diff --git "a/articles/2020-10.json" "b/articles/2020-10.json"
--- "a/articles/2020-10.json"
+++ "b/articles/2020-10.json"
@@ -1 +1 @@
-{"title": ["Madrid explosion leaves three dead - BBC News", "UK and EU in row over bloc's diplomatic status - BBC News", "Coronavirus: French students promised one euro lockdown meals - BBC News", "Biden inauguration: Step forward after bumpy period - Boris Johnson - BBC News", "Food supply problems in NI clearly a Brexit issue - Coveney - BBC News", "Covid: Gavin Williamson hopes England's schools will reopen by Easter - BBC News", "Low-deposit mortgages return after Covid slump - BBC News", "Covid: House party-goers face £800 fines in England, Patel says - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: No more 'easy wins' for hospital staff - BBC News", "Storm Christoph in pictures - BBC News", "University tuition fees frozen at £9,250 for a year - BBC News", "Storm Christoph in North West England: Flooding and evacuations - BBC News", "Covid: How a £20 gadget could save lives - BBC News", "Birmingham mosque becomes UK's first to offer Covid vaccine - BBC News", "Uber: London cabbies plan to sue for damages - BBC News", "Storm Christoph flooding: Financial help offered to victims - BBC News", "Storm Christoph: Travel disruption as snow and rain sweep in - BBC News", "Troubles victims: Thousands of relatives call for action - BBC News", "Glastonbury 2021: Festival axed 'with great regret' - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Biden's inauguration speech calls for unity - it won't be easy - BBC News", "Saga cruises says all customers must be vaccinated - BBC News", "Amanda Gorman: Inauguration poet calls for 'unity and togetherness' - BBC News", "Kamala Harris becomes first female, first black and first Asian-American VP - BBC News", "Covid: Infections 'must be brought down' to help NHS - BBC News", "Covid-19: What might a 'tighter' NI lockdown look like? - BBC News", "Manchester sinkhole: Houses collapse in Gorton street - BBC News", "Covid: £800 house party fines to be introduced in England - BBC News", "Brexit: 'I was asked to pay an extra £82 for my £200 coat' - BBC News", "Storm Christoph: Homes evacuated as storm batters Wales - BBC News", "Fulham 1-2 Man Utd: Paul Pogba fires United back to the top of the Premier League - BBC Sport", "Full transcript of Joe Biden's inauguration speech - BBC News", "Covid: 'Too early' to say if lockdown will end in spring - Boris Johnson - BBC News", "Paddy McElhone: Farmer shooting by Army unjustified, inquest rules - BBC News", "Covid: Nine million people forced to borrow more to cope - BBC News", "As it happened: Biden presidency: Covid deaths 'likely to exceed' 500,000 by February - BBC News", "As it happened: Foster and O'Neill give coronavirus update - BBC News", "Covid: Young people asked how pandemic has affected them - BBC News", "Next pulls out of race to buy Topshop-brands - BBC News", "Liverpool 0-1 Burnley: Ashley Barnes scores winner as Reds' unbeaten run ends - BBC Sport", "Kamala Harris and a 1986 snapshot of that Howard generation - BBC News", "Storm Christoph: More than 2,000 homes in Manchester evacuated - BBC News", "Covid: Nearly 2m UK people got first Covid vaccine in last week - BBC News", "Covid: UK reports 1,820 deaths as Johnson warns tough weeks to come - BBC News", "Inauguration fashion: Purple, pearls, and mittens - BBC News", "Covid-19: Military to assist NI medical staff - BBC News", "Covid: 'Two-month' vaccine wait for housebound woman, 84 - BBC News", "Covid-19: Bridgwater Muller worker dies and 95 staff self-isolating - BBC News", "As it happened: Inauguration: Biden signs orders ending key Trump policies - BBC News", "Author Terry Pratchett's 'inspiring' house for sale - BBC News", "Covid-19: Unison 'not opposed' to military help - BBC News", "Elephants counted from space for conservation - BBC News", "Meghan letter: Royal aides 'won't take sides', High Court told - BBC News", "Covid-19: NI lockdown to be extended until 5 March - BBC News", "Covid: Assaults on emergency workers 'most common' virus-related crimes - BBC News", "Marmite maker Unilever to insist suppliers pay 'living wage' - BBC News", "President Joe Biden inauguration speech: 'Democracy has prevailed' - BBC News", "Dartford mother-of-three died after liposuction in Turkey - BBC News", "Biden inauguration in pictures - BBC News", "Covid vaccine: 'Patience and perspective' needed in Wales - BBC News", "Racism in ballet: Black dancer's 'humiliation' at racist comments - BBC News", "Lockdown children forget how to use knife and fork - BBC News", "Coronavirus: BMJ urges NYT to correct vaccine 'mixing' article - BBC News", "Edinburgh's giant pandas may 'return to China' over Covid losses - BBC News", "Families rescued in Peak District after getting trapped in snow - BBC News", "Covid: Liverpool's leaders call for new national lockdown - BBC News", "Covid-19: Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine arrives at hospitals - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Scottish cabinet to consider further measures - BBC News", "Cold snap creates 'pop-up' ice hockey rink - BBC News", "Covid in Wales: Schools' phased return defended by first minister - BBC News", "Covid: Sweden official defends Christmas trip to Canary Islands - BBC News", "Irish Eurovision singer and Bagatelle frontman Liam Reilly dies - BBC News", "Zoe Davison: Racing trainer dies on same day two of her horses win at Plumpton - BBC Sport", "West Brom 0-4 Arsenal: Arsenal see off Baggies in ruthless display - BBC Sport", "Covid in Scotland: New strain of virus 'accelerating' spread - BBC News", "Coronavirus: India approves vaccines from Bharat Biotech and Oxford/AstraZeneca - BBC News", "Reading stabbing: Five teenagers arrested after boy, 13, dies - BBC News", "EuroMillions: Jackpot of more than £39m won by UK ticket-holder - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Covid: Not much room for lockdown changes, Wales' first minister warns - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Twelve fined for playing dominoes in Tier 4 breach - BBC News", "Boris Johnson says indyref vote should be once-in-generation - BBC News", "Liverpool FC anthem singer Gerry Marsden dies aged 78 - BBC News", "New Year snow flurries fall across England - BBC News", "Covid-19: New variant 'raises R number by up to 0.7' - BBC News", "Suspected Islamists kill dozens in attacks on two Niger villages - BBC News", "Covid: What could 'tougher' measures mean for us? - BBC News", "Pep Guardiola: Man City boss may stay in management longer than planned - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: Anti-lockdown protesters arrested at Hyde Park demo - BBC News", "Benjamin Mendy: Man City 'disappointed' after defender breaches Covid-19 protocols - BBC Sport", "Ryan Garcia stops Luke Campbell after surviving knockdown in Dallas - BBC Sport", "County Antrim poultry flock to be culled after bird flu detected - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Restrictions 'could continue' amid rising cases - BBC News", "Hospitals across UK 'must prepare for Covid surge', senior doctor warns - BBC News", "Covid: Regional rules 'probably going to get tougher', says Boris Johnson - BBC News", "Covid: Cardiff Central MP Jo Stevens in hospital with virus - BBC News", "As it happened: Boris Johnson warns of tougher measures amid Covid surge - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Covid: Snowdonia National Park wardens 'getting abuse' during lockdown - BBC News", "Leicester City 2-0 Southampton: James Maddison and Harvey Barnes send Foxes second - BBC Sport", "Covid: Nurseries 'teetering on the edge' during pandemic - BBC News", "Archie Lyndhurst: CBBC star died in his sleep, says mother - BBC News", "SLS: Nasa's 'megarocket' engine test ends early - BBC News", "Covid-19: Protect us from unlawful killing charges - medics - BBC News", "Phil Spector: Pop producer jailed for murder dies at 81 - BBC News", "Covid-19: Man said he had travelled 100 miles 'for a McDonald's' - BBC News", "RAF veteran receives Covid jab at Salisbury Cathedral - BBC News", "Covid-19: France begins 6pm curfew - BBC News", "Liverpool 0-0 Man Utd: Alisson saves thwart leaders at Anfield - BBC Sport", "Chris Cramer: Tributes paid after former BBC and CNN journalist dies aged 73 - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: 'Patchy supply' hampering vaccine rollout - BBC News", "Covid-19: NI hospitals prepare for peak of latest virus surge - BBC News", "Branson's Virgin rocket takes satellites to orbit - BBC News", "Covid-19: Nisra records highest ever weekly deaths - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Parents' joy as free childcare resumes - BBC News", "Online clothes sellers targeted by 'creepy' messages - BBC News", "Covid-19: BBC's Fergal Keane revisits St Mary’s and Charing Cross Hospital 10 months on - BBC News", "Sudan's Darfur region: 'More than 80 killed' in clashes - BBC News", "Lai Chi-Wai raises HK$5.2m for charity climbing Nina Towers - BBC News", "Covid: Airport support scheme to open in England - BBC News", "As it happened: NHS England under extreme pressure, says NHS chief - BBC News", "Virtual library gives children in England free book access - BBC News", "Gerry Marsden: Funeral held for Pacemakers star - BBC News", "Covid: Church of England services hit by pandemic - BBC News", "Sri Lanka v England: Tourists wobble chasing 74 after Jack Leach takes 5-122 - BBC Sport", "Universal Credit: Benefit increase only 'temporary', says Raab - BBC News", "G7: UK to host Cornwall seaside summit in summer - BBC News", "Statues to get protection from 'baying mobs' - BBC News", "Home Office 'working to restore' lost police records - BBC News", "Eurostar: Government urged to 'safeguard' rail firm's future - BBC News", "Covid-19: Running a roadside van when a pandemic cuts traffic - BBC News", "Coronavirus: William and Kate hear from emergency workers - BBC News", "Covid: People broke lockdown rules in 200-mile drive to see friends - BBC News", "Covid-19: More mass jab centres, airport support and a virtual library - BBC News", "Covid-19: England delivering 140 jabs a minute, says NHS chief executive - BBC News", "Mount Semeru: Erupting volcano spews ash above Indonesia's Java island - BBC News", "Universal credit: MPs urge PM to keep £20 benefit 'lifeline' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Further 1,295 deaths recorded in the UK - BBC News", "Archbishop of Glasgow Philip Tartaglia dies with Covid aged 70 - BBC News", "Covid-19: Bedworth Pokemon player fined for lockdown breach - BBC News", "Manchester Arena and Parsons Green bombers charged with prison officer attack - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Freeman targets 400,000 vaccinations every week - BBC News", "Lockdown Christmas hits: Lidl pink prosecco and takeaways - BBC News", "Covid-19: BBC's Fergal Keane revisits St Mary’s and Charing Cross Hospital 10 months on - BBC News", "'Discriminatory' mental health system overhauled - BBC News", "Fresh calls for NI mother and baby homes inquiry - BBC News", "Covid-19: Welsh Government update - BBC News", "Covid: Police cancel fine for couple visiting care home - BBC News", "Human remains found in search for missing cyclist Tony Parsons - BBC News", "Johnson: 24-7 Covid-vaccine hubs as soon as supply allows - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: The six new lockdown rules - BBC News", "Coronavirus: British tourist blamed for Lauberhorn ski race cancellation - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'How long can we keep going like this? About a week' - BBC News", "Covid-19: We can make this the peak by following rules, says Hancock - BBC News", "Morrisons to be first UK supermarket to pay minimum £10 an hour - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: How do the rules compare to last year? - BBC News", "Edinburgh Woollen Mill rescue deal to save 2,000 jobs - BBC News", "Furlough fraud: I'm still registered as furloughed for a job I quit' - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Stricter rules within days - BBC News", "China: Senior Conservatives call for reset of UK policy - BBC News", "Media billionaire David Barclay dies, aged 86 - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Lockdown lifting 'unlikely' as deaths pass 5,000 - BBC News", "Huawei patent mentions use of Uighur-spotting tech - BBC News", "PMQs: Some food parcels are an 'insult to families' - PM - BBC News", "Earl of Strathmore admits sex attack at Glamis Castle home - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Sinovac: Brazil results show Chinese vaccine 50.4% effective - BBC News", "Covid-19: More than 100,000 vaccine doses administered in NI - BBC News", "Customs staff: Vaccinate us to keep trade flowing - BBC News", "Four arrested over 'public nuisance' at Redditch and Birmingham hospitals - BBC News", "Covid: Birmingham hospitals move 200 doctors to intensive care duties - BBC News", "Plastic bag charge to double to 10p from April in Scotland - BBC News", "Naomi Campbell's Kenya tourism role causes row - BBC News", "Heavy snow causes widespread disruption in Scotland - BBC News", "Covid-19: New test rule for England arrivals pushed back to Monday - BBC News", "David Attenborough to front government-funded 5G AR app - BBC News", "GCSE and A-level pupils could sit mini exams to aid grading - BBC News", "Covid-19: Lockdown measures 'starting to show signs of some effect' - PM - BBC News", "Covid-19: Alabama crowds ignore coronavirus to celebrate championship - BBC News", "Covid-19: New treatment, NHS staff struggles and free meals row - BBC News", "Trump impeachment process: Who are the key players? - BBC News", "Gurlitt's last Nazi-looted work returned to owners - BBC News", "Cramlington woman celebrates 100th birthday with covid jab - BBC News", "People's sonic boom surprise caught on camera - BBC News", "Libby Squire murder trial: Pawel Relowicz 'prowled streets for victim' - BBC News", "Battery lodged in baby's throat for four months - BBC News", "As it happened: Record number of daily deaths reported in UK - BBC News", "Covid vaccine: Pfizer v Oxford AstraZeneca v Moderna - BBC News", "Covid-19: Special school staff want jab priority - BBC News", "Tottenham Hotspur 1-1 Fulham: Ivan Cavaleiro earns a point for Premier League strugglers - BBC Sport", "Call for better coronavirus masks for all medical staff - BBC News", "Covid: Play your part in fight against virus, says Patel - BBC News", "YouTube suspends Donald Trump's channel - BBC News", "Covid: UK reports record 1,564 daily deaths - BBC News", "Mohamud Mohammed Hassan: Hundreds march over arrested man's death - BBC News", "Covid: Three Democratic lawmakers test positive after Capitol riot - BBC News", "Tesco, Asda and Waitrose ban shoppers without face masks - BBC News", "Trump impeached for second time - BBC News", "YFN Lucci: US rapper wanted in Atlanta for suspected murder - BBC News", "Covid: Many NHS staff 'traumatised' by first wave of virus, study shows - BBC News", "Duchess of York: From Budgie the Helicopter to Mills & Boon - BBC News", "Capitol riots: Who broke into the building? - BBC News", "Britain's Got Talent: Filming postponed due to coronavirus concerns - BBC News", "Boris Johnson condemns 'disgraceful scenes' in US - BBC News", "National Express to suspend all services - BBC News", "Fears schools will be overwhelmed by laptopless pupils - BBC News", "Trump allowed back onto Twitter - BBC News", "Trump auction for Arctic oil rights sees little interest - BBC News", "Reading stabbing: Three teenagers charged with murder after boy, 13, dies - BBC News", "Capitol riot: Biden says BLM protest would have been treated 'very differently' - BBC News", "Essex lorry deaths: Dad learned of son's fate on social media - BBC News", "As it happened: PM sets out Covid vaccine rollout plan - BBC News", "Teachers' grades to replace A-levels and GCSEs in England - BBC News", "Adrian Chiles confirmed in Emma Barnett 5 Live slot - BBC News", "Covid: Seven mass vaccination hubs announced for England - BBC News", "Capitol riots: World media see Trump ignite an 'insurrection' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'How long can we keep going like this? About a week' - BBC News", "Breonna Taylor: Two Louisville officers fired over roles in shooting - BBC News", "Stella Tennant: Family confirms model's death was suicide - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: 'Well over half' of care home residents vaccinated - BBC News", "Two more life-saving Covid drugs discovered - BBC News", "Capitol riot: What does a deadly day mean for Trump's legacy? - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Belfast Trust cancels urgent cancer surgeries - BBC News", "Capitol riots: How a Trump rally turned deadly - BBC News", "Capitol riots: A visual guide to the storming of Congress - BBC News", "Muted response as Clap for Heroes returns - BBC News", "Capitol riot: Five startling images from the siege - BBC News", "Capitol riots: Moment protesters storm US legislature - BBC News", "Capitol riots: Boris Johnson condemns Donald Trump for sparking events - BBC News", "Ryanair scraps most UK and Irish lockdown flights - BBC News", "Covid: UK travel curbs to keep out South Africa variant - BBC News", "Capitol riots: Pro-Trump protesters storm the US legislature - in pictures - BBC News", "'Mr Christmas' lights switched off for last time in Croxley Green - BBC News", "Inside one GP surgery's Covid vaccine roll-out - BBC News", "Covid-19: Baby's mother issues mottled skin warning - BBC News", "Trump’s Twitter downfall - BBC News", "ICU hospital staff: 'Scared, sad, petrified, worried' - BBC News", "Elon Musk becomes world's richest person as wealth tops $185bn - BBC News", "Capitol siege: Trump's words 'directly led' to violence, Patel says - BBC News", "Reading stabbing: Murder-accused teenagers appear in court - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "McDonald's pauses walk-in takeaways in lockdown - BBC News", "US Capitol riots: World leaders react to 'horrifying' scenes in Washington - BBC News", "'Show us it's safe' to be open, say nursery staff - BBC News", "Alex Rodda murder: Matthew Mason guilty of killing schoolboy - BBC News", "Covid-19: Boris Johnson makes daily jab pledge as Army helps rollout - BBC News", "Organ donor mum wishes she could help her children in need of kidneys - BBC News", "Meat factories warn Covid absences could hit supplies - BBC News", "Covid tests for Channel hauliers to continue 'until further notice' - BBC News", "Aston Villa plan to play youngsters against Liverpool in FA Cup after Covid outbreak - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: Vaccine rollout widens as hospital pressure rises - BBC News", "Sainsbury's Christmas sales rise despite smaller turkeys - BBC News", "Analysis: Can lockdown stop the new coronavirus variant? - BBC News", "Covid: China places 11m under lockdown after outbreak in northern city - BBC News", "The Wanted's Tom Parker says brain tumour has 'shrunk significantly' - BBC News", "Lockdown: 'I've borrowed £4m just to remain closed' - BBC News", "Capitol siege: An eyewitness account from inside the House chamber - BBC News", "Asos frontrunner to buy Topshop, Topman and Miss Selfridge brands - BBC News", "Boohoo 'set to buy Debenhams brand and website' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Top adviser warns France at 'emergency' virus moment - BBC News", "Covid-19: Essex student helps 600 refugees out of 'period poverty' - BBC News", "Covid: Israel vaccinates 16 to 18-year-olds ahead of exams - BBC News", "Covid: School return in Wales 'unlikely' for all in February - BBC News", "Care home worker thought cancer misdiagnosis was a 'cruel joke' - BBC News", "Skewen flood victims could be out of homes for days - BBC News", "SpaceX: World record number of satellites launched - BBC News", "England in Sri Lanka: Tourists complete six-wicket win and take series 2-0 - BBC Sport", "Boeing 737 Max cleared to fly again 'too early' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Pressure on NHS front line 'relentless' - Hancock - BBC News", "Covid: Teachers 'not at higher risk' of death than average - BBC News", "Fraud epidemic 'is now national security threat' - BBC News", "Snow: Severe weather warnings in place across UK - BBC News", "Covid-19: MPs call for school reopening plan, and will France have a third lockdown? - BBC News", "Putin condemns Navalny protests as Western concern grows - BBC News", "Covid: 'Not a moment to ease measures,' says Matt Hancock - BBC News", "Robert Rowland: Former Brexit MEP dies in Bahamas diving accident - BBC News", "Pandemic prompts Super Bowl ad rethink in US - BBC News", "Covid: Schools will be told of reopening plans 'as soon as we can' - BBC News", "South Africa coronavirus variant: 77 cases found in UK - BBC News", "US police vehicle ploughs into crowd watching 'burnouts' - BBC News", "Barclaycard customers face higher minimum payments - BBC News", "Skewen flood: Is Wales' coalmining past behind home evacuations? - BBC News", "'Droves' of Pampas grass pickers at South Shields beach - BBC News", "Covid-19: Mansfield newlyweds, 90 and 86, in vaccination plea - BBC News", "'Knackered and confused.' That's just the parents - BBC News", "Covid: Call for long-term plan to help 'burnt-out' nurses - BBC News", "Heatwave sweeps Australian cities and raises bushfire danger - BBC News", "Dylan Freeman: Mother admits killing disabled son - BBC News", "'Running Man' robber jailed after nearly 13 years on the run - BBC News", "Travellers: Shocking lack of pitches for families, charity warns - BBC News", "Skewen flood victims face 'months' before returning home - BBC News", "Jenners: Building's owner says store 'will remain' despite Frasers move - BBC News", "PTSD: Eyes can reveal previous trauma, study reveals - BBC News", "Covid: 'More deadly' UK variant claim played down by scientists - BBC News", "Moderna vaccine appears to work against variants - BBC News", "Channel 4 Deepfake Queen complaints dropped by Ofcom - BBC News", "Debenhams shops to close permanently after Boohoo deal - BBC News", "Covid: Dutch curfew riots rage for third night - BBC News", "Gordon Brown: Trust has broken down in way UK is run - BBC News", "Q&A: Cwm Taf maternity problems - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Over-70 vaccine letters start but blue envelope delay - BBC News", "Cwm Taf maternity: Failings 'affected two-thirds of women' - BBC News", "Mastercard to push up fees for UK purchases from EU - BBC News", "Frank Lampard: Chelsea sack manager with Thomas Tuchel expected to replace him - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: Mexican President López Obrador tests positive - BBC News", "Janet Yellen to be first female US treasury secretary - BBC News", "Covid: Hays Travel to close 89 shops as lockdown delays 'bounce back' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer self-isolates for third time - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Ways to 'accelerate' vaccine plans being examined - BBC News", "Welsh Valentine's Day: 'Why we mark St Dwynwen's Day' - BBC News", "Cwm Taf maternity: Mothers ignored and made to feel worthless - BBC News", "Keon Lincoln: Mother 'heard gunshots' that killed teen - BBC News", "Covid-19: Police investigate potential breaches at republican funeral - BBC News", "Skewen flooding: Villagers warned not to return to homes - BBC News", "Kickstart: Most job roles for youths not yet filled - BBC News", "Covid: Volunteers in Maesteg clear snow for vulnerable to get vaccine - BBC News", "Manchester United 3-2 Liverpool: Bruno Fernandes settles FA Cup thriller - BBC Sport", "Covid: Early years staff safety 'cause for concern' - BBC News", "Couple killed in Cameron House Hotel fire named - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Police support Crown probe into care home deaths - BBC News", "Covid: Sir Billy Connolly receives his first vaccine jab - BBC News", "Covid: Fire Brigades Union safety demands 'unworkable', says report - BBC News", "Shipping crisis: I'm being quoted £10,000 for a £1,600 container' - BBC News", "Covid: School return in Wales 'unlikely' for all in February - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Majority of discretionary self-isolation support applications rejected, Labour say - BBC News", "Festival season 'still possible' despite Glastonbury cancellation - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'New variant may be associated with higher mortality' - PM - BBC News", "Inquiry uses legal powers to seek Salmond evidence - BBC News", "Bus driver jailed after passenger's death in Swansea crash - BBC News", "Covid: James Bond film No Time To Die delayed for third time - BBC News", "Covid: How a £20 gadget could save lives - BBC News", "Birmingham mosque becomes UK's first to offer Covid vaccine - BBC News", "Hotel quarantine for UK arrivals to be discussed - BBC News", "St Agnes Cold War bunker for sale - BBC News", "Covid: Side-by-side in a London mosque - funerals and a food bank - BBC News", "Brexit: Retailers warn they could burn goods stuck in EU - BBC News", "Skewen flood: Is Wales' coalmining past behind home evacuations? - BBC News", "Coronavirus: UK R number 'between 0.8 and 1' - BBC News", "Covid-19: 'Unrealistic' to expect NI lockdown to end on 5 March - BBC News", "From Sea Shanty TikTok to a record deal - BBC News", "Trump 'prank-called by Piers Morgan impersonator' - BBC News", "Keon Lincoln murder probe: Boy dies after Handsworth attack - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Thirteen residents die in Bishopbriggs care home - BBC News", "Covid-19: Ministers mull £500 Covid payment and retail sales suffer record annual drop - BBC News", "Covid: Museums and galleries 'fighting for survival', Art Fund says - BBC News", "Paula Badosa: Australian Open player 'sorry' after revealing she has Covid - BBC News", "Biden's inauguration speech calls for unity - it won't be easy - BBC News", "Your pictures of Scotland 15 - 22 January - BBC News", "Covid: Wedding party in Stamford Hill broken up by police - BBC News", "Covid-19: No plans for universal £500 self-isolation payment, No 10 says - BBC News", "Essex lorry deaths: Men jailed for killing 39 migrants in trailer - BBC News", "Covid: 'Significant failure' over handling summer exam grades - BBC News", "Covid: £800 house party fines to be introduced in England - BBC News", "Cyber criminals publish more than 4,000 stolen Sepa files - BBC News", "Covid: 'Too early' to say if lockdown will end in spring - Boris Johnson - BBC News", "Paddy McElhone: Farmer shooting by Army unjustified, inquest rules - BBC News", "Police arrest 320 dangerous UK child sex offenders - BBC News", "CCTV captures moment hotel fire takes hold - BBC News", "Chorley 0-1 Wolverhampton Wanderers: Vitinha's superb goal sees Wolves past non-league opponents - BBC Sport", "Cameron House: Fire caused by ash left in cupboard - BBC News", "Next pulls out of race to buy Topshop-brands - BBC News", "Coronavirus: UK variant 'may be more deadly' - BBC News", "Shoppers stuck at home shun new clothes in 2020 - BBC News", "Liverpool 0-1 Burnley: Ashley Barnes scores winner as Reds' unbeaten run ends - BBC Sport", "Brexit: Nissan commits to keep making cars in Sunderland - BBC News", "Detentions and warnings over Navalny protests - BBC News", "Skewen flood: Mine shaft 'blow out' may have flooded village - BBC News", "Australian Open 2021: Andy Murray's hopes of playing in tournament over - BBC Sport", "Cameron House: Mum 'tortured' by son's death in hotel fire - BBC News", "Cladding crisis: 'Delays could bankrupt us' - BBC News", "Covid lockdown rule breakers could 'make pandemic longer' - BBC News", "Beckhams pay themselves £21m despite business losses - BBC News", "Covid-19: Bridgwater Muller worker dies and 95 staff self-isolating - BBC News", "Covid-19: Couple in 'only chance' wedding in Milton Keynes Hospital - BBC News", "As it happened: Biden White House 'will tackle domestic extremism' - BBC News", "Covid-19: NI lockdown to be extended until 5 March - BBC News", "Mick Norcross: Towie star and businessman dies aged 57 - BBC News", "Covid-19: Two £10,000 fines for '150-person' funeral - BBC News", "Dartford mother-of-three died after liposuction in Turkey - BBC News", "Coronavirus: EU vaccine woes mount as new delays emerge - BBC News", "Manchester sinkhole: Houses collapse in Gorton street - BBC News", "Covid: Royal Glamorgan Hospital nurse felt 'overwhelming fear' - BBC News", "Meng Wanzhou: Bullets sent in mail to Huawei's finance chief - BBC News", "Covid-19: BBC's Fergal Keane revisits St Mary’s and Charing Cross Hospital 10 months on - BBC News", "BBC licence fee is 'least worst' option, says new chairman Richard Sharp - BBC News", "Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra: Does stylus spell end of the Note? - BBC News", "Covid: Infections levelling off in some areas - scientist - BBC News", "Fresh calls for NI mother and baby homes inquiry - BBC News", "Covid: Police cancel fine for couple visiting care home - BBC News", "Covid-19: Brazil hospitals 'run out of oxygen' for virus patients - BBC News", "Covid-19: South America travel ban and NHS 'crisis' warning - BBC News", "Past Covid-19 infection may provide 'months of immunity' - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: The six new lockdown rules - BBC News", "Covid-19: Packed hospitals raised death risk by 20% - BBC News", "Over-50s rush to book holidays as vaccine boosts confidence - BBC News", "Coronavirus: British tourist blamed for Lauberhorn ski race cancellation - BBC News", "Covid: Hospitals in Wales' hardest-hit area pause some urgent surgery - BBC News", "Covid-19: High Street chemists start vaccinations in England - BBC News", "Covid: Students' rent strike threat over accommodation - BBC News", "Covid: Asylum seeker camp conditions prompt inspection calls - BBC News", "TikTok level crossing stunt 'staggeringly stupid' - BBC News", "Armie Hammer: Actor pulls out of film over 'vicious' online abuse - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Twitter boss: Trump ban is 'right' but 'dangerous' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Insurance fears stop care homes taking patients - BBC News", "Covid-19: More than 100,000 vaccine doses administered in NI - BBC News", "As it happened: Travel from South America to UK banned - BBC News", "UK snow: Yorkshire ambulance service declares 'major incident' - BBC News", "Pimlico Plumbers to make workers get vaccinations - BBC News", "Coronavirus variants and mutations: The science explained - BBC News", "Cyberpunk 2077: We underestimated difficulties - BBC News", "Portishead mum mistakes pregnancy for lockdown weight gain - BBC News", "Marcus Rashford and top chefs demand free school meals review - BBC News", "Coronavirus: PM says UK 'taking steps' over Brazil variant - BBC News", "Covid-19: Passengers told to check train times as routes cut - BBC News", "Heavy snow causes widespread disruption in Scotland - BBC News", "Covid-19: New test rule for England arrivals pushed back to Monday - BBC News", "Covid-19: Schools get more time to decide on admission criteria - BBC News", "Brexit shellfish delays leave Scottish seafood rotting - BBC News", "Teen detained over 180mph stolen motorbike pursuit - BBC News", "Super Nintendo World opening delayed by Japan's virus outbreak - BBC News", "Covid-19: North-east England leads race to vaccinate over-80s - BBC News", "Covid: UK travel curbs to keep out South Africa variant - BBC News", "Tesco: Brexit disruption 'is a challenge not a crisis' - BBC News", "Bitcoin: Newport man's plea to find £210m hard drive in tip - BBC News", "Gurlitt's last Nazi-looted work returned to owners - BBC News", "Africa secures 270m Covid-19 vaccine doses - BBC News", "Covid-19: Surge leaves key hospital services 'in crisis' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Government's rough sleeping strategy 'out of step' - BBC News", "Row over half term free school meals plan - BBC News", "Americans react to historic second Trump impeachment - BBC News", "Covid-19: Belfast doctor warns oxygen supplies under 'extreme pressure' - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Covid-19: Brazil travel ban to be discussed over new variant - BBC News", "Tottenham Hotspur 1-1 Fulham: Ivan Cavaleiro earns a point for Premier League strugglers - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: Bracknell couple's 'final meeting' in hospital - BBC News", "Call for better coronavirus masks for all medical staff - BBC News", "Covid: WHO team probing origin of virus arrives in China - BBC News", "Covid: UK reports record 1,564 daily deaths - BBC News", "Patel: No new Covid rules 'today or tomorrow' - BBC News", "Sri Lanka v England: Dom Bess takes 5-30 as tourists dominate in Galle - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: Guide dog delays like 'losing eyesight all over again' - BBC News", "Firms told to look out for domestic abuse signs - BBC News", "Australian Open: Andy Murray tests positive for coronavirus - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: NI to introduce international travel Covid tests - BBC News", "Trump impeached for second time - BBC News", "Siegfried Fischbacher: Member of magic duo Siegfried and Roy dies aged 81 - BBC News", "Richard Leonard quits as Scottish Labour leader - BBC News", "Primark refuses to go online despite £1bn lockdown loss - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: hospital numbers at new record high - BBC News", "Woman arrested after two men die at house in east London - BBC News", "Covid-19: Nurse isolating in caravan for nine months moves back home - BBC News", "Covid: Families 'devastated' by cancer surgery cancellation - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Company's apology after £5,000 vaccine offer - BBC News", "Online retailer Ocado warns of shortages as suppliers cut choice - BBC News", "Covid-19: Priti Patel defends police lockdown fines - BBC News", "Covid-19: Queen and Prince Philip receive vaccinations - BBC News", "Trump Twitter ban 'raises regulation questions' - Hancock - BBC News", "Covid-19: Drop 'absurd' 5% council tax increase - Starmer - BBC News", "Bench arrest video 'stage-managed by anti-lockdown protesters' - BBC News", "WW2's 'Spitfire Women': Eleanor Wadsworth, one of last female pilots, dies - BBC News", "Covid-19: Rapid tests for asymptomatic people to be rolled out - BBC News", "Covid: Aberfan survivor Bernard Thomas dies, aged 63 - BBC News", "Covid-19: Every adult to be offered vaccine by autumn says Matt Hancock - BBC News", "Covid-19: Hancock warns flexing of rules 'could be fatal' - BBC News", "Pakistan power cut plunges country into darkness - BBC News", "The 65 days that led to chaos at the Capitol - BBC News", "Storm Filomena: Spain races to clear snow as temperatures plunge - BBC News", "Crawley Town 3-0 Leeds United: Marcelo Bielsa's side suffer huge FA Cup upset - BBC Sport", "Pompeo: US to lift restrictions on contacts with Taiwan - BBC News", "Analysis: Can lockdown stop the new coronavirus variant? - BBC News", "Police arrest 16 at Clapham Common anti-lockdown protest - BBC News", "Covid-19: Fordingbridge farm chickens risk cull over egg demand - BBC News", "Cladding building owners told not to talk to press - BBC News", "Brexit: Edwin Poots warns of job losses and food shortages - BBC News", "Man Utd 1-0 Watford: Scott McTominay heads early FA Cup winner at Old Trafford - BBC Sport", "Coronavirus: Virtual Mass tour across Ireland for 107-year-old - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: ICU numbers rise amid tighter lockdown warnings - BBC News", "Storm Filomena: Spain sees 'exceptional' snowfall - BBC News", "Covid vaccine: Wales has delivered 70,000 of 275,000 doses - BBC News", "Parler: Amazon to remove site from web hosting service - BBC News", "Covid: Protect family incomes, Starmer urges ministers - BBC News", "Covid vaccine: Wales lagging behind rest of UK with rollout - BBC News", "Happy Mondays star Bez in bid to rival Joe Wicks with lockdown fitness classes - BBC News", "Indonesia landslide: Rescuers buried as they help victims - BBC News", "Covid: UK reports more than 80,000 deaths - BBC News", "NHS Covid-19 jab letters 'confusing over-80s' - BBC News", "'Status quo isn't working' for Scotland, says Starmer - BBC News", "Covid: Warnings 'blatantly ignored' as cars turned away - BBC News", "Covid: Boris Johnson set to announce new England lockdown - BBC News", "Schools to close and exams facing axe in England - BBC News", "New £5 coin to mark Queen's 95th birthday - BBC News", "Reading stabbing: School 'reeling' after boy, 13, dies - BBC News", "Colchester Hospital: Covid deniers removed from 'at capacity' hospital - BBC News", "Ecclestone burglary: Four cleared over £26m celebrity raids - BBC News", "Boris Johnson says indyref vote should be once-in-generation - BBC News", "Covid: Brian Pinker, 82, first to get Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Scots ordered to stay at home in new lockdown - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: First doses of Oxford vaccine administered - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Dr Radha's five mental health tips for lockdown - BBC News", "Covid: Sweden official defends Christmas trip to Canary Islands - BBC News", "Zoe Davison: Racing trainer dies on same day two of her horses win at Plumpton - BBC Sport", "Covid in Scotland: New strain of virus 'accelerating' spread - BBC News", "Covid-19: Oxford vaccine, schools row and the future of gyms - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Google workers form tech giant's first labour union - BBC News", "Nóra Quoirin: 'Misadventure' verdict for girl found in Malaysian jungle - BBC News", "Covid: 'No question' restrictions will be tightened, says Boris Johnson - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: New lockdown from midnight - BBC News", "As it happened: First week after Brexit trade deal poses big test - BBC News", "Covid in England: Professional sport to continue in national lockdown - BBC Sport", "Covid: Keir Starmer in 'back to March' lockdown call - BBC News", "Covid-19: Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine rollout begins in Northern Ireland - BBC News", "Edinburgh's giant pandas may 'return to China' over Covid losses - BBC News", "Families rescued in Peak District after getting trapped in snow - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Scottish cabinet to consider further measures - BBC News", "Covid in Wales: Schools' phased return defended by first minister - BBC News", "Brexit: Call for urgent action over deliveries to NI - BBC News", "UK expats prevented from returning home to Spain - BBC News", "Reading stabbing: Five teenagers arrested after boy, 13, dies - BBC News", "Police arrest MP over 'Covid rule breach' - BBC News", "Covid: What could 'tougher' measures mean for us? - BBC News", "Woman's Hour: The Queen sends 'best wishes' to show on its 75th year - BBC News", "As it happened: PM announces new England lockdown in TV Covid address - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Restrictions 'could continue' amid rising cases - BBC News", "Niger village attacks: Death toll rises to 100 - BBC News", "Covid: Regional rules 'probably going to get tougher', says Boris Johnson - BBC News", "Tanya Roberts: Bond actress and Charlie's Angel dies at 65 - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Covid: Derby County players test positive for Covid-19 - BBC News", "England in Sri Lanka: Moeen Ali tests positive for Covid-19 - BBC Sport", "Zara Holland faces court for 'breaking Covid rules' in Barbados - BBC News", "Covid: New lockdowns for England and Scotland ahead of 'hardest weeks' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Extended period of remote learning for NI schools - BBC News", "Liverpool FC anthem singer Gerry Marsden dies aged 78 - BBC News", "Ladbrokes owner Entain receives offer from MGM Resorts - BBC News", "Covaxin: Concern over 'rushed' approval for India Covid jab - BBC News", "Co-op and Morrisons payment problems investigated - BBC News", "Covid: Highest weekly deaths in Wales since pandemic began - BBC News", "Covid: Shut schools 'like systematic neglect' to disadvantaged pupils - BBC News", "Harvey Weinstein: Court agrees $17m payout for accusers - BBC News", "Covid-19: Five days that shaped the outbreak - BBC News", "Covid deaths: 'Hard to compute sorrow' of 100,000 milestone - PM - BBC News", "Costa Book of the Year: 'Utterly original' Mermaid of Black Conch wins - BBC News", "Covid: UK virus deaths exceed 100,000 since pandemic began - BBC News", "Covid: Floella Benjamin receives first vaccine dose - BBC News", "HS2 protesters dig tunnel to thwart Euston eviction - BBC News", "Facebook News feature launches in UK - BBC News", "Beware fake Covid vaccination invites, NHS warns - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Cut jury size to clear courts backlog - Labour - BBC News", "Scientists address myths over large-scale tree planting - BBC News", "Covid home-schooling: Parents' 'nightmare' juggling work and teaching - BBC News", "Covid: Quarantine hotel plans set to be announced - BBC News", "Covid-19: PM 'deeply sorry' as UK deaths exceed 100,000 - BBC News", "Storm Christoph flooding: Financial help offered to victims - BBC News", "Covid: 'Not a moment to ease measures,' says Matt Hancock - BBC News", "Chris Grayling leads MPs' charge to save hedgehogs - BBC News", "Pandemic prompts Super Bowl ad rethink in US - BBC News", "Covid: Schools will be told of reopening plans 'as soon as we can' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Hotel quarantine expected to be announced, and UK unemployment rises - BBC News", "Covid: Oldham school to withdraw places for lockdown-breach pupils - BBC News", "Xbox sales boom as virus maintains grip on economy - BBC News", "Skewen flood: Is Wales' coalmining past behind home evacuations? - BBC News", "Manchester Arena operator denies 'sacrificing safety' - BBC News", "'Droves' of Pampas grass pickers at South Shields beach - BBC News", "Covid-19: UK deaths likely to come down slowly, Whitty warns - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Seafarers stuck at sea ‘a humanitarian crisis’ - BBC News", "Rape prosecution changes by CPS unlawful, court told - BBC News", "British Asian celebrities unite for video to dispel Covid vaccine myths - BBC News", "Covid-19: Met Police officers in haircut lockdown breach - BBC News", "Skewen flood victims face 'months' before returning home - BBC News", "Covid-19: Vaccine minister 'confident' of supplies amid production delays - BBC News", "Transfer test: RBAI to use primary school test scores - BBC News", "Covid deaths: Four stories in 100,000 - BBC News", "Covid: Cancel developing countries' debt, MPs urge - BBC News", "Covid: Dutch curfew riots rage for third night - BBC News", "UK government backs birth control for grey squirrels - BBC News", "Covid deaths: Why is the UK's death toll so bad? - BBC News", "Inquiry judge's media ban 'unlawful', Court of Session hears - BBC News", "Sport England to direct extra £50m for grassroots sport due to Covid - BBC Sport", "Coronavirus: AstraZeneca defends EU vaccine rollout plan - BBC News", "Storm Christoph: '18 months' for plans to repair Llanerch bridge - BBC News", "Frank Lampard: Chelsea sack manager with Thomas Tuchel expected to replace him - BBC Sport", "Janet Yellen to be first female US treasury secretary - BBC News", "Twitter pilot to let users flag 'false' content - BBC News", "Covid: School closures 'throwing children under the bus' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Five days that shaped the outbreak - BBC News", "Harriet Tubman: Biden moves to put anti-slavery activist on $20 bill - BBC News", "Covid: Hays Travel to close 89 shops as lockdown delays 'bounce back' - BBC News", "NI mother-and-baby home report to be published - BBC News", "Home-schooling: Parents of Welsh-medium pupils 'need more support' - BBC News", "Covid: Curfew stays despite 'scum' riots in Dutch cities - BBC News", "Covid: Teacher dies with virus on 25th birthday - BBC News", "100,000 Covid deaths: A grim milestone in an abnormal year - BBC News", "Covid-19: Police investigate potential breaches at republican funeral - BBC News", "Keon Lincoln: Mother 'heard gunshots' that killed teen - BBC News", "Covid vaccines: Over-80s target missed by Welsh Government - BBC News", "House delivers impeachment charge against Trump - BBC News", "Australia unlikely to fully reopen border in 2021, says top official - BBC News", "Alex Davies-Jones MP 'lost most of cervix after delaying smear' - BBC News", "BBC apologises for Phil Spector death headline - BBC News", "Covid: Paramedic questioned job after being spat at - BBC News", "Sheku Bayoh death: Witness says stamping attack ‘never happened’ - BBC News", "'I'm stranded at Madrid Airport' - BBC News", "Covid-19: 'Toughest week yet' of pandemic for NI hospitals - BBC News", "Covid: UK closes all travel corridors until at least 15 February - BBC News", "Phil Spector: Pop producer jailed for murder dies at 81 - BBC News", "Youngest person in UK convicted of terrorism offence can go free - Parole Board - BBC News", "Trampoline prices 'to soar 50% on shipping costs' - BBC News", "Sri Lanka v England: Tourists win first Test by seven wickets - BBC Sport", "Covid: Tesco staff pay tribute to colleague John Deacy - BBC News", "BT faces £600m lawsuit over 'overcharging' - BBC News", "Liverpool 0-0 Man Utd: Alisson saves thwart leaders at Anfield - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: NI hospitals prepare for peak of latest virus surge - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: 'Patchy supply' hampering vaccine rollout - BBC News", "Chris Cramer: Tributes paid after former BBC and CNN journalist dies aged 73 - BBC News", "Nóra Quoirin death: Girl's body 'placed in the jungle' - BBC News", "Branson's Virgin rocket takes satellites to orbit - BBC News", "Jonathan Peter Brooks: Doctor charged over plastic surgeon attack - BBC News", "Keelan Wilson: Four guilty of Wolverhampton boy murder - BBC News", "Covid: Brazil approves and rolls out AstraZeneca and Sinovac vaccines - BBC News", "'Relentless' dog attack on Richmond Park deer prompts police warning - BBC News", "M1 deaths: Coroner calls for smart motorway review - BBC News", "Lai Chi-Wai raises HK$5.2m for charity climbing Nina Towers - BBC News", "England: Phil Neville leaves Lionesses and joins Inter Miami - BBC Sport", "Covid: £9,000 for 'anxiety and stress' university degree - BBC News", "Github apologises for firing Jewish employee who warned about 'Nazis' - BBC News", "Eurostar: Government urged to 'safeguard' rail firm's future - BBC News", "Biden inauguration: Fortified US statehouses see some small protests - BBC News", "Covid-19: China's economy picks up, bucking global trend - BBC News", "Brexit: Fishing firms hold London protest over disruption - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Matt Hancock says more in hospital than any time in pandemic - BBC News", "Scots TV and theatre star Andy Gray dies aged 61 - BBC News", "Covid: Aberystwyth University tells students to stay home - BBC News", "London Ambulance Service: 'We take thousands of calls every day - it's tough' - BBC News", "Chip-shortage 'crisis' halts car-company output - BBC News", "Covid: People broke lockdown rules in 200-mile drive to see friends - BBC News", "Universal credit: MPs urge PM to keep £20 benefit 'lifeline' - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Covid-19: Critical care wards full in hospitals across England - BBC News", "Brithdir Nursing Home: Inquest into six residents' deaths opens - BBC News", "As it happened: Democrats plan to introduce Trump impeachment articles on Monday - BBC News", "Capitol riots: Who broke into the building? - BBC News", "Covid: Royal Glamorgan Hospital nurse felt 'overwhelming fear' - BBC News", "Stricter Covid supermarket rules being considered in Wales - BBC News", "IGCSE exams taken in private schools still going ahead - BBC News", "Loughton school hit-and-run: Terence Glover detained for killing Harley Watson - BBC News", "National Express to suspend all services - BBC News", "Hunt for fake vaccine fraudster who injected woman, 92, in Surbiton - BBC News", "Moderna becomes third Covid vaccine approved in the UK - BBC News", "Little Mix's Sweet Melody finally tops chart as Christmas songs vanish - BBC News", "Eurovision Song Contest 2021 to 'definitely' go ahead, Graham Norton says - BBC News", "Covid deaths in Scotland 'distressingly high' - BBC News", "Phone footage reveals chaotic scenes inside US Capitol - BBC News", "Michael Apted: TV documentary pioneer and film-maker dies aged 79 - BBC News", "'Racist and sexist' Hampshire police unit officers dismissed - BBC News", "Brexit: M&S temporarily cuts hundreds of products in NI - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Students pledge rent strike over unused uni rooms - BBC News", "As it happened: Moderna vaccine approved in UK for spring rollout - BBC News", "Dame Barbara Windsor's funeral held with 'Queen Peggy' tribute - BBC News", "Google Chrome browser privacy plan investigated in UK - BBC News", "Brexit: Edwin Poots warns of job losses and food shortages - BBC News", "Stella Tennant: Family confirms model's death was suicide - BBC News", "Capitol riots: Panel of Americans ‘shocked’ and ‘disgusted’ - BBC News", "Two more life-saving Covid drugs discovered - BBC News", "New Zealand: Woman dies in rare suspected shark attack - BBC News", "Capitol riots: A visual guide to the storming of Congress - BBC News", "Muted response as Clap for Heroes returns - BBC News", "Soaring house prices in 2020 likely to slow this year, says Halifax - BBC News", "COP26: Alok Sharma leaves business job to focus on climate role - BBC News", "Ambulance waiting times in parts of England 'off the scale' - BBC News", "Lockdown fashion: 'People are back in their pyjamas' - BBC News", "Capitol riots: Boris Johnson condemns Donald Trump for sparking events - BBC News", "Isle of Wight oil tanker 'hijacking' case dropped against seven men - BBC News", "Covid: UK travel curbs to keep out South Africa variant - BBC News", "US Capitol riot: Police officer dies amid pressure on Trump over inciting violence - BBC News", "Depop seller's crop top made from Chiltern Railways train seat cover 'violates terms' - BBC News", "Covid-19: 'Major incident' declared by London Mayor Sadiq Khan - BBC News", "Lockdown: Police get stuck in snow stopping rule-breakers - BBC News", "Hyundai's confusion over Apple electric car tie-up - BBC News", "Covid: Fines reviewed after women 'surrounded by police' - BBC News", "'Show us it's safe' to be open, say nursery staff - BBC News", "Covid-19: Boris Johnson makes daily jab pledge as Army helps rollout - BBC News", "Covid: Families 'devastated' by cancer surgery cancellation - BBC News", "Your pictures of Scotland 1 - 8 January - BBC News", "Climate change: 2020 in a dead heat for world's warmest year - BBC News", "Covid tests for Channel hauliers to continue 'until further notice' - BBC News", "Covid-19: UK sees highest daily toll of 1,325 deaths - BBC News", "Covid-19: Welsh Government update - BBC News", "Prince William talks about NHS and Covid with his children 'every day' - BBC News", "Salmond accuses Sturgeon of misleading parliament - BBC News", "The Wanted's Tom Parker says brain tumour has 'shrunk significantly' - BBC News", "Covid cases 'up almost a third in week after Christmas' - BBC News", "Ex-MP quits Labour ahead of sexual harassment disciplinary process - BBC News", "David Bowie remembered: Streamed shows, unheard songs and TikTok debut - BBC News", "Surge in pupils at school in lockdown sparks call for limit - BBC News", "Marion Ramsey: Police Academy and Broadway star dies at 73 - BBC News", "Schools to close and exams facing axe in England - BBC News", "Reading stabbing: School 'reeling' after boy, 13, dies - BBC News", "1.3 million in UK have had their Covid vaccine - BBC News", "Ecclestone burglary: Four cleared over £26m celebrity raids - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Scots ordered to stay at home in new lockdown - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: First doses of Oxford vaccine administered - BBC News", "US intelligence task force accuses Russia of cyber-hack - BBC News", "Cyclone Imogen: Downgraded storm brings flood warnings to Queensland - BBC News", "Singapore reveals Covid privacy data available to police - BBC News", "Covid-19: 1.3m in UK have received vaccine as cases soar - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Dr Radha's five mental health tips for lockdown - BBC News", "Proud Boys leader released after arrest for burning BLM flag - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "BBC to put lessons on TV during lockdown - BBC News", "Mexican fisherman 'dies after attack on Sea Shepherd conservationists' - BBC News", "Government offers firms new grants to survive lockdown - BBC News", "Covid: PM acted 'decisively' on England lockdown - Sunak - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: New lockdown from midnight - BBC News", "Covid in England: Professional sport to continue in national lockdown - BBC Sport", "Online schooling: Calls to cut data fees during Covid lockdowns - BBC News", "Covid-19: Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine rollout begins in Northern Ireland - BBC News", "UK 'cannot duck' post-Covid inequalities, report warns - BBC News", "Brexit: Call for urgent action over deliveries to NI - BBC News", "UK expats prevented from returning home to Spain - BBC News", "'Let police fight crime with facial recognition' plea - BBC News", "Virgin joins Tui and Thomas Cook in cancelling holiday bookings - BBC News", "Covid: Sir Keir Starmer calls for 'round the clock' vaccinations - BBC News", "Police arrest MP over 'Covid rule breach' - BBC News", "Covid: Urgent cancer ops cancelled in parts of London - BBC News", "Covid-19: UK daily coronavirus cases top 60,000 for first time - BBC News", "Supermarket websites struggle amid new lockdown - BBC News", "Much is an echo of March - but a lot is different too - BBC News", "Conjoined twins Marieme and Ndeye settling at Cardiff school - BBC News", "Tanya Roberts: Bond actress and Charlie's Angel dies at 65 - BBC News", "Colin Bell: Manchester City great dies aged 74 - BBC Sport", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "TalkRadio: YouTube reverses decision to ban channel - BBC News", "Celtic in Dubai: Nicola Sturgeon says aspects of trip 'should be looked into' - BBC Sport", "Paperchase on the brink of administration - BBC News", "Call for better coronavirus masks for all medical staff - BBC News", "Buckingham Palace thief jailed for stealing medals and photos - BBC News", "Vocational exams allowed to go ahead in England - BBC News", "Reading stabbings: Man motivated by 'religious jihad' - BBC News", "Zara Holland faces court for 'breaking Covid rules' in Barbados - BBC News", "Covid: New lockdowns for England and Scotland ahead of 'hardest weeks' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Extended period of remote learning for NI schools - BBC News", "Topshop's flagship Oxford Street store up for sale - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: 'Stay at home' order comes into force - BBC News", "Strangling: Calls for a new non-fatal strangulation offence - BBC News", "Covid lockdown: Joe Wicks online PE classes to return next week - BBC News", "Boeing 737 Max cleared to fly in UK and EU after crashes - BBC News", "Insurers defend covering ransomware payments - BBC News", "Covid-19: Cough, fatigue, sore throat 'more common' with new variant - BBC News", "Covid hotel quarantine: 'It's the luck of the draw' - BBC News", "Covid deaths: 'Hard to compute sorrow' of 100,000 milestone - PM - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Nicola Sturgeon says Boris Johnson visit 'not essential' travel - BBC News", "HS2 protesters dig tunnel to thwart Euston eviction - BBC News", "Covid: Floella Benjamin receives first vaccine dose - BBC News", "Philippa Day: Benefit errors 'predominant factor' in mum's death - BBC News", "US actress Jane Fonda to get Golden Globes' lifetime achievement award - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Cut jury size to clear courts backlog - Labour - BBC News", "Covid: Mum-of-five Karen Hobbs dies, aged 40 - BBC News", "Boris Johnson says independence debate 'irrelevant' to most Scots - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Boy sentenced for racist street attack - BBC News", "Covid-19: NI health and social care workers to get £500 payment - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Your tributes to those who have died - BBC News", "Contactless limit could rise to £100 - BBC News", "South Africa coronavirus variant: 77 cases found in UK - BBC News", "Footage shows officer 'rammed' off motorbike in Oldbury - BBC News", "Covid: English schools could return 8 March 'at the earliest' - PM - BBC News", "Covid-19: PM promises roadmap to 'steadily reclaim our lives' - BBC News", "100,000 Covid deaths: ‘I cursed the sterile white room where Ann died’ - BBC News", "Xbox sales boom as virus maintains grip on economy - BBC News", "Apple Christmas sales surge to $111bn amid pandemic - BBC News", "Spanish Armada maps 'saved for the nation' - BBC News", "Covid-19: UK deaths likely to come down slowly, Whitty warns - BBC News", "'Knackered and confused.' That's just the parents - BBC News", "Covid: Wrexham vaccine production resumes after suspect package - BBC News", "100,000 Covid deaths: ‘I cursed the sterile white room where Ann died’ - BBC News", "Covid-19: Met Police officers in haircut lockdown breach - BBC News", "Elliot Page: Juno actor to divorce Emma Portner - BBC News", "Chelsea Flower Show: Event moved to autumn for first time in history - BBC News", "Covid-19: Vaccine minister 'confident' of supplies amid production delays - BBC News", "Covid-19: 'Poor decisions' to blame for UK death toll, scientists say - BBC News", "Extinction: 'Time is running out' to save sharks and rays - BBC News", "Covid deaths: Four stories in 100,000 - BBC News", "Euston tunnel protesters: HS2 begins eviction - BBC News", "Covid: Scotland 'could go further' on quarantine rules - BBC News", "UK government backs birth control for grey squirrels - BBC News", "Leon Briggs inquest: Luton man who died said 'help me' amid police restraint - BBC News", "Covid deaths: Why is the UK's death toll so bad? - BBC News", "Covid-19: Basildon nurse meets her baby after months in hospital with virus - BBC News", "Coronavirus: AstraZeneca defends EU vaccine rollout plan - BBC News", "Covid: Wary Johnson careful not to raise hopes - BBC News", "Victims typically lose £45,000 each owing to investment scams - BBC News", "Jagtar Singh Johal: British man 'tortured to sign blank confession' in India - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Vaccinate teachers at half-term - Starmer - BBC News", "Covid-hit New Orleans turns homes into floats for Mardi Gras - BBC News", "PMQs: As it happened - 27 January - BBC News", "Covid: Teacher dies with virus on 25th birthday - BBC News", "Facebook apologises for Plymouth Hoe 'error' - BBC News", "100,000 Covid deaths: A grim milestone in an abnormal year - BBC News", "Covid-19: Welsh Government update 27 January 2021 - BBC News", "Goldman Sachs boss gets $10m pay cut for 1MDB scandal - BBC News", "Cyclist Josh Quigley has multiple fractures in second serious crash - BBC News", "Boris Johnson promises plan next month for 'phased' easing of lockdown - BBC News", "Legal threat over bee-harming pesticide use - BBC News", "Global health insurance card to replace EHIC under new rules - BBC News", "Reading stabbings: Khairi Saadallah jailed for park murders - BBC News", "Sol Bamba: Cardiff City defender being treated for cancer - BBC Sport", "Irish 'laughing dad' goes viral - BBC News", "Covid: Women fined for going for a walk receive police apology - BBC News", "UK economy 'to get worse before it gets better' - BBC News", "Trump-Biden: Security fears cloud build-up to inauguration - BBC News", "Brexit: UK driver has ham sandwiches confiscated at Dutch border - BBC News", "UK's biggest union elects first woman leader - BBC News", "Covid: UK at 'worst point' of pandemic, says Hancock - BBC News", "James Brokenshire steps back from ministerial role for cancer surgery - BBC News", "Covid: Wrexham hospital stretched as cases rise rapidly - BBC News", "Online retailer Ocado warns of shortages as suppliers cut choice - BBC News", "Covid: All over-50s in Wales to be offered jab by spring - BBC News", "Marks & Spencer snaps up Jaeger fashion brand - BBC News", "SmartDot radiation-protection phone stickers 'have no effect' - BBC News", "Covid-19: UAE dropped from UK travel corridor list - BBC News", "Covid-19: Southend Hospital oxygen supply reaches 'critical' situation - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Sturgeon urges football not to 'abuse privileges' - BBC News", "Covid deaths: The emergency mortuary in a Surrey woodland - BBC News", "Covid-19: Vaccination hubs, Whitty's warning and lockdown learning - BBC News", "Bench arrest video 'stage-managed by anti-lockdown protesters' - BBC News", "Pupils in Scotland struggle to get online amid Microsoft issue - BBC News", "Covid-19: Rapid tests for asymptomatic people to be rolled out - BBC News", "Luke Evans: The Pembrokeshire Murders sees actor return to Wales - BBC News", "Covid-19: Hancock warns flexing of rules 'could be fatal' - BBC News", "Storm Filomena: Spain races to clear snow as temperatures plunge - BBC News", "Crawley Town 3-0 Leeds United: Marcelo Bielsa's side suffer huge FA Cup upset - BBC Sport", "Europe's slow start: How many people have had the Covid vaccine? - BBC News", "Analysis: Can lockdown stop the new coronavirus variant? - BBC News", "FA Cup draw: Manchester United to host Liverpool in fourth round - BBC Sport", "Inside Newcastle's Covid mass vaccination centre - BBC News", "'My spending has gone up, not down, in lockdown' - BBC News", "Sex and the City: New series announced but Kim Cattrall won't return - BBC News", "Cladding building owners told not to talk to press - BBC News", "Covid: 'I’m one of those people who’s been left out' - BBC News", "As it happened: New tech unveiled at CES 2021 - BBC News", "Croydon University Hospital doctor: Covid 'not fake news' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Boris Johnson criticised over bike ride seven miles from home - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Home schooling issues & vaccine rollout - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: All over-80s to be vaccinated by February - BBC News", "Terra Carta: Prince Charles asks companies to join 'Earth charter' - BBC News", "Covid: Dubai added to Scotland's travel quarantine list - BBC News", "Covid: Morrisons and Sainsbury's ban maskless shoppers - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: ICU numbers rise amid tighter lockdown warnings - BBC News", "Celtic 1-1 Hibernian: Depleted hosts denied win by injury-time strike - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: Welsh Government update - BBC News", "New strangulation law planned to tackle abusers, says justice secretary - BBC News", "Lisa Montgomery: Looking for answers in the life of a killer - BBC News", "Covid vaccine: Wales has delivered 70,000 of 275,000 doses - BBC News", "Covid: Protect family incomes, Starmer urges ministers - BBC News", "Parler social network sues Amazon for pulling support - BBC News", "Indonesia landslide: Rescuers buried as they help victims - BBC News", "BBC Bitesize to be free for BT and EE customers - BBC News", "NHS Covid-19 jab letters 'confusing over-80s' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Hancock says UK at 'worst point' as vaccine brings hope - BBC News", "Covid: 'Most dangerous time' of the pandemic, says Prof Whitty - BBC News", "Biden Twitter account 'starts from zero' with no Trump followers - BBC News", "UK weather: Snow and ice warnings for England and Scotland - BBC News", "Toby Young: Telegraph coronavirus column 'significantly misleading' - BBC News", "TikTok level crossing stunt 'staggeringly stupid' - BBC News", "Covid-19: New test rule for England arrivals pushed back to Monday - BBC News", "Covid-19: Schools get more time to decide on admission criteria - BBC News", "Halam stabbing: Surgeon Graeme Perks 'fighting for his life' - BBC News", "Scottish fishermen 'sailing to Denmark to land catch' - BBC News", "Your pictures of Scotland 8 - 15 January - BBC News", "Covid lockdowns prompt fears over child obesity rise - BBC News", "Covid-19: Bracknell couple's 'final meeting' in hospital - BBC News", "Post-Brexit customs systems not fit for purpose, say meat exporters - BBC News", "Covid-19: Welsh Government update - BBC News", "Brexit: No plans to dilute workers' rights, minister says - BBC News", "Covid-19: South America travel ban begins and UK economy shrinks - BBC News", "Covid: UK to close all travel corridors from Monday - BBC News", "Sylvain Sylvain: New York Dolls guitarist dies aged 69 - BBC News", "Covid: UK's ban on South America and Portugal travellers comes into force - BBC News", "Covid-19: Nisra records highest ever weekly deaths - BBC News", "North Korea unveils new submarine-launched missile - BBC News", "Tory candidate Craig Ross dropped for 'unacceptable' remarks - BBC News", "Technical issue resolved after '150,000 police records lost' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Insurance fears stop care homes taking patients - BBC News", "BBC licence fee is 'least worst' option, says new chairman Richard Sharp - BBC News", "As it happened: Not the time for slightest relaxation, PM says - BBC News", "UK economy shrank by 2.6% in November as services suffered - BBC News", "'Being sectioned felt like a punishment' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Brazil hospitals 'run out of oxygen' for virus patients - BBC News", "Covid: Fake news 'causing UK South Asians to reject jab' - BBC News", "Covid-19: A-level and GCSE results planned for early July - BBC News", "Covid: 'Convalescent plasma no benefit to hospital patients' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Brazil virus already in UK ‘not variant of concern’, scientist says - BBC News", "Police probes compromised after computer records deleted - BBC News", "Covid vaccine: Gwynedd pharmacy 'first in Wales to offer jab' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Early signs of lockdown restrictions working - BBC News", "Covid: Intensive care patients transferred from London to Newcastle - BBC News", "Dustin Diamond diagnosed with cancer - BBC News", "Part of rail bridge collapses near fatal Stonehaven derailment site - BBC News", "Covid-19: NI to introduce international travel Covid tests - BBC News", "Indonesia earthquake: Dozens dead as search for survivors continues - BBC News", "Capitol riots: Police describe a 'medieval battle' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Belfast doctor warns oxygen supplies under 'extreme pressure' - BBC News", "Wayne Rooney: Derby County confirm ex-England captain as manager - BBC Sport", "Covid: Man charged after woman, 92, given fake vaccine - BBC News", "Marcus Rashford and top chefs demand free school meals review - BBC News", "Richard Leonard quits as Scottish Labour leader - BBC News", "East West and Northumberland rail lines get £794m boost - BBC News", "Alexei Navalny: 'More than 3,000 detained' in protests across Russia - BBC News", "Covid-19: Doctors want less wait between jabs as EU struggles with supply - BBC News", "Covid-19: Futures of drinking Senedd members questioned - BBC News", "Cladding crisis: 'Delays could bankrupt us' - BBC News", "Covid: 'More deadly' UK variant claim played down by scientists - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 1,348 more deaths recorded in UK - BBC News", "Keon Lincoln murder probe: Second teenager arrested - BBC News", "Covid: Police injured breaking up Chelsea party with '200 people' - BBC News", "Covid: Number of patients on ventilators passes 4,000 for first time - BBC News", "National Guard: President Biden apologises over troops sleeping in car park - BBC News", "Covid: Rural GPs to run new vaccine hubs amid roll-out criticism - BBC News", "Shipping crisis: I'm being quoted £10,000 for a £1,600 container' - BBC News", "Paul Davies: An understated Tory Senedd leader - BBC News", "Up to 500 new cells to be built in women's prisons - BBC News", "Skewen flood victims could be out of homes for days - BBC News", "Covid vaccine: Betsi Cadwaladr boss warns against queue jumping - BBC News", "Chorley 0-1 Wolverhampton Wanderers: Vitinha's superb goal sees Wolves past non-league opponents - BBC Sport", "Covid hand-outs: How other countries pay if you are sick - BBC News", "Covid-19: New variant 'raises R number by up to 0.7' - BBC News", "Covid: Peaky Blinders' Black Country Museum is vaccine hub - BBC News", "Covid: Four vaccine centres shut amid snow alert for Wales - BBC News", "Larry King: Veteran US talk show host dies aged 87 - BBC News", "Sri Lanka Minister who promoted 'Covid syrup' tests positive - BBC News", "Covid vaccine: 'No impact' on delivery after Storm Christoph floods - BBC News", "PM talks to Biden in first call since inauguration - BBC News", "Covid-19: Couple in 'only chance' wedding in Milton Keynes Hospital - BBC News", "Coronavirus: UK variant 'may be more deadly' - BBC News", "Wuhan marks its anniversary with triumph and denial - BBC News", "Covid: Wedding party in Stamford Hill broken up by police - BBC News", "Covid: Gap between Pfizer vaccine doses should be halved, say doctors - BBC News", "Covid-19: Nurses call for better masks to protect all staff - BBC News", "Cheltenham Town 1-3 Man City: Six-time winners avoid FA Cup shock - BBC Sport", "Essex lorry deaths: Men jailed for killing 39 migrants in trailer - BBC News", "Detentions and warnings over Navalny protests - BBC News", "Covid-19: Two £10,000 fines for '150-person' funeral - BBC News", "Hotel quarantine for UK arrivals to be discussed - BBC News", "Covid: Side-by-side in a London mosque - funerals and a food bank - BBC News", "Coronavirus: EU vaccine woes mount as new delays emerge - BBC News", "Coronavirus: UK R number 'between 0.8 and 1' - BBC News", "Covid in Wales: 'We've lost five patients in a single shift' - BBC News", "New Forest crash: Four ponies killed - BBC News", "Covid-19: UK reports a record 55,892 daily cases - BBC News", "Covid: Illegal New Year party at Essex church broken up - BBC News", "Brexit: Boris Johnson's father applies for French citizenship - BBC News", "Activists cheer as 'sexist' tampon tax is scrapped - BBC News", "Tokyo 2020: Olympics and Paralympics will go ahead, says Japan's PM amid rising infections - BBC Sport", "Covid: 'Nail-biting' weeks ahead for NHS, hospitals in England warn - BBC News", "The KLF's songs are finally available to stream - BBC News", "Newyear 2021: NHS and BLM celebrated in light display - BBC News", "Comedian John Bishop joins Doctor Who cast - BBC News", "Joe Anderson: Liverpool mayor in police probe will not seek re-election - BBC News", "Tommy Docherty: Former Man Utd and Scotland boss dies - BBC Sport", "Covid in Scotland: New strain of virus 'accelerating' spread - BBC News", "Manchester United 2-1 Aston Villa: Bruno Fernandes penalty puts Red Devils joint top - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: London's NHS Nightingale 'ready to admit patients' - BBC News", "Reward offered after Monmouthshire nativity scene destroyed - BBC News", "Police disperse crowd amid muted Hogmanay events - BBC News", "Covid: All London primary schools to stay closed - BBC News", "First Minneapolis police death since George Floyd captured on bodycam - BBC News", "As-it-happened: Hospitals under 'extreme pressure' as virus surges, NHS trusts say - BBC News", "Covid-19: New variant 'raises R number by up to 0.7' - BBC News", "Covid: Councils call for all London schools to stay shut - BBC News", "MF Doom: Hip-hop star dies aged 49 - BBC News", "New Year's Eve: UK sees in 2021 with fireworks and light show - BBC News", "Brexit: Are the borders ready? - BBC News", "Adieu to the single market created by the UK - BBC News", "Brexit: 'Plans in place' to minimise port delays in Wales - BBC News", "Covid vaccine rollout at 'very beginning' in Wales - BBC News", "Norway landslide: Body found as rescuers search Gjerdrum landslide - BBC News", "Ontario finance minister Rod Phillips resigns over Caribbean vacation - BBC News", "Covid: 12-week vaccine gap defended by UK medical chiefs - BBC News", "Brexit: First goods cross Irish Sea trade border - BBC News", "Brexit: New era for UK as it completes separation from European Union - BBC News", "In pictures: New Year, but not quite as we know it - BBC News", "The Archers: Radio 4 to mark 70th anniversary - BBC News", "Brexit: Gibraltar gets UK-Spain deal to keep open border - BBC News", "Omar Elabdellaoui: Norway star hurt by firework on New Year's Eve - BBC News", "Covid-19: England lockdown compliance 'more vital than ever' - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: hospital numbers at new record high - BBC News", "Kim Jong-un pledges to expand North Korea's nuclear arsenal - BBC News", "Covid: Fines reviewed after women 'surrounded by police' - BBC News", "Covid: 'I've relied on parents to keep my family afloat' - BBC News", "Capitol riots: A visual guide to the storming of Congress - BBC News", "Covid: Families 'devastated' by cancer surgery cancellation - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Company's apology after £5,000 vaccine offer - BBC News", "Covid: Royal Glamorgan Hospital nurse felt 'overwhelming fear' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Act like you've got the virus, government urges - BBC News", "Brexit: M&S temporarily cuts hundreds of products in NI - BBC News", "Covid-19: Queen and Prince Philip receive vaccinations - BBC News", "Stricter Covid supermarket rules being considered in Wales - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Covid-19: UK sees highest daily toll of 1,325 deaths - BBC News", "Covid: Aberfan survivor Bernard Thomas dies, aged 63 - BBC News", "Covid-19: Hackney gym owners fined for breaching rules - BBC News", "Covid fine review welcomed by 'intimidated' women - BBC News", "Loughton school hit-and-run: Terence Glover detained for killing Harley Watson - BBC News", "Air disasters timeline - BBC News", "David Moyes: West Ham manager says footballers must not be 'picked on' for coronavirus breaches - BBC Sport", "Covid: Flintshire councillor dies month after mum's funeral - BBC News", "Pompeo: US to lift restrictions on contacts with Taiwan - BBC News", "Analysis: Can lockdown stop the new coronavirus variant? - BBC News", "Google suspends 'free speech' app Parler - BBC News", "Europe's slow start: How many people have had the Covid vaccine? - BBC News", "Police arrest 16 at Clapham Common anti-lockdown protest - BBC News", "Dame Barbara Windsor's funeral held with 'Queen Peggy' tribute - BBC News", "Covid-19: Fordingbridge farm chickens risk cull over egg demand - BBC News", "Prince William talks about NHS and Covid with his children 'every day' - BBC News", "Salmond accuses Sturgeon of misleading parliament - BBC News", "Covid-19: Praise as angling given lockdown go-ahead - BBC News", "Brexit: Edwin Poots warns of job losses and food shortages - BBC News", "Covid cases 'up almost a third in week after Christmas' - BBC News", "Trump’s Twitter downfall - BBC News", "Depop seller's crop top made from Chiltern Railways train seat cover 'violates terms' - BBC News", "Ex-MP quits Labour ahead of sexual harassment disciplinary process - BBC News", "Michael Apted: TV documentary pioneer and film-maker dies aged 79 - BBC News", "Eva Williams, 10, dies one year after brain tumour diagnosis - BBC News", "Storm Filomena: Spain sees 'exceptional' snowfall - BBC News", "Happy Mondays star Bez in bid to rival Joe Wicks with lockdown fitness classes - BBC News", "Covid-19: Lockdown needs to be stricter, scientists warn - BBC News", "Covid: UK reports more than 80,000 deaths - BBC News", "Covid-19: 'Major incident' declared by London Mayor Sadiq Khan - BBC News", "Covid: Warnings 'blatantly ignored' as cars turned away - BBC News", "Covid: UK records new daily high of 1,610 deaths - BBC News", "BBC apologises for Phil Spector death headline - BBC News", "Storm Christoph: Flood warnings in parts of England - BBC News", "Sheku Bayoh death: Witness says stamping attack ‘never happened’ - BBC News", "Government narrowly sees off Tory revolt over anti-genocide trade deal law - BBC News", "'I'm stranded at Madrid Airport' - BBC News", "UK and US fail to do mini-trade deal as Trump exits - BBC News", "Covid: Woman given vaccination on 108th birthday - BBC News", "Covid: How is Europe lifting lockdown restrictions? - BBC News", "Covid court delays: Weeds, leaks, and four-year waits for justice - BBC News", "Japan: One dead as snowstorm causes 130-vehicle pile-up - BBC News", "Schools may reopen region by region, says medical adviser - BBC News", "Duchess of Sussex claims privacy and copyright breached by paper group - BBC News", "Past Covid-19 infection may provide 'months of immunity' - BBC News", "Only 1% of UK university professors are black - BBC News", "'Lack of investment' behind delayed court cases - BBC News", "Will the UK really refuse trade deals over human rights? - BBC News", "Johnson 'glad' to see Trump go, says ex-Civil Service head Lord Sedwill - BBC News", "Brithdir Nursing Home: Inquest into six residents' deaths opens - BBC News", "Covid: Health secretary Matt Hancock self-isolating after app alert - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Your tributes to those who have died - BBC News", "Coal mine go-ahead 'undermines climate summit' - BBC News", "Covid-19: 'Toughest week yet' of pandemic for NI hospitals - BBC News", "Covid: Tesco staff pay tribute to colleague John Deacy - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Schools to stay closed as lockdown extended - BBC News", "Covid-19: UK deaths hit new daily high and Scotland extends lockdown - BBC News", "Brexit: Government considers scrapping some EU labour laws - BBC News", "Verbier: British skier killed in avalanche in Swiss Alps - BBC News", "Brexit: Fishing firms hold London protest over disruption - BBC News", "Parents' stress and depression 'rise during lockdowns' - BBC News", "Alex Davies-Jones MP 'lost most of cervix after delaying smear' - BBC News", "Manchester Arena attack: Man tried to comfort Saffie-Rose Roussos - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Lockdown until 'at least' mid-February - BBC News", "Trump: 'Movement we started only just beginning' - BBC News", "Stolen 500-year-old painting found in Naples cupboard - BBC News", "Covid: Cash refusal 'creeping into UK economy' - BBC News", "Peaky Blinders film confirmed following final TV outing - BBC News", "Motor neurone disease: Edinburgh scientists reveal breakthrough - BBC News", "Conservative rebel MPs pressure government over genocide clause - BBC News", "Epiphany: Orthodox Christians across Russia brave icy dip - BBC News", "Conquering K2 in winter 'together' - BBC News", "Theresa May: PM's foreign aid cut damaged UK's moral leadership - BBC News", "London Ambulance Service: 'We take thousands of calls every day - it's tough' - BBC News", "Universal credit: MPs urge PM to keep £20 benefit 'lifeline' - BBC News", "BBC Radio 4 - File on 4, Locked Up in Lockdown", "New legislation protects Scottish shop staff from customer abuse - BBC News", "Australia v India: Rishabh Pant & Shubman Gill lead tourists to stunning series win - BBC Sport", "Covid in Scotland: Sturgeon to announce outcome of lockdown review - BBC News", "Covid: Positive antibody tests doubled since autumn - BBC News", "M1 deaths: Coroner calls for smart motorway review - BBC News", "Covid-19: Highest UK deaths as Scotland extends lockdown - BBC News", "Covid self-employment income support scheme unfair say mothers - BBC News", "Covid-19: No vaccine postcode lottery in NI, say doctors - BBC News", "Covid: Marylebone rail workers 'held lockdown baby shower' at closed station patisserie - BBC News", "Depop: 'I felt so violated when my account was hacked' - BBC News", "HSBC to close 82 branches this year - BBC News", "Storm Christoph: Amber alert for northern and central England - BBC News", "Boris Johnson condemns 'disgraceful scenes' in US - BBC News", "Covid-19: West Midlands Ambulance Service records busiest day - BBC News", "Eric Jerome Dickey: Best-selling US author dies at 59 - BBC News", "1.3 million in UK have had their Covid vaccine - BBC News", "Former banker Richard Sharp to be next BBC chairman - BBC News", "UK new car registrations in 2020 sink to 30-year low - BBC News", "Greggs faces first loss for 36 years as lockdown bites - BBC News", "US intelligence task force accuses Russia of cyber-hack - BBC News", "Capitol riot: Biden says BLM protest would have been treated 'very differently' - BBC News", "Georgia Senate: ‘I've never seen this energy before' - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Deaths up by 68 as 33,000 more people get vaccine - BBC News", "Covid: Doctors call for rapid rollout of vaccines - BBC News", "Islington street robbery: Man left partially blind after attack - BBC News", "Lockdown: Clap for Carers to return as Clap for Heroes - BBC News", "JoJo Siwa: YouTuber denounces 'gross' board game bearing her image - BBC News", "Teachers' grades to replace A-levels and GCSEs in England - BBC News", "Dr Dre: Rap legend in hospital after brain aneurysm - BBC News", "Reading stabbings: Killer's interest in Islamic jihad 'fleeting' - BBC News", "Covid: Seven mass vaccination hubs announced for England - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'How long can we keep going like this? About a week' - BBC News", "BBC to put lessons on TV during lockdown - BBC News", "Breonna Taylor: Two Louisville officers fired over roles in shooting - BBC News", "Nursery staff 'torn between duty and fear' - BBC News", "Neil Young sells song rights in '$150m' deal - BBC News", "Trump bans Alipay and seven other Chinese apps - BBC News", "Covid variant 'spreading rapidly through Wales' - BBC News", "Senate debate suspended as protesters enter Capitol - BBC News", "Covid-19: Lockdown latest, exams update and car sales slump - BBC News", "Capitol riots: Moment protesters storm US legislature - BBC News", "Covid: WHO team investigating virus origins denied entry to China - BBC News", "Georgia election: Trump voter fraud claims and others fact-checked - BBC News", "Capitol riots: Pro-Trump protesters storm the US legislature - in pictures - BBC News", "Covid: Sir Keir Starmer calls for 'round the clock' vaccinations - BBC News", "Fake NHS vaccine messages sent in banking fraud scam - BBC News", "Inside one GP surgery's Covid vaccine roll-out - BBC News", "Albert Roux: Chef and culinary 'legend' dies aged 85 - BBC News", "Netflix raises UK prices to cover cost of content - BBC News", "Covid-19: UK daily coronavirus cases top 60,000 for first time - BBC News", "Covid-19: Welsh Government update - BBC News", "Shoppers told not to buy more than normal - BBC News", "Conjoined twins Marieme and Ndeye settling at Cardiff school - BBC News", "Covid: Wuhan scientist would 'welcome' visit probing lab leak theory - BBC News", "UK records coldest night of the winter so far - BBC News", "Colin Bell: Manchester City great dies aged 74 - BBC Sport", "Alaska: Trump opens wilderness up for oil drilling - BBC News", "Baby death motorist admits dangerous driving in Kirkcaldy - BBC News", "Tanya Roberts: Bond actress and Charlie's Angel dies at 65 - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Julian Assange loses extradition bail bid - BBC News", "McDonald's pauses walk-in takeaways in lockdown - BBC News", "Cancelled GCSEs and A-levels in England must avoid 'shambles' - BBC News", "US Capitol riots: World leaders react to 'horrifying' scenes in Washington - BBC News", "TalkRadio: YouTube reverses decision to ban channel - BBC News", "'Deepfake porn images still give me nightmares' - BBC News", "Vocational exams allowed to go ahead in England - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Arrivals in UK could soon need negative test - BBC News", "Covid: New lockdowns for England and Scotland ahead of 'hardest weeks' - BBC News", "Analysis: Can lockdown stop the new coronavirus variant? - BBC News", "As it happened: MPs back England's new Covid lockdown - BBC News", "FTSE 100 chief executives 'earn average salary within 3 days' - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Medics concerned over 12-week gap between vaccine doses - BBC News", "Covid-19: Johnson warns England's lockdown won't end 'with a bang' - BBC News", "Covid: Hackney railway arch rave attended by '300 people' - BBC News", "Robert Rowland: Former Brexit MEP dies in Bahamas diving accident - BBC News", "Sturgeon: I did not mislead Scottish Parliament over Salmond - BBC News", "Asos frontrunner to buy Topshop, Topman and Miss Selfridge brands - BBC News", "Pike River: The 29 coal miners who never came home - BBC News", "Spanish flu: Anglesey search for New Zealand family of flu victim - BBC News", "Alexei Navalny: 'More than 3,000 detained' in protests across Russia - BBC News", "Firms planned record 800,000 redundancies last year - BBC News", "Boohoo 'set to buy Debenhams brand and website' - BBC News", "South Africa coronavirus variant: 77 cases found in UK - BBC News", "UK firms told 'set up in EU to avoid trade disruption' - BBC News", "Covid: 'More deadly' UK variant claim played down by scientists - BBC News", "Covid: Number of patients on ventilators passes 4,000 for first time - BBC News", "US police vehicle ploughs into crowd watching 'burnouts' - BBC News", "Covid: Israel vaccinates 16 to 18-year-olds ahead of exams - BBC News", "Smart motorways are dangerous, says Yorkshire police chief - BBC News", "Learning disability vaccine plea: 'Don't leave us to rot' - BBC News", "Covid: DVLA staff in Swansea 'scared to enter the workplace' - BBC News", "Covid vaccine: Betsi Cadwaladr boss warns against queue jumping - BBC News", "Vaccine volunteers: 'It's felt good to fight back against Covid' - BBC News", "Covid-19: New variant 'raises R number by up to 0.7' - BBC News", "Covid: Four vaccine centres shut amid snow alert for Wales - BBC News", "Border poll would be 'absolutely reckless', says Arlene Foster - BBC News", "Larry King: Veteran US talk show host dies aged 87 - BBC News", "SpaceX: World record number of satellites launched - BBC News", "Sri Lanka Minister who promoted 'Covid syrup' tests positive - BBC News", "PM talks to Biden in first call since inauguration - BBC News", "Keon Lincoln murder probe: Three more arrested - BBC News", "Andrew RT Davies returns as Welsh Conservatives leader - BBC News", "McGregor v Poirier 2: Irishman shocked in UFC rematch at Fight Island - BBC Sport", "As it happened: Hancock says 75% of over-80s get first Covid jab - BBC News", "Manchester United 3-2 Liverpool: Bruno Fernandes settles FA Cup thriller - BBC Sport", "In pictures: Tens of thousands gather for pro-Navalny protests - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Over-70 vaccine letters start but blue envelope delay - BBC News", "Cheltenham Town 1-3 Man City: Six-time winners avoid FA Cup shock - BBC Sport", "Covid: Birmingham student party guests 'travelled 200 miles' - BBC News", "Snow: Severe weather warnings in place across UK - BBC News", "Covid: Vaccinated people may spread virus, says Van-Tam - BBC News", "China mine rescue: The moment a miner is rescued - BBC News", "Jim Haynes: A man who invited the world over for dinner - BBC News", "Global health insurance card to replace EHIC under new rules - BBC News", "Irish 'laughing dad' goes viral - BBC News", "UK economy 'to get worse before it gets better' - BBC News", "Covid: UK at 'worst point' of pandemic, says Hancock - BBC News", "Anita Rani to join Emma Barnett on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour - BBC News", "20-year-old Covid patient couldn't tell parents 'I love you' - BBC News", "Covid: Stick with the rules during lockdown, says Patel - BBC News", "Inside Newcastle's Covid mass vaccination centre - BBC News", "As it happened: New tech unveiled at CES 2021 - BBC News", "John Lewis suspends click and collect due to virus safety - BBC News", "Reading stabbings: Father demands answers on Saadallah freedom - BBC News", "Royal Mail names areas hit by Covid postal delays - BBC News", "Reading stabbings: Khairi Saadallah jailed for park murders - BBC News", "Vogue editor defends cover photo of US Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris - BBC News", "Edinburgh Woollen Mill rescue deal to save 2,000 jobs - BBC News", "Capitol riots: Hundreds will be charged over violence - FBI - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Lockdown lifting 'unlikely' as deaths pass 5,000 - BBC News", "Sir David Attenborough receives Covid-19 vaccine - BBC News", "Covid-19: UAE dropped from UK travel corridor list - BBC News", "Earl of Strathmore admits sex attack at Glamis Castle home - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Covid: 'Loads of people without masks' in supermarkets - BBC News", "Covid-19: London's Nightingale hospital taking patients - BBC News", "Covid: Around half of intensive care patients in Wales are dying - BBC News", "Four arrested over 'public nuisance' at Redditch and Birmingham hospitals - BBC News", "Covid: Birmingham hospitals move 200 doctors to intensive care duties - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Boris Johnson criticised over bike ride seven miles from home - BBC News", "Retail sales in 2020 'worst for 25 years' - BBC News", "Covid: 2020 saw most excess deaths since World War Two - BBC News", "Eugene Goodman hailed for guiding Mitt Romney to safety - BBC News", "Naomi Campbell's Kenya tourism role causes row - BBC News", "Covid-19: Rule-breakers, eyesight warning and retail gloom - BBC News", "Covid-19: Rule-breakers 'increasingly likely' to be fined - Cressida Dick - BBC News", "Brexit: UK driver has ham sandwiches confiscated at Dutch border - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: NHS staff shortages 'major problem' - BBC News", "In pictures: Aurora Borealis lights up sky above Scotland - BBC News", "Covid: Gwynedd care home 'frightened' over vaccine delay - BBC News", "Covid: Johnson's bike ride 'didn't break rules' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Alabama crowds ignore coronavirus to celebrate championship - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Families remember loved ones lost to coronavirus - BBC News", "Covid rules: What could be done to tighten lockdown in England? - BBC News", "Cramlington woman celebrates 100th birthday with covid jab - BBC News", "People's sonic boom surprise caught on camera - BBC News", "Covid vaccine: Pfizer v Oxford AstraZeneca v Moderna - BBC News", "Covid: Women fined for going for a walk receive police apology - BBC News", "Covid-19 deaths pass 5,000 mark in Wales - BBC News", "Covid: Eyesight risk warning from lockdown screen time - BBC News", "Covid: Play your part in fight against virus, says Patel - BBC News", "Bill Belichick: NFL coach turns down Presidential Medal of Freedom - BBC News", "Mohamud Mohammed Hassan: Hundreds march over arrested man's death - BBC News", "Europe's slow start: How many people have had the Covid vaccine? - BBC News", "Cuba placed back on US terrorism sponsor list - BBC News", "Covid-19: Williamson promises 300,000 extra laptops - BBC News", "Tesco, Asda and Waitrose ban shoppers without face masks - BBC News", "Croydon University Hospital doctor: Covid 'not fake news' - BBC News", "Covid: Morrisons and Sainsbury's ban maskless shoppers - BBC News", "Parler social network sues Amazon for pulling support - BBC News", "Covid: What next for restrictions as hospital cases rise? - BBC News", "Sonic boom heard over East of England as RAF intercepts civilian plane - BBC News", "Leicester City 2-0 Southampton: James Maddison and Harvey Barnes send Foxes second - BBC Sport", "Coronavirus vaccine: India begins world's biggest drive - BBC News", "Covid-19: Rise in suspected child abuse cases after lockdown - BBC News", "UK weather: Snow and ice warnings for England and Scotland - BBC News", "Archie Lyndhurst: CBBC star died in his sleep, says mother - BBC News", "Brexit: Irish hauliers 'bypassing Welsh ports', say bosses - BBC News", "SLS: Nasa's 'megarocket' engine test ends early - BBC News", "Storm Christoph: Homes evacuated as storm batters Wales - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: How a pilot ended up producing PPE - BBC News", "Joanna Lumley 'shocked' at claims disabled workers unpaid - BBC News", "Toby Young: Telegraph coronavirus column 'significantly misleading' - BBC News", "Halam stabbing: Surgeon Graeme Perks 'fighting for his life' - BBC News", "Boris Johnson says girls' education key to ending poverty - BBC News", "Coronavirus doctor's diary: Karen caught Covid - and took it home - BBC News", "Covid-19: Protect us from unlawful killing charges - medics - BBC News", "Scottish fishermen 'sailing to Denmark to land catch' - BBC News", "RAF veteran receives Covid jab at Salisbury Cathedral - BBC News", "UK weather: Disruption fears lift as snow moves on from UK - BBC News", "Covid: UK to close all travel corridors from Monday - BBC News", "Covid-19: France begins 6pm curfew - BBC News", "Covid-19: Nisra records highest ever weekly deaths - BBC News", "Covid: UK staycation boom predicted once lockdown lifts - BBC News", "Covid-19: BBC's Fergal Keane revisits St Mary’s and Charing Cross Hospital 10 months on - BBC News", "Covid-19: Travel industry 'crisis' and was there Christmas virus spike? - BBC News", "As it happened: Coronavirus: 37, 475 patients in UK hospitals - BBC News", "Sri Lanka v England: Lahiru Thirimanne leads hosts' fightback in Galle - BBC Sport", "Gerry Marsden: Funeral held for Pacemakers star - BBC News", "Home Office 'working to restore' lost police records - BBC News", "Armin Laschet elected leader of Merkel's CDU party - BBC News", "Covid: UK variant could drive 'rapid growth' in US cases, CDC warns - BBC News", "Covid-19: A-level and GCSE results planned for early July - BBC News", "Covid: 'Convalescent plasma no benefit to hospital patients' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: William and Kate hear from emergency workers - BBC News", "Police probes compromised after computer records deleted - BBC News", "Part of rail bridge collapses near fatal Stonehaven derailment site - BBC News", "Capitol riots: Police describe a 'medieval battle' - BBC News", "Covid: Man charged after woman, 92, given fake vaccine - BBC News", "Nóra Quoirin: 'Compelling evidence' of abduction - BBC News", "Mount Semeru: Erupting volcano spews ash above Indonesia's Java island - BBC News", "Covid-19: Further 1,295 deaths recorded in the UK - BBC News", "Covid: UK records new daily high of 1,610 deaths - BBC News", "Madrid explosion leaves three dead - BBC News", "Storm Christoph: Flood warnings in parts of England - BBC News", "Covid: UK records highest daily virus deaths - BBC News", "£80m for treatment services in drug crackdown - BBC News", "Biden inauguration: Step forward after bumpy period - Boris Johnson - BBC News", "Covid: Woman given vaccination on 108th birthday - BBC News", "PMQs: As it happened 20 January - BBC News", "Duchess of Sussex claims privacy and copyright breached by paper group - BBC News", "Low-deposit mortgages return after Covid slump - BBC News", "Donald Trump insists he has 'complete power' to pardon - BBC News", "Doris Hobday: Identical twin among UK's oldest dies with Covid - BBC News", "US election: Bannon Twitter account banned amid clampdown - BBC News", "Musicians 'failed by government' over EU touring, stars say - BBC News", "Biden Inauguration: What will Joe Biden do first? - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Your tributes to those who have died - BBC News", "The 65 days that led to chaos at the Capitol - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Schools to stay closed as lockdown extended - BBC News", "Biden inauguration: How the White House gets ready for a new president - BBC News", "Brexit: Government considers scrapping some EU labour laws - BBC News", "Biden's inauguration speech calls for unity - it won't be easy - BBC News", "Saga cruises says all customers must be vaccinated - BBC News", "Police records: Boris Johnson 'doesn't know' impact of deleted files - BBC News", "Joe Biden inauguration: 46th US president takes oath of office - BBC News", "Amanda Gorman: Inauguration poet calls for 'unity and togetherness' - BBC News", "Kamala Harris becomes first female, first black and first Asian-American VP - BBC News", "Covid smear-test delays prompt calls for home HPV tests - BBC News", "£23m support fund for struggling fishing firms - BBC News", "Lockdown: Police officers fined £200 for cafe meeting - BBC News", "Fulham 1-2 Man Utd: Paul Pogba fires United back to the top of the Premier League - BBC Sport", "Full transcript of Joe Biden's inauguration speech - BBC News", "Covid: Llangollen 'Pimm's and Hymns' reaches Brazil - BBC News", "Covid: 'No furlough because they shut the company' - BBC News", "Epiphany: Orthodox Christians across Russia brave icy dip - BBC News", "Scrapping £20 benefit could see Tories called 'nasty party' - Casey - BBC News", "Kamala Harris and a 1986 snapshot of that Howard generation - BBC News", "Storm Christoph: More than 2,000 homes in Manchester evacuated - BBC News", "NHS Tavistock child gender clinic rated 'inadequate' - BBC News", "Covid: UK reports 1,820 deaths as Johnson warns tough weeks to come - BBC News", "Theresa May: PM's foreign aid cut damaged UK's moral leadership - BBC News", "Biden cabinet: Does this diverse team better reflect America? - BBC News", "Joy Morgan: Murdered student 'may have been given drugs without knowing' - BBC News", "Steve Bannon: The Trump-whisperer's rapid fall from grace - BBC News", "New legislation protects Scottish shop staff from customer abuse - BBC News", "Trump presidency: A flashback through four turbulent years - BBC News", "Covid-19: Military to assist NI medical staff - BBC News", "BBC faces 'financial risk' over licence fee income, watchdog says - BBC News", "US historians on what Donald Trump's legacy will be - BBC News", "Rollout of daily testing of close contacts paused in English schools - BBC News", "Monklands ICU staff are 'physically and emotionally' drained - BBC News", "As it happened: Inauguration: Biden signs orders ending key Trump policies - BBC News", "Author Terry Pratchett's 'inspiring' house for sale - BBC News", "Supermarket delivery driver rescued from Westgate ford - BBC News", "Joe Biden: 'Middle Class Joe' vows to 'finish the job' - BBC News", "Covid-19: No vaccine postcode lottery in NI, say doctors - BBC News", "Meghan letter: Royal aides 'won't take sides', High Court told - BBC News", "Biden inauguration: Americans' hopes and fears for next president - BBC News", "Melania’s jacket and nine other defining images of Trump's presidency - BBC News", "Emotional Biden bids farewell to Delaware - BBC News", "President Joe Biden inauguration speech: 'Democracy has prevailed' - BBC News", "Storm Christoph: Evacuations and flood warnings in England - BBC News", "Biden inauguration in pictures - BBC News", "Natural wonder: Wing 'clap' solves mystery of butterfly flight - BBC News", "Burnley 1-1 Fulham: Clarets hit back to frustrate Cottagers - BBC Sport", "Coronavirus: BMJ urges NYT to correct vaccine 'mixing' article - BBC News", "New Forest crash: Four ponies killed - BBC News", "Covid: Illegal New Year party at Essex church broken up - BBC News", "Paris St-Germain: Mauricio Pochettino replaces Thomas Tuchel as head coach - BBC Sport", "Covid in Wales: Beauty spots 'busy' despite lockdown rules - BBC News", "Covid-19: Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine arrives at hospitals - BBC News", "Tokyo 2020: Olympics and Paralympics will go ahead, says Japan's PM amid rising infections - BBC Sport", "Covid: 'Nail-biting' weeks ahead for NHS, hospitals in England warn - BBC News", "Comedian John Bishop joins Doctor Who cast - BBC News", "West Brom 0-4 Arsenal: Arsenal see off Baggies in ruthless display - BBC Sport", "Manchester United 2-1 Aston Villa: Bruno Fernandes penalty puts Red Devils joint top - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: London's NHS Nightingale 'ready to admit patients' - BBC News", "Covid: Metal detecting 'an escape from pandemic stress' - BBC News", "EuroMillions: Jackpot of more than £39m won by UK ticket-holder - BBC News", "Lisa Montgomery: Only woman on US federal death row to face execution - BBC News", "US election: Legal bid to get Pence to overturn results rejected - BBC News", "Covid: All London primary schools to stay closed - BBC News", "First Minneapolis police death since George Floyd captured on bodycam - BBC News", "France: More than 2,500 break virus restrictions at illegal rave - BBC News", "Thousands raised for East Horndon church 'trashed' by revellers - BBC News", "Covid-19: New variant 'raises R number by up to 0.7' - BBC News", "Covid and dementia: Rhondda woman, 51, feels 'lost' during lockdown - BBC News", "Covid-19: Anti-lockdown protesters arrested at Hyde Park demo - BBC News", "Norway landslide: Body found as rescuers search Gjerdrum landslide - BBC News", "Hospitals across UK 'must prepare for Covid surge', senior doctor warns - BBC News", "Tottenham: Jose Mourinho 'disappointed' after three players attend party - BBC Sport", "Irish Eurovision singer and Bagatelle frontman Liam Reilly dies - BBC News", "Bitcoin tops $34,000 as record rally continues - BBC News", "Suspected Islamists kill dozens in attacks on two Niger villages - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News"], "published_date": ["2021-01-21", "2021-01-21", "2021-01-21", 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deposit.", "People who attend house parties of more than 15 people will be fined, the home secretary says.", "Medics at Glasgow's QEUH are seeing the effects of people delaying healthcare during lockdown.", "The storm brought heavy rain, flooding and snow to parts of England and Wales.", "Tuition fees in England are being frozen for another year and ministers outline plans to reform post-16 education.", "Latest updates from North West England at Storm Christoph brings snow, rain, evacuations and disruption.", "Doctors say people should buy a pulse oximeter to monitor their oxygen levels at home.", "The imam, Sheikh Nuru Mohammed, hopes the centre will dispel false information about the vaccination.", "Thousands of the capital's taxi drivers have already signed up to the planned group legal action.", "Major incidents were declared in north and south Wales as Storm Christoph causes flooding.", "An amber alert has passed but yellow warnings for snow and rain remain in place across Scotland.", "Some 3,500 people sign an open letter, published in three newspapers.", "The Worthy Farm event has been scrapped for a second year running due to the global pandemic.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "'This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge' - the new president knows how daunting his task is.", "Holidaymakers in 2021 must be fully vaccinated against Covid-19, the travel firm says.", "The 22-year-old from LA is the youngest poet to perform at a presidential inauguration.", "Kamala Harris makes history as she is sworn in as US vice-president.", "Researchers warn that unless something changes, hospitals will continue facing significant pressure.", "With Stormont ministers extending the current lockdown, could other measures could be on the table?", "Investigations are ongoing into what caused the road surface to give way, United Utilities say.", "Fines of £800 will be handed to anyone attending a house party of more than 15 people from next week.", "Shoppers buying items from Europe now have to pay customs or VAT charges on those above a certain value.", "Heavy rain is causing flooding and travel disruption, with a warning for ice also forecast.", "Paul Pogba scores a superb winner as Manchester United reclaim top spot in the Premier League by coming from behind for a club-record equalling away win at Fulham.", "'This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge'. Read the 46th president's address in full.", "Boris Johnson says England's measures will be reviewed once the priority groups have had the vaccine.", "Paddy McElhone, 24, was shot in the back by a soldier near his home outside Pomeroy in August 1974.", "There is a \"widening financial gap\" between households because of the pandemic, says the ONS.", "The new president warned it could take months to turn things around.", "Northern Ireland’s coronavirus lockdown restrictions will be extended until 5 March.", "A survey is launched by the children's commissioner for Wales to help assess the impact on them.", "A consortium including the fashion chain will no longer bid to buy Topshop and Topman out of administration.", "Liverpool's 68-game unbeaten home run in the Premier League comes to an end as Ashley Barnes fires home a late winner from the penalty spot to secure a famous victory for Burnley.", "They are all laughing at the camera, but what are the stories of the women next to Kamala Harris?", "More than 2,000 properties in Manchester are affected as police warn some occupants will have Covid.", "Around 200 vaccines are being given every minute, the health secretary tells the Commons.", "A further 1,820 people die in the UK within 28 days of a positive test - another all-time high.", "With the world watching, who created fashion moments on inauguration day?", "The health minister asks the Ministry of Defence to help out, primarily at a number of hospitals.", "An immobile woman says she was told if she could not get to her GP surgery she would have to wait.", "Muller Milk & Ingredients in Somerset confirms 47 dairy workers have tested positive for Covid-19.", "President Biden inked 15 executive orders, moving to rejoin the Paris climate accord.", "His most famous Discworld novels were written in the house in Somerset, the estate agent says.", "Unison clarifies position on military personnel helping at hospitals after drawing criticism.", "Satellite imagery is being used to count elephants in a breakthrough that could aid conservation.", "The Duchess of Sussex is suing the Mail on Sunday over the publication of a letter to her father.", "The curbs may even continue until Easter in an attempt to drive down Covid-19 case numbers.", "Many coronavirus-related prosecutions involved police officers being coughed and spat on by suspects.", "Unilever says that by 2030 suppliers must pay staff enough to cover a family's basic needs.", "Joe Biden makes his inaugural address as the 46th president of the United States.", "Abimbola Ajoke Bamgbose had been fed up with people asking if she was pregnant, an inquest hears.", "Images from Joe Biden's swearing-in and first day as the 46th US President.", "Wales has made a \"very good start\" on delivering jabs, a former chief medical officer says.", "Chloé Lopes Gomes says she has faced humiliating racial harassment while being a ballet dancer in Berlin.", "The pandemic has seen children slipping back in learning and social skills, Ofsted inspectors warn.", "The medical journal's editor says UK guidelines don't recommend giving different coronavirus jabs.", "Lockdown losses mean renewing the 10-year contract to lease Yang Guang and Tian Tian may be unaffordable.", "Police help dozens of motorists who became stranded after heavy snow fell in the Peak District.", "Council leaders say it is \"self-evident\" the tiers system is not containing the new strain of Covid.", "The first doses of the latest coronavirus vaccination to be approved are due to be given on Monday.", "Parliament will be recalled for Nicola Sturgeon to make an \"urgent statement\" as case numbers rise by 2,464.", "A farmer's field in Scotland has been transformed into a \"pop-up\" ice hockey rink.", "Schools in Wales given a flexible approach to ensure a \"safe return\", despite concerns by unions.", "Dan Eliasson, head of the civil contingencies agency, flew to the Canary Islands to see his daughter.", "The frontman, who found success with songs such as Summer in Dublin, \"passed away suddenly\" aged 65.", "Tributes have been paid to trainer Zoe Davison, who died from cancer on the same day two of her horses claimed wins at Plumpton.", "Arsenal continue their Premier League resurgence with a ruthless victory over strugglers West Brom at The Hawthorns.", "The first minister warns Scotland could be entering the most dangerous period since the outbreak began.", "It aims to inoculate some 300m people this year in one of the world's largest vaccination campaigns.", "Four boys and a girl are held on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder after the Reading attack.", "Just one ticket matched all seven numbers in the New Year's Day draw.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "Wales' first minister doesn't \"see much headroom for change\" ahead of a review of lockdown measures.", "Twelve people are caught playing the game in darkened backroom at an eatery in east London.", "Boris Johnson says the gap between referendums on Europe - 41 years - is \"a good sort of gap\" for independence referendums.", "The Gerry and the Pacemakers singer's number one hit became a football terrace anthem.", "Driving conditions on many roads will become \"hazardous\" next week, the Met Office warns.", "A study finds the new coronavirus variant is responsible for pushing the R rate above the crucial 1.0 mark.", "The government said soldiers had been sent to protect the area, close to Niger's border with Mali.", "After the PM hints at tighter measures in England, our science editor looks at what they could entail.", "Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola says he may stay in management much longer than he anticipated.", "Up to 300 people gather in London's Hyde Park to protest at Covid-19 restrictions.", "Manchester City say they are disappointed after defender Benjamin Mendy breaches Covid-19 rules by hosting a New Year's Eve party.", "Mexican-American Ryan Garcia gets up from the canvas to stop Britain's Luke Campbell with a body shot in Dallas, Texas.", "About 30,000 birds are to be culled at the farm near Clough in north Antrim.", "The latest government figures show a further 2,137 cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in Scotland on Friday.", "It comes as a further 57,725 people test positive for the virus, a new daily high.", "Boris Johnson says more areas may need tougher rules, as Labour urges England-wide curbs within 24 hours.", "Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer describes her as a \"dear friend and colleague\", and wishes her well.", "Boris Johnson says regional restrictions in England are \"probably about to get tougher\".", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "The decision to keep car parks open is under \"constant review\", says one national park.", "Leicester City edge a keenly contested Premier League encounter with Southampton to maintain their push for a top-four place.", "Calls are made for \"front-line\" nursery staff to be supported with funding and vaccines.", "CBBC star's mother, Lucy Lyndhurst, says his death has had a \"catastrophic effect\" on their family.", "A critical engine test for Nasa's new \"megarocket\" - the Space Launch System (SLS) - ends early.", "Health groups say NHS staff fear prosecution over decisions if hospitals are overwhelmed.", "Spector, who was jailed for killing actress Lana Clarkson, transformed pop music with his \"wall of sound\".", "He told police he drove to Devizes for a McDonald's even though the town does not have a branch.", "Louis Godwin, 95, said he was \"so pleased\" to get his Covid-19 vaccination at Salisbury Cathedral.", "Prime Minister Jean Castex said the measures would be in place for at least 15 days.", "Leaders Manchester United are thwarted by the second-half heroics of keeper Alisson in a goalless draw with title rivals Liverpool at Anfield.", "The \"fiercely competitive\" but \"kind, thoughtful and caring\" news executive has died aged 73.", "Doctors say the \"patchy supply\" of vaccine to GPs is slowing down efforts to deliver it to patients.", "Northern Health Trust chief says system is under \"huge pressure\" with patients waiting for beds.", "Sir Richard Branson's rocket company succeeds in putting its first satellites in space.", "Statistics agency Nisra says 145 deaths were registered last week, bringing its pandemic total to 1,976.", "Mother Sara Powell-Davies welcomes its return, but nurseries say they fear for the future.", "Women are sent sexually explicit messages and requests for \"worn\" garments.", "As the UK records its highest death toll, Fergal Keane has been to see the strain the NHS is under for the second time.", "Fighting erupted after a man was stabbed in a row between two men from different ethnic groups.", "Former climbing champion Lai Chi-Wai raised HK$5.2 million for spinal cord patients.", "The government is aiming to provide grants by April to mitigate the impact of Covid travel rules.", "Patient numbers have risen by 15,000 since Christmas, but infections are stabilising, says Sir Simon Stevens.", "Pupils in England can read works by popular authors online while schools stay closed in lockdown.", "The Gerry and the Pacemakers singer died from a blood infection at the age of 78.", "More than half of the Church of England's 14,000 parishes will not open for Sunday services later.", "England need 36 runs on the final day to win the first Test against Sri Lanka despite losing three wickets in a chaotic final session in Galle.", "A decision on whether to extend £20 Universal Credit rise is unlikely before March's Budget, minister says.", "The leaders of the US, France, Germany and other leading economies will meet in Cornwall in June.", "The government is planning new laws to stop England's monuments being removed \"on a whim\" by protesters.", "Hundreds of thousands of DNA and arrest records were deleted after a human error, the Home Office says.", "A group of London firms has written to ministers calling for financial support for the rail firm.", "With traffic down and more people working from home, what is the future for these lay-by businesses?", "Prince William says he \"really worries\" about the effect of the pandemic on front-line workers.", "Drivers from Scotland and Portsmouth caught breaking lockdown rules in north Wales.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Sunday.", "But Sir Simon Stevens says the health service has never been in a more precarious situation.", "Mount Semeru has erupted, pouring volcanic matter miles into the air and placing locals on alert.", "Pressure grows on PM after non-binding motion on universal credit top-up is passed by 278 votes.", "The latest death and case figures should be a \"bitter warning for us all\", Public Health England says.", "The Most Reverend Philip Tartaglia tested positive for the virus shortly after Christmas but the cause of his death is not clear.", "The man told police he had travelled 14 miles from his home to search for the fictional characters.", "Hashem Abedi and Ahmed Hassan are accused of assaulting an officer in HMP Belmarsh in May.", "Scotland's health secretary says 400,000 jabs could be administered every week by the end of February.", "Lidl, Just Eat and Asos say demand for fizz, takeaways and clothes all rose during December.", "As the UK records its highest death toll, Fergal Keane has been to see the strain the NHS is under for the second time.", "Black people are more than four times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act in England.", "Amnesty International says the issue of forced adoptions also needs close scrutiny.", "Details and reaction to a briefing by Wales' chief medical officer and NHS Wales chief executive.", "Carol and David Richards had been fined £60 for driving 20 minutes to see her mother.", "Tony Parsons from Tillicoultry vanished more than three years ago during a charity cycle ride.", "The prime minister wants round-the-clock vaccination but adds supply is currently the limiting factor.", "Nicola Sturgeon announces the areas where restrictions will be tightened in Scotland from Saturday.", "The famous Lauberhorn ski event is cancelled after a spike in Covid-19 cases linked to one tourist.", "Staff at one of London's busiest hospitals say it's not going to take much for services to soon break.", "The health secretary urges people to follow rules, saying \"individual decisions\" make a difference.", "Rival supermarkets defend their pay, with Asda saying looking at hourly rates does not tell the whole story.", "Some restrictions have been tightened amid concerns the \"stay at home\" message has not had the same impact.", "Investors have agreed a deal to save the chain, along with Ponden Home and Bonmarché.", "Amid reports of mass furlough fraud the BBC hears from one worker who quit work but still gets furlough pay.", "First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says because of the \"precarious\" situation in relation to the pandemic more restrictions will be brought in.", "A report from a group of Tory MPs adds to internal pressure on the government to harden its stance.", "Together with his twin brother, Sir David built a business empire spanning hotels, retail and newspapers.", "Scotland's first minister says the current restrictions are \"very unlikely\" to be lifted at the end of the month.", "The company denies selling technology that can identify the ethnic group and plans to reword the patent.", "Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer challenged Boris Johnson over the provision of \"disgraceful\" food parcels.", "The Earl of Strathmore attacked a woman in her room during an event he was hosting at Glamis Castle.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "Latest results show Sinovac's Covid-19 vaccine is less effective in Brazil than previously suggested.", "The health minister says it is a \"strong start\" but there is more to do.", "One operator told the BBC his staff were working up to 16 hours a day to help traders.", "Earlier this month videos showing supposed empty hospitals were shared on social media.", "A leaked memo warns several Birmingham hospitals risk being \"overwhelmed\" by coronavirus patients.", "The increase is to further discourage shoppers from buying single-use plastic bags.", "Tweeters query why it has not been given to a prominent Kenyan like actress Lupita Nyong'o.", "A Met Office yellow weather warning for ice is in place after heavy snow caused road closures and travel disruption.", "A negative test had been due to be required from Friday, but ministers said people needed time to prepare.", "Sir David will showcase an augmented reality app as part of a drive to prove the uses of 5G.", "Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said this would help teachers to decide \"deserved grades\".", "But Boris Johnson does not rule out tougher restrictions in England, saying they are kept under review.", "Fans of the University of Alabama football team gathered in the streets of Tuscaloosa, ignoring social distancing.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Wednesday morning.", "These are the lawmakers with a big influence on the impeachment process against the former president.", "The last of 14 works identified as looted from Jewish collectors is returned to the owner's heirs.", "Isabella Curry said she now feels safe and will be able to go out and meet friends soon.", "An RAF aircraft breaking the sound barrier causes a loud bang in skies across the East of England.", "Pawel Relowicz committed \"sexually motivated\" burglaries before Libby Squire's death, jurors hear.", "Doctors believed 11-month-old Sofia-Grace Hill was rejecting food because she had tonsillitis.", "It comes as Boris Johnson is quizzed by MPs on the government's coronavirus response.", "Three vaccines have been approved in the UK - what are the differences between them?", "Parents of disabled children are calling for teachers in special schools to receive the Covid-19 vaccine.", "Ivan Cavaleiro's late header earns Premier League strugglers Fulham a hard-fought draw against Tottenham in their hastily rearranged London derby.", "Doctors leaders' want staff to be given the type of high-quality masks usually only worn in intensive care.", "The home secretary says she will back police to enforce virus rules, as another 1,243 die in the UK.", "The Google-owned service said the president had broken its rules over the incitement of violence.", "The prime minister warns there is a \"very substantial\" risk of intensive care being \"overtopped\".", "Mohamud Mohammed Hassan was arrested at home on Friday but released without charge on Saturday.", "The Democrats say they sheltered in a safe room alongside others who refused to wear masks.", "It follows similar moves by Morrisons and Sainsbury's, but those with medical reasons will be exempt.", "Ten members of his own party voted against the president over his role in the deadly riots at the US Capitol.", "Police in Atlanta want to question YFN Lucci, 29, over a fatal shooting in the city last month.", "More than 700 intensive care staff at nine hospitals were asked about their experiences for a study.", "Her novel Heart for a Compass is a fictional historical saga inspired by her great-great-aunt.", "There's speculation over who was involved in the protests and whether they belong to organised groups.", "Production was to begin later this month but filming and transmission will now be later than hoped.", "The PM leads UK politicians from all parties condemning the riot at the US Capitol building.", "The firm says tighter Covid restrictions and falling passenger numbers have prompted the decision.", "Allowing pupils without laptops into schools could limit the impact of the closures, say head.", "The president will be banned \"permanently\" if he breaks the platform's rules again.", "An Alaska state agency emerged as the main bidder at the sale, which was opposed by environmentalists.", "Two boys and a girl, all aged 13 or 14, are charged with murder after the death of Olly Stephens, 13.", "Joe Biden says it is \"totally unacceptable\" police showed more leniency in the Capitol riot than at anti-racism protests.", "Nguyen Huy Hung was one of 39 people who died in a container en route from Belgium to Essex.", "Boris Johnson has \"no doubt\" there is enough supply to vaccinate the first four priority groups by 15 February.", "Gavin Williamson will \"trust in teachers rather than algorithms\" in awarding this year's results.", "The broadcaster will be a part-time replacement for the new Woman's Hour host.", "The sites, including football stadiums and racecourses, will begin operations next week.", "Events in Washington spark dismay and criticism of America's politics and leader.", "Staff at one of London's busiest hospitals say it's not going to take much for services to soon break.", "The police officer who the FBI said fired the fatal shot is dismissed for breaching policy.", "Her family said the British model, who died in December aged 50, had been \"unwell for some time\".", "More than 113,000 Scots have now been given their first dose of a vaccine against Covid-19.", "The drugs, which save an extra life for every 12 intensive care patients treated, can be used immediately, say experts.", "The president is accused of inciting a riot with his divisive rhetoric - he's unlikely to stay silent.", "Health officials say it was the only option due to the demand for beds as a result of Covid-19.", "A ceremony meant to showcase a peaceful power transfer turns into a dark day. Here are the key moments.", "Breakdown of what happened when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol amid a key Senate vote.", "The weekly applause is back - but its founder distances herself from the initiative.", "News photographers captured extraordinary scenes as Trump supporters stormed the building.", "The US Capitol has gone into lockdown amid violent clashes between police and Trump supporters, who broke security lines and are inside the building.", "The UK prime minister also says the US president is \"completely wrong\" over his election fraud claims.", "The airline warns few, if any, flights will operate to or from Ireland or the UK from the end of January.", "Travellers from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Botswana and Mauritius will be barred from entry.", "US lawmakers and staff are seen wearing protective gas masks as police draw guns on protesters.", "Dave Edwards lit up his home for 42 years but died before the recent festive season.", "At Fullwell Cross Medical Centre in north London, they are now vaccinating almost 1,000 people a week.", "George is recovering after spending three nights in hospital with coronavirus.", "How Trump's favourite social media site banned him - permanently.", "On Wednesday the UK recorded more than 1,000 daily Covid deaths and hospitals are struggling to cope.", "The Tesla and SpaceX owner replaces Jeff Bezos as the richest man on the planet.", "The home secretary says the US president fuelled the violence, as the PM condemns the \"disgraceful scenes\".", "Two boys and a girl are accused of murdering 13-year-old Olly Stephens in Reading.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Drive-through and delivery services will still be available while it reviews its safety procedures.", "Leaders from around the world call for peace and a peaceful transfer of power in Washington.", "Worried childcare staff call on ministers to prove it's safe for them to open in England.", "Matthew Mason beat 15-year-old Alex Rodda to death to stop their sexual relationship being revealed.", "Boris Johnson says the armed forces will use \"battle preparation techniques\" to help vaccinate millions.", "Sarah Bingham's son and daughter have the same rare illness and she is a donor match for both.", "Industry body calls for the early vaccination of workers to keep supply chains running smoothly.", "Lorry drivers will need a negative result to cross into France until further notice, the government says.", "Aston Villa are preparing to field a team of youngsters in Friday's FA Cup third-round tie at home to Liverpool.", "GPs in England receive doses of the Oxford Covid jab as medics warn of \"stretched\" wards.", "Families had smaller gatherings, but sales still rose 9.3% in the Christmas trading period, it says.", "There are concerns the new variant may spread too easily to be controlled by lockdown.", "Residents of Shijiazhuang are banned from leaving and will be tested en masse after an outbreak there.", "The Wanted member shares some good news with his fans, three months on from his cancer diagnosis.", "The new lockdown has pushed pubs and restaurants into yet more debt, some of which may never be repaid.", "Jamie Stiehm was in the House of Representatives press gallery when protesters smashed at the door.", "The online retailer wants to buy the brands, not their shops, suggesting any deal would cost jobs.", "The fast fashion retailer is not purchasing the stores or taking on its staff, the BBC understands.", "The head of France's scientific council suggests a third lockdown is needed amid spread of variants.", "Ella Lambert says the period pain she experiences inspired her to help others.", "Israel has vaccinated more than a quarter of its population and now high school students are eligible.", "Ministers have said schools would stay closed until half term unless Covid cases fall significantly.", "Janice Johnston had 18 months of needless chemotherapy, causing her numerous physical problems.", "Underground investigations are due to begin on Saturday after flooding linked to old mine shaft.", "Entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX company delivers 143 satellites to orbit on a single rocket flight.", "England complete a thrilling victory on day four of the second Test against Sri Lanka to take the series 2-0.", "A former Boeing manager says more investigations are needed on the plane, grounded after two crashes.", "Nearly 38,000 people are in hospital in the UK with coronavirus, the health secretary says.", "The highest-risk job roles were in restaurants, care work and manufacturing.", "From credit card fraud to benefit fraud, the problem costs the UK up to £190bn a year, a report says.", "Motorists are urged to take care with sub-zero temperatures forecast into Monday.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Monday morning.", "The crackdown on Alexei Navalny and his supporters fuels calls in the EU for tougher sanctions.", "The health secretary says it is \"difficult\" to put a timeline on when England's lockdown will be lifted.", "Tributes are paid to Robert Rowland following the accident near his home in the Bahamas.", "Budweiser will not advertise during the Super Bowl for the first time in 37 years.", "Boris Johnson says he understands parents' frustrations but the infection rate is \"still very high\".", "Ministers are due to meet on Monday to consider whether to tighten the UK's border restrictions further.", "Footage shows a police car apparently driving through a group at a street race in Washington state.", "The changes affecting some customers take effect as finances are squeezed by Covid and Christmas.", "A geologist says tens of thousands of old mine shafts must be monitored to help stop more flooding.", "An interior decor trend is blamed for the removal of the grass, which forms part of a wind defence.", "Geoff and Jenny Holland married in August after having to twice postpone their wedding.", "The lack of certainty about schools returning is fraying the exhausted nerves of parents.", "A Royal College of Nursing survey found almost 80% were more stressed because of the Covid pandemic.", "As temperatures continue to remain high, parts of Australia are facing their worst fire risk in a year.", "Three psychiatric reports found Olga Freeman was suffering from a severe depressive illness.", "Ambrose O'Neill disappeared after the first day of his trial in 2008.", "Only 18 out of 251 registered traveller sites have any available spaces, research from a charity suggests.", "Some will be able to return on Tuesday but others are urged to stay away due to safety fears.", "The building's owner vows it will continue as a department store despite the departure of current tenant, the House of Fraser.", "The eyes of people with PTSD behave differently when they see exciting images, researchers say.", "One says he is surprised Boris Johnson shared the early data when it is \"not particularly strong\".", "Laboratory tests suggest antibodies can recognise and fight the UK and South Africa variants.", "The media regulator decided not to pursue complaints about decency over the channel's satire.", "Online retailer Boohoo will buy the brand for £55m, but not its shops, putting 12,000 jobs at risk.", "Police describe it as the worst unrest in the Netherlands for decades, with more than 180 arrests.", "The UK's nations and regions are being treated as if they were \"invisible\", the former PM warns.", "What is behind the review of specialist care for mothers and babies in the south Wales valleys?", "Vaccination appointments for over-70s in Scotland will arrive on Monday as planned - but in white envelopes.", "A new report focuses on the experiences of pregnant women at Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board.", "The move sparks concerns that customers could see prices rise if merchants pass on the higher cost.", "Chelsea sack manager Frank Lampard after 18 months in charge, with former Paris St-Germain and Borussia Dortmund boss Thomas Tuchel expected to replace him.", "Andrés Manuel López Obrador, 67, announces he is receiving medical treatment for the coronavirus.", "The Senate has confirmed Janet Yellen as first female treasury secretary in US history.", "The third national lockdown and travel ban meant the travel firm \"had to act\", a spokeswoman says.", "Sir Keir Starmer says he will be working from home until next Monday.", "A pilot programme for 24/7 vaccinations is among options being considered by the Scottish government.", "Why one family finds St Dwynwen's Day - the Welsh patron saint of lovers - more relevant to their heritage.", "Mothers speaking to the Cwm Taf maternity review \"overwhelmingly\" had distressing experiences.", "The mother of Keon Lincoln, 15, who was shot and stabbed, pleads for information about his death.", "Images circulated on social media show mourners at the funeral of an IRA man in Londonderry.", "First Minister Mark Drakeford earlier visited the site of the flooding which led to 80 people being evacuated.", "About 118,000 placements for young people are yet to be filled due to coronavirus lockdowns.", "Community spirit praised as helpers clear 7cm of snow so vulnerable patients could get Covid jab.", "Bruno Fernandes comes off the bench to fire Manchester United past fierce rivals Liverpool in a pulsating FA Cup fourth-round tie.", "Nurseries, pre-schools and childminders call for rapid testing and priority access to vaccines.", "The two men were guests at Cameron House Hotel on the shores of Loch Lomond when the blaze broke out.", "The force said its role is designed to inform prosecutors and does not indicate a crime has taken place.", "The 78-year-old Scottish comedian received his first dose of the vaccine near his home in Florida.", "A report criticises the union after it told its members not to volunteer due to safety concerns.", "A shortage of shipping containers, rising costs, and congestion at ports are holding back imports from China.", "Ministers have said schools would stay closed until half term unless Covid cases fall significantly.", "The majority of applications for the discretionary part of the test and trace grant are unsuccessful.", "Despite Glastonbury's cancellation, smaller festivals could still go ahead, experts say.", "Boris Johnson says it's more important than ever to be vigilant in following rules and staying home.", "The probe into the handling of harassment claims against Alex Salmond wants to see messages between SNP and government officials.", "Eric Vice, 64, was driving to Swansea University when he hit a bridge.", "The premiere of No Time To Die, Daniel Craig's final 007 outing, is pushed back again due to Covid.", "Doctors say people should buy a pulse oximeter to monitor their oxygen levels at home.", "The imam, Sheikh Nuru Mohammed, hopes the centre will dispel false information about the vaccination.", "Boris Johnson has not ruled out further action to secure the borders amid concerns over Covid variants.", "A bunker built during the Cold War is being auctioned with a guide price of £25,000.", "Worship has been suspended as burials average 15-a-day, yet still there is denial about the disease.", "UK retailers may abandon goods EU customers want to return because it is cheaper than bringing them home.", "A geologist says tens of thousands of old mine shafts must be monitored to help stop more flooding.", "The UK's chief medical adviser warns that \"a very small change and it could start taking off again\".", "Health Minister Robin Swann warns restrictions are likely to continue after latest extension.", "Scottish postie Nathan Evans has quit his job and signed to a record label after storming TikTok with sea shanties.", "The TV presenter says Mr Trump went on with the conversation, believing it to be Morgan.", "A 14-year-old boy is suspected of murder over \"inconceivable violence\" before Keon Lincoln's death.", "The Mavisbank care home in Bishopbriggs was recently rated \"weak\" by the care inspectorate for its Covid response.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Friday morning.", "A national charity renews its plea for donations to help museums hit by the coronavirus pandemic.", "Paula Badosa reveals she has the virus and apologises for making complaints about quarantine rules.", "'This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge' - the new president knows how daunting his task is.", "A selection of your pictures of Scotland sent in between 15 and 22 January.", "The chief rabbi has described the event as a \"shameful desecration of all that we hold dear\".", "A £500 payment is already available for those on low incomes who cannot work from home, No 10 says.", "Thirty-nine Vietnamese migrants suffocated in a sealed container en route to Essex in October 2019.", "A teachers' union says a review delivers a \"scathing\" verdict on how exams were handled in 2020.", "Fines of £800 will be handed to anyone attending a house party of more than 15 people from next week.", "Thousands of files hacked from Scotland's environment watchdog appear on the \"dark web\" after it rejected a ransom demand.", "Boris Johnson says England's measures will be reviewed once the priority groups have had the vaccine.", "Paddy McElhone, 24, was shot in the back by a soldier near his home outside Pomeroy in August 1974.", "Investigators have been targeting offenders who operate online since the first coronavirus lockdown.", "CCTV footage has been released showing fire breaking out in a hotel after a porter put a bag of ash and embers in a cupboard.", "Vitinha's superb goal sees Wolves into the fifth round of the FA Cup at the expense of non-league Chorley.", "Two people died in the blaze at the Cameron House hotel in West Dunbartonshire three years ago.", "A consortium including the fashion chain will no longer bid to buy Topshop and Topman out of administration.", "Evidence suggests the variant that emerged in the UK may be more deadly as well as faster-spreading.", "Clothing was the hardest-hit sector last year, seeing a 25% drop in sales overall.", "Liverpool's 68-game unbeaten home run in the Premier League comes to an end as Ashley Barnes fires home a late winner from the penalty spot to secure a famous victory for Burnley.", "The Japanese car maker has told the BBC its Sunderland plant is secure for the long term.", "Police hold aides to Putin critic Alexei Navalny as opposition activists start a string of rallies.", "Parts of Skewen remain underwater with people unable to return to their flooded homes.", "Andy Murray will miss the Australian Open after failing to find a \"workable quarantine\" solution following his positive test for coronavirus.", "Simon Midgley's mother says she still does not have answers about how her son died in the fire at Cameron House.", "Campaigners say a government fund to pay for the removal of dangerous cladding is woefully inadequate.", "The minority \"blatantly flouting\" restrictions will face enforcement action, a senior officer says.", "The couple paid themselves the sum despite heavy losses at Mrs Beckham's fashion brand.", "Muller Milk & Ingredients in Somerset confirms 47 dairy workers have tested positive for Covid-19.", "NHS staff rally to arrange a wedding for a couple as the groom's condition deteriorates in hospital.", "Many of those who took part in the Capitol riot are believed to have subscribed to extremist views.", "The curbs may even continue until Easter in an attempt to drive down Covid-19 case numbers.", "Stars of the Essex-based reality show pay tribute to a \"true gentleman\" and \"one of the good guys\".", "Under coronavirus restrictions a maximum of 30 people are meant to attend a funeral.", "Abimbola Ajoke Bamgbose had been fed up with people asking if she was pregnant, an inquest hears.", "AstraZeneca is the latest company, after Pfizer, to warn of delivery issues, frustrating officials.", "Investigations are ongoing into what caused the road surface to give way, United Utilities say.", "As Covid patients waited at Royal Glamorgan Hospital the nurse had a fear of \"wanting to leave\".", "Under house arrest in Canada on bank fraud charges, Ms Meng has reportedly received death threats.", "As the UK records its highest death toll, Fergal Keane has been to see the strain the NHS is under for the second time.", "Richard Sharp says the BBC represents good value, but how it is funded \"may be worth reassessing\".", "The S21 Ultra's support for an S Pen will fuel speculation that the Note range's days are numbered.", "But the expert says the new Covid variant means any relaxation of rules will be a \"gradual process\".", "Amnesty International says the issue of forced adoptions also needs close scrutiny.", "Carol and David Richards had been fined £60 for driving 20 minutes to see her mother.", "Reports from Manaus say medical staff are begging for help in a critical situation due to Covid-19.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Thursday evening.", "But researchers warn there is still a risk of catching and passing the virus on to others again.", "Nicola Sturgeon announces the areas where restrictions will be tightened in Scotland from Saturday.", "One in three trusts in England was running above safe levels of bed occupancy by the end of 2020.", "Tui, the UK's largest tour operator, says 50% of bookings on their website are currently by over-50s.", "The famous Lauberhorn ski event is cancelled after a spike in Covid-19 cases linked to one tourist.", "Some urgent procedures including cancer surgery are postponed in one health board area due to Covid.", "Six chemists have been chosen initially, with 200 more offering vaccinations in the next fortnight.", "Hundreds of students say it is not right they will have to wait months for rebates during Covid-19.", "Some housed in the military camp say the conditions are so bad it causes them psychological trauma.", "Police and rail bosses condemn a social media post featuring a car parked on a level crossing.", "Armie Hammer dismisses supposedly leaked messages and says he can now not be apart from his children.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "Jack Dorsey acknowledges that banning the president undermines the ideals of an open internet.", "Homes worry about being sued if people contract the virus while they are staying there.", "The health minister says it is a \"strong start\" but there is more to do.", "Arrivals from most of South America - and from Portugal - will be stopped from Friday.", "Dozens cancel Covid jabs and poor road conditions have a \"severe impact\" on Yorkshire's ambulances.", "Founder Charlie Mullins says it is a \"no-brainer\" that workers should get immunised.", "Scientists are racing to find out more about variants of the coronavirus that are spreading fast.", "The co-founder for Cyberpunk 2077's developer is explaining what went wrong with the launch.", "Samantha Hicks attributed her baby's kicking to sickness having been in hospital with Covid-19.", "The footballer joins celebrities and campaigners to call for action in a letter to the prime minister.", "The prime minister has suggested there could be restrictions on travel from Brazil to the UK.", "Services in England are being cut from 87% of normal levels to 72%, the Rail Delivery Group says.", "A Met Office yellow weather warning for ice is in place after heavy snow caused road closures and travel disruption.", "A negative test had been due to be required from Friday, but ministers said people needed time to prepare.", "Post-primary schools get extra time to decide how they will admit pupils after transfer tests are cancelled.", "A Scottish shellfish firm owner says he is on the brink of bankruptcy as EU customers desert his business.", "The 19-year-old mounted pavements and jumped red lights through London and three counties.", "Nintendo's first theme park, modelled on levels of its Mario games, was due to open on 4 February.", "More than 45% of this priority group has now been vaccinated, compared with about 30% in London.", "Travellers from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Botswana and Mauritius will be barred from entry.", "New Brexit trade rules mean Britain's biggest supermarket faces problems importing some fruit, meat and ready meals.", "James Howells threw away a hard drive containing bitcoin - now worth £210m - by mistake in 2013.", "The last of 14 works identified as looted from Jewish collectors is returned to the owner's heirs.", "It tops up doses already promised as officials worry that Africa is at the back of the vaccine queue.", "England's cancer, critical care, A&E and routine treatments all hit as hospitals accommodate virus patients.", "Boris Johnson pledged to end rough sleeping by 2024, but a watchdog says plans need reviewing post-Covid.", "The government defends its plan to switch to a grant scheme to feed children at half term.", "Our voter panel is divided over the charge of incitement with Trump supporters warning it will deepen divisions.", "A respiratory doctor at the Mater Hospital warns that oxygen supplies are under \"extreme pressure\".", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Ministers could bring in possible measures after a new Covid variant was found in South America.", "Ivan Cavaleiro's late header earns Premier League strugglers Fulham a hard-fought draw against Tottenham in their hastily rearranged London derby.", "The couple, who both have coronavirus, were given \"precious\" time together, their daughter says.", "Doctors leaders' want staff to be given the type of high-quality masks usually only worn in intensive care.", "The scientists investigating the origins of the coronavirus have landed in the city of Wuhan.", "The prime minister warns there is a \"very substantial\" risk of intensive care being \"overtopped\".", "The home secretary says her focus is on enforcement but doesn't rule out tougher restrictions next week.", "Dom Bess takes 5-30 as a dreadful Sri Lanka batting display leaves England in control after day one of the first Test at Galle.", "A blind social media star could wait years for a new guide dog due to delays linked to the pandemic.", "The government wants bosses to do more to help victims as reports of domestic abuse soar in lockdown.", "Andy Murray is still hopeful of playing in the Australian Open despite not travelling to Melbourne after testing positive for coronavirus.", "On Thursday, 16 more deaths related to Covid-19 were recorded along with 973 new positive cases.", "Ten members of his own party voted against the president over his role in the deadly riots at the US Capitol.", "Illusionist Siegfried Fischbacher and partner Roy Horn were an institution in Las Vegas and beyond.", "Mr Leonard says it is in the best interests of the party if he stands down as leader immediately.", "The retailer insists it has no plans to move online, despite warning shop closures could cost it £1bn.", "A total of 1,596 patients are in Scottish hospitals with Covid as pressures on the NHS continue to build.", "The woman, who was Tasered by officers, is taken to hospital with non life-threatening injuries.", "Sarah Link lived in a caravan on her own drive so she could carry on working and protect her mother.", "Vincent Kane does not know when his operation will happen, having been delayed due to the pandemic.", "The property investment firm is accused of trying to \"jump the queue\".", "It said there may be \"an increase of missing items and substitutions over the next few weeks\".", "Officers \"will not hesitate\" to take action against those breaking the rules, home secretary says.", "The vaccines were administered on Saturday by a household doctor at Windsor Castle, a royal source says.", "Health Secretary Matt Hancock says social media giants are \"taking editorial decisions\".", "The Labour leader urges ministers to give councils more money instead to protect family budgets.", "Three people were arrested during an anti-lockdown protest, including the woman seen in the video.", "Eleanor Wadsworth flew hundreds of aircraft, including Spitfires and Hurricanes, to the front line in WW2.", "People who cannot work from home should be prioritised for rapid tests in England, the government says.", "Bernard Thomas was rescued from the rubble of Pantglas primary school on 21 October, 1966.", "But for now, people must stay at home during lockdown and alleviate 'serious' pressure on the NHS.", "Health Secretary Matt Hancock says the NHS is under \"very serious pressure\" and warns people to stay home.", "Electricity is gradually being restored after a huge outage triggered by a power station fault.", "The riots of 6 January took many by surprise, but to those tracking conspiracy and extreme right groups online, the warning signs were all there.", "Extra measures are taken to distribute Covid vaccines amid fears the snow could turn to ice.", "Crawley Town produce one of the FA Cup third round's most emphatic upsets as they stun Premier League side Leeds United.", "US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says contact between officials should no longer be \"shackled\".", "There are concerns the new variant may spread too easily to be controlled by lockdown.", "At least six police vans are deployed to Clapham Common where about 30 protesters gathered.", "The farm has been left with over 4,000 surplus eggs after schools suddenly closed to most pupils.", "The government says a draft agreement saying flat owners need its approval first is \"standard\".", "Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove says \"work is ongoing\" to improve trade from GB to NI.", "Scott McTominay celebrates captaining Manchester United for the first time with an early winner to see off Watford in the FA Cup third round.", "A 107-year-old woman from County Meath is attempting to attend a virtual Mass in every county.", "Increasing numbers of seriously-ill patients add to the pressure facing Scotland's health service.", "Four deaths are reported as Storm Filomena dumps snow and triggers floods across the country.", "A \"significant step-up\" in rolling out vaccines is promised by the health minister.", "If Parler fails to find a new web hosting service by Sunday, the entire network will go offline.", "The Labour leader calls for tougher coronavirus restrictions and says help for low earners must continue.", "Almost 50,000 people in Wales have been given a first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.", "He hopes to beat his own lockdown bulge with his \"Get Buzzin' With Bez\" YouTube classes.", "Two landslides hit the same village in Indonesia within hours, leaving emergency teams trapped.", "Another 1,035 people have died, taking the total since the start of the pandemic to 80,868.", "Patients, many shielding, have been offered appointments miles away from their homes.", "The Labour leader rejects a second independence referendum but calls for other changes to devolution.", "More than 100 cars are turned away from a beauty spot in north Wales, police say.", "Boris Johnson will make a televised address at 20:00 GMT to outline further steps as virus cases rise.", "Lockdown measures will see schools closed until half term, and GCSEs and A-levels unable to go ahead as normal.", "The British coin collection will also mark the 75th anniversary of the death of novelist HG Wells.", "Four boys and a girl are held on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder after the Reading attack.", "An NHS chief executive says it 'beggars belief' people took pictures of empty corridors.", "Four people were accused of being a \"supporting cast\" for burglars who targeted west London homes.", "Boris Johnson says the gap between referendums on Europe - 41 years - is \"a good sort of gap\" for independence referendums.", "The PM says the number of vaccine doses will amount to \"tens of millions\" by the end of March.", "Mainland Scotland faces tougher restrictions from midnight, and schools will remain closed until February.", "The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine programme is being rolled out less than a week after it became the second approved in the UK.", "Dr Radha Modgil shares tips on staying mentally and emotionally well during the coronavirus lockdown.", "Dan Eliasson, head of the civil contingencies agency, flew to the Canary Islands to see his daughter.", "Tributes have been paid to trainer Zoe Davison, who died from cancer on the same day two of her horses claimed wins at Plumpton.", "The first minister warns Scotland could be entering the most dangerous period since the outbreak began.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Monday morning.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "The group of more than 200 engineers say Google must live up to its 'Don't be evil' pledge.", "Nóra Quoirin's family say they are disappointed at the ruling and still think she was abducted.", "Boris Johnson warns of \"tough\" weeks ahead, as coronavirus infection rates continue to surge.", "The first minister says restrictions \"similar to March\" will come into force in mainland Scotland from midnight and schools will not re-open in January.", "The border crossings between the UK and the European Union face their first day of significant traffic under new rules.", "Professional sport in England will be allowed to continue behind closed doors, despite a new national lockdown announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.", "The Labour leader calls for an immediate lockdown in England to get the virus \"back under control\".", "The Department of Health's aim is for all people older than 80 to receive a jab by the end of January.", "Lockdown losses mean renewing the 10-year contract to lease Yang Guang and Tian Tian may be unaffordable.", "Police help dozens of motorists who became stranded after heavy snow fell in the Peak District.", "Parliament will be recalled for Nicola Sturgeon to make an \"urgent statement\" as case numbers rise by 2,464.", "Schools in Wales given a flexible approach to ensure a \"safe return\", despite concerns by unions.", "Economy Minister Diane Dodds writes to Cabinet Office Secretary Michael Gove over the issue.", "UK nationals resident in Spain say they were wrongly turned back when their flight landed in Barcelona.", "Four boys and a girl are held on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder after the Reading attack.", "Rutherglen MP Margaret Ferrier is charged by police with \"alleged culpable and reckless conduct\".", "After the PM hints at tighter measures in England, our science editor looks at what they could entail.", "Her Majesty said the now 75-year-old show had \"played a significant part in the evolving of women\".", "Schools will close for most pupils from Tuesday as people are told to stay at home in new lockdown.", "The latest government figures show a further 2,137 cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in Scotland on Friday.", "The government said suspected jihadists ambushed the two villages near Niger's border with Mali.", "Boris Johnson says more areas may need tougher rules, as Labour urges England-wide curbs within 24 hours.", "The news comes following confusion after her death was prematurely announced on Monday.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "The Championship club said \"several first-team staff and players\" had tested positive.", "England all-rounder Moeen Ali tests positive for Covid-19 upon arrival at Hambantota airport in Sri Lanka.", "The Love Island star is alleged to have \"breached quarantine\" regulations on holiday in Barbados.", "Stay-at-home orders are issued in England and Scotland, as UK classrooms face further disruption.", "The executive also plans to give its stay at home message legal force, with new travel restrictions.", "The Gerry and the Pacemakers singer's number one hit became a football terrace anthem.", "The bid approach is the latest attempt by a casino operator to tap into the online gambling boom.", "The locally-produced Covaxin jab was approved on Sunday before completion of third stage trials.", "Supermarkets say card payment problems that led to long queues are resolved, but cause still unknown", "Total deaths involving Covid pass 6,000, including 467 in the week ending 15 January.", "A Cardiff head teacher says keeping schools closed affects disadvantaged pupils most severely.", "The money comes from the liquidation of a firm co-founded by the disgraced film producer.", "Before Wuhan was locked down in January 2020 officials said the outbreak was under control - but the virus had spread inside and outside the city.", "Boris Johnson says he takes \"full responsibility\" for the UK government's response to the pandemic.", "Trinidadian-born British writer Monique Roffey says she is \"pinching herself\" over her win.", "Another 7,700 registered with coronavirus on the death certificate brings the total to nearly 104,000.", "The 71-year-old Lib Dem peer says she is wearing her \"I've had the jab\" badge with pride.", "The tunnel is a danger to public safety, an HS2 spokeswoman told the BBC.", "The UK is the second market - after the US - to get Facebook's latest news feature.", "The NHS says any invitation which asks for vaccine payment or bank account details is a scam.", "The shadow justice secretary calls for seven-member juries to deal with cases delayed by the pandemic.", "Scientists propose 10 golden rules for restoring forests to maximise benefits for the planet.", "Parents reveal the perils of juggling teaching with work and family life.", "The new measures are likely to apply to British residents arriving in England from high-risk countries.", "Boris Johnson says he takes \"full responsibility for everything that the government has done\".", "Major incidents were declared in north and south Wales as Storm Christoph causes flooding.", "The health secretary says it is \"difficult\" to put a timeline on when England's lockdown will be lifted.", "Ex-cabinet minister wants \"Britain's favourite animal\" to get same protections as bats and badgers.", "Budweiser will not advertise during the Super Bowl for the first time in 37 years.", "Boris Johnson says he understands parents' frustrations but the infection rate is \"still very high\".", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Tuesday morning.", "Several pupils at the school admitted visiting other households, breaking Covid-19 lockdown rules.", "Demand for the video game and cloud computing services helped push Microsoft sales to a new quarterly record.", "A geologist says tens of thousands of old mine shafts must be monitored to help stop more flooding.", "Lawyers for SMG deny claims it was penny-pinching before the 2017 Manchester Arena attack.", "An interior decor trend is blamed for the removal of the grass, which forms part of a wind defence.", "There will be \"a lot more deaths\" before the effect of vaccines is felt, England's chief medical officer says.", "Crew are asking to be designated 'key workers' so they can go home without risking public health.", "Campaigners claim changes to the way decisions were made led to a \"shocking\" fall in cases going to court.", "Comedians Meera Syal, Romesh Ranganathan and Adil Ray make a video urging people to get the vaccine.", "The Met says it was a \"poor decision\" to hire a barber to give cuts to 31 officers in the workplace.", "Some will be able to return on Tuesday but others are urged to stay away due to safety fears.", "Nadhim Zahawi says supply is tight, but he expects the UK to meet its February target of 15 million doses.", "The Belfast grammar school says it will use \"other academic criteria\" in the absence of transfer tests.", "As the UK records its 100,000th death from Covid within 28 days of a positive test, Catherine Burns speaks to some of the people behind the figures.", "It comes as the foreign secretary says the UK will return to spending 0.7% of GDP on aid \"as soon as possible\",", "Police describe it as the worst unrest in the Netherlands for decades, with more than 180 arrests.", "The government gives its support to a project to use oral contraceptives to control grey squirrels.", "As the number of people who died reaches six figures, the factors that led to this terrible total.", "The BBC brought a judicial review over reporting restrictions in a now abandoned legal case against Scotland's child abuse inquiry.", "An extra £50m is being directed towards grassroots sport after a \"significant hit\" to activity levels amid the coronavirus pandemic.", "The pharmaceutical giant said the late signing of contracts limited time to sort out supply glitches.", "Part of the grade II-listed bridge over the River Clwyd was swept away during Storm Christoph.", "Chelsea sack manager Frank Lampard after 18 months in charge, with former Paris St-Germain and Borussia Dortmund boss Thomas Tuchel expected to replace him.", "The Senate has confirmed Janet Yellen as first female treasury secretary in US history.", "The company acknowledges its \"Birdwatch\" idea could be \"messy\", but says it is worth trying.", "Parents and teachers are frustrated and worried about the impact of school closures on children.", "Before Wuhan was locked down in January 2020 officials said the outbreak was under control - but the virus had spread inside and outside the city.", "A plan to put the anti-slavery activist on the banknote was delayed under ex-President Donald Trump.", "The third national lockdown and travel ban meant the travel firm \"had to act\", a spokeswoman says.", "The Stormont-commissioned research examined institutions run by churches and other religious groups.", "English-speaking parents whose children go to Welsh-language schools say they struggle to help them.", "Three nights of rioting will not halt night curfews aimed at stopping coronavirus, say Dutch ministers.", "Claudia Marsh had recently qualified as a teacher and also volunteered for two charities.", "We must remember that every one of the lives lost during the pandemic leaves a legacy of sorrow.", "Images circulated on social media show mourners at the funeral of an IRA man in Londonderry.", "The mother of Keon Lincoln, 15, who was shot and stabbed, pleads for information about his death.", "The Welsh Government misses its target of giving 70% of over-80s the vaccine by last weekend.", "Leaders in the House have brought their article of impeachment against Donald Trump to the Senate.", "The border closure is likely to remain even with widespread vaccinations, a top official says.", "Alex Davies-Jones said \"like so many others\" she put off having a test for months.", "The convicted murderer and music producer was described as \"talented but flawed\" in an online story.", "The Welsh Ambulance Service boss warns that difficult weeks lie ahead in Covid-19 fight.", "An eyewitness speaks publicly for the first time about the 2015 death of a man being restrained by police.", "Lisbet Stone was turned away from her flight to London due to having an outdated Covid test.", "The number of people needing intensive care is expected to continue rising for at least two weeks.", "Passengers must also quarantine for up to 10 days following the closure of all UK travel corridors.", "Spector, who was jailed for killing actress Lana Clarkson, transformed pop music with his \"wall of sound\".", "At the age of 14, he sent encrypted messages inciting an Australian teenager to murder police officers.", "The owner of a toy retailer says high transport costs may mean larger toys become more expensive.", "Jonny Bairstow and Dan Lawrence help England seal victory over Sri Lanka on the final morning of the first Test in Galle.", "Ex-Marine John Deacy, 81, died with Covid-19 just two weeks after his last shift at the supermarket.", "A group of pensioners seek compensation for what they say was the excessive pricing of landlines.", "Leaders Manchester United are thwarted by the second-half heroics of keeper Alisson in a goalless draw with title rivals Liverpool at Anfield.", "Northern Health Trust chief says system is under \"huge pressure\" with patients waiting for beds.", "Doctors say the \"patchy supply\" of vaccine to GPs is slowing down efforts to deliver it to patients.", "The \"fiercely competitive\" but \"kind, thoughtful and caring\" news executive has died aged 73.", "Nóra Quoirin's parents do not accept the findings of an inquest into her death in Malaysia.", "Sir Richard Branson's rocket company succeeds in putting its first satellites in space.", "Jonathan Brooks is charged with the attempted murder of Graeme Perks, who was attacked in his home.", "Police have described the killers of 15-year-old Keelan Wilson as a \"pack of animals\".", "Brazil has the world's second-highest Covid death toll but has seen delay and discord over vaccines.", "A red deer had to be put down after being savaged by a red setter in London's Richmond Park.", "David Urpeth says smart motorways without a hard shoulder carry \"an ongoing risk of future deaths.\"", "Former climbing champion Lai Chi-Wai raised HK$5.2 million for spinal cord patients.", "Phil Neville leaves his role as manager of England's women and takes over at Major League Soccer side Inter Miami.", "Students call for more support as they continue their studies through another lockdown.", "The Jewish employee had warned co-workers about the danger of Nazis during the Capitol Riots.", "A group of London firms has written to ministers calling for financial support for the rail firm.", "Small armed groups gathered in several US cities but most state capitols were quiet amid high security.", "Annual growth of 2.3% puts China on course to be the only major economy to have expanded in 2020.", "Boris Johnson promises £23m in compensation for exporters which have lost orders due to delays.", "Someone is being admitted to hospital with coronavirus every 30 seconds, the health secretary says.", "The Perth-born actor was best known for screen roles including \"Chancer\" in City Lights and \"Pete Galloway\" in River City.", "Students at Aberystwyth are told not to return unless \"absolutely necessary\".", "Ambulance service staff in London explain the unique pressures of working during a pandemic.", "A shortage of computer chips is leading to car factories shutting down for days at a time.", "Drivers from Scotland and Portsmouth caught breaking lockdown rules in north Wales.", "Pressure grows on PM after non-binding motion on universal credit top-up is passed by 278 votes.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "There are very few spare beds for the most seriously ill patients in parts of the country, the NHS says.", "Police found evidence of sub-standard care at the Caerphilly home, an inquest hears.", "Democrats plan to start impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump on Monday, for inciting the invasion of the US Capitol, sources say.", "There's speculation over who was involved in the protests and whether they belong to organised groups.", "As Covid patients waited at Royal Glamorgan Hospital the nurse had a fear of \"wanting to leave\".", "The Welsh Government is in discussions with supermarkets about bringing \"more visible\" regulations.", "While GCSEs and A-levels are cancelled, IGCSEs, often used in independent schools, will continue.", "Terence Glover \"ploughed\" into a group of children in his car as they were leaving school.", "The firm says tighter Covid restrictions and falling passenger numbers have prompted the decision.", "The man charged the 92-year-old £160 and came back a week later asking for a further £100.", "Seventeen million doses have been ordered by the UK and are expected to arrive in spring.", "Sweet Melody becomes the band's fifth number one, and their first since Jesy Nelson left.", "But some performances may be pre-recorded if artists can't travel to Rotterdam.", "The deaths of a further 93 people have been recorded - with the number of patients in hospital at record levels.", "When Trump supporters stormed the Capitol they took out their cameras to record the chaos inside.", "He is remembered for the 7 Up documentary series which followed the lives of 14 children since 1964.", "Secret recordings revealed \"enough profanity, casual sexism and racism to last a lifetime\".", "Criticism of new Brexit trade rules is growing as firms warn of more bureaucracy, higher costs and delays.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "Students say they will refuse to pay for accommodation they cannot use during lockdown.", "It is the third vaccine to be approved for UK use, after the Pfizer and Oxford jabs.", "Ross Kemp and Christopher Biggins do readings at the funeral of the EastEnders and Carry On actress.", "The Competition and Markets Authority will explore whether Google is abusing its market dominance.", "Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove says \"work is ongoing\" to improve trade from GB to NI.", "Her family said the British model, who died in December aged 50, had been \"unwell for some time\".", "We asked people around the US how they responded to the chaotic scenes from the US Capitol.", "The drugs, which save an extra life for every 12 intensive care patients treated, can be used immediately, say experts.", "Shark attacks are rare in the country and it is thought to be the first such death since 2013.", "Breakdown of what happened when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol amid a key Senate vote.", "The weekly applause is back - but its founder distances herself from the initiative.", "The lender says it expects \"downward pressure on house prices\" in 2021 following annual rise of 6% last year.", "Business Secretary Alok Sharma becomes full-time president of November's COP26 conference in Glasgow.", "Data leaked to BBC News shows a rise in the number of hours before patients are offloaded.", "Marks & Spencer's clothes sales overall fall nearly a quarter, but pyjamas are back in fashion.", "The UK prime minister also says the US president is \"completely wrong\" over his election fraud claims.", "The men were detained when special forces stormed the Nave Andromeda off the Isle of Wight.", "Travellers from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Botswana and Mauritius will be barred from entry.", "Top Democrats call for the president to be removed as he commits to an \"orderly\" transition of power.", "A London fashion student made the \"social distancing bandeau\" out of a Chiltern Railways seat cover.", "The mayor says in some parts of London 1 in 20 people has Covid-19, as he declares a \"major incident\".", "It comes as all of Wales has snow and ice warnings for the next few days.", "The Korean car company originally said it was in talks with the tech titan before backtracking.", "Two women were fined £200 after driving five miles to walk around Foremark Reservoir, Derbyshire.", "Worried childcare staff call on ministers to prove it's safe for them to open in England.", "Boris Johnson says the armed forces will use \"battle preparation techniques\" to help vaccinate millions.", "Vincent Kane does not know when his operation will happen, having been delayed due to the pandemic.", "A selection of your pictures of Scotland sent in between 1 and 8 January.", "Satellite data shows that 2020 and 2016 are essentially tied as the hottest years since records began.", "Lorry drivers will need a negative result to cross into France until further notice, the government says.", "A record 68,053 cases are also reported as a third vaccine is approved for use in the UK.", "Details and reaction as First Minister Mark Drakeford confirms an extended closure of schools.", "The Duke of Cambridge says he wants his three children to appreciate sacrifices made during Covid.", "He claims her evidence to an inquiry into sexual harassment allegations against him was \"untrue\".", "The Wanted member shares some good news with his fans, three months on from his cancer diagnosis.", "Meanwhile almost half of people took advantage of Christmas bubble rules, a national survey suggests.", "Kelvin Hopkins has previously denied claims by a party activist of inappropriate physical contact.", "A series of streamed music events, shows and releases will mark five years since the singer's death.", "With attendance as high as 50% in some areas, heads call for pupil limits in England's lockdown schools.", "Ramsey was loved by fans for her role as Officer Laverne Hooks in the Police Academy film series.", "Lockdown measures will see schools closed until half term, and GCSEs and A-levels unable to go ahead as normal.", "Four boys and a girl are held on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder after the Reading attack.", "That includes some of the most vulnerable patients who should soon have \"significant\" protection against the virus.", "Four people were accused of being a \"supporting cast\" for burglars who targeted west London homes.", "Mainland Scotland faces tougher restrictions from midnight, and schools will remain closed until February.", "The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine programme is being rolled out less than a week after it became the second approved in the UK.", "President Trump initially accused China of the hack against US government agencies in December.", "The first cyclone of Australia’s season has been downgraded but continues to cause danger.", "Reversing earlier assurances, officials say tracing data can be used for criminal investigations.", "Boris Johnson tells a briefing that nearly a quarter of people over 80 have received a Covid-19 jab.", "Dr Radha Modgil shares tips on staying mentally and emotionally well during the coronavirus lockdown.", "Enrique Tarrio was detained as he entered the city ahead of a pro-Trump protest this week.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "BBC Two and CBBC will show content for primary and secondary pupils to watch without the internet.", "Sea Shepherd says the collision happened after it came under attack in the Gulf of California.", "Business groups welcomed the new help as a good start but said more aid and a clear plan would be needed.", "Boris Johnson made the decision on restrictions \"in the face of new information\", the chancellor says.", "The first minister says restrictions \"similar to March\" will come into force in mainland Scotland from midnight and schools will not re-open in January.", "Professional sport in England will be allowed to continue behind closed doors, despite a new national lockdown announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.", "The children's commissioner for England and Labour's leader call on firms to help low-income families.", "The Department of Health's aim is for all people older than 80 to receive a jab by the end of January.", "A growing divide over education, jobs, and ethnicity threaten the fabric of society, says Nobel laureate's study.", "Economy Minister Diane Dodds writes to Cabinet Office Secretary Michael Gove over the issue.", "UK nationals resident in Spain say they were wrongly turned back when their flight landed in Barcelona.", "You may be happy to let your phone recognise your face - but what about the police?", "Virgin Holidays joins Tui and Thomas Cook in cancelling holidays after latest coronavirus restrictions.", "In a TV address, Labour's leader says millions of doses need to be given each week by the end of January.", "Rutherglen MP Margaret Ferrier is charged by police with \"alleged culpable and reckless conduct\".", "The cancellations, although rare, reflect the pressure some hospitals are under from Covid.", "Roughly one in 50 people in England has got the virus, Prof Chris Whitty says.", "Demand surges as shoppers rush to secure online delivery slots following news of another lockdown.", "In the tightening of restrictions across the UK there is much that's an echo of March - but a lot that's different too.", "It's been a \"Herculean achievement\" for Marieme and Ndeye, who survived against the odds.", "The news comes following confusion after her death was prematurely announced on Monday.", "Former Manchester City and England midfielder Colin Bell dies aged 74 after a short illness, the Premier League club announces.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "YouTube says the broadcaster posted banned Covid content, but it has decided to reinstate its channel.", "First Minister Nicola Sturgeon thinks Celtic have questions to answer on the grounds for their winter trip to Dubai and says the club's social distancing \"should be looked into\".", "The stationery chain which has 127 stores and around 1,500 employees says shop closures hit it hard.", "Doctors leaders' want staff to be given the type of high-quality masks usually only worn in intensive care.", "Former Buckingham Palace caterer Adamo Canto attempted to sell some items on eBay, a court hears.", "Vocational exams such as BTECs are not being cancelled by the lockdown like GCSEs and A-levels.", "A hearing will decide whether Khairi Saadallah was motivated by a religious or ideological cause.", "The Love Island star is alleged to have \"breached quarantine\" regulations on holiday in Barbados.", "Stay-at-home orders are issued in England and Scotland, as UK classrooms face further disruption.", "The executive also plans to give its stay at home message legal force, with new travel restrictions.", "The famous building on London's Oxford Street has been put on the market by administrators.", "Strict new Covid-19 restrictions come into force in Scotland, prohibiting people from leaving their homes.", "A fresh move to make non-fatal strangulation a specific criminal offence is under way.", "The personal trainer says he wants to \"give children structure\" during lockdown.", "Regulators say the plane is safe to resume service after two fatal crashes led to its grounding.", "Insurers reject claims that by covering ransomware bills they are funding organised crime.", "But loss of taste and smell may be less likely to affect those with the new strain, a study suggests.", "Travellers share their experiences of isolating in hotels, as the UK announces a similar scheme.", "Boris Johnson says he takes \"full responsibility\" for the UK government's response to the pandemic.", "Nicola Sturgeon says she is \"not ecstatic\" about reports the PM will visit Scotland on Thursday.", "The tunnel is a danger to public safety, an HS2 spokeswoman told the BBC.", "The 71-year-old Lib Dem peer says she is wearing her \"I've had the jab\" badge with pride.", "Philippa Day was found collapsed beside a letter rejecting her request for an at-home assessment.", "The 83-year-old Hollywood royalty is also known as an active climate change campaigner.", "The shadow justice secretary calls for seven-member juries to deal with cases delayed by the pandemic.", "Karen Hobbs' sister says she is in shock, and urges people to follow lockdown rules.", "Boris Johnson says most people in Scotland are focused on defeating Covid rather than another referendum.", "Images of Jonathan Mok's swollen eye were posted on Facebook and shared thousands of times.", "Robin Swann says all health workers are valued and have worked tirelessly during the pandemic.", "A collection of your tributes to some of the thousands of people in the UK who have died with coronavirus.", "The financial regulator will consult \"shortly\" on a rise from the current limit of £45.", "Ministers are due to meet on Monday to consider whether to tighten the UK's border restrictions further.", "Footage shows a banned driver in a stolen car drive into a police officer on his motorbike.", "The PM sets the date he hopes England's lockdown will begin to ease, but warns of a \"perilous situation\".", "Boris Johnson also says he shares the \"frustration\" of parents who want to get children back to school.", "Already 100,000 people in the UK have died with Covid. This is the story of one of them.", "Demand for the video game and cloud computing services helped push Microsoft sales to a new quarterly record.", "Families loaded up on the latest technology and sales increased in China.", "The maps depict the famous sea battle in which the English fleet was victorious in 1588.", "There will be \"a lot more deaths\" before the effect of vaccines is felt, England's chief medical officer says.", "The lack of certainty about schools returning is fraying the exhausted nerves of parents.", "The Army sends a bomb disposal unit to a site where the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is produced.", "Already 100,000 people in the UK have died with Covid. This is the story of one of them.", "The Met says it was a \"poor decision\" to hire a barber to give cuts to 31 officers in the workplace.", "The Oscar-nominated actor and his choreographer wife describe as \"difficult\" their decision to split.", "It is the first time the world-famous event will take place in the autumn.", "Nadhim Zahawi says supply is tight, but he expects the UK to meet its February target of 15 million doses.", "A \"legacy of poor decisions\" in 2020 and before the pandemic led to 100,000 deaths, scientists say.", "Scientists say sharks and rays are disappearing from the world's oceans at an \"alarming\" rate.", "As the UK records its 100,000th death from Covid within 28 days of a positive test, Catherine Burns speaks to some of the people behind the figures.", "Bailiffs move in to remove people who dug a 100ft tunnel to block the high-speed rail line.", "Nicola Sturgeon says she is concerned the UK's travel restrictions will not go far enough.", "The government gives its support to a project to use oral contraceptives to control grey squirrels.", "Leon Briggs was \"like a child crying out for a toy\" as he was held down by officers, a jury hears.", "As the number of people who died reaches six figures, the factors that led to this terrible total.", "Nurse Eva Gicain says when she held Elleana for the first time she \"didn't want to let go\".", "The pharmaceutical giant said the late signing of contracts limited time to sort out supply glitches.", "Has the PM effectively admitted we're heading for a full year of limits on our lives?", "Lockdown led to a surge in reports of fraudsters imitating genuine investment firms, regulator says.", "Jagtar Singh Johal has been held in an Indian jail without conviction for more than three years.", "Labour calls for key workers to be added to the first phase of the vaccination programme.", "Residents hit upon the idea after the annual street parade was cancelled because of the pandemic.", "Boris Johnson faced questions from MPs why the UK's coronavirus death toll is the highest in Europe.", "Claudia Marsh had recently qualified as a teacher and also volunteered for two charities.", "The social media platform removed posts after wrongly identifying the place name as offensive.", "We must remember that every one of the lives lost during the pandemic leaves a legacy of sorrow.", "Details from a briefing by the chief medical officer and chief scientific adviser for health.", "David Solomon is being punished for the bank's involvement in the fraudulent Malaysian investment fund.", "Josh Quigley, from Livingston, suffered multiple fractures after coming off his bike at 40mph while training in Dubai.", "The “phased” lifting of restrictions will depend on data on hospitalisations, deaths and vaccinations.", "The government faces legal action over its decision to allow the use of a pesticide that harms bees.", "UK residents can apply for the new card to access emergency medical care when their EHIC card runs out.", "Khairi Saadallah murdered three friends in a Reading park in a \"ruthless and brutal” terror attack.", "Cardiff City defender Sol Bamba is undergoing chemotherapy after being diagnosed with cancer, the Championship club has announced", "County Mayo man howls with laughter while trying to record a birthday message for his son.", "Derbyshire Police apologises to two women fined £200 for driving five miles for a countryside walk.", "New Covid curbs are necessary but they will hit the economy, Chancellor Rishi Sunak warns.", "Thousands of National Guard troops are being deployed to bolster security in Washington DC.", "Dutch TV films officials confiscating ham sandwiches from UK drivers under new food import rules.", "Unison chooses Christina McAnea to replace Dave Prentis, who has been in the job for 20 years.", "Health Secretary Matt Hancock says 2.3 million people in the UK have now had a Covid-19 vaccine dose.", "James Brokenshire will take leave from his Home Office job during further surgery for lung cancer.", "Medical director warns Wrexham Maelor is under huge pressure as numbers of seriously ill patients rise.", "It said there may be \"an increase of missing items and substitutions over the next few weeks\".", "The new Welsh Government vaccine plan says all eligible adults will be offered a jab by the autumn.", "M&S is buying the brand out of administration, but not Jaeger's scores of shops and concessions.", "University of Surrey tests for BBC News found no evidence of any effect.", "The decision follows a rise in cases across the emirates in the past week, officials say.", "A document advises doctors that the minimum level of oxygen required in the blood is being reduced.", "Scotland's first minister says she has doubts about whether Celtic's trip to Dubai was \"really essential\".", "\"Numbers are increasing not decreasing\" - inside an emergency body storage facility in Surrey.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Monday morning.", "Three people were arrested during an anti-lockdown protest, including the woman seen in the video.", "A number of Scottish schools, pupils and parents report Microsoft Teams running slowly or not at all.", "People who cannot work from home should be prioritised for rapid tests in England, the government says.", "Luke Evans portrays the policeman who brought John Cooper to justice for two double murders.", "Health Secretary Matt Hancock says the NHS is under \"very serious pressure\" and warns people to stay home.", "Extra measures are taken to distribute Covid vaccines amid fears the snow could turn to ice.", "Crawley Town produce one of the FA Cup third round's most emphatic upsets as they stun Premier League side Leeds United.", "As countries look to quickly vaccinate people, BBC reporters explain what's happening across Europe.", "There are concerns the new variant may spread too easily to be controlled by lockdown.", "Manchester United will host Premier League champions Liverpool in the fourth round of the FA Cup.", "Seven mass vaccination centres have opened across England to help deliver the Coronavirus vaccine.", "A study finds that the financial burden on poorer families has increased during the pandemic.", "The much-loved TV series is back with a new name but only three of the original four leads will star.", "The government says a draft agreement saying flat owners need its approval first is \"standard\".", "An industry group wants more state help for people like Jon Wilding, whose business is hit by the pandemic.", "Kitchen robots, new TVs, smart masks and a toilet that analyses your poo are among the new products.", "Doctors at the hospital say they're treating more younger patients than in the first wave.", "Boris Johnson was spotted at the Olympic Park on Sunday, despite government advice to \"stay local\".", "Nicola Sturgeon acknowledges technical problems on the first day the vast majority of pupils in Scotland begin the new term at home.", "About 560,000 people will have been vaccinated by the beginning of next month, the health secretary says.", "He wants businesses to do more to protect the planet as he marks 50 years of environmental campaigning.", "It comes after a Celtic player tested positive less than 48 hours after the squad returned from a training trip there.", "People refusing to wear face coverings who are not medically exempt will not be allowed to shop inside.", "Increasing numbers of seriously-ill patients add to the pressure facing Scotland's health service.", "Celtic's only regret about their Dubai trip was Chris Jullien contracting Covid-19, said coach Gavin Strachan, after the draw with Hibernian.", "Details and reaction to Health Minister Vaughan Gething's vaccination rollout plan.", "Justice Secretary Robert Buckland says too many abusers' sentences are not tough enough.", "Lisa Montgomery's lawyers argued she was a mentally ill victim of abuse who deserved mercy, but her victim's community said otherwise.", "A \"significant step-up\" in rolling out vaccines is promised by the health minister.", "The Labour leader calls for tougher coronavirus restrictions and says help for low earners must continue.", "The social network has hit back asking a federal judge to order it to be reinstated.", "Two landslides hit the same village in Indonesia within hours, leaving emergency teams trapped.", "The content will not count in a mobile data allowance to help keep costs of online learning down.", "Patients, many shielding, have been offered appointments miles away from their homes.", "The health secretary says UK vaccine rollout is on track but urges everyone to play their part by following Covid rules.", "The warning from England's chief medical officer comes as seven mass vaccination centres open.", "Joe Biden's presidential Twitter account launches with no followers transferred from President Trump.", "Some areas could see freezing temperatures and 5-10cm of snow on Saturday, the Met Office says.", "The Daily Telegraph must publish a correction over Covid claims, press regulator Ipso rules.", "Police and rail bosses condemn a social media post featuring a car parked on a level crossing.", "A negative test had been due to be required from Friday, but ministers said people needed time to prepare.", "Post-primary schools get extra time to decide how they will admit pupils after transfer tests are cancelled.", "Plastic surgeons express shock at the stabbing of \"highly respected\" Graeme Perks in his home.", "Red tape plus a \"poor\" Brexit deal mean fishermen fear for the future, says an industry body.", "A selection of your pictures of Scotland sent in between 8 and 15 January.", "In one health board, 30% of four and five-year-olds are overweight or obese.", "The couple, who both have coronavirus, were given \"precious\" time together, their daughter says.", "Even experienced exporters are struggling with the system, says the British Meat Processor Association.", "Details and reaction as First Minister Mark Drakeford promises more protection to shop workers.", "It comes after reports that protections including the 48-hour work week could be dropped.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Friday morning.", "Prime Minister Boris Johnson says the action is needed to protect against the risk of new Covid strains.", "He helped kick-start punk and new wave, and was an influence on the Sex Pistols and Guns N' Roses.", "Move follows concern over a new Covid variant which an expert says has already been found in the UK.", "Statistics agency Nisra says 145 deaths were registered last week, bringing its pandemic total to 1,976.", "The show of military strength comes days before the inauguration of Joe Biden as US president.", "Craig Ross was quoted as saying food bank users were \"far from starving\" and more at risk of diabetes.", "The Home Office says it is working to \"assess the impact\" of the issue, which has been resolved.", "Homes worry about being sued if people contract the virus while they are staying there.", "Richard Sharp says the BBC represents good value, but how it is funded \"may be worth reassessing\".", "Scientists warn UK deaths will continue to rise as the global death toll passes two million.", "Coronavirus restrictions in England affected services, with pubs and hairdressers badly hit.", "Antonio says he felt he was discriminated against because of his skin colour when he was sectioned.", "Reports from Manaus say medical staff are begging for help in a critical situation due to Covid-19.", "The NHS fears some communities are being targeted with misinformation, a leading doctor says.", "Replacement exam grades are likely to arrive earlier and be decided by teachers and a test.", "Donations of plasma from people who have recovered from the virus have been suspended.", "A variant that is thought to be more infectious has not been found in the UK, scientist says.", "A letter from police chiefs also says 213,000 records were lost - more than first thought.", "Pharmacist Llyr Hughes said 50 patients would be given the Covid vaccine at his pharmacy on Friday.", "The R number in the UK is officially estimated at 1.2-1.3 as a further 1,280 deaths are reported.", "Hospitals with large critical care capacity are taking patients from other areas to ease pressures.", "The Saved by the Bell actor became ill last week and was taken to hospital.", "Network Rail said a 24m section of side wall fell away from a bridge between Carmont and Stonehaven.", "On Thursday, 16 more deaths related to Covid-19 were recorded along with 973 new positive cases.", "The earthquake struck the island of Sulawesi on Friday, injuring hundreds and destroying a hospital.", "US police held back a mob for hours in a \"barbaric\" battle at the Capitol. Here are their stories.", "A respiratory doctor at the Mater Hospital warns that oxygen supplies are under \"extreme pressure\".", "Wayne Rooney is named as Derby County's new manager, with the ex-England captain also announcing his retirement from playing.", "David Chambers is accused of charging the woman £160 for a bogus jab.", "The footballer joins celebrities and campaigners to call for action in a letter to the prime minister.", "Mr Leonard says it is in the best interests of the party if he stands down as leader immediately.", "The government says the funding will connect \"left-behind\" communities.", "Tens of thousands of people join some of the largest rallies against President Vladimir Putin in years.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Saturday morning.", "It is claimed they were seen drinking on Welsh Parliament premises when a ban on its sale in pubs was in force.", "Campaigners say a government fund to pay for the removal of dangerous cladding is woefully inadequate.", "One says he is surprised Boris Johnson shared the early data when it is \"not particularly strong\".", "It brings the total number of deaths to 97,329.", "Keon Lincoln was attacked by a group of youths in the Handsworth area of Birmingham.", "Police uncover a string of late-night \"incredibly selfish\" parties in Kensington and Chelsea.", "Pressures on intensive care units are seeing one in 10 patients transferred to a different site.", "Photographs of National Guard members sheltering underground spark anger among lawmakers.", "Some elderly people have been told to travel miles to get the jab or face having to wait to get it.", "A shortage of shipping containers, rising costs, and congestion at ports are holding back imports from China.", "Presented as a safe pair of hands, he struggled to make himself heard during tumultuous times.", "Some will enable women to have overnight visits with their children, the Ministry of Justice says.", "Underground investigations are due to begin on Saturday after flooding linked to old mine shaft.", "Booking a jab by following a link in an email meant \"depriving someone else\" of a vaccine, he said.", "Vitinha's superb goal sees Wolves into the fifth round of the FA Cup at the expense of non-league Chorley.", "As the UK rejects £500 Covid pay outs, how are others countries getting people to stick to the rules?", "A study finds the new coronavirus variant is responsible for pushing the R rate above the crucial 1.0 mark.", "Injections are to be delivered at Black Country Living Museum where the series has in part been filmed.", "The vaccination centres temporarily closed in south Wales as a weather warning was extended.", "The popular US broadcaster conducted about 50,000 interviews, from Nelson Mandela to Lady Gaga.", "Pavithra Wanniarachchi, Sri Lanka's health minister, tested positive for Covid on Friday.", "Anybody struggling to get to an appointment will be able to rearrange, a health board says.", "Boris Johnson said he looked forward to \"deepening the longstanding alliance\" between the UK and US.", "NHS staff rally to arrange a wedding for a couple as the groom's condition deteriorates in hospital.", "Evidence suggests the variant that emerged in the UK may be more deadly as well as faster-spreading.", "In the city where the virus first emerged there is now an insistence that it came from elsewhere.", "The chief rabbi has described the event as a \"shameful desecration of all that we hold dear\".", "Delaying second Pfizer doses to give more people their first is \"difficult to justify\", says BMA.", "Inadequate PPE and a new variant may be putting the lives of nurses at risk, says nursing union.", "Manchester City score three times in the last 10 minutes to defeat League Two side Cheltenham and avoid one of the biggest shocks in FA Cup history.", "Thirty-nine Vietnamese migrants suffocated in a sealed container en route to Essex in October 2019.", "Police hold aides to Putin critic Alexei Navalny as opposition activists start a string of rallies.", "Under coronavirus restrictions a maximum of 30 people are meant to attend a funeral.", "Boris Johnson has not ruled out further action to secure the borders amid concerns over Covid variants.", "Worship has been suspended as burials average 15-a-day, yet still there is denial about the disease.", "AstraZeneca is the latest company, after Pfizer, to warn of delivery issues, frustrating officials.", "The UK's chief medical adviser warns that \"a very small change and it could start taking off again\".", "An intensive care doctor says medics are seeing \"unprecedented\" numbers of people dying.", "They were hit while licking freshly laid salt on a road which is a black spot for animal accidents.", "And another 964 people died within 28 days of a positive test, only slightly down on Wednesday's figure.", "Objects are thrown and officers threatened as they break up the New Year's Eve party in Essex.", "As the UK prepares to sever EU ties, Stanley Johnson says he has always regarded himself as French.", "Campaigners say cutting of the 5% VAT rate on tampons and sanitary towels ends a 'sexist' tax.", "Japan's prime minister says the delayed Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics will go ahead this summer despite concern over rising coronavirus cases.", "Doctors urge public to \"take it seriously\" and follow coronavirus restrictions amid rising cases.", "The British dance band make some of their biggest hits available for the first time.", "The new year celebrations featured a tribute to the NHS and a message from David Attenborough.", "Bishop, who recently tested positive for Covid-19, said boarding the Tardis was \"a dream come true\".", "Joe Anderson says Labour should pick another candidate while he seeks to clear his name.", "Former Manchester United and Scotland manager Tommy Docherty dies at the age of 92 following a long illness.", "The first minister warns Scotland could be entering the most dangerous period since the outbreak began.", "Manchester United move level on points with Premier League leaders Liverpool as a Bruno Fernandes penalty seals victory over Aston Villa.", "NHS England says the facility is available to help the capital's hospitals as Covid-19 cases rise.", "The designer of the scene says it is not the first time it has been targeted.", "Several hundred people gathered at Edinburgh Castle despite warnings to stay away.", "Education Secretary Gavin Williamson drops plan to keep primaries open in 10 boroughs in the city.", "Footage is released of the first police-involved death in the US city since George Floyd's in May.", "Staff absences and the new Covid variant are creating a \"challenging situation\", NHS Providers warn.", "A study finds the new coronavirus variant is responsible for pushing the R rate above the crucial 1.0 mark.", "Primary schools in only 10 of London's boroughs are due to reopen next week.", "One of hip-hop's most influential MCs, masked rapper MF Doom died in October, his family confirm.", "It comes as most people heeded warnings to stay home - but police issued fines to those who didn't.", "With a Brexit deal done, we look at the challenges to come at British borders.", "The UK’s new single market is not as big as the country, it now needs to encompass the whole world.", "Some lorries heading for Ireland have already been turned away from Welsh ports over wrong paperwork.", "Health Minister Vaughan Gething urges \"patience\" as the vaccine programme steps up in Wales.", "Nine people are still missing, two days after a hillside collapsed due to flowing clay mud.", "The finance minister had visited the Caribbean while his province is under strict Covid lockdown.", "The UK will now leave a 12-week gap between both parts of the Covid vaccination, rather than 21 days.", "The trade border means most commercial goods entering NI from GB now require a customs declaration.", "Boris Johnson celebrates the \"freedom in our hands\" as the long Brexit process comes to a conclusion.", "Firework displays and some religious rituals go ahead, although Covid mutes celebrations.", "The station will reflect on the world's longest-running serial drama across its output on Friday.", "The deal - yet to become a treaty - enables Spanish workers to continue entering Gibraltar freely.", "Omar Elabdellaoui, who plays for Turkish club Galatasaray, suffers burns and is taken to hospital.", "A new campaign is launched to urge people not to become complacent about the Covid restrictions.", "A total of 1,596 patients are in Scottish hospitals with Covid as pressures on the NHS continue to build.", "Kim Jong-un calls the US his \"biggest enemy\" and says plans for a nuclear submarine are nearly complete.", "Two women were fined £200 after driving five miles to walk around Foremark Reservoir, Derbyshire.", "A self-employed father-of-three calls on UK government to be \"more flexible\" with its Covid support.", "Breakdown of what happened when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol amid a key Senate vote.", "Vincent Kane does not know when his operation will happen, having been delayed due to the pandemic.", "The property investment firm is accused of trying to \"jump the queue\".", "As Covid patients waited at Royal Glamorgan Hospital the nurse had a fear of \"wanting to leave\".", "Advertising campaign warning people not to get complacent comes as 1,325 deaths are recorded in the UK.", "Criticism of new Brexit trade rules is growing as firms warn of more bureaucracy, higher costs and delays.", "The vaccines were administered on Saturday by a household doctor at Windsor Castle, a royal source says.", "The Welsh Government is in discussions with supermarkets about bringing \"more visible\" regulations.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "A record 68,053 cases are also reported as a third vaccine is approved for use in the UK.", "Bernard Thomas was rescued from the rubble of Pantglas primary school on 21 October, 1966.", "The gym owners were given a £1,000 fine after three people were found inside on Friday.", "The friends said they were relieved people would not have to fear being fined for taking a walk.", "Terence Glover \"ploughed\" into a group of children in his car as they were leaving school.", "A timeline of international air crashes from 1998 to the present.", "West Ham manager David Moyes says footballers must not be \"picked on\" for breaching coronavirus guidelines.", "Councillor Kevin Hughes missed his mother's funeral after testing positive for coronavirus.", "US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says contact between officials should no longer be \"shackled\".", "There are concerns the new variant may spread too easily to be controlled by lockdown.", "Apple will also remove the social network from its App Store if it does not change its policies.", "As countries look to quickly vaccinate people, BBC reporters explain what's happening across Europe.", "At least six police vans are deployed to Clapham Common where about 30 protesters gathered.", "Ross Kemp and Christopher Biggins do readings at the funeral of the EastEnders and Carry On actress.", "The farm has been left with over 4,000 surplus eggs after schools suddenly closed to most pupils.", "The Duke of Cambridge says he wants his three children to appreciate sacrifices made during Covid.", "He claims her evidence to an inquiry into sexual harassment allegations against him was \"untrue\".", "Thousands more people have taken up fishing during the pandemic, figures show.", "Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove says \"work is ongoing\" to improve trade from GB to NI.", "Meanwhile almost half of people took advantage of Christmas bubble rules, a national survey suggests.", "How Trump's favourite social media site banned him - permanently.", "A London fashion student made the \"social distancing bandeau\" out of a Chiltern Railways seat cover.", "Kelvin Hopkins has previously denied claims by a party activist of inappropriate physical contact.", "He is remembered for the 7 Up documentary series which followed the lives of 14 children since 1964.", "Eva Williams was unable to travel to the United States for treatment due to coronavirus.", "Four deaths are reported as Storm Filomena dumps snow and triggers floods across the country.", "He hopes to beat his own lockdown bulge with his \"Get Buzzin' With Bez\" YouTube classes.", "The new more infectious variant requires tougher measures to control the spread of Covid, say scientists.", "Another 1,035 people have died, taking the total since the start of the pandemic to 80,868.", "The mayor says in some parts of London 1 in 20 people has Covid-19, as he declares a \"major incident\".", "More than 100 cars are turned away from a beauty spot in north Wales, police say.", "The total number of deaths within 28 days of a positive test during the pandemic is now above 90,000.", "The convicted murderer and music producer was described as \"talented but flawed\" in an online story.", "Police in Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire say they are expecting flooding in their regions.", "An eyewitness speaks publicly for the first time about the 2015 death of a man being restrained by police.", "Tory rebels hope to get another chance to outlaw trade deals with countries involved in mass killings.", "Lisbet Stone was turned away from her flight to London due to having an outdated Covid test.", "US tariffs on Scotch whisky and cashmere remain in place as UK fails to reach deal with Washington.", "Marion Dawson from Renfrewshire is the third oldest person in Scotland to be given the vaccine.", "Europe is gradually easing lockdown measures ahead of the tourist season.", "People accused of crimes in England and Wales - and alleged victims - wait years for a resolution.", "One person is killed and at least 10 are injured after vehicles collide on the Tohoku Expressway.", "Top medical adviser suggests schools in England may reopen region by region after lockdown.", "The Duchess of Sussex is suing the Mail on Sunday over the publication of her letter to her father.", "But researchers warn there is still a risk of catching and passing the virus on to others again.", "Out of 23,000 professors in UK universities only 155 are black, official figures reveal.", "Court cases face serious delays in the UK and lawyers say more investment in technology would help.", "The government is being scrutinised over trade deals with countries with poor human rights records.", "People who say Boris Johnson does not want Joe Biden as president are \"mistaken\", says Lord Sedwill.", "Police found evidence of sub-standard care at the Caerphilly home, an inquest hears.", "Matt Hancock says he will stay at home and urged others to do the same if \"pinged\" by the app.", "A collection of your tributes to some of the thousands of people in the UK who have died with coronavirus.", "The UK's push to secure a deal over fossil fuels is being undercut by a decision to allow a new coal mine, MPs warn.", "The number of people needing intensive care is expected to continue rising for at least two weeks.", "Ex-Marine John Deacy, 81, died with Covid-19 just two weeks after his last shift at the supermarket.", "Mainland Scotland and some islands to remain under toughest coronavirus rules until at least mid-February.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Tuesday evening.", "Labour accuses Kwasi Kwarteng of \"unpicking\" workers' rights, as minister confirms he will review rules.", "The unnamed man lived in Verbier, where the incident happened, police said.", "Boris Johnson promises £23m in compensation for exporters which have lost orders due to delays.", "Many parents struggle to meet their children's needs during the pandemic, say researchers.", "Alex Davies-Jones said \"like so many others\" she put off having a test for months.", "Paul Reid was the first person to reach Saffie-Rose Roussos, eight, after the bomb was detonated.", "Nicola Sturgeon says although there is \"cautious grounds for optimism\" on case numbers, the strictest rules will remain in place.", "Live updates from Trump's last hours in office before Democrat Joe Biden is sworn in as president on Wednesday.", "The artwork has been returned to an Italian museum - whose staff were unaware it was missing.", "A survey by consumer group Which? raises concerns over coronavirus leading to more cashless stores.", "Creator of the BBC crime drama says he \"always wanted to end Peaky with a movie\".", "University of Edinburgh scientists are a step closer to being able to reverse the damage caused by MND.", "Tory MPs want Parliament to debate ending trade deals with countries deemed responsible for genocide.", "Orthodox Christians, Putin among them, take an icy dip to commemorate a special day.", "The BBC speaks to Nirmal Purja, from the team of the first climbers to reach the K2 summit in winter.", "The UK has not always \"lived up to its values\" under Boris Johnson, his predecessor Theresa May says.", "Ambulance service staff in London explain the unique pressures of working during a pandemic.", "Pressure grows on PM after non-binding motion on universal credit top-up is passed by 278 votes.", "Are court backlogs creating miscarriages of justice? Helen Grady investigates.", "The Protection of Workers Bill will make it a new specific offence to assault, abuse or threaten Scottish retail staff.", "India pull off an astonishing run-chase to inflict Australia's first defeat at the Gabba since 1988 and take one of the all-time great series.", "The first minister says her statement to MSPs will concern the duration of Scotland's restrictions.", "Some 10% of the UK population is showing signs of recent infection, a doubling since October, says ONS.", "David Urpeth says smart motorways without a hard shoulder carry \"an ongoing risk of future deaths.\"", "A further 1,610 people die with Covid in the UK as Scotland extends its lockdown to mid-February.", "Campaigners are bringing a judicial review for indirect sexual discrimination on Thursday.", "All practices will have their own rollout plan but they have to meet official targets, says GP committee.", "Staff say there was a Covid outbreak after the \"party\" in a shut patisserie at Marylebone station.", "Hackers are selling Depop app account details on the dark web for as little as 77p each online.", "The bank has named the branches that will close between April and September, but aims to avoid redundancies.", "Large parts of northern and central England are expected to face sustained heavy rain from Tuesday.", "The PM leads UK politicians from all parties condemning the riot at the US Capitol building.", "One hospital boss said a two-week \"lag\" meant things could get worse before they get better.", "He wrote 30 novels about relationships and adventures involving young African American characters.", "That includes some of the most vulnerable patients who should soon have \"significant\" protection against the virus.", "He will lead negotiations with the government over the future of the licence fee.", "New 2020 car registrations sink to a 30-year low and see biggest one-year drop since the Second World War", "The bakery chain says it does not expect profits to return to pre-Covid levels until 2022 at the earliest.", "President Trump initially accused China of the hack against US government agencies in December.", "Joe Biden says it is \"totally unacceptable\" police showed more leniency in the Capitol riot than at anti-racism protests.", "All eyes are on the Senate runoff in Georgia, a key race that could help define Biden's presidency.", "Latest figures show more than 90,000 people in Scotland had received a first vaccination by late December.", "But there are fears bottlenecks in the system may hamper how fast NHS can deliver vaccines.", "The 19-year-old suffered life-changing injuries during the \"vicious\" assault in north London.", "Founder Annemarie Plas says the initiative will return on Thursday under the new name of Clap for Heroes.", "The US star says she had \"no idea\" what questions were included in a game bearing her image.", "Gavin Williamson will \"trust in teachers rather than algorithms\" in awarding this year's results.", "The hip-hop star and producer says he is \"doing great\" and \"getting excellent care\".", "A hearing is deciding whether Khairi Saadallah was motivated by a religious or ideological cause.", "The sites, including football stadiums and racecourses, will begin operations next week.", "Staff at one of London's busiest hospitals say it's not going to take much for services to soon break.", "BBC Two and CBBC will show content for primary and secondary pupils to watch without the internet.", "The police officer who the FBI said fired the fatal shot is dismissed for breaching policy.", "The government closed schools to help reduce the virus spread but says nurseries should stay open.", "Investment company Hipgnosis buys a half share of 1,180 songs by the Canadian folk rocker.", "The latest executive order by the US president will only take effect after he has left office.", "Cases have fallen below England's but the new variant is spreading fast, the health minister says.", "As Trump supporters entered the US Capitol building, politicians halted debate inside.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Wednesday morning.", "The US Capitol has gone into lockdown amid violent clashes between police and Trump supporters, who broke security lines and are inside the building.", "The investigators were turned back, with Beijing saying \"there might be some misunderstanding\".", "President Trump and others have made unsubstantiated claims of fraud in two Senate election run-offs.", "US lawmakers and staff are seen wearing protective gas masks as police draw guns on protesters.", "In a TV address, Labour's leader says millions of doses need to be given each week by the end of January.", "One scam tells recipients they are \"eligible to apply for your vaccine\" with a link to a bogus NHS website.", "At Fullwell Cross Medical Centre in north London, they are now vaccinating almost 1,000 people a week.", "Gordon Ramsay remembers late chef Albert Roux as \"the man who installed gastronomy in Britain\".", "The streaming giant is criticised for \"unfortunate\" timing during the new lockdowns.", "Roughly one in 50 people in England has got the virus, Prof Chris Whitty says.", "Details and reaction to a briefing by Wales' chief medical officer and the head of NHS Wales.", "Stores seek to reassure shoppers that there is no need to bulk-buy in new lockdown.", "It's been a \"Herculean achievement\" for Marieme and Ndeye, who survived against the odds.", "A top Chinese scientist addresses claims the coronavirus leaked from her lab in the city of Wuhan.", "The overnight temperature plunged below -12C in the north west Highlands.", "Former Manchester City and England midfielder Colin Bell dies aged 74 after a short illness, the Premier League club announces.", "The Trump administration pushes ahead with first oil lease sales in an Arctic wildlife refuge.", "A driver, who caused a Fife crash that led to his passenger losing her baby, admits causing death by dangerous driving.", "The news comes following confusion after her death was prematurely announced on Monday.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Judge rules he has an incentive to abscond if allowed to leave jail before major appeal hearing.", "Drive-through and delivery services will still be available while it reviews its safety procedures.", "Head teachers warn replacement grades for GCSEs and A-levels must not repeat last year's \"disaster\".", "Leaders from around the world call for peace and a peaceful transfer of power in Washington.", "YouTube says the broadcaster posted banned Covid content, but it has decided to reinstate its channel.", "Poet Helen Mort is calling for a change in the law after images of her were edited with porn.", "Vocational exams such as BTECs are not being cancelled by the lockdown like GCSEs and A-levels.", "The government says it is considering the move to prevent the virus spreading \"across the UK border\".", "Stay-at-home orders are issued in England and Scotland, as UK classrooms face further disruption.", "There are concerns the new variant may spread too easily to be controlled by lockdown.", "The House of Commons approves the government's decision to impose tough restrictions across the country.", "FTSE 100 chiefs will by Wednesday have earned more this year than the average worker's annual wage.", "The BMA in Scotland says it is concerned about the potential impact of delaying the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.", "There will be a \"gradual unwrapping\" of England's lockdown, Boris Johnson tells MPs ahead of a vote later.", "Police say organisers padlocked the door from the inside to stop officers getting in.", "Tributes are paid to Robert Rowland following the accident near his home in the Bahamas.", "The first minister denies claims she knew about harassment allegations earlier than she told parliament.", "The online retailer wants to buy the brands, not their shops, suggesting any deal would cost jobs.", "It's been 10 years since New Zealand's Pike River mine disaster, and families of victims still feel raw.", "Philip Gannaway served in Wales in World War One and his grave lies thousands of miles from home.", "Tens of thousands of people join some of the largest rallies against President Vladimir Putin in years.", "Despite the furlough scheme, employers decided to cut a record number of jobs during 2020.", "The fast fashion retailer is not purchasing the stores or taking on its staff, the BBC understands.", "Ministers are due to meet on Monday to consider whether to tighten the UK's border restrictions further.", "Firms say they have been advised by officials to set up EU hubs, but the government says it is not policy.", "One says he is surprised Boris Johnson shared the early data when it is \"not particularly strong\".", "Pressures on intensive care units are seeing one in 10 patients transferred to a different site.", "Footage shows a police car apparently driving through a group at a street race in Washington state.", "Israel has vaccinated more than a quarter of its population and now high school students are eligible.", "The claim comes after a coroner ruled two deaths on the M1 motorway were avoidable.", "As high risk groups continue to be immunised there are growing concerns that people with learning disabilities have been missed out.", "Ministers are urged to intervene amid rising Covid infection numbers at the Swansea office.", "Booking a jab by following a link in an email meant \"depriving someone else\" of a vaccine, he said.", "Some of those leading the nation's vaccination effort have told of their experiences.", "A study finds the new coronavirus variant is responsible for pushing the R rate above the crucial 1.0 mark.", "The vaccination centres temporarily closed in south Wales as a weather warning was extended.", "A Sunday Times poll shows 51% of people in favour of holding a border poll in NI within five years.", "The popular US broadcaster conducted about 50,000 interviews, from Nelson Mandela to Lady Gaga.", "Entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX company delivers 143 satellites to orbit on a single rocket flight.", "Pavithra Wanniarachchi, Sri Lanka's health minister, tested positive for Covid on Friday.", "Boris Johnson said he looked forward to \"deepening the longstanding alliance\" between the UK and US.", "Keon Lincoln was attacked by a group of youths in the Handsworth area of Birmingham.", "He replaces Paul Davies who quit after drinking alcohol with other politicians in the Senedd.", "Conor McGregor is left stunned on his return to the UFC as Dustin Poirier wins their rematch at UFC 257 by technical knockout.", "The UK health secretary also says the UK has identified 77 cases of the Covid South Africa variant.", "Bruno Fernandes comes off the bench to fire Manchester United past fierce rivals Liverpool in a pulsating FA Cup fourth-round tie.", "Tens of thousands braved a police crackdown to show support for jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.", "Vaccination appointments for over-70s in Scotland will arrive on Monday as planned - but in white envelopes.", "Manchester City score three times in the last 10 minutes to defeat League Two side Cheltenham and avoid one of the biggest shocks in FA Cup history.", "Some guests were found hiding in cupboards when police raided student flats in Birmingham.", "Motorists are urged to take care with sub-zero temperatures forecast into Monday.", "England's deputy chief medical officer urges those who have had the jab to stick to lockdown rules.", "TV footage from China shows the first miner being brought to the surface, as emergency workers applaud.", "The extraordinary life of an American who invited hundreds of thousands to his Paris home for dinner.", "UK residents can apply for the new card to access emergency medical care when their EHIC card runs out.", "County Mayo man howls with laughter while trying to record a birthday message for his son.", "New Covid curbs are necessary but they will hit the economy, Chancellor Rishi Sunak warns.", "Health Secretary Matt Hancock says 2.3 million people in the UK have now had a Covid-19 vaccine dose.", "The Countryfile star will present the Friday and Saturday editions of the BBC Radio 4 programme.", "A 20-year-old man who spent a week in intensive care says many young people are in denial about Covid.", "Home Secretary Priti Patel says the \"horrifying\" death toll underlines the need to follow restrictions.", "Seven mass vaccination centres have opened across England to help deliver the Coronavirus vaccine.", "Kitchen robots, new TVs, smart masks and a toilet that analyses your poo are among the new products.", "Customers will only be able to collect from Waitrose stores following a \"change in tone\" from the government.", "The father of a Reading terror attack victim asks why the killer was not considered a danger.", "Deliveries may be delayed in 28 areas due to \"resourcing issues\", the postal group says.", "Khairi Saadallah murdered three friends in a Reading park in a \"ruthless and brutal” terror attack.", "Anna Wintour hit back at claims that the informal picture downplayed Ms Harris's achievements.", "Investors have agreed a deal to save the chain, along with Ponden Home and Bonmarché.", "Officials say 170 individuals involved in deadly Capitol riots have been identified, and many more will be.", "Scotland's first minister says the current restrictions are \"very unlikely\" to be lifted at the end of the month.", "The celebrated 94-year-old broadcaster is the latest celebrity to have a first dose of the vaccine.", "The decision follows a rise in cases across the emirates in the past week, officials say.", "The Earl of Strathmore attacked a woman in her room during an event he was hosting at Glamis Castle.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "A supermarket worker says door staff are facing abuse when they challenge those not wearing masks.", "The facility at the ExCeL Centre also has the capital's first mass vaccination centre on site.", "Overall, patients are now more likely to survive, but death rates are high in intensive care.", "Earlier this month videos showing supposed empty hospitals were shared on social media.", "A leaked memo warns several Birmingham hospitals risk being \"overwhelmed\" by coronavirus patients.", "Boris Johnson was spotted at the Olympic Park on Sunday, despite government advice to \"stay local\".", "A slump in demand for fashion and homeware during lockdown left many retailers struggling.", "Last year saw 697,000 deaths registered in the UK - 14% above what would be expected.", "Eugene Goodman was hailed for luring a mob away from the Senate - now new heroics have emerged.", "Tweeters query why it has not been given to a prominent Kenyan like actress Lupita Nyong'o.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Tuesday morning.", "People are still holding house parties, raves and gambling gatherings, the UK's most senior police officer says.", "Dutch TV films officials confiscating ham sandwiches from UK drivers under new food import rules.", "The increasing number of staff off work could prevent the NHS Louisa Jordan opening to Covid patients.", "The Northern Lights were visible overnight from Shetland, Moray and the Highlands.", "The manager of a care home says they were promised the jab on New Year's Eve - but none have arrived.", "Downing Street defends the PM, while the Met Police chief says he did not act \"against the law\".", "Fans of the University of Alabama football team gathered in the streets of Tuscaloosa, ignoring social distancing.", "We share the stories of some of the 12,000 people who have died with coronavirus in Scotland.", "There has been speculation over moves to make lockdown stricter, as infection rates remain high.", "Isabella Curry said she now feels safe and will be able to go out and meet friends soon.", "An RAF aircraft breaking the sound barrier causes a loud bang in skies across the East of England.", "Three vaccines have been approved in the UK - what are the differences between them?", "Derbyshire Police apologises to two women fined £200 for driving five miles for a countryside walk.", "Cwm Taf Morgannwg saw the highest number of weekly deaths and the highest number since April.", "More than a third of people using screens more in lockdown reported eyesight changes, a study suggests.", "The home secretary says she will back police to enforce virus rules, as another 1,243 die in the UK.", "New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick turns down Donald Trump's offer, citing the Capitol riots.", "Mohamud Mohammed Hassan was arrested at home on Friday but released without charge on Saturday.", "As countries look to quickly vaccinate people, BBC reporters explain what's happening across Europe.", "Donald Trump made the decision days before Joe Biden, who wants friendlier US-Cuban ties, takes office.", "The laptops and tablets will be delivered to schools in England to support disadvantaged pupils.", "It follows similar moves by Morrisons and Sainsbury's, but those with medical reasons will be exempt.", "Doctors at the hospital say they're treating more younger patients than in the first wave.", "People refusing to wear face coverings who are not medically exempt will not be allowed to shop inside.", "The social network has hit back asking a federal judge to order it to be reinstated.", "Ministers are reluctant to make the rules even tougher at the moment - but would never rule it out.", "A Typhoon aircraft \"safely escorts\" a civilian aircraft to Stansted Airport, an RAF spokesman says.", "Leicester City edge a keenly contested Premier League encounter with Southampton to maintain their push for a top-four place.", "Health and frontline workers are first in line for jabs at vaccination centres across the country.", "The number of incidents reported to the child safeguarding panel in England rose by a quarter.", "Some areas could see freezing temperatures and 5-10cm of snow on Saturday, the Met Office says.", "CBBC star's mother, Lucy Lyndhurst, says his death has had a \"catastrophic effect\" on their family.", "Sea port managers fear the shift may be part of a long-term trend to ship from the Irish Republic.", "A critical engine test for Nasa's new \"megarocket\" - the Space Launch System (SLS) - ends early.", "Heavy rain is causing flooding and travel disruption, with a warning for ice also forecast.", "Douglas Jones had been enjoying his dream job before the pandemic forced him to return home to southern Scotland.", "Sir Iain Duncan Smith and Joanna Lumley speak out about employees allegedly owed a total of £200,000.", "The Daily Telegraph must publish a correction over Covid claims, press regulator Ipso rules.", "Plastic surgeons express shock at the stabbing of \"highly respected\" Graeme Perks in his home.", "The UK prime minister wants girls' education in developing countries to be a key international focus.", "Everyone has heard about doctors and nurses catching Covid-19 but cleaners and porters have been worse hit.", "Health groups say NHS staff fear prosecution over decisions if hospitals are overwhelmed.", "Red tape plus a \"poor\" Brexit deal mean fishermen fear for the future, says an industry body.", "Louis Godwin, 95, said he was \"so pleased\" to get his Covid-19 vaccination at Salisbury Cathedral.", "People in parts of eastern England woke to a thick covering of snow on Saturday morning.", "Prime Minister Boris Johnson says the action is needed to protect against the risk of new Covid strains.", "Prime Minister Jean Castex said the measures would be in place for at least 15 days.", "Statistics agency Nisra says 145 deaths were registered last week, bringing its pandemic total to 1,976.", "Holiday firms are expecting a \"bumper year\" once lockdown restrictions are lifted.", "As the UK records its highest death toll, Fergal Keane has been to see the strain the NHS is under for the second time.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Saturday.", "The latest UK government data also shows a further 1,295 deaths with 28 days of a positive test.", "Lahiru Thirimanne's unbeaten 76 frustrates England as a spirited Sri Lanka rally on the third day of the first Test in Galle.", "The Gerry and the Pacemakers singer died from a blood infection at the age of 78.", "Hundreds of thousands of DNA and arrest records were deleted after a human error, the Home Office says.", "Centrist Armin Laschet is now in a good position to succeed Angela Merkel as Germany's chancellor.", "Health officials warn the highly contagious UK Covid variant could become the dominant strain in the US by March.", "Replacement exam grades are likely to arrive earlier and be decided by teachers and a test.", "Donations of plasma from people who have recovered from the virus have been suspended.", "Prince William says he \"really worries\" about the effect of the pandemic on front-line workers.", "A letter from police chiefs also says 213,000 records were lost - more than first thought.", "Network Rail said a 24m section of side wall fell away from a bridge between Carmont and Stonehaven.", "US police held back a mob for hours in a \"barbaric\" battle at the Capitol. Here are their stories.", "David Chambers is accused of charging the woman £160 for a bogus jab.", "A Belfast mother says there is \"compelling evidence\" that her daughter was abducted in Malaysia.", "Mount Semeru has erupted, pouring volcanic matter miles into the air and placing locals on alert.", "The latest death and case figures should be a \"bitter warning for us all\", Public Health England says.", "The total number of deaths within 28 days of a positive test during the pandemic is now above 90,000.", "At least three people have died in a suspected gas blast that destroyed four floors of a building.", "Police in Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire say they are expecting flooding in their regions.", "Some 1,820 deaths have been reported in the past 24 hours - surpassing yesterday's previous high.", "The package will also see police target dealers and health services help people with addictions.", "Congratulating Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the PM said it was a \"big moment\" for the UK and US.", "Marion Dawson from Renfrewshire is the third oldest person in Scotland to be given the vaccine.", "Boris Johnson faced questions on the UK's border policy, and the deletion of police records.", "The Duchess of Sussex is suing the Mail on Sunday over the publication of her letter to her father.", "There has been a fourfold increase in mortgage products for those offering a 10% deposit.", "The president responds to reports he is considering presidential pardons over alleged Russia collusion.", "Doris Hobday's family say they are \"totally heartbroken\" to lose her in this way.", "The big social networks are clamping down on threats of violence amid a tense wait for results.", "Some of the UK's biggest music stars sign an open letter demanding action over post-Brexit touring.", "The President-elect has a laundry list of priorities for his first 100 days in the White House.", "A collection of your tributes to some of the thousands of people in the UK who have died with coronavirus.", "The riots of 6 January took many by surprise, but to those tracking conspiracy and extreme right groups online, the warning signs were all there.", "Mainland Scotland and some islands to remain under toughest coronavirus rules until at least mid-February.", "Taking down pictures and clearing out desks is part of a huge operation readying for a new president.", "Labour accuses Kwasi Kwarteng of \"unpicking\" workers' rights, as minister confirms he will review rules.", "'This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge' - the new president knows how daunting his task is.", "Holidaymakers in 2021 must be fully vaccinated against Covid-19, the travel firm says.", "Boris Johnson calls it an \"outrageous\" error which officers are working \"round the clock\" to rectify.", "The new president is sworn into office by Chief Justice John G Roberts.", "The 22-year-old from LA is the youngest poet to perform at a presidential inauguration.", "Kamala Harris makes history as she is sworn in as US vice-president.", "Delays to smear tests in lockdown prompt cervical cancer charities to call for home-testing kits.", "It comes as industry workers warn their livelihoods are at risk due to Brexit border problems.", "Nine Met Police officers who broke lockdown rules have been asked to \"reflect on their choices\".", "Paul Pogba scores a superb winner as Manchester United reclaim top spot in the Premier League by coming from behind for a club-record equalling away win at Fulham.", "'This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge'. Read the 46th president's address in full.", "Online audiences for singalongs in the Llangollen church have \"exploded\", Father Lee Taylor says.", "Out-of-date tax systems mean people are falling through the cracks for help, MPs say.", "Orthodox Christians, Putin among them, take an icy dip to commemorate a special day.", "The ex-government adviser said the Tories would be seen as the \"nasty party\" by ending the top-up.", "They are all laughing at the camera, but what are the stories of the women next to Kamala Harris?", "More than 2,000 properties in Manchester are affected as police warn some occupants will have Covid.", "Services and waiting times must improve at the NHS's child gender-identity service, inspectors say.", "A further 1,820 people die in the UK within 28 days of a positive test - another all-time high.", "The UK has not always \"lived up to its values\" under Boris Johnson, his predecessor Theresa May says.", "The role of a president's inaugural cabinet goes beyond just policy - let's take a closer look.", "The body of Joy Morgan was found two months after a man was convicted of her murder.", "From \"the best talent in politics\" to \"Sloppy Steve\" and fraud charges - what went wrong for Steve Bannon?", "The Protection of Workers Bill will make it a new specific offence to assault, abuse or threaten Scottish retail staff.", "Donald Trump won a surprise victory in 2016 partly because he promised to shake things up. And boy, did he.", "The health minister asks the Ministry of Defence to help out, primarily at a number of hospitals.", "A National Audit Office report calls on the corporation to produce \"a long-term financial plan\".", "The last four years have been a whirlwind - we asked the experts to break down Trump's key moments.", "More work is needed to understand its benefits in schools in England given the new variant, health officials say.", "The BBC's James Cook returns to Monklands Hospital eight months on to find the staff struggling against the odds.", "President Biden inked 15 executive orders, moving to rejoin the Paris climate accord.", "His most famous Discworld novels were written in the house in Somerset, the estate agent says.", "Police say the van \"careered\" off the road and the man was rescued from the overturned vehicle.", "President Biden has said that democracy and 'freedom' are at stake in the upcoming 2024 election.", "All practices will have their own rollout plan but they have to meet official targets, says GP committee.", "The Duchess of Sussex is suing the Mail on Sunday over the publication of a letter to her father.", "Members of our voter panel all wish Joe Biden well, but they're divided over his chances of success.", "As Donald Trump prepares to leave office, here are some of the key moments of his presidency.", "A tearful President-elect Joe Biden says goodbye to his home state on the eve of his inauguration.", "Joe Biden makes his inaugural address as the 46th president of the United States.", "Parts of England prepare for widespread floods as Boris Johnson announces emergency Cobra meeting.", "Images from Joe Biden's swearing-in and first day as the 46th US President.", "The cupped clap of a butterfly's wings may be the key to their flying abilities and their survival.", "Relegation-threatened Fulham lose some of the momentum built up by their win at Everton but show battling qualities to claim a point at Burnley.", "The medical journal's editor says UK guidelines don't recommend giving different coronavirus jabs.", "They were hit while licking freshly laid salt on a road which is a black spot for animal accidents.", "Objects are thrown and officers threatened as they break up the New Year's Eve party in Essex.", "Former Tottenham boss Mauricio Pochettino is named Paris St-Germain boss following Thomas Tuchel's sacking.", "People driving to visit beauty spots in Wales are breaking Covid rules, a Snowdonia park warden says.", "The first doses of the latest coronavirus vaccination to be approved are due to be given on Monday.", "Japan's prime minister says the delayed Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics will go ahead this summer despite concern over rising coronavirus cases.", "Doctors urge public to \"take it seriously\" and follow coronavirus restrictions amid rising cases.", "Bishop, who recently tested positive for Covid-19, said boarding the Tardis was \"a dream come true\".", "Arsenal continue their Premier League resurgence with a ruthless victory over strugglers West Brom at The Hawthorns.", "Manchester United move level on points with Premier League leaders Liverpool as a Bruno Fernandes penalty seals victory over Aston Villa.", "NHS England says the facility is available to help the capital's hospitals as Covid-19 cases rise.", "New detectorist Owen Thomas says \"the link with a life that's gone\" appeals to him.", "Just one ticket matched all seven numbers in the New Year's Day draw.", "A court has ruled that Lisa Montgomery can be executed on 12 January, despite appeals from lawyers.", "A last-ditch attempt to overturn the result is overturned, days before the White House changes hands.", "Education Secretary Gavin Williamson drops plan to keep primaries open in 10 boroughs in the city.", "Footage is released of the first police-involved death in the US city since George Floyd's in May.", "The New Year's Eve event, held in a warehouse in a village in Brittany, was shut down on Saturday.", "Volunteers at All Saints Church in East Horndon have praised those who donated £8,700 for repairs.", "A study finds the new coronavirus variant is responsible for pushing the R rate above the crucial 1.0 mark.", "Amanda Quinn, diagnosed with rapid early onset dementia, says lockdown has been a \"scary\" time.", "Up to 300 people gather in London's Hyde Park to protest at Covid-19 restrictions.", "Nine people are still missing, two days after a hillside collapsed due to flowing clay mud.", "It comes as a further 57,725 people test positive for the virus, a new daily high.", "Tottenham manager Jose Mourinho says he is \"disappointed\" after three of his players breached coronavirus rules by attending a party over Christmas.", "The frontman, who found success with songs such as Summer in Dublin, \"passed away suddenly\" aged 65.", "The cryptocurrency's gain so far this year was almost $5,000 - after the value surged 300% in 2020.", "The government said soldiers had been sent to protect the area, close to Niger's border with Mali.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC."], "section": ["Europe", "UK Politics", "Europe", "UK Politics", "Northern Ireland", "Family & Education", "Business", "UK", "Glasgow & West Scotland", "In Pictures", "Family & Education", "Manchester", "Health", "Birmingham & Black Country", "Business", "Wales", "South Scotland", "Northern Ireland", "Entertainment & Arts", "UK", "US & Canada", "Business", "Entertainment & Arts", "US & Canada", "Health", "Northern Ireland", "Manchester", "UK", "Business", "Wales", null, "US & Canada", "UK", "Northern Ireland", "Business", "US & Canada", "Northern Ireland", "Wales", "Business", null, "US & Canada", "England", "UK", "UK", "US & Canada", "Northern Ireland", "Wales", "Somerset", "US & Canada", "Bristol", "Northern Ireland", "Science & Environment", "UK", "Northern Ireland", "UK", "Business", null, "Kent", "In Pictures", "Wales", null, "Family & Education", "UK", 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Video footage showed the aftermath of the deadly explosion\n\nAt least three people have died following an explosion that caused a building to partially collapse in centre of the Spanish capital, Madrid.\n\nA fourth person was missing and several others were hurt, officials said.\n\nCity officials said the blast, which destroyed four floors of the building, had been caused by a gas leak.\n\nMayor José Luis Martínez Almeida told reporters after the blast that a fire was raging inside the building, which belongs to the Catholic Church.\n\nThe blast happened shortly before 15:00 local time (14:00 GMT) as gas workers were repairing a boiler at the back of the building in the central Puerta de Toledo area of Madrid.\n\nAn 85-year-old woman passer-by and two men were killed while a third man who had been working on the boiler was missing, Spanish media reported. One of the injured was in a serious condition and taken to hospital, according to officials.\n\nSpanish reports said the upper floors affected were being used to house local priests.\n\nRescue workers evacuated more than 50 people from a care home next-door to the building in Caille de Toledo, but a school on the other side was closed at the time of the blast.\n\nFour floors of the building were destroyed in the explosion, which could be heard in many areas of Madrid. Images shared on social media showed billowing smoke and debris strewn along the street.\n\nEmergency services said nine fire crews and 11 ambulances were at the scene and some of those caught up in the blast were treated on the street.\n\nFour floors of the building were destroyed in the explosion\n\nPolice officers cleared the area, closing it to all traffic and pedestrians, and appealed to local residents not to come near.\n\n\"The noise was very loud, very loud, really,\" Lorenzo Fomento, who was working from home at a nearby apartment, told AFP news agency. \"I never heard anything so loud before,\" he added.\n\nThe director of the nursing home, Antonio Berlanga, said all the elderly residents were fine and places were being found for them to spend the night.", "The EU has maintained its diplomatic mission in the UK after Brexit\n\nA diplomatic row has broken out between the UK and EU over the status of the bloc's ambassador in London.\n\nThe UK is refusing to give Joao Vale de Almeida the full diplomatic status that is granted to other ambassadors.\n\nThe Foreign Office is insisting he and his officials should not have the privileges and immunities afforded to diplomats under the Vienna Convention.\n\nIt is understood not to want to set a precedent by treating an international body in the same way as a nation state.\n\nAs it stands, the ambassador would not have the chance to present his credentials to the Queen like other diplomatic heads of mission.\n\nThe British decision is in marked contrast to 142 other countries around the world where the EU has delegations and where its ambassadors are all granted the same status as diplomats representing sovereign nations.\n\nJosep Borrell, the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs, has written to the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, to express his \"serious concerns\".\n\nThe issue is expected to be discussed by EU foreign ministers next Monday when they meet for the first time since the post-Brexit transition period ended on 31 December.\n\nThe Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office wants to treat the EU delegation only as representatives of an international organisation.\n\nThis means EU diplomats would not have the full protection of the Vienna Convention, giving them immunity from detention, criminal jurisdiction and taxation.\n\nThe rights given to staff of international organisations are more ad hoc and less fixed.\n\nThe EU argues it is not a typical international organisation because it has its own currency, judicial system and the power to make law.\n\nIn his letter to Mr Raab last November, seen by the BBC, Mr Borrell says: \"Your service have sent us a draft proposal for an establishment agreement about which we have serious concerns.\n\nAmbassadors of nation states have certain privileges - including being able to present their credentials to the Queen\n\n\"The arrangements offered do not reflect the specific character of the EU, nor do they respond to the future relationship between the EU and the UK as an important third country.\n\n\"It would not grant the customary privileges and immunities for the delegation and its staff. The proposals do not constitute a reasonable basis for reaching an agreement.\"\n\nEU officials privately accuse the Foreign Office of hypocrisy because when the EU's foreign service - known as the External Action Service - was set up in 2010 as a result of the Lisbon Treaty, the UK signed up to proposals that EU diplomats be granted the \"privileges and immunities equivalent to those referred to in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 18 April 1961\".\n\nOne EU source said: \"It seems petty. This is not about privileges, it's about principle. What does it say about the UK, about how much the British signature is worth?\"\n\nSome in the EU also fear hostile states might copy the UK and downgrade the protections granted to EU diplomats in their own countries. This could open them up to being harassed and make them easier for them to be expelled.\n\nA European Commission spokesman said: \"The UK, as a signatory to the Lisbon Treaty, is well aware of the EU's status in external relations, and was cognisant and supportive of this status while it was a member of the EU.\n\n\"The EU has 143 delegations, equivalent to diplomatic missions, around the world. Without exception, all host states have accepted to grant these delegations and their staff a status equivalent to that of diplomatic missions of states under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and the UK is well aware of this fact.\"\n\nHe added: \"Nothing has changed since the UK's exit from the European Union to justify any change in stance on the UK's part.\n\n\"The EU's status in external relations and its subsequent diplomatic status is amply recognised by countries and international organisations around the world, and we expect the United Kingdom to treat the EU Delegation accordingly and without delay.\"\n\nA Foreign Office spokesperson said: \"Engagement continues with the EU on the long-term arrangements for the EU delegation to the UK. While discussions are still ongoing, it would not be appropriate for us to speculate on the detail of an eventual agreement.\"", "\"You need to take care of each other,\" President Macron told students in Paris\n\nFrench President Emmanuel Macron has promised all university students two meals a day for one euro (88p; $1.21) to help them cope during lockdown.\n\n\"We must be able to provide better support,\" he said at a meeting with students in Paris on Thursday.\n\nIt follows protests in which students called for more help to tackle loneliness and financial problems.\n\nFrance is currently under a 18:00-06:00 curfew, and coronavirus cases have risen steadily in recent weeks.\n\nMr Macron, who addressed students at Paris-Saclay university, also said the government would provide subsidies to pay for counselling and other mental health services.\n\nThe subsidies would take the form of a voucher which students can redeem if they feel the need to talk to a mental health professional, the president said.\n\nHe added that the discounted meals would be available from university canteens and other nearby outlets that are providing takeaways.\n\n\"We remain in a period of uncertainty,\" Mr Macron said. \"We will have a second semester that will have the virus and a lot of constraints.\"\n\n\"You need to take care of each other,\" he added.\n\nThe president spoke a day after students took to the streets to demand more attention from the government. They sought to raise awareness of the rising mental health problems many say they are suffering as a result of the pandemic.\n\nA combination of isolation, inactivity and concerns about the job market has left many students close to breakdown, according to university psychologists.\n\nRyan Kennedy says the French government is failing to take student issues seriously\n\n\"I've lived alone in a studio apartment since September - it's the first time I've ever lived alone,\" Ryan Kennedy, a 19-year-old law student in Montpellier, told the BBC.\n\nHe added: \"Not a day goes by without a friend calling me because they're struggling with their mental health.\"\n\nHeïdi Soupault, a political science student from Strasbourg, sent a letter to Mr Macron last week. \"I no longer have dreams,\" she said. \"If we have no hope or prospects for the future at 19, what do we have left?\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"Our mental health goes downhill in situations like this.\"\n\nMany of the protesting students are calling for a return to face-to-face teaching. Some first-year students will be able to return to the classroom from 25 January.\n\nBut, on Thursday, Mr Macron said all students should be allowed on campus once a week providing certain measures are in place.\n\n\"Given what your generation has already gone through, we cannot but take into account your right to some on-site presence, to exchange with your teachers, and to meet with other students,\" he said.\n\nFrance has had a curfew in place since December, but this was tightened on 16 January to the current hours of 18:00-06:00.\n\nBars, restaurants, theatres, cinemas and ski resorts remain shut. Schools, however, are open with extra testing in place.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Johnson: \"It's a big moment for us - we have things we want to do together.\"\n\nThe inauguration of President Joe Biden is a \"step forward\" for the United States, which has \"been through a bumpy period\", Boris Johnson has said.\n\nCongratulating Mr Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, the UK PM said it was a \"big moment\" for the UK and the US and their \"joint common agenda\".\n\nMr Johnson said he looked forward to working with the US on tackling climate change and the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nMaking his inaugural address, Mr Biden said \"democracy has prevailed\".\n\nHe promised to be a president \"for all Americans\" and said his \"whole soul is in putting America back together again\".\n\nOutgoing President Donald Trump, who has not formally conceded to Mr Biden, did not attend the ceremony.\n\nPresident Biden began work straight away on reversing a number of his predecessor's policies, including rejoining the Paris climate change agreement - gaining the praise of Mr Johnson.\n\nThe PM tweeted it was \"hugely positive news\", adding: \"I look forward to working with our US partners to do all we can to safeguard our planet.\"\n\nEarlier this week the former head of the civil service Lord Sedwill suggested Mr Johnson would be glad Mr Trump had not been re-elected for a second term as US president.\n\nWriting in the Daily Mail, Lord Sedwill said those who believed Boris Johnson would have preferred Mr Trump to win again were \"mistaken\".\n\nThe former cabinet secretary - who stepped down in September - said a second term for Mr Trump \"would not have been to the benefit of British or European security, to transatlantic trade, let alone the environmental agenda to which the prime minister is so committed\".\n\nBoris Johnson with Donald Trump at the G7 summit in 2019\n\nMr Johnson's public stance toward the former president has varied over the years.\n\nIn 2015, when he was Mayor of London, Mr Johnson accused Mr Trump of \"stupefying ignorance\" over his comments about violence in the city.\n\nBut as foreign secretary, following Mr Trump's election as president, he said there was a \"lot to be positive about\", and in 2019, praised his \"many good qualities\".\n\nFor his part, Mr Trump has appeared largely supportive of Mr Johnson, backing his flagship Brexit policy and at one point saying of the British PM: \"They call him Britain Trump.\"\n\nAnd echoing his predecessor, in 2019 Mr Biden described the UK prime minister as a \"physical and emotional clone\" of Mr Trump.\n\nAfter winning the presidential election Mr Biden phoned Mr Johnson ahead of other European leaders and expressed his desire to strengthen the historic \"special relationship\" between the two countries.\n\nSpeaking on Wednesday, Mr Johnson said it was the job of all UK prime ministers to have a \"good, close working relationship\" with US presidents but, right now, there were many things the two countries \"wanted to do together\".\n\n\"When you look at the issues which unite me and Joe Biden, the UK and the US right now, there is a fantastic joint common agenda,\" he said. \"For us and America, it is a big moment.\"\n\nHe said he hoped the UK could help the US commit to a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 in the run up to the climate change conference COP 26, to be held in Glasgow this year.\n\nUK prime ministers like to consider American presidents as their best diplomatic friend.\n\nThat relationship, particularly when it comes to security and defence, is unusually close.\n\nWhen, as with Donald Trump, that friend has been unpredictable and unconventional, that has made for some very awkward political moments.\n\nSo for the government, this a really important and positive turning of the page.\n\nThe terribly over-used phrase the 'special relationship', which provokes neurotic behaviour on this side of the Atlantic, has meant the most when there has been a genuine personal chemistry between the two leaders - whether Thatcher and Reagan, or Bush and Blair.\n\nThere is nothing automatic about Mr Biden and Mr Johnson developing that kind of political friendship.\n\nBut in the words of one former senior minister, for the UK Biden means \"we will lose exclusivity but gain predictability: easier to work with, less cringeworthy and more dependable, but we may not be the only girlfriend on speed dial\".\n\nSpeaking to the Guardian, shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy described Mr Biden as \"a woke guy\".\n\nAsked if he agreed, Mr Johnson said: \"I can't comment on that. What I know is that he's a firm believer in the transatlantic alliance and that's a great thing.\"\n\nHe added that there was \"nothing wrong with being woke - I put myself in the category of people who believe that it's important to stick up for your history, your traditions and your values, the things you believe in.\"\n\nOpposition leader Sir Keir Starmer also sent his congratulations to the new president and vice-president.\n\n\"The US begins a new chapter in its history, one of hope, decency, compassion and strength,\" the Labour leader said, adding \"together, our two nations can build a better, more optimistic future for our world.\"\n\nAnd First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon tweeted: \"Warm congratulations and best wishes to President Biden and Vice President Harris.\n\n\"Scotland and the USA share long-standing bonds of friendship and co-operation. We look forward to building on these in the years ahead.\"\n\nWriting in the Daily Mail, former UK Prime Minister Theresa May said Mr Biden's election presented the UK with a \"golden opportunity\" for Western democracies to reverse the trend towards \"absolutism\" - and a \"few strongmen facing off against each other\" - in global affairs.\n\nThe Queen sent a private message to Mr Biden before his inauguration, Buckingham Palace has said.", "Food supply problems into Northern Ireland from Great Britain are \"clearly a Brexit issue\", Ireland's foreign affairs minister has said.\n\nSimon Coveney said the shortages were \"part of the reality\" of the UK leaving the EU.\n\n\"Let's not pretend Brexit doesn't force that kind of change,\" he said, speaking on ITV's Peston programme\n\nOn Tuesday, the NI secretary said images of empty supermarket shelves had \"nothing to do with the protocol\".\n\nRather, Brandon Lewis argued the disruption caused by coronavirus before Christmas was responsible for the shortages of some food products.\n\nThe Northern Ireland Protocol between the UK and the EU requires health certifications on animal-based food products entering NI from the rest of the UK.\n\nMr Coveney said it meant \"very real change\" for some businesses, as there now had to be a \"certain number of checks\" on goods from Britain into Northern Ireland.\n\nHe said that some companies were not ready for this.\n\nMr Coveney said the Republic of Ireland would work with the UK and EU to \"make sure\" supermarket shelves were not empty in the future.\n\nHe said the Brexit divorce deal agreed with the EU by then-prime minister Theresa May would have caused less separation from Northern Ireland from the UK.\n\nAsked about Mr Coveney's comments, International Trade Secretary Liz Truss said the disruption had been \"down to both\" Covid and Brexit - but defended the situation.\n\nSpeaking on the Peston programme she said \"there was always going to be a period of adjustment for businesses\" and \"we are now seeing a more rapid flow of goods into Northern Ireland those supermarket shelves are being stocked\".\n\nMs Truss said the government would continue to support businesses, and that \"predictions of Armageddon haven't happened\".", "The education secretary has said he would \"certainly hope\" schools in England could reopen before Easter.\n\nGavin Williamson said he was \"not able to exactly say\" when pupils would go back but schools would be given two weeks' notice before reopening.\n\nPrimary and secondary schools remain closed, apart from to vulnerable pupils and the children of key workers.\n\nDowning Street said the prime minister wanted schools to open as quickly as possible but would follow the evidence.\n\n\"If we can open them up before Easter then we obviously will do but that is determined by the latest scientific evidence and data,\" the prime minister's official spokesman said.\n\nThe Downing Street spokesman was also less specific about the promise of two weeks' notice, saying: \"We want to give schools as much notice as possible.\"\n\nSchools have been closed to most pupils so far this term, with primary schools closing after one day back, in response to rising Covid levels.\n\nPupils have been told they will be learning at home until at least half-term in mid-February.\n\nBut Mr Williamson was pressed on BBC Radio 4's Today programme whether he could guarantee that schools would reopen at all this term, before the Easter holidays.\n\n\"I want to see them, as soon as the scientific and health advice is there, open at the earliest possible stage - and I certainly hope that would be certainly before Easter,\" said the education secretary, who's responsible for schools in England.\n\nHe said schools and parents would have \"absolutely proper notice\" of when children were going to return, which he said would be a \"clear two weeks\" for teachers and families to get ready.\n\nA lesson from the first lockdown was that it's much harder to reopen schools than to close them.\n\nParents and teachers have to be persuaded again it's safe to go back, families need advance notice to plan their work and childcare, schools need to organise their staffing.\n\nAnd there are other parents who will be pushing for schools to go back as soon as possible, in addition to the vulnerable and key workers' children already attending.\n\nFor Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, already under pressure, it means a high-stakes balancing act - and it clearly remains uncertain whether this will happen for all schools before the Easter holidays.\n\nWhat seems likely, from Mr Williamson and England's deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries, is that this could be a patchwork return beginning after half-term, rather than a single starting date, depending on local levels of the virus.\n\nThe biggest teachers' union, the National Education Union, said schools and parents needed certainty and not a \"stop-start approach\".\n\nLast week Mr Williamson indicated to the Commons education committee that schools in some parts of the country might stay closed at the end of the lockdown, with a return to the \"contingency\" arrangements, under which schools in areas of high infection would be shut.\n\nOn Tuesday, England's deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries also said schools might reopen region by region in a phased return after half-term.\n\nLabour has accused the education secretary of causing \"chaos and confusion\" and called on him to resign.\n\nParty leader Sir Keir Starmer said providing two weeks' advance notice of opening was \"good news coming from an education secretary who normally gives them about 24 hours' notice\".\n\nSir Keir said the government needed to \"give children the ability to learn at home now\" and \"get on with the blindingly obvious\" task of getting testing in place in schools.\n\nAsked about his own future, Mr Williamson said: \"Our focus is making sure that we get the very best of remote education out to all children across the country, making sure that we return schools at the earliest possible moment.\"\n\nIn terms of his own achievements, the education secretary said: \"I'll let other people do the grading.\"\n\nSchools have also been closed by other governments in the UK. In Scotland and Northern Ireland they will remain closed until at least the middle of February, while in Wales the next review of restrictions will be on 29 January.\n\nThe government has also paused plans to roll out rapid daily coronavirus testing in all but a small number of secondary schools and colleges, with health officials saying the new variant meant the risk of missing infections had risen.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Keir Starmer on Gavin Williamson: \"You would struggle... to find many people who would give him more than an F.\"\n\nBut Mr Williamson emphasised that mass testing in schools would continue, clarifying that it was the daily tests for those who had been in contact with a positive case which had been stopped.\n\nThe education secretary was also challenged on the fairness of setting tests as part of the replacement for cancelled GCSEs and A-levels, considering pupils will have missed different amounts of time in school.\n\nMr Williamson said the tests were only \"one element\" for deciding replacement results, which would be based on teachers' grades.\n\n\"That's why we're asking teachers to make a judgement in the round. We're asking teachers to look at the work they've been doing over the whole period of time they've been studying the course,\" he said.", "Low-deposit mortgages have made a return as the market emerges from a Covid-related slowdown.\n\nMortgage products for homeowners with a deposit of 10% of their property's value have risen more than fourfold compared with last summer's low.\n\nThe increase, based on figures from financial information service Moneyfacts, could offer some relief to first-time buyers.\n\nBut the cost of mortgages will remain an issue for many.\n\nIn early September last year, there were only 44 mortgage products available for those able to offer a 10% deposit. At the same time, first-time buyers putting money aside for a deposit were faced with pressures of poor savings rates and rising house prices.\n\nThat choice has now risen to 197 products, according to the Moneyfacts figures, with some big lenders returning in recent weeks.\n\nMortgage products for those able to offer a 15% deposit have also risen sharply, although the choice was already much greater.\n\n\"First-time buyers who may have been concerned that with record low savings rates and increasing house prices, their homeownership dreams may have had to be shelved, may have been pleased to note that we are now seeing some providers return products for those with 10% deposits,\" said Eleanor Williams, from Moneyfacts.\n\nLenders had been grappling with the practical effects that the coronavirus pandemic brought to their business.\n\nWhile some new businesses targeted first-time buyers on social media, many traditional lenders withdrew products from the market.\n\nStaff shortages, and employees working from home, meant they were unable to process applications as fast as they had before the pandemic.\n\nThere were also concerns among lenders that, despite strong activity in the housing market, riskier - and younger - first-time buyers could find it difficult to make mortgage repayments during an economic slowdown caused by the pandemic.\n\nResearch has shown that younger workers are more at risk of redundancy.\n\nAaron Strutt, from mortgage broker Trinity Financial, said lenders were now working more efficiently despite staff still being at home.\n\nHe said that some of the biggest mortgage lenders had returned to the market. Some of the mortgage rates they were offering were not as attractive as they had been, but competition would help push down costs.\n\n\"If you are planning to purchase a property and have a 10% deposit the mortgage rates are not as cheap as they used to be, but they are getting better,\" he said.\n\nMany thousands of existing mortgage-holders who had struggled to make their repayments during the pandemic had taken payment \"holidays\", which are deferrals on payments.\n\nThe latest figures from UK Finance, which represents lenders, show that 130,000 mortgage payment holidays were in place at the end of December 2020, down from a peak of 1.8 million in June last year.", "US President Joe Biden is now speaking from the White House about how his administration will tackle the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nHe says he has been meeting with his Covid response team, and it will “take months” to turn around the situation in the country.\n\nToday he is going to unveil a “national strategy” on Covid-19, he says, which is “comprehensive” and is based on “science and not politics”.\n\nThe plan, which consists of 198 pages, will start with an “aggressive, safe and effective” vaccination campaign.\n\nBut it will take months to protect everyone, he says, so in the meantime, \"mask up\", he tells the American people.\n\nWearing a mask, he says, is \"a patriotic act\".\n\nTo follow our coverage of his first day, head here.", "The emergency department at Glasgow's Queen Elizabeth University Hospital is the biggest and busiest in Scotland.\n\nAmbulances keep arriving, bringing more patients. In a curtained cubicle, one man is explaining to the doctor that he's been in pain for days, but he put off coming in \"because of everything that's going on\".\n\nDr Alan Whitelaw, who runs the department, says that while there might be fewer patients coming through his door, there are no longer any \"easy wins\".\n\n\"Those that are coming are the sick people,\" he says. \"We are undoubtedly seeing the effects of people not seeking healthcare for six to 10 months.\n\n\"We are seeing disease that we wouldn't always see and we are seeing it further down the road.\n\n\"We are making more diagnoses that potentially would be made in primary care or outpatient clinics. On top of that we've got lots of Covid patients coming through the door.\n\n\"So it is those two things together that currently put the NHS under that significant pressure.\"\n\nAll over Scotland, hospitals are under severe pressure, with some treating significantly more coronavirus patients than they did during the first wave of the pandemic.\n\nPublic visitors are not allowed at the QEUH, but BBC Scotland was given special permission to film to highlight the impact of Covid and the importance of following lockdown rules.\n\nOn the day of the BBC's visit, there are 244 Covid patients. Critical care is running at capacity, and across the whole hospital it's a constant challenge to find space for new patients.\n\nDr Whitelaw says the level of unpredictability is extreme. His team has run out of spare beds.\n\n\"We are ten months into strange and difficult times. It's winter, no-one's had a holiday, no-one's had much downtime.\n\n\"Hospitals are fuller in winter, beds are tighter and patients are sick\".\n\nUpstairs, one ward that previously treated patients with infectious diseases like flu or norovirus, is now a Covid ward. All 28 beds are full.\n\nSome patients here are recently diagnosed, others are coming to the end of their isolation, while some have been stepped down from critical care, but need rehabilitation.\n\nSenior charge nurse Karen Paton says it feels like patients are now sicker for longer.\n\n\"We've had this going on for more or less a year now and staff are beginning to feel the emotional distress of it,\" she says.\n\n\"Having to deal with patients succumbing to coronavirus, and just having the emotions of all the patients not being able to have contact from their families.\n\n\"I think it's beginning to take its toll on everybody.\"\n\nCovid patient Gerry Gilroy says QEUH staff have been \"superb\"\n\nIn one room on the ward is Gerry Gilroy, who tested positive for Covid in late December. By 8 January, the day of his 66th birthday, he could barely get out of bed and couldn't eat.\n\n\"It just hit me and I knew there was something not right,\" he says.\n\n\"I know how serious it is. I never thought it would hit me. It's been a bit of an experience but thankfully I'm on the mend.\n\n\"The staff here are superb. When I get out of here, if I can do something for the NHS I'm going to. Doctors, cleaners, nurses, all top drawer.\"\n\nThe impact of Covid is being felt across the hospital. The acute receiving area used to be the first stop for people who needed urgent surgery.\n\nNow it's where medics like Dr Colin Perry assess Covid patients sent in by their GP or NHS 24. It's another area that's full.\n\n\"In the first wave our ICU was busy and it remains very busy, but during that period we had free beds,\" says Dr Perry.\n\n\"This time we have much more pressure on the downstream ward areas, so it is harder to manage the wider needs of the hospital and make room for patients to move through the system.\n\n\"The numbers are far higher than they were a year ago.\"\n\nRepurposing so many wards to treat coronavirus patients has meant some routine work had to be postponed, but staff are working to prioritise all different kinds of treatment.\n\nHelen Dorrance is a senior surgeon who specialises in bowel cancer at the QEUH. On the day the BBC visits she is operating on patients from another hospital to help relieve pressures there.\n\nDemand for critical care makes it difficult to operate some services, but cancer treatment is still running.\n\n\"We work together as a team across the region to make sure people who are the highest priority get dealt with,\" she says. \"But everyone gets their fair share and access to the care they need.\n\n\"It's not a choice, we do have to provide the best care we can for Covid patients and my critical care colleagues are stepping up to the mark.\n\n\"But the rest of us are making sure the rest of the service runs the way it should, so if you have your heart attack or stroke the right people are there to give you the best care.\"\n\nComing to hospital for any reason during the pandemic is a different experience, and services are stretched.\n\nBut the emergency department's Dr Whitelaw adds that no matter what happens, they will cope.\n\n\"We don't come to work to worry or be fearful, we come to work to do our best and to help,\" he says.\n\n\"I think there's an uncertainty about what the next two to three weeks look like.\n\n\"It might be very, very challenging but I have absolute faith that the staff here will continue to do everything that is required.\n\n\"I think the public should be reassured that no matter what is thrown at us we will definitely get through it.\"", "A council worker in Didsbury, Manchester, checks a bridge for damage, after heavy rainfall. On Thursday morning, there were more than 200 flood warnings in place across the country", "There is still no long-term decision on whether to cut fees as a review recommended\n\nUniversity tuition fees in England will be frozen at a maximum of £9,250 for the next academic year.\n\nThe Department for Education (DfE) said a longer-term decision on cuts to fees would be delayed until the next Comprehensive Spending Review.\n\nBut education sector groups said the government \"is wasting an opportunity\" to help university students.\n\nMinisters also set out plans to improve post-16 vocational education including student loans for adult learners.\n\nThe DfE also launched a consultation on changing the timetable for applying to university - to a so-called \"post-qualification admissions\" system.\n\nThis would mean admissions being based on the grades achieve by students, rather than not relying on predictions.\n\nThe government outlined its plans for higher education reforms for over-18s in response to a landmark review, commissioned by the government from finance expert Philip Augar. Its recommendations were published in May 2019.\n\nPlanned reforms include making £2.5bn available for technical qualifications for adult learners through the National Skills Fund, a lifelong student loan entitlement for up to four years of higher education and the prioritising of funding for STEM subjects.\n\nBut the Augar review's recommendations to reduce tuition fees to £7,500, alongside implementing reforms to minimum entry standards and foundation years at universities, were not addressed in this latest response.\n\nThe DfE said given the pandemic \"now is not the right time to conclude the review in full\".\n\nAny further reforms are expected to be announced at the next Spending Review.\n\nMr Augar also suggested the return of maintenance grants for poorer university students as part of his review, but there was not mention of this in the interim response.\n\nUniversity and College Union general secretary Jo Grady said: \"Sadly this interim response confirms that there will not be a radical change to the current system.\n\nThe Augar review recommended tuition fees should be cut to £7,500 and maintenance grants reintroduced\n\n\"The Westminster government is wasting an opportunity to make a real difference for students and institutions.\"\n\nProf Julia Buckingham, president of Universities UK , welcomed the prospect of lifelong loans, saying \"it is encouraging to see government's commitment to making lifelong learning opportunities more accessible to all\".\n\nHowever, Prof Buckingham said \"government should provide maintenance grants for those who need them the most, including those considering studying shorter courses on a modular basis\".\n\nAs part of its Skills for Jobs White Paper, published alongside higher education reforms, the DfE said it wanted to \"put an end to the illusion that a degree is the only route to success and a good job and that further and technical education is the second-class option\".\n\nA white paper is a policy document produced by the government to set out their proposals for future legislation.\n\nIn December, the government announced that tens of thousands of adults without an A-level or equivalent would be able to benefit from nearly 400 fully-funded courses from April.\n\nIt was the first major development in Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Lifetime Skills Guarantee (LSG) scheme, which was launched in September.\n\nThe government wants to boost the status of vocational education\n\nMr Johnson said it would mean \"everyone will be given the chance to get the skills they need, right from the very start of their career\".\n\nEducation Secretary Gavin Williamson said: \"These reforms are at the heart of our plans to build back better, ensuring all technical education and training is based on what employers want and need, whilst providing individuals with the training they need to get a well-paid and secure job.\"\n\nBritish Chamber of Commerce director general Adam Marshall welcomed the plans to put the skills needs of businesses at the heart of further education.\n\n\"As local business leaders look to rebuild their firms and communities in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, it is essential to ensure that the right skills and training provision is in place to support growth,\" he added.\n\nBut organisations representing school and college leaders are also sceptical that there is enough funding for the further education sector to deliver on the proposals.\n\nIn November, an the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said FE colleges and sixth forms faced significant financial uncertainty.\n\nChief executive of the Association of Colleges David Hughes said: \"Colleges have been calling for this, after years of being overlooked and underutilised, but government has to not only recognise the vital college role, it also needs to increase funding.\"", "Video caption: David Olusoga learns the stories of the first inhabitants of the house in the 1840s-50s.\n\nDavid Olusoga learns the stories of the first inhabitants of the house in the 1840s-50s.", "One of the mysteries of Covid-19 is why oxygen levels in the blood can drop to dangerously low levels without the patient noticing.\n\nIt is known as \"silent hypoxia\".\n\nAs a result, patients have been arriving in hospital in far worse health than they realised and, in some cases, too late to treat effectively.\n\nBut a potentially life-saving solution, in the form of a pulse oximeter, allows patients to monitor their oxygen levels at home, and costs about £20.\n\nThey are being rolled out for high-risk Covid patients in the UK, and the doctor leading the scheme thinks everyone should consider buying one.\n\nA normal oxygen level in the blood is between 95% and 100%.\n\n\"With Covid, we were admitting patients with oxygen levels in the 70s or low-or-middle 80s,\" said Dr Matt Inada-Kim, a consultant in acute medicine at Hampshire Hospitals.\n\nHe told BBC Radio 4's Inside Health: \"It was a really curious and scary presentation and really made us rethink what we were doing.\"\n\nDr Inada-Kim became the national clinical lead of the Covid Oximetry@home project.\n\nA pulse oximeter slips over your middle finger and shines a light into the body. It measures how much of the light is absorbed in order to calculate oxygen levels in the blood.\n\nIn England, they are being given to people with Covid who are over 65, younger but have a health problem, or anyone doctors are concerned about. Similar schemes are being rolled out across the UK.\n\nPeople measure and record their oxygen levels three times a day.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by Health Education England - HEE This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nIf oxygen levels drop to 93% or 94%, then people speak to their GP or call 111. If they go below 92%, people should go to A&E or call 999 for an ambulance.\n\nStudies, which have not been reviewed by other scientists, have shown even small drops below 95% are linked to an increased risk of dying.\n\nDr Inada-Kim said: \"The point of this whole strategy is to try to get in early to prevent people getting that sick, by admitting patients at a more salvageable point in their illness.\"\n\nChris Harris, who is 70, was one of the first patients to benefit from the scheme.\n\nHe was being treated for a urinary infection in November last year, but then when he developed unexpected flu-like symptoms his GP sent him for a Covid test. It was positive.\n\n\"I don't mind admitting I was in tears, it was a very stressful, frightening time,\" he told Inside Health.\n\nHis oxygen levels dropped a couple of percentage points below the normal zone, so after a call with his GP, he went to hospital.\n\nAt this point he was still feeling fine, but things changed the day after he was admitted.\n\n\"My breathing started to get a little bit laboured, I had a high temperature as the days went on, [my oxygen levels] were progressively getting lower, they were in their 80s,\" he told me.\n\nChris was treated, did not need intensive care and has made a full recovery.\n\nHe said: \"I may have gone [to hospital] as the very last resort and that's the frightening thing. It was the oxygen meter that forced me to go, I would have just sat it out thinking I would recover.\n\n\"I am extremely lucky and very, very grateful.\"\n\nHis GP, Dr Caroline O'Keefe, says she has seen a massive increase in the number of people being monitored.\n\nShe said: \"On Christmas Day we were monitoring 44 patients, today I have 160 patients who I am monitoring daily. So we are certainly busy.\"\n\n\"We've had to quadruple the size of our team in the last two weeks.\"\n\nOverall, NHS England has supplied around 300,000 pulse oximeters for the home-monitoring scheme.\n\nDr Inada-Kim says there isn't definitive proof that the gadget saves lives and it could take until April to know for sure. However, the early signs are all positive.\n\n\"What we think we can see are the early seeds of a reduction in the length of stay after a hospital admission, an improvement in survival and a reduction in the pressures on the emergency services,\" he said.\n\nHe is so convinced of their role in tackling silent hypoxia that he said everyone should consider buying one.\n\n\"Personally I would, and I know a number of colleagues who have bought pulse oximeters to distribute to their loved ones,\" he said.\n\nHe advised checking they had a CE Kitemark and to avoid apps on smartphones, which he said were not as reliable.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA mosque has become the first in the UK to open as a Covid vaccination centre.\n\nThe Al-Abbas Islamic Centre in Balsall Heath, Birmingham is expected to vaccinate up to 500 people a day.\n\nThe imam, Sheikh Nuru Mohammed, said he hoped it would help dispel false information that the vaccine was forbidden in Islamic law.\n\nNHS England said it fears disinformation could be causing some in the UK's South Asian communities to reject the Covid vaccine.\n\n\"It will send a strong message to our Muslim brothers and sisters. We are doing this to say a big 'no' to fake news and a big 'yes' to the vaccine,\" Sheikh Nuru said.\n\n\"Muslim scholars advise us to get the vaccine because the sanctity of life is important in Islam.\"\n\nImam Sheikh Nuru Mohammed said he hopes the opening of the vaccination centre will help dispel false information\n\nDr Rizwan Alidina, a trustee of the mosque and member of the Birmingham and Solihull Clinical Commissioning Group said: \"The significance of the venue is obviously quite evident with particularly the Muslim community being one of the communities with a bit of a lower uptake than we would otherwise have expected.\"\n\nHe said there had been a good response to the opening of the centre at the mosque and hoped it would soon be carrying out between 300 and 500 vaccinations a day.\n\nNHS England regional medical director for London Dr Vin Diwakar told a Downing Street press conference some communities had \"legitimate and understandable concerns about the vaccines\".\n\nHe said despite it being a \"safe and effective vaccine\", for some Asian and black communities there were \"longstanding concerns\" that \"go back generations\".\n\nDr Diwakar said some people were \"told by their grandparents that experiments were done in the early part of the last century, that unethical experiments were done way back in the 60s\".\n\nSpeaking at the Downing Street briefing, Home Secretary Priti Patel also sought to counter disinformation targeted at people from minority ethnic backgrounds.\n\n\"This vaccine is safe for us all,\" she said.\n\n\"It will protect you and your family... So I urge everyone from across our wonderfully diverse country to get the vaccine when their turn comes to keep us all safe.\"\n\nOne of the first to get the jab at he Birmingham mosque, retired GP Dr Masud Ahmad, said his message to others in the local community was \"that it's quite safe to have it and they should have it\".\n\nOther places of worship, including Salisbury Cathedral and Lichfield Cathedral, opened as vaccine centres last week.\n\nThe Al-Abbas Islamic Centre is administering the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Thousands of London taxi drivers plan to sue Uber for damages alleging the ride-hailing firm operated unlawfully.\n\nThe planned group legal action could, if successful, hit Uber with a bill for millions of pounds.\n\nThe action, part of a planned anti-Uber campaign by black-cab drivers this year, claims it didn't follow private hire rules between 2012 and 2018.\n\nUber said it \"operates lawfully in London and these allegations are completely unfounded\".\n\nThe group action, which will be launched by law firm Mishcon de Reya, will allege that for six years Uber operated unlawfully in London.\n\nTaxi rules in London mean that people have to contact a centralised office for minicabs, whereas they can hail a black cab on the street.\n\nThe lawsuit will claim that between 2012 and 2018, Uber let people hail its drivers directly, contravening those rules.\n\nLitigation specialist RGL Management, which is also working with the cabbies to bring the case, said more than 4,000 had signed up so far.\n\nThere are about 5,200 further registrations being processed, with hundreds of enquiries per day, it said. The firm is funding a marketing campaign, and is looking to sign up as many as 30,000 eligible drivers.\n\nA full-time driver over those six years could claim about £25,000 in lost earnings, it added. The group action is aiming to bring a case to the High Court no later than the first quarter of 2022.\n\nThis is not the first time that London's black cabs have done battle with Uber, but today's announcement shows neither side have conceded defeat.\n\nThe proposed claim itself is huge - loss of earnings for up to 30,000 drivers for nearly 6 years - and comes at a time when London black cabs and private hire vehicle drivers are struggling for work after nearly a year of lockdowns and restrictions.\n\nUber might now have its licence back, but the black cabs aren't willing to give them an easy ride.\n\nAn Uber spokeswoman said: \"Uber operates lawfully in London and these allegations are completely unfounded.\n\n\"We are proud to serve this great global city and the 45,000 drivers in London who rely on the app for earnings opportunities, and are committed to helping people move safely.\"\n\nUber has had a torrid history in the UK capital including previous lawsuits.\n\nIn February 2019 cab drivers lost a legal challenge which argued that Uber's London operating licence was granted by a biased judge.\n\nUber then went on to lose its licence to operate in London in November 2019 after safety concerns.\n\nBut in September last year it was spared a London ban after a judge upheld an appeal against Transport for London's decision over safety.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Drone footage captures the extent of the damage the bridge over the River Clwyd\n\nFinancial help has been promised to those affected by serious flooding, the Welsh Government has announced.\n\nPeople have been forced to leave their homes and a major incident declared after Storm Christoph struck.\n\nAbout 80 people were evacuated during flooding thought to be related to mine works in Skewen, Neath, while 30 were evacuated in Bangor-on-Dee, Wrexham.\n\nThe Welsh Government said it would work with councils to deliver £500-£1,000 payments to affected households.\n\nEnvironment minister, Lesley Griffiths, said people across Wales were facing the \"twin problems\" of floods and the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nShe said: \"We will support people in these circumstances just as we did in the aftermath of storms Ciara and Dennis last year, by working with local authorities to make support payments of between £500 and £1,000 available for each household flooded.\"\n\nSevere flood warnings remain in place across Wales as river levels remain high.\n\nIn the Lower Dee Valley a severe flood warning remains in force, from Llangollen to Trevalyn Meadow, and a major incident was declared in Bangor-on-Dee.\n\nWrexham council leader Mark Pritchard said teams worked to ensure the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, made on Wrexham Industrial Estate, was not lost in the floods.\n\nFirefighters in Skewen waded through water up to their thighs amidst reports of evacuated homes\n\nAbout 80 people were evacuated in Skewen, including residents of a care home, after at least eight streets were left under water.\n\nEmergency services said there were no injuries and all those evacuated had been found accommodation, but people are asked to avoid the area.\n\nIn Denbighshire, a bridge linking Trefnant to Tremeirchion over the River Clwyd collapsed in the storm. The council said it would be investigating the cause of the flooding, which forced road closures and evacuations.\n\nNatural Resources Wales (NRW) said the River Dee, which runs through Bangor-on-Dee, was at its highest recorded level since the water gauge became operational in 1996 - 16.45m (54ft).\n\nIt urged people across Wales to remain vigilant, with river levels not set to have peaked until late Thursday evening, adding they would remain high until Friday morning.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe Met Office said over the past two days Wales had the highest rainfall of the four UK nations.\n\nBetween 19 and 21 January, Aberllefenni in Gwynedd saw 188mm (7.5in) of rain, more than average rainfall for Wales for the whole of January, which is 156.89mm (63in).\n\nThat was followed by 180mm (7in) in Crai reservoir, Powys, 169.8mm (6.6in) in Treherbert, Rhondda Cynon Taf, and 166mm (6.5in) in both Maerdy, RCT, and Capel Curig, Conwy.\n\nLlechryd bridge in Ceredigion has been completely submerged by the River Teifi\n\nUp to 30 people were forced out of their homes in Bangor-on-Dee, Wrexham\n\nNatural Resources Wales said the River Dee was at its highest level since the water gauge became operational\n\nThe flooding threatened the supply of the coronavirus Oxford vaccine, which is produced at Wrexham Industrial Estate.\n\nWrexham council leader Mr Pritchard said it had to work to \"make sure we didn't lose the vaccinations in the floods\".\n\n\"I've been up all night... it's a very difficult time for us,\" he added.\n\nNorth East Wales Search and Rescue helped people whose homes were flooded in New Broughton, Wrexham\n\nWockhardt UK, which manufactures the vaccine, said at about 16:00 GMT on Wednesday, excess water surrounded part of its buildings.\n\n\"The site is now secure and free from any further flood damage and operating as normal,\" it said.\n\nThe clean-up has begun in Ruthin\n\nA multi-agency statement described the situation in Bangor-on-Dee as a \"major incident\".\n\nIt said: \"As a severe weather warning indicates that there is a risk to life...\n\n\"The evacuation effort continues, with all routes in and out of the village currently closed to the public due to the flooding.\"\n\nEarlier, some residents in Ruthin were told to leave their homes - people have been told Covid rules allow them leave their homes in an emergency.\n\nMeanwhile, a man's body was recovered from the River Taff near Blackweir in Cardiff.\n\nDozens of ducks and chickens, and 12 huskies were rescued by the RSPCA from a flooded farm in Bangor, while they also took hay to two donkeys stranded by flood water in Mold.\n\nSome 12 huskies had to be rescued after their kennels flooded\n\nDave Brown said the flooding in his home in Broughton, Flintshire, was horrific and his mother-in-law was rescued by firefighters.\n\n\"You don't realise the damage water does and everything that floats - the sheer volume of water. I am 6ft tall and it almost took me out,\" he said.\n\nDave Brown's mother-in-law was rescued from their home in Broughton, Flintshire\n\nWrexham council said some of the people forced to leave their homes were with relatives, while it found others accommodation after having to initially seek refuge in a church hall.\n\nNine properties in Berse Road in New Broughton were also evacuated.\n\nThe situation in Ruthin, Denbighshire, overnight was \"horrendous\", town councillor Stephen Beach said.\n\n\"The whole of Ruthin was on edge,\" he said.\n\n\"Some people were accommodated at the leisure centre, and others were offered places to stay by local residents. The community was superb.\n\n\"It was the sheer volume of water that came down - there was no stopping it.\"\n\nA yellow weather warning for ice for Wales has been issued by the Met Office until 10:00 GMT on Friday, with concerns it could lead to travel disruption, slips and falls.\n\nNumerous flood warnings and alerts remain in place across Wales, including two severe flood warnings.\n\nThe agency said flood defences were being used and river levels at Holt, Wrexham, would remain high for some time.\"There is therefore a significant risk of localised flooding problems and due to that the severe flood warning will remain in place until the levels drop,\" Keith Iven of NRW said\n\nIn Monmouthshire roads were closed following flooding, and the council said while water levels at the River Usk were dropping, a \"second peak\" on the River Wye had been expected on Thursday night.\n\nThe council had warned people living in Riverside Park, Monmouth, may be impacted and council workers were prepared to offer support.\n\nRiver Tywi has burst its banks in Carmarthen, affecting nearby businesses\n\nMid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service said it had attended 98 flooding-related incidents\n\nIt said it deployed swift water rescue teams to rescue 13 people from vehicles in floodwater. It also winched vehicles from water and pumped water from properties.\n\nIn Cardiff, emergency services attended a crash involving a number of vehicles at about 07:40 on the A4232 between Culverhouse Cross and the M4.\n\nNo-one was seriously injured, but both carriageways were closed for just over an hour. The road has since reopened.\n\nIn Carmarthen, people were treated for the effects of fumes after using a generator to pump water from their homes.\n\nIn Knighton and Crickhowell in Powys, crews spent Wednesday night pumping out a number of properties.\n\nIn Borth, Ceredigion, floodwater hit the water treatment plant, an electrical substation and eight properties.\n\nOgwen Valley Mountain Rescue Team had to rescue a man from the roof of his car.\n\nIt said he had tried to drive through the river ford along the road from Llandygai to Bangor, in Gwynedd, but had become stuck in deep water and had climbed onto the roof. He was not injured.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Derek Brockway - weatherman This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nRhondda Cynon Taf council said it was aware of a minor landslip on the mountainside above Pentre.\n\nIt said an initial inspection determined there was no immediate threat to the area and a further detailed inspection would be carried out on Friday. It asked people to avoid the area.\n\nBangor-on-Dee has been badly hit by Storm Cristoph\n\nDozens of roads have been closed across Wales, and while Covid rules are in place stopping people from travelling apart from for essential reasons, people are being warned not to travel in affected areas due to widespread flooding.\n\nChris Lloyd from North Wales Mountain Rescue Association warned people to not visit flood-hit areas to view the damage.\n\nHe told BBC Radio Wales: \"People who are going out to look at the floods are not only putting themselves at risk, but putting additional people on the roads which professional emergency services don't want - we don't want any more incidents.\"\n\nDenbighshire council said Ysgol Bodfari in Denbigh and Ysgol Caer Drewyn, Corwen, which had been open for vulnerable children and the children of critical workers, have been closed.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The A9 south of Inverness was among the worst affected routes\n\nHeavy snowfall during Storm Christoph has caused travel disruption in parts of Scotland.\n\nVehicles were stuck on the A9 south of Inverness and many roads in the Borders were affected by snow.\n\nThe Queensferry Crossing was closed for a time earlier due to the risk of falling ice before later reopening.\n\nAn amber alert for south-east Scotland was lifted at 08:00 but yellow alerts are in place in other parts of the country until Friday.\n\nTraffic was queued on the A9 after lorries and cars became stuck in snow between Tomatin and Carrbridge.\n\nTractors were used to tow lorries on to cleared stretches of the road.\n\nHeavy snow has also closed the main route to Applecross at the Bealach na Ba.\n\nThe Queensferry Crossing has been reopened after being closed earlier due to the risk of falling ice\n\nThe A939 Cock Bridge to Tomintoul road in Moray was closed after Police Scotland shut the snowgates due to the wintry conditions.\n\nSnow had also affected traffic on parts of the M8.\n\nOn the Highlands' Far North Line, a landslip between Fearn and Tain stations has affected services.\n\nNetwork Rail Scotland said a section of the railway was open with a 5mph speed restriction in place.\n\nChris Tracey, Bear Scotland's south east unit bridges manager, said the Queensferry Crossing was temporarily closed for the safety of bridge users.\n\nHe said: \"We had already mobilised additional ice patrols in response to the weather forecast and the bridge was closed at 04:00 when staff observed ice falling from the structure.\"\n\nThe bridge was reopened after the risk had passed.\n\nEdinburgh is one of the areas where heavy snow has fallen\n\nPolice Scotland has urged people to avoid travelling in the affected areas.\n\nChief Superintendent Louise Blakelock said: \"Government restrictions on only travelling if your journey is essential remain in place and with an amber warning for snow, please consider if your journey really is essential and whether you can delay it until the weather improves.\n\n\"If you deem your journey is essential, plan ahead and make sure you and your vehicle are suitably prepared by having sufficient fuel and supplies such as warm clothing, food, water and charge in your mobile phone in the event you require assistance.\"\n\nAvalanche debris on Turnhouse in the Pentland Hills photographed from Penicuik\n\nPeople heading for the Pentland Hills, south-west of Edinburgh, have been urged to be aware of potential avalanche risk after avalanche debris was spotted on Turnhouse Hill.\n\nTweed Valley Mountain Rescue Team said the \"full depth\" avalanche had enough snow to knock a person off their feet, or even bury them.\n\nTeam leader Dave Wright said avalanches in the Pentland Hills were unusual and walkers, skiers and snowboarders might not appreciate the potential risk.\n\nHe said there had been heavy snowfalls in the hills this week and the avalanche occurred at some point on Thursday afternoon.\n\nMeanwhile, the potential avalanche hazard in all six mountain areas covered by the Scottish Avalanche Information Service - Glen Coe, Lochaber, Creag Meagaidh, Torridon and Northern and Southern Cairgorms - has been classed as \"considerable\".\n\nThe amber weather warning for snow covered a slice of Scotland from south of Edinburgh to close to the Scotland-England border and was valid until Thursday morning.\n\nHowever, further alerts remain in place.\n\nA Bear NW Trunk Roads' tractor clears snow ahead of a lorry on the A9 at the Slochd\n\nIn north-east Scotland and Orkney, a yellow warning for heavy rain and potential flooding is in place until 04:00 on Friday.\n\nYellow warnings for snow and ice are also in place in parts of northern and western Scotland until 12:00 on Friday.\n\nTransport Scotland said it was \"closely monitoring\" the road network and a multi-agency response team would be operational during the weather warnings.\n\nA snow-covered car in Carlops, in the Scottish Borders\n\nDrivers woke up to snow-covered cars in Haddington, East Lothian\n• None In pictures: Scotland in the snow", "Last March, the government set out new thinking on dealing with Northern Ireland's past\n\nThousands of relatives of Troubles victims have signed an open letter calling for the British and Irish governments to fully investigate decades of violence.\n\nIt calls for the long-delayed set up of an independent team of detectives to pursue new prosecutions and other measures to recover information.\n\nThese are measures included in the 2014 Stormont House Agreement.\n\nThe letter is addressed to Taoiseach Micheál Martin and UK PM Boris Johnson.\n\nIt asks for their assurances that their \"human rights as victims will no longer be disregarded or denied\".\n\n\"The peace process has repeatedly failed to deliver on our rights to truth, justice and accountability,\" they said.\n\nThe letter, signed by 3,500 relatives, is being published in the Irish News, Andersonstown News, and US publication the Irish Echo.\n\nThe letter is being printed in several newspapers\n\nMore than 3,600 people were killed during the 30 years of Northern Ireland's Troubles and thousands more injured.\n\nThe UK government has pledged to \"intensify\" engagement with victims' groups in addressing the legacy of the past.\n\nThe Stormont House proposals included a new independent investigation unit to re-examine all unsolved killings and a separate truth recovery mechanism to enable families to gain answers in cases where prosecutions are unlikely.\n\nLast March, the government set out new thinking on dealing with the past, which radically departed from what had been proposed in the Stormont House Agreement.\n\nHe proposed that after a paper review exercise, most unsolved cases would be closed and a new law would be enacted to prevent the investigations from being reopened.\n\nMark Thompson, chief executive of Belfast-based lobby group Relatives for Justice, said about half of those who signed the open letter are 35 years and under.\n\nHe said the letter \"represents the current and future generations\" and that it \"underlines the ongoing trauma and intergenerational impact that the killing of a relative has also had on surviving families\".", "Glastonbury Festival has been cancelled for a second year running due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nThe news was announced on Thursday on the Worthy Farm event's Twitter page.\n\n\"With great regret, we must announce that this year's Glastonbury Festival will not take place,\" said festival organisers Michael and Emily Eavis.\n\n\"And that this will be another enforced fallow year for us. Tickets for this year will roll over to next year. Michael & Emily.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Glastonbury Festival This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIt comes in the same week that the future of UK music was up for debate at a DCMS inquiry into streaming, and in Parliament regarding post-Brexit music touring visas.\n\nThe full statement on the festival website read: \"In spite of our efforts to move heaven and earth, it has become clear that we simply will not be able to make the Festival happen this year. We are so sorry to let you all down.\"\n\nIt confirmed that as with last year, anyone with a ticket will now be offered the opportunity to roll their £50 deposit over to next year, when the festival will hopefully resume. It had been due to take place in June 2021.\n\n\"We are very appreciative of the faith and trust placed in us by those of you with deposits, and we are very confident we can deliver something really special for us all in 2022!\"\n\nCulture Secretary Oliver Dowden shared his \"disappointment\" at the lack of a Glastonbury 2021, on Twitter.\n\n\"This regrettable but understandable decision is recognition that public health comes first\" he posted, \"and that right now, getting 200k fans together in just a few months looks very difficult to make safe\".\n\nHe added: \"We continue to help the arts on recovery, including looking at problems around getting insurance. I'm Glastonbury will be back bigger and better next year.\"\n\nJulian Knight MP, chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee, said news of this year's cancellation was \"devastating\".\n\nSir Paul McCartney headlined Glastonbury in 2004, and was supposed to do so again in 2020\n\n\"We have repeatedly called for ministers to act to protect our world-renowned festivals like this one with a government-backed insurance scheme. Our plea fell on deaf ears and now the chickens have come home to roost,\" he said.\n\n\"The jewel in the crown will be absent but surely the government cannot ignore the message any longer - it must act now to save this vibrant and vital festivals sector.\"\n\nOn 5 January the government responded to a report by UK Music called Let the Music Play: Save Our Summer 2021, which outlined a range of measures that could help the industry get back up and running.\n\nThe government said: \"We know these are challenging times for the live events sector and are working flat out to support it.\n\n\"Our £1.57bn Culture Recovery Fund has already seen more than £1bn offered to arts, heritage and performance organisations to support them through the impact of the pandemic, protecting tens of thousands of creative jobs across the UK, including festivals such as Deer Shed Festival, End of the Road and Nozstock.\"\n\nLast year's 50th anniversary Glastonbury was meant to be headlined by Sir Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar, but it was cancelled during the initial national lockdown in March 2020.\n\nMichael and Emily Eavis previously said that Glastonbury \"lost millions\" after cancelling in 2020\n\nLast month, organiser Emily Eavis told the BBC she hoped this year's festival could go ahead, despite the \"huge uncertainty\" surrounding live music in the pandemic.\n\n\"We're doing everything we can on our end to plan and prepare,\" she told the BBC, \"but I think we're still quite a long way from being able to say we're confident 2021 will go ahead.\"\n\nEavis said Glastonbury lost \"millions\" in 2020. Her father, Michael, has previously warned the festival \"would seriously go bankrupt\" if they had to cancel again next year.\n\nBut that scenario is unlikely \"as long as we can make a firm call either way in advance\", Eavis clarified to the BBC.\n\nNo line-up details had been confirmed for 2021. But just before Christmas, Sir Paul McCartney told the BBC the event was not in his calendar, as it would be a \"superspreader\".\n\nAt the start of January, MPs were told that some of the UK's biggest music festivals could be called off by the end of this month.\n\nThe festival normally welcomes 200,000 people to Pilton in Somerset every year\n\nEvents are \"rapidly approaching the determination point\", after which they'll have to pull the plug, said the Association of Independent Festivals.\n\nOrganisers will be in \"absolutely dire straits\" financially if the season is cancelled, added Anna Wade, of Winchester's Boomtown Fair.\n\nThey were speaking to MPs examining the plight of music festivals in the UK.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "At 12:01, in the midst of his inaugural address, Joe Biden officially became the 46th president of the United States.\n\nHe was already well into outlining exactly how daunting a task he - and the nation - have ahead in what he called its \"winter of peril\".\n\nAmerica is facing a devastating pandemic which has resulted in massive job losses and business closures, a threatened environment, urgent cries for racial justice and resurgence in \"political extremism, white supremacy and domestic terrorism\".\n\nHis speech was not a laundry list of proposals and solutions. Those were reserved for his first 17 executive actions as president - on immigration, climate change, transgender rights and public health, among others.\n\nThe Biden administration has also frozen all of Trump's last-minute regulations pending further review.\n\nInstead, Biden used his speech to offer hope - and to argue, at times forcefully, that the nation must be united in facing the challenges ahead; that it has to move past its current \"uncivil war\".\n\n\"Without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury,\" he said. \"No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos.\"\n\n\"This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge,\" he continued. \"And unity is the path forward\".\n\nAt times, Biden's speech seemed a direct rebuttal to his predecessor's administration, although he did not mention Donald Trump by name.\n\nWhere Trump frequently spoke of American greatness and glorified its founders, Biden noted that the nation's history has been a \"constant struggle\" between its ideals and sometimes harsh realities.\n\nWhere Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway spoke of \"alternative facts\" almost four years ago, Biden said: \"There is truth and there are lies - lies told for power and for profit.\"\n\nBiden wrapped up his inaugural address by warning that America must not \"turn inward\" - both as individuals retreating into \"competing factions\" and as a nation on the world stage.\n\n\"We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again,\" he said.\n\nRhetorically, Biden turned the page from Trump's days of \"America first\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe first 100 days of any administration are always important to a new president. What are his priorities? What will he try to accomplish when his political capital is at its highest?\n\nJoe Biden and his presidential team have had nearly three months to plan out his first actions upon taking the oath of office, but executive action is the (relatively) easy part.\n\nHis speech reflected the reality that he enters office with his top priorities already determined for him.\n\nHis government will be responsible for distributing the coronavirus vaccine in an efficient and equitable way. After that, he will have to focus on the societal and economic disruptions caused by the pandemic.\n\nThe virus has exacerbated income inequality and pushed many households to the brink of economic ruin. It's devastated the travel and hospitality industries and placed incredible strain on the finances of state and local governments.\n\nHis pledge to seek unity will be tested early, as he pushes a sharply divided Congress to pass another, massive round of pandemic stimulus aid. If he wants to enact it quickly, he will need Republican support in the Senate, and already there are signs that some on the right may be lining up in opposition to more spending.\n\nThen there's Trump's Senate impeachment trial, which will present yet another challenge to national unity. It will keep Trump's name in the news for weeks, as his defenders rally to his side and his detractors call for consequences for his actions.\n\nAfter that, Biden's potential political paths diverge. He has said he wants to improve healthcare in the US, address growing college debt, make new investments in infrastructure and tackle climate change.\n\nHe's pledged to push immigration reform legislation that includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented migrants - a political lightning rod that helped fuel Trump's first presidential run.\n\nWhat he prioritises, and how successful his first efforts are, could determine the overall success of his administration. To make lasting change - policies that can't be undone by future presidents - he will have to work with Congress.\n\nThe inauguration ceremony is over. But, as Biden noted in his speech, the American people face one of the most challenging times in their nation's history.\n\n\"We will be judged by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era,\" he said.\n\nBiden campaigned against Trump for the opportunity to face those crises. Now he has his chance.", "Anyone going on a Saga holiday or cruise in 2021 must be fully vaccinated against Covid-19, the tour operator has said.\n\nSaga, which specialises in holidays for the over-50s, said it wanted to protect customers' health and safety.\n\nThe firm said it would delay restarting its travel packages until May to give customers enough time to get jabs.\n\nPeople over 50 in the UK have been rushing to book holidays as vaccinations boost confidence.\n\n\"The health and safety of our customers has always been our number one priority at Saga, so we have taken the decision to require everyone travelling with us to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19,\" Saga said in a statement.\n\n\"Our customers want the reassurance of the vaccine and to know others travelling with them will be vaccinated too.\"\n\nThe firm's holidays were due to restart in March and its cruises in April after a long hiatus, but they will now both be delayed.\n\nSaga said that meant all trips before May would no longer go ahead as planned, acknowledging it would be \"a huge disappointment\" to customers.\n\n\"We will be contacting all guests affected to discuss their options,\" it said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Singapore's 'cruises to nowhere' set back by Covid scare\n\nThe firm said its vaccination policy added to stronger safety processes already planned for when its holidays resume.\n\nThese include requiring cruise passengers to have a Covid-19 test before their trip, as well as a full medical screening.\n\nCapacity on its ships will also be kept to a maximum of 800 people.\n\nThere were some severe covid outbreaks on cruise ships early on the pandemic, before coronavirus restrictions were imposed.\n\nBritish-registered ship the Diamond Princess, owned by the company Carnival, was quarantined for nearly a month in February in the Port of Yokohama in Japan.\n\nMore than 700 of its 3,711 passengers and crew were infected, and 14 died.\n\nThe UK has embarked on a mass vaccination programme as Covid-19 cases surge.\n\nPeople in England are being vaccinated at a rate of 140 jabs per minute, NHS England boss Sir Simon Stevens said this week.\n\nExperts believe in future that airlines, concert venues and restaurants could routinely ask customers to prove that they have been vaccinated.\n\nAnd last week, London plumbing firm Pimlico Plumbers said that all of its staff would be contractually obliged to get the jab.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Hill We Climb: Watch 22-year-old Amanda Gorman's poem reading at Joe Biden's inauguration\n\nAmanda Gorman has become the youngest poet ever to perform at a presidential inauguration, calling for \"unity and togetherness\" in her self-penned poem.\n\nThe 22-year-old delivered her work The Hill We Climb to both the dignitaries present in Washington DC and a watching global audience.\n\n\"When day comes, we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade?\" her five-minute poem began.\n\nShe went on to reference the storming of the Capitol earlier this month.\n\n\"We've seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it, would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy,\" she declared.\n\n\"And this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.\"\n\nThe poet was applauded by Vice President Kamala Harris\n\nIn her poem, Gorman described herself as \"a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother [who] can dream of becoming president, only to find her self reciting for one\".\n\nAmerica's first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate did her job, which was to find the right words at the right time.\n\nIt was a beautifully paced, well-judged poem for a special occasion, but it will live long beyond the time and space of the moment.\n\nAmanda Gorman delivered her piece with grace, the words it contained will resonate with people the world over: today, tomorrow, and far into the future.\n\nThe writer and performer, who became the country's first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017, followed in the footsteps of such famous names as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou.\n\n\"I really wanted to use my words to be a point of unity and collaboration and togetherness,\" Gorman told the BBC World Service's Newshour programme before the ceremony.\n\n\"I think it's about a new chapter in the United States, about the future, and doing that through the elegance and beauty of words.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nUS broadcaster and actress Oprah Winfrey tweeted that she had \"never been prouder to see another young woman rise\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Oprah Winfrey This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAlso on Twitter, Joanne Liu, the former head of aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières, described the poem as \"the most inspiring 5:43 minutes for the longest time\".\n\nFormer First Lady Michelle Obama praised Gorman's \"strong and poignant words\" adding: \"Keep shining, Amanda!\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Michelle Obama This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nUS politician and rights activist Stacey Abrams said the poem was \"an inspiration to us all\".\n\nFormer presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted that Gorman had promised to run for president in 2036 and added: \"I for one can't wait.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Hillary Clinton This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIllinois poet laureate Angela Jackson said the recitation was \"so rich and just so filled with truth\".\n\n\"I was stunned that she was so young and so wise,\" Jackson told the Chicago Sun-Times.\n\nGorman said she \"screamed and danced her head off\" when she found out she had been chosen to read at President Biden's swearing-in ceremony.\n\nShe said she felt \"excitement, joy, honour and humility\" when she was asked to take part, \"and also at the same time terror\".\n\nAnd she added that she hoped her poem, completed on the day supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol, would \"speak to the moment\" and \"do this time justice\".\n\nGorman, pictured with actor Morgan Freeman in 2018, became LA's youth poet laureate at 16\n\nBorn in Los Angeles in 1998, Gorman had a speech impediment as a child - an affliction she shares with America's new president.\n\n\"It's made me the performer that I am and the storyteller that I strive to be,\" she said in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times.\n\n\"When you have to teach yourself how to say sounds [and] be highly concerned about pronunciation, it gives you a certain awareness of sonics, of the auditory experience.\"\n\nGorman became LA's youth poet laureate at 16. Three years later, while studying sociology at Harvard, she became National Youth Poet Laureate.\n\nShe published her first book, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, in 2015 and will publish a picture book, Change Sings, later this year.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Kamala Harris was sworn into office by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.\n\nKamala Harris has made history as the first female, first black and first Asian-American US vice-president.\n\nShe was sworn in just before Joe Biden took the oath of office to become the 46th US president.\n\nMs Harris, who is of Indian-Jamaican heritage, initially ran for the Democratic nomination.\n\nBut Mr Biden won the race and chose Ms Harris as his running mate, describing her as \"a fearless fighter for the little guy\".\n\nPrior to taking the oath at the US Capitol, Ms Harris paid tribute to the women who she says came before her.\n\n\"I stand on their shoulders,\" she said in a video.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Kamala Harris This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nEugene Goodman, the Capitol police officer who was hailed as a hero for steering a pro-Trump mob away from Senate chambers during the 6 January riot, escorted Ms Harris at the inauguration.\n\nMs Harris, 56, was born in Oakland, California, to two immigrant parents: an Indian-born mother and Jamaican-born father.\n\nKamala, left, as child with her mother and younger sister Maya\n\nShe went on to attend Howard University, one of the nation's preeminent historically black colleges and universities. She has described her time there as among the most formative experiences of her life.\n\nMs Harris says she's always been comfortable with her identity and simply describes herself as \"an American\".\n\nAfter four years at Howard, Ms Harris went on to earn her law degree at the University of California, Hastings, and began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney's Office.\n\nShe became the district attorney - the top prosecutor - for San Francisco in 2003, before being elected the first female and the first African American to serve as California's attorney general, the top lawyer and law enforcement official in America's most populous state.\n\nIn her nearly two terms in office as attorney general, Ms Harris gained a reputation as one of the Democratic party's rising stars, using this momentum to propel her to election as California's junior US senator in 2017. She was only the second black woman ever elected to the US senate.\n\nShe launched her candidacy for president to a crowd of more than 20,000 in Oakland at the beginning of 2019.\n\nBut Ms Harris failed to articulate a clear rationale for her campaign, and gave muddled answers to questions in key policy areas like healthcare.\n\nShe was also unable to capitalise on the clear high point of her candidacy: debate performances that showed off her prosecutorial skills, often placing Mr Biden in the line of attack, most notably criticising his praise for the \"civil\" working relationship he had with former senators who favoured racial segregation.\n\nShe dropped out of the presidential race in December 2019.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nBut Mr Biden chose her as his number two in August, calling her \"one of the country's finest public servants\".\n\nAfter Mr Biden was announced as the next president in November, Ms Harris tweeted a video of her congratulating her running mate.\n\n\"We did it, we did it Joe. You're going to be the next president of the United States!\" she beamed.", "Scientists tracking the spread of coronavirus in England say infection levels in the community may have risen at the start of the latest lockdown.\n\nInfections in 6-15 January were up by 50% on early December, with one in 63 people infected, Imperial College London's initial findings suggest.\n\nSwab tests from 143,000 people indicate 1.58% had the virus during in early January - up from 0.91% in December.\n\nMinisters say the report does not yet reflect the impact of the lockdown.\n\nThe latest round of results from Imperial College's React-1 infection survey - one of the country's largest studies into Covid-19 infections - are interim with the full set of results to be published in a week's time.\n\nBut Imperial College London's Prof Paul Elliott warned if the high prevalence continues \"more lives will be lost\".\n\nThe report also says there are \"worrying suggestions of a recent uptick in infections\" and Prof Elliott said the third lockdown - introduced on 6 January - was not having the same impact as the first, in April.\n\nLondon had the highest level in the January period - 2.8%, up from 1.21% in early December.\n\nProf Elliott old BBC Radio 4's Today programme the current R rate - which represents how many people an infected person will pass the virus on to - was \"around 1\".\n\n\"We're seeing this levelling off, it's not going up, but we're not seeing the decline that we really need to see given the pressure on the NHS from the current very high levels of the virus in the population,\" he said.\n\n\"To prevent our already stretched health system from becoming overwhelmed, infections must be brought down,\" Prof Elliot added.\n\nBefore the Covid rules were tightened, the restrictions faced by people in England varied depending on where they lived.\n\nThe researchers say the government's latest daily case figures, which show a slowdown, may reflect a drop in cases just after Christmas, which is only now being registered.\n\nAnd they suggest infection levels may have gone up in early January as a result of people's activity increasing after the Christmas holiday period.\n\nThey admit there is some uncertainty in their data amid a \"fast-changing situation\" but say it is more up to date than the daily government figures because it does not rely on those being tested developing symptoms and then waiting to have their infections confirmed by a laboratory.\n\nThe UK recorded another all-time high of daily coronavirus deaths on Wednesday. A further 1,820 people died within 28 days of a positive Covid test, according to government figures - taking the total number of deaths by that measure to 93,290.\n\nThe findings of the study are seemingly at odds with recent figures from NHS Test and Trace, which has been reporting recent decreases in daily infections and has prompted some experts to suggest that we might be beginning our journey out of the woods.\n\nThe researchers behind the study say the test and trace figures may be reflecting an initial drop in infections just after Christmas, which is only now being registered on the official figures.\n\nThe study's more up to date findings indicate that infection levels did not continue to fall in the first two weeks of January and may even have gone up. So why has this happened?\n\nData on people's movements has shown that there's been increased activity which the scientists involved say has kept transmission of the virus at a high level. The Department of Health says that the study does not yet reflect the impact of the lockdown in England.\n\nBut if this trend continues, say the scientists, the numbers admitted to hospital with severe Covid illness, will not fall in the short term, as some had hoped.\n\nThis is one set of figures over a short number of days so there might be a more optimistic picture when the study reports its full set of results in a week's time. But there is no getting away from the fact that ministers will be disappointed not to have seen a fall at this stage.\n\nUnless things change, even tougher measures will have to be considered.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said there will be \"tough weeks to come\" but he hoped there would be a \"real difference\" by spring as the vaccine programme accelerates.\n\nIt comes as another 60 NHS Covid-19 vaccination centres in England, including a mosque in Birmingham and a cinema in Aylesbury, will welcome their first patients later.\n\nMinisters have sought to reassure people in the top four priority groups for the Covid vaccination that they will get their jab by the government's mid-February target, following complaints from some GPs about unpredictable supplies.\n\nSome 4.6m people in the UK have now received the first dose of a Covid vaccine.\n\nFacebook mobility data, which tracks people's movements, suggested a fall in activity at the end of December but a rise at the start of the new year.\n\nAnd Prof Elliott said everyone should \"reduce their mobility as much as we can\".\n\nA new, more transmissible variant and the fact larger households and deprived communities were more likely to be affected, may also be factors.\n\nThe Imperial survey is one source of data used to estimate the UK's reproduction (R) number, along with other surveys, from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for example, and figures on confirmed cases and hospital admissions.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said the React findings showed \"we must not let down our guard over the weeks to come\".\n\n\"It is absolutely paramount that everyone plays their part to bring down infections,\" he said.\n\n\"This means staying at home and only going out where absolutely necessary, reducing contact with others and maintaining social distancing.\"", "Police checkpoints have seen officers questioning people about whether their travel is essential\n\nNorthern Ireland has been in lockdown since 26 December, in a bid to control the spread of Covid-19.\n\nRestrictions had been eased in the run-up to Christmas, which led to a sharp spike in cases in January, causing severe pressure on the health service.\n\nMedically-trained military personnel will be deployed to help, but a union has questioned the move and said NI should have entered a stricter lockdown sooner.\n\nWith Stormont ministers extending the current lockdown, could other measures could be on the table?\n\nIt's worth bearing in mind that NI is already in tight lockdown restrictions and has been for almost a month.\n\nBut the current measures are now set to remain in place until at least 5 March.\n\nDeputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill said health officials had not requested any other measures be toughened up at this time, given the duration and extent of the current rules.\n\nThe initial lockdown began last March, with non-essential retail not permitted to open again until 12 June.\n\nBy law people are required to stay at home during the lockdown unless they have a reasonable excuse, such as going out for exercise, medical or food needs.\n\nPeople are also required to wear face masks in shops and on public transport, with only a limited number of exemptions.\n\nThose who breach the rules can face fines, with businesses that break the law also able to be fined if they do not follow the rules.\n\nHowever, DUP minister Edwin Poots has expressed concern that not enough has been done by the PSNI to enforce the laws.\n\nIt is a difficult balance for the executive to strike.\n\nThey previously announced that \"Covid marshals\" would be deployed in the retail sector to ensure social distancing in queues and adherence to the rules.\n\nMinisters want to ensure as many people as possible follow the restrictions voluntarily while ensuring the PSNI has enough powers to manage the situation.\n\nHealth Minister Robin Swann has not ruled out revisiting whether the level of fines people can face should be increased, and said he would raise the matter with his executive colleagues.\n\nThe 2020 lockdown saw many businesses right across Northern Ireland forced to close, with retail and hospitality among them.\n\nThere was confusion over whether construction and manufacturing should stop, with the executive later clarifying that essential work on building sites could continue.\n\nIn the latest lockdown, the sector has been permitted to remain fully open.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland, all non-essential construction has been ordered to stop during a fresh lockdown there.\n\nLike in the previous lockdown, people have again been told to work from home unless they cannot.\n\nBut it is worth pointing out many companies have had time to prepare since last March, making their workplaces Covid-secure to allow more staff to attend in person.\n\nThe executive has a defined list of essential businesses here.\n\nFace coverings in shops are mandatory in Northern Ireland's shops\n\nThere has also been confusion about what elements of the retail sector can operate.\n\nAll but essential retail shops were told to close on 26 December, and click-and-collect is only allowed for those essential retailers.\n\nBut concerns were later raised that some larger chains were \"gaming\" the regulations by selling non-essential items, with smaller independent shops who had to close arguing they were being treated unfairly.\n\nThe executive met with retailers last week to discuss this, but it seems unlikely it will act to define essential items in regulations.\n\nA similar situation in Wales last year led to criticism after supermarkets were told by law not to sell certain items.\n\nThe majority of pupils are in an extended period of remote learning until after half-term in February, but some children of key workers and vulnerable children are still permitted to attend the classroom.\n\nLast week it emerged that at least eight times as many pupils in Northern Ireland attended schools in the first week of term in 2021 compared to the first lockdown in 2020.\n\nThough part of this is due to special schools remaining open for all pupils, unlike in March to June last year.\n\nThe executive could potentially revisit the list of services it defines as meeting the \"key worker\" definition for childcare, if it wanted to reduce this further.\n\nIt is also possible schools could remain closed to most pupils for a longer period, in line with extending the lockdown to 5 March.\n\nThe executive says workers, builders, tradespeople and other professionals can continue to go into people's houses to carry out work such as repairs, installations and deliveries.\n\nBut it does not define further what this type of work should include.\n\nIt is possible ministers could tighten the circumstances in which work can be carried out in someone's home, but the guidance already specifies a limited number of exemptions for allowing others inside your home during the lockdown.\n\nHouse moves are also allowed under the regulations, although they were paused in the first lockdown.\n\nMusic lessons and private tutoring are permitted in someone's home, with mitigations.\n\nDuring the first week of lockdown from 26 December, people were told not to leave their homes between 20:00 and 06:00 every day - effectively amounting to a curfew.\n\nMinisters could decide to impose the measure again, if they felt that was necessary - but initially it was imposed to stop house parties over New Year's Eve.\n\nAll but essential travel is not permitted outside of Northern Ireland, and anyone entering Northern Ireland must self-isolate for 10 days on arrival or face a fine.\n\nHowever, there is no formal travel ban on passengers from Great Britain or the Republic of Ireland entering Northern Ireland.\n\nThe executive had voted by a majority before Christmas not to impose such a ban, despite calls from Sinn Féin for it to happen.\n\nOther parties argued that the public health advice did not propose a ban in law, and that travel from the Republic of Ireland to NI should be restricted as well due to its rise in cases.\n\nThe current guidance states that anyone coming into NI from within the Common Travel Area who is staying for more than 24 hours should self-isolate for 10 days, but there are exemptions for those who \"cross the border\" regularly for work or other essential reasons.\n\nThe executive also does not have a formal limit in law for travelling to exercise, unlike in the Republic of Ireland where it is 5km (3 miles).\n\nJustice Minister Naomi Long said there is an \"advisory limit\" of 10 miles for exercise in Northern Ireland.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nTwo houses have partially collapsed after a sinkhole measuring 10ft (3m) opened up on a Manchester street.\n\nFour homes were evacuated on Wednesday evening after the hole appeared on Walmer Street in Abbey Hey, Gorton.\n\nFire crews returned hours later after the front of two of the empty properties crashed to the ground.\n\nUnited Utilities said it was dealing with a collapsed sewer but was investigating all possible causes including the recent heavy rain.\n\nThe fire service was first called to Walmer Street just after 21:00 GMT on Wednesday to reports an unoccupied car had fallen down a hole in the road.\n\nA cordon was put in place and residents evacuated as a precaution, the fire service said.\n\nAfter leaving the scene four hours later, the fire service was alerted to the partial collapse of two houses at 11:00 on Thursday.\n\nNo-one was injured in either incident.\n\nEmergency services remain at the scene on Walmer Street\n\nNearby residents Maureen and Louise Kennedy spoke of their shock after the houses collapsed.\n\n\"You're just waiting for your world to crumble. It's not just the bricks and water, said Ms Kennedy.\n\n\"I've lived in there since I was three. It's the memories.\"\n\nResident Nathaniel OKeleafor said he was \"terrified\" when the sinkhole appeared in the street on Wednesday evening.\n\n\"This morning we are out. We are just trying to find somewhere to live,\" he added.\n\nUnited Utilities said it was dealing with a collapsed sewer on Walmer Street\n\nThe collapse comes as rising levels on the River Mersey in Manchester came \"within centimetres\" of breaching flood defences following heavy rain caused by Storm Christoph.\n\nStation Manager Andrew O'Brien, from Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, praised firefighters who worked \"at the height of the stormy weather\".\n\n\"The safety of the public was our primary concern overnight and again today, and I'm pleased to say no-one has suffered any injuries,\" he said.\n\nUnited Utilities said: \"When it is safe for engineers to go back into the immediate area we will set up emergency drainage and water supply connections to restore services to the area and begin to assess how best to carry out repairs.\n\n\"It is not known what caused the sinkhole but this will be investigated.\"\n\nBBC Radio Manchester and BBC Radio Lancashire will be on air throughout Storm Christoph, bringing you all of the latest information and news updates\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Home Secretary Priti Patel says police have her \"absolute backing\" to enforce coronavirus restrictions\n\nFines of £800 for anyone attending a house party of more than 15 people will be introduced in England from next week, under new Covid measures.\n\nThese will double for each repeat offence to a maximum of £6,400.\n\nAt a No 10 news conference, Home Secretary Priti Patel said there remained a \"small minority that refuse to do the right thing\".\n\n\"To them my message is clear. If you don't follow rules then the police will enforce them,\" she said.\n\nCurrently in England the fine for those attending illegal indoor gatherings stands at £200 - or £100 if paid early.\n\nFines of up to £10,000 for holding large illegal gatherings of more than 30 people will still only apply to the organisers.\n\nPolice will continue to follow the strategy of engaging with the public, explaining the rules and encouraging compliance, but the Home Office has warned that in severe breaches of lockdown rules, offenders should expect to receive a fine.\n\nMs Patel said the government would \"not stand by while a small number of individuals put others at risk\".\n\nShe was joined at the briefing by NHS England regional medical director for London Dr Vin Diwakar, who compared breaking the rules to turning on a light in the middle of a blackout during the Blitz.\n\n\"It doesn't just put you at risk in your house, it puts your whole street and the whole of your community at risk,\" he said.\n\nWelcoming the fines announcement, Martin Hewitt, chairman of the National Police Chiefs' Council, said large gatherings were \"dangerous, irresponsible, and totally unacceptable\".\n\nHe added: \"I hope that the likelihood of an increased fine acts as a disincentive for those people who are thinking of attending or organising such events.\"\n\nOfficial figures will be released next week showing how many fines have been given out since the start of this latest national lockdown, Mr Hewitt said.\n\nHowever, he stressed that \"forces are telling us there has been a significant increase\" in recent weeks.\n\n\"That's reflecting the fact that we've had more officers out on dedicated patrols taking targeted action against those small few who are letting everybody down,\" he said.\n\nAccording to Mr Hewitt, three police officers were injured in Brick Lane, east London, last week, after more than 40 people were found cramped indoors at a house party.\n\nMeanwhile, more than 150 people were found at a party in Hertfordshire, complete with music equipment including mixing decks and amplifiers, and another officer was injured.\n\nHe said forces in England had issued 250 fixed penalty notices (FPNs) to people organising large gatherings between late August, when regulations were introduced, and 17 January.\n\nIn some other recent examples of lockdown breaches:\n\nThe latest fines announcement comes after figures showed that assaults on emergency workers made up more than a quarter of Covid-related crimes prosecuted in the first six months of the pandemic.\n\nThe Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said there were 1,688 such offences between 1 April and 30 September in England and Wales.\n\nThey were among almost 6,500 crimes related to coronavirus in that period.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nSome 1,137 charges were brought for breaking coronavirus laws, according to the figures published by the CPS - which cover completed prosecutions.\n\nOn Thursday, it was reported that another 1,290 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 in the UK, bringing the total to 94,580.\n\nAnd a further 37,892 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus were announced, bringing the total number of cases in the UK to 3,543,646.\n• None What powers do police have?", "\"I had no idea at all I was going to be charged any more for deliveries after Brexit. The extra costs were definitely a bit of a shock.\"\n\nEllie Huddleston, a 26-year-old Londoner, thought she would treat herself to some new work clothes in the January sales.\n\nHaving spotted a bargain, she placed an order for a coat and a number of blouses from two of her favourite clothes brands based in Europe.\n\nBut both deliveries were delayed, held up in customs checks for at least a week, she says.\n\nShe was surprised when she then received a text from courier company DPD, containing a link asking her to pay £58 in customs duties, VAT and additional charges for her £180 order.\n\nOn top of that, the UPS courier for the second parcel showed up at her door several days later, asking for an extra payment of £82 for her £200 coat.\n\nThese charges, imposed by new government rules, have to be collected by the courier firms on the authorities' behalf.\n\n\"I didn't even know when the parcels would be coming - so I sent both back without paying the extra fees and won't be ordering anything from Europe again any time soon,\" Ellie says.\n\nWhen the UK was part of the European Union's customs union, goods could move freely between the country and other member states without import taxes being charged.\n\nBut Ellie was one of the shoppers caught unaware of the fact that those rules have changed since the UK's official exit.\n\nEU retailers sending packages to the UK now need to fill out customs declaration forms. Shoppers may also have to pay customs or VAT charges, depending on the value of the product and where it came from.\n\nHowever, customs charges are the responsibility of the customer, not the retailer, who often has no idea of how much the eventual extra cost might be.\n\nThey cannot be paid in advance and are levied only when the item reaches the UK.\n\nAnother unhappy customer, Graeme from Manchester, paid £300 to buy two pairs of suede winter boots from a German firm online.\n\n\"You couldn't get them anywhere in the UK, so I had no choice but to order them from Europe,\" he told the BBC.\n\nThe next thing he knew, courier UPS had sent him a text message saying he had to pay £147 extra before the boots could be delivered. He paid up, but is still waiting for the goods to arrive.\n\n\"It was virtually impossible to find out what the charges would be beforehand,\" he says, \"so I had to take a shot in the dark.\n\n\"I didn't imagine that it would be half as much again.\"\n\nCourier companies are adding charges to some deliveries from the EU\n\nUnder the new rules, anyone in the UK receiving a gift from the EU worth more than £39 may now face a bill for import VAT - with many items charged at 20%.\n\nFor goods costing more than £135, customs duties may also apply, which can range from 0% to 25% of the product you're buying if they have not been paid by the sender already.\n\nThe extra charges are usually collected by the courier on behalf of the government, with customers asked to pay before they can pick up their package.\n\nSome specialist European retailers, such as bicycle part firm Dutch Bike Bits and Belgium-based Beer On Web, recently said that they would stop all deliveries to the UK because of the VAT changes, which came into force on 1 January.\n\nSome firms have started charging additional \"handling fees\" to shoppers to cover costs associated with extra customs checks and paperwork that must be filled out.\n\nRoyal Mail, for example, is charging an £8 fee it says \"reflects the cost of clearing items through customs and presenting them to Border Force\".\n\nMeanwhile, delivery firm DHL says it is charging UK customers 2.5% of the amount paid to clear customs, with a minimum charge of £11.\n\nMail and freight company TNT is also adding £4.31 on all shipments from the UK to the EU and vice versa. It has said this reflects the increased investment it has had to make in adjusting its systems to cope with Brexit.\n\nA spokeswoman for Logistics UK told the BBC that the handling fees were \"a commercial decision by individual businesses\".\n\nBut Michelle Dale, senior manager at accountants UHY Hacker Young, said that new charges could present a major problem for firms in the coming weeks.\n\n\"I think what we'll find is that a lot of trade with the EU from a business-to-customer perspective will come to a stop until some of these rules are eased,\" she said.\n\nA government spokesperson said: \"The new VAT model ensures goods from EU and non-EU countries are treated in the same way and that UK businesses are not disadvantaged by competition from VAT-free imports.\n\n\"The new system also addresses the problem of overseas sellers failing to pay the right amount of VAT when they sell goods in the UK. We anticipate this will bring in £300m in tax every year, to fund essential UK public services.\"\n\nThere is speculation the rules may change, but until they do, Ellie says she won't be buying from European firms.\n\n\"With all that uncertainty around things and whether or not these charges might change, I'd rather just avoid the hassle,\" she says.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nHomes have been evacuated as Storm Christoph batters Wales with a three-day rainstorm.\n\nNorth Wales Police were called to help some residents in Ruthin who were being told to leave their homes.\n\nThey tweeted that \"people who do not live locally are driving to the area to 'see the floods'\".\n\nA rain warning issued by the Met Office is in place until midday on Thursday, with an ice warning for parts of north and mid Wales.\n\nSouth Wales fire crews pumped out water from homes in Pontypridd and Porth, in Rhondda, and roads were blocked in Powys and Flintshire.\n\nVehicles were pulled from floods by firefighters in Tenby, Llandovery, Llandeilo and Whitland, Mid and West Wales fire service said.\n\nUp to 20cm (8in) of rain is expected to fall, with the heaviest rain forecast for the north west of Wales.\n\nThere were flood warnings in 58 areas as forecasters warned heavy rain and melting snow could affect roads. There were also 57 flood alerts - meaning flooding is possible.\n\nA yellow warning for ice was issued for the north and parts of mid Wales, starting at 01:00 on Thursday and lasting until 10:00, as rain clears.\n\nA minor landslip was reported on the mountainside above Pentre in Rhondda Cynon Taf. Natural Resources Wales, who have responsibility for the land, said there is no immediate threat after an initial inspection, but the council urged residents to keep away from the area.\n\nThe River Taf at Llanglydwen in Carmarthenshire\n\nFlood warnings are in Carmarthenshire - the River Towy and isolated properties between Llandeilo and Abergwili, the River Gwendraeth Fawr at Pontyates and Ponthenry, the River Hydfron at Llanddowror and the River Taf at Trevaughan in Whitland.\n\nThe other flood warnings cover the River Ely at Peterston-Super-Ely in Vale of Glamorgan, the River Vyrnwy in the Meifod area in Powys, the River Rhyd Hir at Riverside Terrace in Gwynedd, two for the River Wye at Glasbury and Builth Wells, the Lower Dee Valley from Llangollen to Trevalyn Meadows, the River Dyfi at Pont ar Dyfi, the River Usk from Brecon to Glangrwyne, two at the River Severn at Abermule to Fron and Aberbechan and the River Lower Clydach at Clydach Bridge, Swansea.\n\nIn River Aeron at Aberaeron, in Ceredigion, the River Loughor at Ammanford and Llandybie and the River Wye at Builth Wells, Powys, are also covered by the warning.\n\nA person had to be saved from a car stuck in floodwater in Corwen, Denbighshire, North East Wales Search and Rescue tweeted.\n\nRest centres have been opened in St Asaph and Ruthin after some localised flooding following heavy rainfall throughout the day. Denbighshire council invited affected residents to use the facilities at the towns' main leisure centres.\n\nAnd Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service said crews were called to help a motorist whose vehicle had become stuck in 3ft of water in Machynlleth.\n\nThe waters lapped the doors of Ruthin's Ocean Pearl restaurant\n\nIn Broughton, Flintshire, Ray and Jacqui Littler said they and their daughter waited all afternoon for help at their flooded bungalow after emergency services told them they were \"flat out\".\n\nThey eventually decided to leave their home on Main Road, which was under 10 inches of water, to stay with friends.\n\nNeighbours blamed a blocked culvert on the fields opposite the road. Police closed the road at about 16:00 GMT and Flintshire council attended, after three houses were affected, with the gardens of two pensioners' bungalows also under water.\n\nOverflowing banks of the River Usk at Brecon\n\nSouth Wales Fire and Rescue Service said it had been called to two incidents overnight with reports of water entering properties in Pontycymmer in Bridgend and Tredegar, Blaenau Gwent.\n\nOn Wednesday morning, it dealt with flooding at properties in Tyfica Road, Pontypridd, and Trebanog Road in Porth, Rhondda, where a crew was helping residents divert and pump out water.\n\nFirefighters also had to rescue 46 sheep from land surrounded by water at Merthyr Road, Llanfoist, Monmouthshire.\n\nCrews from Abergavenny and Ebbw Vale were called to help the stricken animals near the River Usk.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by South Wales Fire and Rescue Service This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by South Wales Fire and Rescue Service\n\nIn Rhondda Cynon Taf, there were also reports of flooding in properties at Pembroke Street, Aberdare and Clydach Vale, Tonypandy.\n\nA tweet from Pontypridd Plaid Cymru councillor Heledd Fychan showed fast-flowing water in the River Taff which runs through the town.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Heledd Fychan This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nWater in the grounds of Gwydir Castle in Llanrwst\n\nJudy Corbett, owner of 16th Century Gwydir Castle in Llanrwst, Conwy, which flooded last year, told BBC Radio Wales things were \"looking pretty dire here this morning\".\n\nShe said: \"We've been obviously monitoring the levels overnight so we've had another sleepless night worrying about the weather but the levels are rising and the water is very violent this morning and of course, we've got another a whole day ahead of us.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Sabrina Lee This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSeveral roads have been hit by flooding, including the B5106 between Llanrwst and Trefriw\n\nThe Met Office warned spray and flooding could lead to \"difficult driving conditions and some road closures\" and the downpours could cause delays.\n\nTraffic Wales said restrictions were in place on the M48 Severn Bridge where traffic is coming off eastbound at junction two or westbound at junction one before being directed back on to cross the bridge, which remains open.\n\nIn Flintshire, the A548 Coast Road has been closed at Tan Lan and Mostyn, the A5118 at Padeswood, the A541 between Llong to Pontblyddyn, Bagillt High Street and the B5101 between Treuddyn and Llanfynydd.\n\nThe A485 in Garreg is also closed from the Brondaw Arms to Pont Aberglaslyn.\n\nThe Dyfi Bridge near Machynlleth is closed\n\nIn Powys, the A487 over the Dyfi Bridge, near Machynlleth, is closed while the A458 at Llanfair Caereinion is blocked in both directions from Bridge Street to Guilsfield turn-off because of flooding.\n\nThe A483 in Builth Wells at the station is also closed along with the bridge over the River Wye.\n\nCapel Bangor in Ceredigion has temporary traffic lights on the A44 at Lovesgrove Roundabout due to flooding, which is affecting traffic between Aberystwyth and Llangurig.\n\nIn Bridgend, New Inn Road has been closed in both directions at The Dipping Bridge, affecting traffic between Ewenny village and the A48.\n\nSouth Wales Police warned people not to attempt driving through floodwater after the A4118 at Llanddewi on Gower became blocked.\n\nIn Gwynedd, the council tweeted that Ffordd Siliwen, Bangor, had been closed following a landslip.\n\nA section of the A470 Dolgellau Bypass has also been closed along with the A4085 at Garreg.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by South Wales Police Swansea This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nNational Rail said some lines between North Llanrwst, Conwy, and Blaenau Ffestiniog in Gwynedd were blocked due to heavy rain while services were also disrupted between Shrewsbury and Machynlleth in Powys.\n\nAlterative road transport will run in place of cancelled services, it said.\n\nThe Met Office said 56mm (2.2in) of rain had fallen at Capel Curig in Snowdonia by 18:00 GMT on Tuesday.\n\nA yellow warning for rain is in place for virtually the whole of Wales until Thursday\n\nForecasters also said fast flowing and deep floodwater \"could cause a danger to life\".\n\nThe Met Office warned flooding could lead to some communities being cut off and possible power cuts.\n\nStrong winds will also follow the torrential rain, with forecasters predicting this may cause \"travelling difficulties across areas higher and more exposed routes\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nPaul Pogba scored a superb winner as Manchester United reclaimed top spot in the Premier League by coming from behind for a club-record equalling away win at Fulham.\n\nIn what is becoming a familiar pattern for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's side outside Manchester this season, they fell behind early in the game, with Ademola Lookman beating the offside trap before firing in an angled drive.\n\nBut for the seventh time away from Old Trafford in 2020-21, United found a winning response - taking their run to 17 games unbeaten away in the Premier League - courtesy of a gift from their opponents and a bit of magic from their French midfielder.\n\nGoalkeeper Alphonse Areola has been a good addition for the Cottagers but in dropping Bruno Fernandes' cross at the feet of Edinson Cavani, he gifted his former Paris St-Germain team-mate the simplest of equalisers.\n\nAnd on the hour mark, Pogba stepped up to decide the contest, firing a superb angled drive across the diving Areola and into the far corner from 20 yards.\n\nThe France international has come in for criticism at times this season but received nothing but praise from his manager after his winner.\n\n\"I am very happy with his performances,\" said Solskjaer.\n\n\"I know what he can do. He does everything. Now he is putting all the elements together in his performances and it is great to see.\n\n\"It was about getting him fit. He is enjoying his football, he is happy and physically in a good shape.\"\n\nThe win takes United to 40 points, two more than both Leicester and Manchester City, who had briefly taken top spot from the Foxes with a 2-0 win over Aston Villa on Wednesday.\n\nSolskjaer, though, was reluctant to get drawn into discussing his side's title credentials with so much of the campaign to go.\n\n\"It is always going to be talked about that when you are halfway through and top of the league, but we are not thinking about this, we just have to go one game at a time,\" he added. \"It is such an unpredictable season.\"\n\nFulham remain in the bottom three, four points behind 17th-placed Burnley.\n• None Man Utd or Man City to end day top? Cassia bassist Lou Cotterill takes on Lawro\n\nSolskjaer felt his side missed a big opportunity to fully assert their title credentials in failing to make the most of their chances in Sunday's 0-0 draw at champions Liverpool.\n\nUnited were clearly in no mood to repeat such a mistake at a wet and windy Craven Cottage on Wednesday against a less daunting and defining opposition, but one that is far more robust now than they were in the season's first month.\n\nThe visitors fell behind, but this is par for the course for this side, who once again did not panic, wrestled control of the game away from their opponents and took the win.\n\nIt is a handy trick for a title-challenging side to have in their locker, although one they would rather not have to repeatedly pull.\n\nIn truth, they should have won more handsomely.\n\nThey had the far greater share of possession and territory and were well ahead of their opponents on shots taken until a frantic finale in which the Cottagers threw in all they had in pursuit of a point.\n\nFred felt he should have had a penalty in the first half courtesy of being caught in the box by a loose challenge from Ruben Loftus-Cheek, but both on-field and VAR officials disagreed.\n\nHarry Maguire twice headed wide from corners, the first from a far less forgivable, unmarked position than the second.\n\nEqually, though, it is a game that could have seen them drop points, especially in light of Fulham's late barrage, which saw David de Gea save superbly with his legs to deny Loftus-Cheek, and the ball pinballing around the United box on more than one occasion.\n\nThe Cottagers demonstrated that they are no pushover, but they are making of habit of being on the rough end of fine margins.\n\nFive straight draws followed by two defeats by a single goal suggests their battle against the drop will go right down to the wire.\n\n\"I'm really pleased but I'm disappointed at the same time, which shows how far we've come,\" said Cottagers boss Scott Parker.\n\n\"I saw a team today that looked threatening and tried their hardest to get back into the game, but we go again. The next challenge is to maintain where we are and don't let defeat sink us.\n\n\"No doubt we can win and operate in this division and we just need to push on and keep improving.\"\n\nUnited lead the way in early concessions\n• None No side has conceded more goals in the opening five minutes of Premier League games this season than Manchester United (4). Manchester United have won seven Premier League games having gone behind this season - only Newcastle in 2001-02 (10) and Man Utd themselves in 2012-13 (9) have done so more in a single campaign.\n• None Manchester United are unbeaten in their last 17 Premier League away games (W13 D4), equalling their longest ever unbeaten run on the road in top-flight history (17 between December 1998 and September 1999).\n• None This was the 41st different game in which Fulham had led in all competitions under Scott Parker, but the first time they had lost such a game (W34 D6).\n• None Edinson Cavani became the first Man Utd player whose first four Premier League goals for the club were all scored away from home.\n• None Since his return to the club in 2016, no Man Utd player has scored more league goals from outside the box than Paul Pogba (6).\n• None Ademola Lookman has been involved in more Premier League goals than any other Fulham player this season (6 - 3 goals, 3 assists).\n• None Bruno Fernandes has gone three Premier League games without a goal or assist for the first time since his Manchester United debut in February 2020.\n\nFulham's next game is in the FA Cup, against Burnley on Sunday (14:30 GMT). Their next league fixture, an away game on Wednesday, 27 January, is a big one. Opponents Brighton are two places and five points above them in the table.\n\nManchester United host Liverpool in the FA Cup on Sunday at 17:00, live on the BBC. They are also in league action the following Wednesday hosting the league's bottom club Sheffield United in a 20:15 kick-off.\n• None Attempt missed. Aleksandar Mitrovic (Fulham) header from the centre of the box is close, but misses to the right. Assisted by Kenny Tete with a cross following a corner.\n• None Attempt blocked. Ademola Lookman (Fulham) left footed shot from the left side of the box is blocked. Assisted by Mario Lemina.\n• None Offside, Fulham. Aboubakar Kamara tries a through ball, but Kenny Tete is caught offside.\n• None Attempt missed. Mario Lemina (Fulham) right footed shot from outside the box is high and wide to the right. Assisted by Aboubakar Kamara.\n• None Attempt blocked. Joe Bryan (Fulham) left footed shot from the left side of the box is blocked.\n• None Attempt missed. Ruben Loftus-Cheek (Fulham) right footed shot from the centre of the box is high and wide to the right following a fast break.\n• None Attempt blocked. Fred (Manchester United) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Harry Maguire with a headed pass. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None You can stream five fourth-round games live on the BBC this weekend, including Liverpool's trip to Manchester United. Find out more here.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThis is America's day. This is democracy's day. A day of history and hope, of renewal and resolve. Through a crucible for the ages, America has been tested anew and America has risen to the challenge. Today we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate but of a cause, a cause of democracy. The people - the will of the people - has been heard, and the will of the people has been heeded.\n\nWe've learned again that democracy is precious, democracy is fragile and, at this hour my friends, democracy has prevailed. So now on this hallowed ground where just a few days ago violence sought to shake the Capitol's very foundations, we come together as one nation under God - indivisible - to carry out the peaceful transfer of power as we have for more than two centuries.\n\nAs we look ahead in our uniquely American way, restless, bold, optimistic, and set our sights on a nation we know we can be and must be, I thank my predecessors of both parties for their presence here. I thank them from the bottom of my heart. And I know the resilience of our Constitution and the strength, the strength of our nation, as does President Carter, who I spoke with last night who cannot be with us today, but who we salute for his lifetime of service.\n\nI've just taken a sacred oath each of those patriots have taken. The oath first sworn by George Washington. But the American story depends not on any one of us, not on some of us, but on all of us. On we the people who seek a more perfect union. This is a great nation, we are good people. And over the centuries through storm and strife in peace and in war we've come so far. But we still have far to go.\n\nWe'll press forward with speed and urgency for we have much to do in this winter of peril and significant possibility. Much to do, much to heal, much to restore, much to build and much to gain. Few people in our nation's history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we're in now. A once in a century virus that silently stalks the country has taken as many lives in one year as in all of World War Two.\n\nMillions of jobs have been lost. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed. A cry for racial justice, some 400 years in the making, moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer. A cry for survival comes from the planet itself, a cry that can't be any more desperate or any more clear now. The rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism, that we must confront and we will defeat.\n\nTo overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America, requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy - unity. Unity. In another January on New Year's Day in 1863 Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. When he put pen to paper the president said, and I quote, 'if my name ever goes down in history, it'll be for this act, and my whole soul is in it'.\n\nMy whole soul is in it today, on this January day. My whole soul is in this. Bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation. And I ask every American to join me in this cause. Uniting to fight the foes we face - anger, resentment and hatred. Extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness, and hopelessness.\n\nWith unity we can do great things, important things. We can right wrongs, we can put people to work in good jobs, we can teach our children in safe schools. We can overcome the deadly virus, we can rebuild work, we can rebuild the middle class and make work secure, we can secure racial justice and we can make America once again the leading force for good in the world.\n\nI know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days. I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. But I also know they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal, that we are all created equal, and the harsh ugly reality that racism, nativism and fear have torn us apart. The battle is perennial and victory is never secure.\n\nThrough civil war, the Great Depression, World War, 9/11, through struggle, sacrifice, and setback, our better angels have always prevailed. In each of our moments enough of us have come together to carry all of us forward and we can do that now. History, faith and reason show the way. The way of unity.\n\nWe can see each other not as adversaries but as neighbours. We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity there is no peace, only bitterness and fury, no progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge. And unity is the path forward. And we must meet this moment as the United States of America.\n\nIf we do that, I guarantee we will not failed. We have never, ever, ever, ever failed in America when we've acted together. And so today at this time in this place, let's start afresh, all of us. Let's begin to listen to one another again, hear one another, see one another. Show respect to one another. Politics doesn't have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn't have to be a cause for total war and we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.\n\nMy fellow Americans, we have to be different than this. We have to be better than this and I believe America is so much better than this. Just look around. Here we stand in the shadow of the Capitol dome. As mentioned earlier, completed in the shadow of the Civil War. When the union itself was literally hanging in the balance. We endure, we prevail. Here we stand, looking out on the great Mall, where Dr King spoke of his dream.\n\nHere we stand, where 108 years ago at another inaugural, thousands of protesters tried to block brave women marching for the right to vote. And today we mark the swearing in of the first woman elected to national office, Vice President Kamala Harris. Don't tell me things can't change. Here we stand where heroes who gave the last full measure of devotion rest in eternal peace.\n\nAnd here we stand just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of our democracy, to drive us from this sacred ground. It did not happen, it will never happen, not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not ever. To all those who supported our campaign, I'm humbled by the faith you placed in us. To all those who did not support us, let me say this. Hear us out as we move forward. Take a measure of me and my heart.\n\nIf you still disagree, so be it. That's democracy. That's America. The right to dissent peacefully. And the guardrail of our democracy is perhaps our nation's greatest strength. If you hear me clearly, disagreement must not lead to disunion. And I pledge this to you. I will be a President for all Americans, all Americans. And I promise you I will fight for those who did not support me as for those who did.\n\nMany centuries ago, St Augustine - the saint of my church - wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love. Defined by the common objects of their love. What are the common objects we as Americans love, that define us as Americans? I think we know. Opportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honour, and yes, the truth.\n\nRecent weeks and months have taught us a painful lesson. There is truth and there are lies. Lies told for power and for profit. And each of us has a duty and a responsibility as citizens as Americans and especially as leaders. Leaders who are pledged to honour our Constitution to protect our nation. To defend the truth and defeat the lies.\n\nLook, I understand that many of my fellow Americans view the future with fear and trepidation. I understand they worry about their jobs. I understand like their dad they lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling thinking: 'Can I keep my healthcare? Can I pay my mortgage?' Thinking about their families, about what comes next. I promise you, I get it. But the answer's not to turn inward. To retreat into competing factions. Distrusting those who don't look like you, or worship the way you do, who don't get their news from the same source as you do.\n\nWe must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal. We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts, if we show a little tolerance and humility, and if we're willing to stand in the other person's shoes, as my mom would say. Just for a moment, stand in their shoes.\n\nBecause here's the thing about life. There's no accounting for what fate will deal you. Some days you need a hand. There are other days when we're called to lend a hand. That's how it has to be, that's what we do for one another. And if we are that way our country will be stronger, more prosperous, more ready for the future. And we can still disagree.\n\nMy fellow Americans, in the work ahead of us we're going to need each other. We need all our strength to persevere through this dark winter. We're entering what may be the darkest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation, one nation. And I promise this, as the Bible says, 'Weeping may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning'. We will get through this together. Together.\n\nLook folks, all my colleagues I serve with in the House and the Senate up here, we all understand the world is watching. Watching all of us today. So here's my message to those beyond our borders. America has been tested and we've come out stronger for it. We will repair our alliances, and engage with the world once again. Not to meet yesterday's challenges but today's and tomorrow's challenges. And we'll lead not merely by the example of our power but the power of our example.\n\nFellow Americans, moms, dads, sons, daughters, friends, neighbours and co-workers. We will honour them by becoming the people and the nation we can and should be. So I ask you let's say a silent prayer for those who lost their lives, those left behind and for our country. Amen.\n\nFolks, it's a time of testing. We face an attack on our democracy, and on truth, a raging virus, a stinging inequity, systemic racism, a climate in crisis, America's role in the world. Any one of these would be enough to challenge us in profound ways. But the fact is we face them all at once, presenting this nation with one of the greatest responsibilities we've had. Now we're going to be tested. Are we going to step up?\n\nIt's time for boldness for there is so much to do. And this is certain, I promise you. We will be judged, you and I, by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era. We will rise to the occasion. Will we master this rare and difficult hour? Will we meet our obligations and pass along a new and better world to our children? I believe we must and I'm sure you do as well. I believe we will, and when we do, we'll write the next great chapter in the history of the United States of America. The American story.\n\nA story that might sound like a song that means a lot to me, it's called American Anthem. And there's one verse that stands out at least for me and it goes like this:\n\n'The work and prayers of centuries have brought us to this day, which shall be our legacy, what will our children say?\n\nLet me know in my heart when my days are through, America, America, I gave my best to you.'\n\nLet us add our own work and prayers to the unfolding story of our great nation. If we do this, then when our days are through, our children and our children's children will say of us: 'They gave their best, they did their duty, they healed a broken land.'\n\nMy fellow Americans I close the day where I began, with a sacred oath. Before God and all of you, I give you my word. I will always level with you. I will defend the Constitution, I'll defend our democracy.\n\nI'll defend America and I will give all - all of you - keep everything I do in your service. Thinking not of power but of possibilities. Not of personal interest but of public good.\n\nAnd together we will write an American story of hope, not fear. Of unity not division, of light not darkness. A story of decency and dignity, love and healing, greatness and goodness. May this be the story that guides us. The story that inspires us. And the story that tells ages yet to come that we answered the call of history, we met the moment. Democracy and hope, truth and justice, did not die on our watch but thrive.\n\nThat America secured liberty at home and stood once again as a beacon to the world. That is what we owe our forbearers, one another, and generations to follow.\n\nSo with purpose and resolve, we turn to those tasks of our time. Sustained by faith, driven by conviction and devoted to one another and the country we love with all our hearts. May God bless America and God protect our troops.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. PM: It's too early to give a lockdown end date\n\nIt is \"too early\" to say whether England's Covid restrictions will be able to end in the spring, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said.\n\nOnce the four priority groups have been vaccinated, by mid-February, \"we'll look then at how we're doing,\" he said.\n\nNearly two million people in the UK have had their first dose of vaccine in the past week, government figures show.\n\nScientist Marc Baguelin, who advises the government, has said restaurants and bars should not reopen before May.\n\nEducation Secretary Gavin Williamson has said he \"certainly hopes\" schools in England can fully reopen before Easter, while Downing Street refused to be drawn on whether this would happen by then.\n\nA further 1,290 people have died within 28 days of a positive Covid test and there have been another 37,892 cases, according to the latest government figures.\n\nAnd almost five million people in the UK have had their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine.\n\nSpeaking after a study suggested infections might have increased at the start of the latest lockdown in England, Mr Johnson said it was \"absolutely crucial\" that people observed the restrictions.\n\nReferring to figures from the Imperial College London survey, he said they showed the new variant of the virus was \"not more deadly but it is much more contagious and the numbers are very great\".\n\nFigures published by Public Health England show cases - meaning people who come forward to get tested while they are infected - have fallen across England since early January.\n\nWith the two sets of figures pointing in different directions, it will be some time before it is known for sure how long it will take for lockdown to relieve the pressure on hospitals.\n\nDr Baguelin, from Imperial College, who sits on a sub-group of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) said the premature opening of the hospitality sector would lead to a \"bump\" in Covid-19 cases.\n\nHe told BBC Radio 4's World at One programme even a partial reopening would generate \"an increase in the R number\". An R number above one means the epidemic is growing.\n\n\"Something of this scale, if it was to happen earlier than May, would generate a bump in transmission, which is already really bad,\" he said.\n\n\"So you have a lot of pressure on hospitals, you will have another wave of some extent. At best you will keep on having very, very unsustainable level of pressure on the NHS.\"\n\nNHS England figures show one in 10 major hospital trusts had no spare adult critical care beds last week.\n\nThis is a debate that is going to start to dominate public discourse.\n\nWith the vaccination programme under way, there is huge clamour to know what will happen once the most vulnerable are vaccinated, by mid-February.\n\nThe problem is there are still so many unknowns.\n\nFirstly, it is hard to predict by how much lockdown will have reduced infection levels, considering there is a new faster-spreading variant to deal with.\n\nThe level of uptake will also be crucial. Surveys suggest as many as one in five may not have the vaccine - although the older, more vulnerable groups tend to be the most willing to be vaccinated.\n\nAnd the fact that no vaccine is 100% effective means come February there could still be significant numbers of very vulnerable people who are not protected.\n\nAnother factor is whether the vaccine stops transmissions - so-called sterilising vaccination.\n\nTrials have shown the vaccines are good at stopping symptoms developing. But that does not mean someone who has received a jab will not pass on the virus.\n\nIf it does not, that, of course, has implications on how many control measures have to be kept in place. It will take us at least until spring to know the answer to this.\n\nAt this stage, it seems hard to see much beyond the possible reopening of schools come March.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was an \"impossible question\" to ask how long the lockdown would need to last.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and only go out for limited reasons.\n\nThis includes for food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nIn Northern Ireland, coronavirus lockdown restrictions will be extended until 5 March, BBC News understands.\n\nIn Scotland, lockdown has been extended until at least the middle of February, with most school pupils to continue learning from home.\n\nAnd in Wales health minister Vaughan Gething has said no \"significant easing\" of Wales' Covid restrictions should be expected when the current guidelines are reviewed this month.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nSir Keir added that the coronavirus vaccines were \"really good news\" but \"should not mask the fact that we have still got a very serious problem\".\n\nThe government is aiming to offer a vaccine to all over-70s, the extremely clinical vulnerable and health and care workers by mid-February.\n\nSixty-five new vaccination centres are opening in England, including a mosque in Birmingham and a cinema in Aylesbury.", "Paddy McElhone was shot in the back by a soldier in 1974\n\nThe shooting dead of a man by the Army in County Tyrone in August 1974 was unjustified, a coroner has ruled.\n\nPaddy McElhone, 24, a farmer, was shot in the back near his home in Limehill, Pomeroy.\n\nAn inquest heard the shot was fired by a soldier from the First Battalion, Royal Regiment of Wales.\n\nJudge Siobhan Keegan said Mr McElhone was an \"innocent man shot in cold blood without warning when he was no threat to anyone\".\n\nThe soldier, now deceased, had been cleared of murder but the circumstances were re-examined in a new inquest ordered by the Attorney General.\n\nPaddy McElhone's family said he was killed without justification, explanation or apology\n\nAfterwards, a statement issued by the McElhone family said it had been a \"very long road\" to reach Thursday's ruling and that the truth \"has been heard\".\n\nIt reads: \"Our family always knew that Paddy was an innocent young man, taken from his home and shot by a British soldier for no reason.\"\n\nEvidence presented to the inquest found Mr McElhone was not on any list associated with the IRA and was an innocent man from a humble background.\n\nThe family said Mr McElhone's parents \"went to their graves broken-hearted knowing that their innocent son had been killed, without justification, explanation or apology\".\n\n\"We feel that, today, Judge Keenan at this inquest has, at long last, exonerated Paddy in full,\" the statement continued.\n\n\"As a family we can grieve Paddy, and respect his memory as an innocent young man.\"\n\nThe inquest into Mr McElhone's death was the first in a series of coroners' investigations into deaths associated with Northern Ireland's Troubles.\n\nIt was held in Omagh courthouse in County Tyrone.", "Nearly nine million people had to borrow more money last year because of the impact of coronavirus, government figures show.\n\nSince June last year, the proportion of workers borrowing £1,000 or more had increased from 35% to 45%, said the Office for National Statistics.\n\nSelf-employed people were more likely than employees to borrow money.\n\nThere was also a large increase in the proportion of disabled people borrowing similar sums, the ONS added.\n\nThis was adding to a \"widening financial gap\" between households.\n\nOverall, young people and low earners have been worst hit by the pandemic, according to the ONS survey.\n\nThose aged under 30 and those with household incomes of less than £10,000 were about 35% and 60% respectively more likely to be furloughed than the population as a whole.\n\nMeanwhile, higher-paid workers were more likely to be on full pay if they were unable to work.\n\nThere has been much focus on a glut of savings ready to be unleashed into the economy when pandemic restrictions are lifted.\n\nThis ONS report shines a light on the reality of this for many ordinary Britons, having to borrow more, amid a hit to incomes during the recession.\n\nDisproportionately this has hit the low paid and the young, and this would have been far worse without the government's support package.\n\nMore homeowners and the over-30s by December expected to be able to save for the year ahead. Fewer renters and under 30s expected to be able to save.\n\nThough the analysis does not include the latest national lockdown, the economic impact of schools closure is also clear.\n\nEmployed parents were twice as likely to experience income loss, though that gap closed when schools reopened. The fear is that this trend will have returned over the past month.\n\nGueorguie Vassilev from the ONS said: \"Many people took a financial hit in the first months of the pandemic, either being furloughed or working fewer hours.\n\n\"What we are seeing now, though, is a widening financial gap between households, where some people are relying on savings or borrowing to make ends meet. Those hardest hit are people on low pay, young people and parents of dependent children.\"\n\nParents living with children were almost twice as likely to report a reduction in income as the rest of the population, the ONS added.\n\nThis gap gradually narrowed throughout the year as schools reopened. Parents were less likely to have a reduced income during the November lockdown than in the first lockdown, as schools stayed open.\n\nHave you needed to borrow a substantial amount of money because of the impact of the pandemic? Tell us your story by emailing: haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Biden invited Taiwan's envoy to his inauguration - what does it mean?\n\nBiden’s inauguration was marked by many historic “firsts”, and one of them could be a sign of potential future clashes between Beijing and Washington. Bi-khim Hsiao, Taiwan’s top envoy to the US, was formally invited to the inauguration - the first time this has happened in more than four decades. A video shared on her social media shows her standing in front of the US Capitol ahead of the inauguration ceremony. “Democracy is our common language and freedom is our common objective,” Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the US said. China views the self-ruled island as part of its territory that it will eventually retake, by force if necessary. And the status of Taiwan has long been a thorny issue in US-China relations, as the US is by far Taiwan’s most important friend. Hsiao’s presence at the inauguration signals the US may continue to demonstrate strong support for Taiwan, despite the fact that many Taiwanese people are concerned that Biden will take a less confrontational stance towards Beijing compared with Trump. By contrast, it’s unclear whether China’s ambassador to the US, Cui Tiankai, attended Biden’s inauguration. Earlier today, China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Cui had been invited, but did not confirm whether he was present in the ceremony. Hua reiterated China’s position of opposing official interactions between Taiwan and the US. It’s a long-running unspoken rule that Beijing and Taipei’s top diplomats in Washington do not attend the same event, because sharing a stage could be seen as Beijing acknowledging Taiwan as an independent sovereign country.", "Education Minister Peter Weir says that from an educational point of view, he wants \"to keep the extent to which they [children] are out of school to a minimum\".\n\nBut Mr Weir said that decisions about schools during the Covid-19 pandemic must \"be weighed up against the wider public health advice\".\n\nSpeaking on the BBC's Evening Extra programme after it was announced that current restrictions will be extended, Mr Weir said that \"nobody wants to see restrictions last longer than they have to\".\n\nHe said the decision to extend lockdown was taken \"very reluctantly but there is a broad consensus in the executive that these are necessary measures that have to be taken to ensure we remain on top of the virus\".\n\nMr Weir added that schools have operated on a slightly different timetable to the rest of the restrictions, and that next week's discussions will consider keeping them closed until 5 March, in line with decisions taken by ministers today.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. While some young people have found it hard at times, others have learnt new skills\n\nYoung people have been asked to share their experiences of how they have coped during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nChildren's Commissioner for Wales Sally Holland said her national survey was important because sometimes views of younger people can be \"surprising\".\n\nShe said the information provided would also help inform the Welsh Government ahead of some tough decisions it will need to make in the future.\n\nA similar survey was carried out in the first lockdown last year.\n\nA recent Prince's Trust Youth Index survey asked young people across the UK about their thoughts and feelings towards the pandemic.\n\nMore than 2,000 responded including 200 from Wales.\n\nIt found 63% of 16 to 25-year-olds said the pandemic had left them \"always\" or \"often\" feeling anxious - 64% said they were feeling like they were \"missing out on being young\".\n\nBBC Wales spoke to a number of children and young people about their thoughts on a variety of issues including home schooling, loneliness and finding out what they are doing to stay positive.\n\nAngel, 16, from Cardiff, is studying for her GCSEs.\n\n\"I've just been confused a lot of the time. All the information out there and it's really hard to process and get to a point where you're in a mindset where you know what's happening.\n\n\"There's such a high level of uncertainty you're constantly worried or actually doubting what's going to happen next.\n\n\"When you have goals for the future it's something to help you get through this but when you're in the circumstances we're in now, it's really hard to find the motivation and a purpose for what you're doing now.\"\n\nTo try and stay positive Angel has been trying to get out for walks during her school breaks or watch Netflix.\n\nShe said she has also tried to learn some sign-language during lockdown and attempted yoga.\n\nEmrys and Clara have been learning home skills\n\nEmrys, 11, from Bridgend, said he misses not having the structure of a school day and seeing his friends.\n\nHe added: \"I'm a social person. I have friends, I chat with them, I play with them, and it's hard not being with my friends but I mean the family will have to do.\"\n\nHe and his six-year-old sister, Clara, have enjoyed going for walks with their parents and have been learning some new skills including washing dishes, cooking dinner and baking cakes.\n\nMeanwhile, 11-year-old Sophie has found it difficult to not get bored during long periods of time in the house.\n\n\"I'd say I cope OK with it at some points, but then not okay with it at other points,\" she added.\n\nSophie said it can be hard sometimes to find things to do\n\nAlicia is studying for her A-levels and has friends who have dropped out of their studies this year because of the stress and anxiety caused by the uncertainty about exams and their futures.\n\nThe 17-year-old also said it was \"heart-breaking\" not being able to see many of her close friends for almost a year.\n\nShe added: \"My thoughts are, it's less of a luxury now, I need to be able to go out to see them and to work.\"\n\nBefore the pandemic, Sarah, 16, from Swansea enjoyed going to her local youth club and took part in a local drama group but it how now moved online, giving a different experience.\n\n\"It's quite sad because I used to enjoy being able to do those things whenever it was on, but I think I'm getting used to do everything online,\" she said.\n\nAs a person who does not cope very well with not knowing what will happen next, the pandemic has caused anxiety at times for Sarah.\n\n\"I am finding it quite scary but hopefully things will change and I'll be able to go back soon,\" she said.\n\n\"I think if you're really struggling with something, talking really helps so it would be nice to see people in person.\"\n\nChildren's commissioner Sally Holland conducted a survey of pupils in Wales during the first lockdown\n\nChildren's helpline MEIC Cymru said it had seen a 10% increase in the number of calls from young people, parents, and carers during the pandemic compared with previous years.\n\nStephanie Hoffman, Head of Social Action at Promo Cymru, the charity which runs the helpline, said: \"We're seeing what I'd say are many more substantive contacts, so a lot more contact dealing with really serious issues to do with social well-being, mental health and relationships, as opposed to what we might have seen more of in the past.\n\n\"Now we're dealing with situations which can be quite complicated.\"\n\nOf the survey, Ms Holland said: \"We've heard a lot from adults showing concern for children at the moment, such as parents, carers and professionals working with children about the potential impact of the lockdown on children.\n\n\"Those voices are important to hear, but it's also important we hear directly from children and young people because sometimes they can be surprising.\"\n\nWe know that Covid-19 vaccinations have been on people's minds in Wales - with many wanting to know when they or their loved-ones will receive theirs.\n\nIf you have a question about this issue, a story you'd like to share or a query about anything else related to coronavirus, you can sent it to us using the form below.\n\nIn some cases your question will be published, displaying your name and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read the terms and conditions.\n\nIf you are reading this page on the BBC News app, you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question on this topic.", "Fashion chain Next has said it will no longer bid to buy Sir Philip Green's Arcadia retail brands Topshop and Topman out of administration.\n\nIt comes after a consortium including the fashion chain was named as frontrunner to buy the brands.\n\nIn a short statement, Next said the consortium had been \"unable to meet the price expectations of the vendor\".\n\nSome 13,000 jobs were put at risk when Arcadia, which also owns Burton and Dorothy Perkins, went bust in November.\n\nIt leaves a clutch of others in the race to buy the 440-store group, including Mike Ashley's Frasers Group, which owns House of Fraser and Sports Direct.\n\nAccording to reports, Authentic Brands, the US owner of the Barneys department store, and JD Sports have tabled a joint offer, while online retailers Asos and Boohoo are also said to be interested.\n\nAdministrators Deloitte have been looking for buyers for some or all of Arcadia, after a slump in sales caused by the pandemic triggered its collapse.\n\nNext, which has 550 UK shops and has weathered the pandemic well, was seen as a good fit to take over the group's assets.\n\nIt had been bidding in partnership with the US hedge fund Davidson Kempner, which was going to put up most of the money.\n\nNext said it wished \"the administrator and future owners [of Arcadia] well in their endeavours to preserve an important part of the UK retail sector\".\n\nExperts expect Arcadia to be broken up, with bidders taking on different parts of the business and brands potentially hived off from their stores.\n\nIn December, Australian collective City Chic said it would buy Arcadia's Evans brand, commerce and wholesale business for £23m but not its store network.\n\nLast year was the worst for the High Street in more than 25 years as the coronavirus accelerated the move towards online shopping, according to the Centre for Retail Research (CRR).\n\nNearly 180,000 retail jobs were lost, up by almost a quarter on the previous year, as shops faced strict curbs and prolonged closures.", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nLiverpool's 68-game unbeaten home run in the Premier League came to an end as Ashley Barnes fired in a late winner from the penalty spot to secure a famous victory for Burnley.\n\nBarnes was tripped in the box by goalkeeper Alisson with seven minutes remaining and converted the spot-kick as Burnley won at Anfield for the first time since 1974.\n\nLiverpool's last league loss on their own ground came nearly four years ago, against Crystal Palace in April 2017, and they are now six points behind leaders Manchester United at the midway point in the campaign.\n\nDivock Origi was given his first start of the season and should have scored when he ran free on goal after pouncing on Ben Mee's error but struck the crossbar.\n\nThe hosts pushed to find the net in the second half but ran out of ideas, Nick Pope making a stunning save to deny Mohamed Salah and fellow substitute Roberto Firmino flicking an effort wide.\n\nBurnley's shock win lifts them up to 16th in the table, seven points clear of the relegation zone.\n• None Klopp takes blame but what has happened to Liverpool?\n\nJurgen Klopp said before the game he was \"not worried\" by his side's poor run, but the latest setback means this has now turned into a real problem for the Liverpool manager.\n\nAfter 19 games, Liverpool are out of form and out of confidence, failing to find the net in their last 440 minutes of top-flight action and awaiting their first league victory of 2021.\n\nThey looked to be hitting their stride on 19 December when they took apart Crystal Palace 7-0, but have not won in the league since and scored just a solitary league goal in that time, against relegation strugglers West Brom.\n\nTheir drop-off from the same stage last season is extraordinary - after 19 games last term the Reds were 13 points clear at the top with 55 points, but they have 21 fewer points now.\n\nAside from Pope's save to thwart Salah and stops from Origi and Trent Alexander-Arnold, Liverpool did not look a side who were threatening to find the net.\n\nThey had 72% possession but much of it was slow and ponderous, and although they had spaces out wide and put 30 crosses into the box, the resolute Burnley defenders headed and hacked clear every ball that came in.\n\nLiverpool won 18 of 19 league games at Anfield as they cantered to the title last term.\n\nBurnley were the spoilers on that occasion - earning a 1-1 draw in July 2020 - and they bettered that showing here with another solid and well-organised display.\n\nCaptain Mee had 14 clearances and made two tackles, while centre-back partner James Tarkowski contributed five interceptions and won the ball back four times.\n\nBurnley are a well-drilled outfit and know their limitations, happy to sit back and soak up the pressure before looking to take their chances on the counter-attack.\n\nThey had sniffs on the break but were unable to get the final ball right and while Barnes forced an excellent save out of Alisson, the assistant referee's flag would have ruled it out.\n\nThey remain the lowest scorers in the league with just 10 goals - level with bottom side Sheffield United - but their defensive solidity means they will always pose a threat, even to the biggest teams.\n\n'We dealt with the basics' - manager reaction\n\nBurnley boss Sean Dyche to Match of the Day: \"Performance, we had to work very hard, as you do in these places, be diligent and do your jobs - shape was good, energy was good.\n\n\"We had a golden chance, kept searching, but you have to deal with the basics and we did that very well.\n\n\"We were close last year, you get a feel of a performance and I said 'you are used to playing against these players, working without the ball, there's always a chance and you have to take it'. Barnsey sticks it in there, gets a toe, it's a penalty and he sticks it away very well.\"\n• None This was Burnley's second Premier League win away against the reigning champions (also v Chelsea in August 2017). Indeed, since the 2017-18 season, Burnley are the only side with two away league wins over the reigning English champions.\n• None Liverpool have gone four league games without scoring for the first time since May 2000. The Reds have had a total of 87 shots since Sadio Mane's 12th-minute strike against West Brom, 25 days ago.\n• None This is the first time a Jurgen Klopp side has gone four league games without scoring since his Mainz side did so in the Bundesliga from November to December 2006.\n• None Liverpool have gone five Premier League games without a win (D3 L2) for only the second time under Klopp (also from Jan-Feb 2017).\n• None Liverpool have conceded two penalty goals at Anfield in this season's Premier League (also Sander Berge for Sheff Utd); they had only conceded two penalty goals at the ground under Klopp before 2020-21.\n• None Liverpool had 27 shots without scoring against Burnley, the most they have had in a single league match without finding the net since April 2013 v Reading (28), and most at Anfield since April 2012 v West Brom (30).\n• None Ashley Barnes' penalty for Burnley was his first away goal in the Premier League in 11 appearances on the road, since netting against Watford back in November 2019.\n• None Since the start of last season, no goalkeeper has made more saves against a single opponent in the Premier League than Burnley's Nick Pope against Liverpool (19). Pope has made 14 saves in his last two games at Anfield, including six tonight.\n\nLiverpool have another big game on Sunday against rivals Manchester United in the FA Cup. That game is live on the BBC (17:00 GMT). Burnley travel to Fulham in the same competition on the same day (14:30).\n• None Offside, Burnley. Dwight McNeil tries a through ball, but Chris Wood is caught offside.\n• None Attempt blocked. Takumi Minamino (Liverpool) left footed shot from outside the box is blocked.\n• None Attempt missed. Dwight McNeil (Burnley) left footed shot from the left side of the box is close, but misses the top left corner. Assisted by Ashley Barnes.\n• None Attempt blocked. Roberto Firmino (Liverpool) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Trent Alexander-Arnold.\n• None Attempt missed. Trent Alexander-Arnold (Liverpool) right footed shot from the right side of the box misses to the left. Assisted by Sadio Mané with a cross.\n• None Joel Matip (Liverpool) is shown the yellow card for hand ball.\n• None Attempt blocked. Mohamed Salah (Liverpool) left footed shot from the right side of the box is blocked. Assisted by Sadio Mané.\n• None Goal! Liverpool 0, Burnley 1. Ashley Barnes (Burnley) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the bottom right corner.\n• None Penalty conceded by Alisson (Liverpool) after a foul in the penalty area.\n• None Attempt blocked. Sadio Mané (Liverpool) right footed shot from the left side of the box is blocked. Assisted by Andrew Robertson. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None You can stream five fourth-round games live on the BBC this weekend, including Liverpool's trip to Manchester United. Find out more here.", "There is a photograph of Kamala Harris, taken in 1986, while she was a student at Howard University.\n\nShe and two other friends, all shoulder pads and plaid, are smiling and laughing, a crowd behind them. It's a picture brimming with energy and hope.\n\nIt's been used a lot in telling the extraordinary story of her rise to become the first black and Asian American woman to be vice-president and the first person who attended one of America's HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) to get to such a position.\n\nBut this is the story of the other women in the photograph, her two best friends - Valarie Pippen and Karen Gibbs - as well as of others who might have been milling about in the background there.\n\nThis was the 1980s, when the children of America's civil rights generation came of age. Being at Howard University, an HBCU at a time when solidarity with the global anti-apartheid movement was reaching fever pitch and at the height of Reaganism, was a formative experience for many of them.\n\nNow they are about to witness one of their own become vice-president. What have their journeys been like and what does this moment feel like?\n\nHistorically Black Colleges, like Howard University, were founded in order to educate African Americans who were otherwise prohibited from attending college, after slavery.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nAlthough that has now changed, a core part of the Howard message remains its focus on cultivating black leaders - it is not just about academic achievement, but social activism too.\n\nKamala Harris has made clear the influence Howard University had on her career and life goals. Last week, on the anniversary of her sorority's founding date, she posted on Instagram, paying homage to her Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, and referring to her days at Howard, attending anti-apartheid marches and being part of the debate team: \"Howard taught me that while you will often find that you're the only one in the room who looks like you, or who has had the experiences you've had, you must remember: you are never alone.\"\n\nLike Ms Harris, I also went to Howard University and became a member of that same sorority decades later.\n\nI became intrigued by the stories of the other women and graduates who ventured out into the same world during the same time as Kamala.\n\nIn that photograph, Valarie Pippen is on the right and smiling with confidence at the camera.\n\nHer parents attended historically black colleges after moving north with the great migration, which was the movement over decades of millions of African Americans to the North from the South, where economic uncertainty and segregation prevailed. They settled in the Chicago region and forged successful careers.\n\nShe was led to Howard, specifically, after her older brother attended and brought home a yearbook that intrigued her.\n\nHoward had a festive celebratory atmosphere that the friends made the most of while they were there\n\n\"The culture was festive and lively yet focused on academic and cultural advancement of oppressed people,\" says Ms Pippen. \"We knew that our generation would make a difference with our success.\"\n\nMs Pippen says that at Howard University \"we all had more of a striving to do well, a striving to live with integrity and to make your mark on the world\".\n\nComing from a high-achieving and proud black family with high expectations of their children, she was brought up knowing that her college experience was going to be important.\n\nShe is now a healthcare consultant, and after graduating from Howard she attended medical school at Yale.\n\nShe recalls the commitment to academic excellence, the need to prove your worth out there in the world and how that also translated into many nights studying with her good friend Kamala.\n\n\"There was one year at Howard, we both stayed for summer school. We worked during the day, did night classes and we studied together afterwards. We did that for the whole summer and we had fun.\n\n\"She was born for the job. Her dedication - like mine - was to academics, being an all around good person and to integrity.\"\n\nIn the 1990s, 52% of black pharmacy recipients, 30% of dentistry degree recipients, and 27% of theology degree recipients were all educated at HBCUs.\n\nToday, the two oldest HBCU medical schools - Meharry Medical College and Howard University - are responsible for more than 80% of black doctors and dentists practising in the US.\n\nHBCUs have educated three-quarters of all black people holding a doctorate; three-quarters of all black officers in the armed forces; and four-fifths of all black federal judges, according to the US Department of Education.\n\nThe culture they fostered was hugely important for many ambitious and successful middle- and upper-class class black families going out into a world to become leaders in their field, within one generation of getting the right to vote.\n\nKaren Gibbs, pictured on the left in that photo, remains best friends with the vice-president elect and Valarie Pippen.\n\nShe is now an attorney and speaks of her time at Howard in the same way Kamala Harris has in the past.\n\nThere was \"a lot of black pride and a lot of black love\" in the Howard community, says Ms Gibbs.\n\n\"We had black professors who loved us. That was the beauty of going to Howard. They nurtured us, they groomed us. They were realistic to tell us what we would confront when we left Howard - but they equipped us to realise and achieve our dreams.\"\n\nThat environment was especially important as an escape from the realities of society.\n\n\"I was raised in a rural area in Delaware, and the people there were really racist. I had been called bad names by a lot of people, despite having a black family and smaller community filled with educators and proud of their roots,\" says Ms Gibbs.\n\nThat is one of the reasons that she wanted to attend Howard University, to become a civil rights lawyer. She made the move so that she could be surrounded by \"love\" and \"support\".\n\n\"It was never a matter if I would go to an HBCU,\" it was just a matter of which she would go to.\n\nMs Gibbs and Ms Pippen's experience at Howard University strikes a chord with others who were also there in the 1980s.\n\nThey speak of the open fostering of social awareness and political activism in movements happening off campus.\n\nBeing in the nation's capital, Howard in particular had a front-row seat to some memorable episodes in politics.\n\nThe debate team in 1981 at Howard University. Kamala Harris was one of the few women to join the club.\n\nDexter Cole, a Howard alumnus and now top executive at TV One, told the BBC that \"our parents actively participated in the civil rights movements and were at the forefront, and we came to Howard with a sense of commitment to not only improve the lives of ourselves, but others as well\".\n\nAcross the nation, HBCUs were training a generation who would have a large impact on the world, and the progression of the broader African-American community.\n\n\"We understood that we were agents of change.\"\n\nMr Cole explained that \"social unrest was very prevalent, but as a student body we knew that we had a seat at the table because of those we saw who went before us\".\n\n\"I remember marching on Capitol Hill on the National Mall. There was a group of students going to protest to make Martin Luther King Jr's birthday a national holiday, and now I look there is a memorial just where I marched.\n\n\"We knew what our rights were and we were determined to invoke our right. That's why there were so many of us active in the anti-apartheid movement - we saw it play out in the US,\" says Ms Gibbs.\n\n\"It was a time when a lot of people from the era transcended into important places in different parts of society,\" says Lita Rosario-Richardson.\n\nMs Rosario-Richardson is currently an entertainment lawyer. On campus, she recruited Ms Harris on to the debate team.\n\n\"The election of Kamala Harris has really made crystal clear that Howard prepares you for anything,\" she adds.\n\nAlthough it is no surprise to those who knew Kamala Harris that she is now the vice-president of the United States, it feels like a vindication for their own personal journeys and the philosophy they took forward with them into the wider world.\n\n\"It was instilled that with your education comes a responsibility to improve the world - specifically our own people. And, we see that that has benefited everyone in America.\n\n\"Kamala is a child of desegregation, like myself. Her nomination seemed historically fit, and she's the right person for it,\" Ms Rosario-Richardson adds.\n\nDexter Cole is now a top executive at TV One\n\n\"Alumni like Thurgood Marshall - the first black Supreme Court Justice - who attended Howard laid the framework.\"\n\nEven during their time as students, these alumni felt that they were connected to greatness and expected to make big strides in the world.\n\nIt was not a feeling confined to Kamala Harris. The stories of these women show many have become movers and shakers in their own fields.\n\n\"All this has come full circle,\" says Andrea Holmes, a graduate who is now a marketing executive.\n\n\"The vice-presidency is where she belongs. She is the role model of the world and to all women and little girls.\"\n\nThe original photograph of Kamala, Valarie and Karen was taken in 1986 at Howard University's famous Homecoming.\n\nAt most schools in the US, homecoming is an annual tradition marked by an American football game and partying. At Howard University, homecoming is marked by a football game as well as a week of events where all generations come back to meet and celebrate. Notable graduates as well as celebrities and artists come to perform, join discussions, and be part of the week.\n\nAs a graduate, I know Homecoming remains a highly anticipated annual event, an experience like no other. That picture captures the energy, friendship and ambition of a group of women, at Howard in an electric era, who felt capable of anything.\n\nValarie Pippen remembers the moment: \"The weekend was truly exhilarating, and you can see from the looks and smiles on our faces we were having the time of our lives.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMore than 2,000 homes in parts of Manchester are being evacuated due to flooding caused by Storm Christoph.\n\nThe Environment Agency (EA) has issued two severe flood warnings, which means danger to life, for the Didsbury and Northenden areas.\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Nick Bailey of Greater Manchester Police has warned some of those affected would \"be Covid-positive or isolating at home\".\n\nHe said the government was working to ensure it was \"totally prepared\" for floods \"in every part of the UK\".\n\nA major incident was earlier declared for the Greater Manchester area where up to 3,000 properties were feared to be at risk.\n\nMr Johnson urged people not to stay in their homes if they were told to evacuate.\n\n\"If you are told to leave your home then you should do so.\n\n\"People may think this is a minor issue at the moment, still relevantly minor by standards of previous floods, but never underestimate the suffering, the misery, that floods can cause people.\"\n\nUnder government restrictions due to the current national lockdown people are allowed to leave their homes to escape harm.\n\nIn an alert to those affected, ACC Bailey said: \"A basin at Didsbury to take water from the Mersey is full. It will over-top in the next few hours. As a result we will be issuing a flood warning to homes.\n\n\"This will be through texted flood alerts to some people, and police officers, PCSOs, firefighters, and volunteers will be knocking on doors.\"\n\nHe said police will be supported by North West Ambulance, the British Red Cross and St John Ambulance.\n\n\"I think it's important to stress that if you are contacted and advised to evacuate then we would strongly urge you to do so,\" he added.\n\nWater levels in the area were expected to peak at about 23:00 GMT on Wednesday.\n\nA major incident has also been declared in Derbyshire, where authorities believe a small number of evacuations are \"likely\" on Thursday morning, when the River Derwent is expected to peak.\n\nCounty council leader Barry Lewis said it could rival levels seen in November 2019, depending on the weather overnight.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The PM says the government is making sure it is “totally prepared in every part of the UK” for flooding after Storm Christoph.\n\nSpeaking after a Cobra emergency meeting on Wednesday, Mr Johnson said work was under way to ensure transport and energy networks, and local council services, were prepared.\n\nHe added that work was also taking place to ensure the necessary numbers of sandbags were available.\n\n\"We want to make sure that we are totally prepared in every part of the UK for flooding, because it is coming on top of the stress people are already under fighting Covid,\" he said.\n\n\"We looked at particularly Manchester, we've got a situation potentially developing there,\" Mr Johnson said.\n\n\"We are looking at a pattern of rainfall possibly not as bad at the end of this week, maybe worse next week.\"\n\nPeople in Greater Manchester have also been advised not to travel.\n\nStephen Rhodes, from Transport from Greater Manchester, said there was disruption across the network.\n\n\"Let's work together and not put our emergency services and the NHS - who are already working extremely hard due to the Covid-19 pandemic - under any more pressure,\" he said.\n\nIn Merseyside, the M57 has been closed in both directions between junction 6 and 7 due to flooding.\n\nThe Environment Agency has issued more than 100 flood warnings, meaning flooding is expected and immediate action required, while there are also more than 200 flood alerts, meaning flooding is possible.\n\nRiver levels have risen rapidly in parts of northern England\n\nThe North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands have been preparing for widespread flooding following the Met Office's amber weather warning for heavy rain until midday Thursday.\n\nThe Met Office said some isolated areas could see up to 200mm (7.8in).\n\nSandbags have been distributed as Storm Christoph batters parts of England\n\n\"Once again the government's response to inevitable flood events has been slow and uncoordinated,\" the Barnsley East MP said.\n\n\"We must ensure councils are supported to protect people, businesses, and local communities, and that all of the necessary precautions are also in place to protect those fighting the floods in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Sheila Evans was among those to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine at the Al Abbas Mosque in Birmingham\n\nNearly two million people in the UK have received their first dose of a Covid vaccine in the past week, government figures show.\n\nBy the end of Tuesday 4.61 million people had received their initial jab, up from 2.64 million the week before.\n\nBut Boris Johnson warned there were \"unquestionably going to be a tough few weeks\" while the vaccine was rolled out and urged people to observe lockdown.\n\nSpeaking during a visit to flood-hit Didsbury in Manchester, the prime minister said it was still \"too early\" to say when some lockdown restrictions could be lifted in England.\n\nHe said figures from an Imperial College London survey showed the new variant of the virus to be \"not more deadly but it is much more contagious and the numbers are very great\".\n\nThe study suggests there was a rise in infections in the community at the start of the latest lockdown in England.\n\nMeanwhile, NHS England figures show one in 10 major hospital trusts had no spare adult critical care beds last week.\n\nThe UK recorded another all-time high of daily coronavirus deaths on Wednesday. A further 1,820 people died within 28 days of a positive Covid test, according to government figures - taking the total number of deaths by that measure to 93,290.\n\nSixty-five new vaccination centres have opened in England, including a mosque in Birmingham and a cinema in Aylesbury.\n\nTwo million jabs a week are needed for the government to achieve its target of offering a vaccine to all over 70s, the extremely clinical vulnerable and health and care workers by mid-February.\n\nGiving a statement in the Commons, Health Secretary Mr Hancock said the country had an \"immense infrastructure in place that, day by day, is protecting the vulnerable and giving hope to us all\".\n\nDescribing this as a \"huge feat\", he said the government was making \"good progress\" towards its target.\n\nAsked about difficulties in getting vaccines to rural areas and whether the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine could be prioritised for these as it is easier to store, Mr Hancock said the challenge was that supply was \"lumpy\", with manufacturers working \"as fast as possible\".\n\nShadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said new variants of the virus showed vaccination needed to go \"further and faster\".\n\nHe asked if there was a contingency plan in place in case vaccines needed to be redesigned to contain mutations.\n\nMr Hancock said the early indications were that the new variant was dealt with by the vaccine \"just as much as the old variant\".\n\nHe also said 63% of residents in elderly care homes had now received a vaccine.\n\nFormer Conservative health secretary Jeremy Hunt, who is now chairman of the Common's Health Select Committee, asked about establishing \"quarantine hotels\" to combat new strains, as well as whether there should be further restrictions on household mixing outside bubbles and mandating FFP2 masks in shops and on public transport.\n\nMr Hancock said the clinical advice was that the current guidelines on personal protective equipment (PPE) were \"right and appropriate\" and said \"very significant measures\" had been brought in for international travel.\n\nIn Northern Ireland more than 160,000 people have received a first vaccine dose, while in Wales, where more than 175,000 people have received a jab, people waiting for theirs have been urged to show \"patience\" and \"perspective\".\n\nScotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon insisted her country's vaccine programme was not lagging behind, during First Minister's Questions on Wednesday.\n\nIn England the rollout of the vaccine started with people aged 80 and over. In some regions where the majority of these have been vaccinated, the programmes are now moving on to the over 70s.\n\nHome Secretary Priri Patel, who will lead a Downing Street press conference later, said ministers were working to ensure police and other front-line workers are moved up the priority list, while Education Secretary Gavin Williamson told BBC Breakfast he hoped teachers and support staff could be moved up the list.\n\nMeanwhile, pumps and sandbags were brought in to protect supplies of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine from the risk of flood water at a warehouse in Wrexham, north-east Wales.\n\nYoung people in Wales have been asked to share their experiences of the pandemic in a survey by the nation's Children's Commissioner.", "Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned there will be \"tough weeks to come\" as the UK reported another all-time high of daily coronavirus deaths.\n\nA further 1,820 people have died within 28 days of a positive Covid test, according to government figures.\n\nIt means the total number of deaths by that measure is now 93,290.\n\nMr Johnson said there was now a \"race against time\" to vaccinate the vulnerable but he hoped there would be a \"real difference\" by spring.\n\nIn an interview with broadcasters, he said the high number of deaths was \"appalling\" and a reflection of the peak infection rates seen a couple of weeks ago.\n\nHe said: \"I must warn people there will be tough weeks to come, but as the vaccine goes in and that programme accelerates, there will be, I think, a real difference by spring.\"\n\nJust under half of the newly reported deaths occurred on Tuesday, while a further quarter took place on Monday or Sunday with the remainder last week or even earlier.\n\nThe previous highest number of daily deaths was the 1,610 reported on Tuesday.\n\nSome 4,609,740 people have now received the first dose of a vaccine - a rise of 343,163 from yesterday.\n\nThere were also a further 38,905 cases, with 3,887 more patients admitted into hospital.\n\nIt is the second consecutive day deaths have hit a new high.\n\nThat, sadly, was to be expected as it is a reflection of the surge in cases seen during December.\n\nIt takes a week or two from the point of infection for someone to become seriously ill - and they can then spend some time in hospital. The high number is also a result of delays reporting deaths - a quarter happened last week or even before.\n\nBut make no mistake the death toll is going up. If you look at the average over the course of a week, the numbers being reported at the moment are twice what they were just two weeks ago.\n\nHowever, we also know they should soon start coming down. Daily infections are falling, with signs lockdown is taking effect. For four days in a row new diagnoses have been below 40,000 - after averaging 60,000 at the start of year.\n\nIt could be another week or so before we start to see the impact of that in the death figures. The hope then would be that within a few weeks we could start seeing a more rapid fall as the impact of the vaccination programme begins to bite.\n\nBut before that happens the daily totals reported could, sadly, go even higher.\n\nNew coronavirus cases are down by 21.5% over the last seven days. But the number of patients being admitted into hospital in the same period has not yet fallen (up by 0.5%).\n\nThe prime minister said it looked as though infection rates across the country overall might now be peaking or flattening, but he cautioned that \"they're not flattening very fast\".\n\nAsked if daily deaths would continue to rise, he said it was \"difficult to predict\".\n\nHe added: \"We must hope that by getting the numbers of daily infections down in the way that perhaps has been happening since the lockdown that will feed through into a reduction in deaths as well.\n\n\"But I must stress that we have tough weeks to come now as we roll out the vaccine.\n\n\"The light will only really begin to dawn as we get those vaccination numbers up.\"\n\nEarlier, the government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, told Sky News: \"This is very, very bad at the moment, with enormous pressure, and in some cases it looks like a war zone in terms of the things that people are having to deal with.\"\n\nHe said there was \"light at the end of the tunnel\" in the form of the vaccination programme.\n\nBut he said vaccines were \"not going to do the heavy lifting for us at the moment, anywhere near it\".\n\nMilitary personnel are going to be deployed to a number of hospitals to help staff cope with high numbers of cases, including in Northern Ireland and Exeter.\n\nAnd this week 10 hospital trusts across England consistently reported having no spare adult critical care beds.\n\nIn other developments, Home Secretary Priti Patel said ministers were working to ensure police and other frontline workers were moved up the priority list for the Covid vaccine.\n\nMr Johnson said the government must rely on advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, but wanted front-line workers to be immunised \"as soon as possible\".\n\nHe also said the vaccination programme remained \"on track\" despite \"constraints on supply\".", "Politicians in pearls, the colour purple and warm woollen mittens - these are just a few of Washington's favourite things from the 2021 Inauguration.\n\nWith America's leaders in the spotlight on the inauguration - and world - stage, sometimes what they wear can say more than their speeches.\n\nDC-based fashion consultant Lauren Rothman says Americans have always taken an interest in what political leaders don for inaugural celebrations. And in 2021, with an ongoing pandemic and economic crisis as well as the swearing-in of the first female vice-president, things feel \"even more loaded\".\n\nIt's all about optics for the politically fashion-minded, says Ms Rothman, who helps style politicians for events including inaugurations past.\n\nSo let's see how outspoken this year's inauguration crowd really was, from the Bidens to Bernie Sanders - with a little help from some real fashion experts.\n\nVice-President Kamala Harris' purple ensemble has already made an impact.\n\n\"Symbolically, it's a bipartisan colour because it marries [Republican] red and [Democratic] blue,\" says Ms Rothman, noting a number of elected officials or spouses had opted for purple today.\n\nBut that's not the only reason purple has a special place for US women in politics. The suffragettes often wore the colour in the 1900s while campaigning for women's right to vote.\n\nProfessor Elka Stevens, coordinator of the fashion design programme at Howard University, also notes it's a colour of significance in the black community - one tied to the Christian experience as well. Ms Harris' pearl necklace also made reference to a tradition in her Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the oldest all-black sorority in the US.\n\nAdd it all up and Ms Harris' choice of pearls and a purple sharp-cut Christopher John Rogers coat was \"an excellent first building block on what the legacy is of how to look like a woman in power\", Ms Rothman says.\n\nBoth Mrs Biden and Ms Harris also took care to choose emerging US brands for their inaugural looks. Ms Harris' outfit, from head-to-toe, showed off African-American designers.\n\nAnd we can't forget Doug Emhoff either, America's \"first second gentleman\".\n\n\"He chose to do everything that he should, which is to not distract and perfectly fit in,\" says Rothman.\n\nWe can't discuss political fashion without bringing up Michelle Obama.\n\nHer purple Sergio Hudson sweater and palazzo pants plus coat look, along with perfectly curled hair, did not disappoint fans of the former first lady.\n\n\"It's a different dress code and different expectation for women who are first ladies versus people who aren't, like women who are elected,\" says Ms Rothman.\n\nFrom baring her arms to wearing both high-end and High Street fashion, Mrs Obama was \"legacy-making\" in a way that hearkened back to Nancy Reagan and Jackie Kennedy, Ms Rothman says.\n\nShe also put many \"independent and ethnic American designers\" on the map during her eight years in the White House.\n\nNewly former First Lady Melania Trump, too, had a clear style, often spotted in sleek looks from well-known brands (think Chanel, Hermès).\n\nOne of her favourite designers was French-American Hervé Pierre, but Prof Stevens also notes she faced a challenge dressing all-American as many US labels said they would not dress her.\n\nFor her final look of the day, Melania swapped out the all-black suit she left the White House in for a Gucci dress with a bold orange print.\n\n\"The curtain is down and she's onto the next phase of her life,\" says Ms Rothman of the sharp contrast. \"I think that's what she's using her clothing to signal: that DC is over.\n\nHe may not win the best-dressed award any time soon, but veteran Senator Bernie Sanders certainly won Twitter with his extra large mittens.\n\nMr Sanders' pair of eye-catching woolly mittens were given to him two years ago by a Vermont schoolteacher who made them from repurposed sweaters and recycled plastic bottles. Those, coupled with a snap of him alone in a crossed-arm pose, made for prime meme fodder.\n\n\"What we love about it is that it's so authentically Bernie,\" says Ms Rothman.\n\nWhen asked for his thoughts on all the stir his inauguration look caused, Mr Sanders simply said: \"In Vermont we dress warm...and we're not so concerned about good fashion. We want to keep warm. And that's what I did today.\"\n\nInauguration 2021 featured performances from Jennifer Lopez (in a crisp white ensemble) and Lady Gaga.\n\nBut it was Gaga's custom black-and-red Schiaparelli gown that stole the show or, more specifically, the large golden dove-shaped brooch she wore atop it.\n\nAside from the Hunger Games comparisons, the almost operatic outfit served another fun purpose in Ms Rothman's eyes.\n\n\"She brought the inaugural ball to the stage in a year where you're not going to get all of the dress up, the ball gowns that we have come to look at and adore and criticise.\"\n\nYouth poet laureate Amanda Gorman was another star on today's stage.\n\nThe self-described \"skinny black girl, descended from slaves and raised by a single mother\", touched on many heavy themes in her verses, but her outfit was a breath of fresh air.\n\nYellow is a colour of hope, energy, light. And her bright red Prada headband was a bold complement. To Prof Stevens, it was almost crown-like.\n\n\"It also honed attention on her hair, because no one else had that particular hairstyle. And we know that hair can be political as well.\"\n\nOur last noteworthy youthful garb of the day was Ella Emhoff, stepdaughter to the vice-president.\n\nHer dainty white collar atop a bejewelled plaid Miu Miu coat was particularly striking - or in the words of Teen Vogue, \"just *chef's kiss*\" - and to Prof Stevens, reminiscent of late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.\n\n\"I really thought about our democracy, justice, the collars [Ginsburg] wore and the messages she would send. I think this was [also] an ode to femininity.\"\n\nAnd as for her brother Cole's look? Prof Stevens' takeaway was: \"You need some gloves, young man.\"\n\nAnd last but not least, let's consider the new president and first lady.\n\nProf Stevens says the political dress mirrored a desire to project comfort and to reassure the nation that US democracy is safe and its way of life is \"going back to something familiar\" despite Covid-19.\n\nThere may not have been anything ground-breaking in Mr Biden's Ralph Lauren suit; perhaps the more interesting aspect is the way he wore it.\n\n\"As a Washington insider he's been wearing suits for decades,\" says Ms Rothman. \"He showed that he knows what works.\"\n\nAlso notable with both Biden's ensembles today: the colour blue. Prof Stevens notes that blue is recognised as a colour of trustworthiness; of stability; of confidence, especially for men.\n\nAs for Jill Biden's custom-made, Swarovski-crystal-accented aquamarine coat from the up-and-coming New York Makarian label?\n\nBoth Prof Stevens and Ms Rothman say it signalled responsibility and modesty.\n\n\"We already know [the Bidens] are very united, but it signalled that they're here and ready to do the work,\" Ms Rothman says.", "More than 100 medically-trained military personnel will be deployed\n\nMembers of the military are to be brought in to help medical staff in Northern Ireland in the fight against Covid-19.\n\nHealth Minister Robin Swann has asked the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to help out, primarily at a number of hospitals across NI.\n\nMore than 100 medically-trained military personnel will be deployed.\n\nThose brought in will assist nursing staff and help on the wards in a move designed to ease the pressure on staff.\n\nIn the past, the use of the military in Northern Ireland has provoked controversy.\n\nWhile military help has already been used during the pandemic to transport equipment and patients, this is the first time military staff will be used in hospitals.\n\nIt is thought the first military staff will be made available as early as next week.\n\nMr Swann said it would have been an abdication of responsibility if he did not avail of help from the military.\n\nHe said while coronavirus cases were lower than two weeks ago, the challenge posed remained \"intense\" and intensive care pressures were expected to increase further in the next eight to 10 days.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Brandon Lewis This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHe confirmed that a request for military assistance for NI's health service had been accepted by the MoD.\n\nThe health minister thanked the MoD for the Military Aid to the Civil Authorities agreement, which is being provided in other UK regions.\n\n\"The armed forces have provided invaluable support in this pandemic, including aeromedical evacuation, real-estate and ongoing logistical planning,\" he said.\n\n\"Our hospitals are under immense pressure and an additional staffing complement will be very welcome on the front line.\n\n\"This is a health decision and I am confident it will be supported on that basis.\"\n\nNI Secretary Brandon Lewis tweeted: \"Battling #COVID19 is a national effort. I'm pleased that 110 medically-trained personnel from our Armed Forces will support health and social care teams across Northern Ireland in their vital work on the frontline against coronavirus.\"\n\nThe move has been welcomed by the Democratic Unionist Party.\n\nWhen it was announced last April that the health minster had made requests for military help, Sinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill said Mr Swann had taken that decision unilaterally.\n\nHowever, she later said her party would not rule out any measure necessary to save lives.\n\nReacting to the latest request for help, Sinn Féin said its priority throughout the pandemic had been to save lives, keep people safe and protect the health service.\n\n\"The Minister of Health has made a request for staffing support from the British Ministry of Defence,\" the party said.\n\n\"We do not rule out any measures to do so, and any effort to make the threat posed by Covid-19 into a green and orange issue is divisive and a distraction.\"\n\nAs of Wednesday, there were 832 people in hospital in Northern Ireland with coronavirus, of whom 67 were in intensive care, with 57 ventilated.\n\nA further 22 people with coronavirus died, bringing the Department of Health's total to 1,671 while there were 905 new cases.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland, 61 new Covid-19-related deaths were recorded on Wednesday, bringing the country's death toll to 2,768.\n\nA further 2,488 new cases of the virus were also confirmed by the Irish Department for Health.\n\nSpeaking at Stormont's press briefing on Wednesday, Mr Swann confirmed the executive would review the current lockdown regulations on Thursday.\n\nNorthern Ireland began a six-week lockdown on 26 December, in a bid to bring the virus under control.\n\nMinisters promised to review the regulations after four weeks.\n\nMr Swann said he would not pre-empt the outcome of Thursday's meeting but confirmed he would bring recommendations from his officials to the meeting.\n\n\"This is not the time to open floodgates or take premature decisions that would lead to another spike in cases,\" he added.\n\n\"We must stay the course.\"\n\nThe minister also provided the latest update on the number of vaccinations - 160,396 doses have now been administered in NI, with 21,690 of those second doses.\n\nHe said he understood the frustration of some people that they were still waiting to hear when their elderly or vulnerable relatives would receive their vaccine, but he urged patience.\n\n\"We cannot go faster than supplies allow,\" he said.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Relatives of some older people in Wales called the vaccinations \"poorly organised\"\n\nA housebound 84-year-old woman said she was told she may have to wait up to two months to have her coronavirus vaccine if she could not get to her GP surgery.\n\nStuart Wilson said his mother Julia was immobile and she required two people with a hoist to get her up.\n\nHe said her surgery in Sketty, Swansea, called on Tuesday offering a jab but they were told it would take time to arrange a house visit.\n\nWelsh Government said a mobile service could take a jab to the housebound.\n\nDr Chris Johns, from Sketty Medical Centre, said: \"I can give assurances that no housebound patient is being asked to wait this long for their vaccination.\n\n\"This is a massive undertaking by GPs and we would ask older patients, if they are mobile, to attend one of our vaccination clinics instead.\"\n\nHe said teams have already made close to 200 house calls to vaccinate those unable to come to the surgery and over the next few weeks GPs would continue to go to patients' homes \"where necessary\".\n\nMore than 175,000 vaccines have been administered across Wales so far.\n\nUnder Welsh Government plans, the goal is for everyone over the age of 70 to be offered a vaccination by mid-February.\n\nMr Wilson said the call left his mother \"concerned and distressed\" so with her permission he spoke to the GP surgery himself.\n\nShe has been with the surgery, which is the Sketty branch of Sketty and Killay Surgeries, for about five years, and they are familiar with her condition as she receives home visits for flu jabs.\n\n\"What I can't understand is how they can invite somebody for a vaccination and then turn around and say because you're housebound, they can't give it yet,\" he added.\n\n\"I'm not asking for preferential treatment; we're not asking to be bumped up the list. I was disgusted by the total lack of information.\"\n\nMr Wilson said he knew of three other cases where patients have been given the same information.\n\nHe said disabled people should receive equal treatment. He has also taken the issue up with the disability rights association, Disability Wales, who have been asked to comment.\n\nA Welsh Government spokesperson said: \"Those who cannot attend their appointment or cannot travel to the vaccination venue can let your health board know through the NHS booking system. They will then be offered another appointment on another day or at a more convenient location.\n\n\"There are also plans in place for people who are housebound and for care homes, which will mean the vaccine can be safely taken to them using a mobile service if they are unable to attend a GP surgery or mass vaccination centre.\"\n\nMeanwhile, the Welsh Government has been criticised over the speed of rolling out vaccines to the over 80s age group.\n\nSteve Hockridge's 92-year-old mother Sheila suffers from Alzheimer's disease and lives alone in Cardiff.\n\nHe contacted her surgery but was told they had \"no information\" about when she would receive a vaccine.\n\n\"My confidence in the Welsh Government has been knocked,\" he said.\n\n\"After all the clarity during this pandemic, with this area they seem to be very, very secretive, giving different messages [which are] quite often conflicting.\"\n\nIn Wrexham, Helen Field said her mother, Eileen, 94, was also still waiting to hear about her vaccine.\n\n\"Our relations over the border in the Wirral area who are in a similar age group of over 80s and 90s have all received their second vaccine,\" she said.\n\n\"The difference is quite alarming and I just want to know what's going on in Wales and why they are so slow in putting the vaccines out?\n\n\"Nobody can seem to give us any information and it seems to be so poorly organised.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government spokesperson said: \"Every day in Wales we are speeding up the vaccination programme.\n\n\"Thousands more people are receiving their first dose of the Covid vaccine and more clinics are opening with 45 vaccination centres operating or due to be operating shortly, and more than 250 GP surgeries being involved by the end of this month. As of 20 January, more than 175,816 people in Wales have been vaccinated.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The company said its milk processing was highly automated with no risk to the products caused by the virus outbreak\n\nOne worker at a dairy has died after contracting coronavirus and 95 others are self-isolating.\n\nMuller Milk & Ingredients said 47 staff members who work at the company's dairy near Bridgwater, Somerset, have tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nIt said it was now testing all 300 workers at its site in North Petherton.\n\nA spokesman for the firm said the safety of its products had not been affected by the outbreak at its factory.\n\nIt was working with Public Health England and the council to help with mass testing, he added.\n\nThe employee was taken to hospital but died. The firm said its thoughts were with the worker's family and friends.\n\nProduction has since been reduced at the site.\n\nThe spokesman added: \"It is important to stress that fresh milk processing is highly automated ensuring no risk to products, with our Bridgwater facility one of the most modern dairies in the UK.\n\n\"As we have done throughout the pandemic, we are placing the safety of our employees first and following best practice as set down by the Health and Safety Executive.\n\n\"Standard measures in place include the use of facemasks, distancing, enhanced deep cleaning and hygiene, underpinned by a programme of e-learning, information and audits to ensure compliance and awareness of the measures.\"\n\nSomerset County Council said it was working closely with Public Health England and the factory and that further testing was being done throughout Thursday.\n\n\"The [council's] rapid outbreak testing team is carrying out further workforce testing today, for workers who were not present on Monday shifts.\n\n\"The testing on Monday identified a number of staff who were positive but asymptomatic, who are now isolating,\" a spokesman said.", "Gabriel is an ardent 'Latino for Trump' who is active in New York Republican circles. He wishes the Biden/Harris administration well but doesn't believe Democrats really want unity and thinks they'll reverse a lot of good Trump policies.\n\nHow did Joe Biden's inaugural speech on unity sit with you?\n\nI caught bits and pieces of the inauguration, but I did not watch the speech. I'll give it a watch when I'm not as busy. Hopefully, his message is not like what we saw on 6 January, when he tried to lambast people as white supremacists for showing up at the Capitol, because that will just alienate people.\n\nThis country has come a long way in terms of race relations and, if we really want unity, let's regain the sense of what an American is. An American isn't white, black or Jewish; it is a person within the United States that takes part in our republic.\n\nWhat do you think of the executive actions he is taking today?\n\nI knew Biden would come out swinging while he stills holds the majority in the legislative branch. It's certainly a statement in the same vein as President Trump's first few days of office, but I think it's horrible. As someone of Hispanic descent, the idea of potentially granting 11 million immigrants citizenship is a slap in the face to everyone who came through the legal process.\n\nJoining the Paris climate agreement again is widely regarded as a farce, even by some ecologists, because nations that are members in the agreement didn't actually hit their targets. The removal of the Keystone Pipeline is not only going to cost people jobs but it could potentially increase our carbon footprint. When it comes to the WHO, they failed us during the Covid pandemic. It's all just smoke and mirrors to undo what President Trump did and stick it in the face of Republicans.", "The former Western Daily Press journalist lived in the property from 1970 until 1994\n\nAn \"inspiring\" house previously owned by fantasy writer Sir Terry Pratchett has been put on the market.\n\nThe creator of the Discworld series lived in the 18th Century property, called Gaze Cottage, in the village of Rowberrow, Somerset, from 1970 until 1994.\n\nSir Terry died aged 66 in 2015, eight years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.\n\nHe wrote more than 70 books during his career and completed his final book in 2014.\n\nAt the turn of the century, Sir Terry was Britain's second most-read author, beaten only by JK Rowling.\n\nIn August 2007, it was reported he had suffered a stroke, but the following December he announced that he had been diagnosed with a very rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's disease.\n\nThe fitted kitchen is in the older half of the house\n\nRuth Treasure-Smith, from Robin King Estate Agent, said: \"He wrote most of his most famous novels in that house in the 80s.\n\n\"The house must have been inspiring. The current owner purchased the property from Terry Pratchett and has lived at the house since.\"\n\nShe said he had received letters to the house addressed to the \"Hogfather\", a quirky and satirical character from the Death collection in the Discworld series.\n\nThe sitting room has an inglenook fireplace complete with bread oven\n\nThe house is being sold at a guide price of £800,000\n\nThe first floor houses the master bedroom which overlooks the garden\n\nThe property has four bedrooms\n\nThe cottage sits on a plot comprising almost a third of an acre\n\nFollow BBC West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: bristol@bbc.co.uk", "More than 100 medically-trained military personnel will be deployed\n\nNI's largest healthcare union has said it has not objected to military personnel being brought in to help medical staff deal with Covid-19.\n\nHowever, Unison said it had questions over the move and there had \"disappointingly\" been no consultation.\n\nAn initial statement from the union on the subject was criticised by some politicians.\n\nUlster Unionist leader Steve Aiken described it as \"appallingly inappropriate\".\n\nA new statement issued on social media, from the union's regional secretary Patricia McKeown, said the first statement had been \"misunderstood\".\n\nSpeaking to Good Morning Ulster, she acknowledged the initial statement had caused \"stress and hurt\" to Unison members and apologised for that.\n\nHealth Minister Robin Swann has asked the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to help out, primarily at a number of hospitals across NI.\n\nMore than 100 medically-trained military personnel will be deployed.\n\nIn the union's initial statement, issued on Wednesday, it said it would ask Mr Swann for \"detailed reasons\" for the move.\n\nIt said this would include \"seeking information as to what other avenues of support have been sought, such as securing additional staffing from private sector healthcare providers\".\n\nHowever, following criticism, Ms McKeown said in a new statement on Thursday morning that the union was \"happy to clarify\" its position.\n\n\"To be absolutely clear, Unison has not objected to assistance from military personnel.\"\n\nShe added: \"In our experience the deployment of military personnel into public services is a decision taken as a last resort.\n\n\"We were immediately concerned that a request for aid of this nature indicates a crisis that is moving out of control.\n\n\"This is why it is important that we know in advance what options are being explored.\"\n\nThe union said it was important to get detailed information on how, when and where external personnel would be deployed and what the management and accountability structures will be in place for them.\n\nSteve Aiken described the first Unison statement as appallingly inappropriate\n\nSpeaking on Radio Ulster's Good Morning Ulster on Thursday, Ms McKeown said: \"We put a statement out last night, it said what we were going to do, but it didn't say why we were going to do it.\n\n\"That caused stress and hurt to our members and I am very, very sorry for that. That's why we corrected it.\"\n\nShe added that if military personnel were being brought in \"it means that all options have been exhausted, there's a big decision facing us now and that decision is a stronger lockdown\".\n\nThe earlier statement from the union, issued on Wednesday night, had been criticised by some politicians.\n\nUlster Unionist leader Steve Aiken said: \"Judging by the number of healthcare workers who have contacted me tonight they are absolutely incredulous at the Unison statement this evening.\n\n\"Getting help is what is needed - time for Unison to withdraw its appallingly inappropriate remarks.\"\n\nDUP assembly member Jonathan Buckley said: \"This statement from Unison is extremely disappointing and is out of step with both Unison's own members and the wider public.\n\n\"I have already been contacted by health service staff making clear that this does not represent their views.\"\n\nHis party colleague Paul Frew tweeted: \"Utterly appalling. A lot of anger tonight for a union that is supposed to support its membership.\"\n\nSpeaking on Good Morning Ulster, West Belfast People Before Profit assembly member Gerry Carroll said: \"We all recognise that we're in a really desperate situation, a really difficult situation.\n\n\"But people want to see the health service expanded permanently and not just a short-term fix which people have questioned on a number of grounds.\"\n\nHowever, Ulster Unionist Doug Beattie said nurses and doctors were exhausted.\n\n\"What we're really talking about here is a surge of some personnel in order to support out frontline nurses who are dead on their feet,\" he said.\n\n\"The here and now is about saving lives.\"\n\nOn Wednesday, Sinn Féin responded to Mr Swann's decision by saying it would not \"rule out\" any measures that help save lives and that \"any effort to make the threat posed by Covid-19 into an orange and green issue is divisive and a distraction\".\n\nThe chief executive of the Belfast Health Trust, Dr Cathy Jack, told Stormont's health committee that the move would ensure staff can continue to deliver care to as many patients as possible.\n\nShe said the military personnel are \"band 4 medically-trained technicians\" who will \"be working under normal management structures\".\n\n\"This is another group of highly-trained individuals that will support staff and I welcome this.\"\n\nDr Jack said discussions were \"ongoing\" about how private health care providers could help in this phase of the pandemic.\n\nShe said a small number of private lists were being used for surgeries with low-risk cancers and more would be freed up in March \"to allow us to try and catch up on the backlog\".\n\nThe Military Aid to the Civil Authorities (MACA) request means armed forces staff will assist nurses and help on the wards in a move designed to ease the pressure on staff.\n\nIt is thought the first military staff will be made available as early as next week.\n\nMr Swann said the Army has previously carried out pandemic roles in Northern Ireland with \"aeromedical evacuation, real-estate and ongoing logistical planning\".\n\nThe health minister added it would have been an abdication of responsibility if he did not avail of help from the military.\n\nHe said while coronavirus cases were lower than two weeks ago, the challenge posed remained \"intense\" and intensive care pressures were expected to increase further in the next eight to 10 days.\n\nAs of Wednesday, there were 832 people in hospital in Northern Ireland with coronavirus, of whom 67 were in intensive care, with 57 ventilated.\n\nA further 22 people with coronavirus died, bringing the Department of Health's total to 1,671 while there were 905 new cases.", "An algorithm is trained to pick out an elephant against a complex backdrop such as a forest\n\nAt first, the satellite images appear to be of grey blobs in a forest of green splotches - but, on closer inspection, those blobs are revealed as elephants wandering through the trees.\n\nAnd scientists are using these images to count African elephants from space.\n\nThe pictures come from an Earth-observation satellite orbiting 600km (372 miles) above the planet's surface.\n\nThe breakthrough could allow up to 5,000 sq km of elephant habitat to be surveyed on a single cloud-free day.\n\nAnd all the laborious elephant counting is done via machine learning - a computer algorithm trained to identify elephants in a variety of backdrops.\n\n\"We just present examples to the algorithm and tell it, 'This is an elephant, this is not an elephant,'\"Dr Olga Isupova, from the University of Bath, said.\n\n\"By doing this, we can train the machine to recognise small details that we wouldn't be able to pick up with the naked eye.\"\n\nAfrican elephants are listed as vulnerable to extinction\n\nThe scientists looked first at South Africa's Addo Elephant National Park.\n\n\"It has a high density of elephants,\" University of Oxford conservation scientist Dr Isla Duporge said.\n\n\"And it has areas of thickets and of open savannah.\n\n\"So it's a great place to test our approach.\n\n\"While this is a proof of concept, it's ready to go.\n\n\"And conservation organisations are already interested in using this to replace surveys using aircraft.\"\n\nConservationists will have to pay for access to commercial satellites and the images they capture.\n\nBut this approach could vastly improve the monitoring of threatened elephant populations in habitats that span international borders, where it can be difficult to obtain permission for aircraft surveys.\n\nThe scientists say it could also be used in anti-poaching work.\n\n\"And of course, [because you can capture these images from space,] you don't need anyone on the ground, which is particularly helpful during these times of coronavirus,\" Dr Duporge said.\n\n\"In zoology, technology can move quite slowly.\n\n\"So being able to use the cutting-edge techniques for animal conservation is just really nice.\"", "Four royal aides say they do not wish to \"take sides\" over a letter from the Duchess of Sussex to her father, the High Court has been told.\n\nIn a letter lawyers for the four said they believed their clients could \"shed some light\" on the letter's drafting but the four were \"strictly neutral\".\n\nMeghan is suing the Mail on Sunday and Mail Online publisher over articles that reproduced parts of the letter.\n\nShe claims her privacy and copyright were breached by the newspaper group.\n\nHer lawyers are asking for summary judgement - a dismissal of Associated Newspapers' (ANL) defence instead of a trial.\n\nThe five articles, published in February 2019, were a \"triple-barrelled invasion\" of the duchess's privacy, correspondence and family, the lawyers claim.\n\nShe is seeking damages from the newspaper group for alleged misuse of private information, copyright infringement and breach of the Data Protection Act over the articles.\n\nANL claims Meghan wrote her letter \"with a view to it being disclosed publicly at some future point\" in order to \"defend her against charges of being an uncaring or unloving daughter\", which she denies.\n\nOn the second day of the hearing on Wednesday, ANL's barrister Antony White QC told the court that a letter from the so-called \"palace four\" showed that \"further oral evidence and documentary evidence is likely to be available at trial which would shed light on certain key factual issues in this case\".\n\nHe said it was \"likely\" there was also further evidence about whether Meghan \"directly or indirectly provided private information\" to the authors of an unauthorised biography of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Finding Freedom.\n\nThe four aides are: Jason Knauf, former communications secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Christian Jones, their former deputy communications secretary, Samantha Cohen, formerly the Sussexes' private secretary, and Sara Latham, their ex-director of communications.\n\n\"None of our clients welcomes his or her potential involvement in this litigation, which has arisen purely as a result of the performance of his or her duties in their respective jobs at the material time,\" their lawyers said in a letter sent on their behalf.\n\n\"Nor does any of our clients wish to take sides in the dispute between your respective clients. Our clients are all strictly neutral.\n\n\"They have no interest in assisting either party to the proceedings. Their only interest is in ensuring a level playing field, insofar as any evidence they may be able to give is concerned.\"\n\nTheir letter said that their lawyers' \"preliminary view is that one or more of our clients would be in a position to shed some light\" on \"the creation of the letter and the electronic draft\".\n\nIt also said they may be able to shed light on \"whether or not the claimant anticipated that the letter might come into in the public domain\" and whether or not the duchess \"directly or indirectly provided private information, generally and in relation to the letter specifically, to the authors of Finding Freedom\".\n\nBut Justin Rushbrooke QC, representing the duchess, said the letter from the four \"contains no information at all that supports the defendant's case on alleged co-authorship (of Meghan's letter), and no indication that evidence will be forthcoming that will support the defendant's case should the matter proceed to trial\".\n\nMeghan, 39, sent a handwritten letter to her father in August 2018, following her marriage to Prince Harry in May that year, which Mr Markle did not attend. The couple are now living in the US with their son Archie.\n\nThe full trial of the duchess's claim had been due to be heard at the High Court this month, but last year the case was adjourned until autumn 2021.\n\nAt the conclusion of the hearing on Wednesday afternoon, Mr Justice Warby reserved his judgement, which he said he would deliver \"as soon as possible\".", "Michelle O'Neill and Arlene Foster were advised restrictions may have to remain in place until after Easter\n\nCoronavirus lockdown restrictions in Northern Ireland will be extended until 5 March, the first and deputy first ministers have said.\n\nThe executive backed the health minister's proposal on Thursday and will review the move on 18 February.\n\nBut ministers were also told that restrictions may have to remain in place until after the Easter holidays.\n\nA lockdown closing non-essential retailers and encouraging employees to work from home began after Christmas.\n\nFamily gatherings are prohibited and people have been ordered to stay at home for all but essential reasons.\n\nSchools are closed to most pupils until after February's half-term but a paper looking at reopening will be put to ministers at next week's executive meeting.\n\nThe lockdown came in response to a spike in the number of cases of coronavirus, which followed a relaxation of some rules in the run-up to Christmas.\n\nFirst Minister Arlene Foster said extending the restrictions was an \"appropriate and necessary response\" to tackle the \"imminent threat\" posed by Covid-19.\n\nShe said she understood it would be difficult for many people to accept, given the uncertainty facing families and businesses, but added: \"To not press forward would risk all of the hard-won gains.\"\n\nThe first and deputy first ministers were right to state just how tough this decision will be for many people.\n\nBut there's an acceptance among the public that restrictions would have to be extended, given how bad things are in our hospitals.\n\nTheir decision also suggests politicians have perhaps learned from the last wave of the pandemic, when restrictions were turned on and off sporadically, and the impact that had both on cases and the messaging.\n\nThey're not alone in sustaining tough lockdown measures, with other UK nations and the Republic of Ireland also keeping their restrictions in place for several more weeks.\n\nBeyond that, it is thought health officials also want to ensure the vaccination programme is also \"well advanced\" before any restrictions are relaxed.\n\nThe hope is that, by spring, the picture will have improved significantly.\n\nUntil then the price we are paying for relaxations before Christmas looks likely to keep rising.\n\nDeputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill said she recognised the executive was asking a lot of everybody but insisted the measures were important.\n\n\"We don't know what will come after [5 March],\" she said.\n\nMs O'Neill said there was a commitment not to keep restrictions in place longer than necessary but decisions would have to be taken in line with the health advice and concerns about a new variant of the virus which is more transmissible.\n\nThe executive's decision comes as another 21 deaths were recorded by the Department of Health on Thursday.\n\nThe reproductive rate of the virus - known as the R-number - had risen to about 1.8 due to Christmas relaxations.\n\nBut the latest estimate from the Department of Health says it is sitting between 0.65 and 0.85 for cases within the community but is still above one for hospital admissions and intensive care.\n\nWhile some may wonder why are restrictions are being extended when the executive's policy has always been based on this rate of infection, the difference is that this time around there are three times as many people in Northern Ireland's hospitals than there were in last April's peak.\n\nDaily case numbers are still significantly higher too.\n\nWhile ministers have agreed to keep the current restrictions in place until March, Health Minister Robin Swann said it was possible they could be needed until Easter, which this year falls in the first week of April.\n\nMinisters say they understand the extension of the lockdown will be difficult for people\n\nIt is understood this plan is being discussed across the four UK nations but ministers will have to consider that in the review next month.\n\nMinisters were also warned that restrictions would be eased on a step-by-step basis in line with reducing pressures on the health service and ensuring the vaccination programme is \"well advanced\" before any relaxations are agreed.\n\nMrs Foster pleaded with people struggling with their mental health during the lockdown to \"please seek help\".\n\nMore than 100 medically-trained military personnel are to be deployed to help health staff deal with the pressure the latest phase of the pandemic is placing on hospitals.\n\nThe chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride said the \"sustained pressure on our health service\" would probably last for three to four weeks.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland, 51 Covid-19 related deaths and 2,608 new cases of the virus were recorded on Thursday.\n\nSimon Hamilton, the chief executive of the Belfast Chamber of Trade and Commerce, said the extension of the lockdown would be of \"little surprise to most businesses\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Simon Hamilton This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe Stormont executive has agreed how to allocate almost £300m to help businesses, education, tourism and transport during the next phase of the lockdown.\n\nA total of £100m is going towards the Local Restrictions Support Scheme, the grant for business premises forced to closed due to the restrictions.\n\nThere will also be £16m for tourism and hospitality, two sectors which have largely been unable to operate.\n\nIn addition, two more support schemes for the sector have been opened.\n\nOne aimed at large tourism and hospitality businesses is offering a pot of £26m, with the Department for Economy having identified 250 businesses that will be eligible.\n\nThe other is a £4m scheme to support those who provide bed-and-breakfast accommodation.\n\nMore money is being made available to help businesses affected by the lockdown\n\nJanice Gault from the trade body the Northern Ireland Hotels Federation said the schemes were a \"real lifeline for the sector\".\n\n\"Trading over the last year has been limited with reserves now severely depleted and businesses operating in survival mode,\" she added.\n\nAlso among those to receive the extra cash will be limited company directors, who had not received support since March.\n\nLast week, a scheme was announced to give directors £1,000 grants which one director described as a \"kick in the teeth\" given that he had little to no income for the past 10 months.\n\nBut that scheme is to be boosted with another £20m so the payments on offer will more than treble to £3,500.\n\nLocal newspapers will also benefit from 12 months of rates relief.", "Assaults on emergency workers made up more than a quarter of Covid-related crimes prosecuted in the first six months of the pandemic, figures show.\n\nThe Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said there were 1,688 such offences between 1 April and 30 September in England and Wales.\n\nMany of these involved police officers being \"coughed and spat on\" by suspected rule-breakers, the CPS said.\n\nThey were among almost 6,500 crimes related to coronavirus in that period.\n\nAssaults on emergency workers, which were the most common prosecution, were \"particularly appalling\" and incidents were still taking place, said director of public prosecutions Max Hill.\n\nHe added: \"I will continue to do everything in my power to protect those who so selflessly keep us safe during this crisis.\"\n\nAccording to the figures published by the CPS - which cover completed prosecutions - there were 1,137 charges brought for breaking coronavirus laws.\n\nThese included a man who claimed 15 people having a party at his house in Manchester were part of his support bubble and another man in Wales caught travelling between counties to solicit the services of a sex worker.\n\nOverall, 2,106 defendants were prosecuted for 6,469 coronavirus-related offences, with a conviction rate of 90%, according to the CPS.\n\nOther crimes flagged as being coronavirus-related by the CPS, included 480 charges for public order offences, 466 for criminal damage and 464 for common assault.\n\nThese included offences such as coughing and spitting while threatening to infect another person with the virus, thefts of essential items and fraudsters taking advantage of the crisis.\n\nMr Hill added: \"The CPS has had to adapt to a raft of new laws and regulations intended to keep the public safe during the pandemic.\n\n\"Our guiding principle throughout has always been to support the police in ensuring the right person in charged with the right offence.\"", "Marmite is one of Unilever's many brands\n\nUnilever has said that by 2030 it will refuse to do business with any firm that does not pay at least a living wage or income to its staff.\n\nThe consumer goods giant defined a living wage as one that covered a family's basic needs \"and helped them break the cycle of poverty\".\n\nIt said it wanted to raise wages for people outside its own workforce in order to promote economic inclusion.\n\nUnilever is one of the first big companies to make such a commitment.\n\nOxfam called the move a \"step in the right direction\".\n\nUnilever, whose products include Marmite, Ben & Jerry's ice cream and Dove soap, said it was committed to helping to build \"a more equitable and inclusive society\".\n\n\"Our ambition is to improve living standards for low-paid workers worldwide,\" it said.\n\n\"We will therefore ensure that everyone who directly provides goods and services to Unilever earns at least a living wage or income, by 2030.\"\n\nThe wage should be enough to cover food, water, housing, education, healthcare, transport and clothing, and also include a provision for unexpected events, Unilever said.\n\nThe firm said it was working with partners to establish exact rates of pay in the 190 countries where it operates.\n\nHowever, Unilever's chief human resources officer Leena Nair said it would pay twice as much as the minimum wage in some countries.\n\nUnilever said it already paid its own employees at least a living wage, but it wanted to secure the same for more people beyond its workforce, specifically focusing on the most vulnerable workers in manufacturing and agriculture.\n\nWhile there is no doubting Unilever's desire to improve the lot of those who make its products, there is also a commercial reason for its living wage initiative.\n\nIt wants all of its suppliers to pay their staff a decent wage by 2030, a plan that has the potential, given Unilever's enormous size and global reach, to change the lives of millions of people.\n\nBut the company also believes the move will give it an advantage in the fierce battle to attract buyers.\n\nAlan Jope, Unilever's Scottish-born chief executive, says customers want to buy products with good credentials, and that this desire has only increased during the pandemic.\n\nMr Jope's comments suggest that the next consumer battlegrounds might not be price, convenience or range of product, but environmental and social considerations.\n\nUnilever wants to get ahead of that trend, and plans to do well by doing good.\n\n\"We will work with our suppliers, other businesses, governments and NGOs - through purchasing practices, collaboration and advocacy - to create systemic change and global adoption of living wage practices,\" it added.\n\nIt has more than 60,000 direct suppliers worldwide, from smallholder farmers to major companies.\n\nAll of them will be covered by its commitment, it said, with millions of people set to benefit.\n\nUnilever already audits its suppliers over climate change commitments, and will use these existing arrangements to make sure workers are being paid a living wage.\n\nSuppliers not willing to sign up may lose their contracts with the firm, Ms Nair said.\n\nAlso by 2030, Unilever said, it would equip 10 million young people with essential job skills.\n\nAdditionally, it committed to spending €2bn (£1.8bn) with suppliers owned and managed by people from under-represented groups by 2025 in an effort to improve diversity.\n\n\"The two biggest threats that the world currently faces are climate change and social inequality,\" said Unilever chief executive Alan Jope.\n\n\"The past year has undoubtedly widened the social divide, and decisive and collective action is needed to build a society that helps to improve livelihoods, embraces diversity, nurtures talent, and offers opportunities for everyone.\"\n\nUnilever chief executive Alan Jope says the firm wants to be a \"positive force in the world\"\n\nHe told the BBC's Today programme that Unilever wanted to be a \"positive force in the world in tackling this persistent and worsening issue of social inequality.\"\n\n\"Without healthy societies, we don't have a healthy business,\" he said.\n\nThe move is the latest in a series of ethical initiatives by Unilever, including promoting vegan food products and experimenting with a four-day working week.\n\nGabriela Bucher, executive director at Oxfam International, welcomed Unilever's announcement, calling it \"an important step in the right direction\".\n\nShe said: \"Unilever's plan shows the kind of responsible action needed from the private sector that can have a great impact on tackling inequality and help to build a world in which everyone has the power to thrive, not just survive.\"\n\nLaura Gardiner, director of the Living Wage Foundation, said commitments such as Unilever's show how some employers \"are leading the way in spreading the living wage through both their business networks, and across their global operations\".\n\nFood services giants Sodexo and Compass Group, which are on the Living Wage Foundation's list of recognised service providers, have made similar supply chain commitments in the UK.", "Joe Biden has been sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, at a low key inauguration ceremony outside the US Capitol in Washington DC.\n\nIn his maiden speech as president, Mr Biden said: \"We've learned again that democracy is precious, democracy is fragile, and at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.\"\n\nRead more: Joe Biden replaces Trump as US president", "Mr Olowo said his wife was \"as near perfection as it's possible to be\"\n\nA woman who died after having liposuction in Turkey had been fed up with people asking if she was pregnant, an inquest heard.\n\nAbimbola Ajoke Bamgbose, 38, of Dartford, Kent, died in August after having the treatment in Izmir.\n\nHusband Moyosore Olowo said he believed she was on holiday with friends until she called to say she was in pain.\n\nHe went to Turkey after she stopped calling and found she had been rushed to hospital for more surgery.\n\nMrs Bamgbose, who also had a Brazilian butt lift, died there two weeks later, the inquest in Maidstone heard.\n\nMr Olowo, a rail safety officer, said his wife paid £5,000 for the package with Mono Cosmetic Surgery as UK treatment was too expensive.\n\nDescribing why she wanted it, he said: \"When a woman is unhappy and getting feelings about her looks, the clothes she buys do not fit and people ask if she is pregnant because of her tummy, sometimes there is nothing we can do. We are powerless.\n\n\"I wasn't concerned. I told her 'you have three children'. I told her my tummy is bigger than hers.\"\n\nHe said his wife, a social worker who graduated with a first class degree, was \"as near perfection as it's possible to be\".\n\nMr Olowo said the medical director in Turkey \"confessed it had been a mistake\".\n\nAssistant coroner Alan Blundson recorded a narrative conclusion, and said: \"This is a tragic case, the more so because the surgery was elective cosmetic surgery.\n\n\"Whilst Mrs Bamgbose was determined to have it performed, her husband had not seen it in any way as necessary.\"\n\nA post-mortem examination found Mrs Bamgbose had a perforated bowel and her death was caused by peritonitis with multiple organ failure as a complication of liposuction surgery.\n\nMr Olowo has said he is suing Mono and the surgeon, Dr Hakan Aydogan, for £1m in the Turkish courts, claiming medical negligence.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Mr Biden took his oath on a Bible that has been in his family since 1893 and was also used each time he was sworn in as Delaware senator. The book itself is five inches (12.5cm) thick with a Celtic cross on the cover", "Wales' former Chief Medical Officer Dame Deirdre Hine thinks the vaccine targets are achievable\n\nPeople waiting for the Covid vaccine need to show \"patience\" and \"perspective\", Wales' former chief medical officer has said.\n\nDame Deirdre Hine said Wales had made a \"very good start\" on delivering jabs.\n\nAged 83, she needs the vaccine herself and accepted there was \"understandable anxiety\" for those still waiting, but said: \"I think we should all quieten down and wait.\"\n\nThere has been criticism of the speed of the roll-out in Wales.\n\nStuart Wilson said he was \"appalled\" his 84-year-old housebound mother had been told she may have to wait up to two months to have her coronavirus vaccine if she cannot get to her GP surgery.\n\nDame Deirdre is regarded as one of Wales' leading medical experts, having not only held the chief medical officer post, but being the woman who established the Welsh breast cancer screening programme.\n\nA past president of the British Medical Association and Royal Society of Medicine, she also oversaw the official inquiry into the 2009 swine flu pandemic in the UK.\n\nIt's not surprising that people are worried and concerned... but I would say to them, let's keep it in proportion, let's look at the perspective\n\nShe told BBC Wales the response from governments had moved forward since then.\n\n\"I can detect some lessons that have been learned from the previous pandemic, the one I reported on. Because, although we had a vaccine then, the arrangements for delivering it were very much less clear and much more protracted than it has been this time.\n\n\"The arrangements for the GPs to deliver, and now pharmacists to deliver, all of that is a tremendous improvement on what I saw at the last pandemic.\"\n\nIn September, Dame Deirdre accused successive governments across the UK of taking \"their eye off the ball\" and failing to prepare for a global pandemic.\n\nShe also correctly warned of the \"real danger\" of a damaging second wave of Covid and has remained critical of failures to get adequate testing and tracing capability up and running in the early stages of the pandemic.\n\nShe added: \"I would say the testing and tracing is another matter, and I think there has been justifiable criticism of that.\"\n\nDame Deirdre, who lives in Cardiff, said she was still \"waiting impatiently\" for her vaccine appointment, but called on people to see the bigger picture.\n\n\"Let's get it in perspective. This is a massive logistical exercise, together with a narrow pipeline of supply of the vaccine, and so I'm not a bit surprised that it's taking as long as it is to get round to everybody. But I have every confidence that they will.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government, along with other UK nations, has committed to vaccinating all four of the highest priority groups by the middle of February, including the over-80s.\n\nLatest figures on vaccination in Wales show that, as of 20 January, there had been 175,816 people to get a first dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.\n\nThis accounts for 5.6% of the population in Wales, while 7.1% have received a vaccination in England, 7.3% in Northern Ireland, and 5.7% in Scotland.\n\nHealth Minister Vaughan Gething has denied Covid-19 vaccines were being held back, following comments from First Minister Mark Drakeford that the supply had to last until February to prevent \"vaccinators standing around with nothing to do\".\n\nMr Drakeford later said on social media that \"nobody is holding back vaccines\" and Mr Gething added: \"We're rolling out the vaccination programme as quickly as possible.\"\n\nDame Deirdre said she believed the targets were achievable, but people's anxieties were \"understandable\".\n\nShe added: \"Some recent research by Imperial College shows that people in my age group, people over 70, are the people most worried about this pandemic and about their own safety.\n\n\"So it's not surprising that people are worried and concerned, dismayed, when they don't get the letter and then that turns to anger. But I would say to them, let's keep it in proportion, let's look at the perspective.\n\n\"If you'd asked me last May and June whether we would even have a vaccine, I would have been highly sceptical.\n\n\"Then once you've got the vaccine, there is the whole logistical exercise of the publicity, letting people know what's likely to happen, getting the personnel assembled to do that, getting the premises.\n\n\"And it's not easy, it's not easy to do all that very, very quickly.\"", "Chloé Lopes Gomes says she has faced racial harassment while being a ballet dancer.\n\nThe French performer is the first black female dancer at Berlin's principal ballet company Staatsballett.\n\nMs Gomes claims she was told she did not fit in because of her skin colour, and was asked to wear white make up so she would 'blend in' with the other dancers.\n\nThe company has responded by saying her allegation \"deeply moves us\" and an internal investigation is underway into racism and discrimination at Staatsballett.", "The pandemic has seen most children in England slipping back with their learning - and some have gone significantly back with their social skills, says Ofsted.\n\nA report from the education watchdog warns some young children have forgotten how to use a knife and fork or have regressed back to nappies.\n\nOlder children have lost their \"stamina\" for reading, say inspectors.\n\nThe Department for Education says it shows the need to keep schools open.\n\nOfsted has examined the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on children, based on visits to 900 schools and early years providers this autumn - and found that it has been a very divided experience.\n\nThe chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, says there are three \"broad groups\" to describe what has happened:\n\nBut Ms Spielman says this did not divide along the lines of advantage and deprivation, but instead factors such as whether parents were able to spend time with children and families having what she described as \"good support structures\".\n\nAmong older children, Ofsted warns of a loss of concentration among those returning to school and that \"online squabbles\" that started on social media during the lockdown are now \"being played out in the classroom\".\n\nThere are also reports of a loss of physical fitness, while other pupils are showing \"signs of mental distress\", with concerns over eating disorders and self-harm.\n\nThere are concerns about pupils who have so far not returned to school - and in a third of schools there has been an \"increase in children being removed from school to be educated at home\".\n\nBut inspectors say schools are still \"firefighting\" practical problems about keeping going during the pandemic, with the challenge of operating bubbles and responding to Covid outbreaks.\n\nGeoff Barton, leader of the ASCL head teachers' union, said the report \"starkly shows the educational and emotional impact of school closures, and why we need to do everything possible to keep schools open\".\n\nBut he warned that it was becoming financially unsustainable to keep schools running, with the cost of safety measures and the need to pay for supply staff when teachers had to self-isolate.\n\nA Department for Education spokeswoman said: \"The government has been clear that getting all pupils and students back into full-time education is a national priority.\"\n\nShe said the £1bn catch-up fund, including support for tutoring, would help to make up for lost learning.", "The editor of the British Medical Journal has asked the New York Times to correct an article that says UK guidelines allow two Covid-19 vaccines to be mixed.\n\nThe US publication reported that UK health officials would allow patients to be given a second dose that is a different vaccine to their first.\n\nFiona Godlee pointed out in her letter to the NYT that it was not a recommendation.\n\nShe said the NYT's headline claiming UK guidelines say such substitutions \"may happen\" was \"seriously misleading\".\n\nThe UK has approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab - but both require two doses which are now to be administered 12 weeks apart\n\nMs Godlee said the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) does not make any recommendation to mix and match - in other words, having a shot of one vaccine and then a different one 12 weeks later.\n\nDr Mary Ramsay, Public Health England's head of immunisations, said: \"We do not recommend mixing the Covid-19 vaccines - if your first dose is the Pfizer vaccine you should not be given the AstraZeneca vaccine for your second dose and vice versa.\"\n\nDr Ramsay added that on the \"extremely rare occasions\" where the same vaccine is unavailable or it is unknown which jab the patient received, it is \"better to give a second dose of another vaccine than not at all\".\n\nMs Godlee urged the New York Times to print a \"highly visible correction\" as soon as possible.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Princess Royal Hospital at Haywards Heath was among the hospitals receiving a delivery\n\nMeanwhile, health staff have criticised the paperwork needed to gain NHS approval to give the coronavirus vaccine, with some medics being asked for proof they are trained in areas such as preventing radicalisation.\n\nThe first doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine are due to be given on Monday after the jab was approved for use in the UK last week.\n\nThe Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was the first vaccine approved in the UK, and 944,539 people have had their first jab.", "Tian Tian arrived in Scotland, along with Yang Guang, from China in 2011\n\nEdinburgh Zoo's giant pandas may have to return to China next year because of financial pressures.\n\nYang Guang and Tian Tian cost about £1m a year to lease from China.\n\nThe zoo, which had hoped to breed the pair, is nearing the end of its 10-year contract with the Chinese government and may be unable to renew the deal.\n\nCovid lockdown closures led to a £2m loss for the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, which runs Edinburgh Zoo and the Highland Wildlife Park.\n\nDavid Field, chief executive of the society, said the charity would have to \"seriously consider every potential saving\", including its giant panda contract.\n\nMr Field said closures had had a \"huge financial impact\" on the charity because most of its income was from visitors.\n\n\"Although our parks are open again, we lost around £2m last year and it seems certain that restrictions, social distancing and limits on our visitor numbers will continue for some time, which will also reduce our income,\" Mr Field said.\n\n\"Yang Guang and Tian Tian have made a tremendous impression on our visitors over the last nine years, helping millions of people connect to nature and inspiring them to take an interest in wildlife conservation.\n\n\"I would love for them to be able to stay for a few more years with us and that is certainly my current aim.\"\n\nYang Guang was given a new enclosure in 2019\n\nThe zoo has already taken a government loan, furloughed staff, made redundancies and launched a fundraising appeal, but was not eligible for the UK government's zoo fund, which was aimed at smaller zoos.\n\n\"The support we have received from our members and animal lovers has helped to keep our doors open and we are incredibly grateful,\" Mr Field added.\n\n\"At this stage, it is too soon to say what the outcome will be. We will be discussing next steps with our colleagues in China over the coming months.\"\n\nThe zoo is part of a number of conservation projects, including one to reintroduce Scottish wildcats.\n\nWork to reintroduce Scottish wildcats in to the Highlands may also suffer from the Zoo's funding problems\n\nHowever, Mr Field said projects like that may also have to be scrapped because of Brexit and being unable to apply for grants from the European Union.\n\n\"We received a £3.2m grant from the EU Life programme to support our Saving Wildcats partnership project, which aims to restore wildcats in Scotland by breeding and releasing them into the wild.\n\n\"Wildcats are on the brink of extinction in Britain and this is the last hope for the species' survival.\"\n\nHe added: \"As we are no longer part of the European Union, our charity is no longer eligible to apply for funding from programmes like EU Life, which have proven critical for our wildlife conservation work and wider efforts to protect animals from extinction.\"\n\nEdinburgh Zoo's conservation genetics laboratory, which supports conservation projects around the world, has lost access to both funding and other researchers as a result.\n\nIt also faces challenges around moving animals, many of which are part of European endangered species breeding programmes.\n\nThe programme is currently about £900,000 short, meaning it may have to be cancelled.\n\nMr Field said: \"We still need to reduce costs to secure our future. It may be that some of our incredibly important conservation projects, including the vital lifeline for Scotland's wildcats, may have to be deferred, postponed or even stopped.\"", "Police rescued 22 people from the snow in Cheshire including a two-year-old child\n\nDozens of people, including a two-year-old child, had to be rescued when they became stranded on rural roads.\n\nPolice and volunteers came to the aid of people whose vehicles were stuck in the Derbyshire Peak District on Saturday.\n\nThere were similar scenes in Cheshire where 22 people, had to be rescued from stranded cars.\n\nThe wintry weather is set to continue with a Met Office warning for ice in the East Midlands and North East.\n\nAt around 20:00 GMT on Saturday, Derbyshire Police reported \"sudden snow\" had left dozens of vehicles and their occupants stranded in the Goyt Valley.\n\nSome visitors to the area were caught off-guard by how quickly the weather changed.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Adam White This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nDerbyshire Police posted on Twitter: \"We are shuttling people back to Buxton as quickly as we can.\n\n\"Sit tight and we will get to you.\"\n\nThe A57 Snake Pass - a road notorious for becoming dangerous in the snow - had been closed earlier in the day because of the weather.\n\nIn Cheshire, police spent three hours helping families stuck in their vehicles in the White Peak area.\n\nIn total 22 people, including eight children - the youngest of whom was two - were recovered from nine vehicles.\n\nCheshire Police Rural Crime Team said: \"The snow had well and truly caught them all out on the back roads.\n\n\"We were three miles (4.8km) from the nearest village, and the light was fading on us quickly.\n\n\"It was decided to get everyone out of their cars and so began a mile walk in the snow.\"\n\nThey were led to a nearby farm where they could be taken to safety in police vehicles.\n\nMost of those rescued from snow in Cheshire had travelled to the area despite coronavirus restrictions\n\nThe force was critical of the families for travelling into the area, that is under tier four coronavirus restrictions.\n\nIt said: \"All except one car was from out of Cheshire. We had people from Sale, Stockport and Salford with the closest being Congleton.\n\n\"Sadly these people have put all of us at risk today.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Liverpool City Council issued their call after local cases nearly trebled in the past fortnight\n\nLiverpool's leaders have called on the government to impose a new nationwide lockdown to halt the spread of the new variant of Covid-19.\n\nActing mayor Wendy Simon and the city council's cabinet said urgent action is needed because the rise in coronavirus cases had reached \"alarming levels\".\n\nThey said it was \"self-evident\" the tier system has not curbed the variant.\n\nIt had been concentrated in London and south-east England but is believed to be spreading north.\n\nCases in Liverpool have almost trebled in the past two weeks to 350 per 100,000.\n\nThis is despite the city successfully leading the national pilot for community testing, which resulted in it becoming the first city to be taken out of tier 3 and moved into tier 2.\n\nHowever, the recent rise in cases meant Liverpool returned to tier three on Thursday.\n\nWendy Simon is the acting mayor for Liverpool\n\nSpeaking to the BBC News Channel, Ms Simon said: \"I think the difficulty with this new strain of the virus is the speed at which it is infecting.\n\n\"What we have seen in these last weeks is that the tier system hasn't worked with this particular strain of the virus.\n\n\"The way the numbers are going, we're likely to go into tier four very, very quickly.\"\n\nMs Simon said officials wanted to \"pre-empt that catastrophe\" and \"recover the economy quicker\", adding: \"We feel these three things - the mass vaccination, the mass testing and certainly a lockdown for a period - is what we need to get the city up and running again.\n\n\"There's a responsibility on us all to act promptly and bring it under control as soon as we can.\"\n\nIn an earlier statement, Ms Simon joined officials at the Labour-run city council to urge the government to \"listen to those at the frontline, both in our hospitals and frontline services\".\n\n\"We as a nation can cope with a lockdown,\" the statement said. \"We have before and we can again.\"\n\nThe city's leaders also called for \"an additional package of welfare and economic support\" to address the \"pain for our retail and hospitality sectors\".\n\nA further 57,725 confirmed cases were announced by the government on Saturday.\n\nThe sharp rise in numbers is partly down to a lag in reporting over the holiday period but, according to Public Health England, is \"largely a reflection of a real increase\".\n\nAlthough the new variant is now spreading more rapidly than the original version, it is not believed to be more deadly.\n\nLiverpool launched the national pilot for community testing in November\n\nOn Sunday, the prime minister said regional restrictions in England were \"probably about to get tougher\".\n\nHe said possible changes included keeping schools closed, although this is not \"something we want to do\".\n\nBoris Johnson said the government was \"entirely reconciled to doing what it takes to get the virus down,\" and warned of a \"tough period ahead\".\n\nHe said increasing vaccination would provide a way out of restrictions and that he hoped \"tens of millions\" would be vaccinated in the next three months.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk", "The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has started to arrive in hospitals, with the first doses due to be given on Monday.\n\nThe Princess Royal Hospital at Haywards Heath in West Sussex was one of the hospitals taking a delivery on Saturday.\n\nThe UK has ordered 100 million doses of the new vaccine - enough to vaccinate 50 million people.", "The Scottish cabinet will meet later to consider further measures to help tackle coronavirus, as 2,464 new cases are reported.\n\nThe Scottish Parliament will then be recalled for First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to make an \"urgent statement\".\n\nMs Sturgeon said the \"rapid increase in Covid cases driven by the new variant\" was of \"very serious concern\".\n\n\"We are in a race between this faster spreading strain of Covid and the vaccination programme,\" she tweeted.\n\nShe warned on Friday that the next few weeks could be the most dangerous period for Scotland since March in the fight against Covid.\n\nThe latest government figures for coronavirus cases showed that 15.2% of Saturday's 17,328 tests were positive.\n\nIt is higher than the 2,137 cases reported on Friday, but still lower than Thursday's 2,539 positive results.\n\nFigures for hospital admissions and deaths over the holiday weekend will not be published until Tuesday.\n\nThe cabinet is likely to consider a further delay to the return of Scottish schools and restrictions that are closer to the stay-at-home lockdown in March.\n\n\"All decisions just now are tough, with tough impacts,\" Ms Sturgeon wrote on twitter. \"Vaccines give us way out, but this new strain makes the period between now and then the most dangerous since start of pandemic.\"\n\nThe Scottish government's emergency resilience committee heard on Saturday that \"quick and decisive action is needed\" as the new variant of the virus is becoming the dominant one in Scotland.\n\nA Scottish government spokesperson said: \"The even steeper rises and severe pressure on the NHS that is being experienced in some other parts of the UK is a sign of what may lie ahead in Scotland if we do not take all possible steps now to slow the spread of the virus, while the vaccination programme progresses.\n\n\"The strong message remains - people should stay at home as much as possible and avoid non-essential interaction with others.\"\n\nThis is just the fifth time the Scottish Parliament has been recalled and the second time within the last week.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Prof Linda Bauld says Scots should be prepared a longer period living with level four restrictions\n\nPublic health expert Prof Linda Bauld, from the University of Edinburgh, has said Scotland should be prepared for Covid restrictions to be extended as infection rates continue to rise.\n\nShe said there were no signs yet that the infection rate was levelling off, having risen suddenly from a daily rate of fewer than 1,000 to more than 2,000 per day in recent days.\n\nShe told BBC Scotland: \"It definitely is a fragile situation and you can see that we have more cases than we would expect at the current time.\n\n\"We may be starting to see some of the impacts of the Christmas mixing, but also we know around four in 10 cases, from recent data, are of the new variant.\n\n\"I would imagine that the new variant is playing a role in these higher rates of infection and if these numbers continue to sit at where they are we are going to have more people in hospital in a week or two's time, and that is very worrying.\"\n\nThe new year offers new hope in the struggle against coronavirus with two vaccines now authorised for UK use - but it looks as if the situation will get worse before it gets better.\n\nMinisters are worried by the rapid spread of the new strain of coronavirus during a holiday period when the highest level of restrictions are already in place.\n\nThey think more needs to be done to suppress the virus, to give the vaccination programme a chance to accelerate and give increasing numbers of people protection.\n\nWhen the Scottish cabinet meets they are likely to consider tightening the current restrictions to something closer to the stay at home lockdown of March 2020.\n\nThat will almost certainly mean a further delay to the return of schools into February.\n\nMinisters will take decisions on Monday morning with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon expected to make a statement at Holyrood in the afternoon.\n\nDaily confirmed cases in Scotland reached record highs on the last three days of 2020, rising to to 2,622 on Thursday.\n\nMs Sturgeon warned last week there might be changes to the plans for reopening schools. Children start online learning from 11 January and are set to return to class by 18 January.\n\nThe education recovery group will meet on Monday.\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said the situation was \"deteriorating and fast-moving\" but any decision to extend school closures should be clearly explained to parents and teachers.\n\nHe said: \"We have been here before so if schools remain closed, the Scottish government must show that it has learned from past mistakes in order to minimise disruption to education.\"\n\nScottish Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie said the Scottish government should prioritise teachers and school staff as vaccines were rolled out.\n\nHe added: \"We must be honest and accept that most pupils, teachers and support staff cannot go back to schools until the situation is brought under control.\"\n\nScottish Labour leader Richard Leonard called for ministers to publish the evidence behind all of its decisions to ensure public consent and compliance.\n\n\"What is clear is that we need to see an acceleration of the vaccine rollout and a step-change in testing,\" he said.\n\n\"It is also clear that financial support from government has simply not been nearly sufficient to make up for the damage that lockdown measures have done to jobs, livelihoods and businesses. The SNP government must distribute additional funds to the frontline now.\"\n\nScottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie said: \"With tighter restrictions on movement and in schools comes a greater responsibility on the government to show its workings.\n\n\"If we are to restrict people's movement then we need to see what the benefit will be. We need an exit plan to give people hope, as well as to show them what is required to ease the restrictions on our freedoms.\"", "A farmer's field in Scotland has been transformed into a \"pop-up\" ice hockey rink.\n\nLocals in Bishopton, Renfrewshire, have been taking advantage of the clear skies and icy conditions.\n\nOne said the frozen rink had been playing host to skaters and hockey players of all ages and abilities, from six to 60.", "Some schools are due to reopen this week in Wales\n\nSchools are being given a flexible approach to ensure a \"safe return\", according to Wales' first minister.\n\nMark Drakeford said experts would be \"looking at all the evidence again early next week\".\n\nUnions have called for a national decision on reopening schools rather than leaving it to local councils.\n\nAccording to local authorities many secondary schools aim to return from 11 January, with some fully open on 6 January.\n\nA joint statement from nine unions called on the Welsh Government to give a \"centralised, coherent response\" regarding all educational settings \"rather than leaving decisions at local levels\".\n\nThe statement from ASCL Cymru, GMB, NAHT Cymru, NASUWT Cymru, NEU Cymru, Ucac, Unison, Unite and Voice continued: \"We are extremely worried that schools will be opening for face-to-face learning from next Monday, whilst Welsh Government continues to gather information about the nature and impact of the new variant of Covid-19...\n\n\"We strongly believe that we need to err on the side of caution and ensure, in advance, that we have the medical 'evidence and information' to ensure that any decisions are the correct ones.\"\n\nThe National Education Union Cymru has called for in-person learning to be delayed until at least 18 January.\n\nThe NASUWT has also threatened \"appropriate action in order to protect members whose safety is put at risk\", while head teachers' union NAHT Cymru said it had taken legal action.\n\nBut Mr Drakeford said: \"We reached an agreement with our local education colleagues that in Wales we will have a phased and flexible return to school.\"\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said on Sunday parents should send their children to primary school as long as they are open in their area.\n\nMark Drakeford: \"No evidence that young people get the illness more severely as a result of the variant\"\n\nJackie Parker, head of Crickhowell High School in Powys, which reopens for some form years from Wednesday, said \"it would have been more sensible to have had a national decision for the time being until the 18th\".\n\nShe said it would have allowed time to see if cases of Covid had increased over the holiday period.\n\n\"People may have been together during the Christmas holiday,\" she said.\n\nFigures published by Public Health Wales on Sunday showed 56 new deaths from Covid and 4,011 new cases of the virus.\n\nWales has been in lockdown since 20 December with restrictions on people meeting others on all but Christmas Day when it was limited to another household and a person living alone.\n\nMr Drakeford said: \"There is no evidence that young people get the illness more severely as a result of the variant.\n\n\"Our technical advisory group will be looking at all the evidence again early next week.\n\n\"And, of course, we will continue to make decisions in the light of the best knowledge, research and information that's available to us at the time,\" he told BBC Radio Wales' Sunday Supplement.\n\nHe also said mass testing in schools would begin as planned this month, in a decision which has been criticised by NAHT Cymru.\n\n\"It will allow more children and more teachers to stay safely in the classroom without having to be sent home because another child or another staff member has tested positive,\" he said.\n\nThe joint unions' statement also said the Welsh Government's testing proposals were unworkable for most schools.\n\n\"Due to the chaotic and rushed nature of this announcement, the lack of proper guidance, and an absence of appropriate support, the Welsh Government's proposals will be inoperable for most schools and colleges,\" it said.\n\nThe statement continued: \"Any suggestion that schools can safely recruit, train and organise a team of suitable volunteers to staff and run testing stations on their premises by an as yet unspecified date in the new term is simply not realistic.\"\n\nSian Gwenllian, Plaid Cymru's education spokeswoman, said \"parents and teachers need to know what the plan is for the next few weeks\".\n\n\"We don't really know very much about this new variant in the way that it transmits within the school community,\" she said.\n\n\"And if it is becoming inevitable that schools will have to close, well, an early decision is better for everybody.\"\n\nWelsh Conservative education spokeswoman Suzy Davies said: \"We've had conflicting reports in the press and on social media about the effect of the new variant on younger children and their role in transmitting the disease - complete confusion reigns...\n\n\"The Welsh Government hasn't succeeded in reassuring teachers and in some cases parents as well.\"", "A top Swedish official involved in the coronavirus response has defended a Christmas holiday in the Canary Islands in the face of heavy criticism.\n\nDan Eliasson is head of the civil contingencies agency, which earlier in December had texted all Swedes urging them to avoid travel.\n\nHe was photographed in Las Palmas airport on the island of Gran Canaria.\n\nMr Eliasson insisted the trip was necessary \"for family reasons\".\n\nHe told Swedish media that he had \"given up a lot of trips during this pandemic\" but thought this one was necessary because he had a daughter living in the Canaries.\n\n\"I celebrated Christmas with her and my family,\" he told Expressen newspaper. He also said he had been worked remotely while in the Canaries.\n\nSweden has had 437,000 confirmed cases and 8,700 deaths - many more than its Scandinavian neighbours. The country has never imposed a full lockdown.\n\nHowever, alarmed by rising numbers of cases last month, the Swedish government reversed some of its guidance and sent a text message to all Swedes asking them to read updated guidelines.\n\nThe guidelines included asking Swedes to avoid unnecessary trips and not to make new contacts during a journey or at the destination.\n\nMr Eliasson was then photographed several times in Gran Canaria, including at the airport.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Expressen This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThere have been calls for Mr Eliasson, an experienced official who has worked at several important departments, to be fired.\n\nPrime Minister Stefan Löfven and other ministers have not yet commented, according to Swedish media.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. From the pandemic to measles, Smitha Mundasad looks at global health challenges in 2021", "Liam Reilly fronted Bagatelle for more than 40 years\n\nIrish Eurovision singer and frontman of the rock band Bagatelle, Liam Reilly, has died aged 65.\n\nA family statement confirmed that Mr Reilly \"passed away suddenly but peacefully at his home\" on 1 January.\n\nMr Reilly fronted Bagatelle for more than 40 years and they had success with songs including Summer in Dublin and Second Violin.\n\nHe also came joint second at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1990 with the song Somewhere in Europe.\n\nThe song finished on 132 points, joint with France's entry sung by Joëlle Ursull, in the contest in Zagreb.\n\nMr Reilly, from Dundalk, County Louth, also composed Ireland's Eurovision entry for the contest in Rome in 1991, when Kim Jackson performed his song Could It Be That I'm In Love, which was placed 10th.\n\n\"We know that his many friends and countless fans around the world will share in our grief as we mourn his loss, but celebrate the extraordinary talent of the man whose songs meant so much to so many.\" the family statement added.\n\nJoe Gallagher, the band's promoter from Strabane, County Tyrone, told BBC Radio Ulster \"the talent that Liam brought to the music industry in Ireland is second to none\".\n\n\"Some of the songs that he has written are up there with some of the better songs written in Ireland,\" he said.\n\n\"He is one of the best singer-songwriters Ireland has ever seen or produced.\"\n\nMr Reilly also wrote songs for others, including The Wolfe Tones. The Irish group paid tribute to him on social media, describing him as \"a master songwriter\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by The Wolfe Tones 🇮🇪 This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by The Wolfe Tones 🇮🇪\n\nStephen Travers, a member of the Miami Showband, said Mr Reilly was a \"national treasure\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Stephen Travers This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section Horse Racing\n\nTributes have been paid to trainer Zoe Davison, who died from cancer on the same day two of her horses claimed wins at Plumpton.\n\nDavison, who had breast cancer for four-and-a-half years, died at her Shovelstrode Racing Stables in Sussex.\n\nBrown Bullet and Mr Jack, both trained at the family's stable, had raced to victory at the Sussex track on Sunday.\n\nSimon Clare, part-owner of Brown Bullet, said: \"Zoe was just the most wonderful human being imaginable.\"\n\nHer husband Andrew Irvine - who she married in 2018 - was by her side, along with family.\n\nHe said: \"She was the most wonderful, incredible person. I am blessed to have spent the last 24 years of my life with her.\"\n\nDaughter Gemelle Johnson, who was assistant to her mother, said: \"I just feel a bit numb inside because of everything.\n\n\"I'm a bit overwhelmed we've had a double for mum. Hopefully we have made her proud. It's surreal. Our team is a family business and we put everything into it. She will be thoroughly missed as she is the glue that holds us together.\n\n\"We've had a few winners around here and it is one of our local tracks. It means everything to us as we want to do her proud.\"\n\nDavison sent out the first of over 100 winners when Sails Legend, with AP McCoy in the saddle, won at Towcester in November 1997.\n\nShe enjoyed her best season with 15 winners in the 2017-18 campaign.\n\nJockey Page Fuller has a long association with the stable and should have ridden Mr Jack but had been stood down from an earlier fall.\n\nShe said: \"You couldn't have written it any better today. She was just a kind and genuine person who was a real horsewoman. She loved her horses and did her best by them.\n\n\"She has been struggling for a long time, but fortunately her strength has rubbed off on everybody else and they showed that by sending out the winners today.\n\n\"It has been a great team effort and it is great she has gone out like that. I don't know anybody who would have a bad word to say about her - she was just one of those really nice people.\"\n\nEd Arkell, ex-Fontwell clerk of the course and now at nearby West Sussex track Goodwood, said: \"Zoe was a huge part of the southern racing circuit. I'm so sorry for her family and she will be very much missed. She was a friendly, happy person who everybody loved.\n\n\"As a trainer, she ran a wonderful family operation. There are less of those these days. She supported her local tracks and became a big part of them.\"\n\nClare added: \"Zoe was the most talented horsewoman imaginable. What she didn't know about horses wasn't worth knowing.\n\n\"She is so incredibly well loved and will be desperately missed by everyone who knew her.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nArsenal continued their Premier League resurgence with a ruthless victory over strugglers West Brom at The Hawthorns.\n\nDefender Kieran Tierney's excellent solo run and curling finish put the Gunners in front in the first half, before the impressive Bukayo Saka rounded off a stunning passing move to make it 2-0.\n\nAlexandre Lacazette added the third and fourth goals after the break - smashing in a rebound from Emile Smith Rowe's shot before he was set up by Tierney.\n\nIt was Arsenal's third league victory in a row after they had failed to win their previous seven.\n\nWest Brom, playing their fourth match under new manager Sam Allardyce, remain second from bottom and six points from safety.\n• None Confidence? Youth? How have Arsenal turned relegation talk into European hopes?\n\nArsenal boss Mikel Arteta said he wanted his players to \"show confidence\" at The Hawthorns, and they certainly did that in a dominant and eye-catching display.\n\nHector Bellerin forced Sam Johnstone into a save within two minutes after Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang broke down the left, and Saka tormented full-back Dara O'Shea on the opposite wing constantly during the opening half.\n\nIt was Saka's ball that fizzed past the back post, inches away from the toe of Aubameyang, after the 19-year-old had got the better of O'Shea and hit it straight at Johnstone.\n\nWest Brom were being suffocated and Tierney's burst of pace to get around Darnell Furlong, before bending it into the far corner, was the perfect way to open the scoring.\n\nSaka made it 2-0 by rounding off a slick, one-touch passing move that former Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger would have been proud of.\n\nWest Brom could offer no response after the break either and Arsenal were 3-0 up on the hour when Lacazette eventually blasted in the rebound from a catalogue of errors by defender Semi Ajayi.\n\nThat was game over but Lacazette was allowed to add a fourth when he was left unmarked to divert Tierney's cross into the roof of the net four minutes later.\n\nArteta, knowing the job was done, was able to bring off Saka and Emile Smith Rowe following impressive performances from both youngsters, while Arsenal continued to create chances to round off a very enjoyable evening in the snow.\n\nAllardyce's first match in charge of West Brom - a 3-0 drubbing by Aston Villa after captain Jake Livermore had been sent off - was a sign of just how tough this job was going to be.\n\nThen that 1-1 draw with Liverpool at Anfield provided hope. The Baggies were resilient, organised and tireless.\n\nBut heavy back-to-back defeats by Leeds United and now Arsenal at home have brought things back down to earth.\n\nWest Brom were overawed in defence, out-run in midfield and frustrated by a lack of opportunities in attack throughout this confidence-crushing defeat.\n\nTheir rare sniffs at goal came from a Granit Xhaka error in the first half - Matheus Pereira chipping it through to Matt Phillips who struck it straight at Bernd Leno - before Callum Robinson's finish was ruled out for offside in the second half.\n\nSubstitute Rekeem Harper's long-range strike deep in stoppage time was also comfortably turned behind by Leno.\n\nIt was West Brom's third home loss in three under Allardyce and they have conceded 12 goals with no reply in those games.\n\n'Everything looks much better' - what they said\n\nWest Brom manager Sam Allardyce: \"Another game gone by where we learn more about the players we have. We have learnt an awful lot about what we can and cannot do.\n\n\"We need to work out a way of not trying to be as sloppy as we have been at conceding goals. It appears when we try to open up we leave opportunities for the opposition and we cannot cope.\"\n\nArsenal manager Mikel Arteta: \"We had a big week, three games in seven days, and we managed to win them and everything looks much better. It was difficult conditions but the team looked sharp from the start. It's a big win.\n\n\"After the results we had before we had to lift things straight away. Now we have got some discipline back. We look more creative in the final third and we look solid at the back.\"\n\nThe best of the stats\n• None West Brom are the first side to lose consecutive home Premier League games by at least four goals since Wigan in August 2010.\n• None Arsenal have scored in all 25 of their Premier League meetings with West Brom, the best 100% scoring record by one side against an opponent in the competition's history.\n• None There were 20 passes in the build-up to Arsenal's first goal scored by Kieran Tierney - since Mikel Arteta's first game in charge on Boxing Day 2019, the Gunners have scored more goals following a sequence of 20+ passes than any other Premier League side (3).\n• None Tierney became the first Scottish player to score an away Premier League goal for Arsenal and the first to do so in the top flight since Charlie Nicholas against Ipswich Town in March 1986.\n• None Alexandre Lacazette has scored five away Premier League goals in 2020-21, his best such tally in a single season in the competition.\n\nWest Brom travel to Blackpool for an FA Cup third-round tie on Saturday, 9 January (15:00 GMT kick-off), before returning to Premier League action on Saturday, 16 January against Wolves (12:30 GMT).\n\nArsenal host Newcastle in their FA Cup match on the same day (17:30 GMT), before facing Crystal Palace at home in the league on Thursday, 14 January (20:00 GMT).\n• None Offside, West Bromwich Albion. Charlie Austin tries a through ball, but Kyle Bartley is caught offside.\n• None Attempt saved. Rekeem Harper (West Bromwich Albion) left footed shot from outside the box is saved in the bottom right corner. Assisted by Matheus Pereira.\n• None Attempt saved. Willian (Arsenal) left footed shot from the right side of the box is saved in the bottom left corner. Assisted by Dani Ceballos.\n• None Attempt missed. Joseph Willock (Arsenal) header from the centre of the box misses to the left. Assisted by Willian with a cross.\n• None Attempt saved. Conor Gallagher (West Bromwich Albion) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Callum Robinson.\n• None Attempt blocked. Charlie Austin (West Bromwich Albion) right footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by Dara O'Shea.\n• None Dani Ceballos (Arsenal) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt saved. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (Arsenal) left footed shot from the left side of the box is saved in the bottom left corner. Assisted by Kieran Tierney.\n• None Attempt missed. Charlie Austin (West Bromwich Albion) right footed shot from the centre of the box is too high. Assisted by Matt Phillips. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None A special and exclusive one-off chat with the music icon\n• None How has their rise come to define our culture?", "Cases have reached record highs in the past week\n\nThe next few weeks could be the most dangerous period for Scotland since March in the fight against Covid, the first minister has warned.\n\nNicola Sturgeon said the new variant of the virus was \"accelerating spread\" across Scotland.\n\n\"If you first foot someone today, or hug/kiss/handshake them HNY, you are putting yourself, others and the NHS at risk,\" she tweeted.\n\nA further 2,539 cases of Covid-19 were confirmed on Friday.\n\nThe number is slightly down on Thursday's figure, but Ms Sturgeon said cases numbers were still \"worryingly high\".\n\nDaily confirmed cases have reached record highs on each of the previous three days, rising to to 2,622 on Thursday.\n\nThe percentage of positive cases also reached 14.4% on Wednesday - the highest it has been since the second wave of the pandemic began in the summer.\n\nMs Sturgeon tweeted: \"Today's case numbers are worryingly high again. The new variant is accelerating spread.\n\n\"PLEASE do not visit other people's homes just now, even today - if you first foot someone today, or hug/kiss/handshake them HNY, you are putting yourself, others & the NHS at risk.\"\n\nShe said the \"vaccine cavalry\" was on the way, offering \"real hope for 2021\", but she added: \"With this new variant, the next few weeks may be the most dangerous we've faced since Mar/April.\n\n\"We must act together to suppress it, to save lives and protect the NHS. Folded hands stick with it.\"\n\nThe number of daily confirmed cases has reached record highs this week\n\nA new study by London's Imperial College has found that the new variant of Covid-19 is \"hugely\" more transmissible than the virus's previous version.\n\nIt concludes the new variant increases the Reproduction or R number by between 0.4 and 0.7.\n\nThe UK's latest R number has been estimated at between 1.1 and 1.3. It needs to be below 1.0 for the number of cases to start falling.\n\nThe Scottish government's most recent estimate of the R number in Scotland has put it between 0.9 and 1.1.\n\nEmma Thomson, a professor of infectious disease at the University of Glasgow, said it was important to get people vaccinated quickly.\n\nThe professor, who has been working on the sequencing of the new Covid mutation, told the BBC that lockdown was not controlling the infection \"on its own\".\n\n\"At least we come in armed into the new year with two vaccines which are highly effective at preventing severe disease. We have that,\" she said.\n\n\"We need to roll it out now to add to the public health measures.\"\n\nParties, traditional \"first-footing\" and social events were banned this Hogmanay, with all of mainland Scotland and Skye being under the highest level of Covid restrictions.\n\nAll official events were cancelled, but police had to disperse a crowds of people who gathered at Edinburgh Castle and Calton Hill to see in the new year.\n\nIt has also emerged that 32 people were charged with reckless conduct after police found them gathered at a rented property in Aberfoyle on 27 December.\n\nA Scottish government spokesperson said: \"As the first minister has pointed out, the sharp rise in cases is evidence that the new strain seems to be speeding up transmission.\n\n\"This is why we are asking people to please stay at home as much as possible and avoid non-essential interaction with others.\n\n\"There is light at the end of the tunnel, but we ask everyone to be patient as we work our way through the vaccination programme, and continue to follow FACTS to keep us all safe.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nIndia has formally approved the emergency use of two coronavirus vaccines as it prepares for one of the world's biggest inoculation drives.\n\nThe drugs regulatory authority gave the green light to the jabs developed by AstraZeneca with Oxford University and by local firm Bharat Biotech.\n\nIndia plans to inoculate some 300 million people on a priority list this year.\n\nIt has recorded the second-highest number of infections in the world, with more than 10.3 million confirmed cases to date. Nearly 150,000 people have died.\n\nOn Saturday India held nationwide drills to prepare more than 90,000 health care workers to administer vaccines across the country, which has a population of 1.3 billion people.\n\nThe Drugs Controller General of India said both manufacturers had submitted data showing their vaccines were safe to use.\n\nHowever, opposition politicians and some doctors have criticised a lack of transparency in the approval process.\n\nDr Swapneil Parikh, an infectious diseases researcher based in Mumbai, told the BBC doctors were in a difficult position.\n\n\"I understand there is a need to go through the process quickly, remove regulatory hurdles,\" he said. \"However... [governments and regulators] have a duty to be transparent about the data they have reviewed and the process involved in making the decision to authorise a vaccine, because if they don't do this, it can affect the public's faith in the process.\"\n\nThe Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is being manufactured locally by the Serum Institute of India, the world's largest vaccine manufacturer. It says it is producing more than 50 million doses a month.\n\nAdar Poonawalla, the company's CEO, told the BBC in November that he aimed to ramp up production to 100 million doses a month after receiving regulatory approval.\n\nThe jab, which is known as Covishield in India, is administered in two doses given between four and 12 weeks apart. It can be safely stored at temperatures of 2C to 8C, about the same as a domestic fridge, and can be delivered in existing health care settings such as doctors' surgeries.\n\nThis makes it easier to distribute than some of the other vaccines. The jab developed by Pfizer/BioNTech - which is currently being administered in several countries - must be stored at -70C and can only be moved a limited number of times - a particular challenge in India, where summer temperatures can reach 50C.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Adar Poonawalla This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe local vaccine, however, was approved despite the absence of data on how efficient it can be. It has yet to go through large-scale trials.\n\nThe Drugs Controller General, V.G. Somani, said Bharat Biotech's Covaxin was \"safe and provides a robust immune response\".\n\nMr Somani said it had been approved \"in public interest as an abundant precaution, in clinical trial mode, to have more options for vaccinations, especially in case of infection by mutant strains\".\n\nIndia, which makes about 60% of vaccines globally, plans to immunise about 300 million people by July 2021. It will prioritise health care workers, the emergency services, and those who are clinically vulnerable because of age or pre-existing conditions.\n\nIndia's existing vaccination programme already reaches about 55 million people a year, administering 390 million free jabs against a dozen diseases. It stocks and tracks the vaccines through a well-oiled electronic system.\n\nIndia immunisation programme is one of the largest in the world\n\nPfizer, whose vaccine has already been approved for use in jurisdictions including the UK, the US and the EU, is also seeking emergency authorisation in India.\n\nIn all, some 30 vaccine candidates are being developed in India.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Olly Stephens was pronounced dead in Bugs Bottom fields in Emmer Green, Reading\n\nFour boys and a girl have been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder after a 13-year-old boy was stabbed to death in Reading.\n\nOliver Stephens, known as Olly, was pronounced dead at Bugs Bottom fields, Emmer Green, on Sunday.\n\nThe five teenagers, all aged 13 or 14, remain in custody, according to Thames Valley Police.\n\nDet Supt Kevin Brown said: \"Our thoughts remain with Olly's family at this incredibly difficult time.\"\n\nHe added: \"This is a tragic and shocking incident which has resulted in the death of a young boy.\"\n\nThe victim's family are being supported by specially trained officers.\n\nFloral tributes to Olly have been left outside Highdown School\n\nHighdown School and Sixth Form Centre said it was \"reeling from the tragic news\".\n\nIn a statement, head teacher Rachel Cave said: \"This student was part of our community and many students and staff knew him well.\n\n\"For a life to be ended at such a young age is a total tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.\"\n\nThe school, in Emmer Green, said it was arranging counselling support for students and setting up an electronic book of condolence.\n\nThames Valley Police said a \"considerable police presence\" would be in place in the area for several days\n\nOfficers were called just before 16:00 GMT on Sunday following reports of an attack.\n\nOfficers are appealing for anyone who was in the area between 15:00 and 16:30 who might have taken photos or camera footage to contact them if they notice anything suspicious.\n\nDet Supt Brown said he believed there would have been witnesses to the \"dreadful incident\" as the area is popular with dog walkers.\n\nA man said his wife was walking their dog through the park on Sunday afternoon when she saw a boy on the ground with several people around him trying to give him first aid.\n\nAnother dog walker said she saw a group of young people standing in the woods in Bugs Bottom fields at about 15:30 and described it as \"slightly unusual\".\n\nReading East MP Matt Rodda has offered his \"deepest condolences\" to the boy's family.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Matt Rodda This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSt Barnabas Church in Emmer Green has invited residents to pray and light a candle in memory of the boy.\n\nFollow BBC South on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to south.newsonline@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A UK ticket-holder has started the new year by winning the EuroMillions jackpot of nearly £40m.\n\nOne ticket matched all five regular numbers and two lucky stars in the draw on Friday night to win the £39,774,466.40 prize.\n\nCamelot's Andy Carter, senior winners' adviser at the National Lottery, said: \"What an amazing start to 2021 for UK EuroMillions players.\"\n\nA ticket-holder has now come forward to claim their prize.\n\nCamelot, which operates the lottery, said checks were being made on the claim.\n\nMr Carter said: \"It is fantastic news that the jackpot winning lucky ticket-holder has now claimed this enormous prize. We will now focus on supporting the ticket-holder through the process.\"\n\nThe winning numbers were 16, 28, 32, 44 and 48 with the lucky stars 01 and 09.\n\nTen other ticket-holders each won £1m in the UK Millionaire Maker New Year's Day event.\n\nIn 2019, a UK ticket-holder won the full £170m EuroMillions jackpot, making them Britain's richest ever lottery winner.\n\nAnd last year, a £57m EuroMillions prize claim was validated just before the deadline. The ticket had been bought in South Ayrshire.\n\nThe winning ticket holder's newfound cash means they are now wealthier than former One Direction singer Zayn Malik, who is worth £36m, according to the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List.\n\nAnd if they have a bit more money in the bank, they could buy one of the UK's most expensive homes, which went on the market last year.\n\nNobody won the EuroMillons Hotpicks jackpot on Friday, which uses the same numbers as the main draw, but one winner scooped the Thunderball top prize of £500,000.\n\nThe Thunderball numbers were 13, 17, 30, 34, 35 and the Thunderball was 01.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Wales went into a new lockdown on 20 December\n\nWales is likely to remain in lockdown for the rest of January as the first minister said he does not \"see much headroom for change\".\n\nMinisters are to review restrictions ahead of an announcement on Friday.\n\nBut Mark Drakeford said it was \"very hard to see where the room for manoeuvre is at the moment\" with the NHS \"under huge pressure\".\n\nWithout further changes, restrictions could be kept until the next three-week review at the end of January.\n\nMr Drakeford also said the Welsh Government was unlikely to tighten restrictions despite the emergence of a new more contagious variant of the virus.\n\nHe said there could be some tweaks \"at the margins\" but no wholesale changes because \"it's difficult to see what more could be done\".\n\nThe government introduced a new four-level system of Covid-19 restrictions on 20 December with people told to stay home and avoid all but essential travel.\n\nA study has found the new variant of Covid-19 to be \"hugely\" more transmissible than the virus's previous version.\n\nThe Imperial College study suggests transmission of the new variant tripled during England's November lockdown while the previous version was reduced by a third.\n\nBut Mr Drakeford does not believe the Welsh Government needs to change the system of restrictions it introduced before details of the new variant emerged.\n\n\"We'll keep our plans under review but level four restrictions in Wales are very strict indeed and it's difficult to see what more could be done to them,\" he said.\n\n\"If they need to be tweaked at the margins to take account of the new variation that's what the cabinet here will consider.\"\n\nHe has dismissed calls by teaching unions to suspend the phased return of face-to-face teaching.\n\nThe government's cabinet will meet on Wednesday to review the current restrictions ahead of an announcement by the first minister on Friday.\n\nBut when asked whether he expected any changes, Mr Drakeford said: \"It's very hard to see where the room for manoeuvre is at the moment.\n\n\"Our health service remains under huge pressure and the coming weeks will be very difficult indeed with winter pressures on the one hand and growing numbers of people suffering with coronavirus in our hospitals on the other.\n\n\"We'll review it, as we said we would, but when I look at the figures I don't see much headroom for change.\"\n\nThe Welsh Conservatives have not criticised the decision to remain in lockdown, but have called for greater scrutiny.\n\nSuzy Davies, Member of the Senedd for South Wales West, said questions would remain \"about how legitimate the decisions of the Welsh Government are\" until MSs had the opportunity to question them in the Welsh Parliament.\n\nPlaid Cymru leader Adam Price said the announcement was unsurprising given the pressures on the NHS, but called on the Welsh Government to ensure a \"rapid rollout\" of the Covid vaccine.\n\nMr Price also called for financial support for people forced to self-isolate and businesses \"during the hardest winter of our time\".\n\nAfter Friday's decision, the next three-week review announcement is not expected until 29 January.\n\nA further 56 people have died after contracting coronavirus in Wales, along with 4,011 new cases, according to data published by Public Health Wales on Sunday.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. A dozen people were fined in London for playing dominoes\n\nTwelve people have been fined after they were caught playing dominoes in a restaurant in east London.\n\nPolice officers found the group hiding in a dark room when they entered the building in Whitechapel on Tuesday.\n\nThe owner initially claimed those inside were workers, before admitting they were playing the game.\n\nTower Hamlets Council has been asked to consider issuing a fine to the owner of the restaurant for breaching tier four Covid-19 restrictions, the Met said.\n\nA video released by the Met shows the restaurant owner saying: \"They're playing dominoes.\"\n\nCh Insp Pete Shaw said: \"The rules under tier four are in place to keep all of us safe, and they do not exempt people from gathering to play games together in basements.\n\n\"The fact that these people hid from officers clearly shows they knew they were breaching the rules and have now been fined for their actions.\"\n• None Met breaks up more than 50 New Year's Eve parties\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Boris Johnson has reiterated his position that a Scottish independence referendum should be a \"once-in-a-generation\" vote.\n\nSpeaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr programme, the prime minister said the gap between referendums on Europe - the first in 1975 and the second in 2016 - was \"a good sort of gap\".\n\nHowever, Mr Marr suggested that now \"things had changed\" for Scotland.\n\nNicola Sturgeon wants to see an independent Scotland join the EU.\n\nAndrew Marr asked the prime minister what a voter in Scotland should do if they decided that a second independence referendum was now something they wanted, and what were the \"democratic tools\" to now do that?\n\nMr Johnson replied by saying: \"Referendums in my experience, direct experience, in this country are not particularly jolly events.\n\n\"They don't have a notably unifying force in the national mood, they should be only once-in-a-generation.\"\n\nAsked what the difference was between a referendum on EU membership being granted and one on Scottish independence being requested, he said: \"The difference is we had a referendum in 1975 and we then had another one in 2016.\n\n\"That seems to be about the right sort of gap.\"\n\nThe 2014 independence referendum resulted in a 55.3% vote against Scotland going alone.\n\nOn Hogmanay, Nicola Sturgeon said Europe should \"keep a light on\" as Scotland will be \"back soon\".\n\nThe first minister tweeted just after the Brexit transition period formally ended at 11:00 on 31 December 2020.\n\nScotland's trading and travel relationships with EU countries will now be governed by the agreement announced by the UK government on Christmas Eve.\n\nMs Sturgeon reiterated the SNP's call for an independent Scotland to join the EU.\n\nTweeting a picture of the words Europe and Scotland joined by a love heart, she wrote: \"Scotland will be back soon, Europe. Keep the light on.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Nicola Sturgeon This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSNP depute leader Keith Brown said: \"It may be a new year but it's the same old incoherent bluster from Boris Johnson. The prime minister pretends otherwise but he knows he can't keep on denying democracy.\n\n\"Even his American pal Donald Trump has learned that if you try to stand in the way of the democratic choice of a nation you get swept away.\n\n\"The people who will decide our future are the people of Scotland, not Boris Johnson and the Westminster Tories.\"\n\nFormer Labour prime minister Tony Blair said it was \"extremely difficult\" to challenge the SNP on independence when the party was \"virtually uncontested\" in Scotland.\n\nHe said: \"We had a referendum that rejected Scottish independence, but Brexit put it back on the agenda again. And it's going to require very careful management. The truth of the matter is it's still not in Scotland's interest to separate from England.\n\n\"There are huge economic and political reasons for the United Kingdom to stay the United Kingdom but we're going to have to examine whether there's different constitutional settlements.\n\n\"I also think it's incredibly important, the single most important thing politically to my mind, is that we get a really capable opposition in Scotland - which should be the Labour Party - that's capable of contesting the Scottish nationalist position in Scotland in a way that prevents them from doing what they do at the moment, which is govern Scotland but pretend they're in opposition.\"\n\nScottish Greens co-leader Lorna Slater said: \"Only the people of Scotland have the right to determine Scotland's future.\n\n\"Seventeen consecutive opinion polls have demonstrated majorities in favour of independence, with the most recent indicating a record 58% support.\n\n\"Whether it's the botched handling of the coronavirus crisis, the Brexit catastrophe or just the heartlessness of Tory governments we haven't voted for, it's clear that the UK isn't working for Scotland.\"", "Gerry Marsden was awarded an MBE in 2003 for services to Liverpudlian Charities.\n\nGerry and the Pacemakers singer Gerry Marsden, whose version of You'll Never Walk Alone became a football terrace anthem for his hometown club of Liverpool, has died at the age of 78.\n\nHis family said he died on Sunday after a short illness not linked to Covid-19.\n\nMarsden's band was one of the biggest success stories of the Merseybeat era, and in 1963 became the first to have their first three songs top the chart.\n\nThe band's other best known hit, Ferry Cross The Mersey, came in 1964.\n\nIt was written by Marsden himself as a tribute to his city, and reached number eight.\n\nMarsden was made an MBE in 2003 for services to charity after supporting victims of the Hillsborough disaster.\n\nAt the time, he said he was \"over the moon\" to have received the honour, following his support for numerous charities across Merseyside and beyond.\n\nGerry Marsden in 2009 on the Mersey ferry, which he made famous with his song Ferry Cross The Mersey, as he received the Freedom of the City in Liverpool\n\nMarsden's daughter, Yvette Marbeck, said he went into hospital on Boxing Day after tests showed he had a serious blood infection that had travelled to his heart.\n\nMs Marbeck told the PA news agency: \"It was a very short illness and too quick to comprehend really.\"\n\nHe died in hospital, Ms Marbeck said, adding: \"He was our dad, our hero, warm, funny and what you see is what you got.\"\n\nLiverpool FC posted on social media that Marsden's words would \"live on forever with us\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Liverpool FC This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nGerry and the Pacemakers worked the same Liverpool club circuit as The Beatles in the 1960s and were signed by the Fab Four's manager Brian Epstein.\n\nEpstein gave Marsden's group the song How Do You Do It, which had been turned down by The Beatles and Adam Faith, for their debut single.\n\nSir Paul McCartney described Gerry and the Pacemakers as The Beatles's \"biggest rivals\" on the Merseyside scene.\n\n\"I'll always remember you with a smile,\" Sir Paul said in his tribute to Marsden.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Paul McCartney This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAnd the other surviving Beatle, Sir Ringo Starr, sent \"peace and love\" to Marsden's family in a tribute on Twitter.\n\nWhile Marsden was a songwriter as well as a singer, his most enduring hit was actually a cover of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical number from 1945, which he had to convince his bandmates to record as their third single.\n\nIn many interviews over the years, he explained how fate played a part in his band ever recording the song. He was watching a Laurel and Hardy movie at Liverpool's Odeon cinema in the early 1960s and, only because it was raining, he decided to stay for the second part of a double feature.\n\nThat turned out to be the film Carousel - which featured that song on its soundtrack - and Marsden was so moved by the lyrics that he became determined that it should become part of his band's repertoire.\n\nIn a 2013 interview, Marsden told the Liverpool FC website how You'll Never Walk Alone was adopted by the club's fans as soon as it topped the chart in 1963: \"I remember being at Anfield and before every kick off they used to play the top 10 from number 10 to number one, and so You'll Never Walk Alone was played before the match. I was at the game and the fans started singing it.\n\n\"When it went out of the top 10 they took the song off the playlist and then for the next match the Kop were shouting 'Where's our song?' So they had to put it back on.\n\n\"Now, every time I go to the game I still get goose pimples when the song comes on and I sing my head off.\"\n\nSir Kenny Dalglish, who managed Liverpool at the time of the Hillsborough tragedy, tweeted that he was \"saddened\" by the news of Marsden's death, and that You'll Never Walk Alone was an \"integral part of Liverpool Football Club, and never more so than now\".\n\nLiverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram posted a tribute on Twitter, saying he was \"devastated\" by the news.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Steve Rotheram This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nGerry was an entertainer. He loved being an entertainer; he loved people seeing him in the street and asking him for his autograph and the like.\n\nHe had a very distinctive voice, and that is terribly important. You knew instantly it was him on those records. He was best on those ballads.\n\nI think he really did them very well indeed. You'll Never Walk Alone was a big show song that had been around for years and years, and lots of people had done it.\n\nJust before Gerry brought his version out, Johnny Mathis brought his out. If that version had been played on the Kop, I don't think the Kop would have taken to it because you couldn't sing along with Johnny Mathis - he had too big a range and too perfect a voice.\n\nBut Gerry sounded like everyman and it was absolutely perfect for the Kop. I think it's the greatest football anthem of the lot.\n\nAs well as being a Liverpool anthem, You'll Never Walk Alone has also been adopted by fans at both Celtic in Scotland and Borussia Dortmund in Germany.\n\nMarsden's career began at legendary live music venue, The Cavern Club, where The Pacemakers played nearly 200 times.\n\nThe club said on Twitter that Marsden was \"not only a legend, but also a very good friend of The Cavern\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by The Cavern Club This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post 4 by The Cavern Club\n\nGerry and The Pacemakers achieved nine hit singles and two hit albums between 1963 and 1965, before splitting up.\n\nMarsden pursued a solo career before the band reformed in 1974 for a world tour.\n\nIn 1985, Marsden was back in the pop spotlight when he was invited to be one of the vocalists of a charity version of You'll Never Walk Alone, which was released to raise funds for victims of a fire at a Bradford City match.\n\nIn doing so, Marsden set another chart record by becoming the first person to sing on two different chart-topping versions of the same song.\n\nSo when, after the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989, the other Pacemakers classic of Ferry Cross The Mersey was chosen to raise funds for its victims and a group of famous Liverpudlian singers was gathered, Marsden was again included and was back at number one once more for a cause he held dear for the rest of his life.\n\nMarsden was awarded the Freedom of Liverpool in April 2009, an occasion he marked by boarding a ferry across the Mersey and getting out his guitar to sing his famous hit which described the scene.", "A woman takes her dog for an early walk in Allendale in Northumberland\n\nMany parts of England have seen snow flurries accompany the arrival of New Year.\n\nAreas which welcomed in 2021 with several centimetres of snow included Northumberland, parts of Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.\n\nThe Met Office has warned worse is to come with more wintry showers forecast.\n\nDriving conditions on many roads will become \"hazardous\" as the cold weather continues next week, it said.\n\nSeveral football matches were cancelled this weekend due to frozen pitches.\n\nGround staff at West Bromwich Albion were faced with heavy snowfall prior to their Premier League match with Arsenal at The Hawthorns on Saturday evening.\n\nGround staff clear snow from the pitch prior to the Premier League match at The Hawthorns, West Bromwich on Saturday\n\nFurther snow is predicted mainly inland and particularly over higher ground where above 200-300m a further few centimetres of snow is possible.\n\nThe chill in the air is due to high pressure to the north of the UK, which is dragging air from the east \"which at this time of year is cold\", the Met Office said.\n\nThe cold easterly winds are set to develop next week, bringing wintry showers - particularly around eastern parts - while hazardous freezing fog, frost and ice risks will all continue, forecasters said.\n\nSledging in the snow around Silverdale Country Park in Newcastle-under-Lyme\n\nTwo women looking out over the snow covered Huntcliff sea cliffs in Saltburn on the North Yorkshire coast\n\nMeteorologist Alex Burkill said: \"Obviously it's very cold and it's going to stay cold through this week.\n\n\"Whilst there will be some wintry hazards around, it's not really until the end of the week until we see any significant snow.\"\n\nColston Bassett in Nottinghamshire got a light dusting of snow on Saturday\n\nA buried garden Buddha after heavy overnight snow in Buxton in Derbyshire\n\nRAC Breakdown spokesman Simon Williams said: \"The message for those who have to drive is to adjust their speed according to the conditions and leave extra stopping distance so 2021 doesn't begin with an unwelcome bump and an insurance claim.\n\n\"Snow and ice are by far the toughest driving conditions, so if they can be avoided that's probably the best policy.\"\n\nA plough clears snow from the roads in Allendale, Northumberland\n\nA man takes his dogs for an early morning walk through the snow in Allenheads, Northumberland\n\nWaterfowl were still active at a snowy Chapel en le Frith in the Derbyshire Peak District\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Researchers have been tracking changes to the \"spike\" of the virus\n\nThe new variant of Covid-19 is \"hugely\" more transmissible than the virus's previous version, a study has found.\n\nIt concludes the new variant increases the Reproduction or R number by between 0.4 and 0.7.\n\nThe UK's latest R number has been estimated at between 1.1 and 1.3. It needs to be below 1.0 for the number of cases to start falling.\n\nProf Axel Gandy of London's Imperial College said the differences between the viruses types was \"quite extreme\".\n\n\"There is a huge difference in how easily the variant virus spreads,\" he told BBC News. \"This is the most serious change in the virus since the epidemic began,\" he added.\n\nThe Imperial College study suggests transmission of the new variant tripled during England's November lockdown while the previous version was reduced by a third.\n\nCases of Covid-19 have begun to increase rapidly during the second spike, and the number of cases recorded in a single day reached a new high on Thursday.\n\nEarly results indicated that the virus was spreading more quickly among under-20s, particularly among secondary school age children.\n\nBut the very latest data indicates that it was spreading quickly across all age groups, according to Prof Gandy who was a member of the research team.\n\n\"One possible explanation is that the early data was collected during the time of the November lockdown where schools were open and the activities of the adult population were more restricted. We are seeing now that the new virus has increased infectiousness across all age groups.\"\n\nProf Jim Naismith, of Oxford University, said he believed that the new findings indicated that even tougher restrictions would soon be needed.\n\n\"The data from Imperial represent the best analysis to date and imply that the measures we have employed to date, would - with the new virus - fail to reduce the R number to below 1.\n\n\"In simpler terms, unless we do something different the new virus strain is going to continue to spread, more infections, more hospitalisations and more deaths.\"\n\nThe R number is the average number of people an infected person infects. If it is above 1 the epidemic is growing.\n\nThe most chilling finding from this piece of research is that the November lockdown in England, hard though it was for many people, would not have stopped the variant form of the virus spreading. The same severe restrictions that saw cases of the previous version of the virus fall by a third, would see a tripling of the new variant. This is why there has been such a sudden tightening of restrictions across the country.\n\nIt is unclear whether the current restrictions will be enough to control the spread of the virus. Given the fact that it has taken two lockdowns to stop the earlier version of the virus overwhelming the NHS, many scientists fear that further tightening will be necessary.\n\nInfection levels will begin to drop as enough people are vaccinated. But until then it is now more important than ever for people to follow social distancing guidelines, wear masks where required and to regularly wash their hands.\n\nThe new year brings with it hope of a more normal life in the next few months but also a new form of the virus that all of us will have to combat in the coming days and weeks.\n\nProfessor Lawrence Young, of Warwick University, said early indications suggested that vaccines would be effective against the new form of the virus.\n\n\"Variants virus have been around since the beginning of the pandemic and are a product of the natural process by which viruses develop and adapt to their hosts as they replicate.\n\n\"Most of these mutations have no effect on the behaviour of the virus but very occasionally they can improve the ability of the virus to infect and/or become more resistant to the body's immune response.\"\n\nFurther research is needed to understand why the variant is spreading so quickly. But early indications are that vaccines should be effective against it.\n\nThe new virus has been designated \"Variant of Concern 202012/01\" or VOC by Public Health England.\n\nIt was detected in November and thought to have originated in the south-east England in September.\n\nThere is no evidence to suggest that it is more deadly, but it will increase the number of cases which in turn will add further pressure on the NHS.\n\nThe variant can now be found across the UK, except Northern Ireland, but it is heavily concentrated in London, as well as south-east and eastern England.", "The aftermath of an attack in August in Niger, which has suffered a number claimed by jihadist groups\n\nSuspected Islamist militants have attacked two villages in Niger, with reports of dozens of civilians killed.\n\nAround 49 died and 17 were injured in the village of Tchombangou, while another 30 died in Zaroumdareye - both near Niger's western border with Mali, Reuters reports.\n\nThere have been several recent violent incidents in Africa's Sahel region, carried out by militant groups.\n\nFrance said on Saturday that two of its soldiers were killed in Mali.\n\nHours earlier, a group with links to al-Qaeda said it was behind the killing of three French troops in a separate attack in Mali on Monday.\n\nFrance has been leading a coalition of West African and European allies against Islamist militants in the Sahel.\n\nBut the region continues to be affected by ethnic violence, banditry, and human and drug trafficking.\n\nIn light of Saturday's attacks, Interior Minister Alkache Alhada said soldiers had been sent to the area, according to French outlet RFI. But Mr Alhada did not say how many casualties there had been across the two villages.\n\nA local official, quoted by AFP news agency, said many people were killed, and a local journalist spoke of up to 50 deaths.\n\nNiger's Tillabéri region, where the villages are situated, lies within the so-called tri-border area between Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, which has been plagued by jihadi attacks in recent years.\n\nTravel by motorbike has been banned in the region for a year, as part of efforts to stop incursions by Islamic militants, who often launch attacks from the vehicles.\n\nAreas of Niger are also facing repeated attacks by jihadists from Nigeria, where the government is fighting an insurgency by Boko Haram.\n\nLast month, members of the group killed at least 27 people in Niger's south-eastern Diffa region.\n\nThe latest attacks in Tillabéri come amid national elections in Niger, as President Mahamadou Issoufou steps down after two five-year terms.\n\nElection officials announced provisional results on Saturday, showing a lead for Mohamed Bazoum - a former minister and a member of Niger's ruling party.\n\nA second round of votes is expected to be held on 21 February, once ballots have been validated by the country's constitutional court.", "The prime minister has said that tougher measures could be needed to help cope with a surge in coronavirus cases.\n\nHe has not yet said whether we will need school closures, or even overnight curfews like those imposed in France.\n\nBut clues about such measures to tackle the new more infectious variant come from the government's Sage advisory committee.\n\nThe headline is that whether we see a return to only being allowed one form of daily outdoor exercise, or stricter controls on travel around the country, we'll be hearing a lot more about something already very familiar: hand hygiene, social distancing, wearing masks and ensuring there is fresh air.\n\nThese may sound familiar but the advisers believe that because the new variant spreads so easily, the measures need to be applied with \"a step change in rigour\" - in other words, a lot more forcefully.\n\nThey suggest considering a return to the two-metre rule because it's more effective than the one-metre plus guidance adopted last year.\n\nMasks need to be made of three layers, not just one, and worn in more locations than now - including workplaces, schools and crowded outdoor spaces.\n\nThe key message is that it is vital to reduce social contact - being close to people, especially indoors for long periods of time, carries the highest risk of infection.\n\nSo expect tier four-type bans on visiting other households to become normal.\n\nThe advisers also say many people still do not recognise the key symptoms of Covid-19 - so ministers need to spell them out and help people understand why they should self-isolate.\n\nBut they also say it is essential to praise the efforts made so far, to recognise sacrifices and emphasise how they've kept infection numbers lower than they would otherwise have been.\n\nWhatever new measures are picked, the advice to ministers is to offer \"clear and convincing explanations\" to motivate people.\n\nThat could be a hint that the government's current \"hands, face, space\" slogan may need to make way for something stronger.", "Last updated on .From the section Man City\n\nManchester City manager Pep Guardiola says he may stay in management much longer than he anticipated.\n\nGuardiola, 49, has previously talked of limiting his time in football to pursue other interests.\n\n\"Before, I thought I was going to retire soon. Now I'm thinking I'm going to retire older. So, I don't know,\" Guardiola said.\n\nThe Spaniard signed a new two-year deal at City in November and has won six major trophies at the club.\n\nPrior to his arrival in Manchester, Guardiola, who turns 50 this month, spent four years as manager of Barcelona and three in charge of Bayern Munich.\n\n\"Experience helps you, especially the way I live my profession,\" he added.\n\nGuardiola's five-year stay at City represents the longest commitment he has made to a club in his management career.\n\nHe has won two Premier League titles, the FA Cup and three League Cups since joining them in 2016.\n\nDespite going into Sunday's match at Chelsea on the back of a six-game unbeaten run and with two games in hand on most clubs around them in the table, he is cautious about talk of winning a third league title.\n\n\"If you think about what [can] happen in January, February - the two games [in hand], we can lose these two games and anything can happen,\" he said.\n\n\"So, in the Premier League, every game is so tough and it is better to be calm. The real Premier League, the people I spoke to before I landed here, said everyone can lose to everyone. I didn't see this until now.\n\n\"Now is the first time when I see in the Premier League, one team is able to lose or win seven, and after draw, and after lose. The results are unpredictable.\"\n\nAmong the challengers this season are arch rivals Manchester United, who City face in the Carabao Cup semi-finals.\n\nOle Gunnar Solskjaer's side have been rejuvenated in recent weeks, shrugging off the disappointment of a Champions League exit with some excellent domestic form.\n\n\"Ole is happier than me,\" said Guardiola, whose preparations have been affected by five players testing positive for Covid-19.\n\n\"But I am not much concerned about United. I am so busy with what we have to do and what we can do with the players.\n\n\"They are there because they deserve it. Since I arrived I expected them to be there all the time. Sometimes in the last seasons it has not been possible, especially in the Premier League.\"\n• None A special and exclusive one-off chat with the music icon\n• None How has their rise come to define our culture?", "Police made 17 arrests at the demonstration in Hyde Park\n\nPolice have made arrests at an anti-lockdown demonstration in central London.\n\nCrowds of between 200 to 300 people began to gather in Hyde Park, which is in a tier four coronavirus area, at about 13:30 GMT on Saturday, the Metropolitan Police said.\n\nSeventeen people were arrested on suspicion of breaching public health regulations.\n\nMost demonstrators had left the park by 16:45, police said.\n\nThe Met tweeted: \"Officers continue to engage with groups of people who have gathered in the Hyde Park area.\n\n\"A number of people have been arrested under health protection regulations and taken into custody.\n\n\"We urge those in the area to leave immediately.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Metropolitan Police Events This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMore than two people are generally not allowed to meet in public under tier four rules.\n\nThe police force added: \"Officers will take enforcement action where we see clear breaches of the tier four rules.\n\n\"It's up to all of us to make the right choices and slow the spread of the virus.\"\n\nA group called The People's Lockdown, Stand For Your Human Rights, had said it was going to hold a event at Hyde Park on Saturday afternoon.\n\nIn an online post, it called on people to \"stand with your loved ones\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section Man City\n\nManchester City say they are disappointed after defender Benjamin Mendy breached Covid-19 rules by hosting a New Year's Eve party.\n\nA spokesperson for the France international said the 26-year-old held a dinner party with guests from outside his household.\n\nThe mixing of households indoors is banned under the UK government's tier four restrictions.\n\nCity said they would conduct an internal investigation.\n\nMendy was named on the bench for City's Premier League game away to Chelsea on Sunday (16:30 GMT).\n\n\"While it is understood that elements of this incident have been misinterpreted in the reports [carried by newspapers earlier], and that the player has publicly apologised for his error, the club is disappointed to learn of the transgression and will be conducting an internal investigation,\" the club said in a statement.\n\nA spokesperson for Mendy said: \"Benjamin and his partner allowed a chef and two friends of his partner to attend his property for a dinner party on New Year's Eve.\n\n\"Ben accepts that this is a breach of Covid-19 protocols and is sorry for his actions in this matter. Ben has had a Covid test and is liaising with Manchester City about this.\"\n\nExplaining why Mendy was in his matchday squad on Sunday, manager Pep Guardiola told Sky Sports: \"First of all the club made a statement; second Benjamin already had Covid in the past - he's been tested every day like all of us and he's negative. He knows what he has done and he will learn in the future.\"\n\nMeanwhile, goalkeeper Ederson, forward Ferran Torres, and midfielder Tommy Doyle are among six City players out of the Chelsea game because of coronavirus.\n\nThe trio have tested positive for the virus, adding to the cases of Kyle Walker, Gabriel Jesus and Eric Garcia.\n\nEarlier on Sunday, defender Garcia became the sixth City player to test positive for coronavirus.\n\nGarcia, along with a member of staff who also returned a positive test, will now self-isolate.\n\nCity previously postponed their match against Everton on 28 December because of positive tests.\n\nThere have been a number of apparent coronavirus breaches by players at Premier League clubs in recent days.\n\nTottenham criticised three of their players after they attended a party over Christmas, while Fulham are looking into reports that striker Aleksandar Mitrovic allegedly broke coronavirus rules.\n\nCrystal Palace manager Roy Hodgson also apologised after midfielder Luka Milivojevic was pictured with Mitrovic at a gathering in London.\n\nFulham's match against Burnley on Sunday was postponed after an increase in positive cases at the club.\n\nCity also had to cancel their match against Everton on 28 December because of positive tests.", "Last updated on .From the section Boxing\n\nLuke Campbell's hopes of another world title shot suffered a severe blow as Ryan Garcia rose from the canvas to land a superb stoppage in Dallas.\n\nIn a gripping lightweight fight, Briton Campbell landed a left hook in round two to floor Mexican-American Garcia.\n\nSome asked how the much-hyped Garcia might respond to adversity and while he fought on emotion, he found answers.\n\nCampbell survived a tough attack in the fifth, but a well-placed body shot ended the contest two rounds later.\n\n\"You taught me a lot,\" Garcia, 22, told 33-year-old Campbell as the opponents embraced in the beaten man's corner at the American Airlines Center.\n\nThe jubilant reaction from Garcia's team - including gym-mate Saul 'Canelo' Alvarez - hinted at relief, but unquestionably emphasised the statement they knew their man had made.\n\nIn beating a fighter of Campbell's pedigree - and by rising from the canvas to do so - this win served up plenty of answers about Garcia, whose social media following led him to be identified as the world's 12th most marketable athlete in October.\n\n\"I think I showed a lot of people who I really am. I showed today I am special,\" he told DAZN.\n\n\"They wanted to show me as a social media fighter. Anybody who puts you down, remember you're not who people tell you who you are - you are who you choose to be. I chose to be a champion tonight.\n\n\"He caught me, I was like, 'I got dropped, this is crazy'. I've never been dropped in my life. I had to adjust. I knew I could beat him, I just had to get back up.\"\n\nGarcia is the first man to beat Campbell by stoppage. Shortly after the fight Campbell told Garcia in his dressing room that he punched harder than anyone he had ever faced. The London 2012 Olympic gold medallist then told his Twitter followers that Garcia has a \"massive future ahead\".\n\nThis stoppage win will add to the kind of hype that has led some American broadcasters to suggest Garcia's star status could bring new fans to the sport in the years to come.\n\nThe 1-3 bookmakers' favourite was carried to the ring on a throne while Campbell waited in the ring in Texas.\n\nBut within two rounds a heavy left hook put Garcia on his back and it is to his credit he got up, took the fight to his rival and won rounds in the aftermath.\n\nGarcia had only twice gone past round four, and his last two bouts had lasted less than 180 seconds in total. He carried a fizz in his punches throughout and a left hook-right hand combination in the fifth rocked Campbell and sent him into the ropes as the bell sounded.\n\nIn a contest that ebbed and flowed, Campbell found some poise after a relentless attack from Garcia when the action resumed at the start of the sixth.\n\nBut a round later, Campbell braced for an attack to his head only for Garcia to beautifully drive a left hand to the body that left him on all fours.\n\nGarcia's team raced into the ring, lifted their man and placed a crown on his head.\n\nHis 21st win in as many fights could earn him a world title shot next, or his preferred bout with American Gervonta Davis.\n\nFor now, it has justified the hype and underlined his threat. After the fourth loss of his career, Campbell will need to regroup if he is to attempt to win a world title for the third time.\n• None A special and exclusive one-off chat with the music icon\n• None How has their rise come to define our culture?", "A large poultry flock is to be culled in County Antrim, after an outbreak of bird flu.\n\nThirty thousand birds are to be destroyed as a precautionary measure at the farm near Clough.\n\nIt is the first time the disease has been detected in a commercial flock in Northern Ireland since 1998\n\nThe outbreak affected a business rearing young hens for egg production and it is understood there are other poultry farms in the area.\n\nIt will mean certain movement restrictions in 3km and 10km protection zones around the affected farm, with potential trade implications for other poultry businesses there.\n\nBird flu is a notifiable disease carried by migratory wild birds. It can spread quickly and rapidly causes death in affected flocks.\n\nRestrictions were put in place earlier in the winter in an attempt to prevent transmission to commercial flocks which make up a key part of Northern Ireland's important agri-food industry.\n\nSince 23 December there has been a requirement for all poultry flocks, no matter how small, to be housed.\n\nPublic health advice is that bird flu- or avian influenza - poses a low risk to human health and the Food Standards Agency advises that it does not present a food risk.\n\nPoultry is a £750m a year industry in Northern Ireland which employs 5,000 people. There are around 24 million birds on 650 farms, most of them in counties Tyrone and Antrim.\n\nThe disease has been detected in a number of wild birds in Northern Ireland this winter and in commercial flocks in both Great Britain and in the Republic of Ireland.\n\nIn the short term it will mean no movements on or off poultry farms in the area, with a licensing system being introduced in the coming days.\n\nPoultry products from outside the restricted zone can continue to be traded with EU member states and products from within the zones can be sold on home markets.\n\nOther countries will apply their own rules depending on their assessment of the situation.\n\nNorthern Ireland's chief vet Robert Huey repeated his message for poultry owners to apply rigorous biosecurity measures.\n\n\"Given the level of suspicion and the density of the poultry population around the holding, it is vital that as a matter of precaution, we act now and act fast,\" he said.\n\n\"I have therefore taken the decision to cull the birds as well as introduce temporary control zones around the holding in an effort to protect our poultry industry and stop the spread of the virus.\n\n\"An epidemiological investigation is under way to determine the likely source of infection and determine the risk of disease spread.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Prof Linda Bauld says Scots should be prepared a longer period living with level four restrictions\n\nScotland should be prepared for Covid restrictions to be extended as infection rates continue to rise, a public health expert has said.\n\nThe latest government figures show a further 2,137 cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in Scotland on Friday.\n\nProf Linda Bauld described it as a \"fragile situation\", despite the rate dropping below Thursday's 2,539 cases.\n\nThe latest figures for hospital admissions and deaths will not be published until Tuesday.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon warned on Friday that the next few weeks could be the most dangerous period for Scotland since March in the fight against Covid as the new variant of the virus was \"accelerating spread\" across Scotland.\n\nDaily confirmed cases reached record highs on the last three days of 2020, rising to to 2,622 on Thursday.\n\nThe percentage of positive cases also reached 14.4% on Wednesday - the highest it has been since the second wave of the pandemic began in the summer.\n\nIt had dropped to 10.8% on Friday. A percentage of lower than 5% is needed to show the virus is under control, according to the WHO.\n\nProf Bauld, a public health expert at the University of Edinburgh, said there were no signs yet that the infection rate was levelling off, having risen suddenly from a daily rate of fewer than 1,000 to more than 2,000 per day in recent days.\n\nShe told BBC Scotland: \"It definitely is a fragile situation and you can see that we have more cases than we would expect at the current time.\n\n\"We may be starting to see some of the impacts of the Christmas mixing, but also we know around four in 10 cases, from recent data, are of the new variant.\n\n\"I would imagine that the new variant is playing a role in these higher rates of infection and if these numbers continue to sit at where they are we are going to have more people in hospital in a week or two's time, and that is very worrying.\"\n\nAll of mainland Scotland is under level four restrictions in an attempt to slow down the rate of virus spread\n\nThis would bring \"real challenges\" for hospitals, especially in the central belt, Prof Bauld said, adding that it was \"absolutely imperative that we do not see these number rise more than they are now\".\n\nShe said it would take some time to see the impact of level four restrictions introduced in mainland Scotland on Boxing Day.\n\n\"Mentally we just need to be prepared for the fact that we may be living with the level four restrictions for longer than the Scottish government currently plans,\" Prof Bauld said.\n\nShe said the new, more transmissible coronavirus variant would make it harder to get the R number below one in Scotland and schools may not be able to fully reopen on 18 January.\n\nThe government's education recovery group was preparing with schools for blended learning to go on longer if necessary, she added.\n\nAll of mainland Scotland is under level four restrictions in an attempt to slow down the rate of virus spread.\n\nA new study by London's Imperial College has found that the new variant of Covid-19 is \"hugely\" more transmissible than the virus's previous version.\n\nIt concludes that the new variant increases the Reproduction or R number by between 0.4 and 0.7.\n\nThe Scottish government's most recent estimate of the R number in Scotland has put it between 0.9 and 1.1. It needs to be below 1.0 for the number of cases to start falling.\n\nThe government has described the vaccination programme as a \"light at the end of the tunnel\" and has urged people to stay at home as much as possible in the meantime.", "Hospitals across the UK are being told to prepare to face the same Covid pressures as the NHS in London and south-east England.\n\nSenior doctor Prof Andrew Goddard said the virus's highly infectious new variant was spreading nationwide.\n\nCase numbers were \"mild\" compared with where he expected them to be next week, he said, with doctors \"really worried\".\n\nIt comes as a further 57,725 people have tested positive for Covid - a new daily high.\n\nThis is the fifth day in a row new daily cases have been over 50,000 and brings the total number of cases to 2,599,789.\n\nAnother 445 deaths, of people who had tested positive within the previous 28 days, were reported on Saturday - bringing the total number of deaths to 74,570, according to government figures.\n\nThe UK-wide total for people in hospital with Covid has already passed the spring peak.\n\nHalf of the major hospital trusts in England are said to be dealing with more Covid-19 patients than at the worst point of the first wave in April, with the NHS facing its \"busiest winter ever\".\n\nProf Goddard, of the Royal College of Physicians, told BBC Breakfast: \"There's no doubt that Christmas is going to have a big impact, the new variant is also going to have a big impact, we know that is more infectious, more transmissible, so I think the large numbers that we're seeing in the South East, in London, in south Wales, is now going to be reflected over the next month, two months even, over the rest of the country.\"\n\nHe said: \"It seems very likely that we are going to see more and more cases, wherever people work in the UK, and we need to be prepared for that.\"\n\nPressure has been so great on hospitals in London and south-east England that some patients have been moved out of the area.\n\nLondon's weekly rate of coronavirus cases is 858 per 100,000 people, double the UK figure.\n\nDominic Harrison, director of public health for Blackburn and Darwen, said a decision on a new lockdown had to be decided \"in the next week\" - instead of waiting for the North to get to the same rates as the capital \"and 'call it late' which has been our pattern of response too often\".\n\nThe most recent UK-wide statistics, from 28 December, showed there were 23,823 people in hospital with Covid. That was already significantly higher than the spring peak, which saw 21,683 in hospital on 12 April.\n\nOnly English hospitals have released figures for the final three days of December - and these show that a further 2,302 Covid patients were occupying hospital beds on 31 December.\n\nLondon's Nightingale emergency hospital is ready to admit patients, the NHS has said, while other sites currently not in use are being readied.\n\nSorry, your browser cannot display this map\n\nProf Goddard said it was vital the public did not \"let their guard down\" and continued to follow government guidelines, including wearing a face mask, maintaining social distancing and washing hands.\n\n\"Until the vaccination hits and does its job - that's what our best defence is going to be,\" he said.\n\nDr Ami Jones, an intensive care consultant in Wales, told BBC Breakfast that \"hospitals are absolutely bursting\", adding that a quarter of her staff were currently off sick or self-isolating, making managing patients even more challenging.\n\n\"When we see the daily figures - we know that will sting us in about 10-12 days' time in the hospital,\" she said. \"We are not even at day 10 post-Christmas yet and it's already exceedingly busy.\n\n\"We are going to get to the point where we physically don't have the staff to look after people safely anymore.\"\n\nDr Jones also urged the public to \"please just obey the rules\", adding: \"Stop mixing with other households because it is spreading like wildfire - and we haven't got much more space in the hospitals left.\"\n\nDo you work in a hospital? Have you recently been treated in a hospital, or due to be treated? Email your experiences: haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nRegional restrictions in England are \"probably about to get tougher\" to curb rising Covid infections, the prime minister has warned.\n\nBoris Johnson told the BBC stronger measures may be required in parts of the country in the coming weeks.\n\nHe said this included the possibility of keeping schools closed, although this is not \"something we want to do\".\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has called for new England-wide restrictions within 24 hours.\n\nSir Keir said coronavirus was \"clearly out of control\" and it was \"inevitable more schools are going to have to close\".\n\nIt comes as the UK recorded more than 50,000 new confirmed Covid cases for the sixth day in a row, with 54,990 announced on Sunday.\n\nAn additional 454 deaths within 28 days of a positive test result have also been reported, meaning the total by this measure is now above 75,000.\n\nSpeaking on BBC One's Andrew Marr Show, Mr Johnson said he stuck by his previous prediction that the situation would be better by the spring, and he hoped \"tens of millions\" would be vaccinated in the next three months.\n\nBut he added: \"It may be that we need to do things in the next few weeks that will be tougher in many parts of the country. I'm fully, fully reconciled to that.\"\n\n\"And I bet the people of this country are reconciled to that because, until the vaccine really comes on stream in a massive way, we're fighting this virus with the same set of tools.\"\n\nThe PM added that ministers had taken \"every reasonable step that we reasonably could\" to prepare for winter, but \"could not have reasonably predicted\" the new, more transmissible variant of the virus that has emerged over the autumn.\n\nSpeaking after Mr Johnson's interview, Sir Keir said introducing new nationwide restrictions in England \"has to be the first step to controlling the virus\".\n\n\"There's no good the prime minister hinting that further restrictions are coming into place in a week or two or three,\" he told reporters on Sunday. \"That delay has been the source of so many problems.\"\n\n\"Let's not have the prime minister saying 'I'm going to do it, but not yet',\" he added.\n\nMeanwhile, Mr Johnson defended plans for primary schools to reopen in most of England on Monday, amid opposition from teaching unions and some local councils.\n\nIt came after Amanda Spielman, the head of Ofsted, England's schools watchdog, said closures should be kept to an \"absolute minimum\".\n\nThe rapidly rising infection rates mean it should come as no surprise that tougher measures are being considered.\n\nInfection levels are nearly four times higher now than they were at the start of December - and that in turn has put more pressure on hospitals.\n\nThere are signs the restrictions have started slowing the rises in London, the East of England and the South East.\n\nBut that on its own is not enough. Ministers want to get cases down.\n\nSo what extra can be done? After all most of England is effectively in lockdown already with tier four in place. Those places not in tier four could, of course, follow.\n\nBut some public health experts are warning more needs to be done.\n\nThere is a determination to get primary school children back - they have among the lowest rates of infection if you look at symptomatic cases.\n\nBut infection rates are higher among secondary school age children. The government has bought itself time by delaying their return.\n\nA further 20 million people in England were added to tier four - \"stay at home\" - the toughest set of rules, on 31 December in a bid to stem a surge in Covid cases.\n\nIt means 78% of the population of England is now in tier four, under which non-essential shops are closed and people can only leave their homes for a certain number of reasons.\n\nThe Scottish government will meet on Monday to consider \"further action\" to limit the spread of the disease, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said.\n\nAll of mainland Scotland is currently under its own level four restrictions - with only some islands under less stringent tier three measures.\n\nWales entered a nationwide lockdown on 20 December, with First Minister Mark Drakeford saying on Sunday it was \"difficult to see\" how the rules could be strengthened further.\n\nHe said Welsh ministers would consider whether restrictions could be \"tweaked at the margins\" at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.\n\nNorthern Ireland is in the second week of a six-week lockdown that began on Boxing Day. Stricter measures, including a \"stay-at-home curfew\", ended on Saturday.\n\nIn another development, an academic has said there is a \"big question mark\" over whether a vaccine developed at Oxford University will be as effective against a new variant of the virus that has emerged in South Africa.\n\nProf Sir John Bell, Regius professor of medicine at the university, said the team there were currently investigating this question \"right now\".\n\nHe added it was \"unlikely\" the variant would \"turn off the effect of vaccines entirely,\" and in any case it would be possible to tweak the vaccine in around 4-6 weeks.\n\n\"Everybody should stay calm - it's going to be fine,\" he told Times Radio.\n\n\"But we're now in a game of cat and mouse - because these are not the only two variants we're going to see.\"", "Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer described Jo Stevens as a \"dear friend and colleague\"\n\nCardiff Central MP Jo Stevens is being treated in hospital for Covid-19.\n\nA statement was released on her Twitter account on Saturday night in which her team thanked people for their good wishes.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer described Ms Stevens as a \"dear friend and colleague\", and wished her well.\n\nOn New Year's Eve, her Twitter account said she had been \"laid low with Covid for a while\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Keir Starmer This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMs Stevens, who is Labour's shadow culture secretary, was elected as an MP in May 2015.\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford tweeted: \"All of our thoughts and best wishes are with Jo for a speedy recovery.\n\n\"Thank you to Jo's constituency team for continuing to support Cardiff Central constituents at this difficult time.\"", "The rapidly rising infection rates mean it should come as no surprise that tougher measures are being considered.\n\nInfection levels are nearly four times higher now than they were at the start of December – and that in turn has put more pressure on hospitals.\n\nThere are signs the restrictions have started slowing the rises in London, the East of England and the South East. But that on its own is not enough. Ministers want to get cases down.\n\nSo what extra can be done? After all, most of England is effectively in lockdown already with tier four in place. Those places not in tier four could, of course, follow.\n\nBut many public health experts are warning more needs to be done.That’s why we have seen so much debate about schools in recent days.There is a determination to get primary school children back – they have among the lowest rates of infection if you look at symptomatic cases.\n\nBut infection rates are higher among secondary school-age children. The government has bought itself time by delaying their return.\n\nIt looks like there is going to be a very difficult trade-off that needs to be made between the damage to education and wellbeing of children and the risk of further spread of the virus.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Police said a car which had been parked on a bend in the road in Snowdonia was an \"accident waiting to happen\"\n\nStaff looking after a car park in a Welsh national park have been \"getting abuse\" as crowds continue to gather at popular beauty spots.\n\nA spokeswoman for Snowdonia National Park said the decision to keep car parks open was under \"constant review\".\n\nShe explained closing them could lead to unauthorised parking and would exclude locals with mobility issues.\n\nWales is at alert level four, meaning non-essential travel is banned and exercise must start and finish at home.\n\nOn Saturday, North Wales Police said officers had \"turned away\" people who wanted to walk up Snowdon in breach of stay-at-home rules, including some some from Milton Keynes and London.\n\nA red Honda was towed away at Pen y Pass, near Llanberis, after police said it had been parked unsafely on a bend, in snowy conditions.\n\nAt the start of the first lockdown in March, campsites, caravan parks and tourist hotspots were closed by the Welsh Government after \"unprecedented\" crowds gathered at beauty spots.\n\nThe Welsh Government decided to close beauty spots during the first lockdown after scenes like this at Pen y Gwryd in Snowdonia\n\nSnowdonia National Park Authority said it had chosen not to close its car parks again because the areas remained open to people living nearby.\n\n\"Closing car parks can lead to unauthorised parking on roads, so we are keeping them open at the moment,\" a spokeswoman said.\n\n\"The mountains are open for people to be able to exercise from their front doors. Keeping car parks open allows people with mobility issues to exercise as well.\n\n\"We are working closely with police and Gwynedd council and we are reviewing it constantly.\"\n\nNorth Wales Police say beauty spots have been \"disappointingly busy\" since Christmas\n\nShe said its busiest car park, at Pen y Pass near Snowdon, had been overseen by wardens over the Christmas and New Year period, but in a more educational role than in previous years.\n\n\"Places like Pen y Pass are usually manned anyway but their role has changed slightly. They are getting some abuse, which is a shame,\" she continued.\n\n\"We are adopting a similar approach to police: engaging with people, asking what their plans are then educating them.\n\n\"The majority of the time people are going 'I misunderstood that', or people are saying 'I'm doing what I want anyway'.\"\n\nA breach of Covid rules can incur a £60 fine, which rises to £120 for a second breach.\n\nWales is in an alert level four lockdown\n\nPenny Brockman, of Central Beacons Mountain Rescue Team, called on people to help protect themselves and others, including rescue volunteers, by following government guidelines.\n\n\"It is important for people's well-being to walk, but there are probably lots of wonderful places in their own local areas,\" she added.\n\nSouth Wales Police tweeted a picture of Hamilton the police horse \"staying at home\" in his stable, urging people to be \"more like him\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by South Wales P❄️lice This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nLeicester City climbed to second in the Premier League as they won a keenly contested encounter with fellow top-four hopefuls Southampton at King Power Stadium.\n\nJames Maddison fired in from a tight angle after 37 minutes, the Foxes midfielder instructing his team-mates to stand back as he performed a socially distanced celebration, before Harvey Barnes added a second deep into second-half stoppage-time.\n\nVictory takes Leicester within one point of leaders Manchester United, who travel to third-placed Liverpool on Sunday, while Southampton are eighth, three points outside the top four.\n• None How Leicester followed guidance on celebrations - and others didn't\n• None Reaction to Leicester v Southampton, plus the rest of Saturday's Premier League action\n\nThe Saints dominated in the opening stages and created the first opening when Che Adams stretched the home defence on the counter-attack, while Leicester's Barnes' powerful drive forced Alex McCarthy into action with the game's first shot after 19 minutes.\n\nThe visitors, without talisman Danny Ings after the striker tested positive for Covid-19 last week, went close to a response through Ryan Bertrand and Will Smallbone either side of half-time but neither could find a way past Kasper Schmeichel.\n\nIn an entertaining conclusion, Stuart Armstrong rattled the Leicester crossbar with an excellent strike from the edge of the penalty area, while Jan Bednarek produced a superb goalline clearance to deny Barnes and the returning McCarthy saved from Jamie Vardy as both sides pushed for a late goal.\n\nIt took Leicester until the 95th minute to seal the three points, Barnes calmly slotting past McCarthy on the break.\n\nLeicester manager Brendan Rodgers challenged his side to \"disrupt the Premier League hierarchy\" after a 2-1 win over Newcastle in their last league outing maintained their top-four hopes.\n\nVictory in this stern test ensured they continue to do just that.\n\nEnjoying their longest unbeaten run of the season, their streak now at six matches in all competitions since defeat by Everton a month ago, Rodgers' side delivered an assured performance to remain firmly in contention at the top.\n\nDespite their lofty position as the halfway stage approaches, Leicester have struggled at home this campaign - their four defeats at King Power Stadium in 2020-21 is as many as they suffered in the entirety of last season.\n\nThough largely frustrated in the early exchanges as the visitors retained possession, Leicester's superior quality in attack eventually ensured that record was improved with Maddison turning sharply to meet Youri Tielemans' through-ball before drilling home.\n\nThe in-form Barnes once again impressed and eventually got the goal his performance deserved to equal his best season tally of 10 after just 24 games.\n\nUnlike last season's post-Christmas collapse, the Foxes are yet to show signs of falling away. Maddison - involved in six of Leicester's last 12 league goals - and Barnes are easing the pressure on Vardy to deliver every week and there appears the strength in depth to better maintain this challenge.\n\nThe only concern for Rodgers at the end of a pleasing night was the sight of Vardy appearing to limp off as he was replaced by Kelechi Iheanacho in the final minutes.\n\nWhen Southampton claimed victory in the corresponding fixture last January, the 2-1 win marked a remarkable short-term recovery from a club-record defeat by the Foxes less than three months earlier.\n\nOne year on, this match served as another reminder of how quickly the Saints are progressing under Ralph Hasenhuttl.\n\nThey were, however, unable to set a club top-flight record of seven consecutive away games without defeat in the absence of frontman Ings. That was despite their relative freshness, having not played for 12 days after their FA Cup tie against Shrewsbury Town was postponed last weekend because of a Covid-19 outbreak at the League One club.\n\nFollowing their impressive 1-0 victory over Liverpool on 4 January, a triumph which left Hasenhuttl with tears in his eyes, Southampton once again applied themselves with commendable determination but ultimately failed to produce in the final third.\n\nAdams ran out of space at the byeline after breaking clear from the halfway line in the game's first opening, and neither Bertrand nor Smallbone were able to place past Schmeichel as the equaliser their hard work perhaps deserved evaded them.\n\nAt the back, Bednarek produced the heroics to keep his side in the game and full-back Kyle Walker-Peters provided a regular outlet on the right, but Southampton, who named four teenagers on their bench because of an injury crisis, have now scored only once in five league games.\n\nThat is an obvious concern for Hasenhuttl as he looks to ensure his side do not fade after their promising start.\n\n'We took social distancing to the letter' - what the managers said\n\nLeicester boss Brendan Rodgers told BBC Sport: \"It's a very good win against a good team. We were too passive at the start, we took social distancing to the letter and didn't get close to them. After that we had some sustained attacks and ended up getting a brilliant goal.\n\n\"At half-time we had to reiterate the importance of fighting, you have to fight for every result and Southampton keep going. We were outstanding second half and should have scored more goals. We did the dirty work much better and Harvey Barnes showed again that he is a finisher now.\"\n\nOn Maddison's celebration: \"I said to them there is lots of negativity around it but see it as a positive and be creative. Supporters still want to see players celebrate, the happiness, so be creative with it.\"\n\nSouthampton boss Ralph Hasenhuttl said: \"It's never nice to lose a game but we had chances. We hit the bar, we fought with everything we have. We are definitely a team that is never giving up. The quality of the opponent was better than ours today.\n\n\"The first goal, you don't shoot at goal like that every day, it was fantastic from Maddison. We had good chances but we couldn't finish and that was the difference.\n\n\"It doesn't look good at the moment, we have a lot of injuries and not many alternatives. The good news is we have 29 points and they don't take them away from us. We did our best with the options we have. We have nine injured but we are fighting for everything.\"\n• None Leicester earned their first home league victory against Southampton since April 2016, ending a run of four without a win against the Saints at King Power Stadium.\n• None Southampton's first 12 Premier League games in 2020-21 witnessed 41 goals (24 scored) at an average of 3.4 per game. Their past six games have seen just six goals (two scored).\n• None Jamie Vardy had seven shots for Leicester, his highest tally without scoring in a single Premier League match in his career.\n• None Vardy has faced Southampton seven times at home in the Premier League, more than any other side at King Power Stadium without scoring in the competition.\n• None James Maddison scored in consecutive Premier League games for Leicester for the first time since October 2019, matching his goal tally at home from each of the previous two campaigns (three).\n\nBoth sides return to action on Tuesday. Leicester host Chelsea in the Premier League at 20:15 GMT, while Southampton welcome Shrewsbury to St Mary's in their postponed FA Cup third-round tie (20:00).\n• None Goal! Leicester City 2, Southampton 0. Harvey Barnes (Leicester City) right footed shot from the centre of the box to the centre of the goal. Assisted by Youri Tielemans following a fast break.\n• None Attempt missed. Stuart Armstrong (Southampton) right footed shot from outside the box is high and wide to the right following a corner.\n• None Offside, Leicester City. Marc Albrighton tries a through ball, but Ayoze Pérez is caught offside.\n• None Attempt missed. Wilfred Ndidi (Leicester City) right footed shot from outside the box is too high. Assisted by Marc Albrighton.\n• None Attempt saved. Jamie Vardy (Leicester City) left footed shot from the centre of the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by James Justin.\n• None Attempt missed. Daniel N'Lundulu (Southampton) header from the centre of the box misses to the left. Assisted by Kyle Walker-Peters with a cross.\n• None Offside, Leicester City. Timothy Castagne tries a through ball, but Ayoze Pérez is caught offside.\n• None Attempt blocked. Jamie Vardy (Leicester City) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Ayoze Pérez with a cross.\n• None Marc Albrighton (Leicester City) wins a free kick on the right wing.\n• None Attempt missed. James Ward-Prowse (Southampton) right footed shot from the centre of the box is high and wide to the right. Assisted by Stuart Armstrong. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Hear how David Bowie always managed to stay ahead of his time\n• None Joe Wicks and guests are here to bring positivity to your day", "Nurseries have stayed open during the latest lockdown, unlike schools\n\nNurseries are \"teetering on the edge\" and will \"find it hard to survive with next-to-no funding\" as children are kept home in lockdown, an owner said.\n\nLittle Stars near Pontypool has seen numbers drop by 35% - and Emma Matthews says nurseries are \"running on empty\".\n\nUnlike schools, they have remained open and an industry association wants support so they are around to \"provide places for children in the future\".\n\nA Welsh Government spokeswoman said funding was available through councils.\n\nDescribing childcare workers as \"front-line\", the National Day Nurseries Association (NDNA) Cymru also called for anxious staff to be made a priority for the Covid vaccine as they work with little protective equipment.\n\n\"We feel we have poured our heart into serving families and want acknowledgement for the early years and the vital part we play in the community,\" Ms Matthews said.\n\nLittle Stars furloughed some staff during the lockdown last March, with nurseries open for children of keyworkers only.\n\nLittle Stars nursery near Pontypool has seen numbers drop by more than a third\n\nThey reopened fully last summer and this has remained under Welsh Government guidance.\n\nHowever, many parents have decided not to send children - some because they are adhering to stay-at-home rules, are self-isolating, have lost their jobs and are struggling to pay bills, or are on furlough.\n\n\"The reasons are varied and valid why parents decide to pull children out,\" Ms Matthews added.\n\n\"The situation isn't great and some say 'we will wait and see next week'. It's very difficult to formulate a plan then or to furlough. We are teetering on the edge.\"\n\nLittle Stars is down the road from the new Grange hospital that opened in Cwmbran last November\n\nBefore coronavirus, the nursery looked after 65 children each day - but last week, 47 attended, made up of babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers.\n\nThere were also 11 babies due to start in January - but only one is attending because of reasons such as new mothers extending their maternity leave.\n\nMs Matthews believes facilities should be open for children of keyworkers only - allowing nurseries to access support for those not attending.\n\nA baby, a toddler and a staff member from Little Stars had coronavirus - and employees are worried for themselves and their families.\n\nIn Wales eligible children can access 30 hours of early-years education and childcare per week for 48 weeks of the year\n\nThey are unable to wear personal protective equipment because of their close contact with children, and describing workers as \"front-line\" who \"keep the economy going\", Ms Matthews said they should be in the priority group for the vaccine and weekly testing.\n\n\"Social distancing is the challenge,\" she added.\n\n\"Face, space and hands... we can only do hands. The others are impossible.\"\n\nThe facility received a grant of £10,000 at the start of the pandemic and a rate relief grant of £1,000, but Ms Matthews wants more support.\n\n\"It's about valuing the service,\" she said. \"It wasn't a very stable industry pre-Covid. But it's made it very fragile now.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government has been urged to give more help, allowing nurseries to survive and \"provide places for children in the future\" by NDNA Cymru.\n\nIt also said early years staff \"must be a priority for the vaccine to enable them to continue providing support for our youngest children and their families\".\n\nWhile nurseries were closed to all but keyworkers initially, they have been open since summer 2020\n\n\"We all know it's impossible to social distance from toddlers and babies who need close care from nappy changing to the contact and affection that supports their development and learning,\" added chief executive Purnima Tanuku.\n\nA Welsh Government spokeswoman said while the rates of coronavirus in Wales remain high, cases in children under five continue to be relatively low.\n\n\"Childcare providers have worked very hard to ensure settings are safe, with low numbers of children on site,\" she added.\n\nThe spokeswoman said funding is provided to councils, enabling them to help childcare settings experiencing financial difficulties and the Childcare Offer for Wales continues to be in place for all eligible children.\n\n\"We are following the advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation about the people who should be vaccinated first - all those in the priority groups will be immunised as safely and as quickly as possible,\" she added.\n\nMost school children in Wales will learn from home until at least February half-term, unless there is a big drop in Covid cases\n\nChildren's commissioner Sally Holland said she\"empathises with the concerns of staff\" and thanked them for their work \"during an extremely difficult period\".\n\n\"Nurseries play a really important part in young children's wellbeing and development,\" she said.\n\n\"Any services that can remain open for children is to be welcomed due to the importance for their health and wellbeing.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "CBBC star Archie Lyndhurst, the son of Only Fools and Horses actor Nicholas Lyndhurst, died in his sleep from a brain haemorrhage, his mother has said.\n\nLucy Lyndhurst said a second post-mortem exam had revealed his death was caused by a condition called Acute Lymphoblastic Lymphoma/Leukaemia.\n\nShe described Archie as \"the most magical human being we have ever met\".\n\nThe 19-year-old's death on 22 September had had a \"catastrophic effect\" on their family, she wrote on Instagram.\n\nArchie with his father Nicholas and mother Lucy Smith in 2017\n\nLucy said she and husband Nicholas were assured by the doctor who explained the post-mortem results to them that there \"wasn't anything anyone could have done as Archie showed no signs of illness\". She said it was \"not leukaemia as we know it\" and that acute in medical terms meant \"rapid\".\n\nThe couple were \"utterly floored\" to think something like this could happen, she wrote, adding: \"It's very rare and around only 800 people a year die from it.\"\n\nShe said that just days earlier he had been celebrating his birthday with \"the love of his life Nethra\".\n\n\"Life is fragile, precious and sometimes incredibly cruel,\" Lucy wrote.\n\nShe also criticised some media outlets for attempting to garner information about how her son had died from the coroner, before they knew the results of the post mortem themselves.\n\n\"To have a coroner call you a few days after your child has died to say the press have been calling for the results of Archie's post mortem, I think stoops to an all time low for us,\" she noted.\n\n\"What gives the press the right to badger a coroner's office solely to find the cause of death before the parents? The complete lack of empathy is astounding. We released no information at the time as we had no idea what he had died from.\"\n\nNicholas appeared alongside his son in an episode of So Awkward in 2019\n\nArchie began his acting career at the Sylvia Young Theatre School at the age of 10 and was best known for playing Ollie Coulton in the CBBC comedy show So Awkward.\n\nHe appeared in the sitcom, which followed the lives of a group of friends in secondary school, from its first series in 2015.\n\nNicholas appeared alongside his son in a 2019 episode of the programme.\n\nArchie's other roles included recurring appearances as a younger incarnation of comedian Jack Whitehall in various TV programmes.\n\nThese included BBC Three sitcom Bad Education, in which he was seen as a younger version of Whitehall's Alfie Wickers character.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The four main engines were fired in unison for the first time, but had to be shut down early\n\nA critical engine test for Nasa's new \"megarocket\" has ended early, but the agency denied it amounted to a failure.\n\nShortly before 22:30 GMT (17:30 EST) on Saturday, the four engines ignited, burning for more than a minute before the event was aborted.\n\nThe core stage of the Space Launch System (SLS) was being evaluated at Stennis Space Center, in Mississippi.\n\nThe engines were supposed to fire for eight minutes to simulate the rocket's climb to orbit.\n\nThe SLS is part of Nasa's Artemis programme, which aims to put Americans back on the lunar surface in the 2020s.\n\nWhen it makes its maiden flight - possibly later this year - the SLS will become the most powerful rocket ever to have flown to space.\n\nTeams at Stennis are still poring over the data to find out what happened. John Honeycutt, SLS program manager at Nasa's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, said there were \"a lot of dynamics going on\" when the engine shut down.\n\nThe engines' power levels were being throttled down and up again; they were also being prepared to pivot - or gimbal. This movement allows the rocket to be steered during flight.\n\nThe RS-25 engines are the same type that powered the space shuttle orbiter\n\n\"We did see a little bit of a flash come from around the interface between the thermal protection blanket on engine four at the time when we had initiated the gimbal,\" Honeycutt told reporters at a post-test briefing at Stennis.\n\nThe as-yet unknown problem triggered what Nasa calls a failure identification (Fid), followed by a major component failure (MCF). As a result of the fault, an onboard computer known as the engine controller sent a message to another computer called the core stage controller, which took a decision to shut down the vehicle.\n\n\"Any parameter that went awry on the engine could have sent that failure ID,\" said John Honeycutt.\n\nIt was the first time all four RS-25 engines had been ignited together, in a test known as a \"hotfire\".\n\nThe core stage of the rocket was anchored to a massive steel structure called the B-2 test stand on the grounds of the Stennis facility.\n\nTo prepare the core stage, engineers filled its tanks with more than 700,000 gallons (2.6 million litres) of super-cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellant.\n\nThis was the eighth and final test in the Green Run, a programme of evaluation carried out by engineers from Nasa and Boeing - the rocket's prime contractor.\n\nAlthough the test was intended to run for eight minutes, engineers would have received all the data required to certify the rocket for flight after 250 seconds.\n\nThey wanted to iron out any problems before the core stage is used for the first SLS launch, in which it will send Nasa's next-generation Orion spacecraft on a loop around the Moon.\n\nNasa's outgoing administrator Jim Bridenstine declined to call Saturday's event a failure: \"This is why we test,\" he said, adding: \"Before we put American astronauts on American rockets, that's when we need it to be perfect.\"\n\nOfficials have not yet decided whether to re-run the hotfire, or proceed with shipping the core stage to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida to prepare it for the rocket's uncrewed maiden flight, a mission called Artemis-1.\n\n\"It depends what the anomaly was and how challenging it's going to be to fix it,\" said Bridenstine.\n\nNasa administrator Jim Bridenstine said perfection wasn't a realistic expectation for the first engine test\n\nAsked whether a launch this year was still feasible, he added: \"I think it's too early to tell. As we figure out what went wrong, we're going to know what the future holds.\"\n\nHowever, if one or more of the engines needs to be replaced, there are spares waiting to be used at Stennis Space Center.\n\nThe Artemis-1 mission will evaluate how both the SLS and Orion capsule perform prior to Nasa staging a repeat of this lunar loop with astronauts in 2023.\n\nThis will be followed by the first landing on the Moon by humans since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.\n\nThe SLS consists of the 65m (212 ft) -long core stage with two smaller solid rocket boosters (SRBs) attached to the sides. Engineers at KSC have begun stacking the individual SRB segments for Artemis-1.\n\n\"This powerful rocket is going to put us in a position to be ready to support the agency and the country in deep space missions to the Moon and beyond,\" John Honeycutt said during a media briefing on Tuesday.\n\nArtwork: The initial version of the SLS - known as Block 1 - during the climb to orbit\n\nOfficials have been planning to ship the core stage to Florida in February.\n\nIts engines are of the same type that powered the spaceplane-like shuttle orbiter - America's crewed space vehicle for 30 years from 1981-2011.\n\nNasa is re-using flown hardware: the RS-25 engines used in this test helped launch 21 shuttle missions. Two were used on the last shuttle flight - STS-135 in 2011.\n\nThe four RS-25s can generate 1.6 million lbs (7 Meganewtons) of thrust - the force that propels a rocket through the air.\n\nWhen the solid rocket boosters are added to the core stage, the combined system will produce 8.8 million pounds (39.1 Meganewtons) of thrust. This will make it 15% more powerful than the giant Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s and 70s.\n\nPrior to Saturday's test, John Shannon, vice president and SLS program manager at Boeing praised teams at Stennis for keeping the Green Run on track despite the pandemic and this year's particularly active hurricane season.", "Doctors and nurses need protection from prosecution over Covid-19 treatment decisions made under the pressures of the pandemic, medical bodies have said.\n\nGroups including the British Medical Association have written to ministers saying medical workers fear they could be at risk of unlawful killing charges.\n\nIt comes as the UK's chief medical officers said the NHS could be overwhelmed in weeks.\n\nThe government said staff should not have to fear legal action.\n\nThe letter from the health organisations points out that the prime minister warned in November that the NHS being overwhelmed would be a \"medical and moral disaster\", where \"doctors and nurses could be forced to choose which patients to treat, who would live and who would die\".\n\nIt said: \"With the chief medical officers now determining that there is a material risk of the NHS being overwhelmed within weeks, our members are worried that not only do they face being put in this position but also that they could subsequently be vulnerable to a criminal investigation by the police.\"\n\nCo-ordinated by the Medical Protection Society (MPS), the letter was signed by the British Medical Association, the Doctors' Association UK, the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin and Medical Defence Shield.\n\nIt calls for emergency legislation to protect doctors and nurses from \"inappropriate\" legal action when dealing with circumstances outside their control.\n\nExisting guidance for doctors and nurses on when to administer or withdraw treatment does not give legal protection, the letter says.\n\nIt also says the guidance does not consider the circumstances of the pandemic where demand for healthcare may outstrip supply.\n\n\"The first concern of a doctor is their patients and providing the highest standard of care at all times,\" the medical bodies said.\n\n\"We do not believe it is right that healthcare professionals should suffer from the moral injury and long-term psychological damage that could result from having to make decisions on how limited resources are allocated, while at the same time being left vulnerable to the risk of prosecution for unlawful killing.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What does it mean if the NHS is overwhelmed?\n\nThe medical organisations said no healthcare professional should be \"above the law\" and that the emergency legislation should only apply to decisions made \"in good faith\" and \"in circumstances beyond their control and in compliance with relevant guidance\".\n\nThey said the change in the law should be temporary and should apply retrospectively from the start of the pandemic.\n\nMedical staff in the NHS are protected financially from clinical negligence claims by indemnity schemes where the state pays the costs of claims.\n\nBut if someone dies as a result of a lack of treatment, doctors and nurses fear prosecutors could bring charges such as gross negligence manslaughter, which can carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.\n\nEarlier this month, a survey by the MPS of 2,420 of its members found that 61% were concerned about facing an investigation following a decision made in a high-pressure situation.\n\nAbout 36% were concerned about being investigated for a decision to withdraw or withhold life-prolonging treatment due to pressure on resources during the pandemic.\n\nA Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: \"Dedicated frontline NHS staff should be able to focus on treating patients and saving lives during the pandemic without fear of legal action.\"\n\nNHS staff have been told that existing indemnity arrangements will continue and will cover \"the vast majority of liabilities\", the spokesman said.", "Phil Spector pictured in court during his murder trial\n\nUS music producer Phil Spector has died at the age of 81, while serving a prison sentence for murder.\n\nSpector, who transformed pop with his \"wall of sound\" recordings, worked with the Beatles, the Righteous Brothers and Ike and Tina Turner.\n\nIn 2009, he was convicted of the 2003 murder of Hollywood actress Lana Clarkson.\n\nHis death was confirmed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.\n\n\"California Health Care Facility inmate Phillip Spector was pronounced deceased of natural causes at 6:35 p.m. on Saturday, January 16, 2021, at an outside hospital. His official cause of death will be determined by the medical examiner in the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office,\" it said.\n\nSpector produced 20 top 40 hits between 1961 and 1965. His production methods influenced major artists including the Beach Boys and Bruce Springsteen.\n\nHis life was ultimately blighted by drug and alcohol addiction, and he all but retired from the music scene during the 1980s and 1990s.\n\nIn February 2003, actress Lana Clarkson was found dead at his house in Alhambra, California with a bullet wound to her head. Clarkson, who was known for her work in the sword-and-sorcery genre and starred in films including Barbarian Queen, had met Spector hours earlier at a nightclub.\n\nSpector claimed the shooting happened when Clarkson \"kissed the gun\" - but his trial heard from four women who claimed Spector had threatened them with guns in the past when they had spurned his advances.\n\nFollowing an initial mistrial, Spector was convicted of second degree murder and given a sentence of 19 years to life.\n\nLana Clarkson was an actress and model who starred in the film 1985 Barbarian Queen\n\nHarvey Phillip Spector was born in New York in 1939, to Russian-Jewish parents. His father killed himself when Spector was a boy, and his mother moved her family to Los Angeles.\n\nHe began his career in his teens as a performer, forming a band - the Teddy Bears - with three high school friends. They had a hit single in 1958 with a song that took its title from the wording on his father's gravestone: \"To know him is to love him.\"\n\nThe record went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, but the group split the following year.\n\nSpector founded his own record label, Philles, in 1961. He produced high-profile 1960s girl groups such as Crystals and the Ronettes, including on 1963 hits Be My Baby and Baby I Love You.\n\nHe also worked on The Righteous Brothers' hits You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' and Unchained Melody.\n\nSpector produced hits for The Ronettes, later marrying their lead singer Ronnie Bennett\n\nHis signature production technique, the \"Wall of Sound,\" involved layering several instruments, including strings, woodwind and brass, to give a lush, orchestral sound.\n\nIn the early 1970s, Spector collaborated with The Beatles on their final album Let It Be, as well as producing John Lennon's solo album Imagine.\n\nAs the decade progressed, the much-feted producer became reclusive and disturbing accounts of his behaviour became widespread. Spector is said to have held a gun to singer Leonard Cohen's head during sessions for his album Death of a Ladies' Man.\n\nRonettes lead singer Veronica \"Ronnie\" Bennett, who became Spector's second wife and divorced him in 1974, wrote in her 1990 autobiography that he subjected her to years of horrific abuse. She said he had threatened to kill her and display her body in a glass-topped coffin he kept in her basement.\n\n\"I can only say that when I left in the early '70s, I knew that if I didn't leave at that time, I was going to die there,\" Ronnie wrote of the time.\n\nWriting on Instagram after her ex-husband's death, Ronnie Spector said he had been \"a brilliant producer but a lousy husband\".\n\n\"When I was working with Phil Spector, watching him create in the recording studio, I knew I was working with the very best,\" she wrote. \"He was in complete control, directing everyone. So much to love about those days.\n\n\"Meeting him and falling in love was like a fairytale,\" she continued. \"The magical music we were able to make together was inspired by our love. I loved him madly, and gave my heart and soul to him.\n\n\"Unfortunately Phil was not able to live and function outside of the recording studio. Darkness set in, many lives were damaged.\"\n\nSinger Darlene Love, who sang on several songs Spector produced, said he \"changed the sound of rock 'n' roll\" but likened their relationship to \"a bad marriage\".\n\n\"The problem I have with Phil is that he wanted to control Darlene Love's talent,\" she told Variety. \"If he couldn't do that, he was going to do everything in his power to keep my talent from shining.\"\n\nWeeks before Lana Clarkson was shot dead, Spector gave a rare interview to British broadsheet The Telegraph.\n\n\"I would say I'm probably relatively insane, to an extent,\" he told the paper, adding that he had \"devils inside that fight me\".\n\nResponding to news of the producer's death, Blondie guitarist Chris Stein tweeted: \"When we went to Phil Spector's house in the 70s he came to the door holding a bottle of diet Manischewitz wine in one hand and a presumably loaded 45 automatic in the other. Long story.", "The man from Luton was fined £200 for travelling to Devizes and also had his car seized for having no insurance\n\nA man told police he had driven from Luton to Devizes to visit a McDonald's, even though the town does not have a branch of the burger chain.\n\nWiltshire Police called his actions a \"flagrant breach\" of lockdown regulations and fined the man £200.\n\nThe 34-year-old was stopped on Estcourt Street in Devizes, a distance of more than 100 miles (160km) from Luton.\n\nHis car was also seized for having no insurance, police added.\n\n\"The distance travelled across numerous counties to Devizes, which doesn't have a McDonald's restaurant, is a flagrant breach of the regulations currently in place.\n\n\"The majority of people across Wiltshire continue to act responsibly and we thank you for that, however, it is important to protect the NHS that we all stick to the rules,\" said police.\n\nThe man was stopped on Thursday evening.\n\nFollow BBC West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: bristol@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Louis Godwin said receiving the vaccine was \"no trouble at all\" and encouraged others to have it as soon as they could\n\nSalisbury Cathedral has been transformed into a vaccination centre with an RAF veteran being one of the first to receive the Covid-19 jab.\n\nFormer Flight Sergeant Louis Godwin, 95, gave a thumbs-up after being vaccinated in the cathedral, which dates back more than 800 years.\n\n\"I was so pleased to get it, especially in a setting like this,\" he said.\n\nOrganisers were aiming to vaccinate 1,000 people aged over 80 with the Pfizer/BioNTech jab on Saturday.\n\nPeople queuing to receive their vaccines at Salisbury Cathedral on Saturday\n\nMr Godwin, a great-grandfather of 12, joined the RAF aged 18 in 1943 and served as an air gunner during World War Two.\n\n\"I've had many jabs in my time, especially in the RAF. After the war, I was sent to Egypt and I had a couple of jabs which knocked me over for a week,\" he said.\n\n\"This one, the doctor said to me 'well that's done' and I thought he hadn't started. So it's no trouble at all and no pain.\"\n\nA health worker prepares the vaccine to be administered at the cathedral\n\nStella Bennett, 88, said she felt \"safer\" after receiving the jab.\n\n\"It was easy. I live on my own so it has been hard but I've managed. At least I'm at home and not in hospital with it,\" she said.\n\nDerek Burnett was also among those inoculated against the virus on Saturday.\n\n\"I feel unbelievably relieved as lockdown has been a big strain. It takes a big weight off my mind,\" said the 81-year-old.\n\nOrganisers hoped to vaccinate 1,000 people aged over 80 during the day\n\nThe Very Rev Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury described the vaccines as \"a real sign of hope for us at the end of this very, very difficult year\".\n\n\"I doubt that anyone is having a jab in surroundings that are more beautiful than this so I hope it will ease people as they come into the building,\" he said.\n\nThe Very Rev Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury, described hosting the event as \"absolutely wonderful\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The French government has imposed a nationwide curfew from 6pm - 6am to fight the surge in cases of coronavirus.\n\nWhile some departments were already under these restrictions, the majority of France was under an 8pm - 6am curfew.\n\nFrench Prime Minister Jean Castex said the measures would be in place for at least 15 days.", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nManchester United \"missed an opportunity\" to beat Liverpool, said boss Ole Gunnar Solskjaer after his side stayed top of the Premier League with a goalless draw against the champions.\n\nIt was a game that failed to justify the pre-match anticipation and Solskjaer will know his side had the better chances to claim a statement victory at Anfield.\n\nLiverpool, without a recognised centre-back and with midfielders Jordan Henderson and Fabinho in defence, dominated possession in the first half but it was United who came closest when Bruno Fernandes' 20-yard free-kick curled inches wide.\n\nFernandes was then thwarted after the break by the outstretched leg of Liverpool keeper Alisson before Thiago Alcantara's long-range effort finally brought the previously unemployed David de Gea into action.\n\nAlisson was Liverpool's hero late on when he blocked Paul Pogba's drive from point-blank range.\n\n\"It was an opportunity missed with the chances we had but then again we were playing a very good side.\" Solskjaer told BBC Sport. \"I'm disappointed but, still, a point is OK if you win the next one.\n\n\"We have improved and progressed. It's not just the result we're disappointed with, it's some of the performance. I know these boys can play better.\"\n\nUnited are now two points ahead of Manchester City, who moved up to second by beating Crystal Palace 4-0, and Leicester City in third. Liverpool, who have scored just one goal in their past four league games, have dropped to fourth, a point behind the Foxes.\n\n\"The performance was good enough to win it but to win a game you have to score goals and we didn't do that, so that's why we had that result,\" said Reds boss Jurgen Klopp.\n\n\"We try not to not score. We obviously have to ignore the fact and hope it will be good again.\"\n• None 'From dejection to frustration in 12 months, Anfield draw underlines Man Utd progress'\n• None Lawro's predictions v You Me At Six drummer Dan Flint\n\nKlopp cut a frustrated figure pretty much from the first whistle, his voice booming around Anfield with a tone of displeasure, showing unhappiness with his own players and officials.\n\nThe German's team, so used to steamrollering all before them in recent times, are going through a very dry spell and barely created an opening worthy of the name here against a resolute Manchester United defence.\n\nToo often, Liverpool's approach play ended with a careless pass or an aimless cross and the longer this game went on the more United looked the most likely winners.\n\nIt was perhaps inevitable Liverpool would be unable to maintain their relentless style, but there will be concerns they have now gone four league games without a win since Crystal Palace were demolished 7-0 at Selhurst Park.\n\nBefore this draw, West Bromwich Albion left Anfield with a point, while Liverpool also had a goalless draw at Newcastle United and lost at Southampton.\n\nSadio Mane and Mohamed Salah are feeding off scraps, while Roberto Firmino's impact was so minimal that he was withdrawn near the end, even with the hosts chasing a goal.\n\nA team as good as Liverpool will not remain off the boil for too long, but there is no doubt they are struggling for form and spark. The fact this is their longest barren sequence in the league since February and March 2005 tells the tale.\n\nManchester United may have a taken a point before this game and there will be justified satisfaction that they subdued Liverpool so completely, created the game's best chances and remain top of the table.\n\nAnd yet there must also be disappointment that they could not cash in completely on an off-colour Liverpool, with reality dawning on them very late that they could take all three points.\n\nFernandes, despite being poor in general, almost unlocked Liverpool twice, while Solskjaer and his backroom team threw their hands up in frustration as other good positions were wasted late on.\n\nIn the final reckoning, however, there will be few complaints at this outcome, which leaves them three points ahead of Liverpool with the visit to Anfield negotiated without mishap.\n\nUnited were well organised and grew into the game after a poor opening half-hour and had real defensive heroes in captain Harry Maguire and left-back Luke Shaw, with the latter particularly outstanding.\n\nIt is a display that will give them increased confidence and belief as they lead the pack - although they might just look back and think a point could so easily have been three.\n\n'It was an opportunity missed' - reaction\n\nManchester United manager Solskjaer said: \"They are a good side and they have some injury problems but we didn't pounce on that.\n\n\"I felt we grew into the game and got stronger and stronger and were closer to winning.\n\n\"We were a bit disappointed in the performance, not just the result. We didn't do well enough to cause them problems in the first half but we defended well and they didn't create too many chances.\"But I think everyone was a bit disappointed with the way we started the game but that is a good feeling to have - that we were disappointed in the performance.\"\n\nLiverpool boss Klopp told BBC Sport: \"The performance was good and the first half was exceptionally good.\n\n\"With all the things that were said before the game - United are flying and we were struggling - and then to play this kind of game, I was happy with that.\n\n\"We tried in the second half again, but you cannot deny United over 90 minutes, not with the counter-attacking threat they have. So they had two really good chances, I have to say, but we had our chances in the second half as well.\n\n\"The way we understood the game, the way we felt the game, the way we read the moments were really good. But it is not exactly how it should be so we have space for improvement, absolutely. We will keep working on that.\"\n• None Liverpool and Manchester United have drawn 0-0 at Anfield in the league three times in the past five seasons, as many times as in the previous 48 top-flight campaigns.\n• None United are unbeaten in their past 16 away matches in the Premier League (W12 D4) - only once have they gone longer without a defeat on the road in the competition (17 games ending in September 1999).\n• None Liverpool are now unbeaten in their past 68 league games at Anfield, earning 178 out of a possible 204 points over this run.\n• None United are the first side to stop Liverpool scoring at Anfield in a Premier League match since Manchester City in October 2018 - this was Liverpool's 43rd home league game since then.\n• None Under Klopp, Liverpool are unbeaten in all seven of their Premier League games at Anfield when facing the side starting the day top of the table (W3 D4).\n• None Marcus Rashford was caught offside five times in this match, the most of any Premier League player this season and the most by a United player since Robin van Persie (six) against Spurs in January 2013.\n\nUnited are at Fulham in the league on Wednesday (20:15 GMT) and Liverpool host Burnley on Thursday (20:00). Next Sunday, Manchester United and Liverpool will meet again - at Old Trafford this time - in the FA Cup fourth round, a match you can watch live on BBC One and the BBC Sport website.\n• None Marcus Rashford (Manchester United) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Curtis Jones (Liverpool) wins a free kick on the right wing.\n• None Offside, Manchester United. Paul Pogba tries a through ball, but Marcus Rashford is caught offside.\n• None Attempt blocked. Paul Pogba (Manchester United) header from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Luke Shaw with a cross.\n• None Attempt saved. Paul Pogba (Manchester United) right footed shot from the centre of the box is saved in the bottom right corner.\n• None Attempt missed. Thiago (Liverpool) right footed shot from outside the box misses to the right. Assisted by Georginio Wijnaldum. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Missed all the goals, highlights and talking points from Saturday's Premier League action? Match of the Day is streaming now", "Chris Cramer, a major figure in BBC News and later CNN International, has died at the age of 73 after a period of ill health. Former BBC director of news Richard Sambrook looks back at his life.\n\nChris Cramer's legacy will be the major change in attitudes and support for journalist safety he championed through the BBC and across the wider industry, as well as many achievements in newsgathering and international news.\n\nHe began his career as a teenager on the Portsmouth Evening News, moving to BBC Radio Solent when it launched in 1970.\n\nAfter a year's secondment in Brunei he found his way to the BBC TV Newsroom in the 1970s and developed his reputation as a highly competitive and effective news editor and field producer.\n\nIn 1980 he and a BBC team were in the Iranian Embassy in London collecting visas when it was seized by gunmen opposed to Ayatollah Khomeini. A standoff and siege followed, with Chris among 26 hostages.\n\nHe managed to feign serious illness and was released by the gunmen allowing him to give vital information to the authorities before the SAS stormed the embassy and rescued the hostages.\n\nAt a time when no-one understood or spoke of PTSD, it had a marked effect on his life.\n\nArmed police on the adjoining balcony to the Iranian Embassy during the siege in 1980\n\nMany journalists and crew subsequently spoke of his care and attention when they had difficult experiences and he went on to drive major changes in understanding and support for journalists' safety.\n\nWith BBC Safety manager Peter Hunter, Chris introduced the first hostile environment training courses, risk assessments and equipment for those covering conflicts.\n\nFormer correspondent Martin Bell recalls: \"From Vietnam to Croatia I had covered 10 wars without protection. Then in June 1992 we were shot up crossing the airport runway in Sarajevo in a soft-skinned vehicle. Within two weeks Chris had procured our first armoured Land Rover, the redoubtable 'Miss Piggy', and the body armour to go with it.\"\n\nHe later introduced the first confidential counselling service for news teams, recognising PTSD, and helped found the International News Safety Institute, which spearheaded safety across the news industry.\n\nDuring the 1980s he was at the forefront of organising and overseeing major news coverage, including Michael Buerk's reporting from the Ethiopian famine, coverage of the IRA Brighton bomb attack on the British government, the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, Kate Adie's reporting from Tiananmen Square, the fall of eastern Europe, the first Gulf War and many more major events.\n\nHis fierce competitiveness delivered a series of major exclusives and awards for BBC News.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Jeremy Bowen This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIn the 1990s he oversaw major investment in BBC Newsgathering and the integration of radio and TV reporting - often against internal resistance. His managerial style could be uncompromising and tough, but he was also bitingly funny, shrewd and his hard exterior hid a warm-hearted and generous core.\n\nHe was crucial to establishing the integrated News division as it exists today.\n\nIn 1996 he left the BBC to move to Atlanta as managing director and executive vice-president of CNN International.\n\nThere he took his passion for news safety and his competitive news edge to develop the network into a greater global force.\n\nAs his former BBC and CNN colleague Tony Maddox has said: \"Among his many accomplishments Chris was a pioneer and innovator in field safety for journalists. He led the development of guidelines and practices now widely adopted across the industry.\"\n\nCramer moved to CNN after his time with the BBC\n\nHe was a larger-than-life figure who generated affection and respect in equal measure, often wielding a rapid and disarming wit.\n\nHe is also remembered for supporting women into senior and executive positions and helping them succeed.\n\nDirector of BBC News Fran Unsworth recalls: \"He was one of journalism's enormous characters and a legend in the television news industry. But the legend and the reported image always belied the man.\n\n\"He was immensely kind, thoughtful and caring underneath that image he sometimes projected.\"\n\nFormer deputy director general Mark Byford said: \"He was probably the greatest newsgathering executive ever in the broadcast news business and his organisational skills, competitiveness, eye for a story and steel were extraordinary.\n\n\"He was also, behind the facade, a gentle giant who cared for his people with amazing passion and love.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by John Simpson This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n\"Many editors, correspondents and presenters in BBC News owe their success to his mentorship - myself included.\"\n\nAfter 11 years he left CNN and took up roles first with Reuters TV and then the Wall Street Journal, where his experience and expertise were used to develop their digital video services.\n\nHe leaves his wife, Nina, son Richard and daughter Nicolette and his daughter Hannah by an earlier marriage to Helen, a former BBC producer.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BMA Scotland GP chief says doctors \"can't plan\" for vaccines\n\nDoctors leaders say the \"patchy supply\" of vaccine to GP surgeries across Scotland is hampering the speed of delivery to patients.\n\nMinisters have pledged a first dose of the vaccine to 1.4 million of the most vulnerable Scots by mid-February.\n\nBut the British Medical Association in Scotland said inconsistencies in supply made it difficult to plan patient appointments to receive the vaccine.\n\nThey also said some GP surgeries had yet to receive any vaccine at all.\n\nThe Scottish government said it was working with health boards to resolve the issues.\n\nCurrently, about 16,000 vaccinations a day are being carried out in Scotland. However, that is expected to rise significantly as efforts to deliver the vaccine are scaled up.\n\nOn Sunday, 1,341 new cases of Covid-19 were reported - the lowest daily figure since 28 December. However, the numbers being admitted to hospital have continued to rise, reaching 1,918.\n\nNo new deaths were registered.\n\nHealth Secretary Jeane Freeman has pledged that the workforce and infrastructure will be in place to vaccinate 400,000 people each week by the end of February.\n\nThe government has already announced plans for large vaccination centres in Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh.\n\nIt comes after more than 5,000 front-line health and care staff were vaccinated at the NHS Louisa Jordan in Glasgow on Saturday.\n\nGP practices across Scotland are currently providing vaccination services to those aged over 80.\n\nAbout 16,000 vaccinations are currently being carried out a day in Scotland\n\nSpeaking on the BBC's Politics Scotland programme, Dr Andrew Buist, who chairs the British Medical Association's (BMA) GP committee in Scotland, said there was inconsistencies across the GP network.\n\nHe said the vaccine deployment plan was \"ambitious\" and so far \"good progress\" had been made in giving it to priority groups such as care homes residents and front-line health staff.\n\nHowever, he told the programme: \"The current problem lies with the next priority group, which is the 80-plus group, which GPs in Scotland are set to vaccinate because the supply of the vaccine so far has been quite patchy.\n\n\"Some practices have a good supply, some have had none so far.\"\n\nHe said his practice had received 100 doses of the vaccine for 600 patients over the age of 80, who all needed to be vaccinated by 5 February.\n\nHe added: \"I then have to do another 1,200 patients in the 70-plus group and the extremely clinically vulnerable by the middle of February, so we need to do 1,700 vaccines in the next four weeks.\n\n\"Now we can do that. We are used to providing large number of flu vaccinations and it is possible, we have our workforce in place, but we need the vaccine, otherwise we can't do it.\"\n\nWhen asked if his practice was running out of vaccine at the end of each day, Dr Buist said: \"Yes - we can't plan, that's the key thing. We can't send out appointments to patients until we're sure we have the vaccine in our fridge.\n\n\"We were given 100 doses on Monday. We used that all up by Friday. We don't want to send out appointments to patients until we know that we can definitively vaccinate them otherwise patients get very upset.\"\n\nVaccinators have reported being able to extract one additional dose from vaccine vials\n\nDr Buist said vaccinators were regularly managing to extract higher numbers of doses from vaccine vials despite claims that some doses were being wasted.\n\nHe said there was widespread experience of six doses being extracted from Pfizer vaccine vials, which were marketed as having five doses, while 11 doses were regularly being taken from AstraZeneca vials.\n\nBut Dr Buist criticised issues around the red tape some retired health professional had faced when volunteering to become vaccinators.\n\n\"I have reports that arrangement to get doctors and nurses back into the system have been quite bureaucratic and I think it's something we need to look at.\"\n\nThe Scottish government acknowledged that there had been delays in vaccine supplies reaching some GP surgeries.\n\nA spokeswoman said: \"GPs have a significant role to play in delivering the vaccine - and we thank them for their hard work and patience as we roll out more vaccines to those in the communities.\n\n\"We know there have been some initial delays in supply reaching some practices and are working with health boards to resolve this. Vaccines are being manufactured as quickly as possible and we will continue to explore all options available to increase supply.\"\n\nThe government said health boards were providing order information for their GP practices to National Procurement who in turn advised the distribution partner.\n\nThe spokeswoman added: \"Once stock is released for ordering, the distribution partner inputs the GP orders on to their ordering system. Once the order has been placed, GP practices will receive an automated email providing an indication of the delivery day.\n\n\"We too want to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible and are continually working hard to see if distribution can be made faster in any respect.\"", "Hospitals are preparing for the expected peak of the latest Covid-19 surge this week, the Northern Trust's chief executive has said.\n\nJennifer Welsh said there was \"huge pressure across the (healthcare) system\" with more intensive care admissions expected.\n\nThirty patients were awaiting admission to Antrim Area Hospital on Sunday morning, she said.\n\nThere were 25 more deaths linked to Covid-19 reported in NI on Sunday.\n\nThe total number of deaths recorded by the Department of Health since the start of the pandemic is now 1,606.\n\nIt was also reported that there had been 822 more positive cases, with 67 people in intensive care and 50 people on ventilators.\n\nThere are 840 patients being treated for Covid- 19 across Northern Ireland, according to the latest available figures with hospitals working at 93% capacity.\n\nMeanwhile, Northern Ireland has been continuing its vaccination programme having distributed 140,559 first doses and 20,174 second doses.\n\nThe total number of jabs administered in the UK, including both first and second doses, is 4,307,002 according to government data.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland on Sunday, there were 13 further deaths related to Covid-19, bringing the total number to 2,608 since the start of the pandemic.\n\nThere was also a further 2,944 positive cases, bringing the total number of cases in the state to 172,726.\n\nThe Republic of Ireland's Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan said the situation in the country's hospitals was \"stark\" and that people of all ages were being admitted and taken into intensive care.\n\nAt the beginning of January, Health Minister Robin Swann said that modelling indicated the \"peak of the third surge\" would hit in the third week of January.\n\nFrontline health staff have spoken to BBC News NI about their \"exhaustion\" and stress, as the pressure on the system continues to increase amid the surging number of cases.\n\nNorthern Ireland is currently in the third week of a six-week lockdown, with ministers scheduled to review measures next week.\n\nHowever, health officials have warned that an extension of the restrictions could be required to reduce pressure on the health service.\n\nNorthern Trust chief executive Jennifer Welsh said hospitals were \"coping but at great cost\"\n\nMs Welsh told BBC NI's Sunday Politics programme that the \"ICU surge is yet to come\" and that the Northern Trust - where two major hospitals, Antrim Area and Causeway, are located - has had to redeploy staff to prepare for the coming days.\n\nShe said both hospitals had been \"under significant pressure and have been for some time\".\n\nShe said 30 patients in Antrim Area's Emergency Department are waiting on a bed after a decision was made to admit them - 24 of those patients have been waiting longer than 12 hours.\n\nMs Welsh added that almost half of all patients in Antrim Area Hospital have tested positive for Covid-19.\n\n\"At the peak of the first wave in Antrim and Causeway the highest number of Covid positive patients was 73.\n\n\"In November, the highest number was 102 and we peaked on Thursday at 202. We have now dropped below that slightly.\"\n\nThe chief executive said the hospitals were \"coping but at great cost\", with many urgent surgeries cancelled.\n\n\"Emergency surgery is being done but we are not being able to do any other in the Antrim Area site.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by bbctheview This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n\"We have been able to deliver some red flag cancer surgery at Causeway but we would like to do more.\"\n\nDespite these emergency measures already in place, the worst of the current surge is only expected to arrive this week.\n\nShe added: \"We are not going to get out of this quickly. It's going to be a challenge for us as a system.\n\n\"It's been building from October.\"\n\n\"We're not yet at the peak of intensive care admissions and we expect that this week.\n\n\"Antrim has doubled its intensive care beds from seven to 14 in anticipation of the coming surge - 11 are already being used.\n\n\"All hospitals have doubled their ICU footprint. There are more than 160 inpatients in Antrim Area Hospital.\"", "Within seconds of being dropped, LauncherOne had ignited its engine\n\nSir Richard Branson's rocket company Virgin Orbit has succeeded in putting its first satellites in space.\n\nTen payloads in total were lofted on the same rocket, which was launched from under the wing of one of the entrepreneur's old 747 jumbos.\n\nSir Richard is hoping to tap into what is a growing market for small, lower-cost satellites.\n\nBy using a jet plane as the launch platform, he can theoretically send up spacecraft from anywhere in the world.\n\nIn reality, of course, his Virgin Orbit system has to be licensed in the locality where it is used, which at the moment is solely California. But there are well-advanced plans to bring the 747 and its rockets to Cornwall in south-west England, for example.\n\nSunday's success was a big fillip for Sir Richard's team who had tried and failed to launch a rocket in May last year. That effort was thwarted by a breached propellant line feeding liquid oxygen to the booster's first-stage Newton-3 engine.\n\nNo such problems occurred this time.\n\nThe modified 747, named Cosmic Girl, left its base in California's Mojave desert at 10:50 PST (18:50 UTC) to fly out over the Pacific Ocean.\n\nA little under 60 minutes later, and cruising at 35,000ft (10,500m), the jet banked hard to the right, dropping as it did so the 21m-long rocket that had been clamped to its underside.\n\nWithin seconds this booster, called LauncherOne, had ignited its engine and was climbing to space.\n\nCorrect deployment of the various spacecraft onboard at an altitude of roughly 500km was confirmed a couple of hours later.\n\n\"A new gateway to space has just sprung open,\" said Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart. \"That LauncherOne was able to successfully reach orbit today is a testament to this team's talent, precision, drive, and ingenuity.\"\n\nSir Richard has been trying to find the right solution to get into the satellite launch business since 2009. His concrete proposal was first put before the public at the Farnborough International Air Show three years later.\n\nThere is an emerging market for small, lower-cost spacecraft, whose developers are seeking more flexible and affordable ways of getting their assets above the Earth.\n\nSorry, we're having trouble displaying this content. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nVirgin Orbit is one of a number of companies now racing to meet this demand. Other contenders include the Rocket Lab outfit, which sends up its vehicles from a ground launch pad in New Zealand. But there are tens of other small rocket start-ups at various stages of maturation, and some of these plan to operate from the UK as well.\n\n\"Virgin Orbit has achieved something many thought impossible. It was so inspiring to see our specially adapted Virgin Atlantic 747, Cosmic Girl, send the LauncherOne rocket soaring into orbit,\" Sir Richard said.\n\n\"This magnificent flight is the culmination of many years of hard work and will also unleash a whole new generation of innovators on the path to orbit. I can't wait to see the incredible missions Dan and the team will launch to change the world for good.\"\n\nSir Richard presented the LauncherOne concept at Farnborough in 2012\n\nWill Whitehorn is the president of UKSpace, the trade body representing the space industry in Britain. He's also a former president of Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard's other space company which hopes soon to start flying fare-paying passengers above the atmosphere in a rocket plane.\n\nHe said Virgin Orbit's success on Sunday was hugely significant.\n\n\"This is a momentous day for the small satellite world, as we will be able to launch satellites responsively; and for the UK this event promises sovereign launch capability very soon,\" he told BBC News.\n\n\"I plan to push hard for a launch from Cornwall to coincide with the G7 meeting this year if at all possible!\"\n\nSunday's payloads were mostly shoebox-sized and developed by universities\n\nThe air-launched system has the flexibility to operate anywhere - in theory", "Northern Ireland's statistics agency has recorded its highest weekly Covid-19 related registered deaths since the pandemic began.\n\nNisra said 145 deaths were registered in the first week of 2021, although administrative delays over Christmas may have affected the number.\n\nThat brings the agency's death toll to 1,976 by 8 January.\n\nThe figures come as the chief medical officers from NI and the Republic issued a joint stay-at-home plea.\n\nDr Michael McBride and Dr Tony Holohan said they were \"gravely concerned\" about the \"unsustainably high level of Covid-19 infection\" across the island of Ireland.\n\nConcern was raised in the Republic of Ireland this week as figures showed it has the world's highest number of confirmed new Covid-19 cases per million people.\n\nOn Friday evening, the Irish Department of Health reported 50 further deaths with Covid-19 and 3,498 new cases of the virus. More than half (54%) of those newly diagnosed are under the age of 45.\n\nNorthern Ireland is in the third week of a six-week lockdown, with ministers scheduled to review measures next week.\n\nHowever, health officials have warned that an extension of the restrictions could be required to reduce pressure on the health service.\n\nOf the 2,019 deaths recorded by Nisra by 8 January, 1,247 (62%) occurred in hospital, 622 (31%) in care homes, 12 (0.6%) in hospices and 138 (7%) at residential addresses or other locations.\n\nPeople aged 75 and over account for just over three-quarters of all Covid-19 related registered deaths (77.6%) between 19 March 2020 and 8 January 2021.\n\nJust over a fifth (22.2%) of all Covid-19 related registered deaths have been of people with an address in the Belfast council area.\n\nMeanwhile, the Department of Health reported 26 further Covid-related deaths on Friday.\n\nFive of these deaths did not occur in the past 24 hours.\n\nThe Department of Health bases its figures on a positive test result being recorded, whereas Nisra figures are based on mentions of the virus on death certificates, so people may or may not have been confirmed to have contracted the virus prior to death.\n\nA further 1,052 individuals have tested positive for Covid-19 and 63 patients are being treated in intensive care units, 47 of whom are on ventilators.\n\nThe chief medical officers warned the high infection rate was having a \"significant impact\" on the health of the population and the \"safe functioning\" of the healthcare systems.\n\nThey said the public should avoid all unnecessary journeys, including cross-border travel.\n\nPointing out that many of the patients admitted to hospital in January have been younger than 65, they warned coronavirus could affect anyone, \"regardless of age or underlying condition\".\n\n\"It highlights the need for us all to protect one another by staying at home,\" said the medical officers.\n\nNorthern Ireland's spike in infections has been put down to an easing of restrictions over Christmas.\n\nAsked if he regretted being part of the decision to ease restrictions, Health Minister Robin Swann said the executive had tried to be balanced in its approach.\n\n\"I regret the pressures we see now in our hospitals, but let's remember it's caused by this virus, we have it in our power to bring it back under control and get us back to where we were in the summer,\" he told BBC News NI on Friday.\n\nMr Swann pleaded with people to follow the current restrictions.\n\n\"We're in the middle of a very tough six-week scenario, and how we come out of this will be a more graduated approach to make sure we get the benefits of what we've already done, and also the benefits of the vaccine.\"", "Sara Powell-Davies said she was lucky her nursery was able to open following lockdown\n\nA mother with two young children has said it was \"incredibly stressful\" trying to manage without free childcare during lockdown.\n\nThe Welsh Government's scheme was suspended in April, with funds redirected to pay for childcare for key workers' children.\n\nNow the offer, available to working parents of three and four-year-olds, has been reinstated.\n\nBut there are concerns many nurseries have been operating at a loss.\n\nWorking parents of three and four-year-old children are able to claim up 30 hours of early-years education and childcare a week for 48 weeks a year under the Childcare Offer for Wales.\n\nThose whose children become eligible in the autumn term, can apply from September.\n\nSara Powell-Davies, from Caerphilly, said it had been really hard to manage without the help during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nThe mother to three-year-old Tirion and one-year-old Cadel said the free childcare saved the family about £200 a month.\n\n\"It does make a massive difference to our finances every month,\" she said.\n\nMrs Powell-Davies said, while she was lucky Cadel's nursery was open, after-school clubs would not run in September due to the coronavirus pandemic, which would make juggling childcare around work a challenge.\n\n\"It's incredibly stressful trying to manage this anyway,\" she said.\n\n\"We do rely on support like private nursery provision, after-school care [and] wraparound because we don't have any family that is able to support us.\n\n\"So, this is our lifeline.\"\n\nChildcare Offer for Wales gives those eligible 30 hours of early-years education and childcare per week for 48 weeks of the year\n\nChildcare providers are paid £4.50 per hour for every child who takes up a place through the childcare offer.\n\nBut the National Day Nurseries Association said many of its members were operating at a loss as fewer children had been attending and costs had gone up to comply with Covid-19 safety regulations.\n\nIts chief executive Purnima Tanuku called on the Welsh Government to set up a \"transformation fund to be able to support the sector until occupancy levels pick up and to really review the hourly rate to reflect the additional cost they've had to incur\".\n\nLyn Bourne, of Britannia Day Nursery, said nurseries were a \"forgotten industry\"\n\nBefore the coronavirus pandemic, around 70 children attended Britannia Day Nursery in Caerphilly - now there are about 40.\n\nOwner Lyn Bourne said the nursery was losing money every week, but was determined to keep going.\"It is hard financially and emotionally, but we decided we wanted to keep going so we've just done our best to do that,\" she said.Ms Bourne said she hoped the childcare offer would help some parents to bring children back, but said nurseries needed extra financial help from the government too.\"Nurseries are closing every week,\" she said.\"We seem to be a forgotten industry, but we're so important.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government confirmed that coronavirus guidance restricting children to groups of eight in childcare would be lifted.\n\nDeputy Minister for Social Care Julie Morgan said: \"Bringing the offer back will not only help parents, but it is crucial for providers too in supporting their businesses to recover after what has been a period of great uncertainty and anxiety for many.\"\n\nA Welsh Government spokesman said the hourly rate was under review and it was considering extending the offer to parents in education or training or \"on the cusp\" of returning to work.\n\nHe added: \"The childcare offer being restarted funded childcare for an average of 13,000 children per month before the pandemic, a significant investment in the Welsh childcare sector.\n\n\"We have also relaxed some of the regulatory requirements on childcare settings in the national minimum standards to make it easier for them to operate under the current restrictions.\"", "Women selling clothes online are being sent explicit messages, with requests for sex and \"worn\" garments.\n\nBoth businesses and private individuals have experienced the problem when advertising on mainstream platforms.\n\nWomen have been sent '\"creepy\" messages on Facebook, Instagram, eBay, and Depop, the BBC has learned.\n\nSome were asked for additional items including worn tights, explicit photos and used underwear.\n\nWhen inappropriate profiles were blocked or reported, some would reappear with a different account, sources told the BBC.\n\n\"During lockdown, the messages have gotten really creepy,\" said Sara Faye, who has sold her clothes on Depop for years.\n\n\"They always want to know how many times it has been worn and if it is dirty.\"\n\nMs Faye used to post images of herself in the clothes on the platforms but has now stopped because of the messages.\n\nWomen often model the clothing they're selling in the photos\n\n\"Don't message me on an innocent second-hand website, just because you can see a hot girl in the photos,\" she added. \"It feels like a violation, you should be able to sell your clothes online without getting harassed.\"\n\nSellers were sometimes offered additional money for used clothing or explicit images.\n\nJennifer Savin - a Cosmopolitan features writer, who recently investigated the topic - was offered ��5 for more than 50 intimate images after posting items on eBay.\n\n\"I think there are a lot of users out there, just trying their luck,\" she told the BBC. \"Who knows if they'd even pay up if they were to be sent the explicit content in the first place?\"\n\nOne online seller, who relies on the profits made on these platforms for a living, said \"it was a balance between feeling safe and needing the money.\"\n\nEstablished clothing brands have also reported receiving inappropriate messages and requests on Facebook and Instagram.\n\nLovely's Vintage Emporium sells vintage clothes and receives many such comments every week.\n\nLovely's Vintage Emporium says it receives many inappropriate messages every week\n\n\"I get a lot of messages about the model, especially if there are shirts with close-up images,\" said owner Lynnette Peck.\n\n\"I had a fetishist asking what [shoes] smelt like, who wore them and if I could take a photo of myself wearing them.\"\n\nShe has now stopped selling certain items on the website, after receiving explicit photographs through Facebook Messenger.\n\nNaomi Edmondson, who runs lingerie brand Edge o'Beyond, said the business was \"constantly bombarded with creepy comments from men\", often asking for sex.\n\n\"We get so many creepy messages and comments it's too time-consuming to report them all,\" she said. \"A few times I have felt concerned for safety.\n\n\"We create lingerie to empower women, we do not welcome the minority of men who think it's acceptable to send explicit pictures.\"\n\nSome of the women the BBC spoke to said they hadn't reported the messages because they were \"embarrassed\", \"ashamed\" or \"didn't want to risk losing their accounts\".\n\nFacebook, Instagram, Depop and eBay all said they take these kinds of messages seriously and would take action against those who violated policy.\n\nThey all urged users to report and block any accounts which break the rules.\n\nFacebook - which also owns Instagram - said it has built a \"global safety and security team as well as powerful technology\" to remove accounts as quickly as possible.\n\nDepop said it aims to respond to 95% reports of inappropriate behaviour within three hours, during business hours.\n\n\"The issue of women receiving creepy messages when selling clothes online is not a new phenomenon,\" said Jo O'Reilly, digital privacy expert at ProPrivacy.\n\n\"This is particularly concerning because to sell on most popular online selling platforms, including eBay and Depop, it is mandatory for users to provide a postal address - likely to be their home address.\"\n\nBut that is technically against the terms and conditions of most selling platforms.\n\n\"The very nature of selling second-hand clothes means that sellers will often post photos of themselves wearing the items,\" she says.\n\n\"That can, unfortunately, attract unwanted attention from buyers who might wish to buy worn clothes rather than just second-hand items.\"\n\nAlthough sites restrict the selling of certain used items, such as underwear, private messaging provides a \"loophole\", she added.", "Boris Johnson has said there is still a very substantial risk of intensive care units in hospitals being overwhelmed by the spread of the coronavirus.\n\nIt comes on a day when the UK has recorded the highest number of deaths in a single day in Europe.\n\nFergal Keane last visited the Imperial Healthcare Trust’s St Mary’s and Charing Cross hospital in London last April.\n\nHe's been back to see how they're coping.", "UN peacekeepers ended their mission in Darfur last month\n\nThe number of people killed in clashes between different ethnic groups in Sudan's West Darfur state has risen to 83, a medical body has said.\n\nThe fighting in the state capital, El Geneina, began on Saturday after a row in which a man was stabbed to death.\n\nA state-wide curfew has been imposed and Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok has sent a delegation to investigate.\n\nA conflict in Darfur that began in 2003 forced millions to flee and, despite a peace process, tensions remain.\n\nSaturday's violence comes less than three weeks after peacekeepers from the United Nations and African Union handed over security to the Khartoum authorities after 13 years there, reports the BBC's Youssef Taha.\n\nSimilar clashes in El Geneina last year, which saw Arab pastoralists fight with non-Arab groups, caused hundreds of casualties.\n\nThe most recent fighting was centred around a camp for people who had been displaced by the Darfur conflict. A deadly row between two men escalated into a fight involving armed militias, the AFP news agency reports.\n\nThe Central Committee of Sudan Doctors said the death toll had risen from 48 to 83, and the number of wounded from around 100 to 160.\n\nMembers of the armed forces were among the victims, it said.\n\nCasualties were likely to rise further as fighting was continuing, the medical body added.\n\nThe government said on Sunday that troop reinforcements would be sent to the area\n\nThe announcement was made after army chief Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan met top security officials to discuss the violence.\n\nA peace deal involving most, but not all, groups in Darfur was signed last year.\n\nThe Darfur conflict began under the presidency of Omar al-Bashir, who was overthrown in 2019 and is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes and genocide in the region.\n\nJustice for the people of Darfur was a key rallying cry for civilian groups who backed the ouster of the president after nearly three decades in power.\n\nThe Sudanese Professionals' Association, which was at the forefront of the anti-Bashir movement, called for the current transitional government to deal with the \"unruly armed groups which have been freely moving and terrorising civilians since the collapse of the former regime\", Sudan's news agency reports.\n\nYou may also be interested in:\n\nLast year Mohanad Hashim visited Kalma camp where some of the millions of people who fled flighting ended up:\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The ongoing struggle for peace in Darfur", "A man has scaled a Hong Kong skyscraper in his wheelchair to raise money for spinal cord patients.\n\nLai Chi-Wai, who became paralysed after a road accident ten years ago, climbed 250 metres (820ft) of the Nina Towers building.\n\nBefore his accident, Lai Chi-Wai was a rock-climbing champion in Asia and eighth best in the world.\n\nHe said that \"knowing there was a possibility...that I could be a climber again, I found some direction in life\".", "A financial support scheme for airports in England will open this month, the government says, as the aviation sector faces new Covid travel curbs.\n\nAviation minister Robert Courts said the move was a response to the closure of all UK air corridors from Monday.\n\nThe aim was to provide grants by the end of this financial year, he said.\n\nIndustry groups had warned there was only so long airports could \"run on fumes\", following the announcement of the new quarantine rules.\n\nUnder the new rules beginning at 04:00 GMT on Monday, all travel corridors - which have been in place to allow arrivals from some countries to forgo quarantine - will close.\n\nAll arrivals to the UK after that time will need to isolate for up to 10 days, although the quarantine period can be cut short with a negative test after five days.\n\nPeople will also have to show proof of a negative test taken in the previous 72 hours before travelling.\n\nOn Sunday, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab also told the BBC'S Andrew Marr Show that Public Health England would also be stepping up checks on travellers who must self-isolate, while enforcement checks at borders would also be \"ramped up\".\n\nHe added that asking all arrivals to self-isolate in hotels was a \"potential measure\" the government was keeping under review.\n\nIn a tweet, Mr Courts said the Airport and Ground Operations Support Scheme \"will help airports reduce\" additional costs faced due to the pandemic and that further details would follow soon.\n\nThe scheme had first been announced in November, but without a set start date. It will involve grants of up to £8m per applicant, to be used to cover fixed costs, such as business rates.\n\nIn a statement at the time, the Airport Operators Association said the scheme would be a relief. However, it said support equivalent to business rates would only go so far and with the pandemic crisis deepening, a broader package of support was needed for all four nations, to see the sector through the next few months.\n\nAOA chief executive Karen Dee said the measures would \"provide much-needed support to many embattled airports, helping them through the challenging months ahead\".\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson announced the changes to the UK's travel rules at a Downing Street briefing on Friday, saying they would \"protect against the risk of as yet unidentified new strains\" of Covid.\n\nThe new rules will be in place until at least 15 February, he said.\n\nA ban on travellers from South America, Portugal and Cape Verde also came into force on Friday, having been imposed over concerns about a new variant identified in Brazil.\n\nNew variants causing concern have previously been identified in the UK and South Africa, with many countries imposing restrictions on arrivals from both nations.\n\nScientists fear the variants seen in South Africa and Brazil may interfere with the effectiveness of vaccines and evade parts of the immune system.\n\nThe government's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance told the press briefing on Friday that some of the new variants may be able to \"get round\" the Covid vaccines but it was \"really quite easy\" to adjust the vaccines to deal with mutations in the virus.\n\nThe travel industry said closing the travel corridors was understandable due to the health emergency, but warned it would deepen the crisis for the sector.\n\nTim Alderslade, chief executive of Airlines UK, said the system had been \"a lifeline for the industry\" last summer but \"things change and there's no doubting this is a serious health emergency\". He said he assumed the government would remove the latest restrictions as soon as it was safe.\n\n\"We've had no revenue now effectively for 12 months, give or take a few months in the summer last year. If we're going to have an aviation sector coming out of this we need to open up in the summer,\" he told the BBC.\n\nTravel operators had already been forced to cancel holidays before the latest restrictions were announced.\n\nEarlier this week, Jet2 suspended all flights and holidays until 25 March over \"ongoing uncertainty\" and budget travel provider EasyJet on Thursday began cancelling holidays up to and including 24 March.\n\nThe Department for Transport has said it is supporting the travel industry with an extension to the furlough scheme until the end of April, business rates relief and tax deferrals.\n\nWith all parts of the UK under strict virus rules amid high levels of infection, only essential travel is permitted.\n\nOn Saturday, another 1,295 deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test were reported in the UK, and a further 41,346 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus.\n\nAre you due to travel back to the UK from overseas? Do you work in the travel industry? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Pilot Douglas Jones, 27, was enjoying his dream job, working for Aegean Airlines and living in Greece, when the pandemic began last spring - and borders began to close.\n\nFearing being stranded in Greece, he booked a flight home to Scotland and within a couple of weeks learned his job was gone.\n\nBack home, in the small Scottish town of Moffat, in Dumfries and Galloway, he found himself “desperate to do something”.\n\n\"When you have been used to living in Berlin and Athens and you move back to Moffat, living with your dad, it is a bit of slowdown,\" he says.\n\nIt was a relative of a friend who spotted south of Scotland firm Alpha Solway was hiring new workers to meet demand for personal protective equipment (PPE).\n\nIt certainly marked a change of pace – the nine-to-five office-based routine was difficult to adjust to for someone accustomed to navigating the skies of Europe – but Douglas says he was \"surprised\" by what parts of his old job he could bring to his new post.\n\n\"A lot in commercial aviation is about awareness - situational awareness - and a lot of that can be built into manufacturing as well,\" he says.\n\nWhile looking forward to returning to the skies one day, he adds: “I have learned a huge amount here.\n\n“There are good people here doing a good job and I am helping at least with that.\"", "Children in England will be able to access books online free during school closures via a virtual library.\n\nInternet classroom Oak National Academy created the library after schools moved to remote learning for the majority of pupils until February half-term.\n\nFormed with The National Literacy Trust, the library will provide a book a week from its author of the week.\n\nThe aim is to increase young readers' access to e-books and audiobooks, particularly the most disadvantaged.\n\nOak National Academy is funded by the Department for Education and has provided more than 28 million lessons since the start of the school term on 4 January.\n\nIn the last two weeks, 4.1 million pupils accessed its resources.\n\nThe latest lockdown has seen schools in England close except for children of key workers and vulnerable pupils.\n\nMatt Hood, principal of Oak National Academy, said: \"It's incredible to be able to add to our offer something vital for children's literacy and their mental wellbeing.\"\n\nJonathan Douglas, chief executive of the National Literacy Trust, said it was \"essential\" to enable as many children as possible to \"access a world of great literature\".\n\nHe added: \"Many children's literacy skills were profoundly affected by the first lockdown and school closures.\n\n\"We will do everything in our power to support children, families and teachers during this new lockdown period.\"\n\nDescribing the virtual library as a \"fantastic resource\", Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said learning and children's development must continue while schools remain closed.\n\nHe said: \"Reading is hugely beneficial not only for children's literacy skills, but also their mental health and wellbeing.\"\n\nThe first book to feature will be Dame Jacqueline Wilson's The Story Of Tracy Beaker, and will be available to access free for a week from 17 January.\n\nDame Jacqueline said with schools closed, the free online library is needed more than ever, adding: \"I think it's vitally important that every child should have an opportunity to access books.\"", "The funeral of Gerry and the Pacemakers singer Gerry Marsden has been held at a church near his beloved River Mersey.\n\nMarsden died, aged 78, in hospital on 3 January following a blood infection.\n\nAs the frontman in the band Gerry and the Pacemakers, his hits included Ferry Cross The Mersey and a cover version of You'll Never Walk Alone.\n\nEx-Liverpool boss Sir Kenny Dalglish was among the mourners at the funeral which had to remain small because of Covid restrictions.\n\nSir Kenny managed the club at the time of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, which led to the deaths of 96 fans who were attending an FA Cup game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.\n\nGerry Marsden sings You'll Never Walk Alone before an Anfield match in 2010\n\nSir Kenny said: \"You'll Never Walk Alone has huge meaning to the lives of Liverpool supporters around the world and is synonymous with the club.\n\n\"He will be sadly missed by those who knew him and the millions he never got to meet.\"\n\nYou'll Never Walk Alone became a football terrace anthem for Marsden's hometown club soon after it topped the charts in 1963.\n\nThe song was played during the funeral by a guitarist while a version of Marsden singing Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying, a song he wrote for his wife Pauline, also featured.\n\nShe said: \"We, his family, are totally devastated and have been so moved and amazed at the extent of the respect, love and affection received from all over the world.\n\n\"When the time is right and we have come out of this terrible pandemic we hope a fitting memorial can be held for him in the city he loved so much.\"\n\nGerry and the Pacemakers was one of the biggest British bands in the 1960s\n\nReferring to the lyrics from Ferry Cross the Mersey, close friend Arthur Johnson said: \"He lived close to the banks of the Mersey for all his life and as the words of his song say: 'This land's the place I love and here I'll stay'.\"\n\nLiverpool City Region mayor Steve Rotheram said: \"I feel privileged he let me into his life, although that makes his passing even more painful.\"\n\nIn 1962, Beatles manager Brian Epstein signed up Gerry and the Pacemakers and, a year later, they became the first band to have their first three songs top the charts - How Do You Do It, I Like It and You'll Never Walk Alone.\n\nA flag on the Royal Iris Mersey ferry flew at half mast after the death of Gerry Marsden\n\nThey were one of the successes of the Merseybeat era, with former Beatles star Sir Paul McCartney saying at the time of Marsden's death that: \"Gerry was a mate from our early days in Liverpool\".\n\n\"He and his group were our biggest rivals on the local scene.\"", "More than half of the Church of England's 14,000 parishes will not open for Sunday services later, as places of worship are hit hard by Covid-19.\n\nMany of the Church's clergy are shielding, while some parishes have decided it is not safe enough to admit worshippers.\n\nMost mosques in London did not open for Friday prayers.\n\nThe Catholic Church in England and Wales says parishes that are able to follow guidelines will still open.\n\nDespite coronavirus restrictions, places of worship in England and Wales can open - but many are struggling to do so safely.\n\nPlaces of worship remain closed throughout Scotland, while Northern Ireland's main church denominations are to cease public worship until early February.\n\nThe Church of England has told the BBC more than half of its parishes - including some cathedrals - will not open for communal prayer on Sunday. Many have moved their worship online.\n\nThe Church said some of its clergy were shielding, and all parishes were making their own decision.\n\nLincoln Cathedral took the decision to suspend in-person worship and move services online earlier in the week.\n\nRev Canon Nick Brown, Precentor of Lincoln, said the decision was taken \"with a very heavy heart\" but explained: \"To bring people together in worship is at the very heart of our purpose, but having considered expert advice we believe that the best way to help limit the spread of Covid-19 is to suspend public services for the time being.\"\n\nThe Catholic Church in England and Wales says it will keep its churches under review to make sure \"the highest standards of safety are maintained\". It is also organising online masses in many parishes.\n\nBritain's most senior Catholic, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, had criticised previous orders for churches to close.\n\nWith more than half of the Church of England's parishes closed for communal worship, thousands of Christians are being deprived of spiritual sustenance, at a time when many feel sorely in need of it.\n\nOther religions are also grappling with the issue and have worked hard to make their places of worship Covid-compliant by, for example, introducing strict booking and ticketing systems.\n\nMany church parishes have adapted by moving services online, a trend mirrored in some Jewish and Muslim denominations. These have been largely successful, and in some cases attracted new audiences from thousands of miles away. However, it's difficult to replicate the sense of community when people can physically and regularly meet up.\n\nOne Rabbi I spoke to last summer admitted he was worried some of his synagogue regulars, kept away by Covid-19, might never return.\n\nThere's also a financial aspect. Places of worship rely heavily on the generosity of believers. Weekly donations have been hit by church closures, and many revenue-generating schemes, such as hiring out church halls, have been cancelled. Many of the country's ancient cathedrals make much of their income from tourist admission fees.\n\nDifferent parts of the UK have taken different approaches, with all places of worship currently closed in Scotland, for example. Some Christian leaders, largely accepting of initial closures during the first lockdown, have gradually spoken out in favour of being able to make the decision themselves.\n\nBut with most shops and sporting facilities closed in England, some campaigners, such as the National Secular Society, have railed against what they say is \"a worrying deference to religious entitlement\".\n\nMeanwhile, the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board has told the BBC although most mosques in England and Wales did open for Friday prayers, the majority in London did not - and it says it has asked its members in areas where the infection rate is rising to work closely with Public Health England and local authorities.\n\nUnder the latest lockdowns in the UK, there are changes to usual practices for worshippers of all religions.\n\nIn the areas of the UK where communal worship is allowed, a number of measures are in place, such as carrying out services in the shortest possible time, and ensuring worshippers do not mingle with anyone not in their own household or support bubble.\n\nFaith leaders have accepted the need for restrictions.\n\nThe Muslim Council of Britain urges \"strong caution for mosques wishing to continue remaining open to the public for worship... and for tremendous care to be exercised\".\n\nMeanwhile, the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev Sarah Mullally, who has been in charge of the Church of England's plans for resuming services, has said \"some may feel that it is currently better not to attend in person... Clergy who have concerns, and others who are shielding, should take particular care and stay at home\".\n\nHow have you been affected by the issues relating to coronavirus? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n• None What are the rules for places of worship?", "Last updated on .From the section Cricket\n\nEngland need further 36 runs to win\n\nEngland need 36 runs on the final day to win the first Test against Sri Lanka despite losing three wickets in a chaotic end to the fourth day in Galle.\n\nChasing only 74, the tourists slipped to 14-3 as Dom Sibley and Zak Crawley fell to left-arm spinner Lasith Embuldeniya before captain Joe Root was run out after a mix-up with Jonny Bairstow.\n\nBairstow, who survived a run-out chance of his own, and debutant Dan Lawrence saw England to 38 without further loss before bad light ended play early.\n\nBairstow and Lawrence will resume on 11 and seven respectively at 04:15 GMT on Monday.\n\nEarlier, Sri Lanka were bowled out for 359, with Lahiru Thirimanne scoring 111 - his first century for almost eight years - and Angelo Matthews 73.\n\nJack Leach, playing his first Test since 2019, took 5-122 and Dom Bess 3-100 to finish with match figures of 8-130 and set up what should still be a comfortable England victory despite a wearing pitch.\n\nEngland won their most recent series in Sri Lanka 3-0, but their record in Asia - and playing spin - is poor and it reared its head again in a remarkable start to their fourth-innings chase.\n\nSibley, whom many feel is vulnerable against spin, was bowled for two not offering a shot, while Crawley, who was dropped on one, added only eight before a drive was superbly caught at gully by Kusal Mendis.\n\nEngland contributed to their own problems as captain Root, who scored a magnificent 228 in the first innings, was run out by a direct hit by wicketkeeper Niroshan Dickwella, colliding with bowler Dilruwan Perera after Bairstow called for a risky single.\n\nBairstow and Lawrence restored calm in a 24-run stand to steer England to stumps, and they remain firm favourites to take a 1-0 lead in the two-match series.\n\n\"If Sri Lanka had run Bairstow out just after Root it would have been very interesting,\" former England captain Michael Vaughan said on BBC Test Match Special.\n\nSri Lanka, whose first-innings effort of 135 in just 46.1 overs was described as \"one of the worse we've ever seen\", showed significantly more character and application in the second.\n\nOpener Thirimanne, 76 not out as the hosts resumed on 156-2, moved to his second Test century - 54 innings after his first, the third longest gap in Test history - with a cut for four off Bess.\n\nThe left-hander averaged 22 in 36 Tests before this match and his place was in serious doubt, only for captain Dimuth Karunaratne to be ruled out before the game with a thumb injury.\n\nAfter Thirimanne got a faint inside edge to the excellent Jos Buttler off Sam Curran, former captain Mathews played a dogged 219-ball innings containing only two fours to ensure Sri Lanka at least wiped out a 286-run first-innings deficit.\n\nWhen he edged Leach to Root at slip to be last man out, Sri Lanka were left wondering what might have been had they shown the same discipline first time round.\n\nBess, who took 5-30 in the first innings despite struggling with his length, improved throughout the second innings and took a wicket in the first over of his three spells on Sunday.\n\nHe had nightwatchman Embuldeniya caught by Sibley at short cover off the 12th ball of the day, before returning to have stand-in captain Dinesh Chandimal held at slip by Root, and Dickwella caught behind as he attempted to guide the ball to third man.\n\nLeach, who has missed England's past 11 Tests - in part due to illness - yorked Dasun Shanaka and had the dangerous Wanindu Hasaranga superbly taken by Root at slip, before Perera became Buttler's first stumping in Test cricket.\n\nThe wicket of Mathews rounded off Leach's five-wicket haul, the first time two England spinners had achieved the feat in the same match since Derek Underwood and John Emburey in Sri Lanka in 1982.\n\n'It will only mean something if we win' - reaction\n\nEngland spinner Jack Leach on BBC Test Match Special: \"I wouldn't say I bowled well. It has been hard graft out there and I have certainly found I am probably a little rusty.\n\n\"At times I felt I could have done a better job, but the pleasing thing is I felt I bowled better as the game went on.\n\n\"We will come back tomorrow, knock these off and then I can be happy about my five wickets. It will only mean something if we win.\"\n\nFormer England captain Michael Vaughan: \"It has been an exciting day's play. Sri Lanka hung in there.\n\n\"Credit to Sri Lanka - we pelted them but on days three and four have shown they are a team that can compete in home conditions.\"\n\nFormer Sri Lanka all-rounder Russel Arnold: \"The start of England's innings was hectic. We saw panic from England, but Bairstow and Lawrence now look like they have it under control.\"\n• None Find all the resources you need to help with education at home\n• None The hilarious hit history podcast is back for a new series", "There are warnings more children could be plunged into poverty\n\nA decision on whether the £20 weekly rise in Universal Credit will be kept in place is unlikely before March's Budget, a top minister has indicated.\n\nCampaigners say the uplift, worth more than £1,000 a year, has been a lifeline for the vulnerable during the pandemic.\n\nLabour will use a Commons debate on Monday to add pressure on ministers to agree now to extend it beyond 31 March.\n\nBut Dominic Raab told the BBC it was a \"temporary measure\" and the Budget would spell out support \"in the round\".\n\nIn an interview with Andrew Marr, the foreign secretary confirmed that Conservative MPs would be told to abstain in Monday's debate, meaning Labour's \"opposition day\" motion will be approved.\n\nWhile the motion will not be binding on ministers and won't change policy, the BBC's Ben Wright said not opposing it represented an attempt by the government to \"neutralise\" the issue for the time being.\n\nIt showed, he added, how concerned ministers were about the prospect of a rebellion by Tory MPs - many of whom want an end to the uncertainty over the issue - if they had been asked to vote against it.\n\nThe standard Universal Credit allowance, which is claimed by more than 5.5 million households, was increased by £20 a week in April 2020 as part of Chancellor Rishi Sunak's early Covid economic response.\n\nWhile it was designed as a temporary response to help those unable to work or struggling due to the lockdown, opposition parties and charities say failing to extend will cause real hardship for hundreds of thousands of people.\n\nThe Joseph Rowntree Foundation has suggested about 16 million people will be directly affected, with millions of households facing an income loss equivalent to £1,040 a year.\n\nThe organisation has warned 500,000 more people will be driven into poverty, including 200,000 children, while a further 500,000 of those already in poverty will find themselves in even worse hardship.\n\nIts director Helen Barnard said a decision could not be delayed any longer.\n\n\"The chancellor has said the economy is going to get worse before it gets better and our evidence shows it is those with the least who are often suffering the most,\" she said.\n\n\"No one can seriously argue that cutting support for those on the lowest incomes in April will do anything other than weaken our already fragile economy.\"\n\nAsked whether the government should act now, Mr Raab said Monday's debate was a \"political\" move by the opposition and not about the government's overall financial support during the pandemic.\n\nHe promised to \"look at everything in the round\" to make sure support for the most vulnerable was available.\n\n\"Obviously in March there will be a Budget where again that holistic approach can be taken by the chancellor, but we've put that support in place to make sure that the most vulnerable communities can be protected at this very difficult time,\" he told Andrew Marr.\n\nThe government says it has injected an extra £7bn into the welfare system during the pandemic, including boosting Working Tax Credits by more than £1,000 a year for a 12-month period.\n\nLabour has urged the government to \"see sense\" on Universal Credit, saying that it would be both morally and economically wrong to \"take £1,000 a year from Britain's families\" at the peak of the unemployment crisis.", "The leaders of most of the world's biggest economies will get a brief taste of the English seaside this June as they gather for the G7 summit.\n\nCornwall's Carbis Bay, known for its sandy beach and clear waters, will be the venue for discussions on debt, climate change and post-Covid recovery.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson called it the \"perfect location for such a crucial summit\".\n\nThe UK, US, Germany, France, Canada, Italy and Japan make up the G7.\n\nLeaders from Australia, India, South Korea and the EU will also attend the event, from 11 to 13 June, as guests.\n\nVisit Cornwall estimates the county will make £50m, with the summit providing a boost to tourism and the area's international profile.\n\nBut the likes of US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron are unlikely to enjoy an ice cream and a barefoot stroll through Carbis Bay's surf.\n\nG7 summits require security cordons, with anti-globalisation protests having affected several previous get-togethers.\n\nMeasures in place for the meeting in Biarritz, France, in 2019, saw the seaside resort likened to a temporary \"fortress\".\n\nThe Cornish meeting will be the first face-to-face G7 since the pandemic started. Last year's event - scheduled to take place at Camp David, Maryland - took place online instead.\n\nThe previous two UK-hosted meetings were at Lough Erne, Co Fermanagh, in 2013, and Gleneagles, Perth and Kinross, in 2005.\n\nBoris Johnson invoked the leading role of Cornwall's mining communities in the industrial revolution\n\nThis year, delegates will be put up - with Covid restrictions in place - at the Tregenna Castle Resort, overlooking nearby St Ives, and other locations.\n\nThe National Maritime Museum Cornwall in Falmouth will host international media.\n\nThe UK is hosting the summit as president of the G7 for the year.\n\n\"As the most prominent grouping of democratic countries, the G7 has long been the catalyst for decisive international action to tackle the greatest challenges we face,\" Mr Johnson said.\n\nHe added that leaders should approach the economic challenges of Covid \"by uniting with a spirit of openness to create a better future\".\n\n\"Two-hundred years ago Cornwall's tin and copper mines were at the heart of the UK's industrial revolution and this summer Cornwall will again be the nucleus of great global change and advancement,\" the prime minister said.\n\nVisit Cornwall chief executive Malcolm Bell said the summit would \"not only showcase the beauty of Cornwall but give us the opportunity to communicate our heritage, culture and the connections\".\n\nLocal leaders said it would provide a \"fantastic opportunity\" to showcase the county on the world stage.\n\nThe government said it would announce more of its plans \"in due course\".\n\nThe G7 meeting comes five months ahead of UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow in November.", "A statue of Edward Colston was thrown into Bristol Harbour last June, after being pulled down and rolled through the streets\n\nThe government is planning new laws to protect statues in England from being removed \"on a whim or at the behest of a baying mob\", Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick has said.\n\nWriting in the Sunday Telegraph, he said generations-old monuments should be \"considered thoughtfully\".\n\nThe legislation would require planning permission for any changes and a minister would be given the final veto.\n\nIt will be revealed in Parliament on Monday.\n\nThe plans follow the toppling of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston last year and a wider discussion on the removal of controversial monuments.\n\nFour people were later charged with criminal damage over the removal of the Colston statue, and six people accepted conditional cautions over their involvement.\n\nIn the paper, the communities secretary said Britain should not try to edit or censor its past.\n\nMr Jenrick said any decision to remove heritage assets in England would require planning permission and a consultation with local communities, adding that he wanted to see a \"considered approach\".\n\nHe wrote: \"Our view will be set out in law, that such monuments are almost always best explained and contextualised, not taken and hidden away.\"\n\nMr Jenrick added that he had noticed an attempt to set a narrative which seeks to erase part of the nation's history, saying this was \"at the hand of the flash mob, or by the decree of a 'cultural committee' of town hall militants and woke worthies\".\n\nHe said: \"We live in a country that believes in the rule of law, but when it comes to protecting our heritage, due process has been overridden. That can't be right.\n\n\"Local people should have the chance to be consulted whether a monument should stand or not.\n\n\"What has stood for generations should be considered thoughtfully, not removed on a whim or at the behest of a baying mob.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Metropolitan Police say they are seeking to identify those responsible for the damage\n\nThe death of George Floyd while in the custody of police in Minneapolis sparked anti-racism protests across the world.\n\nDuring largely peaceful demonstrations in the UK, the controversial Colston statue was dumped into Bristol Harbour and a memorial to Sir Winston Churchill was vandalised with the words \"was a racist\".\n\nSpeaking in June, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: \"The statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square is a permanent reminder of his achievement in saving this country - and the whole of Europe - from a fascist and racist tyranny.\n\n\"It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should ... be at risk of attack by violent protesters.\n\n\"Yes, he sometimes expressed opinions that were and are unacceptable to us today, but he was a hero, and he fully deserves his memorial.\"\n\nColston made his fortune in the slave trade and bequeathed his money to charities in Bristol, which led to many venues, streets and landmarks bearing his name.\n\nThe Society of Merchant Venturers, the Bristol charity which runs institutions named after Edward Colston, said it was right that the statue was removed, along with other memorials to \"a man who benefited from trading in human lives\".\n\nThey said it was part of acknowledging Bristol's \"dark past\" and building \"a city where racism and inequality no longer exist\".\n\nFollowing the toppling of the statue, Colston's Girls School changed its name to Montpelier High School and the city's Colston Hall music venue is now known as the Bristol Beacon.\n\nA statue of a Black Lives Matter protester was placed on the empty plinth without permission in July and was removed shortly afterwards.", "Work to restore hundreds of thousands of fingerprint, DNA and arrest records accidentally wiped from police databases is ongoing, the Home Office has said.\n\nAround 400,000 records were lost, according to The Times, which first reported the story.\n\nThe Home Office did not comment on how many records were likely to be restored, or how long it would take.\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel said the issue was \"a result of human error\".\n\nData was wiped from the Police National Computer (PNC) - which stores and shares criminal records information across the UK - after being inadvertently flagged for deletion.\n\nThe PNC is used in police investigations and provides real-time checks on people, vehicles and crimes, as well as whether suspects are wanted for any unsolved offences.\n\nThe coding that caused the problem was introduced in November 2020, and the deletions started earlier this week.\n\nInitially, it was thought some 150,000 records were lost, but it since has emerged the number could be significantly higher.\n\nCommenting on the error, Ms Patel said: \"Engineers continue to work to restore data lost as a result of human error during a routine housekeeping process earlier this week.\n\n\"I continue to be in regular contact with the team, and working with our policing partners, we will provide an update as soon as we can.\"\n\nEarlier, Labour shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds called on Ms Patel to take responsibility for the error and be clear about the impact it had had.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Breakfast, he described the situation as \"extraordinarily serious\", adding: \"Priti Patel will be responsible for criminals walking free.\n\n\"We're not going to be able to link suspects to crime scenes without the DNA and fingerprint evidence.\"\n\nThe National Police Chiefs' Council said the lost data had resulted in a couple of \"near misses\" for serious crimes when trying to identify an offender.\n\nPolicing minister Kit Malthouse insisted the affected records \"apply to cases where individuals were arrested and then released with no further action\".\n\nHe added: \"We are working to recover the affected records as a priority. While we do so, the Police National Computer is functioning and the police are taking steps to mitigate any impact.\"", "A group of London business leaders has written to the government calling for financial support for the struggling rail firm Eurostar.\n\nIn a letter to the Treasury and Department for Transport, they urge \"swift action to safeguard its future\".\n\nBosses of firms such as Fortnum & Mason signed the letter asking for access to government loans and business rates relief \"at the very least\".\n\nThe government says it is \"working closely\" with Eurostar.\n\nThe cross-Channel rail company is threatened by a large drop in passenger numbers due to coronavirus-related travel restrictions.\n\nIt reported in November that passenger numbers had been down 95% since March 2020.\n\nWith two trains an hour normally scheduled in peak hours, it now runs just two services a day from London to Paris and Brussels.\n\nThe letter, coordinated by business campaigning group London First and seen by the BBC, describes the firm as one that has \"fallen through the cracks\". Unlike some airlines, it has not been eligible for government-backed loans.\n\n\"If this viable business is allowed to fall between the cracks of support - neither an airline, nor a domestic railway - our recovery could be damaged,\" it says.\n\nCo-signed by 28 leaders, including the vice-chancellor of Middlesex University, the chief executive of West End property company Shaftesbury, as well as the boss of the ExCeL conference centre, the letter points out that the company currently employs 1,200 people in the UK.\n\nThe firm is 55% owned by French state rail firm SNCF. The UK government sold its stake in the business to private companies for £757m in 2015.\n\nThe letter also credits Eurostar with reducing carbon emissions. Since it launched in 1994, it has transported more than 190 million passengers between Britain and mainland Europe.\n\nA spokesman for Eurostar said: \"Without additional funding from government there is a real risk to the survival of Eurostar, the green gateway to Europe.\n\nHe described the current situation as \"very serious\".\n\nA spokesman for the Department for Transport said: \"We recognise the significant financial challenges facing Eurostar as a result of Covid-19 and the unprecedented circumstances currently faced by the international travel industry.\"\n\nHe added the government had been in contact with Eurostar \"on a regular basis\" since the start of the coronavirus crisis and would continue to work closely with the firm.\n• None How are travel rules being relaxed?", "Few people get as unique a take on the movement, mood and feelings of the public than the business owners that sit in its lay-bys.\n\nSince the start of lockdown they have juggled highs and lows.\n\nFrom supporting lorry drivers unable to stop at closed service stations to seeing their customers told to stay at home - and in turn not spend money with them.\n\nSome are now questioning their future and role in a workforce predicted to change its patterns and work from home more in the future.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Duke of Cambridge shared his own experiences of seeing \"death and so much bereavement\"\n\nThe Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have been told the pandemic will leave many emergency workers \"broken\".\n\nMany police and NHS workers are too concerned with battling the pandemic to look after their mental health, they were told.\n\nInsp Phil Spencer from Cleveland Police said staff did not engage enough with counselling \"because we don't want to take anybody else's valuable time\".\n\nPrince William said he \"really worries\" about the effect on front-line workers.\n\n\"When you're surrounded by that level of intense trauma and sadness and bereavement, it really does, it stays with you at home, it stays with you for weeks on end,\" he said.\n\nInsp Spencer said emergency workers \"run towards danger, run towards a terrorist attack, we run towards the pandemic\".\n\n\"Perhaps further down the line when all this is gone we're going to have some broken police officers and emergency services staff, because we're too busy focusing on protecting the most vulnerable,\" he said.\n\nThe couple also spoke to counsellors from Hospice UK's Harrogate-based Just B support line for NHS staff, social care workers, carers and emergency services, which their foundation helps financially.\n\nThe prince said he feared \"you're all so busy caring for everyone else that you won't take enough time to care for yourselves\".\n\nHe and Catherine said the stigma surrounding seeking help for mental health issues must end.\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.\n• None The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Two drivers from Scotland were stopped by police on Anglesey going to see friends.\n\nPeople who drove more than 200 miles to visit friends in Wales and a group having a party in a garden shed have been caught breaking Covid rules.\n\nPolice forces in Wales have broken up parties, football matches and fined people for visiting beauty spots this weekend while Wales is in lockdown.\n\nTwo motorists were reported by North Wales Police in Anglesey after driving from Scotland to visit friends.\n\nWhile in Swansea, eight people were fined after a party was held in a shed.\n\nThe drivers from Scotland were stopped by police at Valley, near Holyhead, and reported for driving without insurance and breaching Covid travel restrictions.\n\nOfficers from North Wales Police on Saturday also stopped a car from Portsmouth as the driver was travelling to \"collect a front bumper\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by South Wales Police Vale of Glamorgan This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by South Wales Police Vale of Glamorgan\n\n\"Travelling nearly 300 miles for a piece of cosmetic plastic for your car is not essential at this time,\" said North Wales Police's Intercept team.\n\n\"The regulations have been broadcast far and wide. Please be mindful you will be reported if your journey is not essential.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Gwent Police | Caerphilly Borough Officers This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nEven though national parks have shut car parks in a bid to stop people visiting, North Wales Police said it received about 100 calls on Saturday about potential Covid breaches - and officers told people they need to take \"personal responsibility\" and \"stay home\".\n\nSouth Wales Police officers issued fixed penalty notices after finding people from \"all different households\" in a shed - which had been converted into a bar - in the Sketty area of Swansea all \"mixing together\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Mark Drakeford This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA further nine fixed penalty notices were given out in the Townhill area of the city after different households attended a baby reveal party on Sunday.\n\nFive people were warned about breaking laws in Neath Port Talbot after a group travelled to a field to play football, while four people were fined after a house party in Aberavon.\n\nUnder coronavirus rules people are only allowed to leave their homes for \"essential\" reasons, including to shop for food, get medical treatment and to exercise.\n\nWhile exercise is allowed, people are not allowed to drive to a spot for a walk, run or cycle, and the law means exercising with people you do not live with (or who are your bubble if you live alone) is banned.\n\nThose found to be in breach of Covid laws can be fined £60 for the first offence, with the penalties increasing up to £1,920. If prosecuted, however, a court can impose an unlimited fine.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid lockdown: 'This is why we say to you do not come out'\n\nUntil recently police had been using an education first approach, but the Welsh Government has repeatedly said it wants to see stricter enforcement of the rules.\n\nIn Powys, road officers from Dyfed-Powys Police stopped cars and turned around people driving to exercise.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by Traffic Wales North & Mid #KeepWalesSafe This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIn Port Talbot, two people sat on a bench drinking alcohol were fined by South Wales Police for \"leaving home without a reasonable excuse\".\n\nGwent Police officers broke-up a house party in Glyn-Gaer, Caerphilly county, on Friday evening and issued fines.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Sunday. We'll have another update for you on Monday.\n\nTen new mass Covid vaccination centres are to open in England from Monday, as the government bids to meet its target of offering 15 million people in the UK a dose by 15 February. Blackburn Cathedral and St Helens Rugby Ground are among the venues chosen to join the seven hubs already in use. NHS England said the new centres would offer \"thousands\" of jabs a week. It comes as another 324,233 vaccine doses have been administered across the UK, taking the total above 3.5 million. Check when you will be eligible for a jab.\n\nA financial support scheme for airports in England will open this month, the government says, as the aviation sector faces new Covid travel curbs. Aviation minister Robert Courts said the move was a response to the closure of all UK air corridors from Monday. The aim is to provide grants before the end of this financial year, he said. Industry groups had warned there was only so long airports could \"run on fumes\", following the announcement of the new quarantine rules. Under the new rules beginning at 04:00 GMT on Monday, all travel corridors - which have been in place to allow arrivals from some countries to forgo quarantine - will close.\n\nMore than half of the Church of England's 14,000 parishes will not open for Sunday services today, as places of worship are hit hard by Covid-19. Many of the Church's clergy are shielding, while some parishes have decided it is not safe enough to admit worshippers. It has also been revealed that most mosques in London remained closed on Friday, meaning Muslims had to make alternative arrangements for Friday prayers. Despite current coronavirus restrictions, places of worship in England and Wales can open - but many are struggling to do so safely. Places of worship remain closed throughout Scotland, while Northern Ireland's main church denominations are to cease public worship until early February. Remind yourself of the rules where you live for places of worship.\n\nChildren in England will be able to access books online free during school closures via a virtual library. Internet classroom Oak National Academy created the library after schools moved to remote learning for the majority of pupils until February half-term. Formed with The National Literacy Trust, the library will provide a book a week from its author of the week. The aim is to increase young readers' access to e-books and audiobooks, particularly the most disadvantaged. The latest lockdown has seen schools in England close to all but children of key workers and vulnerable pupils.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe Duke of Cambridge has expressed his pride at the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh for stepping up and having their Covid-19 vaccinations. In a video call with frontline workers, Prince William spoke about his grandparents after being told medics have witnessed \"vaccine hesitancy\" among some communities during the jab rollout. He praised NHS staff behind the rollout of the vaccine, and described the programme as \"tremendous\", saying it didn't \"just happen\". Staff joked they had been \"thinking and dreaming\" of vaccines all day and night with some describing working seven-day weeks.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. In a video call, the Duke of Cambridge said the vaccination programme was \"tremendous\"\n\nYou can find more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nAnd it's been almost a month since people in some parts of the UK were allowed to meet in Christmas \"bubbles\", so what impact did this have?\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The boss of NHS England reveals Covid-19 jabs are being done much faster than people are newly catching the virus\n\nPeople in England are being vaccinated four times faster than new cases of the virus are being detected, NHS England's chief executive has said.\n\nSir Simon Stevens told the BBC that 140 people a minute were now being given the jab, usually the first dose of two.\n\nBut he said the NHS had never been in a more precarious position, with 75% more Covid patients than at the April peak.\n\nIt comes as a further 298,087 people received their first dose of the vaccine on Saturday.\n\nThere were also 671 more deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test, and another 38,598 positive tests.\n\nSir Simon told the Andrew Marr Show some hospitals would open for vaccinations 24 hours a day, seven days a week on a trial basis in the next 10 days.\n\nHe said England was on course to deliver 1.5 million doses this week. Scotland has delivered a total of more than 224,000 first doses, Wales has given over 126,000 and Northern Ireland nearly 118,000 - although Scotland and Wales do not report figures at the weekend.\n\nHalf of all over-80s have now been vaccinated, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said. \"Each jab brings us one step closer to normal,\" he said.\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab told the BBC that the UK was making \"good progress\" in ensuring every adult was offered a vaccine by September and \"if it can be done more swiftly, that's a bonus\".\n\nMore people have now been vaccinated than have had positive tests since the pandemic began, with 10 more mass vaccination sites due to open in England on Monday.\n\nSir Simon said hospitals and staff were under \"extreme pressure\", however. Asked if the NHS has ever been in a more precarious situation, he said \"no\", adding that the pandemic was a \"unique event\" in its 72-year history.\n\nSomeone was being admitted to hospital with coronavirus every 30 seconds, Sir Simon said, and since Christmas patient numbers had risen by 15,000 - the equivalent of 30 full hospitals.\n\nIt means there are 75% more Covid-19 patients in hospital than there were in the April peak, the NHS chief executive said.\n\nAlthough there were promising signs infection rates were falling, he said they were still too high and rising in some areas and age groups, including the over-60s.\n\nHe said the number of critical care beds had been increased by 50% since the first wave of the pandemic but a \"very small number\" of patients were still having to be transferred between regions when hospitals were full.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The foreign secretary said there would be increased UK border checks next week\n\nAsked about the ratio of nurses to patients in London intensive care units, Sir Simon said there were sometimes three patients for every nurse rather than the one-to-one ratio normally expected. But patients were receiving the \"highest quality care possible\".\n\nAbout 53,000 NHS staff are currently off work due to the virus, he added.\n\nSir Simon said the health service would only be able to maintain the vaccination rate and \"hold the line if people continue to do the right thing and prevent the transmission of coronavirus\".\n\nVaccinating priority groups by the spring would not mean that \"with one bound we are free\" of coronavirus restrictions, he said. But he added: \"I don't think we will have to wait until the autumn.\"\n\nHe said he suspected that there would be enough supply of the vaccine - \"the crucial thing\" - to begin lifting restrictions before then.\n\nSir Simon also warned that although starting with the most vulnerable groups reduced the risk of deaths, a quarter of hospital patients with the virus were currently under 55 - and therefore not a priority unless they have a medical condition that puts them at additional risk.\n\nAsked about suggestions that some vaccination centres were having to throw away leftover doses, he said: \"The guidance from the chief medical officer is crystal clear: every last drop of vaccine should be used.\"\n\nMany centres were finding they were able to get six doses out of a five-dose vial, and Sir Simon said they should keep a reserve list of staff and high-risk patients who could be contacted to receive a vaccination at short notice.\n\nDr Rosie Shire from the Doctors' Association UK told the BBC that as well as sometimes getting six doses out of the five-dose Pfizer vials, they had also got 11 or 12 doses out of 10-dose AstraZeneca vials.\n\nBut she said the uncertain dose count made it harder to know how many last-minute appointments to book in order to use up the supply.\n\nMr Raab said that he was not aware of any delays to supplies from manufacturers Pfizer and AstraZeneca and said he was \"confident we have the flexibility\" to deliver enough doses.\n\n\"It is an enormous challenge. We are meeting it,\" he said. \"But we take nothing for granted.\"\n\nThe foreign secretary said the risk that new variants could prove resistant to vaccines or more deadly meant the UK had to take the \"precautionary approach\" of requiring all travellers to quarantine on arrival from Monday, closing the travel corridors which previously been exempt.\n\n\"We don't want to find in two or three weeks time that our vaccine roll out is imperilled because we haven't taken the precautionary measures on travel corridors,\" he said.\n\nChecks by Border Force on the passenger locator forms filled out on arrival would be increased, Mr Raab said, as would the follow-up calls by Public Health England intended to ensure people were isolating for up to 10 days.\n\nAsked whether the UK would introduce quarantine hotels to ensure people maintained their isolation, he said all potential measures were under review but there was a challenge in the \"workability\" of the proposal.\n\nHow have you been affected by the issues relating to coronavirus? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Smoke rises from Mount Semeru, the highest volcano on the Indonesian island of Java\n\nIndonesia's Mount Semeru has erupted, pouring ash an estimated 5.6km (3.4 miles) into the sky above Java, the country's most densely populated island.\n\nNo evacuation orders have so far been issued, and no casualties reported.\n\nThe National Disaster Mitigation Agency (NDMA) warned villagers living on the mountain's slopes to be alert for ongoing volcanic activity.\n\nFootage showed ash from the 3,676m (12,060ft) volcano looming over homes.\n\n\"The villages of Sumber Mujur and Curah Koboan [in Lumajang municipality] are located in the trajectory of the hot clouds,\" local official Thoriqul Haq said on Saturday.\n\nResidents of the Curah Kobokan river basin have been urged to watch for possible \"cold lava\" mudflow, which can be triggered by intense rainfall combining with volcanic material.\n\nMount Semeru erupted at about 17:24 local time (10:24 GMT), authorities said.\n\nA picture from the Indonesian National Board for Disaster Management shows ash rolling over the landscape\n\nIndonesia sits on the Pacific \"Ring of Fire\" where tectonic plates collide, causing frequent volcanic activity as well as earthquakes.\n\nSemeru - also known as \"The Great Mountain\" - is the highest volcano in Java and one of the most active. It is also one of Indonesia's most popular tourist hiking destinations.\n\nThe volcano previously erupted in December, when about 550 people were evacuated.", "A non-binding Labour motion calling for the universal credit top-up to be kept in place beyond 31 March passed by 278 votes to none after a Commons debate.\n\nSix Tory MPs defied party orders to abstain and voted with Labour, adding to the pressure on the PM on the issue.\n\nThe prime minister said the government had provided £280bn worth of support during the pandemic but all measures would be kept under \"constant review\".\n\nThe motion, which will not automatically lead to a change in policy, was put forward by Labour as a way to put additional pressure on the government to continue the increase, worth £1,000 a year.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Carl, a roofer, describes going from \"not having enough to barely having enough\" on universal credit.\n\nFormer Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb was among six Conservative MPs to rebel, along with Peter Aldous, Robert Halfon, Jason McCartney, Anne Marie Morris and Matthew Offord.\n\nAhead of the vote, Mr Crabb told the BBC that although there were \"difficult pressures on the chancellor\" extending the increase for 12 months was \"the right thing to do\".\n\nBBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said there were dozens of Conservative MPs who were \"deeply uneasy\" about ending the £20 weekly increase to universal credit.\n\nShe added that it was also understood the cabinet minister with responsibility for benefits, Therese Coffey, was arguing that the uplift should not be dropped in April.\n\nCharities and anti-poverty campaigners are pleading with the government to keep the support in place, describing it as a lifeline for more than 5.5 million families who receive the standard universal credit allowance.\n\nFood poverty campaigner and chef Jack Monroe told the BBC that the £20 increase \"has been a lifeline\" for millions of people who have needed to top up their income or rely on universal credit payments in order to get by.\n\nSir Keir said the increase was a vital safety net for those who had lost their jobs, seen their working hours slashed or who were not eligible for the government's wage subsidy furlough scheme.\n\n\"If we don't give a helping hand to families through this pandemic, then we are going to slow our economic recovery as we come out it.\n\n\"We urge Boris Johnson to change course and give families certainty today that their incomes will be protected.\"\n\nSix billion pounds of the benefits bill - the difference between poverty or not for 1.2 million families, according to a think tank.\n\nThe £1,040 a year increase to universal credit is a very emotive issue.\n\nThere's even a battle over what to call it.\n\nTo the government, its introduction was a one-off boost to cope with a crisis. For Labour, taking it away is a cut.\n\nMinisters would prefer we looked at the overall level of support they've provided for workers and businesses during the pandemic. The opposition say the £20 a week boost is a powerful symbol of the state's willingness to help.\n\nEven the act of debating it today is disputed. Labour say they've got the right occasionally to set the agenda in Parliament. Boris Johnson said his MPs risk abuse from campaigners and protestors if they engage.\n\nThe Joseph Rowntree Foundation has suggested about 16 million people will be directly affected if the £20 is rolled back.\n\nIt says 500,000 more people will be driven into poverty, including 200,000 children, while a further 500,000 of those already in poverty will find themselves in even worse hardship.\n\nHowever, free market think tank the Institute for Economic Affairs has argued that \"across-the-board benefit increases are a wasteful use of taxpayers' money\" at a time when the government is borrowing \"a hair-raising amount of money\".\n\nUniversal credit is a single payment replacing old benefits such as housing benefit and child tax credits.\n\nYou can claim universal credit if you are on a low income or are out of work.\n\nThe standard allowance varies from around £340 to just under £600 a month, depending on your age or whether you are single.\n\nYou may be eligible to receive more money on top of the standard allowance if, for example, you have children or a health condition.\n\nSpeaking on behalf of the Northern Research Group, Conservative MP John Stevenson said the £1,000 increase had been \"a real life-saver for people throughout this pandemic\".\n\n\"To end it now would be devastating for the 6 million individuals and families who are already struggling to stay afloat,\" he added.\n\nWhile the vote is not binding, and will not lead to a change in policy, it will increase pressure on the government to keep the increase or come up with an alternative.\n\nLabour said the Conservatives' decision to abstain created \"unnecessary uncertainty\" but minister Nadhim Zahawi described the vote as \"a political stunt\".\n\nThe government says it has strengthened the welfare system with an extra £7bn of funding during the pandemic while families struggling with food and household bills can get help through the £170m Winter Grant Scheme.\n\nMinisters also point to extra support for housing costs, through an increase in local housing allowance for those on housing benefits and hardship payments worth £670m next year for those unable to pay their council tax bills.", "A further 1,295 deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test have been reported in the UK, the third-highest daily total since the pandemic began.\n\nIt brings the total number of deaths by this measure to 88,590.\n\nThere have also been a further 41,346 lab-confirmed cases, and 4,262 more people have been admitted to hospital.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, medical director for Public Health England, said the \"continuous rise in cases and deaths should be a bitter warning for us all\".\n\n\"We must not forget the basics,\" she added. \"The lives of our friends and family depend on it.\n\n\"Keep your distance from others, wash your hands and wear a mask.\"\n\nThe latest figures come ahead of Monday's change in travel rules for the UK, with all travel corridors closing, meaning arrivals from every country will have to quarantine.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson announced the changes at Downing Street on Friday, saying they would \"protect against the risk of as yet unidentified new strains\" of Covid.\n\nWhile daily figures can fluctuate due to delays in reporting, the seven-day average of Covid deaths in the UK has now risen slightly to 1,103.\n\nFor cases, however, there has been a drop in the seven-day average, with the figure now at 48,565.\n\nThere are currently 37,475 people in hospital with the virus, government figures show, while a further 324,233 people have received their first vaccine dose.\n\nThe government has promised all the over-70s, the extremely clinically vulnerable and front-line health and care workers - about 15 million people - will be offered a jab by mid February.\n\nCurrently, just over 3.5 million doses have been administered.\n\nThe government has also announced £120m in funds for the social care sector to be used by local authorities to increase staffing levels.\n\nStaff absence rates have risen in care homes and among home care staff, due to them testing positive or having to self-isolate.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said the money would bolster staffing numbers in a \"controlled and safe way, whilst ensuring people continue to receive the highest quality of care\".\n\nA further £149m funding was announced in December to support rapid testing of care home staff.\n\nSpeaking alongside the PM on Friday, England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, said the number of patients being admitted to hospital with coronavirus was set to peak within the next 10 days, while the peak for deaths was also yet to come.\n\nHe added, however, that he hoped the peak in infections had already happened in the South East, East and London, where there was a surge in the new, more transmissible variant.\n\n\"The peak of deaths I fear is in the future, the peak of hospitalisations in some parts of the country may be around about now and beginning to come off the very, very top,\" he said.\n\n\"Because people are sticking so well to the guidelines we do think the peaks are coming over the next week to 10 days for most places in terms of new people into hospital.\"\n\nHowever, chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance stressed it was a \"suppressed peak\" that would \"boil over for sure\" if controls were eased.\n\nHe said: \"This is not the natural peak that's going to come down on its own, it's coming down because of the measures that are in place.\n\n\"Take the lid off now and it's going to boil over for sure and we're going to end up with a big problem.\"\n\nMeanwhile, on Saturday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer suggested he would back further coronavirus measures, as \"the tougher the restrictions now the quicker we get the virus back under control\".\n\nSir Keir said he was \"still worried\" by the number of infections, despite signs they are falling - and that the \"sense that we are through the worst\" of the third wave was wrong.\n\n\"Nobody likes restrictions but the tougher the restrictions now the quicker we get the virus back under control, the quicker we reduce the number of hospital admissions and the quicker we get that number of deaths, tragically, down,\" he added.", "The Archbishop of Glasgow, the Most Reverend Philip Tartaglia, has died suddenly at his home in the city.\n\nArchbishop Tartaglia had tested positive for Covid-19 shortly after Christmas and was self-isolating.\n\nThe Catholic Church said the cause of his death was not yet clear.\n\nHe was ordained a priest in 1975 and had served as leader of Scotland's largest Catholic community since 2012.\n\nA statement from the Archdiocese of Glasgow said: \"It is with the greatest sorrow that we announce the death of our Archbishop.\n\n\"The Pope's Ambassador to Great Britain, Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, has been informed.\n\n\"It will be for Pope Francis to appoint a new Archbishop to succeed Archbishop Tartaglia, but until then the Archdiocese will be overseen by an administrator.\"\n\nScotland's Catholic bishops described Archbishop Tartaglia as a \"gentle, caring and warm-hearted pastor\".\n\nThey said in a statement: \"His loss to his family, his clergy and the people of the Archdiocese of Glasgow will be immeasurable but for the entire Church in Scotland this is a day of immense loss and sadness.\n\n\"He was a gentle, caring and warm-hearted pastor who combined compassion with a piercing intellect.\n\n\"His contribution to the work of the Bishops' Conference of Scotland over the past 16 years was significant and we will miss his wisdom, wit and robust Catholic spirit very much.\"\n\nArchbishop Tartaglia had been self-isolating at home after contracting coronavirus\n\nThe statement concluded: \"On behalf of the Bishops of Scotland, we commend his soul into the hands of God and pray that he may enjoy eternal rest.\"\n\nArchbishop Tartaglia was a lifelong Celtic fan and the club tweeted their tribute to him: \"We are saddened to hear of the death of Archbishop Philip Tartaglia who was a huge supporter of the club and regularly attended matches at Celtic Park.\n\n\"Everyone at Celtic offers their sincere condolences to Philip's family and Scotland's Catholic community at this sad time.\"\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the archbishop was \"a fine man who was much loved within the Catholic community and beyond\".\n\nMs Sturgeon tweeted: \"I always valued my interactions with him and he will be greatly missed. My thoughts are with his loved ones and wider community. May he rest in peace.\"\n\nThe leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Douglas Ross, tweeted: \"Tragic news about the sudden passing of Archbishop Philip Tartaglia. My condolences to his friends and family.\n\n\"His death will be keenly felt within the Catholic Church and across the wider community.\"\n\nThe leader of Glasgow City Council described the archbishop as \"a true Glaswegian\" who \"knew its people and the challenges faced by ordinary citizens, regardless of their faith or beliefs\".\n\nCouncillor Susan Aitken added: \"He was also unafraid to use his position to challenge deprivation, austerity and the ill-effects of welfare reform when he believed it was his duty to call them out.\"\n\nArchbishop Tartaglia was born in Glasgow on 11 January 1951 - the eldest son of Guido and Annita Tartaglia.\n\nAfter attending St Thomas' Primary in Riddrie, he began his secondary education at St Mungo's Academy before moving to the national junior seminary at St Vincent's College, Langbank.\n\nHe later attended St Mary's College, at Blairs, Aberdeen, before completing his ecclesiastical studies at the Pontifical Scots College, and the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.\n\nOn returning to Scotland, he was an assistant and then parish priest at Our Lady of Lourdes, Cardonald, St Patrick's, Dumbarton, and St Mary's, Duntocher.\n\nArchbishop Tartaglia was ordained by then Archbishop Thomas Winning in the Church of Our Lady of Good Counsel, Dennistoun, on 30 June 1975.\n\nHe was a leading opponent of proposals to legalise same-sex marriage in Scotland and also criticised ministers over anti-bigotry legislation.\n\nThe Archdiocese of Glasgow is the largest of Scotland's eight dioceses with an estimated Catholic population of about 200,000. It comprises 95 parishes and is served by about 200 priests.\n\nArchbishop Tartaglia was the eighth person to hold the office since the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland in 1878.\n\nHe followed Archbishop Mario Conti and Archbishop Thomas Winning, who later became Cardinal Winning.", "The player told police he had travelled from his home in Bedworth to hunt the characters\n\nA man has been fined for breaking lockdown rules after travelling 14 miles to play Pokemon Go.\n\nHe admitted to Warwickshire Police he had driven from his home in Bedworth to look for the characters in Kenilworth.\n\nHe was fined £200 for \"contravening the requirement to not leave or be outside the place they live without a reasonable excuse\".\n\n\"Everyone has a part to play in ensuring they slow the spread of the virus,\" a police spokeswoman said.\n\n\"We would like to remind people they must not leave or be outside their home unless they have a reasonable excuse.\"\n\nPokemon Go is a Japanese augmented reality game for smartphones. First launched in 2016, it allows players to hunt for characters that \"appear\" in real-life places.\n\nIt has been downloaded around the world more than one billion times.", "Hashem Abedi (left) and Ahmed Hassan are due to appear at Bromley Magistrates' Court\n\nThe Manchester Arena and Parsons Green bombers have been charged with assaulting a prison officer together, the BBC has learned.\n\nHashem Abedi, 23, and Ahmed Hassan, 21, are accused of assaulting an officer in HMP Belmarsh, south London, in May last year.\n\nAnother man who is awaiting sentencing for terror offences is also charged with assaulting the same person.\n\nThe three men are due to appear at Bromley Magistrates' Court on 7 April.\n\nAbedi, who was jailed in August for murdering the 22 victims of the May 2017 Manchester Arena attack, is also charged with assaulting a second prison officer during the same incident on 11 May.\n\nHassan, from London, whose Parsons Green tube bomb injured 51 people in September 2017, was jailed for attempted murder the following year.\n\nMuhammed Saeed, 22, from Manchester, is the third person charged. Last year, he admitted possessing terrorist documents.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Up to 400,000 people could be given the Covid-19 vaccine every week by the end of February, Scottish Health Secretary Jeane Freeman has told MSPs.\n\nHealth teams are ramping up the rollout of jabs, with 1,100 vaccination centres now open and using two vaccines.\n\nMinisters aim to vaccinate care home residents, NHS staff and over-80s by the first week of February.\n\nThey then hope to have completed the over-70 group by mid-February and over-65 and vulnerable groups by March.\n\nThis would see 1.4m people given the jab, and Ms Freeman said the government's \"priority is to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible\".\n\nHowever, the BMA Scottish GP Committee has warned the vaccine supply is \"stuttering\" and blamed \"bureaucratic hold-ups\" for delaying distribution.\n\nIn a statement at Holyrood, the health secretary said Scotland faces \"a more perilous situation than at any point in this pandemic\", with the new variant of coronavirus \"increasing in its dominance\" of infections north of the border.\n\nHowever Ms Freeman said there was hope in the form of the vaccination programme, which she said was \"scaling up rapidly\".\n\nA first dose of vaccine has now been given to just over 80% of care home residents and 55% of staff, along with 52% of frontline NHS staff.\n\nAnd in the eight days since 4 January, just over 2% of those aged 80 or over in the community have been given a first dose.\n\nMs Freeman said that age was \"the greatest risk factor for serious illness and death from Covid, and represents well over 90% of preventable mortality\".\n\nThe government is prioritising giving a first dose to as many people as possible, which Ms Freeman said provides \"very high protection\", with a second dose of the same vaccine then administered within 12 weeks.\n\nMs Freeman said that by the end of February, an average of 400,000 people should be getting a jab per week.\n\nJeane Freeman said the vaccine programme was \"scaling up rapidly\"\n\nThe government is also working to set up large vaccination centres in the community, which could handle up to 20,000 vaccinations a week in a single location.\n\nSites include the Event Complex conference centre in Aberdeen, Ravenscraig Regional Sports Facility in Motherwell, Queen Margaret University in Musselburgh and the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, and Ms Freeman said work was ongoing to secure more centres in the Glasgow area in particular.\n\nA total of 4.5m adults in Scotland are in line to be vaccinated.\n\nMs Freeman said she was aware that people would \"want to know when it will be their turn\", saying a national advertising campaign would be established to \"inform the public\".\n\nScottish Conservative health spokesman Donald Cameron said it was \"clear not enough people are being vaccinated each day and timetables are slipping\".\n\nHe also asked Ms Freeman whether there were delays to the creation of a national booking system, after speculation that it could hold up the start of mass vaccinations.\n\nThe health secretary said she did not believe it was the case that timetables were slipping, and said there were no delays to the national booking system - adding that it would be \"ready from the beginning of February to do its job\".\n\nMeanwhile Scottish Labour's Monica Lennon asked how quickly the country could move to a 24 hours a day rollout of vaccines.\n\nMs Freeman said this was \"entirely possible\" once the mass vaccination centres are open, saying she \"would anticipate that would be by the end of February or early March\".\n\nShe said: \"The will is there to do that, if that is what it takes, because the objective is to get as many people vaccinated as possible.\"\n\nThe BMA Scottish GP Committee has said practices \"don't know when their next supply is coming in\".\n\nIts chairman, Dr Andrew Buist, told BBC Scotland's Drivetime programme the Scottish government \"must do everything possible to ensure vaccine supply is as good as it can be\".\n\nHe said: \"I've spoken with the chief medical officer about this and emphasised we should remove any bureaucratic hold-up to the distribution of this vaccine.\n\n\"People are obviously very anxious to get it as soon as possible.\n\n\"We know what the priority groups are, we have the practices ready and running to give it to their patients. We just need to get the vaccine to them.\"\n• None All over-80s to be vaccinated by February", "More than six million glasses of pink prosecco were enjoyed by Lidl customers over the festive period as strict Covid rules prompted people to indulge.\n\nThe discount supermarket reported record total sales for the four weeks to 27 December with revenue up 18%.\n\nTakeaway firm Just Eat and online fashion retailer Asos have also reported stellar sales for the period.\n\nAll three benefited as restaurants and non-essential shops faced strict curbs or were forced to close.\n\nDemand was so strong, Lidl said it had shifted 7,000 glasses of mulled wine and almost 17,000 deluxe mince pies every hour in the run up to Christmas.\n\nIt also sold more than 2.7 million servings of panettone, the festive Italian cake.\n\nLidl continued to press ahead with its store expansion programme in the period, opening four new stores in December at a time when many businesses are closing down.\n\nBoss Christian Härtnagel said: \"Despite this Christmas being a difficult time for many across the country, we are pleased to have been able to help our customers enjoy themselves.\n\n\"As we look ahead to this year, we remain committed to our expansion and investment plans,\" he added.\n\nJust Eat said delivery orders in the UK surged 58% in the last three months of 2020 compared with the same period last year.\n\nThe takeaway firm, which operates around the world, said this had been its third consecutive quarter of growth, reflecting the huge demand for takeaway food as restaurants have faced curbs and closures.\n\nBoss Jitse Groen said the firm's progress in the UK was \"particularly exciting\" with demand up nearly five-fold in the fourth quarter of 2020 compared with the same period in 2019.\n\nIts UK sales force has also doubled compared with last year.\n\nIt was a similar story for Asos, whose sales for the four months to 31 December rose 36% to £554.1m, something it credited in part to restrictions on non-essential shops.\n\nThe fashion retailer, which also operates across Europe and the US, said its active customer base was now 24.5 million, up 1.1 million on the same period last year.\n\nRichard Lim, head of analysts Retail Economics, said: \"Lockdowns, fewer opportunities to mix socially and cancelled Christmas parties have decimated the demand for new outfits this year.\n\n\"But what consumers did spend was focused towards casual-wear and channelled online where the retailer was well position to leverage this opportunity.\"", "Boris Johnson has said there is still a very substantial risk of intensive care units in hospitals being overwhelmed by the spread of the coronavirus.\n\nIt comes on a day when the UK has recorded the highest number of deaths in a single day in Europe.\n\nFergal Keane last visited the Imperial Healthcare Trust’s St Mary’s and Charing Cross hospital in London last April.\n\nHe's been back to see how they're coping.", "Plans have been announced to overhaul the mental health system - with the aim of making it less discriminatory towards black people.\n\nMinisters say changes to how people are sectioned in England and Wales will see them treated \"as individuals, with rights, preferences, and expertise\".\n\nBlack people are over four times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act, relative to population.\n\nThe mental health charity Mind said the changes \"cannot come soon enough.\"\n\nPeople are detained under the mental health act - or sectioned - for their own safety, or the safety of others.\n\nHow long they are detained for varies - but once detained, they are immediately considered to be \"sectioned\".\n\nUse of the Mental Health Act has increased markedly - from 2005/6 to 2015/16, the number of people detained in hospital increased by 40%.\n\nNHS data for England shows there were at least 50,893 new detentions under the Mental Health Act in 2019/20 - but the overall total will be higher as not all providers submitted data.\n\nOf those detentions, 5,336 people were black or black British.\n\nThe data also shows that in 2019/20 there were 321 detentions per 100,000 population for people who were black or black British - while there were 73 detentions per 100,000 for white people.\n\nWith the act disproportionately used against black people, the reforms will see a Patient and Carers Race Equality Framework introduced across all NHS mental health trusts - which the government describes as a practical tool to improve the outcome for BAME communities.\n\nWhat ministers call \"culturally appropriate advocates\" will also be developed, so patients from all ethnic backgrounds can be supported.\n\n\"We need to bring mental health laws into the 21st Century,\" said Health Secretary Matt Hancock.\n\n\"I want to ensure our health service works for all, yet the Mental Health Act is now 40 years old.\n\n\"This is a significant moment in how we support those with serious mental health issues, which will give people more autonomy over their care and will tackle disparities for all who access services - in particular for people from minority ethnic backgrounds.\"\n\nThe reforms will also ensure that autism or a learning disability cannot be a reason for detaining someone under the act.\n\nIn future, a clinician will have to identify another psychiatric condition to order their detention.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What is it like to be sectioned?\n\nThe current Mental Health Act dates from 1983 and the aim of these reforms, which are widely supported, is to give people greater say over their care and to rebalance the system between the state and the individual.\n\nAmong the recommendations are plans to introduce statutory advance choice documents which will allow people to express their preferred treatment before they reach a crisis and need hospitalisation.\n\n\"This is just the beginning of what is now a long overdue process,\" said Sophie Corlett, director of external relations at the mental health charity Mind.\n\n\"At the moment, thousands of people are still subjected to poor, sometimes appalling, treatment, and many will live with the consequences far into the future.\n\n\"Our understanding of mental health has moved on significantly in recent decades but our laws are rooted in the 19th Century.\"\n\nThe recommendations, set out in a government White Paper, build on the proposals from an independent review of the act, which was ordered by then prime minister Theresa May in October 2017 and which published its conclusions in December 2018.\n\nMinisters intend to publish a Mental Health Bill in 2022, following a consultation on their plans.", "Amnesty says about 7,500 women and girls gave birth in the Northern Ireland homes,\n\nThere have been calls for an inquiry into mother and baby homes in Northern Ireland.\n\nIt comes as the Irish government is to apologise after an investigation found an \"appalling level of infant mortality\" in the Republic of Ireland's homes.\n\nAbout 9,000 children died in the 18 institutions under investigation.\n\nMothers and babies who were in similar homes in Northern Ireland want a full inquiry to be held in NI too.\n\nStormont commissioned research into whether or not there should an inquiry held into the homes which operated in Northern Ireland, is due to be published by the end of January.\n\nPatrick Corrigan from Amnesty International said the issue of forced adoptions also needs close scrutiny.\n\n\"We have had cases of mothers telling us that ultimately, many decades later, when they tried to track down their long-lost children they found adoption certificates where they said their signature had actually been forged,\" he said.\n\n\"So I think that there is criminality to investigate here and that it behoves the Northern Ireland Executive to set up the inquiry that has long been sought here and long been denied.\"\n\nIn 2017 research into infant mortality rates at former mother and baby homes in Northern Ireland had prompted initial calls for a public inquiry.\n\nBBC News NI previously spoke to Eunan Duffy who was 47 years old when he found out he was adopted from Marianvale mother and baby home in Newry, County Down.\n\nIt was one of a network of institutions in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland which offered women the voluntary option, for those who were unmarried, to give birth in private and give their babies up for adoption\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Marian Vale was one of a network of mother and baby institutions in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland\n\nAmnesty says there were more than a dozen mother-and-baby institutions in Northern Ireland.\n\nIt said about 7,500 women and girls gave birth in the Northern Ireland homes, operated by both Catholic and Protestant churches and religious organisations.\n\nIn Northern Ireland, research into mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries was commissioned three years ago and was initially expected to take 12 months.\n\nIt was completed in February last year, but was then sent to those facing criticism to give them an opportunity to reply.\n\nA Department of Health spokesperson said: \"A paper will be brought to the executive shortly for its consideration. Subject to executive approval, it is intended to publish the research report before the end of January 2021.\"\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland, the commission that investigated the homes found that the number of children who died was about 15% of all those who were born in the institutions.\n\nTaoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Mícheál Martin said the report, which can be read in full here, described a \"dark, difficult and shameful chapter\" of Irish history.\n\nSolicitor Claire McKeegan, who represents the Birth Mothers for Justice group, welcomed the apology in the Republic of Ireland, but said mothers and children in NI had not received one.\n\n\"The crimes perpetrated on them have yet to be investigated,\" she said.\n\n\"Those perpetrators who forced them into arbitrary detention, hard labour and colluded in the forced adoption of their babies, remain unchallenged in this jurisdiction.\"\n\nMary O'Neill became pregnant when she was 18 and was sent to Marianvale in Newry in the late 1970s.\n\nThere she gave birth to a baby girl who was taken away from her almost immediately after the birth.\n\nShe wanted to keep the baby, but was not allowed and was told the baby would be put up for adoption.\n\nThe mother and baby scandal became an international news story when 'significant human remains' were found on the grounds of a former home in County Galway\n\nMs O'Neill told Good Morning Ulster she eventually tracked down her daughter after 40 years.\n\n\"It was a long search, everywhere you went you were up against a brick wall,\" she said.\n\n\"There was no help, the social workers didn't want to tell you anything.\"\n\nShe finally found out her daughter was living in America but was coming home for her 40th birthday.\n\nShe said when she met her it was like meeting a stranger.\n\n\"But thank God we have met and we have a good relationship. She's still keeping in touch,\" Ms O'Neill said.\n\n\"It means the world to me, because you always wondered where was she? Was she happy? Did she know about you?\n\n\"It was always in the back of your mind. It never went away, the tears and the heartache.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMs O'Neill said she was happy the victims in the Republic of Ireland were getting an apology, but wishes the homes in Northern Ireland could have been included.\n\nMechelle Dillon's mother was 21 and pregnant when she was sent to Marianvale in Newry in 1969.\n\nShe was placed in foster care a few months after her birth.\n\nHer mother returned to her home village and then moved to England. But she came back for Mechelle when she was around eight or nine-months-old.\n\nShe said she believed she was not adopted because she was born with a cyst on her mouth.\n\n\"I would have maybe been classed as a reject, if you want to put it that way,\" she said.\n\n\"It's the same as if you go to look for a little puppy and if the puppy doesn't feel right and you think 'Oh God, I'll have a lot of vet bills here, I don't want that puppy' - I would have probably been classed the same because I would have had that defect.\"\n\nSDLP leader Colum Eastwood said \"the executive should move quickly to publish the research report and then call a full public inquiry\".", "The numbers of care home residents and staff testing positive for Covid-19 have hit their highest levels.\n\nThere were 1,507 positive tests in care homes in Wales in the most recent week, a 78% rise on the week before.\n\nAcross Wales, 37,026 residents and staff were tested by either the NHS or the Lighthouse laboratories the week beginning 4 January, according to Public Health Wales.\n\nBroken down, 6,466 care home residents were tested in the most recent week and 582 (9%) were positive in results from NHS laboratories.\n\nAlso, 248 care home workers tested positive, with about 96% of tests negative.\n\nBut there were another 677 positive test results from Lighthouse labs, which do not distinguish between residents and care home staff.\n\nAll of these categories saw the highest numbers yet recorded.\n\nResidents and staff are supposed to be tested weekly at care homes in Wales.\n\nCare Home Inspectorate Wales also now publish separate figures around testing , which showed 137 care homes in Wales (13%) had notified one or more positive cases in staff or residents in the most recent week available and 31.8% within the last month.\n\nSwansea had 17 care homes which had notified at least one case in the week ending 1 January; Cardiff had 15 homes with at least one case and Bridgend was next with 13 care homes.", "Decima Minhinnick, pictured at her 90th birthday party, lives in a care home and has vascular dementia\n\nA couple who were fined £60 for driving 20 minutes to see a relative in a care home have had their fine cancelled by police.\n\nCarol and David Richards from Bridgend travelled seven miles to Porthcawl to visit her mother Decima Minhinnick, 94.\n\nOn Tuesday, police defended the fine, claiming the couple had broken lockdown rules.\n\nOn Wednesday, South Wales Police said it had \"since been reviewed and the notice has been rescinded\".\n\n\"The individual concerned has been notified\".\n\nIn a statement, it added: \"Wales remains at alert level four and South Wales Police will continue to patrol our communities to ensure the legislation, which has been enacted to slow the spread of coronavirus, is complied with\".\n\nMrs Richards has said she was \"mortified\" they were stopped by police while returning on Sunday from what she said was a compassionate visit.\n\nShe said on Tuesday she did not believe they breached lockdown rules.\n\nMrs Richards said the couple had arranged the visit to Picton Court Care Home in advance with the permission of staff, and spoke to her mother, who has vascular dementia, through the window of her ground-floor room from the car park.\n\nDavid and Carol Richards complained about the £60 fine\n\nShe told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that when she was issued with the fine it was like \"a sort of dystopian novel\", adding that the officer involved was \"pedantic and inflexible\".\n\n\"I was angry - she just would not listen to any protestations, and so she said 'you're going to be issued with a £60 fixed penalty fine'.\n\n\"It's not about the 60 quid, it's about the principle.\"\n\nThe home is just over seven miles from where the couple live", "Tony Parsons was last seen on 29 September 2017\n\nPolice have discovered human remains during a search for a man who went missing more than three years ago during a charity cycle ride.\n\nTony Parsons, from Tillicoultry, was last seen on 29 September 2017 outside the Bridge of Orchy Hotel.\n\nDetectives said the discovery was made during a detailed search of a remote site close to a farm near the A82 at Bridge of Orchy.\n\nPolice said that Mr Parsons' family have been made aware of the discovery.\n\nEfforts to recover the remains will continue over the coming days before a post mortem is held to establish their identity.\n\nTwo men, both aged 29, were arrested and then released pending further inquiries in December in connection with the disappearance of Mr Parsons.\n\nPolice have been carrying out searches in the area in recent days\n\nDet Ch Insp Alan Somerville said: \"This is clearly a significant development and extensive work is ongoing to recover the remains and confirm their identity.\n\n\"We have informed Mr Parsons' family, who are being supported by specialist officers.\n\n\"The thoughts of everyone involved in the investigation are with them at this difficult time.\"\n\nMr Parsons cycled through Glencoe village and was last seen at the Bridge of Orchy Hotel\n\nThe former navy officer, who was 63 when he went missing, was last seen outside the hotel at about 23:30. He then continued south along the A82 in the direction of Tyndrum but there were no more sightings of him after that.\n\nExtensive searches were carried out in the area, involving local mountain rescue teams, volunteers, Police Scotland dogs and the force's air support unit.\n\nMr Parsons had caught the train to Fort William on the day he was last seen with the intention of cycling the 104-mile (167km) journey home to Tillicoultry.", "Covid vaccinations will be offered 24 hours a day, seven days a week as soon as supply allows, Boris Johnson says.\n\nThe prime minister said the plan was to extend opening hours of vaccination centres - at the moment, most sites run from 08:00 to 22:00.\n\nThe 24-7 service will be piloted in a small number of places first - with NHS staff likely to be offered the option of overnight vaccinations first.\n\nBut Mr Johnson said supply was the limiting factor at the moment.\n\nThe NHS had just over a million doses available last week and used up most of them.\n\nThis week, there are thought to be more but not yet enough to vaccinate two million people - the weekly target the government is aiming to reach in the coming weeks.\n\nAt Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Johnson said there would be 24-7 vaccination \"as soon as possible\".\n\nThe UK has access to two vaccines at the moment - the Pfizer-BioNTech jab and another produced in partnership by Oxford University and AstraZeneca.\n\nA third vaccine made by the US company Moderna has been approved but is not yet available to the UK.\n\nMr Johnson praised the work of the more than 200 hospitals and 1,000 GP-led NHS vaccination sites running at the moment.\n\n\"They are going exceptionally fast,\" he added.\n\nBy the end of Monday, 2.4 million people had received their first vaccine dose.\n\nThe government has promised all the over-70s, the extremely clinically vulnerable and front-line health and care workers - about 15 million people - will be offered a jab by mid February.\n\nThere is actually enough vaccine in the country to vaccinate all the highest at-risk groups.\n\nThe problem is that not all of it has been packaged into vials or passed through the final safety checks.\n\nThere should soon be two million doses available each week for the NHS to use.\n\nBut the key question once that is achieved is how quickly and by how much supply can increase from there.\n\nTo make full use of the network of vaccination centres - the ambition is to have 2,700 up and running - many millions of doses will be needed each week.\n\nThere is huge global demand for these vaccines.\n\nAnd while the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab is made in the UK, the Pfizer-BioNTech one is made abroad as is the Moderna vaccine.\n\nSupplies of the latter are not expected until the spring.\n\nThis is an issue the government is likely to be grappling with for some time.\n\nBut despite the concerns, it should also be recognised the UK has been quick out of the blocks.\n\nOnly two countries have vaccinated a larger proportion of the population than the UK.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was vital the government moved quickly.\n\nSpeaking about the planned 24-7 vaccination, he said: \"I obviously welcome that and urge the prime minister and the government to get on with this.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Nadhim Zahawi, the minister in charge of the vaccination programme, was also asked about supply, at an appearance before the Science and Technology Committee.\n\nHe said he had a \"clear line of sight\" for the expected numbers that would be available to the NHS for the next few months but refused to give any more detail.\n\n\"The more we show off about how many vaccine batches we're receiving, the more difficult life becomes for the manufacturers,\" he said.\n\nAstraZeneca vice president Sir Mene Pangalos said one of the issues the firm was facing was that infections among staff had begun to hinder production.\n\n\"I feel that it is critical that those who are working on vaccines are immunised because if you have an outbreak at one of the centres, which we've had actually or in one of the groups in Oxford that's working on new variants, or those working on the regulatory files everything stops.\"", "Changes to Scotland's lockdown restrictions have been announced. The tightening of the rules follows concerns the \"stay at home\" message is not having the same impact it did during last year's lockdown. The changes will come into effect on Saturday.\n\nThe availability and operation of click and collect services will be limited to retailers selling essential items such as clothes, footwear, baby equipment, homeware and books. Also, outlets that sell electrical goods; do key cutting; undertake shoe repairs, plus garden centres and plant nurseries can continue the collect service.\n\nFor qualifying businesses, staggered appointments will need to be offered to avoid any potential for queuing, and access inside premises for collection will not be permitted.\n\nCustomers in Scotland will no longer be allowed to go inside to collect takeaway food or coffee. Businesses will have to operate from a serving hatch or doorway.\n\nThe aim is to reduce the risk of customers coming into contact indoors with each other, or with staff.\n\nIt will be against the law in all level four areas of Scotland to drink alcohol outdoors in public.\n\nThis will mean that buying a takeaway pint and consuming on the street will not be permitted.\n\nIt is intended to underline the message that people should only be leaving home for essential purposes.\n\nThe Scottish government is strengthening the obligation on employers to allow their staff to work from home whenever possible.\n\nThe law already says that people should only be leaving home to go to work if it is work that cannot be done from home. This is a legal obligation that falls on individuals.\n\nHowever, statutory guidance is being introduced to make clear that employers should support employees to work from home wherever possible.\n\nThe Scottish government is strengthening provisions in relation to work inside people's houses.\n\nCurrent guidance says that in level four areas work is only permitted within a private dwelling if it is essential for the upkeep, maintenance and functioning of the household. This guidance is now being put into law.\n\nThe final change is an amendment to the regulations requiring people to stay at home.\n\nThis is intended to close an apparent loophole rather than change the spirit of the law. It will also bring the wording of the stay at home regulations in Scotland into line with the other UK nations.\n\nCurrently the law states that people can only leave home for an essential purpose.\n\nThe amendment will make it clear that people \"must not leave or remain outside\" the home unless it is for an essential purpose.\n\nThe Scottish government's full lockdown guidance is available here.", "The Lauberhorn course is the longest downhill run in the world (file image)\n\nA British tourist has been blamed for a spike in coronavirus cases that led officials to cancel Switzerland's famous Lauberhorn ski race.\n\nThe resort of Wengen, where the race is held, had recorded only 10 cases of the virus by mid-December.\n\nBut the number soon began to rise and many cases have since been linked to the new highly infectious variant of Covid-19 first identified in the UK.\n\nAt least 27 cases are connected to one British tourist, contact tracers say.\n\nThe tourist stayed in a hotel in Wengen over the holiday period.\n\nThe Lauberhorn course is the longest downhill run in the world, and racers can reach speeds of 160km/h (100 mph).\n\nOfficials desperately tried to save the race, shutting schools and offering to close off the resort to everyone but the competitors.\n\nSwiss health officials initially agreed with the plan, but a further jump in cases at the start of this week prompted them to pull the emergency brake and cancel the event.\n\nThe Lauberhorn track is 4,480m (14,700ft) long - and the race will now have to wait until 2022\n\nWengen is devastated. The Lauberhorn is one of the top competitions on the World Cup ski circuit. It is dearly loved by the Swiss, who have watched with delight as some of their own homegrown talent, such as Beat Feuz and Carlo Janka, have triumphed there.\n\nMoreover, the long love affair between Switzerland and British winter tourists has frosted over to some extent.\n\nIt was only last month that the vanishing Brits of Verbier, who reportedly fled Switzerland rather than accept the government mandated quarantine, triggered a flurry of negative headlines.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Italy's Foppolo ski resort was closed until 6 January and missed the all-important Christmas ski season\n\nNow the high point of Switzerland's skiing calendar has been abruptly cancelled, and some Swiss blame the British.\n\nOthers say Switzerland only has itself to blame.\n\nWhile neighbours France and Italy closed their resorts over the festive period, the Swiss government opted for a precarious balancing act. It kept its slopes open, but closed all bars and restaurants and limited ski lifts to two-thirds capacity.\n\nMost Swiss resorts are quiet, with just a few locals enjoying the runs. But still some tourists arrived and, as Wengen's experience shows, just one infected guest is enough to cause major damage.\n\nInstead of hosting a major ski race, Wengen officials are now racing to control the virus. Mass testing has already begun in the resort.\n\nSwitzerland's government has extended the closure of bars, restaurants, museums, and theatres until the end of February in a bid to control the new variant. It has also ordered non-essential shops to close and made working from home obligatory.\n\nAs for the Lauberhorn, Switzerland's oldest and fiercest skiing rival, Austria, will now host the postponed event. Nothing could have been calculated to upset the Swiss more.\n\nThe event was first moved to the Austrian ski resort of Kitzbühel, but an outbreak of coronavirus there has prompted another move, this time to Flachau, 100km to the east.\n\nThe cluster of cases in Jochberg near Kitzbühel broke out among a group of mainly British trainee ski instructors.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nI'm standing in what should be an operating theatre - but instead it's been converted into an intensive care unit for Covid-19 patients on ventilators.\n\nThis is the first time I have seen it full of patients like this. Normally this theatre would be busy with major cancer surgery, but that's been transferred to another building.\n\nA children's recovery area, still decorated with colourful stickers of cartoons, is once again filled with desperately sick adults. Every day, more wards are being transformed into ICU - ready for the next influx of patients.\n\nWe have been given access to University College Hospital, in central London. This is the same intensive care unit that I first visited in April, during the first peak.\n\nIt is one of the busiest hospitals in the capital and intensive care here is expanding across a hospital that is under pressure like never before, from a relentless rise in Covid admissions.\n\nI am struck by the toll the pandemic is taking on staff. It's immense - both physically and mentally. They are shell-shocked. \"My emotions are all over the place. Scared, sad, petrified, worried,\" one ICU nurse tells me.\n\nI asked one of the consultants who I've met several times in the last year, Dr Jim Down, how long they can keep going like this - and the answer was stark. \"At this rate, about a week. After that we really need to see it slow down or we're going to see the care we can deliver suffering.\"\n\nThey have got three times as many critically ill patients in the hospital as normal. The number of Covid admissions to London hospitals has doubled in just two weeks - they're more stretched now than at the peak last April. Senior staff are worried.\n\nDr Alice Carter compares it to an elastic band that is close to snapping. \"It gets to a point where you stretch so far it never returns back to its baseline. I think that's probably where we are now. It's not going to take much more for that elastic band to break, and that's the real fear for us at the moment.\"\n\nDr Alice Carter: 'It's not going to take much more for that elastic band to break'\n\nThat could have very serious consequences, she adds. \"If we get to that point, we can't offer anyone ICU, not just Covid patients, but anyone who has a traffic accident or a heart attack or a stroke - whatever it is, to take them in.\"\n\nFor 38-year-old Rachel Arfin, one of the three pregnant women in intensive care with Covid-19, treatment is more complicated. Her baby is due in five weeks and the staff have to monitor them both.\n\n\"They can't do anything that will harm the baby,\" she says. \"All the time [they are] checking, monitoring the baby.\" She is reassured by the \"beautiful sound\" of her baby's heartbeat.\n\n\"They are looking after two people in one. They're saving lives,\" says Rachel. But her children - she has seven - keep asking when she's coming home.\n\nRachel Arfin's baby is due in five weeks - both are doing well\n\nI've reported from here several times during the pandemic and am always struck by the professionalism and dedication of staff. It's always quiet and calm, but that belies what's actually happening. This is a system under strain like never before.\n\nThe warning signs are clear, the NHS is on the brink. Unless infection rates fall, soon it will have a serious impact. The pressure on staff is unrelenting. I saw two nurses in tears.\n\nCompared to when I visited in April, it's a lot busier. In some ways, it's more structured - they now know what they're dealing with. They've got new treatments, such as the drug dexamethasone, which they didn't have last time. And many of the staff have now had the first dose of the vaccine.\n\nBut other aspects don't get any easier, such as the emotional burden of breaking bad news over a telephone or video call. It is very different to being able to hold someone's hand.\n\nStaff say they don't know which patients to help first\n\nICU staff have incredibly high standards. They're used to doing everything meticulously and perfectly. And they're doing all they can. But sometimes they go home and feel guilty that they can't do more. The impact on nurses - the bedrock of care in intensive care - is visible.\n\nThe highly specialised staff are usually one-to-one with patients. Deputy sister Ashleigh Shillingford is looking after three or four ventilated patients at a time, with one other junior member of staff. It's emotional and often devastating work.\n\n\"We are so stretched we have to prioritise and prioritising care is not the NHS that I grew up in - we shouldn't have to choose which patient gets what care first.\" She says she's never had to make decisions like these before.\n\n\"You just don't know who to help first. The patients are losing their lives at a dramatic speed, we're not just getting old people,\" she says, \"these are young people that we're getting.\"\n\nGerald Williams, 58, is awaiting chemotherapy for lung cancer and had been shielding, but he still caught coronavirus. \"All of a sudden, out of the blue, Covid came knocking on my door and it's frightening - you don't know how you're getting your next breath,\" he says.\n\nGerald Williams had been shielding but he still caught coronavirus\n\nHe wants to get home to his daughters, the youngest of whom is 13. And he's annoyed at those who don't take it seriously. \"People are moaning and groaning. Even in A&E. They need to get a life. Don't be idiots, forget about meeting your mate, stay home. No-one is invulnerable.\"\n\nFor now the Trust is coping better than many others in London and is still taking Covid patients from other hospitals. But the next few weeks could be the biggest challenge the NHS has ever faced - and it will be its doctors and nurses who will bear the brunt for all of us.\n\nAs the BBC's medical editor, Fergus Walsh has been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic and its immense impact on the UK.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Matt Hancock: 'Together we can make this the peak'\n\n\"We can make this the peak\" of the coronavirus pandemic \"if enough people follow the rules\", Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said.\n\nHe told BBC Breakfast it was \"those individual decisions\" that determine the virus's spread and it \"comes down to the behaviour of everyone\".\n\nPeople \"shouldn't take the mickey out of the rules,\" he said.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and only go out for limited reasons.\n\nThis includes for food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nLatest figures show there are now more than 35,000 people in hospital with Covid - an increase on the spring peak.\n\nIt comes as Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to be questioned by MPs on the vaccine rollout later.\n\nMeanwhile, Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is also due to announce whether there will be any changes to lockdown restrictions later. Ministers have been discussing the possibility of tightening the current restrictions.\n\nWhen asked on BBC Breakfast if this was the peak of this wave of the pandemic, Mr Hancock replied: \"I want it to be, but that comes down to the behaviour of everyone.\n\n\"Together we can make this the peak if enough people follow the rules which are incredibly clear.\"\n\nMr Hancock said England's lockdown measures were \"always under review\", but he would be \"very reluctant\" to remove the rule of meeting one other person outside for exercise as \"it is a lifeline\" for some people, including those who live alone. Mr Hancock has already ruled out scrapping support bubbles.\n\n\"What I'd rather is that everybody follow that rule and doesn't stretch it or flex it,\" he said.\n\nOn the news that patients at a hospital in London are to be discharged early and sent to a hotel to help free up beds for critically ill coronavirus patients, Mr Hancock said moving patients to hotels \"isn't something we are actively putting in place\".\n\nKing's College Hospital said it would help to create space for the \"high numbers\" of new admissions and would \"temporarily accommodate mainly homeless patients who are ready to safely leave hospital and will benefit from further support from community partners\".\n\nThere are very early signs that infections may have peaked - although as always we should be careful about reading too much into a few days' worth of data.\n\nThe past two days have seen newly diagnosed cases hover around the 46,000-mark. Up to the weekend, the average was close to 60,000.\n\nThe drop has largely been driven by falls in new cases in London, the South East and East of England.\n\nThe national picture does mask some regional differences. Cases are rising in the North West, which is causing particular concern.\n\nIt is too early for the vaccination programme to be having any significant impact so a combination of the national lockdown on top of the tier four restrictions that were imposed in some areas before Christmas look like they may be beginning to have an impact.\n\nThere is also some evidence the new variant may not be quite as fast-spreading as first feared - a Public Health England study suggested rather than being 70% more transmissible it may actually be somewhere between 30% to 50%.\n\nAnd, if it does represent the start of a continuous fall, it is important to remember it will still take some time to translate into fewer hospital cases - people being admitted at the moment are those who would have caught the virus a week or two ago.\n\nBut after six weeks of pretty sustained rises, it is at least an encouraging sign.\n\nAsked about images of elite footballers celebrating goals with hugs, Mr Hancock said: \"I think elite sport is important because these are tough times, and being able to watch the football on the telly is really important because there's loads of things that you can't do.\"\n\nHe said the Premier League has \"special arrangements to ensure that players are safe\" as well as a testing regime.\n\nThe health secretary told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine will accelerate over the coming weeks, saying they were \"on track\" to deliver it to 14 million people by mid-February.\n\nVaccines deployment minister Nadhim Zahawi later told the Commons' science and technology committee that he was \"confident\" of achieving this target.\n\nMore than 2.4 million people have now had a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, while 412,167 people have had a second dose. Mr Hancock said 40% of the 3.4m people over 80 in England had been vaccinated so far.\n\n\"We have the capacity to get that vaccine out. The challenge is that we need to get the vaccine in,\" Mr Hancock said.\n\n\"What I know is that the supply will increase over the next few weeks and that means the very rapid rate that we are going at at the moment will continue to accelerate over the next couple of weeks.\"\n\nOn Tuesday, NHS Providers chief executive Chris Hopson said it was \"pretty clear\" that because of the new strain the Covid-19 infection rate was not going to go down as quickly as it did during the first wave.\n\n\"It now looks like the peak for NHS demand may actually be in February,\" he said.", "Morrisons will become the first UK supermarket to pay at least £10 an hour from April.\n\nIt will increase its minimum pay for up to 96,000 workers from £9.20.\n\nRetail trade union Usdaw negotiated the £10 per hour basic rate which is 50p an hour above the voluntary Living Wage Foundation rate.\n\nHowever, other big supermarkets appear unlikely to follow any time soon, with Asda saying that just looking at hourly rates does not tell the full story.\n\nMorrisons said for the majority of its workers the pay increase will be approximately 9%.\n\nPart of the increase will result from changing the company's annual bonus scheme from a discretionary yearly payment into a guaranteed amount in workers' hourly rates.\n\nIt will boost the weekly pay of someone working 36.75 hours a week from £330.10 to £367.50.\n\nUnion members still need to approve the deal. The result will be announced on 12 February and, if accepted, the new rates will be paid from 5 April 2021.\n\n\"The new consolidated hourly rate is now the leading rate of the major supermarkets,\" said Joanne McGuinness, Usdaw national officer after the Morrisons announcement.\n\n\"It's been a tough time for food retail staff who have worked throughout the pandemic in difficult circumstances,\" said Ms McGuinness.\n\n\"They provide the essential service of keeping the nation fed and deserve our support, respect and appreciation. Most of all they deserve decent pay and this offer is a welcome boost.\"\n\nIn addition to the hourly pay increase, Morrisons will pay a higher London weighting.\n\nRates for inner London will be 85p and for outer London 60p per hour, up from 75p in inner London and 50p in outer London.\n\nDavid Potts, Morrisons chief executive said: \"It's a symbolic and important milestone that represents another step in rewarding the incredibly important work that our colleagues do up and down the country.\"\n\nMorrisons' move propels it to the top of the supermarket pay league, leapfrogging Aldi and Lidl. Will other big rivals follow suit?\n\nSupermarket staff have become frontline heroes in this pandemic and there's a new-found respect for the vital work they do in keeping us fed day-in day-out.\n\nMany consumers may welcome the idea of higher rewards for those staff.\n\nBut supermarkets have already taken on a lot of extra costs in ramping up their operations as well as recruiting thousands of extra staff.\n\nAnd there are no shortage of workers looking for jobs right now, which could keep a lid on pay.\n\nLidl has already announced plans to increase its hourly wage for staff from March, increasing the rate for 20,000 workers from £9.30 to £9.50.\n\nWithin London's M25 motorway boundary the rate has increased from £10.75 to £10.85 an hour.\n\n\"It is only right that we increase the income for our colleagues who are the backbone of our business.,\" said chief executive Christian Härtnagel.\n\n\"This is about recognising their hard work and dedication in keeping the nation fed during a year like no other.\n\nAsda, which pays £9.18 outside London and either £9.76 or £10.31 inside the capital, pointed out that it pays above National Living Wage rules and never employs on 'zero hours' contracts.\n\nAn Asda statement said: \"On top of a competitive wage structure, Asda colleagues also receive a host of benefits which contribute to their yearly earnings, these including colleague discount in our stores and online, special discounts for shops and a yearly performance-based bonus.\n\n\"So simply looking at the hourly rate doesn't tell the full story.\"\n\nSainsbury's basic hourly pay is £9.30, and a statement to the BBC made no mention of any immediate intention to raise the rate.\n\nA spokesperson said, \"Our colleagues do a brilliant job and we are so proud of how they continue to go above and beyond for our customers.\n\n\"We have made two thank you payments to frontline workers in recognition of this in the last year and regularly review colleague pay to make sure we offer leading rates.\"\n\nA Waitrose spokesperson said: \"Our hourly minimum starting pay across the UK for non-management Partners in Waitrose is currently £9.10 following a short induction period, with scope for higher pay according to performance.\n\n\"We review Partner pay annually each April and will do so again this year.\"\n\nM&S said their minimum pay for workers is £9.00 an hour, but pointed out that those that worked during the pandemic last April and May were handed a 15% pay reward on top of the rate.\n\nLatest available data suggests Aldi currently pays £9.40 an hour, Tesco £9.30 and Co-op £9.", "As Scotland's hospitals fill with Covid patients and the daily-registered death toll passes 5,000, there are concerns the \"stay at home\" message has not had the same impact it did during last year's lockdown.\n\nSome of the restrictions announced by Nicola Sturgeon in early January have now been tightened even further.\n\nHow do Scotland's current lockdown rules compare to those imposed last March?\n\nLast March outdoor exercise was allowed only if people were alone or with someone from the same household. It was initially limited to once a day, before this restriction was eased in May 2020.\n\nAll exercise had to be done close to home. No mixing with other households or other any outdoor relaxation was allowed.\n\nNow up to two people from separate households can meet for outdoor sport or exercise. Children under 12 years old do not count towards this number.\n\nThere is no limit on how many times you can go out to exercise each day, but you should still stay close to home and avoid crowded areas.\n\nProf Jason Leitch, Scotland's clinical director, says police enforcement is used as \"last resort\" against people who break the rules.\n\nThese rules are not expected to change in Scotland. However, the UK government has warned that exercise restrictions may be tightened after \"large groups\" have flouted their own two-person rule.\n\nLast March non-essential shops were ordered to shut along with cafes, bars, restaurants and cinemas. Supermarkets and pharmacies were among premises which could stay open.\n\nIn July a new law made it compulsory to wear a face covering in shops across Scotland.\n\nAll pubs, restaurants and cafes must remain closed in Scotland's level four areas - although they can still serve takeaway food. The definition of \"essential retail\" has also been narrowed, forcing homeware shops and garden centres to close once again.\n\nRules on click and collect will be tightened from 16 January. The service will be limited to retailers selling essential items and access inside premises for collection will not be allowed.\n\nTakeaway customers will also no longer be allowed inside premises for pick-up from 16 January. Businesses will have to operate from a serving hatch or doorway.\n\nSchools and nurseries were closed last March, with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon saying there were too many absent staff to continue.\n\nMany teachers prepared homeworking packs and some online learning. Parents and pupils had to get used to home schooling.\n\nChildren of essential workers and vulnerable pupils were looked after by staff in childcare hubs.\n\nSchools began the January 2021 term largely via online and remote learning.\n\nAs before, only children of key workers and vulnerable children are allowed in classrooms - but this time there is more focus on learning than simply child care.\n\nThe number of pupils attending school is much higher than last year.\n\nProf Leitch suggests this may be because Scotland has \"too much open\" in the rest of society with working adults in greater need of childcare. He said a \"sweet spot\" needs to be found to keep children and adults safe.\n\nThe Scottish government hopes pupils can return to the classroom in February, but this plan is to be kept under review.\n\nSee where coronavirus case rates have been rising in Scotland with this interactive map.\n\nPeople were told to stay at home except for essential shopping for food or medicine, going out for their daily exercise, or to care for the vulnerable.\n\nEmployers were asked to make provisions for staff to work from home. Wearing of face coverings on public transport was not initially required, but became mandatory in Scotland in June.\n\nIt is a legal requirement not to leave home for anything other than essential purposes. A \"reasonable excuse\" can include essential shopping, exercise or caring responsibilities.\n\nPeople should only go out to work if it absolutely cannot be done from home. It is illegal to travel between Scotland and other parts of the UK unless the journey is essential.\n\nThere are no expectations of enhanced travel restrictions, as the rules are already \"pretty tight\" says Prof Leitch.\n\n\"We have a stay at home law, it is illegal to fly overseas, it is illegal to travel, it is illegal to leave your home without a reason to do so,\" he added.\n\nThe latest contact tracing figures from Public Health Scotland show that since November, shops have accounted for 19% of the places visited by people the week before their positive test.\n\nWhile these figures don't tell us whether people contracted the virus in a specific location, they do suggest the most likely sources.\n\nThe number of cases traced to shopping-related locations increased by 83% between 27 December and 3 January.\n\nOther large increases were seen when:\n\nIn March \"essential\" was the key word for all employers. Businesses were told they could only stay open if what they do was \"essential\" to the effort of tackling Covid or the wellbeing of society.\n\nNicola Sturgeon said building sites should close unless they involved work on an \"essential building\" such as a hospital. Visits from tradespeople were allowed only for \"essential repairs\".\n\nOutdoor workplaces, construction, manufacturing, veterinary services and film and TV production can remain open. Employers have been told to plan for the minimum number of people needed on site to operate safely and effectively.\n\nHome visits by tradespeople are still allowed for essential maintenance. This guidance is being put into law from 16 January.\n\nProf Leitch says the Scottish government continues to examine rules around what constitutes essential and non-essential construction.", "A deal has been agreed for the sale of the Edinburgh Woollen Mill, Ponden Home and Bonmarché chains, which were on the brink of closure.\n\nThe businesses went into administration last year after a collapse in sales due to the pandemic.\n\nAlmost 2,000 staff will be kept on but as many as 260 stores could close.\n\nThe buyers are a consortium of international investors who will inject fresh funds into the business, led by the existing management team.\n\nEdinburgh Woollen Mill, which sells mid-price knitwear and other clothing to older shoppers, is part of a stable of retail brands owned by billionaire businessman, Philip Day.\n\nIt is understood that Mr Day will effectively lend the group the money to buy the businesses which will be paid back over a number of years.\n\nThe deal also covers two other brands in the group, value retailer Bonmarché, and Ponden Home, an interiors chain based in the south east of England.\n\nThe new owners plan to operate 246 stores across both the Edinburgh Woollen Mill and Ponden Home brands, retaining 1,453 staff in those stores, the head office and distribution centres in Carlisle.\n\nHowever, 85 Edinburgh Woollen Mill stores and 34 Ponden Home stores have been closed permanently, with the loss of 485 jobs.\n\nWakefield-based Bonmarché will retain 72 of its stores and 531 staff including head office and distribution centre staff.\n\nThe majority of its stores, 148 outlets, remain under review with staff on furlough.\n\nAdministrators representing Edinburgh Woollen Mill and Ponden Home said the deal represented the best chance to save stores and jobs, given the difficult outlook for UK retail.\n\n\"We regret that not all of Edinburgh Woollen Mill and Ponden Home could be rescued,\" said Tony Wright, partner at FRP. \"This has resulted in a significant number of redundancies at a particularly challenging time of year and period of economic uncertainty.\"\n\nRetail has been particularly hard hit by measures to curb the spread of Covid-19. Even when shops have been open many shoppers stayed away, wary of the health risks.\n\nThe British Retail Consortium said consumers bought 5% less last year than the year before (not including food). Much of that custom switched from the High Street to online, making it harder for chains whose customers usually shop in person. Physical stores saw sales drop by a quarter, the BRC said.\n\nOther major brands including Topshop-owner Arcadia and Debenhams have also gone into administration, costing hundreds of jobs.\n\n\"Lockdowns have proved hugely damaging for mid-range fashion chains like Edinburgh Woollen Mill and Bonmarché whose traditional customer base has not adapted so quickly to online shopping as younger shoppers,\" said Susannah Streeter, analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.\n\n\"The backers of this rescue deal clearly believe there is pent-up demand amongst core customers which will be released once the doors are flung open once more,\" she added.\n\nOn Monday, Marks & Spencer announced it was buying Jaeger, another brand that had belonged to Philip Day's portfolio.\n\nPeacocks, another High Street fashion brand in the EWM group remains in administration.", "Sally told the BBC she is still waiting for her P45 despite handing in her notice in November\n\nHairdresser Sally had a surprise when she looked at her tax record with HM Revenue and Customs: \"It said I'd still been getting furlough pay from a job I left in November.\"\n\nShe told BBC Radio 5 Live's Wake up to Money: \"That was a revelation - none of it had landed in my bank account.\"\n\nHers is among more than 21,000 reports of suspected furlough fraud currently being handled by HMRC.\n\nThe money is either due to fraudulent claims, or is being paid out in error.\n\nThe Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, commonly called the furlough scheme was launched in March 2020, at the start of the coronavirus crisis, to minimise unemployment. Under the scheme, the government pays 80% of employees' wages up to £2,500 a month.\n\nThe number of tip offs to the taxman has spiralled since last April, from 3,000 to 21,378 reports of suspect payments by early January.\n\nSally's former employer told the BBC she did not know Sally had resigned\n\nAt the peak of its use in early May, the scheme was supporting 8.9 million jobs.\n\nIt was extended in January until the end of April 2021 and now also applies to those who are unable to work due to caring responsibilities, or because they are clinically extremely vulnerable.\n\nThe scheme has been widely supported for its role in supporting employers and jobs during the pandemic, but it has been found to be open to abuse.\n\nTax lawyer Anita Clifford said at the 'extreme end' of furlough fraud were 'dormant companies being resurrected' and 'fake employees'\n\nSally believes her former employer broke the rules after she resigned from the salon last year.\n\nShe told the BBC she sent her resignation letter and returned her uniform to her employer in the post in November, but \"heard nothing back\". A client later contacted her asking if she was OK, as they had heard she was off work, \"sick\".\n\nSally started to get her paperwork together to register as self-employed but when she opened her online HMRC account, she noticed she was registered as receiving payments equivalent to those she was getting while on furlough - although the money was not reaching her account.\n\nShe left it a couple of weeks in case her resignation was taking a few weeks to be processed.\n\nTo date, Sally has still has not received a P45, and says she is still registered as being paid through the furlough scheme.\n\nHMRC has called on anyone concerned about suspected abuse of the team to get in touch with the department\n\n\"In the middle of the pandemic, where people are losing homes because they can't get any help, I think it's quite sickening,\" she said.\n\n\"It's wrong, and it makes a mockery of all those people who are suffering.\"\n\nThe BBC contacted Sally's former employer, who has denied the claims, saying she did not know that Sally had resigned, and had struggled to get in touch with her.\n\nTax barrister, Anita Clifford, from the firm Bright Line Law, said Sally's experience was \"a classic example\".\n\n\"Whether it's a mistake, or whether some actors are doing it deliberately, continuing furlough payments for former employees is a classic way of defrauding the system.\"\n\nHMRC has previously stressed that some employers may accidentally be committing furlough fraud.\n\nMs Clifford told the BBC that she was seeing businesses coming forward, \"worried about the mistakes that they've made\".\n\nBut she added examples of furlough fraud could be more extreme, where some businesses \"are seeking to claim money for completely fake employees\".\n\n\"In time to come, we'll certainly see enforcement activity, and people very worried about being on the receiving end of a criminal prosecution for some of these things.\n\n\"Certainly where you have dormant companies being resurrected, in order to claim money from the furlough scheme, you have fake employees... businesses being quite unscrupulous, you're not using the funds to pay salaries, I think those are the businesses you'll eventually see being looked at very seriously for criminal prosecution,\" she said.\n\nHMRC told the BBC: \"The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme is part of the collective national effort to protect jobs. This is taxpayers' money and fraudulent claims limit our ability to support people and deprive public services of essential funding.\"\n\nNames have been changed to protect identities\n• None What happens when furlough ends?\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The Archbishop of Glasgow, Philip Tartaglia, has died suddenly at his home in Glasgow.\n\nA spokeswoman for the Catholic Church said that Archbishop Tartaglia had tested positive for Covid-19 shortly after Christmas and was self-isolating at home.\n\nThe cause of death is not yet clear.\n\nArchbishop Tartaglia, who was 70, was ordained a priest in 1975 and served as Archbishop of Glasgow since 2012.\n\nThe spokeswoman said it would be for Pope Francis to appoint a new archbishop, but until then the Archdiocese will be overseen by an administrator.", "Senior Conservatives have called for a \"reset\" in UK policy towards China, including sanctions against officials responsible for human rights abuses.\n\nThe Conservative Human Rights Commission demanded a rethink in relations after hearing evidence of abuses from torture to slavery.\n\nIt urged the UK to work with allies to respond to China's behaviour.\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab has said the UK plays a \"leading role\" in highlighting abuses.\n\nThe Commission made the recommendations in a new report endorsed by two former Conservative foreign secretaries, Lord Hague and Sir Malcolm Rifkind.\n\nIt adds to growing internal pressure on the government from Conservative circles to harden its line on China.\n\nThe Commission says it has heard first-hand evidence of human rights violations in China from dissidents, lawyers, and human rights campaigners.\n\nThis included violations of media freedom, clampdowns on Uighur Muslims, modern day slavery, and the establishment of an \"Orwellian surveillance state,\" it added.\n\nThe group said this showed the need for a \"comprehensive review\" of China policy across UK government departments.\n\nIt also called for the UK to diversify its supply chains to reduce \"strategic dependency\" on China and further efforts to highlight rights issues at the United Nations.\n\nMr Raab announced fines on Tuesday for UK firms doing business in China if they cannot show that their products aren't linked to forced labour in the country's Xinjiang region.\n\nIn December, the BBC revealed new evidence that China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities into hard, manual labour in the cotton fields of Xinjiang.\n\nMPs and peers are separately pushing for new laws to block trade deals with countries found guilty of genocide, something which for now the government is resisting.\n\nMr Raab told MPs the idea was \"well-meaning\" but it would be wrong to \"sub-contract\" the issue of when to break off trade talks to the courts.\n\nThe Conservative Human Rights Commission, established in 2005, aims to highlight human rights concerns and keep the issue high on the party's agenda.", "David (right) and Frederick Barclay receiving their knighthoods in 2000\n\nSir David Barclay, the co-owner of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, has died at the age of 86.\n\nSir David, together with his twin brother Sir Frederick, built up a business empire spanning hotels, retail and media.\n\nHis death was announced in the Telegraph, which reported that he died on Sunday after a short illness.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson, a former columnist for the paper, paid tribute to Sir David.\n\n\"Farewell with respect and admiration to Sir David Barclay who rescued a great newspaper, created many thousands of jobs across the UK and who believed passionately in the independence of this country and what it could achieve,\" he tweeted.\n\nThe Barclay brothers, who had an estimated wealth of £7bn according to the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List, were known for being media shy and rarely gave interviews.\n\nBorn in Hammersmith, west London, in 1934, Sir David was profoundly shaped by his childhood memories of war, and the death of his father when he was 12.\n\nHe and his twin Frederick - who was 10 minutes younger - started out as painters and decorators, before moving into property and eventually hotels.\n\nTheir success in property and hotels helped them take over Ellerman Lines, a shipping business with interests in brewing, in 1983.\n\nThis provided a launch pad from which they would become billionaires.\n\nAt various times, their hotel portfolio has included a number of trophy assets, including the Ritz Hotel in London, which they sold in March last year.\n\nIn 2012, the BBC’s Panorama reported that the Ritz had not paid any corporation tax since it had been taken over by the Barclays in 1995.\n\nAt the time, Sir David said they had “acted in a responsible way with regard to taxation and have never been involved in any tax avoidance scheme.”\n\nIn 2015, the twins sold off the hospitality group Maybourne, which included luxury hotels like Claridges.\n\nThe brothers first ventured into media ownership with their 1992 purchase of The European, a pan-European newspaper that shut down in 1998.\n\nThey also bought The Scotsman in 1995 and Sunday Business in 1997.\n\n“After these ventures in the publishing arena, the brothers had nurtured since the 1980s an ambition to own the Telegraph group,” The Telegraph said.\n\nThey acquired the Telegraph Group in 2004 for £665m from Canadian media magnate Conrad Black's Hollinger group.\n\nThe brothers also had a number of forays into retail, including Shop Direct, fashion retailer Very and delivery firm Yodel.\n\nThe pair were knighted in 2000 for services to charity. By this point their foundation was thought to have donated about £40m to charity and medical research.\n\nThe notoriously private twins' relationship was the subject of an extraordinary legal case last year, in which Sir David's three sons were accused by his brother of bugging conversations at the Ritz Hotel, which they previously owned.\n\nIn its obituary the Telegraph said Sir David had been a voracious reader, obsessed with newspapers, business, economics and politics, and had always said he had been educated at the \"university of life\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid in Scotland: Lockdown likely to extend to February\n\nScotland's first minister has said the country's current lockdown is \"very unlikely\" to be lifted at the end of the month.\n\nNicola Sturgeon was speaking as she confirmed that more than 5,000 people have now died after testing positive for the virus.\n\nA review of the current restrictions is due to be carried out at the end of January.\n\nMs Sturgeon said it was possible that there would be no easing at that point.\n\nA further 54 deaths have been recorded in the past 24 hours - bringing the total by that measure to 5,023.\n\nBut the most recent figures from the National Records of Scotland - which record all deaths registered in Scotland where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate - put the total at 6,686.\n\nMs Sturgeon told her daily briefing that the figures were a reminder of the toll the virus had taken.\n\nAnd she said every death had caused heartbreak to friends, families and loved ones across the country.\n\nThe first minister also said Scotland's NHS would be under far greater pressure if the current restrictions had not been put in place on Boxing Day.\n\nAnd she urged people not to raise their expectations about what will be announced when the lockdown review is completed in a fortnight as wholesale lifting of the restrictions was \"very unlikely\".\n\nShe added: \"There may not even be any lifting of these restrictions as soon as the end of January - we will have to consider all of that carefully and set it out in due course.\"\n\nAll of mainland Scotland and some islands were placed into level four restrictions on 26 December, with schools remaining closed to most pupils until at least the end of the month.\n\nA further 1,875 positive cases of the virus were recorded on Monday, bringing the total since the pandemic began to 153,423.\n\nThe number of people in hospital with the virus stands at 1,717 - an increase of 53 since yesterday and higher than the peak of about 1,500 in the first wave in April.\n\nOf these, 133 patients are intensive care units, with Ms Sturgeon saying that the virus was putting \"very acute pressure\" on hospitals.\n\nThe first minister also said that 175,942 people in Scotland had received their first vaccine dose by Monday.\n\nOpposition parties have claimed that the rollout of the vaccine has been \"sluggish\" in Scotland compared to south of the border - a charge that the government denies.\n\nAnd they have called for greater transparency over how many people are being given the jab every day.\n\nHealth Secretary Jeane Freeman said on Monday that the government was aiming to vaccinate about 560,000 people in Scotland by 31 January.\n\nNon-essential shops have been closed in Scotland since 26 December\n\nThe Scottish government has previously said it is concerned that too many people have not been following the \"stay at home\" rules that are in place across the whole of the mainland and some islands.\n\nMinisters have been discussing the possibility of imposing tougher rules on click and collect shopping and takeaway food, with an announcement expected to be made on Wednesday.\n\nRetail industry representatives have described click and collect services as a \"lifeline\" for struggling businesses amid the forced closure of all non-essential shops.\n\nAnd they said they had not been shown any evidence that click and collect was driving transmission of the virus.\n\nMs Sturgeon told her daily coronavirus briefing that the government may not stop click and collect services altogether.\n\nBut she added: \"If we are saying to people right now that you should not be out of your home for shopping unless it is essential, then do we need to have click and collect for non-essential services instead of having that for delivery?\"\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross told BBC Scotland that he did not want to see further restrictions put in place unless there was evidence that they would have the desired effect.\n\nHe also suggested that restricting click and collect would simply result in more people going back into supermarkets to do their shopping.\n\nThe Scottish government is also under pressure to lift the the current ban on public Sunday worship, with a group of 500 church leaders from across the UK - including 200 in Scotland - insisting that there is \"no evidence of any tangible contribution to community transmission through churches in Scotland\".\n\nIn a letter to the first minister, they claim that the ban may be unlawful and accuse the government of failing to understand that \"Christian worship is an essential public service, and especially vital to our nation in a time of crisis\".\n\nA Scottish government spokeswoman said: \"Test and Protect tells us where people were in their 48-hour infectious period.\n\n\"So we know that on one day last week the seven-day number for places of worship was 120, and data from yesterday shows the seven-day number for places of worship is 38, underlining the essential decision to require places of worship to close for public health reasons.\"\n\nMeanwhile, it has been confirmed that everyone arriving in Scotland from overseas will need to show proof of a negative test from Friday.\n\nThe test will need to be \"highly reliable\", the first minister said, and will need to have been from the previous three days - although young children may be exempt from the restriction.\n\nThose travelling from countries not on the quarantine exemption list will still need to self-isolate on arrival.\n\nThe new rules, which will also come into force in England, were first outlined last week.", "A Huawei patent has been brought to light for a system that identifies people who appear to be of Uighur origin among images of pedestrians.\n\nThe filing is one of several of its kind involving leading Chinese technology companies, discovered by a US research company and shared with BBC News.\n\nHuawei had previously said none of its technologies was designed to identify ethnic groups.\n\nIt now plans to alter the patent.\n\nThe company indicated this would involve asking the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) - the country's patent authority - for permission to delete the reference to Uighurs in the Chinese-language document.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nUighur people belong to a mostly Muslim ethnic group that lives mainly in Xinjiang province, in north-western China.\n\nGovernment authorities are accused of using high-tech surveillance against them and detaining many in forced-labour camps, where children are sometimes separated from their parents.\n\nBeijing says the camps offer voluntary education and training.\n\nChina's technology companies deny selling software that can be used to pick out Uighur people from the rest of the population by their appearance\n\n\"One technical requirement of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security's video-surveillance networks is the detection of ethnicity - particularly of Uighurs,\" said Maya Wang, from Human Rights Watch.\n\n\"While in the rest of the world, such targeting and persecution of a people on the basis of their ethnicity would be completely unacceptable, the persecution and severe discrimination of Uighurs in many aspects of life in China remain unchallenged because Uighurs have no power in China.\"\n\nHuawei's patent was originally filed in July 2018, in conjunction with the Chinese Academy of Sciences .\n\nIt describes ways to use deep-learning artificial-intelligence techniques to identify various features of pedestrians photographed or filmed in the street.\n\nIt focuses on addressing the fact different body postures - for example whether someone is sitting or standing - can affect accuracy.\n\nBut the document also lists attributes by which a person might be targeted, which it says can include \"race (Han [China's biggest ethnic group], Uighur)\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. BBC News visited the camps where China’s Muslims have their \"thoughts transformed\", in 2019\n\nA spokesman said this reference should not have been included.\n\n\"Huawei opposes discrimination of all types, including the use of technology to carry out ethnic discrimination,\" he said.\n\n\"Identifying individuals' race was never part of the research-and-development project.\n\n\"It should never have become part of the application.\n\n\"And we are taking proactive steps to amend it.\n\n\"We are continuously working to ensure new and evolving technology is developed and applied with the utmost care and integrity.\"\n\nThe patent was brought to light by the video-surveillance research group IPVM.\n\nIt had previously flagged a separate \"confidential\" document on Huawei's website, referencing work on a \"Uighur alert\" system.\n\nIn that case, Huawei said the page referenced a test rather than a real-world application and denied selling systems that identified people by their ethnicity.\n\nOn Wednesday, Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the UK Parliament's Foreign Affairs Select Committee and leads the Conservative Party's China Research Group, told BBC News: \"Chinese tech giants supporting the brutal assault on the Uighur population show us why we as consumers and as a society must be careful with who we buy our products from or award business to.\n\n\"Developing ethnic-labelling technology for use by a repressive regime is clearly not behaviour that lives up to our standards.\"\n\nIPVM also discovered references to Uighur people in patents filed by the Chinese artificial-intelligence company Sensetime and image-recognition specialist Megvii.\n\nSensetime's filing, from July 2019, discusses ways facial-recognition software could be used for more efficient \"security protection\", such as searching for \"a middle-aged Uighur with sunglasses and a beard\" or a Uighur person wearing a mask.\n\nA Sensetime spokeswoman said the references were \"regrettable\".\n\n\"We understand the importance of our responsibilities, which is why we began to develop our AI Code of Ethics in mid-2019,\" she said, adding the patent had predated this code.\n\nMegvii's June 2019 patent, meanwhile, described a way of relabelling pictures of faces tagged incorrectly in a database.\n\nLike Huawei, Megvii now plans to withdraw the original version of its patent\n\nIt said the classifications could be based on ethnicity, for example, including \"Han, Uighur, non-Han, non-Uighur and unknown\".\n\nThe company told BBC News it would now withdraw the patent application.\n\n\"Megvii recognises that the language used in our 2019 patent application is open to misunderstanding,\" it said.\n\n\"Megvii has not developed and will not develop or sell racial- or ethnic-labelling solutions.\n\n\"Megvii acknowledges that, in the past, we have focused on our commercial development and lacked appropriate control of our marketing, sales, and operations materials.\n\n\"We are undertaking measures to correct the situation.\"\n\nIPVM also flagged image-recognition patents filed by two of China's biggest technology conglomerates, Alibaba and Baidu, that referenced classifying people by ethnicity but did not specifically mention the Uighur people by name.\n\nAlibaba responded: \"Racial or ethnic discrimination or profiling in any form violates our policies and values.\n\n\"We never intended our technology to be used for and will not permit it to be used for targeting specific ethnic groups.\"\n\nProtests have been held across the world to highlight China's treatment of Uighur people\n\nAnd Baidu said: \"When filing for a patent, the document notes are meant as an example of a technical explanation, in this case describing what the attribute-recognition model is rather than representing the expected implementation of the invention.\n\n\"We do not and will not permit our technology to be used to identify or target specific ethnic groups.\"\n\nBut Human Rights Watch said it still had concerns.\n\n\"Any company that sells video-surveillance software and systems to the Chinese police would have to ensure that they meet the police's requirements, which includes the capacity for ethnicity detection,\" Ms Wang said.\n\n\"The right thing for these companies to do is to immediately cease their sale and maintenance of surveillance equipment, software and systems, to the Chinese police.\"", "At Prime Minister’s Questions, Boris Johnson said that “the lockdown measures we had in place, combined with tier four measures, are starting to show some signs of effect.”\n\nLooking at cases of Covid-19 in England, the average for the week ending 1 January was almost 55,000 cases.\n\nThese people will have been infected before England’s lockdown came in on January 6, although much of the country was under very strict measures before then.\n\nSo, using publicly available data, it might be too early to make this assessment.\n\nAnd in the past month, we’ve seen that a couple of days of decline can quickly be followed by a sustained increase in cases.\n\nBut what is clear is that hospital admissions from coronavirus appear to be increasing (they usually peak up to a couple of weeks after high numbers of cases).\n\nThe latest seven day average (ending on January 7) saw 3,705 people admitted to hospital daily in England – that’s the highest throughout the entire pandemic.", "A Scottish earl has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a woman at his ancestral home in Angus.\n\nThe Earl of Strathmore, Simon Bowes-Lyon, forced his way into the sleeping woman's room during a weekend event he was hosting at Glamis Castle.\n\nHe repeatedly assaulted the 26-year-old victim and tried to pull off her nightdress during the 20-minute attack.\n\nBowes-Lyon, 34 - who is the Queen's first cousin twice removed - has been placed on the sex offenders register.\n\nHe was granted bail at Dundee Sheriff Court and sentence was deferred.\n\nSheriff Alistair Carmichael also ordered Glamis Castle be assessed for its suitability to house Bowes-Lyon while under a tagging order.\n\nThe court heard the woman fled the castle the morning after the attack on 13 February last year and flew home to report the matter to police.\n\nBoth Police Scotland and the Metropolitan Police were involved in the investigation.\n\nGlamis Castle was the childhood home of the Queen Mother\n\nOutside court, Bowes-Lyon said he was \"greatly ashamed\" of his actions.\n\nHe added: \"Clearly I had drunk to excess on the night of the incident. I should have known better. I recognise, in any event, that alcohol is no excuse for my behaviour.\n\n\"I did not think I was capable of behaving the way I did but have had to face up to it and take responsibility.\n\n\"My apologies go, above all, to the woman concerned, but I would also like to apologise to family, friends and colleagues for the distress I have caused them.\"\n\nGlamis Castle, near Forfar, has been the seat of the Bowes-Lyon family since 1372.\n\nIt was the childhood home of the Queen Mother, and the Queen's sister Princess Margaret was born there.\n\nBowes-Lyon was a great-great nephew of the Queen Mother.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "The Chinese vaccine is one of two that the Brazilian government has lined up\n\nA coronavirus vaccine developed by China's Sinovac has been found to be 50.4% effective in Brazilian clinical trials, according to the latest results released by researchers.\n\nIt shows the vaccine is significantly less effective than previous data suggested - barely over the 50% needed for regulatory approval.\n\nThe Chinese vaccine is one of two that the Brazilian government has lined up.\n\nBrazil has been one of the countries worst affected by Covid-19.\n\nSinovac, a Beijing-based biopharmaceutical company, is behind CoronaVac, an inactivated vaccine. It works by using killed viral particles to expose the body's immune system to the virus without risking a serious disease response.\n\nSeveral countries, including Indonesia, Turkey and Singapore, have placed orders for the vaccine.\n\nLast week researchers at the Butantan Institute, which has been conducting the trials in Brazil, announced that the vaccine had a 78% efficacy against \"mild-to-severe\" Covid-19 cases.\n\nBut on Tuesday they revealed that calculations for this figure did not include data from a group of \"very mild infections\" among those who received the vaccine that did not require clinical assistance.\n\nWith the inclusion of this data, the efficacy rate is now 50.4%, said researchers.\n\nBut Butantan stressed that the vaccine is 78% effective in preventing mild cases that needed treatment and 100% effective in staving off moderate to serious cases.\n\nThe Sinovac trials have yielded different results across different countries.\n\nLast month Turkish researchers said the Sinovac vaccine was 91.25% effective, while Indonesia, which rolled out its mass vaccination programme on Wednesday, said it was 65.3% effective. Both were interim results from late-stage trials.\n\nThe latest figures for China's coronavirus vaccine show just how difficult it is to compare vaccines.\n\nOn the face of it, the 50% effectiveness figure isn't as good as Oxford's 70% or Pfizer and Moderna's 95%. But trials are run very differently in different countries - the numbers of volunteers enrolled varies wildly, as do the criteria used to test how much protection the vaccines offer.\n\nA figure for efficacy is reached by looking at how many people developed Covid after being given the vaccine, compared with how many were affected when given a dummy injection. Normally, that is based on people developing obvious symptoms but in this Brazilian trial, people with no symptoms also appear to have been included.\n\nSo it's only when the full data from all trials of this vaccine are published that scientists can analyse its real efficacy, and compare like with like. Only limited data for this Sinovac vaccine is currently available - and experts say that is confusing the picture.\n\nIn the long term, many vaccines against Covid are needed to vaccinate the world and, inevitably, some will perform better than others - but giving as many people as possible some protection is the priority.\n\nThere has been concern and criticism that Chinese vaccine trials are not subject to the same scrutiny and levels of transparency as its Western counterparts.\n\nBoth the Sinovac vaccine and the vaccine developed by Oxford University and pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca have requests for emergency use authorisation pending with regulators in Brazil.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe latest news comes as Brazil is dealing with a major spike in cases. The country currently has the third highest number of Covid-19 cases in the world at over 8.1 million, just behind the US and India.\n\nThe BBC World Service's Americas editor Candace Piette says the country is suffering one of the world's deadliest outbreaks but as yet, has not announced when its vaccination programme will begin.\n\nThe delay has been caused in large part by the government's haphazard and divided approach to vaccination, says our correspondent.", "More than 100,000 Covid-19 vaccinations had been issued in Northern Ireland by Tuesday evening, Robin Swann has said.\n\nThe health minister said, of that figure, 91,419 people had received their first vaccine dose.\n\nHe added that 95% of care home residents had received their first dose and about 20% of those aged over 80 have received their first dose.\n\nIt comes as leading GP said the goal to begin a mass vaccine rollout by summer is \"achievable\" but hinges on supply.\n\nThe Department of Health published its plan to deliver vaccines in Northern Ireland on Tuesday.\n\nDr Alan Stout said the timeline was \"very sensible\" but was \"almost 100%\" dependent on getting enough of the vaccine.\n\nAt Wednesday's health briefing, Mr Swann said the programme had made a \"strong start\" but there was more to do.\n\nHe also said he has decided to issue tighter visiting guidelines for hospitals.\n\n\"I have ensured visiting will be permitted to hospices and care homes, but visits to general medical wards will no longer be permitted from this Friday\", he said.\n\nThe minister added that the measure would be kept under constant review.\n\nMr Swann also confirmed a new rapid test for Covid-19, which can return results in 12 minutes, would be used in emergency departments.\n\nHe said a pilot programme has been carried out using the LumiraDX nasal swab, which will enable health staff to \"very quickly identify patients who do not have Covid-19\".\n\nHe also repeated that the current lockdown restrictions were working and had helped to reduce NI's rate of infection, but warned the executive would still have \"difficult decisions\" to take in relation to decisions about whether to extend some restrictions in the coming weeks.\n\nOn Wednesday, a further 19 Covid-related deaths were announced by the Department of Health in Northern Ireland.\n\nA further 1,145 new cases of the virus were also reported.\n\nMeanwhile, Northern Ireland's chief medical officer warned there was \"no doubt\" that levels of the new, more transmissible variant of coronavirus are rising in Northern Ireland.\n\nSpeaking at Stormont's executive briefing, Dr Michael McBride said that the new variant was making the job to contain it \"twice as difficult\".\n\nThe new variant is said to be up to 70% more transmissible, but there is no evidence it is more dangerous.\n\nThe first confirmed case of the new strain was detected in Northern Ireland on 23 December, but officials had said levels in Northern Ireland remained lower than in other areas of the UK.\n\nDr McBride said there would now be situations where the variant could spread, where previously it may not have.\n\n\"We need to be extremely cautious in the weeks ahead,\" he warned, adding that the virus would not \"magically disappear\" on 6 February, when the current lockdown is due to end.\n\nStormont ministers have to review the regulations on or before 22 January, with that scheduled for next Thursday.\n\nDr McBride said Northern Ireland had some distance to go before restrictions are lifted\n\nDr Stout, the chair of NI's GP committee, said practices needed another 22,000 doses to finish vaccinating people aged over 80.\n\nSpeaking to BBC's Good Morning Ulster, he said he was \"very confident\" the next doses would come through shortly.\n\n\"I have been overwhelmed by the desire of practices, the determination just to get going and the one thing we need to give them is vaccine - we need to get the supply in as quickly as possible.\n\n\"This is such a good news story that everybody wants the vaccine and everybody wants to give it.\"\n\nThe plan is for the vaccine to be given to the general population in summer 2021.\n\nGP clinics should have received their first delivery of the vaccine by Tuesday.\n\nResponding to reports in The Daily Telegraph that GPs administering the vaccine in England had been asked to \"slow down\" to let other regions \"catch-up\", Dr Stout said Northern Ireland had taken a different approach to how it rolled out vaccines to GPs.\n\nHe said vaccines were shared among all practices in Northern Ireland.\n\n\"We just don't have the full amount of vaccine in practice to give. We could have given all of the vaccine that a certain number of practices needed to start with but there were issues with inequality and discrimination ... so that's why an amount has gone to every single practice, so at least they have some.\"", "Customs operators have pleaded with the government to prioritise vaccinations for staff they insist are key front-line workers in the effort to keep vital supplies flowing into the UK.\n\nOne operator told the BBC his staff were working flat out - often up to 16 hours a day - to help traders comply with the new post-Brexit customs requirements.\n\n\"A Covid outbreak would be disastrous. Customs clearance staff should be identified as key workers and fast-tracked for vaccination.\"\n\nAnother said he had written to Transport Secretary Grant Shapps and his local MP for Ashford, Damian Green saying any coronavirus-related staff shortages could force them to close.\n\n\"We have 14 staff. Two have already had to self-isolate, if we lose any more we would have to consider closing\".\n\nRod McKenzie of the Road Haulage Association supports the argument to accelerate vaccinations of port and customs staff.\n\n\"Customs agents are absolutely swamped, they are understaffed by tens of thousands and although volumes have been light thanks to pre-Christmas and pre-Brexit stockpiling, we are approaching a critical point:\"\n\nSteve Cock of logistics firm KGH said that volume would begin to build this week and described Friday as \"a moment of truth\" as volumes would be close to normal, imposing the first serious test of the system's capacity.\n\nThe government told the BBC that vaccination priorities were based on clinical vulnerability determined by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.\n\nAlthough the government said it would be looking at key workers beyond the current priorities - like teachers - that would not come till after phase 1 of the current programme ends. That is not expected till late March at the earliest.\n\nAlthough the ports themselves have been running reasonably smoothly, that is because many traders aren't getting as far as the ports as their documentation is not complete.\n\nThe Dover-Calais crossing last week saw only 40% of its usual traffic for this time of year. Many foreign hauliers have been avoiding the UK for fear of getting stuck on the wrong side of the channel or raising their prices by as much as six times to compensate for the additional risks of congestion.\n\nCracks in the system have already started to show with large European delivery firm DPD cancelling road deliveries from the UK to the EU while Ocado, M&S, and Fortnum and Mason have cited problems delivering to customers in the EU and Northern Ireland.\n\nFish and seafood exports have been particularly hard hit.\n\nMany small traders who usually club together to share the cost of space on large lorries headed to their primary markets in the EU have hit serious roadblocks.\n\nProducts of animal origin now need Export Health Certificates signed off by veterinary professionals.\n\nThe burden of getting multiple certificates for single lorries has brought exports to the EU to a virtual standstill for some traders.\n\nThe focus in the UK is understandably primarily on food supplies into the UK and although there are some limited shortages being reported in fruit and vegetable supplies, shelves in the UK are showing very few gaps.\n\nThe problems are more acute in Northern Ireland, which for the purposes of trade is still part of the EU customs area. For that reason, what is happening to food exports from GB to Northern Ireland is perhaps a useful proxy for what is happening to UK food exports to the EU.\n\nThe last thing the UK-EU trade machinery can afford right now is for critical staff - caught in the crossfire of pandemic and Brexit - to be laid low.", "The men were arrested on suspicion of causing a public nuisance at hospitals in Birmingham and Worcestershire\n\nFour men have been arrested on suspicion of causing a public nuisance at hospitals in the West Midlands.\n\nThe men, aged between 31 and 37, were held in relation to incidents in Birmingham and Worcestershire between 31 December and 9 January.\n\nEarlier this month, police said they were investigating after people posted videos of supposedly empty hospital corridors on social media.\n\nThe videos claiming Covid-19 was a hoax sparked an outcry from medical workers.\n\nWest Mercia Police launched a joint investigation with West Midlands Police, after incidents were reported at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital and the Alexandra in Redditch.\n\nHospitals in Worcester and Kidderminster also featured, before the footage was deleted.\n\nThe West Mercia force confirmed it had arrested two men from Bromsgrove aged 31 and 34 as well as a 37 year-old man from Kidderminster and a fourth man, aged 34, from Droitwich.\n\nThey were also detained relating to incidents in a park in Bromsgrove as well as the town centre.\n\nAll four men have since been bailed with conditions not to enter any hospital in England unless they have a medical reason to do so.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Birmingham has one of the largest intensive care capacities in the whole country\n\nTwo hundred doctors will be redeployed to one of England's largest intensive care units amid fears it could be \"overwhelmed\".\n\nA leaked memo warned hospitals in Birmingham were \"in a position of extremis\" as Covid-19 cases rise.\n\nElective surgeries at the city's main Queen Elizabeth Hospital will stop as staff move to critical care duties.\n\nA spokesperson said the approach ensured \"the greatest good for the greatest numbers of people\".\n\nThe trust's decision to redeploy doctors was revealed in a leaked email to the Health Service Journal, which has been verified by the BBC.\n\nSent by consultant Peter Hewins, it said hospitals in Birmingham risked being \"overwhelmed\" amid a \"period of absolute emergency\".\n\nThe University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) said there were 873 patients with Covid-19 across its sites, with 125 in intensive care.\n\nThis was significantly more than in April 2020, it said, as it announced plans to double its intensive care capacity to more than 250 beds.\n\nTime-critical surgery, including cancer operations, will continue, the trust said, but elective procedures at the Queen Elizabeth will be paused, and reduced elsewhere.\n\nThere will also be a \"further reduction of outpatient activity\", a spokesperson said, adding: \"Every member of staff will be supported by the Trust in delivering the best care wherever they are working.\"\n\nThere are currently 873 Covid-19 patients being treated at the trust\n\nNeighbouring University Coventry and Warwickshire Hospitals Trust confirmed it had started taking Covid patients from Birmingham.\n\nUniversity Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) is one of the largest teaching hospital trusts in England.\n\nIt runs several hospitals, including Birmingham Heartlands, the Queen Elizabeth, Solihull Hospital and Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield. It also runs Birmingham Chest Clinic.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The minimum cost of carrier bags in Scotland is set to double to 10p from 1 April.\n\nThe Scottish government has said it is important to increase the charge periodically to encourage the use of reusable options instead.\n\nEnvironment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham said the move was to deter the use of single-use plastic bags.\n\nThe 5p charge was introduced in 2014, with plastic bag usage dropping by 80% by the following year.\n\nMs Cunningham said: \"Thanks to the people of Scotland, the introduction of the charge has been successful in reducing the amount of single-use carrier bags in circulation.\n\n\"While the 5p bag charge was suitable when it was first introduced, it is important that pricing is updated to ensure that the charge continues to be a factor in making people think twice about using a single-use carrier bag.\"\n\nSome retailers have pledged to donate their carrier bag charges to good causes, with £2.5m raised in 2019.\n\nPrior to the charge being introduced in 2014, 800 million single use carrier bags were issued annually in Scotland.\n\nBy 2015 this fell by 80% with the Marine Conservation Society noting in 2016 that the number of plastic carrier bags being found on Scotland's beaches dropped by 40% two years in a row with a further drop of 42% recorded between 2018 and 2019.\n\nKeep Scotland Beautiful chief executive Barry Fisher said: \"Since 2014 the single use carrier bag charge has significantly helped reduce the number of bags being given out by retailers - saving thousands of tonnes of single use plastic realising a significant net carbon saving and reducing the chances of these items becoming littered.\n\n\"However, there is still an opportunity to challenge individual behaviours and improve consumer awareness which the doubling of the charge will help do.\n\nDue to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Scottish government is looking into creating an exemption on the bag charge for certain deliveries and collections, as was the case last year at the onset of the pubic health crisis.", "Naomi Campbell and Kenyan Tourism Minister Najib Balala sealed the deal over the weekend\n\nThe appointment of British supermodel Naomi Campbell as Kenya's tourism ambassador has caused a Twitter storm in the East African nation.\n\nMany queried why it had not been given to a prominent Kenyan like Hollywood actress Lupita Nyong'o.\n\nOthers leapt to her defence, saying the debate already justified her role.\n\nKenya's tourism sector has been badly hit by coronavirus, with visitor numbers down by 72% between January and October last year.\n\n\"The sector hence lost over 110bn Kenyan shillings [$1bn, £738m] of direct international tourists' revenue due to the Covid-19 pandemic,\" Kenya's Tourism Research Institute reported last month.\n\nThe country is famous for its wildlife safaris and beach resorts.\n\nKenyan Tourism Minister Najib Balala said the deal with Ms Campbell was done over the weekend after he met the model, who is currently on holiday in Kenya.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Ministry of Tourism & Wildlife-Kenya This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by Ministry of Tourism & Wildlife-Kenya\n\nThe 50-year-old style icon and philanthropist has been posting images of her stay on Instagram, where she has 10 million followers.\n\n\"We welcome the exciting news that Naomi Campbell will advocate for tourism and travel internationally for the Magical Kenya brand,\" Mr Balala said, without giving further deals of the contract.\n\nBut the statement, posted on Twitter on Tuesday, prompted instant outrage from some, and the supermodel's name has since been trending in the country.\n\nOne tweeter cited other Kenyan celebrities better suited to the ambassadorial role, including models Ajuma Nasenyana and Debra Sanaipei, as well as Nyong'o.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Syombua A. Kibue 🇰🇪 This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nOne tweeter said the backlash revealed an unhealthy attitude in Kenya: \"At the end of the day, it's all about who will get the job done. This mentality is what causes nepotism and tribalism in Kenyan institutions, it should be about the most suitable candidate not 'one of our own' thing.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMs Campbell's defenders praised her for visiting Kenya several times and said it was not only the model's social media following that made her the perfect appointment.\n\nHer circle of friends were equally important as she would attract wealthy tourists willing to spend money.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Mlolwa🐬 This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe tourism industry usually contributes about 8.8% to Kenya's annual Gross domestic product (GDP), according to Kenya's East African newspaper.\n• None The supermodel and the warlord", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Large parts of Scotland woke up to a blanket of snow on Thursday, including in Rutherglen where conditions became challenging for drivers\n\nMotorists continue to face difficult conditions after heavy snow across parts of Scotland caused road closures.\n\nA Met Office yellow warning for ice will be in place overnight and for all of Friday for mainland Scotland.\n\nThe A9 at Dunblane was closed due to snow but has now reopened, while driving conditions on the M90 and M8 were reported as difficult.\n\nThere have also been problems in the Scottish Borders where up to a foot of snow fell overnight.\n\nTraffic Scotland has reported difficult driving conditions on the M77 at Fenwick, M80 around Cumbernauld and the A9 at Greenloaning.\n\nA woman walks through the snow in Braco near Dunblane\n\nThe impact of the overnight freeze on a hedgerow near Strathaven, South Lanarkshire\n\nIn the Borders several lorries got stuck on the A7 between Selkirk and Hawick, while difficult driving conditions were also reported on the A68 at the Carter Bar and Soutra.\n\nThere were also delays on the A83 Old Military Road diversion and the A82 at Tyndrum.\n\nMeanwhile, police have urged drivers to properly clear their car windscreens before setting off in the wintry conditions.\n\nOfficers in Dumfries and Galloway shared a picture of a driver they stopped and charged for failing to do this.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by DumfriesGPolice This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nPeople should only be leaving home to make essential journeys in parts of Scotland under level four Covid measures, under current Scottish government lockdown regulations.\n\nCh Supt Louise Blakelock, of Police Scotland, said: \"Government guidance on only travelling if your journey is essential remains in place and so with an amber warning for snow, please consider if your journey really is essential and whether you can delay it until the weather improves.\n\n\"If your journey really is essential, plan ahead and make sure you and your vehicle are suitably prepared by having sufficient fuel and supplies such as warm clothing, food, water and charge in your mobile phone in the event you require assistance.\"\n\nA motorist brushes snow off a car in Braco near Dunblane\n\nThe village of Bowden near Melrose woke up to snow\n\nA snowy scene at Fountainhall in the Scottish Borders\n\nPolice in Shetland have also warned of ice badly affecting roads on the islands.\n\nScotRail said its services could be affected, particularly on the Highland mainline.\n\nScottish Borders Council said the effects of the adverse weather could cause disruption into Friday morning.\n\nEmergency planning officer Jim Fraser said: \"With widespread snow and some freezing rain possible over the course of Wednesday and Thursday, there is the strong potential for disruption across our road network and communities.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Michael Matheson MSP This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSome of the deepest snowfalls in recent weeks have been in the Highlands, including the Cairngorms.\n\nEarlier this month, the UK had its coldest night of the winter so far after a temperature of -12.3C was recorded in the north west Highlands.\n\nThe temperature was recorded at Loch Glascarnoch, near Garve, south of Ullapool in Wester Ross.\n\nThe record lowest temperature in the UK is -27.2C, which was recorded in Braemar, Aberdeenshire, in 1895 and 1982 and at Altnaharra in the Highlands in 1995.", "Pre-departure Covid-19 testing will now be required for everyone travelling to England from 04:00 GMT on Monday.\n\nThe rules had been due to come into force on Friday, but the government said people needed time \"to prepare\".\n\nThose arriving by plane, train or boat, including UK nationals, will have to take a test up to 72 hours before leaving the country they are in.\n\nAnyone arriving from places not on the UK's travel corridor list must still self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nThe Scottish government is planning to impose the same rules and has had to defer them coming into effect as a result of changes in England.\n\n\"This meant Scotland was also obliged to delay implementation as we need sight of their final regulations in order to properly draft and approve the relevant Scottish regulations,\" a spokeswoman said.\n\nIt is expected the requirement will come into force in Scotland at 04:00 GMT on Monday as well. Wales and Northern Ireland are expected to announce plans for pre-arrival testing in the coming days.\n\nAnnouncing the deferral on Twitter, Transport Secretary Mr Shapps said: \"To give international arrivals time to prepare, passengers will be required to provide proof of a negative Covid-19 test before departure to England from Monday 18 January at 4am.\"\n\nHe also reminded travellers to fill out the Passenger Locator Form - used in track and trace - and added that those without proof of a negative test faced a fine of £500.\n\nProblems with testing availability and capacity mean some countries will initially be exempt.\n\nFor instance, the requirement will not apply to travellers from St Lucia, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda until 04:00 GMT on 21 January.\n\nTravellers from Falkland Islands, Ascension Islands and St Helena are exempted permanently.\n\nHauliers are exempt to allow the free flow of freight, as are air, international rail and maritime crew.\n\nThe government has said all forms of PCR test will be accepted, as will other forms of test with \"97% specificity, 80% sensitivity\".\n\nThe move comes as a further 1,564 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test - the biggest figure reported in a single day since the pandemic began.\n\nWednesday's figure brings the total number of deaths by that measure to 84,767.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England, said there had now been more deaths in the second wave than the first.\n\nMeanwhile on Wednesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was \"concerned\" about a new coronavirus variant that is believed to have emerged in Brazil.\n\nHe acknowledged it was not yet clear how effective existing vaccines would be against the latest new variant.\n\nMr Johnson said the UK was taking steps to make sure it was not brought into the country.\n\nA government Covid committee is meeting on Thursday to discuss the possibility of stopping flights from Brazil.\n\nArrivals from Brazil already have to self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nAre you due to travel back to the UK from Brazil? Share your experience. Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Sir David will appear in \"very high-resolution holographic video\"\n\nSir David Attenborough is to front an augmented reality app letting users see exotic plants and animals in their own surroundings, as part of a government drive to prove the uses of 5G.\n\nThe Green Planet AR app has been given £2.3m government funding as one of nine 5G test projects given a total of £28m.\n\nIt will be released alongside The Green Planet, Sir David's forthcoming BBC series that will show plants in detail.\n\nThe five-part documentary series is expected to be broadcast in 2022.\n\nAugmented reality superimposes virtual objects on to the world around us, meaning the app's users will be able to use their smartphones to see Sir David and \"meticulously detailed graphics of exotic plants and animals\" as if they were in front of them.\n\nThe app will help prove \"how new technology can reconnect us with the natural world whilst demonstrating the power of 5G to a huge new audience\", according to Minister for Digital Infrastructure Matt Warman.\n\nThe app will be available in \"set locations\" around the UK. Developer Factory 42 said it does not yet know how many locations, but they could include parks, visitor attractions like Kew Gardens and urban settings. Users will need a 5G-enabled device.\n\nThe other projects sharing the £28m funding include one to provide live, multi-angle HD video streams and replays on phones at sporting events; one to allow people to experience exhibits at The Eden Project in Cornwall from their own homes; and one to control the 113 cranes at the Port of Felixstowe in Suffolk.\n\nThey follow nine other 5G trial projects that were awarded a total of £35m in February 2020.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Pupils are currently learning remotely from home\n\nA-level, AS and GCSE students in England could be asked to sit mini external exams to help teachers with their assessments after formal exams were cancelled last week.\n\nIn a letter to the exams regulator, Ofqual, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said this would help teachers to decide \"deserved grades\".\n\nHe promised not to use an algorithm which led to controversy last summer.\n\nHead teachers said the \"devil was in the detail\" for these plans.\n\nThe letter was published on Wednesday morning, as Mr Williamson appeared before the education select committee to answer questions on the impact of Covid-19 on education.\n\nIn the letter to Ofqual he said: \"A breadth of evidence should inform teachers' judgments, and the provision of training and guidance will support teachers to reach their assessment of a student's deserved grade.\n\n\"In addition, I would like to explore the possibility of providing externally set tasks or papers, in order that teachers can draw on this resource to support their assessments of students.\"\n\nMr Williamson's pledge not to use an algorithm to determine grades comes after thousands of A-level students had their results downgraded from school estimates last summer - before Ofqual announced a U-turn allowing them to use teachers' predictions.\n\n\"We have agreed that we will not use an algorithm to set or automatically standardise anyone's grade,\" the letter says.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Gavin Williamson: \"The top priority is for all those that work in schools\"\n\n\"Schools and colleges should undertake quality assurance of their teachers' assessments and provide reassurance to the exam boards. We should provide training and guidance to support that, and there should also be external checks in place to support fairness and consistency between different institutions and to avoid schools and colleges proposing anomalous grades.\"\n\nBut he added: \"Changes should only be made if those grades cannot be justified, rather than as a result of marginal differences of opinion.\n\n\"Any changes should be based on human decisions, not by an automatic process or algorithm.\"\n\nA consultation on plans for this year is being launched later this week.\n\nGeoff Barton, head of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the letter set out \"broad and sensible parameters\" for assessing GCSEs and A-levels after exams were cancelled.\n\n\"But, as ever, the devil will be in the detail of how this is turned into reality,\" Mr Barton said.\n\nHe welcomed confirmation that no algorithm would be applied this year \"following last summer's grading debacle.\"\n\nBut he questioned how any system of externally set assessment would work and how it could ensures fairness for students whose education had been heavily disrupted.\n\n\"It is vital that the final plans not only provide fairness and consistency but that they are also workable for schools, colleges and teaching staff who will have to put them into practice,\" he added.\n\nNational Education Union joint general secretary Dr Mary Bousted said: \"Had the government listened to the NEU and put in place a contingency plan sooner we would be in a better position now to make sure grades could be awarded reliably and without creating severe workload issues for education staff and students.\n\nShe said the union would continue to work with the Dfe and Ofqual, but they needed to see the full details of the plans as soon as possible to ensure grades are fair and the process is manageable for staff.\n\nTaking questions from MPs on the education select committee, Mr Williamson said he wanted to see schools re-opening at the earliest opportunity and that he would \"never apologise for being the biggest champion for keeping schools open\".\n\nHe said attendance rates of vulnerable and key worker pupils in schools since the start of term were higher than in the first lockdown.", "The prime minister has said lockdown measures are \"starting to show signs of some effect\", but he has refused to rule out extra restrictions in England.\n\nAt PMQs, Boris Johnson said measures were kept under \"constant review\" after Labour's Sir Keir Starmer said it was obvious more restrictions were needed.\n\nMr Johnson added that vaccine centres would move to 24-7 \"as soon as we can\".\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and only go out for limited reasons.\n\nThis includes for food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nLater, Mr Johnson told the Commons Liaison Committee there was a \"very substantial\" risk of intensive care capacity in hospitals being \"overtopped\", and appealed to people to follow lockdown rules.\n\nHe said the situation was \"very, very tough\" in the NHS and the strain on staff was \"colossal\".\n\nMeanwhile, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has announced new restrictions in Scotland from Saturday, including limiting click and collect services to essential items only and restricting takeaways.\n\nAt Prime Minister's Questions, Sir Keir said stronger restrictions were needed in England and accused Mr Johnson of being \"slow to act\".\n\nHe asked the prime minister why restrictions were weaker in this lockdown compared with March.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson says the government acted \"within 24 hours\" of advice on the new Covid-19 variant\n\n\"We keep things under constant review,\" Mr Johnson replied. \"If there is any need to toughen up restrictions - which I don't rule out - we will of course come to this House.\n\n\"The lockdown measures we have in place combined with tier four measures that we were using are starting to show signs of some effect and we must take account of that too.\"\n\nHe added it was early days and urged people to abide by the rules.\n\nQuestioned by the liaison committee on Wednesday afternoon, Mr Johnson said it was \"far, far too early\" to say there could be any relaxation of the lockdown in the middle of February, and \"we've got to work very hard to achieve that\".\n\nHe acknowledged that it was a \"tragedy\" that so many children were missing face-to-face teaching at school and said reopening schools was \"the priority\".\n\nTier four - the highest level in England's tier system which bans households mixing indoors - was introduced on 21 December in parts of south-east England, including London.\n\nIt was then widened to include more of southern England on Boxing Day. England has been in a national lockdown since 5 January.\n\nMr Johnson also said the vaccination programme was going \"exceptionally fast\" but \"at the moment the limit is on supply\" of the vaccine.\n\n\"We will be going to 24/7 as soon as we can,\" he told MPs, saying Health Secretary Matt Hancock will set out further details \"in due course\".\n\nMore than 2.4 million people have had a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, while 412,167 people have had a second dose.\n\nScotland's Health Secretary Jeane Freeman said it was \"entirely possible\" to offer round-the-clock vaccinations in Scotland once mass sites were up and running by late February or early March.\n\nThere are very early signs that infections may have peaked - although as always we should be careful about reading too much into a few days' worth of data.\n\nThe past two days have seen newly diagnosed cases hover around the 46,000-mark. Up to the weekend, the average was close to 60,000.\n\nThe drop has largely been driven by falls in new cases in London, the South East and East of England.\n\nThe national picture does mask some regional differences. Cases are rising in the North West, which is causing particular concern.\n\nIt is too early for the vaccination programme to be having any significant impact so a combination of the national lockdown on top of the tier four restrictions that were imposed in some areas before Christmas look like they may be beginning to have an impact.\n\nThere is also some evidence the new variant may not be quite as fast-spreading as first feared - a Public Health England study suggested rather than being 70% more transmissible, it may actually be somewhere between 30% to 50%.\n\nAnd, if it does represent the start of a continuous fall, it is important to remember it will still take some time to translate into fewer hospital cases - people being admitted at the moment are those who would have caught the virus a week or two ago.\n\nBut after six weeks of pretty sustained rises, it is at least an encouraging sign.\n\nEarlier, Health Secretary Matt Hancock questioned whether there would be demand for a round-the-clock vaccination operation, saying: \"Most people want to get vaccinated in the daytime, and also most people who are doing the vaccinations want to give them in the daytime, but there may be circumstances in which that would help.\"\n\nHe said England's lockdown measures were \"always under review\", but he would be \"very reluctant\" to remove the rule of meeting one other person outside for exercise as \"it is a lifeline\" for some people, including those who live alone. Mr Hancock has already ruled out scrapping support bubbles.\n\n\"What I'd rather is that everybody follow that rule and doesn't stretch it or flex it,\" he said.", "Fans of the University of Alabama football team gathered in the streets of Tuscaloosa in Alabama, ignoring social distancing.\n\nThey were celebrating the university's third national championship in the past six years.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Wednesday morning. We'll have another update for you at 18:00 BST.\n\nThe first Covid patients have begun receiving a new treatment it's hoped will prevent sufferers becoming seriously ill. The patients are part of a large-scale trial testing the effect of inhaling a protein called interferon beta which the body produces when it gets a viral infection. Developed at Southampton University Hospital and produced by biotech company, Synairgen, early findings suggest the treatment cuts the odds of severe illness by almost 80%. Find out more here.\n\nKaye Flitney is one of those enrolled on the clinical trial\n\nMany hospital staff treating the sickest patients during the first wave of the pandemic have been left struggling to cope, a new study suggests. Researchers at King's College London questioned 709 workers at nine units in England and nearly half reported symptoms of severe anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or problem drinking. Lead researcher Prof Neil Greenberg said it should be a \"wake-up call\" for managers about the need to provide more mental health support. Some staff are they're also facing abuse online and at protests from Covid sceptics and anti-lockdown activists.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nChildren's minister Vicky Ford says caterers must urgently improve the quality of food parcels being provided for low-income families. Catering company Chartwells has apologised after photographs of some parcels were shared online and heavily criticised. The packages - more on them here - are being sent to children who would normally receive free school meals in England. The row could well come up when Education Secretary Gavin Williamson faces MPs' questioning later. Our education correspondent looks closely at Mr Williamson - a man whose political obituary has been written so many times he must sometimes feel like the walking dead.\n\nTwitter user Roadside Mum complained about the parcel she received\n\nNurse Kate Fraser said administering the vaccination to Ms Curry had been \"emotional\"\n\nFind more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nPlus, Britain's top police officer, Dame Cressida Dick, says it's \"preposterous\" to suggest some people are not aware of what the lockdown laws now tell them to do. So how much do you know? Try our quiz.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "Democrats, including Jamie Raskin (centre), voted to impeach President Donald Trump, as did 10 Republicans\n\nThe US House of Representatives has voted to impeach President Donald Trump for a second time over his alleged role in the 6 January deadly assault on the Capitol.\n\nHis impeachment for \"incitement to insurrection\" was approved by 232 representatives including 10 Republicans.\n\nDemocrats led the effort to charge Mr Trump with encouraging the riots.\n\nBut some Republicans had backed calls for impeachment.\n\nSo, who are these key players, and what do we know about them?\n\nWhen the impeachment charges go to the Senate for trial, the case for the prosecution will be made by a team of lawmakers, led by Mr Raskin, a Democratic representative from Maryland since 2017 and a former professor of constitutional law.\n\nThe impeachment of Mr Trump represents the continuation of an extremely challenging start to 2021 for Mr Raskin, 58.\n\nJamie Raskin (left) helped to draft the article of impeachment against President Trump\n\nThe congressman's 25-year-old son, Tommy Bloom Raskin, took his own life on New Year's Eve and was laid to rest in early January.\n\nA day after the funeral, Mr Raskin found himself hunkering down with colleagues, shielding from a violent mob that rampaged through the Capitol where lawmakers were meeting to certify November's presidential election result.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Rep. Jamie Raskin This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nOn the day of the assault, Mr Raskin helped to draw up an article of impeachment against President Trump.\n\nSpeaking to the Washington Post, Mr Raskin said his son, who was studying law at Harvard University, would have considered last week's violence \"the absolute worst form of crime against democracy\".\n\n\"It really is Tommy Raskin, and his love and his values and his passion, that have kept me going,\" Mr Raskin said.\n\nIn total, nine Democrats, including Mr Raskin, have been named as impeachment managers. One is Representative Madeleine Dean, from Pennsylvania, who is one of three women on the team.\n\nMs Dean started her career in law, opening her own three-woman practice in Pennsylvania before teaching English at a university.\n\nHaving been active in state politics for decades, she was elected to the House in 2018, using her seat to champion women's reproductive rights, gun law reform, and healthcare for all, among other issues.\n\nMadeleine Dean has called for a quick trial of President Trump in the Senate\n\nIn an interview with MSNBC, Ms Dean, 68, said she favoured a \"speedy trial\" in the Senate if Mr Trump was impeached.\n\n\"This isn't about a party. This isn't about politics. This is about protection of our constitution, of our rule of law,\" Ms Dean said.\n\nAs the Speaker of the House, Ms Pelosi has been in the spotlight since the riots in the Capitol.\n\nMs Pelosi leads the Democrats in the lower chamber of Congress, so the 80-year-old had a huge influence over the decision to introduce an article of impeachment against Mr Trump.\n\nMs Pelosi had the House proceed with impeachment after former Vice-President Mike Pence did not invoked constitutional powers to force out Mr Trump, who was then president.\n\nMr Pence said at the time he believed such a move was against the country's interests.\n\n\"This president is guilty of inciting insurrection. He has to pay a price for that,\" Ms Pelosi said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The storming of the US Capitol\n\nMr McConnell, a 78-year-old Republican senator for Kentucky, is one to watch in the Senate.\n\nThe upper chamber's former majority leader remains the man at the helm of the upper chamber's Republican caucus.\n\nDubbed the \"Grim Reaper\" by Democrats, Mr McConnell was a thorn in the side of former President Barack Obama, often manoeuvring to frustrate his legislative agenda and judicial appointments.\n\nHe was also the driving force behind Mr Trump's acquittal in his first impeachment trial in 2019.\n\nIn his last few weeks as Senate leader, Mr McConnell also delayed Mr Trump's trial until after the former president left office, saying there was no time for a \"fair or serious trial\" ahead of Mr Biden's inauguration.\n\nMr McConnell has not publicly commented on whether he supports convicting or acquitting Mr Trump, but he has sent some mixed messages.\n\nMitch McConnell had been loyal to President Trump until the Capitol riots\n\nThough he spent the last four years in the president's corner, the minority leader said the rioters were \"provoked by\" Mr Trump and that he plans to hear out both sides in the trial.\n\nBut later on in January, he also joined the majority of Republican senators to vote for a motion to toss out the impeachment case as unconstitutional now that Mr Trump is no longer in the White House.\n\nMr McConnell may no longer have the final say on all things impeachment, but as Democrats need Republican support to convict Mr Trump with the required two-thirds majority, he still has a key role to play in the upcoming proceedings.\n\nWith just over a week to go before the trial, Mr Trump parted ways with his legal team, including attorneys Butch Bowers and Deborah Barbier.\n\nThey were quickly replaced by David Schoen, a trial lawyer, and Bruce Castor, a former district attorney, who will lead the defence efforts for the former president.\n\nIn a statement, both attorneys said they didn't believe the push to impeach Mr Trump is constitutional.\n\nDavid Schoen, left, and Bruce Castor will lead the defence efforts for the former president\n\nMr Castor added: \"The strength of our Constitution is about to be tested like never before in our history.\n\n\"It is strong and resilient. A document written for the ages, and it will triumph over partisanship yet again, and always.\"\n\nMr Schoen has previously represented Roger Stone, former adviser to Mr Trump. Stone received a presidential pardon in December.\n\nThe lawyer also made headlines in the past for meeting with Jeffrey Epstein in his final days to discuss possible representation, and for later saying he did not believe the death of the US financier and sex offender was suicide.\n\nMr Castor, a former Pennsylvania district attorney, is known for declining to prosecute Bill Cosby for sexual assault in 2005. The comedian was eventually convicted on three counts of sexual assault in a 2018 retrial of his case.\n\nMs Cheney, 54, is third-highest-ranking Republican leader in the House. As the daughter of former Republican Vice-President Dick Cheney, she has a high profile in the party.\n\nSo, her support for impeachment is particularly significant.\n\nLiz Cheney has accused President Trump of inciting the attack on Congress\n\nMr Trump had \"summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack\", Ms Cheney said of the Capitol riots.\n\n\"There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,\" the Wyoming representative said.\n\nHowever, in a recent test of support for conviction on impeachment charges that Mr Trump incited his supporters to mount an insurrection at the US Capitol, 45 out of 50 Senate Republicans voted last week to consider stopping the trial before it even starts.\n\nMs Cheney survived a House Republican vote - 145-61 - to oust her from her leadership position after breaking ranks with other GOP lawmakers last month to impeach the former president.\n\nShe is also now facing a primary challenger for her Wyoming congressional seat after voting to impeach Mr Trump.\n\nBlocking Mr Trump from ever running for office again is one rationale that may motivate some Republicans to impeach the president.\n\nThat reasoning could be attractive to Republican senators like Mr Sasse, who is seen as a possible contender for the presidency in 2024.\n\nElected to the Senate in 2014, the 48-year-old has been an ardent critic of Mr Trump.\n\nBen Sasse refused to overturn the results of November's presidential election in Congress\n\nMr Sasse was firmly opposed to a Republican effort - cheered on by Mr Trump - to overturn the certification of President-elect Joe Biden's election victory in Congress.\n\nOn the question of impeachment, Mr Sasse said he would \"definitely consider whatever articles they might move\" in the House.\n\nA two-thirds majority would be needed to convict Mr Trump in the Senate, meaning at least 17 Republicans - including Mr Sasse - would have to vote for it.\n\nIn Mr Trump's first impeachment trial in 2020, it was Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts who presided over the proceedings.\n\nThis time, he declined to participate, handing the job over to the 80-year-old Vermont Democrat, who will take the gavel in this second impeachment trial.\n\nMr Leahy was first elected to the Senate in 1974, and is the longest serving lawmaker in the upper chamber.\n\nHe will be presiding in his role as the Senate's president pro tempore - a constitutional officer, responsible for presiding over the Senate in the absence of the vice-president.\n\nIn a statement, he said \"the president pro tempore takes an additional special oath to do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws\" when presiding over an impeachment trial.\n\n\"It is an oath that I take extraordinarily seriously.\"", "Many of the works in Gurlitt's collection were in poor condition when they were discovered in 2012 (file photo)\n\nWhen a trove of 1,500 artworks hoarded by the son of a Nazi-era art dealer was discovered in 2012, an investigation began to find out how many were looted from Jewish owners.\n\nEventually only 14 were conclusively identified as looted, and now Germany has declared the last of those works has been returned to the owner's heirs.\n\nDas Klavierspiel (Playing the Piano) by Carl Spitzweg was owned by music publisher Henri Hinrichsen.\n\nHe was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.\n\nGerman Culture Minister Monika Grütters said the return of the work sent an \"important signal\", and that while it could not make up for the deep suffering, it could \"make a contribution to historical justice and fulfil our moral responsibility\".\n\nThe 19th-Century work by Spitzweg was confiscated by the Nazis in 1939, the same year that Hinrichsen had bought it.\n\nDas Klavierspiel by Carl Spitzweg was seized by the Nazis in 1939\n\nIt was bought in 1940 by Hildebrand Gurlitt, a Nazi-era dealer who had been given the task by Adolf Hitler of dealing in art seized from Jewish collectors and of buying up so-called \"degenerate art\" removed from museums for a planned Führermuseum in the Austrian city of Linz.\n\nThe money for the Spitzweg work was paid into a blocked account, so Hinrichsen would never have received it.\n\nIn 2015, the piece was identified as looted, and it was handed over to the auctioneers Christie's on Tuesday, according to the wishes of Hinrichsen's heirs.\n\nAlthough his collection of 1,500 works, plundered from museums as well as individuals, was initially confiscated after the war by the Allies, Hildebrand Gurlitt eventually managed to get it back.\n\nGurlitt died in the 1950s and when German authorities approached his widow in 1961 in search of part of his collection, she claimed the works had been destroyed at the end of World War Two by Allied bombing.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BBC's Stephen Evans was granted exclusive access to look at some of the long-lost masterpieces in 2014\n\nIt was only when tax investigators searched the Munich flat of his son Cornelius Gurlitt in 2012 that they found more than 1,400 of the works. Another 60 pieces were discovered at his Austrian home in Salzburg the following year.\n\nThe son died in 2014 with questions still hanging over the ownership of the collection - as he was protected by a statute of limitations.\n\nA court ruled that the works could be bequeathed to the Museum of Fine Arts in the Swiss capital Bern, as Cornelius Gurlitt had requested.\n\nWhile some of the works were deemed to belong to the family, the German Lost Art Foundation then tried to find out, with the Swiss museum, who were the rightful owners of the rest.\n\nFourteen pieces have now conclusively identified as belonging to Jewish owners and returned.\n\nAmong the many masterpieces in the collection was this work by Edouard Manet", "Isabella Curry urged others to get the jab and said it was just a little \"prick in the arm\"\n\nA woman has celebrated her 100th birthday by getting a covid vaccination at home.\n\nIsabella Curry, known as Ella, from Cramlington, was among some of the most vulnerable people in Northumberland to receive the vaccine.\n\nMs Curry, who lives alone, urged others not to be afraid to get the jab and said it was just a little \"prick in the arm\" and she now felt safe.\n\nHer birthday was also marked by the arrival of a card from the Queen.\n\nShe said: \"This vaccine means I'll be able to go out, meet my friends soon and feel safe.\"\n\nIsabella Curry's nephew Neil Curry thanked the \"army\" of helpers who cared for his aunt\n\nMs Curry's nephew, Neil Curry from Bristol, said he was delighted she had had the vaccination but sad the whole family could not get together for the milestone birthday.\n\n\"We had a family reunion for Ella's 90th - we all got together in Newcastle. We would have all got together again to mark this occasion, but we couldn't,\" he said.\n\nHe also said he wanted to thank the \"army\" of people who looked after his aunt including Noreen and Jim Hutchinson, who did her shopping and cut her grass.\n\nHe also thanked June and Peter Marshall and all the other people who collected her prescriptions and mobile library books.\n\nKate Fraser, the community nurse who administered the vaccination, said: \"It's been an emotional time being able to give Isabella her vaccination.\"\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.", "People's reaction to a sonic boom heard across the East of England has been caught on camera.\n\nIt happened after a Typhoon aircraft took off from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire to escort a plane to Stansted Airport because it had lost communications at about 13:05 GMT.\n\nPeople in Cambridgeshire, Essex and parts of London posted videos on social media, with one person heard asking if it was thunder.\n\nHeather Eastlake, who was filming herself exercising near Cambridge, described her reaction as being like \"a deer in the highlights\".", "Libby Squire was not seen alive after travelling to Oak Road playing fields with Pawel Relowicz, a court heard\n\nA man accused of raping and murdering a student committed a string of \"sexually motivated\" burglaries in the months before her death, a court has heard.\n\nJurors heard \"trophies\" - underwear and sex toys - stolen from other women were found after his arrest.\n\nProsecutors claim he was \"prowling the streets\" of Hull's student area in search of a victim when he intercepted the \"extremely vulnerable\" Ms Squire.\n\nSheffield Crown Court previously heard the defendant drove Ms Squire - who had earlier been refused entry to a nightclub - to the Oak Road playing fields.\n\nOnce there, jurors were told, he subjected her to an \"act of sexual violence\" before he disposed of her body in the River Hull.\n\nHer remains were found in the Humber Estuary almost seven weeks later.\n\nProsecutor Richard Wright QC said Mr Relowicz would claim Ms Squire had \"instigated consensual sexual intercourse\", and he had left her \"safe and well\" on the fields.\n\nRichard Wright QC continued to outline the case against Pawel Relowicz on Wednesday\n\nHowever, Sam Alford, who lives nearby, reported hearing a woman's \"desperate screams\" coming from the direction of the river, the court heard.\n\nProsecutors allege the screams were Ms Squire's and a man seen \"emerging from the darkness\" and fleeing the area was the defendant.\n\n\"Libby was never seen again\", Mr Wright told jurors.\n\nThe screams, and scratches to the defendant's face were evidence Ms Squire had \"fought him off\", the court heard.\n\nMr Wright said the evidence established \"that she was raped by a man whose entire motivation for coming into contact with her that night was to take her away from safety to a remote area well known to him and there to subject her to his uncontrollable sexual urges\".\n\nThe prosecutor said a pathologist concluded he could not establish how Ms Squire died despite \"an obvious bruise\" to the inside of her right thigh.\n\nMr Wright told jurors a CCTV recording made after the last sighting of Ms Squire showed Mr Relowicz performing a sex act in the middle of a street.\n\nA condom found at the scene days later yielded a DNA profile matching the defendant, the court heard.\n\nIn the year leading up to Ms Squire's disappearance, Mr Relowicz exposed himself to women in public and watched them through windows as they changed or had sex, the court heard.\n\nHe also \"burgled their homes with the purpose of stealing their underwear and sexual toys or other objects,\" Mr Wright said.\n\nUniversity of Hull student Libby Squire was last seen in the early hours of 1 February 2019\n\nFollowing his arrest on 6 February, Mr Wright said, police recovered the pink holdall \"full of sex toys... and some photographs of young women and several pairs of women's knickers and thongs\".\n\nA statement made by Ms Squire's mother, Lisa Squire, was read out in court describing her daughter having battled mental health issues including an eating disorder, self-harming - cutting the top of her arms, legs and chest - and depression.\n\nShe said her eldest child had been afraid of water since she was young, to the point she would not go near a swimming pool when on holiday. She was also scared of the dark, jurors were told.\n\nStatements by Ms Squire's boyfriend Connor James-Pye were also read out, in which he described Libby as being \"a happy drunk\" and that she \"didn't understand moderation\".\n\nHowever, on the night she disappeared, the court heard Ms Squire \"didn't want to go out because she had a lecture the next morning, but she didn't want to let the girls down\".\n\nMr James-Pye last heard from his girlfriend at about 22:30 on 31 January, jurors heard.\n\nThe 21-year-old's body was recovered from the Humber Estuary on 20 March 2019\n\nFollow BBC East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The button battery was stuck in Sofia-Grace's throat for four months\n\nAn 11-month-old girl who was rejecting solid food had a button battery lodged in her throat for four months.\n\nDoctors thought Sofia-Grace Hill had tonsillitis or a viral infection until an X-ray revealed the battery the size of a 10p in her oesophagus.\n\nShe underwent a two-hour operation to remove it and is now on a liquid only diet.\n\nA surgeon said her survival may be due to the battery being old and without charge.\n\nDad Calham, from Swindon, first noticed something was wrong in January 2020 and had countless paramedic call-outs and visits to the GP and local hospital.\n\nShe had a two-hour operation to remove the battery\n\nHe was convinced there was something else going on as Sofia-Grace would only eat pureed food.\n\nAfter another hospital trip in May, she was given an X-ray which showed the battery lodged in her oesophagus was causing serious damage as it had corroded.\n\nMr Hill said: \"I was gutted when I saw it and angry at myself. I blamed myself, but now I realise there was nothing we could have done to know.\"\n\nThe button battery is the size of a 10p\n\nSofia-Grace had a feeding tube fitted to help her with food and to stop her throat from closing.\n\nEvery two weeks she has a general anaesthetic to stretch her oesophagus but faces the prospect of further surgery.\n\nMr Hill said: \"The damage has left a pocket in her oesophagus which needs to close but Sofia is improving week by week with regular dilations which is improving her oesophagus.\n\n\"But I know the chance of survival in the first weeks after this happens is very low so we are moving in the right direction.\"\n\nSofia-Grace is improving week by week, her dad said\n\nMr Hill is unsure how Sofia-Grace, now almost two-years-old, got hold of the button battery and warned parents about the dangers.\n\nHe said: \"Just get rid of them or lock them away and don't give your child car keys to play with. Always trust your instincts as a parent.\"\n\nJanet McNally, consultant paediatric surgeon at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children, who is treating Sofia-Grace, said her survival may be because the battery was old and had lost its charge.\n\nShe said that without someone seeing a child swallow a battery or obvious symptoms it was not unusual for it to be missed.\n\n\"Clinicians and the government have been warning of the dangers of button batteries for a long time. But not all parents are aware of how dangerous they can be.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Brazil's variant: Two 'spike' changes flagged up\n\nAs MPs have been mentioning today - a coronavirus variant has been found circulating in the Amazonas state of Brazil, and was picked up in Japan in travellers from the region. It’s different from the UK and South African variants, but it contains common mutations - two changes to the virus’ \"spike\" in particular which have been flagged as potentially making the virus more infectious. This is not going to be the last mutation we hear about. At the moment changes are mainly being picked up in areas that do lots of genetic tracking of the virus - it’s almost certain there are other mutations already circulating unseen in other parts of the world. And the virus will continue to mutate - it’s just a question of how, how much and how fast. For now there’s no evidence the virus is becoming more dangerous - but if more people catch it then, left unchecked, more will potentially become ill or die. But the vaccines, which target several different areas of the virus’ spike, should still work - though that’s something that scientists the world over will be monitoring very closely.", "The three main Covid-19 vaccines are from Pfizer-BioNTech, the University of Oxford and Astra-Zeneca and Moderna.\n\nThe Pfizer, Oxford and Moderna vaccines each require two doses and you are not fully vaccinated until you have had both shots.\n\nBut there are many differences between them.\n\nThe BBC's Laura Foster looks at how much immunity they give, how they prevent infection and how they compare.", "Parents say teachers at special schools often provide medical care and should be treated like other front-line workers\n\nParents of children with special educational needs and disabilities are calling for teachers in special schools to be vaccinated against Covid-19.\n\nMany parents have been told their children cannot attend school because of safety concerns about the virus.\n\nNow they want staff in special schools to be prioritised for the vaccine and considered front-line workers.\n\nThe government said special schools should encourage pupils to attend.\n\nLaura cares for son Oscar alone and says their respite support collapsed during the pandemic\n\nStaff in special schools are often required to provide personal and medical care for pupils, such as clearing tracheotomies, on top of regular teaching responsibilities.\n\nThe schools also offer precious respite to many families of disabled children who require a lot of additional care.\n\nLaura Godfrey, 33, from Norwich, is mum to nine-year-old Oscar, who usually attends a school for children with complex needs. His return was delayed at the start of term, despite government advice for these schools to remain open.\n\n\"His school provision is essential to us as a family. Oscar's mental health suffered a lot in the first lockdown, as did mine. It was a very dark time.\"\n\nHe is currently attending school, but Laura worries it could be forced to close in the event of an outbreak.\n\nShe is calling for staff at special schools to be given PPE and access to the vaccine, to keep schools open and protect vulnerable pupils.\n\n\"They should be recognised and treated as front-line staff and afforded the same protections.\"\n\nLaura's calls have been echoed by Mark Powell, CEO of the Dorset-based Diverse Abilities charity which runs a special school in Poole.\n\nStaff at Langside School in Poole were provided with PPE at the start of the pandemic\n\nThe school bought its own PPE in order to remain open during the pandemic but said it was \"very difficult and extremely costly\".\n\nMr Powell described PPE as a \"wonderful barrier to prevent the spread of the virus\" but said it had also been \"a devastating barrier to the development and well-being of our pupils\".\n\n\"The fact we have nurses, physiotherapists, and occupational therapists on site to form part of our children's school provision means that our school can be classified as a health setting, which are at the top of the list for priority vaccinations.\"\n\nThe Department for Education said the impact of being out of education \"can be greatest on vulnerable children and those with education, health and care plans\".\n\nIt said special schools should \"continue to welcome and encourage pupils to go into school full-time\" where possible and \"ensure pupils with Send can successfully access remote education\" if they are unable to attend.", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nIvan Cavaleiro scored a late header to earn Premier League strugglers Fulham a hard-fought draw against Tottenham in their hastily rearranged London derby.\n\nThe Portuguese forward's finish cancelled out Harry Kane's first-half diving header and came just minutes after Son Heung-min hit the post in search of Spurs' second.\n\nCavaleiro sealed a remarkable turnaround for a side whose manager Scott Parker said it was \"scandalous\" to be given just two days' notice to face Jose Mourinho's men after Spurs' game at Aston Villa was postponed because of a Covid-19 outbreak in the Villa camp.\n\nTottenham boss Mourinho had little sympathy for the visitors as the derby itself was a rearranged fixture, having been called off three hours before kick-off when originally scheduled on 30 December.\n\nFor all the complications surrounding the fixture, the intensity from two sides at opposite ends of the table was high at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, with Fulham's fifth successive league draw a valuable point in their efforts to escape the relegation zone.\n• None Relive Tottenham v Fulham as it happened and analysis\n\nFulham made a bright start and Andre-Frank Zambo Anguissa's fierce shot to test Hugo Lloris was a warning of what was to come from a side who remain 18th despite the draw.\n\nThe excellent Alphonse Areola twice denied Son in the first 45 minutes, first blocking a toe-poked effort before palming a header away.\n\nAreola could do nothing, however, to deny Kane the opener in the 25th minute, with the striker beating the Frenchman with a thumping diving header from an excellently-placed Sergio Reguilon cross.\n\nKane was off target with another header and Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Kenny Tete threatened to respond for the visitors, who had the woodwork to thank for denying Son in the second half after the South Korean scuffed a shot past Areola.\n\nSubstitute Ademola Lookman was instrumental following his introduction, creating the equaliser for Cavaleiro seven minutes after coming off the bench.\n\nThe powerful finish extended Fulham's unbeaten run to five league matches, which is their longest such sequence in the top flight in three Premier League campaigns since 2012-13.\n\nThis latest draw highlights just how resolute Parker's men have become after a slow start to the campaign, in which they collected just one point from their first six matches.\n\nSpurs punished for reliance on Kane and Son\n\nWhile the Cottagers may be in the relegation places and had lost a record 13 successive top-flight matches to London rivals, they presented a significantly sterner test of Mourinho's men than non-league side Marine - a team made up of NHS workers, teachers and a refuse collector - which Spurs cruised past in the third round of the FA Cup on Sunday.\n\nThe prolific pair of Kane and Son, a duo that has now scored 23 of Tottenham's 30 league goals this term, were among 10 to return to Spurs' starting line-up.\n\nSon was an unused substitute on their trip to Crosby but Kane, along with Lloris, Eric Dier, Serge Aurier and Harry Winks came back from being rested.\n\nWhile Kane was clinical with the nodded finish, he reacted in frustration as he flicked another header off target.\n\nThat miss, as well as the wastefulness of Reguilon - who sent an early effort over - and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg's tame strike, ensured Fulham were still in it at half-time.\n\nMoussa Sissoko also dithered in the box when an early second-half chance presented itself, allowing Tosin Adarabioyo to superbly block.\n\nSon's effort off the post, and their reliance on him and Kane for goals, ultimately proved costly as Cavaleiro ended the hosts' run of three clean sheets in January.\n\nAnd while Reguilon did have the ball in the back of the net again for Tottenham in the final minute, it was immediately disallowed for offside as Spurs missed the chance to move up to third in the table.\n\n'Some players had one day's training' - what the managers said\n\nTottenham manager Jose Mourinho, speaking to BBC Sport: \"In the first half Alphonse Areola made some impossible saves, a couple of others in the second, too.\n\n\"We have to kill a game and we didn't - but you have to keep a clean sheet, not make mistakes, so it was a very avoidable goal. The markers are there, there wasn't even an advantage in terms of numbers.\n\n\"Fulham were intelligent enough to understand the way they play, they change, they become more defensive and they are getting results. I thought they were a bit lucky but they were good.\n\n\"We have bad results and we should - and we could have - avoided these results.\"\n\nFulham boss Scott Parker, speaking to BBC Sport: \"I'm very proud of this team for what we've been through. There's a lot of talk around - everyone assumes about what happened. I know what we've been through the last two weeks.\n\n\"We had players out there today who had one day's training. What pleased me most was a desire and a passion and a real quality at times tonight.\n\n\"There's a real determination and hard work from this group of players. They've never shied away from anything.\"\n\nOn Monday's announcement of the game with Tottenham: \"We were told, in the end, at 9:30. It was put to me on Saturday, if there was a possibility, but I just batted it off thinking 'no chance'.\n\n\"This game was supposed to be scheduled 16 days ago - for 10 days some of these boys were locked up in their houses. I was surprised but it wasn't in terms of preparing for this game, we've prepared in two days for a game before, it was more just getting told of the consequences that you face.\"\n\nBest of the stats\n• None Tottenham and Fulham played out their first draw in the Premier League since December 2009, with Spurs winning 10 of the last 11 encounters (L1).\n• None Tottenham are unbeaten in their last eight London derbies in the Premier League (W3 D5), they've never gone longer without defeat against sides from the capital in the competition.\n• None Fulham have drawn five consecutive Premier League games, their longest such run since January 2007 (six games).\n• None Fulham have gained five points in their last four Premier League away games (W1 D2 L1), more than they collected in their previous 13 on the road in the competition (W1 D1 L11).\n• None Only Brighton (12) and Sheffield United (11) have dropped more points from winning positions than Spurs (10) in the Premier League this season.\n• None Tottenham's Harry Kane has become just the third player to score 25 Premier League goals with his head (25), his right foot (94) and his left foot (34) - after Robbie Fowler and Andy Cole.\n• None Ademola Lookman has been directly involved in five goals (two goals, three assists) in the Premier League this season, more than any other Fulham player.\n\nTottenham travel to Bramall Lane on Sunday (14:05 GMT) to face the Premier League's bottom side Sheffield United, who on Tuesday earned their first top-flight win of the season.\n\nFulham face Chelsea in another derby, hosting their west London rivals on Saturday (17:30 GMT).\n• None Offside, Tottenham Hotspur. Erik Lamela tries a through ball, but Son Heung-Min is caught offside.\n• None Attempt blocked. Antonee Robinson (Fulham) left footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Aboubakar Kamara. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Can the TV personality make it as a pro footballer?\n• None New drama brings the chilling crimes of Charles Sobhraj to life", "Doctors' leaders have called for urgent improvements in personal protective equipment for health workers.\n\nThe British Medical Association is appealing for a higher grade of face mask to guard against coronavirus infection.\n\nIt says there is 'growing evidence' that the virus is being spread through the air by aerosols.\n\nThese are tiny virus particles that can build up in stuffy rooms and they have been linked to outbreaks of Covid-19.\n\nThis follows an open letter from more than 1,500 health professionals for staff on general wards to be given the type of high-quality masks usually only worn in intensive care units.\n\nPublic Health England (PHE) has issued guidance on what PPE staff in different settings require. It was last updated in October 2020.\n\nEarly in the pandemic, it was widely believed that to catch the disease you had to either be close to an infected person and hit by droplets from their coughs or sneezes or touch a surface they had contaminated.\n\nBut research during the course of last year highlighted how it is also possible for the virus to be carried in what are called aerosols, drifting and accumulating in the air.\n\nMost infections are thought to have occurred indoors in badly ventilated rooms, and many studies have shown that the 'airborne route' can be an important factor.\n\nAcross the UK, the guidance for hospital staff is to wear surgical masks in most areas.\n\nMore sophisticated masks - a type known as FFP3 that includes an air filter - are only required in intensive care or when certain procedures are carried out that are known to generate aerosols.\n\nIn their letter, the consultants, doctors and nurses say healthcare workers are three to four times more likely to become infected than the general population.\n\nBut they point out that staff in intensive care units, who have the best level of protection, have about half the risk of catching the virus than colleagues on general wards.\n\nThe letter states: \"It is now essential that healthcare workers have their PPE upgraded to protect against airborne transmission\".\n\nBarry McAree, a consultant surgeon in Northern Ireland, is one of many healthcare workers to be ill with Covid.\n\nHe is self-isolating at home right after his testing positive for the second time.\n\nA signatory to the letter, he says his hospital in Antrim followed the guidance about which type of masks should be worn in which areas, but he became infected nonetheless. It is not clear how and when he caught it.\n\n\"There's so much evidence that we are talking about an airborne infection that it has to be said that it is not appropriate just to wear FFP3 in environments when aerosol generating procedures take place.\"\n\nHe believes that with such high levels of the virus in the community and in hospitals, staff should be wearing the higher-grade masks whenever they're close to patients.\n\nSurgical masks can be bought online for about 10p each, while the FFP3 masks are far more expensive about £5.00.\n\nDr Barry Jones, a retired gastroenterologist and leading expert on aerosols, says that's nothing compared to the cost of a patient with Covid,\n\nHe points to data showing that roughly a fifth of people needing hospital treatment for Covid may have acquired the infection in hospital in the first place.\n\n\"We should do everything we can to reduce that possibility - it's the air we share that's killing us.\"\n\nA few hospitals have decided to break with official guidance.\n\nIt's understood that hospitals in Cambridge, Plymouth and Exeter have decided to equip staff with FFP3 masks if they face patients diagnosed with Covid or suspected of having it.\n\nOne consultant, who did not want to be named, said: \"When you realise patients are more infectious at an earlier stage of disease and are presenting at general wards with poorer ventilation than intensive care units and staff are wearing a poorer quality of PPE, you really want those in a position of leadership to listen and to act.\"\n\nRCN General Secretary Dame Donna Kinnair, said: \"Without delay, they must state whether existing PPE guidance is adequate for the new variant.\n\n\"While more research is carried out, we ask for the precautionary principle to be applied and staff to be given a higher level of PPE if working with suspected or confirmed cases.\"\n\nPublic Health England said this was a matter for NHS England to comment on.\n\nA Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: \"The safety of NHS and social care staff has always been our top priority and we continue to work tirelessly to deliver PPE that protects those on the frontline.\n\n\"UK guidance on the safest levels of PPE is written by experts and agreed by all four chief medical officers. Our guidance is kept under constant review based on the latest evidence and data.\n\n\"Emerging evidence and data, including on variant strains, will be continually monitored and reviewed, and the guidance updated accordingly if needed.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Home Secretary Priti Patel: \"Our selfless police officers... will enforce the regulations and I will back them to do so\"\n\nPeople have been urged to \"play your part\" and follow Covid rules by Home Secretary Priti Patel, who says she will back police to enforce laws.\n\nAt a No 10 briefing, Ms Patel said a minority were \"putting the health of the nation at risk\" by flouting rules.\n\nPolice are \"moving more quickly to issuing fines\", she added, with nearly 45,000 fixed penalty notices issued across the UK.\n\nAnother 1,243 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid.\n\nAnd there have been a further 45,533 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK.\n\nMeanwhile, another 145,076 people have received a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and 20,768 a second dose, bringing the totals respectively to 2,431,648 and 412,167.\n\nAt the briefing, Ms Patel said: \"My message today to anyone refusing to do the right thing is simple: if you do not play your part, our selfless police officers - who are out there risking their own lives every day to keep us safe - they will enforce the regulations.\n\n\"And I will back them to do so, to protect our NHS and to save lives.\"\n\nIt comes after the UK's most senior police officer said lockdown rule-breakers were more likely to be fined as Covid laws would be enforced \"more quickly\".\n\nMetropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick said her officers had been forced to break up parties, despite hospitals in London struggling to cope with rising patient numbers.\n\nChairman of the National Police Chiefs' Council Martin Hewitt, who also spoke at the Downing Street briefing, said people should be asking themselves whether their reason for leaving home was \"truly essential\".\n\nHe stressed that police officers had been \"putting themselves at risk in order to keep people safe\", and said it had been \"disappointing\" to see some of the behaviour by rule-breakers.\n\nHe said examples of recent breaches included:\n\nMr Hewitt said he made \"no apology\" for police issuing fines, and warned people breaking rules - such as by organising parties or not wearing face coverings on public transport - to \"expect\" a fine.\n\nAsked if there needed to be more clarity on the guidance around exercise and staying local, Mr Hewitt said it would be wrong to put a \"particular distance\" on how far people could exercise from their home - as it would be too difficult for police to enforce.\n\nHe said it was right there was an exception to allow people to exercise, but insisted it was the public's responsibility to make sure they were doing so safely.\n\nThere is a big focus on adherence to lockdown rules. But what has almost gone unnoticed is the fact that cases may have actually started falling.\n\nThere has now been two consecutive days where newly diagnosed cases have hovered around the 46,000 mark. Up to the weekend, the average was close to 60,000.\n\nThe drop has largely been driven by falls in new cases in London, the south east and east of England.\n\nIn some regions, cases are still going up. The north west of England is causing particular concern.\n\nIt is too early for the vaccination programme to be having any significant impact, so a combination of the national lockdown on top of the tier four restrictions that were imposed in some areas before Christmas look like they may be beginning to have an impact.\n\nCare must be taken in reading too much into a couple of days' data.\n\nHospital cases are still rising - patients being admitted at the moment are the ones who were infected a week or so ago - but it does at least offer a glimmer of hope.\n\nLater in the news conference, NHS medical director for London Dr Vin Diwakar said the capital's Nightingale hospital has reopened and was admitting patients to help with the coronavirus spread.\n\nHe told reporters it was taking non-Covid patients to help free up beds in London's hospitals.\n\nDr Diwakar warned that if levels of hospitalisation in the capital continued to rise then more patients would need to be transferred out of London, adding that the NHS across the country was under pressure.\n\nIn Birmingham, 200 doctors are being redeployed to one of the country's largest intensive care units as it nears capacity.\n\nThe University Hospitals Birmingham Trust said there were 873 patients with Covid-19 in their hospitals, with 125 in intensive care.\n\nEarlier, crime and policing minister Kit Malthouse said people have a \"duty\" to make this lockdown \"the last one\".\n\n\"We are urging the small minority of people who aren't taking this seriously to do so now, and [we say] to them that, if they don't, they are much more likely to get fined by the police,\" he told BBC Breakfast.\n\nDame Cressida told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the move towards greater enforcement was \"common sense\" rather than a show of \"dictatorial policing\".\n\nFines start at £200 in England and Northern Ireland, and £60 in Wales and Scotland. Large parties can be shut down by the police, with fines of up to £10,000.\n\nEngland is currently under a national lockdown, meaning people must stay at home and can go out only for limited reasons such as food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home.\n\nSimilar lockdown measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - all of which are in charge of deciding and enforcing their own coronavirus restrictions.\n• None Could I be fined for exercising?", "YouTube has become the latest social network to suspend President Trump.\n\nThe Google-owned service has prevented his account from uploading new videos or live-streaming material for a minimum of seven days, and has said it may extend the period.\n\nThe firm said the channel had broken its rules over the incitement of violence.\n\nThe president had posted several videos on Tuesday night, some of which remain online.\n\nGoogle has not provided details of what Mr Trump said in the video it banned, however the BBC has discovered it was a clip from a press conference he had given on Tuesday.\n\nThe move came hours after civil rights groups had threatened to organise an ads boycott against YouTube.\n\nPresident Trump's YouTube channel remains live but he cannot post new videos\n\nJim Steyer - who previously helped coordinate similar action against Facebook last year - had called on Google to go further and take the president's channel offline.\n\n\"We hope they will make it permanent. It is disappointing that it took a Trump-incited attack to get here, but appears that the major platforms are finally beginning to step up,\" he tweeted after the suspension.YouTube suspends Donald Trump's channel\n\nGoogle said that Mr Trump could still face his page being closed if he falls foul of its three-strikes policy.\n\n\"After review, and in light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, we removed new content uploaded to Donald J Trump's channel for violating our policies,\" it said in a statement.\n\n\"It now has its first strike and is temporarily prevented from uploading new content for a minimum of seven days.\n\n\"Given the ongoing concerns about violence, we will also be indefinitely disabling comments on President Trump's channel, as we've done to other channels where there are safety concerns found in the comments section.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Apple chief Tim Cook told CBS News that those involved with the riots on the US Capitol last week should be held accountable.\n\n\"Everyone that had a part in it needs to be held accountable. I think no one is above the law. We're a rule of law country.\"\n\nHe did not mention President Trump by name, but added: \"I don't think we should let it go. This is something we've got to be serious about.\"\n\nMr Trump had already been suspended by Facebook and Instagram following last week's rioting on Capitol Hill, until at least the transition of power to Joe Biden on 20 January.\n\nTwitter has gone further by imposing a permanent ban.\n\nAmazon's Twitch has also disabled his account on its platform. And Snapchat has locked his account.\n\nShopify, Pinterest, TikTok and Reddit have also taken steps to restrict content associated with the president and his calls for the results of the US election to be challenged.\n\nYouTube has often been behind its social media rivals when it comes to moderating user-posted content.\n\nOver the years it has come under fire from campaign groups and big advertisers for not acting swiftly.\n\nNow it has followed Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat in restricting Donald Trump's access to its platform.\n\nAnd as so often, there's a lack of transparency about exactly what prompted the President's suspension.\n\nIt's only saying that a video violated its policies on incitement to violence, but is indicating that the issue was the President's remarks to reporters on Tuesday where he refused to take responsibility for the attack on Congress.\n\nOf course, those comments were broadcast on TV channels, including the BBC, and are still widely available.\n\nIt's not long ago that the social media landscape was being described as the Wild West when it came to moderating content - now the platforms suddenly seem eager to appear more cautious than the mainstream media.\n\nIt's amazing what the threat of regulation can do.", "A further 1,564 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test - the biggest figure reported in a single day since the pandemic began.\n\nIt brings the total number of deaths by that measure to 84,767.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England, said there have now been more deaths in the second wave than the first.\n\nAnd the prime minister warned there was a \"very substantial\" risk of intensive care capacity being \"overtopped\".\n\nSpeaking to the Commons Liaison Committee, Boris Johnson said the situation was \"very, very tough\" in the NHS and the strain on staff was \"colossal\".\n\nHe appealed to the public to follow lockdown rules, which require people in England to stay at home and only go out for limited reasons, such as for food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home.\n\nSimilar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nA further 47,525 new cases have also been recorded.\n\nPerhaps the most distressing element about the latest Covid deaths is that the numbers are almost certainly going to rise from here.\n\nPeople who are dying now are likely to have been infected three or so weeks ago, around Christmas time.\n\nThat was at a point when infection rates were rising quite steeply, so in the coming days and weeks we should, sadly, expect to see more deaths than this being reported.\n\nToday's figures are affected by the weekend, which sees delays in reporting deaths that tend to translate into higher figures from Tuesday onwards.\n\nCurrently around 1,000 people a day on average are dying once you take this into account.\n\nBut the figures also provide some hope. For the third day in a row the number of newly diagnosed infections are well below 50,000.\n\nThere have been several days where they have exceeded 60,000.\n\nIf that trend continues, and the number of new cases keeps coming down, that will eventually translate into the number of deaths falling.\n\nBut it is going to take some weeks for that to happen.\n\nThese are, as many have been saying, the darkest days of the pandemic so far.\n\nEarlier, during Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Johnson said lockdown measures were \"starting to show signs of some effect\".\n\nLabour's Sir Keir Starmer called for tougher restrictions in England, asking why they were weaker in this lockdown compared with March.\n\nDuring the first lockdown, nurseries were closed to most children and it was not permitted to exercise with someone from another household.\n\n\"We keep things under constant review,\" Mr Johnson replied. \"If there is any need to toughen up restrictions - which I don't rule out - we will of course come to this House.\"\n\nHe stressed that it was early days, but said: \"The lockdown measures we have in place combined with tier four measures that we were using are starting to show signs of some effect.\"\n\nLater, asked by the Commons Liaison Committee whether schools could reopen after February half-term, Mr Johnson said: \"It is far, far too early for us to say [early signs of progress mean] we can go into any kind of relaxation in the middle of February, we've got to work very hard to achieve that.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson took questions from MPs on the Commons Liaison Committee\n\nThe prime minister also said on Wednesday that Covid vaccinations will be offered 24 hours a day, seven days a week as soon as supply allows.\n\nThe number of people in the UK who have received the first dose of a vaccine has risen to 2,639,309 - up by 207,661 from the day before.\n\nCommenting on the latest daily figures, PHE's Dr Doyle said: \"With each passing day, more and more people are tragically losing their lives to this terrible virus.\"\n\nShe added: \"It is essential that we stay at home, minimise contact with other people and act as if you have the virus.\"\n\nThe vast majority of the deaths reported on Tuesday happened over the past week. However, at least 100 were in 2020, with one death dating back to May.\n\nThe previous highest daily death toll was on Friday, when 1,325 people were reported to have died.\n\nThese government figures count people who died within 28 days of testing positive, but there are other ways of measuring the total number of deaths.\n\nWhen all deaths where coronavirus is mentioned on the death certificate are counted, plus deaths known to have occurred more recently, the number of deaths involving Covid in the UK is more than 100,000.\n\nAnother method is to count excess deaths - all deaths over and above the usual number at the time of year.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Johnson: \"We are taking steps to ensure that we do not see the import of this new variant\".\n\nMeanwhile, the prime minister has said he is \"concerned\" about a new coronavirus variant that is believed to have emerged in Brazil. He acknowledged it is not yet clear how effective existing vaccines will be against the latest new variant.\n\nThe UK is taking steps to make sure it is not brought into the country, Mr Johnson said.\n\nA government Covid committee is meeting on Thursday to discuss the possibility of stopping flights from Brazil.\n\nArrivals from Brazil already have to self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nAnd from Monday, anyone arriving into the UK from any country will have to present a negative Covid test. The new rule had been due to come into force this week but the government said it was being put back to give travellers more time to prepare.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nHundreds of people have joined a march organised following claims a man died hours after being released by police in Cardiff.\n\nThe family of Mohamud Mohammed Hassan, 24, claim he was assaulted in custody.\n\nMore than 300 people took part in a march from the city centre to Cardiff Bay police station.\n\nSouth Wales Police said it found no evidence of excessive force. The police watchdog said initial tests showed Mr Hassan was not killed by any injuries.\n\nThe Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said toxicology tests were now being carried out and it was awaiting the full post-mortem results.\n\nEarlier, First Minister Mark Drakeford said the reports of Mr Hassan's death were \"deeply concerning\".\n\nMr Hassan was arrested at his Roath home on Friday on suspicion of breach of the peace but released without charge on Saturday morning.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMr Hassan's aunt Zainab Hassan told BBC Wales she had seen Mr Hassan within an hour of his release.\n\n\"He was released on Saturday morning with lots of wounds on his body and lots of bruises,\" she said.\n\n\"He didn't have these wounds when he was arrested and when he came out of Cardiff Bay police station, he had them.\"\n\nIn a virtual session of the Welsh Parliament on Monday, Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price said: \"Every effort should be made to seek the truth of what happened.\"\n\nHe said he wanted to know why Mr Hassan was arrested and what happened during his arrest.\n\nMr Hassan's aunt Zainab Hassan said she saw him after his release\n\n\"Why did this young man die?,\" he added.\n\nMr Price said any inquiry should not be prejudged, but asked if the first minister would \"help the family find those answers\".\n\nIn response, Mr Drakeford said reports of the story were \"deeply concerning\".\n\n\"Our thoughts must be with the family of a young man who was... a fit and healthy individual,\" the Cardiff West MS said.\n\nMark Drakeford said he was deeply concerned by the reports\n\nMr Drakeford, who said the death must be \"properly investigated\", said the first step in any inquiry would be to allow the IOPC to carry out their work, which he said he expected \"to be done rigorously and with full and visible independence\".\n\nHe added that if there were things the Welsh Government could do \"I will make sure that we attend properly to those\".\n\nProtesters on Tuesday afternoon chanted \"no justice, no peace\" and called for the police force to release CCTV of Mr Hassan's time in custody.\n\nProtesters on Tuesday afternoon marched from the city centre to Cardiff Bay\n\nIn a statement on Monday, South Wales Police said Mr Hassan was arrested at his home in Newport Road on Friday night and taken to Cardiff Bay police station.\n\nHe was released at 08:30 GMT on Saturday and officers returned to the property at about 22:30 following his death.\n\nIt added: \"As part of the South Wales Police investigation CCTV and body-worn video has already been, and will continue to be, examined.\n\n\"This will assist in establishing and understanding the events that took place.\n\n\"Early findings by the force indicate no misconduct issues and no excessive force.\"\n\nProtesters were heard chanting \"no justice, no peace\"\n\nCatrin Evans, the IOPC's director for Wales, said its investigation would focus on Mr Hassan's arrest, the journey in a police van to custody and his time at Cardiff Bay police station, including whether relevant assessments were made before he was released.\n\nShe said they would be \"urgently examining the extensive relevant CCTV footage and body-worn video\" and would be speaking to the officers involved as well as witnesses who saw his arrest on Friday evening and his movements the next day after leaving custody.\n\nShe added: \"I send my condolences to Mr Hassan's family and friends, and to everyone affected by his sad death.\n\n\"We are aware of concerns being expressed and questions being asked about use of force by police officers. We will look carefully at the level of force used during the interaction and I would urge people show patience while our inquiries, which will take some time, are made.\"\n\nMs Evans added: \"An interim report from a post-mortem examination is awaited.\n\n\"Preliminary indications are that there is no physical trauma injury to explain a cause of death, and toxicology tests are required.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Bonnie Watson Coleman is one of three Democratic lawmakers to have tested positive since the invasion of the US Capitol\n\nThree US lawmakers have tested positive for the coronavirus after sheltering for hours with colleagues during last week's deadly assault on the Capitol.\n\nHouse Democrats Bonnie Watson Coleman, Pramila Jayapal and Brad Schneider have announced their diagnoses.\n\nLast Wednesday they hunkered down in secure rooms, seeking refuge from an invasion of Congress in which five people died.\n\nSome Republicans were not wearing masks during the ordeal, footage suggests.\n\nVideo shared by Punchbowl News shows several lawmakers apparently refusing facemasks offered to them.\n\nHowever, CBS pictures from inside the chamber show Ms Jayapal was herself not wearing a mask at one point.\n\nMedical experts fear more lawmakers may have contracted the disease, potentially amounting to a super-spreader event at a time when coronavirus infections and deaths continue to rise in the US.\n\nThe US has recorded the highest number of coronavirus infections (22.6 million) and deaths (367,000) in the world, with no sign of the epidemic abating, despite the limited roll-out of vaccines.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. When a mob stormed the US capitol\n\nOver the weekend, top congressional doctor Brian Monahan told lawmakers and congressional staff who sheltered together from the riots to get tested.\n\n\"The time in this room was several hours for some and briefer for others,\" Mr Monahan said. \"During this time, individuals may have been exposed to another occupant with coronavirus infection.\"\n\nMr Monahan did not say how many lawmakers were in the room, but called on them to observe social-distancing measures and wear masks.\n\nNew Jersey Democratic Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman was the first lawmaker to confirm she had tested positive on Monday. In a tweet, the 75-year-old cancer survivor said she was resting at home with \"mild, cold-like symptoms\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMs Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state, and Illinois congressman Mr Schneider revealed they had tested positive on Tuesday.\n\nAll three Democrats accused Republican lawmakers of refusing to wear masks as they huddled together for safety last Wednesday.\n\n\"Any member who refuses to wear a mask should be fully held accountable for endangering our lives,\" Ms Jayapal wrote, calling for mask transgressors to be fined.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Rep. Pramila Jayapal This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe wearing of masks has been an explosive political issue throughout the pandemic in the US, with some lawmakers openly refusing to don a face covering.\n\nA Republican congressman, Jake LaTurner of Kansas, tested positive for Covid-19 after participating in a House vote to reject Arizona's presidential election results on Wednesday.\n\nBut on Tuesday, Mr LaTurner's spokesperson told the Topeka Capital-Journal newspaper that he was not in the secure area of the Capitol building where multiple members have since tested positive.\n\nOn Friday Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), had warned that Wednesday's rioting would probably have significant health consequences.\n\n\"You have to anticipate that this is another surge event,\" he told the McClatchy news agency. \"You had largely unmasked individuals in a non-distanced fashion, who were all through the Capitol.\"\n\nCoronavirus has swept through the heart of the American political establishment during the pandemic. One notable outbreak happened in September last year, when an event was held at the White House to announce the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court justice.\n\nSoon after, US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump tested positive for the virus, along with numerous other senior government officials.", "Tesco, Asda and Waitrose have become the latest supermarkets to say they will deny entry to shoppers who do not wear face masks unless they are medically exempt.\n\nIt follows a similar move by Morrisons, while Sainsbury's says it will challenge those who flout the rules.\n\nRetailers have been criticised for not doing enough to stop people breaking Covid rules as infections spread.\n\nBut enforcement of face coverings is officially a police responsibility.\n\nHowever, supermarkets can deny entry to their premises which is private property, and can call the police if someone refuses to follow the rules or becomes abusive.\n\nSenior police figures have reportedly said there is little officers can do to enforce the rules in shops because they are so busy.\n\nBut policing minister Kit Malthouse said that they would offer \"backup if things go seriously wrong\".\n\n\"What we hope is that in the vast majority of cases the enforcement, or the reminders if you like, put in place by the store owners will be enough,\" he told BBC News.\n\nA Tesco spokeswoman said the supermarket chain had decided to strengthen its policies.\n\n\"To protect our customers and colleagues, we won't let anyone into our stores who is not wearing a face covering, unless they are exempt in line with government guidance,\" she said.\n\n\"We are also asking our customers to shop alone, unless they're a carer or with children. To support our colleagues, we will have additional security in stores to help manage this.\"\n\nAn Asda spokesman said if customers had forgotten their face coverings, it would continue to offer them one free of charge.\n\nBut he added: \"Should a customer refuse to wear a covering without a valid medical reason and be in any way challenging to our colleagues about doing so, our security colleagues will refuse their entry.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. How to wear your mask. Hint: it's not any of these three options\n\nAndrew Murphy, executive director of operations at Waitrose, said: \"We've listened carefully to the clear change in tone and emphasis of the views and information shared by the UK's governments in recent days.\n\n\"By insisting on the wearing of face coverings, over and above the social distancing measures we already have in place, we aim to make our shops even safer for customers.\"\n\nOn Tuesday, Sainsbury's told the BBC it did not have the power to deny entry to shoppers without masks. However, trials showed customers complied more when asked to wear masks by security guards at the door, it said.\n\nIn an interview with the BBC, Sainsbury's boss, Simon Roberts, said \"we are not going to ban customers\".\n\nBut he urged shoppers to wear a mask and shop alone.\n\n\"By doing that we will help keep everybody safe,\" he said.\n\nThe Co-op also said it would not ban shoppers without masks from entering, and instead urged customers to take responsibility for wearing a face covering when visiting its stores, as it was mandatory by law.\n\nBoss of Co-op Food Jo Whitfield said: \"We've increased our in-store messaging to remind customers and government guidance does state that the police can take measures if members of the public don't comply with this law.\"\n\nIceland said it would take a similar approach, adding the vast majority of its customers continued to shop in compliance with the law.\n\n\"In view of the rising tide of abuse and violence being directed at our store colleagues, we do not expect them to confront the small minority of customers who aggressively refuse to comply with the law,\" a spokesman added.\n\nIn England, the police can issue a £200 fine to someone breaking the face covering rules. In Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, a £60 fine can be imposed. Repeat offenders face bigger fines.", "President Trump has just become the first sitting president to be impeached twice by the US House of Representatives.\n\nWe asked members of our BBC voter panel to weigh in as well.\n\nHere's what they said:\n\nQuote Message: Everything he has done is unconstitutional and, as a president, the number one thing he should be doing is upholding the Constitution. If not for him continually fighting the election results and claiming the election was stolen, if not for him holding that rally near the Capitol, if not for him talking about 'uprising', last week would very likely not have happened. Unfortunately it was completely predictable. from Melissa Dangaran 51, from Minnesota Everything he has done is unconstitutional and, as a president, the number one thing he should be doing is upholding the Constitution. If not for him continually fighting the election results and claiming the election was stolen, if not for him holding that rally near the Capitol, if not for him talking about 'uprising', last week would very likely not have happened. Unfortunately it was completely predictable.\n\nQuote Message: Unprecedented. He should not have been impeached at all. There is no justification, no legal basis, no constitutional basis for it. It's a rush to judgment for ulterior motives and a dark stain on our country. I'm concerned about the double standard and I'm afraid our Constitution is on its deathbed. Why would anybody who's rational think that our president meant for people to go break into the Capitol? from Belinda Noah 45, from Florida Unprecedented. He should not have been impeached at all. There is no justification, no legal basis, no constitutional basis for it. It's a rush to judgment for ulterior motives and a dark stain on our country. I'm concerned about the double standard and I'm afraid our Constitution is on its deathbed. Why would anybody who's rational think that our president meant for people to go break into the Capitol?\n\nQuote Message: It's more of a symbolic impeachment at this point because he'll be out soon, but it's necessary nonetheless. Not only is he a threat to our national security, but he doesn't condone white supremacy and other threats. It's deeply saddening to me. from Williams Morales 19, from Georgia It's more of a symbolic impeachment at this point because he'll be out soon, but it's necessary nonetheless. Not only is he a threat to our national security, but he doesn't condone white supremacy and other threats. It's deeply saddening to me.\n\nQuote Message: I was in DC at the rally - not near the Capitol - but I saw the president speak with my own eyes and he did not call for anyone to storm the building or cause harm. It's just a way to ensure he will not run in the next four years. It is political and it will create a bigger divide between left and right. All violence should be condemned fairly and justly. It was a very sad outcome, but I do not believe it was the most horrible day in our country's history. from Gabriel Montalvo 21, from New York I was in DC at the rally - not near the Capitol - but I saw the president speak with my own eyes and he did not call for anyone to storm the building or cause harm. It's just a way to ensure he will not run in the next four years. It is political and it will create a bigger divide between left and right. All violence should be condemned fairly and justly. It was a very sad outcome, but I do not believe it was the most horrible day in our country's history.", "US rapper YFN Lucci is wanted by police in Atlanta, Georgia, for his alleged involvement in the murder of a local man last month.\n\nTwo suspects have been arrested over the killing of the 28-year-old victim.\n\nAuthorities have appealed for help in locating YFN Lucci, 29 - whose birth name is Rayshawn Bennett.\n\nHe is wanted on suspicion of murder, aggravated assault and participation in criminal street gang activity, police told US media.\n\nThey say another man was wounded in the incident.\n\nLast month YFN Lucci released new material under the title Wish Me Well 3.\n\nIn 2018 rapper Cardi B was forced to defend her then-fiancé Offset against allegations of homophobia after he used a lyric by YFN Lucci that included the word \"queer.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Jasmina Alston This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Many hospital staff treating the sickest patients during the first wave of the pandemic were left traumatised by the experience, a study suggests.\n\nResearchers at King's College London asked 709 workers at nine intensive care units in England about how they were coping as the first wave eased.\n\nNearly half reported symptoms of severe anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or problem drinking.\n\nOne in seven had thoughts of self-harming or being \"better off dead\".\n\nNursing staff were more likely to report feelings of distress than doctors or other clinical staff in the anonymous web-based survey, which was carried out in June and July last year.\n\nVictoria Sullivan, an intensive care nurse at Queen's Hospital in Romford, said she often can't sleep because she's thinking about what is happening at the hospital.\n\nHer worst moment was breaking the news of a death on the phone, she said, adding that the screams from the patient's relatives \"will honestly stay with me forever\".\n\n\"Telling someone over the phone and all you can say is 'I'm really sorry', whilst they're crying their heart out, is quite traumatising,\" she said.\n\n\"Although you're saying how sorry you are, in the back of your mind, you're also thinking: 'I've got three other patients I've got to go and see, the infusions need drawing up, and meds need to be given and a nurse needs support'.\n\n\"The guilt is just too much.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nIn the study, which has been published online but has not yet been peer-reviewed:\n\nThe researchers say the findings are, in some ways, not surprising given the pressures ICU staff have faced.\n\nTheir workload has been relentless, caring for more patients than is ideal and under extremely challenging circumstances.\n\nLead researcher Prof Neil Greenberg said the findings should be a \"wake-up call\" for NHS managers.\n\nHe said: \"The severity of symptoms we identified are highly likely to impair some ICU staff's ability to provide high-quality care as well as negatively impacting on their quality of life.\"\n\nProf Greenberg said it was important to have \"occupationally focused\" mental health care to try to keep staff fighting fit or, where this was not possible, to ensure they got help to access the right sort of care.\n\nAnd he said that, while their work suggested things may have improved over the summer, there were signs the numbers experiencing mental health problems would rise in November and December.\n\nProf Partha Kar, diabetes consultant at Portsmouth Hospitals NHS trust, said it was \"really, really difficult seeing people battling through all sorts of odds\".\n\nHe added: \"We've got sickness rates high all around us and colleagues from all specialities, where they're not accustomed to seeing such ill patients, coming out and trying to help.\n\n\"Understandably the impact of that on everybody's mental health is not insignificant either... it's such a tough place to be in.\"\n\nPTSD is an anxiety disorder caused by very stressful, frightening or distressing events.\n\nSomeone with PTSD often relives the traumatic event through nightmares and flashbacks, and may experience feelings of isolation, irritability and guilt.\n\nThey may also have problems sleeping, such as insomnia, and find concentrating difficult.\n\nThese symptoms are often severe and persistent enough to have a significant impact on the person's day-to-day life.\n\nCauses of PTSD can include:\n\nAn NHS spokesperson said: \"This is an incredibly tough time for NHS staff working on the front line which is why we have invested £15m in support, including 38 local mental health and well-being hubs and a service for staff with complex mental health needs, such as trauma and addiction.\n\n\"The public can also help to support doctors and nurses by following the 'hands, space, face' guidance to reduce pressure on hospitals and save lives.\"\n\nIf you or someone you know has been affected by mental health issues, the organisations listed at this link might be able to help", "Sarah Ferguson has a long-held interest in history, especially that of the royals and the aristocracy\n\nSarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, has written her first novel for adults, to be released by the leading romantic fiction publisher Mills & Boon.\n\nHer Heart for a Compass is based on the life of the duchess's great-great-aunt, Lady Margaret Montagu Douglas Scott.\n\nShe has previously written children's books, non-fiction about Queen Victoria, and her own memoirs.\n\nShe said: \"I am proud to bring my personal brand of historical fiction to the publishing world.\"\n\n\"It all started with researching my ancestry. Digging into the history of the Montagu-Douglas Scotts, I first came across Lady Margaret, who intrigued me because she shared one of my given names,\" she added.\n\n\"But although her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, were close friends with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, I was unable to discover much about my namesake's early life, and so was born the idea which became Her Heart for a Compass.\"\n\nThe story will include some real people and events and also draw on the duchess's own experiences but she said \"my imagination took over\".\n\n\"I have long held a passion for historical research and telling the stories of strong women in history through film and television,\" she added.\n\nFor the big screen, she conceived the idea for the 2009 movie Young Victoria, starring Emily Blunt and written by Julian Fellowes.\n\nShe was a producer on the film and her daughter, Princess Beatrice, had a minor part. The duchess also worked on a documentary about Princess Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, Prince Albert's mother.\n\nShe recently revived her children's book series, Budgie the Helicopter.\n\nHeart for a Compass was written with the collaboration of established Mills & Boon novelist Marguerite Kaye, who has created more than 50 novels for the imprint, set in a variety of eras.\n\nThe duchess's novel is a saga that takes in events at Queen Victoria's court and the grand country houses of Scotland and Ireland, and crosses into the slums of London and on to the bustle of 1870s New York.\n\nMills & Boon described the story as a \"fascinating journey of a woman, born into the higher echelons of society, who desires to break the mould, follow her internal compass (her heart) and discover her raison d'être - and falling in love along the way\".\n\nMills & Boon is the UK's top publisher of romantic fiction and says it sells one of its novels every 10 seconds.\n\nThe stories are \"written by women, for women, it has a romance for every reader promising a happily-ever-after ending every time\", it adds.\n\nOther well-known names to venture into the Mills & Boon world include Made in Chelsea and I'm A Celebrity star Georgia Toffolo, whose debut romance novel, Meet Me in London, came out last year.\n\nBest-selling authors have also created stories for Mills & Boon under a pseudonym, including Destiny writer Sally Beauman (Vanessa James) and The Shell Seekers author Rosamunde Pilcher (Jane Fraser). PG Wodehouse also contributed a story in 1912.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Who were the protesters that broke into buildings on Capitol Hill after attending a rally in support of Donald Trump?\n\nSome were carrying symbols and flags strongly associated with particular ideas and factions, but in practice many of the members and their causes overlap.\n\nImages show individuals associated with a range of extreme and far-right groups and supporters of fringe online conspiracy theories, many of whom have long been active online and at pro-Trump rallies.\n\nOne of the most startling images, quickly shared across social media, shows a man dressed with a painted face, fur hat and horns, holding an American flag.\n\nHe's been identified as Jake Angeli, a well-known supporter of the baseless conspiracy theory QAnon. He calls himself the QAnon Shaman.\n\nHis social media presence shows him attending multiple QAnon events and posting YouTube videos about deep state conspiracies.\n\nHe was pictured in November making a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, about unproven claims the election was fraudulent.\n\nHis personal Facebook page is filled with images and memes relating to all sorts of extreme ideas and conspiracy theories.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nAnother group spotted at the storming of the Capitol were members of the far-right group Proud Boys.\n\nThe organisation was founded in 2016 and is anti-immigrant and all male. In the first US presidential debate President Trump in response to a question about white supremacists and militias said: \"Proud Boys - stand back and stand by.\"\n\nThe individual on the right is Nick Ochs, who describes himself as a \"Proud Boy Elder\".\n\nOne of their members, Nick Ochs, tweeted a selfie inside the building saying \"Hello from the Capital lol\". He also filmed a live stream inside.\n\nWe haven't identified the individual standing on the left in the above image.\n\nMr Ochs' profile on the messaging app Telegram describes himself as a \"Proud Boy Elder from Hawaii.\"\n\nIndividuals with large followings online were also spotted at the protests.\n\nAmong them was the social media personality Tim Gionet, who goes under the pseudonym \"Baked Alaska\".\n\nTim Gionet, better known as \"Baked Alaska\", livestreamed himself from the Capitol on Wednesday\n\nHis livestream from inside the Capitol posted on a niche streaming service was watched by thousands of people and showed him talking to other protesters.\n\nA Trump supporter, Mr Gionet has made a name for himself as an internet troll.\n\nYouTube banned his channel in October after he posted videos of himself harassing shop workers and refusing to wear a face-mask during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nOther platforms that have previously shut down his accounts include Twitter and PayPal.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 'Treason, traitors and thugs' - the words lawmakers used to describe Capitol riot\n\nA photo that went viral of a man who'd entered the office of senior Democrat politician Nancy Pelosi has been named as Richard Barnett from Arkansas.\n\nRichard Barnett left a message for US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying \"we will not back down\"\n\nOutside Capitol Hill buildings, he told the New York Times that he took an envelope from the speaker's office and says left a note calling her an expletive.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Matthew Rosenberg This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nReacting to the New York Times interview, Republican congressman Steve Womack said on Twitter: \"I'm sickened to learn that the below actions were perpetrated by a constituent.\"\n\nLocal media reports say Mr Barnett is involved in a group that supports gun rights, and that he was interviewed at a 'Stop the Steal' rally following the presidential election - a movement that refused to accept Joe Biden's victory and supports the president's unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud.\n\nIn the interview at the rally organised by 'Engaged Patriots' he said: \"If you don't like it, send somebody out to get me 'cause I ain't going down easy.\"\n\nThe group associated with Mr Barnett held a fundraiser in October with proceeds going towards body cameras for the local police department, according to the Westside Eagle Observer local paper.\n\nAs the events were unfolding, many social media users, especially those associated with QAnon and supporters of President Trump, were claiming that agitators from the loose-knit left-wing group antifa were involved.\n\nThe implication was that these activists were disguised as Trump supporters to create disruption.\n\nA number of prominent Republican politicians, such as US Representative Matt Gaetz, claimed it was antifa masquerading as Trump supporters.\n\nOne widely-shared post claimed one protester had a \"communist hammer\" tattoo, as evidence that he wasn't a Trump supporter.\n\nOn closer inspection, the symbol is from the video game series Dishonored.\n\nThere have also been suggestions that Mr Angeli, the man wearing fur and horns, was a Black Lives Matter supporter, with users sharing an image of him at a BLM event in Arizona.\n\nMr Angeli was indeed at that event, but he was there as a counter-protester. In images taken there, he's seen holding a QAnon sign.\n\nAt least one of the rioters was holding a Confederate flag, which represented US states that supported the continuation of slavery during the American civil war. For this reason, it is considered by many to be a symbol of racism and there have been calls to ban it across the US. Others see it as an important part of southern US history.\n\nA protester carries the Confederate flag after breaching US Capitol security\n\nIn July it was announced that the flag could no longer be flown on American military properties because of a new policy to reject \"divisive symbols\".\n\nPresident Trump has defended the use of the Confederate flag in the past, saying: \"I know people that like the Confederate flag and they're not thinking about slavery...I just think it's freedom of speech.\"\n\nThere were also protesters holding aloft flags featuring a coiled rattlesnake on a yellow background, often accompanied by the phrase \"don't tread on me\". This is known as the Gadsden flag, harking back to the American revolution and the war to expel British colonialists.\n\nIt was adopted by libertarians in the 1970s, according to an article in the New Yorker, and more recently became a favourite symbol of conservative Tea Party activists.\n\nThe flag has been adopted by the right over the past couple of decades, says Prof Margaret Weir, a political science expert at Brown University.\n\nIt is also used by anti-government, white supremacist groups who embrace violence, she says.", "The Christmas Day special saw Ashley Banjo (r) sit in for Simon Cowell\n\nThe filming of the next series of ITV show Britain's Got Talent has been postponed due to coronavirus concerns.\n\nProduction on the show was due to begin later this month but will now start at a later date yet to be confirmed.\n\nITV said it had decided to move \"the record and broadcast\" of the show's 15th series\" to safeguard \"the well-being of everyone involved\".\n\nThe filming of the programme's audition shows typically involves hundreds of people congregating en masse.\n\nIt is understood this has been considered to be unviable due to lockdown restrictions currently in place.\n\nWriting on Twitter, ITV thanked viewers for their \"continued love and support\" for the long-running programme.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by BGT This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe filming of last year's Christmas special was also postponed after at least three crew members tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nThe Christmas Day programme saw former contestants return to perform again alongside the show's panel of celebrity judges.\n\nThe show saw Ashley Banjo sit in for Simon Cowell, who spent much of last year recovering from an electric bicycle accident.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Prime Minister Boris Johnson has condemned the \"disgraceful scenes\" in the US, after supporters of President Donald Trump stormed Congress and clashed with police.\n\nRioters breached the Capitol building where lawmakers met to confirm Joe Biden's presidential election victory.\n\nThe PM said it was \"vital that there should be a peaceful and orderly transfer of power\".\n\nAnd Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was a \"direct attack on democracy\".\n\n\"The United States stands for democracy around the world and it is now vital that there should be a peaceful and orderly transfer of power,\" Mr Johnson tweeted.\n\nScottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, meanwhile, called the events \"utterly horrifying\".\n\nFriend of President Trump and leader of Reform UK - formerly the Brexit Party - Nigel Farage tweeted: \"Storming Capitol Hill is wrong. The protesters must leave.\"\n\nThe US Congress has now reconvened after the violence - spurred on by Mr Trump's unproven claims of electoral fraud - to certify Mr Biden's victory in the US election in November\n\nHundreds of the president's supporters stormed the Capitol, and staged an occupation of the building in Washington DC.\n\nBoth chambers of Congress were forced into recess, as protesters clashed with police and tear gas was released.\n\nFour people died on Capitol grounds during the violence, including a woman shot by police and three others, who died as a result of \"medical emergencies\", local police said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police place US Capitol Building on lockdown after Trump supporters breached security lines\n\nUK MPs from across the political spectrum have criticised the events in the US.\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab said there was \"no justification for these violent attempts to frustrate the lawful and proper transition of power\", while Home Secretary Priti Patel called the scenes \"unacceptable and undemocratic\".\n\nShe added: \"There is no justification for this violence and Donald Trump must condemn it.\"\n\nHer Conservative colleague, and former Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt directly addressed President Trump for telling the crowd to march on Congress, tweeting: \"He shames American democracy tonight and causes its friends anguish - but he is not America.\"\n\nLabour's deputy leader, Angela Rayner said: \"The violence that Donald Trump has unleashed is terrifying, and the Republicans who stood by him have blood on their hands.\"\n\nAnd shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy said the events were \"the legacy of a politics of hate that pits people against each other and threatens the foundations of democracy\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Boris Johnson This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMeanwhile, Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey has defended the prime minister's response to the rioting.\n\nAsked on ITV's Peston programme why Mr Johnson hadn't criticised Mr Trump, she said: \"The prime minister has been clear tonight that we need a peaceful and orderly transition.\"\n\nMs Coffey added that events in the US were a \"reminder that democracy is something precious - and will only continue to thrive as long as we protect institutions that make this country important and not demean each other when the majority of what we want to achieve is similar outcomes\".\n\nDonald Trump and Boris Johnson at a Nato summit in 2019\n\nMeanwhile, the SNP's leader in Westminster, Ian Blackford, said the end of Mr Trump's presidency \"cannot come quick enough\".\n\nHe tweeted: \"What a legacy the events of today are to his time in office. Shameful, shocking, an affront to democracy.\"\n\nLeader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, called the scenes \"absolutely horrendous\", while his party's foreign affairs spokeswoman, Layla Moran, said: \"The scenes coming out of Washington tonight are an attack on democracy.\"", "National Express has announced that it is suspending its entire national network of coach services from midnight on Sunday.\n\nThe firm said tighter Covid restrictions and falling passenger numbers had prompted the decision.\n\nIt added that it hoped to restart services in March.\n\nAll customers whose travel has been cancelled will be contacted and offered a free amendment or full refund, the company said.\n\nAll journeys before Monday 11 January will be completed to ensure any passengers making essential journeys are not stranded.\n\nChris Hardy, managing director of National Express UK Coach, said: \"We have been providing an important service for essential travel needs. However, with tighter restrictions and passenger numbers falling, it is no longer appropriate to do this.\n\nHe added that as the vaccination programme was rolled out and government guidance changed, the company would regularly review when services could restart.\n\n\"We plan to be back on the road as soon as the time is right and have put a provisional restart date of Monday 1 March in place,\" he said.\n\nNational Express first suspended coach services during the coronavirus crisis in April, then restarted in July.\n\nServices have been operating at half capacity, with strict cleaning and Covid protocols. As the tier structure came into operation, demand for services reduced.\n\nAs with the previous suspension, employees will be furloughed.\n\nFirms that transport passengers, including coach, rail and aviation businesses, have been under intense pressure during the coronavirus crisis.\n\nAvanti West Coast, the train operating company running services on the West Coast mainline, has confirmed it will cut its timetable from 18 January.\n\nAvanti says the new timetable will 'more closely reflect the current demand for our services whilst still allowing key workers, and those needing to make essential journeys, to travel with confidence'.\n\nDuring the first major lockdown in March, services on key intercity routes were reduced from three an hour to one. This included services from both Manchester and Birmingham to London.\n\nThe Department for Transport has been consulting with all train operators about service reductions during the latest lockdown.\n\nThe exact scale of reduction is still being worked on, but the DfT says service levels may fall to as low as 40% of the normal timetable by some operators.\n\nThe focus is to ensure essential workers can still make essential journeys.\n\n\"Following discussions with the Department for Transport we will be introducing a new timetable on Monday 18 January. This will more closely reflect the current demand for our services whilst still allowing key workers, and those needing to make essential journeys, to travel with confidence.\"\n\nOn Thursday, Ryanair also announced that it would make big cuts to its flight schedule from 21 January, with few, if any flights to or from the UK or Ireland until \"draconian travel restrictions are removed\".\n\nTrain services are expected to be reduced in lockdown, with some in the industry anticipating reductions of between 50% and 60% compared with normal service.\n\nIn the first national lockdown in England, services were reduced to almost half.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Work to get pupils connected in Wolverhampton is well under way\n\nThere are concerns some schools in lockdown could be inundated with pupils without laptops after a change to the vulnerable pupil list.\n\nPupils are learning remotely in England after schools were closed on Tuesday to all but children of key workers and those deemed vulnerable.\n\nBut those without laptops or space to study are now eligible to attend school, under government guidance.\n\nHeads' union, NAHT, said the move could reduce the effect of the shutdown.\n\nSchools were ordered to close to most pupils as a way of limiting the spread of the virus.\n\nNational Association of Head Teachers general secretary Paul Whiteman said demand for key worker and vulnerable places in schools had risen substantially since the last school shutdown.\n\nNearly a third of the 2,000 head teachers who joined an online union meeting on Wednesday afternoon reported having between 20 and 30% of pupils in school, the NAHT said.\n\nMr Whiteman said: \"It is critical that key worker child school places are only used when absolutely necessary to truly reduce numbers and spread of the virus.\n\n\"We have concern that the government has not supplied enough laptops for all the children without them and so has made lack of internet access a vulnerable criteria - only adding to numbers still in school.\n\n\"It is important that all vulnerable pupils have access to a school place, but the government must provide laptops and internet access for every pupil that needs one, so that they can access home learning to take some of the strain off the demand for school places.\n\n\"Nearly half of head teachers who we polled during a webcast on Wednesday evening said that had received fewer than 10% of the laptops they'd requested.\n\n\"It is essential that this is rectified immediately, so that we can keep school attendance figures at a level which will have the desired impact on getting transmission rates under control.\"\n\nJane Girt, head teacher of Carlton Bolling College in Bradford, said the rule change could leave her having to accommodate an extra 200 pupils on top of those already on the key worker and vulnerable children list.\n\nShe told BBC News that having so many pupils in school would \"defeat the object\" of closing amid the England-wide lockdown.\n\nMrs Girt said her secondary, which has more than 1,500 students, had received 261 laptops from the government since March but about 50% of pupils were sharing a device with another family member.\n\nThe prime minister told MPs on Wednesday that 560,000 devices had been given out to schools in 2020 and a further 50,000 so far this week.\n\nAnd Gavin Williamson reiterated that those without access to remote learning via digital devices could attend school.\n\nHe said: \"Schools are much better prepared to deliver online learning, with the delivery of hundreds of thousands of devices at breakneck speed, data support and high quality video lessons.\"\n\nBut Ofcom estimates there are up to 1.5m pupils without digital devices in their homes, on which they can learn.\n\nAmanda Bailey, director of the child poverty commission in north-east England, said pupils without internet access tended to be concentrated in disadvantaged areas and this meant some schools would be \"largely fully open\", she said.\n\n\"And we know that the most deprived communities are the ones most vulnerable to the health impact of the pandemic,\" she added.\n\n\"Our main concerns are that we're now nine months into this situation and we're still talking about families not having sufficient access to digital devices or data or the internet.\"\n\nLabour Councillor Beverley Momenabadi, Wolverhampton's champion for digital innovation, said the guidance massively expands the number of children who are entitled to go into school.\n\nShe said although plans to support those needing access while self-isolating in her city are at an advanced stage, with rental schemes being accessed and donations sought, the new lockdown changes the game completely.\n\nShe called for a national plan for the transition to remote learning.\n\nCouncillor Momenabadi said: \"Even after Gavin Williamson's statement in the Commons, children across the country are still waiting for that national plan.\n\n\"And even on the devices they've said will arrive; how will these be distributed, when will they arrive, will they arrive in time to ensure that no child misses out on their education?\"\n\nWill you have to send your child back to school because you are unable to supervise home learning? Or are you a teacher concerned about lack of equipment? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nUS President Donald Trump has been allowed to Tweet again, after being locked out of his account for 12 hours.\n\nPosting a more conciliatory message, he refrained from reiterating false claims of voter fraud.\n\nTwitter said that it would ban Mr Trump \"permanently\" if he breached the platform's rules again.\n\nThe move from Twitter puts clear water between it and Facebook, which suspended him \"indefinitely\" on Thursday.\n\nTwitter has instead given the outgoing president a final warning.\n\nEarlier on Thursday, the popular gaming platform Twitch also placed an indefinite ban on Mr Trump's channel, which he has used for rally broadcasts.\n\nMr Trump tweeted several message on Wednesday, calling the people who stormed Capitol Hill \"patriots\". He also said \"We love you.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. When a mob stormed the US capitol\n\nA spokesperson for Twitter said: \"After the Tweets were removed and the subsequent 12-hour period expired, access to @realDonaldTrump was restored.\n\n\"Any future violations of the Twitter Rules, including our Civic Integrity or Violent Threats policies, will result in permanent suspension of the @realDonaldTrump account.\"\n\nEarlier in the day, the president was suspended from Facebook and Instagram. That suspension will be reviewed after the transition of power to Joe Biden on 20 January.\n\nThe social network had originally imposed a 24-hour ban after the US Capitol attack.\n\nFacebook's chief, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote that the risks of allowing Mr Trump to post \"are simply too great\".\n\nMr Zuckerberg said Facebook had removed the president's posts \"because we judged that their effect - and likely their intent - would be to provoke further violence\".\n\nThis Facebook post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Facebook The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Facebook content may contain adverts. Skip facebook post by Mark This article contains content provided by Facebook. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Facebook cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Facebook content may contain adverts.\n\nHe said it was clear Mr Trump intended to undermine the transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden.\n\n\"Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete,\" he wrote.\n\nMr Trump's favoured platform, Twitter, suspended the president for 12 hours on Wednesday.\n\nThe company said it required the removal of three tweets for \"severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy\".\n\nIt said the president's account would remain locked for good if the tweets were not removed.\n\nTwitter has now confirmed the offending tweets have been removed, and he is free to tweet again.\n\nSnapchat also stopped Mr Trump from creating new posts, but did not say if or when it would end the ban. YouTube also removed Wednesday's video.\n\nThe president's supporters stormed the seat of US government and clashed with police, leading to the death of one woman.\n\nThe violence brought to a halt congressional debate over Democrat Joe Biden's election win.\n\nIn the House and Senate chambers, Republicans were challenging the certification of November's election results.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"We will never give up, we will never concede\", Trump tells supporters\n\nBefore the violence, President Trump had told supporters on the National Mall in Washington that the election had been stolen.\n\nHours later, as the violence mounted inside and outside the US Capitol, he appeared on video and repeated the false claim.", "The controversy over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been ongoing since 1977\n\nThe Trump administration has held the first sale for rights to drill for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - but it drew no interest from major companies.\n\nAn Alaskan state agency emerged as the primary bidder at the auction, which has been heavily criticised by environmental groups.\n\nThe sale raised less than $15m (£11m) - far less than the government had hoped.\n\nThe tepid interest comes amid big changes in the energy industry.\n\nMajor companies, including oil giant Exxon, Shell and BP, have said they are focusing their spending on renewable energy, amid a huge slump in oil prices, in part triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nAdam Kolton, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, said the sale was an \"epic failure\" for the Trump administration and the Alaska Republicans, who had backed the move as a way to create jobs and reduce American dependence on foreign oil.\n\n\"After years of promising a revenue and jobs bonanza they ended up throwing a party for themselves, with the state being one of the only bidders,\" he said in a statement.\n\n\"We have long known that the American people don't want drilling in the Arctic Refuge, the [Alaska native] Gwich'in people don't want it, and now we know the oil industry doesn't want it either.\"\n\nThe refuge is home to more than 200 species of bird including the Northern shrike\n\nMr Kolton said his organisation would continue to fight in court to reverse the sale of the land, which is home to caribou, polar bears and millions of migratory birds.\n\nThe wildlife refuge is estimated to hold some 11 billion barrels of oil.\n\nOpening the wilderness for drilling and development has been a long-term priority for Alaska Republicans, but development was expected to be costly since the area has minimal roads and infrastructure.\n\nAfter decades of controversy, the sale was finally authorised by the US Congress in 2017 as part of a major package of tax cuts. The auction comes just weeks before Donald Trump is due to leave office on 20 January.\n\nPresident-elect Joe Biden had vowed to protect the refuge and environmental groups have also challenged the sale, which they say threatens land that provides a vital home to wildlife.\n\nA federal court rejected arguments by environmental groups seeking to block the auction on Tuesday.\n\nPolar bears are particularly at risk of dying in oil spills\n\nAt Wednesday's auction, the Bureau of Land Management said it had received bids for 12 of the 22 tracts of land offered, covering more than 600,000 acres.\n\nThe Alaska Industrial Development and Industrial Authority, a state agency, was the sole bidder on at least eight of the 12 tracts.\n\nSome bids submitted were \"incomplete\", the bureau said.\n\nThe state agency has said it plans to work with private companies on development of the refuge, which encompasses more than 19,000 million acres overall.\n\nOn social media platform Twitter, Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy called the sale \"historic for Alaska and tremendous for America\".\n\n\"Opening [Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] for responsible resource development could put more oil in our pipeline, put Alaskans to work, bring billions of dollars of investment to our state, support American energy independence, and provide critical revenues to our state and local communities,\" he wrote.\n\n\"Alaskans have waited two generations for this moment; I stand with them in support of this day.\"", "Olly Stephens was stabbed to death in Emmer Green in Reading on Sunday\n\nThree teenagers have been charged with murder and conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm after a boy, 13, was stabbed to death in Reading.\n\nOliver Stephens, known as Olly, was pronounced dead at Bugs Bottom fields, Emmer Green, on Sunday.\n\nTwo boys, aged 13 and 14, and a girl, aged 13, will appear in Reading Magistrates' Court on Thursday.\n\nTwo other boys, also aged 13, have been released on bail, with strict conditions, until 1 February.\n\nThe girl has also been charged with perverting the course of justice.\n\nIn a statement, Oliver's family said: \"An Olly-sized hole has been left in our hearts.\"\n\nHis parents said their son was \"an enigma\", and having both autism and suspected pathological demand avoidance meant \"he became a challenge we never shied away from\".\n\nThe family described the ordeal as \"every parents' worst nightmare\".\n\nThey also sought to highlight those who helped at the scene, including \"a Good Samaritan that tried valiantly to save Oliver\", an off-duty doctor who offered help, and the emergency services.\n\nOfficers were called just before 16:00 GMT on Sunday following reports of an attack in fields on the boundary of Emmer Green and Caversham Heights.\n\nParents laying flowers at nearby Highdown School called the killing \"utterly senseless\" and said their children who attended school with Olly were \"devastated\".\n\nDet Supt Kevin Brown urged anyone with information to contact police and not to share any images or footage on social media.\n\n\"This continues to be a very difficult time for the family of Olly. Our thoughts remain with them,\" he said.\n\n\"The Stephens family appreciate all of the kindness shown to them but they have asked that their privacy is respected at this very difficult time.\"\n\nFollow BBC South on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to south.newsonline@bbc.co.uk.", "South Vietnam flags were seen during the unrest Image caption: South Vietnam flags were seen during the unrest\n\nOn Wednesday, as protesters gathered outside before swarming the Capitol building, the yellow flags of the old South Vietnam regime could be seen.\n\nIn fact, the yellow flags of the former South Vietnam are a common sight at pro-Trump rallies across the United States.\n\nVietnamese Americans, especially those of the older generation who fled Vietnam after Saigon fell in 1975, are known for their support for the Republican party and Donald Trump.\n\nA pre-election survey by the group Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote found that Vietnamese Americans are the only major East Asian ethnic community that favoured Trump over Biden . Trump’s anti-China and anti-communist rhetoric resonated greatly with the former refugees who risked their lives to escape communism.\n\nBut the support for President Trump has also become an increasingly divisive issue amongst the Vietnamese American community.\n\nHours after the Capitol riot, there are still calls on pro-Trump internet forums like the \"ABC Trump\" Facebook page for Vietnamese Americans to “take to the streets in support of President Trump” as “the battle continues”.\n\nBut there have also been condemnations.\n\n“This is embarrassing,” one young Vietnamese American wrote on Twitter, adding: “They’ve brought shame to the flag”.", "Nguyen Huy Hung was one of 39 people who died in a container en route from Belgium to Essex\n\nThe father of a 15-year-old boy who was one of 39 people to die in a lorry trailer said he learned of his son's death through social media.\n\nNguyen Huy Hung died in the sealed container en route from Belgium to Purfleet, Essex, in October 2019.\n\nHis father, Nguyen Huy Tung, said the family could not believe it until \"we saw his body by our own eyes\" at the hospital.\n\nEight men are being sentenced for their role in the people-smuggling operation.\n\nThe bodies of 39 Vietnamese nationals were discovered in a refrigerated trailer on 23 October last year\n\nThe 39 Vietnamese migrants, aged 15 to 44, were sealed inside the container for at least 12 hours.\n\nThe Old Bailey heard how it became a \"tomb\" as temperatures reached an \"unbearable\" 38.5C (101F).\n\nThe people trapped inside had used a metal pole to try to punch through the roof, but only managed to dent the interior.\n\nAt a sentencing hearing set to last three days in front of Mr Justice Sweeney, some of their final desperate phone messages were played in court.\n\nIn one message, a man spoke with ragged breaths as he apologised to his family.\n\n\"I can't breathe,\" he said. \"I want to come back to my family. Have a good life.\"\n\nIn the background, a voice could be heard pleading: \"Come on everyone. Open up, open up.\"\n\nProsecutor Jonathan Polnay read out statements from the victims' families, and the mother of another 15-year-old who died, Dinh Dinh Binh, said her family had \"not been able to get back to our normal life yet\".\n\n\"Our economic conditions and work are negatively affected,\" she said. \"We have had to sell some properties of the family to afford our life.\"\n\nThe 39 people who died in the back of a trailer as it crossed the North Sea between Zeebrugge and the UK\n\nTran Hai Loc and his wife Nguyen Thi Van, both 35, were found huddled together in the trailer, and left behind two children, aged six and four.\n\nThe children's grandfather, Tran Dinh Thanh, said: \"At the moment their children are very small - this incident will affect their future.\n\n\"Every day, when they come home from school they always look at the photos of their parents on the altar. The decease of both parents is a big loss to them.\"\n\nThe moment lorry driver Maurice Robinson opened the trailer door and discovered the bodies inside was captured on CCTV\n\nPhan Thi Thanh, 41, had sold the family home and left her son with his godmother before setting off on the journey.\n\nHer son, who is now being looked after by his father in the UK, said he felt \"very heartbroken with mum not around\".\n\nHaulier boss Ronan Hughes, 41, of Tyholland, County Monaghan, Ireland, was described as a ringleader of the operation. He closed his eyes as the phone messages were played to the court. Other defendants hung their heads.\n\nBoth Maurice Robinson (l) and Ronan Hughes (r) admitted 39 counts of manslaughter in connection with the case\n\nHughes had previously admitted manslaughter, as had 26-year-old lorry driver Maurice Robinson, from County Armagh, who discovered the bodies in the trailer.\n\nEamonn Harrison, 24, of Newry, County Down, who dropped off the trailer at Zeebrugge port, and people-smuggler Gheorghe Nica, 43, were convicted of the same charge by a jury.\n\nThey will be sentenced alongside Christopher Kennedy, 24, from County Armagh, Valentin Calota, 38, from Birmingham, Alexandru-Ovidiu Hanga, 28, of Hobart Road, Tilbury, Essex, and Gazmir Nuzi, 43, of Tottenham, north London, who were convicted for their role in the smuggling.\n\nGheorghe Nica and Eamonn Harrison were both found guilty of manslaughter\n\nMr Polnay said: \"These defendants were party to a sophisticated, long-running and profitable conspiracy to smuggle [mainly] Vietnamese migrants to the UK, in the back of lorries, in a deliberate and intentional breach of border control.\"\n\nThe fee was between £10,000 and £13,000 for each migrant, for the \"VIP route\", the court heard.\n\nMr Polnay said seven smuggling trips were identified between May 2018 and 23 October 2019, but there was \"an irresistible inference that there were more events than those that were fortuitously detected\".\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "It is inevitable that part of the politics of a pandemic is the perceived relative performance of different countries.\n\nYou can pick your metric to make your comparison, and plenty have.\n\nThe death toll in the UK, and the economic slump, have come in for particular criticism.\n\nBut the government has, for some time, sought to emphasise how the UK is ahead of the game on vaccinations.\n\nThe UK was considerably quicker than the EU, for instance, in licencing the first vaccine, from Pfizer-BioNTech.\n\nAt today's news conference, the Prime Minister has pointed out that the UK has already given more people a first jab for Covid than all the other countries in Europe put together.\n\nSir Simon Stevens, the Chief Executive of the National Health Service in England, added that the UK has jabbed four times as many people as Germany and 300 times more than France.\n\nBut he acknowledged the scale of the ongoing challenge - trying to vaccinate as many people in the next five weeks as normally happens in five months with the flu jab.\n\nOne final thought: ministers tend to suggest international comparisons are pointless or premature when the comparisons are less than flattering.\n\nThey're rather keener on them when the numbers look better.", "Teachers' estimated grades will be used to replace cancelled GCSEs and A-levels in England this summer, says Education Secretary Gavin Williamson.\n\nHe told MPs he would \"trust in teachers rather than algorithms\", a reference to the U-turn over last year's exams.\n\nFor primaries, he confirmed there would be no Year 6 Sats tests this year.\n\nMr Williamson promised parents it would be \"mandatory\" for schools to provide \"high-quality remote education\" of three to five hours per day.\n\nHe said this would be \"enforced\" by Ofsted, with inspections where there were \"serious concerns\" about what was provided for children now studying at home.\n\nLabour's Shadow Education Secretary, Kate Green, accused Mr Williamson of \"chaos and confusion\" - and said he had failed to listen to the \"expertise of professionals on the front line\".\n\nShe said he had given a \"cast-iron commitment\" that exams would go ahead - and Ms Green said: \"At that moment, we should have known they were doomed to be cancelled.\"\n\nMr Williamson, in a statement to the House of Commons, said there would be \"training and support\" for teachers in estimating grades, \"to ensure these are awarded fairly and consistently\".\n\nHe also told MPs there would be no Sats tests for those at the end of primary school.\n\n\"I can absolutely confirm that we won't be proceeding with Sats this year. We do recognise that this will be an additional burden on schools\n\nGeoff Barton, leader of the ASCL head teachers' union, said rather than a \"vague statement\" of how A-levels and GCSEs would be graded, ministers should already have a system ready in place - and it was a \"dereliction of duty\" that it was not already prepared.\n\nAnd he warned against repeating the \"shambles\" of last summer's cancelled exams.\n\nThe education secretary confirmed to MPs that GCSEs and A-levels are not going ahead - after this week's decision that it was no longer feasible with so much time lost in the Covid pandemic and the latest lockdown.\n\nThe exams watchdog Ofqual will draw up proposals for an alternative way of deciding results, for qualifications that could be used for jobs, staying on in school or university places.\n\nSimon Lebus, the watchdog's interim head, said evidence for replacement grades could include tests, homework, mock exams and teachers' observations - and would take into account how much of the syllabus had been covered.\n\nA consultation is expected to begin next week, with plans to be decided by the end of February or possibly sooner.\n\nLast year's attempts to find an alternative approach to exam results, which initially used an algorithm, descended into chaos - and eventually switched to using teachers' grades.\n\nAnd without any exam papers or standardised mock exams, the use of teachers' assessments, with some process of moderation between schools, will be used for this summer's candidates.\n\nOn vocational qualifications, Labour's Ms Green said the education secretary was \"failing to show leadership on exams in January\".\n\nVocational exams, such as BTecs, are carrying on, if schools and colleges decide to continue with them - but college leaders had complained that there needed to be a national decision to avoid confusion.\n\nIf students cannot take BTec exams this month as planned, they will still be awarded a grade, if they have \"enough evidence to receive a certificate that they need for progression\", says the awarding body Pearson.\n\nAn Ofqual spokeswoman said they would consider options for replacement exam results, academic and vocational, \"to ensure the fairest possible outcome in the circumstances\".\n\nThe exams watchdog's decisions will face much scrutiny - with the previous head of Ofqual resigning after last summer's U-turns over grades.\n\nMr Williamson's statement in the Commons came as all GCSE, AS and A-level exams in Northern Ireland were cancelled due to the Covid-19 crisis.\n\nEducation Minister Peter Weir announced the decision in the Stormont assembly on Wednesday.\n\nScotland has already cancelled its Nationals, Highers and Advanced Highers.\n\nGCSEs and A-levels in Wales were scrapped in November.", "Adrian Chiles first joined 5 Live for its launch in 1994\n\nAdrian Chiles has been confirmed as the broadcaster who will replace Emma Barnett on BBC Radio 5 Live on Thursday mornings.\n\nNaga Munchetty now presents the same show from Monday to Wednesday.\n\nChiles has previously presented the same time slot on Fridays, along with the BBC's The One Show and Match of the Day 2, as well as ITV's Daybreak show.\n\n\"Adrian is a wonderful broadcaster who our audience trust and respect,\" said 5 Live controller Heidi Dawson.\n\n\"He has that unique ability to put listeners at ease and make them smile, whilst remaining relentless in his questioning of those in positions of power.\"\n\nChiles, who will present the show on Thursdays and Fridays, joined the station at its launch in 1994 and has featured regularly on shows like Wake Up To Money, and 5 Live Drive.\n\nFollowing his move to mid-morning, Chiles' Question Time Extra Time show will be replaced by a new programme, hosted by Colin Murray.\n\nBarnett, who has moved to BBC Radio 4 to host Woman's Hour, defended herself this week after a guest who was booked to appear on the BBC Radio 4 programme dropped out due to remarks the presenter made about her off-air.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Epsom Racecourse in Surrey will be one of seven mass vaccination hubs announced by the government\n\nSeven new mass Covid vaccination hubs across England have been announced by the government.\n\nCentres in London, Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Surrey and Stevenage are due to begin operations next week.\n\nVarious venues will be converted into regional centres in a bid to meet the government's target of vaccinating 14 million people in the UK by February.\n\nIt is expected the hubs will be staffed by NHS staff and volunteers.\n\nThe seven sites announced by Downing Street are:\n\nAshton Gate Stadium, home to Bristol City FC, will be used to help the government meet its vaccination target\n\nSupermarket chain Morrisons has confirmed car parks at its stores in Yeovil, Wakefield and Winsford would be used to drive-through vaccinations from Monday. It has also offered an additional 47 sites to the government.\n\nPremier League club Tottenham Hotspur has also offered the use of its stadium to the NHS as a venue to provide the coronavirus vaccine.\n\nThe sites across England will begin operations next week", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. US Capitol riots: How the world's media reacted\n\nShock and contempt for the violent storming of the US Capitol by Donald Trump's supporters is evident in many reports and commentary on the event from around the world.\n\nFrom Germany's Die Welt daily describing \"disturbing, sad, terrifying scenes\", to the Nigerian Tribune saying \"Trump supporters defile US democracy\", many criticise the outgoing president for what what they see as his role in degrading America's institutions and democracy.\n\nOne commentator in Argentina's leading daily Clarin called it \"the 'scorched earth' legacy of Donald Trump\".\n\n\"Narcissism prevailing over all dignity, he harasses institutions, tramples on democracy, divides his own camp,\" says an editorial in France's Le Figaro.\n\n\"In refusing to quit, Donald Trump exposes the fragility of the American system in a final destructive offensive,\" a columnist says in France's Le Monde. Another headline in the paper calls him \"the insurrectional president\".\n\nIn Turkey, the pro-government Turkiye paper notes: \"Trump's stubbornness stirred the US\".\n\n\"I expect Trump to be tried after this turmoil,\" said one pundit on Egypt's MBC Misr TV, adding that \"the US is no longer a superpower in the full sense of the word\".\n\nSeveral of America's adversaries seized the opportunity to portray the incident as an example of the country's structural weaknesses and what they see as its hypocrisy.\n\n\"@SpeakerPelosi once referred to the Hong Kong riots as 'a beautiful sight to behold' — it remains yet to be seen whether she will say the same about the recent developments in Capitol Hill,\" tweeted China's daily Global Times.\n\n\"Capital vandals show fragility of US democracy,\" claimed a headline in the paper.\n\nIn Iran, state TV and radio inaccurately reported that the mayor of Washington DC had imposed \"martial law\", instead of the 12-hour curfew on the capital, which is what actually happened.\n\nAnd in Russia, where the first day of the Orthodox Christmas is currently being celebrated, footage of Trump's supporters ransacking the Capitol dominates state TV.\n\nMorning bulletins have focused on the events in America\n\nRolling news channel Rossiya 24 has played scenes of the violence at length, with no comment other than the caption \"Attack on the Capitol\".\n\nSome channels have also shown sympathy for the pro-Trump supporters, suggesting that they had cause to feel \"cheated\" over November's presidential election, and talked up claims that the event represents a crisis for US and even Western democracy.\n\nRossiya 24 said they were \"dissatisfied with the most scandalous election in US history\", while Rossiya 1 said it was the US system of democracy that was \"to a large degree the cause of today's events\".\n\nEven for those not necessarily unfriendly to America, the incident shows serious rifts in society that Trump's departure won't address.\n\nIt is \"a spectacular demonstration of frustration that has been building in the USA for decades,\" says one commentator in Poland's conservative daily Rzeczpospolita.\n\n\"Behind the façade of plastered smiles… and phrases about 'the best country in the world' lies the drama of a gigantic income gap, society in which more and more people struggle to make ends meet, while the few do not even know how many billions they own.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nI'm standing in what should be an operating theatre - but instead it's been converted into an intensive care unit for Covid-19 patients on ventilators.\n\nThis is the first time I have seen it full of patients like this. Normally this theatre would be busy with major cancer surgery, but that's been transferred to another building.\n\nA children's recovery area, still decorated with colourful stickers of cartoons, is once again filled with desperately sick adults. Every day, more wards are being transformed into ICU - ready for the next influx of patients.\n\nWe have been given access to University College Hospital, in central London. This is the same intensive care unit that I first visited in April, during the first peak.\n\nIt is one of the busiest hospitals in the capital and intensive care here is expanding across a hospital that is under pressure like never before, from a relentless rise in Covid admissions.\n\nI am struck by the toll the pandemic is taking on staff. It's immense - both physically and mentally. They are shell-shocked. \"My emotions are all over the place. Scared, sad, petrified, worried,\" one ICU nurse tells me.\n\nI asked one of the consultants who I've met several times in the last year, Dr Jim Down, how long they can keep going like this - and the answer was stark. \"At this rate, about a week. After that we really need to see it slow down or we're going to see the care we can deliver suffering.\"\n\nThey have got three times as many critically ill patients in the hospital as normal. The number of Covid admissions to London hospitals has doubled in just two weeks - they're more stretched now than at the peak last April. Senior staff are worried.\n\nDr Alice Carter compares it to an elastic band that is close to snapping. \"It gets to a point where you stretch so far it never returns back to its baseline. I think that's probably where we are now. It's not going to take much more for that elastic band to break, and that's the real fear for us at the moment.\"\n\nDr Alice Carter: 'It's not going to take much more for that elastic band to break'\n\nThat could have very serious consequences, she adds. \"If we get to that point, we can't offer anyone ICU, not just Covid patients, but anyone who has a traffic accident or a heart attack or a stroke - whatever it is, to take them in.\"\n\nFor 38-year-old Rachel Arfin, one of the three pregnant women in intensive care with Covid-19, treatment is more complicated. Her baby is due in five weeks and the staff have to monitor them both.\n\n\"They can't do anything that will harm the baby,\" she says. \"All the time [they are] checking, monitoring the baby.\" She is reassured by the \"beautiful sound\" of her baby's heartbeat.\n\n\"They are looking after two people in one. They're saving lives,\" says Rachel. But her children - she has seven - keep asking when she's coming home.\n\nRachel Arfin's baby is due in five weeks - both are doing well\n\nI've reported from here several times during the pandemic and am always struck by the professionalism and dedication of staff. It's always quiet and calm, but that belies what's actually happening. This is a system under strain like never before.\n\nThe warning signs are clear, the NHS is on the brink. Unless infection rates fall, soon it will have a serious impact. The pressure on staff is unrelenting. I saw two nurses in tears.\n\nCompared to when I visited in April, it's a lot busier. In some ways, it's more structured - they now know what they're dealing with. They've got new treatments, such as the drug dexamethasone, which they didn't have last time. And many of the staff have now had the first dose of the vaccine.\n\nBut other aspects don't get any easier, such as the emotional burden of breaking bad news over a telephone or video call. It is very different to being able to hold someone's hand.\n\nStaff say they don't know which patients to help first\n\nICU staff have incredibly high standards. They're used to doing everything meticulously and perfectly. And they're doing all they can. But sometimes they go home and feel guilty that they can't do more. The impact on nurses - the bedrock of care in intensive care - is visible.\n\nThe highly specialised staff are usually one-to-one with patients. Deputy sister Ashleigh Shillingford is looking after three or four ventilated patients at a time, with one other junior member of staff. It's emotional and often devastating work.\n\n\"We are so stretched we have to prioritise and prioritising care is not the NHS that I grew up in - we shouldn't have to choose which patient gets what care first.\" She says she's never had to make decisions like these before.\n\n\"You just don't know who to help first. The patients are losing their lives at a dramatic speed, we're not just getting old people,\" she says, \"these are young people that we're getting.\"\n\nGerald Williams, 58, is awaiting chemotherapy for lung cancer and had been shielding, but he still caught coronavirus. \"All of a sudden, out of the blue, Covid came knocking on my door and it's frightening - you don't know how you're getting your next breath,\" he says.\n\nGerald Williams had been shielding but he still caught coronavirus\n\nHe wants to get home to his daughters, the youngest of whom is 13. And he's annoyed at those who don't take it seriously. \"People are moaning and groaning. Even in A&E. They need to get a life. Don't be idiots, forget about meeting your mate, stay home. No-one is invulnerable.\"\n\nFor now the Trust is coping better than many others in London and is still taking Covid patients from other hospitals. But the next few weeks could be the biggest challenge the NHS has ever faced - and it will be its doctors and nurses who will bear the brunt for all of us.\n\nAs the BBC's medical editor, Fergus Walsh has been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic and its immense impact on the UK.", "Two US police officers linked to a notorious raid in which young black medic Breonna Taylor was fatally shot have been fired, authorities have said.\n\nDetectives Myles Cosgrove and Joshua Jaynes are the latest officers to be dismissed over the shooting in March last year.\n\nThe incident in Kentucky caused outrage, spurring protests against racism and police brutality.\n\nMs Taylor, 26, died when police raided her home in connection to a drug case.\n\nThe FBI said Mr Cosgrove fired the shot that killed Ms Taylor at her home in Louisville.\n\nLouisville police dismissed Mr Cosgrove for violating procedures for use of force and failing to use a body camera during the search, the Louisville Courier Journal reported on Wednesday.\n\nMr Jaynes, the newspaper said, was fired for violating the police force's policy for truthfulness and search warrant preparation.\n\nDuring the raid, Ms Taylor's boyfriend fired at the officers who he said he believed were attackers breaking into their home.\n\nPolice say they knocked on the door to announce their presence before breaking down the door with a battering ram.\n\nMs Taylor's boyfriend said police did not make their presence known, and he fired out of self-defence. Three officers returned fire with 32 shots, six of which hit Ms Taylor.\n\nMs Taylor's name became a global rallying cry as people demanded a thorough investigation into her death.\n\nBlack Lives Matter activists in the US have demanded that Louisville police take stronger action against the officers in the case and say that police too often escape unpunished after killing members of the public.\n\nBut despite the outcry against Ms Taylor's shooting, no criminal charges were sought relating to her death.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"Questions still aren't answered\": Breonna Taylor's family are worried about a \"cover-up\"", "Tennant was remembered as \"a beautiful soul\" and \"a sensitive and talented woman\"\n\nBritish model Stella Tennant took her own life after being \"unwell for some time\", her family has confirmed.\n\nIn a statement, her family said it was \"a matter of our deepest sorrow and despair that she felt unable to go on.\"\n\nTennant, who made her name in the early 1990s modelling for designers like Karl Lagerfeld and Versace, died in December five days after her 50th birthday.\n\nHer family said they were \"humbled by the outpouring of messages of sympathy and support\" they have received.\n\nTennant was \"a beautiful soul, adored by a close family and good friends, a sensitive and talented woman whose creativity, intelligence and humour touched so many\", they said.\n\n\"In grieving Stella's loss, her family renews a heartfelt request that respect for their privacy should continue.\"\n\nBorn in London on 1970, Tennant was known for her androgynous sultry looks and aristocratic heritage.\n\nShe shot to fame after being photographed for British Vogue at the age of 22 in 1993, going on to work with such designers as Alexander McQueen and Jean Paul Gaultier.\n\nTennant retired from the catwalk in 1998 but later returned. She also worked on campaigns to promote saving energy and reducing the environmental impact of fast fashion.\n\nShe had four children with French-born photographer David Lasnet. The couple married in the Scottish borders in 1999 and announced their separation last year.\n\nTennant with David Lasnet on their wedding day in 1999\n\nStella McCartney, Victoria Beckham and fellow model Naomi Campbell were among those to pay tribute after her death was announced last month.\n\nCampbell said she had been \"a class act in every way\", while Beckham remembered her as \"an incredible talent\".\n\nIf you have been affected by any of the issues in this article, information and support is available from BBC Action Line.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Medical staff are \"well over half way through\" vaccinating Scotland's care home residents with their first dose against Covid-19.\n\nThe first minister said this was \"extremely important\", as care homes accounted for more than a third of Covid-related deaths in the past week.\n\nBy Sunday more than 113,000 people in Scotland had been given their first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.\n\nSome 1,100 vaccination centres are set to be operational within a week.\n\nThe government has set a target of giving a first dose to everyone over the age of 80 in Scotland within the next four weeks.\n\nScotland has about 30,000 residents living in care homes for older people.\n\nA further 78 deaths of people who had tested positive for Covid-19 were announced on Thursday, the highest daily number during the second wave of the virus.\n\nMeanwhile, the National Records of Scotland said the virus had been mentioned on 183 death certificates in the week to Sunday - with 63 of these deaths occurring in care homes.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said this underlined the importance of rolling out the vaccine in care homes, saying it would hopefully start to significantly reduce the risk of residents dying due to coronavirus.\n\nAnd she said the government would start issuing a daily update on how many people had been given the jab from next week.\n\nThe first minister said: \"Vaccination ultimately is what will provide us with the route out of this pandemic, so we are absolutely determined to make sure as many people as possible are vaccinated just as quickly as it is possible to do so.\"\n\nAs of Sunday, a total of 113,459 people had been given their first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in Scotland.\n\nThe Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine began to be rolled out on Monday, and will be reflected in statistics from next week.\n\nA total of 36 people have had a second dose of the vaccine, with efforts now focused on giving a first jab to as many people as possible\n\nThis means that people will now not receive their second dose for up to 12 weeks rather than within 21 days - a move that has been criticised by some medics.\n\nBut Chief Medical Officer Dr Gregor Smith said the first dose gave \"substantial\" protection against the virus.\n\nThe vaccine is being rolled out to health and social care workers in the first instance, then care home residents and other over-80s.\n\nEventually everyone in Scotland over the age of 18 - a total of 4.4m people - will be given a jab, although the government has refused to set targets beyond the initial phase due to uncertainty over supplies.\n\nNicola Sturgeon has said Scotland is in a race between the vaccine and the virus\n\nThe UK government had already committed to publishing vaccination figures on a daily basis, and the Scottish Conservatives had been pushing for the Scottish government to follow suit.\n\nTory leader Douglas Ross said that \"publishing these numbers will increase transparency and give the public confidence that progress is being made in our fight against Covid-19\".\n\nThe MP told BBC Scotland that he had been getting inquiries from constituents about when they could expect to get a jab, saying people \"need to know roughly where they are on that list and when they can expect to receive that vaccine\".\n\nScottish Labour called on the government to backdate the statistics and to publish \"a detailed breakdown of how many people in each priority group has been vaccinated\".\n\nThe party's health spokeswoman, Monica Lennon, said: \"Quicker progress must be made on securing vaccinations sites and vaccinators, including the contribution that community pharmacy teams can make.\"\n\nAt her daily briefing, Ms Sturgeon said over-80s should not worry if they had not yet been contacted about a vaccine appointment.\n\nShe said these were being \"aligned with availability of supply\" in different local areas.\n\nThe first minister said there was \"no need to phone your GP\", and that people would be \"contacted with an appointment as soon as possible\".\n\nShe also said the government was considering \"as a matter of ongoing review\" whether tighter restrictions may still be needed.\n\nScotland has been in a new lockdown since Tuesday, and Ms Sturgeon said it was \"probably too early\" for this to be reflected in the number of new infections.\n\nHowever she warned that the number of interactions people are having needed to be \"radically\" cut in order to slow the spread of the virus.\n\nShe said shutting down construction, manufacturing and click-and-collect businesses was \"the kind of thing we need to look at if we have a concern that we are not sufficiently reducing the number of people who are out and about and interacting\".", "Two more life-saving drugs have been found that can cut deaths by a quarter in patients who are sickest with Covid.\n\nThe anti-inflammatory medications, given via a drip, save an extra life for every 12 treated, say researchers who have carried out a trial in NHS intensive care units.\n\nSupplies are already available across the UK so they can be used immediately to save hundreds of lives, say experts.\n\nThere are over 30,000 Covid patients in UK hospitals - 39% more than in April.\n\nThe UK government is working closely with the manufacturer, to ensure the drugs - tocilizumab and sarilumab - continue to be available to UK patients.\n\nAs well as saving more lives, the treatments speed up patients' recovery and reduce the length of time that critically-ill patients need to spend in intensive care by about a week.\n\nBoth appear to work equally well and add to the benefit already found with a cheap steroid drug called dexamethasone.\n\nAlthough the drugs are not cheap, costing around £500 per patient, on top of the £5 course of dexamethasone, the advantage of using them is clear - and less than the cost per day of an intensive care bed of around £2,000, say experts.\n\nLead researcher Prof Anthony Gordon, from Imperial College London, said: \"For every 12 patients you treat with these drugs you would expect to save a life. It's a big effect.\"\n\nIn the REMAP-CAP trial carried out in six different countries, including the UK, with around 800 intensive care patients:\n\nProf Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, said: \"The fact there is now another drug that can help to reduce mortality for patients with Covid-19 is hugely welcome news and another positive development in the continued fight against the virus.\"\n\nHealth and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock said: \"The UK has proven time and time again it is at the very forefront of identifying and providing the most promising, innovative treatments for its patients.\n\n\"Today's results are yet another landmark development in finding a way out of this pandemic and, when added to the armoury of vaccines and treatments already being rolled out, will play a significant role in defeating this virus.\"\n\nThe drugs dampen down inflammation, which can go into overdrive in Covid patients and cause damage to the lungs and other organs.\n\nDoctors are being advised to give them to any Covid patient who, despite receiving dexamethasone, is deteriorating and needs intensive care.\n\nTocilizumab and sarilumab have already been added to the government's export restriction list, which bans companies from buying medicines meant for UK patients and selling them on for a higher price in another country.\n\nThe research findings have not yet been peer reviewed or published in a medical journal.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"We will never give up, we will never concede\", Trump tells supporters\n\nThis is how the Trump presidency ends. Not with a whimper, but with a bang.\n\nFor weeks, Donald Trump had been pointing to 6 January as a day of reckoning. It was when he told his supporters to come to Washington DC, and challenge Congress - and Vice-President Mike Pence - to discard the results of November's election and keep the presidency in his hands.\n\nOn Wednesday morning, the president and his warm-up speakers set the whirlwind in motion.\n\nRudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, said the election disputes should be resolved through \"trial by combat\".\n\nDonald Trump Jr, the president's oldest son, had a message to members of his party who would not \"fight\" for their president.\n\n\"This isn't their Republican Party anymore,\" he said. \"This is Donald Trump's Republican Party.\"\n\nThen the president himself encouraged the growing crowd, which had chanted \"stop the steal\" and \"bullshit\" at the president's prompting, to march the two miles from the White House to the Capitol.\n\n\"We will never give up. We will never concede,\" the president said. \"Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.\"\n\nAs the president was concluding his remarks, a different kind of drama was playing out within the Capitol itself, as a joint session of Congress prepared to tabulate the state-by-state results of the election.\n\nFirst, Pence - disregarding the president's urging to throw out the results from contested states - released a statement that he did not have such powers and his role was \"largely ceremonial\".\n\nThen Republicans issued their first challenge, to Arizona votes, and the House and Senate began their separate deliberations on whether to accept Joe Biden's victory there.\n\nThe House proceedings were raucous, with both sides cheering as their speakers made their remarks.\n\n\"The oath that I took this past Sunday to defend and support the Constitution makes it necessary for me to object to this travesty,\" said newly elected Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who had recently made headlines for insisting that she would carry a handgun with her in Congress. \"I will not allow the people to be ignored.\"\n\nProtesters gathered outside the Capitol as the joint session started\n\nIn the Senate, the debate was taking on a different tone. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, dressed in the kind of dark suit and tie that befits a funeral, was coming to bury Donald Trump, not praise him.\n\n\"If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral,\" McConnell said. \"We'd never see the whole nation accept an election again. Every four years would be a scramble for power at any cost.\"\n\nThe Kentucky senator, who will become the Senate minority leader as a result of his party's two recent defeats in Georgia, said that the chamber was designed to \"stop short-term passions from boiling over and melting the foundations of our republic\".\n\nHis words were practically still hanging in the air when the passions outside the Capitol boiled over, and the Trump supporters, perhaps inspired by the earlier speeches, stormed the building. They swamped the insufficient security in place and brought the proceedings to a grinding halt, as lawmakers, staff and media rushed to find shelter from the rioters.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. How a Trump rally near the White House turned deadly at the Capitol\n\nThe drama unfolded in fits and starts. Television cameras broadcast images of protesters dancing and waving flags on the steps of the Capitol. Photos and snippets popped up on social media of rioters inside the building, attempting to break into the legislative chambers and posing in the offices of elected legislators; of security officers, guns drawn in the House of Representatives, behind barricaded doors.\n\nIn Wilmington, Delaware, President-elect Joe Biden scrapped a planned speech on the economy and condemned what he called an \"insurrection\" in Washington.\n\n\"At this hour our democracy is under unprecedented assault unlike anything we've seen in modern times,\" he said. \"An assault on the citadel of liberty, the Capitol itself.\"\n\nHe concluded his short remarks with a challenge to Trump: to go on national television to condemn the violence and \"demand an end to this siege\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Joe Biden: The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are\n\nMinutes later, Trump would offer his message to the nation - but it was not the one Biden suggested.\n\nInstead, sandwiched between his now familiar complaints about the election being \"stolen\", he told his supporters \"to go home, we love you, you're very special\".\n\nIt was the kind of kid gloves way the president has routinely responded to transgressions from his supporters - whether it was their violent treatment of protesters at his rallies, the \"very fine people on both sides\" statement after the clashes at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville or his \"stand back and stand by\" message to the far-right Proud Boys group during the first debate with Biden.\n\nTrump's tweet, and two subsequent ones which also praised his supporters, were flagged and then removed by Twitter, which took the unprecedented step of locking the president's account for 12 hours. Facebook followed suit, banning Trump for a full day.\n\nFor the first time in his presidency, for the first time in his long, intimate relationship with social media, Donald Trump had been silenced.\n\nIf this is the \"at long last, have you left no sense of decency\" moment for Donald Trump, it arrives as they're cleaning up blood and broken glass in the US Capitol.\n\nAs the afternoon stretched into the evening, and police finally secured the US Capitol, a growing chorus of voices - from the left and right - condemned the violence. It was not surprising that Democrats, like soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, laid the riots at the feet of the president.\n\n\"January 6 will go down as one of the darkest days in American history,\" he said. \"A final warning to our nation of the consequences of the demagogic president, the people who enable him, the captive media that parrot his lies and the people who follow him as he attempts to push America to the brink of ruin.\"\n\nMore noteworthy, however, were the Republicans who followed suit.\n\n\"We just had a violent mob assault the Capitol in an attempt to prevent those from carrying out our Constitutional duty,\" tweeted Congresswoman Lynne Cheney, a frequent Republican critic of the president's. \"There is no question that the president formed the mob, the president incited the mob, the president addressed the mob.\"\n\nThe condemnations were not limited to Trump's reliable intraparty critics, however. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who frequently sides with the president, also spoke out.\n\n\"It's past time for the president to accept the results of the election, quit misleading the American people, and repudiate mob violence,\" he said.\n\nFirst Lady Melania Trump's Chief of Staff Stephanie Grisham and Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Matthews both resigned in protest, and there are reports that more administration officials will head for the exits in the next 24 hours.\n\nCBS has reported that Trump administration Cabinet officials are discussing the 25th amendment to the US constitution, which outlines how the vice-president and a majority of the Cabinet can temporarily remove a president from office.\n\nWhether Pence and the Cabinet act or not, Trump's presidency will be over in just two weeks. At that point, Republican Party leaders will have to grapple with a future where it has lost control of the Congress and the White House and has a former president whose reputation is badly tarnished but who still has strong sway over a sizeable segment of the party's base.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Mitt Romney warns fellow Republicans not to be complicit in attack on democracy\n\nWednesday's events could presage a pitched battle for the direction of the party, as conservatives within the party attempt to wrest control away from Trump and his loyalists. McConnell, given his remarks earlier in the day, appears willing to chart such a course. Others, like Utah Senator Mitt Romney, a former Republican presidential nominee, may also take a leading role.\n\nThey will be challenged by others within the party who may be more interested in laying claim to Trump's populist mantle. It was notable that Josh Hawley of Missouri, the first senator to announce he would object the results of the election in the Senate, did not step away from his challenge even after the Senate reconvened following the violence in the Capitol.\n\nCrisis can bring political opportunity, and there are many politicians who will not hesitate to use it to gain advantage.\n\nMeanwhile, Trump - for now - is still in power. And while he may be chastened, he may be sitting in the White House residence watching television temporarily without his social media outlet, he will not be silent for long.\n\nAnd once he decamps for his new Florida home, he could begin making plans to settle scores and, perhaps, someday return to power and rebuild a legacy that, for the moment, lies in tatters.", "The Belfast Health Trust has said it has no other option but to cancel urgent cancer surgery.\n\nThese are known as red flag cancer cases where an operation is expected to impact on a person's recovery and even surviving the disease.\n\nThe Department of Health has confirmed to the BBC that it's estimated that one in 60 people in NI have Covid-19.\n\nIt is understood the trust expects \"many 100s\" of new Covid patients in the next three weeks.\n\nThe demand for bed space is described as \"highly significant\", while a source added that all is being done to \"find beds and staff\".\n\nThey continued: \"People in here are moving heaven and earth to find beds in anticipation of what is coming and that's why some cancer patients even those who have been told their case is urgent are having their surgery cancelled.\"\n\nEffectively the move means that choices are already being made within the health service about who should receive critical treatment.\n\nThe daughter of a 66-year-old woman who was told her surgery has been cancelled has described the move as \"deeply worrying\".\n\n\"Mummy was diagnosed with cancer of the lining of the bladder in November, it's since spread to the muscle wall of her bladder. She was told in December her surgery was urgent - but now it's been cancelled.\n\n\"She is so frightened, it is just horrendous and I'm sure mum is not alone.\"\n\nWhile a cancer patient might have been told their case is critical and that treatment is necessary within weeks, some Covid patients are also being told that in order to survive they require treatment immediately.\n\nWith the number of cases soaring this is worse than the first lockdown and according to health professionals there is worse to come.\n\nThe BBC understands that the health minister is expected to respond to the problem in the coming days.\n\nIt is hoped that he will announce a regional approach to tackling cancelled surgeries among the various health trusts.\n\nNorthern Ireland's other health trusts have also begun to cancel operations due to pressures created by coronavirus.\n\nThe Northern, Western, Southern and South-Eastern trusts have said they will be cancelling planned surgeries.\n\nHospitals have said they were facing a surge in coronavirus cases following Christmas.\n\nOn Thursday, 599 people were in hospital with Covid-19.\n\nThe Belfast Trust apologised for the \"distress\" caused by the cancellations.\n\n\"Belfast Trust has made the difficult decision to cancel all planned inpatient surgery this week due to rising numbers of Covid cases,\" a spokesperson said.\n\nThe trust said it was contacting those affected and \"will rearrange this surgery as soon as possible and we will do everything we can to ensure continuity of care throughout this challenging time\".\n\nThe Northern Trust said it had \"regrettably\" cancelled the majority of its planned or elective surgeries to \"both free up staff to support the significant COVID-19 surge experience in the Trust and to reduce the clinical risk to patients who are or may be exposed to the virus\".\n\nIt apologised and said it would contacting people.\n\nThe Western Trust said it is \"facing unprecedented pressures due to the escalating rate\" of Covid infections.\n\nDirector of Acute Hospitals, Geraldine McKay, said routine elective inpatient, outpatient and day case surgeries have now been postponed until further notice.\n\nShe said the decision was \"very regrettable, but necessary\".\n\n\"Red flag and some time critical procedures and clinics will continue, but will be reviewed daily,\" she said.\n\nShould the number of Covid patients further increase, she added, the trust will \"have no option but to move to perform emergency and trauma surgery only\".\n\nA spokesperson for the South Eastern Trust said it was still carrying out some planned surgery, but the majority would be cancelled by next week.\n\nThe Southern Trust said it had taken its decision in response to the \"very significant recent increase\" in the number of Covid-19 cases.\n\nIt said this had been compounded by an increase in trauma workload and recent icy weather.\n\nThe trust said it would continue to provide day surgery and endoscopy across its hospital sites.\n\nOf the 3,359 planned procedures scheduled across NI between 29 December 2020 and 4 January, 3,267 went ahead as planned, according to the Health and Social Care website.\n\nThere were 92 cancellations which amounted to about 3% of all surgeries.", "During a speech earlier in the day, President Trump had asked his supporters to march towards the Capitol in protest. They breached the building while Congress was certifying Joe Biden's win.\n\nProtesters made it all the way to the Senate floor and the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.\n\nHere are the key moments in a dark day for US democracy.", "The US is reeling after supporters of President Trump stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC on the day Congress was meeting to confirm Joe Biden's election victory.\n\nLawmakers were forced to take shelter, the building was put into lockdown and four people died in the chaos that followed a pro-Trump rally near the White House.\n\nHere's a breakdown of how events unfolded on Wednesday.\n\nJust before midday local time (17:00 GMT) thousands of people gather at the Ellipse, near the White House, to hear the president speak at a \"Save America\" rally.\n\nHe tells them: \"We're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue... and we're going to the Capitol and we're going to try and give… our Republicans, the weak ones... the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.\"\n\nAs the speech ends, crowds start to drift towards the Congress building, about a mile and a half away, where they are met by police barriers.\n\nThe Capitol is home to the two chambers of the US government that make up Congress - the House of Representatives and the Senate.\n\nChanting crowds start to gather on both sides of the building at around 13:10, grappling with police at the metal barricades.\n\nTear gas and pepper spray are used to try to keep the protesters at bay.\n\nPolice officers struggle to maintain control of the situation as protesters advance on the building on multiple fronts.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police place US Capitol Building on lockdown after Trump supporters breached security lines\n\nOn the east side, the crowd force their way through barricades on the Capitol Plaza and move on the main entrance, quickly gaining access to the Great Rotunda.\n\nOnce inside, they head for the House and Senate chambers.\n\nIgor Bobic, a journalist for the Huffington Post, captures a group of men forcing a police officer to retreat up a set of stairs as they continue their advance.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Igor Bobic This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSenators are forced to abandon the process of confirming President-elect Biden's victory and the building goes into lockdown.\n\nThe doors of the House chamber are locked and a makeshift barricade is erected in front of them. Security officials guard the entrance, guns drawn.\n\nWithin an hour, protesters have also broken police lines on the west side of the Capitol, scaling walls to reach the building itself before smashing windows and forcing doors open.\n\nOther videos and images show rioters storming through the building's ornately-decorated corridors and chambers chanting \"USA!\" and \"Stop the steal\".\n\nShortly before 15:00, gunshots are reportedly heard inside the building.\n\nPhotos and video footage later show a female protester being shot as she tries to break through the barricaded doors of the Speakers' Lobby.\n\nDespite efforts by police and others at the scene to save her, she is later reported to have died.\n\nOn the other side of the building, protesters break into the Senate chamber, one taking seat in the Speaker's chair.\n\nAnother protester is photographed nearby sitting in Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, with his foot on the table.\n\nAfter growing condemnation of the riots, President Trump eventually calls for calm, telling the protesters to leave peacefully: \"Go home. We love you, you're very special.\"\n\nBy 17:40, the building is cleared and made secure ahead of the 18:00 curfew ordered by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser.\n\nSeveral thousand National Guard troops, FBI agents and US Secret Service are deployed to help.\n\nMore than six hours after the storming of the building, senators return and resume the day's business of certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election.\n\nAt 03:41 on Thursday, Congress confirms President-elect Joe Biden will succeed President Trump on 20 January.", "Young women clap for heroes outside Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London\n\nA revived initiative to applaud the heroes of the pandemic has returned - but much more quietly than last year.\n\nIt comes after the founder of Clap for Carers distanced herself from its return after facing online abuse.\n\nAnnemarie Plas wanted to bring back the weekly applause under a new name of Clap for Heroes to lift spirits in the new lockdown but it fell a little flat.\n\nSome health workers have said they would rather people stay at home and wear a mask than clap for them.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said he participated at 20:00 GMT on Thursday, but clapping \"isn't enough\".\n\n\"They need to be paid properly and given the respect they deserve,\" he tweeted., of the health workers.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The weekly clap returned but Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said clapping alone \"wasn't enough\"\n\nThe idea of clapping and banging pots from doorsteps originally began as a one-off to support NHS staff on 26 March - three days after the UK went into lockdown for the first time.\n\nAfter proving popular it was expanded to cover all key workers and continued every Thursday for 10 weeks last year, with millions of people across the UK taking part.\n\nMembers of the Royal Family and politicians including Prime Minister Boris Johnson also joined in with the show of support.\n\nHowever, the event faced criticism for becoming politicised, with some suggesting the NHS would benefit more from extra funding than applause.\n\nPeople in some streets stood on doorsteps and leaned out windows to clap for the pandemic's heroes, and landmarks in London were illuminated blue for the occasion - but reports suggested the applause was noticeably quieter than last year.\n\nAnnemarie Plas and her family were threatened online for her efforts\n\nOn Wednesday, Ms Plas, a 36-year-old mother-of-one, announced the return of the initiative, saying she hoped to \"lift the spirit of all of us\" including \"all who are pushing through this difficult time\".\n\nBut some NHS workers were less than enthusiastic. Ami Jones, an intensive care consultant from Wales, tweeted: \"No thanks. I'd rather you obey the rules, stay at home, wear masks and wash your hands.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Rachel Clarke 💙 This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAnd palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke said: \"Please don't clap us. Just wear a mask, wash your hands and respect lockdown.\"\n\nIn a tweet posted hours before the weekly clap was due to return, Ms Plas, a Dutch national living in south London, said she had been targeted with personal abuse and threats against her and her family by \"a hateful few\" on social media.\n\n\"I have no political agenda, I am not employed by the government, I do not work in PR, I am just an average mum at home trying to cope with the lockdown situation,\" she said, in a statement.\n\nShe said the newly revived clap could and should still happen at 20:00 GMT.\n\n\"It's up to each person to decide how relevant or worthwhile they feel it is to participate,\" she said.\n\nThe fountains in Trafalgar Square were illuminated blue for the initiative on Thursday\n\nSome incorporated pots and pans during their weekly claps in warmer months", "As violent Trump supporters surged past barricades and into the US Capitol, news agency photographers - who were there to document the vote certifying Joe Biden's election win - captured extraordinary scenes.\n\nThe last time government buildings were breached in Washington was in 1814 and the invaders were British soldiers.\n\nBut in 2021 a Trump supporter, carrying the Confederate flag, is walking freely through the halls near the entrance to the Senate, encountering little resistance.\n\nThe Confederacy was the group of southern states that fought to keep slavery during the American Civil War. In this image, the oil paintings of political figures in the background emphasise this imagery of the past.\n\nThere have been renewed calls for the Confederate flag to be banned across the US following the anti-racism protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, a black man.\n\nHowever Mr Trump has defended use of the flag, calling it a matter of free speech.\n\nOne man in a Trump beanie here walks between the red guide ropes, as many visitors might do on a guided-tour to view the Crypt, the Statuary Hall and the Rotunda.\n\nBut this man is carrying a podium bearing the seal of the Speaker of the House, as he poses in front of a painting depicting the surrender of Gen Burgoyne in the war of independence.\n\nAnother man, identified as Jake Angeli, an ardent Trump supporter who has attended a number of the president's rallies, shouts as he makes his way to the Senate Chamber.\n\nHis incongruous garments set him apart from other protesters wearing black hoodies. These Trump activists stand by taking selfies, but he has clearly come here to be photographed by others.\n\nThe apparent lack of a security presence is in sharp contrast to other Washington protests where there is a highly visible presence of heavily armed security forces protecting US institutions.\n\nAnother Trump supporter, identified as Richard Barnett, sits with one boot disrespectfully on a desk that is at the very centre of power in Congress. It is in the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.\n\nIn the scene, unimaginable days earlier, Barnett in his baseball cap and checked shirt resembles a raconteur regaling friends with tales of his exploits.\n\nThe image went viral as did pictures of the notes he and others left on Ms Pelosi's desk.\n\nThis dramatic image shows how the formal proceedings came to a violent halt as Capitol police officers drew their guns on doors being attacked by protesters intent on entering the House Chamber.\n\nMany commentators asked if they were watching a coup unfold as doors were barricaded and firearms brandished.\n\nThe composition is reminiscent of a scene in a Hollywood Western, the lawmen bracing for the doors to be breached.\n\nUS President-elect Joe Biden made an impassioned TV address describing the scenes as \"an assault on democracy\" - this chilling picture encapsulates what he meant.", "A Joint Session of Congress to certify the election of Joe Biden has gone into an unexpected recess, and the Capitol building into lockdown, after Trump supporters breached security lines.\n\nEarlier, President Trump addressed supporters at a rally outside the White House and encouraged them to protest the election result.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"I condemn encouraging people to behave in the disgraceful way they did in the Capitol\"\n\nDonald Trump was \"completely wrong\" to cast doubt on the US election and encourage supporters to storm the Capitol, Boris Johnson has said.\n\nThe UK prime minister said he \"unreservedly condemns\" the US president's actions.\n\nFour people died after a pro-Trump mob stormed the building in a bid to overturn the election result.\n\nMr Trump had urged protesters to march on the Capitol after making false electoral fraud claims.\n\nHe later called on his supporters to \"go home\", while continuing to make false claims - Twitter and Facebook later froze his accounts.\n\nThe president has now said there will be an \"orderly transition\" to President-elect Joe Biden, whose November election victory has now been certified by US lawmakers.\n\nBut he added that he continued to \"totally disagree\" with the outcome of the vote, repeating his unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud.\n\nOn Wednesday night, Mr Johnson condemned the \"disgraceful scenes\" and called for a \"peaceful and orderly transfer of power\".\n\nBut asked by the BBC's political correspondent Alex Forsyth if President Trump was directly responsible, he said: \"All my life America has stood for some very important things. An idea of freedom, an idea of democracy.\n\n\"As you say, in so far as he encouraged people to storm the Capitol, and in so far as the president has consistently cast doubt on the outcome of a free and fair election, I believe that was completely wrong.\n\n\"I believe what President Trump has been saying about that has been completely wrong and I unreservedly condemn encouraging people to behave in the disgraceful way that they did in the Capitol.\"\n\nThe PM, speaking at a Downing Street briefing, then welcomed the confirmation of President-elect Biden, saying \"democracy has prevailed\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nHundreds of the president's supporters stormed the Capitol on Wednesday - where lawmakers were meeting to confirm Mr Biden's election victory - and staged an occupation of the building in Washington DC.\n\nBoth chambers of Congress were forced into recess, as protesters clashed with police and tear gas was released.\n\nA woman died after being shot by police, and three others died as a result of \"medical emergencies\", local police said.\n\nUK politicians from different parties have all condemned Mr Trump's actions in encouraging the storming of the Capitol.\n\nEarlier, Home Secretary Priti Patel said the president's comments had \"directly led\" to the events and he \"didn't do anything to de-escalate that\".\n\nShe added: \"He basically has made a number of comments yesterday that helped to fuel that violence and he didn't actually do anything to de-escalate that whatsoever... what we've seen is completely unacceptable.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Priti Patel says Donald Trump was wrong for not condemning the violence\n\nSpeaking on Thursday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Mr Trump should \"take responsibility\" for what happened, calling it the \"culmination of years of the politics of hate and division\".\n\nSir Keir added he welcomed the outgoing president's agreement to an orderly handover, but told reporters \"he should have said it a long time ago.\"\n\nScottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said Mr Trump had been \"inciting insurrection in his own country,\" and called it a \"dark period\" in US history.\n\n\"What we witnessed last night is not that surprising. In some senses, Donald Trump's presidency has been moving towards this moment almost from the moment it started,\" she told ITV's Good Morning Britain.\n\nScotland's Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf said the home secretary should \"give serious consideration\" to denying Mr Trump entry to the UK after he leaves office.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 'Treason, traitors and thugs' - the words lawmakers used to describe Capitol riot\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab said certification of Mr Biden's victory was \"good to see\" after the \"shocking events\" on Wednesday, adding the UK condemned the violence \"unequivocally\".\n\nFormer Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, who shared time in office with Mr Trump, said there should be \"no place for the rule of the mob\".\n\nBut senior Welsh Conservative Andrew RT Davies has been criticised after comparing the rioting to politicians who supported a second referendum on Brexit.\n\nMr Davies, a member of the Welsh Parliament, later tweeted that \"violence must never be tolerated\".\n\nHis party colleague, the Conservative MP Simon Hoare, suggested Mr Trump could be sent to the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay:\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Simon Hoare MP This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nCommons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has written to express his \"solidarity\" with US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose empty office was broken into by protesters.\n\n\"Seeing your office trashed in that way and its occupation by one of the rioters was particularly outrageous. I am just so relieved you were not hurt,\" he wrote.\n\nTrump supporters left this note on the desk of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives.", "Ryanair is making big cuts to its flight schedule from 21 January in response to the latest Covid lockdowns.\n\nIt warned that few, if any, flights would operate to or from Ireland or the UK from the end of January until \"draconian\" restrictions were removed.\n\nCustomers hit by the cancellations will be advised by email of entitlements to free moves or refunds, it said.\n\nRyanair also cut its full year traffic forecast from currently \"below 35 million\" to 26-30 million passengers.\n\nThe airline said that new Covid restrictions could reduce traffic in February and March to as little as 500,000 passengers each month. It expects January traffic to fall below 1.25 million.\n\nIt said it did not expect these latest flight cuts and further traffic reductions to materially affect its net loss for the year to 31 March 2021, since many of the flights would have been loss-making.\n\nRyanair hit out at Irish and UK governments for the latest lockdowns.\n\n\"The WHO have previously confirmed that governments should do everything possible to avoid brutal lockdowns, because lockdowns 'do not get rid of the virus',\" Ryanair said in a statement.\n\n\"Ireland's Covid-19 travel restrictions are already the most stringent in Europe, and so these new flight restrictions are inexplicable and ineffective when Ireland continues to operate an open border between the Republic and the North of Ireland.\"\n\nIt called on the Irish Government to accelerate the rollout of vaccines.\n\n\"The fact that the Danish Government, with a similar five million population, has already vaccinated 10 times more citizens than Ireland shows that emergency action is needed to speed Covid vaccinations in Ireland.\"\n\nRival low-cost carrier Norwegian said its traffic figures had been hit heavily by the pandemic, with customer numbers down 94% compared to the same period the previous year.\n\nIn December, 129,664 customers flew with Norwegian, with the capacity and total passenger traffic both down by 98%.\n\n\"2020 has been a very challenging year and we now find ourselves fighting for survival,\" said Jacob Schram, chief executive of Norwegian.\n\n\"The vaccination is now being rolled out across the world and is good news for both the aviation industry and those who want to travel.\"", "Mauritius has been removed from the safe list\n\nTravellers from countries near South Africa are to be banned from entering England to stop the spread of the South African Covid variant.\n\nArrivals from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Botswana, as well as island nations Mauritius and Seychelles, will be affected.\n\nThe rule will take effect on 9 January but there will be an exemption for British and Irish nationals.\n\nThey will need to follow existing quarantine procedures.\n\nA ban by visitors to the UK from South Africa started on 24 December.\n\nThe latest restriction brought in by the Department for Transport also affects travellers arriving from Eswatini, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Mozambique.\n\nIt will apply from 04:00 GMT on Saturday to people who have travelled from or through any of the specified countries in the last 10 days.\n\nIt is understood most flights from the affected countries arrive at airports in England, although it is expected the policy will be formally adopted by the other UK nations.\n\nThe measures will be in place for an initial period of two weeks.\n\nMeanwhile, Botswana, and the islands of Seychelles and Mauritius, are being removed from the UK list of safe travel corridors as there is a high frequency of travel between the islands and South Africa.\n\nThe new variant of coronavirus circulating in South Africa is already being seen in other countries, including the UK.\n\nThe variant, much like the new UK variant first seen in Kent, appears to be more contagious than previous ones.\n\nAnyone arriving into the UK from most destinations must quarantine for 10 days.\n\nBut there are a list of countries exempt from the rules, meaning returning travellers do not need to self-isolate, called the travel corridor list.\n\nUnder the latest announcement, the travel corridor with Israel will also end amid concerns about rising infection levels in that country.\n\nHowever, rules in place across the UK currently ban travel abroad unless for specific reasons.", "Protesters in support of US President Donald Trump swarmed the Capitol building, forcing officials to order lawmakers to shelter in place and halting debate in both the House and Senate. Congress was meeting to confirm President-elect Joe Biden's electoral college victory.", "Mr Christmas' light displays attracted thousands of visitors over the years\n\nThe family of a man known affectionately as Mr Christmas has turned off his festive lights for the last time.\n\nDave Edwards, 86, lit up his home in Croxley Green, Hertfordshire, with extravagant light displays for 42 years to raise money for charity.\n\nHe died from cancer on the eve of his annual switch-on in November.\n\nHis daughter Sharon Markham called on local residents to \"continue to light up Croxley every year\".\n\nMr Edwards started putting up the light display with his wife - who died three years ago - as a competition with a house across the street, and continued to build on the set over the years.\n\nDave Edwards was dubbed Mr Christmas due to the illuminations at his home in Croxley Green\n\nPeople would travel miles to see the festive lights\n\nMrs Markham said each year they raised about £5,000 for charity, but this year a \"record amount\" of more than £10,000 had been donated.\n\nWhen his family said the 2020 display would be the last due to Mr Edwards's failing health, people across the village rallied together by installing their own displays in his honour.\n\nSharon Markham said her parents were \"such amazing people but their light will always be shining\"\n\nResidents of Croxley Green placed a banner opposite Mr Christmas' home to thank him for his displays and fundraising\n\nTurning off the lights at 21:23 GMT on Wednesday, in an event filmed for the Mr Christmas Facebook page, Mrs Markham thanked the community for its support over the years.\n\n\"Without you we could not have achieved the things we have done,\" she said.\n\n\"I thought turning the lights on was hard enough but switching them off - this moment has been worrying me for months and now it's finally here.\n\n\"For now, though, we say goodbye and we thank Mr and Mrs Christmas for all the joy they have brought us all.\n\n\"We ask you all to continue to light up Croxley every year.\"\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "Dr Anil Mehta, a GP at Fullwell Cross Medical Centre in North London, told the BBC that staff were working from 7 in the morning until 10pm at night during the three days of their weekly Covid-19 vaccine rollout, describing the process as a 'full team effort.\n\nDr Mehta was also keen to encourage people who might be nervous about the vaccine to take up the offer, emphasising that the evidence behind the vaccine 'was very strong'.\n\nThis message was echoed by Zahin Ahmed, whose grandfather Shafiquz Zaman has now received both doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine at the clinic. Mr Ahmed, who is from the Bangladeshi community, also said it was important that minority communities took up the offer of the vaccine when called upon to do so.", "George had mottled skin, swelling on his lips, a high temperature and could not keep fluids down\n\nThe mother of a baby who was treated in hospital for Covid-19 has urged parents to be alert to symptoms such as mottled skin and sickness.\n\nMyer Rudelhoff's four-month-old son George spent three nights in Basildon hospital, in Essex.\n\nHe had patchy skin, swelling on his lips, a high temperature and could not keep fluids down.\n\nShe said: \"I thought it was a sickness bug. I had no idea it was caused by coronavirus.\"\n\nDiarrhoea, vomiting and abdominal cramps in children can be a sign of coronavirus according to some researchers, but the officially recognised symptoms are a fever, cough and loss of smell or taste.\n\nMrs Rudlehoff, who lives in Basildon, noticed her son had a temperature on New Year's Eve but put it down to teething.\n\nGeorge began vomiting the following evening and on 2 January she called NHS 111, who told her to take him to hospital.\n\nShe said: \"I really did not want to go. I was so scared about him getting the virus there, I had no idea he had it.\n\n\"He got so poorly so quickly when we arrived and was really lethargic. They took a swab and, when they said he was positive, I burst into tears. It was such a shock.\"\n\nMyer Rudelhoff was scared to take her son to hospital but realised he was too poorly and needed treatment\n\nThe mother-of-two said she presumed it was not Covid-19 because he did not have a cough, though he did develop a mild one a few days later while in hospital.\n\nShe said the staff were \"amazing\" and she wanted to reassure parents \"not to be afraid to go to hospital\" if their children were ill.\n\nNurses told her they had treated several other children with the same mottled skin and sickness and asked her to share her story to raise awareness of these symptoms.\n\nMrs Rudelhoff's post on Facebook was shared nearly 7,000 times within three days.\n\nIn the post, she said she felt \"upset, angry and frustrated\" because she had taken the illness very seriously but George had still managed to catch it. He was the only member of the family who tested positive.\n\nGeorge was discharged from hospital and was making a good recovery at home, she said.\n\nGeorge is now making a good recovery at home and is being looked after by his big brother Stanley\n\nDr Kilali Ominu-Evbota, paediatric consultant at Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, said: \"It's great to hear that George is now back home and on the road to recovery.\n\n\"George's family did the right thing and we encourage parents to seek medical advice with their GP or via the NHS 111 service in order to get the correct treatment for their child.\"\n\nBasildon has an infection rate of 1,265 cases per 100,000 people - compared to the average England rate of 606.9.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n• None 'Upset stomach' in children may be coronavirus\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The president says he hates Big Tech. Yet he has loved using Twitter.\n\nHe's used it as a way, for more than 10 years, to bypass the media and speak directly to voters.\n\nThe 280 characters fits neatly with his style of political engagement - broad brushstrokes rather than details.\n\nAnd Twitter has undoubtedly benefited from President Trump too, the place to go to hear the latest musings from the most powerful person on the planet.\n\nThat decade-long symbiosis has been ended with a shuddering halt.\n\nImmediately after the deadly riots, Twitter locked the President's Twitter feed and asked Mr Trump to delete three tweets for violations around its Civic Integrity policy., which he promptly did.\n\nAfter the suspension he tweeted as a new man, the nonsense claims of mass voter fraud replaced with a more conciliatory tone.\n\nPrivately though Twitter was pondering whether it had gone far enough. Facebook had already acted, banning Donald Trump \"indefinitely\".\n\nAfter more than 48 hours of consideration, Twitter acted. It made unquestionably the most important moderation decision in its history. It banned the president of the United States.\n\nSome have asked why he wasn't kicked off sooner.\n\nMr Trump or one of his associates appears to have deleted some of his most recent tweets\n\nWell, Twitter has very specific rules about world leaders.\n\n\"We recognise that sometimes it may be in the public interest to allow people to view tweets that would otherwise be taken down,\" Twitter's rules say.\n\n\"At present, we limit exceptions to one critical type of public-interest content - tweets from elected and government officials.\"\n\nChief executive Jack Dorsey had felt it was in the public interest to keep the account active, albeit with warning messages.\n\n\"No one is turning a blind eye,\" a senior source told the BBC before the ban.\n\nIn short, Mr Trump had been allowed to remain on Twitter - despite numerous breaches of its rules - because he is the president.\n\nWith less than two weeks to go of Trump's presidency, many social media companies have now decided enough is enough.\n\nCritics say the outgoing president's words on social media, for years, helped to incite Wednesday's storming of Capitol Hill.\n\nAll the big social media companies have made it clear that - as a private citizen - if you continually look to peddle conspiracy theories and promote extremism, you should expect to be kicked out. With just a few days of his presidency left, Mr Trump is already being held to a different standard - his privileges stripped.\n\nWhat's driving this? To be cynical, social media companies are acutely aware that President-elect Joe Biden believes Big Tech hasn't done enough to quell fake news and hate speech on their platforms.\n\nRioters broke into Congress after a speech by Mr Trump on Wednesday\n\nThey are now desperate to show that they can, in fact, police their own platforms without the need for stringent legal reforms.\n\nWhat better way to show you're serious than to act on Mr Trump's misinformation?\n\nWhat will Mr Trump do next? Well he's already said he's looking into the possibility of building his own platform in the future.\n\nBut for now he's consigned to the fringes of the internet. Can Trumpism survive without Big Tech? We're about to find out.\n\nJames Clayton is the BBC's North America technology reporter based in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @jamesclayton5.", "For the first since April the UK has recorded more than 1,000 daily Covid-related deaths – one of the highest figures of the pandemic.\n\nRight now, London is at the epicentre of this crisis. Hospitals now have more Covid patients being admitted every day than they did at the peak in April. Many doctors and nurses say they're reaching breaking point.\n\nThe BBC's medical editor Fergus Walsh has been allowed to film inside the intensive care unit at London's University College Hospital, which is one of the busiest in the capital.\n\nRead more: 'How long can we keep going like this? About a week'", "Elon Musk has become the world's richest person, as his net worth crossed $185bn (£136bn).\n\nThe Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur was pushed into the top slot after Tesla's share price increased on Thursday.\n\nHe takes the top spot from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who had held it since 2017.\n\nMr Musk's electric car company Tesla has surged in value this year, and hit a market value of $700bn (£516bn) for the first time on Wednesday.\n\nThat makes the car company worth more than Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, GM and Ford combined.\n\nMr Musk reacted to the news in signature style, replying to a Twitter user sharing the news with the remark \"how strange\".\n\nAn older tweet pinned to the top of his feed offered further insight into his thoughts on personal wealth.\n\n\"About half my money is intended to help problems on Earth, and half to help establish a self-sustaining city on Mars to ensure continuation of life (of all species) in case Earth gets hit by a meteor like the dinosaurs or WW3 happens and we destroy ourselves,\" it reads.\n\nThe tycoon's fortunes have been buoyed by politics in the US, where the Democrats will have control of the US Senate in the forthcoming session.\n\nDaniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities wrote: \"A Blue Senate is very bullish and a potential 'game changer' for Tesla and the overall electric vehicle sector, with a more green-driven agenda now certainly in the cards for the next few years.\"\n\nExpected electric vehicle tax credits would benefit Tesla, \"which continues to have an iron grip on the market today\", he added.\n\nMr Bezos is also using his personal wealth to fund space exploration\n\nMr Bezos has also seen his fortunes rise over the past year. The coronavirus pandemic has meant Amazon benefited from stronger demand for both its online store and cloud computing services.\n\nHowever, he gave a 4% stake in the business to his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott after they split, which helped Mr Musk overtake him.\n\nIn addition, the threat of regulation has meant Amazon's stock has not risen as high as it might otherwise have done.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Who is Elon Musk? Meet the meme-loving magnate behind SpaceX and Tesla...published in 2021\n\nThe owner of a business which has only just made its first annual profit and is still a minnow compared to the likes of Toyota - or Amazon - is now the world's richest person.\n\nIt is the fact that Tesla's share price has increased more than seven-fold in the past year that has sent Elon Musk's fortune rocketing past that of Jeff Bezos.\n\nTo believe the electric car-maker's worth could rise so rapidly in just 12 months is the ultimate example of irrational exuberance.\n\nIt means that Musk will have to show within the next five years that Tesla can make more profits than just about the whole of the rest of the motor industry combined to justify the valuation.\n\nMind you, his many fans will point out that the somewhat eccentric tycoon has constantly confounded the sceptics who bet that he would go bust.\n\nAnd of course 20 years ago another tech visionary was staring disaster in the face when the dot com bubble burst and big profits seemed a distant dream - but Jeff Bezos went on to make those who bet on Amazon very rich indeed.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Priti Patel says Donald Trump was wrong for not condemning the violence\n\nDonald Trump's comments \"directly led\" to his supporters storming Congress and clashing with police, Home Secretary Priti Patel has said.\n\nFour people have died after a pro-Trump mob stormed the building in a bid to overturn the election result.\n\nPresident Trump had urged protesters to march on the Capitol after making false claims of electoral fraud.\n\nMs Patel said the president's words had fuelled the violence and he \"didn't do anything to de-escalate that\".\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has condemned the \"disgraceful scenes\" and called for a \"peaceful and orderly transfer of power\".\n\nOn Wednesday evening, President Trump later called on his supporters to \"go home\", while continuing to make false claims of electoral fraud.\n\nHe has been suspended from his Facebook and Instagram accounts for at least two weeks, and possibly indefinitely. Twitter has also frozen his account.\n\nThe president has now said there will be an \"orderly transition\" to Democrat Joe Biden, whose November election victory has now been certified by US lawmakers.\n\nBut he added that he continued to \"totally disagree\" with the outcome of the vote, repeating his unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud.\n\nHundreds of the president's supporters stormed the Capitol - where lawmakers were meeting to confirm Mr Biden's election victory - and staged an occupation of the building in Washington DC.\n\nBoth chambers of Congress were forced into recess, as protesters clashed with police and tear gas was released.\n\nMs Patel told BBC Breakfast the scenes were \"awful beyond words\".\n\nThe home secretary said: \"His comments directly led to the violence, and so far he has failed to condemn that violence and that is completely wrong.\"\n\nShe added: \"He basically has made a number of comments yesterday that helped to fuel that violence and he didn't actually do anything to de-escalate that whatsoever... what we've seen is completely unacceptable.\"\n\nA woman died after being shot by police, and three others died as a result of \"medical emergencies\", local police said.\n\nPoliticians across the UK's political parties lined up to condemn the scenes in Washington.\n\nSpeaking on Thursday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Mr Trump should \"take responsibility\" for what happened, calling it the \"culmination of years of the politics of hate and division\".\n\nSir Keir added he welcomed the outgoing president's agreement to an orderly handover, but told reporters \"he should have said it a long time ago.\"\n\nScottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said Mr Trump had been \"inciting insurrection in his own country,\" and called it a \"dark period\" in US history.\n\n\"What we witnessed last night is not that surprising. In some senses, Donald Trump's presidency has been moving towards this moment almost from the moment it started,\" she told ITV's Good Morning Britain.\n\nScotland's Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf said the home secretary should \"give serious consideration\" to denying Mr Trump entry to the UK after he leaves office.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police place US Capitol Building on lockdown after Trump supporters breached security lines\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab said certification of Mr Biden's victory was \"good to see\" after the \"shocking events\" on Wednesday, adding the UK condemned the violence \"unequivocally\".\n\nFormer Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, who shared time in office with Mr Trump, said there should be \"no place for the rule of the mob\".\n\nBut senior Welsh Conservative Andrew RT Davies has been criticised after comparing the rioting to politicians who supported a second referendum on Brexit.\n\nMr Davies, a member of the Welsh Parliament, later tweeted that \"violence must never be tolerated\".\n\nHis party colleague, the Conservative MP Simon Hoare, suggested Mr Trump could be sent to the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay:\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Simon Hoare MP This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nFriend of President Trump and leader of Reform UK - formerly the Brexit Party - Nigel Farage tweeted: \"Storming Capitol Hill is wrong. The protesters must leave.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey has defended the prime minister's response to the rioting.\n\nAsked on ITV's Peston programme why Mr Johnson hadn't criticised Mr Trump, she said: \"The prime minister has been clear tonight that we need a peaceful and orderly transition.\"\n\nCommons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has written to express his \"solidarity\" with US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose empty office was broken into by protesters.\n\n\"Seeing your office trashed in that way and its occupation by one of the rioters was particularly outrageous. I am just so relieved you were not hurt,\" he wrote.\n\nTrump supporters left this note on the desk of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives.\n\nIt is a truism of British diplomacy that every occupant of 10 Downing Street has to get on with every occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, regardless of their politics or character.\n\nPersonal consideration is pushed aside. What matters is the national interest and staying close to one of Britain's closest allies.\n\nThus even now, even after Donald Trump's incitement of the Capitol mob, even though there are less than two weeks until the inauguration, even as close Republican allies jump ship, Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab were reluctant to criticise the president by name in their initial response overnight.\n\nYes, they condemned the violence. But of Mr Trump, not a word. This caution was matched by the Prime Ministers of fellow so-called Five Eyes intelligence allies, Australia and New Zealand, both of whom also both failed to mention Mr Trump in their condemnatory tweets.\n\nIn contrast, European leaders were quick to blame the president personally.\n\nIt was only this morning that a British minister, Home Secretary Priti Patel, felt able to follow suit in strong terms.\n\nSo was this natural and sensible diplomatic caution in the midst of a febrile crisis?\n\nOr was this, as some Labour figures are already claiming, a function of the closeness between the current UK government and the Trump administration?\n\nIt was only a few weeks ago that Defence Secretary Ben Wallace told The Sun that he would miss Donald Trump because he was a good friend to Britain.\n\nWhatever one's views, it is certainly the case that the British government is seen on the international stage by some has having ideological proximity to Mr Trump.\n\nChanging that reputation is seen by many diplomats as a priority in the months ahead, a task made more urgent by events overnight.", "Olly Stephens was stabbed to death in Emmer Green in Reading on Sunday\n\nThree teenagers accused of murdering a 13-year-old boy who was stabbed to death have appeared in Crown Court.\n\nOliver Stephens, known as Olly, was pronounced dead at Bugs Bottom fields, Emmer Green in Reading, on Sunday.\n\nTwo boys, aged 13 and 14, and a 13-year-old girl have been charged with murder and conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm.\n\nThey have all been remanded in youth detention custody and a provisional trial date has been set for 21 June.\n\nThe three teenagers, who cannot be identified because of their ages, had appeared at Reading Youth Court earlier on Thursday before the Crown Court hearing.\n\nThe defendants only spoke at the youth court to confirm their names, ages and addresses.\n\nThe court heard the girl has also been charged with perverting the course of justice.\n\nThe Crown Court hearing was told a potential trial was estimated to last five or six weeks.\n\nPolice were called just before 16:00 GMT on Sunday following reports of an attack in fields on the boundary of Emmer Green and Caversham Heights.\n\nOlly was pronounced dead at the scene.\n\nIn a statement released on Wednesday, his family said: \"An Olly-sized hole has been left in our hearts.\"\n\nHis parents said their son was \"an enigma\", and having both autism and suspected pathological demand avoidance meant \"he became a challenge we never shied away from\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "McDonald's is pausing walk-in takeaway services in the UK as new lockdown restrictions come into force.\n\nDine-in meals and walk-in takeaways will not be available temporarily while it reviews safety procedures, it said.\n\nIts UK boss said it will be testing \"additional measures that may further enhance the safety of our takeaway service.\"\n\nRival food chains Burger King, Subway, KFC and Pret A Manger are still offering takeaways in-store.\n\nMcDonald's UK and Ireland chief executive Paul Pomroy said that safety measures across the firm's 1,300 restaurants will be reviewed by an independent health and safety body.\n\nHe added that customers would be kept updated via the restaurant's app and its website. Drive-through and delivery services across the fast food chain will remain open.\n\nUnder new lockdown restrictions which came into force in England and Scotland this week, hospitality firms are allowed to offer takeaways and deliveries.\n\nBut rules which previously allowed takeaways or click-and-collect services for alcoholic drinks have been scrapped.\n\nWales and Northern Ireland were already in lockdown, which meant that pubs, restaurants and cafes were restricted to takeaway-only too.\n\nAfter the first nationwide lockdown in March, many chains including McDonald's, Burger King and Pret closed their doors to hungry customers.\n\nThey gradually reopened with additional safety measures in place, such as plastic screens in front of the tills, hand sanitiser dispensers and restrictions on the number of customers allowed in at any one point. Some also pared back the number of dishes on offer.\n\nA Burger King spokesperson said that takeaway was still available in some branches and that it would continue to offer click-and-collect and delivery services \"in line with guidance issued\".\n\nSandwich chain Pret A Manger told the BBC that it is keeping some outlets open for both takeaways and delivery, but it would keep the number under review in the coming months.\n\n\"Last year we shifted our business to focus on delivery and expanded our delivery platform partnerships, to make Pret available to a wider customer base\", a spokesperson said.\n\n\"Since then, we have seen a significant increase in the use of delivery.\"\n\nSubway and KFC also confirmed that they remain open for in-store takeaways, deliveries and click-and-collect orders across the UK.\n\nFast food firm Leon, which has 65 outlets, said that 28 of their sites will remain open for takeaways and deliveries.\n\n\"We will continue to keep as many restaurants open as possible, as we did in the previous two lockdowns in line with government guidelines,\" a spokesperson said.\n\nDespite adapting their business models, many casual dining chains have been forced to make job cuts in the last year as lockdown restrictions hit sales. Pret, for example, announced 3,000 job cuts in August, while Greggs made 820 job cuts at the end of 2020.", "Supporters of US President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday\n\nWorld leaders have condemned violent scenes in Washington after supporters of US President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol building on Wednesday.\n\nThe riot forced the suspension of a joint session of Congress to certify Joe Biden's electoral victory.\n\nMany leaders called for peace and an orderly transition of power, describing what happened as \"horrifying\" and an \"attack on democracy\".\n\n\"The United States stands for democracy around the world and it is now vital that there should be a peaceful and orderly transfer of power,\" he wrote on Twitter.\n\nOther UK politicians joined him in criticising the violence, with opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer calling it a \"direct attack on democracy\".\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel told the BBC that Mr Trump's comments \"directly led\" to his supporters storming Congress and clashing with police.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Home Secretary Priti Patel says Donald Trump was wrong for not condemning the violence\n\nScotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted that the scenes from the US Capitol were \"utterly horrifying\".\n\nIn Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said those who stormed the US legislature were \"attackers and rioters\" and that she felt \"angry and also sad\" after seeing pictures from the scene.\n\nShe told a meeting of German conservatives: \"I regret very much that President Trump has still not admitted defeat, but has kept raising doubts about the elections.\"\n\nChina meanwhile attempted to draw comparisons between the rioters who entered Congress to try and subvert the US election result and pro-democracy protesters who stormed Hong Kong's Legislative Council last year.\n\nForeign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying claimed events in Hong Kong were more \"severe\" than those in Washington but \"not one demonstrator died\".\n\nThe comparisons between the two incidents has caused outrage among Hong Kong's pro-democracy activists and their supporters.\n\nRussia blamed the \"archaic\" US electoral system and the politicisation of the media for Wednesday's unrest in Washington.\n\n\"The electoral system in the United States is archaic, it does not meet modern democratic standards, creating opportunities for numerous violations, and the American media have become an instrument of political struggle,\" foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.\n\nElsewhere in Europe, a chorus of leaders condemned the scenes in Washington as an attack on democracy.\n\nSpanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said: \"I have trust in the strength of US democracy. The new presidency of Joe Biden will overcome this tense stage, uniting the American people.\"\n\nIn a video on Twitter, French President Emmanuel Macron said: \"When, in one of the world's oldest democracies, supporters of an outgoing president take up arms to challenge the legitimate results of an election, a universal idea - that of 'one person, one vote' - is undermined.\n\n\"What happened today in Washington DC is not American, definitely. We believe in the strength of our democracies. We believe in the strength of American democracy\" he added.\n\nSwedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven described the incident as \"worrying\" and said it was \"an assault on democracy\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by SwedishPM This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nTop EU leaders have also made their views known. European Council President Charles Michel said he trusted the US \"to ensure a peaceful transfer of power\" to Mr Biden, while European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she looked forward to working with the Democrat, who \"won the election\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Charles Michel This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nLike many other global figures, the Secretary-General of the Nato military alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, said that the outcome of the election \"must be respected\".\n\nFor his part, UN Secretary-General António Guterres was \"saddened\" by the events at the US Capitol, his spokesman said.\n\nThe events also shocked America's close ally and neighbour to its north. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadians were \"deeply disturbed and saddened by the attack on democracy\".\n\n\"Violence will never succeed in overruling the will of the people. Democracy in the US must be upheld - and it will be,\" he wrote on Twitter.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. When a mob stormed the US capitol\n\nFrom New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, tweeted that \"democracy - the right of people to exercise a vote, have their voice heard and then have that decision upheld peacefully - should never be undone by a mob\".\n\nMeanwhile Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia - another close US ally - condemned the \"distressing scenes\" and said he looked forward to a peaceful transfer of power.\n\nIn India, the world's largest democracy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi - who has enjoyed a good relationship with President Trump - said he was \"distressed to see news about rioting and violence\" in Washington.\n\n\"Orderly and peaceful transfer of power must continue,\" he tweeted.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Narendra Modi This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nTurkey, an ally through Nato, said it invited \"all parties\" to show \"restraint and common sense\".\n\nThe Venezuelan government, which the US does not recognise as legitimate, said \"with this regrettable episode, the United States suffers the same thing that it has generated in other countries with its policies of aggression\".\n\nIn statements on Twitter, Argentina's President Alberto Fernández and Chile's President Sebastián Piñera also condemned the scenes in Washington. Mr Piñera said Chile \"trusts in the solidity of US democracy to guarantee the rule of law\".\n\nIn Japan, one of America's closest allies and partners, Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said the government hoped for a \"peaceful transfer of power\" in the United States.\n\nFrom Fiji, Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, who led a coup in 2006, also expressed outrage at the events that took place.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by Frank Bainimarama This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAnd in Singapore, Senior Minister Teo Chee Hean said he had watched as the \"shocking\" scenes took place, adding: \"Its a sad day.\"", "Nursery staff are not advised to wear face coverings\n\nChildcare organisations are demanding to see evidence that it is safe for them to remain open while schools and colleges have closed to most pupils.\n\nStaff have close contact with children and babies daily, when they change nappies and receive them by the hand from parents, for example.\n\nMinisters have insisted early years settings are safe as young children have very low rates of the virus.\n\nNurseries argue the evidence cited is based on data about old variant Covid.\n\nEngland's three main nursery organisations, the Early Years Alliance, the National Day Nurseries Association and childminders' group, Pacey, have joined together to mount a #ProtectEarlyYears campaign.\n\nThey want the government to provide clear scientific evidence on the risks to early years staff of staying open, particularly in light of the increased transmissibility of the new variant of Covid-19.\n\nSue Cardy, owner and manager of Ready Teddy Go Pre School, in Shoeburyness, Essex said: \"There isn't anyone who has asked: 'Is it 100% safe for us to remain fully open? No one can see the virus and staff may be asymptomatic, and so we all run an element of risk of catching or spreading it.\"\n\nShe added: \"Staff have families and are not all young... 50% of my staff are over 50 and some have underlying medical conditions.\"\n\nVicky, the manager of a church pre-school in Cheshire West and Chester said she could potentially have 30 children plus 10 staff in a church hall, with no PPE recommended, and limited social distancing.\n\n\"As an early years provider, I am increasingly worried about the safety of both staff and children, yet if we chose to partially close, we could be financially penalised.\"\n\nAnd Georgie Morrell from Brighton and Hove said: \"Since re-opening, I have had four households tell me. they are Covid positive.\n\n\"This is clearly very close to home and yet we have been given no choice or support but to remain open and carry on.\"\n\nNeil Leitch, chief executive of the Early Years Alliance, said: \"It is simply not acceptable that, at the height of a global pandemic, early years providers are being asked to work with no support, no protection and no clear evidence that is safe for them to do so.\n\n\"We know how vital access to early education and care is to many families, but it cannot be right to ask the early years workforce to put themselves at risk. That is why it is vital that the government takes the urgent steps needed to safeguard those working in the sector, particularly mass testing and priority access to vaccinations.\n\nNursery providers are calling for staff to be tested, priority for vaccination and for state funding lost due to lower numbers during the pandemic, to be replaced by government.\n\nPurnima Tanuku, chief Executive of National Day Nurseries Association, said nurseries were determined to support families during the current lockdown.\n\nBut, she added: \"Time and again, whether it's on PPE, cleaning costs, testing or staffing, early years providers have been overlooked by the Department for Education.\n\n\"Now, they are the only part of the education sector fully open to all children and must be given priority.\"\n\nOn Wednesday, vaccines minister Nadim Zahawi said there was very little risk to younger children.\n\n\"The nursery sector has taken tremendous care in making sure the premises are also Covid safe. It is the right thing to do.\"\n\nThe Department for Education is yet to comment on the #ProtectEarlyYears demands.", "Matthew Mason will be sentenced later this month\n\nA man who killed a schoolboy after paying him to stop their sexual relationship being revealed has been found guilty of murder.\n\nMatthew Mason admitted bludgeoning 15-year-old Alex Rodda with a wrench in Ashley, Cheshire, in 2019.\n\nThe 19-year-old paid Alex more than £2,000 after he contacted his then girlfriend about \"flirty\" messages, Chester Crown Court heard.\n\nMason, of Ash Lane in Ollerton, will be sentenced on 25 January.\n\nLawyers acting for Mason, who denied murder, had claimed the killing was the result of self-defence or a loss of control.\n\nBut the jury rejected this and found him guilty of murdering Alex by a majority of 10 to two.\n\nAs the verdict was returned, Mason appeared to be crying in the dock.\n\nMembers of Alex's family were also in tears. In a statement, they said they had \"never come across a more selfish, cold and calculating person\" as Mason.\n\n\"Mason has attempted to blame Alex and discredit his name throughout this trial and thankfully the jury were able to see through his web of deceit,\" they said.\n\nSpeaking outside the court, Alex's father Adam Rodda said the trial had been \"very difficult\" for the family and they were relieved Mason had been found guilty of murder.\n\n\"We wouldn't have accepted anything else, we would have been distraught if any other verdict had been given. We prayed and we are obviously delighted that justice has been done,\" he said.\n\nAlex Rodda was killed in woodland in Cheshire\n\nOn the evening of 12 December, Mason said he had picked Alex up from his home and drove him to a remote area of woodland where he told him he could not afford to give him any more money.\n\nThe agricultural engineering student, who was the son of a farmer, told the court he had taken the wrench with him to \"scare him\".\n\nHe claimed that, once in the woods, Alex had threatened to ruin his life \"financially or socially\" and pushed him to the floor, grabbing the wrench and hitting Mason with it.\n\nMason said he managed to get the wrench from Alex and recalled hitting him with it twice, although the court heard evidence of further blows.\n\nAlex, a pupil at Holmes Chapel High School, was struck at least 15 times to the head and his body was found by refuse collectors the next morning.\n\nEvidence showed Alex had been struck at least 15 times with the wrench\n\nThe jury heard Mason had paid Alex more than £2,000 to stop him reporting their \"intimate sexual relationship\".\n\nIn the month before the murder, Alex contacted Mason's girlfriend to tell her that her boyfriend had been messaging him \"in a flirty way\" and had sent an explicit photo and video.\n\nMason denied the claim but began making payments to the 15-year-old's bank account.\n\nBy the time of Alex's death, Mason had transferred more than £2,200 and was asking friends and family to borrow money, the court was told.\n\nGiving evidence, Mason, who lived with his family on a farm near Knutsford, admitted having sex with Alex but said he thought it was \"wrong\".\n\nHe told the court he did not believe his friends would accept him if he was gay or bisexual.\n\nIn the week before Alex's death, Mason made internet searches for phrases including \"what would happen if you kicked someone down the stairs\", \"everyday poison\" and \"the mysteries of Cheshire unsolved deaths of missing people\".\n\nBut he told the court he had been searching the terms because he was suicidal.\n\nAlex's body was found in woodland by refuse collectors\n\nAfter killing Alex, Mason had a drink with friends in the Red Lion pub in Pickmere and The Golden Pheasant pub in Plumley, Cheshire Police said.\n\nHe later returned to the woods and the prosecution believe he dragged Alex's body to the side of the road and attempted to put him inside his car.\n\nAfter failing to do this, he drove away. But a witness had taken a photo of his Renault Clio car parked on the track and reported this to police.\n\nMason was identified as the owner and arrested the next day.\n\nPolice said Mason had dried blood on his hands and there was a bin bag in his boot with a blood-stained fleece, the wrench and Alex's jacket in it.\n\nDet Insp Nigel Reid said: \"Mason had murder on his mind as he drove Alex to his death under the pretence of sexual activity.\n\n\"He chose a secluded place to kill him in cold blood, a place he believed he would go unseen and his crime undetected.\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The coronavirus vaccine rollout is a national challenge requiring an unprecedented effort - involving the armed forces - Boris Johnson says.\n\nThe PM confirmed almost 1.5 million people in the UK have now received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine.\n\nMore than 1,000 GP-led sites in England will be able to offer a total of \"hundreds of thousands\" of jabs each day by 15 January, he said.\n\nThe Army will use \"battle preparation techniques\" to help achieve that goal.\n\nIt came as a further 1,162 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were reported on Thursday - the second consecutive day of more than 1,000 recorded fatalities - and 52,618 new cases.\n\nAnd as Simon Stevens, head of the NHS in England, warned 10,000 patients with Covid had been admitted to hospital since Christmas Day.\n\nSpeaking at a Downing Street news conference, Mr Johnson said there would likely be \"lumpiness and bumpiness\" in the rollout of vaccines.\n\nHe said: \"Let's be clear, this is a national challenge on a scale like nothing we've seen before and it will require an unprecedented national effort.\n\n\"Of course, there will be difficulties, appointments will be changed but... the Army is working hand in glove with the NHS and local councils to set up our vaccine network and using battle preparation techniques to help us keep up the pace.\"\n\nAlongside GPs, there will be 223 hospital sites and seven \"giant vaccination centres\" - as well as an initial 200 community pharmacies - offering jabs, Mr Johnson said.\n\nEveryone will have a vaccination centre within 10 miles of their home, he added, with a \"full vaccination deployment plan\" to be published on Monday.\n\nHe also said there would be a national booking system for vaccinations - but did not give any more details.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Brigadier Phil Prosser said his task was to ensure everyone in England had equal access to the vaccine\n\nBrigadier Phil Prosser, commander of military support to the vaccine delivery programme, told the news conference his team was \"embedded\" with the NHS.\n\nHe said his \"day job\" is to deliver combat supplies to UK forces in time of war, \"at speed in the most arduous and challenging conditions\".\n\nThe government has set a target to offer vaccination slots to 15 million in the top four priority groups - including all over-80s - by 15 February.\n\nAnd Mr Johnson said that, with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine available, he could pledge one of those groups - care home residents - would all receive their jab by the end of January.\n\nThe widespread rollout of the vaccine has begun in earnest with the first doses delivered during the day to family doctors for distribution.\n\nBut there were concerns from some GPs over supplies, as Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the levels of vaccine supply was the \"rate-limiting\" factor as jabs would be delivered as quickly as stock is available.\n\nIt comes as some hospitals in England are at risk of becoming Covid-only sites, with rising admissions for the virus forcing trusts to cut back on other services.\n\nThe latest NHS statistics also show that there were 30,370 patients with Covid in UK hospitals on Tuesday, a much higher figure than the first peak in the spring of 2020.\n\nHospital leaders have warned medics are becoming increasingly stretched with \"untrained staff\" used to fill gaps.\n\nAt 20:00 GMT, people in some streets stepped out onto doorsteps to clap for the heroes of the pandemic, following a weekly initiative which gained popularity during the UK's first lockdown.\n\nHowever, Thursday's clap for heroes was more muted than those seen last year, perhaps reflecting criticism the initiative had become politicised.\n\nLots of detail has been given about how the NHS - working hand-in-hand with the military - will be able to deliver the vaccines.\n\nThere will be more local vaccination centres, hospital hubs and even mass vaccination at sports stadiums.\n\nThousands of extra vaccinators have already been trained - and thousands more are waiting in the wings.\n\nBut the biggest hurdle the UK faces is vaccine supply.\n\nIf it is not available, it cannot be put in arms no matter how good the vaccination network is.\n\nIn the long-term, supply is not likely to be a problem - but in the coming weeks it could be tight.\n\nThere is enough vaccine in the country to offer all those at highest risk a jab by mid-February.\n\nBut it is not yet all ready for the NHS to use, either because the final safety checks have not been done or the vaccine has not been put into vials.\n\nThe former depends on lab work by the medicines regulator, while the latter is the job of a plant in Wrexham.\n\nEach stage takes some time. The target is achievable, but a lot has to go right.\n\nSir Simon Stevens said there were 50% more coronavirus patients in England's hospitals now compared to the peak last April, affecting every region across the country.\n\nHe said: \"That number is accelerating very, very rapidly... the pressures are real and they are growing.\"\n\nIn Northern Ireland, the Belfast Health Trust has said it has no other option but to cancel all of its urgent cancer surgery amid \"highly significant\" demand for bed space.\n\nThe cancelled operations will affect those patients for whom surgery could impact recovery and even survival, the trust said.\n\nBoris Johnson said all parts of government would be throwing everything at the vaccination effort \"round the clock\"\n\nIn one positive development for hospitals, two more life-saving drugs that can cut deaths by a quarter in patients who are sickest with Covid have been cleared for widespread use, with immediate effect.\n\nThe anti-inflammatory medications, given via a drip, save an extra life for every 12 treated, researchers said, following NHS trials.\n\nElsewhere, the UK has implemented restrictions on travellers to England from countries near South Africa to stop the spread of the South African Covid variant.\n\nMeanwhile, Mr Johnson and Sir Simon were asked about persistent social media claims that coronavirus does not exist - and that reports of packed hospital wards of people being treated are just a myth.\n\nSir Simon said that such misinformation was an \"insult\" to hard-working critical care staff.\n\n\"There is nothing more demoralising than having that kind of nonsense spouted when it is most obviously untrue,\" he said.", "Sarah Bingham said she is a match donor for her daughter Ariel and eldest son Noah (far right)\n\nA mother with two children who need kidney transplants said she wishes she could help both of them, but can only donate one organ.\n\nSarah Bingham's son Noah, 20, and daughter Ariel, 16, have the same rare genetic condition.\n\nMrs Bingham, 48, is a donor match for her children and said her maternal instinct is to donate to both of them.\n\nBut her organ was always due to go to her daughter and two family friends are matches for her son.\n\nHer husband Darryl, 49, is not a match, so cannot be a donor for their children.\n\nBoth Noah and Ariel have nephronophthisis, which causes inflammation and scarring to the kidneys.\n\nMrs Bingham, of Hexham, Northumberland, said although her son is \"very poorly\", he undergoes regular dialysis and is in a stable condition.\n\nHer daughter's kidney function \"has been deteriorating more in the last year\" and she will probably need a transplant first.\n\nMrs Bingham said: \"I was all set to give a kidney to my daughter and then my son went into renal failure and he also needs a kidney. Obviously, I've only got one that I can donate.\n\n\"The renal teams don't push you [to make a decision], because you're putting yourself on the line to donate a kidney.\n\n\"You have to make that call yourself, but obviously as a mum when you've got two children who both need kidney transplants and you've expected to give your kidney to one, and suddenly the other one needs one as well, you feel this dilemma.\"\n\nNoah Bingham is in a stable condition thanks to regular kidney dialysis\n\nProblems began in 2016 when Ariel started to feel constantly tired.\n\nHer fatigue was initially put down to exam stress, but tests at Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary found she had the kidney condition.\n\nMrs Bingham was told she would be a suitable donor for Ariel when the time came.\n\nThen, in 2019, Noah became ill and was diagnosed with the same condition.\n\nHe is stable, but would need to put on weight to undergo a transplant.\n\nThe couple have another son Casper, 12, who is being tested to see if he also has the condition.\n\nDarryl Bingham is not a suitable match for his two eldest children\n\nProf John Sayer, a kidney specialist at Newcastle's Freeman Hospital who is treating Noah, said nephronophthisis affects about one in 100,000 people.\n\n\"There's clearly a dilemma because there's a shortage of donors for patients needing kidney transplants.\n\n\"But kidney failure itself is not rare. There are 4,500 people across the country waiting for a transplant.\"\n\nHe added patients often face a \"gruelling and terrifying\" wait of about three years for a donor organ.\n\nIn December, Mr Bingham completed the challenge of walking 12,000 steps every day for 12 days to raise money for Kidney Research UK, which has supported the family.\n\nMrs Bingham said that if Ariel's condition was to deteriorate first she would get her kidney\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Some supermarkets faced issues over the festive period due to ports disruption\n\nThe UK meat industry has called for the early vaccination of workers to keep food supplies running smoothly during the coronavirus crisis.\n\nIt warned that absences during the pandemic, coupled with disruption at ports, could hit food supply chains.\n\nAn early vaccination call for supermarket staff was also made by the boss of Sainsbury's on Thursday.\n\nThe government said the food industry remains \"well-prepared\" to make sure people have the food they need.\n\nThe British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) said coronavirus and disruption at ports due to new systems brought in after the Brexit transition period were \"a severe challenge to the industry and to the smooth running of the nation's food supply chain\".\n\nIt argued frontline workers in meat factories should get early vaccinations due to the risk of a rapid spread of the new strains of the virus among key workers.\n\nThe government has set out who will get vaccinated first, which starts with care home residents and the oldest and most vulnerable people.\n\nBut Nick Allen, chief executive of the BMPA, said it would be logical to also prioritise key workers in the food industry.\n\n\"As the new coronavirus variant takes hold across the whole of the UK, we are hearing widespread reports of rapidly rising absences in the food supply chain,\" he said.\n\nSome firms supplying supermarkets \"are seeing a tripling of staff having to take time off work through illness or enforced self-isolation\", he added.\n\nPressures on staff during the lockdown include illness, having to self-isolate, and childcare while some schools are closed under England's lockdown.\n\nDue to the specialised nature of meat production, if even a few key factory personnel such as the foreman or managers are absent, production can stop, Mr Allen said.\n\nEarly vaccinations should not be restricted to the meat industry, according to Mr Allen. All key workers in the food industry should get early vaccinations, he said.\n\nEven supermarkets themselves are having problems with absences, he suggested.\n\n\"The key food supply chains ought to be prioritised,\" he said. \"All food industry key workers should be prioritised [for vaccination]\".\n\nThe government is advised on vaccinations by a group of experts called the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).\n\nProfessor Wei Shen Lim, Covid-19 Chair for the JCVI, said the committee's advice on vaccine prioritisation \"was developed with the aim of preventing as many deaths as possible.\"\n\n\"As the single greatest risk of death from Covid-19 is older age, prioritisation is primarily based on age,\" he said.\n\n\"It is estimated that vaccinating everyone in the priority groups would prevent 99% of deaths, including those associated with occupational exposure to infection,\" the professor added.\n\nSainsbury's boss Simon Roberts also called for early vaccinations for key workers on Thursday.\n\n\"My view is that priority has to be given to those that need it first,\" he said. \"Those on the frontline should be part of that as and when capacity becomes available.\"\n\nAbsence rates for Sainsbury's staff are lower than at the peak of the crisis, but are rising, and have stepped up in the last few days, he said.\n\nThe Sainsbury's absence rate is currently 8%. The business has 172,000 employees.\n\nAsda said that it had seen an increase in employees self-isolating and shielding in line with the rising UK infection rate.\n\nHowever, it said that absence rates were still lower than at the peak of the pandemic.\n\n\"We are taking proactive steps to manage colleague absences by retaining temporary colleagues hired over the Christmas period and are bringing in additional temporary colleagues in those stores that need them the most,\" and Asda spokesman said.\n\nTesco has asked clinically vulnerable staff to stay at home.\n\nMorrisons, meanwhile, is also seeing more absences, but the rate is still more than half that of the peak of the pandemic. It is also a bigger business having taken on 26,000 extra staff during the crisis.\n\nAndrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the British Retail Consortium said: \"While absence rates are currently rising, retailers are closely monitoring the situation in stores and distribution centres and supply chains continue to run smoothly.\n\nA spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs said: \"As we have seen in recent months, the UK has a large, diverse and highly resilient food supply chain.\n\n\"We continue to closely monitor the situation and are working closely with the food industry on the workforce and absence related challenges presented by the pandemic.\"\n\nThey added that the food industry remains \"well-prepared\" to make sure people across the country have the food they need.\n\nUK ports have seen disruption due to the effects of coronavirus on trade and new systems brought in after the Brexit transition period.\n\nMr Roberts of Sainsbury's said that, so far, the flow of goods from Europe is in decent shape, but there had been some problems in sending food to Northern Ireland.There is still some backlog in general merchandising, he added.\n\nHowever, Scottish seafood exporters warned on Thursday that they had been hit by the \"perfect storm of Brexit disruption\".\n\n\"Weakened by Covid-19, and the closure of the French border before Christmas, the end of the Brexit transition period has unleashed layer upon layer of administrative problems, resulting in queues, border refusals and utter confusion,\" said Donna Fordyce, chief executive of Seafood Scotland.\n\nShe said IT problems in France meant consignments were diverted from Boulogne-sur-Mer to Dunkirk, \"which was unprepared as it wasn't supposed to be at the export frontline.\"\n\nThere have also been IT issues on the UK side with HMRC, she added.\n\n\"These businesses are not transporting toilet rolls or widgets,\" she said. \"They are exporting the highest quality, perishable seafood which has a finite window to get to markets in peak condition. If the window closes these consignments go to landfill.\"\n\nThe National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations also warned of delays to fish exports due to \"a brick wall of bureaucracy\".", "Lorry drivers crossing the Channel will continue to need a recent negative Covid test result \"until further notice\", the UK government has said.\n\nHauliers have been required to prove they have tested negative since the border with France reopened last month.\n\nThe decision to continue testing comes from the French government, the Department for Transport said.\n\nTransport Secretary Grant Shapps urged \"all hauliers to get tested before getting to the border\".\n\nThe decision comes as the introduction of new trading rules between the UK and European Union prompts disruption for some businesses and hauliers.\n\nMr Shapps said the government was \"offering support to businesses to set-up testing facilities at their own premises, assisting the smooth passage of trucks and good across the border, as well as setting up testing at information and advice sites around the country\".\n\nDrivers and crew of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs), drivers of large goods vehicles (LGVs) and van drivers are advised to obtain a negative test before arriving in Kent or at other Channel crossing points.\n\nThere are now 34 testing sites for hauliers situated in key \"stopping spots\" across the UK, with further sites being set up, the DfT said.\n\nTests must be authorised and taken 72 hours before entry into France.\n\nIn addition to a negative Covid test result, some hauliers require a new 24-hour permit to enter Kent since the introduction of the new UK-EU rules.\n\nFrance reported 21,703 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, while the UK reported 52,618.\n\nLast month, the border crisis saw France refuse arrivals from the UK for 48 hours between 20 and 22 December due to a new virus variant initially discovered in Kent.\n\nPassenger ferries and lorry freight bound for France were suspended from Dover, Portsmouth and Newhaven.\n\nAn emergency procedure devised as part of post-Brexit preparations allowed lorries to be \"stacked\" - leaving thousands of foreign drivers stranded throughout southern England.", "Last updated on .From the section Aston Villa\n\nAston Villa are preparing to field a team of youngsters in Friday's FA Cup third-round tie at home to Liverpool after a \"significant\" Covid-19 outbreak at the club.\n\nA final decision on whether the game will take place at all will be made on Friday.\n\nVilla manager Dean Smith, his coaching staff and the rest of the club's first-team squad will not be involved after the outbreak forced the closure of the club's Bodymoor Heath training headquarters on Thursday.\n\nThe club is in discussions with the Football Association and want to fulfil the fixture (kick-off 19:45 GMT) but final confirmation on whether the tie is played is still on hold pending the results of further testing on the young players who are now being considered for selection.\n\nMark Delaney, Villa's under-23 coach, is scheduled to take charge in the absence of Smith and his backroom staff. He will be accompanied by a doctor, physiotherapist and kit staff.\n\nThe game was thrown into doubt when Villa confirmed the shutdown of the training ground after \"a large number of first-team players and staff\" returned positive Covid-19 results after being tested on Monday.\n\nThose affected went into isolation and a second round of tests was carried out immediately, which produced more positive results on Thursday.\n\nVilla are keen to play the game against Jurgen Klopp's Premier League champions, who they thrashed 7-2 earlier this season. Manager Smith had planned to rest several stars for the game but the Covid-19 outbreak has thrown the club's plans into chaos.\n\nThey will now be hoping the additional Covid-19 testing returns a clean bill of health with Villa liaising closely with the FA in the hope of getting the game played on Friday night.\n\nThe meeting between in-form Villa and Liverpool is one of the most attractive ties of the third round, even if both managers were set to field unfamiliar line-ups.\n\nIt also remains to be seen whether Villa's scheduled Premier League home game against Tottenham Hotspur at Villa Park on Wednesday goes ahead.\n• None What sport has been hit by Covid-19 this weekend?\n\nElswhere, Southampton's FA Cup third-round game against Shrewsbury on Sunday was called off on Thursday after a significant number of Shrews players and staff tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nWayne Rooney and Derby's first-team squad will miss their FA Cup tie at Chorley on Saturday following a Covid-19 outbreak which closed their training ground on Monday.\n\nThe Rams' team for the game at Victory Park will be made up of under-23 and under-18 players.\n\nVilla will be doing all they can to ensure Friday's tie goes ahead but the Covid-19 outbreak could also have Premier League ramifications.\n\nVilla are scheduled to face fourth-placed Spurs at Villa Park on Wednesday and they currently stand only three points behind Jose Mourinho's team.\n\nThere must now be question marks over whether that game will take place.\n\nIf the game is off it will only add to the fixture congestion both clubs are likely to face in an already crowded calendar this season.\n\nVilla, even though they planned to leave out several established first-team players against Liverpool, still had high FA Cup ambitions and would have wanted to maintain the momentum that has given them such an impressive start to the season after only surviving in the top flight on the final day of last season.\n\nThey will hope the latest testing brings no further complications in the FA Cup context - then attention will turn to what has the potential to be a hugely significant game on Wednesday.\n• Stream eight live FA Cup third-round games this weekend on BBC iPlayer, the BBC Sport website and app. Find out more here.", "GPs in England are receiving doses of the Oxford Covid jab as medics warn about overstretched hospitals.\n\nThe rollout of the Oxford vaccine is part of the NHS's biggest-ever effort and aims to offer jabs to 13 million by mid-February - including all over-80s.\n\nBirmingham's NHS said there are enough supplies with more to come as politicians warned doses may run out.\n\nSome hospitals in England are at risk of becoming Covid-only sites, with rising admissions for the virus forcing trusts to cut back on other services.\n\nAnd hospital leaders have warned medics are becoming increasingly stretched with \"untrained staff\" used to fill gaps.\n\nIt came as a further 1,162 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were reported on Thursday - the second consecutive day of more than 1,000 recorded fatalities - and 52,618 new cases.\n\nThe latest NHS statistics also show that there were 30,370 patients with Covid in UK hospitals on Tuesday.\n\nThe rollout of the Oxford vaccine to GPs will help increase vaccinations among the top four priority groups who are first in line to receive doses.\n\nThe Department of Health said 1.3 million people in the UK, including almost a quarter of those aged over 80 in England, have received at least one dose so far.\n\nWriting to Health Secretary Matt Hancock, the Birmingham political leaders criticised communication around the vaccination programme in the city.\n\n\"We acknowledge that the vaccination rollout is in its early days, but we have also learned today that Birmingham has not yet been supplied with any AstraZeneca stock, while current Pfizer stocks are scheduled to run out on Friday this week with currently no clarity on when further supplies will arrive.\"\n\nThey added \"it remains unclear who is responsible for overseeing the vaccination programme in Birmingham, and whom we should hold accountable for progress and delivery\".\n\nThe letter is signed by Labour leader of Birmingham City Council, Ian Ward; Liam Byrne MP, Labour's candidate for the West Midlands mayor, and by Conservative MP and ex-minister Andrew Mitchell.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Liam Byrne This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nBut NHS Birmingham and Solihull told the BBC: \"Thousands of people in Birmingham and Solihull have already been vaccinated and this continues at pace.\n\n\"We have sufficient supplies and more will be coming.\"\n\nWest Midlands mayor Andy Street said he has been assured supplies of the Oxford vaccine will be delivered to Birmingham on Friday.\n\nElsewhere, Gillian McLauchlan, deputy director of public health at Salford Council, described \"teething\" issues with the vaccine rollout there.\n\nShe told councillors at a local scrutiny committee: \"We have no control over vaccine supplies. We are told literally two days in advance 'your next lot of vaccines are coming'.\"\n\nEngland's vaccination programme is described as the biggest in NHS history, with an aim to offer jabs to most care home residents by the end of January and the most vulnerable by mid-February.\n\nOfficials leading the vaccination programme are adamant rollout is going to plan - and are cautioning against judging performance too early.\n\nOf course, there will be teething problems, but the fact remains the UK has vaccinated more per head of population than any other country apart from Israel and Bahrain.\n\nWhile rollout of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine started on Monday, it was actually only being used at the hospital hubs up to Thursday.\n\nDeliveries are now being made to hundreds of local vaccination centres. There are 17 in the Birmingham region so they should start to receive doses imminently.\n\nThat should mean there is a vaccine available if they do run out of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab.\n\nAlthough disruption to the rollout of the programme in the city may still happen as local centres are warning they cannot book patients in until they know they have stock available.\n\nBut the fact the city's leaders felt compelled to write to the health secretary to warn about this is an illustration of the pressure in the system at the moment.\n\nGiven the high level of infections and current lockdown, there is a desperation in all quarters to get the most at-risk vaccinated as quickly as possible.\n\nAnd until the nation sees that translate into significant numbers of people getting vaccinated - 2 million a week is the goal - people will remain on edge.\n\nThe Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was approved for emergency use on 2 December but requires specialist storage unsuitable for most GP practices, with doses largely delivered in hospitals.\n\nThe Oxford-AstraZeneca jab was approved on 30 December and does not require specialist storage. It was first rolled out on Monday to hospitals and to GPs in England from Thursday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. One medical centre in London is now vaccinating almost 1,000 people a week\n\nMr Hancock visited a GP surgery in London to promote the roll out earlier - but staff there said delivery of the Oxford vaccine had been delayed.\n\nThe health secretary said he was \"delighted\" care home residents would begin receiving their first Oxford jabs from GPs this week.\n\n\"This will ensure the most vulnerable are protected and will save tens of thousands of lives,\" he said.\n\nGP Ammara Hughes, a partner at Bloomsbury Surgery, told broadcasters its first delivery of the Oxford jab had been pushed back 24 hours to Thursday.\n\nShe said: \"It's just more frustrating than a concern because we've got the capacity to vaccinate. And if we had a regular supply - we do have the capacity to vaccinate three to four thousand patients a week.\"\n\nMr Hancock described supply of vaccine as a \"rate-limiting\" step.\n\nHe said: \"For the first three days with the Oxford vaccine we did it in hospitals to check that it was working well and it's working well so now we can make sure that it gets to all those GP surgeries that like this one can do all the vaccinations that are needed.\n\n\"The rate-limiting step is the supply of vaccine. We're working with the companies - both Pfizer and AstraZeneca - to increase the supply.\"\n\nMore than 700 local vaccination sites will administer jabs, with the government announcing a further seven mass vaccination sites across England.\n\nAnother 180 GP-led sites, 100 new hospital sites and a pilot scheme involving local pharmacies will open this week.\n\nMeanwhile, nearly 19,981 second doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab - which was the first to be approved for emergency use in the UK last month - were administered between 29 December and 3 January, NHS England said.\n\nIt came as Rupert Pearse, professor of intensive care medicine and a consultant at the Royal London, said his own intensive care staff are having to care for far more sick patients.\n\nHe told BBC Radio 4's Today programme there would usually be a ratio of one fully-trained intensive care nurse for each patient in a unit but staff are becoming increasingly stretched.\n\n\"Right now we are diluting down to one [intensive care] nurse to three [patients] and filling those gaps with untrained staff and in some instances doctors helping nurses deliver their care... and we're even facing diluting that further to one in four,\" he said.\n\nAll of the UK is now under strict virus curbs, with Wales, Northern Ireland and most of Scotland also in lockdown, and vaccinations are progressing across the devolved nations.", "Supermarket giant Sainsbury's has reported a bumper Christmas, with sales up 9.3% for the festive trading period.\n\nMore customers bought their food online than ever before, it said.\n\nIn the 10 days leading up to Christmas, it delivered 1.1 million online orders, twice last year's number.\n\n\"Many customers had to change their Christmas plans at the last minute and we sold smaller turkeys and more lamb and beef than normal,\" said chief executive Simon Roberts.\n\nSainsbury's Christmas trading period covered the nine weeks from 1 November 2020 to 2 January 2021.\n\nFor the 15 weeks to 2 January, like-for-like sales, which strip out the impact of new store openings, were up 8.6%.\n\n\"We now expect, after forgoing business rates relief of £410m, to report underlying profit before tax of at least £330m in the financial year to March 2021,\" the supermarket said.\n\nThat is down from the previous year's figure of £586m.\n\nSainsbury's has delivered bumper festive sales. It's invested heavily in boosting online capacity to keep up with the soaring demand.\n\nSupermarkets have struggled to make money from doing online deliveries, but Sainsbury's says its operation has become more efficient and profitability has improved. As volumes have increased, there are more orders in every van delivering to a smaller radius of customers.\n\nClick-and-collect is a lot cheaper to do than home deliveries. And this accounted for about a quarter of online sales in the final week.\n\nArgos generated more than half its sales from online well before the pandemic. More than 300 Argos counters are now inside Sainsbury's supermarkets, making it easy for people to pick up goods and gifts. Its fast-track delivery service can deliver to customers' homes and collection points within hours and this has seen growth of 62%.\n\nThis is a business that's been well placed to benefit from the huge shift to digital this Christmas.\n\nChristmas and New Year celebrations were constrained by coronavirus restrictions, which limited the number of people and households allowed to meet up.\n\nSainsbury's said that while people had smaller gatherings, they still treated themselves, with sales of the supermarket's premium Taste the Difference range up 11%.\n\nPremium champagne sales were up 52%, it added, echoing similar findings by rival Morrisons.\n\n\"People did more home baking than usual, with mincemeat sales up 24%. Customers still wanted New Year's Eve at home to feel special and we sold a record number of steaks,\" Sainsbury's said.\n\nSales of groceries, general merchandise and clothing were stronger than expected throughout the quarter, particularly since the start of England's second national lockdown, it added.\n\nClothing benefited from better-than-anticipated full-price sales, driven by customers shopping earlier for Christmas and changes to the supermarket's Black Friday trading strategy.\n\nSeparate figures issued by discount retailer B&M indicated that it too had a good Christmas, with like-for-like revenues at its UK stores up 21.1% year-on-year in the 13 weeks to 26 December.\n\n\"With our combination of exceptional value and convenient out-of-town locations, we are confident that our business model will prove highly relevant to the needs of customers in 2021,\" said chief executive Simon Arora.", "Lockdowns have worked before, but can we expect the new one to do the same?\n\nIt feels like we are back in March or April last year, when the strict controls on all our lives led to a fairly quick decline in levels of coronavirus.\n\nBut one of the crucial differences this time is the new variant, which is thought to spread between 50 and 70% faster than previous forms of the virus.\n\nExperts warn there are now no guarantees that lockdown will be enough to bring the variant under control.\n\n\"It still would not have been easy, but it would have been a much easier situation if it had not been for the new variant,\" Prof Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, told Inside Health.\n\n\"That really pushes the bounds of our ability to control the spread of the virus, even with measures that were previously relatively quite effective.\"\n\nThe coronavirus spreads when we come into contact with each other so moving classrooms online, telling people to stay at home and closing shops breaks many of those opportunities for human contact.\n\nIf we consider the R number - the average number of people each infected person passes the virus on to - it was about 3.0 in the run up to the first lockdown and anything above 1.0 means cases are climbing.\n\nR fell to 0.6 during the first lockdown.\n\nThen every 1,000 infected people passed the virus on to 600 others, who passed it on to 360 others and so on.\n\nBut if the new variant is 50% more transmissible then the R number, in the same lockdown conditions, would be about 0.9.\n\nThen 1,000 infected people would pass the virus onto 900 others, then 810 and so on.\n\nAs you can see this leads to far slower decline.\n\nAnd that assumes lockdown can get R down to 0.9 in areas where the new variant has become the most common form of the virus.\n\nIf, as some studies suggest, the variant is about 70% more transmissible then R may stay above 1.0 and cases may not fall at all.\n\n\"We'd at best flatten the curve, keep numbers at a roughly constant level, and that's frankly why there is so much emphasis on getting vaccine into people's arms as quickly as possible,\" said Prof Ferguson.\n\nIt is hard to lock down even harder as there are some parts of society - hospitals, supermarkets - that need to be kept open.\n\nWhat happens to the number of cases over the coming weeks will be closely monitored. If this lockdown is less effective then we will have to live with it for longer.\n\nThere have been some encouraging signs over the Christmas break, which was a bit like a lockdown due to school holidays and other restrictions.\n\n\"We are in a very difficult situation here, but my initial assessment of the last few days is that the rate is slowing which is good news,\" Prof John Edmunds, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the BBC.\n\nHe added: \"It looks likes those restrictions should be sufficient to stop the increase, whether they will be sufficient to bring cases down sufficiently we are yet to see.\"\n\nEventually the vaccine will give people immunity so we do not need the same controls on our lives.\n\nNow more than ever this is a race between the virus and the vaccine.", "Shijiazhuang authorities have started mass-testing residents following an outbreak in the city\n\nChina has placed 11 million people in the northern city of Shijiazhuang under lockdown after more than 100 new Covid cases were confirmed there.\n\nResidents are banned from leaving the city and schools have also been closed.\n\nMore than 5,000 testing sites have been set up so every resident can be tested.\n\nThe new figures are the highest China has seen in more than five months. The country has been able to contain such outbreaks by immediately taking tough action.\n\nThis has involved consistently using mass testing when new clusters of cases appear, even if they seem relatively small.\n\nHebei province, where Shijiazhuang is located, reported 120 new cases on Thursday and all but one of those infections was in the city. Elsewhere in the country, 22 new cases were confirmed.\n\nThe virus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 before spiralling into a global pandemic.\n\nThursday's lockdown comes just weeks ahead of Chinese New Year, a time when people in China travel en masse to spend the holiday with their families.\n\nBut residents in the Gaocheng district of Shijiazhuang, considered to be the epicentre of the outbreak, are now not allowed to leave their local area. Other residents are banned from leaving the city.\n\nIn terms of transport, bus travel has been halted and many flights have been cancelled.\n\nResidents have been banned from leaving the city\n\nIn a sign of just how seriously the authorities see the situation, even the postal service in and out of Shijiazhuang has been suspended for three days. And the restrictions are being tightly enforced - police were photographed in protective hazmat suits guarding the entrance to an expressway.\n\nThree officials in Shijiazhuang's Gaocheng district have been punished for \"negligence\", according to the state-run China Daily newspaper.\n\n\"Villages should identify, report, isolate and treat cases as early as possible, so as to cut off the transmission,\" Wu Hao, a national health official, was quoted as saying.\n\nFive hospitals in Shijiazhuang have been cleared for Covid-19 patients, with three others standing by, the city's Vice-Mayor Meng Xianghong said.\n\nThursday's lockdown comes just weeks ahead of Chinese New Year - a time when families gather\n\nIt is not the first time China has locked down a city in response to a cluster of cases since the outbreak in Wuhan.\n\nIn October, all nine million residents of the Chinese city of Qingdao were tested in five days after a dozen cases were confirmed. The cases were linked to a hospital treating coronavirus patients arriving from abroad.\n\nThe same month, authorities in Kashgar, in Xinjiang, tested around 4.7m people after an outbreak there.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Many businesses in Beijing say that customers are still staying away", "The star thanked fans for their messages of support\n\nThe Wanted's Tom Parker has told fans he is \"responding well\" to treatment for his brain tumour.\n\nThe singer praised the NHS as he wrote on Instagram: \"Significant reduction: These are the words I received today and I can't stop saying them over and over again.\"\n\nSharing a picture with his wife Kelsey Hardwick and their two children, he added: \"Today is a good day.\"\n\nThe 32-year-old was found to have an inoperable brain tumour last year.\n\nThe diagnosis came after he suffered two seizures last summer. Because of Covid-19 restrictions, his wife was not allowed in the hospital during three days of tests and he received the news alone.\n\nAt the time he vowed to fight the cancer \"all the way\". Two weeks later he became a father for the second time after Hardwick gave birth to a baby boy.\n\nThe singer shared a photo of his young family alongside the latest update on his health\n\nSharing an update on his condition on Thursday, Parker said: \"I had an MRI scan on Tuesday and my results today were a significant reduction to the tumour and I am responding well to treatment.\n\n\"I can't thank our wonderful NHS enough,\" he continued. \"You're all having a tough time out there but we appreciate the work you are all doing on the front line.\"\n\nThe star also thanked his wife, calling her \"my rock\", and thanked fans for their support. \"Your love, light and positivity have inspired me,\" he wrote. \"Every message has not been unnoticed they have given me so much strength.\"\n\nParker achieved fame in the early 2010s as part of The Wanted, reaching number one with the singles All Time Low and Glad You Came.\n\nSince the band went on hiatus in 2014, he has played Danny Zuko in a touring production of Grease and reached the semi-finals of Celebrity Masterchef.\n\nHe married Hardwick, an actress, in 2018. As well as Bodhi, the couple have an 18-month-old daughter.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Just when the hospitality sector thought things couldn't get any worse, it has been hit by another lockdown.\n\nLast year's rolling closures forced Martin Wolstencroft to borrow £4m just to ensure the survival of Arc Inspirations, a bar chain with 17 venues across the north of England that he has spent the last two decades building into a successful business.\n\nAnd the latest lockdown has forced Mr Wolstencroft to ask his bank to lend him another £1m.\n\nHe is far from alone. UK Hospitality says the closure of pubs, restaurants and hotels is costing business owners such as Mr Wolstencroft a total of £500m a month, even allowing for any government support. And that has led to a huge rise in debt.\n\n\"The money that we are borrowing is really just to stand still,\" Mr Wolstencroft said.\n\n\"We'll be coming out of this in a far worse position with far greater debt and it totally reduces our ability to grow our business for the future.\n\n\"And all of this has been brought about through no fault of our own.\"\n\nHe reckons the debt he has taken on so far will take the business six years to pay back, which leaves him facing some difficult decisions.\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak has announced a package of grants worth up to £3,000 a month per property to keep retail, hospitality and leisure businesses afloat until the spring.\n\nBut Mr Wolstencroft, who pays rents of more than £16,000 a month on some of his bars, described the grants as a \"mere drop in the ocean\".\n\nThe effect of taking on huge debts with no prospect of reopening soon is a major threat to millions working in the hospitality sector.\n\nMore than 1,600 restaurants closed last year, costing 30,000 jobs, says property adviser Altus.\n\nWhen bars, hotels and other hospitality businesses are included, almost 300,000 jobs were lost last year as a result of the pandemic, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics.\n\nAnd that figure is expected to more than double in the first three months of this year alone.\n\nKate Nicholls, the boss of UK Hospitality, predicts the total will hit 660,000 by the end of March.\n\nUK Hospitality chief executive Kate Nicholls is calling for further support for the industry\n\n\"The longer that these restrictions are in place, the more rapidly businesses will simply run out of cash and be unable to to remain open,\" she said.\n\nA survey of the trade body's members revealed that 80% of businesses did not have enough cash to make it through to April. \"It's going to be unbelievably brutal in the first quarter,\" Ms Nicholls said.\n\nThe latest lockdown follows a bruising Christmas period for the hospitality sector, which typically depends on a busy December to tide it over during January, traditionally a quiet month for pubs and restaurants.\n\n\"It's obviously very worrying for our industry,\" says Tim Hughes, who runs the Plough pub at Sleapshyde in Hertfordshire.\n\n\"They have banned takeaway sales of alcohol from pubs, but off-licences and supermarkets can carry on selling it,\" he said.\n\nBetween them, Mr Hughes, his brother and his father run three pubs in the St Albans area. They have already borrowed £350,000 and Mr Hughes says the latest lockdown will force them to take on even more debt just to survive.\n\nMonthly fixed costs at each of the pubs run to £9,500 and only one of their venues qualifies for the full £3,000 grant, so Mr Hughes says the Treasury's support \"doesn't touch the sides\".\n\nIt's the fourth time Mr Hughes has been forced to close the doors to the Plough - and each time it has cost him about £5,000.\n\nThis time, he also had to give away £4,000 worth of jumbo pork, vegetarian and vegan Bavarian bratwursts, bought to give 2,000 customers a substantial meal in the pub's \"winter garden\" during the festive period.\n\nThat was before an unexpected decision to put St Albans into tier three forced him to close the pub. He cancelled those bookings and refunded customers their £16,000.\n\nThe Plough's \"winter garden\", which was booked up for the Christmas period, stands empty\n\nRalph Findlay, the boss of Marston's, which has 1,700 pubs across the country and employs 14,000 people, said some pubs that had been forced to close their doors because of the lockdown would never reopen.\n\nHalf of Marston's employees are under 25, he said. \"I really worry about the impact of this on their employment prospects in places where it's very difficult to find employment.\"\n\nHe has called for pubs to be given more time before they are required to pay business rates again, which will leave pubs facing an £800m bill as soon as the current rates holiday expires in March, according to the British Beer & Pub Association.\n\nThat would force landlords, including Mr Hughes, to foot a bill that works out at £25,000 a pub.\n\n\"We are kidding ourselves if we think that more debt upon more debt is going to be sustainable,\" said Stephen Welton, executive chairman of the Business Growth Fund.\n\n\"Past recessions have shown very clearly that it's coming out of a recession - when companies are short of working capital - that they fall over.\"\n\nFor Mr Hughes at the Plough, he is looking for all the support he can get to avoid being put into a \"bigger black hole\".\n\nA Treasury spokesman said: \"\"We've taken swift action throughout the pandemic to protect lives and livelihoods.\"\n\nHe said the grant scheme would continue to support businesses and jobs through to the spring.", "Jamie Stiehm is a US political columnist who was in the Capitol building in Washington DC when it was stormed by pro-Trump rioters. Here's what she saw from the press gallery in the House of Representatives.\n\nI had told my sister earlier: \"Something bad is going to happen today. I don't know what, but something bad will happen.\"\n\nOutside the Capitol, I encountered a group of very boisterous supporters of President Donald Trump, all waving flags and pledging their allegiance to him. There was a sense that trouble was brewing.\n\nI went inside to the House of Representatives and up into the press gallery, where we were assigned seats, looking down at the rather sombre gathering. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was holding the gavel, and keeping people to their five-minute statements.\n\nAs we went into the second hour, all of a sudden we heard breaking glass. The air began getting fogged. An announcement from the Capitol Police said, \"An individual has breached the building\". So everyone looked around and then it was business as usual. But after that, the announcements kept coming. And they were getting more and more urgent.\n\nThey announced that the intruders had breached the rotunda, which is under the famed marble dome. The sacred house of democracy was under fire.\n\nMany of us are hardened journalists - I've seen my share of violence covering homicides in Baltimore - but this was very unpredictable. The police didn't seem to know what was happening. They weren't coordinated. They locked the chamber doors but at the same time, they told us we would have to evacuate. So there was a sense of panic.\n\nI was afraid. I'll tell you that. And I've spoken to other journalists who said they were a little ashamed of themselves for feeling afraid.\n\nThere was a sense of \"nobody's in charge here, the Capitol Police have lost control of the building, anything can happen\".\n\nIf you think back to the September 11 attacks in 2001, there was one plane that went down and didn't hit its target. That target was the Capitol. There were echoes of that. I made a call to my family, just to let them know that I was here and it was a dangerous situation.\n\nThere was a shot. We could see there was a standoff in our chamber. Five men were holding guns at the door. It was a frightening sight. Men were looking through a broken glass window and looked like they could shoot at any second.\n\nThankfully there was no gunfire inside the chamber. But for a while there, it felt like it would be a real possibility. Because things were going downhill very fast.\n\nWe had to crawl under railings to get out of the way. I was not dressed to do that. A lot of women were dressed up, wearing heels, because they had come for a formal ritual.\n\nI sheltered in the House cafeteria alongside others. I'm still shaking now.\n\nI have seen a lot as a journalist, but this was something more. This was the collective public sphere being undermined, assaulted, degraded. And I think this was why the Speaker wanted to return and hold the gavel again and go on.\n\nAfterwards I had to decide whether I was going to go back to the chamber too. I decided l probably would, because the message that is sending is: \"You can incite a mob, but we're going to go on\". I think that is a very important political message.", "Asos says it is in \"exclusive\" talks to buy Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge and HIIT brands out of administration.\n\nBut the online retailer said it only wanted the brands, not their shops, suggesting any deal would cost jobs.\n\nThe current owner of the brands, Sir Philip Green's Arcadia Group, fell into administration last November putting 13,000 jobs at risk.\n\nAsos said it was \"a compelling opportunity\" to buy \"strong brands that resonate well with its customer base\".\n\n\"However, at this stage, there can be no certainty of a transaction and Asos will keep shareholders updated as appropriate,\" it added.\n\nLast week, a consortium including fashion chain Next dropped its bid to buy Topshop and Topman because it could not meet the price tag.\n\nOthers interested in some or all of Arcadia - which also owns Dorothy Perkins and Burton - include Mike Ashley's Frasers Group, a consortium including JD Sports, and the online retailer Boohoo.\n\nIn addition, the Issa brothers, who recently bought supermarket chain Asda, and Chinese fast fashion giant Shein are said to have made bids for Topshop.\n\nAsos has seen strong sales in the pandemic and is already one of the biggest wholesalers for Topshop, Topman, Burton and Miss Selfridge.\n\nAdministrators from Deloitte requested that final bids be submitted last Monday, with the auction expected to conclude at the end of January.\n\nSir Philip Green is under pressure to use his own money to plug an estimated £350m hole in Arcadia's pension fund, which has about 10,000 members.\n\nLast year the retail tycoon had an estimated fortune of £930m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.\n\nArcadia employed about 13,000 people and had 444 shops at the time of its collapse.", "Boohoo is set to buy the Debenhams brand and website, the BBC understands.\n\nHowever, the fast fashion retailer will not be taking on any of the company's remaining 118 High Street stores or its workforce.\n\nThe announcement could come as early as Monday morning.\n\nThe 242-year-old chain is already in the process of closing down, after administrators failed to secure a rescue deal for the business, with the likely loss of 12,000 jobs.\n\nA closing down sale at 124 Debenhams stores began in December, as administrators continued to seek offers for all, or parts of the business.\n\nIn the last week or so, the company announced that six shops would not reopen after lockdown, including its flagship department store on London's Oxford Street.\n\nBoohoo has already bought a number of High Street brands out of administration. It snapped up Oasis, Coast and Karen Millen, but not the associated stores.\n\nDebenhams has struggled for years with falling profits and rising debts, as more shopping has moved online. It called in administrators twice in two years, most recently in April.\n\nMike Ashley has bought other struggling businesses including House of Fraser and Evans Cycles\n\nHowever, its position became untenable during the coronavirus pandemic as non-essential retailers were forced to close for prolonged periods.\n\nThe firm had already trimmed its store portfolio and cut about 6,500 jobs since May, as it struggled to stay afloat.\n\nBusinessman Mike Ashley, who founded Sports Direct and also owns House of Fraser, had already made an offer for Debenhams after it was initially put up for sale in April.\n\nHowever the takeover offer, thought to be in the region of £125m, was rejected as being too low, leaving JD Sports as the last remaining bidder.\n\nMr Ashley had previously built up a 29% stake in the chain, but saw his £150m holding wiped out in 2019, when the company fell into administration and then ended up in the hands of its lenders - a consortium led by hedge fund Silverpoint.\n\nIn early December, the Frasers Group confirmed that it was working on a possible last minute rescue of Debenhams.\n\nThe announcement came five days after staff were informed and liquidators moved in to Debenhams' stores to start clearing stock, after a potential rescue deal with JD Sports fell through.\n\nBut Frasers said there was \"no certainty\" it could save the chain.\n\nOne of the biggest issues, it said, was the collapse into administration last week of another High Street giant, Arcadia, which is the biggest concession holder in Debenhams department stores.", "More than 26,000 are now in hospital with the virus, according to government data\n\nFrance's top medical adviser said on Sunday that a third national lockdown would probably soon be needed to combat coronavirus in the country.\n\nA strict curfew was implemented last weekend, but cases continue to climb.\n\nProf Jean-Francois Delfraissy, head of the scientific council that advises leaders on Covid-19, said \"there is an emergency\" and this week was critical.\n\nHe called for swift government action, amid rising concerns about the spread of new variants of the coronavirus.\n\nProf Delfraissy said data showed a new more transmissible variant first detected in the UK now makes up between 7-9% of cases in some French regions and will be hard to stop.\n\nHe said the country was in a better situation than others in Europe, but described the new variants as the \"equivalent of a second pandemic\".\n\n\"If we do not tighten regulations, we will find ourselves in an extremely difficult situation from mid-March,\" the advisor warned during an interview with BFM television.\n\nThe French government is expected to meet on Wednesday to decide if further measures are needed.\n\nOfficials have so far resisted implementing a third national lockdown, preferring an overnight curfew system which allows schools to stay open.\n\nBut daily infection numbers are rising - with the seven-day moving average now above 20,000 despite the 18:00 curfew.\n\nFrench Prime Minister Jean Castex previously said restrictions could be imposed \"without delay\" if the situation deteriorated further.\n\nThe country's virus death toll topped 73,000 on Sunday, as the country tightened restrictions on arrivals into the country.\n\nUnder new rules anyone entering from inside the EU by air or ferry must now present a negative Covid-19 test result within 72 hours of travel. Those entering France from the EU by road, including cross-border workers, will not be required to take a test.\n\nPresident of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said last week that all non-essential travel \"must be strongly advised against\" but EU nations have so far agreed to keep borders open.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police in Paris ensure shops close at 6pm as France begins a new curfew to tackle Covid-19", "Ella Lambert had never sewn before but borrowed a friend's machine to learn how to make sanitary pads made from cloth\n\nA student whose \"terrible period pains\" inspired her to start a reusable sanitary pad project has helped 600 refugees get out of \"period poverty\".\n\nElla Lambert, 20, from Chelmsford, Essex, started The Pachamama Project during the first coronavirus lockdown.\n\nShe said she wanted to help women who were unable to buy period products.\n\nNearly 2,500 pads sewn by 150 volunteers have been sent to camps in Greece and Lebanon.\n\nWomen are given four pads each, which are washable and can be reused for about five years, she said.\n\nThe pads are distributed to women in refugee camps\n\nMs Lambert said: \"In March I had terrible period pain, I was being sick, it was awful, and it made me think, I know I'm not the only person going through this.\n\n\"The people I want to help, in these camps, they're experiencing period pain and having to use random tissue paper, cardboard, socks, scraps of material and even leaves - whatever they can get hold of.\"\n\nThe University of Bristol languages student set up her not-for-profit group in March and launched her sanitary product - Pacha Pads - in August, with the help of charities and groups in the two countries to distribute them.\n\nThousands of pads have been made by hundreds of volunteers since August\n\nIt started when she put appeals for material on community groups, she said.\n\nVolunteers from all over the UK came forward to make the products after she developed a pattern, created a guide and explained how to source material for free.\n\nThe products are then sent back to her to be posted abroad, after quality checks.\n\nSome of the sewers came from groups formed to make scrubs for NHS workers during the first lockdown, and who still wanted to be useful, she said.\n\nAlice Corrigan, from The Free Shop of Lebanon, said the project helped with the \"fight against period poverty in Lebanon\"\n\nAlice Corrigan, founder of The Free Shop Lebanon, which hands out the products for free in its shop, said: \"Sustainable menstrual products are very new to many Lebanese and in particular Syrian women.\"\n\nShe added it is not common for them to talk about menstrual activity, so it was important they could be helped to understand its importance and accept it as part of their routine.\n\nKaty Chadwick, technical adviser at the charity ActionAid UK, said: \"For too many women and girls and people who menstruate a lack of access to products impacts on their ability to move freely and to access education and other opportunities.\n\n\"It's encouraging to see new initiatives to support the most marginalised women and girls access sustainable products.\"\n\nAll the sanitary pads are washable so they can be reused for up to about five years\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "It is hoped that vaccinating teenagers will allow them to sit exams\n\nIsrael has started vaccinating 16 to 18-year-olds against Covid-19, in an effort to enable them to sit exams.\n\nMore than a quarter of Israel's population of nine million have received at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine since 19 December, its health ministry says.\n\nIt started with the elderly and others at high risk, but people aged 40 and over can also now get the jab.\n\nIsrael hopes to start reopening its economy in February.\n\nThe inclusion of 16 to 18-year-olds - with parental permission - is meant \"to enable their return (to school) and the orderly holding of exams\", an education ministry spokeswoman said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe matriculation exams that Israeli students sit at the end of high school play an important role in deciding where they will go to university. Their results can also affect their placement in the military, where many young Israelis do compulsory service.\n\nThe education ministry has said it is too early to say whether schools will reopen next month.\n\nIsrael started its rapid vaccination drive - the fastest in the world - on 19 December, reaching 10% of its population by the end of 2020.\n\nIsrael has recorded more than 596,000 cases and 4,392 deaths with Covid-19, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.\n\nOn Sunday, the government said it would ban passenger flights in and out of the country from Monday night for the rest of January, in an effort to halt the spread of new virus variants.\n\n\"Other than rare exceptions, we are closing the sky hermetically to prevent the entry of the virus variants and also to ensure that we progress quickly with our vaccination campaign,\" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.\n\nForeigners have largely been blocked from entering Israel during the pandemic.", "All schools moved to online learning before Christmas, following concerns from unions over the new coronavirus variant\n\n\"Wholesale\" return of pupils to school after February half term is \"unlikely\", Wales' first minister has said.\n\nMark Drakeford said there were \"intermediate positions between where we are today, with very few children in school, and everybody being back\".\n\nPreviously, ministers said schools would stay closed to most until February half term unless Covid cases fell significantly.\n\nThose preparing for qualifications and very young children may return first.\n\nMr Drakeford told a coronavirus briefing on Friday he had recently chaired a meeting of the teaching unions and local education authorities.\n\n\"We all agreed that we would work purposefully together to find ways of bringing more young people back into the classroom,\" he said.\n\n\"Does that mean that we will see a wholesale return of every child in every classroom, every day of the week across Wales? I do think that that is probably unlikely.\n\n\"But there are intermediate positions between where we are today, with very few children in school, and everybody being back.\"\n\nHe said there had been \"practical, creative, imaginative\" proposals put forward which could mean some children being back in the classroom for some of the week.\n\nMinisters previously said schools would stay closed until half term unless Covid cases fell significantly\n\nThese could include \"children preparing for qualifications [and] very young children for whom online learning really isn't a genuine possibility\".\n\n\"I certainly don't rule out making some of those things happen after the February half term, but I do think it's unlikely in the way you said that we would see every child back full-time in every classroom in the way that we would ideally wish to do,\" he added.\n\nAll schools and colleges moved to online learning before Christmas, following concerns from unions over the new coronavirus variant.\n\nThey have remained open for children of critical workers and vulnerable learners, as well as for learners who needed to complete essential exams or assessments.\n\nEarlier this month, when Education Minister Kirsty Williams said schools and colleges would stay closed to most pupils until the February half term, unions welcomed the news, saying the health and safety of pupils and staff \"had to be a priority\".\n\nBut, they added, teachers must now be given the vaccine as a priority, and pupils and staff must be protected before talks about reopening schools could begin.\n\nTeachers are still not on the priority list for immunisation, and have to wait to get the jab dependent on their age and if they have a medical condition.\n\nAt the time, Laura Doel, director of The National Association of Headteachers Cymru, said: \"Any plan that sees school staff return to face-to-face learning should be afforded as much protection as possible against the virus.\n\n\"Once these issues have been addressed, then we can discuss the orderly return to school we all want.\"\n\nOpposition parties have called for clear plans on how schools would return and for support to make sure pupils from poorer backgrounds did not fall behind due to a \"digital divide\".\n\nPlaid Cymru's education spokeswoman Sian Gwenllian said: \"The Welsh Government must plan now for the gradual and safe reopening of schools, putting in place safety measures, and should lay out plans for a vaccination programme for schools staff.\"\n\nWelsh Conservative education spokeswoman Suzy Davies called for the Welsh Government to publish evidence on its reasons for closing schools, bring forward vaccines for teachers, and said money must be made available for all pupils to access laptops for online learning.", "Janice Johnston says doctors who misdiagnosed her \"took so much away from me\"\n\nA care home worker who was wrongly diagnosed with cancer said she thought it was a \"cruel joke\" when she was told doctors had made a mistake and she did not have cancer at all.\n\nMum-of-four Janice Johnston said her \"world crumbled\" when she learned she had a rare form of blood cancer at Kent and Canterbury Hospital in 2017.\n\nShe had 18 months of oral chemotherapy treatment, during which she experienced weight loss, nausea and bone pain, and had to give up her job as an auxiliary nurse.\n\nWhen the treatment did not appear to be working, she says, medics upped the dosage.\n\nIn 2018, she sought alternative treatment at Guy's Hospital in London. It was there a specialist told her she did not have cancer at all but a different condition.\n\nMrs Johnston was awarded £75,950 in damages after East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust admitted liability. Staff at the hospital had failed to do the necessary ultrasound scan and bone marrow biopsy before diagnosing her.\n\nMrs Johnston, 53, said: \"The cancer diagnosis was an absolute shock. They said my life span would be shortened.\n\n\"I was at high risk of a fatal stroke or heart attack and I could drop down at any minute. It was heartbreaking and devastating.\n\n\"It didn't sink in until I saw the haematologist. I was in a room with people having serious chemotherapy who looked incredibly ill. I thought: 'I'm like them'.\"\n\nMrs Johnston says doctors told her she would need chemotherapy for life.\n\nThe side-effects led to her feeling \"wiped out\", her hair thinning, her teeth becoming loose and her gums receding.\n\nShe says occupational health told her that her immune system was jeopardised and she could pick up infections easily. That meant she was forced to resign from her job.\n\n\"Giving up work was horrible,\" Mrs Johnston says.\n\nShe was also worried she would not get to see some of her daughters get married or her grandchildren grow up.\n\nThe trust admitted failing to carry out vital tests before diagnosing Mrs Johnston\n\nAfter searching on the internet to find out more about the blood cancer she was told she had - Polycythaemia vera (PV) - she learned that Guy's Hospital offered a different type of chemotherapy and asked her consultant for an appointment there.\n\nMrs Johnston recalls: \"The specialist at Guy's looked over my blood counts and said: 'I don't think you have blood cancer'.\"\n\nThe doctor told Mrs Johnston she had a different condition called secondary PV which is not cancer.\n\n\"She asked if I'd had a bone marrow test and scan of the spleen to confirm the diagnosis - I hadn't had either. My husband thought it was fantastic but I was angry.\n\n\"I thought it was a cruel joke on me. It didn't sink in. My husband couldn't understand why I wasn't jumping for joy - but it had taken my life.\"\n\nOne of the hardest things to cope with for Mrs Johnston was thinking she had been a \"fraud\".\n\n\"I'd been doing some fundraising to try and have something positive to focus on. Cancer Research UK asked if I'd be guest of honour at a charity run in Margate. I stood on stage in front of 3,000 women saying I had cancer.\n\n\"I'm mortified that people will think I made it up. It has made me feel awful and like I have lied to everyone,\" she said.\n\nMrs Johnston now has severe anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).\n\n\"I still get flashbacks to it,\" she says. \"It was two years of my life. They took so much away from me.\"\n\nShe says she wants to \"raise awareness\" about her experience, and for \"anyone that does get diagnosed with it, to ask questions and learn as much as they can about it and if they feel any doubt, to get a second opinion\".\n\nA spokesperson for East Kent Hospitals said: \"A misdiagnosis of this kind is exceptionally rare and we wholeheartedly apologise to Ms Johnston.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Teresa Dalling says a river of orange water rushed through the village on Thursday\n\nFlood victims will not be able to return to their homes until their safety can be assured, a council leader has said.\n\nThe Coal Authority has said initial checks suggested water built up in a mine shaft causing a \"blow out\" that flooded properties in Skewen, Neath Port Talbot.\n\nAbout 80 people were evacuated as water rushed through the village on Thursday.\n\nCouncil leader Rob Jones said it was unlikely residents could return Monday.\n\nHe said underground investigations would begin on Saturday and the work could take two to three days.\n\n\"Safety is the paramount concern for us,\" he said.\n\n\"Because we can't guarantee the site safety - that's the reason why people will remain away from their properties until such time as we can give the all clear.\n\n\"We don't know what the water has done underground.\"\n\nThe fire service said on Saturday morning the pumping operation was \"making good progress\".\n\nMr Jones told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast people may be able to return next week but \"did not want to raise hopes\" it will be Monday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nHe said the flooding was \"more than likely\" related to old mine workings with six mines known about in area. He said the industry dated back 300 years.\n\nSkewen resident John Thomas returned home from a funeral with wife Lynne on Thursday to find their house had turned into \"a lake\".\n\nHe said: \"The water was around the level of the bottom of the doors so we couldn't go in, so we just had to stand there and watch this orange-coloured water just piling up and up and up.\n\n\"Other people who were evacuated had the chance to move things upstairs, I didn't have a chance to do that because I couldn't get in to it.\"\n\nAt least 80 people had to leave their homes in the village after flooding\n\nLocal MP Stephen Kinnock said affected residents were staying in \"lots of different places\" across the region.\n\nAnd he praised the \"extraordinary\" generosity of the community and the support of the Salvation Army with donations of food, clothing and toiletries.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Stephen Kinnock This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nNatural Resources Wales (NRW) said officers were continuing to look at how to minimise the risk of pollution to nearby rivers, and investigating any impacts on the River Neath.\n\nThe Coal Authority, which manages the effects of past coal mining, is investigating the incident.\n\nChief executive Lisa Pinney said equipment, due on site on Saturday, would be used to drill into mine workings to \"fully investigate what has happened\".\n\n\"The blow out is likely to have been caused by a blockage underground which has caused water to back up and to break out using the easiest path,\" she said.\n\n\"The excessive rainfall of the past few days and the prolonged rainfall this winter, will have put additional pressure on the system.\n\n\"We know that people will want to get back to their homes and we will continue to progress these works as soon as possible, but public safety has to come first.\"\n\nThere are a number of historical mine workings in Skewen dating back beyond 1850.\n\nOn Saturday, Mr Jones said water was still pouring out of the affected site so workers were diverting it, while machines cleared gulleys and drains to give the water the chance to enter drainage systems.\n\nA residents' incident support centre has been set up at Abbey Primary School to offer help and information over the weekend, between 09:00-17:00 GMT.\n\nThe council has asked residents to be \"patient as the investigation continues\" and has set up a helpline. Tel. 01639 686868.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA new world record has been set for the number of satellites sent to space on a single rocket.\n\nThe 143 payloads, of all shapes and sizes, rode to orbit on a SpaceX Falcon rocket that launched out of Florida.\n\nThe number beats the previous record of 104 satellites carried aloft by an Indian vehicle in 2017.\n\nIt's further evidence of the major structural changes taking place in space activity that are allowing many more actors to get involved.\n\nThis shift is the result of a revolution in robust, miniaturised, low-cost components - many taken direct from consumer electronics such as smartphones - that mean pretty much anyone can now build a capable satellite in a very small package.\n\nAnd with SpaceX offering to transport those packages to orbit for just $1m, the commercial opportunities will continue to open up.\n\nGuatemala's Santa María volcano: Planet is imaging the entire Earth daily with its Dove satellites\n\nSpaceX itself had 10 satellites on the Falcon - the latest additions to its Starlink telecommunications mega-constellation, which is going to deliver broadband internet connections around the globe.\n\nSan Francisco's Planet company had the most satellites of all on the flight - 48.\n\nThese were another batch of its SuperDove models that image the Earth's surface daily at a resolution of 3-5m. The new spacecraft take the firm's operational fleet now in orbit to more than 200.\n\n\"Internet of things\": SpaceBees will connect to all manner of objects on the ground\n\nThe SuperDoves are the size of a shoebox. Many of the other payloads on the Falcon rocket were little bigger than a coffee mug, however; and some were smaller even than a paperback book.\n\nSwarm Technologies is rolling out what it calls the SpaceBees. They're just 10cm by 10cm by 2.5cm.\n\nThey'll act as telecommunications nodes to connect devices that are attached to all manner of objects on the ground, from migrating animals to shipping containers.\n\nThe satellites were mounted on a dispenser that ejected them in sequence\n\nSome of the larger items on the Falcon rocket were suitcase-sized. Among these were several radar satellites. Radar has been one of the major beneficiaries of the revolution in componentry.\n\nTraditionally, radar satellites were big, multi-tonne objects that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fly, which essentially meant only the military or major space agencies could afford to operate them.\n\nBut the adoption of new materials and compact \"off the shelf\" parts have dramatically shrunk the size (to under 100kg) and price (a couple of million dollars) of these spacecraft.\n\niQPS artwork: The radar satellites unfurl large antennas once they are in space\n\nIceye from Finland, Capella from the US, and iQPS of Japan all took the ride to orbit on Sunday. These start-ups are establishing constellations in the sky that will return rapid, repeat imagery of the Earth.\n\nRadar has the advantage over standard optical cameras of being able to pierce cloud, and to sense the Earth's surface whether it is day or night. We're entering an age when any change on the planet, wherever it happens, will be picked up almost immediately.\n\nThe Falcon carried the 143 satellites into a 500km-high path that runs from pole to pole. This is one of the drawbacks of a big rideshare mission: you go where the rocket goes, and for some that might not be ideal.\n\nA number of satellite missions will want an orbit that's higher or lower in the sky, or on a different inclination to the equator.\n\nThis can be achieved by mounting the satellites on \"space tugs\" which, after coming off the top of the rocket, modify the final parameters for their \"passengers\" over the course of several weeks. Sunday's Falcon carried two such tugs.\n\nBut for some missions a bespoke ride is going to be the only satisfactory solution. It's why we're now witnessing a rush to produce small rockets that can run dedicated flights.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Watch: Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne rocket blasts its way to space\n\nThese smaller rockets will not be able to compete on cost with the big vehicles, such as SpaceX's Falcon-9, but they should attract the custom of those with very specific or urgent needs.\n\nDan Hart, the CEO of Virgin Orbit, which has developed a small rocket that can be launched from under the wing of a Boeing 747, says the start-ups are becoming more discerning.\n\n\"These small satellites used to be points of fascination and interest, and it was a case of finding the cheapest way possible to get into space,\" he explained.\n\n\"That's rapidly changing. These are now businesses with critical missions that risk losing revenue if they have to wait on others or go into an unsuitable orbit. And that's why you're going to see people who will pay that little bit more to get to where they want to go when they absolutely need to go there,\" he told BBC News.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Will Marshall: \"Our satellites 'phoned home' and they are healthy\"\n\nWith the roll call of satellites going into orbit now accelerating rapidly, the issue of traffic management is becoming a hot topic.\n\nFull-on collisions are currently rare, but a surprisingly large number (10%) of satellites will even now experience sudden, unexpected momentum changes, most probably the result of being hit by some small fragment from a previous mission.\n\nThe space sector needs to find smarter ways to track objects in orbit and to command timely avoidance manoeuvres, otherwise certain altitudes could ultimately become unusable because of the presence of dangerously dense debris fields.\n\nJonathan McDowell from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is a noted historian of astronautics.\n\nHe commented: \"There are now over 3,000 working satellites in orbit. The number of satellites launched last year at over 1,200 is over twice as many as in any previous year. And the ones launched today - that used to be the number you'd launch in a whole year. So it's getting really crowded up there.\"\n\nWill Marshall, the CEO of Planet, said his company, and indeed all of the companies on Sunday's flight, were accutley aware of the issue.\n\n\"We are seeing crowded areas in certain orbits,\" he told BBC News.\n\n\"Most of the crowded piece that is in danger of what they call Kessler Syndrome (runaway collisions) is quite high up. So one of the tricks that all of these satellites that were launched today use is to just stay really low where there's still a lot of atmospheric drag and eventually those satellites just come down.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Cricket\n\nSecond Test, Galle (day four of five)\n\nEngland completed a thrilling victory on day four of the second Test against Sri Lanka to take the series 2-0.\n\nChasing a tricky 164, England were 89-4 on a turning pitch but opener Dom Sibley hit 56 not out to lead them to a six-wicket win.\n\nSibley, who had not reached double figures in the series, put on 75 with Jos Buttler, who made 46 not out.\n\nEarlier, England capitalised on reckless batting to dismiss Sri Lanka for 126 in their second innings.\n\nDom Bess and Jack Leach took four wickets each and the hosts would have been dismissed even more cheaply but for 40 from number 10 Lasith Embuldeniya, who finished with match figures of 10-210.\n\nResuming on 339-9 in their first innings, England conceded a first-innings deficit of 37 when Jack Leach was dismissed with only five runs added.\n\nSri Lanka were favourites at that point but England completed a turnaround on a dramatic day when 15 wickets fell.\n\nThe series win is England's fourth in a row and they are also unbeaten in 10 successive Tests under Joe Root's captaincy, going into a difficult series in India which starts on 5 February.\n\nEngland are fourth in the World Test Championship table, 0.5% behind third-placed Australia.\n• None Root urges England not to 'stand still'\n• None TMS podcast: What does England's series win mean for India tour?\n\nThis was also England's fifth consecutive away Test win, the first time they have achieved that feat since World War One. They are developing an impressive winning habit.\n\nSri Lanka's batting, perhaps spooked by the turning pitch, was inept and their effort in the field lacklustre, but England were clinical.\n\nBess and Leach bowled well - far better than their wicketless showing in the first innings - while James Anderson took a brilliant high catch and Zak Crawley two excellent grabs at short leg.\n\nSri Lanka were leading only by 115 when their eighth wicket fell, before Embuldeniya, who had a remarkable game in defeat, dragged them to a score.\n\nThe target looked competitive - the hosts were possibly even favourites - but the manner England in which overhauled it was mightily impressive.\n\nThere was a wobble when Jonny Bairstow was trapped lbw for a useful 28-ball 29, Root - the dominant player in the series - was bowled for 11 and Dan Lawrence edged behind with a further 85 needed.\n\nHowever, Sibley played the anchor role while Buttler provided impetus in his typically attacking style.\n\nSibley, so at sea in his previous three innings, calmly nudged singles into the leg side. Buttler played thumped drives to the extra-cover boundary, smacked a reverse sweep through point and launched a slog sweep through mid-wicket.\n\nIn the end, England won with ease, Sibley sealing a fine win by tapping for one.\n\nSri Lanka threatened better in this match, having been convincingly beaten by seven wickets in the first.\n\nThey batted well in the first innings and in Embuldeniya they have a fine spinner, playing only his ninth Test.\n\nBut their fourth-day performance was abysmal. Their batting was akin to their performance on day one of the series when they were bowled out for 135.\n\nThe dismissals of captain Dinesh Chandimal - skying a slog sweep to Anderson at mid-on having hit a four a ball earlier - and Niroshan Dickwella, who drove Bess to extra cover two minutes before lunch, were the worst of a series of needlessly aggressive shots.\n\nSri Lanka also disappointed in the field. They were a little unfortunate that Sibley survived three tight lbw reviews, all of which were umpire's call, but their tactics were baffling.\n\nChandimal set the field back and allowed an accumulator in Sibley to tick along as he wished.\n\nThis tour, while important for points in the World Test Championship, always felt like the warm-up act in a huge year for England's Test team.\n\nNext they face a far bigger challenge in India before a summer against New Zealand, top of the Test rankings, India again, and an Ashes series in Australia the winter.\n\nThe biggest plus of this series has been the emphatic run-scoring of Root. He did not score a century in 2019 but made 228 and 186, albeit against a poor Sri Lanka. The skipper amassed 426 runs at an average of 106.50 in the series.\n\nBess and Leach were by no means perfect - they bowl too many bad balls - but finished the series with 12 and 10 wickets respectively.\n\nThe match-winning fifty for Sibley is also a significant boost going into the four Tests in India. Having been dismissed by Embuldeniya in every innings on tour previously, he showed he can grind out a score.\n\nEngland's veteran bowlers, Anderson and Stuart Broad, proved once again they can perform in unhelpful conditions.\n\nThere are question marks, however, about opener Crawley, whose top score in four innings was 13.\n\nThe issues at the top of the order are complicated by the fact Bairstow, who has done well at number three, has been rested for the first two Tests in India.\n\nEngland opener Dom Sibley on Test Match Special: \"I didn't think I'd left any stone unturned with regards playing spin, but then you go back to your room in the evening and think 'maybe I'm not up to this' and have those doubts.\n\n\"It is about accepting those and just believing. It just feels like pure relief at the moment.\"\n\nSri Lanka captain Dinesh Chandimal: \"We were outplayed today. We have done all the hard work in the last three days but as a batting unit we made the same mistakes of the first Test. There are no excuses for the batsmen and we've got to learn how to bat like Joe Root.\"\n\nFormer England captain Michael Vaughan: \"A really, really strong performance from England. If you look down from one to 11, most people have contributed.\n\n\"They will have to bowl better in India. But the confidence that this will do for the team, and for Joe Root at the start of a huge year, is huge.\"", "A former senior manager at Boeing's 737 plant in Seattle has raised new concerns over the safety of the company's 737 Max.\n\nThe aircraft, which was grounded after two accidents in which 346 people died, has already been cleared to resume flights in North America and Brazil, and is expected to gain approval in Europe this week.\n\nBut in a new report, Ed Pierson claims that further investigation of electrical issues and production quality problems at the 737 factory is badly needed.\n\nRegulators in the US and Europe insist their reviews have been thorough, and that the 737 Max aircraft is now safe.\n\nIn his report, Mr Pierson claims that regulators and investigators have largely ignored factors, which he believes, may have played a direct role in the accidents.\n\nHe explicitly links them to conditions at the company's factory in Renton, near Seattle at the time. Boeing says this is unfounded.\n\nInvestigators believe both accidents were triggered by the failure of a single sensor. It sent inaccurate data to a piece of flight control software, called MCAS.\n\nThis automated system then repeatedly forced the nose of the aircraft downwards, when the pilots were trying to gain height. Ultimately each aircraft was pushed into an unrecoverable dive.\n\nEfforts to make the 737 Max safe have focused on redesigning the MCAS software, and ensuring it can no longer be triggered by a single sensor failure.\n\nFor Ed Pierson, this does not go nearly far enough. A US Navy veteran, who had a senior role on the 737 production line from 2015-2018, he was a star witness during congressional hearings into the disasters involving the Max.\n\nHe told lawmakers he had become so concerned about conditions at the factory, he had told his bosses that he was hesitant about taking his own family on a Boeing plane.\n\nEd Pierson (centre), seated next to his attorney Eric Havian (right), at a House Transportation Committee hearing on oversight of the Boeing 737 Max certification, on 11 December 2019\n\nHe testified that during 2018, the factory was in a \"chaotic\" and \"dysfunctional\" state as, he claimed, staff there struggled under pressure from managers to build new planes as quickly as possible.\n\nNow, he is worried that these issues have been overlooked in the rush to get the 737 Max back in the air.\n\nHis report draws on material from the official investigations. It claims that both of the crashed aircraft suffered from - what he believes were - production defects, almost from the moment they entered service.\n\nThese included intermittent flight control system problems and electrical anomalies that occurred in the days and weeks before the accidents.\n\nHe claims these may have been symptoms of flaws in the aircrafts' highly complex wiring systems, which could have contributed to the erroneous deployment of MCAS.\n\nHe also points out that sensor failures contributed to both accidents and asks why such failures were happening on brand new machines.\n\nIn the case of the Lion Air plane, a faulty sensor was replaced with another part that was not properly calibrated.\n\nAll signs, Mr Pierson says, \"point back to where these airplanes were produced, the 737 factory\".\n\nHowever, he insists that the possibility of production defects playing a role in the accidents has not been addressed by regulators.\n\nHe claims this could lead to further tragedies, involving the Max or even a previous version of the 737.\n\nMr Pierson's concerns are supported by the celebrated aviation safety campaigner Captain Chesley Sullenberger.\n\nBest known as \"Sully\", one of the pilots who safely ditched a crippled and engineless Airbus plane in the Hudson river off Manhattan in 2009, he too believes that modifications to the Max do not go far enough.\n\nHe believes changes are needed to warning systems aboard the plane, which were carried over from a previous version of the 737 and are \"not up to modern standards\".\n\nCaptain Chesley \"Sully\" Sullenberger (centre) testifies during a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing on the status of the grounded Boeing 737 Max in June 2019\n\n\"Ed Pierson's report is very disturbing, about manufacturing issues in the Boeing factories that go well beyond just the Max, and also affect… the previous version of the 737,\" says Capt Sullenberger.\n\n\"There are many critically important unanswered questions that must be answered.\n\n\"Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) must finally become more transparent, and begin to provide information and data, so that independent experts can determine the worthiness of the work that's been done.\"\n\nThe BBC has also spoken to a former senior inspector with the UK's Air Accident Investigations Branch (AAIB), who now works as a safety specialist. He warns that Mr Pierson's findings should be viewed in a wider context.\n\nThe report, he says, does make some \"valid observations\" about the pressures on Boeing's production line and quality control, and concerns about specific components.\n\nHowever, he adds that \"taking the limited information in any accident report… and making fresh interpretations of it, is not the same as conducting a new investigation\".\n\nThe issues highlighted, he adds, \"may have been investigated and dismissed already, for good reason\".\n\nThe FAA, meanwhile, insists it only approved the return to service of the Max, following a \"comprehensive and methodical safety review process\".\n\nA worker stands by a Boeing 737 Max plane on the tarmac at the Boeing Renton factory in Washington\n\nIt adds: \"None of the many investigations of the two accidents produced evidence that a production flaw played a role\", and emphasises that \"every aircraft leaving the factory is inspected by a team of FAA inspectors before it is cleared for delivery\".\n\nBoeing itself will not comment on whether the electrical and flight control problems highlighted by Mr Pierson may have played a factor in the two accidents, on the grounds that this is a matter for the investigating authorities.\n\nIt has, however, described suggestions of any link between conditions at Renton and the two accidents as \"completely unfounded\", emphasising that none of the authorities investigating the crashes has found any such link.\n\nPatrick Ky, the head of Europe's aviation safety agency, EASA, has previously told the BBC he is \"certain\" the plane is safe to fly.\n\nBut relatives of those who died aboard ET302 are continuing to urge the agency not to allow the 737 Max to operate in Europe, \"until continuing concerns about the aircraft's safety have been fully and openly addressed\".", "People in Lebanon are living under one of the world's strictest lockdowns. Under the round-the-clock curfew, citizens who are not \"essential workers\" have been barred from leaving their homes since 14 January.\n\nLaila, 12, is in Beirut trying to study while her family works from home.\n\n\"We all have our own work to do and when we have meetings we hear each other. It can be a real distraction and stop you from finishing your work on time,\" she says.\n\n\"Sometimes I can't study well because I get stressed with all the work they're giving us. It is definitely not the same studying online as it is in the physical world.\"\n\nFor hairdresser Walid Kanaan this year has been \"extremely difficult psychologically and economically\".\n\n\"I own my shop but still I cannot afford it. I pay the workers' salary so I am really broke,\" says the 45-year-old.\n\n\"It is hitting hard. You can't go out at all or do anything. My wife works in a bank and she is also collapsing. She doesn't know if she will still have her job or not.\n\n\"We don't trust the government that if they bring a vaccine it will be safe to take it. We can only pray for God to protect us.\"\n\nRead more stories from people in lockdown in Lebanon here.", "Teachers were not at significantly higher risk of death from Covid-19 than the general population, Office for National Statistics figures suggest.\n\nRestaurant staff, people working in factories and care workers had among the highest death rates, followed by taxi drivers and security guards.\n\nNurses were more than twice as likely as their peers to die of coronavirus.\n\nSecondary school teachers may have been at slightly, but not measurably, higher risk than the average.\n\nThe ONS looked at death rates from coronavirus in England and Wales between 9 March and 28 December 2020.\n\nIt found 31 in every 100,000 working-age men and 17 in every 100,000 working-age women had died of Covid-19.\n\nThis equated to just under 8,000 deaths among 20-64-year-olds.\n\nBut care workers, security guards and people working in certain manufacturing roles died at more than three times the rate of their peers.\n\nTwo-thirds of deaths were among men.\n\nAs well as being more likely to be male, working-age people who died of Covid last year had other things in common: they were much more likely to work in jobs where they were either regularly exposed to known Covid cases or working in close proximity with other people more generally.\n\nMany of the highest-risk jobs were also relatively low paid and may be more likely to be casual or insecure, without sick pay, including hospitality, care work and taxi driving.\n\nAmong teachers, there were 18 deaths per 100,000 among men and 10 per 100,000 among women.\n\nBreaking that down by role, secondary school teachers appear to have a very slightly elevated risk at 39 deaths per 100,000 people in men and 21 per 100,000 in women.\n\nPer 100,000 men aged 20-64, 31 died in the population as a whole compared with:\n\nPer 100,000 women aged 20-64, 17 died in the population as a whole compared with:\n\nThese are illustrative examples, not an exhaustive league table.\n\nThe ONS calculated the rate by dividing the number of deaths by the number of workers in each job role.\n\nBecause the numbers for secondary teachers were comparatively small - 52 deaths in total - it's difficult to be certain about their exact risk, but any increase there might be compared with the general population was not considered statistically significant.\n\nHowever, while teachers were not at higher risk than the average, they did appear to be at higher risk than some other professional job roles, which have seen very few or no deaths.\n\nThe ONS excluded from its analysis any occupation that had seen fewer than 10 deaths, and the average death rate for the whole population masks this variation.\n\nThe study also covers periods where there were limited numbers of children attending school.\n\nBut the figures do tell us teachers didn't have an elevated risk of the magnitude faced by health and care staff and by lower-paid manual and service workers.\n\nOther groups of staff studied with higher death rates, including hospitality and some factory and construction workers, also had their usual work paused for similar chunks of that period.\n\nWhile these figures tell us the death rates in each occupation group, they do not tell us the jobs are themselves causing more infections.\n\nThe ONS looked at age and sex but did not adjust for ethnicity, health or socioeconomic status which might influence an individual's risk.\n\nONS analyst Ben Humberstone said: \"As the pandemic has progressed, we have learnt more about the disease and the communities it impacts most. There are a complex combination of factors that influence the risk of death; from your age and your ethnicity, where you live and who you live with, to pre-existing health conditions.\n\n\"Our findings do not prove that the rates of death involving COVID-19 are caused by differences in occupational exposure,\" he added.\n\nThis also just refers to deaths, not infections which may result in serious illness.\n\nSome earlier ONS data suggested certain types of teacher may have an increased risk of catching coronavirus, although again the body did not consider this to be statistically significant.\n\nDirector of policy for the Association of School and College Leaders teachers' union, Julie McCulloch, said: \"When trying to understand rates of coronavirus-related deaths, there are likely to be many complex factors and we need to be careful not to jump to conclusions about the relative risks of different workplaces.\n\n\"What we do know is that, when schools are fully open, education staff are asked to work in environments that are inherently busy and crowded. In order to give them reassurance, and to minimise the disruption to education, it is vital that they are prioritised for vaccination as soon as possible.\"\n\nWhether teachers should be prioritised for vaccines has been a matter of debate.\n\nAt the moment the programme is being rolled out based on what will save the most lives and prevent the most severe illness.\n\nAfter the oldest age groups, people with health conditions and frontline staff who are regularly exposed to the virus, the government will have to publish a new raft of priorities.\n\nVaccines minister Nadim Zahawi has indicated more people could be prioritised on the basis of their job role, including teachers, shop workers and police officers.", "Fraud has reached epidemic levels in the UK and should be seen as a national security issue, says think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).\n\nThe scale of credit card, identity and cyber-fraud makes it the most prevalent crime, costing up to £190bn a year.\n\nUK intelligence agencies should play a greater role in responding, the RUSI argues in a report.\n\nPolicing should be better resourced, working more closely with the private sector, it adds.\n\nThe report argues that the scale of fraud against the private sector has an impact on the reputation of the UK as a place to do business.\n\nMeanwhile, the amount lost by the government in fraudulent claims represents a \"heist\" on the public purse, undermining faith and trust, it says.\n\nIt is the crime UK citizens are most likely to fall victim to, but the failures in responding risk undermining public confidence in the rule of law.\n\nThe Crime Survey for England and Wales found 3.7 million reported incidents in 2019-20 of members of the public being targeted by credit card, identity and cyber-fraud.\n\nThe private sector takes the biggest financial losses. One estimate from 2017 put the cost of fraud to businesses at £140bn.\n\nFraud against the public sector, including benefit, tax credit and student loan fraud, is estimated to cost £31-48bn a year, the upper figure larger than the UK's annual defence budget.\n\nThe losses go beyond the financial, the authors say.\n\n\"Fraud has the potential to disrupt society in multiple ways, by psychologically impacting individuals, undermining the viability of businesses, putting pressure on public services, fuelling organised crime and funding terrorism,\" they add.\n\nThe report cites evidence that terrorist groups and lone actors turn to fraud in order to finance their activities.\n\nIn one case, eight supporters of the Islamic State group were convicted of defrauding UK pensioners out of more than £1m, which was alleged to be used in part to fund travel from the UK to Syria.\n\nThe men carried out a type of courier fraud in which they pretended to be police officers, telling victims that their bank accounts had been compromised and needed to be transferred.\n\nBut despite the growing scale of the problem, there is no national strategy for tackling the issue, while the police response is underfunded and lacking focus.\n\nThis makes fraud \"everyone's problem but no-one's priority\", according to the report, written by RUSI experts Helena Wood, Tom Keatinge, Keith Ditcham and Ardi Janjev.\n\nThe digitisation of everyday life - accelerated by Covid - has only increased the risks, with organised crime groups showing increased sophistication in their tactics.\n\n\"The UK has become a target destination for global fraudsters,\" the RUSI argues.\n\nBut the extent to which international criminals focus on the UK is hard to gauge, because intelligence agencies have not traditionally focused on the issue.\n\nOne senior fraud professional interviewed by the researchers said that despite 30 years of investigating fraud, they still had no idea what proportion of the threat emanated from overseas.\n\nClassifying fraud as a national security issue would help ensure the right level of resourcing and prioritisation, the authors argue.\n\nThey also recommend more focused intelligence direction from the National Security Council, including greater tasking for GCHQ as well as the National Crime Agency to understand the issue.\n\nThey call for better information-sharing and use of data analytics, as well as more money and attention from police forces to address what they call a \"responsibility vacuum\".", "People made the most of the snowy slopes of Gold Hill in Shaftesbury, Dorset\n\nSevere weather warnings are in place across much of the UK after large parts of the country saw heavy snowfall.\n\nThe blanket of snow drew people outside for sledging and winter walks, but motorists have been warned to take extra care on icy roads with sub-zero temperatures forecast overnight.\n\nSeveral coronavirus vaccination and testing centres were closed in England and Wales due to the conditions.\n\nPolice reminded the public to keep to lockdown rules while out in the snow.\n\nOfficers in Wandsworth, south-west London, encouraged people with gardens to play in the snow at home.\n\nAnd police in Rutland, Leicestershire, were among several forces questioning why people were leaving their homes to go sledging.\n\nContinuing coronavirus lockdowns across the four UK nations mean most of the population must stay at home, except for a limited number of reasons.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. For cats Bonny and Freddy, the snow is a chance to explore. Credit: Rachel Prew\n\nAs well as four vaccination centres in Wales, six Covid testing centres in the West Midlands had to close due to heavy snow on Sunday.\n\nHighways England warned that the snow had caused collisions on the M3, M27 and M25 in southern England, with the agency urging drivers to only travel if absolutely necessary.\n\nThose using the roads for essential journeys have been urged to allow plenty of extra time for their travel and pedestrians and cyclists are also advised to be cautious.\n\nThe Met Office put a yellow weather warning for snow in place on Sunday, stretching from coast to coast in southern England and ending just south of Manchester.\n\nIt is also in place for western and northern areas of Scotland, most of Northern Ireland and all of Wales apart from Anglesey.\n\nAn amber warning for snow in Nottingham and Stoke meant travel disruption and power cuts were likely on Sunday evening.\n\nYellow weather warnings for ice are in place until 11:00 GMT Monday for all of Wales and Northern Ireland, northern and eastern Scotland and much of southern England and the Midlands.\n\nMany people swapped their usual daily bout of exercise for sledging on Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath, north London, but police urged people to stay at home\n\nGritters leapt into action near Touchen-end in Berkshire\n\nIn Wales, appointments at the Bridgend, Rhondda, Abercynon and Merthyr Tydfil coronavirus vaccination centres were rescheduled for safety reasons, the Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board said.\n\nUp to 1in (3cm) of snow was forecast to fall in most areas of Wales, with 4-6in (10-15cm) expected in the Brecon Beacons and Snowdonia.\n\nIn the West Midlands, coronavirus testing centres at Castle Vale Stadium, the Arcadian Centre and Maypole Youth Centre were closed, Birmingham City Council said.\n\nFacilities in Moat Street, Coventry and The Place in Oakengates in Shropshire also closed, along with one in Lichfield, Staffordshire, local MP Michael Fabricant said.\n\nAnd in Devon, a gritting lorry overturned on Dartmoor. Devon County Council urged people to avoid travel unless it was absolutely essential and not to travel to find snow.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Devon County Council This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMet Office forecaster Simon Partridge said a band of hail, sleet, snow and rain moved in through Wales and south-west England in the early hours before sweeping across the UK and stalling over the Midlands, which saw some of the heaviest snow.\n\nColeshill, near Birmingham, had seen had 3.5in (9cm) by Sunday lunchtime.\n\nThe snow clouds eased away on Sunday evening but overnight temperatures could be as low as -4C to -6C (25F to 21F) for a lot of the south of the UK, the forecaster added.\n\n\"Some localised spots, likely in the Midlands, could see it as low as -10C (14F),\" he said.\n\nSnowmen popped up in the grounds of Guildford Castle, Surrey\n\nAs shown on the M1 in Bedfordshire, the wintry showers have caused hazardous driving conditions\n\nChris Fawkes of BBC Weather said some stretches of the M4 and M5 had been completely covered in snow at some points on Sunday morning.\n\nHe said this was partly because traffic has been low due to lockdown restrictions - and vehicles are needed to help grit mix into snow to make it melt.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Monday morning. We'll have another update for you this evening.\n\nMost pupils across the UK have not been in school since before the Christmas holidays - and now Tory MPs are calling for a \"route map\" for the reopening of schools in England. Pupils have been told they will be learning from home until at least the February half-term holidays. And Education Secretary Gavin Williamson says schools will be given at least two weeks' notice to reopen - which he \"hopes\" will happen before Easter. So, with no firm timetable, the chairman of the education select committee, Robert Halfon, has called for a plan to be laid out to MPs. He has asked for an urgent question in the Commons - if granted, Mr Williamson must respond. No part of the UK has yet announced a firm date for schools' reopening - you can read about the different nations' plans here.\n\nThe UK must reform how it is governed or risk becoming a \"failed state\", former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown has warned. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, he says Covid has exposed \"tensions\" between Whitehall and the nations and regions. Recent polls have suggested rising support for Scottish independence - and a potential border vote in Northern Ireland. \"The complaint is that Whitehall does not fully understand the country it is supposed to govern,\" says Mr Brown.\n\nFrance's top medical adviser says a third national lockdown will probably soon be needed to combat Covid-19. Prof Jean-Francois Delfraissy says \"there is an emergency\", adding that the \"UK variant\" now makes up between 7-9% of cases in some French regions. A strict curfew was implemented last weekend but cases continue to climb. You can see police enforcing the 6pm shutdown below.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police in Paris ensure shops close at 6pm as France begins a new curfew to tackle Covid-19\n\nRiot police in the Netherlands have clashed with protesters who are angry at new coronavirus restrictions. Officers used water cannon and tear gas to clear demonstrators in Eindhoven. They had gathered in defiance of a new 9pm curfew. Some protesters threw fireworks, looted supermarkets and smashed shop windows. There were smaller demonstrations in the capital, Amsterdam.\n\nAustralia has suspended a travel bubble with New Zealand - after NZ's first Covid case in months was confirmed to be the South African variant. The infected patient had served 14 days in quarantine and tested negative twice before developing symptoms later. Travellers coming from New Zealand to Australia in the next 72 hours will now have to go through hotel quarantine. Health Minister Greg Hunt said the suspension was done out of an \"abundance of caution\".\n\nYou can find more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page. This explainer looks at various questions - including whether the vaccine stops you spreading the disease.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Supporters of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny protest against his arrest across Russia\n\nRussian President Vladimir Putin has condemned as \"illegal and dangerous\" the mass rallies in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.\n\nTens of thousands defied a heavy police presence to join the rallies across Russia on Saturday. More than 3,500 were detained, monitors say.\n\nEU foreign ministers discussed the protests on Monday, but did not agree on further sanctions on Russia.\n\nIn Moscow riot police were seen beating and dragging away demonstrators.\n\nThe foreign ministers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are demanding \"restrictive measures against Russian officials responsible for arrests\".\n\nPoland's President Andrzej Duda also urged the EU to step up sanctions on Russia following the arrest of Mr Navalny. A week ago he was sentenced to 30 days in jail for violating parole conditions - a case he condemns as fabricated.\n\nMr Navalny, President Putin's most high-profile critic, called for protests after he was arrested at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, on arrival from Berlin on 17 January.\n\nDemonstrations were held on Saturday in about 100 cities and towns from Russia's Far East and Siberia to Moscow and St Petersburg.\n\nFrench Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian described the arrests as a \"slide towards authoritarianism\" and called for further sanctions against Russia.\n\n\"Change is in the air in Russia,\" declared Lithuania's new Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis, as he arrived for his first meeting with EU counterparts.\n\nBut he soon discovered that change is not always in the air in Brussels.\n\nA couple of years ago, one seasoned Spanish politician lamented the meetings of the 27 EU foreign ministers as being \"more a valley of tears\" than a place for decision-making: \"We express our condolence and concern… but no capacity for action comes out of it.\"\n\nUnfortunately for that same politician - Josep Borrell - he's now the man who chairs these gatherings.\n\nThe EU has already imposed sanctions on six senior Russian officials - including the head of the FSB security service - over the nerve agent attack on Mr Navalny last August.\n\nBut MEPs are urging the EU to go further and hit Mr Putin's administration \"where it really hurts - the money\".\n\nIn December, the EU unveiled a tougher sanctions regime, including asset freezes and travel bans for foreign individuals accused of human rights violations. It puts the bloc alongside the US and UK, which adopted so-called Magnitsky Acts.\n\nThey take the name of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison in 2009 after reporting massive fraud by Russian tax officials. The EU version does not bear his name, to avoid alienating Russia-leaning member states.\n\nAgreeing on EU sanctions is always tough, as it requires all 27 countries to agree and we're told no concrete proposal was discussed by foreign ministers today.\n\nObservers say the scale of the Russia-wide demonstrations was unprecedented for recent years, and the Moscow protest was the capital's largest in almost a decade.\n\nThey appeared to enjoy widespread passive support, with trolley bus passengers waving to the crowds and large numbers of car drivers beeping their horns.\n\nProtesters, like these in St Petersburg, braved freezing cold to rally for Mr Navalny\n\nThe protests were also notable for the high proportion of young Russians who turned out. Opposition rallies have attracted more young people since Mr Navalny began releasing online investigations into alleged government corruption.\n\nMany protesters said they were angered by the findings of that report, and chants of \"Putin is a thief!\" were heard during Saturday's demonstrations.\n\nSocial media also played a key role in driving young people - many of whom have only ever known a Putin-led Russia - to take to the streets. Posts promoting the demonstrations were viewed hundreds of millions of times on TikTok.\n\nThe flood of videos prompted Russia's official media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, to demand the app take down any information \"encouraging minors to act illegally\".\n\nMr Putin has said no underage children should take part in the protests: \"One must under no circumstances push forward underage people. After all, it is terrorists who act like that, when they drive in front of them women and children. The emphasis is slightly different, but essentially, this is the same thing.\"\n\nPolice should also act within the law, he said.\n\nNo-one should seek to advance \"their ambitious objectives and goals, particularly in politics\" through protests, he added, in an apparent reference to Mr Navalny.\n\nMr Navalny's video report into this Black Sea resort has been viewed 85 million times\n\nOn Sunday Mr Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov criticised a message from the US embassy in Moscow warning people to avoid the demonstrations, branding the warning an \"interference in our domestic affairs\".\n\nThe embassy said such warnings were a \"common and routine practice\".\n\nMeanwhile, the Russian embassy in the UK also accused Western nations of using their embassies to encourage the protests.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Russian Embassy, UK This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Health Secretary Matt Hancock says lifting restrictions can only happen when \"facts on the ground\" show it is safe\n\nIt is \"difficult to put a timeline\" on when England's lockdown could be lifted, Matt Hancock has said.\n\nThe health secretary said there were \"early signs\" the measures were working but it was \"not a moment to ease up\".\n\nHe said there were 37,000 people in hospital with coronavirus in the UK and \"more people on ventilators than at any time in this whole pandemic\".\n\n\"The pressure on the NHS remains huge and we've got to get that case rate down,\" he said.\n\nThe number of coronavirus cases in the UK has been falling, but the number of people in hospital remains high, as does the UK's daily death numbers.\n\nA further 592 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test and another 22,195 cases have been recorded, according to Monday's government figures.\n\nThe are 4,076 people in hospital on ventilators.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and only go out for limited reasons.\n\nThis includes for food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nAt Monday's Downing Street press briefing, Mr Hancock said: \"I understand the yearning people have to get out of this.\n\n\"The thing is that we have to look at the facts on the ground and we have to monitor those facts.\n\n\"And of course, everybody wants to have a timeline for that, but I think most people understand why it is difficult to put a timeline on it because it's a matter of monitoring the data.\"\n\nHe set out the factors the government would take into account when reaching decisions over lifting the restrictions, including: the death rate, the number of people in hospital, whether there were new coronavirus variants and the success of the vaccine rollout.\n\nAlmost four in five of the UK's over-80s have had the vaccine, Mr Hancock said, with nearly 6.6m people in total having had their first dose.\n\nThe falling numbers of infections being reported and the rising rate of vaccination are incredibly promising - even if the drop in infections reported on Monday may have been partly an artefact of fewer people coming forward for a test because of the snow.\n\nBut that does not offer any guarantees of a rapid lifting of lockdown.\n\nWhat is concerning ministers are the high numbers in hospital.\n\nThe number of new admissions seems to have plateaued - but at a very high rate.\n\nClose to 4,000 patients a day are being admitted to hospital.\n\nTo put that in context, that is four times the total number of all types of respiratory admissions the NHS would normally see in winter.\n\nIt means the numbers in hospital are at nearly twice the level they were at the peak in the spring during the first wave.\n\nWith better treatments available, patients are spending longer in hospital.\n\nSo come mid-February the pressures in hospital are likely to be very high, leaving ministers little wriggle-room to relax restrictions.\n\nThe big unknown, however, is what impact and how quickly vaccination will have an effect on admissions.\n\nThere is encouraging early news from Israel that hospitalisation really starts to drop three weeks after the first dose.\n\nIf that is repeated here, the picture could quickly change.\n\nBut until that happens the government - in the words of Health Secretary Matt Hancock - is urging the country to hold its nerve.\n\nSpeaking at the Downing Street press conference, Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer for England, warned: \"We are not out of this by a very long way.\"\n\nShe said current coronavirus rates were still causing concern, patience was needed about the vaccination programme and the NHS still faced its usual winter pressures.\n\nSusan Hopkins, from Public Health England, said the UK need to see the death rate \"fall much lower\" before any decision to ease measures.\n\nShe said teams were currently studying the impact on the UK's vaccine programme of the variant first identified in South Africa.\n\nBut she added the \"consensus view\" from four UK laboratories suggested that \"the current vaccine works against the variant that was first discovered in the UK\".", "Former Brexit Party MEP Robert Rowland was described as a larger than life character\n\nA former Brexit Party MEP has died in a diving accident near his home in the Bahamas.\n\nRobert Rowland, 54, represented the south east of England at the European Parliament from July 2019 until January 2020.\n\nNigel Farage paid tribute to the \"larger than life character\" and \"enthusiastic\" Brexit supporter.\n\nHe announced the death of his former colleague in a statement on Sunday.\n\nThe Royal Bahamas Police Force said it had \"received reports of a drowning incident\" on Saturday and was \"conducting inquires\".\n\nMr Farage said: \"It is with great sadness that I have to announce the death of Robert Rowland, after a diving accident near his home in the Bahamas.\n\n\"Following a successful career in the City, Robert was an enthusiastic Brexit Party MEP and larger than life character.\"\n\nHe said he wished to extend his \"sincerest condolences\" to Mr Rowland's family, including his wife and four children.\n\nFormer Brexit Party MEP David Bull said he was \"beyond devastated,\" adding: \"Robert was a wonderful friend and colleague.\"\n• None Farage's Brexit Party officially changes its name\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Budweiser has said it will not advertise its beer during the Super Bowl this year, joining a growing number of big brands sitting out the annual American football championship.\n\nThe event remains one of the most-watched in the US each year, drawing more than 100 million viewers in 2020.\n\nThe advertisements are often as much a conversation-starter as the game itself, sometimes sparking controversy.\n\nFirms say the virus has made finding the right message especially difficult.\n\nOthers are grappling with financial hits caused by the pandemic, which has dampened spending on many items, while also casting more than 10 million Americans out of work, resurfacing racial and economic inequalities and sharpening political divisions.\n\nBudweiser's parent company, Anheuser-Busch, said it planned to reallocate the money it would have spent on a 30-second Budweiser spot during the game to support an Ad Council campaign promoting coronavirus vaccination.\n\nIt is the first time the flagship brand will not make a game-time appearance in 37 years.\n\n\"This commitment is an investment in a future where we can all get back together safely over a beer\", it said, adding that it would still promote some of its other brands, such as Bud Light, during the game.\n\nOn Monday, Budweiser released a full 90-second Super Bowl ad on YouTube entitled \"Bigger Picture\", which showed US citizens overcoming pandemic challenges together and aimed to raise awareness about Covid-19 vaccines.\n\nCoke, Pepsi and Hyundai are among the other major names also planning to forego airtime during the broadcast.\n\nCoca-Cola said it had made the \"difficult choice\" to \"ensure we are investing in the right resources during these unprecedented times\". The firm did not advertise during the 2019 game either.\n\nHyundai cited \"marketing priorities\" and the timing of upcoming vehicle launches.\n\nPepsi has also said it would not promote its flagship soda during the game. Instead, it is spending money on an advert airing to promote the Super Bowl halftime show it has sponsored for almost a decade.\n\nThe Super Bowl boasts some of the most expensive advertising slots all year\n\nGiven all the economic, political and health questions of 2020, companies may have felt it was prudent to pull back - especially several months ago, when they would have had to start planning for such a high-profile night, said Kimberly Whitler, professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business\n\n\"It's the biggest night of TV watching and so they have to plan it months in advance,\" she said. \"There was so much uncertainty that to go and invest in a Super Bowl ad might have actually felt or seemed frivolous at the time.\"\n\nThe decision goes \"beyond finances\", she added. \"It's also, 'How do we identify the right tone that will match the moment'.\"\n\nThis year's Super Bowl will see star quarterback Tom Brady's Tampa Bay Buccaneers face off against reigning champions the Kansas City Chiefs on 7 February.\n\nLast year, firms spent an average of $5.25m (£3.8m) for a 30-second spot during the championship, driving Super Bowl ad spending to a record $450m, according to Kantar consultancy.\n\nThe firm has said its research suggests Super Bowl ads are \"typically 20 times more effective\" in changing a brand's perception than a normal advert.\n\nAnheuser-Busch, an official sponsor of the National Football League, is typically one of the night's top spenders, so the absence of its flagship brand may create its own buzz, said Satya Menon, a Chicago-based managing partner of of ROI practice at Kantar.\n\nChipotle's very first Super Bowl commercial is entitled, \"Can a burrito change the world?\"\n\n\"Budweiser in particular is a very established brand ... so for them, it's all about generating love and goodwill and maybe this is another way,\" she says.\n\n\"They do have a lot of pre-game advertising out there. When people have the expectation that they wil be there and then they don't see the brand, they'll start thinking why are they not.\"\n\nMeanwhile, the sports showdown still seems to be finding plenty of firms ready to fill spots left by the stalwarts. Names of newcomers include Chipotle and Fiverr, a freelance platform that has seen business soar during the pandemic.\n\n\"It doesn't get any bigger than the Super Bowl from a branding and marketing perspective,\" said Fiverr's chief marketing officer Gali Arnon. \"We believe this is a major opportunity for us to introduce the world to Fiverr in a unique and creative way.\"\n\nMany of this year's advertisers are firms coming from the e-commerce sector, which have benefited from the pandemic, Ms Menon said.\n\nAnd though audience numbers for NFL games have slipped this year, for those firms making their game-night debuts, Ms Menon says she still expects ads to have a big impact - even if the pandemic puts a damper on the traditional Super Bowl parties and other festivities, which can make championship feel like an unofficial national holiday.\n\n\"There isn't very much going on in life, so it will always have that great reach,\" she says. \"Some of that excitement may not be there, but watching will definitely be there.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson says teachers and pupils will be told “as much as we can, as soon as we can” about reopening schools\n\nThe government will tell teachers and parents when schools in England can reopen \"as soon as we can\", the prime minister has said.\n\nMPs have called on the government to set out a \"route map\" for reopening amid concerns for children's education.\n\nBoris Johnson said he understood why people wanted a timetable but he did not want to lift restrictions while the infection rate was \"still very high\".\n\nHe would not guarantee schools would reopen before April's Easter break.\n\nMr Johnson said: \"We've now got the R [reproduction rate] down below 1 across the whole of the country, that's a great achievement, we don't want to see a huge surge of infection just when we've got the vaccination programme going so well and people working so hard.\n\n\"I understand why people want to get a timetable from me today, what I can tell you is we'll tell you, tell parents, tell teachers as much as we can as soon as we can.\"\n\nHe said the government would be \"looking at the potential of relaxing some measures\" before mid-February, with Downing Street clarifying that this meant looking at the data to decide \"what we may or may not be able to ease from 15 February onwards\".\n\nA further 592 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test and another 22,195 cases have been recorded, according to Monday's government figures.\n\nAt Monday's Downing Street press briefing, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said almost four in five of the UK's over-80s have had the vaccine, with nearly 6.6m people in total having had their first dose.\n\nBut he said the NHS continues to be under \"intense pressure\", with Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer for England, saying there are \"twice the number of people in hospital than we had in the first wave\" of the pandemic.\n\nRobert Halfon, chairman of the education select committee, told BBC Breakfast there was \"enormous uncertainty\" and called for the government to set out what the conditions needed to be for pupils to return to schools.\n\nThe Conservative MP for Harlow suggested the government could consider tighter restrictions in other parts of society and the economy, in order to enable schools to open.\n\nTory MPs were enraged by reports over the weekend that schools might not re-open fully until after the Easter holidays.\n\nMinisters say it's the progress of the pandemic that will determine their decision rather than a pre-agreed timetable.\n\nYet whenever the government speaks, parents hear dates. Whether it's that the situation will be reviewed at half-term. Or a pledge to give two weeks' notice when classes will come back.\n\nMPs are now pushing for more transparency from the government about how they'll assess the data, and for some ideas between school being mostly closed or totally open.\n\nThis issue is a perfect metaphor for the situation facing the entire country. Too much hope breeds disappointment, but living with uncertainty is just as hard. And you can come up with a plan but it might have to be junked if the virus has other ideas.\n\nChildren's Commissioner for England Anne Longfield joined the call for clarity and told the BBC: \"Children are more withdrawn, they are really suffering in terms of isolation, their confidence levels are falling, and for some there are serious issues.\"\n\nEducation Secretary Gavin Williamson said the government wanted to \"see all children back at the very earliest moment\".\n\nSchools in England have been closed to most pupils since the national lockdown began on 5 January due to high levels of Covid transmission in the community.\n\nThere have been calls for teachers to be vaccinated sooner, although it is not clear if that would allow schools to reopen earlier.\n\nThe majority of pupils in England are learning from home with schools only open to the children of key workers, vulnerable children and those who cannot learn at home\n\nCovid death rates among educational professionals are not \"statistically significantly different\" to those in the general population, according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, but secondary school teachers appeared to have an elevated risk compared particularly with people working in office-type jobs.\n\nAmong secondary school teachers Covid death rates were 39.2 deaths per 100,000 males, compared with 31.4 for all males aged 20 to 64, and 21.2 per 100,000 females, compared with 16.8, but the ONS said these were \"not statistically significantly different than those of the same age and sex in the wider population\".\n\nSchools will remain closed in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales until at least the February half-term - with the Welsh first minister saying it is \"unlikely\" all pupils will return after the break.\n\nGemma Cocker with her children Charlie and Lyla\n\nGemma Cocker from Brighton is one of the many parents struggling to balance childcare, home learning and work.\n\nShe says she's having to share her work laptop with her son, who has already missed learning time after the family moved home and did not have internet access. \"We didn't have any internet. The school said they had reached their limit so couldn't take him,\" she says.\n\nAnd because her children are young, she says: \"They're never just going to watch a classroom by themselves, you have to be with them the whole time.\"\n\nKitty Jones, 11, is in her last year of primary school and she says home learning is \"tricky\" because she is not used to using different remote platforms like Google Classroom and she wants to return \"as soon as possible\".\n\n\"I still think that I'm learning a bit, but I don't think I'm learning as much as I would be in person,\" she tells BBC Radio 4's World at One programme.\n\nHolly Agbukor, 18, is studying for her A-levels, says it is \"quite stressful\" learning at home, as it is a \"different environment, so it is not as easy to be fully present in the lessons\".\n\nBut, she says, while is it \"difficult\" working at home, \"I don't think it is worth the cost of reintroducing the virus into society and making things worse overall\".\n\nHow has home-schooling been going for your family? You can share your experience by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "The UK has identified 77 cases of the coronavirus variant first detected in South Africa, the health secretary has said.\n\nCases are linked to travellers arriving in the UK, rather than community transmission, Matt Hancock added.\n\nHe told the BBC's Andrew Marr cases were under \"very close\" observation and enhanced contact tracing was under way.\n\nMinisters are due to meet on Monday to consider imposing tougher restrictions on people arriving from abroad.\n\nScientists have said there is a chance the South African variant may harm the effectiveness of current vaccines.\n\nMeanwhile, Mr Hancock said that \"three quarters of all the 80-year-olds in the country and a similar number of care homes\" have received their first doses of the vaccine.\n\nBoth the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines require two doses, and figures so far reflect those given the first dose.\n\nMr Hancock said that it was \"far too early to say\" what proportion of the population needed to be vaccinated before lockdown restrictions could be eased.\n\nAll viruses, including the one that causes Covid-19, mutate, and variants have been first located in the UK, South Africa and Brazil.\n\nThe South Africa variant has been found in at least 20 other countries, including the UK.\n\nMr Hancock said that all the South Africa variant cases in the UK were linked to travel.\n\n\"That's why we have got such stringent border measures in place against movement from South Africa,\" he added.\n\nThe UK closed all travel corridors last week until at least 15 February, with almost all travellers arriving in the country now required to show proof of a negative Covid-19 test to be allowed entry.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has not ruled out bringing in tougher measures at UK borders, telling a Downing Street news conference on Friday: \"We don't want to put that (efforts to control Covid) at risk by having a new variant come back in.\"\n\nMinisters are set to discuss whether to tighten border restrictions further, including the possibility of hotel quarantines for travellers.\n\nMr Hancock said: \"We have got to be cautious at the borders.\"\n\nAsked for a date on when lockdown restrictions might end, Mr Hancock said it was \"one of the many things that we don't yet know the answer to\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Matt Hancock on easing restrictions: \"We don't know the answer\"\n\nGovernment data on 14 January showed there were 35 confirmed cases of the South Africa variant identified in the UK, and a further 12 \"probable\" cases.\n\nMr Hancock said nine cases of the Brazil variant had been found in the UK, adding \"we are monitoring each and every one very closely\".\n\nShadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that Labour had been \"pushing the government to take tougher measures at the border since last spring\".\n\nShe said: \"We would fully expect the government to bring in tougher quarantine measures, we would expect them to roll out a proper testing strategy and we would expect them as well to start checking up on the people who are quarantining.\n\n\"Only three out of every hundred people who are asked to quarantine when they arrive into the UK actually face any checks at all - that's just simply not sufficient.\"\n\nOn Friday, Mr Johnson said there was \"some evidence\" the UK variant may be associated with \"a higher degree of mortality\".\n\nThe UK government's chief scientific officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, said there was \"a lot of uncertainty around these numbers\" but that early evidence suggested the variant could be about 30% more deadly.\n\nThe PM said on Friday that there was evidence that both the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine and Oxford-AstraZeneca jab were effective against the variant first detected in the UK.\n\nSir Patrick has warned that the variants in South Africa and Brazil might \"have certain features which means they might be less susceptible to vaccines\".\n\nBut he said \"there is no evidence\" that the two variants have transmission advantages over those already in the UK and so having cases here doesn't mean \"they will take off\".\n\nMeanwhile, England's deputy chief medical officer warned that people who have received a Covid-19 vaccine could still pass the virus on to others and should continue following lockdown rules.\n\nWriting in the Sunday Telegraph, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam stressed that scientists \"do not yet know the impact of the vaccine on transmission\".\n\nHe said vaccines offer \"hope\" but infection rates must come down quickly.\n\nIt's a key question but the fact is that no one can be sure.\n\nThat's because the trials of the vaccines explored the safety of the drugs and how well they prevent people from becoming ill - with good results for both.\n\nBut they did not investigate whether vaccination also stops infection and therefore whether people who've been immunised can still spread the virus to others.\n\nIf a vaccinated person did become infected, they probably wouldn't realise because they wouldn't have any symptoms. That's why health officials and ministers are so concerned.\n\nIt's possible that the antibodies boosted by the vaccine suppress the effects of the virus but don't eliminate it from the upper airway.\n\nMany scientists are cautiously hopeful that in this scenario, the amount of virus would be reduced but they're waiting for the results of studies under way now.\n\nAnd until there's an answer, it's difficult to calculate how and when it's safe to ease restrictions and allow people to mix again.\n\nA further 610 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test were reported in the UK on Sunday - down from 671 deaths last Sunday - in addition to 30,004 new infections.\n\nThe number of positive cases has fallen for the fourth day in a row and is the lowest figure since before Christmas.\n\nThe death figures tend to be lower on a Sunday and Monday because of weekend lags in reporting of the data.\n\nMeanwhile, more than six million people have had their first dose of a Covid vaccine - with the figure now standing at 6,353,321.\n\nNadhim Zahawi, the minister responsible for the vaccine rollout, said on Twitter that 6,353,321 of the \"most vulnerable and frontline heroes\" had received a first dose of the vaccine, but there was still \"much more to do\".\n\nThere were 4,076 Covid patients in mechanical ventilation beds in UK hospitals as of Friday, according to government data.\n\nThat is higher than during the first wave, when the peak was 3,301 on 12 April.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Video filmed in Tacoma, Washington, shows a police car apparently ploughing through a crowd of people\n\nA police officer is under investigation in the US after his vehicle ploughed into a group of people, running over at least one, in Tacoma, Washington.\n\nNobody was killed in the incident, although one person was rushed to hospital with injuries.\n\nA video shows a large group of people surrounding the police car as it revs its engine in an apparent effort to drive off.\n\nThe group refuses to move, and police say people started hitting the car.\n\nThe police officer then speeds through the group, hitting numerous people. One person is dragged under the car.\n\nTacoma Police Department said multiple vehicles and approximately 100 people were blocking an intersection when officers arrived on the scene. The group was apparently watching street racers doing \"burnouts\".\n\n\"During the operation, a responding Tacoma police vehicle was surrounded by the crowd. People hit the body of the police vehicle and its windows as the officer was stopped in the street,\" police said in a statement.\n\n\"The officer, fearing for his safety, tried to back up, but was unable to do so because of the crowd,\" it said.\n\n\"While trying to extricate himself from an unsafe position, the officer drove forward striking one individual and may have impacted others,\" it said.\n\nThe person who was run over was rushed to hospital. Their condition is as yet unclear.\n\nThe Pierce County Force Investigation Team is investigating the incident, the statement said. The police officer has not been identified.\n\n\"I am concerned that our department is experiencing another use of deadly force incident,\" Interim Police Chief Mike Ake said in the statement.\n\n\"I send my thoughts to anyone who was injured in tonight's event, and am committed to our department's full co-operation in the independent investigation and to assess the actions of the department's response during the incident.\"\n\nThe incident comes at a time of rising anger over the use of excessive force by police in the US.\n\nPeople across the world took to the streets last year to demonstrate their anger at the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis, and to demand an end to police brutality and what they see as systemic racism.", "Some Barclaycard customers will see their minimum repayments rise from Tuesday, at a time when finances are already stretched owing to Covid and Christmas.\n\nThe new requirements are tailored to each customer, although some may see a significant rise in demands.\n\nBut the changes will also see charges for exceeding a credit limit scrapped.\n\nJanuary is a pinch point for many in debt and borrowers are being urged to seek help if they are in trouble.\n\nBarclaycard signalled the changes to their pricing structures in November, although some borrowers may have missed the notice, which was titled \"changes to your terms and conditions\".\n\nThe new repayment rates will affect those with Platinum, Initial, Freedom, Forward, Cashback, Littlewoods, Rewards and Hilton Honors cards, but not Premier or Woolwich cards.\n\nFor cardholders who started using their cards in the last decade, the minimum repayment each month has been calculated as the highest of 2.25% of the full balance, 1% of the balance plus interest, or £5. This differed slightly for longer-standing customers.\n\nThe new charges mean minimum repayments will be the highest of between 2% and 5% of the full balance, between 1% and 3% of the balance plus interest, or £5.\n\nThis means some people could see the minimum repayment rise, although some other charges - such as the late payment fee - will be limited.\n\nThe exact percentage depends on the customer and would have been outlined in the November message.\n\nA Barclaycard spokesman said: \"We are increasing minimum payments for some customers to help them pay off debt quicker and reduce the overall interest they pay.\n\n\"This is part of our ambition to ensure that no Barclaycard customer gets into persistent debt - where they pay more in interest and charges than reducing their debt and take a long time to pay this debt off - and is being put in place to support our customers.\"\n\nSara Williams, who writes the Debt Camel blog, said that the higher minimum payment may well come as a \"nasty shock\".\n\n\"January is always the tightest month for money for most people. December pay is often early, so the money has to stretch further, and if you put any Christmas presents or expenses on your Barclaycard, this month's bill will be high anyway,\" she said.\n\n\"For people who were hardly managing before, the increase to the minimum payments may tip the bill over into being unaffordable.\"\n\nDebt charities had already warned that the coronavirus pandemic meant the UK was \"sleepwalking into a debt crisis\".\n\nThe government-backed Money and Pensions Service - which offers free guidance - said it was expecting a call about debt at least every four minutes throughout January.\n\nBarclaycard said the timing of the changes - which coincide with lockdown and many people on a reduced furlough income - was unintentional and had been signalled some time ago.\n\nAny borrowers who feel the new repayment levels are unaffordable are being asked to contact the company.\n\nMore broadly, anyone struggling to make debt repayments of any kind is being urged to face their difficulties and seek help.\n\n\"Financial worries negatively affect our 'cognition', which are the thinking processes that support and maintain our mental health. When in a poor state, financial worries cause stress and our cognition fails,\" said Keiron Sparrowhawk, a cognition expert from the Being Well Group, which runs the MyCognition app.\n\nThis could lead to depression and hasty, ill-thought-out decisions, he said.\n\n\"Together, depression and anxiety are distressing and disabling, causing us to spiral out of control and enter a pit of hell,\" he said.", "The water is warmer than the air and is creating a mist along Dynevor Road\n\nThe coalmining heritage of Wales has been implicated in flooding of homes - but what has happened in Skewen?\n\nAbout 80 people were evacuated from the Neath Port Talbot village, with at least eight streets left under water.\n\nCouncil leader Rob Jones says the flood appears to be related to mine works - but the volume of water involved has hampered a full assessment so far.\n\nThe Coal Authority is investigating how \"historic underground mining features\" in the area exacerbated the problem.\n\nA geologist says there are tens of thousands of old mine shafts across the former south Wales coalfield and it is \"incredibly difficult\" to monitor them all.\n\nSkewen lies within an old coal mining hotspot, with several former colliery sites near the village that operated in the 19th and early 20th Century.\n\nThere were colliery sites near what is now Drummau Road, in the north of the village and another close to Old Road, near Neath Abbey.\n\nSkewen was part of a collection of collieries that stretched between Neath and Llanelli on the western side of south Wales' coalfield.\n\nGraham Levins, secretary of the Welsh Mines Preservation Trust, said old mines often contain groundwater which can flood in heavy rain.\n\nHe said: \"A lot of them go very, very deep down, much below the local water level and that's why they had all the big wheels to pump the water out.\n\n\"It fills up with water and will find a way out. Normally rainfall you get it doesn't cause a lot of problems but when you get really heavy rain, the water drains down through the ground and builds up.\"\n\nStreets were turned into rivers in Skewen\n\nGeologist Tom Backhouse said water was coming out of an area near the junction of Goshen Park and Drummau Road, where there is a record of a mine shaft dating from the turn of the 20th Century.\n\nIt then started \"rushing down\" Drummau Road, causing the flooding that forced evacuations.\n\n\"What we can expect to have happened is that the water level in the mines rose to a point where it's burst out of that entry point from the mine workings below.\n\n\"Also, there are images of very ochre like orange-coloured water and again, that may well be issuing from the mine workings on the highlands to the east of the property on the hill behind.\n\n\"That may be where the shallow workings have flooded.\"\n\nHe said old mine working across the former coalfield area hold water at a certain depth, but when an event such as Storm Christoph drops \"a huge amount in a small area\", the levels rise quickly.\n\n\"As it gets closer and closer to the surface, it basically looks for an escape, the pressure builds up,\" he continued.\n\n\"What it looks like has happened on the junction of Goshen Park and Drummau Road, where the mine shaft is recorded, is that pressure has built up at that point and then burst out through the shaft which is very likely to have been capped with wood or something like that.\n\n\"Where you've got those mine shafts, which ultimately are vertical tunnels down into the mine workings below, the water has literally forced itself up through that shaft, and the pressure is obviously so great it's caused this devastating flash flood.\"\n\nAs well as properties, vehicles were submerged in water\n\nThere are about 13 shafts recorded within about 820ft (250m) of the one in Goshen Park, so Mr Backhouse said it is possible more than one may have burst.\n\nThere are tens of thousands in south Wales and he said it was \"incredibly difficult\" to check them all, but there were \"tell tale signs\" as to why they may collapse such as age or what type of developments are around them.\n\nThe clean up has continued on Friday morning\n\n\"Not to try and fear-monger or anything but of course this sort of thing can happen again,\" he said.\n\n\"If another event like Storm Christoph happens, the water levels in the mine rises as quickly as it did, there's absolutely nothing to say that it wouldn't happen again in the future.\n\n\"And obviously as climate changes and we have many more events like Storm Christoph, they are going to increase in frequency, they are going to be much more severe.\n\n\"The Coal Authority will have to consider the risk in places like Skewen, and they'll have to understand how it will affect residents and proactively manage that and look at how to reduce the risks for residents.\"", "Pictures of the Pampas grass on social media are thought to have made the area in South Shields popular\n\nA boom in the popularity of Pampas grass with interior decorators has led to \"droves\" of people picking the plant which grows wild near a beach.\n\nThe grass, near Littlehaven Beach in South Shields, forms part of a wind defence to stop sand blowing onto roads and helps protect the coastline.\n\nSouth Tyneside Council warned anyone found removing it could be prosecuted.\n\nCouncillor Ernest Gibson said while the grass may look \"beautiful in vases\" people were \"damaging the environment\".\n\nThe grass, which was popular in the 1970s, can sell for up to £40 a bunch and has proved a popular addition to people's homes.\n\nIt is thought that photographs on social media sites such as Instagram may have influenced people turning up and taking it, Mr Gibson added.\n\n\"Pampas grass is quite expensive to buy if you went to a florist. It's cheaper to come to South Tyneside and take it away,\" he said.\n\n\"But what we are doing is urging people not to come here and take it away, it's there for a reason.\"\n\nPampas grass and Marram grass form part of a defence along the coast at South Shields\n\nThe Pampas grass helps to bond poor soils found at the coast, while Marram grass helps to prevent erosion in the dunes.\n\nSigns are to be erected warning people not to pick the grass because it is already in need of replenishment, the council said.\n\n\"Through Covid, we have a massive amount of people coming to the coastal town, it's Benidorm without the sunshine,\" he added.\n\n\"It's great to see people at the seaside enjoying it [the grass] and that's what it's part of. It's there for everybody to view.\"\n\nGarden designer George Wright said Pampas grass was \"very popular\" and he had seen demand increase two or three times at his nursery in West Boldon. He also expressed concern for the area.\n\n\"Once they take the flower heads themselves they take the seeds. Eventually this will become very much a patchy area and they will all start to decline.\n\n\"Pampas grass is becoming more and and more popular at the moment and I think a lot of it is people are starting to extend their houses into the garden so they want something nice in there, and also it's being used for interior decoration in houses.\"\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Geoff and Jenny Holland married in August after two previous attempts to wed were delayed by the pandemic\n\nTwo newlywed pensioners are urging everyone to get vaccinated as they were among the first to receive a dose at a new centre.\n\nGeoff Holland, 90, and 86-year-old wife Jenny married in August after meeting at Town View independent living centre in Mansfield.\n\nThe pair tied the knot after being forced to postpone their nuptials twice due to the pandemic.\n\nThey both received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.\n\nThe couple made their vaccination plea as a centre at an old DIY store on Chesterfield Road South, in Mansfield, opened on Monday.\n\nIt has joined 31 other new sites opening across England this week, with anyone aged 75 and over who lives within a 45-minute drive encouraged to book their injections.\n\nMrs Holland praised staff at the vaccination site for the care she and her new husband received.\n\n\"We've been well looked after while we've been here,\" she said.\n\n\"People have worked long and hard to get this vaccine so I think people ought to have it.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Time-lapse footage shows how a DIY store was transformed into a vaccine centre in three weeks\n\nMr and Mrs Holland said they both tested positive for coronavirus a couple of months ago after Mr Holland reported feeling unwell.\n\nBoth managed to recover without developing major symptoms.\n\nDespite the delay to their wedding and the ongoing after-effects of the pandemic, Mrs Holland said married life was turning out to be \"brilliant\".\n\n\"Hopefully, one day soon, we'll be able to have a get together and celebrate with our family and friends who couldn't be there on the day,\" she said.\n\nKathryn Turner, Mr Holland's daughter, said the family was thrilled the pair received their jabs.\n\n\"It's fantastic that they are getting the vaccine so their love story can continue,\" she said.\n\n\"Hopefully this will help us all get back to some sort of normality.\"\n\nThe Hollands met in the summer of 2019 and were engaged the following New Year's Eve\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n• None COVID-19 Vaccination in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire - NHS Nottingham and Nottinghamshire CCG The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Parents are struggling with the sense of uncertainty, says psychologist\n\nHome schooling can be tough. It's difficult to concentrate, there's emotional exhaustion, boredom, a lack of motivation and it's really hard not going out to see friends. And that's just the parents.\n\nThis winter lockdown is taking its toll on families, now struggling even more on the black ice of uncertainty as no-one can say when schools in England are going to reopen for most pupils again.\n\n\"There's a sense of fatigue,\" says Jacqueline Smallwood, who is at home with three secondary-school children. She says her own \"concentration levels have fallen dramatically\".\n\n\"It's so repetitive that it just makes you feel tired,\" she says of the latest lockdown and the \"silent struggle\" facing both parents and their children to try to get motivated.\n\nHome school shows no sign of coming to an early end\n\nThere might have been some guilty enjoyment at the start of the year when the school term was initially delayed, not having to get up and out on cold January mornings.\n\nUntil it dawned on them that this was becoming something much longer than a few weeks.\n\nIt's morphed from early January to half term in mid-February and now maybe Easter in early April or even later. And Jacqueline says, as a matter of \"respect\", parents need to know what's happening about schools.\n\nThe confusion over a return date seems to have further frayed the nerves of parents.\n\nThe mother, who lives outside Canterbury in Kent, says she worries about the pressures building up on young people.\n\nFor teenagers like her sons, she says this \"should be a pivotal time in their lives,\" when they're beginning to get some independence and when social lives are hugely important - but instead they're stuck inside with their parents.\n\n\"We can't live like the Waltons forever,\" she says, referencing the US TV series of a folksy family relying on each other.\n\nJacqueline says families are finding this latest lockdown tougher than the spring or summer\n\nThe first lockdown created an unexpected sense of togetherness, an \"enforced bonding\" that she says turned out to be a \"massive positive\".\n\nBut Jacqueline, who works as a writer, sees no such upside to the latest lockdown. There is a collective frustration - and she says it has been made even worse by the confusion about when schools will go back.\n\nThe online home-schooling seems to be working, she says, with teachers trying to boost the enthusiasm levels, but it's no real substitute for being in school. And she wants much more clarity about when they will go back.\n\n\"I've tried not to be political about decisions being made, but you can't help but feel disappointed. They don't seem to understand how real people are living,\" she says.\n\nShe says when politicians say maybe schools will or won't be back by Easter, they don't realise how much that uncertainty affects families trying to plan for what comes next.\n\nEducational psychologist Dan O'Hare says the \"key word is 'uncertainty'\".\n\nLiving on a laptop can take its toll on parents having to work and home school their children\n\nNot knowing what is coming next adds to the pressure, he says, and children out of school are already facing big unknowns such as what's going to happen about exams or when will they see their friends and teachers.\n\n\"It's really stressful for children and their families,\" says Dr O'Hare, who is co-chair of the British Psychological Society's division for educational and child psychology. \"They need a sense of a plan.\"\n\nThis lockdown is also in the depths of winter - and he says employers need to think about making sure staff working from home are able to take a break in daylight hours, so that families can get outside.\n\nIt's no use asking parents to answer work emails all day and expect them to go out when it's dark.\n\nSchools have been providing more online lessons in this lockdown\n\nFor some families it has got very difficult.\n\n\"It's affected her emotionally a lot,\" says Dave in Bolton, who is worrying about his six-year-old daughter, who has been crying because she misses her friends.\n\n\"It's awful, you can't put a positive spin on it. She's at that age where she's enjoying her friends, becoming more socialised,\" he told BBC 5 Live.\n\n\"She's quite a confident little girl and I can't help worry that being stuck at home is going to impact her in the longer term.\"\n\nThe father says many of her classmates are still going into school - and that makes it even harder when she sees her friends on school Zoom calls.\n\nEmployers should make sure that parents' working hours allow them to get out in daylight, says psychologist\n\nJen Locke in Newcastle makes the point that women can often be \"the most adversely affected by the decision to keep schools closed\".\n\nShe says home schooling has \"fallen squarely on my shoulders\", helping her children in the day and then shifting her work with an IT company into the evening, so it's an early start through to a very late finish.\n\n\"It's a huge mental strain… I'm knackered from it all,\" she says, right down to trying to get children to bed who aren't tired because they're not going out.\n\nA lockdown weariness seems to be out there, despite the best efforts of schools.\n\nSimon Armstrong in Bristol, whose son is in secondary school, says: \"Virtual lessons, no matter how well delivered, are a woeful substitute for real lessons.\"\n\n\"I am at the end of my tether,\" he says.\n\nThe Department for Education said: \"We are committed to reopening schools as soon as the public health picture allows, and will inform schools, parents and pupils of plans ahead of February half term.\"\n\nBut Labour has accused the government of causing \"chaos and confusion\" for parents and schools.\n\nThe National Association of Head Teachers said: \"Now is the moment for calm heads to decide on a sustainable return to school, not another chaotic and last-minute set of decisions that could easily result in a yo-yo return to lockdown.\"", "Of 2,000 Welsh members of the Royal College of Nursing who took part in a survey, 75.9% reported increased stress over the past year\n\nA long-term plan is needed to help nurses cope with post-traumatic stress resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, union officials have said.\n\nLast year the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) ran a survey looking at its impact on front-line staff and how it had changed nurses' lives.\n\nOf 2,000 Welsh members who took part, 75.9% reported increased stress and 52% were worried about their mental health.\n\nThe Welsh Government said it recognised the pressures on NHS workers.\n\nCarol Doggett, senior matron at Swansea's Morriston Hospital, said nurses were often becoming patients' \"next of kin\" during the pandemic, due to the \"absence of family, particularly at end of life\".\n\n\"Which we would do anyway, naturally, but in the absence of family it's far more profound than supporting them in a holistic way if they were present with us,\" she said.\n\nSenior matron Carol Doggett says the extreme pressure experienced in intensive care had been felt throughout the hospital\n\nMs Doggett said the extreme pressure experienced in intensive care had been felt throughout the hospital.\n\n\"Patients are coming in through [the emergency department]. They are sicker. The number of sicker patients has definitely increased,\" she said.\n\n\"That results in them having an extended period in hospital. They can stay beyond Covid. They continue to suffer with those conditions that present themselves as a result of Covid.\"\n\nOn Sunday, Ms Doggett's colleague, Morriston intensive care consultant John Gorst, said as many as five patients are dying with Covid during a single 12-hour shift.\n\nNicky Hughes, associate director of nursing at RCN Wales, said: \"The Welsh Government needs to set a long-term plan in place to deal with post-traumatic stress and other mental health issues amongst nurses as a result of the pandemic.\n\n\"Nurses are exhausted, stressed and nearing burnout. Every day they tell us that they feel that they have nothing left to give and feel devalued.\"\n\nAlmost a year on from the start of the pandemic nurses have had to find \"ever more physical and emotional strength\" to cope with Covid-19, said Ms Hughes.\n\nMental health charity Mind Cymru agreed with the RCN that a \"coherent long-term strategy\" was needed to help front-line workers deal with the pandemic's effect on their mental health.\n\n\"We urge Welsh Government to factor this in to their plans and take the necessary steps to give people the support they need,\" said Simon Jones, Mind Cymru's head of policy.\n\n\"Nursing staff and other healthcare professionals have played, and continue to play, a vital role in combatting the pandemic, often putting their own health and wellbeing at risk.\n\n\"Even before the outbreak, we heard from many healthcare professionals struggling with the mental health impact of things like long working hours without breaks, unsociable shift patterns, and dealing with traumatic events.\"\n\nA mental health support hotline for front-line NHS staff in Wales - Health for Health Professionals (HHP) Wales - has been set up by Cardiff University and has received Welsh Government funding.\n\nThe hotline's director Prof Jonathan Bisson said he was \"encouraged\" by the Welsh Government's investment in HHP Wales along with Traumatic Stress Wales, which helps people who have experienced traumatic events.\n\n\"These two initiatives are taking a long term strategic approach to support health workers exposed to traumatic events,\" Prof Bisson said.\n\n\"HHP Wales offers access to mental health support for any member of NHS staff in Wales and has linked with Traumatic Stress Wales to provide evidence-based treatment to health workers who are experiencing post traumatic stress disorder as a result of traumatic experiences related to the pandemic and other causes.\"\n\nPlaid Cymru said the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on health and care workers \"mustn't be underestimated\".\n\n\"The Welsh Government must demonstrate that they're taking this seriously with a robust workforce strategy that takes into account the mental health needs of workers, including sufficient down time after the pandemic, and addresses the need to retain and recruit more staff,\" said Plaid's health spokesman Rhun ap Iorwerth.\n\nThe Welsh Government called the \"commitment and tireless hard work\" of nurses across Wales \"truly remarkable\".\n\nA spokesman said: \"We recognise the pressures the NHS workforce is experiencing and have worked closely with NHS employers and trade unions to create a comprehensive wellbeing package to help support them, which includes a dedicated and confidential Samaritans listening support helpline.\n\n\"We have also expanded our Health for Health Professionals Wales service which offers psychological and mental health support, as well as a number of free-to-access health and wellbeing support apps.\"\n\nRCN Wales said it was glad the Welsh Government was backing projects supporting health workers.\n\nIt said it encouraged the continued development of a \"long-term strategy to deal with the lasting impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on our nursing workforce.\"", "A heatwave sweeping south-east Australia has sent temperatures soaring in the nation's biggest cities and escalated the threat of bushfires.\n\nA large blaze has been contained in Adelaide, South Australia after it burned through 2,500 hectares.\n\nNeighbouring Victoria state is facing its worst fire risk in a year.\n\nTemperatures in those states have started to cool but New South Wales and Queensland will see their heatwave continue into Tuesday.\n\nSydney recorded temperatures of above 40C by Monday afternoon.\n\nHealth officials have urged people to stay inside and to avoid physical activity, and for those near bushfires to avoid inhaling smoke.\n\nThe blaze in the Adelaide Hills has been contained but is expected to continue to burn for the next few days, local media reports.\n\nIt is believed to have destroyed several houses but has not caused injuries.\n\nThe blaze has burned through more than 2,500 hectares\n\nPeople in the area have been warned to take care.\n\n\"Smoke will reduce visibility on the roads and there is a risk of trees and branches falling,\" a statement from SA police said.\n\nImages taken on Monday show smoke over Adelaide obscuring parts of the city skyline and prompting some residents to wear face masks.\n\nAdelaide was blanketed by smoke on Monday\n\nAfter the hot spell began on Friday, the Bureau of Meteorology (Bom) issued heatwave warnings for South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and Queensland.\n\nOn Monday, Victoria's state capital Melbourne recorded temperatures of 41.5C at 12.40pm (01.40 GMT).\n\nPeople in Victoria have been urged to be careful when in water after the state recorded seven drownings over the past 10 days, ABC News reports.\n\nPeople in Sydney flocked to beaches at the weekend seeking relief from the heat\n\nThe heat is expected to linger until mid-week as the hot air mass tracks east across the country.\n\nAfter extreme bushfires and heatwaves a year ago, Australia's summer this year has so far been cooler and wetter. Meteorologists say the conditions are influenced by a La Nina phenomenon.\n\nAustralia has warmed on average by 1.4C since national records began in 1910, according to its science and weather agencies.\n\nThat's led to an increase in the number of extreme heat events, as well as increased fire danger days.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Hell to high water: Australia’s summer of extremes in 2019-20\n\n\"In summer we now see a greater frequency of very hot days compared to earlier decades,\" said BoM and the national science agency, CSIRO, in their 2020 State of the Climate report.\n\nThe same report noted that 2019 - Australia's hottest year on record - had 33 days where the national maximum temperature exceeded 39C. That surpassed the total number of days over 39C in the previous six decades.\n\nHeatwaves are Australia's deadliest natural disaster and have killed thousands more people than bushfires or floods.", "Police found Dylan Freeman in his mother's bed surrounded by toys\n\nA woman has admitted suffocating her severely disabled son after suffering a breakdown.\n\nDylan Freeman's body was found in Acton, west London, on 16 August with a sponge in his mouth.\n\nHis mother Olga Freeman pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility.\n\nThree psychiatric reports said Freeman was suffering from a severe depressive illness with psychotic symptoms at the time of the killing.\n\nFreeman attended Acton Police Station to report herself following the killing.\n\nOfficers later found Dylan in his mother's bed surrounded by toys.\n\nDylan had autism, Cohen syndrome - which is linked to abnormalities in many parts of the body - and significant difficulties with language and communication.\n\nIn the week leading up to the killing, Freeman had spoken about saving the world and being a Messiah, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said.\n\nOlga Freeman had booked flights abroad the night before Dylan's body was found\n\nFreeman appeared by video-link to enter her plea and will be sentenced on 11 February.\n\nSpeaking after the hearing, the CPS's Kristen Katsouris described the death as \"tragic\".\n\nShe added: \"Olga Freeman had loved and cared for Dylan for many years, but the strain and pressures of her son's severe and complex special needs had built up and that, combined with her impaired mental health, led to heart-breaking consequences.\"\n\nA post-mortem examination at Great Ormond Street Hospital recorded Dylan's cause of death as upper airway obstruction.\n\nThe Met Police said Freeman had spoken to friends about struggling with the responsibility of caring for Dylan.\n\nOn the night before his body was found, Freeman booked two seats on a flight to Tel Aviv and told her friend not to go into Dylan's room.\n\nThe body of Dylan was found at a house in Cumberland Park, Acton\n\nAt the time of his death, his father, celebrity photographer Dean Freeman, was in Spain.\n\nHe described his son as \"a beautiful, bright, inquisitive and artistic child who loved to travel, visit art galleries and swim\".\n\nFor more London news follow on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Ambrose O'Neill was sentenced in his absence in 2008\n\nA violent robber who went on the run for nearly 13 years has finally been caught and jailed.\n\nAmbrose O'Neill - dubbed \"The Running Man\" due to his ability to evade capture - skipped his 2008 trial over an attack on an antiques dealer.\n\nHe was sentenced to eight years in prison in his absence but spent years at large, until police got a tip-off he was in hiding in Lincolnshire.\n\nThe 42-year-old was arrested on Friday and is now beginning his sentence.\n\nNottinghamshire Police said in 2007, O'Neill, of Ludgate Close in Arnold, knocked on his victim's front door in Seagrave, Leicestershire, posing as a pizza delivery man.\n\nWhen his victim opened the door, O'Neill pushed him over, punched him in the face and demanded he open a safe, threatening to kill him.\n\nBut he ultimately left empty-handed and was later arrested.\n\nO'Neill attended the first day of his trial at Leicester Crown Court but then went on the run.\n\nPolice said they launched Operation Gladiolus in December 2020 in a bid to track him down.\n\nPC James Gill, from Nottinghamshire Police's \"wanted squad\", said: \"We knew he had changed his appearance and lived in an area where people do not know him and he had an assumed identity,\" he said.\n\n\"He was laughing at the police, so we were determined to do everything to find him.\"\n\nA major breakthrough came from an anonymous tip-off suggesting O'Neill may be living with a woman in the Wyberton area, in Lincolnshire.\n\nPolice narrowed it down to a house in Causeway and arrested the \"surprised\" O'Neill in the early hours of Friday.\n\nPC James Gill worked in his free time to bring O'Neill to justice, Nottinghamshire Police said\n\nOfficers also arrested a 41-year-old woman on suspicion of assisting an offender. She remains in custody.\n\nO'Neill is due to appear at Leicester Crown Court on 29 January, where his sentence could be extended, the force added.\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Bethany and her two children have been on a waiting list for more than a year\n\nThere is a \"shocking\" lack of places for traveller families to live in England, according to a charity.\n\nOnly 18 out of 251 registered traveller sites have any spaces available, research from Friends, Families and Travellers (FFT) suggests.\n\nIt says the government must \"do more\" to identify land for the community to live on.\n\nThe government says councils are \"best placed\" to assess the local need for permanent traveller sites.\n\nIn October, FFT wrote to all local authorities and private registered site providers in England to ask how many pitches they had available.\n\nIt received responses relating to 251 out of 266 traveller sites - which represented 3,482 permanent pitches and 304 transit pitches.\n\nA transit pitch is a short-term place where people can stay for a set period of usually up to three months.\n\nBethany says she's near the bottom of the waiting list for a pitch in her local area\n\nBethany Rose, 26, and her two children have been on a waiting list for a pitch in West Sussex for more than a year.\n\nShe is currently staying with her parents in their caravan on a registered traveller site. But this is against the rules of their tenancy contract and she will have to move out once the coronavirus pandemic is over.\n\nBethany has a health condition which means she can often be paralysed from the waist down and she needs to be close to her mum who is her carer.\n\n\"It's frustrating, annoying, aggravating, I feel let down,\" she says. \"I'm disabled. I'm homeless and I have two kids.\n\n\"For anyone normally it would just be like, 'Boof, there you go, there's a property, go and live there'. But I can't do that. I can't even get a house, I can't buy a plot of land, I can't do anything.\"\n\nBethany and her children are currently living with her parents on a traveller site in West Sussex\n\nIt's estimated about 1.1 million households are on local authority housing waiting lists, but Bethany believes it would be easier for her to get a home if she wasn't a traveller.\n\nShe says being a traveller is a huge part of her identity and she wants to live on a site so she can continue to be connected to her heritage.\n\n\"A whole community is there if you need something or something happens,\" she said. \"If you fall or you go to hospital, you can guarantee your neighbour will watch the kids until you come back. If you need a cup of sugar, you can just go round.\"\n\nThe research from FFT comes as MPs were due to debate a petition on Monday against government proposals to criminalise trespassing. However, this has been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nThe new measures could see travellers facing a fine or prison if they set up unauthorised encampments - currently it's a civil offence.\n\nIn a consultation paper published in 2019, the Home Office said there had been \"long-standing concerns\" about the distress they caused to local communities.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sarah Tanner posted a video saying she was \"disgusted\" by mess left by travellers in Dorset\n\nIn June 2020, residents in Dorset complained about mess left by travellers on a local park - which included a car being abandoned in the middle of a cricket pitch, rubbish dumped in green spaces and human waste deposited in the pond and lake.\n\nFFT says councils are failing to provide enough sites for travellers to live on.\n\nIn January 2019, plans to spend £5m on new traveller pitches in Milton Keynes were put on hold after a \"heated\" meeting with local residents.\n\nBethany believes councils are not doing more to provide extra sites because of discrimination towards travellers.\n\n\"They're building 50,000 new houses in West Sussex, not one of those places is having a site,\" she said. \"So you've got the Nimby (Not In My Back Yard) culture attached to that.\n\n\"For every 50 houses, they could put a site of five which is a whole little community that they can get used to and go, 'Yeah, OK, they're not as bad as people say.'\n\n\"That also means we're not pulling up the side of the roads. We're not being moved off. We're just trying to live like everyone else.\"\n\nMilton Keynes Council changed its plan to build a new traveller site after listening to residents\n\nWest Sussex County Council says when a vacancy comes up on a permanent site all those who have expressed an interest in that location are considered for the pitch.\n\nThe FFT wants the government to reintroduce pitch targets and a statutory duty on local authorities to meet the assessed need for Gypsy and traveller sites.\n\nIt also calls on the government to abandon its proposal to criminalise trespassing.\n\nSarah Sweeney, policy and communications manager at FFT, said: \"It is deeply unfair that while the government is dramatically failing to identify enough land for Gypsy and traveller families to live on, the home secretary is working to create laws to imprison, fine and remove the homes of families living on roadside camps for the 'crime' of having nowhere else to go.\"\n\nThe Local Government Association says it wants the government to publish \"better data\" on the scale of unauthorised encampments and the availability of authorised sites to help councils in England meet their planning obligations.\n\nA spokeswoman for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: \"Unauthorised encampments cause distress and disruption for many people across the country so it's right we are giving the police the powers they need to address this issue.\n\n\"Councils are best placed to assess the local need for permanent traveller sites and decide where they should be, and can apply for funding through our Shared Ownership and Affordable Homes Programme to help build them.\"", "At least 80 people had to leave their homes in the village after flooding\n\nPeople whose homes were flooded after a \"blow out\" at a mine shaft are said to be \"devastated\" as they face months before they can return home.\n\nSteve Morris said his son Gareth and his girlfriend's home in Skewen, Neath Port Talbot, was inundated by \"orange\" flood water containing sewage.\n\nBut some will be allowed back to their properties on Tuesday.\n\nResidents of Goshen Park and Sunnyland Crescent who have yet to contact Neath Port Talbot council are urged to do so in the next 24 hours.\n\nThe council said access to these properties would continue to be affected beyond 26 January and the Coal Authority wished to have early discussions with them.\n\nMr Morris told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast that his son called him on Thursday to say his house was about to be flooded.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Teresa Dalling says a river of orange water rushed through the village on Thursday\n\n\"I live about half a mile away... and by the time I got to his address I could see the water levels were rising rapidly up the road,\" he explained.\n\n\"Then it was so quick - the water came through his rear patio doors firstly, then the gardens and then the drains couldn't cope on the main road and came through the front door, then the side door.\n\n\"His ground floor was four feet under water, and it was this orange coloured water. There was sewage in the house, so his ground floor needs totally gutting.\"\n\nMr Morris said Gareth and his girlfriend are staying in a hotel as they wait to be allowed back to assess the damage.\n\nHe hopes their insurance firm will pay to rent a home for them, adding: \"I can honestly see them being out of their house for between six and 10 months.\n\n\"They are obviously devastated - they have only been in there for 12 months so everything was near enough brand new.\"\n\nCerys Thomas was at her mother's house with her son, in Goshen Park, when she saw water coming through the front door.\n\nThe stairs at the home of Cerys Thomas' parents were left caked in mud\n\nShe said: \"I said to my mother to get my son and herself out and up toward the street. I phoned the police then, because I could see it was going to be an emergency, and within minutes my parents' conservatory doors just blew through.\n\n\"The pressure of the water just blew through the house and the water, within minutes, was up to my waist.\n\n\"Trying to get out of the house was very scary because the pressure of the front door was getting pushed back.\"\n\nShe said the street was under water \"within seven minutes\".\n\n\"It was something you would see in a movie,\" she said.\n\nWithin minutes of water entering the house Ms Thomas was up to her waist in water\n\nMeanwhile, the Coal Authority said it has identified the cause of the \"blow out\".\n\nChief executive Lisa Pinney told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast: \"Firstly, I just want to say our thoughts are with everyone affected by this flooding and we are genuinely sorry people have been affected in this way.\n\n\"What we know so far is the blow out was caused by a blockage underground which caused water to break out, basically to find the easiest path, and there's no doubt the excessive rainfall in the days before was also a factor in that.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMs Pinney said crews had been able to find the site of the collapsed mineshaft which had caused the flooding, and the authority had started to \"develop options\".\n\n\"We really understand people want to get back into their homes, they want to collect things, they want to know what the next steps are,\" she continued.\n\n\"We are working as fast as possible to make that happen and we hope to be able to provide some more information in the next day or so, but you will understand that we have to be sure for public safety.\"\n\nMs Pinney said there are almost 300 mine shafts or entries across the Skewen mine works, which covers an area of about 12 sq km (7.6 sq miles).\n\nShe added: \"We have checked all recorded shafts in the immediate area and we are doing continued checks over the coming days. We have found no problems. They are all safe.\"", "Jenners department store in Edinburgh has been at the site since 1838\n\nThe owner of the Jenners building in Edinburgh has promised that it will remain a department store - despite the departure of its current tenant, the House of Fraser.\n\nFrasers Group said it would cease trading at the site on 3 May, with the loss of 200 jobs.\n\nThe building is owned by Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen.\n\nA company spokesman said it would continue as a store and that \"advanced\" talks were taking place with operators.\n\nThe Jenners building has occupied a prime location on Princes Street for 183 years.\n\nIt was bought by Mr Povlsen - who is one of Scotland's biggest landowners - in 2017, reportedly for £53m.\n\nThe store is currently operated by the Frasers Group, which owns the commercial rights to the Jenners trading name.\n\nIt said it would be quitting the site in May after the two sides were unable to come to an agreement.\n\nA Frasers spokesman claimed that the landlord had not been able to \"work mutually on a fair agreement\".\n\nHe said this had led to \"the loss of 200 jobs and a vacant site for the foreseeable future, with no immediate plans.\n\n\"Our commitment to our Frasers strategy remains but landlords and retailers need to work together in a fair manner, especially when all stores are closed.\"\n\nAnders Holch Povlsen is one of Scotland's biggest landowners\n\nHowever, Anders Krogh Vogdrup - the director of AAA United, which owns the Jenners building - said it had given Frasers a substantial rent reduction and rent-free periods to cover the lockdowns.\n\n\"Frasers has made the decision that it does not wish to continue in occupation,\" he said.\n\n\"This will see the end of the 16-year association between House of Fraser and this building, but not of the 180 years of Jenners department store.\"\n\nMr Vogdrup told BBC Scotland that it had bought the Jenners building \"out of passion for its architecture and history\".\n\n\"We have been sad to read on social media that we are to close the department store, as that is not the case,\" he said.\n\n\"We fought to keep the current tenant and we are now in advanced talks with other partners.\"\n\nHe said their \"first priority\" was to keep it as a department store, while there were also plans to turn some unused parts of the building into a hotel.\n\n\"The Jenners department store and building is the jewel in the crown of Edinburgh,\" he added.\n\n\"We are not turning it into a hotel. It will remain a department store.\"\n\nHe also expects the Jenners name will remain on the side of the building.\n\nMr Povlsen, whose parents set up Scandinavian fashion company Bestseller, is believed to be worth £4.5bn. As well as owning Bestseller he is a major shareholder in online retailer Asos.\n\nHe has previously revealed plans to use parts of the Princes Street building for a hotel, with the rest reserved for retail.\n\nThe plans included the restoration of the building's Victorian facade and central atrium, which is a three-storey, top-lit grand saloon. A rooftop restaurant and bar would overlook nearby St Andrew Square.\n\nMr Vogdrup said the plans to refurbish the store were now on hold due to the current economic climate.\n\nJenners has dominated Edinburgh's main shopping thoroughfare since the mid-19th Century.\n\nIt was opened in 1838 by local drapers Charles Jenner and Charles Kennington, who found themselves out of work after being sacked for taking a day off to go to the races in Musselburgh.\n\nInitially called Kennington & Jenner, the boutique store proved popular for keeping the people of Edinburgh in fine silks and linen, which could normally only be found in London.\n\nBy 1890 the shop had changed name to Charles Jenner & Co and had expanded to adjoining buildings, making it one of the biggest stores in Scotland.\n\nBut just two years later fire destroyed the shop and ambitious plans - backed by the local council - were launched for a new look Jenners.\n\nCelebrated architect William Hamilton Beattie, who also designed the Balmoral and Carlton Hotel, was brought in for the redesign.\n\nCharles Jenner died in 1893 before the work was completed in 1895.\n\nIn 1911 the popular store was given a Royal Warrant.\n\nAfter struggling in the the 21st Century, the Jenners brand was sold to rivals House of Fraser for £46m in 2005.\n\nIn 2018, House of Fraser was bought by Mike Ashley's Sports Direct group.", "The pupils of someone with PTSD have an exaggerated response when viewing exciting or dangerous images, the study found\n\nA person's pupils can reveal if they have suffered a traumatic experience in the past, according to new research.\n\nThe joint Swansea and Cardiff universities study found the eyes of people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) behave differently.\n\nIt found their pupils have an exaggerated response when viewing exciting or dangerous images.\n\nThose behind the study said it could be useful in diagnosis, treatment and in bench-marking progress.\n\nNormally pupil size fluctuates with changing light levels, but it can also alter when a person is scared, excited, or even concentrating hard.\n\nShocking or surprising images can cause pupils to enlarge, however the researchers discovered this reaction was highly exaggerated in people who have experienced a traumatic event.\n\nThree groups of people were tested - some with diagnosed PTSD, others who had experienced a traumatic event but had no PTSD, and a control group of people with no previous issues.\n\nProf Nicola Gray, of Swansea University, co-authored the study with Prof Robert Snowden of Cardiff University.\n\nShe said: \"The pupil normally shows a fast constriction when the person sees a new image, but then the pupil gets bigger - especially if the picture is arousing, such as a scary image of, for example, fierce animals or weapons.\n\n\"However, the patients with PTSD behaved differently in both phases. First, their pupil did not constrict much when shown a new picture, and then it expanded more to the scary images than for people without PTSD.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Could virtual reality help treat PTSD in veterans?\n\nOne man with PTSD who wished to remain anonymous described how, after his time in the Army, he was left unable to drive at night because his pupils could not contract sufficiently in response to street lights and on-coming headlights, leaving him dazzled and unable to see properly.\n\nThe research found the PTSD group showed enlarged pupils to images which were positive and exciting.\n\n\"When we displayed exciting scenes, such as a sporting triumph or an image of a person sky-diving, these images elicited the same enhanced pupil response in the PTSD group as the frightening pictures,\" Prof Snowden said.\n\n\"The subjects weren't frightened by these images, but the images were arousing. Once again, the people with PTSD showed a far greater response, indicating that they were even more aroused by these images than the other participants\".\n\nAccording to Prof Gray this finding could help to develop new therapies for PTSD.\n\n\"If exciting, but non-threatening, images elicit the same response, then it may be possible in the future to use them to gradually reduce the arousal levels of people experiencing PTSD.\"\n\nPTSD is an anxiety disorder caused by very stressful, frightening or distressing events.\n\nSomeone with PTSD often relives the traumatic event through nightmares and flashbacks, and may experience feelings of isolation, irritability and guilt.\n\nThey may also have problems sleeping, such as insomnia, and find concentrating difficult.\n\nThese symptoms are often severe and persistent enough to have a significant impact on the person's day-to-day life.\n\nCauses of PTSD can include:\n\nThe pupil is the opening in the middle of the iris\n\nProf Gray said the research may also be useful from a diagnostic perspective.\n\n\"PTSD comes in many forms, from people who have experienced a one-off sudden event like a car crash, to those who have gone through many traumatic events over a period of months or years via abuse.\n\n\"Sometimes people struggle to express these thoughts, or might even play them down in order to please the therapist.\n\n\"Having a more objective method to look for these signs of hypervigilance and hyperarousal may be useful in order to obtain a more accurate benchmark of how the person is progressing.\"", "Scientists say signs a new coronavirus variant is more deadly than the earlier version should not be a \"game changer\" in the UK's response to the pandemic.\n\nBoris Johnson has said there is \"some evidence\" the variant may be associated with \"a higher degree of mortality\".\n\nBut the co-author of the study the PM was referring to said the variant's deadliness remained an \"open question\".\n\nAnother adviser said he was surprised Mr Johnson had shared the findings when the data was \"not particularly strong\".\n\nA third top medic said it was \"too early\" to be \"absolutely clear\".\n\nAt a Downing Street coronavirus news conference on Friday, the prime minister said: \"In addition to spreading more quickly, it also now appears that there is some evidence that the new variant - the variant that was first identified in London and the South East - may be associated with a higher degree of mortality.\"\n\nSpeaking alongside the PM, the government's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said there was \"a lot of uncertainty around these numbers\" but that early evidence suggested the variant could be about 30% more deadly.\n\nFor example, Sir Patrick said if 1,000 men in their 60s were infected with the old variant, roughly 10 of them would be expected to die - but this rises to about 13 with the new variant.\n\nThe announcement followed a briefing by scientists on the government's New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) which concluded there was a \"realistic possibility\" that the variant was associated with an increased risk of death.\n\nBut one of the briefing's co-authors, Prof Graham Medley, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"The question about whether it is more dangerous in terms of mortality I think is still open.\"\n\n\"In terms of making the situation worse it is not a game changer. It is a very bad thing that is slightly worse,\" added Prof Medley, who is a professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.\n\nAnother 1,348 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test were reported in the UK on Saturday, in addition to 33,552 new infections, according to the government's coronavirus dashboard.\n\nThere is huge uncertainty in the evidence on how lethal the variant is.\n\nThe scientific experts that reviewed the data used a precise phrase saying it was a \"realistic possibility\" the new variant is more deadly.\n\nThat means there's a roughly 50-50 chance it will turn out to be true.\n\nWith time, and sadly more deaths, the picture will become clearer.\n\nWhile people debate the uncertainties though, we already know this variant has the ability to kill more people than the old ones.\n\nA virus that spreads faster (this one is 30-70% faster) will infect more people, more quickly, putting a greater strain on hospitals and leading to a sharper spike in deaths.\n\nIt is why viruses becoming more transmissible can be a bigger problem than ones becoming more deadly.\n\nNervtag's chairman Prof Peter Horby defended the government's \"transparency\" in making the announcement.\n\n\"Scientists are looking at the possibility that there is increased severity... and after a week of looking at the data we came to the conclusion that it was a realistic possibility,\" he said.\n\n\"We need to be transparent about that. If we were not telling people about this we would be accused of covering it up.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Patrick Vallance: \"There is evidence that there's an increased risk for those who have the new variant\"\n\nBut Dr Mike Tildesley, a member of Sage subgroup the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M), agreed it was too early to draw \"strong conclusions\" as the suggested increased mortality rates were based on \"a relatively small amount of data\".\n\nHe told BBC Breakfast he was \"actually quite surprised\" Mr Johnson had made the early findings public rather than monitoring the data \"for a week or two more\".\n\n\"I just worry that where we report things pre-emptively where the data are not really particularly strong,\" Dr Tildesley added.\n\nPublic Health England medical director Dr Yvonne Doyle also said it was not \"absolutely clear\" the new variant was more deadly than the original.\n\n\"There is some evidence, but it is very early evidence. It is small numbers of cases and it is far too early to say,\" she told the Today programme.\n\nMeanwhile, senior doctors are calling on England's chief medical officer to cut the gap between the first and second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine.\n\nThe British Medical Association told Prof Chris Whitty an extension to the maximum gap between jab from three weeks to 12 weeks, to get the first dose to more people, was \"difficult to justify\".", "Moderna's Covid vaccine appears to work against new, more infectious variants of the pandemic virus found in the UK and South Africa, say scientists from the US pharmaceutical company.\n\nEarly laboratory tests suggest antibodies triggered by the vaccine can recognise and fight the new variants.\n\nMore studies are needed to confirm this is true for people who have been vaccinated.\n\nThe new variants have been spreading fast in a number of nations.\n\nThey have undergone changes or mutations that mean they can infect human cells more easily than the original version of coronavirus that started the pandemic.\n\nExperts think the UK strain, which emerged in September, may be up to 70% more transmissible.\n\nCurrent vaccines were designed around earlier variants, but scientists believe they should still work against the new ones, although perhaps not quite as well. There are already some early results that suggest the Pfizer vaccine protects against the new UK variant.\n\nFor the Moderna study, researchers looked at blood samples taken from eight people who had received the recommended two doses of the Moderna vaccine.\n\nThe findings are yet to be peer reviewed, but suggest immunity from the vaccine recognises the new variants.\n\nNeutralising antibodies, made by the body's immune system, stop the virus from entering cells.\n\nBlood samples exposed to the new variants appeared to have sufficient antibodies to achieve this neutralising effect, although it was not as strong for the South Africa variant as for the UK one.\n\nModerna says this could mean that protection against the South Africa variant might disappear more quickly.\n\nProf Lawrence Young, a virus expert at Warwick Medical School in the UK, said this would be concerning.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. BBC health and science journalist Laura Foster compares the three different Covid-19 vaccines\n\nModerna is currently testing whether giving a third booster shot might be beneficial.\n\nLike other scientists, the company is also investigating whether redesigning the booster to be a better match for the new variants will be beneficial.\n\nStephane Bancel, chief executive officer of Moderna, said the company believed it was \"imperative to be proactive as the virus evolves\".\n\nUK regulators have already approved Moderna's vaccine for rollout on the NHS, but the 17m pre-ordered doses are not expected to arrive until Spring.\n\nThe vaccine works in a similar way to the Pfizer one already being used in the UK.\n\nMore than 6.3 million people in the UK have already received a first dose of either the Pfizer or the AstraZeneca vaccine.", "Media regulator Ofcom has decided not to take any action over Channel 4's use of a \"deepfaked\" video of the Queen.\n\nThe \"alternative Christmas message\" attracted 354 complaints about decency after it aired on Christmas Day.\n\nIt showed an AI-generated version of the Queen, who made jokes about the Royal Family and the prime minister, and danced on top of a table.\n\nBut after assessing things, Ofcom decided not to pursue the complaints about disrespecting the monarch.\n\n\"In our view, Channel 4 made clear that the images were deliberately manipulated as a device to question societal trust in what we see online,\" a spokeswoman for the regulator said.\n\n\"We also consider that the satirical tone of the film was in keeping with audience expectations of this broadcaster,\" it added.\n\nThat decision is similar to Channel 4's own defence of the satire, in which it argued that the parody left viewers \"in no doubt that it was not real\".\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by Channel 4 This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nIt also argued the message of the video as a whole was a warning about the importance of trust, and how easily convincing fake images and video can be created - even uploading a behind-the-scenes video about its creation.\n\nAfter airing on national television in the UK, the video has spread widely online, racking up nearly two million views on YouTube alone.\n\nIt has not, however, been universally popular - on top of the formal complaints to Ofcom, it has a poor ratio of likes-to-dislikes on YouTube - with more than 19,000 likes, but nearly 5,000 dislikes.\n\nDeepfakes work by training a computer to draw a person's face by showing it thousands of photographs of that person, ideally from many different angles and in different lighting conditions.\n\nThe computer can then draw that person's face on top of another actor's performance.\n\nThe more varied and numerous the images used in training the model, the better the result - which is why it is almost universally used to fake the appearance of celebrities, who already have hours of available film or television footage available.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nBut there are other limitations on the technology, too.\n\nThe similarity in facial structure, size, and appearance of the actor whose face is being replaced affects the realism of the finished deepfake. It is also far easier to produce a convincing result if the person remains still, as movement can often reveal the artificial nature of the animation.\n\nThe voice must also be replaced by an impersonator and the entire process is incredibly demanding, even for high-end computers, often taking many days of computation.\n\nHowever, the technique is advancing rapidly, and the results are becoming more convincing with each passing year, with major film firms such as Disney actively exploring the technique and developing their own variants.", "Fashion retailer Boohoo has bought the Debenhams brand and website for £55m.\n\nHowever, it will not take on any of the firm's remaining 118 High Street stores or its workforce.\n\nBoohoo said it was a \"transformational deal\" and a \"huge step\". But the deal means that up to 12,000 jobs at the department store chain are set to go.\n\nThe 242-year-old Debenhams chain is already in the process of closing down, after administrators failed to secure a rescue deal for the business.\n\nIn a separate development, Asos says it is in \"exclusive\" talks to buy the Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge and HIIT brands out of administration.\n\nBut the online retailer said it only wanted the brands, not their shops, suggesting any deal would cost jobs.\n\nThe current owner of the brands, Sir Philip Green's Arcadia Group, fell into administration last November putting 13,000 jobs at risk.\n\nA closing-down sale at 124 Debenhams stores began in December, as the administrators continued to seek offers for all or parts of the business.\n\nThe company announced recently that six shops would not reopen after lockdown, including its flagship department store on London's Oxford Street.\n\nThe administrators of Debenhams UK, FRP Advisory, said they had undertaken a \"thorough and robust process\" to achieve \"the best outcome for Debenhams' stakeholders\".\n\n\"This transaction will allow a new Debenhams-branded business to emerge under strong new ownership, including an online operation and the opportunity to secure an international franchise network that will operate under licence using the Debenhams name,\" they added.\n\nBoohoo has already bought a number of High Street brands out of administration. It snapped up Oasis, Coast and Karen Millen, but not the associated stores.\n\nIts executive chairman, Mahmud Kamani, said: \"This is a transformational deal for the group, which allows us to capture the fantastic opportunity as ecommerce continues to grow. Our ambition is to create the UK's largest marketplace.\n\n\"Our acquisition of the Debenhams brand is strategically significant as it represents a huge step which accelerates our ambition to be a leader, not just in fashion ecommerce, but in new categories including beauty, sport and homeware.\"\n\nBoohoo said Debenhams was expected to relaunch on Boohoo's web platform later this year.\n\nIn the meantime, Debenhams will continue to operate its website for an agreed period.\n\nBoohoo's fast-fashion model has come under scrutiny\n\nBoohoo has recently come under fire over workers' pay and conditions and its ultra-low pricing.\n\nAs well as facing questions about the environmental impact of its fast-fashion business model, there have been accusations of widespread abuse of employment law at some of Boohoo's suppliers in Leicester.\n\nInvestigations last year suggested workers were being paid below the minimum wage.\n\nAfter an independent review of the claims found a series of failings, Mr Kamani said last month that the firm was working to fix the problems, adding: \"We will make a better Boohoo.\"\n\nWhile online retailers have been whittling away at their High Street rivals for years, few could have predicted how quickly bricks-and-mortar stalwarts have collapsed. The pandemic has fatally undermined their already parlous finances. Businesses that appeared to have a chance of survival just a year ago have been wiped out and their brands bought by online players.\n\nThe scale of the change is profound: when Debenhams listed on the stock exchange in 2011, investors valued it at £1.6bn. Boohoo, which was founded only in 2006, already has a stock market value of £4.4bn. Asos, a bit player two decades ago when Sir Philip Green's Arcadia group was riding high and toying with a bid for Marks & Spencer, is now valued by the stock market at £5bn.\n\nNeither Boohoo or Asos see any value in the Debenhams or Topshop High Street estates. Instead, they will concentrate on development of the brands and the associated customer data. This is bad news for the 19,000-odd people who work in the branches of Debenhams and Topshop, and will leave councils around the country wondering how they will fill town centres that were based on retail.\n\nBut just as canny entrepreneurs and private equity companies are gearing up to buy struggling pub chains, in the hope of a recovery once lockdown restrictions are eased, so will some investors be wondering what next for the High Street. The British love affair with shopping will not end overnight and a well-placed punt now could have big rewards.\n\nDebenhams has struggled for years with falling profits and rising debts, as more shopping has moved online. It called in administrators twice in two years, most recently in April.\n\nHowever, its position became untenable during the coronavirus pandemic as non-essential retailers were forced to close for prolonged periods.\n\nThe firm had already trimmed its store portfolio and cut about 6,500 jobs since May, as it struggled to stay afloat.\n\nBusinessman Mike Ashley, who founded Sports Direct and also owns House of Fraser, had already made an offer for Debenhams after it was initially put up for sale in April.\n\nHowever, the takeover offer, thought to be in the region of £125m, was rejected as being too low.\n\nMeanwhile, one of House of Fraser's flagship outlets, the Jenners department store in Edinburgh, is to leave its Princes Street home after 183 years. It will close on 3 May with the loss of 200 jobs.\n\nThe building's owner, Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, announced in November 2019 that he intended to convert the site, replacing Jenners with a hotel, cafes, a rooftop restaurant and luxury shops.\n\nHowever, a spokesperson for Frasers Group said it had been \"unable to reach an agreement\" with Mr Povlsen and that the closure of Jenners would leave \"a vacant site for the foreseeable future with no immediate plans\".\n\nDo you work for Debenhams? Has your job been affected? Please get in touch by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dutch police have described it as the worst unrest in four decades\n\nMore than 180 people were arrested in 10 Dutch cities as protesters defying a curfew clashed with riot police for a third night running.\n\nShops in Rotterdam were looted and police used water cannon, as rioters resisted latest Covid restrictions.\n\nPrime Minister Mark Rutte condemned \"criminal violence\" and the justice minister said the curfew would remain.\n\nThe Dutch chief of police said the riots no longer had \"anything to do with the basic right to demonstrate\".\n\nThe Netherlands has had nearly one million confirmed Covid cases since the start of the outbreak, with more than 13,500 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University in the US, which is tracking the pandemic.\n\nThe government recently introduced a night-time curfew which runs from 21:00 (20:00 GMT) to 04:30. Anyone caught violating it faces a €95 (£84) fine.\n\nThere were further violent scenes in many towns and cities. Riot police clashed with protesters in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, as well as Amersfoort, Den Bosch, Alphen and Helmond.\n\nSome of the worst disturbances were in the south of Rotterdam where police said 10 officers were hurt. Across the country 184 people were arrested. Amsterdam's mayor appealed to parents to keep young people indoors.\n\nSeveral cities have vowed to introduce emergency measures in an effort to prevent more disturbances\n\nThe windows of some shops were smashed in Rotterdam\n\nFires were lit on the streets of The Hague, where police on bicycles attempted to move small clusters of men who threw stones and fireworks. There was violence in the southern city of Den Bosch, where rioters set off fireworks, broke windows, looted a supermarket and overturned cars.\n\nA woman living near Den Bosch train station told Dutch radio that masked youths had left a trail of destruction in the city centre. \"I saw windows smashed and fireworks going off. Really crazy, just like a war zone,\" the woman said. Roads into the city were closed to stop people joining the rioters and Mayor Jack Mikkers imposed an emergency order banning gatherings on Tuesday.\n\nThe ignition of discontent has rocked the core of Dutch society.\n\nIn the absence of any legitimate way to socialise, is this simply an outlet for young men to feel part of something, their masks concealing their identities and enabling them to violently channel their frustrations?\n\nThere are more sinister influences at play. Messages on social media, overt and covert, have whipped up anger. Misinformation has even been spread by some politicians.\n\nSome of the worst violence was in Rotterdam\n\nSome feared a curfew would be a tipping point, as Dutch restrictions tighten while some neighbouring countries relax their rules. The vast majority of people in the Netherlands are peacefully observing the curfew.\n\nThe unrest was initially seen as a response to the first \"stay-at-home\" order imposed since Nazi occupation during World War Two. That notion has been dismissed by Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who said the rioters were simply criminals and would be treated as such.\n\nBut there are simmering anxieties in Dutch towns and cities, and with less than two months before a general election, voters are vulnerable and the streets volatile.\n\nThere has been widespread shock at the violence. In Rotterdam, where police used water cannon during clashes with rioters, Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb signed an emergency decree, giving police broader powers of arrest. He reacted furiously to shops being looted in the south of the city, condemning \"shameless thieves, I can't call it anything else\".\n\nThe prime minister said the police had the government's full support: \"The riots have nothing to do with protesting or fighting for freedom.\"\n\nRotterdam shop-owner Emrah Köker said he had no words for what he had seen. \"How can this happen in the Netherlands?\" he asked Dutch daily newspaper Algemeen Dagblad. Justice Minister Ferd Grapperhuis challenged anyone to explain what looting a shop had to do with coronavirus.\n\nThe mayor of Den Bosch said police had struggled to respond to the violence because they were needed in other nearby towns.\n\nFootball fans of the Willem II club took to the streets of Tilburg to \"protect their city\" against rioters, news site Brabants Dagblad reports.\n\nMayors in several cities have vowed to introduce emergency measures in an effort to prevent more disturbances.\n\nThe Dutch prime minister has condemned the violence\n\nThere has been widespread shock in the Netherlands over the violence", "The public's trust in the way the UK is run is breaking down, former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown has warned.\n\nHe said Covid-19 had exposed \"tensions\" between Whitehall and the nations and regions, who were often treated by the centre as if they were \"invisible\".\n\nMr Brown is urging Boris Johnson to set up a commission to review how the country is governed and powers shared.\n\nBut the PM said his focus was on the pandemic, stressing the benefits of the union could be \"seen everywhere\".\n\nMr Brown's intervention comes amid a looming clash between Mr Johnson and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who has demanded the UK agree to another Scottish independence referendum if the SNP wins a majority in May's Holyrood elections.\n\nThe Court of Session is hearing arguments about whether Holyrood can legislate to hold one even if the UK government continues to object.\n\nWriting in the Daily Telegraph, Mr Brown - who advocates a federal system with more power for nations and regions - says the pandemic has \"brought to the surface tensions and grievances that have been simmering for years\" between Downing Street and the various parts of the UK.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Conservatives election win was not 'a signal that the country is at ease' warns Brown\n\nHe points to \"bitter disputes\" over issues such as lockdown restrictions and furlough and said unless underlying tensions were resolved, the UK risked becoming a \"failed state\".\n\nIn an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today, he said at a time \"when all should be pulling together and intensifying co-operation across the UK\" there was division and claims by the leaders of Scotland and Wales and the English regions that they were not being properly consulted.\n\nLast year there were rows between the government and local authorities over coronavirus tiers, with the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, objecting to plans to put the region into the strictest level of restrictions.\n\nMr Brown told Today that while he was \"confident\" that Scotland would still be part of the UK in ten years time, the way the UK was governed had to change.\n\n\"I think the public are fed up. I think in many ways, they feel they are being treated as second class citizens, particularly in the outlying areas, that they are invisible and forgotten.\"\n\n\"Something has broken down in trust and has to be repaired.\"\n\nMr Brown is advising the Labour Party on its devolution strategy - but has also held talks with government ministers including Michael Gove in recent weeks.\n\nGovernment sources say they are focused on taking tangible steps to demonstrate the value of the UK.\n\nThe idea of a fundamental review of the UK's power structures has been suggested as one possible way to counter support for Scottish independence ahead of May's Holyrood election.\n\nBut a series of polls now suggest support for independence is higher than support for the union - and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will demand another referendum if, as seems likely, her party - the SNP - wins in May.\n\nHe is calling on Boris Johnson to immediately set up a commission on democracy to review how the UK is governed, something the Conservatives promised in their manifesto before the last general election.\n\nIn his Telegraph article, he suggests it would find that the UK needs a Forum of the Nations and Regions, citizens' assemblies, and a greater focus on the benefits of cooperation in areas such as the NHS and the armed forces.\n\nThe current Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer also supports devolving more powers from Westminster but opposes another Scottish independence referendum.\n\nThe SNP said last week that there would be a \"legal referendum\" after the pandemic if May's Holyrood election returned a pro-independence majority.\n\nAsked if he would stand in the way of this, Mr Johnson said what the British public wanted was for its political leaders to focus on beating coronavirus, adding that the advantages of the UK's four nations working together \"spoke for themselves\".\n\n\"I think people can see everywhere in the UK the visible benefits of our wonderful union,\" he said.\n\n\"A vaccine programme that is being rolled out by a National Health Service, a vaccine that was developed in labs in Oxford and is being administered by the British Army.\"\n\nBut the SNP said the Scottish people, not Westminster-based politicians, should decide the country's future.\n\n\"No amount of constitutional tinkering from Labour would protect Scotland from Brexit or the Tory power grab - only independence can do that,\" said Kirsten Oswald, the party's deputy Westminster leader.\n\n\"The Scottish people will see right through this attempt to deny their democratic right.\"\n\nA poll commissioned by the Sunday Times in Northern Ireland found 51% of people wanted a referendum on Irish unity in the next five years.\n\nDUP leader and Northern Irish First Minister Arlene Foster said such a vote would be \"absolutely reckless\".\n\nNumbers supporting Wales breaking away from the UK also appear to be rising. The pro-independence campaign group Yes Cymru has said membership swelled from 2,000 at the start of 2020 to more than 17,000.\n\nPlaid Cymru has also promised to hold an independence referendum if it wins the next Senedd election.\n\nResponding to Mr Brown's intervention, the party's Westminster leader Liz Saville Roberts said: \"It's been clear for many years that the UK doesn't work for Wales - I'm glad that the Labour Party are starting to see that.\"", "Prince Charles Hospital now has an expanded special care baby unit and six en-suite delivery rooms\n\nIt followed concerns that emerged in late 2018 that women and babies may have come to harm because of staff shortages and failures to report serious incidents.\n\nThe review by experts from two royal colleges was in addition to the health board's own investigation. Maternity services in Cwm Taf are now in special measures and an independent panel was set up to drive improvements.\n\nHow many incidents are we talking about?\n• None 150cases from 2016-2018 reviewed so lessons can be learnt\n\nThe health board's own investigation looked at 43 cases, including 25 serious incidents. Of these initial cases, 20 were at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant and 23 at Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil. The serious incidents include eight stillbirths and five deaths shortly after birth, all between January 2016 and last September.\n\nThey came to light after concerns were raised that staff had not been reporting serious incidents.\n\nThe health board said it faced \"extreme\" staff shortages and was urgently trying to make improvements.\n\nBut the review team cast doubt on the ability of the health board to make changes, without more support. It said it was \"dismayed\" that an internal report, written by a consultant midwife, highlighting many safety concerns last September was not acted upon, \"thereby continuing to expose women to unacceptable risks\".\n\nA consultant midwife also identified 67 stillbirths, going back to 2010, which had not been reported by the health board.\n\nThe independent panel decided to widen its scope to look at 350 cases of women who were transferred out of the health board area.\n\nIn October 2019, the panel said it was looking at a total of 150 cases between 2016 and 2018 - including the 43 cases initially investigated. There is still scope to look back at further years.\n\nWho has been investigating?\n\nThe health minister Vaughan Gething ordered an \"independent external review\" by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology and the Royal College of Midwives last October.\n\nIts findings, published in April 2019, were damning and found services \"under extreme pressure\" and \"dysfunctional\", while mothers had distressing experiences in how they were treated.\n\nCwm Taf's maternity services were placed in special measures and the independent panel overseeing changes has indicated as well as looking back in detail at past cases it wanted to ensure improvements were robust and to look at lessons that could be learned across Wales.\n\nHave any changes been made?\n\nThe royal colleges review team ordered urgent action after visiting hospitals in January 2019 - finding \"a number of immediate quality and safety concerns\".\n\nMeasures included more cover by doctors, strengthened processes for flagging up problems and more support for junior doctors. Cwm Taf now says these have all been completed.\n\nThe latest progress report from the independent panel in January 2020 found the most urgent improvements had been made.\n\nStaffing levels and training had improved, there was a better system for flagging up complaints and surveys found \"high levels of satisfaction\" from women using Prince Charles Hospital.\n\nThe panel was \"cautiously optimistic\" that long term improvements would be made.\n\nChioma Udeogu, who has moved back home to Nigeria\n\nThe review's parallel report on how families were dealt with was perhaps the most powerful testimony on the problems at Cwm Taf.\n\nMothers were said to have been ignored or made to feel worthless.\n\nThey spoke of being ignored or patronised.\n\nOne mother said: \"I want having a baby to be a good experience. It's ruined it.\"\n\nThere was the case of Sarah Handy, who was sent home from hospital in pain with laxatives, before giving birth prematurely at home. Her daughter died.\n\nChioma Udeogu's daughter was delivered stillborn after failings in her care at the Royal Glamorgan hospital in January 2017. An internal investigation has already found midwives failed for 12 hours to carry out antenatal checks on Mrs Udeogu, an engineering student at the University of South Wales at the time.\n\n\"I believe that if I was properly monitored in the hospital I wouldn't have lost her,\" she said.\n\nJessica Western, from Rhoose, in the Vale of Glamorgan, said she was not listened to when she could not feel her baby move in the month before the birth.\n\nJessica Western says she was not listened to at different points before and after the birth of her baby\n\nHer daughter Macie died in March 2018, 19 days after she was born.\n\n\"I'm only young and I do want to have more kids eventually, but I'm not prepared to put myself through a pregnancy if this could happen again,\" she said.\n\nAnother, Monique Aziz, from Coedely, Rhondda Cynon Taff, whose baby son died days after leaving hospital, said: \"I just want to know if he would have still been here if things had been done differently.\"\n\nWhat else has been happening?\n\nIn the background, there have been long planned changes in how maternity services are organised.\n\nFrom March 2019, doctor-led care for mothers in labour or for babies needing specialist neonatal care is now only provided on one site - Prince Charles Hospital. The Royal Glamorgan still has a 24-hour midwife unit for less complicated births and will continue to provide all antenatal services, clinic appointments, scans and tests during pregnancy.\n\nThe changes follow long-standing concerns that specialist maternity staff had been spread too thinly. The health board says those changes will help address challenges, including over staffing.\n\nAfter the critical report, the health board's chief executive went on sickness leave and then resigned in August 2019.\n\nStress and sickness absence was reported to be an issue among midwives, in the aftermath of the review.\n\nHow far back to those concerns go?\n\nThe fragility of maternity services in the area can be traced back for at least a decade. In a review in 2011 the Wales Audit Office raised concerns about staffing, skill mix and absences and the health board's ability to deliver maternity services on two sites.\n\nConcerns about the quality of maternity care were also at the heart of a controversial plan in 2014 to centralise some specialist services in fewer hospitals along the M4 corridor. It recommended moving doctor-led care for mothers and children (along with A&E) from the Royal Glamorgan hospital.\n\nCwm Taf health board initially rejected the plan and several months of wrangling followed.\n\nFour years later, the proposals on maternity services are only now being finally implemented.\n\nWhat is the independent panel doing?\n\nThe chairman Mick Giannasi - who has a track record going into troubled organisations, like Anglesey Council and the Welsh Ambulance Service - brings clinical expertise. He is also setting up a system so families can be involved and kept fully informed.\n\nIn the first progress report in October 2019, the panel said there had been progress - around a third of the action points in the improvement plan had been delivered - but a \"significant amount of work\" still needed to be done.\n\nThere had been \"significant\" progress by January 2020 although with more than two thirds of recommendations it was still \"work in progress\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Vaccination appointments for people aged 70-79 are being delivered from Monday - but plans to use distinctive blue envelopes in some parts of the country have been delayed.\n\nThe aim is to have this group receive their first dose by mid-February.\n\nOn Sunday morning, the Scottish government said some letters would be sent out in blue envelopes and given Royal Mail priority.\n\nBut in a statement published later it said the envelopes were not yet ready.\n\nIt added that the change has no impact on the vaccination programme timetable.\n\nVaccinations for over-80s are continuing, with Nicola Sturgeon revealing on Sunday that about 40% of this age group had received a first dose of the vaccine.\n\nAll appointments will initially be sent out in white envelopes which will have a window and a black NHS logo on the right hand side.\n\nThe blue envelopes were due to be sent out in Fife, Forth Valley, Ayrshire and Arran, Lanarkshire, Greater Glasgow and Clyde, and Lothian as part of a new booking system.\n\nUnder the system, patients are scheduled in order of priority and more boards are expected to make use of the technology as the vaccination programme expands.\n\nA Scottish government spokesman said the blue envelopes would be introduced \"as quickly as possible\".\n\nHe added: \"The blue envelopes we hoped to use were not ready in time for the first tranche of vaccine appointment invitations so distinctive NHS branded white envelopes are being used as a temporary measure.\n\n\"The absolute priority remains the roll-out of vaccinations and this temporary change to the envelope colour has absolutely no impact to our timetable.\n\n\"We continue to strongly urge everyone in the 70-79 age group to check all their post in the coming weeks and take up the offer of the vaccine when it is received,\" he added.\n\nAccording to the Scottish government's vaccine deployment plan, the 470,000 people aged in the 70 and 79 age bracket should receive their first dose by mid-February.\n\nSome patients may receive a phone call from their local health board as part of the appointment process.\n\nAnd all patients aged 75 to 79 in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde will be invited via phone.\n\nA Royal Mail spokesman said \"clearly marked envelopes\" would be used to make it easier for the postal service to identify and prioritise this mail during sorting and delivery process.\n\nHe added: \"We are poised to make these letters even more noticeable in the coming weeks as we have agreed.\"\n\nMeanwhile, the Scottish government has said it is on track for all those aged 80 and over to have received their first dose of the vaccine by the end of the first week in February.\n\nThis age group are being contacted by telephone or another form of letter.\n\nMinisters have faced criticism over the pace of the vaccine rollout, and accusations that Scotland is \"lagging behind\" England on the vaccine roll-out.\n\nOpposition parties say vaccines are not being supplied to GPs' surgeries fast enough.\n\nAnd they point to the latest official figures which show that 13% of over 80s in Scotland had their first dose by Sunday 17 January, while 56.3% of same age group had been vaccinated in England.\n\nMs Sturgeon told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that, a week on, the figure had reached about 40%.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Nicola Sturgeon says the over 70s are to receive their vaccine date\n\nThe UK government Health Secretary Matt Hancock told Andrew Marr on Sunday that 75% of over-80s and three-quarters of UK care homes had received a first Covid vaccine in England.\n\nAbout 95% of Scottish care home residents have received their first dose, Ms Sturgeon told the Scottish government briefing on Friday.\n\nShe said the over-80s roll-out has been slower because the Scottish government has \"very deliberately\" concentrated on vaccinating care home residents first, which is \"more time consuming and labour intensive\".\n\nThis was designed to target the most vulnerable and was in line with the priority list compiled by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises on vaccine rollout across the UK, she said.\n\nScotland's national clinical director Prof Jason Leitch has defended the plan, which has been challenged by the British Medical Association (BMA) for not getting second doses out quickly enough.\n\nProf Leitch told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme: \"The difficulty with the BMA's position is that we would have to de-prioritise another group, either care home residents or the over-80s, in order to give a second dose to younger people.\n\n\"And that's what the Joint Committee on Vaccination have told us not to do.\n\n\"They have told us in very clear terms - give the first dose to as many vulnerable people as you can and that gives us the best chance of saving the most lives.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Deputy First Minister John Swinney told Politics Scotland that the Scottish government was \"actively exploring\" the possibility of stricter rules around facemasks.\n\nHe said the issue was being \"looked at\" after new rules announced in Germany last week required people to wear medical-grade facemasks on public transport and in shops.\n\nMr Swinney said progress was being made in reducing cases but hospitals were still under \"enormous pressure\" and it would be \"foolish\" to rule out strengthening restrictions further in the future.", "Concerns emerged in late 2018 that women and babies may have come to harm because of staff shortages and failures to report serious incidents\n\nTwo-thirds of women at the heart of a review into maternity services at a Welsh health board could have had very different outcomes if they had received better care, a report has found.\n\nThe Independent Maternity Services Oversight Panel (Imsop) focused on the experiences of pregnant women at Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board.\n\nIts maternity services have been in special measures since \"serious failings\" were found two years ago.\n\nConcerns emerged in late 2018 that women and babies may have come to harm because of staff shortages and failures to report serious incidents.\n\nThis sparked a major independent review, which gave a damning verdict on maternity services in the health board area that covers about 450,000 people living in Rhondda Cynon Taf, Bridgend and Merthyr Tydfil.\n\nPublished on Monday, the Imsop report focuses on the care of 27 women, most of whom were admitted to an intensive care unit during 28 \"episodes of care\" between January 2016 and September 2018.\n\nIt found that 19 reviews of maternal care (68%) revealed at least one factor where \"different management would reasonably have been expected to alter the outcome\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Kayden was born with severe brain damage following mistakes in his mother's maternity care\n\nThe panel's chairman, Mick Giannasi, said: \"These findings will be concerning and potentially distressing for the women and families involved, and it will be difficult for staff.\n\n\"Of the 28 episodes of care, we concluded that in 27 of them, our independent teams who reviewed the care would have done something differently. Put simply, what went wrong, might not have gone wrong if things had been done differently.\"\n\nTwo further reviews of stillbirths and neonatal mortality and morbidity will follow later this year. In total, all three independent reviews will looks at 160 cases.\n\nImsop's findings reinforce those of the Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.\n\nThe royal colleges' 2019 investigation found mothers faced \"distressing experiences and poor care\" at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant and Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, with maternity services deemed \"dysfunctional\".\n\nFour key areas have been identified by Imsop as factors which contributed to poor care. These are:\n\nWales' Health Minister Vaughan Gething said the latest report recognises things are moving in the right direction for the health board, but more needs to be done.\n\n\"The report highlights that women weren't always at the centre of their care and that women weren't always listened to, and that led to harm that could have been avoided,\" Mr Gething told reporters at the latest Welsh Government press briefing.\n\n\"Nothing will be able to change what these women and their families experienced at these two hospitals or the outcome for those families whose babies died or came to harm.\n\n\"I am deeply sorry for everything that happened.\"\n\nVaughan Gething says he is \"deeply sorry\" women and their families were not listened to\n\nHe said he hoped \"families can take some comfort\" from the reviews that have provided answers to questions they were asking.\n\n\"My thoughts are with everyone affected by this report today and those who are still awaiting the outcome of their reviews,\" Mr Gething added.\n\nCwm Taf Morgannwg health board said it has been \"working with the panel and families\" to put in place a \"comprehensive maternity and neonatal improvement programme\".\n\n\"It has been a period of reflection during which we have examined the regrettable failings in maternity services of the former Cwm Taf University Health Board and we acknowledge the fact that we still have some way to go,\" said Greg Dix, the health board's executive director of nursing and midwifery.\n\n\"We will never forget the tragedies suffered by women, their families and our staff, and the learning from these cases is a key corner stone on which we are building our improvement plans.\"", "Credit card giant Mastercard is to raise the fees it charges EU merchants when UK cardholders buy goods and services from them online by fivefold.\n\nIt has sparked fears that consumer prices could rise if merchants choose to pass on those costs, especially on items not available from UK retailers.\n\nTransactions with airlines, hotels, car rentals and holiday firms based in the EU could all be affected.\n\nMastercard attributed the move to the UK's decision to leave the EU.\n\nIt said that only online sales would be affected and that \"in practice\" UK consumers would not notice the change.\n\nThe change affects the \"interchange\" fees Mastercard sets on behalf of big banks, so that its customers can use their payment networks.\n\nFrom October, Mastercard said it would increase these fees to 1.5% on every transaction, up from 0.3%.\n\nThe EU introduced a cap on such fees in 2015 after concerns they pushed prices up for consumers and unfairly burdened companies.\n\nBritish customers makes tens of billions of pounds of purchases every year from European merchants on credit cards alone - and the hike in fees from Mastercard will affect the majority of those.\n\nThe increase may be relatively small but it's significant, coming at a time when retailers may face extra paperwork and checks - higher costs - for goods coming into the UK.\n\nWith Covid restrictions bringing their own challenges, businesses, especially smaller ones, may be compelled to pass on the costs to consumers.\n\nAnd it's not just items crossing borders. The payments for most items bought on Amazon in the UK are processed via its Luxembourg headquarters.\n\nWith the increase not coming in for several months, international companies may look at ways to reclassify UK sales, to avoid the charges.\n\nMastercard is implementing the rises simply as it's no longer bound by the restrictions imposed by the UK being in the EU. The banks which receive the fees have said in the past that they are invested in areas such as card security and innovation. This time, however, the trade body which represents them has declined to comment on the rises.\n\nBut Mastercard said that since the end of the Brexit transition period, the cap no longer applied to many payments between the UK and European Economic Area (which also includes Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway).\n\n\"As a result of the UK leaving the EEA, Mastercard will adapt interchange rates on UK cards to the commitments it gave the European Commission in 2019 for non-EEA card transactions,\" the company said.\n\n\"In practice, only EEA merchants making e-commerce sales to UK cardholders will see a change.\"\n\nKevin Hollinrake, chair of the parliamentary group on Fair Business Banking, told the Financial Times, which first reported the story, that the move \"smacks of opportunism\".\n\nAnd Callum Godwin, chief economist at CMSPI, the global payments consultancy, said airlines, hotels, car rentals and travel groups would be hit.\n\n\"[This will happen] anywhere the consumer is in the UK and the merchant is in the EU,\" he said.\n\nHe added that many firms in these industries were already struggling due to the pandemic.\n\nVisa, Mastercard's larger rival, has not announced plans to change its fees but told the FT it was keeping the issue under review.\n\nCompanies in the UK and EU are already facing added costs and delays due to post-Brexit trade rules brought in on 1 January.\n\nSome EU exporters have already stopped deliveries to the UK because of new VAT related charges.\n\nMeanwhile, UK consumers who have bought goods from firms based in the bloc have found themselves facing hefty charges to cover customs duties, taxes and administration.", "Chelsea have sacked manager Frank Lampard after 18 months in charge, with former Paris St-Germain boss Thomas Tuchel expected to replace him.\n\nLampard, 42, leaves with the club ninth in the Premier League after last week's defeat at Leicester City, having won once in their past five league matches.\n\nHis final game was Sunday's 3-1 FA Cup fourth-round win against Luton.\n\nLampard was appointed on a three-year contract when he replaced Maurizio Sarri at Stamford Bridge in July 2019.\n• None Watch Monday Night Club: Is Tuchel right man for Chelsea?\n• None 'Lampard had seen enough Chelsea managers go to know the score'\n• None Why Tuchel will be a popular appointment in the Chelsea dressing room\n• None Tuchel set to come in after Lampard sacking - reaction\n\nIn a statement released on Monday night, Lampard said he was \"disappointed not to have had the time to take the club forward\" and added that it had been a \"huge privilege and an honour\" to manage the club.\n\n\"When I took on this role I understood the challenges that lay ahead in a difficult time for the football club,\" he continued.\n\n\"I am proud of the achievements that we made, and I am proud of the academy players that have made their step into the first team and performed so well. They are the future of the club.\"\n\nChelsea are hopeful that new manager Tuchel will be on the bench for Wednesday's Premier League game against Wolves at Stamford Bridge.\n\nHe will not be exempt from coronavirus quarantine.\n\nBut if Tuchel tests negative on entry to the United Kingdom and then negative again in order to enter a Premier League club's bubble, he will be granted an exemption by the Football Association for attending matches and training.\n\nHe will still have to serve a quarantine period outside of those environments, which will last five days.\n\nFormer Chelsea midfielder Lampard guided them to fourth place and the FA Cup final in his first season in charge, and a 3-1 win against Leeds in early December put the club top of the Premier League.\n\nHowever, the Blues have suffered five defeats in their past eight league games, as many as they had in their previous 23.\n\nIn a statement, Chelsea said: \"This has been a very difficult decision, and not one that the owner and the board have taken lightly.\n\n\"We are grateful to Frank for what he has achieved in his time as head coach of the club. However, recent results and performances have not met the club's expectations, leaving the club mid-table without any clear path to sustained improvement.\n\n\"There can never be a good time to part ways with a club legend such as Frank, but after lengthy deliberation and consideration it was decided a change is needed now to give the club time to improve performances and results this season.\"\n\nOwner Roman Abramovich said Lampard's status as an \"important icon\" of the club \"remains undiminished\" despite his dismissal.\n\n\"This was a very difficult decision for the club, not least because I have an excellent personal relationship with Frank and I have the utmost respect for him,\" said Abramovich.\n\n\"He is a man of great integrity and has the highest of work ethics. However, under current circumstances we believe it is best to change managers.\"\n\nLampard did not sign a single player during his first season as the club were operating under a transfer embargo, but spent more than £200m on seven major signings last summer, including £45m on Leicester's Ben Chilwell and £71m on midfielder Kai Havertz from Bayer Leverkusen.\n\nIt is the most Chelsea have spent in one summer, eclipsing the £186m they invested at the start of the 2017-18 season.\n\nLampard is Chelsea's all-time record scorer, with 211 goals for the club between 2001 and 2014, and is also joint-seventh on the list of most capped England players, having made 106 appearances for his country over 15 years from 1999.\n\nDuring his 13 seasons as a player at Stamford Bridge, he made 648 appearances and won 11 major trophies - including four Premier League titles and the 2012 Champions League.\n\nHis first managerial job was at Derby. In his one season in charge, they reached the Championship play-off final, where they lost to Aston Villa.\n\nLampard became the 10th full-time manager appointed by Abramovich since the billionaire bought the club in 2003.\n\nAccording to football finance journalist Kieran Maguire, Abramovich had spent £110m on sacking managers before Lampard's dismissal.\n\nHaving finished with 66 points last season after 20 wins and 12 defeats, Chelsea have lost six times in their opening 19 league games this season.\n\nLampard's points-per-game average of 1.67 is the lowest of any permanent Chelsea manager in the Premier League. During the Abramovich era, only Andre Villas-Boas (47.5%) has a worse win rate than Lampard's 52.4%, in all competitions among permanent Chelsea bosses.\n\nIn contrast, Jose Mourinho's win rate in all competitions during his first spell in charge was 67.03%, while Sarri, Antonio Conte, Avram Grant, Carlo Ancelotti and Claudio Ranieri all had win rates over 60%.\n\nAnalysis - lack of confidence among squad key to sacking\n\nLampard was sacked because the club could not see him reversing a slide in form.\n\nAfter qualifying for the Champions League last season and spending more than £200m on players in the summer, the aim this campaign was to close the gap on the leaders, but that has not been achieved.\n\nAlthough links will be made between Tuchel's heritage and the poor form of fellow Germans Kai Havertz and Timo Werner, the change was made because of the lack of confidence among the whole squad.\n\nIt is hoped that Tuchel can rejuvenate a team that is five points outside of the top four, and an announcement could be made within 24 hours.\n\nThe decision to sack Lampard was very difficult for Abramovich, who has never made a statement when changing Chelsea managers previously.\n\nIn the end, Lampard paid for his relative inexperience as a manager, which cannot be said of Tuchel.\n\nBest of reaction to Lampard sacking\n\nManchester City boss Pep Guardiola: \"People talk about projects and ideas. They don't exist. You have to win or you will be replaced. I am not judging Chelsea's decision. I respect their decision. But our world is to win as much as possible.\n\n\"I hope to see Frank soon and go to a restaurant with him when lockdown is finished.\"\n\nTottenham boss Jose Mourinho: \"It is the brutality of football. Anything can happen in football now, every time somebody loses their job it is sad news but he is a big boy, [with] a strong personality and strong mentality.\n\n\"I am pretty sure he will be back when he wants to be back and his career will be good. I hope so.\"\n\nWest Ham boss David Moyes: \"I'm disappointed for Frank as I saw him as one of the most up and coming young English managers in the country.\n\n\"It's a big thing we try to encourage our own British managers into the big leagues, if we can. I'm sure he'll come back and learn from it.\n\n\"He did a great job last year - he did a really good job with so many youngsters coming through the academy. It seemed a little bit harder for him this year. I'm sure he'll take time off, come back and get better.\"\n\nLeicester boss Brendan Rodgers: \"Clearly I'm really sad for Frank and his staff. I know how much the club means to him.\n\n\"Looking at the squad and how young they are, they need time. He hasn't been given that time. I really feel for him. He did great at Derby.\n\n\"He had the courage to step out of an amazing career and could have taken an easier route. It was a job he couldn't turn down, even though he didn't have a lot of experience.\n\n\"Results haven't been what he would have wanted, but I feel it's a job that needed time.\"\n\nCrystal Palace manager Roy Hodgson: \"It saddens me. I thought he did an excellent job last season. I was rather hoping that the idol of the fans and Chelsea legend that he is, he'd get a longer shot than 18 months.\n\n\"Managers who have had short stays at Chelsea have gone on to have good careers elsewhere. When you're sacked for the first time, it is a devastating blow. There's no doubt he has a pedigree to be a very good manager.\"\n\nFormer Chelsea striker Chris Sutton speaking on BBC 5 Live's Monday Night Club: \"It is 52 days since Chelsea were top of the Premier League and 48 days ago that Chelsea had been on an unbeaten run of 17 games.\n\n\"So in the space of 48 days the owner has decided to write Frank Lampard off. How are we ever going to know if Frank Lampard is a good manager? You only every really learn about people and their characteristics and traits when they go through a little bit of adversity and Frank has gone through a little bit of adversity.\n\n\"Frank has basically been sacked for the owner's expectations. I feel sorry for Frank because he is a club legend.\n\n\"They are five points off fourth place, but the bottom line is that the owner wants to win the Premier League and that was always going to be the pressure.\n\n\"Chelsea should have been more loyal. We know the owner's track record - he is ruthless, he is brutal and guillotined Frank.\"\n\nScott G: Been a Chelsea fan since Nevin, Speedie and Dixon and admit I've enjoyed all the success money has brought us over the last 20 years. However, there's a sadness about that decision. Some things money can't buy. #SuperFrank\n\nFil Harris: Isn't the whole point of appointing a younger manager to give him time to build and develop? Craziness from Chelsea to sack Lampard after such a short time.\n\nSimon Kirk: Been a Chelsea fan since 1969 and have never been so annoyed at a sacking of a Chelsea manager. He needed at least another 18 months. Shame on you Abramovich and the Chelsea board for supporting such a decision.\n\nRyan Howard: I find it such a weird sacking - a month or so ago Chelsea were in a nice groove, Zouma and Silva were scoring and keeping clean sheets, now after one bad run he gets sacked. Chelsea could be a world-class club if they just gave a manager proper time to build a team.\n\nPeter Josi: Chelsea are totally right to sack Lampard, he lacked the experience or coaching prowess to lead the side. The next phase should start with an investigation into our transfer policy and how our last two record signings turned out to be flops.\n\nThomas Wilson: Why are people surprised Lampard was sacked? Chelsea have been ruthlessly successful for 15 years. They are not going to suddenly resort to being generously unsuccessful because of a club legend being at the helm.\n• None All the goals, highlights and drama from Sunday's fourth-round ties are", "The leader says he is \"optimistic\" and is recieving medical treatment\n\nMexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has announced he has tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nThe 67-year-old said on Twitter that his symptoms were mild and that he was \"optimistic\" following the diagnosis.\n\nThe development comes as Mexico grapples with an upsurge in infections, with deaths nearing 150,000.\n\nMr López Obrador says he will continue working from home, including speaking to President Vladimir Putin about acquiring a Russian-made vaccine.\n\nIt was announced earlier on Sunday that a call between the two leaders will take place on Monday to discuss their bilateral relationship and the possible supply of Sputnik V jabs.\n\nThe Mexican president said last year he would try and acquire 12 million doses of the Russian-made vaccine if it proved effective.\n\nMexico has not yet approved the jab for use, but officials want to expand the country's vaccination program for the population of 128 million people amid delivery delays from Pfizer-BioNTech.\n\nSputnik V has already received authorisation in a number of other countries, including Brazil and Argentina. Hungary became the first in the EU to give it the green light this week.\n\nJosé Luis Alomia Zegarra, a senior health official, described Mr López Obrador's condition as stable and told a news briefing that \"a team of medical specialists\" were attending to the president.\n\nMexico has recorded more than 1.75m virus cases since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins University tracking.\n\nThe nation's confirmed death toll of 149,614 is one of the highest in the world - behind only the US, Brazil and India.", "Janet Yellen has been confirmed as the first ever female US treasury secretary in a Senate vote.\n\nMs Yellen, who headed the US central bank from 2014 to 2018, earlier won bipartisan support from members of the Senate Finance Committee.\n\nShe will be responsible for guiding the Biden administration's economic response to the pandemic.\n\nThe US is struggling to rebound economically from the hit caused by the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nAt her confirmation hearing on 19 January, Ms Yellen urged Congress to approve trillions more in pandemic relief and economic stimulus, saying that lawmakers should \"act big\" without worrying about national debt.\n\nIn response, Republican senators warned the former Federal Reserve head this was not the time for \"a laundry list\" of liberal reforms.\n\nMs Yellen disagreed, highlighting the fact that many families whose incomes have fallen were not reached by jobless programmes. She argued that plans to raise taxes must be seen in the context of financing bigger investments necessary to make the US economy competitive.\n\n\"The focus now is not on tax increases. It is on programmes to help us get through the pandemic,\" she stressed.\n\nJanet Yellen was previously chair of the US Federal Reserve. She was known for focusing more attention on the impact of the central bank's policies on workers and the costs of America's rising inequality.\n\nBefore then-President Barack Obama named her to lead the Fed in 2014, she had served as one of its board members for a decade, including four years as vice-chair.\n\nJanet Yellen speaking at a press conference in 2017 as US Federal Reserve Chair\n\nDonald Trump bucked Washington tradition when he opted not to appoint Ms Yellen to a second four-year term at the Fed.\n\nHowever, her climb to the top of the economics profession had made her a feminist icon in the economics world.\n\nWhen she left the Fed in 2018, many paid tribute to her leadership by imitating her signature look of a blazer with a popped collar.\n\nMs Yellen is seen as someone able to satisfy both progressive and centrist members of Mr Biden's Democratic party. Her nomination to lead the Fed in 2014 won support from some Republicans.\n\nHer focus on employment, rather than inflation, gave her a reputation of favouring low interest rates, which spur economic activity by making it less expensive to borrow money.\n\nBut under her leadership, the Fed raised interest rates for the first time since 2008 - albeit less aggressively than some more conservative commentators supported.\n\nHer stewardship of that process has won praise on Wall Street, even as it remains hotly debated.", "Sunderland-based Hays Travel took over Thomas Cook's stores and staff in 2019\n\nTravel firm Hays Travel is to close 89 of its 535 shops following a review into its take over of Thomas Cook.\n\nThe Sunderland-based firm bought the collapsed company in October 2019 and deferred a review into the performance of its shops until 2021.\n\nA Hays Travel spokeswoman said the third national lockdown and travel ban meant \"the company had to act\".\n\nShe said 388 staff affected by the closures would be offered \"alternative work options\" to minimise redundancies.\n\nChief operating officer Jonathon Woodall said the \"first priority\" was to \"look after our customers\" and ensure \"the highest standards of customer service\".\n\nHe added that the firm was \"continuing with our robust two-year business plan and continue to be ready for the bounce back when it comes\".\n\nDame Irene Hays said business had not bounced back as had been hoped\n\nDame Irene Hays, owner and chair of the Sunderland-based firm, said it was \"always our intention to review the performance of our shops at the end of the licence period\".\n\n\"We had hoped the business would bounce back in January and it has not,\" she said.\n\n\"We have done everything we could to safeguard jobs and the business thus far, and we have come up with a range of options for those at risk of redundancy to help as many colleagues as we can.\"\n\nOptions for staff include working from home or filling vacancies in other shops.\n\nThe spokeswoman said the firm employed about 7,700 people, many of whom were \"working from home taking bookings for holidays for 2021 and beyond\".\n\nThe company has yet to confirm which of its locations will be affected.\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Sir Keir Starmer is isolating after a contact tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer is self-isolating for the third time, after coming into contact with someone who tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nHe said he would be working from home until next Monday after being notified of the contact earlier.\n\nSir Keir confirmed on Twitter that he had no symptoms.\n\nThe Labour leader last self-isolated in December after a member of his staff tested positive for Covid-19, but he never showed any symptoms of the virus.\n\nHe also self-isolated in September after a member of his family showed symptoms - but they later tested negative, allowing Sir Keir to get back to Westminster.\n\nIf you are contacted by NHS Test and Trace and told you have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for the virus, you have a legal obligation to self-isolate.\n\nYou then have to stay at home, not going out for any reason, for 10 days from the time you last saw the contact.\n\nIf you don't stick to the rules, the police can issue you with a fine, starting at £1,000.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Keir Starmer This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nFor Sir Keir, he needs to stay indoors until next Monday and cancel all his upcoming plans for the week.\n\nHe will still be able to take part in Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday via video link.\n\nThe current list of MPs set to question Boris Johnson, shows that only one will now physically be in the Commons with the PM.\n\nA number of politicians have had to self-isolate during the pandemic, including the prime minister.\n\nThe latest was Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who got a notification from the NHS app to stay at home.\n\nHe had the virus last March, but said self-isolation was \"perhaps the most important part of all the social distancing\" and urged others to do the same if contacted.\n\nMr Hancock's isolation period was due to end on Sunday, so he is expected back in Whitehall this week.", "Health and social care staff have been vaccinated at the NHS Louisa Jordan Hospital in Glasgow\n\nThe Scottish government is \"looking at all sorts of ways\" to accelerate its Covid-19 vaccine programme, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said.\n\nThe government is considering a pilot of 24/7 vaccine arrangements, chiefly aimed at younger age groups.\n\nA total of 46% of over-80s in Scotland have now had a first dose, along with 95% of older care home residents.\n\nMs Sturgeon said the programme was \"picking up pace\" and \"on track\" to reach all over-70s by mid-February.\n\nShe said the government was \"looking at all options\" to get the vaccine out to people as quickly as possible.\n\nThe government aims to have the top priority groups - including care home residents and staff, frontline health workers and all those aged over 80 - given a first dose by the end of the first week in February.\n\nFrom Monday, letters are being sent out to people aged 70 to 79 inviting them to receive their first doses. Ms Sturgeon says the programme is \"on track\" to having this group complete by the middle of February.\n\nThere has been some criticism of the speed of the rollout in Scotland, with a greater proportion of over-80s having already received a jab in England.\n\nHowever Ms Sturgeon said the programme was \"making good progress\" and said any differences with the rest of the UK were because of an early focus on vaccinating older care home residents - 95% of whom have now had their first dose.\n\nShe said she was \"absolutely confident\" that the government would hit its targets.\n\nAnd the first minister said consideration was being given to how to speed up the programme further, saying her government is \"looking at all sorts of ways to accelerate things\".\n\nShe said: \"We are looking at piloting 24/7 arrangements so that when we get into wider groups of the population, people will have choices about the time they turn up for vaccines.\n\n\"There's been debate about whether people will want to turn up in the middle of the night to get vaccinated - some will and some won't. If that sort of thing is going to add to what we are able to do, it is likely to have the greatest impact when you get down into the relatively younger age groups.\n\n\"If we think it is appropriate there may be some things we try just to see if they would work, and if they don't we won't continue with them.\n\n\"We are looking at all of these options to make sure that as the supply increases, we can get it to people as quickly as possible.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon said there was \"some early evidence\" that lockdown was reducing the number of new Covid-19 cases, although she said the government would take a \"cautious\" approach to restrictions - which are currently due to run into mid-February at the earliest.\n\nShe also voiced some \"cautious grounds for optimism\" that admissions to hospital are starting to \"tail off slightly\", although she warned that pressure on the NHS would remain \"acute\" for some time.\n\nOpposition leaders called for the vaccine programme to be accelerated and for support to be targeted at key workers.\n\nA mass vaccination centre is being set up at the P&J Live Arena in Aberdeen\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said: \"People are talking about a 24/7 approach here in Scotland - I think based on the figures so far we need to focus just on a seven day approach, because we are not vaccinating people quickly enough.\n\n\"We are not making the progress we need to, to get people vaccinated as quickly as possible.\"\n\nScottish Labour MSP Sarah Boyack said the vaccine programme \"needs to be accelerated as fast as possible\"\n\nShe said: \"We are all behind this vaccine being rolled out - but it has to be as soon as possible, because people are getting nervous.\n\n\"Whether it's police staff, construction staff, care staff who have been worried for weeks - the vaccine has got to be the top priority, along with the test and trace so we can monitor the impact on the ground and get targeted support to people.\"\n\nScottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie said Scotland was \"slipping further and further behind England\" and added: \"The first minister's excuses on the rollout of the vaccine are wearing very thin.\"", "The Francis family said they would be exchanging cards and having a special meal for their lockdown St Dwynwen's Day\n\nIt may not be as well-known as Valentine's Day but St Dwynwen's Day is a special time for some in Wales.\n\nSian and Trystan Francis from Rhiwbina in Cardiff do not celebrate Valentine's Day but on Monday will exchange St Dwynwen cards and have a special meal.\n\nMr Francis, 40, said: \"It's just a part of my culture - I didn't know about Valentine's Day until about Year 6.\n\n\"My parents didn't celebrate Valentine's Day at all but they did send cards on Santes Dwynwen.\"\n\nSian and Trystan Francis perform as Do Re Mi Canu\n\nThe Welsh patron saint of lovers St Dwynwen - or Santes Dwynwen in Welsh - was a 4th Century princess who lived in what is now the Brecon Beacons National Park.\n\nThe story goes she was unlucky in love, became a nun and went on to pray for true lovers to have better luck than she did.\n\nMrs Francis, who grew up in Mountain Ash, Rhondda Cynon Taf, said her family did not speak Welsh but she went to a Welsh medium school and her mother learnt the language as an adult.\n\nMrs Francis, 38, said: \"I think if you're going to celebrate anything that says that you love your partner, then this one is loads more relevant to us because it's part of our heritage and our culture - Valentine's Day is not really that much to do with us.\"\n\nThe family have been busy organising cards and treats for their children, Jac, two, and Mimi, seven.\n\n\"I bought a card for Mimi from a mystery person and that's being delivered tomorrow,\" she said.\n\nShe added Covid had meant the celebration was a bit more low-key this year.\n\n\"I bought some cupcakes but we would normally go out for food and stuff,\" she said.\n\nMenna Llinos and her family celebrated with heart-shaped pizza in Llantwit Major, Vale of Glamorgan\n\nThere was a time when they also marked Valentine's Day before they had a change of heart, she said.\n\n\"Over time we just went, 'actually, it's a bit irrelevant to us',\" she said.\n\n\"And you can never get a restaurant [on Valentine's Day],\" Mr Francis added.\n\nCarys Ingram from Llantwit Major, Vale of Glamorgan, has been making heart-shaped cookies with her children\n\nMr Francis, who grew up speaking Welsh at home, said their choice was not unusual among their friends.\n\n\"My friends, people within the Welsh-speaking community definitely, celebrate Santes Dwynwen,\" he said.\n\n\"There is a subculture within Wales that does exist within Welsh-speaking communities so I would say Santes Dwynwen is part of that.\"\n\nMrs Francis said it meant they were able to avoid the commercialisation of the better-known celebration.\n\n\"Santes Dwynwen isn't particularly commercialised because it is so niche,\" she added.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Jessica Western says she is still fighting to find out why her daughter Macie died\n\nThe full extent of the problems with maternity services at two hospitals in the south Wales valleys rings out when the voices of women and families are listened to.\n\nAs one said: \"I want having a baby to be a good experience. It's ruined it.\"\n\nWomen repeatedly stated they were not listened to and their concerns were not taken seriously or valued.\n\nThey spoke of being ignored or patronised while being cared for at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant and Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil.\n\nOften, their suspicions and concerns were found to have reflected a genuine problem that emerged later, but at the time they were dismissed when they tried to voice their concerns.\n\nA major independent review has found Cwm Taf health board's maternity services were \"under extreme pressure\" and the health minister has ordered them be put into special measures.\n\nIt was prompted by 25 serious incidents, including eight stillbirths and four neonatal deaths, between January 2016 and last September.\n\nThe independent review team has released a separate, damning 78-page report, which shares the views of 140 family members, including mothers about their experiences at the hospitals.\n\nNearly two thirds of women questioned felt they had not had good quality care during their pregnancy.\n\nThe review said: \"Many women had felt something was wrong with their baby or tried to convey the level of pain they were experiencing but they were ignored or patronised, and no action was taken, with tragic outcomes including stillbirth and neonatal death of their babies.\"\n\nOne woman said she felt worthless, adding: \"I'm broken from the whole experience, the lack of care and compassion.\"\n\nOn the care itself, repeatedly the review team heard from mothers who did not always believe the right level of skills and expertise were available at the right time.\n\nThere was a failure to seek a second, more senior opinion, and to escalate concerns, especially with women with complex pregnancies.\n\nOne mother said: \"He told me there was no point calling the consultant on a Sunday as no one would come.\"\n\nAnother said: \"I never saw the same consultant. They didn't know me, and they didn't want to know me. I was pushed in and out of rooms with all sorts of people.\"\n\nMothers faced too many variables in the service offered - from the time of day they used it, to staffing levels and the communication skills of the staff they met.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 'We picked the wrong day to be ill'\n\nSarah Handy's experience is highlighted in the report as illustrating a number of serious issues.\n\nIn pain, she was begging to see a doctor when she arrived in hospital in April 2017 and was left for nearly three hours without examination before being told it was constipation.\n\nMs Handy, 33, was sent back home to Merthyr Tydfil with laxatives and pain relief and that evening her baby Jennifer was delivered prematurely by her husband and mother-in-law.\n\nDespite their efforts to give CPR to save her life, Jennifer died.\n\nThe review said it showed:\n\nMs Handy said after the report came out: \"Today it's been proven in black and white that we were right to highlight our concerns and push for further investigation into our Jennifer's death.\n\n\"We just wish that this report will now do what it promised and improve the quality of care so that no other family has to go the traumatic experience we went through.\"\n\nOn communication, although individual staff were spoken of as excellent, many women felt during their care this aspect was extremely poor.\n\nWhen concerns were raised, there was a \"significant dissatisfaction\" with how they were dealt with, with dismissive attitudes.\n\nMany women were not listened to or taken seriously, one saying she was \"laughed at\" when she expressed concern.\n\nOther responses included: \"I was never asked, never believed.\n\n\"If only they had asked the right questions.\n\n\"Most importantly, we were not listened to. By the time we were it was too late.\"\n\nThe review said women reported an \"almost callous and brutal use of language\" and disregard for feelings.\n\nWhen one mother was concerned that she may be losing her baby she was told to \"prepare for the worst - it could be a miscarriage\" and then told to go home as \"there wasn't a lot she could do.\"\n\nYounger mothers in particular often felt their concerns were dismissed, which became an \"emerging theme\" for the review team.\n\nThere were failures to apologise, lack of access to notes and comprehensive investigations over concerns.\n\nWith high risk pregnancies, one woman interviewed believed that there was a lack of expertise and that \"anything different from the norm, they didn't seem set up to deal with it\".\n\nAnother described the antenatal clinic as being \"like a cattle-market\".\n\nWhen babies were lost, \"many women and families received no bereavement counselling or support and continue to experience emotional distress\".\n\nOne mother talking about the demand on midwives and doctors in the Royal Glamorgan Hospital, said it was \"no way a reflection on them\".\n\n\"They would always spend as much time as possible with me but unfortunately when needs must I was left with some questions but again this was due to staff shortages,\" she said.\n\nAnother said: \"There were so many jobs for one midwife to do and then people wonder why mistakes get made. They are human and are exhausted\".\n\nThe review published two parallel reports into Cwm Taf maternity services and the experiences of mothers\n\nThe review team said it was disappointing that lessons had not been learnt from a review of Furness General Hospital services four years ago.\n\nProf Jean White, chief nursing officer, said: \"It should be a joyous occasion giving birth to a child. Many of the women who shared their stories had care well below the standards we expect and that's not right.\n\n\"I think over time there appears to be a culture that has developed rather than an open culture where people are encouraged to say what's gone wrong, there is a blame culture.\"\n\nIn the words of another parent: \"Listen to women and families and believe what they tell you when they are in pain.\"\n\nThe review team concludes: \"The strong message heard from women and families in Cwm Taf is that they don't want their experiences to happen to anyone else and the importance to them that the organisation learns from these experiences to ensure that improvement and change occurs.\"\n\nCwm Taf chief executive Allison Williams said she was deeply sorry, is taking the findings very seriously but recognised \"significant work\" was still needed.\n\n\"Some of the feedback we have received from patients is extremely distressing and their experience in our maternity service has been totally unacceptable,\" she added.\n\nIf you have been affected by stillbirth, the following organisations might be able to help:", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe mother of a 15-year-old boy attacked by a group of youths said she heard the gunshots that killed him.\n\nKeon Lincoln was \"set upon\" at about 15:30 GMT on Thursday on Linwood Road in Handsworth, Birmingham, and died later in hospital, police said.\n\nIn an emotional appeal, Sharmaine Lincoln pleaded with the local community to \"help us understand why this has happened\".\n\nFive teenage boys have so far been arrested over his death.\n\nA post-mortem examination revealed Keon was shot and stabbed to death.\n\nKeon Lincoln's mother said not a day would go by when she would not hear her son's \"unbelievable\" laugh\n\nRemembering that afternoon, Ms Lincoln said: \"I heard the gunshots and my first instinct was, 'Where's my son?'\n\n\"A few minutes went by, we heard somebody was in the road and it was my boy.\"\n\nWest Midlands Police arrested three teenagers over the weekend on suspicion of Keon's murder - a 14-year-old boy from Birmingham and two others, aged 15 and 16, at an address in Walsall.\n\nThis is in addition to two 14-year-old boys arrested on Friday, one of whom remains in custody and the other released under investigation.\n\n\"The community needs to step up and put themselves in the shoes of the family,\" police say\n\nDet Ch Insp Alastair Orencas, from West Midlands Police, said the attack on Keon was \"the most pointless use of extreme violence I've witnessed in my 24 years in the police force\".\n\n\"The level of violence has not just caused shock to the family, but to hardened police officers,\" he said. \"It was an absolutely pointless attack, one I can't clear my mind of.\"\n\nThe force is appealing for information and Det Ch Insp Orencas said the community response was \"not where it should be\".\n\n\"These are multiple offenders in broad daylight. I simply don't believe there's not information out there that can help me with the inquiry,\" he said.\n\nKeon Lincoln was attacked on Linwood Road, a residential street in the Handsworth area of Birmingham\n\nMs Lincoln remembered her son as a joker, cheeky - a \"loving child with a jolly spirit\" whose \"unbelievable laugh\" would echo daily around her home.\n\n\"It doesn't make sense, the type of person Keon was, it doesn't make sense as to why someone would want to harm him or take his life in such a brutal way,\" she said.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Pictures of the funeral have led to criticism from unionists\n\nPolice have begun an investigation into potential breaches of Covid-19 regulations at the funeral of an IRA man in Londonderry.\n\nEamon McCourt, 62, who reportedly died with Covid-19, was buried on Monday.\n\nUnder current Covid-19 restrictions funerals in Northern Ireland are limited to 25 people.\n\nThe police said a \"significant number of people\" had gathered, in a manner \"likely to be in breach\" of the coronavirus regulations.\n\nPSNI Ch Supt Darrin Jones said anyone found in breach of public health regulations would be reported to the Public Prosecution Service.\n\nHe said police had \"engaged with representatives of the family of the deceased, the local church and local political representatives\", prior to the funeral.\n\n\"As a result, police were given a number of assurances as to the conduct of the funeral, and that people would seek to pay their respects to the deceased from outside their homes rather than gather at the funeral.\"\n\nPictures of the leading republican's funeral show men in white shirts and black ties flanking the cortege and dozens of others behind them.\n\nCh Supt Jones added: \"Regrettably at the funeral on Monday morning, a significant number of people gathered as part of the cortège, in a manner likely to be in breach of the health protection regulations.\"\n\nUnionist politicians had called on the police to act after images circulated online of mourners.\n\nDUP MLA Gary Middleton said those who had abided by Covid-19 restrictions would view the scenes from the funeral \"with dismay\".\n\nHe said it was \"hard to put into words the sheer recklessness of those involved\".\n\n\"Within republicanism it seems that certain individuals are viewed as being more important than public health regulations,\" Mr Middleton said.\n\n\"In those minds the reality of Covid-19 has not been brought home, or at the very least it is viewed as less important than having a public display at a funeral.\n\n\"Such sights are most painful for relatives who have recognised the need for such painful restrictions to be put in place and have abided by them.\"\n\n\"Eamon 'Peggy' McCourt who passed away on Saturday morning was buried from his family home in Creggan, a right accredited to us all.\n\n\"However, it was evident that social-distancing measures and permitted mourner numbers were completely ignored by those in attendance.\n\n\"Again, the majority of people in Northern Ireland who have followed lockdown measures since March 2020 are asking themselves why can republicans do whatever they like?\"\n\nHe called on the police to explain why such \"a large funeral procession was permitted to take place and what actions will follow\".\n\nIn a statement, Sinn Féin said: \"Everyone has a responsibility to follow the public health guidelines.\n\n\"Sinn Féin held its own tribute to his memory online.\"\n\nIn June last year, about 1,800 people attended the funeral of leading IRA member Bobby Storey in west Belfast.\n\nAmong them was Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill, the Sinn Féin vice-president, who later admitted the public health message had been undermined.\n\nIn May, Assistant Chief Constable Alan Todd said there had been social-distancing breaches at funerals in Northern Ireland in both the unionist and nationalist communities.\n\nThis story was amended on 27 January 2021 to remove the phrase 'IRA veteran'. Whilst referring to Mr McCourt's long history in republicanism, we accept the phrase was open to misinterpretation.", "The first minister visited the site of the flooding, where 80 villagers were evacuated from their homes\n\nResidents have been urged to stay away from homes flooded after a \"blow out\" at a mine shaft following reports some had returned against advice.\n\nEighty people had to be evacuated from Skewen, Neath Port Talbot, on Thursday and the Coal Authority is investigating the cause of the flooding.\n\nOn Sunday First Minister Mark Drakeford visited the village.\n\nSpecialists said mine shafts in the area were stable, but villagers were told it was not safe to return home.\n\nNeath Port Talbot Council tweeted on Sunday afternoon that some evacuated residents had ignored the warnings.\n\nIt said: \"We are getting reports that some residents who have been evacuated are returning to their homes.\n\n\"Investigations are ongoing at the site, including safety checks by utility companies. They have asked us to reiterate the request for residents to stay away and that it is not safe to return today or tomorrow.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Mark Drakeford This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIt is not known how many residents were thought to have returned to their flooded homes or how long they were there for.\n\nBigger equipment is being brought in to \"understand in detail what has caused the blow out\", according to Coal Authority chief executive Lisa Pinney.\n\nThe Coal Authority, which manages the effects of past mining on communities, said it believed the \"blow out\" was likely to have been caused by a blockage underground which caused water to back up before breaking out.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Teresa Dalling says a river of orange water rushed through the village on Thursday\n\nCouncil leader Rob Jones warned residents it was unlikely that they could return home by Monday.\n\nMs Pinney said a hand-drilling crew \"determined the precise location and extension of the collapsed mine shaft\" on Saturday.\n\nThe village was flooded after a mine shaft \"blow out\"\n\n\"This now allows us to bring in larger equipment to investigate the wider mine workings and drainage channels in the area around it, so we can understand in detail what has caused the blow out,\" she said.\n\n\"We have checked all recorded shafts in the immediate area and found them all to be safe.\n\n\"We will be checking over a wider area in the days ahead.\"\n\nDuring his visit to the village Mr Drakeford was shown the sinkhole which had opened up on Thursday, leading to the flooding.\n\nOn Friday the Welsh Government confirmed financial support would be made available to people affected by the floods, up to £1,000 per household.\n\nMr Drakeford said on Sunday: \"Particularly for families who have no insurance, this is a devastating event.\n\n\"They will know that the Welsh Government is there to help and we will do that through the local authority which has been here very visibly, helping people in the last couple of days.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Rishi Sunak: 'We’re throwing absolutely everything at it'\n\nFewer than 2,000 young people have so far started new roles under the government's £2bn Kickstart jobs scheme, data shows.\n\nThe programme, which launched in September, has created 120,000 temporary jobs to date.\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak told the BBC coronavirus restrictions were making it harder for more young people to get started.\n\nHowever, he expected the number to rise once restrictions are lifted.\n\n\"Obviously because of the lockdowns and restrictions, that hampers businesses' ability to bring people into work,\" said Mr Sunak,\n\n\"What we can look forward to, as the restrictions ease, is more of these young people starting those placements.\n\n\"But taking a step back, we announced this scheme first week of July, it went live the first week of September and here we are, just a few months later, with 120,000 jobs having being vetted, funded and created.\"\n\nThe Chancellor insisted that the government had moved at an \"enormous pace\" to set up the programme, which targets youths at risk of long-term unemployment.\n\n\"I've always said my priority through this crisis is to protect, support and create as many jobs as possible, and young people in particular have been at the forefront of my mind,\" said Mr Sunak.\n\n\"We know that they're most likely to work in affected sectors, they're twice as likely to be furloughed, and the ones leaving college are entering a really difficult labour market.\"\n\nYouth unemployment rose to 14.5% between August to October 2020, with 597,000 people aged 16 to 24 unemployed, up from 11% in the same period in 2019.\n\nLatest data from the Department of Work Pensions shows that as of 15 January, 1,868 young people had begun their placements.\n\nHayden Finlayson, recipient of a Kickstart work placement with Whistl in Bedford\n\nHayden Finlayson, 24, is one of them. He was made redundant from a retail job last summer.\n\nLooking for work during the pandemic proved difficult: \"You start thinking about things - whether you're going to find work again.\"\n\nHe has secured a Kickstart placement at a Whistl distribution centre in Bedford, an opportunity for which he is grateful.\n\n\"I gave it a go. It's a new experience and I want to do new things,\" he said. \"[I'm learning] different skills every day, things I've never done before.\"\n\nBusinesses apply to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to create Kickstart places, which are then vetted for suitability.\n\nYoung people aged between 16 and 24 who are on Universal Credit are matched to roles by their job centre work coaches.\n\nThey are then interviewed by the prospective employer, which decides whether to take them on.\n\nFor each successful placement, the government covers the National Minimum Wage for a six-month period, at 25 hours per week.\n\nA further £1,500 grant is available per placement to help cover setup costs and assist in the development of employability skills. The current £2bn budget allows for around 250,000 roles.\n\nFSB's Craig Beaumont says the decision to allow small firms offer placements through a faster, more direct process is four months late\n\nFollowing criticism from small businesses, firms who wish to create just a handful of roles will have the option of applying direct to the Department for Work and Pensions.\n\nPreviously, small firms who wanted to create fewer than 30 Kickstart jobs had to group together, or use a \"gateway\" provider as an intermediary.\n\nMore than 600 gateways have now been approved, but small businesses complained that they found the process slow and difficult.\n\n\"The decision should have been made in September,\" said Craig Beaumont, chief of external affairs at the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB).\n\n\"There is now a backlog of cases of people who've been appointed through intermediaries, who've not been able to access that work yet. So we need a real focus from the government to clear that.\"\n\nAsked if the scheme would need extending because continuing restrictions could prevent its aims being achieved this year, Mr Sunak left the possibility open.\n\nAnna Szymanowska runs Fighter Shots, which makes ginger-based remedy drinks. She is keen to create three digital marketing Kickstart roles as soon as possible.\n\nHowever, she says her application - which was done in a pool with other businesses - took a long time.\n\nSmall business owner Anna Szymanowska would like to hire three young people for digital marketing roles\n\n\"It was a little bit lengthy, because the first time I heard of the scheme was July or August,\" she told the BBC.\n\n\"We applied within a month [of hearing about it], and just yesterday we received a contract to sign. So it was lengthy but otherwise well managed.\"\n\nThe Chancellor told the BBC that the changes hadn't been made earlier because Kickstart had been set up \"at speed\". He pointed out other interventions aimed at supporting young people's jobs, including investment in employment support schemes, training and apprenticeships.\n\nTracy Fishwick is the managing director of Transform Lives Company, a social enterprise which helps people into work.\n\nShe believes that the young people chosen to have Kickstart placements will be very important.\n\n\"The young people who really probably would already get a job with a little bit of help - we don't want all the Kickstart jobs going to those young people,\" said Ms Fishwick, who previously worked with the Future Jobs Fund - a scheme for young people created by Labour in 2009.\n\n\"We need to be able to put things in place to support those young people who were already unemployed before Covid.\"", "Volunteers responded to an appeal on social media on Saturday night\n\nVolunteers helped to clear up to 7cm of snow at a community hospital so Covid-19 vaccines could be given to about 300 vulnerable patients.\n\nMore than a dozen people cleared the car park at Maesteg community hospital in Bridgend county on Sunday where the Pfizer-BioNtech jab is being given.\n\nPeople with brushes and shovels came to the rescue after a Facebook appeal and Bridgend council provided a plough.\n\nOne local councillor said their community spirit \"knows no bounds\".\n\nThe Maesteg area had been at or near the top of Wales' Covid case rate chart for a few weeks before Christmas - with an infection rate of more than 1300 cases per 100,000 at its height.\n\nVaccinations were delayed for about an hour on Sunday and Maesteg West councillor Ross Thomas, who helped organise the clear-up, said it would have been a \"disaster\" to have cancelled the appointments.\n\nCovid jabs at four other locations in south Wales had to be cancelled after snow cause widespread disruption across the UK.\n\nAnd Mr Thomas praised the local community for preventing their centre from also falling victim to the weather.\n\n\"With a few Facebook call-outs we had a dozen or so volunteers within the hour together with surgery staff, a number of the GPs,\" Mr Thomas told BBC Radio Wales.\n\nCouncillor Ross Thomas said there would be some aching backs on Monday morning\n\n\"The grounds of the hospital are not small by any stretch of the imagination. It was a valiant effort over two-and-a-half hours to ensure we could allow access to Maesteg community hospital.\n\n\"It's thanks to them that 300 more people in the 80 and over priority group in the Llynfi valley received their jab yesterday.\"\n\nAnother 40 vulnerable patients will receive their Covid jabs on Monday.\n\nMr Thomas said the spirit in his community \"knows no bounds\" and added: \"People rally round, it's a sense of belonging, its genuinely instilled in our DNA in Maesteg and it was on show.\n\n\"Not only did people want to help, I think it's clear there's anxiety in the community about the virus.\n\n\"Ahead of Christmas some local wards here in the Llynfi valley had the highest case rates in Europe.\n\n\"There was the realisation yesterday that it wasn't just shovelling snow out of the way, it was about getting on top of this virus and ensuring the most vulnerable people in this community have a fighting chance moving forward.\"", "Last updated on .From the section FA Cup\n\nBruno Fernandes' superb 78th-minute free-kick gave Manchester United victory in a thrilling FA Cup tie with old rivals Liverpool at Old Trafford.\n\nLiverpool led a fantastic contest through Mohamed Salah, who then equalised after Mason Greenwood and Marcus Rashford had struck for the hosts either side of the break.\n\nBut in a game which had everything last week's drab stalemate between this pair at Anfield lacked, Fernandes came off the bench to have the final word after Fabinho had fouled Edinson Cavani on the edge of the area.\n• None Don't worry about us, says Reds boss Klopp\n\nFernandes might have been slightly off the pace in recent games but when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer needed his £47m inspiration to come up with another special moment, the Portuguese delivered, bending his shot round the wall and beyond Allison's reach.\n\nThe victory earns United a home meeting with an in-form West Ham side managed by former boss David Moyes in the fifth round.\n\nBut the search for form goes on for Liverpool, whose only win in seven games since that seven-goal hammering of Crystal Palace came against Aston Villa's kids in the last round, and who have a meeting with Jose Mourinho's Tottenham looming on Thursday.\n• None Watch all the goals from the FA Cup fourth round\n\nIt was not quite the ending Solskjaer served up when he won a previous fourth-round meeting between these sides but, as in 1999, they had to come from behind.\n\nAnd while Fernandes applied the devastating finish, that goal should not be allowed to overshadow Rashford's contribution to United's victory.\n\nSo much has been said about the England forward as a social crusader it is sometimes easy to forget he also needs to be judged as a footballer.\n\nAt only 23, he is still a long way off his prime but he is developing into an outstanding forward, with vision to match his speed and finishing ability.\n\nThe pass that created Greenwood's equaliser was superb. Taking possession just inside his own half, Rashford delivered a 60-yard pass with such accuracy all Greenwood needed to do was take one touch to control with his chest before drilling low into the far corner.\n\nRashford's raw pace put Liverpool's defence under constant stress and the delicate touch that took him past Rhys Williams by the touchline in a move that ended with Paul Pogba curling wide was sensational.\n\nAnd then there was his goal, which needed a perfectly-timed run to go beyond the Liverpool defence and reach Greenwood's through ball, and then a cool head to apply the finish.\n\nAt that point, it seemed United had the game under control. It did not quite work out that way and once again, Fernandes, who has won four Premier League player of the month awards out of the seven he has been eligible for since leaving Sporting Lisbon less than 12 months ago, underlined his credentials as English football's most influential player at present.\n\nSalah's effort was the first time Liverpool had been ahead at Old Trafford since January 2017, since when Liverpool have won both the Champions League and Premier League, a clear indication that whatever issues Jurgen Klopp is wrestling with at the moment, they are not insurmountable.\n\nThe finish for the striker's 18th goal of the season did not hint at a lack of confidence as he raced on to Roberto Firmino's precise through ball, having escaped the attentions of Victor Lindelof, and lifted his shot beyond the reach of Dean Henderson.\n\nEvidently, what Klopp needs is to find a solution in defence. Williams was shaky and at fault for Rashford's goal, while Fabinho was exposed by United in this game and Cavani exploited the Brazilian's defensive inexperience to earn the free-kick that won the game.\n\nEven so, after Salah equalised from close range after United had lost possession to James Milner and never recovered their position after working their way up-field from a short goal-kick, the visitors did have chances to win it themselves.\n\nBut Dean Henderson saved from Trent Alexander-Arnold and Salah before Fernandes struck - so Liverpool's wait for a first FA Cup win since 1921 at Old Trafford, and Jurgen Klopp's for a first win at United full stop, goes on.\n\nManchester United are next in action against Sheffield United in the Premier League at Old Trafford on Wednesday, 27 January (20:15GMT). Liverpool play at Tottenham on Thursday, 28 January (20:00GMT).\n• None Manchester United have eliminated Liverpool from the FA Cup proper for the 10th time; in the competition's history, only Liverpool themselves (12 v Everton) have knocked a particular side out more times (including finals).\n• None Liverpool have won just one of their past 15 matches at Old Trafford in all competitions (D4 L10), and are winless in their last eight at the ground (D4 L4).\n• None Manchester United have won each of their past eight home games in the FA Cup; only from 1908 to 1912 have they had a better winning run on home soil in the competition (9 games).\n• None Liverpool are the first reigning Premier League champion to be eliminated from the FA Cup as early as the fourth round since Manchester City in 2014-15.\n• None Liverpool have lost back-to-back games in all competitions for the first time since March 2020.\n• None Roberto Firmino has assisted Mohamed Salah for 18 goals in all competitions for Liverpool, the most any player has set up another for the Reds under Jurgen Klopp. Since they first played together in 2017-18, this is the most one player has assisted another for all Premier League sides in all competitions.\n• None Mason Greenwood scored his first goal for Man Utd in 11 appearances in all competitions, ending his longest run of games without a goal for the club. Aged 19 years and 115 days, he was the youngest Man Utd player to score against Liverpool since Wayne Rooney in January 2005 in the Premier League (19y 83d).\n• None Marcus Rashford has scored more goals at Old Trafford against Liverpool than he has against any other opponent on home soil for Manchester United (4).\n• None Since his Man Utd debut in February 2020, Bruno Fernandes has scored more goals than any other player for Premier League clubs (28).\n• None No player has scored more goals for Premier League clubs in all competitions this season than Salah for Liverpool (19, level with Harry Kane).\n• None Attempt missed. Mohamed Salah (Liverpool) left footed shot from the right side of the box misses to the right following a set piece situation.\n• None Paul Pogba (Manchester United) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Victor Lindelöf (Manchester United) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Edinson Cavani (Manchester United) hits the right post with a header from the centre of the box. Assisted by Bruno Fernandes with a cross.\n• None Attempt saved. Marcus Rashford (Manchester United) left footed shot from the centre of the box is saved in the top left corner. Assisted by Aaron Wan-Bissaka.\n• None Goal! Manchester United 3, Liverpool 2. Bruno Fernandes (Manchester United) from a free kick with a right footed shot to the bottom right corner. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None All the goals, highlights and drama from Saturday's fourth-round ties are", "Early years educational providers in England have been told to remain open\n\nMany staff at nurseries, pre-schools and childminders \"don't feel safe at work\", says the Early Years Alliance.\n\nThe group, representing early years providers, wants staff in this sector to be a higher priority for Covid testing and vaccinations.\n\nNurseries and settings for young children in England have been told to remain open during lockdown.\n\nThe government said the under-fives were \"unlikely to be playing a driving role in transmission\".\n\nThe Early Years Alliance received more than 3,500 responses in a survey of staff in nurseries or childcare settings and said these suggested widespread concerns - with half of those who replied saying they did not feel safe at work.\n\nNeil Leitch, chief executive of the group, said the safety worries were \"a cause for serious concern\".\n\nHe called on the government to implement rapid coronavirus testing among early years staff \"as a matter of urgency\", adding they should be \"given priority access to vaccinations in phase two of the rollout\".\n\nThere are currently no confirmed plans for lateral-flow testing in nurseries and pre-schools.\n\nBut the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is looking at whether some high-risk professions should be prioritised for vaccination.\n\nAnd Education Secretary Gavin Williamson told the BBC's Breakfast programme he would \"very much like to see it\" once the most vulnerable groups had received their jabs.\n\nA Department for Education (DfE) spokesman said: \"Keeping nurseries and childminders open will support parents and deliver the crucial care and education for our youngest children.\n\n\"Current evidence suggests that pre-school children are less susceptible to infection and are unlikely to be playing a driving role in transmission.\"\n\nThe Early Years Alliance survey also found concerns that staff shortages would make it difficult for some nurseries and pre-school settings to stay open.\n\nDr Amelia Massoura, who runs Stepping Stone pre-school, in Sittingbourne, Kent, said: \"Out of six members of staff, four have contracted Covid-19.\n\n\"Fortunately, all have recovered well.\"\n\nVanessa Linehan, manager of Sandbrook Community Playgroup in Hackney in London, said: \"We are happy to stay open to support our families.\n\n\"But we want our staff to have testing and vaccinations as a priority.\n\n\"We encourage local authorities to prioritise appropriate testing for early-years staff through their community testing programmes,\" said the Department for Education spokesman.\n\nThe Department for Education says the under-fives are \"unlikely\" to drive up coronavirus transmission\n\nHowever, Labour's shadow education minister Tulip Siddiq accused the government of \"incompetence and neglect\", saying early-years staff \"deserve... proper access to testing\".\n\nShe questioned why \"the government has refused to publish the scientific basis for keeping early-years settings open in lockdown\" and called on it to \"urgently pull back from the brink of funding changes that could lead to viable early-years providers going bust\".\n\nThe government changed the funding formula for the early years sector in December, basing it on current attendance rather than pre-pandemic levels.\n\nAccording to the DfE, early years attendance is at 54% of the usual daily level, as of 14 January, leading to a shortfall in revenues.\n\nIn primary and secondary schools, which are open to vulnerable children and children of key workers only, average attendance levels have fallen to just 14%.\n\nRoughly half of nurseries and pre-schools and a third of childminders expect to be operating at a loss by the end of the spring term, based on current levels of government support, according to the survey.\n\n\"Early years providers are the only part of the education sector that the government has asked to remain open to all families,\" said Mr Leitch\n\n\"It is surely not too much to ask for the protection - both practical and financial - needed to ensure that we can continue to do so.\"", "Richard Dyson and Simon Midgley were thought to be on a winter break in Scotland\n\nTwo men who died when a fire tore through a luxury five-star hotel on the shores of Loch Lomond have been named.\n\nSimon Midgley and Richard Dyson, believed to be from London, were staying at Cameron House Hotel when the blaze broke out on Monday morning.\n\nPolice have not confirmed the identity of those who died, but relatives have paid tribute on social media.\n\nThe hotel's director has praised the actions of the emergency services in preventing further tragedy.\n\nFirefighters who brought a couple and their baby to safety from an upper floor have been hailed as \"heroes\".\n\nA baby was rescued by firefighters from an upper floor of the hotel\n\nAndrew and Louise Logan, and their son Jimmy, from Worcestershire, were taken to hospital after being brought to safety, but were later discharged.\n\nMore than 200 guests were evacuated from the building when the blaze broke out. A joint investigation into the cause of the fire is under way.\n\nSocial media posts suggested that Mr Midgley and Mr Dyson were on a winter break in Scotland.\n\nA post on Mr Midgley's Instagram account on Saturday showed pictures of Cameron House Hotel and said: \"Home for the weekend.\"\n\nRelatives have been expressing their shock at news of the couple's deaths.\n\nMr Midgley's sister posted a picture of her brother and his partner on Facebook, while another relative wrote: \"I'm beyond heartbroken.\"\n\nKate Baxter wrote on Twitter: \"Such unbearably sad news.. RIP @SimonMidgleyPR, a shining star in our wonderfully close-knit industry.\"\n\nAccording to his Facebook page, Mr Midgley was a freelance journalist at the London Evening Standard and ran his own PR company, while Mr Dyson is believed to be a TV producer.\n\nPolice and firefighters remained at the scene on Tuesday morning, with the scale of the damage becoming more apparent.\n\nBBC Scotland's Andrew Black was allowed on site and said: \"The damage to the building is pretty extensive, especially the upper floors. There's a smell of burning wood and we could hear a fire alarm from part of the building still going off.\"\n\nThe BBC understands that a wedding due to take place at Cameron House hotel this weekend has been moved to another luxury hotel.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Drone footage from above Loch Lomond shows the extent of the damage at Cameron House\n\nIn a new statement, Cameron House's director, Andy Roger, praised the \"very swift actions of the emergency services\".\n\nHe said: \"Everyone associated with Cameron House Hotel is still coming to terms with the events of yesterday and we are all hugely conscious that two people tragically lost their lives in the fire.\n\n\"Their families and friends are foremost in our thoughts as we co-operate fully with the investigation teams to try to establish the circumstances surrounding this terrible incident.\n\n\"The emergency services were on the scene long into the night and I cannot praise their efforts highly enough. They are true heroes. The firemen bringing out a couple and their young child by ladder from a second-floor room was a heart-stopping moment for all those who witnessed it.\n\n\"We're also enormously grateful for the many, many offers of practical support and good wishes from the UK hospitality industry and also from the local community, which has rallied around to help. It's been a humbling experience, but we are a small, tight-knit community on Loch Lomond and a response like that is typical of our many friends and neighbours.\"\n\nMr Roger said the hotel had made arrangements for the vast majority of the guests to travel home or continue with their breaks and he thanked them for their patience and \"good spirits\".\n\nHe also paid tribute to the staff at Cameron House who he said had shown \"an enormous degree of care and teamwork throughout the last two days\".\n\nLocal people have been speaking of their shock and sadness at what happened at the hotel.\n\nOne woman told BBC Scotland: \"We are just very sad for all the families involved and so sorry for the people who work there.\"\n\nAnother added: \"It's absolutely horrific. I think the local community really feels it.\"\n\nReverend Ian Miller, a retired minister who lives locally and was called in to offer guests support in the aftermath of the fire, said those affected \"fell into two groups\".\n\n\"There were those in the side bedrooms which weren't really touched and they just realised they had escaped something terrible,\" he said.\n\n\"But for those in the main building then there were degrees of trauma. Some had escaped with virtually nothing.\n\n\"One man came out in his underwear. Another woman told me she just grabbed her baby, change bag and moved out.\"\n\nThe Scottish Fire and Rescue service remained at the scene on Tuesday morning\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme, John Gow, from forensic investigations firm IFIC, said: \"There will be a number of strands to this investigation, running in tandem.\n\n\"Obviously, sadly, there is the death investigation due to the fatalities that occurred.\n\n\"There is the origin and cause investigation which is establishing how the fire started and spread throughout the property.\n\n\"It is also likely there will be an investigation to establish if the fire precaution measures were adequate and operated as they should.\"\n\nCameron House, an 18th Century mansion, was converted into a luxury hotel and resort in 1986.\n\nIt is a popular wedding venue and houses the Michelin-starred Martin Wishart at Loch Lomond restaurant.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Covid-19 has been reported in 60% of Scotland's care homes\n\nPolice Scotland has confirmed it will support the dedicated Crown Office unit which has been set up to investigate Covid-19 deaths in care homes.\n\nThe force said its involvement does not indicate that crimes have been committed but is designed simply to inform prosecutors.\n\nCases of the virus have been reported in 60% of Scotland's care homes, with a total of 5,635 residents affected.\n\nThe first minister described the impact on the sector as \"heartbreaking\".\n\nEarlier this month Lord Advocate James Wolffe QC announced the new unit and said it would help determine if Fatal Accident Inquiries were to be held into the deaths.\n\nThe outbreaks across Scotland include one on Skye which is under police investigation.\n\nOfficers are looking into the circumstances surrounding the deaths of three women - aged 84, 86 and 88 - at Home Farm in Portree.\n\nOn Friday police outlined the support officers will provide to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) review.\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Duncan Sloan said: \"We understand the significant public anxiety caused by reports of deaths among those being cared for and staff in the health and care sectors as a result of coronavirus.\n\n\"This is a matter of great concern for us all.\"\n\nMr Sloan said COPFS is working with a number of agencies and asked the force to gather \"additional information\".\n\nHe added: \"Our involvement does not necessarily indicate that crimes are being investigated and the information we gather on behalf of COPFS will help inform its decision on whether further action is required.\n\n\"These are challenging times for everyone but Police Scotland will continue to work with COPFS and other partner agencies to maximise public safety, to support and protect the vulnerable in our communities and to support the work of colleagues in the health and care professions.\"", "The comedian's wife shared a picture online of the 78-year-old after he received the vaccination\n\nSir Billy Connolly has received his first dose of the coronavirus vaccine.\n\nThe comedian's wife Pamela Stephenson shared an image on social media of the 78-year-old wearing a mask with a plaster on his left arm.\n\nAlongside the picture, Ms Stephenson wrote: \"Thank God... Billy had his first Covid vaccine today!\"\n\nSir Billy, who lives in Florida, was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2013 and announced he was \"finished with stand-up\" last year.\n\nHe said at the time: \"The Parkinson's has made my brain work differently and you need to have a good brain for comedy.\"\n\nSir Billy now lives in Florida with his wife Pamela Stephenson\n\nSir Billy joins famous faces including actress Dame Judi Dench, broadcaster Sir David Attenborough and actor Sir Ian McKellen in receiving the vaccine.\n\nHollywood star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger also shared a video of him receiving the jab earlier this week.", "The Fire Brigades Union has held back firefighters from efforts to tackle the pandemic in England with \"unreasonable\" safety demands, a report claims.\n\nIn it, the fire service watchdog says the union has insisted on \"unworkable\" rules for testing and self-isolation.\n\nThousands of firefighters assisted health and emergency services last year but in December, as vaccinations began, the FBU asked members not to volunteer.\n\nThe union says it cannot be sure its members will be safe if they do.\n\nThat is because councils and fire chiefs have pulled out of an agreement on health protection measures, it added.\n\nFor most of last year the agreement allowed firefighters to perform a range of additional duties, including delivering meals, driving ambulances and transporting bodies.\n\nFirefighters returning from roles in potential contact with Covid victims would spend several days self-isolating and being tested to show they were not infected.\n\nBy December, when there was the prospect of firefighters helping with vaccinations, a row over the deal resulted in the union giving new advice to members\n\nThe FBU said in message on 9 December: \"At this time, members are asked not to volunteer and to suspend any expression of interest that they have registered until such time as satisfactory arrangements can be secured that allow a national agreement to be reached.\"\n\nOn 13 January, local councils, which employ firefighters, decided the agreement with the union \"was no longer sustainable or appropriate\", partly because of the requirements for staff to have tests and self-isolate.\n\nThey said these made it impossible to run the fire service flexibly. Fire chiefs argued that police officers and paramedics did not have to isolate and await test results.\n\nThe union says it cannot be sure its members will be safe if they volunteer\n\nThe FBU general secretary, Matt Wrack, told the BBC he still was not able to advise firefighters about additional Covid-related duties because the union did not know what the safety risks would be locally.\n\n\"I'm not prepared to ask people to volunteer if there aren't safety measures in place,\" he said. \"I don't want to see a deadly virus brought into workplaces when we have measures in place which have avoided it in the past several months.\"\n\nThe fire minister, Lord Stephen Greenhalgh, said: \"Brave firefighters have been prevented from stepping up to support the pandemic response because of the actions of the Fire Brigades Union.\"\n\nZoe Billingham, an inspector at Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Fire and Rescue Services, said many firefighters had contributed to the effort during the Covid crisis, but much more could have been done.\n\nShe described the union's position as \"deeply regrettable\" and \"not what the public would expect of a fire service\".\n\nThe inspectorate has released several reports calling for the modernisation of fire service working practices and criticising the FBU.\n\nLancashire Fire and Rescue Service said it had begun testing its staff twice a week\n\nAccording to this one, the dispute between firefighters and their employers has held up vital work to protect lives.\n\nIn Greater Manchester requests to the fire service to help with NHS Track and Trace were delayed by 12 weeks.\n\nIn Cleveland, the fire and rescue service had to use non-operational support staff, rather than firefighters, to carry out temperature testing for the local authority.\n\nIn Suffolk and South Yorkshire, there were delays to plans for firefighters to help get into properties where residents were suffering from Covid.\n\nThe FBU says it was not given an opportunity to respond to these claims before the report was published. Mr Wrack dismissed it as poorly-sourced and politically-motivated.\n\nSome fire services have reached agreements with local branches of the union instead so that they can volunteer for the vaccination effort.\n\nLancashire Fire and Rescue Service said it had begun testing its staff twice a week and those giving vaccinations had also received them first.", "Helen White's lighting business is struggling to absorb a six-fold increase in freight costs.\n\n\"We were paying £1,600 per container in November, this month we've been quoted over £10,000,\" says Helen White.\n\nThe founder of start-up Houseof.com, which imports lighting from China, says the rise in shipping costs means she's making a loss on what she sells.\n\nShe's one of many UK importers facing soaring freight costs amid a global shipping crisis that may last months.\n\nA shortage of empty shipping containers in Asia and bottlenecks at the UK's deep sea ports are behind the problems.\n\nIt was hoped the backlogs could be cleared during the Chinese New Year holiday in February, but instead a coronavirus outbreak in China is adding to the uncertainty facing firms.\n\nIn the UK the difficulties in international shipping have coincided with problems faced by businesses trading with the EU after Brexit.\n\nOne Manchester-based freight forwarder said the logistics industry is facing the most challenging conditions he's seen in the 17 years he's been in the business.\n\nCraig Poole from Cardinal Maritime said during lockdowns, people have been turning to online shopping, and that's causing a surge in demand for goods from China.\n\nFreight forwarder Craig Poole says the logistics industry is facing hugely challenging conditions\n\nBut some companies can't absorb the skyrocketing freight costs that shipping lines are charging. That could lead to higher prices for consumers or businesses having to close.\n\n\"The really unfortunate thing is, the small businesses who can't afford to pay those rates are going to go under as a result,\" Mr Poole said.\n\nHelen White's lighting range is designed in the UK and manufactured in Guangzhou, China.\n\nShe said the six-fold increase in shipping costs is hard to take, especially when getting hold of a container \"is like gold dust\".\n\n\"It's really hard for a small business to absorb those costs. We'll be making a loss on the goods we're selling.\"\n\nLighting seller houseof.com is struggling to import stock from China\n\nAt the other end of the supply chain, Chinese manufacturers and logistics firms say they are equally frustrated.\n\nJohnny Tseng is the owner and director of Hong Kong-based J&B Clothing Company Ltd., which manufactures garments for some of the UK's most popular fashion sites including Boohoo and Pretty Little Thing.\n\nHe's been supplying clothes to British retailers for more than 40 years, but he says his family-run firm won't be able to absorb inflated shipping rates for much longer.\n\n\"To be honest I don't even know how we can survive if we carry on shipping things at this kind of cost.\"\n\nJohnny Tseng says sky-high shipping rates are putting his business at risk.\n\nHe says he's now being quoted $14,000 to ship a container to the UK, when the usual price is $2,500.\n\nThe shortage of empty containers in China and congestion at UK ports caused some of his stock to miss the busy Christmas trading period. Now some customers are holding orders for their Autumn-Winter collections until next year.\n\n\"It's chaos,\" he said. \"We are making a loss. We take it as a loss leader and keep our fingers crossed it will go back to normal after Chinese New Year, but it is a major issue if it persists this way.\"\n\nUsually during the Chinese New Year holiday, factories in China shut down for two weeks. There were hopes the pause in production would give UK ports a chance to clear the backlog of ships waiting to dock, and encourage shipping lines to move more empty containers back to Asia, which is a less profitable journey.\n\nChinese workers usually travel home for the Chinese New Year holiday.\n\nBut rising numbers of coronavirus cases have prompted the Chinese authorities to stagger factory closing dates so that not all workers are travelling to their home regions at the same time. A worsening outbreak could lead to travel restrictions, in which case some factories may not stop production at all.\n\nCraig Poole says some companies have been caught out by factories closing earlier than planned.\n\n\"A lot of businesses that can't get those goods away are delaying orders until after Chinese New Year, so this situation could continue 'til March,\" he said.\n\nPatrick Lee from the Hong Kong-based Unique Logistics International said it could be even longer than that.\n\n\"Middle of the year at the earliest is what we're hearing from end customers in the UK, and also from some of our people in the industry. Some of the carriers as well,\" he said.\n\nMr Lee has called on the shipping lines to add more ships to help ease the backlog of stock orders building up at warehouses across China.\n\n\"They are increasing sailing but can increase a lot more. There are idle ships out there that they can reactivate without too much difficulty,\" he said.\n\nThe disruption could last for several months, according to logistics specialist Patrick Lee\n\nBut a spokeswoman for the World Shipping Council said carriers are using all available capacity.\n\n\"The demand for transportation service far exceeds supply. As in any free market, this puts upward pressure on rates,\" she said.\n\nShipping lines have been trying to drive down demand from British importers by charging a premium for deliveries to the UK, or bypassing the country's ports altogether.\n\nOne shipping line recently offered freight rates of $12,050 for a 40ft container from China to Southampton, but charged just $8,450 for the same container to travel from China to Rotterdam, Hamburg, or Antwerp.\n\nThe UK's largest container port at Felixstowe has been experiencing long delays since October. Congestion has also been a problem at the Port of Southampton, albeit to a lesser extent.\n\nThe bottlenecks were initially caused by a surge in imports as business activity picked up after the first wave of the pandemic. Huge shipments of PPE and the usual Christmas rush added to container volumes and ports struggled to cope.\n\nThe UK's largest container port at Felixstowe has been experiencing bottlenecks for months\n\n\"Most of the carriers just don't want UK cargo because of the issues when the vessels dock, so mainly they're favouring European ports and we are having to truck containers over,\" said freight forwarder Craig Poole.\n\nHe said that adds a cost of up to £2,000 per container, and takes an extra seven to ten days to reach the delivery point in the UK.\n\nFor business-owners like Helen White, the difficulties affecting the shipping industry can't be solved quickly enough.\n\n\"Lots of little start-ups are really hurting,\" she said. \"It has been paired with logistical nightmares across Europe as well. It just feels like logistics is falling apart at the moment. It's hard to see where the resolution is.\"", "All schools moved to online learning before Christmas, following concerns from unions over the new coronavirus variant\n\n\"Wholesale\" return of pupils to school after February half term is \"unlikely\", Wales' first minister has said.\n\nMark Drakeford said there were \"intermediate positions between where we are today, with very few children in school, and everybody being back\".\n\nPreviously, ministers said schools would stay closed to most until February half term unless Covid cases fell significantly.\n\nThose preparing for qualifications and very young children may return first.\n\nMr Drakeford told a coronavirus briefing on Friday he had recently chaired a meeting of the teaching unions and local education authorities.\n\n\"We all agreed that we would work purposefully together to find ways of bringing more young people back into the classroom,\" he said.\n\n\"Does that mean that we will see a wholesale return of every child in every classroom, every day of the week across Wales? I do think that that is probably unlikely.\n\n\"But there are intermediate positions between where we are today, with very few children in school, and everybody being back.\"\n\nHe said there had been \"practical, creative, imaginative\" proposals put forward which could mean some children being back in the classroom for some of the week.\n\nMinisters previously said schools would stay closed until half term unless Covid cases fell significantly\n\nThese could include \"children preparing for qualifications [and] very young children for whom online learning really isn't a genuine possibility\".\n\n\"I certainly don't rule out making some of those things happen after the February half term, but I do think it's unlikely in the way you said that we would see every child back full-time in every classroom in the way that we would ideally wish to do,\" he added.\n\nAll schools and colleges moved to online learning before Christmas, following concerns from unions over the new coronavirus variant.\n\nThey have remained open for children of critical workers and vulnerable learners, as well as for learners who needed to complete essential exams or assessments.\n\nEarlier this month, when Education Minister Kirsty Williams said schools and colleges would stay closed to most pupils until the February half term, unions welcomed the news, saying the health and safety of pupils and staff \"had to be a priority\".\n\nBut, they added, teachers must now be given the vaccine as a priority, and pupils and staff must be protected before talks about reopening schools could begin.\n\nTeachers are still not on the priority list for immunisation, and have to wait to get the jab dependent on their age and if they have a medical condition.\n\nAt the time, Laura Doel, director of The National Association of Headteachers Cymru, said: \"Any plan that sees school staff return to face-to-face learning should be afforded as much protection as possible against the virus.\n\n\"Once these issues have been addressed, then we can discuss the orderly return to school we all want.\"\n\nOpposition parties have called for clear plans on how schools would return and for support to make sure pupils from poorer backgrounds did not fall behind due to a \"digital divide\".\n\nPlaid Cymru's education spokeswoman Sian Gwenllian said: \"The Welsh Government must plan now for the gradual and safe reopening of schools, putting in place safety measures, and should lay out plans for a vaccination programme for schools staff.\"\n\nWelsh Conservative education spokeswoman Suzy Davies called for the Welsh Government to publish evidence on its reasons for closing schools, bring forward vaccines for teachers, and said money must be made available for all pupils to access laptops for online learning.", "Three quarters of applications for a £500 discretionary grant, which aims to help those on low incomes self-isolate, have been rejected, figures suggest.\n\nEmployed or self-employed people in England who do not qualify for the Test and Trace Support Payment because they do not receive benefits can apply.\n\nData obtained by Labour and shared with BBC Newsnight suggests just 12,069 of 49,877 applications were successful.\n\nThe government said it was assessing how the scheme is supporting people.\n\nThe cumulative figures obtained by Labour suggest that between October and December last year, 35,252 applications to local authorities in England for the discretionary part of the test and trace support payment scheme were rejected, while 12,069 were granted.\n\nThe government introduced the Test and Trace Support payment in late September as a way of topping up any benefits or Statutory Sick Pay a person receives.\n\nThe Department of Health and Social Care says it is a targeted scheme designed to help people on low incomes.\n\nThere is a list of specific criteria applicants must meet for the grant, but those who do not qualify for this payment and who are on a low income or may face financial hardship as a result of self-isolating, can apply for a discretionary payment.\n\nLocal authorities in England oversee the entire support scheme, with the qualifying criteria set by the government. They blame overly strict criteria and inadequate government guidance for people being rejected who feel they should qualify for a grant.\n\nThe Local Government Association, which represents councils in England as well as the London boroughs, said some councils were having to turn down applications for the discretionary support because \"people are ineligible or have failed to provide the evidence needed\".\n\nLast month, the self-isolation period for contacts of people with confirmed coronavirus was shortened from 14 to 10 days after the time of exposure.\n\nPeople who are contacted by NHS Test and Trace and told to self-isolate, face fines of up to £10,000 if they fail to comply. Those who don't self-isolate risk spreading the virus to others.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nDr Nishant Joshi, a GP trainee working at a practice in Luton, says he meets, on a daily basis, people who are faced with what he calls a \"Sophie's choice\".\n\nHe says: \"People come to me with essentially a Sophie's choice situation - I know I have to isolate but also I don't have enough money to put food on my table.\n\n\"If I say to somebody who comes to me with a health problem, you need to take a couple of weeks off work, I've had patients who have come to me and they're in tears.\"\n\nRachel, a shop worker from East London with a disabled son, tested positive in early January and was left in a desperate situation after having to self-isolate.\n\nShe says: \"I didn't have a hot meal for 10 days. I had two bowls of cornflakes and a hot dog. I was hungry. I was petrified\".\n\nShe adds: \"It's been probably the worst two weeks of my life. On a personal level I knew I had no choice but to isolate to keep my son safe.\n\n\"Had I not been in that position I can't guarantee that I would have done the whole self isolation thing because you get desperate.\"\n\nHer local councillor eventually dropped off a hot meal. Rachel was fortunate and received a £500 grant at the end of her isolation.\n\nJosie Tothill said missing two weeks of work \"could be the difference between feeding your kids or not, or paying rent or not\"\n\nJosie Tothill from Manchester didn't qualify for the scheme, even though her job, as a personal assistant to a woman who needs mental health support, means she is on a low income.\n\nShe had to self-isolate in October after her sister tested positive. But she did not receive a call from Test and Trace despite being a contact. Only people with a Test and Trace number are eligible.\n\nJosie says: \"It was difficult, but I got by. But for a lot of people, especially if you work in care, you are already on poverty wages, so to miss two weeks of work - that could be the difference between feeding your kids or not, or paying rent or not.\n\n\"So you can see, for some people, it's impossible to do that isolation, so it's much harder to control the virus.\"\n\nThe Labour Party, which obtained the figures from local authorities under the Freedom of Information Act, says the government must make sure everyone can afford to self isolate.\n\nShadow communities secretary Steve Reed said it was vital that people who self-isolated were not \"punished for doing the right thing\".\n\nHe told the BBC: \"The problem is the government established a fixed pot of money and, in some cases, councils have eked it out so much that many people applying for the funding haven't received it.\n\n\"In other cases councils have used up all the money because they have more people applying than were expected.\n\n\"So, we end up with a postcode lottery, if you live in one area you might get the funding, if you live in another area you might not.\"\n\nAnalysis of the figures by the BBC shows that of the applications to the discretionary scheme:\n\nWhile most of councils that responded rejected the majority of applications to the discretionary scheme, a smaller number bucked the trend.\n\nLambeth granted 77% of applications, Haringey and Wakefield 75%, and Solihull 64%.\n\nWhile it's impossible to rule out that applications may be coming from people who are taking a chance, it's also clear that some councils are apparently more flexible about the criteria used on the discretionary scheme.\n\nThe government is putting £70 million into funding the scheme. It said: \"Local authorities are responsible for decisions when it comes to making additional discretionary payments to people who fall outside the scope of the main scheme and are facing financial hardship as a result of having to self-isolate.\n\n\"We continue to work closely with the 314 local authorities in England to assess how the scheme is supporting people experiencing financial difficulties.\"\n\nThe Local Government Association said the government \"needs to ensure its £500 self-isolation payment support scheme is available to those in need of financial support\".\n\nIt says it is \"good\" that councils will receive extra government funding \"to support people on low incomes who do not meet the strict criteria for this main scheme, but who may face financial hardship because of the requirement to self-isolate\".", "Because of its scale, work on Glastonbury's site must begin earlier than most festivals\n\nMusic festivals are \"still possible\" this summer, despite the cancellation of Glastonbury, says the head of the Association of Independent Festivals.\n\nPaul Reed said Glastonbury \"is a different beast to most festivals and most likely ran out of time due to the size and complexity of the event\".\n\nSmaller events could still happen if the government ensures organisers can access cancellation insurance, he said.\n\n\"For most festivals, the cut-off point is more likely the end of March.\"\n\nOn Thursday, Glastonbury organisers Michael and Emily Eavis called off their festival for the second year in a row because of the coronavirus pandemic.\n\n\"In spite of our efforts to move Heaven & Earth, it has become clear that we simply will not be able to make the festival happen,\" they said in a joint statement. \"We are so sorry to let you all down.\"\n\nTickets for the festival, which normally attracts 200,000 people and was due to take place in June, will roll over to 2022.\n\nGlastonbury is the UK's biggest music festival, but it was not the only event to cancel its plans on Thursday. The Country To Country festival, which was due to take place in March, also said its 2021 edition would not happen.\n\nThe three-day event, which attracts some of country music's biggest names to indoor venues in London, Dublin and Glasgow, said it had pulled the plug due to the \"current restrictions on mass gatherings and international travel\".\n\nThe announcements came as coronavirus deaths soared in England, with more than 8,500 deaths recorded in the past week. On Thursday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it was \"too early\" to say whether England's Covid restrictions would be lifted by the spring.\n\nStormzy has already been announced as a headliner for August's Reading and Leeds festivals\n\nGlastonbury's cancellation has raised fears for other music festivals this summer. However, the organisers of Glasgow's TRNSMT said there was \"reason to be optimistic\" that it could go ahead in July, with headliners Lewis Capaldi, Liam Gallagher and the Courteeners.\n\n\"Glastonbury is the biggest festival in the world and it's sad to see that, due to its enormous scale and taking several months to get the city-sized festival site ready, it's unable to go ahead this year,\" boss Geoff Ellis told Scotland's Daily Record.\n\n\"By comparison, TRNSMT is a much smaller city centre event with no camping. As such it takes us days rather than months to build TRNSMT. Therefore, we will continue to listen to and follow the advice from the government and remain positive about events later in the summer.\"\n\nHis comments were echoed by Bestival co-founder Rob Da Bank, who tweeted that \"festival season will happen in the UK this summer\", adding: \"Sadly Glasto is such a mammoth beast to plan it ran outta time.\"\n\nSacha Lord, co-founder of Manchester's Parklife festival, added that Glastonbury's cancellation was \"yet another blow\" to freelancers who work in the live music sector.\n\nSpeaking to BBC Breakfast on Friday, Mr Reed said the UK was at a \"serious point in the pandemic and festivals only want to return when it is safe to do so\".\n\nHe added that festivals were currently struggling to get insurance for coronavirus-related cancellations. Last week, MPs from the House of Commons culture select committee wrote to the chancellor, urging him to launch a Covid-19 insurance scheme to protect live music.\n\nThe appeal was backed by more than 100 industry figures, including organisers of the TRNSMT and Parklife festivals. \"We do need government to intervene in this issue,\" said Mr Reed.\n\nIn a tweet on Thursday, Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden expressed his regret at Glastonbury's cancellation and said the government was \"looking at problems around getting insurance\".\n\nA government spokeswoman said on Friday they are in \"regular dialogue\" with public health experts to \"agree a realistic return date for festivals and other large events\". They added they were still helping festivals with the £1.5bn Culture Recovery Fund, \"with many already receiving this support\".\n\nLatitude Festival has been held at Henham Park, near Southwold, since 2006\n\nOther European countries, including Austria and Germany, have launched schemes to cover events that cannot be rescheduled, including music festivals. At present, England has a scheme protecting film and TV shoots, but not music.\n\nHowever, some festivals have been given support by the government's £1.57bn Culture Recovery Fund, including Womad, End of the Road and Nozstock.\n\nMelvin Benn, whose company Festival Republic organises the Latitude, Download and the Reading & Leeds festivals, said that without an insurance scheme, other events would be left \"staring into the same barrel that Glastonbury stared into\".\n\n\"People can't afford to take that financial risk,\" he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.\n\nThe government is holding \"early stage talks\" with insurers, confirmed Tim Thornhill of Tyser's Insurance, which counts Glastonbury amongst its clients.\n\n\"We have helped to put in place the film and TV restart scheme, which the chancellor explained saved 14,000 jobs,\" he said. \"So if we can do something for events, that would be welcome across the industry\".\n\nWhile there is \"no guarantee\" that insurance could be provided, he said there was \"significant urgency\" to finding a solution \"within the next few months\".\n\n\"It's really important that the government supports the industry,\" added Radiohead's Colin Greenwood. \"And they need to start thinking about that now, and not when we reach that point - say in October this year - when there are enough people vaccinated for [live music] to become safe.\n\n\"Nobody wants to go to anything, or take part in anything, that's going to turn into a super-spreader event,\" he said.\n\n\"But obviously there has to be a way out of this, through vaccination. And I think we need to make sure that systems are in place so we can get back into doing what we love.\"\n\nJulian Knight MP, chair of the culture select committee, said the government was working on insurance plans, because of the importance of festivals to British culture and the economy.\n\n\"I've been in to see the chancellor,\" he told BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat. \"Finally I think there is some movement. I understand that they are dropping some of the objections that they may have had, and that we may end up with an insurance scheme.\n\n\"However, there's a danger that it's too little too late.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "PM: We are enforcing lockdown with increasing toughness\n\nSky News's Sam Coates asks whether, if the new variant is more dangerous, it is right that more people are \"out and about\" during the current lockdown than the first one last year. The PM says that \"we are enforcing the law very strictly with increasing toughness\", meaning increased fines to dissuade risky behaviour. \"It depends on everybody doing the right thing and avoiding transmission,\" he says, adding that is what will be more effective than police action. On why the new variant may be transmitting more readily, Sir Patrick Vallance says it is not believed the new variant has a higher viral load, meaning people \"shed more virus\". He suggests it may be other factors that make it more transmissible. On the current infection rate, Chris Whitty says that while infections are slowly going down \"it is at a very, very high level\". He says that among some age groups - including those 20 to 30 - infections may still be increasing. And on hospitalisations, he says that they are \"broadly flat\" for the UK as a whole, but there are variations between regions. \"That peak is not yet definitely going down yet,\" he says. Deaths will be delayed further with the peak expected in the future, he adds. Video caption: Infection level 'very, very high' and 'extremely precarious' - Prof Whitty Infection level 'very, very high' and 'extremely precarious' - Prof Whitty", "The Holyrood inquiry into the handling of harassment claims against Alex Salmond is using legal powers to seek documents from the Crown Office.\n\nThe documents include messages between SNP officials, civil servants and advisers relating to Mr Salmond's legal challenge to the complaints process.\n\nIt is the first time MSPs have issued such a formal request in the history of the Scottish Parliament.\n\nConvener Linda Fabiani said the action was necessary to continue its work.\n\nThe committee was established in the wake of a judicial review court case where the Scottish government admitted its internal investigation of two harassment complaints against Mr Salmond had been unlawful.\n\nThe government had to pay out more than £500,000 in legal expenses to the former first minister, who was later acquitted of 13 charges of sexual assault in a separate criminal trial.\n\nThe notice, formally issued by Holyrood chief executive David McGill, states that the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) \"may hold documents relevant and necessary for the committee to fulfil its remit\".\n\nThe committee is seeking the release of documents detailing text or WhatsApp communications between SNP chief operating officer Susan Ruddick and Scottish government ministers, civil servants or special advisers between August 2018 and January 2019, that may be relevant to the inquiry.\n\nIt also wants to see any documents linked to the leaking of complaints to the Daily Record newspaper in August 2018.\n\nMs Fabiani said: \"Throughout this inquiry, the committee has been determined to get as much information as possible to inform its task.\n\n\"This is a step that hasn't been taken lightly, and is a first for this Parliament, but which the committee felt was needed as it continues its vital work.\"\n\nThe Crown Office has been given until 17:00 on 29 January to respond to the notice.\n\nNever before in Holyrood's history has it attempted to use this legal power of compulsion.\n\nSection 23 of the Scotland Act makes it possible to force a witness to give evidence in person or - as in this case - to hand over documents.\n\nIt sounds straightforward but lots of legal terms and conditions apply.\n\nThat's especially true in this case where MSPs are trying to compel the Crown Office - in charge of prosecutions and headed up by the Lord Advocate.\n\nThe Lord Advocate has potential get-outs if he considers releasing documents would \"prejudice criminal proceedings\" or otherwise be \"contrary to the public interest\".\n\nThat public interest test could be key.\n\nClearly, MSPs think social media messages and other material held by the Crown Office could be relevant to their inquiry and should be released.\n\nThe Crown Office has argued that disclosing evidence gathered in a criminal case for other purposes risks undermining confidence in the police and prosecutors.\n\nThe Lord Advocate has a big call to make - has the prosecution service (which he runs) or the parliament (to which he is answerable as a minister) got the better sense of where - on balance - the public interest lies?\n\nIn other developments, Mr Salmond has been given a deadline by which to appear before the committee.\n\nThe former SNP leader has been given the option of giving evidence to the committee either in person in the Parliament or by appearing remotely on a number of dates in the first week of February.\n\nMs Fabiani said if this was not possible then the \"committee regrets that it will not be able to take oral evidence from you\" although he would be free to submit further written evidence.\n\nMr Salmond's lawyers had said he was only available in the second week of February.\n\nIn a letter to the committee, the former first minister said this was because he had still to complete two further submissions but the process had been \"hampered\" by the Scottish government's \"failure\" to release its legal advice and the ongoing bid to recover documents from the Crown Office.\n\nMr Salmond's appearance is much anticipated following his written submission earlier this month in which he alleged that Nicola Sturgeon misled parliament.\n\nMs Sturgeon, who \"entirely rejects\" his claims, is expected to give evidence in the coming weeks and has said she is looking forward to putting her side across.\n\nMeanwhile, the committee has once again written to the Scottish government urging it to waive legal privilege and release the advice it received from lawyers regarding the case.\n\nA Crown Office spokesman said: \"COPFS has received the correspondence from the committee and will respond in early course.\"\n\nA Scottish government spokeswoman said: \"We will consider the committee's letter - but the Scottish government has already taken unprecedented steps to provide the committee with access to relevant information to allow it to fulfil its remit.\n\n\"The government has, exceptionally, provided the committee with access to a summary of the legal advice on the judicial review on a confidential basis.\"", "Eric Vice, 64, was on his way to Swansea University when he crashed into a bridge\n\nA bus driver who crashed his double-decker bus into a bridge, killing a passenger, has been jailed.\n\nJessica Jing Ren, 36, died 11 days after the bus, which was going to Swansea University, hit a bridge on Neath Road on 12 December 2019.\n\nEric Vice, 64, pleaded guilty to causing death by dangerous driving and causing serious injury by dangerous driving at Swansea Crown Court.\n\nHe was sentenced to two years and six months.\n\nMs Ren had been on the front row of the upper deck of the bus and was on her phone at the time of the crash, the court heard.\n\nShe was a visiting academic at the university's accounting and finance department from Huanghuai University in China, where she had a five-year-old son with her husband, who is also a lecturer.\n\nProsecutor Carina Hughes said the crash left trapped passengers covered in debris and forced to crouch down in the flattened upper deck while they waited to be rescued.\n\nOlympic gold medallist and 400m hurdles world record holder Kevin Young, who was studying at the university, saw Ms Ren hit the front windscreen.\n\nEric Vice is \"consumed with guilt\" his defence barrister said\n\n\"Mr Young says that she was slowly trying to mouth some words to him, but it was inaudible.\n\n\"He described that he held her hand to try and comfort her until the police and paramedics arrived.\"\n\nMs Hughes said Ms Ren had been unconscious when cut out of the bus by firefighters 90 minutes later and was airlifted to the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, with spine injuries, leg fractures, lacerations and a severe brain injury.\n\nAerospace engineering student Richard Thompson, 20, was seriously injured in the crash and required facial reconstruction. Mr Young suffered a head wound and two broken ribs.\n\nThe court heard passenger statements saying the bus appeared to be running late and the driver had been waving passengers on to the bus without scanning their tickets.\n\nMs Hughes said when Vice encountered traffic between Swansea University's Singleton campus and its Swansea Bay campus, he decided to take a different route, one he had taken several times before when driving a single-decker bus.\n\nShe said 21 passengers has been on board, 13 of whom were on the top deck.\n\nMs Hughes said Vice had driven past two height restriction warnings on the route.\n\nThe bus went under the stone arch of the railway bridge, but hit the lower steel bridge.\n\nIan Ibrahim, defending, said it had been \"without doubt a catastrophic error of judgement.\"\n\nHe added: \"He is consumed with guilt - he's been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder and severe depression.\"\n\nJessica Jing Ren was a visiting academic at Swansea University from Huanghuai University in China\n\nJudge Geraint Williams said: \"That fatal error of yours resulted in the death of a promising young academic.\n\n\"Following the crash you stayed at the scene where you witnessed first-hand the carnage you had created.\n\n\"I can't think of a word short of carnage to describe the scene on the upstairs of that bus - but it could have been many, many times worse.\n\n\"The stark reality in this case is that your impatience that day robbed you of the care which ordinarily you applied to your professional driving.\"\n\nThe scene inside the bus after it crashed into a railway bridge in Neath Road, Swansea\n\nAt the time of her death, Ms Ren's family said in a statement: \"Jessica was the loving wife of Wenquang Wang, a devoted mother to five-year-old Yushu Wang and the cherished Daughter of Mingqi Ren.\n\n\"A much loved and talented academic, Jessica will be deeply missed by her family and her friends both in China and in Swansea and will leave a great void in their lives.\"\n\nIn a statement released after Ms Ren died, Swansea University said: \"We are deeply shocked and saddened to hear of the death of Jessica Jing Ren.\n\n\"Our thoughts are with Jessica's family at this time and we extend our deepest condolences at their tragic loss.\"", "Daniel Craig with director Cary Joji Fukunaga on the No Time To Die set in 2019\n\nThe release of the next James Bond film has been delayed for a third time because of the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nNo Time To Die had already been pushed back twice, and will now debut globally on 8 October, an announcement on the film's website said.\n\nIt had originally been due to hit screens in April 2020.\n\nThe film is the 25th instalment in the Bond franchise, and marks Daniel Craig's final appearance as British secret service agent 007.\n\nIt also features Lea Seydoux and Rami Malek.\n\nThe delay will come as a further blow to cinemas that have been forced to shut for months at a time because of lockdowns.\n\nEarlier this week, leading film-makers including Danny Boyle and Sir Steve McQueen wrote to the UK Government, calling for financial support for cinema chains because \"UK cinema stands on the edge of an abyss\".\n\nCineworld said in October, when No Time To Die was pushed back for the second time, that delays to big budget releases meant the industry was \"unviable\".\n\nBond's latest move sparked a flurry of other delays to major releases. Sony has pushed back Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Peter Rabbit 2, Jared Leto's Morbius, Tom Holland's Uncharted and Cinderella, which will star singer Camila Cabello; while Universal has moved Tom Hanks' Bios from April to November.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by James Bond 007 This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nThe UK Cinema Association said the decision to postpone No Time To Die again, \"while clearly disappointing, is at the same time not surprising given the current situation around Covid-19 in the UK as well as the US and other major film territories\".\n\nThe postponement of Daniel Craig's swansong and other films \"underlines the need for ongoing support for the UK cinema sector\", the trade body's chief executive Phil Clapp said.\n\nThe association is calling on the government to provide \"direct funding\" to chains, which represent 80% of ticket sales.\n\nOne of the major chains, Vue, said the delay was \"understandable\", and that the continuing attempts to release the film in cinemas \"is further testament to our shared belief in a bright future for the big screen\".\n\nHowever, the latest postponement could stoke speculation that the film may ultimately skip cinemas and be released on a streaming platform.\n\nMajor Disney titles like Pixar's Soul and its live-action remake of Mulan bypassed cinemas, premiering instead on the Disney+ streaming service.\n\nWonder Woman 1984, meanwhile, was made available in the US on the HBO Max streaming service on the same day it received a limited cinema release.\n\nLast year, Warner Bros announced its 2021 titles - including sci-fi epic Dune and The Matrix 4 - would all adopt a similar dual release pattern, escalating tensions between Hollywood and US movie theatres.\n\nRami Malek plays the villainous Safin in the thrice-delayed film\n\nThe Dig, a new historical drama starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan, was due to be released in selected UK cinemas this month. Now, the film will only be available on Netflix from 29 January.\n\nAsked whether No Time To Die might go down the same route, Fiennes - who will reprise his role as M in the film - recently told BBC News: \"That's a good question and I'm not really in a position to answer it.\n\n\"I would love the idea that people could go to the cinema and have the full effect of the big-screen energy behind the Bond, but I'm sure it's something the people who make these executive decisions are probably considering.\n\n\"I really hope we come through this so people can go to the cinema. Maybe they just have to hold their nerve. But of course we don't know, and there may be financial reasons or imperatives that [mean] they have to put it on a streaming system.\"\n\nIf No Time To Die is indeed released in cinemas in October, it will arrive a full six years on from the release of its 2015 predecessor Spectre.\n\nThat won't be far behind the six years and four months that separated the release of Licence to Kill in summer 1989 and GoldenEye in late 1995 - the biggest gap between two Bond films.\n\nThe last Bond film, 2015's Spectre, took almost $900m (£690m) at worldwide box offices.\n\nOther blockbusters to have been delayed by the pandemic include action sequel Top Gun: Maverick and Marvel's Black Widow.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "One of the mysteries of Covid-19 is why oxygen levels in the blood can drop to dangerously low levels without the patient noticing.\n\nIt is known as \"silent hypoxia\".\n\nAs a result, patients have been arriving in hospital in far worse health than they realised and, in some cases, too late to treat effectively.\n\nBut a potentially life-saving solution, in the form of a pulse oximeter, allows patients to monitor their oxygen levels at home, and costs about £20.\n\nThey are being rolled out for high-risk Covid patients in the UK, and the doctor leading the scheme thinks everyone should consider buying one.\n\nA normal oxygen level in the blood is between 95% and 100%.\n\n\"With Covid, we were admitting patients with oxygen levels in the 70s or low-or-middle 80s,\" said Dr Matt Inada-Kim, a consultant in acute medicine at Hampshire Hospitals.\n\nHe told BBC Radio 4's Inside Health: \"It was a really curious and scary presentation and really made us rethink what we were doing.\"\n\nDr Inada-Kim became the national clinical lead of the Covid Oximetry@home project.\n\nA pulse oximeter slips over your middle finger and shines a light into the body. It measures how much of the light is absorbed in order to calculate oxygen levels in the blood.\n\nIn England, they are being given to people with Covid who are over 65, younger but have a health problem, or anyone doctors are concerned about. Similar schemes are being rolled out across the UK.\n\nPeople measure and record their oxygen levels three times a day.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by Health Education England - HEE This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nIf oxygen levels drop to 93% or 94%, then people speak to their GP or call 111. If they go below 92%, people should go to A&E or call 999 for an ambulance.\n\nStudies, which have not been reviewed by other scientists, have shown even small drops below 95% are linked to an increased risk of dying.\n\nDr Inada-Kim said: \"The point of this whole strategy is to try to get in early to prevent people getting that sick, by admitting patients at a more salvageable point in their illness.\"\n\nChris Harris, who is 70, was one of the first patients to benefit from the scheme.\n\nHe was being treated for a urinary infection in November last year, but then when he developed unexpected flu-like symptoms his GP sent him for a Covid test. It was positive.\n\n\"I don't mind admitting I was in tears, it was a very stressful, frightening time,\" he told Inside Health.\n\nHis oxygen levels dropped a couple of percentage points below the normal zone, so after a call with his GP, he went to hospital.\n\nAt this point he was still feeling fine, but things changed the day after he was admitted.\n\n\"My breathing started to get a little bit laboured, I had a high temperature as the days went on, [my oxygen levels] were progressively getting lower, they were in their 80s,\" he told me.\n\nChris was treated, did not need intensive care and has made a full recovery.\n\nHe said: \"I may have gone [to hospital] as the very last resort and that's the frightening thing. It was the oxygen meter that forced me to go, I would have just sat it out thinking I would recover.\n\n\"I am extremely lucky and very, very grateful.\"\n\nHis GP, Dr Caroline O'Keefe, says she has seen a massive increase in the number of people being monitored.\n\nShe said: \"On Christmas Day we were monitoring 44 patients, today I have 160 patients who I am monitoring daily. So we are certainly busy.\"\n\n\"We've had to quadruple the size of our team in the last two weeks.\"\n\nOverall, NHS England has supplied around 300,000 pulse oximeters for the home-monitoring scheme.\n\nDr Inada-Kim says there isn't definitive proof that the gadget saves lives and it could take until April to know for sure. However, the early signs are all positive.\n\n\"What we think we can see are the early seeds of a reduction in the length of stay after a hospital admission, an improvement in survival and a reduction in the pressures on the emergency services,\" he said.\n\nHe is so convinced of their role in tackling silent hypoxia that he said everyone should consider buying one.\n\n\"Personally I would, and I know a number of colleagues who have bought pulse oximeters to distribute to their loved ones,\" he said.\n\nHe advised checking they had a CE Kitemark and to avoid apps on smartphones, which he said were not as reliable.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA mosque has become the first in the UK to open as a Covid vaccination centre.\n\nThe Al-Abbas Islamic Centre in Balsall Heath, Birmingham is expected to vaccinate up to 500 people a day.\n\nThe imam, Sheikh Nuru Mohammed, said he hoped it would help dispel false information that the vaccine was forbidden in Islamic law.\n\nNHS England said it fears disinformation could be causing some in the UK's South Asian communities to reject the Covid vaccine.\n\n\"It will send a strong message to our Muslim brothers and sisters. We are doing this to say a big 'no' to fake news and a big 'yes' to the vaccine,\" Sheikh Nuru said.\n\n\"Muslim scholars advise us to get the vaccine because the sanctity of life is important in Islam.\"\n\nImam Sheikh Nuru Mohammed said he hopes the opening of the vaccination centre will help dispel false information\n\nDr Rizwan Alidina, a trustee of the mosque and member of the Birmingham and Solihull Clinical Commissioning Group said: \"The significance of the venue is obviously quite evident with particularly the Muslim community being one of the communities with a bit of a lower uptake than we would otherwise have expected.\"\n\nHe said there had been a good response to the opening of the centre at the mosque and hoped it would soon be carrying out between 300 and 500 vaccinations a day.\n\nNHS England regional medical director for London Dr Vin Diwakar told a Downing Street press conference some communities had \"legitimate and understandable concerns about the vaccines\".\n\nHe said despite it being a \"safe and effective vaccine\", for some Asian and black communities there were \"longstanding concerns\" that \"go back generations\".\n\nDr Diwakar said some people were \"told by their grandparents that experiments were done in the early part of the last century, that unethical experiments were done way back in the 60s\".\n\nSpeaking at the Downing Street briefing, Home Secretary Priti Patel also sought to counter disinformation targeted at people from minority ethnic backgrounds.\n\n\"This vaccine is safe for us all,\" she said.\n\n\"It will protect you and your family... So I urge everyone from across our wonderfully diverse country to get the vaccine when their turn comes to keep us all safe.\"\n\nOne of the first to get the jab at he Birmingham mosque, retired GP Dr Masud Ahmad, said his message to others in the local community was \"that it's quite safe to have it and they should have it\".\n\nOther places of worship, including Salisbury Cathedral and Lichfield Cathedral, opened as vaccine centres last week.\n\nThe Al-Abbas Islamic Centre is administering the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Ministers will discuss at a meeting on Monday whether to tighten restrictions at UK borders - including the possibility of hotel quarantines for travellers, the BBC has been told.\n\nAt a Downing Street news conference on Friday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson did not rule out taking further action.\n\nIt comes amid increased concerns over the spread of new coronavirus variants.\n\nUnder current travel curbs, almost all people arriving in the UK must test negative for Covid to be allowed entry.\n\nThe test must be taken in the 72 hours before travelling and anyone arriving without one faces a fine of up to £500.\n\nAll passengers are also required to quarantine for up to 10 days, although the isolation period can be cut short with a second negative test after five days in England.\n\nThe only people not subject to the conditions are children under 11, hauliers, air, international rail and maritime crew, and passengers from the Common Travel Area - comprised of the Republic of Ireland, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man\n\nScotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own quarantine rules, which differ slightly.\n\nAs of Monday, travel corridors, which exempted passengers arriving from some countries from quarantine, were suspended throughout the UK.\n\nAsked whether the government would bring in further measures at UK borders, Mr Johnson said: \"I really don't rule it out, we may need to take further measures still.\n\n\"We may need to go further to protect our borders.\n\n\"We don't want to put that [efforts to control Covid] at risk by having a new variant come back in.\"\n\nOne more infectious variant , which was first identified in Kent, has already spread widely across the UK.\n\nAnd, at the briefing, the prime minister announced that early evidence suggests this variant may be more deadly.\n\nOther new variants causing concern have been identified in South Africa and Brazil in the weeks since the Kent variant was discovered.\n\nThose discoveries led to direct flights to the UK from all South American countries and several southern African countries being suspended.\n\nScientists fear these variants discovered in other countries may interfere with the effectiveness of vaccines and evade parts of the immune system.\n\nWhile those travelling into the UK are asked to abide by the 10-day isolation and told they can be subject to checks, London mayor Sadiq Khan is among those who have called for the UK to adopt the use of enforced quarantine in hotel rooms.\n\nThe policy is among the measures in Australia that has limited the country to just 28,750 positive cases during the entire pandemic, fewer than the UK currently has every day.\n\nTravellers who choose to go to Australia have to pay for their rooms at one of a number of selected quarantine facilities - and have all their meals delivered to their room throughout a stay of at least 14 days. They get tested twice for Covid during that period and if they test positive their quarantine is extended for a further 14 days.\n\nMeanwhile, passengers arriving into London's Heathrow airport this week have complained of queues at passport control and what they described as poor social distancing, after the latest travel restrictions - requiring travellers to show proof of their negative Covid tests - came into force.\n\nOn Friday, former British ambassador Peter Westmacott posted a picture on Twitter of long queues at the airport.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Peter Westmacott This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA government spokesman said people \"should not be travelling unless absolutely necessary\".\n\nThe statement added: \"You must have proof of a negative test and a completed passenger locator form before arriving.\n\n\"Border Force have been ramping up enforcement and those not complying could be fined £500.\n\n\"It's ultimately up to individual airports to ensure social distancing on site.\"\n\nWith all parts of the UK under strict virus rules amid high levels of infection, only essential foreign travel is permitted in the current advice from the Foreign Office.\n\nA further 40,261 cases, and 1,401 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test were reported on Friday in the UK.", "The bunker is in a rural location near St Agnes, Cornwall\n\nAn \"eerie\" underground bunker built during the Cold War has been put up for sale with a guide price of £25,000.\n\nThe former monitoring post near St Agnes, Cornwall was built in 1961 and is accessed down a 14ft (4.2m) ladder.\n\nSellers have suggested \"a variety of uses\" for the \"out of the ordinary\" property, subject to planning permission from Cornwall Council.\n\nIt was used in the Cold War to monitor aircraft and any potential nuclear threats, said auctioneer Adam Cook.\n\nThe auction will be held online in February\n\nThe bunker was manned by volunteers and consists of an access shaft, a toilet and a monitoring room.\n\nIt is being auctioned online as part of a triangular piece of land on 18 February.\n\nThe site was first opened in 1961 and closed in 1991 and is accessed down a \"rustic vehicular track\", according to the online advert.\n\nMr Cook said it is a former Royal Observer Corps Monitoring Post \"but people love calling it a nuclear bunker\".\n\nHe said the bunker would have been one of around 1,500 monitoring posts built in coastal regions in the UK between the 1960s and 1990s.\n\nOld bunk beds remain in the bunker\n\nAccessed by a hatch, Mr Cook described the reinforced concrete bunker as \"a little bit eerie when you're there on your own\".\n\n\"I'm glad I've been down there...[to have] half a chance of explaining it to customers.\"\n\nHe said there was still a sense of what it used to be with an \"old bunk bed\" and a toilet \"which I don't think you'd fancy using but it certainly gives you the atmosphere\".\n\nMr Cook explained it is \"difficult to pigeon hole it onto any one kind of purchaser\" and said the buyer could be anyone from a history enthusiast to a landowner.\n\n\"All kinds could be interested and we're already getting lots of calls about it.\"\n\nFollow BBC News South West on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your comments and story ideas to spotlight@bbc.co.uk.\n• None Cold War bunker up for sale for £25,000", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Some of the volunteers are working to prepare bodies for burial\n\nA mosque in east London has closed for all communal prayer. Instead it is serving two purposes - providing funerals and feeding the local community. Michael Buchanan finds a team of volunteers there battling to deal with the pandemic.\n\nThe family shuffled quietly past a crate of milk cartons. They came through the small porch, towards the open coffin. Inside was a woman - a loved one - who died of Covid two days ago. The coffin sat feet away from tins and packets to be distributed by the local food bank. The milk was the latest delivery.\n\nIt is impossible to capture the enormous consequences of the pandemic. But last Saturday lunchtime, this tragic image - one of grief and hardship coming together - came close, for me at least.\n\nCovid-19 has made extraordinary demands of so many different people, but what is currently happening at the Masjid Ibrahim and Islamic Centre in east London is truly remarkable. Situated on a busy road, with the noise of ambulance sirens regularly shattering its peaceful interior, the mosque has closed to communal prayer and is open for two other purposes - to provide a funeral service and a food bank to the local community. Both are inundated.\n\n\"We've had so many bodies coming in. It's quite shocking. It's one after another after another. We've never had that situation before,\" says Sofia Bhatti. Alongside her friend, Tabassum Khokhar - known as Tabs - the pair are unheralded heroes. They volunteer to wash the bodies of Covid-positive women prior to burial.\n\nThe practice, called Ghusl, is a sacred Islamic ritual and is usually performed by the deceased's relatives, who cleanse and shroud the body. But Covid restrictions mean families are currently denied that religious honour, so volunteers like Sofia and Tabs are taking on what they consider to be a privileged task.\n\n\"We actually believe that when we are shrouding here, that God is shrouding the soul at the same time,\" says Tabs, standing by a coffin. By day, she works as a teaching support worker in a local school, so the PPE that the mosque provides - bodysuit, footwear, two sets of gloves, masks and visors - is crucial for her. \"I make sure my PPE is secure because it's not just about me, it's about my family. I have an 81-year-old mother.\"\n\nThe women are seeing first hand - and in graphic detail - the pressure the NHS is under. \"Very often we see bodies coming in with a lot of medical equipment still attached to them,\" says Sofia. \"Tubes and pipes and catheters still attached. So it makes our job a little bit harder.\" One of the women they washed during my visit had died in the ambulance, never actually reaching hospital.\n\nVery often we see bodies coming in with a lot of medical equipment still attached to them. Tubes and pipes and catheters\n\nThere are far more bodies than during the first peak and there is a larger age range. One day this week, the mosque was handling seven bodies. A few days earlier they said they'd processed 10 funerals, all arranged for free and paid for by donations. Before the pandemic, they'd handled two to three funerals a week. The two local hospital trusts in east London have each had more than 1,000 Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic. More have died at home.\n\nThe borough of Newham, where the mosque sits, has suffered a disproportionate number of deaths. Home to the Olympic Park, the 2012 London games were meant to regenerate this area. Yet it retains high levels of poverty and overcrowded housing. Add in a diverse population, rich in south Asian culture, and large numbers of people who can't work from home and the virus has sadly ripped through its residents.\n\nIsfand Aslam said he's shocked by what's going on. His father, Mohammad, died on 3 January, a week after falling ill. His positive Covid test result arrived two days after his death. The 85-year-old was a committee member at the Masjid Ibrahim and despite his age had been in good health. \"It took a week between him passing away and getting buried. Initially I was getting a lot of condolences from friends. But by the end of that week I am giving condolences to three friends because their fathers had passed away. It's now got to the stage where everybody we know knows somebody who has passed away.\"\n\nThe sheer number of deaths is impacting the area's main Muslim cemetery. Normally, the Gardens of Peace buries three to four people each day. They're currently carrying out an average of 15 funerals daily. Overall, they are about 50% busier than usual. They can no longer promise burials within 24 hours, as per Muslim custom.\n\nDespite this, there is still a concerning number of people in the local area who either don't think Covid is real or are resistant to taking a vaccine. There was anger among some community leaders before Christmas when it emerged the Bangladeshi High Commission in London held a cultural evening to celebrate its independence. Photos from the event, on 16 December, showed a group - including the High Commissioner herself - standing close together with no masks or social distancing. The High Commission said performers had been Covid tested and it had issued 10 videos in Bangla urging British-Bangladeshis to adhere to UK government guidance.\n\nIt's now got to the stage where everybody we know knows somebody who has passed away\n\nTo counter disinformation among its members, an imam at the Masjid Ibrahim, Mohammad Ammar, filmed a short video of himself being injected with the vaccine and urged his congregation to follow suit. Imam Ammar has actually been furloughed by the mosque as it focusses all its resources on battling the pandemic, including feeding its local community.\n\nThe virus forced the mosque to open a food bank in March. It is still running 10 months on. On Monday night, I watched a steady stream of people gather in the gloom at the rear of the mosque to fill their bags. Most were collecting on behalf of a larger household, and the mosque says they're currently feeding 350 families each week, including students, refugees, people with no access to public funds and those who've lost income.\n\nAmong those collecting food on Monday was Mohammad Rahman. A 42-year-old chef, he lost his job in an Indian restaurant three months ago. The married father of two boys - aged eight and six - told me he was already in rent arrears and struggling to pay his energy bills. \"My son says 'where is the pizza'? But I have no money. He says '[can I have] chicken and chips'? But I have no money. The shops are open, but no money\", he adds, taking his hands from his pockets.\n\nIn normal times, the Masjid Ibrahim would attract about 1,100 worshippers over three floors for Friday prayers, and there has been some pressure on the leadership to reopen for communal worship. But Asim Uddin, chairman of the mosque, says now is not the time. \"Prayers, yes, it's important. But right now what is the need? The need of the community is they want to be fed and they want a place where they can respectfully bury their loved ones. And the demand is overwhelming. Right now, it's better they stay home, and they can pray at home until the situation goes back to normal.\"\n\nMichael Buchanan is the BBC's social affairs correspondent and has been reporting on the impact of the pandemic on communities in the UK. Last year, he visited the town of Pontypool to find out what impact coronavirus restrictions were having in Wales.", "UK retailers could abandon goods EU customers want to return, with some even thinking of burning them because it is cheaper than bringing them home.\n\nThey say the new EU trade deal has put costly duties on returns at a time when firms are already struggling.\n\nThe BBC has been told UK High Street and luxury brands have a mounting volume of goods stuck with courier services on the continent.\n\nNone of the retailers would comment on the problem.\n\nAdam Mansell, boss of the UK Fashion & Textile Association (UKFT), said it's \"cheaper for retailers to write off the cost of the goods than dealing with it all, either abandoning or potentially burning them.\"\n\nSince 1 January, lots of European customers have been presented with an unexpected customs invoice when signing for goods they've ordered from the UK. These new customs charges are a result of the new EU trade deal with the UK.\n\n\"It's part of the ongoing small print of the deal,\" said Mr Mansell. \"If you're in Germany and buying goods from the UK, you as the German customer are the importer bringing goods into the EU.\n\n\"You then have a courier company knocking on the door giving you a customs clearance invoice that you need to pay to receive your goods.\"\n\nMany customers automatically reject the goods, refusing to pay the additional surcharges, leaving couriers to take them away.\n\nAbout 30% of items bought online are returned, according to figures from Statista. That has meant large volumes of goods are heading back to the UK.\n\nWhen goods arrive back at depots on the Continent, there is new customs paperwork to complete. \"Export clearance charge, import charge arrival, import VAT charge and depending on the goods a rules of origin document as well,\" said Mr Mansell.\n\n\"Lots of large businesses don't have a handle on it, never mind smaller ones.\"\n\nThe BBC has seen a document that states four major UK High Street fashion retailers are stockpiling returns in Belgium, Ireland and Germany. One brand will incur charges of almost £20,000 to get the returns back.\n\nCouriers and freight businesses that ship from the UK to Europe are also experiencing delays getting goods to the Continent because of the new customs clearances.\n\n\"It's a bigger change than we thought possible,\" explained Shona Brown from Speedy Freight, a courier service. \"Before, we'd get the order to Germany and off the driver would go.\n\n\"Now we've got to do export entry detailing where was it made, the driver needs to go to the customs office at Dover, then customs in Germany on arrival and then sort out the VAT. There are so many hoops to jump through, it's so laborious.\"\n\n\"You've got to have manpower to figure out what to do. And with people working from home it's difficult. For small businesses, it is a huge thing for people to do,\" she added.\n\nUlla Vitting Richards runs her sustainable fashion brand VILDNIS from the UK. She has stopped exporting to her fastest growing market, the EU, because of the new customs processes.\n\n\"I've been involved in logistics before. I expected it to be bad and I am used to shipping to the USA which is difficult. But this is just mind-blowing,\" she said.\n\n\"Every day there is another layer. In the first two weeks we couldn't get answers. For two years we were told to get ready for Brexit. But for these we couldn't prepare.\"\n\nShe added: \"I don't think we can increase prices but we might just have to say that we can't make the business with the EU work. It is a real shame. There is a huge interest in sustainable fashion in Europe and we might have to walk away from it.\"\n\nUlla did speak with the Department for International Trade for help and advice. She was told that setting up a subsidiary distribution hub in Europe might be a good idea: \"He told me we'd be best off moving stock to a warehouse in Germany and get them to handle it.\"\n\nRetailers in the UK and Europe that trade across the new customs border are all still adapting to the rules. Hauliers and customs agents are facing a steep learning curve too.\n\nThe government said: \"Now the UK has left the EU customs union and Single Market, there are new rules and processes businesses will need to follow.\n\n\"We have encouraged companies new to dealing with customs declarations to appoint a specialist to deal with import and export declarations on their behalf - and we made more than £80m available to expand the capacity of the customs agents market.\"\n\nIt added: \"Most businesses use a specialist such as a customs broker, freight forwarder or fast parcel operator to deal with this.\n\n\"The government will continue to work closely with businesses to ensure they are able to trade effectively under the new rules.\"", "The water is warmer than the air and is creating a mist along Dynevor Road\n\nThe coalmining heritage of Wales has been implicated in flooding of homes - but what has happened in Skewen?\n\nAbout 80 people were evacuated from the Neath Port Talbot village, with at least eight streets left under water.\n\nCouncil leader Rob Jones says the flood appears to be related to mine works - but the volume of water involved has hampered a full assessment so far.\n\nThe Coal Authority is investigating how \"historic underground mining features\" in the area exacerbated the problem.\n\nA geologist says there are tens of thousands of old mine shafts across the former south Wales coalfield and it is \"incredibly difficult\" to monitor them all.\n\nSkewen lies within an old coal mining hotspot, with several former colliery sites near the village that operated in the 19th and early 20th Century.\n\nThere were colliery sites near what is now Drummau Road, in the north of the village and another close to Old Road, near Neath Abbey.\n\nSkewen was part of a collection of collieries that stretched between Neath and Llanelli on the western side of south Wales' coalfield.\n\nGraham Levins, secretary of the Welsh Mines Preservation Trust, said old mines often contain groundwater which can flood in heavy rain.\n\nHe said: \"A lot of them go very, very deep down, much below the local water level and that's why they had all the big wheels to pump the water out.\n\n\"It fills up with water and will find a way out. Normally rainfall you get it doesn't cause a lot of problems but when you get really heavy rain, the water drains down through the ground and builds up.\"\n\nStreets were turned into rivers in Skewen\n\nGeologist Tom Backhouse said water was coming out of an area near the junction of Goshen Park and Drummau Road, where there is a record of a mine shaft dating from the turn of the 20th Century.\n\nIt then started \"rushing down\" Drummau Road, causing the flooding that forced evacuations.\n\n\"What we can expect to have happened is that the water level in the mines rose to a point where it's burst out of that entry point from the mine workings below.\n\n\"Also, there are images of very ochre like orange-coloured water and again, that may well be issuing from the mine workings on the highlands to the east of the property on the hill behind.\n\n\"That may be where the shallow workings have flooded.\"\n\nHe said old mine working across the former coalfield area hold water at a certain depth, but when an event such as Storm Christoph drops \"a huge amount in a small area\", the levels rise quickly.\n\n\"As it gets closer and closer to the surface, it basically looks for an escape, the pressure builds up,\" he continued.\n\n\"What it looks like has happened on the junction of Goshen Park and Drummau Road, where the mine shaft is recorded, is that pressure has built up at that point and then burst out through the shaft which is very likely to have been capped with wood or something like that.\n\n\"Where you've got those mine shafts, which ultimately are vertical tunnels down into the mine workings below, the water has literally forced itself up through that shaft, and the pressure is obviously so great it's caused this devastating flash flood.\"\n\nAs well as properties, vehicles were submerged in water\n\nThere are about 13 shafts recorded within about 820ft (250m) of the one in Goshen Park, so Mr Backhouse said it is possible more than one may have burst.\n\nThere are tens of thousands in south Wales and he said it was \"incredibly difficult\" to check them all, but there were \"tell tale signs\" as to why they may collapse such as age or what type of developments are around them.\n\nThe clean up has continued on Friday morning\n\n\"Not to try and fear-monger or anything but of course this sort of thing can happen again,\" he said.\n\n\"If another event like Storm Christoph happens, the water levels in the mine rises as quickly as it did, there's absolutely nothing to say that it wouldn't happen again in the future.\n\n\"And obviously as climate changes and we have many more events like Storm Christoph, they are going to increase in frequency, they are going to be much more severe.\n\n\"The Coal Authority will have to consider the risk in places like Skewen, and they'll have to understand how it will affect residents and proactively manage that and look at how to reduce the risks for residents.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Infection level \"very, very high\" and \"extremely precarious\" - Prof Whitty\n\nThe UK is at an \"extremely precarious\" point, according to the chief medical adviser, despite signs Covid infections are beginning to fall.\n\nThe virus's reproduction rate is estimated to be at or below one for the first time since early December.\n\nAnything below one means the epidemic is shrinking.\n\nBut cases are falling from a \"very, very high level\", Prof Chris Whitty said - and may still be increasing in some areas.\n\n\"A very small change and it could start taking off again from an extremely high base,\" he warned.\n\nSpeaking at a Number 10 press conference on Friday evening, the UK's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said the \"awful\" death rate would stay high \"for a little while before it starts coming down\".\n\n\"That was always what was predicted...and I think the information about the new variant doesn't change that\".\n\nEarly evidence suggests the variant of coronavirus that emerged in the UK may be more deadly, although findings are preliminary and there is a high level of uncertainty.\n\nDr Susan Hopkins at Public Health England said there was \"evidence from some but not all data sources which suggests that the variant of concern which was first detected in the UK may lead to a higher risk of death than the non-variant.\n\n\"Evidence on this variant is still emerging and more work is under way to fully understand how it behaves.\"\n\nThe Department of Health and Social Care said while the UK's R or reproduction number, might be below one - meaning a shrinking epidemic - overall, \"cases remain dangerously high and...it is essential that everyone continues to stay at home, whether they have had the vaccine or not.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures suggested cases were decreasing slightly or levelling off across Britain.\n\nBut infections are falling more slowly than they did during the first lockdown - by somewhere around a quarter every fortnight compared with a halving back in April.\n\nA further 40,261 cases, and 1,401 deaths were recorded on Friday in the UK.\n\nMore than five million people had been given a first dose of the vaccine by 21 January, and about half a million had received their second dose.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has previously said it is \"too early\" to say whether England's Covid restrictions will be able to end in the spring.\n\nWhile cases are falling or stable across the rest of the UK, in Northern Ireland cases have continued to rise and the new, more infectious strain has overtaken the older variant of the virus as of the start of January.\n\nDuring the week ending 16 January, about one in 55 people in England had the virus, the ONS estimated, with one in 35 in London testing positive.\n\nOne in 100 people had the virus in Scotland and one in 70 in Wales.\n\nBut in Northern Ireland infections have shot up from an an estimated one in 200 people testing positive in the week to 2 January, to one in 60 last week.\n\nONS statistician Sarah Crofts said while fewer people were testing positive in England, \"rates remain high and we estimate the level of infection is still over one million people\".\n\nAnd, she pointed out, \"the picture across the UK is mixed\".\n\nA survey by tech company ZOE and King's College London, based on swabs of people with and without symptoms, also suggested the R number could be at 0.8.\n\nAnd it estimated symptomatic cases had fallen by a quarter since last week.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What is the R number and what does it mean?\n\nMeanwhile, the proportion of people testing positive for the new Covid variant has risen considerably in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, ONS data suggest.\n\nBut the new strain, which remains by far the main source of infections in England, has yet to overtake the old strain in Scotland and Wales.\n\nWithin England, the proportion of infections that appear to be due to the new variant remained stable, but the gap between the regions is narrowing.\n\nIn the figures covering 2 January, 80% of infections looked like the new variant in London compared to 30% in the North East.\n\nTwo weeks later, that gap had narrowed to 70% in London versus 50% in the North East.\n\nIt is not clear what is behind the small fall in London, but it may be down to behaviour change, or other variants like the South Africa strain now in circulation and diluting the numbers.", "It would be unrealistic to expect all lockdown restrictions in Northern Ireland to be lifted on 5 March, Health Minister Robin Swann has said.\n\nOn Thursday, the executive announced that the current restrictions, which have been in place since 26 December, would be extended to 5 March.\n\nBut ministers were also told restrictions may have to remain in place until after the Easter holidays.\n\nMr Swann said the decision to extend restrictions had not been easy.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio Ulster's Good Morning Ulster programme, he said: \"Can I say that'll we'll have to extend them at that point [5 March]? At this time, no I can't.\n\n\"But it would, I think, be unrealistic to think that we'd be able to lift every restriction come that date because we do see where this virus is going, the trajectory it's taking, the large number of positive cases that we are managing but also the large number of hospital admissions that we currently have.\n\nRobin Swann says the decision to extend the restrictions had not been easy\n\n\"There has to be a consideration and planning put into place - we know Covid's going to be with us for a very long time, we also know it will take time for our vaccination process to kick in and have that major effect.\"\n\nA lockdown closing non-essential retailers and encouraging employees to work from home began after Christmas.\n\nFamily gatherings are prohibited and people have been ordered to stay at home for all but essential reasons.\n\nSchools are closed to most pupils until after February's half-term break but a paper looking at reopening will be put to ministers at next week's executive meeting.\n\nThe Catholic Church, the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church and the Methodist Church have all confirmed that in-person worship will continue to be suspended until 5 March in accordance with the executive's decision on the restrictions.\n\nThe churches say there are exceptions for weddings and funerals and private prayer.\n\nTwelve more Covid-19 related deaths were recorded in Northern Ireland on Friday, taking the overall death toll recorded by the Department of Health to 1,704.\n\nIt is a story that changes not only by the day but by the hour and is dictated by numbers.\n\nNever before have we scrutinised hospital figures so closely, especially this week.\n\nAnd the numbers are important as we know how many intensive care unit (ICU) beds are available across Northern Ireland and potentially how many will be required in the next 24 hours.\n\nOn Wednesday, 33 ICU beds were available - on Friday that dropped to 18.\n\nBut as we enter a difficult 72 hours, there is a feeling that the health system will cope.\n\nA regional approach to the crisis means no hospital is left to shoulder responsibility on its own.\n\nEvery afternoon a call is made about whether an additional \"pod\" - a bay of beds - is required to be opened at the Nightingale facility at Belfast City Hospital.\n\nIf not, it is felt that hospitals can hold their own for another 24 hours.\n\nCoping is good but comes at a terrible cost - keeping a lid on Covid-19 is only possible because so much else within hospitals has been cancelled.\n\nA heavy price has been paid and will continue to be paid for months, possibly years to come.\n\nOn Wednesday it was announced more than 100 medically-trained military personnel would be deployed in Northern Ireland to help hospital staff deal with Covid-19 pressures after a request by Mr Swann.\n\nSpeaking at Stormont's Health Committee on Thursday, Sinn Féin MLA Pat Sheehan said: \"My only concern is that they [military personnel] don't get in the way of the real professionals who are doing the work to save lives.\n\n\"This is slamming the dead cat down on the table to deflect attention away from the inadequacies in the health department at the minute.\"\n\nOn Friday, Mr Swann responded by saying he was \"disappointed and disgusted\" by Mr Sheehan's comments.\n\nHe added: \"The majority of our health service workers are actually welcoming them because this is a tough period of time that we are entering into in the health service.\n\n\"To hear some of the comments where he's actually, I think, criticising the level of delivery that our health service has given over these past 10-12 months, I think is disappointing.\"\n\n\"It wouldn't be the language that would be reflective of his party leadership in regards to the assistance that we're receiving from the Army.\"\n\nDeputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill, the Sinn Féin vice-president, had previously said her party's priority had \"always been to save lives\" and she would \"never rule out anything that actually supports the health service\".\n\nFirst Minister Arlene Foster, the DUP leader, said on critics of the move to deploy military medics were putting \"political intolerance before patients\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Arlene Foster #WeWillMeetAgain This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMr Swann also said the executive would \"not be found wanting\" in enforcing Covid-19 regulations.\n\nIt came after a district judge said on Wednesday that \"the powers-that-be made a significant error\" in making breaches of some rules punishable only with fines.\n\nDistrict Judge Michael Ranaghan told Dungannon Magistrates' Court he would have remanded two defendants from Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, in custody if he had \"the power to do so\".\n\nShania Devenney, 21, of Kilmacormick Drive, and Nathan Maguire, 20, of Carnmore Lodge, were charged with contravening the regulations when arrested by police who were alerted to anti-social behaviour.\n\nA police officer told the court there had been repeated parties at Ms Devenney's address this month.\n\nThe judge, granting bail, said: \"I cannot consider remanding in custody as these matters are fine-only.\n\n\"The powers-that-be made a significant error when drafting legislation in making these fine-only offences.\n\n\"Had I the power to do so I would definitely be remanding these two in custody.\"\n\nThe PSNI has issued more than 2,000 Covid-19 fines during the pandemic\n\nThe health minister said the executive had asked people \"to work with us\" and had increased the level of fines.\n\nAsked about the judge's comments about enforcement, Mr Swann said he was \"content enough to raise it with executive colleagues and ask the justice minister to have a look at that\".\n\nMr Swann added that the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland were abiding by the regulations as it is the \"right thing to do\".\n\nOn Tuesday, police revealed that 2,159 penalty notices had been issued during the pandemic, with fines starting at £200.\n\nThere have been 55 failure-to-isolate fines, which incur a £1,000 fine.", "Scottish postie Nathan Evans has quit his job and signed to a record label after storming TikTok with sea shanties.\n\nNathan said the singalong craze for his The Wellerman rendition exploded in just a matter of weeks.\n\nAnd Friday sees an official release of the shanty, after he was picked up by Polydor records.\n\nThe 26-year-old from Airdrie said it goes to show that if you keep going anything can happen.", "Mr Trump was duped by the prankster, Morgan said\n\nDonald Trump was called on Air Force One last year by a prankster posing as Piers Morgan, the TV presenter says.\n\nThe president, as he was at the time, only realised he had been tricked when he phoned the real Morgan while on his way to vote in Florida last year.\n\nThe alleged security breach is said to have happened in October, but only emerged in an interview Morgan gave to the BBC's Americast podcast.\n\nThe two recently had a falling out over Mr Trump's handling of the pandemic.\n\nAsked by the BBC's Jon Sopel why Mr Trump had called Morgan out of the blue this past October, the presenter described \"an absolutely hilarious story, where somebody had called [Trump] pretending to be me the day before and got through to him on Air Force One\".\n\nThe 45th US president didn't realise he had been duped, Morgan said. \"They had a conversation with Trump thinking he was talking to me.\"\n\nIt is not clear who the alleged hoaxers were, but if the story is true President Trump would not be the first political leader to have been pranked.\n\nCanadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, while he was foreign secretary, have both been tricked on the phone in recent years.\n\nBut it would revive long-running questions about the security of President Trump's phone conversations.\n\nMorgan became increasingly critical of Mr Trump in the final months of his presidency\n\nThe BBC has asked the Secret Service for comment.\n\nMorgan was a high-profile tabloid editor in the UK who took over from Larry King with a primetime CNN chat show in 2011. He now presents a breakfast show in the UK.\n\nHe was initially supportive of President Trump after his surprise election win but became increasingly critical in the last 12 months.\n\n\"We had a very nice conversation... I always got on well with Trump,\" Morgan said of their October call, but added that Mr Trump's \"character flaws - the chronic narcissism, the desire to make everything about himself\" made him a \"useless leader\".\n\nOn their friendship, Morgan described Mr Trump's behaviour since the November presidential election as \"egregious\" and \"so obviously on a pathway\" to the Capitol Hill riots on 6 January.\n\n\"I just felt - no, I'm done with you now,\" Morgan said.\n\nYou may also be interested in:\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The recording of the conversation between Elton John and the man he believed was Vladimir Putin", "Keon Lincoln died after being subjected to \"inconceivable violence\"\n\nA 15-year-old boy has died after being attacked in a residential street by a group of youths \"armed with knives\".\n\nPolice said Keon Lincoln was \"set upon\" at about 15:30 GMT on Thursday on Linwood Road, in Handsworth, Birmingham, and died later in hospital.\n\nThe attackers fled the scene in a car which crashed into a house a short distance away, added police, who said they had since seized the vehicle.\n\nA 14-year-old boy has been arrested on suspicion of murder and is in custody.\n\nThe investigation is progressing \"at pace\", according to the West Midlands force, which detained the suspect on Friday morning.\n\nDet Ch Insp Alastair Orencas, who is leading a murder inquiry, said Keon died \"in the most violent of circumstances\".\n\nKeon was attacked on Linwood Road, a residential street in the Handsworth area of Birmingham\n\nWitnesses who reported the carrying of knives to officers also said shots were heard.\n\nPolice confirmed Keon, who lived locally, was attacked with weapons but did not specify which sort.\n\nThe motive remained unknown said police, who urged those who could identify the attackers to contact the force.\n\n\"We are not sure of all the details at the moment, but we do know that Keon was set upon by this group and suffered a series of serious injuries,\" said Ch Supt Steve Graham, adding that five or six youths were believed to have been involved.\n\nPolice have not disclosed the nature of Keon's injuries. They say they are unable to say how he died before a post-mortem examination takes place.\n\nOfficers are searching Linwood Road after the attack on Thursday afternoon\n\nDet Ch Insp Orencas said: \"The death of Keon has shocked the whole community.\n\n\"This level of violence in broad daylight on a residential street is inconceivable, let alone the fact the target was a 15-year-old boy.\"\n\nHe said the family, who were being supported by specialist officers, \"had the worst shock imaginable\".\n\nIn a statement issued by police, the family said they were \"devastated\" by their loss, and remembered Keon as \"fun-loving\" and \"full of life and love\".\n\nThe tribute added: \"He had an infectious laugh that lit up the room whenever he was in it.\"\n\nPolice have seized a crashed car they believe to be a getaway vehicle\n\nDetectives are examining a white car they believe to be the getaway vehicle which crashed into a house on Wheeler Street.\n\nCCTV footage has been seized and the area is cordoned off while investigations continue.\n\nA resident of Linwood Road, who did not wish to be named, said she was shocked to hear someone had been killed.\n\nShe said: \"We've lived here 45 years and I've never heard of anything like this.\n\n\"It's just shocking and really, really sad.\"\n\nPolice have appealed for dash cam and CCTV footage as they piece together the events of Thursday afternoon\n\nLocal Labour MP, Khalid Mahmood, described the death as \"extremely tragic\" and \"a needless thing to have happened\".\n\nHe said: \"We must work with police as much as we can to stop this happening again.\"\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A coronavirus outbreak at Mavisbank care home has led to the deaths of 13 residents\n\nA total of 13 residents at an East Dunbartonshire care home have died in a Covid-19 outbreak.\n\nThe owners of Mavisbank care home in Bishopbriggs confirmed the deaths and said that a further seven residents had also tested positive for the virus.\n\nAnother 11 staff members were self-isolating following positive tests.\n\nThe Care Inspectorate rated the home in Lennox Crescent as \"weak\" in its Covid-19 response in an inspection last month.\n\nAt the unannounced check on 26 October, inspectors found the cleanliness of the home a \"significant concern\".\n\nIt went on to describe the cleanliness of the environment and the overall fabric of the building as \"poor\".\n\nInspectors said in their report that they were \"very concerned about the potential risk of infection for residents\".\n\nSenior managers responded immediately and maintenance staff were deployed to clean the home.\n\nHowever, the operators were ordered to carry out a deep clean of the facility by 11 November.\n\nMavisbank owners HC-One said they were monitoring the situation closely.\n\nMavisbank was given a rating of \"weak\" in October\n\nA spokeswoman said: \"Our thoughts and sympathies are with all families who have lost a loved one from coronavirus.\n\n\"As we navigate this outbreak, we continue to work closely with all the relevant authorities to contain the virus and safeguard our residents.\n\n\"We are pleased that a number of residents have now recovered, and we continue to closely monitor the health and wellbeing of all those affected.\n\n\"This includes following all government guidance in relation to infection prevention and control.\"\n\nResponding to the Care Inspectorate report, the company said the health, safety and wellbeing of its residents and staff was a priority.\n\nThe spokeswoman said: \"We were disappointed that inspectors found some elements of our robust infection control plan were not being fully implemented and we acted urgently to respond to this feedback. These issues were immediately rectified so that when inspectors returned, they were able to see and approve of the work that had been completed.\n\n\"Senior staff are also supporting the home and our learning and development team are ensuring that all colleagues complete refresher training which includes our specific coronavirus training modules on the virus, enhanced infection control procedures, and the correct use of PPE.\n\n\"These training modules have been regularly updated to reflect all changes in the guidance over recent months.\"\n\nCaroline Sinclair, of East Dunbartonshire Health and Social Care Partnership, said, \"We are aware of this very sad situation and have been working with Mavisbank care home to provide a high level of clinical support to residents at this difficult time. Our thoughts are with the families of those who have passed and others affected by their loss.\"", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Friday morning. We'll have another update for you this evening.\n\nMinisters wrestling with how to ensure people with coronavirus obey laws to self-isolate are to consider paying £500 to anyone who tests positive. It's among options drawn up for England by the Department of Health to encourage people to stay at home, amid fears the current support leaves some unable to afford the time away from work. However, Treasury sources say funding a universal payment to the tune of £453m a week is unlikely.\n\nBritish retail sales saw their largest annual fall in history last year as the impact of coronavirus took its toll. Sales fell by 1.9% in 2020, when compared with 2019, official figures show. Clothes shops were hit hard, with a record annual fall of more than 25%. Meanwhile, UK government borrowing hit £34.1bn last month, the highest December figure on record, as the cost of pandemic support weighed on the economy, the Office for National Statistics says.\n\nA Crown Office unit set up to probe Covid-related deaths is investigating cases at 474 care homes in Scotland, ahead of prosecutors' decisions on whether they should be the subject of a fatal accident inquiry or prosecution. Care homes say the investigation is \"disproportionate\". But Linda Duncan, whose 91-year-old mother Anne died last April, argues: \"A lot of the focus has been on the government response but we need this investigation to look at the private operators.\"\n\nHalf of all staff at nurseries, pre-schools and childminders \"don't... feel safe at work\", with about one in every 10 having tested positive since 1 December, according to an Early Years Alliance survey of more than 3,000 staff. Providers in England have been told to remain open to all children during lockdown and the government says under-fives are \"unlikely to be playing a driving role in transmission\".\n\nAs lockdown has forced families apart, grandparents have had to find new ways of keeping in touch with their grandchildren. Annette Landy tells us how reading over video calls to Alicia, eight, and Sadie, two, has made things a little easier.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Harry Potter and The Secret Garden have proven to be favourites\n\nYou can find more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nIf you're struggling to understand why vaccinating the most vulnerable won't immediately end lockdown, health correspondent Nick Triggle explains the reasoning.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "The Florence Nightingale Museum announced it would close for the foreseeable future\n\nMuseums and galleries are \"fighting for survival\" amid the current lockdown, a national charity has warned.\n\nThe Art Fund has predicted that small institutions are likely to suffer most and said more help is needed.\n\nSo far, the charity has only been able to help 15% of applicants to its emergency response fund.\n\nEarlier this month, it was announced London's Florence Nightingale Museum is to close for the foreseeable future due to the impact of the pandemic.\n\nThe Williamson Art Gallery & Museum in Birkenhead is also under threat of closure, according to the Art Fund.\n\nThe charity's director Jenny Waldman said: \"The latest lockdown is a body blow and is leaving our museums and galleries fighting for survival.\n\n\"Smaller museums in particular, which are so vital to their communities, simply do not have the reserves to see them through this winter.\n\nResearch previously conducted by the charity found six in 10 museums, galleries and historic houses were worried about their own survival.\n\n\"Tragically, we are now seeing well-known and much-loved museums facing mothballing or permanent closure,\" Waldman said.\n\nIn November, the charity offered limited edition artworks to members of the public who donated to help coronavirus-hit museums.\n\nSir Anish, Lubaina Himid, David Shrigley and Michael Landy were among the artists who provided their works to the appeal.\n\nArt Fund has renewed its appeal for people to donate to the crowdfunding campaign, which is called Together For Museums.\n\nNew works of art from Howard Hodgkin, Jeremy Deller and Cornelia Parker have been added to the items on offer.\n\nJeremy Deller worked on the 2016 Somme commemoration project featuring 'Ghost Tommies' appearing across UK locations\n\nSir Anish said: \"Museums are where we go to engage with art, witness our psychic history and understand ourselves. Today they face great difficulty.\n\n\"The Art Fund campaign gives us an opportunity to help museums to continue to provide access to all in spite of the difficulties of this time.\"\n\nArt Fund has also announced £750,000 of new grants to help 23 museums respond to the pandemic - taking its total spend so far to £2.25 million.\n\nBut that is only a small proportion of the applications the charity has received, which total over £16 million.\n\nRecipients include the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, for a health and wellbeing project, and Portland Museum, Dorset, for a plan to recreate Rufus Castle digitally.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Spanish player Paula Badosa has revealed that she has the virus\n\nA Spanish tennis player who was among many Australian Open competitors to complain about quarantine rules has revealed she has coronavirus.\n\nPaula Badosa said she had felt unwell with symptoms before testing positive for the virus in Melbourne on Thursday.\n\nBadosa is believed to be the fourth competitor to test positive in hotel quarantine, but is the first to identify herself publicly.\n\nOn Friday, she said \"sorry guys\", adding quarantine rules were \"pivotal\".\n\n\"Please, don't get me wrong. Health will always comes first & I feel grateful for being in Australia,\" tweeted Badosa, who is ranked 67th globally in singles.\n\nThe 23-year-old said she had been taken to a separate hotel in Melbourne to \"self-isolate and be monitored\".\n\n\"I'll try to recover as soon as possible listening to the doctors,\" she said.\n\nVictoria state health authorities said on Wednesday a total of 10 infections had been linked to the event, but a few were \"viral shedding\" cases where the person was not infectious.\n\nMelbourne endured one of the world's longest lockdowns last year and many locals have concerns about the potential Covid risk posed by the tournament.\n\nTennis Australia chartered 15 flights to bring players and their entourages into the country, but three flights had passengers who later tested positive for the virus.\n\nBadosa is one of 72 players who have been confined full-time to their hotel rooms for 14 days - under a state health order - after the infections were discovered. She has already spent seven days in isolation.\n\nPlayers who arrived on flights with no infections are also in quarantine but are allowed five hours of court practice a day.\n\nSeveral players have complained about the impacts to their tennis preparation.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Confined players have been training in their hotel rooms\n\nEarlier this week, in a tweet reported by Australian media that has since been deleted, Badosa wrote: \"At the beginning the rule was the positive section of the plane who was with that person had to quarantine. Not the whole plane.\n\n\"Not fair to change the rules at the last moment. And to have to stay in a room with no windows and no air.\"\n\nBut Tennis Australia and state officials have rejected assertions that any rules were changed or not clear ahead of time.\n\n\"We're thinking of you Paula, and hoping you feel better soon,\" the Australian Open's Twitter account replied in a message to Badosa on Friday.\n\nOrganisers have said that despite the infections, the Grand Slam will go ahead on 8 February.", "At 12:01, in the midst of his inaugural address, Joe Biden officially became the 46th president of the United States.\n\nHe was already well into outlining exactly how daunting a task he - and the nation - have ahead in what he called its \"winter of peril\".\n\nAmerica is facing a devastating pandemic which has resulted in massive job losses and business closures, a threatened environment, urgent cries for racial justice and resurgence in \"political extremism, white supremacy and domestic terrorism\".\n\nHis speech was not a laundry list of proposals and solutions. Those were reserved for his first 17 executive actions as president - on immigration, climate change, transgender rights and public health, among others.\n\nThe Biden administration has also frozen all of Trump's last-minute regulations pending further review.\n\nInstead, Biden used his speech to offer hope - and to argue, at times forcefully, that the nation must be united in facing the challenges ahead; that it has to move past its current \"uncivil war\".\n\n\"Without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury,\" he said. \"No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos.\"\n\n\"This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge,\" he continued. \"And unity is the path forward\".\n\nAt times, Biden's speech seemed a direct rebuttal to his predecessor's administration, although he did not mention Donald Trump by name.\n\nWhere Trump frequently spoke of American greatness and glorified its founders, Biden noted that the nation's history has been a \"constant struggle\" between its ideals and sometimes harsh realities.\n\nWhere Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway spoke of \"alternative facts\" almost four years ago, Biden said: \"There is truth and there are lies - lies told for power and for profit.\"\n\nBiden wrapped up his inaugural address by warning that America must not \"turn inward\" - both as individuals retreating into \"competing factions\" and as a nation on the world stage.\n\n\"We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again,\" he said.\n\nRhetorically, Biden turned the page from Trump's days of \"America first\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe first 100 days of any administration are always important to a new president. What are his priorities? What will he try to accomplish when his political capital is at its highest?\n\nJoe Biden and his presidential team have had nearly three months to plan out his first actions upon taking the oath of office, but executive action is the (relatively) easy part.\n\nHis speech reflected the reality that he enters office with his top priorities already determined for him.\n\nHis government will be responsible for distributing the coronavirus vaccine in an efficient and equitable way. After that, he will have to focus on the societal and economic disruptions caused by the pandemic.\n\nThe virus has exacerbated income inequality and pushed many households to the brink of economic ruin. It's devastated the travel and hospitality industries and placed incredible strain on the finances of state and local governments.\n\nHis pledge to seek unity will be tested early, as he pushes a sharply divided Congress to pass another, massive round of pandemic stimulus aid. If he wants to enact it quickly, he will need Republican support in the Senate, and already there are signs that some on the right may be lining up in opposition to more spending.\n\nThen there's Trump's Senate impeachment trial, which will present yet another challenge to national unity. It will keep Trump's name in the news for weeks, as his defenders rally to his side and his detractors call for consequences for his actions.\n\nAfter that, Biden's potential political paths diverge. He has said he wants to improve healthcare in the US, address growing college debt, make new investments in infrastructure and tackle climate change.\n\nHe's pledged to push immigration reform legislation that includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented migrants - a political lightning rod that helped fuel Trump's first presidential run.\n\nWhat he prioritises, and how successful his first efforts are, could determine the overall success of his administration. To make lasting change - policies that can't be undone by future presidents - he will have to work with Congress.\n\nThe inauguration ceremony is over. But, as Biden noted in his speech, the American people face one of the most challenging times in their nation's history.\n\n\"We will be judged by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era,\" he said.\n\nBiden campaigned against Trump for the opportunity to face those crises. Now he has his chance.", "A selection of your pictures of Scotland sent in between 15 and 22 January. Send your photos to scotlandpictures@bbc.co.uk. Please ensure you adhere to the BBC's rules regarding photographs that can be found here.\n\nPlease also ensure you follow current coronavirus guidelines and take your pictures safely and responsibly.\n\nConditions of use: If you submit an image, you do so in accordance with the BBC's terms and conditions.\n\nHot dog: Ann Baldwin thinks it looks warm enough for a swim in this shot looking towards Inchcolm Island and Arthur’s Seat from the sailing club in Dalgety Bay, Fife, 10 minutes before sunrise.\n\nLittle sucker: Tessa McAndrew helped this beautiful octopus back into the water after finding him clinging to driftwood on the beach at Lower Largo.\n\nWindswept: Bad hair day for these trees in the Pentland Hills Regional Park in Edinburgh. Claire Dunbar took this picture during one of the many recent snow dumps in the area.\n\nIntricate web: The sun was making an attempt to defrost this frozen spider web in Colin Sergeant's back garden in Motherwell.\n\nHindsight: David Fox thinks this roe deer fawn that he captured on his camera at Strathbraan in Perthshire will be \"a future Monarch of the Glen\".\n\nTrue snowman: Only Gordon Brandie knows what this Highland fling snowman is wearing under his kilt and peg sporran in Faskally, Perthshire.\n\nStill life: Artistic beauty found when looking through a drainage hole in the Arbroath sea wall.\n\nBlurred lines: Sunrise on top of Falkland Hill in the early hours of the morning, taken by Jordan Moreham.\n\nStick together: Judith McIntyre spotted these wooden friends huddling to keep warm this winter in Kingston, Moray.\n\nHowling wind: Three-year-old Poppy enjoying a very windy afternoon walk on Craiglockhart Hill in Edinburgh with her mum, Sophia Lyons.\n\nCollectivism vs Individualism: Victor Tregubov took this shot of birds in countryside near Glasgow.\n\nStrike a pose: Colin Little on the bank of the River Lossie in Elgin, said: \"This otter posed for a couple of shots before diving under again.\"\n\nBlack and white: Derek Brown took this snowy scene in Stow just outside Galashiels in the Scottish Borders.\n\nEbb and flow: Michelle Moggach said it was \"Baltic but beautiful\" at Aberdeen Beach while she gazed at the sea.\n\nAlan Kemp said about 100 fieldfares descended on his pink berry Rowan trees in Murthly, Perthshire and devoured the lot in one sitting.\n\nMindfulness: Shirley Faichney captured a zen moment during a recent sunrise at West Wemyss beach in Fife.\n\nBridge to nowhere: Rachel Abbie was left puzzled as to where her walk was leading at Belhaven Beach in Dunbar.\n\nWinter wonderland: The path for Ross McKellar looks bright in High Blantyre in Glasgow.\n\nAutumn meets winter: Agnes Neal observed a sole woman walking through this peaceful scene in Queen's Park in Glasgow.\n\nSquirrel Nutkin: David Doogan loves it when this bushy-tailed friend joins him for a picnic in his garden in Glencoe, Argyll.\n\nTop of the world: ...well it was for Katie Gillingham and her friends on Goatfell on the Isle of Arran this week.\n\nEthereal moonlight: Arletta Babicz thought there was a \"magical vibe\" when he took this shot of the most photographed tree in Scotland at Loch Lomond.\n\nFollow the herd: Christopher Barrow thought it was funny when this flock of sheep kept following him while he was out skiing in Almondbank, Perthshire.\n\nPillars of the community: Poll nan Crann pier, known locally as Stinky Bay due to the large amount of seaweed blown onto the beach by storms which then rots in the sun. Seonaidh MacInnes took this picture at night on the Isle of Benbecula.\n\nRising above the herd: Jim Clark thought this beast could have been thinking outside the box when he captured this shot at Glanderston Dam, Barrhead.\n\nVirgin powder: Dan Price-Davies enjoyed Alpine conditions at Clashindarroch Forest while Nordic skiing with his son, Lestin, this week.\n\nCloud inversion: Steve Mitchell took in this stunning view overlooking a snowy drystone dyke at the top of the Cairn o' Mount (B974) road between Banchory and Fettercairn.\n\nWinter Washingland: Louise Harper took this picture of colourful plastic pegs with no job to do during heavy snow in Motherwell.\n\nThe Night Walker: Tamar Lewis thought there was an eerie glow in the sky as she took an evening stroll through Pollok Country Park.\n\nStripped bare: This dead-looking tree brings life to Dave Cullen's picture of the Cramond landscape in Edinburgh.\n\nDuck down: All but one mallard enjoying the food thrown to them at St Fillans in the snow, taken by Kenn Begley.\n\nWinter coat: Glen Tanar cleansed in white, near the summit of Baudy Meg in Aberdeenshire, taken by Neil Marchant.\n\nFyrish sunrise: It's as if Sir Hector Munro ordered his monument to be put in the best light possible for Laura Steel who took this picture in Evanton near Alness.\n\nSun and shadows: Michal Markowski took this eye-catching picture in West Linton using a drone.\n\nHair ice: Jane Tweedie noticed this rare phenomenon while out walking at Craigellachie, Moray. It is also known as ice wool or frost beard and is a type of ice that forms on dead wood and takes the shape of fine, silky hair.\n\nUdderly mootiful: Izabela Bodzioch took this picture of cows admiring the view of Ben Cruachan covered in snow.\n\nIce bath: Jan Overmeer said he changed his mind about going for a swim in Loch Carron when he was greeted by this frozen scene.\n\nJack Frost: Graeme Mackay was mesmerised by the patterns Mother Nature had made on the sunroof of his car in Aberdeen.\n\nSwan Lake: Bob Smart captured the sheer power and might of this magnificent bird at Townhill Loch in Fife.\n\nFine sunset: James MacArthur captured the fresh breath of brightness burning the last corner of Loch Fyne as the sun dropped below the skyline.\n\nPlease ensure that the photograph you send is your own and if you are submitting photographs of children, we must have written permission from a parent or guardian of every child featured (a grandparent, auntie or friend will not suffice).\n\nIn contributing to BBC News you agree to grant us a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to publish and otherwise use the material in any way, including in any media worldwide.\n\nHowever, you will still own the copyright to everything you contribute to BBC News.\n\nAt no time should you endanger yourself or others, take any unnecessary risks or infringe the law.\n\nYou can find more information here.\n\nAll photos are subject to copyright.", "Guests fled when officers arrived at the Stamford Hill school, where the windows had been covered\n\nPolice broke up a wedding party in north London, where they now say about 150 people had gathered.\n\nOfficers found the windows at the Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School, in Stamford Hill, had been covered when they arrived at 21:15 GMT on Thursday.\n\nGuests fled from the strictly Orthodox Charedi Jewish school when the police arrived. The organisers face a £10,000 fine for breaking lockdown rules.\n\nThe Met originally claimed that about 400 guests were at the gathering.\n\nIn a statement, the school said its hall had been leased out.\n\nA spokesman for the school, whose principal Rabbi Avrahom Pinter died in April after contracting coronavirus, said \"we had no knowledge that the wedding was taking place\".\n\nHe added: \"We are absolutely horrified about last night's event and condemn it in the strongest possible terms.\"\n\nBoris Johnson supports the police for \"taking action against people who flagrantly and selfishly ignore the rules\", according to the prime minister's official spokesman.\n\nThe spokesman said: \"Large gatherings such as that pose a health risk, not just to those who attend but those who they live with or others who they may come into contact with.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Chief Rabbi Mirvis This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nChief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, meanwhile, said the \"overwhelming majority\" of the Jewish community would be appalled at the event.\n\nRabbi Mirvis, who serves as the head of the UK's orthodox Jewish community but is not the leader of the Charedi group, called the wedding party \"a most shameful desecration of all that we hold dear\".\n\nFive guests were issued with £200 fixed penalty notices, according to police, who said their inquiries had established those present at the school had gathered for a wedding.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. A video shared with the Jewish Chronicle shows officers in Stamford Hill\n\nVideo shared with the Jewish Chronicle shows officers in Stamford Hill speaking with a man to explain why they are there, although he is not accused of any wrongdoing.\n\nThey are then seen arriving at the Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School.\n\nDet Ch Sup Marcus Barnett of the Met Police said: \"This was a completely unacceptable breach of the law.\n\n\"People across the country are making sacrifices by cancelling or postponing weddings and other celebrations and there is no excuse for this type of behaviour.\n\n\"My officers are working tirelessly with the community and we will not hesitate to take enforcement action if that is required to keep people safe.\"\n\nOn Friday morning, a security guard at the school told the BBC there were more like 100 guests at the party than the much higher number given out by police.\n\nThe Met later said in a statement: \"Although initial calls suggested some 400 people had attended the wedding, it is now believed that approximately 150 people were in attendance.\"\n\nStamford Hill is part of the borough of Hackney, which has a Covid-19 infection rate of 625.43 cases per 100,000 people. The England average rate is 471.31 per 100,000 people.\n\nThe mayor of Hackney, Philip Glanville, said he was \"deeply disappointed\" that the wedding party had taken place, despite \"the number of lives that have already been lost in the Charedi community and across the borough\".\n\nHe added: \"Unfortunately, similar events have taken place even at this venue before and we need to be really clear how unacceptable it is.\n\n\"We will be meeting with the Rabbinate and our community partners over the coming days to see how we can prevent further incidents of this nature.\"\n\nLondon is under an England-wide lockdown, which prevents social mixing between households.\n\nLondoners are asked to only leave home for limited reasons such as shopping, going to work, seeking medical assistance, or avoiding domestic abuse.\n\nFor more London news follow on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.\n\nDo you have any information to share about this incident? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "There are no plans to pay everyone in England who tests positive for Covid £500 to self-isolate, No 10 has said.\n\nThe PM's official spokesman said there was already a £500 payment available for those on low incomes who could not work from home and had to isolate.\n\nA universal £500 payment was among suggestions in a leaked Department of Health document.\n\nThere are fears the current financial support is not working because low paid workers cannot afford to self-isolate.\n\nBut a senior government source said the idea of extending the £500 payments to everyone who tests positive had been drawn up by officials and had not been considered by the prime minister.\n\nBBC Newsnight's Katie Razzall said ministers were aware self-isolation was crucial for stopping the spread of coronavirus and the \"options paper\" had been drawn up by civil servants at the Department of Health.\n\nShe said it would be discussed soon by the Covid operations committee chaired by Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove, adding the move suggested there was an admission in government that too many people were not staying at home and a decision needed to be made quickly.\n\nThe story was first reported by the Guardian which said the options paper suggested the proposal could cost up to £453m per week - 12 times the cost of the current payouts.\n\nEnvironment Secretary George Eustice told the BBC he had not seen the leaked document but said the issue of financial support for people self-isolating was \"always kept under review\".\n\n\"We've got to consider all sorts of policies in order to make sure that people abide by the rules, are able to abide by the rules and we get the infection rate down,\" he said.\n\nBut the prime minister's official spokesman denied the government was planning to introduce the new payment, telling reporters: \"We've given local authorities £70m for the scheme and they are able to provide extra payments on top of those £500 if they think it necessary.\n\n\"That £500 is on top of any other benefits and statutory sick pay that people are eligible for.\"\n\nAsked about document, the spokesman said he would not comment on a leaked paper.\n\nIt's impossible to say exactly what proportion of people stay at home for the full 10 days after being in contact with someone who has tested positive, however some evidence suggests the minority of people do.\n\nA government-backed study from September 2020 suggests that just 10.9% of people remained indoors for the full time.\n\nLabour has often cited this report when arguing that people cannot afford to miss work, but a closer look at it suggests that, of those who break the rules, just 8.9% do \"to go to work\".\n\nMost people reported going out for things like shopping or exercise, but also because they didn't think they needed to quarantine as they didn't develop symptoms.\n\nThis research is quite old (done before self-isolation grants came in) and has a relatively small sample size of just 400 people.\n\nHowever, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) has also highlighted research that shows that most people don't completely follow the rules.\n\nThis research also suggests that those on lower incomes felt they were three times less able to self-isolate than those better off.\n\nBBC political correspondent Ben Wright said there was concern in government about the huge cost of the proposal for the Treasury.\n\nHowever, he said the issue of financial incentives and trying to get people to self-isolate was clearly a live discussion within government.\n\nIt became a legal requirement last September for anyone in England testing positive for coronavirus to self-isolate.\n\nThe £500 grant already available in England is funded by the government but administered by local authorities.\n\nThe same level of payment is available in Scotland and Wales with similar conditions attached. Northern Ireland offers a discretionary self-isolation grant that covers expenses, such as the cost of groceries.\n\nThere is a list of specific criteria applicants must meet for the grant, but those who do not qualify for this payment and who are on a low income or may face financial hardship as a result of self-isolating can apply for a discretionary payment.\n\nHowever, there have been high rejection rates for this discretionary grant in England, figures obtained by Labour and reported by the BBC this week suggest.\n\nBetween October and December last year, three-quarters of the 49,877 applications were rejected, the data showed.\n\nScotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said the Scottish government would welcome the introduction of a £500 payment, as the additional funds it would generate for Scotland could allow for a similar scheme to be set up.\n\nSpeaking at her regular coronavirus briefing, she said: \"We will see whether that transpires or not, but any extra resources for self-isolation we would use to support self-isolation.\"\n\nProf Susan Michie, an adviser on the government's Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme just 18% of people with symptoms were self-isolating for the full 10 days they were meant to.\n\nShe said financial support currently offered to people having to self-isolate was a \"key weakness\" of the government's pandemic strategy.\n\nSharon, a cleaner from Kent, told the BBC if no money were to come in for two weeks she would not be able to afford to self-isolate.\n\n\"I have a mortgage to pay,\" she said.\n\n\"I can't even afford to heat my property at the moment because my wages were cut and that £500 payment would make all the difference. I would be able to self-isolate.\n\n\"It wouldn't be enough money, but it would help.\"\n\nThe DoH said it would not comment on a leaked paper but stressed it was incumbent on everyone to help protect the NHS by staying at home and following the rules at \"one of the toughest moments of this pandemic\".\n\nA spokesman said £50m was invested at the time the Test and Trace Support Payment scheme launched and it was providing a further £20m to help support people on low incomes who need to self-isolate.\n\nPeople who have tested positive for coronavirus and those considered at risk of having been exposed to it must self-isolate.\n\nOther legal obligations to self-isolate in the UK include:\n\nWould £500 be enough to help you to self-isolate? Please share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "The 39 people who died in the back of a trailer as it crossed the North Sea between Zeebrugge and the UK\n\nFour men have been jailed for the manslaughter of 39 Vietnamese migrants found dead in a lorry trailer in Essex.\n\nThe migrants died \"excruciatingly painful\" deaths, having suffocated in the container en route from Belgium to Purfleet in October 2019, a judge said.\n\nRonan Hughes, 41, and Gheorghe Nica, 43, played \"leading roles\" in the smuggling conspiracy and were jailed for 20 and 27 years respectively.\n\nAt the Old Bailey, two lorry drivers were also jailed for manslaughter.\n\n[Left to right] Eamonn Harrison, Ronan Hughes, Gheorghe Nica and Maurice Robinson were all jailed for manslaughter\n\nEamonn Harrison, 24, who towed the trailer to the Belgian port of Zeebrugge before their journey to the UK, was sentenced to 18 years.\n\nMaurice Robinson, 26, was given 13 years and four months, having collected the trailer and opened it in an industrial estate to find the migrants dead.\n\nThree others members of the people-smuggling gang were also sentenced for conspiracy to facilitate unlawful immigration.\n\nChristopher Kennedy, 24, from County Armagh, was jailed for seven years; Valentin Calota, 38, of Birmingham, for four-and-a-half years; and Alexandru-Ovidiu Hanga, 28, of Hobart Road, Tilbury, Essex, was given a three-year sentence.\n\n[Left to right] Valentin Calota, Alexandru-Ovidiu Hanga and Christopher Kennedy were also sentenced on Friday\n\nSentencing, Mr Justice Sweeney said: \"I have no doubt that the conspiracy was a sophisticated, long-running and profitable one to smuggle mainly Vietnamese people across the channel.\"\n\nHe said on the fatal trip the temperature had been rising along with the carbon dioxide levels throughout, hitting 40C (104F) while the container was at sea on 22 October 2019.\n\n\"There were desperate attempts to contact the outside world by phone and to break through the roof of the container,\" the judge said.\n\n\"All were to no avail and, before the ship reached Purfleet, [the victims] all died in what must have been an excruciatingly painful death.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Video evidence showed how the trainer containing 39 Vietnamese migrants made its way to the UK\n\nThe victims had used a metal pole to try to punch through the roof but only managed to dent the interior.\n\nThe court heard some of their final desperate phone messages, including one where a man spoke with ragged breaths as he apologised to his family.\n\n\"I can't breathe,\" he said. \"I want to come back to my family. Have a good life.\"\n\nJustice Sweeney added: \"The willingness of the victims to try and enter the country illegally provides no excuse for what happened to them.\"\n\nThe bodies of 39 Vietnamese nationals were discovered in a refrigerated trailer on 23 October 2019\n\nDuring the trial, jurors were given a snapshot of the victims - who included a bricklayer, a university graduate and a nail bar technician - and their dreams of a better life.\n\nMany of their families borrowed heavily to fund their passage, relying on their potential future earnings once they got into the UK.\n\nThe father of Nguyen Huy Tung, one of two 15-year-olds in the container, later learned of his son's death via social media.\n\nHarrison, of Newry, County Down, claimed he did not know there were people in the trailer when he towed it to the Belgian port, and that he watched \"a wee bit of Netflix\" in bed as they were loaded on.\n\nAfter receiving this message from his boss, Robinson got out of his cab, opened the trailer door and discovered the bodies\n\nRobinson, from County Armagh, collected the trailer when it arrived on UK shores just after midnight on 23 October.\n\nHis boss, Hughes, had messaged him: \"Give them air quickly don't let them out.\"\n\nRobinson gave a thumbs-up in reply. When Robinson stopped on a nearby industrial estate, he found that the migrants were all dead.\n\nHis barrister said Robinson, who admitted manslaughter, being part of the trafficking plot and money laundering, was \"horrified by what he saw\".\n\nThe moment lorry driver Maurice Robinson opened the trailer door and discovered the bodies inside was captured on CCTV\n\nThe trial examined three smuggling attempts by the gang - two that were successful on 11 and 18 October, and the final trip on 23 October.\n\nOn all three runs, Nica, of Basildon, Essex, had arranged cars and a van to transport the migrants at the UK end.\n\nWhen Robinson discovered the bodies, there was a series of telephone conversations between him and Nica and Hughes, of Tyholland, County Monaghan, Ireland, before the driver eventually dialled 999.\n\nIn his evidence, Nica said Robinson told him: \"I have a problem here - dead bodies in the trailer.\"\n\nWhile Hughes admitted manslaughter, both Nica and Harrison were convicted by a jury.\n\nMr Justice Sweeney said that in the conspiracy \"two played leading roles, namely - in order of importance - Hughes and Nica\".\n\nHe accepted Hughes was \"not at the very top of the conspiracy\" but said his role was \"pivotal... in that he ran a haulage business and supplied the trailers and drivers used to transport the migrants\".\n\nThe judge said Nica \"recruited and paid the drivers whose job it was to collect the migrants when they reached the drop-off site in this country and to drive them to the safe house(s) where they were to be held until payment\".\n\nHe added at the top of the conspiracy was a Vietnamese man called \"Fong\", who was based in London.\n\nMr Justice Sweeney told the defendants jailed for manslaughter they would serve two-thirds of the term in custody, instead of the usual half.\n\nEarlier this month, Gazmir Nuzi, 43, of Barclay Road, Tottenham, north London, was sentenced, having admitted his limited role in the people-smuggling operation. It was accepted he was not a member of the organised crime group behind the smuggling operation.\n\nDet Ch Insp Daniel Stoten said: \"May this serve as a warning to those who think it's OK to prey on the vulnerabilities of migrants and their families, transporting them in a way worse than we would transport animals.\n\n\"My message to you is that we will find you and we will stop you.\"\n\nHe said the victims died in an \"unimaginable way, because of the utter greed of these criminals\".\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "Last summer's A level results prompted an outcry from students - leading to an independent review\n\nThere was a \"significant failure\" in the way exam bodies in Wales handled awarding student grades in 2020, a report says.\n\nThe independent review found there was \"too much confidence\" in statistical models, and the appeals process in place was inadequate.\n\nQualifications Wales (QW) said it had learnt many lessons and WJEC exam board will look \"in detail\" at the findings.\n\nTeaching union UCAC described the report's findings as \"scathing\".\n\nIts release comes after it was announced this week that teachers will make 2021 grade assessments\n\nThe review was ordered by the Welsh Government following the outcry over initial examination results awarded in August for A-level students.\n\nThe assessment approach resulted in a \"significant breakdown\" in trust, says the review\n\nIn the weeks after the coronavirus pandemic took hold, formal external exams in Wales were scrapped, with schools asked to provide grade assessments for sixth-form and GCSE pupils.\n\nHowever, it later emerged 42% of the A-level grades were lower than those submitted by teachers.\n\nIn her foreword the report panel's chairwoman Louise Casella, said substantial numbers of young people across Wales \"were left feeling bewildered and distressed as they received A level results that bore no relation to their expectation and their abilities\".\n\nThe result decision was reversed, and school's predicted grades reinstated, but not before \"some learners lost their university place and some were not able to progress as planned in 2020\", noted Ms Casella, who is also director of The Open University in Wales.\n\nThe review found that QW and the WJEC board would have known the \"scale of the outliers\" and had \"an insight\" into the likely number of appeals.\n\nBut the bodies failed to fully test \"alternative routes or approaches\" to the statistical models they used to standardise results.\n\nThe review added it was \"surprising\" QW did not explore additional safeguards, after having being previously warned about, and acknowledging that there were potential problems with the statistical process.\n\nThe report said it could not find evidence either WJEC or QW \"acknowledged, accepted or anticipated the scale of the issues\" nor the risk of unfairness to learners, and that it considered this a \"significant failure\".\n\nThe approach last summer had resulted in a \"significant breakdown\" in trust between the teaching profession and the regulator and examining body, added the report authors.\n\nIt said fairness must now be central to planning for 2021, avoiding automated algorithms to predict individual grades, and developing an appeals process.\n\nDelivering the report, the review panel chair added: \"There is now a real opportunity for the education sector of Wales to come together to develop and deliver a qualifications system that puts learners at its heart, not only for the cohort facing qualifications in 2021, but for the longer term.\"\n\nQW said the review had \"some useful findings and recommendations that we are already addressing\".\n\nChair David Jones and Chief Executive Philip Baker said: \"We would have welcomed greater engagement with the review panel so there was full consideration of all the issues.\"\n\nChief Executive of WJEC Ian Morgan, said he was \"disappointed with some aspects of the report\" but the exam board would \"look in detail at the findings to identify areas where we need to take action to continuously improve as an organisation.\"\n\nEducation Minister Kirsty Williams has already said teachers will assess grades in 2021\n\nEducation Minister Kirsty Williams has welcomed the report and how it would help drive how students are graded by teachers and schools this summer.\n\n\"It is my sincere hope and expectation that our education system can continue to work together to support the progression of our learners in exam years, both through the delivery of these assessment arrangements and through a wider package of support,\" she said.\n\nUCAC Deputy General Secretary Rebecca Williams, said the report supported its call for external moderation of grades, to improve fairness to students.\n\n\"There are longer-term recommendations, including the need to be more ambitious in terms of reform of qualifications and assessment in relation to the new curriculum, and we look forward to discussing these over the coming months,\" she said.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Home Secretary Priti Patel says police have her \"absolute backing\" to enforce coronavirus restrictions\n\nFines of £800 for anyone attending a house party of more than 15 people will be introduced in England from next week, under new Covid measures.\n\nThese will double for each repeat offence to a maximum of £6,400.\n\nAt a No 10 news conference, Home Secretary Priti Patel said there remained a \"small minority that refuse to do the right thing\".\n\n\"To them my message is clear. If you don't follow rules then the police will enforce them,\" she said.\n\nCurrently in England the fine for those attending illegal indoor gatherings stands at £200 - or £100 if paid early.\n\nFines of up to £10,000 for holding large illegal gatherings of more than 30 people will still only apply to the organisers.\n\nPolice will continue to follow the strategy of engaging with the public, explaining the rules and encouraging compliance, but the Home Office has warned that in severe breaches of lockdown rules, offenders should expect to receive a fine.\n\nMs Patel said the government would \"not stand by while a small number of individuals put others at risk\".\n\nShe was joined at the briefing by NHS England regional medical director for London Dr Vin Diwakar, who compared breaking the rules to turning on a light in the middle of a blackout during the Blitz.\n\n\"It doesn't just put you at risk in your house, it puts your whole street and the whole of your community at risk,\" he said.\n\nWelcoming the fines announcement, Martin Hewitt, chairman of the National Police Chiefs' Council, said large gatherings were \"dangerous, irresponsible, and totally unacceptable\".\n\nHe added: \"I hope that the likelihood of an increased fine acts as a disincentive for those people who are thinking of attending or organising such events.\"\n\nOfficial figures will be released next week showing how many fines have been given out since the start of this latest national lockdown, Mr Hewitt said.\n\nHowever, he stressed that \"forces are telling us there has been a significant increase\" in recent weeks.\n\n\"That's reflecting the fact that we've had more officers out on dedicated patrols taking targeted action against those small few who are letting everybody down,\" he said.\n\nAccording to Mr Hewitt, three police officers were injured in Brick Lane, east London, last week, after more than 40 people were found cramped indoors at a house party.\n\nMeanwhile, more than 150 people were found at a party in Hertfordshire, complete with music equipment including mixing decks and amplifiers, and another officer was injured.\n\nHe said forces in England had issued 250 fixed penalty notices (FPNs) to people organising large gatherings between late August, when regulations were introduced, and 17 January.\n\nIn some other recent examples of lockdown breaches:\n\nThe latest fines announcement comes after figures showed that assaults on emergency workers made up more than a quarter of Covid-related crimes prosecuted in the first six months of the pandemic.\n\nThe Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said there were 1,688 such offences between 1 April and 30 September in England and Wales.\n\nThey were among almost 6,500 crimes related to coronavirus in that period.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nSome 1,137 charges were brought for breaking coronavirus laws, according to the figures published by the CPS - which cover completed prosecutions.\n\nOn Thursday, it was reported that another 1,290 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 in the UK, bringing the total to 94,580.\n\nAnd a further 37,892 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus were announced, bringing the total number of cases in the UK to 3,543,646.\n• None What powers do police have?", "Cyber criminals who stole thousands of digital files belonging to environmental regulator Sepa have published them on the internet.\n\nThe public body had about 1.2GB of data stolen from its digital systems on Christmas Eve.\n\nSepa rejected a ransom demand for the attack, which has been claimed by the international Conti ransomware group.\n\nContracts, strategy documents and databases are among the 4,000 files released.\n\nThe data has been put on the dark web - a part of the internet associated with criminality and only accessible through specialised software.\n\nSepa chief executive Terry A'Hearn said: \"We've been clear that we won't use public finance to pay serious and organised criminals intent on disrupting public services and extorting public funds.\n\n\"We have made our legal obligations and duty of care on the sensitive handling of data a high priority and, following Police Scotland advice, are confirming that data stolen has been illegally published online.\n\n\"We're working quickly with multi-agency partners to recover and analyse data then, as identifications are confirmed, contact and support affected organisations and individuals.\"\n\nThe attack locked Sepa's emails and contacts centre but Sepa said \"priority regulatory, monitoring, flood forecasting and warning services were continuing to adapt and operate\".\n\nSepa said the theft was the equivalent to a fraction of the contents of an average laptop hard drive.\n\nSepa chief executive Terry A'Hearn said the organisation had faced a \"significant and sophisticated cyber-attack\"\n\nSome of the information stolen was already publicly available but other files included data about staff and suppliers was not.\n\nWhere information has been identified to date, staff have been contacted and are being supported.\n\nBrett Callow, of cyber security company Emsisoft, has been tracking the Sepa ransomware attack.\n\nHe said: \"Conti may well be the work of the same people behind another type of ransomware called Ryuk.\n\n\"There are similarities in the code, ransom note and attack mechanisms.\n\n\"When the complete haul of data is posted like this, it usually means the group has given up hope of being able to extract payment from the victim of monetise the data in other ways.\n\n\"It's a loss for them. At this point, they've lost all leverage and the action is intended to serve as a warning to future victims.\"\n\nDet Insp Michael McCullagh, of Police Scotland's cybercrime investigations unit, said: \"This remains an ongoing investigation.\n\n\"Inquiries remain at an early stage and continue to progress including deployment of specialist cybercrime resources to support this response.\"\n\nThe authorities will be pleased.\n\nIt looks like Sepa decided not to play ball with the cyber criminals.\n\nRansomware is a scourge that is costing organisations billions of pounds and every time a victim pays, it fuels further attacks.\n\nSadly for Sepa this is far from over.\n\nBy the looks of the stash of files that the hackers stole and encrypted, Sepa will have months of work ahead to try to recover important documents and spreadsheets from backups and rebuild their records.\n\nIt's also telling that, according to the hackers website, almost 1,000 people have so far looked at the documents.\n\nWho knows what other criminals or hackers are poring over the files right now.\n\nMaking the documents open to all means that information can be extracted to potentially be used against Sepa in further attacks or extortion attempts.\n\nIt will be months, perhaps even years until the organisation can say it is safe once more and can put this cyber attack behind it.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. PM: It's too early to give a lockdown end date\n\nIt is \"too early\" to say whether England's Covid restrictions will be able to end in the spring, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said.\n\nOnce the four priority groups have been vaccinated, by mid-February, \"we'll look then at how we're doing,\" he said.\n\nNearly two million people in the UK have had their first dose of vaccine in the past week, government figures show.\n\nScientist Marc Baguelin, who advises the government, has said restaurants and bars should not reopen before May.\n\nEducation Secretary Gavin Williamson has said he \"certainly hopes\" schools in England can fully reopen before Easter, while Downing Street refused to be drawn on whether this would happen by then.\n\nA further 1,290 people have died within 28 days of a positive Covid test and there have been another 37,892 cases, according to the latest government figures.\n\nAnd almost five million people in the UK have had their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine.\n\nSpeaking after a study suggested infections might have increased at the start of the latest lockdown in England, Mr Johnson said it was \"absolutely crucial\" that people observed the restrictions.\n\nReferring to figures from the Imperial College London survey, he said they showed the new variant of the virus was \"not more deadly but it is much more contagious and the numbers are very great\".\n\nFigures published by Public Health England show cases - meaning people who come forward to get tested while they are infected - have fallen across England since early January.\n\nWith the two sets of figures pointing in different directions, it will be some time before it is known for sure how long it will take for lockdown to relieve the pressure on hospitals.\n\nDr Baguelin, from Imperial College, who sits on a sub-group of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) said the premature opening of the hospitality sector would lead to a \"bump\" in Covid-19 cases.\n\nHe told BBC Radio 4's World at One programme even a partial reopening would generate \"an increase in the R number\". An R number above one means the epidemic is growing.\n\n\"Something of this scale, if it was to happen earlier than May, would generate a bump in transmission, which is already really bad,\" he said.\n\n\"So you have a lot of pressure on hospitals, you will have another wave of some extent. At best you will keep on having very, very unsustainable level of pressure on the NHS.\"\n\nNHS England figures show one in 10 major hospital trusts had no spare adult critical care beds last week.\n\nThis is a debate that is going to start to dominate public discourse.\n\nWith the vaccination programme under way, there is huge clamour to know what will happen once the most vulnerable are vaccinated, by mid-February.\n\nThe problem is there are still so many unknowns.\n\nFirstly, it is hard to predict by how much lockdown will have reduced infection levels, considering there is a new faster-spreading variant to deal with.\n\nThe level of uptake will also be crucial. Surveys suggest as many as one in five may not have the vaccine - although the older, more vulnerable groups tend to be the most willing to be vaccinated.\n\nAnd the fact that no vaccine is 100% effective means come February there could still be significant numbers of very vulnerable people who are not protected.\n\nAnother factor is whether the vaccine stops transmissions - so-called sterilising vaccination.\n\nTrials have shown the vaccines are good at stopping symptoms developing. But that does not mean someone who has received a jab will not pass on the virus.\n\nIf it does not, that, of course, has implications on how many control measures have to be kept in place. It will take us at least until spring to know the answer to this.\n\nAt this stage, it seems hard to see much beyond the possible reopening of schools come March.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was an \"impossible question\" to ask how long the lockdown would need to last.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and only go out for limited reasons.\n\nThis includes for food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nIn Northern Ireland, coronavirus lockdown restrictions will be extended until 5 March, BBC News understands.\n\nIn Scotland, lockdown has been extended until at least the middle of February, with most school pupils to continue learning from home.\n\nAnd in Wales health minister Vaughan Gething has said no \"significant easing\" of Wales' Covid restrictions should be expected when the current guidelines are reviewed this month.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nSir Keir added that the coronavirus vaccines were \"really good news\" but \"should not mask the fact that we have still got a very serious problem\".\n\nThe government is aiming to offer a vaccine to all over-70s, the extremely clinical vulnerable and health and care workers by mid-February.\n\nSixty-five new vaccination centres are opening in England, including a mosque in Birmingham and a cinema in Aylesbury.", "Paddy McElhone was shot in the back by a soldier in 1974\n\nThe shooting dead of a man by the Army in County Tyrone in August 1974 was unjustified, a coroner has ruled.\n\nPaddy McElhone, 24, a farmer, was shot in the back near his home in Limehill, Pomeroy.\n\nAn inquest heard the shot was fired by a soldier from the First Battalion, Royal Regiment of Wales.\n\nJudge Siobhan Keegan said Mr McElhone was an \"innocent man shot in cold blood without warning when he was no threat to anyone\".\n\nThe soldier, now deceased, had been cleared of murder but the circumstances were re-examined in a new inquest ordered by the Attorney General.\n\nPaddy McElhone's family said he was killed without justification, explanation or apology\n\nAfterwards, a statement issued by the McElhone family said it had been a \"very long road\" to reach Thursday's ruling and that the truth \"has been heard\".\n\nIt reads: \"Our family always knew that Paddy was an innocent young man, taken from his home and shot by a British soldier for no reason.\"\n\nEvidence presented to the inquest found Mr McElhone was not on any list associated with the IRA and was an innocent man from a humble background.\n\nThe family said Mr McElhone's parents \"went to their graves broken-hearted knowing that their innocent son had been killed, without justification, explanation or apology\".\n\n\"We feel that, today, Judge Keenan at this inquest has, at long last, exonerated Paddy in full,\" the statement continued.\n\n\"As a family we can grieve Paddy, and respect his memory as an innocent young man.\"\n\nThe inquest into Mr McElhone's death was the first in a series of coroners' investigations into deaths associated with Northern Ireland's Troubles.\n\nIt was held in Omagh courthouse in County Tyrone.", "Some 320 of the UK's most dangerous child sex offenders have been arrested since the first coronavirus lockdown, the National Crime Agency (NCA) said.\n\nInvestigators have been focusing on tracking down offenders who operate online.\n\nThe operation led to a total of 4,760 arrests and 6,500 children safeguarded between April and September last year.\n\nMeanwhile, the Home Office has launched a strategy to collect detailed data about child grooming gangs.\n\nThe Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Strategy aims to identify and convict offenders who operate in groups by gathering more information about their characteristics, including ethnicity.\n\nIt also involves investing in the national child abuse image database to identify offenders more quickly, protecting police from frequently being exposed to indecent images, and enabling parents to ask officers if someone with access to their child is known to them for cases of abuse.\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel said some who had suffered child sexual abuse had told her they felt \"let down by the state\", and insisted she was \"determined to put this right\".\n\nRob Jones, an NCA director, welcomed the initiative \"at a time when the threat to children is more severe than it has ever been\", highlighting that last year there were at least 300,000 people posing a sexual threat to children in the UK.\n\nHe said the NCA was focusing on the most dangerous offenders \"as part of the whole system approach\".\n\n\"Many feel they can operate with impunity online - using anonymisation techniques, secure accounts and the dark web - but as we have shown with this operation they are wrong and we have the capabilities to track them down,\" he said.\n\nMr Jones added: \"These are not just images or videos being viewed online.\n\n\"What we are uncovering here is evidence of the horrific, real-world sexual abuse of children.\"\n\nOut of the 320 arrested as part of the NCA's operation targeting the UK's most dangerous child sex offenders, 122 were targeted by NCA officers.\n\nSeventeen were in positions of trust, including a volunteer with the Scouts, church youth group leaders, a social worker, primary school and college teachers, a hospital care assistant, a police officer, and a civil servant.\n\nIn the year ending March 2020 the NCA and UK policing made 7,212 arrests and safeguarded and protected 8,329 children. This was a 50% increase in arrests and a 10% increase in safeguards compared with the year ending March 2019.\n\nMs Patel said that the national strategy would tackle and respond to \"all forms of child sexual abuse, relentlessly going after abusers, whilst better protecting victims and survivors\".\n\nShe added: \"Crucially, it contains a commitment to collect higher quality data on the characteristics of offenders, so that the government can build a fuller picture of perpetrators, and tackle the abuse that has blighted many towns and cities across our country.\"\n\nThe government has pledged to support local authorities' responses to exploitation through funding for The Children's Society's Prevention Programme initiative, which has so far trained 13,363 professionals to spot signs of child abuse.\n\nThrough the Online Safety Bill, the Home Office has also said it will ensure technology companies are held to account for harmful content on their sites.\n\nThe Children's Society's chief executive, Mark Russell, has described the strategy as a \"golden opportunity to improve support for child victims of horrific crimes and send a clear signal that child sexual abuse and exploitation are crimes that will not be tolerated\".\n\nThe scheme was also welcomed by GCHQ and charity NSPCC, which said it has received more than 40 calls a day about child sexual abuse since the pandemic began.\n\nGCHQ's director of serious and organised crime said: \"Our work to tackle systemic internet problems, the insight we provide into offender behaviour and our efforts alongside law enforcement to identify and pursue the worst offenders will help to ensure there is no safe space online for these people to operate.\"\n\nNSPCC chief executive Sir Peter Wanless said it \"rightly puts the emphasis on early intervention and action across government but added it \"must be backed up with serious investment in support for victims\" - and that children were still being exposed to abuse from teachers and social workers.\n\nSir Peter said: \"It's crucial that no young person is left unprotected which is why it's disappointing the government has not committed to closing the legal loophole that enables some adults to abuse their position of power to have sexual contact with 16 and 17-year-olds in their care.\"", "CCTV footage has been released of the moment a fire took hold in a hotel after a porter put a bag of ash and embers in a cupboard.\n\nSimon Midgley and his partner Richard Dyson died in the fire at Cameron House next to Loch Lomond in December 2017.\n\nCameron House admitted charges under the Fire Scotland Act of failing to take fire safety measures.\n\nChristopher O'Malley, who put the bag in the cupboard, admitted breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act.", "Last updated on .From the section FA Cup\n\nNon-league Chorley were unable to emulate the heroes from 1986 by causing an FA Cup sensation against Wolves - but the National League North side came away with all the credit from their fourth-round tie at Victory Park.\n\nVitinha's superb 30-yard shot after 12 minutes proved enough to secure an all-Premier League tie against Arsenal or Southampton at Molineux in the fifth round.\n\nBut Nuno Espirito Santo's side were less than impressive against their part-time opponents.\n\nChorley had the first shot of the match through Elliot Newby, and after Vitinha had struck his first Wolves goal with the visitors' only shot on target, it was the hosts who had the best chances.\n\nCrucially, they also pocketed around £120,000 in prize money, plus TV fees, to sustain them through what could be a difficult period after their league was suspended for two weeks amid funding concerns earlier in the day.\n\n\"If you are going to lose, I would prefer to lose to a goal like that than a scruffy goal,\" said Chorley boss Jamie Vermiglio.\n\n\"I am proud of what we have done for our community, my kids at school will remember that their head teacher got this far in the FA Cup. Hopefully it can inspire some of them.\n\n\"We are approaching up to half a million [in earnings from the cup run], we have people who are isolating, and those players have given them a little bit of happiness.\n\n\"If it is 2-0 or 3-0 at half-time the game is done and people are turning their TVs off. That did not happen. I felt we were in the game. Every player was outstanding.\"\n• None How to follow FA Cup fourth round on the BBC\n\nIf this does end up being Chorley's last game of the season, it is one they will remember for some time, not only for the action on the pitch but also for the huge volley of fireworks that went off behind the main stand minutes into the contest.\n\nFor visiting Wolves, it was a step into the unknown. Their starting line-up got changed in the away dressing room, while their substitutes - European Championship winner Rui Patricio and Spain international Adama Traore among them - readied themselves in a sponsors' lounge.\n\nSeemingly those starting the game on the bench got the better deal.\n\nWolves boss Nuno paid Chorley the compliment of picking a strong starting line-up, including £35.6m record signing Fabio Silva and England international Conor Coady.\n\nAnd had this match been played in more imposing surroundings, it could have been mistaken for one of those Premier League games where one side sits back, challenges the opposition to break them down and then hits them on the counter.\n\nWolves' return of 76% possession and one shot on target, set against Chorley's five shots on target, suggests home manager Vermiglio got his tactics spot on.\n\nIndeed, had Andy Halls, a personal trainer by day, not had his goal-bound header tipped over by John Ruddy after an hour, Chorley might have forced a different outcome.\n\n\"The scene was set for us to lose this game,\" said Nuno. \"John Ruddy did his job, everybody knows his quality. He helped us to win the game.\"\n\nIt was nevertheless a typically English FA Cup tie, enlivened by Vermiglio yelling \"nothing wrong with that\" when two Wolves players went down under agricultural challenges, and then laughing in Traore's face amid a brief skirmish.\n\nIt was fantastic knockabout stuff. Sadly, the enduring disappointment was that other than staff, media and stewards, no-one was there in person to witness it.\n• None Wolves have reached the FA Cup fifth round in three of the last five seasons, as many as in the 21 seasons prior to this.\n• None Premier League teams have progressed from 45 of their 47 FA Cup ties against non-league teams (96%), with only Norwich vs Luton in 2013 and Burnley vs Lincoln in 2017 failing to progress.\n• None Separated by 120 years and 362 days, Chorley have lost both of their FA Cup games against top-flight opponents, losing against Notts County in January 1900 and Wolves.\n• None Vitinha became the 32nd different Wolves player to score a goal for Nuno Espirito Santo in all competitions and the 11th different Portuguese player to do so, with what was his third shot in his 12th appearance.\n• None Since the start of 2017-18, Wolves have had 11 different Portuguese scorers - more than twice as many as any other English league team in that time (Nottingham Forest, five).\n\nWolves are next in action against Chelsea in the Premier League at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday, 27 January (18:00 GMT).\n• None Attempt blocked. Rayan Aït-Nouri (Wolverhampton Wanderers) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Rúben Neves.\n• None Harry Cardwell (Chorley) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt missed. Pedro Neto (Wolverhampton Wanderers) left footed shot from outside the box is high and wide to the left. Assisted by Rúben Neves.\n• None Arlen Birch (Chorley) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt blocked. Fábio Silva (Wolverhampton Wanderers) right footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by Pedro Neto. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None You can stream five fourth-round games live on the BBC this weekend, including Liverpool's trip to Manchester United. Find out more here.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA hotel fire which claimed the lives of two men started after a porter put a bag of ash and embers in a cupboard containing kindling and newspaper.\n\nSimon Midgley and his partner Richard Dyson died in the fire at Cameron House next to Loch Lomond in December 2017.\n\nCameron House pled guilty to charges under the Fire Scotland Act of failing to take fire safety measures.\n\nChristopher O'Malley, who put the bag in the cupboard, admitted breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act.\n\nO'Malley's lawyer said the night porter - from Renton in West Dunbartonshire - deeply regretted his actions, and did not deliberately start the fire.\n\nDumbarton Sheriff Court also heard that Cameron House did not have proper procedures in place for the disposal of ash, or for training staff.\n\nThe owners also failed to keep cupboards that contained potential ignition sources free of combustibles.\n\nAt about 04:00 on 18 December 2017, O'Malley, 35, cleared ash and embers from a fireplace in the Cameron House reception into a metal bucket.\n\nHe then emptied the contents of the bucket into a plastic bag, which he put into the concierge cupboard.\n\nThe cupboard also contained flammable materials including kindling, newspapers and cardboard.\n\nRichard Dyson, left, and Simon Midgley, right, who both died, had been on a winter break in Scotland\n\nAt about 06:40 an initial fire alarm sounded and staff noticed smoke coming from the concierge cupboard.\n\nO'Malley opened the door and flames took hold, spreading to the hall.\n\nHe and two others tried to fight the blaze with fire extinguishers, but were overcome by the flames.\n\nAdvocate depute Michael Meehan QC told the court the cupboard was well alight and the \"blaze immediately took hold and spread from there\".\n\nHe added: \"As a result of [Cameron House's] failure to keep the cupboard free of combustibles, ash and embers ignited and fire spread in the main building.\"\n\nThe night manager sounded the alarm and called 999. Firefighters arrived within 10 minutes to find a \"well developed\" fire in the mansion, which is near Balloch in West Dunbartonshire.\n\nMore than 200 guests were staying in the hotel.\n\nThe court heard one family-of-three on the second floor had to be rescued by firefighters while a couple on the first floor had to crawl to safety because corridors and fire escape pathways were filling with smoke and gases.\n\nIt was after 08:00 when it was discovered that Mr Dyson, 38, and Mr Midgley, 32, were missing.\n\nFirefighters wearing breathing apparatus found Mr Dyson on a landing at the top of a staircase.\n\nMr Midgley was lying in a fire escape passageway. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene.\n\nMr Dyson was taken to hospital, where he was also pronounced dead.\n\nPost-mortem examinations said the men's causes of death had been inhalation of smoke and fire gases.\n\nThe couple had travelled from London, and were staying at the five-star resort as the final stop on their winter break to Scotland.\n\nSheriff William Gallacher also heard of an incident three nights before the fatal fire, where O'Malley and another night porter were told not to put ash into plastic bags because it was a fire hazard.\n\nCameron House QC Peter Gray said it was therefore \"extremely difficult to understand\" why O'Malley did not follow this guidance on the night of the fire.\n\nThe court also heard that Cameron House staff were not properly trained in the safe disposal of ash and that no written procedures were in place.\n\nThere was also no procedure in place for emptying the metal ash bins outside the hotel on a regular basis.\n\nThat was contrary to recommendations made in two fire risk assessments carried out by an independent company in 2016 and 2017.\n\nAfter the first report was received by Cameron House management in January 2016, the resort manager agreed there was a lack of a formal procedure for disposing of ash and delegated the responsibility for this to his deputy.\n\nMr Meehan said this report \"should have been a game-changer\" for Cameron House.\n\nWhen the issue was raised again in a follow-up report a year later, managers believed it had already been dealt with.\n\nMr Gray said: \"The resort manager understood incorrectly that all the actions had been completed, including in relation to the written procedure for disposing of ash from open fires.\"\n\nThe Scottish Fire and Rescue Service had also warned Cameron House managers about the risks of storing combustibles in the concierge cupboard in August 2017.\n\nThe audit highlighted the potential danger of fire spreading rapidly through the building because of its age and voids.\n\nA follow-up letter was sent to management in November 2017 - one month before the fire - but combustibles continued to be stored in the cupboard.\n\nCameron House's lawyer added that the failings were not deliberate breaches but occurred \"as a result of genuine errors\".\n\nHe also told the court the fire had gone undetected for a long period before being discovered, and that the hotel had a \"suite of measures in place\" to deal with fire safety.\n\nAn absence of formal procedures for dealing with ashes and embers gave staff the opportunity to improvise, he added.\n\nMr Gray continued: \"I am instructed to extend my deepest sympathies from the accused to the families of Mr Midgley and Mr Dyson.\n\nHe said the hotel takes its duties to ensure the safety of its guests extremely seriously.\n\nDetails of what happened at Cameron House were first revealed in court on 14 December last year, but reporting restrictions meant they could not be published until now.\n\nSentencing is due to take place on 29 January.", "Fashion chain Next has said it will no longer bid to buy Sir Philip Green's Arcadia retail brands Topshop and Topman out of administration.\n\nIt comes after a consortium including the fashion chain was named as frontrunner to buy the brands.\n\nIn a short statement, Next said the consortium had been \"unable to meet the price expectations of the vendor\".\n\nSome 13,000 jobs were put at risk when Arcadia, which also owns Burton and Dorothy Perkins, went bust in November.\n\nIt leaves a clutch of others in the race to buy the 440-store group, including Mike Ashley's Frasers Group, which owns House of Fraser and Sports Direct.\n\nAccording to reports, Authentic Brands, the US owner of the Barneys department store, and JD Sports have tabled a joint offer, while online retailers Asos and Boohoo are also said to be interested.\n\nAdministrators Deloitte have been looking for buyers for some or all of Arcadia, after a slump in sales caused by the pandemic triggered its collapse.\n\nNext, which has 550 UK shops and has weathered the pandemic well, was seen as a good fit to take over the group's assets.\n\nIt had been bidding in partnership with the US hedge fund Davidson Kempner, which was going to put up most of the money.\n\nNext said it wished \"the administrator and future owners [of Arcadia] well in their endeavours to preserve an important part of the UK retail sector\".\n\nExperts expect Arcadia to be broken up, with bidders taking on different parts of the business and brands potentially hived off from their stores.\n\nIn December, Australian collective City Chic said it would buy Arcadia's Evans brand, commerce and wholesale business for £23m but not its store network.\n\nLast year was the worst for the High Street in more than 25 years as the coronavirus accelerated the move towards online shopping, according to the Centre for Retail Research (CRR).\n\nNearly 180,000 retail jobs were lost, up by almost a quarter on the previous year, as shops faced strict curbs and prolonged closures.", "Early evidence suggests the variant of coronavirus that emerged in the UK may be more deadly, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.\n\nHowever, there remains huge uncertainty around the numbers - and vaccines are still expected to work.\n\nThe data comes from mathematicians comparing death rates in people infected with either the new or the old versions of the virus.\n\nThe new more infectious variant has already spread widely across the UK.\n\nMr Johnson told a Downing Street briefing: \"In addition to spreading more quickly, it also now appears that there is some evidence that the new variant - the variant that was first identified in London and the south east - may be associated with a higher degree of mortality.\n\n\"It's largely the impact of this new variant that means the NHS is under such intense pressure.\"\n\nPublic Health England, Imperial College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Exeter have each been trying to assess how deadly the new variant is.\n\nTheir evidence has been assessed by scientists on the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag).\n\nThe group concluded there was a \"realistic possibility\" that the virus had become more deadly, but this is far from certain.\n\nSir Patrick Vallance, the government's chief scientific adviser, described the data so far as \"not yet strong\".\n\nHe said: \"I want to stress that there's a lot of uncertainty around these numbers and we need more work to get a precise handle on it, but it obviously is a concern that this has an increase in mortality as well as an increase in transmissibility.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Patrick Vallance: \"There is evidence that there's an increased risk for those who have the new variant\"\n\nPrevious work suggests the new variant spreads between 30% and 70% faster than others, and there are hints it is about 30% more deadly.\n\nFor example, with 1,000 60-year-olds infected with the old variant, 10 of them might be expected to die. But this rises to about 13 with the new variant.\n\nThis difference is found when looking at everyone testing positive for Covid, but analysing only hospital data has found no increase in the death rate. Hospital care has improved over the course of the pandemic as doctors get better at treating the disease.\n\nThe new variant was first detected in Kent in September. It is now the most common form of the virus in England and Northern Ireland, and has spread to more than 50 other countries.\n\nThe Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine are both expected to work against the variant that emerged in the UK.\n\nHowever, Sir Patrick said there was more concern about two other variants that had emerged in South Africa and Brazil.\n\nHe said: \"They have certain features which means they might be less susceptible to vaccines.\n\n\"They are definitely of more concern than the one in the UK at the moment and we need to keep looking at it and studying this very carefully.\"\n\nThe prime minister said the government was prepared to take further action to protect the country's borders to prevent new variants from entering.\n\n\"I really don't rule it out, we may need to take further measures still,\" he said.\n\nLast week the government extended a travel ban to South America, Portugal and many African countries amid concerns about new variants, while all international travellers must now test negative ahead of departure to the UK and go into quarantine on arrival.", "Shoppers bought far fewer clothes last year as lockdowns meant people had less opportunity to socialise and go out.\n\nClothes sales slumped 25%, the biggest drop in 23 years when records began, official figures suggest.\n\nWhile shops have reported demand for certain clothing such as pyjamas and loungewear has risen, demand for going-out items has fallen sharply.\n\nAnd despite a pick-up in December, clothing sales remain lower than before the pandemic struck.\n\n\"With few opportunities to socialise during lockdown and many people working from home, the clothing sector has been one of the \"worst-affected by restrictions\", the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.\n\nEarlier this month, Marks & Spencer said sales of sleepwear had soared\n\nGrowing numbers of High Street shops have faced financial difficulties due to the temporary store closures imposed during lockdowns.\n\nTopshop-owner Arcadia and competitors Debenhams, Edinburgh Woollen Mill Group, Oasis and Warehouse have all slid into insolvency since lockdown measures were first imposed last March.\n\nThe inability to try clothes on in bricks-and-mortar shops, as well as restrictions on eating out meaning consumers are going out less, have all affected sales, the ONS suggested.\n\nAnd the slump in demand for fashion meant that British retail sales saw their largest annual fall on record in 2020.\n\nSales fell by 1.9% last year, when compared with 2019, the largest year-on-year fall since records began in 1997.\n\nRetail sales, including fuel, did see a small increase last month, growing by 0.3% when compared with November.\n\nIt came following the end of England's national lockdown on 2 December. Sales had slumped by 4.1% in November during a month-long shutdown.\n\nBut \"this was very clearly not a Merry Christmas for most of the High Street\", said Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.\n\n\"For most retailers it's the most crucial month of the year to get profit back on track but the large upswing in sales after the pain of the November lockdowns didn't materialise,\" she said.\n\nONS deputy national statistician for economic statistics Jonathan Athow said that some sectors, however, had been \"able to buck the trend\" last year.\n\n\"The increased popularity of click-and-collect and people buying more items from home led to a strong year for overall internet sales, with record highs for food and household goods sales online.\"\n\nIn a sign of the way the pandemic has changed shopping habits, the value of online retail sales jumped by 46.1% in 2020 when compared with 2019 - the highest annual growth reported since 2008.\n\nOnline trade now accounts for more than one-third of all retail sales.\n\nRichard Lim, chief executive of Retail Economics, explained that the rise of online had \"polarised industry performance\".\n\n\"The gap widened between those retailers with the most sophisticated online propositions from those with legacy store-dependent business models,\" he said.\n\nOnline-only retailers such as Boohoo and Asos, for example, have reported strong sales figures in 2020.\n\nSupermarkets in particular have embraced the shift to digital, with online food store sales up 79.3% last year.\n\nThere was also better news from the John Lewis Partnership, which owns Waitrose, on Friday. It said that it would return a £300m emergency coronavirus loan to the government as trading went \"better than anticipated\" over Christmas.\n\nToday's figures show just how badly the clothing sector has been affected these last 12 months.\n\nFashion is the big retail loser from this pandemic. Who needs to splash out on the latest trends when we're working from home and not going out? And even when clothing shops are open, chances are you can't try things on.\n\nWith all of the Covid-19 measures in place, the fun has been sucked out of shopping. We haven't stopped spending, but most of it is going online. Boohoo and Asos have seen very strong sales growth, for instance.\n\nThe going's far harder for retailers with large numbers of physical stores. The pressures have already taken their toll on the likes of Sir Philip Green's Arcadia Group and Debenhams.\n\nAnd things may well get worse on the high street before they better. Many retailers are worried about the end of the business rates holiday and of the temporary ban on eviction for non payment of rent in April. These will result in a big increase in costs when sales have yet to fully recover.\n\nBut Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, called for more help for non-essential shops and High Street retailers who continue to be affected by lockdown restrictions.\n\n\"With no end in sight for retailers closed in lockdown, many will struggle to survive under a mounting rent burden, and a return to full business rates in April,\" she said.\n\nShe called on government to offer \"targeted\" business rates relief to businesses worst-affected by the pandemic.\n\n\"Decisive action is needed to save jobs, shops and local communities, with town and city centres looking to be particularly hard hit unless the government acts now.\"\n\nEarlier in January, a report from the Centre for Retail Research said that 2020 was the worst for High Street job losses in more than 25 years, because of the acceleration towards online shopping.\n\nNearly 180,000 retail jobs were lost last year, up by almost a quarter from 2019, it said.", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nLiverpool's 68-game unbeaten home run in the Premier League came to an end as Ashley Barnes fired in a late winner from the penalty spot to secure a famous victory for Burnley.\n\nBarnes was tripped in the box by goalkeeper Alisson with seven minutes remaining and converted the spot-kick as Burnley won at Anfield for the first time since 1974.\n\nLiverpool's last league loss on their own ground came nearly four years ago, against Crystal Palace in April 2017, and they are now six points behind leaders Manchester United at the midway point in the campaign.\n\nDivock Origi was given his first start of the season and should have scored when he ran free on goal after pouncing on Ben Mee's error but struck the crossbar.\n\nThe hosts pushed to find the net in the second half but ran out of ideas, Nick Pope making a stunning save to deny Mohamed Salah and fellow substitute Roberto Firmino flicking an effort wide.\n\nBurnley's shock win lifts them up to 16th in the table, seven points clear of the relegation zone.\n• None Klopp takes blame but what has happened to Liverpool?\n\nJurgen Klopp said before the game he was \"not worried\" by his side's poor run, but the latest setback means this has now turned into a real problem for the Liverpool manager.\n\nAfter 19 games, Liverpool are out of form and out of confidence, failing to find the net in their last 440 minutes of top-flight action and awaiting their first league victory of 2021.\n\nThey looked to be hitting their stride on 19 December when they took apart Crystal Palace 7-0, but have not won in the league since and scored just a solitary league goal in that time, against relegation strugglers West Brom.\n\nTheir drop-off from the same stage last season is extraordinary - after 19 games last term the Reds were 13 points clear at the top with 55 points, but they have 21 fewer points now.\n\nAside from Pope's save to thwart Salah and stops from Origi and Trent Alexander-Arnold, Liverpool did not look a side who were threatening to find the net.\n\nThey had 72% possession but much of it was slow and ponderous, and although they had spaces out wide and put 30 crosses into the box, the resolute Burnley defenders headed and hacked clear every ball that came in.\n\nLiverpool won 18 of 19 league games at Anfield as they cantered to the title last term.\n\nBurnley were the spoilers on that occasion - earning a 1-1 draw in July 2020 - and they bettered that showing here with another solid and well-organised display.\n\nCaptain Mee had 14 clearances and made two tackles, while centre-back partner James Tarkowski contributed five interceptions and won the ball back four times.\n\nBurnley are a well-drilled outfit and know their limitations, happy to sit back and soak up the pressure before looking to take their chances on the counter-attack.\n\nThey had sniffs on the break but were unable to get the final ball right and while Barnes forced an excellent save out of Alisson, the assistant referee's flag would have ruled it out.\n\nThey remain the lowest scorers in the league with just 10 goals - level with bottom side Sheffield United - but their defensive solidity means they will always pose a threat, even to the biggest teams.\n\n'We dealt with the basics' - manager reaction\n\nBurnley boss Sean Dyche to Match of the Day: \"Performance, we had to work very hard, as you do in these places, be diligent and do your jobs - shape was good, energy was good.\n\n\"We had a golden chance, kept searching, but you have to deal with the basics and we did that very well.\n\n\"We were close last year, you get a feel of a performance and I said 'you are used to playing against these players, working without the ball, there's always a chance and you have to take it'. Barnsey sticks it in there, gets a toe, it's a penalty and he sticks it away very well.\"\n• None This was Burnley's second Premier League win away against the reigning champions (also v Chelsea in August 2017). Indeed, since the 2017-18 season, Burnley are the only side with two away league wins over the reigning English champions.\n• None Liverpool have gone four league games without scoring for the first time since May 2000. The Reds have had a total of 87 shots since Sadio Mane's 12th-minute strike against West Brom, 25 days ago.\n• None This is the first time a Jurgen Klopp side has gone four league games without scoring since his Mainz side did so in the Bundesliga from November to December 2006.\n• None Liverpool have gone five Premier League games without a win (D3 L2) for only the second time under Klopp (also from Jan-Feb 2017).\n• None Liverpool have conceded two penalty goals at Anfield in this season's Premier League (also Sander Berge for Sheff Utd); they had only conceded two penalty goals at the ground under Klopp before 2020-21.\n• None Liverpool had 27 shots without scoring against Burnley, the most they have had in a single league match without finding the net since April 2013 v Reading (28), and most at Anfield since April 2012 v West Brom (30).\n• None Ashley Barnes' penalty for Burnley was his first away goal in the Premier League in 11 appearances on the road, since netting against Watford back in November 2019.\n• None Since the start of last season, no goalkeeper has made more saves against a single opponent in the Premier League than Burnley's Nick Pope against Liverpool (19). Pope has made 14 saves in his last two games at Anfield, including six tonight.\n\nLiverpool have another big game on Sunday against rivals Manchester United in the FA Cup. That game is live on the BBC (17:00 GMT). Burnley travel to Fulham in the same competition on the same day (14:30).\n• None Offside, Burnley. Dwight McNeil tries a through ball, but Chris Wood is caught offside.\n• None Attempt blocked. Takumi Minamino (Liverpool) left footed shot from outside the box is blocked.\n• None Attempt missed. Dwight McNeil (Burnley) left footed shot from the left side of the box is close, but misses the top left corner. Assisted by Ashley Barnes.\n• None Attempt blocked. Roberto Firmino (Liverpool) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Trent Alexander-Arnold.\n• None Attempt missed. Trent Alexander-Arnold (Liverpool) right footed shot from the right side of the box misses to the left. Assisted by Sadio Mané with a cross.\n• None Joel Matip (Liverpool) is shown the yellow card for hand ball.\n• None Attempt blocked. Mohamed Salah (Liverpool) left footed shot from the right side of the box is blocked. Assisted by Sadio Mané.\n• None Goal! Liverpool 0, Burnley 1. Ashley Barnes (Burnley) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the bottom right corner.\n• None Penalty conceded by Alisson (Liverpool) after a foul in the penalty area.\n• None Attempt blocked. Sadio Mané (Liverpool) right footed shot from the left side of the box is blocked. Assisted by Andrew Robertson. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None You can stream five fourth-round games live on the BBC this weekend, including Liverpool's trip to Manchester United. Find out more here.", "Nissan's car plant in Sunderland is the UK's biggest and employs 6,000 people directly\n\nJapanese car maker Nissan has told the BBC its Sunderland plant is secure for the long term as a result of the trade deal reached between the UK and the EU.\n\nIt said it will move additional battery production close to the plant where it has 6,000 direct employees and supports nearly 70,000 jobs in the supply chain.\n\nCurrently, the batteries in its Leaf electric cars are imported from Japan.\n\nNissan would not confirm if this would mean additional jobs at Sunderland, which is the UK's largest car plant.\n\nManufacturing the more powerful batteries in the UK will ensure its cars comply with trade rules agreed with the EU requiring at least 55% of the car's value to be derived from either the UK or the EU to qualify for zero tariffs when exported to the EU.\n\nSome 70% of the cars made in Sunderland are exported and the vast majority of them are sold in the EU.\n\nNissan had issued stark warnings last year that if the UK left the EU without a trade deal, the resulting tariffs on cars and components would make the Sunderland plant \"unsustainable\".\n\nNissan's chief operating officer Ashwani Gupta told the BBC: \"The Brexit deal is positive for Nissan. Being the largest automaker in the UK we are taking this opportunity to redefine auto-making in the UK.\n\nNissan's Ashwani Gupta said the Brexit deal had created a 'competitive environment'\n\n\"It has created a competitive environment for Sunderland, not just inside the UK but outside as well.\n\n\"We've decided to localise the manufacture of the 62kWh battery in Sunderland so that all our products qualify [for tariff-free export to the EU]. We are committed to Sunderland for the long term under the business conditions that have been agreed.\"\n\nIt came as Nissan paused one of its two production lines in Sunderland on Friday as disruption at ports caused by the pandemic affected its supply chain.\n\nThe company said the move would affect the line which produces the Qashqai and Leaf, but work would resume next week.\n\nBusiness Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng welcomed the firm's endorsement of Sunderland as a manufacturing base.\n\n\"Nissan's decision represents a genuine belief in Britain and a huge vote of confidence in our economy thanks to the certainty our trade deal with the EU delivers,\" he said.\n\n\"For the dedicated and highly-skilled workforce in Sunderland, it means the city will be home to Nissan's latest models for years to come and positions the company to capitalise on the wealth of benefits that will flow from electric vehicle production.\"\n\nIt's particularly welcome after the more guarded comments from the boss of Vauxhall's parent company last week.\n\nSpeaking as the tie-up between Fiat Chrsyler and Peugeot Citroen was christened with new umbrella name Stellantis, boss Carlos Tavares said that the future of its Ellesmere Port plant depended on the support the UK government was prepared to offer after its decision to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars after 2030.\n\n\"If you change, brutally, the rules and if you restrict the rules for business then there is at one point in time a problem,\" he said.\n\nLooking forward, he said it would make more sense to locate an electric vehicle factory closer to the larger EU market.\n\nIndustry voices welcomed the news from Nissan but reinforced the message from Vauxhall's owners that the government needs to do more to secure the future of the car industry as it electrifies.\n\n\"This is obviously good news and will help the Nissan Leaf avoid any future tariffs, but we are going to need to see a lot more investment in battery production in the UK if we are to preserve the UK as a car manufacturer and exporter,\" said Professor David Bailey of Warwick University.\n\nThe head of trade body the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders agreed.\n\n\"The battery plant in Sunderland may be enough for Nissan's near-term plans to build tens of thousands of electric cars but the UK made 1.5 million cars last year and all will be partly electric by 2030,\" Mike Hawes said.\n\nAndy Palmer, former boss of Aston Martin and current chairman of electric bus maker Switch Mobility, has gone further. He says that 800,000 jobs are at risk if the UK government doesn't act now to foster battery investment.\n\n\"Without electric vehicle batteries made in the UK, the country's auto industry risks becoming an antiquated relic and overtaken by China, Japan, America and Europe.\"\n\nHe urged the UK government to use every lever at its disposal to make the UK attractive.\n\nUK car investment has fallen sharply since the UK voted to leave the EU.\n\nIn the five years to 2016 it averaged £3.5bn per year. In the four years since it has averaged around £1bn - a fall of 71% at a time when the technology and map of car production are going through their biggest revolution since the car was invented.\n\nThe Nissan decision is therefore a very welcome boost to the UK which is in an international scramble for the investment of the future which is happening right now.", "Police warned that unsanctioned protests would be \"immediately suppressed\"\n\nRussian police have detained close aides of the jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny, as a string of nationwide protests gets under way.\n\nPolice have broken up demonstrations in the eastern Khabarovsk region, amid stern warnings for people to stay home.\n\nMr Navalny's supporters flooded social media with calls to rally at protests expected in dozens of cities later.\n\nHe is Russian leader Vladimir Putin's most high-profile critic.\n\nHe was arrested last Sunday after he flew back to Moscow from Berlin, where he had been recovering from a near-fatal nerve agent attack in Russia last August.\n\nOn his return, he was immediately taken into custody and found guilty of violating parole conditions. He says it is a trumped-up case designed to silence him.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Alexei Navalny was filmed by the BBC saying goodbye to his wife and then being led away by authorities\n\nMore than 60m people have watched his new video about President Vladimir Putin's alleged luxury Black Sea palace.\n\nThe Kremlin denies the property belongs to the president.\n\nAmong those detained in Moscow on Thursday were his spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, and one of his lawyers, Lyubov Sobol. They face fines or short jail terms.\n\nMs Sobol, who has a young child, was later released. But Ms Yarmysh has now been jailed for nine days.\n\nProminent Navalny activists are also being held in the cities of Vladivostok, Novosibirsk and Krasnodar.\n\nUnauthorised rallies are being planned in more than 60 cities across Russia for Saturday. Moscow police say any unauthorised demonstrations and provocations will be \"immediately suppressed\".\n\nA thousand people were reported to have come onto the streets in the Khabarovsk region, with some of them already detained.\n\nMr Navalny's wife Yulia, who travelled back to Russia with him from Germany, said she would demonstrate in Moscow \"for myself, for him, for our children, for the values and the ideals that we share\".\n\nAlexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has drawn millions of followers on social media, through slickly produced videos alleging large-scale official corruption. He has long denounced Mr Putin's administration as \"feudal\" and full of \"crooks and thieves\".\n\nFor a long time the Russian authorities made out that Alexei Navalny was irrelevant. Just a blogger. With a tiny following. No threat whatsoever.\n\nRecent events suggest the opposite. First Mr Navalny was targeted with a nerve agent, allegedly by a secret group of FSB state security hitmen. Instead of investigating the poisoning, Russia is investigating him: on his return from Germany the Kremlin critic was arrested.\n\nHaving put Mr Navalny behind bars, the authorities are putting pressure on his supporters. The Kremlin's greatest fear is of a Ukraine-style revolution in Russia that would sweep away those in power.\n\nThere's no indication that such a scenario is imminent. But with economic problems growing, the Kremlin will worry that Mr Navalny could act as a lightning rod for protest sentiment. That explains the police crackdown on Navalny allies ahead of Saturday's potential protests.\n\nPlus, this is getting personal. Mr Navalny's video about \"Putin's Palace\" on the Black Sea was designed to cause maximum embarrassment to the Russian president.\n\nIn the \"Putin's palace\" video Mr Navalny alleges that rich businessmen close to Mr Putin paid for a sumptuous 17,691sq m (190,424sq ft) palace for him at Gelendzhik, by the Black Sea.\n\nIt is alleged to have a casino, a theatre and many other comforts, including a vineyard and tea house in the sprawling grounds. The Kremlin dismissed the YouTube video as a \"pseudo-investigation\" aimed at earning money for Mr Navalny.\n\nProsecutors have warned people against protesting in support of Mr Navalny on Saturday. Russia's education ministry has told parents not to allow their children to attend.\n\nSome Russian celebrities in the arts and sports have pledged support for Mr Navalny. They include ice hockey star Artemi Panarin.\n\nFormer world chess champion Garry Kasparov - now a leading anti-Putin activist based in the US - tweeted that pro-Navalny posts were being widely blocked in Russia.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Garry Kasparov This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIn a phone call to President Putin on Friday, EU Council President Charles Michel voiced \"grave concern\" about the jailing of Mr Navalny.\n\nMr Michel said the EU was \"united in its call on Russia to swiftly release Mr Navalny and proceed with the investigation into the assassination attempt on him, in full transparency and without further delay\".\n\nIn October, the EU imposed sanctions on six top Russian officials and a Russian chemical weapons research centre over the Novichok poisoning of Mr Navalny.\n\nThe Kremlin retaliated with tit-for-tat sanctions, denying any role in the attack and rejecting the expert finding that the Russian nerve agent had been used.\n\nThe Black Sea palace allegedly features a casino, an ice rink and a vineyard\n\nThe social media app TikTok has a flood of videos from Russians promoting the protests planned for Saturday. The messages about Mr Navalny have been going viral for several days.\n\nA well-known Russian TikTok user, Slava Varfolomeyev, told BBC Russian: \"I go on TikTok and find that every third video is about 'Putin's palace', the detention of Navalny and the 23 January rally!\"\n\nHe said that on Thursday \"this swelled to a maximum: practically seven out of every 10 videos were on that topic [Navalny]\". TikTok's popularity is based on short-form videos.\n\nOn Wednesday Russia's official media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, demanded that TikTok take down any information \"encouraging minors to act illegally\", threatening large fines.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Teresa Dalling says a river of orange water rushed through the village on Thursday\n\nSerious flooding which forced villagers from their homes was potentially caused by a mine shaft \"blow out\" during Storm Christoph, authorities have said.\n\nAbout 80 people were evacuated as water rushed through Skewen, Neath Port Talbot, on Thursday.\n\nResidents have been told they will not be able to return home this weekend or \"possibly longer\".\n\nThe Coal Authority said initial checks suggested water had built up in the shaft and flooded the village.\n\nCarl Banton, from the Coal Authority, said there had been a \"tremendous amount\" of rain recently and potentially a blockage in the drainage system could have caused the mine shaft to \"blow out\".\n\nMr Banton reassured people that officers had visually checked other mine shafts in the area and were \"not concerned\" any would collapse.\n\n\"The mine shaft in question is the one that was on actually on the water level, it has found its point of weakness,\" he said.\n\nCarl Banton said that while investigations were ongoing heavy rain may have overwhelmed the mine shaft\n\nA major incident was declared as water rushed into the village on Thursday, leaving eight streets underwater as Storm Christoph caused widespread flooding across Wales.\n\nOn Friday, as firefighters continued to pump water out of the village, Natural Resources Wales (NRW) confirmed the Tennant Canal had been polluted \"from mine water\".\n\nLate on Friday evening, Neath Port Talbot council said, for safety reasons, people forced to leave their homes would \"not be able to return home this weekend, and the wait could possibly longer\".\n\nA support centre will open at Abbey Primary School from Saturday, with council officers on site to help people access emergency support.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe Coal Authority, which manages the effects of historical coal mining, are investigating the cause of the flooding.\n\nMr Banton said initial findings showed there may have been a build-up of water on the hillside which had \"found its way out\" through the mine shaft, flooding the village.\n\n\"The flow appears to be subsiding... but what we are unsure of is if there is a feed of additional water into the mine workings, from the extensive mine workings on the hillside,\" he added.\n\nAt least 80 people have had to leave their homes in the village after flooding\n\nMr Banton said officers would drill down into the shaft and investigate on Saturday, in the hope that people could soon be allowed back into their homes.\n\n\"A lot of the mining in this area is very old... some of it dates back to the early 1800s... we have no details of how the shaft in question here was originally filled or capped,\" he said.\n\n\"We will ensure the mine shaft is properly capped and sorted out.\"\n\nMartyn Evans, of NRW, said officers were looking at how to minimise the risk of pollution to nearby rivers, and investigating any impacts on the River Neath.\n\n\"We have also carried out tests on other watercourses in the vicinity of the incident. Results indicate there has been no significant impact on those at present,\" he said.\n\nOn Thursday night a further 20 homes were evacuated by emergency services as the water continued to rush through the village.\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford confirmed on Friday financial support would be made available to people affected by the recent floods, up to £1,000 per household.\n\n\"This is the same level of support available a year ago when storms Ciara and Dennis hit Wales, just before the pandemic,\" he said.\n\nThe water is warmer than the air and is creating a mist along Dynevor Road\n\nSkewen resident John Thomas said he returned home from a funeral with wife Lynne on Thursday to find their house had turned into \"a lake\", he told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast.\n\nHe said: \"The water was around the level of the bottom of the doors so we couldn't go in, so we just had to stand there and watch this orange-coloured water just piling up and up and up.\"\n\nMr Thomas said that with water up to his waist, he was unable to get in to rescue possessions.\n\nHe added: \"We're in a bit of a dip on the road, so you could see it gradually coming up, they were worried it might have been a sinkhole because of the coal mines.\n\n\"It's definitely mine workings, just by looking at the colour of the water, it's an orange colour.\n\n\"Other people who were evacuated had the chance to move things upstairs, I didn't have a chance to do that because I couldn't get in to it.\"\n\nThe couple are now staying with their daughter, with everyone else who was evacuated from their homes finding accommodation and told to avoid the area.\n\nMore than 30 residents of Cwrt-Clwydi-Gwyn care home were among those moved as a precaution.\n\nIt was a sleepless night for Skewen resident Teresa Dalling\n\nTeresa Dalling, who lives in Dynevor Road, said she had spent the night fearing for her safety.\n\n\"I haven't slept. I was up the back door every two hours checking the water level,\" she said.\n\n\"I didn't know we lived near old mines and if there's been a collapse, my fear is more could follow and that's terrifying.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Stephen Kinnock This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAs well as properties, vehicles were submerged in water\n\nUp to 45 firefighters were involved at the scene at the height of the flooding.\n\nIn a joint statement, the police, fire service and Neath Port Talbot Council urged people not to return to their homes until it was safe.\n\nCh Supt Trudi Meyrick said: \"We appreciate people are eager to get back to their homes and we are working with partners to allow this to happen as soon as it is safe to do so.\n\n\"In the meantime we ask people to please be patient as their safety is our top priority.\"\n\nIn one home, floodwater can be seen filling the living room\n\nFirefighters are continuing to pump water out of the village where people were forced to leave their homes\n\nDeputy Chief Fire Officer Roger Thomas, of Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service, said firefighters remained in the village, pumping out water.\n\nHe said: \"We will continue to monitor the situation and support our partner agencies and those affected over the next few days.\"\n\nHomes were evacuated at Goshen Park, in Skewen\n\nNeath Port Talbot council said a local rest centre was available, and measures had been put in place to protect against Covid-19.\n\nChief executive Karen Jones said they would continue to support residents who had to leave their homes and they would ensure others had a safe place to go if further evacuations were necessary.\n\nNetwork Rail said engineers had checked for any potential damage to the railway line, but had found no \"cause for concern\".\n\nThe water has rushed through the streets of the town\n\nA severe flood warning remains in force for the Lower Dee Valley, from Llangollen to Trevalyn Meadows.\n\nThree flood warnings are in place for the River Wye at Monmouth, River Ritec at Tenby, and Bangor-on-Dee, where people were forced to leave their homes on Thursday as flooding saw a major incident declared. Eleven flood alerts are also in place.\n\nSnow and ice could also exacerbate issues for emergency services and those forced to leave their homes, with temperatures forecast to plummet in coming days.", "Last updated on .From the section Tennis\n\nFive-time finalist Andy Murray will miss the Australian Open after a solution to find a \"workable quarantine\" following his positive test for coronavirus could not be found.\n\nThe 33-year-old Briton was set to fly out to Melbourne last week, but was not allowed to travel on a charter flight after being found to have Covid-19.\n\nThe former world number one had hoped to travel safely and compete as planned on the back of a negative test.\n\nMurray said he was \"gutted\" not to go.\n\nHe was asymptomatic and is now out of self-isolation, but finding a way for him to travel to Australia and then going into quarantine before the tournament starts on 8 February proved too difficult.\n\n\"We've been in constant dialogue with Tennis Australia to try and find a solution which would allow some form of workable quarantine, but we couldn't make it work,\" said Murray.\n\n\"I want to thank everyone there for their efforts. I'm devastated not to be playing out in Australia. It's a country and tournament that I love.\"\n\nMurray was able to play only seven official matches in 2020 because of a lingering pelvic injury, and the five-month suspension of the tours because of the pandemic.\n\nAt 123rd in the world, he was ranked too low to gain direct entry into Australian Open so the three-time Grand Slam champion was given a wildcard.\n\nThe Australian Open at Melbourne Park is starting three weeks later than usual because of the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nPlayers had to test negative before taking one of the 15 chartered flights - which were put on last week by tournament organisers and operated at 25% capacity - to Australia.\n\nOn arrival, the players and their support staff went straight into a 14-day quarantine under the conditions imposed by the Australian government.\n\nThat agreement allowed them out of their rooms for up to five hours a day for food and practice.\n\nHowever, 72 players have been confined to their rooms in a tougher quarantine - which led to some complaints and creative ways of staying fit - after they travelled on three flights where positive cases were found on arrival.\n\nHaving missed his flight to Melbourne, and therefore last weekend's window for the players to begin 14 days of quarantine, Murray was always up against it.\n\nThere are no health issues, and no injury concerns, and Murray had been hoping he could make it to Australia to complete quarantine in time to play a first-round match on either 8 or 9 February.\n\nBut the only \"workable quarantine\" would have included five hours out of his room every day. This was no longer available, and no player - irrespective of age or injury history - would want to play a Grand Slam first-round match just hours after two weeks in a hotel room.\n\nMurray is understandably devastated: he knows that at 33, and with two hip operations behind him, he cannot guarantee there will be another opportunity.\n\nBut it would have been a long way to travel potentially to lose in the first round, and receiving a special exemption may not have sat well with Murray over time.\n\nInstead, he will work with his team on his next move. Montpellier and Rotterdam are the next two ATP tournaments in Europe, although nothing is easy with Covid travel restrictions.\n• None You can stream five fourth-round games live on the BBC this weekend, including Liverpool's trip to Manchester United. Find out more here.", "Jane Midgley says she needs answers about the death of her son, Simon\n\nThe mother of a man killed in a fire at a hotel on the shores of Loch Lomond more than two years ago has said it is \"torture\" not knowing why he died.\n\nSimon Midgley, 32, and Richard Dyson, 38, died in the fire which fire broke out at the Cameron House Hotel in 2017.\n\nJane Midgley said she needs answers about what led to Simon's death.\n\nThe Crown Office said it was committed to ensuring the circumstances around the deaths were aired in an \"appropriate legal forum\".\n\nMs Midgley said every day without answers was like the day she found out about his death.\n\n\"I just live it every single day and I can't cope with it much longer,\" she said. \"I need to know why they are not here and it's so difficult.\n\n\"I need answers. Why are these boys not here anymore? Why did this happen? Nearly three years on, no one is telling me.\"\n\nRichard Dyson and Simon Midgley were thought to be on a winter break in Scotland\n\nShe told BBC Scotland she wakes up during the night thinking about her son, asking herself \"has this really happened?\".\n\n\"Nearly three years on, should I still be feeling this hurt and pain?\"\n\nAfter the fire, the emergency services conducted investigations.\n\nWhile this can be a lengthy process, reports from the fire service and the police were passed to the Crown months ago.\n\nMs Midgley criticised prosecutors for not providing her with more information. She added she thinks they should be in contact with her more regularly than every four weeks.\n\nShe said: \"When the Crown say that they regularly update the family and are in regular contact that is always to say... 'it's still ongoing', 'we'll update you with anything significant', 'it's complicated'.\"\n\nShe added that there were many questions she still wanted answers to.\n\n\"The most important thing is finding out why Simon couldn't get out of that hotel that night - what went wrong. I have no idea, I've got to understand, I just need the answers.\n\n\"I need to know how it happened. I need to know why the boys didn't get out of that hotel when it was on fire, how it started, where it started, why they could not get out, could it have been prevented... it is pure torture.\"\n\nFire broke out at the Cameron House hotel in 2017\n\nMr Midgley was a freelance writer with the Evening Standard. Following his death the newspaper's editor, George Osbourne, paid tribute to Mr Midgley's \"adventurous spirit\".\n\nA spokesman for the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service said: \"Our staff have been in regular contact with the nearest relatives and provided them with information at every stage.\n\n\"The information that can be shared while a case is being investigated is limited so as not to prejudice any potential proceedings.\n\n\"The Crown‎ is committed to ensuring that the facts and circumstances surrounding the deaths of Simon Midgley and Richard Dyson are thoroughly investigated by the relevant agencies, fully considered by COPFS and, in due course, aired in an appropriate legal forum.\n\n\"The nearest relatives will continue to be kept updated in relation to any significant developments.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Amy says her flat isn't worth anything until it is made safe\n\nThe government's fund to pay for the removal of dangerous cladding is woefully inadequate, oversubscribed and taking too long to make buildings safe, campaigners say.\n\nMore than three and a half years since the Grenfell Tower fire which killed 72 people, an estimated 700,000 people are still living in high-rise blocks with flammable cladding.\n\nThe £1.6bn Building Safety Programme was set up in 2019. Concerns have emerged about the contract that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government requires applicants to the fund, usually managing agents or building owners, to sign.\n\nA clause in the contract, seen by the BBC, indicates applicants will be financially liable for any repair work not covered by the fund.\n\nThe BBC has learnt that some managing agents are refusing to sign the document, further delaying the repair work, and have written to the government asking ministers to clarify the position.\n\nChristian Hansen, a solicitor at Bindmans LLP specialising in housing law and fire safety claims, said the contract showed that \"there's going to be a significant shortfall between the costs of the [repair] works that are required and the funding provided under the scheme\".\n\n\"Someone is going to need to pick up the bill and pay the difference. This contract makes clear it's going to be the leaseholders and for many, this could be tens of thousands of pounds, potentially ruinous costs,\" he warned.\n\nMr Hansen said that leaseholders wanted the focus of government action \"to be on the manufacturers of the defective materials and construction companies who built these buildings\".\n\n\"At the moment, they are the ones profiting from putting people's lives at risk.\"\n\n\"It is absolutely terrifying knowing that you are stuck here,\" says Amy\n\nFirst-time buyer Amy Cottenden, who is 28, bought a one-bed flat in Metis Tower in the centre of Sheffield for £85,000 in 2017.\n\nInspections of the 14-storey building in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy revealed it had the same type of flammable ACM cladding and other safety faults.\n\nWork to remove the cladding started last month, but Ms Cottenden, who is a frontline NHS health worker, is frustrated at what she describes as a lack of progress.\n\n\"The pace of work is extremely slow. So far, they've put scaffolding up and removed three panels. They have told us it's going to take between 12 and 24 months just to take the cladding off,\" she said.\n\n\"It is absolutely terrifying knowing that you are stuck here. With lockdown, they are saying not to go out, but you are in a building where all you want to do is not be in it. You can't leave. You can't sell. My flat isn't worth anything until it is made safe.\"\n\nWhile the government's Building Safety Fund is paying for the Grenfell-style cladding to be removed, the building has other fire safety faults, including missing fire breaks, that aren't covered by the scheme.\n\nIt could cost up to £6m to fix. Flat owners fear they may face huge bills of up to £50,000 each.\n\n\"We can't pay it and we shouldn't have to pay it. It is not our fault. We could all go bankrupt because of this,\" Ms Cottenden said.\n\nA spokesperson for Rendall & Rittner, the company which manages Metis Tower, said government funding to remove ACM cladding had been approved totalling £6.3m.\n\nHowever, an application to the same fund to pay for the removal of other types of unsafe cladding was rejected and the company has appealed against that decision.\n\nThe company added: \"We understand and sympathise with residents and owners about the uncertainty that this situation is causing and will do all we can to assist.\"\n\nWhat started as a cladding scandal has now become a much wider building safety crisis, exposing decades of regulatory failure.\n\nSafety inspections have revealed that many buildings have other serious faults, including missing fire breaks, flammable balconies and defective insulation. None of that is covered by the government's Building Safety Fund.\n\nDr Nigel Glen, the chief executive of ARMA, the trade association for residential leasehold management, said the additional costs that leaseholders were currently facing for non-cladding-related issues remained a huge concern.\n\n\"In the longer term, the draining of reserve funds will also mean that in the years to come, any major works that were being saved up for, such as a new roof or lift repairs, will have to be funded anew by the leaseholders,\" he added.\n\nA spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said that despite the pandemic, significant progress had been made to remove dangerous cladding, but \"building safety remains the responsibility of the building owner and we expect them to ensure any necessary work is carried out safely and effectively\".\n\n\"All applicants to the Building Safety Fund are told the amount of funding they have been awarded before being asked to sign contracts - this is clearly explained in the guidance,\" the spokesperson added.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. This is the moment a police officer broke up a house party on Saturday\n\nA minority still breaking Covid lockdown rules could make the pandemic \"stretch longer\" in Wales, a senior police officer has warned.\n\nThe \"gold commander\" for policing lockdown across the Gwent force area said he wanted to thank the vast majority for sticking to the law.\n\nBut Chief Superintendent Mark Hobrough said those \"blatantly flouting\" rules would face enforcement action.\n\nNearly 3,800 fines have been issued in Wales for Covid rule breaches.\n\nThe latest figures released by UK police forces revealed nearly three-quarters of those fines went to men, and the largest group falling foul of Covid rules were aged between 18 and 24.\n\nCh Supt Hobrough, who oversees Gwent Police's response to Covid-19, said he and his officers had seen a change in the way the public responded to the restrictions since the first lockdown was announced in March 2020.\n\n\"When it first started there was certainly a lack of understanding among the public,\" he said.\n\n\"We were called for advice and questions on what was allowed or not allowed, which we've certainly seen diminish.\"\n\nHe said initially his force was dealing with breaches of regulations by pubs and bars, or people holding house parties.\n\n\"That has changed over time. We still have experiences of house parties and people congregating in houses, which just isn't allowed obviously.\n\n\"But I think we are also seeing breaches in relation to people congregating in beauty spots and maybe not exercising in line with the requirements.\"\n\nAccording to the National Police Chiefs' Council, there were 3,770 fixed penalty notices issues by the four Welsh forces between the last Friday in March and 20 December last year.\n\nOf those fines, 2,188 were for breaching rules on movement restrictions, while 823 faced penalties for gathering in private properties outside their own households.\n\nA further 113 notices were issued to individuals for staying in Wales when it was not their main residence, and 89 were hit with fines for entering or leaving local health protection areas, when many counties in Wales had separate travel restrictions in place in the autumn.\n\nThe figures also reveal that just two fines were issued in the period for failing to wear a face covering in designated indoor areas.\n\nSgt Dan Wise says enforcement is sometimes the only option for his team\n\nOut on the streets of Newport, and around the rest of the Gwent force area, the officers on the ground said they wanted to educate the public whenever rules changed, but they will enforce clear breaches.\n\n\"Some of the things people have been stopped for are travelling into Wales to look at the snow,\" said Sgt Dan Wise, as he carried out checks on motorists in Newport.\n\n\"Others are travelling to local beauty spots to exercise. Obviously, these are things that are not acceptable.\"\n\nHe said as the pandemic continues, with high numbers of cases and given how easily the virus can spread, \"we will look to enforce where people are blatantly flouting the rules\".\n\nAt the Gwent Police headquarters, Ch Supt Hobrough said he had this message for the minority of \"those people who aren't abiding\" by the rules: \"It would very much be within everybody's interest for them to reflect on the way they are conducting themselves.\n\n\"Because that minority of people who aren't abiding are possibly making this pandemic stretch longer.\"\n• None Coronavirus legislation and guidance on the law - GOV.WALES The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "David and Victoria Beckham have paid themselves £21m from their sports and media business since 2019, according to the their latest accounts.\n\nThis is despite continued heavy losses at Ms Beckham's fashion business, where trade has worsened during the pandemic.\n\nProfit at David Beckham Ventures Limited (DBVL), the brand management firm owned by the former footballer and his wife, fell £3.5m to £11.3m in 2019.\n\nThis was in part due to money spent on expansion and charitable donations.\n\nHowever, the celebrity couple still paid themselves a £14.5m dividend at the end of 2019, accounts show, and took a further £7.1m in 2020.\n\nA spokesman attributed the payments to \"profitable performance\" at DBVL, which among other things manages Mr Beckham's strategic partnerships with Adidas and Haig Club whisky.\n\nHe also noted that the company's revenue climbed by £600,000 in 2019 to £16.2m.\n\nHowever, Victoria Beckham Holdings (VBHL), which manages the former Spice Girl's fashion label, fared much worse during that time.\n\nLosses at the business - which is also backed by the Beckhams' former business partner Simon Fuller and private equity firm NEO investment Partners - widened to £16.6m during the year, following a loss of £12.5m in 2018.\n\nIt marked the seventh year the brand has been in the red since it was founded in 2008.\n\nVBHL blamed costs associated with the launch of the Victoria Beckham Beauty business, a new cosmetics range in which the group has an 85% shareholding.\n\nIt also noted that total sales across the whole business were up by 7% in 2019.\n\nNevertheless, auditors BDO, who signed off on the accounts, warned that the business was now reliant on shareholder support to keep going which could \"cast significant doubt on the company's ability to continue as a going concern\".\n\nAs the pandemic hammered the business last April, VBHL had to borrow £9.2m from its shareholders to repay an outstanding bank loan to HSBC after breaking its debt covenants.\n\nVBHL said it was doing all it could to \"navigate\" the coronavirus crisis, including taking \"all actions possible to conserve cash\".\n\n\"All non-essential expenditure is being deferred and hiring freezes have been implemented for open positions.to enable the company to navigate through this pandemic,\" it said.", "The company said its milk processing was highly automated with no risk to the products caused by the virus outbreak\n\nOne worker at a dairy has died after contracting coronavirus and 95 others are self-isolating.\n\nMuller Milk & Ingredients said 47 staff members who work at the company's dairy near Bridgwater, Somerset, have tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nIt said it was now testing all 300 workers at its site in North Petherton.\n\nA spokesman for the firm said the safety of its products had not been affected by the outbreak at its factory.\n\nIt was working with Public Health England and the council to help with mass testing, he added.\n\nThe employee was taken to hospital but died. The firm said its thoughts were with the worker's family and friends.\n\nProduction has since been reduced at the site.\n\nThe spokesman added: \"It is important to stress that fresh milk processing is highly automated ensuring no risk to products, with our Bridgwater facility one of the most modern dairies in the UK.\n\n\"As we have done throughout the pandemic, we are placing the safety of our employees first and following best practice as set down by the Health and Safety Executive.\n\n\"Standard measures in place include the use of facemasks, distancing, enhanced deep cleaning and hygiene, underpinned by a programme of e-learning, information and audits to ensure compliance and awareness of the measures.\"\n\nSomerset County Council said it was working closely with Public Health England and the factory and that further testing was being done throughout Thursday.\n\n\"The [council's] rapid outbreak testing team is carrying out further workforce testing today, for workers who were not present on Monday shifts.\n\n\"The testing on Monday identified a number of staff who were positive but asymptomatic, who are now isolating,\" a spokesman said.", "Elizabeth Kerr and Simon O'Brien were married moments before he was put on a mechanical ventilator\n\nAn engaged couple taken to hospital in the same ambulance with Covid-19 were able to marry moments before the man was sedated and put on a ventilator.\n\nElizabeth Kerr, 31, and Simon O'Brien, 36, were taken to Milton Keynes University Hospital with breathing difficulties on 9 January.\n\nStaff rallied to arrange a wedding as the groom's condition worsened.\n\nThey held off intubating Mr O'Brien so the ceremony could go ahead. The couple are now recovering in hospital.\n\nMrs Kerr, a nurse, and Mr O'Brien had planned to marry in June.\n\nBoth contracted the disease and were taken to hospital together when their oxygen levels fell dangerously low.\n\nThey were placed on separate wards but when Mrs Kerr told nurse Hannah Cannon about their wedding plans, she asked her if they would like to marry in the hospital.\n\nMrs Kerr said she was told it could be their only chance.\n\n\"Those are words I never, ever want to hear again,\" she said.\n\nA photo on Mrs Kerr's phone shows the wedding took place in the beds of the intensive care unit\n\nHowever, while staff were securing the wedding licence, Mr O'Brien's condition further deteriorated and on 12 January he was placed on the intensive care unit, to be put on a ventilator.\n\nThey waited to intubate him just long enough for the ceremony to go ahead.\n\nMs Cannon said: \"With lots of teamwork... we were able to give them a wedding, not necessarily the wedding that they would have initially intended, but certainly something positive, remarkable and memorable for them to really hold on to.\"\n\nShe filmed the marriage for the couple's families and friends, and catering staff at the hospital provided a cake.\n\nShortly after saying \"I do\", Mr O'Brien was placed on the ventilator.\n\nThe couple have now been reunited on a recovery ward and were able to kiss for the first time since being married.\n\nMrs Kerr said having the wedding meant \"everything\" to them.\n\n\"If we hadn't had each other and we hadn't been given that opportunity to get married, I don't think both of us would be here now,\" she added.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The White House has just put out a statement marking the 48th anniversary of Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court decision that essentially legalised the right to abortion.\n\n\"In the past four years, reproductive health, including the right to choose, has been under relentless and extreme attack,\" the statement from Biden and Harris begins .\n\nThey go on to say they are committed to \"codifying\" the judgement, which means pass legislation through Congress that enshrines abortion access into law.\n\nThey will also appoint judges who will support abortion access, they say. Trump, during his time in office, was able to give the Supreme Court a conservative majority, making anti-abortion activists hopeful that Roe v Wade could eventually be overturned.\n\nBiden was the only candidate during the primary to say he endorsed the so-called Hyde Amendment, which says that no federal funds can go towards abortions. After nearly all 22 other candidates came out against the Hyde Amendment, he reversed his stance.\n\nAlthough abortion is technically legal across the US, multiple states have instituted laws that make it nearly impossible in practice. Abortion activists hope that a law would make it more difficult for local governments to restrict access.", "Michelle O'Neill and Arlene Foster were advised restrictions may have to remain in place until after Easter\n\nCoronavirus lockdown restrictions in Northern Ireland will be extended until 5 March, the first and deputy first ministers have said.\n\nThe executive backed the health minister's proposal on Thursday and will review the move on 18 February.\n\nBut ministers were also told that restrictions may have to remain in place until after the Easter holidays.\n\nA lockdown closing non-essential retailers and encouraging employees to work from home began after Christmas.\n\nFamily gatherings are prohibited and people have been ordered to stay at home for all but essential reasons.\n\nSchools are closed to most pupils until after February's half-term but a paper looking at reopening will be put to ministers at next week's executive meeting.\n\nThe lockdown came in response to a spike in the number of cases of coronavirus, which followed a relaxation of some rules in the run-up to Christmas.\n\nFirst Minister Arlene Foster said extending the restrictions was an \"appropriate and necessary response\" to tackle the \"imminent threat\" posed by Covid-19.\n\nShe said she understood it would be difficult for many people to accept, given the uncertainty facing families and businesses, but added: \"To not press forward would risk all of the hard-won gains.\"\n\nThe first and deputy first ministers were right to state just how tough this decision will be for many people.\n\nBut there's an acceptance among the public that restrictions would have to be extended, given how bad things are in our hospitals.\n\nTheir decision also suggests politicians have perhaps learned from the last wave of the pandemic, when restrictions were turned on and off sporadically, and the impact that had both on cases and the messaging.\n\nThey're not alone in sustaining tough lockdown measures, with other UK nations and the Republic of Ireland also keeping their restrictions in place for several more weeks.\n\nBeyond that, it is thought health officials also want to ensure the vaccination programme is also \"well advanced\" before any restrictions are relaxed.\n\nThe hope is that, by spring, the picture will have improved significantly.\n\nUntil then the price we are paying for relaxations before Christmas looks likely to keep rising.\n\nDeputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill said she recognised the executive was asking a lot of everybody but insisted the measures were important.\n\n\"We don't know what will come after [5 March],\" she said.\n\nMs O'Neill said there was a commitment not to keep restrictions in place longer than necessary but decisions would have to be taken in line with the health advice and concerns about a new variant of the virus which is more transmissible.\n\nThe executive's decision comes as another 21 deaths were recorded by the Department of Health on Thursday.\n\nThe reproductive rate of the virus - known as the R-number - had risen to about 1.8 due to Christmas relaxations.\n\nBut the latest estimate from the Department of Health says it is sitting between 0.65 and 0.85 for cases within the community but is still above one for hospital admissions and intensive care.\n\nWhile some may wonder why are restrictions are being extended when the executive's policy has always been based on this rate of infection, the difference is that this time around there are three times as many people in Northern Ireland's hospitals than there were in last April's peak.\n\nDaily case numbers are still significantly higher too.\n\nWhile ministers have agreed to keep the current restrictions in place until March, Health Minister Robin Swann said it was possible they could be needed until Easter, which this year falls in the first week of April.\n\nMinisters say they understand the extension of the lockdown will be difficult for people\n\nIt is understood this plan is being discussed across the four UK nations but ministers will have to consider that in the review next month.\n\nMinisters were also warned that restrictions would be eased on a step-by-step basis in line with reducing pressures on the health service and ensuring the vaccination programme is \"well advanced\" before any relaxations are agreed.\n\nMrs Foster pleaded with people struggling with their mental health during the lockdown to \"please seek help\".\n\nMore than 100 medically-trained military personnel are to be deployed to help health staff deal with the pressure the latest phase of the pandemic is placing on hospitals.\n\nThe chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride said the \"sustained pressure on our health service\" would probably last for three to four weeks.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland, 51 Covid-19 related deaths and 2,608 new cases of the virus were recorded on Thursday.\n\nSimon Hamilton, the chief executive of the Belfast Chamber of Trade and Commerce, said the extension of the lockdown would be of \"little surprise to most businesses\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Simon Hamilton This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe Stormont executive has agreed how to allocate almost £300m to help businesses, education, tourism and transport during the next phase of the lockdown.\n\nA total of £100m is going towards the Local Restrictions Support Scheme, the grant for business premises forced to closed due to the restrictions.\n\nThere will also be £16m for tourism and hospitality, two sectors which have largely been unable to operate.\n\nIn addition, two more support schemes for the sector have been opened.\n\nOne aimed at large tourism and hospitality businesses is offering a pot of £26m, with the Department for Economy having identified 250 businesses that will be eligible.\n\nThe other is a £4m scheme to support those who provide bed-and-breakfast accommodation.\n\nMore money is being made available to help businesses affected by the lockdown\n\nJanice Gault from the trade body the Northern Ireland Hotels Federation said the schemes were a \"real lifeline for the sector\".\n\n\"Trading over the last year has been limited with reserves now severely depleted and businesses operating in survival mode,\" she added.\n\nAlso among those to receive the extra cash will be limited company directors, who had not received support since March.\n\nLast week, a scheme was announced to give directors £1,000 grants which one director described as a \"kick in the teeth\" given that he had little to no income for the past 10 months.\n\nBut that scheme is to be boosted with another £20m so the payments on offer will more than treble to £3,500.\n\nLocal newspapers will also benefit from 12 months of rates relief.", "Mick Norcross, 57, was found dead at his home in Essex on Thursday\n\nFormer The Only Way Is Essex star Mick Norcross has died at the age of 57.\n\nThe businessman and father of Kirk Norcross, who also appeared in the ITV show, was found dead at his home in Bulphan at 15:15 GMT on Thursday.\n\nEssex Police said the death was not being treated as suspicious.\n\nIn tributes on social media, fellow Towie stars past and present, including Gemma Collins and James \"Arg\" Argent, called him \"one of the good guys\" and a \"true gentleman\".\n\nNorcross first appeared in the reality show in 2011 in his position as owner of Sugar Hut, a Brentwood nightclub which was often attended by the cast.\n\nHe left the show two years later, stating that the venue's prominent place in Towie had damaged its brand.\n\nThe star posted a tweet to his 505,000 followers on Thursday morning saying: \"At the end remind yourself that you did the best you could. And that's good enough.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Sugar Hut This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe club tweeted that \"Mr Sugarhut\" had been a \"very talented, friendly and fun guy\" and a \"true Essex legend, who will be sorely missed\".\n\nCollins, who briefly dated Norcross during their time on the show, shared a photo of them together on Instagram and said he had been \"one of the good guys\", while Argent tweeted that he had been \"a true gentleman and a very kind man\".\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by gemmacollins This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nTributes were also shared by Towie stars Lauren Goodger and Mario Falcone, with the latter tweeting that he was \"thankful I got the privilege of having you in my life\".\n\nIn another tweet, Mark Wright, the Towie star turned TV presenter and professional footballer, said he was \"a great man, an inspiration to many, always so polite and welcoming\".\n\nPresenter Denise Van Outen tweeted that he was \"such a lovely man\" while TV chef James Martin, posted that he was \"a true gentleman, who I had the pleasure to meet and spend evenings with over the years\".\n\nThe Only Way Is Essex posted a tribute on Instagram, saying the team behind the show were \"shocked and deeply saddened\".\n\nThey said: \"He was hugely popular with cast, crew and the audience alike. Charming, generous and host to many of Essex's most glamorous events, Mick will be missed by us all.\"\n\nAn Essex Police spokesman said officers \"were called to an address in Brentwood Road, Bulphan shortly before 15:15 on Thursday\" and \"sadly, a man inside was pronounced dead\".\n\nThe police spokesman said the death was \"not being treated as suspicious and a file will be prepared for the coroner\".\n\nIf you have been affected by any of the issues in this article, information and support is available from BBC Action Line.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "Police said they had been in contact with the family before the funeral took place \"in an attempt to ensure safety\"\n\nA funeral director has been fined £10,000 after police were called to a funeral with close to 150 people in attendance.\n\nHertfordshire Police said the large gathering in Welwyn Garden City on Thursday was reported to them by members of the public.\n\nCoronavirus rules mean a maximum of 30 people can attend a funeral.\n\nA second person was fined, by Bedfordshire Police, for when the gathering was in Arlesey, Bedfordshire.\n\nSupt Nick Caveney, of Hertfordshire Police, said: \"This was a clear and blatant breach of the current restrictions.\"\n\nHe said the fine was given to the funeral director \"for not managing this event correctly and advising their clients of the rules\".\n\n\"We implore all business owners to ensure they are following the restrictions safely and responsibly,\" he said.\n\n\"Flagrant breaches such as this will not be tolerated.\"\n\nThe force said it had worked with other agencies and the family in advance of the funeral \"in an attempt to ensure the safety of those attending and that of the wider public\".\n\nBut when officers attended they found the large number of people at the church, and a 41-year-old man from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, was handed the £10,000 fine after police served a fixed penalty notice.\n\nSeveral members of the public had contacted the force about the funeral at the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady, Queen of Apostles on Woodhall Lane.\n\nBedfordshire Police said a man in his 30s was issued with the fine over the gathering.\n\nCh Supt John Murphy from the force said: \"Fines and enforcement are a last resort for us, and we will always engage and work with families in the first instance.\n\n\"But we need to take firm action against those who brazenly decide to go against the guidelines outlined by the government and put a large number of people at risk.\"\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "Mr Olowo said his wife was \"as near perfection as it's possible to be\"\n\nA woman who died after having liposuction in Turkey had been fed up with people asking if she was pregnant, an inquest heard.\n\nAbimbola Ajoke Bamgbose, 38, of Dartford, Kent, died in August after having the treatment in Izmir.\n\nHusband Moyosore Olowo said he believed she was on holiday with friends until she called to say she was in pain.\n\nHe went to Turkey after she stopped calling and found she had been rushed to hospital for more surgery.\n\nMrs Bamgbose, who also had a Brazilian butt lift, died there two weeks later, the inquest in Maidstone heard.\n\nMr Olowo, a rail safety officer, said his wife paid £5,000 for the package with Mono Cosmetic Surgery as UK treatment was too expensive.\n\nDescribing why she wanted it, he said: \"When a woman is unhappy and getting feelings about her looks, the clothes she buys do not fit and people ask if she is pregnant because of her tummy, sometimes there is nothing we can do. We are powerless.\n\n\"I wasn't concerned. I told her 'you have three children'. I told her my tummy is bigger than hers.\"\n\nHe said his wife, a social worker who graduated with a first class degree, was \"as near perfection as it's possible to be\".\n\nMr Olowo said the medical director in Turkey \"confessed it had been a mistake\".\n\nAssistant coroner Alan Blundson recorded a narrative conclusion, and said: \"This is a tragic case, the more so because the surgery was elective cosmetic surgery.\n\n\"Whilst Mrs Bamgbose was determined to have it performed, her husband had not seen it in any way as necessary.\"\n\nA post-mortem examination found Mrs Bamgbose had a perforated bowel and her death was caused by peritonitis with multiple organ failure as a complication of liposuction surgery.\n\nMr Olowo has said he is suing Mono and the surgeon, Dr Hakan Aydogan, for £1m in the Turkish courts, claiming medical negligence.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Reports suggest AstraZeneca may have warned of a 60% cut to doses available\n\nA second coronavirus vaccine manufacturer has warned of supply issues to the European Union, compounding frustration in the bloc.\n\nAstraZeneca said a production problem meant the number of initial doses available would be lower than expected.\n\nThe fresh blow comes after some nations' inoculation programmes were slowed due to a cut in deliveries of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.\n\nThe EU Health Commissioner expressed \"deep dissatisfaction\" at the news.\n\nOfficials have not confirmed publicly how big the shortfall will be, but an unnamed EU official told Reuters news agency that deliveries would be reduced to 31m - a cut of 60% - in the first quarter of this year.\n\nThe drug firm had been set to deliver about 80 million doses to the 27 nations by March, according to the official who spoke to Reuters.\n\nThe AstraZeneca vaccine, developed with Oxford University, has not yet been approved by the EU's drug regulator but is expected to get the green light at the end of this month, paving the way for jabs to be given.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Stella Kyriakides This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA spokesman for AstraZeneca said on Friday that \"initial volumes will be lower than originally anticipated\" without giving further details.\n\nHis written statement blamed the discrepancy on \"reduced yields at a manufacturing site within our European supply chain\" and said the firm was continuing to ramp up production volumes.\n\nNews of the delay comes amid criticism and frustration across the region about the speed of vaccination roll-outs.\n\nIsrael, the United Arab Emirates, the UK, and the US are all well ahead of EU nations in terms of doses given per capita so far.\n\nThe European Commission has co-ordinated orders for all member states, with vaccines then distributed based on their population size.\n\nVaccines are increasingly seen by experts as the only way out of the Covid-19 crisis, with many European nations struggling to cope with a deadly surge of the virus over the winter period.\n\nAustrian media have reported that only 600,000 of two million AstraZeneca doses promised by the end of March will arrive in the country on time, with the remaining 1.4m now being delivered in April.\n\nA delay would be \"completely unacceptable\", Austrian Health Minister Rudolf Anschober said on Friday.\n\nAs for Pfizer, the US firm said it had to cut shipments for the next few weeks while it worked to increase capacity at its Belgian processing plant. The EU has ordered 600 million doses from Pfizer.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Ursula von der Leyen This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSome regions, including Germany's most populous state North-Rhine Westphalia and parts of Italy, said earlier this week that they were suspending giving first jabs of the two-dose vaccine because of the shortages.\n\nItaly and Poland have threatened to take legal action in response to the reduction in vaccine supply.\n\nMeanwhile Hungary's government, which has complained over the time it is taking EU regulators to approve the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, has reached a deal with Russia to buy up large quantities of its Sputnik V vaccine, even though it has not received EU approval.\n\nEuropean Council President Charles Michel, who led a call of EU leaders this week, said Thursday that officials were considering all ideas to try and stop future vaccine delays.\n\n\"All possible means will be examined to ensure rapid supply, including early distribution to avoid delays,\" he said.\n\nEuropean Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Mr Michel both say they are still aiming for the target of 70% of the EU population being vaccinated by summer.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid vaccine safety: How does a vaccine get approved?\n\nThe total number of German Covid deaths climbed above 50,000 on Friday - a day after the country warned that it could close its borders if other EU countries were less strict in controlling the virus. Berlin sounded the alarm amid rising concern about new variants.\n\nEU leaders agreed late on Thursday to keep their internal borders open but warned non-essential travel might need to be restricted to curb the spread of the virus.\n\nMs von der Leyen said Thursday that more testing and \"targeted measures\" were needed throughout the EU in order to keep internal and external borders open.\n\nFor its part, France said it would impose tighter travel restrictions for European arrivals from Sunday, requiring a negative PCR Covid test within three days of travel.\n\nIn the Netherlands, a ban on all flights from the UK, South Africa and South American countries came into effect on Saturday to try and prevent new coronavirus variants gaining a foothold.\n\nLooking forward to the future, officials from EU nations reliant on tourism - including Spain and Greece - have floated the possibility of using vaccination certificates to allow for cross-border travel but there has been scepticism within the bloc.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nTwo houses have partially collapsed after a sinkhole measuring 10ft (3m) opened up on a Manchester street.\n\nFour homes were evacuated on Wednesday evening after the hole appeared on Walmer Street in Abbey Hey, Gorton.\n\nFire crews returned hours later after the front of two of the empty properties crashed to the ground.\n\nUnited Utilities said it was dealing with a collapsed sewer but was investigating all possible causes including the recent heavy rain.\n\nThe fire service was first called to Walmer Street just after 21:00 GMT on Wednesday to reports an unoccupied car had fallen down a hole in the road.\n\nA cordon was put in place and residents evacuated as a precaution, the fire service said.\n\nAfter leaving the scene four hours later, the fire service was alerted to the partial collapse of two houses at 11:00 on Thursday.\n\nNo-one was injured in either incident.\n\nEmergency services remain at the scene on Walmer Street\n\nNearby residents Maureen and Louise Kennedy spoke of their shock after the houses collapsed.\n\n\"You're just waiting for your world to crumble. It's not just the bricks and water, said Ms Kennedy.\n\n\"I've lived in there since I was three. It's the memories.\"\n\nResident Nathaniel OKeleafor said he was \"terrified\" when the sinkhole appeared in the street on Wednesday evening.\n\n\"This morning we are out. We are just trying to find somewhere to live,\" he added.\n\nUnited Utilities said it was dealing with a collapsed sewer on Walmer Street\n\nThe collapse comes as rising levels on the River Mersey in Manchester came \"within centimetres\" of breaching flood defences following heavy rain caused by Storm Christoph.\n\nStation Manager Andrew O'Brien, from Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, praised firefighters who worked \"at the height of the stormy weather\".\n\n\"The safety of the public was our primary concern overnight and again today, and I'm pleased to say no-one has suffered any injuries,\" he said.\n\nUnited Utilities said: \"When it is safe for engineers to go back into the immediate area we will set up emergency drainage and water supply connections to restore services to the area and begin to assess how best to carry out repairs.\n\n\"It is not known what caused the sinkhole but this will be investigated.\"\n\nBBC Radio Manchester and BBC Radio Lancashire will be on air throughout Storm Christoph, bringing you all of the latest information and news updates\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA nurse felt \"overwhelming fear\" as 13 ambulances queued at her hospital's A&E department - in the Welsh region currently hardest hit by Covid deaths.\n\nTo date Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board, which runs Royal Glamorgan Hospital, has reported 1,091 deaths of patients with coronavirus.\n\nBBC Wales was granted access to A&E at the hospital in Rhondda Cynon Taf.\n\nSenior doctor Amanda Farrow said the whole hospital had faced \"unrelenting\" pressure last Saturday.\n\nSarah Fogarasy was the senior nurse on duty as 13 ambulances queued up outside her A&E department\n\nSenior A&E nurse Sarah Fogarasy, who was on shift as the ambulances arrived, said there was no capacity at the unit - a situation that left her wanting \"to leave\".\n\n\"We had to escalate it to our site manager and deputy head of nursing who were liaising with the executive team on call,\" she said.\n\n\"And then it got to 13 patients outside - I had no capacity in this unit, no resuscitation capacity, no capacity to put a patient on CPAP [continuous positive airway pressure] should they require that and no physical areas to put a patient in.\n\nOn Saturday, 13 ambulances queued outside the hospital's A&E department\n\nShe said she found it hard to keep going.\n\n\"This bit makes me quite emotional… for the first time I was sat trying to coordinate this department and I had that overwhelming fear that I just wanted to leave,\" Ms Fogarasy continued.\n\n\"I was just - 'I'm done. I'm done with this'... and it's scary, it fills you full of fear when you have got 13 ambulances outside, queuing around the carpark. Where do you go from that?\"\n\nShe said it was the team that kept her going: \"I started looking around to all the staff working tirelessly and just trying to remember what we're here for and why I became a nurse.\n\n\"I know it sounds soppy but it's literally the humanitarian effort that has gone into [fighting] this pandemic that has kept people going.\n\n\"It's the sheer determination and guts of the staff working in these times that is so powerful, that keeps the shift going.\"\n\nEmergency Medicine Consultant Amanda Farrow said it was a \"very emotional time for everyone\"\n\nDr Farrow, emergency medicine consultant, said staffing and bed numbers were of particular concern.\n\n\"In the emergency department the challenge we have is with regards to flow, so that is our daily challenge,\" she explained.\n\n\"And we say it's like playing a game of Tetris trying to work out which patient you can put where.\"\n\nStaff reported feeling overwhelmed as they work through the second Covid wave\n\nShe said the second wave of the virus had also seen more staff off sick with Covid and isolating - with some becoming very ill.\n\n\"We've had staff in as patients and one of my colleagues - I saw them when they were critically ill and ended up going to intensive care,\" continued Dr Farrow.\n\n\"So it's very emotional time for everyone as well you know, looking after the sick patients and looking after your colleagues.\n\n\"There's a level of anxiety still around - will you be the next person to get this disease?\"\n\nShe said although fewer people were attending A&E, they were seeing more people arriving by ambulance and presenting with more complex needs.\n\n\"The group of patients we are seeing this time I think is different, we're definitely having more younger people with Covid that are becoming sick, the volume is very high in the community.\n\n\"I think people are afraid of come into the hospital as well, so there are still quite a lot of patients who leave it maybe a bit too late before they're seeking hospital attention.\"\n\nSpeaking from her intensive care bed, Helen Whatmore said she was extremely grateful to staff\n\nHelen Whatmore, 45, from Beddau, has been hospital since early December after developing Covid symptoms.\n\nSpeaking from her intensive care bed, she said she had been unwell in February so assumed she had already caught the virus.\n\n\"I honestly didn't believe it was as bad until I caught [Covid] this time,\" she said.\n\n\"This time it's absolutely knocked the socks off me. It's nearly killed me.\n\n\"A friend of mine passed away as I came into hospital and I came down very rapidly with Covid, kidney problems and pneumonia.\"\n\nShe said she was grateful for the care she had received: \"The nurses are coming in [working] all shifts, they're fighting for your loved ones, from the time they enter right until the time they leave, then they're changing over and doing the same again.\n\n\"People are passing away… how much more have they got to do? We're asking them to protect our children and our families. Why are we not protecting them ourselves? Saving our families and our own children.\"", "Top Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou has been sent bullets in the mail while under house arrest in Vancouver, according to court testimony.\n\nIt was one of several alleged death threats revealed on Wednesday by the company providing her security.\n\nMs Meng was detained in 2018 on charges relating to allegedly misleading HSBC about Huawei's dealings in Iran.\n\nHer case has created a rift between China and Canada, with Beijing repeatedly calling for her release.\n\nThe chief financial officer of Huawei was arrested at Vancouver International Airport on a warrant from the US, where she is facing charges of bank fraud and potentially causing HSBC to break US sanctions.\n\nDays after she was released on bail, she was placed under house arrest in Vancouver. She has been fighting against her extradition to the US, which wants her to stand trial.\n\nThe threats were revealed at the British Columbia Supreme Court by Doug Maynard, chief operating officer of security firm Lions Gate Risk Management.\n\nHe said Ms Meng received \"five or six\" threatening letters at her residence in June and July 2020 and that the letters were \"easily identifiable by markings on the outside\". He added that \"sometimes there were bullets inside the envelopes\".\n\nThe role of the Vancouver police and any investigations is unclear.\n\nMs Meng has been in court pushing for conditions of her bail to be loosened, including dropping the daytime security detail that constantly follows her.\n\nShe is permitted to leave home between 6am and 11pm and pays for a round-the-clock security detail. She also wears a GPS tracking anklet as stipulated by her bail conditions.\n\nThe government has also granted family members of Ms Meng permission to travel to Canada, sparking controversy.\n\nConservative MP Raquel Dancho said the exception was an \"insult to the millions of Canadians who were told by this government not to visit loved ones\" over the holidays.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Raquel Dancho This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nShe called the move disappointing, noting that Beijing detained two Canadians soon after Ms Meng's arrest in December 2018 and has held them in prison ever since, subjecting them to interrogations.\n\nMs Meng's defence lawyer has argued that Canada is effectively being asked \"to enforce US sanctions\".\n\nHuawei has been one of the main targets of the Trump administration's attack on Chinese companies that it deems are security threats and pass data to the government.\n\nThe US has placed harsh restrictions on Huawei and has banned its 5G equipment from its networks. It also added 38 names linked to Huawei to a trade blacklist.\n\nThis week Huawei came under fire for technology that identifies people who appear to be of Uighur origin among images of pedestrians.\n\nHuawei had previously said none of its technology was designed to identify ethnic groups.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "Boris Johnson has said there is still a very substantial risk of intensive care units in hospitals being overwhelmed by the spread of the coronavirus.\n\nIt comes on a day when the UK has recorded the highest number of deaths in a single day in Europe.\n\nFergal Keane last visited the Imperial Healthcare Trust’s St Mary’s and Charing Cross hospital in London last April.\n\nHe's been back to see how they're coping.", "The licence fee is the \"least worst\" way of funding the BBC, its incoming chairman Richard Sharp has said.\n\nBut Mr Sharp told MPs he had an \"open mind\" about how the corporation should be funded in the future, and it \"may be worth reassessing\" the current system.\n\nHe also said he didn't think the BBC's Brexit coverage was biased overall, but \"there were some occasions when the Brexit representation was unbalanced\".\n\nQuestion Time \"seemed to have more Remainers than Brexiteers\", he said.\n\nBBC Three's Normal People was one of the corporation's biggest hits last year\n\nThe £157.50 licence fee is due to stay in place until at least 2027, when the BBC's Royal Charter ends, with a debate about how the broadcaster should be funded after that.\n\nMr Sharp, who spent 23 years working as a banker for Goldman Sachs, told the House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport select committee: \"At 43p a day, the BBC represents terrific value.\"\n\nThe government is currently reviewing whether its cost should continue rising with inflation from 2022, and whether non-payment should remain a criminal offence. Mr Sharp said he was \"not in favour of decriminalisation\".\n\nHe said other possible options for funding the BBC in the future could include a household tax like the one used in Germany, \"which amounts to the same amount of money\".\n\nHe added: \"So when we next get the chance to review the structure of this then it may be worth reassessing.\"\n\nAsked whether he believed the BBC's coverage of Brexit had been unbalanced, he replied: \"No, actually I don't.\n\n\"I believe there were some occasions when the Brexit representation was unbalanced.\n\n\"So if you ask me if I think Question Time seemed to have more Remainers than Brexiteers, the answer is yes, but the breadth of the coverage I thought was incredibly balanced, in a highly toxic environment that was extremely polarised.\"\n\nQuestion Time has said it has robust processes in place to ensure balance on its panels.\n\nMr Sharp said he was \"considered to be a Brexiteer\" and had donated around £400,000 to the Conservative Party over the past 20 years.\n\nHe said the biggest issue now facing the BBC is impartiality, and that \"trust in leadership and trust in processes\" must be rebuilt after high-profile equal pay cases with journalists such as Carrie Gracie and Samira Ahmed.\n\n\"Clearly some of the problems it's had recently are really rather terrible and reflect a culture that needs to be rebuilt, so everybody who cherishes the BBC and works at the BBC feels proud and happy to work there,\" he said. \"Then in my view that would produce a better output inevitably.\"\n\nMr Sharp also told the committee he would give his £160,000 salary as BBC chairman to charity.\n\nWhen asked \"what's in it for you?\" Mr Sharp, whose heritage is Jewish, said: \"We're all a product of our upbringing and I was very fortunate with the parents I have, my great grandparents came to this country escaping tyranny.\n\n\"I think I won the lottery in life to be British and if I can make a contribution, I couldn't be happier to.\n\n\"The BBC is part of the fabric of all our national identities, it offers education and enrichment and is also important for our position in the world... It is a massive privilege to be chair of the BBC.\"\n\nSir David Clementi, the current BBC chairman, steps down in February. The post-holder is officially appointed by the Queen on the recommendation of the government.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "The Galaxy S21 Ultra has hardware built into it to make use of the firm's S Pen stylus\n\nSamsung's new flagship Galaxy S smartphone works with its stylus for the first time.\n\nThe S Pen is an optional add-on for the Galaxy S21 Ultra. But the move will fuel speculation the firm will phase out its separate Note handset range.\n\nSamsung told the BBC it had yet to make a decision about this.\n\nThe company's handset sales have declined more quickly than the wider market. One expert said a streamlined line-up might help address this.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. WATCH: First look at Samsung's S21 Ultra phone\n\n\"There's increasing logic for Samsung to converge the Galaxy S and Note platforms, because there's so little differentiation between the two kinds of devices now,\" said Ben Wood, from the CCS Insight consultancy.\n\n\"That would align them with Apple, which also has one big phone launch event a year.\n\n\"My concern is that every time Samsung has announced its Note products in the past, it has planted a seed in consumers' minds that the Galaxy S products have become kind of the old ones.\"\n\nThe benefit of having a stylus is that it is easier to write, draw or annotate notes than using a finger. But to work it requires special hardware under the glass of the phone's display to pass power to the stylus and to track its tip.\n\nThe Android-based Galaxy S21 Ultra has a 6.8in (17.3cm) display, which is only slightly smaller than the top-end 6.9in Note.\n\nIn years past, the Note phones were known as \"phablets\", and their size was the other key distinguishing factor with the S range.\n\nUnlike the Note series, the S21 Ultra requires a special case to stow away the pen\n\nProduct manager Mark Notton said \"we haven't decided\", when asked whether Samsung planned to continue the Note family.\n\n\"It does not mean that Samsung is not committed to the Note category, but is expanding the Note experience across device categories,\" the firm said in a follow-up statement.\n\n\"We will actively listen to consumers' feedback and reflect it in our continued product innovation.\"\n\nThe S21 Ultra will start at £1,149 when it goes on sale on 29 January. The S Pen costs an extra £35 on its own, or £85 when bundled with a case that stores it.\n\nThat puts it in the ballpark of the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra's £1,179 starting price, which comes with a stylus that slots into its body.\n\nThere are also two other lower-cost models in the new range, neither of which works with the S-Pen stylus: the 6.2in S21 and 6.7in S21+.\n\nAll three models feature a redesigned camera module on their back.\n\nAll the Galaxy S21 phones feature a redesigned camera module on their back\n\nBut while the two lower-end models have three lenses - ultra-wide, wide and 3x-zoom telephoto - the S21 Ultra adds a further 10x-zoom telephoto lens, letting owners shoot action from even further away.\n\nThe handsets also benefit from a new Director's View facility. It lets users film video while getting thumbnail previews superimposed on-screen of what it would look like if they switched to another lens.\n\nAll three phones can film in 8K - double the maximum resolution of the competing iPhone 12 range's native video app.\n\nThe Director's View mode lets users preview how the recorded shot will change in a video if they switch to a different lens while filming\n\nHowever, the handsets may be more notable for following Apple in two regards.\n\nThey have abandoned a slot for a microSD memory card.\n\nAnd they will be sold without either a charger - a decision over which Samsung had mocked its rival. - or earphones.\n\nSamsung posted this ad in October on social media before deleting it\n\n\"We discovered that more and more Galaxy users are reusing accessories they already have,\" the firm said.\n\nSamsung typically unveils its Galaxy range in late February, but has brought forward this year's launch to coincide with the CES tech show.\n\n\"Samsung needs S21 to be a success given that S20 was launched in the middle of Covid first wave in Europe and didn't gain many fans,\" commented Marta Pinto, from research firm IDC.\n\nShe added the earlier launch date could help it compete in the \"premium market\" with Apple, whose iPhones were released later than normal last year.\n\nThe South Korean firm should also benefit from collapsing sales of Huawei's devices in the West, caused by US sanctions that prevent them offering the Google Play store and some of the search giant's other services.\n\nSamsung dedicated a segment of its Unpacked launch presentation to its partnership with Google\n\nBut Mr Wood said Samsung was facing growing competition from other Chinese brands including Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo.\n\n\"Samsung's differentiator is going to be its ability to market its strong brand, and the fact it has a very wide product portfolio,\" he commented.\n\nSamsung also aims to widen its appeal with two further accessories.\n\nIt has a new pair of £219 wireless earbuds that monitor what the user is doing.\n\nSamsung's earbuds should automatically adapt their audio output according to what the user is doing\n\nIf they detect the wearer is talking, they automatically turn down the volume of music and amplify the sounds of the nearby environment picked up by their microphones, allowing the owner to have a brief conversation without needing to take them out or manually adjust their settings.\n\nSamsung also is launching the £30 Galaxy SmartTag - a Bluetooth-enabled tracker that can be attached to belongings or pets.\n\nIt will allow an app to show their location, so long as the tag is in range of the owner or anyone else's compatible Samsung device.\n\nThe tracker will compete with similar products from the current market leader Tile.\n\nThe SmartTag will challenge Tile, which already sells a range of Bluetooth trackers\n\nApple is widely rumoured to be working on similar devices of its own.", "The coronavirus growth rate is slowing in the UK and the number of infections is starting to level off in some areas, a top scientist has said.\n\nProf Neil Ferguson told the BBC that in some NHS regions there is a \"sign of plateauing\" in cases and hospital admissions.\n\nBut he warned the overall death toll would exceed 100,000.\n\nOn Wednesday, the UK saw its biggest daily death figure since the start of the pandemic, with 1,564 deaths.\n\nIt has taken the total number of deaths by that measure to 84,767. There were also 47,525 new cases.\n\nIt comes after Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the national lockdown measures were \"starting to show signs of some effect\", but it was early days and urged people to abide by the rules.\n\nPeople in England are required to stay at home and only go out for limited reasons, such as for food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home.\n\nSimilar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nProf Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London whose modelling led to the first lockdown in March, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme it was \"much too early\" to say when the number of cases would come down.\n\nBut he said: \"It looks like in London in particular and a couple of other regions in the South East and East of England, hospital admissions may even have plateaued.\n\n\"It has to be said this is not seen everywhere - both case numbers and hospital admissions are going up in many other areas, but overall at a national level we are seeing the rate of growth slow.\"\n\nProf Ferguson added: \"I would hope the hospital admissions might plateau… sometime in the next week, but hospital bed occupancy may continue to rise slowly for up to two weeks.\"\n\nHe warned the overall death toll would be \"well over 100,000\", adding \"there's nothing we can do about that now\".\n\nProf Ferguson added Covid restrictions could be in place for many months to come, adding the new variant's increased transmissibility would mean relaxation of the rules will be a \"gradual process to the autumn\".\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel said on Thursday that the government will not be introducing tougher social distancing rules \"today or tomorrow\" and insisted that ministers are focusing on increasing enforcement of the current restrictions.\n\nAsked about speculation further measures could include a three-metre social distancing rule or a requirement to wear masks outside, she told ITV's This Morning: \"This isn't about new rules coming in - we're going to stick with enforcing the current measures.\"\n\nMeanwhile, a major study led by Public Health England has shown most people who have had Covid-19 are protected from catching it again for at least five months.\n\nPast infection was linked to an 83% lower risk of getting the virus, compared with those who had never had Covid-19, scientists found.\n\nProf Susan Hopkins, who led the study, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the finding \"doesn't eliminate\" the risk of people catching Covid-19 again, and infecting others.\n\nShe said: \"We found people with very high amounts of virus in their nose and throat swabs, that would easily be in the range which would cause levels of transmission to other individuals.\"\n\nProf Hopkins said she hoped that after Easter, \"we will start to see reduced infection rates, as we did at that time last year\" and the number of people who have been vaccinated at a \"very high level\".\n\nThe UK is continuing efforts to ramp up the rollout of the Covid vaccine, with the prime minister saying that Covid vaccinations will be offered 24 hours a day, seven days a week as soon as supply allows.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock tweeted on Thursday to say that \"three million vaccines have now been administered\" in the UK.\n\nOn Thursday, NHS England published a breakdown of vaccinations by age and region for the first time.\n\nMr Johnson told the Commons Liaison Committee on Wednesday that he was \"concerned\" about a new Covid variant that is believed to have emerged in Brazil and said that the UK was taking steps to ensure it is not brought into the UK.\n\nA Downing Street spokesman said ministers met this morning to discuss \"urgent measures to reduce the potential spread to the UK of the Brazilian variant\".\n\nThey could include a ban on flights from Brazil. Arrivals from Brazil already have to self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nMeanwhile, the Deputy Scottish First Minister John Swinney told BBC Breakfast \"the virus is not accelerating as fast as it was\" in Scotland.\n\nHe said \"there are some early signs of optimism\" but emphasised people should follow all guidance as the \"virus is still at a very strong level\".", "Amnesty says about 7,500 women and girls gave birth in the Northern Ireland homes,\n\nThere have been calls for an inquiry into mother and baby homes in Northern Ireland.\n\nIt comes as the Irish government is to apologise after an investigation found an \"appalling level of infant mortality\" in the Republic of Ireland's homes.\n\nAbout 9,000 children died in the 18 institutions under investigation.\n\nMothers and babies who were in similar homes in Northern Ireland want a full inquiry to be held in NI too.\n\nStormont commissioned research into whether or not there should an inquiry held into the homes which operated in Northern Ireland, is due to be published by the end of January.\n\nPatrick Corrigan from Amnesty International said the issue of forced adoptions also needs close scrutiny.\n\n\"We have had cases of mothers telling us that ultimately, many decades later, when they tried to track down their long-lost children they found adoption certificates where they said their signature had actually been forged,\" he said.\n\n\"So I think that there is criminality to investigate here and that it behoves the Northern Ireland Executive to set up the inquiry that has long been sought here and long been denied.\"\n\nIn 2017 research into infant mortality rates at former mother and baby homes in Northern Ireland had prompted initial calls for a public inquiry.\n\nBBC News NI previously spoke to Eunan Duffy who was 47 years old when he found out he was adopted from Marianvale mother and baby home in Newry, County Down.\n\nIt was one of a network of institutions in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland which offered women the voluntary option, for those who were unmarried, to give birth in private and give their babies up for adoption\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Marian Vale was one of a network of mother and baby institutions in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland\n\nAmnesty says there were more than a dozen mother-and-baby institutions in Northern Ireland.\n\nIt said about 7,500 women and girls gave birth in the Northern Ireland homes, operated by both Catholic and Protestant churches and religious organisations.\n\nIn Northern Ireland, research into mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries was commissioned three years ago and was initially expected to take 12 months.\n\nIt was completed in February last year, but was then sent to those facing criticism to give them an opportunity to reply.\n\nA Department of Health spokesperson said: \"A paper will be brought to the executive shortly for its consideration. Subject to executive approval, it is intended to publish the research report before the end of January 2021.\"\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland, the commission that investigated the homes found that the number of children who died was about 15% of all those who were born in the institutions.\n\nTaoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Mícheál Martin said the report, which can be read in full here, described a \"dark, difficult and shameful chapter\" of Irish history.\n\nSolicitor Claire McKeegan, who represents the Birth Mothers for Justice group, welcomed the apology in the Republic of Ireland, but said mothers and children in NI had not received one.\n\n\"The crimes perpetrated on them have yet to be investigated,\" she said.\n\n\"Those perpetrators who forced them into arbitrary detention, hard labour and colluded in the forced adoption of their babies, remain unchallenged in this jurisdiction.\"\n\nMary O'Neill became pregnant when she was 18 and was sent to Marianvale in Newry in the late 1970s.\n\nThere she gave birth to a baby girl who was taken away from her almost immediately after the birth.\n\nShe wanted to keep the baby, but was not allowed and was told the baby would be put up for adoption.\n\nThe mother and baby scandal became an international news story when 'significant human remains' were found on the grounds of a former home in County Galway\n\nMs O'Neill told Good Morning Ulster she eventually tracked down her daughter after 40 years.\n\n\"It was a long search, everywhere you went you were up against a brick wall,\" she said.\n\n\"There was no help, the social workers didn't want to tell you anything.\"\n\nShe finally found out her daughter was living in America but was coming home for her 40th birthday.\n\nShe said when she met her it was like meeting a stranger.\n\n\"But thank God we have met and we have a good relationship. She's still keeping in touch,\" Ms O'Neill said.\n\n\"It means the world to me, because you always wondered where was she? Was she happy? Did she know about you?\n\n\"It was always in the back of your mind. It never went away, the tears and the heartache.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMs O'Neill said she was happy the victims in the Republic of Ireland were getting an apology, but wishes the homes in Northern Ireland could have been included.\n\nMechelle Dillon's mother was 21 and pregnant when she was sent to Marianvale in Newry in 1969.\n\nShe was placed in foster care a few months after her birth.\n\nHer mother returned to her home village and then moved to England. But she came back for Mechelle when she was around eight or nine-months-old.\n\nShe said she believed she was not adopted because she was born with a cyst on her mouth.\n\n\"I would have maybe been classed as a reject, if you want to put it that way,\" she said.\n\n\"It's the same as if you go to look for a little puppy and if the puppy doesn't feel right and you think 'Oh God, I'll have a lot of vet bills here, I don't want that puppy' - I would have probably been classed the same because I would have had that defect.\"\n\nSDLP leader Colum Eastwood said \"the executive should move quickly to publish the research report and then call a full public inquiry\".", "Decima Minhinnick, pictured at her 90th birthday party, lives in a care home and has vascular dementia\n\nA couple who were fined £60 for driving 20 minutes to see a relative in a care home have had their fine cancelled by police.\n\nCarol and David Richards from Bridgend travelled seven miles to Porthcawl to visit her mother Decima Minhinnick, 94.\n\nOn Tuesday, police defended the fine, claiming the couple had broken lockdown rules.\n\nOn Wednesday, South Wales Police said it had \"since been reviewed and the notice has been rescinded\".\n\n\"The individual concerned has been notified\".\n\nIn a statement, it added: \"Wales remains at alert level four and South Wales Police will continue to patrol our communities to ensure the legislation, which has been enacted to slow the spread of coronavirus, is complied with\".\n\nMrs Richards has said she was \"mortified\" they were stopped by police while returning on Sunday from what she said was a compassionate visit.\n\nShe said on Tuesday she did not believe they breached lockdown rules.\n\nMrs Richards said the couple had arranged the visit to Picton Court Care Home in advance with the permission of staff, and spoke to her mother, who has vascular dementia, through the window of her ground-floor room from the car park.\n\nDavid and Carol Richards complained about the £60 fine\n\nShe told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that when she was issued with the fine it was like \"a sort of dystopian novel\", adding that the officer involved was \"pedantic and inflexible\".\n\n\"I was angry - she just would not listen to any protestations, and so she said 'you're going to be issued with a £60 fixed penalty fine'.\n\n\"It's not about the 60 quid, it's about the principle.\"\n\nThe home is just over seven miles from where the couple live", "The governor of Amazonas state warned of a \"critical\" moment and has implemented a curfew\n\nHospitals in the Brazilian city of Manaus have reached breaking point while treating Covid-19 patients, amid reports of severe oxygen shortages and desperate staff.\n\nThe city, in Amazonas state, has seen a surge of deaths and infections.\n\nHealth professionals, quoted by local media, warned \"many people\" could die due to lack of supplies and assistance.\n\nBrazil has recorded more than 205,000 virus deaths - the second-highest tally in the world, behind the US.\n\nA new coronavirus variant has recently emerged in Brazil, with several cases in travellers arriving in Japan traced back to the Amazonas region.\n\nAmazonas suffered heavy losses in the first wave of the pandemic but is also being badly hit by a new rise in infections.\n\nRefrigerated containers were brought to hospitals to help store bodies last week, as authorities declared a state of emergency.\n\nJessem Orellana, from the Fiocruz-Amazonia scientific investigation institute, told the AFP news agency that some hospitals in Manaus had \"run out of oxygen\" with some centres becoming \"a type of suffocation chamber\" for patients.\n\nThe researcher told Brazilian media she had received reports from the front-line of \"dramatic\" scenes playing out in some hospitals.\n\nReports in the daily Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper described desperate staff having to try to keep patients alive through manual ventilation.\n\nIn a widely shared video from the region, a female medical worker asks the internet for help: \"We're in an awful state. Oxygen has simply run out across the whole unit today.\"\n\n\"There is no oxygen and lots of people are dying,\" she says in the clip. \"If anyone has any oxygen, please bring it to the clinic. There are so many people dying.\"\n\nThe UK has banned travellers from much of Latin America over a new variant detected in Brazil\n\nAmazonas Governor Wilson Lima said the state was \"in the most critical moment of the pandemic\" and has announced a nightly curfew will begin at 19:00 local time (23:00 GMT) on Friday to try to stem the spread.\n\nMarcellus Campelo, a local health secretary, said the state needed three times the amount of oxygen it can produce locally and appealed for help.\n\nBrazil's vice-president shared images on Twitter of the air force transporting hospital supplies, including oxygen cylinders and stretchers, to the city as reports of the situation spread throughout the country.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by General Hamilton Mourão This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHealth officials also say some patients will be airlifted to other states for treatment due to the demand for intensive care units, Reuters reports.\n\nFelipe Naveca, deputy director of research at the state-run Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, told the BBC's South America correspondent Katy Watson that the new variant had evolved separately from those in the UK and South Africa, but that it showed some of the same characteristics: \"Some of these mutations have been linked to increased transmission and that is of concern.\"\n\nMr Naveca said that they did not yet have any data to suggest that existing vaccines would be any less effective against the new variant. \"We have to do a lot more sequencing of samples to answer that question,\" he said.\n\nHowever, on Thursday UK officials announced a ban on travellers from South America, Portugal and Cape Verde due to the new strain.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Thursday evening. We'll have another update for you on Friday morning.\n\nTravel from South America and Portugal to the UK is being banned, other than for British or Irish citizens and foreign nationals with residence rights. The new ruling is being brought in because of concerns about the new Brazilian coronavirus variant and comes into force from 04:00 GMT on Friday. The ban applies to people who have travelled from, or through, these countries in the 10 days before their departure for the UK: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela. Find out more about the new variants here.\n\nDoctors have warned that the recent surge in Covid hospital cases has left key hospital services in England in crisis. Accident and Emergency departments are facing rising delays in admitting extremely sick patients on to wards, NHS data shows. The total number of people facing year-long waits for routine treatments is more than 100 times higher than it was before the pandemic - and cancer specialists are warning of a \"terrifying\" disruption to their services that would cost lives.\n\nThe government has told schools not to provide free meals to eligible pupils' families over half term, with food to be provided by councils under the Covid Winter Grant Scheme instead. The Department for Education said vulnerable families would continue to receive meals outside of term time through the welfare support they have made available. But councils say the government should be responsible for providing food vouchers during the February half-term, like it did over summer.\n\nA top scientist has said the coronavirus growth rate in the UK is slowing, with the number of infections starting to level off in some areas. Prof Neil Ferguson told the BBC that in some NHS regions there is a \"sign of plateauing\" in cases and hospital admissions. But he warned the overall death toll - currently standing at over 80,000 - would exceed 100,000. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said the national lockdown measures in place across the UK are \"starting to show signs of some effect\" but warned that it was still early days.\n\nMany people feel they've put on weight during the pandemic, due to staying indoors more and turning to comfort food. Samantha Hicks, from Portishead, North Somerset, thought she was one of them - but what she believed was a few extra pounds of weight was actually a baby. She gave birth to her daughter Julia just 10 days after discovering she was pregnant. Her pregnancy was even missed when she was taken to hospital in November with Covid-19. She said: \"My tummy was a bit swollen but again, because I felt sick and I wasn't great, it never occurred to me I was pregnant.\"\n\nThe UK travel rules have been updated again. Find out all the details you need here.\n\nFind more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "Most people who have had Covid-19 are protected from catching it again for at least five months, a study led by Public Health England shows.\n\nPast infection was linked to around a 83% lower risk of getting the virus, compared with those who had never had Covid-19, scientists found.\n\nBut experts warn some people do catch Covid-19 again - and can infect others.\n\nAnd officials stress people should follow the stay-at-home rules - whether or not they have had the virus.\n\nProf Susan Hopkins, who led the study, said the results were encouraging, suggesting immunity lasted longer than some people feared, but protection was by no means absolute.\n\nIt was particularly concerning some of those reinfected had high levels of the virus - even without symptoms - and were at risk of passing it on to others, she said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Prof Susan Hopkins from Public Health England said immunity from having Covid-19 is \"not 100% protective\"\n\n\"This means even if you believe you already had the disease and are protected, you can be reassured it is highly unlikely you will develop severe infections but there is still a risk that you could acquire an infection and transmit to others,\" she added.\n\n\"Now more than ever, it is vital we all stay at home to protect our health service and save lives.\"\n\nFrom June to November 2020, almost 21,000 healthcare workers across the UK were regularly tested to see whether they:\n\nOf those who had no antibodies to the virus, suggesting they may have never had it, 318 developed potential new infections within this timeframe.\n\nBut among the 6,614 with antibodies, this figure was just 44 potential new infections.\n\nResearchers received various different pieces of evidence suggesting these people had become re-infected - including new symptoms more than 90 days after their first infection, new positive swab tests and blood tests.\n\nSome tests are still being run and researchers say their results will be updated as they come in.\n\nScientists will continue to monitor the healthcare workers for 12 months to see how long immunity lasts.\n\nThey will also look closely at cases with the new variant - which was not widespread at the time of this first analysis - and observe the immunity of participants who receive the vaccine.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Can you become immune to coronavirus?\n\nDr Julian Tang, a virus expert at the University of Leicester, said the results were reassuring for healthcare workers.\n\n\"Having the vaccine after recovering from Covid-19 is not an issue... and will likely boost the natural immunity,\" he added.\n\n\"We also see this with the seasonal flu vaccine.\n\n\"So hopefully the results from this paper will reduce the anxiety of many healthcare-worker colleagues who have concerns about getting Covid-19 twice.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Changes to Scotland's lockdown restrictions have been announced. The tightening of the rules follows concerns the \"stay at home\" message is not having the same impact it did during last year's lockdown. The changes will come into effect on Saturday.\n\nThe availability and operation of click and collect services will be limited to retailers selling essential items such as clothes, footwear, baby equipment, homeware and books. Also, outlets that sell electrical goods; do key cutting; undertake shoe repairs, plus garden centres and plant nurseries can continue the collect service.\n\nFor qualifying businesses, staggered appointments will need to be offered to avoid any potential for queuing, and access inside premises for collection will not be permitted.\n\nCustomers in Scotland will no longer be allowed to go inside to collect takeaway food or coffee. Businesses will have to operate from a serving hatch or doorway.\n\nThe aim is to reduce the risk of customers coming into contact indoors with each other, or with staff.\n\nIt will be against the law in all level four areas of Scotland to drink alcohol outdoors in public.\n\nThis will mean that buying a takeaway pint and consuming on the street will not be permitted.\n\nIt is intended to underline the message that people should only be leaving home for essential purposes.\n\nThe Scottish government is strengthening the obligation on employers to allow their staff to work from home whenever possible.\n\nThe law already says that people should only be leaving home to go to work if it is work that cannot be done from home. This is a legal obligation that falls on individuals.\n\nHowever, statutory guidance is being introduced to make clear that employers should support employees to work from home wherever possible.\n\nThe Scottish government is strengthening provisions in relation to work inside people's houses.\n\nCurrent guidance says that in level four areas work is only permitted within a private dwelling if it is essential for the upkeep, maintenance and functioning of the household. This guidance is now being put into law.\n\nThe final change is an amendment to the regulations requiring people to stay at home.\n\nThis is intended to close an apparent loophole rather than change the spirit of the law. It will also bring the wording of the stay at home regulations in Scotland into line with the other UK nations.\n\nCurrently the law states that people can only leave home for an essential purpose.\n\nThe amendment will make it clear that people \"must not leave or remain outside\" the home unless it is for an essential purpose.\n\nThe Scottish government's full lockdown guidance is available here.", "Covid-19 patients in England's busiest intensive care units in 2020 were 20% more likely to die, University College London research has found.\n\nThe increased risk was equivalent to gaining a decade in age.\n\nBy the end of 2020, one in three hospital trusts in England was running at higher than 85% capacity.\n\nEleven trusts were completely full on 30 December, and the total number of people in intensive care with Covid has continued to rise since then.\n\nThe link between full ICUs and higher death rates was already known, but this study is the first to measure its effect during the pandemic.\n\nTighter lockdown restrictions are needed to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, says study author Dr Bilal Mateen.\n\nResearchers looked at more than 4,000 patients who were admitted to intensive care units in 114 hospital trusts in England between April and June last year.\n\nThey found the risk of dying was almost a fifth higher in ICUs where more than 85% of beds were occupied, than in those running at between 45% and 85% capacity.\n\nThat meant a 60-year-old being treated in one of these units had the same risk of dying as a 70-year-old on a quieter ward.\n\nThe Royal College of Emergency Medicine sets 85% as the maximum safe level of bed occupancy.\n\nHowever, the team found there was no tipping point after which deaths rose - instead, survival rates fell consistently as bed-occupancy increased.\n\nThis suggests \"a lot of harm is occurring before you get to 85%\".\n\nPatients admitted to ICUs that were less than 45% full were 25% less likely to die than average.\n\nUsually if a very sick patient's heart stops, everyone on the ward will rush to help them, Dr Mateen explained.\n\nBut when there are too many patients, staff's time is inevitably split, so \"it makes sense that the quality of patient care would be sacrificed\", he said.\n\nWhile extra beds and equipment can, and have, been provided through the Nightingale hospitals and the private sector, finding enough qualified staff has been an issue.\n\n\"You can't just create an ICU nurse who knows how to operate a mechanical ventilator overnight,\" Dr Mateen told the BBC.\n\nThese are highly-skilled roles that take years of training and sometimes decades of experience, he added.\n\nInstead, a \"robust vaccination programme\" and tighter lockdown restrictions are needed to bring down cases and hospitalisations, he believes.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What does it mean if the NHS is overwhelmed?\n\nCo-author Prof Christina Pagel at UCL added: \"This paper highlights for the first time that putting such strain on ICUs during pandemic peaks does, sadly, mean that that chances of someone dying in intensive care are higher.\n\n\"Our work underlines the urgency of both vaccinating vulnerable groups as soon as possible and reducing Covid transmission in the community to relieve pressure on intensive care.\"\n\nIt's difficult to say for sure that fuller ICUs are actually causing more deaths - it's possible that as they get fuller, only the sickest patients are admitted.\n\nBut Dr Mateen says there was no evidence of rationing - of sick patients being turned away.\n\nEven pre-Covid, data suggests larger ICUs had lower death rates - with a 25% increase in bed numbers linked to a corresponding 25% fall in mortality.\n\nAnd the findings are supported by a wealth of evidence from before the pandemic and from around the world.", "Coach and tour operators have seen an unexpected growth in bookings in the last fortnight.\n\nWhilst there is no doubt that the pandemic continues to put huge pressure on lives and the NHS, this is a small amount of sunshine for the travel industry, which has had a tough year.\n\nTUI, the UK's largest tour operator, says 50% of bookings on their website are currently by over-50s.\n\nThis was previously a smaller market for them.\n\nNational Express's coach holiday businesses say bookings made by those 65 and over have increased by 185% in the last fortnight compared to last year.\n\n\"Since the announcement of the vaccine, it's given our customer base, predominantly those over 65, increased confidence to book and have that summer getaway in 2021\" says Jit Desai, head of holidays and travel at National Express.\n\n\"We launched the brochure for spring-summer 2021 just this weekend gone, and on Monday we took a week's worth of bookings in a day and that's continued so far,\" says Mr Desai. \"What the vaccine does is give certainty and confidence.\n\n\"That then allows the customer and ourselves the ability to plan ahead\".\n\nThe pandemic has been devastating for the travel sector. Tens of thousands of jobs have gone in the UK. Millions of Britons cancelled breaks because the health situation was in flux across the world.\n\nBut National Express now points to returning confidence to travel.\n\n\"Many we've spoken to have had the first jab. They know in 12 weeks they'll get a second jab. It gives them certainty that they can enjoy and look forward to their 2021 holiday. It is something to look forward to, to being with people, with friends, like minded and from the same generation.\"\n\nDawn and Ray - 75 and 78 years old - are from Hampshire and are due to have their first jab soon. They have just booked five UK holidays.\n\n\"We are raring to go once we've got that vaccine, we are really looking forward to it - both of us. We are going to Wales, Leicestershire, to York where there is a mystery tour - and to the Cotswolds'\", Dawn said.\n\nFor Dawn and Ray, it's the ease of coach travel that's appealing, as well as the safety. She adds \"they've looked after us so well in the past, the coaches are clean, we'll all wear masks, we all look after each other.\"\n\nAt the moment, 90% of the bookings with National Expresses coach businesses are UK based, so it looks like another good year for the staycation.\n\n\"European bookings are lower because of the uncertainty on the continent,\" says Mr Desai.\n\n\"The UK wins because of the lack of need to quarantine. And uncertainty about the moves other governments might make whilst away also creates fear.\"\n\nIt's not just UK breaks that are selling. The UK's largest tour operator TUI, famous for its sun-drenched European beach holidays, says there has also been a change in the last fortnight.\n\n\"We're seeing a customer base or age group that wasn't booking before, that is starting to book,\" says Andrew Flintham the MD of TUI UK. \"The over 50s, we assume, is on the back to the vaccine news.\"\n\nWhilst TUI UK boss acknowledges that \"the market is still depressed and it's not where we want it - we are seeing glimmers of hope.\"\n\nTrips to towns in England are among those being booked\n\nThere are also interesting changes emerging in the types of breaks holidaymakers plan to take and the months they're planning to travel.\n\n\"People are booking later into the summer, hedging their bets\" said Mr Flintham. \"More July and August and a lot of demand for September and October.\n\n\"People are booking longer holidays, we're seeing more people booking ten or eleven or 14 nights rather than seven. People are maybe catching up on what they've missed.\"\n\nAs TUI analysed its recent booking data, one trend they spotted is the emergence of large, multigenerational group bookings.\n\n\"It is family time we've all missed. We can't get away from our own families, but our broader families we can't see, and that's feeding into our choices\" Mr Flintham explains.\n\nAfter such a bad 10 months, and TUI cancelling all holidays until the middle of February at the earliest because of the new lockdown, how does the rest of the summer look?\n\n\"I think the summer holiday is on\" says Mr Flintham, \"I think we just need time for people to get that confidence, but yes, we think there will be a good summer this summer\".\n\nFor those who've watched the paralysis brought upon the travel industry since last winter, a morsel of good news about customers booking again is being celebrated.\n\n\"This is fantastic news and to be hugely welcomed by an industry that has been utterly devastated by the pandemic\", says Sophie Griffiths, editor of Travel Trade Gazette.\n\n\"Ten months into this crisis and the industry has still received zero dedicated support from the government despite being unique as a sector in terms of giving out thousands in refunds while getting next to nothing back in for 2020.\"", "The Lauberhorn course is the longest downhill run in the world (file image)\n\nA British tourist has been blamed for a spike in coronavirus cases that led officials to cancel Switzerland's famous Lauberhorn ski race.\n\nThe resort of Wengen, where the race is held, had recorded only 10 cases of the virus by mid-December.\n\nBut the number soon began to rise and many cases have since been linked to the new highly infectious variant of Covid-19 first identified in the UK.\n\nAt least 27 cases are connected to one British tourist, contact tracers say.\n\nThe tourist stayed in a hotel in Wengen over the holiday period.\n\nThe Lauberhorn course is the longest downhill run in the world, and racers can reach speeds of 160km/h (100 mph).\n\nOfficials desperately tried to save the race, shutting schools and offering to close off the resort to everyone but the competitors.\n\nSwiss health officials initially agreed with the plan, but a further jump in cases at the start of this week prompted them to pull the emergency brake and cancel the event.\n\nThe Lauberhorn track is 4,480m (14,700ft) long - and the race will now have to wait until 2022\n\nWengen is devastated. The Lauberhorn is one of the top competitions on the World Cup ski circuit. It is dearly loved by the Swiss, who have watched with delight as some of their own homegrown talent, such as Beat Feuz and Carlo Janka, have triumphed there.\n\nMoreover, the long love affair between Switzerland and British winter tourists has frosted over to some extent.\n\nIt was only last month that the vanishing Brits of Verbier, who reportedly fled Switzerland rather than accept the government mandated quarantine, triggered a flurry of negative headlines.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Italy's Foppolo ski resort was closed until 6 January and missed the all-important Christmas ski season\n\nNow the high point of Switzerland's skiing calendar has been abruptly cancelled, and some Swiss blame the British.\n\nOthers say Switzerland only has itself to blame.\n\nWhile neighbours France and Italy closed their resorts over the festive period, the Swiss government opted for a precarious balancing act. It kept its slopes open, but closed all bars and restaurants and limited ski lifts to two-thirds capacity.\n\nMost Swiss resorts are quiet, with just a few locals enjoying the runs. But still some tourists arrived and, as Wengen's experience shows, just one infected guest is enough to cause major damage.\n\nInstead of hosting a major ski race, Wengen officials are now racing to control the virus. Mass testing has already begun in the resort.\n\nSwitzerland's government has extended the closure of bars, restaurants, museums, and theatres until the end of February in a bid to control the new variant. It has also ordered non-essential shops to close and made working from home obligatory.\n\nAs for the Lauberhorn, Switzerland's oldest and fiercest skiing rival, Austria, will now host the postponed event. Nothing could have been calculated to upset the Swiss more.\n\nThe event was first moved to the Austrian ski resort of Kitzbühel, but an outbreak of coronavirus there has prompted another move, this time to Flachau, 100km to the east.\n\nThe cluster of cases in Jochberg near Kitzbühel broke out among a group of mainly British trainee ski instructors.", "Some 13 ambulances queued outside the Royal Glamorgan Hospital hospital's A&E department on Saturday\n\nHospitals in the area with Wales and England's worst Covid death rates are only coping by postponing urgent surgery such as cancer operations.\n\nCwm Taf Morgannwg had already suspended some non-emergency services but the boss of the health board said they have now paused some urgent procedures.\n\nCwm Taf covers Rhondda Cynon Taf and Merthyr Tydfil, which have the highest and second highest Covid death rates.\n\nHealth Minister Vaughan Gething said he \"would not be surprised\" if other health boards were forced to do the same soon, if case rates did not come down.\n\n\"There is real harm being done... because of the level of hospital admissions,\" he said.\n\n\"Our critical care units are at 150% of their capacity and that has very real consequences.\n\n\"It reinforces why all of us need to do the right thing in reducing our contacts with other people and follow the rules, otherwise greater harm will be caused.\"\n\nThe news comes as NHS bosses said the number of Covid patients in Welsh hospitals is double April's peak.\n\nOn Thursday, Public Health Wales (PHW) said a further 54 people had died with coronavirus in Wales, taking the total number of deaths since the start of the pandemic to 4,117.\n\nMr Lyons said on Wednesday night their field hospital Ysbyty Seren in Bridgend had 74 patients, people they \"wouldn't have been able to accommodate within our usual hospitals\".\n\n\"We are coping, but that's coping because we've been cancelling urgent surgery.\n\n\"We even had to cancel some cancer surgery over the last few weeks,\" Mr Lyons told BBC Radio Wales.\n\n\"My heart goes out to families and to patients with all the stress and the worry that gives.\n\n\"It's tough times and we're all in it together, and we do see that optimism, that glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel but it's hard.\"\n\nNearly half of hospital beds in the health board - which covers Bridgend, Merthyr Tydfil and Rhondda Cynon Taf- are taken up with Covid-19 patients, including 31 in critical care or on ventilation.\n\nThey outnumber those in critical care with other conditions by three to one.\n\nLatest NHS Wales figures show 2,806 hospital patients in Wales with Covid-19 - 35% of all patients. This is twice the proportion in May.\n\nIn Rhondda Cynon Taf, the Covid death rate is 283.9 per 100,000 population - followed by Merthyr Tydfil where the death rate is 253.6.\n\n\"It's an absolute tragedy for the families and the loved ones and very sobering,\" said Mr Lyons.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. See how case rates have changed in each part of Wales\n\n\"We're coping but only because of the dedication of our staff, and it's immensely humbling to see people giving up their spare time coming in doing extra shifts, but the toll on them is immense.\n\n\"In practice our hospitals are full and although we are coping that we're only coping because we've cancelled all but the most urgent surgery.\n\n\"We've redeployed staff who've been incredibly flexible from places they normally work such as outpatients.\"\n\nThe health board oversees three hospitals - Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend and the Royal Glamorgan in Rhondda Cynon Taf.\n\nA nurse at Royal Glamorgan Hospital, near Llantrisant, said earlier this week how she felt \"overwhelming fear\" as 13 ambulances queued outside her hospital's A&E department.", "Six pharmacies will be vaccinating people invited by letter to make an appointment online\n\nSome High Street pharmacies in England will start vaccinating people from priority groups on Thursday, with 200 providing jabs in the next two weeks.\n\nSix chemists in Halifax, Macclesfield, Widnes, Guildford, Edgware and Telford are the first to offer appointments to those invited by letter.\n\nBut pharmacists say many more sites should be allowed to give the jab, not just the largest ones.\n\nMore than 2.6 million people in the UK have now received their first dose.\n\nAcross the UK, the target is to vaccinate 15 million people in the top four priority groups - care home residents and workers, NHS frontline staff, the over-70s and the extremely clinically vulnerable - by mid-February.\n\nThe vaccines - made by either Oxford-AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech - are being administered at hospitals, care homes, GP surgeries and vaccination centres.\n\nIt comes as the UK saw its highest number of daily reported coronavirus deaths since the pandemic began, with the government announcing a further 1,564 deaths of people within 28 days of a positive Covid test.\n\nOn Wednesday evening, the Scottish government published its detailed 16-page plan for rolling out the vaccine, including details of how many vaccines it expects to receive every week until the end of May.\n\nThe first pharmacy sites in England to deliver a vaccine have been chosen because they are capable of delivering large numbers of vaccines quickly while allowing space for social distancing.\n\nPeople will be invited by letter to make an appointment at one of the pharmacies, or a vaccination centre, through the NHS Covid-19 vaccination booking service.\n\nAnyone who doesn't want to travel to these sites can still be vaccinated by their local GP or hospital service, but they may have to wait longer.\n\nUp to 70 more pharmacies will be taking bookings for appointments for next week, with 200 in total offering slots over the next fortnight, according to NHS England.\n\nVaccines are currently being offered at more than 1,000 sites, including :\n\nAn Asda supermarket in Birmingham will also host a vaccination centre, with pharmacy staff giving jabs in the store's former clothing section from 25 January.\n\nBut the National Pharmacy Association says the rules on which pharmacies qualify to deliver Covid vaccines should be relaxed to allow more to take part.\n\nHow people awaiting vaccines will queue and socially distance in the Halifax store of Boots\n\nAt present, pharmacies have to be able to deliver 1,000 vaccines a week, have enough fridge space to store all the doses, and be able to open seven days a week.\n\nAndrew Lane, of the National Pharmacy Association, said now that the Oxford vaccine had been approved, community pharmacies could store and administer it in the same way as they deliver the flu jab.\n\nThe Oxford vaccine only needs to be stored at fridge temperature, as opposed to the freezer temperatures of -70C required by Pfizer.\n\n\"We're here, we're trained, we will deliver,\" said Mr Lane, who represents Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Northamptonshire.\n\nNHS England has said that as more supplies of vaccine become available, more community pharmacists will be able to play a role in the programme.\n\nThe government's vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said staff across the NHS had \"pulled out all the stops to help ramp up vaccinations\" and were working day and night to keep people safe.\n\nProf Claire Anderson, chair of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's English Pharmacy Board, said pharmacy teams in hospital, primary care and the community were \"working flat out to support the nation's health\".\n\nShe said she looked forward to the vaccination programme being expanded through pharmacies to benefit patients.\n\nBoris Johnson said on Wednesday that vaccinations would also start being offered 24 hours a day, seven days a week \"as soon as possible\" - but supply of doses was currently the limiting factor.\n\nIt comes as hospitals struggle to cope with the rising numbers of patients being admitted with Covid.\n\nA study published today has shown the impact of packed intensive care units on death rates, finding that patients in England's busiest ICUs in 2020 were 20% more likely to die.\n\nMeanwhile, a government committee is meeting later to discuss whether to stop flights from Brazil coming to the UK because of concern about a new variant of the virus believed to have emerged there.\n\nArrivals from Brazil already have to self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nThe strain is one of a small number of new variants which have been spreading, including ones first spotted in the UK and South Africa.\n\nScientists are racing to understand what it means for the vaccines - but most experts think vaccines will still be effective.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Bangor student Michelle Francis said students had hardly used rooms and had not been able to use facilities on campus\n\nHundreds of students are preparing to take part in rent strikes after paying for \"hardly used\" rooms during the pandemic.\n\nSome Welsh universities have already offered refunds to students who have been living away due to Covid-19.\n\nBut students in Cardiff, Swansea and Bangor claim they are being treated unfairly and are threatening to withhold rent.\n\nUniversities said they were trying to work out the implications of Covid-19.\n\nAnd a solicitor warned students they could face legal action for not paying rent, with long-term implications possible if they lose.\n\nFace-to-face teaching was suspended and many students moved back home before Christmas as coronavirus cases continued to rise.\n\nStaggered returns are being introduced in order to \"help stop the spread of the virus in student accommodation\", according to the Welsh Government.\n\nThey said they had not been living in the rooms or using facilities, despite paying for them, because they were abiding by Welsh Government guidelines.\n\nCardiff Metropolitan University, Aberystwyth University, Swansea University, Bangor University and Cardiff University have now offered eligible students rebates or discounts for time not spent living on campus.\n\nUniversity of South Wales said it will be offering a \"rent holiday\" on university-owned accommodation in Treforest, Rhondda Cynon Taf, for the period 4 January to 12 February.\n\nUniversity of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD) said on Thursday it is now offering refunds to students who have not returned to university-owned accommodation while teaching is solely online.\n\nBut students say the offers are inadequate for students already paying £9,000-a-year tuition fees at a time when most of the teaching was online, and they had been unable to use facilities in halls.\n\nWhile the students cannot hold their protests in person due to coronavirus laws, hundreds are now planning to cancel their direct debits, withholding thousands of pounds of rent from universities.\n\nMichelle Francis, who formed the Bangor Rent Strike campaign, said the university's offer of a 10% discount to eligible students living in university-owned accommodation did not go far enough.\n\nShe said students who had chosen to go home for Christmas were not eligible, despite being unable to use facilities paid for during the first term.\n\n\"[We were] advised to have left university from the beginning of December and to come back at 8 February,\" she said.\n\n\"That's 25% of our halls that we've been paying and we're not there... we should be allowed to have that back.\"\n\nSo far over 300 students have joined the campaign to cancel their direct debits paid to Welsh universities and campaigners said the numbers were growing daily.\n\nOn Wednesday, Cardiff University joined other Welsh universities in offering a rent rebate to students living in university-owned accommodation during the pandemic.\n\nBut the full rebate, for the time students are unable to return to live in their accommodation, will not be applied until April.\n\nSwansea University has also confirmed a rent reduction to students in university halls who have been asked to remain at home.\n\nOisin Mulholland of Swansea Rent Strike said the group wanted the university to commit to fairly \"assessing the situation\", including for the coming term, and students who had already moved in should be given rebates as well.\n\n\"There was a window in January, where the Welsh Government said return, but the English government said don't return, and the university said nothing,\" he said.\n\n\"Many students came back and are now trapped in Swansea and can't go back because of lockdown\"\n\nIbrahim Khan said students were struggling and needed the rebate immediately\n\nIbrahim Khan, of the Cardiff Rent Strike campaign, said the rebate was \"too late\" for students struggling financially now.\n\n\"The university should be giving us the rebate this January as opposed to the third instalment in April,\" he said.\n\nLawyers have warned that students would in breach of contract if they cancel the direct debit for their rent.\n\nSiôn Fôn, a solicitor at Darwin Gray, encouraged students to discuss the issue with their families and student unions before taking action.\n\n\"I think a case could be brought forward pretty easily against somebody not paying rent,\" he said.\n\nBut he said students may have a case against the university due to not being able to access advertised facilities, but if the university took legal action it could have long-term consequences for individuals.\n\n\"If the students lose, and even after losing don't pay the rent, that would come up on credit scores, or with the bank, if they're trying to get a mortgage or a credit card it would come up on their record,\" he warned.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"How am I going to afford to do my food shop... if I can't go to work?\"\n\nA spokesperson for Cardiff University said technical reasons meant they had to wait until the April instalment of accommodation fees to provide the rebate.\n\nSwansea University said some students had already returned when the stay at home guidance was issued, and it was working through the \"implications of this\".\n\n\"To help with this the university will not generate invoices for any students with university accommodation until May when we have been able to look at these cases,\" a spokesman said.\n\nBangor University said it did not wish to add anything further following its rebate announcement.\n\nThe Welsh Government said it had provided an extra £40m to help universities, including £10m for towards student hardship and support.\n\n\"It would seem fair that students should be eligible for a rebate for the period when a course is online only and we welcome moves by universities to address this,\" a spokesman said.\n\n\"We are actively considering how we can support our students and universities even further.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Residents of an asylum seeker camp in Pembrokeshire says life is 'very bad'\n\nAsylum seekers housed in a military training camp have claimed the \"very bad\" conditions are making them feel increasingly desperate.\n\nThe Home Office decided to house up to 250 asylum seekers at the site in Penally, Pembrokeshire, from September.\n\nBut some housed at the camp claim the conditions are unsafe and putting them at risk of coronavirus.\n\nPlaid Cymru has called for an urgent inspection, but the Home Office said it was safe and \"Covid-compliant\".\n\nOn Thursday afternoon, the independent chief inspector for borders and immigration David Bolt said he hoped an inspection can begin \"within a few weeks\" and was awaiting further details he requested from the Home Office.\n\nProtests and counter-protests have taken place at the camp, with concerns conditions breach human rights.\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford has said the facility was \"unsuitable\" for vulnerable people who have \"fled terror and suffering\".\n\nNow, asylum seekers have spoken to the BBC about their experiences of living in the camp during the pandemic, with some claiming the site does not abide by Covid-19 rules.\n\nPhotos taken inside the camp show the living conditions in one of the rooms\n\nOne man, who wishes to remain anonymous, arrived at the camp on 1 October.\n\nHe said he had pain from \"old injuries\" obtained in Syria, but had to wait \"four days\" to see a doctor. He also has concerns about hygiene facilities at the camp.\n\n\"There is no observance of the Covid safety laws,\" he said, claiming \"six men\" share a small bedroom, dozens eat in the same room, and some staff preparing food do not wear face masks.\n\nVideo footage and photographs of the camp, seen by BBC Wales, show bathroom floors covered with water, every toilet in one bathroom blocked, beds in communal rooms less than 2m (6ft) apart and a bathroom where all the soap dispensers are empty.\n\nThe Home Office said medical need determined GP appointments, social distancing was required, and soap was replenished at the site.\n\nThe man said the camp's conditions had left him in a \"bad psychological state\" and others had attempted self-harm: \"Should I try to hurt myself to get out of here?\"\n\nHe said he and other residents were able to leave the camp as long as they are back by 22:00 GMT, but said he was reluctant to go out due to the \"humiliation, abuse and racism\" he has experienced.\n\nThe site has attracted protests in recent months\n\nWhile some have welcomed the refugees, posting welcome notes outside the gates, the camp has been described as a target for \"hard-right extremist\" protesters.\n\nThe Home Office said that, where someone claims their mental health is suffering, it would consider if their needs can be met at the site.\n\nAnother resident, from Eritrea, north-east Africa, said life in the camp was stressful, and people were being \"treated like prisoners\".\n\n\"For the Eritrean community in this camp, the most difficult thing is we escaped from our country from indefinite military service and illegal imprisonment,\" he said.\n\n\"So we feel like we are imprisoned in a military camp. It is all coming back to us.\"\n\nOne resident said it was impossible to maintain social distancing in a room with six people\n\nThe man said he had been told to be careful and to abide to Covid rules, but there was \"no protection\" as he was sleeping in a room with five others.\n\n\"Most of the bathrooms - they are broken,\" he said.\n\n\"They are filled with tissues, masks, everything you can find, they are blocked, they don't work.\"\n\nHe said he had not been offered a coronavirus test since arriving about three months ago.\n\nThe Home Office said residents had often entered the UK some time ago, and had been mainly placed in the camp after being in the south-east of England and around London.\n\nIt added that coronavirus tests were only necessary in line with Welsh Government guidance.\n\nIt added that Clearsprings Ready Homes, which manage the camp, took immediate steps to repair damage.\n\nSome have welcomed the asylum seekers in the community\n\nBut Plaid Cymru's leader in Westminster, Liz Saville Roberts, has called for an \"urgent\" and \"transparent\" inspection of the site.\n\nIn a letter to the UK's Independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, David Bolt, the MP said: \"We are now not only in the middle of winter, but cases of Covid-19 in Wales are rising at an alarming rate.\n\n\"I am extremely worried that the conditions at the old military barracks are wholly unsuitable to deal with the cold weather and to facilitate effective social distancing.\n\n\"This shows a clear disregard for the health and wellbeing of those being kept in the camp.\"\n\nAbout 40 men took part in the protest outside the camp in November over claims their human rights were being breached\n\nShe told BBC Radio Wales: \"If we aspire to be a nation of sanctuary, surely we should be looking at how people, while they are with us, are integrated into our communities and given all the services that they need, rather than putting them in a convenient enclosed space in a tiny community which is ill equipped itself to deal with this... Let alone far right protests outside and all the pressure that's put on the local population.\n\n\"We need to make sure that this doesn't set a precedent into the future.\"\n\nMr Bolt told Ms Saville Roberts he had \"received assurances\" from the Home Office that the Penally camp had an independent Covid-19 audit on 4 November.\n\nIn a letter, he said he hoped an inspection could be held \"within a few weeks\".\n\nHe said he was keen to understand how the Home Office \"was assuring itself\" individuals who were particularly vulnerable, including torture victims, potential victims of modern slavery, and those with complex health and other needs, were being identified and action taken to safeguard them.\n\nHe said: \"While on site I would expect the only restrictions to be those relating to Covid-19 and that inspectors would be free to examine the premises and facilities, observe daily life and interview staff and service users, and I would look to the Home Office to ensure that whoever is responsible for managing the site understands that they must cooperate with the inspection team.\"\n\nIn December, the Welsh Labour Government deputy minister Jane Hutt called on the Home Secretary Priti Patel to close the camp, describing the conditions as \"unsafe\" and \"inhumane\".\n\nTom Nunn, a solicitor representing some of the residents at camp, said the Home Office had said the camp should only be used as short-term accommodation for single, asylum-seeking males with no known vulnerabilities.\n\nBut he said 20 clients had been transferred away from the camp due to being vulnerable, and feared a serious incident would happen if things did not change.\n\n\"The majority of them have been detained and/or tortured in their country of origin, many have been exploited on their journey to the UK and a large number have fairly severe mental health problems,\" he said.\n\n\"It should not be the case that the only effective way of being transferred out is through making submissions through lawyers, and we are concerned about a large number of individuals who for a myriad of reasons may be unable to obtain this representation.\"\n\nThe UK's Minister for Immigration Compliance, Chris Philp, said: \"We provide asylum seekers in Penally with safe, Covid-compliant and weather-proof accommodation along with free, nutritious meals, all paid for by the taxpayer.\n\n\"We take the welfare of those in our care extremely seriously and asylum seekers can contact the 24/7 helpline run by Migrant Help if they have any issues.\n\n\"We are fixing our asylum system to make it firm and fair. We will be bringing forward legislation which will stop abuse of the system while ensuring it is compassionate towards those who need our help, welcoming people through safe and legal routes.\"", "The TikTok clip was reported to police by Network Rail\n\nA TikTok stunt featuring a car parked on a level crossing has been branded \"staggeringly stupid\".\n\nThe \"reckless\" social media post, recorded on the line at Bromley Cross, Bolton, showed a camera and tripod set up on the railway to record the scene.\n\nAn accompanying caption asked viewers: \"Would you take the risk to get the shot no-one else would?\"\n\nInsp Becky Warren, from British Transport Police, said: \"No picture or video is worth risking your life for.\"\n\nNetwork Rail, which reported the footage after it appeared on the video-sharing app, blasted the \"staggeringly stupid and dangerous\" clip.\n\nIt issued a reminder that trespassing on railway lines is against the law.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by ManchesterPiccadilly This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nNorth West route director Phil James said using the tracks \"as a backdrop for a photo shoot beggars belief\".\n\n\"Lives could so easily have been lost by this reckless behaviour,\" he said.\n\nInsp Warren added: \"There is simply no excuse for not following safety procedures at level crossings. The behaviour shown by the individuals in this video is incredibly dangerous and reckless.\"\n\nMany instances of trespass involve people using railway lines as backdrops for selfies and even wedding photos.\n\nLast year, Network Rail and British Transport Police launched a You vs. Train campaign to highlight the issue of young people trespassing.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Armie Hammer has starred in The Social Network and Call Me By Your Name\n\nUS actor Armie Hammer has pulled out of a new film with Jennifer Lopez after what he described as \"vicious and spurious online attacks against me\".\n\nHammer had been set to appear in the action comedy Shotgun Wedding.\n\nHowever, the star's role will now be re-cast after private messages he supposedly sent were circulated online.\n\nIn a statement, Hammer dismissed the messages and said the subsequent abuse meant he could no longer spend months away from his children while filming.\n\n\"I'm not responding to these [false] claims but in light of the vicious and spurious online attacks against me, I cannot in good conscience now leave my children for four months to shoot a film in the Dominican Republic,\" the 34-year-old said, according to Deadline and Variety.\n\nThe Social Network and Call Me By Your Name actor added that film studio Lionsgate \"is supporting me in this and I'm grateful to them for that\".\n\nHammer has two children aged six and three with TV host Elizabeth Chambers. The couple announced their divorce last summer.\n\nHis name began trending over the weekend after explicit messages detailing disturbing sexual fantasies, which were purportedly sent by him, appeared online.\n\nA spokesman for Shotgun Wedding told the PA news agency that the film's producers accepted his decision.\n\n\"Given the imminent start date of Shotgun Wedding, Armie has requested to step away from the film and we support him in his decision,\" they said.\n\nHammer played the Winklevoss twins in 2010's The Social Network and starred opposite Timothée Chalamet in 2017's acclaimed drama Call Me By Your Name. He also appeared alongside Lily James in the Netflix adaptation of Rebecca, which came out last year.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Twitter boss Jack Dorsey has said banning US President Donald Trump was the right thing to do.\n\nHowever, he expressed sadness at what he described as the \"extraordinary and untenable circumstances\" surrounding Mr Trump's permanent suspension.\n\nHe also said the ban was in part a failure of Twitter's, which hadn't done enough to foster \"healthy conversation\" across its platforms.\n\nTwitter has been praised and criticised for freezing Mr Trump's account.\n\nGerman leader Angela Merkel and Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador - neither an ally of the outgoing US president - spoke out against the tech titan's move.\n\nIn a long Twitter thread, Twitter's chief said he did not celebrate or feel pride in the ban - which came after the Capitol riot last week.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by jack This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHe reiterated that removing the president from Twitter was made after \"a clear warning\" to Mr Trump.\n\n\"We made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter,\" Mr Dorsey said.\n\nHe also accepted that the move would have consequences for an open and free internet.\n\n\"Having to take these actions fragment the public conversation. They divide us….And sets a precedent I feel is dangerous.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police place US Capitol Building on lockdown after Trump supporters breached security lines\n\nHe also addressed criticism that just a handful of tech bosses can make decisions on who does and doesn't have a voice on the internet - and on accusations of censorship.\n\n\"A company making a business decision to moderate itself is different from a government removing access, yet can feel much the same,\" said Mr Dorsey.\n\nThe decision to remove users, posts and tweets has been criticised by some for violating First Amendment - free speech - rights.\n\nHowever, big tech firms generally argue that as they are private companies, and not state actors, this law does not apply when they moderate their platforms.\n\nFacebook and YouTube have taken steps to silence the president, while Amazon shut down Parler, an app widely used by his supporters.\n\nNow Snapchat has also announced that Mr Trump will be permanently banned from its platform too.\n\nIt had already announced an indefinite suspension, but has now decided that \"in the interest of public safety and based on his attempts to spread misinformation, hate speech, and incite violence\" to permanently terminate his account.\n\nOn Monday, the German chancellor's spokesperson said she found the social media ban \"problematic\". And the Mexican president said: \"I don't like anybody being censored.\"\n\nIncoming US President-elect Joe Biden has said he wants companies like Facebook and Twitter to do more to take down hate speech and fake news.\n\nHe has previously said he wants to repeal Section 230, a law protecting social media companies from being sued for the things people post.\n\nIt's not clear how Mr Biden intends to regulate Big Tech, though it's likely to be a legislative focus of his.", "Despite the huge need to free up space in hospitals, some care homes say insurance issues make it impossible for them to accept Covid-19 patients.\n\nIn October, the government launched a scheme for designated care homes to take patients recovering from the virus but insurance is a stumbling block.\n\nSir David Behan, head of the UK's largest care home company, HC-One, says insurance has become a major concern.\n\nThe government says it is working to resolve the issue.\n\n\"We are aware the adult social care insurance market is changing in response to the pandemic, and recognise some care providers may encounter difficulties as their policies come up for renewal,\" said a Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson.\n\nOne Hampshire care home says it will have to stop taking patients within days because its insurance will expire.\n\nWaterside House in Netley, Hampshire usually provides holidays and respite care for people with disabilities.\n\nBut since the autumn it has been taking Covid-positive patients discharged from hospitals on the south coast.\n\nThey are looked after on a separate floor from other residents, and the home has had to meet high infection control standards.\n\nHome manager Sarah Knight said demand for the 31 beds is unparalleled and added: \"I've been in nursing a long, long time, and I have never known anything like this.\n\n\"People end up in an ambulance sat outside hospitals for hours and hours, or they end up on a trolley in A&E in a corridor for hours and hours.\n\n\"By offering the best that we've got here, we can reduce some of that burden.\"\n\nJan Tregelles is chief executive of the charity Revitalise which runs Waterside House\n\nThe government originally hoped there would be 500 designated care homes taking in Covid-positive patients.\n\nBut Waterside House is one of only 129 which have been set up to take those who have not completed 14 days in isolation.\n\nHowever, its public indemnity insurance protection, which it needs in case someone contracts Covid there, runs out at the end of January.\n\nWaterside House is run by the charity Revitalise, whose chief executive, Jan Tregelles, said they have tried everything, but will soon have to start turning away people.\n\n\"It's shocking,\" she says. \"We are truly helpless. We have a fantastic team of nurses and colleagues already.\n\n\"The facilities are here, everything's arranged and we can't step up to support our communities at this time.\"\n\nOne resident, Alan Washbourne, who has been living at Waterside House since he was discharged from hospital during the first wave of the pandemic, said: \"I feel quite safe here.\"\n\nHe is not on the Covid floor of the home, and added: \"If I were to go to somewhere else, which is possible, I might not feel quite so safe.\"\n\nAlan Washbourne has been at Waterside House since April last year\n\nAfter so many deaths last spring, many care homes will not consider taking patients who are Covid-positive, even with extra infection control measures.\n\nMeanwhile, growing numbers of staff are off sick or self-isolating, leaving care homes facing shortages.\n\nAnd many are also finding it difficult to get the public indemnity insurance.\n\nSir David Behan is chairman of HC-One, the UK's largest care home provider\n\nSince November, HC-One, which is the UK's largest care home provider, has had to cover its own Covid risks because it cannot get the insurance.\n\nSir David said it is one of the reasons why they have not taken part in the designated places scheme.\n\n\"You've got solicitors' firms advertising, taking cases up against care companies,\" he says.\n\n\"So, this isn't a theoretical risk that there may be proceedings, it's an actual risk, and therefore we need cover.\n\n\"The NHS wouldn't operate without similar liability cover and that's what we need to see, and I think governments have a role to play working with the insurance industry to work to find a solution.\"\n\nThe Department for Health and Social Care said it was making efforts to determine what actions it could take.\n\n\"Our priority is to ensure everyone receives the right care, in the right place, at the right time,\" said a spokesperson.", "More than 100,000 Covid-19 vaccinations had been issued in Northern Ireland by Tuesday evening, Robin Swann has said.\n\nThe health minister said, of that figure, 91,419 people had received their first vaccine dose.\n\nHe added that 95% of care home residents had received their first dose and about 20% of those aged over 80 have received their first dose.\n\nIt comes as leading GP said the goal to begin a mass vaccine rollout by summer is \"achievable\" but hinges on supply.\n\nThe Department of Health published its plan to deliver vaccines in Northern Ireland on Tuesday.\n\nDr Alan Stout said the timeline was \"very sensible\" but was \"almost 100%\" dependent on getting enough of the vaccine.\n\nAt Wednesday's health briefing, Mr Swann said the programme had made a \"strong start\" but there was more to do.\n\nHe also said he has decided to issue tighter visiting guidelines for hospitals.\n\n\"I have ensured visiting will be permitted to hospices and care homes, but visits to general medical wards will no longer be permitted from this Friday\", he said.\n\nThe minister added that the measure would be kept under constant review.\n\nMr Swann also confirmed a new rapid test for Covid-19, which can return results in 12 minutes, would be used in emergency departments.\n\nHe said a pilot programme has been carried out using the LumiraDX nasal swab, which will enable health staff to \"very quickly identify patients who do not have Covid-19\".\n\nHe also repeated that the current lockdown restrictions were working and had helped to reduce NI's rate of infection, but warned the executive would still have \"difficult decisions\" to take in relation to decisions about whether to extend some restrictions in the coming weeks.\n\nOn Wednesday, a further 19 Covid-related deaths were announced by the Department of Health in Northern Ireland.\n\nA further 1,145 new cases of the virus were also reported.\n\nMeanwhile, Northern Ireland's chief medical officer warned there was \"no doubt\" that levels of the new, more transmissible variant of coronavirus are rising in Northern Ireland.\n\nSpeaking at Stormont's executive briefing, Dr Michael McBride said that the new variant was making the job to contain it \"twice as difficult\".\n\nThe new variant is said to be up to 70% more transmissible, but there is no evidence it is more dangerous.\n\nThe first confirmed case of the new strain was detected in Northern Ireland on 23 December, but officials had said levels in Northern Ireland remained lower than in other areas of the UK.\n\nDr McBride said there would now be situations where the variant could spread, where previously it may not have.\n\n\"We need to be extremely cautious in the weeks ahead,\" he warned, adding that the virus would not \"magically disappear\" on 6 February, when the current lockdown is due to end.\n\nStormont ministers have to review the regulations on or before 22 January, with that scheduled for next Thursday.\n\nDr McBride said Northern Ireland had some distance to go before restrictions are lifted\n\nDr Stout, the chair of NI's GP committee, said practices needed another 22,000 doses to finish vaccinating people aged over 80.\n\nSpeaking to BBC's Good Morning Ulster, he said he was \"very confident\" the next doses would come through shortly.\n\n\"I have been overwhelmed by the desire of practices, the determination just to get going and the one thing we need to give them is vaccine - we need to get the supply in as quickly as possible.\n\n\"This is such a good news story that everybody wants the vaccine and everybody wants to give it.\"\n\nThe plan is for the vaccine to be given to the general population in summer 2021.\n\nGP clinics should have received their first delivery of the vaccine by Tuesday.\n\nResponding to reports in The Daily Telegraph that GPs administering the vaccine in England had been asked to \"slow down\" to let other regions \"catch-up\", Dr Stout said Northern Ireland had taken a different approach to how it rolled out vaccines to GPs.\n\nHe said vaccines were shared among all practices in Northern Ireland.\n\n\"We just don't have the full amount of vaccine in practice to give. We could have given all of the vaccine that a certain number of practices needed to start with but there were issues with inequality and discrimination ... so that's why an amount has gone to every single practice, so at least they have some.\"", "A ban on travellers to the UK from South America has left one family fearing it could leave them stranded abroad for months.\n\nThe restriction comes into force at 04:00 GMT on Friday amid fears of a new Covid variant identified in Brazil.\n\nBritish and Irish citizens and foreign nationals with residence rights will still be able to travel but must isolate for 10 days.\n\nHowever many flights have now been cancelled.\n\nJon Den travelled to Brazil with his wife Carla, 32, in October so that her family - who live in Goiania - could meet their one-year-old daughter Luiza for the first time.\n\nThe couple, who live in Wolverhampton, are due to fly back to the UK on 6 February but Jon now fears they may be stuck out there for months due to the travel ban.\n\n\"We had planned to visit in February 2020 but we had to postpone because of the lockdown and that was rough on my wife, she suffered a lot,\" the 31-year-old says.\n\n\"Now I think my mum is suffering as she's expecting Luiza to be back, but who knows now?\n\n\"My initial reaction was worry because it's so unknown. The thought of not being able to return home and being stranded is not a nice feeling.\n\n\"I'm hoping British residents will be able to get home but I don't know if the government will organise flights. I think it's a long shot. I hope we can get home and not be stranded out here for months.\n\n\"We've got to be patient but at the same time flexible.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Several Leeds bus drivers were faced with challenging conditions in the snow.\n\nHigh demand and heavy snow have had a \"severe impact\" on Yorkshire's ambulances, with bad weather also affecting coronavirus vaccinations.\n\nThe county ambulance trust declared a major incident, urging calls only in a \"serious or life-threatening emergency\" due to poor road conditions.\n\nA vaccination centre in Barnsley was closed, with patients told to await new appointments.\n\nCovid testing centres in Kirklees and Bradford also suspended operations.\n\nA yellow Met Office warning for snow and ice is in force until 21:00 GMT.\n\nMark Millins, strategic commander at Yorkshire Ambulance Service, said \"very snowy conditions across West, South and North Yorkshire\" had caused gridlock and made driving difficult.\n\nStaff were \"working extremely hard to reach patients\", he said, but \"hazardous driving conditions and blocked roads mean that it is taking us longer than normal in the worst-hit areas.\"\n\nVaccinations taking at the Priory Campus in Lundwood, Barnsley, were suspended from 15:00 GMT\n\nIn Barnsley, the town's Clinical Commissioning Group issued a tweet advising that it had postponed all Covid vaccinations at one centre from 15:00 on Thursday.\n\nIt asked those due to receive jabs at the Priory Campus in Lundwood after this time not to travel, and said patients would be contacted with a rescheduled appointment.\n\nThe group said its two remaining centres at Goldthorpe and Apollo Court, in Dodworth, remained open, but those unable to attend would also get a new time and date.\n\nWest Yorkshire Police said it had also seen a surge in calls and urged people not to call 101 for \"non-urgent matters\".\n\nSupt Chris Bowen said the force had received 300 calls to the 999 and 101 numbers in the space of an hour on Thursday morning.\n\nA large snowball fight on Woodhouse Moor in Leeds was criticised for an apparent lack of social distancing after footage was posted on social media.\n\nLiam Ford, who recorded the video, said he saw the \"awful scenes\" after he \"heard the commotion while on a walk round the block\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. A large group of people have been filmed in a snowball fight in Leeds\n\nPolice urged drivers to stay at home until the roads cleared\n\nMotorists reported hazardous driving conditions on many routes and police warned people to stay at home or allow extra time for essential journeys.\n\nPhil Airey said his usual 30-minute commute from Boston Spa to Harrogate took 90 minutes due to the poor conditions.\n\n\"The gritters have been doing their job but any sort of hill then it's not very good and if you go off onto the little roads well they are not good at all,\" he said.\n\nWest Yorkshire's road policing unit said it was dealing with a number of crashes while the North Yorkshire force said the A59 was blocked near Skipton due to a number of vehicles getting stuck in the snow.\n\nThe Met Office has not issued a weather notice for Friday, but a yellow warning for snow and ice on Saturday is in place across most of northern England and Scotland.\n\nPolice say they have dealt with a number of collisions and accidents\n\nFollow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk or send video here.", "Charlie Mullins said workers getting vaccinated is \"a no-brainer\".\n\nA large London plumbing firm plans to rewrite all of its workers' contracts to require them to be vaccinated against coronavirus.\n\nPimlico Plumbers chairman Charlie Mullins said it was \"a no-brainer\" that workers should get the jab.\n\nIf they do not want to comply with the policy, it will be decided on a case-by-case basis whether they are kept on, he said.\n\nEmployment lawyers said the plan carried risks for the business.\n\nThe NHS is seeking to vaccinate 15 million people from priority groups by mid-February as part of efforts to try to control the spread of Covid-19.\n\nBut Mr Mullins said he was prepared to pay for private immunisations for people at the firm, should they become available, which would be done on the company's time.\n\nDoctors have warned that key hospital services in England are in crisis, with reports of hospitals cancelling urgent operations after a surge in Covid patients in recent weeks.\n\nPimlico Plumbers plans to change its contracts for new joiners to require immunisation. It will rewrite its contracts with existing workers and employees as soon as is practical, depending on vaccine availability.\n\nThe firm has about 350 plumbers working as contractors and about 120 employees.\n\nMr Mullins said the firm was \"not putting anyone under any pressure\" to have the jab.\n\nHowever, new starters who were not immunised would not be taken on, he said.\n\nMr Mullins said employees approved of the policy.\n\n\"It's a no-brainer,\" he said. \"I've talked to people who have said: 'I will queue up all night to get the vaccine.'\n\n\"I think it will be the norm in five or six months. To go into a bar or cinema, or go on a plane, you have to have a vaccine,\" he added.\n\nMr Mullins said he had set aside £800,000 to pay for private vaccinations, but estimated costs more in the region of £100,000.\n\n\"Whatever it costs, I will pay,\" he said. \"I would pay £1m tomorrow to safeguard our staff.\n\n\"If people don't want the vaccine, let them sit at home and not have a normal life,\" he added.\n\nHowever, employment lawyers said this vaccination policy could be risky.\n\nLegally, companies cannot force employees to take a vaccine, said Thrive Law managing director Jodie Hill.\n\n\"They can't jab a vaccine in your arm,\" she said.\n\nPeople who refuse vaccination and are dismissed may have grounds to make a legal claim, she said.\n\n\"Even if they put that [requirement] in a new contract, I don't think they'd get away with it,\" she said.\n\nEmployees with more than two years' service could claim unfair dismissal. But this option is not open to workers and self-employed contractors.\n\nBroadly, people can refuse a vaccination for legitimate reasons such as being pregnant or breastfeeding, for religious reasons, because of disability or allergy, or for ethical vegan reasons if the jab contains animal products.\n\nThe two vaccines approved for use in the UK, from Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech, do not contain any components of animal origin, a Department for Health and Social Care spokesman confirmed.\n\nDismissal for employees with one or more of these protected characteristics could give rise to a discrimination claim.\n\nPeople who are hesitant about taking the vaccine for personal reasons would not be able to claim discrimination, but could potentially claim unfair dismissal if they have been with the firm for two years or more.\n\nPeople with strong anti-vaccination beliefs may be protected under equality law, Ms Hill added.\n\nThe company and Mr Mullins have previously faced a lengthy legal battle with one of its former contractors, Gary Smith.\n\nIn 2018, Mr Smith won a Supreme Court ruling over holiday and sick pay. However, an employment tribunal later ruled that he was not entitled to make a claim for the back pay, as he had not completed the necessary paperwork.\n\nMr Mullins insisted that the vaccination change to contracts \"will be done legally\", but said that he was willing to take this matter to the Supreme Court as well, if necessary.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The rapid spread of coronavirus variants has put the world on alert and triggered a new lockdown in the UK. What are these variants and why are they causing concern?\n\nAll viruses naturally mutate over time, and Sars-CoV-2 is no exception.\n\nSince the virus was first identified a year ago, thousands of mutations have arisen.\n\nThe vast majority of mutations are \"passengers\" and will have little impact, says Dr Lucy van Dorp, an expert in the evolution of pathogens at University College London.\n\n\"They don't change the behaviour of the virus, they are just carried along.\"\n\nBut every once in a while, a virus strikes lucky by mutating in a way that helps it survive and reproduce.\n\n\"Viruses carrying these mutations can then increase in frequency due to natural selection, given the right epidemiological settings,\" Dr van Dorp says.\n\nThis is what seems to be happening with the variant that has spread across the UK, known as 202012/01, and a similar, but different variant, recently identified in South Africa (501.V2).\n\nHundreds of thousands of viral genomes have been analysed across the world\n\nThere is no evidence so far that either causes more severe disease, but the worry is that health systems will be overwhelmed by a rapid rise in cases.\n\nIn a rapid risk assessment of these \"variants of concern\", the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said they place increased pressure on health systems.\n\n\"Although there is no information that infections with these strains are more severe, due to increased transmissibility, the impact of Covid-19 disease in terms of hospitalisations and deaths is assessed as high, particularly for those in older age groups or with co-morbidities,\" the EU agency said.\n\nThe variants have different origins but share a mutation in a gene that encodes the spike protein, which the virus uses to latch on to and enter human cells.\n\nScientists think this could be why they appear more infectious.\n\n\"The UK and South African virus variants have changes in the spike gene consistent with the possibility that they are more infectious,\" says Prof Lawrence Young at the University of Warwick.\n\nBut as Dr Jeff Barrett, director of the Covid-19 genomics initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, points out, it's the combination of what the virus is doing and what we're doing that determines how fast it spreads.\n\n\"With the new variant, the situation changes more quickly as restrictions are relaxed and tightened, and there is less room for error in controlling the spread,\" he says.\n\n\"We don't have any evidence, however, that the new variant can fundamentally evade masks, social distancing, or the other interventions - we just need to apply them more strictly.\"\n\nThe spike protein (foreground) enables the virus to enter and infect human cells\n\nWith vaccine roll-out underway, scientists are racing to understand the repercussions for vaccines, which are based on the spike protein sequence.\n\nThere is particular concern about the South Africa variant, which has several changes in the spike (S) protein.\n\nMost experts think vaccines will still be effective, at least in the short term.\n\nDr Julian W Tang, a virologist at the University of Leicester, says vaccines can be modified to be \"more close-fitting and effective against this variant in a few months\".\n\n\"Meanwhile, most of us believe that the existing vaccines are likely to work to some extent to reduce infection/ transmission rates and severe disease against both the UK and South African variants - as the various mutations have not altered the S protein shape that the current vaccine-induced antibodies will not bind at all.\"\n\nMink outbreaks are a \"spillover\" from the human pandemic\n\nScientists are carrying out laboratory studies to find out more about the variants. And they are tracking every move of the virus as it hopscotches around the world.\n\nBy taking a swab from an infected patient, the genetic code of the virus can be extracted and amplified before being \"read\" using a sequencer.\n\nThe string of letters, or nucleotides, allows genomes and mutations to be compared.\n\n\"It is thanks to these efforts, and UK testing laboratories, that the UK variant has been flagged so quickly as a potential cause of concern,\" Dr van Dorp says.\n\nProf Julian Hiscox, chair in infection and global health at the University of Liverpool, says that, through the efforts of scientists to sequence the virus, \"we've got a really good handle on variants that emerge\".\n\nIn the short-term, only the harshest of lockdowns will reduce case numbers, he says.\n\n\"What lockdown does is reduce the number of people with the virus and reduce the amount of virus out there and that's a good thing.\"\n\nBut in the long term, Prof Hiscox suspects, we may face a scenario like flu, where new vaccines are developed and administered every year.\n\n\"The problem is, the more variants we get, the greater the chance the virus will be able to escape part of the vaccine - and this may reduce [its] efficacy,\" he says.\n• None New coronavirus variant: What do we know?", "The co-founder for Cyberpunk 2077's developer has released a new video explaining what went wrong with the game.\n\nCD Projekt's Marcin Iwiński admitted they \"underestimated the task\" of adapting the game for consoles like the PS4 and Xbox One.\n\nMarcin says he's \"deeply sorry for this and this video is me publicly owning up\".\n\nThe game was arguably the most anticipated release of 2020 but the launch just before Christmas was a disaster.\n\nThe problems led to Sony and Microsoft removing the game from online stores and gamers were offered refunds.\n\nCyberpunk 2077 is a set in the fictional Night City - a dystopian future where pollution and crime are rampant and social inequality is the norm.\n\nIn the video, Marcin explains issues originated from Cyperpunk's \"huge\" scope, particularly the high number \"of custom objects, interacting systems, and mechanics\", making it a complex game.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by Cyberpunk 2077 This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nAs this was \"condensed in one big city\" rather than spread over a bigger space - it needed greater hardware capability.\n\nSo despite working well for high-end PCs, it couldn't be adjusted to older generation consoles such as the PS4 and Xbox One, making in-game streaming difficult.\n\n\"We hit the ground running on PC. While not perfect, it's a version of Cyberpunk we're very proud of.\"\n\nMarcin adds that testing did not \"show a big part of the issues\" that gamers experienced.\n\n\"As we got closer to the final release, we saw significant improvements each and every day.\"\n\nHe also blames the coronavirus pandemic for creating issues for CD Projekt as they tried to improve performance after launch.\n\n\"A lot of the dynamics we normally take for granted got lost over video calls or email. And we took that hit too.\"\n\nLooks good right? But this wasn't what the game looked like for a lot of console gamers\n\nMarcin added the \"incredibly hard working and talented\" development team should not be blamed for problems, saying the final decision came down to him and the board.\n\n\"Believe me, we never ever intended for anything like this to happen. I assure you that we will do our best to regain your trust\".\n\nAs part of that, he says they intend to fix the problems and improve the game across platforms.\n\n\"Our ultimate goal is to fix the bugs and crashes,\" he says, with updates to the game expected to arrive in the coming days and weeks.\n\n\"We treat this entire situation very seriously and are working hard to make it right.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nListen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.", "Julia is doing well after her surprise arrival into the world\n\nA mother who gave birth just 10 days after discovering she was pregnant thought she had put on weight in lockdown.\n\nSamantha Hicks, from Portishead, North Somerset, attributed her baby Julia's kicking to sickness having been ill.\n\nHer pregnancy was missed even when she was in Southmead Hospital in Bristol with Covid-19 in November .\n\n\"It never occurred to me I was pregnant as I had taken two previous tests which both came back negative,\" she said.\n\nWhen Mrs Hicks was taken to the Covid ward in hospital, doctors asked if she was pregnant and she said no.\n\nShe said she had noticed a small amount of weight gain but put it down to lockdown and that she thought she might have Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) as it runs in the family.\n\nMrs Hicks said: \"I felt a bit of movement but I thought it was because I had not been well.\n\n\"My tummy was a bit swollen but again, because I felt sick and I wasn't great, it never occurred to me I was pregnant.\"\n\nHer husband Joe said: \"On Christmas Day, I asked her if she was sure she wasn't pregnant, but she said no and she knows her own body.\n\n\"Then on January 1, I had my hands on Sammy and we felt a baby kick.\n\n\"We took another pregnancy test which came back positive.\"\n\nAt that stage, Mrs Hicks thought she was only five or six months into her term and returned to her job in a care home, walking 40 minutes to get there.\n\nTen days later, her contractions began and Mr Hicks rushed her to hospital\n\n\"It was unreal, the doctors only realised Julia was full term when she was born,\" he said.\n\nThe couple, who have two sons aged three and eight, said they had not planned on having more children.\n\nThey have since been \"inundated\" with gifts from friends, family and strangers in Portishead, who have offered blankets and essentials to help out.\n\n\"We want to say thank you to everyone really,\" Mr Hicks said.\n\nHelen Blanchard, Director of Nursing and Quality at North Bristol NHS Trust said: \"We would like to pass our congratulations to Mrs Hicks and her family on their new arrival.\n\n\"As Mrs Hicks experienced when she was cared for at Southmead, it is routine practice to ask people if they are, or could be, pregnant upon admission.\n\n\"However, we would ask a patient to do a pregnancy test if they were undergoing specific operations or procedures.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Marcus Rashford and a group of celebrity chefs and campaigners have called on Boris Johnson to review the government's free school meals policy.\n\nThe group, including Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Tom Kerridge, have written to the PM asking him to \"fix\" the system long-term.\n\nThey called for a strategy to help \"end child food poverty\" before the summer holidays.\n\nNo 10 said \"no child will ever go hungry\" because of the Covid pandemic.\n\nThe call for a wide review comes after another row over free school meals during February half-term.\n\nThe government has said food will be provided to children by councils under the Covid Winter Grant Scheme while schools are closed for the holiday.\n\nCouncils and unions say the government should provide food vouchers instead, with the Local Government Association's Councillor Richard Watts telling BBC Radio 4's PM programme the grant had already been allocated for other support.\n\nBut Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"We are down to semantics whether it is the school delivering the meal or whether it is the local authority - fortunately there is quite a lot of different support available.\"\n\nAs well as getting the backing of Rashford - who has led campaigns around child poverty over the course of the pandemic - the letter has been signed by chefs Oliver, Kerridge and Fearnley-Whittingstall, along with actor Dame Emma Thompson and over 40 charities and education leaders.\n\nOrganised by the Food Foundation charity, the letter said it was time to \"step back and review the policy in more depth\".\n\nThey called for an \"urgent comprehensive review into free school meal policy across the UK\" to feed into the government's next Spending Review, saying it should look at:\n\nThe signatories praised the Department for Education's \"swift response\" to reports earlier this week of inadequate food parcels sent to families, saying the \"robustness of the message from you and the secretary of state on this issue was very welcome\".\n\nBut, they added that \"following the series of problems which have arisen over school food vouchers, holiday provision and food parcels since the start of the pandemic\", now was the time for a review.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Tom Kerridge: There has to be a solution to free school meals\n\nAnna Taylor, executive director of the Food Foundation charity, said the last few months had seen \"crisis after crisis with the provision of free school meals\".\n\n\"The result of that is disadvantaged children have often paid the price,\" she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.\n\n\"Our view is that really unless we do a root and branch review these problems are going to still keep appearing.\"\n\nChef Fearnley-Whittingstall also called for a more consistent, long-term response to the issue of food poverty.\n\n\"We need to get out of this fire-fighting, highly reactive series of actions by the government,\" he told the same programme.\n\nThe signatories want a review to be published and debated in Parliament before the 2021 summer holidays.\n\n\"We are ready and willing to support your government in whatever way we can to make this review a reality and to help develop a set of recommendations that everyone can support,\" the letter said.\n\n\"School food is essential in supporting the health and learning of our most disadvantaged children.\n\n\"Now, at a time when children have missed months of in-school learning and the pandemic has reminded us of the importance of our health, this is a vital next step.\"\n\nAnti-poverty campaigner and food writer Jack Monroe welcomed the letter to the PM, but told the BBC: \"We need to be feeding children right now.\"\n\nShe added: \"While it is great to be looking longer term... having an underpinning strategy that means that children aren't put into poverty in the first place, we need to also immediately be putting resources in to ensure people aren't going hungry, today, tonight, next week and in the February half-term.\n\n\"This isn't a rhetorical thing. It isn't a dinner party discussion. We need to be doing this now.\"\n\nA Downing Street spokesperson said: \"It is great that celebrities and groups across society see the importance of school food. The PM thanks Marcus Rashford for his letter and will reply soon.\n\n\"School food is essential in supporting the health and learning of the most disadvantaged pupils. The prime minister has been clear that no child will ever go hungry as a result of the pandemic\".", "The prime minister has suggested there could be restrictions on travel from Brazil to the UK - but a final decision has not been taken.\n\nBoris Johnson was asked by Labour MP Yvette Cooper why checks on people arriving from Brazil have not been strengthened, given that a new variant of coronavirus has been identified there.\n\nMr Johnson said: \"We are taking steps to ensure that we do not see the import of this new variant from Brazil.\"\n\nThe UK government’s 'Covid-O' committee is expected to discuss the new Brazil variant of coronavirus at a meeting on Thursday.", "People needing to travel by rail during lockdown are being urged to double-check train times, as services are being reduced.\n\nServices in England are being cut from 87% of normal levels to 72%, industry body the Rail Delivery Group said.\n\nIt said the number of trains would reflect the drop in passengers, and provide better value for money for taxpayers who are subsidising services.\n\nPeak services will be prioritised to help key workers, it added.\n\nWhile some timetables have already changed, others will be altered in the next few weeks.\n\nSince the early days of the pandemic, the government has spent billions of pounds covering the fall in ticket revenues for rail companies, owing to low passenger numbers.\n\nCutting some services will save public money, the government said.\n\nRail minister Chris Heaton-Harris said: \"It is critical that our railways continue to deliver reliable services for key workers and people who cannot reasonably work from home, and that they respond quickly to changes in demand.\"\n\nRail usage has slumped, with passenger journeys falling more than 90% to 35 million journeys for the three-month period to June, according to the Office of Rail and Road.\n\nThe figures recovered a little to 134 million for the three months to September - the latest published.\n\nWith fewer passengers, the government argues, it makes sense to run fewer services.\n\nNot least because right now, the government are footing much of the bill; since the start of the pandemic, the government has spent more than £4bn covering the fall in ticket revenues because of low passenger numbers.\n\nThe cuts aren't as deep as they were in March - then services were running around 55% of pre-pandemic levels - which is partly because the train companies want to make sure it doesn't take as long getting the services back up again when they are needed.\n\nLonger term, rail companies are nervous about how quickly passengers, particularly commuters, will return, but for now the message is still firmly \"stay at home\".\n\n\"Train timetables must still meet the needs of those who have to travel, said Transport Focus chief executive Anthony Smith.\n\n\"Many key workers rely on the first and last services of the day so it's important that these are maintained. Providing enough capacity for those who are travelling to properly social distance remains vital.\"\n\nAlthough timetables were restored when restrictions were eased over the summer, rail franchising has since been scrapped and replaced with a model which means the taxpayer is currently liable for the losses on the railways.\n\nIn September, the bill had run to more than £3.5bn - and the Department for Transport has said \"significant\" support is still needed.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Large parts of Scotland woke up to a blanket of snow on Thursday, including in Rutherglen where conditions became challenging for drivers\n\nMotorists continue to face difficult conditions after heavy snow across parts of Scotland caused road closures.\n\nA Met Office yellow warning for ice will be in place overnight and for all of Friday for mainland Scotland.\n\nThe A9 at Dunblane was closed due to snow but has now reopened, while driving conditions on the M90 and M8 were reported as difficult.\n\nThere have also been problems in the Scottish Borders where up to a foot of snow fell overnight.\n\nTraffic Scotland has reported difficult driving conditions on the M77 at Fenwick, M80 around Cumbernauld and the A9 at Greenloaning.\n\nA woman walks through the snow in Braco near Dunblane\n\nThe impact of the overnight freeze on a hedgerow near Strathaven, South Lanarkshire\n\nIn the Borders several lorries got stuck on the A7 between Selkirk and Hawick, while difficult driving conditions were also reported on the A68 at the Carter Bar and Soutra.\n\nThere were also delays on the A83 Old Military Road diversion and the A82 at Tyndrum.\n\nMeanwhile, police have urged drivers to properly clear their car windscreens before setting off in the wintry conditions.\n\nOfficers in Dumfries and Galloway shared a picture of a driver they stopped and charged for failing to do this.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by DumfriesGPolice This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nPeople should only be leaving home to make essential journeys in parts of Scotland under level four Covid measures, under current Scottish government lockdown regulations.\n\nCh Supt Louise Blakelock, of Police Scotland, said: \"Government guidance on only travelling if your journey is essential remains in place and so with an amber warning for snow, please consider if your journey really is essential and whether you can delay it until the weather improves.\n\n\"If your journey really is essential, plan ahead and make sure you and your vehicle are suitably prepared by having sufficient fuel and supplies such as warm clothing, food, water and charge in your mobile phone in the event you require assistance.\"\n\nA motorist brushes snow off a car in Braco near Dunblane\n\nThe village of Bowden near Melrose woke up to snow\n\nA snowy scene at Fountainhall in the Scottish Borders\n\nPolice in Shetland have also warned of ice badly affecting roads on the islands.\n\nScotRail said its services could be affected, particularly on the Highland mainline.\n\nScottish Borders Council said the effects of the adverse weather could cause disruption into Friday morning.\n\nEmergency planning officer Jim Fraser said: \"With widespread snow and some freezing rain possible over the course of Wednesday and Thursday, there is the strong potential for disruption across our road network and communities.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Michael Matheson MSP This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSome of the deepest snowfalls in recent weeks have been in the Highlands, including the Cairngorms.\n\nEarlier this month, the UK had its coldest night of the winter so far after a temperature of -12.3C was recorded in the north west Highlands.\n\nThe temperature was recorded at Loch Glascarnoch, near Garve, south of Ullapool in Wester Ross.\n\nThe record lowest temperature in the UK is -27.2C, which was recorded in Braemar, Aberdeenshire, in 1895 and 1982 and at Altnaharra in the Highlands in 1995.", "Pre-departure Covid-19 testing will now be required for everyone travelling to England from 04:00 GMT on Monday.\n\nThe rules had been due to come into force on Friday, but the government said people needed time \"to prepare\".\n\nThose arriving by plane, train or boat, including UK nationals, will have to take a test up to 72 hours before leaving the country they are in.\n\nAnyone arriving from places not on the UK's travel corridor list must still self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nThe Scottish government is planning to impose the same rules and has had to defer them coming into effect as a result of changes in England.\n\n\"This meant Scotland was also obliged to delay implementation as we need sight of their final regulations in order to properly draft and approve the relevant Scottish regulations,\" a spokeswoman said.\n\nIt is expected the requirement will come into force in Scotland at 04:00 GMT on Monday as well. Wales and Northern Ireland are expected to announce plans for pre-arrival testing in the coming days.\n\nAnnouncing the deferral on Twitter, Transport Secretary Mr Shapps said: \"To give international arrivals time to prepare, passengers will be required to provide proof of a negative Covid-19 test before departure to England from Monday 18 January at 4am.\"\n\nHe also reminded travellers to fill out the Passenger Locator Form - used in track and trace - and added that those without proof of a negative test faced a fine of £500.\n\nProblems with testing availability and capacity mean some countries will initially be exempt.\n\nFor instance, the requirement will not apply to travellers from St Lucia, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda until 04:00 GMT on 21 January.\n\nTravellers from Falkland Islands, Ascension Islands and St Helena are exempted permanently.\n\nHauliers are exempt to allow the free flow of freight, as are air, international rail and maritime crew.\n\nThe government has said all forms of PCR test will be accepted, as will other forms of test with \"97% specificity, 80% sensitivity\".\n\nThe move comes as a further 1,564 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test - the biggest figure reported in a single day since the pandemic began.\n\nWednesday's figure brings the total number of deaths by that measure to 84,767.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England, said there had now been more deaths in the second wave than the first.\n\nMeanwhile on Wednesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was \"concerned\" about a new coronavirus variant that is believed to have emerged in Brazil.\n\nHe acknowledged it was not yet clear how effective existing vaccines would be against the latest new variant.\n\nMr Johnson said the UK was taking steps to make sure it was not brought into the country.\n\nA government Covid committee is meeting on Thursday to discuss the possibility of stopping flights from Brazil.\n\nArrivals from Brazil already have to self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nAre you due to travel back to the UK from Brazil? Share your experience. Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Post-primary schools have been given extra time to decide how they will admit pupils in 2021 following the cancellation of transfer tests.\n\nOn Wednesday the AQE said it would not hold any transfer tests in the 2020-21 school year.\n\nThey had originally planned to go ahead with a test in late February after cancelling tests in January.\n\nThe other test provider, PPTC, had also previously announced it would not hold tests this year.\n\nAttention will now focus especially on what criteria grammar schools will use to select pupils.\n\nSome have already published what criteria they would use in the event transfer tests were cancelled but it is not clear if those will now change.\n\nAll post-primaries were to submit their admissions criteria to the Education Authority (EA) by this Friday.\n\nBut following the AQE's move the Department of Education (DE) has written to schools to tell them they do not have to provide criteria to the EA until Friday 22 January.\n\n\"This will allow them to meet the statutory deadline for publication on their website of 2 February 2021,\" the DE letter said.\n\n\"I would also remind you that boards of governors should ensure that any admissions criteria are robust and are able to clearly and objectively rank order applicants.\"\n\nIt is unclear how most grammar schools who have used transfer tests to select pupils in previous years will admit children in 2021.\n\nPatrick Allen, principal of Foyle College in Londonderry, said his school's board of governors was now working to determine this year's admissions criteria.\n\n\"This is and continues to be an exceptional year. It is a very difficult circumstance,\" he said.\n\n\"We are trying to do the best and what is right for as many pupils as possible in looking at various permutations and combinations of criteria\".\n\nEducation Minister Peter Weir said it was \"a very disappointing day\" for many families.\n\n\"The transfer test, while it has never been about being compulsory for either a school or indeed an individual parent, does enable a level of parental choice and that has been dramatically reduced as a result of that,\" he told Radio Ulster's Good Morning Ulster programme.\n\n\"But sadly what we have seen is for this year, the pandemic has prevented those transfer tests taking place, and I am very disappointed and entirely understand the disappointment and frustration of many families today.\"\n\nMr Weir said there had been \"a lack of consistency\" from AQE.\n\n\"I don't think the way things have worked out from AQE's point of view, particularly over the last couple of weeks, have been particularly helpful,\" he said.\n\nThe minister also apologised for \"clumsy language\" in a statement he issued on Wednesday night.\n\nWriting on Twitter about the cancellation of the transfer test, Mr Weir said: \"This severely limits parental choice and children's opportunities.\"\n\n\"There was no adverse intention towards non-selective schools,\" he said in relation to his tweet.\n\n\"I think both selective and non-selective schools have got excellent records in Northern Ireland.\"\n\n\"But once the opportunities for entry to any school is reduced then that is a reduction in opportunities for all.\"\n\nUUP MLA Robbie Butler has proposed that pupils' results in tests in primary schools could be given to parents and then used by grammar schools to decide which children get a place.\n\nMr Butler said that he had some favourable responses from some grammars and some primary schools to that proposal.\n\n\"Whilst I don't think my solution is absolutely perfect I do believe it to be absolutely fair and absolutely compassionate,\" he told MLAs on the committee.\n\n\"We have the genesis of a solution for these P7 pupils.\"\n\nBut, speaking on Wednesday, Mr Weir replied that there were issues with that approach.\n\n\"There are very major problems, I'm being honest with you, in terms of the models that have been put forward for academic selection without the test,\" he said.\n\nThe minister said it would be difficult to get comparable information for pupils across all primaries.\n\n\"While it's not entirely ruling out those and there is the option for schools to do it, it does leave them in a very difficult position making comparability between pupils on a fair basis,\" he said", "Jamie McMillan said delays in exporting his shellfish would result in them arriving dead\n\nA Scottish shellfish firm has warned it is on the brink of bankruptcy as delays continue at ports following the introduction of post-Brexit red tape.\n\nLochfyne Langoustines managing director Jamie McMillan said his firm had already lost some consignments after they were found to be rotten by the time they arrived in France.\n\nHe also warned EU customers were now going to Denmark to buy langoustines.\n\nMr McMillan described it as a \"very, very serious situation\".\n\nHis comments came after transport company DFDS announced a further delay in exports of group consignments of seafood to the EU.\n\nIt halted groupage exports last week after delays in getting new paperwork for EU border posts in France.\n\nDFDS said it would not resume those exports until Monday.\n\nMr McMillan told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme: \"We've been screaming for the last six months - eight months - that we have to get our produce to market within 12 to 24 hours.\n\n\"Any delays in that process, our shellfish will arrive in France dead.\n\n\"We lost two pallets last week. It took five days to arrive in Boulogne from Scotland, so our goods were rotten on arrival.\"\n\nTransport company DFDS has said it will not resume groupage exports until Monday\n\nHe added: \"Customers are not buying from us any more - we have become unreliable suppliers.\n\n\"Everybody has stopped buying. This has happened for the past two weeks. We can't continue this to happen for another week because we will be out of business.\n\n\"We have had no sales to the EU, our biggest market for live shellfish, in the last two weeks.\n\n\"If we go another week without that, we are finished.\"\n\nMr McMillan said there were \"sticking points\" in both the UK and France, with transportation hubs in Scotland struggling with increased paperwork and checks by vets.\n\n\"There are sticking points down in France as well,\" he said.\n\n\"There are delays at the borders in France for up to 30 hours, I'm hearing, to clear customs by the time they do all their checks.\"\n\nThe UK government's Scotland Office minister David Duguid said he did not underestimate the struggles the industry was facing with paperwork, IT and ports.\n\nHe said the UK and Scottish governments, fish exporters and the EU needed to come together to work through the issues, which he estimated would last \"weeks\" and not months.\n\nHe told Good Morning Scotland: \"What I can commit to is that the UK government, whether that's through Defra or the Scotland Office, we are working day and night in resolving the issues that we know about and that we can fix directly.\n\n\"The other issues that are maybe the responsibility of the Scottish government, or indeed the EU on the other side of the channel, Defra are engaging heavily with those parties as well.\"\n\nHowever, when asked directly on the programme how long the problems would last, Mr Duguid responded: \"How long is a piece of string?\"\n\nFish ate up a lot of the time in negotiating the deal for departing the European customs union and single market.\n\nNow grown to become a much bigger political predator, it has started the post-Brexit era by threatening to devour UK ministers with the task of making the deal work.\n\nThe fisheries minister admitted she was preparing for Christmas rather than seeing how the deal had turned out on 24 December. Asked how long it will take to sort out delays, a Scotland Office minister asked: \"How long's a piece of string?\"\n\nThe prime minister says there will be compensation, but it seems that is due to come from the fund intended to expand the fishing fleet.\n\nAnd Michael Gove, who appears to have more of a grasp of the detail, was in the Commons on Wednesday, acknowledging there's a vast amount for the government yet to sort out - and that was only for Northern Ireland.\n\nAt least the province got a grace period before consignments of food require the paperwork now needed to send fish to France. That was sought by fish and meat exporters.\n\nIt's not clear if the request was made of EU negotiators, but it hasn't materialised. Yet coming the other way, the UK has given a six-month preparation period for EU exporters to Britain.\n\nBecause seafood is freshly delivered, it is the product that hit the obstacles first. Meat and dairy are sure to follow.\n\nBeef exporters to Europe are beginning to face delays, while Brexit chickens are coming home to roast.", "A teenage motorcyclist who led police on a 30-minute pursuit at speeds of up to 180mph (290km/h) through London and three counties has been sentenced.\n\nOfficers in Haringey, London, spotted a speeding rider at about 21:20 BST on 20 May and were joined by a police helicopter as they followed it along the M1, through Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire.\n\nThe biker mounted pavements, drove through multiple red lights and the wrong way down the motorway hard shoulder before he was arrested at a service station.\n\nMarian Vasilica Dragoi, 19, of Teynton Terrace, Haringey, pleaded guilty to dangerous driving, failing to stop for police, driving without a licence and being uninsured and was sentenced at Wood Green Crown Court to 46 weeks' detention.", "The opening of Nintendo's first theme park has been delayed because of rising coronavirus cases in Japan.\n\nSuper Nintendo World, modelled on levels of the company's Mario games, had been due to open on 4 February.\n\nBut Japan has expanded its state of emergency, due to last until at least 7 February, beyond Tokyo to include Osaka prefecture, where the park is located.\n\nThe opening, at Universal Studios Japan, had already been postponed from mid-2020 because of the pandemic.\n\nBut in December, Nintendo posted a video tour of the park in December, starring Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong, among others.\n\nIt is not the first theme park to suffer problems during the pandemic - the shuttered Disneyland theme park in California is set to become a large-scale vaccination centre.\n\nThe state of emergency in Japan, which has so far avoided the types of lockdowns seen in the UK and other European nations, prohibits non-essential trips outside the home.\n\nOn Tuesday, the country's total number of cases reached 300,000, with more than 4,000 deaths.\n\nAnd many of those have been in the past three months.\n\nThe rising number of cases has also led to some doubts over the fate of the Tokyo Olympics, scheduled for this summer, having already been postponed last year.\n\nOrganisers, however, insist the Games will go ahead.", "Nearly 46% of over-80s in England's North East and Yorkshire region have been given their first dose of a Covid vaccine - more than any other area, official figures show.\n\nThis compares with about 30% of over-80s in both London and the East of England who have received a first jab.\n\nLondon Mayor Sadiq Khan claims the capital is not getting its fair share of vaccine doses.\n\nIn total, more than 2.2 million people in England have had one vaccine dose.\n\nAbout 400,000 second doses have also been administered, despite guidance from the UK's chief medical officers and vaccine advisers, the JCVI, that giving a first dose to as many people as possible was a public health priority.\n\nThe NHS England figures cover Covid-19 vaccinations given to people at hospital hubs and GP practices between 8 December 2020 and 10 January 2021.\n\nAmong the over-80s alone, most first doses - 204,140 - were administered in north-east England and Yorkshire, while the lowest number (92,398) were given to this age group in London.\n\nOverall, more than one-third of people aged 80 and over in England have received at least one dose.\n\nThe figures show that in the Midlands more vaccine doses had been administered to all people in the top priority groups - 387,647 - than in any other area of England. In London, a total of 199,986 first doses were given and in the East the figure was 186,291.\n\nThese include care home residents, frontline heath and care staff, the over-80s and people who are clinically extremely vulnerable, who are most at risk of becoming seriously ill and dying from the Covid-19.\n\nThe percentage of the whole population to have received a first dose so far ranged from 4.3% in the north-east and Yorkshire to 2.2% in London.\n\nMr Khan said he was \"hugely concerned\" that Londoners had received only one-tenth of the vaccines that had been given across the country.\n\n\"The situation in London is critical with rates of the virus extremely high, which is why it's so important that vulnerable Londoners are given access to the vaccine as soon as possible,\" he said.\n\nHe said he would hold talks with vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi to ensure more vaccines were delivered to reflect the level of need in the city.\n\nLondon has a younger average population than other parts of England and the smallest number of people aged over 80 compared with other regions.\n\nDr Mary Ramsay, head of immunisation at Public Health England, said vaccinating over a third of all over-80s was \"a great achievement\".\n\nBut she said people must continue to follow the guidance that is in place to protect themselves and their loved ones.\n\n\"These data will help us to evaluate the protection from the vaccine and to effectively target the roll-out of the programme to help control the virus and save lives,\" she added.", "Mauritius has been removed from the safe list\n\nTravellers from countries near South Africa are to be banned from entering England to stop the spread of the South African Covid variant.\n\nArrivals from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Botswana, as well as island nations Mauritius and Seychelles, will be affected.\n\nThe rule will take effect on 9 January but there will be an exemption for British and Irish nationals.\n\nThey will need to follow existing quarantine procedures.\n\nA ban by visitors to the UK from South Africa started on 24 December.\n\nThe latest restriction brought in by the Department for Transport also affects travellers arriving from Eswatini, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Mozambique.\n\nIt will apply from 04:00 GMT on Saturday to people who have travelled from or through any of the specified countries in the last 10 days.\n\nIt is understood most flights from the affected countries arrive at airports in England, although it is expected the policy will be formally adopted by the other UK nations.\n\nThe measures will be in place for an initial period of two weeks.\n\nMeanwhile, Botswana, and the islands of Seychelles and Mauritius, are being removed from the UK list of safe travel corridors as there is a high frequency of travel between the islands and South Africa.\n\nThe new variant of coronavirus circulating in South Africa is already being seen in other countries, including the UK.\n\nThe variant, much like the new UK variant first seen in Kent, appears to be more contagious than previous ones.\n\nAnyone arriving into the UK from most destinations must quarantine for 10 days.\n\nBut there are a list of countries exempt from the rules, meaning returning travellers do not need to self-isolate, called the travel corridor list.\n\nUnder the latest announcement, the travel corridor with Israel will also end amid concerns about rising infection levels in that country.\n\nHowever, rules in place across the UK currently ban travel abroad unless for specific reasons.", "Tesco says it has seen some disruption to food supplies in Northern Ireland since trading arrangements with the EU changed on 1 January.\n\n\"We see this as a challenge at the moment, but not a crisis,\" boss Ken Murphy said.\n\nBut he said the retailer was working closely with government on both sides of the Irish Sea to \"smooth the flow\".\n\nSince 31 December, Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK that has stayed in the EU's single market for goods.\n\nMr Murphy said certain foodstuffs had faced supply chain disruption going into both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.\n\n\"Ready meals have been the most affected as they have an eight-day shelf life so any wait is more likely to have an impact,\" he said.\n\n\"Some processed meat and some citrus fruit has also been impacted, but it is important to stress that our availability in the Republic and Northern Ireland is strong and is very strong in the mainland UK.\n\nLast week, all the major grocers wrote to Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove asking him to take urgent action.\n\nBut Tesco said its \"comprehensive preparations and... strong relationships with suppliers\" had allowed it to maintain strong levels of availability during the Brexit transition period.\n\nMr Murphy said he was confident Tesco would have the right measures in place to supply Northern Ireland after end of a three month grace period on certain rules and regulations with the EU on 31 March.\n\nHe also said there had also been \"teething problems\" with supply flows from continental Europe to Great Britain.\n\n\"Inevitably there are bedding-in issues, teething issues, that you would expect with any new process that's been set up at relatively short notice,\" he said.\n\n\"We're working our way through those and we would hope over the coming weeks and months that we will end up with a much smoother flow of product.\"\n\nUnder new trading arrangements, food products entering Northern Ireland from Britain need to be professionally certified and are subject to new checks and controls at ports.\n\nMarks & Spencer has temporarily reduced its range of food products in Northern Ireland\n\nA three month \"grace period\" means that supermarkets currently don't need to comply with all the EU's usual certification requirements until 1 April - but there has still been disruption.\n\nM&S has temporarily reduced its range of food products and Sainsbury's has been sourcing Spar-branded products from an NI wholesaler.\n\nThis week the bosses of Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Iceland, Co-Op and Marks & Spencer warned that trade into Northern Ireland would become \"unworkable\" if further new certification requirements were introduced in April .\n\nThe government said a new dedicated team has already been set up and will be working with supermarkets, the food industry and the Northern Ireland Executive to develop ways to streamline the movement of goods.\n\nTesco's comments came as the supermarket giant reported record sales for the Christmas period after customers looked to \"treat themselves\" amid tough Covid restrictions across most of the UK.\n\nUK like-for-like sales were up 8.1% in the six weeks to 9 January, as the supermarket saw a surge in demand for goods in its Tesco Finest range.\n\nBig grocers have benefited at a time when most non-essential shops and restaurants are closed, prompting consumers to spend more on their weekly shop. But they have faced criticism too.\n\nLast month, Tesco said it would repay £585m of business rates relief after it was criticised for paying dividends to shareholders during the crisis. Most big grocers followed suit.\n\nTesco was later criticised for keeping its shops open on Boxing Day despite union calls to give staff the day off.\n\nIn its results the grocer said it had given all frontline staff a 10% bonus over Christmas. It also said it had shielded vulnerable staff and taken on nearly 35,000 additional temporary staff for the season.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. James Howells says he wishes he had never thrown away the hard drive\n\nA man who threw away a laptop hard drive containing bitcoin he believes is now worth about £210m wants his council to let him search for it in landfill.\n\nJames Howells had 7,500 bitcoins, a virtual currency, on the hard drive, which he mistakenly threw away in 2013.\n\nHe said he was willing to donate 25% of the value of the bitcoins to his home city of Newport in south Wales - about £52.5m - if he found the hard drive.\n\nNewport council said excavation was not possible under its licensing permit.\n\nMr Howells said if he was to recover the hard drive, he would want the money to be put into a \"Covid relief fund\" for people in Newport to use \"no questions asked\".\n\n\"Imagine how great it would be to say 'I've given everyone in the city a few hundred pounds',\" he told the BBC.\n\nMr Howells bought the bitcoins for almost nothing in 2009, but the hard drive ended up in a drawer after he spilled a drink on his laptop.\n\nHe kept the hard drive in his office drawer and \"totally forgot about bitcoin all together\" - so when he had a clear out, he believed everything had been taken off it.\n\nWhen he threw the hard drive away in 2013, the value of the bitcoins was about $7.5m (£4.6m).\n\nBut now they are worth almost 50 times more, with the cost of a single bitcoin currently just over £28,000 after a surge in value.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. James Howells: \"When I went up to the landfill site yesterday my first thought was 'I've got not chance'\"\n\nHe said he has asked Newport council if he could search the landfill several times, but had not been granted permission.\n\n\"I offered the local authority 10% of the recovered funds in order to give me permission to search on their property and unfortunately they said no at the time,\" Mr Howells told BBC Radio 5 Live.\n\n\"What actually happened after that was the value of bitcoin skyrocketed even further. In 2017 the value of my hard drive was approximately £125m, at which point I made them another offer of 10% and unfortunately that offer was refused as well.\n\nJames Howells said he wants to donate a quarter of the money to the people of Newport\n\n\"I haven't actually made an offer to them today, but I'm willing to increase my offer to them to 25%. On today's valuation that would be £52.5m and I'd like to put that into a Covid relief fund for the citizens of Newport.\"\n\nMr Howells said searching for the discarded hard drive would \"not be as hard as you might think\" as he would employ a professional team - and knows when he threw it away so could use that to find a grid reference of where the hard drive is buried.\n\nHe added investors had offered to cover the cost of excavating the landfill, in exchange for a large proportion of the recovered bitcoin.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMr Howells said he wants to meet with the council to discuss what he said would be a \"win-win-win\" situation for him, the council and the city.\n\nBut a spokeswoman for the council said: \"Newport City Council has been contacted a number of times since 2013 about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware said to contain bitcoins.\n\n\"The first time was several months after Mr Howells first realised the hardware was missing.\n\n\"The council has told Mr Howells on a number of occasions that excavation is not possible under our licencing permit and excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area.\n\n\"The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds - without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order.\"", "Many of the works in Gurlitt's collection were in poor condition when they were discovered in 2012 (file photo)\n\nWhen a trove of 1,500 artworks hoarded by the son of a Nazi-era art dealer was discovered in 2012, an investigation began to find out how many were looted from Jewish owners.\n\nEventually only 14 were conclusively identified as looted, and now Germany has declared the last of those works has been returned to the owner's heirs.\n\nDas Klavierspiel (Playing the Piano) by Carl Spitzweg was owned by music publisher Henri Hinrichsen.\n\nHe was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.\n\nGerman Culture Minister Monika Grütters said the return of the work sent an \"important signal\", and that while it could not make up for the deep suffering, it could \"make a contribution to historical justice and fulfil our moral responsibility\".\n\nThe 19th-Century work by Spitzweg was confiscated by the Nazis in 1939, the same year that Hinrichsen had bought it.\n\nDas Klavierspiel by Carl Spitzweg was seized by the Nazis in 1939\n\nIt was bought in 1940 by Hildebrand Gurlitt, a Nazi-era dealer who had been given the task by Adolf Hitler of dealing in art seized from Jewish collectors and of buying up so-called \"degenerate art\" removed from museums for a planned Führermuseum in the Austrian city of Linz.\n\nThe money for the Spitzweg work was paid into a blocked account, so Hinrichsen would never have received it.\n\nIn 2015, the piece was identified as looted, and it was handed over to the auctioneers Christie's on Tuesday, according to the wishes of Hinrichsen's heirs.\n\nAlthough his collection of 1,500 works, plundered from museums as well as individuals, was initially confiscated after the war by the Allies, Hildebrand Gurlitt eventually managed to get it back.\n\nGurlitt died in the 1950s and when German authorities approached his widow in 1961 in search of part of his collection, she claimed the works had been destroyed at the end of World War Two by Allied bombing.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BBC's Stephen Evans was granted exclusive access to look at some of the long-lost masterpieces in 2014\n\nIt was only when tax investigators searched the Munich flat of his son Cornelius Gurlitt in 2012 that they found more than 1,400 of the works. Another 60 pieces were discovered at his Austrian home in Salzburg the following year.\n\nThe son died in 2014 with questions still hanging over the ownership of the collection - as he was protected by a statute of limitations.\n\nA court ruled that the works could be bequeathed to the Museum of Fine Arts in the Swiss capital Bern, as Cornelius Gurlitt had requested.\n\nWhile some of the works were deemed to belong to the family, the German Lost Art Foundation then tried to find out, with the Swiss museum, who were the rightful owners of the rest.\n\nFourteen pieces have now conclusively identified as belonging to Jewish owners and returned.\n\nAmong the many masterpieces in the collection was this work by Edouard Manet", "A provisional 270 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been secured by the African Union (AU) for distribution across the continent.\n\nAll of the doses will be used this year, promises current AU head South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.\n\nThis is on top of 600 million doses already promised but is still not enough to vaccinate the whole region.\n\nThere are fears that poorer countries globally will wait far longer than richer nations to be inoculated.\n\nAlthough infection numbers and death rates are comparatively lower across most of Africa, cases are spiking again in some areas.\n\nA new variant of Covid-19 in South Africa is causing particular alarm and makes up most of the new cases.\n\n\"As a result of our own efforts we have so far secured a commitment of a provisional amount of 270 million vaccines from three major suppliers: Pfizer, AstraZeneca (through Serum Institute of India) and Johnson & Johnson,\" President Ramaphosa said on Wednesday.\n\nAt least 50 million of the doses will be available \"for the crucial period of April to June 2021,\" he said.\n\nIn addition, the region is expecting around 600 million doses from the global Covax effort which aims to provide vaccines to lower-income countries.\n\nBut officials are still waiting for details and are now \"happy we have alternative solutions,\" Nicaise Ndembi, senior science adviser for the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told the AP news agency.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid vaccines in Africa: What you need to know\n\nMr Ramaphosa said officials are worried that the doses from the Covax effort released in the first half of 2021 will only be enough to inoculate health care workers. With a population of 1.3 billion people and each person requiring two vaccine jabs, Africa would need around 2.6 billion doses to eventually vaccinate everyone.\n\n\"These endeavours aim to supplement the Covax efforts, and to ensure that as many dosages of vaccine as possible become available throughout Africa as soon as possible,\" he explained.\n\nAfrica has recorded more than three million cases of Covid-19 and nearly 75,000 deaths. By contrast, the US has reported close to 23 million infections and more than 383,000 fatalities.\n\nThere has been a global rush to buy vaccines, with richer countries accused of buying up most of the supply.\n\nAs many had feared, Africa appears to be at the back of the queue to get Covid-19 vaccines.\n\nThe announcement of 270 million doses by South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa - who is also the current chair of the African Union - is good news. This is in addition to those secured by the Covax facility, which is led by the World Health Organisation and the Vaccine Alliance, Gavi. The facility has secured 600 million doses - enough to vaccinate only a fifth of the continent.\n\nBut it may be a while before any of them get to the continent. The announcements are agreements to supply vaccines. There is still the actual procurement process that needs to happen. Negotiations are ongoing.\n\nWealthier nations had a head start. They already acquired the bulk of the early doses being produced through advance purchase deals with manufacturers. The race is on to meet that demand.\n\nAfrica, on the other hand, still faces funding deficits. There are questions also about the continent's readiness to receive the vaccines. Ultra-cold refrigeration is needed for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Countries are working on building their cold chains. But even this is marred by a shortage of funds.\n\nSo, the continent can only wait.", "The surge in Covid hospital cases has left key hospital services in England in crisis, doctors are warning.\n\nNHS data showed A&Es were facing rising delays admitting extremely sick patients on to wards.\n\nMeanwhile, the total number of people facing year-long waits for routine treatments is now more than 100 times higher than it was before the pandemic.\n\nCancer experts are also warning the disruption to their services was \"terrifying\" and would cost lives.\n\nReports have emerged of hospitals cancelling urgent operations - London's King's College Hospital has stopped priority two treatments, which are those that need to be done within 28 days.\n\nAnd Birmingham's major hospital trust has temporarily suspended most liver transplants.\n\nIt comes after a surge in Covid patients in recent weeks.\n\nOne in three patients in hospital have the virus - and at some sites it is more than half.\n\nNHS England medical director Prof Stephen Powis said the NHS was facing an \"exceptionally tough challenge\", adding services would continue to be under pressure until the virus was under control.\n\nBut he stressed non-Covid treatment was still happening - with three times as many diagnostic tests and twice as many operations being carried out than in the spring when the pandemic first hit.\n\nThe data published by NHS England showed the scale of the impact from dealing with Covid on key hospital services.\n\nThe figures for cancer date back to November, before the surge in cases.\n\nAt that point, the number of urgent cancer check-ups and treatments being started was at normal levels.\n\nBut since then, concerns have been raised that services have been reduced.\n\nProf Pat Price, of the Catch Up With Cancer campaign, said services were facing the \"biggest crisis\" of her 30-year career.\n\n\"This is a truly terrifying scenario,\" she added.\n\nAnd the Royal College of Surgeons warned the pandemic was having a \"calamitous impact\" on waiting times for planned surgery.\n\nSarah Scobie, from the Nuffield Trust think tank, said services were under \"intolerable strain\", adding \"the worst is yet to come\".\n\nSaffron Cordery, of NHS Providers, which represents hospital bosses, agreed: \"The next few weeks are no doubt going to be the most testing in NHS history.\"", "The government must review its strategy to end rough sleeping in England by 2024 after coronavirus showed it to be \"out of step\", a watchdog warned.\n\nA National Audit Office report praised the 'Everyone In' scheme, which housed about 33,000 people in the crisis.\n\nBut the plan highlighted issues with the current strategy - with thousands more needing help than expected.\n\nThe government said it was \"regularly taking into account the lessons learned\" from the pandemic.\n\nBoris Johnson made the pledge to end rough sleeping by the end of this Parliament shortly before he won the general election in 2019.\n\nAt the time, a snapshot figure taken by the government one evening showed 4,266 people were sleeping on the streets in England.\n\nBut it did not include people in night shelters or assessment centres, and could have missed people sleeping hidden from view.\n\nResearch by the BBC carried out in February 2020 showed more than 28,000 people across the UK had been recorded as sleeping rough in the previous 12 months - and in England, councils were seeing figures five times higher than the snapshot.\n\nThe 'Everyone In' scheme, launched in March 2020, aimed to provide emergency shelter for all rough sleepers during the first wave of the pandemic.\n\nFunding was ended two months later to the anger of many charities, but the government said it had made a number of more targeted funding pledges to tackle the issue since.\n\nThe National Audit Office (NAO) carried out an investigation into the housing of rough sleepers in the pandemic and praised the \"considerable achievement\" of 'Everyone In'.\n\nThe head of the watchdog, Gareth Davies, said the government \"acted swiftly to house rough sleepers and keep transmission rates low during the first wave\".\n\nBut the NAO investigation found between the end of March and November 2020, 33,139 people were given accommodation through the scheme - a number almost eight times greater than the annual snapshot of rough sleepers.\n\nExamples included Bristol City Council which reported it accommodated 400 people in March, despite its most recent snapshot count being 98 rough sleepers.\n\nAnd the London Borough of Southwark had 25 known rough sleepers in March 2020, but within hours of 'Everyone In' launching, it had taken 200 people into hotels, with nearly 1,000 accommodated by November.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. How the UK's homeless are coping during the coronavirus pandemic\n\nThe government pledged to carry out a review of its strategy to end rough sleeping early in 2020, but the plans took a back seat as the crisis unfolded.\n\nThe NAO said there was \"an ongoing need for a review of the strategy as it is out of step with the government's target\", adding there were now \"important lessons from Everyone In to consider\".\n\nMr Davies said the scale of the rough sleeping population in England has now been made clear, and it \"far exceeds\" previous government estimates.\n\n\"Understanding the size of this population, and who needs specialist support, is essential to achieve its ambition to end rough sleeping\", he added.\n\nThe report also highlighted the large number of people remaining in emergency accommodation unable to move on as they have no recourse to public funds - a condition put into the residence permit of some immigrants meaning they cannot access benefits.\n\nThe NAO also called on the government to \"keep under close review\" its more targeted response to the current coronavirus resurgence, whether it will \"protect vulnerable individuals as decisively\" as 'Everyone in'.\n\nA spokesman from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said they were pleased the NAO recognised its achievements with 'Everyone In'.\n\nHe added: \"By November, we had supported around 33,000 people, with nearly 10,000 in emergency accommodation and more than 23,000 in longer-term accommodation.\n\n\"We recently announced an additional £10m to help accommodate rough sleepers and ensure they are registered with a GP to receive the vaccine, and we will invest £750m next year as part of our commitment to end rough sleeping.\"\n\nAsked whether the review into the ending rough sleeping strategy would take place, the spokesman said: \"Our ambition to end rough sleeping within this parliament still stands, and we are regularly taking into account the lessons learned from our ongoing pandemic response, including 'Everyone In'.\"", "The government has defended its scheme to offer free food to struggling families in England over half term - after criticism from teachers' unions and council leaders.\n\nFood will be provided for children by councils under the Covid Winter Grant Scheme, rather than through schools.\n\nBut councils say the government should provide food vouchers over half term.\n\n\"Vulnerable families will continue to receive meals,\" said a Department for Education (DFE) spokeswoman.\n\n\"Our guidance is clear: schools provide free school meals for eligible pupils during term time.\n\n\"Beyond that, there is wider government support in place to support families and children via the billions of pounds in welfare support we've made available,\" said the DFE spokeswoman.\n\nBut the Local Government Association (LGA), representing councils, said \"the government should provide food vouchers to eligible families during February half-term as it did last summer\" - and that the £170m Covid Winter Grant Scheme should be used for other support.\n\n\"During the last full national lockdown, government recognised the significant extra pressures on low income families and extended free school meal provision into the school holidays,\" said Richard Watts, chairman of the LGA's resources board.\n\n\"Government was explicit that the Covid Winter Grant Scheme was not intended to replicate or replace free school meals, but was to enable councils to support low income households, particularly those at risk of food poverty as we moved towards economic recovery.\"\n\nThe row follows the DFE's publication of guidelines on free meals, after an outcry over pictures of food packages to replace free school meals during the lockdown.\n\nThe prime minister and other ministers criticised the quality of what was being sent out by some school food firms.\n\nMarcus Rashford has spear-headed a campaign for holiday food\n\nThe DfE guidance says: \"Schools do not need to provide lunch parcels or vouchers during the February half term.\n\n\"There is wider government support in place to support families and children outside of term-time through the Covid Winter Grant Scheme.\"\n\nThe DFE insists that even though schools will not provide food parcels or vouchers during half term, children will still be supplied with food through the Covid Winter Grant Scheme.\n\nThis aims to support those most in need with the cost of food, energy, water bills and other essentials.\n\nCouncils are required to work out their own local approach to eligibility, using benefits data and their local knowledge to decide how to support vulnerable families.\n\nMoving to this scheme for a replacement for school meals during half term, with the added pressure of a lockdown, has drawn criticism from head teachers and teachers.\n\nKevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, warned that switching schemes meant \"yet more disruption to free schools meals could lie ahead in half term\".\n\nHe said using this scheme could cause an \"unnecessary logistical nightmare\", suggesting continuing with providing meals through schools would be more simple.\n\nMr Courtney said: \"This week, Matt Hancock, Gavin Williamson and Boris Johnson made public statements about how appalled they were by the quality of food parcels shared on Twitter,\" said Mr Courtney.\n\nBut he said ministers should now \"hang their heads in shame\" for threatening more \"chaos and confusion\" over providing food.\n\n\"These are battles which should not have to be repeatedly fought,\" said Mr Courtney.\n\nNational Association of Head Teachers general secretary Paul Whiteman accused the the government of \"badly thought out and last-minute schemes to help with holiday hunger\" which he said were \"leaving families and children anxious\".\n\n\"The government must urgently clarify for families how they will be helped during the upcoming half term holiday so they can be assured that they will not go hungry,\" said Mr Whiteman.\n\nLabour's Tulip Siddiq, shadow minister for children and early years, said: \"Time and time again this government has had to be shamed into providing food for hungry children over school holidays.\"\n\nFood charities and anti-poverty campaigners, including footballer Marcus Rashford, have repeatedly clashed with the government over the issue of food for poor pupils during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly over school holidays.\n\nThe footballer forced the government to back down in the summer over its plans not to offer free meals in the holidays to poor pupils, whose families were likely to be suffering with reduced incomes.\n\nBut over the October half-term when the provision was withdrawn many local authorities continued to offer them from their own budgets.", "President Donald Trump has just become the only US president to be impeached twice by the House of Representatives. He was impeached on Wednesday for \"incitement of insurrection\" following last week's riot at the US Capitol. However, a recent poll suggests that a majority of Republicans still support President Trump and don't hold him responsible for the violence.\n\nWe've been hearing from lawmakers - but what do Americans think? We asked members of our BBC voter panel to weigh in.\n\nBelinda is an attorney and devoted Trump supporter of Native American and African American ancestry. She says this second impeachment vote is wrong and misconstrues the facts of what happened last week in favour of political expediency.\n\nThis is unprecedented. There is no justification, no legal or constitutional basis for this impeachment. He did not even receive due process. It's a rush to judgment for ulterior motives and a dark stain on our country. I'm afraid our Constitution is on its deathbed. I hope the American people will stand up against this outrage. It's indicative of what would happen in a communist country where we have no free speech rights.\n\nThose who broke in should be charged appropriately for whatever laws they violated. But why would anybody who's rational think that our president meant for people to go break into the Capitol? His rallies have always been peaceful and most of the people on Wednesday were middle-aged and elderly, with children and grandchildren.\n\nIndividuals who violated the law should definitely be prosecuted but I don't see how you can blame someone for a speech and someone else's criminal activity. It can't be selective enforcement of the law.\n\nMelissa is a Filipino American small business owner with two children who had told us the country could not afford four more years of Donald Trump. She says the behaviour he displayed last Wednesday was undoubtedly an impeachable offense.\n\nEverything he has done is unconstitutional and, as a president, the number one thing he should be doing is upholding the Constitution.\n\n[Republican Congresswoman] Liz Cheney said that, if not for the president, last week would not have happened and she's right. If not for him continually fighting the election results, if not for him repeatedly sending the false message the election was stolen, if not for him holding that rally near the Capitol, if not for him talking about an 'uprising', last week would very likely not have happened.\n\nEven three months ago, before all the lawsuits and everything else he was saying, I was not shocked by his behaviour. It's all completely predictable because it's just within his character. So the argument by politicians that impeachment could divide us more, I don't see that as the goal of impeachment.\n\nIt can't help but I don't think it will have any impact on deterring violence. There needs to be some kind of statement that the president is not allowed to attack another branch of government. It's a chance for the Republican Party to rid itself of Trump's stranglehold on them.\n\nGabriel is a regional coordinator for the New York Young Republicans and is an outspoken 'Latino for Trump'. He condemns the violence of last Wednesday but says the reaction has been unfair and worries about where the party will go from here.\n\nI do not think that Donald Trump should be impeached. I was in DC at the rally on 6 January - I did not go near the Capitol and went back to my hotel room - but I saw the president speak with my own eyes and he did not call for anyone to storm the building or cause harm.\n\nThis is just a way to ensure he will not run in the next four years. It is political and it will create a bigger divide between left and right. I fear that people will become reactionary and elected officials will use impeachment in the future not as a last resort to uphold our republic but as a tool to remove whoever they don't agree with.\n\nAll violence should be condemned fairly and justly. It was a very sad outcome, but I do not believe it was the most horrible day in our country's history and it was not a coup. It's important to dictate that violence is not the answer. The day was supposed to be different. January 6 did something to the Republican Party. The actions of the few will discourage many of the new voters that Trump brought in and made his base.\n\nWilliams is a first-generation Mexican American college student in Atlanta who has been extremely concerned about what he has seen in his country over the past four years. He says the events of the past week justify today's vote in the House.\n\nI believe he should have been impeached. Not only is he a threat to our national security, but he doesn't condemn white supremacy and other threats. That affects us internally within the United States as well as abroad.\n\nIt's more of a symbolic impeachment at this point because he'll be out soon, but it's necessary nonetheless. Impeachment failed once, but now he has set the precedent that a president can be impeached more than once.\n\nIn processing the past week, all I could do at first was to ignore it and joke about the situation. It's deeply saddening to me.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA respiratory doctor at Belfast's Mater Hospital has warned that hospital oxygen supplies are under \"extreme pressure\".\n\nDr Nick Magee also said more younger patients were now being treated in hospital than during the first and second waves of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nHe said in the past they did not have to consult other NI hospitals about how much oxygen they had.\n\n\"That was never a thing in previous January flu problems,\" he told the BBC.\n\n\"But that is something we are now having to think of,\" he added.\n\nEarlier this week Northern Ireland's Chief Medical Officer Dr Michael McBride said there is enough oxygen to cope with the current demand.\n\nBut according to Dr Magee the current level of oxygen being used in \"bays\" at the Mater means patients cannot charge their mobile phones by their bedside because of the \"fire risk\".\n\n\"It is all well controlled and we are making sure that we can share out that oxygen burden. That is something we are having to think about,\" he said.\n\n\"I can't say specifically about other regional hospitals but I know that they are under extreme pressure and it's just something we have to think of as a region.\n\n\"Can we supply oxygen adequately for the amounts of oxygen we are using in hospitals?\"\n\nThe number of Covid positive hospital in-patients has increased significantly since last week - up from 599 a week ago to 850 on Thursday.\n\nThe number of people in ICU has also risen from 44 to 58 in the past week.\n\nDr Magee said staff were concerned about having to cope with \"large volumes\" of patients requiring respiratory support.\n\nHe said the number of younger patients becoming increasingly sick with the virus was growing.\n\nOn Wednesday, the Mater Hospital moved six patients who had been on wards into ICU and also took patients from the Southern Health Trust.\n\n\"Recently I saw a 29-year-old patient, also three who were in their mid 30s that all required respiratory support on a ward,\" he told BBC News NI.\n\n\"They are frightened they are wearing specialist masks CPAP masks that help them breathe. They are scared.\"\n\nThe relentless pressure of the past 10 months and the prospect of a further surge in admissions over the next fortnight is weighing heavily on the minds of medics.\n\n\"We are really worried about next week,\" said Dr Magee.\n\n\"It's very busy this week, we are coping well but we are particularly concerned about next week.\n\n\"Normally, if we had somebody who needed a lot of respiratory support we would involve a high dependency unit but all the respiratory wards are becoming like high dependency units.\n\n\"Volume of sicker, younger patients is much greater and it's not something that I would [have] ever seen before,\" he added.\n\nThe Southern Health and Social Care Trust said its hospitals had limited infrastructure to manage high numbers of patients requiring oxygen so a regional agreement was in place to share resources across Trusts to support Covid-positive patients.\n\n\"As a result some patients have been diverted to Belfast or SE Trust to help reduce pressure on the Southern Trust hospital system,\" a statement said.\n\n\"Craigavon and Daisy Hill hospitals remain very busy with high numbers of Covid-19 positive patients who are dependent on oxygen therapy.\n\n\"These protocols are in place as part of regional surge planning to ensure that we can safely manage the current high volume of Covid-19 patients needing hospital care.\n\n\"Patients who are currently being treated in Craigavon and Daisy Hill have secure supplies of oxygen.\"", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Travel from Brazil to the UK could be banned in response to the discovery of a new coronavirus variant.\n\nMinisters have met to discuss possible measures and a block on flights could also be extended to other South American countries in a bid to stop its spread.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has said he is \"concerned\" about the new variant and \"extra measures\" were being taken.\n\nArrivals from Brazil are currently required to self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nCabinet Office minister Michael Gove chaired a meeting earlier to discuss whether measures should be put in place.\n\nNew variants of Covid-19 have also been identified in the UK and South Africa.\n\nDuring a two-hour appearance in front of the Commons Home Affairs Committee on Wednesday Mr Johnson stopped short of promising a ban on travel from Brazil.\n\n\"We already have tough measures ... to protect this country from new infections coming in from abroad,\" he said.\n\n\"We are taking steps to do that in respect of the Brazilian variant.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Johnson: \"We are taking steps to ensure that we do not see the import of this new variant\".\n\nProf Susan Hopkins, who is Strategic Response Director for Covid-19 with Public Health England, told BBC Breakfast experts were looking at the Brazilian variant and needed to grow the virus in the UK in order to perform laboratory experiments.\n\n\"So we need to understand the biology of these [new strains], as well as understanding mutations,\" she said.\n\n\"We will be watching them all to make sure that they can't escape your immune response, which is the key thing that we're looking at the moment.\"\n\nA travel ban was put in place on arrivals from South Africa on 24 December, which was later extended to several other nearby countries, following the discovery of a new variant.\n\nLuiz Amorim, a graphic designer in London, said he had travelled to Brazil to spend Christmas with his family and was now worried he may not be able to get home.\n\n\"My wife was also supposed to come but didn't in the end,\" he said. \"Now I am worried I won't be able to get back to her in London.\"\n\nMr Amorim said his workplace had been supportive but he may have to take leave if he was unable to return, with his original flight back having been cancelled.\n\nHe has now booked another flight on 27 January and is \"watching the news closely to see what will happen\".\n\nThe discussion comes after it was announced a requirement for arrivals into England to test negative for coronavirus 72 hours before their journey will now come into force at 04:00 GMT on Monday.\n\nTransport Secretary Grant Shapps said the new rules had been delayed from Friday \"to give international arrivals time to prepare\".\n\nLabour's Yvette Cooper, chairwoman of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, described the delay in introducing the new rules as \"truly shocking\".\n\nScotland is taking the same approach to international travellers but will implement the policy on Friday, while Wales and Northern Ireland are expected to announce their own plans in the coming days.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer criticised the government for delaying pre-departure testing for arrivals to England, describing the situation as a \"complete mess\".\n\n\"Priti Patel has talked tough about the borders but other countries have been doing testing for months and months,\" he said.\n\nSir Keir said people were \"really worried\" about strains in other parts of the world, including Brazil, and people would be \"bewildered and they will feel that we're exposed\".", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nIvan Cavaleiro scored a late header to earn Premier League strugglers Fulham a hard-fought draw against Tottenham in their hastily rearranged London derby.\n\nThe Portuguese forward's finish cancelled out Harry Kane's first-half diving header and came just minutes after Son Heung-min hit the post in search of Spurs' second.\n\nCavaleiro sealed a remarkable turnaround for a side whose manager Scott Parker said it was \"scandalous\" to be given just two days' notice to face Jose Mourinho's men after Spurs' game at Aston Villa was postponed because of a Covid-19 outbreak in the Villa camp.\n\nTottenham boss Mourinho had little sympathy for the visitors as the derby itself was a rearranged fixture, having been called off three hours before kick-off when originally scheduled on 30 December.\n\nFor all the complications surrounding the fixture, the intensity from two sides at opposite ends of the table was high at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, with Fulham's fifth successive league draw a valuable point in their efforts to escape the relegation zone.\n• None Relive Tottenham v Fulham as it happened and analysis\n\nFulham made a bright start and Andre-Frank Zambo Anguissa's fierce shot to test Hugo Lloris was a warning of what was to come from a side who remain 18th despite the draw.\n\nThe excellent Alphonse Areola twice denied Son in the first 45 minutes, first blocking a toe-poked effort before palming a header away.\n\nAreola could do nothing, however, to deny Kane the opener in the 25th minute, with the striker beating the Frenchman with a thumping diving header from an excellently-placed Sergio Reguilon cross.\n\nKane was off target with another header and Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Kenny Tete threatened to respond for the visitors, who had the woodwork to thank for denying Son in the second half after the South Korean scuffed a shot past Areola.\n\nSubstitute Ademola Lookman was instrumental following his introduction, creating the equaliser for Cavaleiro seven minutes after coming off the bench.\n\nThe powerful finish extended Fulham's unbeaten run to five league matches, which is their longest such sequence in the top flight in three Premier League campaigns since 2012-13.\n\nThis latest draw highlights just how resolute Parker's men have become after a slow start to the campaign, in which they collected just one point from their first six matches.\n\nSpurs punished for reliance on Kane and Son\n\nWhile the Cottagers may be in the relegation places and had lost a record 13 successive top-flight matches to London rivals, they presented a significantly sterner test of Mourinho's men than non-league side Marine - a team made up of NHS workers, teachers and a refuse collector - which Spurs cruised past in the third round of the FA Cup on Sunday.\n\nThe prolific pair of Kane and Son, a duo that has now scored 23 of Tottenham's 30 league goals this term, were among 10 to return to Spurs' starting line-up.\n\nSon was an unused substitute on their trip to Crosby but Kane, along with Lloris, Eric Dier, Serge Aurier and Harry Winks came back from being rested.\n\nWhile Kane was clinical with the nodded finish, he reacted in frustration as he flicked another header off target.\n\nThat miss, as well as the wastefulness of Reguilon - who sent an early effort over - and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg's tame strike, ensured Fulham were still in it at half-time.\n\nMoussa Sissoko also dithered in the box when an early second-half chance presented itself, allowing Tosin Adarabioyo to superbly block.\n\nSon's effort off the post, and their reliance on him and Kane for goals, ultimately proved costly as Cavaleiro ended the hosts' run of three clean sheets in January.\n\nAnd while Reguilon did have the ball in the back of the net again for Tottenham in the final minute, it was immediately disallowed for offside as Spurs missed the chance to move up to third in the table.\n\n'Some players had one day's training' - what the managers said\n\nTottenham manager Jose Mourinho, speaking to BBC Sport: \"In the first half Alphonse Areola made some impossible saves, a couple of others in the second, too.\n\n\"We have to kill a game and we didn't - but you have to keep a clean sheet, not make mistakes, so it was a very avoidable goal. The markers are there, there wasn't even an advantage in terms of numbers.\n\n\"Fulham were intelligent enough to understand the way they play, they change, they become more defensive and they are getting results. I thought they were a bit lucky but they were good.\n\n\"We have bad results and we should - and we could have - avoided these results.\"\n\nFulham boss Scott Parker, speaking to BBC Sport: \"I'm very proud of this team for what we've been through. There's a lot of talk around - everyone assumes about what happened. I know what we've been through the last two weeks.\n\n\"We had players out there today who had one day's training. What pleased me most was a desire and a passion and a real quality at times tonight.\n\n\"There's a real determination and hard work from this group of players. They've never shied away from anything.\"\n\nOn Monday's announcement of the game with Tottenham: \"We were told, in the end, at 9:30. It was put to me on Saturday, if there was a possibility, but I just batted it off thinking 'no chance'.\n\n\"This game was supposed to be scheduled 16 days ago - for 10 days some of these boys were locked up in their houses. I was surprised but it wasn't in terms of preparing for this game, we've prepared in two days for a game before, it was more just getting told of the consequences that you face.\"\n\nBest of the stats\n• None Tottenham and Fulham played out their first draw in the Premier League since December 2009, with Spurs winning 10 of the last 11 encounters (L1).\n• None Tottenham are unbeaten in their last eight London derbies in the Premier League (W3 D5), they've never gone longer without defeat against sides from the capital in the competition.\n• None Fulham have drawn five consecutive Premier League games, their longest such run since January 2007 (six games).\n• None Fulham have gained five points in their last four Premier League away games (W1 D2 L1), more than they collected in their previous 13 on the road in the competition (W1 D1 L11).\n• None Only Brighton (12) and Sheffield United (11) have dropped more points from winning positions than Spurs (10) in the Premier League this season.\n• None Tottenham's Harry Kane has become just the third player to score 25 Premier League goals with his head (25), his right foot (94) and his left foot (34) - after Robbie Fowler and Andy Cole.\n• None Ademola Lookman has been directly involved in five goals (two goals, three assists) in the Premier League this season, more than any other Fulham player.\n\nTottenham travel to Bramall Lane on Sunday (14:05 GMT) to face the Premier League's bottom side Sheffield United, who on Tuesday earned their first top-flight win of the season.\n\nFulham face Chelsea in another derby, hosting their west London rivals on Saturday (17:30 GMT).\n• None Offside, Tottenham Hotspur. Erik Lamela tries a through ball, but Son Heung-Min is caught offside.\n• None Attempt blocked. Antonee Robinson (Fulham) left footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Aboubakar Kamara. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Can the TV personality make it as a pro footballer?\n• None New drama brings the chilling crimes of Charles Sobhraj to life", "Gerry and Barbara Jarrett were admitted to hospital with Covid-19 two weeks ago\n\nAn elderly couple with coronavirus have been helped by a hospital to say their last goodbyes to each other after the wife's condition deteriorated.\n\nGerry and Barbara Jarrett, from Bracknell, Berkshire, are in separate wards at Frimley Park Hospital, Surrey.\n\nTheir daughter Chloe, who posted a picture of one reunion on Twitter, said her mother \"looked to be at the end\".\n\nShe said her parents had \"precious\" extra time together thanks to the hospital's \"incredible\" efforts.\n\nMrs Keljarrett said her 79-year-old father and mother, 76, who have been together for 50 years, were admitted to hospital with Covid-19 two weeks ago.\n\nOn Tuesday she posted: \"In the midst of a pandemic peak, staff (namely a consultant, a surgeon and a HCA) at FPH just made sure my dad saw my mum for what is likely the last time.\"\n\nShe said another meeting happened on Wednesday when \"mum looked to be at the end\".\n\nFrimley Park Hospital said the reunions were the sort of \"care that matters the most\"\n\nShe said: \"Dad was wheeled in, crying, touched her hand and her eyes flew open. She was awake and bright and could talk.\n\n\"We got a precious extra hour or two before her breathing got worse again and got to say what we wanted.\n\n\"All thanks to the staff who made these meetings possible. In current times I just find that incredible.\"\n\nMrs Keljarrett, a teacher at The Brakenhale School, said her father was \"showing signs of improvement but has a very long journey to complete\".\n\n\"He has a number of other health issues that will make recovery that bit trickier, but I have to remain positive that he will overcome this horrendous virus,\" she added.\n\nShe said she had met hospital workers who were \"pulling unexpected double shifts\" due to short-staffing.\n\n\"How they are managing such compassion when they are stretched to their emotional and physical limits I do not know,\" she added.\n\nResponding to Mrs Keljarrett's Twitter post, the hospital wrote: \"Our hearts go out to you and your family.\n\n\"We are so glad that our staff managed to make this time just a little bit easier for you all.\n\n\"This truly is some of the care we give that matters the most.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Doctors' leaders have called for urgent improvements in personal protective equipment for health workers.\n\nThe British Medical Association is appealing for a higher grade of face mask to guard against coronavirus infection.\n\nIt says there is 'growing evidence' that the virus is being spread through the air by aerosols.\n\nThese are tiny virus particles that can build up in stuffy rooms and they have been linked to outbreaks of Covid-19.\n\nThis follows an open letter from more than 1,500 health professionals for staff on general wards to be given the type of high-quality masks usually only worn in intensive care units.\n\nPublic Health England (PHE) has issued guidance on what PPE staff in different settings require. It was last updated in October 2020.\n\nEarly in the pandemic, it was widely believed that to catch the disease you had to either be close to an infected person and hit by droplets from their coughs or sneezes or touch a surface they had contaminated.\n\nBut research during the course of last year highlighted how it is also possible for the virus to be carried in what are called aerosols, drifting and accumulating in the air.\n\nMost infections are thought to have occurred indoors in badly ventilated rooms, and many studies have shown that the 'airborne route' can be an important factor.\n\nAcross the UK, the guidance for hospital staff is to wear surgical masks in most areas.\n\nMore sophisticated masks - a type known as FFP3 that includes an air filter - are only required in intensive care or when certain procedures are carried out that are known to generate aerosols.\n\nIn their letter, the consultants, doctors and nurses say healthcare workers are three to four times more likely to become infected than the general population.\n\nBut they point out that staff in intensive care units, who have the best level of protection, have about half the risk of catching the virus than colleagues on general wards.\n\nThe letter states: \"It is now essential that healthcare workers have their PPE upgraded to protect against airborne transmission\".\n\nBarry McAree, a consultant surgeon in Northern Ireland, is one of many healthcare workers to be ill with Covid.\n\nHe is self-isolating at home right after his testing positive for the second time.\n\nA signatory to the letter, he says his hospital in Antrim followed the guidance about which type of masks should be worn in which areas, but he became infected nonetheless. It is not clear how and when he caught it.\n\n\"There's so much evidence that we are talking about an airborne infection that it has to be said that it is not appropriate just to wear FFP3 in environments when aerosol generating procedures take place.\"\n\nHe believes that with such high levels of the virus in the community and in hospitals, staff should be wearing the higher-grade masks whenever they're close to patients.\n\nSurgical masks can be bought online for about 10p each, while the FFP3 masks are far more expensive about £5.00.\n\nDr Barry Jones, a retired gastroenterologist and leading expert on aerosols, says that's nothing compared to the cost of a patient with Covid,\n\nHe points to data showing that roughly a fifth of people needing hospital treatment for Covid may have acquired the infection in hospital in the first place.\n\n\"We should do everything we can to reduce that possibility - it's the air we share that's killing us.\"\n\nA few hospitals have decided to break with official guidance.\n\nIt's understood that hospitals in Cambridge, Plymouth and Exeter have decided to equip staff with FFP3 masks if they face patients diagnosed with Covid or suspected of having it.\n\nOne consultant, who did not want to be named, said: \"When you realise patients are more infectious at an earlier stage of disease and are presenting at general wards with poorer ventilation than intensive care units and staff are wearing a poorer quality of PPE, you really want those in a position of leadership to listen and to act.\"\n\nRCN General Secretary Dame Donna Kinnair, said: \"Without delay, they must state whether existing PPE guidance is adequate for the new variant.\n\n\"While more research is carried out, we ask for the precautionary principle to be applied and staff to be given a higher level of PPE if working with suspected or confirmed cases.\"\n\nPublic Health England said this was a matter for NHS England to comment on.\n\nA Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: \"The safety of NHS and social care staff has always been our top priority and we continue to work tirelessly to deliver PPE that protects those on the frontline.\n\n\"UK guidance on the safest levels of PPE is written by experts and agreed by all four chief medical officers. Our guidance is kept under constant review based on the latest evidence and data.\n\n\"Emerging evidence and data, including on variant strains, will be continually monitored and reviewed, and the guidance updated accordingly if needed.\"", "It was initially believed that Covid-19 originated at a market in Wuhan\n\nA World Health Organization (WHO) team has arrived in the Chinese city of Wuhan to start its investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nThe long-awaited probe comes after months of negotiations between the WHO and Beijing.\n\nA group of 10 scientists is set to interview people from research institutes, hospitals and the seafood market linked to the initial outbreak.\n\nCovid-19 was first detected in Wuhan in central China in late 2019.\n\nThe team's arrival on Thursday morning coincides with a resurgence of new coronavirus cases in the north of the country, while life in Wuhan is relatively back to normal.\n\nThey will undergo two weeks of quarantine before beginning their research, which will rely upon samples and evidence provided by Chinese officials.\n\nTeam leader Peter Ben Embarek told AFP news agency just before the trip that it \"could be a very long journey before we get a full understanding of what happened\".\n\n\"I don't think we will have clear answers after this initial mission, but we will be on the way,\" he said.\n\nThe probe, which aims to investigate the animal origin of the pandemic, looks set to begin after some initial hiccups.\n\nChina resisted this investigation because it doesn't want to look back. It sees the potential for more blame, from a group of foreigners. It has its official version of what happened already.\n\nThe government paper published months ago declared \"victory\" in the war against the virus. But it didn't have a verdict - not one it made public anyway - on where the new coronavirus came from nor how it passed to humans. There's been global pressure to answer that, to prevent repeat pandemics.\n\nThe WHO team will be heavily reliant on their Chinese hosts for access: to key places in Wuhan and beyond, and crucially to research material, human and animal samples and data gathered by China's authorities over the past year. The man leading the WHO team said he is open minded. No theories - and there is a range of theories - are off the table. All sides have talked about the importance of the science. But the investigators arrived here as a propaganda effort, lead by China's state media, is in full swing, to question whether the pandemic originated here in the first place.\n\nDespite a lack of any credible evidence it's reported for months now that it was in Spain, Italy or maybe the US before it was seen in China. A campaign intended to undermine the very reason the WHO is, finally, here in Wuhan.\n\nEarlier this month the WHO said its investigators were denied entry into China after one member of the team was turned back and another got stuck in transit. But Beijing said it was a misunderstanding and that arrangements for the investigation were still in discussion.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid-19: How everyday life has changed in Wuhan\n\nChina has been saying for months that the although Wuhan is where the first cluster of cases was detected, it is not necessarily where the virus originated.\n\nProfessor Dale Fisher, chair of the global outbreak and response unit at the WHO, told the BBC that he hoped the world would consider this a scientific visit. \"It's not about politics or blame but getting to the bottom of a scientific question,\" he said.\n\nProf Fisher added that most scientists believed that the virus was a \"natural event\".\n\nThe visit comes as China reports its first fatality from Covid-19 in eight months.\n\nNews of the woman's death in northern Hebei province prompted anxious chatter online and the hashtag \"new virus death in Hebei\" trended briefly on social media platform Weibo.\n\nThe country has largely brought the virus under control through quick mass testing, stringent lockdowns and tight travel restrictions.\n\nBut new cases have been resurfacing in recent weeks, mainly in Hebei province surrounding Beijing and Heilongjiang province in the northeast.", "A further 1,564 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test - the biggest figure reported in a single day since the pandemic began.\n\nIt brings the total number of deaths by that measure to 84,767.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England, said there have now been more deaths in the second wave than the first.\n\nAnd the prime minister warned there was a \"very substantial\" risk of intensive care capacity being \"overtopped\".\n\nSpeaking to the Commons Liaison Committee, Boris Johnson said the situation was \"very, very tough\" in the NHS and the strain on staff was \"colossal\".\n\nHe appealed to the public to follow lockdown rules, which require people in England to stay at home and only go out for limited reasons, such as for food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home.\n\nSimilar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nA further 47,525 new cases have also been recorded.\n\nPerhaps the most distressing element about the latest Covid deaths is that the numbers are almost certainly going to rise from here.\n\nPeople who are dying now are likely to have been infected three or so weeks ago, around Christmas time.\n\nThat was at a point when infection rates were rising quite steeply, so in the coming days and weeks we should, sadly, expect to see more deaths than this being reported.\n\nToday's figures are affected by the weekend, which sees delays in reporting deaths that tend to translate into higher figures from Tuesday onwards.\n\nCurrently around 1,000 people a day on average are dying once you take this into account.\n\nBut the figures also provide some hope. For the third day in a row the number of newly diagnosed infections are well below 50,000.\n\nThere have been several days where they have exceeded 60,000.\n\nIf that trend continues, and the number of new cases keeps coming down, that will eventually translate into the number of deaths falling.\n\nBut it is going to take some weeks for that to happen.\n\nThese are, as many have been saying, the darkest days of the pandemic so far.\n\nEarlier, during Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Johnson said lockdown measures were \"starting to show signs of some effect\".\n\nLabour's Sir Keir Starmer called for tougher restrictions in England, asking why they were weaker in this lockdown compared with March.\n\nDuring the first lockdown, nurseries were closed to most children and it was not permitted to exercise with someone from another household.\n\n\"We keep things under constant review,\" Mr Johnson replied. \"If there is any need to toughen up restrictions - which I don't rule out - we will of course come to this House.\"\n\nHe stressed that it was early days, but said: \"The lockdown measures we have in place combined with tier four measures that we were using are starting to show signs of some effect.\"\n\nLater, asked by the Commons Liaison Committee whether schools could reopen after February half-term, Mr Johnson said: \"It is far, far too early for us to say [early signs of progress mean] we can go into any kind of relaxation in the middle of February, we've got to work very hard to achieve that.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson took questions from MPs on the Commons Liaison Committee\n\nThe prime minister also said on Wednesday that Covid vaccinations will be offered 24 hours a day, seven days a week as soon as supply allows.\n\nThe number of people in the UK who have received the first dose of a vaccine has risen to 2,639,309 - up by 207,661 from the day before.\n\nCommenting on the latest daily figures, PHE's Dr Doyle said: \"With each passing day, more and more people are tragically losing their lives to this terrible virus.\"\n\nShe added: \"It is essential that we stay at home, minimise contact with other people and act as if you have the virus.\"\n\nThe vast majority of the deaths reported on Tuesday happened over the past week. However, at least 100 were in 2020, with one death dating back to May.\n\nThe previous highest daily death toll was on Friday, when 1,325 people were reported to have died.\n\nThese government figures count people who died within 28 days of testing positive, but there are other ways of measuring the total number of deaths.\n\nWhen all deaths where coronavirus is mentioned on the death certificate are counted, plus deaths known to have occurred more recently, the number of deaths involving Covid in the UK is more than 100,000.\n\nAnother method is to count excess deaths - all deaths over and above the usual number at the time of year.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Johnson: \"We are taking steps to ensure that we do not see the import of this new variant\".\n\nMeanwhile, the prime minister has said he is \"concerned\" about a new coronavirus variant that is believed to have emerged in Brazil. He acknowledged it is not yet clear how effective existing vaccines will be against the latest new variant.\n\nThe UK is taking steps to make sure it is not brought into the country, Mr Johnson said.\n\nA government Covid committee is meeting on Thursday to discuss the possibility of stopping flights from Brazil.\n\nArrivals from Brazil already have to self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nAnd from Monday, anyone arriving into the UK from any country will have to present a negative Covid test. The new rule had been due to come into force this week but the government said it was being put back to give travellers more time to prepare.", "The home secretary has said the government will not announce new Covid restrictions on Thursday or Friday, but did not rule out further measures being announced next week.\n\nPriti Patel told ITV her focus was on enforcing the current lockdown rules.\n\nIt is thought ministers are considering measures like requiring masks outside or allowing people to exercise only with people from the same household.\n\nOn Wednesday, the UK recorded 1,564 new deaths, the highest daily total so far.\n\nMrs Patel emphasised the current stay-at-home rules, under which people are only allowed to go out for a limited number of reasons, including work, essential shopping and providing care to a vulnerable person.\n\nAsked whether further restrictions could include a three-metre social distancing rule, or the requirement to wear masks outside, the home secretary told ITV's This Morning: \"The plans are very much to enforce the rules.\n\n\"This isn't about new rules coming in - we're going to stick with enforcing the current measures.\"\n\nBut Ms Patel did not rule out new measures being announced next week, saying: \"We are not thinking about bringing in new measures today or tomorrow.\"\n\nAt a press conference on Monday, she said police would move more quickly to fine people who break the rules.\n\nOver the course of the pandemic, more than 30,000 such fines have been issued.\n\nA senior backbench Conservative MP has written to his colleagues to criticise the government's approach to coronavirus restrictions.\n\nSteve Baker, deputy chairman of the Covid Recovery Group of MPs, which is sceptical of lockdown measures, said that if the government did not change its strategy, \"inevitably the prime minister's leadership will be on the table: we strongly do not want that after all we have been through as a country\".\n\nHe asked his colleagues to impress upon the party's chief whip the need for \"a clear plan for when our full freedoms will be restored, with a guarantee that this strategy will not be used again next winter\".\n\nHowever, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has questioned why the current lockdown restrictions are \"weaker\" than those imposed in March last year, when deaths and hospitalisations were lower than they are now.\n\nHe questioned why nurseries were open when primary schools were closed, and whether estate agents should be allowed to continue with house viewings.\n\nRules have been further tightened in Scotland this week, with new restrictions on click and collect and takeaway services.", "Last updated on .From the section Cricket\n\nSpinner Dom Bess took 5-30 as a woeful Sri Lanka batting display left England in control after the opening day of the first Test in Galle.\n\nThe hosts were bowled out for 135 in only 46.1 overs despite winning the toss on a pitch that offered only a little spin.\n\nEngland closed on 127-2, with Joe Root unbeaten on 66, Jonny Bairstow 47 not out and their third-wicket stand worth 110.\n\nDom Sibley and Zak Crawley fell to left-arm spinner Lasith Embuldeniya for four and nine respectively.\n\nSri Lanka's total was the lowest in a first innings in a Galle Test, and was a pitiful exhibition of indiscipline and poor strokes which demonstrated a clear lack of understanding of how to build a Test innings.\n\nEngland, who made five changes from their previous Test in August, were disciplined with the ball and tidy in the field, aside from a drop from debutant Dan Lawrence, with Stuart Broad superb in taking 3-20.\n\nTheir reward was a strong position on their first day of overseas Test cricket since the coronavirus pandemic took hold, and their opening action of a year that includes home and away series against India, a likely two-Test series against world number one side New Zealand and a bid to regain the Ashes in Australia.\n\nThe second day starts at 04:30 GMT on Friday.\n• None 'Right up there with the worst we've seen' - Sri Lanka collapse shocks pundits\n\nWith England's most recent Test being played five months ago, and Sri Lanka playing in South Africa over Christmas and the new year, there was concern that the tourists would not be as prepared as the hosts.\n\nBroad, who had Lahiru Thirimanne caught at leg slip and Kusal Mendis, who has now made a duck in four successive Test innings, caught behind in the seventh over, showcased his experience and guile by turning to off-cutters almost immediately.\n\nBess, playing his 11th Test, may have taken his second five-wicket haul in Tests but struggled to find a consistent line and length.\n\nKusal Perera reverse swept Bess' second ball to Root at slip, while Niroshan Dickwella slapped a long hop to Sibley at point to fall for 12.\n\nAfter getting Dasun Shanaka in fortunate circumstances as a sweep rebounded off Bairstow at short leg into wicketkeeper Jos Buttler's hands, Bess produced a beautifully flighted delivery to bowl Dilruwan Perera between bat and pad for a duck.\n\nHe rounded off the innings by bowling the reverse-sweeping Wanindu Hasaranga for 19 as the hosts lost their last five wickets for 30 runs.\n\nStand-in captain Dinesh Chandimal and Angelo Mathews offered some fight with a stand of 56 for the fourth wicket, the former becoming the 12th Sri Lankan to reach 4,000 Tests runs and Mathews the fifth to 6,000.\n\nHowever, both fell tamely in the space of three balls as Broad - who had taken three wickets in 80 overs in Sri Lanka before this match - had Mathews slashing to slip, before Chandimal looped a simple catch to Sam Curran at cover to give Jack Leach his first Test wicket since November 2019.\n• None Why the Sri Lanka tour matters for the Ashes\n\nFor England this two-Test tour, which was cut short in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic, is a build-up to the four-Test series in India that follows.\n\nTo stand any chance of beating Virat Kohli's side England must play spin well, and they will be concerned by the early inroads that Sri Lanka made.\n\nOpener Sibley, whom many feel is vulnerable against spin, edged to slip via his back pad as he attempted to work Embuldeniya to leg.\n\nCrawley, promoted to open given Rory Burns' absence to be at the birth of his first child, looked to take Embuldeniya over the top - a shot he played superbly last summer - but mistimed it to mid-off.\n\nHowever, Root, whose fifty was his 50th in Test cricket, will be buoyed by the way he and the recalled Bairstow nullified the spin threat as they shared England's highest partnership in Galle.\n\nIt was a chanceless stand, although Root overturned an lbw decision on 20 with replays showing the ball would have gone over the stumps.\n\nBoth he and Bairstow scored around the wicket, with Root playing the sweep to good effect, and Bairstow cutting and flicking through mid-wicket well.\n\nThey will hope to build a substantial first-innings lead and turn the match into a three-innings game.\n\n'England didn't have to work hard at all' - reaction\n\nEngland spinner Dom Bess on BBC Test Match Special: \"We have put ourselves in a really good position. Rooty and Jonny batted really well because the wicket started to spin.\n\n\"I felt I was quite nervous. I hadn't bowled in a game since the Test matches last summer.\n\n\"I didn't feel I bowled as well as I know I can. That's cricket, isn't it? There might be days bowl exceptionally well and go 1-100.\"\n\nFormer England captain Michael Vaughan: \"It was a fantastic day for England.\n\n\"The partnership with Root and Bairstow was exactly what was required by Sri Lanka.\n\n\"Mathews and Chandimal are experienced pros. They were playing nicely and then played two rash shots. It was so poor from Sri Lanka.\"\n\nSri Lanka batting coach Grant Flower: \"I'm at a loss for words, I've never seen us bat that badly. They know these conditions well and it should have been a big advantage.\n\n\"England's batsmen showed us there's nothing wrong with the pitch. We batted terribly.\"\n\nFormer Sri Lanka all-rounder Russell Arnold: \"It is not a minefield. It was very poor from Sri Lanka. England didn't have to work hard at all.\n\n\"It is very, very disappointing. It surprised me and I expected a lot more.\"\n• None Can the TV personality make it as a pro footballer?\n• None New drama brings the chilling crimes of Charles Sobhraj to life", "Lucy Edwards, pictured with dog Olga, became BBC Radio 1's first blind presenter when she guested in 2019\n\nA blind social media star said she could be waiting for years for a new guide dog because of delays connected with the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nLucy Edwards creates videos on living with sight loss, which have been watched millions of times.\n\nThe 25-year-old has used a guide dog since she was 17 and said she had lost her independence since her latest dog was retired four months ago.\n\nShe said it was like losing her \"eyesight all over again\".\n\n\"It has really knocked my confidence that in a pandemic I don't have my dog any more,\" Ms Edwards, from Sutton Coldfield, in the West Midlands, said.\n\n\"I don't feel comfortable going outside on my own.\"\n\nLucy Edwards says she struggles to socially distance using her cane alone, as she does not know where people are around her\n\nShe now relies on her cane and her sighted partner, but added she found it difficult to socially distance with just a cane and felt \"scared\" without the support of her dog Olga.\n\nThe Guide Dogs for the Blind Association said the pandemic meant it had been forced to stop dog training for five months last year.\n\nIt said 52 dogs had been trained and become qualified in the Midlands in 2020, compared with 125 in 2019, and added the monthly figures showed a big impact in April.\n\nWhile general dog training is continuing during the third England lockdown, with social distancing measures in place, some orientation and other work has stopped, along with puppy training classes.\n\nWest Bromwich marathon runner Dave Heeley, who was appointed an OBE in the New Year Honours, has been waiting for a dog for more than two years.\n\n\"The dog is your best friend, your dog is your mobility and I don't feel that from a stick,\" he said.\n\nDave Heeley has been waiting two years for a dog\n\nThe Guide Dogs for the Blind Association said over the past two years it had matched 80% of people with a guide dog within 16 months.\n\nThe charity currently has about 5,000 guide dogs working in the UK and within the next few years said it was targeting 1,000 new guide dog partnerships a year.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Employers \"have a duty\" to support staff who suffer domestic abuse but few have adequate policies in place, the government says.\n\nIt said bosses were in a unique position to help but a \"lack of awareness and stigma\" held them back.\n\nCalls to domestic abuse services have surged in the pandemic as couples spend more time at home.\n\nBusiness Minister Paul Scully said employers could be a \"bridge between a worker and the support they need\".\n\n\"It was once taboo to talk about mental health, but now most workplaces have well-established policies in place. We want to see the same happen for domestic abuse, but more quickly and more effectively,\" he said in an open letter to employers.\n\nManagers and colleagues are often the only other people outside the home that victims talk to each day and so \"uniquely placed\" to spot signs of abuse, he said.\n\nThese include becoming more withdrawn than usual, sudden drops in performance, mentions of controlling or coercive behaviour in partners, or physical signs such as bruising.\n\nEmployers did not have to become \"specialists\" in handling domestic abuse, Mr Scully said, but could do more to help, including:\n\nFirms already taking action include Vodafone, which offers specialist training to HR and line managers and support for victims including counselling and additional paid leave.\n\nIn August, law firm Linklaters strengthened its policies and now offers people who need to flee their home but can't stay with others three nights' accommodation in a hotel.\n\nIt also offers the option of paid leave, plus one-off payments of £5,000 to help victims trying to become financially independent.\n\nDomestic violence charity Refuge said it saw an 80% increase in calls to its helpline during the first national lockdown, a trend the government believes has continued.\n\nAnd in November, 43% of respondents to a survey by charity Surviving Economic Abuse showed an abuser had interfered with someone's ability to work or study from home during the crisis.\n\nExamples included hiding phones or computers, removing wi-fi connections, and phoning an employer claiming a breach of lockdown rules, in an apparent effort to get them sacked.\n\nDomestic abuse isn't a new problem, nor does today's call to businesses apply only during a pandemic.\n\nBut coronavirus has highlighted new and existing risks.\n\nFor many victims and survivors, work is a place of respite.\n\nBeing based at home, or on furlough, can reduce communication with team members, and prevent face-to-face chats with colleagues.\n\nI've heard of employers finding simple yet effective ways of supporting staff during the pandemic.\n\nFor example, finding a plausible reason for an employee whose remote communications were being overlooked, to go into the office as a one-off, so they could talk freely and hand over an ID document for safe keeping.\n\nOf course, not every business can afford to offer emergency accommodation or financial support to those in urgent need. But the focus of today's letter is on awareness, using free support and removing stigma.\n\nThe charity Surviving Economic Abuse wants the government to go further, and put paid leave for domestic abuse victims into law.\n\nElizabeth Filkin, who chairs the Employer's Initiative on Domestic Abuse, argues there are real benefits in supporting staff - including around productivity, loyalty and reputation.\n\nEmployment lawyer Sarah Chilton, a partner at CM Murray, told the BBC that all employers have a duty to protect their staff's health and safety while working from home. That includes if they are being subjected to domestic abuse.\n\n\"Where an employee is required to work at home during, for example, the pandemic, the employer should take account of any risk to that person's physical and mental health and safety in the environment in which they work.\"\n\nAngela Ogilvie, global director of HR at Linklaters, said training was vital to spot signs of abuse, especially now.\n\n\"Victims may avoid calls or videos for example. They may become quiet, anxious or tearful, secretive about their home life.\n\n\"And it's being conscious of how you start those conversations because they may be overheard, so you may have to switch your conversation to email or text.\"\n\nMr Scully said the government would consult on ways to help domestic abuse victims at work, for instance by making it easier to request flexible working.\n\nThe government's Domestic Abuse Bill also continues to make its way through parliament.\n\nIt will bring into law a statutory definition of domestic abuse that includes coercive or controlling behaviour as well as emotional and economic abuse.", "Last updated on .From the section Tennis\n\nFormer world number one Andy Murray's participation at the Australian Open is in doubt after the Briton tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nThe 33-year-old Scot was set to fly out to Melbourne on a chartered flight arriving there over the next 36 hours.\n\nInstead he remains in quarantine and isolating at home in London.\n\nMurray, who is said to be in good health, remains hopeful he will be allowed to travel safely at a later date and compete as planned.\n\nThe five-time Australian Open runner-up pulled out of last week's ATP event in Delray Beach as he wanted to \"minimise the risks\" of catching a transatlantic flight to Florida.\n\n'He will be refused'\n\nThe Australian Open will start on 8 February at Melbourne Park, three weeks later than usual, because of the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nPlayers must test negative before taking one of the 15 chartered flights - which have been put on by tournament organisers and will operate at 25% capacity - to Australia.\n\nOnce they have arrived, they will have to pass a series of Covid tests during a 14-day quarantine in Melbourne before the Grand Slam.\n\n\"Mr Murray, and the other 1,240 people as part of the program, need to demonstrate that if they're coming to Melbourne they have returned a negative test,\" said Victorian state health minister Martin Foley.\n\n\"So should Mr Murray arrive, and I have no indication that he will, he will be subject to those same rigorous arrangements as everyone else. Should he test positive prior to his attempts to come to Australia, he will be refused.\"\n\nMurray's planned appearance at Melbourne Park would come two years after he played there in what he feared would be his final match as a professional.\n\nAt 123rd in the world, Murray is ranked too low to gain direct entry into the tournament so the three-time Grand Slam champion has been given a wildcard.\n\nMurray was able to play only seven official matches in 2020 because of a lingering pelvic injury, and the five-month suspension of the tours because of the pandemic.\n\nThe Scot is among a number of players to have their plans disrupted.\n\nAmerican Madison Keys, who reached the Australian Open women's singles semi-finals in 2015, said she would not be playing in Melbourne after testing positive for coronavirus.\n\nWorld number two Rafael Nadal is travelling to Melbourne in search of a record 21st Grand Slam men's singles title without coach Carlos Moya, who has decided to stay at home in Spain with his family because of the health situation.\n\nWorld number three Dominic Thiem's coach Nicolas Massu has also not travelled after a positive Covid test, Thiem's father Wolfgang told Austrian newspaper Kurier.\n\n'Change of year, but not a change of luck' - analysis\n\nA change of year does not appear to have brought about a change of luck for Andy Murray.\n\nHe is now hoping he will be given permission to arrive in Melbourne late - and outside the window Tennis Australia painstakingly negotiated with the Victorian state government.\n\nIf he does get the green light to travel, having completed self-isolation in the UK and returned a negative test, he will still have to spend 14 days in quarantine on arrival.\n\nThat means he won't be able to play in the warm-up events the week before the Australian Open.\n\nBut it would keep alive his hopes of playing in the first Grand Slam of the year, as players will be allowed out of their rooms to practise for five hours a day during quarantine.\n\nAmerican player Tennys Sandgren, meanwhile, boarded a charter plane to Melbourne despite testing positive for coronavirus.\n\nThe world number 50, a two-time Australian Open quarter-finalist, tweeted that after testing positive in November he had returned another positive on Monday and might not be able to fly on Wednesday.\n\nBut Australian Open organisers said his medical file had been reviewed by Victoria state authorities and he had then been cleared to fly.\n\nThey explained that players are only allowed to enter Australia with proof of a negative test done just before departure or \"with approval to travel as a recovered case at the complete discretion of an Australian government authority\".\n\nSandgren posted on social media that he had been ill in November but was \"totally healthy now\".\n\n\"My two tests were less than eight weeks apart,\" he wrote. \"There's not a single documented case where I would be contagious at this point.\"\n\nLisa Neville, minister for police and emergency services, tweeted: \"Tennys Sandgren's positive result was reviewed by health experts and determined to be viral shedding from a previous infection, so was given the all clear to fly.\n\n\"No-one who is Covid positive for the first time - or could still be infectious - will be allowed in for the Aus Open.\"\n• None Alerts: Get tennis news sent to your phone\n• None Can the TV personality make it as a pro footballer?\n• None New drama brings the chilling crimes of Charles Sobhraj to life", "Passengers will need to provide a negative Covid-19 test taken within 72 hours before departure\n\nPassengers arriving into NI from outside the UK and Republic of Ireland will soon have to produce a negative Covid-19 test before departure.\n\nFirst Minister Arlene Foster confirmed the executive had agreed the plan on Thursday.\n\nPeople arriving from countries not on the government's travel corridors list will also still have to self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nThe move has already been agreed in the Republic of Ireland.\n\nPassengers arriving there will be subject to the new rules from Saturday, with the measure taking effect in England and Scotland from Monday.\n\nNegative tests 72 hours prior to arrival are already a requirement in the Republic of Ireland for passengers travelling from Great Britain and South Africa.\n\nSpeaking at Stormont's press conference on Thursday, the first minister said Northern Ireland's R-number had also fallen to between 0.7 and 0.9 for new cases of the virus.\n\nThe reproductive rate of the virus - known as the R rate, measures the infection rate of Covid-19 and had risen to about 1.8 due to Christmas relaxations.\n\nDeputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill said the drop showed the \"very real\" effect of lockdown restrictions imposed on 26 December, but she warned there was still \"no room for complacency\".\n\nShe said she still believed there needed to be an \"two-island approach\" to travel restrictions, including discussions with the British and Irish governments as a \"matter of urgency\".\n\nMrs Foster said Stormont ministers had also expressed frustration at the executive meeting over a lack of data-sharing from authorities in the Republic of Ireland, and called for it to be escalated.\n\nPSNI Chief Constable (centre) Simon Byrne attended Stormont's press briefing on Thursday with the first and deputy first ministers\n\nPSNI Chief Constable Simon Byrne said 40 penalty notices a day are being handed out to those who breach the Covid-19 regulations.\n\nHe told the press briefing that if people continued flouting rules, they could expect \"firm and swift enforcement\".\n\n\"We won't turn a blind eye when people break the rules.\"\n\nOn Thursday, 16 more deaths related to Covid-19 were reported by the Department of Health in Northern Ireland, bringing its total to 1,533.\n\nThere have been 973 new cases diagnosed in the past 24 hours, while 58 Covid-19 patients are being treated in ICUs across Northern Ireland, of which 44 are on ventilators.\n\nMrs Foster said she found it \"incredible and frankly unbelievable\" that some people were still holding house parties and gatherings, despite the pandemic rates and the lockdown.\n\nOn Wednesday, health officials warned that levels of the new, more transmissible variant of the virus are rising.\n\nMr Swann said that meant more \"difficult decisions\" on lockdown restrictions could be required.\n\nNorthern Ireland is in the third week of a six-week lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19.\n\nThe executive is due to review the current restrictions on 21 January.\n\nThe first and deputy first ministers said they would take evidence from health officials before deciding whether an extension of the lockdown would be required.\n\nMinisters have expressed concerns about keeping non-essential parts of businesses open\n\nMinisters have also expressed concerns about some larger retailers \"gaming\" the regulations and keeping open non-essential parts of their businesses.\n\nA meeting between the first and deputy first ministers and representatives of the retail sector is due to happen on Friday afternoon.\n\nElsewhere, the Chief Medical Officer has confirmed that unpaid carers looking after Clinically Extremely Vulnerable individuals should receive the first dose of their vaccine when phase two of the vaccination programme begins next month.\n\nDr Michael McBride told Stormont's Health Committee they are provided for on a list of prioritisation provided by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which decides the order of vaccination delivery.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Department of Health This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by Department of Health\n\nMr Swann was asked if his department was \"putting all its eggs in the vaccine basket\".\n\nHe said it was \"not the entirety of the answer\", adding: \"It will take time for the benefits of it to bed in.\n\n\"And while it is doing it, we still have to follow those restrictions that are in place.\n\n\"We may actually have to introduce more.\"\n\nOn Thursday afternoon the department tweeted that 121,711 vaccines have been administered in Northern Ireland.\n\nMrs Foster said that by end of this month, it is hoped all care home residents, health staff and those aged over 80 in Northern Ireland will have received their first vaccination.\n\nShe said that would be an \"incredible achievement\" and make Northern Ireland one of the top-performing countries in rolling out its vaccination programme.\n\nMeanwhile, the chairman of the Police Federation for NI (PFNI) has said officers need more powers to enforce Covid-19 regulations.\n\nAt present officers can only issue guidance and advice on the public health regulations.\n\nPFNI chairman Mark Lindsay said that puts officers in a \"difficult position\".\n\nThe federation represents thousands of rank and file PSNI officers.\n\n\"I think we are well past the stage where police officers are the people that should be giving advice around the guidance,\" Mr Lindsay told BBC Radio Foyle.", "President Trump has just become the first sitting president to be impeached twice by the US House of Representatives.\n\nWe asked members of our BBC voter panel to weigh in as well.\n\nHere's what they said:\n\nQuote Message: Everything he has done is unconstitutional and, as a president, the number one thing he should be doing is upholding the Constitution. If not for him continually fighting the election results and claiming the election was stolen, if not for him holding that rally near the Capitol, if not for him talking about 'uprising', last week would very likely not have happened. Unfortunately it was completely predictable. from Melissa Dangaran 51, from Minnesota Everything he has done is unconstitutional and, as a president, the number one thing he should be doing is upholding the Constitution. If not for him continually fighting the election results and claiming the election was stolen, if not for him holding that rally near the Capitol, if not for him talking about 'uprising', last week would very likely not have happened. Unfortunately it was completely predictable.\n\nQuote Message: Unprecedented. He should not have been impeached at all. There is no justification, no legal basis, no constitutional basis for it. It's a rush to judgment for ulterior motives and a dark stain on our country. I'm concerned about the double standard and I'm afraid our Constitution is on its deathbed. Why would anybody who's rational think that our president meant for people to go break into the Capitol? from Belinda Noah 45, from Florida Unprecedented. He should not have been impeached at all. There is no justification, no legal basis, no constitutional basis for it. It's a rush to judgment for ulterior motives and a dark stain on our country. I'm concerned about the double standard and I'm afraid our Constitution is on its deathbed. Why would anybody who's rational think that our president meant for people to go break into the Capitol?\n\nQuote Message: It's more of a symbolic impeachment at this point because he'll be out soon, but it's necessary nonetheless. Not only is he a threat to our national security, but he doesn't condone white supremacy and other threats. It's deeply saddening to me. from Williams Morales 19, from Georgia It's more of a symbolic impeachment at this point because he'll be out soon, but it's necessary nonetheless. Not only is he a threat to our national security, but he doesn't condone white supremacy and other threats. It's deeply saddening to me.\n\nQuote Message: I was in DC at the rally - not near the Capitol - but I saw the president speak with my own eyes and he did not call for anyone to storm the building or cause harm. It's just a way to ensure he will not run in the next four years. It is political and it will create a bigger divide between left and right. All violence should be condemned fairly and justly. It was a very sad outcome, but I do not believe it was the most horrible day in our country's history. from Gabriel Montalvo 21, from New York I was in DC at the rally - not near the Capitol - but I saw the president speak with my own eyes and he did not call for anyone to storm the building or cause harm. It's just a way to ensure he will not run in the next four years. It is political and it will create a bigger divide between left and right. All violence should be condemned fairly and justly. It was a very sad outcome, but I do not believe it was the most horrible day in our country's history.", "Siegfried and Roy were one of the hottest tickets in Las Vegas\n\nSiegfried Fischbacher, one half of celebrated magic double act Siegfried and Roy, has died from pancreatic cancer in Las Vegas at the age of 81.\n\nThe pair were among the biggest names in the world of magic and were known for working with lions and tigers.\n\nPaying tribute, David Copperfield called him a \"legend in magic\", and Penn Jillette said Siegfried and Roy were \"pure showbiz and pure class\".\n\nRoy Horn died from Covid-19 complications last May.\n\nThe pair \"invented the full length magic show headlining Vegas\", according to Jillette, who is known as part of the duo Penn and Teller.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Penn Jillette This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSiegfried and Roy teamed up in their native Germany in the 1950s, and the highlight of their extravagant shows was their performances with white lions and white tigers.\n\nHorn was attacked by a 400lb white Bengal tiger named Montecore during a performance in Las Vegas in 2003, leaving him partially paralysed and using a wheelchair.\n\nHe underwent lengthy rehabilitation and was later able to walk again, but the attack ended the duo's long-running Las Vegas residency.\n\nRoy Horn (left) had to use a wheelchair after the tiger attack\n\nFischbacher and Horn, whose real name was Uwe Ludwig Horn, had met on a cruise ship and were later signed up by a liner company.\n\nAfter being spotted and signed to perform at a nightclub in Bremen, they went on to tour Europe and brought tigers into their act.\n\nBut they shot to worldwide fame after launching their Las Vegas shows in the 1960s.\n\nTheir unique brand of magic and artistry consistently attracted sell-out crowds. They performed an estimated 5,000 shows for 10 million fans in the city after 1990, when they began performing at the Mirage hotel-casino.\n\nThey were also estimated to have grossed more than $1bn by 2001, which included their thousands of shows at other venues in earlier years.\n\nIn 2004, their act became the basis for the animated comedy Father of the Pride, about the mischievous adventures of a family of white lions who perform with Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas.\n\nHorn's condition improved and by 2006 he was able to talk and walk with assistance from Fischbacher.\n\nIn 2009, the duo staged a final appearance with a tiger (said to be Montecore, but this was disputed by some) at a benefit for the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute in Las Vegas.\n\nSiegfried Fischbacher was devoted to his partner Roy\n\nThey retired from showbusiness in 2010. After Horn's death last year, Fischbacher said: \"Today, the world has lost one of the greats of magic, but I have lost my best friend.\n\n\"From the moment we met, I knew Roy and I, together, would change the world. There could be no Siegfried without Roy, and no Roy without Siegfried.\"\n\nFischbacher recently had a 12-hour operation to remove a malignant tumour. He had been receiving care at home from two hospice workers in recent days.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nRichard Leonard has resigned as Scottish Labour leader, saying it is in the best interests of the party for him to stand down.\n\nMr Leonard said he believed speculation about his leadership had become a \"distraction\".\n\nAnd he said he would be stepping down with immediate effect.\n\nHis resignation comes just months ahead of the Scottish Parliament election, which is scheduled to be held in May.\n\nMr Leonard had been leader of the party for three years after succeeding Kezia Dugdale.\n\nThe former union official had faced open calls to quit from some of his own MSPs last year amid concerns that his leadership style could damage the party in the forthcoming Scottish Parliament election.\n\nPolls have suggested that many Scottish Labour supporters struggle to recognise him, and he is closely associated with former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.\n\nScottish Labour had dominated politics in Scotland for decades, but is currently the third largest party at Holyrood behind the SNP and Conservatives.\n\nAnd Mr Leonard's critics had questioned whether he was capable of turning the party's fortunes around.\n\nMr Leonard was seen as a close ally of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn\n\nIn a statement, Mr Leonard said the decision to resign had not been easy - but he felt it was the right one for him and his party.\n\nHe said: \"I have thought long and hard over the Christmas period about what this crisis means, and the approach Scottish Labour takes to help tackle it.\n\n\"I have also considered what the speculation about my leadership does to our ability to get Labour's message across. This has become a distraction.\n\n\"I have come to the conclusion it is in the best interests of the party that I step aside as leader of Scottish Labour with immediate effect.\"\n\nHe also insisted that Scotland now needs a Labour government more than ever, and accused both the Scottish and UK governments of mishandling the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nMr Leonard added: \"While I step down from the leadership today, the work goes on - and I will play my constructive part as an MSP in winning support for Labour's vision of a better future in a democratic economy and a socialist society.\"\n\nHis decision leaves Scottish Labour looking for its fifth leader since the independence referendum in 2014 - with Johann Lamont, Jim Murphy and Kezia Dugdale all having held the job since then.\n\nA Procedures Committee, to oversee the election of Mr Leonard's successor, has been formed and will have its first meeting on Friday.\n\nMeanwhile, Labour's Scottish Executive Committee will also meet in the coming days to agree a timetable for the process.\n\nMSP Jackie Baillie, who was Scottish Labour's deputy leader, has taken charge of the party on an interim basis.\n\nThis sudden resignation four months from the Holyrood elections seems to have taken Scottish Labour by surprise.\n\nMSPs I've spoken to said they did not see it coming.\n\nThere have been times when Richard Leonard has been under severe pressure from some in his party to stand down.\n\nWhen several MSPs publicly called for him to quit because the party had gone backwards at successive elections on his watch, he stood firm.\n\nHis critics seemed to have accepted that he would lead them and a divided party into the Holyrood election.\n\nThat has now changed and interim leader Jackie Baillie has to quickly organise a contest to replace him.\n\nIt's a contest in which Anas Sarwar, if he stands, would be an obvious frontrunner - even although he lost last time to Mr Leonard, who was seen as much closer to the then UK party leader, Jeremy Corbyn.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Mr Leonard should be \"very proud\" of his achievements as leader of the party in Scotland.\n\nSir Keir added: \"I would like to thank Richard for his service to our party and his unwavering commitment to the values he believes in.\n\n\"Richard has led Scottish Labour through one of the most challenging and difficult periods in our country's history, including a general election and the pandemic.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Neil Findlay MSP This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMr Leonard had been due to face a confidence vote at the party's ruling Executive Committee last September - but the motion was withdrawn at the last minute.\n\nIt came after four Scottish Labour MSPs called for him to go, warning that the party faced \"catastrophe\" at the ballot box under his leadership.\n\nThey pointed to the party's dismal performance in previous elections under Mr Leonard.\n\nScottish Labour finished fifth in the European election in May 2019, and then lost all but one of its MPs in the general election in December of the same year.\n\nMr Leonard insisted at the time that he intended to lead the party into this year's Holyrood election, and accused his opponents of waging \"internal war\" against him.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who faced Mr Leonard in her weekly question session in the Scottish Parliament, tweeted that she had \"always liked Richard Leonard\" despite their political difference.\n\nShe added: \"He is a decent guy and I wish him well for the future.\"\n\nRuth Davidson, who quit as leader of the Scottish Tories in 2019 before returning to lead the party at Holyrood, said she had always found Mr Leonard to be a \"thoroughly decent man and a committed campaigner.\"\n\nAnas Sarwar, who was defeated by Mr Leonard in the leadership contest in 2017 and is seen as one of the favourites to replace him, said he was sure Mr Leonard would \"continue to fight for a fairer, more just and more equal society today, tomorrow and long into the future.\"\n\nBut Labour MSP Neil Findlay, an outspoken supporter of Mr Leonard, took aim at those who had sought to oust him last year - describing them as \"flinching cowards\" and \"sneering traitors\".", "Primark stores have been hit hard by lockdown\n\nPrimark says it has no plans to sell its clothes online despite warning that lockdown store closures could cost it more than £1bn in lost sales.\n\nSome 305 of Primark's 389 global stores are shut - including all 190 UK outlets - but unlike rivals it has no online arm to fall back on.\n\nCustomers have said they would welcome the retailer setting up an online shop.\n\nBut Primark, which saw a 30% sales fall to £2bn in the 16 weeks to 2 January, says the cost would mean price rises.\n\nIt contrasts with online only fashion retailers such as Asos and Boohoo, whose sales rose by around 40% in the last four months of 2020.\n\nOn Thursday, consumers called on Primark to embrace e-commerce with one tweeting: \"Online sales are thru the roof during the pandemic. You're missing out on a LOT of money.\"\n\nBut the retailer tweeted back: \"We prefer to sell our products in our physical stores but thanks for the suggestion.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Primark This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSince March last year, non-essential shops in the UK and overseas have faced strict curbs and prolonged closures and all are currently shut in England.\n\nIn a statement, Primark said that if all of its stores stayed closed until 27 February 2021, it expected to miss out on £1.05bn of sales - up from a previous estimate of £650m.\n\nThe retailer said it would partially mitigate this by cutting its costs, but did not say if that would mean job losses. It added that it only expected to break even in the first half of the financial year, after seeing healthy operating profits of £441m last time around.\n\nIn the past Primark has said it won't sell online because the cost of manning the operation and processing high volumes of returns would mean it could no longer offer low prices.\n\n\"As a fast fashion retailer they are on a low margins anyway - they have to be very competitive on price,\" Patrick O'Brien, UK retail research director at GlobalData told the BBC.\n\nHe said pure online players like Asos and Boohoo could make it work because they were \"geared up for it in terms of logistics\".\n\nPrimark shops saw strong sales when they reopened after the first lockdown\n\n\"But Primark would be starting from scratch, and would have to integrate any new online operation with its existing store structure which would be costly.\"\n\nDespite this Mr O'Brien said the retailer was still likely succeed, pointing to the surge in sales it saw when its shops reopened after the first lockdown.\n\nBut Retail Economics' Richard Lim said Primark was at risk of \"potentially alienating its customers\" who increasingly expect to be able to shop online.\n\n\"They have very loyal customers who love the brand, but they are crying out to be able to access it online.\n\n\"The longer they are not online, the more disruptive it is. The more their customers are discovering new brands and ways to shop.\"\n\nAssociated British Foods also owns food and agriculture businesses. Sales across the group were down 13% in the 16 weeks to 2 January at £4.8bn.\n\nThere are always winners and losers in retail but this Christmas the picture is more polarised than ever thanks to the effects of the pandemic. Just contrast the fortunes of Primark, which doesn't sell online, with Boohoo and Asos which have both reported soaring growth in sales.\n\nAll our big supermarkets have now reported bumper Christmas trading, too, which is no real surprise given we can't go out to eat and so many of us are working from home. This growth has also been driven by an extraordinary rise in internet orders.\n\nWhile Primark is bracing itself to lose £1bn in business as a result of store closures, Tesco says it added £1bn of extra sales online this festive quarter. It's been very tough for many traditional non-food retailers, big and small, who've been unable to make up for all the lost sales from their High Street shops. Looking ahead, the big question is where the online dial will settle when our lives eventually return to normal.", "The number of people being treated in Scotland's hospitals for coronavirus has reached another record daily high.\n\nLatest Scottish government figures show a total of 1,596 people are in hospital with recently confirmed Covid.\n\nThis is up from Friday's figure of 1,530 patients.\n\nThe deaths of a further 93 people who had tested positive for the virus have been recorded in the past 24 hours, the same tally as Friday which was the highest daily figure of the pandemic.\n\nIt is the second day in a row there has been a record figure for Covid hospital patients.\n\nOf the 1,596 people in hospital, a total of 109 are in intensive care, up seven on Friday's figure.\n\nNational clinical director Prof Jason Leitch said Scotland's hospitals were \"very busy and fragile\" but coping so far.\n\nHe said: \"People should not be worried we have reached capacity but the best way of getting those numbers down is to reduce the prevalence of the virus.\"\n\nProf Leitch said the NHS could create more intensive care capacity if needed but \"all of that has a cost in what we won't be able to do\" elsewhere in the health service.\n\nThe NHS Louisa Jordan temporary hospital in Glasgow can be used to care for the sickest of Covid patients if the spike in admissions continues, but officials are trying to avoid this \"if we can manage without it\", Prof Leitch added.\n\nThis is because it is better for patients and staff for Covid patients to be in traditional intensive care units, he explained.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon has described the latest Covid figures as \"a big concern\".\n\nOn Twitter, she said: \"Covid case numbers still a big concern and putting huge pressure on the NHS, as hospital and ICU cases increase.\n\n\"Also, 93 further deaths remind us just how dangerous the virus can be - my thoughts are with all those grieving.\"]\n\nThe Scottish government data shows a further 1,865 new cases of Covid have been reported in the last 24 hours, down from the 2,309 cases reported on Friday.\n\nHowever, the daily test positivity rate is 8.7%, up from 8.1% on the previous day.\n\nThis breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.\n\nYou can receive Breaking News on a smartphone or tablet via the BBC News App. You can also follow @BBCBreaking on Twitter to get the latest alerts.", "A 28-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of murder after two men died at a property in east London.\n\nPolice were called to an address in Tavistock Gardens, Ilford, at 04:24 GMT to reports of a disturbance.\n\nTwo men were found seriously injured inside the property and both died at the scene.\n\nThe woman, who was Tasered during the arrest, also suffered non life-threatening injuries. She has been taken to hospital, the Met Police said.\n\nA man who lives a short way down the street said he was awoken by the sounds of a woman screaming.\n\nKuddus Miah, 44, said: \"She was screaming 'help, help, call the police'.\n\n\"The police and ambulances were there very quick.\"\n\nThe men who were found seriously injured on Sunday morning died at the scene\n\n\"I got changed out my PJs and went outside and asked one of the neighbours opposite what happened.\n\n\"She said a woman was coming in and out of the house crying out for help.\n\n\"Apparently they were new tenants. We've lived here around 15 years and it's a very quiet neighbourhood, it's shocking.\"\n\nSeveral forensics officers were seen outside the house and a large police cordon has been put in place.\n\nForensic officers have been seen working in the house\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Sarah and her husband Gary lived in the caravan on the drive for nine months\n\nA nurse who lived in a caravan for nine months to protect her mother from coronavirus says moving back into her house was like \"winning the lottery\".\n\nSarah Link and her husband Gary, who usually share a home with her mother, bought the caravan in March to allow them to isolate.\n\n\"I have cried a river in the caravan, if it wasn't for Gary, I wouldn't have got through it,\" Mrs Link said.\n\nThey moved back home for Christmas after her mother received the vaccine.\n\nThe caravan, bought for £600 and parked on their own drive in Cradley, in the Black Country, allowed Mrs Link to continue working at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital and her husband at his fishmonger's business.\n\n\"I'd do it again tomorrow. I would do it every time, I would have done anything to protect mum,\" she said.\n\n\"We were thinking it would be four weeks, 12 weeks max, then the summer came and went and nine months later we were still there. It was incredible, I just can't believe we did it,\" Mrs Link, who has been a nurse for 17 years, said.\n\nThe couple both contracted coronavirus in December, but carried on living in the caravan so they could self-isolate and continue to protect Mrs Link's 84-year-old mother.\n\nMrs Link said her Christmas this year was \"magical\" after moving out of the caravan\n\n\"I went back to work properly last week. I still get tired easily and suffer with fatigue, but I'm OK,\" Mrs Link said.\n\n\"It's getting ridiculous the cases... some people still walk around and don't believe it's real. If people came on my ward and see what I've seen.\"\n\nMrs Link said she had not hugged her mother since before March as they were still taking precautions to keep her safe.\n\nShe said Christmas and new year had been \"magical\" adding it was the \"best\" she had ever experienced after being able to move back home.\n\n\"We all cried when it turned midnight, that year we'd all had.\n\n\"It was like winning the lottery, waking up in a proper bed.\n\n\"We're in the warm... I wouldn't be happier if I'd won a million pounds.\"\n\nThe couple decorated the caravan throughout the year\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Vincent Kane - pictured with his grandson Sonny - is facing uncertainty about his operation\n\nThe son of a man with pancreatic cancer has said the last-minute cancellation of his surgery has been \"devastating\".\n\nJodie Kane said his father Vincent was due to have his operation on Friday.\n\nHowever, that procedure was cancelled by the Belfast Health Trust on Tuesday as the worsening coronavirus crisis increases the pressure on hospitals.\n\nThe trust apologised, saying it had faced an 80% rise in the number of patients with Covid-19 admitted to hospitals since Christmas Day.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio Ulster's Nolan Show, Jodie said that there was now \"no guarantee\" his 68-year-old father would get the treatment.\n\n\"To be told we had the chance of a very successful surgery on offer and then to have it taken away at the last minute is pretty devastating,\" he said.\n\n\"Even the surgeon himself said they would be concerned if it was to go on more than four weeks.\n\n\"There is an uncertainty hanging over us now that we don't know when he'll actually get that surgery or what the impact on his health is going to be.\"\n\nVincent Kane - pictured with his with wife Karen - has been suffering other health issues arising from his cancer\n\nVincent, from Newtownards, County Down, did not receive treatment for some of his other symptoms as it was planned that the surgery would help with those.\n\n\"Because they were hoping to get him straight into surgery he hasn't had the blockage in his gall bladder addressed so he's jaundiced, he's covered in a rash, can't sleep, he's lost a lot of weight,\" Jodie said.\n\n\"Undoubtedly there are people worse off than us out there but it is still a critical illness that he has got and it is one that we don't have an end in sight for, in terms of treatment.\n\n\"There must be a way of helping all those in need, or I suppose if you were being really honest about it those who stand the best chance of surviving - making the decisions for the benefit of them.\n\n\"There's no guarantee that in six weeks' time surgery is going to be an option because who knows what's going to happen with Covid?\"\n\nThe Belfast Health Trust said it had to reduce the number of ill patients on wards to protect them from coronavirus\n\nJodie called on those who were breaking Covid-19 regulations to think about the the \"direct and indirect impacts\" of their actions.\n\n\"We've every sympathy for anyone who has a loved one who needs [intensive] care because of Covid but cancer and Covid are both life-and-death situations.\n\n\"We can minimise the risks of one of them as a collective society just by taking the necessary precautions.\n\n\"It could be someone they love or their neighbour or someone in their community that's in the same situation as us in the very near future.\"\n\nFlo McClements, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in December, found out on Tuesday that her surgery - scheduled for Thursday - had been cancelled by the Belfast Health Trust.\n\nSpeaking to BBC Radio Foyle, her son Gregg said the pressure was \"mounting day by day\" on the the 72-year-old from Ballymoney, County Antrim.\n\n\"She had waited all through Christmas for the date and due to the Covid-19 restrictions we as a family had stayed away from her,\" he added.\n\nFlo McClements' family wants to \"give her a hug\" after her operation was cancelled\n\n\"We left her on her own with my dad just to make sure she didn't catch Covid and risk the operation.\n\n\"When you get the date you like to think it's the next step to recovery but unfortunately that didn't happen.\"\n\nGregg said his mother was \"putting on a brave face\" but it was difficult for the family to not be with her in person during what was a difficult time.\n\n\"That's actually the hardest part that we can't go up and have a cup of tea with her or give her a hug to make her feel a bit better even for a few minutes.\"\n\nThe Belfast Health Trust said it \"would like to sincerely apologise\" to those affected by the postponement of surgeries.\n\nIt said the decision was taken to reduce the number of ill patients on wards that would be more at risk from the virus than others.\n\n\"This was an incredibly difficult decision to make and we did not take it without considering all the information available to us,\" said the trust.\n\n\"We do not underestimate the anxiety and distress this causes the patients and families affected and we deeply regret this.\n\nIt said it would do \"everything in our power\" to reschedule their operations \"as soon as possible\".", "The company offered to pay surgeries a £5,000 charitable donation \"or to the staff member directly\" in emails\n\nThe Hacking Trust's medical division approached surgeries in Bristol and Worthing offering to pay the money to charity \"or the staff member directly\".\n\nRobyn Clark, from the Institute of General Practice Management, said it was \"just appalling\".\n\nThe company, based in London, has apologised, saying its \"good intentions\" were \"misinterpreted\".\n\nNHS England said people \"will rightly take a dim view of anyone who tries to jump the queue\".\n\n\"The NHS is free at the point of access for everyone who needs it,\" said Mrs Clark.\n\n\"What we felt this company was trying to do was jump the queue.\"\n\nThe Bristol-based manager said she worried it could \"create more health inequality\".\n\nShe said: \"The JCVI [Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation] is trying to prioritise the vaccine based on the vulnerability to Covid.\"\n\nThe e-mail sent to the GP surgery in Worthing said The Hacking Trust was aware that \"many appointments\" for vaccinations are not kept, and that it would be interested in being informed of \"any no-shows\".\n\nA donation of £5,000 would be paid to a staff member or given to charity for each dose it could secure, the e-mail said.\n\nIn a statement, the Battersea-based company said it \"offered charitable donations to staff or surgeries in this difficult time for any vaccines which were unused\".\n\nIt added: \"We had heard that some vaccines were being unused due to missed appointments. We would apologise that our good intentions have been misinterpreted.\"\n\nNHS England said it knew \"these particular emails were received across the country\".\n\nDr Nikki Kanani, GP and NHS medical director for primary care, said hundreds of NHS teams across the country were \"working hard to deliver vaccines quickly to those who would benefit most\".\n\n\"NHS staff will never ask for, or accept, cash for vaccines,\" she said.\n\nThe Department of Health and Social Care said vaccinations were available from the NHS \"for free\" and \"cannot be sold privately in the UK\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Online supermarket Ocado has become the first big retailer to warn of shortages of some products.\n\nIt told customers in an email that there may be \"an increase of missing items and substitutions over the next few weeks\".\n\nStaff sickness and self-isolation means some food producers are cutting the number of product lines they offer.\n\nWhile customers might not get their exact product choice, plenty of food should be available, Ocado said.\n\n\"Staff absences across the supply chain may lead to an increase in product substitutions for a small number of customers as some suppliers consolidate their offering to maintain output,\" a spokesperson said.\n\nThe news comes after a rush of online food orders for supermarkets, as shoppers try to stay at home after the new lockdown started.\n\nWithin a couple of hours of Prime Minister Boris Johnson's speech to the nation on Monday, shoppers reported problems with Sainsbury's and Tesco, while Ocado customers were placed in a virtual queue.\n\nOcado told its customers that from Friday \"changes to the UK supply chain have affected some of our suppliers and may result in an increase of missing items and substitutions over the next few weeks.\"\n\nIt added: \"We apologise for any inconvenience caused and we are working hard to mitigate any impact.\"\n\nFood suppliers are grappling with staffing problems, hospitality clients who have closed their doors and delays at the border with the EU.\n\nWholesalers the BBC spoke to this week said they faced throwing away thousands of pounds worth of food because of cancelled orders following new restrictions.\n\nThe UK meat industry has called for the early vaccination of its workers to keep food supplies running smoothly during the coronavirus crisis.\n\nIt warned earlier this week that absences during the pandemic, coupled with disruption at ports, could hit food supply chains.\n\nAn early vaccination call for supermarket staff was also made by the boss of Sainsbury's on Thursday.\n\nThe government said the food industry remains \"well-prepared\" to make sure people have the food they need.\n\nThe British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) said coronavirus and disruption at ports due to new systems brought in after the Brexit transition period were \"a severe challenge to the industry and to the smooth running of the nation's food supply chain\".", "Home Secretary Priti Patel has said officers \"will not hesitate\" to enforce lockdown rules as she defended the way police have handled breaches.\n\nShe said rising numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths illustrated the need for \"strong enforcement\".\n\nIt comes after the National Police Chiefs' Council published guidance saying officers should issue fines more quickly when rules are broken.\n\nMore than 30,000 fines have been handed out by forces in England and Wales.\n\nNPCC figures show 32,329 fixed penalty notices were issued between 27 March and 21 December last year.\n\nThe number of people who have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test surpassed 80,000 on Saturday, and a further 59,937 people tested positive.\n\nMinisters have launched a new campaign urging people to act like they have the virus and scientists have warned that lockdown measures in England need to be stricter.\n\n\"The vast majority of the public have supported this huge national effort and followed the rules,\" Ms Patel said.\n\n\"But the tragic number of new cases and deaths this week shows there is still a need for strong enforcement where people are clearly breaking these rules to ensure we safeguard our country's recovery from this deadly virus.\n\n\"Enforcing these rules saves lives. It is as simple as that. Officers will continue to engage with the public across the country and will not hesitate to take action when necessary.\"\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock has warned the public to follow the lockdown restrictions, telling the BBC's Andrew Marr programme that \"every time you try to flex the rules, that could be fatal\".\n\nBut Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer criticised the government for not providing \"absolute clarity of messaging\", telling the BBC's Andrew Marr that there had been \"mixed messaging over the last nine months\".\n\nNPCC guidance, published on 6 January, says officers should still offer people \"encouragement\" to comply with the regulations and explain any changes.\n\n\"However, if the individual or group does not respond appropriately, then enforcement can follow without repeated attempts to encourage people to comply with the law,\" the NPCC said.\n\nOn Saturday 12 people were arrested during an anti-lockdown protest in south London.\n\nElsewhere, North Wales Police turned away more than 100 cars at Moel Famau in Flintshire by Saturday lunchtime, and Norfolk Police fined one couple who had travelled about 130 miles (209km) to see a seal colony.\n\nHowever, Derbyshire Police has launched an urgent review into how fines were issued after two women were charged £200 each.\n\nThe pair were stopped by officers for walking five miles from their home with hot drinks, which they were told were not allowed as they were \"classed as a picnic\".\n\nJohn Apter, chair of the Police Federation of England and Wales, said officers were under \"immense pressure to do the right thing\" and said with \"such a changing landscape politically and legally\" there were going to be things which did not go right.\n\nHe said the police had to balance the relationship with the public.\n\n\"It's not easy because all we are trying to do in policing is keep as many people safe as possible,\" he said.", "The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have received Covid-19 vaccinations, Buckingham Palace has said.\n\nA royal source said the vaccinations were administered on Saturday by a household doctor at Windsor Castle.\n\nThe source added the Queen decided to let it be known she had the vaccination to prevent further speculation.\n\nThe Queen, 94, and Prince Philip, 99, are among around 1.5 million people in the UK to have had at least one dose of a Covid vaccine so far.\n\nPeople aged over 80 in the UK are among the high-priority groups who are being given the vaccine first.\n\nThe couple have been spending the lockdown in England at their Windsor Castle home after deciding to have a quiet Christmas at their Berkshire residence, instead of the traditional royal family gathering at Sandringham.\n\nLast month, the Queen appeared alongside several other senior members of the royal family for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began.\n\nIn 2020 she went seven months - between March and October - without carrying out public engagements outside of a royal residence.\n\nDuring that time, her eldest child, Prince Charles, 72, contracted coronavirus and displayed mild symptoms.\n\nPalace sources also told the BBC that her grandson Prince William tested positive in April - although Kensington Palace refused to comment officially.\n\nThe Queen made a private pilgrimage to the grave of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey in November\n\nThe Queen used her Christmas Day message to reassure anyone struggling without friends and family this year that they \"are not alone\".\n\nShe said the pandemic had \"brought us closer\" despite causing hardship, adding that the Royal Family has been \"inspired\" by people volunteering in their communities.\n\nOn Friday a third coronavirus vaccine - made by US company Moderna - was approved for use in the UK, joining the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines already approved by UK regulators.\n\nIt is not known which vaccine the Queen and Prince Philip have received.\n\nAll the approved vaccines require two doses to provide the best possible protection, with the second dose being given up to 12 weeks after the first.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has said the aim is to vaccinate 15 million people in the UK by mid-February, including care home residents and staff, frontline NHS staff, everyone over 70 and those who have been categorised as clinically extremely vulnerable.", "Bans imposed by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram on Donald Trump's accounts raise a \"very big question\" about how social media is regulated, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said.\n\nThe companies acted after supporters of the US president stormed Washington DC's Capitol building on Wednesday.\n\nMr Hancock said the bans showed they were now \"taking editorial decisions\".\n\nCampaigners want social media to be treated as \"publishers\", rather than \"platforms\", meaning more regulation.\n\nBut opponents of the idea argue that it could allow governments to limit debate.\n\nMr Trump faces an impeachment charge, with Democrats accusing the Republican president of encouraging the Washington riots, in which five people died.\n\nTwitter permanently suspended his @realDonaldTrump account on Saturday, citing the \"risk of further incitement of violence\".\n\nBut Mr Trump called this an attack on free speech and suggested he would look at \"building out our own platform in the future\".\n\nThere has been a long-running debate over whether social media companies should be treated in law as \"publishers\", with greater responsibility for dealing with libellous, discriminatory, misleading or incendiary content posted by users.\n\nMr Hancock, a former culture secretary, told BBC One's Andrew Marr Show: \"The scenes, clearly encouraged by President Trump - the scenes at the Capitol - were terrible - and I was very sad to see that because American democracy is such a proud thing.\n\n\"But there's something else that has changed, which is that social media platforms are making editorial decisions now. That's clear because they're choosing who should and shouldn't have a voice on their platform.\"\n\nMr Hancock said that development was likely to have \"consequences\".\n\nAsked earlier about Twitter's decision to ban Mr Trump's account, he told Sky News: \"I think it raises a very important question, which is it means that the social media platforms are taking editorial decisions.\n\n\"And that is a very big question because then it raises questions about their editorial judgements and the way that they're regulated.\"\n\nTwitter's ban on Mr Trump's account followed the increasing use of warning labels on his posts referring to the coronavirus pandemic and the result of the US presidential election.\n\nIn a blog on Friday, the company said its public interest framework existed \"to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly\".\n\nIt added: \"However, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules and cannot use Twitter to incite violence. We will continue to be transparent around our policies and their enforcement.\"\n\nFacebook and Instagram banned Mr Trump \"indefinitely\" on Thursday, with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg saying this sanction would not be lifted until at least 20 January, when Joe Biden is sworn in as the new US president.", "\"Absurd\" council tax rises should be scrapped to ease the pressure on family budgets, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has said.\n\nLocal authorities in England will be able to raise council tax by 5% from April, with 3% used to top up adult social care budgets.\n\nSir Keir said this meant those living in a band D property could see bills rise by an average of £90.\n\nHe added that the prime minister should provide extra funding to councils.\n\nBut the government says the rise in council tax bills, plus extra money from central government, will ensure a real-terms increase in support for local services.\n\nSir Keir wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: \"It is absurd that during the deepest recession in 300 years, at the very time millions are worried about the future of their jobs and how they will make ends meet, Boris Johnson and [Chancellor] Rishi Sunak are forcing local government to hike up council tax.\n\n\"The prime minister said he would do 'whatever is necessary' to support local authorities in providing vital services - he needs to make good on that promise.\"\n\nSir Keir urged Mr Johnson to \"give families the security they need\" by dropping the tax increase.\n\nHe said families had been treated as an \"afterthought\" by the government during the pandemic, adding that Labour would become the \"party of the family\" under his leadership.\n\nA Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson said: \"Council tax plays an important role in helping fund the frontline services needed to respond to the pandemic.\n\n\"Our approach strikes a balance between allowing local authorities to address service pressures and ensuring local residents have the final say on excessive increases.\"\n\nA £500m fund to support people struggling with finances meant councils could \"cut bills further for some of the most vulnerable households\", they added, while a £7.2bn support package would help meet \"the major Covid-19 service pressures in their local area\".\n\nThe chancellor's Spending Review in November set out the cost to the UK economy so far of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nMr Sunak warned the \"economic emergency\" caused by the pandemic had only begun, with lasting damage to growth and jobs.\n\nInterviewed on BBC One's Andrew Marr Show, Sir Keir said there was no scope for a \"major renegotiation\" of the UK's post-Brexit trade deal with the EU, but added that there were \"bits already that need to be improved on\".\n\nAnd, asked about the possibility of another Scottish referendum on independence from the UK, he said that a \"further, divisive\" vote was not \"the way forward\".\n\n\"But I do accept that the status quo isn't working\", Sir Keir added. \"I don't accept the argument that the status quo isn't working, the next thing you do is go to a referendum.\"\n\nThe prime minister has said such a vote - last held in 2014 - should be a \"once-in-a-generation\" event.\n\nBut Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said a referendum should take place.", "Dorset Police said officers dispersed dozens of demonstrators from the town centre as they attempted to march\n\nA video shared online apparently showing a woman being arrested in breach of lockdown for sitting on a bench was \"stage-managed\", police said.\n\nDorset Police believe the video was planned and recorded by anti-lockdown protesters during a demonstration in Bournemouth on Saturday.\n\nThree people were arrested for not giving their details so officers could issue fines for breaking Covid rules.\n\nThe BBC has asked one of the protesters who posted the video to comment.\n\nThe force said two of those held were later de-arrested when they confirmed their details in police custody and a third was released when his details were verified - all three were then issued fixed penalty notices.\n\nOfficers also issued at least seven other fines and 10 dispersal notices.\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Mark Callaghan, from Dorset Police, said: \"We believe this video was planned, stage-managed and recorded by members of the protest group who turned up in multiple areas, several of whom refused to engage or provide their details.\n\n\"If people refuse to give their details in such circumstances then it leaves officers with little option, but to arrest until the details are established. Our officers would only arrest as a last resort.\n\n\"It was clear that the group was deliberately organising their activities, walking around in twos and then trying to come together in a 'flash mob'-style approach, as they have done previously. This activity went on for a couple of hours.\"\n\nThe force's chief constable James Vaughan earlier said: \"I condemn the actions of these selfish individuals who knowingly flouted the lockdown restrictions.\"\n\nThe force said there were \"repeated attempts\" to engage with the organisers to stop the planned protest and found a number of the protesters had \"travelled considerably\" from out of the Dorset area.\n\nMr Vaughan added: \"Our county is gripped with infections and yet these irresponsible individuals have ignored what is being asked of them and have left their homes to protest. Shame on them.\"\n\nSam Crowe, director of public health for Dorset, said its hospital services were \"close to being overwhelmed\".\n\nMr Crowe said: \"Infection rates locally have been doubling in less than a week. If this carries on, our hospitals will not be able to cope with caring for those needing life-saving treatment. Stay at home means exactly that.\"\n\nLatest figures show Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole has reached 745.2 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nAlso on Saturday, 16 people were also arrested during an anti-lockdown protest in south London.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Eleanor Wadsworth was a civilian pilot with the Air Transport Auxiliary\n\nOne of the last surviving \"Spitfire Women\", who ferried aircraft to the front line in World War Two, has died.\n\nEleanor Wadsworth, who was 103, was part of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), a civilian service that transported fighter aircraft and crew.\n\nThe ATA Association said she was among 165 women who flew without radios or instrument flying instructions.\n\nMrs Wadsworth, who lived in Bury St Edmunds, died in December after a month of illness.\n\nDuring the war, about 1,250 men and women from 25 countries transferred some 309,000 aircraft of 147 different types.\n\nMrs Wadsworth said the \"thought of learning to fly for free was a great incentive\" to join the ATA\n\nMrs Wadsworth, who was born in Nottingham, joined the ATA in 1943 after seeing an advertisement for female pilots and was one of the first six successful candidates to be accepted with no or little previous flying experience, historian Sally McGlone said.\n\nIn 2020, the former pilot told her housing association's in-house magazine that she had been \"looking for a new challenge\" when she joined the service.\n\n\"The thought of learning to fly for free was a great incentive [so] I put my name down and didn't think much about it,\" she said.\n\nShe added that she had enjoyed flying Spitfires the most, which she did 132 times.\n\n\"It was a beautiful aircraft, great to handle,\" she said.\n\nTributes have been paid to her bravery on social including one from former RAF Tornado navigator and Gulf prisoner of war John Nichol.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by John Nichol This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMs McGlone said Mrs Wadsworth and her fellow ATA pilots \"will remain an inspiration to women worldwide\", while fellow historian Howard Cook said she and her fellow \"Spitfire Women\" had been \"incredibly brave\".\n\nAuthor Karen Borden, who interviewed Mrs Wadsworth for an upcoming book, added that \"like many of the women pilots, she was incredibly humble about her contribution to the war effort\".\n\n\"She joked about how flying 'straight and level' was her mark... and how marvellous it was to take to the air on her own.\"\n\nEleanor Wadsworth (bottom row, far left) joined the ATA in 1943\n\nHer son Robert said she had been \"a wonderful mother, an adoring grandmother and great-grandmother\", who had been \"matter of fact\" about her wartime service.\n\nHe said she would say that \"we had a job to do [and] we just got on and did it\".\n\nHer funeral will take place on Tuesday.\n\nMrs Wadsworth had been one of three surviving female ATA pilots, alongside American Nancy Stratford and Briton Jaye Edwards, who lives in Canada.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Asymptomatic testing for Covid can help \"break the chains of transmission\", Matt Hancock says\n\nRegular rapid testing for people without coronavirus symptoms will be made available across England this week, the government has said.\n\nThe community testing regime - expanded to cover all 317 local authorities - uses rapid lateral flow tests, which can return results in 30 minutes.\n\nLocal councils are being encouraged to prioritise tests for those who cannot work from home during the lockdown.\n\nThe health secretary said asymptomatic testing can help break transmission.\n\nMeanwhile, NHS England has invited tens of thousands of people over 80 to book vaccinations.\n\nA further 563 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test and another 54,940 cases reported, according to government figures on Sunday.\n\nThe total number of deaths in the UK after a positive test passed 80,000 on Saturday.\n\nThe government has launched a campaign telling people to act like they have got the virus in a bid to tackle the rise in infections.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and can go out only for limited reasons such as food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nThe Department of Health and Social Care said expanding the Community Testing Programme to more people without symptoms was \"crucial given that around one in three people\" who contract Covid-19 show no symptoms.\n\nIt said regular community testing using the rapid tests had already identified more than 14,800 positive Covid-19 cases.\n\nSo far, 131 local authorities in England have enrolled in the government's community testing programme, with Milton Keynes, Slough, Doncaster and Essex the latest to join.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said targeted asymptomatic testing and subsequent isolation was \"highly effective in breaking chains of transmission\".\n\nBut Angela Raffle, a consultant in public health at the University of Bristol Medical School, said increasing lateral flow testing was \"very worrying\" and warned the benefits of finding symptomless cases \"will be outweighed by the many more infectious cases that are missed by these tests\".\n\nDefending lateral flow tests on the BBC's Andrew Marr programme Mr Hancock said mass asymptomatic testing in Liverpool had seen the case rate drop \"more sharply than it did in other similar areas where only restrictions were brought in\".\n\nNHS Test and Trace will also work closely with other government departments to scale up workforce testing, the Department of Health and Social Care said.\n\nMany are already piloting regular workforce testing, with 15 large employers having taken up this offer already across 64 sites, \"including organisations operating in the food, manufacturing, energy and retail sectors, and within the public sector including job centres, transport networks and the military\".\n\nThe Department of Health and Social Care said plans were already in place for rapid testing of staff and students in schools and colleges and staff in primary schools.\n\nAsked when schools could reopen by the BBC's Andrew Marr, Mr Hancock said there were four conditions: that there is not a major new variant, the vaccine rollout is proceeding effectively, the number of deaths is falling and there is an easing of pressure on the NHS.\n\nMatthew Fell, of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), which represents 190,000 UK businesses, said: \"This expansion of testing will help more critical workers and those unable to work from home to operate safely, while also catching new cases more swiftly.\"\n\nBusiness Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the safety of the workforce had been an \"absolute priority\" and said the expansion of testing means \"we can keep our economy on the move while giving individuals in key sectors complete confidence that their workplace is safe\".\n\nBut Prof Susan Michie, professor of health psychology at University College London, told BBC Breakfast the country would continue a \"yo-yoing of lockdown\" without a \"test, trace and isolate system that actually works\" and warned there needed to be tighter restrictions and tougher messaging than in March to prevent \"tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in the next few weeks\".", "Bernard Thomas was interviewed by BBC Wales at the time of the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster\n\nA survivor of the Aberfan disaster has died after contracting Covid-19.\n\nAs a nine-year-old Bernard Thomas was rescued from the rubble of Pantglas primary school after one of the biggest tragedies in Welsh history.\n\nA total of 144 people were killed in the disaster on 21 October, 1966, after thousands of tonnes of coal slurry slid from a tip. Of those 116 were primary school pupils.\n\nLater Bernard was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress.\n\nHe told S4C he \"still heard the sounds of children screaming.\"\n\nPaying tribute to Mr Thomas, 63, who died on Wednesday, his brother Andrew told BBC's Newyddion: \"Bernard was a real character and his death has come as a shock to us as a family and the community of Aberfan.\"\n\n\"We can't be sure where he caught Covid, but he had an eye appointment at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital on 21 December.\n\n\"A few days later, he became ill and at Prince Charles Hospital, he tested positive for Covid-19.\"\n\n\"Although he had been receiving oxygen through a mask, we spoke regularly on the phone and he told us he was getting better.\n\n\"But on Wednesday morning he removed his mask to eat his breakfast, and 10 minutes after eating he faded away.\"\n\n\"It's a huge shock but I don't blame anybody.\"\n\nOn the 50th anniversary of the disaster Bernard told the BBC: \"I still wonder what the others would have been doing if it hadn't happened. Who would have got married to who, you know.\"\n\nBernard is survived by his 90-year-old mother Gwen, with whom he shared a home, and brothers Andrew and Robert.", "Coronavirus does not show much sign of \"abating\" in Scotland, says the deputy first minister as he refused to rule out tougher restrictions.\n\nScotland is facing \"a very alarming situation\" with the virus, according to John Swinney, whose comments come as the country records its highest death toll so far in the pandemic in the last two days, where 93 Scots died from the virus.\n\nSwinney tells Politics Scotland: \"I don't think I'm revealing a state secret when I say that the debate within cabinet [on Monday] was not whether we were going too far but whether we were going far enough.\"\n\nMr Swinney says Scotland recorded around 130 cases per 100,000 people on Boxing Day, but the figure shot up to 300 just 10 days later.\n\nDespite the new measures put in place, Mr Swinney said: \"It doesn't show much sign of abating to any extent.\n\n\"We're seeing case numbers which are hovering around 2,000 per day... so we've got an accelerating situation on our hands and we have to constantly review whether more restrictions are required.\"\n\nHe added: \"We remain open to considering further restrictions if they are necessary.\"", "Flexing the coronavirus lockdown rules could be fatal, the health secretary has warned as hospital admissions soar.\n\nMatt Hancock did not rule out strengthening current restrictions and told the BBC's Andrew Marr the NHS was under \"very serious pressure\".\n\nIt comes after almost 55,000 new cases of coronavirus were reported in the UK and the number of deaths after a positive test passed 80,000.\n\nScientist Prof Peter Horby warned the UK was in \"the eye of the storm\".\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the rules were tough but \"may not be tough enough\" and called for the government to hold daily press conferences to avoid \"mixed messages\".\n\nThe UK recorded another 563 deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test on Sunday, down from 1,065 deaths on Saturday.\n\nHowever, there tends to be fewer deaths reported on Sundays, due to a reporting lag over the weekend. There were also a further 54,940 daily cases.\n\nMr Hancock told Andrew Marr \"every time you try to flex the rules that could be fatal\" and said staying at home was the \"most important thing we can do collectively as a society\".\n\nThe health secretary said he did not want to speculate on whether the government would further strengthen restrictions, after warnings from scientists on Saturday that they may need to be stricter.\n\n\"People need to not just follow the letter of the rules but follow the spirit as well and play their part,\" he said.\n\nHis comments came after Home Secretary Priti Patel defended police over enforcing lockdown rules following the case of two women who were fined for going for a walk five miles from their homes - a decision which is now under review.\n\nThe government has launched a campaign telling people to act like they have got the virus in a bid to tackle the rise in infections.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and can go out only for limited reasons such as food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nEngland's chief medical officer Prof Chris Whitty said that if the virus continued on its current trajectory \"many hospitals will be in real difficulties, and very soon\".\n\nIn a statement released on Sunday, he said that unless people started to follow the rules more strictly, emergency patients will have to be turned away from hospitals, causing \"avoidable deaths\".\n\nProf Horby, chairman of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), said there may be \"early signs that something is beginning to bite\" due to the restrictions - but if they did not then stricter measures would be needed.\n\nHe told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show: \"I really hope people take this very seriously. It was bad in March, it's much worse now.\n\n\"We've seen record numbers across the board, record numbers of cases, record numbers of hospitalisations, record numbers of deaths.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Professor Peter Horby explains why the new Covid-19 variant is up to 70% more transmissible\n\nProf Horby said tougher measures might include those during the March lockdown, such as people only being able to exercise once a day and stricter rules about meeting people.\n\n\"We are in a situation where everything that was risky in the past is now more risky,\" he said.\n\nProf Horby said early signs were encouraging that the vaccines would be effective against the new Covid variants - first identified in the UK and in South Africa - and he did not want people to \"hide under the duvet\".\n\n\"We can see the end game now,\" he said.\n\nHigher cases inevitably mean more hospitalisations and more deaths.\n\nThe most recent figures show that, on average, 894 people per day are now dying within 28 days of a positive Covid test, up from 438 at the start of December.\n\nThe spike in cases since Christmas means that figure is almost certain to get worse before the most recent lockdown measures can start to have any effect.\n\nScientists think the new variant of the disease is more \"transmissible\", possibly because each infected individual produces more of the actual virus - sometimes referred to as the viral load.\n\nVaccination should help to protect the most vulnerable from serious symptoms but we don't yet know if receiving the jab stops an individual contracting the virus and passing it on to others.\n\nScientists say that may mean even tougher restrictions will be needed to bring the R-number below one and start to reduce the overall size of the pandemic.\n\nMass community testing is to be rolled out this week, the government has said, and the health secretary said around two million people had been vaccinated in the UK, with some 200,000 jabs being given in England daily.\n\nMr Hancock said by autumn every adult in the UK would be offered a vaccine.\n\nHe said the government was on course to reach its target of 15 million people vaccinated by mid-February, with the opening of seven mass vaccination centres this week likely to increase the rate of jabs.\n\nMr Hancock told Sky News' Sophy Ridge he hoped coronavirus could be treated like seasonal flu with an annual vaccination programme in the future.\n\nProf Horby said the vaccines may have to be updated \"every few years\" as the virus mutates and said it was unlikely the virus would go away completely.\n\n\"We're going to have to live with it,\" he said. \"But that may change significantly.\n\n\"It may well become more of an endemic virus that's with us all the time and may cause some seasonal pressures and some excess deaths but is not causing the huge disruption that we're seeing now.\"", "Electricity is gradually being restored in Pakistan following a huge power cut across the country, which led to every city reporting outages.\n\nHomes nationwide were suddenly plunged into darkness from about midnight.\n\nPower is now back in most cities but officials warn that it could still be a few hours before electricity is fully restored.\n\nThe outage is believed to have been caused by a fault at a power plant in the south of the country.\n\nPower cuts are not uncommon in Pakistan. Essential facilities such as hospitals often use diesel-fuelled generators as a back-up power supply.\n\n\"A countrywide blackout has been caused by a sudden plunge in the frequency in the power transmission system,\" Pakistan's power minister, Omar Ayub Khan, wrote on Twitter in the early hours of Sunday.\n\nHomes across the country were plunged into darkness at about midnight\n\nMr Khan later said that power had been restored in most major cities but that it would take a few more hours for the grid to go completely back to normal.\n\nHe added that the outage occurred after a fault developed at the Guddu power plant in Sindh province shortly before midnight on Saturday (19:00 GMT).\n\nInvestigators were at the site to ascertain the cause of the fault, Mr Khan said.\n\nBlackouts sometimes occur in Pakistan because of chronic power shortages, with many areas having no electricity for several hours a day. The issue has previously led to street protests.\n\nIn 2013, Pakistan's electricity network broke down completely after a power plant in south-western Balochistan province developed a technical fault.\n\nPakistanis seem to have largely taken this power cut in their stride. Outages lasting a number of hours are not uncommon, though they are rarely on this scale, and normally occur during the hotter summer months. The last time there was a near national blackout like this was in 2015.\n\nSo far, there have been no reports of problems at hospitals, which have their own back-up supplies. A senior member of staff at a major hospital in the city of Karachi told me they could maintain services for 48-72 hours without mainline power.\n\nMany businesses and richer families invariably own diesel or petrol fuelled generators too, allowing them to continue using electricity whenever power cuts occur. There were reports of queues at some petrol stations earlier in the day as people tried to keep refilling their generators.\n\nOthers will have been without internet and phone access, or hot water, but - already used to periods without electricity - appear to have accepted the outage with an air of resignation.", "Many were taken by surprise by the events in Washington, but to those who closely follow conspiracy and extreme right groups online, the warning signs were all there.\n\nAt 02:21 Eastern Standard Time on election night, President Trump walked onto a stage set up in the East Room of the White House and declared victory.\n\n\"We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.\"\n\nHis speech came an hour after he'd tweeted: \"They are trying to steal the election\".\n\nHe hadn't won. There was no victory to steal. But to many of his most fervent supporters, these facts didn't matter, and still don't.\n\nSixty five days later, a motley coalition of rioters stormed the US Capitol building. They included believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory, members of \"Stop the Steal\" groups, far-right activists, online trolls and others.\n\nOn Friday 8 January - some 48 hours after the Washington riots - Twitter began a purge of some of the most influential pro-Trump accounts that had been pushing conspiracies and urging direct action to overturn the election result.\n\nThen came the big one - Mr Trump himself.\n\nThe president was permanently banned from tweeting to his more than 88 million followers \"due to the risk of further incitement of violence\".\n\nThe violence in Washington shocked the world and seemed to catch the authorities off guard.\n\nBut for anyone who had been carefully watching the unfolding story - online and on the streets of American cities - it came as no surprise.\n\nThe idea of a rigged election was seeded by the president in speeches and on Twitter, months before the vote.\n\nOn election day, the rumors started just as Americans were going to the polls.\n\nA video of a Republican poll watcher being denied entry to a Philadelphia polling station went viral. It was a genuine error, caused by confusion about the rules. The man was later allowed into the station to observe the count.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Will Chamberlain This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by Will Chamberlain\n\nBut it became the first of many videos, images, graphics and claims that went viral in the days that followed, giving rise to a hashtag: #StopTheSteal.\n\nThe message behind it was clear - Mr Trump had won a landslide victory, but dark forces in the establishment \"deep state\" had stolen it from him.\n\nIn the early hours of Wednesday 4 November, while votes were still being counted and three days before the US networks called the election for Joe Biden, President Trump claimed victory, alleging \"a fraud on the American public\".\n\nMr Trump did not provide any evidence to back up his claims. Studies carried out for previous US elections have shown that voter fraud is extremely rare.\n\nBy mid-afternoon a Facebook group called \"Stop the Steal\" was created and quickly became one of the fastest-growing in the platform's history. By Thursday morning, it had added more than 300,000 members.\n\nMany of the posts focused on unsubstantiated allegations of mass voter fraud, including manufactured claims that thousands of dead people had voted and that voting machines had somehow been programmed to flip votes from Mr Trump to Mr Biden.\n\nBut some of the posts were more alarming, speaking of the need for a \"civil war\" or \"revolution\".\n\nBy Thursday afternoon, Facebook had taken down Stop the Steal, but not before it had generated nearly half a million comments, shares, likes, and reactions.\n\nDozens of other groups quickly sprang up in its place.\n\nThe idea of a stolen election continued to spread online and take hold. Soon, a dedicated Stop the Steal website was launched in a bid to register \"boots on the ground to protect the integrity of the vote\".\n\nOn Saturday 7 November, major news organisations declared that Joe Biden had won the election. In Democratic strongholds, throngs of people took to the streets to celebrate. But the reaction online from Mr Trump's most ardent supporters was one of anger and defiance.\n\nThey planned a rally in Washington DC for the following Saturday, dubbed the Million MAGA (Make America Great Again) March.\n\nTrump tweeted that he might try to stop by the demonstration and \"say hello\".\n\nPrevious pro-Trump rallies in Washington had failed to attract large crowds. But thousands gathered at Freedom Plaza that sunny morning.\n\nOne extremism researcher called it the \"debut of the pro-Trump insurgency\".\n\nAs Trump's motorcade drove through the city, supporters screaming with delight rushed to catch a glimpse of the president, who beamed at them wearing a red MAGA hat.\n\nWhile mainstream conservative figures were present, the event was dominated by far-right groups.\n\nDozens of members of the far-right, anti-immigrant, all-male group Proud Boys, who have repeatedly been involved in violent street protests and were among those who would later break into the US Capitol, joined the march. Militia groups, far-right media figures and promoters of conspiracy theories were also there.\n\nAs night fell, clashes between Trump supporters and counter-protesters broke out, including a brawl about five blocks from the White House.\n\nThe violence - although largely contained by police on this occasion - was a clear sign of things to come.\n\nBy now, President Trump and his legal team had invested their hopes in dozens of legal cases.\n\nAlthough a number of courts had already dismissed fraud allegations, many in the pro-Trump online world became fascinated with two lawyers with close ties to the president - Sidney Powell and L Lin Wood.\n\nMs Powell and Mr Wood promised they were preparing cases of voter fraud so comprehensive that when released, they would destroy the case for Mr Biden having won the presidency.\n\nMs Powell, 65, a conservative activist and former federal prosecutor, told Fox News that the effort would \"release the Kraken\" - a reference to a gigantic sea monster from Scandinavian folklore that rises up from the ocean to devour its enemies.\n\nThe \"Kraken\" quickly became an internet meme, representing sprawling, unsubstantiated claims of widespread election fraud.\n\nMs Powell and Mr Wood became heroes to followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory - who believe President Trump and a secret military intelligence team are battling a deep state made up of Satan-worshipping paedophiles in the Democratic Party, media, business and Hollywood.\n\nThe lawyers became a conduit between the president and his most conspiracy-minded supporters - a number of whom ended up inside the Capitol on 6 January.\n\nMs Powell and Mr Wood were successful in whipping up sound and fury online, but their legal efforts came to nothing.\n\nWhen they released almost 200 pages of documents in late November, it became clear that their lawsuit consisted predominantly of conspiracy theories and debunked allegations that had already been rejected by dozens of courts.\n\nThe filings contained simple legal errors - and basic misspellings and typos.\n\nStill, the meme lived on. The terms \"Kraken\" and \"Release the Kraken\" were used more than a million times on Twitter before the Capitol riot.\n\nDeath threats were made against a Georgia election worker, and Republican officials in the state - including Governor Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and the official in charge of the state's voting systems, Gabriel Sterling - were branded \"traitors\" online.\n\nMr Sterling issued an emotional and prescient warning to the president in a press conference on 1 December.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"This has to stop... someone's gonna get killed\": Mr Sterling calls on President Trump to condemn the threats\n\n\"Someone's going to get hurt, someone's going to get shot, someone's going to get killed, and it's not right,\" he said.\n\nIn Michigan in early December, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, had just finished trimming her Christmas tree with her four-year-old son when she heard a commotion outside her Detroit home.\n\nAbout 30 protesters with banners stood outside, shouting \"Stop the steal!\" through megaphones.\n\n\"Benson, you are a villain,\" one person yelled.\n\nOne of the demonstrators live-streamed the protest on Facebook, stating that her group was \"not going away\".\n\nIt was just one of a rash of protests targeting people involved in the vote.\n\nIn Georgia, a constant stream of Trump supporters drove past Mr Raffensperger's home, honking their horns. His wife received threats of sexual violence.\n\nIn Arizona, demonstrators gathered outside of the home of Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, at one point warning: \"We are watching you.\"\n\nOn 11 December, the Supreme Court rejected an attempt by the state of Texas to throw out election results.\n\nAs the president's legal and political windows continued to close, the language in pro-Trump online circles became increasingly violent.\n\nOn 12 December, a second Stop the Steal rally was held in the capital. Once again, thousands attended, and once again prominent far-right activists, QAnon supporters, fringe MAGA groups and militia movements were among the demonstrators.\n\nMichael Flynn, Mr Trump's former national security advisor, likened the protesters to the biblical soldiers and priests breaching the walls of Jericho. This echoed the rally organisers' call for \"Jericho Marches\" to overturn the election result.\n\nNick Fuentes, the leader of Groypers, a far-right movement that targets Republican politicians and figures they deem too moderate, told the crowd: \"We are going to destroy the GOP!\"\n\nThe march once again turned violent.\n\nThen two days later, the Electoral College certified Mr Biden's victory, one of the final steps required for him to take office.\n\nOn online platforms, supporters were becoming resigned to the view that all legal avenues were dead ends, and only direct action could save the Trump presidency.\n\nSince election day, alongside Mr Flynn, Ms Powell and Mr Wood, a new figure had rapidly gained prominence among pro-Trump circles online.\n\nRon Watkins is the son of Jim Watkins, the man behind 8chan and 8kun - message boards filled with extreme language and views, violence and extreme sexual content. They gave rise to the QAnon movement.\n\nIn a series of viral tweets on 17 December, Ron Watkins suggested President Trump should follow the example of Roman leader Julius Caesar, and capitalise on \"fierce loyalty of the military\" in order to \"restore the Republic\".\n\nRon Watkins encouraged his more than 500,000 followers to make #CrossTheRubicon a Twitter trend, referring to the moment when Caesar launched a civil war by crossing the Rubicon river in 49BC. The hashtag was also used by more mainstream figures - including the chairwoman of Arizona Republican Party, Kelli Ward.\n\nIn a separate tweet, Ron Watkins said Mr Trump must invoke the Insurrection Act, which empowers the president to deploy the military and federal forces.\n\nMr Trump met Ms Powell, Mr Flynn and others at a strategy meeting at the White House the following day, 18 December.\n\nDuring the meeting, according to the New York Times, Mr Flynn called on Mr Trump to impose martial law and deploy the military to \"rerun\" the election.\n\nThe meeting further stoked online chatter about \"war\" and \"revolution\" in far-right circles. Many came to see the joint session of Congress on 6 January, normally a formality, as a last roll of the dice.\n\nA wishful story began to take hold among QAnon and some MAGA supporters. They hoped that Vice-President Mike Pence, who was set to preside over the 6 January ceremony, would ignore the electoral college votes.\n\nThe president, they said, would then deploy the military to quell any unrest, order the mass arrest of the \"deep state cabal\" who had rigged the election and send them to Guantanamo Bay military prison.\n\nBack in the land of reality, none of this was remotely feasible. But it launched a movement for \"patriot caravans\" to organise ride shares to help transport thousands from around the country to Washington DC on 6 January.\n\nLong processions of vehicles flying Trump flags and sometimes towing elaborately decorated trailers gathered in car parks in cities including Louisville, Kentucky, Atlanta, Georgia, and Scranton, Pennsylvania.\n\n\"We are on our way,\" one caravaner posted on Twitter with a picture of about two dozen supporters.\n\nAt an Ikea parking lot in North Carolina, another man showed off his truck. \"The flags are a little tattered - we'll call them battle flags now,\" he said.\n\nAs it became clear that Mr Pence and other key Republicans would follow the law and allow Congress to certify Mr Biden's win, the language towards them became vicious.\n\n\"Pence will be in jail awaiting trial for treason,\" Mr Wood tweeted. \"He will face execution by firing squad.\"\n\nOnline discussion reached boiling point. References to firearms, war and violence were rife on self-styled \"free speech\" social platforms such as Gab and Parler, which are popular with Trump supporters, as well as on other sites.\n\nIn Proud Boys groups, where members had once supported police, some turned against authorities, whom they deemed to no longer be on their side.\n\nHundreds of posts on a popular pro-Trump site, TheDonald, openly discussed plans to cross barricades, carry firearms and other weapons to the march in defiance of Washington's strict gun laws. There was open chatter about storming the Capitol and arresting \"treasonous\" members of Congress.\n\nOn Wednesday 6 January, Mr Trump addressed a crowd of thousands at the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House, for more than an hour.\n\nEarly on he encouraged supporters to \"peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard\", but he ended with a warning. \"We fight like hell, and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.\n\n\"So we're going to, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue… and we're going to the Capitol.\"\n\nTo some observers, the potential for violence that day was clear from the outset.\n\nMichael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security under President George W Bush, blamed the Capitol Police, who reportedly turned down offers of assistance from the much larger National Guard ahead of time. He characterised it as \"the worst failure of a police force I can think of\".\n\n\"I think it was a very foreseeable potential negative turn of events,\" Mr Chertoff said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\n\"To be blunt, it was obvious. If you read the newspaper and were awake, you understood that you've got a lot of people who have been convinced there was a fraudulent election. Some of them are extremists, and violent. Some of the groups openly said, 'Bring your guns'.\"\n\nStill, many Americans were astonished by Wednesday's scenes, like James Clark, a 68-year-old Republican from Virginia.\n\n\"I find it absolutely shocking. I didn't think it would come to this,\" he told the BBC.\n\nBut the signs were there for weeks. A hodgepodge of extreme and conspiratorial groups were convinced that the election was stolen. Online, they repeatedly talked about arming themselves, and violence.\n\nPerhaps the authorities didn't think their posts were serious, or specific enough to investigate. They now face pointed questions.\n\nFor Joe Biden's inauguration on 20 January, Mr Chertoff is expecting a \"much stronger showing\" by security services than last Wednesday night.\n\nBut that hasn't stopped many on extreme platforms calling for further violence and disruption on the day.\n\nThere are questions, too, for the major social media platforms, which enabled conspiracy theories to reach millions of people.\n\nLate on Friday, Twitter deleted the accounts of Mr Flynn, the former Trump advisor, the \"Kraken\" lawyers Ms Powell and Mr Wood, and Mr Watkins. Then Mr Trump himself.\n\nArrests of those who stormed the Capitol continue. But most of the rioters still live in a parallel online universe - a subterranean world filled with alternative facts.\n\nThey have already come up with fanciful explanations to dismiss Mr Trump's video statement, posted on Twitter the day after the riots, in which he acknowledged for the first time that \"a new administration will be inaugurated on 20 January\".\n\nHe can't possibly be giving up, they contend. Among their new theories - it's not really him in the video but a computer-generated \"deep fake\". Or perhaps the president is being held hostage.\n\nMany still believe Mr Trump will prevail.\n\nThere's no evidence behind any of this, but it does prove one thing.\n\nNo matter what happens to Donald Trump, the rioters who stormed the US Capitol are not backing down anytime soon.", "Spain is in a race against time to clear roads covered by heavy snow, and get Covid vaccines and food supplies to areas affected by Storm Filomena.\n\nUp to 50cm (20 inches) of snow fell on the capital Madrid, one of the worst hit areas, between Friday and Saturday.\n\nAt least four people died and thousands of travellers were left stranded.\n\nOvernight, temperatures plunged to -8C (18F) in parts of Spain, amid warnings by meteorologists that the snow was turning to perilous ice.\n\nThe unusual cold wave on the Iberian peninsula is expected to last until Thursday.\n\nThe Spanish government said it had taken extra steps - including police-escorted convoys - to ensure its expected shipment of some 300,000 coronavirus vaccines can be distributed as planned to regional health authorities later on Monday.\n\n\"The commitment is to guarantee the supply of health, vaccines and food. Corridors have been opened to deliver the goods,\" Transport Minister Jose Luis Abalos said on Sunday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Madrid has been hit by heavy snowfall after Storm Filomena\n\nSoldiers have been deployed to clear some of the 700 major roads.\n\nSome 3,500 tonnes of salt were later brought on lorries to the capital, Spain's El Mundo website reported on Monday.\n\nThe record-breaking snowfall has triggered some unprecedented scenes here in Madrid. People have skied along the city's main commercial street, Gran Vía, and one man was pictured being pulled through the district of Hortaleza on a sled by five huskies.\n\nBut other responses to the snow have been more controversial due to concerns about Covid-19. Dozens of young people had a snowball fight in Callao square, for example, and many of them were without facemasks.\n\nNearby, in Puerta del Sol, others celebrated the snow by dancing a conga. The daily Marca newspaper branded it \"the conga of shame\".\n\nAlthough the snowfall has now stopped, low temperatures have left snow and ice piled up across the capital and the surrounding region. And with residents advised to avoid using their cars, public transport has seen a surge in demand.\n\nThis has compounded coronavirus concerns as many metro train carriages were packed at rush hour on Monday morning, making social distancing impossible.\n\nMadrid's international airport began gradually resuming operations on Sunday afternoon, having cancelled all flights on Friday.\n\nSome 500 people across the Madrid region were forced to spend the night in temporary shelter, including sports centres, after they were trapped by the whiteout.\n\nAbout 100 shoppers and staff spent two nights at a shopping centre in Majadahonda, a town north of the capital. \"There are people sleeping on the ground on cardboard,\" one restaurant employee told TVE television.\n\nSpain's Meteorological Agency said Saturday's snowfall was the heaviest in Madrid since 1971\n\nBut there were stories of heroism too, including doctors and medical workers who abandoned their cars and walked for hours to get to work. One doctor, Alvaro Sanchez, said on social media he had walked 17km (10 miles) over nearly two hours to get to work, while two nurses, Paco and Monica, said they had walked 22km to their hospital.\n\nThey were praised by Spanish Health Minister Salvador Illa, who tweeted: \"The commitment that the entire group of health workers is showing is an example of solidarity and dedication.\"\n\nSome 4x4 vehicle owners offered to transport medical workers, while other volunteers helped to clear hospital entrance ways.\n\n\"Health staff have been working (hard) for more than a year and this is just a short moment for us, so as citizens, we are trying to help; it is everyone's responsibility,\" said Fernando de la Fuente, 60, who helped clear the entrance to Madrid's Gregorio Maranon Hospital.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nSpaniards in large parts of the country have been warned to take care in the coming days as temperatures could fall to -12C (10F) in some areas until Thursday.", "Last updated on .From the section FA Cup\n\nCrawley Town delivered one of the FA Cup third round's most emphatic upsets as the League Two underdogs tore apart Marcelo Bielsa's Leeds.\n\nThree second-half goals rewarded a fantastic performance from John Yems' side as they made light of the 62 places between themselves and their Premier League visitors.\n\nNick Tsaroulla, playing only his seventh game in senior football, set the ball rolling, beating three Leeds defenders to fire home a superb solo opener.\n\nUnited keeper Kiko Casilla's error allowed Ashley Nadesan to double the lead before Jordan Tunnicliffe added a third for Crawley, who could have won by more.\n• None Watch all of the goals from the FA Cup third round\n• None Can Mark Wright make it as a pro at Crawley?\n\nBielsa made seven changes to his side but Leeds fielded England midfielder Kalvin Phillips among several regular top-flight starters including Pablo Hernandez, Ezgjan Alioski and club record signing Rodrigo.\n\nHowever, after an even first half, they were completely outplayed in the second period by a Crawley side who have reached the fourth round for only the third time, having spent most of their 125-year existence in non-league football.\n\nCrawley even had the luxury of bringing on reality TV celebrity Mark Wright in stoppage time for the former The Only Way Is Essex star's debut, having signed for the club on non-contract terms in December.\n\nLeeds' loss is the first time in 34 years a top-flight side has lost to a fourth-tier team by three or more goals and only the second ever instance since a fourth division was added to the Football League in 1958.\n\nThey may be the lesser-known of the two Red Devils but Crawley's efforts were no less impressive than Manchester United's 6-2 dissection of Leeds last month.\n\nWhile Bielsa rested first-choice stars such as Patrick Bamford, Luke Ayling, Stuart Dallas and Mateusz Klich, there was still plenty of experience mixed in with the youth in Leeds' line-up.\n\nBut the hosts, sixth in League Two after an eight-game unbeaten run, never gave them the chance to settle and while neither side could break the deadlock before the interval, it was Crawley who went closest as Casilla kept out Tom Nichols' close-range header.\n\nHe was helpless, however, to prevent Tsaroulla - a former Tottenham trainee who spent a year out of the game because of injuries sustained in a car crash - firing Crawley ahead after a twisting run into the area that beguiled the Leeds back-line.\n\nRather than protect their lead, Crawley went for the jugular and Nadesan soon doubled their advantage, although his strike owed much to a bobble that beat Casilla at his near post.\n\nTunnicliffe then fired into the roof of the net after Casilla parried from Nadesan and Crawley could have had a fourth after top scorer Max Watters came off the bench to round the keeper, only to be denied by a covering defender.\n\nThe win marked the first time in four attempts that Crawley have beaten a Premier League side in the FA Cup and so comfortable was the victory that TV personality Wright was given his late cameo.\n\nAnother name added to Leeds' list of cup woes\n\nBielsa was left to mull over back-to-back 3-0 defeats, albeit this one coming in a much different context to Leeds' Premier League loss at Tottenham on 2 January.\n\nThis was the former Argentina manager's first taste of an FA Cup shock, after far more mundane exits against Arsenal and QPR in Bielsa's two previous campaigns since taking the Elland Road reins in 2018.\n\nBut it was not unfamiliar ground for Leeds as Crawley - who have finished in the bottom half of League Two for five successive seasons - emulated non-league pair Histon and Sutton United, as well as lower-league clubs Rochdale and Newport, in upsetting the Whites this century.\n\nThe visitors only forced one real save from Crawley keeper Glenn Morris, who reacted well to push away Ian Poveda's strike from an acute angle in the first half.\n\nLeeds might point to a penalty they perhaps should have had before the interval when Crawley defender Tony Craig got away with pulling back Rodrigo as he attempted to meet Helder Costa's volleyed cross.\n\nBut there was no video assistant referee system at the game, and they offered very little going forward after Rodrigo was substituted at half-time.\n\nIt was a fourth successive third-round exit in a competition they could have looked to with some hope, given their relatively comfortable position in the Premier League.\n\n\"We've got 11 star men\" - what they said\n\nCrawley manager Yems to BBC Sport: \"You have to enjoy these games - you work hard enough for it. It was a really good team performance and it's clear that we've got 11 star men.\n\n\"These players have got a lot to prove to the clubs who have released them and we've showed what we can do against a really good side.\n\n\"Let's see who we get in the next round and enjoy the moment.\"\n\nLeeds midfielder Alioski to BBC Radio 5 Live: \"We are really disappointed and it wasn't the result that we wanted. We took the game really seriously and we wanted to win and go on a run, so it is disappointing.\n\n\"Crawley played the game of their lives, and congratulations. To beat us 3-0 - I still can't believe it.\n\n\"The manager said what he wanted to say. It's important for every player to know what this means. He is sad and the players are sad.\"\n• None Attempt blocked. Sam Greenwood (Leeds United) left footed shot from outside the box is blocked.\n• None Attempt missed. Raphinha (Leeds United) left footed shot from outside the box is high and wide to the left. Assisted by Pablo Hernández.\n• None Jake Hessenthaler (Crawley Town) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt saved. Hélder Costa (Leeds United) header from the centre of the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Pablo Hernández.\n• None Jamie Shackleton (Leeds United) wins a free kick on the right wing.\n• None Attempt blocked. Max Watters (Crawley Town) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Tom Nichols. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None All the goals and highlights from a huge Saturday of third-round matches are", "Mike Pompeo said the US-Taiwan relationship should not be \"shackled\" (file photo)\n\nThe US is lifting long-standing restrictions on contacts between American and Taiwanese officials, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says.\n\nThe \"self-imposed restrictions\" were introduced decades ago to \"appease\" the mainland Chinese government, which lays claim to the island, the US state department said in a statement.\n\nThese rules are now \"null and void\".\n\nThe move is likely to anger China and increase tensions between Washington and Beijing.\n\nIt comes as the Trump administration enters its final days ahead of the inauguration of Joe Biden as president on 20 January.\n\nThe Biden transition team have said the president-elect is committed to maintaining the long-standing US policy towards Taiwan.\n\nAnalysts say they will be unhappy with such a policy decision being made in the final days of the Trump administration, but that the move could be reversed easily by Mr Pompeo's successor Antony Blinken.\n\nChina regards Taiwan as a breakaway province, but Taiwan's leaders argue that it is a sovereign state.\n\nRelations between the two are frayed and there is a constant threat of a violent flare up that could drag in the US, an ally of Taiwan.\n\nIn a statement on Saturday, Mr Pompeo said the US state department had introduced complicated restrictions limiting the communication between American diplomats and their Taiwanese counterparts.\n\n\"Today I am announcing that I am lifting all of these self-imposed restrictions,\" he said. \"Today's statement recognises that the US-Taiwan relationship need not, and should not, be shackled by self-imposed restrictions of our permanent bureaucracy.\"\n\nHe added that Taiwan was a vibrant democracy and a reliable US partner, and that the restrictions were no longer valid.\n\nFollowing the announcement, Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wu thanked Mr Pompeo, saying he was \"grateful\".\n\n\"The closer partnership between Taiwan and the US is firmly based on our shared values, common interests and unshakeable belief in freedom and democracy,\" he wrote in a tweet.\n\nLast August, US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar became the highest-ranking US politician to hold meetings on the island for decades.\n\nIn response, China urged the US to respect what it calls its \"one China\" principle.\n\nThe US also sells arms to Taiwan, though it does not have a formal defence treaty with the country, as it does with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nChina and Taiwan have had separate governments since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.\n\nBeijing has long tried to limit Taiwan's international activities and both have vied for influence in the Pacific region.\n\nTensions have increased in recent years and Beijing has not ruled out the use of force to take the island back.\n\nAlthough Taiwan is officially recognised by only a handful of nations, its democratically-elected government has strong commercial and informal links with many countries.", "Lockdowns have worked before, but can we expect the new one to do the same?\n\nIt feels like we are back in March or April last year, when the strict controls on all our lives led to a fairly quick decline in levels of coronavirus.\n\nBut one of the crucial differences this time is the new variant, which is thought to spread between 50 and 70% faster than previous forms of the virus.\n\nExperts warn there are now no guarantees that lockdown will be enough to bring the variant under control.\n\n\"It still would not have been easy, but it would have been a much easier situation if it had not been for the new variant,\" Prof Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, told Inside Health.\n\n\"That really pushes the bounds of our ability to control the spread of the virus, even with measures that were previously relatively quite effective.\"\n\nThe coronavirus spreads when we come into contact with each other so moving classrooms online, telling people to stay at home and closing shops breaks many of those opportunities for human contact.\n\nIf we consider the R number - the average number of people each infected person passes the virus on to - it was about 3.0 in the run up to the first lockdown and anything above 1.0 means cases are climbing.\n\nR fell to 0.6 during the first lockdown.\n\nThen every 1,000 infected people passed the virus on to 600 others, who passed it on to 360 others and so on.\n\nBut if the new variant is 50% more transmissible then the R number, in the same lockdown conditions, would be about 0.9.\n\nThen 1,000 infected people would pass the virus onto 900 others, then 810 and so on.\n\nAs you can see this leads to far slower decline.\n\nAnd that assumes lockdown can get R down to 0.9 in areas where the new variant has become the most common form of the virus.\n\nIf, as some studies suggest, the variant is about 70% more transmissible then R may stay above 1.0 and cases may not fall at all.\n\n\"We'd at best flatten the curve, keep numbers at a roughly constant level, and that's frankly why there is so much emphasis on getting vaccine into people's arms as quickly as possible,\" said Prof Ferguson.\n\nIt is hard to lock down even harder as there are some parts of society - hospitals, supermarkets - that need to be kept open.\n\nWhat happens to the number of cases over the coming weeks will be closely monitored. If this lockdown is less effective then we will have to live with it for longer.\n\nThere have been some encouraging signs over the Christmas break, which was a bit like a lockdown due to school holidays and other restrictions.\n\n\"We are in a very difficult situation here, but my initial assessment of the last few days is that the rate is slowing which is good news,\" Prof John Edmunds, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the BBC.\n\nHe added: \"It looks likes those restrictions should be sufficient to stop the increase, whether they will be sufficient to bring cases down sufficiently we are yet to see.\"\n\nEventually the vaccine will give people immunity so we do not need the same controls on our lives.\n\nNow more than ever this is a race between the virus and the vaccine.", "Dozens of demonstrators were walking and chanting along Clapham High Street as police attempted to keep them contained to the area\n\nSixteen people have been arrested during an anti-lockdown protest in south London.\n\nPolice officers clashed with some of the maskless protesters who arrived in Clapham Common, some shouting \"take your freedom back\".\n\nSix police vans were deployed to the scene while officers moved the crowd of about 30 people away from the area.\n\nGathering for the purpose of a protest is not an exemption to the rules, the Met Police said.\n\nOne woman shouted from her car at the protesters \"there's a pandemic going\", while another bystander shouted \"idiots\".\n\nOne anti-lockdown protester, who was detained at Clapham Common park, said \"I stand under common law, not maritime law and this is assault\" as he was put into handcuffs by police officers.\n\nA large police presence remains around Clapham Common station, but almost all protesters had left the area as of 14:00 GMT.\n\nIt comes as a \"major incident\" was declared as the spread of Covid-19 threatens to \"overwhelm\" London hospitals.\n\nCity Hall said Covid-19 cases in the capital had exceeded 1,000 per 100,000, while there were 35% more people in hospital with the virus than in the peak of the pandemic in April.\n\nPolice could be seen questioning several people at the demonstration\n\nPolice battled to disperse the protestors gathering in Clapham Common\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Ben Jackson said the closure of the farm's bulk-buyers like hotels and schools has left thousands of eggs unsold\n\nA fall in bulk egg orders due to the lockdown could lead to chickens being culled, a poultry-farmer has warned.\n\nFluffetts Farm near Fordingbridge had been supplying free range eggs to 350 Hampshire schools, but orders stopped when schools suddenly closed.\n\nFarm owner, Ben Jackson said: \"If you can't sell the eggs you can't still keep feeding the chickens and therefore something has to give.\"\n\nHe said he hoped to work out a local delivery system to avoid culling birds.\n\nMr Jackson, who has been selling some of the surplus eggs off on social media, has more than 13,000 chickens laying 12,000 eggs each day.\n\nThe cancellation of his school orders has left him with about 4,000 spare eggs a day. The farm has also been hit by restaurants and pubs closing again.\n\nThe farm has a surplus of about 4,000 eggs each day from its 13,000 chickens\n\nHe said: \"If we can't find a home for the eggs the worst-case scenario is that we may have to look to get rid of some of our chickens, but that's what we're trying to avoid.\n\n\"Other chicken farmers are in the same situation - they are talking about potentially having to cull birds in the next week or so - it's not a decision that anyone wants to make.\n\n\"We just want to get through this dark time - we're just taking it a day at time.\"\n\nChickens at the farm are currently in a bird lockdown.\n\nSince 14 December strict biosecurity regulations have been in place following a number of outbreak of avian influenza throughout England.\n• None 'I'll have to throw away £6,000-worth of milk'", "Flat owners applying to a fund to help pay to remove flammable building cladding will be told not to talk to the press without government approval.\n\nA draft agreement, uncovered by the Sunday Times, says that even where there is \"overwhelming public interest\" in speaking to journalists, the government must be told first.\n\nThe government said the wording was \"standard\".\n\nIt set up a £1.6bn fund last year to repair the most dangerous buildings.\n\nBut it warned that the fund might not cover all the costs of removing the cladding.\n\nThe clause might affect building owners and professional managing agents but also residents who manage their building.\n\nSome types of the covering, often added to newer blocks of flats, have been proven to be a fire hazard.\n\nAfter the 2017 Grenfell fire, the government pledged that safe alternatives to dangerous cladding would be provided on all buildings in England taller than 18m.\n\nIt set up the £1.6bn fund to help foot the costs.\n\nThe agreement, between the building owner or leaseholder and the government, says: \"The Applicant shall not make any communication to the press or any journalist or broadcaster regarding the Project or the Agreement (or the performance of it by any Party) without the prior written approval of Homes England and [the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government ]\" and its press offices.\n\nIt says an exception can be made \"where such disclosure is in the overwhelming public interest (in which case disclosure will not be made without first allowing Homes England and MHCLG to make representations on such proposed disclosure).\"\n\nThe UK Cladding Action Group tweeted that it was \"clearly a matter of public interest\" that these issues were aired in public.\n\n\"No department should be hiding behind non-disclosure agreements to stop scrutiny of their actions,\" the group said.\n\nAnother campaign group, Manchester Cladiators, said the existence of the \"gagging clause\" was \"shocking but not necessarily that surprising\".\n\nSpokesperson Rebecca Fairclough said residents would feel \"intimidated\" by it, adding: \"We ask the government to remove this unfair clause immediately and focus on the priority of solving this institutional failure, which still exists and is only growing over three and a half years after the Grenfell tragedy.\"\n\nThe government insists that the wording in the agreement, under the heading \"Marketing material\", is there to ensure applicants come to the government first.\n\n\"The terms set out are standard in commercial agreements and are not specific to this fund - to suggest otherwise is misleading and inaccurate,\" the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) said in a statement.\n\n\"We want a constructive working relationship with building owners who apply to the fund and applicants are asked to work with the department on public communications relating to the project.\"", "Edwin Poots said he has asked senior UK government figures to consider unilaterally revoking the NI Protocol\n\nThe Stormont minister whose officials are responsible for the new Irish Sea border has said some food will be unavailable if changes are not made.\n\nDUP Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots has also said jobs could be at risk.\n\nHe said problems at the ports were being caused by new rules applied on imports of food and other products from Britain to Northern Ireland.\n\nEarlier Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove said trade from GB to NI \"will get worse before it gets better\".\n\nMr Gove said that \"work is ongoing\" and it is \"all part of the process of leaving the European Union\".\n\nHe added that he had spoken to ministers from all parties in the Northern Ireland Executive.\n\nAfter speaking with hauliers, supermarkets and processors this week, Mr Poots predicted the loss of jobs and rising costs.\n\n\"A wide range of frozen and chilled foods will be unavailable after the temporary exemption period ends,\" he tweeted.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Edwin Poots MLA This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThat exemption period applies to supermarkets and other food importers and runs out in April.\n\nAfter that they will have to comply with all the paperwork required to ship food in, or find suppliers on the island of Ireland or elsewhere in the EU.\n\nNew rules - called the Northern Ireland Protocol - were introduced because while the UK has left the EU, Northern Ireland has remained in the Single Market for goods and is continuing to apply EU customs rules.\n\nThe arrangement was agreed between the UK and the EU to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland.\n\nMr Poots said he had spoken to senior UK government figures to ask them to consider unilaterally revoking the protocol as it was \"damaging Northern Ireland at the economic and societal level\".\n\nAnd he hit out at members of Sinn Fein, the SDLP, and Alliance Party who he claimed had supported it.\n\nMembers of those parties have countered similar claims from other DUP politicians in recent days.\n\nThey said DUP MPs had voted against alternative arrangements that would have been simpler to manage before the government pushed ahead with the protocol plan.\n\nResponding to Mr Poot's tweet on Friday evening, SDLP leader Colum Eastwood wrote: \"You broke it, you own it.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Colum Eastwood This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSinn Féin MLA Martina Anderson accused Mr Poots of being \"asleep at the wheel\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Martina Anderson MLA This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) has called for the assembly to be recalled to discuss difficulties over trading between Great Britain and Northern Ireland due to Brexit.\n\nUUP MLA Roy Beggs said: \"The impact of the Irish Sea border is causing horrendous difficulties for hauliers and this is being seen in shops and businesses across Northern Ireland.\n\n\"It is damaging the Northern Ireland economy and the situation is escalating.\"\n\nEarlier on Friday, Michael Gove said it had been expected that there would be \"some initial disruption\" to trade between GB and NI, but that the government is \"ironing\" issues out.\n\nHe said discussions with the executive in Northern Ireland were \"in order to make sure that the [Northern Ireland] protocol works\".\n\n\"[To make sure] that businesses in Northern Ireland can continue to have access to the rest of the UK market, and that Northern Ireland businesses can have the goods that they need on the shelves, that they have access to at the moment,\" he said.\n\nNorthern Ireland has remained a part of the EU's single market for goods while the rest of the UK has left.\n\nThis means food products from Great Britain are subject to checks when they enter Northern Ireland.\n\nSimilar processes and checks also apply when moving food products from Great Britain into the Republic of Ireland.\n\nMeanwhile, an organisation representing haulage firms has called on the UK and Irish government to relax some of the new Irish Sea trade border rules.\n\nThe Road Haulage Association (RHA) said there is serious disruption to freight movements into the island of Ireland.\n\nThe RHA said relaxing the controls on food products and customs declarations \"would help traders to ship goods that have struggled to move over recent days.\"\n\n\"The problems have led to gaps in supermarket shelves and lorries delayed at ports because of problems with red-tape and the situation is worsening,\" the organisation added.\n\n\"We are facing an inflexible, cumbersome and time consuming process just to move goods.\"\n\nThe UK government said the flow of goods \"between GB and NI has been smooth overall and arrivals of freight have continued to increase substantially over this week\".\n\n\"There are no significant queues at NI ports and supermarkets are reporting healthy supplies into their Northern Ireland stores,\" a spokesperson added.\n\n\"We recognise the need to provide as much support to the haulage sector as possible as industry adapts to new processes. That's why hauliers can benefit from the Trader Support Service, which provides free advice and support to businesses of all sizes moving goods under the Northern Ireland Protocol.\n\n\"We have been engaging intensively with the Irish authorities and hauliers on the issues that have been encountered for goods transiting through Dublin port.\"\n\nOn Thursday customs authorities in the Republic of Ireland announced a temporary relaxation of one customs process.\n\nHauliers will be able to use an override code to complete a piece of administration known as ENS.\n\nThe letters ENS refer to an entry summary declaration, an online form which goods carriers are now legally obliged to submit to Irish customs when transporting goods from Great Britain into Ireland.\n\nLorries arriving in Ireland from Great Britain have faced new checks since 1 January\n\nOn Thursday night the Irish Revenue Commissioners said it recognised that \"some businesses are experiencing difficulties on lodging their safety and security ENS declarations\".\n\nIt said that in response it was providing a \"temporary easement\" which would allow an ENS to be produced without all the normally required information.\n\nAn Irish government spokesperson said it is \"absolutely essential that Ireland fulfils its obligations as a member of the EU and that we protect the integrity of the single market and the customs union\".\n\n\"We appreciate that the new requirements and customs formalities present significant challenges and impose additional burdens on businesses.\"\n\nMeanwhile Stena, the ferry company, said it was cancelling a dozen sailings between Wales and Ireland next week due to \"a decline in freight volumes during the first week of Brexit.\"", "Last updated on .From the section FA Cup\n\nScott McTominay's fourth-minute header was enough to give Manchester United an unconvincing victory in their FA Cup third-round tie against Watford on Saturday.\n\nWearing the captain's armband for the first time in a much-changed side from Wednesday's Carabao Cup semi-final defeat by Manchester City, McTominay found the net after rising to meet Alex Telles' corner.\n\nThe hosts did have chances to increase their lead, but Juan Mata failed to find a finish to an excellent three-man move just before half-time, then Daniel James and substitute Marcus Rashford had shots saved after the break.\n\nBut none of those opportunities were better than that for Hornets defender Adam Masina, who saw his effort blocked by United keeper Dean Henderson not long after McTominay had struck.\n• None Watch all the goals from the FA Cup third round\n• None How all of Saturday's FA Cup action unfolded\n• None How to follow FA Cup third round on the BBC\n\nNow under their fifth manager in two years, Xisco Munoz, Watford had other chances too - Joao Pedro's header went straight to Henderson and Ken Sema was off target with his.\n\nMason Greenwood and Donny van de Beek did little to press their claims for a regular starting slot in manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's side, while Jesse Lingard - making only his third appearance of the season and the subject of interest from a number of clubs in the January transfer window - showed glimpses of form but eventually faded.\n\nUnited will go into the hat for Monday's fourth and fifth-round draws, while Watford are left to focus on winning promotion back to the Premier League at the first attempt.\n\nGiven the increasing awareness of the effects of concussion, the decision of United's medical staff to take no risks with defender Eric Bailly when he was caught in the head by Henderson's knee as the keeper punched clear was a welcome one.\n\nThe Football Association had hoped to introduce concussion substitutes by now but it has not yet been able to as detailed protocols are yet to be received from Ifab, the world game's rulemakers.\n\nAs Bailly was guided towards the tunnel in the last minute of the first half, Harry Maguire replaced him and helped United keep the clean sheet which ensured they reached the fourth round for the 34th time in their past 36 attempts.\n\nAfterwards, United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer said: \"I think it was his neck. I don't think it was concussion so that is a positive. But we have got to do scans.\"\n\n'I wanted to test McTominay and he delivered' - post-match quotes\n\nManchester United manager Solskjaer said: \"Scott has got everything a leader has to have. I wanted to test him by making him captain and see how he would react.\n\n\"He delivered and he always does. He was brilliant today.\n\n\"We have always trusted our young men coming through and Scott is one who we believe has the Manchester United DNA in him and knows what it is to be a Manchester United player.\"\n\nMcTominay on captaining the side: \"When the manager told me it was a surreal moment. I've been here since I had just turned five, so that's 18 or 19 years associated with the club and it is a huge honour.\n\n\"I love this club and it has been my whole life.\"\n\nUnited turn their attentions to a big week in the Premier League. Solskjaer's side travel to Burnley on Tuesday (20:15 GMT) knowing victory will send them top of the table above Liverpool - who they then play at Anfield on Sunday (16:30 GMT).\n\nWatford's miserable run at Old Trafford continues - stats of the day\n• None The last time Manchester United failed to progress in the FA Cup third round was January 2014, when they lost 2-1 to Swansea.\n• None Watford have lost on 10 consecutive visits to Old Trafford, scoring just three goals.\n• None United have progressed from each of their past 17 FA Cup matches against opposition from a lower division, since a 1-0 home defeat by League One side Leeds United in January 2010.\n• None McTominay has scored four goals in 22 matches this season, one short of his best tally in a campaign (five goals in 37 appearances in 2019-20). Three of those goals have been scored in the first five minutes of games.\n• None Watford attempted 18 shots in the match - only in their 2-0 loss at Huddersfield (21) have they had more shots on the road this season.\n• None Attempt blocked. Marc Navarro (Watford) right footed shot from outside the box is blocked.\n• None Will Hughes (Watford) wins a free kick in the attacking half.\n• None Attempt missed. Juan Mata (Manchester United) left footed shot from outside the box is high and wide to the right from a direct free kick.\n• None Joseph Hungbo (Watford) wins a free kick on the right wing.\n• None Joseph Hungbo (Watford) wins a free kick on the right wing.\n• None Attempt blocked. Joseph Hungbo (Watford) left footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by João Pedro. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Calculate the impact and how to change it\n• None Sir David Attenborough shows us the forces of nature that support the Earth", "A 107-year-old woman from Clonard, County Meath is attempting a virtual Mass tour across Ireland while in lockdown.\n\nNancy Stewart and granddaughter, Louise Coghlan, have been shielding together since March last year, and have set themselves the spiritual challenge.\n\nThey are attending Mass services across the 32 counties on the island from the comfort of their own kitchen.\n\nLouise said that because they have been shielding for so long together, she is constantly trying to find \"different ways of keeping granny entertained\".\n\nShe said that when she asks Nancy if she wants to watch Mass her \"eyes light up like I'd just given her a million euros\".\n\nNancy, whose favourite saint is St Anthony, said she can hardly believe she is able to watch Mass on a computer or a phone from her comfy armchair.\n\n\"I feel so happy and so refreshed sitting happily in my own kitchen, in my armchair looking at Mass,\" she told BBC News NI.\n\n\"I can't believe it, I'm trying to believe it's true.\"", "The number of patients in intensive care with Covid has risen sharply, amid warnings that tougher lockdown measures may be needed.\n\nLatest Scottish government figures show 1,877 new cases of Covid were reported in the last 24 hours\n\nThe number of people in intensive care has risen from 109 to 123, the highest daily jump since October.\n\nDeputy First Minister John Swinney said a tightening of restrictions could not be ruled out.\n\nA total of 1,598 people are currently in hospital with recently-confirmed Covid, up from Saturday's figure of 1,596 patients which was the highest number since the outbreak began.\n\nThe daily test positivity rate was10%, up from 8.7% on Saturday, when 1,865 positive cases were recorded.\n\nThe deputy first minister said the country was facing \"a very alarming situation\" with the virus.\n\nSpeaking on Politics Scotland, Mr Swinney said coronavirus does not show much sign of \"abating\" and he would not rule out tougher lockdown measures.\n\nHe said: \"We're seeing case numbers which are hovering around 2,000 per day... so we've got an accelerating situation on our hands and we have to constantly review whether more restrictions are required.\"\n\nThere have been some encouraging signs in recent days with average positivity rates falling, a possible indicator that the lockdown is having an impact, but Prof Linda Bauld, of Edinburgh University, urged caution.\n\nShe said: \"The numbers are not reducing at the rate which we want them to, so [it is] still a very fragile situation.\n\n\"The measures we have now I hope are working but it's not clear whether they are tough enough.\n\n\"I think the key change the government could make is in the sectors which are still open, particularly workplaces but also things like takeaways and click and collect.\"\n\nMr Swinney said the Scottish government is \"open to considering further restrictions if they are necessary\"\n\nProfessional sport, along with manufacturing and construction work have been allowed to continue in this lockdown, whereas they were not in the first wave in March.\n\nThe deputy first minister said the meeting of the cabinet which agreed the latest lockdown saw ministers wondering if they had gone far enough to stop the spread.\n\nMr Swinney added: \"I don't think I'm revealing a state secret when I say that the debate within cabinet was not whether we were going too far but whether we were going far enough.\"\n\nA total of three deaths were recorded in the past 24 hours but these figures are lower at weekends because register offices are generally closed.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Madrid has been hit by heavy snowfall after Storm Filomena\n\nStorm Filomena has blanketed parts of Spain in heavy snow, with half of the country on red alert for more on Saturday.\n\nRoad, rail and air travel has been disrupted and interior minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said the country was facing \"the most intense storm in the last 50 years\".\n\nMadrid, one of the worst affected areas, is set to see up to 20cm (eight inches) of snow in the next 24 hours.\n\nFurther south the storm caused rivers to burst their banks.\n\nFour deaths have been reported so far as a result of Filomena. Officials said two people had been found frozen to death - one in the town of Zarzalejo, north-west of Madrid, and the other in the eastern city of Calatayud. Two people travelling in a car were swept away by floods near the southern city of Malaga.\n\nAs snow fell on Madrid on Friday evening, a number of vehicles became stranded on a motorway near the capital.\n\nThe city's Barajas airport has closed, along with a number of roads, and all trains to and from Madrid have been cancelled.\n\nFirefighters were called in to assist drivers who had become stuck. In some areas the military were called in to help clear roads.\n\nSpanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez urged people to stay at home and to follow the instructions of emergency services. King Felipe and Queen Letizia took to Twitter to urge \"extreme caution against the risks of accumulation of ice and snow\".\n\nThe country's AEMET weather agency said the snowfall was \"exceptional and most likely historic\".\n\nA number of people were seen making the most of the snowy scenery, walking through Madrid's Puerta del Sol square.\n\nLarge parks in Madrid have since been closed as a precaution, AFP news agency reports.\n\nOne man was pictured skiing along the Gran Via, the capital's famous shopping street.\n\nIn Cañada Real, the largest shanty town in western Europe, residents were seen creating a bonfire to keep warm.\n\nThe cold weather is set to continue beyond the weekend with temperatures in Madrid predicted to hit -12C on Thursday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "Wales has received 275,000 doses of the two Covid-19 vaccines to deal with the pandemic.\n\nAbout 70,000 people received a first dose after the first month of the vaccine rollout.\n\nThe Welsh Government confirmed it has had more than 250,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and 25,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab.\n\nThe health minister promised a \"really significant step-up\" in the roll-out after opponents criticised its speed.\n\nThe Pfizer jabs were first administered in early December at seven sites across Wales as part of the UK-wide immunisation programme.\n\nThis 82-year-old woman was one of 100 to receives her vaccine at a special clinic in Swansea on Saturday\n\nApproximately 1.6% of people were vaccinated up to 3 January - fewer than all other UK nations.\n\nIn England, about 1.9% of the population had received the first dose, while 2.1% of people in both Scotland and Northern Ireland had received their first jab.\n\nThe Welsh Government has dismissed criticism it is lagging behind, with health officials saying the new Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine would help speed up the programme \"considerably\".\n\nTwo full doses of the Oxford vaccine gave 62% protection, a half dose followed by a full dose was 90% and overall the trial showed 70% protection.\n\nThe rollout of the Oxford vaccine started on Monday, with 25,000 doses received this week, according to the Welsh Government.\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford said on Friday that Wales would receive another 25,000 Oxford doses next week and 80,000 the week after that.\n\nWhen asked how many doses of the Pfizer vaccine Wales had received, he said he could not recall the exact figure but further deliveries had been received \"on the 23rd and the 27th of December\".\n\nPressed on a figure, he said: \"It's the low hundreds of thousands\", adding: \"The Pfizer vaccine has particular challenges in terms of the conditions that it's got to be stored in and in parts of Wales that is a very particular challenge because it is a hard vaccine to transport over long distances to relatively scattered and remote communities.\n\n\"But the fact that we've got it and the fact that we're able to use more of it than we originally anticipated means we'll be able to accelerate the use of it over the next couple of weeks.\"\n\nThese were the latest comparative weekly totals - daily updates are promised from this week onwards in Wales\n\nOn Sunday, the Welsh Government confirmed it had received 25,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in the first week but the quantity would increase, allocated to Wales based on a population share on a weekly basis.\n\n\"We are confident in the assurances we have been given that this will increase over the next few weeks to around 100,000 per week,\" they said.\n\n\"We are delivering all the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine allocated to Wales directly to GPs, other primary care providers and hospitals as soon as it is available.\"\n\nConservative MP for the Vale of Clwyd, Dr James Davies, said: \"We all know that the Pfizer vaccine is difficult to transport and store and needs to be stored at -70 degrees, that's understood.\n\n\"But the issue is that actually, if you look at the rest of the UK, including very rural areas, they've managed to deal with it... and it is difficult to see why they haven't been in a position to be organised earlier and to ramp-up the delivery.\"\n\nRhun ap Iorwerth, Plaid Cymru's health spokesman, called for transparency: \"It is very worrying to find out that we have had in Wales more than 250,000 doses but only a relatively small proportion of that have yet ended up in people's arms, protecting people, because that's what we want to happen.\"\n\nHe has written an open letter to Health Minister Vaughan Gething calling for greater clarity on the vaccine deployment programme, asking for a dashboard of information which would allow the public to track the rollout's progress for themselves, including volume of doses delivered and administered by health board and by the nine priority groups.\n\nDr Olwen Williams, vice-president for Wales at the Royal College of Physicians, also called on health boards and Welsh Government to publish regular data showing which groups of people have been vaccinated, with patient-facing health workers prioritised over other colleagues.\n\n\"I think that would give assurance to people working in the NHS and the population in general, that the programme is progressing as planned,\" she said.\n\nAll data will be published daily from Monday but Mr Gething conceded that Wales, from last week's figures, was \"slightly behind on the population share and I'm not getting away from that.\"\n\nHe said the race was not \"necessarily against other UK nations\" but against the virus.\n\nHe also told BBC Radio Wales' Sunday Supplement that, in the next two to three weeks, he expected to see a \"really significant step-up in the delivery of the vaccine\" as more GP practices and community pharmacies help.\n\n\"We're going to get through many more people, giving them significant protection with a first vaccine,\" he said.\n\n\"And that will mean that we're going to be able to prevent most of the avoidable deaths.\"\n\nIt is hoped the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will speed up the process.\n\nBy the end of last week, it was being offered to patients aged over 80 at 73 GP practices.\n\nMore than 100 are expected to be offering the jabs next week, Mr Gething said, \"and then we get into several hundred thereafter and we'll bring community pharmacies on board.\"\n\nThe UK and Scottish governments did not provide the numbers of Pfizer vaccines supplied to England and Scotland. BBC Wales is still waiting for a response from the Northern Irish Executive.\n\nMeanwhile, regular rapid testing for people without coronavirus symptoms will be made available in England.\n\nThe Welsh Government said it would evaluate its mass testing pilots in Merthyr Tydfil and lower Cynon Valley, as well as elsewhere in the UK, to inform its approach to community testing.\n\nA spokesman added: \"We have announced regular asymptomatic testing of health and social care workers, in education and daily contact testing in South Wales Police.\n\n\"A pilot has also started at the Tata Port Talbot site. We are also exploring other opportunities for regular testing to support critical services.\"", "Amazon is removing \"free speech\" social network Parler from its web hosting service for violating rules.\n\nIf Parler fails to find a new web hosting service by Sunday evening, the entire network will go offline.\n\nParler styles itself as an \"unbiased\" social media and has proved popular with people banned from Twitter.\n\nAmazon told Parler it had found 98 posts on the site that encouraged violence. Apple and Google have removed the app from their stores.\n\nLaunched in 2018, Parler has proved particularly popular among supporters of US President Donald Trump and right-wing conservatives. Such groups have frequently accused Twitter and Facebook of unfairly censoring their views.\n\nWhile Mr Trump himself is not a user, the platform already features several high-profile contributors following earlier bursts of growth in 2020.\n\nTexas Senator Ted Cruz boasts 4.9 million followers on the platform, while Fox News host Sean Hannity has about seven million.\n\nThe move comes after Apple suspended Parler from its app store. The suspension will remain in place for as long as the network continued to spread posts that incite violence, it said.\n\nGoogle removed the app from its store on Friday.\n\nResponding to Google's move earlier, Parler's chief executive John Matze said: \"We won't cave to politically motivated companies and those authoritarians who hate free speech!\"\n\nHe also warned that Parler could be offline for up to a week while \"we rebuild from scratch\".\n\nIt briefly became the most-downloaded app in the United States after the US election, following a clampdown on the spread of election misinformation by Twitter and Facebook.\n\nIn a letter obtained by CNN, Amazon's AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler's Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the social network \"does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service\".\n\n\"AWS provides technology and services to customers across the political spectrum, and we continue to respect Parler's right to determine for itself what content it will allow on its site\", the letter said.\n\n\"However we cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others.\".\n\nParler will be removed from Amazon's web hosting service shortly before midnight on Sunday Pacific Standard Time (07:59 GMT on Monday).\n\nOn Saturday, Apple removed Parler from its app store after warning the network to remove content that violated its rules or face a ban.\n\n\"Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people's safety\", it said in a statement announcing the app's suspension on Saturday evening.\n\nFor months, Parler has been one of the most popular social media platforms for right-wing users.\n\nAs major platforms began taking action against viral conspiracy theories, disinformation and the harassment of election workers and officials in the aftermath of the US presidential vote, the app became more popular with elements of the fringe far-right.\n\nThis turned the network into a right-wing echo chamber, almost entirely populated by users fixated on revealing examples of election fraud and posting messages in support of attempts to overturn the election outcome.\n\nIn the days preceding the Capitol riots, the tone of discussion on the app became significantly more violent, with some users openly discussing ways to stop the certification of Joe Biden's victory by Congress.\n\nUnsubstantiated allegations and defamatory claims against a number of senior US figures such as Chief Justice John Roberts and Vice-President Mike Pence were rife on the app.\n\nGoogle and Apple say they are taking necessary action to ensure violent rhetoric is not promoted on their platforms.\n\nHowever, to those increasingly concerned about freedom of speech and expression on online platforms, it represents another example of draconian action by major tech companies which threatens internet freedom.\n\nThis is a debate which is certain to continue beyond the Trump presidency.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Keir Starmer calls for families to be put \"at the heart of our recovery\" from the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has urged the government to \"protect family incomes\" as it deals with the economic effects of coronavirus.\n\nIn his first speech of the year, he demanded teachers, the armed forces and care workers are left out of the public sector pay freeze.\n\nSir Keir also called for tougher restrictions to be considered for tackling coronavirus.\n\nNo 10 said the government had \"shown it is prepared to act\".\n\nWith coronavirus restrictions and lockdowns shutting thousands of businesses, the economy was 7.9% smaller in October last year than it had been six months earlier.\n\nAnd the government's independent forecaster, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, predicts that unemployment will rise to 2.6 million by the middle of this year.\n\nIn his speech, Sir Keir attacked the government for \"having been found wanting at every turn\", accusing Boris Johnson of being \"indecisive\" and acting \"too slow\" over further lockdowns and support for business and families.\n\nHe said: \"The British people will forgive many things. They know the pandemic is difficult.\n\n\"But they also know serial incompetence when they see it - and they know when a prime minister simply isn't up to the job.\"\n\nBut the PM's official spokeswoman rejected the criticism, saying: \"This government has shown it is prepared to act. When given evidence in the morning it has taken action that evening.\"\n\nAsked by the BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg whether the government should tighten restrictions, such as closing nurseries, Sir Keir said there \"probably is more that we could do [and we] may have to get tougher\".\n\nBut he did not outline what measures he would recommend, instead saying it was \"time to hear from the scientists what else can be done - and that probably should be done in the next few hours\".\n\nThe Labour leader said ministers must \"protect family incomes and support businesses\" from the economic effects of previous restrictions and the current lockdown.\n\nHe added policies must \"make a real difference to millions of people across the country\" and \"put families at the heart of our recovery\".\n\nSir Keir argued the £20-a-week rise given to Universal Credit claimants last April must continue beyond this April's cut-off point.\n\nCouncil tax increases in England of up to 5% this April must not happen, he said, while calling for the ban on evictions and repossessions to be extended.\n\nThe government's pay freeze for at least 1.3 million public sector workers - which does not apply to NHS frontline staff and those earning below £24,000 a year - must not go ahead, said Sir Keir.\n\n\"I know this isn't everything that's needed,\" he added, \"and after so much suffering we can't go back the status quo.\n\n\"We cannot return to an economy where over half our care workers earn less than the living wage, where childcare is among the most expensive in Europe, where our social care system is a national disgrace and where over four million children grow up in poverty.\"\n\nAn opposition leader has no policy leavers to pull. They have to rely on words to persuade the public they are worthy of power.\n\nWith the next general election an eternity away, Sir Keir Starmer knows the question of competence matters far more to voters than ideology right now.\n\nThe Labour leader was unsparing in his criticism of the government's handling of the pandemic - accusing the prime minster of serial incompetence, dithering and delay.\n\nSir Keir said the government could reverse planned changes to council tax and universal credit to ease the financial pressure on families.\n\nBut pressed on how lockdown might be different today if he was in No 10, the Labour leader mirrored the government's messaging.\n\nHe said there was \"probably\" more that could be done around nurseries and estate agent viewings, but Sir Keir's mantra was listen to the scientists.\n\nIt's what ministers say endlessly too.\n\nSir Keir argued that, just as a Labour government \"built the welfare state from the rubble\" of World War Two, a future one can \"secure our economy, protect our NHS and rebuild our country so that Britain is the best country to grow up in and the best country to grow old in\".\n\nBut Conservative Party co-chairman Amanda Milling accused Sir Keir of \"calling for actions the Conservatives are already taking in government\".\n\n\"We have delivered an unprecedented £280bn package of support to protect jobs, livelihoods and public services through this pandemic,\" she added, including the furlough scheme, the temporary increase to Universal Credit and extra funding for councils.\n\n\"The Conservatives will continue to put families and communities at the heart of every decision we take as we deliver on our promises to the British people,\" Ms Milling said.\n\nIn his Spending Review in November, Chancellor Rishi Sunak warned that the \"economic emergency\" caused by the pandemic had only begun.\n\nHe promised to take \"extraordinary measures to protect people's jobs and incomes\".", "The Oxford vaccine rollout started in Wales earlier this week - those figures are not yet included\n\nMore than 14,000 people had their first dose of the Covid-19 jab in Wales in the past week, the latest figures show.\n\nIt takes the numbers on the priority list to have got the Pfizer-BioNTech jab to 49,403 since the rollout started on 8 December.\n\nBut Wales is lagging behind the rest of the UK so far, with a lower proportion of people getting a first dose.\n\nThe Welsh Government said that by next week, 60 GP practices and 20 centres would be vaccinating.\n\nHealth officials said the new Oxford vaccine would help speed up the programme \"considerably\".\n\nThe numbers do not include the first people to receive the new vaccine, which began to be given this week.\n\nPublic Health Wales (PHW) said the real numbers were likely to be higher, with the figures a snapshot based on those vaccines recorded electronically so far.\n\nThey give a breakdown by health board and also show how many people have been given their first dose.\n\nThe figures also include people, such as NHS staff, who work in Wales but live over the border, but do not yet give details of people in different priority categories.\n\nRhun ap Iorwerth, Plaid Cymru's health spokesman, said: \"We need real transparency on progress of the vaccination process.\n\n\"This must include clear targets and data on how many vaccines come to Wales, and how many are distributed and given out by each health board to each priority group - both the first and second doses - so we can measure this against the targets. This is how confidence can be built that Wales is on track.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government said: \"These are early days in our mass vaccination programme. Momentum will continue to build and the speed of our vaccination programme will increase each week.\n\n\"From Monday, the number of people vaccinated will be published daily and we will publish our vaccination rollout plan early next week.\"\n\nThe figure in Wales means approximately 1.6% of people have been vaccinated up to 3 January - fewer than other UK nations - and the gap appears to be growing compared to last week.\n\nIn England, nearly 1.1 million people were given the first dose by 3 January. This is about 1.9% of the population. NHS England said 60% of doses have gone to people aged over 80.\n\nIf vaccinations were being given at the same rate in Wales as in England, a further 13,000 people would have been given a dose.\n\nIn both Scotland and Northern Ireland, 2.1% of people have been given a first dose.\n\nHow many people have had a Covid-19 vaccine? Residents in Wales vaccinated by health board, to 3 January Source: Public Health Wales, 7 January. Excludes 224 unknown and 1,024 doses for priority groups living in England\n\nSamantha is keen to have the vaccine as soon as possible and return to work\n\nDental nurse Samantha Davies, 47, who has shielded since March, was overjoyed at the prospect of having the coronavirus vaccine and returning to work.\n\nBut she is now in limbo after confusion over whether she could have the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab because of her ongoing treatment for Crohn's Disease.\n\nAfter filling out a questionnaire sent by PHW, a consultant recommended she should have the Pfizer-BioNTech jab instead.\n\nThis is because of the inflectra infusion treatment she receives every eight weeks to treat her Crohn's Disease - a type of inflammatory bowel condition.\n\nHowever, the Pfizer vaccine is in shorter supply than the Oxford vaccine and the Swansea practice where Samantha works was only offered 10 vaccinations.\n\nAs Samantha, from Foelgastell, Carmarthenshire, is shielding and not in work, she was not considered a priority for one of these.\n\nSwansea Bay health board has since said the advice about vaccines was given in error and pledged to arrange an appointment for her as soon as possible.\n\n\"It's just being home all the time. Some people I know had it two or three weeks ago. The government put me shielding since March on sick pay and I just want to return to work,\" she said.\n\nWhile she was furloughed from April to August, Samantha has been on statutory sick pay since.\n\nDr Gillian Richardson, the senior officer responsible for the Covid-19 vaccine programme in Wales, said the efforts from NHS Wales and PHW had been \"exceptional\".\n\n\"The number of doses unable to be used have been incredibly low - around 1% - and significantly below anticipated levels, thanks to the robust appointment planning and reserve lists,\" she said.\n\n\"The NHS is providing vaccines as quickly and as safely as possible to people in the priority groups.\"\n\nDerek Hinchliffe, 80, says he is \"frustrated\" at not knowing when he will get his first dose of vaccine\n\nHowever, 80-year-old Derek Hinchliffe, who is eligible for a first dose of a Covid vaccine during this period of the rollout, said he was \"frustrated\" because he has had no information about getting the first dose.\n\nMr Hinchliffe, who lives with his wife in Penpedairheol in Caerphilly county, said: \"We've had nothing - no communication.\n\n\"We've got friends the same as us who live in England who have had their first dose, and some of them are having their second vaccination.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Stephen Crabb This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nConservative health spokesman Andrew RT Davies renewed his call for a vaccinations minister to be appointed to take control.\n\n\"Of course we welcome the increase in the number of vaccinations, but the rough calculation is that one in 65 people in Wales has had their jab compared to one in 50 in England,\" he said,\n\n\"Factor in the postcode lottery emerging in Wales, and the picture's not looking great.\n\n\"You're twice as likely in south Wales to have had the vaccination and three times more likely to have had it in mid Wales than in north Wales.\"\n\nDr Richardson called the second Covid vaccine - Oxford-AstraZeneca - which began its roll-out on Monday a \"real game-changer\".\n\nShe said it would help speed up vaccinations considerably.\n\nThere are challenges with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine because it has to be stored at extremely cold temperatures, while the Oxford vaccine can be be kept in a fridge.\n\nBoth vaccines will be available in Wales and the Welsh Government said 40,000 doses of the Oxford jab would be available within the first two weeks - with 22,000 jabs this week.\n\nTwo full doses of the Oxford vaccine gave 62% protection, a half dose followed by a full dose was 90% and overall the trial showed 70% protection.", "Bez in training for his new exercise classes in a park in Manchester\n\nHappy Mondays star Bez is to launch his own lockdown fitness classes to inspire the nation like Joe Wicks.\n\nThe former maraca-shaking dancer, 56, wants to rival Joe Wicks with his online YouTube classes \"Get Buzzin' With Bez\" to be launched on 17 January.\n\nBez, whose on-stage \"freaky dancing\" made him an icon of the 'Madchester' music scene, has admitted he also wants to budge his own lockdown bulge.\n\nHe won Celebrity Big Brother in 2005 and even made a bid to become an MP.\n\nBez, whose real name is Mark Berry, will be shown being trained in the fitness classes rather than acting as the instructor himself.\n\nHe said: \"I'd like to think I'm somewhere between Joe Wicks and Mr Motivator.\n\n\"I've started this new year seriously unfit, with a fat belly and creaky hips, and I can't stop eating chocolate.\n\n\"Last lockdown I got unfit, fat, lazy and into some seriously bad eating habits.\n\nBez being put through his paces with a personal trainer\n\n\"This year, this lockdown, I need to sort it out sharpish.\"\n\nHe said that people can join him on \"on this mad journey or just sit on the sofa and have a good laugh at me\".\n\nBez said he has \"started this new year seriously unfit, with a fat belly and creaky hips\"\n\nThe former dancer added: \"At the very least, I know I'll be making people smile, at best I'll be helping people get fit and mentally happier alongside me.\"\n\nThe Happy Mondays, along with bands like The Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets, spearheaded the indie music 'Madchester' scene of the late 80s and early 90s.\n\nBez dancing with his maraca on BBC One's Top of the Pops as the band perform Step On in 1989\n\nBez's bug-eyed dance routines were said to have inspired the group's song Freaky Dancin' and made him one of the best-known members of the group, alongside frontman Shaun Ryder.\n\nTheir hits included Step On, Kinky Afro, Hallelujah and 24 Hour Party People.\n\nHowever, serious drug habits and infighting led to the Salford band's breakup in 1993.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "An ambulance had to be lifted out of the mud\n\nRescuers searching for victims of a landslide in Indonesia were buried by a second mudslide just hours later, officials say.\n\nThe first landslide, in Cihanjuang village, West Java, was triggered by torrential rain.\n\nAnother struck as survivors were still being evacuated. At least 12 people died and dozens more are missing.\n\nLandslides are common in Indonesia during rainy season, and often blamed on deforestation.\n\nThe latest disasters hit the villagers in Sumedang regency, about 150km (95 miles) southeast of the capital Jakarta, three and a half hours apart on Saturday.\n\nThe first happened at 16:00 (09:00 GMT) and the second at 19:30 (12:30 GMT), disaster agency spokesman Raditya Jati said in a statement.\n\n\"The first landslide was triggered by high rainfall and unstable soil conditions. The subsequent landslide occurred while officers were still evacuating victims around the first landslide area,\" he added.\n\nRescuers are believed to be among those killed, he added. A six-year-old boy was also among the dead, according to AFP news agency.\n\nSome 27 people were believed to be missing late on Sunday, local media quoted Deden Ridwansah, the head of the local search and rescue agency as saying. About 46 were known to have survived.\n\nBad weather had forced the search to be suspended, he said, but it was expected to resume on Monday.\n\nIndonesia frequently suffers floods and landslides. Thousands of people had to be evacuated in the capital Jakarta this time last year as the city was inundated.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n• None The fastest-sinking city in the world", "More than 80,000 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test since the start of the pandemic, official figures have shown.\n\nA further 1,035 deaths in the UK were reported on Saturday, taking the total by that measure to 80,868.\n\nThe number of daily cases of people who tested positive for coronavirus increased by 59,937.\n\nOnly the US, Brazil, India and Mexico have recorded more Covid deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.\n\nIt is the fourth day in a row that the UK has reported more than 1,000 daily deaths.\n\nIt comes as scientists advising the government have warned that lockdown measures in England need to be stricter to achieve the same impact as the March shutdown.\n\nMinisters have launched a new campaign urging people to act like they have the virus.\n\nMeanwhile, Buckingham Palace has said the Queen, 94, and the Duke of Edinburgh, 99, received Covid-19 vaccinations on Saturday.\n\nThe Office for National Statistics recently estimated as many as one in 50 people in England had coronavirus between 27 December and 2 January, while in London it was one in 30.\n\nOn Friday, mayor Sadiq Khan said the spread of Covid in the capital was \"out of control\".\n\nOfficial figures from Public Health England showed London had the highest regional case rate in the UK, exceeding 1,000 per 100,000 people.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and can only go out for essential reasons. Similar measures are in place across most of Scotland, in Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nProf Robert West, a participant in the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B), which advises the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said the current rules were \"still allowing a lot of activity which is spreading the virus\".\n\nHe said the new variant of Covid was around 50% more infectious compared to the virus that infected people last March.\n\n\"That means that if we were to achieve the same result as we got in March we would have to have a stricter lockdown, and it (the current regime) is not stricter,\" he added.\n\nThe professor of health psychology at University College London also told the BBC more children were going to school, compared to during the first lockdown.\n\nHe said schools were \"a very important seed of community infection\".\n\nMore children are at school, after the Department for Education widened the categories of vulnerable and key worker pupils allowed to attend. Attendance rates have risen to 50% in some places.\n\nProf Susan Michie, who is also a member of Sage, said the spread of the new, more infectious variant meant current restrictions were \"too lax\".\n\n\"When you look at the data, it shows that almost 90% of people are overwhelmingly adhering to the rules - despite the fact that we're also seeing more people out and about,\" she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.\n\nShe said, in comparison to the first lockdown in spring 2020, more people were allowed to go out to work and children's nurseries were open, making public transport busier.\n\nThe number of people travelling by public transport in London has decreased since the latest national lockdown began, with tube journeys now at 18% of the pre-pandemic demand and bus journeys at 30%, according to figures from Transport for London.\n\nHowever, during the first lockdown passenger numbers fell below 10% at some points.\n\nScientists believe the new variant spreads between 50 and 70% faster compared to previous forms of the virus.\n\nProf Kevin Fenton, London regional director for Public Health England, said there were \"things we could do better\" to reduce the number of infections, including greater compliance with mask wearing and social distancing when shopping and using public transport.\n\nTorsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation think tank, told BBC Radio 4's PM programme that the UK's statutory sick pay system was \"not fit for purpose for a pandemic\" and more effective measures to encourage people to isolate were needed.\n\nAs cases and deaths soar, the government has launched an advertising campaign, which will be shared across television, radio, newspapers and on social media, urging people to stay at home and not to get complacent.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Department of Health and Social Care This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by Department of Health and Social Care\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said: \"I know the last year has taken its toll - but your compliance is now more vital than ever.\"\n\nGovernment sources say there is also likely to be more focus from police on enforcing rather than explaining rules.\n\nOn Saturday afternoon, 12 people were arrested during an anti-lockdown protest in south London.\n\nIf you would like to send us a tribute to a friend or family member who died after contracting coronavirus, please use the form below.\n\nPlease remember to include a photo of your loved one and their name. Upload your pictures here. Don't forget to include your contact details, so we can get in touch with you.\n\nWe would like to respond to everyone individually and include every tribute in our coverage, but unfortunately that may not be possible. Please be assured your message will be read and treated with the utmost respect.\n\nPlease note the contact details you provide will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your tribute.\n• None Lockdown needs to be stricter, scientists warn", "Kay and Kenneth Hayward said they felt the journey was too unsafe\n\nPeople waiting to receive the Covid-19 vaccine say they are confused by NHS letters inviting them to travel to centres miles away from their homes.\n\nThe first 130,000 letters have been sent to people aged 80 or older who live about 30 to 45 minutes' drive away from one of seven new regional centres.\n\nBut patients, many of whom are shielding, questioned why they had to travel so far in a pandemic.\n\nLocal jabs are available to people if they wait, the NHS said.\n\nThe seven centres include Ashton Gate in Bristol, Epsom racecourse in Surrey, London's Nightingale hospital, Newcastle's Centre for Life, the Manchester Tennis and Football Centre, Robertson House in Stevenage and Birmingham's Millennium Point.\n\nPeople will not miss out on their vaccination if they do not use the letters to make an appointment at one of the centres, the NHS said.\n\nTwo Labour MPs tweeted about their concerns about the letters being delayed in getting out to people due to coronavirus affecting Royal Mail staff.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Sarah Jones MP This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMary McGarry from Leamington Spa in Warwickshire told BBC News that her letter points to an NHS online booking page which suggests she would have to take her husband, who has cancer and a lung disease, 20 miles to Birmingham.\n\n\"We're very reluctant to go into Birmingham city centre,\" she said.\n\n\"If we can't get somebody to take us, we'd have to go on the train but we're shielding because my husband's got poor health.... we want to know why we've got to travel that far?\"\n\nKay Hayward, from Whitwick in Leicestershire, said she went online to book an appointment for her 85-year-old husband Kenneth and was offered five different places including Widnes in Cheshire and Stevenage in Hertfordshire.\n\n\"I thought they must be joking... we talked about it and we thought it was actually safer to stay here and for him not not have it.\n\n130,000 letters have been sent out by NHS England so far\n\n\"But we were worried if we turned this down, we'd be off the list.. the letter doesn't say anything about having the vaccines anywhere else locally.\"\n\nAndrea Eaton, from Coventry, said she was so angry that her 81-year-old mother, who has heart problems and leukaemia, was offered Birmingham for her appointment that she attempted to ring Downing Street on Saturday night to complain.\n\nShe said she reached the press office and said: \"I want you to give Boris a message please that he has lied to the British public.\n\n\"He has told them they never need to go more than 10 miles... they were really rude and just put the phone down on me.\"\n\nAndrea Eaton said she wanted to get a message to Boris Johnson so rang Downing Street on Saturday evening\n\nA spokesperson from Number 10 told BBC News that they did not wish to comment, but wanted to remind the public to use the government website to write to the prime minister or contact their constituency MP.\n\nCouncillor Shaun Davies, the Labour leader at Telford and Wrekin Council in Shropshire, said he had been contacted by dozens of people who have found the letters misleading, thinking this is their only chance to get the vaccine.\n\nHe said he had spoken to Trafford Council and was aware of people in Shropshire being sent to Manchester and residents there being directed to Birmingham to get their jabs.\n\n\"For many people they have been told consistently to wait for the NHS to contact you in order to get a vaccine and that's what they've had for the first time as a piece of communication.\n\n\"This is really, really concerning for people in their 80s or 90s because of the importance of getting the vaccine.\"\n\nThe letters are not \"going to the heart\" of the public health message which is staying home and staying local, he said.\n\nMore than 500,000 letters will be sent out to homes offering people appointments at the centres over the next seven days\n\nDr Sarah Raistrick, from Coventry and Rugby Clinical Commission group (CCG), said people did not have to travel to the centres but admitted the letter did not make that clear.\n\n\"You can wait and be contacted by your local GP service and have it locally if you'd prefer.\n\n\"If you sit tight, you will be contacted and I'm hopeful that if you're 80 or over, by the end of this month you will have had your vaccination whether that is locally or whether you have chosen to travel,\" she said.\n\nWork will be done with the NHS locally and nationally to make that message clearer, she added.\n\nThe seven centres were chosen to give a geographical spread covering as many people as possible and are capable of delivering thousands of jabs per week, NHS England has said.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Sir Keir Starmer has said the \"status quo isn't working\" for Scotland but has again rejected calls for a second independence referendum.\n\nThe Labour leader, who backs devolving more powers from Westminster, claimed another vote would be \"divisive\".\n\nHowever, he said he did not agree with Boris Johnson's assessment that there should not be another referendum for at least 40 years.\n\nThe SNP said a vote would allow Scots to choose how to rebuild after Covid.\n\nLast year Sir Keir said he would set up a constitutional commission to offer a \"positive alternative to the Scottish people\".\n\nHe told BBC One's Andrew Marr Show: \"I don't think there should be another referendum, I don't think a further divisive referendum is the way forward.\n\n\"But I do accept that the status quo isn't working. I don't accept the argument that the status quo isn't working, the next thing you do is go to a referendum.\n\n\"I think there are other things you can do, other arguments that can be made in support of the United Kingdom.\"\n\nAsked about Boris Johnson's 40-year position, Sir Keir replied: \"I heard the prime minister say that and I don't agree with him on that.\"\n\nSpeaking on BBC Politics Scotland, Deputy First minister John Swinney rejected suggestions that the recovery from the Covid crisis should be a greater priority than another independence vote.\n\nHe said: \"An independence referendum is an essential priority of the people of Scotland because it gives us the opportunity to choose how we rebuild as a country from Covid.\n\n\"It would give us the opportunity to decide on our constitutional future and to determine the nature of our economy and how we deal with and support our citizens.\"\n\nEarlier this month Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the BBC he thought the 41-year interval between the UK's referendums on joining the EU and leaving it was a \"good sort of gap\".\n\nMr Johnson said in his experience, such votes \"don't have a notably unifying force in the national mood, they should be only once in a generation\".", "This car was one of many turned away by police at Moel Famau on Saturday\n\nPeople are \"blatantly\" ignoring rules on lockdown restrictions despite repeated warnings, police have said.\n\nMore than 100 cars had been turned away from Moel Famau on the Flintshire border by Saturday lunchtime, with some driving past \"road closed\" signs.\n\nIn Snowdonia, Gwynedd, a warden said a group from Leicester would have \"probably ignored our advice\" if police had not arrived and told them to leave.\n\nLevel four restrictions mean travelling for exercise is not allowed in Wales.\n\nKeith Ellis, a warden at Pen y Pass in Snowdonia, said while it had been much quieter this weekend, people were still travelling, despite the restrictions.\n\n\"We've had three from Leicester first thing this morning and if the police hadn't turned up they would have probably ignored our advice and carried on up the mountain,\" he said.\n\n\"What they were wearing was totally inappropriate and they would have probably got into danger.\n\n\"We've had people also from Liverpool and some locals turning up knowing full well what the rules are, but just trying it on.\n\n\"Luckily there are a lot more police officers around and all these people have been spoken to and advised by the police as well.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by NWP Rural Crime Team /Tîm Troseddau Cefn Gwlad HGC This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA Welsh Government spokesman said: \"Cases of coronavirus are very high in Wales at the moment and there is a new strain of the virus circulating, which is highly infectious and moving quickly.\n\n\"At alert level four, exercise should always be undertaken from home, unless you have special circumstances which requires some flexibility - such as disability or autism.\n\n\"The more people gather, the greater the risk of spreading or catching the virus.\"", "Boris Johnson is expected to announce a set of new national restrictions for England, similar to the March lockdown, in a televised address at 20:00 GMT.\n\nThe PM is likely to urge the public to follow the new rules from midnight.\n\nIt is expected people will be told to work from home if possible and schools will close for most pupils.\n\nIt is not yet clear when the measures will be reviewed, but MPs are likely to be given a vote to approve them retrospectively on Wednesday.\n\nMeanwhile, the UK's chief medical officers warned of a \"material risk of healthcare services being overwhelmed\" in several areas over the next 21 days.\n\nScotland announced a legal requirement to stay at home from midnight, with schools to be closed.\n\nMr Johnson will set out plans for England as the UK's devolved nations have the power to set their own coronavirus regulations.\n\nBoth Wales and Northern Ireland are already under national restrictions.\n\nOn Monday, the UK recorded more than 50,000 new confirmed Covid cases for the seventh day in a row.\n\nAs of 08:00 GMT, there were 26,626 Covid-19 patients in hospital in England, according to the latest figures.\n\nThis is a week-on-week increase of 30%, and a new record high.\n\nMr Johnson is expected to tell people to work from home unless they are a key worker, or it is not possible for them to do so, for example if they work on a construction site, according to BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg.\n\nIt is also understood that England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, has told the prime minister the new variant of coronavirus is now spreading throughout the country.\n\nThe new variant - first identified in Kent and since seen across the UK and other parts of the world - has been found to spread much more easily than earlier variants.\n\nA No 10 spokesman said the spread of the new variant had led to \"rapidly escalating case numbers across the country\".\n\n\"The prime minister is clear that further steps must now be taken to arrest this rise and to protect the NHS and save lives,\" he added.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer - who called for a national lockdown in England within 24 hours on Sunday - said: \"I hope the prime minister has been listening to the clear calls for tough national restrictions.\"\n\nHospitals have said they are under \"extreme pressure\" and one of Britain's most senior doctors warned on the weekend that trusts across the UK should prepare themselves for a surge in cases.\n\nThe number of Covid-19 patients in UK hospitals is currently above the level seen in spring 2020.\n\nA further 58,784 cases and an additional 407 deaths within 28 days of a positive test result were reported on Monday, though deaths in Scotland were not recorded.\n\nWhat worked before may not work again - even a repeat of the March lockdown may not be enough to contain the new variant.\n\nConsider the R number - the number of people each infected person passes the virus onto on average.\n\nThe March lockdown brought R down to 0.6 and led to a sharp decline in cases.\n\nEvery 100 infected people passed the virus onto 60 others, who passed it onto 36, then 21, then 12 and so on.\n\nBut the new variant is thought to be around 50% more transmissible so its R number, in the same lockdown conditions, would be around 0.9.\n\nThen 100 infected people would pass the virus onto 90 others, then 81, then 73, then 66 and so on.\n\nThis is a far slower decline.\n\nHowever, uncertainty around the new variant means there are scenarios where its levels plateau rather than fall during lockdown conditions.\n\nIt is going to be a tough start to the year. Even with immediate and tough restrictions there are a projected 20,000 additional deaths in the first months of 2021.\n\nNow more than ever this is a race between the virus and the vaccine.\n\nMr Johnson's address comes as UK chief medical officers recommended the Covid threat level be increased to five - its highest level.\n\nIt means the NHS may soon be unable to handle a further sustained rise in cases, the medical officers said in a joint statement.\n\nNHS Providers, which represents health service trusts, said hospitals were at a \"critical point\" and that \"immediate and decisive action\" is needed.\n\nPreviously, the government described level five as requiring stricter social distancing measures. The first lockdown, which began in March 2020, was when the UK was under level four.\n\nThese Covid threat levels are separate to the regional tier system of restrictions in England.\n\nAnnouncing tougher measures in Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: \"It is no exaggeration to say that I am more concerned about the situation we face now than I have been at any time since March last year.\"\n\nThe new restrictions in Scotland mean it will be a legal requirement to stay at home except for certain essential purposes, similar to the first lockdown last March. Schools will be closed to pupils until February.\n\nIn Wales, all schools and colleges will move to online learning until at least 18 January.\n\nNorthern Ireland's Stormont Executive are also meeting to discuss possible new measures in light of Mr Johnson's televised address - which will air on BBC One and the BBC iPlayer from 19:35 GMT.\n\nThe prime minister will speak amid continued uncertainty over whether schools will remain open to all pupils in England, after several councils requested classrooms stay shut.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 82-year-old Brian Pinker is given the Oxford vaccine at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford\n\nEarlier on Monday, an 82-year-old retired maintenance manager became the first person in the UK to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.\n\nBrian Pinker said he was \"really proud\" to receive a jab developed in the UK, which will form a large part of the country's mass vaccination plan.\n\n\"The nurses, doctors and staff today have all been brilliant and I can now really look forward to celebrating my 48th wedding anniversary with my wife Shirley later this year,\" Mr Pinker said.", "Most pupils will be studying from home for the rest of this half term\n\nSchools and colleges in England are to be closed to most pupils until at least half term, Boris Johnson has announced.\n\nThe prime minister said the new lockdown had to be \"tough enough\" to stop the variant virus from spreading - and teaching will go online.\n\nA-Levels and GCSEs will be cancelled, a government source confirmed to BBC News - although vocational exams will go ahead.\n\nThe National Education Union accused the government of causing \"chaos\".\n\nIn a television address, Mr Johnson announced the biggest changes to schools since the early days of the first lockdown in March.\n\n\"Because we now have to do everything we possibly can to stop the spread of the disease, primary schools, secondary schools and colleges across England must move to remote provision from tomorrow,\" said the prime minister.\n\nThis means a return to online learning for pupils of all ages - apart from vulnerable children and the children of key workers who can continue to go into school.\n\nPrimary schools went back today - and will then close again tomorrow\n\n\"We recognise that this will mean it's not possible or fair for all exams to go ahead this summer, as normal,\" said Mr Johnson.\n\nIt is understood that vocational exams will continue, but GCSEs and A-levels will be cancelled - and that the exam watchdog Ofqual will make \"alternative arrangements\" for delivering results.\n\nAn attempt to produce replacement exam grades last summer turned into one of the biggest U-turns of the pandemic.\n\nTeachers' unions accused the government of failing to react more swiftly to \"mounting evidence\" about Covid transmission in schools and to make preparations for remote teaching and alternatives to written exams.\n\nBut Mary Bousted, co-leader of the National Education Union, said Education Secretary Gavin Williamson had \"become an expert in putting his head in the sand\".\n\nGeoff Barton of the ASCL head teachers' union criticised ministers for having issued legal threats to keep schools open at the end of last term - and then \"made a series of chaotic announcements about the start of this term\".\n\nThe new term, which began on Monday for primary pupils, has only lasted a day before it has been suspended.\n\nThe prime minister said he hoped that schools would be \"reopening schools after the February half term\".\n\nThere have been assurances that there will be a more thorough approach to home learning than in the first lockdown last year.\n\nThe Department for Education has provided hundreds of thousands of computer devices - with the aim of supporting those without the equipment needed to work online from home.\n\nThere have also been suggestions Ofsted inspectors will play a more active role in checking on what support schools are providing to pupils in their online learning.\n\nUniversities in England had already planned a staggered return for this term - but there will now be even fewer students on campus this month.\n\nThe latest lockdown guidance says university students who are taking hands-on courses such as medicine or veterinary science should return for face-to-face lessons as planned.\n\nThese students will be expected to take two Covid tests or self-isolate for 10 days when they return.\n\nBut students on all other courses are being told not to come back to university if possible and to start their term online \"until at least mid-February\".", "The Queen's 95th birthday will be commemorated on one of five new coins released this year, the Royal Mint has announced.\n\nThe 2021 British coin collection will also mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of novelist Sir Walter Scott, and the 75th anniversary of the death of author HG Wells.\n\nThe release of a £5 coin is typically reserved for significant royal events.\n\nIn April the Queen will become the first UK monarch to reach 95.\n\nThe new £5 coin depicts the royal cypher \"EIIR\", above the words \"my heart and my devotion\", a nod to part of her 1957 Christmas broadcast, which was the first to be televised.\n\nDuring that speech, the Queen told the nation: \"In the old days the monarch led his soldiers on the battlefield and his leadership at all times was close and personal.\n\n\"Today things are very different. I cannot lead you into battle, I do not give you laws or administer justice, but I can do something else, I can give you my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.\"\n\nThe anniversary of the birth of Sir Walter Scott, who wrote the novels Waverley, Rob Roy and Ivanhoe and is considered one of Scotland's most famous figures, will be celebrated with a £2 coin.\n\nThe 75th anniversary of the death of science fiction author HG Wells, who penned works such as The Time Machine and The War Of The Worlds, will also be marked on a £2 coin, with a depiction of images from his novels.\n\nThe 50th anniversary of decimalisation, when Britain's modern coins came into force, will be featured on a 50p coin.\n\nThe 75th anniversary of the death of the inventor John Logie Baird, famous for his early prototypes of the television, will be commemorated on another new 50p coin.\n\nAs the Queen's head already appears on one side of all coins in circulation, these five coins will each offer a different depiction from the various stages of her reign.\n\nClare Maclennan, of the consumer division at the Royal Mint, said this year's commemorative coins marked \"some of the biggest anniversaries in 2021\", with each coin \"a miniature work of art\" designed as \"a treasured keepsake or gift\".\n\nThe commemorative set will be available to purchase from the Royal Mint website.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Olly Stephens was pronounced dead in Bugs Bottom fields in Emmer Green, Reading\n\nA school says its community has been left \"reeling\" after a 13-year-old boy was stabbed to death in Reading.\n\nOliver Stephens, known as Olly, was pronounced dead at Bugs Bottom fields, Emmer Green, on Sunday.\n\nFour boys and a girl, all aged 13 or 14, have been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder. They remain in custody.\n\nHighdown School and Sixth Form Centre head teacher Rachel Cave described the boy's death as a \"total tragedy\".\n\nIn a statement, she said: \"This student was part of our community and many students and staff knew him well.\n\n\"Many have been deeply affected by this tragedy.\n\n\"In normal circumstances we would open the school and welcome in students for support before the start of the term.\n\n\"We are currently unable to do this, of course, but are arranging counselling support and will be establishing an electronic book of condolence.\"\n\nFlowers have been left outside Highdown School\n\nMs Cave said the school was \"a supportive and close-knit community\" which would \"work together over the coming days and weeks\".\n\nDet Supt Kevin Brown, of Thames Valley Police, said: \"Our thoughts remain with Olly's family at this incredibly difficult time.\"\n\nHe added: \"This is a tragic and shocking incident which has resulted in the death of a young boy.\"\n\nThe victim's family are being supported by specially trained officers.\n\nThames Valley Police said a \"considerable police presence\" would be in place in the area for several days\n\nOfficers were called just before 16:00 GMT on Sunday following reports of an attack.\n\nOfficers are appealing for anyone who was in the area between 15:00 and 16:30 who might have taken photos or camera footage to contact them if they notice anything suspicious.\n\nDet Supt Brown said he believed there would have been witnesses to the \"dreadful incident\" as the area is popular with dog walkers.\n\nA man said his wife was walking their dog through the park on Sunday afternoon when she saw a boy on the ground with several people around him trying to give him first aid.\n\nAnother dog walker said she saw a group of young people standing in the woods in Bugs Bottom fields at about 15:30 and described it as \"slightly unusual\".\n\nReading East MP Matt Rodda has offered his \"deepest condolences\" to the boy's family.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Matt Rodda This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSt Barnabas Church in Emmer Green has invited residents to pray and light a candle in memory of the boy.\n\nFollow BBC South on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to south.newsonline@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Nick Hulme said intensive care units at Colchester and Ipswich hospitals were \"at capacity\"\n\nSecurity officers removed Covid-19 \"deniers\" who were taking pictures of empty corridors at a NHS hospital where the intensive care unit is at maximum capacity, its chief executive said.\n\nThe incident took place at Colchester Hospital at the weekend.\n\nChief executive Nick Hulme said it \"beggars belief\" some people were calling the pandemic a hoax.\n\nHe said it was \"the right thing to do\" to keep corridors in outpatients units as empty as possible.\n\nMr Hulme said hospital security had to \"remove people who were taking photographs of empty corridors and then posting them on social media, saying the hospital is not in crisis\".\n\n\"When you've got that sort of social media pressure and those people denying the reality of Covid it really concerns us. Words fail me,\" he said.\n\n\"Why would people do that when we all know somebody who has died from Covid?\n\n\"Of course there are empty corridors at the weekend in outpatients, because that's the right thing to do.\n\n\"We are facing the biggest health challenge we've ever seen and we are still seeing people flouting the [social distancing] rules.\"\n\nPeople had to be removed from Colchester Hospital's outpatients ward for taking pictures of empty corridors and claiming Covid-19 was a hoax\n\nUnder coronavirus pandemic restrictions on social distancing, many outpatient consultations had been moved online or were taking place over the telephone, he added.\n\nPhysical appointments, tests and procedures had been organised differently to avoid crowded waiting areas.\n\nMr Hulme is chief executive of East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust which also runs Ipswich Hospital and he said there were currently 320 patients being treated for Covid-19 across both sites.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "The homes of Frank and Christine Lampard, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha and Tamara Ecclestone and her husband were broken into in December 2019\n\nFour people have been cleared of being involved in a plot to raid the luxury homes of celebrities in west London.\n\nItems belonging to Frank Lampard, Tamara Ecclestone and the family of tycoon Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha were among the items taken during three burglaries in December 2019.\n\nProsecutors said Maria Mester, 48, Emil Bogdan Savastru, 30, Sorin Marcovici, 53, and Alexandru Stan, 49, were a \"supporting cast\" for the burglars.\n\nBut a jury found all four not guilty.\n\nIsleworth Crown Court heard the three burglaries had netted \"big money\" for the raiders, with \"fabulous jewellery\" stolen and the majority of it having never been recovered.\n\nJay Rutland, Tamara Ecclestone and their daughter had left for Lapland on the morning of the burglary\n\nJewellery and cash worth £25m was taken from Ms Ecclestone's Kensington home while she was on holiday in Lapland with her husband Jay Rutland and their daughter.\n\nMr Lampard and his TV presenter wife Christine had about £60,000 in watches and jewellery stolen when they were out, while raiders also ransacked the family home of Mr Srivaddhanaprabha, who died in 2018 in a helicopter crash, the jury was told.\n\nThe four defendants were accused of eight charges including conspiracy to burgle.\n\nHowever, each denied their involvement with the plot, saying they had no knowledge that the alleged burglars were criminals.\n\nJurors were shown an image from Maria Mester's Facebook account, in which she was said to be wearing Tamara Ecclestone's necklace\n\nThe court heard escort Ms Mester had flown into the UK from Italy on 7 December.\n\nPolice described her as the plot's \"matriarch\", but the 48-year-old told jurors she was only in London after being paid £5,000 to accompany one of the alleged burglars for the week.\n\nSavastru was arrested at Heathrow Airport on 30 January as he prepared to leave for Japan, wearing Mr Srivaddhanaprabha's Tag watch and carrying a Louis Vuitton bag stolen from Mr Rutland.\n\nHe told the court he thought the items had been left behind by the alleged burglars at the Airbnb property he had helped them rent.\n\nThe four Romanian nationals were cleared of all charges apart from Savastru, who was convicted of one count of attempting to conceal criminal property.\n\nThe 30-year-old will be sentenced at a later date.\n\nA group of alleged burglars, who cannot be named for legal reasons, are accused of carrying out the raids.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Boris Johnson has reiterated his position that a Scottish independence referendum should be a \"once-in-a-generation\" vote.\n\nSpeaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr programme, the prime minister said the gap between referendums on Europe - the first in 1975 and the second in 2016 - was \"a good sort of gap\".\n\nHowever, Mr Marr suggested that now \"things had changed\" for Scotland.\n\nNicola Sturgeon wants to see an independent Scotland join the EU.\n\nAndrew Marr asked the prime minister what a voter in Scotland should do if they decided that a second independence referendum was now something they wanted, and what were the \"democratic tools\" to now do that?\n\nMr Johnson replied by saying: \"Referendums in my experience, direct experience, in this country are not particularly jolly events.\n\n\"They don't have a notably unifying force in the national mood, they should be only once-in-a-generation.\"\n\nAsked what the difference was between a referendum on EU membership being granted and one on Scottish independence being requested, he said: \"The difference is we had a referendum in 1975 and we then had another one in 2016.\n\n\"That seems to be about the right sort of gap.\"\n\nThe 2014 independence referendum resulted in a 55.3% vote against Scotland going alone.\n\nOn Hogmanay, Nicola Sturgeon said Europe should \"keep a light on\" as Scotland will be \"back soon\".\n\nThe first minister tweeted just after the Brexit transition period formally ended at 11:00 on 31 December 2020.\n\nScotland's trading and travel relationships with EU countries will now be governed by the agreement announced by the UK government on Christmas Eve.\n\nMs Sturgeon reiterated the SNP's call for an independent Scotland to join the EU.\n\nTweeting a picture of the words Europe and Scotland joined by a love heart, she wrote: \"Scotland will be back soon, Europe. Keep the light on.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Nicola Sturgeon This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSNP depute leader Keith Brown said: \"It may be a new year but it's the same old incoherent bluster from Boris Johnson. The prime minister pretends otherwise but he knows he can't keep on denying democracy.\n\n\"Even his American pal Donald Trump has learned that if you try to stand in the way of the democratic choice of a nation you get swept away.\n\n\"The people who will decide our future are the people of Scotland, not Boris Johnson and the Westminster Tories.\"\n\nFormer Labour prime minister Tony Blair said it was \"extremely difficult\" to challenge the SNP on independence when the party was \"virtually uncontested\" in Scotland.\n\nHe said: \"We had a referendum that rejected Scottish independence, but Brexit put it back on the agenda again. And it's going to require very careful management. The truth of the matter is it's still not in Scotland's interest to separate from England.\n\n\"There are huge economic and political reasons for the United Kingdom to stay the United Kingdom but we're going to have to examine whether there's different constitutional settlements.\n\n\"I also think it's incredibly important, the single most important thing politically to my mind, is that we get a really capable opposition in Scotland - which should be the Labour Party - that's capable of contesting the Scottish nationalist position in Scotland in a way that prevents them from doing what they do at the moment, which is govern Scotland but pretend they're in opposition.\"\n\nScottish Greens co-leader Lorna Slater said: \"Only the people of Scotland have the right to determine Scotland's future.\n\n\"Seventeen consecutive opinion polls have demonstrated majorities in favour of independence, with the most recent indicating a record 58% support.\n\n\"Whether it's the botched handling of the coronavirus crisis, the Brexit catastrophe or just the heartlessness of Tory governments we haven't voted for, it's clear that the UK isn't working for Scotland.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 82-year-old Brian Pinker is given the Oxford vaccine at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford\n\nDialysis patient Brian Pinker, 82, has become the first person to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.\n\nThe retired maintenance manager got the jab at 7:30 GMT from nurse Sam Foster at Oxford's Churchill Hospital.\n\nMore than half a million doses of the vaccine are ready for use on Monday.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said it was a \"pivotal moment\" in the UK's fight against the virus, as vaccines will help curb infections and then allow restrictions to be lifted.\n\nBut Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned on Monday there was \"no question we will have to take tougher measures\", which will be announced in \"due course\", as the UK struggles to control a new, fast-spreading variant of the virus.\n\nOn Sunday more than 50,000 new confirmed Covid cases were recorded in the UK for the sixth day running, prompting Labour to call for a third national lockdown in England.\n\nNorthern Ireland and Wales currently have their own lockdowns in place and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced a fresh lockdown will begin in Scotland from 00:01 on Tuesday.\n\nThe rollout comes as rows continue over whether pupils should return to school with the current high levels of Covid infections.\n\nSix hospital trusts - in Oxford, London, Sussex, Lancashire and Warwickshire - have begun administering the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab, with 530,000 doses ready for use.\n\nMost other available doses will be sent to hundreds of GP-led services and care homes across the UK later in the week, according to the Department of Health and Social Care.\n\nMr Pinker, who has been having dialysis for kidney disease at the Churchill Hospital for a number of years, said he was \"really proud\" the vaccine was developed in Oxford.\n\n\"The nurses, doctors and staff today have all been brilliant and I can now really look forward to celebrating my 48th wedding anniversary with my wife Shirley later this year,\" he said.\n\nMusic teacher and father-of-three Trevor Cowlett, 88, and Prof Andrew Pollard, a paediatrician working at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and lead investigator of the Oxford vaccine trial, were also among the first to be vaccinated.\n\nChief nurse Ms Foster, who administered the first dose, told the BBC it was a \"huge privilege\", saying: \"Every single patient that we have vaccinated over the last couple of weeks have got their own personal stories to the difference it's going to make, so it is no different this morning.\"\n\nSpeaking during a visit to London's Chase Farm Hospital, to meet some of the first people to receive the Oxford vaccine, the prime minister said there were \"tough, tough\" weeks to come.\n\nThere will now be a \"massive ramp-up\" in vaccination numbers \"in the weeks ahead\", Mr Johnson said, and the number of vaccine doses will amount to \"tens of millions by the end of March\".\n\nAsked when the government will be able to vaccinate two million people a week, Mr Johnson said the government will give more details \"in the next few days... as soon as we have better numbers to give\".\n\nMr Hancock told BBC Breakfast the Oxford vaccine rollout was a \"pivotal moment\" in the fight against coronavirus, saying: \"It's going to be a tough few weeks ahead, but this is the way out.\"\n\nAsked about reports potential volunteers were being deterred by the additional training and forms, Mr Hancock said they were going to \"reduce the amount of bureaucracy\".\n\n\"For instance there's one of the training programmes about how to tackle terrorism, I don't think that's necessary, we're going to stop that,\" he said.\n\nHowever, he said this was not delaying the delivery of the vaccine, adding that the next delivery of the vaccine will be \"early this week\" to be \"deployed next week\".\n\nEngland's chief medical officer Chris Whitty said the vaccines \"give us a route out in the medium term\" but warned the NHS was \"under considerable and rising pressure in the short term\".\n\nFormer health secretary and Conservative chairman of the Commons' health committee Jeremy Hunt tweeted that it was \"time to act\" and the government needed to close schools and borders, ban all household mixing and impose a 12-week national lockdown in England.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Jeremy Hunt This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nLabour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth agreed that a national lockdown was needed, as well as \"rapidly scaled-up vaccine distribution\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Matt Hancock: 'This way can save more lives'\n\nAs the recent rise in Covid cases puts increased pressure on the NHS, the UK has accelerated its vaccination rollout by planning to give both doses of the vaccine 12 weeks apart, having initially planned to leave 21 days between jabs.\n\nThe UK's chief medical officers have defended the delay to second doses, saying getting more people vaccinated with the first jab \"is much more preferable\".\n\nMake no mistake, the UK is in a race against time.\n\nThat much is clear from the decision to delay the second dose of the vaccine to focus on giving as many people as possible their first doses.\n\nSo how fast can the NHS go? Ultimately it wants to get to two million doses a week.\n\nThat will not be achieved this week.\n\nBut Monday marks the start of the NHS putting the accelerator to the floor.\n\nA rapid increase in the vaccination rate should follow.\n\nBut how quickly the UK can go is dependent on several complex processes.\n\nFirst, the vaccine has to be manufactured, then it has to be put into vials and packaged up (known as fill and finish). After that each batch has to be checked and certified before being sent to NHS vaccination sites where there needs to be enough vaccinators and support staff to ensure those doses are given as quickly as possible.\n\nProblems at any one stage can disrupt how quickly the vaccination programme can be rolled out.\n\nWhile there are millions of doses of each vaccine in the country and a total of 140 million of both vaccines pre-ordered, there are currently just over one million - around 500,000 of each - ready to be given this week.\n\nNHS medical director Professor Stephen Powis said: \"The NHS' biggest vaccination programme in history is off to a strong start, thanks to the tremendous efforts of NHS staff who have already delivered more than one million jabs.\"\n\nHe said the Oxford vaccine rollout was \"chalking up another world first that will protect thousands more over the coming weeks\".\n\nThe Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was the first jab approved in the UK, and more than a million people have had their first one.\n\nThe first person to get the jab on 8 December, Margaret Keenan, has already had her second dose.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dr Nikita Kanani, NHS England's medical director for primary care, says it's crucial to get more patients the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine\n\nThe Oxford jab - which was approved for use in late December - can be stored at normal fridge temperatures, making it easier to distribute and store than the Pfizer jab. It is also cheaper per dose.\n\nThe UK has secured 100 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, enough for most of the population.\n\nCare home residents and staff, people aged over 80, and frontline NHS staff will be first to receive it.\n\nGPs and local vaccination services have been asked to ensure every care home resident in their local area is vaccinated by the end of January, the Department of Health and Social Care said.\n\nSome 730 vaccination sites have already been established across the UK, with the total set to surpass 1,000 later this week, the department added.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Nicola Sturgeon announces stay at home rules in new lockdown\n\nScots are to be ordered to stay at home amid a fresh Covid-19 lockdown which will see schools remain closed to pupils until February.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said new curbs would be introduced at midnight in a bid to contain the new, faster-spreading strain of the virus.\n\nNew laws will require people to stay at home and work from home where possible.\n\nOutdoor gatherings are also to be cut back, with people only allowed to meet one person from one other household.\n\nPlaces of worship are to be closed, group exercise banned, and schools will largely operate via online and remote learning.\n\nThese rules will apply across the Scottish mainland until at least the end of January, and will be kept under review.\n\nIsland areas will remain in level three - but Ms Sturgeon said they would be monitored carefully.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson later announced similar lockdown measures for the whole of England with all schools and colleges closing to most pupils until mid February.\n\nA further 1,905 new cases were reported in Scotland on Monday - with 15% of tests returning a positive result, something Ms Sturgeon said \"illustrates the severity and urgency of the situation\".\n\nThe first minister said she was \"more concerned about the situation we face now than I have been at any time since March last year\", with the new coronavirus strain now accounting for half of new cases.\n\nAnd she said a \"steeply rising trend of infections\" was threatening to put \"significant pressure\" on NHS services, saying hospitals could breach capacity within three to four weeks.\n\nThe new rules - which will be put down in law - mean Scots will only be allowed to leave home for essential purposes, such as shopping for food and medicine, exercise and caring responsibilities.\n\nNo limit is to be put on how many times people can go out to exercise, but outdoor meetings are to be limited to a maximum of two people from two households.\n\nEveryone who can work from home will be required to, and people in the \"shielding\" category are advised not to go in to work at all.\n\nThe construction and manufacturing industries will remain open, but Ms Sturgeon said this would be kept under review.\n\nPlaces of worship are to close, the number of people who can attend weddings is to be cut to five, and funeral wakes will no longer be allowed.\n\nSchools are to remain closed to the majority of pupils until February, with Ms Sturgeon saying community transmission of the virus must be brought to a lower level amid concerns that the new variant of the virus spreads more easily among young people.\n\nShe said she knew remote learning presented \"significant challenges\" for parents, teachers and pupils, adding: \"I want to be clear that it remains our priority to get school buildings open again for all pupils are quickly as possible and then keep them open.\"\n\nThe first minister said she was considering whether teachers could be given the Covid-19 vaccine as a priority.\n\nMore than 100,000 people have been given a first dose of the vaccine in Scotland, and the government expects to have access to just over 900,000 doses by the end of January.\n\nHowever Ms Sturgeon said the best way to get schools open again was to drive down transmission of the virus - urging Scots to abide by the rules.\n\nThese are the toughest restrictions Scotland has faced since the lockdown of March 2020.\n\nIt is - once again - becoming compulsory to stay at home except for essential purposes like food shopping, exercise and medical care.\n\nThe extended closure of schools to most pupils is something the Scottish government was particularly keen to avoid.\n\nThese decisions are a measure of how worried ministers are about the rapid spread of the new variant of coronavirus, which is fast becoming the dominant strain.\n\nWith 225 cases per 100,000 people, Scotland is thought to be about four weeks behind London, which already has four times as many cases and NHS services under considerable pressure.\n\nThe Scottish government believes that without further action the NHS here would run out of beds for Covid patients within a month.\n\nThis new alert comes at the start of a new year which also brings new hope for a route out of the pandemic with two vaccines now beginning to offer protection.\n\nAround 100,000 doses have already been administered in Scotland but it is likely to take several months to reach all in the most vulnerable groups.\n\nThe first minister said Scotland was now in \"a race between the vaccine and the virus\".\n\nShe said: \"The Scottish government will do everything we can to speed up distribution of the vaccine. But all of us must do everything we can to slow down the spread of the virus.\n\n\"We can already see - by looking at infection rates in the south of England - some of what could happen here in Scotland. To prevent that, we need to act immediately and firmly.\n\n\"For government, that means introducing tough measures - as we have done today. And for all of us, it means sticking to the rules.\"\n\nScottish Conservative group leader Ruth Davidson raised concerns about online learning, saying it was vital that pupils had \"equal access to high-quality education\".\n\nAnd Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said teachers and working parents would need support to make the remote learning system work.\n\nMs Sturgeon said her government had \"agonised\" over the decision on schools, and said the \"fundamental priority\" was to re-open them in full as soon as possible.\n\nShe said: \"Just as the last places we ever want to close are schools and nurseries - so it is the case that schools and nurseries will be the first places we want to reopen as we re-emerge from this latest lockdown.\"\n\nThe NHS has coped so far in Scotland - more so than many other parts of the UK.\n\nBut in places like Glasgow and Lanarkshire it has been very, very tight. And here like everywhere else staff are bracing themselves for the post-Christmas effects of rising cases.\n\nThe first minister gave some stark figures on hospital and ICU occupancy - suggesting we are just weeks away from reaching limits.\n\nThere is so little give in the system they will be glad to see everything possible done to prevent stretched services being overwhelmed at a time when we are on our way to getting out the other side.\n\nThere is real anxiety about what the next few weeks might bring.\n• None Covid in Scotland: New lockdown from midnight", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. James Shaw, from Dundee, was among the first to receive the jab\n\nThe first Scottish recipients of the new Oxford University and AstraZeneca vaccine have received their jabs.\n\nJames Shaw, 82, and his 82-year-old wife Malita were among the first to be vaccinated in Dundee.\n\nThe couple received their first doses at Lochee Health and Community Care Centre.\n\nNicola Sturgeon has said she hoped all over-50s and those with underlying health conditions will have been vaccinated by early May.\n\nJames said: \"My wife and I are delighted to be receiving this vaccination. I have asthma and bronchitis and I have been desperate to have it so I am really pleased to be one of the first to be getting it.\n\n\"I know it takes a little while for the vaccine to work but after today I know that I will feel a bit less worried about going out. I will still be very careful and avoid busy places but knowing I have been vaccinated will really help me.\n\n\"All of my friends have said they are going to have the vaccine when it is their turn and I would encourage everyone who is offered this vaccination to take it.\"\n\nJames Shaw, 82, was one of the first people in Scotland to receive the AstraZeneca/Oxford Covid-19 vaccine, administered by advanced nurse practitioner Justine Williams\n\nThe Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine programme is being rolled out less than a week after it was approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). It is the second vaccine approved for use in the UK.\n\nNHS Tayside is rolling out the vaccine through GP practices in the community and will also vaccinate elderly residents and staff in care homes.\n\nIts associate director of public health Dr Daniel Chandleris said: \"The efforts of our vaccination teams have been amazing and it is testament to a real whole team approach that sees the first over-80s in the general population have their jabs today in Tayside.\n\n\"The availability and mobility of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine gives us the opportunity to start to roll out the biggest vaccine programme that the UK has ever seen across our communities.\n\n\"Over-80s are the first priority group and patients will be contacted directly to attend a vaccination session.\"\n\nScottish Secretary Alister Jack added: \"This is another important moment in our fight against the virus - every vaccination takes us a step closer to getting back to our normal lives as soon as possible.\n\n\"As with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, the UK is the first country in the world to approve and roll out the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, with the UK Government ordering and paying for millions of doses for people in all parts of the UK.\"\n\nThe milestone came as First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced a new stricter lockdown.\n\nWith the exception of essential travel, people in mainland Scotland will have to remain at home from midnight.\n\nStatistics released on Monday showed a further 1,905 people had contracted Covid-19.\n\nFigures for hospital admissions and deaths over the holiday weekend will not be published until Tuesday.\n\nMs Sturgeon likened the situation to a race between the vaccine and the virus.\n\nShe said: \"In one lane we have vaccines - our job is to make sure they run as fast as possible.\n\n\"But in the other lane is the virus which - as a result of this new variant - has just learned to run much faster and has most definitely picked up pace in the last couple of weeks.\n\n\"To ensure that the vaccine wins the race, it is essential to speed up vaccination as far as possible. But to give it the time it needs to get ahead, we must also slow the virus down.\"\n\nThe new vaccine will initially be available in the hospitals that have been delivering the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine, and new community settings will be able to deliver the jabs from 11 January.\n\nPeople in Scotland will be contacted by their health board when it is their turn to be vaccinated.\n\nThe Oxford vaccination marks a major turning point in the pandemic and will lead to a massive expansion in the UK's immunisation campaign, with enough to vaccinate 50 million people throughout the UK already on order.\n\nIt is easier to transport and store than the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which needs cold storage of about -70C.\n\nThe Oxford vaccine is logistically much easier to distribute\n\nThe UK government has said 530,000 doses of the Oxford vaccine will be available to the UK from Monday, with \"millions due by the beginning of February\".\n\nScotland will ultimately get an 8.2% share of these vaccines, based on its population.\n\nChief Medical Officer Dr Gregor Smith has said he expects the NHS in Scotland to receive 440,360 doses of the vaccine during January.\n\nThe first minister said on Monday about 100,000 people in Scotland have already received a first dose of vaccine.\n\nBoth vaccines require two doses to be administered with an interval of between four and 12 weeks.\n\nPreviously the advice was for the vaccines to have a four-week gap between doses.\n\nThe Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) then recommended as many people as possible in the top priority groups should be offered a first dose as the initial priority.", "Dr Radha Modgil from BBC Radio 1’s Life Hacks shares her top five tips on how to stay mentally and emotionally well during the coronavirus lockdown, all beginning with the letter C.\n\nSticking to a routine, making sure we take care of ourselves, and using our creativity in new ways are all ways she suggests we can ease the psychological toll that staying inside is having on all of us.\n\nListen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.", "A top Swedish official involved in the coronavirus response has defended a Christmas holiday in the Canary Islands in the face of heavy criticism.\n\nDan Eliasson is head of the civil contingencies agency, which earlier in December had texted all Swedes urging them to avoid travel.\n\nHe was photographed in Las Palmas airport on the island of Gran Canaria.\n\nMr Eliasson insisted the trip was necessary \"for family reasons\".\n\nHe told Swedish media that he had \"given up a lot of trips during this pandemic\" but thought this one was necessary because he had a daughter living in the Canaries.\n\n\"I celebrated Christmas with her and my family,\" he told Expressen newspaper. He also said he had been worked remotely while in the Canaries.\n\nSweden has had 437,000 confirmed cases and 8,700 deaths - many more than its Scandinavian neighbours. The country has never imposed a full lockdown.\n\nHowever, alarmed by rising numbers of cases last month, the Swedish government reversed some of its guidance and sent a text message to all Swedes asking them to read updated guidelines.\n\nThe guidelines included asking Swedes to avoid unnecessary trips and not to make new contacts during a journey or at the destination.\n\nMr Eliasson was then photographed several times in Gran Canaria, including at the airport.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Expressen This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThere have been calls for Mr Eliasson, an experienced official who has worked at several important departments, to be fired.\n\nPrime Minister Stefan Löfven and other ministers have not yet commented, according to Swedish media.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. From the pandemic to measles, Smitha Mundasad looks at global health challenges in 2021", "Last updated on .From the section Horse Racing\n\nTributes have been paid to trainer Zoe Davison, who died from cancer on the same day two of her horses claimed wins at Plumpton.\n\nDavison, who had breast cancer for four-and-a-half years, died at her Shovelstrode Racing Stables in Sussex.\n\nBrown Bullet and Mr Jack, both trained at the family's stable, had raced to victory at the Sussex track on Sunday.\n\nSimon Clare, part-owner of Brown Bullet, said: \"Zoe was just the most wonderful human being imaginable.\"\n\nHer husband Andrew Irvine - who she married in 2018 - was by her side, along with family.\n\nHe said: \"She was the most wonderful, incredible person. I am blessed to have spent the last 24 years of my life with her.\"\n\nDaughter Gemelle Johnson, who was assistant to her mother, said: \"I just feel a bit numb inside because of everything.\n\n\"I'm a bit overwhelmed we've had a double for mum. Hopefully we have made her proud. It's surreal. Our team is a family business and we put everything into it. She will be thoroughly missed as she is the glue that holds us together.\n\n\"We've had a few winners around here and it is one of our local tracks. It means everything to us as we want to do her proud.\"\n\nDavison sent out the first of over 100 winners when Sails Legend, with AP McCoy in the saddle, won at Towcester in November 1997.\n\nShe enjoyed her best season with 15 winners in the 2017-18 campaign.\n\nJockey Page Fuller has a long association with the stable and should have ridden Mr Jack but had been stood down from an earlier fall.\n\nShe said: \"You couldn't have written it any better today. She was just a kind and genuine person who was a real horsewoman. She loved her horses and did her best by them.\n\n\"She has been struggling for a long time, but fortunately her strength has rubbed off on everybody else and they showed that by sending out the winners today.\n\n\"It has been a great team effort and it is great she has gone out like that. I don't know anybody who would have a bad word to say about her - she was just one of those really nice people.\"\n\nEd Arkell, ex-Fontwell clerk of the course and now at nearby West Sussex track Goodwood, said: \"Zoe was a huge part of the southern racing circuit. I'm so sorry for her family and she will be very much missed. She was a friendly, happy person who everybody loved.\n\n\"As a trainer, she ran a wonderful family operation. There are less of those these days. She supported her local tracks and became a big part of them.\"\n\nClare added: \"Zoe was the most talented horsewoman imaginable. What she didn't know about horses wasn't worth knowing.\n\n\"She is so incredibly well loved and will be desperately missed by everyone who knew her.\"", "Cases have reached record highs in the past week\n\nThe next few weeks could be the most dangerous period for Scotland since March in the fight against Covid, the first minister has warned.\n\nNicola Sturgeon said the new variant of the virus was \"accelerating spread\" across Scotland.\n\n\"If you first foot someone today, or hug/kiss/handshake them HNY, you are putting yourself, others and the NHS at risk,\" she tweeted.\n\nA further 2,539 cases of Covid-19 were confirmed on Friday.\n\nThe number is slightly down on Thursday's figure, but Ms Sturgeon said cases numbers were still \"worryingly high\".\n\nDaily confirmed cases have reached record highs on each of the previous three days, rising to to 2,622 on Thursday.\n\nThe percentage of positive cases also reached 14.4% on Wednesday - the highest it has been since the second wave of the pandemic began in the summer.\n\nMs Sturgeon tweeted: \"Today's case numbers are worryingly high again. The new variant is accelerating spread.\n\n\"PLEASE do not visit other people's homes just now, even today - if you first foot someone today, or hug/kiss/handshake them HNY, you are putting yourself, others & the NHS at risk.\"\n\nShe said the \"vaccine cavalry\" was on the way, offering \"real hope for 2021\", but she added: \"With this new variant, the next few weeks may be the most dangerous we've faced since Mar/April.\n\n\"We must act together to suppress it, to save lives and protect the NHS. Folded hands stick with it.\"\n\nThe number of daily confirmed cases has reached record highs this week\n\nA new study by London's Imperial College has found that the new variant of Covid-19 is \"hugely\" more transmissible than the virus's previous version.\n\nIt concludes the new variant increases the Reproduction or R number by between 0.4 and 0.7.\n\nThe UK's latest R number has been estimated at between 1.1 and 1.3. It needs to be below 1.0 for the number of cases to start falling.\n\nThe Scottish government's most recent estimate of the R number in Scotland has put it between 0.9 and 1.1.\n\nEmma Thomson, a professor of infectious disease at the University of Glasgow, said it was important to get people vaccinated quickly.\n\nThe professor, who has been working on the sequencing of the new Covid mutation, told the BBC that lockdown was not controlling the infection \"on its own\".\n\n\"At least we come in armed into the new year with two vaccines which are highly effective at preventing severe disease. We have that,\" she said.\n\n\"We need to roll it out now to add to the public health measures.\"\n\nParties, traditional \"first-footing\" and social events were banned this Hogmanay, with all of mainland Scotland and Skye being under the highest level of Covid restrictions.\n\nAll official events were cancelled, but police had to disperse a crowds of people who gathered at Edinburgh Castle and Calton Hill to see in the new year.\n\nIt has also emerged that 32 people were charged with reckless conduct after police found them gathered at a rented property in Aberfoyle on 27 December.\n\nA Scottish government spokesperson said: \"As the first minister has pointed out, the sharp rise in cases is evidence that the new strain seems to be speeding up transmission.\n\n\"This is why we are asking people to please stay at home as much as possible and avoid non-essential interaction with others.\n\n\"There is light at the end of the tunnel, but we ask everyone to be patient as we work our way through the vaccination programme, and continue to follow FACTS to keep us all safe.\"", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Monday morning. We'll have another update for you at 18:00 BST.\n\nThe first patients have been given the Oxford vaccine - five days after it was approved for use in the UK. Dialysis patient Brian Pinker, aged 82, was the first to receive it. It's a \"pivotal moment\" in the fight against the virus, according to Health Secretary Matt Hancock. More than 500,000 doses are ready to go, with care home residents and staff, people aged over 80, and NHS workers at the front of the queue. Some 730 vaccination sites have already been established, we're told, with the total set to surpass 1,000 later this week. The Oxford jab is easier to distribute and store than the Pfizer version, which was the first to be approved. It's also cheaper per dose. Find out more about how it was developed, and when you might receive one.\n\nThe vaccine news may be positive, but few deny the coronavirus situation in the UK right now is bleak. On Sunday, more than 50,000 new cases were recorded for the sixth day running and Labour is calling for a third national lockdown in England. Boris Johnson has admitted tougher restrictions are likely. Nicola Sturgeon is expected to announce new restrictions for Scotland later, while Northern Ireland and Wales already have their own lockdowns in place. The obvious next step for England would probably be to move more areas into tier four - a reminder of what that means - but our science editor David Shukman says there are other steps under discussion too.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nJanuary is normally a boom time for gyms, but coronavirus restrictions mean many are closed and others can't offer any group classes. At the same time, there's been an explosion in fitness tech, allowing more of us than ever to work out at home. So what does this mean for the future of the gym sector? Our reporter Eleanor Lawrie looks closely. Meanwhile, wherever you are in the UK, see 21 simple ways to get fitter in 2021.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sports expert Ruth Lowry says exercising outdoors could help us cope with Covid this winter\n\nThe pandemic has prompted many of us to change direction, career-wise, whether out of choice or necessity. Our CEO Secrets series has been documenting some of those forging a new path here in the UK, but the same trends are going on elsewhere too. In India, Shalini Sharma and Mrinali Hariyal have gone from stay-at-home mums cooking for their families to chefs providing meals for paying customers. They're plugging the gap left by restaurant closures and finding new identities for themselves. Watch their stories.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nFind more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nPlus, are pandemics the new normal?\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "More than 200 workers at Google-parent Alphabet have taken steps to form a labour union in a rare development for an American tech giant.\n\nThey said the organisation will give staff greater power to voice concerns about discriminatory work practices at the firm and how it handles issues like online hate speech.\n\nThe move follows walkouts and other actions by staff in recent years.\n\nGoogle said it would \"continue engaging directly with all our employees\".\n\n\"We've always worked hard to create a supportive and rewarding workplace for our workforce,\" Kara Silverstein, director of people operations, said in a statement.\n\n\"Of course our employees have protected labour rights that we support. But as we've always done, we'll continue engaging directly with all our employees\".\n\nThe announcement of the Alphabet Workers Union comes weeks after Google's firing of a high-profile black artificial intelligence and ethics researcher generated uproar.\n\nThe US National Labor Relations Board also recently ruled the firm had unlawfully fired employees for attempting to organise a union.\n\nGoogle staff stage a walkout in 2018 over the company's handling of sexual misconduct allegations\n\nStaff have also mobilised against the firm's \"Project Maven\" work with the Department of Defense and the company's handling of sexual harassment complaints.\n\n\"This union builds upon years of courageous organizing by Google workers,\" Nicki Anselmo, program manager, said in the announcement.\n\n\"From fighting the 'real names' policy, to opposing Project Maven, to protesting the egregious, multi-million dollar payouts that have been given to executives who've committed sexual harassment, we've seen first-hand that Alphabet responds when we act collectively.\n\n\"Our new union provides a sustainable structure to ensure that our shared values as Alphabet employees are respected even after the headlines fade.\"\n\nThe group was organised by software engineers but is open to all ranks at the company's US and Canadian workforce, including temporary workers and contractors.\n\nIt is affiliated with the larger labour group, Communication Workers of America, but is not seeking formal recognition from the federal government, limiting its bargaining power.\n\nIt represents a small fraction of Alphabet's workforce, which includes more than 130,000 people as of September and roughly as many contractors, vendors and temporary staff.\n\nMembers who join will contribute about 1% of their compensation to the effort.\n\n\"We want Alphabet to be a company where workers have a meaningful say in decisions that affect us and the societies we live in,\" organisers wrote on Twitter.", "Nóra Quoirin was born with holoprosencephaly, a disorder that affects brain development\n\nA girl whose body was found in a jungle during a holiday in Malaysia died by misadventure, a coroner has recorded.\n\nNóra Quoirin, 15, from Balham, south-west London, was discovered dead nine days after she went missing from an eco-resort in August 2019.\n\nThe family said they were \"utterly disappointed\" with the verdict, which ruled out any criminal involvement.\n\nThey believe \"layers of evidence\" that were heard at the inquest point towards Nora having been abducted.\n\nThe family were staying in Sora House in Dusun eco-resort near Seremban, about 40 miles (65km) south of Kuala Lumpur, when they reported Nóra missing, the day after they had arrived.\n\nNóra, who was born with holoprosencephaly - a disorder which affects brain development - was eventually found by a group of civilian volunteers in a palm-oil plantation less than two miles from the holiday home.\n\nThe Quoirins, whose lawyers had asked the coroner to record an open verdict, said in a statement after the ruling that they have a number of reasons for the abduction theory. These include:\n\nSearch and rescue teams were deployed in an effort to locate Nora\n\nIn the statement, issued through the Lucie Blackman Trust, the family said they witnessed 80 slides presented in court as the verdict was given, adding that none of them \"engaged with who Nóra really was - neither her personality nor her intellectual abilities\".\n\nThey said: \"The coroner made mention several times of her inability to rule on certain points due to not knowing Nóra enough.\n\n\"It is indeed our view that to know Nóra would be to know that she was simply incapable of hiding in undergrowth, climbing out a window and making her way out of a fenced resort in the darkness unclothed.\"\n\nThe statement added: \"We believe we have fought not just for Nóra but in honour of all the special needs children in this world who deserve our most committed support and the most careful application of justice.\n\n\"This is Nóra's unique legacy and we will never let it go.\"\n\nFom the outset Meabh Quoirin believed her daughter had been abducted but Malaysian police insisted Nóra's disappearance had always been a missing persons case and ruled out any criminal involvement.\n\nThe authorities closed the case in January 2020, and Nóra's parents pushed for the inquest.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police played the sound of Nóra's mother's voice through a loudspeaker in the jungle\n\nDuring the inquest, a British pathologist who carried out a second post-mortem examination said Nóra's body had no injuries to suggest she was attacked or restrained.\n\nOn the final day of evidence, an investigating officer who was on duty the morning Nóra was reported missing said he was confident there were no criminal elements involved in her disappearance.\n\nFollowing the coroner's verdict, the Quoirins' legal team have discussed the family's rights moving forward, which include the possibility of applying for a revision of the misadventure verdict at the High Court of Seremban.\n\nLouise Azmi, one lawyer for the family, said they had pressed for an open verdict to reflect the lack of positive evidence in the case regarding what happened to Nora.\n\nAn open verdict would leave open the possibility that a criminal element was involved in Nora's death, Mrs Azmi said.\n\nShe told the BBC based on everything the family know of Nora, \"they continue to believe it is impossible she would have willingly walked away into the jungle\".\n\nThe family's legal team say parents Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin are \"disappointed\" with today's verdict.\n\nBut, Coroner Maimoonah Aid said her verdict was made not on \"theories\" and \"speculation\" surrounding the case, but on the balance of probabilities of the evidence presented before her.\n\nWith no evidence to the contrary she ruled out foul play.\n\nMoving forward, the Quoirin family now have the possibility to apply for a revision of the verdict with the High Court of Seremban.\n\nThere is precedent of a verdict being overturned in Malaysia before.\n\nIn 2019, following an appeal, a Malaysian coroner's verdict of misadventure concerning the death of 18-year-old model Ivana Smit was overturned in Kuala Lumpur and reopened as a murder investigation.\n\nAccording to Quoirin family lawyer Sakthy Vell, the family say they now need time to consider their next course of action.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. PM: 'No question we're going to have to take tougher measures'\n\nBoris Johnson has said there is \"no question\" the government will announce stricter measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus \"in due course\".\n\nHe predicted \"tough, tough\" weeks to come, with more than three-quarters of England's population already under the highest - tier four - restrictions.\n\nOn Sunday, the UK recorded more than 50,000 new confirmed Covid cases for the sixth day in a row.\n\nLabour is calling for new England-wide restrictions to come in immediately.\n\nLeader Sir Keir Starmer said it was \"inevitable\" more schools would have to close to lessen the spread of coronavirus.\n\nIn Scotland, further new restrictions are to come into force at midnight, including a \"legal requirement\" for people to stay at home. except for essential purposes.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said Scotland was effectively returning to conditions similar to Spring's nation-wide lockdown, with the curbs in place until at least the end of January.\n\nAn additional 454 deaths within 28 days of a positive test result were reported across the UK on Sunday, meaning the total by this measure is now above 75,000.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the \"old tier system\" in England was \"no longer strong enough\" to contain increasing infections.\n\nHospitals are coming under increasing pressure, as cases mount up.\n\nThe old tier system is no longer enough…the figures are only heading in one direction.\n\nThese are the words of the health secretary and a health minister.\n\nBoris Johnson says stricter measures are coming, which immediately sparks the questions \"when?,\" and \"what are you waiting for?\"\n\nDowning Street wants to push a tougher message on adherence to the current rules in England while it assesses the latest Christmas data, but is coming under growing pressure to act sooner.\n\nWith Nicola Sturgeon about to go further in Scotland and the Labour leader calling for an immediate national lockdown, it's difficult to see how the prime minister can wait much longer.\n\nAsked what further restrictions would be put in place, Mr Johnson said: \"What we have been waiting for is to see the impact of the tier four measures on the virus and it is a bit unclear, still, at the moment.\n\n\"But if you look at the numbers, there is no question that we are going to have to take tougher measures and we will be announcing those in due course.\"\n\nHe said the faster-spreading coronavirus variant that has developed in south-eastern England required \"extra-special vigilance\".\n\nBBC science editor David Shukman said new measures could include limits on outdoor exercise and a return to the two-metre (rather than one-metre-plus) social distancing rule, as applied during the first lockdown last year.\n\nSpeaking on a visit to Chase Farm Hospital in north London, the prime minister argued that closing primary schools must remain a \"last resort\", adding that the \"risk to kids\" was \"very, very small\".\n\nSecondary schools in England are currently closed until 18 January, except for pupils in their final GCSE and A-level years, who are due to return on 11 January.\n\nAsked whether they could remain closed, Mr Johnson said: \"We are keeping things under review.\"\n\nBut former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt urged the government to close all schools and UK borders \"right away\", while banning \"all household mixing\".\n\nThe Conservative MP, who now chairs the Commons Health Committee, said these restrictions should be \"time-limited\" to \"12 weeks or so\", after which the roll-out of vaccines would provide \"light at the end of the tunnel\".\n\nMore than 500,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine are now available for use, with the Pfizer BioNTech jab having been issued since early last month.\n\nThe virus is winning at the moment, despite science fighting back with a vaccine. New daily cases of Covid have been rising to record levels, which means hospital numbers and deaths will increase too.\n\nMinisters say more measures are coming, but it is not clear yet what that will mean in practice.\n\nScotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are already in lockdown, and most of England is under tier four rules.\n\nIn recent days the focus has shifted to schools and whether they can be kept open without making the epidemic worse.\n\nExperts agree that the risk the virus poses to children is still low, but they can spread the disease.\n\nWith a new, more transmissible variant of Covid circulating, the government may have to enact this unpalatable \"last resort\" of closing classrooms.\n\nSome 78% of the population of England is now in tier four, under which non-essential shops are closed and people can only leave their homes for a certain number of reasons.\n\nThe Scottish government meets later to consider \"further action\", with all of mainland Scotland currently under its own level four restrictions - only some islands are under less stringent tier three measures.\n\nWales entered a nationwide lockdown on 20 December, while Northern Ireland is in the second week of a six-week lockdown that began on Boxing Day.\n\nIn another development, an academic has said there is a \"big question mark\" over whether a vaccine developed at Oxford University will be as effective against a new variant of the virus that has emerged in South Africa.\n\nProf Sir John Bell, Regius professor of medicine at the university, said the team there were currently investigating this question \"right now\".\n\nHe added it was \"unlikely\" the variant would \"turn off the effect of vaccines entirely\", and in any case it would be possible to tweak the vaccine in around four to six weeks.\n\nBut Matt Hancock told Today he was \"incredibly worried\" about the South African variant, saying: \"This is a very, very significant problem.\"\n\n\"We have shown that we are prepared to move incredibly quickly, within 24 hours if we think that is necessary, and we keep these things under review all the time,\" added the health secretary.", "Quote Message: The return of lockdown for at least the rest of January is a severe blow for much of the Scottish economy. It could be worse: this is not the peak Christmas season for retail and hospitality, though the season they’ve just had was very hard going for many, and non-existent for others. This is also the quietest part of the tourism year, so January is a relatively good month to lose one’s bookings. For many firms, it is better than last spring, because they have infection controls in place. And there is a less harsh closure scheme, meaning construction sites and others can stay open, subject to tight rules. Many employers have settled into patterns of working from home, so this does not carry the shock of last March. There was little expectation of getting staff back into offices for months yet. But that doesn’t make this time any easier for workers who are also parents. They know, from last year, how tough it is to handle childcare and lessons while schools are shut - and this time, they have to manage without good weather. The other, more negative comparison with last spring is that firms now are, typically, deeper in debt and with less spare cash to pay the bills that don’t stop - rent, and utility bills, for instance. Some delayed payments are getting tougher to keep on hold. Their frustration with the slow movement of government grant schemes is showing. They aren’t disputing the case for further lockdown but they are making their own case for support through it, and for a recovery strategy once restrictions are lifted, including a boost to consumer confidence and spending.\" from Douglas Fraser Scotland business & economy editor\n\nThe return of lockdown for at least the rest of January is a severe blow for much of the Scottish economy. It could be worse: this is not the peak Christmas season for retail and hospitality, though the season they’ve just had was very hard going for many, and non-existent for others. This is also the quietest part of the tourism year, so January is a relatively good month to lose one’s bookings. For many firms, it is better than last spring, because they have infection controls in place. And there is a less harsh closure scheme, meaning construction sites and others can stay open, subject to tight rules. Many employers have settled into patterns of working from home, so this does not carry the shock of last March. There was little expectation of getting staff back into offices for months yet. But that doesn’t make this time any easier for workers who are also parents. They know, from last year, how tough it is to handle childcare and lessons while schools are shut - and this time, they have to manage without good weather. The other, more negative comparison with last spring is that firms now are, typically, deeper in debt and with less spare cash to pay the bills that don’t stop - rent, and utility bills, for instance. Some delayed payments are getting tougher to keep on hold. Their frustration with the slow movement of government grant schemes is showing. They aren’t disputing the case for further lockdown but they are making their own case for support through it, and for a recovery strategy once restrictions are lifted, including a boost to consumer confidence and spending.\"", "Northern Ireland's First Minister Arlene Foster has said there \"is a gateway of opportunity\" for the UK and Northern Ireland after Brexit.\n\nShe told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that the trade deal also tackled \"some of the great difficulties that there are with the (Northern Ireland) Protocol\".\n\nThe purpose of the Protocol is to prevent a hardening of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It does that by keeping Northern Ireland in the EU's single market for goods and by having Northern Ireland apply EU customs rules at its ports.\n\nAs a result, an 'Irish Sea border' now exists, with most commercial goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain requiring a customs declaration.\n\nThe Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which Mrs Foster leads, opposed the protocol and had criticised the establishment of such a border. She told The Andrew Marr show that her party \"didn't want the protocol but it is here\".\n\n\"I have to mitigate against that and my job from now on is to mitigate against those excesses and to hold the government to account,\" Mrs Foster added.", "Last updated on .From the section Sport\n\nProfessional sport in England can continue behind closed doors, despite a new national lockdown announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.\n\nIt means Premier League football and elite leagues in other sports are allowed to carry on.\n\nThe sport and leisure rules in England are similar to those announced in Scotland earlier on Monday.\n\nPeople living in England have been told to stay at home and schools will shut for most pupils from Tuesday.\n\nOn Monday, the UK recorded more than 50,000 new confirmed Covid cases for the seventh day in a row.\n\nFor those in England, exercising outside is allowed once a day. Venues such as gyms, tennis courts and golf courses will be closed.\n\nOrganised outdoor sport for disabled people is exempt from the new measures.\n\nGames and training in non-elite football - which includes all adult and youth grassroots, except for disabled people - have been suspended.\n\nThe Women's FA Cup is among the non-elite competitions placed on hold. All but one of the second-round matches scheduled to take place on Sunday were postponed because of Covid-19 regulations.\n\nTeams from the Women's Super League and Women's Championship enter the draw from the fourth round onwards.\n\nWhich non-elite football has been suspended? Steps three to six of the National League System (all divisions below the National League North and South) Tiers three to seven of the Women's Football Pyramid (all divisions below the Women's Championship) Women's FA Cup (classified as 'non-elite' up to and including the third round) All indoor and outdoor youth and adult grassroots football, including under-18s (except organised outdoor football for disabled people, which is allowed to continue)\n\nFollowing Monday's announcement by the prime minister, this week's sporting fixtures in England are set to go ahead as planned.\n\nIn football, the Carabao Cup semi-finals are being played on Tuesday and Wednesday, while the FA Cup third round - which has 32 fixtures spanning four days - starts on Friday.\n\nThere are also several Women's Super League, English Football League and National League games set to take place, as well as English Premiership and Premier 15s rugby union matches, plus the Masters snooker event in Milton Keynes.\n\nEarlier on Monday, Rochdale chief executive David Bottomley said he believes it is \"inevitable\" that the EFL will have to temporarily suspend fixtures because of rising coronavirus cases.\n\nSeven of last Saturday's EFL games - and 52 across the season - have been called off as teams are affected by the virus.\n\nFour Premier League matches have also been postponed this season because of coronavirus cases.\n\nWhat does the new lockdown mean for sport in England?\n\nThe UK government published its guidance for England's new national lockdown shortly after the prime minister's televised address at 20:00 GMT.\n\nHere are the points relating to sport and physical activity:\n• None Elite sportspeople (and their coaches if necessary, or parents/guardians if they are under 18) - or those on an official elite sports pathway - to compete and train\n• None Outdoor sports courts, outdoor gyms, golf courses, outdoor swimming pools, archery/driving/shooting ranges and riding arenas must also close\n• None Organised outdoor sport for disabled people is allowed to continue\n\nWhile golfing has been allowed to continue in Scotland under strict rules, courses will be closed in England.\n\nEngland Golf said it was \"extremely disappointed\" with the decision, adding it had made a \"strong case\" to keep the sport open in recent months.\n\nWhere can I exercise and who can I exercise with?\n\nYou can exercise in a public outdoor place:\n• None with the people you live with\n• None with your support bubble ( if you are legally permitted to form one)\n• None or, when on your own, with one person from another household\n• None public gardens (whether or not you pay to enter them)\n\nUK Active, a not-for-profit organisation that promotes health and fitness, says the government must act immediately to \"minimise the damaging impact of lockdown\".\n\n\"We know from the millions of people that depend on gyms, pools, and leisure centres to support their physical and mental health, how essential they are,\" said UK Active chief executive Huw Edwards.\n\n\"We cannot afford to wait until the vaccine rollout is advanced before we act, so the government must explore all options at this time and provide a credible plan for maintaining this support to millions of people who rely on these Covid-secure facilities to stay strong and healthy.\n\n\"Furthermore, the UK governments must protect this sector before it becomes too late.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nBoris Johnson must bring back \"the spirit of March\" to get control of coronavirus in England, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has said.\n\nSir Keir said the virus was \"out of control\" and a second \"national lockdown\" - including the closure of all schools - was needed.\n\nThe PM had to give a firm \"stay at home message\", Sir Keir told the BBC.\n\nMr Johnson will make a televised address at 20:00 GMT to set out further restrictions amid surging cases.\n\nIt comes as Scotland announced a legal requirement to stay at home from midnight.\n\nSir Keir said Labour would support any move towards tighter restrictions in England, but urged the prime minister to \"stop dithering\" and take action.\n\nThe Labour leader said it was \"inevitable\" that schools would need to close.\n\n\"There is complete chaos, with parents not knowing what is going on. We need to create space for the vaccine now, to be rolled out safely.\n\n\"The virus is out of control. We have got to get it back under control. The more we delay, the worse it will be. The more we delay, the longer schools will be closed.\"\n\nIn March last year, Boris Johnson told people in England they could only leave home to exercise once a day, travel to and from work when it is \"absolutely necessary\", shop for essential items and fulfil any medical or care needs.\n\nCurrently, shops selling non-essential goods have been told to shut and gatherings in public of more than two people who do not live together are prohibited in tier four areas.\n\nSir Keir said the government's message needed to be firmer and backed by law, if necessary, to encourage people to comply.\n\nIn an interview with the BBC's deputy political editor Vicki Young, he urged the country to get back to \"the spirit of March, where there was a very strong stay at home message\".\n\n\"You only need to go out on the streets now and you see lots of people out and about, you see trains that are half full,\" said the Labour leader.\n\n\"We need to go back to where we were in March with very very strong messaging about staying at home.\n\n\"And I'm afraid that the closure of schools is now inevitable, and therefore that needs to be part of that plan, as part of the national plan for further restriction.\n\n\"And that means that we need to have measures in place to protect working parents, most in place to enable children to learn at home, and a plan to get schools safely reopened again and that goes back to vaccination. It must be mission critical now.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Eileen Lynch, 94, was the first person in Northern Ireland to receive the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine\n\nUp to 11,000 people aged over 80 across Northern Ireland are set to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine this week.\n\nThe aim is to ensure everyone in that age group will be offered the vaccine by the end of January.\n\nThirty GP practices will be administering 50,000 doses of the vaccine, which was approved for use in the UK on 30 December.\n\nIt is the second vaccine to be approved in the battle against coronavirus in Northern Ireland.\n\nIt comes ahead of a UK-wide announcement by the prime minister, set to be made at 20:00 GMT on Monday, in which further restrictions will be announced.\n\nIn a statement, a No 10 spokesman said the new variant of Covid-19 had \"led to rapidly escalating case numbers across the country\" and \"further steps must now be taken to arrest this rise\".\n\nOn Monday, Northern Ireland recorded a further 1,801 Covid-19 cases and 12 more virus-related deaths.\n\nThese latest figures from the Department of Health bring the total number of deaths to 1,366, while 79,873 people have tested positive for the virus since the pandemic started.\n\nMore than 12,000 cases have been reported in the past seven days, more than double the week before.\n\nThe seven-day rate per 100,000 people is now 660 positive cases, compared to 200 per 100,000 two weeks ago.\n\nMedical experts believe that is down to the two-week easing of restrictions over the Christmas period.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland on Monday, an additional 6,110 confirmed cases of Covid-19 were announced, with six further deaths linked to the virus.\n\nNorthern Ireland is in the second week of a six-week lockdown in which non-essential retail is closed.\n\nThe first doses of the vaccine were given delivered at a GP surgery on the Falls Road in West Belfast on Monday afternoon.\n\nThe first person in Northern Ireland to receive the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine was 94-year-old Eileen Lynch.\n\nSpeaking after receiving the vaccine, Ms Lynch said she was \"delighted and privileged\" to receive it.\n\n\"I feel like I can really look forward to the year ahead now that I have been vaccinated,\" she said.\n\nThe Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine has already been used to vaccinate care home residents and staff.\n\nBy mid December, 50,000 doses of that vaccine had been made available and by 30 December, Northern Ireland's Department of Health reported that 33,000 people had been vaccinated.\n\nThis included 8,940 care home residents, 10,484 care home staff and 14,259 health and social care staff.\n\nAccording to the latest NI statistics, for the first time the percentage positive cases in the over 80s is down - an indication the vaccination process is working.\n\nThere are approximately 82,000 people over 80 in NI and BBC News NI understands that if deliveries of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine happen as planned, it is thought that all of those over 80, as well as GPs and their staff, could be vaccinated within three weeks.\n\nWhile 50,000 doses have been delivered to Northern Ireland, a further 23,000 vaccines are expected on 19 January while another 68,000 are due on 24 January.\n\nDr Alan Stout, who is a GP in Belfast, told BBC News NI that members are \"very optimistic\" that 11,000 people can be vaccinated this week.\n\nThe Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is the second coronavirus vaccine to be approved in the UK\n\nNI's chief medical officer said the Oxford-AstraZeneca rollout would run alongside the ongoing vaccination programme.\n\nDr Michael McBride said: \"First and foremost we must act to protect those most at risk of severe disease and death.\n\n\"The evidence shows that the initial dose of vaccine offers as much as 70% protection against the effects of the virus.\n\n\"Providing that level of protection on a large scale will have the greatest impact on reducing mortality and hospitalisations, protecting the health and social care system.\"\n\nThe Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine has to be kept at an extremely low temperature which complicates handling constraints.\n\nThe Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is considered easier to store and distribute.\n\nIts rollout consists of two full doses of the vaccine, with the second dose to be given four to 12 weeks after the first.\n\nGPs are appealing to the public to remain calm and wait to be called for their vaccine either by telephone or by letter.\n\nDr Stout said as demand grows worldwide for the vaccine, that schedule could easily change.\n\n\"The public have to be patient, we have a system and must be allowed to get on with it - it really is 'don't call us - we will call you'.\"\n\nWhile some vaccinations will take place in surgeries others will happen in a drive-through system.\n\nCovid-19 is deadlier than flu, which means January 2021 is going to be even tougher than usual.\n\nAlso, Covid patients tend to stay much longer in hospital with more severe symptoms requiring additional beds and care.\n\nBut those rising patient numbers aren't matched by an increased workforce.\n\nInstead it is expected that the nurse-patient ratio will increase (even though many aren't trained to work in critical care) as there simply aren't enough nurses available.\n\nSome health unions fear this will only add to Northern Ireland's excess mortality rate, which is greater than that in Great Britain.\n\nOnce again, this highlights Northern Ireland's failing health care system, which was already below par well before the start of the pandemic.\n\nCoronavirus infection figures here are expected to peak between 15 and 21 January. That will be felt not only in hospitals but also in GP practices as they continue to roll out the vaccine.\n\nWhile at this stage the six weeks look bleak it's hoped that the additional Astra-Zeneca vaccine and the low incidence of flu will go a long way in not only saving lives, but also protecting the health service.\n\nDr Stout said much planning had gone into ensuring the programme happened as smoothly as possible.\n\n\"People will literally stay in their cars and be asked to roll up their sleeves - it has to be safe and efficient in order for us to get through it and safely.\"\n\nThe UK has ordered 100 million doses of the new vaccine - enough to vaccinate 50 million people.\n\nMeanwhile, Dr Tom Black, chair of the British Medical Association in Northern Ireland, said it was \"appalling\" that the Pfizer vaccine was not to be administered in two doses within 21 days as instructed by the company and threatened legal action.\n\nDr Black was responding to news that the UK will give both parts of the Oxford and Pfizer vaccines 12 weeks apart.\n\n\"They have left care workers in Northern Ireland with a gap in their expected immunity,\" he told BBC NI's Radio Foyle on Monday.\n\n\"In that period doctors, nurses, porters or health care professionals could infect patients because they will not be protected against the transmission of the infection to patients.\"\n\nThe UK's chief medical officers have defended their Covid vaccination plan.\n\nThey said getting more people vaccinated with the first jab was \"much more preferable\" and that the great majority of the initial protection from clinical disease is after the first dose of vaccine.\n\nDr Black is to meet NI Health Minister Robin Swann later to express health care workers' concern over the change in vaccine policy.", "Tian Tian arrived in Scotland, along with Yang Guang, from China in 2011\n\nEdinburgh Zoo's giant pandas may have to return to China next year because of financial pressures.\n\nYang Guang and Tian Tian cost about £1m a year to lease from China.\n\nThe zoo, which had hoped to breed the pair, is nearing the end of its 10-year contract with the Chinese government and may be unable to renew the deal.\n\nCovid lockdown closures led to a £2m loss for the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, which runs Edinburgh Zoo and the Highland Wildlife Park.\n\nDavid Field, chief executive of the society, said the charity would have to \"seriously consider every potential saving\", including its giant panda contract.\n\nMr Field said closures had had a \"huge financial impact\" on the charity because most of its income was from visitors.\n\n\"Although our parks are open again, we lost around £2m last year and it seems certain that restrictions, social distancing and limits on our visitor numbers will continue for some time, which will also reduce our income,\" Mr Field said.\n\n\"Yang Guang and Tian Tian have made a tremendous impression on our visitors over the last nine years, helping millions of people connect to nature and inspiring them to take an interest in wildlife conservation.\n\n\"I would love for them to be able to stay for a few more years with us and that is certainly my current aim.\"\n\nYang Guang was given a new enclosure in 2019\n\nThe zoo has already taken a government loan, furloughed staff, made redundancies and launched a fundraising appeal, but was not eligible for the UK government's zoo fund, which was aimed at smaller zoos.\n\n\"The support we have received from our members and animal lovers has helped to keep our doors open and we are incredibly grateful,\" Mr Field added.\n\n\"At this stage, it is too soon to say what the outcome will be. We will be discussing next steps with our colleagues in China over the coming months.\"\n\nThe zoo is part of a number of conservation projects, including one to reintroduce Scottish wildcats.\n\nWork to reintroduce Scottish wildcats in to the Highlands may also suffer from the Zoo's funding problems\n\nHowever, Mr Field said projects like that may also have to be scrapped because of Brexit and being unable to apply for grants from the European Union.\n\n\"We received a £3.2m grant from the EU Life programme to support our Saving Wildcats partnership project, which aims to restore wildcats in Scotland by breeding and releasing them into the wild.\n\n\"Wildcats are on the brink of extinction in Britain and this is the last hope for the species' survival.\"\n\nHe added: \"As we are no longer part of the European Union, our charity is no longer eligible to apply for funding from programmes like EU Life, which have proven critical for our wildlife conservation work and wider efforts to protect animals from extinction.\"\n\nEdinburgh Zoo's conservation genetics laboratory, which supports conservation projects around the world, has lost access to both funding and other researchers as a result.\n\nIt also faces challenges around moving animals, many of which are part of European endangered species breeding programmes.\n\nThe programme is currently about £900,000 short, meaning it may have to be cancelled.\n\nMr Field said: \"We still need to reduce costs to secure our future. It may be that some of our incredibly important conservation projects, including the vital lifeline for Scotland's wildcats, may have to be deferred, postponed or even stopped.\"", "Police rescued 22 people from the snow in Cheshire including a two-year-old child\n\nDozens of people, including a two-year-old child, had to be rescued when they became stranded on rural roads.\n\nPolice and volunteers came to the aid of people whose vehicles were stuck in the Derbyshire Peak District on Saturday.\n\nThere were similar scenes in Cheshire where 22 people, had to be rescued from stranded cars.\n\nThe wintry weather is set to continue with a Met Office warning for ice in the East Midlands and North East.\n\nAt around 20:00 GMT on Saturday, Derbyshire Police reported \"sudden snow\" had left dozens of vehicles and their occupants stranded in the Goyt Valley.\n\nSome visitors to the area were caught off-guard by how quickly the weather changed.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Adam White This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nDerbyshire Police posted on Twitter: \"We are shuttling people back to Buxton as quickly as we can.\n\n\"Sit tight and we will get to you.\"\n\nThe A57 Snake Pass - a road notorious for becoming dangerous in the snow - had been closed earlier in the day because of the weather.\n\nIn Cheshire, police spent three hours helping families stuck in their vehicles in the White Peak area.\n\nIn total 22 people, including eight children - the youngest of whom was two - were recovered from nine vehicles.\n\nCheshire Police Rural Crime Team said: \"The snow had well and truly caught them all out on the back roads.\n\n\"We were three miles (4.8km) from the nearest village, and the light was fading on us quickly.\n\n\"It was decided to get everyone out of their cars and so began a mile walk in the snow.\"\n\nThey were led to a nearby farm where they could be taken to safety in police vehicles.\n\nMost of those rescued from snow in Cheshire had travelled to the area despite coronavirus restrictions\n\nThe force was critical of the families for travelling into the area, that is under tier four coronavirus restrictions.\n\nIt said: \"All except one car was from out of Cheshire. We had people from Sale, Stockport and Salford with the closest being Congleton.\n\n\"Sadly these people have put all of us at risk today.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The Scottish cabinet will meet later to consider further measures to help tackle coronavirus, as 2,464 new cases are reported.\n\nThe Scottish Parliament will then be recalled for First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to make an \"urgent statement\".\n\nMs Sturgeon said the \"rapid increase in Covid cases driven by the new variant\" was of \"very serious concern\".\n\n\"We are in a race between this faster spreading strain of Covid and the vaccination programme,\" she tweeted.\n\nShe warned on Friday that the next few weeks could be the most dangerous period for Scotland since March in the fight against Covid.\n\nThe latest government figures for coronavirus cases showed that 15.2% of Saturday's 17,328 tests were positive.\n\nIt is higher than the 2,137 cases reported on Friday, but still lower than Thursday's 2,539 positive results.\n\nFigures for hospital admissions and deaths over the holiday weekend will not be published until Tuesday.\n\nThe cabinet is likely to consider a further delay to the return of Scottish schools and restrictions that are closer to the stay-at-home lockdown in March.\n\n\"All decisions just now are tough, with tough impacts,\" Ms Sturgeon wrote on twitter. \"Vaccines give us way out, but this new strain makes the period between now and then the most dangerous since start of pandemic.\"\n\nThe Scottish government's emergency resilience committee heard on Saturday that \"quick and decisive action is needed\" as the new variant of the virus is becoming the dominant one in Scotland.\n\nA Scottish government spokesperson said: \"The even steeper rises and severe pressure on the NHS that is being experienced in some other parts of the UK is a sign of what may lie ahead in Scotland if we do not take all possible steps now to slow the spread of the virus, while the vaccination programme progresses.\n\n\"The strong message remains - people should stay at home as much as possible and avoid non-essential interaction with others.\"\n\nThis is just the fifth time the Scottish Parliament has been recalled and the second time within the last week.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Prof Linda Bauld says Scots should be prepared a longer period living with level four restrictions\n\nPublic health expert Prof Linda Bauld, from the University of Edinburgh, has said Scotland should be prepared for Covid restrictions to be extended as infection rates continue to rise.\n\nShe said there were no signs yet that the infection rate was levelling off, having risen suddenly from a daily rate of fewer than 1,000 to more than 2,000 per day in recent days.\n\nShe told BBC Scotland: \"It definitely is a fragile situation and you can see that we have more cases than we would expect at the current time.\n\n\"We may be starting to see some of the impacts of the Christmas mixing, but also we know around four in 10 cases, from recent data, are of the new variant.\n\n\"I would imagine that the new variant is playing a role in these higher rates of infection and if these numbers continue to sit at where they are we are going to have more people in hospital in a week or two's time, and that is very worrying.\"\n\nThe new year offers new hope in the struggle against coronavirus with two vaccines now authorised for UK use - but it looks as if the situation will get worse before it gets better.\n\nMinisters are worried by the rapid spread of the new strain of coronavirus during a holiday period when the highest level of restrictions are already in place.\n\nThey think more needs to be done to suppress the virus, to give the vaccination programme a chance to accelerate and give increasing numbers of people protection.\n\nWhen the Scottish cabinet meets they are likely to consider tightening the current restrictions to something closer to the stay at home lockdown of March 2020.\n\nThat will almost certainly mean a further delay to the return of schools into February.\n\nMinisters will take decisions on Monday morning with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon expected to make a statement at Holyrood in the afternoon.\n\nDaily confirmed cases in Scotland reached record highs on the last three days of 2020, rising to to 2,622 on Thursday.\n\nMs Sturgeon warned last week there might be changes to the plans for reopening schools. Children start online learning from 11 January and are set to return to class by 18 January.\n\nThe education recovery group will meet on Monday.\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said the situation was \"deteriorating and fast-moving\" but any decision to extend school closures should be clearly explained to parents and teachers.\n\nHe said: \"We have been here before so if schools remain closed, the Scottish government must show that it has learned from past mistakes in order to minimise disruption to education.\"\n\nScottish Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie said the Scottish government should prioritise teachers and school staff as vaccines were rolled out.\n\nHe added: \"We must be honest and accept that most pupils, teachers and support staff cannot go back to schools until the situation is brought under control.\"\n\nScottish Labour leader Richard Leonard called for ministers to publish the evidence behind all of its decisions to ensure public consent and compliance.\n\n\"What is clear is that we need to see an acceleration of the vaccine rollout and a step-change in testing,\" he said.\n\n\"It is also clear that financial support from government has simply not been nearly sufficient to make up for the damage that lockdown measures have done to jobs, livelihoods and businesses. The SNP government must distribute additional funds to the frontline now.\"\n\nScottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie said: \"With tighter restrictions on movement and in schools comes a greater responsibility on the government to show its workings.\n\n\"If we are to restrict people's movement then we need to see what the benefit will be. We need an exit plan to give people hope, as well as to show them what is required to ease the restrictions on our freedoms.\"", "Some schools are due to reopen this week in Wales\n\nSchools are being given a flexible approach to ensure a \"safe return\", according to Wales' first minister.\n\nMark Drakeford said experts would be \"looking at all the evidence again early next week\".\n\nUnions have called for a national decision on reopening schools rather than leaving it to local councils.\n\nAccording to local authorities many secondary schools aim to return from 11 January, with some fully open on 6 January.\n\nA joint statement from nine unions called on the Welsh Government to give a \"centralised, coherent response\" regarding all educational settings \"rather than leaving decisions at local levels\".\n\nThe statement from ASCL Cymru, GMB, NAHT Cymru, NASUWT Cymru, NEU Cymru, Ucac, Unison, Unite and Voice continued: \"We are extremely worried that schools will be opening for face-to-face learning from next Monday, whilst Welsh Government continues to gather information about the nature and impact of the new variant of Covid-19...\n\n\"We strongly believe that we need to err on the side of caution and ensure, in advance, that we have the medical 'evidence and information' to ensure that any decisions are the correct ones.\"\n\nThe National Education Union Cymru has called for in-person learning to be delayed until at least 18 January.\n\nThe NASUWT has also threatened \"appropriate action in order to protect members whose safety is put at risk\", while head teachers' union NAHT Cymru said it had taken legal action.\n\nBut Mr Drakeford said: \"We reached an agreement with our local education colleagues that in Wales we will have a phased and flexible return to school.\"\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said on Sunday parents should send their children to primary school as long as they are open in their area.\n\nMark Drakeford: \"No evidence that young people get the illness more severely as a result of the variant\"\n\nJackie Parker, head of Crickhowell High School in Powys, which reopens for some form years from Wednesday, said \"it would have been more sensible to have had a national decision for the time being until the 18th\".\n\nShe said it would have allowed time to see if cases of Covid had increased over the holiday period.\n\n\"People may have been together during the Christmas holiday,\" she said.\n\nFigures published by Public Health Wales on Sunday showed 56 new deaths from Covid and 4,011 new cases of the virus.\n\nWales has been in lockdown since 20 December with restrictions on people meeting others on all but Christmas Day when it was limited to another household and a person living alone.\n\nMr Drakeford said: \"There is no evidence that young people get the illness more severely as a result of the variant.\n\n\"Our technical advisory group will be looking at all the evidence again early next week.\n\n\"And, of course, we will continue to make decisions in the light of the best knowledge, research and information that's available to us at the time,\" he told BBC Radio Wales' Sunday Supplement.\n\nHe also said mass testing in schools would begin as planned this month, in a decision which has been criticised by NAHT Cymru.\n\n\"It will allow more children and more teachers to stay safely in the classroom without having to be sent home because another child or another staff member has tested positive,\" he said.\n\nThe joint unions' statement also said the Welsh Government's testing proposals were unworkable for most schools.\n\n\"Due to the chaotic and rushed nature of this announcement, the lack of proper guidance, and an absence of appropriate support, the Welsh Government's proposals will be inoperable for most schools and colleges,\" it said.\n\nThe statement continued: \"Any suggestion that schools can safely recruit, train and organise a team of suitable volunteers to staff and run testing stations on their premises by an as yet unspecified date in the new term is simply not realistic.\"\n\nSian Gwenllian, Plaid Cymru's education spokeswoman, said \"parents and teachers need to know what the plan is for the next few weeks\".\n\n\"We don't really know very much about this new variant in the way that it transmits within the school community,\" she said.\n\n\"And if it is becoming inevitable that schools will have to close, well, an early decision is better for everybody.\"\n\nWelsh Conservative education spokeswoman Suzy Davies said: \"We've had conflicting reports in the press and on social media about the effect of the new variant on younger children and their role in transmitting the disease - complete confusion reigns...\n\n\"The Welsh Government hasn't succeeded in reassuring teachers and in some cases parents as well.\"", "Economy Minister Diane Dodds has written to Cabinet Office Secretary Michael Gove to call for urgent action to be taken on deliveries to NI.\n\nSince Christmas some orders have been cancelled or delayed and some retailers have suspended deliveries.\n\nThe problem is related to uncertainty about post-Brexit transition rules.\n\nHM Customs announced a grace period on New Year's Eve confirming most parcels from GB-NI will not need customs declarations until at least April.\n\nThe problems have not affected all companies with many continuing to take orders and deliver as normal.\n\nHowever, some companies had already suspended deliveries, including John Lewis.\n\nThe government said the three-month grace period \"recognises the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland, the impacts of any disruption to parcel movements in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and specific challenges for operators moving express consignments\".\n\nA government spokesman said further details will be published in the new year, adding: \"Our priority is to have a pragmatic approach that allows us to comply with the [Northern Ireland] Protocol without causing undue disruption to businesses and citizens.\n\n\"HMRC is engaging with operators to finalise arrangements.\"\n\nSome changes have already come into effect.\n\nA Northern Ireland-based business receiving goods valued at £135 or more through an express carrier or Royal Mail will need to submit a customs declaration.\n\nThey will need to do this within three months of receiving the goods and can use the government's Trader Support Service to do so.\n\nExcise goods, which mostly refers to alcoholic drinks, will also need a declaration when being sent from GB to NI.\n\nThe government has advised retailers of those goods to contact their delivery company.\n\nIt said: \"They will then tell you if they carry the type of goods you want to send and, if they do, they will ask you to provide any additional information that they need so that a declaration can be made.\"", "About 10 UK nationals resident in Spain say they were wrongly turned back when their flight landed in Barcelona.\n\nThey left Heathrow on the Saturday morning British Airways flight, but were refused entry on arrival.\n\nThey were stopped by border police and ultimately flown back to the UK.\n\nSpain has banned all but Spanish nationals and residents flying from the UK to Spain since 22 December in the hope of containing the spread of the new UK strain of Covid-19.\n\nOne passenger on the flight, who did not wish to be named, said that those on board had been told repeatedly that only Spanish nationals or residents would be allowed to enter the country and that their residency certificates, also known as green certificates, were shown to airline staff several times.\n\nHowever, on arrival, British passengers with green residency certificates were prevented from entering Spain.\n\nBA has confirmed that about 10 people were denied entry into Barcelona, as they did not meet the Spanish authorities' required criteria.\n\nOne of those affected, Ruth O'Leary, said: \"I was very confused, obviously. I asked them what other documents I could provide.\n\n\"They seemed to be just flat-out refusing anything I had and just wouldn't let me on the flight. Very upsetting really.\n\n\"Quite an awful feeling not to be able to go back to your own house and to not really be given an explanation why you can't go home.\"\n\nOther British expat passengers have also said that they have been stopped from boarding planes to Spain.\n\nOne passenger on board said that seven British citizens were prevented from boarding a British Airways/Iberia flight from Heathrow to Madrid on Saturday evening, despite having their green residency certificates, as well as negative Covid tests.\n\nThe exact number of flights and passengers affected has not been released by the Foreign Office.\n\nIn a statement on Monday, Iberia said that on 1 January, it received an email from the border police saying that registration as a European citizen was no longer considered to be a valid document to prove legal residency in Spain as a British citizen.\n\nHowever, by 19:30 on 2 January, the airline received a second email, confirming that the document could be used if it had not expired.\n\nA British Airways spokesperson said: \"In these difficult and unprecedented times with dynamic travel restrictions, we are doing everything we can to help and support our customers.\"\n\nThe Spanish Embassy in London tweeted a letter stating it was aware that during the current travel restrictions, there had been some problems for British nationals resident in Spain who had not been allowed to return.\n\nThe embassy clarified that green certificates were valid proof of residency.\n\nThe Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: \"We have worked closely with the Spanish government to resolve these issues.\n\n\"The Spanish Embassy in London has re-confirmed today that both the green residence certificate and the new residence TIE card [Photo-ID card] are equally valid in terms of proving residence in Spain, as set out in the [Brexit] Withdrawal Agreement.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Olly Stephens was pronounced dead in Bugs Bottom fields in Emmer Green, Reading\n\nFour boys and a girl have been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder after a 13-year-old boy was stabbed to death in Reading.\n\nOliver Stephens, known as Olly, was pronounced dead at Bugs Bottom fields, Emmer Green, on Sunday.\n\nThe five teenagers, all aged 13 or 14, remain in custody, according to Thames Valley Police.\n\nDet Supt Kevin Brown said: \"Our thoughts remain with Olly's family at this incredibly difficult time.\"\n\nHe added: \"This is a tragic and shocking incident which has resulted in the death of a young boy.\"\n\nThe victim's family are being supported by specially trained officers.\n\nFloral tributes to Olly have been left outside Highdown School\n\nHighdown School and Sixth Form Centre said it was \"reeling from the tragic news\".\n\nIn a statement, head teacher Rachel Cave said: \"This student was part of our community and many students and staff knew him well.\n\n\"For a life to be ended at such a young age is a total tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.\"\n\nThe school, in Emmer Green, said it was arranging counselling support for students and setting up an electronic book of condolence.\n\nThames Valley Police said a \"considerable police presence\" would be in place in the area for several days\n\nOfficers were called just before 16:00 GMT on Sunday following reports of an attack.\n\nOfficers are appealing for anyone who was in the area between 15:00 and 16:30 who might have taken photos or camera footage to contact them if they notice anything suspicious.\n\nDet Supt Brown said he believed there would have been witnesses to the \"dreadful incident\" as the area is popular with dog walkers.\n\nA man said his wife was walking their dog through the park on Sunday afternoon when she saw a boy on the ground with several people around him trying to give him first aid.\n\nAnother dog walker said she saw a group of young people standing in the woods in Bugs Bottom fields at about 15:30 and described it as \"slightly unusual\".\n\nReading East MP Matt Rodda has offered his \"deepest condolences\" to the boy's family.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Matt Rodda This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSt Barnabas Church in Emmer Green has invited residents to pray and light a candle in memory of the boy.\n\nFollow BBC South on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to south.newsonline@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Margaret Ferrier admitted travelling back from London to Glasgow after testing positive for coronavirus\n\nScottish MP Margaret Ferrier has been arrested by police after she admitted using public transport while infected with Covid-19.\n\nMs Ferrier apologised for what she called a \"blip\" in September.\n\nShe was suspended from the SNP group at Westminster and leaders, including First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, urged her to quit as an MP over the row.\n\nPolice Scotland said she had been charged in connection with \"alleged culpable and reckless conduct\".\n\nMs Ferrier apologised in September after travelling from London to Glasgow having tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nThe Rutherglen and Hamilton West MP said she had experienced \"mild symptoms\" and taken a test, but had then decided to travel to Westminster because she was \"feeling much better\".\n\nShe then travelled home again on a train after receiving the positive test result, and said she \"deeply regretted\" her actions.\n\nA Police Scotland spokesman said: \"We can confirm that officers today arrested and charged a 60-year-old woman in connection with alleged culpable and reckless conduct.\n\n\"This follows a thorough investigation by Police Scotland into an alleged breach of coronavirus regulations between 26 and 29 September 2020.\n\n\"A report will be sent to the procurator fiscal and we are unable to comment further.\"\n\nMs Ferrier has been contacted for comment.", "The prime minister has said that tougher measures could be needed to help cope with a surge in coronavirus cases.\n\nHe has not yet said whether we will need school closures, or even overnight curfews like those imposed in France.\n\nBut clues about such measures to tackle the new more infectious variant come from the government's Sage advisory committee.\n\nThe headline is that whether we see a return to only being allowed one form of daily outdoor exercise, or stricter controls on travel around the country, we'll be hearing a lot more about something already very familiar: hand hygiene, social distancing, wearing masks and ensuring there is fresh air.\n\nThese may sound familiar but the advisers believe that because the new variant spreads so easily, the measures need to be applied with \"a step change in rigour\" - in other words, a lot more forcefully.\n\nThey suggest considering a return to the two-metre rule because it's more effective than the one-metre plus guidance adopted last year.\n\nMasks need to be made of three layers, not just one, and worn in more locations than now - including workplaces, schools and crowded outdoor spaces.\n\nThe key message is that it is vital to reduce social contact - being close to people, especially indoors for long periods of time, carries the highest risk of infection.\n\nSo expect tier four-type bans on visiting other households to become normal.\n\nThe advisers also say many people still do not recognise the key symptoms of Covid-19 - so ministers need to spell them out and help people understand why they should self-isolate.\n\nBut they also say it is essential to praise the efforts made so far, to recognise sacrifices and emphasise how they've kept infection numbers lower than they would otherwise have been.\n\nWhatever new measures are picked, the advice to ministers is to offer \"clear and convincing explanations\" to motivate people.\n\nThat could be a hint that the government's current \"hands, face, space\" slogan may need to make way for something stronger.", "The Queen said she wished Woman's Hour \"continued success\" in the programme's \"important work\"\n\nThe Queen has sent her \"best wishes\" to Woman's Hour to mark the BBC Radio 4 show's 75th year.\n\nThe 94-year-old noted that the show had \"played a significant part in the evolving role of women\".\n\n\"As you celebrate your 75th year, it is with great pleasure that I send my best wishes to the listeners and all those associated with Woman's Hour,\" she said in a letter sent to the programme.\n\nEmma Barnett read out the message on her first day as the show's presenter.\n\n\"During this time, you have witnessed and played a significant part in the evolving role of women across society, both here and around the world,\" the Queen added in her message.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Presenter Emma Barnett reads a message from Her Majesty to Woman's Hour listeners.\n\n\"In this notable anniversary year, I wish you continued success in your important work as a friend, guide and advocate to women everywhere.\"\n\nSpice Girl Melanie C also performed a rendition of The Beatles track Here Comes the Sun, after presenter Barnett had declared that 2021 \"has to be better\" than the previous year.\n\nLater, guest Imelda Staunton, who will play Her Majesty in the upcoming series five of Netflix's royal drama, The Crown, described her as being like \"the original Spice Girl\".\n\n\"The Queen, you think, might be an original Spice Girl because girl power is what she is,\" said the actress, who is due to take over the role from Olivia Colman. \"She became the head of state and all that sort of thing.\n\n\"It's the continuity of The Queen that has been so important... Whether you're a royalist or not, this person has got up and gone to work every day for 60 years, and I sort of admire that.\"\n\nLast month, the Queen used her Christmas Day message to reassure anyone struggling without friends and family this year that they \"are not alone\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe message helped to mark a memorable opening day in the hot seat for Barnett, which also saw her discuss Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian under house arrest in Tehran, with her husband Richard and the MP and former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt.\n\nBarnett - known for hosting Newsnight and shows on 5 Live - has replaced Jane Garvey, who presented her final edition of Woman's Hour after 13 years last week, saying the programme \"needs to move on, and now it can\".\n\nGarvey's exit came three months after her co-host Dame Jenni Murray also left the long-running show after 33 years.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Emma Barnett This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nBarnett's 5 Live show has been taken over by BBC Breakfast presenter Naga Munchetty, who also broadcast her first show on Monday.\n\nMunchetty told listeners she was \"absolutely delighted to be here with you on the first Monday of 2021\".\n\n\"I am so excited to be on board with you on this, the morning show we are making together,\" she added. \"We are going to get to know each other, I promise. There is so much to talk about.\"\n\nEmma Barnett interviewed former prime minister Theresa May on her 5 Live show\n\nWoman's Hour is a topical, conversation-led programme; Barnett has a strong news pedigree. Her previous 5 Live show involved thorough interrogation of politicians, and she has made no secret of her love of politics, not least in her outings on Newsnight.\n\nIt doesn't get any bigger than the Queen, obviously. Interestingly, the other big 'get' for her first show is Sonia Khan, former special adviser to the Chancellor.\n\nSo Barnett's first show indicates very clearly that she will make Woman's Hour newsier and more political.\n\nIt's also a safe bet that short, visual clips of the kind that allowed Barnett's 5 Live show to dramatically increase its impact will also be a big feature of her time in the job.\n\nOne early challenge: getting an even bigger name for next Monday. Any thoughts?\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "The lockdown announcement contained the clearest indication yet of how quickly the government hopes to vaccinate the at risk groups.\n\nA target of mid February for vaccinating all the over 70s and those deemed extremely clinically vulnerable and frontline health and care staff opens up a pathway to a significant easing of restrictions by the start of March.\n\nBut it will require a rapid acceleration in vaccination rates.\n\nSo far nearly one million people have been vaccinated.\n\nBy the end of the week that number is expected to double.\n\nThe hope is that later in January two million doses a week will be given.\n\nThat will be the minimum needed – there are around 12 million in those priority groups.\n\nBy vaccinating them, there is the potential to prevent close to nine in 10 deaths.\n\nBut achieving that requires a lot to go right.\n\nThere is enough vaccine in the country to vaccinate that many people, but not all of it has been through the final “fill and finish” process which involves packaging it in glass vials (and there is a shortage of those) and then the batches have to be checked and signed off by the regulator – a process that is taking weeks at the moment.\n\nAnd all of that is before it is sent out to the NHS vaccination centres to inject it into people’s arms.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Prof Linda Bauld says Scots should be prepared a longer period living with level four restrictions\n\nScotland should be prepared for Covid restrictions to be extended as infection rates continue to rise, a public health expert has said.\n\nThe latest government figures show a further 2,137 cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in Scotland on Friday.\n\nProf Linda Bauld described it as a \"fragile situation\", despite the rate dropping below Thursday's 2,539 cases.\n\nThe latest figures for hospital admissions and deaths will not be published until Tuesday.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon warned on Friday that the next few weeks could be the most dangerous period for Scotland since March in the fight against Covid as the new variant of the virus was \"accelerating spread\" across Scotland.\n\nDaily confirmed cases reached record highs on the last three days of 2020, rising to to 2,622 on Thursday.\n\nThe percentage of positive cases also reached 14.4% on Wednesday - the highest it has been since the second wave of the pandemic began in the summer.\n\nIt had dropped to 10.8% on Friday. A percentage of lower than 5% is needed to show the virus is under control, according to the WHO.\n\nProf Bauld, a public health expert at the University of Edinburgh, said there were no signs yet that the infection rate was levelling off, having risen suddenly from a daily rate of fewer than 1,000 to more than 2,000 per day in recent days.\n\nShe told BBC Scotland: \"It definitely is a fragile situation and you can see that we have more cases than we would expect at the current time.\n\n\"We may be starting to see some of the impacts of the Christmas mixing, but also we know around four in 10 cases, from recent data, are of the new variant.\n\n\"I would imagine that the new variant is playing a role in these higher rates of infection and if these numbers continue to sit at where they are we are going to have more people in hospital in a week or two's time, and that is very worrying.\"\n\nAll of mainland Scotland is under level four restrictions in an attempt to slow down the rate of virus spread\n\nThis would bring \"real challenges\" for hospitals, especially in the central belt, Prof Bauld said, adding that it was \"absolutely imperative that we do not see these number rise more than they are now\".\n\nShe said it would take some time to see the impact of level four restrictions introduced in mainland Scotland on Boxing Day.\n\n\"Mentally we just need to be prepared for the fact that we may be living with the level four restrictions for longer than the Scottish government currently plans,\" Prof Bauld said.\n\nShe said the new, more transmissible coronavirus variant would make it harder to get the R number below one in Scotland and schools may not be able to fully reopen on 18 January.\n\nThe government's education recovery group was preparing with schools for blended learning to go on longer if necessary, she added.\n\nAll of mainland Scotland is under level four restrictions in an attempt to slow down the rate of virus spread.\n\nA new study by London's Imperial College has found that the new variant of Covid-19 is \"hugely\" more transmissible than the virus's previous version.\n\nIt concludes that the new variant increases the Reproduction or R number by between 0.4 and 0.7.\n\nThe Scottish government's most recent estimate of the R number in Scotland has put it between 0.9 and 1.1. It needs to be below 1.0 for the number of cases to start falling.\n\nThe government has described the vaccination programme as a \"light at the end of the tunnel\" and has urged people to stay at home as much as possible in the meantime.", "Security has been stepped up in Niger's Tillabéri region, where the two villages are situated\n\nNiger's prime minister says 100 people are now known to have been killed in Saturday's attacks by suspected jihadists on two villages.\n\nBrigi Rafini said 70 people were killed in the village of Tchombangou and 30 others in Zaroumdareye - both near Niger's border with Mali.\n\nIt was one of the deadliest days in living memory, as Niger grapples with ethnic violence and Islamist militancy.\n\nNo group has said it carried out the attacks.\n\nAccording to local mayor Almou Hassane, those responsible travelled on \"about 100 motorcycles,\" AFP news agency reports.\n\nThey split into two groups and carried out the attacks simultaneously.\n\nFormer minister Issoufou Issaka told AFP that jihadists launched the assaults after villagers killed two of their group members, though this hasn't been officially confirmed.\n\nMayor Hassane said 75 other villagers were left wounded in the aftermath, and some have been evacuated for treatment in Ouallam and the capital, Niamey.\n\nPrime Minister Rafini visited both of the villages on Sunday.\n\n\"This situation is simply horrible... but investigations will be conducted so that this crime does not go unpunished,\" he told reporters.\n\nNiger's Tillabéri region lies within the so-called tri-border area between Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, which has been plagued by jihadist attacks for many years.\n\nNiger's Prime Minister Brigi Rafini visited the two villages on Sunday\n\nLast month, seven Nigerien soldiers were killed in an ambush in the region.\n\nAreas of Niger are also facing repeated attacks by jihadists from neighbouring Nigeria, where the government is fighting an insurgency by Boko Haram.\n\nAs part of efforts to quell the violence, France has been leading a coalition of West African and European allies against Islamist militants in the Sahel.\n\nCoalition forces have become targets, and last week five French soldiers were killed in two separate incidents in Mali.\n\nThe latest attacks in Tillabéri also come amid national elections in Niger, as President Mahamadou Issoufou steps down after two five-year terms.\n\nElection officials announced provisional results on Saturday, showing a lead for Mohamed Bazoum - a former minister and a member of Niger's ruling party.\n\nA second round of votes is expected to be held on 21 February, once ballots have been validated by the country's constitutional court.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nRegional restrictions in England are \"probably about to get tougher\" to curb rising Covid infections, the prime minister has warned.\n\nBoris Johnson told the BBC stronger measures may be required in parts of the country in the coming weeks.\n\nHe said this included the possibility of keeping schools closed, although this is not \"something we want to do\".\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has called for new England-wide restrictions within 24 hours.\n\nSir Keir said coronavirus was \"clearly out of control\" and it was \"inevitable more schools are going to have to close\".\n\nIt comes as the UK recorded more than 50,000 new confirmed Covid cases for the sixth day in a row, with 54,990 announced on Sunday.\n\nAn additional 454 deaths within 28 days of a positive test result have also been reported, meaning the total by this measure is now above 75,000.\n\nSpeaking on BBC One's Andrew Marr Show, Mr Johnson said he stuck by his previous prediction that the situation would be better by the spring, and he hoped \"tens of millions\" would be vaccinated in the next three months.\n\nBut he added: \"It may be that we need to do things in the next few weeks that will be tougher in many parts of the country. I'm fully, fully reconciled to that.\"\n\n\"And I bet the people of this country are reconciled to that because, until the vaccine really comes on stream in a massive way, we're fighting this virus with the same set of tools.\"\n\nThe PM added that ministers had taken \"every reasonable step that we reasonably could\" to prepare for winter, but \"could not have reasonably predicted\" the new, more transmissible variant of the virus that has emerged over the autumn.\n\nSpeaking after Mr Johnson's interview, Sir Keir said introducing new nationwide restrictions in England \"has to be the first step to controlling the virus\".\n\n\"There's no good the prime minister hinting that further restrictions are coming into place in a week or two or three,\" he told reporters on Sunday. \"That delay has been the source of so many problems.\"\n\n\"Let's not have the prime minister saying 'I'm going to do it, but not yet',\" he added.\n\nMeanwhile, Mr Johnson defended plans for primary schools to reopen in most of England on Monday, amid opposition from teaching unions and some local councils.\n\nIt came after Amanda Spielman, the head of Ofsted, England's schools watchdog, said closures should be kept to an \"absolute minimum\".\n\nThe rapidly rising infection rates mean it should come as no surprise that tougher measures are being considered.\n\nInfection levels are nearly four times higher now than they were at the start of December - and that in turn has put more pressure on hospitals.\n\nThere are signs the restrictions have started slowing the rises in London, the East of England and the South East.\n\nBut that on its own is not enough. Ministers want to get cases down.\n\nSo what extra can be done? After all most of England is effectively in lockdown already with tier four in place. Those places not in tier four could, of course, follow.\n\nBut some public health experts are warning more needs to be done.\n\nThere is a determination to get primary school children back - they have among the lowest rates of infection if you look at symptomatic cases.\n\nBut infection rates are higher among secondary school age children. The government has bought itself time by delaying their return.\n\nA further 20 million people in England were added to tier four - \"stay at home\" - the toughest set of rules, on 31 December in a bid to stem a surge in Covid cases.\n\nIt means 78% of the population of England is now in tier four, under which non-essential shops are closed and people can only leave their homes for a certain number of reasons.\n\nThe Scottish government will meet on Monday to consider \"further action\" to limit the spread of the disease, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said.\n\nAll of mainland Scotland is currently under its own level four restrictions - with only some islands under less stringent tier three measures.\n\nWales entered a nationwide lockdown on 20 December, with First Minister Mark Drakeford saying on Sunday it was \"difficult to see\" how the rules could be strengthened further.\n\nHe said Welsh ministers would consider whether restrictions could be \"tweaked at the margins\" at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.\n\nNorthern Ireland is in the second week of a six-week lockdown that began on Boxing Day. Stricter measures, including a \"stay-at-home curfew\", ended on Saturday.\n\nIn another development, an academic has said there is a \"big question mark\" over whether a vaccine developed at Oxford University will be as effective against a new variant of the virus that has emerged in South Africa.\n\nProf Sir John Bell, Regius professor of medicine at the university, said the team there were currently investigating this question \"right now\".\n\nHe added it was \"unlikely\" the variant would \"turn off the effect of vaccines entirely,\" and in any case it would be possible to tweak the vaccine in around 4-6 weeks.\n\n\"Everybody should stay calm - it's going to be fine,\" he told Times Radio.\n\n\"But we're now in a game of cat and mouse - because these are not the only two variants we're going to see.\"", "Former Bond actress and Charlie's Angel Tanya Roberts has died in hospital in Los Angeles at the age of 65.\n\nRoberts appeared with Sir Roger Moore in his final Bond film, 1985's A View To A Kill, and had a recurring role in That '70s Show.\n\nShe also starred in the final series of Charlie's Angels on TV in 1980.\n\nHer death was prematurely announced on Monday, only for doctors to say she was still alive. However, her death was then confirmed on Tuesday.\n\nRoberts had collapsed while walking her dogs on 24 December and was admitted to Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre.\n\nHer partner Lance O'Brien mistakenly thought she had died on Sunday after visiting her in hospital. After getting a call from doctors to say she was deteriorating quickly, he went to her bedside, her eyes closed and she \"faded\", TMZ reported.\n\nDevastated, he walked out of the room and then the hospital without speaking to medical staff before informing Roberts' agent that he had \"just said goodbye to Tanya\".\n\nBut while being interviewed for US TV show Inside Edition on Monday, Mr O'Brien got a call from the hospital to say she was alive.\n\nThe moment was captured on film, as he picked up his phone and said: \"Now you're telling me she's alive? Thank the Lord.\" However, she died on Monday night.\n\nShe appeared in A View To A Kill alongside Sir Roger Moore and singer Grace Jones\n\nBorn Victoria Leigh Blum in 1955, Roberts grew up in New York before moving to Hollywood in 1977.\n\nHer big break came when she replaced Shelly Hack in Charlie's Angels, joining Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd as third 'Angel' Julie.\n\nAfter the show's cancellation, she appeared in such fantasy adventure films as The Beastmaster and Hearts and Armour.\n\nShe also played comic book heroine Sheena in a 1984 film that saw her nominated for a Golden Raspberry award for worst actress.\n\nRoberts received another Razzie nomination for her role as geologist Stacey Sutton in 1985 Bond film A View to a Kill.\n\nRoberts in the title role in Sheena: Queen of the Jungle\n\nShe admitted being \"a little cautious\" about taking the role, but said it would have been \"ridiculous\" to have turned it down.\n\nRoberts' subsequent films included Night Eyes and Inner Sanctum, erotic thrillers that did little to advance her career.\n\nShe went on to play Midge Pinciotti in more than 80 episodes of That '70s Show between 1998 and 2004.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Derby County said several staff members and first-team players tested positive for the virus\n\nChampionship side Derby County has said \"several first-team staff and players\" have tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nIn a statement, the club said it had closed its Moor Farm training ground and was speaking to the EFL and the Football Association about forthcoming fixtures.\n\nThe club said it would not reveal the names of those who had tested positive, due to medical confidentiality.\n\nIt added they would be isolating in line with government guidelines.\n\nThe outbreak at Derby comes after Sheffield Wednesday closed their Middlewood Road training ground following a Covid-19 outbreak at the club.\n\nThe Rams were beaten 1-0 by Wednesday in their most recent match on New Year's Day at Hillsborough.\n\nDerby, who are third from bottom in the Championship, are due to travel to Chorley on Saturday for a third round FA Cup tie.\n\nFormer England striker Wayne Rooney took over as interim manager at Derby after the club sacked former head coach Phillip Cocu in November\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section Cricket\n\nEngland all-rounder Moeen Ali has tested positive for Covid-19 upon the squad's arrival in Sri Lanka.\n\nThe 33-year-old, who tested negative before departure, will now isolate for 10 days in accordance with the Sri Lanka government's quarantine protocol.\n\nFellow all-rounder Chris Woakes has been deemed as a possible close contact, and will observe a period of self-isolation and further testing.\n\nEngland's two-Test tour of Sri Lanka starts in Galle on 14 January.\n\nEngland had lateral flow tests and a PCR test at Hambantota airport upon arrival, with Moeen's PCR test returning the positive.\n\nThe rest of the touring parting will be retested on Tuesday morning, before being allowed to train for the first time on Wednesday.\n\nMoeen is the first England player to test positive for the virus, with a full summer of games against West Indies, Pakistan, Australia and Ireland being completed without any cases.\n\nEngland's last overseas tour, in South Africa, was cut short in December after positive cases in the Cape Town hotel where England were staying. England returned two positive tests - that were later verified as false positives.\n\nLast week England captain Joe Root said he did not expect the tour to be postponed if there were one or two isolated cases of the virus.\n\nSince England's tour of South Africa was called off, Pakistan's tour of New Zealand and Sri Lanka's of South Africa have both continued despite positive cases.\n\nEngland flew on a chartered flight from London to Hambantota on Saturday evening.\n\nAll of the players, and touring party, tested negative before their departure and were sprayed with disinfectant upon their arrival in Sri Lanka.\n\nThe series was scheduled to take place last year but England flew home after the tour was called off on 13 March as the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic took hold.\n\nSri Lanka has seen 44,774 coronavirus infections and 213 deaths during the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.\n\nGiven the circumstances of their abandoned trip to South Africa, this is clearly alarming for England, however it's important to make the distinction between the two tours. In South Africa, they felt their bubble was breached, whereas this is an issue internal to the tourists.\n\nMoeen will be moved to Galle, the location of the two Tests, for his period of isolation, but given that is not due to end until the day before the first match, he must be considered a huge doubt.\n\nEngland have planned for this sort of issue, travelling with seven reserves in addition to the squad of 16. Three of those reserves - Mason Crane, Amar Virdi and Matt Parkinson - are spinners, but have only Crane's one Test cap between them.\n\nAt the moment, England have not discussed promoting a player to the main squad but should they feel the need to supplement frontline spinners Dom Bess and Jack Leach in their Test XI, then an inexperienced name is set for a big opportunity.", "Zara Holland appeared on the second series of Love Island\n\nLove Island star Zara Holland is to be prosecuted for allegedly breaking Covid rules on holiday in Barbados.\n\nIsland police say the former Miss Great Britain is expected to appear in court on Wednesday, accused of \"breaching quarantine\".\n\nStation Sergeant Michael Blackman told Newsbeat she was \"intercepted\" at the airport and later presented herself at a police station.\n\nIt's not clear whether she will appear in court in person or by video link.\n\nAn apology from the 25-year-old for what she described as \"a massive mix-up and misunderstanding\" was published by the Barbados Today website.\n\nShe told the publication: \"I have been a guest of this lovely island in excess of 20 years and would never do anything to jeopardise an entire nation that I have nothing but love and respect for and which has treated me as a family.\"\n\nListen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nEveryone in England must stay at home except for permitted reasons during a new coronavirus lockdown expected to last until mid-February, the PM says.\n\nAll schools and colleges will close to most pupils and switch to remote learning from Tuesday.\n\nBoris Johnson warned the coming weeks would be the \"hardest yet\" amid surging cases and patient numbers.\n\nHe said those in the top four priority groups would be offered a first vaccine dose by the middle of next month.\n\nAll care home residents and their carers, everyone aged 70 and over, all frontline health and social care workers, and the clinically extremely vulnerable will be offered one dose of a vaccine by mid-February.\n\nSchools in Northern Ireland will have an \"extended period of remote learning\", the Stormont Executive said.\n\nSpeaking from Downing Street, Mr Johnson told the public to follow the new lockdown rules immediately, before they become law in the early hours of Wednesday.\n\nAll the new measures in England will then last until at least the middle of February, he said, as a new more infectious variant of the virus spreads across the UK.\n\nThe PM added that he believed the country was entering \"the last phase of the struggle\".\n\nHospitals were under \"more pressure from Covid than at any time since the start of the pandemic\", he said.\n\nAnd he reiterated the slogan used earlier in the pandemic, urging people to immediately \"stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives\".\n\nOn Monday, the UK recorded more than 50,000 new confirmed Covid cases for the seventh day in a row.\n\nA further 58,784 cases and an additional 407 deaths within 28 days of a positive test result were reported, though deaths in Scotland were not recorded.\n\nAs of 08:00 GMT, there were 26,626 Covid-19 patients in hospital in England, according to the latest figures.\n\nThis is a week-on-week increase of 30%, and a new record high.\n\nThose who are clinically extremely vulnerable will be contacted by letter and should now shield once more, Mr Johnson said.\n\nSupport and childcare bubbles will continue under the new measures - and people can meet one person from another household for outdoor exercise.\n\nCommunal worship and life events like funerals and weddings can continue, subject to limits on attendance.\n\nWhile Mr Johnson said end-of-year exams would not take place as normal in the summer, he said alternative arrangements would be announced separately.\n\nThe government has published a 22-page document outlining the new rules in detail.\n\nThe House of Commons has been recalled to allow MPs to vote on the new restrictions on Wednesday.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said his MPs would \"support the package of measures\", saying \"we've all got to pull together now to make this work\".\n\nOnce again it is the threat to the NHS that has forced the hand of ministers.\n\nIn England there has been a 50% rise in the number of patients in hospital with Covid since Christmas day.\n\nTo put that into context, it equates to 18 hospitals being filled.\n\nCurrently around three out of 10 beds are occupied by patients with the disease.\n\nIn some hospitals it is more than six in 10.\n\nBut what is worrying ministers and NHS leaders is that the number is just going to increase.\n\nIn the spring it took nearly three weeks after lockdown for hospital cases to peak.\n\nThe last six days have seen in excess of 50,000 new infections confirmed each day across the UK - a number of these infections are next week's hospital admissions.\n\nIt is why the UK's chief medical officers were warning there was a \"material risk\" of some hospitals being overwhelmed if something did not change.\n\nMr Johnson spoke after UK chief medical officers recommended the Covid threat level be increased to five - its highest level.\n\nLevel five means the NHS may soon be unable to handle a further sustained rise in cases, the medical officers said in a joint statement.\n\nNHS Providers, which represents health service trusts, said hospitals were at a \"critical point\" and that \"immediate and decisive action\" was needed.\n\nAnnouncing tougher measures in Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: \"It is no exaggeration to say that I am more concerned about the situation we face now than I have been at any time since March last year.\"\n\nFor pupils who returned for their first day of the new term at primary school on Monday, it's turned out to be an extremely short-lived visit.\n\nBoris Johnson's announcement will see primary, secondary and further education colleges closed for at least the next six weeks, except for vulnerable and key workers' children.\n\nIt's a much bigger shift in policy than had been anticipated, even a few days ago.\n\nEven the return date will depend on the progress in tackling the virus.\n\n\"I hope we can steadily move out of lockdown, reopening schools after the February half term,\" said the prime minister.\n\nKeeping schools open was the government's most definite of red lines, a few weeks ago they were threatening councils that wanted to close them - but it's now been overtaken by the spiking lines on the Covid infection charts.\n\nEven after the chaos of last year's replacement grades, GCSEs and A-levels are being cancelled again - with a replacement system still to be decided. Vocational exams are to continue.\n\nFor parents dreading home schooling, there are plans for it to be better supported this time - with more computer devices available and suggestions that Ofsted inspectors will check what schools are offering.\n\nBut there's no escaping that this will feel like another sudden and chaotic change of direction for schools and parents.\n\nMr Johnson's pledge on vaccinations comes after an 82-year-old retired maintenance manager became the first person in the UK to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 jab\n\nSome 13.9 million people are among the four priority groups who will receive a vaccine dose by about 15 February, vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. BBC's Laura Foster explains the order in which the Covid vaccine will be given\n\nHow will you be affected by the latest developments? What questions do you have? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "First Minister Arlene Foster and Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill met throughout Monday\n\nThere will be an extended period of remote learning for schools in Northern Ireland, the executive has said.\n\nMinisters met on Monday night as other parts of the UK tightened their coronavirus restrictions.\n\nThe Stormont executive also plans to give its stay at home guidance legal force, with new restrictions on travel.\n\nDeputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill said details would be formalised on Tuesday.\n\nThe health and education ministers will bring separate papers on the issues to the executive at the meeting, she added.\n\nNorthern Ireland's Education Minister Peter Weir had previously announced a staggered return to school for pupils during the month of January.\n\nThe first transfer test, used by many grammar schools to select pupils, is due to take place on Saturday but there have been calls from some teaching unions and political parties for the test to be cancelled this year, in light of the uncertainty with the pandemic.\n\nIn England, all schools and colleges will close to most pupils and switch to remote learning until the middle of February, and end-of-year exams will not take place this summer as normal.\n\nRecommendations on exams in Northern Ireland are also expected to be brought forward by the executive on Tuesday.\n\nIt is understood ministers will update the assembly on Wednesday about their decisions.\n\nFirst Minister Arlene Foster said the new restrictions were unfortunate, but necessary.\n\nShe said she believed the stay-at-home message will be in place \"for the rest of January, probably into February\".\n\n\"We will of course review it, as we're legally bound to do every couple of weeks.\"\n\nShe added that ministers would \"much prefer\" for face-to-face education to continue, but said they had to \"take into account the very serious situation that we find ourselves in tonight.\"\n\nBoth organisations which organise transfer tests will be making announcements on Tuesday, she said.\n\n\"We'll wait to hear what they have to say. They do of course have to abide by public health advice, but they are private organisations and they will make their own announcements.\"\n\nThe Irish government is considering a proposal to close schools for the rest of January.\n\nOn Monday, the Department of Health reported that a further 1,801 people had tested positive for the virus in the past 24 hours.\n\nThere have also been 12 more Covid-19 related deaths.\n\nThese latest figures from the Department of Health bring the total number of deaths to 1,366, while 79,873 people have tested positive for the virus since the pandemic started.\n\nMore than 12,000 cases have been reported in the past seven days, more than double the week before.\n\nThe seven-day rate per 100,000 people is now 660 positive cases, compared to 200 per 100,000 two weeks ago.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland on Monday, an additional 6,110 confirmed cases of Covid-19 were announced, with six further deaths linked to the virus.\n\nScotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has already announced a fresh lockdown there from midnight, with schools closed until February.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio Ulster's Evening Extra programme, Dr Michael McBride said Scotland's measures were \"prudent and sensible\".\n\nMeanwhile, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine rollout has begun in Northern Ireland.\n\nUp to 11,000 people aged over 80 across Northern Ireland are set to receive the this week, with some of the first doses delivered at a GP surgery on the Falls Road in West Belfast on Monday afternoon.\n\nUp to 11,000 people aged over 80 across Northern Ireland are set to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca\n\nThe SDLP has called for the assembly to be recalled on Tuesday to discuss the rolling out of the vaccine.\n\nIt can be recalled if at least 30 MLAs sign a petition.\n\nOn Monday, Justice Minister Naomi Long welcomed the opening of Northern Ireland's first Nightingale venue, which will be used for courts and tribunals business.\n\nThe facility was approved by a meeting of the executive on 17 December, and will sit in the International Convention Centre in Belfast (ICC).\n\nActivity at the centre will be phased in, in line with Covid-19 regulations.\n\nIn other coronavirus-related developments on Monday:", "Gerry Marsden was awarded an MBE in 2003 for services to Liverpudlian Charities.\n\nGerry and the Pacemakers singer Gerry Marsden, whose version of You'll Never Walk Alone became a football terrace anthem for his hometown club of Liverpool, has died at the age of 78.\n\nHis family said he died on Sunday after a short illness not linked to Covid-19.\n\nMarsden's band was one of the biggest success stories of the Merseybeat era, and in 1963 became the first to have their first three songs top the chart.\n\nThe band's other best known hit, Ferry Cross The Mersey, came in 1964.\n\nIt was written by Marsden himself as a tribute to his city, and reached number eight.\n\nMarsden was made an MBE in 2003 for services to charity after supporting victims of the Hillsborough disaster.\n\nAt the time, he said he was \"over the moon\" to have received the honour, following his support for numerous charities across Merseyside and beyond.\n\nGerry Marsden in 2009 on the Mersey ferry, which he made famous with his song Ferry Cross The Mersey, as he received the Freedom of the City in Liverpool\n\nMarsden's daughter, Yvette Marbeck, said he went into hospital on Boxing Day after tests showed he had a serious blood infection that had travelled to his heart.\n\nMs Marbeck told the PA news agency: \"It was a very short illness and too quick to comprehend really.\"\n\nHe died in hospital, Ms Marbeck said, adding: \"He was our dad, our hero, warm, funny and what you see is what you got.\"\n\nLiverpool FC posted on social media that Marsden's words would \"live on forever with us\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Liverpool FC This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nGerry and the Pacemakers worked the same Liverpool club circuit as The Beatles in the 1960s and were signed by the Fab Four's manager Brian Epstein.\n\nEpstein gave Marsden's group the song How Do You Do It, which had been turned down by The Beatles and Adam Faith, for their debut single.\n\nSir Paul McCartney described Gerry and the Pacemakers as The Beatles's \"biggest rivals\" on the Merseyside scene.\n\n\"I'll always remember you with a smile,\" Sir Paul said in his tribute to Marsden.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Paul McCartney This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAnd the other surviving Beatle, Sir Ringo Starr, sent \"peace and love\" to Marsden's family in a tribute on Twitter.\n\nWhile Marsden was a songwriter as well as a singer, his most enduring hit was actually a cover of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical number from 1945, which he had to convince his bandmates to record as their third single.\n\nIn many interviews over the years, he explained how fate played a part in his band ever recording the song. He was watching a Laurel and Hardy movie at Liverpool's Odeon cinema in the early 1960s and, only because it was raining, he decided to stay for the second part of a double feature.\n\nThat turned out to be the film Carousel - which featured that song on its soundtrack - and Marsden was so moved by the lyrics that he became determined that it should become part of his band's repertoire.\n\nIn a 2013 interview, Marsden told the Liverpool FC website how You'll Never Walk Alone was adopted by the club's fans as soon as it topped the chart in 1963: \"I remember being at Anfield and before every kick off they used to play the top 10 from number 10 to number one, and so You'll Never Walk Alone was played before the match. I was at the game and the fans started singing it.\n\n\"When it went out of the top 10 they took the song off the playlist and then for the next match the Kop were shouting 'Where's our song?' So they had to put it back on.\n\n\"Now, every time I go to the game I still get goose pimples when the song comes on and I sing my head off.\"\n\nSir Kenny Dalglish, who managed Liverpool at the time of the Hillsborough tragedy, tweeted that he was \"saddened\" by the news of Marsden's death, and that You'll Never Walk Alone was an \"integral part of Liverpool Football Club, and never more so than now\".\n\nLiverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram posted a tribute on Twitter, saying he was \"devastated\" by the news.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Steve Rotheram This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nGerry was an entertainer. He loved being an entertainer; he loved people seeing him in the street and asking him for his autograph and the like.\n\nHe had a very distinctive voice, and that is terribly important. You knew instantly it was him on those records. He was best on those ballads.\n\nI think he really did them very well indeed. You'll Never Walk Alone was a big show song that had been around for years and years, and lots of people had done it.\n\nJust before Gerry brought his version out, Johnny Mathis brought his out. If that version had been played on the Kop, I don't think the Kop would have taken to it because you couldn't sing along with Johnny Mathis - he had too big a range and too perfect a voice.\n\nBut Gerry sounded like everyman and it was absolutely perfect for the Kop. I think it's the greatest football anthem of the lot.\n\nAs well as being a Liverpool anthem, You'll Never Walk Alone has also been adopted by fans at both Celtic in Scotland and Borussia Dortmund in Germany.\n\nMarsden's career began at legendary live music venue, The Cavern Club, where The Pacemakers played nearly 200 times.\n\nThe club said on Twitter that Marsden was \"not only a legend, but also a very good friend of The Cavern\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by The Cavern Club This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post 4 by The Cavern Club\n\nGerry and The Pacemakers achieved nine hit singles and two hit albums between 1963 and 1965, before splitting up.\n\nMarsden pursued a solo career before the band reformed in 1974 for a world tour.\n\nIn 1985, Marsden was back in the pop spotlight when he was invited to be one of the vocalists of a charity version of You'll Never Walk Alone, which was released to raise funds for victims of a fire at a Bradford City match.\n\nIn doing so, Marsden set another chart record by becoming the first person to sing on two different chart-topping versions of the same song.\n\nSo when, after the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989, the other Pacemakers classic of Ferry Cross The Mersey was chosen to raise funds for its victims and a group of famous Liverpudlian singers was gathered, Marsden was again included and was back at number one once more for a cause he held dear for the rest of his life.\n\nMarsden was awarded the Freedom of Liverpool in April 2009, an occasion he marked by boarding a ferry across the Mersey and getting out his guitar to sing his famous hit which described the scene.", "US casino giant MGM Resorts has made an $11bn (£8.1bn) offer for British gaming company Entain, which owns Ladbrokes.\n\nThe move is the latest attempt by a casino operator to move into the online gambling business.\n\nIn addition to its chain of High Street betting shops, UK-based Entain also owns a number of online sports betting and gambling sites.\n\nEntain confirmed the offer, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, but said the price was too low.\n\nIt had recently rebuffed an earlier $10bn (£7.3bn) all-cash approach from MGM, the newspaper said.\n\nIn a statement, Entain said the latest bid approach \"significantly undervalues the company and its prospects\".\n\nMGM Resorts, which runs the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, now has until the beginning of next month to decide whether to make a formal bid or to walk away.\n\nFTSE 100-listed Entain. which renamed itself from GVC Holdings last month, describes itself as \"one of the world's largest sports betting and gaming groups operating in the online and retail sector\".\n\nAlong with Ladbrokes, it also owns brands such as Bwin, Partypoker, Coral, Eurobet, Gala and Foxy Bingo.\n\nAfter news of the latest offer for the firm, investors started betting on Entain, pushing its share price up by more than 25% to £14.30 a share - above MGM's offer of roughly £13.83 a share - a sign that market watchers are expecting a higher bid.\n\nIf the two firms do reach an agreement, it would follow another deal in September when MGM rival Caesars Entertainment agreed to buy UK-based William Hill for $3.7bn (£2.9bn).\n\n\"Following Caesar's offer for William Hill last year, a bid by MGM for Ladbroke's owner Entain isn't exactly a surprise,\" said Nicholas Hyett an analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.\n\n\"The two are working together to take advantage of the recent legalisation of sports betting in the US, a market worth many billions of dollars a year.\"\n\nPredictions about the stockmarket have a habit of making the person trying to guess the future look foolish. No such problem for Laura Foll, a fund manager at the investment firm Janus Henderson. On the Today programme on Monday, she forecast more takeover offers for household names in Britain, noting that the UK markets remained unloved by investors and so - perhaps - undervalued.\n\nAn hour after the prediction a big offer duly landed, with Entain, the London-listed company that owns Ladbrokes and other gambling brands, saying it had received a takeover proposal from MGM Resorts, an American rival.\n\nThe US company is offering to pay shareholders in Entain not in cash, but in new MGM shares - an obvious move given the sky-high rating of US shares compared to those listed in London.\n\nIt looks a carbon copy of last year's deal where Caesars, best known for its Las Vegas properties, bought another venerable name in British bookmaking, William Hill. Get ready for more acquisitive foreign companies looking for deals in bargain basement London.\n\nThe new bid for Entain comes with financial backing from MGM's largest shareholder, InterActiveCorp (IAC), which took a 12% stake in MGM Resorts last August.\n\nAt the time, IAC's chief executive Barry Diller said it planned to work with MGM to expand its online gambling portfolio.\n\nThe attempted acquisition comes as the casino industry faces headwinds from the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nThe economy of Asian casino hub Macau shrank 49% in the first quarter of this year, while unemployment in Las Vegas reached 30% earlier in the year and remains well above the US average.\n\nMGM Resorts, which is the operator of the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, laid off 18,000 furloughed employees in the US in August.\n\nMany online gambling companies, by contrast, saw a boost during Covid-19 restrictions, prompting many casino owners to pivot their businesses towards online.", "Experts have raised concerns over India's emergency approval of a locally-produced coronavirus vaccine before the completion of trials.\n\nOn Sunday, Delhi approved the vaccine - known as Covaxin - as well as the global AstraZeneca Oxford jab, which is also being manufactured in India.\n\nThe head of Bharat Biotech, which makes Covaxin, defended the approval process, but health experts warn it was rushed.\n\nHealth watchdog All India Drug Action Network said it was \"shocked\".\n\nIt said that there were \"intense concerns arising from the absence of the efficacy data\" as well a lack of transparency that would \"raise more questions than answers and likely will not reinforce faith in our scientific decision making bodies\".\n\nThe statement came after India's Drugs Controller General, VG Somani, insisted Covaxin was \"safe and provides a robust immune response\".\n\nHe added the vaccines had been approved for restricted use in \"public interest as an abundant precaution, in clinical trial mode, to have more options for vaccinations, especially in case of infection by mutant strains\".\n\n\"The vaccines are 100% safe,\" he said, adding that side effects such as \"mild fever, pain and allergy are common for every vaccine\".\n\nThe All India Drug Action Network, however, said it was \"baffled to understand the scientific logic\" to approve \"an incompletely studied vaccine\".\n\nOne of India's most eminent medical experts, Dr Gagandeep Kang, told the Times of India newspaper that she had \"not seen anything like this before\". She added that \"there is absolutely no efficacy data that has been presented or published\".\n\nEven social media users were quick to point out that approving the vaccine before trials were complete was a matter of concern irrespective of how safe or effective the vaccine eventually turned out to be.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Joy This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nBut Krishna Ella, chairman of Bharat Biotech, met reporters on Monday and said the approval of Covaxin had not been rushed. He cited previous examples where emergency authorisation approvals had been given based only on immunogenicity data.\n\n\"Under Indian laws we can get emergency approval for the vaccine based on fulfilling five parameters after Phase 2 trails. That is what has happened with our vaccine. So it is not a premature approval,\" he said.\n\n\"We will complete the Phase 3 trials soon and provide the efficacy data for the vaccine by February.\"\n\nThe company currently has 20 million doses available and plans to produce about 700 million doses this year, Dr Ella said.\n\n\"We have four facilities coming up and we are planning [to make] around 200 million doses in Hyderabad, 500 million doses in other cities.\"\n\nMany scientists and opposition politicians have raised questions over what they say is the hasty authorisation of Covaxin.\n\nBharat Biotech has developed the vaccine with the state-run Indian Council of Medical Research - and the effort has been touted as an example of India's might in vaccine development and production.\n\nRegulators say the vaccine is safe and effective. The firm says phase 1 and phase 2 trials have shown good results.\n\nBut scientists say that the government's decision not to release data on the vaccine's efficacy for peer review has raised concerns.\n\nMr Modi has welcomed the approval, saying Covaxin is a shining example of his ambitious Atmnirbhar (self-reliance) India campaign.\n\nBut experts worry that questions over the approval process don't bode well for the campaign. And there could be deeper issues. Many believe that the government needs to be more transparent about the authorisation process because the success of the Covid-19 vaccine programme depends on public trust.\n\nThe emergency authorisation also sparked a fierce debate on Indian Twitter on Sunday night between ministers and opposition leaders.\n\nIndia's health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan called out opposition leaders for failing to \"applaud\" the country's \"prowess\" in locally producing a vaccine. India makes about 60% of vaccines globally.\n\nMembers of the main opposition Congress party, Shashi Tharoor and Jairam Ramesh, and former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state, Akhilesh Yadav, were among those who raised concerns about the manner in which Covaxin was approved.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Shashi Tharoor This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Dr Harsh Vardhan This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe approval comes as India gears up to vaccinate its population of more than 1.3 billon people. Amid fears that richer countries are buying up much of the vaccine supply, India too appears to be stockpiling vaccines.\n\nIn an interview with the Associated Press, Adar Poonawalla, whose Serum Institute of India (SII) is manufacturing the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine, said the jab was given emergency authorisation on the condition that it would not be exported outside India.\n\nMr Poonawalla said his company, the world's largest vaccine maker, was also not allowed to sell the shot in the private market.\n\nThis has raised concerns in India's neighbouring countries, including Nepal and Bangladesh, which were primarily depending on the SII to start vaccinating their populations.\n\nBangladesh had already ordered 30 million doses of the vaccine in the first phase, Reuters reported, but now the fate of the order is unclear. The country's health secretary told local media in December that it expected the first batch of the jab by February.\n\nIndia plans to vaccinate some 300 million people on a priority list by August.\n\nIt has recorded the second-highest number of infections in the world, with more than 10.3 million confirmed cases to date. Nearly 150,000 people have died.\n\nBoth vaccines approved on Sunday can be transported and stored at normal refrigeration temperatures.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "Co-op, Morrisons and their payments processing provider ACI say they are investigating an IT glitch that created problems for card payments in stores.\n\nLong queues were seen outside some of the Co-op's convenience stores from Sunday amid the snow, with some shoppers asked to use cash.\n\nCo-op and Morrisons said customers were no longer experiencing problems but they, and ACI, were studying the cause.\n\nOne MP said the problem exposed the risks of letting cash use \"wither\".\n\nACI, which provides real-time payments processing for the retailers, said: \"We are working closely with the IT teams at our partners to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. We apologise to shoppers for any inconvenience caused.\"\n\nThe issue comes as contactless payments have taken off in the UK during the pandemic, with fewer consumers using cash to pay for groceries.\n\nCustomers complained about the issue on social media.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Jen Bartram This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA Co-op spokesman told the BBC: \"All card transactions are being processed as usual and our payment process partner is investigating after we experienced an intermittent issue.\n\n\"We would like to apologise to customers for any inconvenience caused during that time.\"\n\nThe BBC witnessed the card processing issue affecting some of The Co-op's stores meant that self-service checkouts had to be closed, requiring customers to queue to be served at tills manned by staff.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by David of Nottingham This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post 2 by David of Nottingham\n\nAt some stores, customers queuing outside were warned on Monday evening that transactions had to be \"cash-only\" due to the ongoing issue.\n\nSome customers said they had to use the convenience store's cash machine to withdraw money to pay for purchases.\n\nHowever in other stores, the problem was intermittent, impacting some payment card brands, but not others.\n\nShadow economic secretary to the Treasury Pat McFadden said: \"This shows the dangers of letting the cash network just wither away as use declines.\n\n\"The government promised legislation to secure nationwide access to cash a year ago. It hasn't been brought forward.\"", "The case rate in Bridgend peaked just before Christmas, but now we are seeing deaths in hospitals\n\nThe total number of deaths involving Covid-19 in Wales has reached its highest weekly total of the pandemic.\n\nThere were 467 deaths in the week ending 15 January, which is 13 more than the week before.\n\nThis was nearly 40% of all registered deaths, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).\n\nBoth Betsi Cadwaladr and Cwm Taf Morgannwg health boards saw their highest weekly numbers, more than experienced during the first wave.\n\nBetsi Cadwaladr had 74 deaths while Cwm Taf Morgannwg had 116.\n\nUnlike during the peak in the first wave in 2020, Wales is also now seeing higher numbers of deaths in north Wales and west Wales.\n\nIn north-east Wales, where there have been the highest case rates of Covid-19 in recent weeks, there were 30 deaths of Flintshire residents, including 25 in hospital. In Wrexham, there were 27 deaths - with 21 in hospital.\n\nCwm Taf Morgannwg health board saw 49 hospital deaths in Bridgend - the highest weekly number in Wales. There were also 33 patients who died in Rhondda Cynon Taf (RCT) and six in Merthyr Tydfil.\n\nAll counties recorded at least three deaths involving Covid-19 and the total number of deaths in Wales, up to and registered by 15 January, was 5,884.\n\nWhen deaths registered over the following few days are counted, there is now a total of 6,074.\n\nRCT, with 752 deaths, has the largest number in Wales, followed by Cardiff with 637, up to the latest week.\n\nWhen looking at crude mortality rates, the highest number of deaths - when taking into account the size of populations in England and Wales - are Welsh areas: RCT, followed by Merthyr Tydfil and Blaenau Gwent.\n\nSo-called excess deaths, which compare all registered deaths with previous years, continue to be above the five-year average.\n\nLooking at the number of deaths we would normally expect to see at this point in the year is seen as a useful measure of how the pandemic is progressing.\n\nIn Wales, the number of deaths from all causes fell from 1,198 in the previous week - the highest recorded during the pandemic - to 1,170. But this was still 314 (36.7%) higher than the five-year average for that week.\n\nThis means deaths have been more than the peak in the first wave of the pandemic - 1,169 deaths in the week ending 17 April 2020 - for two weeks in a row.\n\nThe highest proportion of excess deaths was 84.1% in London.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Schools and colleges in Wales moved to online learning before Christmas\n\nKeeping schools shut during the Covid pandemic is \"almost like systematic neglect\" to disadvantaged pupils, a head teacher has said.\n\nCardiff head Armando Di-Finizio said there was a \"fair degree of trauma\" among pupils because of the lockdowns.\n\nOne expert said children from disadvantaged backgrounds were falling furthest behind academically.\n\nThe Welsh Government said it ensured vulnerable children could continue to attend school.\n\nBefore the pandemic the proportion of pupils receiving free school meals who achieved five or more GCSEs was 32% lower than the figure for other pupils in Wales.\n\nAt Eastern High School, where 47% of children receive free school meals, Mr Di-Finizio said the challenges of lockdown were greater for pupils who may not have support or structure at home for learning.\n\nArmando Di-Finizio, head teacher of Eastern High School, says the the attainment gap among pupils is \"widening\"\n\nMr Di-Finizio told Wales Live he did not think the balance was right \"between those who are genuinely vulnerable\" with the virus and young people who are vulnerable in terms of their welfare and wellbeing and their academic progress.\n\n\"I think there would have been other ways to handle this because we are seeing students struggling because of it and the attainment gap is widening for this generation,\" he said.\n\n\"It's almost like systematic neglect of young people that is going on day after day, week after week, month after month.\n\n\"We have to somehow pull this back because I do wonder one day, how the children will look back and judge us in terms of our responses.\"\n\nAnother concern since the pandemic began, he said, was the fact the number of child protection cases at his school has doubled.\n\n\"I don't want to sound alarmist, but I do believe it will take a number of years for us to unpick the traumas that young people go through because we don't know yet just what this lasting impact will be,\" he added.\n\nProfessor Chris Taylor says home learning reduces the ability to provide a \"level playing field\" for education\n\nWelsh Chief Inspector of Schools Meilyr Rowlands, has previously said there was evidence of widening inequality in performance as a result of the pandemic.\n\nSocial Sciences Prof Chris Taylor, from Cardiff University, said this gap was continuing to widen.\n\n\"Closing schools exposes and accentuates the deep disadvantage that many families have across Wales in the different circumstances that they're in,\" Prof Taylor said.\n\nHome learning reduces the ability of schools \"to provide that level playing field\" for educational opportunities.\n\n\"Instead, we're relying on what families and households can produce and provide to support that learning,\" he said.\n\nProf Taylor added some children would \"feel like they've left school at the age of 14 or 15, instead of 18\" in terms of their learning, and the focus for them should be preparing for the next step in their education rather than exams that are not going to happen this summer.\n\nHe said some pupils who may have been planning to leave school at 16 should remain in education until they are 18 to \"remedy some of the missed opportunities\", and that summer school and activities should be put on to help address isolation.\n\nAlmost half of all pupils receive free school meals at Eastern High School in Cardiff\n\nSiân Gwenllian MS, Plaid Cymru's education spokeswoman, has called on the Welsh Government to publish a plan on how pupils will be helped to catch up with \"lost education\".\n\n\"Those children in more deprived areas have been doubly disadvantaged - coronavirus has been more prevalent in these areas, meaning they will have lost more school prior to the lockdown, and these children are less likely to have the means to access online learning,\" she said.\n\nA Welsh Government spokesman said it had provided \"more than 130,000 [electronic] devices\" since the start of the pandemic for pupils' home learning.\n\n\"We've also recruited more than 1,000 teaching and support staff to provide additional support for learners who may have missed out on teaching time due to the pandemic,\" he said.\n\nThe government has ensured vulnerable children, as well as children of critical workers, could continue to attend school throughout the pandemic, he added.", "A US bankruptcy judge has agreed a $17m (£12.4m) payout to women who accused disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct.\n\nWeinstein, 68, was convicted last year and jailed for 23 years for rape and sexual assault.\n\nThe payout for his victims will come from the liquidation of the Weinstein Co, which filed for bankruptcy in 2018.\n\nThe judge overruled an objection from some accusers looking to pursue appeals outside of bankruptcy court.\n\nJudge Mary Walrath said without the settlement, the plaintiffs would get \"minimal, if any, recovery.\"\n\nThe Weinstein Co was set up as an independent film studio with the disgraced Hollywood mogul one of its co-founders.\n\nThe company collapsed in late 2017, following widespread claims of sexual misconduct against Weinstein, who was convicted of sexually assaulting a former production assistant and raping an actress.\n\nThe US judge said that 83% of sexual misconduct claimants in the bankruptcy \"have expressed very loudly that they want closure through acceptance of this plan, that they do not seek to have to go through any further litigation in order to receive some recovery, some possible recompense... although it's clear that money will never give them that\".\n\nThe $17m fund will be divided among more than 50 claimants, with the most serious allegations resulting in payouts of $500,000 or more.\n\nThe settlement was put to a vote of Weinstein's accusers, with 39 voting in favour and eight opposed.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThey will have the option to forgo most of their payout under the plan if they want to continue pursuing their claims.\n\nInsurers contributed $35m under the liquidation plan, which also provides $9.7m to the former officers and directors of the Weinstein Co, allowing them to pay a portion of their legal bills over the last several years.\n\nThe directors and officers, who include Weinstein's brother, Bob, also received releases that absolve them of any potential liability for enabling Weinstein's conduct.\n\nThe Weinstein Co sold its assets to Lantern Entertainment, which later became Spyglass Media Group, for $289m.", "A year ago, the Chinese government locked down the city of Wuhan. For weeks beforehand officials had maintained that the outbreak was under control - just a few dozen cases linked to a live animal market. But in fact the virus had been spreading throughout the city and around China.\n\nThis is the story of five critical days early in the outbreak.\n\nBy 30 December, several people had been admitted to hospitals in the central city of Wuhan, having fallen ill with high fever and pneumonia. The first known case was a man in his 70s who had fallen ill on 1 December. Many of those were connected to a sprawling live animal market, Huanan Seafood Market, and doctors had begun to suspect this wasn't regular pneumonia.\n\nSamples from infected lungs had been sent to genetic sequencing companies to identify the cause of the disease, and preliminary results had indicated a novel coronavirus similar to Sars. The local health authorities and the country's Center for Disease Control (CDC) had already been notified, but nothing had been said to the public.\n\nAlthough no-one knew it at the time, between 2,300 and 4,000 people were by now likely infected, according to a recent model by MOBS Lab at Northeastern University in Boston. The outbreak was also thought to be doubling in size every few days. Epidemiologists say that at this early part of an outbreak, each day and even each hour is critical.\n\nWuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was sealed off on 1 January 2020\n\nAt around 16:00 on 30 December, the head of the Emergency Department at Wuhan Central Hospital was handed the results of a test carried out by sequencing lab Capital Bio Medicals in Beijing.\n\nShe went into a cold sweat as she read the report, according to an interview given later to Chinese state media.\n\nAt the top were the alarming words: \"SARS CORONAVIRUS\". She circled them in bright red, and passed it on to colleagues over the Chinese messaging site WeChat.\n\nWithin an hour and a half, the grainy image with its large red circle reached a doctor in the hospital's ophthalmology department, Li Wenliang. He shared it with his hundreds-strong university class group, adding the warning, \"Don't circulate the message outside this group. Get your family and loved ones to take precautions.\"\n\nWhen Sars spread through southern China in late 2002 and 2003, Beijing covered up the outbreak, insisting that everything was under control. This allowed the virus to spread around the world. Beijing's response invoked international criticism and - worryingly for a regime deeply concerned about stability - anger and protests within China. Between 2002 and 2004, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) went on to infect more than 8,000 people and kill almost 800 worldwide.\n\nRobert Maguire of the WHO and a Chinese doctor visit a Sars patient in Guangzhou, China – April 2003\n\nOver the coming hours, screen shots of Li's message spread widely online. Across China, millions of people began talking about Sars online.\n\nIt would turn out that the sequencers made a mistake - this was not Sars, but a new coronavirus very similar to it. But this was a critical moment. News of a possible outbreak had escaped.\n\nThe Wuhan Health Commission was already aware that there was something going on in the city's hospitals. That day, officials from the National Health Commission in Beijing arrived, and lung samples were sent to at least five state labs in Wuhan and Beijing to sequence the virus in parallel.\n\nNow, as messages suggesting the possible return of Sars began flying over Chinese social media, the Wuhan Health Commission sent two orders out to hospitals. It instructed them to report all cases direct to the Health Commission, and told them not to make anything public without authorisation.\n\nWithin 12 minutes, these orders were leaked online.\n\nIt might have taken a couple more days for the online chatter to make the leap from Chinese-speaking social media to the wider world if it wasn't for the efforts of veteran epidemiologist Marjorie Pollack.\n\nThe deputy editor of ProMed-mail, an organisation which sends out alerts on disease outbreaks worldwide, received an email from a contact in Taiwan, asking if she knew anything about the chatter online.\n\nDr Marjorie Pollack is an epidemiologist based in New York\n\nBack in February 2003, ProMed had been the first to break the news of Sars. Now, Pollack had deja vu. \"My reaction was: 'We're in trouble,'\" she told the BBC.\n\nThree hours later, she had finished writing an emergency post, requesting more information on the new outbreak. It was sent out to ProMed's approximately 80,000 subscribers at one minute to midnight.\n\nAs word began to spread, Professor George F Gao, director general of China's Center for Disease Control [CDC], was receiving offers of help from contacts around the world.\n\nChina revamped its infectious disease infrastructure after Sars - and in 2019, Gao had promised that China's vast online surveillance system would be able to prevent another outbreak like it.\n\nBut two scientists who contacted Gao say the CDC head did not seem alarmed.\n\n\"I sent a really long text to George Gao, offering to send a team out and do anything to support them,\" Dr Peter Daszak, the president of New York-based infectious diseases research group EcoHealth Alliance, told the BBC. But he says that all he received in reply was a short message wishing him Happy New Year.\n\nDirector of the Chinese Center for Disease Control, George F Gao – 22 January 2020\n\nEpidemiologist Ian Lipkin of Columbia University in New York was also trying to reach Gao. Just as he was having dinner to ring in the New Year, Gao returned his call. The details Lipkin reveals about their conversation offer new insights into what leading Chinese officials were prepared to say at this critical point.\n\n\"He had identified the virus. It was a new coronavirus. And it was not highly transmissible. This didn't really resonate with me because I'd heard that many, many people had been infected,\" Lipkin told the BBC. \"I don't think he was duplicitous, I think he was just wrong.\"\n\nLipkin says he thinks Gao should have released the sequences they had already obtained. My view is that you get it out. This is too important to hesitate.\"\n\nGao, who refused the BBC's requests for an interview, has told state media that the sequences were released as soon as possible, and that he never said publicly that there was no human-to-human transmission.\n\nThat day, the Wuhan Health Commission issued a press release stating that 27 cases of viral pneumonia had been identified, but that there was no clear evidence of human to human transmission.\n\nIt would be a further 12 days before China shared the genetic sequences with the international community.\n\nThe Chinese government refused multiple interview requests by the BBC. Instead, it gave us detailed statements on China's response, which state that in the fight against Covid-19 China \"has always acted with openness, transparency and responsibility, and … in a timely manner.\"\n\nBBC This World's 54 Days: China and the pandemic can be seen on BBC Two at 21:00 GMT on Tuesday 26 January, or 23:30 on Monday 1 February (except BBC Two Northern Ireland). Or watch on BBC iPlayer.\n\nPart two - 54 Days: America and the Pandemic - will be on BBC Two on Tuesday 2 February at 21:00.\n\nInternational law stipulates that new infectious disease outbreaks of global concern be reported to the World Health Organization within 24 hours. But on 1 January the WHO still had not had official notification of the outbreak. The previous day, officials there had spotted the ProMed post and reports online, so they contacted China's National Health Commission.\n\n\"It was reportable,\" says Professor Lawrence Gostin, Director of the WHO Collaborating Center on national and global health law at Georgetown University in Washington DC, and a member of the International Health Regulations roster of experts. \"The failure to report clearly was a violation of the International Health Regulations.\"\n\nDr Maria Van Kerkhove, a WHO epidemiologist who would become the agency's Covid-19 technical lead, joined the first of many emergency conference calls in the middle of the night on 1 January.\n\n\"We had the assumptions initially that it may be a new coronavirus. For us it wasn't a matter of if human to human transmission was happening, it was what is the extent of it and where is that happening.\"\n\nIt was two days before China responded to the WHO. But what they revealed was vague - that there were now 44 cases of viral pneumonia of unknown cause.\n\nChina says that it communicated regularly and fully with the WHO from 3 January. But recordings of internal WHO meetings obtained by the Associated Press (AP) news agency some of which were shared with PBS Frontline and the BBC, paint a different picture, revealing the frustration that senior WHO officials felt by the following week.\n\n\"'There's been no evidence of human to human transmission' is not good enough. We need to see the data,\" Mike Ryan WHO's health emergencies programme director is heard saying.\n\nThe WHO was legally required to state the information it had been provided by China. Although they suspected human to human transmission, the WHO were not able to confirm this for a further three weeks.\n\n\"Those concerns are not something they ever aired publicly. Instead, they basically deferred to China,\" says AP's Dake Kang. \"Ultimately, the impression that the rest of the world got was just what the Chinese authorities wanted. Which is that everything was under control. Which of course it wasn't.\"\n\nThe number of people infected by the virus was doubling in size every few days, and more and more people were turning up at Wuhan's hospitals.\n\nBut now - instead of allowing doctors to share their concerns publicly - state media began a campaign that effectively silenced them.\n\nOn 2 January, China Central Television ran a story about the doctors who spread the news about an outbreak four days earlier. The doctors, referred to only as \"rumour mongers\" and \"internet users\", were brought in for questioning by the Wuhan Public Security Bureau and 'dealt with' 'in accordance with the law'.\n\nOne of the doctors was Li Wenliang, the eye doctor whose warning had gone viral. He signed a confession. In February, the doctor died of Covid-19.\n\nThe Chinese government says that this is not evidence that it was trying to suppress news of the outbreak, and that doctors like Li were being urged not to spread unconfirmed information.\n\nBut the impact of this public dressing down was critical. For though it was becoming apparent to doctors that there was, in fact, human-to-human transmission, they were prevented from going public.\n\nA health worker from Li's hospital, Wuhan Central, told us that over the next few days \"there were so many people who had a fever. It was out of control. We started to panic. [But] The hospital told us that we were not allowed to speak to anyone.\"\n\nThe Chinese government told us that \"it takes a rigorous scientific process to determine if a new virus can be transmitted from person to person\".\n\nThe authorities would continue to maintain for a further 18 days that there was no human-to-human transmission.\n\nLabs across the country were racing to map the complete genetic sequence of the virus. Among them was a renowned virologist in Shanghai, Professor Zhang Yongzhen who began sequencing on 3 January.\n\nAfter having worked for two days straight, he obtained a complete sequence. His results revealed a virus that was similar to Sars, and therefore likely transmissible.\n\nOn 5 January, Zhang's office wrote to the National Health Commission advising taking precautionary measures in public places.\n\n\"On that very day, he was working to try and get information released as soon as possible, so the rest of the world could see what it was and so we could get diagnostics going\", says Zhang's research partner, Professor Edward Holmes an evolutionary virologist at the University of Sydney.\n\nBut Zhang could not make his findings public. On January 3, the National Health Commission had sent a secret memorandum to labs banning unauthorised scientists from working on the virus and disclosing the information to the public.\n\n\"What the notice effectively did,\" says AP's Dake Kang, \"is it silenced individual scientists and laboratories from revealing information about this virus and potentially allowing word of it to leak out to the outside world and alarm people.\"\n\nNone of the labs went public with the genetic sequence of the virus. China continued to maintain it was viral pneumonia with no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.\n\nIt would be six days before it announced that the new virus was a coronavirus, and even then, it did not share any genetic sequences to allow other countries to develop tests and begin tracing the spread of the virus.\n\nThree days later, on 11 January, Zhang decided it was time to put his neck on the line. As he boarded a plane between Beijing and Shanghai, he authorised Holmes to release the sequence.\n\nThe decision came at a personal cost - his lab was closed the next day for \"rectification\" - but his action broke the deadlock. The next day state scientists released the sequences they had obtained. The international scientific community swung into action, and a toolkit for a diagnostic test was publicly available by 13 January.\n\nDespite the evidence from scientists and doctors, China would not confirm there was human-to-human transmission until 20 January.\n\nIllustration of spike proteins (red) of Covid-19 binding with receptors (blue) on a target human cell\n\nAt the beginning of any emerging disease outbreak, says health law expert Lawrence Gostin, it's always chaotic. \"It was always going to be very difficult to control this virus, from day one. But by the time we knew [the international community] it was transmissible human to human, I think the cat was already out the bag, it already spread.\n\n\"That was the shot we had, and we lost it.\"\n\nAs Wang Linfa, a bat virologist at Duke-Nus Medical School in Singapore, says: \"January 20th is the dividing line, before that the Chinese could have done much better. After that, the rest of the world should be really on high alert and do much better.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMore than 100,000 people have died with Covid-19 in the UK, after 1,631 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were recorded in the daily figures.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said he took \"full responsibility\" for the government's actions, saying: \"We truly did everything we could.\"\n\n\"I'm deeply sorry for every life lost,\" he said.\n\nA total of 100,162 deaths have been recorded in the UK, the first European nation to pass the landmark.\n\nEarlier, figures from the ONS, which are based on death certificates, showed there had been nearly 104,000 deaths since the pandemic began.\n\nThe government's daily figures rely on positive tests and are slightly lower.\n\nMr Johnson told Tuesday's Downing Street news conference that it was \"hard to compute the sorrow contained in this grim statistic\".\n\nHe gave his \"deepest condolences\" to those who had lost loved ones, including \"fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, and the many grandparents who've been taken\".\n\nThe UK is the fifth country to pass 100,000 deaths, coming after the US, Brazil, India and Mexico.\n\nA surge in cases in recent weeks - driven in part by a new, fast-spreading variant of the virus - has left the UK with one of the highest coronavirus death rates globally.\n\nA further 20,089 coronavirus cases were recorded on Tuesday, continuing a downward trend in the number of UK cases seen in recent days. The number of people in hospital remains high, as do the UK's daily death figures.\n\nMr Johnson said the coronavirus infection rate remained \"pretty forbiddingly high\" despite lockdown restrictions which have been in place in England since 5 January.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and only go out for limited reasons - including for food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nMr Johnson said he would set out more detail in \"the next few days and weeks\" about \"when and how we want to get things open again\".\n\nIt's a terrible milestone - and one that represents unimaginable loss.\n\nMost of the deaths have come in two waves - the sharp, sudden surge in the spring followed by a slow and sustained rise throughout autumn and winter.\n\nMistakes have been made - the delay locking down back in March is one that is often cited even by the government's own advisers.\n\nThe UK, like much of Europe, was also woefully underprepared with limited testing and contact tracing systems.\n\nBut the ageing population, high rates of obesity, the fact the UK is a global hub and its inter-connectedness with Europe are also factors that meant we were tragically never going to escape lightly once the virus got a foothold.\n\nSpeaking alongside the prime minister, Prof Chris Whitty, England's chief medical officer, described it as a \"very sad day\".\n\nHe said the number of people dying \"will come down relatively slowly over the next two weeks - and will probably remain flat for a while now\".\n\nProf Whitty added the new coronavirus variant had changed the UK's situation \"very substantially\" with infection rates \"just about holding\" due to lockdown restrictions.\n\nBut he said the number of people testing positive for Covid-19 in the UK \"has been coming down\" and the number of people in hospital with Covid has \"flattened off\" - including in London, the South East and East of England.\n\nHowever, there were \"some areas\" where the hospital figures were \"still not convincingly reducing\", he said.\n\nNHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens said there had been \"continuing improvements in hospital treatment for severely sick coronavirus patients\".\n\nHe said he expected more treatments within the next six to 18 months, adding: \"We can see a world in which coronavirus may be more treatable, but for now, it's a combination of reducing infections and getting vaccinations done.\"\n\nOne day there will be a public inquiry - maybe several - seeking to understand why so many died.\n\nLast summer, back when the government was subsidising people to eat out at restaurants, Boris Johnson said there would be an independent inquiry into the government's handling of Covid, but gave no details or dates.\n\nHe still hasn't, despite a recent call from bereaved families, trade unions and charities for lessons to be learnt now.\n\nThe gravest public health crisis for a century would have tested any government.\n\nBut as the pandemic has worsened, the criticisms and questions have mounted - about the timing of lockdowns, the rollout of test and trace and the failure to protect care homes last spring.\n\nThere is now pressure on Boris Johnson from some Tory MPs to ease restrictions as soon as the most vulnerable are vaccinated.\n\nBut this evening a sombre prime minister said the government would first do everything it could to minimise further loss of life.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England, said it was a \"sobering moment in the pandemic\", saying: \"Each death is a person who was someone's family member and friend.\"\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was a \"national tragedy\" to have reached 100,000 deaths.\n\nThe government had been \"behind the curve at every stage\" of the pandemic and had not learnt lessons over the summer, he added.\n\nThe epidemiologist whose modelling in part prompted the UK's first national lockdown said more action in the autumn of last year could have saved lives.\n\nProf Neil Ferguson told BBC Radio 4's PM programme: \"Had we acted both earlier and with greater stringency back in September when we first saw case numbers going up, and had a policy of keeping case numbers at a reasonably low levels, then I think a lot of the deaths we've seen, not all by any means, but a lot of the deaths we've seen in the last four or five months, could have been avoided.\"\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said the death toll was \"heartbreaking\" and warned there was a \"tough period ahead\".\n\n\"The vaccine offers the way out, but we cannot let up now,\" he added.\n\nMore than 6.8 million people in the UK have had their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, according to the latest figures.\n\nPlease enable JavaScript or upgrade your browser to see this interactive\n\nIf you would like to send us a tribute to a friend or family member who died after contracting coronavirus, please use the form below.\n\nPlease remember to include a photo of your loved one and their name. Upload your pictures here. Don't forget to include your contact details, so we can get in touch with you.\n\nWe would like to respond to everyone individually and include every tribute in our coverage, but unfortunately that may not be possible. Please be assured your message will be read and treated with the utmost respect.\n\nPlease note the contact details you provide will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your tribute.", "The Mermaid of Black Conch, a dark love story about a fisherman and a mermaid torn from the sea, has won the Costa Book of the Year award.\n\nTrinidadian-born British writer Monique Roffey beat four other contenders with her sixth novel to scoop the £30,000 prize.\n\nJudges said the book was \"utterly original... and feels like a classic in the making\".\n\nA \"delighted\" Roffey said her win was a vote for Caribbean literature.\n\n\"A huge thank you to the judges for exposing my book to a wide readership. I'll be pinching myself for weeks to come,\" she added.\n\nBased on a Taino legend of a beautiful woman transformed into a mermaid, the story is set in the Caribbean village of St Constance.\n\nDavid, a fisherman, unexpectedly attracts the attention of Aycayia, a mermaid who is drawn to his singing. When she is captured from the sea during an annual fishing competition, he does all he can to save her, with dramatic consequences.\n\nProfessor Suzannah Lipscomb, chair of judges, said: \"The Mermaid of Black Conch is an extraordinary, beautifully written, captivating, visceral book - full of mythic energy and unforgettable characters, including some tremendously transgressive women.\"\n\nThe Costa Book Awards have a reputation for picking popular reads: books you would recommend to a friend. And I would definitely recommend The Mermaid of Black Conch.\n\nAt first, the novel might sound a bit odd. Set on a Caribbean island in the 1970s, it is a bittersweet love story between a beautiful young woman cursed to live as a mermaid and a fisherman.\n\nBased on a legend passed down by the indigenous people of the Caribbean, the Taino, there are touches of magic and snippets of poetry. The book was also shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize last year, which rewards fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel.\n\nBut while it is unusual it is also a joy to read, brimming with memorable characters and vivid descriptions.\n\nWe see the mermaid's \"hair flying like a nest of cables\" while we are told \"sea moss trailed from her shoulders like slithers of beard\" and \"barnacles speckled the swell of her hips.\"\n\nFor me, this was a hugely entertaining and thought-provoking novel and a worthy winner.\n\nRoffey, a senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, secured her publishing deal through Peepal Tree Press, an independent publisher supporting Caribbean writers.\n\nShe then crowd-funded her publicity campaign with the support of fellow authors.\n\nThe Mermaid of Black Conch is set in the Caribbean\n\nRoffey's entry was also named Costa's Novel of the Year earlier this month, alongside winners from four other categories:\n\nThe Mermaid of Black Conch is the thirteenth novel to take the overall prize. Days Without End by Sebastian Barry was the last novel to be named Costa Book of the Year in 2016.\n\nTuesday's virtual ceremony also saw London-based writer Tessa Sheridan receive the 2020 Costa Short Story Award.\n\nSheridan won the public vote and £3,500 for her story, The Person Who Serves, Serves Again.\n\nThe Costa Book Awards, formerly the Whitbread Book Awards, were established in 1971 to encourage, promote and celebrate the best contemporary British writing.\n\nIt is open to UK and Irish authors.\n\nSeamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Sebastian Barry are among the authors to have won the book of the year award more than once.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "The number of people to have died with coronavirus in the UK has exceeded 100,000.\n\nThere have been nearly 104,000 deaths since the pandemic began, data from the UK's national statisticians shows.\n\nThe figures, which go up to 15 January, are based on death certificates. The government's daily figures, which rely on positive tests, are slightly lower.\n\nIt follows a surge of cases last month, leaving the UK with one of the highest coronavirus death rates globally.\n\nThe Office for National Statistics and its counterparts in Scotland and Northern Ireland registered 7,776 deaths with coronavirus on the death certificate in the most recent week.\n\nThat total is the third highest of the epidemic.\n\nLast April, there were two weeks with more than 9,000 coronavirus deaths registered across the UK - but there have been no other weeks with more than 7,000 deaths registered.\n\nAbout nine in 10 death certificates citing coronavirus registered Covid as the cause of death.\n\nMost of the deaths have been in older age groups - nearly three-quarters of those who have died with the virus were over 75. One in three deaths were care home residents.\n\nChris Hopson, of NHS Providers, which represents health service managers, described the milestone as a \"tragedy\".\n\n\"Behind each death will be a story of sorrow and grief,\" he said.\n\n\"We pay tribute, once again, to NHS and care staff who have done everything they can throughout the long months of this pandemic to avoid each one of these deaths and reduce patient harm.\n\n\"We won't know the true impact of Covid-19 for a long time to come because of its long-term effects.\n\n\"But, as well as the high death rate, it's particularly concerning that this virus has widened health inequalities and affected black, Asian and minority-ethnic communities disproportionately.\"\n\nSarah Scobie, of the Nuffield Trust think tank, said it was a \"harrowing figure\".\n\nShe added: \"While the vaccine rollout for the most vulnerable is continuing at impressive speed, it will be a while until the benefits feed through to the figures.\"\n\nWe were one of the worst hit countries, if not the worst, in the spring - certainly in Europe and the G7.\n\nTwo big drivers of that were the timing of the first lockdown and the terrible numbers of deaths in care homes.\n\nAs a result, the UK could always rank among the hardest hit nations overall.\n\nBut comparing experiences in second waves is harder.\n\nSome countries have very clearly done better than the UK.\n\nAustralia, for example, has seen very few coronavirus deaths overall, and deaths quite close to usual levels throughout 2020.\n\nBut the US, which had a milder first wave than the UK, has seen steady numbers of coronavirus deaths throughout summer and autumn.\n\nIts death toll has been catching up with that of the UK in the most recent data, covering up until Christmas.\n\nAnd some countries that missed the first wave entirely - such as Poland (shown above) or Germany - have seen significant spikes in deaths in recent months.\n\nWith deaths rising since then in many countries and vaccination programmes only getting up and running, there is still a long way to go before we will know who has had the toughest second wave.\n• None Lockdown needs to be stricter, scientists warn", "Baroness Floella Benjamin has spoken of her pride after receiving a first coronavirus vaccine dose.\n\nThe 71-year-old actress said she would wear a badge saying \"I've had the jab\" after being vaccinated.\n\nThe Lib Dem peer, who came to Britain in 1960 and was born in Trinidad, is known for appearing in the children's programme Play School and received a damehood last year.\n\nOver 6.8m people in the UK have now received a first vaccine dose.\n\nAs a member of the House of Lords, Baroness Benjamin has spoken regularly about the disproportionate effect of Covid-19 on black, Asian and minority ethnic communities as well as the knock-on impact of the pandemic.\n\nIn September, she told peers she knew two people who had taken their own lives \"because they could not cope with the uncertainty of the future\".\n\nShe is also a member of the Lords Covid-19 Committee.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Floella Benjamin This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe government has set a target for all those in the top four priority groups - around 15 million - to be offered a vaccine by mid-February.\n\nTwo vaccines - developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca - are being used. A third, from Moderna, has been approved.\n\nAll have been shown to be safe and effective in trials with two doses needed to offer the best protection - now timed 12 weeks apart.\n\nIt comes as British Asian celebrities united to dispel myths about the coronavirus vaccine.\n\nComedians Romesh Ranganathan and Meera Syal and cricketer Moeen Ali appear in a video urging people to get a jab.\n\nA study from the Royal Society for Public Health found 57% of black, Asian and minority ethnic people said they would take the vaccine.\n\nThis figure compared with 79% of white people who would do so.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. One protester said: \"This is the only way I can effect change\"\n\nPeople campaigning against the HS2 rail project have dug a tunnel near Euston station, in a bid to prevent their eviction from a protest camp.\n\nIn September, members of HS2 Rebellion set up a Tree Protection Camp in Euston Square Gardens in central London to protest against the £106bn scheme.\n\nThey claim the tunnel is 100ft (30m) long and has taken two months to dig.\n\nActivists say the tunnel - codenamed \"Kelvin\" - is their \"best defence\" against being evicted.\n\nOne protester, identified only as Blue, told the BBC: \"It is all very dangerous and life-threatening but it is all worth it. This is the only way I can effect change, I would sacrifice everything for the climate ecological emergency to not be happening.\"\n\nThe 18-year-old added: \"We want to be as safe as possible. It is not about us martyring ourselves, it is about delaying and stopping HS2.\"\n\nDemonstrators have previously built tree houses and scaled cranes near the HS2 Euston site\n\nA spokeswoman for HS2 said tunnel protests were \"costly to the taxpayer\".\n\nShe added: \"These are a danger to the safety of the protesters, HS2 staff, High Court enforcement officers and the general public, as well as putting unnecessary strain on the emergency services during the pandemic.\n\n\"Safety is our first priority when taking possession of land and removing illegal encampments.\"\n\nBritish Transport Police said it was aware of the tunnel but it was a matter for the Met Police, which said no complaint yet had been made.\n\nHS2 is set to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It is hoped the 20-year project will reduce rail passenger overcrowding and help to rebalance the UK's economy.\n\nThe campaign group alleges HS2 is the \"most expensive, wasteful and destructive project in UK history\" and that it is \"set to destroy or irreparably damage 108 ancient woodlands and 693 wildlife sites\".\n\nHowever, HS2 bosses have said seven million trees will be planted during phase one of the project and that much ancient woodland will \"remain intact\".\n\nSeasoned activist Daniel Cooper - better known as Swampy - has been at Euston supporting the campaigners\n\nTransport Secretary Grant Shapps told MPs in September that the first phase of the high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham would not open until 2028 at the earliest.\n\nThe second phase, to Manchester and Leeds, was due to open in 2032-33 but that has been pushed back to 2035-40.\n\nNetwork Rail, which owns the land, has been approached for a comment about the tunnel.\n\nHS2 protester Dr Larch Maxey said the tunnel was \"warm and quiet\"\n\nTunnelling as a form of environmental protest has a long history in the UK.\n\nIn the 1990s it was one of the ways that pushed environmental concerns into the headlines and changed perceptions.\n\nIn one of the environmental protesters' tunnelling guides, written by \"Disco Dave\", it says:\n\n\"In the world of NVDA (non-violent direct action) there are few defence tactics that can compare with the protest tunnel. Dangerous, laborious and time consuming, tunnelling is the ultimate and desperate tactic of desperate people in desperate times.\"\n\nThe first protest tunnel goes back to the M11 and 1993 but they only really developed during the Newbury Bypass protests in 1996.\n\nProtest tunnels against the A30 in Devon and Manchester Airport's second runway then followed.\n\nNot only did they make household names of environmental campaigners like \"Swampy\" but they arguably changed transport policy - road-building reduced massively.\n\nWe have seen tunnels more recently in 2017 in Coldharbour in Surrey in a protest against fracking so it's not a massive surprise we are seeing tunnels again.\n\nTunnelling in particular as a direct action slows down developers and it is expensive to dig out protesters safely.\n\nDisco Dave wrote: \"That ultimately is the purpose of tunnels and tree houses. To act as a deterrent warning the authorities that should they decide to evict, then it will hurt them where for them it hurts most - in the pocket.\"\n\nWhat will be interesting is if these tunnels have the same impact on HS2 as they did on the road-building programme of the late 1990s.\n\nWill it reframe HS2 so it will be seen in the same way as fracking or road building? Or can the argument still be made that it is a low-carbon form of travel even though it does cause some destruction of habitat?\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Facebook News, the social network's dedicated section for news content, is launching in the UK.\n\nThe UK is the second market to get Facebook News, which launched in the United States last year.\n\nSeveral major news publishers, including Channel 4, Sky News, and The Guardian have signed deals with Facebook to provide content.\n\nIt comes as the tech industry's relationship with the media comes under increased scrutiny.\n\nAnd French publishers recently agreed a deal with Google on how a new EU copyright law about news excerpts should be applied.\n\nFacebook News is the social network's own attempt to address the long-running friction between it and news publishers, as advertising spend has increasingly moved to the large tech firms instead of individual news outlets.\n\nThe new feature is set to go live on Tuesday afternoon, Facebook said.\n\nThe new feature is a dedicated tab within the Facebook mobile app, accessible by tapping the three-line icon for more options.\n\nThe tab features a mix of major daily news stories and \"personalised\" news selected for each reader based on their interests, as decided by Facebook's algorithm.\n\nFacebook says it pays publishers \"for content that is not already on the platform\", and says the feature will also provide publishers with new advertising and subscription \"opportunities\".\n\nThe dedicated news feed will have personalisation controls, Facebook says\n\nThat may be partly based on data from the United States, which Facebook says shows more than 95% of traffic on Facebook News is from people who have not read those publications before.\n\nThe social network says the new product is a \"a multi-year investment that puts original journalism in front of new audiences\".\n\nAnd news organisations, for which new readers are often in short supply, are signing up.\n\nIn November, when it first announced the product was heading to the UK, major names such as The Economist, The Independent, and Cosmopolitan were already on board.\n\nAhead of Tuesday's launch, The Daily Mail, Financial Times and Telegraph were also announced, among others.\n\nBBC News has not signed a commercial deal with Facebook News, but may still appear on the tab through public posts it makes on the Facebook platform.\n\nFacebook also says that this new product is a direct result of discussions with the news industry, with which it has often been at loggerheads.\n\nThe tech giant is responsible for driving a lot of traffic around the internet, and a story which performs well on Facebook will often attract more readers than one which does not.\n\nBut Facebook has also repeatedly made changes to its algorithms over the years which have affected news organisations, sometimes with little notice. It has also encouraged organisations to use its features such as instant articles, or to make video content for Facebook.\n\nHowever, it envisions Facebook News as a better solution than earlier attempts, and one it plans to roll out to other countries - including France and Germany - in the near future.\n\n\"Our goal has always been to work out the best ways we can support the industry in building sustainable business models,\" Facebook said in its blog post about the UK launch.\n\n\"As we invest more in news, and pay publishers for more content in more countries, we will work with them to support the long-term viability of newsrooms.\"", "The fake email looks like it has come from NHS Test and Trace\n\nThe NHS has warned people to be vigilant about fake invitations to have the coronavirus vaccination, sent by scammers.\n\nThe scam email includes a link to \"register\" for the vaccine, but no registration for the real vaccination is required.\n\nThe fake site also asks for bank details either to verify identification or to make a payment.\n\nThe NHS says it would never ask for bank details, and the vaccine is free.\n\nCyber-security consultant Daniel Card told BBC News that traffic data indicates thousands of people had clicked the link to the fake site - although it is unclear how many then filled in the form.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by NHS This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHe urged people to remain vigilant: \"These things spring up, we take them down and then they spring up again.\"\n\nBoth the National Cyber Security Centre and Action Fraud have asked anyone who receives a scam email or text to report it.\n\n\"Vaccines are our way out of this pandemic,\" said health secretary Matt Hancock.\n\n\"It is vital that we do not let a small number of unscrupulous fraudsters undermine the huge team effort under way across the country to protect millions of people from this terrible disease.\"\n\nAt the start of January, Derbyshire police issued a warning about a text message scam which offered Covid vaccinations.\n\n\"If you receive a text or email that asks you to click on a link or for you to provide information, such as your name, credit card or bank details, it's a scam,\" the force said.\n\nLast year, tech firms warned that coronavirus was a popular hook for scammers. In April 2020 Google said it was blocking 18 million scam emails a day on the subject.", "Labour is calling for juries to be cut from 12 members to seven, to stem the \"gravest crisis\" in the justice system since World War Two.\n\nShadow justice secretary David Lammy said action was needed to clear the backlog of thousands of cases.\n\nHe argued that smaller juries and the use of more temporary courts would allow socially distanced trials.\n\nThe government has not ruled out such a move but insists measures it is taking to clear the backlog are working.\n\nLast week four criminal justice watchdogs warned that courts in England and Wales were straining under pressure from the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nJury trials ground to a halt at the start of the first lockdown, when people were advised to stay at home except in limited circumstances.\n\nWhen they resumed, there were severe delays and numerous cancellations due to social-distancing requirements.\n\nRecent figures revealed that the number of unheard cases in crown courts had reached a record 54,000.\n\nThe backlog means some from last year may not go before a jury until 2022, and it could be years before the courts get back on track.\n\nLabour wants the temporary return of so-called \"wartime juries\" of seven rather than 12 members to speed up the process.\n\n\"Victims of rape, murder, domestic abuse, robbery and assault are facing delays of up to four years because of the government's failure to act,\" Mr Lammy said.\n\nHe also urged the government to speed up the rollout of temporary \"Nightingale courts\" to hear civil, family and tribunals work, as well as non-custodial crime cases.\n\nTen of these were announced in July 2020 to help deal with the backlog in court proceedings, and 20 are now in operation across England and Wales.\n\nLeading lawyers are sceptical about Labour's proposal to reach back into wartime history.\n\nThe Criminal Bar Association - representing barristers who prosecute and defend trials - says a panel of seven may allow more courtrooms to be used, but it wouldn't solve what it says is chronic underfunding - and potentially undermines one of the most important safeguards in our society.\n\nThe Law Society, for solicitors, wants to see evidence that smaller panels would ease backlogs without risking injustices.\n\nThe Ministry of Justice's internal modelling calculated last year that reduced juries would lead to a 10% increase in cases - but that was before courtrooms received new Covid-proof screens that have allowed more trials to run.\n\nScotland's courts are using cinemas to host juries - and while that is not being actively discussed in England, it's not been ruled out either.\n\nEven if juries were slimmed, courts would still need to tightly control the number of defendants who can use their cells and courtroom docks to meet Public Health England's guidelines.\n\nIn April last year, the head of judiciary in England and Wales, Lord Burnett, backed the idea of reducing the number of jurors if social distancing continued.\n\nIn June, Justice Secretary Robert Buckland told the BBC he was \"very attracted\" by the idea of smaller juries, as had happened in wartime, and judge-only trials in less serious cases.\n\nThe Ministry of Justice says it has now installed plastic screens in more than 450 courtrooms and jury deliberation rooms to reduce Covid risks.\n\nIt says the safety measures are designed for 12-person juries and that the impact of lowering the number of jurors would be negligible.\n\nHowever, a spokesman said nothing was being ruled out and ministers were continuing to consider every option available to ensure courts recover quickly.\n\n\"This approach is already delivering results, with magistrates' backlogs falling significantly and the number of cases being dealt with in the crown courts reaching pre-Covid levels last month,\" he added.\n\nThe spokesman also said: \"We know more must be done and are investing £110m into a range of measures to drive this recovery further, including opening more Nightingale courts.\"", "Trees must be able to cope with projected climate change\n\nScientists have proposed 10 golden rules for tree-planting, which they say must be a top priority for all nations this decade.\n\nTree planting is a brilliant solution to tackle climate change and protect biodiversity, but the wrong tree in the wrong place can do more harm than good, say experts at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.\n\nThe rules include protecting existing forests first and involving locals.\n\nForests are essential to life on Earth.\n\nThey provide a home to three-quarters of the world's plants and animals, soak up carbon dioxide, and provide food, fuels and medicines.\n\nBut they're fast disappearing; an area about the size of Denmark of pristine tropical forest is lost every year.\n\n\"Planting the right trees in the right place must be a top priority for all nations as we face a crucial decade for ensuring the future of our planet,\" said Dr Paul Smith, a researcher on the study and secretary general of conservation charity, Botanic Gardens Conservation International, in Kew.\n\nIt takes at least a century to restore damaged forests\n\nA raft of ambitious tree-planting projects are underway around the world to replace the forests being lost.\n\nBoris Johnson has said he is aiming to plant 30,000 hectares (300 sq km) of new forest a year across the UK by the end of this parliament.\n\nAn African-led movement to plant a 5,000-mile (8,048km) forest wall to fight the climate crisis is set to become the largest living structure on Earth, three times the size of the Great Barrier Reef.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. A solution that's slowing desertification on the front lines of climate change\n\nHowever, planting trees is highly complex, with no universal easy solution.\n\n\"If you plant the wrong trees in the wrong place you could be doing more harm than good,\" said lead researcher Dr Kate Hardwick of RBG Kew.\n\nAll too often natural forests teeming with plants, animals and fungi are replaced by commercial plantations with row upon row of timber trees, which will be harvested after a few decades, she told BBC News.\n\n\"What we're trying to do is to encourage people, wherever possible, to try and recreate forests which are similar to the natural forests and which provide multiple benefits to people, the environment and to nature as well as capturing carbon.\"\n\nThe review of research, published in the journal Global Change Biology, found that in some cases, planned tree planting does not increase carbon capture and can have negative effects.\n\nKeeping forests in their original state is always preferable; undamaged old forests soak up carbon better and are more resilient to fire, storm and droughts. \"Whenever there's a choice, we stress that halting deforestation and protecting remaining forests must be a priority,\" said Prof Alexandre Antonelli, director of science at RGB Kew.\n\nPut local people at the heart of tree-planting projects\n\nStudies show that getting local communities on board is key to the success of tree-planting projects. It is often local people who have most to gain from looking after the forest in the future.\n\nReforestation should be about several goals, including guarding against climate change, improving conservation and providing economic and cultural benefits.\n\nSelect the right area for reforestation\n\nPlant trees in areas that were historically forested but have become degraded, rather than using other natural habitats such as grasslands or wetlands.\n\nUse natural forest regrowth wherever possible\n\nLetting trees grow back naturally can be cheaper and more efficient than planting trees.\n\nSelect the right tree species that can maximise biodiversity\n\nWhere tree planting is needed, picking the right trees is crucial. Scientists advise a mixture of tree species naturally found in the local area, including some rare species and trees of economic importance, but avoiding trees that might become invasive.\n\nMake sure the trees are resilient to adapt to a changing climate\n\nUse tree seeds that are suitable for the local climate and how that might change in the future.\n\nPlan how to source seeds or trees, working with local people.\n\nCombine scientific knowledge with local knowledge. Ideally, small-scale trials should take place before planting large numbers of trees.\n\nThe sustainability of tree re-planting rests on a source of income for all stakeholders, including the poorest.\n• None Will millions more trees really stop climate change?", "Clare Ferguson-Walker says she has struggled with home-schooling her two children\n\nAs kitchen tables are turned back into classrooms across Wales, parents admit they are struggling with the return to home-schooling.\n\nFor Clare Ferguson-Walker from Tavernspite, Pembrokeshire, the experience has been a \"nightmare\".\n\nShe said trying to educate her two children alongside work has resulted in her relying on universal credit.\n\nGetting to grips with home-schooling in the first lockdown was \"a shock to the system\".\n\n\"My heart goes out to teachers, I can't imagine what it was like for them putting together all these packages,\" she said.\n\n\"My son is 12 and loves gaming so he's quite tech-savvy. When I have managed to pin him down he's been 'go away, dinosaur mother, I know how to do it!'\n\n\"I'm not au fait with these subjects I haven't done for years. It's different to how I learned at school.\"\n\nAs a single parent, Clare said she had found it difficult to juggle home-schooling with her work.\n\n\"At first, in the summer, we were doing Joe Wicks exercises every day then some work. Then it fell into chaos. I tried really hard at the beginning to be organised.\n\n\"I'm an artist and sculptor - that work ended and my income has dried up so I'm on universal credit.\n\n\"It's incredibly tough financially. Life has revolved around looking after the kids,\" she said.\n\nBy the end of the year, she said the pressure had all become too much.\n\n\"The thought of going through that again in the winter months - without sunny days in the garden - the stress really got to me.\n\n\"I was finding myself going repeatedly from the kettle to the fridge and back again in this weird loop, thinking what do I do now?\n\n\"It was like being a caged animal, like one of those bears that starts to pace in a cage. The kids had gone feral by then.\n\n\"I think it's been horrendous for young people and families - we can't even rely on grandparents. Mental health struggles are at an all-time high,\" she said.\n\n\"The one positive is I've got to know my kids a hell of a lot more and there have been times that have been lovely.\n\n\"I think they've learned more sat around the kitchen table when we've been talking about what's going on, they've learned about rational thinking, the importance of science and not jumping to conclusions.\n\nJayne Palmer advises not sitting down at a desk\n\nJayne Palmer from Cardiff, who home-educated both her sons, said there was too much pressure on parents to replicate traditional classroom learning.\n\n\"This is not an ideal circumstance for home-education families either because they are not used to being locked indoors.\n\n\"I think there's far too much emphasis in continuing the set curriculum. Right now it's a complete waste of time. There's pressure to compete in a system parents weren't even involved in.\n\nIt is far more important to \"create and interest in learning,\" she said.\n\n\"There's been a tendency of families to rush to buy desks and chairs and pens. What we find is the best way forward is not to sit down and teach your children - watch documentaries with them, play online games with historical content, practise reading to them, do some cooking, Lego or gardening.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nSome travellers coming to England will have to quarantine in hotels amid concerns about new Covid variants, the government is expected to announce.\n\nBoris Johnson will discuss proposals with ministers later, but a decision may not be announced until Wednesday.\n\nMost foreign nationals from high-risk countries are already denied UK entry, so the new rules will mainly affect returning UK citizens and residents.\n\nQuarantine rules are set by each of the UK nations but tend to be similar.\n\nThe requirement to isolate in a hotel for 10 days will apply to arrivals from most of southern Africa and South America, as well as Portugal, because many flights from Brazil come via Lisbon, according to BBC Newsnight's political editor Nicholas Watt.\n\nHe said there had been \"no definitive decision yet\" on arrivals from other parts of the world and this was \"still a live issue\".\n\nWhitehall sources said those quarantining in hotels would have to pay for the costs of their own accommodation.\n\nThe prime minister will later chair a meeting of the Covid operations committee, attended by senior ministers, to discuss the options.\n\nMeanwhile, more than 100,000 people have died with Covid-19 in the UK, after 1,631 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were recorded in the daily figures.\n\nAt the moment, almost all arrivals to the UK need to have tested negative for Covid-19 within the 72 hours before they set off to be allowed entry. Then they still have to quarantine for up to 10 days, although this can be done at home.\n\nIn England, this self-isolation period can be cut short with a second negative test after five days.\n\nQuarantine rules are set separately in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland but have only tended to differ slightly, and there has been a \"four nations\" approach to discussions around hotel quarantine, Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said.\n\nBut deputy first minister John Swinney said his government would \"go at least as far\" as any Westminster policy, adding: \"If these UK restrictions are at a minimal level, we will look at other controls we can announce - including additional supervised quarantine measures - that can further protect us from importation of the virus.\"\n\nHotel quarantine is already in use in countries including New Zealand and Australia.\n\nJessica Gold (centre), her son William Copsey (left), and her mother, Rossana Gold, are trying to get home to the UK from South Africa\n\nJessica Gold, from London, has been trying to get home from South Africa with her mother, 77, and son, 13, since 1 January - but their flights have been cancelled three times.\n\nShe says the idea of having to quarantine in a hotel when she eventually manages to get home is \"absolutely absurd\".\n\n\"Now we are booked to return on 16 Feb, and there is no way we can or will stay in a hotel to quarantine when I have my own place and we can quarantine there, as we have done in the past,\" says Jessica, who flew out to her safari lodge in Greater Kruger National Park, on business, at the end of November.\n\nJessica, 42, wants the government to get tougher on enforcing travellers' home quarantines, rather than bringing in the hotel rule which she says is \"ridiculous and an extra unnecessary expense during these very tough times\".\n\nJessica adds that she's looking into other ways of getting home earlier, before any potential new rules kick in.\n\nShadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds told MPs on Tuesday that bringing in hotel quarantine plans for arrivals from a small number of countries would leave \"gaping holes\" in the UK's defences against any new, unknown variants of coronavirus coming from across the globe.\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel said all current travel measures were being kept under review and the government \"will not hesitate to take further action\" to combat variants, especially as they could effect the efficacy of Covid vaccines.\n\nTravel writer Simon Calder told BBC Breakfast it was \"going to be tricky\" to identify people arriving from the high-risk countries, as travellers could go to a third country before coming to the UK.\n\nHe said British citizens in Portugal, for example, could travel to Madrid in order to fly back to the UK.\n\nPassengers in Australian quarantine hotels have all meals delivered to their room\n\nIn Australia, travellers are allocated a hotel room on arrival and taken there by bus. Often, entire flights are accommodated in the same hotel.\n\nThe New South Wales government promises to make \"every attempt\" to find suitable accommodation for travellers and families. But availability of rooms means there are severe limits on the number of people who can arrive in the country on any given day.\n\nThe hotel quarantine lasts a minimum of 14 days up to 24 days, providing a person tests negative twice.\n\nThe passenger must cover the cost of quarantine - at about £2,800 for a family of two adults and two children.\n\nFees are waived for those who can prove they are unable to pay, and there are certain exemptions.\n\nBut not following the rules is a criminal offence, and in New South Wales carries fines of around £6,000 for individuals, six months in prison, or both - with an extra fine for each day the offence continues.\n\nHotel quarantine is among the measures credited with limiting cases of coronavirus in Australia - which has a population of around 25 million - to just 28,777 positive cases during the entire pandemic, a smaller number of cases than is currently being recorded in the UK every day.\n\nBut international arrivals to Australia have fallen dramatically since its hotel quarantine policy was introduced in March 2020.\n\nBetween July and October 2020, just 72,111 people arrived in Australia to live, work or visit - compared with 7.5 million people in the same period in 2019, according to Australian government figures.\n\nRob Paterson, chief executive of Best Western Hotels, said his hotels would be well-prepared for the expected new policy.\n\nSome already have Covid infection controls in place, he said, as they have been used to host \"step-down\" patients who complete their recovery in hotels to free up hospital beds.\n\nMr Paterson told BBC Breakfast quarantining customers would like to see reduced prices, a contact arrival process, CCTV and security to stop people leaving and meals delivered three times a day outside the door - along with clean linen and towels.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: “That idea of looking at hotels is certainly one thing we are actively now working on.”\n\nJoss Croft, chief executive of UKinbound, which represents the tourism sector, said he hoped hotel quarantine rules would cover as few countries as possible and told the BBC's Newsnight the industry had been \"decimated\".\n\nIn a joint statement, the Airport Operators Association and Airlines UK said the country already had \"some of the highest levels of restrictions in the world\" and tougher rules would be \"catastrophic\".", "President Joe Biden has said that the US might be able to boost its daily vaccination roll-out targets after criticising the Trump administration’s record.\n\nBiden, who has described the previous vaccine programme as a \"dismal failure\", has committed to getting 100 million vaccine doses done in his first 100 days and has since said: \"I think we may be able to get that to 1.5 million a day, rather than one million a day.\"\n\nIs he right about the vaccine roll-out under the Trump administration?\n\nAs of 20 January, when Biden became US president, about 16.5 million vaccines had been administered.\n\nThat is some way off the Trump administration's target of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020. In fact, fewer than three million people had received a jab by 31 December.\n\nVaccinations have sped up since the start of the year.\n\nThe daily average for the week before Trump left office was less than 900,000, according to Our World in Data .\n\nThat figure has since risen above one million doses a day, and Biden has come under some scrutiny for not setting a more ambitious target.\n\nWhen you look at the countries doing the most vaccinations by population, the US is fourth after Israel, the UAE and the UK in terms of doses per 100 people.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Drone footage captures the extent of the damage the bridge over the River Clwyd\n\nFinancial help has been promised to those affected by serious flooding, the Welsh Government has announced.\n\nPeople have been forced to leave their homes and a major incident declared after Storm Christoph struck.\n\nAbout 80 people were evacuated during flooding thought to be related to mine works in Skewen, Neath, while 30 were evacuated in Bangor-on-Dee, Wrexham.\n\nThe Welsh Government said it would work with councils to deliver £500-£1,000 payments to affected households.\n\nEnvironment minister, Lesley Griffiths, said people across Wales were facing the \"twin problems\" of floods and the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nShe said: \"We will support people in these circumstances just as we did in the aftermath of storms Ciara and Dennis last year, by working with local authorities to make support payments of between £500 and £1,000 available for each household flooded.\"\n\nSevere flood warnings remain in place across Wales as river levels remain high.\n\nIn the Lower Dee Valley a severe flood warning remains in force, from Llangollen to Trevalyn Meadow, and a major incident was declared in Bangor-on-Dee.\n\nWrexham council leader Mark Pritchard said teams worked to ensure the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, made on Wrexham Industrial Estate, was not lost in the floods.\n\nFirefighters in Skewen waded through water up to their thighs amidst reports of evacuated homes\n\nAbout 80 people were evacuated in Skewen, including residents of a care home, after at least eight streets were left under water.\n\nEmergency services said there were no injuries and all those evacuated had been found accommodation, but people are asked to avoid the area.\n\nIn Denbighshire, a bridge linking Trefnant to Tremeirchion over the River Clwyd collapsed in the storm. The council said it would be investigating the cause of the flooding, which forced road closures and evacuations.\n\nNatural Resources Wales (NRW) said the River Dee, which runs through Bangor-on-Dee, was at its highest recorded level since the water gauge became operational in 1996 - 16.45m (54ft).\n\nIt urged people across Wales to remain vigilant, with river levels not set to have peaked until late Thursday evening, adding they would remain high until Friday morning.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe Met Office said over the past two days Wales had the highest rainfall of the four UK nations.\n\nBetween 19 and 21 January, Aberllefenni in Gwynedd saw 188mm (7.5in) of rain, more than average rainfall for Wales for the whole of January, which is 156.89mm (63in).\n\nThat was followed by 180mm (7in) in Crai reservoir, Powys, 169.8mm (6.6in) in Treherbert, Rhondda Cynon Taf, and 166mm (6.5in) in both Maerdy, RCT, and Capel Curig, Conwy.\n\nLlechryd bridge in Ceredigion has been completely submerged by the River Teifi\n\nUp to 30 people were forced out of their homes in Bangor-on-Dee, Wrexham\n\nNatural Resources Wales said the River Dee was at its highest level since the water gauge became operational\n\nThe flooding threatened the supply of the coronavirus Oxford vaccine, which is produced at Wrexham Industrial Estate.\n\nWrexham council leader Mr Pritchard said it had to work to \"make sure we didn't lose the vaccinations in the floods\".\n\n\"I've been up all night... it's a very difficult time for us,\" he added.\n\nNorth East Wales Search and Rescue helped people whose homes were flooded in New Broughton, Wrexham\n\nWockhardt UK, which manufactures the vaccine, said at about 16:00 GMT on Wednesday, excess water surrounded part of its buildings.\n\n\"The site is now secure and free from any further flood damage and operating as normal,\" it said.\n\nThe clean-up has begun in Ruthin\n\nA multi-agency statement described the situation in Bangor-on-Dee as a \"major incident\".\n\nIt said: \"As a severe weather warning indicates that there is a risk to life...\n\n\"The evacuation effort continues, with all routes in and out of the village currently closed to the public due to the flooding.\"\n\nEarlier, some residents in Ruthin were told to leave their homes - people have been told Covid rules allow them leave their homes in an emergency.\n\nMeanwhile, a man's body was recovered from the River Taff near Blackweir in Cardiff.\n\nDozens of ducks and chickens, and 12 huskies were rescued by the RSPCA from a flooded farm in Bangor, while they also took hay to two donkeys stranded by flood water in Mold.\n\nSome 12 huskies had to be rescued after their kennels flooded\n\nDave Brown said the flooding in his home in Broughton, Flintshire, was horrific and his mother-in-law was rescued by firefighters.\n\n\"You don't realise the damage water does and everything that floats - the sheer volume of water. I am 6ft tall and it almost took me out,\" he said.\n\nDave Brown's mother-in-law was rescued from their home in Broughton, Flintshire\n\nWrexham council said some of the people forced to leave their homes were with relatives, while it found others accommodation after having to initially seek refuge in a church hall.\n\nNine properties in Berse Road in New Broughton were also evacuated.\n\nThe situation in Ruthin, Denbighshire, overnight was \"horrendous\", town councillor Stephen Beach said.\n\n\"The whole of Ruthin was on edge,\" he said.\n\n\"Some people were accommodated at the leisure centre, and others were offered places to stay by local residents. The community was superb.\n\n\"It was the sheer volume of water that came down - there was no stopping it.\"\n\nA yellow weather warning for ice for Wales has been issued by the Met Office until 10:00 GMT on Friday, with concerns it could lead to travel disruption, slips and falls.\n\nNumerous flood warnings and alerts remain in place across Wales, including two severe flood warnings.\n\nThe agency said flood defences were being used and river levels at Holt, Wrexham, would remain high for some time.\"There is therefore a significant risk of localised flooding problems and due to that the severe flood warning will remain in place until the levels drop,\" Keith Iven of NRW said\n\nIn Monmouthshire roads were closed following flooding, and the council said while water levels at the River Usk were dropping, a \"second peak\" on the River Wye had been expected on Thursday night.\n\nThe council had warned people living in Riverside Park, Monmouth, may be impacted and council workers were prepared to offer support.\n\nRiver Tywi has burst its banks in Carmarthen, affecting nearby businesses\n\nMid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service said it had attended 98 flooding-related incidents\n\nIt said it deployed swift water rescue teams to rescue 13 people from vehicles in floodwater. It also winched vehicles from water and pumped water from properties.\n\nIn Cardiff, emergency services attended a crash involving a number of vehicles at about 07:40 on the A4232 between Culverhouse Cross and the M4.\n\nNo-one was seriously injured, but both carriageways were closed for just over an hour. The road has since reopened.\n\nIn Carmarthen, people were treated for the effects of fumes after using a generator to pump water from their homes.\n\nIn Knighton and Crickhowell in Powys, crews spent Wednesday night pumping out a number of properties.\n\nIn Borth, Ceredigion, floodwater hit the water treatment plant, an electrical substation and eight properties.\n\nOgwen Valley Mountain Rescue Team had to rescue a man from the roof of his car.\n\nIt said he had tried to drive through the river ford along the road from Llandygai to Bangor, in Gwynedd, but had become stuck in deep water and had climbed onto the roof. He was not injured.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Derek Brockway - weatherman This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nRhondda Cynon Taf council said it was aware of a minor landslip on the mountainside above Pentre.\n\nIt said an initial inspection determined there was no immediate threat to the area and a further detailed inspection would be carried out on Friday. It asked people to avoid the area.\n\nBangor-on-Dee has been badly hit by Storm Cristoph\n\nDozens of roads have been closed across Wales, and while Covid rules are in place stopping people from travelling apart from for essential reasons, people are being warned not to travel in affected areas due to widespread flooding.\n\nChris Lloyd from North Wales Mountain Rescue Association warned people to not visit flood-hit areas to view the damage.\n\nHe told BBC Radio Wales: \"People who are going out to look at the floods are not only putting themselves at risk, but putting additional people on the roads which professional emergency services don't want - we don't want any more incidents.\"\n\nDenbighshire council said Ysgol Bodfari in Denbigh and Ysgol Caer Drewyn, Corwen, which had been open for vulnerable children and the children of critical workers, have been closed.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Health Secretary Matt Hancock says lifting restrictions can only happen when \"facts on the ground\" show it is safe\n\nIt is \"difficult to put a timeline\" on when England's lockdown could be lifted, Matt Hancock has said.\n\nThe health secretary said there were \"early signs\" the measures were working but it was \"not a moment to ease up\".\n\nHe said there were 37,000 people in hospital with coronavirus in the UK and \"more people on ventilators than at any time in this whole pandemic\".\n\n\"The pressure on the NHS remains huge and we've got to get that case rate down,\" he said.\n\nThe number of coronavirus cases in the UK has been falling, but the number of people in hospital remains high, as does the UK's daily death numbers.\n\nA further 592 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test and another 22,195 cases have been recorded, according to Monday's government figures.\n\nThe are 4,076 people in hospital on ventilators.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and only go out for limited reasons.\n\nThis includes for food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nAt Monday's Downing Street press briefing, Mr Hancock said: \"I understand the yearning people have to get out of this.\n\n\"The thing is that we have to look at the facts on the ground and we have to monitor those facts.\n\n\"And of course, everybody wants to have a timeline for that, but I think most people understand why it is difficult to put a timeline on it because it's a matter of monitoring the data.\"\n\nHe set out the factors the government would take into account when reaching decisions over lifting the restrictions, including: the death rate, the number of people in hospital, whether there were new coronavirus variants and the success of the vaccine rollout.\n\nAlmost four in five of the UK's over-80s have had the vaccine, Mr Hancock said, with nearly 6.6m people in total having had their first dose.\n\nThe falling numbers of infections being reported and the rising rate of vaccination are incredibly promising - even if the drop in infections reported on Monday may have been partly an artefact of fewer people coming forward for a test because of the snow.\n\nBut that does not offer any guarantees of a rapid lifting of lockdown.\n\nWhat is concerning ministers are the high numbers in hospital.\n\nThe number of new admissions seems to have plateaued - but at a very high rate.\n\nClose to 4,000 patients a day are being admitted to hospital.\n\nTo put that in context, that is four times the total number of all types of respiratory admissions the NHS would normally see in winter.\n\nIt means the numbers in hospital are at nearly twice the level they were at the peak in the spring during the first wave.\n\nWith better treatments available, patients are spending longer in hospital.\n\nSo come mid-February the pressures in hospital are likely to be very high, leaving ministers little wriggle-room to relax restrictions.\n\nThe big unknown, however, is what impact and how quickly vaccination will have an effect on admissions.\n\nThere is encouraging early news from Israel that hospitalisation really starts to drop three weeks after the first dose.\n\nIf that is repeated here, the picture could quickly change.\n\nBut until that happens the government - in the words of Health Secretary Matt Hancock - is urging the country to hold its nerve.\n\nSpeaking at the Downing Street press conference, Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer for England, warned: \"We are not out of this by a very long way.\"\n\nShe said current coronavirus rates were still causing concern, patience was needed about the vaccination programme and the NHS still faced its usual winter pressures.\n\nSusan Hopkins, from Public Health England, said the UK need to see the death rate \"fall much lower\" before any decision to ease measures.\n\nShe said teams were currently studying the impact on the UK's vaccine programme of the variant first identified in South Africa.\n\nBut she added the \"consensus view\" from four UK laboratories suggested that \"the current vaccine works against the variant that was first discovered in the UK\".", "A group of MPs is calling for hedgehog nesting sites to get the same protections as those for bats and badgers, in an effort to boost numbers.\n\nFormer Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has tabled an amendment to the Environment Bill, which he said would help \"Britain's favourite animal\".\n\nThe spiky mammals should be on developers' \"radar\" when they are planning a project, he added.\n\nA report in 2018 suggested UK hedgehog numbers had halved since 2000.\n\nRough estimates put the population at one million, compared with 30 million during the 1950s.\n\nMr Grayling's amendment would add hedgehogs the list of protected animals under the Wildlife and Countryside Act.\n\nThis would place a legal obligation on developers to search for the animals and take action to reduce the risk to them from building.\n\nChris Grayling said hedgehogs should feature on property developers' surveys\n\nIt is illegal to kill or capture hedgehogs using certain methods but Mr Grayling said: \"It seems wrong to me, for example, that whenever a developer has to carry out a wildlife survey before starting work on a project that the hedgehog is not on anyone's radar.\n\n\"It is Britain's favourite animal, its numbers are declining and it should be as well protected as any other popular but threatened British animal.\"\n\nFormer cabinet ministers Liam Fox, Andrew Mitchell and Dame Cheryl Gillan are among 13 fellow Conservative MPs supporting Mr Grayling's amendment.\n\nLabour's Hilary Benn and Debbie Abrahams have also signed it.\n\nThe Environment Bill - which seeks to write environmental principles into UK law for the first time - will be debated in the House of Commons on Tuesday.\n\nIt includes setting legally binding targets to improve air quality, water, biodiversity and waste reduction by 2037.\n\nBut some Conservative backbenchers say this is much too slow. They want the targets brought forward to 2030 at the latest.\n\nAn amendment from the Conservative MP, Chris Loder, calls for unmissable targets to reduce plastics waste.\n\nIt comes as a report from Greenpeace and the Environmental Investigation Agency claims that the UK's 10 largest supermarket chains put plastic equivalent to the weight of 90 Eiffel Towers on to the market in 2019.\n\nThe study found that while the number of single-use carrier bags fell by more than a third, more than one and a half billion plastic \"bags for life\" were issued by the top brands, and that 2.5 billion plastic water bottles were sold or given away.\n\nThe Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the bill would help \"improve the environment for future generations\".\n\nIt added that ministers were \"ambitious\" to \"drive a world-leading programme of environmental reform\".\n\nFor Labour, shadow environment secretary Luke Pollard said the bill should be prioritised to complete its passage in this session of Parliament.\n\nHe added that the UK needed legislation that \"recognises the urgency of the crisis and doesn't go backwards\".", "Budweiser has said it will not advertise its beer during the Super Bowl this year, joining a growing number of big brands sitting out the annual American football championship.\n\nThe event remains one of the most-watched in the US each year, drawing more than 100 million viewers in 2020.\n\nThe advertisements are often as much a conversation-starter as the game itself, sometimes sparking controversy.\n\nFirms say the virus has made finding the right message especially difficult.\n\nOthers are grappling with financial hits caused by the pandemic, which has dampened spending on many items, while also casting more than 10 million Americans out of work, resurfacing racial and economic inequalities and sharpening political divisions.\n\nBudweiser's parent company, Anheuser-Busch, said it planned to reallocate the money it would have spent on a 30-second Budweiser spot during the game to support an Ad Council campaign promoting coronavirus vaccination.\n\nIt is the first time the flagship brand will not make a game-time appearance in 37 years.\n\n\"This commitment is an investment in a future where we can all get back together safely over a beer\", it said, adding that it would still promote some of its other brands, such as Bud Light, during the game.\n\nOn Monday, Budweiser released a full 90-second Super Bowl ad on YouTube entitled \"Bigger Picture\", which showed US citizens overcoming pandemic challenges together and aimed to raise awareness about Covid-19 vaccines.\n\nCoke, Pepsi and Hyundai are among the other major names also planning to forego airtime during the broadcast.\n\nCoca-Cola said it had made the \"difficult choice\" to \"ensure we are investing in the right resources during these unprecedented times\". The firm did not advertise during the 2019 game either.\n\nHyundai cited \"marketing priorities\" and the timing of upcoming vehicle launches.\n\nPepsi has also said it would not promote its flagship soda during the game. Instead, it is spending money on an advert airing to promote the Super Bowl halftime show it has sponsored for almost a decade.\n\nThe Super Bowl boasts some of the most expensive advertising slots all year\n\nGiven all the economic, political and health questions of 2020, companies may have felt it was prudent to pull back - especially several months ago, when they would have had to start planning for such a high-profile night, said Kimberly Whitler, professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business\n\n\"It's the biggest night of TV watching and so they have to plan it months in advance,\" she said. \"There was so much uncertainty that to go and invest in a Super Bowl ad might have actually felt or seemed frivolous at the time.\"\n\nThe decision goes \"beyond finances\", she added. \"It's also, 'How do we identify the right tone that will match the moment'.\"\n\nThis year's Super Bowl will see star quarterback Tom Brady's Tampa Bay Buccaneers face off against reigning champions the Kansas City Chiefs on 7 February.\n\nLast year, firms spent an average of $5.25m (£3.8m) for a 30-second spot during the championship, driving Super Bowl ad spending to a record $450m, according to Kantar consultancy.\n\nThe firm has said its research suggests Super Bowl ads are \"typically 20 times more effective\" in changing a brand's perception than a normal advert.\n\nAnheuser-Busch, an official sponsor of the National Football League, is typically one of the night's top spenders, so the absence of its flagship brand may create its own buzz, said Satya Menon, a Chicago-based managing partner of of ROI practice at Kantar.\n\nChipotle's very first Super Bowl commercial is entitled, \"Can a burrito change the world?\"\n\n\"Budweiser in particular is a very established brand ... so for them, it's all about generating love and goodwill and maybe this is another way,\" she says.\n\n\"They do have a lot of pre-game advertising out there. When people have the expectation that they wil be there and then they don't see the brand, they'll start thinking why are they not.\"\n\nMeanwhile, the sports showdown still seems to be finding plenty of firms ready to fill spots left by the stalwarts. Names of newcomers include Chipotle and Fiverr, a freelance platform that has seen business soar during the pandemic.\n\n\"It doesn't get any bigger than the Super Bowl from a branding and marketing perspective,\" said Fiverr's chief marketing officer Gali Arnon. \"We believe this is a major opportunity for us to introduce the world to Fiverr in a unique and creative way.\"\n\nMany of this year's advertisers are firms coming from the e-commerce sector, which have benefited from the pandemic, Ms Menon said.\n\nAnd though audience numbers for NFL games have slipped this year, for those firms making their game-night debuts, Ms Menon says she still expects ads to have a big impact - even if the pandemic puts a damper on the traditional Super Bowl parties and other festivities, which can make championship feel like an unofficial national holiday.\n\n\"There isn't very much going on in life, so it will always have that great reach,\" she says. \"Some of that excitement may not be there, but watching will definitely be there.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson says teachers and pupils will be told “as much as we can, as soon as we can” about reopening schools\n\nThe government will tell teachers and parents when schools in England can reopen \"as soon as we can\", the prime minister has said.\n\nMPs have called on the government to set out a \"route map\" for reopening amid concerns for children's education.\n\nBoris Johnson said he understood why people wanted a timetable but he did not want to lift restrictions while the infection rate was \"still very high\".\n\nHe would not guarantee schools would reopen before April's Easter break.\n\nMr Johnson said: \"We've now got the R [reproduction rate] down below 1 across the whole of the country, that's a great achievement, we don't want to see a huge surge of infection just when we've got the vaccination programme going so well and people working so hard.\n\n\"I understand why people want to get a timetable from me today, what I can tell you is we'll tell you, tell parents, tell teachers as much as we can as soon as we can.\"\n\nHe said the government would be \"looking at the potential of relaxing some measures\" before mid-February, with Downing Street clarifying that this meant looking at the data to decide \"what we may or may not be able to ease from 15 February onwards\".\n\nA further 592 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test and another 22,195 cases have been recorded, according to Monday's government figures.\n\nAt Monday's Downing Street press briefing, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said almost four in five of the UK's over-80s have had the vaccine, with nearly 6.6m people in total having had their first dose.\n\nBut he said the NHS continues to be under \"intense pressure\", with Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer for England, saying there are \"twice the number of people in hospital than we had in the first wave\" of the pandemic.\n\nRobert Halfon, chairman of the education select committee, told BBC Breakfast there was \"enormous uncertainty\" and called for the government to set out what the conditions needed to be for pupils to return to schools.\n\nThe Conservative MP for Harlow suggested the government could consider tighter restrictions in other parts of society and the economy, in order to enable schools to open.\n\nTory MPs were enraged by reports over the weekend that schools might not re-open fully until after the Easter holidays.\n\nMinisters say it's the progress of the pandemic that will determine their decision rather than a pre-agreed timetable.\n\nYet whenever the government speaks, parents hear dates. Whether it's that the situation will be reviewed at half-term. Or a pledge to give two weeks' notice when classes will come back.\n\nMPs are now pushing for more transparency from the government about how they'll assess the data, and for some ideas between school being mostly closed or totally open.\n\nThis issue is a perfect metaphor for the situation facing the entire country. Too much hope breeds disappointment, but living with uncertainty is just as hard. And you can come up with a plan but it might have to be junked if the virus has other ideas.\n\nChildren's Commissioner for England Anne Longfield joined the call for clarity and told the BBC: \"Children are more withdrawn, they are really suffering in terms of isolation, their confidence levels are falling, and for some there are serious issues.\"\n\nEducation Secretary Gavin Williamson said the government wanted to \"see all children back at the very earliest moment\".\n\nSchools in England have been closed to most pupils since the national lockdown began on 5 January due to high levels of Covid transmission in the community.\n\nThere have been calls for teachers to be vaccinated sooner, although it is not clear if that would allow schools to reopen earlier.\n\nThe majority of pupils in England are learning from home with schools only open to the children of key workers, vulnerable children and those who cannot learn at home\n\nCovid death rates among educational professionals are not \"statistically significantly different\" to those in the general population, according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, but secondary school teachers appeared to have an elevated risk compared particularly with people working in office-type jobs.\n\nAmong secondary school teachers Covid death rates were 39.2 deaths per 100,000 males, compared with 31.4 for all males aged 20 to 64, and 21.2 per 100,000 females, compared with 16.8, but the ONS said these were \"not statistically significantly different than those of the same age and sex in the wider population\".\n\nSchools will remain closed in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales until at least the February half-term - with the Welsh first minister saying it is \"unlikely\" all pupils will return after the break.\n\nGemma Cocker with her children Charlie and Lyla\n\nGemma Cocker from Brighton is one of the many parents struggling to balance childcare, home learning and work.\n\nShe says she's having to share her work laptop with her son, who has already missed learning time after the family moved home and did not have internet access. \"We didn't have any internet. The school said they had reached their limit so couldn't take him,\" she says.\n\nAnd because her children are young, she says: \"They're never just going to watch a classroom by themselves, you have to be with them the whole time.\"\n\nKitty Jones, 11, is in her last year of primary school and she says home learning is \"tricky\" because she is not used to using different remote platforms like Google Classroom and she wants to return \"as soon as possible\".\n\n\"I still think that I'm learning a bit, but I don't think I'm learning as much as I would be in person,\" she tells BBC Radio 4's World at One programme.\n\nHolly Agbukor, 18, is studying for her A-levels, says it is \"quite stressful\" learning at home, as it is a \"different environment, so it is not as easy to be fully present in the lessons\".\n\nBut, she says, while is it \"difficult\" working at home, \"I don't think it is worth the cost of reintroducing the virus into society and making things worse overall\".\n\nHow has home-schooling been going for your family? You can share your experience by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Tuesday morning. We'll have another update for you this evening.\n\nRules for people entering the UK could get tighter later - with the government expected to enforce hotel quarantine in England for some arrivals. Currently, people arriving in the UK must test negative before setting off, and then self-isolate for 10 days on arrival. This can be reduced to five days in England after a second negative test. But it's feared that not everyone follows the rules - so people could now be told to stay in hotels, where the isolation will be enforced. It's thought the rules will definitely apply to UK citizens and residents arriving from southern African, South America, and Portugal (foreign nationals are already banned from arriving from those \"high risk\" areas). The rules could also apply to other countries. And it's expected that people will have to pay their own way. Although each part of the UK sets its own travel rules, Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said a \"four nations\" approach is being discussed. Here's a glimpse from last year of hotel quarantine in Australia.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe UK's unemployment rate rose to 5% in the three months to November, up from 4.9%, as the pandemic continued to hit the jobs market. In November, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said unemployment could peak at 2.6 million by the middle of this year - that's 7.5% of the working population.\n\nThe EU has been criticised for a slow vaccine rollout - which is partly down to delays from manufacturers Pfizer and AstraZeneca (although the latter's jab hasn't actually been approved in the EU yet). Now the EU says vaccine makers must provide \"early notification\" when they want to export vaccines outside the bloc. This could mean more doses stay inside the EU. The UK minister responsible for vaccine deployment, Nadhim Zahawi, has said he is confident Pfizer - which manufactures its vaccine in Belgium - will deliver for both the UK and the EU. This tweet is from the EU's health commissioner.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Stella Kyriakides This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nRiot police in the Netherlands have again clashed with people defying a curfew, following a weekend of unrest. More than 150 were arrested. In Rotterdam, police fired warning shots and tear gas, after an emergency order failed to move demonstrators.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dutch police described the rioting as the worst unrest in four decades\n\nDespite Covid and the strains on the system, there is still kindness - and new life - in NHS hospitals. The BBC's Hugh Pym went to Kings Mill Hospital, part of Sherwood Forest Hospitals Trust, to meet the patients and staff.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. WATCH: ‘Among all the doom and gloom there’s positives’\n\nYou can find more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page. This page analyses UK data - including the recent fall in daily cases.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "The school's head teacher said it was unacceptable staff were being put at risk\n\nA school has threatened to withdraw places for pupils who have told teachers they are visiting people outside their households.\n\nYew Tree Community School in Oldham said several children had admitted visiting friends, neighbours and family contrary to Covid-19 lockdown rules.\n\nHead teacher Martine Buckley said she would take the action when \"parents were putting staff in danger\".\n\nThe Department for Education said \"all vulnerable\" pupils should go to school.\n\nDuring the current lockdown schools are open only to pupils listed as vulnerable and the children of key workers.\n\nFamilies can form \"childcare bubbles\" with one other household, and children who live with two parents who live separately can move between households - but any further mixing is forbidden.\n\nIn a letter posted on the Chadderton school's Facebook page, Mrs Buckley said she was \"upset\" to be writing it \"but I feel I must\".\n\n\"Our lovely children are open and honest and they tell us about their lives and activities,\" she said.\n\n\"A number of them are telling us that they are visiting friends, neighbours and family which is against the law.\n\n\"Our teachers and support staff are putting their own safety at risk to look after your children and they should be confident you are doing your bit to follow the lockdown rules.\n\n\"I am afraid I will have to withdraw the offer of a place in school to children whose parents are putting us in danger.\"\n\nWhile a number of parents applauded the message, others have been angered.\n\nOne man told the BBC his two grandchildren were at the school and children as young as four have been asked about their activities at home, which was \"out of order\".\n\n\"My granddaughters are pretty intimidated by the tone,\" he said.\n\n\"Asking them questions like that and then the answers off the back of that. They come to a decision of whether they are going to displace them or not.\"\n\nThe school has about 660 pupils aged between four and 11.\n\nA spokeswoman for the Department for Education said during the current lockdown, schools were \"open for vulnerable children and the children of critical workers\".\n\n\"We expect schools to work with families to ensure all critical worker children are given access to a place if this is required,\" she added.\n\n\"We encourage all vulnerable children to attend.\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk", "Microsoft has reported booming demand for its Xbox gaming consoles as the pandemic continues to lift the fortunes of the American tech giant.\n\nIts Azure cloud computing services also got a boost due to a surge in working and learning from home.\n\nThe gains helped push the firm's overall revenue up 17% to a record $43.1bn (£31.4bn).\n\nBut its growth came as the virus continues to weigh on other industries.\n\nMicrosoft boss Satya Nadella said the firm is benefiting from a long-term shift in behaviour.\n\n\"What we have witnessed over the past year is the dawn of a second wave of digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry,\" he said.\n\nXbox sales jumped 40% in the three months to 31 December while Azure services soared 50%.\n\nThe virus continues to weigh on industries outside of tech\n\nThe pandemic has prompted many firms to switch to remote working, while keeping many entertainment options outside of the home off-limits.\n\nMicrosoft has seized on the changes, focusing energy on updating its remote work software options.\n\nThe firm also released two new Xbox consoles in November, helping to boost the performance of its personal computing unit.\n\nMicrosoft's gaming business topped $5bn in quarterly sales for the first time ever due to gaming subscriptions and sales as well as new consoles.\n\nThe firm said profits in the quarter rose 33% compared with last year to $15.5bn.\n\nIts shares - which climbed roughly 40% last year - were up another 4% in after-hours trade,\n\n\"These were blow out numbers that will be another feather in the cap for the tech sector as the cloud growth party is just getting started,\" said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.\n\nBut the gains enjoyed by tech firms like Microsoft stand in contrast to the ongoing struggles seen in other industries such as hospitality, retail and travel.\n\nCoffee chain Starbucks on Tuesday said its sales in the last three months of 2020 fell roughly 5% compared to 2019, driven by a drop in business in the US where concerns about Covid-19 have prompted authorities to urge people to stay at home.\n\nIn China, where the virus is under more control, sales rose 5%, the company said.\n\nThe firm said it expected business to return to growth in the next few months, including in the critical US market.\n\nBut profits in the quarter dropped 30% to $622.2m compared with last year, sending the firm's shares lower in after-hours trade.", "The water is warmer than the air and is creating a mist along Dynevor Road\n\nThe coalmining heritage of Wales has been implicated in flooding of homes - but what has happened in Skewen?\n\nAbout 80 people were evacuated from the Neath Port Talbot village, with at least eight streets left under water.\n\nCouncil leader Rob Jones says the flood appears to be related to mine works - but the volume of water involved has hampered a full assessment so far.\n\nThe Coal Authority is investigating how \"historic underground mining features\" in the area exacerbated the problem.\n\nA geologist says there are tens of thousands of old mine shafts across the former south Wales coalfield and it is \"incredibly difficult\" to monitor them all.\n\nSkewen lies within an old coal mining hotspot, with several former colliery sites near the village that operated in the 19th and early 20th Century.\n\nThere were colliery sites near what is now Drummau Road, in the north of the village and another close to Old Road, near Neath Abbey.\n\nSkewen was part of a collection of collieries that stretched between Neath and Llanelli on the western side of south Wales' coalfield.\n\nGraham Levins, secretary of the Welsh Mines Preservation Trust, said old mines often contain groundwater which can flood in heavy rain.\n\nHe said: \"A lot of them go very, very deep down, much below the local water level and that's why they had all the big wheels to pump the water out.\n\n\"It fills up with water and will find a way out. Normally rainfall you get it doesn't cause a lot of problems but when you get really heavy rain, the water drains down through the ground and builds up.\"\n\nStreets were turned into rivers in Skewen\n\nGeologist Tom Backhouse said water was coming out of an area near the junction of Goshen Park and Drummau Road, where there is a record of a mine shaft dating from the turn of the 20th Century.\n\nIt then started \"rushing down\" Drummau Road, causing the flooding that forced evacuations.\n\n\"What we can expect to have happened is that the water level in the mines rose to a point where it's burst out of that entry point from the mine workings below.\n\n\"Also, there are images of very ochre like orange-coloured water and again, that may well be issuing from the mine workings on the highlands to the east of the property on the hill behind.\n\n\"That may be where the shallow workings have flooded.\"\n\nHe said old mine working across the former coalfield area hold water at a certain depth, but when an event such as Storm Christoph drops \"a huge amount in a small area\", the levels rise quickly.\n\n\"As it gets closer and closer to the surface, it basically looks for an escape, the pressure builds up,\" he continued.\n\n\"What it looks like has happened on the junction of Goshen Park and Drummau Road, where the mine shaft is recorded, is that pressure has built up at that point and then burst out through the shaft which is very likely to have been capped with wood or something like that.\n\n\"Where you've got those mine shafts, which ultimately are vertical tunnels down into the mine workings below, the water has literally forced itself up through that shaft, and the pressure is obviously so great it's caused this devastating flash flood.\"\n\nAs well as properties, vehicles were submerged in water\n\nThere are about 13 shafts recorded within about 820ft (250m) of the one in Goshen Park, so Mr Backhouse said it is possible more than one may have burst.\n\nThere are tens of thousands in south Wales and he said it was \"incredibly difficult\" to check them all, but there were \"tell tale signs\" as to why they may collapse such as age or what type of developments are around them.\n\nThe clean up has continued on Friday morning\n\n\"Not to try and fear-monger or anything but of course this sort of thing can happen again,\" he said.\n\n\"If another event like Storm Christoph happens, the water levels in the mine rises as quickly as it did, there's absolutely nothing to say that it wouldn't happen again in the future.\n\n\"And obviously as climate changes and we have many more events like Storm Christoph, they are going to increase in frequency, they are going to be much more severe.\n\n\"The Coal Authority will have to consider the risk in places like Skewen, and they'll have to understand how it will affect residents and proactively manage that and look at how to reduce the risks for residents.\"", "Twenty-two people were killed and hundreds more injured in the 2017 bombing\n\nThe operator of the Manchester Arena has denied it \"deliberately sacrificed safety\" in the aftermath of the 2017 bombing.\n\nAn inquiry has heard how security failures contributed to the arena being unsafe on the night of the attack.\n\nVenue operator SMG has disputed claims it \"was akin to the worst kind of Dickensian factory owner, deliberately and cynically sacrificing safety\".\n\nTwenty-two people were killed and hundreds more injured when Salman Abedi detonated a home-made device as fans left the arena following an Ariana Grande concert.\n\nAndrew O'Connor QC, representing SMG, told the inquiry the firm had always accepted responsibility for security in the City Room, where the bomb exploded.\n\nBut he denied the firm had sought to \"blame others,\" adding it had \"simply sought to explain how SMG discharged its responsibilities\".\n\n\"It is for that purpose and not for prevarication, finger-pointing or buck passing that we have sought to explain to you SMG's relationship with all the other organisations involved,\" he added.\n\nMr O'Connor said the company accepted there were \"shortcomings\" with its written risk assessments but maintained it \"did have a system for assessing terrorism-related risk\".\n\nThe public inquiry into the bombing will look at whether the attack could have been prevented\n\nPatrick Gibbs QC, representing BTP, told the inquiry the force made five key mistakes on the night of the bombing.\n\nThis included having no officers on patrol at Victoria station when Abedi made his final journey to the arena and not having an officer in the City Room at the end of the concert.\n\nOther mistakes included failing to complete a written risk-assessment for the concert, officers not following instructions from their duty sergeant and that PC Stephen Corke, the most experienced officer on duty, was not at the arena complex for the end of the event.\n\nBTP has since made significant changes to its procedures since the attack, the inquiry was told.\n\nThese include monthly meetings with the arena operators to discuss events.\n\nThe inquiry, which began in September, continues.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Pictures of the Pampas grass on social media are thought to have made the area in South Shields popular\n\nA boom in the popularity of Pampas grass with interior decorators has led to \"droves\" of people picking the plant which grows wild near a beach.\n\nThe grass, near Littlehaven Beach in South Shields, forms part of a wind defence to stop sand blowing onto roads and helps protect the coastline.\n\nSouth Tyneside Council warned anyone found removing it could be prosecuted.\n\nCouncillor Ernest Gibson said while the grass may look \"beautiful in vases\" people were \"damaging the environment\".\n\nThe grass, which was popular in the 1970s, can sell for up to £40 a bunch and has proved a popular addition to people's homes.\n\nIt is thought that photographs on social media sites such as Instagram may have influenced people turning up and taking it, Mr Gibson added.\n\n\"Pampas grass is quite expensive to buy if you went to a florist. It's cheaper to come to South Tyneside and take it away,\" he said.\n\n\"But what we are doing is urging people not to come here and take it away, it's there for a reason.\"\n\nPampas grass and Marram grass form part of a defence along the coast at South Shields\n\nThe Pampas grass helps to bond poor soils found at the coast, while Marram grass helps to prevent erosion in the dunes.\n\nSigns are to be erected warning people not to pick the grass because it is already in need of replenishment, the council said.\n\n\"Through Covid, we have a massive amount of people coming to the coastal town, it's Benidorm without the sunshine,\" he added.\n\n\"It's great to see people at the seaside enjoying it [the grass] and that's what it's part of. It's there for everybody to view.\"\n\nGarden designer George Wright said Pampas grass was \"very popular\" and he had seen demand increase two or three times at his nursery in West Boldon. He also expressed concern for the area.\n\n\"Once they take the flower heads themselves they take the seeds. Eventually this will become very much a patchy area and they will all start to decline.\n\n\"Pampas grass is becoming more and and more popular at the moment and I think a lot of it is people are starting to extend their houses into the garden so they want something nice in there, and also it's being used for interior decoration in houses.\"\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Prof Chris Whitty said it was a very sad day, as the UK surpassed 100,000 Covid deaths\n\nThe number of daily coronavirus deaths in the UK is likely to come down \"relatively slowly\", England's chief medical officer has warned.\n\nProf Chris Whitty said the UK was going to see \"a lot more deaths\" over the next few weeks before the effects of the vaccination programme were felt.\n\nCurrent restrictions were \"just about holding\" in lowering infection rates, he told a Downing Street briefing.\n\nIt comes as the UK surpassed 100,000 coronavirus deaths on Tuesday.\n\nA further 1,631 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were recorded in the daily figures.\n\nAnd 20,089 coronavirus cases were reported on Tuesday, continuing a downward trend in the number of UK cases seen in recent days.\n\nProf Whitty told a Downing Street news conference the rolling seven-day average for deaths was 1,242 - \"an incredibly high number\" - and unlikely to come down quickly.\n\n\"I think we have to be realistic that the rate of mortality, the number of people dying a day, will come down relatively slowly over the next two weeks - and will probably be flat for a while now.\"\n\nProf Whitty said the number of people testing positive for coronavirus was \"still at a very high number, but it has been coming down\".\n\nBut he cautioned against relaxing restrictions \"too early\", as Office for National Statistics data showed a \"rather slower\" decrease.\n\nThe number of people in hospital with Covid-19 in the UK had \"flattened off\", he said, but was still an \"incredibly high number\" and \"substantially above the peak in April\".\n\nProf Whitty said the new, more transmissible variant discovered in the south east of England at the end of last year had altered the UK's situation \"very substantially\" and had made it \"much harder\" to bring infection levels down.\n\n\"We were worried two weeks ago that the measures we have at the moment were not enough to hold this new variant,\" he told the news conference.\n\n\"I think what the data I showed you at the beginning of the slide sessions shows is that the rates are just about holding with the new variant, with what everybody's doing.\n\n\"It's going to be much harder because of this new variant and I think we have to be realistic about that.\"\n\nSir Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said that more than a quarter of a million severely ill coronavirus patients have been looked after in hospital since the pandemic started last year.\n\n\"This is not a year that anybody is going to want to remember nor is it a year that across the health service any of us will ever forget,\" he said.\n\nThe daily Covid figures have seen the number of deaths top 100,000. But they also contain some signs of hope.\n\nJust over 20,000 new infections have been reported - down from 22,000 yesterday.\n\nThis compares to an average of 60,000 at the start of the year.\n\nIt is a sharp fall, although Prof Whitty cautions it may actually be a little slower than that.\n\nNot everyone who is infected comes forward for testing and the government surveillance programme which involves random testing of the population suggests the fall has not been quite so great.\n\nNonetheless, it is clear the infection rate is coming down - and that offers hope.\n\nHospital cases have plateaued and should soon start falling. That will eventually lead to a reduction in the number of deaths.\n\nThen, in February, the vaccination programme should start having an impact, leading, hopefully, to a rapid drop in deaths.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson told the briefing the coronavirus infection rate remained \"pretty forbiddingly high\" to ease lockdown restrictions, which have been in place in England since 5 January.\n\nBut he said \"at a certain stage we will want to be getting things open\".\n\nHe added: \"What I will be doing in the course of the next few days and weeks is setting out in more detail, as soon as we can, when and how we want to get things open again.\"\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and only go out for limited reasons - including for food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nMeanwhile, the epidemiologist whose modelling prompted the UK government to impose the first lockdown has told BBC Radio 4's PM he believes more action in autumn last year could have \"drastically reduced\" the number of lives lost in the second wave - some 60,000.\n\nProf Neil Ferguson said: \"They couldn't have been eliminated, but they could have been drastically reduced by earlier action, unfortunately.\n\n\"How much is difficult to judge, the new variant was unpredictable and did change our understanding of how much was needed to control spread, but we did just let the autumn wave get to far, far too high infection levels.\"\n\nReacting to the UK's death toll, Mr Johnson said he took \"full responsibility\" for the government's actions, but added: \"We truly did everything we could.\"", "The fate of more than 200,000 seafarers who play a crucial role in keeping global trade flowing is being labelled a \"humanitarian crisis at sea\".\n\nMore than 300 firms and organisations are urging for them to be treated as \"key workers\", so they can return home without risking public health.\n\nMore than 90% of global trade - from household goods to medical supplies - is moved by sea.\n\nBut governments have banned crew from coming ashore amid Covid-19 fears.\n\nLarge firms including shipping titan AP Moller-Maersk, oil firms BP and Shell, consumer giant Unilever and mining groups Rio Tinto and Vale, as well as maritime transporters, unions, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and other supply chain partners have signed the Neptune Declaration on Seafarer Wellbeing and Crew Change.\n\nThey are calling for all countries to designate seafarers as key workers and implement crew change protocols.\n\nThe signees of the Neptune Declaration are warning global leaders that ignoring the risk to crews' mental and physical wellbeing threatens global supply chains, which are crucial to vaccinating the world from coronavirus.\n\nThe firms and organisations hope that world leaders, gathering at this year's virtual Davos Forum, will heed their call.\n\n\"Unified, prompt action from governments and other key stakeholders is needed to protect the lives and livelihoods of the 1.6 million seafaring men and women who serve us all across the seas, and who continue to face extreme risk to their safety and earnings,\" said WEF's head of supply chain and transport Margi Van Gogh.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. India coronavirus: The stranded sailor yet to meet his daughter\n\n\"By granting stranded seafarers key worker status, and by prioritising vaccine allocation for transport crew, we can prevent a deepening humanitarian and economic crisis.\"\n\nAccording to latest data from the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) and international ship owners body Bimco, there are 1.6 million seafarers serving on internationally trading merchant ships worldwide.\n\nTypically, ICS estimates around 100,000 seafarers are rotated every month, with 50,000 staff disembarking and 50,000 crew embarking ships to comply with international maritime regulations, governing safe working hours and crew welfare.\n\nSeafarers usually work 10-12 hours shifts, seven days a week to man ships, on four or six-month-long contracts, followed by a period of leave.\n\nBut due to the coronavirus crisis and travel bans brought in by many governments to combat new variants of Covid-19, hundreds of thousands of crew are spending extended periods at sea, far beyond the expiry of their contracts.\n\nFor those who have been at sea for months longer than their contract stipulates, there is a growing risk to their mental and physical wellbeing.\n\n\"Seafarers are the unacceptable collateral damage on the war on Covid-19 and this must stop,\" said ICS secretary general Guy Platten.\n\n\"If we want to maintain global trade seafarers must not be put to the back of the vaccine queue. You can't inject a global population without the shipping industry and most importantly our seafarers. We are calling on the supply chain to take action to support seafarers now.\"", "Changes were made to rape prosecution policy that led to a \"shocking\" fall in offences before courts in England and Wales, the Court of Appeal has heard.\n\nThe End Violence Against Women (EVAW) coalition is challenging what it said was an \"unlawful\" move by the Crown Prosecution Service in 2016-18.\n\nThe CPS said there was no \"substantial change\" in how cases were treated.\n\nAnd it denied the coalition's claim it had been taking on only \"strong cases\" to keep conviction rates up.\n\nAccording to the EVAW, the CPS adopted what is known as the \"bookmaker's approach\" to cases, which saw prosecutors considering what may happen based on past experience of similar cases, rather than its earlier \"merits-based approach\" based on objective assessment of the evidence.\n\nIn documents before the court, Phillippa Kaufmann QC said that from September 2016 prosecutors were \"trained away\" from the former CPS policy, including through a series of roadshows.\n\nIn 2017 legally binding guidance on the old approach was removed, and the CPS introduced a 60% conviction rate target in relation to rape cases.\n\nMs Kauffmann said both the volume of cases and the charging rate fell.\n\nShe cited figures showing an average of 3,446 rape cases were charged per year between 2009 and 2016, compared with 2,822 in 2017, a fall of 23%.\n\nAt the same time the charging rate \"declined precipitously\" from 56% in 2016, to 47% in 2017 and 34% in 2018.\n\nThe court documents note the conviction target was removed at some point between 2017 and 2019, and guidance relating to the \"merits-based approach\" to prosecutions was reintroduced.\n\nThe campaigners are aiming to show there was a policy change and the way the CPS went about it was unlawful.\n\nIf a ruling goes in its favour, the EVAW hopes some cases could be looked at again by the CPS.\n\nLawyers for the CPS argue the case was not suitable for a legal challenge.\n\nIn written submissions, Tom Little QC, says the move away from a \"merits-based approach\" was out of a concern that \"some people were being prosecuted when the case ought not to have been charged\".\n\nHe added the decision to initiate the roadshows and remove the guidance \"did not result in any substantial change in the application of the evidential test in the code for Crown prosecutors\".\n\nIn a statement, the CPS said: \"Independent inspectors have found no evidence of a risk-averse approach and have reported a clear improvement in the quality of our legal decision-making in rape cases.\"\n\nThe judges are expected to give their ruling in the case at a later date.", "Celebrities including comedians Romesh Ranganathan and Meera Syal and cricketer Moeen Ali have made a video urging people to get the Covid vaccine.\n\nThe video was co-ordinated by Citizen Khan creator Adil Ray, who said he wanted to dispel vaccination myths for those from ethnic minority communities.\n\nMayor of London Sadiq Khan and former Conservative Party Chairman Baroness Warsi are among the others taking part.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Adil Ray OBE 💙 This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n\"We all just feel we needed to do something,\" Ray told the BBC.\n\nFake news about the vaccine, particularly in the South Asian community, has led to concerns about uptake.\n\nRay appears in the five-minute video alongside stars like former Coronation Street actress Shobna Gulati, who tells viewers: \"We will find our way through this. And we will be united once again with our friends and our families. All we have to do is take the vaccination.\"\n\nSomali-born British journalist Rageh Omaar and his ITV colleague Ranvir Singh join comedians like Sanjeev Bhaskar, Asim Chaudhry and Ranganathan to debunk common vaccine misinformation and misconceptions.\n\nRanganathan says: \"There's no chip or tracker in the vaccine to keep watching where you go. Your mobile phone actually does a much better job of that.\"\n\nAfter posting the video, Ray told BBC Radio Leicester: \"For the British Asian and black communities, at the very beginning of the pandemic we were told they were perhaps the most vulnerable, that there was a disproportionate number of cases and even deaths.\n\n\"Even now there are a disproportionate number of deaths. But nothing was really done about it and that was really quite confusing for a lot of the community. So we felt that we've got to try and take the lead a little bit here and dispel some of these myths.\"\n\nHe added: \"This was recorded entirely independently from the government - the only thing we did do was we went to the NHS website for the correct medical guidance.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nWith the UK aiming to offer Covid vaccinations to every adult by autumn, vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi said confidence in the vaccines was high in the UK, with 85% saying they would accept the jab.\n\nBut he said that those who were hesitant \"skew heavily\" towards black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.\n\nThe UK is recording the ethnicity and occupations of people who receive the vaccine and figures would be published soon, Mr Zahawi added.\n\nLast month, a poll commissioned by the Royal Society of Public Health suggested 57% of black, Asian and minority ethnic people would be happy to have the coronavirus vaccine, compared with 79% of white people.\n\nDr Harpreet Sood, who is leading an NHS anti-disinformation drive, recently said fake news was likely to be causing some people from the UK's South Asian communities to reject the vaccine.\n\nSuch warnings have led the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board to urge places of worship and community hubs to be used as vaccination centres in an attempt to inspire confidence.\n\nThe board's chairman, Imam Qari Asim, said: \"As an imam, my message is simple - do not trust 'fake news', verify before you amplify.\"\n\nThe Al Abbas Mosque in Birmingham is being used as a Covid vaccination centre\n\nMany mosques are using their Friday sermons to urge people to have the jab, while some imams are sharing photos of themselves getting the jab on social media.\n\nMeanwhile, the government has announced £23m funding for a network of \"community champions\" to spread accurate information and provide support for people in at-risk groups including older people, disabled people and ethnic minorities.\n\nOn Monday, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick visited the UK's first vaccination centre to be opened in a mosque, at Al-Abbas Islamic Centre in Birmingham.\n\n\"It is absolutely brilliant to see faith communities like this stepping up and playing their part in the vaccine programme,\" Mr Jenrick said.\n\n\"We have to build trust, ensure that we counter misinformation and ensure that everyone, regardless of their faith, regardless of what community they're from, gets access to the programme.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "The police officers were on duty when they had their hair cut, the Met says\n\nThirty-one Met Police officers who broke coronavirus rules to get haircuts are facing £200 fines.\n\nTwo officers who hired a barber to give the cuts to staff at Bethnal Green Police Station, on 17 January, are also facing misconduct investigations, the Met said.\n\nUnder current lockdown restrictions in England, barbers and hairdressers are not allowed to work.\n\nDet Ch Supt Marcus Barnett said he was \"deeply disappointed\" in the officers.\n\n\"Although officers donated money to charity as part of the haircut, this does not excuse them from what was a very poor decision,\" he said. \"I expect a lot more of them.\n\n\"Quite rightly, the public expect police to be role models in following the regulations, which are designed to prevent the spread of this deadly virus.\"\n\nThe investigation comes after fines were handed out to nine officers who were caught eating breakfast together in a Greenwich café.\n\nAll those officers were issued with a £200 fixed penalty notice.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "At least 80 people had to leave their homes in the village after flooding\n\nPeople whose homes were flooded after a \"blow out\" at a mine shaft are said to be \"devastated\" as they face months before they can return home.\n\nSteve Morris said his son Gareth and his girlfriend's home in Skewen, Neath Port Talbot, was inundated by \"orange\" flood water containing sewage.\n\nBut some will be allowed back to their properties on Tuesday.\n\nResidents of Goshen Park and Sunnyland Crescent who have yet to contact Neath Port Talbot council are urged to do so in the next 24 hours.\n\nThe council said access to these properties would continue to be affected beyond 26 January and the Coal Authority wished to have early discussions with them.\n\nMr Morris told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast that his son called him on Thursday to say his house was about to be flooded.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Teresa Dalling says a river of orange water rushed through the village on Thursday\n\n\"I live about half a mile away... and by the time I got to his address I could see the water levels were rising rapidly up the road,\" he explained.\n\n\"Then it was so quick - the water came through his rear patio doors firstly, then the gardens and then the drains couldn't cope on the main road and came through the front door, then the side door.\n\n\"His ground floor was four feet under water, and it was this orange coloured water. There was sewage in the house, so his ground floor needs totally gutting.\"\n\nMr Morris said Gareth and his girlfriend are staying in a hotel as they wait to be allowed back to assess the damage.\n\nHe hopes their insurance firm will pay to rent a home for them, adding: \"I can honestly see them being out of their house for between six and 10 months.\n\n\"They are obviously devastated - they have only been in there for 12 months so everything was near enough brand new.\"\n\nCerys Thomas was at her mother's house with her son, in Goshen Park, when she saw water coming through the front door.\n\nThe stairs at the home of Cerys Thomas' parents were left caked in mud\n\nShe said: \"I said to my mother to get my son and herself out and up toward the street. I phoned the police then, because I could see it was going to be an emergency, and within minutes my parents' conservatory doors just blew through.\n\n\"The pressure of the water just blew through the house and the water, within minutes, was up to my waist.\n\n\"Trying to get out of the house was very scary because the pressure of the front door was getting pushed back.\"\n\nShe said the street was under water \"within seven minutes\".\n\n\"It was something you would see in a movie,\" she said.\n\nWithin minutes of water entering the house Ms Thomas was up to her waist in water\n\nMeanwhile, the Coal Authority said it has identified the cause of the \"blow out\".\n\nChief executive Lisa Pinney told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast: \"Firstly, I just want to say our thoughts are with everyone affected by this flooding and we are genuinely sorry people have been affected in this way.\n\n\"What we know so far is the blow out was caused by a blockage underground which caused water to break out, basically to find the easiest path, and there's no doubt the excessive rainfall in the days before was also a factor in that.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMs Pinney said crews had been able to find the site of the collapsed mineshaft which had caused the flooding, and the authority had started to \"develop options\".\n\n\"We really understand people want to get back into their homes, they want to collect things, they want to know what the next steps are,\" she continued.\n\n\"We are working as fast as possible to make that happen and we hope to be able to provide some more information in the next day or so, but you will understand that we have to be sure for public safety.\"\n\nMs Pinney said there are almost 300 mine shafts or entries across the Skewen mine works, which covers an area of about 12 sq km (7.6 sq miles).\n\nShe added: \"We have checked all recorded shafts in the immediate area and we are doing continued checks over the coming days. We have found no problems. They are all safe.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Nadhim Zahawi: \"We have 367m vaccines from seven different manufacturers that we have contracted with\"\n\nSupplies of vaccines are \"tight\" but the UK believes it will receive enough doses to meet its targets, the vaccine minister has said.\n\nNadhim Zahawi told BBC Breakfast manufacturers were \"confident\" they would deliver for the UK amid warnings of production delays.\n\nIt comes as the EU said it might tighten vaccine export controls.\n\nCountries should avoid \"vaccine nationalism\" and ensure a fair global supply, Mr Zahawi said.\n\nMeanwhile, more than 100,000 people have died with Covid-19 in the UK, after 1,631 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were recorded in the daily figures.\n\nMr Zahawi said the vaccination programme was still on track to deliver a first dose to 15 million of the most vulnerable by mid-February and to offer all adults their first dose by autumn.\n\nHe said the UK had supplies of the Oxford vaccine manufactured domestically by AstraZeneca as well as the Pfizer one, which is made in Belgium.\n\nThe government is also planning to publish figures on the take-up of the vaccine by ethnicity from Thursday, following concerns that some black, Asian and ethnic minority communities were more hesitant to get the jab.\n\n\"I'm confident we will meet our mid-February target and continue beyond that,\" Mr Zahawi told the BBC.\n\n\"Supplies are tight, they continue to be, these are new manufacturing processes,\" he added. \"It's lumpy and bumpy, it gets better and stabilises and improves going forward.\"\n\nBut he declined to say that he had received guarantees about the number of doses the UK would receive from Pfizer or other manufacturers and refused to confirm how many doses had already arrived.\n\nThe prime minister's spokesman said AstraZeneca had committed to delivering two million doses a week to the UK, and the government was not expecting any changes to that supply.\n\nDowning Street also rejected German media reports claiming a very low efficacy rate for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine among older people, saying they had been denied by Oxford University, AstraZeneca and the German health ministry.\n\nChief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance told the cabinet the trials showed similar immune responses in younger and older adults.\n\nAnd England's chief medical adviser, Prof Chris Whitty, has defended the UK's strategy of extending the time between first and second doses of coronavirus vaccines from three to 12 weeks in order to immunise more people.\n\nHe told the Downing Street coronavirus briefing on Tuesday that the \"great majority\" of protection came from the first dose.\n\nHe also said there was \"no evidence\" that immunity waned between three and 12 weeks after the first dose was administered.\n\nProf Whitty said: \"We thought very carefully about what the balance of this is, but the balance of risk in terms of reducing the number of deaths in the community - and I really want to stress that, that is the aim of this - is to maximise the number of people who get that first dose, where the great majority of protection comes from.\"\n\nThe latest tension over supply of the Covid vaccine is another illustration of just how fragile this issue is.\n\nThere are huge global demands for Covid vaccine, limited raw materials and constraints on manufacturing.\n\nThe UK already has enough vaccine to jab all the highest-risk groups by mid-February, although not all of it has been packaged up or been through the final safety checks.\n\nThis explains why ministers are confident about the immediate target for the over-70s, health and care workers and the extremely clinically vulnerable.\n\nBut what is in doubt is how quickly the UK can vaccinate in the medium term.\n\nWith the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured in the UK those supply routes are more guaranteed.\n\nBut the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is made in Belgium. The UK, like the rest of Europe, is affected by the problems with manufacturing that are being experienced with that vaccine.\n\nWith Europe experiencing major problems rolling out its vaccination programme - per head of population five times fewer vaccines have been delivered - this is a story that is going to rumble on for months.\n\nThe UK has placed orders for 367 million doses of vaccines from seven manufacturers, Mr Zahawi said. \"As vaccines come along we will get more volume, millions more in the weeks and months to come,\" he added.\n\nThe tension over vaccine supplies increased after UK-based AstraZeneca warned the EU it would have to reduce planned deliveries because of production problems. Pfizer-BioNTech has also said supplies will be temporarily lower as it works to increase capacity at its Belgian factory.\n\nIt has prompted the EU to accuse AstraZeneca of failing to meet its commitments and to warn that it might require all companies producing Covid vaccines to provide \"early notification\" whenever they planned to export supplies out of the EU.\n\n\"The thing to do now is not to go down the dead end of vaccine nationalism. It's to work together to protect our people,\" Mr Zahawi said.\n\n\"No-one is safe until the whole world is safe.\"\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock subsequently said the UK government \"oppose protectionism in all its forms\" and urged all international partners to \"be collaborative\" and \"work closely together\" on vaccine distribution.\n\nHe added that the EU's warning that it could restrict exports of vaccines made in the bloc was \"unfortunate and especially so in the midst of a pandemic\".\n\nMeanwhile, the head of NHS England earlier told MPs coronavirus could become a \"much more treatable disease\" over the next six to 18 months, with the hope of a return to a \"much more normal future\".\n\nSir Simon Stevens told the Health and Social Care Committee: \"The first half of the year, vaccination is going to be crucial.\n\n\"I think a lot of us in the health service are increasingly hopeful that in the second half of the year and beyond we will also see more therapeutics and more treatments for coronavirus.\"\n\nHe also said it \"would be great\" if the Covid vaccine and flu vaccine were combined into a single jab, if not for next winter then future ones.\n\nAnd he said vaccines were being used as fast as they arrived in the NHS, with more than half of those aged 75-79 having now had their first dose.\n\nThe UK aims to offer Covid vaccination to every adult by autumn.\n\nMr Zahawi said confidence in the vaccines was high, with 85% of people saying they would accept the jab.\n\nBut he said those who were hesitant \"skew heavily\" towards black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.\n\nThe government is providing £23m of funding to 60 local councils and voluntary groups to boost vaccine take-up among groups such as older people, disabled people, and people from ethnic minority backgrounds.\n\nIt comes as celebrities such as comedians Romesh Ranganathan and Meera Syal and cricketer Moeen Ali appeared in a video urging people in their communities to get vaccinated.\n\nMr Zahawi told ITV's Good Morning Britain his uncle had died from Covid-19 last week. He had been eligible for vaccination but caught the virus before he could receive it, the minister said.\n\nThis \"grim and horrible\" experience made him determined to ensure that the most vulnerable were protected as quickly as possible, Mr Zahawi said.\n\nSir Simon said there was concern about vaccine hesitancy in some groups, where there were access problems as well as \"systematic attempts to misinform and lie about the vaccine programme targeted particularly at minority populations, and - in some cases - long-standing mistrust of public services\".\n\nHe said disruption to vaccine deliveries from EU export restrictions was not thought to be likely.\n\nIn other developments, the UK has offered to carry out genomic sequencing for other countries around the world to help identify further new variants.\n\nPublic Health England said it would give \"crucial early warning\" of any mutations that might cause the virus to spread faster, make people more ill or possibly reduce the effectiveness of vaccines.", "Transfer tests normally used by grammar schools have been cancelled this year\n\nOne of NI's most prominent grammar schools has said it will use primary school test scores to decide which pupils to admit in 2021.\n\nRoyal Belfast Academical Institution said it would \"adopt other academic criteria for admission to the school\".\n\nThat is despite the vast majority of grammar schools not planning to use academic criteria this year.\n\nThe tests run by the AQE and the Post-Primary Transfer Consortium (PPTC) were cancelled in early 2021.\n\nAs a result, grammar schools - which are attended by about 45% of post-primary pupils in Northern Ireland - are drawing up new criteria for how they will select pupils in 2021.\n\nBanbridge Academy, Bangor Grammar, Belfast Royal Academy and Regent House are among those to have published their admissions criteria for 2021.\n\nNone of those schools are using academic criteria, but pupils applying will have to have entered the AQE transfer test.\n\nSome other grammars like Thornhill College and St Columb's College in Londonderry, which decided in 2020 not to use the PPTC transfer test in 2021, have also published admissions criteria.\n\nIn a statement to BBC News NI, Royal Belfast Academical Institution (RBAI) said it was \"committed to the principle that a child should be placed in a school which offers a curriculum best suited to the aptitudes of that child\".\n\n\"For this reason RBAI believes that the use of academic criteria for admission to grammar schools is the outworking of that principle,\" the school said.\n\n\"Accordingly, in the absence of AQE and PPTC tests for admissions, RBAI will adopt other academic criteria for admission to the school.\"\n\nRBAI said scores in practice AQE or PPTC transfer tests will be taken into account\n\nThe school is planning to use standardised scores in the Progress Test in English (PTE) and Progress Test in Maths (PTM) which pupils sat in Primary Five to decide which pupils to admit.\n\nRBAI said that school year was \"the most recent one which has not been interrupted\".\n\nPupils scores in practice AQE or PPTC transfer tests taken under supervision by a teacher will also be taken into account.\n\n\"RBAI is satisfied that this is a reasonable and robust way of selecting pupils based on academic aptitude in the absence of a bespoke test,\" the school said.\n\nRBAI normally admits 150 pupils each year, but received 227 applications for places in 2020.\n\nThe admissions criteria for all post-primary schools will be published on the Education Authority (EA) website on 2 February.\n\nThe UUP assembly member Robbie Butler had proposed that pupils' results in tests in primary schools could be given to parents and then used by grammar schools to decide which children get a place.\n\nBut Education Minister Peter Weir had said there would be \"major problems\" with that approach.", "In March 2020, we were told it would be a ‘’good outcome’’ if coronavirus killed 20,000 people across the UK.\n\nNow the bleakest milestone has been reached: 100,000 deaths.\n\nIn a statement, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said \"behind these heart-breaking figures are friends, families and neighbours. The vaccine offers us the way out, but we cannot let up now and we sadly still face a tough period ahead. The virus is still spreading and we're seeing over 3,500 people per day being admitted into hospital.\"\n\nHealth correspondent Catherine Burns looks at the past year of the UK’s epidemic and hears from families who have lost loved ones.\n\nFilmed and edited by Julius Peacock. Additional filming by Emily Brooks", "The UK government should cancel the debt owed by developing countries struggling with the impact of Covid-19, MPs have said.\n\nThe International Development Committee warned that the pandemic was fuelling extreme poverty and food insecurity.\n\nIt was also disrupting routine healthcare, such as tuberculosis immunisations, it added.\n\nThe Foreign Office said it was spending £1.3bn to protect livelihoods, improve health systems and distribute vaccines.\n\nMore than two million people around the world have died after contracting coronavirus, with almost 100 million cases reported.\n\nAppearing before the Commons International Development Committee, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said he wanted the UK to be a \"force for good in the world\" as it fought the pandemic.\n\nHe defended the government's decision to cut overseas aid spending next year, saying there were \"no easy choices\" given the hit to the public finances from the pandemic.\n\nThe cuts mean the UK will fail to meet the UN target of spending 0.7% of national income on overseas aid in 2021-2, a target that was enshrined into UK law in 2015.\n\nMr Raab said he hoped the UK would be able to reach 0.7% again as \"soon as possible\" but this would only happen once the long-term damage to the UK's balance sheet had been \"corrected\".\n\nLabour said the government was \"betraying the world's poorest.\"\n\nShadow international development secretary Preet Kaur Gill said: \"This move signals a retreat from the world stage, damages the UK's reputation and will only show our allies and detractors that Britain under Boris Johnson is no longer interested in fulfilling our moral or legal responsibilities.\n\n\"Labour are committed to spending 0.7% of Gross National Income on aid to tackle global poverty and injustice and will oppose any attempt from this government to damage this country's reputation.\"\n\nMr Raab said he took seriously warnings from Conservative MPs and ex-ministers that to press ahead with the cuts without passing new legislation would be unlawful.\n\nFormer Solicitor General Lord Garnier said earlier on Tuesday that Mr Raab's \"reputation\" and the government's domestic and international standing would be damaged if it was seen to \"flout a clear legal obligation\".\n\nIn tough financial times, Mr Raab said the UK needed to \"make the most\" of its £10bn spending, avoiding \"salami-slicing\" budgets and focusing on a handful of priorities such as climate, biodiversity, conflict prevention and helping the \"bottom billions\" out of extreme poverty.\n\n\"I think we should unabashedly be proud and confident about the moral responsibility we have to make the world a better place,\" he said.\n\n\"At the same time, I see a range of grittier strategic interests in dealing with climate change and humanitarian suffering and indeed trade.\"\n\nThe Foreign Office took over responsibility for overseas aid in September after absorbing the Department for International Development.\n\nOn debt cancellation, the committee said that, due to disruption caused by the pandemic, millions of people in developing countries were more at risk from diseases such as tuberculosis because of missed immunisations.\n\nMillions were more likely to lose their livelihoods because of the global recession and millions of women were more exposed to sexual violence.\n\nThe MPs want the government to provide more aid to address the problems and cancel long-term national debt that was diverting cash away from those in need.\n\nA Foreign Office spokesperson said: \"We'll only be safe from coronavirus when we're all safe - which is why the UK is leading global efforts to fight this pandemic, committing up to £1.3bn of new UK aid to find and equitably distribute a vaccine, strengthen health systems, protect livelihoods and support the global economy.\"\n\nThey added that the UK would use its 2021 presidency of the G7 group of leading economies \"to help the world build back stronger and fairer after the pandemic\".\n\nThis would include \"promoting open societies, championing gender equality and girls' education, and setting out new international approaches to global health security and climate action\", the spokesperson said.\n\nThe UK has announced it will step up its efforts to help other countries, including some of the poorest in the world, to find new variants of Covid-19.\n\nIn a speech in London, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the UK would share its world-leading genomics expertise worldwide to help countries identify new mutations of the virus and protect global health security.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dutch police have described it as the worst unrest in four decades\n\nMore than 180 people were arrested in 10 Dutch cities as protesters defying a curfew clashed with riot police for a third night running.\n\nShops in Rotterdam were looted and police used water cannon, as rioters resisted latest Covid restrictions.\n\nPrime Minister Mark Rutte condemned \"criminal violence\" and the justice minister said the curfew would remain.\n\nThe Dutch chief of police said the riots no longer had \"anything to do with the basic right to demonstrate\".\n\nThe Netherlands has had nearly one million confirmed Covid cases since the start of the outbreak, with more than 13,500 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University in the US, which is tracking the pandemic.\n\nThe government recently introduced a night-time curfew which runs from 21:00 (20:00 GMT) to 04:30. Anyone caught violating it faces a €95 (£84) fine.\n\nThere were further violent scenes in many towns and cities. Riot police clashed with protesters in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, as well as Amersfoort, Den Bosch, Alphen and Helmond.\n\nSome of the worst disturbances were in the south of Rotterdam where police said 10 officers were hurt. Across the country 184 people were arrested. Amsterdam's mayor appealed to parents to keep young people indoors.\n\nSeveral cities have vowed to introduce emergency measures in an effort to prevent more disturbances\n\nThe windows of some shops were smashed in Rotterdam\n\nFires were lit on the streets of The Hague, where police on bicycles attempted to move small clusters of men who threw stones and fireworks. There was violence in the southern city of Den Bosch, where rioters set off fireworks, broke windows, looted a supermarket and overturned cars.\n\nA woman living near Den Bosch train station told Dutch radio that masked youths had left a trail of destruction in the city centre. \"I saw windows smashed and fireworks going off. Really crazy, just like a war zone,\" the woman said. Roads into the city were closed to stop people joining the rioters and Mayor Jack Mikkers imposed an emergency order banning gatherings on Tuesday.\n\nThe ignition of discontent has rocked the core of Dutch society.\n\nIn the absence of any legitimate way to socialise, is this simply an outlet for young men to feel part of something, their masks concealing their identities and enabling them to violently channel their frustrations?\n\nThere are more sinister influences at play. Messages on social media, overt and covert, have whipped up anger. Misinformation has even been spread by some politicians.\n\nSome of the worst violence was in Rotterdam\n\nSome feared a curfew would be a tipping point, as Dutch restrictions tighten while some neighbouring countries relax their rules. The vast majority of people in the Netherlands are peacefully observing the curfew.\n\nThe unrest was initially seen as a response to the first \"stay-at-home\" order imposed since Nazi occupation during World War Two. That notion has been dismissed by Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who said the rioters were simply criminals and would be treated as such.\n\nBut there are simmering anxieties in Dutch towns and cities, and with less than two months before a general election, voters are vulnerable and the streets volatile.\n\nThere has been widespread shock at the violence. In Rotterdam, where police used water cannon during clashes with rioters, Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb signed an emergency decree, giving police broader powers of arrest. He reacted furiously to shops being looted in the south of the city, condemning \"shameless thieves, I can't call it anything else\".\n\nThe prime minister said the police had the government's full support: \"The riots have nothing to do with protesting or fighting for freedom.\"\n\nRotterdam shop-owner Emrah Köker said he had no words for what he had seen. \"How can this happen in the Netherlands?\" he asked Dutch daily newspaper Algemeen Dagblad. Justice Minister Ferd Grapperhuis challenged anyone to explain what looting a shop had to do with coronavirus.\n\nThe mayor of Den Bosch said police had struggled to respond to the violence because they were needed in other nearby towns.\n\nFootball fans of the Willem II club took to the streets of Tilburg to \"protect their city\" against rioters, news site Brabants Dagblad reports.\n\nMayors in several cities have vowed to introduce emergency measures in an effort to prevent more disturbances.\n\nThe Dutch prime minister has condemned the violence\n\nThere has been widespread shock in the Netherlands over the violence", "The greys were introduced to Britain from North America in the 19th Century\n\nThe UK government has given its support to a project to use oral contraceptives to control grey squirrel populations.\n\nEnvironment minister Lord Goldsmith says the damage they and other invasive species do to the UK's woodlands costs the UK economy £1.8 billion a year.\n\nThe bizarre-sounding plan is to lure grey squirrels into feeding boxes only they can access with little pots containing hazelnut spread.\n\nThese would be spiked with an oral contraceptive.\n\nLord Goldsmith says the damage from squirrels also threatens the effectiveness of government efforts to tackle climate change by planting tens of thousands of acres of new woodlands.\n\nOn Tuesday, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) told BBC News: \"We hope advances in science can safely help our nature to thrive, including through the humane control of invasive species.\"\n\nA partnership of conservation and forestry organisations called the UK Squirrel Accord (UKSA) is behind the proposal.\n\nIt says grey squirrels, which were first introduced from North America in the late 19th century, cause huge damage to woodlands by stripping bark from trees aged between 10-50 years, the younger trees in a forest.\n\nThey particularly target broad-leafed varieties including oak, which are particularly ecologically important because they support so many other species.\n\nIt is estimated the UK is home to some three million of these invasive rodents.\n\nRed squirrels are now confined mainly to Scotland and Ireland\n\nThey have displaced the native red squirrel across most of the UK.\n\nLord Goldsmith says the government supports the plan as well as a longer-term effort to breed infertility into female grey squirrels to reduce their numbers.\n\nInvasive non-native species such as grey squirrels threaten our native biodiversity, he argues.\n\nWhen regulating grey squirrels with oral contraceptive was first proposed in 2017, the government's Animal and Plant Health Agency said it thought it could reduce their numbers by as much as 90%.\n\nThe project also has royal approval.\n\nPrince Charles was instrumental in founding the UK Squirrel Accord with the objective of \"managing the negative impacts of invasive grey squirrels in the UK\".\n\nHe has written of the importance of protecting Britain's remaining red squirrels.\n\n\"These charming and intelligent creatures never fail to delight\", he wrote last week in his capacity as patron of the Red Squirrel Survival Trust, describing red squirrels as the \"symbol and benchmark\" of healthy woods.\n\nJason Gilchrist, an ecologist from Edinburgh Napier University, has written in defence of the grey squirrel but he says he supports the oral contraceptive plan.\n\nHe acknowledges there is a need to manage grey squirrel populations.\n\n\"It is better than the alternative: a shotgun\", he told BBC News.\n\nIt is the same argument the UKSA makes: dosing the animals with contraceptives provides a humane alternative to culling them.\n\nLast week, the Royal Forestry Society, a member of the Squirrel Accord, called for just such a cull.\n\nSimon Lloyd, its chief executive, says efforts to tackle global warming and improve biodiversity will be undermined unless grey squirrel numbers can be reduced.\n\nNew trees will not survive to \"deliver the carbon capture or biodiversity objectives if grey squirrels cannot be controlled\", he told the Daily Telegraph.\n\nThe UKSA has been experimenting with ways to deliver oral contraceptives to squirrels for more than three years now.\n\nLast year, it tested special feeding stations designed so only grey squirrels can gain access in woodland in East Yorkshire.\n\nInstead of contraceptives, the hazelnut paste bait was dosed with a dye that, when ingested, causes squirrel hair to fluoresce under UV light.\n\nThe researchers found that more than 90% of the grey squirrel population being studied visited the traps.\n\nThey concluded that it was possible to deliver repeat doses of a contraceptive to the majority of grey squirrels in a wood.", "More than 100,000 people in the UK have died from a virus, that, this time last year, felt like a far-off foreign threat. How did we come to be one of the countries with the worst death tolls?\n\nThere is no quick answer to that question, and there is sure to be a long and detailed public inquiry once the pandemic is over. But there are plenty of clues that, when pieced together, help build a picture of why the UK has reached this devastating number.\n\nSome will point a finger at the government - its decision to lock-down later than much of western Europe, the stuttering start to its test-and-trace network and the lack of protection afforded to care home residents.\n\nOthers will spotlight deeper rooted problems with British society - its poor state of public health, with high levels of obesity, for example.\n\nOthers, still, will note that some of the UK's great strengths - its position as a vibrant hub for international air travel, its ethnically diverse and densely-packed urban populations - exposed its vulnerability to a virus that spreads effortlessly between people.\n\nIn some people's eyes, the UK's island status might have helped it. New Zealand, Australia and Taiwan managed to stop the virus getting a foothold and deaths have been kept to a minimum - Australia has seen fewer deaths throughout the pandemic than the UK is recording every day on average.\n\nAll introduced strict border restrictions immediately and lockdowns to contain the virus before it had spread. The UK did not. It was not until June that quarantine rules were introduced for all arrivals and even then travel corridors were soon set up, relaxing the rules for travellers from certain countries. Only this month were these scrapped.\n\nProf Devi Sridhar, an expert in public health from Edinburgh University, is one of those who has been critical of the approach the UK has taken from the start.\n\nShe says the UK, like much of Europe, was \"complacent\" about the threat of infectious disease - choosing to treat the new coronavirus \"like flu\" and allowing it to spread, while talking about the desire to achieve herd immunity.\n\nThis all changed in late March, when a full lockdown eventually came. But there was a crucial delay of a week which is estimated to have cost more than 20,000 lives, according to government modeller Prof Neil Ferguson, because of how quickly infection rates were doubling at that point.\n\nThis, of course, is said with the benefit of hindsight. Government modellers themselves acknowledge the data was \"really quite poor\" making it difficult to make a decision that would have significant repercussions. It is a point acknowledged by Prof Chris Whitty, the UK's chief medical adviser. Speaking in the summer he said there had been \"very limited information\" in early March.\n\nBy then, the virus was ripping through care homes. Around 30% of deaths in the first wave happened in care homes; 40% if you include care home residents who died in hospital.\n\nThose at the heart of government acknowledge mistakes were made. UK chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said recently: \"The lesson is go earlier than you think you want to, go harder than you think you want to, and go a bit broader than you think you want to in terms of applying the restrictions.\"\n\nBy May, restrictions were beginning to be eased. But was this too soon?\n\nThe government seized on the relative lull to focus on building what the prime minister promised would be a \"world-beating\" test-and-trace system. The idea was that new outbreaks could be nipped in the bud, with comprehensive tracking by a centralised team of tracers.\n\nThe mere fact this had to be done some months after the virus had struck, illustrates another factor behind the high number of deaths - the UK was simply not prepared for a pandemic of this nature in the way some Asian nations had been. Countries such as South Korea and Taiwan had established test-and-trace systems in place that were ready to be activated.\n\nThe UK had a chance to bed in its system in the summer but it was riven with teething problems, with tracers struggling to reach many contacts and the testing capacity slowing down as demand rose.\n\nLow levels of infection over the summer had created a false sense of security.\n\nDesperate to boost the economy, the government launched the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, offering people discounted meals out during August. To what extent it contributed to the rise in the autumn is much argued about but certainly some doctors blame it in part for an increase in patients seen.\n\nThe truth is the virus never went away. Testing in the summer showed even at the lowest levels there were still around 500 cases a day being diagnosed - and random testing in the population subsequently showed the true level may have been twice that.\n\nIn late August around 1,000 people a day were testing positive. By mid-September that had trebled and from there it rose five-fold to 15,000 by mid October. The numbers testing positive have never returned below 10,000 a day on average since.\n\nAnother decision that has been heavily criticised was the refusal of ministers to introduce a short two-week lockdown, or \"circuit breaker\", in September - despite their advisers on Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) recommending such a step. The argument was it would have set the spread of the virus back by at least a month, giving test and trace time to regroup.\n\nWales, however, did introduce its own \"fire-breaker\" - a 17-day lockdown in October. It got infection rates down, but as soon as it was lifted they rebounded. This is, of course, why lockdowns have been criticised.\n\nEdinburgh University infectious diseases expert Prof Mark Woolhouse, one of the modellers who feeds data into Sage, is on the record in the autumn questioning the logic of them for this very reason. It remains up for debate how effective a circuit-breaker would actually have been.\n\nThis after all is the time of year when respiratory illnesses start to increase. Schools had returned as had university students, creating new environments for the novel coronavirus to spread.\n\nWhen a lockdown was eventually introduced in England in November it was to last four weeks, with Sage members lamenting the delay. \"The absence of a decision is a decision in itself,\" says Wellcome Trust director Sir Jeremy Farrar.\n\nBut even before that lockdown was lifted cases had started going up in the south-east of England. Within weeks it became clear what was happening. The virus had mutated and a new faster-spreading variant was on the rise.\n\nBy mid-December the clamour for lockdown was growing again, but the plan for a Christmas relaxation of restrictions had already been announced. In every nation of the UK, ministers waited.\n\nAt the start of 2021, with hospital admissions rising rapidly, the UK's four chief medical officers intervened, issuing a joint statement warning the NHS was at \"material risk\" of being overwhelmed. Within hours the UK was back in lockdown.\n\nWhat has struck some is just how similar the mistakes have been in terms of locking down late.\n\n\"It will take years to unpick why Covid has gone so badly in the UK,\" says University College London infectious diseases expert Dr Neil Stone. \"But the failure to learn from wave one stands out.\"\n\nBut it must also be recognised that there are factors outside the control of the government - certainly in terms of its pandemic response - that have contributed to the high number of deaths.\n\nOne of the reasons the virus was able to take a hold and spread so quickly was because of geography and the fact the UK - and London in particular - is a global hub. Genetic analysis has shown the virus was brought into the UK on at least 1,300 separate occasions, mainly from France, Spain and Italy, by the end of March.\n\nIt was here before we knew it. That's not something Australia or New Zealand had to deal with on such a scale.\n\nDensity of population is also a factor. The UK is among the 10 most densely populated big nations - those with populations of more than 20 million. What is more, our cities are more inter-connected than they are in many places.\n\nIt meant the virus was able to seed everywhere quite quickly. Contrast this with Italy which saw the vast majority of cases in the north of the country in the first wave.\n\nThe ageing population also needs to be taken into account. Once you do this, and adjust for the size of the population - known as age-standardised mortality - deaths have risen, but not by as much as some of the headline figures suggest.\n\nThe health of the nation has also been a factor. The UK has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world. And obesity increases the risk of hospitalisation and death, according to Public Health England. One study found the risk of death was almost double for those who are severely obese.\n\nConditions such as diabetes, kidney disease and respiratory problems also increase the risk - a fifth of Covid deaths have listed diabetes on the death certificate.\n\nAgain the UK has relatively high rates of these illnesses.\n\nBut many have argued that these high levels of ill-health have been compounded by the levels of inequality in the UK.\n\nLevels of ill health and life expectancy have always been worst in the poorest areas, but the pandemic certainly seems to have exacerbated this.\n\nOffice for National Statistics data shows mortality rates have been twice as high in deprived areas as they have been in wealthy areas. The Health Foundation is carrying out its own inquiry into the issue, arguing the Covid death toll needs to be seen through the \"lens\" of inequality to fully understand it.\n\nIt is something that has also been raised by Prof Michael Marmot, one of the country's leading experts on health inequalities. \"The UK's dismal record is telling us something important about our society.\"\n\nIf you, or someone you know, have been affected by bereavement, here is a list of organisations that may be able to help.", "A senior judge prevented the BBC from properly reporting a £2.6m legal claim against Scotland's child abuse inquiry, a court has been told.\n\nThe Court of Session heard how Lady Smith, chairwoman of the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI), faced an employment tribunal claim in 2019.\n\nLady Smith passed orders which stopped detail of the action being reported.\n\nThe top judge denied any wrongdoing in regard to the claim that was later abandoned.\n\nThe employment tribunal case alleging discrimination, harassment and victimisation was from a former senior member of the inquiry legal team.\n\nBBC Scotland has raised a judicial review of the SCAI restriction orders, arguing they were beyond the powers of Lady Smith and her involvement in the case meant any restriction decision should have been made by the employment tribunal.\n\nBut Roddy Dunlop QC, advocate for the SCAI, told the Court of Session the corporation's case was academic as the original restriction order had been overtaken by another order.\n\nMr Dunlop also argued the BBC had not spelled out to the SCAI what detail it wanted to publish in relation to the tribunal.\n\nKenneth McBrearty QC, acting for the broadcaster, told the court the purpose of the original restriction order was, \"not merely to prohibit disclosure or publication of the documents. It was to prohibit disclosure or publication of the very existence of the proceedings\".\n\nHe said: \"It is in effect what is equivalent to what in England has been described as a super injunction. That is what in effect it amounts to because it prohibits even the disclosure of the proceedings.\n\n\"The importance of this case lies with the way the Restriction Order impinged on the open justice principle. If there was a need for an order restricting the disclosure of any material, that is an order to be sought from the employment judge.\"\n\nThe case before Lord Boyd is being heard at the Court of Session\n\nThe Court of Session heard the employment tribunal claim for £2.6m damages was brought in July, 2019, by the inquiry's former lead junior counsel, John Halley.\n\nA news release, issued by SCAI in October 2019, confirmed existence of the claim and a denial that Lady Smith had discriminated against Mr Halley. An initial hearing took place that month and Mr Halley abandoned the tribunal two months later.\n\nBut Mr McBrearty QC said the SCAI press release did not include the full outline of the claim\n\nHe said: \"All that the media was to be entitled to publish was that which the respondent had considered able to include in a press release in circumstances to which the respondent was herself party in the proceedings.\"\n\nThe BBC is seeking declarators from the Court of Session stating that Lady Smith's restriction orders were unlawful.\n\nRoddy Dunlop QC said the BBC had the option to present to Lady Smith what it wanted to report on in the case, as per the detail of the media restriction order, and then get her permission to publish but failed to do so.\n\nHe said: \"That simple request is all that needed to be done and it wasn't resorted to. That's why the alternative remedy aspect of this is a problem to the BBC.\n\n\"There needs to be a practical effect, the entitlement to publish could have been obtained at any point by asking.\"\n\nMr Dunlop pointed out that the original restriction orders objected to by the BBC have now been replaced by a new order issued in March last year.\n\nHe said: \"What is the point of challenging orders which cease to have any potency.\n\n\"Why is it we continue to expend grey matter, and more importantly public funds on both sides, in fighting on something which is in any view within the terms of the reference [of the SCAI inquiry] and within article ten [of Human Rights legislation].\"\n\nOn Wednesday Mr Dunlop will continue his submissions before Lord Boyd.", "An extra £50m is being directed towards grassroots sport after a \"significant hit\" to activity levels amid the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nFunding agency Sport England - which has already invested £220m since the start of the crisis - announced the additional money as part of a new 10-year strategy.\n\nThousands of clubs, swimming pools, leisure centres and gyms have been forced to shut in recent months.\n\nWith many children having done no sport outside of PE lessons since the start of November, and schools now shut across the county, emphasis will be placed on supporting young people to get active.\n\nEarlier this month, figures showed the majority of young people failed to meet the recommended 60 minutes of daily exercise in the last academic year. Almost a third of children were classed as 'inactive' as a result of the first lockdown, not even doing 30 minutes.\n\nAnother focus in the new 'Uniting the Movement' strategy will be tackling the long-standing inequalities that have existed within the sport sector and reinforced by the recent disruption.\n\nNew data shows the pandemic has disproportionately affected people from lower socio-economic groups and BAME backgrounds, for whom there was already a clear pattern of low activity.\n\n\"This strategy comes at a critical time\" said Tim Hollingsworth, the chief executive of Sport England.\n\n\"We have made significant funding available, but many organisations are struggling, and activity levels have taken a significant hit.\n\n\"At the heart of all this is a ruthless focus on providing opportunities to people and communities that have traditionally been left behind.\"\n\nAndy Reed, Chair of the Sport for Development Coalition, said: \"The impact of the pandemic, growing social challenges and subsequent widening inequalities mean we urgently need a new social contract with sport and physical activity, focused on the wider social outcomes that sport can deliver.\"\n\n\"We must expand understanding, recognition and investment in the contribution that sport can make beyond health and wellbeing, to addressing loneliness and social isolation, improving educational attainment and employability, to community cohesion, and reducing anti-social behaviour and entry into the justice system.\"\n\nA group of more than 50 sports bodies have called for a new government action plan and emergency funding to help them survive the pandemic. The Save Our Sports campaign has warned that the activity sector - which employs nearly 600,000 people in the UK and contributes £16bn to the economy each year - faces an unprecedented crisis.\n\nHuw Edwards, the chief executive of Ukactive, which represents the physical activity industry, said: \"Crucially, before the sector begins its recovery from the impact of Covid-19, it must first survive it.\n\n\"The publication of this strategy needs to be accompanied by a new level of urgency and commitment from the government that it will not leave parts of this sector behind, and provide the necessary financial and regulatory support so desperately needed.\"\n\nBut Sports Minister Nigel Huddleston said it was \"placing sport and physical activity at the heart of its coronavirus recovery plan, and Sport England's new strategy provides a strong base to invest in sports organisations, facilities and people\".\n• None All the goals, highlights and drama from Sunday's fourth-round ties are", "The head of AstraZeneca has defended its rollout of the coronavirus vaccine in the EU, amid tension with member states over delays in supply.\n\nPascal Soriot told Italian newspaper La Repubblica that his team was working \"24/7 to fix the very many issues of production of the vaccine\".\n\nHe said production was \"basically two months behind where we wanted to be\".\n\nHe also said the EU's late decision to sign contracts had given limited time to sort out hiccups with supply.\n\nMr Soriot, chief executive of the UK-Swedish multinational, said a contract with the UK had been signed three months before the one with the EU, giving more time for glitches to be ironed out.\n\nHe told La Repubblica that problems in \"scaling up\" vaccine production were being experienced at two plants, one in the Netherlands and one in Belgium.\n\n\"It's complicated, especially in the early phase where you have to really sort out all sorts of issues,\" he said.\n\n\"We believe we've sorted out those issues, but we are basically two months behind where we wanted to be.\"\n\nHe added: \"We've also had teething issues like this in the UK supply chain. But the UK contract was signed three months before the European vaccine deal. So with the UK we have had an extra three months to fix all the glitches we experienced.\n\nAstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said a vaccine targeting the South African variant was being worked on\n\n\"Would I like to do better? Of course. But, you know, if we deliver in February what we are planning to deliver, it's not a small volume. We are planning to deliver millions of doses to Europe, it is not small.\"\n\nMr Soriot also said AstraZeneca was working on a vaccine with Oxford University that would target the South African variant of the coronavirus.\n\nScientists have warned there is a chance the South African variant may harm the effectiveness of current vaccines.\n\nThe AstraZeneca vaccine is already being used in the UK but has not yet been approved by the EU, although the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is expected to give it the green light at the end of this month.\n\nThe bloc signed a deal in August for 300 million doses, with an option for 100 million more. The EU had hoped that, as soon as approval was given, delivery would start straight away, with some 80 million doses arriving in the 27 nations by March.\n\nThe EU has ordered 600 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which is already being used on patients around the bloc.\n\nBut Pfizer-BioNTech said last week it was delaying shipments for the next few weeks because of work to increase capacity at its Belgian plant.\n\nIn response to the delays, the EU has said it might restrict exports of vaccines made in the bloc.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sofia Bettiza explains why some countries are far ahead of others in the vaccination race\n\nHealth Commissioner Stella Kyriakides said companies making Covid vaccines in the bloc would have to \"provide early notification whenever they want to export vaccines to third countries\".\n\nShe said the 27-member EU bloc would \"take any action required to protect its citizens\".\n\nEuropean Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, addressing the virtual version of the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), usually held in Davos, said: \"Europe invested billions to help develop the world's first Covid-19 vaccines. And now, the companies must deliver. They must honour their obligations.\"\n\nHave you been affected by vaccine supply issues? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Drone footage captures the extent of the damage the bridge over the River Clwyd\n\nIt could take 18 months to draw up plans to rebuild a bridge which was swept away during last week's Storm Christoph, a council has warned.\n\nLlanerch bridge, between Trefnant and Tremeirchion in Denbighshire, is a backroad link to the A55.\n\nThe grade II-listed bridge crosses the River Clwyd and villagers now face a seven-mile detour.\n\nMeanwhile, some people in Skewen, Neath Port Talbot, can return home later after flooding caused by the storm.\n\nDenbighshire council said diversions would go through St Asaph while Llanerch bridge was repaired.\n\n\"It means it takes much longer now to go from Tremeirchion to Trefnant or St Asaph,\" he said.\n\n\"I know of one couple that have a horse in stables on the other side of the river - so it's a seven-mile journey each way, twice a day, for them now.\n\n\"It's quite a challenge and we're starting to think about how long we'll need to live with it. Are we talking a year, two, three, or maybe much longer than that?\"\n\nVale of Clwyd Conservative MP James Davies said the bridge should be rebuilt: \"There are many who would wish to see the bridge replaced like-for-like, although I appreciate that the new structure will need to take into account the challenges posed by modern-day and projected river flows.\"\n\nDenbighshire council's Meirick Lloyd Davies suggested the structure could be widened, similar to the one in Llangollen.\n\nBut the Trefnant ward councillor added: \"We will need money from the Welsh Government and I hope the UK government are also ready to throw something into the bucket because it is very expensive.\"\n\nA council spokesman said: \"We will seek to resolve this as soon as we are able.\n\n\"Final plans for the bridge will involve a number of third parties and it could take up to 18 months or more to resolve.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government said the condition of the structure was the responsibility of the owner, with local authorities having powers to ensure listed structures were preserved.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Cerys Thomas said her mother's conservatory windows were blown open by the force of the water\n\nSouth Wales was also hit by Storm Christoph on Thursday and in Skewen about 80 people were evacuated as water rushed through the village on Thursday.\n\nThe Coal Authority said initial checks suggested water built up in a mine shaft, causing a \"blow out\" which flooded properties.\n\nThose living in Jubilee Crescent and Dunevor Road have been told they can return home, but others will have to wait until the Coal Authority has made further investigations.\n\nCouncil leader Rob Jones told Breakfast with Claire Summers: \"We haven't got the exact figures of the number of people who will be able to return home today, there's going to be further assessments this morning.\n\n\"As early as we can, we will release the names of the streets of those people who will be able to go back, but it will be conditional. They need to go back in a controlled manner. We've still got Covid around.\"\n\nHe added houses would need to have their electrics checked and information would be provided on how to do this.\n\nOther people have been warned it could take months before they can go home.", "Chelsea have sacked manager Frank Lampard after 18 months in charge, with former Paris St-Germain boss Thomas Tuchel expected to replace him.\n\nLampard, 42, leaves with the club ninth in the Premier League after last week's defeat at Leicester City, having won once in their past five league matches.\n\nHis final game was Sunday's 3-1 FA Cup fourth-round win against Luton.\n\nLampard was appointed on a three-year contract when he replaced Maurizio Sarri at Stamford Bridge in July 2019.\n• None Watch Monday Night Club: Is Tuchel right man for Chelsea?\n• None 'Lampard had seen enough Chelsea managers go to know the score'\n• None Why Tuchel will be a popular appointment in the Chelsea dressing room\n• None Tuchel set to come in after Lampard sacking - reaction\n\nIn a statement released on Monday night, Lampard said he was \"disappointed not to have had the time to take the club forward\" and added that it had been a \"huge privilege and an honour\" to manage the club.\n\n\"When I took on this role I understood the challenges that lay ahead in a difficult time for the football club,\" he continued.\n\n\"I am proud of the achievements that we made, and I am proud of the academy players that have made their step into the first team and performed so well. They are the future of the club.\"\n\nChelsea are hopeful that new manager Tuchel will be on the bench for Wednesday's Premier League game against Wolves at Stamford Bridge.\n\nHe will not be exempt from coronavirus quarantine.\n\nBut if Tuchel tests negative on entry to the United Kingdom and then negative again in order to enter a Premier League club's bubble, he will be granted an exemption by the Football Association for attending matches and training.\n\nHe will still have to serve a quarantine period outside of those environments, which will last five days.\n\nFormer Chelsea midfielder Lampard guided them to fourth place and the FA Cup final in his first season in charge, and a 3-1 win against Leeds in early December put the club top of the Premier League.\n\nHowever, the Blues have suffered five defeats in their past eight league games, as many as they had in their previous 23.\n\nIn a statement, Chelsea said: \"This has been a very difficult decision, and not one that the owner and the board have taken lightly.\n\n\"We are grateful to Frank for what he has achieved in his time as head coach of the club. However, recent results and performances have not met the club's expectations, leaving the club mid-table without any clear path to sustained improvement.\n\n\"There can never be a good time to part ways with a club legend such as Frank, but after lengthy deliberation and consideration it was decided a change is needed now to give the club time to improve performances and results this season.\"\n\nOwner Roman Abramovich said Lampard's status as an \"important icon\" of the club \"remains undiminished\" despite his dismissal.\n\n\"This was a very difficult decision for the club, not least because I have an excellent personal relationship with Frank and I have the utmost respect for him,\" said Abramovich.\n\n\"He is a man of great integrity and has the highest of work ethics. However, under current circumstances we believe it is best to change managers.\"\n\nLampard did not sign a single player during his first season as the club were operating under a transfer embargo, but spent more than £200m on seven major signings last summer, including £45m on Leicester's Ben Chilwell and £71m on midfielder Kai Havertz from Bayer Leverkusen.\n\nIt is the most Chelsea have spent in one summer, eclipsing the £186m they invested at the start of the 2017-18 season.\n\nLampard is Chelsea's all-time record scorer, with 211 goals for the club between 2001 and 2014, and is also joint-seventh on the list of most capped England players, having made 106 appearances for his country over 15 years from 1999.\n\nDuring his 13 seasons as a player at Stamford Bridge, he made 648 appearances and won 11 major trophies - including four Premier League titles and the 2012 Champions League.\n\nHis first managerial job was at Derby. In his one season in charge, they reached the Championship play-off final, where they lost to Aston Villa.\n\nLampard became the 10th full-time manager appointed by Abramovich since the billionaire bought the club in 2003.\n\nAccording to football finance journalist Kieran Maguire, Abramovich had spent £110m on sacking managers before Lampard's dismissal.\n\nHaving finished with 66 points last season after 20 wins and 12 defeats, Chelsea have lost six times in their opening 19 league games this season.\n\nLampard's points-per-game average of 1.67 is the lowest of any permanent Chelsea manager in the Premier League. During the Abramovich era, only Andre Villas-Boas (47.5%) has a worse win rate than Lampard's 52.4%, in all competitions among permanent Chelsea bosses.\n\nIn contrast, Jose Mourinho's win rate in all competitions during his first spell in charge was 67.03%, while Sarri, Antonio Conte, Avram Grant, Carlo Ancelotti and Claudio Ranieri all had win rates over 60%.\n\nAnalysis - lack of confidence among squad key to sacking\n\nLampard was sacked because the club could not see him reversing a slide in form.\n\nAfter qualifying for the Champions League last season and spending more than £200m on players in the summer, the aim this campaign was to close the gap on the leaders, but that has not been achieved.\n\nAlthough links will be made between Tuchel's heritage and the poor form of fellow Germans Kai Havertz and Timo Werner, the change was made because of the lack of confidence among the whole squad.\n\nIt is hoped that Tuchel can rejuvenate a team that is five points outside of the top four, and an announcement could be made within 24 hours.\n\nThe decision to sack Lampard was very difficult for Abramovich, who has never made a statement when changing Chelsea managers previously.\n\nIn the end, Lampard paid for his relative inexperience as a manager, which cannot be said of Tuchel.\n\nBest of reaction to Lampard sacking\n\nManchester City boss Pep Guardiola: \"People talk about projects and ideas. They don't exist. You have to win or you will be replaced. I am not judging Chelsea's decision. I respect their decision. But our world is to win as much as possible.\n\n\"I hope to see Frank soon and go to a restaurant with him when lockdown is finished.\"\n\nTottenham boss Jose Mourinho: \"It is the brutality of football. Anything can happen in football now, every time somebody loses their job it is sad news but he is a big boy, [with] a strong personality and strong mentality.\n\n\"I am pretty sure he will be back when he wants to be back and his career will be good. I hope so.\"\n\nWest Ham boss David Moyes: \"I'm disappointed for Frank as I saw him as one of the most up and coming young English managers in the country.\n\n\"It's a big thing we try to encourage our own British managers into the big leagues, if we can. I'm sure he'll come back and learn from it.\n\n\"He did a great job last year - he did a really good job with so many youngsters coming through the academy. It seemed a little bit harder for him this year. I'm sure he'll take time off, come back and get better.\"\n\nLeicester boss Brendan Rodgers: \"Clearly I'm really sad for Frank and his staff. I know how much the club means to him.\n\n\"Looking at the squad and how young they are, they need time. He hasn't been given that time. I really feel for him. He did great at Derby.\n\n\"He had the courage to step out of an amazing career and could have taken an easier route. It was a job he couldn't turn down, even though he didn't have a lot of experience.\n\n\"Results haven't been what he would have wanted, but I feel it's a job that needed time.\"\n\nCrystal Palace manager Roy Hodgson: \"It saddens me. I thought he did an excellent job last season. I was rather hoping that the idol of the fans and Chelsea legend that he is, he'd get a longer shot than 18 months.\n\n\"Managers who have had short stays at Chelsea have gone on to have good careers elsewhere. When you're sacked for the first time, it is a devastating blow. There's no doubt he has a pedigree to be a very good manager.\"\n\nFormer Chelsea striker Chris Sutton speaking on BBC 5 Live's Monday Night Club: \"It is 52 days since Chelsea were top of the Premier League and 48 days ago that Chelsea had been on an unbeaten run of 17 games.\n\n\"So in the space of 48 days the owner has decided to write Frank Lampard off. How are we ever going to know if Frank Lampard is a good manager? You only every really learn about people and their characteristics and traits when they go through a little bit of adversity and Frank has gone through a little bit of adversity.\n\n\"Frank has basically been sacked for the owner's expectations. I feel sorry for Frank because he is a club legend.\n\n\"They are five points off fourth place, but the bottom line is that the owner wants to win the Premier League and that was always going to be the pressure.\n\n\"Chelsea should have been more loyal. We know the owner's track record - he is ruthless, he is brutal and guillotined Frank.\"\n\nScott G: Been a Chelsea fan since Nevin, Speedie and Dixon and admit I've enjoyed all the success money has brought us over the last 20 years. However, there's a sadness about that decision. Some things money can't buy. #SuperFrank\n\nFil Harris: Isn't the whole point of appointing a younger manager to give him time to build and develop? Craziness from Chelsea to sack Lampard after such a short time.\n\nSimon Kirk: Been a Chelsea fan since 1969 and have never been so annoyed at a sacking of a Chelsea manager. He needed at least another 18 months. Shame on you Abramovich and the Chelsea board for supporting such a decision.\n\nRyan Howard: I find it such a weird sacking - a month or so ago Chelsea were in a nice groove, Zouma and Silva were scoring and keeping clean sheets, now after one bad run he gets sacked. Chelsea could be a world-class club if they just gave a manager proper time to build a team.\n\nPeter Josi: Chelsea are totally right to sack Lampard, he lacked the experience or coaching prowess to lead the side. The next phase should start with an investigation into our transfer policy and how our last two record signings turned out to be flops.\n\nThomas Wilson: Why are people surprised Lampard was sacked? Chelsea have been ruthlessly successful for 15 years. They are not going to suddenly resort to being generously unsuccessful because of a club legend being at the helm.\n• None All the goals, highlights and drama from Sunday's fourth-round ties are", "Janet Yellen has been confirmed as the first ever female US treasury secretary in a Senate vote.\n\nMs Yellen, who headed the US central bank from 2014 to 2018, earlier won bipartisan support from members of the Senate Finance Committee.\n\nShe will be responsible for guiding the Biden administration's economic response to the pandemic.\n\nThe US is struggling to rebound economically from the hit caused by the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nAt her confirmation hearing on 19 January, Ms Yellen urged Congress to approve trillions more in pandemic relief and economic stimulus, saying that lawmakers should \"act big\" without worrying about national debt.\n\nIn response, Republican senators warned the former Federal Reserve head this was not the time for \"a laundry list\" of liberal reforms.\n\nMs Yellen disagreed, highlighting the fact that many families whose incomes have fallen were not reached by jobless programmes. She argued that plans to raise taxes must be seen in the context of financing bigger investments necessary to make the US economy competitive.\n\n\"The focus now is not on tax increases. It is on programmes to help us get through the pandemic,\" she stressed.\n\nJanet Yellen was previously chair of the US Federal Reserve. She was known for focusing more attention on the impact of the central bank's policies on workers and the costs of America's rising inequality.\n\nBefore then-President Barack Obama named her to lead the Fed in 2014, she had served as one of its board members for a decade, including four years as vice-chair.\n\nJanet Yellen speaking at a press conference in 2017 as US Federal Reserve Chair\n\nDonald Trump bucked Washington tradition when he opted not to appoint Ms Yellen to a second four-year term at the Fed.\n\nHowever, her climb to the top of the economics profession had made her a feminist icon in the economics world.\n\nWhen she left the Fed in 2018, many paid tribute to her leadership by imitating her signature look of a blazer with a popped collar.\n\nMs Yellen is seen as someone able to satisfy both progressive and centrist members of Mr Biden's Democratic party. Her nomination to lead the Fed in 2014 won support from some Republicans.\n\nHer focus on employment, rather than inflation, gave her a reputation of favouring low interest rates, which spur economic activity by making it less expensive to borrow money.\n\nBut under her leadership, the Fed raised interest rates for the first time since 2008 - albeit less aggressively than some more conservative commentators supported.\n\nHer stewardship of that process has won praise on Wall Street, even as it remains hotly debated.", "Twitter is asking its users for help in combating fake news.\n\nIt has announced a pilot that allows people to submit notes on tweets that may be false or misleading.\n\nThe initiative, named 'Birdwatch', is being trialled among a small group in the US initially. The firm acknowledged the new system would have to be \"resistant to manipulation attempts\".\n\nCompanies like Twitter are looking at how they can better moderate their platforms.\n\nTwitter said on Monday: \"We know this might be messy and have problems at times, but we believe this is a model worth trying.\"\n\nTwitter, along with other large social media companies, has struggled to deal with disinformation on its platform.\n\nThe pilot will allow users to flag tweets they believe to be \"misleading or false\", provide evidence to the contrary and discuss them with other - on a separate 'Birdwatch' site.\n\nAdditional notes and flags would then be placed on to content.\n\nTwitter says this new approach could help it respond more quickly when misleading information spreads.\n\n\"Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors,\" Twitter said.\n\nTwitter already adds labels to some misleading news. For example, many of Donald Trump's false claims of voter fraud were labelled by the company.\n\nTwitter also reserves the right to remove tweets - and in extreme circumstances ban users - which it did with the US president after the riots in Washington earlier this month.\n\nTwitter, though, wants to go further: \"We don't want to limit efforts to circumstances where something breaks our rules or receives widespread public attention,\" said Twitter's Vice-President Keith Coleman.\n\nParticipants will have to provide a verified phone number and email to take part, in a bid to keep bots and bad actors away, as well as having no recent rule violations against their Twitter account.\n\nPresident Biden said in his inauguration speech that: \"We must reject a culture where facts are manipulated, or even manufactured.\"\n\nJames Clayton is the BBC's North America technology reporter based in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @jamesclayton5.", "Parents and teachers say they are \"frustrated\" schools will be shut until the February half term and fear the impact it will have on children.\n\nSpeaking to Radio Wales' phone-in, one caller said they felt young people were being \"thrown under the bus\".\n\nOthers said they were fed up with \"bitty information\" from the Welsh Government.\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford said it was the \"best certainty\" he could offer \"in a world which is highly uncertain\".\n\nSo how have parents, pupils and professionals reacted to the announcement that schools may not reopen until 22 February?\n\nDr Dai Samuel welcomed the news as a consultant treating Covid patients - but as a dad he feels some \"trepidation\"\n\nDr Dai Samuel, a consultant at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant, Rhondda Cynon Taf, is also a father and lives in one of the worst-hit areas in Wales.\n\nHe said he had mixed feelings about the decision as he had \"two hats on\" - one as an NHS doctor treating Covid patients and the other as a dad.\n\n\"The hospitals are full and the ITU units only have beds now because they've expanded that capacity,\" he said.\n\n\"It's a very precarious position and I just hope that this measure now for the next three to six weeks will hopefully allow us to get through this winter, allow the vaccines to take effect and get us out of this mess come the spring and summer.\n\n\"I'm a doctor so, from a medical point of view, yes [the decision is] a massive sigh of relief, but as a father and someone who lives in Merthyr - a town that's been hit already significantly by the virus and the economical impacts of that - I've got some sort of trepidation because I fear that those businesses now that still remain closed will suffer and will go under.\n\n\"What will happen to that generation of children now who might not get the education they deserve and would have had otherwise… who won't achieve what they could have?\"\n\nTrying to home-school four young children and work is a \"challenge\", said Kaarina Rutta Reuter from Sully, Vale of Glamorgan.\n\n\"It's a challenge trying to help all four at the same time and also having in the back of your mind, 'I should also be working and doing other things',\" she said.\n\n\"I was quite sure that this was going to happen. It didn't come as a surprise I have to say, because the situation is just so bad I think there is no other way out of it at the moment. I just wish we had known earlier on and it would have been easier to plan.\"\n\nThe pressures of juggling home-schooling with her career mean she is working at night when the children have gone to bed.\n\n\"I don't even try to work during the day with the children around because I've just realised it's just not possible.\n\n\"My husband is working full-time but I'm only working part-time, I'm teaching at university so I still have quite flexible hours - apart from obviously teaching hours - it just means that I have to work in the evening or over the weekend, just organise yourself differently.\"\n\nShe said it was \"best not to have too high expectations\" when it came to guessing when lockdown would end and schools would reopen.\n\n\"Like we saw in the first lockdown in spring, in the end it was quite a bit longer than we had all thought,\" she said.\n\n\"I would hope they could go back in March, that's my hope for now but I think we'll just have to wait and see what will happen with the numbers over the next few weeks, months and just take it from there really.\"\n\nA father called Ron, from Bridgend, told the phone-in with Dot Davies he was predominantly worried about the effects on children, particularly in the south Wales valleys.\n\n\"I just see children deteriorating on a regular basis. I can only speak about my own - I have a teenage daughter and her mental health, her lack of access to her school, her teachers, to her peers, will cause more harm than the virus will cause children.\n\n\"It feels like we are asking our children to donate their kidneys to the vulnerable. We are throwing them under the bus as far as I'm concerned.\"\n\nAnna, 16, who is studying for her GCSEs at Ysgol Gyfun Gwyr, Swansea, said the decision to keep schools and colleges closed was \"a big disappointment\".\n\n\"The idea of staying in the house until February fills me with dread because we've been in the house for months,\" she told Newyddion.\n\nAfter a case of Covid-19 in her school, she said she had to self-isolate, adding: \"It's been an age since I last saw my friends, went to school, and really learned.\n\n\"It's really hard. We've been back in school since Wednesday and doing everything online but it's nigh-on impossible. It's not the same.\n\n\"It's really hard to learn. There's this feeling of 'why am I even bothering?' - I really want to go back but I appreciate that might not be possible because people are dying. It's not an easy situation.\"\n\nHer mock assessments before her final assessments - which were brought in to replace exams - have been cancelled until the return to school, which she said has taken away some of the pressure.\n\n\"Without practising, there's a lot of uncertainty. What's going to be in the assessment? So, it is nice to hear they've cancelled them. It's a difficult situation so cancelling them takes a bit of the pressure off children and young people my age.\"\n\nMother-of-three Amanda Williams from Bridgend told the Local Democracy Reporting Service she was glad schools would remain closed and hoped it would minimise the spread of the virus.\n\n\"I don't believe schools are safe to open at the moment,\" she said.\n\n\"Until they can classify exactly what the main symptoms are in children I think it's a risk to send children back to school and it's a risk with these new variants.\"\n\nMrs Williams lives in Bridgend county borough, where infection rates are the highest among all Welsh local authority areas. One of her relatives is currently on a ventilator at Bridgend's Princess of Wales Hospital with Covid-19.\n\n\"In the last week I've heard of a lot of people passing away such as friends of friends. It's starting to get closer to home.\"\n\nSarah Curley, a maths teacher and mother of twins, also from Bridgend, said she would \"rather be in school\" but agreed schools remaining shut was the \"safest option\".\n\nShe said: \"In school each day I come into contact with 100-odd pupils and we don't wear PPE.\"\n\nMs Curley said she was glad her school, Coleg Cymunedol Y Dderwen in Bridgend, would not be welcoming students back on Monday, as originally planned, because of the area's high infection rates.\n\n\"My anxiety was through the roof around Christmas. I could see the numbers going up and I was thinking, 'I've got to go back into school next week'.\"", "A year ago, the Chinese government locked down the city of Wuhan. For weeks beforehand officials had maintained that the outbreak was under control - just a few dozen cases linked to a live animal market. But in fact the virus had been spreading throughout the city and around China.\n\nThis is the story of five critical days early in the outbreak.\n\nBy 30 December, several people had been admitted to hospitals in the central city of Wuhan, having fallen ill with high fever and pneumonia. The first known case was a man in his 70s who had fallen ill on 1 December. Many of those were connected to a sprawling live animal market, Huanan Seafood Market, and doctors had begun to suspect this wasn't regular pneumonia.\n\nSamples from infected lungs had been sent to genetic sequencing companies to identify the cause of the disease, and preliminary results had indicated a novel coronavirus similar to Sars. The local health authorities and the country's Center for Disease Control (CDC) had already been notified, but nothing had been said to the public.\n\nAlthough no-one knew it at the time, between 2,300 and 4,000 people were by now likely infected, according to a recent model by MOBS Lab at Northeastern University in Boston. The outbreak was also thought to be doubling in size every few days. Epidemiologists say that at this early part of an outbreak, each day and even each hour is critical.\n\nWuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was sealed off on 1 January 2020\n\nAt around 16:00 on 30 December, the head of the Emergency Department at Wuhan Central Hospital was handed the results of a test carried out by sequencing lab Capital Bio Medicals in Beijing.\n\nShe went into a cold sweat as she read the report, according to an interview given later to Chinese state media.\n\nAt the top were the alarming words: \"SARS CORONAVIRUS\". She circled them in bright red, and passed it on to colleagues over the Chinese messaging site WeChat.\n\nWithin an hour and a half, the grainy image with its large red circle reached a doctor in the hospital's ophthalmology department, Li Wenliang. He shared it with his hundreds-strong university class group, adding the warning, \"Don't circulate the message outside this group. Get your family and loved ones to take precautions.\"\n\nWhen Sars spread through southern China in late 2002 and 2003, Beijing covered up the outbreak, insisting that everything was under control. This allowed the virus to spread around the world. Beijing's response invoked international criticism and - worryingly for a regime deeply concerned about stability - anger and protests within China. Between 2002 and 2004, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) went on to infect more than 8,000 people and kill almost 800 worldwide.\n\nRobert Maguire of the WHO and a Chinese doctor visit a Sars patient in Guangzhou, China – April 2003\n\nOver the coming hours, screen shots of Li's message spread widely online. Across China, millions of people began talking about Sars online.\n\nIt would turn out that the sequencers made a mistake - this was not Sars, but a new coronavirus very similar to it. But this was a critical moment. News of a possible outbreak had escaped.\n\nThe Wuhan Health Commission was already aware that there was something going on in the city's hospitals. That day, officials from the National Health Commission in Beijing arrived, and lung samples were sent to at least five state labs in Wuhan and Beijing to sequence the virus in parallel.\n\nNow, as messages suggesting the possible return of Sars began flying over Chinese social media, the Wuhan Health Commission sent two orders out to hospitals. It instructed them to report all cases direct to the Health Commission, and told them not to make anything public without authorisation.\n\nWithin 12 minutes, these orders were leaked online.\n\nIt might have taken a couple more days for the online chatter to make the leap from Chinese-speaking social media to the wider world if it wasn't for the efforts of veteran epidemiologist Marjorie Pollack.\n\nThe deputy editor of ProMed-mail, an organisation which sends out alerts on disease outbreaks worldwide, received an email from a contact in Taiwan, asking if she knew anything about the chatter online.\n\nDr Marjorie Pollack is an epidemiologist based in New York\n\nBack in February 2003, ProMed had been the first to break the news of Sars. Now, Pollack had deja vu. \"My reaction was: 'We're in trouble,'\" she told the BBC.\n\nThree hours later, she had finished writing an emergency post, requesting more information on the new outbreak. It was sent out to ProMed's approximately 80,000 subscribers at one minute to midnight.\n\nAs word began to spread, Professor George F Gao, director general of China's Center for Disease Control [CDC], was receiving offers of help from contacts around the world.\n\nChina revamped its infectious disease infrastructure after Sars - and in 2019, Gao had promised that China's vast online surveillance system would be able to prevent another outbreak like it.\n\nBut two scientists who contacted Gao say the CDC head did not seem alarmed.\n\n\"I sent a really long text to George Gao, offering to send a team out and do anything to support them,\" Dr Peter Daszak, the president of New York-based infectious diseases research group EcoHealth Alliance, told the BBC. But he says that all he received in reply was a short message wishing him Happy New Year.\n\nDirector of the Chinese Center for Disease Control, George F Gao – 22 January 2020\n\nEpidemiologist Ian Lipkin of Columbia University in New York was also trying to reach Gao. Just as he was having dinner to ring in the New Year, Gao returned his call. The details Lipkin reveals about their conversation offer new insights into what leading Chinese officials were prepared to say at this critical point.\n\n\"He had identified the virus. It was a new coronavirus. And it was not highly transmissible. This didn't really resonate with me because I'd heard that many, many people had been infected,\" Lipkin told the BBC. \"I don't think he was duplicitous, I think he was just wrong.\"\n\nLipkin says he thinks Gao should have released the sequences they had already obtained. My view is that you get it out. This is too important to hesitate.\"\n\nGao, who refused the BBC's requests for an interview, has told state media that the sequences were released as soon as possible, and that he never said publicly that there was no human-to-human transmission.\n\nThat day, the Wuhan Health Commission issued a press release stating that 27 cases of viral pneumonia had been identified, but that there was no clear evidence of human to human transmission.\n\nIt would be a further 12 days before China shared the genetic sequences with the international community.\n\nThe Chinese government refused multiple interview requests by the BBC. Instead, it gave us detailed statements on China's response, which state that in the fight against Covid-19 China \"has always acted with openness, transparency and responsibility, and … in a timely manner.\"\n\nBBC This World's 54 Days: China and the pandemic can be seen on BBC Two at 21:00 GMT on Tuesday 26 January, or 23:30 on Monday 1 February (except BBC Two Northern Ireland). Or watch on BBC iPlayer.\n\nPart two - 54 Days: America and the Pandemic - will be on BBC Two on Tuesday 2 February at 21:00.\n\nInternational law stipulates that new infectious disease outbreaks of global concern be reported to the World Health Organization within 24 hours. But on 1 January the WHO still had not had official notification of the outbreak. The previous day, officials there had spotted the ProMed post and reports online, so they contacted China's National Health Commission.\n\n\"It was reportable,\" says Professor Lawrence Gostin, Director of the WHO Collaborating Center on national and global health law at Georgetown University in Washington DC, and a member of the International Health Regulations roster of experts. \"The failure to report clearly was a violation of the International Health Regulations.\"\n\nDr Maria Van Kerkhove, a WHO epidemiologist who would become the agency's Covid-19 technical lead, joined the first of many emergency conference calls in the middle of the night on 1 January.\n\n\"We had the assumptions initially that it may be a new coronavirus. For us it wasn't a matter of if human to human transmission was happening, it was what is the extent of it and where is that happening.\"\n\nIt was two days before China responded to the WHO. But what they revealed was vague - that there were now 44 cases of viral pneumonia of unknown cause.\n\nChina says that it communicated regularly and fully with the WHO from 3 January. But recordings of internal WHO meetings obtained by the Associated Press (AP) news agency some of which were shared with PBS Frontline and the BBC, paint a different picture, revealing the frustration that senior WHO officials felt by the following week.\n\n\"'There's been no evidence of human to human transmission' is not good enough. We need to see the data,\" Mike Ryan WHO's health emergencies programme director is heard saying.\n\nThe WHO was legally required to state the information it had been provided by China. Although they suspected human to human transmission, the WHO were not able to confirm this for a further three weeks.\n\n\"Those concerns are not something they ever aired publicly. Instead, they basically deferred to China,\" says AP's Dake Kang. \"Ultimately, the impression that the rest of the world got was just what the Chinese authorities wanted. Which is that everything was under control. Which of course it wasn't.\"\n\nThe number of people infected by the virus was doubling in size every few days, and more and more people were turning up at Wuhan's hospitals.\n\nBut now - instead of allowing doctors to share their concerns publicly - state media began a campaign that effectively silenced them.\n\nOn 2 January, China Central Television ran a story about the doctors who spread the news about an outbreak four days earlier. The doctors, referred to only as \"rumour mongers\" and \"internet users\", were brought in for questioning by the Wuhan Public Security Bureau and 'dealt with' 'in accordance with the law'.\n\nOne of the doctors was Li Wenliang, the eye doctor whose warning had gone viral. He signed a confession. In February, the doctor died of Covid-19.\n\nThe Chinese government says that this is not evidence that it was trying to suppress news of the outbreak, and that doctors like Li were being urged not to spread unconfirmed information.\n\nBut the impact of this public dressing down was critical. For though it was becoming apparent to doctors that there was, in fact, human-to-human transmission, they were prevented from going public.\n\nA health worker from Li's hospital, Wuhan Central, told us that over the next few days \"there were so many people who had a fever. It was out of control. We started to panic. [But] The hospital told us that we were not allowed to speak to anyone.\"\n\nThe Chinese government told us that \"it takes a rigorous scientific process to determine if a new virus can be transmitted from person to person\".\n\nThe authorities would continue to maintain for a further 18 days that there was no human-to-human transmission.\n\nLabs across the country were racing to map the complete genetic sequence of the virus. Among them was a renowned virologist in Shanghai, Professor Zhang Yongzhen who began sequencing on 3 January.\n\nAfter having worked for two days straight, he obtained a complete sequence. His results revealed a virus that was similar to Sars, and therefore likely transmissible.\n\nOn 5 January, Zhang's office wrote to the National Health Commission advising taking precautionary measures in public places.\n\n\"On that very day, he was working to try and get information released as soon as possible, so the rest of the world could see what it was and so we could get diagnostics going\", says Zhang's research partner, Professor Edward Holmes an evolutionary virologist at the University of Sydney.\n\nBut Zhang could not make his findings public. On January 3, the National Health Commission had sent a secret memorandum to labs banning unauthorised scientists from working on the virus and disclosing the information to the public.\n\n\"What the notice effectively did,\" says AP's Dake Kang, \"is it silenced individual scientists and laboratories from revealing information about this virus and potentially allowing word of it to leak out to the outside world and alarm people.\"\n\nNone of the labs went public with the genetic sequence of the virus. China continued to maintain it was viral pneumonia with no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.\n\nIt would be six days before it announced that the new virus was a coronavirus, and even then, it did not share any genetic sequences to allow other countries to develop tests and begin tracing the spread of the virus.\n\nThree days later, on 11 January, Zhang decided it was time to put his neck on the line. As he boarded a plane between Beijing and Shanghai, he authorised Holmes to release the sequence.\n\nThe decision came at a personal cost - his lab was closed the next day for \"rectification\" - but his action broke the deadlock. The next day state scientists released the sequences they had obtained. The international scientific community swung into action, and a toolkit for a diagnostic test was publicly available by 13 January.\n\nDespite the evidence from scientists and doctors, China would not confirm there was human-to-human transmission until 20 January.\n\nIllustration of spike proteins (red) of Covid-19 binding with receptors (blue) on a target human cell\n\nAt the beginning of any emerging disease outbreak, says health law expert Lawrence Gostin, it's always chaotic. \"It was always going to be very difficult to control this virus, from day one. But by the time we knew [the international community] it was transmissible human to human, I think the cat was already out the bag, it already spread.\n\n\"That was the shot we had, and we lost it.\"\n\nAs Wang Linfa, a bat virologist at Duke-Nus Medical School in Singapore, says: \"January 20th is the dividing line, before that the Chinese could have done much better. After that, the rest of the world should be really on high alert and do much better.\"", "Harriet Tubman was a spy and a nurse for the Union during the US Civil War\n\nThe Biden administration has said it will seek to push forward a plan to make anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman the face of a new $20 bill.\n\nA note featuring Ms Tubman, who was born a slave in about 1822, was originally due to be unveiled in 2020.\n\nThe US Treasury said she would replace former President Andrew Jackson, a slave owner.\n\nBut the effort was delayed under former President Donald Trump, who branded it \"pure political correctness\".\n\nNow President Joe Biden has revived the project, with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki telling reporters the Treasury was \"exploring ways to speed up\" the process.\n\nThe move would make Ms Tubman the first African American to appear on a US banknote, and the first woman for more than 100 years.\n\n\"It's important that our notes, our money - if people don't know what a note is - reflect the history and diversity of our country, and Harriet Tubman's image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that,\" Ms Psaki said on Monday.\n\nA mock-up of the new $20 note\n\nThe women last depicted on US notes were former First Lady Martha Washington, on the $1 silver certificate from 1891 to 1896, and Native American Pocahontas, in a group image on the $20 bill from 1865 to 1869.\n\nHowever, given the complexities of redesigning and producing US banknotes, the bill is not expected to be released any time soon.\n\nIn 2019, Mr Trump's Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said the redesign would be delayed until at least 2026. At the time, he said he was focused on redesigning bills to address counterfeiting issues, not making changes to their imagery.\n\nMr Trump, an admirer of his populist predecessor Andrew Jackson - whose portrait hung in his office - expressed opposition to the redesign.\n\nWhile campaigning in 2016, Mr Trump suggested that Ms Tubman be put on the $2 bill instead.\n\nBorn into slavery in about 1822, Ms Tubman grew up working in the cotton fields in Dorchester County, Maryland. She was the fourth of nine children born to two enslaved parents, Benjamin Ross and Harriet Rit.\n\nAs a teenager, she was hit in the head by an iron weight thrown by an overseer, leaving her severely injured.\n\nShe escaped from a slave plantation in 1849, fleeing north to the neighbouring state of Pennsylvania.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. How Harriet Tubman escaped slavery and then helped others to do so.\n\nIn the years that followed, Ms Tubman returned multiple times to Maryland to rescue others, conducting them along the so-called \"underground railroad\", a network of safe houses used to spirit slaves from the south to the free states in the north.\n\nShe is estimated to have made some 13 missions to rescue more than 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network.\n\nLater, she became a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, a prominent supporter of the women's suffrage movement, and a famous veteran of the struggle for the abolition of slavery.\n\nAfter the war, Ms Tubman toured eastern cities giving speeches in support of women's suffrage, drawing on her experiences in the fight against slavery.\n\nShe died in 1913, aged 91, surrounded by her family.", "Sunderland-based Hays Travel took over Thomas Cook's stores and staff in 2019\n\nTravel firm Hays Travel is to close 89 of its 535 shops following a review into its take over of Thomas Cook.\n\nThe Sunderland-based firm bought the collapsed company in October 2019 and deferred a review into the performance of its shops until 2021.\n\nA Hays Travel spokeswoman said the third national lockdown and travel ban meant \"the company had to act\".\n\nShe said 388 staff affected by the closures would be offered \"alternative work options\" to minimise redundancies.\n\nChief operating officer Jonathon Woodall said the \"first priority\" was to \"look after our customers\" and ensure \"the highest standards of customer service\".\n\nHe added that the firm was \"continuing with our robust two-year business plan and continue to be ready for the bounce back when it comes\".\n\nDame Irene Hays said business had not bounced back as had been hoped\n\nDame Irene Hays, owner and chair of the Sunderland-based firm, said it was \"always our intention to review the performance of our shops at the end of the licence period\".\n\n\"We had hoped the business would bounce back in January and it has not,\" she said.\n\n\"We have done everything we could to safeguard jobs and the business thus far, and we have come up with a range of options for those at risk of redundancy to help as many colleagues as we can.\"\n\nOptions for staff include working from home or filling vacancies in other shops.\n\nThe spokeswoman said the firm employed about 7,700 people, many of whom were \"working from home taking bookings for holidays for 2021 and beyond\".\n\nThe company has yet to confirm which of its locations will be affected.\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "There has been a recent investigation into mother-and-baby homes in the Republic of Ireland\n\nA report into mother-and-baby homes and Magdalene Laundries in Northern Ireland is expected to be published later.\n\nThe Stormont-commissioned research was carried out by Queen's University and Ulster University.\n\nIt examined whether a public inquiry should be held into the homes.\n\nAmnesty has estimated about 7,500 women and girls gave birth in the institutions operated by both Catholic and Protestant churches and other religious organisations.\n\nSome survivors, both unmarried pregnant mothers who were brought to the facilities and children who were later adopted, have long called for a public inquiry.\n\nThe NI Executive is currently meeting to discuss the report and its recommendations.\n\nFirst Minster Arlene Foster tweeted to say she had spoken to survivors of the homes about the report and the next steps.\n\nShe described it as \"a shameful chapter\", adding: \"Now the silence is broken and their stories have rightfully begun to be told\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Arlene Foster #WeWillMeetAgain This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nDeputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill said earlier that Tuesday's research \"breaks the silence\" around what happened.\n\nShe added that \"what happened was so, so wrong\", and that her thoughts were with the survivors \"who deserve answers to their many questions\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Michelle O’Neill This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe report was commissioned by the Department of Health in 2018 and assessed the period from 1922 to 1999.\n\nIt was completed in February 2020 but was then sent to those facing criticism to give them an opportunity to reply.\n\nSolicitor Claire McKeegan, representing the group Birth Mothers and their Children for Justice NI, said many women were branded as \"fallen\" after becoming pregnant outside marriage and were forced to carry out unpaid labour.\n\nThis \"abuse\", she said, happened on both sides of the Irish border.\n\n\"The state in Northern Ireland not only permitted what happened, but also policed it,\" she added.\n\nAmnesty said there were more than a dozen mother-and-baby home and Magdalene Laundry-type institutions in NI, with the last one closing its doors as recently as 1990.\n\nPatrick Corrigan, NI programme director of Amnesty International, said the report would \"shed new light on the appalling extent and vast scale of the suffering experienced by generations of women and girls in these institutions\".\n\nThe human rights organisation has written to the first and deputy first ministers urging them to meet survivors of mother-and-baby homes.\n\n\"It's time for ministers to listen to the survivors - both the women and girls forced into the homes and the children born there,\" said Mr Corrigan.\n\nThe publication of the report in Northern Ireland comes after a similar investigation into mother-and-baby homes and laundries in the Republic of Ireland, which prompted an apology from Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Mícheál Martin.\n\nThis report found an \"appalling level of infant mortality\".\n\nAbout 9,000 children died in the 18 institutions which were investigated.\n\nMr Martin said there had been \"profound and generational wrong\", adding it was a \"dark, difficult and shameful chapter\" of Irish history.\n\nFollowing the report's publication, NI's first and deputy first ministers Arlene Foster and Michelle O'Neill met the Irish Children's Minister Roderic O'Gorman.\n\nBoth Mrs Foster and Ms O'Neill said there was a need for the executive and the Irish government to work together in sharing information and to support survivors.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Time out of school has affected some children who have not established their language skills\n\nParents in English-speaking homes whose children go to Welsh-language schools need more support during lockdown, the Welsh language commissioner has said.\n\nSome parents said time away from face-to-face schooling was affecting younger children who have not fully established their language skills.\n\nOne mother said \"not only do you not know how to help them, you don't know what the question is to start with\".\n\nThe Welsh Government said it had given guidance to Welsh-medium schools.\n\nThere are 65,000 children in Welsh-medium or bilingual primary schools across Wales.\n\nCardiff council estimated more than 70% of children in Welsh-medium education in the city did not speak Welsh at home.\n\nWelsh language commissioner Aled Roberts said any parents concerned about remote learning in should let the school and teachers know in the first instance.\n\nHowever, he said it should be ensured there were \"as many resources as possible to support them\" at a national level and these policies should \"recognise the huge investment that these people are making [into] Welsh-medium education\".\n\nAngela Crabtree said her nine-year-old daughter Ffion had to help her younger sisters\n\nAngela Crabtree, from Caerphilly, said her daughters were partly reliant on her eldest child Ffion to translate Welsh schoolwork.\n\nMs Crabtree, who is on furlough, said keeping up Welsh-language skills had been a challenge for her three daughters, Ffion, Natalie and Chloe, who go to Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Caerffili.\n\n\"It's hard if they ask you a question, not only do you not know how to help them, you don't know what the question is to start with,\" she said.\n\nNatalie and Chloe are partly reliant on their older sister Ffion to translate Welsh work during lockdown\n\n\"The school has been really good in sending things back bilingually, but I've still got the challenge of trying to make sure that the girls look at the Welsh first.\n\n\"Off the back of the first lockdown I think what suffered most was their Welsh language, especially the middle child, going from the infants to the juniors - her Welsh comprehension fell behind a bit.\"\n\nLisa Jane Thomas, from Cardiff, said she was concerned her youngest child, who attends a Welsh-medium school, was going to be disadvantaged.\n\n\"These are really critical stages and to have so much timeout, it does worry me that may be putting her back [and] is going to make it more difficult for her longer term,\" she said.\n\nMs Thomas said she felt there \"ought to be more recognition\" and more could be offered to help parents and children.\n\nYsgol Gynradd Gymraeg Caerffili headteacher Lynn Griffiths said parents make a \"conscious decision\" to send children to Welsh-medium schools\n\nHead teacher of Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Caerffili, Lynn Griffiths, said of almost 440 pupils at the school, three families spoke to him about issues with Welsh-language learning.\n\nMr Griffiths said it was \"a rarity\" after one family that chose not to send their child back to the school this year, while the two other \"listened to what support we can provide them to enable them to do the best for their children\".\n\n\"But also let's not forget our parents have made a conscious decision to send their children to a Welsh medium school because they want their children to be fully bilingual and the advantages that will give them,\" he said.\n\nCampaign group Parents for Welsh medium education said it was launching new website end of this month to help parents by collating Welsh language resources in one place, due to the extra pressure of lockdown home-schooling.\n\nElin Maher, who is a part of the group, said: \"Obviously, we do acknowledge that acquiring language is done best in the classroom, with the teacher at the front and to be surrounded by the language - we want to reassure parents that the language will be there.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government, which has a target of one million people speaking Welsh by 2050, said it appreciated the challenges all parents faced with learning at home.\n\nA spokesman said: \"We have provided guidance to schools to help them during the pandemic, which includes dedicated support for Welsh-medium learners whose families don't speak Welsh.\n\n\"This includes advice for parents and carers on how they can support their children to use the Welsh language while at home.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Maaike Neuféglise said she found blood on the floor of her shop alongside upturned stands and damaged equipment\n\nThe Dutch government says it will not lift a curfew, after a third night of violent protests against increased Covid curbs across the Netherlands.\n\nShops in Rotterdam and other cities were looted and Finance Minister Wopke Hoekstra said: \"It's scum doing this\". More than 180 arrests have been made.\n\nThe Dutch chief of police said the riots no longer had \"anything to do with the basic right to demonstrate\".\n\nThe criminal violence had to stop, said Prime Minister Mark Rutte.\n\nShop-owners in Rotterdam, Den Bosch and other cities spent Tuesday morning cleaning up the debris from Monday night's violence.\n\nRotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb sent a passionate message to \"shameless thieves\" who had caused the damage: \"Does it make you feel good that you've helped ruin your city? To wake up with a bag full of stolen stuff beside you?\"\n\nA night-time curfew from 21:00 (20:00 GMT) to 04:30 was imposed last Saturday to halt the spread of the virus. Anyone caught violating it faces a €95 (£84) fine. Mr Hoekstra said they would not \"capitulate to a few idiots\" and anyone who caused damage should be tracked down and be made to pay for it.\n\nSome of the worst damage was caused in the southern city of Den Bosch\n\nThe Netherlands has had nearly a million confirmed Covid cases since the start of the outbreak, with more than 13,500 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University in the US, which is tracking the pandemic.\n\nRiot police clashed with protesters in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, as well as Amersfoort, Den Bosch, Alphen and Helmond.\n\nSome of the worst disturbances were in the south of Rotterdam where police said 10 officers were hurt. Most of the rioters were youths or young men, and Amsterdam's mayor appealed to parents to keep young people indoors.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dutch police have described it as the worst unrest in four decades\n\nFires were lit on the streets of The Hague, where police on bicycles attempted to move small clusters of men who threw stones and fireworks.\n\nIn Den Bosch in the south, rioters set off fireworks, broke windows, looted a supermarket and overturned cars. A local woman told Dutch radio that masked youths had left a trail of destruction in the city centre. \"I saw windows smashed and fireworks going off. Really crazy, just like a war zone,\" she said.\n\nSeveral cities have vowed to introduce emergency measures in an effort to prevent more disturbances\n\nRoads into Den Bosch were closed to stop people joining the rioters and Mayor Jack Mikkers imposed an emergency order banning gatherings on Tuesday.\n\nThe region's chief prosecutor, Heleen Rutgers, urged parents to ensure teenagers stayed at home. \"Start talking about how to respond to calls on social media to go and turn up somewhere,\" she told public broadcaster NOS.\n\nIn some southern cities, such as Maastricht and Breda, football fans marched through the centres promising to protect them from rioters. Ex-football international Robin van Persie appealed to people in Rotterdam to keep \"our beautiful city\" intact.\n\nThe ignition of discontent has rocked the core of Dutch society.\n\nIn the absence of any legitimate way to socialise, is this simply an outlet for young men to feel part of something, their masks concealing their identities and enabling them to violently channel their frustrations?\n\nThere are more sinister influences at play. Messages on social media, overt and covert, have whipped up anger. Misinformation has even been spread by some politicians.\n\nSome of the worst violence was in Rotterdam\n\nSome feared a curfew would be a tipping point, as Dutch restrictions tighten while some neighbouring countries relax their rules. The vast majority of people in the Netherlands are peacefully observing the curfew.\n\nThe unrest was initially seen as a response to the first \"stay-at-home\" order imposed since Nazi occupation during World War Two. That notion has been dismissed by Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who said the rioters were simply criminals and would be treated as such.\n\nBut there are simmering anxieties in Dutch towns and cities, and with less than two months before a general election, voters are vulnerable and the streets volatile.\n\nThere has been widespread shock at the violence. In Rotterdam, where police used water cannon against the rioters, the mayor signed an emergency decree, giving police broader powers of arrest.\n\nThe prime minister said the police had the government's full support: \"The riots have nothing to do with protesting or fighting for freedom.\"\n\nRotterdam shop-owner Emrah Köker said he had no words for what he had seen. \"How can this happen in the Netherlands?\" he asked Dutch daily newspaper Algemeen Dagblad. The justice minister said he challenged anyone to explain what looting a shop had to do with coronavirus.\n\nIn Den Bosch, Maaike Neuféglise said the damage to her shop was heartbreaking and ran into thousands of euros. \"Everything's ruined. I saw the videos, it was a complete invasion. There must have been 40 people in our store,\" she told broadcaster Omroep Brabant.\n\nThe city's mayor said police had struggled to respond to the violence because they were needed in other nearby towns.", "Claudia Marsh was a volunteer for an eating disorder charity which had helped her in the past\n\nAn \"incredible\" recently-qualified teacher has died with coronavirus on her 25th birthday.\n\nClaudia Marsh's death was described as \"sudden and unexpected\" by a charity which had helped her recover from an eating disorder several years ago.\n\nShe had gone on to volunteer for the organisation and became a \"beacon of hope\" for others.\n\nHer mother Tina Marsh, from Heswall in Wirral, said she was \"very proud\" and \"blown away\" by the many tributes.\n\nWriting on Facebook, Ms Marsh said she was a \"beautiful daughter and incredible sister\" who was selfless in her work for Merseyside-based charities Talking Eating Disorders (TEDS) and The Whitechapel Centre.\n\nShe said: \"She loved giving back to people less fortunate than herself.\"\n\nFamily friend Leigh Best, who founded TEDS, described the death as \"heartbreaking\".\n\nShe added: \"Claudia was very special, kind, caring and a dedicated teacher.\n\n\"She supported countless families across the UK. Claudia made her own little packs to give out to others with eating disorders with positive affirmations.\n\n\"She was full of positivity, kindness and hope, and had a smile that would brighten up the whole room.\"\n\nIn a statement, the Whitechapel Centre, where Claudia also volunteered, said staff were \"devastated\", adding she would leave behind a \"legacy of care, dedication and enthusiasm\".\n\nThe charity said she put all of her time and energy into providing food and clothing to those who needed it during the pandemic.\n\n\"Claudia always put others before herself and her memory will live on through the impact and contribution she made to our organisation,\" the centre said.\n\n\"She was instrumental in bringing together our volunteer community.\"\n\nMs Marsh has set up an online fundraising page for the two charities, which has already garnered more than £10,000.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "It wasn't normal when the prime minister stood at the lectern in Downing Street's wood-panelled State Dining Room and announced that four people had died from coronavirus on 9 March last year.\n\nIt wasn't normal, that day, when he announced the obscure-sounding virus was a global pandemic that, in the 21st Century, the UK government would struggle to contain.\n\nIt was unprecedented, in peacetime, when, on 23 March, Boris Johnson instructed the country to stay at home.\n\nIt was shocking when, on 28 March, official figures reported more than 1,000 cases in a single day.\n\nA few weeks later, there were sharp intakes of breath when the UK government's chief scientific adviser told MPs, and all of us, that keeping the numbers of deaths down to around 20,000 would be a \"good outcome\".\n\nIt wasn't normal when the Treasury started paying the wages of millions of people to prevent hardship on a vast scale.\n\nIt wasn't normal when planes stayed on the ground, roads and trains emptied.\n\nIt certainly wasn't normal when classrooms fell largely silent, or when the nooks and crannies of Westminster, usually full of intrigue, emptied.\n\nBut in that new strangeness it became normal, week after week, for millions of us to stand in the street, on balconies or on doorsteps to express thanks to those who care for us.\n\nAnd there is now an emerging routine of the most vulnerable rolling up their sleeves, sometimes in front of the cameras, for vaccines that offer at least part of the route to the future.\n\nYet the daily publication of the numbers of people who have died because of Covid has become an all-too-familiar rhythm.\n\nIn the middle of the afternoon, every day, the latest total emerges. A previously unimaginable communication has become a regular part of the country's conversation.\n\nBut today that number has reached a terrible height. Every one of those 100,000 lives lost leaves its own story, and sorrow, behind.\n\nThis miserable landmark is a moment to remember, maybe, that what has happened in the last year, to our politics, to us all is not normal at all.", "Pictures of the funeral have led to criticism from unionists\n\nPolice have begun an investigation into potential breaches of Covid-19 regulations at the funeral of an IRA man in Londonderry.\n\nEamon McCourt, 62, who reportedly died with Covid-19, was buried on Monday.\n\nUnder current Covid-19 restrictions funerals in Northern Ireland are limited to 25 people.\n\nThe police said a \"significant number of people\" had gathered, in a manner \"likely to be in breach\" of the coronavirus regulations.\n\nPSNI Ch Supt Darrin Jones said anyone found in breach of public health regulations would be reported to the Public Prosecution Service.\n\nHe said police had \"engaged with representatives of the family of the deceased, the local church and local political representatives\", prior to the funeral.\n\n\"As a result, police were given a number of assurances as to the conduct of the funeral, and that people would seek to pay their respects to the deceased from outside their homes rather than gather at the funeral.\"\n\nPictures of the leading republican's funeral show men in white shirts and black ties flanking the cortege and dozens of others behind them.\n\nCh Supt Jones added: \"Regrettably at the funeral on Monday morning, a significant number of people gathered as part of the cortège, in a manner likely to be in breach of the health protection regulations.\"\n\nUnionist politicians had called on the police to act after images circulated online of mourners.\n\nDUP MLA Gary Middleton said those who had abided by Covid-19 restrictions would view the scenes from the funeral \"with dismay\".\n\nHe said it was \"hard to put into words the sheer recklessness of those involved\".\n\n\"Within republicanism it seems that certain individuals are viewed as being more important than public health regulations,\" Mr Middleton said.\n\n\"In those minds the reality of Covid-19 has not been brought home, or at the very least it is viewed as less important than having a public display at a funeral.\n\n\"Such sights are most painful for relatives who have recognised the need for such painful restrictions to be put in place and have abided by them.\"\n\n\"Eamon 'Peggy' McCourt who passed away on Saturday morning was buried from his family home in Creggan, a right accredited to us all.\n\n\"However, it was evident that social-distancing measures and permitted mourner numbers were completely ignored by those in attendance.\n\n\"Again, the majority of people in Northern Ireland who have followed lockdown measures since March 2020 are asking themselves why can republicans do whatever they like?\"\n\nHe called on the police to explain why such \"a large funeral procession was permitted to take place and what actions will follow\".\n\nIn a statement, Sinn Féin said: \"Everyone has a responsibility to follow the public health guidelines.\n\n\"Sinn Féin held its own tribute to his memory online.\"\n\nIn June last year, about 1,800 people attended the funeral of leading IRA member Bobby Storey in west Belfast.\n\nAmong them was Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill, the Sinn Féin vice-president, who later admitted the public health message had been undermined.\n\nIn May, Assistant Chief Constable Alan Todd said there had been social-distancing breaches at funerals in Northern Ireland in both the unionist and nationalist communities.\n\nThis story was amended on 27 January 2021 to remove the phrase 'IRA veteran'. Whilst referring to Mr McCourt's long history in republicanism, we accept the phrase was open to misinterpretation.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe mother of a 15-year-old boy attacked by a group of youths said she heard the gunshots that killed him.\n\nKeon Lincoln was \"set upon\" at about 15:30 GMT on Thursday on Linwood Road in Handsworth, Birmingham, and died later in hospital, police said.\n\nIn an emotional appeal, Sharmaine Lincoln pleaded with the local community to \"help us understand why this has happened\".\n\nFive teenage boys have so far been arrested over his death.\n\nA post-mortem examination revealed Keon was shot and stabbed to death.\n\nKeon Lincoln's mother said not a day would go by when she would not hear her son's \"unbelievable\" laugh\n\nRemembering that afternoon, Ms Lincoln said: \"I heard the gunshots and my first instinct was, 'Where's my son?'\n\n\"A few minutes went by, we heard somebody was in the road and it was my boy.\"\n\nWest Midlands Police arrested three teenagers over the weekend on suspicion of Keon's murder - a 14-year-old boy from Birmingham and two others, aged 15 and 16, at an address in Walsall.\n\nThis is in addition to two 14-year-old boys arrested on Friday, one of whom remains in custody and the other released under investigation.\n\n\"The community needs to step up and put themselves in the shoes of the family,\" police say\n\nDet Ch Insp Alastair Orencas, from West Midlands Police, said the attack on Keon was \"the most pointless use of extreme violence I've witnessed in my 24 years in the police force\".\n\n\"The level of violence has not just caused shock to the family, but to hardened police officers,\" he said. \"It was an absolutely pointless attack, one I can't clear my mind of.\"\n\nThe force is appealing for information and Det Ch Insp Orencas said the community response was \"not where it should be\".\n\n\"These are multiple offenders in broad daylight. I simply don't believe there's not information out there that can help me with the inquiry,\" he said.\n\nKeon Lincoln was attacked on Linwood Road, a residential street in the Handsworth area of Birmingham\n\nMs Lincoln remembered her son as a joker, cheeky - a \"loving child with a jolly spirit\" whose \"unbelievable laugh\" would echo daily around her home.\n\n\"It doesn't make sense, the type of person Keon was, it doesn't make sense as to why someone would want to harm him or take his life in such a brutal way,\" she said.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "People were vaccinated at Cwmbran Stadium on Tuesday\n\nA pledge that 70% of the over-80s would get the Covid-19 vaccine by last weekend was missed, the Welsh Government has admitted.\n\nWeather has been blamed for the problem with figures showing 96,830, or 52.8%, had their first dose.\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford said many over-80s felt unsafe attending appointments amid the snow and ice.\n\nThe pledge had been made by Health Minister Vaughan Gething in the Senedd, last week.\n\nBut earlier, Mr Gething said that as well as missed appointments, five mass vaccination centres were affected by the conditions and \"a range of additional GP clinics didn't go ahead\".\n\nLatest data shows almost 97,000 of the most vulnerable have had a dose - but there is a lag and it can take up to five days for doses injected to be included in the figures. At least 289,566 people have had a first dose - 9.2% of the population.\n\nThat compares to 10.6% in England, 8.6% in Northern Ireland and 8% in Scotland.\n\nMr Drakeford told First Minister's Questions earlier: \"We will not reach the 70% for over-80s because of the interruption to the programme of vaccination that happened on Sunday and on Monday morning.\n\nA pledge 70% of over-80s would be inoculated by last weekend was missed\n\n\"I won't have people over-80 feeling pressurised to come out to be vaccinated when they themselves decide that it is not safe for them to do so.\"\n\nHe said all of those people would have been offered a further opportunity to be vaccinated by the end of Wednesday.\n\nHowever, Mr Drakeford said Wales was on track to meet plans to offer everybody in the top four priority groups (those aged 70 or over) a vaccination by mid-February.\n\nAround 23,700 first doses a day would need to be given for the first four priority groups to be have a vaccine offered by 14 February.\n\nOn the latest seven day rolling average, it would take 25 days.\n\nBut Mr Davies said: \"Welsh Conservatives would have been the first to congratulate the Welsh Government and its health minister had the target been reached on Friday, but that target has been missed.\n\n\"It's the same old Labour story of taking credit when things go well but look to blame anyone and everything else when it goes wrong.\"\n\nIn the Senedd, he accused the government of running a \"postcode lottery\" for vaccinations, which Mr Drakeford denied.\n\nThe first minister said figures had gone from 162,000 people being vaccinated last week to 230,000 this Tuesday.\n\nHe said that was \"the fastest rate of increase in any part of the United Kingdom\", and accused Mr Davies of wanting to \"run it down\".\n\n\"He leads a Conservative party in Wales, which has reverted to its 19th Century type - for Wales, see England.\"\n\nPlaid Cymru's Rhun ap Iorwerth said he did not think \"blaming snow over the weekend holds water\".\n\n\"Snow did cause problems in certain areas but the problem was that you were still on 24% of over-80s in the middle of last week. There was too high a mountain to climb,\" he added.\n\nBut Mr Gething said the weather was an \"obvious factor\" on both Sunday and Monday.\n\nIn a statement, he said more than 11,000 care home residents - 67% of the priority group - had received their first vaccine dose.\n\nOver 65% of Welsh Ambulance Service staff had also taken up the offer of a vaccine.\n\n\"We have seen a significant escalation in the pace of vaccine deployment here in Wales over the last couple of weeks,\" he told Members of the Senedd (MSs).", "Leaders in the US House of Representatives have officially delivered their article of impeachment against former President Donald Trump to the Senate, the first step in beginning his trial.\n\nRead more: Trump impeachment trial delayed until next month", "Anyone entering Australia has to undergo a mandatory 14-day hotel quarantine\n\nAustralia is unlikely to fully open its borders in 2021 even if most of its population gets vaccinated this year as planned, says a senior health official.\n\nThe comments dampen hopes raised by airlines that travel to and from the country could resume as early as July.\n\nDepartment of Health Secretary Brendan Murphy made the prediction after being asked about the coronavirus' escalation in other nations.\n\nDr Murphy spearheaded Australia's early action to close its borders last March.\n\n\"I think that we'll go most of this year with still substantial border restrictions,\" he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Monday.\n\n\"Even if we have a lot of the population vaccinated, we don't know whether that will prevent transmission of the virus,\" he said, adding that he believed quarantine requirements for travellers would continue \"for some time\".\n\nCitizens, permanent residents and those with exemptions are allowed to enter Australia if they complete a 14-day hotel quarantine at their own expense.\n\nDr Brendan Murphy (left) was Australia's chief medical officer and now leads the Department of Health\n\nQantas - Australia's national carrier - reopened bookings earlier this month, after saying it expected international travel to \"begin to restart from July 2021.\"\n\nHowever, it added this depended on the Australian government's deciding to reopen borders.\n\nThe country opened a travel bubble with neighbouring New Zealand late last year, but currently it only operates one-way with inbound flights to Australia.\n\nAustralia has also discussed the option of travel bubbles with other low-risk places such as Taiwan, Japan and Singapore.\n\nA passenger from New Zealand arriving at Sydney Airport last October\n\nA vaccination scheme is due to begin in Australia in late February. Local authorities have resisted calls to speed up the process, giving more time for regulatory approvals.\n\nAustralia has so far reported 909 deaths and about 22,000 cases, far fewer than many nations. It reported zero locally transmitted infections on Monday.\n\nExperts have attributed much of Australia's success to its swift border lockdown - which affected travellers from China as early as February - and a hotel quarantine system for people entering the country.\n\nLocal outbreaks have been caused by hotel quarantine breaches, including a second wave in Melbourne. The city's residents endured a stringent four-month lockdown last year to successfully suppress the virus.\n\nOther outbreaks - including one in Sydney which has infected about 200 people - prompted internal border closures between states, and other restrictions around Christmas time.\n\nThe state of Victoria said on Monday it would again allow entry to Sydney residents outside of designated \"hotspots\", following a decline in cases.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Travel abroad UK: How to fly during a global pandemic\n\nWhile the measures have been praised, many have also criticised them for separating families across state borders and damaging businesses.\n\nDr Murphy said overall Australia's virus response had been \"pretty good\" but he believed the nation could have introduced face masks earlier and improved its protections in aged care homes.\n\nIn recent days, Australia has granted entry to about 1,200 tennis players, staff and officials for the Australian Open. The contingent - which has recorded at least nine infections - is under quarantine.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Ms Davies-Jones wanted to highlight how \"vitally important\" smear tests are\"\n\nAn MP has described how she had to have most of her cervix removed after putting off a smear test for several months.\n\nPontypridd MP Alex Davies-Jones, 31, said she was invited for her first routine screening in December 2015 and \"like so many others, I put it off\".\n\nFollowing a reminder in April 2016 she went for the cervical screening.\n\nShe wrote in the i newspaper it led to her being diagnosed with CIN3, abnormal cells and had to have surgery.\n\nIf left untreated, CIN3 can have a high chance of becoming cancerous.\n\nMs Davies-Jones wrote in the paper she was left \"without the majority of my cervix\" after the surgery.\n\nShe said she used her article to urge others \"don't delay in booking\" and said she felt compelled to write about her experiences for Cervical Cancer Prevention Week.\n\nA cervical screening checks the health of your cervix.\n\nA small sample of cells is taken from the cervix and checked for certain types of human papillomavirus (HPV) that can cause changes to the cells.\n\nIf present the sample is then checked for any changes in the cells which can be treated before they get a chance to turn into cervical cancer.\n\nThe NHS advises women between the ages of 25 to 49 to have a smear test every three years.\n\nAlex Davies-Jones became the Labour MP for Pontypridd in the 2019 General Election\n\nShe wrote: \"I used all of the usual excuses that you may have heard before.\n\n\"I was simply too busy, I couldn't get an appointment and I had no symptoms or abnormalities that were worrying me.\"\n\nMs Davies-Jones wrote she thought the routine screening would \"just be five minutes of awkward conversation with the nurse at my local GP whilst taking my knickers off\".\n\n\"I didn't ever think that there could be a chance that my cells would be 'abnormal' and that the next few months of my life would leave me terrified and constantly contemplating my own mortality.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Chloe Delevingne had a smear test live on the Victoria Derbyshire programme to show what the procedure involved\n\nIf she had put off the screening any longer \"the situation could have been different\", the MP wrote.\n\nShe said she first received a type of laser treatment to \"burn off the abnormal cells from my cervix\" but more treatment was needed after the doctor told her the abnormal cells on her cervix were \"embedded deeper and looked more challenging than expected\".\n\nThen she had to have surgery, a \"cold knife biopsy\".\n\n\"I was without the majority of my cervix, but my life was saved. It was over,\" she wrote.\n\n\"Sadly, for many this isn't the case. For the next few years, I attended screenings every six months to ensure the abnormal cells didn't return.\n\n\"My last screening was in April 2018. Thankfully again all was fine but the anxiety and fear that surrounded me as I awaited those results has stayed with me even now.\"\n\nShe went on to give birth to her son Sullivan in March 2019.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "In 2009, Spector was convicted of the 2003 murder of Hollywood actress Lana Clarkson\n\nThe BBC has apologised for the original headline in its reporting of the death of the convicted murderer Phil Spector.\n\nThe former music producer died on Saturday at the age of 81, while serving a prison sentence for the murder of Lana Clarkson in 2003.\n\nThe first version on the breaking news story on the BBC News website carried the headline: \"Talented but flawed producer Phil Spector dies aged 81\".\n\nThe BBC said the headline \"did not meet our editorial standards\".\n\nThe text was quickly changed to: \"Pop producer jailed for murder dies at 81.\"\n\n\"This was changed within minutes and we also deleted a tweet that had gone out automatically with the original headline,\" a statement issued by the BBC read.\n\n\"We apologise for this error.\"\n\n\"Our coverage of the story across BBC News has been clear that Phil Spector was convicted of the murder of Lana Clarkson and had a long history of violence and abuse,\" it continued.\n\nSpector was convicted of murdering Clarkson, an actress, in 2009.\n\nHis death was confirmed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.\n\nReacting to the original version of the BBC's story, pop star Lily Allen tweeted: \"Rolling eyes at all the journos deliberately downplaying Phil Spector being a murderer in their headlines, so everyone points this out while linking to their articles resulting in lots of clicks.\"\n\n\"How about 'Murderer, Phil Spector dies aged 81'?\" offered author and historian Hallie Rubenhold.\n\nThe headline was also discussed on TV and radio programmes on Monday, including Loose Women and Radio 4's Woman's Hour, and prompted an article in the Guardian.\n\nThe phrasing of the BBC's article - and others like it - were \"a reflection of how a man's 'genius' is often viewed as more important than a woman's humanity,\" said columnist Arwa Mahdawi.\n\nSpector, who transformed pop with his \"wall of sound\" recordings, worked with The Beatles, The Righteous Brothers and Tina Turner.\n\nBut after the commercial failure of Tina Turner's River Deep, Mountain High, he largely withdrew from public life, and entered a long decline, marked by erratic behaviour, heavy drinking, and a fondness for guns.\n\nHis turbulent marriage to Ronettes singer Veronica Bennett, known as Ronnie Spector, ended in divorce.\n\n\"Unfortunately Phil was not able to live and function outside of the recording studio,\" she wrote after his death was announced. \"Darkness set in, many lives were damaged.\"\n\nSinger Darlene Love, who sang on several songs Spector produced, said he \"changed the sound of rock 'n' roll\" but likened their relationship to \"a bad marriage\".\n\n\"The problem I have with Phil is that he wanted to control Darlene Love's talent,\" she told Variety. \"If he couldn't do that, he was going to do everything in his power to keep my talent from shining.\"\n\nWeeks before Lana Clarkson was shot dead, Spector gave a rare interview to British broadsheet The Telegraph.\n\n\"I would say I'm probably relatively insane, to an extent,\" he told the paper, adding that he had \"devils inside that fight me\".\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 'I was spat at working as an ambulance paramedic'\n\nAfter experiencing its most difficult period of the entire Covid-19 pandemic in December, the boss of Welsh Ambulance Service said it was still under \"extreme pressure\".\n\nAt one stage, 400 staff - 12% of all workers - were sick or self-isolating.\n\nJason Killens said this was exacerbated by high call numbers and \"significant delays\" handing patients to hospitals.\n\nOne paramedic described questioning whether he was in the right job after being spat at during the pandemic.\n\nThe chief executive said it meant \"patients with less serious conditions waited much longer than we would like\".\n\nParamedic Stan Baxter was assaulted by someone who spat at him\n\nParamedic Stan Baxter, describing the pressure he and colleagues were under, said at one point an incident caused him to question whether he wanted to continue working.\n\n\"During the peak of the pandemic last year, I was assaulted by a member of the public where I was spat at in the face,\" he said.\n\n\"And that's really the only time that I've stopped and gone: 'Is this for me?'\"\n\nHowever the \"vast majority of the public\" had been \"absolutely fantastic\", he stressed, adding: \"We've had people waving at us, buying us coffee.\"\n\nLuke Robinson and Stan Baxter must wear more protective equipment when they help patients\n\nFor his work partner, Luke Robinson, their job made it clear how coronavirus had made a resurgence across the country.\n\n\"I worked New Year's Eve and I responded to a number of incidents which involved just regular health complaints,\" he said.\n\n\"But next door or in the adjacent building there's people having parties and you can tell that there's large gatherings going on. And it's really frustrating because it really hammers home that some people aren't listening to the rules.\n\n\"And it's not surprising that we're seeing a second wave now.\"\n\nMr Killens said the pressure was now \"palpably less\" compared to last month, but admitted difficult weeks lie ahead.\n\n\"December was probably the most pressurised period during the whole pandemic for a number of reasons,\" he said.\n\n\"Staff that were symptomatic or isolating, that's been at its peak in December.\n\n\"We've seen more work both in the 111 and 999 service, that is patients contacting us with Covid-related symptoms, and of course because of the pressure on the rest of the NHS, we've seen extended handover at some of our emergency departments and what that's meant regrettably is some less serious patients have waited a lot longer in the community than I would have expected.\"\n\nSoldiers have been helping to relieve pressure on ambulance staff\n\nThe ambulance service has been at its highest level of alert - described as \"extreme pressure\" - since early December.\n\nIt was so bad at the beginning of the month, the service had to declare a \"critical incident\", because of severe problems in south east Wales in particular - and one man had to wait 19 hours in an ambulance outside a hospital.\n\nThis strain has been partly blamed for deteriorating ambulance response times, with the situation exacerbated by the fact hospitals are struggling.\n\nAmbulances spent more than 11,661 hours outside emergency departments waiting to transfer patients in December - an equivalent to a total of more than 485 days. The average delay was one hour and eight minutes.\n\nThe Ambulance Service has been hit by high numbers of staff sick or self-isolating\n\n\"We would usually see handover delays through winter - but what's unique this time is the overlay of the pandemic,\" Mr Killens added.\n\n\"There has to be additional distancing, this means less capacity in emergency departments.\n\n\"Testing also needs to be done before patients are admitted - the additional complexities mean the process is slower and there's less space for patients to go into.\"\n\nHe said the impact of implementing Covid precautions is also affecting how quickly crews can respond.\n\n\"As a result of the virus, we're having to clean vehicles and equipment more frequently and thoroughly than before,\" Mr Killens said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\n\"Also there are levels for personal protective equipment that staff have to wear to protect themselves and others. Level three - the highest in some cases.\n\n\"And it takes a number of minutes for crews to put that on before staff treat the patients.\"\n\nTo bolster staffing levels and speed up response times, about 80 soldiers are assisting the Welsh Ambulance Service for the second time since the start of the pandemic - along with smaller number of staff from other services like the fire service.\n\n\"They are driving emergency ambulances for us... which means an emergency ambulance clinician can look after the patient,\" Mr Killens added.\n\n\"They'll drive the ambulance from the scene to hospital... it enables us to put more ambulances on the streets to respond to patients more quickly given the levels of absence that we've seen.\"\n\nParamedics now have to carry out a more rigorous and time-consuming cleaning regime\n\nAfter facing relentless pressure for close to a year, Mr Killens is worried about the impact on mental health and well-being of ambulance and control centre staff.\n\nThe service is focused on \"what we can do to keep them fit and well\", he said.\n\nBut he praised staff for \"stepping up to the plate\" - and insists some of the lessons learnt during the last year will benefit the service during the longer term.\n\n\"I've been in the ambulance sector for 25 years and this is like dealing with a very long incident,\" said Mr Killens.\n\n\"So, a major incident an emergency service routinely responds to generally will be over in a couple of hours. But the level of pressure has been sustained now for 12 months.\n\n\"All of our people have stepped up and done what was necessary and got on with providing the best care in really difficult circumstances.... we will come through it and at the end of the pandemic and will be a stronger organisation for it.\"\n\nHe believes the service is now \"on the home straight\" in dealing with the pandemic.\n\n\"We've had two waves of this virus and learnt much along the way, and with a vaccine rollout we have a real opportunity now to see an end to the disruption, the personal impact and the level of death and harm,\" Mr Killens said.\n\n\"By the time we get to the other side of the spring, probably we will be able to return to some kind of normality whatever that will be 18 months into a pandemic.\n\n\"There's a couple of difficult weeks to come, but if we can emerge through February and March, provided we all stick to the rules, because it's easy for the virus to grab hold again if we get complacent .... we'll be in a far better position as we come to the spring.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sheku Bayoh death: Eyewitness says stamping attack on officer 'never happened'\n\nTwo police officers involved in the death of a black man they were restraining may have provided false statements, the BBC can reveal.\n\nThey said Sheku Bayoh carried out a stamping attack on a female PC before he was brought to the ground and restrained by up to six officers.\n\nBut now an eyewitness has spoken publicly for the first time about the 2015 incident.\n\nHe told a Panorama investigation that the stamping attack \"never happened\".\n\nThe Scottish Police Federation said its officers had cooperated truthfully with investigators.\n\nMr Bayoh, a 31-year-old father of two, died in the incident in the Fife town of Kirkcaldy in 2015.\n\nA public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his death has recently got under way. One of its tasks is to examine whether his race was a factor.\n\nSheku Bayoh was restrained on the ground for five minutes before falling unconscious\n\nOn the night of 2 May 2015, Sheku Bayoh had taken drugs, which friends said dramatically altered his behaviour.\n\nPolice were called early the following morning after he was spotted behaving erratically with a knife in the streets of his home town.\n\nAccording to police statements, by the time the officers arrived at the scene Mr Bayoh no longer had the knife but he failed to obey instructions to get down on the ground.\n\nEach of the officers used force on Mr Bayoh within seconds of encountering him, including CS Spray and batons.\n\nHe then punched PC Nicole Short, who went to the ground.\n\nTwo officers, PCs Craig Walker and Ashley Tomlinson, would later tell investigators that Mr Bayoh then carried out a violent stamping attack on PC Short while she lay on the ground, a claim reported widely in the media.\n\nThe stamping attack was widely reported in the newspapers\n\nPC Walker told investigators: \"I had a clear view of him… he had his arms raised up at right angles to his body and brought his right foot down in a full-force stamp on to her lower back.\"\n\nPC Tomlinson said: \"I thought he had killed her. He stomped on her back again.\"\n\nNow, evidence obtained by Panorama suggests these accounts may be false.\n\nMr Bayoh was restrained on the ground for five minutes before falling unconscious. He was pronounced dead at hospital a short time later.\n\nA post-mortem examination report revealed 23 separate injuries to Mr Bayoh's body, including a broken rib and gashes to his head. The cause of death was recorded as \"sudden death in a man intoxicated [with drugs] whilst under restraint\".\n\nIn 2018, the Crown Office in Scotland decided there would be no prosecutions against any officers involved.\n\nKevin Nelson gave evidence to investigators two days after the incident\n\nKevin Nelson was in a nearby house and saw events unfold over a garden hedge.\n\nHe gave his account to investigators from Pirc (Police Investigations and Review Commissioner), which investigates deaths in custody, two days after the incident.\n\nSpeaking publicly for the first time, Mr Nelson told Panorama he saw Mr Bayoh attempt to walk away from the officers, ignoring their commands, before being sprayed with CS spray. He said Mr Bayoh retaliated and punched PC Short.\n\nAsked if there had been any further contact with PC Short, he said, \"No. He was running off… after the punch, there was no more attack on her at all.\"\n\nMr Nelson said Mr Bayoh ran off from where PC Short went down and was quickly intercepted by the other officers.\n\nAsked about PC Walker's claim that Mr Bayoh had \"his arms raised up… and brought his right foot down in a full force stamp\", Mr Nelson said: \"That never happened. I didn't see him stamping at all or, other than the punch, any raised arms.\n\n\"After the punch, that was it. There was no more attack on her at all. That's not right.\"\n\nThe officers provided their accounts to investigators 32 days after Mr Bayoh's death.\n\nMr Nelson said no-one from Pirc returned to ask about the discrepancy between their account and his.\n\nThe eyewitness said he decided to speak out because it was unfair on Mr Bayoh's family that the officers had \"made the incident worse than it actually was to justify what had happened and… that's not right\".\n\nMr Nelson's account is supported by CCTV footage of the incident, obtained by the BBC.\n\nIt is poor quality but appears to show that once PC Short is knocked down by Mr Bayoh, the action moves away from her, and he is brought down within five seconds.\n\nPC Short did not mention in her statement she had been stamped on. Now retired, she later said she was unsure if she was conscious, and only learned about the alleged stamping attack when her colleagues told her about it afterwards.\n\nIn the CCTV, PC Short appears to get to her feet a few seconds after Mr Bayoh is brought down.\n\nMike Franklin says conflicts of evidence should have been resolved\n\nMike Franklin, former commissioner for the body which investigated police complaints in England and Wales, looked at Panorama's evidence.\n\nHe said: \"I think there's nothing more serious than a police officer who gives false information in an investigation where somebody has died. So without accusing them of lying, I simply say that there's a big conflict.\n\n\"Two officers who were there say that it did happen. The person to whom it happened didn't mention it. And an eyewitness says it didn't happen.\n\n\"I would've been reluctant to sign off the investigation as complete, without resolving those… conflicts of evidence.\"\n\nMr Bayoh's sister, Kadi Johnson, told Panorama the new allegations had made her \"really angry\".\n\nShe said the way her brother was \"painted\" by the accounts given after his death was not who he was.\n\nMr Bayoh's sister, Kadi Johnson, said the new allegations had made her really angry\n\nA spokesman for the Scottish Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, said serving officers were unable to comment on matters \"to which they may be called upon to give sworn evidence\" but that they had \"co-operated fully and truthfully with the investigations that have taken place\".\n\nIt added it had seen \"compelling material that Mr Bayoh did violently stamp on the back of a policewoman as she lay unconscious\".\n\nThe BBC asked for this material to be produced but was told the inquiry was the \"proper forum\" for such matters.\n\nThe Crown Office, which directed the Pirc Inquiry, told Panorama it had examined \"eye-witness accounts of police and civilian witnesses\" and instructed \"appropriate investigation\".\n\nIt said after careful consideration it was decided there should be no prosecutions but reserved the right to prosecute should evidence become available.\n\nPirc told Panorama its investigation was \"detailed and extensive\" but could not comment further because of the public inquiry.\n\nPolice Scotland Chief Constable Iain Livingstone expressed his condolences to the Bayoh family and said the force would \"participate fully\" in the inquiry.\n\nKevin Clarke died after being restrained in London by up to nine officers\n\nPanorama's \"I Can't Breathe: Black and Dead in Custody\" also investigates the case of Kevin Clarke, 35, who died in 2018 after being restrained in London by up to nine officers.\n\nAn inquest into his death resulted in a damning verdict on the police and ambulance services.\n\nMr Clarke's sister Tellecia told the programme that if the officers \"hadn't used excessive force he would still be here today… treat him like a human being, and not just see him as a big scary black man\".\n\nMetropolitan Police Commander Bas Javid apologised to Mr Clarke's family and accepted the restraint had not been appropriate.", "Lisbet Stone is stranded at Madrid Airport due to having an out-of-date coronavirus test result\n\nPassenger Lisbet Stone says she is stuck in Madrid Airport after airline officials said her coronavirus test result was out of date.\n\nFrom Monday, travellers arriving in the UK, whether by boat, train or plane, have to show proof of a negative Covid-19 test to be allowed entry.\n\nThe test must be taken in the three days before travelling.\n\nFor those with connecting flights, the test must be 72 hours before your final departure point to England.\n\nAnyone arriving without one faces a fine of up to £500.\n\nMrs Stone originally travelled to Cuba in February 2020 to see family. The British Cuban dual national was unable to fly home to the UK when Cuba closed its borders in March.\n\nThe family say she had several previous flights cancelled before finally being able to leave this weekend. She hasn't been able to see her four children or her husband Trevor in 11 months.\n\nThe government are understood to be speaking to Air Europa to try to get Mrs Stone home. Carriers have been told that they should permit stranded passengers to board and will not be fined for doing so.\n\nWhile Mrs Stone has been caught out by the new restrictions for incoming travellers, the first day of the new regulations appeared to go smoothly.\n\nMrs Stone left Jose Marti International Airport in Havana, Cuba, on Sunday night to fly back to the UK via Madrid.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Coronavirus: How to fly during a global pandemic (this video reflects the rules before the hotel quarantine was introduced in the UK)\n\nShe took a Covid test on Thursday to be guaranteed a result by Saturday. It was negative and Mrs Stone was able to board the plane from Cuba.\n\nHowever, on arrival at Madrid-Barajas Airport, Mrs Stone says she was stopped from boarding the next leg of her journey to London Gatwick by Air Europa staff, because her test had been taken more than 72 hours before the final flight.\n\n\"She's crying her eyes out,\" says Trevor Stone, her husband. \"I feel absolutely helpless. She doesn't have any Euros as she wasn't meant to stay in Spain. The authorities have given her no help whatsoever, we are just trying to understand what to do.\n\n\"She took her test 72 hours before the start of her journey, but had to take a connecting flight onwards. There would be no other way to do it, it is not physically possible.\"\n\nIn the meantime, Mr Stone says he has been home-schooling their four children on his own through the pandemic.\n\nTrevor Stone (left) has been caring for the couple's four children on his own for 11 months since Lisbet Stone was unable to leave Cuba\n\n\"We are just desperate to get her home - I'm so worried about her and after 11 months, she really wants to see her children,\" he added. \"We haven't done anything wrong, I don't know what to do or who to turn to.\"\n\nA Department for Transport spokesman said: \"Passengers travelling to the UK must provide proof of a negative coronavirus test which meets the performance standards set out by the government in the guidance published on gov.uk.\n\n\"The type of test could include a PCR test or antigen test, including a lateral flow test. Anyone who cannot provide the necessary documentation may not be allowed to board their flight.\"\n\nAir Europa and Madrid Airport have been approached by the BBC for comment.", "Medical staff are expected to \"face pressures unlike any other they have faced before\" as NI approaches its toughest week so far in the pandemic.\n\nThe British Medical Association has said while its doctors are \"coping\", many feel they are unable to give care to the \"standard they would want\".\n\nThe peak in intensive care is predicted to happen next weekend.\n\nThe head of the BMA in NI, Dr Tom Black has been critical of the way this wave of the pandemic has been managed.\n\nHe said: \"Staff will do their best in a very difficult situation, where many decisions in this pandemic were made too late.\"\n\nWhile it is expected the number of hospital admissions will peak sometime over the next eight to 10 days, the number requiring intensive care treatment is likely to continue increasing for at least another fortnight.\n\nDr Black said he was concerned for both patients and staff.\n\nHe said: \"It is likely that over the next few weeks doctors will be asked to work in a new location or provide support to areas that are already overstretched.\n\n\"Many have already had planned annual leave cancelled.\"\n\nThere were a further 19 virus-related deaths and 640 more Covid-19 cases reported in Northern Ireland on Monday.\n\nThe latest figures from the Department of Health bring the total number of deaths to 1,625, while 96,001 people have tested positive for the virus since the pandemic began.\n\nSome 65 patients are in ICU, down two from the last report, and 51 patients are being ventilated.\n\nSince the vaccine rollout began in NI, 146,733 people have been vaccinated, according to the Department of Health.\n\nOf that number, 125,717 were first doses and 21,016 were second jabs.\n\nA total of 31,393 people from the over-80 age group have been vaccinated.\n\nEarlier the BMA told BBC News NI that more than 90,000 doses the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine had arrived in Northern Ireland but the Department of Health has said it is anticipated separate deliveries will arrive by this weekend.\n\nDr Black said many staff members had reported feeling \"exhausted and demoralised\" and he warned that when it came to reviewing how the pandemic was handled \"this phase will stand out as one where we could have planned better\".\n\nHealth Minister Robin Swann said the next seven days is \"when we will see that real intense pressure coming on our inpatients and intensive care units\".\n\n\"Our worst case scenario has modelling up to 1,200 inpatients - and that's a serious pressure that comes on our system,\" he told Radio Ulster's Evening Extra programme.\n\n\"We can go up into nearly 200 ICU capacity but that comes at a stretch, that comes with putting our staff under severe pressure in ICU units.\n\n\"It also comes by having to shift the ICU specialist nurse from a ratio of one-to-one to a ratio of one-to-two or even one-to-three in extreme pressures.\n\n\"That's not something we want to do,\" he added.\n\nThe past week saw hospitals across Northern Ireland coming together in order to cope with the strain.\n\nOn 10 January, the Southern Health Trust was on the cusp of declaring a major incident amid the mounting pressures across the health service.\n\nThat was avoided as many off-duty staff answered a call to come into work and the health trusts pulled together to provide a regional response to the crisis.\n\nPatients were diverted to those hospitals which could take them and where infrastructure could cope with supplying additional oxygen to the very ill.\n\nOver the weekend of 9/10 January the Southern Health Trust - the smallest of the health trusts - was dealing with the highest number of patients who required oxygen.\n\nIn the past week the Northern and Southern Health Trusts have seen the highest number of patients.\n\nThat reflects the high rate of community transmission in some areas those trusts cover.\n\nMeanwhile, no resolution has been reached between Stormont leaders and the Irish Government over the sharing of passenger data.\n\nLast week, First Minister Arlene Foster and Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill criticised Dublin for failing to share information on travellers arriving there during the pandemic.\n\nMichelle O'Neill said it was \"regrettable\" the issue has not been resolved\n\nFirst Minister Arlene Foster said repeated efforts to access data on passenger locator forms filled out by people arriving in the Republic of Ireland had failed.\n\nMrs Foster and Ms O'Neill indicated on Thursday that they planned to raise the matter directly with Taoiseach (Irish prime minsiter) Micheál Martin.\n\nMs O'Neill told the Northern Ireland Assembly on Monday that no resolution has been found yet.\n\nShe told MLAs the issue had been raised \"on every occasion we have had the opportunity\" and that it was \"regrettable\" that the issue had not been resolved.\n\nThe travel issue will be discussed at a meeting on Wednesday involving the first minister, the deputy first minister, Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney and NI Secretary of State Brandon Lewis.\n\n\"I hope that perhaps Wednesday's meeting will allow some opportunity for there to be a way forward,\" the deputy first minister added.\n\nIt was announced on Sunday that all travellers who have returned from Portugal or transited through 16 South American countries in the past 14 days will have to - along with their household - self-isolate for 10 days upon return to Northern Ireland.\n\nThis includes travellers who entered these countries en route to another destination. All travellers returning home from South America are advised to be tested, whether or not they have symptoms.\n\nFrom Thursday, all international travellers will be required to present a negative Covid-19 test result before arriving in Northern Ireland.\n\nThis rule comes into effect in England, Scotland and Wales on Monday.\n\nOn Monday, the Department of Health in the Republic of Ireland reported eight more coronavirus-related deaths.\n\nIt brings its death toll to 2,616.\n\nThe department said 2,121 new cases of the virus had been reported, with a cumulative total of 174,843 infections.\n\nIt said that as of 14:00 local time on Monday, 1,975 Covid-19 patients are in hospital, of which 200 are in ICU (intensive care units).\n\nIrish Chief Medical Officer, Dr Tony Holohan, said: \"This third wave of the pandemic has seen higher level of hospitalisations across all age groups.\n\n\"There are now more sick people in hospital than any time in the course of this pandemic\".", "All travellers arriving in the UK will need to show proof of a negative Covid-19 test\n\nAll UK travel corridors, which allow arrivals from some countries to avoid having to quarantine, have now closed.\n\nTravellers arriving in the UK, whether by boat, train or plane, also have to show proof of a negative Covid-19 test to be allowed entry.\n\nThe test must be taken in the 72 hours before travelling and anyone arriving without one faces a fine of up to £500.\n\nAll passengers will still be required to quarantine for up to 10 days.\n\nThe isolation period can be cut short with a negative test after five days in England, but it does not apply in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.\n\nThe government has said the travel corridor closure will be in force until at least 15 February.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Coronavirus: How to fly during a global pandemic (this video reflects the rules before the hotel quarantine was introduced in the UK)\n\nUnder the new rules, travellers arriving from the Falklands, St Helena and Ascension Islands are exempt.\n\nThose arriving from some Caribbean islands are exempt until 04:00 GMT on Thursday 21 January.\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab told the BBC'S Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that Public Health England would be stepping up checks on travellers who must self-isolate.\n\nHe said enforcement checks at borders would also be \"ramped up\" and added that asking all arrivals to self-isolate in hotels was a \"potential measure\" the government was keeping under review.\n\nPassengers arriving into London's Heathrow airport on Monday said they had been met with \"substantial\" queues at passport control and one couple complained they had \"felt unsafe\" due to what they described as poor social distancing.\n\nPassengers speak to staff at the entrance to the Covid-19 Testing Centre at Heathrow\n\nAndy Hart, from London, who had arrived into the UK from Nairobi, said: \"We felt that even though everyone was masked they were far too close together.\n\n\"It took an hour and 10 minutes. I've been flying 30 times a year for 20 years. I mean, once or twice have I ever seen it [airport queues] like this. How can this happen during Covid times?\"\n\nMeanwhile on Sunday, the government announced that a financial support scheme for airports in England would open this month in response to the new travel curbs.\n\nAviation minister Robert Courts said the aim was to provide grants of up to £8m per applicant by the end of this financial year. The scheme was first announced in November but without a start date.\n\nIndustry groups have warned there was only so long airports could \"run on fumes\", following the announcement of the new quarantine rules.\n\nEasyJet chief executive Johan Lundgren said the closure of the travel corridors will not have a \"significant impact\" on his airline in the short term as flight numbers were already limited due to the pandemic.\n\nHe told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the minimum number of days arrivals must wait to take a negative test releasing them from quarantine could be reduced from five days to three days.\n\nKaren Dee, chief executive of trade body the Airport Operators Association, said she supported the decision to close the travel corridors but stressed the need for \"a clear pathway out\".\n\nA ban on travellers from South America, Portugal and Cape Verde also came into force on Friday, having been imposed over concerns about a new variant identified in Brazil.\n\nNew variants causing concern have previously been identified in the UK and South Africa, with many countries imposing restrictions on arrivals from both nations.\n\nScientists fear the variants seen in South Africa and Brazil may interfere with the effectiveness of vaccines and evade parts of the immune system.\n\nThe travel industry has said closing the travel corridors was understandable due to the health emergency, but warned it would deepen the crisis for the sector.\n\nTim Alderslade, chief executive of Airlines UK, said the system had been \"a lifeline for the industry\" last summer but \"things change and there's no doubting this is a serious health emergency\". He said he assumed the government would remove the latest restrictions as soon as it was safe.\n\n\"We've had no revenue now effectively for 12 months, give or take a few months in the summer last year. If we're going to have an aviation sector coming out of this we need to open up in the summer,\" he told the BBC.\n\nThe Department for Transport has said it is supporting the travel industry with an extension to the furlough scheme until the end of April, business rates relief and tax deferrals.\n\nWith all parts of the UK under strict virus rules amid high levels of infection, only essential travel is permitted.\n\nOn Sunday, another 671 deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test were reported in the UK, and a further 38,598 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus.\n\nAre you due to travel back to the UK from overseas? Do you work in the travel industry? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Phil Spector pictured in court during his murder trial\n\nUS music producer Phil Spector has died at the age of 81, while serving a prison sentence for murder.\n\nSpector, who transformed pop with his \"wall of sound\" recordings, worked with the Beatles, the Righteous Brothers and Ike and Tina Turner.\n\nIn 2009, he was convicted of the 2003 murder of Hollywood actress Lana Clarkson.\n\nHis death was confirmed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.\n\n\"California Health Care Facility inmate Phillip Spector was pronounced deceased of natural causes at 6:35 p.m. on Saturday, January 16, 2021, at an outside hospital. His official cause of death will be determined by the medical examiner in the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office,\" it said.\n\nSpector produced 20 top 40 hits between 1961 and 1965. His production methods influenced major artists including the Beach Boys and Bruce Springsteen.\n\nHis life was ultimately blighted by drug and alcohol addiction, and he all but retired from the music scene during the 1980s and 1990s.\n\nIn February 2003, actress Lana Clarkson was found dead at his house in Alhambra, California with a bullet wound to her head. Clarkson, who was known for her work in the sword-and-sorcery genre and starred in films including Barbarian Queen, had met Spector hours earlier at a nightclub.\n\nSpector claimed the shooting happened when Clarkson \"kissed the gun\" - but his trial heard from four women who claimed Spector had threatened them with guns in the past when they had spurned his advances.\n\nFollowing an initial mistrial, Spector was convicted of second degree murder and given a sentence of 19 years to life.\n\nLana Clarkson was an actress and model who starred in the film 1985 Barbarian Queen\n\nHarvey Phillip Spector was born in New York in 1939, to Russian-Jewish parents. His father killed himself when Spector was a boy, and his mother moved her family to Los Angeles.\n\nHe began his career in his teens as a performer, forming a band - the Teddy Bears - with three high school friends. They had a hit single in 1958 with a song that took its title from the wording on his father's gravestone: \"To know him is to love him.\"\n\nThe record went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, but the group split the following year.\n\nSpector founded his own record label, Philles, in 1961. He produced high-profile 1960s girl groups such as Crystals and the Ronettes, including on 1963 hits Be My Baby and Baby I Love You.\n\nHe also worked on The Righteous Brothers' hits You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' and Unchained Melody.\n\nSpector produced hits for The Ronettes, later marrying their lead singer Ronnie Bennett\n\nHis signature production technique, the \"Wall of Sound,\" involved layering several instruments, including strings, woodwind and brass, to give a lush, orchestral sound.\n\nIn the early 1970s, Spector collaborated with The Beatles on their final album Let It Be, as well as producing John Lennon's solo album Imagine.\n\nAs the decade progressed, the much-feted producer became reclusive and disturbing accounts of his behaviour became widespread. Spector is said to have held a gun to singer Leonard Cohen's head during sessions for his album Death of a Ladies' Man.\n\nRonettes lead singer Veronica \"Ronnie\" Bennett, who became Spector's second wife and divorced him in 1974, wrote in her 1990 autobiography that he subjected her to years of horrific abuse. She said he had threatened to kill her and display her body in a glass-topped coffin he kept in her basement.\n\n\"I can only say that when I left in the early '70s, I knew that if I didn't leave at that time, I was going to die there,\" Ronnie wrote of the time.\n\nWriting on Instagram after her ex-husband's death, Ronnie Spector said he had been \"a brilliant producer but a lousy husband\".\n\n\"When I was working with Phil Spector, watching him create in the recording studio, I knew I was working with the very best,\" she wrote. \"He was in complete control, directing everyone. So much to love about those days.\n\n\"Meeting him and falling in love was like a fairytale,\" she continued. \"The magical music we were able to make together was inspired by our love. I loved him madly, and gave my heart and soul to him.\n\n\"Unfortunately Phil was not able to live and function outside of the recording studio. Darkness set in, many lives were damaged.\"\n\nSinger Darlene Love, who sang on several songs Spector produced, said he \"changed the sound of rock 'n' roll\" but likened their relationship to \"a bad marriage\".\n\n\"The problem I have with Phil is that he wanted to control Darlene Love's talent,\" she told Variety. \"If he couldn't do that, he was going to do everything in his power to keep my talent from shining.\"\n\nWeeks before Lana Clarkson was shot dead, Spector gave a rare interview to British broadsheet The Telegraph.\n\n\"I would say I'm probably relatively insane, to an extent,\" he told the paper, adding that he had \"devils inside that fight me\".\n\nResponding to news of the producer's death, Blondie guitarist Chris Stein tweeted: \"When we went to Phil Spector's house in the 70s he came to the door holding a bottle of diet Manischewitz wine in one hand and a presumably loaded 45 automatic in the other. Long story.", "Now 20, he was jailed for life at Manchester Crown Court after admitting inciting terrorism overseas\n\nThe youngest person convicted of a terrorism offence in the UK - who plotted to murder police in Australia on Anzac Day aged 14 - can be freed from jail, the Parole Board has ruled.\n\nThe 20-year-old, from Blackburn, who can only be identified as RXG, sent encrypted messages inciting an Australian to launch attacks in 2015.\n\nHe was jailed for life that year after admitting inciting terrorism overseas.\n\nBut the Parole Board now says it is \"satisfied\" he is suitable for release.\n\n\"After considering the circumstances of his offending, the progress made while in detention, and the evidence presented at the hearings, the panel was satisfied that RXG was suitable for release,\" the board said in a document detailing the decision.\n\nDuring his trial, the court heard how at the age of 14, the boy adopted an older persona in messages to alleged Australian jihadist Sevdet Besim, 18, instructing him to kill police officers at the remembrance parade.\n\nHe sent thousands of messages suggesting Mr Besim get his \"first taste of beheading\" by attacking \"a proper lonely person\".\n\nAustralian police were alerted to the plot after British officers discovered material on the teenager's phone.\n\nA written summary of the Parole Board decision reveals that two hearings took place to consider the decision - hearings that included evidence from RXG himself.\n\nThe summary records that \"no-one at the hearing considered there to be a need for further time\" in custody and that \"all necessary work had been completed\".\n\nRXG, who became eligible for parole in October, is said to have \"undertaken extensive specialist work in detention to address his offending behaviour, his understanding of Islam and to develop his level of maturity\".\n\nThe Parole Board panel noted that \"considerable progress that had been made\", the summary records.\n\nLicense conditions for the 20-year-old a requirement to live at designated address, wearing an electronic tag, and limits on his contacts, movements and activities.\n\nAnzac Day is a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand\n\nA ban on identifying RXG, made when he was sentenced, would normally have expired on his 18th birthday, but a number of media organisations made representations to the High Court, arguing that he should be named.\n\nBut in 2019, the court ruled identifying him was likely to cause him \"serious harm\", and so granted him lifelong anonymity.\n\nThe decision taken by the judge, Dame Victoria Sharp, has only been made in a small number of cases.\n\nIn 2016, two brothers who had tortured other children in South Yorkshire were granted lifelong anonymity.\n\nLifelong anonymity under new identities was also been granted after release to Mary Bell, the Newcastle child killer; Maxine Carr, who obstructed police investigating the 2002 Soham murders by her partner Ian Huntley; and Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, who murdered Liverpool toddler James Bulger.", "Soaring shipping costs are likely to cause a bounce in the cost of trampolines in the UK this summer, according to one games retailer.\n\nJames Owen, owner of Outdoor Toys, says high transport costs and port congestion may mean larger toys such as swings, trampolines and climbing frames will be more expensive.\n\nTrampoline prices could soar by 40-50%, he told BBC 5 Live's Wake Up to Money.\n\n\"The port congestion just keeps snowballing,\" he said.\n\n\"More and more issues keep arising,\" Mr Owen added. \"We can't get space out of China, there's a container shortage.\n\n\"Hauliers are really stretched, rates keep climbing.\"\n\nHis firm makes some products in the UK already and rising shipping costs will mean it will become economical to make more.\n\n\"For the first time ever, the ocean freight outweighs the cost of the item,\" in some cases, he said.\n\nDemand for Chinese goods has soared around the world in recent months, placing a strain on existing shipping capacity.\n\nThe price of shipping a 40-foot container on major world trade routes has almost tripled since a year ago, according to research firm Drewry.\n\nHauliers in the UK are also charging more. It used to cost about £650 to haul a container from the port of Felixstowe to the company's site in mid-Wales, Mr Owen says.\n\nThe cost is now up to £1,800 per container \"if you can get the haulier to take it,\" he says.\n\nWhether people will pay the premium for a new outdoor toy is \"a good question,\" he said.\n\nIt emerged over the weekend that Irish hauliers are bypassing Welsh ports to avoid Brexit bureaucracy.\n\nSo-called \"teething problems\" with new export rules are causing \"enormous strain on staff\", according to one haulage company.\n\nBut others warn of a longer-term shift by truck firms from using Holyhead, Fishguard and Pembroke Dock.", "Last updated on .From the section Cricket\n\nEngland won by seven wickets; take 1-0 series lead\n\nEngland wrapped up a seven-wicket victory over Sri Lanka in the first Test of a two-match series in Galle.\n\nResuming on 38-3, needing another 36 for victory, Jonny Bairstow and debutant Dan Lawrence carried England to their target inside 35 minutes on the final morning of an enthralling encounter.\n\nBairstow ended unbeaten on 35 and Lawrence 21, although the latter survived an lbw review against Dilruwan Perera and Sri Lanka did not refer another shout that replays suggested would have been overturned.\n\nAfter England slipped to 14-3 during a frantic end to day four, Bairstow and Lawrence's unbroken 62-run stand guided them to an ultimately comfortable win.\n\nThe second Test starts at 04:30 GMT on Friday at the same ground.\n• None 'It wasn't perfect but England's win ticked a lot of boxes'\n• None 'We are on an upward curve' - Root savours fourth straight away win\n\nEngland are now unbeaten in nine Tests under Joe Root's captaincy, they have won four consecutive overseas Tests for the first time since 1957, and boast five successive wins in Sri Lanka.\n\nVictory improved England's chances of reaching the inaugural World Test Championship final at Lord's in June. They remain fourth in the standings, with the two top sides playing in the final.\n\nEngland out of the blocks quickly\n\nRoot's side have been slow starters in series in recent years - they lost the opening Test against Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in 2019, and against West Indies last summer.\n\nHowever, Sunday's top-order wobble aside, they were rarely troubled in the first of six successive Tests on the subcontinent - an achievement made all the more impressive given they had one day of match practice before this game.\n\nRoot scored a magnificent 226 in the first innings, and off-spinner Dom Bess and slow left-armer Jack Leach, who returned match figures of 8-130 and 6-177 respectively, found more rhythm as the game progressed, which bodes well for the sterner four-Test series in India that follows this tour.\n\nLawrence can take considerable credit for his first-innings 73 and the manner in which he helped negate England's second-innings nerves alongside the efficient Bairstow, while wicketkeeper Jos Buttler was tidy behind the stumps throughout on a dry, turning pitch.\n\nSri Lanka, meanwhile, were left wondering what if. Their collapse to 135 all out on the first day was described as \"one of the worse we've ever seen\", and even an extra 50 runs could have changed the course of this game.\n\n'Very impressive' - what they said\n\nEngland captain and player of the match Joe Root: \"To come here with the little preparation we have had and play in the manner we have is very impressive.\n\n\"We worked extremely hard and for the spinners to come out of the game with two five-fors is a great effort. Without the preparation, it is testament to their characters.\n\n\"It is a good start to the tour. We know we have to keep getting better but I am really pleased with the start we have had.\"\n\nEngland bowler Stuart Broad on BBC Test Match Special: \"It looked like we could lose a wicket every ball last night. We were pretty happy when play finished last night.\n\n\"It felt calm here this morning. We had a job to do and felt we had enough in tank to chase 30-odd. To do it without losing a wicket is awesome.\"\n\nFormer England captain Michael Vaughan: \"When I think about the preparation England have had, in Loughborough in a tent, one day in the middle in Sri Lanka and then rain, to put in this kind of performance is a great effort.\n\n\"I can't think Sri Lanka will gift England two poor days in the next Test - that match will be really tough.\n\n\"I am happy England have played in difficult conditions and won the game.\"\n\nSri Lanka captain Dinesh Chandimal: \"We were outplayed in first innings with bat and ball. As a batting unit, especially playing at home, you have to get a big total in the first innings. It cost us the game.\n\n\"Everyone did their bit in the second innings. We played outstanding knocks in the second innings. We have to take the positives out of this.\"\n\nSri Lanka coach Mickey Arthur: \"The first innings was very poor - it was an unacceptable batting performance.\n\n\"Even if we get 220 in the first innings we keep ourselves massively in the game, so that's where it was lost. We did put it right in the second innings. But it was too late.\"\n• None All the goals, highlights and analysis from the weekend's Premier League matches including Manchester United's visit to Anfield: MOTD2 is streaming now on BBC iPlayer", "Staff gathered outside a supermarket to pay their respects to a colleague who died with coronavirus.\n\nJohn Deacy, 81, worked the Christmas Eve shift at the Tesco Extra store in Gabalfa, Cardiff, died just two weeks later.\n\nFriends and colleagues clapped as the funeral procession went by the store.\n\nFormer members of a jazz band, formed by Mr Deacy in the 1970s, marched in front of the hearse.\n\nHis son, Wayne, 56, said: “My dad put everyone above himself. He’d do anything for anyone.\n\n\"He’d help anyone and would never speak badly of people.”\n\nMr Deacy was in the Royal Marines for seven years and was a semi-professional boxer before starting a career at the industrial gas company BOC.\n\nHe went on to work for the supermarket for 16 years.\n\n“We’ve had loads and loads of messages from hundreds of staff who said he will leave a massive gaping hole,\" his son said.", "BT is facing a class action lawsuit over claims it failed to compensate elderly customers who were overcharged for landlines for years.\n\nIn 2017, Ofcom said people who only had a landline telephone were \"getting poor value for money in a market that is not serving them well enough\".\n\nAs a result, BT reduced the price of its landlines by £7 a month.\n\nBut campaigners are unhappy that \"loyal customers\" have still not been compensated for previous overcharging.\n\n\"Ofcom made it very clear that BT had spent years overcharging landline customers, but did not order it to repay the money it made from this,\" said Justin Le Patourel, founder of consumer group Collective Action on Landlines (CALL) and a telecoms consultant who worked for Ofcom for 13 years.\n\n\"We think millions of BT's most loyal landline customers could be entitled to compensation of up to £500 each, and the filing of this claim starts that process.\"\n\nBT said it \"strongly disagrees\" with the claim that it had engaged in anti-competitive behaviour and intends to defend itself \"vigorously\" in court.\n\nA spokesman for BT said: \"We take our responsibilities to older and more vulnerable customers very seriously and will defend ourselves against any claim that suggests otherwise.\n\n\"For many years we've offered discounted landline and broadband packages in what is a competitive market with competing options available, and we take pride in our work with elderly and vulnerable groups, as well as our work on the Customer Fairness agenda.\"\n\nLaw firm Mishcon de Reya has filed a claim with the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) worth £600m. The claim could result in payments of up to £500 each for 2.3 million BT customers, should it be successful.\n\nThe case represents customers who purchased a BT landline contract, but did not also take BT broadband or pay TV packages.\n\nSince 2009, the wholesale costs of providing landlines to consumers have been falling by at least 25%.\n\nBut in October 2017, Ofcom found that all major landline providers in the UK had increased the line rental charges by 28-41%.\n\nOfcom strongly criticised market leader BT for raising prices, saying that customers were being given \"poor value\" for money.\n\nIt added that many of the affected customers had \"been with BT for decades\" and were more likely to be old, on low incomes and vulnerable.\n\nBT announced that it would slash its landline prices by £84 a year.\n\nBT's argument is that Ofcom's final statement did not explicitly accuse it of engaging in anti-competitive behaviour.\n\nBut independent telecoms analyst Ian Grant says that the telecoms giant \"has a history of abusing its position\".\n\n\"Earlier in 2017, Ofcom fined BT £42m because it was late providing high-speed Ethernet lines, and forced BT to make good the losses of firms like Vodafone and TalkTalk,\" he told the BBC.\n\n\"Ofcom, which has a statutory duty to stop consumer abuses, could have done the same for these customers. Instead, it allowed BT to get away with a 37% price cut, at a time when the difference between its costs and what it charged customers had risen between 50-74%.\"\n\nMr Grant added: \"It is especially poor that BT was overcharging customers who were mostly over 65, more than three-quarters of whom had never used a different provider, and for whom the telephone was their only communications link.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nManchester United \"missed an opportunity\" to beat Liverpool, said boss Ole Gunnar Solskjaer after his side stayed top of the Premier League with a goalless draw against the champions.\n\nIt was a game that failed to justify the pre-match anticipation and Solskjaer will know his side had the better chances to claim a statement victory at Anfield.\n\nLiverpool, without a recognised centre-back and with midfielders Jordan Henderson and Fabinho in defence, dominated possession in the first half but it was United who came closest when Bruno Fernandes' 20-yard free-kick curled inches wide.\n\nFernandes was then thwarted after the break by the outstretched leg of Liverpool keeper Alisson before Thiago Alcantara's long-range effort finally brought the previously unemployed David de Gea into action.\n\nAlisson was Liverpool's hero late on when he blocked Paul Pogba's drive from point-blank range.\n\n\"It was an opportunity missed with the chances we had but then again we were playing a very good side.\" Solskjaer told BBC Sport. \"I'm disappointed but, still, a point is OK if you win the next one.\n\n\"We have improved and progressed. It's not just the result we're disappointed with, it's some of the performance. I know these boys can play better.\"\n\nUnited are now two points ahead of Manchester City, who moved up to second by beating Crystal Palace 4-0, and Leicester City in third. Liverpool, who have scored just one goal in their past four league games, have dropped to fourth, a point behind the Foxes.\n\n\"The performance was good enough to win it but to win a game you have to score goals and we didn't do that, so that's why we had that result,\" said Reds boss Jurgen Klopp.\n\n\"We try not to not score. We obviously have to ignore the fact and hope it will be good again.\"\n• None 'From dejection to frustration in 12 months, Anfield draw underlines Man Utd progress'\n• None Lawro's predictions v You Me At Six drummer Dan Flint\n\nKlopp cut a frustrated figure pretty much from the first whistle, his voice booming around Anfield with a tone of displeasure, showing unhappiness with his own players and officials.\n\nThe German's team, so used to steamrollering all before them in recent times, are going through a very dry spell and barely created an opening worthy of the name here against a resolute Manchester United defence.\n\nToo often, Liverpool's approach play ended with a careless pass or an aimless cross and the longer this game went on the more United looked the most likely winners.\n\nIt was perhaps inevitable Liverpool would be unable to maintain their relentless style, but there will be concerns they have now gone four league games without a win since Crystal Palace were demolished 7-0 at Selhurst Park.\n\nBefore this draw, West Bromwich Albion left Anfield with a point, while Liverpool also had a goalless draw at Newcastle United and lost at Southampton.\n\nSadio Mane and Mohamed Salah are feeding off scraps, while Roberto Firmino's impact was so minimal that he was withdrawn near the end, even with the hosts chasing a goal.\n\nA team as good as Liverpool will not remain off the boil for too long, but there is no doubt they are struggling for form and spark. The fact this is their longest barren sequence in the league since February and March 2005 tells the tale.\n\nManchester United may have a taken a point before this game and there will be justified satisfaction that they subdued Liverpool so completely, created the game's best chances and remain top of the table.\n\nAnd yet there must also be disappointment that they could not cash in completely on an off-colour Liverpool, with reality dawning on them very late that they could take all three points.\n\nFernandes, despite being poor in general, almost unlocked Liverpool twice, while Solskjaer and his backroom team threw their hands up in frustration as other good positions were wasted late on.\n\nIn the final reckoning, however, there will be few complaints at this outcome, which leaves them three points ahead of Liverpool with the visit to Anfield negotiated without mishap.\n\nUnited were well organised and grew into the game after a poor opening half-hour and had real defensive heroes in captain Harry Maguire and left-back Luke Shaw, with the latter particularly outstanding.\n\nIt is a display that will give them increased confidence and belief as they lead the pack - although they might just look back and think a point could so easily have been three.\n\n'It was an opportunity missed' - reaction\n\nManchester United manager Solskjaer said: \"They are a good side and they have some injury problems but we didn't pounce on that.\n\n\"I felt we grew into the game and got stronger and stronger and were closer to winning.\n\n\"We were a bit disappointed in the performance, not just the result. We didn't do well enough to cause them problems in the first half but we defended well and they didn't create too many chances.\"But I think everyone was a bit disappointed with the way we started the game but that is a good feeling to have - that we were disappointed in the performance.\"\n\nLiverpool boss Klopp told BBC Sport: \"The performance was good and the first half was exceptionally good.\n\n\"With all the things that were said before the game - United are flying and we were struggling - and then to play this kind of game, I was happy with that.\n\n\"We tried in the second half again, but you cannot deny United over 90 minutes, not with the counter-attacking threat they have. So they had two really good chances, I have to say, but we had our chances in the second half as well.\n\n\"The way we understood the game, the way we felt the game, the way we read the moments were really good. But it is not exactly how it should be so we have space for improvement, absolutely. We will keep working on that.\"\n• None Liverpool and Manchester United have drawn 0-0 at Anfield in the league three times in the past five seasons, as many times as in the previous 48 top-flight campaigns.\n• None United are unbeaten in their past 16 away matches in the Premier League (W12 D4) - only once have they gone longer without a defeat on the road in the competition (17 games ending in September 1999).\n• None Liverpool are now unbeaten in their past 68 league games at Anfield, earning 178 out of a possible 204 points over this run.\n• None United are the first side to stop Liverpool scoring at Anfield in a Premier League match since Manchester City in October 2018 - this was Liverpool's 43rd home league game since then.\n• None Under Klopp, Liverpool are unbeaten in all seven of their Premier League games at Anfield when facing the side starting the day top of the table (W3 D4).\n• None Marcus Rashford was caught offside five times in this match, the most of any Premier League player this season and the most by a United player since Robin van Persie (six) against Spurs in January 2013.\n\nUnited are at Fulham in the league on Wednesday (20:15 GMT) and Liverpool host Burnley on Thursday (20:00). Next Sunday, Manchester United and Liverpool will meet again - at Old Trafford this time - in the FA Cup fourth round, a match you can watch live on BBC One and the BBC Sport website.\n• None Marcus Rashford (Manchester United) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Curtis Jones (Liverpool) wins a free kick on the right wing.\n• None Offside, Manchester United. Paul Pogba tries a through ball, but Marcus Rashford is caught offside.\n• None Attempt blocked. Paul Pogba (Manchester United) header from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Luke Shaw with a cross.\n• None Attempt saved. Paul Pogba (Manchester United) right footed shot from the centre of the box is saved in the bottom right corner.\n• None Attempt missed. Thiago (Liverpool) right footed shot from outside the box misses to the right. Assisted by Georginio Wijnaldum. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Missed all the goals, highlights and talking points from Saturday's Premier League action? Match of the Day is streaming now", "Hospitals are preparing for the expected peak of the latest Covid-19 surge this week, the Northern Trust's chief executive has said.\n\nJennifer Welsh said there was \"huge pressure across the (healthcare) system\" with more intensive care admissions expected.\n\nThirty patients were awaiting admission to Antrim Area Hospital on Sunday morning, she said.\n\nThere were 25 more deaths linked to Covid-19 reported in NI on Sunday.\n\nThe total number of deaths recorded by the Department of Health since the start of the pandemic is now 1,606.\n\nIt was also reported that there had been 822 more positive cases, with 67 people in intensive care and 50 people on ventilators.\n\nThere are 840 patients being treated for Covid- 19 across Northern Ireland, according to the latest available figures with hospitals working at 93% capacity.\n\nMeanwhile, Northern Ireland has been continuing its vaccination programme having distributed 140,559 first doses and 20,174 second doses.\n\nThe total number of jabs administered in the UK, including both first and second doses, is 4,307,002 according to government data.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland on Sunday, there were 13 further deaths related to Covid-19, bringing the total number to 2,608 since the start of the pandemic.\n\nThere was also a further 2,944 positive cases, bringing the total number of cases in the state to 172,726.\n\nThe Republic of Ireland's Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan said the situation in the country's hospitals was \"stark\" and that people of all ages were being admitted and taken into intensive care.\n\nAt the beginning of January, Health Minister Robin Swann said that modelling indicated the \"peak of the third surge\" would hit in the third week of January.\n\nFrontline health staff have spoken to BBC News NI about their \"exhaustion\" and stress, as the pressure on the system continues to increase amid the surging number of cases.\n\nNorthern Ireland is currently in the third week of a six-week lockdown, with ministers scheduled to review measures next week.\n\nHowever, health officials have warned that an extension of the restrictions could be required to reduce pressure on the health service.\n\nNorthern Trust chief executive Jennifer Welsh said hospitals were \"coping but at great cost\"\n\nMs Welsh told BBC NI's Sunday Politics programme that the \"ICU surge is yet to come\" and that the Northern Trust - where two major hospitals, Antrim Area and Causeway, are located - has had to redeploy staff to prepare for the coming days.\n\nShe said both hospitals had been \"under significant pressure and have been for some time\".\n\nShe said 30 patients in Antrim Area's Emergency Department are waiting on a bed after a decision was made to admit them - 24 of those patients have been waiting longer than 12 hours.\n\nMs Welsh added that almost half of all patients in Antrim Area Hospital have tested positive for Covid-19.\n\n\"At the peak of the first wave in Antrim and Causeway the highest number of Covid positive patients was 73.\n\n\"In November, the highest number was 102 and we peaked on Thursday at 202. We have now dropped below that slightly.\"\n\nThe chief executive said the hospitals were \"coping but at great cost\", with many urgent surgeries cancelled.\n\n\"Emergency surgery is being done but we are not being able to do any other in the Antrim Area site.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by bbctheview This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n\"We have been able to deliver some red flag cancer surgery at Causeway but we would like to do more.\"\n\nDespite these emergency measures already in place, the worst of the current surge is only expected to arrive this week.\n\nShe added: \"We are not going to get out of this quickly. It's going to be a challenge for us as a system.\n\n\"It's been building from October.\"\n\n\"We're not yet at the peak of intensive care admissions and we expect that this week.\n\n\"Antrim has doubled its intensive care beds from seven to 14 in anticipation of the coming surge - 11 are already being used.\n\n\"All hospitals have doubled their ICU footprint. There are more than 160 inpatients in Antrim Area Hospital.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BMA Scotland GP chief says doctors \"can't plan\" for vaccines\n\nDoctors leaders say the \"patchy supply\" of vaccine to GP surgeries across Scotland is hampering the speed of delivery to patients.\n\nMinisters have pledged a first dose of the vaccine to 1.4 million of the most vulnerable Scots by mid-February.\n\nBut the British Medical Association in Scotland said inconsistencies in supply made it difficult to plan patient appointments to receive the vaccine.\n\nThey also said some GP surgeries had yet to receive any vaccine at all.\n\nThe Scottish government said it was working with health boards to resolve the issues.\n\nCurrently, about 16,000 vaccinations a day are being carried out in Scotland. However, that is expected to rise significantly as efforts to deliver the vaccine are scaled up.\n\nOn Sunday, 1,341 new cases of Covid-19 were reported - the lowest daily figure since 28 December. However, the numbers being admitted to hospital have continued to rise, reaching 1,918.\n\nNo new deaths were registered.\n\nHealth Secretary Jeane Freeman has pledged that the workforce and infrastructure will be in place to vaccinate 400,000 people each week by the end of February.\n\nThe government has already announced plans for large vaccination centres in Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh.\n\nIt comes after more than 5,000 front-line health and care staff were vaccinated at the NHS Louisa Jordan in Glasgow on Saturday.\n\nGP practices across Scotland are currently providing vaccination services to those aged over 80.\n\nAbout 16,000 vaccinations are currently being carried out a day in Scotland\n\nSpeaking on the BBC's Politics Scotland programme, Dr Andrew Buist, who chairs the British Medical Association's (BMA) GP committee in Scotland, said there was inconsistencies across the GP network.\n\nHe said the vaccine deployment plan was \"ambitious\" and so far \"good progress\" had been made in giving it to priority groups such as care homes residents and front-line health staff.\n\nHowever, he told the programme: \"The current problem lies with the next priority group, which is the 80-plus group, which GPs in Scotland are set to vaccinate because the supply of the vaccine so far has been quite patchy.\n\n\"Some practices have a good supply, some have had none so far.\"\n\nHe said his practice had received 100 doses of the vaccine for 600 patients over the age of 80, who all needed to be vaccinated by 5 February.\n\nHe added: \"I then have to do another 1,200 patients in the 70-plus group and the extremely clinically vulnerable by the middle of February, so we need to do 1,700 vaccines in the next four weeks.\n\n\"Now we can do that. We are used to providing large number of flu vaccinations and it is possible, we have our workforce in place, but we need the vaccine, otherwise we can't do it.\"\n\nWhen asked if his practice was running out of vaccine at the end of each day, Dr Buist said: \"Yes - we can't plan, that's the key thing. We can't send out appointments to patients until we're sure we have the vaccine in our fridge.\n\n\"We were given 100 doses on Monday. We used that all up by Friday. We don't want to send out appointments to patients until we know that we can definitively vaccinate them otherwise patients get very upset.\"\n\nVaccinators have reported being able to extract one additional dose from vaccine vials\n\nDr Buist said vaccinators were regularly managing to extract higher numbers of doses from vaccine vials despite claims that some doses were being wasted.\n\nHe said there was widespread experience of six doses being extracted from Pfizer vaccine vials, which were marketed as having five doses, while 11 doses were regularly being taken from AstraZeneca vials.\n\nBut Dr Buist criticised issues around the red tape some retired health professional had faced when volunteering to become vaccinators.\n\n\"I have reports that arrangement to get doctors and nurses back into the system have been quite bureaucratic and I think it's something we need to look at.\"\n\nThe Scottish government acknowledged that there had been delays in vaccine supplies reaching some GP surgeries.\n\nA spokeswoman said: \"GPs have a significant role to play in delivering the vaccine - and we thank them for their hard work and patience as we roll out more vaccines to those in the communities.\n\n\"We know there have been some initial delays in supply reaching some practices and are working with health boards to resolve this. Vaccines are being manufactured as quickly as possible and we will continue to explore all options available to increase supply.\"\n\nThe government said health boards were providing order information for their GP practices to National Procurement who in turn advised the distribution partner.\n\nThe spokeswoman added: \"Once stock is released for ordering, the distribution partner inputs the GP orders on to their ordering system. Once the order has been placed, GP practices will receive an automated email providing an indication of the delivery day.\n\n\"We too want to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible and are continually working hard to see if distribution can be made faster in any respect.\"", "Chris Cramer, a major figure in BBC News and later CNN International, has died at the age of 73 after a period of ill health. Former BBC director of news Richard Sambrook looks back at his life.\n\nChris Cramer's legacy will be the major change in attitudes and support for journalist safety he championed through the BBC and across the wider industry, as well as many achievements in newsgathering and international news.\n\nHe began his career as a teenager on the Portsmouth Evening News, moving to BBC Radio Solent when it launched in 1970.\n\nAfter a year's secondment in Brunei he found his way to the BBC TV Newsroom in the 1970s and developed his reputation as a highly competitive and effective news editor and field producer.\n\nIn 1980 he and a BBC team were in the Iranian Embassy in London collecting visas when it was seized by gunmen opposed to Ayatollah Khomeini. A standoff and siege followed, with Chris among 26 hostages.\n\nHe managed to feign serious illness and was released by the gunmen allowing him to give vital information to the authorities before the SAS stormed the embassy and rescued the hostages.\n\nAt a time when no-one understood or spoke of PTSD, it had a marked effect on his life.\n\nArmed police on the adjoining balcony to the Iranian Embassy during the siege in 1980\n\nMany journalists and crew subsequently spoke of his care and attention when they had difficult experiences and he went on to drive major changes in understanding and support for journalists' safety.\n\nWith BBC Safety manager Peter Hunter, Chris introduced the first hostile environment training courses, risk assessments and equipment for those covering conflicts.\n\nFormer correspondent Martin Bell recalls: \"From Vietnam to Croatia I had covered 10 wars without protection. Then in June 1992 we were shot up crossing the airport runway in Sarajevo in a soft-skinned vehicle. Within two weeks Chris had procured our first armoured Land Rover, the redoubtable 'Miss Piggy', and the body armour to go with it.\"\n\nHe later introduced the first confidential counselling service for news teams, recognising PTSD, and helped found the International News Safety Institute, which spearheaded safety across the news industry.\n\nDuring the 1980s he was at the forefront of organising and overseeing major news coverage, including Michael Buerk's reporting from the Ethiopian famine, coverage of the IRA Brighton bomb attack on the British government, the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, Kate Adie's reporting from Tiananmen Square, the fall of eastern Europe, the first Gulf War and many more major events.\n\nHis fierce competitiveness delivered a series of major exclusives and awards for BBC News.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Jeremy Bowen This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIn the 1990s he oversaw major investment in BBC Newsgathering and the integration of radio and TV reporting - often against internal resistance. His managerial style could be uncompromising and tough, but he was also bitingly funny, shrewd and his hard exterior hid a warm-hearted and generous core.\n\nHe was crucial to establishing the integrated News division as it exists today.\n\nIn 1996 he left the BBC to move to Atlanta as managing director and executive vice-president of CNN International.\n\nThere he took his passion for news safety and his competitive news edge to develop the network into a greater global force.\n\nAs his former BBC and CNN colleague Tony Maddox has said: \"Among his many accomplishments Chris was a pioneer and innovator in field safety for journalists. He led the development of guidelines and practices now widely adopted across the industry.\"\n\nCramer moved to CNN after his time with the BBC\n\nHe was a larger-than-life figure who generated affection and respect in equal measure, often wielding a rapid and disarming wit.\n\nHe is also remembered for supporting women into senior and executive positions and helping them succeed.\n\nDirector of BBC News Fran Unsworth recalls: \"He was one of journalism's enormous characters and a legend in the television news industry. But the legend and the reported image always belied the man.\n\n\"He was immensely kind, thoughtful and caring underneath that image he sometimes projected.\"\n\nFormer deputy director general Mark Byford said: \"He was probably the greatest newsgathering executive ever in the broadcast news business and his organisational skills, competitiveness, eye for a story and steel were extraordinary.\n\n\"He was also, behind the facade, a gentle giant who cared for his people with amazing passion and love.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by John Simpson This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n\"Many editors, correspondents and presenters in BBC News owe their success to his mentorship - myself included.\"\n\nAfter 11 years he left CNN and took up roles first with Reuters TV and then the Wall Street Journal, where his experience and expertise were used to develop their digital video services.\n\nHe leaves his wife, Nina, son Richard and daughter Nicolette and his daughter Hannah by an earlier marriage to Helen, a former BBC producer.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Nóra Quoirin's parents: \"The inquest is a battle we must continue in Nóra's name\"\n\nThe mother of a 15-year-old girl found dead in a Malaysian jungle says she believes her daughter's body was placed by somebody in the spot she was found.\n\nNóra Quoirin, from Balham in south London, vanished from her room at the Dusun rainforest resort in August 2019.\n\nHer body was found near the resort nine days after she went missing. A coroner recorded her death was by misadventure.\n\nMeabh Quoirin, who thinks Nora was abducted, said the family would \"never give up their fight for justice\".\n\nNóra was born with holoprosencephaly, a disorder that affects brain development, and her parents have always believed that wandering off from the resort - which is about 40 miles from Kuala Lumpur - was not something their daughter would have done.\n\nA post-mortem examination found Nóra had died three days before her body was found, due to gastrointestinal bleeding from hunger and stress endured over a prolonged period.\n\nBut Mrs Quoirin points out that the jungle had been searched on four occasions in the seven days leading up to her death, with police suggesting the teenager been \"alive and moving\" during the first stages of the search.\n\n\"The fact that search teams were there, along with many hundreds of volunteers in that particular area so close to her death, makes us feel that she was placed there at a later point,\" Mrs Quoirin told the BBC.\n\nNóra's parents Maebh and Sebastien Quoirin want there to be a revision of the inquest verdict\n\nThe teenager's mother pointed out that the inquest had not explained how her daughter ended up in the jungle, where her unclothed body was eventually found by a group of volunteers.\n\n\"I suppose the easiest one to dwell on was the fact there was an open window [in the family's chalet],\" said Mrs Quoirin, who is originally from Belfast.\n\n\"Someone opened that window, it wasn't any of us. That is totally unexplained.\"\n\nMalaysian police have always treated Nóra's disappearance as a missing person case. They maintain there was no suggestion of abduction, kidnap or foul play.\n\nDuring the search for her daughter, Mrs Quoirin told emergency services that their work meant \"the world to us\"\n\n\"Nóra always looked to someone else for reassurance on what she should do next so the idea that she would have climbed out a window - even found a window or seen a window in the pitch black - is in our view crazy,\" Mrs Quorin said.\n\n\"If she had somehow mistaken which door was for the bathroom and had gone out the front door for instance... she was barefoot, she would have instantly felt pain and she would have been absolutely petrified.\"\n\nNóra's parents have asked for a revision of the inquest verdict as \"so many questions have been left unanswered\".\n\nNóra was born with holoprosencephaly, a disorder which affects brain development\n\n\"I think it will be impossible to ever have all the answers to questions that inevitably we will agonise over for the rest of our lives,\" Mrs Quoirin said.\n\n\"We can do more justice by at least recognising who this child was and that she wouldn't have - couldn't have - done the things that have been ruled through this verdict of misadventure.\n\n\"It's our duty to Nora to stand up for that, to really recognise who she was and stand up in the name of all children with special needs, to recognise who these children are, what they represent in our society.\"", "Within seconds of being dropped, LauncherOne had ignited its engine\n\nSir Richard Branson's rocket company Virgin Orbit has succeeded in putting its first satellites in space.\n\nTen payloads in total were lofted on the same rocket, which was launched from under the wing of one of the entrepreneur's old 747 jumbos.\n\nSir Richard is hoping to tap into what is a growing market for small, lower-cost satellites.\n\nBy using a jet plane as the launch platform, he can theoretically send up spacecraft from anywhere in the world.\n\nIn reality, of course, his Virgin Orbit system has to be licensed in the locality where it is used, which at the moment is solely California. But there are well-advanced plans to bring the 747 and its rockets to Cornwall in south-west England, for example.\n\nSunday's success was a big fillip for Sir Richard's team who had tried and failed to launch a rocket in May last year. That effort was thwarted by a breached propellant line feeding liquid oxygen to the booster's first-stage Newton-3 engine.\n\nNo such problems occurred this time.\n\nThe modified 747, named Cosmic Girl, left its base in California's Mojave desert at 10:50 PST (18:50 UTC) to fly out over the Pacific Ocean.\n\nA little under 60 minutes later, and cruising at 35,000ft (10,500m), the jet banked hard to the right, dropping as it did so the 21m-long rocket that had been clamped to its underside.\n\nWithin seconds this booster, called LauncherOne, had ignited its engine and was climbing to space.\n\nCorrect deployment of the various spacecraft onboard at an altitude of roughly 500km was confirmed a couple of hours later.\n\n\"A new gateway to space has just sprung open,\" said Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart. \"That LauncherOne was able to successfully reach orbit today is a testament to this team's talent, precision, drive, and ingenuity.\"\n\nSir Richard has been trying to find the right solution to get into the satellite launch business since 2009. His concrete proposal was first put before the public at the Farnborough International Air Show three years later.\n\nThere is an emerging market for small, lower-cost spacecraft, whose developers are seeking more flexible and affordable ways of getting their assets above the Earth.\n\nSorry, we're having trouble displaying this content. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nVirgin Orbit is one of a number of companies now racing to meet this demand. Other contenders include the Rocket Lab outfit, which sends up its vehicles from a ground launch pad in New Zealand. But there are tens of other small rocket start-ups at various stages of maturation, and some of these plan to operate from the UK as well.\n\n\"Virgin Orbit has achieved something many thought impossible. It was so inspiring to see our specially adapted Virgin Atlantic 747, Cosmic Girl, send the LauncherOne rocket soaring into orbit,\" Sir Richard said.\n\n\"This magnificent flight is the culmination of many years of hard work and will also unleash a whole new generation of innovators on the path to orbit. I can't wait to see the incredible missions Dan and the team will launch to change the world for good.\"\n\nSir Richard presented the LauncherOne concept at Farnborough in 2012\n\nWill Whitehorn is the president of UKSpace, the trade body representing the space industry in Britain. He's also a former president of Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard's other space company which hopes soon to start flying fare-paying passengers above the atmosphere in a rocket plane.\n\nHe said Virgin Orbit's success on Sunday was hugely significant.\n\n\"This is a momentous day for the small satellite world, as we will be able to launch satellites responsively; and for the UK this event promises sovereign launch capability very soon,\" he told BBC News.\n\n\"I plan to push hard for a launch from Cornwall to coincide with the G7 meeting this year if at all possible!\"\n\nSunday's payloads were mostly shoebox-sized and developed by universities\n\nThe air-launched system has the flexibility to operate anywhere - in theory", "A doctor has appeared in court charged with the attempted murder of a \"highly-respected\" fellow plastic surgeon who was stabbed in his own home.\n\nGraeme Perks, 65, was stabbed in his abdomen and chest in Halam, Nottinghamshire, on Thursday.\n\nJonathan Peter Brooks, also charged with three counts of attempted arson with intent to endanger life, appeared at Nottingham Magistrates' Court.\n\nMr Perks is currently in a serious but stable condition, police said.\n\nMr Brooks, 56, of Landseer Road, Southwell, has also been charged with possession of a knife in a public place.\n\nHe was remanded in custody to appear at Nottingham Crown Court on 15 February.\n\nPolice said they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the attack.\n\nGraeme Perks has been described as \"one of the most highly regarded and respected surgeons in the profession\"\n\nThe two men were colleagues at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.\n\nA spokeswoman for the trust said: \"This incident has affected many of our staff who worked closely with, and are friends with Graeme.\n\n\"Our thoughts are with Graeme and his family at this time.\"\n\nMr Perks had served as president of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons (BAPRAS), which described him as \"one of the most highly-regarded and respected surgeons in the profession\".\n\nPolice previously said Mr Perks had gone to investigate the sound of breaking glass at about 04:15 GMT on Thursday, after an intruder was believed to have smashed their way into the house.\n\nPolice said Mr Perks was stabbed at his home in Halam, Nottinghamshire, while his family were upstairs\n\nThey said Mr Perks was stabbed and the suspect ran off.\n\nMr Perks worked in London, Sheffield, Newcastle and Melbourne, Australia, but returned to the UK in the mid-1990s and started working in Nottingham.\n\nHe and his wife have raised thousands of pounds for charity by opening their garden to visitors, and were featured on BBC Radio Nottingham after raising more than £34,000.\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Keelan Wilson was 15 when he was stabbed more than 40 times\n\nFour men have been found guilty of murdering a boy stabbed more than 40 times in a \"well-planned execution\".\n\nKeelan Wilson, 15, was fatally injured on Langley Road in Merry Hill, Wolverhampton, on 29 May, 2018.\n\nThe four murderers acted \"like a pack of animals\" amid rising gang violence in the city, police said.\n\nKeelan's mother Kelly Ellitts said the convictions meant justice for her son, but added \"nothing would bring Keelan back\".\n\nIt emerged a few days after the murder that when an ambulance was called for the wounded boy, his final words included \"tell my mum I love her\".\n\nThe trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court heard how the night time attack - carried out by Brian Sasa and Nehemie Tampwo, each aged 20, along with Tyrique King and Zenay Pennant-Phillips, both 19 - was \"not in any way spontaneous\".\n\nDet Sgt Nick Barnes from the West Midlands force said Keelan had the \"single worst set of injuries\" he had seen on a victim in more than six years investigating homicide.\n\nThere had been increasing acts of violence between opposing gangs leading up to the murder, including disorder earlier that day, police said.\n\nThat included weapons being brandished in Wolverhampton city centre, and in another incident, Keelan and two others being shot at by a group of youngsters on bikes. No one was hurt.\n\nBut later on, the court heard, the group of four killers ran towards Keelan as he sat in a taxi close to his home, then pulled open the rear door and \"set about him with weapons\", inflicting more than 40 knife wounds.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Keelan Wilson's mother Kelly Ellitts 'hit the floor' when she saw he had been stabbed\n\nMichael Duck QC, prosecuting, said the killing \"was not in any way a spontaneous act of violence\".\n\nHe said: \"This was a well-planned, targeted group attack by a number of youths armed with knives, and that was with the plan to execute another young man.\"\n\nDuring the 13-week trial, jurors heard there was evidence to suggest the victim had \"become embroiled in gang culture\", with his killers believing he had switched factions.\n\nDet Sgt Barnes said it was \"difficult\" to pinpoint a motive \"because Keelan wasn't on the police radar particularly for any such activity\".\n\nKeelan was wounded just metres from his home, receiving 43 stab wounds in total, according to police.\n\nHe had been driving with a friend - with whom he met up after the shooting incident - when their car broke down, which led to a taxi being called.\n\nA spokesperson for the Crown Prosecution Service said while Keelan was attacked on boarding the vehicle, his friend was \"left unscathed\" and fled, making it \"evident\" to authorities that \"Keelan was the only target\".\n\nMs Ellitts said she lived with the shock of her son's death daily.\n\n\"This isn't something that you think of every now and again, this is a daily thing that you have to live with.\n\n\"It's terrible my daughters won't know who he is.\"\n\nOn the day of Keelan's death, CCTV captured a scene from the Wolverhampton city centre disorder that police said was linked to gang activity\n\nSasa, of Long Ley, Heath Town, Wolverhampton; King, of Chelwood Gardens, Wolverhampton; Tampwo of Fern Grove in Bletchley, Milton Keynes; and Pennant-Phillips, whose address cannot be published for legal reasons, had all denied murder.\n\n\"Keelan was a child who had his whole life ahead of him,\" Det Sgt Barnes said.\n\nThe convictions, he added, came after a \"very difficult and long investigation,\" with more than 2,000 lines of inquiry having to be examined.\n\nSome lines of investigation had been met with a \"wall of silence,\" he said.\n\nJudge Michael Chambers said: \"It is an utter tragedy that a 15-year-old child lost his life at the hands of others who are barely older than he.\"\n\nSentencing is set to take place at Wolverhampton Crown Court on 19 March.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n• None 'Tell mum I love her' said stabbed boy\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Monica Calazans, a 54-year-old nurse in São Paulo, was given a Chinese-developed vaccine\n\nA nurse has received Brazil's first Covid-19 vaccine dose after regulators gave emergency approval to two jabs.\n\nRegulator Anvisa gave the green light to vaccines from Oxford-AstraZeneca and China's Sinovac, doses of which will be distributed among all 27 states.\n\nBrazil has the world's second-highest death toll from Covid-19 and cases are rising again across the country.\n\nPresident Jair Bolsonaro has been heavily criticised for his handling of the pandemic.\n\nThe president, who caught Covid-19 last year and recovered, has said he will not take a vaccine.\n\nAuthorities reported 551 new fatalities on Sunday, the first time in six days that it had fallen short of 1,000 although this could reflect a delay in the reporting of numbers over the weekend.\n\nIn all, more than 209,000 Covid-related deaths have been recorded in Brazil, a raw total figure only exceeded by the US.\n\nOver 8.4 million infections have been confirmed since the start of the pandemic - the third-highest tally in the world.\n\nHealth Minister Eduardo Pazuello told reporters that the national vaccination programme in the country of 211 million people would begin in earnest in the coming days. Two Brazilian biomedical centres which have been given approval to produce the jabs will be heavily involved.\n\nAbout six million doses of the Sinovac-developed CoronaVac have already been produced in Brazil, while the government is waiting for shipments of the AstraZeneca vaccine from a laboratory in India.\n\nShortly after Anvisa's board gave emergency approval, Monica Calazans, a 54-year-old nurse in São Paulo, became the first person to be inoculated with CoronaVac.\n\nHer vaccination was organised by the São Paulo state government, which is led by Mr Bolsonaro's main political rival, João Doria.\n\nThis has been a rare piece of good news today for Brazilians who are grappling with a devastating second wave.\n\nFrom where I am, the city of Manaus, the vaccine does not feel real. People here are trying to recover a collapsed health system and doing what they can to keep their sick relatives alive.\n\nThe pandemic has become deeply political in Brazil. President Bolsonaro continues to present himself as a vaccine sceptic and he was notably absent as the vaccines were approved. Instead, Monday's newspapers will no doubt have São Paulo Governor Doria slapped on their front pages.\n\nHe is expected to run in next year's presidential elections and has backed the Sinovac vaccine from the very start. He was once a Bolsonaro ally and is now his nemesis - but there is no doubt who is leading the way in trying to get the population vaccinated.\n\nEarlier this week researchers said the Chinese vaccine had been found to be 50.4% effective in Brazilian clinical trials. This, results showed, was significantly less effective than previous data suggested - barely over the 50% needed for regulatory approval.\n\nCoronaVac is also being used in China, Indonesia and Turkey.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe news comes after revelations that a new coronavirus variant has emerged in Brazil. Several cases were traced back to the Amazonas state, where a state of emergency is in place.\n\nManaus, the state capital, has been hit especially hard, with beds and life-saving oxygen running low. Refrigerated containers have also been brought to hospitals to help store bodies.\n\nNeighbouring Venezuela said it had sent a convoy of trucks with oxygen supplies to help Amazonas.\n\nPresident Bolsonaro has faced mounting criticism for his handling of Brazil's outbreak, and several anti-government protests were held last week.\n\nAn opponent of lockdowns, he has previously blamed state governors and mayors for the Covid crisis, saying the federal government has provided all the resources needed to tackle the virus.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The deer had to be put down by a gamekeeper after the attack\n\nA warning has been issued by royal parks police after a dog carried out a \"relentless\" attack on a deer that had to be put down.\n\nFootage shows the dog savaging the red deer in London's Richmond Park.\n\nCases of pets worrying deer in London's eight royal parks have shot up during lockdown, police say. They are urging owners to keep dogs on leads.\n\nSeparately, on Sunday, a 10-year-old child was injured by a herd of deer being chased by a dog in Bushy Park.\n\nPolice said the incident in the park in Richmond-upon-Thames, which left the child needing hospital treatment, underlined the need for people to keep their dogs on a lead if they are unsure how they will react to deer.\n\nOn Friday, Franck Hiribarne, 44, from Kingston in south-west London, admitted causing or permitting an animal he was in charge of to injure another animal, in relation to the Richmond Park attack.\n\nWimbledon magistrates heard the doe suffered deep wounds, then received a broken leg when it was hit by a car as it tried to flee from the dog. Witnesses described the attack as \"relentless\".\n\nThe deer had to be put down by a gamekeeper after the attack in October.\n\nMr Hiribarne, who reported the matter himself to the Royal Parks Office, said he usually walked his red setter Alfie on a lead until he was well away from any grazing deer, and that the dog had been responding well to \"off-lead\" commands.\n\nThe dog owner, who was fined £600, said in a statement: \"I was genuinely shocked and sorry for what had happened and since then I have refrained completely from letting Alfie off the leash in any park.\n\n\"I have also taken a special dog trainer specialised in gundogs to control more accurately any of his hunting instincts. He has made great progress.\"\n\nFour deer have died from dog attacks in the royal parks since March 2020, while there have been 58 incidents of dogs chasing the herds - a big increase on previous years - according to the manager of Richmond Park.\n\nPart of the increase is thought to be down to new dog owners who are unfamiliar with the best conduct around wildlife.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Alexandru Murgeanu (l) and Jason Mercer were killed in the crash on the M1 in South Yorkshire\n\nA coroner has called for a review of smart motorways after an inquest heard the deaths of two men on a stretch of the M1 could have been avoided.\n\nJason Mercer, 44, and Alexandru Murgeanu, 22, died when Prezemyslaw Szuba crashed his lorry into their vehicles near Sheffield on 7 June 2019.\n\nCoroner David Urpeth said smart motorways without a hard shoulder carry \"an ongoing risk of future deaths\".\n\nHighways England said it was \"addressing many of the points raised\".\n\nMr Urpeth recorded a verdict of unlawful killing at Sheffield Town Hall. He added he would be writing to Highways England and the transport secretary asking for a review.\n\nThe inquest heard the deaths of the two men may have been avoided had there had been a hard shoulder.\n\nOn the stretch of the M1 where the crash took place, the hard shoulder has been replaced by an active lane.\n\nSzuba, 40, from Hull, was jailed last year after admitting causing their deaths by careless driving.\n\nHe was speaking from prison to the inquest.\n\nPrezemyslaw Szuba was jailed over the deaths\n\nAnswering questions over the phone, Szuba told the hearing he accepted he was driving without paying proper attention.\n\n\"I have already accepted that at my trial,\" he said, but added: \"If there had been a hard shoulder on this bit of motorway, the collision would have been avoidable.\n\n\"I would have driven past these two cars as it would be safer and they would have been able to come home safely and I would be able to come back home.\"\n\nSzuba said he had only three to five seconds to react, and asked if he would have avoided the crash had he been paying attention, he said: \"It's difficult to say after everything now.\"\n\nSgt Mark Brady, who oversees major collision investigations for South Yorkshire Police, told the hearing: \"Had there been a hard shoulder, had Jason and Alexandru pulled on to the hard shoulder, my opinion is that Mr Szuba would have driven clean past them.\"\n\nBut he accepted the primary cause of the crash was Szuba's inattention to the road.\n\nThe crash happened after a collision between a Ford Focus driven by Mr Mercer, from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, and a Ford Transit driven by Mr Murgeanu, who was living in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, but was originally from Romania.\n\nWhen Mr Mercer and Mr Murgeanu got out to exchange details they were hit by the lorry, and both died at the scene.\n\nMr Mercer's wife Claire has campaigned against smart motorways since her husband's death, and was at the hearing on Monday.\n\nClaire Mercer has campaigned against the use of smart motorways since her husband's death\n\nIn a statement, Highways England said it was \"determined\" to do everything it could to make roads as safe as possible and was already addressing many of the points raised by the coroner \"as published in the Government's Smart Motorway Evidence Stocktake and Action Plan of March 2020\".\n\n\"We will carefully consider any further comments raised by the coroner once we receive the report,\" it added.\n\nFollow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A man has scaled a Hong Kong skyscraper in his wheelchair to raise money for spinal cord patients.\n\nLai Chi-Wai, who became paralysed after a road accident ten years ago, climbed 250 metres (820ft) of the Nina Towers building.\n\nBefore his accident, Lai Chi-Wai was a rock-climbing champion in Asia and eighth best in the world.\n\nHe said that \"knowing there was a possibility...that I could be a climber again, I found some direction in life\".", "Last updated on .From the section England\n\nPhil Neville has left his role as manager of England's women and been appointed in charge of David Beckham's Major League Soccer side Inter Miami.\n\nThe 43-year-old was appointed as England boss in January 2018 and his contract was set to end in July.\n\nThe Football Association says it will \"shortly confirm\" an interim head coach until Sarina Wiegman's arrival.\n\nNetherlands manager Wiegman will take on the role after the delayed Tokyo Olympics in August.\n\nFormer Manchester United and Everton defender Neville was the leading contender to manage Great Britain at the Games, but his move to the United States has left the FA needing another option.\n\n\"This is a very young club with a lot of promise and upside, and I am committed to challenging myself, my players and everyone around me to grow and build a competitive soccer culture we can all be proud of,\" Neville said of his American move.\n\nBeckham said of his former Manchester United team-mate: \"I have known Phil since we were both teenagers at the academy.\n\n\"We share a footballing DNA having been trained by some of the best leaders in the game, and it's those values that I have always wanted running through our club.\"\n\nThe MLS side had been managed by former Uruguay striker Diego Alonso before the 45-year-old left by mutual consent earlier this month.\n\nBeckham added: \"Anyone who has played or worked with Phil knows he is a natural leader, and I believe now is the right time for him to join.\"\n\nNeville led the Lionesses to their first SheBelieves Cup title in 2019 and fourth place at the Women's World Cup later the same year, but results since that tournament have been poor.\n\nEngland's struggles under Neville continued at the 2020 SheBelieves Cup, where a late defeat by Spain in the final match was their seventh loss in 11 games.\n\nThe Lionesses have not played since that game last March because of the coronavirus pandemic.\n\n\"It has been an honour to manage England and I have enjoyed three of the best years of my career,\" said Neville, who won 19 of his 35 games in charge.\n\n\"The players who wear the England shirt are some of the most talented and dedicated athletes I have ever had the privilege to work with.\n\n\"They have challenged me and improved me as a coach, and I am very grateful to them for the fantastic memories we have shared.\"\n\nNeville, who had no previous experience in the women's game before taking over, has made a \"significant contribution\" during his three-year spell, said Baroness Campbell, the FA's director of women's football.\n\n\"The commitment, dedication and respect he has shown the position has been clear to see,\" she added.\n\n\"I will personally miss our many conversations about ways we can improve and progress.\"\n\nEngland are ranked sixth in the world, having been third when Neville succeeded Mark Sampson.\n\nNeville's record against the best sides came under particular scrutiny, with England winning one of their nine games against teams ranked in the top five in the world during his reign.\n\nNeville's record against teams ranked in the world's top five\n\n\"After steadying the ship at a challenging period, he helped us to win the SheBelieves Cup for the first time, reach the World Cup semi-finals and qualify for the Olympics,\" added Campbell.\n\n\"Given his status as a former Manchester United and England player, he did much to raise the profile of our team.\n\n\"He has used his platform to champion the women's game, worked tirelessly to support our effort to promote more female coaches and used his expertise to develop many of our younger players.\"\n\nWhat happens next with England?\n\nThe FA is expected to name England's interim head coach in the next few days.\n\nAmong the favourites is former Norway midfielder Hege Riise, one of the greatest players of her generation - a European Championship winner in 1993, a World Cup winner in 1995 and an Olympic gold medallist in 2000.\n\nAfter retiring as a player, Riise moved into club management in Norway and also coached the country's Under-23 side before spending three years as assistant to then-USA head coach Pia Sundhage from 2009.\n\nShe then joined the set-up at Norwegian club LSK Kvinner in 2012 - becoming head coach in 2017 - as they won six successive titles between 2014 and 2019, while also reaching the 2018-19 Champions League quarter-finals.\n\nRiise was one of seven nominees for the Fifa best women's coach award in 2020, won by Wiegman in December.\n\nThe new interim manager has no England fixtures booked in the diary, though there has reportedly been discussions over a mini-tournament during the next international window in February.\n\nEngland will not be taking part in the SheBelieves Cup but could host a tournament which would see three other nations take part in a round-robin event.\n• None All the goals, highlights and analysis from the weekend's Premier League matches, including Manchester United's visit to Liverpool: MOTD2 is streaming now on BBC iPlayer", "Morgan Le-Riche and other students have questioned if they should be paying full tuition fees\n\n\"I am paying £9,000 for a university degree that is causing me nothing but anxiety and stress.\"\n\nFor Morgan Le-Riche, the university experience since the coronavirus pandemic hit has not been worth the fee.\n\nSome students are calling for reduced tuition fees and more support.\n\nThe Welsh Government said it provided the most generous student support package in the UK and has appointed a dedicated minister for mental health.\n\nIn announcing a lockdown earlier this week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said students in England would not return to the classroom until mid February, with calls for clarity over what will happen in Wales.\n\nMorgan, who is studying criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Wales, said \"something needs to be done to help us students\".\n\nHer Facebook post calling for more help was shared 3,000 times in three days - something that surprised her but also highlighted the depth of feeling.\n\nStudents face an uncertain time with with restrictions currently in place\n\nThe second year student said: \"I don't think the government is understanding students, instead they are only recognising primary and secondary schools - there's no recognition for university students.\"\n\nMorgan was given assignments to complete over Christmas, but said her lecturers had turned off their emails so she could not seek guidance when she was finding work difficult.\n\n\"I feel like the amount of stress I've had has meant I'm not doing a high enough standard of work, that I would normally do, due to the lack of assistance,\" she said.\n\nShe said more time with tutors and spaces for students to come together to discuss mental health would be beneficial.\n\nThe University of South Wales said their course teams are committed to providing \"comprehensive support\" and are \"readily available to offer help and guidance for students\".\n\nStudents in England have been told to work online and remain where they are\n\nA petition calling for the UK government to reduce university student tuition fees from £9,250 to £3,000 has gained more than 400,000 signatures online.\n\nMorgan thinks she has been \"massively let down\" and there needs to be a \"heavy reduction\" on the amount students are paying for their courses.\n\nA Welsh Government spokesman said: \"We are the only country in the whole of Europe that provides equivalent up front living costs grants and loans for full and part-time undergraduates, and for post-graduates.\n\n\"This already covers campus-based and distance learners and will continue throughout the academic year.\"\n\nDanielle Herbert believes university students need more focus from government\n\nJournalism student Danielle Herbert, who also studies at the University of South Wales, said online learning has helped her mental health because otherwise a lot of her face-to-face interactions would be limited.\n\nDespite \"lecturers trying their best\", students' experiences since March last year have not been \"adequate for a £9,000 fee\".\n\nThe third-year student from Swindon said the prime minister's announcement of an England-wide lockdown was stressful \"because there was no mention of universities\".\n\nShe said: \"I was left very unclear and confused as to where I stood on travelling back to Wales. As someone who suffers from anxiety, I rely on concrete facts and that wasn't provided. We have been ignored by the prime minister.\n\n\"I had just paid my rent for this term - which was £2,300 - and I looked at my mum and dad and said: 'Am I even going to be able to go back to my student flat'?\"\n\nDanielle has called for more help for students in dealing with mental health issues during the pandemic\n\nShe does not believe students have had the same level of support as secondary school pupils, adding: \"We're still expected to produce the same standard of work without protection whilst there's a pandemic going on - it's really unrealistic.\"\n\nDanielle said having a \"no detriment\" policy in place would help to relieve students' stress.\n\n\"I think there's a real issue amongst students and students' mental health and it's only grown because of coronavirus. I think we will see the consequences of that if nothing is done.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government said: \"To support mental health services, we have made an additional £9.9m available, as part of efforts to ensure people can access the right support when they need it.\n\n\"In October we announced an additional £10m to support mental health services for higher education students in Wales to increase capacity in students' unions and universities to provide support services.\n\n\"This is in addition to the £27m Higher Education Investment and Recovery Fund announced in the summer.\"\n\nThe University of South Wales said the safety and wellbeing of students is its priority and students have access to a \"wide range of comprehensive support for their health, mental health and wellbeing\".\n\n\"Recognising that a number of staff would be on leave over the Christmas and New Year holidays, the course team let students know they were available for help and support right up until the end of term and students were encouraged to ask for support if they needed it,\" said a spokesperson.\n\n\"We are providing a full and interactive blended learning offer this term, in line with Welsh Government guidance, so that students can receive good experiences and a high-quality education, enabling them to progress and complete their studies on time.\"", "Software giant Github has apologised for firing a Jewish employee who warned co-workers to be careful about Nazis.\n\nThe employee was fired two days after using the word to describe participants in the US Capitol riots.\n\nBut Github now says that decision was a mistake, and its head of HR has resigned over the scandal.\n\nThe company says it has offered the fired employee his job back, and clarified that \"employees are free to express concerns about Nazis\".\n\nMicrosoft-owned Github is one of the most popular software development tools in the world, with more than 50 million users. News of the internal row was first reported by Business Insider.\n\nPeople associated with a range of extreme and far-right groups and supporters of fringe online conspiracy theories stormed Congress.\n\nAs it happened, the Jewish employee posted to an internal Github Slack channel: \"Stay safe homies, Nazis are about.\"\n\nBut the comment sparked criticism from a co-worker about the use of the word \"Nazi\" to describe the rioters, calling it \"untasteful conduct\" for the workplace.\n\nThe Jewish employee, who wished to remain anonymous, told Techcrunch he had been \"genuinely concerned about his co-workers in the area, in addition to his Jewish family members\".\n\nTwo days later, he was fired for his \"patterns of behaviour\".\n\nBut the firing led to an outcry from many more co-workers, with hundreds signing an internal letter calling on Github to explain the decision - and to publicly denounce Nazis.\n\nAmid the outcry, the company opened an investigation with an external investigator.\n\n\"The investigation revealed significant errors of judgment and procedure,\" chief executive Erica Brescia wrote in a blogpost. \"Our head of HR has taken personal accountability and resigned from GitHub.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Joe Biden: \"Yesterday, in my view, was one of the darkest days in the history of our nation.\"\n\nShe said the firm had \"reversed the decision to separate with the employee\", and had contacted him - but it is not clear if the employee wishes to return after the treatment he received.\n\nThe company has also issued statements condemning white supremacists, Nazism, anti-Semitism, and those who took part in the Capitol riots.", "A group of London business leaders has written to the government calling for financial support for the struggling rail firm Eurostar.\n\nIn a letter to the Treasury and Department for Transport, they urge \"swift action to safeguard its future\".\n\nBosses of firms such as Fortnum & Mason signed the letter asking for access to government loans and business rates relief \"at the very least\".\n\nThe government says it is \"working closely\" with Eurostar.\n\nThe cross-Channel rail company is threatened by a large drop in passenger numbers due to coronavirus-related travel restrictions.\n\nIt reported in November that passenger numbers had been down 95% since March 2020.\n\nWith two trains an hour normally scheduled in peak hours, it now runs just two services a day from London to Paris and Brussels.\n\nThe letter, coordinated by business campaigning group London First and seen by the BBC, describes the firm as one that has \"fallen through the cracks\". Unlike some airlines, it has not been eligible for government-backed loans.\n\n\"If this viable business is allowed to fall between the cracks of support - neither an airline, nor a domestic railway - our recovery could be damaged,\" it says.\n\nCo-signed by 28 leaders, including the vice-chancellor of Middlesex University, the chief executive of West End property company Shaftesbury, as well as the boss of the ExCeL conference centre, the letter points out that the company currently employs 1,200 people in the UK.\n\nThe firm is 55% owned by French state rail firm SNCF. The UK government sold its stake in the business to private companies for £757m in 2015.\n\nThe letter also credits Eurostar with reducing carbon emissions. Since it launched in 1994, it has transported more than 190 million passengers between Britain and mainland Europe.\n\nA spokesman for Eurostar said: \"Without additional funding from government there is a real risk to the survival of Eurostar, the green gateway to Europe.\n\nHe described the current situation as \"very serious\".\n\nA spokesman for the Department for Transport said: \"We recognise the significant financial challenges facing Eurostar as a result of Covid-19 and the unprecedented circumstances currently faced by the international travel industry.\"\n\nHe added the government had been in contact with Eurostar \"on a regular basis\" since the start of the coronavirus crisis and would continue to work closely with the firm.\n• None How are travel rules being relaxed?", "A small group of armed protesters held a rally in front of the capitol building in Texas\n\nSmall groups of protesters - some of them armed - gathered on Sunday at statehouses in the US, where tensions are high after the deadly riots at the Capitol in Washington.\n\nProtests were held outside capitol buildings in Texas, Oregon, Michigan, Ohio and elsewhere.\n\nBut many other statehouses were quiet, amid a ramping up of security across US legislatures. No clashes were reported.\n\nThe FBI has warned of armed protests ahead of Wednesday's inauguration.\n\nPresident-elect Joe Biden will take office two weeks after pro-Trump protesters stormed the US Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January, leaving five dead, including a police officer.\n\nMore than 25,000 National Guard troops are being deployed to secure Washington. In a sign of just how worried officials are about potential unrest, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told the Associated Press on Sunday that all Guard members were being vetted because of fears of an insider threat.\n\nAlso on Sunday, a county official from New Mexico was arrested in Washington in connection with the riots at the US Capitol on 6 January.\n\nCouy Griffin, the founder of a group called Cowboys for Trump, had vowed to return on inauguration day with firearms to \"embrace my Second Amendment\".\n\nMany cities had prepared for potentially violent protests over the weekend, erecting barriers and deploying thousands of National Guard troops.\n\nPosts on pro-Trump and far-right online networks had called for armed demonstrations on Sunday in particular, but some militias told their followers not to attend, citing heavy security or claiming the planned events were police traps.\n\nSmall crowds of protesters numbering in the dozens gathered in only some cities, leaving the streets surrounding many statehouses largely empty.\n\nMembers of the the Boogaloo Bois were seen outside the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing\n\nThe New York Times reported about 25 members of the Boogaloo Bois movement were among heavily-armed protesters who gathered at the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. But the men - who are part of a loosely organised extremist group that wants to overthrow the US government - said they were there for a long-planned gun rights rally.\n\nMeanwhile in Michigan, about two dozen people - some carrying rifles - protested outside the statehouse in Lansing, as police watched on.\n\n\"I am not here to be violent and I hope no one shows up to be violent,\" one protester told Reuters news agency.\n\nA similarly small group of about a dozen protesters, a few armed with rifles, stood outside the Texas Capitol in Austin.\n\nOutside Pennsylvania's capitol in Harrisburg, one Trump supporter noted the poor turn-out, telling Reuters: \"There's nothing going on.\"\n\nMore protests are expected on Wednesday, when Mr Biden will officially be sworn into office, replacing Mr Trump as president.\n\nMr Biden will issue executive orders to reverse President Trump's travel bans and re-join the Paris climate accord on his first day in the White House.\n\nThe president-elect is also expected to focus on reuniting families separated at the US-Mexico border, and to issue mandates on Covid-19 and mask-wearing.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The US Capitol is on high alert ahead of Biden's inauguration\n\nMuch of Washington DC has been locked down ahead of the inauguration. The National Mall, which is usually thronged with thousands of people for inaugurations, has been shut at the request of the Secret Service.\n\nThe Biden team had already asked Americans to avoid travelling to the nation's capital for the inauguration because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Local officials said people should watch the event remotely.", "China's economy grew at the slowest pace in more than four decades last year, official figures show, but remains on course to be the only major economy to have expanded in 2020.\n\nThe economy grew 2.3% last year, despite Covid-19 shutdowns causing output to slump in early 2020.\n\nStrict virus containment measures and emergency relief for businesses helped the economy recover.\n\nGrowth in the final three months of the year picked up to 6.5%.\n\n\"The GDP data shows the economy has almost normalised. This momentum will continue, although the current Covid-19 outbreak in a couple of provinces in northern China might temporarily cause fluctuation,\" said Yue Su, principal economist for the Economist Intelligence Unit.\n\nChina's mainland share markets as well as Hong Kong's Hang Seng posted modest gains on the latest figures, which exceeded economists' expectations, according to a Reuters poll.\n\nHowever, Covid-19 was still a major drain on growth in 2020, with nationwide shutdowns of factories and manufacturing plants forcing economic growth down to its slowest rate for four decades.\n\nChina's manufacturing sector appears to have recovered, with Monday's data showing a 7.3% increase in industrial output.\n\nExports have also led the way. Data last week showed Chinese exports grew by more than expected in December, as coronavirus disruptions around the world fuelled demand for Chinese goods.\n\nThat is despite a stronger yuan, which makes Chinese exports more expensive for overseas buyers.\n\nChina's economy has seen a strong rebound, while the rest of the world struggles with anaemic demand, millions of job losses, and businesses shutting down.\n\nChina's economic engine roared back to life after a brutal lockdown that saw the Chinese economy contract by a historic 6.8% in the first quarter of 2020.\n\nWe should always be circumspect about Chinese data - with the usual caveat that the trajectory of the data rather than the figures themselves are a useful guide to how China's economy is growing.\n\nWhat these numbers show is that China's strategy of locking down cities hard and quickly has worked.\n\nA combination of government-led investment and global demand for Chinese goods also helped to power a rapid recovery, and boost exports.\n\nStill - this is the lowest rate of annual growth in more than 40 years for the economic giant. Worries over a resurgence of the virus are also clouding China's growth outlook, with consumer demand still weak.\n\nAnd Beijing is trying to navigate a prickly trade relationship with the US, with the incoming administration unlikely to be softer on China than President Donald Trump.\n\nAll of these challenges will no doubt weigh on Chinese growth in 2021 - but they seem to be in a better place than the rest of the world's major economies.\n\nIt was not all good news from the latest figures.\n\nLi Wei, a senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank, said pandemic-related exports and credit-fuelled car and housing sales accounted for much of the growth, while domestic demand lagged behind.\n\n\"Domestic household consumption of food, clothing, furniture and utilities remains below pre-pandemic levels, while the hospitality and transportation sectors continue to face capacity and travel restrictions,\" he told Reuters.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Why does China’s economy matter to you?\n\nAlthough retail sales grew by 4.6% in the fourth quarter of 2020, they fell by 3.9% for the year.\n\nMany analysts are tipping growth to accelerate in 2021, but the China Bureau of Statistics has warned of a \"grave and complex environment both at home and abroad\", with the pandemic having a \"huge impact\".\n\nChina still faces many challenges, including continuing trade tensions with the US and how they might play out under the administration of President-elect Joe Biden, who takes office later this week.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Lorry drivers have been holding up the traffic in Westminster.\n\nBoris Johnson has pledged £23m to help businesses affected by Brexit delays amid protests by fishing firms.\n\nDemonstrations took place outside government departments in central London by exporters who are warning their livelihoods are under threat.\n\nExports of fresh fish and seafood have been severely disrupted by new border controls since the UK's transition period ended earlier this month.\n\nThe PM said firms would be compensated for delays that were not their fault.\n\nIndustry associations have complained that extra paperwork has made it difficult to deliver fresh produce to mainland Europe before it goes off.\n\nThey have warned that if the situation continues, jobs could soon be at risk.\n\nPressed on what he would do in response, Mr Johnson said the government would step in to support firms which \"through no fault of their own have experienced bureaucratic delays, difficulties getting their goods through, where there is a genuine willing buyer on the other side of the channel\".\n\n\"There's a £23m compensation fund we've set up and we'll make sure they get help,\" he said.\n\nDetails of the scheme are expected later this week.\n\nAfter a day of protests in central London, which saw 20 lorries drive up Whitehall, the Metropolitan Police said 14 people had been reported for Covid-related offences, but no arrests were made.\n\nMark Moore, manager of the Dartmouth Crab Company, said his business and others were protesting to \"raise awareness\" of the impact of new border checks.\n\nHe told BBC Radio 5 Live his company had faced delays of up to eight and a half hours when delivering produce into the European Union.\n\nHe added that the situation was \"especially difficult\" for the shellfish sector, where goods were at risk of going off before reaching customers.\n\n\"It's not about the increased documentation per se,\" he said.\n\n\"We have taken that on board, and we ourselves - and I know many others - have had no issues with producing the actual paperwork.\n\n\"It's the volume required and the timeframe in which to produce it, which doesn't lend itself to live shellfish and fish generally.\"\n\nThere are 24 lorries in total, overwhelmingly from seafood exporters in Scotland. Businesses taking part say the Brexit trade deal has left their industry high and dry.\n\nAnd although one haulier from Aberdeenshire I spoke to was keen to stress that their coordinated protest was peaceful, it is clear that they all feel that direct action is now necessary to make the government sit up and take notice.\n\nGood natured though their action was, it did for a time cause serious traffic congestion along Whitehall and Parliament Square.\n\nHowever, low levels of traffic perhaps caused by the Covid lockdown meant the roads around Whitehall didn't grind to a complete halt.\n\nAt stake, they believe, is an industry, but also thousands of livelihoods. Exporters say they are backed by fishermen who are struggling to land their catches.\n\nAnd although the rural Scottish communities which are sustained by fishing might seem like a long way from the streets of SW1, the hauliers certainly made their presence felt this morning.\n\nHaving left the EU's customs union and the single market, UK exports are subject to new customs and veterinary checks which have caused problems at the border.\n\nSome Scottish fishermen have been landing their catch in Denmark to avoid the \"bureaucratic system\" involved in exporting to Europe, according to Scotland's rural economy secretary.\n\nLast week, Boris Johnson told a committee of MPs that fishing firms impacted by disruption would be compensated for \"temporary frustrations\".\n\nBut the BBC was told that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) did not know about the promise of compensation before it was made by Mr Johnson.\n\nSpeaking to reporters, the prime minister said he understood the \"frustrations\" of the fishing industry, noting its plight had been \"exacerbated by the Covid pandemic\".\n\n\"Unfortunately, the demand in restaurants on the continent for UK fish has not been what it was before the pandemic, just because the restaurants have been closed for so long,\" he added.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer accused ministers of trying to \"blame fishing communities\" for problems \"rather than accepting it's their failure to prepare\".\n\n\"The government has known there would be a problem with fishing and particularly the sale of fish into the EU for years,\" he told reporters.\n\nMuch media attention has been focussed on Scotland as this export crisis has unfolded.\n\nBut exactly the same problem is rearing its head in the UK's other great fishing stronghold - at the other end of the UK in Devon and Cornwall.\n\nA virtual Who's Who of South West fishing leaders wrote to the environment secretary back in November warning that the new post-Brexit export requirements would have a \"seriously detrimental effect\" on the industry, claiming this \"could be the final straw for many businesses\".\n\nHere, too, many fish exports have now ground to a halt and others have encountered obstacles and long delays.\n\nAnd exporters have reacted angrily to the government's repeated insistence that the issues they've been experiencing over the last two weeks are just \"teething problems\".", "Although it has been common to hear and see the impact on care homes internationally throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, one country where such insight has been rare is China.\n\nPrivate care homes have been growing in popularity in China in recent years, but there are some stigmas associated with the industry.\n\nIn China, many view nursing homes as going against the cultural concept of “filial piety”. This is the belief that the young should respect for and care for their elders, and so many believe the elderly should live with their children, and not live in care homes.\n\nHowever, as cases of the virus grow in the northeast of the country, the official broadcaster CCTV has offered viewers a rare insight into how China’s elderly in these facilities are being protected.\n\nA journalist today has visited the Shijiazhuang Nursing Home. Shijiazhuang is the Chinese city that has been hardest hit by the virus in recent weeks.\n\nIn a 30-minute livestream in which he is clad in hazmat suit and visor, journalist Gu Junling introduces viewers to how the facilities are kept safe, and shows viewers inside the care home’s stockrooms, packed with ample provisions for its residents.\n\nMany of the residents seem happy to speak to the journalist and talk about how they are healthy, and happy. Masks are mandatory for both residents and staff, even in the areas outside on-site. However, far from being kept under house arrest, residents are shown to have sufficient space to go outside, use computers and games rooms.", "Tributes have been paid to the actor Andy Gray who has died at the age of 61.\n\nThe Perth-born star was a well known face on TV and the stage for more than 40 years.\n\nAmong his best known on-screen roles were \"Chancer\" in the 1980s comedy City Lights and more recently \"Pete Galloway\" in BBC soap River City.\n\nHis River City co-star Gayle Telfer Stevens said Gray was a \"national treasure\".\n\nShe added: \"Not only was he an exceptional actor and entertainer who brought so much joy to so many people, he was an extraordinary man.\n\n\"When you were in his presence you could feel it was of greatness. The most kind, clever, funny beyond measure, beautiful man.\"\n\nAndy Gray, second from the left in the back row, starred as \"Chancer\" in the hit 1980s comedy show \"City Lights\"\n\nAndy Gray performing at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013\n\nSteve Carson, director of BBC Scotland, said: \"We are deeply saddened by the news that one of Scotland's much loved comedy actors and close friend to many at BBC Scotland, Andy Gray has passed away.\n\n\"On screen and in person he could always make you laugh and was one of the kindest people to have around on any production. Our thoughts are with his family at this difficult time.\"\n\nAndy Gray, pictured with Grant Stott, had been one of the stars at Edinburgh's King's Theatre pantomime for years\n\nMartin McCardie, executive producer at BBC Scotland Studios, added: \"When Andy joined River City in 2016 he had an extremely successful stage, TV and film career behind him, but the character of Pete Galloway turned out to be one of the most popular ever to pass through Shieldinch.\n\n\"Andy took ill in 2018 and he had to leave the show and he had a difficult time. His ongoing recovery was borne with humour and gratitude for what he had. He had unfinished business on River City and we were looking forward to welcoming him back to film with us before the end of the current series.\"\n\nAndy Gray was genuinely one of the nicest people in the world of showbusiness.\n\nWhether you were an actor, or a journalist, or just someone who'd seen him in panto, he was always ready to have a chat.\n\nWhen he dropped out of his Fringe show in 2018, after being diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia, he was inundated with good wishes, but said he wanted privacy to deal with his illness.\n\nHe retreated to his home in Perthshire and took the time to recover.\n\nWhen he returned to the stage of the Kings Theatre in Edinburgh for their 2019 panto, it was an emotional milestone.\n\nWrapped in his Batman dressing gown backstage (he was a huge fan with a shed full of film paraphernalia) he admitted it could be overwhelming. Sometimes the whoops and cheers of the audience at his arrival in the midst of a glitzy song and dance routine would go on for several minutes.\n\nHis co-stars Grant Stott and Allan Stewart watched from the wings and said it had restored the balance of their long established trio. The Kings is one of the only theatres to have a tradition of a pantette - where the cast sit in the auditorium and watch the front of house staff performing the show. Andy wasn't spared the merciless send up, nor would he have wanted to.\n\nDaughter Claire was also in the show - as one of the three bears - and her baby daughter was in Andy's arms for the curtain call. But whether his actual family, or his panto family, or the generations of people who've seen him onstage or screen, it was a moment of hope, as well as joy, that someone who'd brought so much laughter and entertainment to Scotland was back.\n\nThat's why his sudden death at 61 is such a cruel blow.\n\nHe had been campaigning to keep the Kings afloat, and was involved in online performances. He and Allan Stewart had hoped to appear in one of the few surviving pantomimes in Milton Keynes but that too was cancelled.\n\nFriends and colleagues knew he'd been admitted to hospital in the last few days, and feared the worst. Those who simply knew him as someone who made them laugh, on stage or screen, are no less bereft.\n\nTonight the world of Scottish entertainment is in mourning for a gifted comic actor, writer and genuinely nice man.", "Aberystwyth University's vice chancellor told students not to attend lectures unless \"absolutely necessary\"\n\nAberystwyth University has told its students not to return to campus following new advice from the Welsh Government.\n\nA phased return had been planned from 11 January, but this has now been postponed.\n\nVice-chancellor Prof Elizabeth Treasure said students should not attend the university, in Ceredigion, unless \"absolutely necessary.\"\n\nOn Friday the Welsh Government told learners \"study from home if you can\".\n\nMs Treasure said: \"We are reviewing our plans for in-person teaching and will inform you as soon as we can. Whilst we are reviewing those plans, we don't want students travelling to the university unnecessarily.\"\n\nShe said there were certain exceptions, including students without internet access and those for whom laboratory access was essential.\n\nWales' Education Minister, Kirsty Williams, said universities were reviewing their plans based on their individual circumstances.\n\n\"On return, students are also expected to take two asymptomatic tests and comply with rules as they re-join their term time household,\" she said.\n\nDespite the announcement, Bangor University said on Facebook on Friday that it \"falls under the rules of the Welsh Government which allow for a staggered return to blended learning\".\n\nCardiff University said earlier this week that most students would not return to face-to-face teaching until 22 February.\n\nA Welsh Government spokesman said: \"Our message to students, staff and universities in general is the same as the rest of the population: Stay home, work or study from home if you can.\n\n\"Only attend your place of work or study if you can't work from home.\"\n\nThe new announcement came after calls for clarity were made because of differences with the rules in England.\n\nAt that point, the Welsh Government and Universities Wales said the plans agreed before Christmas would remain in place.\n\nOn Friday, it was announced that schools and colleges would stay closed to most pupils until the February half term unless there is a \"significant\" fall in Covid cases.", "LAS received almost 200,000 calls in December - up 50,000 on November, when London was in the second national lockdown\n\nLast week London exceeded the grim milestone of 10,000 deaths linked to Covid-19. Thousands of people are critically ill in hospital, and as many as 5% of Londoners are thought to have the virus in some parts of the city. As coronavirus continues to circulate silently around the capital, staff at the London Ambulance Service (LAS) are under immense pressure.\n\nThe service is currently taking up to 8,500 calls a day, compared with a pre-Covid figure of 5,000 to 6,000, according to its chief executive Garrett Emmerson.\n\nLizzie Cooke is one of the workers at LAS's south London headquarters who are dealing with strangers at what is a distressing time.\n\nI covered the London Bridge terror attacks and Grenfell but this is a different scale\n\nCalmly, the 30-year-old answers the phone and usually asks first if the patient is breathing.\n\n\"In the first wave we were getting a lot of calls of [people seeking] reassurance,\" Lizzie says. \"But now there are more and more who have symptoms, and family members are really frightened.\"\n\nIt is a fear that Lizzie knows all too well, having been hospitalised with Covid-19 in March. She spent a week receiving treatment for the virus.\n\n\"I was at work taking calls and struggling to concentrate,\" the call-handling supervisor says. \"At times I would just have my head on the desk in between calls.\n\n\"I started to develop chest pains five days later so my parents took me to Royal County Hospital, in Hampshire, and an X-ray showed a lot of fluid in my lungs. It was quite horrible.\n\n\"Luckily, I wasn't on a ventilator but I had the oxygen hood, and the nurses were so rushed off their feet. I didn't have my phone with me or know my parents' numbers off by heart so for that week I was quite alone and isolated.\n\n\"It was just a mixture of the unknown and not knowing when it was going to stop that was so daunting.\"\n\nThe unprecedented volume of calls means waiting times for patients are increasing\n\nLizzie's personal battle with coronavirus has helped her to empathise with people who call up with breathing problems.\n\nIt's something she says she's having to do more and more.\n\n\"Just before Christmas we were getting a lot of respiratory and cardiac arrest calls,\" she says. \"You could just hear colleagues counting to four [for chest compressions] and it was echoing around the room. It has been tough.\n\n\"We are getting calls from family members who are really frightened. I covered the London Bridge terror attacks and Grenfell but this is a different scale.\n\n\"I did get one call for toothache, but that's part of the job.\"\n\nLizzie, who lives in Hampshire, says that because the coverage of coronavirus is everywhere, it is \"difficult to escape\".\n\nWhen she's not at work she binge-watches Line of Duty on Netflix, but she says winding down isn't easy.\n\nLizzie sometimes thinks about the people who aren't following the rules aimed at helping stop the spread of the virus, and those who deny Covid-19 even exists.\n\n\"It's a kick in the teeth,\" she says. \"It is frustrating on the way to work when you see people not wearing masks or even posting stuff on social media not believing the virus is real.\n\n\"I just don't know where the disconnect is coming from; there are many people in hospital, many people dying, and I don't know what more needs to be said to make them realise how dangerous the illness is.\"\n\nSorry, your browser cannot display this map\n\nSitting a few metres away from Lizzie is 24-year-old Louise Essam, who has been in the job for two years.\n\n\"Every call we take at the moment is coronavirus,\" she says. \"My record was 108 calls in a day back in March during the first wave.\n\n\"But easily in the last few weeks I've been taking around 100 a day at times,\" Louise adds.\n\n\"We are just doing the best we can,\" says emergency call co-ordinator Louise Essam\n\n\"Sometimes I'll come in for a shift and can just hear colleagues counting one, two, three, four, for the compressions, and you just know what kind of shift it is going to be.\n\n\"It has been tough and quite frustrating, really. We are trying to help people. We are under so much pressure as there are high waiting times, but we are just doing the best we can.\"\n\nHelp is at hand though from the LAS workers' fellow emergency services personnel.\n\nMet Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick visited Wembley Stadium on Wednesday, where her officers are being trained to drive ambulances\n\nSeventy-five Met Police officers are currently being trained at Wembley Stadium to drive ambulances.\n\nThey will start work as drivers from 20 January, joining the 200 firefighters who are already helping LAS.\n\n\"It came as a huge relief when they announced it,\" says 37-year-old paramedic Ben West.\n\nBen West has been with the London Ambulance Service for 13 years\n\nAs is the case with many frontline workers, Ben says he is concerned about the dangers of exposure to coronavirus.\n\nHe has lost four colleagues to Covid-19, including Ian Reynolds, a paramedic based in Croydon, and Melonie Mitchell, a member of the NHS 111 team. They both died during the first wave in April.\n\n\"I wouldn't be a normal person if I said I wasn't scared,\" he says.\n\n\"I am scared and I do worry but we take every day as it comes, take our precautions and we just see where we go with that.\n\n\"We know the virus is out there in the community and we are not immune.\"", "Audi factories, like others, will make thousands fewer cars at the start of this year\n\nAudi is having to slow production because of a computer-chip shortage it is calling a \"crisis upon a crisis\".\n\nBoss Markus Duesmann said it was now aiming to make 10,000 fewer cars in the first quarter of the year and putting more than 10,000 workers on furlough.\n\nIts parent company, Volkswagen, announced its own go-slow due to a lack of chips last week, alongside rivals such as Honda.\n\nMr Duesmann told the Financial Times carmakers had been caught by surprise.\n\nAfter a poor start to 2020 for new car sales, manufacturers cut their orders from the Chinese factories making computer chips.\n\nBut then, at the end of the year, \"everybody was quite surprised by the strength of the market\", Mr Duesmann said.\n\nHowever, ordering new chips is not simple.\n\nCCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber said: \"Semiconductors have a broad range of applications but a very limited pool of companies capable of manufacturing the silicon.\n\n\"Demand is high, and supply is tight\" and any sudden needs \"can prove very difficult to accommodate\".\n\n\"Modern cars are becoming computers on wheels, with an abundance of silicon required to control everything from the infotainment system to camera, radar and lidar,\" he said.\n\nThe demand from carmakers \"competes for manufacturing capacity with smartphones, servers and a host of other segments\".\n\nAnd a boom in the market for devices such as PCs and new game consoles was making it doubly difficult to book manufacturing time.\n\nThe shortages have seen Mercedes-maker Daimler, Fiat, Ford, Honda, Nissan, Subaru and Toyota all reportedly suspend production for days or weeks at a time.\n\nAnd German car-parts company Continental described \"largescale supply shortages\", with lead times of six to nine months, adding bottlenecks were expected to continue \"well into 2021, causing major disruptions\".", "Two drivers from Scotland were stopped by police on Anglesey going to see friends.\n\nPeople who drove more than 200 miles to visit friends in Wales and a group having a party in a garden shed have been caught breaking Covid rules.\n\nPolice forces in Wales have broken up parties, football matches and fined people for visiting beauty spots this weekend while Wales is in lockdown.\n\nTwo motorists were reported by North Wales Police in Anglesey after driving from Scotland to visit friends.\n\nWhile in Swansea, eight people were fined after a party was held in a shed.\n\nThe drivers from Scotland were stopped by police at Valley, near Holyhead, and reported for driving without insurance and breaching Covid travel restrictions.\n\nOfficers from North Wales Police on Saturday also stopped a car from Portsmouth as the driver was travelling to \"collect a front bumper\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by South Wales Police Vale of Glamorgan This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by South Wales Police Vale of Glamorgan\n\n\"Travelling nearly 300 miles for a piece of cosmetic plastic for your car is not essential at this time,\" said North Wales Police's Intercept team.\n\n\"The regulations have been broadcast far and wide. Please be mindful you will be reported if your journey is not essential.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Gwent Police | Caerphilly Borough Officers This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nEven though national parks have shut car parks in a bid to stop people visiting, North Wales Police said it received about 100 calls on Saturday about potential Covid breaches - and officers told people they need to take \"personal responsibility\" and \"stay home\".\n\nSouth Wales Police officers issued fixed penalty notices after finding people from \"all different households\" in a shed - which had been converted into a bar - in the Sketty area of Swansea all \"mixing together\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Mark Drakeford This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA further nine fixed penalty notices were given out in the Townhill area of the city after different households attended a baby reveal party on Sunday.\n\nFive people were warned about breaking laws in Neath Port Talbot after a group travelled to a field to play football, while four people were fined after a house party in Aberavon.\n\nUnder coronavirus rules people are only allowed to leave their homes for \"essential\" reasons, including to shop for food, get medical treatment and to exercise.\n\nWhile exercise is allowed, people are not allowed to drive to a spot for a walk, run or cycle, and the law means exercising with people you do not live with (or who are your bubble if you live alone) is banned.\n\nThose found to be in breach of Covid laws can be fined £60 for the first offence, with the penalties increasing up to £1,920. If prosecuted, however, a court can impose an unlimited fine.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid lockdown: 'This is why we say to you do not come out'\n\nUntil recently police had been using an education first approach, but the Welsh Government has repeatedly said it wants to see stricter enforcement of the rules.\n\nIn Powys, road officers from Dyfed-Powys Police stopped cars and turned around people driving to exercise.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by Traffic Wales North & Mid #KeepWalesSafe This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIn Port Talbot, two people sat on a bench drinking alcohol were fined by South Wales Police for \"leaving home without a reasonable excuse\".\n\nGwent Police officers broke-up a house party in Glyn-Gaer, Caerphilly county, on Friday evening and issued fines.", "A non-binding Labour motion calling for the universal credit top-up to be kept in place beyond 31 March passed by 278 votes to none after a Commons debate.\n\nSix Tory MPs defied party orders to abstain and voted with Labour, adding to the pressure on the PM on the issue.\n\nThe prime minister said the government had provided £280bn worth of support during the pandemic but all measures would be kept under \"constant review\".\n\nThe motion, which will not automatically lead to a change in policy, was put forward by Labour as a way to put additional pressure on the government to continue the increase, worth £1,000 a year.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Carl, a roofer, describes going from \"not having enough to barely having enough\" on universal credit.\n\nFormer Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb was among six Conservative MPs to rebel, along with Peter Aldous, Robert Halfon, Jason McCartney, Anne Marie Morris and Matthew Offord.\n\nAhead of the vote, Mr Crabb told the BBC that although there were \"difficult pressures on the chancellor\" extending the increase for 12 months was \"the right thing to do\".\n\nBBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said there were dozens of Conservative MPs who were \"deeply uneasy\" about ending the £20 weekly increase to universal credit.\n\nShe added that it was also understood the cabinet minister with responsibility for benefits, Therese Coffey, was arguing that the uplift should not be dropped in April.\n\nCharities and anti-poverty campaigners are pleading with the government to keep the support in place, describing it as a lifeline for more than 5.5 million families who receive the standard universal credit allowance.\n\nFood poverty campaigner and chef Jack Monroe told the BBC that the £20 increase \"has been a lifeline\" for millions of people who have needed to top up their income or rely on universal credit payments in order to get by.\n\nSir Keir said the increase was a vital safety net for those who had lost their jobs, seen their working hours slashed or who were not eligible for the government's wage subsidy furlough scheme.\n\n\"If we don't give a helping hand to families through this pandemic, then we are going to slow our economic recovery as we come out it.\n\n\"We urge Boris Johnson to change course and give families certainty today that their incomes will be protected.\"\n\nSix billion pounds of the benefits bill - the difference between poverty or not for 1.2 million families, according to a think tank.\n\nThe £1,040 a year increase to universal credit is a very emotive issue.\n\nThere's even a battle over what to call it.\n\nTo the government, its introduction was a one-off boost to cope with a crisis. For Labour, taking it away is a cut.\n\nMinisters would prefer we looked at the overall level of support they've provided for workers and businesses during the pandemic. The opposition say the £20 a week boost is a powerful symbol of the state's willingness to help.\n\nEven the act of debating it today is disputed. Labour say they've got the right occasionally to set the agenda in Parliament. Boris Johnson said his MPs risk abuse from campaigners and protestors if they engage.\n\nThe Joseph Rowntree Foundation has suggested about 16 million people will be directly affected if the £20 is rolled back.\n\nIt says 500,000 more people will be driven into poverty, including 200,000 children, while a further 500,000 of those already in poverty will find themselves in even worse hardship.\n\nHowever, free market think tank the Institute for Economic Affairs has argued that \"across-the-board benefit increases are a wasteful use of taxpayers' money\" at a time when the government is borrowing \"a hair-raising amount of money\".\n\nUniversal credit is a single payment replacing old benefits such as housing benefit and child tax credits.\n\nYou can claim universal credit if you are on a low income or are out of work.\n\nThe standard allowance varies from around £340 to just under £600 a month, depending on your age or whether you are single.\n\nYou may be eligible to receive more money on top of the standard allowance if, for example, you have children or a health condition.\n\nSpeaking on behalf of the Northern Research Group, Conservative MP John Stevenson said the £1,000 increase had been \"a real life-saver for people throughout this pandemic\".\n\n\"To end it now would be devastating for the 6 million individuals and families who are already struggling to stay afloat,\" he added.\n\nWhile the vote is not binding, and will not lead to a change in policy, it will increase pressure on the government to keep the increase or come up with an alternative.\n\nLabour said the Conservatives' decision to abstain created \"unnecessary uncertainty\" but minister Nadhim Zahawi described the vote as \"a political stunt\".\n\nThe government says it has strengthened the welfare system with an extra £7bn of funding during the pandemic while families struggling with food and household bills can get help through the £170m Winter Grant Scheme.\n\nMinisters also point to extra support for housing costs, through an increase in local housing allowance for those on housing benefits and hardship payments worth £670m next year for those unable to pay their council tax bills.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Staff are in \"the eye of the storm\" amid the coronavirus pandemic, the NHS says\n\nTen hospital trusts across England consistently reported having no spare adult critical care beds in the most recent figures.\n\nIt comes as hospital waiting times, coronavirus admissions and patients requiring intensive care are rising.\n\nEngland's 140 acute trusts had 5,503 adult critical care beds on 10 January, with 4,632 in use.\n\nNHS bosses have warned hospitals could \"hit the limit\" of their capacity this week.\n\n\"I think, this next week, we will be at the limit of what we probably have the physical space and the people to safely do,\" Danny Mortimer, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said.\n\n\"And, of course, this is the week when we expect also the highest rate of admissions, the highest demand for the care that we're providing.\"\n\nThe latest figures from NHS England show the number of trusts that were, on average, at full capacity in adult critical care across an entire week rose from four to 10 in the week to 10 January.\n\nThis was the highest number in the last 10 weeks for which data was available.\n\nThe increase comes despite trusts adding an additional 50% \"surge\" capacity across the summer and autumn to cope with winter pressures, according to NHS England.\n\nOverall, 30 acute hospital trusts in England had no spare adult critical care beds on 10 January alone. But daily admissions figures can vary from day-to-day as patients move in and out of intensive care.\n\nSpeaking on the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, NHS England chief executive Sir Simon Stevens said nine critical care patients had recently been transferred to other parts of the country because of no beds being available in their local area.\n\nSpeaking about all admissions, Sir Simon said hospitals in England had seen an increase of 15,000 inpatients since Christmas Day.\n\n\"That's the equivalent of filling 30 hospitals full of coronavirus patients and staggeringly every 30 seconds across England another patient is being admitted to hospital with coronavirus,\" he added.\n\nHelen Buckingham, from Health think-tank The Nuffield Trust, said the NHS was facing a winter \"like no other\" and, on top of rising coronavirus hospital admissions, critical care beds were also required for non-Covid patients.\n\n\"The NHS has pulled out all the stops to create more beds this year, and hospitals are working together so that patients who need critical care can be moved to other hospitals as necessary - but without more fully trained critical care staff there isn't much further the service can go,\" she said.\n\nThe figures only tell part of the story. The creation of extra beds to cope with rising numbers of Covid patients has come at a price.\n\nCritical care beds have been set up in overspill areas including departments usually reserved for operations. What is more, there is no extra staff to look after these extra patients - so specialist intensive care nurses have been stretched across more patients than normal. Instead of providing one-to-one care for the most sick, some areas are seeing nurses looking after three or four patients.\n\nStaff from other areas have had to be redeployed into critical care departments too.\n\nThat of course comes at a cost to non-Covid services and is part of the reason we have seen planned surgery and even cancer care being cut back on.\n\nA leaked email recently revealed about 200 doctors would be redeployed to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham amid fears its intensive care unit could be \"overwhelmed\".\n\nUniversity Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust said it had \"significantly\" more patients in hospital with Covid-19 than in April last year.\n\nThe trust had 147 critical care beds available across its hospitals as of 10 January, all of which were full as of the latest figures.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What does it mean if the NHS is overwhelmed?\n\nA spokesman said the trust would continue to extend its intensive care teams \"so they are able to treat the rising number of Covid-19 patients and those who require time-critical surgery, including cancer operations\".\n\nAiredale NHS Foundation Trust, despite having nine critical care beds overall, said it did not normally experience full occupancy at this time in the year and the ward had both Covid and non-Covid patients.\n\n\"We are experiencing normal winter pressures across the trust, combined with an increasing number of Covid-19 patients, particularly over the last week,\" a spokeswoman said.\n\n\"Every bed in ICU that is occupied by a Covid-19 patient is one less available for people who need that level of care for other reasons.\"\n\nSir Simon said the current number of patients in critical care was a \"clear indication of the huge pressure on the NHS\", including ambulance and mental health services as well as hospitals.\n\n\"The likelihood is, even with a stabilising of infections in some parts of the country, we're still seeing increases in infections among the over-60s in many parts of the country,\" he added.\n\n\"The forecasts are the pressure on hospitals will only get more intense over the next several weeks.\"\n\nNHS England said critical care services were under \"unprecedented pressure\".\n\nA spokeswoman added that hospitals had \"tried and tested plans in place\" to manage pressure from increased Covid-19 and non-Covid patients, including mutual aid practices where hospitals work together to manage admissions.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Evelyn Jones was one of the care home residents whose family raised concerns\n\nSix care home residents died after suffering dehydration and malnourishment because of alleged neglect, an inquest has been told.\n\nStanley James, 89, June Hamer, 71, Stanley Bradford, 76, Edith Evans, 85, Evelyn Jones, 87, and William Hickman, 71 all died between 2003 and 2005.\n\nThey were residents at Brithdir Nursing Home in New Tredegar, Caerphilly.\n\nThe inquest in Newport follows Operation Jasmine, an £11.6m inquiry into alleged neglect at six homes.\n\nOne of Wales' biggest inquiries, it was launched after the death of an 84-year-old patient at a nursing home in Newbridge, Caerphilly.\n\nOpening the inquest, Assistant Coroner for Gwent Geraint Williams said police started investigating in 2005 following the death of an 84-year-old \"mentally infirm\" woman at another care home in Newbridge.\n\nMr Williams said it led to officers uncovering a \"pattern of concerns linked to other deaths in other care homes\".\n\nJune Hamer went into Brithdir in 2003\n\nIn relation to the Brithdir inquiry, Mr Williams said: \"Operation Jasmine uncovered evidence suggesting poor care of residents, including allegations of poor pressure sore and peg [percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy] feed management, malnourishment, and general neglect of the residents' long-term needs, together with deficient standards of care and nursing practice.\"\n\nThe inquest heard resident Mr James, who had dementia and was not mobile, developed several pressure sores in the 18 months before he died in August 2003.\n\nMr Bradford, who had schizophrenia, was admitted to the Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil on several occasions for complaints of \"dehydration, chest and urine infections\".\n\nBefore he died in August 2005 he was \"observed to be seriously malnourished\", by doctors.\n\nDementia patient Mrs Evans was admitted to the same hospital in September 2005, where nurses found the site around her feeding tube \"infected\", while broken skin was found on her buttocks and she appeared \"unkempt and dirty, and her mouth and lips were dry and her tongue was thick\".\n\nThe trial of the late Dr Prana Das for care home neglect collapsed after he suffered brain damage in an attack\n\nDr Prana Das, who owned and ran the nursing home along with several other facilities in Wales, faced a string of charges relating to failings in care.\n\nHe suffered a brain injury during a burglary at his home in 2012 and was declared medically unfit to stand trial.\n\nDr Das died in January 2020 aged 73, but his widow and co-owner of the home, Dr Nishebita Das, who is said not to have taken part in running it, is expected to give evidence at the inquest.\n\nMr Williams told the hearing that, even before the couple purchased the home in April 2002 under their company Puretruce Health Care Limited, \"serious concerns\" were raised by state agencies regarding the number of residents who had suffered pressure ulcers.\n\n\"Those issues continued, even after Dr Das assumed ownership of the home,\" he said.\n\nMr Williams said the inquest will consider the actions of nurses and carers at the home, \"many of whom came to this country from abroad to work and have since returned there, and are now not available to participate in the inquest\".\n\nThe inquest is set to last until March.\n\nA hearing into the death of a seventh resident, Matthew Higgins, 86, will be held following the conclusion of this inquest.", "A Republican lawmaker who had been in office for less than a week when she invoked German dictator Adolf Hitler in a Washington speech has apologised for saying that she agreed with the mass murderer.\n\nIllinois Congresswoman Mary Miller had said in a speech on Tuesday outside the Capitol, one day before her fellow Trump supporters ransacked the building, that Hitler had been \"right\".\n\nMiller told the crowd: \"You know, if we win a few elections we’re still going to be losing unless we win the hearts of our children.\n\n\"It’s the battle. Hitler was right on one thing - that whoever has the youth has the future.\"\n\nHitler, among his supporters in Germany in 1933 Image caption: Hitler, among his supporters in Germany in 1933\n\nThe comments drew large-scale condemnation, with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum saying in a statement that it \"unequivocally condemns any leader trying to advance a position by claiming Adolf Hitler was ‘right.’\"\n\nUnder Hitler, millions of Jews and other minority groups were murdered across Europe by Germany and its allies during World War Two.\n\nOn Friday, Miller insisted that she is not anti-semitic and accused other of \"trying to intentionally twist my words\".\n\n\"I sincerely apologise for any harm my words caused and regret using a reference to one of the most evil dictators in history to illustrate the dangers that outside influences can have on our youth,\" she said.\n\nCorrection 23rd June 2022: This post originally described Mary Miller as having praised Hitler and has been amended to make clear that she invoked Hitler in her speech.", "Who were the protesters that broke into buildings on Capitol Hill after attending a rally in support of Donald Trump?\n\nSome were carrying symbols and flags strongly associated with particular ideas and factions, but in practice many of the members and their causes overlap.\n\nImages show individuals associated with a range of extreme and far-right groups and supporters of fringe online conspiracy theories, many of whom have long been active online and at pro-Trump rallies.\n\nOne of the most startling images, quickly shared across social media, shows a man dressed with a painted face, fur hat and horns, holding an American flag.\n\nHe's been identified as Jake Angeli, a well-known supporter of the baseless conspiracy theory QAnon. He calls himself the QAnon Shaman.\n\nHis social media presence shows him attending multiple QAnon events and posting YouTube videos about deep state conspiracies.\n\nHe was pictured in November making a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, about unproven claims the election was fraudulent.\n\nHis personal Facebook page is filled with images and memes relating to all sorts of extreme ideas and conspiracy theories.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nAnother group spotted at the storming of the Capitol were members of the far-right group Proud Boys.\n\nThe organisation was founded in 2016 and is anti-immigrant and all male. In the first US presidential debate President Trump in response to a question about white supremacists and militias said: \"Proud Boys - stand back and stand by.\"\n\nThe individual on the right is Nick Ochs, who describes himself as a \"Proud Boy Elder\".\n\nOne of their members, Nick Ochs, tweeted a selfie inside the building saying \"Hello from the Capital lol\". He also filmed a live stream inside.\n\nWe haven't identified the individual standing on the left in the above image.\n\nMr Ochs' profile on the messaging app Telegram describes himself as a \"Proud Boy Elder from Hawaii.\"\n\nIndividuals with large followings online were also spotted at the protests.\n\nAmong them was the social media personality Tim Gionet, who goes under the pseudonym \"Baked Alaska\".\n\nTim Gionet, better known as \"Baked Alaska\", livestreamed himself from the Capitol on Wednesday\n\nHis livestream from inside the Capitol posted on a niche streaming service was watched by thousands of people and showed him talking to other protesters.\n\nA Trump supporter, Mr Gionet has made a name for himself as an internet troll.\n\nYouTube banned his channel in October after he posted videos of himself harassing shop workers and refusing to wear a face-mask during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nOther platforms that have previously shut down his accounts include Twitter and PayPal.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 'Treason, traitors and thugs' - the words lawmakers used to describe Capitol riot\n\nA photo that went viral of a man who'd entered the office of senior Democrat politician Nancy Pelosi has been named as Richard Barnett from Arkansas.\n\nRichard Barnett left a message for US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying \"we will not back down\"\n\nOutside Capitol Hill buildings, he told the New York Times that he took an envelope from the speaker's office and says left a note calling her an expletive.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Matthew Rosenberg This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nReacting to the New York Times interview, Republican congressman Steve Womack said on Twitter: \"I'm sickened to learn that the below actions were perpetrated by a constituent.\"\n\nLocal media reports say Mr Barnett is involved in a group that supports gun rights, and that he was interviewed at a 'Stop the Steal' rally following the presidential election - a movement that refused to accept Joe Biden's victory and supports the president's unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud.\n\nIn the interview at the rally organised by 'Engaged Patriots' he said: \"If you don't like it, send somebody out to get me 'cause I ain't going down easy.\"\n\nThe group associated with Mr Barnett held a fundraiser in October with proceeds going towards body cameras for the local police department, according to the Westside Eagle Observer local paper.\n\nAs the events were unfolding, many social media users, especially those associated with QAnon and supporters of President Trump, were claiming that agitators from the loose-knit left-wing group antifa were involved.\n\nThe implication was that these activists were disguised as Trump supporters to create disruption.\n\nA number of prominent Republican politicians, such as US Representative Matt Gaetz, claimed it was antifa masquerading as Trump supporters.\n\nOne widely-shared post claimed one protester had a \"communist hammer\" tattoo, as evidence that he wasn't a Trump supporter.\n\nOn closer inspection, the symbol is from the video game series Dishonored.\n\nThere have also been suggestions that Mr Angeli, the man wearing fur and horns, was a Black Lives Matter supporter, with users sharing an image of him at a BLM event in Arizona.\n\nMr Angeli was indeed at that event, but he was there as a counter-protester. In images taken there, he's seen holding a QAnon sign.\n\nAt least one of the rioters was holding a Confederate flag, which represented US states that supported the continuation of slavery during the American civil war. For this reason, it is considered by many to be a symbol of racism and there have been calls to ban it across the US. Others see it as an important part of southern US history.\n\nA protester carries the Confederate flag after breaching US Capitol security\n\nIn July it was announced that the flag could no longer be flown on American military properties because of a new policy to reject \"divisive symbols\".\n\nPresident Trump has defended the use of the Confederate flag in the past, saying: \"I know people that like the Confederate flag and they're not thinking about slavery...I just think it's freedom of speech.\"\n\nThere were also protesters holding aloft flags featuring a coiled rattlesnake on a yellow background, often accompanied by the phrase \"don't tread on me\". This is known as the Gadsden flag, harking back to the American revolution and the war to expel British colonialists.\n\nIt was adopted by libertarians in the 1970s, according to an article in the New Yorker, and more recently became a favourite symbol of conservative Tea Party activists.\n\nThe flag has been adopted by the right over the past couple of decades, says Prof Margaret Weir, a political science expert at Brown University.\n\nIt is also used by anti-government, white supremacist groups who embrace violence, she says.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA nurse felt \"overwhelming fear\" as 13 ambulances queued at her hospital's A&E department - in the Welsh region currently hardest hit by Covid deaths.\n\nTo date Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board, which runs Royal Glamorgan Hospital, has reported 1,091 deaths of patients with coronavirus.\n\nBBC Wales was granted access to A&E at the hospital in Rhondda Cynon Taf.\n\nSenior doctor Amanda Farrow said the whole hospital had faced \"unrelenting\" pressure last Saturday.\n\nSarah Fogarasy was the senior nurse on duty as 13 ambulances queued up outside her A&E department\n\nSenior A&E nurse Sarah Fogarasy, who was on shift as the ambulances arrived, said there was no capacity at the unit - a situation that left her wanting \"to leave\".\n\n\"We had to escalate it to our site manager and deputy head of nursing who were liaising with the executive team on call,\" she said.\n\n\"And then it got to 13 patients outside - I had no capacity in this unit, no resuscitation capacity, no capacity to put a patient on CPAP [continuous positive airway pressure] should they require that and no physical areas to put a patient in.\n\nOn Saturday, 13 ambulances queued outside the hospital's A&E department\n\nShe said she found it hard to keep going.\n\n\"This bit makes me quite emotional… for the first time I was sat trying to coordinate this department and I had that overwhelming fear that I just wanted to leave,\" Ms Fogarasy continued.\n\n\"I was just - 'I'm done. I'm done with this'... and it's scary, it fills you full of fear when you have got 13 ambulances outside, queuing around the carpark. Where do you go from that?\"\n\nShe said it was the team that kept her going: \"I started looking around to all the staff working tirelessly and just trying to remember what we're here for and why I became a nurse.\n\n\"I know it sounds soppy but it's literally the humanitarian effort that has gone into [fighting] this pandemic that has kept people going.\n\n\"It's the sheer determination and guts of the staff working in these times that is so powerful, that keeps the shift going.\"\n\nEmergency Medicine Consultant Amanda Farrow said it was a \"very emotional time for everyone\"\n\nDr Farrow, emergency medicine consultant, said staffing and bed numbers were of particular concern.\n\n\"In the emergency department the challenge we have is with regards to flow, so that is our daily challenge,\" she explained.\n\n\"And we say it's like playing a game of Tetris trying to work out which patient you can put where.\"\n\nStaff reported feeling overwhelmed as they work through the second Covid wave\n\nShe said the second wave of the virus had also seen more staff off sick with Covid and isolating - with some becoming very ill.\n\n\"We've had staff in as patients and one of my colleagues - I saw them when they were critically ill and ended up going to intensive care,\" continued Dr Farrow.\n\n\"So it's very emotional time for everyone as well you know, looking after the sick patients and looking after your colleagues.\n\n\"There's a level of anxiety still around - will you be the next person to get this disease?\"\n\nShe said although fewer people were attending A&E, they were seeing more people arriving by ambulance and presenting with more complex needs.\n\n\"The group of patients we are seeing this time I think is different, we're definitely having more younger people with Covid that are becoming sick, the volume is very high in the community.\n\n\"I think people are afraid of come into the hospital as well, so there are still quite a lot of patients who leave it maybe a bit too late before they're seeking hospital attention.\"\n\nSpeaking from her intensive care bed, Helen Whatmore said she was extremely grateful to staff\n\nHelen Whatmore, 45, from Beddau, has been hospital since early December after developing Covid symptoms.\n\nSpeaking from her intensive care bed, she said she had been unwell in February so assumed she had already caught the virus.\n\n\"I honestly didn't believe it was as bad until I caught [Covid] this time,\" she said.\n\n\"This time it's absolutely knocked the socks off me. It's nearly killed me.\n\n\"A friend of mine passed away as I came into hospital and I came down very rapidly with Covid, kidney problems and pneumonia.\"\n\nShe said she was grateful for the care she had received: \"The nurses are coming in [working] all shifts, they're fighting for your loved ones, from the time they enter right until the time they leave, then they're changing over and doing the same again.\n\n\"People are passing away… how much more have they got to do? We're asking them to protect our children and our families. Why are we not protecting them ourselves? Saving our families and our own children.\"", "The Welsh Government is in discussions about bringing in \"more visible\" coronavirus regulations.\n\nStricter enforcement of coronavirus rules could return to supermarkets in Wales, Mark Drakeford has said.\n\nThe first minister said he had heard concerns from people \"expressing anxiety\" about a lack of \"visible protections\" in supermarkets.\n\nThe Welsh Government is now in talks with stores about social-distancing measures.\n\nMr Drakeford said he wanted to see stores policed as they were during the first lockdown.\n\nAmong the measures previously used was a strict limit of the numbers of people allowed in a store however Mr Drakeford said people were worried the rules \"don't appear to be there this time\".\n\n\"Given the fact the new variant is so much easier to catch... we are looking at supermarkets and other places where people leave their homes, to make sure they are organised in a way that keeps their staff and customers safe,\" he said.\n\nHe said previously sanitising arrangements had been \"very visible\", one-way markings were prominently displayed, regular reminders were announced to customers and staff were also posted at the front entrance of supermarkets\n\n\"That person was carefully controlling the numbers of people going in, to make sure that they were no more than a certain number of people in the store at any one time,\" he said.\n\n\"There was somebody directing people to the checkout, to make sure people weren't queuing next to each other over prolonged periods, and markings on the floor so people kept at a two-metre distance\".\n\nHowever the first minister said some of those measures are no longer as apparent to people.\n\n\"I want to make sure that those visible signs of the protections that are being offered to the public and the shop workers are in place again.\"\n\nFederation of Small Businesses Wales said has called for clarity on what support would be available and the possible new measures required of shops.\n\nPolicy Chair, Ben Francis, said: \"We've already asked to see more information on the technical data that informs the decisions that Welsh Government are making.\n\n\"It seems clear that businesses will require funding support for longer than was originally anticipated if they are to survive this troubling period.\n\n\"Welsh Government should urgently give clarity on what additional funding will be made available to support businesses beyond this next three week period to allow them to plan.\"", "While GCSEs and A-levels are being cancelled, the IGCSE exams will go ahead this summer\n\nThe IGCSE exams, usually only taken in private schools, are still going ahead this summer - even though GCSEs and A-levels have been cancelled.\n\nExam boards that run IGCSEs plan to offer them, while many other exams have been stopped by the pandemic.\n\nIGCSE qualifications, alternative exams to GCSEs, are not usually available in state schools.\n\nPupils in England whose A-levels and GCSEs are cancelled will depend on replacement grades from teachers.\n\nBut Education Secretary Gavin Williamson's scrapping of exams this summer does not apply to students taking IGCSEs.\n\nA Department for Education report in 2019 found 94% of IGCSEs were taken in private schools, accounting for 164,000 exam entries.\n\nThe decision not to cancel them was welcomed by the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference (HMC), representing some of the most prestigious independent schools.\n\nThe HMC's general secretary, Simon Hyde, said their schools \"would be the first to cheer if pupils educated by the state had the same opportunity\".\n\n\"The decision to cancel GCSEs was premature. Exams are the fairest way of assessing what learners know and understand and we would like to see as many pupils as possible take a form of exam in the summer,\" said Dr Hyde.\n\nIndependent schools often offer a mix of IGCSEs and GCSEs for different subjects, although IGCSEs do not count towards school league tables.\n\nThe qualifications - International GCSEs - are offered by Cambridge Assessment and Pearson and are taken in other countries as well as the UK. Both boards say they are planning to go ahead with exam papers for UK schools this summer.\n\nIGCSEs were not included in the cancellation of exams announced by England's Department for Education and it will be up to individual schools to decide whether to continue with them.\n\nJulie McCullloch of the ASCL head teachers' union said: \"It creates another inconsistency, but none of this is easy.\"\n\nShe said it created an \"odd situation\" when GCSEs were cancelled but IGCSEs were going ahead, but she recognised that an international qualification could need a common approach across different countries.\n\nWith the latest lockdown and most pupils studying at home, GCSEs and A-levels have been cancelled in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nIn England, the exams watchdog Ofqual will launch a consultation next week on a replacement way of deciding grades - but Ofqual does not regulate IGCSEs and they will not be part of the watchdog's proposals.", "Harley Watson's mother Jo described him as a \"kind, caring, selfless, intelligent and comical young man\"\n\nA man who killed a 12-year-old boy by driving into schoolchildren in a \"deliberate\" hit and run has been detained in a secure hospital.\n\nHarley Watson died after he was hit by a car outside Debden Park High School in Loughton, Essex, on 2 December 2019.\n\nTerence Glover, 52, pleaded guilty to manslaughter by diminished responsibility at an earlier hearing.\n\nHe also admitted 10 counts of attempted murder and has been detained under the Mental Health Act indefinitely.\n\nAt the sentencing hearing at Snaresbrook Crown Court, Harley's mother Jo described her son as a \"kind, caring, selfless, intelligent and comical young man\".\n\nHe was hit by Glover's Ford Ka as he left school with friends and died later in Whipps Cross University Hospital.\n\nTerence Glover has been sentenced indefinitely under the Mental Health Act\n\nChristine Agnew, prosecuting, said eye-witnesses saw Glover's car \"ploughing through and hitting children from behind\".\n\nShe said he \"deliberately mounted the pavement... and drove directly at a group of people, mostly children, intending to kill them\".\n\nGlover, previously of Newmans Lane, Loughton, also pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of 23-year-old Raquel Jimeno and six boys and three girls aged between 12 and 16 who were outside the school.\n\nThe court heard he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and medical experts agreed his \"significant\" mental illness \"provided an explanation for his conduct\".\n\nHe was given a hospital order under the Mental Health Act 1983, meaning if his illness was treated successfully, he would be transferred to prison.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Harley Watson's classmates paid tribute to him in 2019\n\nJudge Andrew Edis said if transferred, Glover must serve a life sentence with a minimum of 15 years.\n\nIn his sentencing statement, Judge Edis noted his history of mental illness and cocaine use, but said Glover's actions were \"appalling\".\n\n\"He caused the death of a much-loved and admired 12-year-old boy who had done no harm to anyone,\" he said.\n\nHe added that Glover's behaviour \"requires punishment as well as treatment\" and there was \"no doubt that this defendant is dangerous\".\n\nHe also ordered that Glover be banned from driving for life and that the car should be destroyed.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "National Express has announced that it is suspending its entire national network of coach services from midnight on Sunday.\n\nThe firm said tighter Covid restrictions and falling passenger numbers had prompted the decision.\n\nIt added that it hoped to restart services in March.\n\nAll customers whose travel has been cancelled will be contacted and offered a free amendment or full refund, the company said.\n\nAll journeys before Monday 11 January will be completed to ensure any passengers making essential journeys are not stranded.\n\nChris Hardy, managing director of National Express UK Coach, said: \"We have been providing an important service for essential travel needs. However, with tighter restrictions and passenger numbers falling, it is no longer appropriate to do this.\n\nHe added that as the vaccination programme was rolled out and government guidance changed, the company would regularly review when services could restart.\n\n\"We plan to be back on the road as soon as the time is right and have put a provisional restart date of Monday 1 March in place,\" he said.\n\nNational Express first suspended coach services during the coronavirus crisis in April, then restarted in July.\n\nServices have been operating at half capacity, with strict cleaning and Covid protocols. As the tier structure came into operation, demand for services reduced.\n\nAs with the previous suspension, employees will be furloughed.\n\nFirms that transport passengers, including coach, rail and aviation businesses, have been under intense pressure during the coronavirus crisis.\n\nAvanti West Coast, the train operating company running services on the West Coast mainline, has confirmed it will cut its timetable from 18 January.\n\nAvanti says the new timetable will 'more closely reflect the current demand for our services whilst still allowing key workers, and those needing to make essential journeys, to travel with confidence'.\n\nDuring the first major lockdown in March, services on key intercity routes were reduced from three an hour to one. This included services from both Manchester and Birmingham to London.\n\nThe Department for Transport has been consulting with all train operators about service reductions during the latest lockdown.\n\nThe exact scale of reduction is still being worked on, but the DfT says service levels may fall to as low as 40% of the normal timetable by some operators.\n\nThe focus is to ensure essential workers can still make essential journeys.\n\n\"Following discussions with the Department for Transport we will be introducing a new timetable on Monday 18 January. This will more closely reflect the current demand for our services whilst still allowing key workers, and those needing to make essential journeys, to travel with confidence.\"\n\nOn Thursday, Ryanair also announced that it would make big cuts to its flight schedule from 21 January, with few, if any flights to or from the UK or Ireland until \"draconian travel restrictions are removed\".\n\nTrain services are expected to be reduced in lockdown, with some in the industry anticipating reductions of between 50% and 60% compared with normal service.\n\nIn the first national lockdown in England, services were reduced to almost half.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Police have issued CCTV footage of a man they want to speak to in connection with the incident\n\nA fraudster claiming to work for the NHS injected a 92-year-old woman with a fake Covid-19 vaccine, City of London Police has said.\n\nDetectives are hunting the man who charged the victim in Surbiton, south-west London, £160.\n\nPolice said it was \"crucial\" he was caught as soon as possible as he \"may endanger people's lives\".\n\nDet Insp Kevin Ives described it as a \"disgusting and totally unacceptable assault\".\n\nIt comes after the NHS warned people that no-one should be turning up at doorsteps offering a vaccine for payment, following a spate of fake text messages.\n\nUnder the current coronavirus vaccine rollout plans, people will be invited to receive the vaccine by their GP or healthcare provider.\n\nPolice said the victim allowed the man into her home on the afternoon of 30 December after he said he was from the NHS and there to administer the Covid-19 vaccine.\n\nShe said she was jabbed in the arm with a \"dart-like implement\" before being charged £160, which the man said would be refunded by the NHS.\n\nPolice said it was not known what substance, if any, was administered, but the woman had been checked at her local hospital and showed no ill effects.\n\nDet Insp Ives appealed for information to help identify the suspect.\n\nHe added: \"It is crucial we catch him as soon as possible as not only is he defrauding individuals of money, he may endanger people's lives.\"\n\nThe man made a second visit to the woman's home on 4 January, when he asked for another £100, police said.\n\nThe man was spotted in the Tolworth area of Kingston-upon-Thames on 4 January\n\nOfficers released CCTV footage on Friday of a man dressed in a navy blue tracksuit with white stripes down the side, who they want to speak to in connection with the incident.\n\nHe is described as a white man in his early 30s, who is about 5ft 9ins (1.75m) tall, of medium build, with light brown hair that is combed back. He speaks with a London accent.\n\nA spokesman for the Department of Health said: \"NHS England will never ask for bank details, Pin numbers or passwords, when contacting you about a vaccination.\n\n\"Any communication which claims to be from the NHS but asks for payment, or bank details, is fraudulent and can be ignored. It can be reported to police via Action Fraud.\n\n\"You will never be charged for the vaccine.\"\n\nFor more London news follow on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said it is \"excellent news\" that a third coronavirus vaccine has been approved for use in the UK.\n\nIt is made by US company Moderna and works in a similar way to the Pfizer one already being offered on the NHS.\n\nThe UK has pre-ordered 17 million doses of the Moderna vaccine - 10 million more than planned - but supplies are not expected to arrive until spring.\n\nIt is the last Covid vaccine with final trial data published.\n\nThere are hundreds still in development, with some expected to report findings in the near future.\n\nAround 1.5 million people in the UK have had at least one dose of a Covid vaccine so far, with either the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines already approved by UK regulators.\n\nThat figure includes almost a quarter of those aged over 80 in England - people at highest risk of severe illness or death from the virus.\n\nVaccines are being given to the most vulnerable first, as set out in a list of nine high-priority groups, covering around 30 million people in the UK.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Vaccine Deployment Minister Nadhim Zahawi welcomed the approval of the Moderna jab\n\nThe prime minister has said the aim is to vaccinate 15 million people in the UK by mid-February, including care homes residents and staff, frontline NHS staff, everyone over 70 and those who are clinically extremely vulnerable.\n\nHealth and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock said: \"This is further great news and another weapon in our arsenal to tame this awful disease.\"\n\nThe UK had originally ordered 7 million doses of the Moderna jab, but has increased this to get even more people immunised as quickly as possible.\n\nIn total, the UK has now ordered 367 million doses of vaccines to protect against Covid-19.\n\nNadhim Zahawi, vaccine deployment minister, said: \"The NHS is pulling out all the stops to vaccinate those most at risk as quickly as possible, with over 1,000 vaccination sites live across the UK by the end of the week to provide easy access to everyone, regardless of where they live.\n\n\"The Moderna vaccine will be a vital boost to these efforts and will help us return to normal faster.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid vaccine safety: How does a vaccine get approved?\n\nThe Moderna vaccine, an RNA vaccine like Pfizer's, injects part of the virus's genetic code in order to provoke an immune response.\n\nIt requires temperatures of around -20C for shipping - similar to a normal freezer.\n\nIn comparison, the Pfizer/BioNTech one requires temperatures closer to -75C, making transport logistics much more difficult.\n\nThe AstraZeneca jab is easier to store and distribute, as it can be kept at normal fridge temperature.\n\nAll of these vaccines require a second booster shot, but a first dose is likely to be given to as many people as possible.\n\nIn trials with more than 30,000, the Moderna vaccine offered nearly 95% protection from severe Covid.\n\nNo vaccine is 100% effective and it takes time for protection to build. For all of the Covid vaccines, we still do not know how long immunity will last.\n\nPeople who have received a coronavirus vaccine should continue to follow social distancing rules to protect themselves and others.\n\nEU and US regulators have already approved the Moderna vaccine.", "The band recently became a trio (left-right): Leigh-Anne Pinnock, Jade Thirlwall and Perrie Edwards\n\nLittle Mix have risen to top the top of UK singles chart after Christmas songs released their grip on the top 40.\n\nSweet Melody has become the band's fifth number one, three months after it was released - and will be their last with Jesy Nelson, who quit last year.\n\nThe 29-year-old said in December that nine years in the girl group had taken \"a toll on her mental health\".\n\nLittle Mix's victory is part of a huge chart upheaval, after 56 Christmas songs dropped out of the top 100.\n\nAmong them was last week's number one, Wham's Last Christmas, which set a new record for the biggest-ever fall from the top. The festive ballad has now left the chart altogether.\n\nThe previous record-holder - Three Lions, by The Lightning Seeds with Frank Skinner and David Baddiel - fell from number one to 96 after England crashed out of the World Cup in 2018.\n\nSweet Melody has risen from number nine to number one this week, giving Little Mix their first chart-topper since Shout Out To My Ex in 2016.\n\nJade Thirlwall told BBC Radio 1 the milestone was particularly important because it was \"the last single we did as a four with Jesy\".\n\n\"And it's even more special that now, going into 2021 as a three, we've got the first number one,\" she added.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by Official Charts This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. End of youtube video by Official Charts\n\nAcknowledging a fan campaign to boost the song's chart position, bandmate Perrie Edwards said: \"I just want to squish every single fan who managed to get it to number one.\n\n\"The power they have, I'm sorry. The song's been out for months!\"\n\nWith fans abandoning their festive playlists, the stage was also set for singles that had previously been forced out of the top 40 to stage a dramatic return.\n\nDua Lipa's Levitating jumped 63 places to number five, reclaiming a position it last held on 3 December; and Tate McRae's You Broke Me First rocketed from number 74 to nine. In total, there were 39 new entries or re-entries in the top 75.\n\nIn the album chart, Taylor Swift's Evermore returned to number one, four weeks after its surprise pre-Christmas release, while companion album Folklore climbed to number 12.\n\nMeanwhile, Harry Styles' Fine Line reached a new chart peak at number two following the release of a video for his latest single Treat People With Kindness, which sees him dance with Fleabag's Phoebe Waller-Bridge.\n\nLewis Capaldi's Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent - the UK's biggest-selling album of both 2019 and 2020 - also climbed to number six, notching up its 86th week in the top 10.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Graham Norton has been the BBC's Mr Eurovision since 2009\n\nGraham Norton, who commentates for the UK's BBC Eurovision coverage, has said the song contest will go ahead this year despite the coronavirus pandemic.\n\n\"There's definitely going to be a Eurovision... The competition element is going to happen,\" he said.\n\nContest organisers told the BBC: \"We can confirm the Eurovision Song Contest will definitely take place this year.\"\n\nBut pre-recorded performances may be used if acts cannot travel to Rotterdam or have to isolate when they get there.\n\nLast year's contest was cancelled due to the pandemic. It was replaced in the UK with a programme looking back at the event's history, including a vote to find the greatest Eurovision song of all time.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nNorton told US radio station Sirius XM that if some artists are unable to travel to the Netherlands in 2021, \"they can Zoom in a performance\". He added: \"I doubt we'll be in a stadium full of 20,000 people.\"\n\nOrganisers stressed that while \"the general gist of Graham's comments is correct\", pre-recorded performances will be used if an act can't travel, rather than asking them to perform live from their home country.\n\nThe filmed routines will be shown \"if a participant cannot travel to Rotterdam due to the current pandemic, or in the unfortunate instance of an artist having to quarantine on site\", a spokesman said.\n\nBroadcasters will have to follow a \"strict set of guidelines\" to help them record their \"live on tape\" performances \"to keep the competition fair should it not go ahead in the traditional way\", he added.\n\nThe new rules state: \"The recording will take place in real time (as it would be at the contest) without making any edits to the vocals or any part of the performance itself after the recording.\"\n\nThis year's contest will take place on 22 May.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk", "The number of people in Scotland who have died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus now stands at 4,872\n\nScotland's hospitals have more Covid patients than ever before - with the number of deaths also \"distressingly high\", the first minister has said.\n\nThe latest figures showed that the deaths of 93 people who had tested positive for the virus have been recorded in the past 24 hours.\n\nBut the figure includes some people who died over Christmas and New Year.\n\nThere were also 1,530 people in hospital with the virus, higher than the peak of 1,520 last April.\n\nOf these, 102 patients were in intensive care - with Ms Sturgeon saying the statistics showed the \"severity of the pressure\" that hospitals are facing.\n\nThe 93 deaths recorded on Friday is the highest daily figure since the outbreak began - with the previous high being 84 on 15 April.\n\nBut Ms Sturgeon said the figure will \"undoubtedly include some people who died over the Christmas and New Year period and the delay in registration because of the bank holidays means that their deaths are only being reported today.\"\n\nShe added: \"To be clear, that is not more than 90 people who died yesterday. It will be people who have died over a period of time.\n\n\"That does not change the fact they are all individuals who have died and have died of Covid.\"\n\nA further 2,309 people have tested positive for Covid-19, which was 8.1% of the tests carried out on Thursday and takes the total number of cases in Scotland to 146,024.\n\nThe figures mean that the total number of people in Scotland who have died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus now stands at 4,872.\n\nThe Scottish government has said it is concerned that too many people have not been following the \"stay at home\" rules that are in place across the whole of the mainland and some islands.\n\nIt believes that more people are using the country's road and public transport networks than during the lockdown last spring.\n\nAnd it has warned that tougher restrictions could be needed to increase compliance with the travel restrictions.\n\nMs Sturgeon told her daily briefing that the areas being looked at included non-essential click and collect shopping, further restrictions on takeaway food, non-essential construction and whether more people should be working from home.\n\nThe first minister also confirmed that universities and colleges will not resume in-person teaching until at least the end of February.\n\nThis means that students should stay at home rather than travelling back to their campus or accommodation.\n\nThere will be exceptions for cases where remote study is not possible - for example for a student nurse or a doctor on a practical placement.\n\nAnd Ms Sturgeon said any students who have remained on campus will be \"fully supported\" by their institution.\n\nAll of mainland Scotland was placed into level four restrictions from 26 December before additional measures, including closing schools to most pupils until at least the end of the month, was introduced on Tuesday.\n\nScotland's interim chief medical officer, Dr Dave Caesar, insisted on Friday morning that coronavirus case numbers in January \"could have been worse\".\n\nHe said the restrictions that were introduced on Boxing Day had helped to \"blunt the spike\" but warned that the country was \"not out of the woods yet\".\n\nDr Caesar told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme: \"Our case numbers are high, but they're not as high as they could have been if we hadn't taken the measures that we undertook from Boxing Day.\n\n\"Our health system is under serious pressure but is coping.\n\n\"I hate to say it, but it could have been worse by this time in January. We're not out of the woods yet by any stretch of the imagination, but I suppose we're holding our own in very significantly challenging circumstances.\"\n\nNew Covid testing measures for international travellers are to be introduced\n\nNew plans to make international passengers test negative for Covid-19 before travelling to Scotland and England have also been unveiled, with Ms Sturgeon saying she hoped the scheme could start by the end of next week.\n\nIt will mean people arriving by plane, train or boat - including UK nationals - will have to take a test up to 72 hours before leaving the country they are travelling from.\n\nProf Linda Bauld of Edinburgh University said the move was long overdue as the UK had \"really struggled from the beginning\" with limiting the impact of international travel on the pandemic.\n\nBut she said the country should also consider introducing supervised quarantine for people arriving from overseas.", "When Trump supporters stormed the Capitol they took out their cameras to record the chaos inside. The BBC looked through hours of phone footage to paint a picture of what happened.", "Film director Michael Apted, best known for the Up series of TV documentaries following the lives of 14 people every seven years, has died aged 79.\n\nHe also directed Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorillas In The Mist and the 1999 Bond movie The World Is Not Enough.\n\nThe original 7 Up in 1964 set out to document the life prospects of a range of children from all walks of life.\n\nThe show was inspired by the Aristotle quote \"give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man\".\n\nThe first 7 Up show was followed by 14 Up at the start of the next decade, which interviewed the same children as teenagers - and the pattern was set right up until 63 Up in 2019.\n\nThroughout all those intervening years ITV viewers became engrossed with the stories of private school trio Andrew, Charles and John, of Jackie who went through two divorces, of Neil who went from jobless and homeless to Liberal Democrat councillor, and of working class chatterbox Tony, whose life ambition was to become a jockey.\n\nApted's shows - which won three Bafta awards - have often been described as the forerunner of modern-day reality TV series, giving its participants the time to tell their own stories on screen.\n\nBut unlike their modern counterparts, the original Up children tended to fade away from the limelight in the seven years between each chapter.\n\nIn 2008, Apted was made a companion of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George in the Queen's Birthday Honours for services to the British film and television industries.\n\nThomas Schlamme, president of the Directors Guild of America, said Apted was a \"fearless visionary\" whose legacy would live on.\n\nHe said Apted, who was born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, \"saw the trajectory of things when others didn't and we were all beneficiaries of his wisdom and lifelong dedication\".\n\nITV's managing director Kevin Lygo said the director's six-decade career was \"in itself truly remarkable\".\n\nHe said the Up series \"demonstrated the possibilities of television at its finest in its ambition and its capacity to hold up a mirror to society and engage with and entertain people while enriching our perspective on the human condition\".\n\nApted directed the 19th James Bond film The World Is Not Enough\n\n\"The influence of Michael's contribution to film and programme-making continues to be felt and he will be sadly missed,\" Lygo added.\n\nMichael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, producers of the James Bond film franchise, said Apted \"was a director of enormous talent\" and \"beloved by all those who worked with him\".\n\n\"We loved working with him on The World Is Not Enough and send our love and support to his family, friends and colleagues,\" they said.\n\nA post on the Twitter account of the band Garbage, who performed the theme for The World Is Not Enough, labelled Apted a \"delightful, charming soul\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Garbage This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nComposer David G Arnold, who composed the Bond theme and worked with Apted on three other non-Bond movies, said he felt \"lucky\" to work with him.\n\n\"A more trusting, funny, friendly and, most importantly, kind, person you'd never meet. So pleased to have known him and so sad that he's gone,\" Arnold wrote on Twitter.", "Former Det Insp Tim Ireson led the unit for two years and would have been sacked if he was still serving\n\nThree members of a \"toxic\" police unit have been sacked for gross misconduct after their \"offensive\" conversations were secretly bugged.\n\nThe devices picked up \"homophobic, racist and sexist\" conversations in the offices of Hampshire's Serious and Organised Crime Unit in Basingstoke in 2018, a misconduct panel heard.\n\nA number of force staff referred to it as a \"lads' pad\".\n\nTwo other officers would have been sacked but had already left the force.\n\nThe misconduct hearing was told in the 24 days the office was bugged - following concerns raised by a whistleblower - there was \"enough profanity, casual sexism and racism to last a lifetime\".\n\nDet Sgt Oliver Lage, Det Sgt Gregory Willcox and PC James Oldfield have been dismissed while retired Det Insp Tim Ireson and former PC Craig Bannerman were the two who had previously left the force.\n\nTrainee Det Con Andrew Ferguson, who sent colleagues a fake pornographic image of members of the royal family, has been given a final written warning.\n\nThe six men were based at the Serious and Organised Crime Unit in Basingstoke\n\nImposing the sanctions, panel chairman John Bassett said the conduct had been \"shameful\".\n\nHe said police officers could not \"pick and choose the standards they will abide by\" in order to create more \"cohesive\" teams.\n\nMr Bassett said PC Ferguson was \"essentially a good officer\" who joined the team three months before the recordings, by which time the \"culture was well-established\".\n\nHe said the officer was \"conflicted by what he witnessed\" and \"felt unable to raise the matter with a supervisor\".\n\nChief Constable Olivia Pinkney said the force's internal investigation had revealed a \"catalogue of sexist, racist, homophobic and ableist language and commentary that has rightly shocked us all\".\n\nShe added: \"These officers have failed to deliver on the promise they made to uphold fundamental human rights and accord equal respect to all people.\n\n\"[They] have undermined the trust and confidence of our communities and damaged the reputations of their colleagues.\"\n\nThe six officers have apologised but some told the disciplinary panel swearing was in the \"fabric\" of the police force.\n\nOne also said they felt they were being \"made an example of\" by the force which should have learned from other previous incidents.\n\nIn all, 20 police officers and staff from the unit have faced some sort of disciplinary action.\n\nDuring the misconduct hearing at Hampshire Constabulary's headquarters in Eastleigh, it was heard a \"toxic, abhorrent culture\" developed with officers using offensive terms for women, black people, immigrants, disabled, gay and transgender people and foreign nationals.\n\nJason Beer QC, prosecuting, said the only black member of the team was referred to using racist tropes and references to slavery.\n\nWomen were described using derogatory terms and stared at in the canteen, he added.\n\nThe men admitted some of the charges of breaching standards of professional behaviour against them but claimed it only amounted to misconduct not gross misconduct.\n\nZoe Wakefield, chair of Hampshire Police Federation, said: \"The outdated and offensive views we heard during the hearing have no place in society and they certainly have no place in policing.\n\n\"We should not let the awful language and terminology used by a very small number of police officers tarnish the hard work and dedication of thousands of police officers and staff in Hampshire...\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Marks & Spencer has temporarily stopped selling hundreds of items in its Northern Ireland stores due to Brexit red tape.\n\nThe retailer said it feared its food would be blocked due to new rules governing shipments between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.\n\nA growing number of firms have spoken out about paperwork delays at ports.\n\nThe government said traders and hauliers need to take steps to comply with new border rules.\n\nM&S took the decision to temporarily drop hundreds of products, including chocolate fudge pudding and sweet and sour chicken, from its Northern Ireland stores after it saw competitors' lorries barred from travelling between the mainland and Northern Ireland.\n\nAn entire consignment in a lorry can be held up if only one item in the truck doesn't have the correct customs forms filled out.\n\nThe retailer said it aimed to get the products back up for sale soon.\n\nAn M&S spokesperson said: \"We have served customers in Northern Ireland for over 50 years and our priority is to make sure we continue to deliver the same choice and great quality range that our loyal customers have always enjoyed.\n\n\"Stores have been receiving regular deliveries this week, however following the UK's recent departure from the EU, we are transitioning to new processes and we're working closely with our partners and suppliers to ensure customers can continue to enjoy a great range of products.\"\n\nIn addition to problems shipping goods internally in the UK, the new Brexit trade rules are creating problems for exporters and traders transporting goods to and from the EU, say firms.\n\nThe UK sealed a trade deal with the European Union (EU) on 24 December that was billed as preserving its zero-tariff and zero-quota access to the bloc's single market.\n\nBut in addition to red tape causing delays, major retailers that use the UK as a distribution hub for European business could face possible tariffs if they re-export goods to the EU.\n\nOn Friday, M&S chief executive Steve Rowe warned of more red tape and a rise in export costs to some countries.\n\n\"The best example I can give you of that is Percy Pig,\" he said,\n\n\"Percy Pig is actually manufactured in Germany. If it comes to the UK and we then send it to Ireland, in theory it would have some tax on it,\" he added.\n\nM&S said it was \"actively working to mitigate\" the effects of the \"rules of origin\" regulations, under which products are taxed differently depending on which country they come from.\n\nOther firms have also been hit by the confusion caused by new Brexit trading rules.\n\nParcels giant DPD has suspended some services, while seafood exporter John Ross said the chaos was like being \"thrown in the cold Atlantic without a lifejacket\".\n\nShane Brennan, chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation, which represents chilled transport and storage companies, said the emerging problems had come despite the amount of cross-border traffic still being quite low.\n\n\"Trade flows are still only about 50% of what we would expect, but even at those levels we are seeing levels of confusion and delays,\" he told the BBC's Today programme. \"The feeling is we are building to quite a significant potential disruption.\"\n\nA government spokesman acknowledged that there had been \"some issues\", but said ministers had always been clear there would be some disruption at the end of the transition period.\n\nThe Cabinet Office said in a statement that the volume of border crossings had been low so far this year, but that it expected crossings to steadily increase to normal levels.\n\nThis brings the potential for \"significant disruption if traders and hauliers have not taken the necessary steps to comply with the new rules,\" the Cabinet Office said.\n\nOut of about 1,500 lorries per day trying to get from Great Britain to the EU in the new year, 700 have been turned away - mainly due to a lack of a negative Covid test for drivers, it said.\n\n\"We have always been clear there would be changes now that we are out of the customs union and single market, so full compliance with the new rules is vital to avoid disruption,\" said Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove.\n\nHowever, anger is growing among companies whose livelihoods depend on export trade.\n\nIn a letter on Friday to Business Secretary Alok Sharma, Scottish salmon producer John Ross Jr launched a stinging attack on the government's handling of the situation.\n\nThe firm's sales director, Victoria Leigh-Pearson, wrote that the company had in recent months \"had to endure the government issuing a barrage of useless information\" and an \"absence of factually correct information from all government agencies.\" It amounted, she said, to \"gross incompetence\".\n\nJohn Ross exports to 36 countries and has won the Queen's Award twice\n\nPart of the letter to Alok Sharma:\n\nAs I write, perishable goods that were dispatched from our facility five days ago, headed for France following a process that your department advised, have still not crossed the border. This usually takes only 24 hours because they are consolidated with the produce of other companies, which have not been able to follow the correct procedures due to a knowledge gap directly attributable to your department.\n\nEntire trucks are currently being rejected without explanation by the French customs authority. Our hauliers have now pulled their services as such a backlog has been created. Other hauliers are not taking on new customers. Today, we've even had confirmation that the IT systems of the UK and France are incompatible. After four years you only establish this now?\n\nYour so-called 'deal' is worthless if this situation is not fixed immediately, and unless you put in place measures to address the issues that continue to unfold on a daily basis. Moreover, as a seafood exporter, it feels as though our own government has thrown us into the cold Atlantic waters without a lifejacket.\n\nJohn Ross is not the only Scottish seafood exporter suffering. The industry says it has been hit by a \"perfect storm\" of Brexit disruption, which could sink a centuries-old industry.\n\n\"These businesses are not transporting toilet rolls or widgets. They are exporting the highest quality, perishable seafood which has a finite window to get to markets in peak condition,\" said Donna Fordyce, chief executive of Seafood Scotland.\n\n\"If the window closes, these consignments go to landfill.\"\n\nShe said the sector has already been weakened by Covid-19, the closure of the French border before Christmas as well as \"layer upon layer\" of problems associated with Brexit.\n\nThe group fears that without exports, the fishing fleet will have little reason to go out.\n\n\"In a very short time, we could see the destruction of a centuries-old market which contributes significantly to the Scottish economy,\" added Ms Fordyce.\n\nUK government Minister for Scotland David Duguid blamed Scottish leaders for the issues.\n\n\"The Scottish Government has persistently refused to accept the democratic vote to leave the EU, but that does not allow them to abdicate their responsibilities to Scottish businesses,\" he said.\n\n\"Over the past 18 months they have assured the fishing industry that the systems they were putting in place would be adequate. They clearly are not.\"\n\nParcel delivery service DPD UK said it had paused its European Road Service because of the '\"increased burden\" of customs paperwork for packages heading to the EU, including the Republic of Ireland.\n\nDPD said 20% of parcels had \"incorrect or incomplete data attached\", which meant they would have to be returned.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What Brexit means for Britons travelling, shopping, studying or owning properties in the EU.\n\nIn an email to its business customers, the company said that it had been a \"challenging few days\" for its international operation, and that it would \"pause and review\" its service. It plans to restart on 13 January.\n\n\"It has now become evident that we have an increased burden with the new, more complex processes, and additional customs data we require from you for your parcels destined to Europe\" the firm wrote.\n\nThe boss of one of Wales' largest hauliers said logistical problems have emerged at the Irish border too.\n\nAndrew Kinsella, managing director of Gwynedd Shipping, said his company has a backlog of 60 lorries waiting to be shipped to Dublin.\n\nHe said many hauliers are finding that their customers are not able to generate the special declarations that are needed to ultimately enable a lorry to get onto a ferry.\n\n\"Whilst you don't see queues at ports and terminals the reality is that these queues are developing elsewhere in our depot in Holyhead, in our depot in Deeside and in our depot in Newport in South Wales, and lots of hauliers have depots in the proximity of ports,\" he said.\n\n\"There are a lot of issues about demarcation about who is going to arrange the export declaration with the UK revenue authorities, who's going to arrange the import declaration, the hauliers then trying to arrange the import safety and security declaration to create an ENS number which helps you generate a PBN number so there has been a lot of everyone finding their feet\".\n\nCorrection 9th April 2021: An earlier version of this article included a photo showing queues of lorries at Dover Port. This photo was replaced in the hours after publication after it was established that it had been taken months earlier.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Growing numbers of students in England have pledged to withhold rent on university accommodation they cannot use during the Covid lockdown.\n\nOrganisers say this is building up to be a major protest, estimating that about 15,000 students at dozens of universities have signed up so far.\n\nThey want a rebate on rent when many students are being kept off campus at the start of term.\n\nBut universities say they only provide 20% of student accommodation.\n\nUniversities UK says this means \"many decisions on refunds will be made by private landlords and other providers\".\n\nIn November, University of Manchester offered a 30% rent rebate for the first half of the academic year, worth about £1,000 to each student in halls.\n\nThe move followed protests over lack of support during the coronavirus pandemic which saw students tear down temporary fencing in one demonstration.\n\nUniversity of Manchester students have been calling for a rent strike\n\nThe reduction will be applied to direct debit payments this month, with students who have already paid for the whole year getting a refund.\n\nBut organiser of the Rent Strike Now campaign, Ben McGowan, said the new lockdown means students are still paying for halls they are unable to return to which has prompted a wave of student anger.\n\nOn Twitter, campaigners listed more than 40 universities where they said students were pledging to withhold rent.\n\nThe campaign group Rent Strike Now tweeted a list of universities where there are campaigns\n\n\"Most of us are being told not to go back so we're paying for accommodation we can't use and there's been no extra support from universities and government,\" added Saranya Thambiranjah, a first year at Bristol University who also helps run the campaign.\n\n\"Rent striking is a great way to make our voices heard and get universities to listen our concerns.\"\n\nStudents at universities not yet part of this campaign have said they will organise similar challenges on their own campuses, including Coventry and Keele.\n\nRebecca Hyde is having to do her journalism course in her bedroom\n\nAt Nottingham Trent University, student campaigner Rebecca Hyde, who is doing a masters in broadcast journalism, said 244 students had so far pledged to withhold rent on university halls since their campaign was launched a few days ago.\n\nShe believes universities should do more to help students who are having to pay for rooms they are unable to use through no fault of their own.\n\nShe says her course leaders have been brilliant but missing out on using studios and running \"news days\" with her fellow students \"is just so disappointing\".\n\nNottingham Trent University says it understands student concerns over rents and urged the government \"to show leadership to find a solution that is fair to all students\".\n\n\"At NTU, only a minority of our students are in accommodation operated by or on behalf of the university.\n\n\"We do not want a repeat of the situation in the summer term of 2020 where most of our students were reliant on the goodwill of private accommodation providers who did not always do the right thing,\" said the university in a statement.\n\nAt King's College London, campaign secretary \"Juno\" likewise reported hundreds of new pledges to withhold rent in the past few days, saying students felt they had been \"lured\" into their accommodation at the start of the academic year.\n\nA King's spokesperson promised that students would not be charged for accommodation they are unable to use during lockdown.\n\nAbout a quarter of students are in privately-run purpose built accommodation, and one of the biggest of these providers, Unite Students, is also facing demands.\n\nLiverpool John Moores student Suhail Accad, in Unite accommodation, says his rent strike post on Instagram has gained 3,000 followers and has had 8,000 shares in just a few days.\n\n\"It's expensive to stay here,\" says Suhail.\n\nUnite was unable to comment directly on the threat of rent strikes but maintains that it is doing all it can to help keep students and staff safe \"during this challenging period\".\n\nUniversities UK said universities were looking at the issue \"actively\" and considering what support they can offer students.\n\n\"Universities recognise the financial pressures the pandemic has placed on students and are providing increased financial and other support as a result.\n\n\"With government restrictions reducing the numbers of students returning in person to universities, now is the time for the government to seriously consider the financial implications for students and institutions and what support they will provide.\"", "Prof Chris Whitty will front one of the adverts Image caption: Prof Chris Whitty will front one of the adverts\n\nThe government is urging people in England to stay at home and \"act like you've got it\" as part of a new advertising campaign.\n\nThe \"stay at home, save lives\" campaign will run across TV, radio, out-of-home advertising and social media.\n\nThe campaign will include a new advert fronted by England's Chief Medical Officer, Prof Chris Whitty, which will air for the first time on ITV at 19:15 GMT tonight.\n\nThe UK reported a record number of deaths and cases today, as hospitals come under growing pressure, with some in the South East at extreme capacity.\n\nAround one in three people with Covid-19 don’t have any symptoms and can pass it on without realising, the government said, \"which is why it’s essential everyone stays at home and remembers Hands, Face, Space\".\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said: \"Our hospitals are under more pressure than at any other time since the start of the pandemic, and infection rates across the entire country continue to soar at an alarming rate.\n\n“The vaccine has given us renewed hope in our fight against the virus but we must not be complacent.\n\n\"The NHS is under severe strain and we must take action to protect it, both so our doctors and nurses can continue to save lives and so they can vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as we can.\n\n“I know the last year has taken its toll – but your compliance is now more vital than ever. So once again, I must urge everyone to stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives.”", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. One floral tribute had Dame Barbara's photograph in the centre\n\nThe funeral of EastEnders and Carry On actress Dame Barbara Windsor has taken place in London.\n\nRoss Kemp, who played her on-screen son in the soap, was among the 30 mourners and gave a reading, as did actor and friend Christopher Biggins.\n\nDame Barbara died in December at the age of 83, having had dementia.\n\nThere were floral arrangements spelling Babs, The Dame and Saucy, and a mock pub sign showing her as The Queen Peggy in the style of the soap's Queen Vic.\n\nDame Barbara played pub landlady Peggy Mitchell in EastEnders for more than two decades.\n\nA version of the EastEnders Queen Vic pub sign was painted in tribute\n\nScott Mitchell, who was married to Dame Barbara for 20 years, was joined at Golders Green Crematorium by family and friends including comedians Matt Lucas and David Walliams.\n\n\"As Covid has denied so many of Barbara's family, friends and fans a chance to say farewell properly, I wanted to share the order of service to let people be a small part of it,\" Mr Mitchell told the PA news agency.\n\n\"My heart goes out to every family who have experienced the same restrictions at their loved ones' funerals.\"\n\nLeft-right: Christopher Biggins, Ross Kemp and David Walliams were among the mourners\n\nHe added: \"I would again like to thank my family, friends, the media and the public for their incredible support and well wishes since Barbara's passing.\"\n\nDame Barbara's coffin was brought into the crematorium to sound of Frank Sinatra's On The Sunny Side Of The Street, and the service featured a recording of Sparrows Can't Sing from the actress's 1963 film of the same.\n\nIt finished with the famous topless photo of Dame Barbara from the film Carry On Camping, alongside her quote: \"That picture will follow me to the end.\"\n\nLong-time friend Anna Karen, who played Dame Barbara's on-screen sister Aunt Sal in EastEnders, also paid tribute during the service.\n\nThe funeral was also attended by Loose Women's Jane Moore and EastEnders actor Jamie Borthwick. However, the numbers were limited due to coronavirus social distancing.\n\nAlzheimer's Research UK recently said it had seen a spike in donations since Dame Barbara's death, and a JustGiving page set up as a tribute to her and in aid of the charity has raised more than £150,000 (including Gift Aid).\n\nMr Mitchell said that was \"beyond anything we may have dreamed of\".\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Google's plan to replace web browser cookies with a system that shares less data with advertisers is being investigated in the UK.\n\nThe Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said Google's plan could have a \"significant impact\" on news websites and the digital advertising market.\n\nIt had already raised concerns that publishers' profits could sink if they were unable to run personalised ads.\n\nBut Google said digital advertising practices had to \"evolve\".\n\nCookies are small files a web browser stores on a user's device when they visit a webpage.\n\nThey can be used to remember what items a person has added to their online basket and deliver personalised content.\n\nThey can also be used to track somebody's activity online and deliver targeted advertising.\n\nSome cookies known as cross-site or third-party cookies can let publishers track a person's web activity as they move from one website to another.\n\nBy default, Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox browsers already block cross-site cookies.\n\nBut Google intends to go further by ending support for all cookies except first-party ones - those used by sites to track activity within their own pages.\n\nIt wants to replace them with new tools that give advertisers more limited, anonymised information such as how many users visited a promoted product's page after seeing a relevant ad - but not tie this information to individual users.\n\nAccording to one industry group opposing the move, Google's Chrome browser is installed on more than 70% of computers in the UK.\n\nSo even if other web browsers do not adopt the same approach the move would still be significant.\n\n\"Google's Privacy Sandbox proposals will potentially have a very significant impact on publishers like newspapers, and the digital advertising market. But there are also privacy concerns to consider,\" said Andrea Coscelli, chief executive of the CMA.\n\nA coalition of about a dozen small tech companies and publishers - Marketers for an Open Web (Mow) - claims some of its members' revenues could drop by as much as two-thirds.\n\nMoreover, it suggests the move would put too much power into Google's hands.\n\n\"Google will effectively control how websites can monetise and operate their business,\" it warned last month.\n\n\"This means that any business that buys or sells advertising will be reliant on Google for a part of the process, whether they like it or not.\n\n\"This will reduce the ability of independent players to compete with Google, strengthening its monopoly control of online commerce.\"\n\nThe group has also raised concerns about other related matters, including the tech firm's plan to end support for user-agent strings.\n\nThese are bits of text that browsers send to websites at the start of a user's visit to reveal details about the device and browser being used.\n\nPublishers use this information to optimise the way their sites appear.\n\nBut Google is phasing out support on the grounds that they are also used as an alternative to cookies to track users, and sometimes cause compatibility issues.\n\nThe CMA previously issued a report into the matter in July.\n\nAt that point it acknowledged that while there were benefits to consumers from the kinds of privacy measures Google was proposing, they might be outweighed by other concerns.\n\nIt added that \"many news publishers\" had expressed concern that their news sites would become \"unsustainable\".\n\nUntil recently, the European Commission was responsible for most large and complex competition cases involving the UK.\n\nOn 1 January, the CMA took over these responsibilities on a local level due to Brexit.\n\nLast November, the government announced it would create a new Digital Markets Unit within the CMA.\n\nThe organisation subsequently detailed how it would to govern the behaviour of Google, Facebook and other tech platforms \"that currently dominate\" online markets, and give consumers \"more control over how their data is used\".\n\nThe new unit becomes operational in April, but is dependent on legislation going through Parliament before it gets new powers, and that may not happen until 2022.\n\nSince that would be too late to block Google's Privacy Sandbox plans, the probe is being carried out under the existing regime.\n\nEven so, all those involved will be watching closely for signs of how willing the authority is to confront the US's largest tech companies.", "Edwin Poots said he has asked senior UK government figures to consider unilaterally revoking the NI Protocol\n\nThe Stormont minister whose officials are responsible for the new Irish Sea border has said some food will be unavailable if changes are not made.\n\nDUP Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots has also said jobs could be at risk.\n\nHe said problems at the ports were being caused by new rules applied on imports of food and other products from Britain to Northern Ireland.\n\nEarlier Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove said trade from GB to NI \"will get worse before it gets better\".\n\nMr Gove said that \"work is ongoing\" and it is \"all part of the process of leaving the European Union\".\n\nHe added that he had spoken to ministers from all parties in the Northern Ireland Executive.\n\nAfter speaking with hauliers, supermarkets and processors this week, Mr Poots predicted the loss of jobs and rising costs.\n\n\"A wide range of frozen and chilled foods will be unavailable after the temporary exemption period ends,\" he tweeted.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Edwin Poots MLA This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThat exemption period applies to supermarkets and other food importers and runs out in April.\n\nAfter that they will have to comply with all the paperwork required to ship food in, or find suppliers on the island of Ireland or elsewhere in the EU.\n\nNew rules - called the Northern Ireland Protocol - were introduced because while the UK has left the EU, Northern Ireland has remained in the Single Market for goods and is continuing to apply EU customs rules.\n\nThe arrangement was agreed between the UK and the EU to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland.\n\nMr Poots said he had spoken to senior UK government figures to ask them to consider unilaterally revoking the protocol as it was \"damaging Northern Ireland at the economic and societal level\".\n\nAnd he hit out at members of Sinn Fein, the SDLP, and Alliance Party who he claimed had supported it.\n\nMembers of those parties have countered similar claims from other DUP politicians in recent days.\n\nThey said DUP MPs had voted against alternative arrangements that would have been simpler to manage before the government pushed ahead with the protocol plan.\n\nResponding to Mr Poot's tweet on Friday evening, SDLP leader Colum Eastwood wrote: \"You broke it, you own it.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Colum Eastwood This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSinn Féin MLA Martina Anderson accused Mr Poots of being \"asleep at the wheel\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Martina Anderson MLA This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) has called for the assembly to be recalled to discuss difficulties over trading between Great Britain and Northern Ireland due to Brexit.\n\nUUP MLA Roy Beggs said: \"The impact of the Irish Sea border is causing horrendous difficulties for hauliers and this is being seen in shops and businesses across Northern Ireland.\n\n\"It is damaging the Northern Ireland economy and the situation is escalating.\"\n\nEarlier on Friday, Michael Gove said it had been expected that there would be \"some initial disruption\" to trade between GB and NI, but that the government is \"ironing\" issues out.\n\nHe said discussions with the executive in Northern Ireland were \"in order to make sure that the [Northern Ireland] protocol works\".\n\n\"[To make sure] that businesses in Northern Ireland can continue to have access to the rest of the UK market, and that Northern Ireland businesses can have the goods that they need on the shelves, that they have access to at the moment,\" he said.\n\nNorthern Ireland has remained a part of the EU's single market for goods while the rest of the UK has left.\n\nThis means food products from Great Britain are subject to checks when they enter Northern Ireland.\n\nSimilar processes and checks also apply when moving food products from Great Britain into the Republic of Ireland.\n\nMeanwhile, an organisation representing haulage firms has called on the UK and Irish government to relax some of the new Irish Sea trade border rules.\n\nThe Road Haulage Association (RHA) said there is serious disruption to freight movements into the island of Ireland.\n\nThe RHA said relaxing the controls on food products and customs declarations \"would help traders to ship goods that have struggled to move over recent days.\"\n\n\"The problems have led to gaps in supermarket shelves and lorries delayed at ports because of problems with red-tape and the situation is worsening,\" the organisation added.\n\n\"We are facing an inflexible, cumbersome and time consuming process just to move goods.\"\n\nThe UK government said the flow of goods \"between GB and NI has been smooth overall and arrivals of freight have continued to increase substantially over this week\".\n\n\"There are no significant queues at NI ports and supermarkets are reporting healthy supplies into their Northern Ireland stores,\" a spokesperson added.\n\n\"We recognise the need to provide as much support to the haulage sector as possible as industry adapts to new processes. That's why hauliers can benefit from the Trader Support Service, which provides free advice and support to businesses of all sizes moving goods under the Northern Ireland Protocol.\n\n\"We have been engaging intensively with the Irish authorities and hauliers on the issues that have been encountered for goods transiting through Dublin port.\"\n\nOn Thursday customs authorities in the Republic of Ireland announced a temporary relaxation of one customs process.\n\nHauliers will be able to use an override code to complete a piece of administration known as ENS.\n\nThe letters ENS refer to an entry summary declaration, an online form which goods carriers are now legally obliged to submit to Irish customs when transporting goods from Great Britain into Ireland.\n\nLorries arriving in Ireland from Great Britain have faced new checks since 1 January\n\nOn Thursday night the Irish Revenue Commissioners said it recognised that \"some businesses are experiencing difficulties on lodging their safety and security ENS declarations\".\n\nIt said that in response it was providing a \"temporary easement\" which would allow an ENS to be produced without all the normally required information.\n\nAn Irish government spokesperson said it is \"absolutely essential that Ireland fulfils its obligations as a member of the EU and that we protect the integrity of the single market and the customs union\".\n\n\"We appreciate that the new requirements and customs formalities present significant challenges and impose additional burdens on businesses.\"\n\nMeanwhile Stena, the ferry company, said it was cancelling a dozen sailings between Wales and Ireland next week due to \"a decline in freight volumes during the first week of Brexit.\"", "Tennant was remembered as \"a beautiful soul\" and \"a sensitive and talented woman\"\n\nBritish model Stella Tennant took her own life after being \"unwell for some time\", her family has confirmed.\n\nIn a statement, her family said it was \"a matter of our deepest sorrow and despair that she felt unable to go on.\"\n\nTennant, who made her name in the early 1990s modelling for designers like Karl Lagerfeld and Versace, died in December five days after her 50th birthday.\n\nHer family said they were \"humbled by the outpouring of messages of sympathy and support\" they have received.\n\nTennant was \"a beautiful soul, adored by a close family and good friends, a sensitive and talented woman whose creativity, intelligence and humour touched so many\", they said.\n\n\"In grieving Stella's loss, her family renews a heartfelt request that respect for their privacy should continue.\"\n\nBorn in London on 1970, Tennant was known for her androgynous sultry looks and aristocratic heritage.\n\nShe shot to fame after being photographed for British Vogue at the age of 22 in 1993, going on to work with such designers as Alexander McQueen and Jean Paul Gaultier.\n\nTennant retired from the catwalk in 1998 but later returned. She also worked on campaigns to promote saving energy and reducing the environmental impact of fast fashion.\n\nShe had four children with French-born photographer David Lasnet. The couple married in the Scottish borders in 1999 and announced their separation last year.\n\nTennant with David Lasnet on their wedding day in 1999\n\nStella McCartney, Victoria Beckham and fellow model Naomi Campbell were among those to pay tribute after her death was announced last month.\n\nCampbell said she had been \"a class act in every way\", while Beckham remembered her as \"an incredible talent\".\n\nIf you have been affected by any of the issues in this article, information and support is available from BBC Action Line.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "The storming of the US Capitol building in Washington DC stunned viewers around the world.\n\nBut how did Americans feel seeing the seat of their government being ransacked?\n\nWe asked members of our BBC voter panel for their views.\n\nSimon grew up in Uganda during its civil war and became a US citizen last year. A master's student and stay-at-home father, he warns that, while things may settle down, \"democracy is not guaranteed\".\n\nI'm disgusted but not surprised. I anticipated this would happen and it was a matter of when, not if.\n\nI didn't anticipate that it would happen in the capital. This is the president whose people - since the racial justice movement in the summer - said they were for \"law and order\". So the \"law and order\" people broke into the Capitol and changed the American flag with the Trump flag. History shows that has not happened in over 200 years, so it tells you how dangerous this man is.\n\nIn Uganda, in November, when the opposition was arrested, people took to the streets and got shot. Here, in the summer, the Capitol building was protected and they were breaking up peaceful protests.\n\nIt's clear that [Trump supporters] have been organising, we've seen this was going to happen, yet we subconsciously did not think that white people are a threat. That is the construct of this country and how law enforcement viewed it.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 'Treason, traitors and thugs' - the words lawmakers used to describe Capitol riot\n\nTaylor is a staunch Trump supporter and recently travelled to Washington DC for a post-election pro-Trump rally. A photographer by trade, she was upset by the rioting but believes unsubstantiated claims that left-wing radicals were behind the violence.\n\nIt was just heart-breaking to watch what was going on and the behaviour of protesters is just not like the Trump people I've been around. If it did come from any conservatives, then I condemn it. There's no excuse for violence.\n\nIt doesn't change my support for Trump. The people that love Trump, that's not going to change no matter if he gets a second term or not. It just means we're going to hold out for 2024 and hope either he runs again or his kids do.\n\nOur country is going to go downhill over the next four years if Biden does take office. I'm actually moving today out of the city into the suburbs of a Republican county because I am afraid of how Democratic counties will end up under a Biden presidency.\n\nWe're going to catapult towards socialism and communism. I'm worried for the country's future, but regardless of who takes office, we have a lot of healing to do. I hope we can all find our common humanity and embrace each other when this is all over, which is hopefully soon.\n\nJames is a lifelong Republican who worked on Capitol Hill for the party for nearly two decades, but cast his first ever vote for a Democrat in the 2020 election. He was stunned by 6 January's events and expects it to become a bad footnote in the country's history.\n\nI find it absolutely shocking. I didn't think it would come to this.\n\nI had actually thought about going down to the protests with a sign that said \"Republicans Against Trump\". My brother said, if I had done that, there would have been five deaths, not four, and he may have been right. I'm astounded by the stupidity of these people who show up without masks and who are being filmed. Quite a few of them are going to prison. It's a serious situation when you break past a police barricade and go into a building that's supposed to be secure.\n\nI have a lot of friends who say things couldn't get worse, but I have to remind them, as a student of history, that it has been worse. The Civil War was much worse. There was a lot of violence in the South during the Reconstruction period. This is something the country will get over. I was heartened by President-elect Biden's speech yesterday. Finally we've got someone who's sounding presidential. We haven't had it for the last four years.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA'Kayla is a college student who supports the Black Lives Matter movement. She says law enforcement \"coddled\" the rioters at the Capitol and thus made an argument for police reform because they were far more aggressive at protests she attended.\n\nIt's so irritating I can't put into words how frustrating it is. They stormed the Capitol and the police were gentle and lackadaisical with them. I expected the police to use force, but they were so kind and gentle. During the summer, when the Black Lives Matter protests were going on, so many people were injured, locked up and lost their lives.\n\nFrom my own experience, marching peacefully on the front lines in Charleston, we had tear gas thrown at us and had to pour milk in our eyes. It was excruciating. And for what? We're marching for a cause, because we had the murder of somebody by the police. What are they upset about? They're upset because we are living in a democracy and they didn't get their way.\n\nDuring one of the debates, when Trump said \"stand back and stand by\", is this what he was talking about? This is the calm before the storm. I think it's going to get way more ugly, but Kamala [Harris] and Joe [Biden] are a symbol of change and hope.\n\nWhether [Trump supporters] like it or not, America is moving towards a more progressive country and there's going to be a lot of changes.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Joe Biden: Black Lives Matter protesters would have been treated \"differently\"", "Two more life-saving drugs have been found that can cut deaths by a quarter in patients who are sickest with Covid.\n\nThe anti-inflammatory medications, given via a drip, save an extra life for every 12 treated, say researchers who have carried out a trial in NHS intensive care units.\n\nSupplies are already available across the UK so they can be used immediately to save hundreds of lives, say experts.\n\nThere are over 30,000 Covid patients in UK hospitals - 39% more than in April.\n\nThe UK government is working closely with the manufacturer, to ensure the drugs - tocilizumab and sarilumab - continue to be available to UK patients.\n\nAs well as saving more lives, the treatments speed up patients' recovery and reduce the length of time that critically-ill patients need to spend in intensive care by about a week.\n\nBoth appear to work equally well and add to the benefit already found with a cheap steroid drug called dexamethasone.\n\nAlthough the drugs are not cheap, costing around £500 per patient, on top of the £5 course of dexamethasone, the advantage of using them is clear - and less than the cost per day of an intensive care bed of around £2,000, say experts.\n\nLead researcher Prof Anthony Gordon, from Imperial College London, said: \"For every 12 patients you treat with these drugs you would expect to save a life. It's a big effect.\"\n\nIn the REMAP-CAP trial carried out in six different countries, including the UK, with around 800 intensive care patients:\n\nProf Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, said: \"The fact there is now another drug that can help to reduce mortality for patients with Covid-19 is hugely welcome news and another positive development in the continued fight against the virus.\"\n\nHealth and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock said: \"The UK has proven time and time again it is at the very forefront of identifying and providing the most promising, innovative treatments for its patients.\n\n\"Today's results are yet another landmark development in finding a way out of this pandemic and, when added to the armoury of vaccines and treatments already being rolled out, will play a significant role in defeating this virus.\"\n\nThe drugs dampen down inflammation, which can go into overdrive in Covid patients and cause damage to the lungs and other organs.\n\nDoctors are being advised to give them to any Covid patient who, despite receiving dexamethasone, is deteriorating and needs intensive care.\n\nTocilizumab and sarilumab have already been added to the government's export restriction list, which bans companies from buying medicines meant for UK patients and selling them on for a higher price in another country.\n\nThe research findings have not yet been peer reviewed or published in a medical journal.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A young woman has died after a rare suspected shark attack in New Zealand.\n\nPolice named the victim as 19-year-old Kaelah Marlow, from Hamilton.\n\nMarlow was taken out of the water still alive but died at the scene despite efforts to save her life. Police said it appeared she had been injured by a shark.\n\nThe attack happened at Waihi Beach on North Island not far from the country's biggest city Auckland.\n\n\"Police extend our deepest sympathies to Kaelah's family and loved ones at this very difficult time,\" police said in a statement.\n\n\"We appreciate her death was extremely traumatic for those who were at Waihi Beach yesterday and we are offering victim support services to anyone who requires it,\" the statement said.\n\nShark attacks are unusual in the country and this is thought to be the first fatality since 2013. Local media cited witnesses as saying the woman had been swimming right in front of the lifeguard flags on Thursday.\n\nWhen they heard screams, lifeguards went out by boat immediately and pulled her to shore.\n\nIt is not clear what kind of shark attacked Kaelah Marlow, but an eyewitness reportedly claimed it was a great white, a species which is protected in the waters around New Zealand.\n\n\"Sharks are reasonably common near all northern beaches of New Zealand, most are harmless and even species considered dangerous very rarely interact with swimmers,\" shark researcher Kina Scollay told the BBC.\n\n\"My thoughts and sympathies are with the victim's family and we need to remember that this is a real tragedy to real people. I worry that this gets lost sight of in the media scramble after such events.\"\n\nOne witness quoted by local media said he believed a great white shark attacked the woman\n\nMr Scolley said that while attacks were rare, there were ways to be careful about interactions that could go wrong. Among the risk factors are, for instance, fish feeding events or dead animals in the water.\n\n\"If a large shark approaches or is seen nearby people should stay calm, warn those nearby and calmly exit the water,\" he said.\n\nA seven-day rahui, a traditional Maori prohibition restricting access to an area, has been placed on the beach.\n\nThe last recorded shark attack was in 2018 when a man was injured - but survived - at Baylys Beach. Over the past 170 years, there have only been 13 fatal shark attacks documented in New Zealand, according to the country's department of conservation.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "The US is reeling after supporters of President Trump stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC on the day Congress was meeting to confirm Joe Biden's election victory.\n\nLawmakers were forced to take shelter, the building was put into lockdown and four people died in the chaos that followed a pro-Trump rally near the White House.\n\nHere's a breakdown of how events unfolded on Wednesday.\n\nJust before midday local time (17:00 GMT) thousands of people gather at the Ellipse, near the White House, to hear the president speak at a \"Save America\" rally.\n\nHe tells them: \"We're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue... and we're going to the Capitol and we're going to try and give… our Republicans, the weak ones... the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.\"\n\nAs the speech ends, crowds start to drift towards the Congress building, about a mile and a half away, where they are met by police barriers.\n\nThe Capitol is home to the two chambers of the US government that make up Congress - the House of Representatives and the Senate.\n\nChanting crowds start to gather on both sides of the building at around 13:10, grappling with police at the metal barricades.\n\nTear gas and pepper spray are used to try to keep the protesters at bay.\n\nPolice officers struggle to maintain control of the situation as protesters advance on the building on multiple fronts.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police place US Capitol Building on lockdown after Trump supporters breached security lines\n\nOn the east side, the crowd force their way through barricades on the Capitol Plaza and move on the main entrance, quickly gaining access to the Great Rotunda.\n\nOnce inside, they head for the House and Senate chambers.\n\nIgor Bobic, a journalist for the Huffington Post, captures a group of men forcing a police officer to retreat up a set of stairs as they continue their advance.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Igor Bobic This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSenators are forced to abandon the process of confirming President-elect Biden's victory and the building goes into lockdown.\n\nThe doors of the House chamber are locked and a makeshift barricade is erected in front of them. Security officials guard the entrance, guns drawn.\n\nWithin an hour, protesters have also broken police lines on the west side of the Capitol, scaling walls to reach the building itself before smashing windows and forcing doors open.\n\nOther videos and images show rioters storming through the building's ornately-decorated corridors and chambers chanting \"USA!\" and \"Stop the steal\".\n\nShortly before 15:00, gunshots are reportedly heard inside the building.\n\nPhotos and video footage later show a female protester being shot as she tries to break through the barricaded doors of the Speakers' Lobby.\n\nDespite efforts by police and others at the scene to save her, she is later reported to have died.\n\nOn the other side of the building, protesters break into the Senate chamber, one taking seat in the Speaker's chair.\n\nAnother protester is photographed nearby sitting in Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, with his foot on the table.\n\nAfter growing condemnation of the riots, President Trump eventually calls for calm, telling the protesters to leave peacefully: \"Go home. We love you, you're very special.\"\n\nBy 17:40, the building is cleared and made secure ahead of the 18:00 curfew ordered by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser.\n\nSeveral thousand National Guard troops, FBI agents and US Secret Service are deployed to help.\n\nMore than six hours after the storming of the building, senators return and resume the day's business of certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election.\n\nAt 03:41 on Thursday, Congress confirms President-elect Joe Biden will succeed President Trump on 20 January.", "Young women clap for heroes outside Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London\n\nA revived initiative to applaud the heroes of the pandemic has returned - but much more quietly than last year.\n\nIt comes after the founder of Clap for Carers distanced herself from its return after facing online abuse.\n\nAnnemarie Plas wanted to bring back the weekly applause under a new name of Clap for Heroes to lift spirits in the new lockdown but it fell a little flat.\n\nSome health workers have said they would rather people stay at home and wear a mask than clap for them.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said he participated at 20:00 GMT on Thursday, but clapping \"isn't enough\".\n\n\"They need to be paid properly and given the respect they deserve,\" he tweeted., of the health workers.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The weekly clap returned but Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said clapping alone \"wasn't enough\"\n\nThe idea of clapping and banging pots from doorsteps originally began as a one-off to support NHS staff on 26 March - three days after the UK went into lockdown for the first time.\n\nAfter proving popular it was expanded to cover all key workers and continued every Thursday for 10 weeks last year, with millions of people across the UK taking part.\n\nMembers of the Royal Family and politicians including Prime Minister Boris Johnson also joined in with the show of support.\n\nHowever, the event faced criticism for becoming politicised, with some suggesting the NHS would benefit more from extra funding than applause.\n\nPeople in some streets stood on doorsteps and leaned out windows to clap for the pandemic's heroes, and landmarks in London were illuminated blue for the occasion - but reports suggested the applause was noticeably quieter than last year.\n\nAnnemarie Plas and her family were threatened online for her efforts\n\nOn Wednesday, Ms Plas, a 36-year-old mother-of-one, announced the return of the initiative, saying she hoped to \"lift the spirit of all of us\" including \"all who are pushing through this difficult time\".\n\nBut some NHS workers were less than enthusiastic. Ami Jones, an intensive care consultant from Wales, tweeted: \"No thanks. I'd rather you obey the rules, stay at home, wear masks and wash your hands.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Rachel Clarke 💙 This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAnd palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke said: \"Please don't clap us. Just wear a mask, wash your hands and respect lockdown.\"\n\nIn a tweet posted hours before the weekly clap was due to return, Ms Plas, a Dutch national living in south London, said she had been targeted with personal abuse and threats against her and her family by \"a hateful few\" on social media.\n\n\"I have no political agenda, I am not employed by the government, I do not work in PR, I am just an average mum at home trying to cope with the lockdown situation,\" she said, in a statement.\n\nShe said the newly revived clap could and should still happen at 20:00 GMT.\n\n\"It's up to each person to decide how relevant or worthwhile they feel it is to participate,\" she said.\n\nThe fountains in Trafalgar Square were illuminated blue for the initiative on Thursday\n\nSome incorporated pots and pans during their weekly claps in warmer months", "UK house prices rose by 6% last year, according to the Halifax, but the lender is predicting \"downward pressure\" on values in 2021.\n\nThe mortgage lender, part of Lloyds Banking Group, said that prices \"soared\" in the second half of 2020.\n\nPent-up demand, a clamour for more space, and stamp duty holidays led to higher prices.\n\nBut the Halifax said the economic realities of 2021 meant activity would slow as the year progressed.\n\n\"With the pace of the UK's economic recovery expected to be constrained by the renewed national lockdown, and unemployment widely predicted to rise in the coming months, downward pressure on house prices remains likely as we move through 2021,\" said Russell Galley, managing director at the Halifax.\n\nHe said that last year was a market of two halves - starting with slow growth, and stalling when the market was closed during the first national lockdown, but then booming when it reopened.\n\nThis meant that overall, demand and price growth were relatively high.\n\nThe conclusion mirrors the findings of rival lender, the Nationwide, which said that UK house prices climbed 7.5% in 2020, the highest growth rate for six years.\n\nBoth mortgage lenders base their findings on their customer data.\n\nLucy Pendleton, from estate agents James Pendleton, said: \"The simple truth is that extra space has become non-negotiable for legions of homeowners with families, and the usual winter slowdown has met the immovable force that is hundreds of thousands of people all trying to jump to larger properties at the same time.\"\n\nThe Halifax said there were already signs of the market slowing, with prices rising by 0.2% in December compared with the previous month.\n\nThat was the slowest monthly rise of the last six months.\n\nThe lender said the average home was valued at £253,374.\n• None Where can I afford to live?", "The switch has been welcomed by climate campaigners\n\nAlok Sharma is to leave his position as business secretary to focus full-time on his role as president of the UN COP26 climate conference in November.\n\nThe Glasgow event is expected to be the biggest summit the UK has ever hosted.\n\nMr Sharma, who will remain in the cabinet, said he was \"delighted to have been asked by the PM to dedicate all my energies\" to the position.\n\nKwasi Kwarteng replaces him as business secretary while Anne-Marie Trevelyan becomes the new energy minister.\n\nThe government says a successful summit will be critical if the UK wants to meet the objectives set out by the Paris Agreement and reduce global emissions.\n\nThe event had originally been scheduled for November 2020 but was delayed by a year due to Covid-19.\n\nThe BBC's political correspondent Jessica Parker said the decision to move Alok Sharma wasn't a surprise and would be seen as a recognition of the need to free him up to do more of the crucial diplomatic leg-work required.\n\nSome MPs had previously warned that Mr Sharma lacked the \"bandwidth\" to head the conference alongside his cabinet job, especially given the strains on business due to the pandemic.\n\nIn his new role, which is based in the Cabinet Office, Mr Sharma's will remain a member of Boris Johnson's top team but be focused solely on coordinating global action to tackle climate change\n\nBoris Johnson chose Mr Sharma to head the event after ex-minister Claire O'Neill was ousted from the position in the summer of 2019.\n\nShe later condemned what she called broken promises and backsliding on climate commitments.\n\nFormer Conservative PM David Cameron turned down the chance to head the conference and ex-Foreign Secretary Lord Hague was also involved in discussions.\n\nMr Sharma's move will be welcomed by climate campaigners, who worried he was over-stretched running a frantically busy department while also orchestrating the most important climate meeting on Earth.\n\nMany of these summits - known as COPs - yielded little because the leadership was poor.\n\nThe French produced a triumphant agreement in the 2015 Paris COP after mustering the mighty force of French diplomacy.\n\nMr Sharma is reported to accept that he now needs to concentrate full time on the challenge.\n\nHe will need subtle diplomatic skills, a mastery of detail and the stamina of an ox as he attempts to corral world leaders into agreement on curbing emissions faster. He'll also need 100% support from the PM.\n\nThe greatest obstacle to action - Donald Trump - will soon disappear from the scene, and with China making bold promises, the COP has potential.\n\nBut politicians have been so slow to act that some key tipping points in the climate might already have been breached.\n\nReflecting on his new role, Mr Sharma said: \"The biggest challenge of our time is climate change and we need to work together to deliver a cleaner, greener world and build back better for present and future generations.\n\n\"Through the UK's Presidency of COP26 we have a unique opportunity, working with friends and partners around the world, to deliver on this goal.\"\n\nRichard Black, senior associate at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) said: \"Allowing Alok Sharma to focus full-time on his COP26 role is a sensible decision, not least as it signals the government's commitment to ensuring that the summit is a success.\n\n\"With the election of Joe Biden as the next US President and China's recent carbon neutrality pledge, the diplomatic opportunities have opened up for more ambitious action on climate change. Mr Sharma's job will be to seize them.\"\n\nAnd ex-cabinet minister Amber Rudd, who led the UK delegation at the Paris climate change conference, said the move showed the government \"recognises the importance and opportunity for a global agreement this year\".\n\nResponding to his new appointment, Mr Kwarteng said he was \"thrilled\" and pledged to help businesses through this period of \"extremely challenging circumstances\".\n\nThe Spelthorne MP, who entered Parliament in 2010, has been energy minister since July 2019.\n\nLabour's shadow business secretary Ed Miliband said Mr Kwarteng had \"a massive task\" in providing business with \"a plan to help them through this year, not the inadequate sticking plaster measures we have seen\".\n\nHe welcomed the decision to make Mr Sharma's COP role full time.\n\n\"It's absolutely crucial that the full political, diplomatic and strategic resources of government are now directed to the most ambitious outcome at Glasgow, which is a 1.5 degree deal.\"", "The number of hours ambulances spent waiting to offload patients in parts of England is \"off the scale\", the Royal College of Emergency Medicine says.\n\nData leaked to BBC News shows ambulance waiting times at hospitals in the South East rose by 36% in December compared to the same month in 2019.\n\nPeople are also having to wait longer for ambulances to arrive when called.\n\nAmbulance services say it is taking longer to hand over patients but they are doing all they can to meet demand.\n\nIt comes as the NHS faces unprecedented pressure because of the Covid pandemic.\n\nA paramedic working in London told BBC News he had encountered patients left waiting up to 12 hours for an ambulance in the last week.\n\nOne patient in London with a broken leg had to wait outside at night for six hours before an ambulance arrived to collect him, he said.\n\nOn another occasion, paramedics were called to attend to a young man with Covid-19 whose oxygen levels were \"so low\". He was given oxygen when they arrived - but that was eight hours after the ambulance was called.\n\nIncidents such as these are \"dangerous\" and the service is \"on its knees\", the paramedic added.\n\nThe figures also show that at one point on Monday this week more than 700 patients were left waiting for an ambulance to arrive in London when none was available.\n\nDifferent statistics obtained by BBC News highlight the number of hours spent waiting to offload patients at hospitals half an hour after ambulances arrived at hospitals in the South East.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What does it mean if the NHS is overwhelmed?\n\nSouth East Coast Ambulance service lost 7,803 hours queuing outside hospitals, an increase on 5,732 hours in 2019.\n\nKent saw the greatest rise in this period. One of its hospitals, Medway Maritime Hospital, saw a doubling in ambulance waiting times.\n\nThese figures are \"off the scale\", according to Royal College of Emergency Medicine Vice President Adrian Boyle.\n\n\"It is not because more ambulances are being called, it's because the amount of time they're spending outside a hospital has increased,\" he said.\n\nDr Boyle says ambulances left queuing outside hospitals meant crews were not available to respond to other emergencies.\n\nHe says services are facing a \"crisis\" unlike any other he has seen.\n\n\"People may feel they have a winter crisis every year but this is a different order of magnitude\", he added.\n\n\"This is the worst winter crisis I've been through in my 25 years of practising as a doctor.\"\n\nAmbulance services say they are are doing everything they can to meet the demand.\n\nA London Ambulance Service Trust spokesperson said: \"We are continuing to prioritise the most seriously ill and injured patients, and our team of trained clinicians in our control rooms are working hard to monitor and maintain contact with many other patients as needed while they are waiting for ambulance crews to arrive.\"\n\nA South East Coast Ambulance Service Trust spokesperson said: \"We are doing everything we can to increase the number of staff available to meet this demand, including increasing overtime, to ensure crews are as available as possible to respond to patients in the community.\"\n\nHave you been affected by the issues raised in this story? You can share your experience by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Marks & Spencer says sales of sleepwear have soared as people spend more time at home because of Covid restrictions.\n\nThe retailer sold 20% more women's pyjamas during the 13 weeks to 26 December, with many of them being bought as Christmas presents.\n\n\"The great British public are back in their pyjamas,\" said chief executive Steve Rowe.\n\nDespite this, clothing sales as a whole fell nearly a quarter, although food sales showed modest growth.\n\nM&S said its trading was \"robust\" over the Christmas period, but UK revenues for the quarter were £2.52bn, 8.2% lower than last year.\n\nM&S blamed \"on-off restrictions and distortions in demand patterns\" due to the coronavirus crisis.\n\nM&S also said that potential post-Brexit tariffs on part of its range exported to the EU, together with \"very complex\" administrative processes, would \"significantly impact\" its businesses in Ireland and the Czech Republic, as well as its franchise business in France.\n\nMr Rowe said the chain's popular Percy Pig sweets, made in Germany, were one product that could face tax rises.\n\nIt said it was \"actively working to mitigate\" those effects.\n\nMr Rowe thanked staff for \"a first-class execution of Christmas for our customers in near impossible conditions\".\n\nThe High Street stalwart said customers had responded to its \"innovative seasonal product\" during the four-week run-up to Christmas.\n\nLike-for-like food sales had risen 2.6% during the period, it said.\n\nHowever, clothing and home sales fell by 24.1%, and UK sales overall were down 7.6% on a like-for-like basis.\n\nTrading was hit particularly badly in November by the national lockdown in England, with clothing and home sales slumping 40.5% in the month and food sales down 4.5%.\n\n\"Near-term trading remains very challenging, but we are continuing to accelerate change under our Never the Same Again programme to ensure the business emerges from the pandemic in very different shape,\" Mr Rowe said.\n\nOn the positive side, M&S said its tie-up with online firm Ocado had produced \"very strong\" results, while customers had responded to its \"innovative seasonal product\" during the four-week run-up to Christmas.\n\nRoss Hindle, retail sector analyst at Third Bridge, said: \"Despite the pressure faced by their clothing division, the M&S food division is expected to deliver solid results, propelled by both stockpiling and its Ocado partnership.\n\nHe pointed to reports that M&S was poised to acquire the Jaeger clothing brand as a possible way forward, saying it \"hints at the potential for a more aggressive shift into the multi-brand space\".\n\n\"M&S have numerous large stores which could be filled with non-M&S merchandise in order to drive their top-line. The risk here is whether such brands might cannibalise M&S branded products,\" he added.\n\nEmily Salter, retail analyst at GlobalData, said M&S was \"paying the cost for its inability to adapt fast enough to changing shopping habits\".\n\n\"M&S's recovery is slow versus other apparel players, as it continues to be hurt by an online platform unable to make up for lost store sales,\" she added.\n\nShe saw little point in a potential purchase of Jaeger, as it would be \"costly to turn around and do little to boost the retailer's fortunes\".\n\nHowever, she said M&S's focus on value in food had \"started to pay off, with decent sales growth, especially considering dampened footfall on High Streets\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"I condemn encouraging people to behave in the disgraceful way they did in the Capitol\"\n\nDonald Trump was \"completely wrong\" to cast doubt on the US election and encourage supporters to storm the Capitol, Boris Johnson has said.\n\nThe UK prime minister said he \"unreservedly condemns\" the US president's actions.\n\nFour people died after a pro-Trump mob stormed the building in a bid to overturn the election result.\n\nMr Trump had urged protesters to march on the Capitol after making false electoral fraud claims.\n\nHe later called on his supporters to \"go home\", while continuing to make false claims - Twitter and Facebook later froze his accounts.\n\nThe president has now said there will be an \"orderly transition\" to President-elect Joe Biden, whose November election victory has now been certified by US lawmakers.\n\nBut he added that he continued to \"totally disagree\" with the outcome of the vote, repeating his unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud.\n\nOn Wednesday night, Mr Johnson condemned the \"disgraceful scenes\" and called for a \"peaceful and orderly transfer of power\".\n\nBut asked by the BBC's political correspondent Alex Forsyth if President Trump was directly responsible, he said: \"All my life America has stood for some very important things. An idea of freedom, an idea of democracy.\n\n\"As you say, in so far as he encouraged people to storm the Capitol, and in so far as the president has consistently cast doubt on the outcome of a free and fair election, I believe that was completely wrong.\n\n\"I believe what President Trump has been saying about that has been completely wrong and I unreservedly condemn encouraging people to behave in the disgraceful way that they did in the Capitol.\"\n\nThe PM, speaking at a Downing Street briefing, then welcomed the confirmation of President-elect Biden, saying \"democracy has prevailed\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nHundreds of the president's supporters stormed the Capitol on Wednesday - where lawmakers were meeting to confirm Mr Biden's election victory - and staged an occupation of the building in Washington DC.\n\nBoth chambers of Congress were forced into recess, as protesters clashed with police and tear gas was released.\n\nA woman died after being shot by police, and three others died as a result of \"medical emergencies\", local police said.\n\nUK politicians from different parties have all condemned Mr Trump's actions in encouraging the storming of the Capitol.\n\nEarlier, Home Secretary Priti Patel said the president's comments had \"directly led\" to the events and he \"didn't do anything to de-escalate that\".\n\nShe added: \"He basically has made a number of comments yesterday that helped to fuel that violence and he didn't actually do anything to de-escalate that whatsoever... what we've seen is completely unacceptable.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Priti Patel says Donald Trump was wrong for not condemning the violence\n\nSpeaking on Thursday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Mr Trump should \"take responsibility\" for what happened, calling it the \"culmination of years of the politics of hate and division\".\n\nSir Keir added he welcomed the outgoing president's agreement to an orderly handover, but told reporters \"he should have said it a long time ago.\"\n\nScottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said Mr Trump had been \"inciting insurrection in his own country,\" and called it a \"dark period\" in US history.\n\n\"What we witnessed last night is not that surprising. In some senses, Donald Trump's presidency has been moving towards this moment almost from the moment it started,\" she told ITV's Good Morning Britain.\n\nScotland's Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf said the home secretary should \"give serious consideration\" to denying Mr Trump entry to the UK after he leaves office.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 'Treason, traitors and thugs' - the words lawmakers used to describe Capitol riot\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab said certification of Mr Biden's victory was \"good to see\" after the \"shocking events\" on Wednesday, adding the UK condemned the violence \"unequivocally\".\n\nFormer Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, who shared time in office with Mr Trump, said there should be \"no place for the rule of the mob\".\n\nBut senior Welsh Conservative Andrew RT Davies has been criticised after comparing the rioting to politicians who supported a second referendum on Brexit.\n\nMr Davies, a member of the Welsh Parliament, later tweeted that \"violence must never be tolerated\".\n\nHis party colleague, the Conservative MP Simon Hoare, suggested Mr Trump could be sent to the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay:\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Simon Hoare MP This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nCommons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has written to express his \"solidarity\" with US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose empty office was broken into by protesters.\n\n\"Seeing your office trashed in that way and its occupation by one of the rioters was particularly outrageous. I am just so relieved you were not hurt,\" he wrote.\n\nTrump supporters left this note on the desk of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives.", "The Liberia-flagged oil tanker Nave Andromeda docked at Southampton after the incident\n\nSeven men, including two who had already been charged, will face no action over a suspected hijacking of an oil tanker off the Isle of Wight.\n\nSpecial forces stormed the Nave Andromeda on 25 October after the crew raised concerns about stowaways.\n\nMatthew Okorie, 25, and Sunday Sylvester, 22, had been charged with conduct endangering ships.\n\nBut prosecutors dropped their case after evidence analysis \"cast doubt\" on whether the tanker was put in danger.\n\nThe Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said initial reports had indicated there was a \"real and imminent threat\" to the vessel, but added mobile phone footage and witness accounts \"could not show that the ship or crew were threatened\" and there was no evidence the men had any intention to seize control of the vessel.\n\nThe CPS said the new evidence meant the \"legal test\" for the offence was \"no longer met\".\n\n\"Our case was that the actions of the men were responsible for the endangerment of the vessel, but further material was then supplied by a maritime expert which significantly undermined whether there was a threat of danger,\" prosecutors said in a statement.\n\nThe Home Office said it was \"disappointed\" by the CPS's decision and added it was working with prosecutors to \"urgently resolve the issues raised by this case\".\n\nA spokesman said: \"It is frustrating that there will be no prosecution in relation to this very serious incident and the British people will struggle to understand how this can be the case.\"\n\nHampshire Constabulary said the five other men, who were arrested on suspicion of seizing or exercising control of a ship by use of threats or force, also face no police action.\n\nThey will remain detained under immigration regulations.\n\nThe 748ft-long (228m) ship left Lagos in Nigeria on 5 October bound for Southampton.\n\nAs it approached the Isle of Wight 20 days later, an emergency call came from the ship concerned about stowaways on board while the 22 crew members had locked themselves in the ship's citadel - secure area.\n\nThe men had been found on the ship earlier in the voyage and the vessel had made unsuccessful attempts to dock in other ports.\n\nIt was reported the men became hostile as the tanker approached the UK - but the CPS said it was thought this may have occurred while the ship was outside of UK waters.\n\nAt the time the Ministry of Defence called the incident a \"suspected hijacking\" and said Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and Home Secretary Priti Patel authorised a special forces operation in response to a police request following a 10-hour stand-off.\n\nIn a nine-minute operation carried out under the cover of darkness, Special Boat Service commandos boarded the vessel and arrested the seven men, believed to be Nigerian nationals seeking asylum in the UK.\n\nThe Liberian-registered tanker later docked in Southampton.\n\nSpecial forces boarded the Nave Andromeda on the evening of 25 October\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Mauritius has been removed from the safe list\n\nTravellers from countries near South Africa are to be banned from entering England to stop the spread of the South African Covid variant.\n\nArrivals from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Botswana, as well as island nations Mauritius and Seychelles, will be affected.\n\nThe rule will take effect on 9 January but there will be an exemption for British and Irish nationals.\n\nThey will need to follow existing quarantine procedures.\n\nA ban by visitors to the UK from South Africa started on 24 December.\n\nThe latest restriction brought in by the Department for Transport also affects travellers arriving from Eswatini, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Mozambique.\n\nIt will apply from 04:00 GMT on Saturday to people who have travelled from or through any of the specified countries in the last 10 days.\n\nIt is understood most flights from the affected countries arrive at airports in England, although it is expected the policy will be formally adopted by the other UK nations.\n\nThe measures will be in place for an initial period of two weeks.\n\nMeanwhile, Botswana, and the islands of Seychelles and Mauritius, are being removed from the UK list of safe travel corridors as there is a high frequency of travel between the islands and South Africa.\n\nThe new variant of coronavirus circulating in South Africa is already being seen in other countries, including the UK.\n\nThe variant, much like the new UK variant first seen in Kent, appears to be more contagious than previous ones.\n\nAnyone arriving into the UK from most destinations must quarantine for 10 days.\n\nBut there are a list of countries exempt from the rules, meaning returning travellers do not need to self-isolate, called the travel corridor list.\n\nUnder the latest announcement, the travel corridor with Israel will also end amid concerns about rising infection levels in that country.\n\nHowever, rules in place across the UK currently ban travel abroad unless for specific reasons.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Trump calls for an 'orderly transition of power' to the Biden administration on January 20th\n\nA US Capitol police officer has died from injuries sustained in the attack on Congress by a pro-Trump mob as top Democrats have called for the president to be removed for \"inciting\" the riot.\n\nHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged Vice-President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th amendment to the Constitution to declare the president unfit for office.\n\nAlternatively, she vowed to initiate the process to impeach the president.\n\nWednesday's violence came hours after Mr Trump encouraged his supporters to fight against the election results as Congress was certifying President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the November vote.\n\nFive people have died in relation to the riot, including Brian Sicknick, an officer at the US Capitol Police (USCP) who was \"injured while physically engaging with protesters\", the police said.\n\nMeanwhile, the top congressional Democrats - Speaker Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer - have urged Vice-President Pence and Mr Trump's cabinet to remove the president for \"his incitement of insurrection\".\n\n\"The President's dangerous and seditious acts necessitate his immediate removal from office,\" they said in a joint statement.\n\nThe duo called for Mr Trump to be ousted using the 25th Amendment, which allows the vice-president to step up if the president is unable to perform his duties owing to a mental or physical illness.\n\nBut it would require Mr Pence and at least eight cabinet members to break with Mr Trump and invoke the amendment, something they have so far seemed unlikely to do. Mr Trump is due to leave office on 20 January, when Mr Biden will be sworn in.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMrs Pelosi indicated that if the vice-president failed to act, she would convene the House to launch their second impeachment proceedings against Mr Trump.\n\nHowever, to succeed in convicting and removing the president, Democrats would need a two-thirds majority in the Senate, and there is no indication they would get those numbers. And it was not clear whether enough time remained to carry out the process.\n\nMrs Pelosi's deputy, Katherine Clark, told CNN the House could move on impeachment next week.\n\nMedia reports, quoting unnamed sources, said Mr Trump had suggested to aides he was considering granting a pardon to himself in the final days of his presidency. The legality of such a move is untested.\n\nIt wasn't until Thursday night, more than 24 hours after the US Capitol had been ransacked by his supporters, that Donald Trump released a recorded statement calling for \"healing and reconciliation\" in a wounded nation.\n\nThat was the very least that could be expected from a US president in a time of crises, and it probably will not be enough to silence calls for his removal, impeachment or resignation. Those demands have been coming from the political left, of course, but also from parts of the right - longtime critics, from former allies and, remarkably, even the conservative editorial page of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.\n\nEver since November's election, when Trump chose to attack the results rather than admit defeat, a reckoning was coming. The pressure, like a malfunctioning steam engine, was building toward a catastrophic ending.\n\nOn Thursday night, the president began trying to pick up the pieces.\n\nTeleprompter Trump had spoken. In past crises, unscripted Trump has quickly returned, with words and actions that reveal his earlier comments were insincere.\n\nWith 12 days left in his presidency, the question is whether, or more likely when, that Trump will return - and what happens when he does.\n\nPresident Trump returned to Twitter on Thursday following a 12-hour freeze of his account. His message was the closest he has come to a formal acceptance of his defeat after weeks of falsely insisting he actually won the election in a \"landslide\".\n\n\"Now Congress has certified the results a new administration will be inaugurated on January 20th,\" the Republican said in a video, without mentioning Mr Biden by name.\n\n\"My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power. This moment calls for healing and reconciliation.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 'Treason, traitors and thugs' - the words lawmakers used to describe Capitol riot\n\nMr Trump said he had \"immediately deployed\" the National Guard to expel the intruders, though some US media reported he had hesitated to send in the troops, leaving his vice-president to give the order.\n\nHe also praised his \"wonderful supporters\" and promised \"our incredible journey is only just beginning\".\n\nLaw enforcement have been heavily criticised after they were overrun by the protesters. Mr Biden said: \"Nobody could tell me that if it was a group of Black Lives Matter protesters yesterday they wouldn't have been treated very differently than the thugs that stormed the Capitol.\"\n\nImages captured inside the Capitol building showed protesters roaming through some of the corridors unimpeded.\n\nThe FBI is seeking to identify those involved in the rampage, and the Washington DC police have released pictures of \"persons of interest\" for their involvement in the riot. The Department of Justice says people could face charges of seditious conspiracy, as well as rioting and insurrection.\n\nWashington police say 68 people have so far been arrested. One of those detained at the Capitol had a \"military-style automatic weapon and 11 Molotov cocktails (petrol bombs)\", according to the federal attorney for Washington DC.\n\nThe official responsible for security in the House of Representatives, the sergeant at arms, has resigned. Mr Schumer has called for his counterpart in the Senate to be sacked. USCP chief Steven Sund is also resigning, effective 16 January, following calls from Mrs Pelosi.\n\nOn Thursday, crews began installing a non-scalable 7ft (2m) fence around the Capitol which will remain in place for at least 30 days.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Joe Biden: Black Lives Matter protesters would have been treated \"differently\"\n\nAshli Babbitt, a 35-year-old US Air Force veteran from San Diego, California, was named as the woman fatally shot by a police officer who has now been placed on leave. Law enforcement told US media the victim was unarmed.\n\nThree others died after suffering unspecified medical emergencies on Capitol grounds: Benjamin Philips, 50, from Pennsylvania; Kevin Greeson, 55, from Alabama; and Rosanne Boyland, 34, from Georgia. Mr Greeson's family said he died of a heart attack.\n\nPolice said that 14 officers had been injured in the riot.\n\nOn Thursday evening, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos - one of the longest serving members of the president's administration - became the second cabinet member to quit following the Capitol riot.\n\nIn her resignation letter, Ms DeVos accused the president of fomenting Wednesday's disorder. \"There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me.\"\n\nEarlier in the day, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao stepped down, saying she had been \"deeply troubled\" by the rampage.\n\nOther aides to quit include special envoy Mick Mulvaney, a senior national security official, and the chief of staff to First Lady Melania Trump. A state department adviser was also sacked after calling Mr Trump \"unfit for office\" in a tweet.", "Fashion student Mhari Thurston-Tyler posted an advert for the \"crop top\" (right) on Depop after she says she found some discarded Chiltern Railways seat covers (like those on the left)\n\nA fashion student has been warned not to sell prohibited items on the clothes app, Depop, after she posted an advert for a top made from a train seat cover.\n\nMhari Thurston-Tyler made the bandeau out of a Chiltern Railways seat cover designed to promote social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nThe 20-year-old sold the top for £15 but later refunded her customer and took the advert down.\n\nDepop said the item \"clearly violates our terms of service\".\n\nThe app for buying and selling second-hand clothes said the sale of stolen goods was banned - but Ms Thurston-Tyler denied stealing.\n\nShe told BBC News she found two of the blue seat covers \"balled up on the floor\" outside Marylebone station in London in September.\n\nMs Thurston-Tyler, who is a fashion student at Central Saint Martins, re-sewed one of the covers to make it fit her, before deciding to advertise the second cover on Depop.\n\n\"I have no money at the moment so decided to put the second one on Depop to see if anyone would buy it,\" she said, adding that the app had become her main source of income as she has struggled to find other work during the pandemic.\n\n\"I have to resort to little things like this to make ends meet, to pay the bills.\"\n\nMs Thurston-Tyler's advert went viral on social media after being shared by Depop Drama's Instagram and Twitter accounts.\n\nMhari Thurston-Tyler said she has been unable to find a job during the coronavirus pandemic and sells clothes on Depop \"to make ends meet\"\n\nIn the advert, Ms Thurston-Tyler models the seat cover and describes it as a \"social distancing crop\", adding: \"Got a few of these can do different sizes.\"\n\nMs Thurston-Tyler, from Kenilworth in Warwickshire, said a Depop customer paid her £15 and ordered a crop top \"in extra small\".\n\nBut realising she should not be making money out of Chiltern Railways' property, Ms Thurston-Tyler refunded the customer 15 minutes later and took the advert down shortly afterwards.\n\n\"I didn't steal it but I understand it's not right to re-sell it,\" she said.\n\nA Depop spokesperson said Ms Thurston-Tyler would be banned from the platform if she listed any other prohibited goods.\n\n\"We explicitly prohibit the sale of illegal and unlawful content on the app, including any stolen goods,\" they said.\n\n\"This item clearly violates our terms of service, but as it has been removed by the seller and is no longer for sale on the platform, we will not be taking immediate steps to ban this user.\"\n\nMs Thurston-Tyler said she hopes to make her own line of crop tops with the words \"children railways\" on the design, while \"the hype\" of the viral moment continues.\n\nChiltern Railways said it has been using the social distancing \"seat sashes\" since the beginning of the UK's Covid epidemic.\n\nA spokeswoman added: \"Whilst we appreciate this new take on railway memorabilia, these items are there to help customers travel with confidence and we would respectfully ask that they are left in place.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. London mayor Sadiq Khan: \"Unless the virus reduces... we could run out of beds\"\n\nThe spread of Covid in London is \"out of control\" according to Sadiq Khan, who has declared a \"major incident\".\n\nThe coronavirus infection rate in London has exceeded 1,000 per 100,000 people, based on the latest figures from Public Health England.\n\nHowever, the Office for National Statistics recently estimated as many as one in 30 Londoners has coronavirus.\n\nMr Khan told BBC political reporter Karl Mercer that the figure is as high as one in 20 in some parts of London.\n\nMajor incidents have previously been called for the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 and the terror attacks at Westminster Bridge and London Bridge.\n\nA major incident is any emergency that requires the implementation of special arrangements by one or all of the emergency services, the NHS or the local authority.\n\nIt means the emergency services and hospitals cannot guarantee their normal level of response.\n\nCurrently, there are more than 7,000 people in hospital with Covid-19, the mayor said.\n\nThis is a 35% increase compared to last April's peak of the pandemic, he added.\n\nDr Samantha Batt-Rawden, an ICU registrar and President of the Doctors' Association UK, tweeted: \"We tried. We really tried. NHS staff pleaded with people that Christmas is not worth it. Now one in 30 people in London have Covid and ICUs are overwhelmed. My heart is broken.\"\n\nAn analysis of Public Health England figures show in the week to 3 January, the number of cases rose across all of the London's boroughs compared with the previous week, with 17 individually recording more than 1,000 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nTesting increased in parts of the city after a drop over the Christmas period but positivity was high among people taking lab-based tests - suggesting more testing is needed to find undiagnosed cases in the community.\n\nIn the past week, many parts of the capital saw a rise in deaths where a person had tested positive for coronavirus in the previous 28 days - with some areas recording more than double the number of deaths compared with the previous week.\n\nHowever, reporting over the Christmas period may have affected this.\n\nOut of the 18 acute hospital trusts in London providing figures to the government, all of them recorded having more beds being filled by coronavirus patients than in the previous week.\n\nBarts NHS Health, one of London's largest trusts, saw a 30% increase in coronavirus patients between 29 December and 5 January, to 830.\n\nThe London Ambulance Service is now taking up to 8,000 emergency calls a day, the mayor says\n\nThe mayor of London's announcement comes after the counties of Sussex and Surrey declared similar major incidents on Thursday.\n\nHe said the London Ambulance Service was currently taking up to 8,000 emergency calls a day, compared to 5,500 on a typical busy day.\n\nThe London Fire Brigade said more than 100 firefighters had been drafted in to drive ambulances to help cope with the demand.\n\nEvery frontline agency involved in protecting the public has a legal duty to prepare for emergencies by devising and testing major incident plans.\n\nThese public bodies declare a major incident when the situation they're confronting is so big or terrible that it's not only likely to cause serious harm, but it will also compromise their ability to respond effectively.\n\nIn general terms, that means public bodies can legally stop delivering some everyday services, so that their personnel, attention and resources can be diverted to the emergency confronting them.\n\nAt other times, the plans will lead to the military sending soldiers to aid the civilian effort, as we have seen already during the pandemic.\n\nPrevious major incidents include the Grenfell Tower disaster in London, the Salisbury Novichok poisonings and the 2017 terrorism attacks.\n\nLondon's regional director for Public Health England Kevin Fenton said the current wave of coronavirus was \"the biggest threat\" the capital has faced in this pandemic to date.\n\nHe added: \"The emergence of the new variant means we are setting record case rates at almost double the national average, with at least one in 30 people now thought to be carrying the virus.\n\n\"We know this will sadly lead to large numbers of deaths, so strong and immediate action is needed.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What does it mean if the NHS is overwhelmed?\n\nMr Khan is warning that London is \"at crisis point\".\n\n\"If we do not take immediate action now, our NHS could be overwhelmed and more people will die,\" he said.\n\n\"Londoners continue to make huge sacrifices and I am today imploring them to please stay at home unless it is absolutely necessary for you to leave. Stay at home to protect yourself, your family, friends and other Londoners and to protect our NHS.\"\n\nHe said he had written to Prime Minister Boris Johnson asking for more financial support for Londoners who need to self-isolate and are unable to work, and for daily vaccination data.\n\nMr Khan also called for the closure of places of worship and for face masks to be worn routinely outside the home, including in crowded places and supermarket queues, in a bid to curb case numbers.\n\nTwo hospital trusts in London have recorded more than 1,000 coronavirus deaths\n\nThe mayor of London was in a sombre mood when I spoke to him earlier this afternoon. One in 20 Londoners in some areas now has Covid, and there is a real fear that hospitals will simply be overwhelmed in the next two weeks.\n\nDeclaring a major incident is a real indication of the levels of concern felt not just at City Hall but across London's emergency services and the NHS.\n\nMore Londoners are now in hospital with coronavirus than at the peak of the first wave last April - and those numbers are growing by more than 800 every day.\n\nIt's believed the last mayor to declare a London-wide major incident was Boris Johnson in response to the 2011 riots.\n\nThe coming days will be some of the most challenging in the city's recent history.\n\nKatie Sanderson, a junior doctor working in London, said she is worried how long medical staff can cope with the surge of patients.\n\n\"[Staff] are working on wards and spending long amounts of time with patients who need high-intensive oxygen therapy,\" she said.\n\n\"It is technically challenging and the emotional burden is enormous. I see it in a flatness in their demeanour, like we've all got used to doing things which before were totally inconceivable.\"\n\nGeorgia Gould, chair of London Councils, described London's rising coronavirus rate as \"dangerous\".\n\nShe added: \"One in 30 Londoners now has Covid. This is why public services across London are urging all Londoners to please stay at home except for absolutely essential shopping and exercise.\n\n\"This is a dark and difficult time for our city but there is light at end of the tunnel with the vaccine rollout. We are asking Londoners to come together one last time to stop the spread - lives really do depend on it.\"\n\nEarlier this week as the prime minister introduced an England-wide lockdown, the Met Police said officers were going to be \"more inquisitive\" towards Londoners seen outside.\n\nThe Met handed out 1,761 fines for breaches of coronavirus laws between 27 March and 20 December.\n\nDeputy Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist said the major incident was a \"stark reminder\" of the point London is at in the pandemic.\n\nHe said: \"These rule-breakers cannot continue to feign ignorance of the risk that this virus poses or listen to the false information and lies that some promote downplaying the dangers.\n\n\"Every time the virus spreads it increases the risk of someone needlessly losing their life.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 'One of the worst shifts of my life - it's overwhelming'\n\nIn response to Mr Khan's announcement the government said the NHS is continuing to \"face a huge challenge\"\n\nA spokeswoman added: \"It is absolutely paramount people in London, and the rest of the country, follow the rules and stay at home to protect the NHS and save lives.\n\n\"We are working closely with NHS England to support hospitals in the capital, including additional bed capacity at the London Nightingale.\n\n\"Financial support is in place for workers who need to self-isolate - including a £500 payment for those on the lowest incomes who have been contacted by NHS Test and Trace.\"\n\nFor more London news follow on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.\n\nHave any of the issues raised in this article had an impact on you? You can share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid lockdown: 'This is why we say to you do not come out'\n\nPeople are being warned about breaking lockdown restrictions after the police got stuck in snow due to rule-breakers.\n\nA car driving on Moel Famau hill, Flintshire, despite roadblocks, skidded off the road on Thursday night, with officers deployed to help the passengers.\n\nHowever, they then became stuck and had to call mountain rescuers.\n\nA yellow warning for snow and ice has been issued by the Met Office for all of Wales, until midnight on Friday.\n\nPolice said: \"This is why we say to you do not come out.\"\n\nOn a video posted on Twitter, an officer for the North Wales Police Rural Crime Team warned people about the consequences of breaking the rules.\n\n\"It is now involving two agencies, two police vehicles, two mountain rescue vehicles and three police officers and the casualty.\"\n\nRob Taylor from North Wales Police Rural Crime Team said the person who was driving the car, which travelled 200m when it lost control was \"very, very lucky to be alive and escape uninjured\".\n\n\"We've been having problems with people lately flouting the law and going where they shouldn't be going,\" he said.\n\n\"People have been going through them for various reasons whether that's a walk or sledge and gathering in large groups. So we have been paying attention.\n\n\"This issue that was highlighted perfectly yesterday where someone's gone there thinking it's okay to flout the law. They get themselves in trouble and cause an emergency response from police and actually put those police officers' lives at risk.\n\n\"Their actions can really affect many people.\"\n\nSnow and ice warnings are in place for all of Wales\n\nThe snow warning for Friday said 5cm of snow could also fall on hills and mountains, with a widespread frost forecast for the morning.\n\nRoad agencies said driving conditions on the A55 in Flintshire were difficult, with snow on Rhuallt Hill.\n\nOne lane on the expressway has been closed eastbound between Pentre Halkyn and Northop following a crash.\n\nRoads have also been closed in Denbighshire following the heavy snow.\n\nThe Met Office warned there was a risk of slips and falls with sleet and snow predicted to fall on to already-frozen ground, creating icy patches.\n\nForecasters said that while snow was likely to fall on hills and mountains, flurries could be seen elsewhere, but this was likely to \"be slight and temporary\".\n\nFurther ice warnings have also been issued until 11:00 GMT on Saturday.\n\nResidents in parts of Wales have been waking to snow, including in Mold, Flintshire\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Hyundai has sparked confusion over a possible electric car tie-up with Apple.\n\nThe South Korean car company initially said it was in the \"early stage\" of talks with the iPhone maker about a possible electric car partnership.\n\nBut hours later it backtracked and said it was talking with a number of potential partners without naming Apple.\n\nHyundai's share price rose more than 20% when the tie-up was announced.\n\n\"Apple and Hyundai are in discussions but they are at an early stage and nothing has been decided,\" it said in a statement which was later revised. Hyundai's value shot up $9bn (£6.5bn) after the Apple announcement.\n\nWhile an updated statement said it was talking to a number of companies about a possible electric car tie-up including Apple, a later version omitted the US tech firm.\n\nApple is known for its secretiveness when it comes to new products and partnerships.\n\n\"I'm not surprised to see a big jump in the valuation of Hyundai. The stock market loves car companies who are tech firms as seen with Tesla rise,\" said Sarwant Singh, managing partner at consultants Frost & Sullivan. \"This partnership helps Hyundai be seen as a tech innovator.\"\n\nLast month, news emerged that Apple was moving forward with self-driving car technology with a 2024 launch date.\n\nThe electric vehicle (EV) market is becoming increasingly competitive, with companies such as Tesla grabbing the headlines with its rapidly-increasing valuation. Tesla chief executive Elon Musk is now the richest man in the world, displacing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.\n\nExperts say an electric vehicle from Apple is still at least five years away.\n\nThey say pandemic-related delays could push the start of production into 2025 or beyond.\n\nHyundai has already been pushing into new technologies such as electric, driverless and flying cars.\n\nLast month, it took a controlling stake in Boston Dynamics in a deal that valued the mobile robot firm at $1.1bn.\n\nThe company is also setting up a $4bn autonomous-driving joint venture with auto parts supplier Aptiv.\n\nBoth partners will invest $2bn, while Ireland-based Aptiv will contribute about 700 engineers and transfer patents and intellectual property to the venture.\n\n\"Apple could certainly jumpstart that project and Hyundai brings the vehicle development and manufacturing expertise,\" said Jeff Schuster at automobile data firm LMC Automotive\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nApple's efforts to produce an electric car, known as Project Titan, have been on and off ever since plans were revealed in 2014.\n\nThere have been rumours over who would assemble an Apple-branded car as it may be difficult for the tech giant to manufacture them on its own.\n\nIts rival Alphabet's Waymo chose a factory in Detroit to mass produce its own self-driving cars.", "Jessica Allen (left) and Eliza Moore are now sticking to walks nearer their homes\n\nA police force that was criticised for its \"intimidating\" approach to two walkers is to review its lockdown fines policy.\n\nJessica Allen and Eliza Moore said they were surrounded by police after driving five miles from their home for a walk on Wednesday, and fined £200 each.\n\nDerbyshire Police initially said driving to exercise was \"not in the spirit\" of lockdown.\n\nBut it now says new national guidelines mean it will review its position.\n\nIn a statement, the force said all of its fixed penalties issued during the new national lockdown will be reviewed.\n\nMs Allen, from Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, said she assumed \"someone had been murdered\" when she arrived at Foremark Reservoir on Wednesday afternoon.\n\nWhen she and her friend were questioned by police, they were also told by officers the hot drinks they had brought along were not allowed as they were \"classed as a picnic\".\n\nShe said: \"The next thing, my car is surrounded. I got out of my car thinking 'There's no way they're coming to speak to us'. Straight away they start questioning us.\n\n\"I said we had come in separate cars, even parked two spaces away and even brought our own drinks with us. He said 'You can't do that as it's classed as a picnic'.\"\n\nMs Allen said the experience was \"very intimidating\" and had left her feeling scared of police in general.\n\nForemark Reservoir is five miles away from where Jessica Allen and Eliza Moore live\n\nHer friend, Ms Moore, said she was \"stunned at the time\" so did not challenge police and gave her details so they could send a fixed penalty notice.\n\nAt the time Derbyshire Police said that driving to a location to exercise \"is clearly not in the spirit of the national effort to reduce our travel, reduce the possible spread of the disease and reduce the number of deaths\".\n\nThe force added: \"Where there are cases of blatant breaches of the regulations then fines will be issued by officers.\"\n\nDerbyshire Police has also been giving fixed penalty notices to people who visit Calke Abbey and Elvaston Castle.\n\nFixed penalty notices have been given to people who visit Calke Abbey, a National Trust property\n\nBut in a statement, the force said further guidance issued by the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) had \"clarified the policing response concerning travel and exercise\".\n\nThe guidance said: \"The Covid regulations which officers enforce and which enables them to issue FPNs [fixed penalty notices] for breaches, do not restrict the distance travelled for exercise.\"\n\nThe NPCC added that rather than issue fines for people who travel out of their local area \"but are not breaching regulations, officers will encourage people to follow the guidance\".\n\nThe force has now said it will be \"aligning to adhere to this stance\".\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Kem Mehmet said: \"We are grateful for the guidance from the NPCC.\n\n\"The actions of our officers continues to be to protect the public, the NHS and to help save lives.\"\n\nIt is not the first time the force has been accused of being overzealous in enforcing alleged lockdown breaches.\n\nIn the country's first lockdown in March the use of a drone to film people walking in the Peak District was labelled \"nanny policing\".\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Nursery staff are not advised to wear face coverings\n\nChildcare organisations are demanding to see evidence that it is safe for them to remain open while schools and colleges have closed to most pupils.\n\nStaff have close contact with children and babies daily, when they change nappies and receive them by the hand from parents, for example.\n\nMinisters have insisted early years settings are safe as young children have very low rates of the virus.\n\nNurseries argue the evidence cited is based on data about old variant Covid.\n\nEngland's three main nursery organisations, the Early Years Alliance, the National Day Nurseries Association and childminders' group, Pacey, have joined together to mount a #ProtectEarlyYears campaign.\n\nThey want the government to provide clear scientific evidence on the risks to early years staff of staying open, particularly in light of the increased transmissibility of the new variant of Covid-19.\n\nSue Cardy, owner and manager of Ready Teddy Go Pre School, in Shoeburyness, Essex said: \"There isn't anyone who has asked: 'Is it 100% safe for us to remain fully open? No one can see the virus and staff may be asymptomatic, and so we all run an element of risk of catching or spreading it.\"\n\nShe added: \"Staff have families and are not all young... 50% of my staff are over 50 and some have underlying medical conditions.\"\n\nVicky, the manager of a church pre-school in Cheshire West and Chester said she could potentially have 30 children plus 10 staff in a church hall, with no PPE recommended, and limited social distancing.\n\n\"As an early years provider, I am increasingly worried about the safety of both staff and children, yet if we chose to partially close, we could be financially penalised.\"\n\nAnd Georgie Morrell from Brighton and Hove said: \"Since re-opening, I have had four households tell me. they are Covid positive.\n\n\"This is clearly very close to home and yet we have been given no choice or support but to remain open and carry on.\"\n\nNeil Leitch, chief executive of the Early Years Alliance, said: \"It is simply not acceptable that, at the height of a global pandemic, early years providers are being asked to work with no support, no protection and no clear evidence that is safe for them to do so.\n\n\"We know how vital access to early education and care is to many families, but it cannot be right to ask the early years workforce to put themselves at risk. That is why it is vital that the government takes the urgent steps needed to safeguard those working in the sector, particularly mass testing and priority access to vaccinations.\n\nNursery providers are calling for staff to be tested, priority for vaccination and for state funding lost due to lower numbers during the pandemic, to be replaced by government.\n\nPurnima Tanuku, chief Executive of National Day Nurseries Association, said nurseries were determined to support families during the current lockdown.\n\nBut, she added: \"Time and again, whether it's on PPE, cleaning costs, testing or staffing, early years providers have been overlooked by the Department for Education.\n\n\"Now, they are the only part of the education sector fully open to all children and must be given priority.\"\n\nOn Wednesday, vaccines minister Nadim Zahawi said there was very little risk to younger children.\n\n\"The nursery sector has taken tremendous care in making sure the premises are also Covid safe. It is the right thing to do.\"\n\nThe Department for Education is yet to comment on the #ProtectEarlyYears demands.", "The coronavirus vaccine rollout is a national challenge requiring an unprecedented effort - involving the armed forces - Boris Johnson says.\n\nThe PM confirmed almost 1.5 million people in the UK have now received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine.\n\nMore than 1,000 GP-led sites in England will be able to offer a total of \"hundreds of thousands\" of jabs each day by 15 January, he said.\n\nThe Army will use \"battle preparation techniques\" to help achieve that goal.\n\nIt came as a further 1,162 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were reported on Thursday - the second consecutive day of more than 1,000 recorded fatalities - and 52,618 new cases.\n\nAnd as Simon Stevens, head of the NHS in England, warned 10,000 patients with Covid had been admitted to hospital since Christmas Day.\n\nSpeaking at a Downing Street news conference, Mr Johnson said there would likely be \"lumpiness and bumpiness\" in the rollout of vaccines.\n\nHe said: \"Let's be clear, this is a national challenge on a scale like nothing we've seen before and it will require an unprecedented national effort.\n\n\"Of course, there will be difficulties, appointments will be changed but... the Army is working hand in glove with the NHS and local councils to set up our vaccine network and using battle preparation techniques to help us keep up the pace.\"\n\nAlongside GPs, there will be 223 hospital sites and seven \"giant vaccination centres\" - as well as an initial 200 community pharmacies - offering jabs, Mr Johnson said.\n\nEveryone will have a vaccination centre within 10 miles of their home, he added, with a \"full vaccination deployment plan\" to be published on Monday.\n\nHe also said there would be a national booking system for vaccinations - but did not give any more details.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Brigadier Phil Prosser said his task was to ensure everyone in England had equal access to the vaccine\n\nBrigadier Phil Prosser, commander of military support to the vaccine delivery programme, told the news conference his team was \"embedded\" with the NHS.\n\nHe said his \"day job\" is to deliver combat supplies to UK forces in time of war, \"at speed in the most arduous and challenging conditions\".\n\nThe government has set a target to offer vaccination slots to 15 million in the top four priority groups - including all over-80s - by 15 February.\n\nAnd Mr Johnson said that, with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine available, he could pledge one of those groups - care home residents - would all receive their jab by the end of January.\n\nThe widespread rollout of the vaccine has begun in earnest with the first doses delivered during the day to family doctors for distribution.\n\nBut there were concerns from some GPs over supplies, as Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the levels of vaccine supply was the \"rate-limiting\" factor as jabs would be delivered as quickly as stock is available.\n\nIt comes as some hospitals in England are at risk of becoming Covid-only sites, with rising admissions for the virus forcing trusts to cut back on other services.\n\nThe latest NHS statistics also show that there were 30,370 patients with Covid in UK hospitals on Tuesday, a much higher figure than the first peak in the spring of 2020.\n\nHospital leaders have warned medics are becoming increasingly stretched with \"untrained staff\" used to fill gaps.\n\nAt 20:00 GMT, people in some streets stepped out onto doorsteps to clap for the heroes of the pandemic, following a weekly initiative which gained popularity during the UK's first lockdown.\n\nHowever, Thursday's clap for heroes was more muted than those seen last year, perhaps reflecting criticism the initiative had become politicised.\n\nLots of detail has been given about how the NHS - working hand-in-hand with the military - will be able to deliver the vaccines.\n\nThere will be more local vaccination centres, hospital hubs and even mass vaccination at sports stadiums.\n\nThousands of extra vaccinators have already been trained - and thousands more are waiting in the wings.\n\nBut the biggest hurdle the UK faces is vaccine supply.\n\nIf it is not available, it cannot be put in arms no matter how good the vaccination network is.\n\nIn the long-term, supply is not likely to be a problem - but in the coming weeks it could be tight.\n\nThere is enough vaccine in the country to offer all those at highest risk a jab by mid-February.\n\nBut it is not yet all ready for the NHS to use, either because the final safety checks have not been done or the vaccine has not been put into vials.\n\nThe former depends on lab work by the medicines regulator, while the latter is the job of a plant in Wrexham.\n\nEach stage takes some time. The target is achievable, but a lot has to go right.\n\nSir Simon Stevens said there were 50% more coronavirus patients in England's hospitals now compared to the peak last April, affecting every region across the country.\n\nHe said: \"That number is accelerating very, very rapidly... the pressures are real and they are growing.\"\n\nIn Northern Ireland, the Belfast Health Trust has said it has no other option but to cancel all of its urgent cancer surgery amid \"highly significant\" demand for bed space.\n\nThe cancelled operations will affect those patients for whom surgery could impact recovery and even survival, the trust said.\n\nBoris Johnson said all parts of government would be throwing everything at the vaccination effort \"round the clock\"\n\nIn one positive development for hospitals, two more life-saving drugs that can cut deaths by a quarter in patients who are sickest with Covid have been cleared for widespread use, with immediate effect.\n\nThe anti-inflammatory medications, given via a drip, save an extra life for every 12 treated, researchers said, following NHS trials.\n\nElsewhere, the UK has implemented restrictions on travellers to England from countries near South Africa to stop the spread of the South African Covid variant.\n\nMeanwhile, Mr Johnson and Sir Simon were asked about persistent social media claims that coronavirus does not exist - and that reports of packed hospital wards of people being treated are just a myth.\n\nSir Simon said that such misinformation was an \"insult\" to hard-working critical care staff.\n\n\"There is nothing more demoralising than having that kind of nonsense spouted when it is most obviously untrue,\" he said.", "Vincent Kane - pictured with his grandson Sonny - is facing uncertainty about his operation\n\nThe son of a man with pancreatic cancer has said the last-minute cancellation of his surgery has been \"devastating\".\n\nJodie Kane said his father Vincent was due to have his operation on Friday.\n\nHowever, that procedure was cancelled by the Belfast Health Trust on Tuesday as the worsening coronavirus crisis increases the pressure on hospitals.\n\nThe trust apologised, saying it had faced an 80% rise in the number of patients with Covid-19 admitted to hospitals since Christmas Day.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio Ulster's Nolan Show, Jodie said that there was now \"no guarantee\" his 68-year-old father would get the treatment.\n\n\"To be told we had the chance of a very successful surgery on offer and then to have it taken away at the last minute is pretty devastating,\" he said.\n\n\"Even the surgeon himself said they would be concerned if it was to go on more than four weeks.\n\n\"There is an uncertainty hanging over us now that we don't know when he'll actually get that surgery or what the impact on his health is going to be.\"\n\nVincent Kane - pictured with his with wife Karen - has been suffering other health issues arising from his cancer\n\nVincent, from Newtownards, County Down, did not receive treatment for some of his other symptoms as it was planned that the surgery would help with those.\n\n\"Because they were hoping to get him straight into surgery he hasn't had the blockage in his gall bladder addressed so he's jaundiced, he's covered in a rash, can't sleep, he's lost a lot of weight,\" Jodie said.\n\n\"Undoubtedly there are people worse off than us out there but it is still a critical illness that he has got and it is one that we don't have an end in sight for, in terms of treatment.\n\n\"There must be a way of helping all those in need, or I suppose if you were being really honest about it those who stand the best chance of surviving - making the decisions for the benefit of them.\n\n\"There's no guarantee that in six weeks' time surgery is going to be an option because who knows what's going to happen with Covid?\"\n\nThe Belfast Health Trust said it had to reduce the number of ill patients on wards to protect them from coronavirus\n\nJodie called on those who were breaking Covid-19 regulations to think about the the \"direct and indirect impacts\" of their actions.\n\n\"We've every sympathy for anyone who has a loved one who needs [intensive] care because of Covid but cancer and Covid are both life-and-death situations.\n\n\"We can minimise the risks of one of them as a collective society just by taking the necessary precautions.\n\n\"It could be someone they love or their neighbour or someone in their community that's in the same situation as us in the very near future.\"\n\nFlo McClements, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in December, found out on Tuesday that her surgery - scheduled for Thursday - had been cancelled by the Belfast Health Trust.\n\nSpeaking to BBC Radio Foyle, her son Gregg said the pressure was \"mounting day by day\" on the the 72-year-old from Ballymoney, County Antrim.\n\n\"She had waited all through Christmas for the date and due to the Covid-19 restrictions we as a family had stayed away from her,\" he added.\n\nFlo McClements' family wants to \"give her a hug\" after her operation was cancelled\n\n\"We left her on her own with my dad just to make sure she didn't catch Covid and risk the operation.\n\n\"When you get the date you like to think it's the next step to recovery but unfortunately that didn't happen.\"\n\nGregg said his mother was \"putting on a brave face\" but it was difficult for the family to not be with her in person during what was a difficult time.\n\n\"That's actually the hardest part that we can't go up and have a cup of tea with her or give her a hug to make her feel a bit better even for a few minutes.\"\n\nThe Belfast Health Trust said it \"would like to sincerely apologise\" to those affected by the postponement of surgeries.\n\nIt said the decision was taken to reduce the number of ill patients on wards that would be more at risk from the virus than others.\n\n\"This was an incredibly difficult decision to make and we did not take it without considering all the information available to us,\" said the trust.\n\n\"We do not underestimate the anxiety and distress this causes the patients and families affected and we deeply regret this.\n\nIt said it would do \"everything in our power\" to reschedule their operations \"as soon as possible\".", "Gordy Philip took an icy bike ride on the Great Glen Way between Blackfold and Abriachan in the hills above Loch Ness. He said of his image: \"Could be the light at the end of the road on the first day of another lockdown.\"", "New data from EU satellites shows that 2020 is in a statistical dead heat with 2016 as the world's warmest year.\n\nThe Copernicus Climate Change Service says that last year was around 1.25C above the long-term average.\n\nThe scientists say that unprecedented levels of heat in the Arctic and Siberia were key factors in driving up the overall temperature.\n\nThe past 12 months also saw a new record for Europe, around 0.4C warmer than 2019.\n\nLast December, the World Meteorological Organization predicted that 2020 would be one of the three warmest years on record.\n\nThis new, more complete report from Copernicus says that last year is right at the top of the list.\n\nHigh temperatures saw fires rage in spring and summer in many locations inside the Arctic circle\n\nThe Copernicus data comes from a constellation of Sentinel satellites that monitor the Earth from orbit, as well as measurements taken at ground level.\n\nTemperature data from the system shows that 2020 was 1.25C warmer than the average from 1850-1900, a time often described as the \"pre-industrial\" period.\n\nOne key factor driving up the temperatures was the heating experienced in the Arctic and Siberia.\n\nIn some locations there, temperatures for the year as a whole were 6C above the long-term average.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThis exceptional warming led to a very active wildfire season. Fires in the Arctic Circle released a record amount of CO2, according to the study, up over a third from 2019.\n\nThe Copernicus service concludes that while 2020 was very marginally cooler than 2016, the two years are statistically on a par as the differences between the figures for the two years are smaller than the typical differences found in other temperature databases for the same period.\n\nMore data on 2020's temperature will be released in the next week or so from other agencies, including Nasa and the UK Met Office.\n\nThe scientists say that the closeness between the years is all the more remarkable considering the impacts of the El Niño/La Niña weather cycle.\n\nPeople saw their homes burnt down in some parts of Siberia\n\nEurope also saw a new record level of warming for the year, 0.4C warmer than 2019. A major heat wave in July and August was an important factor driving up the mercury across the continent.\n\nGlobally, the 10-year period from 2011-2020 is the warmest decade, with the last six years being the six hottest on record.\n\n\"Twenty-twenty stands out for its exceptional warmth in the Arctic and a record number of tropical storms in the North Atlantic,\" said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.\n\n\"It is no surprise that the last decade was the warmest on record, and is yet another reminder of the urgency of ambitious emissions reductions to prevent adverse climate impacts in the future.\"\n\nWhile a strong La Niña may cool temperatures a little in 2021, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are likely to remain high, contributing to ongoing warming.\n\nNew data from the UK's Met Office suggests that average concentrations of CO2 will reach levels that are 50% higher than they were before the industrial revolution.\n\nResearchers predict that annual average CO2 concentration at the Mauna Loa recording station in Hawaii will be around 2.29 parts per million (ppm) higher in 2021 than in 2020.\n\nDespite the global slowdowns caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the scientists say this rise is being driven by emissions from the use of fossil fuels and from deforestation.\n\nEurope saw a prolonged heat wave in July and August that pushed the year to a new record\n\nWhile weather patterns linked to the La Niña event may boost growth in tropical forests and increase the amount of the gas that's absorbed, it won't be enough to slow the overall rise.\n\nThe Met Office says that CO2 will exceed 417ppm in the atmosphere for several weeks from April to June.\n\nThis is 50% higher than the level of 278ppm that pertained in the late 18th Century as widespread industrial activity was just beginning.\n\n\"The human-caused build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere is accelerating,\" said Prof Richard Betts from the Met Office.\n\n\"It took over 200 years for levels to increase by 25%, but now just over 30 years later we are approaching a 50% increase.\"\n\n\"Reversing this trend and slowing the atmospheric CO2 rise will need global emissions to reduce, and bringing them to a halt will need global emissions to be brought down to net zero. This needs to happen within about the next 30 years if global warming is to be limited to 1.5C.\"", "Lorry drivers crossing the Channel will continue to need a recent negative Covid test result \"until further notice\", the UK government has said.\n\nHauliers have been required to prove they have tested negative since the border with France reopened last month.\n\nThe decision to continue testing comes from the French government, the Department for Transport said.\n\nTransport Secretary Grant Shapps urged \"all hauliers to get tested before getting to the border\".\n\nThe decision comes as the introduction of new trading rules between the UK and European Union prompts disruption for some businesses and hauliers.\n\nMr Shapps said the government was \"offering support to businesses to set-up testing facilities at their own premises, assisting the smooth passage of trucks and good across the border, as well as setting up testing at information and advice sites around the country\".\n\nDrivers and crew of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs), drivers of large goods vehicles (LGVs) and van drivers are advised to obtain a negative test before arriving in Kent or at other Channel crossing points.\n\nThere are now 34 testing sites for hauliers situated in key \"stopping spots\" across the UK, with further sites being set up, the DfT said.\n\nTests must be authorised and taken 72 hours before entry into France.\n\nIn addition to a negative Covid test result, some hauliers require a new 24-hour permit to enter Kent since the introduction of the new UK-EU rules.\n\nFrance reported 21,703 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, while the UK reported 52,618.\n\nLast month, the border crisis saw France refuse arrivals from the UK for 48 hours between 20 and 22 December due to a new virus variant initially discovered in Kent.\n\nPassenger ferries and lorry freight bound for France were suspended from Dover, Portsmouth and Newhaven.\n\nAn emergency procedure devised as part of post-Brexit preparations allowed lorries to be \"stacked\" - leaving thousands of foreign drivers stranded throughout southern England.", "A further 1,325 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test - the biggest figure reported in a single day since the pandemic began.\n\nIt means there have been just short of 80,000 deaths by that measure - as another 68,053 new cases were recorded.\n\nPublic Health England (PHE) said the number of deaths would \"continue to rise until we stop the spread\".\n\nIt comes as the government launches a new campaign in England urging people to \"act like you've got\" the virus.\n\nThe campaign, including an advert fronted by England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, is intended to remind the public Covid is spreading fast, with large numbers showing no symptoms.\n\nIn the advert, Prof Whitty says: \"Covid-19, especially the new variant, is spreading quickly across the country.\n\n\"This puts many people at risk of serious disease and is placing a lot of pressure on our NHS.\n\n\"Once more, we must all stay home. If it is essential to go out remember, wash your hands, cover your face indoors and keep your distance from others.\"\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said: \"Our hospitals are under more pressure than at any other time since the start of the pandemic, and infection rates across the entire country continue to soar at an alarming rate.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Department of Health and Social Care This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by Department of Health and Social Care\n\nHospital leaders have warned of stretched staffing with 31,624 coronavirus patients in UK hospitals on Wednesday - 46% above the peak during the first wave last year.\n\nDr Ian Higginson, vice president of Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said the situation in London and south-east England was \"pretty dire\" and would get worse in the rest of the country before long.\n\n\"We're heading for some really dark times, I fear, in this phase of the pandemic,\" he said.\n\nRichard Mitchell, chief executive of Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Trust, said the increase in patients seen in London was now affecting his area in Nottinghamshire.\n\nHe said: \"Critical care is exceptionally busy and the colleagues who work here are tired, they're fatigued and they're worn out.\"\n\nMeanwhile, a third Covid vaccine received emergency approval for use in the UK with 17 million doses of the jab, made by US firm Moderna, pre-ordered by the UK.\n\nThe vaccine joins the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca jabs in being approved, with close to 1.5 million people now vaccinated in the UK.\n\nDr William Welfare, Covid-19 response director at PHE, said: \"Each life lost to this virus is a tragedy, but sadly we can expect the death toll to continue to rise until we stop the spread.\n\n\"Approximately one in three people who have coronavirus have no symptoms and could be spreading it without realising it.\n\n\"To protect our loved ones it is essential we all stay at home where possible. This will reduce new infections, ease the pressure on the NHS and save lives.\"\n\nLondon Mayor Sadiq Khan said the spread of Covid in the capital was now \"out of control\", as he declared a \"major incident\".\n\nThis means the emergency services and hospitals cannot guarantee their normal level of response, and allows special arrangements to be implemented.\n\nThe previous highest daily death toll - 1,224 - was recorded on 21 April 2020 during the UK's first lockdown. Daily deaths were in the single figures as recently as September.\n\nThe UK has recorded the fifth-highest number of deaths behind the United States, Brazil, India and Mexico, according to Johns Hopkins University.\n\nWe are now seeing the record numbers of cases over the Christmas period translate into record numbers of deaths.\n\nAnd with new infections rising rapidly - more than 1.1 million people in England estimated to be infected with Covid-19 last week - these tragic numbers are set to continue for some time.\n\nAnd that is mainly because of the new variant form of the virus which is thought to be between 30-70% more transmissible.\n\nThe administration of the vaccines to at-risk groups should see a reduction in the numbers dying by the end of the month and the numbers having to go into hospital going down sometime after that.\n\nThat is the other way around from what you normally hear - but that it because a successful vaccine programme will initially remove those most likely to die from the path of the virus.\n\nFitter or younger people - who are less likely to die but could still end up occupying hospital beds - won't be getting their jabs for some time yet.\n\nThe advent of spring's better weather should also help cases to fall, but ministers will have to decide what level of risk - and deaths - society is prepared to tolerate.\n\nFriday saw 619,941 tests conducted in the 24 hours to 09:00 GMT - also a new record.\n\nEngland, much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland continue to be under strict national measures, with stay-at-home orders in place for most people.\n\nThe R number - the rate at which an infected person passes on the virus to someone else - is now estimated to be between 1.0 to 1.4, meaning the epidemic is growing between 0% and 6% per day.\n\nCovid infections rose by almost a third between Boxing Day and 3 January, reaching 70,000 new cases a day according to a major study.\n\nIn a different piece of research, an estimated 1.2 million people in total had Covid over a similar time period, the Office for National Statistics said.\n\nBoris Johnson pledged on Thursday to use England's lockdown to implement an \"unprecedented national effort\" to offer vaccination to those at the highest risk from Covid by 15 February.\n\nHe said the Army would be drafted in to use \"battle preparation techniques\" to achieve the goal, which could see up to 15 million people offered a vaccine by the middle of next month.\n\nIn another development, from next week all travellers to the UK will need to show a recent negative test result before they arrive.\n\nHave you been affected by the issues raised in this story? You can share your experience by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Parents and teachers are \"frustrated\" about plans to keep schools closed until the February half term and concerned about the impact on children.\n\nSpeaking to the BBC Radio Wales phone-in, callers said they felt young people were being \"thrown under the bus\".\n\nOthers said they were fed up with \"bitty information\" from the Welsh Government.\n\nKaarina Rutta from Sully, Vale of Glamorgan, told the programme she was having to work at night when her four children had gone to bed after home schooling.\n\n\"It's a challenge trying to help all four at the same time and also having in the back of your mind I should also be working and doing other things,\" she said.\n\n\"I was quite sure that this was going to happen,\" she added.\n\n\"It didn't come as a surprise I have to say, because the situation is just so bad I think there is no other way out of it at the moment.\n\n\"I just wish we had known earlier on and it would have been easier to plan.\"\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford said it was the \"best certainty\" he could offer \"in a world which is highly uncertain\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Duke of Cambridge asked how staff were coping during the pandemic and thanked them for their sacrifice\n\nThe Duke of Cambridge has said he talks to his three children about NHS staff \"every day\" to help them to understand the \"sacrifices\" made during Covid.\n\nPrince William's comments were part of a video call to London hospital staff.\n\n\"Catherine and I and all the children talk about all of you guys every day, so we're making sure the children understand all of the sacrifices that all of you are making,\" he said.\n\nIt comes after the London mayor said the virus was \"out of control\".\n\nSadiq Khan declared a major incident on Friday - meaning the emergency services and hospitals cannot guarantee their normal level of response - after the number of Covid patients in the capital's hospitals surpassed 7,000.\n\nStaff at Homerton University Hospital in east London told the Duke of Cambridge that queues of people waiting to be vaccinated at the hospital offered hope, but that the way out of the crisis was for the public to \"stay at home\" during lockdown.\n\nIn recent days the hospital has seen its highest number of admissions since the pandemic began.\n\nDuring the UK's first national lockdown, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their three children Prince George (left), Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis joined in with the weekly Clap for Carers event\n\nThe duke, who is joint patron of NHS Charities Together, said: \"A huge thank you for all the hard work, the sleepless nights, the lack of sleep, the anxiety, the exhaustion and everything that you are doing, we are so grateful.\n\n\"Good luck, we are all thinking of you.\"\n\nHis video call, which took place on Thursday, is one of many he and the duchess have made to NHS staff during the pandemic.\n\nPrince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis have also shown their support for the health service by getting involved with the weekly Clap for Carers applause during the UK's first national lockdown.\n\nAnd on Saturday, the Duchess's birthday, Kensington Palace said the family's thoughts \"continue to be with all those working on the front line at this hugely challenging time\".\n\nChief nurse Catherine Pelley told the prince her hospital had used funds from NHS Charities Together to set up various support initiatives such as a \"wobble room\" for colleagues to relax in.\n\n\"For us this week, starting vaccinating has been one of the single most significant impacts on people feeling that there is a future out of this, and the queues out the door here where they have been vaccinating have been really hopeful for people,\" she said.\n\n\"But the support we need is stay at home, help us. Because that will get us all out of this, whatever our role is, and we will get society out of this.\"\n\nAfter speaking to Ms Pelley and her colleagues about how they supported one another, the prince said: \"It's good that you and your team are keeping your spirits high and I always find that having some sort of sense of humour through everything is very important, otherwise we all go mad.\"\n\nThe Duke of Cambridge said he wants his children to appreciate the sacrifices made by NHS staff during the pandemic", "Ms Sturgeon has rejected claims made by former first minister Alex Salmond\n\nAlex Salmond has accused Nicola Sturgeon of misleading parliament, calling evidence she gave to an inquiry into the handling of sexual harassment claims against him \"simply untrue\".\n\nMr Salmond's comments emerged in a written submission to a separate investigation into whether the first minister breached the ministerial code.\n\nThe submission has been shared with the Holyrood committee.\n\nMs Sturgeon says she \"entirely rejects Mr Salmond's claims\".\n\nIn the submission, the former first minister said that Ms Sturgeon had misled parliament and broken the ministerial code with breaches including failing to inform the civil service in good time of her meetings with him.\n\nHe claimed she allowed the Scottish government to contest a civil court case against him despite having had legal advice that it was likely to collapse.\n\nMs Sturgeon told the Holyrood inquiry she had become aware of allegations at a meeting with Mr Salmond at her home.\n\nIt since emerged she met his former chief of staff in the days before, but she said she had forgotten about that meeting.\n\nMr Salmond said that claim was untenable.\n\nHis submission said that she misled parliament, and that amounted to a breach of the code. He also said she breached the code by failing to to inform civil servants of the nature of the meetings that took place between the two of them at her home where the allegations were discussed.\n\nAlex Salmond walked free from court in March having been cleared of charges of sexual assault\n\nMr Salmond's statement read: \"The pre-arranged meeting in the Scottish Parliament of 29 March 2018 was \"forgotten\" about because acknowledging it would have rendered ridiculous the claim made by the first minister in parliament that it had been believed that the meeting on 2 April was on SNP Party business and thus held at her private residence.\"\n\nBoth Mr Salmond and Ms Sturgeon are expected to give evidence to the committee in the coming weeks.\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross responded to the claims, saying: \"Nobody ever bought Nicola Sturgeon's tall tales to have suddenly turned forgetful, especially about the devastating moment she found out of sexual harassment allegations against her friend and mentor of 30 years.\n\n\"What has been revealed are allegations of shocking, deliberate and corrupt actions at the heart of government. There is now clear evidence of Nicola Sturgeon abusing her power to deceive the Scottish public.\n\n\"If this proves to be correct, it is a resignation matter. No first minister, at any time, can be allowed to get away with repeatedly and blatantly lying to the Scottish Parliament and breaking the ministerial code.\"\n\nScottish Labour deputy leader Jackie Baillie said Alex Salmond's explosive allegations demanded answers from the first minister to the committee.\n\nShe said: \"The bombshell accusation that Nicola Sturgeon has broken the ministerial code has the potential to end her political career and demands a robust and honest answer from the first minister.\n\n\"This committee demands truthfulness and honesty from every witness it calls - it is vital that the first minister tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth when she appears.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon has repeatedly dismissed any notion of a conspiracy against Mr Salmond.\n\nHer spokeswoman said: \"The first minister entirely rejects Mr Salmond's claims about the ministerial code.\n\n\"We should always remember that the roots of this issue lie in complaints made by women about Alex Salmond's behaviour whilst he was first minister, aspects of which he has conceded. It is not surprising therefore that he continues to try to divert focus from that by seeking to malign the reputation of the first minister and by spinning false conspiracy theories.\n\n\"The first minister is concentrating on fighting the pandemic, stands by what she has said, and will address these matters in full when she appears at committee.\"\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions on Friday evening, SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford MP said he did not believe the accusations about the first minister were correct.\n\nHe said: \"I believe that the first minister has acted in an honourable way, she's someone that I've every faith and trust in.\n\n\"I can tell you that the approval ratings for the first minister, the respect that she has right up and down the country of Scotland is enormous and this is something that will pass, when she appears in front of the committee these matters will be dealt with.\"\n\nAlex Salmond has just turned up the heat on his successor with a submission that presents a direct and serious challenge to the reputation of Nicola Sturgeon - who was once his closest political ally.\n\nWhat he no doubt considers as an attempt to secure justice, some others will see as a case of deflection and revenge.\n\nAllegations of breaking the ministerial code of conduct and misleading parliament are serious and, if upheld, potentially career threatening.\n\nYet even some of Ms Sturgeon's fiercest critics at Holyrood do not expect the inquiries into the Scottish government's mishandling of harassment complaints against Mr Salmond to force her from office.\n\nMr Salmond seems to expect the review of the first minister's actions under the ministerial code of conduct to remain narrow enough that it could not possibly find against her.\n\nThe first minister herself appears confident of persuading all comers, including a cross-party committee of MSPs (before which both she and Mr Salmond are due to appear in the coming weeks) that she has acted properly throughout.", "The star thanked fans for their messages of support\n\nThe Wanted's Tom Parker has told fans he is \"responding well\" to treatment for his brain tumour.\n\nThe singer praised the NHS as he wrote on Instagram: \"Significant reduction: These are the words I received today and I can't stop saying them over and over again.\"\n\nSharing a picture with his wife Kelsey Hardwick and their two children, he added: \"Today is a good day.\"\n\nThe 32-year-old was found to have an inoperable brain tumour last year.\n\nThe diagnosis came after he suffered two seizures last summer. Because of Covid-19 restrictions, his wife was not allowed in the hospital during three days of tests and he received the news alone.\n\nAt the time he vowed to fight the cancer \"all the way\". Two weeks later he became a father for the second time after Hardwick gave birth to a baby boy.\n\nThe singer shared a photo of his young family alongside the latest update on his health\n\nSharing an update on his condition on Thursday, Parker said: \"I had an MRI scan on Tuesday and my results today were a significant reduction to the tumour and I am responding well to treatment.\n\n\"I can't thank our wonderful NHS enough,\" he continued. \"You're all having a tough time out there but we appreciate the work you are all doing on the front line.\"\n\nThe star also thanked his wife, calling her \"my rock\", and thanked fans for their support. \"Your love, light and positivity have inspired me,\" he wrote. \"Every message has not been unnoticed they have given me so much strength.\"\n\nParker achieved fame in the early 2010s as part of The Wanted, reaching number one with the singles All Time Low and Glad You Came.\n\nSince the band went on hiatus in 2014, he has played Danny Zuko in a touring production of Grease and reached the semi-finals of Celebrity Masterchef.\n\nHe married Hardwick, an actress, in 2018. As well as Bodhi, the couple have an 18-month-old daughter.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Covid infections rose by almost a third between 26 December and 3 January, reaching 70,000 new cases a day according to a major study.\n\nIn a different piece of research, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated 1.2 million people in total had Covid over a similar time period.\n\nDaily infections are understood to have risen to about 150,000 since then.\n\nThat would bring daily coronavirus cases above the first peak.\n\nThe R or reproduction number for the virus is now between 1 and 1.4 for the UK, reflecting the sharp rise in cases in recent weeks.\n\nSeparate ONS data suggests just under half (44%) of British adults formed a Christmas bubble.\n\nThese temporary rules let up to three households mix indoors on 25 December - unless they were living in a Tier 4 area.\n\nThe ONS estimated how much of the population had Covid in the week of 27 December- 2 January:\n\nThe ONS data suggests cases rose by three-quarters between its two most recent study periods: 12-18 December and 27 December - 2 January.\n\nThe ZOE Covid Symptom Study was able to track more recent changes since there was no pause in its research for Christmas.\n\nIt found the epidemic is growing throughout the UK.\n\nResearchers estimate the virus's reproduction or R number is currently 1.2 across the UK.\n\nBoth sources indicate London has the most severe epidemic with the highest number of cases.\n\nConfirmed cases, published on the government's dashboard, are always lower than those in surveys because they mainly reflect the test results of people coming in with symptoms.\n\nBoth the ONS and ZOE also look at asymptomatic cases - people who may not otherwise get tests.\n\nSome asymptomatic testing is now available in the community but it is not being widely taken up.\n\nAbout a fifth of people responding to a separate ONS survey looking at the social impacts of the pandemic, said they had found it difficult to follow the Christmas rules.\n\nAnd half of those gave the fact that they had already made plans as the reason.\n\nRules, which were set to allow everyone in the UK to mix in a five-day window, were changed at the last minute, on 19 December.\n\nIn England, people living in Tiers 1-3 were allowed to form a one-day Christmas bubble with a maximum of two other households.\n\nThose in Tier 4, including about 10 million people in Greater London, were not permitted to mix at all.\n\nMixing was permitted in Scotland and Wales for Christmas Day only.\n\nHow has coronavirus affected you? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nOr use this form to get in touch:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your comment or send it via email to HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any comment you send in.", "A former Labour MP has quit the party before disciplinary proceedings against him concerning sexual harassment could be concluded, Labour has said.\n\nKelvin Hopkins was suspended by the party in 2017 after a Labour activist, Ava Etemadzadeh, accused him of inappropriate physical contact.\n\nMs Etemadzadeh said the ex-MP's exit from the party was \"disappointing\".\n\nThe BBC has attempted to contact Mr Hopkins, 79, for a response, but he has previously denied the accusations.\n\nA Labour spokesperson said it \"takes all complaints of sexual harassment extremely seriously and they are fully investigated in line with our rules and procedures, and any appropriate disciplinary action is taken.\n\n\"We are disappointed that the party's disciplinary processes did not reach a conclusion due to Kelvin Hopkins' decision to resign his membership,\" they added.\n\n\"We are establishing an independent process to investigate complaints, including sexual harassment, to ensure complainants can feel confident that in coming forward they will be heard and get the justice they deserve.\"\n\nMr Hopkins, who first won the seat of Luton North from the Conservatives in 1997, stood down ahead of the 2019 election - a decision, he said, which was to do with his wife's health, not the accusations.\n\nHe had originally been referred to the party's National Constitutional Committee following the allegations in 2017 and had expressed frustration at the length of time the hearing was taking.\n\nResponding to his decision to leave the party, Ms Etemadzadeh tweeted: \"This is very disappointing news. I hope Keir Starmer listens to my concerns and fixes this broken system.\"", "David Bowie left his mark with songs like Space Oddity, Let's Dance and Under Pressure\n\nA series of streamed music events, shows and new releases are marking David Bowie's birthday and the fifth anniversary of his death.\n\nThe musician would have turned 74 on Friday, while Sunday is five years since he died of cancer.\n\nA star-studded tribute concert and his 2015 stage musical Lazarus will both be streamed over the weekend.\n\nTwo previously unreleased Bowie tracks have also been released, while his music has now arrived on TikTok.\n\nThe tribute gig, titled A Bowie Celebration: Just For One Day, will feature Bowie's former bandmates alongside stars including Boy George, Duran Duran, Trent Reznor, Adam Lambert, Gary Barlow and actor Gary Oldman.\n\nStarting at 18:00 PT on Friday (02:00 GMT Saturday), the show will be led by Bowie's longtime pianist Mike Garson and will be available for 24 hours.\n\nDuran Duran released a timely cover of Bowie's track Five Years ahead of the show. \"My life as a teenager was all about David Bowie,\" singer Simon Le Bon said.\n\n\"He is the reason why I started writing songs. Part of me still can't believe in his death five years ago, but maybe that's because there's a part of me where he's still alive and always will be.\"\n\nOn Friday, Bowie's previously unreleased covers of Bob Dylan's Tryin' to Get to Heaven and John Lennon's Mother were also put out into the world.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by David Bowie - Topic This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nBBC Four is hosting a Bowie Night on Friday, while there will be special programmes on BBC Radio 4 and 6 Music. They include Bowie: Dancing Out in Space, which will air simultaneously on the two stations on Sunday.\n\nIn it, producer Tony Visconti describes how Bowie and Lennon first met awkwardly in a New York hotel room ahead of their collaborations on the former's cover of The Beatles' Across the Universe and his own 1975 song Fame.\n\n\"He was terrified of meeting John Lennon,\" says Visconti. \"About one in the morning I knocked on the door and for about the next two hours, John Lennon and David weren't speaking to each other.\n\n\"Instead, David was sitting on the floor with an art pad and a charcoal and he was sketching things and he was completely ignoring Lennon.\n\n\"So, after about two hours of that, he [John] finally said to David, 'Rip that pad in half and give me a few sheets. I want to draw you.' So David said, 'Oh, that's a good idea', and he finally opened up. So John started making caricatures of David, and David started doing the same of John and they kept swapping them and then they started laughing and that broke the ice.\"\n\nMeanwhile, next weekend will see the release of Stardust, a film biopic about Bowie's journey to becoming Ziggy Stardust, starring singer and actor Johnny Flynn.\n\nHowever, Bowie's family have not given it their blessing, meaning the film-makers were not allowed to use any of his music. Instead Flynn, as Bowie, is seen performing songs by Jacques Brel, The Yardbirds and one of Flynn's own compositions.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Heads are calling for limits to the number of pupils in school during lockdown in England, with attendance rates surging to 50% in some places.\n\nThe two head teachers' unions, NAHT and ASCL, say the high numbers attending could hamper the fight against the virus.\n\nThe Department for Education has widened the categories of vulnerable and key worker pupils who can attend.\n\nIt is insisting that schools ensure all children who qualify can attend.\n\nThe widened categories not only include vulnerable pupils and children of workers in critical occupations but also those who cannot access remote learning either because they do not have devices or space to study.\n\nChildren of parents working on the Brexit arrangements are also included.\n\nTeachers have described streets around schools being packed with parents dropping off their children and almost all staff having to come in and work despite the lockdown.\n\nHeads say they fear schools could be overwhelmed by children who do not have access to lap tops to learn remotely.\n\nJessica Jane, a learning assistant at a school in Hampshire, told the BBC: \"I work in a primary school where we are having to bring in every single member of staff as the list of key-workers is vast in our area and over 50% of our children are attending.\n\n\"Our community school is not closed and streets are packed with parents morning and afternoon collecting their children from open schools.\"\n\nShe added: \"My colleagues and I are still being put at risk every single day as are our families.\"\n\nA teacher from the Midlands who did not wish to be named said the number had risen from 10 pupils a day in the first lockdown to about 90 a day this week.\n\n\"We're talking just under to just over a third of the usual amount of pupils for our school here.\n\n\"The vast majority are key worker children, not vulnerable.\n\n\"I also know that other primary schools in our area have similar amounts of children in school - one neighbouring school in particular, which is only slightly larger than us, is estimating/averaging 100 to 160 children in school every day.\"\n\nGeoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, called the lack of limits \"bizarre... in a week when the prime minister has told the nation that it is necessary to move schools to remote education in order to suppress coronavirus transmission\".\n\n\"We are hearing reports that attendance in some primary schools is in excess of 50% because of demand from critical workers and families with children classed as vulnerable under criteria which has been significantly widened,\" he said.\n\n\"We are urgently seeking clarification about the maximum number who should be in school while protecting public health.\n\n\"This seems completely illogical given the fact that the government has taken the drastic action of a full national lockdown precisely in order to limit contacts.\"\n\nPaul Whiteman, general secretary of National Association of Head Teachers, said schools could not \"meet the demand created by government and reduce social mixing in the way the prime minister announced\".\n\n\"The government acknowledges that schools do play a role in the transmission of the virus. Therefore, there comes a point when occupancy levels might be so high that they work against the efforts to bring down infection rates in communities, as is the national aim.\n\n\"This could result in prolonging the amount of time pupils are away from the classroom, which we are all anxious to avoid.\"\n\nA Department for Education spokesman said: \"Schools are open for vulnerable children and the children of critical workers. We expect schools to work with families to ensure all critical worker children are given access to a place if this is required.\n\n\"If critical workers can work from home and look after their children at the same time then they should do so, but otherwise this provision is in place to enable them to provide vital services.\n\n\"The protective measures that schools have been following throughout the autumn term remain in place to help protect staff and students, while the national lockdown helps reduce transmission in the wider community.\"\n\nBut Emma Knights, chief executive of the National Governance Association, reflected head teachers' concerns, saying between 40 and 60% of pupils were attending schools across England.\n\n\"The real problem is we have got two different national narratives going on,\" she said - with the prime minister saying \"stay at home\" but the DfE telling schools to take all eligible children who turn up.\n\nDr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said the government seemed unable to decide whether schools were safe or unsafe.\n\nCommenting on the latest Coronavirus Infection Survey from the Office for National Statistics, Dr Bousted, said: \"Let this data end their confusion. Schools are clearly driving infection amongst children, and then onto the wider community.\n\n\"This peaked on Christmas Day with one in every 27 secondary-age children and one in 40 primary-age children infected.\n\n\"In London this rises to one in 18 secondary pupils and one in 23 primary pupils. These figures are truly shocking and entirely the result of government negligence.\"\n• None How are Covid rules changing across UK schools?", "Marion Ramsey will be remembered by fans for her notable role in the US comedy series Police Academy\n\nMarion Ramsey, best known for her acting in the American film series Police Academy, has died at the age of 73, her agent has announced.\n\nHer management at Roger Paul Inc told the BBC she died at her Los Angeles home on Thursday morning.\n\nThe agency said Ramsey had recently fallen ill, but did not give a cause of death.\n\nRamsey was adored by fans for her portrayal of the squeaky-voiced Officer Laverne Hooks in Police Academy.\n\nShe also had an illustrious career on Broadway, starring in the 1978 production Eubie!, a biographical musical about celebrated jazz pianist Eubie Blake.\n\n\"Her passion for performing and sharing her heart with the world was immense,\" Roger Paul Inc said in a statement.\n\n\"Marion carried with her a kindness and permeating light that instantly filled a room upon her arrival.\n\n\"The dimming of her light is already felt by those who knew her well. We will miss her, and always love her.\"\n\nRamsey featured in six Police Academy films as Officer Laverne Hooks\n\nBorn in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1947, Ramsey started her career in the theatre, appearing in both the original Broadway and subsequent touring productions of Hello, Dolly!.\n\nShe was prolific on Broadway, co-starring in many shows, including Harold Prince's Grind with Ben Vereen, and Eubie! with Gregory and Maurice Hines.\n\nHer agent said Ramsey was \"particularly proud\" about Broadway's Dreamgirls finally becoming a major motion picture in 2006, because she was one of the singers that the original Broadway show's producer, Tom Eyen, based the three main characters on.\n\nRamsey's career in TV and film career took off after she appeared as a guest on the hit sitcom The Jeffersons in 1976.\n\nFollowing that, she was a regular on Cos, Bill Cosby's sketch show.\n\nShe starred in six Police Academy films in total, making her a familiar face to fans of the franchise.\n\nRamsey's agent said she had an immense passion for performing\n\nAmerican actor Michael Winslow wrote in a tweet that he had \"no words to say or explain the pain\" of losing Ramsey.\n\n\"In the 80s the Police Academy films cast a long shadow over the comedy genre - they were everywhere & everyone watched them,\" British producer Jonathan Sothcott wrote. \"#MarionRamsey was hilarious as Hooks - a fine comedic actress.\"\n\nA message on the Twitter account for the movie When I Sing read: \"It is with great sadness that I share our loss of my friend, and one of the shining stars of When I Sing (her final role), the beautiful, kind, hilarious, #MarionRamsey. I will miss you, my silly sister.\"", "Most pupils will be studying from home for the rest of this half term\n\nSchools and colleges in England are to be closed to most pupils until at least half term, Boris Johnson has announced.\n\nThe prime minister said the new lockdown had to be \"tough enough\" to stop the variant virus from spreading - and teaching will go online.\n\nA-Levels and GCSEs will be cancelled, a government source confirmed to BBC News - although vocational exams will go ahead.\n\nThe National Education Union accused the government of causing \"chaos\".\n\nIn a television address, Mr Johnson announced the biggest changes to schools since the early days of the first lockdown in March.\n\n\"Because we now have to do everything we possibly can to stop the spread of the disease, primary schools, secondary schools and colleges across England must move to remote provision from tomorrow,\" said the prime minister.\n\nThis means a return to online learning for pupils of all ages - apart from vulnerable children and the children of key workers who can continue to go into school.\n\nPrimary schools went back today - and will then close again tomorrow\n\n\"We recognise that this will mean it's not possible or fair for all exams to go ahead this summer, as normal,\" said Mr Johnson.\n\nIt is understood that vocational exams will continue, but GCSEs and A-levels will be cancelled - and that the exam watchdog Ofqual will make \"alternative arrangements\" for delivering results.\n\nAn attempt to produce replacement exam grades last summer turned into one of the biggest U-turns of the pandemic.\n\nTeachers' unions accused the government of failing to react more swiftly to \"mounting evidence\" about Covid transmission in schools and to make preparations for remote teaching and alternatives to written exams.\n\nBut Mary Bousted, co-leader of the National Education Union, said Education Secretary Gavin Williamson had \"become an expert in putting his head in the sand\".\n\nGeoff Barton of the ASCL head teachers' union criticised ministers for having issued legal threats to keep schools open at the end of last term - and then \"made a series of chaotic announcements about the start of this term\".\n\nThe new term, which began on Monday for primary pupils, has only lasted a day before it has been suspended.\n\nThe prime minister said he hoped that schools would be \"reopening schools after the February half term\".\n\nThere have been assurances that there will be a more thorough approach to home learning than in the first lockdown last year.\n\nThe Department for Education has provided hundreds of thousands of computer devices - with the aim of supporting those without the equipment needed to work online from home.\n\nThere have also been suggestions Ofsted inspectors will play a more active role in checking on what support schools are providing to pupils in their online learning.\n\nUniversities in England had already planned a staggered return for this term - but there will now be even fewer students on campus this month.\n\nThe latest lockdown guidance says university students who are taking hands-on courses such as medicine or veterinary science should return for face-to-face lessons as planned.\n\nThese students will be expected to take two Covid tests or self-isolate for 10 days when they return.\n\nBut students on all other courses are being told not to come back to university if possible and to start their term online \"until at least mid-February\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Olly Stephens was pronounced dead in Bugs Bottom fields in Emmer Green, Reading\n\nA school says its community has been left \"reeling\" after a 13-year-old boy was stabbed to death in Reading.\n\nOliver Stephens, known as Olly, was pronounced dead at Bugs Bottom fields, Emmer Green, on Sunday.\n\nFour boys and a girl, all aged 13 or 14, have been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder. They remain in custody.\n\nHighdown School and Sixth Form Centre head teacher Rachel Cave described the boy's death as a \"total tragedy\".\n\nIn a statement, she said: \"This student was part of our community and many students and staff knew him well.\n\n\"Many have been deeply affected by this tragedy.\n\n\"In normal circumstances we would open the school and welcome in students for support before the start of the term.\n\n\"We are currently unable to do this, of course, but are arranging counselling support and will be establishing an electronic book of condolence.\"\n\nFlowers have been left outside Highdown School\n\nMs Cave said the school was \"a supportive and close-knit community\" which would \"work together over the coming days and weeks\".\n\nDet Supt Kevin Brown, of Thames Valley Police, said: \"Our thoughts remain with Olly's family at this incredibly difficult time.\"\n\nHe added: \"This is a tragic and shocking incident which has resulted in the death of a young boy.\"\n\nThe victim's family are being supported by specially trained officers.\n\nThames Valley Police said a \"considerable police presence\" would be in place in the area for several days\n\nOfficers were called just before 16:00 GMT on Sunday following reports of an attack.\n\nOfficers are appealing for anyone who was in the area between 15:00 and 16:30 who might have taken photos or camera footage to contact them if they notice anything suspicious.\n\nDet Supt Brown said he believed there would have been witnesses to the \"dreadful incident\" as the area is popular with dog walkers.\n\nA man said his wife was walking their dog through the park on Sunday afternoon when she saw a boy on the ground with several people around him trying to give him first aid.\n\nAnother dog walker said she saw a group of young people standing in the woods in Bugs Bottom fields at about 15:30 and described it as \"slightly unusual\".\n\nReading East MP Matt Rodda has offered his \"deepest condolences\" to the boy's family.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Matt Rodda This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSt Barnabas Church in Emmer Green has invited residents to pray and light a candle in memory of the boy.\n\nFollow BBC South on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to south.newsonline@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"We've now vaccinated over 1.3m people across the UK\"\n\nSome 1.3 million people in the UK have now received their first dose of a Covid vaccine, says the government.\n\nIn England, that includes nearly a quarter of the most elderly, vulnerable patients.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said it meant that within a two to three weeks they should have a \"significant degree of immunity\" to the virus.\n\nHe said there would be a ramping up to get more people immunised - up to 2 million a week.\n\nThe ambition is to vaccinate all the over-70s, the most clinically vulnerable and front-line health and care workers by mid-February. That will require around 13 million vaccinations.\n\nHe defended the UK's policy of immunising more people with one dose immediately - rather than holding some stock back to give people a second booster shot - in order to save \"the most lives the fastest\".\n\nUS regulators have questioned the policy, saying it is premature without more trial evidence, but the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency says it is a pragmatic decision to protect more people.\n\nBoth the Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines require two doses to provide the best possible protection.\n\nInitially, the strategy for the Pfizer vaccine was to offer people the second dose 21 days after their initial jab - full immunity starts seven days after the second dose.\n\nBut when approval was announced for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on 30 December, it was also announced that the policy would now change - the new priority would be to give as many people a first shot of either vaccine, rather than providing the required two doses in as short a time as possible.\n\nEveryone will still receive their second dose, but this will now be within 12 weeks of their first.\n\nEngland's chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty told the Downing Street press conference that extending the gap between the first and second jabs would mean the number of people vaccinated can be doubled over three months.\n\n\"If over that period there is more than 50% protection then you have actually won. More people will have been protected than would have been otherwise.\n\n\"Our quite strong view is that protection is likely to be lot more than 50%.\"\n\nAsked whether the longer gap could lead to an increase risk of the virus mutating into a version that could escape the vaccine, he said it was a worry, but a small one.\n\nChief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said vaccines would probably need to be changed further down the line to continue to be a good match for the virus - but that this was relatively quick to do.\n\nOne of the exciting things about the science of the RNA vaccines is that they are incredibly fast to make in response to new mutations, he said.", "The homes of Frank and Christine Lampard, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha and Tamara Ecclestone and her husband were broken into in December 2019\n\nFour people have been cleared of being involved in a plot to raid the luxury homes of celebrities in west London.\n\nItems belonging to Frank Lampard, Tamara Ecclestone and the family of tycoon Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha were among the items taken during three burglaries in December 2019.\n\nProsecutors said Maria Mester, 48, Emil Bogdan Savastru, 30, Sorin Marcovici, 53, and Alexandru Stan, 49, were a \"supporting cast\" for the burglars.\n\nBut a jury found all four not guilty.\n\nIsleworth Crown Court heard the three burglaries had netted \"big money\" for the raiders, with \"fabulous jewellery\" stolen and the majority of it having never been recovered.\n\nJay Rutland, Tamara Ecclestone and their daughter had left for Lapland on the morning of the burglary\n\nJewellery and cash worth £25m was taken from Ms Ecclestone's Kensington home while she was on holiday in Lapland with her husband Jay Rutland and their daughter.\n\nMr Lampard and his TV presenter wife Christine had about £60,000 in watches and jewellery stolen when they were out, while raiders also ransacked the family home of Mr Srivaddhanaprabha, who died in 2018 in a helicopter crash, the jury was told.\n\nThe four defendants were accused of eight charges including conspiracy to burgle.\n\nHowever, each denied their involvement with the plot, saying they had no knowledge that the alleged burglars were criminals.\n\nJurors were shown an image from Maria Mester's Facebook account, in which she was said to be wearing Tamara Ecclestone's necklace\n\nThe court heard escort Ms Mester had flown into the UK from Italy on 7 December.\n\nPolice described her as the plot's \"matriarch\", but the 48-year-old told jurors she was only in London after being paid £5,000 to accompany one of the alleged burglars for the week.\n\nSavastru was arrested at Heathrow Airport on 30 January as he prepared to leave for Japan, wearing Mr Srivaddhanaprabha's Tag watch and carrying a Louis Vuitton bag stolen from Mr Rutland.\n\nHe told the court he thought the items had been left behind by the alleged burglars at the Airbnb property he had helped them rent.\n\nThe four Romanian nationals were cleared of all charges apart from Savastru, who was convicted of one count of attempting to conceal criminal property.\n\nThe 30-year-old will be sentenced at a later date.\n\nA group of alleged burglars, who cannot be named for legal reasons, are accused of carrying out the raids.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Nicola Sturgeon announces stay at home rules in new lockdown\n\nScots are to be ordered to stay at home amid a fresh Covid-19 lockdown which will see schools remain closed to pupils until February.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said new curbs would be introduced at midnight in a bid to contain the new, faster-spreading strain of the virus.\n\nNew laws will require people to stay at home and work from home where possible.\n\nOutdoor gatherings are also to be cut back, with people only allowed to meet one person from one other household.\n\nPlaces of worship are to be closed, group exercise banned, and schools will largely operate via online and remote learning.\n\nThese rules will apply across the Scottish mainland until at least the end of January, and will be kept under review.\n\nIsland areas will remain in level three - but Ms Sturgeon said they would be monitored carefully.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson later announced similar lockdown measures for the whole of England with all schools and colleges closing to most pupils until mid February.\n\nA further 1,905 new cases were reported in Scotland on Monday - with 15% of tests returning a positive result, something Ms Sturgeon said \"illustrates the severity and urgency of the situation\".\n\nThe first minister said she was \"more concerned about the situation we face now than I have been at any time since March last year\", with the new coronavirus strain now accounting for half of new cases.\n\nAnd she said a \"steeply rising trend of infections\" was threatening to put \"significant pressure\" on NHS services, saying hospitals could breach capacity within three to four weeks.\n\nThe new rules - which will be put down in law - mean Scots will only be allowed to leave home for essential purposes, such as shopping for food and medicine, exercise and caring responsibilities.\n\nNo limit is to be put on how many times people can go out to exercise, but outdoor meetings are to be limited to a maximum of two people from two households.\n\nEveryone who can work from home will be required to, and people in the \"shielding\" category are advised not to go in to work at all.\n\nThe construction and manufacturing industries will remain open, but Ms Sturgeon said this would be kept under review.\n\nPlaces of worship are to close, the number of people who can attend weddings is to be cut to five, and funeral wakes will no longer be allowed.\n\nSchools are to remain closed to the majority of pupils until February, with Ms Sturgeon saying community transmission of the virus must be brought to a lower level amid concerns that the new variant of the virus spreads more easily among young people.\n\nShe said she knew remote learning presented \"significant challenges\" for parents, teachers and pupils, adding: \"I want to be clear that it remains our priority to get school buildings open again for all pupils are quickly as possible and then keep them open.\"\n\nThe first minister said she was considering whether teachers could be given the Covid-19 vaccine as a priority.\n\nMore than 100,000 people have been given a first dose of the vaccine in Scotland, and the government expects to have access to just over 900,000 doses by the end of January.\n\nHowever Ms Sturgeon said the best way to get schools open again was to drive down transmission of the virus - urging Scots to abide by the rules.\n\nThese are the toughest restrictions Scotland has faced since the lockdown of March 2020.\n\nIt is - once again - becoming compulsory to stay at home except for essential purposes like food shopping, exercise and medical care.\n\nThe extended closure of schools to most pupils is something the Scottish government was particularly keen to avoid.\n\nThese decisions are a measure of how worried ministers are about the rapid spread of the new variant of coronavirus, which is fast becoming the dominant strain.\n\nWith 225 cases per 100,000 people, Scotland is thought to be about four weeks behind London, which already has four times as many cases and NHS services under considerable pressure.\n\nThe Scottish government believes that without further action the NHS here would run out of beds for Covid patients within a month.\n\nThis new alert comes at the start of a new year which also brings new hope for a route out of the pandemic with two vaccines now beginning to offer protection.\n\nAround 100,000 doses have already been administered in Scotland but it is likely to take several months to reach all in the most vulnerable groups.\n\nThe first minister said Scotland was now in \"a race between the vaccine and the virus\".\n\nShe said: \"The Scottish government will do everything we can to speed up distribution of the vaccine. But all of us must do everything we can to slow down the spread of the virus.\n\n\"We can already see - by looking at infection rates in the south of England - some of what could happen here in Scotland. To prevent that, we need to act immediately and firmly.\n\n\"For government, that means introducing tough measures - as we have done today. And for all of us, it means sticking to the rules.\"\n\nScottish Conservative group leader Ruth Davidson raised concerns about online learning, saying it was vital that pupils had \"equal access to high-quality education\".\n\nAnd Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said teachers and working parents would need support to make the remote learning system work.\n\nMs Sturgeon said her government had \"agonised\" over the decision on schools, and said the \"fundamental priority\" was to re-open them in full as soon as possible.\n\nShe said: \"Just as the last places we ever want to close are schools and nurseries - so it is the case that schools and nurseries will be the first places we want to reopen as we re-emerge from this latest lockdown.\"\n\nThe NHS has coped so far in Scotland - more so than many other parts of the UK.\n\nBut in places like Glasgow and Lanarkshire it has been very, very tight. And here like everywhere else staff are bracing themselves for the post-Christmas effects of rising cases.\n\nThe first minister gave some stark figures on hospital and ICU occupancy - suggesting we are just weeks away from reaching limits.\n\nThere is so little give in the system they will be glad to see everything possible done to prevent stretched services being overwhelmed at a time when we are on our way to getting out the other side.\n\nThere is real anxiety about what the next few weeks might bring.\n• None Covid in Scotland: New lockdown from midnight", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. James Shaw, from Dundee, was among the first to receive the jab\n\nThe first Scottish recipients of the new Oxford University and AstraZeneca vaccine have received their jabs.\n\nJames Shaw, 82, and his 82-year-old wife Malita were among the first to be vaccinated in Dundee.\n\nThe couple received their first doses at Lochee Health and Community Care Centre.\n\nNicola Sturgeon has said she hoped all over-50s and those with underlying health conditions will have been vaccinated by early May.\n\nJames said: \"My wife and I are delighted to be receiving this vaccination. I have asthma and bronchitis and I have been desperate to have it so I am really pleased to be one of the first to be getting it.\n\n\"I know it takes a little while for the vaccine to work but after today I know that I will feel a bit less worried about going out. I will still be very careful and avoid busy places but knowing I have been vaccinated will really help me.\n\n\"All of my friends have said they are going to have the vaccine when it is their turn and I would encourage everyone who is offered this vaccination to take it.\"\n\nJames Shaw, 82, was one of the first people in Scotland to receive the AstraZeneca/Oxford Covid-19 vaccine, administered by advanced nurse practitioner Justine Williams\n\nThe Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine programme is being rolled out less than a week after it was approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). It is the second vaccine approved for use in the UK.\n\nNHS Tayside is rolling out the vaccine through GP practices in the community and will also vaccinate elderly residents and staff in care homes.\n\nIts associate director of public health Dr Daniel Chandleris said: \"The efforts of our vaccination teams have been amazing and it is testament to a real whole team approach that sees the first over-80s in the general population have their jabs today in Tayside.\n\n\"The availability and mobility of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine gives us the opportunity to start to roll out the biggest vaccine programme that the UK has ever seen across our communities.\n\n\"Over-80s are the first priority group and patients will be contacted directly to attend a vaccination session.\"\n\nScottish Secretary Alister Jack added: \"This is another important moment in our fight against the virus - every vaccination takes us a step closer to getting back to our normal lives as soon as possible.\n\n\"As with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, the UK is the first country in the world to approve and roll out the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, with the UK Government ordering and paying for millions of doses for people in all parts of the UK.\"\n\nThe milestone came as First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced a new stricter lockdown.\n\nWith the exception of essential travel, people in mainland Scotland will have to remain at home from midnight.\n\nStatistics released on Monday showed a further 1,905 people had contracted Covid-19.\n\nFigures for hospital admissions and deaths over the holiday weekend will not be published until Tuesday.\n\nMs Sturgeon likened the situation to a race between the vaccine and the virus.\n\nShe said: \"In one lane we have vaccines - our job is to make sure they run as fast as possible.\n\n\"But in the other lane is the virus which - as a result of this new variant - has just learned to run much faster and has most definitely picked up pace in the last couple of weeks.\n\n\"To ensure that the vaccine wins the race, it is essential to speed up vaccination as far as possible. But to give it the time it needs to get ahead, we must also slow the virus down.\"\n\nThe new vaccine will initially be available in the hospitals that have been delivering the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine, and new community settings will be able to deliver the jabs from 11 January.\n\nPeople in Scotland will be contacted by their health board when it is their turn to be vaccinated.\n\nThe Oxford vaccination marks a major turning point in the pandemic and will lead to a massive expansion in the UK's immunisation campaign, with enough to vaccinate 50 million people throughout the UK already on order.\n\nIt is easier to transport and store than the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which needs cold storage of about -70C.\n\nThe Oxford vaccine is logistically much easier to distribute\n\nThe UK government has said 530,000 doses of the Oxford vaccine will be available to the UK from Monday, with \"millions due by the beginning of February\".\n\nScotland will ultimately get an 8.2% share of these vaccines, based on its population.\n\nChief Medical Officer Dr Gregor Smith has said he expects the NHS in Scotland to receive 440,360 doses of the vaccine during January.\n\nThe first minister said on Monday about 100,000 people in Scotland have already received a first dose of vaccine.\n\nBoth vaccines require two doses to be administered with an interval of between four and 12 weeks.\n\nPreviously the advice was for the vaccines to have a four-week gap between doses.\n\nThe Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) then recommended as many people as possible in the top priority groups should be offered a first dose as the initial priority.", "US intelligence agencies have said they believe Russia was behind the \"serious\" cyber compromise revealed in December.\n\nPresident Trump had previously suggested China might have been behind the hack, although other members of his administration had pointed the finger at Moscow.\n\nIn a joint statement, the intelligence bodies say they currently believe fewer than 10 US government agencies saw their data compromised, although other organisations outside of government were also affected.\n\nThey say work is still going on to understand the scope of the incident, which appears to have been aimed at gathering intelligence and which they say is \"ongoing\" a month after details first emerged.\n\nThe update on the investigation came in a statement from a task force called the Cyber Unified Coordination Group which was set up to deal with the incident. It comprises intelligence and law enforcement agencies including the FBI and NSA.\n\nThe group said it was still working to understand the scope of what had taken place.\n\nEighteen thousand customers who used Orion product from the company Solar Winds were exposed but US intelligence says it believes a much smaller number saw follow-on activity from the hackers in which they stole data. The US Treasury was among those which previously acknowledged being targeted.\n\n\"This is a serious compromise that will require a sustained and dedicated effort to remediate,\" the statement said. Many organisations are having to scour their systems for signs that they may have been compromised.\n\nThe incident sent shockwaves across the US partly because the breach was undiscovered for many months and was potentially far-reaching in terms of who it might have affected. It also suggested a degree of sophistication and stealth which was widely seen as a trademark of hackers from the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence agency.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Experts have been warning for years that it's not a matter of if, but when, hackers will kill somebody\n\nSoon after the incident was revealed, President Trump raised the possibility that China might be responsible, but members of his own administration including the secretary of state and attorney general pointed the finger at Moscow. The latest statement shows the assessment of US intelligence agencies is that Russia was behind it, although it does not go so far as accusing the Russian state itself, saying only that the actor was \"likely Russian in origin\". Moscow has denied playing any part.\n\nPresident-elect Joe Biden has previously said it was important to take \"meaningful steps\" to hold those responsible to account. It is not yet clear, though, what that might involve. While some US politicians suggested the breach might even be compared to an \"act of war\", most cyber-experts disputed this and the US intelligence community has now played down suggestions that it could have had destructive impact.\n\n\"At this time, we believe this was, and continues to be, an intelligence-gathering effort,\" the latest statement says. This is significant since it suggests no evidence has been found that this was preparatory activity for a more destructive cyber-attack which might switch off systems. This may limit the US response since espionage operations do not breach the cyber norms the US itself promotes (largely because it too carries out such intelligence-gathering operations against other nations).\n\nIn December UK officials say they believed a small number of UK organisations were affected but said they did not believe they were in the public sector.", "Queensland in Australia has seen heavy rainfall as an ex-tropical cyclone crosses the state, bringing warnings of “life-threatening\" flash flooding.\n\nMeteorologists say cyclones are more likely in Australia this year because of La Nina weather conditions.", "Singapore's Covid app is widely used across the country\n\nSingapore has admitted data from its Covid contact tracing programme can also be accessed by police, reversing earlier privacy assurances.\n\nOfficials had previously explicitly ruled out the data would be used for anything other than the virus tracking.\n\nBut parliament was told on Monday it could also be used \"for the purpose of criminal investigation\".\n\nClose to 80% of residents are signed up to the TraceTogether programme, which is used to check in to locations.\n\nThe voluntary take up increased after it was announced it would soon be needed to access anything from the supermarket to your place of work.\n\nThe TraceTogether programme, which uses either a smartphone app or a bluetooth token, also monitors who you have been in contact with.\n\nIf someone tests positive with the virus, the data allows tracers to swiftly contact anyone that might have been infected. This prompted concerns over privacy - fears which have been echoed across the world as other countries rolled out their own tracing apps.\n\nTo encourage people to enrol, Singaporean authorities promised the data would never be used for any other purpose, saying \"the data will never be accessed, unless the user tests positive for Covid-19 and is contacted by the contact tracing team\".\n\nBut Minister of State for Home Affairs Desmond Tan told parliament on Monday that it can in fact also be used \"for the purpose of criminal investigation\", adding that \"otherwise, TraceTogether data is to be used only for contact tracing and for the purpose of fighting the Covid situation\".\n\nHowever, the privacy statement on the TraceTogether site was then updated on the same day to state that \"the Criminal Procedure Code applies to all data under Singapore's jurisdiction\".\n\n\"Also, we want to be transparent with you,\" the statement reads. \"TraceTogether data may be used in circumstances where citizen safety and security is or has been affected.\n\n\"The Singapore Police Force is empowered under the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) to obtain any data, including TraceTogether data, for criminal investigations.\"\n\nOn Tuesday, the country's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Vivian Balakrishnan, clarified that it was not just TraceTogether data that was used in cases of serious criminal investigations.\n\nHe said under the CPC, \"other forms of sensitive data like phone or banking records\" would also have their privacy regulations overruled in such cases.\n\nMr Balakrishnan added that to his knowledge, police had so far only once accessed contact tracing data, in the case of a murder investigation.\n\nThe minister stressed though that \"once the pandemic is over and there will no longer be a need for contact tracing, we will happily stand down the TraceTogether programme.\"\n\nMonday's announcement though sparked some controversy on social media, with people calling out the government and some users posting that they had now deleted the app.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by prEEtipls This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n\"I'm disappointed, but not at all surprised,\" local journalist and activist Kirsten Han told the BBC. \"This is actually something that I've been flagging as a concern since the earlier days of TraceTogether - and was sometimes told that I was just a paranoid fearmonger undermining efforts to fight Covid-19.\n\n\"It doesn't feel good at all to discover I was right.\"\n\n\"I think why most people are so angry about this is not that they feel like they're constantly being watched,\" one Singaporean, who did not want to be named, told the BBC. \"We already have that through other means like CCTV.\n\n\"It's more that they feel like they've been cheated. The government had assured us many times that TraceTogether would only be used for contact tracing, but now they've suddenly added this new caveat.\"\n\nAnother person told the BBC they wished they could delete the app, but daily life would be impossible without it.\n\n\"So I'm just going to disable my Bluetooth for TraceTogether from now on, unless I have to use it to enter somewhere. If the app is not only going to be used for contact tracing, then it's too much of an invasion of privacy.\"\n\nAustralian privacy watchdog Digital Rights Watch, told the BBC they were \"extremely concerned\" about the news from Singapore.\n\n\"This is the worst case scenario that privacy advocates have warned about since the start of the pandemic,\" Programme Director Lucie Krahulcova told the BBC. \"Such an approach will erode public trust in future health responses and therefore impede their efficacy.\"\n\nLike most countries, Australia has rolled out its own contact tracing app but uptake has been sluggish precisely because of privacy concerns.\n\nSingapore was among the first countries to introduce a contact tracing app nationally in March last year.\n\nThe introduction of the token in June had sparked a rare backlash against the government over concerns the device would be mandatory. An online petition calling for it to be ditched has gathered some 55,000 signatures so far.\n\nSingapore has been been one of the most successful countries in tackling the pandemic. Despite a big outbreak among its foreign workers early on, local infection rates have for months been close to zero.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Singapore rolled out its Covid tracing tokens last June", "Whitty: Priority to vaccinate those who would die from virus\n\nAndy Woodcock from the Independent asks about testing for people arriving into the UK from abroad and why it wasn't done sooner. The prime minister says the government will be bringing in measures to \"ensure that we test people coming into this country and preventing the virus from being readmitted\". Responding to a second question on schools and whether teachers and pupils should be vaccinated, Prof Chris Whitty says there is no evidence of hospitals filling up with children and it appears, that even with the new variant, \"children are relatively much less affected than other groups\". He says from a clinical point of view the real priority is to vaccinate the people that we know \"are by far the most likely to die and by far most likely to end up in hospital\". He adds there will have to be decisions made once the most vulnerable groups are vaccinated but we are not yet at that stage. The chief medical officer adds that neither vaccine currently in use in the UK has been licensed for children yet.", "Dr Radha Modgil from BBC Radio 1’s Life Hacks shares her top five tips on how to stay mentally and emotionally well during the coronavirus lockdown, all beginning with the letter C.\n\nSticking to a routine, making sure we take care of ourselves, and using our creativity in new ways are all ways she suggests we can ease the psychological toll that staying inside is having on all of us.\n\nListen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.", "Enrique Tarrio says his far-right group will turn out in numbers on Wednesday\n\nThe leader of the far-right Proud Boys group has been released after his arrest on suspicion of burning a Black Lives Matter flag last month.\n\nEnrique Tarrio faces destruction of property charges. On Tuesday, a judge ordered him to stay out of Washington.\n\nHe has reportedly admitted torching a banner taken from a black church during a rally in December in the city.\n\nPresident Donald Trump has been urging supporters to gather in the capital this week for another demonstration.\n\nOn Tuesday, a judge released him on his own recognisance pending his trial.\n\nOn Wednesday, members of Congress are due to certify Democratic President-elect Joe Biden's election victory before he takes office on 20 January.\n\nMr Tarrio has said on the social media app Parler that the Proud Boys will \"turn out in record numbers on Jan 6th\", referring to his members as \"the most notorious group of extraordinary gentlemen\".\n\nThe National Guard has been deployed by Washington DC's mayor to assist local authorities. Officials say the troops will not be armed and will be there to assist with crowd management and traffic control.\n\nA spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department, Dustin Sternbeck, told the Washington Post on Monday that Mr Tarrio had been stopped in a vehicle shortly after it entered the district.\n\nThe 36-year-old was also found during his arrest to be in unlawful possession of two devices that allow guns to hold additional bullets, a source told CBS News.\n\nThe destruction of property charge relates to a protest in Washington DC on 12 December in support of the outgoing Republican president's unsubstantiated claims of systemic election fraud.\n\nThe mostly peaceful demonstration ended in isolated scuffles as confrontations with counter-protesters broke out. Police said more than three dozen people were arrested and four churches were vandalised.\n\nMr Tarrio - who lives in Miami, where he also reportedly runs a grassroots organisation called Latinos for Trump - told the Washington Post at the time that he had burned the Black Lives Matter flag.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\n\"Let's make this simple,\" he said. \"I did it.\"\n\nBut he maintained he did not know the Asbury United Methodist Church, where the flag had reportedly flown, was predominantly attended by African American worshippers.\n\nMr Tarrio also said Proud Boy members have had their flags and hats stolen in past demonstrations without anyone being arrested for those alleged incidents.\n\nEarlier on Monday, another black church that was vandalised during December's protest sued Mr Tarrio and the Proud Boys.\n\nCounter-demonstrators were mostly kept at a distance from Trump supporter last month by Washington DC police\n\nThe Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church accused the group of climbing over a fence and tearing down a Black Lives Matter sign.\n\nKristen Clarke, head of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a statement: \"Black churches and other religious institutions have a long and ugly history of being targeted by white supremacists in racist and violent attacks meant to intimidate and create fear.\n\n\"Our lawsuit aims to hold those who engage in such action accountable.\"\n\nThe city's police department said last month it had been considering a potential hate crime charge over the incident.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Kate Thistleton will front new content from Bitesize Daily\n\nBBC TV is to help children keep up with their studies during the latest lockdown by broadcasting lessons on BBC Two and CBBC, as well as online.\n\nSchools have been closed to most children across the UK as part of tougher measures to control Covid-19.\n\nThe BBC will show curriculum-based programmes on TV from Monday.\n\nThey will include three hours of primary school programming every weekday on CBBC, and at least two hours for secondary pupils on BBC Two.\n\nDuring the first lockdown in the spring, lessons were available on iPlayer, red button and online, but not on regular TV channels.\n\nThe move comes amid concerns that low-income families may struggle to afford data packages for their children to take part in online learning.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson praised the BBC's \"fantastic\" plans on Tuesday. BBC Director-General Tim Davie said \"education is absolutely vital\".\n\nHe continued: \"The BBC is here to play its part and I'm delighted that we have been able to bring this to audiences so swiftly.\"\n\nThe primary programmes, which will be broadcast on CBBC from 09:00 every day, will include BBC Live Lessons and BBC Bitesize Daily as well as Our School, Celebrity Supply Teacher, Horrible Histories and Operation Ouch.\n\nBBC Two will cater for secondary students with programming to support the GCSE curriculum, including adaptations of Shakespeare plays alongside science, history and factual titles.\n\nBitesize Daily primary and secondary will also air every day on the red button as well as episodes being available on demand on iPlayer.\n\nCulture Secretary Oliver Dowden said the BBC \"has helped the nation through some of the toughest moments of the last century\".\n\n\"And for the next few weeks it will help our children learn whilst we stay home, protect the NHS and save lives,\" he added. \"This will be a lifeline to parents and I welcome the BBC playing its part.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Sea Shepherd is working to protect the endangered vaquita porpoise\n\nA Mexican fisherman has died after his boat collided with a larger vessel used by US conservationist group Sea Shepherd, reports say.\n\nSea Shepherd said the clash happened after fishing boats attacked one of its vessels in the Gulf of California, where it is working to protect the endangered vaquita porpoise.\n\nIt said its vessel was trying to leave when one of the boats smashed into it.\n\nThe man's family allege that his boat was intentionally rammed.\n\nHealth official Alonso Perez told AFP news agency on Monday that one fisherman died after sustaining serious injuries, while a second remained in a stable condition.\n\nSea Shepherd said its Farley Mowat vessel was removing an illegal net from a protected area on 31 December when a group of people on small fishing boats launched a \"violent attack\", including throwing Molotov cocktails.\n\n\"Following routine anti-piracy procedures, the Farley Mowat undertook defensive manoeuvring to avoid the attacks. As the vessel attempted to leave the scene, one of the [boats] aggressively swerved in front of the Farley Mowat, crashing directly into the hull\" and splitting in two, it said.\n\nThe group said it provided emergency first aid to the two men who had been on board the fishing boat.\n\nConservationists working for Sea Shepherd have been attacked several times while patrolling the vaquita refuge.\n\nThe group works with Mexican authorities to remove illegal gillnets used to catch totoaba fish, which are highly valued in Chinese traditional medicine. The nets are designed to trap the heads of fish but not their bodies, but are blamed for trapping and killing the endangered porpoises as well.", "Businesses in retail, hospitality and leisure will receive new grants to help them keep afloat until spring, Chancellor Rishi Sunak has said.\n\nThe grants will be worth up to £9,000 per property, the Treasury says.\n\nMr Sunak told the BBC he was \"committed to protecting jobs and supporting businesses\".\n\nBusiness groups welcomed the new help as a good start but warned the money still wouldn't be enough to save many firms from collapse.\n\nThe help is in addition to business rates relief and the furlough scheme, which has been extended until the end of April.\n\nFirms do not have to pay the grant money back.\n\nMr Sunak said he would consider whether or how to extend support packages in its Budget on 3 March.\n\n\"The Budget early in March is an excellent opportunity to take stock of the range of support we have put in place and set out the next stage of our economic response,\" he said.\n\nThe director general of the CBI business group, Tony Danker, earlier warned leaving additional support until the Budget could be too late for many firms, saying. \"the comprehensive restrictions required a new comprehensive response\".\n\nIt was a fear echoed by other business groups, the BCC and the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB).\n\nBCC director general, Adam Marshall, warned many smaller firms would not qualify for help and \"will be left struggling to see how this new top-up grant will help them out of their cashflow problems.\"\n\nHe also called for the support to be extended to firms in other sectors \"who are also feeling the devastating impacts of these restrictions.\"\n\nFSB chair Mike Cherry also said the funds would be a lifeline to many, but \"do not go far enough to match the scale of the crisis that small firms are facing.\"\n\nThe British Beer & Pub Association described the grants as a \"lifeline\", but added that companies on which pubs rely, such as breweries, would also need help.\n\nSeb Heeley, owner of distillery Manchester Gin, says he needs dates to plan around\n\nSeb Heeley, owner of distillery Manchester Gin, told the BBC that fixed dates to aim for are crucial for his business.\n\n\"We need a date to work towards and we don't have that so, again, we're in limbo,\" he said. \"It takes three or four weeks\" to prepare, including retraining staff, he added.\n\nHis business has been closed since October because of restrictions in the Manchester area. It borrowed money under the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS).\n\n\"We start repayment in June and there's good chance we won't be open, so they are going to have to extend that,\" he said.\n\nHe said much of the £9,000 grant will be taken up by the £6,000 a month his business owes in pension contributions and national insurance alone.\n\nMr Sunak said the new support would \"help businesses to get through the months ahead - and crucially it will help sustain jobs, so workers can be ready to return when they are able to reopen\".\n\nBusinesses such as cafes, restaurants, leisure centres and shops that do not sell essentials have been particularly hard hit by coronavirus lockdown measures as people are told to stay at home.\n\nAll non-essential shops, leisure and entertainment venues are now closed, with pubs and restaurants allowed to offer takeaway food and non-alcoholic drinks only.\n\nThe new measures contained no additional support for self-employed people.\n\nMel Stride, chair of parliament's Treasury Committee, which scrutinises the finance department's work, warned the chancellor \"must not forget those who have fallen through the gaps around previous support packages.\"\n\nWhile this is welcome and essential support, it is now clear that the most optimistic timetable for economic lift-off from the pandemic is going to be put back.\n\nThis raises questions about the length of the furlough scheme, and government-guaranteed loans.\n\nBefore this, the best-case scenario was that mass vaccination, enabling a confident reopening of the economy, would allow furloughed workers to go straight back to their jobs in late spring.\n\nThis was never the government's central forecast, but looked possible amid optimism about the vaccine last month.\n\nEven if all vulnerable people can be vaccinated by March, the first three months of the year will see school lockdowns which will harm growth, and therefore a possible double dip recession.\n\nBusiness groups which welcomed this support say they now need a clear long-term plan. They want to know that current levels of support will stay in place until most of the population is vaccinated.\n\nHundreds of thousands of self-employed workers who fell through the gaps of support remain under huge pressure, particularly ahead of the self assessment tax deadline.\n\nA decision on extending the £20 a week increase to universal credit will also be required.\n\nEngland's lockdown rules are due to be reviewed on 15 February while Scotland's will be reviewed at the end of January.\n\nIn the UK, the unemployment rate rose to 4.9% in the three months to October, with the jobless total up to 1.7 million people.\n\nThe Office for Budgetary Responsibility, the government's independent forecaster, predicts the UK economy will have shrunk by 11.3% in 2020 - the biggest decline in 300 years. It expects unemployment to peak at 9.7%.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe PM acted \"decisively\" in announcing a new lockdown in England \"in the face of new information\", Rishi Sunak says.\n\nPeople must now stay at home except for a handful of permitted reasons and schools have closed to most pupils.\n\nThe chancellor said the action was \"regrettable\" but it was \"right we take these measures\", which will be reviewed on 15 February, to suppress the virus.\n\nIt came after UK chief medical officers recommended the Covid threat level be increased to five - its highest level.\n\nBoris Johnson said vaccinating the top four priority groups by mid-February could allow restrictions to be eased, with Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove telling Sky News the measures may remain until March.\n\nMeanwhile, the prime minister is due to hold a press conference in Downing Street at 17:00 GMT with chief medical officer for England Prof Chris Whitty and the government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance.\n\nTough new lockdown restrictions forbidding people from leaving home for non-essential reasons have also come into force across the Scottish mainland. Wales has been in a national lockdown since 20 December and Northern Ireland entered a six-week lockdown on 26 December.\n\nThe UK reported a record 58,784 cases on Monday, as well as a further 407 deaths within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nMr Gove told BBC Breakfast: \"The four chief medical officers of the United Kingdom met and discussed the situation yesterday and their recommendation was that the country had to move to level five, the highest level available of alert that meant there was an imminent danger to the NHS of being overwhelmed unless action was taken.\n\n\"And so in the circumstances we felt that the only thing we could do was to close those primary schools that were open.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Gove:\" With a heavy heart but with clear evidence we had to act.\"\n\nHe said the action was taken \"with the heaviest of hearts\" and \"we had to act\" following that advice.\n\n\"It is a very, very difficult time for the whole country, that's why it's so important we do everything we can in government to vaccinate people,\" he said.\n\nHe said a million people had been vaccinated so far \"up until the weekend\" and it was hoped that number would reach more than 13 million in February.\n\nWhen asked about the target of two million vaccines a week and concerns over logistics and the safety systems, Mr Gove said the vaccination process was a \"complicated exercise\" but the NHS \"has more than risen to the challenge\".\n\nThe government was \"looking at further options\" to restrict international travel, he said.\n\nMr Gove told Sky News he could not say exactly when the lockdown in England would end, adding: \"I think it is right to say that as we enter March we should be able to lift some of these restrictions but not necessarily all.\"\n\nCabinet Office minister Michael Gove saying the lockdown may have to last to March may not come as much of a surprise to many.\n\nWhile the government has set a target of offering the most at-risk a jab by mid February, it will take several weeks longer for the full effect to be felt given it takes time for an immune response to kick in.\n\nThe bigger question is whether or not the government could have acted earlier.\n\nIt was clear before Christmas the new variant was pushing up infection rates - and that in turn would mean more hospital admissions.\n\nThe delay looks costly. Since Christmas Day, the number of Covid-19 patients in hospital has risen by 50% alone - enough to fill 18 hospitals.\n\nWhile the government did introduce tier four the weekend before Christmas in parts of the south east of England, which banned mixing over the festive period and led to the closure of non-essential shops and gyms, most of the country were allowed to meet up on Christmas Day.\n\nInfections from Christmas Day are now being felt - the numbers have been rising sharply ever since. Some of these are next week's hospital admissions - and is why the chief medical officers warned of the risk of hospitals becoming overwhelmed, which Mr Gove said persuaded them to act on Monday.\n\nIf lockdown had come earlier, it may well have been shorter.\n\nProf Andrew Hayward - a member of the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) - told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the lockdown measures \"will save tens of thousands of lives\".\n\nBut he said \"the virus is different\" and \"it may be that the lockdown measures that we have are not enough\"\n\n\"This lockdown period we need to do more than just stay at home, wait for the vaccine, we need to be actively bearing down on it,\" he said.\n\nAt Scotland's daily briefing, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon called for people to hold on to the fact there was now \"a clear route out of this pandemic\".\n\nShe said there had been urgent discussions between the four home nations about whether border controls should be tightened - and she hoped there would be an announcement soon.\n\nAnnouncing England's lockdown on Monday, Mr Johnson said hospitals were under \"more pressure from Covid than at any time since the start of the pandemic\".\n\nHe ordered people to stay indoors other than for limited exceptions - such as essential medical needs, food shopping, exercise and work that cannot be done at home - and said schools and colleges should move to remote teaching for the majority of students until at least half term.\n\nPeople who are clinically extremely vulnerable will be contacted by letter and should now shield once more, Mr Johnson said.\n\nWhile the rules become law in the early hours of Wednesday, people should follow them now, Mr Johnson added.\n\nMr Johnson said the new variant of coronavirus, which is up to 70% more transmissible, was spreading in a \"frustrating and alarming\" manner and warned that the number of Covid-19 patients in English hospitals is 40% higher than the first peak.\n\nThe House of Commons has been recalled to allow MPs to vote on England's new restrictions on Wednesday.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said his MPs would \"support the package of measures\", saying \"we've all got to pull together now to make this work\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. BBC's Laura Foster explains the order in which the Covid vaccine will be given\n\nHow will you be affected by the latest developments? What questions do you have? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Quote Message: The return of lockdown for at least the rest of January is a severe blow for much of the Scottish economy. It could be worse: this is not the peak Christmas season for retail and hospitality, though the season they’ve just had was very hard going for many, and non-existent for others. This is also the quietest part of the tourism year, so January is a relatively good month to lose one’s bookings. For many firms, it is better than last spring, because they have infection controls in place. And there is a less harsh closure scheme, meaning construction sites and others can stay open, subject to tight rules. Many employers have settled into patterns of working from home, so this does not carry the shock of last March. There was little expectation of getting staff back into offices for months yet. But that doesn’t make this time any easier for workers who are also parents. They know, from last year, how tough it is to handle childcare and lessons while schools are shut - and this time, they have to manage without good weather. The other, more negative comparison with last spring is that firms now are, typically, deeper in debt and with less spare cash to pay the bills that don’t stop - rent, and utility bills, for instance. Some delayed payments are getting tougher to keep on hold. Their frustration with the slow movement of government grant schemes is showing. They aren’t disputing the case for further lockdown but they are making their own case for support through it, and for a recovery strategy once restrictions are lifted, including a boost to consumer confidence and spending.\" from Douglas Fraser Scotland business & economy editor\n\nThe return of lockdown for at least the rest of January is a severe blow for much of the Scottish economy. It could be worse: this is not the peak Christmas season for retail and hospitality, though the season they’ve just had was very hard going for many, and non-existent for others. This is also the quietest part of the tourism year, so January is a relatively good month to lose one’s bookings. For many firms, it is better than last spring, because they have infection controls in place. And there is a less harsh closure scheme, meaning construction sites and others can stay open, subject to tight rules. Many employers have settled into patterns of working from home, so this does not carry the shock of last March. There was little expectation of getting staff back into offices for months yet. But that doesn’t make this time any easier for workers who are also parents. They know, from last year, how tough it is to handle childcare and lessons while schools are shut - and this time, they have to manage without good weather. The other, more negative comparison with last spring is that firms now are, typically, deeper in debt and with less spare cash to pay the bills that don’t stop - rent, and utility bills, for instance. Some delayed payments are getting tougher to keep on hold. Their frustration with the slow movement of government grant schemes is showing. They aren’t disputing the case for further lockdown but they are making their own case for support through it, and for a recovery strategy once restrictions are lifted, including a boost to consumer confidence and spending.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Sport\n\nProfessional sport in England can continue behind closed doors, despite a new national lockdown announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.\n\nIt means Premier League football and elite leagues in other sports are allowed to carry on.\n\nThe sport and leisure rules in England are similar to those announced in Scotland earlier on Monday.\n\nPeople living in England have been told to stay at home and schools will shut for most pupils from Tuesday.\n\nOn Monday, the UK recorded more than 50,000 new confirmed Covid cases for the seventh day in a row.\n\nFor those in England, exercising outside is allowed once a day. Venues such as gyms, tennis courts and golf courses will be closed.\n\nOrganised outdoor sport for disabled people is exempt from the new measures.\n\nGames and training in non-elite football - which includes all adult and youth grassroots, except for disabled people - have been suspended.\n\nThe Women's FA Cup is among the non-elite competitions placed on hold. All but one of the second-round matches scheduled to take place on Sunday were postponed because of Covid-19 regulations.\n\nTeams from the Women's Super League and Women's Championship enter the draw from the fourth round onwards.\n\nWhich non-elite football has been suspended? Steps three to six of the National League System (all divisions below the National League North and South) Tiers three to seven of the Women's Football Pyramid (all divisions below the Women's Championship) Women's FA Cup (classified as 'non-elite' up to and including the third round) All indoor and outdoor youth and adult grassroots football, including under-18s (except organised outdoor football for disabled people, which is allowed to continue)\n\nFollowing Monday's announcement by the prime minister, this week's sporting fixtures in England are set to go ahead as planned.\n\nIn football, the Carabao Cup semi-finals are being played on Tuesday and Wednesday, while the FA Cup third round - which has 32 fixtures spanning four days - starts on Friday.\n\nThere are also several Women's Super League, English Football League and National League games set to take place, as well as English Premiership and Premier 15s rugby union matches, plus the Masters snooker event in Milton Keynes.\n\nEarlier on Monday, Rochdale chief executive David Bottomley said he believes it is \"inevitable\" that the EFL will have to temporarily suspend fixtures because of rising coronavirus cases.\n\nSeven of last Saturday's EFL games - and 52 across the season - have been called off as teams are affected by the virus.\n\nFour Premier League matches have also been postponed this season because of coronavirus cases.\n\nWhat does the new lockdown mean for sport in England?\n\nThe UK government published its guidance for England's new national lockdown shortly after the prime minister's televised address at 20:00 GMT.\n\nHere are the points relating to sport and physical activity:\n• None Elite sportspeople (and their coaches if necessary, or parents/guardians if they are under 18) - or those on an official elite sports pathway - to compete and train\n• None Outdoor sports courts, outdoor gyms, golf courses, outdoor swimming pools, archery/driving/shooting ranges and riding arenas must also close\n• None Organised outdoor sport for disabled people is allowed to continue\n\nWhile golfing has been allowed to continue in Scotland under strict rules, courses will be closed in England.\n\nEngland Golf said it was \"extremely disappointed\" with the decision, adding it had made a \"strong case\" to keep the sport open in recent months.\n\nWhere can I exercise and who can I exercise with?\n\nYou can exercise in a public outdoor place:\n• None with the people you live with\n• None with your support bubble ( if you are legally permitted to form one)\n• None or, when on your own, with one person from another household\n• None public gardens (whether or not you pay to enter them)\n\nUK Active, a not-for-profit organisation that promotes health and fitness, says the government must act immediately to \"minimise the damaging impact of lockdown\".\n\n\"We know from the millions of people that depend on gyms, pools, and leisure centres to support their physical and mental health, how essential they are,\" said UK Active chief executive Huw Edwards.\n\n\"We cannot afford to wait until the vaccine rollout is advanced before we act, so the government must explore all options at this time and provide a credible plan for maintaining this support to millions of people who rely on these Covid-secure facilities to stay strong and healthy.\n\n\"Furthermore, the UK governments must protect this sector before it becomes too late.\"", "Internet providers are under pressure to do more to help low-income families afford data packages for their children to take part in remote learning.\n\nIt follows a decision to close UK schools to most pupils to enforce new coronavirus lockdowns.\n\nThe children's commissioner for England told the BBC that \"broadband companies really need to step up\".\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer added he thought the cost of data was \"a big problem\".\n\n\"We're asking people to endure very tough restrictions. And there has to be the other side of that contract,\" he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.\n\n\"Everybody needs to try and make this work. And that includes the companies that can take away the charging for data. It's a serious situation.\"\n\nWhen questioned about the topic at a Downing Street press conference, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: \"We are looking at... the potential costs to parents of online teaching, and we're going to do our best to support them in any way that we can and to work with the internet companies.\"\n\nThere is concern that some disadvantaged pupils are currently dependent on pay-as-you-go or monthly mobile phone subscriptions that only include a small data allowance because their families cannot afford or otherwise obtain a separate fixed broadband connection.\n\n\"There are 25 million pay-as-you go customers in the UK, and about seven million of those struggle with the cost of topping up their data,\" commented Chris Thorpe from the Centre For The Acceleration Of Social Technology charity.\n\nMany schools are using video-chat software including Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet to live-stream classes, assemblies and other activities, which all benefit from a fast, stable connection and can consume a lot of data.\n\nIn addition, other tools including Google Classroom, Tapestry and Class Dojo are used by pupils to submit schoolwork and receive marks and other feedback.\n\nThe situation became more pressing after the prime minister announced last night that England's lockdown would mean schools and colleges would remain closed to most pupils until at least the February half-term.\n\nTech for UK - a coalition of technologists and other concerned business leaders - has suggested one way forward would be for internet providers to \"zero rate\" edtech apps and websites, so that their data use would be deducted from a mobile subscriber's monthly allowance.\n\nHowever, it acknowledges the challenge in doing so is to pick which platforms to support without giving some providers an unfair advantage over others.\n\nThe Department for Education already runs a scheme for disadvantaged children who do not have access to a home broadband connection to temporarily increase their mobile data allowance.\n\nIn some cases, this involves an extra 20 gigabytes a month. In others - such as Three - it provides an \"unlimited\" data upgrade.\n\nSchools, trusts and local authorities need to request the support on a pupil's behalf.\n\nThe networks involved in the initiative include:\n\nIn cases when this is not available, the government offers 4G wireless routers - which use mobile networks to offer a wi-fi connection - as an alternative.\n\nIn addition, Vodafone provided 350,000 \"free data\" Sim cards to thousands of primary and secondary schools and colleges in November.\n\n\"We are actively considering what to do now about this new situation,\" it said.\n\nO2 pledged in October to donate 10,000 devices and 12 months of free data to \"vulnerable individuals\".\n\nAnd Virgin Media noted it had launched a discounted home broadband service for families facing financial difficulties and receiving universal credit.\n\nBT says it has already removed all caps on its home broadband plans to help ensure children can stay connected to their schools.\n\nAnne Longfield, the children's commissioner for England, said she was also concerned about the provision of devices.\n\n\"A lot of children still don't have laptops. They're surviving on broken phones,\" she told the Today programme.\n\nThe Department for Education said it had delivered more than 560,000 devices to schools and councils in England between the start of the pandemic and the end of last year.\n\nIn addition, it aims to have delivered a further 100,000 laptops and tablets to schools by the end of this week to help get closer to its overall target of one million devices.\n\nHowever, teaching groups have raised concerns about the rollout.\n\nSome children are being provided with tablets to keep them connected to their schools\n\n\"We must hear no more of rationing of equipment, as we did late last year,\" Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU) told the BBC.\n\n\"If the stockpiles exist, as the Department for Education claim they do, then they must be distributed urgently. We have heard too many stories of requests from schools not being met, or not being fully met.\"\n\nSteven George of head teachers' union, NAHT added that a website used to order laptops had been inaccessible over the Christmas break, so some members had been unable to make requests.\n\nIn addition, the Association of School and College Leaders suggested the government had \"never really got to grips\" with the issue.\n\n\"It is certainly sending out lots of laptops for disadvantaged children to schools. But there's clearly still a gap, not just in terms of the number of devices that are required but also in terms of whether families have sufficient connectivity,\" said general secretary Geoff Barton.\n\n\"This has happened because it is a crisis situation, and there hasn't been a great deal of time in which to properly assess the level of need that exists, but it does expose the fact that pre-crisis, there hadn't been a properly joined-up national strategy on digital learning.\"\n\nOthers have noted that the device allocation scheme does not extend to printers - which are needed for worksheets and other materials sent by teachers - putting low-income families at a further disadvantage.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Eileen Lynch, 94, was the first person in Northern Ireland to receive the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine\n\nUp to 11,000 people aged over 80 across Northern Ireland are set to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine this week.\n\nThe aim is to ensure everyone in that age group will be offered the vaccine by the end of January.\n\nThirty GP practices will be administering 50,000 doses of the vaccine, which was approved for use in the UK on 30 December.\n\nIt is the second vaccine to be approved in the battle against coronavirus in Northern Ireland.\n\nIt comes ahead of a UK-wide announcement by the prime minister, set to be made at 20:00 GMT on Monday, in which further restrictions will be announced.\n\nIn a statement, a No 10 spokesman said the new variant of Covid-19 had \"led to rapidly escalating case numbers across the country\" and \"further steps must now be taken to arrest this rise\".\n\nOn Monday, Northern Ireland recorded a further 1,801 Covid-19 cases and 12 more virus-related deaths.\n\nThese latest figures from the Department of Health bring the total number of deaths to 1,366, while 79,873 people have tested positive for the virus since the pandemic started.\n\nMore than 12,000 cases have been reported in the past seven days, more than double the week before.\n\nThe seven-day rate per 100,000 people is now 660 positive cases, compared to 200 per 100,000 two weeks ago.\n\nMedical experts believe that is down to the two-week easing of restrictions over the Christmas period.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland on Monday, an additional 6,110 confirmed cases of Covid-19 were announced, with six further deaths linked to the virus.\n\nNorthern Ireland is in the second week of a six-week lockdown in which non-essential retail is closed.\n\nThe first doses of the vaccine were given delivered at a GP surgery on the Falls Road in West Belfast on Monday afternoon.\n\nThe first person in Northern Ireland to receive the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine was 94-year-old Eileen Lynch.\n\nSpeaking after receiving the vaccine, Ms Lynch said she was \"delighted and privileged\" to receive it.\n\n\"I feel like I can really look forward to the year ahead now that I have been vaccinated,\" she said.\n\nThe Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine has already been used to vaccinate care home residents and staff.\n\nBy mid December, 50,000 doses of that vaccine had been made available and by 30 December, Northern Ireland's Department of Health reported that 33,000 people had been vaccinated.\n\nThis included 8,940 care home residents, 10,484 care home staff and 14,259 health and social care staff.\n\nAccording to the latest NI statistics, for the first time the percentage positive cases in the over 80s is down - an indication the vaccination process is working.\n\nThere are approximately 82,000 people over 80 in NI and BBC News NI understands that if deliveries of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine happen as planned, it is thought that all of those over 80, as well as GPs and their staff, could be vaccinated within three weeks.\n\nWhile 50,000 doses have been delivered to Northern Ireland, a further 23,000 vaccines are expected on 19 January while another 68,000 are due on 24 January.\n\nDr Alan Stout, who is a GP in Belfast, told BBC News NI that members are \"very optimistic\" that 11,000 people can be vaccinated this week.\n\nThe Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is the second coronavirus vaccine to be approved in the UK\n\nNI's chief medical officer said the Oxford-AstraZeneca rollout would run alongside the ongoing vaccination programme.\n\nDr Michael McBride said: \"First and foremost we must act to protect those most at risk of severe disease and death.\n\n\"The evidence shows that the initial dose of vaccine offers as much as 70% protection against the effects of the virus.\n\n\"Providing that level of protection on a large scale will have the greatest impact on reducing mortality and hospitalisations, protecting the health and social care system.\"\n\nThe Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine has to be kept at an extremely low temperature which complicates handling constraints.\n\nThe Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is considered easier to store and distribute.\n\nIts rollout consists of two full doses of the vaccine, with the second dose to be given four to 12 weeks after the first.\n\nGPs are appealing to the public to remain calm and wait to be called for their vaccine either by telephone or by letter.\n\nDr Stout said as demand grows worldwide for the vaccine, that schedule could easily change.\n\n\"The public have to be patient, we have a system and must be allowed to get on with it - it really is 'don't call us - we will call you'.\"\n\nWhile some vaccinations will take place in surgeries others will happen in a drive-through system.\n\nCovid-19 is deadlier than flu, which means January 2021 is going to be even tougher than usual.\n\nAlso, Covid patients tend to stay much longer in hospital with more severe symptoms requiring additional beds and care.\n\nBut those rising patient numbers aren't matched by an increased workforce.\n\nInstead it is expected that the nurse-patient ratio will increase (even though many aren't trained to work in critical care) as there simply aren't enough nurses available.\n\nSome health unions fear this will only add to Northern Ireland's excess mortality rate, which is greater than that in Great Britain.\n\nOnce again, this highlights Northern Ireland's failing health care system, which was already below par well before the start of the pandemic.\n\nCoronavirus infection figures here are expected to peak between 15 and 21 January. That will be felt not only in hospitals but also in GP practices as they continue to roll out the vaccine.\n\nWhile at this stage the six weeks look bleak it's hoped that the additional Astra-Zeneca vaccine and the low incidence of flu will go a long way in not only saving lives, but also protecting the health service.\n\nDr Stout said much planning had gone into ensuring the programme happened as smoothly as possible.\n\n\"People will literally stay in their cars and be asked to roll up their sleeves - it has to be safe and efficient in order for us to get through it and safely.\"\n\nThe UK has ordered 100 million doses of the new vaccine - enough to vaccinate 50 million people.\n\nMeanwhile, Dr Tom Black, chair of the British Medical Association in Northern Ireland, said it was \"appalling\" that the Pfizer vaccine was not to be administered in two doses within 21 days as instructed by the company and threatened legal action.\n\nDr Black was responding to news that the UK will give both parts of the Oxford and Pfizer vaccines 12 weeks apart.\n\n\"They have left care workers in Northern Ireland with a gap in their expected immunity,\" he told BBC NI's Radio Foyle on Monday.\n\n\"In that period doctors, nurses, porters or health care professionals could infect patients because they will not be protected against the transmission of the infection to patients.\"\n\nThe UK's chief medical officers have defended their Covid vaccination plan.\n\nThey said getting more people vaccinated with the first jab was \"much more preferable\" and that the great majority of the initial protection from clinical disease is after the first dose of vaccine.\n\nDr Black is to meet NI Health Minister Robin Swann later to express health care workers' concern over the change in vaccine policy.", "Food banks have seen increased demand during the pandemic\n\nThe UK \"cannot duck\" tackling inequalities of health, ethnicity, education and jobs post-Covid, a major review has warned.\n\nThe report's chairman, Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton, says a lot of work to repair and rebuild the damage will be needed after the pandemic.\n\nThe Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) Deaton Review of Inequalities warned the fabric of society was under threat.\n\nThe review says there is a \"once-in-a-generation opportunity to tackle the disadvantages faced by many that this pandemic has so devastatingly exposed\".\n\n\"We now face a set of challenges which we cannot duck.\"\n\nSir Angus said: \"As the vaccines should, at some point this year, take us into a world largely free of the pandemic, it is imperative to think about policies that will be needed to repair the damage and that focus on those who have suffered the most.\n\n\"We need to build a country in which everyone feels that they belong.\"\n\nWhile the pandemic had highlighted the disproportionate impact on ethnic minority groups and deprived communities, it also showed that the UK's best-paid and most highly educated have been \"much better able to ride out the crisis\", the report said.\n\nYoung people have been among the worst hit economically\n\nChildren from poorer households found it harder to do schoolwork during lockdown and have been more likely to miss school since September, it noted.\n\nAnd while the biggest risk factor for coronavirus is age, younger people have been hit harder by the economic consequences of the crisis.\n\nThe cost of the pandemic is \"just colossal\" IFS director Paul Johnson told the BBC's Today programme.\n\n\"We've seen the biggest reduction in national income, essentially in history, over the last year, we've seen the biggest public deficit in history outside of the two world wars, so there's no getting around the fact that the pandemic and the response to it has had a bigger effect on the economy than anything essentially in the whole of history.\"\n\nThe report highlighted the effects of the pandemic on different groups, including on education, which is \"probably more worrying\" than the overall economic effect, Mr Johnson said.\n\n\"The first lockdown lockdown saw a dreadful impact on the education particularly of poorer children... they were getting less in the way of online lessons from their schools.\n\n\"There's a huge private school/state school divide in this, but also a big divide within state schools between those children who had support at home, had the facilities at home - laptops and internet and so on - but who also had the support from school - so there's a big impact on education but also a very unequal one,\" he added.\n\nThe review is calling for extra support for children who have fallen behind and help for school and university leavers to find jobs.\n\nIt says the welfare safety net must be adapted so it supports non-traditional forms of employment, including insecure and self-employed workers, and minority ethnic groups must be given greater economic opportunities.\n\nProgress in reducing poor mental and physical health could be \"one of the clearest indications of success of economic and social policy\", it adds.\n\nMark Franks, director of welfare at the Nuffield Foundation, which funded the review, said: \"Individuals are subject to a wide range of potential vulnerabilities around dimensions including age, ethnicity, place of birth, education, income and the nature of their employment.\n\n\"Where these vulnerabilities intersect, they can amplify and reinforce one another and play a huge role in driving unequal outcomes.\"\n\nHowever, the government said it was already spending vast sums to support people and the economy through the pandemic.\n\nA spokesman said: \"We're doing everything we can to ensure our coronavirus support reaches those who need it the most, which is why we've invested more than £280bn to protect the incomes, livelihoods and health of millions of people across the UK.\"\n\nThis included an additional £9bn for the welfare system and £2bn for the Kickstart Scheme, tripling traineeships, incentives for firms hiring apprentices and doubling the number of work coaches \"so that nobody is left without hope or opportunity\", the spokesman said.", "Economy Minister Diane Dodds has written to Cabinet Office Secretary Michael Gove to call for urgent action to be taken on deliveries to NI.\n\nSince Christmas some orders have been cancelled or delayed and some retailers have suspended deliveries.\n\nThe problem is related to uncertainty about post-Brexit transition rules.\n\nHM Customs announced a grace period on New Year's Eve confirming most parcels from GB-NI will not need customs declarations until at least April.\n\nThe problems have not affected all companies with many continuing to take orders and deliver as normal.\n\nHowever, some companies had already suspended deliveries, including John Lewis.\n\nThe government said the three-month grace period \"recognises the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland, the impacts of any disruption to parcel movements in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and specific challenges for operators moving express consignments\".\n\nA government spokesman said further details will be published in the new year, adding: \"Our priority is to have a pragmatic approach that allows us to comply with the [Northern Ireland] Protocol without causing undue disruption to businesses and citizens.\n\n\"HMRC is engaging with operators to finalise arrangements.\"\n\nSome changes have already come into effect.\n\nA Northern Ireland-based business receiving goods valued at £135 or more through an express carrier or Royal Mail will need to submit a customs declaration.\n\nThey will need to do this within three months of receiving the goods and can use the government's Trader Support Service to do so.\n\nExcise goods, which mostly refers to alcoholic drinks, will also need a declaration when being sent from GB to NI.\n\nThe government has advised retailers of those goods to contact their delivery company.\n\nIt said: \"They will then tell you if they carry the type of goods you want to send and, if they do, they will ask you to provide any additional information that they need so that a declaration can be made.\"", "About 10 UK nationals resident in Spain say they were wrongly turned back when their flight landed in Barcelona.\n\nThey left Heathrow on the Saturday morning British Airways flight, but were refused entry on arrival.\n\nThey were stopped by border police and ultimately flown back to the UK.\n\nSpain has banned all but Spanish nationals and residents flying from the UK to Spain since 22 December in the hope of containing the spread of the new UK strain of Covid-19.\n\nOne passenger on the flight, who did not wish to be named, said that those on board had been told repeatedly that only Spanish nationals or residents would be allowed to enter the country and that their residency certificates, also known as green certificates, were shown to airline staff several times.\n\nHowever, on arrival, British passengers with green residency certificates were prevented from entering Spain.\n\nBA has confirmed that about 10 people were denied entry into Barcelona, as they did not meet the Spanish authorities' required criteria.\n\nOne of those affected, Ruth O'Leary, said: \"I was very confused, obviously. I asked them what other documents I could provide.\n\n\"They seemed to be just flat-out refusing anything I had and just wouldn't let me on the flight. Very upsetting really.\n\n\"Quite an awful feeling not to be able to go back to your own house and to not really be given an explanation why you can't go home.\"\n\nOther British expat passengers have also said that they have been stopped from boarding planes to Spain.\n\nOne passenger on board said that seven British citizens were prevented from boarding a British Airways/Iberia flight from Heathrow to Madrid on Saturday evening, despite having their green residency certificates, as well as negative Covid tests.\n\nThe exact number of flights and passengers affected has not been released by the Foreign Office.\n\nIn a statement on Monday, Iberia said that on 1 January, it received an email from the border police saying that registration as a European citizen was no longer considered to be a valid document to prove legal residency in Spain as a British citizen.\n\nHowever, by 19:30 on 2 January, the airline received a second email, confirming that the document could be used if it had not expired.\n\nA British Airways spokesperson said: \"In these difficult and unprecedented times with dynamic travel restrictions, we are doing everything we can to help and support our customers.\"\n\nThe Spanish Embassy in London tweeted a letter stating it was aware that during the current travel restrictions, there had been some problems for British nationals resident in Spain who had not been allowed to return.\n\nThe embassy clarified that green certificates were valid proof of residency.\n\nThe Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: \"We have worked closely with the Spanish government to resolve these issues.\n\n\"The Spanish Embassy in London has re-confirmed today that both the green residence certificate and the new residence TIE card [Photo-ID card] are equally valid in terms of proving residence in Spain, as set out in the [Brexit] Withdrawal Agreement.\"", "South Wales Police piloted the use of facial recognition in Cardiff - it was later ruled unlawful\n\nPolice should be allowed more access to facial recognition technology, a firm developing it for use in the private sector has said.\n\nLast year, appeal court judges ruled a trial project to scan thousands of faces by South Wales Police was unlawful. The force did not appeal.\n\nWelsh company Credas said laws were not keeping up with the latest technology.\n\nThe Home Office said it wants police to use new crime-reducing technology while \"maintaining public trust\".\n\nCredas believes such facial recognition technology could be a vital tool in fighting crime.\n\n\"Ten years ago it would have felt space age, but now it's everywhere - just logging into my phone or laptop, we're all used to it now,\" said chief executive Rhys David.\n\n\"But the legislation will never keep up with the technological advancements.\"\n\nThe firm, based in Penarth in the Vale of Glamorgan, works with firms to prevent crime in commercial settings, helping them confirm a client's identity.\n\nIt can include estate agents, the legal sector, accountancy or gambling operations - any businesses regulated to reduce fraud and money laundering.\n\n\"There's common stories of people buying houses with someone else's identity and manipulating the paperwork so that the funds get transferred into the wrong account and it's too late then - we can't recover that,\" said Mr David.\n\n\"It's a very difficult position to be in, but technologies like ours are closing the gap.\"\n\nApps can compare people's picture to that on their passport\n\nCredas's app uses facial recognition - people take a selfie and the app compares it to a photograph of their passport to verify they are who they claim to be.\n\nClaire Williams works for FBM estate agent in Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, which has been using the software for the past two years.\n\n\"Before we would take people's passports or driver's licence, they would either come into the office and we would photocopy it, or we would even accept a scanned, emailed copy.\n\n\"There would be no way of knowing whether these were legitimate passports and driver's licences.\n\n\"They might have been using fake IDs, trying to launder money through the property industry - putting money into the properties, then reselling them to launder the money.\"\n\nBut scanning faces to confirm details for a mortgage is a very different beast to automated facial recognition, which is what was being trialled by South Wales Police - scanning faces in a crowd, often without people's knowledge.\n\nThat was ruled unlawful after a challenge by civil rights group Liberty and Ed Bridges from Cardiff.\n\n\"Real-time surveillance is considerably more complex than in the commercial space where it's a fairly static, controlled environment. But we should be adopting it and encouraging it to reduce a criminal footprint,\" added Mr David.\n\n\"I find it really sad that the police aren't encouraged to use technology like this to keep our country safe.\n\n\"Let's be honest, the police don't want to sell us trainers. They're not looking to capture our images or biometric footprints to sell us goods. It's to keep us safe, so the police can run very sophisticated facial matching programmes in real time to identify criminals.\"\n\nThe frustration was echoed by the surveillance camera commissioner, Tony Porter, who is the independent regulator appointed to oversee the use of camera systems in England and Wales.\n\nFollowing the appeal court ruling on South Wales Police in August, he said he had been \"fruitlessly and repeatedly\" calling for an updated code the police could follow.\n\nWhile campaigners Liberty felt the court's ruling left little room for the technology to be safely used, Mr Porter disagreed, adding: \"I believe adoption of new and advancing technologies is an important element of keeping citizens safe.\"\n\nHe has issued new guidance on the use of facial recognition in light of the case, but it remains just that - guidance, not law.\n\nIt has left police forces still trying to iron out the problems raised by the Court of Appeal - the potential for gender and ethnic biases and a robust code to cover when, how and where the technology can be used, and in search of whom.\n\nProf Martin Innes, from the Universities' Police Sciences Institute, evaluated the rollout of automatic facial recognition for South Wales Police in 2018, flagging ethical and regulatory challenges facing forces.\n\n\"If you look back at the history of new and innovative technologies in policing this is what always happens. You have to let the law catch up a little bit and find out what matters and where the key points of regulation are,\" he said.\n\nAt present, different standards between the private and public sectors \"could be very, very confusing,\" he added.\n\n\"There is a risk that these technologies get introduced almost by stealth and they start popping up everywhere.\"\n\nPembrokeshire estate agent Claire Williams now uses a facial recognition app to match faces to identity\n\nIn a way, some of that has already happened, from mobile phones that can detect your face to hi-tech doorbells\n\nStopping criminal harm \"seems to be an equally justifiable reason\" to use the technology, argued Prof Innes.\n\n\"But we need to think quite carefully about how far do we want this to go, and where is it appropriate for us to introduce these technologies in our lives.\n\n\"There are issues - but there are potentially opportunities and benefits to be gained if it can be done in the right way, as well.\"\n\nThe Home Office and the police say they will consider any ideas that could improve the way live facial recognition technology is used.\n\n\"We want police to use new technologies, like live facial recognition, in a way that reduces crime while maintaining public trust,\" said a Home Office spokesperson.\n\n\"We are working closely with the police to ensure national College of Policing guidance complies with the Court of Appeal's request to clarify how live facial recognition will be used.\n\n\"The government committed in the Home Office Biometrics Strategy to review the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice and it will be updated in due course.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Virgin Holidays has become the latest travel firm to cancel holidays after new coronavirus lockdown restrictions were imposed.\n\nIt said schedules will be cancelled until mid-February, joining similar moves by Tui, Jet2 and Thomas Cook.\n\nThe companies said customers would be contacted about their future travel options during what Virgin described as \"these extraordinary circumstances\".\n\nThomas Cook said it will call customers to offer refunds or rebooking.\n\nTui said it was \"cancelling all holidays in line with international travel restrictions\". It added that said customers due to depart from England, Scotland and Wales would be contacted to discuss options.\n\nThe company said that customers due to travel from an English airport before mid-February, or from a Scottish or Welsh airport up to 31 January, would not be able to do so.\n\nThose customers will be contacted \"in departure date order to discuss their options\", Tui said, which include rebooking \"with an incentive\", getting a credit note, or a full refund.\n\n\"Customers currently overseas can continue to enjoy their holidays as planned and we will update them directly if there are any changes to their holidays,\" Tui added.\n\nIn a statement, Virgin said: \"In line with the new national lockdown restrictions we have reviewed the upcoming holiday schedule and will be cancelling all holidays up to and including 14 February 2021.\n\n\"To simplify the options and to provide immediate peace of mind for customers whose holidays will no longer be going ahead, we're automatically providing a digital voucher for the value of their trip, redeemable up until 30 September 2021, which they can use to rebook a holiday, departing any time before 31 December 2022.\"\n\nVirgin added that customers \"may also request a refund\".\n\nMeanwhile, Jet2 said it was extending \"the suspension of flights and holidays up to and including 11 February 2021\".\n\nA spokesman said: \"For customers due to travel from 12th February onwards, we will provide another update closer to the time.\"\n\nThomas Cook, which became an online-only travel brand in September after its earlier collapse, said: \"Following the announcement of the latest lockdown, we are calling our customers to offer refunds or move their holidays to a later date.\".\n\nChief executive Alan French said: \"We've seen over the festive period that customers are looking ahead to the summer and beginning to book in earnest for those important summer weeks in the sun.\n\n\"I am sure that after many more weeks spent at home - and with the progress of the vaccine rollout - we will see an even bigger demand for people to escape to the beach this summer.\"\n\nLast month, a number of countries suspended routes to the UK due to the rapid spread of a new variant of coronavirus.\n\nThe blanket travel ban to the EU was then lifted, but with rules varying from country to country. The suspension of flights between the UK and China remains in place.\n\nLast year Tui was investigated by competition authorities after complaints that it had not given prompt refunds.\n\nBritish Airways Holidays, part of Britain's biggest airline, said it would be offering refunds if customers are no longer allowed travel.\n\nThe firm said in a statement: \"We are contacting all affected British Airways Holidays customers following the announcement of new national lockdown restrictions.\n\n\"Customers due to depart by 12 February 2021 will be offered a refund for their holiday. Our teams continue to monitor the situation and update our policy accordingly.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Keir Starmer: \"If we pull together as a nation, we can win\"\n\nSir Keir Starmer has called for a \"round the clock\" vaccination programme to tackle the rise in Covid cases.\n\nAs part of a televised speech, the Labour leader said the government needed to deliver \"millions of doses a week by the end of the month\".\n\nHe said there were \"serious questions for the government to answer\" over the timing of the lockdown in England, but Labour would support the restrictions.\n\nBoris Johnson said daily vaccination figures would be published from Monday.\n\nThe prime minister has also said the four most vulnerable groups of people across the UK should receive their first dose by mid-February.\n\nBoth the PM and Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, have announced lockdowns this week.\n\nWales has been in a national lockdown since 20 December and Northern Ireland entered a six-week lockdown on 26 December.\n\nEngland's lockdown will become law from 00:01 GMT Wednesday and MPs will return to the Commons later that day to vote on the measures retrospectively.\n\nThe restrictions come into force as the number of new daily confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK topped 60,000 for the first time since the pandemic started.\n\nOn Tuesday, 60,914 had tested positive in the previous 24 hours and a further 830 people had died within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nIn an address to the nation on BBC One, in response to Boris Johnson's televised address on Monday, Sir Keir said the UK had reached a \"critical moment in our fight against coronavirus\".\n\nThe Labour leader said people were \"angry at the mistakes the government has made\" and ministers needed to answer questions on why they did not act sooner over locking down England.\n\nHe stressed that Labour would continue to hold the government to account, but added: \"Whatever our quarrels with the government and with the prime minister, the country now needs us to come together.\n\n\"At this darkest of moments, we need a new national effort to re-kindle the spirit of last March - to come together and to do everything possible to stay at home [and] to protect the NHS and save lives.\"\n\nSir Keir reiterated that Labour would support the new lockdown when it comes to the retrospective Commons vote on Wednesday and \"join in this national effort\".\n\nBut he called for the government to use the lockdown to establish \"a massive, immediate, and round the clock vaccination programme\" to \"deliver millions of doses a week by the end of the month in every village and town, every high street and every GP surgery\".\n\nThe Labour leader added: \"This is now a race between the virus and the vaccine and if we pull together as a nation, we can win.\n\n\"We need a new contract between the government and the British people: The country stays at home, the government delivers the vaccine.\"\n\nEarlier at a Downing Street press conference, Mr Johnson said more than 1.3 million people across the UK had now been vaccinated with either the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines.\n\nThe figure included 23% of over-80s in England - part of a programme Mr Johnson said aimed to save \"the most lives the fastest\".\n\nThe PM said there will \"still be long weeks ahead\", but that he wanted to give \"maximum possible transparency\" about the vaccination roll-out.\n\nMore details will be announced on Thursday, with daily updates starting on Monday, \"so that you can see day by day and jab by jab how much progress we are making\", he added.\n\nAsked whether the target could be met, Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty, said the timetable was \"realistic but not easy\".", "Margaret Ferrier admitted travelling back from London to Glasgow after testing positive for coronavirus\n\nScottish MP Margaret Ferrier has been arrested by police after she admitted using public transport while infected with Covid-19.\n\nMs Ferrier apologised for what she called a \"blip\" in September.\n\nShe was suspended from the SNP group at Westminster and leaders, including First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, urged her to quit as an MP over the row.\n\nPolice Scotland said she had been charged in connection with \"alleged culpable and reckless conduct\".\n\nMs Ferrier apologised in September after travelling from London to Glasgow having tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nThe Rutherglen and Hamilton West MP said she had experienced \"mild symptoms\" and taken a test, but had then decided to travel to Westminster because she was \"feeling much better\".\n\nShe then travelled home again on a train after receiving the positive test result, and said she \"deeply regretted\" her actions.\n\nA Police Scotland spokesman said: \"We can confirm that officers today arrested and charged a 60-year-old woman in connection with alleged culpable and reckless conduct.\n\n\"This follows a thorough investigation by Police Scotland into an alleged breach of coronavirus regulations between 26 and 29 September 2020.\n\n\"A report will be sent to the procurator fiscal and we are unable to comment further.\"\n\nMs Ferrier has been contacted for comment.", "Potentially life-saving cancer operations have been put on hold at a major London NHS trust because of the number of beds taken by Covid patients.\n\nKing's College Hospital Trust has cancelled all \"Priority 2\" operations - those doctors judge need to be carried out within 28 days.\n\nCancer Research UK said such cancellations did not appear to be widespread across the country.\n\nAnd surgery has not been stopped on the same scale as during the first wave.\n\nRebecca Thomas, who has had her bowel cancer surgery at King's College Hospital \"cancelled indefinitely\", told the BBC she felt like she had been left \"in limbo\".\n\nUntil she has surgery her tumour cannot be studied to see how aggressive it is, and so she won't know until then how significant this wait will turn out to be.\n\nA spokesperson for the Trust, which mainly serves patients in south London, said: \"Due to the large increase in patients being admitted with Covid-19, including those requiring intensive care, we have taken the difficult decision to postpone all elective procedures, with the exception of cases where a delay would cause immediate harm.\n\n\"A small number of cancer patients due to be operated on this week have had their surgery postponed, with patients being kept under close review by senior doctors.\"\n\nProf Neil Mortensen, President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, said he had heard from members that \"hospitals across London are having to cancel cancer surgeries as a result of the huge number of Covid-19 patients being hospitalised.\"\n\nBut it hasn't yet emerged as an issue affecting hospitals outside London.\n\nWhen Covid-19 hit last March, NHS England developed guidance on prioritising patients who needed operations, with emergency procedures that needed to be carried out within 24 hours coming first.\n\nThese life-saving operations have continued throughout the pandemic and there is no prospect of that stopping.\n\nHowever, patients in the \"priority 2\" category - who should have surgery within 28 days, to save their life or stop their disease progressing \"beyond operability\" - have found their operations being cancelled at King's.\n\nThe 28-day guideline is based on the patient's individual symptoms and the expected growth rate of their particular cancer.\n\n\"Delays further than that could have a negative impact on that person's chance of survival,\" according to Kruti Shrotri at Cancer Research UK.\n\nAnd delays in diagnosis and treatment in general can lead to worsening chances of recovery, she said.\n\nThis will vary dramatically by person and cancer type, but in some cases, a matter of a few weeks can make the difference between a cancer that can be survived or not.\n\nGenevieve Edwards, chief executive at Bowel Cancer UK, said research showed \"even a month's delay to cancer treatment can increase a person's risk of dying by up to 13% - a risk that keeps rising the longer their treatment is delayed\".\n\nWhile this was \"really concerning to hear,\" she said, \"it's not by and large something we've heard is happening widespread across the country\".\n\nThis is an improvement from the first wave of Covid-19 when the NHS had to put a near-blanket ban on non-urgent surgery.\n\nBut for those patients who are affected, this news will be \"incredibly hard,\" and Ms Shrotri stressed that patients with any symptoms that could be cancer should not put off going to see their GP.\n\n\"The NHS is open,\" she said.\n\nSurgery is most at risk because of the shortage of intensive care beds - but other forms of cancer treatment, including radiotherapy, should continue.\n\nNHS Providers, which represents hospital bosses in England, said trusts were doing all they could to \"prioritise on the basis of clinical need\".", "The number of new daily confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK has topped 60,000 for the first time since the pandemic started.\n\nAccording to government figures on Tuesday, the number of people who tested positive was 60,916.\n\nOne in 50 people in private households in England had Covid last week - and one in 30 in London, according to estimates based on the latest data.\n\nA further 830 people have also died within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nIt comes as England and Scotland announced new strict lockdowns, with people told to stay at home.\n\nAt a press conference at Downing Street on Tuesday, Boris Johnson said 1.3 million people had now been vaccinated in the UK - including 23% of over 80s in England, some 650,000 people.\n\nBut he said more than one million people were currently infected - with the number of patients in hospitals 40% higher than in the first peak.\n\nThe government's chief medical adviser Prof Chris Whitty cited the Office for National Statistics' random sampling data for England as showing how widespread the virus is.\n\n\"We're now into a situation where across the country as a whole, roughly one in 50 people have got the virus, higher in some parts of the country, lower in others,\" he said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Professor Chris Whitty: \"No evidence\" the new variant is \"more dangerous\"\n\nThe number of new daily cases has consistently been above 50,000 since 29 December.\n\nBack in the first peak of the pandemic in the spring, the number of daily confirmed cases never went above 7,000.\n\nHowever, it is thought the true number of cases then was much higher but not picked up because testing capacity was limited. It was estimated there were about 100,000 new infections a day at the end of March - but there was not the testing to detect it.\n\nHospital admissions of people with Covid-19 in England also reached another record high on Tuesday, NHS England figures show.\n\nAt a hospital in Lincolnshire, a \"critical\" incident has been declared after a sharp rise in patients requiring admission.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. How NHS nurses and doctors are struggling to cope with Covid as cases continue to rise in England\n\nAnd potentially life-saving cancer operations have been put on hold at a major London NHS trust because of the number of beds taken by Covid patients.\n\nHowever, Cancer Research UK said such cancellations did not appear to be widespread across the country.\n\nIn a statement after the case numbers were released, Public Health England medical director Yvonne Doyle said the rapid rise in cases was \"highly concerning and will sadly mean yet more pressure on our health services in the depths of winter\".\n\nAfter seven consecutive days of more than 50,000 cases being confirmed, the fact that more than 60,000 have been recorded should not come as a surprise.\n\nIt will take a week, if not more, for the impact of lockdown to be felt.\n\nAnd all the evidence suggests the new variant of coronavirus, which is more transmissible than previous ones, means the impact is likely to be more limited than it was in previous ones.\n\nThe figures are also a warning about what the NHS is facing.\n\nSome of this week's infections are next week's hospital admissions.\n\nAbout three in 10 beds are now occupied by Covid patients. In some hospitals more than six in 10 are.\n\nHospitals are now busy making more spaces on their wards - that means cancelling planned work, including in some places cancer treatment.\n\nBoris Johnson and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon both announced new lockdowns on Monday.\n\nWales has been in a national lockdown since 20 December and Northern Ireland entered a six-week lockdown on 26 December.\n\nRestrictions are also being tightened further in Northern Ireland, and an order for people to stay at home will become legally enforceable from Friday.\n\nIn a televised address to the nation, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer urged the government to use the lockdown to create a \"round the clock\" vaccination programme.\n\nHe also called on people to \"recapture the spirit\" of the beginning of the pandemic.\n\nAt the press conference on Tuesday, Mr Johnson repeated his suggestion that there is a \"prospect\" of the lockdown being eased in mid-February.\n\n\"But you will also appreciate there are a lot of caveats, a lot of ifs built into that, the most important of which is that we all now follow the guidance,\" he said.\n\nEarlier, Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove told Sky News he could not say exactly when the lockdown in England would end, but \"as we enter March we should be able to lift some of these restrictions but not necessarily all\".\n\nMr Whitty said the virus \"is not going to go away, just as flu doesn't go away, just as many other viruses don't go away\".\n\n\"We shouldn't kid ourselves that this just disappears with spring,\" he said.\n\nMr Whitty said although hopefully there would be nearly no measures needed from the spring onwards, the government might have to bring in a few restrictions next winter.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"We've now vaccinated over 1.3m people across the UK\"\n\nOn Monday the UK's chief medical officers recommended the Covid threat level be increased to five - its highest level.\n\nAlthough the new variant is now spreading more rapidly than the original version, it is not believed to be more deadly.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. BBC's Laura Foster explains the order in which the Covid vaccine will be given", "Supermarkets' online shopping operations have come under strain with customers rushing to book deliveries as the new coronavirus lockdown began.\n\nWithin a couple of hours of Prime Minister Boris Johnson's speech to the nation on Monday, shoppers reported problems with Sainsbury's and Tesco.\n\nSainsbury's said on Tuesday that earlier it had restricted access to its online services to manage high demand.\n\nThe surge in demand echoes consumers' reaction at the start of the pandemic.\n\nSainsbury's said: \"We temporarily limited access to our groceries online service last night so that we could manage high demand for slots and updates customers were making to existing orders.\n\n\"We're continuing to monitor the situation and are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.\"\n\nA spokeswoman said customers should now be able to use the Sainsbury's app and website \"as usual\".\n\nAfter the first lockdown in March, supermarkets reported panic buying and a rush to book online delivery slots despite grocers insisting there would be no shortages if consumers shopped sensibly.\n\nShoppers used social media to vent their frustration on Monday, with Twitter user Auld Bryan saying: \"Ocado have already introduced their virtual queue process on their app. It's March 2020 all over again.\"\n\nAnother tweet, by Karl Dyson, said of Ocado: \"You'd think ~10 months in to this, they'd have worked on scalable infrastructure for the website?\"\n\nThere were also reports of people having problems with the Tesco app and website, including when trying to check out and complete payment.\n\nHowever, a spokesman for Britain's biggest supermarket said on Monday evening that there had been no reports from Tesco's technical department of any website problems.\n\nThe supermarket had increased the number of slots available for online delivery before the latest lockdown measures.\n\nAn email from Tesco UK boss Jason Tarry already sent to customers said: \"Since March, we have more than doubled home delivery and Click+Collect slots to 1.5 million a week, with over 760,000 vulnerable customers registered with us who are eligible for priority slots.\"\n\nUsers complained that the Sainsbury's app was down following the prime minister's announcement on Monday.\n\nTwitter user Francesca Balgobind wrote: \"What's happening with the Sainsbury's shopping app tonight? Website is down too?\"\n\nAnother social media user, Matt, said some 40 minutes after Mr Johnson had finished speaking: \"Sainsbury's app and website down\".\n\nAsda saw more demand for online shopping after the lockdown announcement, but said it had increased the number of slots available since the first two national lockdowns.\n\nMorrisons also reported a jump in the number of shoppers using its website after the announcement.\n\nHowever, despite the longer waiting queues, the grocer said it continued to have \"good slot availability\" for home deliveries.\n\nThroughout the pandemic, supermarkets have urged people to shop normally.\n\nBefore Christmas, in the run-up to the end of the Brexit transition period, some grocers reported temporary shortages of fresh goods due to congestion at UK shipping ports.", "By 8pm on Monday it felt inevitable.\n\nBut it doesn't mean that a national instruction to close the doors was automatic. Or indeed that new lockdowns in England and Scotland aren't still dramatic and painful.\n\nWith tightening up in Wales and Northern Ireland too, the spread of coronavirus this winter has been faster than governments' attempts to keep up with it - leaving leaders with little choice but to take more of our choices away.\n\nThere is much that's an echo of March. Work, school, life outside the home will be constrained in so many ways, with terrible and expensive side-effects for the economy.\n\nThis time, it's already spluttering - restrictions being turned on and off for months have starved so much trade of vital business.\n\nBut there's a lot that's different too. After so long, the public is less forgiving of the actions taken, and there is frustration particularly over last-minute changes for schools; fatigue too with having to live under such limits.\n\nBy now, Boris Johnson's opponents, inside and outside the Tory party, have plenty of evidence to suggest that he would rather put off difficult decisions.\n\nBut there is another profound change, that the prime minister was unsurprisingly keen to point out on live TV, where the UK, at the moment, has a leading reputation.\n\nVaccines exist, partly due to UK science, and are being injected into willing arms already.\n\nThe scientific triumph still needs to be turned into a logistical victory. But if around 13 million vaccines can be offered over the next six weeks, we may be on the way.\n\nOne member of the cabinet told me: \"We should do absolutely nothing but this, the vaccine - it should be the entire focus of the government; every government shoulder should be put to every government wheel.\"\n\nIt's not just the country's health and economic fortunes riding on hitting that stretching target, but the government's reputation too.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The twins' father says what they have achieved is a 'herculean achievement'\n\nConjoined twins who were expected to die within days when they were born are nearly four years later said to be settling in at their Cardiff school.\n\nMarieme and Ndeye Ndiaye were brought to the UK from Senegal in 2017 by their father Ibrahima for treatment at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital.\n\nThe girls, now four, are learning to stand and their father said their progress was \"a Herculean achievement\".\n\nTheir head teacher said the girls had made friends and were \"laughing a lot\".\n\nThe girls, who have separate hearts and spines but share a liver, bladder and digestive system, have conditions which put them at higher risk of complications from Covid.\n\nHowever, Mr Ndiaye said he had wanted them to start school for their development.\n\n\"When you look in the rear view mirror, it was an unachievable dream,\" he said.\n\n\"From now, everything ahead will be a bonus to me. My heart and soul is shouting out loud, 'Come on! Go on girls! Surprise me more!'.\"\n\nMr Ndiaye brought the girls to the UK through funding from a charitable foundation run by Senegal's first lady Marieme Faye Sall, before he sought asylum.\n\nIn March 2018, the family were moved by the Home Office to Cardiff as asylum seekers can be moved anywhere in the UK and they now have discretionary leave to remain.\n\nIn 2019, Great Ormond Street surgeons considered attempting separation but it was something Mr Ndiaye did not want because of the risks involved.\n\nThe girls have such complex circulatory systems medics now believe they would not survive being separated\n\nSince then, doctors have found the girls' circulatory systems to be more closely linked than previously thought and neither would survive without the other, making separation now impossible.\n\nThe girls' head teacher Helen Borley said they were learning well since starting reception in September and had made new friends.\n\nShe said: \"Children either say, 'I'm Marieme's friend' or 'I'm Ndeye's friend' - they don't say, 'I'm the twins' friend'. Children very much identify as being one person's friend or another - because the girls are very different characters.\n\n\"They are laughing a lot - which is always a good sign, isn't it? Any child that is laughing a lot is a happy child.\"\n\nMarieme receives oxygen from Ndeye's stronger heart and food via their linked stomachs\n\nFor the twins, school needs to fit around hospital visits.\n\nIn October, the girls needed surgery at Great Ormond Street Hospital.\n\nDr Gillian Body, a paediatric consultant at the Children's Hospital for Wales in Cardiff, said the procedure was important, despite the risks.\n\nShe said: \"The girls have complex anatomies and that makes them prone to infections and potentially sepsis.\n\n\"One of the challenges we had was getting antibiotics into them quickly, and this tube or cannula they've had fitted, means we can get them into them more quickly with less distress to the girls.\"\n\nThe girls have been experiencing the feeling of standing, at children's hospice Ty Hafan\n\nShe said Marieme's heart was complex with lots of abnormalities that cause her problems with doing exercise and can lead to breathlessness.\n\nAt children's' hospice Ty Hafan in Sully, Vale of Glamorgan, the girls have been learning what it feels like to stand.\n\nA special frame gives them the experience of being upright, helping build strength in their legs.\n\nPhysiotherapist Sara Wade-West said it had been hard for them.\n\n\"It's a really different sensation when you're used to being sat down, to be upright can be scary,\" she said.\n\n\"To start with, particularly Ndeye wasn't very keen. We try and sneak the therapy in around the play, encouraging them to reach for toys to make them work a bit harder, but if they know it's therapy it's not so fun.\n\n\"Because of their cardiac function we can't push them too much so it's finding that balance - challenging them to get stronger but not exhausting them.\"\n\nThe twins' father Ibrahima Ndiaye said they were his \"warriors\"\n\nWatching his daughters stand is more than just a breakthrough for their father.\n\n\"They are showing that they don't only want to live, but be active and play their part in society,\" he said.\n\n\"All these achievements bring light and hopes for the future. But I know how fragile, complex and unpredictable their lives can be.\"\n\nMr Ndiaye said his hopes were \"parallel to my fears\" as the girls had \"so many times come close to the worst\".\n\n\"But the very least I can do for the girls is figure out my hopes for them,\" he said.\n\n\"The most I can do is to be beside them and live inside that hope and never allow anything to take that hope away.\n\n\"They are my warriors. They have proved they will never surrender without fighting. It is not yet over.\"", "Former Bond actress and Charlie's Angel Tanya Roberts has died in hospital in Los Angeles at the age of 65.\n\nRoberts appeared with Sir Roger Moore in his final Bond film, 1985's A View To A Kill, and had a recurring role in That '70s Show.\n\nShe also starred in the final series of Charlie's Angels on TV in 1980.\n\nHer death was prematurely announced on Monday, only for doctors to say she was still alive. However, her death was then confirmed on Tuesday.\n\nRoberts had collapsed while walking her dogs on 24 December and was admitted to Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre.\n\nHer partner Lance O'Brien mistakenly thought she had died on Sunday after visiting her in hospital. After getting a call from doctors to say she was deteriorating quickly, he went to her bedside, her eyes closed and she \"faded\", TMZ reported.\n\nDevastated, he walked out of the room and then the hospital without speaking to medical staff before informing Roberts' agent that he had \"just said goodbye to Tanya\".\n\nBut while being interviewed for US TV show Inside Edition on Monday, Mr O'Brien got a call from the hospital to say she was alive.\n\nThe moment was captured on film, as he picked up his phone and said: \"Now you're telling me she's alive? Thank the Lord.\" However, she died on Monday night.\n\nShe appeared in A View To A Kill alongside Sir Roger Moore and singer Grace Jones\n\nBorn Victoria Leigh Blum in 1955, Roberts grew up in New York before moving to Hollywood in 1977.\n\nHer big break came when she replaced Shelly Hack in Charlie's Angels, joining Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd as third 'Angel' Julie.\n\nAfter the show's cancellation, she appeared in such fantasy adventure films as The Beastmaster and Hearts and Armour.\n\nShe also played comic book heroine Sheena in a 1984 film that saw her nominated for a Golden Raspberry award for worst actress.\n\nRoberts received another Razzie nomination for her role as geologist Stacey Sutton in 1985 Bond film A View to a Kill.\n\nRoberts in the title role in Sheena: Queen of the Jungle\n\nShe admitted being \"a little cautious\" about taking the role, but said it would have been \"ridiculous\" to have turned it down.\n\nRoberts' subsequent films included Night Eyes and Inner Sanctum, erotic thrillers that did little to advance her career.\n\nShe went on to play Midge Pinciotti in more than 80 episodes of That '70s Show between 1998 and 2004.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Last updated on .From the section Man City\n\nManchester City legend Colin Bell has died, aged 74, after a short illness, the Premier League club have announced.\n\nThe former England midfielder made 501 appearances for City between 1966 and 1979, scoring 153 goals. He won 48 caps for his country.\n\n\"Few players have left such an indelible mark on City,\" said a club statement on Tuesday.\n\nIn 2004, Manchester City fans voted to name one of the stands at Etihad Stadium in Bell's honour.\n\n\"Colin Bell will always be remembered as one of Manchester City's greatest players and the very sad news today of his passing will affect everybody connected to our club,\" said City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak.\n\n\"I am fortunate to be able to speak regularly to his former manager and team-mates, and it's clear to me that Colin was a player held in the highest regard by all those who had the privilege of playing alongside him or seeing him play.\n\n\"The passage of time does little to erase the memories of his genius.\"\n• None 'Bell will always be king of Man City' - tributes paid after death of club great\n\nAfter starting his career at Bury, Bell moved to Manchester City - then in the second tier - midway through the 1965-66 season in a £47,500 deal.\n\nHe helped Joe Mercer's team win promotion that season and was instrumental in the Blues winning the First Division title two years later.\n\nDuring his 13 years as a player at Maine Road, he also won the FA Cup, League Cup and Cup Winners' Cup.\n\nHowever, his career was hampered by a serious knee injury he suffered in a League Cup tie against Manchester United in November 1975, when he was 29.\n\nAfter making a comeback later that season, he was injured again against Arsenal and out for another 18 months.\n\nBell regained fitness and received an emotional ovation on his return at Maine Road on 26 December 1977.\n\nHowever, he did not have the same freedom and mobility as he had done and played only a handful more games.\n\nBell finished his career with a brief spell in the United States playing for San Jose Earthquakes.\n\nIn 2004, he was awarded an MBE for his services to football and remained a regular presence at City games in recent seasons.\n\n'De Bruyne reminds me a lot of Colin' - tributes pour in for the 'King of the Kippax'\n\nFormer City team-mate Mike Summerbee, who was part of their 'Holy Trinity' alongside Bell and Francis Lee in the 1960s and 1970s, described Bell as \"just the greatest footballer\" the club has had.\n\n\"Colin was a lovely, humble man. He was a huge star for Manchester City but you would never have known it,\" said ex-forward Summerbee, 78.\n\n\"He was quiet, unassuming and I always believe he never knew how good he actually was.\n\n\"[Current City midfielder] Kevin de Bruyne reminds me a lot of Colin in the way he plays and the way he is as a person.\"\n\nFormer England forward Lee says he thinks the knee injury curtailed Bell's career \"by a good four or five years\".\n\n\"Colin had tremendous stamina. He was a very good player technically and had the ability to score goals,\" said Lee, 76.\n\n\"He goes into the top five City players of all time - only in the last 10, 15 years has anyone else come along who can take that mantle.\"\n\nSummerbee and Lee were among a number of former and current City players to pay tribute to Bell, along with celebrity fans including former Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher.\n\nBell would \"always have a smile\" and \"meet and greet everyone\" he knew, said former City midfielder Michael Brown.\n\n\"He's done lots of charity work and always tried to help people,\" added Brown, who first met Bell as a youngster having come up through City's academy.\n\n\"It's a huge loss. To have done so much and be so low key was admirable.\"\n\nEx-City defender Micah Richards said Bell was \"one of the nicest men ever\", while their former full-back Pablo Zabaleta added he was \"absolutely devastated\" by the news.\n\nFormer England striker Gary Lineker said Bell was one of his favourite players when he was growing up.\n\n\"Terrific box to box midfielder. A real gem for Manchester City and England,\" added the Match of the Day host.\n\nThe Times' chief football writer Henry Winter said Bell \"oozed class, skill and glamour\" as he was \"flowing across rutted pitches, taking people on, creating and scoring\".", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "YouTube has reinstated TalkRadio's channel on its platform hours after saying it had been \"terminated\" for breaking the tech firm's rules.\n\nIt said the broadcaster had posted material that contradicted expert advice about the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nBut it explained its U-turn saying it sometimes made exceptions to guidelines that state repeat offenders face a permanent ban.\n\nTalkRadio said it had yet to be given a full explanation for the affair.\n\nThe decision to ban TalkRadio had appalled digital rights campaigners, with one group - Big Brother Watch - claiming it was evidence that \"big tech censorship is spiralling out of control\".\n\nThe Google-owned service has issued a brief statement explaining its actions.\n\n\"TalkRadio's YouTube channel was briefly suspended, but upon further review, has now been reinstated,\" it said.\n\n\"We quickly remove flagged content that violate our community guidelines, including Covid-19 content that explicitly contradict expert consensus from local health authorities or the World Health Organization. We make exceptions for material posted with an educational, documentary, scientific or artistic purpose, as was deemed in this case.\"\n\nYouTube has not published details of the offending posts.\n\nBut independent fact-checkers have repeatedly challenged some of the claims made by interviewees featured by the London-based radio station.\n\nYouTube operates a \"three strikes\" policy, whereby channels that break its community guidelines three times within a 90-day period can be permanently banned, but other infractions lead to temporary restrictions.\n\nProhibited content includes \"medically unsubstantiated claims\" relating to Covid-19, and videos that contradict expert consensus from local health authorities such as the NHS.\n\n\"YouTube is making decisions about which opinions the public are allowed to hear, even when they are sourced to responsible and regulated new providers,\" TalkRadio said in a statement this evening.\n\n\"This sets a dangerous precedent and is censorship of free speech and legitimate national debate.\"\n\nThe broadcaster tweeted the statement minutes after YouTube's change of heart. It did not appear to be aware that its channel had been reinstated at the time, but has since acknowledged the move.\n\nTalkRadio has about 424,000 listeners, according to the latest figures from market research provider Rajar.\n\nIt uses YouTube as a means to livestream shows from its studios and to provide an archive of past broadcasts.\n\nIts channel on the platform has 242,000 subscribers.\n\nYouTube's action had meant that TalkRadio's website had featured articles featuring broken embedded clips for most of the day, and that users who had shared its clips would have been unable to view them.\n\nThe US firm has previously imposed a permanent ban against conspiracy theorist David Icke, and a one-week video suspension of right-wing outlet One America News Network's ability to publish new clips - in both cases for breaches of its Covid rules.\n\nIt's pretty clear something has gone wrong at YouTube in the last 24 hours.\n\nIt appeared as though TalkRadio had been banned for good on YouTube - or \"terminated\" as the company put it.\n\nYouTube is now saying it was a short suspension, which certainly seems like a backtrack.\n\nEven now, it's not obvious what the offending material was that caused this action. The whole process reinforces the idea that YouTube's moderation policies - where it draws the line between freedom of expression and clamping down on misinformation - can be messy and inconsistent.\n\nAnd when YouTube takes such an action without giving full details, it rains controversy down on its own head.\n\nThis plays to a broader movement by YouTube and other social media companies to take a harder line on disinformation.\n\nJoe Biden is about to become US President - and he wants social media companies to do more to remove fake news.\n\nBut as they are increasingly finding out, refereeing their own platforms can be hugely difficult, and this highlights the need for greater transparency about moderation decisions.", "Last updated on .From the section Celtic\n\nScotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says Celtic have questions to answer about their trip to Dubai.\n\nMs Sturgeon says possible breaches of social distancing rules while in the Middle East \"should be looked into\".\n\nHowever, Celtic insist the training camp was approved by the Scottish government, while the Scottish FA have no plans to investigate the trip.\n\n\"For me, the question for Celtic is what is the purpose of them being there,\" Ms Sturgeon said.\n\n\"I've seen comments from the club that it's more for R&R than training.\n\n\"I have also seen some photographs - and I don't know the full circumstances - that would raise a question in my mind about whether all the rules elite players have to follow in their bubble around social distancing are being complied with.\"\n\nPictures have emerged of members of the Celtic party in the UAE not wearing face masks and potentially breaching the social distancing rules that those in Scottish football must adhere to.\n\nIt remains unclear if the Scottish FA will investigate that matter.\n\nCeltic travelled to the United Arab Emirates on Saturday just hours after their 1-0 defeat by Rangers.\n\nTravellers returning from the UAE are exempt from self-isolation protocols in Scotland, with elite athletes in Scotland permitted to travel abroad to compete.\n\n\"Elite sport has been in a privileged position and as long as that is the case it's really important they don't abuse it,\" said Ms Sturgeon at her daily coronavirus briefing on Tuesday.\n\n\"I saw their [Celtic's] statement and have not spent a lot of time looking into it, but as I understand it the government gave advice to the Scottish FA about the rules around training camps in November.\n\n\"The world has changed quite a bit since then but it's not our role to sign off what a club does around these training camps.\n\n\"The rules may have to change, but they were that elite sportspeople and teams can go overseas if it is important in the context of training and competitions.\"\n\nMainland Scotland has been in Tier 4 - the highest level of restrictions - since 26 December, and Ms Sturgeon addressed the nation on Monday ordering people to stay at home where possible.\n\nDeputy first minister John Swinney has accused Celtic of not setting \"a particularly great example\".\n\n\"I don't think it's a good idea,\" he told BBC Radio Scotland on Monday.\n\n\"When we are asking members of the public to take on very, very significant restrictions on the way in which they live their lives, I think we have all got to demonstrate leadership on this particular question.\"\n\nWhen approached for comment on Monday, a Celtic spokesman told BBC Scotland: \"The training camp was arranged a number of months ago and approved by all relevant footballing authorities and the Scottish government through the Joint Response Group on 12 November.\n\n\"The team travelled prior to any new lockdown being in place, to a location exempt from travel restrictions. The camp, the same one as we have undertaken for a number of years, has been fully risk assessed.\n\n\"If the club had not received Scottish government approval, then we would not have travelled.\"\n\nIn November, Celtic requested their fixture with Hibernian, originally scheduled for this weekend, be moved to Monday, 11 January to accommodate the trip.\n\nThe SPFL granted the change, despite objections from the Easter Road side.", "Stationery chain Paperchase is on the brink of administration after most of its stores were forced to close over the Christmas period.\n\nThe firm has filed a notice to appoint administrators, a move that will give it breathing space from its creditors while it works out a rescue plan.\n\nThe company has 127 stores and about 1,500 employees.\n\nThe second lockdown in November came at a crucial period for the firm, which makes a high proportion of sales then.\n\nJust under half its sales, 40%, come from trade in November and December.\n\nPaperchase said: \"The cumulative effects of lockdown one, lockdown two - at the start of the Christmas shopping period - and now the current restrictions have put unbearable strain on retail businesses across the country.\"\n\nThe company went through an insolvency process, known as a Company Voluntary Arrangement or CVA, almost two years ago to cut costs.\n\nThe chain now has 10 working days to find a solution.\n\nPaperchase said its strong online trading had not made it \"immune\" from the impact of shop closures across the country.\n\n\"Out of lockdown we've traded well, but as the country faces further restrictions for some months to come, we have to find a sustainable future for Paperchase,\" it added.\n\n\"We are working hard to find that solution and this [notice of administration] is a necessary part of this work. This is not the situation we wanted to be in.\n\nThe chain is the latest of a string of high-profile retailers to hit trouble in the past year.\n\nThe sector was already battling with the shift to online sales, coupled with rising costs, including rents and higher minimum wages.\n\nCoronavirus restrictions which shut non-essential shops piled on the pressure.\n\nOthers that have run into trouble recently include Debenhams, which last month said it would cease trading putting 12,000 jobs at risk. Arcadia Group, which owns Topshop and Dorothy Perkins, has also gone into administration, putting a further 13,000 jobs at risk.\n\nMeanwhile, Edinburgh Woollen Mills' brands Peacocks and Jaeger also fell into administration in November, putting 21,000 jobs at risk.\n\nAnd earlier last year, Oasis and Warehouse fell into administration in mid-April after failing to find buyers, and online fashion group Boohoo said in June it was buying the brands but closing all stores.", "Doctors' leaders have called for urgent improvements in personal protective equipment for health workers.\n\nThe British Medical Association is appealing for a higher grade of face mask to guard against coronavirus infection.\n\nIt says there is 'growing evidence' that the virus is being spread through the air by aerosols.\n\nThese are tiny virus particles that can build up in stuffy rooms and they have been linked to outbreaks of Covid-19.\n\nThis follows an open letter from more than 1,500 health professionals for staff on general wards to be given the type of high-quality masks usually only worn in intensive care units.\n\nPublic Health England (PHE) has issued guidance on what PPE staff in different settings require. It was last updated in October 2020.\n\nEarly in the pandemic, it was widely believed that to catch the disease you had to either be close to an infected person and hit by droplets from their coughs or sneezes or touch a surface they had contaminated.\n\nBut research during the course of last year highlighted how it is also possible for the virus to be carried in what are called aerosols, drifting and accumulating in the air.\n\nMost infections are thought to have occurred indoors in badly ventilated rooms, and many studies have shown that the 'airborne route' can be an important factor.\n\nAcross the UK, the guidance for hospital staff is to wear surgical masks in most areas.\n\nMore sophisticated masks - a type known as FFP3 that includes an air filter - are only required in intensive care or when certain procedures are carried out that are known to generate aerosols.\n\nIn their letter, the consultants, doctors and nurses say healthcare workers are three to four times more likely to become infected than the general population.\n\nBut they point out that staff in intensive care units, who have the best level of protection, have about half the risk of catching the virus than colleagues on general wards.\n\nThe letter states: \"It is now essential that healthcare workers have their PPE upgraded to protect against airborne transmission\".\n\nBarry McAree, a consultant surgeon in Northern Ireland, is one of many healthcare workers to be ill with Covid.\n\nHe is self-isolating at home right after his testing positive for the second time.\n\nA signatory to the letter, he says his hospital in Antrim followed the guidance about which type of masks should be worn in which areas, but he became infected nonetheless. It is not clear how and when he caught it.\n\n\"There's so much evidence that we are talking about an airborne infection that it has to be said that it is not appropriate just to wear FFP3 in environments when aerosol generating procedures take place.\"\n\nHe believes that with such high levels of the virus in the community and in hospitals, staff should be wearing the higher-grade masks whenever they're close to patients.\n\nSurgical masks can be bought online for about 10p each, while the FFP3 masks are far more expensive about £5.00.\n\nDr Barry Jones, a retired gastroenterologist and leading expert on aerosols, says that's nothing compared to the cost of a patient with Covid,\n\nHe points to data showing that roughly a fifth of people needing hospital treatment for Covid may have acquired the infection in hospital in the first place.\n\n\"We should do everything we can to reduce that possibility - it's the air we share that's killing us.\"\n\nA few hospitals have decided to break with official guidance.\n\nIt's understood that hospitals in Cambridge, Plymouth and Exeter have decided to equip staff with FFP3 masks if they face patients diagnosed with Covid or suspected of having it.\n\nOne consultant, who did not want to be named, said: \"When you realise patients are more infectious at an earlier stage of disease and are presenting at general wards with poorer ventilation than intensive care units and staff are wearing a poorer quality of PPE, you really want those in a position of leadership to listen and to act.\"\n\nRCN General Secretary Dame Donna Kinnair, said: \"Without delay, they must state whether existing PPE guidance is adequate for the new variant.\n\n\"While more research is carried out, we ask for the precautionary principle to be applied and staff to be given a higher level of PPE if working with suspected or confirmed cases.\"\n\nPublic Health England said this was a matter for NHS England to comment on.\n\nA Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: \"The safety of NHS and social care staff has always been our top priority and we continue to work tirelessly to deliver PPE that protects those on the frontline.\n\n\"UK guidance on the safest levels of PPE is written by experts and agreed by all four chief medical officers. Our guidance is kept under constant review based on the latest evidence and data.\n\n\"Emerging evidence and data, including on variant strains, will be continually monitored and reviewed, and the guidance updated accordingly if needed.\"", "Adamo Canto had worked as a catering assistant at the palace's Royal Mews since 2015\n\nA Buckingham Palace catering assistant who stole medals and photographs from the Queen's residence has been jailed.\n\nAdamo Canto, 37, stole items including signed photos of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and a photo album of US President Donald Trump's UK visit.\n\nPolice said some of the goods, worth between £10,000 and £100,000, had been listed for sale on eBay.\n\nCanto, from Scarborough, North Yorkshire, was jailed for eight months after he admitted stealing the items.\n\nSouthwark Crown Court heard police recovered a \"significant quantity\" of stolen items when they searched his quarters at the palace's Royal Mews, where he had worked as a catering assistant since 2015.\n\nCanto stole an album of photos from US President Donald Trump's visit to the UK\n\nA total of 37 items were offered for sale \"well under\" their true value, with Canto making £7,741.\n\nOne item was a photo album of US President Donald Trump's visit to the UK, worth £1,500.\n\nCanto also took official signed photographs of the Duke of Sussex and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.\n\nSome 77 items were taken from the palace shop, while others were stolen from staff lockers, the Queen's Gallery shop and the Duke of York's storeroom.\n\nCanto also admitted stealing a Companion of Bath medal belonging to the Master of the Household, which was sold online for £350, and a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order medal from the locker of former British Army officer Maj Gen Richard Sykes.\n\nCanto pleaded guilty to three counts of theft by an employee at a hearing in November and was jailed on Monday.\n\nFollow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Vocational exams, including BTEcs, are to go ahead this month in England - despite calls for them to be cancelled alongside GCSEs and A-levels.\n\n\"Schools and colleges can continue with the vocational and technical exams that are due to take place in January, where they judge it right to do so,\" said a Department for Education spokeswoman.\n\nFurther education college leaders had complained this was unfair to students.\n\nThey said students would face \"stress\" from taking exams in the lockdown.\n\nThe Association of Colleges warned the decision, giving schools and colleges the option on whether to carry on with BTecs, would create more confusion.\n\nChief executive David Hughes said some colleges would cancel exams and others would continue - but without any clarity about what would happen to \"students in colleges which do cancel for safety reasons\".\n\n\"A national decision would have allowed for more fairness,\" said Mr Hughes.\n\nThe announcement from the Department for Education has left it open for schools and colleges to decide whether to go ahead with vocational and technical exams.\n\n\"Schools and colleges have already implemented extensive protective measures to make them as safe as possible,\" said the DFE's spokeswoman.\n\nThe Department for Education said it recognised \"this is a difficult time\" but wanted to allow students who had prepared for exams and assessments to continue, including those who needed to take hands-on practical tests for qualifications for jobs.\n\nA joint statement from the mayors of Manchester and Liverpool said it was wrong to go ahead with these vocational exams when other academic exams had been cancelled.\n\n\"It is unfair to ask these students to go into colleges when everyone else is being told to stay at home.\n\n\"This will cause unnecessary anxiety and concern just when they need to be able to focus,\" said the statement from Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram.\n\nThe mayors highlighted that students taking BTecs were more likely to be from \"working-class backgrounds and ethnic minority communities\" and they should not be treated any less well than those following an \"academic route\" in exams.\n\nHow will you be affected by the latest developments? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Khairi Saadallah admitted three counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder\n\nA man who stabbed three people to death in a Reading park believed he was carrying out \"an act of religious jihad\", a court has heard.\n\nKhairi Saadallah, 26, stabbed to death James Furlong, 36, David Wails, 49, and Joseph Ritchie-Bennett, 39, during the attack in Forbury Gardens in June.\n\nAs part of his sentencing, a hearing will decide if he was motivated by a religious or ideological cause.\n\nThe prosecution claim the stabbing spree was a terror attack.\n\nSaadallah has admitted three counts of murder and attempted murder, but denies he was motivated by an ideology.\n\nProsecutor Alison Morgan QC told the court he \"executed\" his victims and intended to \"kill as many people as he could\" in the name of violent jihad.\n\nShe said: \"In less than a minute, shouting Allahu Akhbar the defendant carried out a lethal attack with a knife, killing all three men before they had a chance to respond and try to defend themselves.\n\n\"Within the same minute, the defendant went on to attack others nearby, stabbing three more people, Stephen Young, Patrick Edwards and Nishit Nisudan, causing them significant injuries.\"\n\nThe court was shown CCTV footage of Saadallah in Morrisons buying the knife he used in the attack\n\nSaadallah was captured on CCTV leaving his flat on the day of the attack\n\nStating the prosecution's case she said the attack was \"carefully planned and executed\" by the defendant with \"determination and precision\".\n\nShe added: \"The defendant believed that in carrying out this attack he was acting in pursuit of his extreme ideology, an ideology he appears to have held for some time.\n\n\"He believed that in killing as many people as possible that day he was performing an act of religious jihad.\"\n\nAfter the attack Sadallah fled but was chased down by police, and later admitted the attacks in his cell, the court heard.\n\nIn interviews with police he \"howled like a dog\" and claimed to have magic powers, which the prosecution said was a \"disingenuous\" attempt to suggest he had a mental disorder.\n\n\"After a careful period of assessment and treatment at Belmarsh prison, it is clear that he does not have a major mental illness\", a report by a psychiatrist read out in court said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. A friend of the victims, Michael Main, said: \"They were always happy\"\n\nSaadallah arrived in the UK as an asylum seeker in 2012, having fled the civil war in his home country of Libya in North Africa.\n\nThe court heard the defendant, who had been refused asylum, had been involved with militias as part of the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.\n\nBetween 2013 and 2020 he was repeatedly arrested and convicted of various offences in the UK.\n\nWhile in HMP Bullingdon, Saadallah was observed to be keen to interact with radical preacher Omar Brooks - associated with banned terror group Al-Muhajiroun - who was also at the jail at the time, the court heard. He was released from the prison in June, days before the attack.\n\nSaadallah had been due to be deported, but was told by the government circumstances in Libya at the time were a \"legal barrier\".\n\nThe court was told he had also searched on the internet \"how to disappear with magic\" and accessed a website with the flag associated with Islamic State.\n\nA probation officer who had contact with Saadallah flagged his concerns about his mental health, but a psychiatrist has since concluded the attack on June 20 was \"unrelated to the effects of either mental disorder or substance misuse\".\n\nSaadallah, of Basingstoke Road in Reading, launched his attack as people enjoyed a summer Saturday evening in Forbury Gardens on 20 June.\n\nEyewitnesses said he walked along a footpath when he suddenly ran towards a group of men sitting on the grass.\n\nHistory teacher Mr Furlong and Mr Ritchie-Bennett, a US citizen, were both stabbed once in the neck, while scientist Mr Wails was stabbed in the back.\n\nAll three were pronounced dead at the scene.\n\nThree others - their friend Stephen Young, as well as Patrick Edwards and Nishit Nisudan, who were sitting in a nearby group - were also injured by Saadallah.\n\nThe sentencing before Mr Justice Sweeney is expected to conclude on January 11.\n\nFloral tributes were left near the entrance to the park where the men were killed\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Zara Holland appeared on the second series of Love Island\n\nLove Island star Zara Holland is to be prosecuted for allegedly breaking Covid rules on holiday in Barbados.\n\nIsland police say the former Miss Great Britain is expected to appear in court on Wednesday, accused of \"breaching quarantine\".\n\nStation Sergeant Michael Blackman told Newsbeat she was \"intercepted\" at the airport and later presented herself at a police station.\n\nIt's not clear whether she will appear in court in person or by video link.\n\nAn apology from the 25-year-old for what she described as \"a massive mix-up and misunderstanding\" was published by the Barbados Today website.\n\nShe told the publication: \"I have been a guest of this lovely island in excess of 20 years and would never do anything to jeopardise an entire nation that I have nothing but love and respect for and which has treated me as a family.\"\n\nListen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nEveryone in England must stay at home except for permitted reasons during a new coronavirus lockdown expected to last until mid-February, the PM says.\n\nAll schools and colleges will close to most pupils and switch to remote learning from Tuesday.\n\nBoris Johnson warned the coming weeks would be the \"hardest yet\" amid surging cases and patient numbers.\n\nHe said those in the top four priority groups would be offered a first vaccine dose by the middle of next month.\n\nAll care home residents and their carers, everyone aged 70 and over, all frontline health and social care workers, and the clinically extremely vulnerable will be offered one dose of a vaccine by mid-February.\n\nSchools in Northern Ireland will have an \"extended period of remote learning\", the Stormont Executive said.\n\nSpeaking from Downing Street, Mr Johnson told the public to follow the new lockdown rules immediately, before they become law in the early hours of Wednesday.\n\nAll the new measures in England will then last until at least the middle of February, he said, as a new more infectious variant of the virus spreads across the UK.\n\nThe PM added that he believed the country was entering \"the last phase of the struggle\".\n\nHospitals were under \"more pressure from Covid than at any time since the start of the pandemic\", he said.\n\nAnd he reiterated the slogan used earlier in the pandemic, urging people to immediately \"stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives\".\n\nOn Monday, the UK recorded more than 50,000 new confirmed Covid cases for the seventh day in a row.\n\nA further 58,784 cases and an additional 407 deaths within 28 days of a positive test result were reported, though deaths in Scotland were not recorded.\n\nAs of 08:00 GMT, there were 26,626 Covid-19 patients in hospital in England, according to the latest figures.\n\nThis is a week-on-week increase of 30%, and a new record high.\n\nThose who are clinically extremely vulnerable will be contacted by letter and should now shield once more, Mr Johnson said.\n\nSupport and childcare bubbles will continue under the new measures - and people can meet one person from another household for outdoor exercise.\n\nCommunal worship and life events like funerals and weddings can continue, subject to limits on attendance.\n\nWhile Mr Johnson said end-of-year exams would not take place as normal in the summer, he said alternative arrangements would be announced separately.\n\nThe government has published a 22-page document outlining the new rules in detail.\n\nThe House of Commons has been recalled to allow MPs to vote on the new restrictions on Wednesday.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said his MPs would \"support the package of measures\", saying \"we've all got to pull together now to make this work\".\n\nOnce again it is the threat to the NHS that has forced the hand of ministers.\n\nIn England there has been a 50% rise in the number of patients in hospital with Covid since Christmas day.\n\nTo put that into context, it equates to 18 hospitals being filled.\n\nCurrently around three out of 10 beds are occupied by patients with the disease.\n\nIn some hospitals it is more than six in 10.\n\nBut what is worrying ministers and NHS leaders is that the number is just going to increase.\n\nIn the spring it took nearly three weeks after lockdown for hospital cases to peak.\n\nThe last six days have seen in excess of 50,000 new infections confirmed each day across the UK - a number of these infections are next week's hospital admissions.\n\nIt is why the UK's chief medical officers were warning there was a \"material risk\" of some hospitals being overwhelmed if something did not change.\n\nMr Johnson spoke after UK chief medical officers recommended the Covid threat level be increased to five - its highest level.\n\nLevel five means the NHS may soon be unable to handle a further sustained rise in cases, the medical officers said in a joint statement.\n\nNHS Providers, which represents health service trusts, said hospitals were at a \"critical point\" and that \"immediate and decisive action\" was needed.\n\nAnnouncing tougher measures in Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: \"It is no exaggeration to say that I am more concerned about the situation we face now than I have been at any time since March last year.\"\n\nFor pupils who returned for their first day of the new term at primary school on Monday, it's turned out to be an extremely short-lived visit.\n\nBoris Johnson's announcement will see primary, secondary and further education colleges closed for at least the next six weeks, except for vulnerable and key workers' children.\n\nIt's a much bigger shift in policy than had been anticipated, even a few days ago.\n\nEven the return date will depend on the progress in tackling the virus.\n\n\"I hope we can steadily move out of lockdown, reopening schools after the February half term,\" said the prime minister.\n\nKeeping schools open was the government's most definite of red lines, a few weeks ago they were threatening councils that wanted to close them - but it's now been overtaken by the spiking lines on the Covid infection charts.\n\nEven after the chaos of last year's replacement grades, GCSEs and A-levels are being cancelled again - with a replacement system still to be decided. Vocational exams are to continue.\n\nFor parents dreading home schooling, there are plans for it to be better supported this time - with more computer devices available and suggestions that Ofsted inspectors will check what schools are offering.\n\nBut there's no escaping that this will feel like another sudden and chaotic change of direction for schools and parents.\n\nMr Johnson's pledge on vaccinations comes after an 82-year-old retired maintenance manager became the first person in the UK to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 jab\n\nSome 13.9 million people are among the four priority groups who will receive a vaccine dose by about 15 February, vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. BBC's Laura Foster explains the order in which the Covid vaccine will be given\n\nHow will you be affected by the latest developments? What questions do you have? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "First Minister Arlene Foster and Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill met throughout Monday\n\nThere will be an extended period of remote learning for schools in Northern Ireland, the executive has said.\n\nMinisters met on Monday night as other parts of the UK tightened their coronavirus restrictions.\n\nThe Stormont executive also plans to give its stay at home guidance legal force, with new restrictions on travel.\n\nDeputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill said details would be formalised on Tuesday.\n\nThe health and education ministers will bring separate papers on the issues to the executive at the meeting, she added.\n\nNorthern Ireland's Education Minister Peter Weir had previously announced a staggered return to school for pupils during the month of January.\n\nThe first transfer test, used by many grammar schools to select pupils, is due to take place on Saturday but there have been calls from some teaching unions and political parties for the test to be cancelled this year, in light of the uncertainty with the pandemic.\n\nIn England, all schools and colleges will close to most pupils and switch to remote learning until the middle of February, and end-of-year exams will not take place this summer as normal.\n\nRecommendations on exams in Northern Ireland are also expected to be brought forward by the executive on Tuesday.\n\nIt is understood ministers will update the assembly on Wednesday about their decisions.\n\nFirst Minister Arlene Foster said the new restrictions were unfortunate, but necessary.\n\nShe said she believed the stay-at-home message will be in place \"for the rest of January, probably into February\".\n\n\"We will of course review it, as we're legally bound to do every couple of weeks.\"\n\nShe added that ministers would \"much prefer\" for face-to-face education to continue, but said they had to \"take into account the very serious situation that we find ourselves in tonight.\"\n\nBoth organisations which organise transfer tests will be making announcements on Tuesday, she said.\n\n\"We'll wait to hear what they have to say. They do of course have to abide by public health advice, but they are private organisations and they will make their own announcements.\"\n\nThe Irish government is considering a proposal to close schools for the rest of January.\n\nOn Monday, the Department of Health reported that a further 1,801 people had tested positive for the virus in the past 24 hours.\n\nThere have also been 12 more Covid-19 related deaths.\n\nThese latest figures from the Department of Health bring the total number of deaths to 1,366, while 79,873 people have tested positive for the virus since the pandemic started.\n\nMore than 12,000 cases have been reported in the past seven days, more than double the week before.\n\nThe seven-day rate per 100,000 people is now 660 positive cases, compared to 200 per 100,000 two weeks ago.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland on Monday, an additional 6,110 confirmed cases of Covid-19 were announced, with six further deaths linked to the virus.\n\nScotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has already announced a fresh lockdown there from midnight, with schools closed until February.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio Ulster's Evening Extra programme, Dr Michael McBride said Scotland's measures were \"prudent and sensible\".\n\nMeanwhile, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine rollout has begun in Northern Ireland.\n\nUp to 11,000 people aged over 80 across Northern Ireland are set to receive the this week, with some of the first doses delivered at a GP surgery on the Falls Road in West Belfast on Monday afternoon.\n\nUp to 11,000 people aged over 80 across Northern Ireland are set to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca\n\nThe SDLP has called for the assembly to be recalled on Tuesday to discuss the rolling out of the vaccine.\n\nIt can be recalled if at least 30 MLAs sign a petition.\n\nOn Monday, Justice Minister Naomi Long welcomed the opening of Northern Ireland's first Nightingale venue, which will be used for courts and tribunals business.\n\nThe facility was approved by a meeting of the executive on 17 December, and will sit in the International Convention Centre in Belfast (ICC).\n\nActivity at the centre will be phased in, in line with Covid-19 regulations.\n\nIn other coronavirus-related developments on Monday:", "The 90,000 sq ft store is a familiar sight for commuters coming out of Oxford Circus Tube station\n\nThe building that houses Topshop's Oxford Street store is up for sale.\n\nThe High Street chain's owner Arcadia went into administration in November, putting 13,000 jobs at risk.\n\nNews of the sale of the three-storey building has prompted an outpouring of emotion on social media, with shoppers recounting how important the flagship store is to them.\n\nThe store, which boasted a DJ booth, nail bar and food stalls, was a retail sensation when it opened in 1994.\n\nHuge crowds gathered at the store for the launch of Kate Moss's Topshop collection in 2014\n\nArcadia - which owns Topshop, Miss Selfridge and Dorothy Perkins - entered administration on 30 November\n\nThe sale of 214 Oxford Street, managed by agents Savills and Eastdil, follows the failure of Sir Philip Green's retail empire to secure funding to pay its debts after sales slumped during the pandemic.\n\nThe Oxford Street building also houses Nike and Vans stores.\n\nArcadia said that although it was in administration, and so all its assets are to be sold, that did not mean the shops in the building would have to close.\n\nPeople have been sharing their feelings about the London landmark, which was often used as a meeting point for friends and was a must-visit for fashion-loving tourists.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Carolin This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by shon faye. This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Kelly Taylor This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nArcadia, which also owns Miss Selfridge, Dorothy Perkins and Burton, had already closed other Topshop stores across the UK, citing the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nIts brands were struggling before the pandemic, partly due to competition from online-only fashion retailers such as Asos, Boohoo and Pretty Little Thing.\n\nBeyonce launched her Ivy Park collection at Topshop in 2016\n\nThe flagship store is currently closed, in line with the rules about non-essential retailers\n\nThe Oxford Street store pictured during Pride in 2018", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sturgeon: Vaccination programme needs to win the race\n\nTough new lockdown restrictions forbidding people from leaving home for non-essential reasons have come into force across the Scottish mainland.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the clampdown was necessary to contain the spread of the new strain of Covid-19.\n\nPeople are now required by law to stay in their homes and to work from home.\n\nOutdoor gatherings have been restricted to one-on-one meet-ups, and schools will close to most pupils until February at the earliest.\n\nMs Sturgeon told MSPs on Monday that Scotland faced an \"extremely serious\" situation, with the new, faster-spreading variant of coronavirus \"a massive blow\".\n\nSchools will remain closed to most pupils until at least the beginning of February.\n\nThe first minister has said she cannot guarantee when children will be allowed back in classrooms or when the latest lockdown restrictions will be lifted.\n\nShe also told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme on Tuesday that she hoped 2.7 million people in Scotland would have received one dose of the Covid vaccine by the middle of May.\n\nShe said: \"I can't be definitive right now about when we will lift these restrictions.\n\n\"I have described this as a race - we've got the vaccine in one lane and we are trying to accelerate that.\n\n\"We've got the virus which has learned to run faster in the other lane and we've got to slow it down.\n\n\"Lockdown is about pushing rates of the virus back, and if we manage to do that then hopefully we will be able to start lifting restrictions while the vaccination programme is ongoing.\"\n\nA government document revealed there were now more than 90 patients in intensive care units, with new modelling suggesting that figure could more than double by early February.\n\nThe modelling sets out different scenarios with the most pessimistic predicting hospitals admissions could soar to more than 8,000 with over 700 patients requiring intensive care.\n\nThe document also revealed that Inverclyde - which a few weeks ago had relatively low levels of Covid - now has the highest case rate, almost 550 per 100,000 - while Dumfries and Galloway has seen its rate increase to 475 per 100,000.\n\nDundee City, East Ayrshire, East Renfrewshire, North Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and the Scottish Borders all now have case rates exceeding 300 per 100,000.\n\nOnly limited data was released by the government in recent days but a full update on deaths, hospital admissions and local infection rates has now been issued.\n\nCases of Covid have risen sharply in recent days\n\nThe new restrictions came into force at midnight and are, in effect, an enhancement to the level four curbs already in place across the mainland and Skye.\n\nThey will run until at least the end of January and could yet be extended both in scope and duration.\n\nScotland's island communities, with the exception of Skye, are to remain in level three for now, although Ms Sturgeon warned this would also remain under review.\n\nNew regulations mean Scots are prohibited from leaving their homes for anything other than \"essential\" purposes - although the law provides a lengthy list of examples of \"reasonable excuses\".\n\nThese include shopping for food or medical supplies, providing or accessing childcare, exercise, and participation in extended households.\n\nAnyone who can do their job from home must do so, and people in the \"shielding\" category have been advised not to go out to work at all.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Nicola Sturgeon announces stay at home rules in new lockdown\n\nNew restrictions have been placed on outdoor gatherings in level four areas, with only two people from separate households now permitted to meet up.\n\nThese restrictions do not include children under the age of 12, who are still allowed to gather to play, but everyone else must abide by them or face a fixed penalty notice.\n\nTravel restrictions remain in place between local authority areas and in and out of Scotland, and people have been urged to stay as close to home as possible when going out for exercise.\n\nSchools will now operate on a remote-learning basis for the majority of pupils when the new term starts on 11 January, with only the children of key workers and vulnerable children to receive face-to-face teaching.\n\nThis is to run until at least 1 February, with a review on 18 January - with Ms Sturgeon saying her \"fundamental priority\" was still to get children back in school full time as quickly as possible.\n\nThe new measures are a bid to control the spread of the new variant of Covid, which is now thought to be responsible for nearly half of all new cases of the virus in Scotland.\n\nOfficials believe Scotland is roughly four weeks behind London - where health services are coming under increasing pressure - and warn that hospitals could hit capacity within the month without major new curbs.\n\nBetween 23 and 30 December, the average number of cases per 100,000 people in Scotland increased by 65%, from 136 to 225.", "\"It could be something as simple as: 'I don't like what you have got on' - that would end in strangulation\"\n\nA fresh move is under way to make non-fatal strangulation a specific criminal offence in England and Wales, after the House of Lords debated the Domestic Abuse Bill.\n\nThe government has said it has no plans to change the law, arguing that non-fatal strangulation is already covered by existing legislation.\n\nHowever, campaigners say abusers who use non-fatal strangulation are telling their victims: \"I am controlling you and I can kill you\" - but too often are charged only with common assault.\n\nThis is what happened in Jenny's case. Her abusive partner used non-fatal strangulation as a means of control throughout the five years they were together.\n\n\"It was like his favourite thing to do,\" says Jenny, who asked the BBC not to use her real name.\n\n\"That sounds really awful and trivial but that is how it becomes as an abuse victim. You learn to accept that is part of your life. It was like something I had to manage.\"\n\n\"We would wake up in the morning and he would be in one of those moods, and I would see it in his eyes and I would think today's the day I'm going to get it.\n\n\"It could be something as simple as: 'I don't like what you have got on' - that would end in strangulation.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. WATCH: Domestic abuse victim - 'He threw me against the wall and strangled me'\n\nEventually one night she did call the police during an attack.\n\n\"He chased me round the house and every time he caught me he would pin me to the floor and strangle me until I had marks.\n\n\"I had burst blood vessels. I was streaming with tears. I just kept thinking: 'This is how I am going to die.'\n\n\"The doors were locked. He'd smashed my phone. I managed to get to the window and shout and one of the neighbours called the police.\"\n\nHowever, she was dismayed by the police response. \"I thought it was quite lax. They didn't take the strangulation as seriously as they should have.\"\n\nHer partner was charged with common assault. He pleaded guilty and was given a three-month sentence, suspended for 18 months.\n\n\"Strangulation needs to be a specific offence. I think the weak police response contributed to keeping me in the relationship,\" she says.\n\nJenny believed her partner would eventually kill her.\n\n\"I just kept looking in the mirror and thinking: you need to leave and you're the only person who can do it.\n\n\"So one day while he was asleep, I picked up whatever I could carry and I ran and got on a train.\"\n\nBaroness Newlove is bringing forward an amendment to the Domestic Abuse Bill in the House of Lords\n\nPoliticians and campaigners tried and failed to have a new offence of non-fatal strangulation introduced in the Domestic Abuse Bill when it was going through the House of Commons.\n\nDuring Tuesday's debate on the bill in the Lords, the Conservative peer and former victims' commissioner, Baroness Newlove, said she intended to table an amendment to the bill when it reached the committee stage.\n\nShe said non-fatal strangulation was currently not being picked up adequately by the police, as it often left no physical marks on the victim.\n\nShe described it as a terrifying crime, with many victims testifying they felt as though their heads were going to explode and they were about to die.\n\nPeers from other parties also spoke in support of a new offence.\n\nNogah Offer, a lawyer with the Centre for Women's Justice, which has been at the forefront of the campaign for a new offence, says: \"We believe this is a real opportunity to make a difference.\"\n\nCommon assault is a summary offence that can be charged by the police.\n\nBut when it involves domestic abuse, it should be referred to the Crown Prosecution Service, its guidance says.\n\nIn a statement, the Ministry of Justice said: \"Non-fatal strangulation is a serious crime which is already covered by existing laws such as common assault and attempted murder.\"\n\nA spokesperson said the government would keep this area of the law under review, but said a specific offence of attempting to choke, strangle or suffocate a person is included in the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and, according to the 2015 Serious Crime Act, attempted strangulation can fall under the offence of coercive or controlling behaviour.\n\nDr Catherine White: \"Ultimately it can lead to death\"\n\nDr Catherine White, clinical director of St. Mary's Sexual Assault Referral Centre in Manchester, says: \"Strangulation often ends up being treated the same as a slap or a punch.\n\n\"It's a very different crime. Often there is no external injury to the neck, which is why it's a very powerful tool for the perpetrator.\n\n\"It can cause confusion but ultimately it can lead to death.\"\n\nA research project led by Dr White describes non-fatal strangulation as a \"gendered crime, with nearly all the patients female and the alleged perpetrators male\".\n\nAnd figures from the Femicide Census, which looked at the cases of women killed by men in the UK, found that in 2018, 29% died through strangulation.\n\nCampaigners point to New Zealand and some parts of the United States and Australia, where non-fatal strangulation has become a specific offence.\n\nMeanwhile, after help from a women's centre and counselling, Jenny now feels stronger and happier.\n\nDespite the pandemic, she says, having finally escaped her abuser: \"2020 was one of the best years of my life.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Body Coach says he will be running PE lessons online for children\n\nJoe Wicks is restarting his online PE lessons from next week, to help families keep fit during lockdown.\n\nThe personal trainer told the BBC he wanted to \"give children structure\" and help them feel \"more optimistic\".\n\nHe said live sessions would run on his YouTube channel at 09:00 GMT on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.\n\nSchools across the UK are reopening later than normal, amid tighter measures to curb the spread of coronavirus.\n\nConfirming the return of his \"PE with Joe\" sessions in an Instagram post, Wicks, known as the Body Coach, said: \"We all need this for our mental health more than ever and exercising can help.\"\n\nHe told BBC Breakfast he had \"a really emotional moment last night\", after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a new national lockdown for England on Monday evening.\n\n\"I was thinking about all the children in the UK and all around the world that are at home in tiny little flats… and they feel like they miss their friends and they miss school,\" he said.\n\n\"And so PE with Joe three days a week is going to really help them get through those days and give them some structure and hopefully help them feel a little bit happier and a bit more optimistic.\"\n\nWicks first began his free online workouts during the national lockdown in March, with the sessions attracting millions of viewers.", "Boeing's 737 Max plane is safe to return to service in the UK and the European Union, regulators have said.\n\nIt ends a 22-month flight ban for the jet, which followed two crashes which caused 346 deaths.\n\nThe plane had already been cleared to resume flying in North America and Brazil.\n\nBut this week a senior manager at Boeing's 737 plant in Seattle warned that recertification had happened too quickly.\n\nRegulators in the US and Europe insist their reviews have been thorough, and that the 737 Max aircraft is now safe.\n\nThe European Union Aviation Safety Agency (Easa), which regulates aviation in 31 mainly EU countries, said it now had \"every confidence\" in the plane following an independent review.\n\n\"But we will continue to monitor 737 Max operations closely as the aircraft resumes service,\" said executive director Patrick Ky.\n\n\"In parallel, and at our insistence, Boeing has also committed to work to enhance the aircraft still further in the medium term, in order to reach an even higher level of safety.\"\n\nThe UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which oversees UK aviation now Britain has left the EU, said the work to return the 737 Max to the skies had been \"the most extensive project of this kind\".\n\nIt said it was in close contact with Tui, currently the only UK operator of the aircraft, as it returned the plane to service.\n\n\"As part of this we will have full oversight of the airline's plans including its pilot training programmes and implementation of the required aircraft modifications.\"\n\nThe 737 Max's first accident occurred in October 2018, when a Lion Air jet came down in the sea off Indonesia.\n\nThe second involved an Ethiopian Airlines version that crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, just four months later.\n\nBoth have been attributed to flawed flight control software, which became active at the wrong time and prompted the aircraft to go into a catastrophic dive.\n\nEasa said it had done a full investigation independent of Boeing or the US Federal Aviation Administration and \"without any economic or political pressure\".\n\nAs a result, it demanded software upgrades, electrical working rework, maintenance checks, operations manual updates and crew training.\n\n\"We asked difficult questions until we got answers and pushed for solutions which satisfied our exacting safety requirements,\" Mr Ky said.\n\nThe CAA said it had based its decision on information from Easa, the US Federal Aviation Agency and Boeing, as well as \"extensive engagement\" with airline operators and pilots.\n\nIt comes days after a report by Ed Pierson, a former Boeing manager, claimed that regulators and investigators had largely ignored factors that may have played a direct role in the accidents.\n\nMr Pierson said that further investigation of electrical issues and production quality problems at the 737 factory in Seattle was badly needed.\n\nOn Wednesday Naoise Connolly Ryan, whose husband Mick died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash, said that the families of victims \"still do not have a full accounting of what happened and why\".\n\n\"Ultimately we are more determined than ever to find out exactly what Boeing knew about this dangerous aircraft, and hold them accountable for the deaths of our loved ones.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Paul Njoroge says his family died because of Boeing's \"negligence\"\n\nBoeing has already agreed to pay $2.5bn (£1.8bn) to settle US criminal charges that it hid information from safety officials about the design of the planes.\n\nThe US Justice Department said the firm chose \"profit over candour\", impeding oversight of the planes.\n\nAbout $500m of that will go to families of the people killed in the tragedies.\n\nHowever, attorneys for the victims of the Ethiopian Airlines crash have said the deal would not end their pending civil lawsuit against Boeing.\n\nOn Wednesday, Boeing posted a record $12bn annual loss after it delayed its all-new 777X jet for the third time, incurring huge charges.\n\nThe coronavirus crisis has caused demand for the industry's largest jetliners to fall, with airline customers shunning deliveries of planes due international travel restrictions.\n\nThe 737 Max has already been cleared to fly in North America and Brazil - now it has the go-ahead from European regulators as well.\n\nIt's a major step for Boeing - although with the current travel restrictions in place, it's likely to be a while before the decision has much practical effect.\n\nBut the controversy won't end there. Relatives of those who died in the Ethiopian Airlines accident have made it clear they haven't heard enough to be sure the aircraft - modified in accordance with regulators' wishes - is truly safe.\n\nAnd this week, a former senior manager at the 737 factory told the BBC why he thought existing planes might still be carrying potentially dangerous manufacturing defects.\n\nThat may explain why Easa has also chosen to publish a report setting out the detailed reasoning behind its decision.\n\nUltimately, the 737 Max may we'll have decades of successful service ahead of it. But for the moment, winning back passenger confidence will be a formidable challenge.", "The Association of British Insurers (ABI) has defended the inclusion of ransomware payments in first-party cyber-insurance policies.\n\nIt said insurance was \"not an alternative\" to doing everything possible to first minimise the risk.\n\nHowever, it added that firms could face financial ruin without the cover.\n\nProf Ciaran Martin, former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, said the UK needed to rethink its policies on ransomware.\n\nRansomware is a form of malware in which infected computers are remotely locked by cyber-criminals, who then demand a ransom, often in the form of Bitcoin, to unlock them and return the data they hold.\n\nThere are many examples of businesses and public bodies which have chosen to pay because they do not have the data backed up, or cannot afford - or do not have time - to rebuild their systems from scratch.\n\nThe Guardian reported that Prof Martin, now at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government, said he believed insurers were \"funding organised crime\" by accepting ransomware claims, but he told the BBC the issue of how to tackle ransomware was far broader than just the insurance sector.\n\nWhile official advice is not to pay the demand, it is not illegal to do so in the UK, he said.\n\n\"I have some sympathy with insurers, because as long as it's legal, there are incentives to pay.\"\n\nWhile the ransom demand may be high, the alternative impact can also be devastating.\n\nWhen the global aluminium producer Norsk Hydro was attacked in 2019, it cost the firm around £45m, and its profits in the immediate aftermath plummeted by 82%, reported Reuters.\n\nNorsk Hydro refused to pay the demand, which would arguably have been cheaper - but it did have insurance.\n\nA spokesman for the ABI said insurers do require that \"reasonable precautions\" are taken to prevent cyber-attacks from succeeding in the first place, just as cars and houses require security measures in place to deter thieves.\n\n\"Some might argue that any insurance that covers against a criminal act could lull the policyholder into a false sense of security,\" he said.\n\nProf Martin said he did not think that banning ransomware insurance claims would necessarily solve the problem.\n\n\"But it's worth a serious piece of consultation because if we continue as we are, things will get worse,\" he said.", "Cough, fatigue, sore throat and muscle pain may be more common in people who test positive for the new UK variant of coronavirus, a study by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests.\n\nThe ONS findings are based on positive tests from a random sample of 6,000 people in England.\n\nLoss of taste and smell may be slightly less likely to affect those with the new form of the virus.\n\nHowever, it is still one of the three main symptoms of the virus.\n\nThe NHS website lists the symptoms as a high temperature, a new continuous cough and a loss or change to sense of smell or taste.\n\nMost people infected with the virus develop at least one of these symptoms.\n\nThe new variant, which was first spotted in Kent in September, spreads more easily than the previous form of the virus and has now spread across the UK, causing a surge in cases which prompted the current lockdown.\n\nThere is some evidence it could be more deadly than other variants, although the data isn't strong enough yet to say for certain.\n\nTwo other variants - one from South Africa and another from Brazil - are also circulating, although at lower levels.\n\nThe ONS analysis looked at the symptoms reported by people up to a week before testing positive for the new variant of coronavirus, compared with those testing positive for the old variant.\n\nThey were tested over two months between mid-November and mid-January.\n\nTest results compatible with the new variant show up as being positive for two genes, rather than three for the other variant.\n\nIn a group of about 3,500 people with the new variant:\n\nIn a group of 2,500 people with the old variant:\n\nThe study found 16% of those with the new variant experienced losing their sense of taste while 15% lost their sense of smell.\n\nThis was slightly lower than reported by people with the old variant (18% for both).\n\nThere was no difference found in levels of headaches, shortness of breath or diarrhoea and vomiting in both groups.\n\nProf Lawrence Young, virologist and professor of molecular oncology at the University of Warwick, said the new variant of the virus had 23 changes compared to the original Wuhan virus.\n\n\"Some of these changes in different parts of the virus could affect the body's immune response and also influence the range of symptoms associated with infection,\" he said.\n\nInfected people appear to produce more virus and this could result in more widespread infection within the body \"perhaps accounting for more coughs, muscle pain and tiredness\", Prof Young added.\n\nThe analysis is part of a long-term study to track coronavirus in the UK population, carried out jointly with Public Health England, the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "UK nationals and residents returning from \"red list\" countries will be made to quarantine in accommodation such as hotels for 10 days, Boris Johnson has said. While exact details of the policy remain unclear, similar schemes are already in place elsewhere, including in Australia and New Zealand. So how does it work?\n\nAfter finally securing her family's place in Australia's quarantine system, Keri McMenamin prepared for the worst - and ordered a vacuum cleaner.\n\nThe 38-year-old was returning to the country with her husband and two children after securing a job offer - leaving the UK in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic last year.\n\n\"It is literally luck of the draw,\" she says of where her family would spend 14 days together once they arrived. \"You didn't know what to expect.\" Having done some research, Keri discovered Facebook groups busy with people relaying their experiences of quarantine.\n\n\"A lot of people were saying, 'Look, just expect the worst and then whatever you get is a bonus.'\"\n\nKeri's children Quinn and Nyala kept busy with board games\n\n\"There were people who had, like, filthy hotel rooms, appalling food, you know, really sort of tiny spaces, no opening windows, no balconies,\" she adds.\n\nThat's when she ordered the vacuum for a friend to deliver when the time came.\n\nIn the end, the family was taken to a hotel in Surfers' Paradise on the Gold Coast and given an interconnecting room. But still, the windows were sealed and their only time outside was 20-minute stints every two to three days.\n\n\"I think what kept us sane was having a routine,\" she adds. \"Joe Wicks in the morning and our yoga in the evening and sort of keeping up your 12,000 steps a day walking around in loops.\" The vacuum came in useful.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThere are strict caps on the numbers travelling to countries using hotels to quarantine arrivals.\n\nBetween July and October 2019, 7.5m people arrived into Australia to live, work and visit. But over the same period last year, when enforced quarantine was in place, just 72,111 people arrived, according to government figures.\n\nPeople like Keri who have been through quarantine in Australia told BBC News that airlines will only confirm seats once a spot in a hotel is secured - leading to last-minute scrambles.\n\nOnline forums suggest expats desperate to get home are facing months of delays, cancellations and uncertainty - around 39,000 have said they want to return.\n\nQuarantine hotel stays themselves are costly - with fees paid for by travellers.\n\nThe quality of food provided to those placed into quarantine in Australia has improved since the start of the pandemic\n\nIn New South Wales, it costs the equivalent of around £1,700 per adult and £2,800 for a family of two adults and two children - billed after the quarantine is completed.\n\nArrivals into New Zealand are charged £1,630 for the first adult, with an extra £500 for each additional adult and £250 for each child.\n\nThe costs include the accommodation and a basic food service and even more basic cleaning - perhaps once per week, or not at all, with one change of linen and towels, depending on the facility.\n\nBut it comes on top of airfares, which have increased due to the pandemic. Fees can be waived for those who cannot pay and there are some exemptions.\n\nEach region has its own rules. In Australia, packages can be brought in from outside, and in New Zealand some of those in quarantine are taken to fields to exercise.\n\nMark Dickinson, from Liverpool, has lived in New Zealand with his wife Lisa for four years but returned to the UK to see their newborn granddaughter in December - he spoke to the BBC 10 days into a 14-day isolation near Auckland.\n\n\"We had to have a test on day zero, then day three, then we're having a test tomorrow on day 11,\" Mark says.\n\n\"The area at the front of the hotel is surrounded by a double-guarded fence. It may have cost us £2,000 but if that means New Zealand stays safe, then we're happy doing it.\"\n\nMark and his wife Lisa added photographs of their newborn granddaughter to a display in a small walking area at their hotel\n\nMany of those isolating found life does not stop in quarantine. Australian Brad Thiele started a new job and celebrated his 51st birthday alone in a 300 sq ft room at the Novotel in central Sydney.\n\nAfter being asked by a person wearing a full hazmat suit at Sydney airport whether he had any concerns about being held in a room for 14 days, Brad was taken to the hotel with a blue-light police escort. On arrival, the military were on hand to ensure he checked in.\n\n\"I quite like practising meditation. So I was able to just sort of just sit and be at peace with the fact this was the first two weeks of the rest of my life having lived abroad in Britain for the past 23 years,\" he says.\n\n\"I had some regimen, it was important to get up in the morning, make the bed, shower, iron a shirt and be smart casual for work. Just finding a rhythm and a pattern in the day.\"\n\nHe's yet to decide whether to take the Novotel up on an offer of a 30% discount on a future stay.\n\nOther countries' experience of setting up a hotel quarantine system provides an insight into the sort of challenges politicians and civil servants in the UK may soon be grappling with.\n\nInitially those in quarantine across the world complained about the quality of food being provided.\n\nThen outbreaks at just two hotels in the Australian state of Victoria were traced to 99% of cases in a second wave across Melbourne that led to around 750 deaths.\n\nA public inquiry found a lack of training, cleaning and contact tracing seeded infections into the local community.\n\nAn urgent review of the hotel quarantine system in New Zealand is under way\n\nReports at the time suggested encounters between private security staff and those staying in quarantine caused the virus to spread. The inquiry did not find evidence to back up the claims.\n\nBut former judge Jennifer Coate criticised a lack of \"health focus\" in the quarantine system in Melbourne, saying risks \"were foreseeable and may have actually been foreseen\".\n\nMeanwhile, New Zealand is investigating after a woman who had served 14 days in quarantine and tested negative twice went on to develop symptoms which were confirmed to be the South Africa variant of Covid-19.\n\nThe 56-year-old woman had recently returned from Europe and is said to have visited almost 30 places in New Zealand before her case was detected. Local officials say she is likely to have been infected by a fellow returnee.\n\nBack in Australia, knowing why the quarantine system is in place and the benefits it brings - the country has largely eradicated the virus - helps motivate people to keep to the rules, Keri McMenamin says.\n\nKeri's family have since been able to enjoy a Christmas with minimal restrictions following their stay in hotel quarantine\n\nShe has just spent a public holiday going about the sort of activities many of us in the UK can but dream of - and her children will be in school this week.\n\n\"We went to a local gym and had a group workout with 30 people,\" she says.\n\n\"And then we went to the countryside, and the kids built little boats out of wood and mingled around and there were families picnicking.\n\n\"I almost feel guilty for having gone through this process and now living a normal life,\" she adds. \"I feel like I don't want to talk to my friends in the UK about how easy our life here is and how normal it is.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMore than 100,000 people have died with Covid-19 in the UK, after 1,631 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were recorded in the daily figures.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said he took \"full responsibility\" for the government's actions, saying: \"We truly did everything we could.\"\n\n\"I'm deeply sorry for every life lost,\" he said.\n\nA total of 100,162 deaths have been recorded in the UK, the first European nation to pass the landmark.\n\nEarlier, figures from the ONS, which are based on death certificates, showed there had been nearly 104,000 deaths since the pandemic began.\n\nThe government's daily figures rely on positive tests and are slightly lower.\n\nMr Johnson told Tuesday's Downing Street news conference that it was \"hard to compute the sorrow contained in this grim statistic\".\n\nHe gave his \"deepest condolences\" to those who had lost loved ones, including \"fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, and the many grandparents who've been taken\".\n\nThe UK is the fifth country to pass 100,000 deaths, coming after the US, Brazil, India and Mexico.\n\nA surge in cases in recent weeks - driven in part by a new, fast-spreading variant of the virus - has left the UK with one of the highest coronavirus death rates globally.\n\nA further 20,089 coronavirus cases were recorded on Tuesday, continuing a downward trend in the number of UK cases seen in recent days. The number of people in hospital remains high, as do the UK's daily death figures.\n\nMr Johnson said the coronavirus infection rate remained \"pretty forbiddingly high\" despite lockdown restrictions which have been in place in England since 5 January.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and only go out for limited reasons - including for food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nMr Johnson said he would set out more detail in \"the next few days and weeks\" about \"when and how we want to get things open again\".\n\nIt's a terrible milestone - and one that represents unimaginable loss.\n\nMost of the deaths have come in two waves - the sharp, sudden surge in the spring followed by a slow and sustained rise throughout autumn and winter.\n\nMistakes have been made - the delay locking down back in March is one that is often cited even by the government's own advisers.\n\nThe UK, like much of Europe, was also woefully underprepared with limited testing and contact tracing systems.\n\nBut the ageing population, high rates of obesity, the fact the UK is a global hub and its inter-connectedness with Europe are also factors that meant we were tragically never going to escape lightly once the virus got a foothold.\n\nSpeaking alongside the prime minister, Prof Chris Whitty, England's chief medical officer, described it as a \"very sad day\".\n\nHe said the number of people dying \"will come down relatively slowly over the next two weeks - and will probably remain flat for a while now\".\n\nProf Whitty added the new coronavirus variant had changed the UK's situation \"very substantially\" with infection rates \"just about holding\" due to lockdown restrictions.\n\nBut he said the number of people testing positive for Covid-19 in the UK \"has been coming down\" and the number of people in hospital with Covid has \"flattened off\" - including in London, the South East and East of England.\n\nHowever, there were \"some areas\" where the hospital figures were \"still not convincingly reducing\", he said.\n\nNHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens said there had been \"continuing improvements in hospital treatment for severely sick coronavirus patients\".\n\nHe said he expected more treatments within the next six to 18 months, adding: \"We can see a world in which coronavirus may be more treatable, but for now, it's a combination of reducing infections and getting vaccinations done.\"\n\nOne day there will be a public inquiry - maybe several - seeking to understand why so many died.\n\nLast summer, back when the government was subsidising people to eat out at restaurants, Boris Johnson said there would be an independent inquiry into the government's handling of Covid, but gave no details or dates.\n\nHe still hasn't, despite a recent call from bereaved families, trade unions and charities for lessons to be learnt now.\n\nThe gravest public health crisis for a century would have tested any government.\n\nBut as the pandemic has worsened, the criticisms and questions have mounted - about the timing of lockdowns, the rollout of test and trace and the failure to protect care homes last spring.\n\nThere is now pressure on Boris Johnson from some Tory MPs to ease restrictions as soon as the most vulnerable are vaccinated.\n\nBut this evening a sombre prime minister said the government would first do everything it could to minimise further loss of life.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England, said it was a \"sobering moment in the pandemic\", saying: \"Each death is a person who was someone's family member and friend.\"\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was a \"national tragedy\" to have reached 100,000 deaths.\n\nThe government had been \"behind the curve at every stage\" of the pandemic and had not learnt lessons over the summer, he added.\n\nThe epidemiologist whose modelling in part prompted the UK's first national lockdown said more action in the autumn of last year could have saved lives.\n\nProf Neil Ferguson told BBC Radio 4's PM programme: \"Had we acted both earlier and with greater stringency back in September when we first saw case numbers going up, and had a policy of keeping case numbers at a reasonably low levels, then I think a lot of the deaths we've seen, not all by any means, but a lot of the deaths we've seen in the last four or five months, could have been avoided.\"\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said the death toll was \"heartbreaking\" and warned there was a \"tough period ahead\".\n\n\"The vaccine offers the way out, but we cannot let up now,\" he added.\n\nMore than 6.8 million people in the UK have had their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, according to the latest figures.\n\nPlease enable JavaScript or upgrade your browser to see this interactive\n\nIf you would like to send us a tribute to a friend or family member who died after contracting coronavirus, please use the form below.\n\nPlease remember to include a photo of your loved one and their name. Upload your pictures here. Don't forget to include your contact details, so we can get in touch with you.\n\nWe would like to respond to everyone individually and include every tribute in our coverage, but unfortunately that may not be possible. Please be assured your message will be read and treated with the utmost respect.\n\nPlease note the contact details you provide will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your tribute.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nNicola Sturgeon has suggested that Boris Johnson should not visit Scotland as it is not an \"essential\" journey.\n\nThe prime minister is widely expected to travel to Scotland on Thursday.\n\nBut Ms Sturgeon said she was \"not ecstatic\" about the plan, saying leaders should abide by the same rules as they ask of the general public.\n\nAsked about the trip, Scottish Secretary Alister Jack said Mr Johnson would go \"wherever he needs to go in his vital work against this pandemic\".\n\nAnd Downing Street has insisted that it is important for the prime minister to be \"visible and accessible\" during the pandemic.\n\nThe prime minister's official spokesman did not confirm details of the visit, but said: \"It remains the fact that it is a fundamental role of the PM to be the physical representative of the UK government\".\n\nThe spokesman added: \"It is right that he is visible and accessible to businesses, communities and the public across all parts of the UK, especially during the pandemic.\"\n\nReports have suggested Mr Johnson is due to visit Scotland on Thursday to thank staff involved in the fight against Covid-19, despite the \"stay at home\" lockdown in place across the country.\n\nSpeaking at her daily coronavirus briefing, Ms Sturgeon stressed that she was not saying Mr Johnson was unwelcome in Scotland, but added that she was \"not ecstatic\" about the idea of him travelling up from London.\n\nDowning Street says it is important for the prime minister to be \"visible and accessible\" across the UK during the pandemic\n\nShe said: \"We are living in a global pandemic and every day I stand and look down the camera and say 'don't travel unless it is essential, work from home if you possibly can' - that has to apply to all of us.\n\n\"People like me and Boris Johnson have to be in work for reasons people understand, but we don't have to travel across the UK. We have a duty to lead by example.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon said her team had suggested she visit a mass vaccination centre in Aberdeen in the coming weeks, but that she had questioned whether the journey was \"genuinely essential\".\n\nShe said: \"If I'm standing here every day saying to all of you watching, don't leave your house unless it is essential, I have a duty to subject myself to that same discipline and decision making.\n\n\"I would say me travelling from Edinburgh to Aberdeen to visit a vaccine centre is not essential - Boris Johnson travelling from London to wherever in Scotland to do the same is not essential.\n\n\"If we're asking other people to abide by that then I'm sorry, I think it's incumbent on us to do likewise.\"\n\nThere are currently cross-border travel restrictions in place for anything other than essential travel, as well as a stay at home order\n\nThe Scottish secretary was asked about the move at Westminster by SNP MP Neale Hanvey, who described the trip as a \"futile\" attempt to bolster the union following a trend of polls suggesting majority support for independence.\n\nMr Jack replied: \"That's ridiculous - the prime minister is the prime minister of the United Kingdom, and wherever he needs to go in his vital work against this pandemic, he will go.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. One protester said: \"This is the only way I can effect change\"\n\nPeople campaigning against the HS2 rail project have dug a tunnel near Euston station, in a bid to prevent their eviction from a protest camp.\n\nIn September, members of HS2 Rebellion set up a Tree Protection Camp in Euston Square Gardens in central London to protest against the £106bn scheme.\n\nThey claim the tunnel is 100ft (30m) long and has taken two months to dig.\n\nActivists say the tunnel - codenamed \"Kelvin\" - is their \"best defence\" against being evicted.\n\nOne protester, identified only as Blue, told the BBC: \"It is all very dangerous and life-threatening but it is all worth it. This is the only way I can effect change, I would sacrifice everything for the climate ecological emergency to not be happening.\"\n\nThe 18-year-old added: \"We want to be as safe as possible. It is not about us martyring ourselves, it is about delaying and stopping HS2.\"\n\nDemonstrators have previously built tree houses and scaled cranes near the HS2 Euston site\n\nA spokeswoman for HS2 said tunnel protests were \"costly to the taxpayer\".\n\nShe added: \"These are a danger to the safety of the protesters, HS2 staff, High Court enforcement officers and the general public, as well as putting unnecessary strain on the emergency services during the pandemic.\n\n\"Safety is our first priority when taking possession of land and removing illegal encampments.\"\n\nBritish Transport Police said it was aware of the tunnel but it was a matter for the Met Police, which said no complaint yet had been made.\n\nHS2 is set to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It is hoped the 20-year project will reduce rail passenger overcrowding and help to rebalance the UK's economy.\n\nThe campaign group alleges HS2 is the \"most expensive, wasteful and destructive project in UK history\" and that it is \"set to destroy or irreparably damage 108 ancient woodlands and 693 wildlife sites\".\n\nHowever, HS2 bosses have said seven million trees will be planted during phase one of the project and that much ancient woodland will \"remain intact\".\n\nSeasoned activist Daniel Cooper - better known as Swampy - has been at Euston supporting the campaigners\n\nTransport Secretary Grant Shapps told MPs in September that the first phase of the high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham would not open until 2028 at the earliest.\n\nThe second phase, to Manchester and Leeds, was due to open in 2032-33 but that has been pushed back to 2035-40.\n\nNetwork Rail, which owns the land, has been approached for a comment about the tunnel.\n\nHS2 protester Dr Larch Maxey said the tunnel was \"warm and quiet\"\n\nTunnelling as a form of environmental protest has a long history in the UK.\n\nIn the 1990s it was one of the ways that pushed environmental concerns into the headlines and changed perceptions.\n\nIn one of the environmental protesters' tunnelling guides, written by \"Disco Dave\", it says:\n\n\"In the world of NVDA (non-violent direct action) there are few defence tactics that can compare with the protest tunnel. Dangerous, laborious and time consuming, tunnelling is the ultimate and desperate tactic of desperate people in desperate times.\"\n\nThe first protest tunnel goes back to the M11 and 1993 but they only really developed during the Newbury Bypass protests in 1996.\n\nProtest tunnels against the A30 in Devon and Manchester Airport's second runway then followed.\n\nNot only did they make household names of environmental campaigners like \"Swampy\" but they arguably changed transport policy - road-building reduced massively.\n\nWe have seen tunnels more recently in 2017 in Coldharbour in Surrey in a protest against fracking so it's not a massive surprise we are seeing tunnels again.\n\nTunnelling in particular as a direct action slows down developers and it is expensive to dig out protesters safely.\n\nDisco Dave wrote: \"That ultimately is the purpose of tunnels and tree houses. To act as a deterrent warning the authorities that should they decide to evict, then it will hurt them where for them it hurts most - in the pocket.\"\n\nWhat will be interesting is if these tunnels have the same impact on HS2 as they did on the road-building programme of the late 1990s.\n\nWill it reframe HS2 so it will be seen in the same way as fracking or road building? Or can the argument still be made that it is a low-carbon form of travel even though it does cause some destruction of habitat?\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Baroness Floella Benjamin has spoken of her pride after receiving a first coronavirus vaccine dose.\n\nThe 71-year-old actress said she would wear a badge saying \"I've had the jab\" after being vaccinated.\n\nThe Lib Dem peer, who came to Britain in 1960 and was born in Trinidad, is known for appearing in the children's programme Play School and received a damehood last year.\n\nOver 6.8m people in the UK have now received a first vaccine dose.\n\nAs a member of the House of Lords, Baroness Benjamin has spoken regularly about the disproportionate effect of Covid-19 on black, Asian and minority ethnic communities as well as the knock-on impact of the pandemic.\n\nIn September, she told peers she knew two people who had taken their own lives \"because they could not cope with the uncertainty of the future\".\n\nShe is also a member of the Lords Covid-19 Committee.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Floella Benjamin This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe government has set a target for all those in the top four priority groups - around 15 million - to be offered a vaccine by mid-February.\n\nTwo vaccines - developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca - are being used. A third, from Moderna, has been approved.\n\nAll have been shown to be safe and effective in trials with two doses needed to offer the best protection - now timed 12 weeks apart.\n\nIt comes as British Asian celebrities united to dispel myths about the coronavirus vaccine.\n\nComedians Romesh Ranganathan and Meera Syal and cricketer Moeen Ali appear in a video urging people to get a jab.\n\nA study from the Royal Society for Public Health found 57% of black, Asian and minority ethnic people said they would take the vaccine.\n\nThis figure compared with 79% of white people who would do so.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nAuthorities who dealt with a benefits claim from a single mother, who took a fatal overdose after her payments were cut, made 28 errors in managing her case, a coroner has found.\n\nPhilippa Day, 27, was found collapsed at her Nottingham home beside a letter rejecting her request for an at-home benefits assessment in August 2019.\n\nShe died after two months in a coma.\n\nNottingham Coroner's Court heard the way her claim was dealt with was the \"predominant factor\" in her overdose.\n\nRecording a narrative conclusion, coroner Gordon Clow said he could not determine whether she intended to die rather than put her life at risk.\n\nMiss Day, who had been diagnosed with unstable personality disorder, had been receiving disabled living allowance (DLA) payments as she had type 1 diabetes.\n\nThose payments stopped in January 2019 after she made an application for a personal independence payment (PIP), reducing her income from £228 a week to £60.\n\nThis, the inquest heard, was because a form she had sent went missing and her payments were not reinstated for months, despite her eligibility.\n\nThis led to her taking out short-term loans and ending up in debt.\n\nThe court heard in June, she called the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to say she was \"starving\" and \"couldn't survive like this for much longer\".\n\nPhilippa Day (left) took a fatal overdose and died in October 2019\n\nShe was then asked to attend a face-to-face assessment despite it being \"distressing\" for her, Mr Clow said.\n\nThe coroner added Miss Day's mental health problems were \"exacerbated\" by the benefits process.\n\nHe accepted it had been \"the last straw\" for Miss Day who was already experiencing a range of stressors.\n\nHe said: \"Were it not for this problem, it is not likely that she would have [overdosed] on the 7th or 8th of August.\"\n\nCall handlers repeatedly failed to flag that the case required \"additional support\" due to her mental health problems, the coroner said.\n\nThe DWP did not tell her community psychiatric nurse that she had not returned the form before refusing her application, which could have resolved the issue.\n\nThe coroner said call handlers received little to no training on personality disorders like Miss Day's - all that was available was a factsheet.\n\nCapita was made aware of the risks to Miss Day's health from a face-to-face interview by her community psychiatric nurse, but did not act on it, he added.\n\nMr Clow said: \"Given the sheer number of problems in the handling of her claim, I am unable to conclude that each of these was attributable to individual human error.\"\n\nHe concluded the failure to administer her benefit claim in a way that avoided exacerbating her mental health problems was the \"predominant factor\" that caused Miss Day to overdose.\n\nMr Clow recommended changes at both the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and Capita, the authorities involved.\n\nIn a prevention of future deaths report, Mr Clow said the DWP should consider timely mental health training for call handlers and address \"poor record keeping\".\n\nThe DWP and Capita were also directed to review the change of assessment process so that it does not \"create unnecessary distress\".\n\nA spokesman for the DWP said: \"This is a deeply tragic case. Our sincere condolences are with Miss Day's family and we will carefully consider the coroner's findings.\"\n\nA Capita spokesman said the company also apologised for the mistakes made.\n\n\"We have strengthened our processes over the last 18 months and are committed to continuously working to deliver a high-quality, empathetic service for every claimant,\" he said.\n\n\"In partnership with the DWP, we will act upon the coroner's findings and make further improvements to our processes.\"\n\nThis conclusion amounts to a near dismantling of the process for applying for the main disability benefit for people with psychiatric problems.\n\nWhile around 40% of claimants for personal independence payments have mental health conditions, the inquest found that call handlers for the DWP didn't receive adequate mental health training.\n\nThe coroner found there was an \"institutional assumption\" in the DWP that problems with a claim were the claimants' fault.\n\nLast year a report from the National Audit Office (NAO) found the department had investigated 69 suicides of benefit claimants since 2014-15.\n\nThere were more cases they could have looked into, said the NAO, but in any case the department couldn't demonstrate any improvements from their investigations had actually been implemented.\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Jane Fonda has had a glittering acting career spanning six decades\n\nUS actress Jane Fonda is to be honoured with a lifetime achievement award at next month's Golden Globes, which celebrate excellence in film and TV.\n\n\"Her undeniable talent has gained her the highest level of recognition,\" said the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) - the ceremony's organiser.\n\n\"While her professional life has taken many turns, her unwavering commitment to evoking change has remained.\"\n\nFonda, 83, has had a glittering acting career spanning six decades.\n\nThe HFPA said she would be given the Cecil B deMille Award at the annual ceremony in Beverly Hills, California, on 28 February.\n\nThe Oscar-winning actress made her debut in 1960, later becoming one of the brightest Hollywood stars with films like Barbarella, Nine to Five and On Golden Pond.\n\nHer most recent performance was in the Netflix comedy series Grace and Frankie.\n\nFonda is also well known as a political activist, most recently as a campaigner against climate change. In 2016, she spent Thanksgiving among the protesters at Standing Rock, demonstrating against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.\n\nIn the 1960s she vocally opposed the Vietnam War.\n\nThe actress - who has written a book about how people can get involved in such activism - has been arrested several times during protests, and hopes her actions have raised awareness.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "Labour is calling for juries to be cut from 12 members to seven, to stem the \"gravest crisis\" in the justice system since World War Two.\n\nShadow justice secretary David Lammy said action was needed to clear the backlog of thousands of cases.\n\nHe argued that smaller juries and the use of more temporary courts would allow socially distanced trials.\n\nThe government has not ruled out such a move but insists measures it is taking to clear the backlog are working.\n\nLast week four criminal justice watchdogs warned that courts in England and Wales were straining under pressure from the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nJury trials ground to a halt at the start of the first lockdown, when people were advised to stay at home except in limited circumstances.\n\nWhen they resumed, there were severe delays and numerous cancellations due to social-distancing requirements.\n\nRecent figures revealed that the number of unheard cases in crown courts had reached a record 54,000.\n\nThe backlog means some from last year may not go before a jury until 2022, and it could be years before the courts get back on track.\n\nLabour wants the temporary return of so-called \"wartime juries\" of seven rather than 12 members to speed up the process.\n\n\"Victims of rape, murder, domestic abuse, robbery and assault are facing delays of up to four years because of the government's failure to act,\" Mr Lammy said.\n\nHe also urged the government to speed up the rollout of temporary \"Nightingale courts\" to hear civil, family and tribunals work, as well as non-custodial crime cases.\n\nTen of these were announced in July 2020 to help deal with the backlog in court proceedings, and 20 are now in operation across England and Wales.\n\nLeading lawyers are sceptical about Labour's proposal to reach back into wartime history.\n\nThe Criminal Bar Association - representing barristers who prosecute and defend trials - says a panel of seven may allow more courtrooms to be used, but it wouldn't solve what it says is chronic underfunding - and potentially undermines one of the most important safeguards in our society.\n\nThe Law Society, for solicitors, wants to see evidence that smaller panels would ease backlogs without risking injustices.\n\nThe Ministry of Justice's internal modelling calculated last year that reduced juries would lead to a 10% increase in cases - but that was before courtrooms received new Covid-proof screens that have allowed more trials to run.\n\nScotland's courts are using cinemas to host juries - and while that is not being actively discussed in England, it's not been ruled out either.\n\nEven if juries were slimmed, courts would still need to tightly control the number of defendants who can use their cells and courtroom docks to meet Public Health England's guidelines.\n\nIn April last year, the head of judiciary in England and Wales, Lord Burnett, backed the idea of reducing the number of jurors if social distancing continued.\n\nIn June, Justice Secretary Robert Buckland told the BBC he was \"very attracted\" by the idea of smaller juries, as had happened in wartime, and judge-only trials in less serious cases.\n\nThe Ministry of Justice says it has now installed plastic screens in more than 450 courtrooms and jury deliberation rooms to reduce Covid risks.\n\nIt says the safety measures are designed for 12-person juries and that the impact of lowering the number of jurors would be negligible.\n\nHowever, a spokesman said nothing was being ruled out and ministers were continuing to consider every option available to ensure courts recover quickly.\n\n\"This approach is already delivering results, with magistrates' backlogs falling significantly and the number of cases being dealt with in the crown courts reaching pre-Covid levels last month,\" he added.\n\nThe spokesman also said: \"We know more must be done and are investing £110m into a range of measures to drive this recovery further, including opening more Nightingale courts.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Karen Hobbs, from Cardiff, had a heart attack and died, weeks after testing positive for Covid\n\nThe family of a 40-year-old mother-of-five who died with coronavirus have urged people to respect lockdown rules.\n\nKaren Hobbs had a heart attack and died, weeks after testing positive for Covid-19.\n\nThe former EasyJet cabin crew member developed symptoms a week before Christmas, was not able to get out of bed and started struggling to breathe.\n\nShe was taken to hospital and died on 19 January.\n\nKaren's sister Rachel Hobbs said her normally healthy sister became very ill over Christmas.\n\n\"She just looked dreadful, Christmas Day she was laid up in bed, she couldn't do anything,\" she said.\n\n\"I knew she was really bad but I'd never seen anybody like that before, it was shocking, for someone that healthy to be barely able to walk to a car is quite shocking.\"\n\nOn 2 January, Karen was put into an induced coma.\n\n\"She was really terrified, she said 'I need to come out of this and see my children again'. She never came out of it,\" her sister added.\n\nKaren Hobbs' children are now 14, 11, nine, eight and four.\n\nThe family were told Karen's organs were beginning to fail and she was \"going downhill\" about a week before she died, and they were allowed to visit.\n\n\"She did look a little bit better, she had more colour, she was quite puffy - swelling and a bit of a rash on her. Her lungs were struggling, so we came home a little bit shocked.\n\n\"They started feeding her in a tube and were able to move her, I thought perhaps she's recovering a little bit and then I had the phone call to say that she'd gone.\n\n\"Her body just couldn't take it any more. I don't think it's sunk in. I think the children are still in a bit of shock as well, I thought she would come out of it but she just had it so severe. \"\n\nKaren's children made her a get well soon card while she was in hospital\n\nRachel said her sister, from Cardiff, was healthy with no underlying conditions.\n\n\"She didn't go anywhere - she did online shopping, she was in the house - so we don't even know where it could have come from, she was one of the ones who stayed safest.\n\n\"It's just shocking to think a young mum of five is no longer here. They've lost their mum and they lost their grandfather and nan a couple of years ago so they must feel 'who will be next'?\n\nRachel Hobbs says it still has not sunk in that she has lost her sister\n\nRachel said her sister was a fantastic mother to her five children, aged 14, 11, nine, eight and four.\n\n\"I don't think the youngest understands, I think she thinks mummy's still just in the hospital.\n\n\"She was a very hands-on mum, she spent a lot of time with the children. She'd sit and play with them for hours, sit and colour, she was always there for them.\"\n\nRachel says her youngest niece does not yet understand what has happened to her mother\n\nRachel added that Karen had no patience with people who broke lockdown rules: \"She used to get quite annoyed about people who broke the rules and she wasn't slow on coming forward, she'd say it as well.\n\n\"It just goes to show how bad this virus is. She would say 'make sure you follow the rules because nobody is safe, it is real this virus, stay at home and only go out when you need to'.\"\n\nIn the days since Karen's death a fundraising page has been set up by friends to support her children and their dad, and has raised more than £20,000.\n\nKaren spoke of how frightened she was in her final post on Facebook\n\n\"I'm absolutely amazed at how generous people have been and how kind people have been, the community has come together and I think she'd be proud too that it's raising awareness about the pandemic.\n\n\"That'll help the children going forward now. Out of a bad thing, it's been nice people getting in touch, kind words, messages, little things about what she was like.\"\n\nKaren loved colouring and playing with her children, her sister said", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson joined the production line at the Lighthouse Laboratory in Glasgow for the unpacking of Covid tests\n\nBoris Johnson has insisted that Scotland's independence debate is \"irrelevant\" to most people as he urged the country to unite against Covid.\n\nThe PM was speaking during a trip to Scotland to emphasise the strength of the UK working together during the pandemic.\n\nThe SNP said he was panicking as opinion polls show declining support for the union.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon also questioned if his trip is essential.\n\nThe PM started his day-long visit by going to the Lighthouse Laboratory - which processes Covid tests - at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital campus in Glasgow.\n\nHe later visited troops who are setting up a vaccination centre in the Castlemilk area of the city, and toured the Valneva vaccine factory in Livingston.\n\nThe factory is expected to deliver 60 million doses to the UK by the end of the year if its vaccine is approved.\n\nMr Johnson used the visit to argue that the priority should be \"fighting this pandemic and coming back more strongly together\" rather than arguing about the constitution.\n\nAnd he praised the \"amazing performance\" of Scottish people in the \"national effort\" to fight the pandemic.\n\nThe prime minister said: \"I think endless talk about a referendum without any clear description of what the constitutional situation would be after that referendum is completely irrelevant now to the concerns of most people\".\n\nMr Johnson also criticised the SNP's record in government, and added: \"We don't actually know what the referendum would set out to achieve.\n\n\"We don't know what the point of it would be - what happens to the army, what happens to the Crown, what happens to the pound, what happens to the Foreign Office. Nobody will tell us what it's all meant to be about.\"\n\nHe told reporters that \"the very same people\" who wanted independence \"also said only a few years ago, in 2014, that this was a once-in-a-generation event\".\n\n\"I'm inclined to stick with what they said last time,\" Mr Johnson said.\n\nMr Johnson met troops who are setting up a vaccination centre\n\nUnder the current Covid regulations, people are only able to travel between Scotland and England for essential reasons, with similar regulations also in place to stop travel across council boundaries within Scotland.\n\nAsked at her daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday how she felt about the prime minister's visit while the strict travel restrictions were in place, Ms Sturgeon replied she was \"not ecstatic\" about it.\n\nShe argued that leaders should abide by the same rules they impose on the general public, adding that she had herself rejected a suggested visit to a vaccine centre in Aberdeen for this reason.\n\nDowning Street has insisted it is important for the prime minister to be \"visible and accessible\" across the whole of the UK during the pandemic.\n\nIn response to Ms Sturgeon's criticism, the prime minister's official spokesman said: \"These are Covid-related visits. You've seen the prime minister do a number of them over the past few weeks.\n\n\"It is obviously important that he is continuing to meet and see those who are on the front line in terms of those who are providing tests, in terms of those who are working so hard to deliver the vaccination plan.\"\n\nMr Johnson's visit to Scotland is widely seen as being part of a \"charm offensive\" in response to polls indicating a rise in support for independence.\n\nHowever, polls have also suggested that the independence question is currently a lower priority for many people than other issues such as the pandemic, health and education.\n\nA series of opinion polls have suggested that support for independence is now ahead of support for remaining in the UK\n\nCabinet Office Minister Michael Gove said it was \"only right\" the prime minister visited people on the front line of the vaccine roll-out to make sure it is operating effectively.\n\nHe told BBC Breakfast Mr Johnson has visited other crucial locations in the UK's pandemic response, such as the Wrexham plant making the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, adding: \"No one thinks that's illegitimate.\"\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer also said he backed the visit. \"I'm with the prime minister on this one,\" he told LBC Radio.\n\n\"He is the prime minister of the UK. It's important that he travels to see what is going on, on the ground.\"\n\nIt comes as the Scottish government sets out its budget, described as the \"most important in the history of devolution\" in the wake of huge spending increases to support people and businesses during the pandemic.\n\nBoris Johnson had a clear purpose on his visit to Scotland - to talk up what he calls the power of cooperation across the UK.\n\nDressed in white lab coat and protective gear, he was happy to tell me how the UK government is supporting the fight against coronavirus in Scotland.\n\nThat includes spending lots of money supporting jobs and businesses, building test centres, and procuring vaccine supplies from companies like the one he was visiting in Livingston.\n\nNo matter what the prime minister does, or that the UK and Scottish governments are following broadly similar Covid strategies - the public in Scotland perceives that Nicola Sturgeon and her team are handling the pandemic response better.\n\nThis visit was controversial because it happened during lockdown but it went ahead because the UK government recognises how much work it has to do to make the case for the union in Scotland, with Scottish elections due in May when the question of indyref2 will be to the fore.\n\nOn Sunday, the SNP revealed an 11-point \"roadmap to a referendum\" on Scottish independence, which sets out how the party intends to take forward its plan for another vote on the issue.\n\nIt says a \"legal referendum\" will be held after the pandemic if there is a pro-independence majority at Holyrood following May's election.\n\nAnd it says it will \"vigorously oppose\" any legal challenge from the UK government.\n\nNicola Sturgeon's SNP has published a \"roadmap\" aimed at holding a legal referendum once the pandemic ends\n\nMr Johnson has repeatedly stated his opposition to a referendum, and has suggested that another one should not be held for 40 years.\n\nOpposition parties in Scotland have also accused Ms Sturgeon and the SNP of putting the push for independence ahead of the Covid pandemic.\n\nBut SNP deputy leader Keith Brown said the prime minister's trip was evidence that he is in a \"panic\" about the prospect of another referendum.", "Jonathan Mok posted a selfie and another photo of his injuries on Facebook\n\nA 16-year-old boy has been sentenced for racially attacking a Singapore student who was told \"we don't want your coronavirus in our country\".\n\nJonathan Mok was beaten up on Oxford Street last February by a group of boys in an \"unprovoked attack\".\n\nThe teenager was convicted of racially aggravated grievous bodily harm following a trial at Highbury Corner Youth Court.\n\nThe chair of the bench gave the boy an 18-month youth rehabilitation order.\n\nHe was also ordered to wear an electronic tag, follow a curfew order between 20:00 and 07:00 for 10 weeks and must pay £600 compensation to Mr Mok.\n\nChair of the bench Mervyn Mandell warned that had he been an adult he \"would have gone to jail for a very long time\".\n\n\"This was an unprovoked attack for no reason other than his [Mr Mok's] appearance,\" he said.\n\nJonathan Mok had been walking home after having dinner in central London\n\nMr Mok, 23, suffered a complicated fracture to his nose and cheekbone which required surgery, screws and stitches.\n\nImages of his swollen eye were shared widely on social media following the attack.\n\nThe court heard previously how the UCL law student turned around after a friend of the attacker made a remark about coronavirus towards him.\n\nWitnesses described a \"commotion on the street\" where Mr Mok and his friend were \"confronted by a group of white males\".\n\nThey heard someone shout \"you are diseased don't come near me\".\n\nMr Mok was then punched in the face. The teenager joined the attack and continued to punch and kick Mr Mok.\n\nProsecutor Simon Maughan said the teenager was \"quick to get involved\" in the group attack.\n\nA victim impact statement read out on behalf of Mr Mok said the crime had \"taken a heavy toll\" on him and his family.\n\nHe added: \"My legal education had to be halted for a month due to surgery and follow up medical appointments.\n\n\"I have anxiety and have problems sleeping. I believe the defendant is a threat to Singaporeans and South East Asians. He has shown no remorse.\"\n\nThe teenager's defence barrister Gerard Pitt said the boy handed himself in following a police CCTV appeal last March.\n\nNo-one else has been charged in connection with the attack.\n\nMr Pitt said: \"He has always maintained he did not say anything about coronavirus and that was vindicated at the trial.\"\n\nThe court heard Mr Mok could not be 100% sure the defendant was the boy who said anything about coronavirus.\n\nThe boy had no previous convictions, but had two youth cautions for common assaults, the court was told.\n\nBefore being sentenced the teenager said: \"When I saw the picture I felt disgusted.\n\nFor more London news follow on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Robin Swann says all health workers are valued and have worked tirelessly during the pandemic\n\nHealth workers in Northern Ireland are to get a \"special recognition\" payment for their work during the pandemic.\n\nIt is intended that all staff will receive a payment of £500, said Health Minister Robin Swann.\n\nHowever, it will be subject to approval from the Department of Finance.\n\nThere had been calls from some political parties and health unions for staff to be recognised for their efforts.\n\nScotland has already announced a similar one-off payment and Mr Swann said it would reflect the \"principle of parity\".\n\n\"There are no words to properly convey what health workers have done for us, we will never be able to repay that debt,\" added the minister.\n\nThe development comes as Northern Ireland's Department of Health has recorded 16 more coronavirus-related deaths, taking its toll so far to 1,779.\n\nA further 527 people have tested positive for the virus in the past 24 hours.\n\nThere are 775 people in Northern Ireland's hospitals who are being treated for the virus - 68 of them are in intensive care and the number of people requiring ventilators has risen to 56.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland, 54 more Covid-19 related deaths were recorded on Wednesday. It brings the Republic of Ireland's death toll to 3,120.\n\nThe Irish Department of Health also confirmed 1,335 more Covid-19 cases.\n\nSpeaking at the weekly health news conference on Wednesday, Mr Swann said the pandemic had caused \"destruction\" and left \"heartbreak in its wake\".\n\n\"Staying at home is making a difference. The R-number has been moving in the right direction,\" he said.\n\n\"We have to sustain and build on that progress.\"\n\nThe reproductive rate of the virus - known as the R rate, measures the infection rate of Covid-19 and had risen to about 1.8 after Christmas relaxations.\n\nIt has been falling since lockdown restrictions were introduced on 26 December, and Chief Medical Officer Dr Michael McBride said NI's R-number for hospital admissions has now fallen back below one.\n\nBut he warned that the pressure on the system was still significant and would continue for several more weeks.\n\nHe added that there would need to be a \"sustained\" drop in the figures before relaxations of the lockdown could be considered by the executive.\n\nIt has also been confirmed that the number of people in Northern Ireland who have received their first Covid-19 now stands at 168,140.\n\nMore than 50,000 people aged over 80 have been vaccinated.\n\nOn the payment to health workers, Mr Swann said it would \"not be without its challenges\" but that he valued all staff in the health service.\n\n\"For some people, especially some of our lower paid workers, it may in fact have an adverse impact on their social security payments or supports that recipients may be claiming,\" he added.\n\n\"I have written to the ministers of finance and communities asking them to urgently consider the issue and to engage with the tax and benefit authorities in Great Britain to request that these payments are excluded from consideration in this regard.\"\n\nThere will also be a one-off payment of £2,000 for all non-salaried students on clinical placements in the health service.\n\nMr Swann added that he intends to provide a one-off payment for carers as well, describing them as \"among the greatest unsung heroes\" of the pandemic.\n\nBut he said: \"There is still more work to be done in this regard and it will be significantly more complex to administer than the staff payment.\"\n\nKevin McAdam, who is from Unite the union, said the \"recognition payments\" will be allocated with assurances that this will not affect pay negotiations with healthcare workers.\n\nMr McAdam welcomed that health care workers and non-salaried students on placements will be \"receiving something more tangible than applause\".\n\n\"The student payment is a recognition payment, it does not solve the problems around whether student placements should be paid, I think that is an argument for another day.\"\n\nMeanwhile, a senior Department of Finance official has warned there is \"a higher than usual risk\" of some £430m unspent by the NI Executive being returned to the Treasury.\n\nMinisters must submit further funding bids, or risk it being handed back at the end of the financial year.\n\nA department official, Jeff McGuinness, said the Treasury was being pressed to show flexibility in carrying unspent money over but added that it was \"imperative\" Stormont pressed ahead, rather then rely on agreement from Treasury.\n\nHe said the other devolved administrations were also asking the Treasury for similar levels of carry-forward of unspent fiscal allocations.", "More than 127,000 people in the UK who contracted coronavirus have lost their lives - with the pandemic claiming more than 3.4 million deaths worldwide. As the UK marks a year since the first coronavirus lockdown was called, it's a time for reflection.\n\nWe have gathered tributes to more than 770 of those who have died. Below are words of remembrance from friends, family and colleagues.\n\nPlease enable JavaScript or upgrade your browser to see this interactive\n\nThe tributes are displayed at random, which means that you will see different faces each time you visit this page.\n\nIf we have used your tribute to your friend or family member, it will appear in the carousel above, or you can find it by entering their name in the search box below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. Enter a name to search the tributes\n\nFor more on NHS and healthcare workers, please see this page dedicated to 100 people who died while helping to look after others.\n\nFor more on how it has affected people's lives, from family tragedy to its impact on everyday life, we have a collection of personal stories about life in lockdown.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The limit on a single payment using contactless card technology could rise to £100 - more than double the current limit.\n\nThe coronavirus pandemic led to larger amounts spent via contactless payments on debit cards, credit cards, and cards connected to smartphones.\n\nIt has been less than a year since the limit was raised from £30 to £45.\n\nThe Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said it will consult \"shortly\" on a change in the rules.\n\n\"It is important that payments regulation keeps pace with consumer and merchant expectations,\" the regulator said.\n\n\"Recognising changing behaviour in how people pay, as part of a wider consultation, we will shortly be seeking views on amending our rules to allow for a possible increase in the contactless limit to £100.\"\n\nThe FCA can set the boundaries for payments, under its rules, but the card issuers would have the power to set the actual limits.\n\nThe pandemic has changed the way we pay for things\n\nThe use of contactless technology by consumers has risen sharply in recent years, with more services adopting the technology and most shops offering it as an option.\n\nTo protect workers and consumers during the Covid outbreak, an increase to the current limit of £45 was rushed through by the regulator in April last year.\n\nThe latest figures show that the proportion of contactless payments had fallen slightly compared with pre-pandemic levels, because lockdown measures hit the use of pubs, restaurant, and public transport. They accounted for 41% of card transactions.\n\nHowever, there was a 16% increase in the total value of contactless payments in the UK in October, compared with the same month a year earlier, the latest data from UK Finance - which represents banks - shows.\n\nThe amount spent on contactless hit a monthly record in August, boosted by the Eat Out to Help Out scheme and fewer coronavirus-related restrictions. A total of £8.4bn was spent on credit and debit cards using contactless during that month.\n\n\"The industry believes that a more flexible approach could be merited in future, which takes into account consumer demand, fraud prevention, security and convenience,\" said a spokesman for UK Finance.\n\n\"Contactless is one of a range of payment methods and the industry will also continue to work closely with the regulator to ensure that customers can pay in a way that suits them.\"\n\nHowever, there may be less enthusiasm from some shopkeepers concerned about higher-value theft as a result of the proposed changes.\n\nAndrew Cregan, payments policy advisor at the British Retail Consortium, said: \"We have concerns about raising the contactless limit, with losses from incomplete contactless payments at self-checkouts currently costing retailers millions in lost revenue.\n\n\"Card companies should take measures to reduce incomplete payments and we urge customers to make sure their own transactions always go through. However, the overwhelming priority at the moment must be for the government to address the rocketing card fees.\"", "The UK has identified 77 cases of the coronavirus variant first detected in South Africa, the health secretary has said.\n\nCases are linked to travellers arriving in the UK, rather than community transmission, Matt Hancock added.\n\nHe told the BBC's Andrew Marr cases were under \"very close\" observation and enhanced contact tracing was under way.\n\nMinisters are due to meet on Monday to consider imposing tougher restrictions on people arriving from abroad.\n\nScientists have said there is a chance the South African variant may harm the effectiveness of current vaccines.\n\nMeanwhile, Mr Hancock said that \"three quarters of all the 80-year-olds in the country and a similar number of care homes\" have received their first doses of the vaccine.\n\nBoth the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines require two doses, and figures so far reflect those given the first dose.\n\nMr Hancock said that it was \"far too early to say\" what proportion of the population needed to be vaccinated before lockdown restrictions could be eased.\n\nAll viruses, including the one that causes Covid-19, mutate, and variants have been first located in the UK, South Africa and Brazil.\n\nThe South Africa variant has been found in at least 20 other countries, including the UK.\n\nMr Hancock said that all the South Africa variant cases in the UK were linked to travel.\n\n\"That's why we have got such stringent border measures in place against movement from South Africa,\" he added.\n\nThe UK closed all travel corridors last week until at least 15 February, with almost all travellers arriving in the country now required to show proof of a negative Covid-19 test to be allowed entry.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has not ruled out bringing in tougher measures at UK borders, telling a Downing Street news conference on Friday: \"We don't want to put that (efforts to control Covid) at risk by having a new variant come back in.\"\n\nMinisters are set to discuss whether to tighten border restrictions further, including the possibility of hotel quarantines for travellers.\n\nMr Hancock said: \"We have got to be cautious at the borders.\"\n\nAsked for a date on when lockdown restrictions might end, Mr Hancock said it was \"one of the many things that we don't yet know the answer to\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Matt Hancock on easing restrictions: \"We don't know the answer\"\n\nGovernment data on 14 January showed there were 35 confirmed cases of the South Africa variant identified in the UK, and a further 12 \"probable\" cases.\n\nMr Hancock said nine cases of the Brazil variant had been found in the UK, adding \"we are monitoring each and every one very closely\".\n\nShadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that Labour had been \"pushing the government to take tougher measures at the border since last spring\".\n\nShe said: \"We would fully expect the government to bring in tougher quarantine measures, we would expect them to roll out a proper testing strategy and we would expect them as well to start checking up on the people who are quarantining.\n\n\"Only three out of every hundred people who are asked to quarantine when they arrive into the UK actually face any checks at all - that's just simply not sufficient.\"\n\nOn Friday, Mr Johnson said there was \"some evidence\" the UK variant may be associated with \"a higher degree of mortality\".\n\nThe UK government's chief scientific officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, said there was \"a lot of uncertainty around these numbers\" but that early evidence suggested the variant could be about 30% more deadly.\n\nThe PM said on Friday that there was evidence that both the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine and Oxford-AstraZeneca jab were effective against the variant first detected in the UK.\n\nSir Patrick has warned that the variants in South Africa and Brazil might \"have certain features which means they might be less susceptible to vaccines\".\n\nBut he said \"there is no evidence\" that the two variants have transmission advantages over those already in the UK and so having cases here doesn't mean \"they will take off\".\n\nMeanwhile, England's deputy chief medical officer warned that people who have received a Covid-19 vaccine could still pass the virus on to others and should continue following lockdown rules.\n\nWriting in the Sunday Telegraph, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam stressed that scientists \"do not yet know the impact of the vaccine on transmission\".\n\nHe said vaccines offer \"hope\" but infection rates must come down quickly.\n\nIt's a key question but the fact is that no one can be sure.\n\nThat's because the trials of the vaccines explored the safety of the drugs and how well they prevent people from becoming ill - with good results for both.\n\nBut they did not investigate whether vaccination also stops infection and therefore whether people who've been immunised can still spread the virus to others.\n\nIf a vaccinated person did become infected, they probably wouldn't realise because they wouldn't have any symptoms. That's why health officials and ministers are so concerned.\n\nIt's possible that the antibodies boosted by the vaccine suppress the effects of the virus but don't eliminate it from the upper airway.\n\nMany scientists are cautiously hopeful that in this scenario, the amount of virus would be reduced but they're waiting for the results of studies under way now.\n\nAnd until there's an answer, it's difficult to calculate how and when it's safe to ease restrictions and allow people to mix again.\n\nA further 610 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test were reported in the UK on Sunday - down from 671 deaths last Sunday - in addition to 30,004 new infections.\n\nThe number of positive cases has fallen for the fourth day in a row and is the lowest figure since before Christmas.\n\nThe death figures tend to be lower on a Sunday and Monday because of weekend lags in reporting of the data.\n\nMeanwhile, more than six million people have had their first dose of a Covid vaccine - with the figure now standing at 6,353,321.\n\nNadhim Zahawi, the minister responsible for the vaccine rollout, said on Twitter that 6,353,321 of the \"most vulnerable and frontline heroes\" had received a first dose of the vaccine, but there was still \"much more to do\".\n\nThere were 4,076 Covid patients in mechanical ventilation beds in UK hospitals as of Friday, according to government data.\n\nThat is higher than during the first wave, when the peak was 3,301 on 12 April.", "A banned driver in a stolen car who drove into a police officer on his motorbike has been detained for three years at a young offender's institute.\n\nPC Steve Lovering was deliberately hit by Callum Fellows in Oldbury, West Midlands, after recognising him as a car crime suspect, police said.\n\nFellows, 18, admitted dangerous driving, driving while disqualified and assault at Wolverhampton Crown Court.\n\nFootage from 27 August shows Fellows reversing and knocking Mr Lovering off his bike \"sending him sprawling into the road\" before he sped off on the wrong side of the road and through red traffic lights.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The prime minister said he knew pupils and teachers wanted \"nothing more than to get back to the classroom\"\n\nSchools in England will not be able to reopen to all pupils after the February half-term, but could do so from 8 March, the prime minister has said.\n\nBoris Johnson said this was the earliest schools could reopen and \"depends on lots of things going right\".\n\nThe BBC has been told the aim is for all schools and year groups in England to return at the same time.\n\nTheir return would mark the first stage in lifting the lockdown, the PM said.\n\nHe told a Downing Street news conference: \"The date of 8 March is the earliest that we think it is sensible to set for schools to go back and obviously we hope that all schools will go back.\"\n\n\"I'm hopeful, but that's the earliest that we can do it and it depends on lots of things going right, and... it also depends on us all now continuing to work together to drive down the incidence of the disease through the basic methods we've used throughout this pandemic,\" he added.\n\nThere was not enough data yet to decide when to end the lockdown, he said, but intended to set out a plan for how it could be eased - and the criteria involved - in the final week of February\n\nBBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg described the 8 March date as \"very much a hope and certainly not a guarantee\".\n\nMeanwhile, a further 1,725 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test, according to the latest government figures. The UK's official coronavirus death toll surpassed 100,000 on Tuesday.\n\nMr Johnson told MPs the country remained in a \"perilous situation\" as he said UK nationals and residents arriving from 30 high-risk countries would soon be ordered to quarantine in hotels.\n\nHe revealed a plan for the \"gradual and phased\" lifting of the lockdown in England could come in the week beginning 22 February.\n\nOther restrictions on daily life could be eased after schools reopen, but he explained this would depend on hitting vaccination targets, the capacity of the NHS, and deaths falling.\n\nAn earlier plan for mass testing for pupils and staff remains in place, the BBC has been told.\n\nEngland's schools have been closed to all but vulnerable children and those of key workers since the Christmas break.\n\nIn Scotland, it is hoped schools may begin a phased return in the middle of February.\n\nIn Wales, measures including school and college closures will be reviewed on Friday. In Northern Ireland, a review will take place on Thursday.\n\nThe prime minister said he understood frustration among pupils and teachers \"and for parents and for carers who spent so many months juggling their day jobs, not only with home schooling but meeting the myriad other demands of their children from breakfast until bedtime\".\n\nThe government initially planned to review England's lockdown measures - including school closures - on 15 February, which had raised hopes that pupils could return to classes after half term.\n\nAcknowledging the impact of continued school closures, Mr Johnson pledged to \"work with parents, teachers and schools to develop a long-term plan to make sure that pupils have the chance to make up their learning\" before 2024.\n\nHe said £300m \"of new money to schools\" would fund a catch-up programme over the coming year, with financial incentives for providers to educate pupils who have missed lessons due to the pandemic.\n\nAfter complaints about confusion and drift about when schools in England are going back, Boris Johnson has sought to bring some certainty.\n\nThey won't be going back straight after half term - but the target date will be 8 March.\n\nSources say the aim is for all schools and year groups in England, in primary and secondary, to return back on that date - rather than it being the starting date of a phased or regional return.\n\nAlthough that could be subject to any changes in local Covid-19 levels.\n\nWhen schools do go back it is expected there will be mass testing for pupils and staff, in the scheme initially planned for the start of term.\n\nIt still leaves parents home schooling for another five weeks - and means most of this term will have been without face-to-face lessons.\n\nThis will be a particular worry for pupils heading for whatever replaces GCSEs and A-levels this summer, after almost a full year of stop-start lessons.\n\nHead teachers say the delay is \"no surprise\" - and reopening must be done safely.\n\nAnd Labour says half term should be used to vaccinate teachers to help schools stay open.\n\nBut the prime minister will hope that parents would rather have some clarity about what's happening with schools, even if that means a longer delay.\n\nTeachers' and head teachers' unions said they supported reopening schools but added that it must be safe and not rushed.\n\nMary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said that although the most vulnerable would be protected by March, most parents would not be.\n\n\"It fails completely to recognise the role schools have played in community transmission. The prime minister has already forgotten what he told the nation at the beginning of this lockdown, that schools are a 'vector for transmission',\" she said.\n\nPaul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders' union NAHT, said the government needs to work with head teachers to review safety measures and create a \"workable plan\" for schools to reopen fully.\n\n\"The government will also have to put effort into reassuring families that it is safe to send their children back to school - there is a confidence test the government must pass to make the return a success,\" he said.\n• None How are Covid rules changing across UK schools?", "Times Radio's Tom Newton-Dunn asked about transmission rates in people given the vaccine Image caption: Times Radio's Tom Newton-Dunn asked about transmission rates in people given the vaccine\n\nTom Newton Dunn from Times Radio asks what we know so far about the rate at which people who have had the vaccine can transmit coronavirus.\n\nJonathan Van Tam says there is no clear data on how the vaccine impacts transmission of coronavirus but there are studies working on finding out and we will have that information in time.\n\nHe said the question is less \"will they\" and more \"to what extent\" do they stop transmission.\n\nSir Patrick Vallance says \"you don't have vaccines of this efficacy without there being some effect on transmission\".\n\nHe says it's an important question as \"it will also determine to what extent these vaccines can be used across wider society to reduce transmission overall\".\n\nNewton Dunn asks how the prime minister came to the date of 8 March to reopen schools and whether it would have been \"wiser to wait until you were sure\".\n\nThe prime minister says the date depends on the vaccines working in reducing mortality and serious disease.... and we need to make sure the infection rate is in the right place.\n\n\"We will keep it all under constant review,\" he says.", "Already 100,000 people in the UK have died with Covid, according to the official count. The idea of 100,000 deaths is hard for many of us to comprehend. But each was a human being who lived and loved in their own unique way. This is the story of one of them.\n\nBy 3:01am, alone in a hospital room, Ann Fitzgerald reached for her phone. This would be her last chance to contact her husband of four decades, the man she'd raised two children with, her Tony - to Ann, he was always her Tony.\n\nThe couple had made a pact. So long as Ann was in hospital with Covid, Tony would spend his nights dozing upright in a chair at their bungalow in Pewfall, Merseyside. That way, he would wake up if there was a message alert.\n\nIt wasn't much of a sacrifice, Tony thought, not when the woman he'd loved for 47 years was all by herself and frightened. And besides, each time his phone bleeped Tony would know she was still alive, and silently he'd thank the stars.\n\nAnd so in the early hours of Tuesday 7 April, Ann's last message arrived. She'd summoned the energy to take a farewell selfie as she lay in bed wearing an oxygen mask. \"She must have thought: 'Here's something so you won't forget me,'\" says Tony.\n\nTwo-and-a-half hours later, Ann was dead. She was 65, a mother, a wife, a neighbour, a colleague and a friend, and one of 999 people in the UK who died that day with the novel coronavirus.\n\nSoon after the hospital rang and told Tony of her death, he was at her bedside, dressed from head to toe in PPE. No visitors had been allowed to see her while she was alive, but now she was gone it was apparently fine - for reasons he didn't understand.\n\nTony wept as he apologised to his wife's lifeless body for letting her go like this, with no loved ones by her side. Then he turned and cursed the sterile white hospital ceiling and walls, because they'd been with her at the end and he hadn't.\n\nBack then, few could have imagined the UK's death toll would reach 100,000, or anything close to it.\n\nAt that point, the tally stood at 10,000; three weeks previously the UK government's Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance had said limiting the final figure to twice that sum would be a \"good outcome\".\n\nNow, 10 months on, the total number of people in the UK who have died within 28 days of a coronavirus diagnosis has increased tenfold, while UK excess deaths in 2020 were at their highest level since World War Two. The UK has had one of the highest rates of recorded coronavirus deaths in the world so far.\n\nBy any measure, 100,000 is a devastating amount, roughly equivalent to two Premier League football grounds, or the number of people who attend the Reading festival every year. For many people, the sheer scale of loss conveyed by the figure will be impossible to grasp.\n\n\"Numbers with lots of zeros are very difficult to interpret, and can be made to look large or small,\" says Sir David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at the University of Cambridge.\n\n\"If I say that 100,000 deaths is two months' worth of normal mortality, then it may not look so bad. If I say that it is more than all the [UK] civilian deaths in WW2, or as if everyone in a city the size of Durham got killed, then it sounds worse. It is challenging to adequately convey such a large number of individual tragedies.\"\n\nBut while many may have become numb to the daily death figures, behind every statistic is a real life lost - a real life like Ann's. \"That is why this arbitrary numerical milestone is important,\" says Hetan Shah, chief executive of the British Academy and a former executive director of the Royal Statistical Society. \"It is a chance to reflect again on the terrible toll this pandemic has taken on so many British families.\"\n\nIn a Manchester nightclub one evening in 1973, 18-year-old Tony felt a tap on his arm. It was Ann, a year his senior, whom he knew by sight as a barmaid in one of the city-centre pubs he sometimes drank in. She'd always stood out to him, with her olive skin and striking good looks, but he'd never dared imagine she might be interested in him romantically.\n\n\"I'm here with that fella over there,\" she told him, gesturing towards across the room. \"But I don't like him and I don't know what to do.\"\n\nTony walked over to Ann's date and told him to clear off. Then Tony returned to Ann, and the two of them had a drink together, and then another. Before long they were a couple and Tony decided he was the luckiest man in the world.\n\nSoon he learned all about Ann's background. Her Lithuanian-born Jewish father had died when she was two years old, and with her mother unable to cope she'd been passed between relatives throughout her childhood. By 16 she was living in a bedsit, supporting herself with waitressing and bar work - she'd also been employed at the legendary art-deco Kardoma café on Market Street and at George Best's nightclub, Oscar's.\n\n\"As a consequence of her upbringing she was really, really independent,\" says Tony. \"She was really good at talking to people, and she was sharp - the sharpest, wittiest person I've ever met.\"\n\nThey rented a flat in Fallowfield together and made it their home. After Ann was offered relief work running bars around Manchester, Tony quit his job as a sales rep to join her. Eventually, in 1981, they took on their own pub. It was in what was then a tough part of Salford, but Ann had grown up nearby and knew how to handle the local characters: \"She could have you in stitches, but she could throw you a look, and you knew you had to behave yourself,\" Tony says.\n\nThe couple were offered the chance to take on another pub in Sale Moor. They thought they were going upmarket, but it turned out to be quite the reverse; Tony would joke that he should take away all the tables and chairs and install a boxing ring instead.\n\nBut Ann wasn't intimidated by anyone. According to Tony, when a notorious local villain turned up and demanded a free drink, Ann stood her ground: \"My husband's name is above the front door, and he pays for his drinks, so you're going to pay for yours,\" she told him. Impressed, the villain ended up buying one for Ann instead.\n\nShe and Tony knew it was time to quit when burglars broke in one night while their baby daughter slept in her cot upstairs. Tony went back on the road as a salesman; Ann worked variously as a debt counsellor, an incident manager for the RAC, and a sales trainer at a cotton firm. Their children, Gary, and Rachel, never once heard them argue, Tony says.\n\nFor six years the couple had a stall at Altrincham Market selling women's clothes. \"People would come, not necessarily to buy something - they just wanted to see Ann,\" says Tony. \"And as a consequence, they'd buy something they didn't really want.\" Each time this happened, Ann would give Tony a wink.\n\nBy the start of 2020, Ann and Tony were looking forward to a long retirement together. Both their children had left home, and they'd recently moved to the bungalow. The news broadcasts had begun describing a deadly pandemic that had spread from China. But Ann wasn't leaving the house much while she recovered from an operation to replace both hips.\n\nThen one Thursday in March she went for a haircut; she asked for the colour to be darkened slightly too, and when he first saw her afterwards Tony told her how much he loved it. Ann mentioned that the hairdresser had been coughing.\n\nThree days later, Ann began coughing too, and soon afterwards so did Tony. But with a fever, she felt worse, and within a few more days she was barely able to stand. She asked Tony to call 999.\n\nThe paramedics helped her to the ambulance. It haunts Tony now that he didn't hug or kiss her as they said goodbye. \"Neither of us thought for one moment that it would be the last day I would ever see her alive,\" he says. She told him they'd probably give her antibiotics and he could come and pick her up in a few hours.\n\nBut later that day she phoned him to say the doctors suspected Covid and they would be keeping her in. As in many hospitals during the first wave, no visiting was allowed.\n\nTony could only stay in touch with her by phone. When a doctor told him the next 24 hours were critical, he didn't tell Ann, because he knew how scared she was already by then.\n\nBut he did pass on something else the medic had said - that they were deeply impressed by her upbeat attitude and fighting spirit. Tony told her, too, that he believed she would be home soon: \"I had to say that to keep her fighting, and fight she did for 10 days.\"\n\nThe last time they spoke was Saturday 4 April. Ann told Tony she thought she'd turned a corner; she'd eaten a sandwich and some yoghurt. After that, talking became too difficult for her; she wasn't in intensive care but the mask she wore to help her breathe was getting in the way.\n\nThree days after their last conversation, Tony was sitting in a white hospital room beside Ann's body. He sat with her there for an hour. He didn't just apologise, he also promised he'd make sure she was remembered properly. When it was time to leave, a nurse gave him a booklet about bereavement and a black bag in which to put Ann's belongings. Tony carried them along a hospital corridor, wondering how he would tell Gary and Rachel their mum was dead.\n\nThere are eight photographs of Ann in Tony's living room. In each of them she looks full of joy. \"Every time I look around, there's a picture of Ann somewhere,\" Tony says. \"She's smiling and I'm thinking, 'If only I could turn back the clock.' But I can't, you know, and nor can all those other families and relations, either.\"\n\nNearly 10 months after Ann's death, Tony finds himself resenting the home he's been left alone inside. If they hadn't moved there, he reasons, Ann wouldn't have gone to that hairdresser's that day and caught the virus - she'd still be alive, perhaps.\n\nHe feels robbed of the 20 additional years he hoped they'd spend together, as surely will thousands of other bereaved relatives. While the impact on the very oldest has been widely recognised, those who might have looked forward to a long retirement have been badly hit, too - during the pandemic, around 15% of all UK fatalities with Covid mentioned on the death certificate have been among those aged 65-74.\n\nTony desperately wishes his life would go back to how it was, but knows it won't.\n\nAnn's funeral didn't give him any closure. Tony would rather she had been buried, but the undertaker warned him to hurry - extra restrictions could be introduced any time - so he took the date that was offered by the crematorium.\n\nAs it was, under the rules that were already in force, only 10 mourners were permitted, spaced out around the chapel. No flowers or photographs on display, no hugging.\n\nTony understood why all this was necessary - but it wasn't the celebration of Ann's bright, gregarious, love-filled life that he thought she deserved. He'd have to plan another one when all this was over.\n\nAs the months went on, Tony joined online Covid support groups. It helped talking to others who understood how it felt to have lost someone. There was the family of a 19-year-old boy. A woman who was mourning both her mum and her dad. Another woman whose husband had died in the car as she drove him to hospital.\n\nHe thought of these stories each time he switched on the news and watched the Covid mortality figures climb higher and higher. Behind these cold statistics were human lives. And each was as unique as Ann, with a personality and backstory entirely of their own.\n\nIt would have been Ann and Tony's 41st wedding anniversary on 6 October, the day before the six-month anniversary of her death. The following month, a few days after the UK's Covid death toll reached 50,000, Tony once again felt Ann's absence bitterly on what would have been her 66th birthday.\n\n\"Christmas was a nightmare for me,\" he says. Under the rules for the festive season, Gary and Rachel and their partners were able to be there with him, and cooking lunch kept him busy most of the day. But afterwards, when he was on his own again, the reality hit that another celebration had gone by without Ann beside him, and Tony sat down and sobbed.\n\nFor millions the arrival of the Covid vaccines has brought hope, but it is a cold comfort for those who have lost someone. If every one of the 100,000 were loved by a dozen people, \"that's a million people in Britain who have been bereaved\", says the bioethicist and sociologist Prof Sir Tom Shakespeare. \"We need a national monument, some form of remembering.\"\n\nTony is not one of those who will find it hard to grasp the significance of this bleak milestone.\n\n\"To me it's 100,000 poor souls fighting for breath, and they've not had a hug from anyone in their family,\" he says. \"There's a name - there's a person behind that number. And then they've passed away, and the family goes through the grief that I've been through - the numbness, the shock, the anguish and the pain to come.\"", "Microsoft has reported booming demand for its Xbox gaming consoles as the pandemic continues to lift the fortunes of the American tech giant.\n\nIts Azure cloud computing services also got a boost due to a surge in working and learning from home.\n\nThe gains helped push the firm's overall revenue up 17% to a record $43.1bn (£31.4bn).\n\nBut its growth came as the virus continues to weigh on other industries.\n\nMicrosoft boss Satya Nadella said the firm is benefiting from a long-term shift in behaviour.\n\n\"What we have witnessed over the past year is the dawn of a second wave of digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry,\" he said.\n\nXbox sales jumped 40% in the three months to 31 December while Azure services soared 50%.\n\nThe virus continues to weigh on industries outside of tech\n\nThe pandemic has prompted many firms to switch to remote working, while keeping many entertainment options outside of the home off-limits.\n\nMicrosoft has seized on the changes, focusing energy on updating its remote work software options.\n\nThe firm also released two new Xbox consoles in November, helping to boost the performance of its personal computing unit.\n\nMicrosoft's gaming business topped $5bn in quarterly sales for the first time ever due to gaming subscriptions and sales as well as new consoles.\n\nThe firm said profits in the quarter rose 33% compared with last year to $15.5bn.\n\nIts shares - which climbed roughly 40% last year - were up another 4% in after-hours trade,\n\n\"These were blow out numbers that will be another feather in the cap for the tech sector as the cloud growth party is just getting started,\" said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.\n\nBut the gains enjoyed by tech firms like Microsoft stand in contrast to the ongoing struggles seen in other industries such as hospitality, retail and travel.\n\nCoffee chain Starbucks on Tuesday said its sales in the last three months of 2020 fell roughly 5% compared to 2019, driven by a drop in business in the US where concerns about Covid-19 have prompted authorities to urge people to stay at home.\n\nIn China, where the virus is under more control, sales rose 5%, the company said.\n\nThe firm said it expected business to return to growth in the next few months, including in the critical US market.\n\nBut profits in the quarter dropped 30% to $622.2m compared with last year, sending the firm's shares lower in after-hours trade.", "Apple sales have hit another record, as families loaded up on the firm's latest phones, laptops and gadgets during the Christmas period.\n\nSales in the last three months of 2020 hit more than $111bn (£81bn) - up 21% from the prior year.\n\nThe gains come as the pandemic pushes more activity online, fuelling demand for new technology.\n\nApple now counts more than 1.65 billion active devices globally, including more than 1 billion iPhones.\n\nApple's gains follow the release of its new iPhone 12 suite of phones, which executives said had convinced a record number of people to switch to the company or upgrade from older models.\n\nThe firm said growth in China - where the pandemic has already loosened its grip on the economy - was particularly strong, helped in part by demand for phones compatible with new 5G networks.\n\nSales in the firm's greater China region, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, jumped 57%. In Europe, sales roles 17%, and they rose 11% in the Americas.\n\n\"The products are doing very well all around the world,\" said Luca Maestri, Apple's chief financial officer. \"As we look ahead into the March quarter, we're very optimistic.\"\n\nAnalyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said he thought the firm was just at the beginning of a \"super-cycle\" as Apple devotees finally trade in old phones, coinciding with upgrades to telecommunications networks.\n\n\"With 5G now in the cards and roughly 40% of its 'golden jewel' iPhone installed base not upgrading their phones in the last 3.5 years, [Apple chief Tim] Cook & Co have the stage set for a renaissance of growth,\" he wrote.\n\nBig Tech is having an exceptionally lucrative pandemic.\n\nIt's hard not to be wowed by some of these figures.\n\nThat Apple recorded more than $100bn in sales in just three months is simply astonishing.\n\nFacebook figures are also well up on where they were last year.\n\nAs other companies have struggled to survive, Big Tech has flourished.\n\nThere are other reasons for some of these incredible figures. Certainly it seems iPhone enthusiasts were holding out for the new 5G enabled iPhone12.\n\nBut it's not just Apple and Facebook, all of the massive tech companies are having a bumper year.\n\nCovid-19 means people are spending more time indoors - buying things online, watching things online and chatting online.\n\nPerhaps then it's no surprise that these companies are posting record breaking figures.\n\nBut others point to these figures as yet more evidence that Big Tech has become too big to fail.\n\nThese figures are impressive. But they also attract the attention of politicians who are increasingly asking difficult questions - like are these tech mega companies operating in a market that is fair and with enough competition?\n\nApple said profits in the quarter reached nearly $28.8bn, up 29% compared with the same quarter last year.\n\nThe gains seen by technology firms like Apple contrast with losses hitting many other economic sectors, as the virus restricts activity and keeps shoppers at home.\n\nOther tech firms, such as Microsoft and Facebook, have also enjoyed strong growth.\n\nFacebook on Wednesday said increased online shopping during the pandemic helped lift ad revenue in the quarter by 30%.\n\nThe number of people active on its apps - which also include WhatsApp and Instagram - also rose to 2.6 billion daily, up 15% compared to 2019.\n\nIt said ad spending could slow as the Covid crisis relaxes and shopper appetite returns for services like travel rather than products.\n\nIt also warned that plans by Apple to change how it shares user data could weigh on growth.", "The ink and watercolour maps are believed to have been created the year after the battle\n\nHand-drawn, Elizabethan-era maps depicting the Spanish Armada have been saved for the nation after £600,000 was raised to buy them.\n\nThe 10 maps, believed to have been drawn the year after the famous battle of 1588, were sold to an overseas buyer in July but an export ban was imposed.\n\nThe National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) in Portsmouth raised the money in eight weeks.\n\nIt is now seeking further funds to put the maps on display for the first time.\n\nIt is believed the drawings, completed by an unknown draughtsman, possibly from the Netherlands, were based on a set of engravings from the same year by Elizabethan cartographer Robert Adams.\n\nIn the summer of 1588 the Spanish Armada set sail for England after decades of hostility between Spain's Catholic King Philip II and the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I.\n\nIt is regarded as one of the most significant naval battles in history, when the English fleet of 66 ships defeated the Armada, twice its size, by sailing fire ships into its formation off Calais.\n\nThe English fleet defeated the Spanish Armada in the English Channel in 1588\n\nThe ink and watercolour maps were sold for £600,000, but culture minister Caroline Dinenage imposed an export ban until January and called for a museum or institution to raise funds to purchase them.\n\nNMRN director general Prof Dominic Tweddle said members of the public had \"dug deep in extremely difficult times\".\n\nThe target was reached with the help of £212,800 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and £200,000 from the Art Fund.\n\nMs Dinenage said: \"The export bar system exists so we can keep nationally important works in the country and I am delighted that, thanks to the tireless work of the National Museum of the Royal Navy, the Armada maps will now go on display to educate and inspire future generations.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Prof Chris Whitty said it was a very sad day, as the UK surpassed 100,000 Covid deaths\n\nThe number of daily coronavirus deaths in the UK is likely to come down \"relatively slowly\", England's chief medical officer has warned.\n\nProf Chris Whitty said the UK was going to see \"a lot more deaths\" over the next few weeks before the effects of the vaccination programme were felt.\n\nCurrent restrictions were \"just about holding\" in lowering infection rates, he told a Downing Street briefing.\n\nIt comes as the UK surpassed 100,000 coronavirus deaths on Tuesday.\n\nA further 1,631 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were recorded in the daily figures.\n\nAnd 20,089 coronavirus cases were reported on Tuesday, continuing a downward trend in the number of UK cases seen in recent days.\n\nProf Whitty told a Downing Street news conference the rolling seven-day average for deaths was 1,242 - \"an incredibly high number\" - and unlikely to come down quickly.\n\n\"I think we have to be realistic that the rate of mortality, the number of people dying a day, will come down relatively slowly over the next two weeks - and will probably be flat for a while now.\"\n\nProf Whitty said the number of people testing positive for coronavirus was \"still at a very high number, but it has been coming down\".\n\nBut he cautioned against relaxing restrictions \"too early\", as Office for National Statistics data showed a \"rather slower\" decrease.\n\nThe number of people in hospital with Covid-19 in the UK had \"flattened off\", he said, but was still an \"incredibly high number\" and \"substantially above the peak in April\".\n\nProf Whitty said the new, more transmissible variant discovered in the south east of England at the end of last year had altered the UK's situation \"very substantially\" and had made it \"much harder\" to bring infection levels down.\n\n\"We were worried two weeks ago that the measures we have at the moment were not enough to hold this new variant,\" he told the news conference.\n\n\"I think what the data I showed you at the beginning of the slide sessions shows is that the rates are just about holding with the new variant, with what everybody's doing.\n\n\"It's going to be much harder because of this new variant and I think we have to be realistic about that.\"\n\nSir Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said that more than a quarter of a million severely ill coronavirus patients have been looked after in hospital since the pandemic started last year.\n\n\"This is not a year that anybody is going to want to remember nor is it a year that across the health service any of us will ever forget,\" he said.\n\nThe daily Covid figures have seen the number of deaths top 100,000. But they also contain some signs of hope.\n\nJust over 20,000 new infections have been reported - down from 22,000 yesterday.\n\nThis compares to an average of 60,000 at the start of the year.\n\nIt is a sharp fall, although Prof Whitty cautions it may actually be a little slower than that.\n\nNot everyone who is infected comes forward for testing and the government surveillance programme which involves random testing of the population suggests the fall has not been quite so great.\n\nNonetheless, it is clear the infection rate is coming down - and that offers hope.\n\nHospital cases have plateaued and should soon start falling. That will eventually lead to a reduction in the number of deaths.\n\nThen, in February, the vaccination programme should start having an impact, leading, hopefully, to a rapid drop in deaths.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson told the briefing the coronavirus infection rate remained \"pretty forbiddingly high\" to ease lockdown restrictions, which have been in place in England since 5 January.\n\nBut he said \"at a certain stage we will want to be getting things open\".\n\nHe added: \"What I will be doing in the course of the next few days and weeks is setting out in more detail, as soon as we can, when and how we want to get things open again.\"\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and only go out for limited reasons - including for food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nMeanwhile, the epidemiologist whose modelling prompted the UK government to impose the first lockdown has told BBC Radio 4's PM he believes more action in autumn last year could have \"drastically reduced\" the number of lives lost in the second wave - some 60,000.\n\nProf Neil Ferguson said: \"They couldn't have been eliminated, but they could have been drastically reduced by earlier action, unfortunately.\n\n\"How much is difficult to judge, the new variant was unpredictable and did change our understanding of how much was needed to control spread, but we did just let the autumn wave get to far, far too high infection levels.\"\n\nReacting to the UK's death toll, Mr Johnson said he took \"full responsibility\" for the government's actions, but added: \"We truly did everything we could.\"", "Parents are struggling with the sense of uncertainty, says psychologist\n\nHome schooling can be tough. It's difficult to concentrate, there's emotional exhaustion, boredom, a lack of motivation and it's really hard not going out to see friends. And that's just the parents.\n\nThis winter lockdown is taking its toll on families, now struggling even more on the black ice of uncertainty as no-one can say when schools in England are going to reopen for most pupils again.\n\n\"There's a sense of fatigue,\" says Jacqueline Smallwood, who is at home with three secondary-school children. She says her own \"concentration levels have fallen dramatically\".\n\n\"It's so repetitive that it just makes you feel tired,\" she says of the latest lockdown and the \"silent struggle\" facing both parents and their children to try to get motivated.\n\nHome school shows no sign of coming to an early end\n\nThere might have been some guilty enjoyment at the start of the year when the school term was initially delayed, not having to get up and out on cold January mornings.\n\nUntil it dawned on them that this was becoming something much longer than a few weeks.\n\nIt's morphed from early January to half term in mid-February and now maybe Easter in early April or even later. And Jacqueline says, as a matter of \"respect\", parents need to know what's happening about schools.\n\nThe confusion over a return date seems to have further frayed the nerves of parents.\n\nThe mother, who lives outside Canterbury in Kent, says she worries about the pressures building up on young people.\n\nFor teenagers like her sons, she says this \"should be a pivotal time in their lives,\" when they're beginning to get some independence and when social lives are hugely important - but instead they're stuck inside with their parents.\n\n\"We can't live like the Waltons forever,\" she says, referencing the US TV series of a folksy family relying on each other.\n\nJacqueline says families are finding this latest lockdown tougher than the spring or summer\n\nThe first lockdown created an unexpected sense of togetherness, an \"enforced bonding\" that she says turned out to be a \"massive positive\".\n\nBut Jacqueline, who works as a writer, sees no such upside to the latest lockdown. There is a collective frustration - and she says it has been made even worse by the confusion about when schools will go back.\n\nThe online home-schooling seems to be working, she says, with teachers trying to boost the enthusiasm levels, but it's no real substitute for being in school. And she wants much more clarity about when they will go back.\n\n\"I've tried not to be political about decisions being made, but you can't help but feel disappointed. They don't seem to understand how real people are living,\" she says.\n\nShe says when politicians say maybe schools will or won't be back by Easter, they don't realise how much that uncertainty affects families trying to plan for what comes next.\n\nEducational psychologist Dan O'Hare says the \"key word is 'uncertainty'\".\n\nLiving on a laptop can take its toll on parents having to work and home school their children\n\nNot knowing what is coming next adds to the pressure, he says, and children out of school are already facing big unknowns such as what's going to happen about exams or when will they see their friends and teachers.\n\n\"It's really stressful for children and their families,\" says Dr O'Hare, who is co-chair of the British Psychological Society's division for educational and child psychology. \"They need a sense of a plan.\"\n\nThis lockdown is also in the depths of winter - and he says employers need to think about making sure staff working from home are able to take a break in daylight hours, so that families can get outside.\n\nIt's no use asking parents to answer work emails all day and expect them to go out when it's dark.\n\nSchools have been providing more online lessons in this lockdown\n\nFor some families it has got very difficult.\n\n\"It's affected her emotionally a lot,\" says Dave in Bolton, who is worrying about his six-year-old daughter, who has been crying because she misses her friends.\n\n\"It's awful, you can't put a positive spin on it. She's at that age where she's enjoying her friends, becoming more socialised,\" he told BBC 5 Live.\n\n\"She's quite a confident little girl and I can't help worry that being stuck at home is going to impact her in the longer term.\"\n\nThe father says many of her classmates are still going into school - and that makes it even harder when she sees her friends on school Zoom calls.\n\nEmployers should make sure that parents' working hours allow them to get out in daylight, says psychologist\n\nJen Locke in Newcastle makes the point that women can often be \"the most adversely affected by the decision to keep schools closed\".\n\nShe says home schooling has \"fallen squarely on my shoulders\", helping her children in the day and then shifting her work with an IT company into the evening, so it's an early start through to a very late finish.\n\n\"It's a huge mental strain… I'm knackered from it all,\" she says, right down to trying to get children to bed who aren't tired because they're not going out.\n\nA lockdown weariness seems to be out there, despite the best efforts of schools.\n\nSimon Armstrong in Bristol, whose son is in secondary school, says: \"Virtual lessons, no matter how well delivered, are a woeful substitute for real lessons.\"\n\n\"I am at the end of my tether,\" he says.\n\nThe Department for Education said: \"We are committed to reopening schools as soon as the public health picture allows, and will inform schools, parents and pupils of plans ahead of February half term.\"\n\nBut Labour has accused the government of causing \"chaos and confusion\" for parents and schools.\n\nThe National Association of Head Teachers said: \"Now is the moment for calm heads to decide on a sustainable return to school, not another chaotic and last-minute set of decisions that could easily result in a yo-yo return to lockdown.\"", "The Army sent a bomb disposal unit to Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine producer Wockhardt's unit\n\nProduction of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine has resumed at a plant after it was suspended when a suspicious package was received.\n\nThe Wockhardt UK plant on Wrexham Industrial Estate was evacuated and the Army sent a bomb disposal unit.\n\nPolice said the package had been made safe and its contents would be \"taken away for analysis\".\n\nWockhardt said staff had been allowed to return and its production schedule had not been affected.\n\nBoth Downing Street and Wales' First Minister Mark Drakeford had been receiving updates on the incident since police were called at about 10:40 GMT.\n\nA police cordon was put in place near the plant and the public were asked to keep away. There are no reports of any injuries.\n\n\"There are no wider concerns for public safety, however, some roads on the industrial estate will remain closed whilst we continue our investigations,\" North Wales Police said in a statement.\n\nPolice have asked the public to keep away from the site in Wrexham\n\nForensic police officers were seen examining items on the road outside the plant, which remained closed after the cordon had been lifted.\n\nWockhardt UK said: \"We can confirm that the investigation on the suspicious package received today has been concluded.\n\n\"Given that staff safety is our main priority, manufacturing was temporarily paused whilst this took place safely.\n\n\"We can now confirm that the package was made safe and staff are now being allowed back into the facility.\n\n\"This temporary suspension of manufacturing has in no way affected our production schedule and we are grateful to the authorities and experts for their swift response and resolution of the incident.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. 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The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIn an earlier statement, the global pharmaceutical and biotechnology company confirmed it had \"partially evacuated\" its site to protect staff.\n\nThe Wrexham plant has the capability to produce about 300 million doses of the vaccine a year.\n\nEarlier on Wednesday, John Roberts, who runs CMS Wrexham Ltd, next door to the plant, said he heard a \"big bang\" at about 11:35 GMT - although he could not say where the noise came from.\n\n\"We're next door to Wockhardt. Three of us were talking then we heard a hell of an explosion or a bang,\" he said.\n\n\"I went outside, couldn't see anything. I looked the other side and two blokes were on the roof.\n\n\"The next thing the police had blocked off the road and were looking in the bushes.\"\n\nPolice were at the scene on Wrexham Industrial Estate for most of the day\n\nA police cordon had been put in place near the Wockhardt plant\n\nHis son Mark Roberts said: \"The police just closed the road off and we've heard there's a bomb disposal unit.\n\n\"They've been here about an hour or so - we're on tenterhooks.\n\n\"Boris Johnson toured the factory around December time, so I wonder if that's raised the profile, as it's where they make the Oxford vaccine.\"\n\nThe Wrexham plant has the capability to produce about 300 million doses of the vaccine a year\n\nDave Picken, 53, who lives near Wrexham Industrial Estate, said: \"We've seen lots of police cars and a fire engine.\n\n\"Bomb disposal are here with a robot. We were closer to the factory but police told us to move and cordoned off a bigger area.\n\n\"I did ask an officer how big the bomb is but he said he couldn't say it's a bomb.\"\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson saw the production line for vaccines when he visited the factory\n\nVisiting the plant in November, Prime Minister Boris Johnson it could provide \"salvation for humanity\".\n\nWockhardt UK entered an agreement in August to help prepare the vaccine for distribution.\n\nWhen the company's contract was announced, Ravi Limaye, managing director, said: \"We are immensely proud to have been selected to partner with the UK government on this project.\n\n\"We have a sophisticated sterile manufacturing facility and a highly skilled workforce.\"\n\nOn Thursday, Wrexham council leader Mark Pritchard said teams had worked to ensure the vaccine was not lost in the floods.\n\nThe Welsh Government said there had been \"no adverse effects\" on the coronavirus vaccine roll-out.", "Already 100,000 people in the UK have died with Covid, according to the official count. The idea of 100,000 deaths is hard for many of us to comprehend. But each was a human being who lived and loved in their own unique way. This is the story of one of them.\n\nBy 3:01am, alone in a hospital room, Ann Fitzgerald reached for her phone. This would be her last chance to contact her husband of four decades, the man she'd raised two children with, her Tony - to Ann, he was always her Tony.\n\nThe couple had made a pact. So long as Ann was in hospital with Covid, Tony would spend his nights dozing upright in a chair at their bungalow in Pewfall, Merseyside. That way, he would wake up if there was a message alert.\n\nIt wasn't much of a sacrifice, Tony thought, not when the woman he'd loved for 47 years was all by herself and frightened. And besides, each time his phone bleeped Tony would know she was still alive, and silently he'd thank the stars.\n\nAnd so in the early hours of Tuesday 7 April, Ann's last message arrived. She'd summoned the energy to take a farewell selfie as she lay in bed wearing an oxygen mask. \"She must have thought: 'Here's something so you won't forget me,'\" says Tony.\n\nTwo-and-a-half hours later, Ann was dead. She was 65, a mother, a wife, a neighbour, a colleague and a friend, and one of 999 people in the UK who died that day with the novel coronavirus.\n\nSoon after the hospital rang and told Tony of her death, he was at her bedside, dressed from head to toe in PPE. No visitors had been allowed to see her while she was alive, but now she was gone it was apparently fine - for reasons he didn't understand.\n\nTony wept as he apologised to his wife's lifeless body for letting her go like this, with no loved ones by her side. Then he turned and cursed the sterile white hospital ceiling and walls, because they'd been with her at the end and he hadn't.\n\nBack then, few could have imagined the UK's death toll would reach 100,000, or anything close to it.\n\nAt that point, the tally stood at 10,000; three weeks previously the UK government's Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance had said limiting the final figure to twice that sum would be a \"good outcome\".\n\nNow, 10 months on, the total number of people in the UK who have died within 28 days of a coronavirus diagnosis has increased tenfold, while UK excess deaths in 2020 were at their highest level since World War Two. The UK has had one of the highest rates of recorded coronavirus deaths in the world so far.\n\nBy any measure, 100,000 is a devastating amount, roughly equivalent to two Premier League football grounds, or the number of people who attend the Reading festival every year. For many people, the sheer scale of loss conveyed by the figure will be impossible to grasp.\n\n\"Numbers with lots of zeros are very difficult to interpret, and can be made to look large or small,\" says Sir David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at the University of Cambridge.\n\n\"If I say that 100,000 deaths is two months' worth of normal mortality, then it may not look so bad. If I say that it is more than all the [UK] civilian deaths in WW2, or as if everyone in a city the size of Durham got killed, then it sounds worse. It is challenging to adequately convey such a large number of individual tragedies.\"\n\nBut while many may have become numb to the daily death figures, behind every statistic is a real life lost - a real life like Ann's. \"That is why this arbitrary numerical milestone is important,\" says Hetan Shah, chief executive of the British Academy and a former executive director of the Royal Statistical Society. \"It is a chance to reflect again on the terrible toll this pandemic has taken on so many British families.\"\n\nIn a Manchester nightclub one evening in 1973, 18-year-old Tony felt a tap on his arm. It was Ann, a year his senior, whom he knew by sight as a barmaid in one of the city-centre pubs he sometimes drank in. She'd always stood out to him, with her olive skin and striking good looks, but he'd never dared imagine she might be interested in him romantically.\n\n\"I'm here with that fella over there,\" she told him, gesturing towards across the room. \"But I don't like him and I don't know what to do.\"\n\nTony walked over to Ann's date and told him to clear off. Then Tony returned to Ann, and the two of them had a drink together, and then another. Before long they were a couple and Tony decided he was the luckiest man in the world.\n\nSoon he learned all about Ann's background. Her Lithuanian-born Jewish father had died when she was two years old, and with her mother unable to cope she'd been passed between relatives throughout her childhood. By 16 she was living in a bedsit, supporting herself with waitressing and bar work - she'd also been employed at the legendary art-deco Kardoma café on Market Street and at George Best's nightclub, Oscar's.\n\n\"As a consequence of her upbringing she was really, really independent,\" says Tony. \"She was really good at talking to people, and she was sharp - the sharpest, wittiest person I've ever met.\"\n\nThey rented a flat in Fallowfield together and made it their home. After Ann was offered relief work running bars around Manchester, Tony quit his job as a sales rep to join her. Eventually, in 1981, they took on their own pub. It was in what was then a tough part of Salford, but Ann had grown up nearby and knew how to handle the local characters: \"She could have you in stitches, but she could throw you a look, and you knew you had to behave yourself,\" Tony says.\n\nThe couple were offered the chance to take on another pub in Sale Moor. They thought they were going upmarket, but it turned out to be quite the reverse; Tony would joke that he should take away all the tables and chairs and install a boxing ring instead.\n\nBut Ann wasn't intimidated by anyone. According to Tony, when a notorious local villain turned up and demanded a free drink, Ann stood her ground: \"My husband's name is above the front door, and he pays for his drinks, so you're going to pay for yours,\" she told him. Impressed, the villain ended up buying one for Ann instead.\n\nShe and Tony knew it was time to quit when burglars broke in one night while their baby daughter slept in her cot upstairs. Tony went back on the road as a salesman; Ann worked variously as a debt counsellor, an incident manager for the RAC, and a sales trainer at a cotton firm. Their children, Gary, and Rachel, never once heard them argue, Tony says.\n\nFor six years the couple had a stall at Altrincham Market selling women's clothes. \"People would come, not necessarily to buy something - they just wanted to see Ann,\" says Tony. \"And as a consequence, they'd buy something they didn't really want.\" Each time this happened, Ann would give Tony a wink.\n\nBy the start of 2020, Ann and Tony were looking forward to a long retirement together. Both their children had left home, and they'd recently moved to the bungalow. The news broadcasts had begun describing a deadly pandemic that had spread from China. But Ann wasn't leaving the house much while she recovered from an operation to replace both hips.\n\nThen one Thursday in March she went for a haircut; she asked for the colour to be darkened slightly too, and when he first saw her afterwards Tony told her how much he loved it. Ann mentioned that the hairdresser had been coughing.\n\nThree days later, Ann began coughing too, and soon afterwards so did Tony. But with a fever, she felt worse, and within a few more days she was barely able to stand. She asked Tony to call 999.\n\nThe paramedics helped her to the ambulance. It haunts Tony now that he didn't hug or kiss her as they said goodbye. \"Neither of us thought for one moment that it would be the last day I would ever see her alive,\" he says. She told him they'd probably give her antibiotics and he could come and pick her up in a few hours.\n\nBut later that day she phoned him to say the doctors suspected Covid and they would be keeping her in. As in many hospitals during the first wave, no visiting was allowed.\n\nTony could only stay in touch with her by phone. When a doctor told him the next 24 hours were critical, he didn't tell Ann, because he knew how scared she was already by then.\n\nBut he did pass on something else the medic had said - that they were deeply impressed by her upbeat attitude and fighting spirit. Tony told her, too, that he believed she would be home soon: \"I had to say that to keep her fighting, and fight she did for 10 days.\"\n\nThe last time they spoke was Saturday 4 April. Ann told Tony she thought she'd turned a corner; she'd eaten a sandwich and some yoghurt. After that, talking became too difficult for her; she wasn't in intensive care but the mask she wore to help her breathe was getting in the way.\n\nThree days after their last conversation, Tony was sitting in a white hospital room beside Ann's body. He sat with her there for an hour. He didn't just apologise, he also promised he'd make sure she was remembered properly. When it was time to leave, a nurse gave him a booklet about bereavement and a black bag in which to put Ann's belongings. Tony carried them along a hospital corridor, wondering how he would tell Gary and Rachel their mum was dead.\n\nThere are eight photographs of Ann in Tony's living room. In each of them she looks full of joy. \"Every time I look around, there's a picture of Ann somewhere,\" Tony says. \"She's smiling and I'm thinking, 'If only I could turn back the clock.' But I can't, you know, and nor can all those other families and relations, either.\"\n\nNearly 10 months after Ann's death, Tony finds himself resenting the home he's been left alone inside. If they hadn't moved there, he reasons, Ann wouldn't have gone to that hairdresser's that day and caught the virus - she'd still be alive, perhaps.\n\nHe feels robbed of the 20 additional years he hoped they'd spend together, as surely will thousands of other bereaved relatives. While the impact on the very oldest has been widely recognised, those who might have looked forward to a long retirement have been badly hit, too - during the pandemic, around 15% of all UK fatalities with Covid mentioned on the death certificate have been among those aged 65-74.\n\nTony desperately wishes his life would go back to how it was, but knows it won't.\n\nAnn's funeral didn't give him any closure. Tony would rather she had been buried, but the undertaker warned him to hurry - extra restrictions could be introduced any time - so he took the date that was offered by the crematorium.\n\nAs it was, under the rules that were already in force, only 10 mourners were permitted, spaced out around the chapel. No flowers or photographs on display, no hugging.\n\nTony understood why all this was necessary - but it wasn't the celebration of Ann's bright, gregarious, love-filled life that he thought she deserved. He'd have to plan another one when all this was over.\n\nAs the months went on, Tony joined online Covid support groups. It helped talking to others who understood how it felt to have lost someone. There was the family of a 19-year-old boy. A woman who was mourning both her mum and her dad. Another woman whose husband had died in the car as she drove him to hospital.\n\nHe thought of these stories each time he switched on the news and watched the Covid mortality figures climb higher and higher. Behind these cold statistics were human lives. And each was as unique as Ann, with a personality and backstory entirely of their own.\n\nIt would have been Ann and Tony's 41st wedding anniversary on 6 October, the day before the six-month anniversary of her death. The following month, a few days after the UK's Covid death toll reached 50,000, Tony once again felt Ann's absence bitterly on what would have been her 66th birthday.\n\n\"Christmas was a nightmare for me,\" he says. Under the rules for the festive season, Gary and Rachel and their partners were able to be there with him, and cooking lunch kept him busy most of the day. But afterwards, when he was on his own again, the reality hit that another celebration had gone by without Ann beside him, and Tony sat down and sobbed.\n\nFor millions the arrival of the Covid vaccines has brought hope, but it is a cold comfort for those who have lost someone. If every one of the 100,000 were loved by a dozen people, \"that's a million people in Britain who have been bereaved\", says the bioethicist and sociologist Prof Sir Tom Shakespeare. \"We need a national monument, some form of remembering.\"\n\nTony is not one of those who will find it hard to grasp the significance of this bleak milestone.\n\n\"To me it's 100,000 poor souls fighting for breath, and they've not had a hug from anyone in their family,\" he says. \"There's a name - there's a person behind that number. And then they've passed away, and the family goes through the grief that I've been through - the numbness, the shock, the anguish and the pain to come.\"", "The police officers were on duty when they had their hair cut, the Met says\n\nThirty-one Met Police officers who broke coronavirus rules to get haircuts are facing £200 fines.\n\nTwo officers who hired a barber to give the cuts to staff at Bethnal Green Police Station, on 17 January, are also facing misconduct investigations, the Met said.\n\nUnder current lockdown restrictions in England, barbers and hairdressers are not allowed to work.\n\nDet Ch Supt Marcus Barnett said he was \"deeply disappointed\" in the officers.\n\n\"Although officers donated money to charity as part of the haircut, this does not excuse them from what was a very poor decision,\" he said. \"I expect a lot more of them.\n\n\"Quite rightly, the public expect police to be role models in following the regulations, which are designed to prevent the spread of this deadly virus.\"\n\nThe investigation comes after fines were handed out to nine officers who were caught eating breakfast together in a Greenwich café.\n\nAll those officers were issued with a £200 fixed penalty notice.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Actor Elliot Page and choreographer Emma Portner have decided to divorce after three years of marriage.\n\n\"After much thought and careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to divorce following our separation last summer,\" the Canadian couple said in a statement.\n\n\"We have the utmost respect for each other and remain close friends.\" They provided no further details.\n\nPage, the 33-year-old Oscar-nominated actor, came out as transgender in 2020.\n\nThat decision was widely praised by his many fans and fellow actors.\n\nPage said at the time that he could not \"begin to express how remarkable it feels to finally love who I am enough to pursue my authentic self\".\n\nHe also used the occasion to address discrimination towards trans people.\n\nPage received international acclaim for starring as a pregnant teenager in the 2007 film Juno. Other major films include Inception and the X-Men series, while the actor has more recently starred in Netflix series The Umbrella Academy.\n\nPortner, 26, has said she has always supported Page's decision to come out.", "The famous event has been held at London's Royal Hospital Chelsea since 1913\n\nThe Chelsea Flower Show will take place in September for the first time in its history as a result of the pandemic.\n\nOrganisers had planned to hold a six-day show in May but announced it would be postponed as there was no guarantee what tier London would be in then.\n\nA virtual show will take place in May like in 2020, with the physical event taking place later at London's Royal Hospital Chelsea.\n\nThe Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) said it would be a \"moment in history\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Chelsea Flower Show exhibitors had to display their gardens online last year\n\nThe world-famous show has been taking place for 108 years but has never happened in September.\n\nThis year's event will go ahead between 21-26 September, with the virtual event showing online from 18-23 May.\n\nIt is usually filled with spring and summer colours but the RHS said it hoped the delay will allow a celebration of autumn horticulture.\n\nThousands of people normally attend the week-long event\n\nThe society, which runs the event, said it had a responsibility to exhibitors, visitors, volunteers and staff to delay the flower show, as more people would be vaccinated and levels of infection may have reduced substantially.\n\nDirector general Sue Biggs said: \"Whilst we are sad to have had to delay RHS Chelsea and are sorry for the disruption this will cause, we are excited that we are still planning to bring the world's best-loved gardening event to the nation at a time when more people are gardening more than ever.\n\n\"We know that the autumn dates may not be suitable for everyone, but with our fantastic industry partners we will do everything we can to support them and create a show that will be a moment in history,\" she added.\n\nThose who bought tickets for the event when it was due to happen in May will be contacted by the RHS.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Nadhim Zahawi: \"We have 367m vaccines from seven different manufacturers that we have contracted with\"\n\nSupplies of vaccines are \"tight\" but the UK believes it will receive enough doses to meet its targets, the vaccine minister has said.\n\nNadhim Zahawi told BBC Breakfast manufacturers were \"confident\" they would deliver for the UK amid warnings of production delays.\n\nIt comes as the EU said it might tighten vaccine export controls.\n\nCountries should avoid \"vaccine nationalism\" and ensure a fair global supply, Mr Zahawi said.\n\nMeanwhile, more than 100,000 people have died with Covid-19 in the UK, after 1,631 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were recorded in the daily figures.\n\nMr Zahawi said the vaccination programme was still on track to deliver a first dose to 15 million of the most vulnerable by mid-February and to offer all adults their first dose by autumn.\n\nHe said the UK had supplies of the Oxford vaccine manufactured domestically by AstraZeneca as well as the Pfizer one, which is made in Belgium.\n\nThe government is also planning to publish figures on the take-up of the vaccine by ethnicity from Thursday, following concerns that some black, Asian and ethnic minority communities were more hesitant to get the jab.\n\n\"I'm confident we will meet our mid-February target and continue beyond that,\" Mr Zahawi told the BBC.\n\n\"Supplies are tight, they continue to be, these are new manufacturing processes,\" he added. \"It's lumpy and bumpy, it gets better and stabilises and improves going forward.\"\n\nBut he declined to say that he had received guarantees about the number of doses the UK would receive from Pfizer or other manufacturers and refused to confirm how many doses had already arrived.\n\nThe prime minister's spokesman said AstraZeneca had committed to delivering two million doses a week to the UK, and the government was not expecting any changes to that supply.\n\nDowning Street also rejected German media reports claiming a very low efficacy rate for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine among older people, saying they had been denied by Oxford University, AstraZeneca and the German health ministry.\n\nChief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance told the cabinet the trials showed similar immune responses in younger and older adults.\n\nAnd England's chief medical adviser, Prof Chris Whitty, has defended the UK's strategy of extending the time between first and second doses of coronavirus vaccines from three to 12 weeks in order to immunise more people.\n\nHe told the Downing Street coronavirus briefing on Tuesday that the \"great majority\" of protection came from the first dose.\n\nHe also said there was \"no evidence\" that immunity waned between three and 12 weeks after the first dose was administered.\n\nProf Whitty said: \"We thought very carefully about what the balance of this is, but the balance of risk in terms of reducing the number of deaths in the community - and I really want to stress that, that is the aim of this - is to maximise the number of people who get that first dose, where the great majority of protection comes from.\"\n\nThe latest tension over supply of the Covid vaccine is another illustration of just how fragile this issue is.\n\nThere are huge global demands for Covid vaccine, limited raw materials and constraints on manufacturing.\n\nThe UK already has enough vaccine to jab all the highest-risk groups by mid-February, although not all of it has been packaged up or been through the final safety checks.\n\nThis explains why ministers are confident about the immediate target for the over-70s, health and care workers and the extremely clinically vulnerable.\n\nBut what is in doubt is how quickly the UK can vaccinate in the medium term.\n\nWith the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured in the UK those supply routes are more guaranteed.\n\nBut the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is made in Belgium. The UK, like the rest of Europe, is affected by the problems with manufacturing that are being experienced with that vaccine.\n\nWith Europe experiencing major problems rolling out its vaccination programme - per head of population five times fewer vaccines have been delivered - this is a story that is going to rumble on for months.\n\nThe UK has placed orders for 367 million doses of vaccines from seven manufacturers, Mr Zahawi said. \"As vaccines come along we will get more volume, millions more in the weeks and months to come,\" he added.\n\nThe tension over vaccine supplies increased after UK-based AstraZeneca warned the EU it would have to reduce planned deliveries because of production problems. Pfizer-BioNTech has also said supplies will be temporarily lower as it works to increase capacity at its Belgian factory.\n\nIt has prompted the EU to accuse AstraZeneca of failing to meet its commitments and to warn that it might require all companies producing Covid vaccines to provide \"early notification\" whenever they planned to export supplies out of the EU.\n\n\"The thing to do now is not to go down the dead end of vaccine nationalism. It's to work together to protect our people,\" Mr Zahawi said.\n\n\"No-one is safe until the whole world is safe.\"\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock subsequently said the UK government \"oppose protectionism in all its forms\" and urged all international partners to \"be collaborative\" and \"work closely together\" on vaccine distribution.\n\nHe added that the EU's warning that it could restrict exports of vaccines made in the bloc was \"unfortunate and especially so in the midst of a pandemic\".\n\nMeanwhile, the head of NHS England earlier told MPs coronavirus could become a \"much more treatable disease\" over the next six to 18 months, with the hope of a return to a \"much more normal future\".\n\nSir Simon Stevens told the Health and Social Care Committee: \"The first half of the year, vaccination is going to be crucial.\n\n\"I think a lot of us in the health service are increasingly hopeful that in the second half of the year and beyond we will also see more therapeutics and more treatments for coronavirus.\"\n\nHe also said it \"would be great\" if the Covid vaccine and flu vaccine were combined into a single jab, if not for next winter then future ones.\n\nAnd he said vaccines were being used as fast as they arrived in the NHS, with more than half of those aged 75-79 having now had their first dose.\n\nThe UK aims to offer Covid vaccination to every adult by autumn.\n\nMr Zahawi said confidence in the vaccines was high, with 85% of people saying they would accept the jab.\n\nBut he said those who were hesitant \"skew heavily\" towards black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.\n\nThe government is providing £23m of funding to 60 local councils and voluntary groups to boost vaccine take-up among groups such as older people, disabled people, and people from ethnic minority backgrounds.\n\nIt comes as celebrities such as comedians Romesh Ranganathan and Meera Syal and cricketer Moeen Ali appeared in a video urging people in their communities to get vaccinated.\n\nMr Zahawi told ITV's Good Morning Britain his uncle had died from Covid-19 last week. He had been eligible for vaccination but caught the virus before he could receive it, the minister said.\n\nThis \"grim and horrible\" experience made him determined to ensure that the most vulnerable were protected as quickly as possible, Mr Zahawi said.\n\nSir Simon said there was concern about vaccine hesitancy in some groups, where there were access problems as well as \"systematic attempts to misinform and lie about the vaccine programme targeted particularly at minority populations, and - in some cases - long-standing mistrust of public services\".\n\nHe said disruption to vaccine deliveries from EU export restrictions was not thought to be likely.\n\nIn other developments, the UK has offered to carry out genomic sequencing for other countries around the world to help identify further new variants.\n\nPublic Health England said it would give \"crucial early warning\" of any mutations that might cause the virus to spread faster, make people more ill or possibly reduce the effectiveness of vaccines.", "\"A legacy of poor decisions\" by the UK before and during the pandemic led to one of the worst death rates in the world, scientists have said.\n\nLabour also criticised \"monumental mistakes\" by the prime minister in delaying acting on scientific advice over lockdowns three times.\n\nAfter UK deaths passed 100,000, Boris Johnson said he took \"full responsibility\" for the actions taken.\n\nBut he said it was too soon to learn the lessons from the pandemic response.\n\nProf Linda Bauld, public health expert from the University of Edinburgh, said the UK's current position was \"a legacy of poor decisions that were taken when we eased restrictions\".\n\nShe told the BBC the lack of focus on test and trace and the \"absolute inability to recognise\" the need to address international travel had also led to a more deadly winter surge.\n\nProf Sir Michael Marmot, who carried out a review of inequalities in Covid-19 deaths, said the UK had entered the pandemic \"in a bad state\" with rising health inequality, a slowdown in life expectancy improvements and a lack of investment in the public sector.\n\nShadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth rejected Mr Johnson's claim that he had done \"everything we could\" to minimise the death toll, adding: \"I do not accept that.\"\n\nHe said the prime minister had been given scientific advice to impose lockdowns and \"pushed that back\" - not only in March but again in September and December.\n\nThe government also failed to create a working contact-tracing system, did not introduce effective health controls at the borders and still did not offer \"proper sick pay\", he said.\n\nAt Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Johnson said: \"I mourn every death in this pandemic and we share the grief of all those who have been bereaved. I and the government take full responsibility for all the actions we have taken to fight this pandemic.\"\n\nHe said there would be time to reflect on the decisions taken, but he did not think the right time was in the middle of the pandemic when \"37,000 people are struggling with Covid in our hospitals\".\n\nThe government needed to focus on keeping the virus under control and continuing the fastest vaccine roll-out in Europe, he said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nHe said his message to grieving families was that he \"deeply, personally\" regretted the loss of life and that the best way to honour the memory of those who had died and honour those who were currently grieving was \"to work together to bring this virus down, to keep it under control in the way that we are\".\n\nAsked about the government's \"legacy of poor decisions\", Mr Johnson said ministers followed scientific advice and did everything they could to minimise suffering. He said there were \"no easy solutions\" but the UK could be proud of its efforts to distribute the vaccine.\n\nAfter leading a minute's silence in the Scottish Parliament, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she was \"truly sorry\" for any mistakes, as Scotland recorded a total of 5,888 deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test.\n\nShe said the government did everything it could, but added: \"I don't think any of us, reflecting on numbers like these, can conclude that we have always succeeded.\"\n\nNext month, the prime minister hopes to publish a document giving details of the criteria he will use to start lifting the lockdown, a senior government source told the BBC.\n\nIt will include factors such as the number of hospitalisations and deaths, the progress of the vaccination programme, any changes to the virus and the impact easing restrictions might have on the epidemic - but will be dependent on emerging data about how effectively the vaccine stops the virus spreading.\n\nThe UK is the fifth country to pass 100,000 deaths, coming after the US, Brazil, India and Mexico.\n\nA scientist advising the government has warned the UK could face as many as 50,000 more coronavirus deaths.\n\nProf Calum Semple, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, told the BBC's Newsnight: \"It would really not surprise me if we're looking at another 40-50,000 deaths before this burns out.\n\n\"The deaths on the way up are likely to be mirrored by the number of deaths on the way down in this wave. Each one again is a tragedy and each one represents probably four or five people who survive but are damaged by Covid.\"\n\nHe said the UK had experienced some \"bad luck\" with the emergence of a new, more transmissible variant but had also suffered from \"decades of underinvestment\" in the NHS and \"a public health authority that's been eroded\" .\n\nMeanwhile, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell asked people, regardless of whether they had faith, to reflect on the \"enormity\" of the pandemic and join in a \"prayer for the nation\" at 18:00 GMT every day from 1 February.\n\nThey said the death statistics were were not \"just an abstract figure\", saying: \"Each number is a person: someone we loved and someone who loved us.\"\n\nMuslim leaders backed the call for a daily prayer. Qari Asim, chair of the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board, said Muslims and wider black, Asian and minority ethnic communities had been disproportionately affected by the \"tsunami of pain, grief and devastation\" - with many unable to properly mourn due to Covid restrictions.\n\nOn Tuesday, a further 1,631 coronavirus deaths were recorded, taking the total number of people who had died within 28 days of a positive test to 100,162.\n\nSeparate figures from the Office for National Statistics, which are based on death certificates, show there have been nearly 104,000 deaths since the pandemic began.\n\nA further 20,089 coronavirus cases were recorded on Tuesday, continuing a downward trend in the number of UK cases seen in recent days. The number of people in hospital remains high, as do the UK's daily death figures.\n\nSpeaking alongside the prime minister, England's chief medical officer Prof Chris Whitty said the number of people dying would come down \"relatively slowly\" over the next two weeks - and would probably \"remain flat for a while now\".\n\nElsewhere, bereavement support charities have written to the health secretary calling for more funding in the light of what they call \"the terrible toll of 100,000 deaths\".\n\nThe National Bereavement Alliance, representing a range of charities, said many families had been unable to be with loved ones as they died or to support one another.\n\nThey called for £500m allocated to mental health in England to be used to support the bereaved.\n\nMinister for bereavement Nadine Dorries said the government had given more than £10.2m to charities since March to ensure services were available to those who needed them.\n\nPlease enable JavaScript or upgrade your browser to see this interactive\n\nIf you would like to send us a tribute to a friend or family member who died after contracting coronavirus, please use the form below.\n\nPlease remember to include a photo of your loved one and their name. Upload your pictures here. Don't forget to include your contact details, so we can get in touch with you.\n\nWe would like to respond to everyone individually and include every tribute in our coverage, but unfortunately that may not be possible. Please be assured your message will be read and treated with the utmost respect.\n\nPlease note the contact details you provide will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your tribute.", "Scientists say sharks and rays are disappearing from the world's oceans at an \"alarming\" rate.\n\nThe number of sharks found in the open oceans has plunged by 71% over half a century, mainly due to over-fishing, according to a new study.\n\nThree-quarters of the species studied are now threated with extinction.\n\nAnd the researchers say immediate action is needed to secure a brighter future for these \"extraordinary, irreplaceable animals\".\n\nThey are calling on governments to implement science-based fishing limits.\n\nStudy researcher, Dr Richard Sherley of the University of Exeter, said the declines appear to be driven very much by fishing pressures.\n\nHe told BBC News: \"That's the driver for the 70% reduction in the last 50 years. For every 10 sharks you had in the open ocean in the 1970s, you would have three today, across these species, on average.\"\n\nSharks and rays are caught for their meat, fins and liver oil. They are also captured for recreational fishing and turn up by accident in the catch of fishing boats that are targeting other stocks.\n\nSharks are long-lived species that tend to produce few young\n\nOf the 31 species studied, 24 are now threatened with extinction, and three shark species (the oceanic whitetip shark, and the scalloped and great hammerhead sharks) have declined so sharply they are now classified as critically endangered - the highest threat category, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).\n\nProf Nicholas Dulvy of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, said oceanic sharks and rays are at exceptionally high risk of extinction, much more so than the average bird, mammal or frog, despite ranging far from land.\n\n\"Overfishing of oceanic sharks and rays jeopardises the health of entire ocean ecosystems as well as food security for some of the world's poorest countries,\" he said.\n\nThe researchers compiled global data on sharks and rays found in the open oceans (as opposed to reef sharks or those found close to shore).\n\nOf the 1,200 or so species of sharks and rays in the world, 31 are oceanic, travelling large distances across water.\n\n\"These are some of the big, important, open ocean predators that people will be familiar with,\" said Dr Sherley. \"The kind of sharks that people might describe as awe-inspiring or charismatic.\"\n\nHe said political will is needed to reverse the trends.\n\n\"The science is there, there needs to be the desire to do those stock assessments, to implement the measures that are needed to reduce the take of sharks and that political will has to come from pressure from citizens,\" Dr Sherley explained.\n\nDespite this \"gloomy\" picture, the scientists said a few shark conservation stories give cause for hope.\n\nSonja Fordham, president of Shark Advocates International, a non-profit project of The Ocean Foundation, said a couple of species, including the great white, have started to recover through science-based fishing limits.\n\n\"Relatively simple safeguards can help to save sharks and rays, but time is running out,\" she said.\n\n\"We urgently need conservation action across the globe to prevent myriad negative consequences and secure a brighter future for these extraordinary, irreplaceable animals.\"\n\nPopulations can recover with appropriate conservation\n\nSharks are at the top of the food chain, and crucial to the health of the oceans. Their loss impacts other marine animals as well as human livelihoods.\n\n\"Oceanic sharks and rays are vital to the health of vast marine ecosystems, but because they are hidden beneath the ocean surface, it has been difficult to assess and monitor their status,\" said Nathan Pacoureau of Simon Fraser University.\n\n\"Our study represents the first global synthesis of the state of these essential species at a time when countries should be addressing insufficient progress towards global sustainability goals.\n\n\"While we initially intended it as a useful report card, we now must hope it also serves as an urgent wake-up call.\"\n\nThe research is published in the journal, Nature.", "In March 2020, we were told it would be a ‘’good outcome’’ if coronavirus killed 20,000 people across the UK.\n\nNow the bleakest milestone has been reached: 100,000 deaths.\n\nIn a statement, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said \"behind these heart-breaking figures are friends, families and neighbours. The vaccine offers us the way out, but we cannot let up now and we sadly still face a tough period ahead. The virus is still spreading and we're seeing over 3,500 people per day being admitted into hospital.\"\n\nHealth correspondent Catherine Burns looks at the past year of the UK’s epidemic and hears from families who have lost loved ones.\n\nFilmed and edited by Julius Peacock. Additional filming by Emily Brooks", "Enforcement agents have removed protesters from the makeshift camp near Euston station\n\nBailiffs from HS2 have started to evict activists who dug a tunnel near Euston station in protest against the £106bn rail project.\n\nIt comes after the BBC revealed campaigners spent months digging the tunnel they claim is 100ft (30m) long.\n\nSince August, HS2 Rebellion members have been living in tree houses and tents at a camp nearby.\n\nA HS2 spokeswoman said the protesters were \"trespassing\" on land owned by the company.\n\nThe land being occupied is needed for continued building work around Euston, she added.\n\nEnforcement agents from the National Eviction Team have removed some protesters from the makeshift camp in the park.\n\nPolice have arrested five men and a woman at the site, although one male was later de-arrested.\n\nActivists say the tunnel - codenamed \"Kelvin\" - was dug as their \"best defence\" against being evicted.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Protesters have filmed themselves inside the tunnels\n\nProtesters said they were continuing to dig tunnels and have vowed to stay for as long as possible.\n\nAn 18-year-old, who gave his name as Al, said the tunnels can only be accessed through a section of the makeshift camp and were about 15ft (4.5m) deep.\n\n\"I will stay as long as I can,\" he said, but he added the activists \"have not got much food and water\".\n\nHS2 Rebellion told the BBC four people had \"locked themselves\" to fixing points inside the tunnels.\n\nOne activist, Blue Sandford, admitted the stunt was \"dangerous\" but felt it was \"worth it\".\n\nHS2 protester Dr Larch Maxey said the tunnel was \"warm and quiet\"\n\nEnforcement agents dismantle the make shift camp where HS2 Rebellion members have been living\n\nThe 18-year-old, who is currently on school strike for climate, said HS2 \"is a waste of money\".\n\n\"I'm in this tunnel because they [the government] are irresponsibly putting my life at risk from the climate and ecological emergency,\" she said.\n\n\"They are behaving in a way that is so reckless and unsafe that I don't feel they are giving us any option but to protest in this way to help save our own lives and the lives of all the people round the world.\n\n\"I shouldn't have to do this - I should be in school - the trouble is they are stealing that future and I have to stop them.\"\n\nEnforcement officers have used aerial platforms to try and coax protesters down from the trees\n\nA protester was brought down from the trees by officers\n\nMartin Andryjankczyk, who was carried out of the camp by enforcement agents earlier, predicted it would take \"at least a week or two\" to evict all the protesters.\n\nThe 20-year-old was taken to Holloway Police Station when he was led away but said he had been \"de-arrested\" and returned to the park.\n\n\"I have been living here for the last four months. They (the remaining demonstrators) aren't going to give up that easily,\" he said.\n\nOne activist used to a rope to tie himself between trees at the camp\n\nThe Met Police confirmed a number of officers were sent to the eviction site at Euston Square Gardens to assist High Court enforcement officers should there be any breach of the peace and to uphold Covid legislation.\n\nThe force said five people who were arrested at the site remain in custody.\n\nA spokeswoman for HS2 said tunnel protests were \"costly to the taxpayer\".\n\nShe added: \"HS2 has taken legal temporary possession of Euston Square Gardens in order to progress with works necessary for the construction of the new Euston station.\n\n\"These protests are a danger to the safety of the protesters, our staff and the general public, and put unnecessary strain on the emergency services during a pandemic.\"\n\nHS2 is set to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It is hoped the 20-year project will reduce rail passenger overcrowding and help to rebalance the UK's economy.\n\nThe campaign group alleges HS2 is the \"most expensive, wasteful and destructive project in UK history\" and that it is \"set to destroy or irreparably damage 108 ancient woodlands and 693 wildlife sites\".\n\nHowever, HS2 bosses have said seven million trees will be planted during phase one of the project and that much ancient woodland will \"remain intact\".\n\nThere is a ring of security surrounding the square outside Euston Station and a crowd of journalists reporting on today's event.\n\nEvery now and then there is a burst of singing through a loud hailer and motivational speeches echo from the trees.\n\nMost of the protesters we can see are among the branches, some have cut their safety lines, others are swinging in harnesses.\n\nEarlier, enforcement officers were lifted up in a cherry picker into one of the tree camps . They have spoken with the demonstrators and are now fixing ropes to the high level platforms.\n\nWe've been told at least four people are inside the tunnels HS2 Rebellion have dug under the site.\n\nPeople inside the fence have said they predict the eviction to \"take weeks\".\n\nThe atmosphere is calm but the police have begun to push back people watching, reminding them of Covid-19 regulations and asking to see press passes.\n\nA fence is being erected by officers around the site\n\nFor more London news follow on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Scotland is to initially follow UK travel rules, but could introduce stricter measures next week\n\nScotland could introduce tougher quarantine rules for international travellers than other parts of the UK, the first minister has said.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has announced that UK arrivals from regions with new virus variants will be provided accommodation for 10 days to isolate.\n\nNicola Sturgeon said she was \"concerned the proposal does not go far enough\".\n\nScotland will \"initially emulate\" the UK government measures, she said.\n\nBut further Scottish rules will be set out next week if the four nations do not reach an agreement on a UK-wide approach - which Ms Sturgeon said would be preferable.\n\nThe prime minister has said there are 22 countries with the risk of known new variants, including the South American nations, Portugal and South Africa.\n\nMr Johnson said anyone travelling from these countries who cannot be refused entry to the UK - such as British citizens - will be provided accommodation for 10 days to isolate \"without exception\".\n\nThey will be met at the airport and transferred to specific places, such as hotels.\n\nFurther details of the plan are expected to be outlined by Home Secretary Priti Patel later.\n\nHowever Ms Sturgeon - who was briefed on the UK government proposals in advance - told her daily coronavirus briefing that a \"comprehensive system of supervised quarantine\" was required in the next stage of the pandemic.\n\nAnd she said she was \"seeking urgently\" to persuade the UK government \"to go much further\" while providing additional support to the aviation industry.\n\nThe first minister said: \"Our best route back to greater domestic normality right now, as we continue with the vaccine programme, is firstly to suppress the virus here to as low as level as possible - as we did over the summer - then give ourselves a better chance of controlling it through test and protect, and next by doing much more than we did last year to protect our borders.\"\n\nThe Welsh government has also said the PM's proposals do not go far enough.\n\nWhen questioned by journalists, Ms Sturgeon said she would \"not give arbitrary dates\" on when the travel restrictions might come to an end.\n\nBut she said people \"might not be able to go on holiday overseas\" in order to \"get domestic normality\" back - including the reopening of schools and allowing people more interactions with loved ones.\n\n\"I'm not saying that's easy but maybe that might be a price we all need to be prepared to pay,\" she added.\n\nScottish Conservatives leader Douglas Ross told the BBC that he believed that countries with higher infection rates and strains with quicker transmission should be prioritised.\n\n\"We've got to look at dealing with this in stages,\" he said. \"This doesn't need to be dragged into a Scotland versus England issue or the rest of the UK issue.\n\n\"This is as big an issue within Scotland. We shouldn't be moving around local authority areas so whether it's north or south of the border or within our own communities we've got to reduce travel as much as possible.\"\n\nIt comes as the deaths of a further 92 people who had tested positive for coronavirus were recorded in Scotland - bringing the total to 5,888.\n\nThe total number of deaths across the UK by that measure passed the grim milestone of 100,00 on Tuesday.\n\nMs Sturgeon said she was \"truly sorry\" for any mistakes that had been made in the handling of the pandemic.\n\nShe added: \"She said the death toll should make all political leaders \"think very hard about what more we could have done and what lessons we must continue to learn\".\n\nShe added: \"I know that I, and everyone in my government, have tried every day to do everything we possibly can.\n\n\"But I don't think any of us, reflecting on numbers like these, can conclude that we have always succeeded.\"\n\nA total of 1,330 new cases were recorded in the last 24 hours, representing 6.2% of people tested.\n\nMeanwhile 462,092 people have received the first dose of the vaccine in Scotland - including 56% of the over 80s and 95% of people in care homes.", "The greys were introduced to Britain from North America in the 19th Century\n\nThe UK government has given its support to a project to use oral contraceptives to control grey squirrel populations.\n\nEnvironment minister Lord Goldsmith says the damage they and other invasive species do to the UK's woodlands costs the UK economy £1.8 billion a year.\n\nThe bizarre-sounding plan is to lure grey squirrels into feeding boxes only they can access with little pots containing hazelnut spread.\n\nThese would be spiked with an oral contraceptive.\n\nLord Goldsmith says the damage from squirrels also threatens the effectiveness of government efforts to tackle climate change by planting tens of thousands of acres of new woodlands.\n\nOn Tuesday, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) told BBC News: \"We hope advances in science can safely help our nature to thrive, including through the humane control of invasive species.\"\n\nA partnership of conservation and forestry organisations called the UK Squirrel Accord (UKSA) is behind the proposal.\n\nIt says grey squirrels, which were first introduced from North America in the late 19th century, cause huge damage to woodlands by stripping bark from trees aged between 10-50 years, the younger trees in a forest.\n\nThey particularly target broad-leafed varieties including oak, which are particularly ecologically important because they support so many other species.\n\nIt is estimated the UK is home to some three million of these invasive rodents.\n\nRed squirrels are now confined mainly to Scotland and Ireland\n\nThey have displaced the native red squirrel across most of the UK.\n\nLord Goldsmith says the government supports the plan as well as a longer-term effort to breed infertility into female grey squirrels to reduce their numbers.\n\nInvasive non-native species such as grey squirrels threaten our native biodiversity, he argues.\n\nWhen regulating grey squirrels with oral contraceptive was first proposed in 2017, the government's Animal and Plant Health Agency said it thought it could reduce their numbers by as much as 90%.\n\nThe project also has royal approval.\n\nPrince Charles was instrumental in founding the UK Squirrel Accord with the objective of \"managing the negative impacts of invasive grey squirrels in the UK\".\n\nHe has written of the importance of protecting Britain's remaining red squirrels.\n\n\"These charming and intelligent creatures never fail to delight\", he wrote last week in his capacity as patron of the Red Squirrel Survival Trust, describing red squirrels as the \"symbol and benchmark\" of healthy woods.\n\nJason Gilchrist, an ecologist from Edinburgh Napier University, has written in defence of the grey squirrel but he says he supports the oral contraceptive plan.\n\nHe acknowledges there is a need to manage grey squirrel populations.\n\n\"It is better than the alternative: a shotgun\", he told BBC News.\n\nIt is the same argument the UKSA makes: dosing the animals with contraceptives provides a humane alternative to culling them.\n\nLast week, the Royal Forestry Society, a member of the Squirrel Accord, called for just such a cull.\n\nSimon Lloyd, its chief executive, says efforts to tackle global warming and improve biodiversity will be undermined unless grey squirrel numbers can be reduced.\n\nNew trees will not survive to \"deliver the carbon capture or biodiversity objectives if grey squirrels cannot be controlled\", he told the Daily Telegraph.\n\nThe UKSA has been experimenting with ways to deliver oral contraceptives to squirrels for more than three years now.\n\nLast year, it tested special feeding stations designed so only grey squirrels can gain access in woodland in East Yorkshire.\n\nInstead of contraceptives, the hazelnut paste bait was dosed with a dye that, when ingested, causes squirrel hair to fluoresce under UV light.\n\nThe researchers found that more than 90% of the grey squirrel population being studied visited the traps.\n\nThey concluded that it was possible to deliver repeat doses of a contraceptive to the majority of grey squirrels in a wood.", "Leon Briggs died in hospital after being restrained and detained at Luton police station in November 2013\n\nA man shouted \"help me\" and \"get off me\" as he was restrained face-down by police officers hours before he died, an inquest heard.\n\nLeon Briggs, 39, died in 2013 after being detained under the Mental Health Act at Luton police station.\n\nA jury was told one witness described the father-of-two as \"like a child crying out for a toy\" as he was held down by officers.\n\nAnother said he looked her in the eyes and said \"please help me\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe jury has been shown CCTV of Mr Briggs skipping between shops and across roads, before two Bedfordshire Police officers handcuffed him and placed him in leg restraints on Marsh Road in Luton on 4 November 2013.\n\nMr Briggs was detained in a cell at about 14:25 GMT, but he became unconscious and was pronounced dead in hospital at about 16:15.\n\nThe inquest heard his primary cause of death was \"amphetamine intoxication with prone restraint and prolonged struggling\" with a secondary cause of coronary heart disease.\n\nMr Briggs was described as \"a really good dad\" who loved spending time with his children\n\nThe inquest heard Wendy Hamilton was shopping when she saw one officer restraining Mr Briggs on his lower legs, with another on his shoulders, and a third appeared to be looking through his wallet.\n\nMs Hamilton said she \"thought the amount of pressure being used was not needed\", adding she heard Mr Briggs shout \"get off me\" and \"why are you doing this to me?\".\n\n\"He lifted his head from the pavement, he looked me in the eyes and said 'please help me',\" she said.\n\nShe added when two paramedics arrived \"around 45 minutes\" after she first saw Mr Briggs, she was \"surprised\" they \"did not check Leon at all\".\n\nShe said he was later lifted into a police van \"front first\" and \"face down\", \"like he was a bag of potatoes\" or \"like they were picking up a dog\".\n\n\"They lifted him not in a rough way... but it was not very dignified,\" she said.\n\nFootage showed Mr Briggs walking out of a shop with officers before he was restrained\n\nAnother witness, Raja Khan, said: \"Mr Briggs was crying out... but not in an aggressive manner... in a similar way to a child crying out for a toy.\n\n\"I'm not going to forget what I saw in regard to the restraint... I do not agree with how Mr Briggs was treated... it would have been fair enough if he was being violent but from what I saw, he was not.\"\n\nFormer chairman of the College of Paramedics, Andrew Newton, said paramedics on Marsh Road were likely to have had \"inadequate knowledge\" of dealing with acute behavioural disorder patients like Mr Briggs in 2013, due to a lack of national guidance.\n\nBut Mr Newton added Mr Briggs \"received no meaningful medical care\" because they failed to properly check his vital signs, and this \"fell below the standards of care\".\n\nHe said Mr Briggs should have been taken to hospital in an ambulance.\n\nThe inquest heard part of a statement from Sgt Loren Short, who said he told paramedics Mr Briggs had been detained under the Mental Health Act when they arrived.\n\nPolice Community Support Officer (PCSO) James Collings described Mr Briggs as \"aggressive\" and \"nonsensical\", and \"shouting 'no, no' and snarling\" while in the police van.\n\nPCSO Collings said when he questioned whether Mr Briggs was on drugs, one officer said: \"[He is] mental\", and Mr Briggs replied: \"Don't take the [expletive]\", to which the officer said: \"I'm not taking the [expletive], I just want to get you back and get you some help.\"\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "More than 100,000 people in the UK have died from a virus, that, this time last year, felt like a far-off foreign threat. How did we come to be one of the countries with the worst death tolls?\n\nThere is no quick answer to that question, and there is sure to be a long and detailed public inquiry once the pandemic is over. But there are plenty of clues that, when pieced together, help build a picture of why the UK has reached this devastating number.\n\nSome will point a finger at the government - its decision to lock-down later than much of western Europe, the stuttering start to its test-and-trace network and the lack of protection afforded to care home residents.\n\nOthers will spotlight deeper rooted problems with British society - its poor state of public health, with high levels of obesity, for example.\n\nOthers, still, will note that some of the UK's great strengths - its position as a vibrant hub for international air travel, its ethnically diverse and densely-packed urban populations - exposed its vulnerability to a virus that spreads effortlessly between people.\n\nIn some people's eyes, the UK's island status might have helped it. New Zealand, Australia and Taiwan managed to stop the virus getting a foothold and deaths have been kept to a minimum - Australia has seen fewer deaths throughout the pandemic than the UK is recording every day on average.\n\nAll introduced strict border restrictions immediately and lockdowns to contain the virus before it had spread. The UK did not. It was not until June that quarantine rules were introduced for all arrivals and even then travel corridors were soon set up, relaxing the rules for travellers from certain countries. Only this month were these scrapped.\n\nProf Devi Sridhar, an expert in public health from Edinburgh University, is one of those who has been critical of the approach the UK has taken from the start.\n\nShe says the UK, like much of Europe, was \"complacent\" about the threat of infectious disease - choosing to treat the new coronavirus \"like flu\" and allowing it to spread, while talking about the desire to achieve herd immunity.\n\nThis all changed in late March, when a full lockdown eventually came. But there was a crucial delay of a week which is estimated to have cost more than 20,000 lives, according to government modeller Prof Neil Ferguson, because of how quickly infection rates were doubling at that point.\n\nThis, of course, is said with the benefit of hindsight. Government modellers themselves acknowledge the data was \"really quite poor\" making it difficult to make a decision that would have significant repercussions. It is a point acknowledged by Prof Chris Whitty, the UK's chief medical adviser. Speaking in the summer he said there had been \"very limited information\" in early March.\n\nBy then, the virus was ripping through care homes. Around 30% of deaths in the first wave happened in care homes; 40% if you include care home residents who died in hospital.\n\nThose at the heart of government acknowledge mistakes were made. UK chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said recently: \"The lesson is go earlier than you think you want to, go harder than you think you want to, and go a bit broader than you think you want to in terms of applying the restrictions.\"\n\nBy May, restrictions were beginning to be eased. But was this too soon?\n\nThe government seized on the relative lull to focus on building what the prime minister promised would be a \"world-beating\" test-and-trace system. The idea was that new outbreaks could be nipped in the bud, with comprehensive tracking by a centralised team of tracers.\n\nThe mere fact this had to be done some months after the virus had struck, illustrates another factor behind the high number of deaths - the UK was simply not prepared for a pandemic of this nature in the way some Asian nations had been. Countries such as South Korea and Taiwan had established test-and-trace systems in place that were ready to be activated.\n\nThe UK had a chance to bed in its system in the summer but it was riven with teething problems, with tracers struggling to reach many contacts and the testing capacity slowing down as demand rose.\n\nLow levels of infection over the summer had created a false sense of security.\n\nDesperate to boost the economy, the government launched the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, offering people discounted meals out during August. To what extent it contributed to the rise in the autumn is much argued about but certainly some doctors blame it in part for an increase in patients seen.\n\nThe truth is the virus never went away. Testing in the summer showed even at the lowest levels there were still around 500 cases a day being diagnosed - and random testing in the population subsequently showed the true level may have been twice that.\n\nIn late August around 1,000 people a day were testing positive. By mid-September that had trebled and from there it rose five-fold to 15,000 by mid October. The numbers testing positive have never returned below 10,000 a day on average since.\n\nAnother decision that has been heavily criticised was the refusal of ministers to introduce a short two-week lockdown, or \"circuit breaker\", in September - despite their advisers on Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) recommending such a step. The argument was it would have set the spread of the virus back by at least a month, giving test and trace time to regroup.\n\nWales, however, did introduce its own \"fire-breaker\" - a 17-day lockdown in October. It got infection rates down, but as soon as it was lifted they rebounded. This is, of course, why lockdowns have been criticised.\n\nEdinburgh University infectious diseases expert Prof Mark Woolhouse, one of the modellers who feeds data into Sage, is on the record in the autumn questioning the logic of them for this very reason. It remains up for debate how effective a circuit-breaker would actually have been.\n\nThis after all is the time of year when respiratory illnesses start to increase. Schools had returned as had university students, creating new environments for the novel coronavirus to spread.\n\nWhen a lockdown was eventually introduced in England in November it was to last four weeks, with Sage members lamenting the delay. \"The absence of a decision is a decision in itself,\" says Wellcome Trust director Sir Jeremy Farrar.\n\nBut even before that lockdown was lifted cases had started going up in the south-east of England. Within weeks it became clear what was happening. The virus had mutated and a new faster-spreading variant was on the rise.\n\nBy mid-December the clamour for lockdown was growing again, but the plan for a Christmas relaxation of restrictions had already been announced. In every nation of the UK, ministers waited.\n\nAt the start of 2021, with hospital admissions rising rapidly, the UK's four chief medical officers intervened, issuing a joint statement warning the NHS was at \"material risk\" of being overwhelmed. Within hours the UK was back in lockdown.\n\nWhat has struck some is just how similar the mistakes have been in terms of locking down late.\n\n\"It will take years to unpick why Covid has gone so badly in the UK,\" says University College London infectious diseases expert Dr Neil Stone. \"But the failure to learn from wave one stands out.\"\n\nBut it must also be recognised that there are factors outside the control of the government - certainly in terms of its pandemic response - that have contributed to the high number of deaths.\n\nOne of the reasons the virus was able to take a hold and spread so quickly was because of geography and the fact the UK - and London in particular - is a global hub. Genetic analysis has shown the virus was brought into the UK on at least 1,300 separate occasions, mainly from France, Spain and Italy, by the end of March.\n\nIt was here before we knew it. That's not something Australia or New Zealand had to deal with on such a scale.\n\nDensity of population is also a factor. The UK is among the 10 most densely populated big nations - those with populations of more than 20 million. What is more, our cities are more inter-connected than they are in many places.\n\nIt meant the virus was able to seed everywhere quite quickly. Contrast this with Italy which saw the vast majority of cases in the north of the country in the first wave.\n\nThe ageing population also needs to be taken into account. Once you do this, and adjust for the size of the population - known as age-standardised mortality - deaths have risen, but not by as much as some of the headline figures suggest.\n\nThe health of the nation has also been a factor. The UK has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world. And obesity increases the risk of hospitalisation and death, according to Public Health England. One study found the risk of death was almost double for those who are severely obese.\n\nConditions such as diabetes, kidney disease and respiratory problems also increase the risk - a fifth of Covid deaths have listed diabetes on the death certificate.\n\nAgain the UK has relatively high rates of these illnesses.\n\nBut many have argued that these high levels of ill-health have been compounded by the levels of inequality in the UK.\n\nLevels of ill health and life expectancy have always been worst in the poorest areas, but the pandemic certainly seems to have exacerbated this.\n\nOffice for National Statistics data shows mortality rates have been twice as high in deprived areas as they have been in wealthy areas. The Health Foundation is carrying out its own inquiry into the issue, arguing the Covid death toll needs to be seen through the \"lens\" of inequality to fully understand it.\n\nIt is something that has also been raised by Prof Michael Marmot, one of the country's leading experts on health inequalities. \"The UK's dismal record is telling us something important about our society.\"\n\nIf you, or someone you know, have been affected by bereavement, here is a list of organisations that may be able to help.", "Eva Gicain has been celebrating a belated Christmas with her daughter Elleana and husband Limuel Lina after being discharged from Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge\n\nA nurse who gave birth nearly three months ago while seriously ill with Covid-19 has held her daughter for the first time.\n\nEva Gicain, 30, had the long-awaited reunion with her baby after being discharged from Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge earlier this month.\n\nBaby Elleana had to be delivered about a month early by C-section, but Mrs Gicain has no memory of her birth.\n\n\"When I held Elleana for the first time I didn't want to let go,\" she said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid-19: New mum thanks hospitals after recovery\n\nMrs Gicain was taken to her local hospital with a severe case of Covid-19 at the end of October when she was 34 weeks pregnant, and gave birth a week later.\n\nBut the NHS nurse, who was on maternity leave from her job in London, has no recollection of it or the traumatic weeks that followed.\n\nDays later she was transferred 50 miles (80km) away to Royal Papworth Hospital's critical care unit and became one of the youngest patients ever to be put on to its \"artificial lung\" for acute respiratory failure.\n\nThe extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine acted as Mrs Gicain's lungs so they could recover while she was treated for Covid-19.\n\n\"The first thing I remember is just a few days before Christmas and being told where I was, what I had been through and that Elleana was doing well,\" Mrs Gicain said.\n\nMrs Gicain was given a round of applause by hospital staff after spending the first few weeks of her baby's life in a hospital 50 miles away\n\nHer husband Limuel Lina, 30, who also had Covid-19, was unable to visit her and had to wait three weeks to see Elleana, who was in a special care baby unit.\n\n\"It was so horrible the three of us being in separate places at a time when we should all have been together,\" Mr Lina said.\n\nAlthough the couple knew they were having a girl and had discussed her name, Mr Lina, a healthcare assistant, said he did not know his wife's preferred spelling.\n\n\"[It] meant I couldn't yet get her registered,\" he said.\n\n\"Luckily, I found some personalised pyjamas that Eva had bought as a Christmas present and so I managed to get the spelling from there!\"\n\nThe couple and their daughter celebrated a belated Christmas last week at their home in Basildon, Essex.\n\n\"Life is unpredictable and we are now just looking forward to being a little family and spending time together,\" added Mrs Gicain.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The head of AstraZeneca has defended its rollout of the coronavirus vaccine in the EU, amid tension with member states over delays in supply.\n\nPascal Soriot told Italian newspaper La Repubblica that his team was working \"24/7 to fix the very many issues of production of the vaccine\".\n\nHe said production was \"basically two months behind where we wanted to be\".\n\nHe also said the EU's late decision to sign contracts had given limited time to sort out hiccups with supply.\n\nMr Soriot, chief executive of the UK-Swedish multinational, said a contract with the UK had been signed three months before the one with the EU, giving more time for glitches to be ironed out.\n\nHe told La Repubblica that problems in \"scaling up\" vaccine production were being experienced at two plants, one in the Netherlands and one in Belgium.\n\n\"It's complicated, especially in the early phase where you have to really sort out all sorts of issues,\" he said.\n\n\"We believe we've sorted out those issues, but we are basically two months behind where we wanted to be.\"\n\nHe added: \"We've also had teething issues like this in the UK supply chain. But the UK contract was signed three months before the European vaccine deal. So with the UK we have had an extra three months to fix all the glitches we experienced.\n\nAstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said a vaccine targeting the South African variant was being worked on\n\n\"Would I like to do better? Of course. But, you know, if we deliver in February what we are planning to deliver, it's not a small volume. We are planning to deliver millions of doses to Europe, it is not small.\"\n\nMr Soriot also said AstraZeneca was working on a vaccine with Oxford University that would target the South African variant of the coronavirus.\n\nScientists have warned there is a chance the South African variant may harm the effectiveness of current vaccines.\n\nThe AstraZeneca vaccine is already being used in the UK but has not yet been approved by the EU, although the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is expected to give it the green light at the end of this month.\n\nThe bloc signed a deal in August for 300 million doses, with an option for 100 million more. The EU had hoped that, as soon as approval was given, delivery would start straight away, with some 80 million doses arriving in the 27 nations by March.\n\nThe EU has ordered 600 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which is already being used on patients around the bloc.\n\nBut Pfizer-BioNTech said last week it was delaying shipments for the next few weeks because of work to increase capacity at its Belgian plant.\n\nIn response to the delays, the EU has said it might restrict exports of vaccines made in the bloc.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sofia Bettiza explains why some countries are far ahead of others in the vaccination race\n\nHealth Commissioner Stella Kyriakides said companies making Covid vaccines in the bloc would have to \"provide early notification whenever they want to export vaccines to third countries\".\n\nShe said the 27-member EU bloc would \"take any action required to protect its citizens\".\n\nEuropean Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, addressing the virtual version of the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), usually held in Davos, said: \"Europe invested billions to help develop the world's first Covid-19 vaccines. And now, the companies must deliver. They must honour their obligations.\"\n\nHave you been affected by vaccine supply issues? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "The prime minister has responded to calls that were getting louder for clarity about what might happen next and when.\n\nHe pencilled in a date for the country's diary. But 8 March is the hoped-for beginning of the end of lockdown - far from a guarantee.\n\nPolitical demands for more information from his backbench MPs and the opposition were part of the reason for his announcement. But there was also the relentless march of the clock.\n\nThe government had promised it would give schools in England two weeks' notice of whether they would be able to open after half-term.\n\nWith Boris Johnson not expected in Westminster on Thursday, Wednesday was the last viable moment to keep that vow.\n\nWith cases still so high, and hospitals still so full, in theory the announcement wasn't that much of a surprise.\n\nNorthern Ireland is already in lockdown until 5 March, but will confirm its position on schools on Thursday.\n\nWales and Scotland are reviewing whether to extend closures beyond the middle of February in the next couple of days. Without dramatic falls in case numbers, they seem likely to be in step soon too.\n\nIn practice, though, Mr Johnson's announcement still felt like a big admission: that we're heading for 12 months of limits - starting last March - on our lives in one way or another.\n\nFirms and families around the UK will have had to cope with moving in and out of lockdown for a whole year.\n\nLike Tuesday's terrible 100,000-deaths mark, it's a milestone that at the beginning of all of this simply wouldn't have been imagined.\n\nBut as time as worn on, the pattern has become familiar: push the dates back, confront the worst rather than hope for the best.\n\nThe prime minister altered, maybe, too. You could hear it in his tone when asked what the chances of sticking to his date were. \"That's the earliest,\" he warned, suggesting that a long list of things have to go right.\n\nOne cabinet minister described the government's position: \"The decision making has been more and more cautious as they've been caught out so many times.\"\n\nNo one perhaps would be more delighted than Mr Johnson if the pace of the disease slows dramatically and the promise of the vaccine comes good very soon.\n\nBut at this time, with a buffer of several weeks to keep looking at the information, that's not a commitment that ministers are willing to make.", "Victims lost an average of £45,242 last year after investing with fraudsters imitating genuine investment firms.\n\nMore than £78m was lost in total, according to fraud reporting centre Action Fraud.\n\nReports of clone firm investment scams rose by 29% in April - at the time of the first national lockdown - compared with the previous month.\n\nA UK financial watchdog warned people to be alert, particularly when their finances were stretched.\n\nScammers set up clone firms using the name, address and firm reference number (FRN) of real companies authorised by the regulator - the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).\n\nThey then send out sales materials linking to the websites of legitimate firms, to trick potential investors into thinking they are dealing with the real firm.\n\nThey use their own, similar contact details, so victims still think they are dealing with the genuine firm as they invest money.\n\nLosses can be high as fraudsters tend to encourage large or regular investments before disappearing with the money.\n\nThe ongoing financial impact of Covid-19 may make people more susceptible to clone scams, the FCA said.\n\nMark Steward, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said: \"Fraudsters use literature and websites that mirror those of legitimate firms, as well as encouraging investors to check the firm reference number (FRN) on the FCA Register to sound as convincing as possible.\"\n\nHe said alerts were raised about 1,100 firms, including clones, last year - twice as many as the previous year.\n\nHe said the authorities were taking down clone sites when discovered.\n\n\"When it comes to clones, I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to double check every detail,\" Mr Steward said.\n\nOne victim, called Janet, said: \"After searching the internet for high-return bonds, I received a call the next day about investing in student accommodation.\n\n\"I found legitimate details of the company online - everything seemed genuine, so I invested.\n\n\"A few months later, after a couple more investments, I started to get a bit worried - I still hadn't received confirmation of the latest investment.\n\n\"I tried to call the contacts I had been speaking to, but the numbers were invalid. It was clear I had been scammed.\n\nThe ScamSmart campaign, run by the FCA, has tips to protect yourself from clone investment firms:", "Jagtar Singh Johal, from Dumbarton, is being held under India's anti-terror law\n\nA Scottish man who has been held in an Indian jail without conviction for three years has told the BBC he was tortured to sign a blank confession.\n\nJagtar Singh Johal, from Dumbarton, is being held under India's anti-terror laws, accused of conspiring to murder a number of right-wing Hindu leaders.\n\nCourt documents allege he helped fund the crimes and claim he was a member of a \"terrorist gang\".\n\nMr Johal told the BBC via his lawyer he had been \"falsely implicated\".\n\nIn answers to BBC questions obtained by his lawyer during a virtual prison meeting, the 33-year-old says he was physically tortured into signing a blank confession and forced to record a video which was broadcast on Indian TV.\n\n\"They made me sign blank pieces of paper and asked me to say certain lines in front of a camera under fear of extreme torture,\" he said via his lawyer.\n\nMr Johal's legal team also shared a copy of what they say is a handwritten letter from shortly after his arrest in November 2017 in which he details allegations of how the torture took place.\n\n\"Multiple shocks were administered by placing (the) crocodile clips on my earlobes, nipples and private parts,\" the letter says. \"Multiple shocks were given each day.\n\n\"Two people would stretch my legs, another person would slap and strike me from behind, and the shocks were given by the seated officers.\"\n\n\"At some stages I was left unable to walk and had to be carried out of the interrogation room.\"\n\nThe BBC has been unable to independently verify these allegations of torture.\n\nThe Indian authorities strongly deny them, and have said \"there is no evidence of mistreatment or torture as alleged\".\n\nJagtar got married in India in 2017\n\nMr Johal travelled to India in October 2017 for his wedding.\n\nVideos of the occasion show the new groom jumping enthusiastically to Bhangra music as he celebrated.\n\nIn another he is seen holding his wife's hand, as they perform their first dance in front of friends and family.\n\n\"It was a cheerful day for us, it went exactly as planned,\" recalls his brother Gurpreet Singh Johal.\n\nBut a fortnight later, while on a shopping trip with his new bride in the North Indian state of Punjab, Mr Johal was taken away by police and has been in detention ever since.\n\nHis brother Gurpreet, who lives in Scotland, says Mr Johal was a peaceful activist and is convinced he was arrested because he had written about historical human rights violations against Sikhs in India.\n\n\"I believe my brother is being targeted because he was outspoken,\" Gurpreet says. \"I believe he is innocent and will be proved innocent once the trial starts.\n\n\"Otherwise Indian officials should release him and return him back to his country.\"\n\nJagtar Singh Johal (right) arrives at court in India in November 2017\n\nCharge-sheets from the Indian authorities outline the case against Mr Johal and a group of men whom they believe were involved in a \"series of killings\" of right wing Hindu leaders.\n\nIt is claimed Mr Johal was a member of Khalistan Liberation Front (KLF), described in the documents as an international \"terrorist gang\".\n\nHe is accused of paying £3,000 to the former head of the KLF to help fund the crimes. The documents claim he \"actively participated and had complete knowledge of the conspiracy\".\n\n\"There are very serious charges against him including murder and abetment of terrorism,\" an Indian government official told the BBC.\n\n\"The seriousness of charges against him have been shared with the British authorities,\" they added.\n\nFootage which claims to show Mr Johal in custody was broadcast on Indian TV\n\nMr Johal's lawyer, Jaspal Singh Manjphur, who has represented him since he was first arrested, told the BBC he was concerned by the length of time it was taking for the case to go through the Indian legal system.\n\n\"He has been in custody for over three years,\" Mr Manjphur said. \"Normally, if the prosecution wants, they can complete the case in that much time.\"\n\nMr Manjphur said the authorities had yet to provide any him with any evidence linking his client to the crimes and feared he was being framed, a charge denied by officials.\n\nA few weeks ago, Mr Johal was accused of being involved in another crime. While in prison he has been arrested for helping to plot the murder of a man in October 2020.\n\n\"He is in a high security jail, he is under CCTV surveillance for 24 hours. How can he be in contact with anyone?\", Mr Manjphur said.\n\nMr Johal was last seen in public at court in Delhi earlier this month\n\nMr Johal is being held at Delhi's maximum security Tihar jail.\n\nHe claims he is often forced to stay in solitary confinement and is denied the same facilities as other prisoners, such as hot water.\n\n\"By making me stay in these conditions, they are ensuring that my mental condition remains disturbed,\" he said.\n\n\"It is very tough to live here,\" he said.\n\nThe vast majority of inmates at the prison are, like Mr Johal, held before a conviction in what is known as an \"under-trial\" in India.\n\nAt the end of 2019, 82% of prisoners held in Tihar jail had yet to complete the trial process.\n\nIn India it can take many years before under-trial prisoners ever get to court, especially in terror cases where bail is hard to secure, a concern for Mr Johal's lawyer.\n\n\"He will languish in jail until the trial is completed, in such cases it could take anywhere between five to 10 years,\" Mr Manjphur said.\n\nUK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has raised the case with his Indian counterpart\n\nThe human rights charity Reprieve has written to the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, asking that he calls for Mr Johal's immediate release.\n\nReprieve is also worried that some of the charges Mr Johal is awaiting trial for carry the death penalty as the maximum punishment. But experts stress that executions in India are extremely rare.\n\nThe UK's Foreign Commonwealth and Development office told the BBC that Mr Raab did raise the case with his Indian counterpart during his trip to India in December.\n\n\"We have consistently raised concerns about his case with the Government of India, including allegations of torture and mistreatment and his right to a fair trial,\" it said in a statement.\n\n\"Our staff continue to support Jagtar Singh Johal following his detention in India, and are in regular contact with his family and prison officials about his health and wellbeing.\"\n\nHundreds of people protested outside the Foreign Office\n\nBut Mr Johal's brother Gurpreet said the family was still waiting for a meeting with the foreign secretary.\n\nHe said: \"We are calling for either Jagtar to be charged and a fair trial to take place or to be returned back to his country so he can spend his life with his wife in the UK.\"\n\nIn August last year Gurpreet Singh Johal was joined by dozens who protested outside Downing Street.\n\nJagtar Singh Johal's case has sparked protests around the world, from Westminster to Washington, Geneva to Toronto.\n\nIn his statement to the BBC, Mr Johal had this message for officials back home: \"I plead to the UK government to support me, I'm a British citizen and the government should understand that.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Keir Starmer calls for teachers and support staff to be vaccinated during the February half term\n\nSir Keir Starmer has called on the government to \"use the window\" of the February half-term to vaccinate all teachers and support staff.\n\nSpeaking at Prime Ministers Questions, the Labour leader said reopening schools must be a national priority.\n\nLabour wants to bring forward the vaccination of key workers alongside others in high risk groups.\n\nBut Boris Johnson said the proposal would \"delay our ability to move forward out of lockdown\".\n\nThe PM said teachers in the top nine priority groups would be vaccinated as a \"matter of priority\", adding: \"I know how deeply frustrating it is, the extra burden that we have placed on families by closing the schools.\"\n\nMr Johnson said he remained confident that the top four priority groups - taking in all over-70s, health and care staff and elderly care home residents - would receive a first jab by mid-February \"if we can get the supply\" of vaccines.\n\nBy the end of April those in the next five priority groups, including all over-50s and younger adults with underlying health conditions, should have been offered a jab, under the government's plans.\n\nLabour wants to see workers in critical professions - such as police officers, firefighters and transport workers, as well as teachers - vaccinated alongside these groups.\n\nShadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: \"The NHS rightly deserve congratulations for their impressive and speedy roll out of vaccinations.\n\n\"But now we need to go further and faster.\n\n\"Not only will vaccination acceleration save lives it will help us to carefully and responsibly reopen our economy and crucially ensure children are back in school as transmission reduces.\"\n\nBut asked about the proposal in the Commons, Mr Johnson said it would \"take vaccines away from the more vulnerable groups and... delay our ability to move forward out of lockdown\".\n\nThe government has said it will prioritise the reopening of schools as it begins the process of lifting lockdown restrictions, but in a Commons statement after PMQs, Mr Johnson indicated that schools would remain closed until early March.\n\n\"We hope it will... be safe to begin the reopening of schools from Monday, 8 March, with other economic and social restrictions being removed thereafter as and when the data permits,\" he told MPs.", "The coronavirus pandemic has forced the cancellation of many much-loved events and traditions but the good people of New Orleans were not going to let it ruin their annual Mardi Gras.\n\nWhen the mayor of the Louisiana city announced that the raucous, crowd-filled street carnival parades would not be going ahead, residents decided to turn their houses into floats instead.\n\nThousands have been transformed for the two-week long carnival that runs until Ash Wednesday on 17 February. In the picture below, you can see The Queen's Jubilee House.\n\nA special project was set up encouraging home-owners to hire the many artists who would normally have months of work preparing for the event.\n\nRené Pierre's company usually looks after 75 floats during Mardi Gras and he has managed to get contracts to build 53 house floats.\n\n\"My wife and I were trying to sleep one night, and we kept hearing notifications coming from the website. It was like instant success. It was incredible,\" he told CNN.\n\nThere were a variety of themes such as this reference to the Bernie Sanders meme from last month's presidential inauguration.\n\nAnd this homage to influential women including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who died last year.\n\nThe idea for the house floats came from a carnival regular, Megan Joy Boudreaux, who had suggested it in a post on Twitter after the mayor's announcement in November.\n\n\"It doesn't matter if your budget is zero and you're recycling cardboard boxes, or whether your budget is tens of thousands of dollars and you've got a mansion on St Charles. We want everyone who wants to do this to participate,\" she told the New York Times.\n\nShe said she had expected a few friends and neighbours to join in, but by the beginning of January more than 9,000 people had signed up - some as far afield as the UK and Australia, the AP reports.\n\nSome homes were decorated in honour of musicians, like this house below that paid tribute to former New Orleans resident and jazz clarinet payer Pete Fountain.\n\nAnd this house which referenced country music star Dolly Parton.\n\nThere were also tributes to musician Dr John.\n\nAnd others evoked Zydeco music pioneers Boozoo Chavis and Clifton Chenier and the 'Cajun Hank Williams', DL Menard.\n\nAn online map of the decorated houses is being made available for people to visit in their own time and, it is hoped, in a socially-distanced way.", "Starmer: Get a grip on getting laptops to children\n\nSir Keir says he is \"no wiser\" over where the PM stands on vaccinating teachers. But he moves on to the supplies of technology for children at home. \"The government has got a duty to make sure every single child can learn at home,\" says the Labour leader. But he says a third of families say they don't have enough laptops or home computers, and over 400,000 children are still not able to get online at home. He asks if the PM understands the anger of families that the government \"still haven't got to grips with this\". Johnson says he \"fully understands the frustration and impatience across the country.\" He says the government has provided 1.3 million laptops to children and a £1bn catch up fund, but he promises more details in his statement this afternoon on \"what more we propose to do on reopening of schools\".", "Claudia Marsh was a volunteer for an eating disorder charity which had helped her in the past\n\nAn \"incredible\" recently-qualified teacher has died with coronavirus on her 25th birthday.\n\nClaudia Marsh's death was described as \"sudden and unexpected\" by a charity which had helped her recover from an eating disorder several years ago.\n\nShe had gone on to volunteer for the organisation and became a \"beacon of hope\" for others.\n\nHer mother Tina Marsh, from Heswall in Wirral, said she was \"very proud\" and \"blown away\" by the many tributes.\n\nWriting on Facebook, Ms Marsh said she was a \"beautiful daughter and incredible sister\" who was selfless in her work for Merseyside-based charities Talking Eating Disorders (TEDS) and The Whitechapel Centre.\n\nShe said: \"She loved giving back to people less fortunate than herself.\"\n\nFamily friend Leigh Best, who founded TEDS, described the death as \"heartbreaking\".\n\nShe added: \"Claudia was very special, kind, caring and a dedicated teacher.\n\n\"She supported countless families across the UK. Claudia made her own little packs to give out to others with eating disorders with positive affirmations.\n\n\"She was full of positivity, kindness and hope, and had a smile that would brighten up the whole room.\"\n\nIn a statement, the Whitechapel Centre, where Claudia also volunteered, said staff were \"devastated\", adding she would leave behind a \"legacy of care, dedication and enthusiasm\".\n\nThe charity said she put all of her time and energy into providing food and clothing to those who needed it during the pandemic.\n\n\"Claudia always put others before herself and her memory will live on through the impact and contribution she made to our organisation,\" the centre said.\n\n\"She was instrumental in bringing together our volunteer community.\"\n\nMs Marsh has set up an online fundraising page for the two charities, which has already garnered more than £10,000.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Facebook is taking steps to rectify the error that saw posts referring to Plymouth Hoe taken down\n\nFacebook has apologised for removing posts that named part of a city it deemed to contain an offensive word.\n\nPlymouth Hoe is a historic part of the Devon city's seafront but the social media platform wrongly identified it as an offensive term.\n\nFacebook users have recently had posts taken down for breaching bullying rules after innocently using the place name.\n\nThe company said it \"will take steps to rectify the error\".\n\nDawn Lapthorn, who created the 'Don't Dump it, Plymouth and Surrounding areas' page said she was surprised to receive notifications from Facebook telling her \"community standards on harassment and bullying\" had been breached.\n\nPlymouth Hoe is famous as the place where Sir Francis Drake finished off a game of bowls before setting off to fight the Spanish Armada in 1588\n\nShe said: \"One woman on the group had been making hats, and she forgot to say where the collection point was so people asked her and she wrote Plymouth Hoe.\n\n\"Suddenly I started getting notifications asking me to remove the comments.\n\n\"And then her daughter contacted me asking why her mum had been banned from commenting on the group.\"\n\nOther people commenting on the group's posts have also received notifications and had posts taken down.\n\nMs Lapthorn said: \"I've heard that some Facebook groups have been closed down because of this, and with the work we do in the community and 26,000 members, I've worked too hard to have that put at risk.\"\n\nA Facebook company spokesperson said: \"These posts were removed in error and we apologise to those who were affected. We're looking into what happened and will take steps to rectify the error.\"\n\nFollow BBC News South West on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to spotlight@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "It wasn't normal when the prime minister stood at the lectern in Downing Street's wood-panelled State Dining Room and announced that four people had died from coronavirus on 9 March last year.\n\nIt wasn't normal, that day, when he announced the obscure-sounding virus was a global pandemic that, in the 21st Century, the UK government would struggle to contain.\n\nIt was unprecedented, in peacetime, when, on 23 March, Boris Johnson instructed the country to stay at home.\n\nIt was shocking when, on 28 March, official figures reported more than 1,000 cases in a single day.\n\nA few weeks later, there were sharp intakes of breath when the UK government's chief scientific adviser told MPs, and all of us, that keeping the numbers of deaths down to around 20,000 would be a \"good outcome\".\n\nIt wasn't normal when the Treasury started paying the wages of millions of people to prevent hardship on a vast scale.\n\nIt wasn't normal when planes stayed on the ground, roads and trains emptied.\n\nIt certainly wasn't normal when classrooms fell largely silent, or when the nooks and crannies of Westminster, usually full of intrigue, emptied.\n\nBut in that new strangeness it became normal, week after week, for millions of us to stand in the street, on balconies or on doorsteps to express thanks to those who care for us.\n\nAnd there is now an emerging routine of the most vulnerable rolling up their sleeves, sometimes in front of the cameras, for vaccines that offer at least part of the route to the future.\n\nYet the daily publication of the numbers of people who have died because of Covid has become an all-too-familiar rhythm.\n\nIn the middle of the afternoon, every day, the latest total emerges. A previously unimaginable communication has become a regular part of the country's conversation.\n\nBut today that number has reached a terrible height. Every one of those 100,000 lives lost leaves its own story, and sorrow, behind.\n\nThis miserable landmark is a moment to remember, maybe, that what has happened in the last year, to our politics, to us all is not normal at all.", "The Royal Welsh Show - the biggest agricultural show in Europe - has been cancelled for the second year running because of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nThe board met on Wednesday to discuss holding the show as scheduled in July, but after discussions with Welsh Government decided it wouldn't be feasible.\n\nSteve Hughson, chief executive of the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society, said: “We continue to work alongside the Welsh Government and Public Health Wales to create a road map for the safe re-opening of events.\n\n\"Our events are central to the rural economy and way of life and mean so much to members, exhibitors, traders and visitors.\n\n\"We fully understand the responsibility on all of us to ensure we deliver our events as soon as it is safe to do so.\"\n\nMr Hughson said the society had provided free facilities for a Covid testing centre and a mass vaccination centre at its showground in Llanelwedd, Powys.", "Goldman Sachs' chief executive David Solomon will get a $10m (£7.3m) pay cut for the bank's involvement in the 1MDB corruption scandal.\n\n1MDB was an investment fund set up by the Malaysian government that lost billions due to fraudulent activity.\n\nThe global web of fraud and corruption led to a 12-year jail term for Malaysia's ex-prime minister Najib Razak which he is appealing.\n\nGoldman Sachs called its involvement in the scandal an \"institutional failure\".\n\nGoldman Sachs helped raise $6.5bn for 1MDB by selling bonds to investors, the proceeds of which were largely stolen.\n\nProsecutors alleged that senior Goldman executives ignored warning signs of fraud in their dealings with 1MDB and Jho Low, an adviser to the fund. Two Goldman bankers have been criminally charged in the scandal.\n\nMr Solomon's pay would have been $10m higher but for the actions its board of directors took in response to the 1MDB saga, Goldman Sachs said on Tuesday.\n\nWhile disclosing his salary had dropped to $17.5m for 2020, the bank stressed that Mr Solomon was unaware of the corruption.\n\nHe was not \"involved in or aware of the firm's participation in any illicit activity at the time... the board views the 1MDB matter as an institutional failure, inconsistent with the high expectations it has for the firm\".\n\nMr Solomon's package consists of $2m in cash base pay, a $4.65m cash bonus, and $10.85m in stock-based compensation.\n\nIn October, Goldman agreed to pay nearly $3bn to government officials in four countries to end an investigation into work it performed for 1MDB. The bank collected $600m for arranging the bond sales in 2012 and 2013.\n\nIt has spent years being investigated by regulators across the globe including those in the US, UK, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.In total, Goldman's dealings with 1MDB cost the bank more than $5bn.\n\nDespite the costs and fines from the fallout from the 1MDB scandal, 2020 was a bumper year for Goldman's businesses with annual revenue of $44.6bn, its highest since 2009.\n\nThe US-based bank got a huge boost from the recovery in global stock markets from the depths of the coronavirus recession.\n\nIn 2018 Malaysian police raided the home of former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, as part of their investigation in his involvement with 1MDB.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Handbags and money seized in raids on former Malaysian PM's home (video published in 2018)", "Josh Quigley crashed while cycling at 40mph downhill in Dubai\n\nA record-breaking Scottish cyclist is recovering from his second serious crash in little over a year.\n\nJosh Quigley fractured his spine, pelvis, shoulder, collarbone and elbow after falling off his bike at 40mph while training in Dubai on Tuesday.\n\nThe 28-year-old from Livingston is in hospital awaiting surgery.\n\nLast September he broke the North Coast 500 cycling world record just months after suffering life-threatening injuries while riding across the USA.\n\nMr Quigley told BBC Scotland he was in a lot of pain and unable to walk after his latest crash.\n\nHe said: \"I think a gust of wind took my front wheel out.\"\n\n\"Not sure what the recovery process is looking like yet,\" he added on social media.\n\n\"Very grateful to Ben and Tobias who I was riding with for getting me an ambulance and making sure I got to hospital OK.\n\n\"There's a great cycling community here who have been great to me since I've been here and they're all doing a lot to make sure I am looked after and have what I need in here.\n\n\"Huge thanks also to a few people who stopped at the scene and all of the first responders and medical staff who have helped at the hospital so far.\"\n\nMr Quigley shaved six minutes off the existing North Coast 500 world record when he completed the 516-mile Highland route in 31hrs and 17 minutes last September.\n\nThe route is ranked as one of the world's toughest endurance challenges as it has 34,423ft (10,492m) of ascent - more than Mount Everest, which stands at 29,031ft (8,848m).\n\nHis feat came after he was hit by a vehicle in Texas during a round-the-world-trip in December 2019.\n\nHe had life-threatening injuries and operations on a broken heel and ankle as well as a stent fitted in an artery in his neck, which feeds blood to his brain.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The PM has said he hopes a \"gradual and phased\" relaxation of Covid restrictions can begin in early March.\n\nBoris Johnson told MPs he intended to set out a plan for how the lockdown in England could be eased and the criteria involved in the final week of February.\n\nFactors will include death and hospitalisation numbers, progress of vaccinations and changes in the virus.\n\nHe has ruled out schools in England re-opening after the February half term, instead setting an 8 March target.\n\nIn a statement to Parliament, Mr Johnson said the scientific data was not sufficiently clear to make any decisions now but he hoped to publish a detailed roadmap in just under a month's time as the \"picture became clearer\".\n\nHe also announced plans for tighter border restrictions to combat new variants of Covid, confirming all those arriving from high-risk countries will have to quarantine in hotels and other accommodation for 10 days.\n\nThe PM, who is under pressure from Tory MPs to spell out how the current lockdown will end, said relaxing restrictions would depend on emerging data about how effectively the vaccine stops virus transmission.\n\nHe signalled any easing of restrictions would start with schools, setting a potential re-opening date of 8 March - when he said he hoped the 15 million or so people in the top four vulnerable groups earmarked for vaccinations by mid-February will have had their jabs and have full protection.\n\n\"Our aim will be to set out a gradual and phased approach to easing the restrictions in a sustainable way,\" he said, adding that the \"first sign of normality\" should be pupils returning to school.\n\nHe added: \"We hope it will be safe to begin the re-opening of schools from 8 March with other economic and social restrictions being removed thereafter as the data permits.\"\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said reopening schools should be a national priority and urged the government to vaccinate teachers and support staff during the February half term.\n\nLabour is also calling for the government to prioritise key workers in critical professions, seeing them added to the first phase of the vaccination programme, alongside those might likely to become seriously ill.\n\nCases are falling and the vaccination programme is going well. So why is the government waiting?\n\nFirstly, there are doubts about how fast infections are falling.\n\nWhile the daily figures show they have almost halved in just over a fortnight, the government's surveillance programmes which involve random testing suggest the drop may be slower.\n\nIt is unclear why there is this discrepancy, but understanding the true trajectory is crucial to knowing what will happen to pressures on hospitals.\n\nWhat impact the vaccination programme has will also be vital.\n\nEarly results from Israel, which is leading the world on vaccination, suggest cases in older age groups start falling three weeks after significant numbers are vaccinated. But ministers want to see that pattern repeated here.\n\nThey also want to know what effect vaccination has on transmission - it is possible vaccinated people can still transmit the infection even if they are protected from illness.\n\nThis will not be completely clear by March, but scientists should at least have a better idea.\n\nWhen a plan for exiting lockdown is set out, the government wants to be certain it can be kept to. But given the cost of lockdown the pressure to lift restrictions will grow if progress keeps being made.\n\nLast week, chair of the Covid Recovery Group Conservative MP Mark Harper said if the government meets its 15 February vaccination deadline, then ministers should begin easing lockdown by 8 March.\n\nHe welcomed the announcement from the prime minster.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Mark Harper This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nUnder the current lockdown, people in England must stay at home and only go out for limited reasons such as food shopping and exercise.\n\nSimilar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nEngland's lockdown laws are due to end on 31 March. Mr Johnson has previously said this date is to allow for a \"controlled\" easing of restrictions back into local tiers.\n\nUnder the tier system, different rules are applied to different parts of the country, depending on factors such as pressure on the NHS, number of cases and rates at which case numbers fall.\n\nPupils in England are not expected to return to school before the February half term. Mr Johnson has said schools will be reopened \"as soon as we can\" but did not guarantee that would happen before Easter.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said restrictions in Scotland will continue until mid-February at the earliest.\n\nIn Wales, the lockdown will be reviewed at the end of January, but the government has previously said it does not see \"much headroom for change\".\n\nNorthern Ireland's lockdown has been extended until 5 March.", "As a family of chemicals, neonicotinoids cause harm to pollinating insects such as bees\n\nThe Wildlife Trusts is to take legal action against the UK government over its decision to allow a pesticide that is almost entirely banned in the EU.\n\nIn 2018, the EU banned the outdoor use of neonicotinoid pesticides, which harm pollinating insects such as bees.\n\nBut following Brexit, the government approved the emergency use of one neonicotinoid to combat a crop disease.\n\nThe charity has told Environment Secretary George Eustice of their intention to challenge the decision.\n\nIn a letter to Mr Eustice, the Trusts says it will push for a judicial review unless the government can \"prove it has acted lawfully\".\n\nMultiple studies, including large-scale field trials, have found that neonicotinoids harm pollinators and aquatic life. Research has also shown that they can be linked to the wider collapse in biodiversity.\n\nThe government says it allowed the use of the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam because of the \"potential danger\" to the sugar beet crop from beet yellows virus, which is spread by aphids.\n\nThe virus can have a severe impact on sugar beet.\n\nIt stressed that use of the chemical would be strictly limited, and the risk to bees was \"acceptable\" because sugar beet doesn't flower. Alternative chemicals should be used to kill any wild flowering plants in and around the crops, the government said.\n\nNeonicotinoids are the most widely-used class of insecticides in the world and they work by disrupting the insect central nervous system.\n\nTwo years ago, the EU's ban was supported by then-Environment Secretary Michael Gove, who said the weight of evidence was \"greater than previously understood\". Unless the evidence changed, he said, the restrictions would be maintained post-Brexit.\n\nThe government says the change in policy is based on \"new evidence\". But, so far, they haven't made this science public.\n\nHowever, Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, said there was no new evidence to justify the change in policy.\n\nHe said: \"The government refused a request for emergency authorisation in 2018 and we want to know what's changed. Where's the new evidence that it's okay to use this extremely harmful pesticide?\n\n\"Using neonicotinoids not only threatens bees but is also extremely harmful to aquatic wildlife because the majority of the pesticide leaches into soil and then into waterways. Worse still, farmers are being recommended to use weedkiller to kill wildflowers in and around sugar beet crops in a misguided attempt to prevent harm to bees in the surrounding area. This is a double blow for nature.\"\n\nIt was the National Farmers' Union (NFU) and British Sugar that applied for the authorisation. Victoria Prentis, a minister with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) told BBC News that it \"wasn't ideal\". But she was \"convinced it was appropriate\" and that the government was \"committed to reducing pesticide use and integrated pest management\".\n\nSugar beet affected by the yellowing disease spread by aphids\n\nThe pesticide will be authorised for use if there is a large enough outbreak of the disease. And it can only be used for a period of up to 120 days. Around a dozen other EU countries, including France and Germany, have also agreed emergency permits.\n\nMs Prentis said the authorisation was very specific, and \"targeted at a non-flowering crop, which bees are not attracted to\".\n\nHowever research, shows that the highly toxic chemicals can persist in the wider ecosystem for some time, potentially to be absorbed by wildflowers that pollinators then visit.\n\nProf Glen Jeffery, from University College London (UCL), said he felt \"horror\" when he learned of the government's decision.\n\n\"We've slowly moved away from it and yet it's creeping back in,\" he told BBC News.\n\n\"It's very prevalent in other parts of the world, but then you find in other parts of the world vast numbers of pollinating insects have just vanished and they've just gone through heavy pesticide use. We reach the ridiculous situation where in parts of California thousands of beehives are trucked from Texas and from Florida into California to pollinate crops.\"\n\nThere has been one full sugar beet harvest since outdoor neonicotinoid use was banned. According to the NFU, the 2019-20 harvest was largely unaffected by beet yellows disease. This year's sugar beet harvest is currently underway, and yields are expected to be down by around 25% compared with the five-year average, with some farmers losing as much as 80% of their crop.\n\nAccording to the NFU, there are 3,000 farmers who grow sugar beet, and the wider industry supports around 9,500 jobs in England, largely in the East.\n\nThe NFU has called the situation \"unprecedented\" and its sugar board chairman Michael Sly said: \"I am relieved that our application for emergency use of a neonicotinoid seed treatment for the 2021 sugar beet crop has been granted.\"\n\nNeurobiologist and environmental pharmacologist Dr Chris Connolly said that, since 2018, when neonicotinoids were banned in the EU, around 400 papers had been published looking into thiamethoxam, and none said they were less harmful.\n\nThe peach potato aphid is responsible for spreading the beet yellows virus\n\nHe said he could be in favour of using it: \"But rarely, and when it's really needed - when it's an emergency. It's not an emergency if you apply for it before an emergency.\n\nHe added: \"Is adding pesticides to pesticides the way to go towards better sustainability?\"\n\nWhen they were introduced in 2005, neonicotinoids were seen as a good alternative to traditional pesticides. They are systemic, which means they are absorbed by the plant, so are applied to seeds as a coating - instead of being sprayed. However, it has become clear they are highly toxic to invertebrates such as insects.\n\nThe government recently committed to spending £3bn of international climate finance to \"supporting nature and biodiversity\".\n\nSeveral hundred thousand people have now signed various online petitions against the move. Earlier this month, more than 30 wildlife and environmental organisations, including Pesticide Action Network and the RSPB, wrote a joint letter to Mr Eustice calling on the government to publish the new evidence that led to the derogation being approved.", "The EHIC card is making way for the GHIC card under a new agreement with the EU\n\nUK residents can apply for a Global Health Insurance Card (GHIC) to access emergency medical care in the EU when their current EHIC card runs out.\n\nUnder a new agreement with the EU, both cards will offer equivalent healthcare protection when people are on holiday, studying or travelling for business.\n\nThis includes emergency treatment as well as treatment needed for a pre-existing condition.\n\nThe new GHIC card is free and can be obtained via the official GHIC website.\n\nCurrent European Health Insurance Cards (EHIC) are valid as long as they are in date, and can continue to be used when travelling to the EU.\n\nYou don't need to apply for a GHIC until your current EHIC expires.\n\nPeople should apply at least two weeks before they plan to travel to ensure their card arrives on time.\n\nHealth Minister Edward Argar said: \"Our deal with the EU ensures the right for our citizens to access necessary healthcare on their holidays and travels to countries in the EU will continue.\n\n\"The GHIC is a key element of the UK's future relationship with the EU and will provide certainty and security for all UK residents.\"\n\nIf a UK resident is travelling without a card, they are still entitled to necessary healthcare, and should contact the NHS Business Services Authority (which covers the whole of the UK), which can arrange for payment should they require treatment when abroad.\n\nEHICs from EU member states will continue to be accepted by the NHS.\n\nIt is advised that anyone travelling overseas, whether to the EU or elsewhere in the world, should take out comprehensive travel insurance.", "Khairi Saadallah admitted three counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder\n\nA killer who stabbed three men to death in a Reading park has been handed a whole-life jail term.\n\nKhairi Saadallah murdered James Furlong, 36, David Wails, 49, and 39-year-old Joe Ritchie-Bennett, in June last year in Forbury Gardens.\n\nLondon's Old Bailey previously heard the 26-year-old \"executed\" the men as an \"act of religious jihad\".\n\nPassing sentence Judge Mr Justice Sweeney said it was a \"ruthless and brutal\" terror attack.\n\nSaadallah, who admitted the murders, had also pleaded guilty to the attempted murders of three other men who were also in the park.\n\nThe judge said the victims \"had no chance to react, let alone defend themselves\".\n\n(L-R) David Wails, Joe Ritchie-Bennett and James Furlong were pronounced dead at the scene\n\nHe said he was sure the attack \"involved a substantial degree of premeditation or planning\" and was carried out \"for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause\".\n\nBBC News correspondent Helena Wilkinson, who was in court, said the families of James Furlong and David Wails were present, while Joseph Ritchie-Bennett's loved ones watched via a link from America.\n\nSaadallah showed no emotion as Mr Justice Sweeney went through his sentencing remarks.\n\nOn the afternoon of 20 June, the park was busy due to the first lockdown restrictions being relaxed in England.\n\nAndrew Cafe, who witnessed the stabbings, said he saw Saadallah wielding the \"biggest kitchen knife\" and charging towards him shouting \"Allahu Akbar\".\n\nPharmaceutical manager Mr Ritchie-Bennett and teacher Mr Furlong died from single stab wounds to their necks, while scientist Mr Wails was stabbed once in the back.\n\nDespite treatment from paramedics and doctors, all three friends, who were members of the LGBT community, died at the scene.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Witness Andrew Cafe visited Forbury Gardens for the first time since the attack\n\nThree other people - Nishit Nisudan, Patrick Edwards and Stephen Young - were also injured, before Saadallah threw away the knife and fled the scene, pursued by police.\n\nFollowing his arrest, Saadallah initially said he wanted to plead guilty to the \"jihad that I done\", but the prosecution claimed he later feigned mental illness in police interviews.\n\nAt a previous hearing, the court heard he had developed an emotionally unstable and anti-social personality disorder, with his behaviour worsened by alcohol and cannabis misuse.\n\nBut the judge said it was \"clear that the defendant did not, and does not, have any major mental illness\".\n\nAn examination of Saadallah's phone revealed an interest in extremist material, including images of the flag of Islamic State and Jihadi John, the court previously heard.\n\nWhile at HMP Bullingdon in 2017, he was seen to associate with radical preacher Omar Brookes, who has connections with banned terrorist organisation Al-Muhajiroun.\n\nThe court heard Saadallah, who arrived in Britain from Libya in 2012, had previously been involved with militias who had been part of the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi, and was pictured handling weapons, including firearms.\n\nSince seeking asylum in Britain, he had been repeatedly arrested and convicted of various offences, including theft and assault, between 2013 and 2020.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. CCTV cameras captured Khairi Saadallah before and after the stabbing\n\nHe briefly came to the attention of MI5 in 2019, but the information provided did not meet the threshold of investigation.\n\nSaadallah had been released from prison on 5 June, days before the attack, the court heard.\n\nOn 17 June, he researched the location for his attack online and carried out reconnaissance in the park.\n\nThe following day his probation officer alerted his mental health team over comments he made about magic.\n\nA day later, Saadallah contacted the crisis team himself, but when they visited he did not answer.\n\nFollowing concerns from his brother, police visited the killer the same day, but he told officers he was \"alright\" while he stood near a knife he bought from a supermarket.\n\nAndrew Wails said losing his brother had been devastating\n\nAfter the sentencing, James Furlong's father, Gary, said: \"The secretary of state needs to tell us why this guy wasn't put into some form of detention centre before they could deport him.\n\n\"He was not safe to be released back on the streets.\"\n\nReferring to the fact that Saadallah had been visited by police the night before the attack, Mr Furlong said: \"Given the volume of crimes he's committed and the information that they had on him, for an assessment to be done the night before to say that he's not a danger to the public - it is beyond me.\"\n\nHe described Mr Furlong, originally from Liverpool, as \"a lovely man, loved by his family, idolised by his mother\".\n\nDavid Wails' brother Andrew said: \"For us as a family it's been devastating to lose our much loved son, brother and uncle.\"\n\nIn a statement, the Bennett family described Mr Ritchie-Bennett as a \"devoted and loving husband\" and \"a man who cared strongly about family\".\n\nThe park had been busy due to the first lockdown restrictions being relaxed in England\n\nDet Ch Supt Kath Barnes, head of Counter Terrorism Policing South East, described Saadallah as \"a committed jihadist\".\n\nShe said: \"He has caused unspeakable hurt and distress to the families of the three men who were brutally murdered as they were relaxing and enjoying socialising with friends on a Saturday evening.\n\n\"I'm sure there will also be lasting effects on those who were injured in the attack, who were fortunate not to have been even more seriously harmed.\"\n\nReading Borough Council leader Jason Brock described the attacks as \"horrific\" and \"senseless\" and said a permanent memorial to the victims was planned.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section Cardiff\n\nCardiff City defender Sol Bamba is being treated for cancer, the Championship club has announced.\n\nThe 35-year-old Ivory Coast international has been diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and is undergoing chemotherapy.\n\n\"Sol has begun his battle in typically positive spirits and will continue to be an integral part of the Bluebirds family,\" said the Bluebirds.\n\nBamba joined Cardiff in October 2016 under former manager Neil Warnock.\n\nThe National Health Service Wales describes the illness as \"a type of cancer that develops in the lymphatic system, a network of vessels and glands spread throughout your body.\n\n\"The lymphatic system is part of your immune system\".\n\nThe Bluebirds said Bamba is \"universally admired by team-mates, staff and supporters in the Welsh capital\".\n\nThe club's statement added: \"During treatment Sol will support his team mates at matches and younger players within the Academy, with whom he will continue his coaching development.\n\n\"While we request privacy for him and his family at this time, messages of support to be passed on to Sol may be sent to club@cardiffcityfc.co.uk.\"\n\n\"We are all with you Sol.\"\n\nBamba helped Cardiff win promotion to the Premier League in 2018 and has made more than 100 appearances for the club.\n\nThe former Paris St Germain player has been a hugely popular member of the squad, though this season he has been restricted to five Championship substitute appearances and one League Cup start.\n\nHe is a much travelled player who has had spells at Dunfermline, Hibernian, Leicester City, Trazbonspor and Italian club Palermo as well as Leeds United.\n\nFrance-born Bamba has played 46 times for the Ivory Coast, including World Cup appearances and was part of their African Cup of Nations squad when they were runners-up in 2012.", "A video featuring footage of a County Mayo man being consumed by fits of laughter while trying to record a birthday message for his son, has gone viral.\n\nVincent McDonnell was sending the message to his son David, who was celebrating his 40th birthday in Australia.\n\nHis younger son Paul got the video rolling, but the pair could not contain their laughter as they racked up the attempts.\n\nThe video has been viewed more than 1.5m times on Paul's Twitter account.", "Jessica Allen and Eliza Moore said their cars were surrounded by police when they arrived at the reservoir\n\nTwo women who were fined £200 each when they drove five miles for a walk have had the penalties withdrawn.\n\nJessica Allen and Eliza Moore were walking at Foremark Reservoir, Derbyshire, when they were \"surrounded\" by officers.\n\nAt the time Derbyshire Police insisted driving to exercise was \"not in the spirit\" of the most recent lockdown.\n\nBut new national guidance for police has led the force to quash the fines, and apologise to the women.\n\nChief Constable Rachel Swann said the fines \"have been withdrawn and we have notified the women directly, apologising for any concern caused\".\n\nThe two friends travelled the short distance to the reservoir from their homes in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, on Wednesday afternoon.\n\nThey said their cars were \"surrounded\" by police. They were then questioned on why they were there and told the hot drinks they had brought along were not allowed as they were \"classed as a picnic\".\n\nIn a statement, the women said: \"This afternoon we both received a phone call from Derbyshire Police.\n\n\"After reviewing our case, our fines have been rescinded and we have received an apology on behalf of the constabulary for the treatment we received.\n\n\"We welcomed this apology and we are pleased to draw a line under this event.\"\n\nAfter the incident gained media attention, the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) \"clarified the policing response concerning travel and exercise\".\n\nThe guidance said: \"The Covid regulations which officers enforce and which enables them to issue FPNs [fixed penalty notices] for breaches, do not restrict the distance travelled for exercise.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid: Fined women 'could have been dealt with differently'\n\nDerbyshire Police said: \"Having received clarification of the guidance issued by the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) on Friday, these FPNs as well as a small number of others issued, were reviewed in line with that latest advice, and so it is right that we have taken this action.\"\n\nThe county's police and crime commissioner Hardyal Dhinsda said: \"While the police are doing their absolute best to protect public safety during what is a critical time of the pandemic, the public should rightly expect a proportionate and balanced approach, taking full consideration of individual circumstances.\n\n\"We recognise that errors will occur in the face of complex guidance and legislation and it is important such situations are resolved quickly and fairly, as has been the case here.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The UK economy will \"get worse before it gets better\" as the country battles the pandemic, Chancellor Rishi Sunak has warned.\n\nThe chancellor told MPs the new national restrictions were necessary to control the spread of coronavirus.\n\nHowever, he said they would have a further significant economic impact,\n\n\"Even with the significant economic support we've provided, over 800,000 people have lost their job since February,\" he said.\n\n\"Sadly, we have not and will not be able to save every job and every business.\n\n\"But I am confident that our economic plan is supporting the finances of millions of people and businesses.\"\n\nThe chancellor said \"the road ahead will be tough\", but maintained that the government was \"taking the difficult but right long-term decisions for our country\".\n\nHe said that fiscal stimulus provided so far amounted to more than £280bn, while 1.2 million employers had furloughed almost 10 million employees.\n\nAt the same time, three million people had benefited from self-employment grants.\n\nMr Sunak said he would \"bear in mind\" calls to extend business rate relief and provide further support for the hospitality sector at the Budget in March.\n\nShadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds accused Mr Sunak of being \"out of ideas\" and providing \"nothing new\".\n\nShe said: \"The purpose of an update is to provide us with new information, not to repeat what we already know.\"\n\nThe chancellor's words reflect the fact that with a widespread lockdown, the first months of 2021 are likely to see a further contraction in the UK economy and probably an official double-dip recession. This reflects the physical shutdown nationwide of hospitality and retail, as well as the effect in the data of school shutdowns too.\n\nIn addition, consumers and workers are likely to be more cautious as the vaccine starts to be rolled out. So this is a very odd sort of economic tripwire. The challenge in the next weeks and months gets bigger, although not as big as it was last April. But beyond that, there is the hope of something normal.\n\nThe implication for the chancellor as he prepares a vital early March Budget, however, is further delay to the measures, such as tax rises, to deal with historic levels of pandemic government borrowing.", "In his letter to staff, circulated on social media, Chad Wolf said he had hoped to remain as acting secretary to homeland security until the end of the Trump administration.\n\n\"Unfortunately, this action is warranted by the recent events, including the ongoing and meritless court rulings regarding the validity of my authority as acting secretary,\" he said, \"which serve to divert attention and resources away from the important work of the Department in this critical time of a transition of power\".\n\nWolf's resignation comes after he last week called on Trump and all elected officials to \"strongly condemn\" the Capitol riot.\n\nHis exit throws the department into turmoil just as it is gearing up for inauguration of Joe Biden as president on 20 January, which has been designated a national security special event.", "Rules governing the import of personal goods from the UK to the EU changed after Brexit formally came into effect\n\nA Dutch TV network has filmed border officials confiscating ham sandwiches and other foods from drivers arriving in the Netherlands from the UK, under post-Brexit rules.\n\nThe officials were shown explaining import regulations imposed since the UK formalised its separation from the EU.\n\nUnder EU rules, travellers from outside the bloc are banned from bringing in meat and dairy products.\n\nThe rules appeared to bemuse one driver.\n\n\"Since Brexit, you are no longer allowed to bring certain foods to Europe, like meat, fruit, vegetables, fish, that kind of stuff,\" a Dutch border official told the driver in footage broadcast by TV network NPO 1.\n\nIn one scene, a border official asked the driver whether several of his tin-foil wrapped sandwiches had meat in them.\n\nWhen the driver said they did, the border official said: \"Okay, so we take them all.\"\n\nSurprised, the driver then asked the officials if he could keep the bread, to which one replied: \"No, everything will be confiscated - welcome to the Brexit, sir. I'm sorry.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe UK officially finished its formal separation from the EU on 31 December, 2020.\n\nFrom 23:00 GMT on that date, the UK stopped following EU rules, with new arrangements for travel, trade, immigration and security co-operation coming into force.\n\nA trade deal with the EU was agreed on 24 December, and a week later, UK lawmakers voted in favour of the agreement.\n\nThe UK's departure means big changes for business - with the UK and EU forming two separate markets - the end of free movement, and new regulations, including those governing the import of personal goods.\n\nThe UK government has issued guidance to commercial drivers travelling to the EU, warning them to \"be aware of additional restrictions to personal imports\".\n\n\"You cannot bring POAO (products of an animal origin) such as those containing meat or dairy (e.g. a ham and cheese sandwich) into the EU,\" the guidance says. \"There are exceptions to this rule for certain quantities of powdered infant milk, infant food, special foods, or special processed pet feed.\"\n\nOn its website, the European Commission says the ban is necessary because such goods \"continue to present a real threat to animal health throughout the Union\".\n\n\"It is known, for example, that dangerous pathogens that cause animal diseases such as Foot and Mouth Disease and classical swine fever can reside in meat, milk or their products,\" the Commission says.\n\nSeparately, the Dutch customs agency shared a picture of foodstuffs it had confiscated from motorists in the ferry terminal the Hook of Holland.\n\n\"Since 1 January, you can't just bring more food from the UK,\" the agency said. \"So prepare yourself if you travel to the Netherlands from the UK and spread the word. This is how we prevent food waste and together ensure that the controls are speeded up.\"\n\nThe BBC's economics editor Faisal Islam described the confiscation of ham sandwiches and other foodstuffs at the EU's borders with the UK as \"a standard implication of [the] Brexit deal\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Faisal Islam This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Unison, the UK's biggest trade union, has elected a woman as leader for the first time.\n\nChristina McAnea won 47.7% of the vote and takes over as general secretary from Dave Prentis, who has been in the job since 2001.\n\nThe former assistant general secretary beat fellow officials Paul Holmes, Roger McKenzie and Hugo Pierre in the contest, which began in October.\n\nMs McAnea said: \"I become general secretary at the most challenging time in recent history - both for our country and our public services.\n\n\"Health, care, council, police, energy, school, college and university staff have worked throughout the pandemic, and it's their skill and dedication that will see us out the other side.\n\n\"Their union will continue to speak up for them and do all it can to protect them in the difficult months ahead.\"\n\nUnison is promising action against the government's pay freeze for 1.3 million public sector workers, which it has described as an \"attack\" on members' livelihoods.\n\nMs McAnea said: \"Despite the risks, the immense pressures and their sheer exhaustion, the dedication and commitment of our key workers knows no end. I will not let this government, nor any future one, forget that.\"\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has also demanded a U-turn on public sector pay, as he urges ministers to \"protect family incomes\" from the effects of lockdowns and other restrictions in his first speech of the year.\n\nBut Chancellor Rishi Sunak has said he cannot \"justify a significant, across-the-board\" salary increase while the economy and public finances are suffering in the wake of the pandemic.\n\nMs McAnea, an experienced negotiator and former NHS worker, is expected to be broadly supportive of Sir Keir, as Mr Prentis has been.\n\nThe Labour leader welcomed her victory, saying: \"I know you will be a brilliant representative for Unison members.\n\n\"And it's a significant moment for the union to elect its first woman general secretary. I look forward to working with you.\"\n\nHer election comes at a strained time between Sir Keir and several other unions whose general secretaries have spoken out in support of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, who is currently suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party.\n\nMr Holmes came second in the Unison contest, with 33.8%, followed by Mr McKenzie, on 10.8%, and Mr Pierre, on 7.8%.\n\nMs McAnea grew up in Glasgow and worked as a housing officer before becoming a union employee.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe UK is at the \"worst point\" of the pandemic, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has warned, but said the actions of the public \"could make a difference\".\n\nAt a No 10 briefing, Mr Hancock pleaded with people to follow the government's Covid rules until the vaccine could provide a \"way out\" of the pandemic.\n\nThe government earlier published its plan to immunise tens of millions of people by spring.\n\nSo far 2.3 million people in the UK have had a first Covid vaccine shot.\n\nAnd a total of 2.6 million doses have been given out across the country, with some people having received both doses.\n\nMr Hancock said the new variant of coronavirus was putting the NHS under \"significant pressure\", adding it was \"imperative\" that people limit their social contacts.\n\n\"The NHS, more than ever before, needs everybody to be doing something right now - and that something is to follow the rules,\" he said.\n\n\"I know there has been speculation about more restrictions, and we don't rule out taking further action if it is needed, but it is your actions now that can make a difference.\"\n\nThe health secretary said he could \"rule out\" tightening restrictions by removing support and childcare bubbles, however.\n\nHis comments follow similar warnings from Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and England's chief medical officer Prof Chris Whitty, who said that the next few weeks will be \"the worst\" of the pandemic for the NHS.\n\nAccording to the latest figures, there have been another 529 deaths within 28 days of a positive test in the UK, and another 46,169 cases reported. There are also more than 32,000 people in hospital with coronavirus, data shows.\n\nMatt Hancock has previously said he's learned to rule nothing out when it comes to dealing with the pandemic.\n\nBut today he took the unusual step of doing just that.\n\nSupport bubbles and childcare bubbles, hugely valued by so many, will stay.\n\nSenior Whitehall sources have previously told me bubbles were \"untouchable\" but for a minister to say as much, so explicitly and on the record, means there's now very little wriggle room for the government to change its mind.\n\nMinisters will know that scrapping bubbles, for those that rely on them, could have proved deeply unpopular. But this certainty is a rarity.\n\nWhilst the current emphasis is on compliance, the idea of toughening up controls in other areas is not being ruled out.\n\nThe vaccine delivery plan says it is expected to take until spring to give a first dose to all 32 million people in the UK's priority groups, including everyone over 55 and those who are clinically vulnerable.\n\nUnder the plan, the government has pledged to carry out at least two million vaccinations in England per week by the end of January, which it says will be made possible by rolling out jabs at 206 hospital sites, 50 vaccination centres and around 1,200 local vaccination sites.\n\nIt also reiterates the government's aim of offering vaccinations to around 15 million people in the UK - the over-70s, older care home residents and staff, frontline healthcare workers and the clinically extremely vulnerable - by mid-February.\n\nAccording to Mr Hancock, two fifths of over-80s have now received their first dose, and almost a quarter of care home residents have received theirs.\n\nAlso at the briefing, NHS England's national medical director, Prof Stephen Powis, said the NHS was aiming to vaccinate the rest of the top nine priority groups by April, with a final push to offer all adults over 18 a jab by the autumn.\n\nHe stressed it would take until February before there were \"early signs\" that vaccination was leading to a drop in hospitalisations.\n\nThe country has still not seen the full impact of the Christmas loosening of lockdown restrictions, Prof Powis added, although he noted there are now 13,000 more Covid patients in hospital than there were on Christmas Day.\n\nSpeaking in Bristol earlier, Mr Johnson warned the vaccination programme was in a \"race against time\" because of pressure on the NHS.\n\nHe said it was \"a very perilous moment because everyone can sense the vaccine is coming in - my worry is that will breed false complacency\".\n\nThe newly-published vaccination plan also says ministers are aiming to offer jabs at more than 2,700 sites across the UK.\n\nAnd it says that daily vaccination figures for England will be published from now on - showing the total number vaccinated to date, including first and second doses.\n\nEarlier, NHS England's chief executive, Sir Simon Stevens, told MPs that there was a \"strong case\" for asking the the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) to consider prioritising \"teachers and other key workers\" for vaccination after the \"first nine [priority] groups have been vaccinated\".\n\nA quarter of coronavirus admissions to hospital are for people under the age of 55, he added.\n\nIn the first four weeks of the vaccination campaign, the NHS did 1.3 million vaccinations.\n\nNews that in the past week almost the same again has been done shows progress is being made - even though there has been some concern rollout to care home residents has been slower than hoped.\n\nHitting two million doses a week is the next target - and is something the NHS is aiming to get close to this week.\n\nWith more vaccination sites opening by the day, it should be achievable as long as there is good supply.\n\nThere is already enough vaccine in the country to vaccinate all 15 million people in the highest at-risk groups that have been promised an offer of a vaccine by mid-February.\n\nHowever, not all of it has been through the final safety checks or been packaged up ready for distribution.\n\nChallenges remain, but even at this early stage it is clear there is growing optimism that the programme is on track.\n\nAs seven mass vaccination centres opened across England on Monday, NHS England said hundreds more GP-led and hospital services would also open later this week.\n\nBut with all centres, people will need to wait until they receive an invitation.\n\nTwo vaccines - Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca - are currently being administered in the UK.\n\nOn Friday, a third coronavirus vaccine - made by US company Moderna - was approved for use, although supplies are not expected to arrive until spring.\n\nVaccine programmes are also progressing in the UK's devolved nations.\n\nAll over-50s and everyone who is at greater risk from Covid in Wales will be offered a vaccine by spring, under new plans.\n\nAnd Scotland's health secretary has said every aged over 80 or over in the nation will be offered a jab by February, while care workers in Northern Ireland who provide services to ill or elderly patients living at home can now book an appointment to get a Covid-19 vaccine.\n\nEngland is currently under a national lockdown, meaning people must stay at home and can go out only for limited reasons such as food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home.\n\nSimilar lockdown measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has questioned why there are \"less restrictions in place\" now than there were last March.\n\nIn his first speech of the year, he said: \"I do think it's time to hear from the scientists [about] what else could be done and that probably should be done in the next few hours\".\n\nMeanwhile, the United Arab Emirates is being removed from the UK list of travel corridors amid a spike in Covid cases.\n\nAnd England's Test and Trace scheme has revised one of its definitions of a \"close contact\" - the people who need to be reached if they have been near to someone who has tested positive for Covid.\n\nThis now refers to anyone who has been within two metres of someone for more than 15 minutes, whether in a single period or cumulatively over the course of one day.\n\nPreviously the definition was just a single period of at least 15 minutes.", "Home Office Minister James Brokenshire, who was diagnosed with lung cancer three years ago, is taking leave to have surgery on a lung tumour.\n\nThe Old Bexley and Sidcup MP resigned as Northern Ireland secretary in 2018 for surgery to remove a lesion on his right lung.\n\nOn Monday he confirmed that \"frustratingly\" there had been a recurrence of a tumour there.\n\nHe said he was in \"good hands\" with the \"fantastic NHS team\" looking after him.\n\n\"[I'm] keeping positive and blessed to have the love of Cathy and the kids to support me through this,\" the 53-year-old wrote on Twitter.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said his thoughts were with Mr Brokenshire and his family.\n\n\"Wishing you all the best for your treatment and looking forward to welcoming you back on the team soon,\" he added.\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel said she was \"saddened\" by the news, adding: \"All my thoughts and prayers are with James and his family during this time\".\n\n\"All colleagues across government send James our love and best wishes, and we look forward to having him back soon,\" she added.\n\nHealth secretary Matt Hancock was among government colleagues wishing him well, adding he was \"sending my best wishes for a speedy recovery\".\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer tweeted: \"Wishing you all the best for your treatment, James. Get well soon.\"\n\nMr Brokenshire, who was first elected to Parliament in 2005 as MP for the former constituency of Hornchurch, has also previously served as housing secretary under former PM Theresa May.\n\nHe has called for efforts to \"break some of the stigma around lung cancer\" and raise awareness of the disease.\n• None Brokenshire: There were some pretty dark moments", "Medical director Steve Stanaway says numbers of Covid patients are rising at the hospital\n\nHospital staff in Wrexham are under immense pressure after a \"rapid increase\" in seriously ill coronavirus patients, a medical director has warned.\n\nWrexham now has the highest rate of Covid-19 in Wales, with 851.7 cases per 100,000 of the population.\n\nThis is more than double the Welsh average.\n\nSteve Stanaway, medical director at Wrexham Maelor Hospital, pleaded with people to abide by rules.\n\n\"The worry from a staff's point of view is how much more stretching can we take, how many more staff can we deploy?\" he said.\n\nThe hospital - which is part of Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board - was the latest to suspend routine surgery as it tries to deal with rising numbers of Covid patients.\n\n\"That's created more feelings of stress and anxiety, not least to the people who were hoping to get their surgery this week,\" Mr Stanaway said.\n\nThe health board has postponed the majority of surgeries planned for the next two weeks at Wrexham, although some patients will be offered appointments in Bangor instead.\n\nEmergency surgery, upper gastro-intestinal surgery, endoscopy procedures and caesarean sections will continue at the Wrexham hospital.\n\nProf Arpan Guha, acting executive medical director, said: \"There are many patients expecting to undergo an operation in Wrexham over the coming weeks and we recognise how anxious and worried they will already be about having surgery during the current surge of the pandemic.\n\n\"We are sorry for any further distress or inconvenience this decision may cause and would like to reassure those affected that we are doing all we can to prioritise patients in the most urgent need of care.\"\n\nThe spike in cases in communities in north-east Wales has been blamed on the newer \"faster-spreading\" variant.\n\nWhile case rates in many communities have fallen slightly in recent weeks, in Wrexham numbers are continuing to rise.\n\nThe area now has the highest rate in Wales, followed by Flintshire with 754.6 per 100,000 of the population.\n\nBus services in the area have been affected after 28 drivers of Arriva Buses Wales tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nMeanwhile, Gwynedd, has the lowest case rate in the whole of Wales, with 110.\n\nThe average case rate for Wales stands at 435.9, according to the most recent Public Health Wales figures.\n\nThere have been calls for mass testing - as seen in parts of the south Wales Valleys - in the area as case rates continue to rise, but Wrexham council has said it has no plans to offer this to the wider community.\n\nMr Stanaway said the critical care unit and respiratory unit at the Wrexham hospital was now under huge pressure with the number of new patients needing this level of care \"rapidly increasing\" in recent weeks.\n\n\"The numbers are really quite alarming\", he told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast on Monday. \"It's a huge amount of disease burden within a community.\"\n\nMr Stanaway said there were 125 inpatients being treated with Covid on Sunday night, which he estimated was an increase of 117% since Christmas.\n\nHe said 14 of them where in critical care, with some on ventilators, while 16 where being treated in the hospital's high care respiratory unit - a 45% increase in just four days.\n\n\"There are now so many in that unit they've had to expand it to a completely different part of the hospital,\" he said.\n\n\"If you look at the graphs of the cases they are going up exponentially, they are terrifying to look at, and I think people are very aware that this is what is happening out in the community around them,\" he said.\n\nMr Stanaway said staff were working tirelessly and under huge amounts of pressure to keep caring for the sickest patients, but it was unclear how much more demand the hospital could take.\n\n\"Our current predictions for admissions coming through the door in January are currently sitting at about 350, if you compare that to April, the height of the pandemic, we had 286 people,\" he said.\n\n\"It's a lot more, we've already had 112 people in the first nine days of January. And the numbers are going up and up.\"\n\nHe pleaded with people to abide by the rules.\n\n\"This virus is hurting, and has hurt, a lot of people within Wrexham and Flintshire,\" he said.\n\n\"I can't say it strongly enough... we will get through this, but you just have to play by the rules.\"\n\nLatest figures show 149 staff were isolating and, with high nursing vacancy rates, staff were under huge pressure and were working tirelessly.\n\n\"Of all the years I've worked in the NHS... the resilience, dedication and professionalism our staff are showing is absolutely unbelievable,\" he said.\n\n\"But you have to bear in mind that people are tired, people are stressed, and it does put a strain,\" he said.\n\n\"We absolutely want to see you if you are unwell, but if you can wait or seek care somewhere else... please do that to give us that little bit of headspace.\"", "Online supermarket Ocado has become the first big retailer to warn of shortages of some products.\n\nIt told customers in an email that there may be \"an increase of missing items and substitutions over the next few weeks\".\n\nStaff sickness and self-isolation means some food producers are cutting the number of product lines they offer.\n\nWhile customers might not get their exact product choice, plenty of food should be available, Ocado said.\n\n\"Staff absences across the supply chain may lead to an increase in product substitutions for a small number of customers as some suppliers consolidate their offering to maintain output,\" a spokesperson said.\n\nThe news comes after a rush of online food orders for supermarkets, as shoppers try to stay at home after the new lockdown started.\n\nWithin a couple of hours of Prime Minister Boris Johnson's speech to the nation on Monday, shoppers reported problems with Sainsbury's and Tesco, while Ocado customers were placed in a virtual queue.\n\nOcado told its customers that from Friday \"changes to the UK supply chain have affected some of our suppliers and may result in an increase of missing items and substitutions over the next few weeks.\"\n\nIt added: \"We apologise for any inconvenience caused and we are working hard to mitigate any impact.\"\n\nFood suppliers are grappling with staffing problems, hospitality clients who have closed their doors and delays at the border with the EU.\n\nWholesalers the BBC spoke to this week said they faced throwing away thousands of pounds worth of food because of cancelled orders following new restrictions.\n\nThe UK meat industry has called for the early vaccination of its workers to keep food supplies running smoothly during the coronavirus crisis.\n\nIt warned earlier this week that absences during the pandemic, coupled with disruption at ports, could hit food supply chains.\n\nAn early vaccination call for supermarket staff was also made by the boss of Sainsbury's on Thursday.\n\nThe government said the food industry remains \"well-prepared\" to make sure people have the food they need.\n\nThe British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) said coronavirus and disruption at ports due to new systems brought in after the Brexit transition period were \"a severe challenge to the industry and to the smooth running of the nation's food supply chain\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Health Minister Vaughan Gething aims to offer all adults a jab by the autumn.\n\nAll over-50s and everyone who is at greater risk from Covid will be offered a vaccine by spring, under new Welsh Government plans.\n\nA vaccine strategy unveiled by Health Minister Vaughan Gething aims to offer all adults a jab by the autumn.\n\nIt comes after criticism that the rollout of the vaccine has been slower than in other parts of the UK.\n\nThe latest figures show 86,039 doses had been administered by 22:00 GMT on Sunday.\n\nA total of 327,000 doses - 280,000 of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and 47,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab - have now been delivered to the Welsh NHS.\n\nThe figures mean 2.7% of Wales population has so far been vaccinated - compared to just over 4% in Northern Ireland, about 3.5% in England and 3% in Scotland.\n\nAcross the UK nearly 400,000 second doses have been administered, including 374,613 in England, 79 in Wales, 13,949 in Northern Ireland and, as of January 3, 36 in Scotland.\n\nMr Gething admitted the rest of the UK had \"gone slightly faster than we have\", but said the latest vaccinations figures showed a \"significant acceleration\" in the rollout.\n\nThe Welsh Conservatives accused the government of a \"stuttering start\", while Plaid Cymru said the plan was \"late in the day\".\n\nEveryone over 70, all care home residents and staff, and front-line NHS and social care workers will be offered a jab by mid-February, under similar timescales to other UK nations.\n\nThis 82-year-old woman was one of 100 to receive her vaccine at a special clinic in Swansea on Saturday\n\nThe Welsh Government's vaccination plans aim to cover 2.5 million people by September, with vaccines supplied by the UK government.\n\nMr Gething said: \"Delivering this vaccination programme to the people in Wales is a huge task but an enormous amount of work is going on to make it a success.\n\n\"We are making good progress with thousands more people being vaccinated every day.\"\n\nThe plan sets out a series of \"milestones\" for the vaccine rollout in Wales - all depending on the supply of vaccines approved for use.\n\nAt a press conference, Mr Gething said the government aimed to vaccinate:\n\nMr Gething said 700,000 people would be vaccinated by mid-February.\n\nAccording to the plan, the number of GPs' surgeries delivering vaccines will be increased from around 100 to more than 250 by the end of January.\n\nThe number of mass vaccination centres will increase in the next couple of weeks to 35, according to Welsh Government's plan.\n\nOne of those is Margam Orangery, in Neath Port Talbot, where about 500 people will be vaccinated each day.\n\nAt the press conference, Mr Gething defended the UK-wide decision to increase the gap between giving the two doses of the Pfizer vaccine and said it would \"avoid more deaths\".\n\n\"Each of the vaccines provide a high level of protection against harm from coronavirus. That's really good news for all of us,\" he added.\n\nWelsh Conservative health spokesman Andrew RT Davies said the Welsh Government should have a vaccinations minister who \"gets up in the morning thinking about vaccinations and goes to bed thinking about vaccinations\".\n\nHe said such a move would help the government recover from a \"stuttering start\" to the vaccines programme. Mr Davies said the government needed \"focus and direction to drive this forward\".\n\nPlaid Cymru leader Adam Price welcomed the strategy but said it was \"late in the day\".\n\nMr Price said many people, including his own parents, wanted clarity: \"My parents, who are in their 80s, have been told their surgery won't have the ability to vaccinate them for another three weeks, yet the GP surgery next door is starting this week.\"\n\nLarger supplies of the Oxford jab will be needed to speed up vaccinations\n\nThe Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is crucial to ensuring everyone aged over 70 can have at least one jab by Valentine's Day.\n\nHealth boards plan to use reserves of the Pfizer vaccine, but they alone will not reach the Welsh Government's first milestone. To speed things up, bigger supplies of the Oxford vaccine are needed.\n\nUnlike the Pfizer vaccine however, the stock is not held by the Welsh Government. Instead, it is delivered directly to the frontline - including GPs and community pharmacies - by Public Health England.\n\nAround 24,000 Oxford doses arrived in Wales last week; 26,000 are due this week; and another 80 to 100,000 are expected to arrive in four batches next week.\n\nIf the mid-February milestone is reached, attention then turns to the over-50s and younger people whose health puts them at greater risk.\n\nThey can expect a dose by the Spring, but discussions are continuing between the four UK nations to nail down a more specific date.\n\nDr Helen Alefounder is a GP in Colwyn Bay, Conwy county and part of a team that administered 400 vaccines at care comes last week after receiving the vaccine herself on Wednesday.\n\n\"Between us and the surgery next door that we're working with we've got just shy of 20,000 patients to vaccinate,\" she told BBC Radio Wales.\n\n\"It's an absolutely huge task, it's really scary, but we are really keen and committed to get it done because everybody is sick of lockdown and let's be honest, everybody wants life to return to as normal as possible and the only way we're going to do that is to mass vaccinate people.\"\n\nA mass-vaccination centre has been set up at Margam Orangery near Port Talbot\n\nOther GP surgeries have posted on social media that they have not received as many doses of the vaccine as promised.\n\nVaccination numbers will now be published daily and the number of mass vaccination centres will rise from 22 to 35. The vaccination plan also suggests pharmacies could be used to deploy the vaccine.\n\nDr Gill Richardson, the senior responsible officer for the Covid vaccination programme in Wales, said GPs were \"raring to go\" to get the vaccine distributed.\n\nShe said the model for Wales' vaccination programme was focused around the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine, which was approved in late December and \"much larger quantities\" were expected.\n\nShe also said: \"I know it's very difficult if you haven't had a letter and you're feeling anxious but you are going to be approached and when you're approached we'd like it to be as soon as possible and as convenient as possible to you.\"\n\nMichael Sullivan, 93, from Radyr, Cardiff, is one of those who is yet to receive his letter.\n\nHe said: \"I hear of all these other people having their second jabs and nobody's even thought of contacting me to say I'm going to have one in the first place. It's a bit depressing. It makes me think somebody's not doing what they should be doing.\n\n\"It gets stressful more easily, that's another thing one has to bare in mind - it's going to save my life.\"\n\nTwo full doses of the Oxford vaccine gave 62% protection, a half dose followed by a full dose was 90% and overall the trial showed 70% protection.\n\nElen Jones, the Wales director of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, said community pharmacists were \"willing and skilled to help deliver the vaccination programme, as they do with flu every year\".\n\nShe added pharmacists could help deliver the vaccine \"at a more local level\".\n\nWelsh ministers have been under intense pressure since it became clear that Wales was lagging behind every other home nation in the initial weeks of vaccine rollout.\n\nIt's still not clear why that should be the case - the logistical challenges of rollout and the change in advice over the time period between first and second doses apply across the UK, not just to Wales.\n\nThe health minister says that there has already been \"a significant step-up in delivery\".\n\nThe test of that will be whether the system in Wales can meet the delivery goals set out in the vaccination strategy - which (as for the other home nations) also rely on a regular and sufficient supply of vaccine.", "Marks & Spencer has announced that it has bought the Jaeger fashion brand, which fell into administration last November.\n\nM&S is taking on the brand, but not Jaeger's scores of shops and concessions.\n\nIt is now in the process of finalising a deal to buy its products and \"supporting marketing assets\".\n\nM&S announced in May 2020 that it planned to stock other complementary brands to boost sales.\n\nSince then, it has started to sell products online from the Early Learning Centre, as well as from two designers, Nobody's Child and Ghost London.\n\nRichard Price, managing director of M&S Clothing & Home, said: \"We have set out our plans to sell complementary third party brands as part of our Never the Same Again programme to accelerate our transformation and turbocharge online growth.\n\n\"In line with this, we have bought the Jaeger brand and are in the final stages of agreeing the purchase of product and supporting marketing assets from the administrators of Jaeger Retail Limited. We expect to fully complete later this month.\"\n\nIn a call with journalists last week, chief executive Steve Rowe said M&S wanted to partner with other brands, largely for its online business, but stressed: \"We have no intention of turning into a department store.\"\n\nJaeger had 244 staff and some 63 stores and concessions. In addition, 13 stores closed after administrators were appointed, with the loss of more than 120 posts across stores, head office and distribution.\n\nIt is unclear if any jobs will be saved. There has been no update from the administrators, FRP.\n\nJaeger was founded in 1884, the same year as Marks & Spencer, which started out as a stall in an open market in Leeds known as Marks' Penny Bazaar.\n\nLast week, M&S unveiled quarterly figures showing that its clothing division had seen sales fall nearly a quarter, although sales of sales of sleepwear had soared.\n\nThe retailer sold 20% more women's pyjamas during the 13 weeks to 26 December. However, UK revenues for the quarter were £2.52bn, 8.2% lower than last year.\n\nM&S blamed \"on-off restrictions and distortions in demand patterns\" due to the coronavirus crisis.", "Stickers supposed to protect users against mobile-phone radiation have no effect, scientists have found.\n\nEnergydots says they \"counteract the harmful energy emitted by wireless and electronic equipment\" to aid sleep, cure headaches and give a clearer mind.\n\nBut University of Surrey tests for BBC News found no evidence of any effect.\n\nThe Devon-based company told BBC News the stickers were programmed with \"scalar energy\", which the scientists' equipment would be unable to detect.\n\nEnergydots markets a range of stickers, including the SmartDot, the SleepDot and even the PetDot.\n\nBBC News bought five SmartDots - a special offer for £55 - and sent them to the university's 6th Generation Innovation Centre.\n\nResearchers tested 4G mobile phones and wi-fi access points with and without the stickers applied to them.\n\nAnd a spokesman for the lab said: \"We could not find any evidence that these products had any effect on frequency or power when used as instructed.\"\n\nAn Energydots spokeswoman told BBC News: \"We state clearly that our products harmonise the fields.\n\n\"And the way to test this is to assess via biological testing.\"\n\nLast November, the company published a press release saying it was extremely proud to announce a partnership with the NHS that would see \"brand-new patient engagement units\" installed in Torbay and Royal College of London hospitals.\n\nAt the time, an Energydots spokeswoman told BBC News adverts for its products would appear in the two hospitals, though she clarified the London hospital was in fact University College Hospital.\n\nBut a Torbay Hospital spokesman then told BBC News it knew nothing of this partnership.\n\nAnd within hours, the press release had disappeared from the company's website.\n\nEnergydots later said there had been a misunderstanding with the agency that had promised to organise the adverts.\n\nIts stickers are among a wide range of products on Amazon from companies offering electric-and-magnetic-field (EMF) protection.\n\nEnergydots also suggests placing its SmartDot stickers on wi-fi routers\n\nThese include protective clothing, canopies to be placed over beds and even devices that block radiation from wi-fi routers - making them effectively useless.\n\nCampaigners claiming radiation from mobile phones and other devices poses a health risk have stepped up protests as 5G networks are rolled out.\n\nBut most scientists say even the higher part of the electromagnetic spectrum that may be used by 5G should not harm humans.\n\nAnd within those limits, there are no known consequences for health, the World Health Organization says.", "The United Arab Emirates is being removed from the UK list of travel corridors amid a spike in Covid cases.\n\nThat means anyone who arrives from the UAE after 04:00 GMT on Tuesday now needs to self-isolate for 10 days, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said.\n\nUK officials say Covid cases have risen 52% in the UAE in the last seven days and cite \"a significant acceleration in the number of imported cases\".\n\nIt comes after Scotland removed the UAE city Dubai from its safe travel list.\n\nThe Foreign Office has also updated its advice to advise against all but essential travel to the emirates.\n\nThe recent lockdown restrictions imposed across the UK mean leisure travel is currently banned.\n\nBut the UAE has been in particular focus in recent weeks after a number of UK reality TV and social media stars posted photographs of themselves holidaying there before the rules came into place.\n\nAnd a Celtic footballer tested positive for Covid-19 after the club took a trip to Dubai for a winter training camp.\n\nCeltic were allowed to go as a group under exemptions for elite athletes. As a result,15 playing and coaching staff are now required to self-isolate.\n\nDubai was added to Scotland's travel quarantine list from 04:00 GMT on Monday - with the rule also applying retrospectively for passengers who have arrived in Scotland from the city since January 3.\n\nThe Department for Transport said the removal of the whole of the UAE from the travel corridor is being adopted by all four UK nations.\n\nArrivals to the UK from most destinations now have to quarantine for 10 days.\n\nHowever, arrivals from some countries are exempt from the rules. Those countries make up the so-called travel corridor list.\n\nFrom this week, passengers arriving by boat, train or plane, including UK nationals, must also take a Covid test up to 72 hours before leaving the country of departure.\n\nAre you affected by the government decision to remove UAE from the UK travel corridor list? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "A hospital's oxygen supply has \"reached a critical situation\" due to rising numbers of Covid-19 infections.\n\nA document shared with the BBC showed Southend Hospital has had to reduce the amount it uses to treat patients.\n\nIt said the target range for oxygen levels that should be in patients' blood had been cut from 92% to a baseline of 88-92%.\n\nHospital managing director, Yvonne Blucher, said it was \"working to manage\" the situation.\n\n\"We are experiencing high demand for oxygen because of rising numbers of inpatients with Covid-19 and we are working to manage this,\" she said.\n\n\"The public can play their part by staying home and, where they cannot, following the 'hands, face, space' advice to cut the spread of the virus.\"\n\nIn the document, from the Mid and South Essex Hospitals Foundation Trust, which has been shared with frontline NHS staff, the oxygen supply was said to have \"reached a critical situation\".\n\nIt said it was \"imperative we use oxygen efficiently and safely\" and states patients who are being fed oxygen and have an oxygen saturation of above 92% \"should have their oxygen weaned within the target range\", which is now 88-92%. This means very gradually reducing the saturation level.\n\nIt added that \"maintaining saturations within this target range is safe and no patient will come to harm as a result\".\n\nGPs in Essex have told the BBC that the threshold for sending a patient to hospital for supplemental oxygen is if their oxygen saturation is at 92%. A level of 96-100% is deemed normal.\n\nChris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers which represents hospital trusts in England, said there was \"huge pressure\" on hospital oxygen stocks because giving patients extra oxygen was a \"key part\" of coronavirus treatment.\n\nHe said there were a number of hospitals where this happened in the first phase of coronavirus and over the past few weeks \"similar things have happened\" elsewhere.\n\nChris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers which represents hospital trusts in England, said there was \"huge pressure on oxygen systems\"\n\n\"This is the kind of problem that chief executives and trust leadership teams are having to solve day in, day out,\" he said.\n\n\"If you [a hospital] push your oxygen to an absolutely critical level, then the thing that you can't do is have the oxygen system break down... so effectively you will have to dial it down, in which case you will probably have to transfer patients to the nearest neighbouring hospital for a short period of time.\n\n\"I cannot tell you how much work has been done over the summer and autumn to ensure that people [hospital trusts] have been prepared for this... they knew they would come under pressure if there were to be further waves, as has now proved to be the case.\"\n\nEssex has one of the highest rates of Covid-19 per 100,000 people in the country, with seven of the 14 council areas in the county in the top 20 most infected areas of England.\n\nThe Mid and South Essex Hospitals Foundation Trust said it was \"imperative we use oxygen efficiently and safely\"\n\nNews of oxygen issues is understandably worrying, but not unexpected. Tanks may be full, but flow is a problem.\n\nMany people who are sick with Covid will need extra oxygen to help them breathe. As Covid admissions increase, it can put huge demand on a hospital's piped oxygen supply system to provide this high flow.\n\nHospital bosses have been planning for such scenarios for months, learning from experiences during the first wave of Covid when some trusts ran into difficulties.\n\nMany wards have made improvements to their pipework in preparation for a very busy winter, but there is still a limit to what hospitals can provide.\n\nWhen stretched to the maximum, other steps are needed, such transferring patients elsewhere or limiting how much oxygen is pumped to each patient.\n\nSouthend Hospital has taken this latter measure.\n\nAlthough not ideal, it is not unsafe. Patients will be closely monitored and the trust hopes the situation will improve if new Covid admissions start to go down as people follow the stay at home lockdown rules.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n• None 'One in 18 have Covid-19' in parts of Essex", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Nicola Sturgeon says exemption from quarantine travel requirements for elite sport are to be reviewed\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon has urged football clubs not to \"abuse\" the privileges they are afforded while the rest of Scotland is in lockdown.\n\nPlayers and staff from Celtic FC are having to self-isolate after one tested positive for Covid-19 on return from a mid-season training camp in Dubai.\n\nMs Sturgeon said she had doubts about whether the trip was really necessary.\n\nAnd she said \"everyone, including football, should be erring on the side of caution\" amid a rise in infections.\n\nScottish football below Championship level is to be suspended for three weeks in light of the current lockdown, with Scottish Cup and lower league ties to be rescheduled.\n\nTop flight football in Scotland is continuing while most Scots are subject to a \"stay at home\" order due to the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nCeltic's home fixture against Hibernian went ahead on Monday evening, despite the club having lost 13 players and three staff to Covid-19 issues.\n\nDefender Christopher Jullien tested positive for the virus on return from the club's training camp in Dubai, with others including the club's manager Neil Lennon being forced to isolate as close contacts.\n\nMs Sturgeon said she was \"disappointed and frustrated\" that her daily coronavirus briefing was again being \"dominated by football\".\n\nCeltic trained in Scotland on Saturday after returning from Dubai\n\nShe said she had doubts about whether Celtic's trip \"was really essential\" and whether rules were strictly adhered to, saying it was for the footballing authorities to decide if further action was necessary.\n\nThe first minister issued a warning to clubs that they must stick to the rules set out for them while the rest of the populace is subject to tight restrictions.\n\nShe said: \"Football and elite sport more generally enjoys a number of privileges right now that the rest of us don't have. These privileges include the right to go to overseas training camps and be exempt from quarantine on return.\n\n\"It is really vital, obviously for public health reasons but also I think out of respect for the rest of the population living under really heavy restrictions, that these privileges are not abused.\"\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross is an assistant referee in the game.\n\nHe said that at a time when people are staying at home football games were something many looked forward to.\n\nMr Ross said: \"We don't want to see the whole of Scottish football affected by the actions of one club.\" He also called for financial support to be made available to clubs in the Scottish lower leagues and Scottish Cup who had had their games suspended for three weeks.\n\nCeltic manager Neil Lennon is among those who are self-isolating\n\nMs Sturgeon said Scotland was currently in \"the most perilous and serious position since the start of the pandemic\", with a record number of people in hospital with Covid-19.\n\nShe said everyone should be doing their utmost not to add to pressure on the health services by following the rules.\n\nShe said: \"This whole episode should underline how serious the situation we are in now is. Everyone including football should be erring on the side of caution.\n\n\"I know fans of other clubs feel very strongly that the whole of football should not pay the price for the actions of any one club, and I agree with that.\n\n\"But of course a situation like this does make it essential for us to review the rules - including those around travel exemptions - and that's what we will be doing. As we do, I do hope that Celtic themselves will reflect seriously on all of this.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon cited photographs which emerged of players socialising in Dubai, but Celtic's assistant manager John Kennedy said these created a \"false picture\" and that there had been \"minor slip-ups\" at worst.\n\nThe club had previously claimed the government had given permission for the trip to go ahead, but Ms Sturgeon said it had only provided guidance to the footballing authorities on the rules.\n\nShe said: \"It's not our role to give approval or not to what a football club is doing.\"\n\nA statement posted on the Celtic website said that \"the reality is that a case could well have occurred had the team remained in Scotland\".\n\nIt added: \"Celtic has done everything it can to ensure we have in place the very best procedures and protocols. From the outset of the pandemic, Celtic has worked closely with the Scottish government and Scottish football and we will continue to do so.\"", "As hospital mortuaries fill up in Surrey, England, some of the dead from the coronavirus pandemic are being brought to an emergency body storage facility.\n\nSurrey currently has one of the highest infection rates in the country, and some are concerned the facility may reach capacity.\n\nBBC home editor Mark Easton paid a visit to the site which has been set up in a Surrey woodland.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Monday morning. We'll have another update for you at 18:00 BST.\n\nSeven centres begin operating this morning across England, a key part of efforts to vaccinate 15 million in the top four priority groups by mid-February. To begin with, more than 600,000 aged 80 or over are being sent letters inviting them to book an appointment at one of the hubs - but if the journey is too long, they're being told closer options will be available soon. The centres will be open 12 hours a day and more large-scale sites will follow. The health secretary will give more details later, while the Welsh government will publish its own vaccination plan. In Scotland, more clinics should start to receive the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. Here's how vaccines are approved for use, and some of the challenges a rollout on this scale faces.\n\nScientists have warned stricter measures might be needed to curb infections in England but, right now, the government is focusing on an \"all-out public information\" campaign to improve compliance with the existing rules. Chief medical officer Prof Chris Whitty is appearing on TV and radio this morning urging the public to \"stay at home\" given what he called the \"appalling situation\" we are in. He told BBC One's Breakfast that getting case numbers down was \"everybody's problem\", and \"every unnecessary contact\" with someone from another household gave the virus an opportunity to be transmitted. \"We need to really double down\", he added, because \"this is the most dangerous time we've had in terms of numbers into the NHS.\" If you've seen videos online claiming some hospital wards and corridors are empty, BBC Reality Check explains what's really going on.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe Federation of Small Businesses says a record quarter of a million firms could close over the coming year. The organisation's chairman, Mike Cherry, said financial support provided to businesses during the pandemic had \"not kept pace with intensifying restrictions\". It also wants more help for many self-employed workers who are currently excluded from aid. There's another call for more government support this morning from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer. He wants teachers, the armed forces and care workers to be left out of a public sector pay freeze, and is urging ministers not to end the temporary £20-a-week boost to Universal Credit.\n\nThe Federation of Small Businesses said the government had met the latest national lockdown \"with a whimper\"\n\nThe body representing prison staff says courts should cease hearing trials to help stop the spread of coronavirus in jails. Mark Fairhurst, from the Prison Officers' Union, said there had been a \"massive outbreak\" at Cardiff Prison, and the site was struggling to find space for newly-sentenced arrivals. However, others within the criminal justice sector argue courts must be kept open to prevent the case backlog growing further. The rate of spread in prisons is still well below the wider population, and a prison service spokesman said shielding, mass testing and limited regimes were in place at all facilities.\n\nPrimary and secondary schools are closed to most pupils, and the switch to virtual learning presents challenges for many families. The BBC is trying to help, and from today lessons and programmes will be broadcast on TV, on BBC Two and CBBC. They'll also be available on iPlayer, with additional content online. Find out all you need to know here. If you're looking for some inspiration for PE, Joe Wicks is also back today. For many families, he was one of the fixtures of the first lockdown, and live classes start at 09:00 GMT on his YouTube channel.\n\nFind more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "Dorset Police said officers dispersed dozens of demonstrators from the town centre as they attempted to march\n\nA video shared online apparently showing a woman being arrested in breach of lockdown for sitting on a bench was \"stage-managed\", police said.\n\nDorset Police believe the video was planned and recorded by anti-lockdown protesters during a demonstration in Bournemouth on Saturday.\n\nThree people were arrested for not giving their details so officers could issue fines for breaking Covid rules.\n\nThe BBC has asked one of the protesters who posted the video to comment.\n\nThe force said two of those held were later de-arrested when they confirmed their details in police custody and a third was released when his details were verified - all three were then issued fixed penalty notices.\n\nOfficers also issued at least seven other fines and 10 dispersal notices.\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Mark Callaghan, from Dorset Police, said: \"We believe this video was planned, stage-managed and recorded by members of the protest group who turned up in multiple areas, several of whom refused to engage or provide their details.\n\n\"If people refuse to give their details in such circumstances then it leaves officers with little option, but to arrest until the details are established. Our officers would only arrest as a last resort.\n\n\"It was clear that the group was deliberately organising their activities, walking around in twos and then trying to come together in a 'flash mob'-style approach, as they have done previously. This activity went on for a couple of hours.\"\n\nThe force's chief constable James Vaughan earlier said: \"I condemn the actions of these selfish individuals who knowingly flouted the lockdown restrictions.\"\n\nThe force said there were \"repeated attempts\" to engage with the organisers to stop the planned protest and found a number of the protesters had \"travelled considerably\" from out of the Dorset area.\n\nMr Vaughan added: \"Our county is gripped with infections and yet these irresponsible individuals have ignored what is being asked of them and have left their homes to protest. Shame on them.\"\n\nSam Crowe, director of public health for Dorset, said its hospital services were \"close to being overwhelmed\".\n\nMr Crowe said: \"Infection rates locally have been doubling in less than a week. If this carries on, our hospitals will not be able to cope with caring for those needing life-saving treatment. Stay at home means exactly that.\"\n\nLatest figures show Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole has reached 745.2 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nAlso on Saturday, 16 people were also arrested during an anti-lockdown protest in south London.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Pupils across Scotland have been experiencing problems accessing Microsoft Teams as the majority move to home learning.\n\nA number of schools, pupils and parents have reported the technology running slowly or not at all.\n\nIt is one of the main platforms being used for remote learning with schools shut to most pupils until at least the beginning of February.\n\nMicrosoft Teams tweeted that the issue was being investigated.\n\nA Microsoft spokesperson said: \"Our engineers are working to resolve difficulties accessing Microsoft Teams that some customers are experiencing.\"\n\nWhen pressed on whether demand as a result of home schooling was causing the issue, Microsoft declined to comment.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon highlighted the problem during her daily coronavirus briefing.\n\n\"This is not an issue that is unique to Scotland or indeed unique to schools, but I understand Microsoft is currently working to address it,\" she said.\n\n\"More generally I don't underestimate how difficult this is both for young people learning away from friends… and for parents to juggle home schooling with working.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon was also asked about problems which were being experienced by users of digital learning platform Glow.\n\nShe replied: \"It is not an issue with Glow. It is affecting Glow, but the core issue is not with Glow… the issue is with Microsoft Teams.\"\n\nTwo schools in Wishaw, North Lanarkshire, said the problem was a \"national issue\" although Renfrew High School urged pupils experiencing difficulties not to panic.\n\nClyde Valley High School tweeted: \"Our online learning provision begins today for all of our pupils. Due to the very high demand for Microsoft Teams across Scotland, there may be issues initially getting logged on or accessing some files.\n\n\"This is a national issue on the site and may take a little time to rectify.\"\n\nColtness High School said: \"Unfortunately it appears Microsoft Teams is struggling to cope with the traffic this morning.\n\n\"This is across Scotland and not isolated to Coltness. Pupils and staff are having difficulty loading files. We have reported the issue and hopefully this will be resolved soon.\"\n\nEdinburgh City Council have texted all parents saying: \"There is a city-wide problem with Microsoft Teams this morning. Please be patient as the council is working to resolve it.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by RHS Digital Learning This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by D&G Council This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA Scottish government spokesman said: \"Microsoft has confirmed that this issue is affecting users in the UK and elsewhere in northern Europe. Education Scotland is working closely with the company to resolve the issues.\"\n\nAfter one teacher complained to Microsoft Teams on Twitter, a staff member said: \"We're currently investigating an issue where some users in the UK region are unable to access Microsoft Teams. We will provide further information as soon as this is available.\"\n\nAccording to an Ofcom report in December, about 34,000 (1.2%) premises in Scotland were without a decent broadband connection, while superfast broadband coverage had increased to 94% of homes.\n\nIt also said that fixed and mobile networks in Scotland had \"generally coped well\" with increased demands during the pandemic.\n\nIt comes as plans for remote learning during the latest lockdown reveal big disparities between Scotland's 32 councils.\n\nNot all pupils will be offered live lessons - instead the decision on the best approach has been left to individual schools and teachers.\n\nGuidance on remote learning published by the Scottish government on Friday recommended a \"a balance of live learning and independent activity\".\n\nThe Scottish government said it had invested £25m to address digital exclusion in schools with funding allocations for digital devices and connectivity solutions made to all 32 local authorities.\n\nMore than 50,000 devices such as laptops have been distributed to children and young people to help with remote learning and the programme in total is expected to deliver about 70,000 devices for disadvantaged children and young people across Scotland.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Asymptomatic testing for Covid can help \"break the chains of transmission\", Matt Hancock says\n\nRegular rapid testing for people without coronavirus symptoms will be made available across England this week, the government has said.\n\nThe community testing regime - expanded to cover all 317 local authorities - uses rapid lateral flow tests, which can return results in 30 minutes.\n\nLocal councils are being encouraged to prioritise tests for those who cannot work from home during the lockdown.\n\nThe health secretary said asymptomatic testing can help break transmission.\n\nMeanwhile, NHS England has invited tens of thousands of people over 80 to book vaccinations.\n\nA further 563 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test and another 54,940 cases reported, according to government figures on Sunday.\n\nThe total number of deaths in the UK after a positive test passed 80,000 on Saturday.\n\nThe government has launched a campaign telling people to act like they have got the virus in a bid to tackle the rise in infections.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and can go out only for limited reasons such as food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nThe Department of Health and Social Care said expanding the Community Testing Programme to more people without symptoms was \"crucial given that around one in three people\" who contract Covid-19 show no symptoms.\n\nIt said regular community testing using the rapid tests had already identified more than 14,800 positive Covid-19 cases.\n\nSo far, 131 local authorities in England have enrolled in the government's community testing programme, with Milton Keynes, Slough, Doncaster and Essex the latest to join.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said targeted asymptomatic testing and subsequent isolation was \"highly effective in breaking chains of transmission\".\n\nBut Angela Raffle, a consultant in public health at the University of Bristol Medical School, said increasing lateral flow testing was \"very worrying\" and warned the benefits of finding symptomless cases \"will be outweighed by the many more infectious cases that are missed by these tests\".\n\nDefending lateral flow tests on the BBC's Andrew Marr programme Mr Hancock said mass asymptomatic testing in Liverpool had seen the case rate drop \"more sharply than it did in other similar areas where only restrictions were brought in\".\n\nNHS Test and Trace will also work closely with other government departments to scale up workforce testing, the Department of Health and Social Care said.\n\nMany are already piloting regular workforce testing, with 15 large employers having taken up this offer already across 64 sites, \"including organisations operating in the food, manufacturing, energy and retail sectors, and within the public sector including job centres, transport networks and the military\".\n\nThe Department of Health and Social Care said plans were already in place for rapid testing of staff and students in schools and colleges and staff in primary schools.\n\nAsked when schools could reopen by the BBC's Andrew Marr, Mr Hancock said there were four conditions: that there is not a major new variant, the vaccine rollout is proceeding effectively, the number of deaths is falling and there is an easing of pressure on the NHS.\n\nMatthew Fell, of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), which represents 190,000 UK businesses, said: \"This expansion of testing will help more critical workers and those unable to work from home to operate safely, while also catching new cases more swiftly.\"\n\nBusiness Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the safety of the workforce had been an \"absolute priority\" and said the expansion of testing means \"we can keep our economy on the move while giving individuals in key sectors complete confidence that their workplace is safe\".\n\nBut Prof Susan Michie, professor of health psychology at University College London, told BBC Breakfast the country would continue a \"yo-yoing of lockdown\" without a \"test, trace and isolate system that actually works\" and warned there needed to be tighter restrictions and tougher messaging than in March to prevent \"tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in the next few weeks\".", "Luke Evans plays police officer Steve Wilkins who reopened and solved the two double murders\n\nHollywood actor Luke Evans says telling the true story of the murder of four people was a \"huge responsibility\".\n\nEvans, who was brought up in Aberbargoed, Caerphilly county, returned to Wales to star in ITV drama The Pembrokeshire Murders.\n\nHe plays Dyfed-Powys Police officer Steve Wilkins who in 2006 reopened two unsolved double murders from the 1980s.\n\n\"I just wanted to tell it right and show justice for the victims, which is the most important part,\" Evans said.\n\n\"This is a very serious, sad story where four people lost their lives and their families have struggled and suffered greatly because of it,\" he told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast.\n\n\"So you do feel a huge sense of responsibility.\"\n\nThe Pembrokeshire Murders has been adapted from a book about the case written by Mr Wilkins and ITV journalist Jonathan Hill.\n\nIn 1985 brother and sister Richard and Helen Thomas were shot at their remote mansion near Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, before the property was set alight.\n\nThen in 1989, Peter and Gwenda Dixon were shot dead at close range on the Pembrokeshire coastal path near Little Haven.\n\nThe drama also stars Newport actress Alexandria Riley as Det Insp Ella Richards\n\nBut it was only years later that microscopic DNA and fibres linked the murders to John Cooper, who was already in prison for a string of burglaries.\n\nIn 2011 he was jailed for life.\n\nThe Dracula Untold star said he had not been aware of the notorious case: \"I knew almost nothing about these murders, to the point where when I read what was a treatment two or three years ago… I couldn't believe what I was reading.\n\n\"So I did my own research into it and realised that the story was completely true - it hadn't been embellished, none of this was fiction and it sort of blew my mind.\"\n\nHe said being able to speak to Mr Wilkins while filming was invaluable: \"Me and Steve had a dialogue almost every week for a few hours.\n\n\"We had a lot of conversations before we started shooting where I would speak to him and ask him, not just about the case - obviously that that was very important - but about things like how was it standing in front of John Cooper, having to interview John Cooper, having to deal with his family.\n\n\"You see both sides of the effect of these terrible crimes, you see what the aftermath of what it does to people and how they suffer and you meet Cooper's family as well.\n\n\"Steve has his own family and that also is played into the storyline very powerfully.\"\n\nEvans said the only other time he has worked in Wales was when filming Visit Wales commercials: \"Being Welsh and not getting to work in Wales very often - that certainly was an attraction for me,\" he said.\n\n\"I've done them [the commercials] for a few years - one of them was about the coastal walks of Wales and our beautiful coastline... and then right in this beautiful place I was there back there, portraying a character and trying to find the killer of somebody who murdered people on this coastal path.\"\n\nBut he said he enjoyed playing a Welsh character: \"To go right back to my roots with my accent and that was a really, really exciting to do.\n\nThe series, made by World Productions, the makers of Line of Duty and Bodyguard, finished filming just before Wales' first coronavirus lockdown.\n\n\"When we started The Pembrokeshire Murders it was January so we didn't hear anything really, and then just before we finished there was rumblings of this virus,\" he said.\n\n\"We were very lucky in a way, we wrapped basically on the Friday then on the Monday everything closed.\n\n\"So it was a big sigh of relief when we got to the final wrap of that day and it was very special.\"\n\nThe three-part series also stars Keith Allen, Owen Teale, Alexandria Riley, Caroline Berry, Oliver Ryan and David Fynn.\n\nThe Pembrokeshire Murders in on ITV at 21:00 GMT on 11, 12 and 13 January", "Flexing the coronavirus lockdown rules could be fatal, the health secretary has warned as hospital admissions soar.\n\nMatt Hancock did not rule out strengthening current restrictions and told the BBC's Andrew Marr the NHS was under \"very serious pressure\".\n\nIt comes after almost 55,000 new cases of coronavirus were reported in the UK and the number of deaths after a positive test passed 80,000.\n\nScientist Prof Peter Horby warned the UK was in \"the eye of the storm\".\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the rules were tough but \"may not be tough enough\" and called for the government to hold daily press conferences to avoid \"mixed messages\".\n\nThe UK recorded another 563 deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test on Sunday, down from 1,065 deaths on Saturday.\n\nHowever, there tends to be fewer deaths reported on Sundays, due to a reporting lag over the weekend. There were also a further 54,940 daily cases.\n\nMr Hancock told Andrew Marr \"every time you try to flex the rules that could be fatal\" and said staying at home was the \"most important thing we can do collectively as a society\".\n\nThe health secretary said he did not want to speculate on whether the government would further strengthen restrictions, after warnings from scientists on Saturday that they may need to be stricter.\n\n\"People need to not just follow the letter of the rules but follow the spirit as well and play their part,\" he said.\n\nHis comments came after Home Secretary Priti Patel defended police over enforcing lockdown rules following the case of two women who were fined for going for a walk five miles from their homes - a decision which is now under review.\n\nThe government has launched a campaign telling people to act like they have got the virus in a bid to tackle the rise in infections.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and can go out only for limited reasons such as food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nEngland's chief medical officer Prof Chris Whitty said that if the virus continued on its current trajectory \"many hospitals will be in real difficulties, and very soon\".\n\nIn a statement released on Sunday, he said that unless people started to follow the rules more strictly, emergency patients will have to be turned away from hospitals, causing \"avoidable deaths\".\n\nProf Horby, chairman of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), said there may be \"early signs that something is beginning to bite\" due to the restrictions - but if they did not then stricter measures would be needed.\n\nHe told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show: \"I really hope people take this very seriously. It was bad in March, it's much worse now.\n\n\"We've seen record numbers across the board, record numbers of cases, record numbers of hospitalisations, record numbers of deaths.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Professor Peter Horby explains why the new Covid-19 variant is up to 70% more transmissible\n\nProf Horby said tougher measures might include those during the March lockdown, such as people only being able to exercise once a day and stricter rules about meeting people.\n\n\"We are in a situation where everything that was risky in the past is now more risky,\" he said.\n\nProf Horby said early signs were encouraging that the vaccines would be effective against the new Covid variants - first identified in the UK and in South Africa - and he did not want people to \"hide under the duvet\".\n\n\"We can see the end game now,\" he said.\n\nHigher cases inevitably mean more hospitalisations and more deaths.\n\nThe most recent figures show that, on average, 894 people per day are now dying within 28 days of a positive Covid test, up from 438 at the start of December.\n\nThe spike in cases since Christmas means that figure is almost certain to get worse before the most recent lockdown measures can start to have any effect.\n\nScientists think the new variant of the disease is more \"transmissible\", possibly because each infected individual produces more of the actual virus - sometimes referred to as the viral load.\n\nVaccination should help to protect the most vulnerable from serious symptoms but we don't yet know if receiving the jab stops an individual contracting the virus and passing it on to others.\n\nScientists say that may mean even tougher restrictions will be needed to bring the R-number below one and start to reduce the overall size of the pandemic.\n\nMass community testing is to be rolled out this week, the government has said, and the health secretary said around two million people had been vaccinated in the UK, with some 200,000 jabs being given in England daily.\n\nMr Hancock said by autumn every adult in the UK would be offered a vaccine.\n\nHe said the government was on course to reach its target of 15 million people vaccinated by mid-February, with the opening of seven mass vaccination centres this week likely to increase the rate of jabs.\n\nMr Hancock told Sky News' Sophy Ridge he hoped coronavirus could be treated like seasonal flu with an annual vaccination programme in the future.\n\nProf Horby said the vaccines may have to be updated \"every few years\" as the virus mutates and said it was unlikely the virus would go away completely.\n\n\"We're going to have to live with it,\" he said. \"But that may change significantly.\n\n\"It may well become more of an endemic virus that's with us all the time and may cause some seasonal pressures and some excess deaths but is not causing the huge disruption that we're seeing now.\"", "Spain is in a race against time to clear roads covered by heavy snow, and get Covid vaccines and food supplies to areas affected by Storm Filomena.\n\nUp to 50cm (20 inches) of snow fell on the capital Madrid, one of the worst hit areas, between Friday and Saturday.\n\nAt least four people died and thousands of travellers were left stranded.\n\nOvernight, temperatures plunged to -8C (18F) in parts of Spain, amid warnings by meteorologists that the snow was turning to perilous ice.\n\nThe unusual cold wave on the Iberian peninsula is expected to last until Thursday.\n\nThe Spanish government said it had taken extra steps - including police-escorted convoys - to ensure its expected shipment of some 300,000 coronavirus vaccines can be distributed as planned to regional health authorities later on Monday.\n\n\"The commitment is to guarantee the supply of health, vaccines and food. Corridors have been opened to deliver the goods,\" Transport Minister Jose Luis Abalos said on Sunday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Madrid has been hit by heavy snowfall after Storm Filomena\n\nSoldiers have been deployed to clear some of the 700 major roads.\n\nSome 3,500 tonnes of salt were later brought on lorries to the capital, Spain's El Mundo website reported on Monday.\n\nThe record-breaking snowfall has triggered some unprecedented scenes here in Madrid. People have skied along the city's main commercial street, Gran Vía, and one man was pictured being pulled through the district of Hortaleza on a sled by five huskies.\n\nBut other responses to the snow have been more controversial due to concerns about Covid-19. Dozens of young people had a snowball fight in Callao square, for example, and many of them were without facemasks.\n\nNearby, in Puerta del Sol, others celebrated the snow by dancing a conga. The daily Marca newspaper branded it \"the conga of shame\".\n\nAlthough the snowfall has now stopped, low temperatures have left snow and ice piled up across the capital and the surrounding region. And with residents advised to avoid using their cars, public transport has seen a surge in demand.\n\nThis has compounded coronavirus concerns as many metro train carriages were packed at rush hour on Monday morning, making social distancing impossible.\n\nMadrid's international airport began gradually resuming operations on Sunday afternoon, having cancelled all flights on Friday.\n\nSome 500 people across the Madrid region were forced to spend the night in temporary shelter, including sports centres, after they were trapped by the whiteout.\n\nAbout 100 shoppers and staff spent two nights at a shopping centre in Majadahonda, a town north of the capital. \"There are people sleeping on the ground on cardboard,\" one restaurant employee told TVE television.\n\nSpain's Meteorological Agency said Saturday's snowfall was the heaviest in Madrid since 1971\n\nBut there were stories of heroism too, including doctors and medical workers who abandoned their cars and walked for hours to get to work. One doctor, Alvaro Sanchez, said on social media he had walked 17km (10 miles) over nearly two hours to get to work, while two nurses, Paco and Monica, said they had walked 22km to their hospital.\n\nThey were praised by Spanish Health Minister Salvador Illa, who tweeted: \"The commitment that the entire group of health workers is showing is an example of solidarity and dedication.\"\n\nSome 4x4 vehicle owners offered to transport medical workers, while other volunteers helped to clear hospital entrance ways.\n\n\"Health staff have been working (hard) for more than a year and this is just a short moment for us, so as citizens, we are trying to help; it is everyone's responsibility,\" said Fernando de la Fuente, 60, who helped clear the entrance to Madrid's Gregorio Maranon Hospital.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nSpaniards in large parts of the country have been warned to take care in the coming days as temperatures could fall to -12C (10F) in some areas until Thursday.", "Last updated on .From the section FA Cup\n\nCrawley Town delivered one of the FA Cup third round's most emphatic upsets as the League Two underdogs tore apart Marcelo Bielsa's Leeds.\n\nThree second-half goals rewarded a fantastic performance from John Yems' side as they made light of the 62 places between themselves and their Premier League visitors.\n\nNick Tsaroulla, playing only his seventh game in senior football, set the ball rolling, beating three Leeds defenders to fire home a superb solo opener.\n\nUnited keeper Kiko Casilla's error allowed Ashley Nadesan to double the lead before Jordan Tunnicliffe added a third for Crawley, who could have won by more.\n• None Watch all of the goals from the FA Cup third round\n• None Can Mark Wright make it as a pro at Crawley?\n\nBielsa made seven changes to his side but Leeds fielded England midfielder Kalvin Phillips among several regular top-flight starters including Pablo Hernandez, Ezgjan Alioski and club record signing Rodrigo.\n\nHowever, after an even first half, they were completely outplayed in the second period by a Crawley side who have reached the fourth round for only the third time, having spent most of their 125-year existence in non-league football.\n\nCrawley even had the luxury of bringing on reality TV celebrity Mark Wright in stoppage time for the former The Only Way Is Essex star's debut, having signed for the club on non-contract terms in December.\n\nLeeds' loss is the first time in 34 years a top-flight side has lost to a fourth-tier team by three or more goals and only the second ever instance since a fourth division was added to the Football League in 1958.\n\nThey may be the lesser-known of the two Red Devils but Crawley's efforts were no less impressive than Manchester United's 6-2 dissection of Leeds last month.\n\nWhile Bielsa rested first-choice stars such as Patrick Bamford, Luke Ayling, Stuart Dallas and Mateusz Klich, there was still plenty of experience mixed in with the youth in Leeds' line-up.\n\nBut the hosts, sixth in League Two after an eight-game unbeaten run, never gave them the chance to settle and while neither side could break the deadlock before the interval, it was Crawley who went closest as Casilla kept out Tom Nichols' close-range header.\n\nHe was helpless, however, to prevent Tsaroulla - a former Tottenham trainee who spent a year out of the game because of injuries sustained in a car crash - firing Crawley ahead after a twisting run into the area that beguiled the Leeds back-line.\n\nRather than protect their lead, Crawley went for the jugular and Nadesan soon doubled their advantage, although his strike owed much to a bobble that beat Casilla at his near post.\n\nTunnicliffe then fired into the roof of the net after Casilla parried from Nadesan and Crawley could have had a fourth after top scorer Max Watters came off the bench to round the keeper, only to be denied by a covering defender.\n\nThe win marked the first time in four attempts that Crawley have beaten a Premier League side in the FA Cup and so comfortable was the victory that TV personality Wright was given his late cameo.\n\nAnother name added to Leeds' list of cup woes\n\nBielsa was left to mull over back-to-back 3-0 defeats, albeit this one coming in a much different context to Leeds' Premier League loss at Tottenham on 2 January.\n\nThis was the former Argentina manager's first taste of an FA Cup shock, after far more mundane exits against Arsenal and QPR in Bielsa's two previous campaigns since taking the Elland Road reins in 2018.\n\nBut it was not unfamiliar ground for Leeds as Crawley - who have finished in the bottom half of League Two for five successive seasons - emulated non-league pair Histon and Sutton United, as well as lower-league clubs Rochdale and Newport, in upsetting the Whites this century.\n\nThe visitors only forced one real save from Crawley keeper Glenn Morris, who reacted well to push away Ian Poveda's strike from an acute angle in the first half.\n\nLeeds might point to a penalty they perhaps should have had before the interval when Crawley defender Tony Craig got away with pulling back Rodrigo as he attempted to meet Helder Costa's volleyed cross.\n\nBut there was no video assistant referee system at the game, and they offered very little going forward after Rodrigo was substituted at half-time.\n\nIt was a fourth successive third-round exit in a competition they could have looked to with some hope, given their relatively comfortable position in the Premier League.\n\n\"We've got 11 star men\" - what they said\n\nCrawley manager Yems to BBC Sport: \"You have to enjoy these games - you work hard enough for it. It was a really good team performance and it's clear that we've got 11 star men.\n\n\"These players have got a lot to prove to the clubs who have released them and we've showed what we can do against a really good side.\n\n\"Let's see who we get in the next round and enjoy the moment.\"\n\nLeeds midfielder Alioski to BBC Radio 5 Live: \"We are really disappointed and it wasn't the result that we wanted. We took the game really seriously and we wanted to win and go on a run, so it is disappointing.\n\n\"Crawley played the game of their lives, and congratulations. To beat us 3-0 - I still can't believe it.\n\n\"The manager said what he wanted to say. It's important for every player to know what this means. He is sad and the players are sad.\"\n• None Attempt blocked. Sam Greenwood (Leeds United) left footed shot from outside the box is blocked.\n• None Attempt missed. Raphinha (Leeds United) left footed shot from outside the box is high and wide to the left. Assisted by Pablo Hernández.\n• None Jake Hessenthaler (Crawley Town) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt saved. Hélder Costa (Leeds United) header from the centre of the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Pablo Hernández.\n• None Jamie Shackleton (Leeds United) wins a free kick on the right wing.\n• None Attempt blocked. Max Watters (Crawley Town) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Tom Nichols. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None All the goals and highlights from a huge Saturday of third-round matches are", "A 78-year-old French woman received the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in France\n\nA global race is on to vaccinate people against Covid-19 - and with infections soaring in Europe many have complained that the roll-out is too slow in the EU.\n\nMember states decide individually who to vaccinate, when and where, but the EU is coordinating strategy and buying vaccines in bulk. On Friday, the EU Commission agreed to buy an extra 300 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine - that would give the EU nearly half of the firm's global output for 2021.\n\nBBC reporters in seven European capitals explain how the vaccinations are going on their patch.\n\nIn an election year, the vaccine has become a political battleground, writes Jenny Hill, in Berlin.\n\nThe fact it was German scientists who developed the first effective Covid vaccine has been the source of great national pride. And, by and large, Germans appear to be reasonably comfortable with the idea of immunisation.\n\nA recent survey found 65% were prepared to have the vaccine. Other research indicates that less than a quarter of those surveyed would not. But politically - and perhaps unsurprisingly, given this is an election year - Germany's vaccination programme has become a battleground.\n\nVaccinations began here just under two weeks ago and prioritise the over 80s and care home workers. By Thursday evening, more than 477,000 first doses had been administered.\n\nGermany's share of the EU order amounts to 56 million doses. So far, 1.3 million doses have been delivered.\n\nBut some of the hundreds of specially prepared vaccination centres are still not in use and even the government has admitted there simply isn't enough to go around. Angela Merkel and her health minister Jens Spahn have been accused of failing to secure enough doses.\n\nMuch of the criticism has come from Mrs Merkel's own coalition partners but some within the scientific community have echoed their concerns - that Germany put European interests above its own by insisting on a joint EU procurement process. The scientists who developed the vaccine have said publicly that the EU originally turned down an offer for a further order.\n\nGermany's share of the EU order amounts to 56 million doses. So far, 1.3 million doses have been delivered and it's thought that by the end of the month a further 2.68 million will have followed.\n\nMr Spahn, whose assured performance through the pandemic led some to wonder whether he might be a potential successor to Mrs Merkel, has blamed the shortage on the inability of the manufacturers of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to meet global demand.\n\nGermany has now ordered an extra 30 million doses and, following the recent European approval of the Moderna vaccine, expects to start rolling that out next week. The government is sticking to its pledge that the vaccination programme will be complete by the end of the summer.\n\nThe Czech prime minister has hit out at apparent delays in distributing the vaccine, writes Rob Cameron, in Prague.\n\nThe Czech vaccination effort began on 27 December, when the prime minister, Andrej Babis, became the first person in the country to receive the jab. Mr Babis, who is 66, had previously questioned whether he would be eligible, as he'd had his spleen removed as a teenager.\n\nBut the country's programme has got off to a sluggish start. Mr Babis - a billionaire businessman who has been dogged by both European and Czech investigations into alleged misuse of EU funds - has lost no time venting his (figurative) spleen at the European Commission over the delay. \"We believed when we contributed €12m to the European fund in November that we'd receive the vaccine,\" he told a newspaper this week.\n\nThe health minister conceded this week that immunising the higher-risk groups will take months.\n\nThe country has received 30,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. So far, it has managed to administer it to 19,918 people. The government says it is ready to roll out the jab en masse as soon as supplies arrive from the manufacturers.\n\nIt has also published a strategy, which envisages a three-stage process. The first will see targeted vaccination of high-risk groups. This will gradually give way to mass vaccination in 31 centres, using an online reservation system that will be open to all from 1 February. And the final stage will see the country's GPs deployed, hopefully to administer the Oxford-AstraZeneca and other jabs, which unlike the previous two can be stored and transported at fridge temperature.\n\nHowever, the timing in the original strategy document now appears optimistic. The health minister conceded this week that immunising the higher-risk groups - all health and social care staff, teachers, everyone over 65, all those with serious health conditions - will take months. GPs may not begin vaccinating young, healthy members of society until late spring, or summer.\n\nA sluggish start is being blamed on bureaucracy and vaccine scepticism, writes Hugh Schofield, in Paris.\n\nFrance's boast of a big, effective state apparatus has been badly exposed by the sluggish start to the Covid vaccination programme. After the first week, when neighbouring Germany had inoculated around 250,000 people, France was on a mere 530. By Friday, the figure had gone up to 45,500 - still so small as to be statistically meaningless.\n\nSo why has it taken so long for France to put the plan into action? It is not as if the authorities did not have time to prepare. And it is certainly not a question of a lack of vaccine. In fact, more than a million Pfizer doses are already in cold storage, waiting to be used.\n\nPolls suggest as many as 58% of the public do not want to be given the jab.\n\nThe primary reason for the delay seems to be the cumbersome, over-centralised nature of France's health bureaucracy. A 45-page dossier of instructions issued by the ministry in Paris had to be read and understood by staff at old people's homes.\n\nEach recipient then had to give informed consent in a consultation with a doctor, held no less than five days before injection. The lengthy procedure is in theory to save lives - those of patients who might have an adverse reaction. But as the critics have been arguing, delay in inoculating the population is also costing lives.\n\nAnother problem in France is the high level of scepticism towards vaccination - product of a more general suspicion of government. Polls suggest as many as 58% of the public do not want to be given the jab. The effect - critics say - has been to make the government unduly cautious. When urgency was required, the authorities were reluctant to move fast for fear of galvanising the anti-vaxxers.\n\nAfter President Emmanuel Macron communicated his anger at the delays at the weekend, the pace is picking up. The procedure for consent is being simplified. By the end of January, the plan is to have 500-600 vaccination centres open across the country - either in hospitals or other big public buildings.\n\nPolitically a lot is at stake. The government has already come under fire for failings in providing masks and tests. With opposition voices calling the vaccine delay a \"state scandal\", President Macron needs a roll-out that is fast and problem-free.\n\nNational pride accelerated Russia's rollout, but one man is conspicuously absent from the list of people vaccinated, writes Sarah Rainsford, in Moscow.\n\nRussia registered its main Covid vaccine for domestic use way back in August, before mass safety and efficacy trials had even begun. In December, with those trials still underway, it began rolling out Sputnik V to the public ahead of mass vaccination launches everywhere else in Europe. The rush was driven by national pride as well as medical necessity.\n\nSputnik was initially offered to front line health and education workers but early take-up of the two-dose vaccination was slow and the list of those eligible soon expanded.\n\nA poll by the Levada Centre in late December showed only 38% of respondents were willing to get the jab: wary of domestic healthcare and medicines, Russians were sceptical of bold early claims made for the vaccine and nervous about possible adverse reactions. Even so, and despite similar delays scaling-up production as in other countries, Sputnik's backers announced this week that more than a million people had been vaccinated.\n\nRussia began rolling out its Sputnik V vaccine in December\n\nBut one man still conspicuously absent from the list of the vaccinated is Vladimir Putin, despite the Kremlin saying he will - eventually - get the jab. In the meantime, those who meet him in person are obliged to test for Covid first and even quarantine. The president may need to lead by example, though. Mr Putin has said repeatedly that protecting the economy is his priority so he's banking on mass vaccination to avoid a return to national lockdown.\n\nRussia has built giant, temporary hospitals since the start of the pandemic and the health minister said this week that 25% of Covid beds remain free. There's also been a fall in the number of new daily cases reported - around 25,000 for the past 5 days. But that's not down to the vaccine yet. The country is nearing the end of a 10-day New Year holiday period and the number of Covid tests has also dropped.\n\nAs infection rates grow in a country praised by many for its no-lockdown approach, a successful vaccine programme is crucial writes Maddy Savage, in Stockholm.\n\nAlmost two weeks since 91-year-old care home resident Gun-Britt Johnsson became the first Swede to get the initial dose of a Pfizer jab, there is still no official tally of how many others have received the vaccination.\n\nThe Public Health Agency of Sweden says it's in the process of compiling data from the country's 21 regional health authorities tasked with vaccinating the entire adult population - around eight million people - by 26 June. The date isn't arbitrary, it's the biggest public holiday weekend of the year, when Swedes traditionally hold Midsummer celebrations. Karin Tegmark, a senior manager at the agency, says the date remains \"feasible\". But she says it depends on the delivery of vaccines to the country.\n\nAfter months of high trust levels in the country's no-lockdown approach, support for the health agency has dwindled.\n\nAlongside 4.5 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, Sweden has ordered 3.6 million jabs from Moderna, the first of which are expected to arrive next week. The country also plans to roll-out the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as soon as possible after it is approved by the EU - ideally by February.\n\nSwedes initially appeared lukewarm to the idea of taking a speedily-developed coronavirus vaccine, although a poll at the end of December found 71% would take one. A key driver of the initial scepticism is thought to be the failure of a voluntary mass vaccination programme for swine flu in 2009. Hundreds of Swedish children and young adults under 30 developed the sleeping disorder narcolepsy, which was found to be a side effect of the Pandemrix vaccine.\n\nA successful vaccination programme will be crucial, not least because it comes at a time when Swedish authorities are struggling to maintain public confidence. After months of high trust levels in the country's no-lockdown approach, support for the health agency has dwindled as Sweden has struggled with the second wave of coronavirus.\n\nMeanwhile, several high profile officials have faced heavy criticism for breaching their own recommendations - including the head of the civil contingencies agency (pictured), who resigned after spending Christmas with his daughter in the Canary Islands.\n\nA new government in Belgium seems unified on the vaccine rollout - for now at least, writes Nick Beake, in Brussels.\n\nIt seemed fitting that the first person in Belgium to receive a Covid jab lives in the place where the world's first approved Covid vaccine is being produced. Jos Hermans, a 96-year-old from the municipality of Puurs, was given the injection on 28 December, in his care home. A further 700 elderly residents were also administered a dose in what was a small, initial trial.\n\nThe mass vaccination programme in Belgium began on 5 January, but has been criticised for starting slowly. Federal Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke had promised in November that the rollout would be \"seamless and fast\", tweeting: \"If that does not work, shoot me.\"\n\nThe first phase looks to vaccinate up to 200,000 nursing home residents by the end of this month, or early February. Healthcare professionals will be next in line and the aim was for the whole population to be inoculated by the end of September.\n\nJos Hermans, a 96-year-old from Puurs, was given the injection on 28 December\n\nYou may think the country would be at an advantage being the epicentre of the Pfizer-BioNTech production. While this clearly helps with distribution, Belgium cannot receive more doses - relative to its population - than other EU countries under strict Commission rules. That didn't stop the minister-president of the Flanders region, who admitted this week that he had contacted Pfizer directly in the hope of procuring more doses, only to be rebuffed.\n\nAfter getting a guarantee from Pfizer over supply of the jab, the federal Belgian authorities have adapted their strategy: they now propose giving as many available doses to as many people as they can - and no longer reserving vials for patients' second dose, given three weeks after the first. In general, the federal government, rather than the European Commission has faced any criticism for a delay and has defended its \"careful\" approach.\n\nAnd there appears to be an interesting regional or cultural discrepancy when it comes to whether people are willing to take the vaccine. Of the Flemish population interviewed in a poll, half have said they wanted the vaccine as soon as possible. Among French speakers - it was 20% fewer, which chimes with the deeper scepticism over the border in France.\n\nIn a country where politics are notoriously complicated and fractious - they've only recently agreed a government, after a 500-day vacuum - the Federal Coalition appears unified on its Covid vaccine strategy. For now, at least.\n\nRegional variances and political rows have marked the beginning of Spain's vaccination programme writes Guy Hedgecoe, in Madrid.\n\nSpain started administering the vaccine on 27 December. So far, 743,925 doses have been distributed to regional administrations, with 277,976 people vaccinated, according to the health ministry. The objective of the coalition government is to immunise 2.3 million people within 12 weeks. Priority is being given to elderly residents of care homes, those who look after them, and healthcare personnel.\n\nEach of the country's 17 regions has a high degree of control over healthcare and should receive the number of doses that corresponds to their populations. However, already there has been substantial geographical disparity.\n\nGovernment data showed, for example, that while the northern region of Asturias had used 55% of the doses it had received by 3 January, the Madrid region had only administered 5% by the same date. Some regions are holding back doses to administer a second follow-up jab to the same person in several weeks' time, and some have been vaccinating on national holidays while others have not.\n\nThe pandemic has been the cause of constant political conflict, with the right-wing opposition accusing the leftist government of incompetence.\n\nAlthough vaccination is voluntary, the government has said it is making a register of those who do not wish to be inoculated. That initiative has generated controversy, although the government has insisted the register will merely seek to clarify why people refuse the vaccination.\n\nHowever, the pandemic has been the cause of constant political conflict, with the right-wing opposition accusing the leftist government of Pedro Sánchez of incompetence, lack of transparency and using coronavirus to accumulate power.\n\nThe arrival of a vaccine has not stopped the rancour. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the conservative Popular Party (PP) president of Galicia, warned the number of doses being distributed to each region was being dictated by \"political affiliations or parliamentary needs\", a claim the central government has rejected.", "Lockdowns have worked before, but can we expect the new one to do the same?\n\nIt feels like we are back in March or April last year, when the strict controls on all our lives led to a fairly quick decline in levels of coronavirus.\n\nBut one of the crucial differences this time is the new variant, which is thought to spread between 50 and 70% faster than previous forms of the virus.\n\nExperts warn there are now no guarantees that lockdown will be enough to bring the variant under control.\n\n\"It still would not have been easy, but it would have been a much easier situation if it had not been for the new variant,\" Prof Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, told Inside Health.\n\n\"That really pushes the bounds of our ability to control the spread of the virus, even with measures that were previously relatively quite effective.\"\n\nThe coronavirus spreads when we come into contact with each other so moving classrooms online, telling people to stay at home and closing shops breaks many of those opportunities for human contact.\n\nIf we consider the R number - the average number of people each infected person passes the virus on to - it was about 3.0 in the run up to the first lockdown and anything above 1.0 means cases are climbing.\n\nR fell to 0.6 during the first lockdown.\n\nThen every 1,000 infected people passed the virus on to 600 others, who passed it on to 360 others and so on.\n\nBut if the new variant is 50% more transmissible then the R number, in the same lockdown conditions, would be about 0.9.\n\nThen 1,000 infected people would pass the virus onto 900 others, then 810 and so on.\n\nAs you can see this leads to far slower decline.\n\nAnd that assumes lockdown can get R down to 0.9 in areas where the new variant has become the most common form of the virus.\n\nIf, as some studies suggest, the variant is about 70% more transmissible then R may stay above 1.0 and cases may not fall at all.\n\n\"We'd at best flatten the curve, keep numbers at a roughly constant level, and that's frankly why there is so much emphasis on getting vaccine into people's arms as quickly as possible,\" said Prof Ferguson.\n\nIt is hard to lock down even harder as there are some parts of society - hospitals, supermarkets - that need to be kept open.\n\nWhat happens to the number of cases over the coming weeks will be closely monitored. If this lockdown is less effective then we will have to live with it for longer.\n\nThere have been some encouraging signs over the Christmas break, which was a bit like a lockdown due to school holidays and other restrictions.\n\n\"We are in a very difficult situation here, but my initial assessment of the last few days is that the rate is slowing which is good news,\" Prof John Edmunds, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the BBC.\n\nHe added: \"It looks likes those restrictions should be sufficient to stop the increase, whether they will be sufficient to bring cases down sufficiently we are yet to see.\"\n\nEventually the vaccine will give people immunity so we do not need the same controls on our lives.\n\nNow more than ever this is a race between the virus and the vaccine.", "Last updated on .From the section FA Cup\n\nPremier League rivals Manchester United and Liverpool will meet at Old Trafford in the fourth round of the FA Cup later this month.\n\nNon-league Chorley will host Premier League Wolverhampton Wanderers after beating a depleted Derby County in the third round.\n\nLeague Two Cheltenham Town are set to welcome Pep Guardiola's Manchester City to Whaddon Road.\n\nThe fourth-round ties will be played the weekend of 23-24 January.\n\nCrawley Town, who celebrated a famous 3-0 win over Leeds United on Sunday, will travel to Championship side Bournemouth in the next round.\n\nJose Mourinho's Tottenham will face Wycombe Wanderers at Adams Park, while Fulham take on Burnley in an all-Premier League tie.\n\nChorley would face 14-time winners Arsenal in the fifth round - if the National League North side overcome Wolves and the Gunners beat Southampton.\n\nDavid Moyes could return to former club Manchester United in the last 16 if West Ham beat League One Doncaster Rovers and United seal victory over Liverpool in the fourth round.\n\nThe fifth-round ties will be played 9-11 February.\n• None Watch all the goals and highlights from the FA Cup third round\n• None Goals, highlights and knockouts. All the action from Sunday's third-round ties are", "Seven new mass vaccination centres have opened up across England to help deliver the Coronavirus vaccine, as the Prime Minister says we are facing a \"perilous moment\" in the fight against the virus.\n\nThe Centre of Life in Newcastle is home to one of them, with others in Bristol, Epsom, London, Manchester, Stevenage and Birmingham.\n\nInitially they will be used to vaccinate the over 80's, alongside NHS staff and health and social care workers. It's part of a drive that the government hopes will see 15 million people vaccinated against the virus by mid-February.", "Caroline Rice couldn't afford the ink to print off her child's maths homework\n\nThere are few benefits from lockdown, but one often touted is that people are managing to save a little money: lower transport costs, fewer shop-bought office lunches, cheaper childcare costs and no foreign holidays.\n\nSingle mum Caroline Rice gives a wry smile when asked if she's managed to squirrel away extra cash over the past few months during pandemic restrictions.\n\n\"My spending is up,\" she says. \"The heating costs are higher because it's very cold. I'm having to shop locally because of lockdown, where the prices are slightly higher. The nearest Asda is 12 miles away.\"\n\nThe small savings on little luxuries that many people are making - fewer coffees or restaurant meals - were never an option for her in the first place.\n\nHer meagre finances meant the registered child minder, who lives in rural County Fermanagh, was already living week-to-week. Now it seems like day-to-day, she says.\n\n\"There's a mental stress, fatigue, in having to check the bank balance every day to see how much I'm down,\" she says. \"My child and I haven't bought any clothes in almost a year.\"\n\nShe's having to home-school her child. Many people wouldn't think twice about printing off their child's maths homework project. Caroline had to write it out by hand because they could not afford the ink.\n\nAnd she is not alone. A new report on the finances of low-income families during the pandemic says they are twice as likely to have increased their spending.\n\nIt says extra costs for food, energy and remote learning equipment have piled financial pressure on the poor.\n\nThe study - Pandemic Pressures - was a collaboration between the Resolution Foundation and the Nuffield Foundation-funded Covid Realities research project at the University of York.\n\nDr Ruth Patrick, a social policy lecturer at the University of York, says talk of saving money during the pandemic is \"worlds away\" from the experiences of many low-income parents and carers.\n\n\"Parents have found their spending increases, as some of the usual strategies they use to get by on a low income - shopping around for the best deal, going to families and friends for a meal when the cupboards are empty - have become suddenly impossible,\" she said.\n\nFor Shirley Widdop, an increase in food costs has been one of the biggest issues. The disabled single parent, who lives in Keighley, now has to shield for health reasons. That means using online deliveries a lot.\n\nShe says: \"There's a minimum basket size [with online orders]. You often have to bulk buy in case there's a problem getting delivery slots.\"\n\nShirley Widdop has not saved on life's little luxuries - because she could not afford them in the first place\n\nWhen not shielding, Shirley would seek out food in her supermarket's reduced-price section. \"There used to be just a couple of people. Now there are crowds,\" she says. \"Not everyone has easy access to the internet. And not everyone has a functioning bus service.\"\n\nThe report notes that the pandemic has been marked by a huge reduction in overall spending, with entertainment and social activities restricted by lockdown.\n\nHigher-income households have been the main beneficiaries of this \"enforced saving\", as they spend 40% more of their income on recreation and leisure activities than the poorest fifth of households.\n\nThe report says that in contrast to this overall picture, the pandemic has in many cases made it more expensive to live on a low income with children.\n\nMore than one in three (36%) low-income households with children have increased their spending during the pandemic so far, compared with about one in six (18%) who have reduced their spending.\n\nAmong high-income households without children, 13% have increased their spending, compared with 40% who have reduced it.\n\nUse of food banks has increased significantly during the pandemic\n\nThe report highlights three main reasons for these extra pressures:\n\nIt should also be noted, the report says, that these extra spending pressures are squeezing living standards that had stagnated even before the pandemic.\n\nTo ease the burden, the report says the government should be seeking to maintain the £20-a-week rise in Universal Credit (UC) into next year. Otherwise, six million households face having their incomes cut by more than £1,000.\n\nMike Brewer, chief economist at the Resolution Foundation, said: \"The pandemic has forced society as a whole to spend less and save more. But these broad spending patterns don't hold true for everyone.\n\n\"The extra cost of feeding, schooling and entertaining children 24/7 means that, for many families, lockdowns have made life more expensive to live on a low income.\"\n\nHowever, a government spokesperson said measures had been put in place to \"ensure that nobody is left behind\", including extra welfare payments, job protection safeguards, the £170m Covid Winter Grant Scheme, and equipment for home-schooling.\n\n\"We are committed to supporting the lowest-paid families through the pandemic and beyond,\" the spokesperson said.\n\nSometimes the overall economic figures can not capture the actual on-the-ground financial reality.\n\nThe pandemic lockdowns have led to a \"K-shaped\" recovery. Across the entire economy, staying at home has meant less capacity to spend on going out and a surge in savings. But the economic picture is both up and down at the same time, depending on which household.\n\nThe average picture is composed of wealthier people saving a huge amount and poorer families more squeezed than ever. This report shows how children staying at home have increased food and energy bills. The cost of buying food has increased with fewer store promotions and a requirement to use more expensive local shops. The furlough scheme has kept people paid, but not necessarily on full pay.\n\nSo the chancellor hopes that the vaccine rollout could unleash pent up demand in the form of huge levels of savings from the already well-off. And yet at the same time, will continue to face pressure over extending support - for example, the £20-a-week increase to universal credit.", "A Sex and the City revival is heading to the small screen, more than 20 years after the hit series made its debut.\n\nThe original HBO show followed the lives of four New York women negotiating work and relationships in the late 90s and early 2000s.\n\nBut only three of the fab four are returning for the new TV series - Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis.\n\nKim Cattrall, who played the popular character Samantha, will not feature.\n\nThe US network did not say why Cattrall wasn't cast in the revival, titled And Just Like That - a nod to one of the show's original catchphrases.\n\nHowever, Cattrall has had a strained relationship with the show in recent years, and in particular with her former co-star Parker.\n\nThe new series will consist of 10 half-hour episodes. Production will begin in late spring.\n\nThe trailer for the HBO Max show gives nothing away; It features numerous shots of New York, but none of the characters is seen on screen.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Kristin Davis This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n\"I grew up with these characters, and I can't wait to see how their story has evolved in this new chapter, with the honesty, poignancy, humour and the beloved city that has always defined them,\" Sarah Aubrey, head of original content at HBO Max, said in a statement.\n\nThe original Sex and the City series, created by Darren Star, was based on Candace Bushnell's 1997 book of the same name. It premiered on HBO in 1998 and ran for six seasons until 2004.\n\nThe show inspired two films, Sex and the City in 2008 and Sex and the City 2 in 2010. A prequel series titled The Carrie Diaries, starring Anna Sophia Robb, aired on The CW in 2013/14.\n\nStar also created Netflix show Emily in Paris, and many have drawn inevitable comparisons between that show and SATC.\n\nWhen it first burst on to our TV screens, Sex and the City was seen as revolutionary - four women talking openly about their love and sex lives, not to mention the sex scenes themselves.\n\nThe first series of SATC began filming in 1998\n\nCosmopolitans and rabbit vibrators were trending before trending was a thing.\n\nWhile it was praised by many for its liberating female-led content, it also attracted criticism from some quarters who felt Carrie's ongoing pursuit of Mr Big (Christopher Noth) was not exactly an advert for female independence.\n\nIt was also accused of trivialising issues such as sexual harassment and for its lack of diversity, a criticism levelled at many older shows including Friends.\n\nFashion was a hugely influential part of the series - the tutu worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in the opening credits, teamed with a fur coat and heels, was described as \"an ensemble rich in cultural resonance\".\n\nAnd Manolo Blahnik could never have dreamed of attracting so much publicity for his designer footwear.\n\nIt was a ratings smash, with the hotly anticipated finale in 2004 drawing an audience of 10.6 million viewers in the US.\n\nIn the UK, the final episode was watched by 4.1m on Channel 4.\n\nThe series was predictably most popular in the 18-34 age group.\n\nMany SATC fans will be disappointed that larger-than-life favourite Samantha Jones - played by Kim Cattrall - will not be returning for the sequel series.\n\nSamantha was Sex and the City's most outlandish character and arguably, the star of the show.\n\nWhile Miranda was juggling a career and motherhood, Charlotte was focused on marriage and motherhood and Carrie poured her neuroses into her New York Star column, Samantha was the character perhaps harder to relate to but someone we all wanted to be (at least a little).\n\nShe was fiercely independent and while caring for her friends, she always put her own needs before men.\n\nBut news Cattrall won't reprise the role in And Just Like That comes as no surprise after years of feud rumours which were later confirmed by the British-born Canadian actress.\n\nIn 2017, Cattrall told Piers Morgan she had \"never been friends\" with her co-stars.\n\nShe said there was a \"toxic relationship\" and ruled out appearing in a third Sex and the City movie, denying that her decision was down to pay or \"diva\" demands.\n\nCattrall commented that former co-star Parker \"could have been nicer\" about the situation.\n\nA different actress could play Samantha in the future, she suggested.\n\n\"I played it past the finish line and then some and I loved it and another actress should play it,\" she said. \"Maybe they could make it an African-American Samantha Jones or a Hispanic Samantha Jones, or bring in another character.\"\n\nShe later criticised Parker for being \"cruel\" after she sent condolences following the death of Cattrall's brother.\n\nIn an interview with People magazine shortly afterwards, SJP acknowledged Cattrall \"said things that were really hurtful about me\".\n\nParker said: \"So there was no fight; it was completely fabricated, because I actually never responded.\"\n\nOn Monday, Parker replied on Instagram to someone posting that SJP \"didn't tag Samantha Jones\" into her post announcing the new series.\n\n\"I don't dislike her. I've never said that. Never would. Samantha isn't part of this story. But she will always be part of us. No matter where we are or what we do. x.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Flat owners applying to a fund to help pay to remove flammable building cladding will be told not to talk to the press without government approval.\n\nA draft agreement, uncovered by the Sunday Times, says that even where there is \"overwhelming public interest\" in speaking to journalists, the government must be told first.\n\nThe government said the wording was \"standard\".\n\nIt set up a £1.6bn fund last year to repair the most dangerous buildings.\n\nBut it warned that the fund might not cover all the costs of removing the cladding.\n\nThe clause might affect building owners and professional managing agents but also residents who manage their building.\n\nSome types of the covering, often added to newer blocks of flats, have been proven to be a fire hazard.\n\nAfter the 2017 Grenfell fire, the government pledged that safe alternatives to dangerous cladding would be provided on all buildings in England taller than 18m.\n\nIt set up the £1.6bn fund to help foot the costs.\n\nThe agreement, between the building owner or leaseholder and the government, says: \"The Applicant shall not make any communication to the press or any journalist or broadcaster regarding the Project or the Agreement (or the performance of it by any Party) without the prior written approval of Homes England and [the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government ]\" and its press offices.\n\nIt says an exception can be made \"where such disclosure is in the overwhelming public interest (in which case disclosure will not be made without first allowing Homes England and MHCLG to make representations on such proposed disclosure).\"\n\nThe UK Cladding Action Group tweeted that it was \"clearly a matter of public interest\" that these issues were aired in public.\n\n\"No department should be hiding behind non-disclosure agreements to stop scrutiny of their actions,\" the group said.\n\nAnother campaign group, Manchester Cladiators, said the existence of the \"gagging clause\" was \"shocking but not necessarily that surprising\".\n\nSpokesperson Rebecca Fairclough said residents would feel \"intimidated\" by it, adding: \"We ask the government to remove this unfair clause immediately and focus on the priority of solving this institutional failure, which still exists and is only growing over three and a half years after the Grenfell tragedy.\"\n\nThe government insists that the wording in the agreement, under the heading \"Marketing material\", is there to ensure applicants come to the government first.\n\n\"The terms set out are standard in commercial agreements and are not specific to this fund - to suggest otherwise is misleading and inaccurate,\" the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) said in a statement.\n\n\"We want a constructive working relationship with building owners who apply to the fund and applicants are asked to work with the department on public communications relating to the project.\"", "Small business owner Jon Wilding is facing a dilemma: his livelihood is on hold because of Covid restrictions and he has a big tax bill to settle.\n\nIf his company supplying marquees to outdoor events goes bust, the taxman will get paid, but his reputation as a businessman will be ruined forever.\n\n\"If I shut the business down, I then become director of a business that's gone bankrupt, at which stage getting loans in the future becomes nigh-on impossible,\" he told the BBC.\n\n\"I feel like I'm one of those people who's been left out. We don't need a lot to keep going,\" said Mr Wilding, of Cannock in the West Midlands.\n\n\"The government say their support system is the best in the world, we've done furlough, this that and whatever, but it's not getting to all the people that need it.\"\n\nApart from the Bounce Back Loan scheme, his two-person business has received no government assistance.\n\nHis colleague was furloughed in March last year, but because Mr Wilding is the director, he is not allowed to furlough himself.\n\nThe Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) is particularly concerned about people like Mr Wilding.\n\nIt says directors of small companies, who pay themselves in dividends rather than drawing a salary, are not receiving any help from the government.\n\nThe FSB says somewhere between 700,000 and 1.1 million people fall into this category.\n\nIt has put forward ideas to help some of those firms, which it hopes ministers will adopt.\n\nThe FSB's proposed Directors Income Support Scheme would pay them grants of up to £7,500 to cover three months of lost trading profits. It would be limited to those who earn less than £50,000 a year.\n\n\"Company directors, the newly self-employed, those in supply chains and those without commercial premises are still being left out in the cold,\" said FSB national chairman Mike Cherry.\n\nWithout further government help to cope with the effects of the pandemic, a record 250,000 small businesses could be lost in the next 12 months, the FSB said.\n\n\"The development of business support measures has not kept pace with intensifying restrictions,\" Mr Cherry added.\n\n\"As a result, we risk losing hundreds of thousands of great, ultimately viable small businesses this year, at huge cost to local communities and individual livelihoods.\"\n\nThe Federation of Small Businesses said the government had met the latest national lockdown \"with a whimper\"\n\nThe FSB based its prediction on a survey of 1,400 small firms, 5% of which said they expected to close this year.\n\nIf those figures were replicated across the country, some 250,000 of the UK's 5.9 million small firms could disappear, it said.\n\nMr Cherry said the government had met the latest national lockdown \"with a whimper\" and called for help that went beyond the retail, leisure and hospitality businesses.\n\nThe FSB said it had submitted its support scheme proposals to the Treasury and was expecting a decision this month.\n\nThe Treasury said nothing was planned at present, but added: \"Our support schemes are designed to get help to those who need it most whilst protecting the taxpayer from fraud, but of course we keep everything under review and are always open to further ideas.\"", "But it delivered a fascinating look behind the scenes at two cutting-edge ways the firm is creating video content.\n\nThe first involved the use of a giant screen which is matched with movement-sensors on a camera to create a fake backdrop that shifts in turn with the lens.\n\nA similar technique was pioneered by Industrial Light & Magic and used in the Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian, but this opens the door to other filmmakers.\n\nThe screens involved use Sony's Crystal LED technology, which the firm first unveiled at CES in 2012, but has been unable to bring low down enough in price to take mainstream.\n\nIn effect, this is its version of micro-LED tech, using millions of tiny light emitting diodes (LEDs) to match the number of pixels. The result is much greater brightness and contrast than a normal LCD or OLED display would be capable of.\n\nThe background footage moves in time with the camera to aid the illusion Image caption: The background footage moves in time with the camera to aid the illusion\n\nUntil now, the firm has marketed the tech at building owners wanting the ultimate video walls. But this has the potential to help film and advert-makers place actors within environments they can see, rather than relying on greenscreen effects.\n\nThe second innovation was the creation of an \"immersive reality\" performance, which uses body sensors to create a highly-detailed animated version of an artist.\n\nIt was demoed by the singer-songwriter Madison Beer.\n\nMotion capture has been used for years to add special effects to characters in movies and to place real-world actors into video games.\n\nBut the aim here is to create a lifelike representation of a performer on stage at a concert.\n\nThe footage shown didn't quite escape the \"uncanny valley\" - there's still some way to go before we can't tell the difference between a real person and even a highly detailed avatar.\n\nBut it's easy to imagine that the tech being more impressive when viewed in virtual reality, where users can move about and choose their view.\n\nThe computer-generated image looks less real the closer you get to the performer Image caption: The computer-generated image looks less real the closer you get to the performer\n\nUntil now, VR apps of concerts have either offered a pick of different static camera locations or involved much lower-resolution characters.\n\nWith Covid meaning it's impossible for artists to tour, this second-best experience could be very timely when it's offered to PlayStation VR headsets and other devices soon.", "Many hospitals are still under intense pressure with the increasing number of Covid patients arriving.\n\nDoctors say they are seeing more younger patients in their thirties and forties compared to the first wave.\n\nThe overall pattern of those at risk of becoming seriously ill or dying has not changed significantly and the older someone is, the greater their risk from Covid-19 - particularly those over the age of 65.\n\nThe BBC's Health Editor Hugh Pym was given access to film at Croydon University Hospital in South London.", "Boris Johnson - pictured here in 2013 - has long been a fan of cycling\n\nBoris Johnson has been criticised for travelling seven miles from Downing Street to go cycling during lockdown.\n\nThe Evening Standard reported the prime minister had been spotted in the Olympic Park in East London on Sunday.\n\nGovernment advice allows people to exercise outside, but says you should not travel outside your local area.\n\nA No 10 spokesman would not confirm if Mr Johnson had been driven to the park or cycled there, but said the PM had complied with Covid-19 guidelines.\n\nLabour's Andy Slaughter said: \"Once again it is do as I say, not as I do, from the prime minister.\"\n\nThe Hammersmith MP added: \"London has some of the highest infection rates in the country. Boris Johnson should be leading by example.\"\n\nIn response to the criticism, a Downing Street source told the BBC: \"The PM has exercised within the Covid rules and any suggestion to the contrary is wrong.\"\n\nA woman told the PA news agency she had seen the prime minister in the park: \"He was leisurely cycling with another guy with a beanie hat and chatting, while around four security guys, possibly more, cycled behind them.\n\n\"Considering the current situation with Covid I was shocked to see him cycling around looking so care-free.\n\n\"Also, considering he's advising everyone to stay at home and not leave their area, shouldn't he stay in Westminster and not travel to other boroughs?\"\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock was asked at Monday's Downing Street press conference whether travelling seven miles for a cycle ride was within the rules.\n\nMr Hancock said: \"It is OK, if you went for a long walk and ended up seven miles from home, that is OK, but you should stay local.\n\n\"It is OK to go for a long walk or a cycle ride or to exercise, but stay local.\"\n\nThe issue of travelling for exercise was highlighted at the weekend after two women said they were surrounded by police and fine £200 after driving five miles from home to take a walk.\n\nDerbyshire Police have now dropped the fine and apologised to the women, but the incident led to a debate over the guidance.\n\nGovernment advice for England says you can leave your home to exercise, but adds: \"This should be limited to once per day, and you should not travel outside your local area.\"\n\nThe guidance adds: \"Stay local means stay in the village, town, or part of the city where you live.\"\n\nIn Scotland, the advice is more precise, saying exercise can be taken if it \"starts and finishes at the same place, which can be up to five miles from the boundary of your local authority area\".\n\nFormer Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, who represents a constituency in the Lake District, has written to the PM calling for clearer guidance on exercise similar to that in Scotland.\n\nHe wrote: \"On the one hand, our local police force here in Cumbria are reporting that people... have travelled hundreds of miles to take their exercise in the Lake District.\n\n\"And on the other hand, I have constituents writing to me, worried whether they will be punished for driving five minutes up the road to go for a walk in their local park.\"\n\nMr Farron added: \"We need a solution that clearly deters people from making lengthy trips and potentially spreading the virus, but also that doesn't discourage people from keeping fit and healthy.\"", "Douglas Ross: 'All of Scottish football should not be affected by the actions of one club'\n\nScottish Conservatives leader Douglas Ross tells viewers he thinks politics should be put aside and the UK and Scottish governments should work together to get the vaccinations out as quickly as possible. He is reluctant, as an assistant referee, to comment on the Celtic Dubai situation, but he does say that people have to look at the message it sends out. He points out that for many people at home alone at the moment, football is something they look forward to and \"we don't want to see the whole of Scottish football affected by the actions of one club\". He adds that financial support should be made available to clubs in the Scottish lower leagues & Scottish Cup who have had their games suspended for three weeks.", "Terry Irving, 83, from Dumfries, was given the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on Monday\n\nEveryone aged 80 or over in Scotland will be given the Covid vaccine by February, the health secretary has said.\n\nJeane Freeman also said care home staff and residents, as well as front-line health and social care staff would be vaccinated in the next few weeks.\n\nAs of Sunday, 163,377 Scots had been given a first dose of vaccine.\n\nMs Freeman told BBC Scotland that just under 560,000 people will have been vaccinated by the end of the month.\n\nThe Oxford vaccine will be available at more than 1,100 locations from Monday.\n\nScotland has been given an initial allocation of more than 500,000 doses to use in January.\n\nMs Freeman told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme: \"We intend that by the end of this month, the very beginning of February, we will have vaccinated all residents in care homes and staff, all front-line health and social care workers and all those aged 80 or over.\n\n\"So that's just under 560,000. We've already vaccinated about 70% of people in care homes and about half of the health and social care workforce.\"\n\nShe said the Scottish government was on course to match the UK government's commitment to offer a vaccine jab to everyone in the top four priority groups by the middle of February.\n\nThe health service will be able to vaccinate people as supplies of the jabs arrive, she said, with over-80s being contacted by their GPs.\n\nThe government has now started publishing vaccination figures on a daily basis, with 163,377 Scots having been given a first dose as of Sunday.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the health authorities in Scotland now had enough supplies to give jabs to all over-80s over the coming four weeks.\n\nShe said the aim was to get through the priority list as quickly as possible.\n\nThis had been expected to be complete by mid-May, but Ms Sturgeon said she was \"very, very hopeful we will be able to accelerate that to an earlier point\".\n\nA total of 1,664 people are in hospital being treated for Covid-19, the highest number since the pandemic began - with Ms Sturgeon saying the country was in a \"dangerous situation\".\n\nThe Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has already been administered in the Tayside, Lothian, Orkney and Highlands health board areas but this week will see it being used at vaccination centres across the whole country.\n\nRecent figures suggest a slight fall in the average positivity rates for Covid in many parts of Scotland, but pressures on the NHS have intensified.\n\nThe number of patients in hospital in with Covid rose to new highs at the weekend, and Sunday saw a sharp increase in the number of patients requiring treatment in intensive care.\n\nDeputy First Minister John Swinney said there were few signs that the threat was \"abating\" and that a tightening of restrictions could not be ruled out.\n\nThe majority of Scotland's schools are closed until at least February with pupils now learning from home as the new term begins this week..\n\nOnly vulnerable pupils and the children of key workers will receive face-to-face teaching.\n\nLocal authorities said schools were better prepared to roll out digital learning than they were during the first lockdown.\n\nBut one parents' group has raised concerns about \"equal and fair access to home learning\".", "The Prince of Wales is urging firms to back a more sustainable future and do more to protect the planet, as he marks 50 years of environmental campaigning.\n\nPrince Charles wants companies to join what he is calling \"Terra Carta\" - or Earth charter.\n\nThe charter is being launched alongside a fund run by the Natural Capital Investment Alliance.\n\nIt aims to mobilise $10 billion towards natural capital by 2022.\n\nTerra Carta will harness the \"irreplaceable power of nature\", the prince said in his virtual address to the One Planet Summit on Monday.\n\nHe hopes the new charter will help \"reunite people and planet\".\n\nHe said: \"I can only encourage, in particular, those in industry and finance to provide practical leadership to this common project, as only they are able to mobilise the innovation, scale and resources that are required to transform our global economy.\"\n\nIn his foreword to Terra Carta, the prince writes: \"If we consider the legacy of our generation, more than 800 years ago, Magna Carta inspired a belief in the fundamental rights and liberties of people.\n\n\"As we strive to imagine the next 800 years of human progress, the fundamental rights and value of nature must represent a step-change in our 'future of industry' and 'future of economy' approach.\"\n\nCharles has previously said that people thought he was \"completely dotty\" when he started talking about environmental issues in the 1970s.", "A number of positive cases have been identified among passengers who had flown into Glasgow from Dubai since the new year\n\nDubai has been added to Scotland's travel quarantine list with anyone coming from the country told to self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nThe rule, which came into effect at 04:00, will also apply retrospectively for passengers who have made the journey since 3 January.\n\nCeltic confirmed one of their players tested positive for the virus less than 48 hours after the squad returned from a training trip to Dubai on Friday.\n\nIt is not known if he was on the trip.\n\nThe Scottish government said clinicians and the local NHS health protection team were in contact with Celtic providing advice. It also confirmed that quarantine rules did not apply to sports people who had attended \"elite training\" abroad.\n\nHowever, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon last week questioned the purpose of Celtic's trip and whether they were following social-distancing rules after seeing photos from their Dubai base.\n\nShe warned that professional sport's privileges could be lost if protocols were not followed by all participants.\n\nThe government said the change was due to a number of positive cases being identified in passengers who had flown into Glasgow from Dubai since the new year.\n\nIt said the \"preventative action\" would help stem the rise in coronavirus cases.\n\nTransport Secretary Michael Matheson said: \"It is evident, both in Scotland and in countries across the world, that the virus continues to pose real risks to health and to life and we need to interrupt the rise in cases.\"\n\nHe added: \"Imposing quarantine requirements on those arriving in the UK is our first defence in managing the risk of imported cases from communities with high risks of transmission. That is why we have made the decision to remove Dubai from the country exemptions list.\n\n\"Whether or not an overseas destination has been designated for quarantine restrictions, our message remains clear that people should not currently be undertaking non-essential foreign travel.\n\n\"People need to stay at home to help suppress the virus, protect our NHS and save lives.\"\n\nJoanne Dooey, president of the Scottish Passenger Agents' Association (SPAA), said: \"Removing Dubai from the safe list is understandable. We believe that there has been a cluster of infections around Scots who travelled to Dubai over the Christmas and New Year period.\n\n\"Whilst we're keen to see a return to increased international travel, protecting the health of the whole country remains our key concern and we are supportive of this move.\"", "Morrisons will bar customers who refuse to wear face coverings from its shops amid rising coronavirus infections.\n\nFrom Monday, shoppers who refuse to wear face masks offered by staff will not be allowed inside, unless they are medically exempt.\n\nSainsbury's also said it would challenge those not wearing a mask or who were shopping in groups.\n\nThe announcements come amid concerns that social distancing measures are not being adhered to in supermarkets.\n\nVaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said the government is \"concerned\" shops are not enforcing rules strictly enough.\n\n\"Ultimately, the most important thing to do now is to make sure that actually enforcement - and of course the compliance with the rules - when people are going into supermarkets are being adhered to,\" Mr Zahawi told Sky News.\n\n\"We need to make sure people actually wear masks and follow the one-way system,\" he said.\n\nMorrisons said it had \"introduced and consistently maintained thorough and robust safety measures in all our stores\" since the start of the pandemic.\n\nBut it said: \"From today we are further strengthening our policy on masks.\"\n\nSecurity guards at the UK's fourth-biggest supermarket chain will be enforcing the new rules.\n\nMorrisons' chief executive, David Potts, said: \"Those who are offered a face covering and decline to wear one won't be allowed to shop at Morrisons unless they are medically exempt.\n\n\"Our store colleagues are working hard to feed you and your family, please be kind.\"\n\nFollowing Morrisons' announcement, Sainsbury's said that it was also putting trained security guards at the front of its stores to challenge shoppers who did not comply.\n\nChief executive Simon Roberts said: \"I've spent a lot of time in our stores reviewing the latest situation over the last few days and on behalf of all my colleagues, I am asking our customers to help us keep everyone safe.\n\n\"The vast majority of customers are shopping safely, but I have also seen some customers trying to shop without a mask and shopping in larger family groups.\n\n\"Please help us to keep all our colleagues and customers safe by always wearing a mask and by shopping alone. Everyone's care and consideration matters now more than ever.\"\n\nEarlier on Monday, Mr Zahawi stopped short of saying that supermarket staff should be responsible for enforcing rules on face masks.\n\nEnforcement of face coverings is the responsibility of the police, not retailers. Wearing face masks in supermarkets and shops is compulsory across the UK.\n\nIn England, the police can issue a £200 fine to someone breaking the face covering rules. In Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, a £60 fine can be imposed. Repeat offenders face bigger fines.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. How to wear your mask. Hint: it's not any of these three options\n\nHowever, retail industry body the British Retail Consortium said that, workers have faced an increase in incidents of violence and abuse when trying to encourage shoppers to put them on.\n\nAndrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the British Retail Consortium, added: \"Supermarkets continue to follow all safety guidance and customers should be reassured that supermarkets are Covid-secure and safe to visit during lockdown and beyond.\n\n\"Customers should play their part too by following in-store signage and being considerate to staff and fellow shoppers.\"\n\nUnder current lockdown restrictions across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, people must only leave home for essential reasons, such as buying food or medicine.\n\nIn a bid to contain the spread of coronavirus, supermarkets introduced social distancing measures during the UK's first nationwide lockdown last March. They included limits on the numbers of customers in the shops at any one time, protective plastic screens at tills and \"marshals\" to ensure shoppers were maintaining a two-metre distance.\n\nBut amid rising numbers of infections, some have expressed concerns about a \"lack of visible protections\" implemented by supermarkets in recent weeks.\n\nThe First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, said on Saturday that he wanted to see stores policed as they were during the first lockdown as people were worried the strict enforcement of rules did not \"appear to be there this time\".\n\n\"Given the fact the new variant is so much easier to catch... we are looking at supermarkets and other places where people leave their homes, to make sure they are organised in a way that keeps their staff and customers safe,\" he said.\n\nSupermarket Waitrose said that it was taking a \"cautious approach\" to the virus, with marshals checking that customers are wearing face coverings on the door, hand sanitiser stations at its entrances and written communications to shoppers reminding them to maintain their distance.\n\nTesco said it was limiting the number of customers in store and was also reminding customers to wear masks.\n\n\"We have clear signage explaining this, and we have packs of face coverings available for purchase near the front of our stores for any customers who have forgotten them.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Asda announced last week that it would extend its marshals' hours to 08:00 to 20:00 and increase how often baskets and trollies are cleaned.\n\nShop workers' union Usdaw has also called for firms to apply more stringent measures again.\n\nThe union's general secretary, Paddy Lillis, said that it had received reports that \"too many customers are not following necessary safety measures like social distancing, wearing a face covering and only shopping for essential items\".\n\n\"It is going to take some time to roll out the vaccine and we cannot afford to be complacent in the meantime, particularly with a new strain sweeping the nation,\" Mr Lillis said.\n\nThe trade union also suggested that \"'one-in one-out\" policies and proper queuing systems should be reintroduced in supermarkets.\n\nIt added that these systems should be managed by trained security staff where necessary.", "The number of patients in intensive care with Covid has risen sharply, amid warnings that tougher lockdown measures may be needed.\n\nLatest Scottish government figures show 1,877 new cases of Covid were reported in the last 24 hours\n\nThe number of people in intensive care has risen from 109 to 123, the highest daily jump since October.\n\nDeputy First Minister John Swinney said a tightening of restrictions could not be ruled out.\n\nA total of 1,598 people are currently in hospital with recently-confirmed Covid, up from Saturday's figure of 1,596 patients which was the highest number since the outbreak began.\n\nThe daily test positivity rate was10%, up from 8.7% on Saturday, when 1,865 positive cases were recorded.\n\nThe deputy first minister said the country was facing \"a very alarming situation\" with the virus.\n\nSpeaking on Politics Scotland, Mr Swinney said coronavirus does not show much sign of \"abating\" and he would not rule out tougher lockdown measures.\n\nHe said: \"We're seeing case numbers which are hovering around 2,000 per day... so we've got an accelerating situation on our hands and we have to constantly review whether more restrictions are required.\"\n\nThere have been some encouraging signs in recent days with average positivity rates falling, a possible indicator that the lockdown is having an impact, but Prof Linda Bauld, of Edinburgh University, urged caution.\n\nShe said: \"The numbers are not reducing at the rate which we want them to, so [it is] still a very fragile situation.\n\n\"The measures we have now I hope are working but it's not clear whether they are tough enough.\n\n\"I think the key change the government could make is in the sectors which are still open, particularly workplaces but also things like takeaways and click and collect.\"\n\nMr Swinney said the Scottish government is \"open to considering further restrictions if they are necessary\"\n\nProfessional sport, along with manufacturing and construction work have been allowed to continue in this lockdown, whereas they were not in the first wave in March.\n\nThe deputy first minister said the meeting of the cabinet which agreed the latest lockdown saw ministers wondering if they had gone far enough to stop the spread.\n\nMr Swinney added: \"I don't think I'm revealing a state secret when I say that the debate within cabinet was not whether we were going too far but whether we were going far enough.\"\n\nA total of three deaths were recorded in the past 24 hours but these figures are lower at weekends because register offices are generally closed.", "Last updated on .From the section Scottish Premiership\n\nCeltic's only regret about their Dubai trip was Chris Jullien contracting Covid-19, said coach Gavin Strachan, after the draw with Hibernian.\n\nThirteen Celtic players missed the game as they self-isolate after being deemed close contacts of Jullien.\n\nThe hosts led through David Turnbull's free-kick, but are now 21 points behind Scottish Premiership leaders Rangers after Kevin Nisbet's late Hibs strike.\n\n\"There's regret that one person has caught the virus,\" said Strachan.\n\n\"But there's not a regret in terms of the permission we got to go and the protocols that we followed, which we have done the whole season.\"\n• None 'Celtic's lack of remorse over Dubai farce is risible'\n• None Trouble in paradise? Timeline of Dubai bid to Covid crisis\n\nStrachan, who managed the team against Hibs as Neil Lennon and assistant John Kennedy are also in enforced quarantine, defended the decision to take Jullien - who is out injured for up to four months - on last week's controversial training trip.\n\n\"It was to maintain his treatment with the backroom staff, he went over there so we can get him back as fast as we can,\" Strachan added.\n\n\"Yeah, I can understand the frustration from everybody, because we end up playing with a weaker team, but that could have happened if we were training at home as well.\"\n\nCeltic, who still have three games in hand, fielded an unfamiliar line-up showing six changes, though one of those was enforced by Nir Bitton's suspension, and teenage American forward Cameron Harper was handed a debut.\n\nHibs' request for Celtic players to be retested pre-match was turned down and Jack Ross gave a first appearance to on-loan Arsenal goalkeeper Matt Macey.\n\nAnd it was the visitors who tried to stamp their authority on the game early on with Nisbet heading over and later testing Conor Hazard with a shot after Joe Newell's strike had been pushed out by the Celtic keeper.\n\nHarper shot instead of passing from a promising position in Celtic's first incisive move and long-range efforts from Ismaila Soro and Diego Laxalt drew fine saves from Macey.\n\nTurnbull's superb chip found Callum McGregor in behind the Hibs defence but he could not make the right connection.\n\nLewis Stevenson made his 500th Hibernian appearance as a half-time replacement for Josh Doig and Harper limped off to be replaced by another Celtic debutant Armstrong Oko-Flex on the hour.\n\nChances were at a premium and Hazard was quick off his line to snuff out a chance for Melker Hallberg and Drey Wright's replacement Christian Doidge could not get a header on Jamie Murphy's teasing corner.\n\nMikey Johnston claimed unsuccessfully for a penalty after going down in the Hibs box following Ryan Porteous' challenge and soon made way for Karamoko Dembele.\n\nHibs also made a change with Stephen McGinn replacing Hallberg and the midfielder fouled Turnbull to give the Celtic midfielder the chance to put Celtic ahead, and he did. It was a fantastic strike by Turnbull and his fifth goal for Celtic.\n\nHibs went back on the attack and won a free-kick of their own after Laxalt's foul on Paul McGinn and the latter's header from Stevie Mallan's delivery was cleared on the line only for Nisbet to fire high into the net for parity. A point took Hibs to within two of Aberdeen in third.\n\nWhat did we learn?\n\nUnsurprisingly, Celtic took a while to settle into the match and lacked a focal point in the absence of Leigh Griffiths and Odsonne Edouard.\n\nFor long spells in the second half, the hosts did not look likely to win but took their chance when it came. Defensively, though, they were caught out badly at a set play.\n\nHibs may rue not throwing more caution to the wind at 0-0 but, after three league defeats, a point in Glasgow is a positive result.\n\nWhat did they say?\n\nCeltic coach Gavin Strachan: \"The players put a lot into the game and we thought we did enough to nick it. The sucker punch at the end was frustrating. We were hoping we would have enough bodies back to see that out.\n\n\"There's a lot of football still to be played and you never know what's going to happen. Obviously it's a frustrating time just now but we need to get the win on Saturday, keep racking up the points and see what happens.\"\n\nHibernian head coach Jack Ross: \"We wanted to come and win the game. I certainly think we merited taking something from it. It's good for us to stop the bleeding. It hopefully just propels our side in the right direction again.\n\n\"Kevin Nisbet's goalscoring return has been excellent. The accuracy of the finish and the trust in his finishing ability with the goal has to be like that otherwise I don't think he scores it.\"\n\nCeltic will still be without their isolating players when they host Livingston on Saturday (15:00 GMT). Hibs are at home to Kilmarnock at the same time.\n• None Attempt blocked. Stephen Mallan (Hibernian) right footed shot from the right side of the box is blocked. Assisted by Kevin Nisbet.\n• None Goal! Celtic 1, Hibernian 1. Kevin Nisbet (Hibernian) left footed shot from the right side of the six yard box to the top right corner following a set piece situation.\n• None Attempt blocked. Paul McGinn (Hibernian) header from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Stephen Mallan with a cross.\n• None Paul McGinn (Hibernian) wins a free kick on the right wing.\n• None Attempt missed. Stephen Mallan (Hibernian) right footed shot from outside the box is too high. Assisted by Paul McGinn with a headed pass.\n• None Attempt blocked. Christian Doidge (Hibernian) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Paul McGinn with a cross.\n• None Attempt saved. Jamie Murphy (Hibernian) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the bottom right corner. Assisted by Paul McGinn.\n• None Goal! Celtic 1, Hibernian 0. David Turnbull (Celtic) from a free kick with a right footed shot to the top left corner. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page", "Wales' health minister has acknowledged it was \"entirely understandable people are concerned\" about when they will receive their vaccine.\n\nBut Vaughan Gething also stressed that supplies will increase over the coming weeks.\n\n\"I think a number of people are are anxious because this is a worrying time. And it's entirely understandable on a human level why people are concerned\", he said.\n\nMr Gething admitted that other UK nations had made a better start in rolling out the vaccine.\n\nBut he said that he believed Wales had still made a \"good start\" and \"that's evidenced by the figures\".\n\nWhen asked about the concerns made by some GP practices, Mr Gething said he understands why some of them \"will be frustrated\".\n\nHe added: \"But we're delivering the AstraZeneca vaccine in supplies that we have to keep it going.\n\n\"And as I said, the availability of that vaccine is the current rate limiting step and significantly increasing our delivery because we know there are a range of general practices and others who could deliver more if we had more supply.\n\n\"The supply they're being given is supplied for the week - it's not to stretch through for the whole population that they're covering.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. WATCH: Domestic abuse victim - 'He threw me against the wall and strangled me'\n\nJustice Secretary Robert Buckland has said he hopes to make non-fatal strangulation a specific offence after a call by domestic abuse campaigners.\n\nToo many violent offenders' sentences are not tough enough, he said.\n\nAnd he added that strangulation can be a precursor to even more serious crimes against women.\n\nCampaigners argue that perpetrators are often only charged with common assault, which carries a maximum of six months in prison.\n\nBecause non-fatal strangulation may not leave any marks on the victim, prosecutors do not bring more serious charges, they say.\n\nMr Buckland said: \"There are too many violent offenders not getting sentences proportionate to the seriousness of their crimes because in many cases, prosecutors don't have adequate charging options where the victim has been strangled.\n\n\"The vast majority of these crimes are committed against women and they are often a precursor to even more serious violence.\"\n\nThe justice secretary hopes the new offence can be included in the Police and Sentencing Bill, although discussions are at an early stage.\n\nCampaigners had called for a new offence to be part of the Domestic Abuse Bill. The Conservative peer Baroness Newlove was planning to table an amendment to this bill as it goes through the House of Lords. She won cross-party support during a debate in the Lords last week.\n\nBut the Ministry of Justice believes that as non-fatal strangulation can be used in situations other than domestic abuse, the legislation should have a broader context.\n\nJustice Secretary Robert Buckland said strangulation was often a precursor to even more serious attacks on women\n\nWelcoming the move, Nogah Ofer, a lawyer with the Centre for Women's Justice, which has been at the forefront of the campaign for a new offence said: \"It is time that as a society we stopped normalising and ignoring strangulation.\n\n\"We look forward to police, prosecutors and medical professionals working together to address this with the seriousness it deserves, and hope that survivors of domestic abuse will have greater confidence to seek justice.\"\n\nCampaigner Rachel Williams, who suffered strangulation during an abusive relationship, tweeted that it was \"a great victory\". She was shot and severely injured by her violent partner in 2011, who then killed himself.\n\nLast week, the government said that non-fatal strangulation was already covered by existing legislation from common assault to attempted murder.\n\nIt is now looking at how a new offence was introduced in New Zealand. Parts of Australia and the US have also brought in similar measures.\n\nDuring the Lords debate, crossbench peer Lord Anderson of Ipswich, a QC and former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, warned that \"hurried law can be bad law\".\n\nHe asked whether a more generic offence of aggravated assault or recklessly endangering life might cover these circumstances and questioned how strangulation and suffocation would be defined in the law.", "Lisa Montgomery - the only female inmate on federal death row in the US - has been executed for murder in the state of Indiana. Her lawyers had argued she was a mentally ill victim of abuse who deserved mercy. Her victim's community said otherwise.\n\nThis story was first published on 11 January - before Lisa Montgomery's execution on 13 January.\n\nFor Diane Mattingly, there is one moment from her childhood for which she feels both enormous gratitude and guilt.\n\nShe credits this moment for her \"fairly normal\" life - a house on eight peaceful acres, a loving relationship with her children, nearly two decades at a job working for the state of Kentucky.\n\nAt the same time, she blames it for the fate of her younger half-sister, Lisa Montgomery.\n\nMontgomery was sentenced for the murder of a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant. In December 2004, Montgomery, who was 36 at the time, strangled Bobbie Jo Stinnett before cutting the baby out of her womb and kidnapping it. Stinnett bled to death.\n\nMattingly and Montgomery lived together until Mattingly was eight and her half-sister was four. It was a terrifying household, she says, where physical, psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of Judy Shaughnessy, Montgomery's mother, and her boyfriends was routine.\n\nThe girls' biological father left the home, and after a while, Mattingly was whisked away to foster care. Montgomery was left behind with her mother.\n\nLisa Montgomery and her half-sister Diane Mattingly as children\n\nIt would be 34 years before the half-sisters would see each other again. And that would be from across a courtroom, where lawyers for the US government were trying to persuade a jury to sentence Montgomery to death.\n\n\"One sister got taken out and got put into a loving home and was nurtured and had time to heal,\" says Mattingly. \"The other sister stayed in that situation, and it got worse and worse and worse. And then at the end, she was broken.\"\n\nIn late December, Montgomery's legal team submitted a petition to President Donald Trump that makes the case that after a lifetime of abuse - which they characterise as torture - she is too mentally ill to be executed and deserves mercy.\n\nHowever, in the tiny town of Skidmore, Missouri, where the crime was committed, there is little sympathy for that argument. Many there believe the final moments of Bobbie Jo Stinnett were so horrific, the death sentence is warranted.\n\nLisa Montgomery and Bobbie Jo Stinnett got to know each other online through a shared love of dogs. They had corresponded for weeks on an online forum for rat terrier breeders and enthusiasts called \"Ratter Chatter\". Montgomery told Stinnett that she was also expecting, and the pair shared pregnancy stories.\n\nIn December 2004, Montgomery drove 281.5 km (175 miles) from her home in Kansas to Skidmore, where she had an appointment to look at some puppies owned by Stinnett.\n\nBut it wasn't Montgomery that Stinnett was expecting, it was a woman who went by the name of Darlene Fischer. But Fischer was a name that Montgomery had been using when she separately began messaging Stinnett from a different email address inquiring about buying one of her puppies.\n\nWhen Stinnett answered the door, Montgomery overpowered the pregnant woman, strangled her with a piece of rope, and cut the baby out of her womb.\n\nInvestigators quickly realised that \"Darlene Fischer\" did not exist, and tracked Montgomery down the next day using her emails and computer IP address. They found her cradling a new-born girl she claimed to have given birth to the previous day. Her story quickly fell apart and she confessed to the killing.\n\nSince 2008, Montgomery has been held in a federal prison in Texas for female inmates with special medical and psychological needs, where she has been receiving psychiatric care. Since receiving her execution date, she's been placed on suicide watch in an isolated cell.\n\nMontgomery is scheduled to be put to death by a lethal injection of pentobarbital at Terre Haute prison in Indiana. It is the only federal prison with an active death chamber.\n\nMontgomery's lawyers argue that because of a combination of years of horrific abuse, and a raft of psychological issues, she should never have been given the death penalty. They believe that at the time of the crime, Montgomery was psychotic and out of touch with reality. They have been joined by a chorus of supportive voices from the legal field, including 41 former and current prosecutors, as well as human rights entities like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.\n\nHowever, calls for Trump to be merciful are hardly unanimous. According to Gallup, while support for the death penalty in the US is at its lowest level in more than 50 years, 55% of Americans still believe it is an appropriate punishment for murder. And nowhere is that support more palpably felt in this case than in Skidmore.\n\n\"Bobbie deserves to be here today. Bobbie's family deserves her,\" says Meagan Morrow, a high school classmate of Stinnett's. \"And Lisa deserves to pay.\"\n\nIf you or someone you know needs support for issues about emotional distress, these organisations may be able to help.\n\nLisa Montgomery's current legal team has conducted some 450 interviews with family members, friends, case workers, doctors and social workers. Stitched together, they form a tapestry of family dysfunction, abuse, neglect, professional negligence, substance abuse and untreated mental illness.\n\n\"The whole story is tragic,\" says Kelley Henry, one of Montgomery's federal defence lawyers. \"But one of the things that the president can do is say - to women who have been trafficked, and who have been sexually abused - 'Your abuse matters'.\"\n\nFor Montgomery, her lawyers argue, it began before she was born. According to an interview with her father, Montgomery's mother Judy Shaughnessy drank heavily throughout her pregnancy, and their daughter was born with foetal alcohol syndrome. Multiple medical experts have given statements agreeing with that diagnosis.\n\nWhen Mattingly and Montgomery were young, Shaughnessy beat them and doled out cruel forms of punishment, like taping Montgomery's mouth shut, or pushing Mattingly out into the snow, naked. After their biological father left the home, Mattingly says they were left alone with Shaughnessy's boyfriends, at least one of whom started raping Mattingly.\n\n\"Judy was manipulative and - I hate to use this word, but - evil. She enjoyed torturing the people around her,\" says Mattingly. \"She got joy out of it.\"\n\nAfter Mattingly was removed from the home by social services, Montgomery fell prey to her mother's new husband, who according to statements from his other children, was a violent alcoholic who began sexually abusing Montgomery when she was a pre-teen. The family moved from place to place dozens of times, but it was in a trailer in Sperry, Oklahoma, where her lawyers say the abuse turned into something more akin to torture.\n\nAccording to interviews with her half-siblings and others who spent time with the family, Montgomery's stepfather built a shed onto the trailer where he, and eventually his friends, raped and beat her. Her mother also began trafficking her, allowing handymen like electricians and plumbers to sexually abuse Montgomery in exchange for work on the house.\n\nAs a teenager, Montgomery confided in a cousin, telling him the men would tie her up, beat her and even urinate on her afterwards.\n\nBut the cousin, a sheriff's deputy, confessed to Montgomery's current legal team that he did nothing. In fact, he drove her back home and dropped her off in the hands of her abusers.\n\nLawyer Kelley Henry says one of the things that disturbs her most is that adults in positions of authority were told about what was going on but did nothing.\n\nWhen Shaughnessy eventually split from her second husband, she and Montgomery testified in divorce proceedings about the sexual assaults. The judge in the case scolded Shaughnessy for not reporting the abuse - but did not report the abuse himself.\n\n\"There were so many opportunities where people could have intervened and prevented this,\" says Henry.\n\nMontgomery's cousin told her legal team that he lived with \"regret for not speaking up about what happened to Lisa\".\n\nWhen she was 18, Montgomery married her stepbrother. The couple had four children in five years, but the relationship was not the escape from violence that Montgomery might have hoped it would be. At one point, one of Montgomery's brothers found a home movie that showed Montgomery's husband raping and beating her.\n\n\"It was violent and like a scene out of a horror movie,\" he said in a statement. \"I felt sick watching the video. I didn't know what to do or how to talk to my sister about it.\"\n\nFriends and family began noticing Montgomery's tendency to slip into \"a world of her own\". Her children were disturbed by it. Henry says this was an early sign of her mental illnesses, which include bipolar disorder, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative disorder and traumatic brain injury.\n\nMontgomery eventually divorced her first husband and married Kevin Montgomery. Around this time, she repeatedly claimed to be pregnant again, although she had undergone sterilisation after her fourth baby was born.\n\nOne theory her lawyers put forward regarding the chain of events that led to the murder, is that Montgomery feared her ex-husband would expose her lies about being pregnant and use it against her as he sought custody of their children.\n\n\"There was so much pressure on her at that point,\" says Henry. She describes Montgomery's ex-husband as cruel and harassing. \"She was completely detached from reality.\"\n\nHer lawyers say that as she lost touch with reality, she fantasised about being pregnant.\n\nHenry says Montgomery's original legal defence after she was arrested and charged with murder was woefully inadequate, and presented few of the details about her abuse, trauma and mental illness.\n\nHer lawyers at the time also presented an alternative theory of the crime, which was that Montgomery's brother had actually committed the murder, even though he had an alibi. That was ultimately dropped in favour of an insanity defence, but Henry believes the damage to Montgomery's credibility was already done.\n\nAfter five hours of deliberation, the jury found Montgomery guilty. They recommended a sentence of death.\n\nDiane Mattingly has been speaking publicly for the first time in the hope it can make a difference.\n\n\"I would say, 'President Trump, I want you to look at the life that Lisa had led, I want to look at all the people that have failed her, I want you to look at the rape, the torture, the mental abuse, the physical abuse that this woman had endured,'\" she says. \"I'm asking him to have compassion on her as a person that has been failed over and over and over again. And to not fail her.\"\n\nThe tiny farming town of Skidmore sits in the far northwest corner of Missouri. A generation ago, it was the kind of place where you could \"get your hair cut, see a show, buy rabbit feed and eat dinner\" - but those days are long gone. Today there is a single restaurant and few of the streets are paved.\n\nThe population hovers around just 250, and everyone knew Bobbie Jo Stinnett and her family. Friends recall her as a good student with a love of horses and dogs. She liked going down to the Nodaway River to swim, and playing Nintendo games at slumber parties. She was quiet and kind, they say.\n\nAt the time of her murder, she was newly married and pregnant with her first child.\n\nAlthough the alumni have scattered somewhat, in recent years, the Nodaway-Holt R-VII High School graduating class of 2000 - which had only 22 members - has a tradition to mark the anniversary of the death of their classmate Bobbie Jo Stinnett.\n\nThey hold a collection and try to do something nice for Stinnett's mother. \"Last year, we got flowers, and gave her a $100-plus gift card and then paid her water bill,\" says Jena Baumli.\n\nThe murder 16 years ago is never far from the minds of the town's residents.\n\nFor one thing, the wider world won't let them forget. It has been the subject of two books, multiple true crime television shows, documentaries and countless podcast episodes. And though there's been much recent debate over the fairness of Montgomery's sentence in courthouses and in the opinion pages of newspapers like the New York Times, a similar debate does not exist here.\n\n\"I think that in a lot of the opinion pieces that are being posted, in a lot of things that people are sharing, Bobbie Jo and her daughter, and her mother and her husband and other friends and family, are kind of being forgotten,\" says Tiffany Kirkland, another member of the class of 2000.\n\n\"She always wanted to be a mom,\" says Baumli. \"She was really the first one to have a decent marriage, you know, and I guess looking at Bobbie Jo was like, what your dreams were when you were younger.\"\n\nBecause of Stinnett's easy-going reputation, Morrow remembers instantly dismissing the initial reports of her murder.\n\n\"I was like, 'Oh, she was not.' You know, like, that doesn't happen to Bobbie,\" Morrow says.\n\nBut what happened at the modest clapboard house where Stinnett lived with her husband still haunts some of those involved in the investigation.\n\nNodaway County Sheriff Randy Strong says that the scene that he and his four colleagues found that day was so bloody, they are still traumatised by it. It makes him even angrier that it was Stinnett's mother who discovered her that way.\n\n\"The people that are defending [Montgomery], I wish I could take them back in time, and put them in that room,\" he says. \"And then go, 'Look at this body'. And then go, 'Stand there and listen to the 911 call of [Stinnett's mother]. This is the stuff of nightmares.\"\n\nMany of the residents of Skidmore cite the details of the crime, and the amount of planning that went into it, as evidence that Montgomery was a calculating killer.\n\nShe had catfished Stinnett online under a fake name. She had bought supplies, including a home birth kit, and searched online for how to perform a caesarean section. Sheriff Strong insists that the crime was meticulously planned and that the woman he arrested continued to lie until backed into a corner.\n\nDr Katherine Porterfield, a clinical psychologist who evaluated Montgomery and spent about 18 hours with her, says that psychosis does not always look the way people expect it to.\n\n\"Being psychotic, it does not mean you are not intelligent, nor that you cannot act in a planful way,\" she says. \"We've seen crime for years and years in our country in which people enact terrible violence coming out of a psychotic set of beliefs or thought process. Lisa Montgomery is no different. She enacted this in the grip of a very broken mind.\"\n\nThe baby was returned to her father, after being recovered from Montgomery.\n\nBobbie Jo's mother and husband have have not spoken publicly in many years. But Strong says this is the first year he's heard directly from Stinnett's husband. He thanked the sheriff for recovering his daughter and allowing him to be the parent that his wife couldn't be.\n\n\"I cried,\" says Strong. \"The whole community over there's traumatised by this.\"\n\nSchool friend Baumli says she's read the descriptions of Montgomery's abuse, but it mostly just makes her angry. She says it's not as if all the other people of Skidmore lead idyllic lives free from abuse, poverty and other destructive tragedies. She gives herself as an example - when Stinnett was murdered, Baumli was in rehab for a drug addiction. She missed the funeral because of it.\n\n\"Let's say I didn't stay clean very long,\" she says.\n\n\"I'm sick of hearing about Lisa Montgomery and what she went through. And it's never about what my friend went through,\" she adds. \"I get these images in my head of [Bobbie Jo's mother] finding her daughter that way.\"\n\nThree federal inmates - Orlando Hall, Alfred Bourgeois and Brandon Bernard - have been put to death since the 3 November presidential election. Several high-profile figures had appealed for clemency in Brandon's case but Mr Trump did not heed those calls.\n\nPresident-elect Joe Biden has already pledged to end death penalty proceedings, although he hasn't said when.\n\nUntil July 2020, there had been no federal executions for 17 years. At state level, the number of sentences and executions continues a historic decline. Only 18 death sentences were handed down in 2020 and the number of executions carried out hit a 30-year low. More recently, the states that have been carrying out executions, such as Texas and Tennessee, have halted and delayed executions because of the pandemic.\n\nHowever, the executions ordered by President Trump are continuing. If they all go ahead, the federal government will have executed more people than any administration in nearly 100 years.\n\nProtest against federal executions of death row inmates - outside the US Justice Department, Washington DC, December 2020\n\nTwo other inmates are scheduled to die at Terre Haute prison before Mr Trump's presidency ends. Recently, there has been a virus outbreak on death row at the institution, and previous executions have been linked to outbreaks among the execution team and prison staff.\n\n\"They made this a priority at the risk of the health and lives of corrections officials, of the prisoners on death row, and the communities that all of those Bureau of Prisons officials who flew in from across the country were returning to,\" says Ngozi Ndulue, senior director of research and special projects at the Death Penalty Information Center.\n\n\"This was a very coordinated and determined plan to ensure that as many people could be executed on federal death row as possible before the end of this administration term.\"\n\nMontgomery's lawyers want her sentence commuted to a life sentence, which would allow her to remain under psychiatric care in prison for the rest of her days.\n\nMattingly says looking back to the moment life changed for her as an eight-year-old, she feels guilty that when the social workers came for her, she didn't tell them what was going on in that house.\n\n\"If I had, would they have taken Lisa out of the home also?\" she says. \"There's so many people that failed her throughout her whole life. And I am just asking for somebody - once - not to fail her.\"", "Wales has received 275,000 doses of the two Covid-19 vaccines to deal with the pandemic.\n\nAbout 70,000 people received a first dose after the first month of the vaccine rollout.\n\nThe Welsh Government confirmed it has had more than 250,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and 25,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab.\n\nThe health minister promised a \"really significant step-up\" in the roll-out after opponents criticised its speed.\n\nThe Pfizer jabs were first administered in early December at seven sites across Wales as part of the UK-wide immunisation programme.\n\nThis 82-year-old woman was one of 100 to receives her vaccine at a special clinic in Swansea on Saturday\n\nApproximately 1.6% of people were vaccinated up to 3 January - fewer than all other UK nations.\n\nIn England, about 1.9% of the population had received the first dose, while 2.1% of people in both Scotland and Northern Ireland had received their first jab.\n\nThe Welsh Government has dismissed criticism it is lagging behind, with health officials saying the new Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine would help speed up the programme \"considerably\".\n\nTwo full doses of the Oxford vaccine gave 62% protection, a half dose followed by a full dose was 90% and overall the trial showed 70% protection.\n\nThe rollout of the Oxford vaccine started on Monday, with 25,000 doses received this week, according to the Welsh Government.\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford said on Friday that Wales would receive another 25,000 Oxford doses next week and 80,000 the week after that.\n\nWhen asked how many doses of the Pfizer vaccine Wales had received, he said he could not recall the exact figure but further deliveries had been received \"on the 23rd and the 27th of December\".\n\nPressed on a figure, he said: \"It's the low hundreds of thousands\", adding: \"The Pfizer vaccine has particular challenges in terms of the conditions that it's got to be stored in and in parts of Wales that is a very particular challenge because it is a hard vaccine to transport over long distances to relatively scattered and remote communities.\n\n\"But the fact that we've got it and the fact that we're able to use more of it than we originally anticipated means we'll be able to accelerate the use of it over the next couple of weeks.\"\n\nThese were the latest comparative weekly totals - daily updates are promised from this week onwards in Wales\n\nOn Sunday, the Welsh Government confirmed it had received 25,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in the first week but the quantity would increase, allocated to Wales based on a population share on a weekly basis.\n\n\"We are confident in the assurances we have been given that this will increase over the next few weeks to around 100,000 per week,\" they said.\n\n\"We are delivering all the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine allocated to Wales directly to GPs, other primary care providers and hospitals as soon as it is available.\"\n\nConservative MP for the Vale of Clwyd, Dr James Davies, said: \"We all know that the Pfizer vaccine is difficult to transport and store and needs to be stored at -70 degrees, that's understood.\n\n\"But the issue is that actually, if you look at the rest of the UK, including very rural areas, they've managed to deal with it... and it is difficult to see why they haven't been in a position to be organised earlier and to ramp-up the delivery.\"\n\nRhun ap Iorwerth, Plaid Cymru's health spokesman, called for transparency: \"It is very worrying to find out that we have had in Wales more than 250,000 doses but only a relatively small proportion of that have yet ended up in people's arms, protecting people, because that's what we want to happen.\"\n\nHe has written an open letter to Health Minister Vaughan Gething calling for greater clarity on the vaccine deployment programme, asking for a dashboard of information which would allow the public to track the rollout's progress for themselves, including volume of doses delivered and administered by health board and by the nine priority groups.\n\nDr Olwen Williams, vice-president for Wales at the Royal College of Physicians, also called on health boards and Welsh Government to publish regular data showing which groups of people have been vaccinated, with patient-facing health workers prioritised over other colleagues.\n\n\"I think that would give assurance to people working in the NHS and the population in general, that the programme is progressing as planned,\" she said.\n\nAll data will be published daily from Monday but Mr Gething conceded that Wales, from last week's figures, was \"slightly behind on the population share and I'm not getting away from that.\"\n\nHe said the race was not \"necessarily against other UK nations\" but against the virus.\n\nHe also told BBC Radio Wales' Sunday Supplement that, in the next two to three weeks, he expected to see a \"really significant step-up in the delivery of the vaccine\" as more GP practices and community pharmacies help.\n\n\"We're going to get through many more people, giving them significant protection with a first vaccine,\" he said.\n\n\"And that will mean that we're going to be able to prevent most of the avoidable deaths.\"\n\nIt is hoped the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will speed up the process.\n\nBy the end of last week, it was being offered to patients aged over 80 at 73 GP practices.\n\nMore than 100 are expected to be offering the jabs next week, Mr Gething said, \"and then we get into several hundred thereafter and we'll bring community pharmacies on board.\"\n\nThe UK and Scottish governments did not provide the numbers of Pfizer vaccines supplied to England and Scotland. BBC Wales is still waiting for a response from the Northern Irish Executive.\n\nMeanwhile, regular rapid testing for people without coronavirus symptoms will be made available in England.\n\nThe Welsh Government said it would evaluate its mass testing pilots in Merthyr Tydfil and lower Cynon Valley, as well as elsewhere in the UK, to inform its approach to community testing.\n\nA spokesman added: \"We have announced regular asymptomatic testing of health and social care workers, in education and daily contact testing in South Wales Police.\n\n\"A pilot has also started at the Tata Port Talbot site. We are also exploring other opportunities for regular testing to support critical services.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Keir Starmer calls for families to be put \"at the heart of our recovery\" from the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has urged the government to \"protect family incomes\" as it deals with the economic effects of coronavirus.\n\nIn his first speech of the year, he demanded teachers, the armed forces and care workers are left out of the public sector pay freeze.\n\nSir Keir also called for tougher restrictions to be considered for tackling coronavirus.\n\nNo 10 said the government had \"shown it is prepared to act\".\n\nWith coronavirus restrictions and lockdowns shutting thousands of businesses, the economy was 7.9% smaller in October last year than it had been six months earlier.\n\nAnd the government's independent forecaster, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, predicts that unemployment will rise to 2.6 million by the middle of this year.\n\nIn his speech, Sir Keir attacked the government for \"having been found wanting at every turn\", accusing Boris Johnson of being \"indecisive\" and acting \"too slow\" over further lockdowns and support for business and families.\n\nHe said: \"The British people will forgive many things. They know the pandemic is difficult.\n\n\"But they also know serial incompetence when they see it - and they know when a prime minister simply isn't up to the job.\"\n\nBut the PM's official spokeswoman rejected the criticism, saying: \"This government has shown it is prepared to act. When given evidence in the morning it has taken action that evening.\"\n\nAsked by the BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg whether the government should tighten restrictions, such as closing nurseries, Sir Keir said there \"probably is more that we could do [and we] may have to get tougher\".\n\nBut he did not outline what measures he would recommend, instead saying it was \"time to hear from the scientists what else can be done - and that probably should be done in the next few hours\".\n\nThe Labour leader said ministers must \"protect family incomes and support businesses\" from the economic effects of previous restrictions and the current lockdown.\n\nHe added policies must \"make a real difference to millions of people across the country\" and \"put families at the heart of our recovery\".\n\nSir Keir argued the £20-a-week rise given to Universal Credit claimants last April must continue beyond this April's cut-off point.\n\nCouncil tax increases in England of up to 5% this April must not happen, he said, while calling for the ban on evictions and repossessions to be extended.\n\nThe government's pay freeze for at least 1.3 million public sector workers - which does not apply to NHS frontline staff and those earning below £24,000 a year - must not go ahead, said Sir Keir.\n\n\"I know this isn't everything that's needed,\" he added, \"and after so much suffering we can't go back the status quo.\n\n\"We cannot return to an economy where over half our care workers earn less than the living wage, where childcare is among the most expensive in Europe, where our social care system is a national disgrace and where over four million children grow up in poverty.\"\n\nAn opposition leader has no policy leavers to pull. They have to rely on words to persuade the public they are worthy of power.\n\nWith the next general election an eternity away, Sir Keir Starmer knows the question of competence matters far more to voters than ideology right now.\n\nThe Labour leader was unsparing in his criticism of the government's handling of the pandemic - accusing the prime minster of serial incompetence, dithering and delay.\n\nSir Keir said the government could reverse planned changes to council tax and universal credit to ease the financial pressure on families.\n\nBut pressed on how lockdown might be different today if he was in No 10, the Labour leader mirrored the government's messaging.\n\nHe said there was \"probably\" more that could be done around nurseries and estate agent viewings, but Sir Keir's mantra was listen to the scientists.\n\nIt's what ministers say endlessly too.\n\nSir Keir argued that, just as a Labour government \"built the welfare state from the rubble\" of World War Two, a future one can \"secure our economy, protect our NHS and rebuild our country so that Britain is the best country to grow up in and the best country to grow old in\".\n\nBut Conservative Party co-chairman Amanda Milling accused Sir Keir of \"calling for actions the Conservatives are already taking in government\".\n\n\"We have delivered an unprecedented £280bn package of support to protect jobs, livelihoods and public services through this pandemic,\" she added, including the furlough scheme, the temporary increase to Universal Credit and extra funding for councils.\n\n\"The Conservatives will continue to put families and communities at the heart of every decision we take as we deliver on our promises to the British people,\" Ms Milling said.\n\nIn his Spending Review in November, Chancellor Rishi Sunak warned that the \"economic emergency\" caused by the pandemic had only begun.\n\nHe promised to take \"extraordinary measures to protect people's jobs and incomes\".", "Parler has hit back after Amazon pulled support for its so-called \"free speech\" social network.\n\nParler is suing the tech giant, accusing it of breaking anti-trust laws by removing it.\n\nParler had been reliant on the tech giant's Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing service to provide its alternative to Twitter.\n\nThe platform was popular among supporters of Donald Trump, although the president is not a user.\n\nAmazon took the action after finding dozens of posts on the service that it said encouraged violence.\n\nIn response, the platform has asked a federal judge to order Amazon to reinstate it.\n\n\"AWS's decision to effectively terminate Parler's account is apparently motivated by political animus,\" the complaint reads.\n\n\"It is also apparently designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter.\"\n\n\"There is no merit to these claims,\" it said.\n\n\"AWS provides technology and services to customers across the political spectrum, and we respect Parler's right to determine for itself what content it will allow. However, it is clear that there is significant content on Parler that encourages and incites violence against others, and that Parler is unable or unwilling to promptly identify and remove this content, which is a violation of our terms of service.\n\n\"We made our concerns known to Parler over a number of weeks and during that time we saw a significant increase in this type of dangerous content, not a decrease, which led to our suspension of their services Sunday evening.\"\n\nExamples Amazon had provided included posts calling for the killing of Democrats, Muslims, Black Lives Matter leaders, and mainstream media journalists.\n\nGoogle and Apple had already removed Parler from their app stores towards the end of last week saying it had failed to comply with their content-moderation requirements.\n\nHowever, it had still been accessible via the web - although visitors had complained of being unable to create new accounts over the weekend, without which it was not possible to view its content.\n\nParler has been online since 2018, and may return if it can find an alternative host.\n\nHowever, chief executive John Matze told Fox News on Sunday that \"every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too\".\n\n\"We're going to try our best to get back online as quickly as possible, but we're having a lot of trouble because every vendor we talk to says they won't work with us because if Apple doesn't approve and Google doesn't approve, they won't,\" he added.\n\nAWS's move is the latest in a series of actions affecting social media following the rioting on Capitol Hill last week.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Capitol riots: ‘We would have been murdered’\n\nFacebook and Twitter have also banned President Trump's accounts on their platforms, citing concerns that he might incite further violence.\n\nParler's users included the Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who had led an effort in the Senate to delay certifying Joe Biden's electoral college victory.\n\nHe had about five million followers on the platform - more than his tally on Twitter.\n\nParler's app now shows an error message and its website is offline\n\n\"Why should a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires have a monopoly on political speech?\" he tweeted over the weekend.\n\nParler's downfall appears to have benefited Gab - another \"free speech\" social network that is popular with far-right commentators.\n\nIt has claimed to have \"gained more users in the past two days than we did in our first two years of existing\".\n\nParler has long been a home for what you might call untouchables, people who had been excluded from mainstream services for offences such as blatant racism or incitement to violence.\n\nDuring a brief excursion onto the site over the weekend, I observed plenty of examples of such behaviour, with users exhibiting vile anti-Semitism, displaying Nazi symbols such as the swastika and uttering incoherent threats against those they perceive to be enemies of America.\n\nBut as Amazon's deadline approached something like panic took hold, with users desperately urging their followers to join them on other platforms.\n\nMost seemed to accept that Parler was doomed, while vowing to continue their fight elsewhere.\n\n\"Well this is the end,\" wrote one user, who proclaimed his support for the American Nazi Party.", "An ambulance had to be lifted out of the mud\n\nRescuers searching for victims of a landslide in Indonesia were buried by a second mudslide just hours later, officials say.\n\nThe first landslide, in Cihanjuang village, West Java, was triggered by torrential rain.\n\nAnother struck as survivors were still being evacuated. At least 12 people died and dozens more are missing.\n\nLandslides are common in Indonesia during rainy season, and often blamed on deforestation.\n\nThe latest disasters hit the villagers in Sumedang regency, about 150km (95 miles) southeast of the capital Jakarta, three and a half hours apart on Saturday.\n\nThe first happened at 16:00 (09:00 GMT) and the second at 19:30 (12:30 GMT), disaster agency spokesman Raditya Jati said in a statement.\n\n\"The first landslide was triggered by high rainfall and unstable soil conditions. The subsequent landslide occurred while officers were still evacuating victims around the first landslide area,\" he added.\n\nRescuers are believed to be among those killed, he added. A six-year-old boy was also among the dead, according to AFP news agency.\n\nSome 27 people were believed to be missing late on Sunday, local media quoted Deden Ridwansah, the head of the local search and rescue agency as saying. About 46 were known to have survived.\n\nBad weather had forced the search to be suspended, he said, but it was expected to resume on Monday.\n\nIndonesia frequently suffers floods and landslides. Thousands of people had to be evacuated in the capital Jakarta this time last year as the city was inundated.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n• None The fastest-sinking city in the world", "There are concerns about the cost of education for families reliant on mobile connections\n\nCustomers using BT Mobile, EE, and Plusnet Mobile can use BBC Bitesize content from the end of January without eating into their data allowance.\n\nBitesize provides structured lessons in maths and English for all year groups, as well as offering other curriculum material.\n\nContent from other providers is likely to be made free in the coming days.\n\nMore mobile companies are expected to follow suit in making such content free to use.\n\nThe current UK lockdowns mean most children are now learning from home.\n\nEducation Secretary Gavin Williamson has mandated that schools must provide between three and five hours of online content per day.\n\nThis has led to concerns that children in families without access to broadband could fall behind.\n\nSchools remain open for children classed as vulnerable and those whose parents are key workers.\n\nAll contract and pay-as-you-go customers of BT Mobile, EE and Plusnet Mobile will be eligible and the free package will continue while schools remain closed. No registration is required - the free access will happen automatically.\n\nBT has also asked the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish administrations to each suggest one online resource for schoolchildren in its regions, which it will also zero-rate, as the curriculums differ from English schools.\n\nAccording to UK media watchdog Ofcom, some 880,000 families are reliant solely on mobile connections, and many of those will have data limitations.\n\nBBC director general Tim Davie said: \"With the pandemic forcing schools to close again, we should not allow a lack of digital access to further impact children's education.\n\n\"The BBC will continue to do all we can to ensure every child, whatever their circumstances, can continue to access vital educational materials during this time.\"\n\nThe corporation is also running three hours of curriculum-based TV programmes alongside the BBC Bitesize collection of educational resources. Primary school programming will be on CBBC, with two hours for secondary pupils on BBC Two.\n\nDuring the first lockdown, content was available on iPlayer, Red Button services and online, but not on regular TV channels, although viewers in Scotland did have some programming.\n\nBT said the move was part of its wider Lockdown Learning programme.\n\nBT consumer brands chief executive Marc Allera said: \"We want to ensure that no child is left behind in their education as a result of this pandemic and recognise that we all have a role we can play to help families and carers continue their children's education while schools are closed.\"", "Kay and Kenneth Hayward said they felt the journey was too unsafe\n\nPeople waiting to receive the Covid-19 vaccine say they are confused by NHS letters inviting them to travel to centres miles away from their homes.\n\nThe first 130,000 letters have been sent to people aged 80 or older who live about 30 to 45 minutes' drive away from one of seven new regional centres.\n\nBut patients, many of whom are shielding, questioned why they had to travel so far in a pandemic.\n\nLocal jabs are available to people if they wait, the NHS said.\n\nThe seven centres include Ashton Gate in Bristol, Epsom racecourse in Surrey, London's Nightingale hospital, Newcastle's Centre for Life, the Manchester Tennis and Football Centre, Robertson House in Stevenage and Birmingham's Millennium Point.\n\nPeople will not miss out on their vaccination if they do not use the letters to make an appointment at one of the centres, the NHS said.\n\nTwo Labour MPs tweeted about their concerns about the letters being delayed in getting out to people due to coronavirus affecting Royal Mail staff.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Sarah Jones MP This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMary McGarry from Leamington Spa in Warwickshire told BBC News that her letter points to an NHS online booking page which suggests she would have to take her husband, who has cancer and a lung disease, 20 miles to Birmingham.\n\n\"We're very reluctant to go into Birmingham city centre,\" she said.\n\n\"If we can't get somebody to take us, we'd have to go on the train but we're shielding because my husband's got poor health.... we want to know why we've got to travel that far?\"\n\nKay Hayward, from Whitwick in Leicestershire, said she went online to book an appointment for her 85-year-old husband Kenneth and was offered five different places including Widnes in Cheshire and Stevenage in Hertfordshire.\n\n\"I thought they must be joking... we talked about it and we thought it was actually safer to stay here and for him not not have it.\n\n130,000 letters have been sent out by NHS England so far\n\n\"But we were worried if we turned this down, we'd be off the list.. the letter doesn't say anything about having the vaccines anywhere else locally.\"\n\nAndrea Eaton, from Coventry, said she was so angry that her 81-year-old mother, who has heart problems and leukaemia, was offered Birmingham for her appointment that she attempted to ring Downing Street on Saturday night to complain.\n\nShe said she reached the press office and said: \"I want you to give Boris a message please that he has lied to the British public.\n\n\"He has told them they never need to go more than 10 miles... they were really rude and just put the phone down on me.\"\n\nAndrea Eaton said she wanted to get a message to Boris Johnson so rang Downing Street on Saturday evening\n\nA spokesperson from Number 10 told BBC News that they did not wish to comment, but wanted to remind the public to use the government website to write to the prime minister or contact their constituency MP.\n\nCouncillor Shaun Davies, the Labour leader at Telford and Wrekin Council in Shropshire, said he had been contacted by dozens of people who have found the letters misleading, thinking this is their only chance to get the vaccine.\n\nHe said he had spoken to Trafford Council and was aware of people in Shropshire being sent to Manchester and residents there being directed to Birmingham to get their jabs.\n\n\"For many people they have been told consistently to wait for the NHS to contact you in order to get a vaccine and that's what they've had for the first time as a piece of communication.\n\n\"This is really, really concerning for people in their 80s or 90s because of the importance of getting the vaccine.\"\n\nThe letters are not \"going to the heart\" of the public health message which is staying home and staying local, he said.\n\nMore than 500,000 letters will be sent out to homes offering people appointments at the centres over the next seven days\n\nDr Sarah Raistrick, from Coventry and Rugby Clinical Commission group (CCG), said people did not have to travel to the centres but admitted the letter did not make that clear.\n\n\"You can wait and be contacted by your local GP service and have it locally if you'd prefer.\n\n\"If you sit tight, you will be contacted and I'm hopeful that if you're 80 or over, by the end of this month you will have had your vaccination whether that is locally or whether you have chosen to travel,\" she said.\n\nWork will be done with the NHS locally and nationally to make that message clearer, she added.\n\nThe seven centres were chosen to give a geographical spread covering as many people as possible and are capable of delivering thousands of jabs per week, NHS England has said.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Hancock: We are willing to tighten the rules\n\nThe health secretary stresses the importance of the public following the restrictions of the current lockdown. Asked by Emily Morgan of ITV whether it was time to make the rules stricter amid reports of people not sticking to them at the weekend, Matt Hancock says: \"We keep these things under review and we have demonstrated that we're willing to tighten the rules if they need to be tightened. \"But the thing that really matters right here, right now is that everybody follows the rules as they are today. \"And everybody can play their part in doing that.\" He adds he applauds the action supermarket Morrisons has taken in enforcing the wearing of masks by its customers unless they have a medical reason. \"I want to see all parts of society playing their part in this,\" he says.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Professor Whitty: \"We need to really double down – this is everybody’s problem\"\n\nThe UK will go through the \"most dangerous time\" of the pandemic in the weeks before vaccine rollout has an impact, England's chief medical officer has warned.\n\nProf Chris Whitty urged people to minimise all unnecessary contact with others.\n\nThe next few weeks will be \"the worst\" of the pandemic for the NHS, he said.\n\nThousands more people are due to receive a vaccine this week after seven mass centres opened across England.\n\nNHS England said hundreds more GP-led and hospital services would also open later this week.\n\nBut with all centres, people will need to wait until they receive an invitation.\n\nThe government is aiming to offer vaccinations to around 15 million people in the UK - the over-70s, older care home residents and staff, frontline healthcare workers and the clinically extremely vulnerable - by mid-February.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock will set out the government's vaccine delivery plan at a news conference later.\n\nHe said the proposals would be the \"keystone of our exit out of the pandemic\".\n\nOutlining the vaccine rollout in Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon confirmed that ministers aim to give all over-80s the first dose of the vaccine over the next four weeks.\n\nThe Welsh Government plans to offer a vaccine to all over-50s and everyone who is at greater risk by spring.\n\nMr Hancock said on Sunday about two million people in the UK had been vaccinated so far.\n\nOver the weekend, the UK passed the milestone of 80,000 deaths with coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.\n\nCurrently, around one in 50 people across the UK is infected and Prof Whitty told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"There's a very high chance that if you meet someone unnecessarily they will have Covid.\"\n\nIn a separate interview with BBC One's Breakfast, he said: \"This is everybody's problem. Any single unnecessary contact you have with someone is a potential link in a chain of transmission that will lead to a vulnerable person.\"\n\nHe said there were over 30,000 people [in English hospitals alone] with Covid-19 - compared to about 18,000 [in England] at the peak last April.\n\nHe added that \"anybody who is not shocked\" by the number of people in hospital \"has not understood this at all\".\n\n\"This is an appalling situation,\" he said.\n\nIn Essex, Southend Hospital has had to reduce the amount of oxygen used to treat patients after supply \"reached a critical situation\", according to a document shared with the BBC.\n\nIn Surrey, a temporary mortuary has been opened as hospital mortuaries have reached capacity.\n\nAlmost 200 bodies are being stored at the emergency site, which is a former military hospital, and other local authorities have told the BBC they expect to open similar facilities soon.\n\nProf Stephen Powis, NHS England national medical director, said \"this is much bigger than the first wave back in April\".\n\n\"I don't think anyone in the NHS has known anything like this, this is a once-in-a-century pandemic,\" he said.\n\nProf Rupert Pearse, an intensive care doctor, told BBC Breakfast that in a \"normal\" winter it would be \"unlikely\" that more than three of four flu patients would need intensive care at any one time, but his unit is now running 130 intensive care beds because of the effects of Covid.\n\n\"To compare this to a normal winter flu epidemic is out of all proportion, it's orders of magnitude larger,\" he said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and can go out only for limited reasons such as food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home.\n\nSimilar lockdown measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nMinisters held two meetings on Sunday to discuss how to enforce the current lockdown measures more strictly and whether even tighter restrictions may be needed.\n\nBBC political correspondent Iain Watson said no decisions on further restrictions were taken as there was a desire within government to wait until reliable data on existing measures becomes available in 10 days.\n\nHowever, he added there had been a discussion on better enforcement of existing regulations, including at shops and workplaces.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer questioned why there are \"less restrictions in place\" now than there were last March.\n\nIn his first speech of the year, he said \"we need to see the evidence behind nurseries\" remaining open.\n\nAsked whether tighter restrictions were needed, he said: \"I do think it's time to hear from the scientists [about] what else could be done and that probably should be done in the next few hours\".\n\nThere is a lot of debate about whether the lockdown restrictions need to be tightened.\n\nThere are certainly some anomalies. For example, we are told to only leave the home for essential purposes, but coffee shops remain open for takeaways and retail shops for click-and-collect in England and Wales.\n\nHowever, even if those elements are tightened up, there is a limit to what the government can do. It is why, in his round of media interviews on Monday, Prof Whitty repeatedly talked about individual decision-making.\n\nThe mixing of different households continues. Some of it is allowed under the support bubble exemptions, but undoubtedly some of it is taking place outside of this. It is, after all, virtually impossible to police what goes on in people's homes.\n\nIt is why messaging is so important - and so ministers and officials are stressing the pressure the NHS is under. A further tightening of the restrictions could also help make the point.\n\nBut there is also a recognition this is hard. People are fatigued. A further crackdown could also erode goodwill.\n\nThe vaccination programme is described as the biggest in NHS history.\n\nThe seven mass testing sites, which NHS England said were chosen to give a geographical spread, are:\n\nThe new centres will each be capable of delivering thousands of vaccinations each week and will be followed by \"dozens more\" large-scale sites, NHS England said.\n\nThere will be about 1,200 vaccination sites when more GP-led and hospital services open later this week, along with the first pharmacy-led pilot sites, it added.\n\nSome vulnerable people have questioned why they have been asked to travel to centres miles away from their homes during a pandemic, but the NHS has said people would not miss out on their vaccination if they wait for an appointment at a centre closer to home in the coming weeks.\n\nVaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said nobody should be asked to travel more than 10 miles to get a vaccine once more centres open.\n\nAsked on Today why the centres were not open 24 hours a day, he said it was \"more convenient\" for older people to attend during the day.\n\n\"If we need to go to 24-hour work we will absolutely go to 24 hours a day to make sure we vaccinate as quickly as we can,\" he said.\n\nBut he cautioned: \"We are limited by the amount of vaccine that is coming through the system.\"\n\nPharmaceutical firm Boots said its first vaccination site was due to open later this week to offer the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab to the people most vulnerable.\n\nIt said sites in Huddersfield and Gloucester were planned to open in the coming weeks.\n\nTwo vaccines - Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca - are currently being administered in the UK.\n\nOn Friday a third coronavirus vaccine - made by US company Moderna - was approved for use, although supplies are not expected to arrive until spring.\n\nAre you due to have a vaccination today? What has been your experience of receiving a vaccination? Email: haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "US president-elect Joe Biden has been given his new official presidential Twitter account, but has been forced to start it with zero followers.\n\nThe Biden campaign is unhappy with the move, which marks a change from the previous transition from Barack Obama.\n\nThe new account, @PresElectBiden, will transform into the official @POTUS (President of the United States) one on inauguration day on 20 January.\n\nIn its first six hours online it gained nearly 400,000 followers.\n\nHis team has also registered new accounts - @FLOTUSBiden for the future first lady, Jill Biden, and for the first time, @SecondGentleman, for Ms Harris's husband Doug Emhoff.\n\nDonald Trump inherited the Potus account's 13 million or so followers when it moved to him from Mr Obama - but that will not happen this time.\n\nMr Biden's team was told about the move less than a month ago, and said it meant \"the administration will have to start from zero\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Rob Flaherty This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by President-elect Biden This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nTwitter has not explained why the decision was made, and said it had nothing further to add beyond an official blog post laying out transition plans.\n\nIn that post it said: \"These institutional accounts will not automatically retain the followers from the prior administration,\" without a reason why.\n\nBut it said that people who previously followed the official @POTUS and @VP (Vice-President) accounts, or the personal accounts of Mr Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris - would receive notifications giving them the option to follow the new official ones.\n\nMr Obama was the first US leader to have an official Twitter account. The @POTUS account was set up during his tenure in 2015.\n\nAt the end of his second term, a transition plan for handing over the official accounts to Mr Trump was drawn up - with @POTUS going to the new administration.\n\nAll of Mr Obama's official tweets were archived for posterity on a separate account, @POTUS44 (where they can still be read today).\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by President Obama This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nTwitter said that the official @POTUS account under Mr Trump will be archived in a similar way, under @POTUS45. But Mr Trump rarely used that account, favouring his own Twitter handle.\n\nTwitter notably omitted any mention of the now-suspended @realDonaldTrump account, and declined to answer questions about whether its contents would be archived.\n\nThat is despite a declaration by the White House in 2017 that tweets from that account are considered official statements by the President.\n\nHowever, the US National Archives has already announced - through a tweet - that it will archive all social media content from that account, despite Twitter's lack of a commitment to doing so.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by US National Archives This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post 4 by US National Archives\n\nIt said that the White House has been using a special archiving tool to capture all content, including deleted tweets, because of the Presidential Records Act.\n\nThat is likely to result in a record system similar to The Obama White House Social Media Archive, built after the last transition.\n\nA key goal of the Obama transition was to preserve social media posts \"on the platforms where they were created\".\n\nBut Twitter has permanently suspended Mr Trump from its platform and it remains unclear if it will ever archive his account for posterity.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. UK weather: Will it snow where you are?\n\nSnow and ice weather warnings are in place for much of England and Scotland after widespread recent snowfall.\n\nThe Met Office has issued yellow weather warnings across England and Scotland for Saturday and warned of possible travel disruption.\n\nParts of England and Scotland could see as much as 5-10cm of snow in higher areas, the weather service said.\n\nIt comes as hundreds of schools remain closed after heavy snow hit the north of England on Thursday.\n\nA snow warning is in place for south-east England, including London, the east of England and the East Midlands. The Met Office said East Anglia and parts of Kent and Sussex are most at risk of snow.\n\nSome 1-3 cm of snow may fall fairly widely over these areas, with 5-10 cm possible in places, mostly over parts of East Anglia and any higher ground.\n\nA snow and ice warning is in place for most of Scotland, north-west and north-east England, Yorkshire and Humber, the East Midlands and parts of the West Midlands.\n\nSnow is likely to fall to low levels over east Scotland and northern England.\n\nThe Met Office said 1-3 cm is possible at low levels in these areas but is more likely at higher elevations, where 5-10 cm of snow is possible above 200m - and even 20cm at the highest places.\n\nFog is also forecast for parts of the Midlands and the North, along with mist around Glasgow which may pose hazards for motorists.\n\nPolice forces in Yorkshire have urged people to stay at home unless their travel is essential\n\nTwo girls took their sledge to a golf course near Penicuik, Midlothian\n\nThe coronavirus vaccine rollout has been affected by the weather.\n\nOver-80s who were due to receive their jab at Newcastle's Centre for Life were told they could re-book rather than risk making a trip in the icy conditions.\n\nNewcastle Hospitals tweeted: \"There's enough vaccine for everyone, so don't worry about making a trip to Newcastle.\"\n\nAnd Leeds University has delayed the opening of its asymptomatic Covid-19 test centre.\n\nHeavy snowfall has already caused travel disruption across sections of northern England and Scotland.\n\nTemperatures were as low as -6C on Friday morning in parts of Yorkshire and Cumbria, with yellow warnings set to last through most of Friday.\n\nThere was a loss of gas supply to approximately 700 homes in the Hebden Bridge area after water got into the local gas network and froze.\n\nThe Met Office has published advice from the Department for Transport advising people to clear snow and ice from footpaths outside their homes, preferably in the morning.\n\n\"You can then cover the path with salt before nightfall to stop it refreezing overnight,\" the advice says.\n\nTemperatures in the Greater London area are expected to drop to 1C on Friday and parts of the South East could fall to -2C.\n\nIt comes after \"hazardous\" conditions on Thursday caused problems for the ambulance service in Yorkshire, which struggled to keep up with the high demand, while Covid vaccinations were also affected.\n\nMark Millins, of Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust, said the bad weather was having a \"severe impact\" on its operations and urged people to \"take extra care\" when out walking or driving.\n\nIn Scotland, heavy snow in some areas resulted in road closures.\n\nThe deepest snow on Thursday was in Bingley, West Yorkshire, and Strathallan in Perth, Scotland, both of which recorded 11cm.", "The Daily Telegraph must publish a correction over a \"significantly misleading\" column written by Toby Young, press regulator Ipso has ruled.\n\nThe July 2020 article claimed the common cold could provide \"natural immunity\" to Covid-19 and London was \"probably approaching herd immunity\".\n\nBut on Thursday Ipso found the paper had \"failed to take care not to publish inaccurate and misleading information\".\n\nIpso said the paper \"did not accept it has breached the [Editors] Code\".\n\nIt said the newspaper said that Young's comments on immunity referred to \"cross-reactive T-cells\" that work to combat the virus.\n\nHowever, the media watchdog sided with the complainant, James Whitehead, in its decision, who said that while these cells \"may lessen the impact of Covid-19\" after infection, they \"would not confer 'natural immunity'\"\n\nThe ruling added Young's statement \"misrepresented the nature of immunity\".\n\nIpso also found Young's suggestion that \"London is probably approaching herd immunity, even though only 17% tested positive [for antibodies] in the most recent seroprevalence survey\" could be misleading.\n\nThere is an antibody response and a cellular response to the coronavirus\n\nThe Telegraph referred to surveys listed in an article on Young's own Lockdown Sceptics website in its defence, but the Ipso committee judged these did not accurately reflect \"how herd immunity is reached and whether it exists in London\".\n\nThe ruling concluded that the paper had breached accuracy standards on a topic of \"public importance\", but deemed a correction an appropriate sanction, given the level of \"significant scientific uncertainty\" at the time of publication.\n\nYoung told the BBC: \"I think Ipso has been put in a difficult position because our scientific understanding of the virus is constantly evolving and there is a great deal about it that scientists still disagree about.\n\n\"While some of the things I wrote in that article would be contested by some scientists, they would be confirmed by others... Have we achieved herd immunity in London? I think that's an open question and the 'case' data is unreliable because of the well-documented shortcomings of the PCR test.\n\n\"I may have been over-emphatic in putting the anti-lockdown case, but it's not as if the advocates of a pro-lockdown position are any less emphatic.\n\n\"Don't forget the WHO initially estimated the global IFR [infection fatality rate] of Covid-19 at 3.4%. The consensus now is that it's less than 1% and almost certainly a lot less. Lots of journalists faithfully reported that alarmist figure. Why hasn't Ipso reprimanded them?\"\n\nLast week Young told BBC Newsnight that some of his claims from an article he wrote in June had been \"wrong\", where he had said a second spike of Covid-19 had \"refused to materialise\" and that one-metre rule is \"unnecessary\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by BBC Newsnight This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAt the start of the year, Young, an associate editor at The Spectator and general secretary of the Free Speech Union, installed an app that auto-deletes tweets more than a week old.\n\nHe said he did so to protect against \"politically-motivated offence archaeologists\" - a move unrelated to the Ipso ruling.\n\nReacting to criticism of his past comments on coronavirus from Neil O'Brien, Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, after the deletion, Young then tweeted a defence of his stance against lockdowns.\n\n\"This is an important public debate to have,\" he wrote, \"both because it helps us assess the present government's management of the pandemic and because it will help us prepare better for the next one.\"\n\nThe UK entered a second national lockdown last week in a bid to control spiralling virus infection rates. On Wednesday, the UK saw its biggest daily death figure since the start of the pandemic, with 1,564 deaths.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "The TikTok clip was reported to police by Network Rail\n\nA TikTok stunt featuring a car parked on a level crossing has been branded \"staggeringly stupid\".\n\nThe \"reckless\" social media post, recorded on the line at Bromley Cross, Bolton, showed a camera and tripod set up on the railway to record the scene.\n\nAn accompanying caption asked viewers: \"Would you take the risk to get the shot no-one else would?\"\n\nInsp Becky Warren, from British Transport Police, said: \"No picture or video is worth risking your life for.\"\n\nNetwork Rail, which reported the footage after it appeared on the video-sharing app, blasted the \"staggeringly stupid and dangerous\" clip.\n\nIt issued a reminder that trespassing on railway lines is against the law.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by ManchesterPiccadilly This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nNorth West route director Phil James said using the tracks \"as a backdrop for a photo shoot beggars belief\".\n\n\"Lives could so easily have been lost by this reckless behaviour,\" he said.\n\nInsp Warren added: \"There is simply no excuse for not following safety procedures at level crossings. The behaviour shown by the individuals in this video is incredibly dangerous and reckless.\"\n\nMany instances of trespass involve people using railway lines as backdrops for selfies and even wedding photos.\n\nLast year, Network Rail and British Transport Police launched a You vs. Train campaign to highlight the issue of young people trespassing.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Pre-departure Covid-19 testing will now be required for everyone travelling to England from 04:00 GMT on Monday.\n\nThe rules had been due to come into force on Friday, but the government said people needed time \"to prepare\".\n\nThose arriving by plane, train or boat, including UK nationals, will have to take a test up to 72 hours before leaving the country they are in.\n\nAnyone arriving from places not on the UK's travel corridor list must still self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nThe Scottish government is planning to impose the same rules and has had to defer them coming into effect as a result of changes in England.\n\n\"This meant Scotland was also obliged to delay implementation as we need sight of their final regulations in order to properly draft and approve the relevant Scottish regulations,\" a spokeswoman said.\n\nIt is expected the requirement will come into force in Scotland at 04:00 GMT on Monday as well. Wales and Northern Ireland are expected to announce plans for pre-arrival testing in the coming days.\n\nAnnouncing the deferral on Twitter, Transport Secretary Mr Shapps said: \"To give international arrivals time to prepare, passengers will be required to provide proof of a negative Covid-19 test before departure to England from Monday 18 January at 4am.\"\n\nHe also reminded travellers to fill out the Passenger Locator Form - used in track and trace - and added that those without proof of a negative test faced a fine of £500.\n\nProblems with testing availability and capacity mean some countries will initially be exempt.\n\nFor instance, the requirement will not apply to travellers from St Lucia, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda until 04:00 GMT on 21 January.\n\nTravellers from Falkland Islands, Ascension Islands and St Helena are exempted permanently.\n\nHauliers are exempt to allow the free flow of freight, as are air, international rail and maritime crew.\n\nThe government has said all forms of PCR test will be accepted, as will other forms of test with \"97% specificity, 80% sensitivity\".\n\nThe move comes as a further 1,564 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test - the biggest figure reported in a single day since the pandemic began.\n\nWednesday's figure brings the total number of deaths by that measure to 84,767.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England, said there had now been more deaths in the second wave than the first.\n\nMeanwhile on Wednesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was \"concerned\" about a new coronavirus variant that is believed to have emerged in Brazil.\n\nHe acknowledged it was not yet clear how effective existing vaccines would be against the latest new variant.\n\nMr Johnson said the UK was taking steps to make sure it was not brought into the country.\n\nA government Covid committee is meeting on Thursday to discuss the possibility of stopping flights from Brazil.\n\nArrivals from Brazil already have to self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nAre you due to travel back to the UK from Brazil? Share your experience. Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Post-primary schools have been given extra time to decide how they will admit pupils in 2021 following the cancellation of transfer tests.\n\nOn Wednesday the AQE said it would not hold any transfer tests in the 2020-21 school year.\n\nThey had originally planned to go ahead with a test in late February after cancelling tests in January.\n\nThe other test provider, PPTC, had also previously announced it would not hold tests this year.\n\nAttention will now focus especially on what criteria grammar schools will use to select pupils.\n\nSome have already published what criteria they would use in the event transfer tests were cancelled but it is not clear if those will now change.\n\nAll post-primaries were to submit their admissions criteria to the Education Authority (EA) by this Friday.\n\nBut following the AQE's move the Department of Education (DE) has written to schools to tell them they do not have to provide criteria to the EA until Friday 22 January.\n\n\"This will allow them to meet the statutory deadline for publication on their website of 2 February 2021,\" the DE letter said.\n\n\"I would also remind you that boards of governors should ensure that any admissions criteria are robust and are able to clearly and objectively rank order applicants.\"\n\nIt is unclear how most grammar schools who have used transfer tests to select pupils in previous years will admit children in 2021.\n\nPatrick Allen, principal of Foyle College in Londonderry, said his school's board of governors was now working to determine this year's admissions criteria.\n\n\"This is and continues to be an exceptional year. It is a very difficult circumstance,\" he said.\n\n\"We are trying to do the best and what is right for as many pupils as possible in looking at various permutations and combinations of criteria\".\n\nEducation Minister Peter Weir said it was \"a very disappointing day\" for many families.\n\n\"The transfer test, while it has never been about being compulsory for either a school or indeed an individual parent, does enable a level of parental choice and that has been dramatically reduced as a result of that,\" he told Radio Ulster's Good Morning Ulster programme.\n\n\"But sadly what we have seen is for this year, the pandemic has prevented those transfer tests taking place, and I am very disappointed and entirely understand the disappointment and frustration of many families today.\"\n\nMr Weir said there had been \"a lack of consistency\" from AQE.\n\n\"I don't think the way things have worked out from AQE's point of view, particularly over the last couple of weeks, have been particularly helpful,\" he said.\n\nThe minister also apologised for \"clumsy language\" in a statement he issued on Wednesday night.\n\nWriting on Twitter about the cancellation of the transfer test, Mr Weir said: \"This severely limits parental choice and children's opportunities.\"\n\n\"There was no adverse intention towards non-selective schools,\" he said in relation to his tweet.\n\n\"I think both selective and non-selective schools have got excellent records in Northern Ireland.\"\n\n\"But once the opportunities for entry to any school is reduced then that is a reduction in opportunities for all.\"\n\nUUP MLA Robbie Butler has proposed that pupils' results in tests in primary schools could be given to parents and then used by grammar schools to decide which children get a place.\n\nMr Butler said that he had some favourable responses from some grammars and some primary schools to that proposal.\n\n\"Whilst I don't think my solution is absolutely perfect I do believe it to be absolutely fair and absolutely compassionate,\" he told MLAs on the committee.\n\n\"We have the genesis of a solution for these P7 pupils.\"\n\nBut, speaking on Wednesday, Mr Weir replied that there were issues with that approach.\n\n\"There are very major problems, I'm being honest with you, in terms of the models that have been put forward for academic selection without the test,\" he said.\n\nThe minister said it would be difficult to get comparable information for pupils across all primaries.\n\n\"While it's not entirely ruling out those and there is the option for schools to do it, it does leave them in a very difficult position making comparability between pupils on a fair basis,\" he said", "Police said Graeme Perks had gone to investigate the sound of breaking glass when he was stabbed\n\nPlastic surgeons have expressed shock at the stabbing of \"one of the most highly regarded and respected surgeons\" in their profession.\n\nGraeme Perks, 65, was stabbed in his abdomen and chest during a break-in at his house in Halam, a village near Southwell in Nottinghamshire.\n\nPolice said the attack on Thursday morning had left him \"fighting for his life\" and left his family, who were upstairs at the time, \"extremely upset\".\n\nGraeme Perks has been described as \"one of the most highly regarded and respected surgeons in the profession\"\n\nMr Perks previously served as president of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons (BAPRAS).\n\nCurrent president Ruth Waters said BAPRAS had been contacted by colleagues all around the world as news of the attack spread.\n\n\"All have expressed their shock at what has happened and also their deep concern for his wellbeing and their hope for his speedy recovery,\" she said.\n\n\"It has been my good fortune and honour to know Graeme for many years. I have benefited from his kindness, generosity and extensive knowledge throughout my career in plastic surgery.\"\n\nBAPRAS described him as \"one of the most highly regarded and respected surgeons in the profession\".\n\nAs well as being a leading plastic surgeon, Mr Perks and his wife have raised thousands of pounds for charity by opening their garden to visitors. They were previously featured on BBC Radio Nottingham after raising more than £34,000.\n\nPolice were still outside the house in Halam more than 24 hours later\n\nPolice said Mr Perks had gone to investigate the sound of breaking glass at about 04:15 GMT, after an intruder is believed to have smashed his way into the house.\n\nThey said Mr Perks was stabbed and the suspect ran off.\n\nMr Perks was taken to the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham for surgery, where he remains in a serious condition.\n\nDet Insp Gayle Hart, who is leading the investigation, said: \"The swift arrest of this suspect we hope will provide some reassurance to local residents.\n\n\"This is a horrific incident which has left a man fighting for his life and his family who were upstairs at the time are extremely shocked and upset by the ordeal.\"\n\nMr Perks has served as president of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons (BAPRAS)\n\nMr Perks has previously worked in London, Sheffield, Newcastle and Melbourne, Australia.\n\nHe returned to the UK in the mid-1990s and started working in Nottingham, with a special interest in microsurgical reconstruction after cancer surgery.\n\nHe later became head of the department of Plastic, Reconstructive and Burns Surgery at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.\n\nOutgoing BAPRAS president Mark Henley said: \"Graeme is an amazing colleague who it has been my pleasure and privilege to work with over the last 26 years.\n\n\"His dedication to patients, family and friends is an inspiration to us all and with his wisdom, kindness and humanity he has enabled us to achieve many things that I would never have thought possible. We are all willing him on.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Scottish fishermen have resorted to sailing to Denmark to land their catch as Brexit red tape continues to delay exports, an industry body has said.\n\nThe Scottish Fishermen's Federation, which campaigned to leave the EU, also said the Brexit trade deal was the worst of both worlds for the industry.\n\nMany fishermen \"now fear for their future\", it said.\n\nThe UK government said the deal would \"bring immediate gains to our fishermen and women across the whole UK\".\n\nLate last year, the Scottish Fishermen's Federation (SFF) said it was \"deeply aggrieved\" by the Brexit deal.\n\nFishing firms have also warned of impending bankruptcy as delays continue at ports following the introduction of post-Brexit regulations.\n\nOn Friday, the SFF kept up the pressure on the UK government.\n\nIn a letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, it said some fishermen \"are now making a 72-hour round trip to land fish in Denmark, as the only way to guarantee that their catch will make a fair price and actually find its way to market while still fresh enough to meet customer demands\".\n\nQuotas are used by many countries to manage shared fish stocks. They determine how many fish of each species each country's fleets are allowed to catch.\n\nThe SFF said that Brexit quota gains \"can hardly be claimed as a resounding success\" and that the Brexit deal \"actually leaves the Scottish industry in a worse position on more than half of the key stocks\".\n\n\"This industry now finds itself in the worst of both worlds,\" said SFF chief executive Elspeth Macdonald, accusing Prime Minister Boris Johnson of broken promises on quotas.\n\nThe \"desperately poor deal\" reached on quotas, under which the EU \"have full access to our waters\" means that the UK has \"no ability to leverage more fish from the EU\", she said.\n\n\"This, coupled with the chaos experienced since 1 January in getting fish to market, means that many in our industry now fear for their future, rather than look forward to it with optimism and ambition,\" Ms Macdonald added.\n\nThe Scottish National Party said the letter was \"an utterly devastating verdict on Brexit from Scotland's fishing industry\".\n\nAn SNP spokesperson said the Scottish fishing industry was \"right to be angry\" about the Brexit deal, which it said was costing Scotland's fishing communities millions of pounds.\n\nThe spokesman called on the prime minister to deliver \"a multi-billion pound package of Brexit compensation for Scotland\", adding: \"Communities across Scotland will never forgive the Tories for the damage they are doing to our country with their extreme Brexit obsession.\"\n\nA UK government spokesperson said the Prime Minister would respond to the SFF letter in due course.\n\nThe spokesperson said: \"We have now taken back control of our waters and the agreement we have reached with the EU secures a 25% transfer of quota from EU to UK vessels over five years, starting with 15% this year.\"\n\nThe spokesperson said the government was looking at providing additional financial support for the Scottish fishing industry, which it recognised was facing \"some temporary issues\".\n\n\"The Prime Minister has already committed to investing £100m in the UK's fishing industry and provided the Scottish government with nearly £200m to minimise disruption for businesses,\" the spokesperson added.", "A selection of your pictures of Scotland sent in between 8 and 15 January. Send your photos to scotlandpictures@bbc.co.uk. Please ensure you adhere to the BBC's rules regarding photographs that can be found here.\n\nPlease also ensure you follow current coronavirus guidelines and take your pictures safely and responsibly.\n\nConditions of use: If you submit an image, you do so in accordance with the BBC's terms and conditions.\n\nThe hills are alive: This impressive shot of 11-year-old Hamish at sunrise up the Pentland Hills, with the snow starting to be blown off the peak, was captured by dad Andy Dryden.\n\nMinus coo degrees: \"Hardy Highlander at Abriachan\" is how Gordon Bain described his photo.\n\nRed sky thinking: \"I always walk the dog to catch the sunrise and to gather my thoughts before attempting to juggle home schooling of my two primary school kids with working from home and looking after a toddler\", says Mairi Brittan at Cammo Estate, Edinburgh.\n\nRobin red brrr-east: Graham Laird spotted a little feathered friend not looking entirely delighted while taking a breather in the cold in his garden in Wishaw.\n\nUp at the crack of dawn: \"The Beveridge Park pond in Kirkcaldy looking rather icy\", says John Pow.\n\nAn uphill struggle: It's all downhill from here - but in a fun way - for three-year-old Zachary in King's Park, Glasgow.\n\nFire and ice: \"Taken at Dunbar harbour, East Lothian, in the snowfall on the way to work\", says Rowan Davies.\n\nAbbey thoughts: \"Jedburgh Abbey on a crisp January morning\", says Alan Morrison. \"The sun was captured just as it shone through\".\n\nSon rise: Jeanette Taylor says her two boys loved the adventure of getting up early to see the sun come up at Aberdeen beach. \"A chilly visit but oh so worth it\", she says.\n\nLight on her feet: \"As keen figure skaters my daughter Ada (pictured) and I have had an amazing week skating outdoors on our local frozen pond near Glasgow\", says Helen Campbell. \"I was very careful to check it is safe to skate on first; the ice was absolutely solid\".\n\nFlagging up a beautiful sunrise: An Aberdeen morning, from Finlay Gray.\n\nWell-trained eye: \"My husband Kris took this picture of our 12-year-old son Finlay at our local running track in a Falkirk park with the Ochils in the background\", says Emma Horne. \"Finlay can’t play his beloved rugby at the moment due to Covid but is keeping as fit as he can in other ways\".\n\nA strange light in the sky: Joe Gillies captured this Glasgow scene, complete with reflected light shade, on his phone.\n\nSmiles more fun: First sledging experience for the happy pair of 16-month-old Annabel and 21-month-old Hugh in granny's garden, Isle of Skye, courtesy of Hermione Lamond.\n\nThe gloves are off: \"A walk up Culter Fell (near Biggar), in near-Arctic conditions\", says Chris Green.\n\nPark life: Mark McGuire captured Queen's Park in Glasgow looking like a winter wonderland.\n\nSpecial branch: \"I have seen the Kingfisher darting by on the River Carron over the last two years\", says Paul Ross. \"This is the first time I have managed to get a sharpish image\".\n\nTrees frame: Carole Brunton captured this calming, if cold, scene at home in East Neuk, Fife.\n\nCold feet: \"A coot on one of Dundee's frozen Stobsmuir ponds\", from Sandy Forbes.\n\nHaving the foggiest idea: \"An image of atmospheric fog as it envelops Paisley\", says Gary Chittick. \"Hardly a single recognisable part of Glasgow could be seen\".\n\nSniffer dog: \"Ollie, our 12-week-old cockapoo pup, experiences snow for the first time\" says Iain Clow. \"Lockdown garden fun in East Kilbride\".\n\n... and it seems they never learn! \"Zizou enjoying his sunny snowy morning walk at the river Spey in Knockando\", says Colin Coutts.\n\nI love Arran: \"My wife and I stopped at the top of Fairlie Moor Road, looked back, and this is what we saw\", explains Phil Cowling.\n\nOutstanding in its field: \"Look who we spotted on our walk\", says Ruth Moss. \"He was very bold - wish we’d had something to feed him\".\n\nWatercolour art: \"This is a photo of the Ythan in the centre of Ellon\", says Andy Leonard. \"The colour of the sky is reflected in the water - I used a slow shutter speed to emphasise the water movement.\"\n\nHatman and robin: \"After an overnight fall of snow, Frosty and his friendly robin return to a Glasgow garden\", says John McQueeney.\n\nSmall wonder: \"These mini snowmen on the Prince of Wales Bridge in Kelvingrove Park brightened up a dull and foggy day\", says Geoff Der.\n\nOne man and his dog: \"Snowy walk with my husband and rescue dog Nico\", says Laura Johnstone in Airdrie.\n\nSpot the ball: \"Haggs Castle golf course is closed - maybe!\", says Alan Crozier.\n\nSolar energy: Robert Young's sunset shot from Chapelton looking towards Whitelee wind farm features all sorts of power.\n\nTwo for the price of one: \"Duck!\" could have been the cry from this heron in flight over a fellow bird at the River Avon, Hamilton, as seen by Wilma Phillips.\n\nRoom with a view: A nicely-framed sunset from Audrey Philpott of Skene, Aberdeenshire.\n\nBonnie picture: Sharon Donald was walking Bonnie the collie when she took this shot near Spean Bridge.\n\nKeep it in the family: Derek Warrander making sure lockdown learning is music to the ears of Jessica, 11, and three-year-old Matthew in Aberdeenshire, courtesy of Caseydee Warrander.\n\nFeeling on top of the world: The Cobbler sunset, from Tomasz Zajac.\n\nIce to see you: \"A photo of my husband, Stephen, and Sophie, through a sheet of ice which they then had great fun smashing\", says Leigh Titterington in Menstrie, Clackmannanshire.\n\nSpace station: All quiet outside Glasgow Central, courtesy of Eva Brodie.\n\nSnow angel: \"Exploring a winter wonderland with my daughter Cora at Tyrebagger woods just outside Aberdeen\", says Katherine Blum.\n\nTaps aff: \"Hope this brings a smile to your face\", says Stewart Paul in Cruden Bay. It certainly did!\n\nPlease ensure that the photograph you send is your own and if you are submitting photographs of children, we must have written permission from a parent or guardian of every child featured (a grandparent, auntie or friend will not suffice).\n\nIn contributing to BBC News you agree to grant us a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to publish and otherwise use the material in any way, including in any media worldwide.\n\nHowever, you will still own the copyright to everything you contribute to BBC News.\n\nAt no time should you endanger yourself or others, take any unnecessary risks or infringe the law.\n\nYou can find more information here.\n\nAll photos are subject to copyright.", "Doctors fear the impact of the lockdown and school closures could worsen child obesity\n\nThe health board with the worst child obesity rates in Wales is setting up a unit to tackle the issue.\n\nData from the Child Measurement Programme showed 30.3% of four and five-year-olds in north Wales measured as overweight or obese.\n\nThe Welsh average is 26.4%, but doctors fear this could worsen in the pandemic.\n\nBetsi Cadwaladr University Health Board is recruiting a dietetic lead for a new children's healthy weight management service.\n\nThe service is not being launched directly because of the pandemic, but there are fears lockdowns and school closures could compound the problem.\n\nDr Naomi Simmons, consultant paediatrician at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd in Bodelwyddan, Denbighshire, said: \"I do fear that the pandemic will contribute to an exacerbation of what's already a really, really significant problem.\n\n\"Whilst we're pleased that children are not suffering the acute effects of Covid in the same way as older patients are, on the whole, it's the long-term effects of the country being in this pandemic that we're worried about in terms of the long-term health of these children.\n\n\"It's that lack of routine, it's being out of school, and not being able to access their usual forms of physical activity.\"\n\nDaniel, from Denbighshire - not his real name - is the father of a six-year-old girl who was referred to Dr Simmons's clinic when a GP became concerned about her weight two years ago. She is still under the care of the clinic.\n\nHe said: \"We presumed we were feeding her correctly. She was getting fruit, veg, home-cooked meals. But I think our issue was, we kind of let her have treats, like chocolates and sweets.\n\n\"To be told the news [that she was obese], it was horrible. We were very upset. We were kind of angry about it - we didn't see a problem in her, we didn't believe she was overweight or obese. We were both asking what we had done wrong as parents - we gave her fruit, vegetables, home-cooked meals... we were asking ourselves, 'how have we failed as parents?'\"\n\nWith support from Dr Simmons, his daughter made \"great progress\" and lost weight, he said. Previous signs of health issues such as liver problems had improved. Then the pandemic struck and the country went into its first lockdown, followed by the firebreak, then the current lockdown.\n\nExperts said they feared the impact of children not being able to take part in their usual physical activity\n\nDespite making efforts to keep active and eat healthily, Daniel has seen the gradual effects on his daughter, both physically and mentally.\n\n\"It had a bad effect on her, and not just the weight - mental health-wise it's also affected her. She's six years old and is worried about being around other people in the street,\" he said.\n\n\"In years to come, Covid will be gone, we'll have control of it. But obesity, that's the issue that's going to be prolonged.\n\n\"The long-term mental health impact really scares me - not just for my daughter, but for so many other children.\"\n\nDr Simmons said increasing rates of childhood obesity in recent years meant experts were treating more children with conditions normally associated with adults.\n\n\"Even children as young as primary school age, I'm seeing those children with fatty liver changes for example, as a result of their obesity. We're seeing them with high blood pressure and we're seeing children and young people developing type 2 diabetes and many more with pre-diabetic states because of their obesity.\"\n\nDoctors said they were seeing primary school children with high blood pressure\n\nShe revealed her youngest patient was only a year old and encouraged families to get their children \"used to being fit and healthy and consuming a healthy diet\".\n\n\"It's lack of exercise, it's the sedentary lifestyle that we as a nation are sadly embracing these days,\" she added.\n\nIf children remain overweight and remain obese into adolescence, they have an 80% chance of being obese into adulthood, said Dr Simmons.\n\nShe said she hoped the new service would give \"the very best chance of turning things around\".\n\nSteven Grayston, Betsi Cadwaladr health board's assistant area director of therapy services, said the health board had been working for the past five years to develop its obesity services.\n\n\"This is a specialist weight management service for children who are already obese,\" he said.\n\n\"We want to stop them becoming obese, therefore we want to develop preventative services as well as treatment services.\n\n\"We're very concerned about the impact of Covid and the pandemic on children's activity levels, certainly in terms of team-based sports and access to leisure facilities - particularly things like swimming, which we know children enjoy.\n\n\"We're concerned that children just aren't getting out of the house and doing things, and the impact that'll have and the knock-on effect on obesity levels in the future, as children are just less active and less interested in doing those activities.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government said: \"We will shortly be publishing a revised delivery plan for Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales for 2021-22, which will focus on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on children and families.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Gerry and Barbara Jarrett were admitted to hospital with Covid-19 two weeks ago\n\nAn elderly couple with coronavirus have been helped by a hospital to say their last goodbyes to each other after the wife's condition deteriorated.\n\nGerry and Barbara Jarrett, from Bracknell, Berkshire, are in separate wards at Frimley Park Hospital, Surrey.\n\nTheir daughter Chloe, who posted a picture of one reunion on Twitter, said her mother \"looked to be at the end\".\n\nShe said her parents had \"precious\" extra time together thanks to the hospital's \"incredible\" efforts.\n\nMrs Keljarrett said her 79-year-old father and mother, 76, who have been together for 50 years, were admitted to hospital with Covid-19 two weeks ago.\n\nOn Tuesday she posted: \"In the midst of a pandemic peak, staff (namely a consultant, a surgeon and a HCA) at FPH just made sure my dad saw my mum for what is likely the last time.\"\n\nShe said another meeting happened on Wednesday when \"mum looked to be at the end\".\n\nFrimley Park Hospital said the reunions were the sort of \"care that matters the most\"\n\nShe said: \"Dad was wheeled in, crying, touched her hand and her eyes flew open. She was awake and bright and could talk.\n\n\"We got a precious extra hour or two before her breathing got worse again and got to say what we wanted.\n\n\"All thanks to the staff who made these meetings possible. In current times I just find that incredible.\"\n\nMrs Keljarrett, a teacher at The Brakenhale School, said her father was \"showing signs of improvement but has a very long journey to complete\".\n\n\"He has a number of other health issues that will make recovery that bit trickier, but I have to remain positive that he will overcome this horrendous virus,\" she added.\n\nShe said she had met hospital workers who were \"pulling unexpected double shifts\" due to short-staffing.\n\n\"How they are managing such compassion when they are stretched to their emotional and physical limits I do not know,\" she added.\n\nResponding to Mrs Keljarrett's Twitter post, the hospital wrote: \"Our hearts go out to you and your family.\n\n\"We are so glad that our staff managed to make this time just a little bit easier for you all.\n\n\"This truly is some of the care we give that matters the most.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "UK meat exporters have claimed post-Brexit customs systems are \"not fit for purpose\", with goods delayed for hours, sometimes days, at the border.\n\nThe British Meat Processor Association said even experienced exporters were struggling with the system.\n\nIt said meat exports to the EU were 25% of normal levels for this time of year.\n\nOne large French meat importer told the BBC that he and his competitors were starting to look at alternative suppliers in Spain and Ireland.\n\nThe BBC has contacted the government for comment.\n\nNick Allen, chief executive of the British Meat Processor Association, said: \"Fundamentally, this is not a system that was designed for a 24/7, just-in-time supply chain.\n\n\"The export health certification process was designed for moving containers of frozen meat around the world where you have a bit of leeway on time.\n\n\"No matter how much better we get at filling in the forms, it's really not fit for purpose. This is going back to the dark ages in terms of a process really, in this digital age.\"\n\nHe added \"It's going to be a problem for quite a time until we move forward and hopefully get a better digital system in place and can make it work a bit better, but until then, we've got to put up with all this paperwork and lorries arriving in Ireland with box files full of paper.\"\n\nRizvan Khalid, a lamb exporter based in Shropshire, cannot afford to get the paperwork wrong.\n\nHis company, Euro Quality Lambs, exports 70% of its meat to the EU, including France, Germany, Belgium and Portugal. He says what was once a once well-oiled machine now has a spanner in it.\n\n\"What used to take us 15 minutes is now taking us three or four hours on average before we can get the paperwork completed for one particular load,\" he says.\n\n\"It's taking them [on the French side] up to six hours to go through the health certificates, to open up the lorry and check the goods.\n\n\"All of that is adding time and costs. It's now an extra day before our product gets into the markets of Paris.\"\n\nMeanwhile, some buyers in the EU are losing patience and are beginning to consider other options.\n\nFrancis Ochoa's meat company, Fory Viandes, is based in one of the world's biggest fresh produce markets - the Rungis market, south of Paris.\n\n\"The delays and extra costs mean me and my competitors in the market are obliged to start looking for other solutions,\" he says.\n\n\"One of the solutions unfortunately is to try produce from other countries, Spain for instance. Some of our competitors are ordering lambs from Ireland instead of the UK, so the consequences for UK meat and UK lambs could be disastrous.\"\n\nDown at the international freight checkpoint in Ashford, near the entrance to the Eurotunnel, customs consultant Steve Cocks gave a downbeat assessment.\n\n\"The temporary border post lorry park is full, roads are being closed off and lorries are being sent back to the Covid testing site to hold them there,\" he said.\n\n\"Last week wasn't much to write home about as it was very quiet, but volumes are building and it's just going to get worse. Exports are grinding to a halt and that will affect imports, but if you are a haulier. you don't want to get a lorry stuck on this side of the Channel.\"\n\nAfter decades of friction-free trade, there are bound to be teething problems. Indeed, the government predicted that there would be \"significant additional disruption\" as traders, officials and customers became accustomed to new procedures.\n\nHowever, some things cannot \"bed in\" and will become permanent features. HMRC estimates the additional cost to UK business of bog-standard customs declarations alone at £7bn.\n\nWhen buyers and sellers want to trade, they will find a way, but significant additional cost and complexity is here to stay.", "Patients have been arriving in a steady flow at a community pharmacy in Llanbedrog, Gwynedd, the first in Wales to offer coronavirus vaccines by appointment.\n\nRosie Bennett, who lives in the village Pwllheli, said: “I’m 82 and don’t have a car, so it was a huge relief to know that I wouldn’t have to travel a long distance to have the vaccine.\n\n“Here in the village, we know the staff at the chemists. They’ve been doing a great job during the pandemic and it’s reassuring to have the vaccine from someone you know.\n\n“And it’s a huge relief to be vaccinated. The last few months haven’t been easy for any of us and hopefully today is another small step towards a better future.”\n\nSteffan John, pharmacist on duty, gave Rosie the vaccine and said: “as pharmacists, we give out flu vaccines regularly, so we’re used to organising clinics like this.\n\n“We’re really pleased to do our bit for our community.\n\n“We have had extra training for today, and we also have to make sure there are enough appointments on the list.\n\n\"The vaccine comes in vials of ten doses, so it’s important to vaccinate that many people at a time and not to waste any.”", "Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has denied reports that his department is planning to dilute UK workers' rights.\n\nIt comes after the Financial Times said some protections brought in under EU law - such as the 48-hour limit on the working week - could be scrapped.\n\nNew rules on rest breaks and changes to how holiday pay is calculated from overtime could be proposed, it added.\n\nBut Mr Kwarteng insisted he wanted to \"protect and enhance workers' rights going forward, not row back on them\".\n\nIn a social media post, he said that the UK \"has one of the best workers' rights records in the world - going further than the EU in many areas.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Kwasi Kwarteng This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nLabour said the newspaper report suggested the government was out of step with public feeling on workplace rules.\n\nShadow business secretary Ed Miliband said: \"These proposals are not about cutting red tape for businesses but ripping up vital rights for workers. They should not even be up for discussion.\"\n\nThe FT said the proposals were being drawn up with the approval of Downing Street, but that they hadn't yet been approved by ministers or cabinet.\n\nA government spokesperson said: \"We have absolutely no intention of lowering the standards of workers' rights.\n\n\"The UK has one of the best workers' rights records in the world, and it is well known that the UK goes further than the EU in many areas.\n\n\"Leaving the EU allows us to continue to be a standard setter and protect and enhance UK workers' rights.\"\n\nWhen the UK left the EU it retained many of its laws, but it is now able to change them.\n\nOne aspect of EU employment regulation is the EU's Working Time Directive.\n\nIt governs the hours employees in the EU can be asked to work. This must not exceed 48 hours on average, including any overtime.\n\nBut employees can choose to opt out of the 48-hour week, if they often work overtime in roles in the emergency services, for example.\n\nIn the 2019 Queen's Speech outlining the government's agenda for the coming parliamentary session, changes in employment law were promised.\n\nA new Employment Bill is expected to be published in 2021. One issue it is thought it will address is over the distribution of tips.\n\nTUC General Secretary Frances O'Grady urged the prime minister to \"make good on his promises to his voters\" on Friday.\n\n\"The best way to do that is to bring forward the long-awaited Employment Bill, to make sure everyone is treated fairly at work,\" she said.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Friday morning. We'll have another update for you at 18:00 GMT.\n\nA ban on travellers from South America entering the UK has come into force, amid fears over a potentially more contagious coronavirus variant identified in Brazil. The ban also applies to Portugal and Cape Verde - off West Africa - because of their links to Brazil, along with Panama in southern Central America. British and Irish citizens, and foreign nationals with residence rights, are exempt but must isolate for 10 days on entering the UK. Find out which other countries are subject to a UK travel ban.\n\nThe UK economy shrank by 2.6% in November as lockdown restrictions reduced economic activity, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. The closure of businesses such as pubs, hairdressers and many shops meant the services sector shrank by 3.4%. The setback came after sixth consecutive months of growth, with the ONS saying UK gross domestic product at the end of November was 8.5% below its pre-pandemic peak.\n\nConcerns over child poverty have been raised throughout the pandemic, with a focus on school food vouchers, holiday meal provision and food parcels. Now campaigning Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford has been joined by celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver, Tom Kerridge and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and actress Dame Emma Thompson, in backing charities' calls for a review to \"fix\" the free school meals policy. Downing Street insists \"no child will ever go hungry\" because of the pandemic.\n\nFalse claims are likely to be causing people from ethnic minorities to reject Covid vaccines, warns a doctor leading an NHS campaign. Dr Harpreet Sood says much of the disinformation surrounds the contents of the vaccines. \"We need to be clear and make people realise there is no meat in the vaccine, there is no pork in the vaccine, it has been accepted and endorsed by all the religious leaders and councils and faith communities,\" he says.\n\nA surprise delivery of pizza from sixth-formers who clubbed together left staff at a hospital critical care unit \"lost for words\". Nurse Tina Waltho says the gift came as a welcome boost to deflated staff at the Royal Stoke University Hospital. \"The nurse who had been in charge on the day shift was in tears,\" Mrs Waltho says. \"She had barely eaten all day and was a little emotional.\" While the act drew praise on social media, the identity and school of the pupils remains a mystery.\n\nIf you're wondering how concerned we should be about the new virus variants, our health editor Michelle Roberts examines what we know so far.\n\nYou can find more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Prime Minister Boris Johnson: \"We will temporarily close all travel corridors from 0400 on Monday\"\n\nThe UK is to close all travel corridors from Monday morning to \"protect against the risk of as yet unidentified new strains\" of Covid, the PM has said.\n\nAnyone flying into the country from overseas will have to show proof of a negative Covid test before setting off.\n\nIt comes as a ban on travellers from South America and Portugal came into force on Friday over concerns about a new variant identified in Brazil.\n\nBoris Johnson said the new rules would be in place until at least 15 February.\n\nA further 1,280 people with coronavirus have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive test, taking the total to 87,291.\n\nThe latest government figures on Friday also showed another 55,761 new cases had been reported - up from 48,682 the previous day.\n\nMeanwhile, more than two million people around the world have now died with the virus since the pandemic began, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.\n\nSpeaking at a Downing Street press conference, the prime minister said it was \"vital\" to take extra measures now \"when day by day we are making such strides in protecting the population\".\n\n\"It's precisely because we have the hope of that vaccine and the risk of new strains coming from overseas that we must take additional steps now to stop those strains from entering the country.\"\n\nAll travel corridors will close from 04:00 GMT on Monday. After that, arrivals to the UK will need to quarantine for up to 10 days, unless they test negative after five days.\n\nMr Johnson, who said the rules would apply across the UK after talks with the devolved administrations, added that the government would be stepping up enforcement at the border and in the country.\n\nTravel corridors were introduced in the summer to allow people travelling from some countries with low numbers of Covid cases to come to the UK without having to quarantine on arrival.\n\nTrade body Airlines UK said it supported the latest restrictions \"on the assumption\" that the government would remove them \"when it is safe to do so\".\n\nChief executive Tim Alderslade said travel corridors were \"a lifeline for the industry\" last summer but \"things change and there's no doubting this is a serious health emergency\".\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was the \"right step\" but called the timing of the decision \"slow again\", adding that the public would be thinking \"why on earth didn't this happen before\".\n\nThe prime minister warned that the NHS was facing \"extraordinary pressures\", having had the highest number of hospital admissions on a single day of the pandemic earlier this week.\n\nHe said that came on Tuesday when there were 4,134 new admissions, while the UK currently has more than 37,000 Covid patients in hospitals.\n\nMr Johnson said that once the most vulnerable have been vaccinated by mid-February \"we will think about what steps we could take to lift the restrictions\".\n\nEngland is currently under a national lockdown, meaning people must stay at home and can go out only for limited reasons such as food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home.\n\nSimilar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nAlso speaking at the No 10 briefing, England's chief medical officer Prof Chris Whitty said the restrictions would need to be lifted gradually by \"testing what works, and then if that works going the next step\".\n\nHe said the peak of people entering hospital would be in the next week to 10 days for most places, but \"we hope\" the peak of infections \"already has happened\" in the south-east, east and London.\n\n\"The peak of deaths I fear is in the future, the peak of hospitalisations in some parts of the country may be around about now and beginning to come off the very, very top,\" he said.\n\nA ban on travellers from South America, Portugal and Cape Verde entering the UK came into force on Friday morning as a result of a new, potentially more infectious variant of coronavirus linked to Brazil.\n\nThe government's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance told the press briefing that some of the new variants may be able to \"get round\" the Covid vaccines but it was \"really quite easy\" to adjust the vaccines to deal with mutations in the virus.\n\nNew variants causing concern have previously been identified in the UK and South Africa, with many countries imposing restrictions on arrivals from both nations.\n\nPublic Health England said a total of 35 genomically confirmed and 12 genomically probable cases of the Covid-19 variant which originated in South Africa have been identified in the UK as of 14 January.\n\nEarlier, a leading scientist said one of the two variants first detected in Brazil had been found in the UK - but not the variant that was causing concern.\n\n\"I think it is likely that the vaccine we have now is going to protect against the UK variant and is going to provide protection I suspect against the other variants as well,\" said Sir Patrick. \"The question is to what degree.\"\n\nLatest figures show that more than three million people in the UK have now received the first dose of a vaccine - 3,234,946 - an increase of 316,694 from the previous day.\n\nSir Patrick said he expected the vaccines would reduce transmission of the virus but that \"we shouldn't go mad\" as jabs are rolled out because a risk would remain.\n\n\"Just because you've been vaccinated doesn't mean you can't catch this and pass it on, it means you're protected against severe disease,\" he added.\n\nMeanwhile, the latest estimate of the UK's R number - which is the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to on average - is 1.2 to 1.3, compared with 1-1.4 last week.\n\nBut in London, where tight restrictions came in earlier, the R number is lower - between 0.9 and 1.2.\n\nIn Wales, new laws for shoppers and staff are to be introduced after \"significant evidence\" coronavirus is being spread in supermarkets.\n\nAre you due to travel back to the UK from overseas? Share your experiences. Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "The guitarist also contributed songwriting and piano to the band's explosive debut album\n\nSylvain Sylvain, guitarist with trailblazing 1970s rock band New York Dolls, has died at the age of 69.\n\nOne of the group's founding members, his visceral riffs bridged the divide between punk and glam, and helped kick-start the punk and new wave movements.\n\n\"As most of you know, Sylvain battled cancer for the past two and 1/2 years,\" his wife, Wanda O'Kelley Mizrahi, wrote in a statement on his Facebook page.\n\n\"Though he fought it valiantly, yesterday he passed away.\"\n\nShe added: \"While we grieve his loss, we know that he is finally at peace and out of pain. Please crank up his music, light a candle, say a prayer and let's send this beautiful doll on his way.\"\n\nSylvain's death leaves only one surviving member of the New York Dolls' original line-up from their 1973 debut album, frontman David Johansen. The singer posted his own tribute on Instagram.\n\n\"My best friend for so many years, I can still remember the first time I saw him bop into the rehearsal space/bicycle shop with his carpetbag and guitar straight from the plane after having been deported from Amsterdam, I instantly loved him,\" he wrote.\n\n\"I'm gonna miss you old pal. I'll keep the home fires burning.\"\n\nThe New York Dolls bridged the gap between glam rock and punk\n\nBorn Sylvain Mizrahi in Cairo, Egypt, on Valentine's Day 1951, the musician lived in France as a child before moving to New York with his family.\n\nAfter playing in several bands as a teenager, he co-founded the New York Dolls in 1971, taking the name from a doll repair shop called the New York Doll Hospital (Sylvain had worked across the street before becoming a musician).\n\nLike the punk movement they helped inspire, the band wanted to shake up the self-indulgent state of 70s rock.\n\n\"The reason why the Dolls got together was because of the boredom with the norm of the day, which was like the stadium-rock era,\" Sylvain told Brooklyn Vegan in 2006. \"The 20-minute drum solos, songs that were a big operetta. They were sort of boring, they'd lost their sex appeal.\"\n\nThe Dolls cut through with urgent, punchy songs about sex, drugs, alienation and dysfunction.\n\nThe band's provocative and vulgar live shows gained them a huge following in New York, but many record labels were reluctant to sign them. That situation not helped by their androgynous look - shocking at the time - with their wardrobe sourced from cheap women's clothing stores on New York's Lower East Side.\n\nLate in 1972, tragedy struck when, during a tour of England, Dolls drummer Billy Murcia died in a drug-related accident. He was replaced by Jerry Nolan, after which the Dolls finally secured a contract with Mercury Records.\n\nTheir debut album, simply called New York Dolls, stalled at number 113 in the US chart but is now regarded as a classic, full of sleazy, raucous anthems like Personality Crisis and Trash.\n\nRolling Stone magazine recently named it one of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, writing: \"Glammed-out punkers the New York Dolls snatched riffs from Chuck Berry and Fats Domino and fattened them with loads of attitude and reverb.\n\n\"It's hard to imagine the Ramones or the Replacements or a thousand other trash-junky bands without them.\"\n\nSylvain worked in fashion before becoming a musician\n\nHowever, the band's lack of commercial success saw them dropped after two albums and, despite hiring Sex Pistols guru Malcolm McLaren as a manager, eventually fell apart.\n\nOutside the Dolls, Sylvain toured and recorded with several bands and led various solo projects as his former band's reputation grew.\n\nArtists from the Sex Pistols to Guns N' Roses cited them as an influence, and Morrissey was famously president of their UK fan club before forming The Smiths. In 2004, the singer reunited his idols for a show at London's Meltdown Festival, adding an unexpected second act to their career.\n\nOver the subsequent decade, Sylvain and Johansen, the only remaining members, released three well-received albums.\n\nIn 2019, Sylvain announced his cancer diagnosis, and a GoFundMe was set up to pay his medical bills, raising $79,500 (£58,000).\n\nThe band are cited as an influence by hundreds of musicians\n\nGuitarist Lenny Kaye, best known for playing with Patti Smith, paid tribute to Sylvain's \"heart, belief, and the way you whacked that E chord\".\n\n\"His onstage joy, his radiant smile as he chopped at his guitar, revealed the sense of wonder he must have felt at the age of 10, emigrating from his native Cairo with his family in 1961, the ship pulling into New York Harbor and seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time.\n\n\"His role in the band was as lynchpin, keeping the revolving satellites of his bandmates in precision.\n\n\"Though he tried valiantly to keep the band going, in the end the Dolls' moral fable overwhelmed them, not before seeding an influence that would engender many rock generations yet to come.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Travellers from South America are no longer allowed to come into the UK, amid fears over a new coronavirus variant first identified in Brazil.\n\nThe UK's new travel ban - which also applies to Portugal and Cape Verde - came into force at 04:00 GMT on Friday.\n\nLike variants discovered in the UK and South Africa, it is thought the Brazil variant could be more contagious.\n\nVirologist Prof Wendy Barclay said one Brazilian variant had already been detected in the UK.\n\nHowever, she said this was not \"the variant of concern\", which is thought to be more infectious.\n\nProf Barclay, head of G2P-UK National Virology Consortium, which is studying the effects of emerging coronavirus mutations, said: \"There are two different types of Brazilian variants and one of them has been detected and one of them has not.\"\n\nShe added: \"The new Brazilian variant of concern, that was picked up in travellers going to Japan, has not been detected in the UK.\n\n\"Other variants that may have originated from Brazil have been previously found.\"\n\nEarlier, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps had told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the Brazilian variant of concern was not \"as far as we are aware\" already in the UK, adding that he did not believe there had been any flights from Brazil in the last week.\n\nIt comes as a further 1,248 people with coronavirus have died in the UK.\n\nLatest government figures on Thursday also showed another 48,682 new cases had been reported.\n\nMeanwhile, the number of people in the UK to have received the first dose of a vaccine is now approaching three million.\n\nThe UK's new travel ban applies to people who have travelled from, or through, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela in the last 10 days.\n\nIt also applies to Portugal - because of its strong links to Brazil - and the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde off the coast of west Africa, as well as Panama in central America.\n\nBritish and Irish citizens and foreign nationals with residence rights are still allowed to return - but must isolate for 10 days.\n\nAlso exempt are hauliers who are travelling from Portugal to transport essential goods.\n\nBrazil has seen more than 200,000 deaths and there is concern about the impact the new mutation could have on its health system.\n\nHowever, the UK's travel ban was prompted by fears of how quickly the new variant could spread through the region - since Brazil borders 10 countries.\n\nMr Shapps has said the ban is \"precautionary\", adding he \"can't provide an end date\" to the new rules.\n\n\"We're so close now, we've got three million of these vaccines in people's arms in the UK,\" he told BBC Breakfast.\n\n\"We want to make sure we don't fall at this last hurdle.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nBecause holidays are not currently allowed, Mr Shapps said he did not \"expect a large number of Brits to have jaunted off to South America\", and the government was \"not expecting to see a big repatriation issue as a result\".\n\nOne family, who live in Wolverhampton, told the BBC they feared being stuck out in Brazil.\n\n\"I don't know if the government will organise flights,\" said Jon Dent, 31. He and his wife Carla travelled to the Brazilian city of Goiania in October to introduce their baby daughter to Carla's family.\n\n\"I think it's a long shot,\" he said. \"I hope we can get home and not be stranded out here for months. We've got to be patient but at the same time flexible.\"\n\nJon, pictured here with wife Carla and daughter Luiza, said his initial reaction to the news was worry\n\nMany countries imposed travel restrictions after new variants of Covid-19 were identified in the UK and South Africa.\n\nSeveral Central and South American nations - including Brazil - had already restricted travel from the UK before the latest ban on arrivals.\n\nThere is currently no evidence to suggest that any of the variants cause more serious illness, and scientists are confident that vaccines should work against them.\n\nAccording to Felipe Naveca, deputy director of research at the Brazilian state-run Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, the new variant's origin was \"undoubtedly\" from the Amazon region.\n\nHe told the BBC's South America correspondent Katy Watson the new variant showed some of the same mutations as the UK and South Africa variants - and \"some of these mutations have been linked to increased transmission and that is of concern\".\n\nMr Shapps also announced Qatar and the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba were being removed from the UK's travel corridor list, meaning arrivals from those places will need to self-isolate for 10 days from 04:00 GMT on Saturday.\n\nMeanwhile, France has cracked down on the type of tests that travellers can take to show they are negative.\n\nFrom Monday, travellers will need to show a negative PCR test. Antigen tests - which are the rapid lateral flow tests - will no longer be accepted.\n\nHowever, Mr Shapps said arrangements allowing hauliers to use rapid lateral flow tests before crossing the border from the UK into France remained in place at the moment.\n\nFrom Monday, everyone travelling to England and Scotland will also have to show proof of a negative test. Wales and Northern Ireland are expected to announce their own plans in the coming days.\n\nHow have you been affected by the travel ban? Email: haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Northern Ireland's statistics agency has recorded its highest weekly Covid-19 related registered deaths since the pandemic began.\n\nNisra said 145 deaths were registered in the first week of 2021, although administrative delays over Christmas may have affected the number.\n\nThat brings the agency's death toll to 1,976 by 8 January.\n\nThe figures come as the chief medical officers from NI and the Republic issued a joint stay-at-home plea.\n\nDr Michael McBride and Dr Tony Holohan said they were \"gravely concerned\" about the \"unsustainably high level of Covid-19 infection\" across the island of Ireland.\n\nConcern was raised in the Republic of Ireland this week as figures showed it has the world's highest number of confirmed new Covid-19 cases per million people.\n\nOn Friday evening, the Irish Department of Health reported 50 further deaths with Covid-19 and 3,498 new cases of the virus. More than half (54%) of those newly diagnosed are under the age of 45.\n\nNorthern Ireland is in the third week of a six-week lockdown, with ministers scheduled to review measures next week.\n\nHowever, health officials have warned that an extension of the restrictions could be required to reduce pressure on the health service.\n\nOf the 2,019 deaths recorded by Nisra by 8 January, 1,247 (62%) occurred in hospital, 622 (31%) in care homes, 12 (0.6%) in hospices and 138 (7%) at residential addresses or other locations.\n\nPeople aged 75 and over account for just over three-quarters of all Covid-19 related registered deaths (77.6%) between 19 March 2020 and 8 January 2021.\n\nJust over a fifth (22.2%) of all Covid-19 related registered deaths have been of people with an address in the Belfast council area.\n\nMeanwhile, the Department of Health reported 26 further Covid-related deaths on Friday.\n\nFive of these deaths did not occur in the past 24 hours.\n\nThe Department of Health bases its figures on a positive test result being recorded, whereas Nisra figures are based on mentions of the virus on death certificates, so people may or may not have been confirmed to have contracted the virus prior to death.\n\nA further 1,052 individuals have tested positive for Covid-19 and 63 patients are being treated in intensive care units, 47 of whom are on ventilators.\n\nThe chief medical officers warned the high infection rate was having a \"significant impact\" on the health of the population and the \"safe functioning\" of the healthcare systems.\n\nThey said the public should avoid all unnecessary journeys, including cross-border travel.\n\nPointing out that many of the patients admitted to hospital in January have been younger than 65, they warned coronavirus could affect anyone, \"regardless of age or underlying condition\".\n\n\"It highlights the need for us all to protect one another by staying at home,\" said the medical officers.\n\nNorthern Ireland's spike in infections has been put down to an easing of restrictions over Christmas.\n\nAsked if he regretted being part of the decision to ease restrictions, Health Minister Robin Swann said the executive had tried to be balanced in its approach.\n\n\"I regret the pressures we see now in our hospitals, but let's remember it's caused by this virus, we have it in our power to bring it back under control and get us back to where we were in the summer,\" he told BBC News NI on Friday.\n\nMr Swann pleaded with people to follow the current restrictions.\n\n\"We're in the middle of a very tough six-week scenario, and how we come out of this will be a more graduated approach to make sure we get the benefits of what we've already done, and also the benefits of the vaccine.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Kim Jong-un has been overseeing a huge military showcase broadcast by state media in North Korea\n\nNorth Korea has unveiled a new type of submarine-launched ballistic missile, described by state media as \"the world's most powerful weapon\".\n\nSeveral of the missiles were displayed at a parade overseen by leader Kim Jong-un, reported state media.\n\nThe weapon's actual capabilities remain unclear, as it is not known to have been tested.\n\nThe show of military strength comes days before the inauguration of Joe Biden as US president.\n\nIt also follows a rare political meeting where Mr Kim decried the US as his country's \"biggest enemy\".\n\nImages released by North Korean state media showed at least four large black-and-white missiles being driven past flag-waving crowds.\n\nAnalysts noted it was a previously unseen weapon. \"New year, new Pukguksong,\" tweeted North Korea expert Ankit Panda, using the North Korean name for their submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).\n\nClad in a leather coat and fur hat, Mr Kim is pictured smiling and waving as he watched the display in Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung Square, which also included infantry troops, artillery and tanks.\n\nThe missile was debuted at a military parade which came at the end of an important and rare political meeting\n\n\"The world's most powerful weapon, submarine-launch ballistic missile, entered the square one after another, powerfully demonstrating the might of the revolutionary armed forces,\" the official Korean Central News Agency said.\n\nThe event on Thursday did not showcase North Korea's largest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which was unveiled at a much larger military parade in October. That colossal weapon is believed to be able to deliver a nuclear warhead to anywhere in the US, and its size had surprised even seasoned analysts when it was put on show last year.\n\nThe country's latest display of its arsenal comes at the end of a five-yearly congress of the ruling Workers' Party.\n\nIn his address to members last week, Mr Kim had pledged to expand North Korea's nuclear weapons and military potential, outlining a list of desired weapons including long-range ballistic missiles capable of being launched from land or sea and \"super-large warheads\".\n\nHe also said that the US was Pyongyang's \"biggest obstacle for our revolution and our biggest enemy... no matter who is in power, the true nature of its policy against North Korea will never change\".\n\nUnder Mr Kim's leadership North Korea has made rapid progress in its weapons programme, which it says is necessary to defend itself against a possible US invasion.\n\nThe unveiling of the new missiles appears designed to send the incoming Biden administration a message of the North's growing military prowess, say experts.\n\n\"They'd like us to notice that they're getting more proficient with larger solid rocket boosters,\" Mr Panda tweeted, noting what appeared to be new solid-fuel short-range ballistic missiles on display too. These missiles can be launched more quickly than liquid-fuelled varieties.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un: From enemies to frenemies\n\nOver the last four years, Pyongyang has had an erratic relationship with the US under President Donald Trump's administration. Mr Kim and Mr Trump engaged in mutual insults and threats of war before an unprecedented summit in Singapore in 2018 and declarations of love by the outgoing US leader.\n\nDespite the apparent warming of relations, little concrete progress was made on negotiations over North Korea's nuclear programme and a second summit in Hanoi in 2019 broke down after the US refused Pyongyang's demands for sanctions relief.\n\nKim Jong-un has had a busy week. In this rare party congress at the start of a new year he's earned a new title, pledged to build new nuclear weapons and now he's shown the world some new missiles.\n\nThe general secretary, the title posthumously awarded to his father by which he is now known, had been pretty quiet in 2020 and appeared very few times in state media.\n\nBut 2021 is looking rather different. The party congress has offered him a grand daily domestic platform - even if it is not getting the international attention it may have done due to events in the United States and a global pandemic.\n\nThe parading vehicles include a new submarine-launched ballistic missile and new short-range ballistic missiles. This is a show of strength - flexing the military muscle once more to show the people of North Korea that despite the current bleak economic outlook, this impoverished country is capable of designing and building new strategic weapons.\n\nIt also offers a direct challenge to the incoming US administration.\n\nNorth Korea appears willing to continue with its self-imposed isolation and being subject to strict economic sanctions, and the state has vowed to continue to build nuclear weapons in defiance of the international community.\n\nDuring the transfer of power, President Obama told Donald Trump that North Korea should be his top national security concern.\n\nIn the last four years a combination of US and UN sanctions, so-called \"maximum pressure\" policies and three summits between Mr Trump and Mr Kim have done nothing to alleviate those concerns.\n\nKim Jong-un has shown the new US president this week that he faces the daunting prospect of coming up with new solutions for this decades-old problem.", "Craig Ross had been quoted making comments about food bank users on a podcast\n\nThe Scottish Conservatives have dropped a Holyrood candidate over what they called \"unacceptable comments\".\n\nCraig Ross recorded a podcast last year in which he described food bank users as being more at risk of diabetes than starvation.\n\nHe also questioned the influence footballer Marcus Rashford has on UK government welfare policy.\n\nThe Conservatives suspended Mr Ross, then later announced he was \"no longer a candidate or a member of the party\".\n\nThe party had launched an investigation after the comments came to light, saying: \"These unacceptable comments do not reflect the views of the party.\"\n\nJustice Secretary Humza Yousaf had called for Mr Ross to be thrown out the party and dropped as the Conservative candidate in Glasgow Pollok.\n\nThe Holyrood elections are due to be held on 6 May.\n\nMr Ross, a former lecturer at Langside College, runs a podcast in which he delivers reaction to pieces in The Guardian newspaper \"from the centre-right\".\n\nIn one episode recorded in June 2020, Mr Ross talked about the percentage of body fat of \"ordinary people\".\n\nOriginally reported in the Daily Record, his comments were in response to a Channel 4 News piece featuring foodbanks.\n\nHe said: \"We have no real grasp of just how ridiculously overweight the population is.\n\n\"I'm not saying that every single person who claims to be really hungry and is reliant on charity is also very overweight.\n\n\"But what I am saying is if Channel 4 News is having a reasonable go at showing the reality of food bank usage, then we know the people that they filmed are far from starving. If anything their biggest risk is not starvation, it's diabetes.\"\n\nOn Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford, who has called on Boris Johnson to review the UK government's free school meals policy, Mr Ross said: \"Has Marcus Rashford stood for election to anything? Not that I'm aware of.\"", "The government is assessing the impact of a \"technical issue\" that led to 150,000 records being deleted from police databases.\n\nThe error, first reported in the Times, saw data including fingerprint, DNA and arrest histories wiped after being accidentally flagged for deletion.\n\nThe Home Office said the lost entries related to people who were arrested and then released without further action.\n\nBut Labour said it presented \"huge dangers\" for public safety.\n\nThe data was lost from the Police National Computer - a system that stores and shares criminal records information across the UK.\n\nIt is used to help police investigations and provides real-time checks on people, vehicles and crimes, as well as whether suspects are wanted for any unsolved offences.\n\nA coding error resulted in records that had been flagged for deletion being lost from the database before checks had been carried out to determine whether they could be lawfully held or not.\n\nThe data loss could hinder future police investigations because the fingerprint or DNA evidence would not be able to be cross-checked against evidence from other crime scenes.\n\nPolicing minister Kit Malthouse said the problem had been identified and the process corrected so \"it cannot happen again\" - with the Home Office, National Police Chiefs' Council and other law enforcement partners working \"at pace\" to recover the data.\n\n\"While the loss relates to individuals who were arrested and then released with no further action, I have asked officials and the police to confirm their initial assessment that there is no threat to public safety,\" he said.\n\nThe Home Office said no records of criminal or dangerous persons had been deleted.\n\nThe records are linked to police investigations that were terminated before charge (No Further Action or NFA cases) or to those where an individual had been acquitted at court.\n\nIt is not yet known how many records of each type were lost and full extent of deletions is still being investigated.\n\nThe loss of the data means that officers on the ground may get an incomplete search result when interrogating the system.\n\nShadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds called on Home Secretary Priti Patel to take responsibility for the error and be clear about the impact it had had.\n\n\"She must urgently make a statement about what has gone wrong, the extent of the issue, and what action is being taken to reassure the public. Answers must be given.\"\n\n\"This is an extraordinarily serious security breach that presents huge dangers for public safety.\"\n\nFormer Cumbria Police chief constable Stuart Hyde told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the \"very large\" loss of arrest records presented a \"risk to public safety\".\n\nHe said: \"In order to understand the scale, if you think that about between 6-700,000 people are arrested every year in the UK, that's a very large proportion of those people.\"\n\nIt comes after around 40,000 alerts relating to European criminals were removed from the same database, the PNC, following Britain's post-Brexit deal with the EU.", "Despite the huge need to free up space in hospitals, some care homes say insurance issues make it impossible for them to accept Covid-19 patients.\n\nIn October, the government launched a scheme for designated care homes to take patients recovering from the virus but insurance is a stumbling block.\n\nSir David Behan, head of the UK's largest care home company, HC-One, says insurance has become a major concern.\n\nThe government says it is working to resolve the issue.\n\n\"We are aware the adult social care insurance market is changing in response to the pandemic, and recognise some care providers may encounter difficulties as their policies come up for renewal,\" said a Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson.\n\nOne Hampshire care home says it will have to stop taking patients within days because its insurance will expire.\n\nWaterside House in Netley, Hampshire usually provides holidays and respite care for people with disabilities.\n\nBut since the autumn it has been taking Covid-positive patients discharged from hospitals on the south coast.\n\nThey are looked after on a separate floor from other residents, and the home has had to meet high infection control standards.\n\nHome manager Sarah Knight said demand for the 31 beds is unparalleled and added: \"I've been in nursing a long, long time, and I have never known anything like this.\n\n\"People end up in an ambulance sat outside hospitals for hours and hours, or they end up on a trolley in A&E in a corridor for hours and hours.\n\n\"By offering the best that we've got here, we can reduce some of that burden.\"\n\nJan Tregelles is chief executive of the charity Revitalise which runs Waterside House\n\nThe government originally hoped there would be 500 designated care homes taking in Covid-positive patients.\n\nBut Waterside House is one of only 129 which have been set up to take those who have not completed 14 days in isolation.\n\nHowever, its public indemnity insurance protection, which it needs in case someone contracts Covid there, runs out at the end of January.\n\nWaterside House is run by the charity Revitalise, whose chief executive, Jan Tregelles, said they have tried everything, but will soon have to start turning away people.\n\n\"It's shocking,\" she says. \"We are truly helpless. We have a fantastic team of nurses and colleagues already.\n\n\"The facilities are here, everything's arranged and we can't step up to support our communities at this time.\"\n\nOne resident, Alan Washbourne, who has been living at Waterside House since he was discharged from hospital during the first wave of the pandemic, said: \"I feel quite safe here.\"\n\nHe is not on the Covid floor of the home, and added: \"If I were to go to somewhere else, which is possible, I might not feel quite so safe.\"\n\nAlan Washbourne has been at Waterside House since April last year\n\nAfter so many deaths last spring, many care homes will not consider taking patients who are Covid-positive, even with extra infection control measures.\n\nMeanwhile, growing numbers of staff are off sick or self-isolating, leaving care homes facing shortages.\n\nAnd many are also finding it difficult to get the public indemnity insurance.\n\nSir David Behan is chairman of HC-One, the UK's largest care home provider\n\nSince November, HC-One, which is the UK's largest care home provider, has had to cover its own Covid risks because it cannot get the insurance.\n\nSir David said it is one of the reasons why they have not taken part in the designated places scheme.\n\n\"You've got solicitors' firms advertising, taking cases up against care companies,\" he says.\n\n\"So, this isn't a theoretical risk that there may be proceedings, it's an actual risk, and therefore we need cover.\n\n\"The NHS wouldn't operate without similar liability cover and that's what we need to see, and I think governments have a role to play working with the insurance industry to work to find a solution.\"\n\nThe Department for Health and Social Care said it was making efforts to determine what actions it could take.\n\n\"Our priority is to ensure everyone receives the right care, in the right place, at the right time,\" said a spokesperson.", "The licence fee is the \"least worst\" way of funding the BBC, its incoming chairman Richard Sharp has said.\n\nBut Mr Sharp told MPs he had an \"open mind\" about how the corporation should be funded in the future, and it \"may be worth reassessing\" the current system.\n\nHe also said he didn't think the BBC's Brexit coverage was biased overall, but \"there were some occasions when the Brexit representation was unbalanced\".\n\nQuestion Time \"seemed to have more Remainers than Brexiteers\", he said.\n\nBBC Three's Normal People was one of the corporation's biggest hits last year\n\nThe £157.50 licence fee is due to stay in place until at least 2027, when the BBC's Royal Charter ends, with a debate about how the broadcaster should be funded after that.\n\nMr Sharp, who spent 23 years working as a banker for Goldman Sachs, told the House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport select committee: \"At 43p a day, the BBC represents terrific value.\"\n\nThe government is currently reviewing whether its cost should continue rising with inflation from 2022, and whether non-payment should remain a criminal offence. Mr Sharp said he was \"not in favour of decriminalisation\".\n\nHe said other possible options for funding the BBC in the future could include a household tax like the one used in Germany, \"which amounts to the same amount of money\".\n\nHe added: \"So when we next get the chance to review the structure of this then it may be worth reassessing.\"\n\nAsked whether he believed the BBC's coverage of Brexit had been unbalanced, he replied: \"No, actually I don't.\n\n\"I believe there were some occasions when the Brexit representation was unbalanced.\n\n\"So if you ask me if I think Question Time seemed to have more Remainers than Brexiteers, the answer is yes, but the breadth of the coverage I thought was incredibly balanced, in a highly toxic environment that was extremely polarised.\"\n\nQuestion Time has said it has robust processes in place to ensure balance on its panels.\n\nMr Sharp said he was \"considered to be a Brexiteer\" and had donated around £400,000 to the Conservative Party over the past 20 years.\n\nHe said the biggest issue now facing the BBC is impartiality, and that \"trust in leadership and trust in processes\" must be rebuilt after high-profile equal pay cases with journalists such as Carrie Gracie and Samira Ahmed.\n\n\"Clearly some of the problems it's had recently are really rather terrible and reflect a culture that needs to be rebuilt, so everybody who cherishes the BBC and works at the BBC feels proud and happy to work there,\" he said. \"Then in my view that would produce a better output inevitably.\"\n\nMr Sharp also told the committee he would give his £160,000 salary as BBC chairman to charity.\n\nWhen asked \"what's in it for you?\" Mr Sharp, whose heritage is Jewish, said: \"We're all a product of our upbringing and I was very fortunate with the parents I have, my great grandparents came to this country escaping tyranny.\n\n\"I think I won the lottery in life to be British and if I can make a contribution, I couldn't be happier to.\n\n\"The BBC is part of the fabric of all our national identities, it offers education and enrichment and is also important for our position in the world... It is a massive privilege to be chair of the BBC.\"\n\nSir David Clementi, the current BBC chairman, steps down in February. The post-holder is officially appointed by the Queen on the recommendation of the government.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "It's likely there are variants all over the world - Vallance\n\nITV's Libby Wiener asks if the move to put restrictions in at the borders is too late. The PM says the government is taking steps to protect against the new variants. \"We have a situation now where we have a very high rate of domestic infection in the UK combined with a vaccination programme,\" he says. \"There will come a point in the next weeks and months where the vaccination programme will take effect... and you will see a decline in the death rate. \"What you can't have is a situation where you have new variants with unknown qualities coming in from abroad and that's why we have set up the system to stop arrivals where new variants are a concern.\" Sir Patrick Vallance says the virus is changing all the time and he suspects there are variants \"all over the world of different types\". \"The countries which have detected them first have got good sequencing,\" he says.", "The UK economy shrank by 2.6% in November as England was placed in lockdown for a second time, official figures show.\n\nThe Office for National Statistics said it meant gross domestic product was 8.5% below its pre-pandemic peak.\n\nNovember's decline came after six consecutive months of growth.\n\nPubs and hairdressers were badly hit as the service sector suffered, the ONS said, but some manufacturing and construction activity improved.\n\nThe hit to the service sector - which accounts for about three-quarters of the UK economy - meant it contracted by 3.4% in November, and is now 9.9% below the level of February 2020.\n\nSome economists said the November figure was better than expected, and it appeared many companies were better prepared for the second lockdown, with some sectors staying open for business and many firms having already put in place plans to expand online operations.\n\n\"Steps taken by businesses earlier in the year to Covid-proof their operations - combined with the time-limited nature of the restrictions, and schools remaining open - meant more companies were able to continue trading safely,\" said Alpesh Paleja, lead economist at the CBI employers' group.\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak said the figures showed \"it's clear things will get harder before they get better and today's figures highlight the scale of the challenge we face\".\n\nBut he said the vaccine roll-out and economic support measures meant there were reasons to be hopeful. \"With this support, and the resilience and enterprise of the British people, we will get through this,\" he said.\n\nShadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds said the figures showed the UK has an economic \"mountain to climb\".\n\nSpeaking to the BBC, she said it would be a \"serious mistake\" if Mr Sunak waited until the Budget in March before providing more support and confidence for business.\n\nONS director for economic statistics Darren Morgan said: \"The economy took a hit from restrictions put in place to contain the pandemic during November, with pubs and hairdressers seeing the biggest impact.\"\n\nHowever, he said many firms adjusted to the new pandemic working conditions, such as by expanding click and collect and other online operations.\n\nHe added: \"Manufacturing and construction generally continued to operate, while schools also stayed open, meaning the impact on the economy was significantly smaller in November than during the first lockdown.\n\n\"Car manufacturing, bolstered by demand from abroad, housebuilding and infrastructure grew and are now all above their pre-pandemic levels.\" Construction activity grew by 1.9% during the month.\n\nGross domestic product (GDP) is the sum (measured in pounds) of the value of goods and services produced in the economy.\n\nBut the measurement most people focus on is the percentage change - the growth of the country's economy over a period of time, typically a quarter (three months) or a year.\n\nIf the GDP measure is up on the previous three months, the economy is growing. That generally means more wealth and more new jobs.\n\nIf it is negative, the economy is shrinking.\n\nDespite the GDP figure being better than some analysts had forecast, there are still concerns that the UK could be heading back into recession.\n\nEconomists have warned the UK could see a double-dip recession if restrictions remain in place in the first three months of 2021.\n\nRory Macqueen, from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, said the November figures confirm a significant slowdown in the last quarter of 2020, \"despite November's lockdown in England clearly having a far smaller effect than the first\".\n\nJames Smith, research director of the Resolution Foundation, said there would be a lot of comment about whether these figures point to the UK heading for only its second-ever double-dip recession on record.\n\nBut, he said, the real \"story of the year will be a vaccine-driven bounce back in economic activity for sectors like hospitality and leisure\".\n\n\"The chancellor must do everything he can to support that recovery once public health restrictions ease,\" he added.\n\nAnalysts at Capital Economics also said there was cause for optimism, saying that the current third lockdown could have less impact than feared.\n\n\"The economy has built up a fair bit of immunity to lockdowns, as November's lockdown was much less painful for the economy than the first lockdown.\n\n\"As a result, the Covid-19 economic hole is smaller than we thought, the economy may get back to its pre-crisis crisis level a bit sooner and it makes us more confident that the Bank of England probably won't resort to negative interest rates.\"\n\nThe fall in the economy in November was still considerable, but the figures show businesses adapting to difficult conditions. The hit was a fraction of what occurred in the first lockdown last April, and was mainly confined to the service sector, with pubs and hairdressing for example in sharp decline.\n\nManufacturing and construction largely remained open, as did previously shut public services such as schools. By November car manufacturing and house building were back above the level of output before the pandemic.\n\nThe trade figures also showed a £7bn increase in EU imports in the three months to November as traders stockpiled car parts, medicines and other goods ahead of the end of the Brexit transition period.\n\nThe renewed regional tiered restrictions in December, and more severe national lockdowns this month, still indicate a possible return to overall recession in this tough winter.\n\nBusiness groups continue to argue that extra support is required to support jobs and cash flow well before the Budget in March. But a more sustained lifting of restrictions as vaccines are rolled out should see growth return after the spring.", "Black people are four more times more likely than white people to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act, according to NHS figures.\n\nWhen Antonio Ferreira was sectioned he says he felt he was discriminated against because of his skin colour.\n\nNow a student at Essex University, he hopes to improve police understanding of mental health problems.\n\nIf you are experiencing emotional stress, help and support is available via BBC Action Line.", "The governor of Amazonas state warned of a \"critical\" moment and has implemented a curfew\n\nHospitals in the Brazilian city of Manaus have reached breaking point while treating Covid-19 patients, amid reports of severe oxygen shortages and desperate staff.\n\nThe city, in Amazonas state, has seen a surge of deaths and infections.\n\nHealth professionals, quoted by local media, warned \"many people\" could die due to lack of supplies and assistance.\n\nBrazil has recorded more than 205,000 virus deaths - the second-highest tally in the world, behind the US.\n\nA new coronavirus variant has recently emerged in Brazil, with several cases in travellers arriving in Japan traced back to the Amazonas region.\n\nAmazonas suffered heavy losses in the first wave of the pandemic but is also being badly hit by a new rise in infections.\n\nRefrigerated containers were brought to hospitals to help store bodies last week, as authorities declared a state of emergency.\n\nJessem Orellana, from the Fiocruz-Amazonia scientific investigation institute, told the AFP news agency that some hospitals in Manaus had \"run out of oxygen\" with some centres becoming \"a type of suffocation chamber\" for patients.\n\nThe researcher told Brazilian media she had received reports from the front-line of \"dramatic\" scenes playing out in some hospitals.\n\nReports in the daily Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper described desperate staff having to try to keep patients alive through manual ventilation.\n\nIn a widely shared video from the region, a female medical worker asks the internet for help: \"We're in an awful state. Oxygen has simply run out across the whole unit today.\"\n\n\"There is no oxygen and lots of people are dying,\" she says in the clip. \"If anyone has any oxygen, please bring it to the clinic. There are so many people dying.\"\n\nThe UK has banned travellers from much of Latin America over a new variant detected in Brazil\n\nAmazonas Governor Wilson Lima said the state was \"in the most critical moment of the pandemic\" and has announced a nightly curfew will begin at 19:00 local time (23:00 GMT) on Friday to try to stem the spread.\n\nMarcellus Campelo, a local health secretary, said the state needed three times the amount of oxygen it can produce locally and appealed for help.\n\nBrazil's vice-president shared images on Twitter of the air force transporting hospital supplies, including oxygen cylinders and stretchers, to the city as reports of the situation spread throughout the country.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by General Hamilton Mourão This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHealth officials also say some patients will be airlifted to other states for treatment due to the demand for intensive care units, Reuters reports.\n\nFelipe Naveca, deputy director of research at the state-run Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, told the BBC's South America correspondent Katy Watson that the new variant had evolved separately from those in the UK and South Africa, but that it showed some of the same characteristics: \"Some of these mutations have been linked to increased transmission and that is of concern.\"\n\nMr Naveca said that they did not yet have any data to suggest that existing vaccines would be any less effective against the new variant. \"We have to do a lot more sequencing of samples to answer that question,\" he said.\n\nHowever, on Thursday UK officials announced a ban on travellers from South America, Portugal and Cape Verde due to the new strain.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. At Fullwell Cross Medical Centre, north London, they are now vaccinating almost 1,000 people a week\n\nFake news is likely to be causing some people from the UK's South Asian communities to reject the Covid vaccine, a doctor has warned.\n\nDr Harpreet Sood, who is leading an NHS anti-disinformation drive, said it was \"a big concern\" and officials were working \"to correct so much fake news\".\n\nHe said language and cultural barriers played a part in the false information.\n\nA GP in the West Midlands told the BBC some of her South Asian patients had refused the vaccine when offered it.\n\nDr Sood, from NHS England, said officials were working with South Asian role models, influencers, community leaders and religious leaders to help debunk myths about the vaccine.\n\nMuch of the disinformation surrounds the contents of the vaccine.\n\nHe said: \"We need to be clear and make people realise there is no meat in the vaccine, there is no pork in the vaccine, it has been accepted and endorsed by all the religious leaders and councils and faith communities.\"\n\n\"We're trying to find role models and influencers and also thinking about ordinary citizens who need to be quick with this information so that they can all support one another because ultimately everyone is a role model to everyone\", he added.\n\n\"There's a big piece of work happening where we're translating information, we're making sure the look and feel of it reaches the populations that matter.\"\n\nSome of the disinformation seen by the BBC on social media and on WhatsApp is religiously targeted. Messages falsely claim the vaccines contain animal produce - eating pork goes against the religious beliefs of Muslims, as does eating beef for Hindus.\n\nDr Samara Afzal has been vaccinating people in Dudley, West Midlands. She said: \"We've been calling all patients and booking them in for vaccines but the admin staff say when they call a lot of the South Asian patients they decline and refuse to have the vaccination.\n\n\"Also talking to friends and family have found the same. I've had friends calling me telling me to convince their parents or their grandparents to have the vaccination because other family members have convinced them not to have it\".\n\nWe need to be clear and make people realise there is no meat in the vaccine, there is no pork in the vaccine, it has been accepted and endorsed by all the religious leaders\n\nReena Pujara is a beauty therapist in Hampshire and a practising Hindu. She said she's been bombarded with false information.\n\n\"Some of the videos are quite disturbing especially when you actually see the person reporting is a medic and telling you that the vaccine is going to alter your DNA,\" she said.\n\n\"For a layman it is very confusing. And also when you read that the ingredients in the vaccine derive from a cow - and as Hindus the cow is sacred to us - it is disturbing.\"\n\nAbout 100 mosques have a joined a campaign to counter vaccine disinformation and persuade their communities to take the vaccine. They've said they'll use their Friday sermons to urge people to have the jab.\n\n\"There should be no hesitation in taking [the vaccine] from a moral perspective,\" said Qari Asim, chair of the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB), which has organised the campaign. \"It is our ethical duty to protect ourselves and others from harm.\"\n\nVaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi told the BBC's Asian Network that faith and community leaders had a big role to play in ensuring a high take-up of the vaccine. He said he had met with more than 150 leaders from Sikh, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim communities who were taking the message out \"that it's the right thing to do\".\n\nHe added that the government was taking steps to tackle online disinformation around the vaccine, as well as making sure vaccine guidance was available in many different languages.\n\nA recent poll, commissioned by the Royal Society of Public Health, suggested just over half of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people would be happy to have the coronavirus vaccine.\n\nIt found 57% said they would take the vaccine - compared with 79% of white people.", "Exam results are likely to appear before the end of the summer term\n\nExam results for A-levels and GCSEs in England could be published in early July this year, according to proposals for replacing cancelled exams.\n\nA consultation launched by the exams watchdog and the Department for Education confirmed that grades will be decided by teacher assessment.\n\nBut results this summer are likely to be released much earlier than usual.\n\nEducation Secretary Gavin Williamson said pupils would receive \"a grade that reflects their ability\".\n\nThere are also likely to be written test papers set by exam boards, but marked by teachers, with some later checks if there are concerns about fairness.\n\nFor vocational qualifications, exams which use mostly written papers are also likely to use teachers' grades - but qualifications which need a test of practical, hands-on skills will have separate arrangements.\n\nOfqual and the Department for Education have formally launched a two-week consultation on a system for how results will be decided, after disruption from the pandemic forced the cancellation of exams.\n\nThis is the second year of exam results being disrupted by the pandemic\n\nFor A-levels and GCSEs this could see the scrapping of the traditional results days in August, with a proposal to publish the results in \"early July\", increasing the time for appeals and adding more time before the start of the university term.\n\nLast year the process of replacement results ended with U-turns and confusion, as an algorithm initially used for deciding grades was abandoned and teachers' assessments used instead.\n\nThis time there will be no algorithm, but from the outset the process will rely on the judgement of teachers, who will be asked to use evidence such as coursework, essays, homework and mock exams.\n\nThere are also proposals for test papers, or mini-exams, which would be set by examiners but which would be likely to be marked within schools by teachers.\n\nThese would inform teachers' decisions rather than be a fixed proportion of the final grade - and could be used as evidence for any scrutiny of the reliability of a school's results or if there were appeals over grades.\n\nThere is also a recognition they might have to be taken by some pupils at home.\n\nBut it has still to be decided whether it would be mandatory to take these exams, and whether there would be a single paper per subject or the option to take more.\n\nThe Department for Education has said pupils will not face tests in subject areas they have not covered.\n\nGeoff Barton, leader of the ASCL head teachers' union, said the proposals seemed \"sensible\".\n\nBut he said the written tests would have to be \"exceptionally well designed\" to make them fair between students \"whose learning has been disrupted by the pandemic to greatly varying extents\".\n\n\"There are still many questions left unanswered,\" said the National Education Union's co-leader Kevin Courtney, about how tests could be flexible enough and how appeals will be decided.\n\nThere will be a process of training teachers in how the grading system will operate and be consistent between different schools.\n\nFor vocational qualifications, the proposals say those closer to written A-level and GCSE exams will be graded in a similar way to the academic exams, using teacher assessment to replace written papers.\n\nThere will be different approaches for qualifications requiring proof of practical skills, but there will be arrangements to make this possible.\n\nSome BTec exams have already gone ahead this month and IGCSE exams are still planned to continue this summer.\n\nA-levels and GCSEs have been cancelled in Wales and Northern Ireland, and in Scotland the Nationals, Highers and Advanced Highers have also been scrapped.\n\nEngland's Education Secretary, Mr Williamson, said: \"Fairness to young people has been and will continue to be fundamental to every decision we take on these issues.\"", "Men who had already had the virus were asked to donate blood plasma for the trial\n\nA potential treatment for Covid using blood plasma does not reduce deaths among hospital patients, trials show.\n\nThe results are a blow to researchers and the NHS, which led the drive to collect plasma donations.\n\nThis arm of the Recovery trial, which is investigating a number of promising Covid treatments, has now been closed.\n\nThe Oxford researchers involved say they are \"incredibly grateful\" for the contribution of patients across the country.\n\nDonations of plasma were temporarily suspended, according to NHS Blood and Transplant.**\n\nThere had been huge international interest in the role of convalescent plasma as a possible treatment for hospital patients with Covid-19.\n\nThe treatment involves blood plasma being taken from people who have recovered from the disease - which contains antibodies to coronavirus - and transfused into seriously ill patients.\n\nIt was hoped the plasma donation would give the recipient's struggling immune system a boost to fight off Covid.\n\nThe NHS had been urging people to donate, particularly men who are thought to have higher levels of antibodies in their blood.\n\nBut early analysis of 1,873 deaths in a study of 10,400 UK patients shows the treatment made \"no significant difference\".\n\nIn the group treated with convalescent plasma, 18% of patients died within 28 days - the same figure for the group given standard treatment.\n\nPatients in the study are still being followed up and the final results will be published shortly.\n\nEarlier this week, a separate study showed no evidence that the same treatment improved outcomes for patients in intensive care.\n\nMartin Landray, chief investigator and professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, said the Recovery trial showed \"the value of large randomised trials to properly assess the role of potential treatments\".\n\nThe trial is still investigating other treatments, including tocilizumab, aspirin and an antibody cocktail.\n\nProf Peter Horby, who also worked on the trial, said the largest ever trial of convalescent plasma \"was only possible thanks to the generous donation of plasma by recovered patients and the willingness of current patients to contribute to advancing medical care\".\n\n\"While the overall result is negative, we need to await the full results before we can understand whether convalescent plasma has any role in particular patient sub-groups,\" he said.\n\n**NHS Blood and Transplant restarted donations of blood plasma on 20 January. They could be used to see whether particular groups of patients, such as those with low antibody levels, could benefit.\n\nInternational trials are also testing if plasma helps people when it's used much earlier in the disease, before people get to hospital.", "One of two coronavirus variants first detected in Brazil has been found in the UK, says a leading scientist advising the government.\n\nBut the version discovered is not the \"variant of concern\", Prof Wendy Barclay clarified.\n\nThe \"variant of concern\" from Brazil, detected in travellers to Japan, is thought to be more infectious.\n\nIt led to travellers from South America and Portugal being banned from entering the UK on Friday.\n\nProf Wendy Barclay, who is heading a newly-launched project to study the effects of emerging coronavirus mutations called the G2P-UK National Virology Consortium, said: \"There are two different types of Brazilian variants and one of them has been detected and one of them has not.\"\n\nProf Barclay, who also sits on Nervtag, a committee which advises government on new and emerging respiratory virus threats, said the variant was \"probably introduced some time ago\" and it \"will be being traced very carefully\".\n\nShe added: \"The new Brazilian variant of concern, that was picked up in travellers going to Japan, has not been detected in the UK.\n\n\"Other variants that may have originated from Brazil have been previously found.\"\n\nThe body which collects and analyses the genomes of virus samples - Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium (Cog-UK) - said this variant seen in the UK contained one of the mutations found in the Brazilian \"variant of concern\".\n\nThe mutation, also found in the South African variant, has been linked to a reduced antibody response meaning our bodies might be less able to fight it off.\n\nCog-UK said this alone was not enough to qualify it as a \"variant of concern\", thought it acknowledged \"no internationally agreed definition of a variant of concern has yet been agreed\".\n\nIn other variants of concern, the mutation sits alongside a \"constellation\" of others which together amount to a high chance of making the virus more transmissible.\n\nIt comes as a further 1,248 people with coronavirus have died in the UK.\n\nThe latest government figures on Thursday also showed another 48,682 new cases had been reported.\n\nMeanwhile, the latest estimate for the reproduction (R) number in the UK - which represents the average number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to - is between 1.2 and 1.3.\n\nLast week it was estimated at between 1 and 1.4 by the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.\n\nWhen the figure is above 1, the number of cases increases exponentially.\n\nDespite other variants entering the country since, the Kent variant remains dominant in the UK and is believed to be 30-50% more infectious than the previous form of the virus.\n\nViruses acquire random changes to their genes constantly as they replicate.\n\nMany are neutral or even hurt the virus's ability to spread, but those that give it an advantage will become more common.\n\nMutations are being detected now because enough time has passed for those random changes to take hold.\n\nEven though there is no evidence any of these mutations make the virus more deadly, a virus that infects more people is likely to have a higher death toll.\n\nWhen the virus gets better at sticking onto and breaking into human cells, in theory someone exposed to the same dose is more likely to become ill.\n\nThe use of masks and personal protective equipment, social distancing and hand washing remain the best defences against the virus's spread.\n\nDowning Street said current evidence did not suggest the concerning Brazilian variant affected vaccines or treatment.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMr Shapps described the travel ban, which came into force at 04:00 GMT on Friday, as a \"precautionary\" measure.\n\nIt covers people who have travelled from or through, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela in the last 10 days.\n\nThe ban also applies to Portugal - because of its strong links to Brazil - and the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde off the coast of west Africa, as well as Panama in central America.\n\nBritish and Irish citizens and foreign nationals with residence rights are still allowed to return - but must isolate for 10 days.\n\nAlso exempt are hauliers who are travelling from Portugal to transport essential goods.\n\nDr Mike Tildesley, an epidemiologist who is part of the government's Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, said the travel ban should minimise the risk from a \"more transmissible\" variant.\n\n\"We always have this issue with travel bans, of course, that we're always a little bit behind the curve,\" he told BBC Breakfast.\n\n\"My understanding is that there haven't really been any flights coming from Brazil for about the past week, so hopefully the immediate travel ban should really minimise the risk.\"\n\nDowning Street said it acted \"as quickly as possible\" to impose the travel ban because the concerning Brazilian variant \"could pose a significant risk to the UK\".\n\nHowever, Portugal's government has described the ban as \"absurd\" and illogical\".\n\nThe country's minister of foreign affairs Augusto Santos Silva said he had requested a conversation with his British counterpart after the \"sudden and unexpected\" suspension of flights.\n\nHe added Portugal was already restricting flights from Brazil and there was \"no evidence\" the new variant existed in his country.", "Police investigations have been compromised by an error that led to hundreds of thousands of records being deleted from UK-wide databases, according to a letter seen by the BBC.\n\nThe National Police Chiefs' Council said 213,000 records were deleted - more than the 150,000 first reported.\n\nThis resulted in a couple of \"near misses\" for serious crimes when trying to identify an offender, it said.\n\nThe Home Office has said it is assessing the impact of the mistake.\n\nData including fingerprint, DNA, and arrest histories was wiped from the Police National Computer (PNC) - which stores and shares criminal records information across the UK - after being inadvertently flagged for deletion.\n\nThe PNC is used in police investigations and provides real-time checks on people, vehicles and crimes, as well as whether suspects are wanted for any unsolved offences.\n\nThe Home Office said the lost entries related to people who were arrested and then released without further action.\n\nBut the letter from the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) says officers are aware of at least one instance where the DNA profile from a suspect in custody did not generate a match to a crime scene as expected, potentially impeding the investigation.\n\nIt says that some of the records had been marked for indefinite retention following earlier convictions for serious offences.\n\nAnd it reveals that a \"weeding system\", developed and deployed by a Home Office PNC team, started to delete records wrongly last November.\n\nThe process was only brought to a halt at the start of this week.\n\nThe letter was sent on Friday afternoon by Deputy Chief Constable Naveed Malik of the NPCC to chief constables and police and crime commissioners.\n\nThe deletion of the records has been blamed on a coding error.\n\nThis resulted in records that had been flagged for deletion being lost from the database before checks had been carried out to determine whether they could be lawfully held or not.\n\nPolicing minister Kit Malthouse said the problem had been identified and the process corrected so \"it cannot happen again\".\n\nHe said the Home Office, National Police Chiefs' Council and other law enforcement partners were working \"at pace\" to recover the data.\n\nThe Home Office said no records of criminal or dangerous persons had been deleted.\n\nBut Labour shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds called on Home Secretary Priti Patel to take responsibility for the error and be clear about the impact it had had.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Breakfast, he described the situation as \"extraordinarily serious\", adding: \"Priti Patel will be responsible for criminals walking free. We're not going to be able to link suspects to crime scenes without the DNA and fingerprint evidence.\"\n\nA home office source said the accusation was \"scaremongering and irresponsible\".\n\nFormer Cumbria Police Chief Constable Stuart Hyde told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Friday the \"very large\" loss of arrest records presented a \"risk to public safety\".\n\nThe records are linked to police investigations that were terminated before charge (No Further Action or NFA cases) or to those where an individual had been acquitted at court.\n\nIt is not yet known how many records of each type were lost and full extent of deletions is still being investigated. A minister is expected to update the House of Commons on Monday.\n\nIt comes after about 40,000 alerts relating to European criminals were removed from the PNC following the UK's post-Brexit security deal with the EU.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The pharmacy in Gwynedd is offering the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab\n\nA pharmacy has become the first in Wales to offer Covid jabs, as community vaccine trials begin.\n\nFifty people with appointments are to visit the pharmacy near Pwllheli, Gwynedd, on Friday to receive their first shot of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.\n\nThe pilot has begun in pharmacies in Betsi Cadwaladr health board.\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford said community pharmacists can help with vaccinations \"in more than one way\".\n\nIt follows a letter from Community Pharmacy Wales to Wales' health minister which said there was an \"urgent need\" to use pharmacies in Wales to help roll out coronavirus vaccines.\n\nUK Government figures show 126,375 people in Wales, 4% of the population, have received their first coronavirus jab so far.\n\nThat compares with 4.1% (224,840) in Scotland, 4.9% in England (2,769,164) and 6% (114,567) in Northern Ireland.\n\nHundreds more pharmacies in Wales will offer the jab in the next two weeks.\n\nRosie Bennett, one of the patients to receive a vaccination at Fferyllwyr H L Taylor Pharmacy in Llanbedrog, said getting her vaccine was a \"small step to a better future\".\n\nThe 82-year-old said: \"I don't have a car, so it was a huge relief to know that I wouldn't have to travel a long distance to have the vaccine.\n\n\"Here in the village, we know the staff at the chemists. They've been doing a great job during the pandemic and it's reassuring to have the vaccine from someone you know.\"\n\nSteffan John, the pharmacist who administered the vaccine to Rosie, said the staff are \"really pleased to do their bit for the community\".\n\nPharmacist Llyr Hughes, who runs four pharmacies, including Fferyllwyr H L Taylor Pharmacy, said \"vaccinating at scale\" was the \"only way out of the pandemic\".\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio Wales Breakfast, Mr Hughes said he expected the rollout to happen \"very quickly across all community pharmacies in Wales\".\n\n\"I don't forsee any big problems,\" he said.\n\n\"Community pharmacists have a wealth of experience in delivering flu vaccinations.\n\n\"We will tailor our work model to accommodate for this, as we did for the flu vaccine.\"\n\nMr Hughes said his pharmacy will have vaccinated in the region of more than 100 people by Saturday afternoon.\n\nHe added: \"If we can deliver locally we can provide easier access to older patients.\"\n\nHe explained local patients would be contacted about an appointment for the vaccine at the pharmacy.\n\nMr John said that the vaccine comes in vials of ten doses which means it's \"important to vaccinate that many people at a time and not to waste any\".\n\nLlyr Hughes who runs Fferyllwyr H L Taylor Pharmacy said 50 patients will be vaccinated today\n\nHowever, Mr Drakeford told Friday's Welsh Government press briefing that not all pharmacy premises would be suitable to deliver the Covid vaccines.\n\nHe said some community pharmacists could be asked to administer vaccinations at mass vaccination centres instead, in cases where spaces for vaccinations are small at pharmacies with high volumes of people.\n\nWales' Health Minister Vaughan Gething said the rollout was still in the \"early stages\" of the \"largest vaccination programme Wales has ever seen\".\n\n\"People can be expected to be asked to attend either a mass or community centre, hospital, GP practice, pharmacy or mobile unit,\" he added.\n\nMr Gething said a mix of vaccination sites and centres were chosen so \"everyone across the country has equal access to a vaccination\".\n\nHe added that people will be notified for an appointment, and before that they should not call GPs or health services to request a vaccine and \"add undue pressure\" to their workloads.\n\nPlaid Cymru's health spokesman Rhun ap Iorwerth said Wales' vaccination programme was \"improving far, far too slowly\".\n\n\"As important as it is that we have one pharmacy doing it, what's happening in all the others?\"\n\nPaul Davies, leader of the Conservatives in the Senedd, said it was clear Wales was \"lagging behind\" the rest of the UK on delivering the vaccinations.\n\n\"It's certainly not happening quickly enough, we need to see the Welsh Government stepping up to the plate,\" he said.\n\nThe Welsh Government has said more pharmacists and other primary care services, such as dentists and opticians - are being invited to help with the rollout, subject to vaccine supply.", "The UK's epidemic is still officially estimated to be growing, according to the latest R number, but data suggests new cases are beginning to fall.\n\nThe R number - which takes into account cases, hospitalisations and deaths - is estimated to be between 1.2 and 1.3, compared with 1 and 1.4 last week.\n\nThis suggests the total number of people with the virus is still rising across the UK.\n\nBut in London, where tight restrictions came in earlier, the R number is lower.\n\nIn the capital, the estimate - based on data up until 11 January - is between 0.9 and 1.2, compared with 1.1 and 1.4 the previous week.\n\nIt comes as a further 1,280 people with coronavirus have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive test, taking the total to 87,291.\n\nThe latest government figures on Friday also showed another 55,761 new cases had been reported.\n\nMeanwhile, more than three million people in the UK have now received the first dose of a vaccine - latest figures show the number at 3,234,946.\n\nAlthough the number of people sick with coronavirus is growing in the UK, data from various sources suggests new infections are declining.\n\nThis provides early signs that lockdown restrictions may be taking effect.\n\nThe government's scientific advisory group Sage, which calculates the R number, said areas that have been under tougher restrictions for a longer period of time - including east of England, London, and the south east - are showing \"a slight decline in the number of people infected\".\n\nHowever, they warned that regions such as north-west and south-west England continue to see infections rise, where the spread of the new UK variant may be playing a role.\n\nThe R number is a way of rating coronavirus or any disease's ability to spread. In theory, it describes the number of people that one infected person will pass the virus onto, on average.\n\nIn reality, though, the government's estimate of R gives a wider view of the epidemic's general trend since it also looks at what is happening in hospitals.\n\nCases, hospitalisations and deaths from Covid-19 have been alarmingly high since the beginning of the year and the latest estimate of the R number indicates that the pandemic is continuing to grow.\n\nBut because of the way the data to estimate R is collected - it reflects the situation a week ago. More up to date indicators suggest that there's a slight decline in infections in the east of England, London, and the South East.\n\nThese areas have had the highest prevalence and therefore the toughest restrictions the longest but infections are continuing to rise in the North West and South West probably because of the spread of the new variant of the virus.\n\nDespite this there's some relief at these figures among the government's scientific advisors. They were not sure whether the current restrictions would be enough to prevent the more contagious variant getting out of control. Now they expect Covid-related deaths to level off in a week or so and then decline as the benefits of the vaccine programme begin to take effect.\n\nCases should also begin to decrease in the coming weeks. But all this depends on people continuing to observe the government's social distancing guidelines - and come into contact with others only if it is essential.\n\nProf Sir David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at the University of Cambridge, said coronavirus deaths were likely to peak in the next week to 10 days.\n\nHe told BBC Radio 4's The World At One that the lockdown measures were having an impact, with the peak in infections having passed \"a good few days ago\" which would lead to a reduction in the numbers dying from the disease.\n\n\"They are likely to level off in a week - 10 days maybe - at a peak which is probably going to be bigger than the first wave peak of 1,000-a-day, but then should decline due the reductions in cases that we are seeing and, of course, the vaccine programme.\"\n\nData from the ZOE Covid Symptom Study app gives its own estimate of 0.9 for the virus's R or reproduction number. This is based on cases alone, rather than a wider number of data sources included in the official estimate.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What is the R number and what does it mean?\n\nWhile this leaves out the fact that hospitals are still filling up, looking at cases on their own allows assessment of whether lockdown restrictions are working.\n\nBut the large number of infections recorded at the end of December and the beginning of January means, despite receding cases, hospitalisations and deaths will inevitably continue to rise for some time.\n\nMeanwhile, a ban on travellers from South America, Portugal and Cape Verde entering the UK came into force on Friday as a result of a new, potentially more infectious strain linked to Brazil.\n\nProf Wendy Barclay, a scientist at Imperial College London advising the government, said this \"variant of concern\" had not been detected in the UK but another variant from Brazil was already in circulation.\n\nIt is not clear whether this second strain is more contagious or not.", "Ambulances were lined up outside the Royal London Hospital on Thursday\n\nCovid patients have been transferred to hospitals in Newcastle from over-stretched London intensive care units.\n\nA small number, fewer than five, have been moved hundreds of miles from the south east, the BBC has been told.\n\nHospitals with the largest critical care capacity have been asked to take patients from other areas to ease pressures.\n\nHowever, NHS England has denied that patients have been transferred to Newcastle from London.\n\nThe patient transfers were first reported by The Guardian.\n\nIt is not uncommon for patients to be transferred from one busy hospital to another within the region, but moving the sick from out of their areas is unusual.\n\nThe North of England Critical Care Network, which co-ordinates provision in the North East, north Cumbria and North Yorkshire, confirmed patients had been moved from other parts of England.\n\nIn statement, director Lesley Durham said: \"During this pandemic and at these times of unprecedented pressures, we have ensured equity of patient access to critical care though mutual aid between units in the form of critical care patient transfers.\n\n\"We are also working with our colleagues and networks further afield.\n\n\"Whilst not ideal, it is correct to ensure that every person, regardless of location, has access to a critical care bed if they require one.\"\n\nOne medical expert described transferring people across the country as \"a challenge\"\n\nElsewhere, Northampton General Hospital - which is about 70 miles from London - has been receiving critical care patients from outside its area.\n\nA spokesman said: \"Some patients have been transferred to our critical care unit in recent weeks from other parts of the country, including London.\n\n\"We currently have one 'out-of-area' patient, but they are not from London.\"\n\nNHS England said in a statement: \"The NHS has tried and tested plans in place to manage significant pressure either from high Covid-19 infection rates and non-Covid winter demands and this has always included mutual aid practices whereby hospitals work together to manage admissions.\"\n\nIt added that no patients had been transferred from London to Newcastle, Birmingham, Northampton or Sheffield.\n\nAcross England in the week to 12 January, there were 32,202 patients in hospital with Covid-19, a rise of 5,735 on the previous week.\n\nIn the week up to 10 January there were 330,616 new cases.\n\nHospitals across the North East are already seeing many more patients than the first wave of the pandemic, and the next few weeks are likely to be the toughest yet.\n\nBut right now some - like Newcastle - have room in intensive care and are being asked to take patients from critical care units in the south which have become overwhelmed and run out of room.\n\nNewcastle and Northumbria NHS trusts have already been taking in patients from across their own patch - most notably from Cumbria where there are not nearly enough intensive care beds for the soaring numbers of Covid patients.\n\nBut patient numbers are growing in the North East's hospitals too, and many are already struggling.\n\nThey expect next week will be the worst week they have experienced yet.\n\nTo prepare, elective work is being postponed, wards are being cleared to take in new patients, and intensive care units are being expanded.\n\nConcerns have been raised about seriously-ill patients travelling such long distances.\n\nDr Uwe Franke, intensive care lead at Middlesbrough's James Cook Hospital, said: \"The critical care networks work regionally and nationally and are trying to spread the workload about the country without pushing other units to their limits or out of the durability of their capacity.\n\n\"But there is a difficulty in this; we know that Covid patients are incredibly ill, they are dependent on breathing machines, they are dependent on other machines that need organ support.\n\n\"To transfer these people across the country is quite a challenge.\"\n\nDr Franke added that while hospitals in the North were keen to support colleagues across the country, some - like his own - were already reaching their limit.\n\nHis hospital currently has in excess of 200 Covid patients, with 32 of those in intensive care.\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.", "Dustin Diamond made his name as the studious \"Screech\" in the US sitcom Saved by the Bell\n\nSaved by The Bell actor Dustin Diamond has been diagnosed with cancer, his representative has said.\n\nThe 44-year-old, who played Samuel \"Screech\" Powers in the popular 1990s US school-based sitcom, fell ill last week and was taken to hospital.\n\nHis representative, Roger Paul, said the actor is now waiting for further details.\n\n\"We will know the severity of it when the tests are done,\" Paul said, adding they expect an update next week.\n\nSaved by the Bell ran for four seasons from 1989 to 1993 and followed a group of high school friends and their principal.\n\nDiamond reprised his role in follow-up series Saved by the Bell: The New Class, and Saved by the Bell: The College Years. But he did not appear in the recent revival series.\n\nThe American was also a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother in 2013.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "A 24m section of the bridge parapet collapsed one mile from where a fatal crash took place\n\nPart of a rail bridge has collapsed near the site of the fatal Stonehaven train derailment.\n\nA 24m (79ft) section of the side wall has fallen from the bridge, about a mile north of where three people died when a train left the track and crashed last August.\n\nNetwork Rail said it was a \"structural fault\" and not caused by a landslip.\n\nThe line between Aberdeen and Dundee remains closed while structural engineers assess the fault.\n\nThe structure is located three miles north of Carmont signal box. The collapse was discovered just before 10:00 on Friday.\n\nThe rail company said the damage to the parapet was \"extensive\" and that the line was expected to be closed for a \"significant\" period of time while repairs to the bridge take place.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Network Rail Scotland This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe Network Rail Twitter account told followers engineers would be working around the clock to complete repairs.\n\nSpecialist staff are also checking similar bridges as a precaution.\n\nThe line between Aberdeen and Dundee had just reopened in November, nearly three months after the Stonehaven derailment.\n\nThe driver, a conductor and a passenger died when the Aberdeen to Glasgow service derailed near Stonehaven on 12 August after heavy rain.\n\nNetwork Rail Scotland carried out \"complex\" repairs at the scene of the derailment\n\nAn interim report said the train hit washed-out rocks and gravel.\n\nA Network Rail spokesman said: \"The line is currently closed while our engineers repair a damaged side wall on a bridge between Carmont and Stonehaven.\n\n\"Specialist structural engineers are currently assessing the fault and putting plans in place for its repair.\n\n\"Our engineers will be working around-the-clock to complete this work as quickly as possible.\"", "Passengers will need to provide a negative Covid-19 test taken within 72 hours before departure\n\nPassengers arriving into NI from outside the UK and Republic of Ireland will soon have to produce a negative Covid-19 test before departure.\n\nFirst Minister Arlene Foster confirmed the executive had agreed the plan on Thursday.\n\nPeople arriving from countries not on the government's travel corridors list will also still have to self-isolate for 10 days.\n\nThe move has already been agreed in the Republic of Ireland.\n\nPassengers arriving there will be subject to the new rules from Saturday, with the measure taking effect in England and Scotland from Monday.\n\nNegative tests 72 hours prior to arrival are already a requirement in the Republic of Ireland for passengers travelling from Great Britain and South Africa.\n\nSpeaking at Stormont's press conference on Thursday, the first minister said Northern Ireland's R-number had also fallen to between 0.7 and 0.9 for new cases of the virus.\n\nThe reproductive rate of the virus - known as the R rate, measures the infection rate of Covid-19 and had risen to about 1.8 due to Christmas relaxations.\n\nDeputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill said the drop showed the \"very real\" effect of lockdown restrictions imposed on 26 December, but she warned there was still \"no room for complacency\".\n\nShe said she still believed there needed to be an \"two-island approach\" to travel restrictions, including discussions with the British and Irish governments as a \"matter of urgency\".\n\nMrs Foster said Stormont ministers had also expressed frustration at the executive meeting over a lack of data-sharing from authorities in the Republic of Ireland, and called for it to be escalated.\n\nPSNI Chief Constable (centre) Simon Byrne attended Stormont's press briefing on Thursday with the first and deputy first ministers\n\nPSNI Chief Constable Simon Byrne said 40 penalty notices a day are being handed out to those who breach the Covid-19 regulations.\n\nHe told the press briefing that if people continued flouting rules, they could expect \"firm and swift enforcement\".\n\n\"We won't turn a blind eye when people break the rules.\"\n\nOn Thursday, 16 more deaths related to Covid-19 were reported by the Department of Health in Northern Ireland, bringing its total to 1,533.\n\nThere have been 973 new cases diagnosed in the past 24 hours, while 58 Covid-19 patients are being treated in ICUs across Northern Ireland, of which 44 are on ventilators.\n\nMrs Foster said she found it \"incredible and frankly unbelievable\" that some people were still holding house parties and gatherings, despite the pandemic rates and the lockdown.\n\nOn Wednesday, health officials warned that levels of the new, more transmissible variant of the virus are rising.\n\nMr Swann said that meant more \"difficult decisions\" on lockdown restrictions could be required.\n\nNorthern Ireland is in the third week of a six-week lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19.\n\nThe executive is due to review the current restrictions on 21 January.\n\nThe first and deputy first ministers said they would take evidence from health officials before deciding whether an extension of the lockdown would be required.\n\nMinisters have expressed concerns about keeping non-essential parts of businesses open\n\nMinisters have also expressed concerns about some larger retailers \"gaming\" the regulations and keeping open non-essential parts of their businesses.\n\nA meeting between the first and deputy first ministers and representatives of the retail sector is due to happen on Friday afternoon.\n\nElsewhere, the Chief Medical Officer has confirmed that unpaid carers looking after Clinically Extremely Vulnerable individuals should receive the first dose of their vaccine when phase two of the vaccination programme begins next month.\n\nDr Michael McBride told Stormont's Health Committee they are provided for on a list of prioritisation provided by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which decides the order of vaccination delivery.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Department of Health This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by Department of Health\n\nMr Swann was asked if his department was \"putting all its eggs in the vaccine basket\".\n\nHe said it was \"not the entirety of the answer\", adding: \"It will take time for the benefits of it to bed in.\n\n\"And while it is doing it, we still have to follow those restrictions that are in place.\n\n\"We may actually have to introduce more.\"\n\nOn Thursday afternoon the department tweeted that 121,711 vaccines have been administered in Northern Ireland.\n\nMrs Foster said that by end of this month, it is hoped all care home residents, health staff and those aged over 80 in Northern Ireland will have received their first vaccination.\n\nShe said that would be an \"incredible achievement\" and make Northern Ireland one of the top-performing countries in rolling out its vaccination programme.\n\nMeanwhile, the chairman of the Police Federation for NI (PFNI) has said officers need more powers to enforce Covid-19 regulations.\n\nAt present officers can only issue guidance and advice on the public health regulations.\n\nPFNI chairman Mark Lindsay said that puts officers in a \"difficult position\".\n\nThe federation represents thousands of rank and file PSNI officers.\n\n\"I think we are well past the stage where police officers are the people that should be giving advice around the guidance,\" Mr Lindsay told BBC Radio Foyle.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Rescuers pull a woman from the rubble after the 6.2 magnitude earthquake\n\nA powerful earthquake has rocked Indonesia's Sulawesi island, killing at least 42 people, with more feared dead as rescuers search for survivors.\n\nThe 6.2-magnitude earthquake struck on Friday morning, just hours after an earlier, smaller tremor.\n\nHundreds of people were injured and thousands displaced by the quake.\n\nIndonesia has a history of devastating earthquakes and tsunamis, with more than 2,000 killed in a 2018 Sulawesi quake.\n\nEight people died when the five-storey Mitra Manakarra Hospital in Mamuju partially collapsed on Friday, officials said. About 60 people were safely evacuated from the hospital.\n\n\"It happened so quickly, around 10 seconds,\" Syamsu Ridwan, a local police spokesman, told the BBC. He said the power in the hospital cut out during the earthquake.\n\nOfficials fear the death toll will increase as rescue efforts continue. Rescuers were still searching for survivors late on Friday, but they have been hampered by power cuts and poor mobile phone service.\n\nIndonesian President Joko Widodo offered condolences to the victims, urging people to stay calm and for the authorities to step up search efforts.\n\nThe epicentre of Friday's quake was six kilometres (3.73 miles) northeast of Majene city at a depth of 10km.\n\nVideo footage on social media showed collapsed houses and a girl pinned under rubble calling for help.\n\nThe situation was \"pretty bad\", Dr Gayatri Marliyani, of the geology department at Gajah Mada University in Yogyakarta, told the BBC. She said the governor's office was among the collapsed buildings and confirmed that several hospitals and one hotel had also been damaged.\n\nShe also warned that getting response teams to the area could be hampered by the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nTremors were felt at around 01:00 local time on Friday (17:00 Thursday GMT) for about seven seconds.\n\nNo tsunami warning was issued but thousands are reported to have left their homes, fleeing to safety.\n\nAuthorities have warned that strong aftershocks could follow the two main quakes and that they could still trigger a tsunami.\n\nIndonesia is prone to earthquakes because it lies on the so-called Ring of Fire - a line of frequent quakes and volcanic eruptions on the Pacific rim.\n\nIn 2004, a tsunami triggered by an earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra killed 226,000 people across the Indian Ocean, including more than 120,000 in Indonesia.\n\nThe Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 killed 170,000 people on the Indonesian island of Sumatra after a quake of magnitude 9.1.\n\nAre you in the area? If it is safe to do so, share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Police officers who were targeted by a pro-Trump mob have been speaking out about the \"medieval battle\" that unfolded on the steps of the Capitol and inside the halls of American democracy last week.\n\nPolice faced off against rioters equipped with clubs, shields, pitchforks, firearms, and metal poles stripped from seating set up for next week's inauguration.\n\nHere's what we've learned from their interviews with US media.\n\nMichael Fanone, a 40-year-old DC plainclothes narcotics detective who was told to wear his uniform that day, rushed to the West Terrace of the Capitol where he took turns holding back the crowd, and resting to rinse his face of the the chemical irritants that that crowd was spraying on police.\n\n\"We weren't battling 50 or 60 rioters in this tunnel,\" the MPD (Metropolitan Police Department of District of Columbia) veteran told the Washington Post. \"We were battling 15,000 people. It looked like a medieval battle scene.\"\n\nAfter he was grabbed by his helmet and dragged face-first down several steps, he said the crowd started stripping gear from his vest, including spare ammo, his radio and his badge - all while chanting \"USA!\".\n\nMichael Fanone, a DC detective, was dragged into the crowd and beaten\n\n\"We got one! We got one!\" Mr Fanone said he heard people shout, with others chanting: \"Kill him with his own gun!\"\n\nSome members of the crowd protected him after he started yelling that he has children, the father of four told CNN. He sustained only minor injuries but later found out in hospital that he had suffered a mild heart attack during the brawl.\n\nMPD Officer Daniel Hodges, 32, had already been on shift for several hours before the rioting began.\n\n\"We were battling, you know, tooth and nail for our lives,\" he told ABC News.\n\nIn one viral video, Mr Hodges is seen pinned in a glass doorway between officers and the crowd, as rioters strip his gas mask from his face and beat him with his own police-issued baton. One rioter tried to gouge his eyes.\n\n\"That was one of the three times that day where I thought: Well, this might be it,\" said Mr Hodges. \"This might be the end for me.\"\n\nAs he choked on tear gas, he is seen on video gasping for air to call out for help. Enough police were eventually able to push through the melee to extract him.\n\n\"I had conspiracy theorists and everyone you could think of yelling at me, saying, 'Why are you doing this, you're the traitor,'\" Mr Hodges told radio station WAMU.\n\n\"We're not the traitors. We're the ones who saved Congress that day, and we'll do it as many times as necessary.\"\n\nDespite fearing for his life, Mr Hodges says he decided not to use his gun on the crowd.\n\n\"I didn't want to be the guy who starts shooting, because I knew they had guns - we had been seizing guns all day,\" he told the Post.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nRobert Glover, the commander on scene for MPD, declared a riot at 13:50 local time, nearly two hours after Trump's speech at the White House where he instructed his followers to go to the Capitol.\n\nHe quickly told officers to retake the inauguration bleachers, to stop the crowd from raining down heavy objects on officers from above.\n\nMr Glover told the Post that some rioters may have been caught up in the moment, but others seemed to be moving in \"military formation\" as if they had prepared for the assault. He said that some appeared to be using hand signals to co-ordinate tactics.\n\nSeveral US military veterans, as well as off-duty police officers from Virginia, Maryland and Texas, have since been suspended or arrested for participating in the riot.\n\nMPD Officer Christina Laury, 32, was among the first city police officers to arrive on the scene. When she got to the Capitol, officers were already being brutally attacked by rioters attempting to storm the building.\n\n\"They had bear mace, which is literally used for bears. I got hit with it plenty of times that day and it just seals your eyes shut. You just would see officers going down trying to douse themselves with water, trying to open their eyes up so they can see again.\"\n\n\"The bravery and the heroism that I saw in these officers - the second they were able to open their eyes, they were back up front and they were just trying to stop these individuals from coming in.\"\n\nOne officer being lauded as a hero has yet to speak about his experience - Officer Eugene Goodman, a member of Congress' 2,100 member Capitol Police force.\n\nMr Goodman, an African American Iraq War veteran, was seen singlehandedly distracting a rampaging mob, giving lawmakers enough time to clear the chamber and get to safety.\n\nOn Thursday, a cross-party group of lawmakers introduced a bill calling for him to receive the Congressional Gold Medal for his effort to defend democracy.\n\nThe Capitol Police have been criticised over their response and preparation.\n\nSeveral top Capitol security officials, including the Capitol Police chief and the sergeants-at-arms for the House and Senate, resigned in the wake of the siege amid claims from lawmakers that they had not done enough to prepare for the mob.\n\nProtesters climbed the bleachers that were erected for Biden's inauguration\n\nOn Friday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced General Russel Honoré would be leading an immediate investigation of the Capitol's security infrastructure.\n\nVideo footage has also emerged showing an officer taking a selfie with a rioter inside the Capitol. Some officers reportedly gave directions to rioters telling them how to get to the offices of Democratic lawmakers.\n\nSeveral Capitol Police officers have been suspended for allegedly violating policies as the agency conducts an internal probe.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA respiratory doctor at Belfast's Mater Hospital has warned that hospital oxygen supplies are under \"extreme pressure\".\n\nDr Nick Magee also said more younger patients were now being treated in hospital than during the first and second waves of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nHe said in the past they did not have to consult other NI hospitals about how much oxygen they had.\n\n\"That was never a thing in previous January flu problems,\" he told the BBC.\n\n\"But that is something we are now having to think of,\" he added.\n\nEarlier this week Northern Ireland's Chief Medical Officer Dr Michael McBride said there is enough oxygen to cope with the current demand.\n\nBut according to Dr Magee the current level of oxygen being used in \"bays\" at the Mater means patients cannot charge their mobile phones by their bedside because of the \"fire risk\".\n\n\"It is all well controlled and we are making sure that we can share out that oxygen burden. That is something we are having to think about,\" he said.\n\n\"I can't say specifically about other regional hospitals but I know that they are under extreme pressure and it's just something we have to think of as a region.\n\n\"Can we supply oxygen adequately for the amounts of oxygen we are using in hospitals?\"\n\nThe number of Covid positive hospital in-patients has increased significantly since last week - up from 599 a week ago to 850 on Thursday.\n\nThe number of people in ICU has also risen from 44 to 58 in the past week.\n\nDr Magee said staff were concerned about having to cope with \"large volumes\" of patients requiring respiratory support.\n\nHe said the number of younger patients becoming increasingly sick with the virus was growing.\n\nOn Wednesday, the Mater Hospital moved six patients who had been on wards into ICU and also took patients from the Southern Health Trust.\n\n\"Recently I saw a 29-year-old patient, also three who were in their mid 30s that all required respiratory support on a ward,\" he told BBC News NI.\n\n\"They are frightened they are wearing specialist masks CPAP masks that help them breathe. They are scared.\"\n\nThe relentless pressure of the past 10 months and the prospect of a further surge in admissions over the next fortnight is weighing heavily on the minds of medics.\n\n\"We are really worried about next week,\" said Dr Magee.\n\n\"It's very busy this week, we are coping well but we are particularly concerned about next week.\n\n\"Normally, if we had somebody who needed a lot of respiratory support we would involve a high dependency unit but all the respiratory wards are becoming like high dependency units.\n\n\"Volume of sicker, younger patients is much greater and it's not something that I would [have] ever seen before,\" he added.\n\nThe Southern Health and Social Care Trust said its hospitals had limited infrastructure to manage high numbers of patients requiring oxygen so a regional agreement was in place to share resources across Trusts to support Covid-positive patients.\n\n\"As a result some patients have been diverted to Belfast or SE Trust to help reduce pressure on the Southern Trust hospital system,\" a statement said.\n\n\"Craigavon and Daisy Hill hospitals remain very busy with high numbers of Covid-19 positive patients who are dependent on oxygen therapy.\n\n\"These protocols are in place as part of regional surge planning to ensure that we can safely manage the current high volume of Covid-19 patients needing hospital care.\n\n\"Patients who are currently being treated in Craigavon and Daisy Hill have secure supplies of oxygen.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Derby\n\nChampionship side Derby County have appointed England's record goalscorer Wayne Rooney as their new manager on a two-and-a-half-year contract.\n\nThe 35-year-old, who had been in interim charge since Phillip Cocu was sacked on 14 November, has now also officially retired as a player.\n\nRooney has overseen nine games so far, winning three and drawing four.\n\n\"The opportunity to follow Brian Clough, Jim Smith, Frank Lampard and Phillip Cocu is an honour,\" he said.\n\n\"I knew instinctively Derby County was the place for me.\"\n\nLiam Rosenior takes up the role of assistant manager, with former England boss Steve McClaren continuing as technical director and advisor to the board of directors.\n\nShay Given will become first-team coach and Justin Walker will remain as first-team development coach.\n\nThe Rams are third from bottom in the Championship, level on points with fourth-from-bottom Sheffield Wednesday.\n\nA takeover for the club is expected to go through this week, with a deal between current owner Mel Morris and the Derventio Holdings Group having been agreed in November.\n\nRams chief executive Stephen Pearce said in an interview with BBC Radio Derby on Thursday that there were no problems with the takeover, despite the delays meaning players have not been paid their December wages.\n\n\"Our recent upturn in results under Wayne was married together with some positive performances, notably the 2-0 home win over Swansea City and the 4-0 victory at Birmingham City,\" said Pearce.\n\n\"During that nine-game run we also dramatically improved their defensive record and registered five clean sheets in the process, while in the attacking third we became more effective and ruthless too.\n\n\"Those foundations have provided a platform for the club to build on in the second half of the season.\"\n\nRooney made his professional debut for boyhood club Everton in August 2002 aged just 16 and became the Premier League's youngest scorer with a superb long-range goal against Arsenal before his 17th birthday.\n\nAfter a strong Euro 2004 he moved to Manchester United for £27m, then a world record fee for a teenager.\n\nDuring 13 years with United he won the Premier League five times, the Champions League, the FA Cup and three League Cups.\n\nHis time with England was less successful in terms of team honours, although he did break Sir Bobby Charlton's long-standing record of 49 goals before retiring from international football in August 2017.\n\nHe made a farewell appearance for the Three Lions against the United States in a friendly in November 2018 to finish with 53 goals in 120 appearances.\n\nAfter a second stint at Everton and a spell with American side DC United, Rooney joined Derby in January 2020 as a player-coach on an initial 18-month contract.\n\nHe retires as the second-highest goalscorer in Premier League history, with 208 goals.\n\nWayne Rooney's presence at Derby County was felt on that hot August evening in 2019 when Phillip Cocu won his first match as manager at Huddersfield, a result overshadowed by the announcement of his signing.\n\nRooney's ambition to become a manager was there for all to see when chairman Mel Morris afforded him the opportunity to be a player-coach on arrival in January. He in fact arrived a few months before that but was unable to play, and stayed low key, observing from the sidelines.\n\nA year ago this month he made an instant impact to Derby's fortunes on the field. Players who were underachieving and perhaps found the grind of the Championship a little hard to handle, were taken up a notch by his presence.\n\nSome would say Rooney saved the Rams' season, but this term he struggled on the field and so did Derby.\n\nI am told it was written into his contract that he would have a chance to take control one day and he has already shown in his nine games in interim charge that he can get the squad playing in his image. Gone is the side-to-side, slow build-up possession game, it is a better product to watch.\n\nThe people around him have good pedigree in the game. Shay Given, Liam Rosenior, Justin Walker and Jason Pearcey have experience at all levels - but his relationship with Steve McClaren will be the most important of all.\n\nDerby fans have been calling out for a positive piece of news. Rooney's appointment is the first duck in a row with the takeover expected to be completed any time now and then Championship survival is the hope.\n• None Hear how David Bowie always managed to stay ahead of his time\n• None Joe Wicks and guests are here to bring positivity to your day", "A man accused of allegedly tricking a 92-year-old woman out of £160 for a fake coronavirus vaccination has been charged with fraud and common assault.\n\nDavid Chambers is accused of administering the fake vaccine at her Surbiton home in London last month.\n\nThe 33-year-old, also from Surbiton, is charged with five offences including fraud and going outside in a tier four area without a good reason.\n\nHe denied the charges when he appeared before magistrates on Friday.\n\nMr Chambers was remanded in custody until a hearing on 12 February.\n\nIn the UK, coronavirus vaccines are free of charge and available via the NHS.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Marcus Rashford and a group of celebrity chefs and campaigners have called on Boris Johnson to review the government's free school meals policy.\n\nThe group, including Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Tom Kerridge, have written to the PM asking him to \"fix\" the system long-term.\n\nThey called for a strategy to help \"end child food poverty\" before the summer holidays.\n\nNo 10 said \"no child will ever go hungry\" because of the Covid pandemic.\n\nThe call for a wide review comes after another row over free school meals during February half-term.\n\nThe government has said food will be provided to children by councils under the Covid Winter Grant Scheme while schools are closed for the holiday.\n\nCouncils and unions say the government should provide food vouchers instead, with the Local Government Association's Councillor Richard Watts telling BBC Radio 4's PM programme the grant had already been allocated for other support.\n\nBut Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"We are down to semantics whether it is the school delivering the meal or whether it is the local authority - fortunately there is quite a lot of different support available.\"\n\nAs well as getting the backing of Rashford - who has led campaigns around child poverty over the course of the pandemic - the letter has been signed by chefs Oliver, Kerridge and Fearnley-Whittingstall, along with actor Dame Emma Thompson and over 40 charities and education leaders.\n\nOrganised by the Food Foundation charity, the letter said it was time to \"step back and review the policy in more depth\".\n\nThey called for an \"urgent comprehensive review into free school meal policy across the UK\" to feed into the government's next Spending Review, saying it should look at:\n\nThe signatories praised the Department for Education's \"swift response\" to reports earlier this week of inadequate food parcels sent to families, saying the \"robustness of the message from you and the secretary of state on this issue was very welcome\".\n\nBut, they added that \"following the series of problems which have arisen over school food vouchers, holiday provision and food parcels since the start of the pandemic\", now was the time for a review.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Tom Kerridge: There has to be a solution to free school meals\n\nAnna Taylor, executive director of the Food Foundation charity, said the last few months had seen \"crisis after crisis with the provision of free school meals\".\n\n\"The result of that is disadvantaged children have often paid the price,\" she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.\n\n\"Our view is that really unless we do a root and branch review these problems are going to still keep appearing.\"\n\nChef Fearnley-Whittingstall also called for a more consistent, long-term response to the issue of food poverty.\n\n\"We need to get out of this fire-fighting, highly reactive series of actions by the government,\" he told the same programme.\n\nThe signatories want a review to be published and debated in Parliament before the 2021 summer holidays.\n\n\"We are ready and willing to support your government in whatever way we can to make this review a reality and to help develop a set of recommendations that everyone can support,\" the letter said.\n\n\"School food is essential in supporting the health and learning of our most disadvantaged children.\n\n\"Now, at a time when children have missed months of in-school learning and the pandemic has reminded us of the importance of our health, this is a vital next step.\"\n\nAnti-poverty campaigner and food writer Jack Monroe welcomed the letter to the PM, but told the BBC: \"We need to be feeding children right now.\"\n\nShe added: \"While it is great to be looking longer term... having an underpinning strategy that means that children aren't put into poverty in the first place, we need to also immediately be putting resources in to ensure people aren't going hungry, today, tonight, next week and in the February half-term.\n\n\"This isn't a rhetorical thing. It isn't a dinner party discussion. We need to be doing this now.\"\n\nA Downing Street spokesperson said: \"It is great that celebrities and groups across society see the importance of school food. The PM thanks Marcus Rashford for his letter and will reply soon.\n\n\"School food is essential in supporting the health and learning of the most disadvantaged pupils. The prime minister has been clear that no child will ever go hungry as a result of the pandemic\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nRichard Leonard has resigned as Scottish Labour leader, saying it is in the best interests of the party for him to stand down.\n\nMr Leonard said he believed speculation about his leadership had become a \"distraction\".\n\nAnd he said he would be stepping down with immediate effect.\n\nHis resignation comes just months ahead of the Scottish Parliament election, which is scheduled to be held in May.\n\nMr Leonard had been leader of the party for three years after succeeding Kezia Dugdale.\n\nThe former union official had faced open calls to quit from some of his own MSPs last year amid concerns that his leadership style could damage the party in the forthcoming Scottish Parliament election.\n\nPolls have suggested that many Scottish Labour supporters struggle to recognise him, and he is closely associated with former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.\n\nScottish Labour had dominated politics in Scotland for decades, but is currently the third largest party at Holyrood behind the SNP and Conservatives.\n\nAnd Mr Leonard's critics had questioned whether he was capable of turning the party's fortunes around.\n\nMr Leonard was seen as a close ally of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn\n\nIn a statement, Mr Leonard said the decision to resign had not been easy - but he felt it was the right one for him and his party.\n\nHe said: \"I have thought long and hard over the Christmas period about what this crisis means, and the approach Scottish Labour takes to help tackle it.\n\n\"I have also considered what the speculation about my leadership does to our ability to get Labour's message across. This has become a distraction.\n\n\"I have come to the conclusion it is in the best interests of the party that I step aside as leader of Scottish Labour with immediate effect.\"\n\nHe also insisted that Scotland now needs a Labour government more than ever, and accused both the Scottish and UK governments of mishandling the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nMr Leonard added: \"While I step down from the leadership today, the work goes on - and I will play my constructive part as an MSP in winning support for Labour's vision of a better future in a democratic economy and a socialist society.\"\n\nHis decision leaves Scottish Labour looking for its fifth leader since the independence referendum in 2014 - with Johann Lamont, Jim Murphy and Kezia Dugdale all having held the job since then.\n\nA Procedures Committee, to oversee the election of Mr Leonard's successor, has been formed and will have its first meeting on Friday.\n\nMeanwhile, Labour's Scottish Executive Committee will also meet in the coming days to agree a timetable for the process.\n\nMSP Jackie Baillie, who was Scottish Labour's deputy leader, has taken charge of the party on an interim basis.\n\nThis sudden resignation four months from the Holyrood elections seems to have taken Scottish Labour by surprise.\n\nMSPs I've spoken to said they did not see it coming.\n\nThere have been times when Richard Leonard has been under severe pressure from some in his party to stand down.\n\nWhen several MSPs publicly called for him to quit because the party had gone backwards at successive elections on his watch, he stood firm.\n\nHis critics seemed to have accepted that he would lead them and a divided party into the Holyrood election.\n\nThat has now changed and interim leader Jackie Baillie has to quickly organise a contest to replace him.\n\nIt's a contest in which Anas Sarwar, if he stands, would be an obvious frontrunner - even although he lost last time to Mr Leonard, who was seen as much closer to the then UK party leader, Jeremy Corbyn.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Mr Leonard should be \"very proud\" of his achievements as leader of the party in Scotland.\n\nSir Keir added: \"I would like to thank Richard for his service to our party and his unwavering commitment to the values he believes in.\n\n\"Richard has led Scottish Labour through one of the most challenging and difficult periods in our country's history, including a general election and the pandemic.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Neil Findlay MSP This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMr Leonard had been due to face a confidence vote at the party's ruling Executive Committee last September - but the motion was withdrawn at the last minute.\n\nIt came after four Scottish Labour MSPs called for him to go, warning that the party faced \"catastrophe\" at the ballot box under his leadership.\n\nThey pointed to the party's dismal performance in previous elections under Mr Leonard.\n\nScottish Labour finished fifth in the European election in May 2019, and then lost all but one of its MPs in the general election in December of the same year.\n\nMr Leonard insisted at the time that he intended to lead the party into this year's Holyrood election, and accused his opponents of waging \"internal war\" against him.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who faced Mr Leonard in her weekly question session in the Scottish Parliament, tweeted that she had \"always liked Richard Leonard\" despite their political difference.\n\nShe added: \"He is a decent guy and I wish him well for the future.\"\n\nRuth Davidson, who quit as leader of the Scottish Tories in 2019 before returning to lead the party at Holyrood, said she had always found Mr Leonard to be a \"thoroughly decent man and a committed campaigner.\"\n\nAnas Sarwar, who was defeated by Mr Leonard in the leadership contest in 2017 and is seen as one of the favourites to replace him, said he was sure Mr Leonard would \"continue to fight for a fairer, more just and more equal society today, tomorrow and long into the future.\"\n\nBut Labour MSP Neil Findlay, an outspoken supporter of Mr Leonard, took aim at those who had sought to oust him last year - describing them as \"flinching cowards\" and \"sneering traitors\".", "A rejuvenated Northumberland Line will help connect local communities to Newcastle city centre, say supporters\n\nTwo railway lines, closed to passengers since the 1960s, are to get almost £800m funding from the government.\n\nEast West Rail, which will eventually connect Oxford and Cambridge, will get £760m to open new parts of the line.\n\nThe Northumberland Line, which still carries freight, will get £34m for initial work aimed at reintroducing passenger services.\n\nReopening closed lines like these would help connect \"left-behind\" communities, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said.\n\n\"Restoring railways helps put communities back on the map and this investment forms part of our nationwide effort to build back vital connections and unlock access to jobs, education and housing,\" he said.\n\nThese investments would return these routes \"to their former glory\" and was part of the government's \"levelling up\" agenda, Mr Shapps added.\n\nDiesel engines will initially run on the lines, but Mr Shapps said he hoped more environmentally friendly trains, for example powered by hydrogen or new battery technology, would replace them in the future.\n\nWhen asked by the BBC why the lines wouldn't be electrified, he said these lines might potentially bypass the overhead wire technology altogether.\n\n\"We're building it in such a way that we can use, probably, the very latest technology, potentially, in the future,\" he said.\n\n\"The most important thing is the infrastructure,\" he said. \"It's about building the stations, things you need to do no matter what kind of train you're going to run on there, if it's going to take passengers.\"\n\nBut Labour MP Daniel Zeichner, who represents Cambridge, said: \"Every rail expert will tell you it will cost more later to electrify a line.\"\n\n\"In a time of climate emergency, we really shouldn't be building railway lines for diesel, it's got to be electric.\"\n\nThe line connecting Oxford and Cambridge would serve new housing developments, he said, and rail was \"the right way to get people in and out of a city like Cambridge\".\n\n\"It's very important for the UK economy, but it's got to be done in an environmentally sustainable way,\" he said. \"It seems crazy to be building new railways which aren't electrified in the first place, and I really hope the government will reconsider.\"\n\nThe East West Rail investment will rebuild a train line between Bicester and Bletchley which was closed in 1968.\n\nThe project is being delivered by a publicly-owned body called the East West Company.\n\nThe first phase of East West Rail, which was completed in 2016, connected Oxford and Bicester.\n\nBut at the moment, rail passengers wishing to go from Oxford to Bletchley have to take a detour via Coventry.\n\nThe aim is to get trains running between Oxford and Bletchley by 2025, with new stations at Winslow and Bletchley.\n\nThe Department for Transport said the works will create 1,500 jobs, and have a wider economic benefit for the area.\n\nThe eventual aim of the project, which the government expects to be completed by the end of the decade, is to connect Oxford and Cambridge by rail via Bedford, taking in Milton Keynes and Aylesbury on branches.\n\nThe Northumberland Line was closed to passengers in 1964 as part of a rationalisation of the railway network known as the Beeching cuts.\n\nHenri Murison, director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said the Northumberland Line was \"a really critical piece of local infrastructure\" that would help bring people in south east Northumberland and north Tyneside closer to Newcastle city centre, and closer to well-paid jobs.\n\nPassengers would be able to take the train between Ashington and Newcastle\n\n\"Having better connectivity will help attract businesses to that area, and it will help to deliver genuine levelling-up,\" he said.\n\nThe new £34m investment, which aims to reopen the line between Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Ashington, will include funds for preparatory works and land acquisition.\n\nThere are plans for new stations at at Ashington, Bedlington, Blyth, Bebside, Newsham, Seaton Delaval, and Northumberland Park, in North Tyneside, as well as upgrades to the track and changes to level crossings where new bridges or underpasses were needed, the Department for Transport said.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Supporters of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny protest against his arrest across Russia\n\nRussian police have detained more than 3,000 people in a crackdown on protests in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, monitors say.\n\nTens of thousands of people defied a heavy police presence to join some of the largest rallies against President Vladimir Putin in years.\n\nIn Moscow, riot police were seen beating and dragging away protesters.\n\nMr Navalny, President Putin's most high-profile critic, called for protests after his arrest last Sunday.\n\nHe was detained after he flew back to Moscow from Berlin, where he had been recovering from a near-fatal nerve agent attack in Russia last August.\n\nOn his return, he was immediately taken into custody and found guilty of violating parole conditions. He says it is a trumped-up case designed to silence him.\n\nOVD Info, an independent NGO that monitors rallies, said about 3,100 people had been detained, more than 1,200 of them in Moscow alone. The Kremlin has not commented.\n\nThe unauthorised demonstrations were held in about 100 cities and towns from Russia's Far East and Siberia to Moscow and St Petersburg. Protesters ranged from teenage students to elderly people who demanded Mr Navalny's release.\n\nAt least 40,000 people joined a rally in central Moscow, Reuters news agency estimated. But Russia's interior ministry put the number of protesters at 4,000.\n\nObservers say the scale of the demonstrations across the country was unprecedented while the protest in the capital was the largest in almost a decade.\n\nRiot police used batons against protesters in Moscow\n\nIn the city's Pushkin square, some protesters chanted \"Freedom to Navalny\" and \"Putin go away!\" One woman told the BBC she had decided to join the demonstration because \"Russia has been turned into a prison camp\".\n\nSergei Radchenko, a 53-year-old protester in Moscow, told Reuters: \"I'm tired of being afraid. I haven't just turned up for myself and Navalny, but for my son because there is no future in this country.\"\n\nLyubov Sobol, a prominent aide of Mr Navalny who had already been fined for urging Russians to join the protests, tweeted a video of police roughly pulling her away from an interview with reporters.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Соболь Любовь This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMr Navalny's wife, Yulia, was briefly held at the rally. She posted an image on her Instagram account with the caption: \"Apologies for the poor quality. Very bad light in the police van.\"\n\nSome protesters marched on the high-security prison where Mr Navalny is being held, and many were arrested.\n\nMeanwhile, one independent news source, Sota, said at least 3,000 people had joined a demonstration in the city of Vladivostok, but local authorities there put the figure at 500.\n\nAFP footage showed riot police running into a crowd, and beating some of the protesters with batons.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police used batons to break up protests in Vladivostok\n\nIn the Siberian city of Yakutsk, attendees at a small protest saw temperatures dip as low as -50C (-58F).\n\nPrior to the rallies, Russian authorities had promised a tough crackdown. Several of Mr Navalny's close aides, including his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh, were arrested earlier in the week.\n\nHis supporters called for more protests next weekend.\n\nThere were reports of disruption to mobile phone and internet coverage on Saturday, though it is not known if this was related to the protests.\n\nThe social media app TikTok had been flooded with videos promoting the demonstrations and sharing viral messages about Mr Navalny.\n\nIn response, Russia's official media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, demanded that TikTok take down any information \"encouraging minors to act illegally\", threatening large fines. The education ministry had told parents not to allow their children to attend any demonstrations.\n\nProtesters ignored extreme cold and threats of arrest in Moscow and other cities and towns\n\nIn a push to gain support ahead of the protests, Mr Navalny's team released a video about a luxury Black Sea resort that they allege belongs to President Putin - an accusation denied by the Kremlin. The video has been watched by more than 65 million people.\n\nThe UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, condemned the \"use of violence against peaceful protesters and journalists\" on Saturday, calling on the authorities to release those detained during peaceful demonstrations.\n\nThe US state department condemned what it called \"harsh tactics\" used against protesters and journalists, saying: \"We call on Russian authorities to release all those detained for exercising their universal rights and for the immediate and unconditional release of Aleksey Navalny\".\n\nThe EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said the bloc's foreign ministers would discuss the Russian crackdown on Monday. \"I deplore widespread detentions, disproportionate use of force, cutting down internet and phone connections.\"", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic. We'll have another update for you on Sunday morning.\n\nSenior doctors have asked England's chief medical officer to halve the current 12-week gap between the first and second doses of the Pfizer-Biontech Covid-19 vaccine. The wait was originally three weeks but was then extended, a decision which Prof Chris Whitty said would double the number of people receiving jabs. But, in a letter seen by the BBC, the British Medical Association said the delay was \"difficult to justify\". It comes after the prime minister revealed the UK variant of Covid-19 may be more deadly.\n\nEfforts to distribute the jab in the European Union have faced another setback after UK drug-maker AstraZeneca warned of supply issues. Vaccinations have already been halted in some parts of Europe due to a cut in deliveries of the Pfizer vaccine. Cases in many European countries are surging. Germany has reached 50,000 Covid deaths and Spain has seen record infections in recent weeks.\n\nElizabeth Kerr and Simon O'Brien were engaged to be married when they were taken to hospital in the same ambulance with Covid-19. As his condition worsened, staff at Milton Keynes University Hospital rallied to arrange a wedding for them - and they were able to marry moments before he was sedated and put on a ventilator. Mrs Kerr said she was told it could be their only chance.\"Those are words I never, ever want to hear again,\" she said.\n\nElizabeth Kerr and Simon O'Brien were married moments before he was put on a mechanical ventilator\n\nOn 23 January last year, the Chinese authorities severed transport links out of Wuhan and confined the city's population to their homes. Wuhan has long since recovered from the world's first outbreak of Covid-19. Its streets are bustling again. A year on, John Sudworth explores how it is now being remembered not as a disaster but as a victory, and with an insistence that the virus came from somewhere - anywhere - else.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BBC's Robin Brant visits the Wuhan market where Covid-19 was first traced\n\nMillions of us are less physically active than we were before Covid-19. For those working from home, days on end can be spent hunched over a laptop without ever leaving the house. A survey of people working remotely, by Opinium for the charity Versus Arthritis, found 81% of respondents were experiencing some back, neck or shoulder pain. Here are some tips that could help.\n\nYou can find more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nWondering when you might be able to get a vaccine? Health reporter Philippa Roxby takes you through what you need to know.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "Questions should be asked if politicians who drank on Welsh Parliament premises during a pub alcohol ban can stand for re-election, an ex-standards official has said.\n\nSenedd Tory leader Paul Davies, Darren Millar and Labour's Alun Davies have apologised - they are not thought to have broken the rules, but the two Tories admitted it would not be seen as in their spirit.\n\nA fourth Senedd Member Nick Ramsay has denied being part of the gathering.", "Amy says her flat isn't worth anything until it is made safe\n\nThe government's fund to pay for the removal of dangerous cladding is woefully inadequate, oversubscribed and taking too long to make buildings safe, campaigners say.\n\nMore than three and a half years since the Grenfell Tower fire which killed 72 people, an estimated 700,000 people are still living in high-rise blocks with flammable cladding.\n\nThe £1.6bn Building Safety Programme was set up in 2019. Concerns have emerged about the contract that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government requires applicants to the fund, usually managing agents or building owners, to sign.\n\nA clause in the contract, seen by the BBC, indicates applicants will be financially liable for any repair work not covered by the fund.\n\nThe BBC has learnt that some managing agents are refusing to sign the document, further delaying the repair work, and have written to the government asking ministers to clarify the position.\n\nChristian Hansen, a solicitor at Bindmans LLP specialising in housing law and fire safety claims, said the contract showed that \"there's going to be a significant shortfall between the costs of the [repair] works that are required and the funding provided under the scheme\".\n\n\"Someone is going to need to pick up the bill and pay the difference. This contract makes clear it's going to be the leaseholders and for many, this could be tens of thousands of pounds, potentially ruinous costs,\" he warned.\n\nMr Hansen said that leaseholders wanted the focus of government action \"to be on the manufacturers of the defective materials and construction companies who built these buildings\".\n\n\"At the moment, they are the ones profiting from putting people's lives at risk.\"\n\n\"It is absolutely terrifying knowing that you are stuck here,\" says Amy\n\nFirst-time buyer Amy Cottenden, who is 28, bought a one-bed flat in Metis Tower in the centre of Sheffield for £85,000 in 2017.\n\nInspections of the 14-storey building in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy revealed it had the same type of flammable ACM cladding and other safety faults.\n\nWork to remove the cladding started last month, but Ms Cottenden, who is a frontline NHS health worker, is frustrated at what she describes as a lack of progress.\n\n\"The pace of work is extremely slow. So far, they've put scaffolding up and removed three panels. They have told us it's going to take between 12 and 24 months just to take the cladding off,\" she said.\n\n\"It is absolutely terrifying knowing that you are stuck here. With lockdown, they are saying not to go out, but you are in a building where all you want to do is not be in it. You can't leave. You can't sell. My flat isn't worth anything until it is made safe.\"\n\nWhile the government's Building Safety Fund is paying for the Grenfell-style cladding to be removed, the building has other fire safety faults, including missing fire breaks, that aren't covered by the scheme.\n\nIt could cost up to £6m to fix. Flat owners fear they may face huge bills of up to £50,000 each.\n\n\"We can't pay it and we shouldn't have to pay it. It is not our fault. We could all go bankrupt because of this,\" Ms Cottenden said.\n\nA spokesperson for Rendall & Rittner, the company which manages Metis Tower, said government funding to remove ACM cladding had been approved totalling £6.3m.\n\nHowever, an application to the same fund to pay for the removal of other types of unsafe cladding was rejected and the company has appealed against that decision.\n\nThe company added: \"We understand and sympathise with residents and owners about the uncertainty that this situation is causing and will do all we can to assist.\"\n\nWhat started as a cladding scandal has now become a much wider building safety crisis, exposing decades of regulatory failure.\n\nSafety inspections have revealed that many buildings have other serious faults, including missing fire breaks, flammable balconies and defective insulation. None of that is covered by the government's Building Safety Fund.\n\nDr Nigel Glen, the chief executive of ARMA, the trade association for residential leasehold management, said the additional costs that leaseholders were currently facing for non-cladding-related issues remained a huge concern.\n\n\"In the longer term, the draining of reserve funds will also mean that in the years to come, any major works that were being saved up for, such as a new roof or lift repairs, will have to be funded anew by the leaseholders,\" he added.\n\nA spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said that despite the pandemic, significant progress had been made to remove dangerous cladding, but \"building safety remains the responsibility of the building owner and we expect them to ensure any necessary work is carried out safely and effectively\".\n\n\"All applicants to the Building Safety Fund are told the amount of funding they have been awarded before being asked to sign contracts - this is clearly explained in the guidance,\" the spokesperson added.", "Scientists say signs a new coronavirus variant is more deadly than the earlier version should not be a \"game changer\" in the UK's response to the pandemic.\n\nBoris Johnson has said there is \"some evidence\" the variant may be associated with \"a higher degree of mortality\".\n\nBut the co-author of the study the PM was referring to said the variant's deadliness remained an \"open question\".\n\nAnother adviser said he was surprised Mr Johnson had shared the findings when the data was \"not particularly strong\".\n\nA third top medic said it was \"too early\" to be \"absolutely clear\".\n\nAt a Downing Street coronavirus news conference on Friday, the prime minister said: \"In addition to spreading more quickly, it also now appears that there is some evidence that the new variant - the variant that was first identified in London and the South East - may be associated with a higher degree of mortality.\"\n\nSpeaking alongside the PM, the government's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said there was \"a lot of uncertainty around these numbers\" but that early evidence suggested the variant could be about 30% more deadly.\n\nFor example, Sir Patrick said if 1,000 men in their 60s were infected with the old variant, roughly 10 of them would be expected to die - but this rises to about 13 with the new variant.\n\nThe announcement followed a briefing by scientists on the government's New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) which concluded there was a \"realistic possibility\" that the variant was associated with an increased risk of death.\n\nBut one of the briefing's co-authors, Prof Graham Medley, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"The question about whether it is more dangerous in terms of mortality I think is still open.\"\n\n\"In terms of making the situation worse it is not a game changer. It is a very bad thing that is slightly worse,\" added Prof Medley, who is a professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.\n\nAnother 1,348 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test were reported in the UK on Saturday, in addition to 33,552 new infections, according to the government's coronavirus dashboard.\n\nThere is huge uncertainty in the evidence on how lethal the variant is.\n\nThe scientific experts that reviewed the data used a precise phrase saying it was a \"realistic possibility\" the new variant is more deadly.\n\nThat means there's a roughly 50-50 chance it will turn out to be true.\n\nWith time, and sadly more deaths, the picture will become clearer.\n\nWhile people debate the uncertainties though, we already know this variant has the ability to kill more people than the old ones.\n\nA virus that spreads faster (this one is 30-70% faster) will infect more people, more quickly, putting a greater strain on hospitals and leading to a sharper spike in deaths.\n\nIt is why viruses becoming more transmissible can be a bigger problem than ones becoming more deadly.\n\nNervtag's chairman Prof Peter Horby defended the government's \"transparency\" in making the announcement.\n\n\"Scientists are looking at the possibility that there is increased severity... and after a week of looking at the data we came to the conclusion that it was a realistic possibility,\" he said.\n\n\"We need to be transparent about that. If we were not telling people about this we would be accused of covering it up.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Patrick Vallance: \"There is evidence that there's an increased risk for those who have the new variant\"\n\nBut Dr Mike Tildesley, a member of Sage subgroup the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M), agreed it was too early to draw \"strong conclusions\" as the suggested increased mortality rates were based on \"a relatively small amount of data\".\n\nHe told BBC Breakfast he was \"actually quite surprised\" Mr Johnson had made the early findings public rather than monitoring the data \"for a week or two more\".\n\n\"I just worry that where we report things pre-emptively where the data are not really particularly strong,\" Dr Tildesley added.\n\nPublic Health England medical director Dr Yvonne Doyle also said it was not \"absolutely clear\" the new variant was more deadly than the original.\n\n\"There is some evidence, but it is very early evidence. It is small numbers of cases and it is far too early to say,\" she told the Today programme.\n\nMeanwhile, senior doctors are calling on England's chief medical officer to cut the gap between the first and second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine.\n\nThe British Medical Association told Prof Chris Whitty an extension to the maximum gap between jab from three weeks to 12 weeks, to get the first dose to more people, was \"difficult to justify\".", "In 2002 Julienne created a motor stunt show that ran for many years at Disney theme parks in Paris and Florida. Image caption: In 2002 Julienne created a motor stunt show that ran for many years at Disney theme parks in Paris and Florida.\n\nRémy Julienne, one of the world's best-known stuntmen, has died in France with coronavirus, aged 90.\n\nOver a 50-year career, Julienne devised the crashes, crunches and collisions witnessed in more than 1,400 films.\n\nHe also starred in many of them, albeit anonymously.\n\nThe legendary cascadeur (stunt performer) appeared as a body double for a host of stars, including Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Charles Bronson and Jean-Paul Belmondo.\n\nIn wig and appropriate clothing, he also took on the form of Sophia Loren, Carole Bouquet and Gina Lollobrigida.\n\nAmong his most famous works are the chase scenes in 1969's The Italian Job, in which a fleet of Mini-Coopers in Turin cross a river, dive into the metro and jump from the roof of the Fiat factory.\n\nHe also worked on six Bond films, notably going behind the wheel of a battered yellow Citroën 2CV in For Your Eyes Only.\n\nA life-long lover of motorbikes and anything driven at speed, Julienne specialised in spectacular destruction. But he was committed to the maximum elimination of risk and calculated his stunts with extreme precision.\n\n\"What is beautiful about the job is that you can never be 100% certain,\" he said. \"If you could, then frankly it wouldn't be interesting.", "Keon Lincoln died after being subjected to \"inconceivable violence\"\n\nA second boy has been arrested on suspicion of murdering a 15-year-old who was attacked by a group of youths.\n\nKeon Lincoln was \"set upon\" at about 15:30 GMT on Thursday on Linwood Road in Handsworth, Birmingham, and died later in hospital, police said.\n\nA 14-year-old boy was arrested at a Birmingham address on Friday and is in custody, said West Midlands Police.\n\nAnother 14-year-old, arrested earlier on Friday, also remains in custody.\n\nDet Ch Insp Alastair Orencas, who is leading a murder inquiry, said Keon died \"in the most violent of circumstances\".\n\nThe latest arrest was \"another step forward and Keon's family have been fully updated with this latest development,\" he said.\n\n\"This is a challenging investigation given the number of offenders we believe were involved, but I have a dedicated team of officers working 24/7 to identify those involved and we are making swift progress.\"\n\nKeon was attacked on Linwood Road, a residential street in the Handsworth area of Birmingham\n\nThe attackers fled the scene in a car which crashed into a house a short distance away. Police have seized the vehicle.\n\nCordons placed at the scene in Linwood Road and Wheeler Street, where the car was abandoned, have now been lifted, said the West Midlands force.\n\nPolice confirmed Keon, who lived locally, was attacked with weapons but did not specify which sort.\n\nDetectives say they are unable to say how he died before a post-mortem examination takes place.\n\nAnyone who could identify the attackers has been urged to contact the force.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police released body-worn camera footage of people streaming from the premises\n\nTwo officers were injured as they broke up an \"incredibly selfish\" party, involving about 200 people, in one of London's most expensive neighbourhoods.\n\nOfficers investigated an address on Beauchamp Place, Kensington, at about 03.30 GMT on 17 January, following reports of a mass gathering.\n\nAttendees became hostile and pushed through to avoid being fined, injuring two officers, police said.\n\nThe owner has previously been issued with a £1,000 fine, police said.\n\nPolice discovered about 200 guests at a party on Beauchamp Place, Kensington\n\nSupt Michael Walsh said: \"Attending or organising such parties during this critical period is an incredibly selfish decision to make.\n\n\"While the majority of breaches have been resolved without incident, it deeply saddens me that some individuals have chosen to assault police who are simply doing their part in the collective battle against this deadly virus.\"\n\nPolice said the event was one of a string of late-night parties uncovered in Kensington over the last month.\n\nOn 20 December, police shut down an illegal gathering at a commercial property on Montpelier Street. The property has since been closed.\n\nAn owner of a venue on Harrow Road is facing a £10,000 fine after police found more than 30 socialising during a raid on 16 January.\n\nOn Thursday, police also broke up a wedding party in north London.\n\nThe Met Police originally claimed about 400 guests were at the gathering, but then on Friday said 150 people were present at the Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The number of coronavirus patients on mechanical ventilation in the UK has passed 4,000 for the first time in the pandemic.\n\nA total of 4,076 Covid patients were in ventilator beds as of Friday, according to government data.\n\nThat is higher than during the first wave, when the peak was 3,301 on 12 April.\n\nIt comes as another 1,348 deaths and 33,552 new infections were reported on Saturday.\n\nThe UK's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, told a Downing Street news briefing on Friday: \"The death rate's awful and it's going to stay, I'm afraid, high for a little while before it starts coming down.\"\n\nMeanwhile, new figures show that a record number of seriously-ill Covid patients are being transferred from over-stretched hospitals because of a lack of bed space.\n\nAbout 1 in 10 patients admitted to intensive care are being sent to a different site, according to the body which audits critical care services.\n\nIn a series of reports in the past week, the BBC's Clive Myrie has been to a mortuary and the Royal London Hospital, where 12 out of 15 floors are occupied by Covid patients and staff are struggling to cope.\n\nMartin Freeborn's wife Helen, 64, died with Covid-19 at the hospital shortly before he spoke to the BBC.\n\nMr Freeborn urged people to \"be over-careful\" in taking precautions to stay safe from the virus because \"you don't want this to happen\".\n\n\"Nobody wants to go through this... Don't end up like us, please,\" he added.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Martin Freeborn's wife, Helen, died from Covid at the Royal London Hospital: 'Don't end up like us, please'\n\nThe number of people in mechanical ventilation beds has climbed every day since 18 December when it was 1,364 and now stands at 4,076.\n\nIt is one of the key figures the government considers when deciding its policy on when to ease coronavirus lockdown restrictions.\n\nWhen the pandemic first struck the UK, the government saw what had happened in hospitals in China and Italy and prioritised the provision of ventilators in British hospitals.\n\nIt set about buying as many ventilators as possible, and encouraged British manufacturers to design the machines to build stocks to cope with the worst-case Covid scenario. In September last year, a report found the NHS now had 30,000 ventilators available - about one for every 2,200 people in the UK.\n\nPeople in hospital are also being treated differently from the early days of the pandemic - which may explain why figures suggest slightly more people go on to recover after being on ventilation than back in March, April and May.\n\nA number of drugs are being tested as possible treatments for people with the disease, the BBC's health and science correspondent James Gallagher has said.\n\nThey include the steroid dexamethasone, which has been shown to reduce the risk of death by a third for ventilated patients and by a fifth for those on oxygen. Encouraging results have also been reported from two anti-inflammatory medications, tocilizumab and sarilumab.\n\nDr Ami Jones, intensive care consultant at Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, in Wales, said there had been \"carnage\" for the \"last few weeks\".\n\nSpeaking whilst on shift, she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"We're maybe at 150% capacity and I know London are much worse than that.\n\n\"We've a steady stream of fit, young patients requiring critical care and sadly we're losing some of those patients.\n\n\"We lost a patient overnight and I've replaced them with a patient of similar age.\n\n\"It's heartbreaking - and it's been going on for weeks and weeks and we haven't seen any kind of stop yet.\"\n\nDr Jones said the average Covid patient stays in hospital between two to four weeks \"and it really puts them through it\".\n\nShe added: \"You really want people who are going to be able to survive that three or four weeks and actually come out the other end and make a good recovery.\n\n\"We're not stopping people having care but we're giving it to the people we feel have the best chance of getting through what is a horrific situation we're going to put them through.\"\n\nDr Jones said nurses are \"broken\", both physically, from months of long shifts in personal protective equipment (PPE), and emotionally - partly due to the impact of the virus on them, their families and the community.\n\nDr Rupert Pearse, consultant in intensive care medicine at a London hospital, speaking on behalf of the Intensive Care Society, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that a \"huge number\" of patients were still attending hospital.\n\nHe said: \"Whilst we know the infection rate has probably now peaked, and we can be hopeful to soon be sure we've hit a hospital admissions peak, admissions to ICU [the intensive care unit] usually lag 48 hours behind that.\n\n\"So we're still very very worried that we're being pushed right up to the wire in terms of the resources we're able to deliver for patient care.\"\n\nDr Pearse added that there were three or four times more critical care beds in some hospitals than they would usually have.\n\nHe said: \"I can remember a time when it would take years for an intensive care unit to negotiate one extra bed on a complement of 14 or 15 beds.\n\n\"We, within a few weeks, have massively increased the number of beds and finding the staff - most importantly of all - to deliver that has been a huge logistical exercise.\"\n\nReacting to the ventilation figures, Dr Charlotte Hopkins, deputy chief medical officer for Barts Health NHS trust in east London, said on Twitter there had been a \"fast-paced increase\" since 18 December, and that more than a third of the 4,076 ventilated patients were in London.\n\nIt comes as some scientists said that signs a new Covid variant is more deadly than the earlier version should not be a \"game changer\" in the UK's response to the pandemic.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said on Friday that there was \"some evidence\" the variant that emerged in the UK may be associated with \"a higher degree of mortality\".\n\nBut Prof Graham Medley, the co-author of the study the PM was referring to, said the variant's deadliness remained an \"open\" question.\n\nDr Mike Tildesley, a member of Sage subgroup the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M), said he was \"surprised\" Mr Johnson had shared the findings when the data was \"not particularly strong\".\n\nPublic Health England medical director Dr Yvonne Doyle said it was \"too early\" to be \"absolutely clear\".\n\n\"There is some evidence, but it is very early evidence. It is small numbers of cases and it is far too early to say,\" she told the Today programme.\n\nUp to and including 22 January, 5,861,351 people have now had their first Covid jab and 468,617 have had their second dose.\n\nSenior doctors are calling on England's chief medical officer to cut the gap between the first and second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine.\n\nThe British Medical Association told Prof Chris Whitty an extension to the maximum gap between jab from three weeks to 12 weeks, to get the first dose to more people, was \"difficult to justify\".\n\nThe UK's four chief medical officers have previously defended the delay to the second jab in a letter to medical staff, saying: \"unvaccinated people are far more likely to end up severely ill, hospitalised [or] in some cases dying\".", "Even while posted at the US Capitol, many troops have been seen sleeping on the floor\n\nUS President Joe Biden has apologised after some members of the National Guard stationed at the Capitol were pictured sleeping in a car park.\n\nMore than 25,000 troops were deployed to Washington DC for his inauguration after violence earlier this month.\n\nImages spread on Thursday showing them forced to rest in a nearby parking garage after lawmakers returned.\n\nThe conditions sparked anger among politicians, and some state governors recalled troops over the controversy.\n\nMr Biden called the chief of the National Guard Bureau on Friday to apologise and ask what could be done, according to US media reports.\n\nFirst Lady Jill Biden also visited some of the troops to thank them personally, bringing biscuits from the White House as a gift.\n\n\"I just wanted to come today to say thank you to all of you for keeping me and my family safe,\" she said.\n\nThe photographs showing hundreds of troops in a parking garage went viral on Thursday and sparked outrage, including from members of Congress.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Tim Scott This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMany voiced concerns about the conditions, with guardsmen exposed to car fumes and without proper access to facilities like toilets after having been on alert for days.\n\nImages of the cramped conditions also sparked fears about the spread of coronavirus.\n\nA US official, speaking anonymously to Reuters news agency, said on Friday that between 100 and 200 of those deployed had tested positive for Covid-19. The figure - which would represent a small proportion of the more than 25,000 deployed, has not been publicly confirmed.\n\nChuck Schumer, a Democrat and the new Senate majority leader, said that the move was \"an outrage\" and pledged it \"will never happen again\".\n\nRon DeSantis, Florida's governor, was among those who said he had ordered guards from his state to return home following the controversy.\n\n\"This is a half-cocked mission at this point and the appropriate thing is to bring them home,\" he told Fox News on Friday.\n\nThe Senate Rules Committee is also investigating the issue, Senator Roy Blunt told Politico.\n\nThere are conflicting reports about why the troops were moved from the Capitol.\n\nA National Guard spokesman told US media they were moved on Thursday afternoon at the request of the Capitol Police because of \"increased foot traffic\" as Congress came back into session.\n\nThe acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman, later said her agency \"did not instruct the National Guard to vacate the Capitol Building facilities\", while two officers contradicted her statement in comments to the Associated Press news agency.\n\nThe decision was reversed later on Thursday, when the troops were allowed to return to the Capitol.\n\nA joint statement from the US National Guard and US Capitol Police on Friday said they had worked together to make sure those in the Capitol Complex had \"appropriate spaces\" to take on-duty breaks.\n\nThey also said off-duty troops were being housed in hotel rooms or other accommodation and thanked members of Congress for their concern.\n\nSome 19,000 guardsmen will return to their home states in the coming days with about 7,000 expected to stay on in Washington, according to the New York Times.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Relatives of older people in Wales called the vaccinations \"poorly organised\"\n\nRural GPs are to run new community vaccination centres after concerns over the speed of the roll-out in Wales.\n\nFrom Saturday, three new vaccination hubs will open to give over-80s and those with mobility issues the jab.\n\nIt comes after some living in rural areas said they had been told to travel miles to get the jab or wait weeks to have their first dose.\n\nHealth Minister Vaughan Gething said it would help immunise hundreds of over-80s this weekend.\n\nThere has been criticism of the speed of the roll-out in Wales, with some telling the BBC elderly and housebound relatives had been told there would be a wait if they could not get to their GP surgery.\n\nA total of 212,317 people have been given their first dose of vaccine in Wales, up to 21 January - just over 6.7% of the population.\n\nThe Welsh Government hopes to have 70% of over-80s immunised by the end of this weekend.\n\nBy 21 January, 30% of the over-80s and 60% of care home residents had been given the first dose.\n\nOn Saturday, the Welsh Government announced doctors surgeries in rural areas would join forces to help administer the jab to the elderly and vulnerable.\n\nThe first of the new community centres, run by clusters of GP practices, are to open on the Llyn Peninsula, in Buckley in Flintshire, and Bridgend.\n\nThey will be able to administer both the Pfizer-BioNTech and the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccines.\n\nUntil now, the Pfizer vaccine could only be administered at special mass-vaccination centres, due to the low temperatures it needs to be stored at.\n\nThe Welsh Government said it hoped 3,000 people would get the vaccine administered at the centres this weekend.\n\nHealth Minister Vaughan Gething said: \"Vaccination is our top priority so I want to thank all the GP practices right across Wales that are working in unison to set up these new community vaccination centres.\n\n\"This enables GPs to use both of the vaccines available to us and will help more people to be vaccinated somewhere that is much closer to home than the large vaccination centres.\n\n\"Every week, our vaccination programme speeds up as more centres are opened and more vaccines are available for the small army of healthcare professionals administering vaccines.\"\n\nIn north Wales, a group of GPs have formed a group to deliver about 1,000 vaccines to elderly and vulnerable people.\n\nDr Eilir Hughes, a GP at Ty Doctor Surgery, Gwynedd, said rural GPs had faced a \"real challenge\" to get the most vulnerable patients vaccinated as soon as possible.\n\nThe surgery is about 50 miles away from the nearest vaccination centre in north-west Wales.\n\nHe said bringing three GP practices together to vaccinate hundreds of patients in two days was a \"Herculean effort\".", "Helen White's lighting business is struggling to absorb a six-fold increase in freight costs.\n\n\"We were paying £1,600 per container in November, this month we've been quoted over £10,000,\" says Helen White.\n\nThe founder of start-up Houseof.com, which imports lighting from China, says the rise in shipping costs means she's making a loss on what she sells.\n\nShe's one of many UK importers facing soaring freight costs amid a global shipping crisis that may last months.\n\nA shortage of empty shipping containers in Asia and bottlenecks at the UK's deep sea ports are behind the problems.\n\nIt was hoped the backlogs could be cleared during the Chinese New Year holiday in February, but instead a coronavirus outbreak in China is adding to the uncertainty facing firms.\n\nIn the UK the difficulties in international shipping have coincided with problems faced by businesses trading with the EU after Brexit.\n\nOne Manchester-based freight forwarder said the logistics industry is facing the most challenging conditions he's seen in the 17 years he's been in the business.\n\nCraig Poole from Cardinal Maritime said during lockdowns, people have been turning to online shopping, and that's causing a surge in demand for goods from China.\n\nFreight forwarder Craig Poole says the logistics industry is facing hugely challenging conditions\n\nBut some companies can't absorb the skyrocketing freight costs that shipping lines are charging. That could lead to higher prices for consumers or businesses having to close.\n\n\"The really unfortunate thing is, the small businesses who can't afford to pay those rates are going to go under as a result,\" Mr Poole said.\n\nHelen White's lighting range is designed in the UK and manufactured in Guangzhou, China.\n\nShe said the six-fold increase in shipping costs is hard to take, especially when getting hold of a container \"is like gold dust\".\n\n\"It's really hard for a small business to absorb those costs. We'll be making a loss on the goods we're selling.\"\n\nLighting seller houseof.com is struggling to import stock from China\n\nAt the other end of the supply chain, Chinese manufacturers and logistics firms say they are equally frustrated.\n\nJohnny Tseng is the owner and director of Hong Kong-based J&B Clothing Company Ltd., which manufactures garments for some of the UK's most popular fashion sites including Boohoo and Pretty Little Thing.\n\nHe's been supplying clothes to British retailers for more than 40 years, but he says his family-run firm won't be able to absorb inflated shipping rates for much longer.\n\n\"To be honest I don't even know how we can survive if we carry on shipping things at this kind of cost.\"\n\nJohnny Tseng says sky-high shipping rates are putting his business at risk.\n\nHe says he's now being quoted $14,000 to ship a container to the UK, when the usual price is $2,500.\n\nThe shortage of empty containers in China and congestion at UK ports caused some of his stock to miss the busy Christmas trading period. Now some customers are holding orders for their Autumn-Winter collections until next year.\n\n\"It's chaos,\" he said. \"We are making a loss. We take it as a loss leader and keep our fingers crossed it will go back to normal after Chinese New Year, but it is a major issue if it persists this way.\"\n\nUsually during the Chinese New Year holiday, factories in China shut down for two weeks. There were hopes the pause in production would give UK ports a chance to clear the backlog of ships waiting to dock, and encourage shipping lines to move more empty containers back to Asia, which is a less profitable journey.\n\nChinese workers usually travel home for the Chinese New Year holiday.\n\nBut rising numbers of coronavirus cases have prompted the Chinese authorities to stagger factory closing dates so that not all workers are travelling to their home regions at the same time. A worsening outbreak could lead to travel restrictions, in which case some factories may not stop production at all.\n\nCraig Poole says some companies have been caught out by factories closing earlier than planned.\n\n\"A lot of businesses that can't get those goods away are delaying orders until after Chinese New Year, so this situation could continue 'til March,\" he said.\n\nPatrick Lee from the Hong Kong-based Unique Logistics International said it could be even longer than that.\n\n\"Middle of the year at the earliest is what we're hearing from end customers in the UK, and also from some of our people in the industry. Some of the carriers as well,\" he said.\n\nMr Lee has called on the shipping lines to add more ships to help ease the backlog of stock orders building up at warehouses across China.\n\n\"They are increasing sailing but can increase a lot more. There are idle ships out there that they can reactivate without too much difficulty,\" he said.\n\nThe disruption could last for several months, according to logistics specialist Patrick Lee\n\nBut a spokeswoman for the World Shipping Council said carriers are using all available capacity.\n\n\"The demand for transportation service far exceeds supply. As in any free market, this puts upward pressure on rates,\" she said.\n\nShipping lines have been trying to drive down demand from British importers by charging a premium for deliveries to the UK, or bypassing the country's ports altogether.\n\nOne shipping line recently offered freight rates of $12,050 for a 40ft container from China to Southampton, but charged just $8,450 for the same container to travel from China to Rotterdam, Hamburg, or Antwerp.\n\nThe UK's largest container port at Felixstowe has been experiencing long delays since October. Congestion has also been a problem at the Port of Southampton, albeit to a lesser extent.\n\nThe bottlenecks were initially caused by a surge in imports as business activity picked up after the first wave of the pandemic. Huge shipments of PPE and the usual Christmas rush added to container volumes and ports struggled to cope.\n\nThe UK's largest container port at Felixstowe has been experiencing bottlenecks for months\n\n\"Most of the carriers just don't want UK cargo because of the issues when the vessels dock, so mainly they're favouring European ports and we are having to truck containers over,\" said freight forwarder Craig Poole.\n\nHe said that adds a cost of up to £2,000 per container, and takes an extra seven to ten days to reach the delivery point in the UK.\n\nFor business-owners like Helen White, the difficulties affecting the shipping industry can't be solved quickly enough.\n\n\"Lots of little start-ups are really hurting,\" she said. \"It has been paired with logistical nightmares across Europe as well. It just feels like logistics is falling apart at the moment. It's hard to see where the resolution is.\"", "Paul Davies had been preparing to lead his party's Senedd election campaign in the coming months\n\nPaul Davies has been something of an understated figure leading the Welsh Conservative group in Cardiff Bay since he won the race to succeed Andrew RT Davies in September 2018.\n\nThe Senedd member for Preseli Pembrokeshire tried to move the party group in the direction of being more sceptical of devolution.\n\nBut a row over drinking on Senedd premises ended his ambitions to be the first Conservative first minister of Wales.\n\nBorn in 1969, Paul Davies grew up in the village of Pontsian in Ceredigion.\n\nHe attended Llandysul Grammar School and Newcastle Emlyn Comprehensive School before working for a bank for 20 years.\n\nMr Davies entered Cardiff Bay politics in 2007 when he was elected to the then National Assembly for Wales. He was appointed deputy leader of the Welsh Conservative group in 2011 before becoming interim leader and then leader in 2018.\n\nPaul Davies backed Boris Johnson in the UK Conservative leadership campaign in 2019\n\nPresented as a safe pair of hands during his leadership campaign he has, at times, almost appeared to have been overshadowed by his predecessor Andrew RT Davies, who sometimes seems to enjoy media appearances more than his leader.\n\nFaced with the potential rise of the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party, Paul Davies attempted to steer the Welsh Tories towards a more devo-sceptic, if not anti-devolution, approach.\n\nHe pledged a future Conservative Welsh Government would not \"tread on Westminster's turf\", and \"respect what is not devolved\" by \"unpicking\" the Welsh Government's international relations department.\n\nThere were also promises to halve the current number of Welsh ministers to seven, freeze civil servant recruitment and not increase the budget of the body which runs the Senedd if he became first minister.\n\nWelsh political structures need a \"dose\" of Dominic Cummings, Paul Davies has said\n\nBut the coronavirus pandemic has, arguably, made it even harder for opposition party leaders in the Senedd to cut through to the wider electorate.\n\nThe crisis has given Labour First Minister Mark Drakeford a much bigger profile, on a Wales and UK stage, making it more difficult for other Welsh party leaders to get onto the news agenda.\n\nLast July, there were raised eyebrows when Paul Davies suggested \"a dose of Dom\" was needed in Wales to \"shake up\" its governance.\n\nThe reference to the prime minister's now departed chief advisor and brutal political operator Dominic Cummings was interesting, given the criticism heaped on Mr Cummings a couple of months earlier for driving his family 260 miles from his London home to Durham during lockdown, and a subsequent 25-mile trip to check his eyesight before a return trip.\n\nBacking Remain at the 2016 referendum on EU membership, Paul Davies aimed to steer a steady course during a fractious period for a Conservative Party dealing with the polarising issue of Brexit.\n\nHe has been loyal to the UK party leader of the day, and often stuck to the Westminster line rather than try to carve an independent stance.\n\nDespite this, Mr Davies had wanted the Tory Senedd group leader to be given the title Welsh Conservative leader.\n\nIt is something the party has never formally agreed to do despite a review of its Welsh structures.", "Up to 500 new prison cells are to be built in women's jails, the Ministry of Justice has announced.\n\nThese will be built in existing women's prisons to increase the number of single cells available and improve conditions.\n\nThey will include in-cell showers, and some will enable women to have overnight visits with their children to prepare for life at home after release.\n\nIn future, older cells could also be shut if the prison population reduces.\n\nThe Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has also pledged almost £2m in funding to 38 charities so their \"vital work in steering women away from crime can continue\".\n\nThis may include addressing mental health problems and drug use, both of which affect around half of women in prison.\n\nPrisons minister Lucy Frazer said: \"This funding boost will allow frontline services to continue the incredible work they do with some of the most vulnerable women in our society to prevent them being drawn into crime.\"\n\nAnnouncing the funding, the government reiterated its promise to cut the number of women in custody and provide effective support to deal with problems which could lead to crime in the first place or reoffending.\n\nBut it admitted there could be a temporary rise of inmates in the near future as the number of investigations and prosecutions is expected to increase amid the hiring of 20,000 more police officers.\n\nIt added that the number of women in custody has fallen by 10% since 2010 and stressed that government investment in community services should see this trend continue in the long-term.\n\nIf the number of women in prison falls longer term, the MoJ says the new modern facilities will allow the Prison Service to close old accommodation.\n\nCampaigners largely welcomed the announcement, but warned the efforts do not go far enough to tackle longstanding problems.\n\nKate Paradine, chief executive of charity Women in Prison, said: \"This pledge and funding are just the start, and a far cry from what is needed in order to provide stability for women who face the sharp end of our society.\"\n\nShe called on the government in its upcoming Budget to safeguard the future of women's centres, which she described as an \"anchor that stop women being swept up into crime\" but warned were \"facing a funding cliff edge in April\".\n\nEmily Evison, policy officer at the Prison Reform Trust, said the plans would need to be backed up by \"action on the ground to prove effective\", adding: \"Instead of planning for a rise (in women prisoners), the government should redouble its efforts to ensure women are not being sent to prison to serve pointless short sentences.\"\n\nAndrew Neilson, director of campaigns at the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: \"If the goal is to reduce the number of women entering the criminal justice system, then today's announcement shows that ministers are looking at the issue down the wrong end of a telescope\", claiming the funding promised was \"dwarfed\" by the cost of the extra prison places.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Teresa Dalling says a river of orange water rushed through the village on Thursday\n\nFlood victims will not be able to return to their homes until their safety can be assured, a council leader has said.\n\nThe Coal Authority has said initial checks suggested water built up in a mine shaft causing a \"blow out\" that flooded properties in Skewen, Neath Port Talbot.\n\nAbout 80 people were evacuated as water rushed through the village on Thursday.\n\nCouncil leader Rob Jones said it was unlikely residents could return Monday.\n\nHe said underground investigations would begin on Saturday and the work could take two to three days.\n\n\"Safety is the paramount concern for us,\" he said.\n\n\"Because we can't guarantee the site safety - that's the reason why people will remain away from their properties until such time as we can give the all clear.\n\n\"We don't know what the water has done underground.\"\n\nThe fire service said on Saturday morning the pumping operation was \"making good progress\".\n\nMr Jones told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast people may be able to return next week but \"did not want to raise hopes\" it will be Monday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nHe said the flooding was \"more than likely\" related to old mine workings with six mines known about in area. He said the industry dated back 300 years.\n\nSkewen resident John Thomas returned home from a funeral with wife Lynne on Thursday to find their house had turned into \"a lake\".\n\nHe said: \"The water was around the level of the bottom of the doors so we couldn't go in, so we just had to stand there and watch this orange-coloured water just piling up and up and up.\n\n\"Other people who were evacuated had the chance to move things upstairs, I didn't have a chance to do that because I couldn't get in to it.\"\n\nAt least 80 people had to leave their homes in the village after flooding\n\nLocal MP Stephen Kinnock said affected residents were staying in \"lots of different places\" across the region.\n\nAnd he praised the \"extraordinary\" generosity of the community and the support of the Salvation Army with donations of food, clothing and toiletries.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Stephen Kinnock This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nNatural Resources Wales (NRW) said officers were continuing to look at how to minimise the risk of pollution to nearby rivers, and investigating any impacts on the River Neath.\n\nThe Coal Authority, which manages the effects of past coal mining, is investigating the incident.\n\nChief executive Lisa Pinney said equipment, due on site on Saturday, would be used to drill into mine workings to \"fully investigate what has happened\".\n\n\"The blow out is likely to have been caused by a blockage underground which has caused water to back up and to break out using the easiest path,\" she said.\n\n\"The excessive rainfall of the past few days and the prolonged rainfall this winter, will have put additional pressure on the system.\n\n\"We know that people will want to get back to their homes and we will continue to progress these works as soon as possible, but public safety has to come first.\"\n\nThere are a number of historical mine workings in Skewen dating back beyond 1850.\n\nOn Saturday, Mr Jones said water was still pouring out of the affected site so workers were diverting it, while machines cleared gulleys and drains to give the water the chance to enter drainage systems.\n\nA residents' incident support centre has been set up at Abbey Primary School to offer help and information over the weekend, between 09:00-17:00 GMT.\n\nThe council has asked residents to be \"patient as the investigation continues\" and has set up a helpline. Tel. 01639 686868.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "It is not clear if anyone not entitled succeeded in getting a Covid jab\n\nA health board boss has criticised council staff for potentially sharing Covid vaccine invites with colleagues.\n\nThe board meeting in North Wales heard some council staff, not within groups currently being vaccinated, booked appointments by following a link in an email only intended for the recipient.\n\nBetsi Cadwaladr health board's chairman Mark Polin said such actions could deprive someone else of a jab.\n\nDenbighshire council said it had warned staff the emails were not to be abused.\n\nIt is not clear if anyone not entitled succeeded in getting a Covid jab, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.\n\nOnly front-line social care and health workers, those over 80 and 70 years old, care home residents and their carers are currently being vaccinated.\n\nIndependent member Jackie Hughes spoke about the matter at Thursday's monthly health board meeting.\n\nAnswering her query, Dr Chris Stockport, the health board's executive director of primary care and community services, said: \"We are very clear with our local authority partners and teams of what frontline means in the same way we are elsewhere.\n\n\"When you arrive [for a vaccine] there's a process of validation.\n\n\"The likelihood is they will experience some difficulties working through the booking system [if they try to get into a higher vaccination cohort].\n\n\"It adds complications for a busy team and I would ask them not to do that when it's a clear effort to circumvent the cohort.\"\n\nAt Thursday's daily press briefing the UK Government Home Secretary Priti Patel said people who jumped the queue for the vaccine were \"morally reprehensible\" as they were putting the lives of vulnerable people at risk.\n\nShe said all the UK Government's measures were under review but \"our focus is getting that vaccine to the most vulnerable to make sure we can protect them and obviously protect others in the community\".\n\nMr Polin added: \"Whilst we understand the concerns people should not be doing what they are doing.\n\n\"The priority groups have been identified with clear medical guidance and sound reasoning behind it.\n\n\"So people jumping the queue are depriving someone else, potentially, of receiving the vaccine at the point at which they should.\"\n\nHe said it was a temporary problem, adding: \"We are changing the booking system, so this opportunity is not going to last much longer.\"\n\nHe said staff were looking out for any inappropriate bookings.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section FA Cup\n\nNon-league Chorley were unable to emulate the heroes from 1986 by causing an FA Cup sensation against Wolves - but the National League North side came away with all the credit from their fourth-round tie at Victory Park.\n\nVitinha's superb 30-yard shot after 12 minutes proved enough to secure an all-Premier League tie against Arsenal or Southampton at Molineux in the fifth round.\n\nBut Nuno Espirito Santo's side were less than impressive against their part-time opponents.\n\nChorley had the first shot of the match through Elliot Newby, and after Vitinha had struck his first Wolves goal with the visitors' only shot on target, it was the hosts who had the best chances.\n\nCrucially, they also pocketed around £120,000 in prize money, plus TV fees, to sustain them through what could be a difficult period after their league was suspended for two weeks amid funding concerns earlier in the day.\n\n\"If you are going to lose, I would prefer to lose to a goal like that than a scruffy goal,\" said Chorley boss Jamie Vermiglio.\n\n\"I am proud of what we have done for our community, my kids at school will remember that their head teacher got this far in the FA Cup. Hopefully it can inspire some of them.\n\n\"We are approaching up to half a million [in earnings from the cup run], we have people who are isolating, and those players have given them a little bit of happiness.\n\n\"If it is 2-0 or 3-0 at half-time the game is done and people are turning their TVs off. That did not happen. I felt we were in the game. Every player was outstanding.\"\n• None How to follow FA Cup fourth round on the BBC\n\nIf this does end up being Chorley's last game of the season, it is one they will remember for some time, not only for the action on the pitch but also for the huge volley of fireworks that went off behind the main stand minutes into the contest.\n\nFor visiting Wolves, it was a step into the unknown. Their starting line-up got changed in the away dressing room, while their substitutes - European Championship winner Rui Patricio and Spain international Adama Traore among them - readied themselves in a sponsors' lounge.\n\nSeemingly those starting the game on the bench got the better deal.\n\nWolves boss Nuno paid Chorley the compliment of picking a strong starting line-up, including £35.6m record signing Fabio Silva and England international Conor Coady.\n\nAnd had this match been played in more imposing surroundings, it could have been mistaken for one of those Premier League games where one side sits back, challenges the opposition to break them down and then hits them on the counter.\n\nWolves' return of 76% possession and one shot on target, set against Chorley's five shots on target, suggests home manager Vermiglio got his tactics spot on.\n\nIndeed, had Andy Halls, a personal trainer by day, not had his goal-bound header tipped over by John Ruddy after an hour, Chorley might have forced a different outcome.\n\n\"The scene was set for us to lose this game,\" said Nuno. \"John Ruddy did his job, everybody knows his quality. He helped us to win the game.\"\n\nIt was nevertheless a typically English FA Cup tie, enlivened by Vermiglio yelling \"nothing wrong with that\" when two Wolves players went down under agricultural challenges, and then laughing in Traore's face amid a brief skirmish.\n\nIt was fantastic knockabout stuff. Sadly, the enduring disappointment was that other than staff, media and stewards, no-one was there in person to witness it.\n• None Wolves have reached the FA Cup fifth round in three of the last five seasons, as many as in the 21 seasons prior to this.\n• None Premier League teams have progressed from 45 of their 47 FA Cup ties against non-league teams (96%), with only Norwich vs Luton in 2013 and Burnley vs Lincoln in 2017 failing to progress.\n• None Separated by 120 years and 362 days, Chorley have lost both of their FA Cup games against top-flight opponents, losing against Notts County in January 1900 and Wolves.\n• None Vitinha became the 32nd different Wolves player to score a goal for Nuno Espirito Santo in all competitions and the 11th different Portuguese player to do so, with what was his third shot in his 12th appearance.\n• None Since the start of 2017-18, Wolves have had 11 different Portuguese scorers - more than twice as many as any other English league team in that time (Nottingham Forest, five).\n\nWolves are next in action against Chelsea in the Premier League at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday, 27 January (18:00 GMT).\n• None Attempt blocked. Rayan Aït-Nouri (Wolverhampton Wanderers) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Rúben Neves.\n• None Harry Cardwell (Chorley) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt missed. Pedro Neto (Wolverhampton Wanderers) left footed shot from outside the box is high and wide to the left. Assisted by Rúben Neves.\n• None Arlen Birch (Chorley) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt blocked. Fábio Silva (Wolverhampton Wanderers) right footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by Pedro Neto. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None You can stream five fourth-round games live on the BBC this weekend, including Liverpool's trip to Manchester United. Find out more here.", "A restaurant worker in Lisbon, where benefits to those with symptoms, and those without, are generous\n\nThe idea of a flat £500 payment to anyone who tests positive for Covid-19 has been dismissed by the UK government. Health officials had come up with the suggestion in the hope of encouraging people with the illness to self-isolate.\n\nThere are concerns the virus is continuing to spread because some people are ignoring the instruction to stay home when they show symptoms or test positive. Downing Street has said there is already a £500 sum for those on low incomes who could not work from home and had to isolate. But this must be applied for and there have been high rejection rates in England at least, A behaviour expert who advises the government, told the BBC just 18% of people with symptoms were self-isolating for the full 10 days they were meant to.\n\nSo how do other countries handle the question of paying people to stay at home, or just trusting they will do the right thing? Here, BBC correspondents from Prague to New York, offer an insight.\n\nIn Portugal, even those who are just at-risk of contracting Covid - having been in direct contact with a confirmed case - are entitled to 100% of their basic salary, for 14 days, writes Alison Roberts, in Lisbon.\n\nFor those who show symptoms, or have tested positive, the same is available for up to 28 days. And the normal waiting times people are used to when claiming while ill have also been done away with - these Covid payments kick in on day one of isolation.\n\nThose not on permanent work contracts tend to be treated as self-employed and are eligible for benefits based on income declared. But there are a lot of people, including many immigrants, who lack the necessary paperwork, and are therefore not eligible to claim.\n\nNevertheless, it's perhaps not surprising that, because people are able to claim full basic pay, there hasn't been much, if any, debate about people obeying self-isolation. If there are reports of people not seeking tests, or not isolating, it seems to be more out of ignorance, which is certainly rather worrying.\n\nSlovenia has been offering compensation to people forced to self-isolate after exposure to coronavirus since it first introduced emergency measures in March, writes Guy De Launey in Ljubljana.\n\nDepending on the circumstances, this covers anything from 80% to the full amount of usual earnings. The payments may be made directly to people in quarantine, or as compensation to employers. A government official told the BBC that with its socialist past, it was normal for Slovenia to take care of people in quarantine by providing payments - and that without compensation, it would be impossible to deal with coronavirus.\n\nWhen the measures were first introduced, they enjoyed broad public support. But the second wave of the epidemic has seen case numbers skyrocket - Slovenia's per capita death-rate is now the third highest in the world - and public confidence overall has dipped.\n\nBy the end of 2020, market research company Valicon said that only 12% of Slovenians viewed the government's measures as \"appropriate\", adding that people were \"worried and dissatisfied with the social situation\", suggesting compensation is not a panacea.\n\nIn March last year, the US agreed to pay for some workers to stay at home - a big change for a country that had never paid sick leave requirement before, writes Natalie Sherman in New York.\n\nThe measure guaranteed up to 14 days of pay for workers forced to isolate because they had symptoms, had received medical advice to self-quarantine, or were under government lockdown orders. It also said it would guarantee two-thirds of pay for people caring for someone with the virus for up to two weeks. One study suggested it helped prevent hundreds of news cases a day.\n\nBut the assistance - paid by employers which were then reimbursed by the government via tax credits - expired on 31 December. And even before that, analysts estimated that loopholes meant roughly half of the country's workforce, including many grocery workers and medical staff were potentially excluded.\n\nAs part of his $1.9tn stimulus plan, President Joe Biden is pushing to renew the law, and end the exemptions. But the proposal - which his team estimates would expand the benefit to as many as 106 million more Americans - faces stiff resistance from Republicans and key business lobbies.\n\nIn Germany financial support is generous for people ordered to self-isolate by the authorities because of infection risk, writes Damien McGuinness in Berlin.\n\nAs a result there hasn't been a debate in Germany about breaking self-isolation rules because of financial need. Fines can be huge - tens of thousands of euros - and are strictly enforced. Overall there's no great issue with compliance and Germany's financial package has widespread cross-party backing, and is supported by voters.\n\nEmployees who are unable to work at home receive full pay for up to six weeks. This is paid by the employer, who is then reimbursed by the state. After that, workers may be eligible for sick-pay.\n\nFreelancers and self-employed people are generally also entitled to full pay for six weeks. But they would apply directly to their regional government. The exact rules and level of efficiency for payments vary from region to region. For those in the gig economy - Germany has it, though less so than Britain - this should be covered by state aid, based on tax returns.\n\nThe level of state support was agreed by Germany's national parliament in Berlin. But payments are administered and funded by regional governments.\n\nThere's been some discussion here about paying people to stay home if they test positive for Covid, writes Rob Cameron, in Prague.\n\nThe idea is advocated by at least one independent expert group. But it would be expensive, and the Czech state coffers are already stretched from keeping employees on furlough and paying compensation.\n\nInstead, salaried employees who receive a positive diagnosis are left with two choices: work from home - if they're up to it, if their job allows it and if their employer agrees, or go on sick leave for 10 days and receive 60% salary.\n\nFor the self-employed it's worse. Only those who have chosen to pay state sickness insurance will receive anything. Most opt out - the benefits are marginal. So most continue working from home - if their health and profession allows it.\n\nFor many workers, in other words, a positive Covid test can be a real blow to the wallet. It's an open secret that many people - especially freelancers in creative professions - beg friends and colleagues who test positive not to declare them as contacts, to avoid having to go into quarantine. For some the fear of losing work and money outweighs social responsibility.\n\nMoves to compensate people for taking time off work have largely been well received, writes Maddy Savage in Stockholm.\n\nTo encourage people to stay at home from the moment they develop coronavirus symptoms, the government changed the rules to allow Swedish employees and the self-employed to claim sick pay from the first day they are off, rather than the second. Employees receive about 80% of their salary while they isolate (capped at SEK 700 or £61.88 per day), and the self-employed are entitled to payments capped at 804 SEK or £71.05. The government has also introduced an allowance for people isolating because they live with someone who has coronavirus.\n\nWhile Sweden has largely kept primary schools open throughout the pandemic, parents have been able to make use of a pre-existing benefit which allows them to take state-funded time off work if their children are ill (with the virus or any other illness), and an additional benefit has been introduced for parents who are forced to take time off work to look after children affected by school closures as a result of a local outbreak.\n\nBut these measures have also stirred debates about welfare inequality. There are concerns that workers who are paid by the hour or on temporary contracts aren't entitled to the same level of sickness benefits as permanent staff - there are reports that this has encouraged some to keep working despite developing Covid-19 symptoms.", "Researchers have been tracking changes to the \"spike\" of the virus\n\nThe new variant of Covid-19 is \"hugely\" more transmissible than the virus's previous version, a study has found.\n\nIt concludes the new variant increases the Reproduction or R number by between 0.4 and 0.7.\n\nThe UK's latest R number has been estimated at between 1.1 and 1.3. It needs to be below 1.0 for the number of cases to start falling.\n\nProf Axel Gandy of London's Imperial College said the differences between the viruses types was \"quite extreme\".\n\n\"There is a huge difference in how easily the variant virus spreads,\" he told BBC News. \"This is the most serious change in the virus since the epidemic began,\" he added.\n\nThe Imperial College study suggests transmission of the new variant tripled during England's November lockdown while the previous version was reduced by a third.\n\nCases of Covid-19 have begun to increase rapidly during the second spike, and the number of cases recorded in a single day reached a new high on Thursday.\n\nEarly results indicated that the virus was spreading more quickly among under-20s, particularly among secondary school age children.\n\nBut the very latest data indicates that it was spreading quickly across all age groups, according to Prof Gandy who was a member of the research team.\n\n\"One possible explanation is that the early data was collected during the time of the November lockdown where schools were open and the activities of the adult population were more restricted. We are seeing now that the new virus has increased infectiousness across all age groups.\"\n\nProf Jim Naismith, of Oxford University, said he believed that the new findings indicated that even tougher restrictions would soon be needed.\n\n\"The data from Imperial represent the best analysis to date and imply that the measures we have employed to date, would - with the new virus - fail to reduce the R number to below 1.\n\n\"In simpler terms, unless we do something different the new virus strain is going to continue to spread, more infections, more hospitalisations and more deaths.\"\n\nThe R number is the average number of people an infected person infects. If it is above 1 the epidemic is growing.\n\nThe most chilling finding from this piece of research is that the November lockdown in England, hard though it was for many people, would not have stopped the variant form of the virus spreading. The same severe restrictions that saw cases of the previous version of the virus fall by a third, would see a tripling of the new variant. This is why there has been such a sudden tightening of restrictions across the country.\n\nIt is unclear whether the current restrictions will be enough to control the spread of the virus. Given the fact that it has taken two lockdowns to stop the earlier version of the virus overwhelming the NHS, many scientists fear that further tightening will be necessary.\n\nInfection levels will begin to drop as enough people are vaccinated. But until then it is now more important than ever for people to follow social distancing guidelines, wear masks where required and to regularly wash their hands.\n\nThe new year brings with it hope of a more normal life in the next few months but also a new form of the virus that all of us will have to combat in the coming days and weeks.\n\nProfessor Lawrence Young, of Warwick University, said early indications suggested that vaccines would be effective against the new form of the virus.\n\n\"Variants virus have been around since the beginning of the pandemic and are a product of the natural process by which viruses develop and adapt to their hosts as they replicate.\n\n\"Most of these mutations have no effect on the behaviour of the virus but very occasionally they can improve the ability of the virus to infect and/or become more resistant to the body's immune response.\"\n\nFurther research is needed to understand why the variant is spreading so quickly. But early indications are that vaccines should be effective against it.\n\nThe new virus has been designated \"Variant of Concern 202012/01\" or VOC by Public Health England.\n\nIt was detected in November and thought to have originated in the south-east England in September.\n\nThere is no evidence to suggest that it is more deadly, but it will increase the number of cases which in turn will add further pressure on the NHS.\n\nThe variant can now be found across the UK, except Northern Ireland, but it is heavily concentrated in London, as well as south-east and eastern England.", "The Black Country Living Museum normally gives visitors a taste of ordinary life in the Victorian era\n\nA venue that has doubled as a set for TV series Peaky Blinders is to operate as a Covid-19 vaccination centre.\n\nUsing Black Country Living Museum, a largely open-air site, to deliver jabs is said to be a \"game-changer\" for the local community.\n\nThe Dudley attraction, which is closed to tourists during lockdown, is expected to help administer thousands of injections a week.\n\nPeople are reminded they need an NHS letter of invitation before turning up.\n\nThe formal appointments will initially prioritise doses for people most at risk of complications from the virus.\n\nThe latest figures from NHS England showed 97,310 Covid jabs had been administered in Dudley and the surrounding area by Thursday - the second highest amount in the Midlands.\n\nBut rollout at the museum - which begins on Monday - will see it become Dudley's first vaccination centre.\n\nIt will complement existing GP-led vaccination services which are already up and running locally.\n\nCillian Murphy stars in Peaky Blinders, a Birmingham-set drama filmed in part at the museum\n\nThe museum normally gives visitors a taste of life in the Black Country during bygone days and has been used as a location for Peaky Blinders, the BBC TV series set in nearby Birmingham in the early 20th Century.\n\nSaying the step was a game-changer, Nicholas Barlow, Dudley Council member for health, said: \"Having the Black Country Living Museum on board as a vaccination centre will greatly increase the amount of jabs we can deliver, and the speed at which we can administer them.\n\n\"It will make people safer from this deadly virus more quickly.\"\n\nSally Roberts, Black Country and West Birmingham Clinical Commissioning Group chief nurse, said: \"Our progress [in the area] to date has been incredible and I am delighted that our first vaccination centre, which will be capable of delivering thousands more vaccines each week, is going live.\"\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Appointments were brought forward or rescheduled for safety reasons\n\nFour vaccination centres were shut as snow caused some travel disruption in Wales.\n\nSunday appointments in Bridgend, Rhondda, Abercynon and Merthyr Tydfil were rescheduled for safety reasons, but centres will reopen on Monday, the Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board said.\n\nThe Met Office has extended a yellow weather warning to midnight on Sunday for all of Wales except Anglesey.\n\nA yellow warning for ice runs from midnight until 11:00 GMT on Monday.\n\nPolice have warned of difficult conditions due to snow and ice.\n\nUp to 3cm of snow is forecast to fall in most areas, with 10 to 15cm expected in the Brecon Beacons and Snowdonia.\n\nCwm Taf Morgannwg health board urged anyone with queries about Sunday's vaccination appointments to call the number on their appointment letters.\n\nSnow volunteers cleared pathways so a Covid vaccine pilot in Maesteg could keep running\n\n\"We can confirm that no vaccines have been wasted as a consequence of this temporary Sunday closure and we are grateful to all those who were able to turn up at such short notice yesterday as we brought forward a significant number of Sunday appointments during the course of Saturday,\" it said.\n\n\"Additionally, our 4x4 arrangements are enabling us to continue to reach care homes to vaccinate the staff and residents there.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Traffic Wales South #KeepWalesSafe This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nNorth Wales Police tweeted there was \"widespread snow this morning, particularly in some higher areas, making driving conditions difficult\".\n\nAnd Dyfed-Powys Police said some roads were \"impassable\" and advised people to \"stay home\".\n\nIn Bridgend, officers from South Wales Police were pelted with snowballs as they helped an injured sledger on Heol y Nant.\n\nNorth Wales Police warned of difficult conditions due to \"widespread snow\", particularly on high ground.\n\nIt said the A499 near Pwllheli had received heavy snowfall overnight.\n\nWelsh Ambulance Service boss Jason Killens tweeted, thanking the public for helping crews continue to work despite the conditions.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Jason Killens 💙 This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nVillages were dusted with snow, such as in Llanfynydd, Carmarthenshire\n\nNick Rolfe shared this garden view in Nercwys, near Mold, Flintshire\n\nThe Met Office warned travellers that \"longer journey times by road, bus and train services\" could be expected, although Wales is in a level four lockdown with all but essential travel banned.\n\nIt also said the snow could lead to power cuts and other services, such as mobile phone coverage, may be affected.\n\nThose going out for daily exercise have been warned there could be icy patches on some untreated roads, pavements and cycle paths.\n\nIn Powys, this was the view over Newtown on Sunday\n\nThe hills around Llangollen, Denbighshire, were covered in snow on Saturday\n\nPower cuts and travel delays are possible, the Met Office says\n\nThe drop in temperatures is likely to exacerbate problems after widespread flooding caused by Storm Christoph.\n\nTwo flood warnings issued by Natural Resources Wales remain in place, meaning flooding is expected.\n\nThese cover the River Ritec at Tenby in Pembrokeshire, which could affect the Kiln Park caravan site, and the lower Dee Valley from Llangollen to Trevalyn Meadows.\n\nPretty as a picture... Suzy shared this garden view in Snowdonia\n\nSun up: Heath in Cardiff awakes to a covering of snow\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Larry King, giant of US broadcasting who achieved worldwide fame for interviewing political leaders and celebrities, has died at the age of 87.\n\nKing conducted an estimated 50,000 interviews in his six-decade career, which included 25 years as host of the popular CNN talk show Larry King Live.\n\nHe died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to Ora Media, a production company he co-founded.\n\nEarlier this month, he was treated in hospital for Covid-19, US media say.\n\nThe talk show host, famous for his braces and rolled-up sleeves, had faced several health problems in recent years, including heart attacks.\n\nKing was married eight times to seven women and had five children. Two of them died last year within weeks of each other - daughter Chaia died from lung cancer and son Andy of a heart attack.\n\nKing carried out interviews with every sitting US president from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama and a number of world leaders. His other high-profile guests included Dr Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and Lady Gaga.\n\n\"For 63 years and across the platforms of radio, television and digital media, Larry's many thousands of interviews, awards, and global acclaim stand as a testament to his unique and lasting talent as a broadcaster,\" Ora Media said in a statement, without giving the cause of death.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Larry King: \"I like spontaneity. That's the kind of broadcaster I am\".\n\nBorn Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, King rose to fame in the 1970s with his radio programme The Larry King Show, on the commercial network Mutual Broadcasting System.\n\nIn 1985 he launched Larry King Live on the fledgling CNN, and became one of the network's biggest stars. The programme, broadcast around the world, was a success with audiences, with King answering thousands of phone calls from viewers.\n\nHe earned a number of honours, including two Peabody awards, but was also criticised for his non-confrontational approach and open-ended questions. King boasted of not doing much research for the interviews so, he said, he could learn along with viewers.\n\nBy 2010 his ratings had dropped significantly, with critics saying King's approach felt outdated in an era of more aggressive interviewing styles. King then announced his retirement, saying: \"It's time to hang up my nightly suspenders.\"\n\nIn his final programme on CNN, he told his viewers: \"I don't know what to say, except to you, my audience, thank you. Instead of goodbye, how about so long?\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by CNN Communications This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nCNN replaced him with British journalist and broadcaster Piers Morgan, whose programme King criticised for being \"too much about him\".\n\nMorgan, whose programme was cancelled three years later, said on Twitter on Saturday: \"Larry King was a hero of mine until we fell out after I replaced him at CNN & he said my show was 'like watching your mother-in-law go over a cliff in your new Bentley.' (He married 8 times so a mother-in-law expert).\"\n\nIn a statement, CNN president Jeff Zucker said: \"The scrappy young man from Brooklyn had a history-making career spanning radio and television. His curiosity about the world propelled his award-winning career in broadcasting, but it was his generosity of spirit that drew the world to him.\"\n\nMost recently, King hosted another programme, Larry King Now, broadcast on Hulu and RT, Russia's state-controlled international broadcaster.\n\nA Kremlin spokesman was quoted as saying by state RIA Novosti news agency: \"King repeatedly interviewed Putin. The president has always appreciated his great professionalism and unquestioned journalistic authority.\"\n\nOutside broadcasting, King founded the Larry King Cardiac Foundation in 1988, a charity which helps to fund heart treatment for those with limited financial means or no medical insurance.", "Pavithra Wanniarachchi (L) has become the fourth Sri Lankan minister to test positive\n\nSri Lanka's health minister, who endorsed herbal syrup to prevent Covid, has tested positive for the virus.\n\nPavithra Wanniarachchi tested positive on Friday, a media secretary at the Ministry of Health told the BBC.\n\nShe had promoted the syrup, manufactured by a shaman who claimed it worked as a life-long inoculation against the virus.\n\nSri Lanka recorded 56,076 cases and 276 deaths since the pandemic began, with cases surging in recent months.\n\nMs Wanniarachchi is the fourth minister to test positive. A junior minister, who also took the potion, tested positive earlier this week.\n\nThe health minister had publicly consumed and endorsed the syrup as a way of stopping the spread of the virus. The shaman who invented the syrup, which contains honey and nutmeg, said the recipe was given to him in a visionary dream.\n\nDoctors in the country have quashed claims the herbal syrup works, but AFP news agency reports thousands have travelled to a village to obtain it.\n\nMs Wanniarachchi took two Covid-19 tests and both returned positive results, Viraj Abeysinghe, media secretary at the Ministry of Health told the BBC.\n\nThe minister has been asked to self-isolate and all of her immediate contacts have gone into isolation.\n\nNews of Ms Wanniarachchi's positive test came hours after Sri Lanka approved the emergency use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. The first doses are expected to arrive in the country next week.\n\nSri Lanka isn't the only place where people in positions of power have promoted unproven treatments for Covid.\n\nLast year, Madagascar's President Andry Rajoelina was criticised for promoting a herbal concoction that he claimed could prevent the virus. He was pictured distributing the tonic to poor communities in the capital.\n\nSince the pandemic began, a number of world leaders and cabinet members have contracted Covid. French President Emmanuel Macron, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former President Donald Trump all caught the virus at various points last year.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The people who think Coronavirus is caused by 5G", "Skewen in Neath Port Talbot has been badly hit by flooding over the past two days\n\nThere have been \"no adverse effects\" on the coronavirus vaccine roll-out caused by recent flooding, the Welsh Government has said.\n\nHomes were evacuated in Skewen, Neath Port Talbot, on Thursday as heavy rain caused issues across the country.\n\nSwansea Bay health board said none of its mass vaccination centres or GP surgeries had been affected by floods.\n\nIt added anyone struggling to get to a vaccination appointment because of the flooding would be able to rearrange.\n\nBetsi Cadwaladr University Health Board also said it was not aware of flooding in north Wales causing any issues for the vaccine roll-out.\n\nWrexham council leader Mark Pritchard said on Thursday that teams worked to ensure the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, made on Wrexham Industrial Estate, was not lost in the floods.\n\nThe latest figures released on Friday showed 212,317 people in Wales had received their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, with a further 415 receiving a second dose.\n\nAs well as properties, vehicles were submerged in water\n\nAbout 80 people in Skewen had to be evacuated from their homes after streets were left under water.\n\nFire crews returned to the scene on Friday to continue to pump floodwater away from houses.\n\nMeanwhile, a family in Rossett, Wrexham county, had to be rescued by helicopter after their home became surrounded by floodwater on Thursday night.\n\nNorth Wales has also been hit by floods\n\nOn Friday, Health Minister Vaughan Gething told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast that efforts to rehouse those affected by the floods were being done in \"as Covid-secure a way as possible\".\n\nDorothy Edwards, Covid-19 vaccination programme director for Swansea Bay health board, said: \"None of our mass vaccination centres have been impacted by flooding and we're not aware of any particular issues in primary care.\n\n\"Of course we will be sympathetic if there are people struggling to get to their appointment and if they are booked in at an mass vaccination centres they need to ring the booking line and the appointment will be rearranged.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government said: \"There have been no adverse effects on the vaccine roll-out due to flooding.\"", "Mr Johnson raised the benefits of a UK-US trade deal during his phone call with Mr Biden\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has spoken to Joe Biden for the first time since the new US president was inaugurated.\n\nMr Johnson said on Twitter that he looked forward to \"deepening the longstanding alliance\" between the UK and the US as they drove a \"green and sustainable recovery from Covid-19\".\n\nMr Biden was sworn in as president and Kamala Harris as vice-president in a ceremony in Washington on Wednesday.\n\nThe PM said their inauguration was a \"step forward\" for the US.\n\nA Downing Street spokesman said Mr Johnson \"warmly welcomed\" the president's decision to rejoin the Paris Agreement on climate change and the World Health Organization - both abandoned by Mr Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump.\n\n\"The prime minister praised President Biden's early action on tackling climate change and commitment to reach net zero by 2050,\" the spokesman said.\n\nThe spokesman added that, in building on the two nations' \"long history of cooperation in security and defence, the leaders \"re-committed to the Nato alliance and our shared values in promoting human rights and protecting democracy\".\n\nThe two leaders also talked about \"the benefits of a potential free trade deal\" between the UK and the US, with Mr Johnson reiterating his intention \"to resolve existing trade issues as soon as possible\".\n\nAfter the inauguration of any American president, a political spectator sport immediately begins: the order in which the new occupant of the White House speaks to other world leaders.\n\nIt is a crude metric of relative importance, but a metric nonetheless.\n\nI understand the call lasted for around 35 minutes and was the first conversation Joe Biden has had with a European leader as president.\n\nThe focus on climate change makes political and diplomatic sense. It's a topic where a Conservative prime minister and Democrat president can agree, and it matters particularly to the UK as the host of the COP26 UN Climate Change Summit in Glasgow in November.\n\nBut when you compare what Downing Street said about the call and what the White House said, one thing leaps out.\n\nNo 10's readout refers to a conversation about a trade deal. President Biden's does not.\n\nIt's widely expected there'll be no such agreement any time soon.\n\nMr Johnson and Mr Biden \"looked forward to to meeting in person as soon as the circumstances allow\" and to working together during the forthcoming G7, G20 and COP26 summits, the spokesman added.\n\nA White House statement said Mr Biden \"conveyed his intention to strengthen the special relationship\" between the US and UK and \"revitalize transatlantic ties\".\n\nCongratulating Mr Biden and Ms Harris - who is the first woman and first black and Asian-American person to serve as vice-president - the PM said earlier that their inauguration was a \"step forward\" for the US, which had \"been through a bumpy period\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Johnson: \"It's a big moment for us - we have things we want to do together.\"\n\nMr Johnson said it was a \"big moment\" for the UK and the US and their \"joint common agenda\".\n\nThe BBC's political editor, Laura Kuenssberg has said the Biden Presidency \"brings some hope to government\" because No 10 believes \"there is a lot of overlap\" between what Mr Biden and Mr Johnson want to do.\n\nThe US president has previously said that he does not want a \"guarded border\" between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland following Brexit, and that any UK-US post-Brexit trade deal had to be \"contingent\" on respect for the Good Friday Agreement.\n\nThe PM and Mr Biden have never met in real life, but the new US president once referred to Mr Johnson as a \"physical and emotional clone\" of Mr Trump.\n\nAfter winning the presidential election, Mr Biden phoned Mr Johnson ahead of other European leaders and expressed his desire to strengthen the historic \"special relationship\" between the two countries.", "Elizabeth Kerr and Simon O'Brien were married moments before he was put on a mechanical ventilator\n\nAn engaged couple taken to hospital in the same ambulance with Covid-19 were able to marry moments before the man was sedated and put on a ventilator.\n\nElizabeth Kerr, 31, and Simon O'Brien, 36, were taken to Milton Keynes University Hospital with breathing difficulties on 9 January.\n\nStaff rallied to arrange a wedding as the groom's condition worsened.\n\nThey held off intubating Mr O'Brien so the ceremony could go ahead. The couple are now recovering in hospital.\n\nMrs Kerr, a nurse, and Mr O'Brien had planned to marry in June.\n\nBoth contracted the disease and were taken to hospital together when their oxygen levels fell dangerously low.\n\nThey were placed on separate wards but when Mrs Kerr told nurse Hannah Cannon about their wedding plans, she asked her if they would like to marry in the hospital.\n\nMrs Kerr said she was told it could be their only chance.\n\n\"Those are words I never, ever want to hear again,\" she said.\n\nA photo on Mrs Kerr's phone shows the wedding took place in the beds of the intensive care unit\n\nHowever, while staff were securing the wedding licence, Mr O'Brien's condition further deteriorated and on 12 January he was placed on the intensive care unit, to be put on a ventilator.\n\nThey waited to intubate him just long enough for the ceremony to go ahead.\n\nMs Cannon said: \"With lots of teamwork... we were able to give them a wedding, not necessarily the wedding that they would have initially intended, but certainly something positive, remarkable and memorable for them to really hold on to.\"\n\nShe filmed the marriage for the couple's families and friends, and catering staff at the hospital provided a cake.\n\nShortly after saying \"I do\", Mr O'Brien was placed on the ventilator.\n\nThe couple have now been reunited on a recovery ward and were able to kiss for the first time since being married.\n\nMrs Kerr said having the wedding meant \"everything\" to them.\n\n\"If we hadn't had each other and we hadn't been given that opportunity to get married, I don't think both of us would be here now,\" she added.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Early evidence suggests the variant of coronavirus that emerged in the UK may be more deadly, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.\n\nHowever, there remains huge uncertainty around the numbers - and vaccines are still expected to work.\n\nThe data comes from mathematicians comparing death rates in people infected with either the new or the old versions of the virus.\n\nThe new more infectious variant has already spread widely across the UK.\n\nMr Johnson told a Downing Street briefing: \"In addition to spreading more quickly, it also now appears that there is some evidence that the new variant - the variant that was first identified in London and the south east - may be associated with a higher degree of mortality.\n\n\"It's largely the impact of this new variant that means the NHS is under such intense pressure.\"\n\nPublic Health England, Imperial College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Exeter have each been trying to assess how deadly the new variant is.\n\nTheir evidence has been assessed by scientists on the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag).\n\nThe group concluded there was a \"realistic possibility\" that the virus had become more deadly, but this is far from certain.\n\nSir Patrick Vallance, the government's chief scientific adviser, described the data so far as \"not yet strong\".\n\nHe said: \"I want to stress that there's a lot of uncertainty around these numbers and we need more work to get a precise handle on it, but it obviously is a concern that this has an increase in mortality as well as an increase in transmissibility.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Patrick Vallance: \"There is evidence that there's an increased risk for those who have the new variant\"\n\nPrevious work suggests the new variant spreads between 30% and 70% faster than others, and there are hints it is about 30% more deadly.\n\nFor example, with 1,000 60-year-olds infected with the old variant, 10 of them might be expected to die. But this rises to about 13 with the new variant.\n\nThis difference is found when looking at everyone testing positive for Covid, but analysing only hospital data has found no increase in the death rate. Hospital care has improved over the course of the pandemic as doctors get better at treating the disease.\n\nThe new variant was first detected in Kent in September. It is now the most common form of the virus in England and Northern Ireland, and has spread to more than 50 other countries.\n\nThe Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine are both expected to work against the variant that emerged in the UK.\n\nHowever, Sir Patrick said there was more concern about two other variants that had emerged in South Africa and Brazil.\n\nHe said: \"They have certain features which means they might be less susceptible to vaccines.\n\n\"They are definitely of more concern than the one in the UK at the moment and we need to keep looking at it and studying this very carefully.\"\n\nThe prime minister said the government was prepared to take further action to protect the country's borders to prevent new variants from entering.\n\n\"I really don't rule it out, we may need to take further measures still,\" he said.\n\nLast week the government extended a travel ban to South America, Portugal and many African countries amid concerns about new variants, while all international travellers must now test negative ahead of departure to the UK and go into quarantine on arrival.", "An exhibition now celebrates Wuhan's success in controlling the outbreak\n\nWuhan has long since recovered from the world's first outbreak of Covid-19. It is now being remembered not as a disaster but as a victory, and with an insistence that the virus came from somewhere - anywhere - but here.\n\nFrom the moment a new, pandemic coronavirus emerged in the same city as a laboratory dedicated to the study of new coronaviruses with pandemic potential, Prof Shi Zhengli has found herself the focus of one of the biggest scientific controversies of our time.\n\nFor much of the past year she has met the suggestion that Sars-Cov-2 might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology with angry denial.\n\nNow though, she has offered her own thoughts on how the initial outbreak may have begun in the city.\n\nIn an article in this month's edition of Science Magazine she referred to a number of studies that, she said, suggest the virus existed outside of China before Wuhan's first known case in December 2019.\n\n\"Given the finding of Sars-Cov-2 on the surface of imported food packages, contact with contaminated uncooked food could be an important source of Sars-Cov-2 transmission,\" she wrote.\n\nFrom one of the world's leading experts on coronaviruses, even the discussion of such a possibility seems unusual.\n\nCould a spiralling outbreak of infection that almost destroyed Wuhan's health system, sparked the world's first Covid lockdown and spawned a global catastrophe really have arrived on imported food without any signs of similarly devastating outbreaks elsewhere?\n\n\"The virus came from America,\" this fishmonger told the BBC\n\nBut with the virus vanquished, the idea that it is a foreign import is repeated with almost unanimity across this city of 11 million people.\n\n\"It came here from other countries,\" one woman running a hotpot stall in a busy street tells me. \"China is a victim.\"\n\n\"Where did it come from?\" the next-door fishmonger repeats my question aloud, and then answers: \"It came from America.\"\n\nOn 23 January last year, the Chinese authorities severed transport links out of Wuhan and confined the city's population to their homes.\n\nThe tough lockdown coincided with the annual spring festival celebrations and came too late to prevent the global spread of the disease - five million people had already left the city ahead of the holiday.\n\nDoctors' warnings had gone unheeded and, in an outpouring of anger on the Chinese internet, the authorities stood accused of covering up the initial outbreak in the interests of political stability.\n\nOne year on, there's little sign of that anger in Wuhan today. In fact it's the humdrum normality that is striking - the traffic jams, the bustling markets and busy restaurants.\n\nIts success in eventually bringing the virus under control is now being celebrated in a giant exhibition hall, complete with models of medical workers in hazmat suits, installations of hospital beds and - everywhere you look - giant portraits of President Xi Jinping.\n\nThe accompanying texts mention his \"all-out war\" against the pandemic, his \"resolute decision making\" and how he has been willing to share \"China's solutions\" with the world.\n\nThere can be no doubting the success of China's mass testing programmes, its tracing apps and the widespread mask wearing.\n\nBut its strict enforcement of lockdowns, with little hand-wringing over the impact on individual rights, may be far less easy for democratic countries to emulate.\n\n\"The strategic success achieved in this battle fully manifested the strong leadership of the Communist Party of China and the significant advantages of the socialist system of our country,\" the exhibition proclaims.\n\nDespite China's promise of international co-operation, the world is still no closer to an answer to the biggest question of them all - where did the virus come from?\n\nMany prominent scientists believe that - based on past outbreaks - the most likely source of the coronavirus is a natural one, a \"zoonotic\" leap from bats - known to harbour such viruses - to humans, possibly via an intermediate species.\n\nBut China has produced very little evidence to show the work that's been done in its search for the source, in particular the testing of historic human samples stored by hospitals to determine where and when the virus really started spreading.\n\nThose scientists who argue that the possibility of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology should also be included as part of any investigation are curious about this apparent silence.\n\n\"I find it very unlikely that such investigations would not have already occurred,\" Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, told me.\n\n\"It's a serious risk to resume life as usual without knowing where a dangerous human pathogen came from.\"\n\nWuhan's exhibition also has a display of hospital beds\n\nInstead of publishing its own evidence though, China appears to be taking an anywhere-but-Wuhan approach, with state media cheerleading the idea that the virus may have arrived in Wuhan on frozen food imports or talking cryptically of \"multiple origins\".\n\nAt a recent daily press briefing, I asked China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Hua Chunying, why such narratives were being promoted in the absence of real scientific evidence.\n\n\"Your question reveals your prejudice against China,\" she replied. \"Reports have emerged from Australia, Italy and many other countries that the coronavirus was found in multiple places in the autumn of 2019.\"\n\n\"Aren't these all facts?\" she asked.\n\nNot according to Alina Chan, who told me that such studies \"lack validation\" and some have been conducted without \"the most basic controls\".\n\n\"They do not present persuasive scientific evidence that the virus was circulating outside of China before the late 2019 outbreak in Wuhan,\" she said.\n\n\"The earliest detected cases and outbreak were in Wuhan. Early cases outside of China were found to have travelled from Wuhan. The most similar viruses have been found inside China.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BBC's Robin Brant visits the Wuhan market where Covid-19 was first traced\n\nInterestingly, scientists who have found themselves disagreeing strongly about the likelihood of the lab-leak theory, suddenly find themselves very much aligned on whether the virus came from abroad.\n\n\"I do not find the data linking Sars-Cov-2 to frozen foods to be credible,\" Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in the US, told me.\n\nAs someone who is a firm supporter of China's insistence that the virus could not have escaped from a lab, he gives its latest position much shorter shrift.\n\n\"All the available evidence points to an emergence of the virus somewhere in China in late 2019,\" he said.\n\nChinese virologist Shi Zhengli, seen here inside the laboratory in Wuhan\n\nProf Shi Zhengli recently told the BBC in an exchange of emails that she'd welcome \"any form of visit\" by an inquiry team to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to rule out the possibility of a lab leak.\n\nBut to a follow-up email asking about the alignment of her discussion of possible foreign origins with the Chinese government's own narrative, she sent another reply.\n\n\"Your question is not friendly,\" she wrote.\n\nAfter months of delay and wrangling with China about access, a World Health Organization team has arrived in Wuhan to begin its inquiry into the origins of the virus.\n\nTheir terms of reference hint at the politics behind the scenes, with the document mentioning many of China's talking points, including foreign origins and food-chain transmission.\n\nLast year Wuhan endured one of the strictest lockdowns the world has seen\n\nDr Daniel Lucey, a physician and infectious disease professor at the Georgetown Medical Centre in Washington, suggests the stage is being set for a foregone conclusion.\n\n\"In my view, if you line up side-by-side the WHO's terms of reference with the Shi Zhengli Science article,\" he told me, \"then it is clear that the overarching strategic narrative is that the origin of the virus is outside of China.\"\n\nThe crisis that began in Wuhan is now the world's crisis and, with so many lives and livelihoods lost, answers are desperately needed.\n\nIf the virus came naturally from bats, an understanding of that pathway is important to protect humanity from the risk of repeated \"spillover\" events from the same source.\n\nIf it leaked from a lab, an urgent review of safety protocols is needed - not just in China but globally.\n\nBoards in Wuhan say the virus broke out \"in multiple places around the world\"\n\nScientists are beginning to wonder if those answers will ever be forthcoming.\n\n\"It's undeniable now that politics have gotten in the way of science,\" Alina Chan said.\n\n\"I just hope that the WHO team will relay the details of their experience so that the public can understand what the limitations of their investigation are.\"\n\nIn Wuhan's giant exhibition hall, the city's place in history is again called into question by one of the concluding sign boards which says Covid-19 broke out \"in multiple places around the world\".\n\nFor China, this city's past is now propaganda and the truth, like the virus, is being brought under tight control.", "Guests fled when officers arrived at the Stamford Hill school, where the windows had been covered\n\nPolice broke up a wedding party in north London, where they now say about 150 people had gathered.\n\nOfficers found the windows at the Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School, in Stamford Hill, had been covered when they arrived at 21:15 GMT on Thursday.\n\nGuests fled from the strictly Orthodox Charedi Jewish school when the police arrived. The organisers face a £10,000 fine for breaking lockdown rules.\n\nThe Met originally claimed that about 400 guests were at the gathering.\n\nIn a statement, the school said its hall had been leased out.\n\nA spokesman for the school, whose principal Rabbi Avrahom Pinter died in April after contracting coronavirus, said \"we had no knowledge that the wedding was taking place\".\n\nHe added: \"We are absolutely horrified about last night's event and condemn it in the strongest possible terms.\"\n\nBoris Johnson supports the police for \"taking action against people who flagrantly and selfishly ignore the rules\", according to the prime minister's official spokesman.\n\nThe spokesman said: \"Large gatherings such as that pose a health risk, not just to those who attend but those who they live with or others who they may come into contact with.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Chief Rabbi Mirvis This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nChief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, meanwhile, said the \"overwhelming majority\" of the Jewish community would be appalled at the event.\n\nRabbi Mirvis, who serves as the head of the UK's orthodox Jewish community but is not the leader of the Charedi group, called the wedding party \"a most shameful desecration of all that we hold dear\".\n\nFive guests were issued with £200 fixed penalty notices, according to police, who said their inquiries had established those present at the school had gathered for a wedding.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. A video shared with the Jewish Chronicle shows officers in Stamford Hill\n\nVideo shared with the Jewish Chronicle shows officers in Stamford Hill speaking with a man to explain why they are there, although he is not accused of any wrongdoing.\n\nThey are then seen arriving at the Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School.\n\nDet Ch Sup Marcus Barnett of the Met Police said: \"This was a completely unacceptable breach of the law.\n\n\"People across the country are making sacrifices by cancelling or postponing weddings and other celebrations and there is no excuse for this type of behaviour.\n\n\"My officers are working tirelessly with the community and we will not hesitate to take enforcement action if that is required to keep people safe.\"\n\nOn Friday morning, a security guard at the school told the BBC there were more like 100 guests at the party than the much higher number given out by police.\n\nThe Met later said in a statement: \"Although initial calls suggested some 400 people had attended the wedding, it is now believed that approximately 150 people were in attendance.\"\n\nStamford Hill is part of the borough of Hackney, which has a Covid-19 infection rate of 625.43 cases per 100,000 people. The England average rate is 471.31 per 100,000 people.\n\nThe mayor of Hackney, Philip Glanville, said he was \"deeply disappointed\" that the wedding party had taken place, despite \"the number of lives that have already been lost in the Charedi community and across the borough\".\n\nHe added: \"Unfortunately, similar events have taken place even at this venue before and we need to be really clear how unacceptable it is.\n\n\"We will be meeting with the Rabbinate and our community partners over the coming days to see how we can prevent further incidents of this nature.\"\n\nLondon is under an England-wide lockdown, which prevents social mixing between households.\n\nLondoners are asked to only leave home for limited reasons such as shopping, going to work, seeking medical assistance, or avoiding domestic abuse.\n\nFor more London news follow on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.\n\nDo you have any information to share about this incident? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Senior doctors are calling on England's chief medical officer to cut the gap between the first and second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine.\n\nProf Chris Whitty said extending the maximum wait from three to 12 weeks was a \"public health decision\" to get the first jab to more people across the UK.\n\nBut the British Medical Association said that was \"difficult to justify\" and should be changed to six weeks.\n\nIt comes as early evidence suggests the UK virus variant may be more deadly.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson told a Downing Street briefing on Friday: \"In addition to spreading more quickly, it also now appears that there is some evidence that the new variant - the variant that was first identified in London and the south east - may be associated with a higher degree of mortality.\"\n\nPrevious work suggests the new variant spreads between 30% and 70% faster than others, and there are hints it is about 30% more deadly.\n\nFor example, the government's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said if 1,000 men in their 60s were infected with the old variant, roughly 10 of them would be expected to die - but this rises to about 13 with the new variant.\n\nAnother 1,348 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test were reported in the UK on Saturday, in addition to 33,552 new infections, according to the government's coronavirus dashboard.\n\nThe government's Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) says unpublished data suggests the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is still effective with doses 12 weeks apart - but Pfizer has said it has tested its vaccine's efficacy only when the two doses were given up to 21 days apart.\n\nThe World Health Organization has recommended a gap of four weeks between doses - to be extended only in exceptional circumstances to six weeks.\n\nGovernment minister Robert Jenrick said the current strategy ensured \"millions more people can get the first jab\" and the \"high level of protection\" which it offered.\n\nHe said the BMA's concerns would be taken into account but that the government was following the \"very clear advice\" of the medicines regulator and the UK's four chief medical officers who, he said, \"could not have been clearer that this is the right thing to do for this country\".\n\nA spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Social Care added: \"Our number one priority is to give protection against coronavirus to as many vulnerable people as possible, as quickly as possible.\"\n\nIn the letter to Prof Whitty, seen by the BBC, the British Medical Association (BMA) said it agreed that the vaccine should be rolled out \"as quickly as possible\" - but called for an urgent review and for the gap to be reduced.\n\nThe doctors' union said the UK's strategy \"has become increasingly isolated internationally\" and \"is proving evermore difficult to justify\".\n\n\"The absence of any international support for the UK's approach is a cause of deep concern and risks undermining public and the profession's trust in the vaccination programme,\" the letter said.\n\nDr Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the BMA, said there were \"growing concerns\" that the vaccine could become less effective with doses 12 weeks apart.\n\n\"Obviously the protection will not vanish after six weeks, but what we do not know is what level of protection will be offered [after that point],\" he told BBC Breakfast.\n\n\"We should not be extrapolating data when we don't have it.\"\n\nHe said while he understands the rationale behind the decision, \"no other nation has adopted the UK's approach\".\n\n\"We think the flexibility that the WHO offers of extending to 42 days is being stretched far too much to go from six weeks right through to 12 weeks,\" he added.\n\nThere has been understandable enthusiasm over a promising start to the hugely ambitious UK vaccination rollout.\n\nBut there has been some tension over the decision to lengthen the time between doses for the Pfizer vaccine to 12 weeks.\n\nProf Whitty and other health leaders and experts say this will allow many more people to get vaccinated quickly and the first dose gives most of the protection.\n\nBut critics argue this goes against Pfizer's recommendation of a three-week gap and there is no data to back up the long delay.\n\nThe intervention of the BMA is significant as it shows senior doctors now have widespread concerns, including worries about reliability of supplies if people have to wait longer for a second jab.\n\nThis is a private letter to Chris Whitty seen by the BBC and not a grandstanding press release. The BMA wants to have talks with the chief medical adviser about moving to six weeks.\n\nProf Whitty will no doubt restate his case, but it will be interesting to see whether the BMA argument gains traction in the wider medical world.\n\nThe BMA also suggested second doses might not be guaranteed after a 12-week delay \"given the unpredictability of supplies\".\n\nHowever, Public Health England's medical director said people would get their second dose.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that she backed the current strategy, saying it was \"about bearing down on transmission\" to reduce deaths and reduce the chance of more dangerous variants of the virus emerging.\n\n\"The more people that are protected against this virus, the less opportunity it has to get the upper hand,\" she said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nOther issues highlighted in the letter include:\n\nThe UK's chief medical officers have said the \"great majority\" of initial protection comes from the first jab, while the second dose is likely to help that protection last longer.\n\nIn total, the UK has ordered 100 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and 40 million of the Pfizer vaccine.\n\nBoth vaccines are expected to work against the variant of Covid-19 that emerged in the UK.\n\nWhat has been your experience of receiving the vaccine? Are you waiting for your second dose? Email: haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Nurses are calling for all UK staff to be given a higher grade of face mask to protect them against new variants of coronavirus.\n\nThe Royal College of Nursing warns that inadequate PPE may be putting the lives of nursing staff at risk.\n\nIt has written to the workplace safety watchdog detailing its concerns, soon after a similar appeal from doctors.\n\nEngland's Department of Health says there is no reason to change current guidance.\n\nIt follows a comprehensive review of all the evidence around the new variants and the impact on PPE.\n\nAt present, most nurses working outside of intensive care wear standard surgical masks.\n\nBut the RCN says they may not protect them against the new variant of the virus, and very small airborne viral particles spread in hospitals.\n\nInstead, it wants all NHS staff to be given the kinds of high-grade face masks used in intensive care units, called FFP2 or FFP3 masks.\n\nThe UK guidance on infection prevention and control has recently been updated, but nurses say it allows individual trusts to decide what PPE to use.\n\nAs a result, some hospitals are offering staff high-grade PPE while many are not - and that is leading to unequal levels of protection depending on where nurses work.\n\nMany nurses wear standard surgical masks outside of intensive care\n\nDame Donna Kinnair, chief executive and general secretary of the RCN, said: \"The government's silence on this issue is creating a postcode lottery for nursing staff.\n\n\"It must stop dragging its feet on this issue. Nursing staff need to have full confidence that they are protected.\"\n\nShe added: \"Staff picking up this virus at work are angered at any suggestion they have stopped following the rules - this is down to the new variant and the dangerous shortage of adequate protection.\"\n\nNHS England data shows a 22% rise in the average number of healthcare staff off sick because of Covid-19 in the first week of January, compared with the last week in December.\n\nA spokesman from the Department of Health and Social Care in England said the safety of NHS and social care staff was \"top priority\" but the current guidance did not need changing.\n\n\"In response to the new Covid-19 variants, the UK Infection Prevention Control Cell conducted a comprehensive review of all available evidence and concluded that current guidance and PPE recommendations remain the right ones.\n\n\"New and emerging evidence is continually scrutinised and evaluated by the government, in conjunction with our world-leading scientists,\" the spokesman said.\n\nThe Royal College of Nursing is asking the governments of the UK to:\n\nIt is also calling for the Health and Safety Executive to review the guidance on appropriate use of PPE in all health and care settings.", "Last updated on .From the section FA Cup\n\nCheltenham Town came within nine minutes of one of the biggest shocks in recent FA Cup history before Manchester City staged a dramatic late rally to crush the dreams of the gallant League Two side.\n\nThe Robins, 72 places below City who sit second in the Premier League, threatened huge embarrassment for Pep Guardiola's side after Alfie May put Cheltenham ahead on the hour after a trademark long throw from captain Ben Tozer caused chaos in the area.\n\nCity, who made ten changes to the team that beat Aston Villa in the Premier League on Wednesday, spared their embarrassment when Phil Foden, the game's outstanding player, arrived at the far post to turn in substitute Joao Cancelo's long cross in the 81st minute.\n\nAnd the turnaround was complete three minutes later when a rare moment of slackness in the outstanding Cheltenham defence, with goalkeeper Josh Griffiths superb, switched off and Gabriel Jesus scored from Fernandinho's delivery.\n\nFerran Torres scored Manchester City's third with the last kick of the game to give the scoreline a cruel reflection on Cheltenham's heroic efforts.\n\nIt was so cruel on manager Michael Duff and his players, who now go back the battle for promotion from League Two, while City will be away at Swansea in the fifth round.\n\n\"I'm incredibly proud,\" the Robins boss said of his side's display. \"The players they brought on from the bench and they way they celebrated the goals tells you something. They know they've been in a game. They've done that to better teams than us.\"\n\nThe sight of Manchester City manager Guardiola disputing where Cheltenham could take a throw-in said everything about the way the League Two underdogs gave their mighty opponents a serious fright.\n\nTozer's throw-ins were causing all manner of problems and led to Cheltenham's goal but there was so much more to their performance than that set-piece weapon, a threat any manager in the game would utilise.\n\nCheltenham tried to play football when they got the chance, with goalscorer May, who has done the hard yards in non-league before playing for Doncaster and now Cheltenham, a leading light.\n\nRobins keeper Griffiths, who suffered the ignominy of being beaten from 71 yards by his Newport County opposite number Tom King in midweek, was in defiant form as he saved well from Riyad Mahrez and Torres, showing command throughout. Tozer's headed goalline clearance from Benjamin Mendy in the first half was also symbolic of their 'they shall not pass' approach.\n\nThere may have been no fans inside this compact stadium but there was still a real sense of occasion, the game being halted in the first half because of a firework display nearby.\n\nIn the end this will be a bitter disappointment to Cheltenham but they can be rightly proud and take huge confidence into their League Two promotion battle.\n\nDuff highlighted how financially important the cup run was for his club.\n\n\"It's essential,\" he added. \"Every pound coming in is probably worth a tenner in normal times.\n\n\"These games don't come around very often. It's a shame because [with fans] the place would've been bouncing. Would that have seen us through in the last 10 minutes? I'm not so sure - but the key is to enjoy it.\"\n\nGuardiola made 10 changes to his line-up to give Manchester City's shadow squad a chance to impress.\n\nSome, like the erratic Mendy, did not take that opportunity and it was someone establishing himself in City's side that spared the blushes of this expensively assembled squad.\n\nFoden was magnificent, so light on his feet with glorious ball control, endless creativity and the man pulling the strings for City even when they were struggling to break down resilient Cheltenham.\n\nThe 20-year-old was head and shoulders above his City team-mates. He was the one who was going to pull them out of their grim predicament if anyone was, and so it proved when he popped up with the crucial late equaliser that lifted Guardiola's team and deflated Cheltenham.\n\nFoden had already carved out chances for Mahrez and Gabriel Jesus that were not taken so it was a case of 'do it yourself' when he was the player on target.\n\nThe fact Guardiola was forced to use three subs in Ruben Dias, Ilkay Gundogan and Joao Cancelo once Cheltenham went ahead proved how worried the Premier League giants were.\n\nThis was an unimpressive, scratchy display from City's much-changed team, with Guardiola resting so many of the players who are giving them such an ominous look in the Premier League - luckily they had the brilliance of Foden to pull them out of a deep hole.\n\nGuardiola praised the England attacking midfielder for his impressive performance.\n\n\"Foden is in a great moment and with great confidence,\" he said.\n\n\"He is clinical in front of goal and he had a similar chance to the goal we scored at [Chelsea's] Stamford Bridge - he is playing really well.\"\n\nThe City manager suggested he was confident in the players he put out on the pitch.\n\n\"I didn't have regrets even when we were 1-0 down, we had clear chances from the first minute,\" he added.\n\n\"When they take advantage it gets complicated, but we got it to 1-1 and it was tight. We came here with humility and had the quality to make the difference.\"\n• None Cheltenham have lost all nine of their competitive meetings with Premier League sides, by an aggregate score of 6-23.\n• None City have won 10 consecutive games in all competitions for the first time since a run of 11 from August to October 2017.\n• None May's opener for Cheltenham was the first goal City had conceded in 509 minutes of action in all competitions, since Callum Hudson-Odoi's strike for Chelsea at the start of the month.\n• None Foden is City's top scorer in all competitions this season with nine goals in 25 appearances, one more than he netted in 38 games last season.\n• None Jesus has been involved in 12 goals in 13 FA Cup appearances for City, scoring eight and assisting four.\n• None May has scored four goals in his four FA Cup games for Cheltenham, with each of his eight goals in total in the competition coming in home games.\n• None Goal! Cheltenham Town 1, Manchester City 3. Ferran Torres (Manchester City) right footed shot from very close range to the centre of the goal. Assisted by Ilkay Gündogan.\n• None Attempt missed. Matty Blair (Cheltenham Town) right footed shot from the right side of the box is too high following a corner.\n• None Goal! Cheltenham Town 1, Manchester City 2. Gabriel Jesus (Manchester City) right footed shot from the centre of the box to the centre of the goal. Assisted by Fernandinho with a through ball.\n• None Goal! Cheltenham Town 1, Manchester City 1. Phil Foden (Manchester City) left footed shot from very close range to the bottom left corner. Assisted by João Cancelo with a cross.\n• None Attempt missed. João Cancelo (Manchester City) left footed shot from outside the box misses to the left. Assisted by Riyad Mahrez.\n• None Attempt missed. Phil Foden (Manchester City) header from the centre of the box is too high. Assisted by João Cancelo with a cross. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Hear from the former US president as he reflects on his time in office\n• None How can you eat well for £1 a portion?", "The 39 people who died in the back of a trailer as it crossed the North Sea between Zeebrugge and the UK\n\nFour men have been jailed for the manslaughter of 39 Vietnamese migrants found dead in a lorry trailer in Essex.\n\nThe migrants died \"excruciatingly painful\" deaths, having suffocated in the container en route from Belgium to Purfleet in October 2019, a judge said.\n\nRonan Hughes, 41, and Gheorghe Nica, 43, played \"leading roles\" in the smuggling conspiracy and were jailed for 20 and 27 years respectively.\n\nAt the Old Bailey, two lorry drivers were also jailed for manslaughter.\n\n[Left to right] Eamonn Harrison, Ronan Hughes, Gheorghe Nica and Maurice Robinson were all jailed for manslaughter\n\nEamonn Harrison, 24, who towed the trailer to the Belgian port of Zeebrugge before their journey to the UK, was sentenced to 18 years.\n\nMaurice Robinson, 26, was given 13 years and four months, having collected the trailer and opened it in an industrial estate to find the migrants dead.\n\nThree others members of the people-smuggling gang were also sentenced for conspiracy to facilitate unlawful immigration.\n\nChristopher Kennedy, 24, from County Armagh, was jailed for seven years; Valentin Calota, 38, of Birmingham, for four-and-a-half years; and Alexandru-Ovidiu Hanga, 28, of Hobart Road, Tilbury, Essex, was given a three-year sentence.\n\n[Left to right] Valentin Calota, Alexandru-Ovidiu Hanga and Christopher Kennedy were also sentenced on Friday\n\nSentencing, Mr Justice Sweeney said: \"I have no doubt that the conspiracy was a sophisticated, long-running and profitable one to smuggle mainly Vietnamese people across the channel.\"\n\nHe said on the fatal trip the temperature had been rising along with the carbon dioxide levels throughout, hitting 40C (104F) while the container was at sea on 22 October 2019.\n\n\"There were desperate attempts to contact the outside world by phone and to break through the roof of the container,\" the judge said.\n\n\"All were to no avail and, before the ship reached Purfleet, [the victims] all died in what must have been an excruciatingly painful death.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Video evidence showed how the trainer containing 39 Vietnamese migrants made its way to the UK\n\nThe victims had used a metal pole to try to punch through the roof but only managed to dent the interior.\n\nThe court heard some of their final desperate phone messages, including one where a man spoke with ragged breaths as he apologised to his family.\n\n\"I can't breathe,\" he said. \"I want to come back to my family. Have a good life.\"\n\nJustice Sweeney added: \"The willingness of the victims to try and enter the country illegally provides no excuse for what happened to them.\"\n\nThe bodies of 39 Vietnamese nationals were discovered in a refrigerated trailer on 23 October 2019\n\nDuring the trial, jurors were given a snapshot of the victims - who included a bricklayer, a university graduate and a nail bar technician - and their dreams of a better life.\n\nMany of their families borrowed heavily to fund their passage, relying on their potential future earnings once they got into the UK.\n\nThe father of Nguyen Huy Tung, one of two 15-year-olds in the container, later learned of his son's death via social media.\n\nHarrison, of Newry, County Down, claimed he did not know there were people in the trailer when he towed it to the Belgian port, and that he watched \"a wee bit of Netflix\" in bed as they were loaded on.\n\nAfter receiving this message from his boss, Robinson got out of his cab, opened the trailer door and discovered the bodies\n\nRobinson, from County Armagh, collected the trailer when it arrived on UK shores just after midnight on 23 October.\n\nHis boss, Hughes, had messaged him: \"Give them air quickly don't let them out.\"\n\nRobinson gave a thumbs-up in reply. When Robinson stopped on a nearby industrial estate, he found that the migrants were all dead.\n\nHis barrister said Robinson, who admitted manslaughter, being part of the trafficking plot and money laundering, was \"horrified by what he saw\".\n\nThe moment lorry driver Maurice Robinson opened the trailer door and discovered the bodies inside was captured on CCTV\n\nThe trial examined three smuggling attempts by the gang - two that were successful on 11 and 18 October, and the final trip on 23 October.\n\nOn all three runs, Nica, of Basildon, Essex, had arranged cars and a van to transport the migrants at the UK end.\n\nWhen Robinson discovered the bodies, there was a series of telephone conversations between him and Nica and Hughes, of Tyholland, County Monaghan, Ireland, before the driver eventually dialled 999.\n\nIn his evidence, Nica said Robinson told him: \"I have a problem here - dead bodies in the trailer.\"\n\nWhile Hughes admitted manslaughter, both Nica and Harrison were convicted by a jury.\n\nMr Justice Sweeney said that in the conspiracy \"two played leading roles, namely - in order of importance - Hughes and Nica\".\n\nHe accepted Hughes was \"not at the very top of the conspiracy\" but said his role was \"pivotal... in that he ran a haulage business and supplied the trailers and drivers used to transport the migrants\".\n\nThe judge said Nica \"recruited and paid the drivers whose job it was to collect the migrants when they reached the drop-off site in this country and to drive them to the safe house(s) where they were to be held until payment\".\n\nHe added at the top of the conspiracy was a Vietnamese man called \"Fong\", who was based in London.\n\nMr Justice Sweeney told the defendants jailed for manslaughter they would serve two-thirds of the term in custody, instead of the usual half.\n\nEarlier this month, Gazmir Nuzi, 43, of Barclay Road, Tottenham, north London, was sentenced, having admitted his limited role in the people-smuggling operation. It was accepted he was not a member of the organised crime group behind the smuggling operation.\n\nDet Ch Insp Daniel Stoten said: \"May this serve as a warning to those who think it's OK to prey on the vulnerabilities of migrants and their families, transporting them in a way worse than we would transport animals.\n\n\"My message to you is that we will find you and we will stop you.\"\n\nHe said the victims died in an \"unimaginable way, because of the utter greed of these criminals\".\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "Police warned that unsanctioned protests would be \"immediately suppressed\"\n\nRussian police have detained close aides of the jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny, as a string of nationwide protests gets under way.\n\nPolice have broken up demonstrations in the eastern Khabarovsk region, amid stern warnings for people to stay home.\n\nMr Navalny's supporters flooded social media with calls to rally at protests expected in dozens of cities later.\n\nHe is Russian leader Vladimir Putin's most high-profile critic.\n\nHe was arrested last Sunday after he flew back to Moscow from Berlin, where he had been recovering from a near-fatal nerve agent attack in Russia last August.\n\nOn his return, he was immediately taken into custody and found guilty of violating parole conditions. He says it is a trumped-up case designed to silence him.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Alexei Navalny was filmed by the BBC saying goodbye to his wife and then being led away by authorities\n\nMore than 60m people have watched his new video about President Vladimir Putin's alleged luxury Black Sea palace.\n\nThe Kremlin denies the property belongs to the president.\n\nAmong those detained in Moscow on Thursday were his spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, and one of his lawyers, Lyubov Sobol. They face fines or short jail terms.\n\nMs Sobol, who has a young child, was later released. But Ms Yarmysh has now been jailed for nine days.\n\nProminent Navalny activists are also being held in the cities of Vladivostok, Novosibirsk and Krasnodar.\n\nUnauthorised rallies are being planned in more than 60 cities across Russia for Saturday. Moscow police say any unauthorised demonstrations and provocations will be \"immediately suppressed\".\n\nA thousand people were reported to have come onto the streets in the Khabarovsk region, with some of them already detained.\n\nMr Navalny's wife Yulia, who travelled back to Russia with him from Germany, said she would demonstrate in Moscow \"for myself, for him, for our children, for the values and the ideals that we share\".\n\nAlexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has drawn millions of followers on social media, through slickly produced videos alleging large-scale official corruption. He has long denounced Mr Putin's administration as \"feudal\" and full of \"crooks and thieves\".\n\nFor a long time the Russian authorities made out that Alexei Navalny was irrelevant. Just a blogger. With a tiny following. No threat whatsoever.\n\nRecent events suggest the opposite. First Mr Navalny was targeted with a nerve agent, allegedly by a secret group of FSB state security hitmen. Instead of investigating the poisoning, Russia is investigating him: on his return from Germany the Kremlin critic was arrested.\n\nHaving put Mr Navalny behind bars, the authorities are putting pressure on his supporters. The Kremlin's greatest fear is of a Ukraine-style revolution in Russia that would sweep away those in power.\n\nThere's no indication that such a scenario is imminent. But with economic problems growing, the Kremlin will worry that Mr Navalny could act as a lightning rod for protest sentiment. That explains the police crackdown on Navalny allies ahead of Saturday's potential protests.\n\nPlus, this is getting personal. Mr Navalny's video about \"Putin's Palace\" on the Black Sea was designed to cause maximum embarrassment to the Russian president.\n\nIn the \"Putin's palace\" video Mr Navalny alleges that rich businessmen close to Mr Putin paid for a sumptuous 17,691sq m (190,424sq ft) palace for him at Gelendzhik, by the Black Sea.\n\nIt is alleged to have a casino, a theatre and many other comforts, including a vineyard and tea house in the sprawling grounds. The Kremlin dismissed the YouTube video as a \"pseudo-investigation\" aimed at earning money for Mr Navalny.\n\nProsecutors have warned people against protesting in support of Mr Navalny on Saturday. Russia's education ministry has told parents not to allow their children to attend.\n\nSome Russian celebrities in the arts and sports have pledged support for Mr Navalny. They include ice hockey star Artemi Panarin.\n\nFormer world chess champion Garry Kasparov - now a leading anti-Putin activist based in the US - tweeted that pro-Navalny posts were being widely blocked in Russia.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Garry Kasparov This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIn a phone call to President Putin on Friday, EU Council President Charles Michel voiced \"grave concern\" about the jailing of Mr Navalny.\n\nMr Michel said the EU was \"united in its call on Russia to swiftly release Mr Navalny and proceed with the investigation into the assassination attempt on him, in full transparency and without further delay\".\n\nIn October, the EU imposed sanctions on six top Russian officials and a Russian chemical weapons research centre over the Novichok poisoning of Mr Navalny.\n\nThe Kremlin retaliated with tit-for-tat sanctions, denying any role in the attack and rejecting the expert finding that the Russian nerve agent had been used.\n\nThe Black Sea palace allegedly features a casino, an ice rink and a vineyard\n\nThe social media app TikTok has a flood of videos from Russians promoting the protests planned for Saturday. The messages about Mr Navalny have been going viral for several days.\n\nA well-known Russian TikTok user, Slava Varfolomeyev, told BBC Russian: \"I go on TikTok and find that every third video is about 'Putin's palace', the detention of Navalny and the 23 January rally!\"\n\nHe said that on Thursday \"this swelled to a maximum: practically seven out of every 10 videos were on that topic [Navalny]\". TikTok's popularity is based on short-form videos.\n\nOn Wednesday Russia's official media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, demanded that TikTok take down any information \"encouraging minors to act illegally\", threatening large fines.", "Police said they had been in contact with the family before the funeral took place \"in an attempt to ensure safety\"\n\nA funeral director has been fined £10,000 after police were called to a funeral with close to 150 people in attendance.\n\nHertfordshire Police said the large gathering in Welwyn Garden City on Thursday was reported to them by members of the public.\n\nCoronavirus rules mean a maximum of 30 people can attend a funeral.\n\nA second person was fined, by Bedfordshire Police, for when the gathering was in Arlesey, Bedfordshire.\n\nSupt Nick Caveney, of Hertfordshire Police, said: \"This was a clear and blatant breach of the current restrictions.\"\n\nHe said the fine was given to the funeral director \"for not managing this event correctly and advising their clients of the rules\".\n\n\"We implore all business owners to ensure they are following the restrictions safely and responsibly,\" he said.\n\n\"Flagrant breaches such as this will not be tolerated.\"\n\nThe force said it had worked with other agencies and the family in advance of the funeral \"in an attempt to ensure the safety of those attending and that of the wider public\".\n\nBut when officers attended they found the large number of people at the church, and a 41-year-old man from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, was handed the £10,000 fine after police served a fixed penalty notice.\n\nSeveral members of the public had contacted the force about the funeral at the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady, Queen of Apostles on Woodhall Lane.\n\nBedfordshire Police said a man in his 30s was issued with the fine over the gathering.\n\nCh Supt John Murphy from the force said: \"Fines and enforcement are a last resort for us, and we will always engage and work with families in the first instance.\n\n\"But we need to take firm action against those who brazenly decide to go against the guidelines outlined by the government and put a large number of people at risk.\"\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "Ministers will discuss at a meeting on Monday whether to tighten restrictions at UK borders - including the possibility of hotel quarantines for travellers, the BBC has been told.\n\nAt a Downing Street news conference on Friday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson did not rule out taking further action.\n\nIt comes amid increased concerns over the spread of new coronavirus variants.\n\nUnder current travel curbs, almost all people arriving in the UK must test negative for Covid to be allowed entry.\n\nThe test must be taken in the 72 hours before travelling and anyone arriving without one faces a fine of up to £500.\n\nAll passengers are also required to quarantine for up to 10 days, although the isolation period can be cut short with a second negative test after five days in England.\n\nThe only people not subject to the conditions are children under 11, hauliers, air, international rail and maritime crew, and passengers from the Common Travel Area - comprised of the Republic of Ireland, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man\n\nScotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own quarantine rules, which differ slightly.\n\nAs of Monday, travel corridors, which exempted passengers arriving from some countries from quarantine, were suspended throughout the UK.\n\nAsked whether the government would bring in further measures at UK borders, Mr Johnson said: \"I really don't rule it out, we may need to take further measures still.\n\n\"We may need to go further to protect our borders.\n\n\"We don't want to put that [efforts to control Covid] at risk by having a new variant come back in.\"\n\nOne more infectious variant , which was first identified in Kent, has already spread widely across the UK.\n\nAnd, at the briefing, the prime minister announced that early evidence suggests this variant may be more deadly.\n\nOther new variants causing concern have been identified in South Africa and Brazil in the weeks since the Kent variant was discovered.\n\nThose discoveries led to direct flights to the UK from all South American countries and several southern African countries being suspended.\n\nScientists fear these variants discovered in other countries may interfere with the effectiveness of vaccines and evade parts of the immune system.\n\nWhile those travelling into the UK are asked to abide by the 10-day isolation and told they can be subject to checks, London mayor Sadiq Khan is among those who have called for the UK to adopt the use of enforced quarantine in hotel rooms.\n\nThe policy is among the measures in Australia that has limited the country to just 28,750 positive cases during the entire pandemic, fewer than the UK currently has every day.\n\nTravellers who choose to go to Australia have to pay for their rooms at one of a number of selected quarantine facilities - and have all their meals delivered to their room throughout a stay of at least 14 days. They get tested twice for Covid during that period and if they test positive their quarantine is extended for a further 14 days.\n\nMeanwhile, passengers arriving into London's Heathrow airport this week have complained of queues at passport control and what they described as poor social distancing, after the latest travel restrictions - requiring travellers to show proof of their negative Covid tests - came into force.\n\nOn Friday, former British ambassador Peter Westmacott posted a picture on Twitter of long queues at the airport.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Peter Westmacott This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA government spokesman said people \"should not be travelling unless absolutely necessary\".\n\nThe statement added: \"You must have proof of a negative test and a completed passenger locator form before arriving.\n\n\"Border Force have been ramping up enforcement and those not complying could be fined £500.\n\n\"It's ultimately up to individual airports to ensure social distancing on site.\"\n\nWith all parts of the UK under strict virus rules amid high levels of infection, only essential foreign travel is permitted in the current advice from the Foreign Office.\n\nA further 40,261 cases, and 1,401 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test were reported on Friday in the UK.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Some of the volunteers are working to prepare bodies for burial\n\nA mosque in east London has closed for all communal prayer. Instead it is serving two purposes - providing funerals and feeding the local community. Michael Buchanan finds a team of volunteers there battling to deal with the pandemic.\n\nThe family shuffled quietly past a crate of milk cartons. They came through the small porch, towards the open coffin. Inside was a woman - a loved one - who died of Covid two days ago. The coffin sat feet away from tins and packets to be distributed by the local food bank. The milk was the latest delivery.\n\nIt is impossible to capture the enormous consequences of the pandemic. But last Saturday lunchtime, this tragic image - one of grief and hardship coming together - came close, for me at least.\n\nCovid-19 has made extraordinary demands of so many different people, but what is currently happening at the Masjid Ibrahim and Islamic Centre in east London is truly remarkable. Situated on a busy road, with the noise of ambulance sirens regularly shattering its peaceful interior, the mosque has closed to communal prayer and is open for two other purposes - to provide a funeral service and a food bank to the local community. Both are inundated.\n\n\"We've had so many bodies coming in. It's quite shocking. It's one after another after another. We've never had that situation before,\" says Sofia Bhatti. Alongside her friend, Tabassum Khokhar - known as Tabs - the pair are unheralded heroes. They volunteer to wash the bodies of Covid-positive women prior to burial.\n\nThe practice, called Ghusl, is a sacred Islamic ritual and is usually performed by the deceased's relatives, who cleanse and shroud the body. But Covid restrictions mean families are currently denied that religious honour, so volunteers like Sofia and Tabs are taking on what they consider to be a privileged task.\n\n\"We actually believe that when we are shrouding here, that God is shrouding the soul at the same time,\" says Tabs, standing by a coffin. By day, she works as a teaching support worker in a local school, so the PPE that the mosque provides - bodysuit, footwear, two sets of gloves, masks and visors - is crucial for her. \"I make sure my PPE is secure because it's not just about me, it's about my family. I have an 81-year-old mother.\"\n\nThe women are seeing first hand - and in graphic detail - the pressure the NHS is under. \"Very often we see bodies coming in with a lot of medical equipment still attached to them,\" says Sofia. \"Tubes and pipes and catheters still attached. So it makes our job a little bit harder.\" One of the women they washed during my visit had died in the ambulance, never actually reaching hospital.\n\nVery often we see bodies coming in with a lot of medical equipment still attached to them. Tubes and pipes and catheters\n\nThere are far more bodies than during the first peak and there is a larger age range. One day this week, the mosque was handling seven bodies. A few days earlier they said they'd processed 10 funerals, all arranged for free and paid for by donations. Before the pandemic, they'd handled two to three funerals a week. The two local hospital trusts in east London have each had more than 1,000 Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic. More have died at home.\n\nThe borough of Newham, where the mosque sits, has suffered a disproportionate number of deaths. Home to the Olympic Park, the 2012 London games were meant to regenerate this area. Yet it retains high levels of poverty and overcrowded housing. Add in a diverse population, rich in south Asian culture, and large numbers of people who can't work from home and the virus has sadly ripped through its residents.\n\nIsfand Aslam said he's shocked by what's going on. His father, Mohammad, died on 3 January, a week after falling ill. His positive Covid test result arrived two days after his death. The 85-year-old was a committee member at the Masjid Ibrahim and despite his age had been in good health. \"It took a week between him passing away and getting buried. Initially I was getting a lot of condolences from friends. But by the end of that week I am giving condolences to three friends because their fathers had passed away. It's now got to the stage where everybody we know knows somebody who has passed away.\"\n\nThe sheer number of deaths is impacting the area's main Muslim cemetery. Normally, the Gardens of Peace buries three to four people each day. They're currently carrying out an average of 15 funerals daily. Overall, they are about 50% busier than usual. They can no longer promise burials within 24 hours, as per Muslim custom.\n\nDespite this, there is still a concerning number of people in the local area who either don't think Covid is real or are resistant to taking a vaccine. There was anger among some community leaders before Christmas when it emerged the Bangladeshi High Commission in London held a cultural evening to celebrate its independence. Photos from the event, on 16 December, showed a group - including the High Commissioner herself - standing close together with no masks or social distancing. The High Commission said performers had been Covid tested and it had issued 10 videos in Bangla urging British-Bangladeshis to adhere to UK government guidance.\n\nIt's now got to the stage where everybody we know knows somebody who has passed away\n\nTo counter disinformation among its members, an imam at the Masjid Ibrahim, Mohammad Ammar, filmed a short video of himself being injected with the vaccine and urged his congregation to follow suit. Imam Ammar has actually been furloughed by the mosque as it focusses all its resources on battling the pandemic, including feeding its local community.\n\nThe virus forced the mosque to open a food bank in March. It is still running 10 months on. On Monday night, I watched a steady stream of people gather in the gloom at the rear of the mosque to fill their bags. Most were collecting on behalf of a larger household, and the mosque says they're currently feeding 350 families each week, including students, refugees, people with no access to public funds and those who've lost income.\n\nAmong those collecting food on Monday was Mohammad Rahman. A 42-year-old chef, he lost his job in an Indian restaurant three months ago. The married father of two boys - aged eight and six - told me he was already in rent arrears and struggling to pay his energy bills. \"My son says 'where is the pizza'? But I have no money. He says '[can I have] chicken and chips'? But I have no money. The shops are open, but no money\", he adds, taking his hands from his pockets.\n\nIn normal times, the Masjid Ibrahim would attract about 1,100 worshippers over three floors for Friday prayers, and there has been some pressure on the leadership to reopen for communal worship. But Asim Uddin, chairman of the mosque, says now is not the time. \"Prayers, yes, it's important. But right now what is the need? The need of the community is they want to be fed and they want a place where they can respectfully bury their loved ones. And the demand is overwhelming. Right now, it's better they stay home, and they can pray at home until the situation goes back to normal.\"\n\nMichael Buchanan is the BBC's social affairs correspondent and has been reporting on the impact of the pandemic on communities in the UK. Last year, he visited the town of Pontypool to find out what impact coronavirus restrictions were having in Wales.", "Reports suggest AstraZeneca may have warned of a 60% cut to doses available\n\nA second coronavirus vaccine manufacturer has warned of supply issues to the European Union, compounding frustration in the bloc.\n\nAstraZeneca said a production problem meant the number of initial doses available would be lower than expected.\n\nThe fresh blow comes after some nations' inoculation programmes were slowed due to a cut in deliveries of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.\n\nThe EU Health Commissioner expressed \"deep dissatisfaction\" at the news.\n\nOfficials have not confirmed publicly how big the shortfall will be, but an unnamed EU official told Reuters news agency that deliveries would be reduced to 31m - a cut of 60% - in the first quarter of this year.\n\nThe drug firm had been set to deliver about 80 million doses to the 27 nations by March, according to the official who spoke to Reuters.\n\nThe AstraZeneca vaccine, developed with Oxford University, has not yet been approved by the EU's drug regulator but is expected to get the green light at the end of this month, paving the way for jabs to be given.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Stella Kyriakides This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA spokesman for AstraZeneca said on Friday that \"initial volumes will be lower than originally anticipated\" without giving further details.\n\nHis written statement blamed the discrepancy on \"reduced yields at a manufacturing site within our European supply chain\" and said the firm was continuing to ramp up production volumes.\n\nNews of the delay comes amid criticism and frustration across the region about the speed of vaccination roll-outs.\n\nIsrael, the United Arab Emirates, the UK, and the US are all well ahead of EU nations in terms of doses given per capita so far.\n\nThe European Commission has co-ordinated orders for all member states, with vaccines then distributed based on their population size.\n\nVaccines are increasingly seen by experts as the only way out of the Covid-19 crisis, with many European nations struggling to cope with a deadly surge of the virus over the winter period.\n\nAustrian media have reported that only 600,000 of two million AstraZeneca doses promised by the end of March will arrive in the country on time, with the remaining 1.4m now being delivered in April.\n\nA delay would be \"completely unacceptable\", Austrian Health Minister Rudolf Anschober said on Friday.\n\nAs for Pfizer, the US firm said it had to cut shipments for the next few weeks while it worked to increase capacity at its Belgian processing plant. The EU has ordered 600 million doses from Pfizer.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Ursula von der Leyen This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSome regions, including Germany's most populous state North-Rhine Westphalia and parts of Italy, said earlier this week that they were suspending giving first jabs of the two-dose vaccine because of the shortages.\n\nItaly and Poland have threatened to take legal action in response to the reduction in vaccine supply.\n\nMeanwhile Hungary's government, which has complained over the time it is taking EU regulators to approve the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, has reached a deal with Russia to buy up large quantities of its Sputnik V vaccine, even though it has not received EU approval.\n\nEuropean Council President Charles Michel, who led a call of EU leaders this week, said Thursday that officials were considering all ideas to try and stop future vaccine delays.\n\n\"All possible means will be examined to ensure rapid supply, including early distribution to avoid delays,\" he said.\n\nEuropean Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Mr Michel both say they are still aiming for the target of 70% of the EU population being vaccinated by summer.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid vaccine safety: How does a vaccine get approved?\n\nThe total number of German Covid deaths climbed above 50,000 on Friday - a day after the country warned that it could close its borders if other EU countries were less strict in controlling the virus. Berlin sounded the alarm amid rising concern about new variants.\n\nEU leaders agreed late on Thursday to keep their internal borders open but warned non-essential travel might need to be restricted to curb the spread of the virus.\n\nMs von der Leyen said Thursday that more testing and \"targeted measures\" were needed throughout the EU in order to keep internal and external borders open.\n\nFor its part, France said it would impose tighter travel restrictions for European arrivals from Sunday, requiring a negative PCR Covid test within three days of travel.\n\nIn the Netherlands, a ban on all flights from the UK, South Africa and South American countries came into effect on Saturday to try and prevent new coronavirus variants gaining a foothold.\n\nLooking forward to the future, officials from EU nations reliant on tourism - including Spain and Greece - have floated the possibility of using vaccination certificates to allow for cross-border travel but there has been scepticism within the bloc.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Infection level \"very, very high\" and \"extremely precarious\" - Prof Whitty\n\nThe UK is at an \"extremely precarious\" point, according to the chief medical adviser, despite signs Covid infections are beginning to fall.\n\nThe virus's reproduction rate is estimated to be at or below one for the first time since early December.\n\nAnything below one means the epidemic is shrinking.\n\nBut cases are falling from a \"very, very high level\", Prof Chris Whitty said - and may still be increasing in some areas.\n\n\"A very small change and it could start taking off again from an extremely high base,\" he warned.\n\nSpeaking at a Number 10 press conference on Friday evening, the UK's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said the \"awful\" death rate would stay high \"for a little while before it starts coming down\".\n\n\"That was always what was predicted...and I think the information about the new variant doesn't change that\".\n\nEarly evidence suggests the variant of coronavirus that emerged in the UK may be more deadly, although findings are preliminary and there is a high level of uncertainty.\n\nDr Susan Hopkins at Public Health England said there was \"evidence from some but not all data sources which suggests that the variant of concern which was first detected in the UK may lead to a higher risk of death than the non-variant.\n\n\"Evidence on this variant is still emerging and more work is under way to fully understand how it behaves.\"\n\nThe Department of Health and Social Care said while the UK's R or reproduction number, might be below one - meaning a shrinking epidemic - overall, \"cases remain dangerously high and...it is essential that everyone continues to stay at home, whether they have had the vaccine or not.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures suggested cases were decreasing slightly or levelling off across Britain.\n\nBut infections are falling more slowly than they did during the first lockdown - by somewhere around a quarter every fortnight compared with a halving back in April.\n\nA further 40,261 cases, and 1,401 deaths were recorded on Friday in the UK.\n\nMore than five million people had been given a first dose of the vaccine by 21 January, and about half a million had received their second dose.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has previously said it is \"too early\" to say whether England's Covid restrictions will be able to end in the spring.\n\nWhile cases are falling or stable across the rest of the UK, in Northern Ireland cases have continued to rise and the new, more infectious strain has overtaken the older variant of the virus as of the start of January.\n\nDuring the week ending 16 January, about one in 55 people in England had the virus, the ONS estimated, with one in 35 in London testing positive.\n\nOne in 100 people had the virus in Scotland and one in 70 in Wales.\n\nBut in Northern Ireland infections have shot up from an an estimated one in 200 people testing positive in the week to 2 January, to one in 60 last week.\n\nONS statistician Sarah Crofts said while fewer people were testing positive in England, \"rates remain high and we estimate the level of infection is still over one million people\".\n\nAnd, she pointed out, \"the picture across the UK is mixed\".\n\nA survey by tech company ZOE and King's College London, based on swabs of people with and without symptoms, also suggested the R number could be at 0.8.\n\nAnd it estimated symptomatic cases had fallen by a quarter since last week.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What is the R number and what does it mean?\n\nMeanwhile, the proportion of people testing positive for the new Covid variant has risen considerably in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, ONS data suggest.\n\nBut the new strain, which remains by far the main source of infections in England, has yet to overtake the old strain in Scotland and Wales.\n\nWithin England, the proportion of infections that appear to be due to the new variant remained stable, but the gap between the regions is narrowing.\n\nIn the figures covering 2 January, 80% of infections looked like the new variant in London compared to 30% in the North East.\n\nTwo weeks later, that gap had narrowed to 70% in London versus 50% in the North East.\n\nIt is not clear what is behind the small fall in London, but it may be down to behaviour change, or other variants like the South Africa strain now in circulation and diluting the numbers.", "Morriston is seeing \"unprecedented\" numbers of people die in intensive care\n\nAn intensive care consultant said as many as five patients are dying with Covid during a single 12-hour shift.\n\nDr John Gorst said the number was \"unprecedented\" at his unit in Swansea's Morriston Hospital that would normally only see one person die.\n\nHe said the second wave of the pandemic was more challenging with patients more severely unwell.\n\nIn Wales, there has been an average of about 34 deaths a day during the pandemic up to 19 January.\n\nNew Year's Day saw the most Covid-related deaths in a single day in Wales - 55 - since the pandemic began.\n\n\"In some 12-hour periods we have lost up to five coronavirus patients,\" said Dr Gorst.\n\n\"Usually we expect to see, on average, one patient a day dying in the intensive care unit. To have five die on one day is unprecedented.\n\n\"That's been a real struggle for their families and for the staff dealing with it.\"\n\nFour additional medical wards have opened to cope with the impact of coronavirus at Morriston, with about 300 patients being treated.\n\nDr John Gorst and senior matron Carol Doggett say Covid patients are sicker and younger in the second wave\n\nDr Gorst said: \"If it wasn't for the treatment given on the wards, intensive care would have been completely overwhelmed.\n\n\"However, when patients have failed on these treatments, sadly the safety net of the intensive care unit [and] getting them on an invasive ventilator, largely doesn't work.\n\n\"Most patients who come to intensive care to go on an intensive ventilator, sadly, will not survive.\n\n\"These patients are mostly of working age. They don't have any significant medical conditions.\"\n\n\"This is alien to us as an intensive care unit. We expect far more patients to survive. Now they are not.\"\n\nMorriston's senior matron Carol Doggett agreed that the \"number of sicker patients has definitely increased\", and she said they were younger than had been experienced in the first wave of the pandemic.\n\n\"That should be a stark warning to anyone not to take chances with this,\" she said.\n\nOn Friday, First Minister Mark Drakeford said there was cause for concern over new variants of Covid-19.\n\n\"We know the new highly contagious strain - sometimes called the Kent variant - is now widespread across Wales,\" he said.\n\nHe also said the government was closely monitoring three new variant variants: one from South Africa and two from Brazil.\n\nSix cases of the South African variant have been identified in Wales.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Police tweeted this photo, which appears to show the vehicle severely damaged in the crash\n\nFour ponies have been killed in a collision with a vehicle in the New Forest National Park.\n\nThe animals were hit on Thursday night while licking freshly laid salt on Roger Penny Way, Hampshire Constabulary said.\n\nThree ponies died at the scene while a fourth was found dead later a short distance away.\n\nIn December, three donkeys were killed on the road, which is a black spot for animal accidents.\n\nMark Ferrett, whose daughter owned the ponies, said the deaths were \"unacceptable\"\n\nThe crash happened at about 21:00 GMT on a 40mph (64km/h) section of the road north of Brook.\n\nThe car, a Land Rover Discovery, appears to have been severely damaged in the collision, according to a police tweet, which gave no further details.\n\nMark Ferrett, whose daughter owned the ponies, said the deaths were \"unacceptable\".\n\nHe said: \"I would favour a reduction in the speed [limit]. Please, everyone needs to slow down and stop this carnage.\"\n\nThe New Forest is one of the largest remaining areas of unenclosed land where commoners' cattle, ponies and donkeys roam throughout the open heath.\n\nIn 2019, 58 animals were killed and 32 were injured, according to the New Forest National Park Authority.\n\nThe crash happened on Roger Penny Way, where donkeys, cattle and horses roam freely\n\nAndrew Napthine, a New Forest Agister who helps manage the area's free-roaming animals, attended the scene of the crash, and said the male driver was not injured.\n\nHe said three of the ponies were killed on the road while a fourth fled the scene and died behind a bush.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The UK has reported another 55,892 daily cases of coronavirus, the highest figure on record.\n\nAnd another 964 people died within 28 days of a positive test, only slightly down on the 981 on Wednesday.\n\nIt comes as Health Secretary Matt Hancock appealed to everyone to \"take personal responsibility this New Year's Eve and stay at home\".\n\nHe said he knew how much had been sacrificed this year but, with the NHS under pressure, \"we cannot let up\".\n\nOn Thursday, just after midnight, 20 million more people in England were placed under the toughest restrictions and told to stay at home.\n\nThe new restrictions mean 44 million people, or 78% of the population of England, are now in tier four, where non-essential shops, gyms, cinemas and hairdressers have to stay shut.\n\nPublic Health England medical director Dr Yvonne Doyle said Christmas week had seen a worrying rise in cases - particularly among adults in their 20s and 30s.\n\n\"We have all had to make huge sacrifices this year, but please ensure that you keep your distance from others, wash your hands and wear a mask,\" she said.\n\n\"A night in at new year will mean you are significantly reducing your social contacts and can help stop the spread of the virus.\"\n\nThe 981 deaths recorded on Wednesday was the highest daily figure since April.\n\nMuch of the rise in cases has been blamed on the spread of a new variant, which scientists believe is able to transmit more easily.\n\nIt was initially concentrated in the London, the South East and eastern England, but Mr Hancock has said it is now responsible for the \"majority\" of new cases across the UK.\n\nWith the number of Covid patients in hospitals increasing, some are being moved long distances for intensive care.\n\nDr Michael Marsh, NHS England medical director for the south-west region, said patients had come from Kent to Plymouth and Bristol, where services were \"less stretched\".\n\nThe latest NHS Test and Trace figures show 232,169 people tested positive for Covid in England at least once in the week to 23 December, up 33% on the previous week and the highest weekly rise on record.\n\nCovid case rates are continuing to rise in all regions of England - with London's rate at 735.5 per 100,000 people in the seven days to 27 December, up from 711.9 the previous week, the latest Public Health England report showed.\n\nEastern England saw the second highest rate, 551.3 up from 510.8, followed by south-east England at 450.6, up from 427.4.\n\nMeanwhile, Scotland recorded 2,622 new Covid cases in the past 24 hours - a record high for the third day in a row.\n\nPublic Health Wales reported a further 1,831 cases in Wales, with the highest case rates in Bridgend (825.6 for every 100,000 people) and Merthyr Tydfil (754.2).\n\nAnd Northern Ireland has seen another 1,929 cases in the last 24 hours, as hospitals come close to capacity with latest figures showing only six empty beds.\n\nSome hospital trusts in the south of England have also been reporting that they are under extreme pressure because of increasing numbers of Covid patients.\n\nOn Wednesday, Essex and Buckinghamshire declared major incidents, while an intensive care doctor at London's Whittington Hospital said they were facing a \"tsunami\" of Covid cases.\n\nProf Hugh Montgomery said people who did not follow social distancing rules or wear masks \"have blood on their hands\".\n\nThe NHS said London's Nightingale Hospital had been \"reactivated\" and was ready to admit patients, in anticipation of rising pressures from the spread of the new variant.", "Officers dispersed the party at the Grade II* listed church before midnight\n\nA 500-year-old church was damaged during an illegal New Year's Eve party at the venue.\n\nAll Saints' Church in East Horndon, near Brentwood, was broken into before crowds entered, Essex Police said.\n\nOfficers were threatened and had objects thrown at them as they dispersed hundreds of people and seized equipment, the force said.\n\nTwo men from Harlow, aged 27 and 22, and a 35-year-old from Southwark were arrested.\n\nThey were held on suspicion of public order and drugs offences.\n\nAstrid Gillespie, a volunteer with the Friends of All Saints', said event organisers had smashed a window to put in an extractor fan unit and wired sound equipment into the church's fuse box.\n\nShe said: \"It was a professional set-up, they'd hired portable loos, they had a bar area where you had to exchange tokens... obviously it's a mess.\n\n\"It's such a beautiful church, to find out it's been damaged is devastating.\"\n\nThe conservation group believes it will cost at least £1,000 to repair the Tudor building.\n\nEquipment was seized and fines issued over three illegal parties broken up by officers\n\nPolice later dispersed about 100 people at an illegal party at an abandoned warehouse in Brentwood and made two arrests.\n\nA woman was also fined £10,000 for organising a house party with 100 guests at Bury Road, Sewardstonebury, in Epping Forest.\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Andy Prophet said: \"Unfortunately, there were [those] who decided to blatantly flout the coronavirus rules and regulations and, ultimately, they decided that partying was more important than protecting other people.\n\n\"We've seized their equipment, arrested five people, and issued a large number of fines to those who think this behaviour is acceptable.\"\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "Father (left) and son have had divergent views on Brexit in the past\n\nThe father of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he is applying for French citizenship now that Britain has severed ties with the European Union.\n\nStanley Johnson told France's RTL radio he had always seen himself as French as his mother was born in France.\n\nThe 80-year-old former Conservative Member of the European Parliament voted Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum.\n\nHis son Boris spearheaded the Leave campaign and later took the UK out of the EU as prime minister.\n\nStanley Johnson explained his reasons for seeking French citizenship in an interview broadcast on Thursday, hours before the UK was due to leave EU trading rules.\n\n\"It's not about becoming French,\" he told RTL. \"It's about reclaiming what I already have.\"\n\nHe pointed out that his mother was born in France to a French mother. \"I will always be European,\" he added.\n\nStanley Johnson won a seat in the European Parliament when direct elections were first held in 1979, and later worked for the European Commission. As a result, Boris spent part of his childhood in Brussels.\n\nBrexit issues have divided the Johnson family. The prime minister's sister, the journalist Rachel Johnson, left the Conservative Party to join the Liberal Democrats ahead of the 2017 election in protest against Brexit.\n\nTheir brother, the Conservative MP Jo Johnson, resigned from the cabinet in 2018 to highlight his support for closer links with the EU.", "Tampon tax activist Laura Coryton says scrapping the tampon tax is an important move ‘ending a symptom of sexism’\n\nThe 5% rate of VAT on sanitary products - referred to as the \"tampon tax\" - will be abolished in the UK from 1 January.\n\nEU law required members to tax tampons and sanitary towels at 5%, treating period products as non-essential.\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak committed to scrapping the tax in his March Budget.\n\nCampaigners welcomed the end to what they called a \"sexist tax\" with activist Laura Coryton saying it was \"about ending a symptom of sexism\".\n\nThe UK was able to get rid of the tax now because it is no longer subject to European Union rules on sanitary products.\n\nThe EU is itself in the process of abolishing the tampon tax. In 2018 the European Commission published proposals to change the VAT rules, which would give countries the right to stop taxing tampons and other period products, but the move has not yet been agreed by all members. The Republic of Ireland has zero VAT on sanitary products as the rate was in place prior to EU legislation imposing the 5% minimum VAT rate on EU members.\n\nMs Coryton, 27, who began campaigning to end the tampon tax when she was 21, told the BBC the move \"challenged the negative message that this tax sent to society about women\".\n\nThe move follows Scotland becoming the first in the world to make period products free in November.\n\nFelicia Willow, chief executive of women's rights charity the Fawcett Society, agreed, saying: \"It's been a long road to reach this point, but at last the sexist tax that saw sanitary products classed as non-essential, luxury items can be consigned to the history books.\"\n\nThe Treasury has estimated the move will save the average woman nearly £40 over her lifetime, with a cut of 7p on a pack of 20 tampons and 5p on 12 pads.\n\nIt's been a long road to getting the tampon tax abolished in the UK. Campaigning and debates in parliament by then-MP for Dewsbury Ann Taylor led to the Labour government moving sanitary products to a reduced rate of 5% from January 2001- the lowest rate possible under the EU's VAT rules.\n\nAnd following more campaigning in 2014 by Ms Coryton and lobbying in parliament by former Dewsbury MP Paula Sherriff in 2016, the Conservative government announced that all VAT collected on sanitary products would henceforth be given to charities working with vulnerable women and girls.\n\nAt the same time, the government enshrined in legislation that it would abolish the tampon tax.\n\n\"I'm just so happy and relieved and excited at the same time for this tax to finally be axed,\" said Ms Coryton.\n\n\"It will mean a reduction in prices for period products, and that reduction in cost will be important for the increasing number of people who are battling with poverty, especially due to the pandemic.\"\n\nGemma Abbott is a lawyer and campaigner with the Free Periods group, which successfully campaigned for the government to provide free sanitary products to schools and colleges across England in 2019. The scheme launched in January.\n\nGemma Abbott wants clarity from the government on why the free sanitary products for schools scheme is not mandatory\n\n\"I think it's great news and a real testament to the determined campaigning of many people, like Paula Sheriff and Laura Coryton,\" she said.\n\n\"I think we can agree that any tax that characterises period products as non-essential is absurd and it has no place in a society that is seeking genuine gender equality.\"\n\nFree Periods is now campaigning to ensure that schools and colleges know that the free sanitary products scheme exists and that they sign up for them.\n\nMs Abbott said: \"The latest statistics we have are from last term - at that point only 40% of schools had signed up for the scheme.\"\n\nMs Coryton has set up a social enterprise called Sex Ed Matters with her sister Julia, providing talks in schools and toolkits for teachers to help them deliver the mandatory new sex education curriculum for primary and secondary schools issued in early 2020.\n\nThey did an online survey of 150 teachers and students across the UK, and 100% of respondents said that there is still a stigma attached to periods.\n\n\"If there is a stigma attached to periods, then you're unlikely to speak up when you need period products, or to talk about the free sanitary products scheme that exists,\" stressed Ms Coryton.\n\nBut Free Periods' Ms Abbott is also concerned about the charities supporting women and girls, who will no longer benefit from the proceeds of the previous 5% tax on sanitary products.\n\n\"The tampon tax fund has provided much needed support and funding to a chronically underfunded area,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm worried that the removal of the tampon tax will spell the end of the ring-fenced funding for charities to address really vital issues like domestic violence and rape.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Olympics\n\nThe delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics will go ahead this summer despite concern over rising coronavirus cases, says Japan's prime minister.\n\nThe Olympics are due to begin on 23 July with the Paralympics following a month later from 24 August.\n\nCases have surged in Japan in recent days with Tokyo reporting over 1,000 daily infections for the first time.\n\nBut prime minister Yoshihide Suga said the \"Games will be held this summer\" and be \"safe and secure\".\n\nJapan is responding to cases of the new variant of coronavirus first found in the UK, with Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike warning the number of infections could \"explode\".\n\nThere were a record 1,337 cases in Tokyo on 31 December with 783 new infections announced on Friday.\n\nJapan has recorded 239,041 coronavirus cases and 3,337 deaths during the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.\n\nCosts for the Games have increased by $2.8bn (£2.1bn) because of measures needed to prevent the spread of coronavirus but organisers have ruled out a delay.\n\nThe Games could be the most expensive summer Olympics in history.\n\nA poll by national broadcaster NHK showed that the majority of the Japanese general public oppose holding the Games in 2021, favouring a further delay or outright cancellation of the event.\n\nSuga said the Games going ahead could serve as a \"symbol of global solidarity\".", "The next few weeks will be \"nail-bitingly difficult\" for the NHS, hospital bosses have warned.\n\nStaff absences and the new Covid variant are creating a \"challenging situation\", Saffron Cordery, of NHS Providers, which represents hospital trusts in England, said.\n\nDoctors are urging the public to \"take it seriously and follow the rules\" to protect the health service.\n\nThe year started with 53,285 more Covid cases and 613 deaths being reported.\n\nThe day's figures do not include data from Northern Ireland or Wales, or the numbers of deaths from Scotland - as these are not being published on certain days during the Christmas and New Year period.\n\nIt comes after the UK reported its highest daily cases on Thursday, with a record 55,892 infections.\n\nOn Friday evening, the government confirmed that all primary schools in London would remain closed for the start of the new term, following a review of Covid transmission rates.\n\nFrom Monday, all schools in the capital will now be required to provide remote learning.\n\nPrimaries in nine London boroughs and the City of London district had been set to reopen - while those in the remaining 23 boroughs would have stayed closed from 4 January.\n\nMeanwhile, new analysis by Imperial College London has confirmed the new variant of coronavirus has a much quicker rate of transmission than the original strain.\n\nAnd an analysis of NHS England data from 23 hospital trusts by the Health Service Journal shows that Covid-19 is putting intense pressure on adult acute care and general beds, as well as those in intensive care.\n\nIt found that more than a third of these beds were occupied by patients with Covid-19 on Tuesday, and in three trusts - North Middlesex in London, and Medway and Dartford and Gravesham in Kent - the figure was more than half.\n\nBased on the recent rise in numbers, the analysis suggests that all acute and general beds might soon be filled with Covid-19 patients.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Breakfast, Ms Cordery said the surging transmission and death rates were \"incredibly hard to deal with\".\n\n\"When we are seeing major London trusts saying they are under pressure, that's when we know we're in a very challenging space,\" she said.\n\nA leading intensive care doctor has urged people to follow restrictions until the vaccination programme is fully rolled out.\n\nProf Anthony Gordon, of Imperial College, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"There is light at the end of the tunnel so I would urge people to hold on for these few more months while the vaccination programme makes that difference and then we can truly get back to normal.\n\n\"But we can't overrun the health service because this will just lead to thousands more deaths.\"\n\nAdrian Boyle, vice-president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, urged people to follow guidance on hand washing, social distancing and face coverings to stop the \"entirely preventable\" spread of the virus.\n\nDr Boyle said staff are \"tired\" and at risk of \"burnout\", having \"worked really hard over the summer\" and \"put up with a lot of disruption\".\n\n\"This time people are frustrated, this is now an entirely preventable disease, we know what we did in spring made a lot of this go away. There's also now a vaccine,\" he added.\n\nMore than three-quarters of England is currently under the strictest tier four - \"stay at home\" - coronavirus measures, and other parts of the country have joined higher tiers.\n\nMainland Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are under lockdown.\n\nThere are also concerns the added pressures of rising numbers of Covid patients seen at London hospitals have begun to spread across the country.\n\nSpeaking on Today, Dr Alison Pittard, of the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine, said it was \"only a matter of time before it starts to spread to other parts of country\", adding that \"we're already starting to see that\".\n\nShe stressed it was \"really important that we try and stop the transmission in the community because that translates into hospital admissions\".\n\nIt comes as almost half the major hospital trusts in England are said to be dealing with more Covid-19 patients than at the peak of the first wave in April.\n\nAnd pressure has been so great on some hospitals in London and south-east England that some patients have been moved out of the area.\n\nLondon's Nightingale emergency hospital is ready to admit patients, the NHS has said, while other sites currently not in use are being readied.\n\nHowever, Mike Adams, director of the Royal College of Nursing, questioned whether there were the staff available to run the hospital.\n\n\"Nursing is already stretched beyond capacity so there is no magic pile of nurses we can call upon,\" he told BBC Radio 4's World at One programme.\n\n\"I think the real battle is reducing the spread of the virus and getting the vaccine rolled out.\"\n\nThe new coronavirus variant has driven a big rise in cases, with the worst effects felt so far in London.\n\nResearchers at Imperial College London have confirmed it increases the R number - the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to - by about 0.4 to 0.7.\n\nThe UK's latest R number has been estimated at between 1.1 and 1.3. It needs to be below 1.0 for the number of cases to start falling.\n\nProf Axel Gandy, from the statistic section of Imperial College London, told the Today programme this higher rate of infection means that transmission of the disease would have tripled even during England's November lockdown conditions.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. BBC's Laura Foster explains how to wear your mask correctly and help stop coronavirus spreading\n\nThe hunt is now on to find new ways to slow the spread of coronavirus, with the rules on mask wearing potentially coming up for review.\n\nBehavioural science group SPI-B (Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours), which reports to the Sage group of government advisers, has said that mandatory face coverings may be necessary in a wider number of settings, such as in workplaces and possibly outdoors.\n\nHowever, Dr Simon Clarke, associate professor of cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, told BBC Radio 4's World at One he was not convinced a move towards making the wearing of face coverings mandatory outdoors would make \"much difference\" to transmission rates.\n\nHe said the \"bigger problem\" was people touching their face covering or wearing it incorrectly, adding ministers should focus on ensuring people knew how to wear them and to change and wash them regularly.\n\nThe rollout of the newly approved Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will begin on Monday, almost a month after the Pfizer-BioNTech jab.\n\nSecond doses of either will now take place within 12 weeks rather than 21 days as had been initially planned with the Pfizer vaccine.", "After years of silence, The KLF have uploaded a selection of their most famous songs to streaming services like Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music.\n\nThe band's music has been officially unavailable since 1992, when they deleted their entire back catalogue.\n\nBut eight songs, including dance anthems like 3AM Eternal and What Time Is Love, are now available on an eight-track compilation, Solid State Logik.\n\nFly posters in London suggested The KLF would release more music this year.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by KLF This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nSolid State Logik collects all of the band's biggest hits - including the Tammy Wynette collaboration Justified & Ancient, and the Gary Glitter-sampling Doctorin' The Tardis.\n\nIt comes 29 years after founders Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond turned their backs on music, with a provocative performance at the 1992 Brit Awards - where they tied for best group with Simply Red.\n\nThe duo made their disdain for the industry clear by performing 3AM Eternal while firing blanks from a machine gun into the stunned audience, before an announcer said: \"The KLF have left the music business.\"\n\nDriving the point home, they later dumped a dead sheep on the steps of an after-show party with a note reading, \"I died for ewe\".\n\nCauty and Drummond later burned £1m of their royalties in bundles of £50 notes, on the remote Scottish island of Jura.\n\nIn recent decades the duo have concentrated on book and art projects, including plans to build a \"people's pyramid\", inspired by the death of Cauty's brother and constructed from bricks, each containing 23 grams of human ashes.\n\nBut fans have clamoured for their music - with bootleg clips of their videos and performances achieving tens of millions of views on YouTube, and several \"sound-alike\" versions of their biggest hits appearing on Spotify.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video 2 by KLF This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nWhen other streaming holdouts like AC/DC and Neil Young relented and made their back catalogues available, The KLF still held out. In 2018, Billboard named their absence as one of the eight most significant gaps on streaming services, alongside records by De La Soul and Aaliyah.\n\nThe band announced their surprise resurrection in two posters pasted under a railway bridge in Shoreditch, East London, alongside graffiti referencing The KLF.\n\nThe Instagram account of Cauty's girlfriend showed a figure creating the graffiti creating the graffiti on New Year's Eve.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by sistersofperpetualresistance This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAccording to a statement on the band's YouTube page, Solid State Logik (named after the mixing desk the band used to create their biggest hits) is the first of five planned releases, covering all of the band's releases, under a variety of names.\n\nIt read: \"KLF have appropriated the work done between 1 January 1987 and 31 December 1991 by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The Timelords [and] The KLF.\n\n\"This appropriation was in order to tell a story in five chapters using the medium of streaming. The name of the story is Samplecity Thru Transcentral.\"\n\nThe text goes on to name several projects that are being prepared for release, some of which have never been heard before, including Kick Out The Jams, the Pure Trance Series, and a second volume of Solid State Logik.\n\n\"If you need to know more about the work done by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The Timelords or The KLF, you can find truths, rumours and half-truths scattered across the internet,\" the statement continued.\n\n\"From these truths, rumours and half-truths, you can form your own opinions.\n\n\"The actual facts were washed down a storm drain in Brixton some time in the late 20th Century.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "The UK celebrated the start of 2021 with a fireworks and light display over London that included tributes to NHS staff and the Black Lives Matter movement.\n\nRevellers were not able to gather to celebrate the London mayor's display in the usual way because of the coronavirus pandemic, with people instead told to stay at home.\n\nThe new year celebrations also featured a message of hope from David Attenborough.\n\nWatch the full display on the BBC iPlayer", "The star started filming his role in secret last year\n\nComedian John Bishop is to join Jodie Whittaker for the 13th series of Doctor Who, the BBC has revealed.\n\nThe 54-year-old, who recently tested positive for coronavirus, said boarding the Tardis was a \"dream come true\".\n\nHe will play a character called Dan, who \"becomes embroiled in the Doctor's adventures\" and faces \"evil alien races beyond his wildest nightmares\".\n\nBishop fills the gap left by Bradley Walsh and Tosin Cole, who bowed out in a special New Year's Day episode.\n\nHe began filming his role last November, but the BBC kept the signing under wraps until the broadcast of Revolution Of The Daleks on Friday night.\n\nBishop, who grew up on a Merseyside council estate, had a brief career as a professional footballer before turning his hand to comedy.\n\nHe has previously acted in the Channel 4 drama Skins and the Ken Loach film Route Irish.\n\nEarlier this week, the comedian revealed that he and his wife had tested positive for Coronavirus over Christmas, saying he had been \"flattened\" by \"the worst illness I have ever had\".\n\nWriting on Instagram, he described his symptoms as including \"incredible headaches, muscle and joint point, no appetite, nausea, dizziness [and] chronic fatigue like I didn't know existed\".\n\nHe updated fans on New Year's Eve, saying he and his wife were \"getting a little stronger\" every day, and promising he would return to work in January.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by johnbish100 This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIt is not thought his illness will disrupt production on Doctor Who. The show is on a scheduled break for Christmas and not due to resume filming until later this month.\n\nThe 13th series of the rebooted sci-fi stalwart will see Whittaker return as the extra terrestrial Time Lord, alongside Mandip Gill, who returns as Yaz.\n\nIn a statement, Bishop said: \"If I could tell my younger self that one day I would be asked to step on board the Tardis, I would never have believed it.\n\n\"It's an absolute dream come true to be joining Doctor Who and I couldn't wish for better company than Jodie and Mandip.\"\n\nJodie Whittaker became the first female actress to play The Doctor in 2017\n\nProgramme boss Chris Chibnall added: \"It's time for the next chapter of Doctor Who, and it starts with a man called Dan. Oh, we've had to keep this one secret for a long, long time.\n\n\"Our conversations started with John even before the pandemic hit.\n\n\"The character of Dan was built for him, and it's a joy to have him aboard the Tardis.\"\n\nDoctor Who will return to BBC One later this year.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson is one of five men who have been rebailed by police\n\nLiverpool Mayor Joe Anderson says he will not fight for re-election in May due to an ongoing bribery and witness intimidation investigation.\n\nMr Anderson, 62, made the announcement after Merseyside Police said he had been rebailed until February following his arrest earlier this month.\n\nHe tweeted he was \"disappointed\" with the police decision as he had \"provided all of the information they asked for\".\n\nHe said it was in the Labour Party's best interests to pick a new candidate.\n\nMr Anderson was arrested on 4 December, along with four other men, on suspicion of conspiracy to commit bribery and witness intimidation.\n\nThe year-long investigation, Operation Aloft, has focused on a number of building and development contracts in Liverpool.\n\nFollowing his arrest, Mr Anderson said he was \"stepping away from decision-making\" and would take unpaid leave while the police investigation continued.\n\nThe Labour Party also suspended Mr Anderson pending its outcome.\n\nMr Anderson said he would \"continue to fight to demonstrate that I am innocent of any wrongdoing [and] also to protect my legacy as mayor of this city of which I am proud\".\n\nHe said the timing of the police investigation meant \"it would be in the best interests of the Labour Party to select a new candidate for the mayoral election\".\n\nMr Anderson also wrote: \"I have dedicated my life to this city with loyalty and passion and I am not prepared to throw that away.\"\n\nRichard Kemp, leader of the Liberal Democrat opposition on Liverpool City Council, called on Mr Anderson to immediately resign from the local authority.\n\nMr Kemp said his Labour opponent was a \"lame duck mayor\" who was \"preventing the city from moving on\".\n\nMr Anderson said he hoped the police investigation would be completed \"long before\" the expiry of his term of office.\n\nHe said it would confirm he had \"done nothing wrong\" and his name and reputation \"will be exonerated\".\n\n\"I have never done anything that would harm this city,\" he said.\n\nEarlier, Merseyside Police said five men had been rebailed until 19 February.\n\nThe Labour Party has been contacted by the BBC for a comment.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk", "Last updated on .From the section Football\n\nFormer Manchester United and Scotland manager Tommy Docherty has died at the age of 92 following a long illness.\n\nAs a player, Glasgow-born Docherty made more than 300 appearances for Preston and won 25 caps for Scotland.\n\nHe went on to manage 12 clubs, leading Chelsea to League Cup success in 1965 and United to a 2-1 win over Liverpool in the 1977 FA Cup final.\n\n\"Tommy passed away peacefully surrounded by his family at home,\" his family said in a statement.\n\n\"He was a much-loved husband, father and papa and will be terribly missed.\n\n\"We ask that our privacy be respected at this time.\"\n• None Docherty - manager of many clubs, quicks and one-liners\n\nDocherty - affectionately known by his nickname 'The Doc' - died at home in the north west of England on 31 December.\n\nAfter spells managing Chelsea, Rotherham, QPR, Aston Villa and Porto, he took over as Scotland boss in September 1971 on a temporary basis before getting the job full-time two months later.\n\nBut he was best known for his five-year spell at Manchester United, who approached him to succeed Frank O'Farrell in December 1972 while Scotland were on course to qualify for the 1974 World Cup finals.\n\nUnited were relegated in 1974 under Docherty but they kept the Scot and returned to the top flight at the first time of asking. Two years later, they won the FA Cup with victory over Bob Paisley's Liverpool, who had won the league and would go on to also win the European Cup that year.\n\nDocherty's time at Old Trafford also saw George Best fail to revive his United career, the retirement of Bobby Charlton, and the departure of Denis Law.\n\nIn 2014, he told the BBC he still regretted his decision to leave the Scotland job for United.\n\n\"I was stupid,\" he said. \"I should have stayed with Scotland. [It was] partly the money, I have to be honest about that.\"\n\nDocherty was sacked shortly after the Wembley triumph for having an affair with Mary Brown, the wife of United physiotherapist Laurie Brown.\n\nThe pair later married and they remained together until his death.\n\nDocherty returned to management with First Division side Derby in September 1977, then rejoined QPR two years later. A turbulent time at Loftus Road saw him sacked in May 1980, reinstated after just nine days, then sacked again the following October.\n\nSpells at Sydney Olympic, Preston, South Melbourne and Wolves followed, with Docherty's final managerial job coming at non-league Altrincham in 1987-88.\n\nPost-retirement, he worked as an after-dinner speaker and media pundit.\n\nDocherty was inducted into the Scottish Football Hall of Fame in November 2013.\n\n\"He was tenacious on the park and a great leader off it,\" Petrie added.\n\n\"Tommy was a regular in the Scotland side in the 1950s that qualified for two World Cups, and his record as Scotland manager was impressive, albeit cut short.\n\n\"Looking at the results and performances he inspired, it is hard not to wonder what might have been had he remained.\n\n\"His charisma and love for the game shone even after he stopped managing and it was entirely fitting Tommy should be inducted into the Scottish Football Hall of Fame for his lifelong service.\"", "Cases have reached record highs in the past week\n\nThe next few weeks could be the most dangerous period for Scotland since March in the fight against Covid, the first minister has warned.\n\nNicola Sturgeon said the new variant of the virus was \"accelerating spread\" across Scotland.\n\n\"If you first foot someone today, or hug/kiss/handshake them HNY, you are putting yourself, others and the NHS at risk,\" she tweeted.\n\nA further 2,539 cases of Covid-19 were confirmed on Friday.\n\nThe number is slightly down on Thursday's figure, but Ms Sturgeon said cases numbers were still \"worryingly high\".\n\nDaily confirmed cases have reached record highs on each of the previous three days, rising to to 2,622 on Thursday.\n\nThe percentage of positive cases also reached 14.4% on Wednesday - the highest it has been since the second wave of the pandemic began in the summer.\n\nMs Sturgeon tweeted: \"Today's case numbers are worryingly high again. The new variant is accelerating spread.\n\n\"PLEASE do not visit other people's homes just now, even today - if you first foot someone today, or hug/kiss/handshake them HNY, you are putting yourself, others & the NHS at risk.\"\n\nShe said the \"vaccine cavalry\" was on the way, offering \"real hope for 2021\", but she added: \"With this new variant, the next few weeks may be the most dangerous we've faced since Mar/April.\n\n\"We must act together to suppress it, to save lives and protect the NHS. Folded hands stick with it.\"\n\nThe number of daily confirmed cases has reached record highs this week\n\nA new study by London's Imperial College has found that the new variant of Covid-19 is \"hugely\" more transmissible than the virus's previous version.\n\nIt concludes the new variant increases the Reproduction or R number by between 0.4 and 0.7.\n\nThe UK's latest R number has been estimated at between 1.1 and 1.3. It needs to be below 1.0 for the number of cases to start falling.\n\nThe Scottish government's most recent estimate of the R number in Scotland has put it between 0.9 and 1.1.\n\nEmma Thomson, a professor of infectious disease at the University of Glasgow, said it was important to get people vaccinated quickly.\n\nThe professor, who has been working on the sequencing of the new Covid mutation, told the BBC that lockdown was not controlling the infection \"on its own\".\n\n\"At least we come in armed into the new year with two vaccines which are highly effective at preventing severe disease. We have that,\" she said.\n\n\"We need to roll it out now to add to the public health measures.\"\n\nParties, traditional \"first-footing\" and social events were banned this Hogmanay, with all of mainland Scotland and Skye being under the highest level of Covid restrictions.\n\nAll official events were cancelled, but police had to disperse a crowds of people who gathered at Edinburgh Castle and Calton Hill to see in the new year.\n\nIt has also emerged that 32 people were charged with reckless conduct after police found them gathered at a rented property in Aberfoyle on 27 December.\n\nA Scottish government spokesperson said: \"As the first minister has pointed out, the sharp rise in cases is evidence that the new strain seems to be speeding up transmission.\n\n\"This is why we are asking people to please stay at home as much as possible and avoid non-essential interaction with others.\n\n\"There is light at the end of the tunnel, but we ask everyone to be patient as we work our way through the vaccination programme, and continue to follow FACTS to keep us all safe.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nManchester United moved level on points with Premier League leaders Liverpool as a Bruno Fernandes penalty saw off stubborn Aston Villa.\n\nFernandes drilled his 11th league goal this season - and his fifth from the spot - into the bottom corner to punish Douglas Luiz's clip on Paul Pogba and hand United an eighth win in 10 games.\n\nBertrand Traore's calm finish underneath David de Gea had deservedly drawn Villa level, cancelling out Anthony Martial's stooping first-half header for the hosts.\n\nBut Fernandes' penalty extended United's hold over Villa - they have now won 32 and lost just one of the past 44 league meetings between the sides - and leaves Liverpool top only by virtue of goal difference.\n\nThe spot-kick award angered Aston Villa boss Dean Smith who claimed Pogba \"tripped himself\" and that the video assistant referee should have asked on-pitch official Michael Oliver to review his decision.\n\n\"I don't see why Michael couldn't have looked at it. That's what VAR is for isn't it?\" Smith told BBC Sport.\n\n\"I thought it was a penalty at the time, but I looked at it after the game and saw he tripped himself. I don't think it's a penalty.\n\n\"I think there's enough doubt there to send the referee over to the screen.\"\n\nSmith's side were perhaps unfortunate not to have left Old Trafford with at least a point from a thoroughly entertaining game but they also needed several fine saves from Emiliano Martinez to keep them in it.\n\nAfter Fernandes' spot-kick put United back in front, Martinez superbly tipped a stinging 25-yarder from the Portuguese on to the crossbar as well as denying Martial a second.\n\nMartinez's counterpart David de Gea was just as busy, with a late save from Matty Cash's long-range strike preserving the points, not long after Tyrone Mings had headed wide a glorious chance to level.\n\nOle Gunnar Solskjaer's side have displayed their ability to grind out points at Old Trafford in recent weeks, as evidenced in 1-0 home wins over both West Bromwich Albion and Wolves.\n\nBut they have also shown a willingness to go toe-to-toe with teams who are happy to open up the game and, while this was not quite the shootout of the 6-2 win over Leeds, it was just as easy on the eye.\n\nA number of fluid first-half moves produced chances before Martial's opener as the France forward saw a curler tipped over by Martinez, while Fernandes and Wan-Bissaka were narrowly off target with similar efforts.\n\nMartial stole between Mings and Ezri Konsa to nod the Red Devils ahead from Wan-Bissaka's inviting cross for only his second league goal of the season on his return to Solskjaer's starting line-up.\n\nWhile Luiz was unfortunate to be penalised for what might have been an accidental clip on Pogba, there was enough contact for the penalty to be given and Fernandes continued his excellent record from the spot.\n\nUnited were nine points behind Liverpool after a 1-0 defeat by Arsenal at Old Trafford on 1 November but have made up that gap in just two months to set an intriguing title race into motion.\n\nA minute's silence before the game paid tribute to former boss Tommy Docherty, who famously prevented Liverpool claiming the treble by leading United to an FA Cup win over the Reds in 1977.\n\nAnd while talk of foiling a second successive Liverpool title might be premature, moving alongside them at the Premier League's summit will give Solskjaer's side even more confidence as they eye up a trip to Anfield on 17 January.\n\nWhile Villa were ultimately outgunned by their hosts, their brave display was further evidence of the progress Smith's side have made this season.\n\nThey held their own in the first half, causing United a number of problems down the flanks, with playmaker Jack Grealish prompting and probing to show why the hosts have long considered a move for the Villa captain.\n\nBut they were even more impressive in the early stages of the second period, Grealish crossing for an Ollie Watkins header that was saved by De Gea before collecting a quick free-kick and finding Traore to tuck home the equaliser.\n\nLuiz's foul on Pogba came with Villa very much in the ascendancy and while they then had to ride a storm the visitors still came close to pinching a point as Mings beat fellow England centre-half Harry Maguire to a free-kick only to nod wide.\n\nWith Ross Barkley's return from a hamstring injury imminent, this performance should keep Villa optimistic even if defeat halted a five-game unbeaten run and saw them slip a place to sixth, behind Chelsea on goal difference.\n\nAnd while their rotten record at Old Trafford continues - just one win in 34 visits since 1983, which came courtesy of a Gabriel Agbonlahor header in 2009 - they have still only conceded five times in eight away games this campaign.\n\n'We have improved a lot in a year' - what they said\n\nManchester United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer told BBC Sport: \"You are always delighted with three points. The performance was good and we created chances.\n\n\"It was maybe a little too open and we wasted chances. We tried to play the Hollywood pass instead of securing the first one and using the space that was there.\n\n\"We are happy with what we are doing. We have shown we have improved a lot in a year. We lost to Arsenal away last New Year's Day. We have improved immensely.\"\n\nAston Villa boss Dean Smith told BBC Sport: \"I wasn't happy with the first half. We were miles off the levels where we have been. It felt like a testimonial pace then they deservedly had the lead at half-time. I told the players we needed to be upping our levels.\n\n\"We competed a lot better [in the second half], showed more quality and created chances. I'd take the second-half performance all day long. A dubious penalty has lost us the game.\n\n\"When you look at our performances and results, it shows we are very competitive in this league now, which is what we wanted it to be.\"\n\nUnited's hold over Villa goes on - the stats\n• None Manchester United are unbeaten in their past 16 Premier League matches against Aston Villa (W12 D4).\n• None Aston Villa have lost 13 of their past 15 away Premier League games against Manchester United at Old Trafford (W1 D1).\n• None In Premier League history, the only player to be directly involved in more goals in their first 30 appearances in the competition than Bruno Fernandes (33 - 19 goals, 14 assists) is Andrew Cole (37 - 28 goals, nine assists).\n• None Anthony Martial has now scored on all seven days of the week in the Premier League for Manchester United, becoming the fifth player to do so, after Ryan Giggs, Andrew Cole, David Beckham and Wayne Rooney.\n• None Only Tottenham's Harry Kane (10) has assisted more Premier League goals this season than Jack Grealish (7), while the last Aston Villa player to assist more than seven Premier League goals in a season was Ashley Young in 2010-11 (10).\n• None Since Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's first Premier League match in charge of Manchester United in December 2018, the Red Devils have taken (27) and scored (21) the most Premier League penalties.\n\nManchester United host local rivals Manchester City in the Carabao Cup semi-finals on Wednesday (19:45 GMT) and welcome Watford in the FA Cup on Saturday 9 January (20:00 GMT). Their next Premier League game is away at Burnley on Tuesday 12 January (20:15 GMT).\n\nAston Villa host Liverpool in the FA Cup next Friday (19:45 GMT) before returning to Premier League action at home to Tottenham on Wednesday 13 January (20:15 GMT).\n• None Attempt blocked. Keinan Davis (Aston Villa) left footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked.\n• None Attempt blocked. Keinan Davis (Aston Villa) header from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Ollie Watkins with a cross.\n• None Offside, Manchester United. Paul Pogba tries a through ball, but Marcus Rashford is caught offside.\n• None Attempt saved. Matthew Cash (Aston Villa) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the bottom left corner. Assisted by Jack Grealish.\n• None Nemanja Matic (Manchester United) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Luke Shaw (Manchester United) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None A special and exclusive one-off chat with the music icon\n• None How has their rise come to define our culture?", "London's Nightingale Hospital is ready to admit patients as hospitals in the capital struggle, the NHS has said.\n\nThe Excel Centre site in east London has been \"reactivated\" amid a rise in the number of Covid-19 patients.\n\nOther Nightingale hospital sites across England are also being readied, with the UK recording a record daily rise in coronavirus cases.\n\nAn NHS spokesman said hospitals in London remain under \"significant pressure\".\n\nHe said: \"In anticipation of pressures rising from the spread of the new variant infection, NHS London were asked to ensure the London Nightingale was reactivated and ready to admit patients as needed, and that process is under way.\"\n\nSeveral NHS hospitals in London and the south-east are now reporting they are under extreme pressure as a result of a surge in the number of people falling seriously ill with Covid-19.\n\nAn email to staff at the Royal London Hospital says they are operating in disaster medicine mode - warning they can no longer provide high-standard critical care.\n\nNightingale hospitals in Manchester, Bristol and Harrogate are in use currently for non-Covid patients, the spokesman added.\n\nThe Exeter site received its first Covid patients in November when it began accepting those transferred from the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust, which was described as \"very busy\".\n\nHe said: \"Covid inpatient numbers are rising sharply so the remaining Nightingales are being readied to admit patients once again should they be needed, in line with best clinical practice developed over the first and second waves of coronavirus.\"\n\nSenior intensive care doctor Prof Hugh Montgomery warned those who fail to follow the rules on social distancing, hand washing and wearing a face covering \"have blood on their hands\".\n\nNHS England medical director Stephen Powis has described the Nightingale hospitals as \"our insurance policy, there as our last resort\".\n\nLondon's Nightingale hospital was built in nine days, with the help of hundreds of soldiers\n\nHe told a Downing Street press conference on Wednesday: \"We asked all the Nightingale hospitals a few weeks ago to be ready to take patients if that was required.\n\n\"Indeed, some of them are already doing that, in Manchester taking step-down patients, in Exeter managing Covid patients, and in other places managing diagnostics, for instance.\n\n\"Our first steps though, in managing the extra demands on the NHS, are to expand capacity within existing hospitals - that's the best way to use our staff.\"\n\nLondon's Nightingale Hospital was opened on 3 April and placed on standby weeks later after fewer than 20 patients were treated there.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA £2,500 reward has been offered after a nativity scene was petrol-bombed on Christmas Eve.\n\nThe scene in Raglan, Monmouthshire, had been installed in a bus shelter for families to enjoy over Christmas.\n\nThe fire destroyed statues of a shepherd, Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus - with only the three wise men surviving as they stood outside the shelter.\n\nMiguel Santiago, of the Beaufort Hotel which funded the £10,000 scene, said the attack was \"really disappointing\".\n\n\"I was in the hotel when I saw the fire and I went into panic mode,\" he said.\n\n\"It was about 21:45 on Christmas Eve when it all happened and I ended up using nine extinguishers to put it out.\"\n\nThe wooden nativity was funded by the hotel and put together by retired theatre design lecturer Liz Friendship.\n\nMs Friendship said the festive scene had also been targeted by thieves in the past.\n\n\"In 2018 Mary was taken, in 2019 two shepherds were stolen and never came back, and in 2020 it's burnt down.\n\n\"It's now just three kings staring at the bus stop. It's very sad.\"\n\nThe scene was in ruins following the petrol bomb attack\n\nVillagers are now appealing for help to catch the suspects responsible for the Christmas crime.\n\nMr Santiago added: \"It's a shame because so much effort went into putting it together this year.\n\n\"We added three kings which really made it a great sight, we made sure the figures couldn't be taken by fixing them down.\n\n\"It's really disappointing that this has happened but the locals have been great and we will be back next year with a bigger and better nativity.\"\n\nA spokeswoman for Gwent Police said: \"Officers are investigating a report of criminal damage to a nativity scene on the High Street, in Raglan on Christmas Eve.\n\n\"It has been reported that fire damage was caused to the set at approximately 9.45pm on the evening of Thursday 24th December 2020.\n\n\"The scene that belonged to the Beaufort Hotel was totally damaged as a result.\"\n\nAnyone with information should contact police on 101, she said.", "The crowd at Edinburgh Castle dispersed after police arrived\n\nCrowds of several hundred people gathered at Edinburgh Castle to see in the new year despite police and government warnings to stay away.\n\nPeople sang and danced before dispersing when several police vans and cars drove on to the castle esplanade.\n\nMost Scots heeded warnings to hold Hogmanay celebrations at home with household members.\n\nThere were no midnight fireworks at the castle, but a display was held at the Wallace Monument in Stirling.\n\nA Police Scotland spokesperson said: \"We were aware of gatherings at Edinburgh Castle and Calton Hill around midnight on Hogmanay.\n\n\"Officers safely engaged with those in attendance and explained the current government regulations resulting in the groups dispersing without incident.\"\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said on Thursday that there should be \"no gatherings, no house parties and no first footing\" at Hogmanay.\n\nAll of mainland Scotland and Skye are under level four restrictions, while the other islands are in level three.\n\nDetails have meanwhile emerged of another police enforcement action against a group who gathered at a rented property in Aberfoyle during the festive period.\n\nPolice Scotland confirmed that 32 people were charged with culpable and reckless conduct after officers were called out on 27 December.\n\nAccording to the Scottish Sun, the group had travelled from Glasgow but police were tipped off by locals who spotted vehicles parked outside the property.\n\nPeople in Scotland were urged to stay at home and celebrate the new year with their families\n\nAt Edinburgh Castle, one Hogmanay tradition endured as a lone piper played in the new year at midnight.\n\nWith the capital's traditional new year party cancelled, the organisers of its annual Hogmanay celebration instead released a series of \"drone swarm\" videos titled Fare Well.\n\nThe display featured a swarm of 150 illuminated drones forming symbols and animals in a \"beautiful ode to Scotland\".\n\nEach video was narrated by actor David Tennant and included verses written by Scotland's official poet, makar Jackie Kay.\n\nWhile they appear to be flying above landmarks like Edinburgh Castle, the drones were flown elsewhere before being edited into other footage.\n\nDrones write a message in the sky above the Forth Bridge\n\nThe streets of central Edinburgh were quiet, in contrast to last year's Hogmanay celebrations when about 100,000 visitors attended the street party with live performances from Idlewild and Mark Ronson in Princes Street Gardens.\n\nElsewhere in the UK this year a fireworks and light display, including tributes to NHS staff, was held over the River Thames in London, but people were also told to stay at home rather than go out and celebrate.\n• None UK sees in 2021 with fireworks and light show", "All primary schools in London will remain closed for the start of the new term, the government has confirmed.\n\nLondon mayor Sadiq Khan said the government had \"finally seen sense and U-turned\" on its plan to allow pupils in some areas to return on Monday.\n\nLeaders of nine London local authorities had written to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson urging him to rethink the decision.\n\nMr Williamson said the city-wide closures were \"a last resort\".\n\nThe government said it had decided all primary schools in the capital would be required to provide remote learning after a further review of coronavirus transmission rates.\n\nVulnerable pupils and the children of key workers will continue to attend school, the government said.\n\nEarly years care, alternative provision and special schools will remain open, it added.\n\nSchools in nine London boroughs and the City of London district had been set to reopen - while those in the remaining 23 boroughs would have stayed closed from 4 January.\n\nThe decision was criticised and branded \"illogical\" by councillors and residents in the affected areas, who called for primary schools across the capital to move to online learning until 18 January.\n\nThey pointed out that Covid-19 infection rates were higher in some boroughs told to reopen schools than in others where they were not.\n\nIn a tweet, Mr Khan said a city-wide closure was \"the right decision\" and thanked education minister Nick Gibb for \"our constructive conversations over the past two days\".\n\n\"The government's original decision was ridiculous and has been causing immense confusion for parents, teachers and staff across the capital,\" Mr Khan said.\n\n\"It is right that all schools in London are treated the same, and that no primary schools in London will be forced to open on Monday\".\n\nDan Thorpe, leader of Greenwich council, said he was \"absolutely delighted\" to hear Mr Williamson had \"finally climbed down and reversed his decision\".\n\nKingston Council leader Caroline Kerr said she was \"dismayed\" at the government's handling of situation while a council statement added: \"It never made sense that neighbouring boroughs were being instructed to have different arrangements despite having similar rates of infection.\"\n\nIslington council leader Richard Watts said waiting until New Year's day to announce the further closures was \"unacceptable\".\n\nHe said the decision \"should have been made weeks ago, as the public health situation became clear\".\n\nMary Bousted, of the National Education Union, said the government was right to reverse its \"obviously nonsensical position\".\n\n\"What is right for London is right for the rest of the country,\" she said, and she called on ministers to \"do their duty\" by closing all primary and secondary schools nationwide for at least two weeks.\n\nPaul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders' union NAHT, accused the government of damaging public confidence with a \"confusing and last-minute approach\".\n\n\"Just at the moment when we need some decisive leadership, the government is at sixes and sevens,\" he said.\n\nShadow education secretary Kate Green said the move was \"yet another government U-turn creating chaos for parents just two days before the start of term\".\n\n\"Gavin Williamson must still clarify why some schools in tier 4 are closing and what the criteria for reopening will be,\" she said.\n\nGavin Williamson said closing schools across London was a \"last resort\"\n\nIn a statement, Mr Williamson said children's education and wellbeing remained \"a national priority\" and moving the whole of London to remote education \"really is a last resort and a temporary solution\".\n\n\"We will continue keep the list of local authorities under review, and reopen classrooms as soon as we possibly can,\" he said.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said the situation in London had continued to worsen in the past week and infections and hospital admissions had risen sharply.\n\n\"While our priority is to keep as many children as possible in school, we have to strike a balance between education and infection rates and pressures on the NHS,\" he said.\n\nThe Department for Education had previously said decisions on school closures and openings were based on new infections, positivity rates, and pressures on the NHS.\n\nA spokeswoman for the department said: \"In response to concerning data about the spread of coronavirus, we have implemented the contingency framework for education in a small number of areas of the country, requiring schools to provide remote learning to all but vulnerable and critical worker children and exam years.\n\n\"Decisions on which areas will be subject to the contingency framework are based on close work with PHE, the NHS, the Joint Biosecurity Centre and across government.\"\n\nAre you a parent or teacher who will be affected by the London primary school closures? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Bodycam footage shows the moments before a black man was killed by a police shooting in Minneapolis\n\nMinneapolis police have released bodycam footage of a fatal shooting by officers, the first death at the hands of police in the US city since that of George Floyd, a black man, in May.\n\nThe victim, Dolal Idd, 23, was a suspect in a felony and was stopped by police on Wednesday. He was also black.\n\nInitial witness statements and police say Mr Idd fired first and was shot dead when the officers returned fire.\n\nMinneapolis saw months of unrest after Mr Floyd's death in police custody.\n\nThe protests spread across the US amid allegations of police brutality.\n\nMr Floyd died after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.\n\nThe footage from Wednesday's fatal shooting, from the bodycam of one of the officers involved, was released late on Thursday.\n\nIt shows the officers' cars blocking a white vehicle at a petrol station on the city's south side, not far from where Mr Floyd died.\n\nThe police are heard shouting \"Stop your car, hands up, hands up!\" before shots are fired, including by the officers.\n\nA female passenger in the car with Mr Idd was not hurt, police said, nor were the officers.\n\nMinneapolis police chief Medaria Arradondo said a gun was found at the scene.\n\n\"When I viewed the video that everyone else is viewing - and certainly the real-time slow-down version - it appears the individual inside the vehicle fired his weapon at the officers first,\" he said.\n\nPeople including Mr Idd's father Bayle Gelle gathered at the scene the following day, prompting fears of renewed protests.\n\n\"He was just sitting in the car, and bullets were shot at him, and no reason,\" he said, quoted by CBS News.\n\n\"Why are we here?... Because of colour. He is a black man. We want to know why my sweet son gets shot and killed.\"\n\nGeorge Floyd's death led to violent protests in the city, including this police station set on fire in May\n\nCity mayor Jacob Frey said he was committed to getting the facts and pursuing justice.\n\n\"We know a life has been cut short tonight and that trust between communities of colour and law enforcement is fragile,\" he said in a statement.\n\n\"Rebuilding that trust will depend on complete transparency.\"\n\nMr Floyd's death in May led to calls for reform or even abolition of the city's police department, but those efforts have stalled.", "Much of England has been placed in a new top tier of restrictions - tier four - as the new variant spreads Image caption: Much of England has been placed in a new top tier of restrictions - tier four - as the new variant spreads\n\nEarlier we reported that a study by Imperial College had concluded the new coronavirus variant is \"hugely\" more transmissible. Now some experts are saying that means even tougher restrictions will soon be needed.\n\nProf Jim Naismith, of Oxford University, said: \"The data from Imperial represent the best analysis to date and imply that the measures we have employed to date, would - with the new virus - fail to reduce the R number to below 1.\n\n\"In simpler terms, unless we do something different the new virus strain is going to continue to spread - more infections, more hospitalisations and more deaths.\"\n\nThe R number is the average number of people an infected person passes the virus onto. If it is above 1 the epidemic is growing.\n\nEarly data suggested that the virus was spreading more quickly among the under-20s, particularly among secondary school age children, but the latest results indicate that it is more infectious in all age groups.\n\nProf Axel Gandy, part of the research team, suggested that it may have appeared to spread more easily among school children simply because the early data was collected during the November lockdown, when adults' movements were restricted but schools remained open.", "Researchers have been tracking changes to the \"spike\" of the virus\n\nThe new variant of Covid-19 is \"hugely\" more transmissible than the virus's previous version, a study has found.\n\nIt concludes the new variant increases the Reproduction or R number by between 0.4 and 0.7.\n\nThe UK's latest R number has been estimated at between 1.1 and 1.3. It needs to be below 1.0 for the number of cases to start falling.\n\nProf Axel Gandy of London's Imperial College said the differences between the viruses types was \"quite extreme\".\n\n\"There is a huge difference in how easily the variant virus spreads,\" he told BBC News. \"This is the most serious change in the virus since the epidemic began,\" he added.\n\nThe Imperial College study suggests transmission of the new variant tripled during England's November lockdown while the previous version was reduced by a third.\n\nCases of Covid-19 have begun to increase rapidly during the second spike, and the number of cases recorded in a single day reached a new high on Thursday.\n\nEarly results indicated that the virus was spreading more quickly among under-20s, particularly among secondary school age children.\n\nBut the very latest data indicates that it was spreading quickly across all age groups, according to Prof Gandy who was a member of the research team.\n\n\"One possible explanation is that the early data was collected during the time of the November lockdown where schools were open and the activities of the adult population were more restricted. We are seeing now that the new virus has increased infectiousness across all age groups.\"\n\nProf Jim Naismith, of Oxford University, said he believed that the new findings indicated that even tougher restrictions would soon be needed.\n\n\"The data from Imperial represent the best analysis to date and imply that the measures we have employed to date, would - with the new virus - fail to reduce the R number to below 1.\n\n\"In simpler terms, unless we do something different the new virus strain is going to continue to spread, more infections, more hospitalisations and more deaths.\"\n\nThe R number is the average number of people an infected person infects. If it is above 1 the epidemic is growing.\n\nThe most chilling finding from this piece of research is that the November lockdown in England, hard though it was for many people, would not have stopped the variant form of the virus spreading. The same severe restrictions that saw cases of the previous version of the virus fall by a third, would see a tripling of the new variant. This is why there has been such a sudden tightening of restrictions across the country.\n\nIt is unclear whether the current restrictions will be enough to control the spread of the virus. Given the fact that it has taken two lockdowns to stop the earlier version of the virus overwhelming the NHS, many scientists fear that further tightening will be necessary.\n\nInfection levels will begin to drop as enough people are vaccinated. But until then it is now more important than ever for people to follow social distancing guidelines, wear masks where required and to regularly wash their hands.\n\nThe new year brings with it hope of a more normal life in the next few months but also a new form of the virus that all of us will have to combat in the coming days and weeks.\n\nProfessor Lawrence Young, of Warwick University, said early indications suggested that vaccines would be effective against the new form of the virus.\n\n\"Variants virus have been around since the beginning of the pandemic and are a product of the natural process by which viruses develop and adapt to their hosts as they replicate.\n\n\"Most of these mutations have no effect on the behaviour of the virus but very occasionally they can improve the ability of the virus to infect and/or become more resistant to the body's immune response.\"\n\nFurther research is needed to understand why the variant is spreading so quickly. But early indications are that vaccines should be effective against it.\n\nThe new virus has been designated \"Variant of Concern 202012/01\" or VOC by Public Health England.\n\nIt was detected in November and thought to have originated in the south-east England in September.\n\nThere is no evidence to suggest that it is more deadly, but it will increase the number of cases which in turn will add further pressure on the NHS.\n\nThe variant can now be found across the UK, except Northern Ireland, but it is heavily concentrated in London, as well as south-east and eastern England.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Parents and teachers have criticised the closure decisions\n\nNine London boroughs have written to the education secretary asking him to reverse plans to reopen primary schools in some areas.\n\nAbout a million primary school pupils will not return to lessons next week in a bid to cut Covid transmission rates.\n\nHowever, schools in 10 London boroughs are due to remain open.\n\nIn the letter, the leaders said they were \"struggling to understand the rationale\" behind the idea as pupils and teachers moved between boroughs.\n\nThe government has said the measure would be reviewed fortnightly.\n\nAll primary schools had been due to fully reopen on 4 January but under government plans those in 23 London boroughs will remain closed.\n\nHowever, schools in the City of London, Camden, Greenwich, Hackney, Haringey, Harrow, Islington, Kingston, Lambeth and Lewisham will open.\n\nThe letter to Gavin Williamson has been signed by leaders of all of those boroughs apart from Kingston. It has also been signed by the City of London's policy chair.\n\nIt calls for primary school pupils across the capital to \"move to online learning until 18 January\", apart from vulnerable children and those of key workers.\n\n\"The omission of 10 boroughs ignores the deep interconnectedness of our city, and the many thousands of teachers and students that study or teach in one borough and live in another,\" the letter states.\n\nThe councils also said they had received legal advice that omitting some councils from the list of areas told to take teaching online \"is unlawful on a number of grounds and can be challenged in court\".\n\nRichard Watts, leader of Islington Council, told the BBC there \"seems to be no reason at all to look at this on a borough by borough basis\".\n\n\"The entirety of the rest of the government's handling of the pandemic has rightly treated London as a single entity and this is the first time anyone... has tried to implement different public health measures in different boroughs,\" he said.\n\nIn a statement Dan Thorpe, leader of the Royal borough of Greenwich, accused the government of providing \"a lack of clarity and answers\", adding that the situation was \"causing uncertainty and concern among our schools, families, carers, and undoubtedly children and young people\".\n\nAlthough Kingston Council did not sign the letter, leader Caroline Kerr said reopening primary schools in the borough \"doesn't make any sense\" and that they were \"urgently seeking clarity on the reasoning for the decision\".\n\nMayor of London Sadiq Khan has called the plans \"nonsensical\" and has also written to the government calling for a \"delay to all London schools opening until mid-January\".\n\nKevin Courtney, joint leader of the National Education Union, said the education secretary \"must listen to the leaders of the community, he must listen to school staff and he must listen to the general public who are all telling him that it is not safe to reopen schools on Monday\".\n\nThe Department for Education has previously said decisions on school closures and openings were based on new infections, positivity rates, and pressures on the NHS.\n\nA spokeswoman for the department said: \"In response to concerning data about the spread of coronavirus, we have implemented the contingency framework for education in a small number of areas of the country, requiring schools to provide remote learning to all but vulnerable and critical worker children and exam years.\n\n\"Decisions on which areas will be subject to the contingency framework are based on close work with PHE, the NHS, the Joint Biosecurity Centre and across government.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The musician was known for his performances in which he always wore a mask\n\nHip-hop star MF Doom has died at the age of 49, his family confirmed on social media.\n\nThe London-born musician, real name Daniel Dumile, was known for his sharp, intricate rhymes and his signature mask, which he never removed in public.\n\nIn a post on the rapper's Instagram account on Thursday, his wife Jasmine confirmed that he died on 31 October.\n\nA number of artists have paid tribute to MF Doom including Run The Jewels and Tyler, The Creator.\n\nIn a note addressed to the rapper, his wife paid tribute to \"the greatest husband, father, teacher, student, business partner, lover and friend I could ever ask for\".\n\nHis representatives confirmed his death to Rolling Stone magazine. No cause of death was disclosed.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by mfdoom This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMF Doom was born in London but moved to New York as a child.\n\nAs a teenager he performed in hip-hop group KMD. Following the loss of his younger brother and bandmate DJ Subroc, he disappeared from music becoming, in his own words, \"damn near homeless\".\n\nBut in 1997, he remerged at open mic events in Manhattan, wearing tights over his face. He protected his anonymity for the rest of his career, adopting a mask based on the Marvel villain Doctor Doom for all his public appearances.\n\nHis debut as MF Doom, Operation: Doomsday, was released in 1999, and he followed it up with an almost non-stop outpouring of music.\n\nAs well as six solo albums, he produced a wealth of bootlegs, compilations, collaborations, mixtapes and instrumental albums - including the influential, 10-part Special Herbs series.\n\nHe may be best known for 2004's Madvillainy, which was recorded with crate-digging producer Madlib under the moniker Madvillain, and gave the rapper his first entry on the US album chart.\n\nAnother of his high-profile collaborations was Danger Doom alongside DJ Danger Mouse, and he appeared with Damon Albarn's Gorillaz on their UK number one album Demon Days. Other collaborators included Ghostface Killah, Flying Lotus, The Avalanches and Radiohead.\n\nOne of hip-hop's most respected MCs, he made appearances on BBC Radio 4 and Radio 1 in which he discussed his own music and projects with other artists.\n\nMany of them lined up to pay tribute after news of his death broke on New Year's Eve.\n\n\"RIP to another Giant, your favourite MC's MC... MF DOOM,\" wrote A Tribe Called Quest's Q-Tip on Twitter. \"Crushing news.\"\n\n\"He was a writer's writer,\" added El-P of Run The Jewels. \"Grateful I got to know you a little, king. Proud to be your fan. Thank you for keeping it weird and raw always. You inspired us all and always will.\"\n\n\"All u ever needed in hip-hop was this record,\" Flying Lotus tweeted alongside the album cover to Madvillainy. \"My soul is crushed.\"\n\nApple Music presenter Zane Lowe said: \"Rest In Peace to the great MF Doom. A true artist who gifted us with eternal innovation and creativity.\"\n\nWhile the Sleaford Mods said: \"RIP MF DOOM. Sleep well mate.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. London's new year celebrations featured a message of hope from David Attenborough\n\nThe UK has seen off 2020 and celebrated the dawn of 2021 with a fireworks and light display over London that included tributes to NHS staff.\n\nRevellers were not able to ring in the New Year in the usual way because of the coronavirus pandemic, with people instead told to stay at home.\n\nPolice had to break up various parties and events across England overnight.\n\nForces have handed out hundreds of fines, with several issuing the maximum £10,000 to event organisers.\n\nMuch of the UK saw in the new year while under lockdown rules, with about 44 million people in England - or 78% of the population - in tier four, the top level of Covid restrictions.\n\nMainland Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are also under lockdown.\n\nAlthough people were warned not to attend any parties outside their own homes, there were many around the country who ignored the rules.\n\nThe Metropolitan Police said police attended 58 parties and unlicensed music events in breach of tier four rules across London overnight, the vast majority of which ended when police intervened, they added.\n\nFixed penalty fines were given to 217 people while five others could be fined £10,000 for organising large gatherings. The police force said four other people were arrested for breaching Covid regulations by gathering in central London.\n\nElsewhere, other forces also broke up parties and handed out hundreds of fines. They included Greater Manchester Police, which issued 105 fixed penalty notices at house parties and larger gatherings. And Leicestershire Police had to issue six on-the-spot £10,000 fines to party organisers.\n\nIn Essex, hundreds of people were dispersed from an illegal New Year's Eve party at a church, while Lancashire Police broke up a party in Hyndburn, near Blackburn, attended by 80.\n\nMeanwhile, in Scotland, Edinburgh's traditional Hogmanay street party was cancelled, with videos of a drone display released instead.\n\nThe series of videos showed a swarm of 150 lit-up drones over the Scottish Highlands and Edinburgh were released, which organisers said it was the largest drone show ever produced in the UK.\n\nDespite the cancellation of Edinburgh's traditional Hogmanay celebration - which normally attracts 100,000 people on the city's streets - there were some people who ignored the pleas to stay at home.\n\nCrowds of several hundred people gathered at Edinburgh Castle to see in the new year. They sang Auld Lang Syne and danced before eventually dispersing when several police vans and cars pulled on to the castle esplanade.\n\nAn anti-lockdown protest and New Year's Eve celebration was also held in London\n\nPeople cross Hungerford Bridge in London on New Year's Eve\n\nOn New Year's Eve, Health Secretary Matt Hancock called on people to take \"personal responsibility\" and stay at home to avoid spreading Covid-19.\n\nLondon's 10-minute display over the Thames aired on the BBC at midnight, and began with a poem which addressed the pandemic, that said: \"In the year of 2020 a new virus came our way; We knew what must be done and so to help we hid away.\"\n\nLight projections lit up the sky over the O2 Arena, including the NHS logo in a heart accompanied by a child's voice saying: \"Thank you NHS heroes\".\n\nThe show also recognised Captain Sir Tom Moore, who raised £33m for the NHS by walking laps of his garden and the Black Lives Matter movement. One 2020 phenomena - working from home - was represented with a mute logo backed by a voiceover saying \"You're on mute\".\n\nThe display ended with a call from Sir David Attenborough about the need for action on climate change.\n\nLondon mayor Sadiq Khan said the display had reflected the resolve of Londoners to endure\n\n300 drones were used in the display to create images in the sky\n\nIn a speech being broadcast on BBC One between Doctor Who and EastEnders this evening, Sir David will say that this \"could be a year for positive change - for ourselves, for our planet and for the wonderful creatures with which we share it\".\n\nDespite the \"challenging\" times we live in, \"the reactions to these extraordinary times has proved that when we work together there is no limit to what we can accomplish\", he will say, as he looks ahead to the United Nations Climate Change Conference later this year.\n\nThe sounds of a video conference call starting up were played\n\nMuch of London was far quieter than usual\n\nEdinburgh's streets were largely empty, with Police Scotland warning against Hogmanay gatherings\n\nOfficial figures showed 10.75 million viewers watched the 2021 New Year celebrations on BBC One. It's down from the 11.18m who saw in the start of 2020 on the channel.\n\nMayor of London Sadiq Khan said he was proud of the show, which he said \"paid tribute to our NHS heroes and the way that Londoners continue to stand together\".\n\n\"We showed how our capital and the UK have made huge sacrifices to support one another through these difficult times, and how they will continue to do so as the vaccine is rolled out.\"\n\nUsually, around 100,000 people pack into the streets around Victoria Embankment to watch the New Year's Eve fireworks.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nIn his New Year's message, the Archbishop of Canterbury said he saw \"reasons to be hopeful for the year ahead\" despite the \"tremendous pain and sadness\" brought by 2020.\n\nThe Most Reverend Justin Welby spoke of his experience volunteering as an assistant chaplain at St Thomas' hospital during the pandemic, saying: \"Sometimes the most important thing we do is just sit with people, letting them know they are not alone.\"\n\nIn his message, filmed at the London hospital and broadcast on BBC One on Friday afternoon, he said: \"This crisis has shown us how fragile we are. It has also shown us how to face this fragility.\n\n\"Here at the hospital, hope is there in every hand that's held, and every comforting word that's spoken.\n\n\"Up and down the country, it's there in every phone call. Every food parcel or thoughtful card. Every time we wear our masks.\"\n\nDid you make a special effort to celebrate this New Year? How did you mark it? Share your experiences and pictures of what you got up to by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "For months, the government has been urging businesses to get ready for a new era in trading with the EU. But it was only on Boxing Day that details of all the new rules were actually published.\n\nBusiness groups are relieved that the threat of a no-deal Brexit, which would have meant tariffs (or taxes) on goods crossing the border with the EU, has been removed. But companies that trade with the EU are still facing a lot of new bureaucracy.\n\nAnd the disruption in mid-December, caused by border closures related to the new variant of Covid-19, was a reminder of how dependent the UK economy is on trade across the English Channel.\n\nFrom 1 January 2021, goods entering the EU from Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) face large amounts of new paperwork and checks, including:\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nHauliers will also need to make sure they have the right transportation paperwork before they drive to the border.\n\nThere is particular focus on the \"short straits\" route between Dover and Calais, and the nearby Channel Tunnel, which taken together handle about four million lorries a year.\n\n\"This is the biggest imposition of red tape that businesses have had to deal with in 50 years,\" says William Bain from the British Retail Consortium.\n\nFull controls on British exports to the EU began on 1 January. The first day of the new regime appears to have gone relatively smoothly.\n\nBut it's feared that later in the year, the new controls could cause disruption, even though new border infrastructure has been built at ports such as Calais, to help process vehicles more efficiently.\n\nThere are some mitigating measures though.\n\nIn response to the Covid crisis, the government is delaying full controls on goods entering Great Britain from the EU for a further six months.\n\nThere will be checks from 1 January on controlled substances such as alcohol and tobacco, and traders deemed to be a risk will also be asked to fill in customs declarations.\n\nBut most checks on goods coming in from the EU will be delayed until 1 July, a deadline that could in theory be extended.\n\n\"I think we will want to monitor it,\" the chief executive of HM Revenue and Customs, Jim Harra, told MPs in November. \"Hopefully we will not still be in a situation where Covid-19 is consuming as much of people's attention.\"\n\nOther measures to tackle potential disruption include diverting trade to other ports around the country and opening lorry parks in Kent, to avoid gridlock on the roads.\n\nSome of these contingencies were put into action early, to deal with the Covid border closures in December.\n\nOperation Brock, for example, involved changing the layout of a section of the M20, using a concrete barrier to allow lorries heading for mainland Europe to queue safely on the motorway.\n\nThousands of lorries were also diverted to temporary parking at a disused airport at Manston.\n\nFrom 1 January drivers of lorries weighing more than 7.5 tonnes will need to acquire a Kent Access Permit before they enter the county. They will have to show that they have all the paperwork they need to ferry goods to Europe.\n\nBut that doesn't deal with the challenge of the thousands of vans that cross the Channel every week.\n\n\"What has been serially misunderstood by various parts of government is the scale of the complexity for people on the ground dealing with the paperwork,\" says Duncan Buchanan, the Policy Director of the Road Haulage Association.\n\nThat could mean that instead of queues on motorways, many traders won't be able to leave their depots.\n\n\"Either they won't be able to get vets to sign off on their meat exports, or they won't be able to get their permit because they don't have the right bits of paper,\" says Shane Brennan, chief executive of the Cold Storage Federation.\n\n\"We might see a quite significant holding off of trading - people just not moving stuff in the first few weeks.\"\n\nEighty-five per cent of the volume of trade between the EU and Great Britain is carried by EU hauliers, who are often paid not by the hour, but by the kilometre. If they think there will be too many delays, many may simply not come.\n\nThe government says the readiness of traders to deal with the new system remains its biggest concern.\n\nLorries parked on the M20 in Kent\n\n\"The sheer scale of the overall operation means there are literally many millions of moving parts,\" permanent secretary of the cabinet office Alex Chisholm told MPs. \"Inevitably there are going to be some difficulties for some individual people as they adjust to the new regime.\"\n\nThe government has also announced a new Border Operations Centre as part of plans \"for the UK to have the world's most effective border by 2025\".\n\nQuestions have been asked about how changes at the border might affect food supply. The short answer is no-one can say for sure, but nearly 30% of all the food consumed in the UK is imported from the EU.\n\nThe good news is that there is a deal, which makes a big difference. But the challenge is particularly acute because the UK grows relatively small amounts of fruit and vegetables in January and February and is most dependent on supplies from southern Europe at this time of year.\n\nSo, if there are delays, they could cause some shortages on the shelves.\n\n\"Some gaps are possible but we're not going to run out of food - that's not going to happen\" says Ian Wright.\n\nWhen it comes to non-perishable items, there had been some stockpiling in preparation for either outcome, but extra supplies won't last forever.\n\n\"The crunch point is probably not going to be in the first few days or weeks of January,\" William Bain argues. \"Towards the end of the month, when new orders start being placed and delivered, we will start to see the processes in Kent and the other ports really tested.\"\n\nAnd it's not only about food.\n\nOther retailers, which are used to moving their stock freely around the EU customs union, have had to create separate supply chains for the UK. That is costing them more money, and their new systems have yet to be tested properly.\n\nIt's not just about trade across the English Channel.\n\nTrade across the Irish Sea between Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland will be subject to the same pressures, while Northern Ireland will be a special case under the terms of the Northern Ireland protocol in the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement.\n\nNorthern Ireland will remain in the EU single market for goods, and unlike the rest of the UK it will continue to enjoy frictionless trade with the EU with no checks of any kind at the land border with the Republic.\n\nBut there is a price to pay for that - new bureaucracy within the UK between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.\n\nThe EU, for example, has strict rules on products of animal origin: meat, milk, fish and eggs.\n\nThese products must enter the single market (and, from 1 January, Northern Ireland) through a border control post where paperwork is checked, and a proportion of goods physically inspected.\n\nThere will be a grace period of three months for supermarkets and their suppliers, but some smaller traders may have to get used to the new rules straight away.\n\nAll shipments from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will also need a safety and security declaration, and a customs declaration from a new IT system which none of the traders have used before.\n\nThe government has set up a Trader Support Service to help.\n\nThe details of the new trading arrangements for Northern Ireland were announced separately in early December, and provided some clarity. They include an agreement which means the vast majority of goods being shipped from GB to NI will not be at risk of having tariffs imposed.\n\nBut there are plenty of unresolved issues.\n\nTraders are seeking answers about how to send parcels from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, and some online retailers have already suspended deliveries.\n\nThe trade from British to Northern Irish ports often involves multiple small shipments on a single lorry - all of which will need the right paperwork.\n\n\"We need clear rules for everyone in the supply chain,\" says Duncan Buchanan, \"and when you scratch the surface it is just not ready.\"\n\nIt is expected that many checks will be carried out on a 'light touch' basis to begin with.\n\nBut anyone trading between Great Britain and Northern Ireland is going to have to get used to a new way of working very quickly.", "Nearly half a century of the UK's membership of the European Union and its predecessor organisations ended in January of course.\n\nWhat has now ended is the UK's economic membership of the bloc. Forty-eight years in the European customs union, basically the Common Market, and 28 years in the single market.\n\nThe Single Market was a creation for which the UK has paternity rights. It was Margaret Thatcher's rallying call for European reform, her calling card to unleash a wave of Japanese investment in post-industrial Britain and shepherded into existence by her appointee as commissioner Arthur Cockfield.\n\nIts creation served the UK's economic interests, as it grew the home domestic market available for British exporters without tariff or non-tariff barriers, eventually to nearly half a billion Europeans. It was not without irony that the tortuous negotiations of the past four years were made tougher by the EU's insistence on defending what it calls the \"internal market\", itself created by the British.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nIndeed the institutional underpinning of this huge marketplace became too much for Mrs Thatcher. Famously she became suspicious of Commission President Delors turning up to tell the TUC that through the European Union workers could reassert rights rolled back by the Conservative Government.\n\nAt her 1988 Bruges speech PM Thatcher replied: \"We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.\"\n\nThe car industry was the prototype for the single market\n\nPerhaps this was the beginning of the path to Brexit, carried along by the push to monetary union and resentment at the overreach of the European Court of Justice and the considerable impact of the \"direct effect\" of community and then union law.\n\nThe car industry was the prototype for the single market. Mrs Thatcher's campaigning for EEC membership was quickly followed by a charm offensive that began as opposition leader to get Japanese investors to build high tech factories to sell cars tariff-free across Europe.\n\nFor the UK it would provide employment, technology, capital and competition for the languishing nationalised UK-owned auto sector.\n\nOngoing membership of the EEC, restrictions on union activity and investment tax breaks were part of the deal communicated in writing to the then chairman of Nissan.\n\nThe Datsun Bluebird was being developed in Sunderland and around the same time the Italians and the French threatened to slap tariffs on what they saw as a Japanese ruse to avoid tariffs and undercut their industry.\n\nThe UK government quickly communicated that it was willing to take this matter to the European Court of Justice. The attempt to kill the Nissan factory at birth was fended off.\n\nFrom this, the UK car industry and other advanced manufacturing prospered from being plugged into rapid continent-wide supply chains, delivering each part just in time and just in sequence.\n\nAll of that was enabled by conformity of regulations, standards, zero tariffs and the eradication of non-tariff barriers, for sale, but also within the manufacturing process.\n\nThe UK became the financial centre for the euro\n\nSimilar stories could be told about the pharmaceutical industry, chemicals, the food industry, aerospace, and financial services.\n\nWithin the EU, the UK even became the financial centre for a new currency, the euro, which it did not participate in.\n\nThe single market itself, with regulations set and enforced in Brussels, became a player on the world stage. And yet there was a balancing act. The UK could influence the direction of one of the biggest tankers in the sea but was restricted in acting more nimbly in new industries. In some sectors, the UK's trade dealings with the US or Asia were more important than with Europe.\n\nAnd so this tension led to breaking point. And for the Conservative Party in particular the single market's institutions it created and championed, became something akin to Frankenstein's monster.\n\nThe EU has agreed an investment deal with China\n\nSome Brexiteers had hoped that the edifice would collapse once the UK left. But it has proven more robust than that. Indeed, Brexit has proven a catalyst of the EU to sign trade and investment deals far more quickly, including even with China.\n\nSo now the UK finds itself outside of the machine it created as its strategic competitor. The trade negotiation wasn't primarily about trade. Great Britain has declared regulatory independence, or to be more specific, has declared as much regulatory independence as is compatible with a zero-tariff trade deal.\n\nThe EU retains levers and switches to turn off some of these tariff advantages should the UK use the deal to turn into an offshore tariff free assembly hub for US and Asian manufacturing to be traded into the single market. Unlike with Nissan four decades ago, the European Court of Justice will no longer be there.\n\nThe global pharmaceutical industry offers an opportunity for the UK\n\nThe PM wants regulatory competition but his own deal contains disincentives, if not actual restrictions, on competing \"unfairly\" or too much.\n\nSo the strategy matters. Britain is free, but to do what exactly? To level up? Well the regions that need levelling up are the ones that are actually most dependent on exports to Europe. Exports to Europe will be spared tariffs, thanks to the deal, but there will be literally millions of non-tariff barriers, that the economists calculate matter more, from health checks, customs formalities, origin paperwork, assessments of standards etc.\n\nEven to qualify for tariff-free treatment means, according to new government guidance on \"rules of origin\", analysis of how complicated is the process of grating cheese, of the shelling of nuts, and formalities on where the eyes of a doll come from. Most apply legally from tonight, having been absent for decades.\n\nThe sweet spot for UK will now be to deploy regulatory freedom in sectors that are truly global, where we are not already overly dependent on EU markets.\n\nCertain sub-sectors within technology, finance and pharmaceuticals, for example. In each of these sectors the UK is likely to have to offer more friendly regulation to the multinational private sector, than the EU.\n\nIt doesn't necessarily mean lower standards: It could be that UK medicines regulators, for example, build on the record of rapid approval for Covid vaccines in other medical areas.\n\nThe deployment of massive scientific networks within the National Health service, used for rapid clinical testing, could become the envy of the world.\n\nBrexit Britain is likely to become a laboratory for the global economy. Car companies will need to be attracted with more permissive rules on data and, say autonomous driving testing. Some tech companies are already porting their UK customers to be served under US data privacy laws rather than more restrictive EU ones.\n\nBut the government will also have to be very active and judicious. We are already \"picking winners\" again, at least in the satellite business. What about electric power, where the EU will fight aggressively, versus hydrogen power?\n\nThere are a number of structural economic problems, from poor training, declining productivity and low investment that were not caused by EU membership which, in terms of non-tariff barriers, are made immediately worse by this type of Brexit, for which the UK has no option but to deal with.\n\nNorthern Ireland is mostly left in the EU single market\n\nThat process of looking outwards may not come quickly. Holyrood and Stormont rejected the Brexit trade deal. The UK has replaced a single market of 500 million Europeans free of non-tariff barriers with a single market smaller than the size of the UK.\n\nThere is a trade border in the Irish Sea. Northern Ireland is mostly left in the EU single market. There are non-tariff barriers between Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a result of this deal.\n\nLastly there are some big unknowns and unknowables.\n\nThe inadvertent diplomatic consequences of changes in trade patterns can be profound. If, for example, the eminent historian RW Johnson is to be believed, the UK's accession to the EEC in the first place created the conditions for the fall of South Africa's apartheid regime which was \"hurt in several ways\".\n\nBritish trade was remodelled away from the Commonwealth to Europe, the EEC offered favourable trade with all of Africa except Pretoria. And then when Portugal followed its ally the UK into the EEC, its African colonies and white rule quickly lost to revolutions by black liberation movements in Angola and Mozambique.\n\n\"Thus the seeds of the 1976 Soweto uprising were sown\" in part by the UK joining the EEC. Which is obviously not to suggest the reverse would be true. It is merely to say that events such as these can have very unpredictable knock on effects.\n\nThe Prime Minister has succeeded in taking the UK out of the Single Market created by his heroes. The UK now stands outside a system that it helped invent. For now its new single market is not the size of the country.\n\nThe test of all of this, is to make the UK's new single market the size of the globe.", "Some lorries have been turned away for not having the correct paperwork\n\nPlans are in place to minimise disruption at Welsh ports - especially Holyhead - as the UK enters a post-Brexit new year.\n\nThe EU Brexit transition period is over, and lorry drivers heading to and from the Republic of Ireland require additional paperwork to travel.\n\nOfficials at Holyhead said some lorries have already been turned away because they had the wrong documentation.\n\nThe Welsh Government said it was doing what it could to \"protect\" the port.\n\nTransport Minister Ken Skates said it was \"imperative\" contingency plans were in place for the island, as it wakes up to the new customs regime.\n\nFerry operators in Wales will now require freight customers to link customs information to their booking as they head for the Irish Republic.\n\nWithout that paperwork, port access will be refused.\n\n\"We've had the first few rejects, which is not unexpected,\" said Stena Line's Head of UK Ports, Ian Davies.\n\nSpeaking to BBC Radio Wales from Holyhead on New Year's Day, he said it showed the new system was working.\n\n\"We've had people that have been passed and allowed to be shipped, and we've had a few failures as well, so it will be a learning curve for these customers.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government said a \"worst case scenario\" published by the UK suggested 40% to 70% of heavy goods vehicles arriving at ports after transition ended on New Year's Eve may not have the right documentation to travel.\n\nThe peak period for turning vehicles away is expected to be mid-January.\n\n\"We simply don't know whether things are going to work,\" said Rod McKenzie, who is managing director of policy for the body representing lorry drivers and operators, the Road Haulage Association.\n\n\"There is no question there will be problems, even if all the IT works, things could go wrong, and given traders' unfamiliarity with it there is the potential for a lot of mistakes to be made.\"\n\nA contraflow will allow lorries to be \"stacked\" on parts of the A55 if traffic builds\n\nThe association said it was more worried about \"invisible delays\" in the supply chain, rather than queues at ferry ports.\n\n\"Lorries might not leave their factory gate or depot because the paperwork isn't done,\" he said.\n\n\"It's really, really important that people try to get their paperwork right. The consequences of any mistakes will be a disruption of the supply chain.\"\n\nHe said the sector would know in about a week \"how it's going\".\n\nPembrokeshire council said it had been working to ensure any vehicles turned away from Pembroke Dock and Fishguard were dealt with away from the ports.\n\nIt has arranged overflow locations at Goodwick and Pembroke Dock for its own version of Dover's \"Operation Stack\", where lorries queue along the M20.\n\n\"The importance of Pembrokeshire's ports to the county, Wales and UK as a whole cannot be overestimated,\" said council leader David Simpson.\n\nHolyhead is the UK's second busiest roll-on roll-off ferry port\n\nOn Anglesey, a temporary contraflow is in force on the A55 expressway, eastbound between junctions two and four, allowing any traffic turned away from the port to be redirected back.\n\nIt will be moved to parking locations at Parc Cybi on the outskirts of the town, and if necessary, lorries will be parked on the cordoned-off A55 sections.\n\n\"We will monitor the situation carefully and as soon as it's safe to do so we will remove the temporary contraflow,\" said Mr Skates.\n\n\"While the next few days are expected to be quiet, we know it will become busier as we approach mid-January.\n\n\"Our aim is to do what we can to protect the port, town of Holyhead and wider community from any possible disruption.\"\n\nOn Friday, port authorities on Anglesey said freight traffic has been quiet, as expected over the bank holiday period.\n\nIt follows an steep rise in lorry crossings in the run up to Christmas and the end of the transition period.\n\nFerry operator Stena Line is also responsible for running Holyhead Port.\n\n\"We can't get complacent over the next few days,\" said a Stena spokesman.\n\n\"It's when freight levels come back up that we'll know whether the systems are really working and whether the hauliers are ready. That will be the real test.\"", "More than 35,000 people have received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in Wales\n\nThe Covid vaccine programme is at the \"very beginning\" and vaccination rates are increasing, Wales' Health Minister Vaughan Gething has insisted.\n\nIt follows concerns raised by some politicians over the speed of Welsh vaccine rollout.\n\nInitial figures on how many people have received the first Pfizer-BioNTech jab show Wales is slightly behind those vaccinated elsewhere in the UK.\n\nMr Gething said there were likely to be \"small differences between nations\".\n\n\"Comparisons are naturally being made on the number of vaccinations administered by the four nations of the UK,\" he said in a ministerial statement to Senedd members.\n\n\"Whilst I recognise the data indicates there are other nations ahead of us, the national data presented at this very early stage of the vaccination roll out should be considered provisional and a snapshot of ongoing activity.\"\n\nHe said there would be \"lags\" in data being entered, and local factors affecting vaccinations.\n\n\"For example the vaccination centre in Cardiff and the Vale was unable to operate for two days because of a virus outbreak linked to the site,\" he added.\n\nMore than 35,000 people have now received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in Wales, including healthcare workers who work in Wales but live over the border in England.\n\nAlmost 13,000 of these vaccines were given in the past week.\n\nThe number of vaccinations in Wales up until 27 December account for 1.12% of the Welsh population.\n\nIn England, 1.4% have received a jab, while in Scotland it is 1.7%, and 1.6% in Northern Ireland.\n\nThe Welsh Conservative health spokesman Andrew RT Davies flagged his concerns about the vaccine delivery programme on Thursday.\n\n\"Three weeks ago, the first Covid-19 vaccine was given in Wales, and since that time we have sadly seen confusion and hope drop away,\" he said.\n\n\"Many people over 80 in Wales were desperately waiting for their appointment to do their bit and have the vaccine but as we quickly learnt they would have to wait longer,\" he said.\n\nBut the health minister said daily vaccination rates were \"increasing across Wales\".\n\nThe focus is on delivering vaccines effectively and safely, says Vaughan Gething\n\n\"Looking ahead, all health boards are preparing for significant expansion in capacity from the beginning of January,\" added Mr Gething.\n\nHe said the new Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine approved earlier this week would be available from some GPs in Wales from Monday.\n\n\"This is only the very beginning of what will be a programme spanning many months,\" he said.\n\n\"Whilst the urgency and priority required is clear to all, we must also have some patience and allow the NHS to do what it does so well.\n\n\"My focus, and that of the NHS, is on delivering the vaccine programme quickly but also effectively, safely and equitably.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government has also confirmed it will be following the latest advice from medical advisers on introducing a 12-week gap between the two doses of vaccines needed, for both types of approved jabs.\n\nAll four chief medical officers in the UK have supported the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which said the focus should be on giving at-risk people the first dose of whichever vaccine they receive.\n\n\"It will ensure that more at-risk people are able to get protection from a vaccine in the coming weeks and months, reducing deaths and starting to ease pressure on our NHS,\" said Mr Gething.\n\nVaccinations started earlier in December after regulators approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine\n\nPlaid Cymru has called on the Welsh Government to ask the UK government to publish evidence to justify increasing the period for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.\n\nIn a letter to Mr Gething, the party's health spokesman Rhun ap Iorwerth said the \"sudden switch\" represented \"a very significant departure\" from previous guidelines.\n\nHe added there were \"very real concerns\" that a longer delay between doses \"could significantly decrease the effectiveness of the vaccine\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"I wish I could switch place with my daughter\" - Odd Steinar Sørengen's daughter is missing\n\nA body has been found shortly after rescuers and dog handlers began a risky ground search for 10 people missing in a hillside collapse in Norway.\n\nInitially it was thought too dangerous to send rescuers on to the site, after flowing mud sent homes toppling into a giant chasm in the village of Ask.\n\nHelicopters and drones spent two days searching the scene.\n\nBut on Friday police commander Roy Alkvist said one or two houses appeared safe to enter.\n\nRescuers, who included a Swedish specialist team, began moving into the danger zone on Styrofoam boards. The bright orange boards were laid down on the mud in a domino-effect as rescuers tried to reach one of the wrecked homes, which are 25km (15 miles) north-east of the capital Oslo.\n\nA missing Dalmatian dog was rescued on Thursday and police believe there is still a chance survivors could be found.\n\nHowever, on Friday afternoon an air ambulance helicopter landed near the site and police said a body had been found at 14:30 (13:30 GMT) without giving further details.\n\nRescuers are using orange Styrofoam boards to move around the landslide area\n\nPrime Minister Erna Solberg said her thoughts went out to the victim's family, and to those waiting for news of the other nine people who were missing.\n\nIn Friday's operation the rescuers also prepared a giant army vehicle called a \"paver\", which has a giant steel bridge on which rescuers can move.\n\nHowever, conditions were not yet good enough for the 50-tonne machine to be deployed.\n\nThe plan is to deploy a Norwegian army bridge-laying vehicle as soon as conditions are good enough\n\nFriday's search was a race against time, as the rescuers only had a few hours of daylight in the Norwegian winter. Medics and geologists were reportedly part of the ground rescue team.\n\nThe ground search was called off for the night at 17:30 and police said drones and heat-seeking cameras would continue overnight until rescue crews could return on Saturday morning.\n\nAbout 1,000 people have been evacuated from Gjerdrum municipality, which contains Ask village. Dozens more were moved out of their homes on New Year's Eve.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Aerial footage shows the scale of the landslide\n\nAlthough police have not given details of the missing, they are believed to include men, women and children.\n\nAmong them is a woman who was talking to her husband on the phone while walking the dog when the line went dead, according to Bergens Tidende newspaper.\n\nFurther reports say a couple and their small child are also missing, as well as a woman in her 50s and her adult son.\n\nMore than 30 homes have been destroyed, but officials say more could be lost as the edges of the crater left by the landslide are still breaking away.\n\nThe conditions have proved challenging, with temperatures dropping to -1C (30F) and the clay ground proving too unstable for emergency workers to walk on.\n\nThe scale of the landslide is shown by this aerial view of the disaster site\n\nThe landslide began early on Wednesday, with residents calling emergency services and telling them that their houses were moving, police said.\n\n\"There were two massive tremors that lasted for a long while and I assumed it was snow being cleared or something like that,\" Oeystein Gjerdrum, 68, told broadcaster NRK.\n\n\"Then the power suddenly went out, and a neighbour came to the door and said we needed to evacuate, so I woke up my three grandchildren and told them to get dressed quickly.\"\n\nA spokeswoman for the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) told AFP that the landslide was a so-called \"quick clay slide\" measuring about 300m by 700m (985ft by 2,300ft).\n\n\"This is the largest landslide in recent times in Norway, considering the number of houses involved and the number of evacuees,\" Laila Hoivik said.\n\nQuick clay is a kind of clay found in Norway and Sweden that can collapse and behave as a fluid when it comes under stress.\n\nBroadcaster NRK said heavy rainfall may have made the soil unstable, but questions have since emerged over why construction was permitted in the area.\n\nA 2005 geological survey labelled the area as at high risk of landslides, according to a report seen by the broadcaster TV2. Despite this, the homes were built three years later in 2008.", "Ontario Premier Doug Ford has announced the resignation of his finance minister who took a trip to the Caribbean while the province remained under lockdown.\n\nMr Ford on Thursday said Mr Phillips' departure showed his government \"takes seriously our obligation to hold ourselves to a higher standard\".\n\nCanada's most populous province has discouraged all non-essential travel amid record-high new case counts.\n\nMr Phillips, who is a member of the Progressive Conservative Party, had taken a personal trip to St Barts on 13 December and returned on Thursday morning.\n\nAhead of the holiday season, Ontario health officials had urged residents to stay at home when possible amid an ongoing rise in Covid-19 cases.\n\nPeople line up on Christmas Day at a Covid test site in Ontario\n\nMr Phillips told reporters when he arrived at Toronto Pearson Airport he hoped to keep his job, but would respect the premier's decision.\n\n\"Obviously, I made a significant error in judgment, and I will be accountable for that,\" Mr Phillips said. \"I do not make any excuses for the fact that I travelled when we shouldn't have travelled.\"\n\nLater on Thursday, Mr Ford said in a statement he had accepted Mr Phillips' resignation following a conversation with him. Mr Ford has asked Peter Bethlenfalvy, currently president of the treasury board, to step into the finance minister role.\n\nOn Wednesday, Mr Ford had said he learned of Mr Phillips travel two weeks ago, but said the minister \"never told anyone\" he was going to St Barts, according to CBC.\n\nOntario's New Democratic Party leader Andrea Horwath on Wednesday had pushed for Mr Phillip's firing, saying it was unacceptable for him to \"ignore public health advice\" while the government \"demands sacrifice from everyday Ontarians\".\n\n\"It's not believable that a senior member of cabinet didn't tell the premier's office he was leaving the country for weeks during the height of a global emergency,\" she said in a statement. \"If he didn't, that in itself would be enough reason to demote him.\"", "The UK's chief medical officers have defended the Covid vaccination plan, after criticism from a doctors' union.\n\nThe UK will give both parts of the Oxford and Pfizer vaccines 12 weeks apart, having initially planned to leave 21 days between the Pfizer jabs.\n\nThe British Medical Association said cancelling patients booked in for their second doses was \"grossly unfair\".\n\nBut the chief medical officers said getting more people vaccinated with the first jab \"is much more preferable\".\n\nThe Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was the first jab approved in the UK, and 944,539 people have had their first jab.\n\nThe first person to get the jab on 8 December, Margaret Keenan, has already had her second jab.\n\nPfizer has said it has tested the vaccine's efficacy only when the two vaccines were given up to 21 days apart.\n\nBut the chief medical officers said the \"great majority\" of initial protection came from the first jab.\n\n\"The second vaccine dose is likely to be very important for duration of protection, and at an appropriate dose interval may further increase vaccine efficacy,\" they said.\n\n\"In the short term, the additional increase of vaccine efficacy from the second dose is likely to be modest; the great majority of the initial protection from clinical disease is after the first dose of vaccine.\"\n\nThe decision to delay the second dose has, understandably, caused concern.\n\nThere is some evidence regulators say - at least for the Oxford vaccine - that it will actually boost immunity.\n\nBut for those who are due to get a second dose soon it will undoubtedly be upsetting that they now have to wait.\n\nBut the move is about practicalities. The UK is in the middle of a public health crisis and despite the fact that millions of doses are pre-ordered, there is concern the supply of the vaccine will not be as smooth as everyone would ideally want.\n\nThere is a global demand for these vaccines and there are bound to be times when supply does not meet demand.\n\nSo the logic of the move is that by spreading this thin resource the most widely, it will have the greatest benefit - not only to the vulnerable but to everyone.\n\nLives have been put on hold and livelihoods lost.\n\nThis is the quickest way back to some degree of normality.\n\nEven if it does leave some of the vaccinated susceptible to infection, it should in theory at least protect them from serious illness.\n\nGiven where we are now, the argument is that that is a price worth paying.\n\nAs well as approving the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on Wednesday - the second approved for use in the UK - regulators also said that doctors could wait longer between the two courses.\n\nThis means more people will get the first jab sooner, even if they have to wait longer for their second jab.\n\nExperts advising the government, including the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said the focus should be on giving at-risk people the first dose of whichever vaccine they receive.\n\nDefending the move, the UK's four chief medical officers - including England's Prof Chris Whitty - said in a statement released on New Year's Eve: \"In terms of protecting priority groups, a model where we can vaccinate twice the number of people in the next two to three months is obviously much more preferable.\"\n\nThey said they recognised that rescheduling second appointments was \"operationally very difficult\" and would \"distress patients who were looking forward to being fully immunised\".\n\nHowever, they said that for every 1,000 patients booked in for a second dose, which will \"gain marginally on protection from severe disease\", that would mean 1,000 more people missing out on \"substantial initial protection\".\n\nThe chief medics said that, while one million people had already been vaccinated, approximately 30 million UK patients and health and social care workers eligible in the first phase \"remain totally unprotected and many are distressed or anxious about the wait for their turn\".\n\nThey added that the JCVI was \"confident\" 12 weeks was a reasonable interval between doses \"to achieve good longer-term protection\".\n\n\"We have to follow public health principles and act at speed if we are to beat this pandemic which is running rampant in our communities, and we believe the public will understand and thank us for this decisive action.\"\n\nEarlier, the BMA's Dr Richard Vautrey said GPs were unhappy they were being asked to cancel appointments that had already been made for second doses.\n\nHe said the BMA would support practices who honour the existing appointments for the follow-up vaccination, calling for the government to do the same.", "The first lorries to transport freight under the new arrangements arrived in Belfast on Friday afternoon\n\nThe first goods have crossed the new trade border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.\n\nThe 'Irish Sea border' is a consequence of Brexit and means that most commercial goods entering NI from GB require a customs declaration.\n\nAbout a dozen lorries arrived on a ferry from Cairnryan in Scotland to Belfast at 14:00 GMT on Friday.\n\nThey were met by officials, with some vehicles directed to new border control posts.\n\nMany food products from GB now have to enter NI through these border posts where they can be inspected by the Department of Agriculture.\n\nThese products also need health certificates, though some of the new certification processes will be phased in over the next three months.\n\nThe UK government also announced a three-month \"grace period\" for parcels, meaning those sent by online retailers will be exempt from customs declarations until at least April.\n\nIt said the grace period was necessary to avoid disruption to deliveries at a time when many shops are closed due to pandemic restrictions.\n\nMeanwhile the secretary of state for Northern Ireland has continued to insist the new range of checks, controls and paperwork is not actually a sea border.\n\nBrandon Lewis tweeted: \"There is no 'Irish Sea Border'. As we have seen today, the important preparations the government and businesses have taken to prepare for the end of the Transition Period are keeping goods flowing freely around the country, including between GB and NI.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Brandon Lewis This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nTransport companies are not expecting significant volumes of freight over the next few days.\n\nThere has been significant stockpiling ahead of the changes and it may take one or two weeks before freight volumes are at normal seasonal levels.\n\nSome businesses, particularly haulage companies, are anxious about the new IT systems which are necessary for the border to function.\n\nThey have had less than two weeks to familiarise themselves with the new systems.\n\nPolice officers carried out random vehicle checks near Larne Port on New Year's Eve\n\nSeamus Leheny from Logistics UK said: \"With any reconfiguration of supply chains and new systems there will be teething problems and we expect that.\"\n\nThere will be no new processes or checks for the vast majority of goods leaving NI for GB.\n\nThe new arrangements flow from the Northern Ireland Protocol, a deal reached by the UK and EU in 2019.\n\nIts purpose is to prevent a hard land border in Ireland.\n\nThat is achieved by keeping Northern Ireland in the EU's single market for goods and by having Northern Ireland apply EU customs rules at its ports.\n\nThis will allow goods to flow from NI to the Republic of Ireland and the rest of the EU as they do now, without customs checks or new paperwork.\n\nThe Protocol is opposed by Northern Ireland's unionist parties who fear it will weaken Northern Ireland's position in the UK.\n\nThe arrangement does not change Northern Ireland's constitutional position.\n\nHowever, it does mean a significant new economic barrier within the UK.\n\nUnionist parties fear the sea border will weaken NI's position in the UK\n\nThe UK government has allocated more than £300m for a Trader Support Service to help businesses deal with the new customs arrangements.\n\nThe government is also covering the costs of the new certification requirements for food products.\n\nA Movement Assistance Scheme will pay vets up to £150 to complete the Export Health Certificates which will need to accompany all live animals and products of animal origin entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain.\n\nTrucks pass through a customs post at Dublin Port on Friday morning\n\nThere are also new checks and controls on freight arriving at Dublin Port from GB.\n\nOn Friday morning, the first ferry to arrive in Dublin from Holyhead had about 12 lorries on board.\n\nWhile they all cleared customs checks for the first time without delays, Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney said the change in trading arrangements with the UK would inevitably cause disruption.\n\n\"We have avoided the kind of dramatic disruption of a no trade deal Brexit, but that doesn't mean that things aren't changing very fundamentally, because they are,\" he said.\n\n\"We're now going to see the €80b (£71.2bn) worth of trade across the Irish Sea between Britain and Ireland disrupted by an awful lot more checks and declarations, and bureaucracy and paperwork, and cost and delay.\"\n\nOn Saturday new freight sailings will begin between Rosslare in the Republic of Ireland and Dunkirk in France, allowing cargo to bypass GB and go straight to mainland Europe.\n\nThe six-times weekly service will take 24 hours, which is longer than the \"landbridge\" route via GB.", "A new era has begun for the United Kingdom after it completed its formal separation from the European Union.\n\nThe UK stopped following EU rules at 23:00 GMT, as replacement arrangements for travel, trade, immigration and security co-operation came into force.\n\nBoris Johnson said the UK had \"freedom in our hands\" and the ability to do things \"differently and better\" now the long Brexit process was over.\n\nBut opponents of leaving the EU maintain the country will be worse off.\n\nScottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, whose ambition it is to take an independent Scotland back into the EU, tweeted: \"Scotland will be back soon, Europe. Keep the light on.\"\n\nBBC Europe editor Katya Adler said there was a sense of relief in Brussels that the Brexit process was over, \"but there is regret still at Brexit itself\".\n\nThe first lorries arriving at the borders entered the UK and EU without delay.\n\nOn Friday evening, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps tweeted that border traffic had been \"low due to [the] bank holiday\" but there had been no disruption in Kent as \"hundreds\" of lorries crossed the Channel with a \"small\" number turned back.\n\nSix freight loads travelling from Holyhead in Wales to Ireland had to be turned away due to not having the correct paperwork, the Stena Line ferry and port group said on Friday morning.\n\nBut later on Friday, the group said freight traffic was flowing well through its ports and government customs systems were working well.\n\nIt added that the fall in freight traffic after the Christmas and Brexit stockpiling period meant \"it is too early to draw any conclusions\", but the company remained \"cautiously optimistic that, as freight volumes begin to rise again, we will be able to ensure the continued free movement of goods\".\n\nUK ministers have warned there will be some disruption in the coming days and weeks, as new rules bed in and British firms come to terms with the changes.\n\nBut officials have insisted new border systems are \"ready to go\".\n\nAs the first customs checks were completed after midnight, Eurotunnel spokesman John Keefe said: \"It all went fine, everything's running just as it was before 11pm.\"\n\nNorthern Ireland has different arrangements from other parts of the UK, meaning there will be some customs checks on goods moving between Great Britain and the province.\n\nOn Friday afternoon, the first ferry from Great Britain operating under the terms of Northern Ireland trading protocol docked in Belfast, on schedule at 13:45 GMT.\n\nSeamus Leheny, policy manager at Logistics UK, said six out of the 15 lorries that were on the first ship to arrive into Belfast were brought in for inspection, with one being kept at the port for more than three hours.\n\n\"Inevitably there are going to be teething problems because with such a new, complex system as this there are going to be issues in the first few days,\" he told BBC Radio 4's PM programme.\n\nThe first lorry loads on to the Eurotunnel shuttle after the UK left the single market and customs union\n\nMandy Ridyard, whose aerospace components company makes daily shipments to Northern Ireland, told BBC Radio 4's World at One programme she was \"filling in the same declaration to send goods to the Philippines that I am sending them within the UK\".\n\n\"And obviously that all adds a lot of cost to my business.\"\n\nThe UK officially left the 27-member political and economic bloc on 31 January, three and half years after the UK public voted to leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum.\n\nBut it stuck to the EU's trading rules for 11 months while the two sides negotiated their future economic partnership.\n\nA treaty was finally agreed on Christmas Eve, and became law in the UK on Wednesday.\n\nUnder the new arrangements, UK manufacturers will have tariff-free access to the EU's internal market, meaning there will be no import taxes on goods crossing between Britain and the continent.\n\nBut it does mean more paperwork for businesses and people travelling to EU countries, while there is still uncertainty about what will happen to banking and services.\n\nThe UK and Spain have also reached an agreement meaning the border between Gibraltar and Spain will remain open.\n\nFabian Picardo, Gibraltar's chief minister, said the deal still needed to be formalised, but by abolishing controls between Gibraltar and the EU's passport-free Schengen area, he said it would prevent queues at the border \"which make people's lives a misery and make business difficult\".\n\nIt is a moment that some will regard with huge optimism, others with deep regret.\n\nAnd while this historic move happens at a moment in time, the impact, in some areas, may be less instant or obvious than others - for example, it's expected there'll be relatively little traffic at Dover on the first day of 2021 as new border checks kick in.\n\nNevertheless, significant changes are here - whether on trade, travel, security or immigration - and those changes could well become more apparent in the months ahead.\n\nMr Johnson - who took the UK out of the EU in January six months after becoming prime minister - said it was an \"amazing moment\" for the UK in his New Year message.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nWriting in the Daily Telegraph, he added that the combination of the Brexit deal and rollout of the Oxford vaccine means \"we are creating the potential trampoline for the national bounceback\".\n\nLord Frost, the UK's chief negotiator, tweeted that Britain had become a \"fully independent country again\".\n\nAnd the deputy chairman of the pro-Brexit European Research Group of Tory backbench MPs, David Jones, told the BBC: \"We can now say clearly Britain is a sovereign and independent state.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by David Frost This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nBut opponents of Brexit say the country will be worse off than it was while it was a member of the EU.\n\nIreland's Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said it was \"not something to celebrate\" and the UK's relationship with Ireland will be different from now on, but \"we wish them well\".\n\nFrench President Emmanuel Macron said the UK remained a \"friend and ally\", but he added that the choice to leave the EU was \"the child of European malaise and many lies and false promises\".\n\nIn Brussels, there is a sense of relief the Brexit process is over, but there is regret still at Brexit itself.\n\nBasically, the European Union thinks that Brexit makes it - the EU - and the UK weaker.\n\nBut the EU view is this is less bye-bye Britain and more au revoir, because there are so many loose ends between the two sides.\n\nFor example, there are the ongoing practicalities surrounding Gibraltar, the UK is still waiting to find out what access Brussels is going to give its financial services to the single market, there is cooperation on climate change, and there is a reviewal mechanism written into the treaty for every five years.\n\nFor all of those reasons and more, this is not the end of the EU-UK conversation for the foreseeable future.\n\nThe culmination of the Brexit process means major changes in different areas. These include:", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Countries around the world welcomed 2021 with fireworks, but crowds were only allowed at some displays\n\nMillions around the world have been seeing out 2020 and marking the start of 2021, although the coronavirus pandemic has forced many celebrations to take place in muted form behind closed doors.\n\nWith lockdowns or other restrictions in place in many countries, would-be New Year partygoers were told to have a quiet night in.\n\nOthers have attended ceremonies or festivals wearing masks or taking other precautions.\n\nIn Tokyo, below, people visited the Kanda Myojin Shrine to offer prayers. The popular Shinto shrine reduced the number of visitors allowed, as Japan faces another wave of Covid-19 infections.\n\nIn Wuhan, China, crowds gathered in the city with balloons and festive outfits to count down to midnight on New Year's Eve.\n\nFireworks lit up the night sky in Taiwan to mark the beginning of 2021, witnessed by thousands of spectators who gathered in the centre of Taipei.\n\nLike this family in Seoul, South Korea, many globally have marked the celebration in a small way and often at home.\n\nIt was a chilly celebration in Yekaterinburg, Russia, as people gathered at the city hall, waving sparklers in the 1905 Square.\n\nWhile in the United Arab Emirates, one of the largest New Year fireworks displays saw spectacular colours light up the sky over the emirate of Ras al-Khaimah.\n\nPyrotechnics also illuminated the sky around the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, as the clock struck midnight in Dubai.\n\nThe New Year's Eve party at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin is usually one of Europe's biggest street parties. But this year revellers were told to stay at home and watch the fireworks and music performances on TV or online instead.\n\nThese worshippers in Abuja, Nigeria, marked the end of 2020 with a gospel service.\n\nMeanwhile, people in the city of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast were able to watch the fireworks display outside with friends and family.\n\nBut in New York City, just a handful of people were allowed into Times Square to watch confetti rain down and the traditional crystal ball drop.\n\nBrazilian authorities closed Copacabana Beach, in Rio de Janeiro, but that did not stop some people enjoying celebrations.\n\nA fireworks and light show was held across various locations in London. A number of drones filled the sky close to the O2 Arena in East London forming messages referencing the pandemic, including the NHS logo.", "The Archers returned to BBC Radio 4 in May with \"a new style\" forced upon the show by the coronavirus lockdown\n\nBBC Radio 4 will mark 70 years of The Archers with a series of features across its output on Friday.\n\nAs well as broadcasting episode number 19,343 of the world's longest-running serial drama, stars from it will appear on the station's other programmes.\n\nThis will include inserts into Woman's Hour, Farming Today, and a quiz.\n\nThe Archers, set in the fictional village of Ambridge, began in 1951 with the original purpose of educating farmers on modern agricultural methods.\n\nThe show's editor, Jeremy Howe, said its achievements over the years, coming up to the modern day, are incomparable.\n\n\"Almost daily and in real time The Archers has tracked life in the village of Ambridge across years and more than 19,000 episodes,\" he said.\n\n\"No work of fiction or drama can truly compare to that. As I look back on this incredible legacy, I am looking forward to the next 70 years of The Archers.\"\n\nBack in May, The Archers returned to BBC Radio 4 on Monday, with a \"new style\" forced upon the show by the coronavirus lockdown.\n\nLarge cast recordings with interaction between multiple characters were scrapped in favour of monologues recorded at the actors' homes.\n\nThe storyline of Friday's anniversary episode remains a secret, but celebratory programming on Radio 4 on the day will also include a special edition of With Great Pleasure at Christmas, where cast members from the series share their favourite prose and poetry.\n\nHowe, meanwhile, will appear alongside actor Timothy Bentinck (David Archer) and agricultural story advisor Sarah Swadling in an Archers-flavoured edition of Farming Today.\n\nWoman's Hour will focus on the female characters and storylines that have shaped the show.\n\nFinally, on the day, listeners will be invited to head over to The Bull pub - not literally of course - for the The Archers Anniversary Quiz, hosted by landlords Jolene (Buffy Davis) and Kenton Archer (Richard Attlee).\n\nOn Saturday 2 January, historian David Kynaston will then delve into the history of the programme further documentary feature entitled A Social History of The Archers.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Spain has reached a deal with the UK to maintain free movement to and from Gibraltar once the UK formally leaves the EU on Friday.\n\nTo avoid a hard border, Gibraltar will join the EU's Schengen zone and follow other EU rules, while remaining a British Overseas Territory.\n\nThe deal was announced by Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya, just hours before the UK exits the EU.\n\nThe Rock voted Remain in 2016 and about 15,000 Spanish workers go there daily.\n\n\"With this [agreement], the fence is removed, Schengen is applied to Gibraltar... it allows for the lifting of controls between Gibraltar and Spain,\" said Ms González Laya.\n\nThe Gibraltar deal will mean the EU sending Frontex border guards to facilitate free movement to and from Gibraltar. Their role is planned to last four years.\n\nGibraltarians are British citizens. They elect their own representatives to the territory's parliament, while the British monarch appoints a governor.\n\nThe territory - home to a British military garrison and naval base - is self-governing in all areas except defence and foreign policy.\n\nMs González Laya did not say whether Spanish border guards would eventually be posted at Gibraltar's airport and/or seaport which, under the deal, will be de facto part of the EU's external border.\n\nThe Gibraltar deal would also mean the territory complying with EU fair competition rules in areas such as financial policy, the environment and the labour market, Ms González Laya said.\n\nTwenty-two EU states are in the passport-free Schengen zone, as are Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein, but the UK has never been in it.\n\nOnce Gibraltar joins it, EU citizens arriving from Spain or another Schengen country will avoid passport checks, while arrivals from the UK will have to go through passport control, as is already the case.\n\nUK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab called Thursday's deal a \"political framework\" to form the basis of a separate treaty with the EU regarding Gibraltar.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Why Gibraltar is British - in 60 secs\n\nThe deal does not address the thorny issue of sovereignty. Spain has long disputed British sovereignty over the Rock which was ceded to Britain in 1713 and which is now home to about 34,000 people. The Remain vote there was an overwhelming 96% in the 2016 EU referendum.\n\nThe plan is to have a six-month transition period and then formalise the new arrangements with a treaty.\n\nUnder the current tight Covid rules, there are restrictions on UK citizens arriving via Gibraltar's airport, the UK Foreign Office says.\n\nDominic Raab said \"all sides are committed to mitigating the effects of the end of the [Brexit] Transition Period on Gibraltar, and in particular ensure border fluidity, which is clearly in the best interests of the people living on both sides.\n\n\"We remain steadfast in our support for Gibraltar, and its sovereignty is safeguarded.\"", "Omar Elabdellaoui is receiving treatment in hospital after an accident with a firework\n\nNorway and Galatasaray footballer Omar Elabdellaoui has been injured by a firework during a New Year's Eve celebration.\n\nThe Norwegian vice-captain's club said he was taken to hospital after \"an unfortunate accident at his home\".\n\nHe suffered burns to his face and damage to his eyes, the club said, adding that further tests would assess the extent of his injuries.\n\nThe New Year's Eve incident was one of many involving fireworks in Europe.\n\nIn Elabdellaoui's case, Turkish reports say a firework exploded in the hand of the 29-year-old defender.\n\nTurkish newspaper Hurriyet said the former Manchester City player may have lost vision, without giving further details.\n\nBut in a statement cited by the newspaper, Galatasaray said Elabdellaoui was conscious, in a stable condition and had not undergone surgery.\n\nGalatasaray's manager Fatih Terim and the team captain Arda Turan went to the hospital to visit Elabdellaoui, who joined the club in 2020 from the Greek side Olympiacos FC.\n\nTurkish clubs - including Galatasaray's Turkish Super Lig rivals Fenerbahce, Besiktas and Trabzonspor - took to social media to wish Elabdellaoui a speedy recovery.\n\nTurkish reports say a firework exploded in the hand of 29-year-old Omar Elabdellaoui\n\nElsewhere in Europe, at least four people were killed by fireworks during events to mark the new year.\n\nPolice in Alsace in eastern France said a 25-year-old man died after being hit by a rocket in the village of Boofzheim.\n\nA statement said the device beheaded him and severely injured the face of another young man standing next to him.\n\nA similar incident cost the life of a 28-year-old man in Pulle, a village east of Antwerp in Belgium.\n\nFireworks exploded over Berlin's landmark Brandenburg Gate to usher in the new year\n\nMeanwhile in Italy's north-western province of Asti, a 13-year-old boy died shortly after midnight of injuries to his abdomen caused by a firecracker.\n\nThere were fireworks casualties in Germany as well. In the state of Brandenburg, police said a 24-year-old man died after setting alight \"self-made pyrotechnics\" while a 63-year-old man lost his hand when handling a firecracker.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Countries around the world welcomed 2021 with fireworks, but crowds were only allowed at some displays\n\nInjuries and deaths from fireworks are not unknown over the New Year period. But fewer public fireworks displays than usual were held on New Year's Eve 2020, as coronavirus restrictions placed limits on gatherings worldwide.\n\nSome European countries had moved to limit the use of fireworks ahead of 31 December, with Germany imposing a ban on the sale of pyrotechnics.", "Rachael Powell is \"angry and upset\" about her daughter Emmeline missing out during lockdown Image caption: Rachael Powell is \"angry and upset\" about her daughter Emmeline missing out during lockdown\n\nNew parents missing baby classes and playdates due to lockdown say their children's development has been hit by the impact of coronavirus.\n\nWhen Rachael Powell's one-year-old daughter Emmeline met her grandparents for the first time she \"absolutely screamed the place down\" as she \"didn't know who they were\".\n\n\"I was really looking forward to going to coffee shops, meeting other mums and going to baby classes and then everything stopped,\" says the 39-year-old from Greater Manchester.\n\n\"I felt guilty that she didn't get any of that and have that interaction.\"\n\nEducation consultant and child psychologist Paul Kelly says Covid is having a \"massive impact\" on babies.\n\n\"We are social creatures, social beings - it is pre-programmed in our brains,\" he says. \"When children's brains are stimulated, they grow.\"\n\nDr Kelly says there is also an impact on parents, who are missing out on \"mutual support\".\n\nHe says people should \"grab what they can, when they can\" during these uncertain times and focus on \"how you can enhance [your baby's] development... rather than spending time thinking about how your child might be behind\".", "The number of people being treated in Scotland's hospitals for coronavirus has reached another record daily high.\n\nLatest Scottish government figures show a total of 1,596 people are in hospital with recently confirmed Covid.\n\nThis is up from Friday's figure of 1,530 patients.\n\nThe deaths of a further 93 people who had tested positive for the virus have been recorded in the past 24 hours, the same tally as Friday which was the highest daily figure of the pandemic.\n\nIt is the second day in a row there has been a record figure for Covid hospital patients.\n\nOf the 1,596 people in hospital, a total of 109 are in intensive care, up seven on Friday's figure.\n\nNational clinical director Prof Jason Leitch said Scotland's hospitals were \"very busy and fragile\" but coping so far.\n\nHe said: \"People should not be worried we have reached capacity but the best way of getting those numbers down is to reduce the prevalence of the virus.\"\n\nProf Leitch said the NHS could create more intensive care capacity if needed but \"all of that has a cost in what we won't be able to do\" elsewhere in the health service.\n\nThe NHS Louisa Jordan temporary hospital in Glasgow can be used to care for the sickest of Covid patients if the spike in admissions continues, but officials are trying to avoid this \"if we can manage without it\", Prof Leitch added.\n\nThis is because it is better for patients and staff for Covid patients to be in traditional intensive care units, he explained.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon has described the latest Covid figures as \"a big concern\".\n\nOn Twitter, she said: \"Covid case numbers still a big concern and putting huge pressure on the NHS, as hospital and ICU cases increase.\n\n\"Also, 93 further deaths remind us just how dangerous the virus can be - my thoughts are with all those grieving.\"]\n\nThe Scottish government data shows a further 1,865 new cases of Covid have been reported in the last 24 hours, down from the 2,309 cases reported on Friday.\n\nHowever, the daily test positivity rate is 8.7%, up from 8.1% on the previous day.\n\nThis breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.\n\nYou can receive Breaking News on a smartphone or tablet via the BBC News App. You can also follow @BBCBreaking on Twitter to get the latest alerts.", "North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said US policy towards his country would \"never change\"\n\nNorth Korean leader Kim Jong-un has said the US is his country's \"biggest enemy\" and that he does not expect Washington to change its policy toward Pyongyang - whoever is president.\n\nAddressing a rare congress of his ruling Workers' Party, Mr Kim also pledged to expand North Korea's nuclear weapons arsenal and military potential.\n\nHe said that plans for a nuclear submarine were almost complete.\n\nHis comments come as US President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office.\n\nAnalysts suggest Mr Kim's remarks are an effort to apply pressure on the incoming government, with Mr Biden set to be sworn in on 20 January.\n\nMr Kim enjoyed a warm rapport with outgoing US President Donald Trump, even if little concrete progress was made on negotiations over North Korea's nuclear programme.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nIn his latest address to the Workers' Party - only the eighth congress in its history - Mr Kim said Pyongyang did not intend to use its nuclear weapons unless \"hostile forces\" were planning to use them against North Korea first.\n\nHe said the US was his country's \"biggest obstacle for our revolution and our biggest enemy... no matter who is in power, the true nature of its policy against North Korea will never change,\" state news agency KCNA reported.\n\nHis speech outlined a list of desired weapons including long-range ballistic missiles capable of being launched from land or sea and \"super-large warheads\".\n\nNorth Korea has managed to significantly advance its arsenal despite being subject to strict economic sanctions.\n\nEarlier this week, Mr Kim admitted that his five-year economic plan for the isolated country failed to meet its targets in \"almost every sector\".\n\nNorth Korea closed its borders last January to prevent Covid from entering the country.\n\nIts authorities say the country has not had a single Covid case since the pandemic began but experts say this is highly unlikely due to North Korea's cross-border trade with China.\n\nTrade with China has plummeted by about 80%. Typhoons and floods have devastated homes and crops in North Korea, which remains under strict international sanctions, including over its nuclear programme.\n\nThe speech is likely to be Mr Kim's way of setting the stage for talks with President-elect Joe Biden who will take office in less than two weeks' time.\n\nThe aim is perhaps to put pressure on Washington to show that Pyongyang has no intention of being cowed by sanctions and will continue to expand its nuclear arsenal.\n\nMr Kim had three summits with Donald Trump - but they failed to reach a deal. However, North Korea is in a difficult and bleak economic position caused by strict sanctions, border blockades to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and devastating floods.\n\nThis message may seem threatening, but some analysts believe that there is still room for diplomacy.", "Jessica Allen (left) and Eliza Moore are now sticking to walks nearer their homes\n\nA police force that was criticised for its \"intimidating\" approach to two walkers is to review its lockdown fines policy.\n\nJessica Allen and Eliza Moore said they were surrounded by police after driving five miles from their home for a walk on Wednesday, and fined £200 each.\n\nDerbyshire Police initially said driving to exercise was \"not in the spirit\" of lockdown.\n\nBut it now says new national guidelines mean it will review its position.\n\nIn a statement, the force said all of its fixed penalties issued during the new national lockdown will be reviewed.\n\nMs Allen, from Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, said she assumed \"someone had been murdered\" when she arrived at Foremark Reservoir on Wednesday afternoon.\n\nWhen she and her friend were questioned by police, they were also told by officers the hot drinks they had brought along were not allowed as they were \"classed as a picnic\".\n\nShe said: \"The next thing, my car is surrounded. I got out of my car thinking 'There's no way they're coming to speak to us'. Straight away they start questioning us.\n\n\"I said we had come in separate cars, even parked two spaces away and even brought our own drinks with us. He said 'You can't do that as it's classed as a picnic'.\"\n\nMs Allen said the experience was \"very intimidating\" and had left her feeling scared of police in general.\n\nForemark Reservoir is five miles away from where Jessica Allen and Eliza Moore live\n\nHer friend, Ms Moore, said she was \"stunned at the time\" so did not challenge police and gave her details so they could send a fixed penalty notice.\n\nAt the time Derbyshire Police said that driving to a location to exercise \"is clearly not in the spirit of the national effort to reduce our travel, reduce the possible spread of the disease and reduce the number of deaths\".\n\nThe force added: \"Where there are cases of blatant breaches of the regulations then fines will be issued by officers.\"\n\nDerbyshire Police has also been giving fixed penalty notices to people who visit Calke Abbey and Elvaston Castle.\n\nFixed penalty notices have been given to people who visit Calke Abbey, a National Trust property\n\nBut in a statement, the force said further guidance issued by the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) had \"clarified the policing response concerning travel and exercise\".\n\nThe guidance said: \"The Covid regulations which officers enforce and which enables them to issue FPNs [fixed penalty notices] for breaches, do not restrict the distance travelled for exercise.\"\n\nThe NPCC added that rather than issue fines for people who travel out of their local area \"but are not breaching regulations, officers will encourage people to follow the guidance\".\n\nThe force has now said it will be \"aligning to adhere to this stance\".\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Kem Mehmet said: \"We are grateful for the guidance from the NPCC.\n\n\"The actions of our officers continues to be to protect the public, the NHS and to help save lives.\"\n\nIt is not the first time the force has been accused of being overzealous in enforcing alleged lockdown breaches.\n\nIn the country's first lockdown in March the use of a drone to film people walking in the Peak District was labelled \"nanny policing\".\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Andy Stonely is not eligible for the UK government Covid support scheme\n\nA father who has lived on Universal Credit since the Covid-19 pandemic started has called on the UK government to be \"more flexible\" with its support.\n\nDriving instructor and dad-of-three Andy Stonely is not eligible for the government's Covid support scheme.\n\nThe Federation of Small Businesses Wales has also asked for changes ahead of the next round of grants.\n\nThe Treasury said its Self-Employment Income Support Scheme was \"one of the most generous in the world\".\n\nThis scheme requires claimants to show accounts for the 2018-19 year as well as 2019-20.\n\nHowever, Mr Stonely from Newport hasn't been self-employed for long enough to qualify - so the 35-year-old has had to rely on financial support from his parents.\n\n\"I count myself somewhat lucky because I have been able to claim for Universal Credit,\" he said.\n\n\"But obviously it's minimal and luckily through the help of parents I've been able to keep afloat.\n\n\"It's been tough. It would have been ideal if the government was just slightly more flexible.\"\n\nMr Stonely, who hasn't been able to work for much of the past year due to lockdown restrictions, said Universal Credit was worth \"less than half\" of his normal earnings.\n\nDriving school firm owner Gareth Denny said almost a quarter of his drivers can't claim Covid help\n\nThe coronavirus crisis forced his wife to give up her job to look after their three children, aged three, six and 17, when Mr Stonely was able to work for a short period at the end of the initial lockdown period.\n\nAsked how much longer his family could sustain itself if the current restrictions continue, Mr Stonely told the BBC's Politics Wales show: \"Not too much longer… we're going to be in a very tough situation.\"\n\nMr Stonely is part of a local driving school franchise managed by Gareth Denny, who said 11 of his 43 instructors were in this position.\n\n\"If you imagine that somebody lives their life to their income and suddenly there's absolutely no income to pay their mortgage and their bills, Universal Credit simply doesn't pay most people's mortgage,\" Mr Denny said.\n\nRecent research commissioned by the Community and Prospect trade unions and the Federation of Small Businesses found 53% of self-employed people across the UK had lost more than 60% of their income since the pandemic began.\n\nIn addition, 64% of people said they were now either \"unsure\" or \"less likely\" to want to be self-employed or freelance in the future.\n\n\"These are normal people who have mortgages, families to support, who've just had to fund a Christmas for the families,\" said Ben Francis of Federation of Small Businesses Wales.\n\n\"All those bills are now mounting up the other side of Christmas, and after having an already extremely difficult 12 months, they've now got to see how they manage through the months ahead.\n\n\"We would ask UK government to be flexible in their approach to verifying the statuses of these newly self-employed businesses.\"\n\nThe Community union warns with small businesses \"struggling to get back on their feet\", more people will leave self-employment.\n\nAll non-essential businesses shut in Wales just before Christmas\n\n\"That will be a disaster for our economy, for local economies, for their livelihoods and their families,\" said Kate Dearden of Community.\n\n\"This section of the UK workforce plays a fundamental role and should be properly supported to continue to do so.\"\n\nThe Treasury has already committed to extending the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme until April 2021, although the eligibility criteria for the next round of grants is yet to be published.\n\nA spokesman said the scheme had \"helped more than 2.7 million people so far, claiming over £13.7bn\".\n\nHe added: \"Funding is designed to target those who need it most and protect the taxpayer against fraud and abuse.\n\n\"Those not eligible may still be able to access our loans schemes, tax deferrals, mortgage holidays and business support grants.\"\n• None What extra help will the self-employed get?", "The US is reeling after supporters of President Trump stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC on the day Congress was meeting to confirm Joe Biden's election victory.\n\nLawmakers were forced to take shelter, the building was put into lockdown and four people died in the chaos that followed a pro-Trump rally near the White House.\n\nHere's a breakdown of how events unfolded on Wednesday.\n\nJust before midday local time (17:00 GMT) thousands of people gather at the Ellipse, near the White House, to hear the president speak at a \"Save America\" rally.\n\nHe tells them: \"We're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue... and we're going to the Capitol and we're going to try and give… our Republicans, the weak ones... the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.\"\n\nAs the speech ends, crowds start to drift towards the Congress building, about a mile and a half away, where they are met by police barriers.\n\nThe Capitol is home to the two chambers of the US government that make up Congress - the House of Representatives and the Senate.\n\nChanting crowds start to gather on both sides of the building at around 13:10, grappling with police at the metal barricades.\n\nTear gas and pepper spray are used to try to keep the protesters at bay.\n\nPolice officers struggle to maintain control of the situation as protesters advance on the building on multiple fronts.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police place US Capitol Building on lockdown after Trump supporters breached security lines\n\nOn the east side, the crowd force their way through barricades on the Capitol Plaza and move on the main entrance, quickly gaining access to the Great Rotunda.\n\nOnce inside, they head for the House and Senate chambers.\n\nIgor Bobic, a journalist for the Huffington Post, captures a group of men forcing a police officer to retreat up a set of stairs as they continue their advance.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Igor Bobic This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSenators are forced to abandon the process of confirming President-elect Biden's victory and the building goes into lockdown.\n\nThe doors of the House chamber are locked and a makeshift barricade is erected in front of them. Security officials guard the entrance, guns drawn.\n\nWithin an hour, protesters have also broken police lines on the west side of the Capitol, scaling walls to reach the building itself before smashing windows and forcing doors open.\n\nOther videos and images show rioters storming through the building's ornately-decorated corridors and chambers chanting \"USA!\" and \"Stop the steal\".\n\nShortly before 15:00, gunshots are reportedly heard inside the building.\n\nPhotos and video footage later show a female protester being shot as she tries to break through the barricaded doors of the Speakers' Lobby.\n\nDespite efforts by police and others at the scene to save her, she is later reported to have died.\n\nOn the other side of the building, protesters break into the Senate chamber, one taking seat in the Speaker's chair.\n\nAnother protester is photographed nearby sitting in Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, with his foot on the table.\n\nAfter growing condemnation of the riots, President Trump eventually calls for calm, telling the protesters to leave peacefully: \"Go home. We love you, you're very special.\"\n\nBy 17:40, the building is cleared and made secure ahead of the 18:00 curfew ordered by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser.\n\nSeveral thousand National Guard troops, FBI agents and US Secret Service are deployed to help.\n\nMore than six hours after the storming of the building, senators return and resume the day's business of certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election.\n\nAt 03:41 on Thursday, Congress confirms President-elect Joe Biden will succeed President Trump on 20 January.", "Vincent Kane - pictured with his grandson Sonny - is facing uncertainty about his operation\n\nThe son of a man with pancreatic cancer has said the last-minute cancellation of his surgery has been \"devastating\".\n\nJodie Kane said his father Vincent was due to have his operation on Friday.\n\nHowever, that procedure was cancelled by the Belfast Health Trust on Tuesday as the worsening coronavirus crisis increases the pressure on hospitals.\n\nThe trust apologised, saying it had faced an 80% rise in the number of patients with Covid-19 admitted to hospitals since Christmas Day.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio Ulster's Nolan Show, Jodie said that there was now \"no guarantee\" his 68-year-old father would get the treatment.\n\n\"To be told we had the chance of a very successful surgery on offer and then to have it taken away at the last minute is pretty devastating,\" he said.\n\n\"Even the surgeon himself said they would be concerned if it was to go on more than four weeks.\n\n\"There is an uncertainty hanging over us now that we don't know when he'll actually get that surgery or what the impact on his health is going to be.\"\n\nVincent Kane - pictured with his with wife Karen - has been suffering other health issues arising from his cancer\n\nVincent, from Newtownards, County Down, did not receive treatment for some of his other symptoms as it was planned that the surgery would help with those.\n\n\"Because they were hoping to get him straight into surgery he hasn't had the blockage in his gall bladder addressed so he's jaundiced, he's covered in a rash, can't sleep, he's lost a lot of weight,\" Jodie said.\n\n\"Undoubtedly there are people worse off than us out there but it is still a critical illness that he has got and it is one that we don't have an end in sight for, in terms of treatment.\n\n\"There must be a way of helping all those in need, or I suppose if you were being really honest about it those who stand the best chance of surviving - making the decisions for the benefit of them.\n\n\"There's no guarantee that in six weeks' time surgery is going to be an option because who knows what's going to happen with Covid?\"\n\nThe Belfast Health Trust said it had to reduce the number of ill patients on wards to protect them from coronavirus\n\nJodie called on those who were breaking Covid-19 regulations to think about the the \"direct and indirect impacts\" of their actions.\n\n\"We've every sympathy for anyone who has a loved one who needs [intensive] care because of Covid but cancer and Covid are both life-and-death situations.\n\n\"We can minimise the risks of one of them as a collective society just by taking the necessary precautions.\n\n\"It could be someone they love or their neighbour or someone in their community that's in the same situation as us in the very near future.\"\n\nFlo McClements, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in December, found out on Tuesday that her surgery - scheduled for Thursday - had been cancelled by the Belfast Health Trust.\n\nSpeaking to BBC Radio Foyle, her son Gregg said the pressure was \"mounting day by day\" on the the 72-year-old from Ballymoney, County Antrim.\n\n\"She had waited all through Christmas for the date and due to the Covid-19 restrictions we as a family had stayed away from her,\" he added.\n\nFlo McClements' family wants to \"give her a hug\" after her operation was cancelled\n\n\"We left her on her own with my dad just to make sure she didn't catch Covid and risk the operation.\n\n\"When you get the date you like to think it's the next step to recovery but unfortunately that didn't happen.\"\n\nGregg said his mother was \"putting on a brave face\" but it was difficult for the family to not be with her in person during what was a difficult time.\n\n\"That's actually the hardest part that we can't go up and have a cup of tea with her or give her a hug to make her feel a bit better even for a few minutes.\"\n\nThe Belfast Health Trust said it \"would like to sincerely apologise\" to those affected by the postponement of surgeries.\n\nIt said the decision was taken to reduce the number of ill patients on wards that would be more at risk from the virus than others.\n\n\"This was an incredibly difficult decision to make and we did not take it without considering all the information available to us,\" said the trust.\n\n\"We do not underestimate the anxiety and distress this causes the patients and families affected and we deeply regret this.\n\nIt said it would do \"everything in our power\" to reschedule their operations \"as soon as possible\".", "The company offered to pay surgeries a £5,000 charitable donation \"or to the staff member directly\" in emails\n\nThe Hacking Trust's medical division approached surgeries in Bristol and Worthing offering to pay the money to charity \"or the staff member directly\".\n\nRobyn Clark, from the Institute of General Practice Management, said it was \"just appalling\".\n\nThe company, based in London, has apologised, saying its \"good intentions\" were \"misinterpreted\".\n\nNHS England said people \"will rightly take a dim view of anyone who tries to jump the queue\".\n\n\"The NHS is free at the point of access for everyone who needs it,\" said Mrs Clark.\n\n\"What we felt this company was trying to do was jump the queue.\"\n\nThe Bristol-based manager said she worried it could \"create more health inequality\".\n\nShe said: \"The JCVI [Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation] is trying to prioritise the vaccine based on the vulnerability to Covid.\"\n\nThe e-mail sent to the GP surgery in Worthing said The Hacking Trust was aware that \"many appointments\" for vaccinations are not kept, and that it would be interested in being informed of \"any no-shows\".\n\nA donation of £5,000 would be paid to a staff member or given to charity for each dose it could secure, the e-mail said.\n\nIn a statement, the Battersea-based company said it \"offered charitable donations to staff or surgeries in this difficult time for any vaccines which were unused\".\n\nIt added: \"We had heard that some vaccines were being unused due to missed appointments. We would apologise that our good intentions have been misinterpreted.\"\n\nNHS England said it knew \"these particular emails were received across the country\".\n\nDr Nikki Kanani, GP and NHS medical director for primary care, said hundreds of NHS teams across the country were \"working hard to deliver vaccines quickly to those who would benefit most\".\n\n\"NHS staff will never ask for, or accept, cash for vaccines,\" she said.\n\nThe Department of Health and Social Care said vaccinations were available from the NHS \"for free\" and \"cannot be sold privately in the UK\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA nurse felt \"overwhelming fear\" as 13 ambulances queued at her hospital's A&E department - in the Welsh region currently hardest hit by Covid deaths.\n\nTo date Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board, which runs Royal Glamorgan Hospital, has reported 1,091 deaths of patients with coronavirus.\n\nBBC Wales was granted access to A&E at the hospital in Rhondda Cynon Taf.\n\nSenior doctor Amanda Farrow said the whole hospital had faced \"unrelenting\" pressure last Saturday.\n\nSarah Fogarasy was the senior nurse on duty as 13 ambulances queued up outside her A&E department\n\nSenior A&E nurse Sarah Fogarasy, who was on shift as the ambulances arrived, said there was no capacity at the unit - a situation that left her wanting \"to leave\".\n\n\"We had to escalate it to our site manager and deputy head of nursing who were liaising with the executive team on call,\" she said.\n\n\"And then it got to 13 patients outside - I had no capacity in this unit, no resuscitation capacity, no capacity to put a patient on CPAP [continuous positive airway pressure] should they require that and no physical areas to put a patient in.\n\nOn Saturday, 13 ambulances queued outside the hospital's A&E department\n\nShe said she found it hard to keep going.\n\n\"This bit makes me quite emotional… for the first time I was sat trying to coordinate this department and I had that overwhelming fear that I just wanted to leave,\" Ms Fogarasy continued.\n\n\"I was just - 'I'm done. I'm done with this'... and it's scary, it fills you full of fear when you have got 13 ambulances outside, queuing around the carpark. Where do you go from that?\"\n\nShe said it was the team that kept her going: \"I started looking around to all the staff working tirelessly and just trying to remember what we're here for and why I became a nurse.\n\n\"I know it sounds soppy but it's literally the humanitarian effort that has gone into [fighting] this pandemic that has kept people going.\n\n\"It's the sheer determination and guts of the staff working in these times that is so powerful, that keeps the shift going.\"\n\nEmergency Medicine Consultant Amanda Farrow said it was a \"very emotional time for everyone\"\n\nDr Farrow, emergency medicine consultant, said staffing and bed numbers were of particular concern.\n\n\"In the emergency department the challenge we have is with regards to flow, so that is our daily challenge,\" she explained.\n\n\"And we say it's like playing a game of Tetris trying to work out which patient you can put where.\"\n\nStaff reported feeling overwhelmed as they work through the second Covid wave\n\nShe said the second wave of the virus had also seen more staff off sick with Covid and isolating - with some becoming very ill.\n\n\"We've had staff in as patients and one of my colleagues - I saw them when they were critically ill and ended up going to intensive care,\" continued Dr Farrow.\n\n\"So it's very emotional time for everyone as well you know, looking after the sick patients and looking after your colleagues.\n\n\"There's a level of anxiety still around - will you be the next person to get this disease?\"\n\nShe said although fewer people were attending A&E, they were seeing more people arriving by ambulance and presenting with more complex needs.\n\n\"The group of patients we are seeing this time I think is different, we're definitely having more younger people with Covid that are becoming sick, the volume is very high in the community.\n\n\"I think people are afraid of come into the hospital as well, so there are still quite a lot of patients who leave it maybe a bit too late before they're seeking hospital attention.\"\n\nSpeaking from her intensive care bed, Helen Whatmore said she was extremely grateful to staff\n\nHelen Whatmore, 45, from Beddau, has been hospital since early December after developing Covid symptoms.\n\nSpeaking from her intensive care bed, she said she had been unwell in February so assumed she had already caught the virus.\n\n\"I honestly didn't believe it was as bad until I caught [Covid] this time,\" she said.\n\n\"This time it's absolutely knocked the socks off me. It's nearly killed me.\n\n\"A friend of mine passed away as I came into hospital and I came down very rapidly with Covid, kidney problems and pneumonia.\"\n\nShe said she was grateful for the care she had received: \"The nurses are coming in [working] all shifts, they're fighting for your loved ones, from the time they enter right until the time they leave, then they're changing over and doing the same again.\n\n\"People are passing away… how much more have they got to do? We're asking them to protect our children and our families. Why are we not protecting them ourselves? Saving our families and our own children.\"", "People in England are being told to act like they have got Covid as part of a government advertising campaign aimed at tackling the rise in infections.\n\nBoris Johnson said the public should \"stay at home\" and not get complacent.\n\nOn Friday 1,325 deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test were recorded in the UK - the highest daily figure yet - along with 68,053 new cases.\n\nGovernment sources say there is likely to be more focus from police on enforcing rather than explaining rules.\n\n\"With over 1,000 people dying yesterday it's more important than ever everyone sticks to rules,\" a source told the BBC.\n\nAs cases and deaths soar, the government is releasing its advertising campaign, which will be shared across television, radio, newspapers and on social media.\n\nEngland's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, says in the advert: \"Vaccines give clear hope for the future, but for now we must all stay home, protect the NHS and save lives.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Department of Health and Social Care This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by Department of Health and Social Care\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson says hospitals are \"under more pressure than at any other time since the start of the pandemic\", with infection rates increasing at an \"alarming rate\" across the country and the NHS under \"severe strain\".\n\nIt comes after London's mayor Sadiq Khan said the spread of coronavirus was \"out of control\" as he declared a \"major incident\" in the capital on Friday.\n\nSuch an incident is an emergency that requires the implementation of special arrangements by one or all of the emergency services, the NHS or the local authority.\n\nIt means the emergency services and hospitals cannot guarantee their normal level of response.\n\nWhile the government seeks to reinforce its \"stay at home\" message, some police forces have faced criticism for their approaches to tackling potential breaches of coronavirus restrictions.\n\nDerbyshire Police has said it will review fixed penalties issued during the new national lockdown after two women were ordered to pay £200 each after driving five miles from their home for a walk on Wednesday.\n\nSusan Michie, a professor of health psychology at University College London, said \"more support and enablement\" was needed for people to adhere to the regulations, for example support to help people self-isolate, rather than punishment.\n\nProf Michie, who sits on a subcommittee of the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, also said the current restrictions were \"too lax\".\n\n\"When you look at the data, it shows that almost 90% of people are overwhelmingly adhering to the rules despite the fact that we're also seeing more people out and about,\" she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.\n\nHowever, she said in comparison to the first lockdown last spring the restrictions were less strict, with more people allowed to go out to work and children's nurseries open, meaning public transport is busier.\n\nThe number of people travelling by public transport in London has decreased since the latest national lockdown began, with tube journeys now at 18% pre-pandemic demand and bus journeys at 30%, according to figures from Transport for London.\n\nHowever, during the first lockdown passenger numbers fell below 10% at some points.\n\nProf Michie added that the winter season posed extra challenges because the virus survives longer in the cold and people spend more time indoors, where the virus can spread more easily.\n\nCombined with the more transmissible new variant, she said \"we should have a stricter rather than less strict lockdown than we had back in March\".\n\nDr Adam Kucharski, another scientist advising the government and an associate professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that because the new variant was more transmissible \"each interaction we have has become riskier than it was before\".\n\n\"So even if we went back to that kind of last spring level of reduction in contacts we couldn't be confident that we would see the same effect that we saw last year because of this increased transmission,\" he said.\n\nEngland, much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland continue to be under strict national measures, with stay-at-home orders in place for most people.\n\nThere is considerable concern in government about the continued spread of the virus.\n\nNo 10 believes more needs to be done to emphasise how severe the current situation is - which is why we are getting some very stark warnings from the medical experts.\n\nMinisters continue to praise the public - but there is also more emphasis on people taking the rules seriously, as was the case last spring when the first lockdown was imposed.\n\nThe prime minister warns people against complacency, saying: \"Your compliance is now more vital than ever\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Staff at Portsmouth's Queen Alexandra Hospital are struggling to cope with an increase in the number of Covid-19 patients\n\nLatest figures from Public Health England reveal the coronavirus infection rate in London has exceeded 1,000 per 100,000 people.\n\nThe Office for National Statistics recently estimated as many as one in 30 Londoners has coronavirus.\n\nLondon councils have urged places of worship to close and the bishop of London Sarah Mullally said churches should \"consider the seriousness of the situation\" before holding in person services this weekend.\n\nDr Simon Walsh, an emergency care doctor in London, told BBC Breakfast all London hospitals had \"effectively been working in major incident mode for the last couple of weeks\".\n\n\"Most hospitals have expanded their intensive care capacity to somewhere in the region of three times their normal capacity. Obviously we don't have three times the number of staff so our staff are being spread more thinly,\" he said.\n\nHospitals in other parts of the UK are also under pressure.\n\nIn Wales, senior A&E nurse Sarah Fogarasy said she felt \"overwhelming fear\" as 13 ambulances queued at Royal Glamorgan Hospital last Saturday, with no capacity at the unit.\n\nAnd Dr Justin Varney, director of public health in Birmingham, said he was \"very worried\" about the situation in the city, where hospital bosses have warned they don't have enough intensive care nurses to deal with the growing case load.\n\nHe warned the NHS had still not seen the impact of the rise in cases following the relaxation of restrictions over Christmas \"so it is going to get a lot, lot worse unless we really get this under control\".", "Marks & Spencer has temporarily stopped selling hundreds of items in its Northern Ireland stores due to Brexit red tape.\n\nThe retailer said it feared its food would be blocked due to new rules governing shipments between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.\n\nA growing number of firms have spoken out about paperwork delays at ports.\n\nThe government said traders and hauliers need to take steps to comply with new border rules.\n\nM&S took the decision to temporarily drop hundreds of products, including chocolate fudge pudding and sweet and sour chicken, from its Northern Ireland stores after it saw competitors' lorries barred from travelling between the mainland and Northern Ireland.\n\nAn entire consignment in a lorry can be held up if only one item in the truck doesn't have the correct customs forms filled out.\n\nThe retailer said it aimed to get the products back up for sale soon.\n\nAn M&S spokesperson said: \"We have served customers in Northern Ireland for over 50 years and our priority is to make sure we continue to deliver the same choice and great quality range that our loyal customers have always enjoyed.\n\n\"Stores have been receiving regular deliveries this week, however following the UK's recent departure from the EU, we are transitioning to new processes and we're working closely with our partners and suppliers to ensure customers can continue to enjoy a great range of products.\"\n\nIn addition to problems shipping goods internally in the UK, the new Brexit trade rules are creating problems for exporters and traders transporting goods to and from the EU, say firms.\n\nThe UK sealed a trade deal with the European Union (EU) on 24 December that was billed as preserving its zero-tariff and zero-quota access to the bloc's single market.\n\nBut in addition to red tape causing delays, major retailers that use the UK as a distribution hub for European business could face possible tariffs if they re-export goods to the EU.\n\nOn Friday, M&S chief executive Steve Rowe warned of more red tape and a rise in export costs to some countries.\n\n\"The best example I can give you of that is Percy Pig,\" he said,\n\n\"Percy Pig is actually manufactured in Germany. If it comes to the UK and we then send it to Ireland, in theory it would have some tax on it,\" he added.\n\nM&S said it was \"actively working to mitigate\" the effects of the \"rules of origin\" regulations, under which products are taxed differently depending on which country they come from.\n\nOther firms have also been hit by the confusion caused by new Brexit trading rules.\n\nParcels giant DPD has suspended some services, while seafood exporter John Ross said the chaos was like being \"thrown in the cold Atlantic without a lifejacket\".\n\nShane Brennan, chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation, which represents chilled transport and storage companies, said the emerging problems had come despite the amount of cross-border traffic still being quite low.\n\n\"Trade flows are still only about 50% of what we would expect, but even at those levels we are seeing levels of confusion and delays,\" he told the BBC's Today programme. \"The feeling is we are building to quite a significant potential disruption.\"\n\nA government spokesman acknowledged that there had been \"some issues\", but said ministers had always been clear there would be some disruption at the end of the transition period.\n\nThe Cabinet Office said in a statement that the volume of border crossings had been low so far this year, but that it expected crossings to steadily increase to normal levels.\n\nThis brings the potential for \"significant disruption if traders and hauliers have not taken the necessary steps to comply with the new rules,\" the Cabinet Office said.\n\nOut of about 1,500 lorries per day trying to get from Great Britain to the EU in the new year, 700 have been turned away - mainly due to a lack of a negative Covid test for drivers, it said.\n\n\"We have always been clear there would be changes now that we are out of the customs union and single market, so full compliance with the new rules is vital to avoid disruption,\" said Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove.\n\nHowever, anger is growing among companies whose livelihoods depend on export trade.\n\nIn a letter on Friday to Business Secretary Alok Sharma, Scottish salmon producer John Ross Jr launched a stinging attack on the government's handling of the situation.\n\nThe firm's sales director, Victoria Leigh-Pearson, wrote that the company had in recent months \"had to endure the government issuing a barrage of useless information\" and an \"absence of factually correct information from all government agencies.\" It amounted, she said, to \"gross incompetence\".\n\nJohn Ross exports to 36 countries and has won the Queen's Award twice\n\nPart of the letter to Alok Sharma:\n\nAs I write, perishable goods that were dispatched from our facility five days ago, headed for France following a process that your department advised, have still not crossed the border. This usually takes only 24 hours because they are consolidated with the produce of other companies, which have not been able to follow the correct procedures due to a knowledge gap directly attributable to your department.\n\nEntire trucks are currently being rejected without explanation by the French customs authority. Our hauliers have now pulled their services as such a backlog has been created. Other hauliers are not taking on new customers. Today, we've even had confirmation that the IT systems of the UK and France are incompatible. After four years you only establish this now?\n\nYour so-called 'deal' is worthless if this situation is not fixed immediately, and unless you put in place measures to address the issues that continue to unfold on a daily basis. Moreover, as a seafood exporter, it feels as though our own government has thrown us into the cold Atlantic waters without a lifejacket.\n\nJohn Ross is not the only Scottish seafood exporter suffering. The industry says it has been hit by a \"perfect storm\" of Brexit disruption, which could sink a centuries-old industry.\n\n\"These businesses are not transporting toilet rolls or widgets. They are exporting the highest quality, perishable seafood which has a finite window to get to markets in peak condition,\" said Donna Fordyce, chief executive of Seafood Scotland.\n\n\"If the window closes, these consignments go to landfill.\"\n\nShe said the sector has already been weakened by Covid-19, the closure of the French border before Christmas as well as \"layer upon layer\" of problems associated with Brexit.\n\nThe group fears that without exports, the fishing fleet will have little reason to go out.\n\n\"In a very short time, we could see the destruction of a centuries-old market which contributes significantly to the Scottish economy,\" added Ms Fordyce.\n\nUK government Minister for Scotland David Duguid blamed Scottish leaders for the issues.\n\n\"The Scottish Government has persistently refused to accept the democratic vote to leave the EU, but that does not allow them to abdicate their responsibilities to Scottish businesses,\" he said.\n\n\"Over the past 18 months they have assured the fishing industry that the systems they were putting in place would be adequate. They clearly are not.\"\n\nParcel delivery service DPD UK said it had paused its European Road Service because of the '\"increased burden\" of customs paperwork for packages heading to the EU, including the Republic of Ireland.\n\nDPD said 20% of parcels had \"incorrect or incomplete data attached\", which meant they would have to be returned.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What Brexit means for Britons travelling, shopping, studying or owning properties in the EU.\n\nIn an email to its business customers, the company said that it had been a \"challenging few days\" for its international operation, and that it would \"pause and review\" its service. It plans to restart on 13 January.\n\n\"It has now become evident that we have an increased burden with the new, more complex processes, and additional customs data we require from you for your parcels destined to Europe\" the firm wrote.\n\nThe boss of one of Wales' largest hauliers said logistical problems have emerged at the Irish border too.\n\nAndrew Kinsella, managing director of Gwynedd Shipping, said his company has a backlog of 60 lorries waiting to be shipped to Dublin.\n\nHe said many hauliers are finding that their customers are not able to generate the special declarations that are needed to ultimately enable a lorry to get onto a ferry.\n\n\"Whilst you don't see queues at ports and terminals the reality is that these queues are developing elsewhere in our depot in Holyhead, in our depot in Deeside and in our depot in Newport in South Wales, and lots of hauliers have depots in the proximity of ports,\" he said.\n\n\"There are a lot of issues about demarcation about who is going to arrange the export declaration with the UK revenue authorities, who's going to arrange the import declaration, the hauliers then trying to arrange the import safety and security declaration to create an ENS number which helps you generate a PBN number so there has been a lot of everyone finding their feet\".\n\nCorrection 9th April 2021: An earlier version of this article included a photo showing queues of lorries at Dover Port. This photo was replaced in the hours after publication after it was established that it had been taken months earlier.", "The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have received Covid-19 vaccinations, Buckingham Palace has said.\n\nA royal source said the vaccinations were administered on Saturday by a household doctor at Windsor Castle.\n\nThe source added the Queen decided to let it be known she had the vaccination to prevent further speculation.\n\nThe Queen, 94, and Prince Philip, 99, are among around 1.5 million people in the UK to have had at least one dose of a Covid vaccine so far.\n\nPeople aged over 80 in the UK are among the high-priority groups who are being given the vaccine first.\n\nThe couple have been spending the lockdown in England at their Windsor Castle home after deciding to have a quiet Christmas at their Berkshire residence, instead of the traditional royal family gathering at Sandringham.\n\nLast month, the Queen appeared alongside several other senior members of the royal family for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began.\n\nIn 2020 she went seven months - between March and October - without carrying out public engagements outside of a royal residence.\n\nDuring that time, her eldest child, Prince Charles, 72, contracted coronavirus and displayed mild symptoms.\n\nPalace sources also told the BBC that her grandson Prince William tested positive in April - although Kensington Palace refused to comment officially.\n\nThe Queen made a private pilgrimage to the grave of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey in November\n\nThe Queen used her Christmas Day message to reassure anyone struggling without friends and family this year that they \"are not alone\".\n\nShe said the pandemic had \"brought us closer\" despite causing hardship, adding that the Royal Family has been \"inspired\" by people volunteering in their communities.\n\nOn Friday a third coronavirus vaccine - made by US company Moderna - was approved for use in the UK, joining the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines already approved by UK regulators.\n\nIt is not known which vaccine the Queen and Prince Philip have received.\n\nAll the approved vaccines require two doses to provide the best possible protection, with the second dose being given up to 12 weeks after the first.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has said the aim is to vaccinate 15 million people in the UK by mid-February, including care home residents and staff, frontline NHS staff, everyone over 70 and those who have been categorised as clinically extremely vulnerable.", "The Welsh Government is in discussions about bringing in \"more visible\" coronavirus regulations.\n\nStricter enforcement of coronavirus rules could return to supermarkets in Wales, Mark Drakeford has said.\n\nThe first minister said he had heard concerns from people \"expressing anxiety\" about a lack of \"visible protections\" in supermarkets.\n\nThe Welsh Government is now in talks with stores about social-distancing measures.\n\nMr Drakeford said he wanted to see stores policed as they were during the first lockdown.\n\nAmong the measures previously used was a strict limit of the numbers of people allowed in a store however Mr Drakeford said people were worried the rules \"don't appear to be there this time\".\n\n\"Given the fact the new variant is so much easier to catch... we are looking at supermarkets and other places where people leave their homes, to make sure they are organised in a way that keeps their staff and customers safe,\" he said.\n\nHe said previously sanitising arrangements had been \"very visible\", one-way markings were prominently displayed, regular reminders were announced to customers and staff were also posted at the front entrance of supermarkets\n\n\"That person was carefully controlling the numbers of people going in, to make sure that they were no more than a certain number of people in the store at any one time,\" he said.\n\n\"There was somebody directing people to the checkout, to make sure people weren't queuing next to each other over prolonged periods, and markings on the floor so people kept at a two-metre distance\".\n\nHowever the first minister said some of those measures are no longer as apparent to people.\n\n\"I want to make sure that those visible signs of the protections that are being offered to the public and the shop workers are in place again.\"\n\nFederation of Small Businesses Wales said has called for clarity on what support would be available and the possible new measures required of shops.\n\nPolicy Chair, Ben Francis, said: \"We've already asked to see more information on the technical data that informs the decisions that Welsh Government are making.\n\n\"It seems clear that businesses will require funding support for longer than was originally anticipated if they are to survive this troubling period.\n\n\"Welsh Government should urgently give clarity on what additional funding will be made available to support businesses beyond this next three week period to allow them to plan.\"", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "A further 1,325 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test - the biggest figure reported in a single day since the pandemic began.\n\nIt means there have been just short of 80,000 deaths by that measure - as another 68,053 new cases were recorded.\n\nPublic Health England (PHE) said the number of deaths would \"continue to rise until we stop the spread\".\n\nIt comes as the government launches a new campaign in England urging people to \"act like you've got\" the virus.\n\nThe campaign, including an advert fronted by England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, is intended to remind the public Covid is spreading fast, with large numbers showing no symptoms.\n\nIn the advert, Prof Whitty says: \"Covid-19, especially the new variant, is spreading quickly across the country.\n\n\"This puts many people at risk of serious disease and is placing a lot of pressure on our NHS.\n\n\"Once more, we must all stay home. If it is essential to go out remember, wash your hands, cover your face indoors and keep your distance from others.\"\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said: \"Our hospitals are under more pressure than at any other time since the start of the pandemic, and infection rates across the entire country continue to soar at an alarming rate.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Department of Health and Social Care This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by Department of Health and Social Care\n\nHospital leaders have warned of stretched staffing with 31,624 coronavirus patients in UK hospitals on Wednesday - 46% above the peak during the first wave last year.\n\nDr Ian Higginson, vice president of Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said the situation in London and south-east England was \"pretty dire\" and would get worse in the rest of the country before long.\n\n\"We're heading for some really dark times, I fear, in this phase of the pandemic,\" he said.\n\nRichard Mitchell, chief executive of Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Trust, said the increase in patients seen in London was now affecting his area in Nottinghamshire.\n\nHe said: \"Critical care is exceptionally busy and the colleagues who work here are tired, they're fatigued and they're worn out.\"\n\nMeanwhile, a third Covid vaccine received emergency approval for use in the UK with 17 million doses of the jab, made by US firm Moderna, pre-ordered by the UK.\n\nThe vaccine joins the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca jabs in being approved, with close to 1.5 million people now vaccinated in the UK.\n\nDr William Welfare, Covid-19 response director at PHE, said: \"Each life lost to this virus is a tragedy, but sadly we can expect the death toll to continue to rise until we stop the spread.\n\n\"Approximately one in three people who have coronavirus have no symptoms and could be spreading it without realising it.\n\n\"To protect our loved ones it is essential we all stay at home where possible. This will reduce new infections, ease the pressure on the NHS and save lives.\"\n\nLondon Mayor Sadiq Khan said the spread of Covid in the capital was now \"out of control\", as he declared a \"major incident\".\n\nThis means the emergency services and hospitals cannot guarantee their normal level of response, and allows special arrangements to be implemented.\n\nThe previous highest daily death toll - 1,224 - was recorded on 21 April 2020 during the UK's first lockdown. Daily deaths were in the single figures as recently as September.\n\nThe UK has recorded the fifth-highest number of deaths behind the United States, Brazil, India and Mexico, according to Johns Hopkins University.\n\nWe are now seeing the record numbers of cases over the Christmas period translate into record numbers of deaths.\n\nAnd with new infections rising rapidly - more than 1.1 million people in England estimated to be infected with Covid-19 last week - these tragic numbers are set to continue for some time.\n\nAnd that is mainly because of the new variant form of the virus which is thought to be between 30-70% more transmissible.\n\nThe administration of the vaccines to at-risk groups should see a reduction in the numbers dying by the end of the month and the numbers having to go into hospital going down sometime after that.\n\nThat is the other way around from what you normally hear - but that it because a successful vaccine programme will initially remove those most likely to die from the path of the virus.\n\nFitter or younger people - who are less likely to die but could still end up occupying hospital beds - won't be getting their jabs for some time yet.\n\nThe advent of spring's better weather should also help cases to fall, but ministers will have to decide what level of risk - and deaths - society is prepared to tolerate.\n\nFriday saw 619,941 tests conducted in the 24 hours to 09:00 GMT - also a new record.\n\nEngland, much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland continue to be under strict national measures, with stay-at-home orders in place for most people.\n\nThe R number - the rate at which an infected person passes on the virus to someone else - is now estimated to be between 1.0 to 1.4, meaning the epidemic is growing between 0% and 6% per day.\n\nCovid infections rose by almost a third between Boxing Day and 3 January, reaching 70,000 new cases a day according to a major study.\n\nIn a different piece of research, an estimated 1.2 million people in total had Covid over a similar time period, the Office for National Statistics said.\n\nBoris Johnson pledged on Thursday to use England's lockdown to implement an \"unprecedented national effort\" to offer vaccination to those at the highest risk from Covid by 15 February.\n\nHe said the Army would be drafted in to use \"battle preparation techniques\" to achieve the goal, which could see up to 15 million people offered a vaccine by the middle of next month.\n\nIn another development, from next week all travellers to the UK will need to show a recent negative test result before they arrive.\n\nHave you been affected by the issues raised in this story? You can share your experience by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Bernard Thomas was interviewed by BBC Wales at the time of the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster\n\nA survivor of the Aberfan disaster has died after contracting Covid-19.\n\nAs a nine-year-old Bernard Thomas was rescued from the rubble of Pantglas primary school after one of the biggest tragedies in Welsh history.\n\nA total of 144 people were killed in the disaster on 21 October, 1966, after thousands of tonnes of coal slurry slid from a tip. Of those 116 were primary school pupils.\n\nLater Bernard was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress.\n\nHe told S4C he \"still heard the sounds of children screaming.\"\n\nPaying tribute to Mr Thomas, 63, who died on Wednesday, his brother Andrew told BBC's Newyddion: \"Bernard was a real character and his death has come as a shock to us as a family and the community of Aberfan.\"\n\n\"We can't be sure where he caught Covid, but he had an eye appointment at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital on 21 December.\n\n\"A few days later, he became ill and at Prince Charles Hospital, he tested positive for Covid-19.\"\n\n\"Although he had been receiving oxygen through a mask, we spoke regularly on the phone and he told us he was getting better.\n\n\"But on Wednesday morning he removed his mask to eat his breakfast, and 10 minutes after eating he faded away.\"\n\n\"It's a huge shock but I don't blame anybody.\"\n\nOn the 50th anniversary of the disaster Bernard told the BBC: \"I still wonder what the others would have been doing if it hadn't happened. Who would have got married to who, you know.\"\n\nBernard is survived by his 90-year-old mother Gwen, with whom he shared a home, and brothers Andrew and Robert.", "Three people were found inside the gym in Stean Street in Hackney on Friday\n\nThe owners of a London gym have been fined for breaching Covid-19 rules by remaining open during lockdown.\n\nPolice were called to the fitness centre in Stean Street, Hackney, on Friday to reports of a regulation breach.\n\nThree people were found inside the gym at 09:30 GMT. The owners were given a £1,000 fixed penalty notice.\n\nIt comes as a \"major incident\" was declared as the spread of Covid-19 threatens to \"overwhelm\" its hospitals.\n\nCity Hall said Covid-19 cases in London had exceeded 1,000 per 100,000, while there are 35% more people in hospital with the virus than in the peak of the pandemic in April.\n\nNHS England figures published on Friday showed the number of Covid patients in London hospitals stands at 7,277, up 32% on the previous week.\n\nCh Insp Pete Shaw said: \"Whilst there are certain rules around people being allowed to exercise in public under this lockdown, nowhere in the legislation does it allow people to go to gyms to work out.\n\n\"Those found to be flouting the rules, as with this instance, should expect necessary enforcement action to be taken against them.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Jessica Allen (left) and Eliza Moore said their cars were \"surrounded\" by police\n\nTwo women who criticised a police force for its \"intimidating\" approach to lockdown fines have welcomed a review.\n\nJessica Allen and Eliza Moore were walking at a reservoir five miles from their home when they were stopped by officers and fined £200 each.\n\nDerbyshire Police insisted driving to exercise was \"not in the spirit\" of lockdown but later said new guidance meant it would look again at the issue.\n\nBoth women said they were pleased the force had decided to think again.\n\nDerbyshire Police and Crime Commissioner Hardyal Dhindsa said an \"urgent review\" was under way about how fines had been issued.\n\nLongstanding guidance from the College of Policing says officers should follow the \"Four Es\" and only give fixed penalty notices as a last resort.\n\nJessica Allen and Eliza Moore said their cars were surrounded by police when they arrived\n\nMs Allen said: \"We are happy to hear that Derbyshire Police have been told to not be so heavy handed with fines and return to the Four Es they were originally doing.\n\n\"We are yet to hear anything regarding our fine but if we have managed to save somebody the worry of going for a walk and fearing they would be fined then we have done what we set out to do.\"\n\nMs Allen and Ms Moore drove separately from Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire the five miles to Foremark Reservoir on Wednesday afternoon.\n\nThey said their cars were \"surrounded\" by police, questioned on why they were there and told the hot drinks they had brought along were not allowed as they were \"classed as a picnic\".\n\nMs Allen said the experience was \"very intimidating\" and had left her feeling scared of police in general.\n\nInitially Derbyshire Police defended its actions, saying legislation said trips should be \"local\" and driving to a location to exercise \"is clearly not in the spirit of the national effort to reduce our travel, reduce the possible spread of the disease and reduce the number of deaths\".\n\nDerbyshire police also fined visitors to other beauty spots like Calke Abbey\n\nDerbyshire Police has also been giving fixed penalty notices to people who visit beauty spots at Calke Abbey and Elvaston Castle.\n\nBut later, the force said new guidance from the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) had \"clarified the policing response concerning travel and exercise\".\n\nThe guidance said: \"The Covid regulations which officers enforce and which enables them to issue FPNs [fixed penalty notices] for breaches, do not restrict the distance travelled for exercise.\"\n\nMr Dhindsa said: \"It would appear that the force has been a little over-zealous in its interpretation of the guidance.\n\n\"While the police can enforce the regulations, guidance is just that which can make this a very challenging and complex situation to police.\"\n\nThe chief constable of neighbouring Nottinghamshire, Craig Guildford, said: \"We are not out and about telling people they have gone too far from home. We trust the public to take these regulations seriously.\n\n\"Derbyshire to be fair to them have some unique places that people may want to go to from a load of counties.\n\n\"But our approach is around reasonableness. If someone has gone 50 miles, we will take action, if someone has gone a couple of miles we are very sensible.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Harley Watson's mother Jo described him as a \"kind, caring, selfless, intelligent and comical young man\"\n\nA man who killed a 12-year-old boy by driving into schoolchildren in a \"deliberate\" hit and run has been detained in a secure hospital.\n\nHarley Watson died after he was hit by a car outside Debden Park High School in Loughton, Essex, on 2 December 2019.\n\nTerence Glover, 52, pleaded guilty to manslaughter by diminished responsibility at an earlier hearing.\n\nHe also admitted 10 counts of attempted murder and has been detained under the Mental Health Act indefinitely.\n\nAt the sentencing hearing at Snaresbrook Crown Court, Harley's mother Jo described her son as a \"kind, caring, selfless, intelligent and comical young man\".\n\nHe was hit by Glover's Ford Ka as he left school with friends and died later in Whipps Cross University Hospital.\n\nTerence Glover has been sentenced indefinitely under the Mental Health Act\n\nChristine Agnew, prosecuting, said eye-witnesses saw Glover's car \"ploughing through and hitting children from behind\".\n\nShe said he \"deliberately mounted the pavement... and drove directly at a group of people, mostly children, intending to kill them\".\n\nGlover, previously of Newmans Lane, Loughton, also pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of 23-year-old Raquel Jimeno and six boys and three girls aged between 12 and 16 who were outside the school.\n\nThe court heard he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and medical experts agreed his \"significant\" mental illness \"provided an explanation for his conduct\".\n\nHe was given a hospital order under the Mental Health Act 1983, meaning if his illness was treated successfully, he would be transferred to prison.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Harley Watson's classmates paid tribute to him in 2019\n\nJudge Andrew Edis said if transferred, Glover must serve a life sentence with a minimum of 15 years.\n\nIn his sentencing statement, Judge Edis noted his history of mental illness and cocaine use, but said Glover's actions were \"appalling\".\n\n\"He caused the death of a much-loved and admired 12-year-old boy who had done no harm to anyone,\" he said.\n\nHe added that Glover's behaviour \"requires punishment as well as treatment\" and there was \"no doubt that this defendant is dangerous\".\n\nHe also ordered that Glover be banned from driving for life and that the car should be destroyed.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "9 January A Boeing 737, operated by Sriwijaya Air, crashes into the Java Sea minutes after taking off from Jakarta. All 62 people on board are killed, including seven children and three babies. Officials say a problem with the aircraft's autothrottle had been reported a few days before the crash.\n\n22 May An Airbus A320 carrying 91 passengers and eight members of crew crashes in a residential area of the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, killing more than 90 people. At least two passengers survive the crash.\n\nFlight PK8303 crashed just short of the perimeter at Karachi's Jinnah International Airport\n\n8 January Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 crashes shortly after taking off from the Iranian capital Tehran, killing all 176 passengers and crew members on board. The incident took place amid escalating tensions between the US and Iran, and the Iranian government eventually admitted it had downed the plane \"unintentionally\".\n\n10 March An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max crashes six minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa. All 157 people onboard are killed. The victims come from more than 30 countries.\n\n29 October A Boeing 737 Max, operated by Lion Air, crashes into the Java Sea shortly after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia. All 189 passengers and crew are killed, and a volunteer diver dies in the subsequent recovery operation. Investigators said the plane - which had had technical problems on previous flights - should have been grounded.\n\n18 May A Boeing 737 passenger plane crashes shortly after take-off from Jose Marti International Airport in Havana, killing 112 people. One passenger survives.\n\n11 April A military plane crashes shortly after take-off near the Algerian capital Algiers, killing all 257 people on board, including 10 crew members. Most of the dead are soldiers and their families.\n\n12 March A plane carrying 71 passengers and crew crashes on landing at Kathmandu airport. More than 50 people are killed when the Bombardier Dash 8 turboprop comes down.\n\n18 February A passenger plane crashes into the Zagros mountains in Iran killing all 66 people on board. The Aseman Airlines ATR turboprop crashes about an hour after taking off in the capital, Tehran, heading for the south-western city of Yasuj.\n\n11 February A Russian passenger plane crashes minutes after leaving Moscow's Domodedovo airport with 71 people on board. The Antonov An-148 belonging to Saratov Airlines was en route to the city of Orsk in the Ural mountains when it crashed near the village of Argunovo, about 80km (50 miles) south-east of Moscow.\n\nThere were no passenger jet crashes in 2017 - the safest year in the history of commercial airlines.\n\n25 December A Russian military Tu-154 jet airliner crashes in the Black Sea, with the loss of all 92 passengers and crew. The plane came down soon after take-off from an airport near the city of Sochi. It was carrying artistes due to give a concert for Russian troops in Syria, along with journalists and military.\n\nBereaved residents of the Black Sea resort of Sochi must now come to terms with the latest air disaster\n\n7 December All 48 people on board a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) plane were killed when it crashed in the north of the country. The national airline - accused of safety failures in the past - insisted this time that strict checks on Flight PK-661 from Chitral to Islamabad left \"no room for any technical error\".\n\nAll 48 people on board the Pakistan International Airlines plane were killed when it crashed in the north of the country on 7 December\n\n28 November The plane carrying the football team of the Brazilian club Chapecoense runs out of fuel and crashes near Medellin, Colombia, killing 71 people, including most of the players and management. Three players were among the six survivors, while nine did not travel.\n\n19 May French President Francois Hollande confirms that an EgyptAir flight reported missing between Paris and Cairo has crashed, with 66 people on board.\n\n19 March A FlyDubai Boeing 737-800 crashes in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, killing all 62 people on board.\n\n31 October An Airbus A321, operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia, crashes over central Sinai some 22 minutes after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all 224 people on board. The Islamic State group's local affiliate later says it brought down the plane in response to Russian intervention in Syria.\n\n30 June Indonesian Hercules C-130 military transport plane crashes into a residential area of Medan. The army says all 122 people on board died, along with at least 19 on the ground.\n\n24 March: Germanwings Airbus A320 airliner crashes in the French Alps near Digne, on a flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf. All 148 people on board were feared dead.\n\n28 December: AirAsia QZ8501 flying from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore goes missing over the Java sea. The pilot radioed for permission to divert around bad weather but no mayday alert was issued. There were 162 passengers and crew on board.\n\n24 July: Air Algerie AH5017 disappears over Mali amid poor weather near the border with Burkina Faso. The McDonnell Douglas MD-83 was operated by Spain's Swiftair, and was heading from Ouagadougou to Algiers carrying 116 passengers - 51 of them French. All are thought to have died.\n\n23 July: Forty-eight people die when a Taiwanese ATR-72 plane crashes into stormy seas during a short flight. TransAsia Airways GE222 was carrying 54 passengers and four crew to the island of Penghu. It made an abortive attempt to land before crashing on a second attempt.\n\nMalaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was believed to have been shot down over conflict-hit Ukraine\n\n17 July: Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashes near Grabove in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board, 193 of them Dutch. Pro-Russian rebels are widely accused of shooting the plane down using a surface-to-air missile - they deny responsibility.\n\n8 March: The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing leads to the largest and most expensive search in aviation history. Despite vast effort, notably in the hostile South Indian Ocean, nothing was found until July 2015, when an aircraft wing part washed up on Reunion Island. French officials confirmed the debris was from MH370.\n\n11 February: A military transport plane - a Hercules C-130 - carrying 78 people crashes in a mountainous part of north-eastern Algeria. Reports suggest there is one survivor from among the military personnel, family members and crew.\n\n17 November: Tatarstan Airlines Boeing 737 crashes on landing in Kazan, Russia, killing all 50 people on board.\n\n16 October: Forty-nine people, including foreigners from some 10 countries as well as Laotian nationals, die when a Lao Airlines ATR 72-600 plunges into the Mekong River as it came in to land.\n\n3 June: A Dana Air passenger plane with about 150 people on board crashes in a densely populated area of Nigeria's largest city, Lagos.\n\n20 April: A Bhoja Air Boeing 737 crashes on its approach to the main airport in the Pakistani capital Islamabad, killing all 121 passengers and six crew.\n\n26 July: Some 78 people are killed when a Moroccan military C-130 Hercules crashes into a mountain near Guelmim in Morocco. Officials blamed bad weather.\n\nThe pilot of the IranAir Boeing 727 which crashed near the north-western city of Orumiyeh reported a technical failure before trying to land\n\n8 July: A Hewa Bora Airways plane crash-lands in bad weather in Democratic Republic of Congo, killing 74 of the 118 people on board.\n\n9 January: An IranAir Boeing 727 breaks into pieces near the city of Orumiyeh, killing 77 of the 100 people on board. The pilots had reported a technical failure before trying to land.\n\n5 November: An Aerocaribbean passenger turboprop crashes in mountains in central Cuba, killing all 68 people on board.\n\n28 July: A Pakistani plane on an Airblue domestic flight from Karachi crashes into a hillside while trying to land at Islamabad airport, killing all 152 people on board.\n\n22 May: An Air India Express Boeing 737 overshot a hilltop airport in Mangalore, southern India, and crashed into a valley, bursting into flames and killing 158.\n\n12 May: An Afriqiyah Airways Airbus 330 crashes while trying to land near Tripoli airport in Libya, killing more than 100 people.\n\n10 April: A Tupolev 154 plane carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski crashes near the Russian airport of Smolensk, killing more than 90 people on board.\n\n25 January: Ethiopian Airlines passenger jet crashes into the sea with 89 people on board shortly after take-off from Beirut.\n\n15 July: A Caspian Airlines Tupolev plane crashes in the north of Iran en route to Armenia. All 168 passengers and crew are reported dead.\n\n30 June: A Yemeni passenger plane, an Airbus 310, crashes in the Indian Ocean near the Comoros archipelago. Only one of the 153 people on board survives.\n\n1 June: An Air France Airbus 330 travelling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashes into the Atlantic with 228 people on board. Search teams later recover some 50 bodies in the ocean.\n\nAll 168 passengers and crew were reported dead when a Caspian Airlines Tupolev plane crashed in the north of Iran en route to Armenia\n\n20 May: An Indonesian army C-130 Hercules transport plane crashes into a village on eastern Java, killing at least 97 people.\n\n12 February: A passenger plane crashes into a house in Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 people on board and one person on the ground.\n\n14 September: A Boeing-737 crashes on landing near the central Russian city of Perm, killing all 88 passengers and crew members on board.\n\n20 August: A Spanair plane veers off the runway on take-off at Madrid's Barajas airport, killing 154 people and injuring 18.\n\n30 November: All 56 people on board an Atlasjet flight are killed when it crashes near the town of Keciborlu in the mountainous Isparta province, about 12km (7.5 miles) from Isparta airport.\n\n16 September: At least 87 people are killed after a One-Two-Go plane crashed on landing in bad weather at the Thai resort of Phuket.\n\n17 July: A TAM Airlines jet crashes on landing at Congonhas airport in Sao Paulo, in Brazil's worst-ever air disaster. A total of 199 people are killed - all 186 on board and 13 on the ground.\n\n5 May: A Kenya Airways Boeing 737-800 crashes in swampland in southern Cameroon, killing all 114 on board. The official inquiry is yet to report on the cause of the disaster.\n\n1 January: An Adam Air Boeing 737-400 carrying 102 passengers and crew comes down in mountains on Sulawesi Island on a domestic Indonesian flight. All on board are presumed dead.\n\n29 September: A Boeing 737 carrying 154 passengers and crew crashed into the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, killing all on board, after colliding with a private jet in mid-air.\n\n22 August: A Russian Tupolev-154 passenger plane with 170 people on board crashes north of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine.\n\n9 July: A Russian S7 Airbus A-310 skids off the runway during landing at Irkutsk airport in Siberia. A total of 124 people on board die, but more than 50 survive the crash.\n\n3 May: An Armavia Airbus A-320 crashes into the Black Sea near Sochi, killing all 113 people on board.\n\n10 December: A Sosoliso Airlines DC-9 crashes in the southern Nigerian city of Port Harcourt, killing 103 people on board.\n\n6 December: A C-130 military transport plane crashes on the outskirts of the Iranian capital Tehran, killing 110 people, including some on the ground.\n\nA mass funeral was held for those who died when a Mandala Airlines plane with 112 passengers and five crew on board crashed after take-off in the Indonesian city of Medan\n\n22 October: A Bellview airlines Boeing 737 carrying 117 people on board crashes soon after take-off from the Nigerian city of Lagos, killing everyone on board.\n\n5 September: A Mandala Airlines plane with 112 passengers and five crew on board crashes after take-off in the Indonesian city of Medan, killing almost all on board and dozens on the ground.\n\n16 August: A Colombian plane operated by West Caribbean Airways crashes in a remote region of Venezuela, killing all 160 people on board. The airliner, heading from Panama to Martinique, was packed with residents of the Caribbean island.\n\n14 August: A Helios Airways flight from Cyprus to Athens with 121 people on board crashes north of the Greek capital Athens, apparently after a drop in cabin pressure.\n\n16 July: An Equatair plane crashes soon after take-off from Equatorial Guinea's island capital, Malabo, west of the mainland, killing all 60 people on board.\n\n3 February: The wreckage of Kam Air Boeing 737 flight is located in high mountains near the Afghan capital Kabul, two days after the plane vanished from radar screens in heavy snowstorms. All 104 people on board are feared dead.\n\n21 November: A passenger plane crashes into a frozen lake near the city of Baotou in the Inner Mongolia region of northern China, killing all 53 on board and two on the ground, officials say.\n\n3 January: An Egyptian charter plane belonging to Flash Airlines crashes into the Red Sea, killing all 141 people on board. Most of the passengers are thought to be French tourists.\n\n25 December: A Boeing 727 crashes soon after take-off from the West African state of Benin, killing at least 135 people en route to Lebanon.\n\n8 July: A Boeing 737 crashes in Sudan shortly after take-off, killing 115 people on board. Only one passenger, a small child survived.\n\nThe Benin air crash happened when a Boeing 727 dropped out of the sky soon after take-off, killing at least 135 people travelling to Lebanon\n\n26 May: A Ukrainian Yak-42 crashes near the Black Sea resort of Trabzon in north-west Turkey, killing all 74 people on board - most of them Spanish peacekeepers returning home from Afghanistan.\n\n8 May: As many as 170 people are reported dead in DR Congo after the rear ramp of an old Soviet plane, an Ilyushin 76 cargo plane, apparently falls off, sucking them out.\n\n6 March: An Algerian Boeing 737 crashes after taking off from the remote Tamanrasset airport, leaving up to 102 people dead.\n\n19 February: An Iranian military transport aircraft carrying 276 people crashes in the south of the country, killing all on board.\n\n8 January: A Turkish Airlines plane with 76 passengers and crew on board crashes while coming in to land at Diyarbakir.\n\n23 December: An Antonov 140 commuter plane carrying aerospace experts crashes in central Iran, killing all 46 people aboard. The delegation had been due to review an Iranian version of the same plane built under licence.\n\n27 July: A fighter jet crashes into a crowd of spectators in the west Ukrainian town of Lviv, killing 77 people, in what is the world's worst air show disaster.\n\n1 July: Seventy-one people, many of them children die when a Russian Tupolev 154 aircraft on a school trip to Spain collides with a Boeing 757 transport plane over southern Germany.\n\n25 May: A Boeing 747 belonging to Taiwan's national carrier - China Airlines - crashes into the sea near the Taiwanese island of Penghu, with 225 passengers and crew on board.\n\n7 May: China Northern Airlines plane carrying 112 people crashes into the sea near Dalian in north-east China.\n\n7 May: On the same day, an EgyptAir Boeing 735 crash lands near Tunis with 55 passengers and up to 10 crew on board. Most people survive.\n\n4 May: A BAC1-11-500 plane operated by EAS Airlines crashes in the Nigerian city of Kano, killing 148 people - half of them on the ground.\n\n15 April: Air China flight 129 crashes on its approach to Pusan, South Korea, with over 160 passengers and crew on board.\n\n12 February: A Tupolev 154 operated by Iran Air crashes in mountains in the west of Iran, killing all 117 on board.\n\n29 January: A Boeing 727 from the Ecuadorean TAME airline crashes in mountains in Colombia, killing 92 people.\n\n12 November: An American Airlines A-300 bound for the Dominican Republic crashes after takeoff in a residential area of the borough of Queens, New York, killing all 260 people on board and at least five people on the ground.\n\n8 October: A Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) airliner collides with a small plane in heavy fog on the runway at Milan's Linate airport, killing 118 people.\n\nThe crashed American Airlines flight of November 2000 left much of the Rockaway neighbourhood of New York enveloped by smoke\n\n4 October: A Russian Sibir Airlines Tupolev 154,en route from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk in Siberia, explodes in mid-air and crashes into the Black Sea, killing 78 passengers and crew.\n\n3 July: A Russian Tupolev 154,en route from Yekaterinburg in the Ural mountains to the Russian port of Vladivostok, crashes near the Siberian city of Irkutsk, killing 133 passengers and 10 crew.\n\n30 October: A Singapore Airlines Boeing 747 bound for Los Angeles crashes after take-off from Taipei airport in Taiwan, killing 78 of the 179 people on board.\n\n23 August: A Gulf Air Airbus crashes into the sea as it comes in to land in Bahrain, killing all 143 people on board.\n\n25 July: Air France Concorde en route for New York crashes into a hotel outside Paris shortly after takeoff, killing 113 people, including four on the ground.\n\nThe Singapore Airlines Boeing 747 heading for Los Angeles crashed soon after take-off from Taipei airport in Taiwan\n\n17 July: Alliance Air Boeing 737-200 crashes into houses attempting to land at Patna, India, killing 51 people on board and four on the ground.\n\n19 April: Air Philippines Boeing 737-200 from Manila to Davao crashes on approach to landing, killing all 131 people on board.\n\n31 January: Alaska Airlines MD-83 from Mexico to San Francisco plunges into ocean off southern California, killing all 88 people on board.\n\n30 January: Kenya Airways A-310 crashes into Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from Abidjan, Ivory Coast, en route for Lagos, Nigeria. All but 10 of the 179 people on board die.\n\n31 October: EgyptAir Boeing 767 crashes into Atlantic Ocean after taking off from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York on flight to Cairo, Egypt, killing all 217 on board.\n\n24 February: China Southwest Airlines plane crashes in a field in China's coastal Zhejiang province after a mid-air explosion. All 61 people on board the Russian-built TU-154 flying from Chongqing to the south-eastern city of Wenzhou are killed.\n\n11 December: Thai Airways International A-310 crashes on a domestic flight during its third attempt to land at Surat Thani, Thailand, killing 101 people.\n\n2 September: Swissair MD-11 from New York to Geneva crashes in the Atlantic Ocean off Canada killing all 229 people on board.\n\n16 February: Airbus A-300 owned by Taiwan's China Airlines crashes near Taipei's Chiang Kai-shek airport while trying to land in fog and rain after a flight from Bali, Indonesia. All 196 on board and seven people on ground are killed.\n\n2 February: Cebu Pacific Air DC-9 crashes into mountain in southern Philippines, killing all 104 people aboard.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section West Ham\n\nFootballers \"can get things wrong\" but must not be \"picked on\" despite several breaches of coronavirus guidelines, says West Ham manager David Moyes.\n\nHammers midfielder Manuel Lanzini was one of numerous Premier League players to attend a party over Christmas.\n\nMore than 60 games in England have been called off because of coronavirus outbreaks at clubs.\n\n\"We have to be careful that everybody isn't picking on football players,\" said Moyes.\n\n\"We will all know people who have broken the rules in their own way.\n\n\"The players have followed the protocols. Every day at the training ground they have to go through rituals just to get into the building. They know what their job is. Like most human beings at times, they can get things wrong.\"\n\nArgentina international Lanzini was reminded of his responsibilities by the club and later apologised for his actions on Twitter.\n\nOn Friday, he announced he would be donating to a local foodbank as he wanted \"something good\" to come of his actions.\n\nMoyes praised Lanzini for his \"really good gesture\" but does not want to see players treated unfairly.\n\n\"If you are going to take tough measures on players, then you might as well take on the government people as well who have broken the rules because it's certainly not just football players who have done it,\" he said.\n\n\"You have got to be careful. A lot of people are throwing stones in glass houses at the moment regarding this. We all know what the protocols are, we all know we have to be ever-vigilant and make sure we're doing the right things.\"\n\nThe Premier League has implemented stronger coronavirus protocols in light of a recent surge in cases, including reminding players and managers to avoid handshakes and high fives.\n\nCompliance officers will also apply more robust policies to reporting breaches of protocols and will be tasked with checking hotel stays, travel plans and behaviour in dressing rooms.\n\nThe number of staff attending training grounds will also be reduced, social distancing will be enforced more strictly and the use of canteens will be further limited.\n\nStricter matchday protocols include avoiding unnecessary contact at all times, and substitutes wearing face masks.\n\nIn a note sent to clubs, the Premier League has warned it may take disciplinary action if they fail to to ensure people who breach the rules are \"appropriately investigated and sanctioned\".", "Kevin Hughes was treated at Wrexham Maelor Hospital before he died with coronavirus\n\nA man has died with Covid-19 less than a month after the funeral of his mother, who also died with the virus.\n\nFlintshire councillor Kevin Hughes, 63, was being treated at Wrexham Maelor Hospital but died on Friday morning, the authority said.\n\nHe had previously spoken of his sadness at missing his mother's funeral last month after he tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nCouncil colleague Chris Dolphin said he was a \"big man with a big heart\".\n\nThe independent councillor, also a former policeman and journalist, sat with the Liberal Democrat group.\n\nHe said missing the funeral of his mother, June Margaret Hughes, was one of the \"darkest days\" of his life.\n\nGroup leader, Mr Dolphin, called him a \"friend, fellow councillor, above all, a good man. Not one to stand on the side-lines - a doer. A man of enthusiasm, who was in life to be really involved.\"\n\nCouncil chief executive, Colin Everett, said: \"Kevin was a wonderful person with a big heart. Kevin was one of the most thoughtful and generous people I have worked with in my long career.\n\n\"I will miss him so much as both a councillor and as a friend.\"\n\nThe politician (left) will be remembered by the council at a meeting on 26 January\n\nAuthority leader, Ian Roberts, called Mr Hughes a \"special person and friend who will be very sadly missed by all\".\n\nHe added: \"His contribution as a councillor has been considerable and he was highly respected by his community, members of the council and officers.\n\n\"He was an active local member and represented his community with integrity and in a positive and engaging way.\"\n\nMr Hughes will be remembered by the council at a meeting on 26 January.\n\nThe authority's chairwoman, Marion Bateman, said: \"Our sincere condolences go to his wife Sally, along with his family and friends, at this very sad time.\"", "Mike Pompeo said the US-Taiwan relationship should not be \"shackled\" (file photo)\n\nThe US is lifting long-standing restrictions on contacts between American and Taiwanese officials, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says.\n\nThe \"self-imposed restrictions\" were introduced decades ago to \"appease\" the mainland Chinese government, which lays claim to the island, the US state department said in a statement.\n\nThese rules are now \"null and void\".\n\nThe move is likely to anger China and increase tensions between Washington and Beijing.\n\nIt comes as the Trump administration enters its final days ahead of the inauguration of Joe Biden as president on 20 January.\n\nThe Biden transition team have said the president-elect is committed to maintaining the long-standing US policy towards Taiwan.\n\nAnalysts say they will be unhappy with such a policy decision being made in the final days of the Trump administration, but that the move could be reversed easily by Mr Pompeo's successor Antony Blinken.\n\nChina regards Taiwan as a breakaway province, but Taiwan's leaders argue that it is a sovereign state.\n\nRelations between the two are frayed and there is a constant threat of a violent flare up that could drag in the US, an ally of Taiwan.\n\nIn a statement on Saturday, Mr Pompeo said the US state department had introduced complicated restrictions limiting the communication between American diplomats and their Taiwanese counterparts.\n\n\"Today I am announcing that I am lifting all of these self-imposed restrictions,\" he said. \"Today's statement recognises that the US-Taiwan relationship need not, and should not, be shackled by self-imposed restrictions of our permanent bureaucracy.\"\n\nHe added that Taiwan was a vibrant democracy and a reliable US partner, and that the restrictions were no longer valid.\n\nFollowing the announcement, Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wu thanked Mr Pompeo, saying he was \"grateful\".\n\n\"The closer partnership between Taiwan and the US is firmly based on our shared values, common interests and unshakeable belief in freedom and democracy,\" he wrote in a tweet.\n\nLast August, US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar became the highest-ranking US politician to hold meetings on the island for decades.\n\nIn response, China urged the US to respect what it calls its \"one China\" principle.\n\nThe US also sells arms to Taiwan, though it does not have a formal defence treaty with the country, as it does with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nChina and Taiwan have had separate governments since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.\n\nBeijing has long tried to limit Taiwan's international activities and both have vied for influence in the Pacific region.\n\nTensions have increased in recent years and Beijing has not ruled out the use of force to take the island back.\n\nAlthough Taiwan is officially recognised by only a handful of nations, its democratically-elected government has strong commercial and informal links with many countries.", "Lockdowns have worked before, but can we expect the new one to do the same?\n\nIt feels like we are back in March or April last year, when the strict controls on all our lives led to a fairly quick decline in levels of coronavirus.\n\nBut one of the crucial differences this time is the new variant, which is thought to spread between 50 and 70% faster than previous forms of the virus.\n\nExperts warn there are now no guarantees that lockdown will be enough to bring the variant under control.\n\n\"It still would not have been easy, but it would have been a much easier situation if it had not been for the new variant,\" Prof Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, told Inside Health.\n\n\"That really pushes the bounds of our ability to control the spread of the virus, even with measures that were previously relatively quite effective.\"\n\nThe coronavirus spreads when we come into contact with each other so moving classrooms online, telling people to stay at home and closing shops breaks many of those opportunities for human contact.\n\nIf we consider the R number - the average number of people each infected person passes the virus on to - it was about 3.0 in the run up to the first lockdown and anything above 1.0 means cases are climbing.\n\nR fell to 0.6 during the first lockdown.\n\nThen every 1,000 infected people passed the virus on to 600 others, who passed it on to 360 others and so on.\n\nBut if the new variant is 50% more transmissible then the R number, in the same lockdown conditions, would be about 0.9.\n\nThen 1,000 infected people would pass the virus onto 900 others, then 810 and so on.\n\nAs you can see this leads to far slower decline.\n\nAnd that assumes lockdown can get R down to 0.9 in areas where the new variant has become the most common form of the virus.\n\nIf, as some studies suggest, the variant is about 70% more transmissible then R may stay above 1.0 and cases may not fall at all.\n\n\"We'd at best flatten the curve, keep numbers at a roughly constant level, and that's frankly why there is so much emphasis on getting vaccine into people's arms as quickly as possible,\" said Prof Ferguson.\n\nIt is hard to lock down even harder as there are some parts of society - hospitals, supermarkets - that need to be kept open.\n\nWhat happens to the number of cases over the coming weeks will be closely monitored. If this lockdown is less effective then we will have to live with it for longer.\n\nThere have been some encouraging signs over the Christmas break, which was a bit like a lockdown due to school holidays and other restrictions.\n\n\"We are in a very difficult situation here, but my initial assessment of the last few days is that the rate is slowing which is good news,\" Prof John Edmunds, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the BBC.\n\nHe added: \"It looks likes those restrictions should be sufficient to stop the increase, whether they will be sufficient to bring cases down sufficiently we are yet to see.\"\n\nEventually the vaccine will give people immunity so we do not need the same controls on our lives.\n\nNow more than ever this is a race between the virus and the vaccine.", "Google has suspended \"free speech\" social network Parler from its Play Store over its failure to remove \"egregious content\".\n\nParler styles itself as \"unbiased\" social media and has proved popular with people banned from Twitter.\n\nBut Google said the app had failed to remove posts inciting violence.\n\nApple has also warned Parler it will remove the app from its App Store if it does not comply with its content-moderation requirements.\n\nOn Parler, the app's chief executive John Matze said: \"We won't cave to politically motivated companies and those authoritarians who hate free speech!\"\n\nLaunched in 2018, Parler has proved particularly popular among supporters of US President Donald Trump and right-wing conservatives. Such groups have frequently accused Twitter and Facebook of unfairly censoring their views.\n\nWhile Mr Trump himself is not a user, the platform already features several high-profile contributors following earlier bursts of growth in 2020.\n\nTexas Senator Ted Cruz boasts 4.9 million followers on the platform, while Fox News host Sean Hannity has about seven million.\n\nIt briefly became the most-downloaded app in the United States after the US election, following a clampdown on the spread of election misinformation by Twitter and Facebook.\n\nHowever, both Apple and Google have said the app fails to comply with content-moderation requirements.\n\nFor months, Parler has been one of the most popular social media platforms for right-wing users.\n\nAs major platforms began taking action against viral conspiracy theories, disinformation and the harassment of election workers and officials in the aftermath of the US presidential vote, the app became more popular with elements of the fringe far-right.\n\nThis turned the network into a right-wing echo chamber, almost entirely populated by users fixated on revealing examples of election fraud and posting messages in support of attempts to overturn the election outcome.\n\nIn the days preceding the Capitol riots, the tone of discussion on the app became significantly more violent, with some users openly discussing ways to stop the certification of Joe Biden's victory by Congress.\n\nUnsubstantiated allegations and defamatory claims against a number of senior US figures such as Chief Justice John Roberts and Vice-President Mike Pence were rife on the app.\n\nGoogle and Apple say they are taking necessary action to ensure violent rhetoric is not promoted on their platforms.\n\nHowever, to those increasingly concerned about freedom of speech and expression on online platforms, it represents another example of draconian action by major tech companies which threatens internet freedom.\n\nThis is a debate which is certain to continue beyond the Trump presidency.\n\nIn a statement, Google confirmed it had suspended Parler from its Play Store, saying: \"Our longstanding policies require that apps displaying user-generated content have moderation policies and enforcement that removes egregious content like posts that incite violence.\n\n\"In light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat, we are suspending the app's listings from the Play Store until it addresses these issues.\"\n\nApple has warned Parler it will be removed from the App Store on Saturday in a letter published by Buzzfeed News.\n\nIt said it had seen \"accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate\" the attacks on the US Capitol on 6 January.\n\nMr Matze said Parler had \"no way to organise anything\" and pointed out that Facebook groups and events had been used to organise action.\n\nBut Apple said: \"Our investigation has found that Parler is not effectively moderating and removing content that encourages illegal activity and poses a serious risk to the health and safety of users in direct violation of your own terms of service.\"\n\n\"We won't distribute apps that present dangerous and harmful content.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Swedenborg This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIn a related development, Google has kicked Steve Bannon's War Room podcast off YouTube, saying it had repeatedly violated the platform's rules.\n\nThe ex-White House aide's channel had more than 300,000 subscribers.\n\nSteve Bannon served as President Trump's chief strategist for eight months in 2017\n\n\"In accordance with our strikes system, we have terminated Steve Bannon's channel 'War room' and one associated channel for repeatedly violating our Community Guidelines,\" Google said in a statement.\n\n\"Any channel posting new videos with misleading content that alleges widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 US Presidential election in violation of our policies will receive a strike, a penalty which temporarily restricts uploading or live-streaming. Channels that receive three strikes in the same 90-day period will be permanently removed from YouTube.\"\n\nThe action was taken shortly after the channel posted an interview with Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, in which he blamed the Democrats for the rioting on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.\n\nOne anti-misinformation group said the action was long overdue after \"months of Steve Bannon calling for revolution and violence\".\n\n\"The truth is YouTube should have taken down Steve Bannon's account a long time ago and they shouldn't rely on the labour of extremism researchers to moderate the content on their platform,\" said Madeline Peltz, Senior Researcher at Media Matters for America.", "A 78-year-old French woman received the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in France\n\nA global race is on to vaccinate people against Covid-19 - and with infections soaring in Europe many have complained that the roll-out is too slow in the EU.\n\nMember states decide individually who to vaccinate, when and where, but the EU is coordinating strategy and buying vaccines in bulk. On Friday, the EU Commission agreed to buy an extra 300 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine - that would give the EU nearly half of the firm's global output for 2021.\n\nBBC reporters in seven European capitals explain how the vaccinations are going on their patch.\n\nIn an election year, the vaccine has become a political battleground, writes Jenny Hill, in Berlin.\n\nThe fact it was German scientists who developed the first effective Covid vaccine has been the source of great national pride. And, by and large, Germans appear to be reasonably comfortable with the idea of immunisation.\n\nA recent survey found 65% were prepared to have the vaccine. Other research indicates that less than a quarter of those surveyed would not. But politically - and perhaps unsurprisingly, given this is an election year - Germany's vaccination programme has become a battleground.\n\nVaccinations began here just under two weeks ago and prioritise the over 80s and care home workers. By Thursday evening, more than 477,000 first doses had been administered.\n\nGermany's share of the EU order amounts to 56 million doses. So far, 1.3 million doses have been delivered.\n\nBut some of the hundreds of specially prepared vaccination centres are still not in use and even the government has admitted there simply isn't enough to go around. Angela Merkel and her health minister Jens Spahn have been accused of failing to secure enough doses.\n\nMuch of the criticism has come from Mrs Merkel's own coalition partners but some within the scientific community have echoed their concerns - that Germany put European interests above its own by insisting on a joint EU procurement process. The scientists who developed the vaccine have said publicly that the EU originally turned down an offer for a further order.\n\nGermany's share of the EU order amounts to 56 million doses. So far, 1.3 million doses have been delivered and it's thought that by the end of the month a further 2.68 million will have followed.\n\nMr Spahn, whose assured performance through the pandemic led some to wonder whether he might be a potential successor to Mrs Merkel, has blamed the shortage on the inability of the manufacturers of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to meet global demand.\n\nGermany has now ordered an extra 30 million doses and, following the recent European approval of the Moderna vaccine, expects to start rolling that out next week. The government is sticking to its pledge that the vaccination programme will be complete by the end of the summer.\n\nThe Czech prime minister has hit out at apparent delays in distributing the vaccine, writes Rob Cameron, in Prague.\n\nThe Czech vaccination effort began on 27 December, when the prime minister, Andrej Babis, became the first person in the country to receive the jab. Mr Babis, who is 66, had previously questioned whether he would be eligible, as he'd had his spleen removed as a teenager.\n\nBut the country's programme has got off to a sluggish start. Mr Babis - a billionaire businessman who has been dogged by both European and Czech investigations into alleged misuse of EU funds - has lost no time venting his (figurative) spleen at the European Commission over the delay. \"We believed when we contributed €12m to the European fund in November that we'd receive the vaccine,\" he told a newspaper this week.\n\nThe health minister conceded this week that immunising the higher-risk groups will take months.\n\nThe country has received 30,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. So far, it has managed to administer it to 19,918 people. The government says it is ready to roll out the jab en masse as soon as supplies arrive from the manufacturers.\n\nIt has also published a strategy, which envisages a three-stage process. The first will see targeted vaccination of high-risk groups. This will gradually give way to mass vaccination in 31 centres, using an online reservation system that will be open to all from 1 February. And the final stage will see the country's GPs deployed, hopefully to administer the Oxford-AstraZeneca and other jabs, which unlike the previous two can be stored and transported at fridge temperature.\n\nHowever, the timing in the original strategy document now appears optimistic. The health minister conceded this week that immunising the higher-risk groups - all health and social care staff, teachers, everyone over 65, all those with serious health conditions - will take months. GPs may not begin vaccinating young, healthy members of society until late spring, or summer.\n\nA sluggish start is being blamed on bureaucracy and vaccine scepticism, writes Hugh Schofield, in Paris.\n\nFrance's boast of a big, effective state apparatus has been badly exposed by the sluggish start to the Covid vaccination programme. After the first week, when neighbouring Germany had inoculated around 250,000 people, France was on a mere 530. By Friday, the figure had gone up to 45,500 - still so small as to be statistically meaningless.\n\nSo why has it taken so long for France to put the plan into action? It is not as if the authorities did not have time to prepare. And it is certainly not a question of a lack of vaccine. In fact, more than a million Pfizer doses are already in cold storage, waiting to be used.\n\nPolls suggest as many as 58% of the public do not want to be given the jab.\n\nThe primary reason for the delay seems to be the cumbersome, over-centralised nature of France's health bureaucracy. A 45-page dossier of instructions issued by the ministry in Paris had to be read and understood by staff at old people's homes.\n\nEach recipient then had to give informed consent in a consultation with a doctor, held no less than five days before injection. The lengthy procedure is in theory to save lives - those of patients who might have an adverse reaction. But as the critics have been arguing, delay in inoculating the population is also costing lives.\n\nAnother problem in France is the high level of scepticism towards vaccination - product of a more general suspicion of government. Polls suggest as many as 58% of the public do not want to be given the jab. The effect - critics say - has been to make the government unduly cautious. When urgency was required, the authorities were reluctant to move fast for fear of galvanising the anti-vaxxers.\n\nAfter President Emmanuel Macron communicated his anger at the delays at the weekend, the pace is picking up. The procedure for consent is being simplified. By the end of January, the plan is to have 500-600 vaccination centres open across the country - either in hospitals or other big public buildings.\n\nPolitically a lot is at stake. The government has already come under fire for failings in providing masks and tests. With opposition voices calling the vaccine delay a \"state scandal\", President Macron needs a roll-out that is fast and problem-free.\n\nNational pride accelerated Russia's rollout, but one man is conspicuously absent from the list of people vaccinated, writes Sarah Rainsford, in Moscow.\n\nRussia registered its main Covid vaccine for domestic use way back in August, before mass safety and efficacy trials had even begun. In December, with those trials still underway, it began rolling out Sputnik V to the public ahead of mass vaccination launches everywhere else in Europe. The rush was driven by national pride as well as medical necessity.\n\nSputnik was initially offered to front line health and education workers but early take-up of the two-dose vaccination was slow and the list of those eligible soon expanded.\n\nA poll by the Levada Centre in late December showed only 38% of respondents were willing to get the jab: wary of domestic healthcare and medicines, Russians were sceptical of bold early claims made for the vaccine and nervous about possible adverse reactions. Even so, and despite similar delays scaling-up production as in other countries, Sputnik's backers announced this week that more than a million people had been vaccinated.\n\nRussia began rolling out its Sputnik V vaccine in December\n\nBut one man still conspicuously absent from the list of the vaccinated is Vladimir Putin, despite the Kremlin saying he will - eventually - get the jab. In the meantime, those who meet him in person are obliged to test for Covid first and even quarantine. The president may need to lead by example, though. Mr Putin has said repeatedly that protecting the economy is his priority so he's banking on mass vaccination to avoid a return to national lockdown.\n\nRussia has built giant, temporary hospitals since the start of the pandemic and the health minister said this week that 25% of Covid beds remain free. There's also been a fall in the number of new daily cases reported - around 25,000 for the past 5 days. But that's not down to the vaccine yet. The country is nearing the end of a 10-day New Year holiday period and the number of Covid tests has also dropped.\n\nAs infection rates grow in a country praised by many for its no-lockdown approach, a successful vaccine programme is crucial writes Maddy Savage, in Stockholm.\n\nAlmost two weeks since 91-year-old care home resident Gun-Britt Johnsson became the first Swede to get the initial dose of a Pfizer jab, there is still no official tally of how many others have received the vaccination.\n\nThe Public Health Agency of Sweden says it's in the process of compiling data from the country's 21 regional health authorities tasked with vaccinating the entire adult population - around eight million people - by 26 June. The date isn't arbitrary, it's the biggest public holiday weekend of the year, when Swedes traditionally hold Midsummer celebrations. Karin Tegmark, a senior manager at the agency, says the date remains \"feasible\". But she says it depends on the delivery of vaccines to the country.\n\nAfter months of high trust levels in the country's no-lockdown approach, support for the health agency has dwindled.\n\nAlongside 4.5 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, Sweden has ordered 3.6 million jabs from Moderna, the first of which are expected to arrive next week. The country also plans to roll-out the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as soon as possible after it is approved by the EU - ideally by February.\n\nSwedes initially appeared lukewarm to the idea of taking a speedily-developed coronavirus vaccine, although a poll at the end of December found 71% would take one. A key driver of the initial scepticism is thought to be the failure of a voluntary mass vaccination programme for swine flu in 2009. Hundreds of Swedish children and young adults under 30 developed the sleeping disorder narcolepsy, which was found to be a side effect of the Pandemrix vaccine.\n\nA successful vaccination programme will be crucial, not least because it comes at a time when Swedish authorities are struggling to maintain public confidence. After months of high trust levels in the country's no-lockdown approach, support for the health agency has dwindled as Sweden has struggled with the second wave of coronavirus.\n\nMeanwhile, several high profile officials have faced heavy criticism for breaching their own recommendations - including the head of the civil contingencies agency (pictured), who resigned after spending Christmas with his daughter in the Canary Islands.\n\nA new government in Belgium seems unified on the vaccine rollout - for now at least, writes Nick Beake, in Brussels.\n\nIt seemed fitting that the first person in Belgium to receive a Covid jab lives in the place where the world's first approved Covid vaccine is being produced. Jos Hermans, a 96-year-old from the municipality of Puurs, was given the injection on 28 December, in his care home. A further 700 elderly residents were also administered a dose in what was a small, initial trial.\n\nThe mass vaccination programme in Belgium began on 5 January, but has been criticised for starting slowly. Federal Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke had promised in November that the rollout would be \"seamless and fast\", tweeting: \"If that does not work, shoot me.\"\n\nThe first phase looks to vaccinate up to 200,000 nursing home residents by the end of this month, or early February. Healthcare professionals will be next in line and the aim was for the whole population to be inoculated by the end of September.\n\nJos Hermans, a 96-year-old from Puurs, was given the injection on 28 December\n\nYou may think the country would be at an advantage being the epicentre of the Pfizer-BioNTech production. While this clearly helps with distribution, Belgium cannot receive more doses - relative to its population - than other EU countries under strict Commission rules. That didn't stop the minister-president of the Flanders region, who admitted this week that he had contacted Pfizer directly in the hope of procuring more doses, only to be rebuffed.\n\nAfter getting a guarantee from Pfizer over supply of the jab, the federal Belgian authorities have adapted their strategy: they now propose giving as many available doses to as many people as they can - and no longer reserving vials for patients' second dose, given three weeks after the first. In general, the federal government, rather than the European Commission has faced any criticism for a delay and has defended its \"careful\" approach.\n\nAnd there appears to be an interesting regional or cultural discrepancy when it comes to whether people are willing to take the vaccine. Of the Flemish population interviewed in a poll, half have said they wanted the vaccine as soon as possible. Among French speakers - it was 20% fewer, which chimes with the deeper scepticism over the border in France.\n\nIn a country where politics are notoriously complicated and fractious - they've only recently agreed a government, after a 500-day vacuum - the Federal Coalition appears unified on its Covid vaccine strategy. For now, at least.\n\nRegional variances and political rows have marked the beginning of Spain's vaccination programme writes Guy Hedgecoe, in Madrid.\n\nSpain started administering the vaccine on 27 December. So far, 743,925 doses have been distributed to regional administrations, with 277,976 people vaccinated, according to the health ministry. The objective of the coalition government is to immunise 2.3 million people within 12 weeks. Priority is being given to elderly residents of care homes, those who look after them, and healthcare personnel.\n\nEach of the country's 17 regions has a high degree of control over healthcare and should receive the number of doses that corresponds to their populations. However, already there has been substantial geographical disparity.\n\nGovernment data showed, for example, that while the northern region of Asturias had used 55% of the doses it had received by 3 January, the Madrid region had only administered 5% by the same date. Some regions are holding back doses to administer a second follow-up jab to the same person in several weeks' time, and some have been vaccinating on national holidays while others have not.\n\nThe pandemic has been the cause of constant political conflict, with the right-wing opposition accusing the leftist government of incompetence.\n\nAlthough vaccination is voluntary, the government has said it is making a register of those who do not wish to be inoculated. That initiative has generated controversy, although the government has insisted the register will merely seek to clarify why people refuse the vaccination.\n\nHowever, the pandemic has been the cause of constant political conflict, with the right-wing opposition accusing the leftist government of Pedro Sánchez of incompetence, lack of transparency and using coronavirus to accumulate power.\n\nThe arrival of a vaccine has not stopped the rancour. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the conservative Popular Party (PP) president of Galicia, warned the number of doses being distributed to each region was being dictated by \"political affiliations or parliamentary needs\", a claim the central government has rejected.", "Dozens of demonstrators were walking and chanting along Clapham High Street as police attempted to keep them contained to the area\n\nSixteen people have been arrested during an anti-lockdown protest in south London.\n\nPolice officers clashed with some of the maskless protesters who arrived in Clapham Common, some shouting \"take your freedom back\".\n\nSix police vans were deployed to the scene while officers moved the crowd of about 30 people away from the area.\n\nGathering for the purpose of a protest is not an exemption to the rules, the Met Police said.\n\nOne woman shouted from her car at the protesters \"there's a pandemic going\", while another bystander shouted \"idiots\".\n\nOne anti-lockdown protester, who was detained at Clapham Common park, said \"I stand under common law, not maritime law and this is assault\" as he was put into handcuffs by police officers.\n\nA large police presence remains around Clapham Common station, but almost all protesters had left the area as of 14:00 GMT.\n\nIt comes as a \"major incident\" was declared as the spread of Covid-19 threatens to \"overwhelm\" London hospitals.\n\nCity Hall said Covid-19 cases in the capital had exceeded 1,000 per 100,000, while there were 35% more people in hospital with the virus than in the peak of the pandemic in April.\n\nPolice could be seen questioning several people at the demonstration\n\nPolice battled to disperse the protestors gathering in Clapham Common\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. One floral tribute had Dame Barbara's photograph in the centre\n\nThe funeral of EastEnders and Carry On actress Dame Barbara Windsor has taken place in London.\n\nRoss Kemp, who played her on-screen son in the soap, was among the 30 mourners and gave a reading, as did actor and friend Christopher Biggins.\n\nDame Barbara died in December at the age of 83, having had dementia.\n\nThere were floral arrangements spelling Babs, The Dame and Saucy, and a mock pub sign showing her as The Queen Peggy in the style of the soap's Queen Vic.\n\nDame Barbara played pub landlady Peggy Mitchell in EastEnders for more than two decades.\n\nA version of the EastEnders Queen Vic pub sign was painted in tribute\n\nScott Mitchell, who was married to Dame Barbara for 20 years, was joined at Golders Green Crematorium by family and friends including comedians Matt Lucas and David Walliams.\n\n\"As Covid has denied so many of Barbara's family, friends and fans a chance to say farewell properly, I wanted to share the order of service to let people be a small part of it,\" Mr Mitchell told the PA news agency.\n\n\"My heart goes out to every family who have experienced the same restrictions at their loved ones' funerals.\"\n\nLeft-right: Christopher Biggins, Ross Kemp and David Walliams were among the mourners\n\nHe added: \"I would again like to thank my family, friends, the media and the public for their incredible support and well wishes since Barbara's passing.\"\n\nDame Barbara's coffin was brought into the crematorium to sound of Frank Sinatra's On The Sunny Side Of The Street, and the service featured a recording of Sparrows Can't Sing from the actress's 1963 film of the same.\n\nIt finished with the famous topless photo of Dame Barbara from the film Carry On Camping, alongside her quote: \"That picture will follow me to the end.\"\n\nLong-time friend Anna Karen, who played Dame Barbara's on-screen sister Aunt Sal in EastEnders, also paid tribute during the service.\n\nThe funeral was also attended by Loose Women's Jane Moore and EastEnders actor Jamie Borthwick. However, the numbers were limited due to coronavirus social distancing.\n\nAlzheimer's Research UK recently said it had seen a spike in donations since Dame Barbara's death, and a JustGiving page set up as a tribute to her and in aid of the charity has raised more than £150,000 (including Gift Aid).\n\nMr Mitchell said that was \"beyond anything we may have dreamed of\".\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Ben Jackson said the closure of the farm's bulk-buyers like hotels and schools has left thousands of eggs unsold\n\nA fall in bulk egg orders due to the lockdown could lead to chickens being culled, a poultry-farmer has warned.\n\nFluffetts Farm near Fordingbridge had been supplying free range eggs to 350 Hampshire schools, but orders stopped when schools suddenly closed.\n\nFarm owner, Ben Jackson said: \"If you can't sell the eggs you can't still keep feeding the chickens and therefore something has to give.\"\n\nHe said he hoped to work out a local delivery system to avoid culling birds.\n\nMr Jackson, who has been selling some of the surplus eggs off on social media, has more than 13,000 chickens laying 12,000 eggs each day.\n\nThe cancellation of his school orders has left him with about 4,000 spare eggs a day. The farm has also been hit by restaurants and pubs closing again.\n\nThe farm has a surplus of about 4,000 eggs each day from its 13,000 chickens\n\nHe said: \"If we can't find a home for the eggs the worst-case scenario is that we may have to look to get rid of some of our chickens, but that's what we're trying to avoid.\n\n\"Other chicken farmers are in the same situation - they are talking about potentially having to cull birds in the next week or so - it's not a decision that anyone wants to make.\n\n\"We just want to get through this dark time - we're just taking it a day at time.\"\n\nChickens at the farm are currently in a bird lockdown.\n\nSince 14 December strict biosecurity regulations have been in place following a number of outbreak of avian influenza throughout England.\n• None 'I'll have to throw away £6,000-worth of milk'", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Duke of Cambridge asked how staff were coping during the pandemic and thanked them for their sacrifice\n\nThe Duke of Cambridge has said he talks to his three children about NHS staff \"every day\" to help them to understand the \"sacrifices\" made during Covid.\n\nPrince William's comments were part of a video call to London hospital staff.\n\n\"Catherine and I and all the children talk about all of you guys every day, so we're making sure the children understand all of the sacrifices that all of you are making,\" he said.\n\nIt comes after the London mayor said the virus was \"out of control\".\n\nSadiq Khan declared a major incident on Friday - meaning the emergency services and hospitals cannot guarantee their normal level of response - after the number of Covid patients in the capital's hospitals surpassed 7,000.\n\nStaff at Homerton University Hospital in east London told the Duke of Cambridge that queues of people waiting to be vaccinated at the hospital offered hope, but that the way out of the crisis was for the public to \"stay at home\" during lockdown.\n\nIn recent days the hospital has seen its highest number of admissions since the pandemic began.\n\nDuring the UK's first national lockdown, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their three children Prince George (left), Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis joined in with the weekly Clap for Carers event\n\nThe duke, who is joint patron of NHS Charities Together, said: \"A huge thank you for all the hard work, the sleepless nights, the lack of sleep, the anxiety, the exhaustion and everything that you are doing, we are so grateful.\n\n\"Good luck, we are all thinking of you.\"\n\nHis video call, which took place on Thursday, is one of many he and the duchess have made to NHS staff during the pandemic.\n\nPrince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis have also shown their support for the health service by getting involved with the weekly Clap for Carers applause during the UK's first national lockdown.\n\nAnd on Saturday, the Duchess's birthday, Kensington Palace said the family's thoughts \"continue to be with all those working on the front line at this hugely challenging time\".\n\nChief nurse Catherine Pelley told the prince her hospital had used funds from NHS Charities Together to set up various support initiatives such as a \"wobble room\" for colleagues to relax in.\n\n\"For us this week, starting vaccinating has been one of the single most significant impacts on people feeling that there is a future out of this, and the queues out the door here where they have been vaccinating have been really hopeful for people,\" she said.\n\n\"But the support we need is stay at home, help us. Because that will get us all out of this, whatever our role is, and we will get society out of this.\"\n\nAfter speaking to Ms Pelley and her colleagues about how they supported one another, the prince said: \"It's good that you and your team are keeping your spirits high and I always find that having some sort of sense of humour through everything is very important, otherwise we all go mad.\"\n\nThe Duke of Cambridge said he wants his children to appreciate the sacrifices made by NHS staff during the pandemic", "Ms Sturgeon has rejected claims made by former first minister Alex Salmond\n\nAlex Salmond has accused Nicola Sturgeon of misleading parliament, calling evidence she gave to an inquiry into the handling of sexual harassment claims against him \"simply untrue\".\n\nMr Salmond's comments emerged in a written submission to a separate investigation into whether the first minister breached the ministerial code.\n\nThe submission has been shared with the Holyrood committee.\n\nMs Sturgeon says she \"entirely rejects Mr Salmond's claims\".\n\nIn the submission, the former first minister said that Ms Sturgeon had misled parliament and broken the ministerial code with breaches including failing to inform the civil service in good time of her meetings with him.\n\nHe claimed she allowed the Scottish government to contest a civil court case against him despite having had legal advice that it was likely to collapse.\n\nMs Sturgeon told the Holyrood inquiry she had become aware of allegations at a meeting with Mr Salmond at her home.\n\nIt since emerged she met his former chief of staff in the days before, but she said she had forgotten about that meeting.\n\nMr Salmond said that claim was untenable.\n\nHis submission said that she misled parliament, and that amounted to a breach of the code. He also said she breached the code by failing to to inform civil servants of the nature of the meetings that took place between the two of them at her home where the allegations were discussed.\n\nAlex Salmond walked free from court in March having been cleared of charges of sexual assault\n\nMr Salmond's statement read: \"The pre-arranged meeting in the Scottish Parliament of 29 March 2018 was \"forgotten\" about because acknowledging it would have rendered ridiculous the claim made by the first minister in parliament that it had been believed that the meeting on 2 April was on SNP Party business and thus held at her private residence.\"\n\nBoth Mr Salmond and Ms Sturgeon are expected to give evidence to the committee in the coming weeks.\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross responded to the claims, saying: \"Nobody ever bought Nicola Sturgeon's tall tales to have suddenly turned forgetful, especially about the devastating moment she found out of sexual harassment allegations against her friend and mentor of 30 years.\n\n\"What has been revealed are allegations of shocking, deliberate and corrupt actions at the heart of government. There is now clear evidence of Nicola Sturgeon abusing her power to deceive the Scottish public.\n\n\"If this proves to be correct, it is a resignation matter. No first minister, at any time, can be allowed to get away with repeatedly and blatantly lying to the Scottish Parliament and breaking the ministerial code.\"\n\nScottish Labour deputy leader Jackie Baillie said Alex Salmond's explosive allegations demanded answers from the first minister to the committee.\n\nShe said: \"The bombshell accusation that Nicola Sturgeon has broken the ministerial code has the potential to end her political career and demands a robust and honest answer from the first minister.\n\n\"This committee demands truthfulness and honesty from every witness it calls - it is vital that the first minister tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth when she appears.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon has repeatedly dismissed any notion of a conspiracy against Mr Salmond.\n\nHer spokeswoman said: \"The first minister entirely rejects Mr Salmond's claims about the ministerial code.\n\n\"We should always remember that the roots of this issue lie in complaints made by women about Alex Salmond's behaviour whilst he was first minister, aspects of which he has conceded. It is not surprising therefore that he continues to try to divert focus from that by seeking to malign the reputation of the first minister and by spinning false conspiracy theories.\n\n\"The first minister is concentrating on fighting the pandemic, stands by what she has said, and will address these matters in full when she appears at committee.\"\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions on Friday evening, SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford MP said he did not believe the accusations about the first minister were correct.\n\nHe said: \"I believe that the first minister has acted in an honourable way, she's someone that I've every faith and trust in.\n\n\"I can tell you that the approval ratings for the first minister, the respect that she has right up and down the country of Scotland is enormous and this is something that will pass, when she appears in front of the committee these matters will be dealt with.\"\n\nAlex Salmond has just turned up the heat on his successor with a submission that presents a direct and serious challenge to the reputation of Nicola Sturgeon - who was once his closest political ally.\n\nWhat he no doubt considers as an attempt to secure justice, some others will see as a case of deflection and revenge.\n\nAllegations of breaking the ministerial code of conduct and misleading parliament are serious and, if upheld, potentially career threatening.\n\nYet even some of Ms Sturgeon's fiercest critics at Holyrood do not expect the inquiries into the Scottish government's mishandling of harassment complaints against Mr Salmond to force her from office.\n\nMr Salmond seems to expect the review of the first minister's actions under the ministerial code of conduct to remain narrow enough that it could not possibly find against her.\n\nThe first minister herself appears confident of persuading all comers, including a cross-party committee of MSPs (before which both she and Mr Salmond are due to appear in the coming weeks) that she has acted properly throughout.", "Fishing \"clears the mind of other worries\" says John Ellis from the Canal and Rivers Trust\n\nAnglers have hailed the mental health benefits of the sport after it was given the all-clear to continue, despite lockdown.\n\nThe government said it would be treated as a form of exercise, but subject to restrictions such as social distancing.\n\nRegulations mean people in England must stay at home except for specific purposes, including exercise, shopping for essentials and childcare.\n\nFigures show thousands more people have taken up fishing during the pandemic.\n\nJohn Ellis, national fisheries and angling manager for the Canal and Rivers Trust, said rod licence sales increased by 17% over the last year, the equivalent of about 100,000 people - some new to the sport and others returning.\n\nHe said, despite the colder weather which usually causes a drop in fishing, there are more people out than in a typical January.\n\n\"It is certainly one of few things people can do legally, can do locally,\" he said.\n\nSpencer Moore said it was easy to maintain social distance while fishing\n\nUnder current restrictions in England, anglers must fish alone, or with members of their household, and must not travel outside their local area.\n\nThe government regulations permit people to meet for exercise, but not \"for recreational or leisure purposes\".\n\nThe Department for Culture Media and Sport told the BBC while angling could continue, overarching government guidance meant people should minimise time spent outside their homes.\n\nMr Ellis said he had received emails from parents pleased their children could go fishing at the weekend, adding that for some people it was linked to their mental wellbeing.\n\n\"When you are focussing on fishing, it is very hard to think about anything else, it clears the mind of other worries, at least temporarily,\" he said.\n\nHeadway said fishing was one of its most popular sporting activities for clients\n\nHeadway Birmingham & Solihull, a charity which helps people living with brain injuries, runs regular fishing sessions, which were very popular with its clients.\n\n\"It encourages them to be more active and get some fresh air out in the countryside,\" she said.\n\n\"It also helps their motivation and mental wellbeing, giving them something to look forward to each week, something to talk about and a chance to form friendships with others who enjoy fishing too.\"\n\nSpencer Moore, a bailiff for Blackfords Progressive Angling Society, based in South Staffordshire, said the sport was perfect for social distancing.\n\n\"There are people furloughed, sitting in their house or working from home, but at least they can fish and can get out and wind down,\" he said.\n\n\"Being a fisherman, you are on your own on your peg. Someone might be on another peg, but they can be 20 to 30ft away, so you are nowhere near anyone else.\"\n\nChris Wood advised people to speak to their local angling club before going fishing for the first time\n\nChris Wood, from Shrewsbury Anglers Club, said the group had seen a definite \"upsurge\" in interest during the pandemic.\n\nBut, he said, it had also seen an increase in illegal fishing by people who were not aware of the proper permits needed.", "Edwin Poots said he has asked senior UK government figures to consider unilaterally revoking the NI Protocol\n\nThe Stormont minister whose officials are responsible for the new Irish Sea border has said some food will be unavailable if changes are not made.\n\nDUP Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots has also said jobs could be at risk.\n\nHe said problems at the ports were being caused by new rules applied on imports of food and other products from Britain to Northern Ireland.\n\nEarlier Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove said trade from GB to NI \"will get worse before it gets better\".\n\nMr Gove said that \"work is ongoing\" and it is \"all part of the process of leaving the European Union\".\n\nHe added that he had spoken to ministers from all parties in the Northern Ireland Executive.\n\nAfter speaking with hauliers, supermarkets and processors this week, Mr Poots predicted the loss of jobs and rising costs.\n\n\"A wide range of frozen and chilled foods will be unavailable after the temporary exemption period ends,\" he tweeted.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Edwin Poots MLA This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThat exemption period applies to supermarkets and other food importers and runs out in April.\n\nAfter that they will have to comply with all the paperwork required to ship food in, or find suppliers on the island of Ireland or elsewhere in the EU.\n\nNew rules - called the Northern Ireland Protocol - were introduced because while the UK has left the EU, Northern Ireland has remained in the Single Market for goods and is continuing to apply EU customs rules.\n\nThe arrangement was agreed between the UK and the EU to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland.\n\nMr Poots said he had spoken to senior UK government figures to ask them to consider unilaterally revoking the protocol as it was \"damaging Northern Ireland at the economic and societal level\".\n\nAnd he hit out at members of Sinn Fein, the SDLP, and Alliance Party who he claimed had supported it.\n\nMembers of those parties have countered similar claims from other DUP politicians in recent days.\n\nThey said DUP MPs had voted against alternative arrangements that would have been simpler to manage before the government pushed ahead with the protocol plan.\n\nResponding to Mr Poot's tweet on Friday evening, SDLP leader Colum Eastwood wrote: \"You broke it, you own it.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Colum Eastwood This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSinn Féin MLA Martina Anderson accused Mr Poots of being \"asleep at the wheel\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Martina Anderson MLA This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) has called for the assembly to be recalled to discuss difficulties over trading between Great Britain and Northern Ireland due to Brexit.\n\nUUP MLA Roy Beggs said: \"The impact of the Irish Sea border is causing horrendous difficulties for hauliers and this is being seen in shops and businesses across Northern Ireland.\n\n\"It is damaging the Northern Ireland economy and the situation is escalating.\"\n\nEarlier on Friday, Michael Gove said it had been expected that there would be \"some initial disruption\" to trade between GB and NI, but that the government is \"ironing\" issues out.\n\nHe said discussions with the executive in Northern Ireland were \"in order to make sure that the [Northern Ireland] protocol works\".\n\n\"[To make sure] that businesses in Northern Ireland can continue to have access to the rest of the UK market, and that Northern Ireland businesses can have the goods that they need on the shelves, that they have access to at the moment,\" he said.\n\nNorthern Ireland has remained a part of the EU's single market for goods while the rest of the UK has left.\n\nThis means food products from Great Britain are subject to checks when they enter Northern Ireland.\n\nSimilar processes and checks also apply when moving food products from Great Britain into the Republic of Ireland.\n\nMeanwhile, an organisation representing haulage firms has called on the UK and Irish government to relax some of the new Irish Sea trade border rules.\n\nThe Road Haulage Association (RHA) said there is serious disruption to freight movements into the island of Ireland.\n\nThe RHA said relaxing the controls on food products and customs declarations \"would help traders to ship goods that have struggled to move over recent days.\"\n\n\"The problems have led to gaps in supermarket shelves and lorries delayed at ports because of problems with red-tape and the situation is worsening,\" the organisation added.\n\n\"We are facing an inflexible, cumbersome and time consuming process just to move goods.\"\n\nThe UK government said the flow of goods \"between GB and NI has been smooth overall and arrivals of freight have continued to increase substantially over this week\".\n\n\"There are no significant queues at NI ports and supermarkets are reporting healthy supplies into their Northern Ireland stores,\" a spokesperson added.\n\n\"We recognise the need to provide as much support to the haulage sector as possible as industry adapts to new processes. That's why hauliers can benefit from the Trader Support Service, which provides free advice and support to businesses of all sizes moving goods under the Northern Ireland Protocol.\n\n\"We have been engaging intensively with the Irish authorities and hauliers on the issues that have been encountered for goods transiting through Dublin port.\"\n\nOn Thursday customs authorities in the Republic of Ireland announced a temporary relaxation of one customs process.\n\nHauliers will be able to use an override code to complete a piece of administration known as ENS.\n\nThe letters ENS refer to an entry summary declaration, an online form which goods carriers are now legally obliged to submit to Irish customs when transporting goods from Great Britain into Ireland.\n\nLorries arriving in Ireland from Great Britain have faced new checks since 1 January\n\nOn Thursday night the Irish Revenue Commissioners said it recognised that \"some businesses are experiencing difficulties on lodging their safety and security ENS declarations\".\n\nIt said that in response it was providing a \"temporary easement\" which would allow an ENS to be produced without all the normally required information.\n\nAn Irish government spokesperson said it is \"absolutely essential that Ireland fulfils its obligations as a member of the EU and that we protect the integrity of the single market and the customs union\".\n\n\"We appreciate that the new requirements and customs formalities present significant challenges and impose additional burdens on businesses.\"\n\nMeanwhile Stena, the ferry company, said it was cancelling a dozen sailings between Wales and Ireland next week due to \"a decline in freight volumes during the first week of Brexit.\"", "Covid infections rose by almost a third between 26 December and 3 January, reaching 70,000 new cases a day according to a major study.\n\nIn a different piece of research, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated 1.2 million people in total had Covid over a similar time period.\n\nDaily infections are understood to have risen to about 150,000 since then.\n\nThat would bring daily coronavirus cases above the first peak.\n\nThe R or reproduction number for the virus is now between 1 and 1.4 for the UK, reflecting the sharp rise in cases in recent weeks.\n\nSeparate ONS data suggests just under half (44%) of British adults formed a Christmas bubble.\n\nThese temporary rules let up to three households mix indoors on 25 December - unless they were living in a Tier 4 area.\n\nThe ONS estimated how much of the population had Covid in the week of 27 December- 2 January:\n\nThe ONS data suggests cases rose by three-quarters between its two most recent study periods: 12-18 December and 27 December - 2 January.\n\nThe ZOE Covid Symptom Study was able to track more recent changes since there was no pause in its research for Christmas.\n\nIt found the epidemic is growing throughout the UK.\n\nResearchers estimate the virus's reproduction or R number is currently 1.2 across the UK.\n\nBoth sources indicate London has the most severe epidemic with the highest number of cases.\n\nConfirmed cases, published on the government's dashboard, are always lower than those in surveys because they mainly reflect the test results of people coming in with symptoms.\n\nBoth the ONS and ZOE also look at asymptomatic cases - people who may not otherwise get tests.\n\nSome asymptomatic testing is now available in the community but it is not being widely taken up.\n\nAbout a fifth of people responding to a separate ONS survey looking at the social impacts of the pandemic, said they had found it difficult to follow the Christmas rules.\n\nAnd half of those gave the fact that they had already made plans as the reason.\n\nRules, which were set to allow everyone in the UK to mix in a five-day window, were changed at the last minute, on 19 December.\n\nIn England, people living in Tiers 1-3 were allowed to form a one-day Christmas bubble with a maximum of two other households.\n\nThose in Tier 4, including about 10 million people in Greater London, were not permitted to mix at all.\n\nMixing was permitted in Scotland and Wales for Christmas Day only.\n\nHow has coronavirus affected you? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nOr use this form to get in touch:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your comment or send it via email to HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any comment you send in.", "The president says he hates Big Tech. Yet he has loved using Twitter.\n\nHe's used it as a way, for more than 10 years, to bypass the media and speak directly to voters.\n\nThe 280 characters fits neatly with his style of political engagement - broad brushstrokes rather than details.\n\nAnd Twitter has undoubtedly benefited from President Trump too, the place to go to hear the latest musings from the most powerful person on the planet.\n\nThat decade-long symbiosis has been ended with a shuddering halt.\n\nImmediately after the deadly riots, Twitter locked the President's Twitter feed and asked Mr Trump to delete three tweets for violations around its Civic Integrity policy., which he promptly did.\n\nAfter the suspension he tweeted as a new man, the nonsense claims of mass voter fraud replaced with a more conciliatory tone.\n\nPrivately though Twitter was pondering whether it had gone far enough. Facebook had already acted, banning Donald Trump \"indefinitely\".\n\nAfter more than 48 hours of consideration, Twitter acted. It made unquestionably the most important moderation decision in its history. It banned the president of the United States.\n\nSome have asked why he wasn't kicked off sooner.\n\nMr Trump or one of his associates appears to have deleted some of his most recent tweets\n\nWell, Twitter has very specific rules about world leaders.\n\n\"We recognise that sometimes it may be in the public interest to allow people to view tweets that would otherwise be taken down,\" Twitter's rules say.\n\n\"At present, we limit exceptions to one critical type of public-interest content - tweets from elected and government officials.\"\n\nChief executive Jack Dorsey had felt it was in the public interest to keep the account active, albeit with warning messages.\n\n\"No one is turning a blind eye,\" a senior source told the BBC before the ban.\n\nIn short, Mr Trump had been allowed to remain on Twitter - despite numerous breaches of its rules - because he is the president.\n\nWith less than two weeks to go of Trump's presidency, many social media companies have now decided enough is enough.\n\nCritics say the outgoing president's words on social media, for years, helped to incite Wednesday's storming of Capitol Hill.\n\nAll the big social media companies have made it clear that - as a private citizen - if you continually look to peddle conspiracy theories and promote extremism, you should expect to be kicked out. With just a few days of his presidency left, Mr Trump is already being held to a different standard - his privileges stripped.\n\nWhat's driving this? To be cynical, social media companies are acutely aware that President-elect Joe Biden believes Big Tech hasn't done enough to quell fake news and hate speech on their platforms.\n\nRioters broke into Congress after a speech by Mr Trump on Wednesday\n\nThey are now desperate to show that they can, in fact, police their own platforms without the need for stringent legal reforms.\n\nWhat better way to show you're serious than to act on Mr Trump's misinformation?\n\nWhat will Mr Trump do next? Well he's already said he's looking into the possibility of building his own platform in the future.\n\nBut for now he's consigned to the fringes of the internet. Can Trumpism survive without Big Tech? We're about to find out.\n\nJames Clayton is the BBC's North America technology reporter based in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @jamesclayton5.", "Fashion student Mhari Thurston-Tyler posted an advert for the \"crop top\" (right) on Depop after she says she found some discarded Chiltern Railways seat covers (like those on the left)\n\nA fashion student has been warned not to sell prohibited items on the clothes app, Depop, after she posted an advert for a top made from a train seat cover.\n\nMhari Thurston-Tyler made the bandeau out of a Chiltern Railways seat cover designed to promote social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nThe 20-year-old sold the top for £15 but later refunded her customer and took the advert down.\n\nDepop said the item \"clearly violates our terms of service\".\n\nThe app for buying and selling second-hand clothes said the sale of stolen goods was banned - but Ms Thurston-Tyler denied stealing.\n\nShe told BBC News she found two of the blue seat covers \"balled up on the floor\" outside Marylebone station in London in September.\n\nMs Thurston-Tyler, who is a fashion student at Central Saint Martins, re-sewed one of the covers to make it fit her, before deciding to advertise the second cover on Depop.\n\n\"I have no money at the moment so decided to put the second one on Depop to see if anyone would buy it,\" she said, adding that the app had become her main source of income as she has struggled to find other work during the pandemic.\n\n\"I have to resort to little things like this to make ends meet, to pay the bills.\"\n\nMs Thurston-Tyler's advert went viral on social media after being shared by Depop Drama's Instagram and Twitter accounts.\n\nMhari Thurston-Tyler said she has been unable to find a job during the coronavirus pandemic and sells clothes on Depop \"to make ends meet\"\n\nIn the advert, Ms Thurston-Tyler models the seat cover and describes it as a \"social distancing crop\", adding: \"Got a few of these can do different sizes.\"\n\nMs Thurston-Tyler, from Kenilworth in Warwickshire, said a Depop customer paid her £15 and ordered a crop top \"in extra small\".\n\nBut realising she should not be making money out of Chiltern Railways' property, Ms Thurston-Tyler refunded the customer 15 minutes later and took the advert down shortly afterwards.\n\n\"I didn't steal it but I understand it's not right to re-sell it,\" she said.\n\nA Depop spokesperson said Ms Thurston-Tyler would be banned from the platform if she listed any other prohibited goods.\n\n\"We explicitly prohibit the sale of illegal and unlawful content on the app, including any stolen goods,\" they said.\n\n\"This item clearly violates our terms of service, but as it has been removed by the seller and is no longer for sale on the platform, we will not be taking immediate steps to ban this user.\"\n\nMs Thurston-Tyler said she hopes to make her own line of crop tops with the words \"children railways\" on the design, while \"the hype\" of the viral moment continues.\n\nChiltern Railways said it has been using the social distancing \"seat sashes\" since the beginning of the UK's Covid epidemic.\n\nA spokeswoman added: \"Whilst we appreciate this new take on railway memorabilia, these items are there to help customers travel with confidence and we would respectfully ask that they are left in place.\"", "A former Labour MP has quit the party before disciplinary proceedings against him concerning sexual harassment could be concluded, Labour has said.\n\nKelvin Hopkins was suspended by the party in 2017 after a Labour activist, Ava Etemadzadeh, accused him of inappropriate physical contact.\n\nMs Etemadzadeh said the ex-MP's exit from the party was \"disappointing\".\n\nThe BBC has attempted to contact Mr Hopkins, 79, for a response, but he has previously denied the accusations.\n\nA Labour spokesperson said it \"takes all complaints of sexual harassment extremely seriously and they are fully investigated in line with our rules and procedures, and any appropriate disciplinary action is taken.\n\n\"We are disappointed that the party's disciplinary processes did not reach a conclusion due to Kelvin Hopkins' decision to resign his membership,\" they added.\n\n\"We are establishing an independent process to investigate complaints, including sexual harassment, to ensure complainants can feel confident that in coming forward they will be heard and get the justice they deserve.\"\n\nMr Hopkins, who first won the seat of Luton North from the Conservatives in 1997, stood down ahead of the 2019 election - a decision, he said, which was to do with his wife's health, not the accusations.\n\nHe had originally been referred to the party's National Constitutional Committee following the allegations in 2017 and had expressed frustration at the length of time the hearing was taking.\n\nResponding to his decision to leave the party, Ms Etemadzadeh tweeted: \"This is very disappointing news. I hope Keir Starmer listens to my concerns and fixes this broken system.\"", "Film director Michael Apted, best known for the Up series of TV documentaries following the lives of 14 people every seven years, has died aged 79.\n\nHe also directed Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorillas In The Mist and the 1999 Bond movie The World Is Not Enough.\n\nThe original 7 Up in 1964 set out to document the life prospects of a range of children from all walks of life.\n\nThe show was inspired by the Aristotle quote \"give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man\".\n\nThe first 7 Up show was followed by 14 Up at the start of the next decade, which interviewed the same children as teenagers - and the pattern was set right up until 63 Up in 2019.\n\nThroughout all those intervening years ITV viewers became engrossed with the stories of private school trio Andrew, Charles and John, of Jackie who went through two divorces, of Neil who went from jobless and homeless to Liberal Democrat councillor, and of working class chatterbox Tony, whose life ambition was to become a jockey.\n\nApted's shows - which won three Bafta awards - have often been described as the forerunner of modern-day reality TV series, giving its participants the time to tell their own stories on screen.\n\nBut unlike their modern counterparts, the original Up children tended to fade away from the limelight in the seven years between each chapter.\n\nIn 2008, Apted was made a companion of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George in the Queen's Birthday Honours for services to the British film and television industries.\n\nThomas Schlamme, president of the Directors Guild of America, said Apted was a \"fearless visionary\" whose legacy would live on.\n\nHe said Apted, who was born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, \"saw the trajectory of things when others didn't and we were all beneficiaries of his wisdom and lifelong dedication\".\n\nITV's managing director Kevin Lygo said the director's six-decade career was \"in itself truly remarkable\".\n\nHe said the Up series \"demonstrated the possibilities of television at its finest in its ambition and its capacity to hold up a mirror to society and engage with and entertain people while enriching our perspective on the human condition\".\n\nApted directed the 19th James Bond film The World Is Not Enough\n\n\"The influence of Michael's contribution to film and programme-making continues to be felt and he will be sadly missed,\" Lygo added.\n\nMichael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, producers of the James Bond film franchise, said Apted \"was a director of enormous talent\" and \"beloved by all those who worked with him\".\n\n\"We loved working with him on The World Is Not Enough and send our love and support to his family, friends and colleagues,\" they said.\n\nA post on the Twitter account of the band Garbage, who performed the theme for The World Is Not Enough, labelled Apted a \"delightful, charming soul\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Garbage This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nComposer David G Arnold, who composed the Bond theme and worked with Apted on three other non-Bond movies, said he felt \"lucky\" to work with him.\n\n\"A more trusting, funny, friendly and, most importantly, kind, person you'd never meet. So pleased to have known him and so sad that he's gone,\" Arnold wrote on Twitter.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Eva's father, Paul Slapa, says the generosity of strangers has been \"amazing\"\n\nA 10-year-old girl who needed to travel to the United States for treatment on an inoperable brain tumour has died.\n\nFamily of Eva Williams raised £250,000 needed for a new life-extending trial.\n\nBut the schoolgirl, from Marford, Wrexham, was unable to travel due to coronavirus lockdown measures.\n\nAt the start of 2020, she was diagnosed with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) and died on Friday. Her father said in a tribute: \"We love you Eva - more than you'll have ever known.\"\n\nPaul Slapa, said on social media that his daughter was surrounded by all of her family when she died.\n\nHe posted: \"Over the past week, Eva had lost the ability to speak, eat and swallow fluids, and she has suffered more than any child should ever have to suffer.\n\n\"Watching her still fight each day has been heart-breaking.\n\n\"Eva is an inspiration to many, certainly to me, and I cannot begin to imagine how we will go forward from here.\n\n\"How do we wake up each day and go on? How do we face the world without our baby girl with us? Why did this happen to the most caring and loving of little girls?\n\n\"Every single part of us is in pain and I can't see how that can change. We love you Eva - more than you'll have ever known - and we will keep you with us every day for the rest of our lives.\"\n\nAfter Eva was diagnosed with a high-grade DIPG she had been undergoing radiotherapy treatment to shrink the tumour.\n\nHer father and mother Carran Williams started a fundraising campaign to access the trial treatment in the US, and managed to raise the money in the space of three weeks.\n\nThey had been originally due to take part in the trial in New York in April.\n\nBut then Covid-19 measures saw international flight bans and travel restrictions imposed.\n\nHer plight was raised by the Wrexham MP Sarah Atherton during Prime Minister's Questions in July and Boris Johnson said he would look at what help can be offered to get her to the United States.\n\nEva also had radiotherapy as part of her treatment", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Madrid has been hit by heavy snowfall after Storm Filomena\n\nStorm Filomena has blanketed parts of Spain in heavy snow, with half of the country on red alert for more on Saturday.\n\nRoad, rail and air travel has been disrupted and interior minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said the country was facing \"the most intense storm in the last 50 years\".\n\nMadrid, one of the worst affected areas, is set to see up to 20cm (eight inches) of snow in the next 24 hours.\n\nFurther south the storm caused rivers to burst their banks.\n\nFour deaths have been reported so far as a result of Filomena. Officials said two people had been found frozen to death - one in the town of Zarzalejo, north-west of Madrid, and the other in the eastern city of Calatayud. Two people travelling in a car were swept away by floods near the southern city of Malaga.\n\nAs snow fell on Madrid on Friday evening, a number of vehicles became stranded on a motorway near the capital.\n\nThe city's Barajas airport has closed, along with a number of roads, and all trains to and from Madrid have been cancelled.\n\nFirefighters were called in to assist drivers who had become stuck. In some areas the military were called in to help clear roads.\n\nSpanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez urged people to stay at home and to follow the instructions of emergency services. King Felipe and Queen Letizia took to Twitter to urge \"extreme caution against the risks of accumulation of ice and snow\".\n\nThe country's AEMET weather agency said the snowfall was \"exceptional and most likely historic\".\n\nA number of people were seen making the most of the snowy scenery, walking through Madrid's Puerta del Sol square.\n\nLarge parks in Madrid have since been closed as a precaution, AFP news agency reports.\n\nOne man was pictured skiing along the Gran Via, the capital's famous shopping street.\n\nIn Cañada Real, the largest shanty town in western Europe, residents were seen creating a bonfire to keep warm.\n\nThe cold weather is set to continue beyond the weekend with temperatures in Madrid predicted to hit -12C on Thursday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "Bez in training for his new exercise classes in a park in Manchester\n\nHappy Mondays star Bez is to launch his own lockdown fitness classes to inspire the nation like Joe Wicks.\n\nThe former maraca-shaking dancer, 56, wants to rival Joe Wicks with his online YouTube classes \"Get Buzzin' With Bez\" to be launched on 17 January.\n\nBez, whose on-stage \"freaky dancing\" made him an icon of the 'Madchester' music scene, has admitted he also wants to budge his own lockdown bulge.\n\nHe won Celebrity Big Brother in 2005 and even made a bid to become an MP.\n\nBez, whose real name is Mark Berry, will be shown being trained in the fitness classes rather than acting as the instructor himself.\n\nHe said: \"I'd like to think I'm somewhere between Joe Wicks and Mr Motivator.\n\n\"I've started this new year seriously unfit, with a fat belly and creaky hips, and I can't stop eating chocolate.\n\n\"Last lockdown I got unfit, fat, lazy and into some seriously bad eating habits.\n\nBez being put through his paces with a personal trainer\n\n\"This year, this lockdown, I need to sort it out sharpish.\"\n\nHe said that people can join him on \"on this mad journey or just sit on the sofa and have a good laugh at me\".\n\nBez said he has \"started this new year seriously unfit, with a fat belly and creaky hips\"\n\nThe former dancer added: \"At the very least, I know I'll be making people smile, at best I'll be helping people get fit and mentally happier alongside me.\"\n\nThe Happy Mondays, along with bands like The Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets, spearheaded the indie music 'Madchester' scene of the late 80s and early 90s.\n\nBez dancing with his maraca on BBC One's Top of the Pops as the band perform Step On in 1989\n\nBez's bug-eyed dance routines were said to have inspired the group's song Freaky Dancin' and made him one of the best-known members of the group, alongside frontman Shaun Ryder.\n\nTheir hits included Step On, Kinky Afro, Hallelujah and 24 Hour Party People.\n\nHowever, serious drug habits and infighting led to the Salford band's breakup in 1993.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Lockdown measures in England need to be stricter to achieve the same impact as the March shutdown, scientists advising the government have said.\n\nProf Robert West said the current rules were \"still allowing a lot of activity which is spreading the virus\".\n\nProf Susan Michie also said the spread of the new more infectious variant meant the restrictions were \"too lax\".\n\nThe government said it had adapted its approach and taken \"swift action\" to try and stop the spread of the virus.\n\nThe warnings come after ministers launched a new campaign urging people to act like they have the virus.\n\nMeanwhile, Buckingham Palace has said the Queen, 94, and the Duke of Edinburgh, 99, received Covid-19 vaccinations on Saturday.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and can only go out for essential reasons. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nProf West, a participant in the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B), which advises the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said the new variant of Covid is around 50% more infectious compared to the virus that infected people last March.\n\n\"That means that if we were to achieve the same result as we got in March we would have to have a stricter lockdown, and it's not stricter,\" he said\n\nThe professor of health psychology at University College London, also told the BBC more children were going to school, compared to the first lockdown and he said schools were \"a very important seed of community infection\".\n\nMore people are in schools, after the Department for Education has widened the categories of vulnerable and key worker pupils allowed to attend, with attendance rates surging to 50% in some places.\n\nProf Michie, who is also a member of Sage, agreed the current lockdown was \"too lax\".\n\n\"When you look at the data, it shows that almost 90% of people are overwhelmingly adhering to the rules - despite the fact that we're also seeing more people out and about,\" she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.\n\nShe said in comparison to the first lockdown last spring more people were allowed to go out to work and children's nurseries were open, making public transport busier.\n\nThe number of people travelling by public transport in London has decreased since the latest national lockdown began, with tube journeys now at 18% of the pre-pandemic demand and bus journeys at 30%, according to figures from Transport for London.\n\nHowever, during the first lockdown passenger numbers fell below 10% at some points.\n\nProf Michie, a professor of health psychology at University College London, added that the winter season posed extra challenges because the virus survives longer in the cold and people spend more time indoors, where the virus can spread more easily.\n\nCombined with the more transmissible new variant, she said \"we should have a stricter rather than less strict lockdown than we had back in March\".\n\nScientists believe the new variant spreads between 50 and 70% faster compared to previous forms of the virus.\n\nDr Adam Kucharski, another scientist advising the government and an associate professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that because the new variant was more transmissible \"each interaction we have has become riskier than it was before\".\n\nHe said that even if people reduced their contacts to levels seen last spring, it would not have the same effect on virus transmission.\n\nProf Kevin Fenton, London regional director for Public Health England, said there were \"things we could do better\" to reduce the number of infections, including greater compliance with mask wearing and social distancing when shopping and using public transport.\n\nOn Friday 1,325 deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test were recorded in the UK - the highest daily figure yet - along with 68,053 new cases.\n\nAs cases and deaths soar, the government has launched an advertising campaign, which will be shared across television, radio, newspapers and on social media, urging people to stay at home and not to get complacent.\n\nGovernment sources say there is also likely to be more focus from police on enforcing rather than explaining rules.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Department of Health and Social Care This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by Department of Health and Social Care\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson says hospitals are \"under more pressure than at any other time since the start of the pandemic\", with infection rates increasing at an \"alarming rate\" across the country and the NHS under \"severe strain\".\n\nIt comes after London's mayor Sadiq Khan said the spread of coronavirus was \"out of control\" as he declared a \"major incident\" in the capital on Friday.\n\nDr Simon Walsh, an emergency care doctor in London, told BBC Breakfast the \"unprecedented\" numbers of patients requiring intensive care treatment meant staff were spread \"more and more thinly\".\n\nHospitals in other parts of the UK are also under pressure.\n\nDr Justin Varney, director of public health in Birmingham, said he was \"very worried\" about the situation in the city, where hospital bosses have warned they do not have enough intensive care nurses to deal with the growing case load.\n\nHe warned that the NHS had still not seen the impact of the rise in cases following the relaxation of restrictions over Christmas and added: \"It is going to get a lot, lot worse unless we really get this under control\".\n\nA government spokesperson said: \"Our priority from the outset has been to protect the NHS to save lives and we have taken advice from scientific and medical experts throughout. As new evidence has emerged, we have adapted our approach and taken swift action to try and stop the spread of the virus.\"\n\nTell us how you have been affected by coronavirus by emailing: haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "More than 80,000 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test since the start of the pandemic, official figures have shown.\n\nA further 1,035 deaths in the UK were reported on Saturday, taking the total by that measure to 80,868.\n\nThe number of daily cases of people who tested positive for coronavirus increased by 59,937.\n\nOnly the US, Brazil, India and Mexico have recorded more Covid deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.\n\nIt is the fourth day in a row that the UK has reported more than 1,000 daily deaths.\n\nIt comes as scientists advising the government have warned that lockdown measures in England need to be stricter to achieve the same impact as the March shutdown.\n\nMinisters have launched a new campaign urging people to act like they have the virus.\n\nMeanwhile, Buckingham Palace has said the Queen, 94, and the Duke of Edinburgh, 99, received Covid-19 vaccinations on Saturday.\n\nThe Office for National Statistics recently estimated as many as one in 50 people in England had coronavirus between 27 December and 2 January, while in London it was one in 30.\n\nOn Friday, mayor Sadiq Khan said the spread of Covid in the capital was \"out of control\".\n\nOfficial figures from Public Health England showed London had the highest regional case rate in the UK, exceeding 1,000 per 100,000 people.\n\nUnder the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and can only go out for essential reasons. Similar measures are in place across most of Scotland, in Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nProf Robert West, a participant in the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B), which advises the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said the current rules were \"still allowing a lot of activity which is spreading the virus\".\n\nHe said the new variant of Covid was around 50% more infectious compared to the virus that infected people last March.\n\n\"That means that if we were to achieve the same result as we got in March we would have to have a stricter lockdown, and it (the current regime) is not stricter,\" he added.\n\nThe professor of health psychology at University College London also told the BBC more children were going to school, compared to during the first lockdown.\n\nHe said schools were \"a very important seed of community infection\".\n\nMore children are at school, after the Department for Education widened the categories of vulnerable and key worker pupils allowed to attend. Attendance rates have risen to 50% in some places.\n\nProf Susan Michie, who is also a member of Sage, said the spread of the new, more infectious variant meant current restrictions were \"too lax\".\n\n\"When you look at the data, it shows that almost 90% of people are overwhelmingly adhering to the rules - despite the fact that we're also seeing more people out and about,\" she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.\n\nShe said, in comparison to the first lockdown in spring 2020, more people were allowed to go out to work and children's nurseries were open, making public transport busier.\n\nThe number of people travelling by public transport in London has decreased since the latest national lockdown began, with tube journeys now at 18% of the pre-pandemic demand and bus journeys at 30%, according to figures from Transport for London.\n\nHowever, during the first lockdown passenger numbers fell below 10% at some points.\n\nScientists believe the new variant spreads between 50 and 70% faster compared to previous forms of the virus.\n\nProf Kevin Fenton, London regional director for Public Health England, said there were \"things we could do better\" to reduce the number of infections, including greater compliance with mask wearing and social distancing when shopping and using public transport.\n\nTorsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation think tank, told BBC Radio 4's PM programme that the UK's statutory sick pay system was \"not fit for purpose for a pandemic\" and more effective measures to encourage people to isolate were needed.\n\nAs cases and deaths soar, the government has launched an advertising campaign, which will be shared across television, radio, newspapers and on social media, urging people to stay at home and not to get complacent.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Department of Health and Social Care This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by Department of Health and Social Care\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said: \"I know the last year has taken its toll - but your compliance is now more vital than ever.\"\n\nGovernment sources say there is also likely to be more focus from police on enforcing rather than explaining rules.\n\nOn Saturday afternoon, 12 people were arrested during an anti-lockdown protest in south London.\n\nIf you would like to send us a tribute to a friend or family member who died after contracting coronavirus, please use the form below.\n\nPlease remember to include a photo of your loved one and their name. Upload your pictures here. Don't forget to include your contact details, so we can get in touch with you.\n\nWe would like to respond to everyone individually and include every tribute in our coverage, but unfortunately that may not be possible. Please be assured your message will be read and treated with the utmost respect.\n\nPlease note the contact details you provide will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your tribute.\n• None Lockdown needs to be stricter, scientists warn", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. London mayor Sadiq Khan: \"Unless the virus reduces... we could run out of beds\"\n\nThe spread of Covid in London is \"out of control\" according to Sadiq Khan, who has declared a \"major incident\".\n\nThe coronavirus infection rate in London has exceeded 1,000 per 100,000 people, based on the latest figures from Public Health England.\n\nHowever, the Office for National Statistics recently estimated as many as one in 30 Londoners has coronavirus.\n\nMr Khan told BBC political reporter Karl Mercer that the figure is as high as one in 20 in some parts of London.\n\nMajor incidents have previously been called for the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 and the terror attacks at Westminster Bridge and London Bridge.\n\nA major incident is any emergency that requires the implementation of special arrangements by one or all of the emergency services, the NHS or the local authority.\n\nIt means the emergency services and hospitals cannot guarantee their normal level of response.\n\nCurrently, there are more than 7,000 people in hospital with Covid-19, the mayor said.\n\nThis is a 35% increase compared to last April's peak of the pandemic, he added.\n\nDr Samantha Batt-Rawden, an ICU registrar and President of the Doctors' Association UK, tweeted: \"We tried. We really tried. NHS staff pleaded with people that Christmas is not worth it. Now one in 30 people in London have Covid and ICUs are overwhelmed. My heart is broken.\"\n\nAn analysis of Public Health England figures show in the week to 3 January, the number of cases rose across all of the London's boroughs compared with the previous week, with 17 individually recording more than 1,000 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nTesting increased in parts of the city after a drop over the Christmas period but positivity was high among people taking lab-based tests - suggesting more testing is needed to find undiagnosed cases in the community.\n\nIn the past week, many parts of the capital saw a rise in deaths where a person had tested positive for coronavirus in the previous 28 days - with some areas recording more than double the number of deaths compared with the previous week.\n\nHowever, reporting over the Christmas period may have affected this.\n\nOut of the 18 acute hospital trusts in London providing figures to the government, all of them recorded having more beds being filled by coronavirus patients than in the previous week.\n\nBarts NHS Health, one of London's largest trusts, saw a 30% increase in coronavirus patients between 29 December and 5 January, to 830.\n\nThe London Ambulance Service is now taking up to 8,000 emergency calls a day, the mayor says\n\nThe mayor of London's announcement comes after the counties of Sussex and Surrey declared similar major incidents on Thursday.\n\nHe said the London Ambulance Service was currently taking up to 8,000 emergency calls a day, compared to 5,500 on a typical busy day.\n\nThe London Fire Brigade said more than 100 firefighters had been drafted in to drive ambulances to help cope with the demand.\n\nEvery frontline agency involved in protecting the public has a legal duty to prepare for emergencies by devising and testing major incident plans.\n\nThese public bodies declare a major incident when the situation they're confronting is so big or terrible that it's not only likely to cause serious harm, but it will also compromise their ability to respond effectively.\n\nIn general terms, that means public bodies can legally stop delivering some everyday services, so that their personnel, attention and resources can be diverted to the emergency confronting them.\n\nAt other times, the plans will lead to the military sending soldiers to aid the civilian effort, as we have seen already during the pandemic.\n\nPrevious major incidents include the Grenfell Tower disaster in London, the Salisbury Novichok poisonings and the 2017 terrorism attacks.\n\nLondon's regional director for Public Health England Kevin Fenton said the current wave of coronavirus was \"the biggest threat\" the capital has faced in this pandemic to date.\n\nHe added: \"The emergence of the new variant means we are setting record case rates at almost double the national average, with at least one in 30 people now thought to be carrying the virus.\n\n\"We know this will sadly lead to large numbers of deaths, so strong and immediate action is needed.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What does it mean if the NHS is overwhelmed?\n\nMr Khan is warning that London is \"at crisis point\".\n\n\"If we do not take immediate action now, our NHS could be overwhelmed and more people will die,\" he said.\n\n\"Londoners continue to make huge sacrifices and I am today imploring them to please stay at home unless it is absolutely necessary for you to leave. Stay at home to protect yourself, your family, friends and other Londoners and to protect our NHS.\"\n\nHe said he had written to Prime Minister Boris Johnson asking for more financial support for Londoners who need to self-isolate and are unable to work, and for daily vaccination data.\n\nMr Khan also called for the closure of places of worship and for face masks to be worn routinely outside the home, including in crowded places and supermarket queues, in a bid to curb case numbers.\n\nTwo hospital trusts in London have recorded more than 1,000 coronavirus deaths\n\nThe mayor of London was in a sombre mood when I spoke to him earlier this afternoon. One in 20 Londoners in some areas now has Covid, and there is a real fear that hospitals will simply be overwhelmed in the next two weeks.\n\nDeclaring a major incident is a real indication of the levels of concern felt not just at City Hall but across London's emergency services and the NHS.\n\nMore Londoners are now in hospital with coronavirus than at the peak of the first wave last April - and those numbers are growing by more than 800 every day.\n\nIt's believed the last mayor to declare a London-wide major incident was Boris Johnson in response to the 2011 riots.\n\nThe coming days will be some of the most challenging in the city's recent history.\n\nKatie Sanderson, a junior doctor working in London, said she is worried how long medical staff can cope with the surge of patients.\n\n\"[Staff] are working on wards and spending long amounts of time with patients who need high-intensive oxygen therapy,\" she said.\n\n\"It is technically challenging and the emotional burden is enormous. I see it in a flatness in their demeanour, like we've all got used to doing things which before were totally inconceivable.\"\n\nGeorgia Gould, chair of London Councils, described London's rising coronavirus rate as \"dangerous\".\n\nShe added: \"One in 30 Londoners now has Covid. This is why public services across London are urging all Londoners to please stay at home except for absolutely essential shopping and exercise.\n\n\"This is a dark and difficult time for our city but there is light at end of the tunnel with the vaccine rollout. We are asking Londoners to come together one last time to stop the spread - lives really do depend on it.\"\n\nEarlier this week as the prime minister introduced an England-wide lockdown, the Met Police said officers were going to be \"more inquisitive\" towards Londoners seen outside.\n\nThe Met handed out 1,761 fines for breaches of coronavirus laws between 27 March and 20 December.\n\nDeputy Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist said the major incident was a \"stark reminder\" of the point London is at in the pandemic.\n\nHe said: \"These rule-breakers cannot continue to feign ignorance of the risk that this virus poses or listen to the false information and lies that some promote downplaying the dangers.\n\n\"Every time the virus spreads it increases the risk of someone needlessly losing their life.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 'One of the worst shifts of my life - it's overwhelming'\n\nIn response to Mr Khan's announcement the government said the NHS is continuing to \"face a huge challenge\"\n\nA spokeswoman added: \"It is absolutely paramount people in London, and the rest of the country, follow the rules and stay at home to protect the NHS and save lives.\n\n\"We are working closely with NHS England to support hospitals in the capital, including additional bed capacity at the London Nightingale.\n\n\"Financial support is in place for workers who need to self-isolate - including a £500 payment for those on the lowest incomes who have been contacted by NHS Test and Trace.\"\n\nFor more London news follow on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.\n\nHave any of the issues raised in this article had an impact on you? You can share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This car was one of many turned away by police at Moel Famau on Saturday\n\nPeople are \"blatantly\" ignoring rules on lockdown restrictions despite repeated warnings, police have said.\n\nMore than 100 cars had been turned away from Moel Famau on the Flintshire border by Saturday lunchtime, with some driving past \"road closed\" signs.\n\nIn Snowdonia, Gwynedd, a warden said a group from Leicester would have \"probably ignored our advice\" if police had not arrived and told them to leave.\n\nLevel four restrictions mean travelling for exercise is not allowed in Wales.\n\nKeith Ellis, a warden at Pen y Pass in Snowdonia, said while it had been much quieter this weekend, people were still travelling, despite the restrictions.\n\n\"We've had three from Leicester first thing this morning and if the police hadn't turned up they would have probably ignored our advice and carried on up the mountain,\" he said.\n\n\"What they were wearing was totally inappropriate and they would have probably got into danger.\n\n\"We've had people also from Liverpool and some locals turning up knowing full well what the rules are, but just trying it on.\n\n\"Luckily there are a lot more police officers around and all these people have been spoken to and advised by the police as well.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by NWP Rural Crime Team /Tîm Troseddau Cefn Gwlad HGC This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA Welsh Government spokesman said: \"Cases of coronavirus are very high in Wales at the moment and there is a new strain of the virus circulating, which is highly infectious and moving quickly.\n\n\"At alert level four, exercise should always be undertaken from home, unless you have special circumstances which requires some flexibility - such as disability or autism.\n\n\"The more people gather, the greater the risk of spreading or catching the virus.\"", "A further 1,610 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test - the biggest figure reported in a single day since the pandemic began.\n\nIt means the total number of deaths by that measure is now above 90,000.\n\nA total of 4,266,577 people have now received the first dose of a vaccine, according to the latest government figures.\n\nAnother 33,355 positive Covid cases have been recorded - less than half the peak figure of 68,053 on 8 January.\n\nIt is the lowest number of daily cases seen since 27 December - before the start of England's third nationwide lockdown.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England, said: \"Whilst there are some early signs that show our sacrifices are working, we must continue to strictly abide by the measures in place.\"\n\nShe said reducing contact with others and staying at home will lead to \"a fall in the number of infections over time\".\n\nThe figures come as new estimates from the Office for National Statistics show about one in 10 people across the UK tested positive for Covid-19 antibodies in December - roughly double the October figure.\n\nThe rising number of deaths was to be expected, sadly, after the surge in cases during December.\n\nAnd it is likely that the coming weeks will see figures even higher than this.\n\nToday's numbers are, though, inflated by the fact that delays in registering deaths over the weekend tends to lead to higher figures being reported on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.\n\nOn average, the UK is recording more than 1,100 deaths a day.\n\nTo put that in context, at Christmas it was less than half of that.\n\nBut there are two rays of hope in the daily update.\n\nFirstly, the number of cases is below 40,000 for a third day in a row. Just two weeks ago we saw a few days above 60,000.\n\nThat means in the coming weeks we should start to see fewer people in hospital and eventually fewer deaths.\n\nThe number of vaccinations also continues to rise.\n\nIt seems unlikely the NHS will manage its target of two million doses a week just yet.\n\nBut each increase at least takes us one step closer to getting on top of the virus.\n\nMeanwhile, NHS England said 400 military personnel were now assisting in hospitals in London and the Midlands, as wards face \"unprecedented pressure\".\n\nOn Monday, Prof Stephen Powis, national medical director for NHS England, said it would be \"some time\" before the vaccination programme begins to reduce pressures on hospitals.\n\nAnd in other developments, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said he is self-isolating after being alerted by the UK's NHS Covid-19 app .that he had been in close contact with somebody who tested positive.\n\nHe said self-isolation was \"perhaps the most important part of all the social distancing\" and urged others to do the same if contacted.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Martin Freeborn's wife, Helen, died from Covid at the Royal London Hospital: 'Don't end up like us, please'\n\nThe previous highest number of daily deaths was last Wednesday, when 1,564 deaths were recorded.\n\nTuesday's figure brings the total number of deaths recorded during the pandemic in the UK to 91,470.\n\nThese government figures count people who died within 28 days of testing positive, but there are other ways of measuring the total number of deaths.\n\nAnother method is to count all deaths where coronavirus is mentioned on the death certificate. That figure has now officially reached 95,829, although that is only measured up to 8 January.\n\nThe UK has recorded the fifth-highest number of deaths globally, according to Johns Hopkins University - behind the US, Brazil, India and Mexico.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer tweeted: \"British people are paying the price for the government's serial incompetence.\"", "In 2009, Spector was convicted of the 2003 murder of Hollywood actress Lana Clarkson\n\nThe BBC has apologised for the original headline in its reporting of the death of the convicted murderer Phil Spector.\n\nThe former music producer died on Saturday at the age of 81, while serving a prison sentence for the murder of Lana Clarkson in 2003.\n\nThe first version on the breaking news story on the BBC News website carried the headline: \"Talented but flawed producer Phil Spector dies aged 81\".\n\nThe BBC said the headline \"did not meet our editorial standards\".\n\nThe text was quickly changed to: \"Pop producer jailed for murder dies at 81.\"\n\n\"This was changed within minutes and we also deleted a tweet that had gone out automatically with the original headline,\" a statement issued by the BBC read.\n\n\"We apologise for this error.\"\n\n\"Our coverage of the story across BBC News has been clear that Phil Spector was convicted of the murder of Lana Clarkson and had a long history of violence and abuse,\" it continued.\n\nSpector was convicted of murdering Clarkson, an actress, in 2009.\n\nHis death was confirmed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.\n\nReacting to the original version of the BBC's story, pop star Lily Allen tweeted: \"Rolling eyes at all the journos deliberately downplaying Phil Spector being a murderer in their headlines, so everyone points this out while linking to their articles resulting in lots of clicks.\"\n\n\"How about 'Murderer, Phil Spector dies aged 81'?\" offered author and historian Hallie Rubenhold.\n\nThe headline was also discussed on TV and radio programmes on Monday, including Loose Women and Radio 4's Woman's Hour, and prompted an article in the Guardian.\n\nThe phrasing of the BBC's article - and others like it - were \"a reflection of how a man's 'genius' is often viewed as more important than a woman's humanity,\" said columnist Arwa Mahdawi.\n\nSpector, who transformed pop with his \"wall of sound\" recordings, worked with The Beatles, The Righteous Brothers and Tina Turner.\n\nBut after the commercial failure of Tina Turner's River Deep, Mountain High, he largely withdrew from public life, and entered a long decline, marked by erratic behaviour, heavy drinking, and a fondness for guns.\n\nHis turbulent marriage to Ronettes singer Veronica Bennett, known as Ronnie Spector, ended in divorce.\n\n\"Unfortunately Phil was not able to live and function outside of the recording studio,\" she wrote after his death was announced. \"Darkness set in, many lives were damaged.\"\n\nSinger Darlene Love, who sang on several songs Spector produced, said he \"changed the sound of rock 'n' roll\" but likened their relationship to \"a bad marriage\".\n\n\"The problem I have with Phil is that he wanted to control Darlene Love's talent,\" she told Variety. \"If he couldn't do that, he was going to do everything in his power to keep my talent from shining.\"\n\nWeeks before Lana Clarkson was shot dead, Spector gave a rare interview to British broadsheet The Telegraph.\n\n\"I would say I'm probably relatively insane, to an extent,\" he told the paper, adding that he had \"devils inside that fight me\".\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "In Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, residents have prepared their homes and businesses ahead of the heavy rain\n\nEmergency services in the north of England are preparing for widespread flooding caused by Storm Christoph.\n\nThe Environment Agency has warned of a \"volatile situation\" as heavy rain combines with melting snow, while police in South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester declared major incidents.\n\nAn amber rain warning is in place for Yorkshire, the North West, East Midlands and the east of England.\n\nA yellow rain warning was issued for the rest of the country.\n\nGreater Manchester Police Assistant Chief Constable Nick Bailey said the force had declared a major incident to ensure it was \"as prepared as possible\".\n\n\"The safety of the public is our number one priority and we're continuing to work alongside partner agencies across the region,\" he said.\n\nA government spokesperson said it had provided additional advice to local agencies to help them manage any evacuations and shelter provision in a Covid-secure way.\n\n\"The government has robust plans in place to support any areas affected by extreme weather this winter,\" they added.\n\nSandbags were laid in at-risk areas, with up to 70mm (2.75in) of rain due.\n\nIn isolated spots, particularly in the northern Peak District and parts of the southern Pennines, 200mm (7.87in) could be possible.\n\nNorthern Rail said buses were being used instead of trains on services between Bolton and Blackburn due to flooding at Darwen.\n\nSome motorists attempted to drive through floodwater on Derby Road in Hathern, Leicestershire\n\nIn the amber warning area, the Met Office said there was a \"danger to life\" due to fast-flowing or deep floodwater, and told some communities they might be \"cut off\" by flooded roads.\n\nIt also predicted delays and cancellations to public transport, with the amber warning in place until 12:00 GMT on Thursday.\n\nRos Jones, mayor of Doncaster, said key risk areas had been inspected over the past 36 hours, with the delivery of sandbags continuing on Tuesday.\n\n\"I do not want people to panic, but flooding is possible so please be prepared,\" she said.\n\nResidents of Fishlake, South Yorkshire, which saw severe flooding hit 160 homes and businesses in November 2019, said they felt much better prepared this time round.\n\nFlood warden and parish councillor Peter Trimingham said the arrival of sandbags had been a welcome sight.\n\n\"It gives us confidence,\" he said.\n\nResidents in Fishlake, near Doncaster, say they are better prepared than when flooding hit in 2019\n\nMr Trimingham added: \"We're absolutely hoping it doesn't rise to the same level. But, if it does, we're reasonably comfortable we've still got a chance because the Environment Agency have done tremendous work here along with Doncaster Council.\"\n\nHe said new defences had been built and their team of flood wardens had been expanded to 22 people.\n\nOn Yarlborough Terrace in Bentley, Doncaster, many residents were out of their homes for months after the 2019 floods.\n\nAnna Booth, 37, who was forced to live in a caravan on her drive, said residents were worried about it happening again.\n\n\"Being in the pandemic doesn't help either. Morale's a bit down but I think we'll all pull together again like last time,\" she said.\n\n\"It breaks your heart, it's really sad, but we can't stop the weather.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe Environment Agency issued more than 30 flood warnings, meaning flooding is expected and immediate action required, covering parts of Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Merseyside, Staffordshire and Northamptonshire as of 03:00 GMT on Wednesday.\n\nThere are also more than 150 flood alerts, meaning flooding is possible, issued across northern England, the Midlands and the east.\n\nRiver levels in the Ouse, which flows through York in North Yorkshire, are high before the arrival of Storm Christoph\n\nCatherine Wright, acting executive director for flood and coastal risk management at the Environment Agency, said: \"That rain is falling on very wet ground and so we are very concerned that it's a very volatile situation and we are expecting significant flooding to occur on the back of that weather.\"\n\nShe said the agency would be working with local authorities to help with evacuation efforts should a severe flood warning be issued, adding: \"If you do need to evacuate then that is allowed within the Covid rules.\"\n\nWork took place on Tuesday morning to increase defences near the River Ouse\n\nDiscussing the different levels of flood warnings, she said: \"If you receive a flood alert, please pack valuables like medicines and insurance documents in a bag ready to go.\n\n\"If you receive a flood warning, please move valuables and precious possessions upstairs and be ready to turn off gas, electricity and water.\n\n\"If you receive a severe flood warning, which means you will be evacuated, please listen out and take heed of the advice from the local emergency services.\"\n\nSandbags have been used to help defend homes in Fishlake, Doncaster, which suffered devastating floods in November 2019\n\nBarry Greenwood, from the Upper Calder Valley Flood Prevention Group in West Yorkshire, has been \"sick\" with worry.\n\n\"I went round after the last [flood], people were there with their heads in their hands, thinking 'what am I going to do now?',\" he said.\n\nFlood sirens were sounded in Walsden on Tuesday evening after a flood warning was issued for the area.\n\nIn a tweet, Calderdale Council asked residents to put their flood plan into action and move valuables to a safe place.\n\n\"River levels across the Upper River Calder have risen and are now approaching levels where we expect properties to flood,\" it warned.\n\nEarlier it had said staff were on standby to respond overnight.\n\nThe amber rain warning is in place until Thursday, with yellow warnings covering most of the UK coming in over the next three days\n\nA yellow rain alert is also in place for Wales, Northern Ireland, central and northern England and southern Scotland on Tuesday.\n\nThis yellow warning extends to the rest of England from Wednesday, with a yellow alert for snow and ice in north east Scotland.\n\nHighways England advised drivers to take extra care on motorways and major A roads, while the RAC breakdown service said motorists should only drive if absolutely necessary.\n\nDrivers faced wet road conditions and reduced visibility on the A1(M) near Boston Spa, West Yorkshire, on Tuesday morning\n\nHebden Bridge's volunteer flood warden Keith Crabtree has been monitoring the river levels of Hebden Beck closely\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sheku Bayoh death: Eyewitness says stamping attack on officer 'never happened'\n\nTwo police officers involved in the death of a black man they were restraining may have provided false statements, the BBC can reveal.\n\nThey said Sheku Bayoh carried out a stamping attack on a female PC before he was brought to the ground and restrained by up to six officers.\n\nBut now an eyewitness has spoken publicly for the first time about the 2015 incident.\n\nHe told a Panorama investigation that the stamping attack \"never happened\".\n\nThe Scottish Police Federation said its officers had cooperated truthfully with investigators.\n\nMr Bayoh, a 31-year-old father of two, died in the incident in the Fife town of Kirkcaldy in 2015.\n\nA public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his death has recently got under way. One of its tasks is to examine whether his race was a factor.\n\nSheku Bayoh was restrained on the ground for five minutes before falling unconscious\n\nOn the night of 2 May 2015, Sheku Bayoh had taken drugs, which friends said dramatically altered his behaviour.\n\nPolice were called early the following morning after he was spotted behaving erratically with a knife in the streets of his home town.\n\nAccording to police statements, by the time the officers arrived at the scene Mr Bayoh no longer had the knife but he failed to obey instructions to get down on the ground.\n\nEach of the officers used force on Mr Bayoh within seconds of encountering him, including CS Spray and batons.\n\nHe then punched PC Nicole Short, who went to the ground.\n\nTwo officers, PCs Craig Walker and Ashley Tomlinson, would later tell investigators that Mr Bayoh then carried out a violent stamping attack on PC Short while she lay on the ground, a claim reported widely in the media.\n\nThe stamping attack was widely reported in the newspapers\n\nPC Walker told investigators: \"I had a clear view of him… he had his arms raised up at right angles to his body and brought his right foot down in a full-force stamp on to her lower back.\"\n\nPC Tomlinson said: \"I thought he had killed her. He stomped on her back again.\"\n\nNow, evidence obtained by Panorama suggests these accounts may be false.\n\nMr Bayoh was restrained on the ground for five minutes before falling unconscious. He was pronounced dead at hospital a short time later.\n\nA post-mortem examination report revealed 23 separate injuries to Mr Bayoh's body, including a broken rib and gashes to his head. The cause of death was recorded as \"sudden death in a man intoxicated [with drugs] whilst under restraint\".\n\nIn 2018, the Crown Office in Scotland decided there would be no prosecutions against any officers involved.\n\nKevin Nelson gave evidence to investigators two days after the incident\n\nKevin Nelson was in a nearby house and saw events unfold over a garden hedge.\n\nHe gave his account to investigators from Pirc (Police Investigations and Review Commissioner), which investigates deaths in custody, two days after the incident.\n\nSpeaking publicly for the first time, Mr Nelson told Panorama he saw Mr Bayoh attempt to walk away from the officers, ignoring their commands, before being sprayed with CS spray. He said Mr Bayoh retaliated and punched PC Short.\n\nAsked if there had been any further contact with PC Short, he said, \"No. He was running off… after the punch, there was no more attack on her at all.\"\n\nMr Nelson said Mr Bayoh ran off from where PC Short went down and was quickly intercepted by the other officers.\n\nAsked about PC Walker's claim that Mr Bayoh had \"his arms raised up… and brought his right foot down in a full force stamp\", Mr Nelson said: \"That never happened. I didn't see him stamping at all or, other than the punch, any raised arms.\n\n\"After the punch, that was it. There was no more attack on her at all. That's not right.\"\n\nThe officers provided their accounts to investigators 32 days after Mr Bayoh's death.\n\nMr Nelson said no-one from Pirc returned to ask about the discrepancy between their account and his.\n\nThe eyewitness said he decided to speak out because it was unfair on Mr Bayoh's family that the officers had \"made the incident worse than it actually was to justify what had happened and… that's not right\".\n\nMr Nelson's account is supported by CCTV footage of the incident, obtained by the BBC.\n\nIt is poor quality but appears to show that once PC Short is knocked down by Mr Bayoh, the action moves away from her, and he is brought down within five seconds.\n\nPC Short did not mention in her statement she had been stamped on. Now retired, she later said she was unsure if she was conscious, and only learned about the alleged stamping attack when her colleagues told her about it afterwards.\n\nIn the CCTV, PC Short appears to get to her feet a few seconds after Mr Bayoh is brought down.\n\nMike Franklin says conflicts of evidence should have been resolved\n\nMike Franklin, former commissioner for the body which investigated police complaints in England and Wales, looked at Panorama's evidence.\n\nHe said: \"I think there's nothing more serious than a police officer who gives false information in an investigation where somebody has died. So without accusing them of lying, I simply say that there's a big conflict.\n\n\"Two officers who were there say that it did happen. The person to whom it happened didn't mention it. And an eyewitness says it didn't happen.\n\n\"I would've been reluctant to sign off the investigation as complete, without resolving those… conflicts of evidence.\"\n\nMr Bayoh's sister, Kadi Johnson, told Panorama the new allegations had made her \"really angry\".\n\nShe said the way her brother was \"painted\" by the accounts given after his death was not who he was.\n\nMr Bayoh's sister, Kadi Johnson, said the new allegations had made her really angry\n\nA spokesman for the Scottish Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, said serving officers were unable to comment on matters \"to which they may be called upon to give sworn evidence\" but that they had \"co-operated fully and truthfully with the investigations that have taken place\".\n\nIt added it had seen \"compelling material that Mr Bayoh did violently stamp on the back of a policewoman as she lay unconscious\".\n\nThe BBC asked for this material to be produced but was told the inquiry was the \"proper forum\" for such matters.\n\nThe Crown Office, which directed the Pirc Inquiry, told Panorama it had examined \"eye-witness accounts of police and civilian witnesses\" and instructed \"appropriate investigation\".\n\nIt said after careful consideration it was decided there should be no prosecutions but reserved the right to prosecute should evidence become available.\n\nPirc told Panorama its investigation was \"detailed and extensive\" but could not comment further because of the public inquiry.\n\nPolice Scotland Chief Constable Iain Livingstone expressed his condolences to the Bayoh family and said the force would \"participate fully\" in the inquiry.\n\nKevin Clarke died after being restrained in London by up to nine officers\n\nPanorama's \"I Can't Breathe: Black and Dead in Custody\" also investigates the case of Kevin Clarke, 35, who died in 2018 after being restrained in London by up to nine officers.\n\nAn inquest into his death resulted in a damning verdict on the police and ambulance services.\n\nMr Clarke's sister Tellecia told the programme that if the officers \"hadn't used excessive force he would still be here today… treat him like a human being, and not just see him as a big scary black man\".\n\nMetropolitan Police Commander Bas Javid apologised to Mr Clarke's family and accepted the restraint had not been appropriate.", "Protests against China's alleged abuse of the Muslim Uighur community\n\nThe government has narrowly seen off a rebellion by 33 Tory MPs, who want to outlaw trade deals with countries judged to be committing genocide.\n\nMPs voted by 319 to 308 to remove an amendment to the Trade Bill which would have forced ministers to withdraw from deals with nations the UK High Court ruled guilty of mass killings.\n\nIt comes amid condemnation of China's treatment of the Uighur people.\n\nThe rebels believe they have enough support to secure another vote soon.\n\nAmong those to defy the government were ex-Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, former cabinet ministers David Davis and Damian Green and Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.\n\nThe rebellion is one of the largest on an issue not related to the Covid-19 pandemic during Boris Johnson's time as prime minister.\n\nThe government has a Commons majority of 80 but this was whittled down to just 11 as prominent ex-ministers such as Tobias Ellwood, Caroline Nokes and Nusrat Ghani, as well as a number of MPs first elected last year, sided with the opposition.\n\nMPs have been debating proposals, tabled by cross-bench peer Lord Alton, to give British courts the right to decide if a country is committing genocide, a decision currently left to the jurisdiction of international courts.\n\nThe proposals, also backed by Labour, would mean that ministers would have to revoke post-Brexit trade deals with countries that were ruled to be carrying out systematic mass killings.\n\nThe issue is expected to resurface when the Trade Bill returns to the House of Lords.\n\nEarlier on Tuesday, Conservative rebels, led by former leader Iain Duncan Smith, were unable to force a vote on a separate amendment they had proposed.\n\nEvery speaker in today's debate - from the front and back benches - said genocide was abhorrent. The worst of crimes. There was united criticism of China's brutal treatment of the Uighurs too.\n\nBut the question Parliament has been wrestling with is whether the High Court should have the right to decide if a country is committing genocide. And if they did judge a country has been carrying out mass killings, should the High Court be able to compel the government to revoke any trade treaty it has with that country?\n\nMinisters insist it should be the job of elected governments, not judges, to determine trade policy. But opposition parties and a large cohort of Tory backbenchers argue it's essential the High Court can rule on genocide and ensure the UK's new trade-making freedom has an obligation to uphold human rights too.\n\nThis also is an argument about where power lies after Brexit and what role Parliament should have in shaping trade policy after decades in the EU.\n\nBut BBC Newsnight political editor Nick Watt said that by securing large, but not overwhelming, support for Lord Alton's amendment in the Commons, the rebels hope the government will accept Mr Duncan Smith's own amendment - which would give the Commons the right to debate whether trade deals can be halted if genocide is proven.\n\nThe debate came as the US government formally declared that China was committing genocide in its repression of Uighur muslims in Xinjiang.\n\nThe UK government has been critical of China's treatment of the Uighurs and last week announced measures to cut UK business links with forced labour camps in the region.\n\nBut some MPs suspect the government is pulling its punches to avoid antagonising Beijing.\n\nMr Duncan Smith said the debate was \"all about simply shining a light of hope to all those out there who have failed to get their day in court and failed to be treated properly\".\n\n\"If this country doesn't stand up for that then I want to know what would it ever stand up for again?,\" he added.\n\nBut Trade Minister Greg Hands said it was unprecedented and unacceptable to give the courts powers to revoke trade deals agreed by elected governments.\n\nAnd he argued that no one would benefit from the proposal because the UK currently had no free trade deal with China.", "Lisbet Stone is stranded at Madrid Airport due to having an out-of-date coronavirus test result\n\nPassenger Lisbet Stone says she is stuck in Madrid Airport after airline officials said her coronavirus test result was out of date.\n\nFrom Monday, travellers arriving in the UK, whether by boat, train or plane, have to show proof of a negative Covid-19 test to be allowed entry.\n\nThe test must be taken in the three days before travelling.\n\nFor those with connecting flights, the test must be 72 hours before your final departure point to England.\n\nAnyone arriving without one faces a fine of up to £500.\n\nMrs Stone originally travelled to Cuba in February 2020 to see family. The British Cuban dual national was unable to fly home to the UK when Cuba closed its borders in March.\n\nThe family say she had several previous flights cancelled before finally being able to leave this weekend. She hasn't been able to see her four children or her husband Trevor in 11 months.\n\nThe government are understood to be speaking to Air Europa to try to get Mrs Stone home. Carriers have been told that they should permit stranded passengers to board and will not be fined for doing so.\n\nWhile Mrs Stone has been caught out by the new restrictions for incoming travellers, the first day of the new regulations appeared to go smoothly.\n\nMrs Stone left Jose Marti International Airport in Havana, Cuba, on Sunday night to fly back to the UK via Madrid.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Coronavirus: How to fly during a global pandemic (this video reflects the rules before the hotel quarantine was introduced in the UK)\n\nShe took a Covid test on Thursday to be guaranteed a result by Saturday. It was negative and Mrs Stone was able to board the plane from Cuba.\n\nHowever, on arrival at Madrid-Barajas Airport, Mrs Stone says she was stopped from boarding the next leg of her journey to London Gatwick by Air Europa staff, because her test had been taken more than 72 hours before the final flight.\n\n\"She's crying her eyes out,\" says Trevor Stone, her husband. \"I feel absolutely helpless. She doesn't have any Euros as she wasn't meant to stay in Spain. The authorities have given her no help whatsoever, we are just trying to understand what to do.\n\n\"She took her test 72 hours before the start of her journey, but had to take a connecting flight onwards. There would be no other way to do it, it is not physically possible.\"\n\nIn the meantime, Mr Stone says he has been home-schooling their four children on his own through the pandemic.\n\nTrevor Stone (left) has been caring for the couple's four children on his own for 11 months since Lisbet Stone was unable to leave Cuba\n\n\"We are just desperate to get her home - I'm so worried about her and after 11 months, she really wants to see her children,\" he added. \"We haven't done anything wrong, I don't know what to do or who to turn to.\"\n\nA Department for Transport spokesman said: \"Passengers travelling to the UK must provide proof of a negative coronavirus test which meets the performance standards set out by the government in the guidance published on gov.uk.\n\n\"The type of test could include a PCR test or antigen test, including a lateral flow test. Anyone who cannot provide the necessary documentation may not be allowed to board their flight.\"\n\nAir Europa and Madrid Airport have been approached by the BBC for comment.", "US tariffs have hit the Scotch whisky industry hard\n\nThe UK and US have failed to do a much hoped for \"mini-deal\" over trade in the last days of the Trump administration.\n\nThere were hopes the US would lift tariffs on imports of Scotch whisky and cashmere imposed last year as part of the Boeing-Airbus trade dispute.\n\nBut those duties will now stay in place while President-elect Biden awaits confirmation of his trade team.\n\nThe talks were revealed in a BBC interview with US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in December.\n\nAt the time he said he was hopeful that he and his UK counterpart, International Trade Secretary Liz Truss, could \"get some kind of an agreement out\".\n\nBut the BBC understands that a broad offer from the US was rejected last week by the UK after concerns were expressed by the Business Department about the impact on Airbus' business in the UK.\n\nSince 2019, the EU and US have both imposed tariffs on each others' goods amid a long-running trade dispute between the planemakers Boeing and Airbus.\n\nThe tariffs centre on a long-running dispute between Boeing and Airbus\n\nEarlier last month the UK's Trade Department announced it would unilaterally break from the EU's position of levying tariffs on imports of Boeing aeroplanes, after the end of the Brexit transition period.\n\nIt was, said Ms Truss, an attempt to create goodwill to solve the 16-year old dispute.\n\nBut the UK aerospace industry was furious with what it saw as the government reneging on promises made in early 2020 to support Airbus in the dispute, even after Brexit.\n\nThese concerns were the main block to a deal, but the chaos in Washington DC over the past week also played a part.\n\nThe US was also looking for tariffs on its exports of bourbon to the UK - part of a separate trade dispute over steel - to be settled.\n\nA government source said: \"Ultimately we came close to resolving an intractable 16-year dispute, but didn't quite get there. Any deal must be balanced and work for the whole UK and all of UK industry.\"\n\nThey added: \"No one has fought harder on this than Liz, and she's going to continue pushing it with the Biden administration. She absolutely understands the pain of affected businesses and is determined to get these tariffs lifted and support jobs.\"\n\nThe source said the government had pursued a \"clear de-escalation strategy\" with the Trump administration over the dispute which meant it had avoided being hit with further US tariffs, unlike the EU.\n\nMs Truss still hopes to settle the dispute quickly and has committed to meet Katherine Tai, the new US Trade Representative, in Washington DC as soon as she assumes office, the source added.\n\nKaren Betts, head of the Scotch Whisky Association, said her industry was \"very frustrated\" a deal was not reached.\n\n\"There is deep disappointment across the Scotch whisky industry that distillers are still paying the price for an aerospace dispute that has nothing to do with us.\n\n\"The tariff on single malt Scotch whisky, now in place for 15 months, has caused us to lose over £450m in exports to the US, and our losses continue to mount.\"", "Marion Dawson is the third oldest person in Scotland to be given the vaccine.\n\nA 108-year-old woman has received the Covid vaccination on her birthday.\n\nMarion Dawson, from Houston in Renfrewshire, is the third oldest person in Scotland to be given the vaccine.\n\nShe received her jab at Houston and Killellan Kirk, which is being used by the local GP surgery to deliver vaccinations to the community.\n\nBorn in 1913, Mrs Dawson has lived through two world wars and the Spanish flu pandemic.\n\nDr Diane Fisher, who gave the injection said: \"We are so excited to be starting vaccinations of our over-80s, and that our first patient to be vaccinated is doing so on her birthday.\"\n\nMrs Dawson is the most senior person in NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde to be given the vaccine.\n\nAfter receiving her injection, she said: \"I'm glad it's passed. I never felt a thing.\"\n\nKirk minister, Rev Gary Noonan said: \"Mrs Dawson is a local treasure in Houston, until the lockdown she never missed a week at church.\n\n\"It's fitting she can get her vaccine in the Kirk, a place she loves.\"\n\nDr Mark Storey, partner at Strathgryffe Medical Practice, added: \"It's been a very difficult year in general practice and society as a whole.\n\n\"In our practice we have a family of 10,000 patients, so we are delighted to start vaccinating, especially with Mrs Dawson.\"", "The pace of Europe's Covid-19 vaccination campaign has picked up and in many countries infection rates have been falling.\n\nLockdowns are gradually being eased as the summer tourist season gets under way, and there are plans for an EU-wide digital vaccination certificate to be in place by 1 July.\n\nNationwide curfew ended on 20 June, 10 days earlier than planned. Face masks are no longer required outdoors.\n\nRestaurants, cafes and bars can serve customers indoors, with 50% capacity and up to six people per table.\n\nStanding concerts will resume on 30 June and nightclubs on 9 July (with 75% capacity). People attending will need a health pass which shows either full vaccination, a negative test within the previous 72 hours, or else a previous coronavirus infection.\n\nMedical grade masks are compulsory in shops and on public transport.\n\nFrom 30 June, working from home will no longer be compulsory.\n\nOn 21 June, Italy's curfew was scrapped and the whole country, except for the northwest region of Valle d'Aosta, became \"white zone\" - the country's lowest-risk category.\n\nAmong the measures still in place are social distancing (1m) and the wearing of masks indoors (and in crowded outdoor places), and a ban on house parties and large gathering.\n\nNightclubs and discos are also closed.\n\nAll indoor businesses, with the exception of nightclubs, are open.\n\nThe government introduced a \"corona pass\" in April, the first to do so in Europe.\n\nThis shows - either on a phone or on paper - that you have been vaccinated, previously infected or that you have had a negative test within 72 hours.\n\nPeople need to show it for entry to cinemas, museums, hairdressers or indoor dining.\n\nThe Greek government is welcoming tourists from many countries, if they are fully vaccinated or can provide a negative coronavirus test.\n\nFace coverings must be worn in all public places and there is a curfew from 01:30-05:00, but bars, restaurants, museums and archaeological sites are all open.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Greek island of Milos is aiming to become \"Covid-free\" so it can welcome back tourists\n\nCinemas, theatres, museums and restaurants are open at 50% capacity. From 26 June, this increases to 75%.\n\nNightclubs and discos will also be allowed to reopen, with a limit of 150 people.\n\nFace coverings must be worn in enclosed spaces and 1.5m social distancing observed.\n\nShops, bars, restaurants and museums are open, although face coverings remain compulsory in most public places.\n\nNightclubs can now reopen in parts of Spain with low infection rates.\n\nIn Barcelona, they are restricted to 50% of capacity and can stay open until 03:30 - dancers have to wear masks.\n\nSpain began welcoming vaccinated tourists from 7 June. Most European travellers still have to present a negative Covid test on arrival.\n\nBrussels: Outdoor dining resumed in Belgium on 8 May\n\nShops, cinemas, gyms, cafes and restaurants are open, with restrictions. Households can invite up to four people inside.\n\nFrom 1 July, working from home will no longer be mandatory, if the situation continues to improve.\n\nCultural performances, shows and sports competitions can also go ahead, with limited numbers, and more people will be allowed at weddings and other ceremonies and parties.\n\nPortugal has lifted many of its restrictions but face coverings must still be worn in indoor public spaces and some outdoor settings.\n\nBars and nightclubs remain closed, and it's illegal to drink alcohol outdoors in public places, except for pavement cafés and restaurants.\n\nAlcohol cannot be sold after 21:00 unless it is with a meal.\n\nRestaurants, cafes and cultural venues have to close at 01:00 and have capacity limits.\n\nA weekend travel ban is in force in the Lisbon area, starting at 15:00 on Friday, with residents only allowed to leave for essential journeys.\n\nIn Lisbon and in Albufeira (Algarve), cafes, restaurants and non-essential shops have to close by 15:30 at the weekend and 22:30 on weekdays.\n\nPortugal's summer season looks uncertain, yet its Covid figures have improved\n\nRestaurants, cafes, museums and historic buildings have reopened with capacity limits.\n\nFrom 26 June, a number of restrictions are being lifted.\n\nAlcohol can be sold after 22:00, and nightclubs can open, with an entry pass system.\n\nEvents held in public venues such as cinemas, conference centres and concert halls will be allowed, subject to social distancing.\n\nMasks will no longer be compulsory except on public transport, airports and in secondary schools.\n\nOutdoor services in restaurants and bars returned in June. Theme parks, funfairs, cinemas and theatres, gyms and swimming pools, have reopened as well.\n\nFrom 5 July, restaurants and bars will be able to serve customers indoors. Weddings and other indoor events for up to 50 people will be permitted and the numbers at outdoor organised events will increase.\n\nSince June, pubs have been able to stay open until 22:30 and more people are now allowed at sports events, outdoor concerts, cinemas and markets.\n\nOn 1 July, limits on private gatherings will be raised, and the recommendation to interact with a small circle of people removed.\n\nFurther easing is planned on 15 July and in September.", "'Paul' was accused of committing a domestic burglary in June 2018.\n\nIn early 2019 he was told by police that no further action would be taken against him. However, he was subsequently charged.\n\nLast week - over two years since the alleged offence - he appeared at Inner London Crown Court.\n\nBut his barrister told the court that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had still not served the sole evidence - DNA - in the case on the defence.\n\nPaul (not his real name) is on bail and had his trial put on provisional \"warned\" list - for December 2021.\n\nIt means there is no guarantee it will take place at that time - just that it might.\n\nThe judge explained apologetically that priority is being given to cases where defendants are being held in custody.\n\nSo, three and a half-years from the date of the alleged offence, there has been no justice for the alleged burglary victim - or the accused.\n\nPaul's was one of a number of cases I saw on a visit to Inner London with the chair of the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) James Mulholland QC. He told me it was typical.\n\n\"This is justice 2020, but it has been like this for the last 10 years, delay after delay, inbuilt into the system. These cases are being pushed back continuously.\n\n\"Lack of investment is at the heart of it and government needs to understand that you don't create a proper justice system without proper investment.\n\n\"What we are seeing here are the fruits of a lack of interest.\"\n\nThat apparent \"lack of interest\" is reflected in the state of some court buildings. Outside Inner London I saw a dead pigeon decaying on netting, vast weeds growing up the side of the building and old pipes leaking water.\n\nMeanwhile, a court official told me that some court centres are now listing trials for 2023.\n\nThe delays are caused by a range of factors.\n\nLawyers point to huge cuts to the police, CPS and other agencies such as probation.\n\nThere are a range of things malfunctioning within the system. They include long initial delays caused by police \"releasing suspects under investigation\" - sometimes for years - before a charging decision is made.\n\nSystemic problems continue with the CPS serving evidence late on the defence, meaning lawyers cannot advise their clients in a timely manner.\n\nAnd perhaps most significantly - the decisions by government to cut thousands of crown court sitting days. That has meant that courts have been mothballed while trials stack up in a growing backlog.\n\nNone of these problems are caused by the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown, but they are of course exacerbated by it. Pre-lockdown the crown court backlog in England and Wales stood at some 37,000.\n\n\"Adam\" - not his real name - was accused of rape in March 2018. He denies the charge. His trial has been put back twice, once because of the pandemic.\n\nHe is now on a \"warned\" list for November, while his chosen career in one of the public services is on hold.\n\n\"I have suffered really bad with my mental health through it,\" he says. \"I've had to up my dosage of anti-depressants. It's affected my potential career.\n\n\"The hard work I have done at university and everything to get me there it's all basically going out of the window now. I haven't got any trust or hope that it will be anywhere near the end of this year.\n\n\"I think it will be more like April next year.\"\n\nThe next case I saw involved two young men charged with possession of drugs with intent to supply. The alleged offence took place in December 2017.\n\nNo one in court could explain the delay.\n\nIt was followed by a case in which the judge needed a pre-sentence report from the probation service in order to sentence the defendant. Despite repeated requests, no one was available.\n\nIn order to achieve a conclusion of the case, the judge had to devise a sentence which did not require a report. It was not ideal, but it showed professionals trying to do their best in the face of a lack of resources.\n\n\"Defendants are suspended from their jobs with trial dates one to two years away. Some are losing university places with dates from the alleged offence to trial of four years.\n\n\"And some who are awaiting trial for 18-24 months on bail, can be on electronic tagged curfew from 7-7 every day, for up to two years.\"\n\nTo help deal with the situation, the government has announced that the period of time an accused person can be held before a trial - known as the Custody Time Limit (CTL) - will be increased from six to eight months.\n\nBut the government admitted - in response to a Freedom of Information request from the group Fair Trials - that it did not know how many people had been held in prison beyond the time limit since lockdown.\n\nLawyers fear some accused will spend more time in custody awaiting trial than the sentence they would eventually receive if they pleaded guilty - and that some might falsely plead guilty simply to bring an end to their case.\n\nLife is bleak for those in custody awaiting trial, says Ms Fenn,\n\n\"There are often no visits from family or in-person visits from lawyers. Defendants can be locked up for 23.5 hours a day, education classes and courses are suspended, jobs within the prison restricted, and there are reports of showers being limited to 1-2 a week.\"\n\nCovid has also removed a \"huge amount of mental health, drug and alcohol agency support\", she says.\n\nA Ministry of Justice spokesperson said justice had been kept moving \"despite the unprecedented challenges posed by the pandemic\" and overall, cases are falling.\n\nHowever, they acknowledged that \"more needs to be done\".\n\nThe government has launched an £80 million Criminal Courts Recovery plan which includes:\n\nHowever, only three of the new Nightingale Courts are dealing with crime.\n\nI visited one, Prospero House, a short walk from Inner London. It is a state of the art commercial building with three large courtrooms allowing ample room for social distancing. Every desk has hand sanitiser and protective gloves.\n\nBut Mr Mulholland says: \"We need 60 criminal Nightingale Court buildings. At the moment we have just three.\"\n\nThe CBA says there are around 460 crown courtrooms in England and Wales. Currently around 100 are able to hear trials, though not all are hosting them.\n\nThe government says its plan will bring on stream another 250 of the existing rooms to hear jury trials by the end of October. The CBA believes that simply will not cut into the backlog.\n\nLawyers believe that the Treasury has long seen justice as a poor relation to health and education in terms of public spending.\n\n\"Investing in the criminal justice system is investing in the wealth and prosperity of the country,\" says Mr Mulholland.\n\n\"It is an empty and insulting promise for any minister to declare a war on crime if a government can't fund a system that keeps us safe - and ensures crimes are swiftly investigated and cases come to court on time.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Aerial footage shows the 130-car pile-up on the Tohoku Expressway\n\nA huge snowstorm has struck a highway in Japan, causing a 130-vehicle pile-up, killing one person and injuring 10.\n\nThe storm blanketed a stretch of the Tohoku Expressway in Miyagi prefecture at around noon (03:00 GMT) on Tuesday.\n\nSome 200 people have been caught up in the pile-up and rescuers are currently at the scene, officials said.\n\nJapan has been hit by severe snow storms in recent weeks with some parts of the country seeing double the average expected snowfall.\n\nImages from the expressway in the north of the country show the sheer scale of the pile-up.\n\nOne person died and at least 10 were injured after the vehicles collided\n\nAuthorities had already enforced a 50km/h (31mph) speed limit on the road due to visibility.\n\nThere was a maximum wind speed of about 100km/h (62mph) at the time of the incident, local weather officials said.\n\nThose who were involved have been given drinking water and food, and have been provided with blankets to keep warm, NHK News reports (in Japanese).\n\nThose stuck behind the vehicles have been given food, water and blankets\n\nThe snow has affected some of Japan's high-speed railway network, with a number of train services in the Tohoku region cancelled.\n\nAccording to local media, the region is expected to record up to 40cm (15 inches) of snow in the next 24 hours.\n\nThe country has been experiencing a large amount of snowfall this winter.\n\nLast month, heavy snow left more than 1,000 vehicles stranded on the Kanetsu expressway for two days.\n\nThe weather was so bad that an emergency meeting was called and the country's Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga called on members of the public to be cautious.", "Pupils are currently learning remotely from home\n\nSchools in England may reopen region by region after half term, the government's deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries has said.\n\nSpeaking to the Commons education committee, Dr Harries suggested there would be different rates of infection across the country when lockdown ends.\n\nThis would mean a \"differential application\" of restrictive measures would be required, she said.\n\nSchools were closed at the start of January to stem the spread of Covid-19.\n\nAlthough schools remain open to vulnerable children and those of keyworkers, all others are due to learn remotely from home until after the February half term holiday.\n\nBut the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, has suggested they may not return fully then.\n\nA Department for Education spokesperson said the department was continuing to keep plans for the return to school under review and that it would inform schools, parents and pupils of the plans ahead of February half term.\n\nCommittee chairman Robert Halfon said he suspected schools would be closed for quite \"a few weeks yet\", but there has been no formal confirmation of this.\n\nMedical and science advisers were warning the government before Christmas that the NHS would not be able to manage the number of Covid-19 cases if schools remained open.\n\nThe new, more transmissible variant of the virus had been increasing exponentially in London and the south-east before Christmas.\n\nBut in some parts of the north and north-east saw rates of increase were reducing.\n\nDr Harries said: \"It is highly likely that when we come out of this national lockdown we will not have consistent patterns of infection in our communities across the country.\n\n\"And therefore, as we had prior to the national lockdown, it may well be possible that we need to have some differential application.\"\n\nBut Dr Harries said schools would be at the top of the priority to ensure that the balance of education and wellbeing were \"right at the forefront\" of consideration.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries says schools in England might reopen ''region by region''\n\nGeoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: \"Although the government intends that schools will fully reopen after the February half-term holiday, it is clearly in the balance when this happens and whether there will be any sort of regional approach.\n\n\"We expect that it will depend on coronavirus infection rates and the pressure on the NHS, and that the government will make a call on this issue nearer the time.\n\n\"What is important is that when schools fully reopen, everything possible is done to keep them open and to keep disruption to a minimum.\n\n\"This is why we are calling for education staff to be prioritised for vaccinations as soon as possible, and for schools to be given more support in the use of rapid turnaround mass testing.\"\n\nPaul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said if the government was planning to stagger opening of schools by region, it needed to \"provide clarity sooner rather than later\".\n\n\"This will give vital time to prepare for a smoother reopening of schools and business,\" he said.\n\nOn calls for vaccination of teachers, Dr Harries suggested the safe re-opening of schools did not depend on this.\n\nBut members of the committee suggested education would be less disrupted by teachers needing to go home and isolate when infected.\n\nThe vaccination programme had been worked out in order of vulnerability to the disease, she stressed.\n\nAnd Dr Harries added that although pupils could and did transmit the virus, she did not have evidence of them being \"a significant driver\" of \"large-scale community infections\".", "The publication of a letter from the Duchess of Sussex to her father was a \"triple-barrelled invasion\" of her privacy, the High Court has been told.\n\nMeghan is suing the publisher of the Mail on Sunday and Mail Online over articles that reproduced parts of the private handwritten letter.\n\nShe claims her privacy and copyright were breached by the newspaper group.\n\nHer lawyers are asking for summary judgement - a dismissal of Associated Newspapers' defence instead of a trial.\n\nMeghan's lawyers argue Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) has \"no prospect\" of defending the privacy and copyright claims being brought against them.\n\nThey claim the publication of extracts from the private, handwritten letter to Thomas Markle was \"self-evidently... highly intrusive\".\n\nMeghan, 39, sent the letter to her father in August 2018, following her marriage to Prince Harry in May that year, which Mr Markle did not attend. The couple are now living in the US with their son Archie.\n\nThe five articles, published in February 2019, were a \"triple-barrelled invasion\" of the duchess's privacy, correspondence and family, the lawyers claim.\n\nMr Markle said in a witness statement provided to the remote hearing, which started on Tuesday, that he wanted the letter published to \"set the record straight\" about his relationship with his daughter - but one of Meghan's lawyers described this claim as \"ridiculous\".\n\nMeghan is seeking damages from the newspaper group for alleged misuse of private information, copyright infringement and breach of the Data Protection Act over the articles.\n\nThe Duke and Duchess of Sussex now live in the US with their son\n\nHer lawyers told the court the letter was written in sorrow rather than anger and was an attempt to get her father to stop talking to the press.\n\nBut the newspaper group said in its response to the court that Meghan had written the letter \"with a view to it being disclosed publicly at some future point\" in order to \"defend her against charges of being an uncaring or unloving daughter\".\n\nIn written submissions, the newspaper group's barrister Antony White said \"she must, at the very least, have appreciated that her father might choose to disclose it\" and pointed out that the Kensington Palace communications team had been shown the letter before it was sent.\n\n\"No truly private letter from daughter to father would require any input from the Kensington Palace communications team,\" said Mr White.\n\nBut Meghan's lawyers also pointed out the articles themselves had emphasised the private nature of the correspondence - and dismissed any argument that it was in the public interest for the newspaper to reproduce the letter, saying the public interest was at the \"very end of the bottom end of the scale\".\n\nJustin Rushbrooke, representing the duchess, described the handwritten letter as \"a heartfelt plea from an anguished daughter to her father\".\n\nHe said the \"contents and character of the letter were intrinsically private, personal and sensitive in nature\" and that Meghan \"had a reasonable expectation of privacy in respect of the contents of the letter\".\n\nThe effect of publishing the letter was \"self-evidently likely to be devastating for the claimant\", said Mr Rushbrooke.\n\nThe barrister argued that, even if ANL was justified in publishing parts of the letter, \"on any view the defendant published far more by way of extracts from the letter than could have been justified in the public interest\".\n\nMr White said that the newspaper group would argue that Meghan's status as a member of the royal family was relevant to the case.\n\nIn response to that point, Mr Rushbrooke said: \"Yes, she is in some senses a public figure, but that does not reduce her expectation of privacy in relation to information of this kind.\"\n\nIn Thomas Markle's evidence, he said the letter \"signalled the end\" of his relationship with his daughter, and instead of a reconciliation attempt, the letter was a \"criticism\" of him.\n\nHe said that he had to \"defend himself\" against an article in People magazine. It carried an interview with a \"long-time friend\" of his daughter, who suggested Meghan sent the letter to repair her relationship with her father - something he claimed was false.\n\nThe People article, he claimed, made him appear \"dishonest, exploitative, publicity-seeking, uncaring and cold-hearted\".\n\nHe said he had \"never intended to talk publicly about Meg's letter\" until he read the People magazine piece which, he claimed, suggested he was \"to blame for the end of the relationship\".\n\nThe full trial of the duchess's claim had been due to be heard at the High Court this month, but last year the case was adjourned until autumn 2021.\n\nThis interim remote hearing - to consider the request for summary judgement - is due to last two days. Mr Justice Warby, who is hearing the case, is expected to reserve his judgement to a later date.", "Most people who have had Covid-19 are protected from catching it again for at least five months, a study led by Public Health England shows.\n\nPast infection was linked to around a 83% lower risk of getting the virus, compared with those who had never had Covid-19, scientists found.\n\nBut experts warn some people do catch Covid-19 again - and can infect others.\n\nAnd officials stress people should follow the stay-at-home rules - whether or not they have had the virus.\n\nProf Susan Hopkins, who led the study, said the results were encouraging, suggesting immunity lasted longer than some people feared, but protection was by no means absolute.\n\nIt was particularly concerning some of those reinfected had high levels of the virus - even without symptoms - and were at risk of passing it on to others, she said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Prof Susan Hopkins from Public Health England said immunity from having Covid-19 is \"not 100% protective\"\n\n\"This means even if you believe you already had the disease and are protected, you can be reassured it is highly unlikely you will develop severe infections but there is still a risk that you could acquire an infection and transmit to others,\" she added.\n\n\"Now more than ever, it is vital we all stay at home to protect our health service and save lives.\"\n\nFrom June to November 2020, almost 21,000 healthcare workers across the UK were regularly tested to see whether they:\n\nOf those who had no antibodies to the virus, suggesting they may have never had it, 318 developed potential new infections within this timeframe.\n\nBut among the 6,614 with antibodies, this figure was just 44 potential new infections.\n\nResearchers received various different pieces of evidence suggesting these people had become re-infected - including new symptoms more than 90 days after their first infection, new positive swab tests and blood tests.\n\nSome tests are still being run and researchers say their results will be updated as they come in.\n\nScientists will continue to monitor the healthcare workers for 12 months to see how long immunity lasts.\n\nThey will also look closely at cases with the new variant - which was not widespread at the time of this first analysis - and observe the immunity of participants who receive the vaccine.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Can you become immune to coronavirus?\n\nDr Julian Tang, a virus expert at the University of Leicester, said the results were reassuring for healthcare workers.\n\n\"Having the vaccine after recovering from Covid-19 is not an issue... and will likely boost the natural immunity,\" he added.\n\n\"We also see this with the seasonal flu vaccine.\n\n\"So hopefully the results from this paper will reduce the anxiety of many healthcare-worker colleagues who have concerns about getting Covid-19 twice.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Only 155 out of more than 23,000 university professors in the UK are black, according to official figures.\n\nIt remains below 1%, the same as for the past five years, and is an increase of only 50 posts despite the number of professorships rising by more than 3,000 in that time.\n\nAt this senior academic level, women hold 28% of professorships, up from 23% five years ago.\n\n\"The pace of change is glacial,\" said lecturers' union leader Jo Grady.\n\n\"Universities must do more to ensure a more representative mix of staff at a senior level and stop this terrible waste of talent,\" said Dr Grady, general secretary of the UCU university union.\n\nThe figures on black professors were \"disappointing\" and \"inexplicable\", said Halima Begum, chief executive of the Runnymede Trust race equality think tank, \"given the symbolic importance of education as the foundation of our values.\"\n\n\"Around a quarter of British postgraduates are from ethnic minorities, there is clearly no shortage of qualified black and minority academics seeking elevation to senior teaching and research roles in our universities,\" said Dr Begum.\n\nShe called on vice chancellors to take action over a problem they can \"literally discern with their own eyes every single day they are on campus\".\n\nThe annual figures, published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, provide a breakdown of the UK's academic workforce - and show while there has been a focus on widening access for students, there are still few black academic staff.\n\nAt the level of professor, the number of black professors rose from 105 to 155 between 2014-15 to 2019-20.\n\nBut new higher education providers included in the figures meant an additional 3,200 staff at professor grade, with the proportion of black professors only increasing marginally from 0.5% to 0.7% over five years.\n\nThis compared to 7% of professors who are Asian and 89% white in the figures for 2019-20.\n\nKehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, said that rather than universities being \"progressive dreamlands\", the \"make-up of professors is the perfect reflection of the narrow Eurocentric views still produced by universities\".\n\n\"I have seen very few genuine attempts to address the issues of racism at any level across the sector,\" said Prof Andrews.\n\nAmong all academic staff, 2% are black, 10% are Asian, 75% are white, with the remainder under categories of \"mixed\", \"other or not known\".\n\nThere is still a significant gender gap in professorships, among a group that is also heavily skewed to older age groups, with most in their fifties, sixties and above.\n\nFive years ago, more than 4,500 professors were women, which has risen to 6,300 - from 23% to 28% of these senior posts.\n\nThis is despite women representing 46% of all academic staff.\n\nBaroness Amos, who was the UK's first black female university head, has previously warned of \"deep-seated prejudices and stereotypes which need to be overcome\" in the recruitment of senior staff in higher education.\n\nUniversities UK said \"the evidence is clear that black and minority ethnic staff continue to be under-represented\" at these senior academic levels.\n\n\"More needs to be done to address this inequality which exists within higher education, which mirrors inequalities evident in wider UK society and which will require an unequivocal commitment to change,\" said the universities' organisation.", "Many think the courts system needs to invest more in technology\n\nWhen Louise Westra and her partner decided to adopt a child in November 2018, they were aware of the long process that was ahead of them, but they were not to know that the coronavirus pandemic would hold them back from completing the adoption of their son.\n\nOn 27 March, their petition was due in court. As lockdown had taken effect, telephone conferencing would be used instead of going to court.\n\nHowever, after the phone call, Ms Westra received an email from her solicitor explaining that the papers had not been served to the biological parents of the child. This continued every month after lockdown, as it wasn't possible for the papers to be physically served.\n\n\"It's farcical because one of them is the biological father who lives with the biological mother who has had her petition but the biological father hasn't and they live in the same premises,\" Ms Westra says.\n\nServing papers has to be completed by post via Royal Mail or in some cases lawyers would instruct a process server to physically take the papers and hand them to the person.\n\n\"It sounds very archaic but if [the person] won't take them by hand, the processor can drop the papers near them and tell them what the document contains and that's technically counted as full service,\" says Rebecca Ranson, a solicitor for Maguire Family Law.\n\nUnless a judge approves it, emailing or any other forms of digital communication are not considered valid - even though the majority of people in the UK have access to email and the internet. It is this kind of process, in need of a digital upgrade, that is frustrating for Ms Westra.\n\nMs Westra's case is one of many that have been delayed. The number of outstanding Crown court cases was 43,676 on 26 July, and the entire backlog across magistrates' and Crown courts is more than 560,000. The Commons Justice Committee has announced an inquiry into how these delays could be addressed.\n\nThe reality, however, is that there was already a huge backlog back in December, and Covid-19 has just exacerbated an existing problem. Cases like Ms Westra's have been affected by the pandemic, but many lawyers believe that the legal system could have been better prepared through technology investment over the years.\n\n\"We've got people being held for longer than they otherwise would be, and for every person in custody waiting for trial or waiting on bail for trial, there are witnesses, and complainants and their families awaiting a resolution. Whether it's the lack of technology links in prison, using Skype and improvising or not having enough Nightingale courts - it all boils down to a lack of investment,\" says Joanna Hardy, a London-based barrister.\n\nIn 2016 HM Courts & Tribunals Service began a £1bn court reform programme. This included a video-conferencing tool called the Cloud Video Platform (CVP), which allows for a dedicated private conference area, so criminal lawyers can speak to their clients without visiting prison.\n\nA programme for testing and adopting video technology was planned out until 2022, but in the pandemic, the government had to get CVP up and running in 10 weeks. This has since been extended to civil courts. But this implementation has been challenging, as there are only a restricted number of physical video links allowed.\n\n\"As we weren't ready for this huge technological revolution no-one had manned the tech rooms or built enough rooms on the other end in the prison. We can have as many laptops as we like, as much software as we like but if we can't put a prisoner into a room with a screen, the other end is pointless,\" Ms Hardy says.\n\nAccording to Ms Hardy, the waiting times to get these slots have been \"completely unacceptable\", and it has meant that sometimes hearings had to go ahead without the defendant present.\n\n\"It's like human beings failing where technology could have bridged the gap,\" she says.\n\nA Ministry of Justice spokesperson said that it had offered more than 400 CVP meeting rooms since the outbreak of coronavirus, but added that it is taking steps to increase the available capacity of video conferencing at some locations by extending operating hours. The spokesperson said that the MoJ is also undertaking urgent action to increase the physical number of video link outlets at critical sites.\n\nAt the moment, criminal trials are going ahead using social distancing - meaning sometimes a second courtroom is linked by technology, but this is creating further backlogs, as it means one case is occupying the same space as two.\n\nJustice, the all-party law reform and human rights organisation, has trialled a virtual jury trial with a mock case, and suggested it should be considered as a possible option, but this hasn't been taken on by the courts.\n\nThe issue with virtual jury trials is whether or not they could affect the outcome of a trial. Some lawyers feel like juries should see a witness, feel an exhibit and dispense justice to a fellow human being in the confines of a court room.\n\nJodie Hill says it is more difficult to cross-examine people in video hearings\n\n\"You can lose the impact of cross examination. When you're challenging their evidence in person it's easier to get them to trip up if they're not being honest, whereas if they're on video it might be easier for them to cover it up,\" says Jodie Hill, solicitor and managing director of Thrive Law, an employment law specialist.\n\nFor smaller hearings, online alternatives could be here for the long term, as it means lawyers don't have to travel all over the UK unnecessarily. This doesn't mean that every hearing that can be done remotely, should be done remotely.\n\n\"We don't want overkill. We think some cases still need to be in the room, particularly if you're dealing with vulnerable people or sensitive cases. It has to be a balancing act of harnessing the benefits of technology and thinking about the specific case,\" says Ms Hardy.", "The UK is forging its post-Brexit path as a \"confident, independent nation - and an energetic force for good\", according to the government.\n\nIt's free to set trade on its own terms, pursue opportunities and higher living standards. But can it square profit with principle?\n\nIs turning a blind eye to human rights violations worth it to have a trade deal that knocks a couple of quid off the price of an imported shirt?\n\nThat New Year's resolution is already being tested, as China falls increasingly out of favour.\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab has referred to conditions, under which over a million Uighur Muslims are being held in camps and forced into work, as \"at the worst... torture and inhumane and degrading treatments\".\n\nHe warned that British companies will face fines, if they can't show that their supply chains are free from forced labour.\n\nIn December, a BBC investigation revealed thousands of Uighurs and other minorities have been compelled to toil in the cotton fields of Xinjiang. The region accounts for a fifth of the world's crop - it's not always easy to tell where your t-shirt hails from.\n\nThe UK and Canada have led the charge here, but one wonders how much further can it go.\n\nMr Raab told the BBC that the UK should not be engaging in free trade negotiations with countries whose record was \"well below the level of genocide\".\n\nThere are several issues with this: first, working out who gets to decree human rights abuses.\n\nAmendments to the Trade Bill currently going through Parliament would oblige the government to assess the human rights records of potential partners.\n\nIn July, Dominic Raab accused China of \"gross and egregious\" human rights abuses against its Uighur population\n\nOne amendment proposes allowing the High Court to declare a genocide in other countries, and forcing the immediate cancellation of trade deals with said nations.\n\nMr Raab, however, says the decision to declare a genocide can't, and shouldn't be, delegated to the courts. Rather, it's for MPs to hold the government to account over trade deals.\n\nBut Labour MPs, who have written to their Conservative counterparts urging them to support the amendments, say they've already been denied powers of scrutiny.\n\nThey highlight trade deals rolled over with Egypt, Cameroon and Turkey, with whom the UK previously enjoyed similar deals the EU had struck.\n\nThese three countries, they argue, have questionable records on human rights.\n\nAnd then there's China. The UK is not planning a deal with Beijing and has indicated it won't do a deal with countries that don't share its democratic values.\n\nBut both nations have their eye on joining the wider Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.\n\nWith imports and exports worth almost £80bn in 2019, China already scores as one of the UK's largest trading partners, and it's not just about frocks and financial services crossing borders.\n\nSince Xi Jinping and David Cameron famously sipped a pint in a Buckinghamshire pub in 2015, Chinese investment in the UK has exploded, backing everything from football clubs to restaurant chains.\n\nNow China's appeal has soured, but it may not be easy to back away from encouraging investment, or a trade deal which touts lower import prices and greater opportunities for exporters, when the UK economy is already reeling.\n\nThe Wolverhampton Wanderers are owned by Chinese investors Fosun International\n\nTake textiles - a free trade deal would do away with a 12% tariff on clothes hailing from China. Ultimately, trade deals build on an existing - in this case very lucrative - relationship.\n\nCritics argue it's not enough to refrain from boosting ties with nations with chequered records - they should be lessened.\n\nBut it's even harder to snub countries that are already providing jobs for thousands, or items from the frivolous, such as smartphones, to the vital, like billions of PPE items.\n\nSome say the UK has its own issues elsewhere. It resumed the sales of arms to Saudi Arabia last year, after the government said the method for licensing had been reformulated to ensure they wouldn't be used in Yemen. Human rights groups are less sure.\n\nBalancing its quest to be a responsible citizen, together with exploring fresh fortunes, is just one dilemma the UK faces, as it shapes its new identity on the global stage.", "Boris Johnson will be glad Donald Trump has not been re-elected for a second term as US president, ex-Civil Service head Lord Sedwill has suggested.\n\nWriting in the Daily Mail, Lord Sedwill said those who believed Boris Johnson would have preferred Mr Trump to win again were \"mistaken.\"\n\nHe said he \"would not have been to the benefit\" of British or European security, trade or environment issues.\n\nDowning Street said Mr Johnson looked forward to working with Joe Biden.\n\nThis month he said Mr Trump was \"completely wrong\" to cast doubt on the US election and encourage supporters to storm the Capitol.\n\nAnd in 2015, when he was Mayor of London, Mr Johnson accused him of \"stupefying ignorance\" over his comments about violence in the city.\n\nBut after Mr Trump's victory in the US election in 2016, then Foreign Secretary Mr Johnson said there was a \"lot to be positive about\", and while running for the Conservative leadership in 2019, he said the President had \"many good qualities\".\n\nMr Trump later praised Mr Johnson, saying: \"they call him Britain Trump\".\n\nMr Johnson congratulated Mr Biden in a phone call after his US election win, saying he looked forward to \"strengthening the partnership\" between the US and UK.\n\nBut BBC political correspondent Chris Mason said Lord Sedwill's remarks would not be unhelpful to Downing Street as any perception in Washington that Mr Johnson was like Mr Trump becomes a liability with the arrival of President Biden.\n\nIn his Daily Mail article, Lord Sedwill, who was the UK's most senior civil servant until he stood down in September, said there was \"relief in Western capitals\" that normal diplomatic relationships will be restored once Mr Biden is inaugurated on Wednesday.\n\nThe former Cabinet Secretary said: \"Those of us who regard ourselves as close American allies have badly missed US leadership over the past four years.\n\n\"Based on my time working for Boris Johnson in Downing Street, I believe those who have said he would have preferred a second Trump term are mistaken. That would not have been to the benefit of British or European security, to transatlantic trade, let alone the environmental agenda to which the prime minister is so committed.\"\n\nLord Sedwill added: \"With Brexit accomplished and the Biden administration ready to re-engage, this is the moment for Global Britain to step up.\"", "Evelyn Jones was one of the care home residents whose family raised concerns\n\nSix care home residents died after suffering dehydration and malnourishment because of alleged neglect, an inquest has been told.\n\nStanley James, 89, June Hamer, 71, Stanley Bradford, 76, Edith Evans, 85, Evelyn Jones, 87, and William Hickman, 71 all died between 2003 and 2005.\n\nThey were residents at Brithdir Nursing Home in New Tredegar, Caerphilly.\n\nThe inquest in Newport follows Operation Jasmine, an £11.6m inquiry into alleged neglect at six homes.\n\nOne of Wales' biggest inquiries, it was launched after the death of an 84-year-old patient at a nursing home in Newbridge, Caerphilly.\n\nOpening the inquest, Assistant Coroner for Gwent Geraint Williams said police started investigating in 2005 following the death of an 84-year-old \"mentally infirm\" woman at another care home in Newbridge.\n\nMr Williams said it led to officers uncovering a \"pattern of concerns linked to other deaths in other care homes\".\n\nJune Hamer went into Brithdir in 2003\n\nIn relation to the Brithdir inquiry, Mr Williams said: \"Operation Jasmine uncovered evidence suggesting poor care of residents, including allegations of poor pressure sore and peg [percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy] feed management, malnourishment, and general neglect of the residents' long-term needs, together with deficient standards of care and nursing practice.\"\n\nThe inquest heard resident Mr James, who had dementia and was not mobile, developed several pressure sores in the 18 months before he died in August 2003.\n\nMr Bradford, who had schizophrenia, was admitted to the Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil on several occasions for complaints of \"dehydration, chest and urine infections\".\n\nBefore he died in August 2005 he was \"observed to be seriously malnourished\", by doctors.\n\nDementia patient Mrs Evans was admitted to the same hospital in September 2005, where nurses found the site around her feeding tube \"infected\", while broken skin was found on her buttocks and she appeared \"unkempt and dirty, and her mouth and lips were dry and her tongue was thick\".\n\nThe trial of the late Dr Prana Das for care home neglect collapsed after he suffered brain damage in an attack\n\nDr Prana Das, who owned and ran the nursing home along with several other facilities in Wales, faced a string of charges relating to failings in care.\n\nHe suffered a brain injury during a burglary at his home in 2012 and was declared medically unfit to stand trial.\n\nDr Das died in January 2020 aged 73, but his widow and co-owner of the home, Dr Nishebita Das, who is said not to have taken part in running it, is expected to give evidence at the inquest.\n\nMr Williams told the hearing that, even before the couple purchased the home in April 2002 under their company Puretruce Health Care Limited, \"serious concerns\" were raised by state agencies regarding the number of residents who had suffered pressure ulcers.\n\n\"Those issues continued, even after Dr Das assumed ownership of the home,\" he said.\n\nMr Williams said the inquest will consider the actions of nurses and carers at the home, \"many of whom came to this country from abroad to work and have since returned there, and are now not available to participate in the inquest\".\n\nThe inquest is set to last until March.\n\nA hearing into the death of a seventh resident, Matthew Higgins, 86, will be held following the conclusion of this inquest.", "Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said he is self-isolating after being alerted by the UK's NHS Covid-19 app.\n\nThe West Suffolk MP said self-isolation was \"perhaps the most important part of all the social distancing\" and urged others to do the same if contacted.\n\nIn a tweet, Mr Hancock said he would be working from home until Sunday, adding \"we all have a part to play in getting this virus under control\".\n\nHe contracted coronavirus in March 2020 and suffered \"mild symptoms\".\n\nMr Hancock said he learned from the app he had been \"in close contact with somebody who's tested positive\" and so self-isolating was \"how we break the chains of transmission\".\n\n\"So you must follow these rules like I'm going to,\" he said. \"I've got to work from home for the next six days, and together, by doing this, by following this, and all the other panoply of rules that we've had to put in place, we can get through this and beat this virus.\"\n\nMr Hancock said he was alerted by the app on Monday night, having earlier led a Downing Street press conference alongside NHS England medical director Prof Stephen Powis and Public Health England's Dr Susan Hopkins.\n\nThe NHS app tells a person if they have been in close contact with someone who has later tested positive for coronavirus and tells them to isolate for 10 full days from their last contact.\n\nWhile it is not clear from Mr Hancock's statement if his isolation ends on Sunday or Monday, his period of quarantine suggests he was last in contact with the person who was infected on Wednesday or Thursday.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Matt Hancock This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nDowning Street confirmed that Mr Hancock would not receive the vaccine early because he is leading the pandemic response.\n\nThe prime minister's official spokesman said: \"The PM and the rest of the cabinet will take the vaccine when it's their turn to do so based on the priority lists that have been published.\n\n\"We don't think it's right that the PM or other members of cabinet take the vaccine in place of somebody who is at higher clinical risk.\"\n\nIn March, the health secretary revealed he had tested positive for Covid-19 shortly after Prime Minister Boris Johnson had confirmed he too had the virus.\n\nWhile the health secretary recovered fairly swiftly, and was able to work from home during his illness, Mr Johnson required hospital treatment.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid symptoms: What are they and how long should I self-isolate for?\n\nSelf-isolation, which means staying at home and not leaving, is a legal requirement for anybody who has Covid symptoms, has tested positive for the virus, lives with someone who has symptoms, has arrived from abroad or has been contacted by NHS Test and Trace.\n\nIn December, the self-isolation period required was cut from 14 days to 10 days.\n\nUsing Bluetooth technology the NHS app makes contact between mobile phones when they are near each other, if an owner of a phone later tests positive for the virus and shares that with the app, alerts are sent to anyone who is deemed to have been a close contact.", "More than 127,000 people in the UK who contracted coronavirus have lost their lives - with the pandemic claiming more than 3.4 million deaths worldwide. As the UK marks a year since the first coronavirus lockdown was called, it's a time for reflection.\n\nWe have gathered tributes to more than 770 of those who have died. Below are words of remembrance from friends, family and colleagues.\n\nPlease enable JavaScript or upgrade your browser to see this interactive\n\nThe tributes are displayed at random, which means that you will see different faces each time you visit this page.\n\nIf we have used your tribute to your friend or family member, it will appear in the carousel above, or you can find it by entering their name in the search box below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. Enter a name to search the tributes\n\nFor more on NHS and healthcare workers, please see this page dedicated to 100 people who died while helping to look after others.\n\nFor more on how it has affected people's lives, from family tragedy to its impact on everyday life, we have a collection of personal stories about life in lockdown.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Britain's climate change leadership is being undercut by a government decision to allow a new coal mine in Cumbria, MPs have warned.\n\nThe UK is hosting a UN climate summit in November, where it will urge other nations to phase out fossil fuels.\n\nThe MPs say the government's decision to allow a new colliery at home will make it harder to secure a deal.\n\nThe Woodhouse mine was approved by Cumbria County Council because it will create jobs in an area of high unemployment.\n\nThe planning minister Robert Jenrick could have overruled it, but said the issue was best decided at a local level.\n\nThat verdict was derided by environmentalists, who pointed out that climate change from fossil fuel burning is a global problem.\n\nAlok Sharma, who is leading the COP26 climate summit and who co-ordinates UK policies on climate change, was asked by the Commons business select committee whether the mine approval was \"an embarrassment\". He replied: \"I take your point\".\n\nBusiness Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told the committee there was a \"slight tension\" between approving the mine, near Whitehaven, and broader attempts to clean up the economy.\n\nBut he said ministers decided to allow the pit because it will produce coking coal for steel-making, which otherwise would have to be imported.\n\nHe said: \"There's a slight tension between the decision to open this mine and our avowed intention to take coal off the grid… there was a debate in the government about what we could do about this, but this was a local planning decision.\n\n\"If we don't have sources of coking coal in the UK we would be importing those anyway\".\n\nThis appears to run counter to advice from the Climate Change Committee which has said all coal - including coking coal - should be phased out by 2035. Doubts have been raised about investors in the mine being left with a \"stranded asset\" if the pit is forced to close on climate grounds.\n\nThe mine approval is even more poignant because the UK founded the 'Powering Past Coal Alliance\" - a global club to persuade nations to leave coal in the ground.\n\nA source close to the Alliance secretariat told BBC News that staff were enraged by the decision. They believed the decision had been made to help secure so-called \"Red Wall\" votes in areas which previously voted Labour .\n\nMohamed Adow, from a pressure group, Powershift Africa, told BBC News: \"It is quite bizarre that the UK government, in the year it hosts the biggest global climate talks since the signing of the Paris Agreement, has approved a new coal mine.\"\n\nThe young campaigner Greta Thunberg said the decision showed pledges to achieve net zero emissions targets by 2050 \"basically mean nothing\".\n\nDarren Jones, chair of the business committee, told BBC News it would be hard for the UK to persuade countries like Poland to abandon coal whilst building a mine.\n\nHe argued that the government should have found another way to bring jobs to Cumbria. He said: \"Carbon-intensive industries are looking to the government for leadership on the transition to a green future.\n\n\"Backing coal at home doesn't look in line with the recent Energy White Paper and certainly makes our efforts to secure international agreement on ambitious decarbonisation harder to achieve.\"\n\nThe Environmental Audit Committee Chairman, Philip Dunne, told BBC News: \"If the UK is to achieve its ambition to be an environmental world leader, the government must offer clear guidance on how we can take every industry to net-zero, and offer a pipeline of investable projects.\n\n\"The steel sector needs to develop alternatives to importing coking coal. This could also support the next generation of green jobs - which are urgently needed.\"\n\nThe cross-bench peer Baroness Worthington told BBC News: \"This decision is real laziness of thinking from the government. Just think of signal it sends to all those countries who want to cling on to coal.\n\n\"The government doesn't yet have a cohesive strategy that makes sense. It's crazy. Absolute madness.\"", "Medical staff are expected to \"face pressures unlike any other they have faced before\" as NI approaches its toughest week so far in the pandemic.\n\nThe British Medical Association has said while its doctors are \"coping\", many feel they are unable to give care to the \"standard they would want\".\n\nThe peak in intensive care is predicted to happen next weekend.\n\nThe head of the BMA in NI, Dr Tom Black has been critical of the way this wave of the pandemic has been managed.\n\nHe said: \"Staff will do their best in a very difficult situation, where many decisions in this pandemic were made too late.\"\n\nWhile it is expected the number of hospital admissions will peak sometime over the next eight to 10 days, the number requiring intensive care treatment is likely to continue increasing for at least another fortnight.\n\nDr Black said he was concerned for both patients and staff.\n\nHe said: \"It is likely that over the next few weeks doctors will be asked to work in a new location or provide support to areas that are already overstretched.\n\n\"Many have already had planned annual leave cancelled.\"\n\nThere were a further 19 virus-related deaths and 640 more Covid-19 cases reported in Northern Ireland on Monday.\n\nThe latest figures from the Department of Health bring the total number of deaths to 1,625, while 96,001 people have tested positive for the virus since the pandemic began.\n\nSome 65 patients are in ICU, down two from the last report, and 51 patients are being ventilated.\n\nSince the vaccine rollout began in NI, 146,733 people have been vaccinated, according to the Department of Health.\n\nOf that number, 125,717 were first doses and 21,016 were second jabs.\n\nA total of 31,393 people from the over-80 age group have been vaccinated.\n\nEarlier the BMA told BBC News NI that more than 90,000 doses the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine had arrived in Northern Ireland but the Department of Health has said it is anticipated separate deliveries will arrive by this weekend.\n\nDr Black said many staff members had reported feeling \"exhausted and demoralised\" and he warned that when it came to reviewing how the pandemic was handled \"this phase will stand out as one where we could have planned better\".\n\nHealth Minister Robin Swann said the next seven days is \"when we will see that real intense pressure coming on our inpatients and intensive care units\".\n\n\"Our worst case scenario has modelling up to 1,200 inpatients - and that's a serious pressure that comes on our system,\" he told Radio Ulster's Evening Extra programme.\n\n\"We can go up into nearly 200 ICU capacity but that comes at a stretch, that comes with putting our staff under severe pressure in ICU units.\n\n\"It also comes by having to shift the ICU specialist nurse from a ratio of one-to-one to a ratio of one-to-two or even one-to-three in extreme pressures.\n\n\"That's not something we want to do,\" he added.\n\nThe past week saw hospitals across Northern Ireland coming together in order to cope with the strain.\n\nOn 10 January, the Southern Health Trust was on the cusp of declaring a major incident amid the mounting pressures across the health service.\n\nThat was avoided as many off-duty staff answered a call to come into work and the health trusts pulled together to provide a regional response to the crisis.\n\nPatients were diverted to those hospitals which could take them and where infrastructure could cope with supplying additional oxygen to the very ill.\n\nOver the weekend of 9/10 January the Southern Health Trust - the smallest of the health trusts - was dealing with the highest number of patients who required oxygen.\n\nIn the past week the Northern and Southern Health Trusts have seen the highest number of patients.\n\nThat reflects the high rate of community transmission in some areas those trusts cover.\n\nMeanwhile, no resolution has been reached between Stormont leaders and the Irish Government over the sharing of passenger data.\n\nLast week, First Minister Arlene Foster and Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill criticised Dublin for failing to share information on travellers arriving there during the pandemic.\n\nMichelle O'Neill said it was \"regrettable\" the issue has not been resolved\n\nFirst Minister Arlene Foster said repeated efforts to access data on passenger locator forms filled out by people arriving in the Republic of Ireland had failed.\n\nMrs Foster and Ms O'Neill indicated on Thursday that they planned to raise the matter directly with Taoiseach (Irish prime minsiter) Micheál Martin.\n\nMs O'Neill told the Northern Ireland Assembly on Monday that no resolution has been found yet.\n\nShe told MLAs the issue had been raised \"on every occasion we have had the opportunity\" and that it was \"regrettable\" that the issue had not been resolved.\n\nThe travel issue will be discussed at a meeting on Wednesday involving the first minister, the deputy first minister, Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney and NI Secretary of State Brandon Lewis.\n\n\"I hope that perhaps Wednesday's meeting will allow some opportunity for there to be a way forward,\" the deputy first minister added.\n\nIt was announced on Sunday that all travellers who have returned from Portugal or transited through 16 South American countries in the past 14 days will have to - along with their household - self-isolate for 10 days upon return to Northern Ireland.\n\nThis includes travellers who entered these countries en route to another destination. All travellers returning home from South America are advised to be tested, whether or not they have symptoms.\n\nFrom Thursday, all international travellers will be required to present a negative Covid-19 test result before arriving in Northern Ireland.\n\nThis rule comes into effect in England, Scotland and Wales on Monday.\n\nOn Monday, the Department of Health in the Republic of Ireland reported eight more coronavirus-related deaths.\n\nIt brings its death toll to 2,616.\n\nThe department said 2,121 new cases of the virus had been reported, with a cumulative total of 174,843 infections.\n\nIt said that as of 14:00 local time on Monday, 1,975 Covid-19 patients are in hospital, of which 200 are in ICU (intensive care units).\n\nIrish Chief Medical Officer, Dr Tony Holohan, said: \"This third wave of the pandemic has seen higher level of hospitalisations across all age groups.\n\n\"There are now more sick people in hospital than any time in the course of this pandemic\".", "Staff gathered outside a supermarket to pay their respects to a colleague who died with coronavirus.\n\nJohn Deacy, 81, worked the Christmas Eve shift at the Tesco Extra store in Gabalfa, Cardiff, died just two weeks later.\n\nFriends and colleagues clapped as the funeral procession went by the store.\n\nFormer members of a jazz band, formed by Mr Deacy in the 1970s, marched in front of the hearse.\n\nHis son, Wayne, 56, said: “My dad put everyone above himself. He’d do anything for anyone.\n\n\"He’d help anyone and would never speak badly of people.”\n\nMr Deacy was in the Royal Marines for seven years and was a semi-professional boxer before starting a career at the industrial gas company BOC.\n\nHe went on to work for the supermarket for 16 years.\n\n“We’ve had loads and loads of messages from hundreds of staff who said he will leave a massive gaping hole,\" his son said.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid in Scotland: Schools to stay closed until mid-February at least\n\nScotland's Covid-19 lockdown has been extended until at least the middle of February, with most school pupils to continue learning from home.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon told MSPs that transmission of the virus appeared to be declining but was still too high to ease restrictions.\n\nBut she hopes schools will be able to at least begin a phased return to the classroom in the middle of next month.\n\nThe level four restrictions have been in place since Boxing Day.\n\nMeanwhile the islands of Barra and Vatersay are being moved into the top level of restrictions due to a \"significant outbreak\" there.\n\nThe current restrictions, which have closed non-essential shops and seen a \"stay at home\" message put down in law, had been due to expire at the end of this month.\n\nBut Scottish government ministers agreed they should be extended after a cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning.\n\nMs Sturgeon told MSPs that lockdown was \"beginning to have an impact\" on the number of new infections, but said Scotland remained in a \"very precarious position\".\n\nShe added: \"We need to be realistic that any improvement we are seeing is down, at this stage, to the fact that we are staying at home and reducing our interactions.\n\n\"Any relaxation of lockdown while case numbers, even though they might be declining, nevertheless remain very high, could quickly send the situation into reverse.\"\n\nThe vast majority of Scottish pupils have been home learning since the Christmas holiday\n\nThe announcement came as 1,165 new cases of Covid-19 were registered in Scotland, representing 11.1% of tests carried out.\n\nA total of 1,989 people are in hospital with the virus while a further 71 deaths of people who recently tested positive have been logged.\n\nMs Sturgeon said there was \"real and severe\" pressure on health services, with around 30% more patients in hospital than at the peak of the first wave in April 2020, and that this was \"almost certain to rise for a further period yet\".\n\nSchool buildings and nurseries have been closed to most pupils since the start of term, with all but the children of some key workers and vulnerable pupils learning from home.\n\nNot only will schools remain closed to most pupils until at least mid-February, they are unlikely to return to normal at that point.\n\nThe first minister has indicated that her aim is to begin a phased return, if coronavirus allows. So what might that mean?\n\nThe groups that will get back into class first are likely to include secondary school exam year pupils, the youngest primary school children and those in P7 getting ready to move to high school.\n\nFor others, online learning is likely to last a bit longer.\n\nBoth the return to school and the continuation of the wider lockdown will be reviewed again in a fortnight on 2 Feb.\n\nBy that week, first doses of vaccine should have been offered to all over 80s in Scotland as well as frontline NHS and social care staff and care home residents.\n\nWith only 15-20% of the over 80s reached so far, opposition parties think the programme is slipping behind schedule, which the first minister denies.\n\nMs Sturgeon said she knew how \"challenging and stressful\" home schooling was for families, but said community transmission was \"too high\" to allow a safe return to classrooms.\n\nShe said: \"If it is at all possible, as I very much hope it will be, to begin even a phased return to in-school learning in mid-February, we will.\n\n\"But I also have to be straight with families and say that it is simply too early to be sure about whether and to what extent this will be possible.\"\n\nStatistics released on Monday showed that Scotland had vaccinated 6% of its adult population so far - the same percentage as Wales, but lower than the 8% that have been vaccinated in England and 8.7% in Northern Ireland.\n\nEngland has also given a second dose of the vaccine to 427,386 people, compared to only 3,698 in Scotland.\n\nMs Sturgeon said approximately 100,000 people were being vaccinated per week in Scotland, and that health teams were \"on track\" to expand this to 400,000 per week by the end of February.\n\nStatistics have suggested the vaccination programme in Scotland is currently lagging behind England\n\nMore than 90% of care home residents have now been given a first dose, along with 70% of care home staff and 70% of all frontline health and care workers.\n\nThe first minister said the focus on care homes - where it is \"time consuming and labour intensive\" to give out jabs - was \"why overall figures are at this stage lower than in England\", where more over-80s have received the vaccine.\n\nShe said the \"pace of progress in the over-80s group is also now picking up\", and that the government remained on track to hit its target of completing everyone on the priority list by early May.\n\nScottish Conservative group leader Ruth Davidson said the Scottish government were \"lagging behind their own targets\" on vaccination, saying the focus on care homes \"doesn't explain how slowly the vaccine is reaching GP surgeries and the public\".\n\nShe read out a series of letters from elderly people who had not been contacted about getting a jab, saying they were \"anxious they don't get left behind\".\n\nMs Sturgeon said she would not apologise for \"prioritising the most vulnerable first\", saying all four UK nations were \"working to the same targets\".\n\nScottish Labour's interim leader Jackie Baillie asked if Ms Sturgeon was confident the government could hit its \"critical\" targets, saying GPs were still complaining about \"patchy\" distribution of vaccines.\n\nThe first minister replied that her government would hit its goals, saying it was \"always the intention\" to increase the pace of vaccination as infrastructure and supplies became available.\n\nThis would see care home residents, healthcare staff and all over-80s get a first dose by the start of February, with over-70s and those deemed \"extremely vulnerable\" by mid-February and all over-65s by the beginning of March.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Tuesday evening. We'll have another update for you on Wednesday morning.\n\nScotland's Covid-19 lockdown has been extended until at least the middle of February, with most school pupils to continue learning from home at least until then. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said transmission of the virus appeared to be declining but was still too high to ease restrictions, which have been in place since Boxing Day. It comes as England's deputy chief medical officer said schools may reopen region by region after February half term.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock has said he is self-isolating after being alerted by the UK's NHS Covid-19 app. He urged others to do the same if \"pinged\" by the app and said self-isolation was \"perhaps the most important part of all the social distancing\". Mr Hancock, who is MP for West Suffolk, suffered \"mild symptoms\" when he contracted coronavirus in March 2020.\n\nA group of politicians drank alcohol on Welsh Parliament premises, days after a coronavirus rule banning pubs from serving drinks took effect. BBC Wales has been told Conservative Senedd leader Paul Davies, Darren Millar and Nick Ramsay were drinking together in early December, with Labour Senedd member Alun Davies also involved. Senedd authorities said they are investigating an \"incident\". Elsewhere, an internal investigation has began after railway workers allegedly held a surprise baby shower in a closed Patisserie Valerie bakery at London's Marylebone station during lockdown.\n\nHeadlines about footballers and Covid have been hard to miss lately - with questions about dressing room distancing, off-pitch partying and all those post-goal hugs. But what's football in lockdown actually like for players and their families? BBC Newsbeat has found out by speaking to Wycombe Wanderers footballer Joe Jacobson and his wife Louise.\n\nYou can find more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has confirmed the government is looking at scrapping some EU labour laws now it is no longer bound by the bloc's rules.\n\nBut he promised there would be no dilution of workers' rights.\n\nMeasures under consideration include relaxing the working time directive which enshrines a 48-hour week.\n\nShadow business secretary Ed Miliband warned the government wanted to take a \"wrecking ball\" to hard-won rights.\n\nEarlier this week Mr Kwarteng said he wanted to \"protect and enhance\" labour law after the Financial Times reported that some rules could be weakened.\n\nThe minister later told business leaders the UK had an opportunity to reform regulation derived from EU law, but would not deliberately antagonise the EU - its biggest trading partner - immediately after the Brexit deal.\n\nConfirming the review on Tuesday, Mr Kwarteng told MPs there would be no \"bonfire of rights\".\n\n\"I think the view was that we wanted to look at the whole range of issues relating to our EU membership and examine what we wanted to keep, if you like,\" he said.\n\nBut he said \"the idea that we are trying to whittle down standards, that's not at all plausible or true\".\n\nAppearing before MPs, the business secretary said: \"I'm very struck as I look at EU economies how many EU countries - I think it's about 17 or 18 - have essentially opted out of the working time directive.\n\n\"So even by just following that we are way above the average European standard and I want to maintain that. I think we can be a high-wage, high-employment economy, a very successful economy, and that's what we should be aiming for.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Kwasi Kwarteng This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMr Miliband said that after denying the FT's report, Mr Kwarteng had now \"let the cat out of the bag\" in admitting the government was conducting a review.\n\nHe warned that opting out of the 48-hour week would harm workers in key sectors like the NHS, road haulage and airlines from working excessive hours.\n\n\"A government committed to maintaining existing protections would not be reviewing whether they should be unpicked. This exposes that the government's priorities for Britain are totally wrong.\"\n\nDrew Hendry, the SNP's business spokesman, echoed the criticism, accusing the government of planning an \"assault\" on workers' rights.\n\nMeanwhile the boss of the UK's biggest recruitment firm, Reed, told the BBC's Today programme that there was \"no wish\" among employers to see \"a so-called bonfire of workers' rights.\n\n\"They must be protected because fair treatment is the bedrock of good workplace relations,\" James Reed said.\n\nThe chairman of the firm said the government should instead focus on lower-paid workers and measures that could be taken to improve unemployment, which is set to rise further into mid-2021.\n\n\"I would suggest two things are looked at before any EU rules: The apprenticeship levy, which is clearly failing... and also National Insurance on jobs. It's a tax on jobs - how can that be improved? Especially to help the low-paid back into work.\"\n\nUnder the post-Brexit trade deal with the EU, the UK has agreed to conditions that maintain fair competition, or a level playing field, between the two sides.\n\nHowever, the EU's ambassador to the UK, Joao Vale de Almeida, said Brussels could retaliate if Boris Johnson's government went too far in with deregulation.\n\n\"It will be for us to judge the extent to which it violates this principle of 'level playing field' and if that is the case there are mechanisms in the treaty, in the agreement, that allow us to discuss and eventually to come to an understanding,\" he said on Tuesday.\n\n\"If no understanding there are retaliation measures that can be applied on both sides.\"", "The death happened in the alpine resort of Verbier, in Switzerland\n\nA British man has been killed in an avalanche in the Swiss Alps, police have said.\n\nThe man was among 10 people swept away at the alpine resort of Verbier, to the east of Geneva, on Monday morning.\n\nPolice said the skier, who has not been named, lived in Verbier and died at the scene.\n\nOne person was flown to hospital with serious injuries, while eight others were uninjured, local police said.\n\nA police spokesman said: \"The avalanche occurred outside the piste between the Verbier ski area and 'Les Attelas'.\n\n\"At around 10:20, a skier was driving down a corridor below the 'Attelas' area.\n\n\"A snow drift came loose and carried the skier as well as another person who had been further down at the time.\"\n\nAn investigation has been launched.\n\nThe Foreign Office said it was offering support to the British man's family and was in contact with the authorities in Switzerland.\n\nThe death comes after several days of heavy snowfall across Switzerland, which led to the death of another skier who was killed in an avalanche while skiing in Gstaad.\n\nIt takes the total deaths due to avalanches in the country to seven since last weekend.\n\nMore than 200 British skiers left the popular Verbier resort in December after Switzerland imposed a coronavirus quarantine following the discovery of a new variant of the virus.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Lorry drivers have been holding up the traffic in Westminster.\n\nBoris Johnson has pledged £23m to help businesses affected by Brexit delays amid protests by fishing firms.\n\nDemonstrations took place outside government departments in central London by exporters who are warning their livelihoods are under threat.\n\nExports of fresh fish and seafood have been severely disrupted by new border controls since the UK's transition period ended earlier this month.\n\nThe PM said firms would be compensated for delays that were not their fault.\n\nIndustry associations have complained that extra paperwork has made it difficult to deliver fresh produce to mainland Europe before it goes off.\n\nThey have warned that if the situation continues, jobs could soon be at risk.\n\nPressed on what he would do in response, Mr Johnson said the government would step in to support firms which \"through no fault of their own have experienced bureaucratic delays, difficulties getting their goods through, where there is a genuine willing buyer on the other side of the channel\".\n\n\"There's a £23m compensation fund we've set up and we'll make sure they get help,\" he said.\n\nDetails of the scheme are expected later this week.\n\nAfter a day of protests in central London, which saw 20 lorries drive up Whitehall, the Metropolitan Police said 14 people had been reported for Covid-related offences, but no arrests were made.\n\nMark Moore, manager of the Dartmouth Crab Company, said his business and others were protesting to \"raise awareness\" of the impact of new border checks.\n\nHe told BBC Radio 5 Live his company had faced delays of up to eight and a half hours when delivering produce into the European Union.\n\nHe added that the situation was \"especially difficult\" for the shellfish sector, where goods were at risk of going off before reaching customers.\n\n\"It's not about the increased documentation per se,\" he said.\n\n\"We have taken that on board, and we ourselves - and I know many others - have had no issues with producing the actual paperwork.\n\n\"It's the volume required and the timeframe in which to produce it, which doesn't lend itself to live shellfish and fish generally.\"\n\nThere are 24 lorries in total, overwhelmingly from seafood exporters in Scotland. Businesses taking part say the Brexit trade deal has left their industry high and dry.\n\nAnd although one haulier from Aberdeenshire I spoke to was keen to stress that their coordinated protest was peaceful, it is clear that they all feel that direct action is now necessary to make the government sit up and take notice.\n\nGood natured though their action was, it did for a time cause serious traffic congestion along Whitehall and Parliament Square.\n\nHowever, low levels of traffic perhaps caused by the Covid lockdown meant the roads around Whitehall didn't grind to a complete halt.\n\nAt stake, they believe, is an industry, but also thousands of livelihoods. Exporters say they are backed by fishermen who are struggling to land their catches.\n\nAnd although the rural Scottish communities which are sustained by fishing might seem like a long way from the streets of SW1, the hauliers certainly made their presence felt this morning.\n\nHaving left the EU's customs union and the single market, UK exports are subject to new customs and veterinary checks which have caused problems at the border.\n\nSome Scottish fishermen have been landing their catch in Denmark to avoid the \"bureaucratic system\" involved in exporting to Europe, according to Scotland's rural economy secretary.\n\nLast week, Boris Johnson told a committee of MPs that fishing firms impacted by disruption would be compensated for \"temporary frustrations\".\n\nBut the BBC was told that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) did not know about the promise of compensation before it was made by Mr Johnson.\n\nSpeaking to reporters, the prime minister said he understood the \"frustrations\" of the fishing industry, noting its plight had been \"exacerbated by the Covid pandemic\".\n\n\"Unfortunately, the demand in restaurants on the continent for UK fish has not been what it was before the pandemic, just because the restaurants have been closed for so long,\" he added.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer accused ministers of trying to \"blame fishing communities\" for problems \"rather than accepting it's their failure to prepare\".\n\n\"The government has known there would be a problem with fishing and particularly the sale of fish into the EU for years,\" he told reporters.\n\nMuch media attention has been focussed on Scotland as this export crisis has unfolded.\n\nBut exactly the same problem is rearing its head in the UK's other great fishing stronghold - at the other end of the UK in Devon and Cornwall.\n\nA virtual Who's Who of South West fishing leaders wrote to the environment secretary back in November warning that the new post-Brexit export requirements would have a \"seriously detrimental effect\" on the industry, claiming this \"could be the final straw for many businesses\".\n\nHere, too, many fish exports have now ground to a halt and others have encountered obstacles and long delays.\n\nAnd exporters have reacted angrily to the government's repeated insistence that the issues they've been experiencing over the last two weeks are just \"teething problems\".", "Not all parents have found it easy to home school their children during coronavirus lockdowns\n\nLevels of stress, depression and anxiety among parents and carers have increased with the pressures of the lockdowns, suggests research from the University of Oxford.\n\nMany parents, especially those of secondary-age pupils, say they are worried about their children's futures.\n\nThe government has said it is aware how challenging it is for parents to support children with home learning.\n\nThe research, based on responses from 6,246 parents and carers between mid-March and the end of December 2020, found problems including:\n\nOn an established scale of depression, anxiety and stress, parents' depression scores increased from April through to June from an average of 9.03 to 9.71, says the study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.\n\nWhile these average scores decreased over the summer, when Covid-19 restrictions were eased, to a low of 8.23 in September, they rose again over the course of the autumn term to a high of 10.1 points in December.\n\nParents' stress scores were at their lowest in August and September at 11.4 points, but increased to a high of 13.2 in December, following the pre-Christmas lockdown.\n\nThe researchers said higher levels of stress were detected particularly in low-income families, as well as single-parent households and those with children with special educational needs.\n\nWhile average anxiety scores were relatively stable throughout the whole period - ranging from a 4.71 points in April to 4.24 in July - they hit a high of 5 points in December.\n\nThe study also found just over a third (36%) of parents with young children (10 years or younger) said they were \"substantially worried\" about their children's behaviour, in contrast to just over a quarter (28%) of parents who had older children only (11 years or older).\n\nHowever, nearly half (45%) of those with secondary-age children were worried about their children's education and future, compared to 32% of those with young children.\n\nLeticea, a parent who took part in the study, said: \"I think that UK leaders should have access to this data to see what is going on with the mental health of families and how they are being affected by Covid-19 with increased levels of stress, depression and anxiety - we need something to look forward to.\n\n\"I am also worried that the next three months will show a sharper increase in anxiety and stress where parents are having to do more teaching at home.\n\n\"Children are more worried as their teachers are becoming ill - the 'new variant' sounds more scary, my daughter keeps commenting on an increasing worry of catching Covid-19 which she didn't do so much before.\"\n\nAnother parent, Madiha, said: ''Current times are hard enough as they are.\n\n\"As a working parent, the most important thing for me is to ensure my family's wellbeing, their safety, and their continued development.\n\n\"Prolonged screen time, disruption to daily routine, frequent arguments, lack of exercise, and stress of exams have all been contributing factors to our mental health and wellbeing.\n\nMadiha said she hoped the study would play a part in informing policy and developing interventions to help families.\n\nCathy Creswell, professor of clinical developmental psychology at Oxford University and co-leader of the study, said the findings showed parents were particularly vulnerable to distress during the first lockdown.\n\n\"Our data highlight the particular strains felt by parents during lockdown when many feel that they have been spread too thin by the demands of meeting their children's needs during the pandemic, along with home-schooling and work commitments.\"\n\nSchools were first closed to most pupils in March\n\nJohn Jolly, head of the charity Parentkind, said the research highlighted \"the additional stress and pressure that partial school closures place on parents\".\n\n\"Given the disruption to family life, it is vital that policymakers consult and listen to the concerns of parents on issues that directly impact them and their children's futures.\n\n\"This includes the safety and reopening of schools, the fair allocation of grades in the absence of exams, and remote learning provision.\"\n\nThe Oxford researchers are tracking children's and parents' mental health throughout the current crisis, to help them identify what protects young people from deteriorating mental health and how this may vary according to child and family characteristics.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Ms Davies-Jones wanted to highlight how \"vitally important\" smear tests are\"\n\nAn MP has described how she had to have most of her cervix removed after putting off a smear test for several months.\n\nPontypridd MP Alex Davies-Jones, 31, said she was invited for her first routine screening in December 2015 and \"like so many others, I put it off\".\n\nFollowing a reminder in April 2016 she went for the cervical screening.\n\nShe wrote in the i newspaper it led to her being diagnosed with CIN3, abnormal cells and had to have surgery.\n\nIf left untreated, CIN3 can have a high chance of becoming cancerous.\n\nMs Davies-Jones wrote in the paper she was left \"without the majority of my cervix\" after the surgery.\n\nShe said she used her article to urge others \"don't delay in booking\" and said she felt compelled to write about her experiences for Cervical Cancer Prevention Week.\n\nA cervical screening checks the health of your cervix.\n\nA small sample of cells is taken from the cervix and checked for certain types of human papillomavirus (HPV) that can cause changes to the cells.\n\nIf present the sample is then checked for any changes in the cells which can be treated before they get a chance to turn into cervical cancer.\n\nThe NHS advises women between the ages of 25 to 49 to have a smear test every three years.\n\nAlex Davies-Jones became the Labour MP for Pontypridd in the 2019 General Election\n\nShe wrote: \"I used all of the usual excuses that you may have heard before.\n\n\"I was simply too busy, I couldn't get an appointment and I had no symptoms or abnormalities that were worrying me.\"\n\nMs Davies-Jones wrote she thought the routine screening would \"just be five minutes of awkward conversation with the nurse at my local GP whilst taking my knickers off\".\n\n\"I didn't ever think that there could be a chance that my cells would be 'abnormal' and that the next few months of my life would leave me terrified and constantly contemplating my own mortality.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Chloe Delevingne had a smear test live on the Victoria Derbyshire programme to show what the procedure involved\n\nIf she had put off the screening any longer \"the situation could have been different\", the MP wrote.\n\nShe said she first received a type of laser treatment to \"burn off the abnormal cells from my cervix\" but more treatment was needed after the doctor told her the abnormal cells on her cervix were \"embedded deeper and looked more challenging than expected\".\n\nThen she had to have surgery, a \"cold knife biopsy\".\n\n\"I was without the majority of my cervix, but my life was saved. It was over,\" she wrote.\n\n\"Sadly, for many this isn't the case. For the next few years, I attended screenings every six months to ensure the abnormal cells didn't return.\n\n\"My last screening was in April 2018. Thankfully again all was fine but the anxiety and fear that surrounded me as I awaited those results has stayed with me even now.\"\n\nShe went on to give birth to her son Sullivan in March 2019.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Expert’s report finds eight-year-old Saffie \"could have been saved\" if treated properly for her injuries\n\nA man has described how he tried to help the youngest victim of the Manchester Arena attack as she lay badly injured after the explosion.\n\nPaul Reid, 46, was the first person to reach eight-year-old Saffie-Rose Roussos after the bomb was detonated.\n\nHe said she asked for her mum and said he tried to keep her awake by talking about the Ariana Grande gig.\n\nIt comes after a new report found Saffie could have survived if she had received better medical help.\n\nTwenty-two people were murdered and hundreds more injured when Salman Abedi detonated a bomb in the arena foyer as fans left the concert on 22 May 2017.\n\nMr Reid, who was selling posters at the concert, told the BBC he ran into the foyer seconds after the bomb went off.\n\n\"There was a big bang and I could see up on to the foyer, and there was smoke and you could hear things pinging off the wall,\" he said.\n\n\"I still had the posters in my hand. It was mad because it was like I wasn't there, like I was watching myself.\n\n\"People were just screaming and running in every direction you could think of.\"\n\nSaffie-Rose Roussos was the youngest victim of the Manchester Arena bombing\n\nMr Reid said he tried to help two other people before he noticed Saffie lying on the floor.\n\n\"She was still conscious. I asked her her name and I thought she said Sophie,\" he said.\n\n\"She just got a little bit upset. She asked me for her mum and I said not to worry, we're going to find her in a minute.\n\n\"And I sat there trying to keep her calm. I had to talk to her about the concert, and did she enjoy it.\n\n\"All the time I was sat there, I just thought hundreds of people are just going to come running in here and help us. And, well, hardly anybody came in.\"\n\nThe public inquiry into the attack, which started in September, began to examine the emergency response to the atrocity on Monday.\n\nMr Reid said he began watching the inquiry but said some details given in the opening days did not marry up with his recollection of what happened, and he switched it off.\n\nHe told the BBC after a while another person came to help, but after cutting away some of Saffie's clothing they left and went to the aid of someone else.\n\n\"I gave her [Saffie] a sip of water, because in all this madness there's somebody handing water out,\" he said.\n\n\"So you can imagine in the foyer now, all this is going on and there's a man walking about with water.\"\n\nPaul Reid said he was still haunted by what happened that night\n\nMr Reid said a police officer suggested moving Saffie out of the foyer, but with no stretchers to lift her they had to use a piece of plastic hoarding.\n\n\"The policeman came and said 'she's got to go, I'll take her in my car',\" he added.\n\n\"There was a plastic sheet under somebody's leg who was injured, I started pulling the sheet from under his leg. We put her on it and I started to carry her out, but the board was slippy.\"\n\nHe said they could not get the makeshift stretcher into the officer's car, so they flagged down an ambulance.\n\nMr Reid said he then returned to the foyer, where he went back to the man who he had taken the hoarding from.\n\n\"He had a gash in his stomach, and a paramedic was sitting there holding something against his stomach,\" he said.\n\n\"I held his hand. He had a Liverpool accent so I talked to him about football to take his mind off things, and my mind off things.\"\n\nMr Reid said he was still haunted by what happened that night.\n\n\"It's like yesterday. I can still smell the smoke in that foyer. Still hear the alarms when I go to sleep, when I close my eyes,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm first aid trained, but the most I'd done is put a plaster on.\n\n\"To step in that foyer, it was carnage. It was a war zone.\"\n\nSaffie's parents have said they would not have expected member of the public to have known how to treat her injuries.\n\nHer father Andrew Roussos told the BBC: \"There was a member of the public with her, I can't expect him to tourniquet her, splint her legs and so on.\n\n\"But the medically trained people that were with her, and were with her throughout and didn't apply basic first aid to give Saffie a chance.\"\n\nThe inquiry has previously heard it is important to acknowledge the enormous pressure which those who responded that night came under.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "News of the extended lockdown has not been welcomed by business leaders.\n\nLast month, the Scottish Retail Consortium (SRC) estimated that each week of lockdown meant non-essential stores missing out on £135m of lost sales.\n\nSince then, garden centres and homeware shops have been compelled to close too, and the government has placed curbs on retailers’ click and collect services.\n\nThe SRC says today's extension is a further blow to non-food stores who have already borne a lot during the pandemic.\n\nIt said Scottish stores were set to miss out on almost £950m of lost revenues during the current lockdown period.\n\nQuote Message: The extended lockdown will serve to make it harder for some retailers to emerge from this crisis. Even when we do eventually emerge from enforced hibernation the stark reality is that shops will be unable to trade at capacity due to physical distancing restrictions and caps on the number of customers in stores. This means that April’s abrupt ‘reverse cliff edge’ - which is set to see a 100% re-instatement of business rates – is simply not sustainable. from David Lonsdale Director of the Scottish Retail Consortium The extended lockdown will serve to make it harder for some retailers to emerge from this crisis. Even when we do eventually emerge from enforced hibernation the stark reality is that shops will be unable to trade at capacity due to physical distancing restrictions and caps on the number of customers in stores. This means that April’s abrupt ‘reverse cliff edge’ - which is set to see a 100% re-instatement of business rates – is simply not sustainable.", "On his final full day in office, outgoing president Donald Trump delivered a farewell speech from the White House.\n\nCurrently locked out of his personal social media accounts, Trump struck a concilatory yet defiant tone in the video released via the government's official social media accounts.\n\n\"We did what we came here to do - and so much more,\" he said. \"I took on the tough battles, the hardest fights, the most difficult choices – because that’s what you elected me to do.\"\n\nHe warned that \"the greatest danger\" now facing the country was \"a loss of confidence in our national greatness\".\n\nThe 45th president ran through actions taken by his administration - from \"stand[ing] up to China like never before\" to \"a series of historic peace deals in the Middle East\".\n\nHe added: \"I am especially proud to be the first president in decades who has started no new wars.\"\n\nReferring to the riot at the US Capitol on 6 January, he said: \"All Americans were horrified by the assault on the Capitol... It can never be tolerated.\"\n\nTrump acknowledged that a new administration would take office, but said: \"I want you to know that the movement we started is only just beginning.\"", "It is not known when the artwork was taken as no one reported it missing\n\nA 500-year-old painting has been discovered in a flat in Italy and returned to a museum - where staff were unaware it had even been stolen.\n\nThe copy of Salvator Mundi, which is believed to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci, was found in a bedroom cupboard in Naples on Saturday.\n\nThis copy is thought to have been painted by one of da Vinci's students.\n\nThe 36-year-old owner of the flat was arrested on suspicion of receiving stolen goods, police said.\n\n\"The painting was found on Saturday thanks to a brilliant and diligent police operation,\" Naples prosecutor Giovanni Melillo told the AFP news agency.\n\nThe artwork is usually part of the Doma Museum collection at the San Domenico Maggiore church in the city.\n\nBut Mr Melillo said officials were not aware it had been stolen because \"the room where the painting is kept has not been open for three months\" due to the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nIt is not known when the artwork was taken as no one had reported it missing, but the museum said it was in its possession as recently as last January.\n\nSome experts believe Leonardo's student Giacomo Alibrandi may have painted the artwork\n\nPolice are now investigating the circumstances of the theft, but there was no sign of a break-in at the museum.\n\n\"It is plausible that it was a commissioned theft by an organisation working in the international art trade,\" Mr Melillo said.\n\nIt is not known who painted the artwork, but some experts believe Leonardo's student Giacomo Alibrandi may have done so in the early 1500s.\n\nIt shows Christ with one hand raised, with the other holding a glass sphere.\n\nAnd to add to the mystery - whether or not the original painting is an authentic Leonardo da Vinci is disputed. Leonardo died in 1519 and there are fewer than 20 of his paintings in existence.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The original painting was cleaned and restored from the image on the left to the one on the right\n\nThe original Salvator Mundi has had major cosmetic surgery - its walnut panel base has been described as \"worm-tunnelled\" and at some point it seems to have been split in half. Efforts to restore it have also resulted in abrasions.\n\nThis did not detract buyers, however, and the painting became the most expensive ever sold when it was auctioned for a record $450m (£341m) in 2017.\n\nThe unidentified buyer was involved in a bidding contest, via telephone, that lasted nearly 20 minutes.", "A refusal to accept cash is \"creeping into the wider UK economy\", an expert has said, after a survey suggested coronavirus had hastened a shift towards a cashless society.\n\nConsumer group Which? said that 34% of people asked said they had been unable to pay with cash at least once since March when trying to buy something.\n\nGrocery stores, pubs and restaurants were most likely to refuse.\n\nNatalie Ceeney, who wrote a report on the issue, called for ministers to act.\n\n\"The figures show that it's not simply the odd coffee shop going cashless, but this is creeping into the wider economy,\" said Ms Ceeney, who wrote the Access to Cash Review.\n\n\"We can't just blame individual businesses - many are going cashless because they can't easily bank cash takings because their local branch is closed or some distance away. The government needs to urgently legislate to protect the viability of cash - as it promised to do so last year. Time is running out.\"\n\nWhich? said the lack of cash access was a problem for those who relied on notes and coins - such as people with certain health conditions or without computer access.\n\nSome shops are still keen to accept cash\n\nJenny Ross, Which? Money editor, said: \"We have repeatedly warned about the consequences that coronavirus will have on what was an already fragile cash system, but nowhere near enough action has been taken by the government or the regulator to understand the scale of this issue.\"\n\nThe Treasury has proposed giving the City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, control of overseeing future access to cash and has thrown its weight behind the idea of cashback in shops, without the requirement to buy anything.\n\nDavid Fagleman, director at financial consultancy Enryo, said: \"Our own research shows that despite a decline in use for day-to-day purchases, nearly three-quarters of people think the move to a cashless society is happening too fast and risks leaving some people, particularly the vulnerable, behind.\"", "Cillian Murphy stars in Peaky Blinders, a drama which follows Tommy Shelby and his family\n\nPeaky Blinders creator Steven Knight has confirmed the hit BBC crime drama will conclude with a film following the show's final TV series.\n\nOn Monday, Knight said the upcoming sixth series would be the last but teased that \"the story will continue in another form\".\n\nHe has now confirmed to Deadline: \"My plan from the beginning was to end Peaky with a movie.\n\n\"This is what is going to happen,\" he added.\n\nHe explained that \"Covid had changed our plans\" but did not elaborate.\n\nHelen McCrory, who plays Polly, is the Shelby family matriarch\n\nThe final BBC TV series has resumed filming after being hit by Covid-related production delays.\n\nOn Monday, Knight described the show as being \"back with a bang\" and warned fans that the mobsters would face \"extreme jeopardy\" in the sixth season.\n\nKnight had previously planned for a seven-season run of the drama, which is set in post-World War One Birmingham.\n\n\"My ambition is to make it a story of a family between two wars,\" he said in 2018 ahead of season five. \"I've wanted to end it with the first air raid siren in Birmingham in 1939. It'll take three more series to reach that point.\"\n\nIt now looks like the film might be replacing his plan for series seven.\n\nKnight, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, previously revealed he had been \"approached\" to take the Shelby crime family universe to the big-screen.\n\nSam Claflin as Tommy's political rival Oswald Mosley was a central figure in series five\n\nThe sixth series of the show, which follows Tommy Shelby and his family, will see Anthony Byrne return as director and Nick Goding produce.\n\nTommy Bulfin, executive producer for the BBC, said he was \"very excited\" filming had begun and promised a \"truly remarkable... fitting send-off that will delight fans\".\n\nHe added he was \"so grateful to everyone for all their hard work to make it happen\".\n\nThe production team have developed comprehensive safety protocols to ensure that the series will be produced responsibly and in accordance with government guidelines during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nExecutive producer Caryn Mandabach said the \"safety of our cast and crew is always our priority\" and that they had been \"working diligently\" to get safely back into production since filming was halted last March.\n\n\"Thank you to all the Peaky fans who have been so unwaveringly supportive and patient,\" she added.\n\nPeaky Blinders, which stars Cillian Murphy, first aired on BBC Two eight years ago to widespread critical acclaim.\n\nRatings quickly grew from over two million for the first series to over four million by series four and it found further popularity on Netflix.\n\nIt made the transition to BBC One for the fifth series in 2019, achieving audiences of over five million.\n\nThroughout its run, a host of awards have followed, including NTAs, which are voted for by the public, and a Bafta for best drama series in 2018.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Scientists are a step closer to being able to reverse the damage caused by motor neurone disease (MND).\n\nUniversity of Edinburgh experts have found a problem with MND patients' nerve cells which could be repaired by repurposing drugs approved for other diseases.\n\nThe study has been welcomed by charities including the foundation set up by Scots rugby legend Doddie Weir.\n\nMy Name'5 Doddie foundation described it as \"a very exciting breakthrough\".\n\nMore than 1,500 people are diagnosed with the degenerative condition in the UK every year.\n\nThere is no known cure and more than half die within two years of diagnosis.\n\nThe research found that the damage to nerve cells caused by MND could be repaired by improving the energy levels in mitochondria - the power supply to the motor neurons.\n\nThey discovered in human stem cell models of MND, the axon - the long part of the motor neuron cell that connects to the muscle - was shorter than in healthy cells.\n\nAnd the movement of the mitochondria, which travel up and down the axons, was impaired\n\nThe scientists showed that this was caused by a defective energy supply from the mitochondria and that by boosting the mitochondria, the axon reverted back to normal.\n\nDr Arpan Mehta, who led the study at Euan MacDonald Centre for MND research said: \"The importance of the axon in motor nerve cells cannot be overstated.\n\n\"Our data provides hope that by restoring the cell's energy source we can protect the axons and their connection to muscle from degeneration.\n\n\"Work is already under way to identify existing licensed drugs that can boost the mitochondria and repair the motor neurons. This will then pave the way to test them in clinical trials.\"\n\nThe research centre was established by Euan MacDonald, who was 29 years old when he was diagnosed with MND in 2003\n\nCraig Stockton, the chief executive of MND Scotland, said the \"exciting\" results of the research were another piece of the puzzle to finding an effective treatment for the degenerative condition.\n\n\"We look forward to seeing if these positive results can be replicated for patients,\" he said.\n\n\"Once researchers have identified a drug they believe could have the desired effect, this treatment could then be fast-tracked for human trials using the pioneering MND-SMART clinical trial platform - into which MND Scotland has invested £1.5m.\n\n\"Researchers, clinicians, charities and supporters are all working hard to take us closer to finding a cure and by joining together we'll get to that day even sooner.\"\n\nThe researchers used stem cells taken from people with the C9orf72 gene mutation that causes both MND and frontotemporal dementia.\n\nThey used the stem cells to generate motor neuron cells in the lab.\n\nThe study also used human post-mortem spinal cord tissue from people with MND.\n\nAlthough the research focused on the people with the commonest genetic cause of MND, the researchers said they were hopeful the results would also apply to other forms of the disease.\n\nThe results of the study are now being used to look for existing drugs that boost mitochondrial function.\n\nThe study was funded by the Medical Research Council, Motor Neurone Disease Association, Euan MacDonald Centre for MND Research, My Name'5 Doddie Foundation, UK Dementia Research Institute and Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Protests against China's alleged abuse of the Muslim Uighur community\n\nThe government is facing a rebellion over the Trade Bill, and opposition proposals to give British courts the right to decide if a country is committing genocide.\n\nRebel Tory MPs want to allow Parliament to debate ending trade deals with countries responsible for genocide.\n\nThe government says trade policy should not be set by the courts.\n\nBut some MPs think the proposal would be a good way of targeting China and its treatment of the Uighur people.\n\nOn Tuesday, America's top diplomat Mike Pompeo, in his last day in the role, said the US had determined that China's persecution of the Muslim group and other minorities in Xinjiang province represented genocide and crimes against humanity under international law.\n\nThe UK has repeatedly condemned the actions of the Chinese authorities but stopped short of describing them as genocide - saying only international courts should determine this.\n\nAnd ministers also argue that trade deals are matters for governments, not the courts, to decide upon.\n\nThe MPs' amendment to the Trade Bill is a watered-down version of an earlier proposal from the House of Lords, which would force the government to withdraw from any free trade agreement with any country found guilty of genocide by the High Court of England and Wales.\n\nThe new proposal is signed by 10 Conservative MPs, one of whom described their amendment as \"tidier\" than the Lords version and designed to attract more support.\n\nSpeaking in the Commons, Sir Edward Leigh asked \"is there any way we can acknowledge that genocide is taking place in a discussion on a trade deal\".\n\nIn response, International Trade minister Greg Hands said ministers were prepared to have further discussions but not within the scope of the current legislation.\n\nHe told MPs the government was \"answerable to Parliament, not the courts\" and the Lords version would have led to an \"unacceptable erosion\" of its authority.\n\nThe UK, he added, had \"no plans\" to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement with China due to concerns about its human rights record, particularly its persecution of the Muslim Uighur community.\n\nNusrat Ghani urged ministers to consider the \"compromise\" proposal, which she said recognised the \"separation of powers\" between the executive, Parliament and the courts.\n\nThe Conservative ex-minister said the UK should \"never let economic concerns trump ethical ones by dealing with genocidal states\".\n\n\"Why would we want to use our newfound freedom to trade with states that commit and profit from genocide? Britain is better than that.\"\n\nSpeaking to Politics Live, former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said it is currently \"impossible\" for international courts to rule on whether there has been genocide, as other countries can block hearings in the UN.\n\nHe argued it is therefore important to allow British courts to make the judgement.\n\nThe MP insisted he is not \"anti-China\" but said the Chinese government need to be \"reasonable and behave in a way that is acceptable\" if it wanted to be part of global trading organisations.\n\nShadow international trade secretary Emily Thornberry said Labour would be supporting the new amendment arguing that the government \"does not consider human rights abuses enough before signing up to trade deals\".\n\nThis is an interesting story in its own right because of the issues involved but it's also a neat metaphor for Brexit.\n\nThe government has taken back control of trade policy from the EU but is already having to share it with the House of Lords, Tory MPs and potentially with the High Court.\n\nDuring the passage of the Trade Bill, the government also had to beef up the powers of the Trade and Agriculture Commission - an independent body of experts - in response to lobbying from farmers who were worried about the dilution of food standards.\n\nSoon trade disputes with other countries will partly be overseen by the new Trade Remedies Authority, another organisation that reports to ministers but is independent of them.\n\nAnd of course, everything has to be compatible with World Trade Organisation rules, anyway.\n\nThe government has control of trade. It's just not total.", "19 January is a special day for Orthodox Christians across Russia, including President Vladimir Putin. It's a day reserved for commemorating the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan, and it's called Epiphany. Though temperatures are as low as -20 Celsius, some celebrated this by submerging themselves in ice-cold water.", "A team of Nepalese climbers has become the first ever to summit the world’s second highest mountain, K2, in winter.\n\nK2, along the Pakistan-China border, is notoriously challenging - with high winds and sub-zero temperatures.\n\nOne of the leading members of the team is a former Gurkha and British special forces soldier, Nirmal Purja. He spoke to BBC Pakistan correspondent Secunder Kermani.", "Theresa May has accused her successor Boris Johnson of \"abandoning\" the UK's moral leadership on the world stage.\n\nThe ex-prime minister said Mr Johnson's decision to cut the overseas aid budget below 0.7% of national income had reduced the UK's global \"credibility\".\n\nShe wrote in the Daily Mail the UK had to \"live up to its values\" and would be judged by its actions not its rhetoric.\n\nMr Johnson said the UK was \"embarking on a quite phenomenal year\" of global leadership.\n\nQuestioned about Mrs May's comments by the SNP's Westminster leader Ian Blackford at Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Johnson said: \"I think it's very important the prime minister of the UK has the best possible relationship with the president of the United States.\n\n\"That's part of the job description.\"\n\nHe cited the UK's hosting of a global vaccine summit, the upcoming COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, as well as the G7 summit of leading industrial nations, in Cornwall, and his pledge to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 as examples of the UK's global leadership.\n\nMr Blackford called on the PM to reverse \"his cruel policy of cutting international aid for the world's poorest\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The SNP Westminster leader called in the PM to reverse his \"cruel\" international aid policy\n\nLater on Wednesday, Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States, succeeding Donald Trump.\n\nIn advance of the event, Mr Johnson said he looked forward to working \"hand-in-hand\" with the new administration and that post-Covid challenges could only be tackled by \"international co-operation\".\n\nBut, in an article in the Daily Mail, Mrs May suggested Mr Johnson had squandered international goodwill by choosing not to meet the longstanding UN target of spending 0.7% of income on international development.\n\nThe government says it cannot meet the figure - enshrined in UK law - this year because of the strain placed on the public finances by the pandemic.\n\nTheresa May has made these criticisms - on overseas aid and the threat by the government to override international law - before.\n\nQuite often she gets a dig in when she stands up in the House of Commons.\n\nBut packaging it all up in this way, on this day, is, in the words of one of her close former advisers, \"quite punchy\".\n\nThe government would rather focus on the relationship it is going to forge with the new US president.\n\nMinisters feel they have quite a lot in common with Joe Biden when it comes to working together on the world stage, fighting climate change and co-operating on global security.\n\nMrs May also criticised Mr Johnson's support for legislation which could have allowed the UK to go back on parts of its Withdrawal Agreement with the EU, had it been passed.\n\nControversial clauses were ultimately removed from the Internal Market Bill in December, after the UK and EU reached an agreement.\n\nBut Mr Johnson's threat to break international law was criticised in Europe and the US - where Mr Biden warned it could imperil peace in Northern Ireland.\n\nMrs May said the UK was \"well placed to play a decisive role in shaping this more co-operative world but to lead we must live up to our values\".\n\n\"Other countries listen to what we say not simply because of who we are, but because of what we do. The world does not owe us a prominent place on its stage,\" she added.\n\n\"Whatever the rhetoric we deploy, it is our actions which count. So, we should do nothing which signals a retreat from our global commitments.\"\n\nMrs May suggested the end of the Trump presidency could be a catalyst for a change in world politics\n\nMrs May, who had a sometimes strained relationship with Mr Trump, said Mr Biden's election presented the UK with a \"golden opportunity\" for Western democracies to reverse the trend towards \"absolutism\" - and a \"few strongmen facing off against each other\" - in global affairs.\n\nThe UK holds the presidency of the G7 this year and hosts the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.\n\nMr Johnson said he looked forward to welcoming Mr Biden to the UK at least twice in 2021.\n\n\"In our fight against Covid and across climate change, defence, security, and in promoting and defending democracy, our goals are the same and our nations will work hand-in-hand to achieve them,\" he added.", "LAS received almost 200,000 calls in December - up 50,000 on November, when London was in the second national lockdown\n\nLast week London exceeded the grim milestone of 10,000 deaths linked to Covid-19. Thousands of people are critically ill in hospital, and as many as 5% of Londoners are thought to have the virus in some parts of the city. As coronavirus continues to circulate silently around the capital, staff at the London Ambulance Service (LAS) are under immense pressure.\n\nThe service is currently taking up to 8,500 calls a day, compared with a pre-Covid figure of 5,000 to 6,000, according to its chief executive Garrett Emmerson.\n\nLizzie Cooke is one of the workers at LAS's south London headquarters who are dealing with strangers at what is a distressing time.\n\nI covered the London Bridge terror attacks and Grenfell but this is a different scale\n\nCalmly, the 30-year-old answers the phone and usually asks first if the patient is breathing.\n\n\"In the first wave we were getting a lot of calls of [people seeking] reassurance,\" Lizzie says. \"But now there are more and more who have symptoms, and family members are really frightened.\"\n\nIt is a fear that Lizzie knows all too well, having been hospitalised with Covid-19 in March. She spent a week receiving treatment for the virus.\n\n\"I was at work taking calls and struggling to concentrate,\" the call-handling supervisor says. \"At times I would just have my head on the desk in between calls.\n\n\"I started to develop chest pains five days later so my parents took me to Royal County Hospital, in Hampshire, and an X-ray showed a lot of fluid in my lungs. It was quite horrible.\n\n\"Luckily, I wasn't on a ventilator but I had the oxygen hood, and the nurses were so rushed off their feet. I didn't have my phone with me or know my parents' numbers off by heart so for that week I was quite alone and isolated.\n\n\"It was just a mixture of the unknown and not knowing when it was going to stop that was so daunting.\"\n\nThe unprecedented volume of calls means waiting times for patients are increasing\n\nLizzie's personal battle with coronavirus has helped her to empathise with people who call up with breathing problems.\n\nIt's something she says she's having to do more and more.\n\n\"Just before Christmas we were getting a lot of respiratory and cardiac arrest calls,\" she says. \"You could just hear colleagues counting to four [for chest compressions] and it was echoing around the room. It has been tough.\n\n\"We are getting calls from family members who are really frightened. I covered the London Bridge terror attacks and Grenfell but this is a different scale.\n\n\"I did get one call for toothache, but that's part of the job.\"\n\nLizzie, who lives in Hampshire, says that because the coverage of coronavirus is everywhere, it is \"difficult to escape\".\n\nWhen she's not at work she binge-watches Line of Duty on Netflix, but she says winding down isn't easy.\n\nLizzie sometimes thinks about the people who aren't following the rules aimed at helping stop the spread of the virus, and those who deny Covid-19 even exists.\n\n\"It's a kick in the teeth,\" she says. \"It is frustrating on the way to work when you see people not wearing masks or even posting stuff on social media not believing the virus is real.\n\n\"I just don't know where the disconnect is coming from; there are many people in hospital, many people dying, and I don't know what more needs to be said to make them realise how dangerous the illness is.\"\n\nSorry, your browser cannot display this map\n\nSitting a few metres away from Lizzie is 24-year-old Louise Essam, who has been in the job for two years.\n\n\"Every call we take at the moment is coronavirus,\" she says. \"My record was 108 calls in a day back in March during the first wave.\n\n\"But easily in the last few weeks I've been taking around 100 a day at times,\" Louise adds.\n\n\"We are just doing the best we can,\" says emergency call co-ordinator Louise Essam\n\n\"Sometimes I'll come in for a shift and can just hear colleagues counting one, two, three, four, for the compressions, and you just know what kind of shift it is going to be.\n\n\"It has been tough and quite frustrating, really. We are trying to help people. We are under so much pressure as there are high waiting times, but we are just doing the best we can.\"\n\nHelp is at hand though from the LAS workers' fellow emergency services personnel.\n\nMet Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick visited Wembley Stadium on Wednesday, where her officers are being trained to drive ambulances\n\nSeventy-five Met Police officers are currently being trained at Wembley Stadium to drive ambulances.\n\nThey will start work as drivers from 20 January, joining the 200 firefighters who are already helping LAS.\n\n\"It came as a huge relief when they announced it,\" says 37-year-old paramedic Ben West.\n\nBen West has been with the London Ambulance Service for 13 years\n\nAs is the case with many frontline workers, Ben says he is concerned about the dangers of exposure to coronavirus.\n\nHe has lost four colleagues to Covid-19, including Ian Reynolds, a paramedic based in Croydon, and Melonie Mitchell, a member of the NHS 111 team. They both died during the first wave in April.\n\n\"I wouldn't be a normal person if I said I wasn't scared,\" he says.\n\n\"I am scared and I do worry but we take every day as it comes, take our precautions and we just see where we go with that.\n\n\"We know the virus is out there in the community and we are not immune.\"", "A non-binding Labour motion calling for the universal credit top-up to be kept in place beyond 31 March passed by 278 votes to none after a Commons debate.\n\nSix Tory MPs defied party orders to abstain and voted with Labour, adding to the pressure on the PM on the issue.\n\nThe prime minister said the government had provided £280bn worth of support during the pandemic but all measures would be kept under \"constant review\".\n\nThe motion, which will not automatically lead to a change in policy, was put forward by Labour as a way to put additional pressure on the government to continue the increase, worth £1,000 a year.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Carl, a roofer, describes going from \"not having enough to barely having enough\" on universal credit.\n\nFormer Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb was among six Conservative MPs to rebel, along with Peter Aldous, Robert Halfon, Jason McCartney, Anne Marie Morris and Matthew Offord.\n\nAhead of the vote, Mr Crabb told the BBC that although there were \"difficult pressures on the chancellor\" extending the increase for 12 months was \"the right thing to do\".\n\nBBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said there were dozens of Conservative MPs who were \"deeply uneasy\" about ending the £20 weekly increase to universal credit.\n\nShe added that it was also understood the cabinet minister with responsibility for benefits, Therese Coffey, was arguing that the uplift should not be dropped in April.\n\nCharities and anti-poverty campaigners are pleading with the government to keep the support in place, describing it as a lifeline for more than 5.5 million families who receive the standard universal credit allowance.\n\nFood poverty campaigner and chef Jack Monroe told the BBC that the £20 increase \"has been a lifeline\" for millions of people who have needed to top up their income or rely on universal credit payments in order to get by.\n\nSir Keir said the increase was a vital safety net for those who had lost their jobs, seen their working hours slashed or who were not eligible for the government's wage subsidy furlough scheme.\n\n\"If we don't give a helping hand to families through this pandemic, then we are going to slow our economic recovery as we come out it.\n\n\"We urge Boris Johnson to change course and give families certainty today that their incomes will be protected.\"\n\nSix billion pounds of the benefits bill - the difference between poverty or not for 1.2 million families, according to a think tank.\n\nThe £1,040 a year increase to universal credit is a very emotive issue.\n\nThere's even a battle over what to call it.\n\nTo the government, its introduction was a one-off boost to cope with a crisis. For Labour, taking it away is a cut.\n\nMinisters would prefer we looked at the overall level of support they've provided for workers and businesses during the pandemic. The opposition say the £20 a week boost is a powerful symbol of the state's willingness to help.\n\nEven the act of debating it today is disputed. Labour say they've got the right occasionally to set the agenda in Parliament. Boris Johnson said his MPs risk abuse from campaigners and protestors if they engage.\n\nThe Joseph Rowntree Foundation has suggested about 16 million people will be directly affected if the £20 is rolled back.\n\nIt says 500,000 more people will be driven into poverty, including 200,000 children, while a further 500,000 of those already in poverty will find themselves in even worse hardship.\n\nHowever, free market think tank the Institute for Economic Affairs has argued that \"across-the-board benefit increases are a wasteful use of taxpayers' money\" at a time when the government is borrowing \"a hair-raising amount of money\".\n\nUniversal credit is a single payment replacing old benefits such as housing benefit and child tax credits.\n\nYou can claim universal credit if you are on a low income or are out of work.\n\nThe standard allowance varies from around £340 to just under £600 a month, depending on your age or whether you are single.\n\nYou may be eligible to receive more money on top of the standard allowance if, for example, you have children or a health condition.\n\nSpeaking on behalf of the Northern Research Group, Conservative MP John Stevenson said the £1,000 increase had been \"a real life-saver for people throughout this pandemic\".\n\n\"To end it now would be devastating for the 6 million individuals and families who are already struggling to stay afloat,\" he added.\n\nWhile the vote is not binding, and will not lead to a change in policy, it will increase pressure on the government to keep the increase or come up with an alternative.\n\nLabour said the Conservatives' decision to abstain created \"unnecessary uncertainty\" but minister Nadhim Zahawi described the vote as \"a political stunt\".\n\nThe government says it has strengthened the welfare system with an extra £7bn of funding during the pandemic while families struggling with food and household bills can get help through the £170m Winter Grant Scheme.\n\nMinisters also point to extra support for housing costs, through an increase in local housing allowance for those on housing benefits and hardship payments worth £670m next year for those unable to pay their council tax bills.", "How has the justice system responded to the pandemic? Stories from inside prisons and courts, where lawyers fear delays are creating miscarriages of justice. Helen Grady reports.\n\nAre court backlogs creating miscarriages of justice? When the UK locked down, so did its court system, adding to a backlog that’s left defendants, witnesses and victims facing long waits for trials. Helen Grady speaks to people inside the justice system to find out how it’s coped with the pandemic - from delays in making courts covid-secure to a lack of PPE and overcrowding in prisons. We hear stories from prisons under lockdown and talk to lawyers who fear delays are leading to abuses of the criminal justice system.\n\nProducer: Rob Cave", "New legislation has been passed to protect Scottish shop workers from abuse from customers.\n\nThe Protection of Workers Bill will make it a new specific offence to assault, abuse or threaten staff.\n\nIncidents involving an age-restricted product, such as alcohol or cigarettes, could be treated more seriously.\n\nThe MSP behind the bill, Labour's Daniel Johnson, said attacks on retail workers had increased during the Covid pandemic.\n\nHe told Holyrood: \"Shop staff have been spat at for asking customers to socially distance, and stock has been smashed in retaliation for item limits being imposed.\n\n\"Violence, threats and abuse should not be just part of anyone's job.\"\n\nMr Johnson said that staff requesting age ID could be a \"trigger factor\" in many incidents of abuse.\n\nThe new legislation will also cover people working in bars, restaurants and hotels, and those delivering items bought online who may have to ask for proof of age.\n\nThe bill was supported by all parties at Holyrood, despite the government initially arguing that its provisions were already covered by existing criminal laws.\n\nThe Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service told MSPs that further legislation was not needed, noting that \"violence, threats and abuse against retail workers, or indeed any other person, are prosecuted every day in the courts in Scotland using offences which are commonly understood\".\n\nPolice Scotland meanwhile said there would be \"no significant change in how we go about our business\" as a result of it.\n\nCommunity safety minister Ash Denham said that while there was a \"wide range of existing criminal laws\" currently in place to protect staff, the new legislation could \"make the general public think more about their behaviour when they interact with retail workers\".\n\nThe Scottish Conservatives also backed the bill, although they argued that the presumption against short sentences in Scotland meant anyone convicted under the new law would ultimately not be jailed.\n\nPaul Gerrard, public affairs director for the Co-Op, told BBC Radio Scotland's Drivetime that the retailer had seen a 450% rise in violent incidents in the last few years.\n\n\"It is a huge problem,\" he said. \"We've seen an explosion in violence and abuse toward my colleagues.\n\n\"Now across 350 stores in Scotland we have someone attacked every day. And 10 colleagues are threatened or abused every day.\n\n\"Increasingly we have seen knives, syringes and axes all used against shopworkers.\"\n\nMr Gerrard added that previous incidents were centred on shoplifting or age-restricted sales, but staff were now facing more abuse around enforcing Covid shopping rules.\n\nThe new legislation was passed by 118 votes to 0 in the Scottish Parliament.\n\nThe Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw) is now urging the UK government to introduce similar legislation to protect retail staff in England - something Labour MP Alex Norris is pursuing at Westminster.\n\nUsdaw general secretary Paddy Lillis said: \"It is a great result for our members in Scotland, who will now have the protection of the law that they deserve.\n\n\"So we are looking for MPs to support key workers across the retail sector and help turn around the UK government's opposition.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Cricket\n\nIndia pulled off an astonishing run-chase to inflict Australia's first defeat at the Gabba since 1988, win the fourth Test by three wickets and take one of the all-time great series. Needing 328, a Brisbane record run-chase, the injury-hit tourists got home with three overs to spare. Shubman Gill made 91 and Rishabh Pant was unbeaten on 89. They win the series 2-1, keeping the Border-Gavaskar they won in Australia two years ago. It is perhaps one of the finest Test series wins by any away side, especially given the list of players unavailable to India by the time the final match was played. That included captain and talisman Virat Kohli, who only played in the first Test before departing to be at the birth of his first child, a host of fast bowlers and first-choice spin pair Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja. In addition to the absent players, India somehow recovered from being bowled out for 36 - their lowest total in Test cricket - in losing the series opener by eight wickets. What followed were three Tests of the highest quality and drama, with India producing a stunning comeback to win the second Test by eight wickets, then defiantly batting through the final day to earn a draw in the third. But they saved their best performance for last, a superb contest that ensured the series went down to the final hour of the last day, with the shadows lengthening and a near-empty Gabba filled with the sound of a smattering of raucous India supporters. The tourists were 4-0 overnight and, for them to even get to the point where victory might be possible, Cheteshwar Pujara had to come through a barrage of hostile bowling from the Australia quicks - he was hit 10 times in his 56. He added 114 for the second wicket with the free-scoring Gill, while stand-in captain Ajinkya Rahane, who has presided over India's fightback, signalled their intent with 24 off only 22 balls. Tireless Australia fast bowler Pat Cummins was a threat throughout, removing Pujara, Rahane and Rohit Sharma. Fast bowler Pat Cummins took four wickets for Australia Still, even though India knew a draw would see them retain the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, they never lost sight of the chance of victory and promoted wicketkeeper Pant to number five. At the beginning of the final hour, India were 259-4, meaning they needed 69 runs and Australia six wickets from the final 15 overs. Though Cummins had Mayank Agarwal caught at cover for his fourth wicket, Pant attacked in the company of debutant Washington Sundar. Runs came with increasing freedom and, although Sundar was bowled trying to reverse-sweep Nathan Lyon and Shardul Thakur miscued Josh Hazlewood, Pant could not be stopped. The left-hander's drive down the ground off Hazlewood secured a famous win and sparked joyous India celebrations. 'One of the top three series of all time' - reaction India captain Rahane: \"I don't know how to describe this victory. I'm really proud of all the boys. We didn't talk about anything after Adelaide, we just wanted to show good character and express ourselves. It was all about a team effort.\" Australia captain Tim Paine: \"In the key moments we were found wanting and completely outplayed by India, who fully deserved their series win.\" Man of the match Pant: \"This is one of the biggest things in my life. It has been a dream series.\" Player of the series Cummins: \"The whole India side played fantastically and deserved to win. The game was there for to win, but we didn't take the wickets.\" Former Australia fast bowler Stuart Clark on ABC: \"What a victory that is by India. They have been absolutely outstanding. The man of the moment is Rishabh Pant. He played some of the most insane shots you will ever see. Australia bowled their hearts out, but it wasn't enough.\" Former Australia captain Ian Chappell: \"It had everything. It was an absolutely amazing day. This has been one of top three Test series of all time.\"\n• None Can this British team make an impact on the global scene?\n• None The show must go on in lockdown:", "Nicola Sturgeon is to announce later whether Scotland's Covid-19 lockdown is to continue past the end of January.\n\nThe first minister said Tuesday's statement at Holyrood would concern the \"duration\" of restrictions rather than whether any new ones would be imposed.\n\nMinsters will also decide at a cabinet meeting whether schools will be allowed to re-open in full from 1 February.\n\nEducation Secretary John Swinney has suggested it would be a \"tall order\" for pupils to return to classrooms.\n\nMs Sturgeon said on Monday that she did not want to \"raise parents' expectations\", saying transmission of the virus \"is still higher than we would want it to be\".\n\nThe whole Scottish mainland and several islands have been in a strict lockdown since early January, with a \"stay at home\" message in force.\n\nThis was initially due to run until February, but this will be reviewed by ministers on Tuesday morning with a view to having the restrictions last longer.\n\nWhile Ms Sturgeon has warned that the government would consider further measures if necessary, she said \"it is the duration rather than the content of restrictions that we will be looking at\" on Tuesday.\n\nThe outcome of this review will then be announced to MSPs in a statement at Holyrood in the afternoon.\n\nNicola Sturgeon will announce the result of the latest review in a Holyrood statement\n\nThe review will also cover the situation in schools, with the majority learning remotely from home and only some children of key workers and vulnerable pupils being allowed into school buildings.\n\nOn Monday, the first minister said she did not want to \"raise expectations\" about classes returning to normal, but added that she was \"not going to make any assumptions\" ahead of the cabinet meeting.\n\nShe said: \"I am not going to raise parents' expectations, you can see from the numbers we are seeing some positive signs in the numbers that lockdown is starting to stabilise things and tip them into decline, but transmission is still higher than we would want it to be.\n\n\"We want to get schools back as quickly as we possibly can, it is not in the interests of kids to be out of school for any longer than is absolutely necessary, but community transmission has always been a key factor in these decisions.\"\n\nThis echoed comments from Mr Swinney, who had previously said it would be \"a tall order\" for schools to fully re-open with \"the virus still at a very high level in general within society\".\n\nI am expecting continuity rather than change from today's announcement on coronavirus restrictions.\n\nThe continuation of the current lockdown and presumably the extension of remote learning for most school pupils into the February break at least.\n\nBoth decisions are likely to be reviewed again next month. But it's not clear if the first minister will feel able to suggest a target date for restrictions to ease.\n\nCabinet will also be giving special attention to the serious Covid outbreak on Barra and considering if the level three restrictions that apply in the Western Isles remain appropriate.\n\nWhile there are signs the pace at which the current wave of coronavirus is spreading is starting to slow, evidence of much greater suppression will be required before the stay at home lockdown in place across mainland Scotland is lifted.\n\nThe review comes less than a week after restrictions in Scotland were tightened, with some click and collect services ordered to close and outdoor alcohol consumption banned.\n\nThe entire Scottish mainland has been in the top level of restrictions - level four - since Boxing Day, with level three measures in place in Orkney, Shetland, the Western Isles and some islands in Argyll and Bute and the Highlands.\n\nScots are subject to a legal requirement not to leave home for anything other than essential purposes, such as shopping for essentials, exercise and caring responsibilities.\n\nThe number of new cases reported each day on average has begun to fall, but the number of people in hospital with the virus continues to rise and is now \"significantly\" above that seen in the first wave in 2020.\n\nMs Sturgeon said the \"position overall is very precarious, very concerning in terms of the level of transmission\", but said there were \"some early signs to be optimistic that measures are having an effect\".\n\nThe first minister will take questions from opposition leaders following her statement.\n\nThe Scottish Conservatives have voiced concerns that Covid-19 vaccines are not being rolled out quickly enough, saying the Scottish government are \"trailing their own targets\".\n\nStatistics released on Monday showed that Scotland has vaccinated 264,991 people so far - 6% of its adult population.\n\nThis is lower than the figure for England, where 8% of the adult population - 3,520,056 people - have been vaccinated, and Northern Ireland, which has the highest vaccination rate in the UK at 8.7%.\n\nWales has a similar figure to Scotland at 6%.\n\nEngland has also given a second dose of the vaccine to 427,386 people, compared to only 3,698 in Scotland.\n\nHowever, Ms Sturgeon has insisted that all parts of the UK are \"working to the same targets\" to vaccinate priority groups, and said her government is \"on track\" to hit them subject to supplies arriving.\n\nThis would see care home residents, healthcare staff and all over-80s get a first dose by the start of February, with over-70s and those deemed \"extremely vulnerable\" by mid-February and all over-65s by the beginning of March.\n\nBy that time the government aims to be vaccinating up to 400,000 people a week on average, with all priority groups getting a first jab by early May and the rest of the adult population in line thereafter.", "About one in 10 people across the UK tested positive for Covid-19 antibodies in December, roughly double the October figure, data has shown.\n\nEstimates from the Office for National Statistics suggest between 8% of people in Northern Ireland and 12% of people in England showed signs of past Covid infection.\n\nIn October, antibody positivity ranged from 2% to 7% around the UK.\n\nAnd 6,586 Covid deaths were registered in the UK in the week to 8 January.\n\nThat brings the total registered so far close to 96,000.\n\nNearly a quarter of deaths were people living in care homes - a disproportionate impact on a group of people which accounts for less than 1% of the population.\n\nBack in July, though, care home residents accounted for 40% of deaths.\n\nThe ONS regularly tests a representative sample of the population, both for current infection and for antibodies indicating a past infection.\n\nPeople taking part in the survey are tested whether or not they have had symptoms.\n\nThis is used to estimate how common both the virus and antibodies are in the population as a whole.\n\nAntibodies are proteins in the blood which fight off specific infections.\n\nThey are developed if somebody catches an infection and their body fights it off, or if they have been vaccinated.\n\nYorkshire and the Humber topped the chart with 17% of people having positive antibodies, followed by London.\n\nProf Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick Medical School, said: \"This study shows that infection with the Sars-Cov-2 virus is much more widespread in the UK than previously realised, with around 1 in 10 people estimated to have been infected by December 2020.\n\n\"The implications are that infection rates increased significantly between November and December.\"\n\nBut Scotland had a considerably smaller growth in antibodies than the rest of the UK, rising from 7% to 9% of the population.\n\nThe fact that more people show signs of having at least some protection against Covid-19 is consistent with the dramatic rise in infections during that period.\n\nBut we know that antibodies from natural infection can fade.\n\nIn England, the ONS said, positive antibody tests equated to 5.4 million people aged over 16 having signs of past infection.\n\nThat does not tell you the total number of people infected, however, but acts as a snapshot in time.\n\nIn London, about 16% of people had antibodies in December, up from 11% in October. But at the last peak in May, an estimated 15% of the population had antibodies. This proportion fell, as detectable antibodies recede with time.\n\nExactly what this means for someone's likelihood to become infected again, however, is not fully known.\n\nIt also remains to be seen how long vaccines will protect people for, before they need a booster jab.\n\nBut Public Health England data suggests natural immunity provides at least five months' protection on average, and vaccines often give better protection than natural immunity.\n\nMore than 4 million people in the UK have been given their first dose of the vaccine.\n\nProf Janet Lord, director of the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing at the University of Birmingham, urged caution among those who have already been vaccinated.\n\nAsked whether people who have received the jab can hug their children, she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"I would certainly advise not to do that at the moment because, as you probably know, with the vaccines they take several weeks before they are maximally effective.\n\n\"It's really important that people stay on their guard even if they've had that first vaccination.\"", "Alexandru Murgeanu (l) and Jason Mercer were killed in the crash on the M1 in South Yorkshire\n\nA coroner has called for a review of smart motorways after an inquest heard the deaths of two men on a stretch of the M1 could have been avoided.\n\nJason Mercer, 44, and Alexandru Murgeanu, 22, died when Prezemyslaw Szuba crashed his lorry into their vehicles near Sheffield on 7 June 2019.\n\nCoroner David Urpeth said smart motorways without a hard shoulder carry \"an ongoing risk of future deaths\".\n\nHighways England said it was \"addressing many of the points raised\".\n\nMr Urpeth recorded a verdict of unlawful killing at Sheffield Town Hall. He added he would be writing to Highways England and the transport secretary asking for a review.\n\nThe inquest heard the deaths of the two men may have been avoided had there had been a hard shoulder.\n\nOn the stretch of the M1 where the crash took place, the hard shoulder has been replaced by an active lane.\n\nSzuba, 40, from Hull, was jailed last year after admitting causing their deaths by careless driving.\n\nHe was speaking from prison to the inquest.\n\nPrezemyslaw Szuba was jailed over the deaths\n\nAnswering questions over the phone, Szuba told the hearing he accepted he was driving without paying proper attention.\n\n\"I have already accepted that at my trial,\" he said, but added: \"If there had been a hard shoulder on this bit of motorway, the collision would have been avoidable.\n\n\"I would have driven past these two cars as it would be safer and they would have been able to come home safely and I would be able to come back home.\"\n\nSzuba said he had only three to five seconds to react, and asked if he would have avoided the crash had he been paying attention, he said: \"It's difficult to say after everything now.\"\n\nSgt Mark Brady, who oversees major collision investigations for South Yorkshire Police, told the hearing: \"Had there been a hard shoulder, had Jason and Alexandru pulled on to the hard shoulder, my opinion is that Mr Szuba would have driven clean past them.\"\n\nBut he accepted the primary cause of the crash was Szuba's inattention to the road.\n\nThe crash happened after a collision between a Ford Focus driven by Mr Mercer, from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, and a Ford Transit driven by Mr Murgeanu, who was living in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, but was originally from Romania.\n\nWhen Mr Mercer and Mr Murgeanu got out to exchange details they were hit by the lorry, and both died at the scene.\n\nMr Mercer's wife Claire has campaigned against smart motorways since her husband's death, and was at the hearing on Monday.\n\nClaire Mercer has campaigned against the use of smart motorways since her husband's death\n\nIn a statement, Highways England said it was \"determined\" to do everything it could to make roads as safe as possible and was already addressing many of the points raised by the coroner \"as published in the Government's Smart Motorway Evidence Stocktake and Action Plan of March 2020\".\n\n\"We will carefully consider any further comments raised by the coroner once we receive the report,\" it added.\n\nFollow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Today's rising number of UK deaths was to be expected, sadly, after the surge in cases during December.\n\nAnd it is likely that the coming weeks will see figures even higher than this.\n\nToday’s numbers are, though, inflated by the fact that delays registering deaths over the weekend tend to lead to higher figures being reported on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.\n\nOn average, the UK is recording more than 1,100 deaths a day.\n\nTo put that in context, at Christmas it was less than half that.\n\nBut there are two chinks of light in the daily update.\n\nFirstly, the number of cases is below 40,000 - for a third day in a row. At the turn of the year it was touching 60,000 new diagnoses.\n\nThat means, in the coming weeks, we should start to see fewer hospitalisations and, eventually, deaths.\n\nThe number of vaccinations also continues to rise.\n\nIt seems unlikely the NHS will manage its target of two million doses a week just yet.\n\nBut each increase at least takes us one step closer to getting on top of the virus.", "Campaigners are bringing a judicial review for indirect sexual discrimination on Thursday.\n\nThey say the way the self-employed income support scheme or SEISS is calculated- by averaging out profits between 2016 to 19 - is unfair to to around 75,000 women who’ve taken time off in that period for maternity leave. The government insists using a three-year average is the best way of reflecting a self-employed worker’s income.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Health workers can book an appointment at seven vaccination centres in operation across NI\n\nDoctors have insisted there is no postcode lottery when it comes to rolling out the coronavirus vaccines.\n\nNorthern Ireland's vaccination plan means all those over 80 should receive their first dose by the end of January.\n\nMore than 154,000 doses of a vaccine have now been administered, health officials said.\n\nDr Frances O'Hagan, deputy chairwoman of NI's GP committee, said practices had their own rollout plans but she expected them to meet official targets.\n\n\"As soon as we get the vaccine, we will get it to you,\" she told BBC News NI. \"But please, please wait until we contact you.\"\n\n\"We tailor our programmes to our individual patients and to our geography and to our surroundings.\n\n\"It's not actually a postcode lottery. It's the best way of doing it because we know what suits our patients.\"\n\nDr O'Hagan said she had not heard reports of some practices holding back vaccines until they received bigger amounts to allow for a larger number of vaccinations to be done.\n\nShe said rolling out the programme was a logistical challenge which fell on top of an already heavy workload but the jab would be given out in a \"safe and timely\" fashion.\n\nSinn Féin MP Órfhlaith Begley said doctors in her West Tyrone constituency were working above and beyond to administer the vaccine to as many people as possible.\n\n\"But unfortunately I am hearing that some GPs cannot access supplies of the vaccine,\" she said.\n\n\"There does appear to be, and it is a consistent message from GPs in my own constituency, a feeling the distribution of the vaccine has been unequal to date.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Health Minister Robin Swann has welcomed a further delivery of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine into Northern Ireland on Tuesday morning.\n\nIn a tweet, Robin Swann said: \"We now have the supply to complete all our over 80s and when that group is finished, there will be enough to start into the over 75 programme.\"\n\nPatricia Donnelly, the head of NI's vaccination programme said there had been 154,436 doses of the vaccine administered here, with 132,857 of those being first doses.\n\nOn Tuesday, she said three quarters of care home residents had already received both doses.\n\n\"With the arrival of additional vaccine today, which have been issued this afternoon and tomorrow to GPs, there will be enough to complete the over 80 population and to commence in the over 70 population,\" she added.\n\nA further 24 virus-related deaths and 713 more Covid-19 cases were reported in Northern Ireland on Tuesday.\n\nIt brings the total number of deaths recorded by the Department of Health to 1,649.\n\nThere are currently 842 people in hospital with the virus, 70 people in intensive care units (ICU) and 57 being ventilated.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland, a further 93 Covid-19 related deaths were reported on Tuesday, bringing the country's death toll to 2,708.\n\nA further 2,001 positive cases were also recorded in the latest figures from the Republic's Department of Health.\n\nNorthern Ireland's rate of Covid-19 infection is now below one and has been at that level for a couple of weeks, according to the chief medical officer.\n\nHowever, Dr Michael McBride warned the reproduction (R) number for hospital transmission remains above one.\n\nDr McBride said new variants of the virus had made the job of curtailing the spread even more difficult, and warned he did not foresee any relaxation of restrictions any time soon.\n\n\"We need to ensure that we have as many people who remain at risk of severe disease vaccinated and prioritised with the first dose as possible before we consider significant relaxations in the current restrictions,\" he said.\n\nMeanwhile concerns have been raised that \"social media myths\" are encouraging some care home staff to reject the Covid vaccine.\n\nPauline Shepherd, from the Independent Health and Care Providers, said young women were especially vulnerable to misinformation about the vaccine and fertility.\n\nLast week, the Department of Health said there had been an uptake level of about 80% among care home staff.\n\n\"We are very keen obviously that everyone takes the vaccine, that is really the only way that we are going to get through this,\" she told BBC Radio Foyle.\n\n\"Obviously there are myths going around on social media about the vaccine and some are opting not to take it.\n\n\"Particularly younger females seem to have the view through social media that it may impact fertility\".\n\nA consultant anaesthetist says there is a \"reluctance\" among members of the black, Asian and minority ethnic communities to take Covid-19 vaccines\n\nThere are currently 139 confirmed Covid-19 outbreaks in NI's 483 care homes.\n\nThe Public Health Agency (PHA) and Department of Health were now exploring how \"to dispel the myths\", Ms Shepherd added.\n\nDr Mukesh Chugh, a consultant anaesthetist at Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry, said there had been a \"reluctance\" among black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people to take Covid-19 vaccines.\n\nDr Chugh says this is because of \"anti-vaccine messages\" posted across various social media platforms and messenger apps \"targeted at certain ethnic and religious groups\".\n\n\"I encourage them not to believe the messages they are getting on WhatsApp - these are not scientific messages,\" he said.\n\nOn Tuesday, Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots said a number of groups of key workers should be given priority access to vaccinations.\n\nPrioritisation was decided by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises UK health departments on immunisation.\n\nEdwin Poots said meat plant workers should be among those given priority vaccine access\n\nAsked if he supported prioritisation for food workers in meat plants, Mr Poots told the assembly he did and had raised it with the executive.\n\n\"It's been identified as an essential service - those people working in them are there in cold, wet conditions where we have had a number of outbreaks,\" he said.\n\n\"We should seek to introduce those people somewhat earlier than is currently the case - I will continue to endeavour to press that case.\"\n\nHe said other groups of workers who should be prioritised included \"teachers and police officers\".", "An Instagram post said the alleged baby shower was a \"lovely surprise\"\n\nA rail company has begun an internal investigation after staff allegedly held a surprise baby shower in a closed Patisserie Valerie bakery at London's Marylebone station during lockdown.\n\nChiltern Railways workers told BBC News up to 20 colleagues, including some who were on shift, attended the gathering.\n\nThey claim some party-goers then had positive Covid tests, forcing most of the team to self-isolate.\n\nChiltern said \"appropriate action\" would be taken after its investigation.\n\nMembers of Chiltern Railways customer services staff based at the station told BBC News that about 30 people had been invited to the baby shower on the afternoon of 23 November - both via WhatsApp before the alleged gathering, and face to face on the day of the event.\n\nA national coronavirus lockdown was in place in England in November, so people were banned from meeting anyone indoors who was not part of their household.\n\nOne worker, David [not his real name], said he declined an invitation to the event but walked past the bakery later in his shift to see about 20 colleagues gathered inside.\n\nHe said he was \"shocked and alarmed\" to see people hugging each other, with most of them not wearing masks.\n\nPhotos of the alleged gathering, seen by the BBC, show a table inside a Patisserie Valerie outlet covered with dozens of cupcakes, mince pies, crisps and sandwiches, bunting saying \"it's a boy!\" and handmade flags reading \"happy baby shower\".\n\nOne photo appears to show a group of eight colleagues posing in front of the table of party food, without socially distancing from one another.\n\nSome images were shared on Instagram on 23 November with the caption: \"What a lovely surprise being thrown a baby shower at work today!\"\n\nA Patisserie Valerie spokesman said the company had not been informed of any such event and that none of its team members had access to the Marylebone station cafe, which has remained closed since March due to Covid restrictions.\n\nHe added it was normal for a member of station staff to have keys to the premises for \"security reasons\".\n\nDavid and another colleague claimed three people who allegedly attended the event tested positive over the following four days.\n\nThe positive tests meant 16 members of staff out of the team of about 26 people had to self-isolate for 14 days, David said.\n\nHe said colleagues who lived with, or cared for, vulnerable people were \"petrified\" to hear there had been a staff outbreak, with some \"scared to go home\" for fear of endangering loved ones.\n\nDavid added that he had been caring for his elderly grandmother so self-isolation was \"a real nightmare\" as he had to arrange alternative care for her.\n\nChiltern Railways confirmed a \"small number\" of workers tested positive for Covid or had to self-isolate in the 14-day period after 23 November, but a spokeswoman said \"none of the staff who were alleged to have attended [the baby shower] tested positive\".\n\nShe said Chiltern Railways was investigating and was \"making every effort\" to maintain a Covid-secure environment for staff and customers.\n\nChiltern Railways staff members congratulated their colleague using information boards at the station\n\nIn an email seen by the BBC, which was sent to Chiltern Railways employees on 24 November, a manager said one team member had tested positive and added: \"It is disappointing that social distancing measures do not appear to have been followed and I will be investigating this further.\"\n\nDavid's colleague Peter (not his real name) said he was one of about 10 team members who had to work while the rest of the team was self-isolating.\n\nPeter said the outbreak left those at work feeling \"stretched\" and \"raised the anxiety levels of everyone\" as they worried they might have caught Covid as a result of having worked alongside the alleged party's attendees.\n\n\"A lot of us don't want to be at work during this time, for obvious reasons. We're doing a job where we do come into contact with a lot of people - it's stressful enough with your own family, who are a bit worried about you going in to work at a train station and asking if you're getting the proper protection,\" Peter said.\n\nHe added he felt \"demoralised\" to hear about the alleged party when he spends his shifts encouraging customers to wear masks and socially distance.\n\nThe Department for Transport said it had been made aware of the incident and had contacted Chiltern Railways for a \"full explanation\".\n\nA spokesman for the Office of Rail and Road - which protects the interests of rail and road users - said it had investigated \"an issue relating to Covid-19 concerns\" and had taken action, jointly with Westminster City Council, to \"ensure Chiltern Railways tightens its risk assessment for workers and to revise working arrangements\".", "When Amelia Strike, 21, was logged out of her Depop social shopping app account in October, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.\n\n\"I thought I had just forgotten my password when I couldn't get back in, but a couple of days passed and I realised something wasn't right,\" says the Birmingham-based law student.\n\nShe then received a message from a stranger on Instagram, alerting her to the fact that her account had been taken over by a scammer advertising Apple AirPod headphones for £50.\n\nShe immediately used her brother's Depop account to comment on the offending post and contact the app. It was removed by the firm in a few hours and her password was reset.\n\nBut when Ms Strike logged back in, she was shocked by what she found.\n\n\"I felt sick - I scrolled and scrolled through hundreds of messages people had sent the scammer,\" she says.\n\nThe fraudster had been instructing shoppers to pay them directly through PayPal's \"Friends and Family\" option, which sidesteps Depop's fees and doesn't offer any protection for buyers.\n\nThe scammer sent messages like this one to other Depop users from Amelia's account\n\nMs Strike counted at least three Depop users who made unauthorised payments of £50 to the scammer.\n\nIn Ms Strike's situation, to get users to trust scam listing, the hacker had also uploaded a photo of her name on a post-it note next to the headphones that were supposedly for sale.\n\nThis is a common tactic used by people selling second-hand items online, to prove that the photos were not stolen from another listing.\n\n\"I just felt so violated,\" she says.\n\nShe is not alone - 14 other users have told BBC News that their Depop accounts have been hacked in recent months. In all cases, the fraudsters demanded to be paid directly, rather than through the app.\n\nBlending the look and social elements of Instagram with the buy-and-sell format of eBay, 90% of Depop's users are aged 26 or under.\n\nEmily Goold, 21, a journalism student in Tewkesbury, was scared when her account was hacked and a fraudster posted a listing for a £350 jacket.\n\nEmily Goold, 21, told the BBC a fraudster hacked her Depop account and advertised a £350 Moncler jacket\n\nDepop took the listing down within 12 hours and reset her password, but Ms Goold says such incidents are becoming commonplace.\n\n\"You always know somebody who's had a Depop horror story. It's such a widespread problem now.\"\n\nScammers have continued to plague many online services through the pandemic.\n\nOne \"have a go\" method called \"credential stuffing\" involves using automated tools to repeatedly log into accounts, entering usernames and password information previously exposed from data breaches of other popular online services.\n\nIf a user doesn't use the same password on multiple services or has changed their passwords after being exposed in a data breach, this won't work.\n\nAccording to Liv Rowley, a threat intelligence analyst at cyber-security firm Blueliv, cyber criminals are now targeting Depop accounts on an \"industrial scale\" using this method, capitalising on the fact that people often use similar passwords.\n\nBlending the look and social elements of Instagram with the buy-and-sell format of eBay, 90% of Depop's users are aged 26 or under\n\nDepop told the BBC that the safety and security of its community is its \"number one priority\", and that the service has never had a data breach or had its infrastructure compromised.\n\nThe firm confirmed that credential stuffing is a big part of the problem.\n\n\"Weak passwords and the use of the same password across multiple accounts is the greatest source of account takeover, which is why we have initiated a campaign in the second half of 2020 to force some users to strengthen their passwords and to remind others of the importance of strong and unique passwords,\" says Depop's chief operating officer Dominic Rose.\n\nDepop has started resetting passwords for some 12 million users that have not changed them in over a year and told the BBC it had sent reminders to a similar number to make sure their log-in details are unique.\n\n\"We will continue to remind our community about the importance of account security and updating their passwords.\"\n\nThe firm, founded in 2011, told the BBC that although the number of its users increased nearly two-fold to 26 million last year, it had seen a 50% decrease in account \"takeovers\" since its campaign began.\n\nBut Blueliv found that login details for several thousand hacked Depop accounts are being advertised for as little as $1.05 (77p) each on the dark web - a part of the internet that is only accessible using specialised tools.\n\nWhile a Vice investigation first highlighted the problem in May, there is now evidence that account logins are being sold across multiple dark web \"marketplaces\".\n\nThe information for sale includes usernames and passwords, with extra charged for details such as follower count, the number of sales completed by a user and their ratings by other shoppers.\n\nOn the dark net marketplace White House Market, \"premium\" Depop accounts are being sold for $5\n\n\"The accounts are being compromised and that definitely is concerning,\" Ms Rowley says. \"While it's not a Depop-specific problem, I think [credential stuffing] is one we're going to see expand in the next five years.\"\n\nOne Depop user told the BBC they would feel \"much more comfortable\" if the app introduced two-factor authentication, where users enter a one-time code sent to them via email or text, for example, after attempting to sign in.\n\nDepop confirmed that it intends to implement multi-factor authentication in 2021.\n\nBut Aman Johal, director at law firm Your Lawyers, which specialises in consumer action claims, says the platform needs to act urgently, \"particularly given its relatively young user base, where the duty of care is greater\".\n\n\"The fact that this has been going on for months...is unacceptable. Given the volume of compromised accounts for sale, the horse has already bolted,\" he added.\n\nFor some users, trust in the company has been dented.\n\n\"I feel like their security measures need to be amped up because it's just not good enough,\" says Ms Strike, who has been a Depop user since 2015.\n\n\"I've used [Depop] for a long time but I'm reluctant to continue because it just doesn't feel safe anymore.\"", "HSBC is to close 82 branches in the UK between April and September this year, claiming customers are turning to digital banking.\n\nThe company will have 511 branches across the country following the closure programme.\n\nManagers said they did not expect to make any redundancies, with staff moved to nearby branches instead.\n\nCoronavirus and changing customer habits have altered the way we bank, but there are concerns over closures.\n\nCampaigners say that local branches provide a lifeline for those who need access to cash and face-to-face services, and allow small businesses to bank without too much disruption to their own trade.\n\nHSBC said all but one of the branches earmarked for closure were within one mile of a Post Office, where these day-to-day transactions could be carried out.\n\nIt said - even stripping out the effects of the pandemic - the number of customers using branches had fallen by a third in the past five years, and 90% of all customer contact was over the phone, internet or smartphone, in addition to contacts on social media.\n\nJackie Uhi, HSBC UK's head of network, said: \"The Covid-19 pandemic has emphasised the need for the changes that we are making.\n\n\"It hasn't pushed us in a different direction but reinforces the things that we were focusing on before and has crystallised our thinking. This is a strategic direction that we need to take to have a branch network fit for the future.\"\n\nThis would include changing some branches to concentrate on cash access, as well as the use of \"pop-up\" branches in some areas by the end of the year. It means some remaining branches will offer fewer services.\n\nThe branches to close are:\n\nMay: Brighton, Ditchling Road; Hull, Merit House; Wednesbury; Sutton Coldfield, Four Oaks; Hull, Holderness Road; Pontyclun, Talbot Green; London, Fleet Street; London, Fenchurch Street; London, Old Broad Street; London, Charing Cross; Sheffield, Darnall; Oxford, Summertown; Leeds, Chapel Allerton; Cardiff, Rumney; Torquay, Strand; Staines", "The Met Office warned heavy rain combined with melting snow on higher ground was likely to cause flooding\n\nAn amber rain warning has been issued for parts of northern and central England as Storm Christoph approaches.\n\nThe Met Office told people in Yorkshire and the Humber, the North West, East Midlands and the east of England to expect heavy rain and potential floods.\n\nYellow warnings have been issued for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and southern Scotland.\n\nUp to 70mm (2.75in) of rain is forecast to fall within 48 hours in the worst-hit areas from Tuesday.\n\nThe Met Office said the downpours, set to last throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, were likely to cause flooding when combined with melting snow on higher ground.\n\nIt said there was a \"danger to life\" due to fast-flowing or deep floodwater, and warned some communities there was a good chance they would be \"cut off\" by flooded roads.\n\nIt also predicted delays and cancellations to public transport, with the amber warning in place until 12:00 GMT on Thursday.\n\nCouncils and emergency services have warned people to prepare for potential flooding.\n\nMayor of Doncaster Ros Jones declared a major incident in South Yorkshire ahead of possible flooding.\n\nIn a tweet, she said emergency protocols were instigated on Sunday, with sandbags handed out in flood-risk areas, and told people not to panic but to be prepared.\n\nCalderdale councillor Scott Patient urged residents and businesses to \"take all the steps they can to protect themselves and their property\".\n\nDue to Covid-19 restrictions, Mr Patient said, the authority was preparing \"virtual community support hubs\" to help people if there was flooding.\n\n\"The virtual hubs work similarly to the physical ones, but everything will be done remotely to reduce the need for face-to-face contact and to protect staff, volunteers, those affected by flooding and vulnerable people in our communities,\" he said.\n\nThe Environment Agency has 14 flood warnings - meaning \"immediate action\" is required - in place across England, stretching from the south east to the north east.\n\nThe Met Office amber rain area initially covered parts of the north, but has since been expanded to include some central areas\n\nMet Office forecaster Jon Griffiths said about 40-70mm (1.57-2.75 in) of rain was expected in the north-west over three days, potentially rising to 100-120mm (3.93-4.72 in) in hilly areas.\n\nMr Griffiths said river systems in some areas were already close to capacity.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Prime Minister Boris Johnson has condemned the \"disgraceful scenes\" in the US, after supporters of President Donald Trump stormed Congress and clashed with police.\n\nRioters breached the Capitol building where lawmakers met to confirm Joe Biden's presidential election victory.\n\nThe PM said it was \"vital that there should be a peaceful and orderly transfer of power\".\n\nAnd Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was a \"direct attack on democracy\".\n\n\"The United States stands for democracy around the world and it is now vital that there should be a peaceful and orderly transfer of power,\" Mr Johnson tweeted.\n\nScottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, meanwhile, called the events \"utterly horrifying\".\n\nFriend of President Trump and leader of Reform UK - formerly the Brexit Party - Nigel Farage tweeted: \"Storming Capitol Hill is wrong. The protesters must leave.\"\n\nThe US Congress has now reconvened after the violence - spurred on by Mr Trump's unproven claims of electoral fraud - to certify Mr Biden's victory in the US election in November\n\nHundreds of the president's supporters stormed the Capitol, and staged an occupation of the building in Washington DC.\n\nBoth chambers of Congress were forced into recess, as protesters clashed with police and tear gas was released.\n\nFour people died on Capitol grounds during the violence, including a woman shot by police and three others, who died as a result of \"medical emergencies\", local police said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police place US Capitol Building on lockdown after Trump supporters breached security lines\n\nUK MPs from across the political spectrum have criticised the events in the US.\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab said there was \"no justification for these violent attempts to frustrate the lawful and proper transition of power\", while Home Secretary Priti Patel called the scenes \"unacceptable and undemocratic\".\n\nShe added: \"There is no justification for this violence and Donald Trump must condemn it.\"\n\nHer Conservative colleague, and former Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt directly addressed President Trump for telling the crowd to march on Congress, tweeting: \"He shames American democracy tonight and causes its friends anguish - but he is not America.\"\n\nLabour's deputy leader, Angela Rayner said: \"The violence that Donald Trump has unleashed is terrifying, and the Republicans who stood by him have blood on their hands.\"\n\nAnd shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy said the events were \"the legacy of a politics of hate that pits people against each other and threatens the foundations of democracy\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Boris Johnson This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMeanwhile, Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey has defended the prime minister's response to the rioting.\n\nAsked on ITV's Peston programme why Mr Johnson hadn't criticised Mr Trump, she said: \"The prime minister has been clear tonight that we need a peaceful and orderly transition.\"\n\nMs Coffey added that events in the US were a \"reminder that democracy is something precious - and will only continue to thrive as long as we protect institutions that make this country important and not demean each other when the majority of what we want to achieve is similar outcomes\".\n\nDonald Trump and Boris Johnson at a Nato summit in 2019\n\nMeanwhile, the SNP's leader in Westminster, Ian Blackford, said the end of Mr Trump's presidency \"cannot come quick enough\".\n\nHe tweeted: \"What a legacy the events of today are to his time in office. Shameful, shocking, an affront to democracy.\"\n\nLeader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, called the scenes \"absolutely horrendous\", while his party's foreign affairs spokeswoman, Layla Moran, said: \"The scenes coming out of Washington tonight are an attack on democracy.\"", "An ambulance service has experienced its busiest day of calls on record.\n\nOn Monday, West Midlands Ambulance Service dealt with 5,383 calls in 24 hours. The previous record was 5,001 calls in March 2018.\n\nSeven hundred of those calls came from London as its calls system struggled, according to BBC health correspondent Michele Paduano.\n\nThe ambulance service said Covid-19 and winter weather had resulted in hospitals being \"extremely busy\".\n\nAt the hosptials, the longest a patient waited was five hours and 39 minutes, with two of the longest waits at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham.\n\nA combination of Covid-19 and winter weather has resulted in hospitals being \"extremely busy\"\n\nAt one point on Monday night, 15 ambulances were waiting to hand over patients outside New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton.\n\nA source told the BBC it was \"a very challenging day\" and in total, handovers had accounted for 759 hours of crews' time, equivalent to taking 63 ambulances off the road.\n\nWhile another said at 06:00 GMT on Tuesday, ambulances were still responding to emergency calls from the night before.\n\nTraditionally, the first Monday after New Year is always busy. GP surgeries have been closed and people wait until after the festivities to get medical treatment.\n\nThis year, the number of calls was exacerbated by the service taking about 700 calls for the London ambulance service after its system struggled.\n\nThere was also the perfect storm of snow and ice coupled with coronavirus - made worse because many of our trusts, particularly University Hospitals Birmingham have been struggling with capacity for many months. Usually hospitals would put patients on corridors, they can't because of Covid risks.\n\nThey also have fewer beds due to wider spacing to prevent infection and fewer staff on duty. Hence patients left for hours on ambulances outside.\n\nWest Midlands Ambulance Service is the best performing in the country, but even with near to 500 ambulances a day on the road, it cannot keep up with demand.\n\nProf David Loughton, the chief executive of the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, warned its capacity would \"soon be compromised\".\n\n\"The numbers are ramping up enormously and I don't think we've seen the full impact of what happened on Christmas Day yet, that will take time to come through,\" Prof Loughton said.\n\nHe added a two-week \"lag\" meant things could get worst before they get better.\n\n\"As I always say today's Covid rate is my order book for intensive care in two weeks' time.\"\n\nA West Midlands Ambulance Service spokesman said: \"A combination of Covid-19 and winter weather has resulted in hospitals being extremely busy which unfortunately resulted in hospital handover delays.\n\n\"We work closely with the hospitals to try and ensure our crews are able to handover patients quickly and safely, but due to the extremely high demand some patients did wait longer to be handed over than we would normally see.\"\n\nIn a statement London Ambulance Service NHS Trust said : \"As is standard practice during periods of high demand and high levels of staff sickness, ambulance services provide support for each other, which includes answering 999 calls.\"\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nHave you been affected by the issues raised in this story? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Dickey emerged during a boom for African-American literature in the 1990s\n\nAuthor Eric Jerome Dickey, whose novels of romance, mystery and adventure were best-selling page-turners over more than 20 years, has died aged 59.\n\nThe US writer wrote 30 novels about breathless relationships and thrilling adventures involving young African American characters.\n\nThey included Friends & Lovers, Milk In My Coffee, Cheaters and Finding Gideon.\n\nHe also wrote a series of Marvel comics about a love story between Storm from the X-Men and the Black Panther.\n\n\"His work has become a cultural touchstone over the course of his multi-decade writing career, earning him millions of dedicated readers around the world,\" his publicist Becky Odell told USA Today in a statement.\n\nWriter Roxane Gay was among those paying tribute, describing him as \"a great storyteller\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by roxane gay This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nOther authors to add their voices included Luvvie Ajayi, who described him as \"a literary legend\", and ReShonda Tate Billingsley, who said he was \"an amazing author and an even better friend\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Luvvie is the #ProfessionalTroublemaker This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post 2 by Luvvie is the #ProfessionalTroublemaker\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by ReShonda Tate Billingsley This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by Wesley This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nBorn in Memphis, Tennessee, Dickey started out as a software developer in the aerospace industry. Being laid off from that job gave him a chance to take writing classes and see whether he could make it as an author.\n\nHe emerged during a boom for African-American literature in the 1990s, and his 1996 debut Sister, Sister - about the lives and loves of three siblings - was recently named one of the 50 Most Impactful Black Books of the Last 50 Years by Essence magazine.\n\nHe was particularly praised for his ability to write \"believable\" female characters, and many of his readers were women.\n\nWhen the New York Times profiled him in 2004, it billed him as the \"chick lit king\". Patrik Henry Bass, Essence's books editor, told the paper: \"He is singular in the way he is tapping into the African-American female psyche.\"\n\nAnd Calvin Reid, an editor at trade magazine Publishers Weekly, said: \"He captures black language and black middle-class characters with more depth than you often see in commercial fiction.\"\n\nBy that time, he was selling 500,000 books a year. He was nominated four times for the NAACP Image Award for best work of fiction, winning in 2015 for A Wanted Woman.\n\nBy then, he had branched out into stories of crime, suspense, thrills and spills as well as the steamy and tangled relationships with which he made his name.\n\nHe had four daughters, but said he never based his plots on his own life. \"I avoid my life,\" he once said. \"It bores me. Trust me. A book about me would be a snoozefest.\"\n\nHis final novel, The Son of Mr Suleman, will be published in April.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"We've now vaccinated over 1.3m people across the UK\"\n\nSome 1.3 million people in the UK have now received their first dose of a Covid vaccine, says the government.\n\nIn England, that includes nearly a quarter of the most elderly, vulnerable patients.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said it meant that within a two to three weeks they should have a \"significant degree of immunity\" to the virus.\n\nHe said there would be a ramping up to get more people immunised - up to 2 million a week.\n\nThe ambition is to vaccinate all the over-70s, the most clinically vulnerable and front-line health and care workers by mid-February. That will require around 13 million vaccinations.\n\nHe defended the UK's policy of immunising more people with one dose immediately - rather than holding some stock back to give people a second booster shot - in order to save \"the most lives the fastest\".\n\nUS regulators have questioned the policy, saying it is premature without more trial evidence, but the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency says it is a pragmatic decision to protect more people.\n\nBoth the Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines require two doses to provide the best possible protection.\n\nInitially, the strategy for the Pfizer vaccine was to offer people the second dose 21 days after their initial jab - full immunity starts seven days after the second dose.\n\nBut when approval was announced for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on 30 December, it was also announced that the policy would now change - the new priority would be to give as many people a first shot of either vaccine, rather than providing the required two doses in as short a time as possible.\n\nEveryone will still receive their second dose, but this will now be within 12 weeks of their first.\n\nEngland's chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty told the Downing Street press conference that extending the gap between the first and second jabs would mean the number of people vaccinated can be doubled over three months.\n\n\"If over that period there is more than 50% protection then you have actually won. More people will have been protected than would have been otherwise.\n\n\"Our quite strong view is that protection is likely to be lot more than 50%.\"\n\nAsked whether the longer gap could lead to an increase risk of the virus mutating into a version that could escape the vaccine, he said it was a worry, but a small one.\n\nChief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said vaccines would probably need to be changed further down the line to continue to be a good match for the virus - but that this was relatively quick to do.\n\nOne of the exciting things about the science of the RNA vaccines is that they are incredibly fast to make in response to new mutations, he said.", "Former Goldman Sachs banker Richard Sharp is set to be named the BBC's next chairman, the corporation's media editor Amol Rajan says.\n\nMr Sharp spent 23 years working for the banking giant and was reportedly Chancellor Rishi Sunak's boss there.\n\nHe has recently been acting as an unpaid economic adviser to Mr Sunak during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nHis new role will see him lead negotiations with the government over the future of the licence fee.\n\nThe licence fee is due to stay in place until at least 2027, when the BBC's Royal Charter ends, with a debate about how the broadcaster should be funded after that.\n\nThe government is currently reviewing whether its cost, currently £157.50, should continue rising with inflation from 2022, and whether non-payment should remain a criminal offence.\n\nMr Sharp's career at Goldman Sachs culminated as chairman of its principal investment business in Europe before his departure in 2007. He was then on the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee for six years until 2019.\n\nAs an advisor to the Treasury about its pandemic response, the 63-year-old reportedly played a key role in the £1.57bn arts rescue package, and the film and television production restart scheme.\n\nMr Sharp is a former donor to the Conservative party.\n\nHe was chairman of the Royal Academy of Arts from 2007 to 2012, and founded the charity London Music Masters.\n\nSir David Clementi, the current BBC chairman, steps down in February. The post-holder is officially appointed by the Queen on the recommendation of the government.\n\nJulian Knight, the chair of the DCMS Committee, said in a statement: \"It is disappointing to see this news about the next BBC chairman has leaked out ahead of a formal announcement from the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. The Committee previously expressed some concerns over the appointments process, calling for it to be fair and transparent.\n\n\"The DCMS Committee looks forward to questioning the preferred candidate for the post in a pre-appointment hearing next week on their views at a critical time for the BBC about its role and the future of public service broadcasting more generally.\"\n\nHis views on the BBC itself are unknown. But like new director general Tim Davie, who he met a few weeks before Christmas, he has a commercial background. Just as the relationship between Lord Hall, Davie's predecessor, and Sir David was strong, so the bond between the new DG and chair will be critical.\n\nWhether Sharp supports the licence fee as the pillar of a future BBC settlement is unclear.\n\nThe last time the BBC's future was negotiated with a sceptical Conservative government, the relationship between the director general and the chancellor - then George Osborne - was critical, as Lord Hall explained to me in his exit interview.\n\nThis time, Davie will go into that negotiation with a very close ally of the current chancellor - though Sharp's first duty is to support Davie, and the BBC, and not his old mentee.", "New car registrations fell to their lowest level in nearly three decades last year, according to preliminary figures from the industry's trade body.\n\nIt was also the biggest one-year fall since World War Two, when factories were being turned over to military production, the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders said.\n\nAbout 1.63 million new cars were registered in 2020, compared with 2.3 million in 2019 - a decline of 29%.\n\nIt was the lowest total since 1992.\n\nThe bulk of the lost sales occurred during the first lockdown in the Spring, when showrooms were forced to close, and factories shut down.\n\n\"We lost half a million units from March, April, May - and we never recovered them,\" said the SMMT's chief executive, Mike Hawes.\n\nThe restrictions introduced later in the year were less damaging, largely because dealers were able to sell cars remotely, using 'click and collect' services.\n\nThat remains the case during the new lockdown, announced on Monday.\n\n\"We can still do click and collect, which is important, because that's the very minimum we need,\" said Mr Hawes. \"Not just to keep retail going, but also to keep manufacturing going.\"\n\nOverall, the SMMT said the Covid crisis has cost the car industry some £20bn - and cost the exchequer nearly £2bn in lost VAT.\n\nThere are also serious questions about the extent to which the car market can recover this year. Previous forecasts, which had suggested new registrations could rise to about 2 million in 2021, have been thrown into doubt by the latest restrictions.\n\nBut while the market as a whole has suffered over the past year, sales of electric cars have risen dramatically, increasing their share of the market from 1.5% to 6.5%. Sales of plug-in hybrids also rose sharply.\n\nCar showrooms re-opened from the first lockdown in June\n\n\"If we see this continued level of uptake in electric vehicles, then we anticipate that sales of new EVs and plug-in hybrids will overtake diesel cars in 2021,\" said Ian Plummer, commercial director of motoring website Auto Trader. \"Then, pure EVs will overtake those of their internal combustion engine counterparts in 2026.\"\n\nWith the pandemic continuing to inflict serious damage on the industry, Mr Hawes says the trade deal between the UK and the EU came as a \"massive relief\".\n\nIt confirmed that cars and car parts could continue to move between the two regions, without tariffs - or taxes - being imposed, provided certain conditions are met.\n\nThe SMMT had previously warned that failing to reach a deal could have cost the industry £55bn over five years - and add £2,000 to the cost of each vehicle\n\nBut manufacturers still face potentially significant additional costs due to so-called non-tariff barriers - including border formalities, and the need to obtain extra regulatory approvals for new designs.\n\n\"This is not a free deal\", said Mr Hawes.\n\nAnother consequence of the trade deal is that the UK will need to focus on battery production, if it is to maintain its car industry while phasing out petrol and diesel engines.\n\nThat's because in order to qualify for tariff-free access to the European market, the value of car components made outside the UK and the EU will have to be strictly limited.\n\nSpecific rules relating to batteries effectively mean that from 2027, they themselves will have to be made in the EU or the UK.\n\nThe SMMT believes that, based on current investment plans, UK battery factories will have a capacity of 15 gigawatt-hours (GWh) by 2024.\n\nThat is more than seven times the current level, and would be enough to produce 250,000 electric cars per year.\n\nBut the SMMT insists much more is needed: 60GWh in order to produce 1 million cars per year by 2030, and 120GWh to produce 2mby 2040.\n\nThat, says Mr Hawes, will require \"massive investment\".", "Greggs expects up to a £15m loss for the year, which would be its first annual loss since it listed its shares on the stock exchange in 1984.\n\nThe bakery chain said it does not expect profits to return to pre-Covid levels until 2022 at the earliest.\n\nIt has been battling a sales slump due to the coronavirus pandemic, but sales declines have been lessening.\n\nGreggs made 820 job cuts at the end of last year, after its sales were hit by coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions.\n\nChief executive Roger Whiteside said the impact of the Covid-19 crisis had been \"enormous\" and that a fresh lockdown meant \"significant uncertainties remain in the near term\".\n\nCoronavirus restrictions towards the end of last year led to \"variable trading conditions across the UK\", he said.\n\nSales in the final three months of the year fell by nearly a fifth, but this decline was less than its sales slump in the third quarter.\n\nIn September, Greggs, which is based in Newcastle, said it was in talks with staff to cut hours in an effort to minimise job losses.\n\nBut it still decided to cut 820 jobs because of \"lockdown levels of business\" as High Streets were hit by the crisis.\n\n\"Looking ahead, the significant uncertainty over the duration of social restrictions, along with the impact of higher unemployment levels, makes it difficult to predict performance,\" the firm said.\n\n\"However, we do not expect that profits will return to pre-Covid levels until 2022 at the earliest.\"\n\nGreggs said on Wednesday that total sales for the year were down nearly a third to £811m, but government support had helped to limit pre-tax losses.\n\nIt said it had developed its takeaway business and a delivery tie-up with Just Eat, and had also seen \"strong sales\" through its partnership with retailer Iceland.\n\n\"We have taken action to position Greggs to withstand further short-term shocks and are optimistic about our prospects for growth once social restrictions are lifted,\" Mr Whiteside added.\n\nGreggs wants to open about 100 new stores, on a net basis, over the year ahead.\n\nJulie Palmer, a partner at insolvency consultants Begbies Traynor, said: \"The latest national lockdown will be unwelcome news for Greggs, which has operated shrewdly during the past year in spite of a lack of footfall, with non-essential stores forced to close and millions working from home.\n\n\"The bakery chain has had to adapt its business model and invest digitally to accommodate for the rapid change in shopping habits, offering click-and-collect purchases, as well as a nationwide delivery service through its partnership with Just Eat.\n\n\"This should provide a solid base for the business to expand when government restrictions are eased and the world returns to some normality.\"", "US intelligence agencies have said they believe Russia was behind the \"serious\" cyber compromise revealed in December.\n\nPresident Trump had previously suggested China might have been behind the hack, although other members of his administration had pointed the finger at Moscow.\n\nIn a joint statement, the intelligence bodies say they currently believe fewer than 10 US government agencies saw their data compromised, although other organisations outside of government were also affected.\n\nThey say work is still going on to understand the scope of the incident, which appears to have been aimed at gathering intelligence and which they say is \"ongoing\" a month after details first emerged.\n\nThe update on the investigation came in a statement from a task force called the Cyber Unified Coordination Group which was set up to deal with the incident. It comprises intelligence and law enforcement agencies including the FBI and NSA.\n\nThe group said it was still working to understand the scope of what had taken place.\n\nEighteen thousand customers who used Orion product from the company Solar Winds were exposed but US intelligence says it believes a much smaller number saw follow-on activity from the hackers in which they stole data. The US Treasury was among those which previously acknowledged being targeted.\n\n\"This is a serious compromise that will require a sustained and dedicated effort to remediate,\" the statement said. Many organisations are having to scour their systems for signs that they may have been compromised.\n\nThe incident sent shockwaves across the US partly because the breach was undiscovered for many months and was potentially far-reaching in terms of who it might have affected. It also suggested a degree of sophistication and stealth which was widely seen as a trademark of hackers from the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence agency.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Experts have been warning for years that it's not a matter of if, but when, hackers will kill somebody\n\nSoon after the incident was revealed, President Trump raised the possibility that China might be responsible, but members of his own administration including the secretary of state and attorney general pointed the finger at Moscow. The latest statement shows the assessment of US intelligence agencies is that Russia was behind it, although it does not go so far as accusing the Russian state itself, saying only that the actor was \"likely Russian in origin\". Moscow has denied playing any part.\n\nPresident-elect Joe Biden has previously said it was important to take \"meaningful steps\" to hold those responsible to account. It is not yet clear, though, what that might involve. While some US politicians suggested the breach might even be compared to an \"act of war\", most cyber-experts disputed this and the US intelligence community has now played down suggestions that it could have had destructive impact.\n\n\"At this time, we believe this was, and continues to be, an intelligence-gathering effort,\" the latest statement says. This is significant since it suggests no evidence has been found that this was preparatory activity for a more destructive cyber-attack which might switch off systems. This may limit the US response since espionage operations do not breach the cyber norms the US itself promotes (largely because it too carries out such intelligence-gathering operations against other nations).\n\nIn December UK officials say they believed a small number of UK organisations were affected but said they did not believe they were in the public sector.", "South Vietnam flags were seen during the unrest Image caption: South Vietnam flags were seen during the unrest\n\nOn Wednesday, as protesters gathered outside before swarming the Capitol building, the yellow flags of the old South Vietnam regime could be seen.\n\nIn fact, the yellow flags of the former South Vietnam are a common sight at pro-Trump rallies across the United States.\n\nVietnamese Americans, especially those of the older generation who fled Vietnam after Saigon fell in 1975, are known for their support for the Republican party and Donald Trump.\n\nA pre-election survey by the group Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote found that Vietnamese Americans are the only major East Asian ethnic community that favoured Trump over Biden . Trump’s anti-China and anti-communist rhetoric resonated greatly with the former refugees who risked their lives to escape communism.\n\nBut the support for President Trump has also become an increasingly divisive issue amongst the Vietnamese American community.\n\nHours after the Capitol riot, there are still calls on pro-Trump internet forums like the \"ABC Trump\" Facebook page for Vietnamese Americans to “take to the streets in support of President Trump” as “the battle continues”.\n\nBut there have also been condemnations.\n\n“This is embarrassing,” one young Vietnamese American wrote on Twitter, adding: “They’ve brought shame to the flag”.", "The US is facing another huge election - one that could define how much new president Joe Biden can get done in his first term.\n\nMore than 100 people are gathered in the grey and damp cold in Stone Mountain.\n\nIt's a miserable start to the New Year but this city near Georgia's capital, Atlanta, feels anything but sleepy or hung over.\n\n\"The energy we get here in Georgia is something I've never seen before,\" says Mr Gardner, who was born and raised in local DeKalb County.\n\n\"We've had other Senate races and I'm just excited.\"\n\nHe is joined by fellow Democratic supporters who are singing and dancing outside a house-turned-campaign centre.\n\nIt's to rally support for the two men who are probably President-elect Joe Biden's most important friends right now: Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.\n\nThis traditionally Republican state was won by Mr Biden in November's election - but there were no clear winners for the state's two Senate seats. Now there is a run-off between the top candidates in each race.\n\nIf the two Democrats, Mr Ossoff and Rev Warnock, beat incumbent Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, Mr Biden's party effectively controls the Senate.\n\nShirley Shepphard is handing out stickers, with a smile and confidence.\n\n\"The Democrats can win! Yes we can, yes we can, yes we can!\" she says.\n\nThere's a huge cheer as Mr Ossoff's large blue bus makes its way down the road and pulls up opposite the house.\n\nHe is only 33 years old and, in case his youth wasn't clear enough, he makes a point of jogging on to the small stage.\n\nDuring a polished speech he exclaims: \"The place we demand better is at the ballot box.\"\n\nIf Mr Ossoff wins, he'd be the youngest member of the Senate - a title once held by Joe Biden himself.\n\nNo pressure, but I put to him that the fate of Mr Biden's presidency is in his hands.\n\nIf he loses, is Mr Biden a weakened president before he's even begun?\n\nWithout missing a beat, Mr Ossoff says: \"We will win.\"\n\nFellow Democrat and Senate candidate Mr Warnock could make history alongside him.\n\nHe could become Georgia's first black senator, in a state that has a higher proportion of black people than any other in the US.\n\nRallies have been held for all four candidates, including this one featuring the US vice-president\n\nGeorgia has also found itself becoming the final battleground for an aggrieved President Donald Trump.\n\nThe Republican Senate candidates here - Mr Perdue and Ms Loeffler - are his last foot soldiers.\n\nBoth appeared at his rally the previous night, where he focused on repeating his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.\n\n\"There's no way we lost Georgia, that was a rigged election,\" were the first words out of his mouth.\n\n\"We run all over the world telling people how to run their elections and we don't even know how to run ours.\"\n\nMr Trump has also gone after Georgia's Republican governor and begged another official here, in an astonishing phone call, to find votes to overturn Mr Biden's victory.\n\nThe president has also called the Georgia Senate races \"invalid and illegal\" without any evidence.\n\nThere are concerns from some Republicans he's putting people off voting on Tuesday.\n\nI asked supporters at Trump's rally why they would take part in an election process if they didn't believe it was fair. Some hesitated and suggested it was their civic duty.\n\nFor those who won't vote, it's an advantage that may work for the Democrats.\n\nWhen I ask two Ossoff and Warnock supporters about the claims of election fraud, both women throw their heads back, burst into a long laugh in perfect unison and shake their heads bemused: \"Yeah, that's a good one.\"\n\nThere's another factor in this runoff - teenagers.\n\nSince the 3 November presidential election, more than 23,000 people will have turned 18 in the state and can now vote in this Senate race.\n\nMany young voters have been holding live-streaming events in counties across Georgia.\n\nValerie Ponomarev just turned 18 and is very excited at getting to vote. She was upset she couldn't cast a ballot in the recent presidential election.\n\n\"I did the math in my head and was short by a month as I was born in December,\" she says.\n\n\"I was mad at my mum that I hadn't been born sooner!\"\n\nShe said at first, she didn't even realise the Senate runoff was so crucial in Georgia.\n\nShe's voting for the Democrats, Ms Ponomarev says, adding that a lot of younger people have shown support for Mr Ossoff.\n\n\"I think the youth finally want representation in government because we're so often underrepresented and now that we have Jon Ossoff who is closer to our age,\" she says.\n\nMichael Guisto found himself in the same situation as Ms Ponomarev - too young to cast a ballot in November - and says missing out on that vote was painful.\n\n\"It feels like a redemption,\" he says of this Senate race.\n\nThe polls are suggesting it's a very tight race. But this state knows that whatever it decides, it will have an impact on the country as a whole.\n\nMr Guisto says even though he missed out on the November election, this vote matters.\n\n\"I get to in some ways influence the country but this time it's a bit closer to home.\"", "The deaths of a further 68 people who tested positive for Covid have been recorded in Scotland in the past 24 hours.\n\nIt comes as official figures show 33,381 people received their first dose of the coronavirus vaccine in the week to 27 December.\n\nThat takes the total number of people to get a vaccine in Scotland since 8 December to 92,188.\n\nPatients in hospital with coronavirus rose from 1,347 on Tuesday to 1,384.\n\nHospital admissions have been rising sharply but are still 136 short of the peak figure of 1,520 recorded on 20 April last year.\n\nThe latest statistics show 2,039 new cases of the virus, which is 10.5% of those recently tested, a slightly lower figure than in recent days.\n\nA total of 95 people are in intensive care - a slight increase but significantly lower than the April peak of 208.\n\nHealth officials have expressed concern about the situation in Inverclyde, Dumfries & Galloway and the Scottish Borders, in particular, which have seen sharp rises in positive tests.\n\nWeekly figures show Inverclyde recorded 538.5 cases per 100,000, Dumfries & Galloway 538.1 and the Scottish Borders 435.5.\n\nThere were a further 603 confirmed coronavirus cases in the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde area in the past 24 hours, with an additional 296 in NHS Lanarkshire, 206 in NHS Grampian and 164 in the NHS Lothian area.\n\nSince the start of the pandemic, there have been 141,066 cases in Scotland, with a total of 4,701 people dying within 28 days of first testing positive.\n\nThe latest vaccine figures were released after doctors in Scotland raised concerns about plans to delay the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.\n\nAll four UK nations will now leave up to 12 weeks between the first and second doses of the jab rather than giving both within 21 days.\n\nDr Lewis Morrison, head of the BMA in Scotland, said members had concerns about the potential impact of leaving such a big gap between the two doses.\n\nBut the UK's chief medical officers have defended the move, saying the first dose will give people substantial protection against the virus within two to three weeks.", "Doctors are calling for a significant ramping up of the vaccination programme following approval of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.\n\nThe first patients are expected to receive the jab - the second approved for use in the UK - on Monday.\n\nBut with just over 500,000 doses available to use next week, experts are worried there may be a bottleneck in the system.\n\nThere are more than 25m people in the nine priority groups identified so far.\n\nThis includes all those over 50 and younger adults with health conditions, as well as frontline health and care staff.\n\nMeanwhile, GPs have questioned the wisdom of cancelling patients already booked in for their second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the first jab that was approved and has been used since early December.\n\nAs well as approving the Oxford vaccine on Wednesday, regulators also said that doctors could wait longer between the two courses needed, to ensure faster rollout of vaccination.\n\nBut the British Medical Association's Dr Richard Vautrey said GPs were unhappy they were being asked to cancel appointments that had already been made for second doses. The original advice said they should be given three weeks apart.\n\nHe said it was \"grossly unfair\" and would waste staff time.\n\nOne of those who has been affected is Stella Joseph, who is 82 and has a chronic lung condition.\n\n\"The thing I feel most is utterly helpless, that there's nobody to appeal to, that you can't get any assistance with this at all.\n\n\"I think it is so hard that those of us who were in this first wave were obviously people who are at high risk and we're the ones who have been left high and dry.\"\n\nThe move has also prompted some debate about how strong the evidence is for delaying the second dose.\n\nProf Peter Openshaw, of Imperial College London, said there was \"pretty convincing\" data showing it would enhance the effect of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.\n\nBut he said because the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had not been tested in the same way, there was no comparable evidence.\n\nSo far nearly 950,000 people have received a first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.\n\nThe hope was that when the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was approved, it would lead to a significant increase in the rate of vaccination.\n\nThe jab is easier to store and distribute as it can be kept at normal fridge temperature, unlike the Pfizer-BioNTech one that has to be kept in ultra-cold storage.\n\nThere are thought to be more than five million doses of the Oxford vaccine in the UK, but only just over 500,000 are ready for use.\n\nThat is because vaccines have to be put into vials and batched and certified.\n\nSources at the NHS expressed frustration at the situation. \"The NHS is ready to go, but we can only go as quickly as supply allows,\" one said.\n\nQueen Mary University epidemiologist Deepti Gurdasani said there appeared to be a \"bottleneck\", and the government looked like it was still going to be under its target of two million doses a week.\n\n\"We really need to speed up rollout,\" she said.\n\nThere are currently more than 700 vaccination sites up and running, with several hundred more thought to be ready to go once vaccines are available.\n\nBut the limited supply of the Pfizer vaccine, which has to be shipped in from Belgium, has meant some centres have not been able to vaccinate people every week.\n\nDame Clare Gerada, a former chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: \"We really now need a massive operational system. We need a 24/7 system with GPs, mass vaccination centres and hospitals - this needs to be scaled up.\n\n\"It's got to be football stadia, all these large venues that we've got currently lying dormant.\n\n\"If we can really get a mass operational system up and running, then I can't see why we can't be getting the whole population immunised by the spring.\"\n\nNHS England's medical director for primary care, Dr Nikki Kanani, promised there would be a significant expansion of the vaccination programme in the coming weeks.\n\nShe predicted the majority of care home residents would be protected by the end of January, and frontline staff would start to get a vaccination in large numbers.\n\nShe also praised the progress made so far, thanking the \"tireless efforts of staff\".\n\nEngland Health Secretary Matt Hancock also praised staff, adding the numbers being vaccinated would \"rapidly increase in the months ahead\".", "The 19-year-old victim was attacked on Canonbury Road in Islington shortly before 19:00 GMT on 29 December\n\nA man was left partially blind after he was repeatedly hit in the face during a street robbery in north London.\n\nThe 19-year-old had been walking along Canonbury Road in Islington on 29 December when he was approached by two men, one of whom stole his bag and hit him with a \"baton-style weapon\".\n\nThe Met said he had suffered \"life-changing injuries\" in the \"vicious and unprovoked attack\".\n\nNo arrests have been made and the detectives have appealed for witnesses.\n\nThe attacker has been described by police as black, aged in his late teens with spikey hair and of a skinny build.\n\nDet Con Faisal Issaouni said the 19-year-old victim had been \"left with injuries that will affect him for the rest of his life\".\n\n\"We're reviewing CCTV from the area and have spoken to a number of witnesses as we try to track down the man responsible,\" he added.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Clap for Carers is to return under a new name of Clap for Heroes, the initiative's founder has said.\n\nThe weekly applause for front-line NHS staff and other key workers ran for 10 weeks during the UK's first coronavirus lockdown last spring.\n\nFounder Annemarie Plas tweeted that it would return at 20:00 GMT on Thursday.\n\nMs Plas said she hoped the initiative would \"lift the spirit of all of us\" including \"all who are pushing through this difficult time\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Annemarie This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe idea of clapping and banging pots from doorsteps originally began as a one-off to support NHS staff on 26 March - three days after the UK went into lockdown for the first time.\n\nAfter proving popular it was expanded to cover all key workers and continued every Thursday for 10 weeks, with millions of people across the UK taking part.\n\nMembers of the Royal Family and politicians including Prime Minister Boris Johnson also joined in with the show of support.\n\nHowever, the event later faced criticism for becoming politicised, with some suggesting the NHS would benefit more from extra funding than applause.\n\nLast May, Ms Plas, a Dutch national living in south London, said the weekly applause should end after its 10th week and instead become an annual event.\n\nAt the time, she said the public had \"shown our appreciation\" and it was now up to ministers to \"reward\" key workers.\n\n\"Without getting too political, I share some of the opinions that some people have about it becoming politicised,\" she told the PA news agency ahead of the final clap in May.\n\n\"I think the narrative is starting to change and I don't want the clap to be negative.\"", "YouTuber JoJo Siwa has said she had \"no idea\" that \"gross\" and \"inappropriate\" questions were featured in a board game bearing her image.\n\nIt follows a parental backlash about the Nickelodeon-branded game, marketed to children aged six and over.\n\nThe \"Truth or Dare\" category contained questions like: \"Have you ever gone outside without underwear?\" and \"Have you ever been arrested?\".\n\nParents have expressed disapproval on social media in recent days.\n\nIn response to the online outcry, the 17-year-old internet star said she was \"really upset\" to discover the content of the game, which is called JoJo's Juice.\n\nShe added she was working with Nikelodeon to have removed it from the shops.\n\n\"Over the weekend, it has been brought to my attention by my fans and followers on TikTok that my name and my image have been used to promote this board game that has some really inappropriate content,\" said Siwa, in an Instagram video message.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by itsjojosiwa This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n\"When companies make these games, they don't run every aspect by me and so I had no idea of the types of questions that were on these playing cards.\"\n\nShe added: \"Now when I first saw this, I was really really really upset at how gross these questions were. And so I brought it to Nickelodeon's attention immediately and since then, they have been working to get this game stopped being made, and also pulled from all shelves wherever it's being sold.\"\n\nShe went on to say that she would have \"never approved or agreed to be associated with this game,\" if she had seen the cards beforehand.\n\nOther questions featured in the board game included: \"Have you ever stolen from a store?\" and \"Have you ever walked in on someone naked?\"\n\nThe US teenager posts videos of her day-to-day life on her YouTube channel, Its JoJo Siwa.\n\nShe is also a singer and dancer, having appeared on the reality TV series Dance Moms, alongside her mother, Jessalynn Siwa.\n\nHer musical offerings so far include the singles Boomerang and Kid in a Candy Store.\n\nLast year, she was included on Time magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Teachers' estimated grades will be used to replace cancelled GCSEs and A-levels in England this summer, says Education Secretary Gavin Williamson.\n\nHe told MPs he would \"trust in teachers rather than algorithms\", a reference to the U-turn over last year's exams.\n\nFor primaries, he confirmed there would be no Year 6 Sats tests this year.\n\nMr Williamson promised parents it would be \"mandatory\" for schools to provide \"high-quality remote education\" of three to five hours per day.\n\nHe said this would be \"enforced\" by Ofsted, with inspections where there were \"serious concerns\" about what was provided for children now studying at home.\n\nLabour's Shadow Education Secretary, Kate Green, accused Mr Williamson of \"chaos and confusion\" - and said he had failed to listen to the \"expertise of professionals on the front line\".\n\nShe said he had given a \"cast-iron commitment\" that exams would go ahead - and Ms Green said: \"At that moment, we should have known they were doomed to be cancelled.\"\n\nMr Williamson, in a statement to the House of Commons, said there would be \"training and support\" for teachers in estimating grades, \"to ensure these are awarded fairly and consistently\".\n\nHe also told MPs there would be no Sats tests for those at the end of primary school.\n\n\"I can absolutely confirm that we won't be proceeding with Sats this year. We do recognise that this will be an additional burden on schools\n\nGeoff Barton, leader of the ASCL head teachers' union, said rather than a \"vague statement\" of how A-levels and GCSEs would be graded, ministers should already have a system ready in place - and it was a \"dereliction of duty\" that it was not already prepared.\n\nAnd he warned against repeating the \"shambles\" of last summer's cancelled exams.\n\nThe education secretary confirmed to MPs that GCSEs and A-levels are not going ahead - after this week's decision that it was no longer feasible with so much time lost in the Covid pandemic and the latest lockdown.\n\nThe exams watchdog Ofqual will draw up proposals for an alternative way of deciding results, for qualifications that could be used for jobs, staying on in school or university places.\n\nSimon Lebus, the watchdog's interim head, said evidence for replacement grades could include tests, homework, mock exams and teachers' observations - and would take into account how much of the syllabus had been covered.\n\nA consultation is expected to begin next week, with plans to be decided by the end of February or possibly sooner.\n\nLast year's attempts to find an alternative approach to exam results, which initially used an algorithm, descended into chaos - and eventually switched to using teachers' grades.\n\nAnd without any exam papers or standardised mock exams, the use of teachers' assessments, with some process of moderation between schools, will be used for this summer's candidates.\n\nOn vocational qualifications, Labour's Ms Green said the education secretary was \"failing to show leadership on exams in January\".\n\nVocational exams, such as BTecs, are carrying on, if schools and colleges decide to continue with them - but college leaders had complained that there needed to be a national decision to avoid confusion.\n\nIf students cannot take BTec exams this month as planned, they will still be awarded a grade, if they have \"enough evidence to receive a certificate that they need for progression\", says the awarding body Pearson.\n\nAn Ofqual spokeswoman said they would consider options for replacement exam results, academic and vocational, \"to ensure the fairest possible outcome in the circumstances\".\n\nThe exams watchdog's decisions will face much scrutiny - with the previous head of Ofqual resigning after last summer's U-turns over grades.\n\nMr Williamson's statement in the Commons came as all GCSE, AS and A-level exams in Northern Ireland were cancelled due to the Covid-19 crisis.\n\nEducation Minister Peter Weir announced the decision in the Stormont assembly on Wednesday.\n\nScotland has already cancelled its Nationals, Highers and Advanced Highers.\n\nGCSEs and A-levels in Wales were scrapped in November.", "Dr Dre, seen here in 2018, is one of hip-hop's most successful stars\n\nRapper and producer Dr Dre, one of hip-hop's most successful and influential stars, is being treated in hospital after suffering a brain aneurysm.\n\nThe 55-year-old was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on Monday, TMZ reported.\n\nIn a post on Instagram, he said: \"I'm doing great and getting excellent care from my medical team.\"\n\nHe is \"resting comfortably\" after the aneurysm, his lawyer told Billboard.\n\nIn his post, Dr Dre also wrote: \"I will be out of the hospital and back home soon. Shout out to all the great medical professionals at Cedars. One Love!!\"\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by drdre This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nFriends and fellow stars have sent their well wishes after the reports of his ill health emerged.\n\nIce Cube, his former bandmate in trailblazing 1980s hip-hop group NWA, tweeted: \"Send your love and prayers to the homie Dr. Dre.\"\n\nSnoop Dogg, who was discovered by Dr Dre in the early 1990s, wrote on Instagram: \"GET WELL DR DRE WE NEED U CUZ.\"\n\nMissy Elliott wrote: \"Prayers up for Dr. Dre and his family for healing & Strength over his mind & body.\" And singer Ciara tweeted: \"Praying for you Dr. Dre. Praying for a full recovery.\"\n\nWith NWA and then as a solo artist, leading producer and record label mogul, Dr Dre shaped west coast rap and was instrumental in the careers of other stars like Eminem, 50 Cent and Kendrick Lamar.\n\nAn aneurysm is a bulge in a weakened blood vessel where the blood pressure causes a small area to bulge outwards.\n\nMost brain aneurysms only cause noticeable symptoms if they burst, leading to bleeding on the brain, which can cause a very serious condition and can be fatal.", "(L-R) David Wails, Joe Ritchie-Bennett and James Furlong were pronounced dead at the scene\n\nA man who stabbed three people to death in a Reading park was suffering from psychosis \"right up to the day\" of the killings, a court has heard.\n\nKhairi Saadallah, 26, attacked James Furlong, 36, David Wails, 49, and Joseph Ritchie-Bennett, 39, in the Forbury Gardens in June.\n\nA hearing to decide if he was motivated by a religious or ideological cause has been told he was \"no radical Islamist\".\n\nThe hearing at the Old Bailey is part of his sentencing.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. CCTV cameras captured Khairi Saadallah before and after the stabbing\n\nSaadallah, of Basingstoke Road, Reading, has pleaded guilty to three murders and three attempted murders.\n\nAn examination of his mobile phone revealed extremist material, including an image of the Islamic State flag and the 9/11 Twin Towers attack, the court was told.\n\nThe prosecution is seeking a whole-life prison order, meaning he would never be considered for release.\n\nRossano Scamardella QC, defending, said the sentence should be one of life imprisonment with a starting point of 30 years, due to a lack of serious premeditation, the \"fleeting\" strength of his commitment to Islamist jihad, and his mental health issues.\n\nKhairi Saadallah previously admitted three counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder\n\nHe said while the attack in Reading was \"terrifying\" and \"senseless\", it did not justify the failed Libyan asylum seeker being jailed for more than 30 years.\n\nHe added that \"as brutal as these killings were\", the suggestion they were \"ruthlessly efficient\" had been \"exaggerated\".\n\nSaadallah took \"certain steps to facilitate the killings\", he said, but \"significant planning or premeditation simply does not exist\".\n\nHe told the hearing Saadallah had \"come to the attention of the authorities on hundreds of occasions\", and had a history of frequent interactions with the police, criminal justice system and mental health services.\n\nHe said Saadallah had developed an emotionally unstable and anti-social personality disorder and \"right up until the day of killing he was plainly suffering from episodes of psychosis\".\n\nMr Scamardella said there is no suggestion this caused his offending but insisted his \"culpability [for the attack] is reduced\".\n\nThe court heard earlier that a psychiatrist has since concluded the attack on June 20 was \"unrelated to the effects of either mental disorder or substance misuse\".\n\nKhairi Saadallah was visited and filmed by police during a welfare check the day before the attack\n\nThe court was shown CCTV footage of Saadallah in Morrisons buying the knife he used in the attack\n\nSaadallah had described himself in interview as \"part Muslim and part Catholic\", said Mr Scamardella, adding: \"No radical Islamist would countenance adoption of another faith, it's inconceivable.\"\n\nHe said portraying Saadallah as a committed jihadist was a \"superficially attractive proposition\" based on \"pieces of evidence that exist that demonstrate or at least might demonstrate a fleeting interest\".\n\nThree others - Stephen Young, Patrick Edwards and Nishit Nisudan - were also injured by Saadallah.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Epsom Racecourse in Surrey will be one of seven mass vaccination hubs announced by the government\n\nSeven new mass Covid vaccination hubs across England have been announced by the government.\n\nCentres in London, Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Surrey and Stevenage are due to begin operations next week.\n\nVarious venues will be converted into regional centres in a bid to meet the government's target of vaccinating 14 million people in the UK by February.\n\nIt is expected the hubs will be staffed by NHS staff and volunteers.\n\nThe seven sites announced by Downing Street are:\n\nAshton Gate Stadium, home to Bristol City FC, will be used to help the government meet its vaccination target\n\nSupermarket chain Morrisons has confirmed car parks at its stores in Yeovil, Wakefield and Winsford would be used to drive-through vaccinations from Monday. It has also offered an additional 47 sites to the government.\n\nPremier League club Tottenham Hotspur has also offered the use of its stadium to the NHS as a venue to provide the coronavirus vaccine.\n\nThe sites across England will begin operations next week", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nI'm standing in what should be an operating theatre - but instead it's been converted into an intensive care unit for Covid-19 patients on ventilators.\n\nThis is the first time I have seen it full of patients like this. Normally this theatre would be busy with major cancer surgery, but that's been transferred to another building.\n\nA children's recovery area, still decorated with colourful stickers of cartoons, is once again filled with desperately sick adults. Every day, more wards are being transformed into ICU - ready for the next influx of patients.\n\nWe have been given access to University College Hospital, in central London. This is the same intensive care unit that I first visited in April, during the first peak.\n\nIt is one of the busiest hospitals in the capital and intensive care here is expanding across a hospital that is under pressure like never before, from a relentless rise in Covid admissions.\n\nI am struck by the toll the pandemic is taking on staff. It's immense - both physically and mentally. They are shell-shocked. \"My emotions are all over the place. Scared, sad, petrified, worried,\" one ICU nurse tells me.\n\nI asked one of the consultants who I've met several times in the last year, Dr Jim Down, how long they can keep going like this - and the answer was stark. \"At this rate, about a week. After that we really need to see it slow down or we're going to see the care we can deliver suffering.\"\n\nThey have got three times as many critically ill patients in the hospital as normal. The number of Covid admissions to London hospitals has doubled in just two weeks - they're more stretched now than at the peak last April. Senior staff are worried.\n\nDr Alice Carter compares it to an elastic band that is close to snapping. \"It gets to a point where you stretch so far it never returns back to its baseline. I think that's probably where we are now. It's not going to take much more for that elastic band to break, and that's the real fear for us at the moment.\"\n\nDr Alice Carter: 'It's not going to take much more for that elastic band to break'\n\nThat could have very serious consequences, she adds. \"If we get to that point, we can't offer anyone ICU, not just Covid patients, but anyone who has a traffic accident or a heart attack or a stroke - whatever it is, to take them in.\"\n\nFor 38-year-old Rachel Arfin, one of the three pregnant women in intensive care with Covid-19, treatment is more complicated. Her baby is due in five weeks and the staff have to monitor them both.\n\n\"They can't do anything that will harm the baby,\" she says. \"All the time [they are] checking, monitoring the baby.\" She is reassured by the \"beautiful sound\" of her baby's heartbeat.\n\n\"They are looking after two people in one. They're saving lives,\" says Rachel. But her children - she has seven - keep asking when she's coming home.\n\nRachel Arfin's baby is due in five weeks - both are doing well\n\nI've reported from here several times during the pandemic and am always struck by the professionalism and dedication of staff. It's always quiet and calm, but that belies what's actually happening. This is a system under strain like never before.\n\nThe warning signs are clear, the NHS is on the brink. Unless infection rates fall, soon it will have a serious impact. The pressure on staff is unrelenting. I saw two nurses in tears.\n\nCompared to when I visited in April, it's a lot busier. In some ways, it's more structured - they now know what they're dealing with. They've got new treatments, such as the drug dexamethasone, which they didn't have last time. And many of the staff have now had the first dose of the vaccine.\n\nBut other aspects don't get any easier, such as the emotional burden of breaking bad news over a telephone or video call. It is very different to being able to hold someone's hand.\n\nStaff say they don't know which patients to help first\n\nICU staff have incredibly high standards. They're used to doing everything meticulously and perfectly. And they're doing all they can. But sometimes they go home and feel guilty that they can't do more. The impact on nurses - the bedrock of care in intensive care - is visible.\n\nThe highly specialised staff are usually one-to-one with patients. Deputy sister Ashleigh Shillingford is looking after three or four ventilated patients at a time, with one other junior member of staff. It's emotional and often devastating work.\n\n\"We are so stretched we have to prioritise and prioritising care is not the NHS that I grew up in - we shouldn't have to choose which patient gets what care first.\" She says she's never had to make decisions like these before.\n\n\"You just don't know who to help first. The patients are losing their lives at a dramatic speed, we're not just getting old people,\" she says, \"these are young people that we're getting.\"\n\nGerald Williams, 58, is awaiting chemotherapy for lung cancer and had been shielding, but he still caught coronavirus. \"All of a sudden, out of the blue, Covid came knocking on my door and it's frightening - you don't know how you're getting your next breath,\" he says.\n\nGerald Williams had been shielding but he still caught coronavirus\n\nHe wants to get home to his daughters, the youngest of whom is 13. And he's annoyed at those who don't take it seriously. \"People are moaning and groaning. Even in A&E. They need to get a life. Don't be idiots, forget about meeting your mate, stay home. No-one is invulnerable.\"\n\nFor now the Trust is coping better than many others in London and is still taking Covid patients from other hospitals. But the next few weeks could be the biggest challenge the NHS has ever faced - and it will be its doctors and nurses who will bear the brunt for all of us.\n\nAs the BBC's medical editor, Fergus Walsh has been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic and its immense impact on the UK.", "Kate Thistleton will front new content from Bitesize Daily\n\nBBC TV is to help children keep up with their studies during the latest lockdown by broadcasting lessons on BBC Two and CBBC, as well as online.\n\nSchools have been closed to most children across the UK as part of tougher measures to control Covid-19.\n\nThe BBC will show curriculum-based programmes on TV from Monday.\n\nThey will include three hours of primary school programming every weekday on CBBC, and at least two hours for secondary pupils on BBC Two.\n\nDuring the first lockdown in the spring, lessons were available on iPlayer, red button and online, but not on regular TV channels.\n\nThe move comes amid concerns that low-income families may struggle to afford data packages for their children to take part in online learning.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson praised the BBC's \"fantastic\" plans on Tuesday. BBC Director-General Tim Davie said \"education is absolutely vital\".\n\nHe continued: \"The BBC is here to play its part and I'm delighted that we have been able to bring this to audiences so swiftly.\"\n\nThe primary programmes, which will be broadcast on CBBC from 09:00 every day, will include BBC Live Lessons and BBC Bitesize Daily as well as Our School, Celebrity Supply Teacher, Horrible Histories and Operation Ouch.\n\nBBC Two will cater for secondary students with programming to support the GCSE curriculum, including adaptations of Shakespeare plays alongside science, history and factual titles.\n\nBitesize Daily primary and secondary will also air every day on the red button as well as episodes being available on demand on iPlayer.\n\nCulture Secretary Oliver Dowden said the BBC \"has helped the nation through some of the toughest moments of the last century\".\n\n\"And for the next few weeks it will help our children learn whilst we stay home, protect the NHS and save lives,\" he added. \"This will be a lifeline to parents and I welcome the BBC playing its part.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Two US police officers linked to a notorious raid in which young black medic Breonna Taylor was fatally shot have been fired, authorities have said.\n\nDetectives Myles Cosgrove and Joshua Jaynes are the latest officers to be dismissed over the shooting in March last year.\n\nThe incident in Kentucky caused outrage, spurring protests against racism and police brutality.\n\nMs Taylor, 26, died when police raided her home in connection to a drug case.\n\nThe FBI said Mr Cosgrove fired the shot that killed Ms Taylor at her home in Louisville.\n\nLouisville police dismissed Mr Cosgrove for violating procedures for use of force and failing to use a body camera during the search, the Louisville Courier Journal reported on Wednesday.\n\nMr Jaynes, the newspaper said, was fired for violating the police force's policy for truthfulness and search warrant preparation.\n\nDuring the raid, Ms Taylor's boyfriend fired at the officers who he said he believed were attackers breaking into their home.\n\nPolice say they knocked on the door to announce their presence before breaking down the door with a battering ram.\n\nMs Taylor's boyfriend said police did not make their presence known, and he fired out of self-defence. Three officers returned fire with 32 shots, six of which hit Ms Taylor.\n\nMs Taylor's name became a global rallying cry as people demanded a thorough investigation into her death.\n\nBlack Lives Matter activists in the US have demanded that Louisville police take stronger action against the officers in the case and say that police too often escape unpunished after killing members of the public.\n\nBut despite the outcry against Ms Taylor's shooting, no criminal charges were sought relating to her death.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"Questions still aren't answered\": Breonna Taylor's family are worried about a \"cover-up\"", "Paul Trauberman from Rainbow Smiles said it was hard to give reassurance without knowing the facts about the new variant\n\nNursery staff say they are being \"treated like the bottom of the rung\" after schools in England were told to shut to reduce the virus transmission.\n\nPaul Trauberman, of Rainbow Smiles in Weston-super-Mare, said despite his staff being \"scared\" about the new Covid-19 variant they had come to work.\n\nThe government announced a strict lockdown across the country on Monday.\n\nIt was after the UK moved to Covid-19 threat level five, meaning there is a risk the NHS could be overwhelmed.\n\nMr Trauberman, who took over Rainbow Smiles nursery in 2016, said he felt conflicted.\n\n\"I've come in this morning and I've got staff crying and saying they are scared of this new variant.\"\n\n\"We don't have PPE, we can't social distance, on the other hand we still have a business that is operational and we are not going bankrupt.\"\n\nHe said prolonged closure also carried the risk of going out of business but it was difficult to reassure staff when \"you don't have any of the facts\".\n\n\"One minute it is fine and the schools are going back, and two days later they are sending everyone home.\n\n\"It makes the staff feel insecure and... they just feel like they are being treated like the bottom of the rung.\n\nSchools are expected to remain closed until after the February half-term\n\n\"With this new variant ... they are having to deal with very close contact with children, with a virus around, which they are saying is very, very bad, but with no more information than that.\"\n\nA Department for Education spokesperson said: \"Early years settings remain low risk environments for children and staff and there is no evidence that the new variant of coronavirus disproportionately affects young children.\"\n\nIt said keeping nurseries open supported parents and delivered crucial education for children as Bristol mother-of-three Eleni Franklin has found.\n\nShe said she \"really valued\" Acorns Nursery in Henbury Hill, being open as she and her husband are both key workers - so their children, Allegra, five, Aria, two and Rafe nine-months-old, will attend school and nursery throughout the lockdown.\n\n\"I can see that nurseries are different to schools. There has been one case at Aria's nursery during this whole period, whereas in school there has been quite a few,\" she said.\n\nEleni Franklin said she could see why nurseries were being treated differently to schools\n\n\"The nursery have been pretty good and although I understand there is a risk to staff, they have put a lot of measures in place to keep people safe.\"\n\nOne of the biggest challenges for nurseries - with some staff now unable to work because of their own childcare responsibilities - is maintaining child-to-staff ratios.\n\nMr Trauberman said they worked on a basis of one-to-three for babies, one-to-four for under-three's and one-to-eight with under five-year-olds.\n\n\"We are trying to maintain these bubbles, but normally we would move staff around to accommodate highs and lows of staff and children, to balance it out, but we are unable to do that to enable these bubbles,\" he said.\n\nHis nursery is now identifying families that could potentially keep their children at home if they were unable to meet those ratios.\n\nMr Trauberman, who is a member of an online group for nursery owners, said some people were calling for nurseries to shut, but said if that happened they risked \"not having a business to come back to\".\n\n\"Small businesses are the backbone of the country and if a lot of those go under, the financial implications for the whole country are going to be catastrophic.\"\n\nMother-of-two Kara Willetts, from Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, said she felt it was important her daughter Isobel continued going to nursery as she noticed her behaviour had changed when she had to stop going during the first lockdown in March.\n\n\"Isobel is a really sociable, outgoing child and she really suffered with not going in and seeing her friends during the first lockdown. Her mental health suffered and she displayed behaviour I had never seen from her before,\" she said.\n\nKara Willetts said her daughter Isobel's mental health suffered when nurseries closed during the first lockdown\n\nMrs Willetts said she had full confidence in the measures introduced at the nursery three-and-a-half-year-old Isobel attends in Cheltenham.\n\nShe said that with her husband working from home and a seven-month-old son also at home, the option of Isobel going to nursery was \"beneficial to the whole family\".\n\n\"It is quite difficult for my husband to concentrate on work with two kids at home. Transmission rates in young children are very low and if I had any safety concerns I wouldn't send Isobel there,\" she added.\n\nTom Shea, a former advisor to the Early Year's minister, said: \"The biggest issue is that as a society we regard childcare as something like babysitting, rather than the start of the early year's development of learning.\n\n\"Sadly it seems the main reason for keeping us open is for protecting employment rather than protecting children.\"\n\nMr Shea owns Child First Nursery in Worksop and said he thought there was a \"hierarchy\" among key workers in terms of vaccination priorities. He said \"sensibly\" the first priority was NHS staff, followed by social carers for the elderly. He said teachers ranked a \"reasonable\" third, but that Early Years workers did not feature at all.\n\n\"They are expected just to work, and I am not sure if the government thinks that we are invisible,\" he said.\n\nHe called for early vaccination of Early Years workers to allow them to stay open and be protected.\n\n\"The irony now is that we are being told to keep open even though we are private businesses, we are dictated to about the funding we can receive and how we receive it… and if parents are frightened of their children going into the childcare setting then suddenly we don't get paid for that, so you find nurseries half empty being forced to open and it is not economical to do that.\"\n\nA Department for Education spokesperson said: \"We are funding nurseries as usual and all children are able to attend their early years setting in all parts of England.\n\n\"Working parents on coronavirus support schemes will still remain eligible for childcare support even if their income levels fall below the minimum requirement.\"", "An investment firm has bought 50% of the rights to all Neil Young's songs.\n\nHipgnosis Songs Fund spent an estimated $150m (£110m) on 1,180 songs written by the Canadian folk rocker.\n\nThe fund, which lets people invest in hit songs, has previously splashed out about £1bn snapping up rights to songs from the likes of Mark Ronson, Chic, Barry Manilow and Blondie.\n\nFounded by music industry veteran Merck Mercuriadis, Hipgnosis turns music royalties into an income stream.\n\n\"This is a deal that changes Hipgnosis forever,\" said Mr Mercuriadis.\n\n\"I bought my first Neil Young album aged seven. Harvest was my companion and I know every note, every word, every pause and silence intimately.\n\n\"Neil Young, or at least his music, has been my friend and constant ever since.\"\n\nHipgnosis has been listed on the London Stock Exchange since July 2018. When songs owned by the fund get played on the radio or placed in a film or TV show, it makes money.\n\nBefore setting up Hipgnosis, Mr Mercuriadis managed artists such as Beyoncé, Elton John, Iron Maiden and Guns 'N' Roses.\n\nIn his view, songs are \"as investible as gold or oil\".\n\nHe says hit songs are a stable investment because their revenue is unaffected by fluctuations in the economy.\n\nThe sale of song catalogues has become a booming business during the Covid-19 pandemic, with investors seeing music as a relatively stable asset in an otherwise turbulent market.\n\nEarlier this week, Hipgnosis bought 100% of the rights to Lindsey Buckingham's 161 songs for an undisclosed amount.\n\nThe songs include hits that Buckingham wrote or co-wrote for Fleetwood Mac, including Go Your Own Way and The Chain.\n\nThe group's Stevie Nicks sold 80% of her publishing rights last year to Hipgnosis rival Primary Wave for about $80m.\n\nLast month, Universal Music Group announced it had bought 100% of Bob Dylan's 600 songs for between an estimated $200m and $450m (£150m-£340m).\n\nThe singer-songwriter was the latest of a number of artists to join up with the Los Angeles-based Universal, following other big names such as Bruce Springsteen, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar and Post Malone.\n\nNeil Young rose to prominence in the 1960s and 70s and is one of the most influential songwriters of all time.\n\nHe is known not only for his work as a solo artist, but also with the bands Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.\n\nYoung has released almost 50 studio albums and more than 20 live albums, of which 18 have been certified gold, seven are platinum and three are multi-platinum.\n\nSeven of his albums were included on Rolling Stone Magazine's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time chart: Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, After The Gold Rush, Déjà Vu (with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) Harvest, On The Beach, Tonight's the Night and Rust Never Sleeps.\n\n\"I built Hipgnosis to be a company Neil would want to be a part of,\" said Mr Mercuriadis.\n\n\"We have a common integrity, ethos and passion born out of a belief in music and these important songs.\n\n\"There will never be a 'Burger of Gold', but we will work together to make sure everyone gets to hear them on Neil's terms.\"", "US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order banning transactions with eight Chinese apps.\n\nThe apps include popular payments platform Alipay, as well as QQ Wallet and WeChat Pay.\n\nThe order, which takes effect in 45 days, says that the apps are being banned because they are a threat to US national security.\n\nIt flags the possibility that the apps could be used to track and build dossiers on US federal employees.\n\nTencent QQ, CamScanner, SHAREit, VMate and WPS Office are also included within the order, which only kicks in after Mr Trump has left office.\n\n\"The United States must take aggressive action against those who develop or control Chinese connected software applications to protect our national security,\" the order said.\n\nPresident Trump's order says \"by accessing personal electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, and computers, Chinese connected software applications can access and capture vast swaths of information from users, including sensitive personally identifiable information and private information.\"\n\nThe Trump administration has ratcheted up pressure on Chinese companies in its final months in office, including those it considers a national security risk.\n\nPresident Trump has signed executive orders against a range of Chinese firms arguing they could share data with the Chinese government.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Panorama: How safe is TikTok for young users?\n\nChinese social media app TikTok and telecoms giant Huawei have been among the casualties of Washington's crackdown.\n\nLast month, the Commerce Department added dozens of Chinese companies, including the country's top chipmaker SMIC and drone manufacturer DJI Technology, to a trade blacklist.\n\nThe administration also restricted a number of Chinese and Russian companies with alleged military ties from buying sensitive US goods and technology.\n\nChina has consistently denied claims that these firms share their data with the Chinese government and has responded by imposing its own export laws restricting the export of military technology.\n\nIn August, the US ordered ByteDance, the owner of social media app TikTok, to either shut down or sell off its US assets.\n\nDespite missing a deadline to complete the sale, the US is yet to shut down the app and negotiations continue over its future.\n\nThe latest ban comes as the White House quietly pushed the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to consider a second U-turn on its decision to delist three Chinese telecoms giants.\n\nLast week the NYSE announced it would delist the China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom in line with another executive order.\n\nOn Monday, however, the NYSE reversed that decision, announcing it had decided not to delist the three companies after further consultation with US regulators.\n\nThe NYSE made the decision based on ambiguity about whether the securities were actually covered by the order.\n\nHowever, the exchange has come under pressure over its decision.\n\nThe US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called the NYSE President Stacey Cunningham to tell her he disagrees with the decision, according to Reuters.\n\nRepublican Senator and China hardliner Marco Rubio has also spoken out, saying that the NYSE's refusal to delist the companies was an \"outrageous effort\" to undermine the President's executive order.\n\nThe NYSE is owned by Atlanta-based Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which is run by billionaire Jeffrey Sprecher.\n\nHis wife Kelly Loeffler is one of two Republican senators facing run-off elections on Tuesday in Georgia.", "The new \"highly infectious\" variant of coronavirus is spreading rapidly throughout Wales, the health minister has said.\n\nGiving the first coronavirus briefing of the year, Vaughan Gething said cases of the virus remained very high.\n\nHowever, the case rate across Wales has fallen from a high of 636 per 100,000 people on 17 December to 446 on Monday.\n\nBut cases are rising quickly in north Wales, which Mr Gething believed was due to the new variant.", "This video can not be played\n\nTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Wednesday morning. We'll have another update for you at 18:00 BST.\n\nThe measures announced on Monday have now become law, but MPs will actually vote retrospectively to approve them later today. They're expected to pass with ease - Labour has pledged its support, but said ministers must deliver a round-the-clock vaccination programme. The regulations allow restrictions to potentially be in place until mid-March. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have all imposed lockdowns too, but will they be enough? An estimated one in 50 people in private households in England had coronavirus last week - one in 30 in London, while the number of daily confirmed cases topped 60,000 for the first time. Our health correspondent has more - as we've come to understand, the R number is everything. This graph shows how the R number could drop this time (in red), compared with how it fell during the first lockdown - the slower decline is down to the new, more transmissible variant.\n\nStudents have been anxiously waiting for news after the cancellation of A-Level and GCSE exams in England - not least because of the chaos that surrounded last year's results. Exams had already been cancelled elsewhere in the UK. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson will reveal more in a statement to MPs later. He'll also give more details of support for pupils following the switch by schools and colleges to remote learning. There are fears a digital divide will mean some children are excluded. We've got some advice for parents on virtual learning, and BBC Bitesize will be broadcasting lessons on BBC Two, CBBC and online from Monday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Parents spoke to the BBC after Monday's announcement about school closures in England\n\nPeople arriving in the UK from abroad could soon be required to prove they've had a negative coronavirus test before setting off. The Department for Transport says it's one of several measures being considered to prevent new cases arriving from abroad. Full details are still to be agreed, but it's thought hauliers coming through ports would be exempt. Currently, arrivals from countries not exempt under the travel corridor programme have to isolate for 10 days. See more on the existing rules. Travel firms have been cancelling trips since the latest lockdowns were imposed.\n\n2020 was a dreadful year for the UK car industry and preliminary figures from the industry's trade body show just how bad it was. New car registrations dropped to levels not seen since 1992, and saw the biggest one-year fall since World War Two when factories were turned over to military production. Showrooms and even factories were forced to close in the spring, and the switch to working from home means fewer of us need a vehicle on a daily basis. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said firms were desperately trying to minimise redundancies.\n\nUnable to leave Taiwan due to the pandemic, Peter Lowe decided to get a boat to pass the time. A leisurely hobby soon turned into a quest to clear the country's waterways, river banks and mangrove forests of plastic. His efforts have inspired local volunteers to join in the clean-up, and even prompted the government to take notice. Peter has some advice for all of us feeling trapped right now: \"Do something positive, do something meaningful, particularly towards saving and protecting the earth.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nFind more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nPlus, when lockdown was imposed last Spring, some of life's most basic household tasks suddenly got a lot harder. What are they like now?\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "A Joint Session of Congress to certify the election of Joe Biden has gone into an unexpected recess, and the Capitol building into lockdown, after Trump supporters breached security lines.\n\nEarlier, President Trump addressed supporters at a rally outside the White House and encouraged them to protest the election result.", "It was initially believed that Covid-19 originated at a market in Wuhan\n\nA World Health Organization (WHO) team due to investigate the origins of Covid-19 in the city of Wuhan has been denied entry to China.\n\nTwo members were already en route, with the WHO saying the problem was a lack of visa clearances.\n\nHowever, China has challenged this, saying details of the visit, including dates, were still being arranged.\n\nThe long-awaited probe was agreed upon by Beijing after many months of negotiations with the WHO.\n\nThe virus was first detected in Wuhan in late 2019, with the initial outbreak linked to a market.\n\nWHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was \"very disappointed\" that China had not yet finalised the permissions for the team's arrivals \"given that two members had already begun their journeys and others were not able to travel at the last minute\".\n\n\"I have been assured that China is speeding up the internal procedure for the earliest possible deployment,\" he told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday, explaining that he had been in contact with senior Chinese officials to stress \"that the mission is a priority for WHO and the international team\".\n\nChinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told the BBC \"there might be some misunderstanding\" and \"there's no need to read too much into it\".\n\n\"Chinese authorities are in close co-operation with WHO but there has been some minor outbreaks in multiple places around the world and many countries and regions are busy in their work preventing the virus and we are also working on this,\" she said.\n\n\"Still we are supporting international co-operation and advancing internal preparations. We are in communication with the WHO and as far as I know with dates and arrangements we are still in discussions.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid-19: How everyday life has changed in Wuhan\n\nThe WHO has been working to send a 10-person team of international experts to China for months with the aim of probing the animal origin of the pandemic and exactly how the virus first crossed over to humans.\n\nLast month it was announced that the investigation would begin in January 2021.\n\nThe two members of the international team that had already departed for China had set off early on Tuesday, said the WHO. According to Reuters news agency, WHO emergencies chief Mike Ryan said one had turned back and one was in a third country.\n\nCovid-19 was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in central Hubei province in late 2019.\n\nIt was initially believed the virus originated in a market selling exotic animals for meat. It was suggested that this was where the virus made the leap from animals to humans.\n\nBut the origins of the virus remain deeply contested. Some experts now believe the market may not have been the origin, and that it was instead only amplified there.\n\nSome research has suggested that coronaviruses capable of infecting humans may have been circulating undetected in bats for decades. It is not known, however, what intermediate animal host transmitted the virus between bats and humans.", "US President Donald Trump and others have made new unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud following the rerun of two crucial Senate races in the state of Georgia.\n\nWith the Democrats looking likely to win both seats and with them control of the US Senate, we've debunked some of the theories that have been widely shared on social media.\n\nSince the November election, the president has repeatedly made baseless allegations that Dominion voting machines have been manipulated to engineer electoral fraud.\n\nReferring to the vote in Georgia, Mr Trump said these machines had stopped working in Republican strongholds for \"over an hour\".\n\nThe official in charge of Georgia's voting systems, Gabriel Sterling, said there has been an issue in one county due to \"a programming error on security keys\" but that it was resolved hours before the president made his comments.\n\nMr Sterling tweeted: \"The, votes of everyone will be protected and counted. Sorry you received old intel Mr President.\"\n\nGeorgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger also clarified in a statement that there had been some issues but they did not stop people from voting, Reuters news agency reports.\n\n\"At no point did voting stop as voters continued casting ballots on emergency ballots, in accordance with the procedures set out by Georgia law,\" said Mr Raffensperger.\n\nAn image that has been shared thousands of times on Twitter purported to show a pile of destroyed ballots in Georgia on election day.\n\n\"Our team is in Georgia. They took a little walk. They found shredded ballots in Dell boxes,\" the tweet said.\n\nAlthough the post provided no detail as to where exactly the picture had been taken, we were able to geolocate it to the absentee ballot processing centre at the Georgia World Congress Center in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta.\n\nFulton County elections director Richard Barron told the BBC that the papers in the picture were \"definitely not ballots\", but waste from a letter-opening machine used to cut ballot envelopes.\n\nWe've reported on similar claims about alleged ballot shredding in Georgia before.\n\nIn November, an investigation into the shredding of papers in Cobb County concluded that it was part of a \"routine clean-up operation\" and the documents disposed of were not actual votes \"relevant to the election or the re-tally\".\n\nIn a tweet generating some 300,000 likes and retweets, President Trump claimed there was a \"voter dump\" planned against Republican candidates.\n\nBut there's no evidence of wrongdoing.\n\nIt's not clear exactly what he means by a \"voter dump\", but he may be referring to the fact that large batches of votes are released at once.\n\nThis is standard practice and a valid part of the vote-counting process.\n\nIn Georgia, as in the presidential elections, larger districts, often including cities that may lean Democrat, take longer to report their results.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMr Trump has falsely claimed on multiple occasions that millions of genuine votes in November's presidential election that were counted after polls closed were \"fake\".\n\nIn Georgia, election official Gabriel Sterling noted after the polls closed that some 171,000 early, in-person ballots from DeKalb County, which is Democrat-leaning, were yet to be counted.\n\nAuthorities knew how many of these \"advanced\" votes were coming.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Gabriel Sterling This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA number of Republican officials and activists, including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and the founder of conservative activist group Turning Point USA, claimed workers at the Chatham county count had suddenly stopped counting for the rest of the night and gone home, raising the prospect of foul play.\n\n\"They're doing this again. You can't make this up,\" Charlie Kirk tweeted.\n\nSimilar claims of fraud or suspicious activity were made during the presidential election count in the county, after it took a few days for all the absentee and mail-in ballots to be tabulated.\n\nBut Gabriel Sterling, Georgia's voting systems implementation manager, took to Twitter to say the count \"didn't just stop\".\n\nWorkers had finished counting all the ballots they had except absentee ballots received on election day, Mr Sterling, a Republican, added.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Gabriel Sterling This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe county's board of elections chairman, Tom Mahoney, confirmed later that about 3,000 to 4,000 election day absentee ballots were left to count.", "Protesters in support of US President Donald Trump swarmed the Capitol building, forcing officials to order lawmakers to shelter in place and halting debate in both the House and Senate. Congress was meeting to confirm President-elect Joe Biden's electoral college victory.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Keir Starmer: \"If we pull together as a nation, we can win\"\n\nSir Keir Starmer has called for a \"round the clock\" vaccination programme to tackle the rise in Covid cases.\n\nAs part of a televised speech, the Labour leader said the government needed to deliver \"millions of doses a week by the end of the month\".\n\nHe said there were \"serious questions for the government to answer\" over the timing of the lockdown in England, but Labour would support the restrictions.\n\nBoris Johnson said daily vaccination figures would be published from Monday.\n\nThe prime minister has also said the four most vulnerable groups of people across the UK should receive their first dose by mid-February.\n\nBoth the PM and Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, have announced lockdowns this week.\n\nWales has been in a national lockdown since 20 December and Northern Ireland entered a six-week lockdown on 26 December.\n\nEngland's lockdown will become law from 00:01 GMT Wednesday and MPs will return to the Commons later that day to vote on the measures retrospectively.\n\nThe restrictions come into force as the number of new daily confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK topped 60,000 for the first time since the pandemic started.\n\nOn Tuesday, 60,914 had tested positive in the previous 24 hours and a further 830 people had died within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nIn an address to the nation on BBC One, in response to Boris Johnson's televised address on Monday, Sir Keir said the UK had reached a \"critical moment in our fight against coronavirus\".\n\nThe Labour leader said people were \"angry at the mistakes the government has made\" and ministers needed to answer questions on why they did not act sooner over locking down England.\n\nHe stressed that Labour would continue to hold the government to account, but added: \"Whatever our quarrels with the government and with the prime minister, the country now needs us to come together.\n\n\"At this darkest of moments, we need a new national effort to re-kindle the spirit of last March - to come together and to do everything possible to stay at home [and] to protect the NHS and save lives.\"\n\nSir Keir reiterated that Labour would support the new lockdown when it comes to the retrospective Commons vote on Wednesday and \"join in this national effort\".\n\nBut he called for the government to use the lockdown to establish \"a massive, immediate, and round the clock vaccination programme\" to \"deliver millions of doses a week by the end of the month in every village and town, every high street and every GP surgery\".\n\nThe Labour leader added: \"This is now a race between the virus and the vaccine and if we pull together as a nation, we can win.\n\n\"We need a new contract between the government and the British people: The country stays at home, the government delivers the vaccine.\"\n\nEarlier at a Downing Street press conference, Mr Johnson said more than 1.3 million people across the UK had now been vaccinated with either the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines.\n\nThe figure included 23% of over-80s in England - part of a programme Mr Johnson said aimed to save \"the most lives the fastest\".\n\nThe PM said there will \"still be long weeks ahead\", but that he wanted to give \"maximum possible transparency\" about the vaccination roll-out.\n\nMore details will be announced on Thursday, with daily updates starting on Monday, \"so that you can see day by day and jab by jab how much progress we are making\", he added.\n\nAsked whether the target could be met, Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty, said the timetable was \"realistic but not easy\".", "Fraudsters are sending out bogus text messages about the coronavirus vaccine in an attempt to steal bank details.\n\nThe scam tells recipients they are \"eligible to apply for your vaccine\" with a link to a bogus NHS website, trading standards officers have warned.\n\nThat, in turn, asks for personal information and - crucially - bank details \"for verification\".\n\nThe warning comes the same day as MPs heard that Covid is leading some people into the net of pension fraudsters.\n\nThe fake NHS message is one of a range of scams which have sought to take advantage of the pandemic and the isolation and legitimate worries of potential victims, according to the Chartered Trading Standards Institute.\n\nOthers have included people travelling door-to-door selling counterfeit or useless protection equipment, or fraudsters claiming to be from the official test and trace service and demanding payments.\n\nThe latest scam is preying on those elderly or vulnerable people who are fully expecting to receive legitimate information about their vaccine.\n\nHealth authorities have stressed they would never ask for an individual's banking details.\n\nKatherine Hart, lead office at the CTSI, said: \"I have been tracking and warning the public about Covid-related scams since the beginning of the pandemic, and at every stage of response, unscrupulous individuals have modified their campaigns to defraud the public.\n\n\"The vaccine brings great hope for an end to the pandemic and lockdowns, but some only wish to create even further misery by defrauding others. The NHS will never ask you for banking details, passwords, or PIN numbers and these should serve as instant red flags.\"\n\nShe urged people to report the scams to Action Fraud or Police Scotland.\n\nPensions have been stolen or put into high-risk schemes\n\nThe warning came as MPs on the Work and Pensions Select Committee heard how fraudsters were seizing on victims' financial uncertainty during the pandemic to draw them into pension scams.\n\nRules allowing people to withdraw cash from their pension pot from the age of 55 have led some people to move money into investment schemes which look generous, but are simply vehicles to steal money.\n\n\"Household finances are stretched and so the temptations to use savings or to be tempted by offers of 'free pension reviews', for example, which we've warned about, are very real,\" Mark Steward, from the Financial Conduct Authority told the committee.\n\n\"Of course, a 'free pension review' is hardly free. It is the first step on a process that will lead someone to investing in something that is too good to be true.\"\n\nHe said that fraudsters had used social media advertising to \"industrialise\" this kind of fraud.\n\nWhereas previously, fraudsters had to produce sophisticated glossy brochures and office fronts, they could now operate in anonymity on social media, sending fake information to millions of people.\n\nMillions of pounds have been lost to pension scams in recent years, but it is a crime considered to be widely under-reported by victims and pension companies.\n\nGraeme Biggar, director general of the National Economic Crime Centre, told the committee that fraudsters were continuing to use new avenues to reach potential victims.\n\n\"What we're looking to do next is to move on to fake comparison websites, which is this new gateway into investment frauds, to spot those and take them down at source,\" he said.", "Dr Anil Mehta, a GP at Fullwell Cross Medical Centre in North London, told the BBC that staff were working from 7 in the morning until 10pm at night during the three days of their weekly Covid-19 vaccine rollout, describing the process as a 'full team effort.\n\nDr Mehta was also keen to encourage people who might be nervous about the vaccine to take up the offer, emphasising that the evidence behind the vaccine 'was very strong'.\n\nThis message was echoed by Zahin Ahmed, whose grandfather Shafiquz Zaman has now received both doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine at the clinic. Mr Ahmed, who is from the Bangladeshi community, also said it was important that minority communities took up the offer of the vaccine when called upon to do so.", "Albert Roux pictured in the kitchen of Le Gavroche in 1989\n\nChef and restaurateur Albert Roux, who brought great French cooking to the UK with his brother Michel, has died at the age of 85.\n\nThe pair made gastronomic history in 1982 when their London restaurant, Le Gavroche, became the first in Britain to earn three Michelin stars.\n\nAlbert's death comes almost a year after Michel died at the age of 78.\n\nGordon Ramsay, one of many leading chefs who earned their stripes in Le Gavroche's kitchen, led the tributes.\n\n\"So so sad the hear about the passing of this legend, the man who installed Gastronomy in Britain,\" Ramsay wrote on Instagram.\n\nMarco Pierre White, Marcus Wareing, Pierre Koffman and Monica Galetti are among the other chefs who rose through the ranks at Le Gavroche.\n\nIn his tribute, TV chef James Martin described Albert Roux as \"a true titan of the food scene in this country [who] inspired and trained some of the best and biggest names in the business\".\n\nA family statement said: \"The Roux family has announced the sad passing of Albert Roux, OBE, KFO, who had been unwell for a while, at the age 85 on 4th January 2021.\n\n\"Albert is credited, along with his late brother Michel Roux, with starting London's culinary revolution with the opening of Le Gavroche in 1967.\"\n\nHis son Michel Roux Jr, who now runs Le Gavroche and is a former judge on MasterChef: The Professionals, said: \"He was a mentor for so many people in the hospitality industry, and a real inspiration to budding chefs, including me.\"\n\nFood critic Jay Rayner described Albert Roux as \"an extraordinary man who left a massive mark on the food story of his adopted country\".\n\nHe added: \"The roll call of chefs who went through the kitchens of Le Gavroche alone, is a significant slab of a part of modern UK restaurant culture.\"\n\nChef Tom Kitchin wrote that \"one of the true culinary greats has left us\", and baker and food writer Dan Lepard said it was the \"end of an era\".\n\nAlbert and Michel Roux came from a family of butchers in eastern France, and trained to be patissiers before moving to the UK.\n\nAlbert arrived in the mid-1950s, and in 1967 put his £3,000 savings with money borrowed from friends to open the first Gavroche off Sloane Square in Chelsea.\n\nWith uncompromising standards, elaborate presentation and first-rate service, it raised the standards of haute cuisine in a then-limited English restaurant scene.\n\nIt moved to Mayfair in 1981, and soon became the first British-based establishment to carry the maximum three Michelin stars.\n\n\"An Olympic gold medal,\" Albert said at the time. \"I have had no other ambition.\"\n\nThe Roux dynasty (left-right): Alain Roux, Michel Roux Jnr, Michel Roux and Albert Roux in 2009\n\nIts kitchen would also become the training ground for a new, enlightened generation of British chefs.\n\n\"If cooking is an art form, Le Gavroche was the Royal College of Music, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, Rada and the Courtauld and Warburg institutes all rolled up into one, poached, wrapped in a puff pastry shell with foie gras and served with truffle sauce,\" The Guardian wrote in 2010.\n\nThe brothers also launched the Roux Scholarship, an annual chef competition, in 1983, with many scholars having gone on to win Michelin stars themselves.\n\nAlbert and Michel opened a string of other restaurants, fronted a 13-part TV series on BBC Two in 1990, and published a series of best-selling books about French cookery.", "Shows like Tiger King kept people entertained during the first UK lockdown\n\nNetflix is raising the cost of some of its UK subscriptions from next month, its customers have been told.\n\nThe streaming service said the price rises reflected money spent on content.\n\nIts standard monthly package will go up from £8.99 to £9.99 and its premium one will rise from £11.99 to £13.99, but its basic plan remains at £5.99.\n\nHowever, comparison site Uswitch said the timing of the price rises was unfortunate with UK citizens living under new national lockdowns.\n\nThe streaming service's subscriber numbers have jumped during the pandemic, with almost 16 million new customers added worldwide in the first three months of 2020 alone.\n\nIn the UK, during the first national lockdown which started in March 2020, the amount of streaming content watched by consumers rose by a third compared with the previous year.\n\nBut Netflix faces tough competition from rivals, such as Disney+, which has also announced price rises of £2 per month up to £7.99 or £79.90 for a full year.\n\nNetflix said: \"This year we're spending over $1bn [£736m] in the UK on new, locally-made films, series and documentaries, helping to create thousands of jobs and showcasing British storytelling at its best - with everything from The Crown, to Sex Education and Top Boy, plus many, many more.\n\n\"Our price change reflects the significant investments we've made in new TV shows and films, as well as improvements to our product.\"\n\nA standard Netflix subscription gives users HD streaming on two devices at the same time with the ability to download to two phones or tablets. The premium service allows streaming on up to four screens at once, as well as offering 4K streaming and downloading to four phones or tablets.\n\nSubscribers who do not want to pay the extra can cancel their plan at any time without penalty or simply shift to the basic package, which allows users to watch movies and TV shows in standard definition on one device only and download to one mobile or tablet.\n\nNick Baker, streaming and TV expert at Uswitch.com, said: \"Netflix has been a lifeline for many people during lockdown, so this price rise is an unwanted extra expense for households feeling the financial pressure.\n\n\"It's unfortunate timing that this price hike coincides with another national lockdown, when all of us will be streaming more television and films than ever.\"", "The number of new daily confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK has topped 60,000 for the first time since the pandemic started.\n\nAccording to government figures on Tuesday, the number of people who tested positive was 60,916.\n\nOne in 50 people in private households in England had Covid last week - and one in 30 in London, according to estimates based on the latest data.\n\nA further 830 people have also died within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nIt comes as England and Scotland announced new strict lockdowns, with people told to stay at home.\n\nAt a press conference at Downing Street on Tuesday, Boris Johnson said 1.3 million people had now been vaccinated in the UK - including 23% of over 80s in England, some 650,000 people.\n\nBut he said more than one million people were currently infected - with the number of patients in hospitals 40% higher than in the first peak.\n\nThe government's chief medical adviser Prof Chris Whitty cited the Office for National Statistics' random sampling data for England as showing how widespread the virus is.\n\n\"We're now into a situation where across the country as a whole, roughly one in 50 people have got the virus, higher in some parts of the country, lower in others,\" he said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Professor Chris Whitty: \"No evidence\" the new variant is \"more dangerous\"\n\nThe number of new daily cases has consistently been above 50,000 since 29 December.\n\nBack in the first peak of the pandemic in the spring, the number of daily confirmed cases never went above 7,000.\n\nHowever, it is thought the true number of cases then was much higher but not picked up because testing capacity was limited. It was estimated there were about 100,000 new infections a day at the end of March - but there was not the testing to detect it.\n\nHospital admissions of people with Covid-19 in England also reached another record high on Tuesday, NHS England figures show.\n\nAt a hospital in Lincolnshire, a \"critical\" incident has been declared after a sharp rise in patients requiring admission.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. How NHS nurses and doctors are struggling to cope with Covid as cases continue to rise in England\n\nAnd potentially life-saving cancer operations have been put on hold at a major London NHS trust because of the number of beds taken by Covid patients.\n\nHowever, Cancer Research UK said such cancellations did not appear to be widespread across the country.\n\nIn a statement after the case numbers were released, Public Health England medical director Yvonne Doyle said the rapid rise in cases was \"highly concerning and will sadly mean yet more pressure on our health services in the depths of winter\".\n\nAfter seven consecutive days of more than 50,000 cases being confirmed, the fact that more than 60,000 have been recorded should not come as a surprise.\n\nIt will take a week, if not more, for the impact of lockdown to be felt.\n\nAnd all the evidence suggests the new variant of coronavirus, which is more transmissible than previous ones, means the impact is likely to be more limited than it was in previous ones.\n\nThe figures are also a warning about what the NHS is facing.\n\nSome of this week's infections are next week's hospital admissions.\n\nAbout three in 10 beds are now occupied by Covid patients. In some hospitals more than six in 10 are.\n\nHospitals are now busy making more spaces on their wards - that means cancelling planned work, including in some places cancer treatment.\n\nBoris Johnson and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon both announced new lockdowns on Monday.\n\nWales has been in a national lockdown since 20 December and Northern Ireland entered a six-week lockdown on 26 December.\n\nRestrictions are also being tightened further in Northern Ireland, and an order for people to stay at home will become legally enforceable from Friday.\n\nIn a televised address to the nation, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer urged the government to use the lockdown to create a \"round the clock\" vaccination programme.\n\nHe also called on people to \"recapture the spirit\" of the beginning of the pandemic.\n\nAt the press conference on Tuesday, Mr Johnson repeated his suggestion that there is a \"prospect\" of the lockdown being eased in mid-February.\n\n\"But you will also appreciate there are a lot of caveats, a lot of ifs built into that, the most important of which is that we all now follow the guidance,\" he said.\n\nEarlier, Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove told Sky News he could not say exactly when the lockdown in England would end, but \"as we enter March we should be able to lift some of these restrictions but not necessarily all\".\n\nMr Whitty said the virus \"is not going to go away, just as flu doesn't go away, just as many other viruses don't go away\".\n\n\"We shouldn't kid ourselves that this just disappears with spring,\" he said.\n\nMr Whitty said although hopefully there would be nearly no measures needed from the spring onwards, the government might have to bring in a few restrictions next winter.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"We've now vaccinated over 1.3m people across the UK\"\n\nOn Monday the UK's chief medical officers recommended the Covid threat level be increased to five - its highest level.\n\nAlthough the new variant is now spreading more rapidly than the original version, it is not believed to be more deadly.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. BBC's Laura Foster explains the order in which the Covid vaccine will be given", "Lockdowns have worked before, but can we expect the new one to do the same?\n\nIt feels like we are back in March or April last year, when the strict controls on all our lives led to a fairly quick decline in levels of coronavirus.\n\nBut one of the crucial differences this time is the new variant, which is thought to spread between 50 and 70% faster than previous forms of the virus.\n\nExperts warn there are now no guarantees that lockdown will be enough to bring the variant under control.\n\n\"It still would not have been easy, but it would have been a much easier situation if it had not been for the new variant,\" Prof Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, told Inside Health.\n\n\"That really pushes the bounds of our ability to control the spread of the virus, even with measures that were previously relatively quite effective.\"", "Supermarkets are seeking to reassure shoppers that there is no need to bulk-buy products as new lockdown restrictions come into force.\n\nAsda asked its customers to \"continue to shop considerately and not buy more than they normally would.\"\n\nThere was a surge in online grocery shopping after new lockdown restrictions were announced on Monday, but demand has since dropped back.\n\nStores said they have good availability and have increased delivery slots.\n\nTesco and Sainsbury's have doubled the number of delivery slots since March.\n\nWhen fresh lockdown restrictions were announced on Monday there was a rush online by supermarket shoppers to book delivery slots.\n\nThat surge has since calmed down, but big supermarkets were keen on Wednesday to reassure customers that there is no need to bulk-buy, as stores would like to avoid a repeat of the panic-buying that was triggered by the first lockdown.\n\nAsda said it \"currently has strong product availability across its stores and depots and its colleagues are working around the clock to keep the shelves stocked.\"\n\nSainsbury's said it had \"good availability and encourage customers to shop as normal. We aren't currently restricting products.\"\n\nTesco has had buying limits on various products since the first lockdown, and most recently limited items including eggs, rice, soap and toilet roll after freight delays in December as ports got snarled up.\n\nTesco said on Wednesday that it had \"good availability in stores and online, with plenty of stock to go round, and we would encourage our customers to shop as normal.\"\n\nDuring the first lockdown supermarkets saw a huge spike in demand for online shopping as people tried to avoid mixing in shops.\n\nThe big chains have all increased their capacity to deliver food.\n\nTesco, the biggest UK supermarket chain, has more than doubled the number of online delivery slots available since the start of the crisis, and now has 1.5 million slots per week.\n\nNot all of these get used across the UK at present, so Tesco has no plans at the moment for further slots.\n\nSainsbury's, the second biggest, has also more than doubled the number of its online delivery slots since March, and can meet more than 800,000 orders per week.\n\nAsda, the third biggest chain, has upped the number of available weekly slots by 90% since March to 850,000, and by the start of April it's planning to offer 900,000 slots per week.\n\nMorrison's, the fourth largest UK supermarket chain, said it had increased its online operation fivefold since March.\n\nAsda said on Wednesday that it was also doubling the size of its partnership with Uber Eats. From February Asda will offer a 30-minute delivery service from 200 stores.\n\nAsda is also stepping-up Covid safety measures, including doubling safety marshal hours, more sanitation stations, increasing cleaning, and \"adding a protective antimicrobial coating to customer 'touch points' in stores such as fridge and freezer handles, checkout areas, plus all trolley and basket handles\".\n\nThe chain also has a virtual queueing app called \"Quidini\" whereby customers can sit in their car to wait for a slot in a store if it is busy.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The twins' father says what they have achieved is a 'herculean achievement'\n\nConjoined twins who were expected to die within days when they were born are nearly four years later said to be settling in at their Cardiff school.\n\nMarieme and Ndeye Ndiaye were brought to the UK from Senegal in 2017 by their father Ibrahima for treatment at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital.\n\nThe girls, now four, are learning to stand and their father said their progress was \"a Herculean achievement\".\n\nTheir head teacher said the girls had made friends and were \"laughing a lot\".\n\nThe girls, who have separate hearts and spines but share a liver, bladder and digestive system, have conditions which put them at higher risk of complications from Covid.\n\nHowever, Mr Ndiaye said he had wanted them to start school for their development.\n\n\"When you look in the rear view mirror, it was an unachievable dream,\" he said.\n\n\"From now, everything ahead will be a bonus to me. My heart and soul is shouting out loud, 'Come on! Go on girls! Surprise me more!'.\"\n\nMr Ndiaye brought the girls to the UK through funding from a charitable foundation run by Senegal's first lady Marieme Faye Sall, before he sought asylum.\n\nIn March 2018, the family were moved by the Home Office to Cardiff as asylum seekers can be moved anywhere in the UK and they now have discretionary leave to remain.\n\nIn 2019, Great Ormond Street surgeons considered attempting separation but it was something Mr Ndiaye did not want because of the risks involved.\n\nThe girls have such complex circulatory systems medics now believe they would not survive being separated\n\nSince then, doctors have found the girls' circulatory systems to be more closely linked than previously thought and neither would survive without the other, making separation now impossible.\n\nThe girls' head teacher Helen Borley said they were learning well since starting reception in September and had made new friends.\n\nShe said: \"Children either say, 'I'm Marieme's friend' or 'I'm Ndeye's friend' - they don't say, 'I'm the twins' friend'. Children very much identify as being one person's friend or another - because the girls are very different characters.\n\n\"They are laughing a lot - which is always a good sign, isn't it? Any child that is laughing a lot is a happy child.\"\n\nMarieme receives oxygen from Ndeye's stronger heart and food via their linked stomachs\n\nFor the twins, school needs to fit around hospital visits.\n\nIn October, the girls needed surgery at Great Ormond Street Hospital.\n\nDr Gillian Body, a paediatric consultant at the Children's Hospital for Wales in Cardiff, said the procedure was important, despite the risks.\n\nShe said: \"The girls have complex anatomies and that makes them prone to infections and potentially sepsis.\n\n\"One of the challenges we had was getting antibiotics into them quickly, and this tube or cannula they've had fitted, means we can get them into them more quickly with less distress to the girls.\"\n\nThe girls have been experiencing the feeling of standing, at children's hospice Ty Hafan\n\nShe said Marieme's heart was complex with lots of abnormalities that cause her problems with doing exercise and can lead to breathlessness.\n\nAt children's' hospice Ty Hafan in Sully, Vale of Glamorgan, the girls have been learning what it feels like to stand.\n\nA special frame gives them the experience of being upright, helping build strength in their legs.\n\nPhysiotherapist Sara Wade-West said it had been hard for them.\n\n\"It's a really different sensation when you're used to being sat down, to be upright can be scary,\" she said.\n\n\"To start with, particularly Ndeye wasn't very keen. We try and sneak the therapy in around the play, encouraging them to reach for toys to make them work a bit harder, but if they know it's therapy it's not so fun.\n\n\"Because of their cardiac function we can't push them too much so it's finding that balance - challenging them to get stronger but not exhausting them.\"\n\nThe twins' father Ibrahima Ndiaye said they were his \"warriors\"\n\nWatching his daughters stand is more than just a breakthrough for their father.\n\n\"They are showing that they don't only want to live, but be active and play their part in society,\" he said.\n\n\"All these achievements bring light and hopes for the future. But I know how fragile, complex and unpredictable their lives can be.\"\n\nMr Ndiaye said his hopes were \"parallel to my fears\" as the girls had \"so many times come close to the worst\".\n\n\"But the very least I can do for the girls is figure out my hopes for them,\" he said.\n\n\"The most I can do is to be beside them and live inside that hope and never allow anything to take that hope away.\n\n\"They are my warriors. They have proved they will never surrender without fighting. It is not yet over.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. A BBC team came across roadblocks as they tried to report on research into viruses that bats carry\n\nA Chinese scientist at the centre of unsubstantiated claims that the coronavirus leaked from her laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan has told the BBC she is open to \"any kind of visit\" to rule it out.\n\nThe surprise statement from Prof Shi Zhengli comes as a World Health Organization team prepares to travel to Wuhan next month to begin its investigation into the origins of Covid-19.\n\nThe remote district of Tongguan, in China's south-western province of Yunnan, is hard to reach at the best of times. But when a BBC team tried to visit recently, it was impossible.\n\nPlain-clothes police officers and other officials in unmarked cars followed us for miles along the narrow, bumpy roads, stopping when we did, backtracking with us when we were forced to turn around.\n\nWe found obstacles in our way, including a \"broken-down\" lorry, which locals confirmed had been placed across the road a few minutes before we arrived.\n\nAnd we ran into checkpoints at which unidentified men told us their job was to keep us out.\n\nAt first sight, all of this might seem like a disproportionate effort given our intended destination, a nondescript, abandoned copper mine in which, back in 2012, six workers succumbed to a mystery illness that eventually claimed the lives of three of them.\n\nBut their tragedy, which would otherwise almost certainly have been largely forgotten, has been given new meaning by the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nThose three deaths are now at the centre of a major scientific controversy about the origins of the virus and the question of whether it came from nature, or from a laboratory.\n\nAnd the attempts of Chinese authorities to stop us reaching the site are a sign of how hard they're working to control the narrative.\n\nFor more than a decade, the rolling, jungle-covered hills in Yunnan - and the cave systems within - have been the focus of a giant scientific field study.\n\nChinese virologist Shi Zhengli is seen here inside the laboratory in Wuhan\n\nIt has been led by Prof Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).\n\nProf Shi won international acclaim for her discovery that the illness known as Sars, which killed more than 700 people in 2003, was caused by a virus that probably came from a species of bat in a Yunnan cave.\n\nEver since, Prof Shi - often referred to as \"China's Batwoman\" - has been in the vanguard of a project to try to predict and prevent further such outbreaks.\n\nBy trapping bats, taking faecal samples from them, and then carrying those samples back to the lab in Wuhan, 1,600km (1,000 miles) away, the team behind the project has identified hundreds of new bat coronaviruses.\n\nBut the fact that Wuhan is now home to the world's leading coronavirus research facility, as well as the first city to be ravaged by a pandemic outbreak of a deadly new one, has fuelled suspicion that the two things are connected.\n\nI would personally welcome any form of visit, based on an open, transparent, trusting, reliable and reasonable dialogue. But the specific plan is not decided by me.\n\nThe Chinese government, the WIV, and Prof Shi have all angrily dismissed the allegation of a virus leak from the Wuhan lab.\n\nBut with scientists appointed by the World Health Organization (WHO) scheduled to visit Wuhan in January for an inquiry into the origin of the pandemic, Prof Shi - who has given few interviews since the pandemic began - answered a number of BBC questions by email.\n\n\"I have communicated with the WHO experts twice,\" she wrote, when asked if an investigation might help rule out a lab leak and end the speculation. \"I have personally and clearly expressed that I would welcome them to visit the WIV,\" she said.\n\nTo a follow-up question about whether that would include a formal investigation with access to the WIV's experimental data and laboratory records, Prof Shi said: \"I would personally welcome any form of visit based on an open, transparent, trusting, reliable and reasonable dialogue. But the specific plan is not decided by me.\"\n\nThe BBC subsequently received a call from the WIV's press office, saying that Prof Shi was speaking in a personal capacity and her answers had not been approved by the WIV.\n\nThe BBC denied a request to send the press office a copy of this article in advance.\n\nDr Peter Daszak: \"I've yet to see any evidence at all of a lab leak or a lab involvement in this outbreak\"\n\nMany scientists believe that by far the most likely scenario is that Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, jumped naturally from bats to humans, possibly via an intermediary species. And despite Prof Shi's offer, for now there appears to be little chance of the WHO inquiry looking into the lab-leak theory.\n\nThe terms of reference for the WHO inquiry make no mention of the theory, and some members of the 10-person team have all but ruled it out.\n\nPeter Daszak, a British zoologist, has been chosen as part of the team because of his leading role in a multimillion dollar, international project to sample wild viruses.\n\nIt has involved close collaboration with Prof Shi Zhengli in her mass sampling of bats in China, and Dr Daszak previously called the lab-leak theory a \"conspiracy theory\" and \"pure baloney\".\n\n\"I've yet to see any evidence at all of a lab leak or a lab involvement in this outbreak,\" he said. \"I have seen substantial evidence that these are naturally occurring phenomena driven by human encroachment into wildlife habitat, which is clearly on display across south-east Asia.\"\n\nAsked about seeking access to the Wuhan lab to rule the lab-leak theory out, he said: \"That's not my job to do that.\n\n\"The WHO negotiated the terms of reference, and they say we're going to follow the evidence, and that's what we've got to do,\" he added.\n\nThe Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was linked to early cases of the new coronavirus\n\nOne focus of the inquiry will be a market in Wuhan which was known to be trading in wildlife and was linked to a number of early cases, though the Chinese authorities appear to have already discounted it as a source of the virus.\n\nDr Daszak said the WHO team would \"look at those clusters of cases, look at the contacts, look at where the animals in the market have come from and see where that takes us\".\n\nThe deaths of the three Tongguan workers following exposure to a mineshaft full of bats raised suspicions that they'd succumbed to a bat coronavirus.\n\nIt was exactly the kind of animal-to-human \"spillover\" that was driving the WIV to sample and test bats in Yunnan.\n\nIt is no surprise then that, following those deaths, the WIV scientists began sampling bats in the Tongguan mineshaft in earnest, making multiple visits over the next three years and detecting 293 coronaviruses.\n\nBut apart from one brief paper, very little was published about the viruses they collected on those trips.\n\nIn January this year, Prof Shi Zhengli became one of the first people in the world to sequence Sars-Cov-2, which was already spreading rapidly through the streets and homes of her city.\n\nShe then compared the long string of letters representing the virus's unique genetic code with the extensive library of other viruses collected and stored over the years.\n\nAnd she discovered that her database contained the closest known relative of Sars-Cov-2.\n\nRaTG13 is a virus whose name has been derived from the bat it was extracted from (Rhinolophus affinis, Ra), the place it was found (Tongguan, TG), and the year it was identified, 2013.\n\nSeven years after it was found in that mineshaft, RaTG13 was about to become one of the most hotly contested scientific subjects of our time.\n\nChina imposed tough restrictions on Wuhan to stop the spread of the virus\n\nThere have been many well-documented cases of viruses leaking from labs. The first Sars virus, for example, leaked twice from the National Institute of Virology in Beijing in 2004, long after the outbreak had been brought under control.\n\nThe practice of genetically manipulating viruses is also not new, allowing scientists to make them more infectious or more deadly, so they can assess the threat and, perhaps, develop treatments or vaccines.\n\nAnd from the moment it was isolated and sequenced, scientists have been struck by the remarkable ability of Sars-Cov-2 to infect humans.\n\nThe possibility that it acquired that ability as a result of manipulation in a laboratory was taken seriously enough for an influential group of international scientists to address it head on.\n\nIn what has become the definitive paper ruling out the possibility of a lab leak, RaTG13 has a starring role.\n\nPublished in March in the magazine Nature Medicine, it suggests that if there had been a leak, Prof Shi Zhengli would have found a much closer match in her database than RaTG13.\n\nWhile RaTG13 is the closest known relative - at 96.2% similarity - it is still too distant to have been manipulated and changed into Sars-Cov-2.\n\nSars-Cov-2, the authors concluded, was likely to have gained its unique efficiency through a long, undetected period of circulation in humans or animals of a natural and milder precursor virus that eventually evolved into the potent, deadly form first detected in Wuhan in 2019.\n\nMedics and scientists in Wuhan battled to control the early stages of the pandemic\n\nWhere though, some scientists are beginning to wonder, are those reservoirs of earlier natural infection?\n\nDr Daniel Lucey is a physician and infectious disease professor at the Georgetown Medical Centre in Washington DC and a veteran of many pandemics - Sars in China, Ebola in Africa, Zika in Brazil.\n\nHe is certain that China has already conducted thorough searches for evidence of precursor viruses in stored human samples in hospitals and in animal populations.\n\n\"They have the capability, they have the resources and they have the motivation, so of course they've done the studies in animals and in humans,\" he said.\n\nFinding the origin of an outbreak was vital, he said, not just for wider scientific understanding, but also to stop it emerging again.\n\n\"We should search until we find it. I think it's findable and I think it's quite possible it's already been found,\" he said. \"But then the question arises, why hasn't it been disclosed?\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid-19: How everyday life has changed in Wuhan\n\nDr Lucey still believes that Sars-Cov-2 is most likely to have a natural origin, but he does not want the alternatives to be so readily ruled out.\n\n\"So here we are, 12, 13 months out since the first recognised case of Covid-19 and we haven't found the animal source,\" he said. \"So, to me, it's all the more reason to investigate alternative explanations.\"\n\nMight a Chinese laboratory have had a virus they were working on that was genetically closer to Sars-Cov-2, and would they tell us now if they did? \"Not everything that's done is published,\" Dr Lucey said.\n\nIt's a point I put to Peter Daszak, the member of the WHO origins study team.\n\n\"You know, I've worked with the WIV for a good decade or more,\" he said. \"I know some of the people there pretty well and I have visited the labs frequently, I've met and had dinner with them over 15 years.\n\n\"I'm working in China with eyes wide open, and I'm racking my brain back in time for the slightest hint of something untoward. And I've never seen that.\"\n\nAsked if those friendships and funding relationships with the WIV presented a conflict of interest with his role on the inquiry, he said: \"We file our papers; it's all there for everyone to see.\"\n\nAnd his collaboration with the WIV, he said, \"makes me one of the people on the planet who knows the most about the origins of these bat coronaviruses in China\".\n\nThe conclusion [of the Kunming Hospital University thesis] is neither based on evidence nor logic. But it’s used by conspiracy theorists to doubt me\n\nChina may have provided only limited data about its hunt for the origin of Sars-Cov-2, but it has begun to promote a theory of its own.\n\nBased on a few inconclusive studies conducted by scientists in Europe that suggest Covid-19 may have been circulating earlier than previously thought, state propaganda is full of stories suggesting the virus didn't start in China at all.\n\nIn the absence of proper data, speculation is only likely to grow, much of it focused on RaTG13 and its origins in a Tongguan mineshaft. Old academic papers have been dug up online that appear to differ from the WIV's statements about the sick mine workers - among them a thesis by a student at the Kunming Hospital University.\n\n\"I've just downloaded the Kunming Hospital University student's masters thesis and read it,\" Prof Shi told the BBC.\n\n\"The narrative doesn't make sense,\" she said. \"The conclusion is neither based on evidence nor logic. But it's used by conspiracy theorists to doubt me. If you were me, what you would do?\"\n\nProf Shi has also faced questions about why the WIV's online public database of viruses was suddenly taken offline.\n\nShe told the BBC that the WIV's website and the staff's work emails and personal emails had been attacked, and the database taken offline for security reasons.\n\n\"All our research results are published in English journals in the form of papers,\" she said. \"Virus sequences are saved in the [US-run] GenBank database too. It's completely transparent. We have nothing to hide.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Can you become immune to coronavirus?\n\nThere are important questions to be asked in the Yunnan countryside, not just by scientists, but by journalists too.\n\nAfter a decade of sampling and experimenting on viruses collected from bats, we now know that back in 2013 the closest known ancestor was discovered of a future threat that would claim well over a million lives and devastate the global economy.\n\nYet the WIV, according to the published information, did nothing with it, except sequence it and enter it into a database.\n\nOught that to call into question the very premise on which the expensive, and some would say risky, mass sampling of wild viruses is based?\n\n\"To say that we didn't do enough is absolutely correct,\" Peter Daszak told the BBC. \"To say that we failed is not fair at all. What we should have been doing is 10 times the amount of work on these viruses.\"\n\nBoth Dr Daszak and Prof Shi are adamant that pandemic prevention research is vital, urgent work.\n\n\"Our research is forward-looking, and it's difficult for non-professionals to understand,\" Prof Shi wrote by email. \"In the face of countless micro-organisms that exist in nature, we humans are very small.\"\n\nThe WHO is promising an \"open-minded\" inquiry into the origins of the novel coronavirus, but the Chinese government is not keen on questions, at least not from journalists.\n\nAfter leaving Tongguan, the BBC team tried to drive a few hours north to the cave where Prof Shi carried out her ground-breaking research on Sars almost a decade ago.\n\nStill being followed by several unmarked cars, we hit another roadblock, and were told there was no way through.\n\nA few hours later, we discovered that local traffic had been diverted onto a dirt track that skirted the obstruction, but as we attempted to use the same route, we met yet another \"broken down\" car in our path.\n\nWe were trapped in a field for over an hour, before finally being forced to head for the airport.", "The low temperature was recorded at Loch Glascarnoch\n\nThe UK has had its coldest night of the winter so far after a temperature of -12.3C was recorded in the north west Highlands.\n\nThe temperature was recorded at Loch Glascarnoch, near Garve, south of Ullapool in Wester Ross.\n\nThe record lowest temperature in the UK is -27.2C, which was recorded in Braemar, Aberdeenshire, in 1895 and 1982.\n\nThe same temperature was recorded at Altnaharra in the Highlands in 1995.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Carol Kirkwood This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe coldest night of the winter so far has come amid days of freezing temperatures in Scotland, and more widely across the UK.\n\nThe Met Office has issued yellow \"be aware warnings\" for snow and ice for Scotland for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.\n\nForecasters said a band of sleet and snow was expected arrive across north west Scotland on Wednesday afternoon and move south east across most parts of Scotland overnight.\n\nThe Met Office said up to 2cm, almost an inch, of snow was likely to settle at low levels \"quite widely\" with up to 6cm (2in) above 200m (656ft) and as much as 10cm (4in) above 300m (984ft).", "Last updated on .From the section Man City\n\nManchester City legend Colin Bell has died, aged 74, after a short illness, the Premier League club have announced.\n\nThe former England midfielder made 501 appearances for City between 1966 and 1979, scoring 153 goals. He won 48 caps for his country.\n\n\"Few players have left such an indelible mark on City,\" said a club statement on Tuesday.\n\nIn 2004, Manchester City fans voted to name one of the stands at Etihad Stadium in Bell's honour.\n\n\"Colin Bell will always be remembered as one of Manchester City's greatest players and the very sad news today of his passing will affect everybody connected to our club,\" said City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak.\n\n\"I am fortunate to be able to speak regularly to his former manager and team-mates, and it's clear to me that Colin was a player held in the highest regard by all those who had the privilege of playing alongside him or seeing him play.\n\n\"The passage of time does little to erase the memories of his genius.\"\n• None 'Bell will always be king of Man City' - tributes paid after death of club great\n\nAfter starting his career at Bury, Bell moved to Manchester City - then in the second tier - midway through the 1965-66 season in a £47,500 deal.\n\nHe helped Joe Mercer's team win promotion that season and was instrumental in the Blues winning the First Division title two years later.\n\nDuring his 13 years as a player at Maine Road, he also won the FA Cup, League Cup and Cup Winners' Cup.\n\nHowever, his career was hampered by a serious knee injury he suffered in a League Cup tie against Manchester United in November 1975, when he was 29.\n\nAfter making a comeback later that season, he was injured again against Arsenal and out for another 18 months.\n\nBell regained fitness and received an emotional ovation on his return at Maine Road on 26 December 1977.\n\nHowever, he did not have the same freedom and mobility as he had done and played only a handful more games.\n\nBell finished his career with a brief spell in the United States playing for San Jose Earthquakes.\n\nIn 2004, he was awarded an MBE for his services to football and remained a regular presence at City games in recent seasons.\n\n'De Bruyne reminds me a lot of Colin' - tributes pour in for the 'King of the Kippax'\n\nFormer City team-mate Mike Summerbee, who was part of their 'Holy Trinity' alongside Bell and Francis Lee in the 1960s and 1970s, described Bell as \"just the greatest footballer\" the club has had.\n\n\"Colin was a lovely, humble man. He was a huge star for Manchester City but you would never have known it,\" said ex-forward Summerbee, 78.\n\n\"He was quiet, unassuming and I always believe he never knew how good he actually was.\n\n\"[Current City midfielder] Kevin de Bruyne reminds me a lot of Colin in the way he plays and the way he is as a person.\"\n\nFormer England forward Lee says he thinks the knee injury curtailed Bell's career \"by a good four or five years\".\n\n\"Colin had tremendous stamina. He was a very good player technically and had the ability to score goals,\" said Lee, 76.\n\n\"He goes into the top five City players of all time - only in the last 10, 15 years has anyone else come along who can take that mantle.\"\n\nSummerbee and Lee were among a number of former and current City players to pay tribute to Bell, along with celebrity fans including former Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher.\n\nBell would \"always have a smile\" and \"meet and greet everyone\" he knew, said former City midfielder Michael Brown.\n\n\"He's done lots of charity work and always tried to help people,\" added Brown, who first met Bell as a youngster having come up through City's academy.\n\n\"It's a huge loss. To have done so much and be so low key was admirable.\"\n\nEx-City defender Micah Richards said Bell was \"one of the nicest men ever\", while their former full-back Pablo Zabaleta added he was \"absolutely devastated\" by the news.\n\nFormer England striker Gary Lineker said Bell was one of his favourite players when he was growing up.\n\n\"Terrific box to box midfielder. A real gem for Manchester City and England,\" added the Match of the Day host.\n\nThe Times' chief football writer Henry Winter said Bell \"oozed class, skill and glamour\" as he was \"flowing across rutted pitches, taking people on, creating and scoring\".", "A polar bear cub playing in a snow drift in the area of the proposed oil lease sales\n\nThe Trump administration is pushing ahead with the first sale of oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.\n\nThe giant Alaskan wilderness is home to many important species, including polar bears, caribou and wolves.\n\nNow, after decades of dispute, the rights to drill for oil on about 5% of the refuge will go ahead.\n\nOpponents have criticised the rushed nature of the sale, coming just days before President Trump's term ends.\n\nCovering some 19 million acres (78,000 sq km) the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is often described as America's last great wilderness.\n\nIt is a critically important location for many species, including polar bears.\n\nIn the winter months, pregnant bears build dens in which to give birth.\n\nAs temperatures have risen and sea ice has become thinner, these bears have started building their dens on land.\n\nMany indigenous groups with strong links to the ANWR have opposed oil exploration\n\nThe coastal plain of the ANWR now has the highest concentration of these dens in the state.\n\nThe refuge is also home to Porcupine caribou, one of the largest herds in the world, numbering around 200,000 animals.\n\nIn the spring, the herd moves to the coastal plain region of the ANWR as it is their preferred calving ground.\n\nThe same coastal plain is now the subject of the first ever oil lease sale in the refuge.\n\nThe push for exploration in the park has been a decades long battle between oil companies supported by the state government and environmental and indigenous opponents.\n\nMany of Alaska's political representatives believe that drilling in the refuge could lead to another major oil find, like the one in Prudhoe Bay, just west of the ANWR.\n\nPrudhoe Bay is the largest oil field in North America and supporters believe the ANWR shares the same geology, and potential reserves of crude oil.\n\nOil revenues are critical for Alaska, with every resident getting a cheque for around $1,600 every year from the state's permanent fund.\n\nIn 2017, the Trump administration's tax cutting bill contained a provision to open up the ANWR coastal plain for drilling. It was seen as a way of offsetting the costs of the tax cuts.\n\nThe US Bureau of Land Management is now selling the drilling rights to 22 tracts of land covering about one million acres. These oil and gas leases last for 10 years.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Bernadette Demientieff This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA last-minute attempt to stop the sale in the courts failed but opponents say it will not be the end of their efforts to protect the refuge from drilling.\n\n\"The Trump administration is barrelling forward without doing the careful, legally required analyses of the impacts such activity will have on the environment or the Gwich'in people who have relied on this land for millennia,\" said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, who had sought an injunction against the sale.\n\n\"That's why we've taken them to court. We can't let Trump turn this amazing landscape into an oil field.\"\n\nReports indicate that interest in the lease sales has been low.\n\nThinning ice has seen more polar bears make their dens on land\n\nWhile estimates suggest around 11 billion barrels of oil lie under the refuge, it has no roads or other infrastructure, making it a very expensive place to drill for oil.\n\nSeveral large US banks have said they will not fund oil and gas exploration in the area.\n\nThere is also the matter of a change of leadership in the White House. The Biden team have nominated Deb Haaland as Secretary of the Interior. She is on record as being strongly opposed to drilling in the ANWR.\n\nWith climate change set to be a central focus for the Biden administration, it's likely that efforts to extract new fossil fuels in Alaska will be subject to review and delay.\n\nThis could ultimately limit the interest and opportunity for oil exploration in the refuge.\n\nYou might also be interested in:\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Climate change: The woman watching the ice melt from under her feet", "Stephen Stennett had a head on collision with a van on the B9157 near Kirkcaldy in Fife\n\nA driver who caused a crash in Fife that led to his passenger losing her baby has admitted causing death by dangerous driving.\n\nStephen Stennett, 23, had a head-on collision with a van on the B9157 near Kirkcaldy on 3 October 2018.\n\nThe High Court in Glasgow heard he had attempted a \"dangerous\" overtaking manoeuvre.\n\nJudge Lady Stacey deferred sentence until next month for background reports.\n\nPassenger, Shannon Myers, 18, who was 30 weeks pregnant, had to have an emergency caesarean section due to her injuries in the crash.\n\nHowever, her son Luke Myers died 32 minutes later.\n\nProsecutor Murdoch McTaggart said: \"The accused pulled out and drove into the path of an oncoming van.\n\n\"The accused's vehicle ended up in a ditch on the side of the road.\"\n\nMs Myers, who was in the front passenger seat, complained about pain in her abdomen and was taken to hospital.\n\nA scan showed the baby had a heartbeat of 60 beats per minute.\n\nMr McTaggart said this was regarded as low and gave cause for concern, prompting doctors to perform an emergency C-section.\n\nLuke's cause of death was recorded as \"complications of traumatic abruption due to road traffic collision\".\n\nPathologists said the baby had red marks on his face as well as fractures to his collarbone and four ribs.\n\nA 15-year-old girl, who was also a passenger in the car, sustained a fractured spine, collarbone and sternum.\n\nA fourth passenger, a boy also aged 15, suffered a fractured spine and eye bone as well as a minor head injury.\n\nVan driver Ian Baker, his wife Clara and their 10-year-old daughter had minor injuries.\n\nThe baby's mother paid tribute to Luke on Facebook shortly after his death.\n\nShe said: \"I love you so much my handsome little boy.\"\n\nThe judge Lady Stacey said: \"You will understand you pleaded guilty to a serious crime which had tragic results.\n\n\"When a life is lost, the court will almost always impose a period of imprisonment.\"\n\nStennett said: \"I'm sorry\" before being bailed.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Former Bond actress and Charlie's Angel Tanya Roberts has died in hospital in Los Angeles at the age of 65.\n\nRoberts appeared with Sir Roger Moore in his final Bond film, 1985's A View To A Kill, and had a recurring role in That '70s Show.\n\nShe also starred in the final series of Charlie's Angels on TV in 1980.\n\nHer death was prematurely announced on Monday, only for doctors to say she was still alive. However, her death was then confirmed on Tuesday.\n\nRoberts had collapsed while walking her dogs on 24 December and was admitted to Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre.\n\nHer partner Lance O'Brien mistakenly thought she had died on Sunday after visiting her in hospital. After getting a call from doctors to say she was deteriorating quickly, he went to her bedside, her eyes closed and she \"faded\", TMZ reported.\n\nDevastated, he walked out of the room and then the hospital without speaking to medical staff before informing Roberts' agent that he had \"just said goodbye to Tanya\".\n\nBut while being interviewed for US TV show Inside Edition on Monday, Mr O'Brien got a call from the hospital to say she was alive.\n\nThe moment was captured on film, as he picked up his phone and said: \"Now you're telling me she's alive? Thank the Lord.\" However, she died on Monday night.\n\nShe appeared in A View To A Kill alongside Sir Roger Moore and singer Grace Jones\n\nBorn Victoria Leigh Blum in 1955, Roberts grew up in New York before moving to Hollywood in 1977.\n\nHer big break came when she replaced Shelly Hack in Charlie's Angels, joining Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd as third 'Angel' Julie.\n\nAfter the show's cancellation, she appeared in such fantasy adventure films as The Beastmaster and Hearts and Armour.\n\nShe also played comic book heroine Sheena in a 1984 film that saw her nominated for a Golden Raspberry award for worst actress.\n\nRoberts received another Razzie nomination for her role as geologist Stacey Sutton in 1985 Bond film A View to a Kill.\n\nRoberts in the title role in Sheena: Queen of the Jungle\n\nShe admitted being \"a little cautious\" about taking the role, but said it would have been \"ridiculous\" to have turned it down.\n\nRoberts' subsequent films included Night Eyes and Inner Sanctum, erotic thrillers that did little to advance her career.\n\nShe went on to play Midge Pinciotti in more than 80 episodes of That '70s Show between 1998 and 2004.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Julian Assange will remain in jail as he continues to fight against extradition to the United States.\n\nDistrict Judge Vanessa Baraitser said there were substantial grounds to believe he would abscond.\n\nOn Monday, she ruled the Wikileaks founder cannot be extradited to the US because he might kill himself.\n\nThe US is now appealing that decision - and had opposed releasing the 49-year-old from a maximum security prison before the case is heard.\n\nMr Assange, who was wearing a dark suit and face mask, was not seen to react to the decision at Westminster Magistrates Court.\n\nHe's been held in prison since 2019, after hiding for seven years inside the Ecuadorian Embassy to avoid extradition.\n\nUS prosecutors want to put him on trial for hacking and disclosing classified information - including the identities of informants who were helping intelligence agencies in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.\n\nIn her ruling, DJ Baraitser said Mr Assange still had the incentive to abscond.\n\n\"He is willing to flout the order of this court,\" she said. \"As a matter of fairness, the US must be allowed to challenge my decision and if Mr Assange absconds during this process they will lose the opportunity to do so.\"\n\nDuring the bail application, Mr Assange's barrister Ed Fitzgerald QC said his client had been offered a London home by a supporter, where he could be with his partner and their two young children - but also compelled to remain under the strictest bail conditions.\n\n\"Your decision [on Monday] changes everything and it certainly changes any motive to abscond,\" said Mr Fitzgerald.\n\n\"On any view... [Mr Assange] would be safer isolating with his family in the community, subject to severe restrictions, than if he were in Belmarsh which has, very recently, had a severe outbreak...(of coronavirus). He wishes to live a sheltered life with his family.\"\n\nBut Clair Dobbin, for the USA, told the court Mr Assange had the \"resources, abilities and the sheer wherewithal\" to secretly arrange a flight to another country.\n\n\"[Mr Assange] regards himself as above the law and no cost is too great, whether that cost be to himself or others,\" said the barrister.\n\nJulian Assange's partner, Stella Moris, was among a large group of his supporters who had gathered at court.\n\n\"This a huge disappointment,\" she said. \"Julian should not be in Belmarsh prison in the first place. I urge the [US] Department of Justice to drop the charges and the President of the United States to pardon Julian.\"\n\nDistrict Judge Baraitser blocked Julian Assange's extradition on Monday, ruling that that while he had a case to answer, he was so mentally unwell that the US authorities could not guarantee he would not kill himself once inside a maximum security prison in the country.\n\nThe USA's appeal against that ruling - which will go to more senior judges later this year - will challenge that finding.", "McDonald's is pausing walk-in takeaway services in the UK as new lockdown restrictions come into force.\n\nDine-in meals and walk-in takeaways will not be available temporarily while it reviews safety procedures, it said.\n\nIts UK boss said it will be testing \"additional measures that may further enhance the safety of our takeaway service.\"\n\nRival food chains Burger King, Subway, KFC and Pret A Manger are still offering takeaways in-store.\n\nMcDonald's UK and Ireland chief executive Paul Pomroy said that safety measures across the firm's 1,300 restaurants will be reviewed by an independent health and safety body.\n\nHe added that customers would be kept updated via the restaurant's app and its website. Drive-through and delivery services across the fast food chain will remain open.\n\nUnder new lockdown restrictions which came into force in England and Scotland this week, hospitality firms are allowed to offer takeaways and deliveries.\n\nBut rules which previously allowed takeaways or click-and-collect services for alcoholic drinks have been scrapped.\n\nWales and Northern Ireland were already in lockdown, which meant that pubs, restaurants and cafes were restricted to takeaway-only too.\n\nAfter the first nationwide lockdown in March, many chains including McDonald's, Burger King and Pret closed their doors to hungry customers.\n\nThey gradually reopened with additional safety measures in place, such as plastic screens in front of the tills, hand sanitiser dispensers and restrictions on the number of customers allowed in at any one point. Some also pared back the number of dishes on offer.\n\nA Burger King spokesperson said that takeaway was still available in some branches and that it would continue to offer click-and-collect and delivery services \"in line with guidance issued\".\n\nSandwich chain Pret A Manger told the BBC that it is keeping some outlets open for both takeaways and delivery, but it would keep the number under review in the coming months.\n\n\"Last year we shifted our business to focus on delivery and expanded our delivery platform partnerships, to make Pret available to a wider customer base\", a spokesperson said.\n\n\"Since then, we have seen a significant increase in the use of delivery.\"\n\nSubway and KFC also confirmed that they remain open for in-store takeaways, deliveries and click-and-collect orders across the UK.\n\nFast food firm Leon, which has 65 outlets, said that 28 of their sites will remain open for takeaways and deliveries.\n\n\"We will continue to keep as many restaurants open as possible, as we did in the previous two lockdowns in line with government guidelines,\" a spokesperson said.\n\nDespite adapting their business models, many casual dining chains have been forced to make job cuts in the last year as lockdown restrictions hit sales. Pret, for example, announced 3,000 job cuts in August, while Greggs made 820 job cuts at the end of 2020.", "There are warnings that replacement grades must avoid the problems that saw protests and U-turns last summer\n\nHead teachers have warned a replacement system for cancelled exams in England must avoid the \"shambles\" of last year's results.\n\nEducation Secretary Gavin Williamson is to make a statement on \"alternative arrangements\" for GCSE and A-level exams cancelled in the pandemic.\n\nThis could include using teachers' estimated grades.\n\nA replacement system must not \"inflict further disadvantage on students\", says the exams watchdog Ofqual.\n\nGeoff Barton, leader of the ASCL head teachers' union, said there were \"no easy answers\" in picking an approach - but it had to avoid repeating the \"disaster\" of last summer's cancelled exam season.\n\nHe said there was a \"real need for urgency\" to allow schools time to plan - and that any system for grading had to show \"fairness and consistency\".\n\nWritten papers for GCSEs and A-levels are not going ahead - after this week's decision that it was no longer feasible with so much time lost in the Covid pandemic and the latest lockdown.\n\nMr Williamson will instruct the exams watchdog to come up with proposals for an alternative way of deciding results, which could be used for jobs, staying on in school or university places.\n\nLast year's attempts to find an alternative approach to exam results, which initially used an algorithm, descended into chaos - and eventually switched to using teachers' grades.\n\nAnd without any exam papers or standardised mock exams, the use of teachers' grades, with some process of moderation, is likely to be a key option once again.\n\nVocational exams, such as BTecs, are carrying on, if schools and colleges decide to continue with them.\n\nBut if students cannot take BTec exams this month as planned, they will be able to take them at a later date or otherwise still be awarded a grade, if they have \"enough evidence to receive a certificate that they need for progression\", says the awarding body Pearson.\n\nAn Ofqual spokeswoman said they could consider options for replacement exam results, academic and vocational, \"to ensure the fairest possible outcome in the circumstances\".\n\nAlthough the process is only formally beginning, with a consultation likely on proposals, it is understood that contingency planning had already started to find a back-up if exams were cancelled.\n\nThe exams watchdog's decisions will face much scrutiny - with the previous head of Ofqual resigning after last summer's U-turns over grades.\n\n\"We are discussing alternative arrangements with the Department for Education. We know that many are seeking clarity as soon as possible,\" said Simon Lebus, Ofqual's interim chief regulator.", "Supporters of US President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday\n\nWorld leaders have condemned violent scenes in Washington after supporters of US President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol building on Wednesday.\n\nThe riot forced the suspension of a joint session of Congress to certify Joe Biden's electoral victory.\n\nMany leaders called for peace and an orderly transition of power, describing what happened as \"horrifying\" and an \"attack on democracy\".\n\n\"The United States stands for democracy around the world and it is now vital that there should be a peaceful and orderly transfer of power,\" he wrote on Twitter.\n\nOther UK politicians joined him in criticising the violence, with opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer calling it a \"direct attack on democracy\".\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel told the BBC that Mr Trump's comments \"directly led\" to his supporters storming Congress and clashing with police.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Home Secretary Priti Patel says Donald Trump was wrong for not condemning the violence\n\nScotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted that the scenes from the US Capitol were \"utterly horrifying\".\n\nIn Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said those who stormed the US legislature were \"attackers and rioters\" and that she felt \"angry and also sad\" after seeing pictures from the scene.\n\nShe told a meeting of German conservatives: \"I regret very much that President Trump has still not admitted defeat, but has kept raising doubts about the elections.\"\n\nChina meanwhile attempted to draw comparisons between the rioters who entered Congress to try and subvert the US election result and pro-democracy protesters who stormed Hong Kong's Legislative Council last year.\n\nForeign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying claimed events in Hong Kong were more \"severe\" than those in Washington but \"not one demonstrator died\".\n\nThe comparisons between the two incidents has caused outrage among Hong Kong's pro-democracy activists and their supporters.\n\nRussia blamed the \"archaic\" US electoral system and the politicisation of the media for Wednesday's unrest in Washington.\n\n\"The electoral system in the United States is archaic, it does not meet modern democratic standards, creating opportunities for numerous violations, and the American media have become an instrument of political struggle,\" foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.\n\nElsewhere in Europe, a chorus of leaders condemned the scenes in Washington as an attack on democracy.\n\nSpanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said: \"I have trust in the strength of US democracy. The new presidency of Joe Biden will overcome this tense stage, uniting the American people.\"\n\nIn a video on Twitter, French President Emmanuel Macron said: \"When, in one of the world's oldest democracies, supporters of an outgoing president take up arms to challenge the legitimate results of an election, a universal idea - that of 'one person, one vote' - is undermined.\n\n\"What happened today in Washington DC is not American, definitely. We believe in the strength of our democracies. We believe in the strength of American democracy\" he added.\n\nSwedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven described the incident as \"worrying\" and said it was \"an assault on democracy\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by SwedishPM This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nTop EU leaders have also made their views known. European Council President Charles Michel said he trusted the US \"to ensure a peaceful transfer of power\" to Mr Biden, while European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she looked forward to working with the Democrat, who \"won the election\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Charles Michel This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nLike many other global figures, the Secretary-General of the Nato military alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, said that the outcome of the election \"must be respected\".\n\nFor his part, UN Secretary-General António Guterres was \"saddened\" by the events at the US Capitol, his spokesman said.\n\nThe events also shocked America's close ally and neighbour to its north. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadians were \"deeply disturbed and saddened by the attack on democracy\".\n\n\"Violence will never succeed in overruling the will of the people. Democracy in the US must be upheld - and it will be,\" he wrote on Twitter.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. When a mob stormed the US capitol\n\nFrom New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, tweeted that \"democracy - the right of people to exercise a vote, have their voice heard and then have that decision upheld peacefully - should never be undone by a mob\".\n\nMeanwhile Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia - another close US ally - condemned the \"distressing scenes\" and said he looked forward to a peaceful transfer of power.\n\nIn India, the world's largest democracy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi - who has enjoyed a good relationship with President Trump - said he was \"distressed to see news about rioting and violence\" in Washington.\n\n\"Orderly and peaceful transfer of power must continue,\" he tweeted.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Narendra Modi This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nTurkey, an ally through Nato, said it invited \"all parties\" to show \"restraint and common sense\".\n\nThe Venezuelan government, which the US does not recognise as legitimate, said \"with this regrettable episode, the United States suffers the same thing that it has generated in other countries with its policies of aggression\".\n\nIn statements on Twitter, Argentina's President Alberto Fernández and Chile's President Sebastián Piñera also condemned the scenes in Washington. Mr Piñera said Chile \"trusts in the solidity of US democracy to guarantee the rule of law\".\n\nIn Japan, one of America's closest allies and partners, Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said the government hoped for a \"peaceful transfer of power\" in the United States.\n\nFrom Fiji, Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, who led a coup in 2006, also expressed outrage at the events that took place.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by Frank Bainimarama This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAnd in Singapore, Senior Minister Teo Chee Hean said he had watched as the \"shocking\" scenes took place, adding: \"Its a sad day.\"", "YouTube has reinstated TalkRadio's channel on its platform hours after saying it had been \"terminated\" for breaking the tech firm's rules.\n\nIt said the broadcaster had posted material that contradicted expert advice about the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nBut it explained its U-turn saying it sometimes made exceptions to guidelines that state repeat offenders face a permanent ban.\n\nTalkRadio said it had yet to be given a full explanation for the affair.\n\nThe decision to ban TalkRadio had appalled digital rights campaigners, with one group - Big Brother Watch - claiming it was evidence that \"big tech censorship is spiralling out of control\".\n\nThe Google-owned service has issued a brief statement explaining its actions.\n\n\"TalkRadio's YouTube channel was briefly suspended, but upon further review, has now been reinstated,\" it said.\n\n\"We quickly remove flagged content that violate our community guidelines, including Covid-19 content that explicitly contradict expert consensus from local health authorities or the World Health Organization. We make exceptions for material posted with an educational, documentary, scientific or artistic purpose, as was deemed in this case.\"\n\nYouTube has not published details of the offending posts.\n\nBut independent fact-checkers have repeatedly challenged some of the claims made by interviewees featured by the London-based radio station.\n\nYouTube operates a \"three strikes\" policy, whereby channels that break its community guidelines three times within a 90-day period can be permanently banned, but other infractions lead to temporary restrictions.\n\nProhibited content includes \"medically unsubstantiated claims\" relating to Covid-19, and videos that contradict expert consensus from local health authorities such as the NHS.\n\n\"YouTube is making decisions about which opinions the public are allowed to hear, even when they are sourced to responsible and regulated new providers,\" TalkRadio said in a statement this evening.\n\n\"This sets a dangerous precedent and is censorship of free speech and legitimate national debate.\"\n\nThe broadcaster tweeted the statement minutes after YouTube's change of heart. It did not appear to be aware that its channel had been reinstated at the time, but has since acknowledged the move.\n\nTalkRadio has about 424,000 listeners, according to the latest figures from market research provider Rajar.\n\nIt uses YouTube as a means to livestream shows from its studios and to provide an archive of past broadcasts.\n\nIts channel on the platform has 242,000 subscribers.\n\nYouTube's action had meant that TalkRadio's website had featured articles featuring broken embedded clips for most of the day, and that users who had shared its clips would have been unable to view them.\n\nThe US firm has previously imposed a permanent ban against conspiracy theorist David Icke, and a one-week video suspension of right-wing outlet One America News Network's ability to publish new clips - in both cases for breaches of its Covid rules.\n\nIt's pretty clear something has gone wrong at YouTube in the last 24 hours.\n\nIt appeared as though TalkRadio had been banned for good on YouTube - or \"terminated\" as the company put it.\n\nYouTube is now saying it was a short suspension, which certainly seems like a backtrack.\n\nEven now, it's not obvious what the offending material was that caused this action. The whole process reinforces the idea that YouTube's moderation policies - where it draws the line between freedom of expression and clamping down on misinformation - can be messy and inconsistent.\n\nAnd when YouTube takes such an action without giving full details, it rains controversy down on its own head.\n\nThis plays to a broader movement by YouTube and other social media companies to take a harder line on disinformation.\n\nJoe Biden is about to become US President - and he wants social media companies to do more to remove fake news.\n\nBut as they are increasingly finding out, refereeing their own platforms can be hugely difficult, and this highlights the need for greater transparency about moderation decisions.", "Helen Mort was told no action could be taken over the deepfake porn images\n\nA woman who has been the victim of deepfake pornography is calling for a change in the law.\n\nLast year, Helen Mort discovered that non-sexual images of her had been uploaded to a porn website.\n\nUsers of the site were invited to edit the photos, merging Helen's face with explicit and violent sexual images.\n\nSpeaking to BBC Radio 5 Live's Mobeen Azhar, Helen said she wanted to see the creation and distribution of these images made an offence.\n\n\"This is a crime which in many cases is going on invisibly,\" Helen said. \"Those images of me had been out there for years and I didn't know about them, and I'm still having nightmares about some of them now. It's an incredibly serious form of abuse.\"\n\nDeepfakes are realistic computer-generated images or video, based on a real person.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Actress Bella Thorne opens up about her experience of deepfake abuse\n\nHelen, a poet and writer from Sheffield, was alerted to the deepfake images by an acquaintance.\n\nThe original images were taken from her social media and included holiday pictures and photos from her pregnancy.\n\nShe said although some of the images were clearly manipulated, there were a few more \"chilling\" examples that were a \"lot more plausible'.\n\n\"You go through different phases with things like this,\" she said. \"There was one point where I was just trying to laugh about the almost ridiculous nature of some of it.\n\n\"But obviously, the underlying feeling was shock and actually I initially felt quite ashamed, as if I'd done something wrong. That was quite a difficult thing to overcome. And then for a while I got incredibly anxious about even leaving the house.\"\n\nShe alerted the police to the images but was told that no action could be taken.\n\nDr Aislinn O'Connell, a lecturer in law at Royal Holloway University of London, explained that Helen's case fell outside the current law.\n\n\"In England and Wales, under section 33 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, it is an offence to non-consensually distribute a private sexual photograph or film with the intent to cause distress to the person depicted,\" she said.\n\n\"But this only applies where the original photo or video was private and sexual.\n\n\"In Helen's situation, where non-sexual photos were merged with sexual photos, this isn't covered by the criminal offence.\n\n\"Furthermore, as the photos were not shared with Helen directly, nor did the intention seem to be to cause distress to Helen, the second element is not fulfilled - even though it did, evidently, cause distress. The other potential criminal offence would be harassment, but given the perpetrator here did not direct it at Helen herself, this didn't apply either.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Deepfake videos: Can you really believe what you see?\n\nThe independent Law Commission is currently reviewing the law as it applies to taking, making and sharing intimate images without consent. The outcome of the consultation is due to be published later this year.\n\nHowever, Dr O'Connell said the process of changing the law would take years which she says is \"too long\".\n\nHelen hopes to use her experience to raise awareness around deepfake pornography and has launched a petition calling for a change in the law.\n\nIt has received more than 3,400 signatures.\n\nShe has also written a poem in response to the images.\n\n\"I'm a writer by trade,\" she said. \"And I thought the only thing that is going to allow me to reclaim any sense of agency here is to say something about it using my art form. That's the only power that I have.\n\n\"The intention of this person, as they said in their post, was to humiliate. They said they wanted to see this person humiliated, and I thought well actually I'm not humiliated, and I'm going to speak out about it because I shouldn't be the one who feels ashamed.\"\n\nThe Home Office said it was taking steps to tackle new and emerging forms of violence against women and girls, including intimate image abuse, \"whether this be cyber flashing, revenge porn or deep fake videos.\"\n\n\"We are currently consulting on the development of our new strategy to tackle violence against women and girls and we encourage people to give their views,\" a spokesperson said.\n\n\"This new strategy will ensure victims and survivors are supported, and that perpetrators are identified and brought to justice.\"", "Vocational exams, including BTEcs, are to go ahead this month in England - despite calls for them to be cancelled alongside GCSEs and A-levels.\n\n\"Schools and colleges can continue with the vocational and technical exams that are due to take place in January, where they judge it right to do so,\" said a Department for Education spokeswoman.\n\nFurther education college leaders had complained this was unfair to students.\n\nThey said students would face \"stress\" from taking exams in the lockdown.\n\nThe Association of Colleges warned the decision, giving schools and colleges the option on whether to carry on with BTecs, would create more confusion.\n\nChief executive David Hughes said some colleges would cancel exams and others would continue - but without any clarity about what would happen to \"students in colleges which do cancel for safety reasons\".\n\n\"A national decision would have allowed for more fairness,\" said Mr Hughes.\n\nThe announcement from the Department for Education has left it open for schools and colleges to decide whether to go ahead with vocational and technical exams.\n\n\"Schools and colleges have already implemented extensive protective measures to make them as safe as possible,\" said the DFE's spokeswoman.\n\nThe Department for Education said it recognised \"this is a difficult time\" but wanted to allow students who had prepared for exams and assessments to continue, including those who needed to take hands-on practical tests for qualifications for jobs.\n\nA joint statement from the mayors of Manchester and Liverpool said it was wrong to go ahead with these vocational exams when other academic exams had been cancelled.\n\n\"It is unfair to ask these students to go into colleges when everyone else is being told to stay at home.\n\n\"This will cause unnecessary anxiety and concern just when they need to be able to focus,\" said the statement from Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram.\n\nThe mayors highlighted that students taking BTecs were more likely to be from \"working-class backgrounds and ethnic minority communities\" and they should not be treated any less well than those following an \"academic route\" in exams.\n\nHow will you be affected by the latest developments? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Travellers to the UK from abroad could soon be required to prove they have had a negative coronavirus test.\n\nThe Department for Transport (DfT) said the measure is one of several being considered to \"prevent the spread of Covid-19 across the UK border\".\n\n\"Additional measures, including testing before departure, will help keep the importation of new cases to an absolute minimum,\" the department added.\n\nIt is thought that haulage drivers coming through ports would be exempt.\n\nHowever, the DfT said full details are still to be agreed and will be set out in \"due course\".\n\nAny such measure would be a devolved issue, so the the DfT would need to agree a path forward with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to make it UK-wide.\n\nA spokesperson said: \"With a new strain of the virus on the loose in South Africa and a more infectious variant already widespread in the UK we need to do more.\"\n\nThe measures were being discussed as Boris Johnson imposed the third national lockdown in England to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed.\n\nThe prime minister has faced some calls to strengthen border protections to prevent the arrival of new cases, particularly of new and concerning strains.\n\nHowever, there was no mention of tougher border controls during his address to the nation on Monday, or press conference on Tuesday.\n\nEarlier on Tuesday, Cabinet Office Secretary Michael Gove said announcements will come in the days ahead on \"how we will make sure that our ports and airports are safe\".\n\n\"It is already the case that there are significant restrictions on people coming into this country and of course we're stressing that nobody should be travelling abroad,\" he told ITV.\n\nCurrently, international arrivals from countries that are not exempt under the travel corridor programme have to isolate for 10 days.\n\nBut under the test and release scheme introduced in December, this can be shortened if they have a private test five days after their departure and it comes back negative.\n\nIt is possible lorry drivers could be exempt, but no final decision has been made\n\nDuring the first lockdown, the government argued against introducing border restrictions while the prevalence was so high in the UK, with experts arguing it would do little to bring down infection rates.\n\nA quarantine period, however, was introduced in June after the first peak, when cases were more under control.\n\nEarlier, Home Secretary Priti Patel was accused of leaving the \"nation's doors unlocked\" to new coronavirus variants coming to Britain from overseas.\n\nLabour shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds wrote to Ms Patel calling for an \"urgent review and improvement plan\" as he raised concerns over checks on the arrival of people who are meant to go into quarantine.\n\nHe wrote: \"It is especially worrying given the concerns regarding mutation of the virus that emerged in South Africa, which the health secretary rightly said is 'incredibly worrying'.\n\n\"However, the lack of a robust quarantine system as a result of shortcomings from the government mean that it is virtually impossible to keep a grip on this spread or other variants that may come from overseas, leaving the UK defenceless, and completely exposed, with the nation's doors unlocked to further Covid mutations.\"\n\nThe Home Office defended its \"stringent measures\", and pointed to its move to stop direct flights from South Africa to the UK amid concerns over a new coronavirus variant in high prevalence there.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nEveryone in England must stay at home except for permitted reasons during a new coronavirus lockdown expected to last until mid-February, the PM says.\n\nAll schools and colleges will close to most pupils and switch to remote learning from Tuesday.\n\nBoris Johnson warned the coming weeks would be the \"hardest yet\" amid surging cases and patient numbers.\n\nHe said those in the top four priority groups would be offered a first vaccine dose by the middle of next month.\n\nAll care home residents and their carers, everyone aged 70 and over, all frontline health and social care workers, and the clinically extremely vulnerable will be offered one dose of a vaccine by mid-February.\n\nSchools in Northern Ireland will have an \"extended period of remote learning\", the Stormont Executive said.\n\nSpeaking from Downing Street, Mr Johnson told the public to follow the new lockdown rules immediately, before they become law in the early hours of Wednesday.\n\nAll the new measures in England will then last until at least the middle of February, he said, as a new more infectious variant of the virus spreads across the UK.\n\nThe PM added that he believed the country was entering \"the last phase of the struggle\".\n\nHospitals were under \"more pressure from Covid than at any time since the start of the pandemic\", he said.\n\nAnd he reiterated the slogan used earlier in the pandemic, urging people to immediately \"stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives\".\n\nOn Monday, the UK recorded more than 50,000 new confirmed Covid cases for the seventh day in a row.\n\nA further 58,784 cases and an additional 407 deaths within 28 days of a positive test result were reported, though deaths in Scotland were not recorded.\n\nAs of 08:00 GMT, there were 26,626 Covid-19 patients in hospital in England, according to the latest figures.\n\nThis is a week-on-week increase of 30%, and a new record high.\n\nThose who are clinically extremely vulnerable will be contacted by letter and should now shield once more, Mr Johnson said.\n\nSupport and childcare bubbles will continue under the new measures - and people can meet one person from another household for outdoor exercise.\n\nCommunal worship and life events like funerals and weddings can continue, subject to limits on attendance.\n\nWhile Mr Johnson said end-of-year exams would not take place as normal in the summer, he said alternative arrangements would be announced separately.\n\nThe government has published a 22-page document outlining the new rules in detail.\n\nThe House of Commons has been recalled to allow MPs to vote on the new restrictions on Wednesday.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said his MPs would \"support the package of measures\", saying \"we've all got to pull together now to make this work\".\n\nOnce again it is the threat to the NHS that has forced the hand of ministers.\n\nIn England there has been a 50% rise in the number of patients in hospital with Covid since Christmas day.\n\nTo put that into context, it equates to 18 hospitals being filled.\n\nCurrently around three out of 10 beds are occupied by patients with the disease.\n\nIn some hospitals it is more than six in 10.\n\nBut what is worrying ministers and NHS leaders is that the number is just going to increase.\n\nIn the spring it took nearly three weeks after lockdown for hospital cases to peak.\n\nThe last six days have seen in excess of 50,000 new infections confirmed each day across the UK - a number of these infections are next week's hospital admissions.\n\nIt is why the UK's chief medical officers were warning there was a \"material risk\" of some hospitals being overwhelmed if something did not change.\n\nMr Johnson spoke after UK chief medical officers recommended the Covid threat level be increased to five - its highest level.\n\nLevel five means the NHS may soon be unable to handle a further sustained rise in cases, the medical officers said in a joint statement.\n\nNHS Providers, which represents health service trusts, said hospitals were at a \"critical point\" and that \"immediate and decisive action\" was needed.\n\nAnnouncing tougher measures in Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: \"It is no exaggeration to say that I am more concerned about the situation we face now than I have been at any time since March last year.\"\n\nFor pupils who returned for their first day of the new term at primary school on Monday, it's turned out to be an extremely short-lived visit.\n\nBoris Johnson's announcement will see primary, secondary and further education colleges closed for at least the next six weeks, except for vulnerable and key workers' children.\n\nIt's a much bigger shift in policy than had been anticipated, even a few days ago.\n\nEven the return date will depend on the progress in tackling the virus.\n\n\"I hope we can steadily move out of lockdown, reopening schools after the February half term,\" said the prime minister.\n\nKeeping schools open was the government's most definite of red lines, a few weeks ago they were threatening councils that wanted to close them - but it's now been overtaken by the spiking lines on the Covid infection charts.\n\nEven after the chaos of last year's replacement grades, GCSEs and A-levels are being cancelled again - with a replacement system still to be decided. Vocational exams are to continue.\n\nFor parents dreading home schooling, there are plans for it to be better supported this time - with more computer devices available and suggestions that Ofsted inspectors will check what schools are offering.\n\nBut there's no escaping that this will feel like another sudden and chaotic change of direction for schools and parents.\n\nMr Johnson's pledge on vaccinations comes after an 82-year-old retired maintenance manager became the first person in the UK to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 jab\n\nSome 13.9 million people are among the four priority groups who will receive a vaccine dose by about 15 February, vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. BBC's Laura Foster explains the order in which the Covid vaccine will be given\n\nHow will you be affected by the latest developments? What questions do you have? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Lockdowns have worked before, but can we expect the new one to do the same?\n\nIt feels like we are back in March or April last year, when the strict controls on all our lives led to a fairly quick decline in levels of coronavirus.\n\nBut one of the crucial differences this time is the new variant, which is thought to spread between 50 and 70% faster than previous forms of the virus.\n\nExperts warn there are now no guarantees that lockdown will be enough to bring the variant under control.\n\n\"It still would not have been easy, but it would have been a much easier situation if it had not been for the new variant,\" Prof Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, told Inside Health.\n\n\"That really pushes the bounds of our ability to control the spread of the virus, even with measures that were previously relatively quite effective.\"\n\nThe coronavirus spreads when we come into contact with each other so moving classrooms online, telling people to stay at home and closing shops breaks many of those opportunities for human contact.\n\nIf we consider the R number - the average number of people each infected person passes the virus on to - it was about 3.0 in the run up to the first lockdown and anything above 1.0 means cases are climbing.\n\nR fell to 0.6 during the first lockdown.\n\nThen every 1,000 infected people passed the virus on to 600 others, who passed it on to 360 others and so on.\n\nBut if the new variant is 50% more transmissible then the R number, in the same lockdown conditions, would be about 0.9.\n\nThen 1,000 infected people would pass the virus onto 900 others, then 810 and so on.\n\nAs you can see this leads to far slower decline.\n\nAnd that assumes lockdown can get R down to 0.9 in areas where the new variant has become the most common form of the virus.\n\nIf, as some studies suggest, the variant is about 70% more transmissible then R may stay above 1.0 and cases may not fall at all.\n\n\"We'd at best flatten the curve, keep numbers at a roughly constant level, and that's frankly why there is so much emphasis on getting vaccine into people's arms as quickly as possible,\" said Prof Ferguson.\n\nIt is hard to lock down even harder as there are some parts of society - hospitals, supermarkets - that need to be kept open.\n\nWhat happens to the number of cases over the coming weeks will be closely monitored. If this lockdown is less effective then we will have to live with it for longer.\n\nThere have been some encouraging signs over the Christmas break, which was a bit like a lockdown due to school holidays and other restrictions.\n\n\"We are in a very difficult situation here, but my initial assessment of the last few days is that the rate is slowing which is good news,\" Prof John Edmunds, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the BBC.\n\nHe added: \"It looks likes those restrictions should be sufficient to stop the increase, whether they will be sufficient to bring cases down sufficiently we are yet to see.\"\n\nEventually the vaccine will give people immunity so we do not need the same controls on our lives.\n\nNow more than ever this is a race between the virus and the vaccine.", "I'm standing in what should be an operating theatre - but instead it's been converted into an intensive care unit for Covid-19 patients on ventilators. This is the first time I have seen it full of patients like this.\n\nNormally this theatre would be busy with major cancer surgery, but that's been transferred to another building.\n\nA children's recovery area, still decorated with colourful stickers of cartoons, is once again filled with desperately sick adults. Every day, more wards are being transformed into ICU - ready for the next influx of patients.\n\nWe have been given access to University College Hospital, in central London. This is the same intensive care unit that I visited in April, during the first peak.\n\nIt is one of the busiest hospitals in the capital and intensive care here is expanding across a hospital that is under pressure like never before, from a relentless rise in Covid admissions.\n\nI am struck by the toll the pandemic is taking on staff. It's immense - both physically and mentally. They are shell-shocked. \"My emotions are all over the place. Scared, sad, petrified, worried,\" one ICU nurse tells me.\n\nThey have got three times as many critically ill patients in the hospital as normal. The number of Covid admissions to London hospitals has doubled in just two weeks - they're more stretched now than at the peak last April. Senior staff are worried.", "Bosses of Britain's biggest companies will earn more in the first three days of this week than the average worker's annual wage, research claims.\n\nBy 17:30 GMT on Wednesday, the pay of FTSE 100 chiefs will have overtaken the £31,461 annual median wage for full time workers, the High Pay Centre says.\n\nBosses' pay was flat last year, while average wages generally rose slightly.\n\nThat meant that FTSE chief executives had to work 34 hours to beat median annual pay, not the 33 hours in 2020.\n\nThe High Pay Centre think-tank based its annual calculations on analysis of disclosures in companies' annual reports, combined with government statistics.\n\nHigh Pay Centre director Luke Hildyard said chief executive pay is about 120 times that of the typical UK worker, up significantly from two decades ago.\n\n\"Estimates suggest it was around 50 times at the turn of the millennium or 20 times in the early 1980s,\" he said.\n\n\"Factors such as the increasing role played by the finance industry in the economy, the outsourcing of low-paid work and the decline of trade union membership have widened the gaps between those at the top and everybody else over recent decades.\"\n\nHe said the figures should raise concern about the governance of Britain's biggest companies. \"They should also prompt debate about the effects that high levels of inequality can have on social cohesion, crime, and public health and wellbeing,\" he said.\n\nMedian FTSE 100 chief executive pay was £3.61m in 2019, the last year for which a full set of data is available, the High Pay Centre said.\n\nThe centre said its analysis was based on chief executives' average working day being 12 hours.\n\nHowever, critics said such analysis just fuels the politics of envy without looking at why chief executives matter and the contribution they make.\n\nDaniel Pryor, head of programmes at the Adam Smith Institute, said: \"Good management is more important than ever in a globalised world and small differences in top talent make a big impact on a business' bottom line.\n\n\"That bottom line makes a big difference to workers across the UK, anyone with a private pension, and shareholders.\"\n\nHe pointed out that there is strong, if morbid, evidence about chief executive deaths that shows why the corporate and investment world believe leadership makes a huge difference to the fortunes of their companies.\n\n\"In the past 60 years, unexpected CEO deaths have consistently affected stock price, profitability, investment and sales growth - for better or worse,\" he said, adding: \"Which is why it makes sense for firms to open their wallets to attract the best talent.\"", "Doctors in Scotland have raised concerns about plans to delay the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.\n\nAll four UK nations will now leave up to 12 weeks between the first and second doses of the jab rather than giving both within 21 days.\n\nDr Lewis Morrison, head of the BMA in Scotland, said members had concerns about the potential impact of leaving such a big gap between the two doses.\n\nBut the UK's chief medical officers have defended the move.\n\nThey said that the first dose of either the Pfizer or the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines - the only two so far approved for use in the UK - will give people substantial protection against the virus within two to three weeks of being administered.\n\nAnd they said that the second dose was \"likely to be very important for duration of protection, and at an appropriate dose interval may further increase vaccine efficacy\".\n\nThe Joint Committee of Vaccination and Immunisation, which advises UK health departments and recommended the new strategy, said data showed that one dose of the Pfizer vaccine would be \"90% effective\".\n\nBut the World Health Organization (WHO) has said it would not recommend following the UK's decision to delay giving the second Pfizer dose, saying there was no evidence to support the decision.\n\nPfizer has said it has tested the vaccine's efficacy only when the two doses were given up to 21 days apart.\n\nThe Pfizer vaccine was the first to be approved for use in the UK, with more than a million people having already been given the first dose.\n\nThe change to the vaccination strategy has meant health boards have had to change plans and cancel people booked in for their second doses of the Pfizer jabs.\n\nThis includes medics who are among the priority groups for Covid vaccinations.\n\nDr Lewis Morrison, chairman of the British Medical Association's Scottish Council, raised concerns about the logistical impact of changing the vaccination strategy\n\nDr Morrison told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme that some doctors had told him they would have waited for the AstraZeneca jab, which has been proven to work in the longer timetable, if they had known the second Pfizer dose was going to be delayed.\n\nHe said: \"We are concerned because there's clearly disagreement about the effectiveness of the second dose of Pfizer after that period of time.\n\n\"Furthermore I think if you give more people the first dose when you don't know what vaccine supplies are going to be within that 12-week window, that's a worry that has been expressed to me by a lot of doctors.\n\n\"If we give more people the first dose, do we definitely know that the second one is coming?\n\n\"The announcement about this before a four-day NHS holiday weekend left many places with great difficulty in reorganising vaccinations, with a real risk that vaccination numbers might perversely drop because of the organisational issues.\"\n\nOpposition parties want the Scottish government to publish daily figures for how many people have been vaccinated\n\nIt comes as NHS staff were left queueing for hours outside Glasgow Royal Infirmary on Tuesday after an \"scheduling error\" meant vaccination staff did not turn up.\n\nNHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde has apologised to those affected and said it was rearranging the appointments.\n\nThe Scottish government has said it aims to have given at least one vaccine dose to everyone over the age of 50 and younger people with underlying health conditions by the start of May.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said on Tuesday that the timetable could be accelerated if there were sufficient supplies of the jab.\n\nThe Scottish government is being pressured to provide daily figures on the number of people being vaccinated, as the UK government has already pledged to do.\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said: \"There are now no excuses left for the SNP government to dodge publishing daily vaccination rates alongside the daily infection numbers as soon as possible.\n\n\"The SNP's evasion to try and avoid scrutiny is nothing new but on something so important, the Scottish public must have the same information as will be provided across the UK.\"\n\nHis call was echoed by Scottish Labour health spokeswoman Monica Lennon, who added: \"It is simply unacceptable that scores of NHS staff were left queueing outside in the cold for hours, and well into the evening.\n\n\"It's time for Health Secretary Jeane Freeman to get to grips with the vaccination programme, publish daily figures on the number of vaccinations available and administered, and ensure that our NHS staff do not pay the price of a bungled rollout.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The prime minister says schools will be the first places to reopen\n\nThe end of England's lockdown will not happen with a \"big bang\" but will instead be a \"gradual unwrapping\", Boris Johnson has told MPs.\n\nThe prime minister made the comments in the Commons ahead of a retrospective vote later on the lockdown measures.\n\nHe said the legislation runs until 31 March to allow a \"controlled\" easing of restrictions back into local tiers.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the government's decisions \"have led us to the position we're now in\".\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said there were now 30,074 patients with coronavirus in UK hospitals.\n\nAll of the UK is now under strict virus curbs, with Wales, Northern Ireland and most of Scotland also in lockdown.\n\nIt came as the UK reported a further 1,041 people have died with coronavirus, the highest daily death toll since April.\n\nIn a statement to the Commons, Mr Johnson said the new variant had \"led to more cases than we've seen ever before\" and that this had left the government with \"no choice but to return to national lockdown\".\n\nHe said the legislation ran until the end of March \"not because we expect the full national lockdown to continue until then, but to allow a steady, controlled and evidence-led move down through the tiers on a regional basis\".\n\nHe said this would happen \"brick-by-brick... without risking the hard-won gains that protections have given us\".\n\nBut in response to MPs' questions, he said there was a \"cautious presumption\" that restrictions could start being eased from mid-February.\n\n\"And as was the case last spring, our emergence from the lockdown cocoon will be not a big bang but a gradual unwrapping,\" he added.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"We need a plan\", Keir Starmer told MPs while declaring Labour would support new lockdown\n\nUnder the measures, which came into force legally on Wednesday, people in England will only be able to go out for essential reasons, for exercise outdoors only once a day, and outdoor sports venues must close.\n\nPolice have the powers to enforce the new restrictions with a £200 fine for each breach, doubling on every offence up to a maximum of £6,400 - and a £10,000 penalty for mass gatherings.\n\nOfficers in London arrested at least a dozen people in Parliament Square after a protest against the new measures on Wednesday.\n\nThe need to debate and vote on the restrictions means the Commons has been recalled from its Christmas break for the second time - the first being for the post-Brexit trade deal with the EU.\n\nWith Sir Keir saying Labour will support the motion, the measures are expected to pass with ease.\n\nThe restrictions will be kept under \"continuous review\", Mr Johnson added, with a statutory requirement to reconsider them every two weeks.\n\nAddressing the closure of schools, the PM said \"we did everything in our power to keep them open as long as possible\" and that was why schools were the \"very last thing to close\".\n\nThey would be the \"very first thing to reopen\" after lockdown - that could be after the February half term - but \"we must be very cautious\" about the timetable, he said.\n\nMeanwhile, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson told the Commons that GCSEs, A-level and AS-level exams would be cancelled this year in England, replaced by a form of teacher-assessed grades.\n\n\"This year, we're going to put our trust in teachers, rather than algorithms,\" he said, referencing controversy over the way exam grades were awarded to some students last year.\n\nAll national curriculum tests for primary school children, often known as Sats, are now cancelled, Mr Williamson confirmed.\n\nHe said every school will be expected to provide between three and five hours of virtual teaching each day and that 750,000 laptop and tablet devices will have been distributed by the end of next week.\n\nThe prime minister wasted no time in emphasising the \"fundamental difference\" between this and previous lockdowns.\n\nTo keep opposition from his own MPs at bay he needs to demonstrate that the government's aim to vaccinate the most at-risk groups by mid-February is viable.\n\nHe is also under pressure to give a sense of how quickly restrictions might be lifted after that.\n\nThe course of the pandemic has changed swiftly at times, though, and may do so again, so it's unlikely we'll get any firm new timelines from Boris Johnson today.\n\nMost Conservative backbenchers seem resigned to the need for this new national lockdown and agree the prime minister had \"no choice\" but to act.\n\nBut MPs on all sides are impatient to hear how soon things may start returning to something like life as normal at last.\n\nMr Johnson said unlike in March last year, during the first lockdown, vaccines offered \"the means of our escape\".\n\nBut he said there was now a race to vaccinate vulnerable people quickly, with the government setting a target of immunising the four most vulnerable groups - some 13 million people - by mid-February.\n\n\"After the marathon of last year, we are indeed now in a sprint, a race to vaccinate the vulnerable faster than the virus can reach them,\" Mr Johnson said.\n\n\"Every needle in every arm makes a difference.\"\n\nEarlier, Covid vaccine deployment minister Nadhim Zahawi said he was \"confident\" the government would meet its \"ambitious\" target, adding that community pharmacies would be brought in to assist the vaccination programme.\n\nHe told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that new daily vaccination figures for the UK - which will be released for the first time on Monday - will show there has been a \"significant increase\" in the number of people who have received the jab.\n\nOn Tuesday, Mr Johnson said 1.3 million people in the UK had been vaccinated so far.\n\nMr Zahawi also said nursery schools presented \"very little risk\", are Covid-safe and he defended the decision to keep them open during England's lockdown.\n\nResponding to the prime minister's statement, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said his party will support the new restrictions and urged people to comply with them.\n\n\"The virus is out of control, over a million people in England now have Covid, the number of hospital admissions is rising, tragically so are the numbers of people dying,\" he said.\n\n\"It's only the early days of January and the NHS is under huge strain. In those circumstances, tougher restrictions are necessary.\"\n\nBut he added \"this is not just bad luck, it's not inevitable, it follows a pattern\" of the government being slow to respond.\n\n\"These are the decisions that have led us to the position we're now in - and the vaccine is now the only way out and we must all support the national effort to get it rolled out as quickly as possible.\"\n\nHow have you been affected by Covid? What will lockdown mean for you? Please get in touch by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police raided an illegal rave in a railway arch attended by 300 people.\n\nPolice have issued more than £15,000 in fines after 300 people attended an illegal rave in a railway arch.\n\nOfficers raided an unlicensed music event in Nursery Road, Hackney, at 01.30 GMT on Sunday.\n\nMany people fled the scene, while organisers padlocked the doors from the inside to stop officers getting in, police said.\n\nNo arrests were reported, but 78 fines of up to £200 for breaching lockdown restrictions were issued.\n\nA dog unit and helicopter were deployed to the scene, with police saying they made numerous attempts to contact the organisers.\n\nOrganisers padlocked the door from the inside to prevent officers getting in, police said\n\nCh Supt Roy Smith said: \"This was a serious and blatant breach of the public health regulations and the law.\n\n\"Officers were forced, yet again, to put their own health at risk to deal with a large group of incredibly selfish people who were tightly packed together in a confined space - providing an ideal opportunity for this deadly virus to spread.\n\n\"Not just organisers, but all those present at such illegal parties can expect to be issued a fine.\"\n\nOfficers surrounded the property as dozens of guests scaled fences at the rear of the arch to escape\n\nThere is an England-wide lockdown in place which prevents any social mixing between households.\n\nUnder these restrictions people are asked to only leave home for limited reasons such as shopping, going to work, seeking medical assistance or avoiding domestic abuse.\n\nThe Met Police has broken up several large gatherings in London over the last month including a 150-person wedding at a north London school.\n\nTwo officers were injured as police broke up a party involving about 200 people in Kensington on 17 January.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Former Brexit Party MEP Robert Rowland was described as a larger than life character\n\nA former Brexit Party MEP has died in a diving accident near his home in the Bahamas.\n\nRobert Rowland, 54, represented the south east of England at the European Parliament from July 2019 until January 2020.\n\nNigel Farage paid tribute to the \"larger than life character\" and \"enthusiastic\" Brexit supporter.\n\nHe announced the death of his former colleague in a statement on Sunday.\n\nThe Royal Bahamas Police Force said it had \"received reports of a drowning incident\" on Saturday and was \"conducting inquires\".\n\nMr Farage said: \"It is with great sadness that I have to announce the death of Robert Rowland, after a diving accident near his home in the Bahamas.\n\n\"Following a successful career in the City, Robert was an enthusiastic Brexit Party MEP and larger than life character.\"\n\nHe said he wished to extend his \"sincerest condolences\" to Mr Rowland's family, including his wife and four children.\n\nFormer Brexit Party MEP David Bull said he was \"beyond devastated,\" adding: \"Robert was a wonderful friend and colleague.\"\n• None Farage's Brexit Party officially changes its name\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Nicola Sturgeon: 'It's right that I am properly scrutinised'\n\nScotland's first minister has insisted she did not mislead parliament about when she learned harassment allegations had been made against her predecessor Alex Salmond.\n\nNicola Sturgeon said \"false conspiracy theories were being spun\" about her involvement by Mr Salmond's supporters.\n\nA Holyrood inquiry into how the government handled the allegations against Mr Salmond is under way.\n\nShe said she expects to give evidence to the inquiry in the coming weeks.\n\nThe BBC's Andrew Marr asked Ms Sturgeon how she responded to Mr Salmond saying that parliament had been repeatedly misled, and that evidence she gave to the inquiry was \"simply\" and \"manifestly untrue\".\n\nMs Sturgeon replied that she would \"refute that vigorously\".\n\nHer interview came after the inquiry announced it would use legal powers to seek documents from the Crown Office.\n\nIn response to Ms Sturgeon's interview, a spokeswoman for Mr Salmond said: \"The evidence, if published, will speak for itself\".\n\nA committee of MSPs is investigating the government's handling of two harassment claims against the former first minister, after he successfully challenged the complaints process in court.\n\nShe said it was right that she was scrutinised and that she had hoped to appear before the committee on Tuesday but that this had been delayed by \"a couple of weeks\".\n\nAsked if Alex Salmond was \"spinning false conspiracy theories\", Nicola Sturgeon said: \"There are false conspiracy theories being spun about this... by Alex Salmond, by people around him - you can draw your own conclusions around that.\"\n\nShe added: \"What I certainly reflect on is that at times I appear to be simultaneously accused of colluding with Mr Salmond to somehow cover up accusations of sexual harassment on the one hand.\n\n\"And then on the other hand, being part of some dastardly conspiracy to bring him down.\n\n\"Neither of those are true.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon added: \"I didn't collude with Alex Salmond and I didn't conspire against him.\"\n\nThe first minister reiterated that Mr Salmond had told her about the allegations during a meeting at her home on 2 April 2018.\n\nHowever, Mr Salmond has insisted that she already knew about the allegations as she had been told about them four days earlier by one of his aides.\n\nNicola Sturgeon has previously acknowledge that she initially \"forgot\" about this meeting.\n\nIn evidence to the Holyrood inquiry which was published in October, she said: \"From what I recall, the discussion [with Mr Salmond's aide] covered the fact that Alex Salmond wanted to see me urgently about a serious matter, and I think it did cover the suggestion that the matter might relate to allegations of a sexual nature.\"\n\nSpeaking to The Andrew Marr Show, she added: \"I, at the time I became aware of all of this, just tried hard not to interfere with what was going on and not to do anything that would see these swept aside rather than properly investigated.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon conceded that the Scottish government had made mistakes in how it handled the allegations.\n\n\"What I will never do is apologise for doing everything I could to make sure that complaints about sexual harassment were investigated, and not simply swept under the carpet because of the seniority and powerful position of the person who was subject to them,\" she added.\n\nLast March, Mr Salmond was cleared of 13 charges of sexual assault at the High Court in Edinburgh.\n\nA spokeswoman for Mr Salmond said: \"The two inquiries under way are into why Nicola Sturgeon's government acted unlawfully.\n\n\"Alex has submitted his evidence as requested and the parliamentary committee is now challenging the Crown Office to produce some of the text messages which they believe are being suppressed.\n\n\"The evidence, if published, will speak for itself\"", "Asos says it is in \"exclusive\" talks to buy Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge and HIIT brands out of administration.\n\nBut the online retailer said it only wanted the brands, not their shops, suggesting any deal would cost jobs.\n\nThe current owner of the brands, Sir Philip Green's Arcadia Group, fell into administration last November putting 13,000 jobs at risk.\n\nAsos said it was \"a compelling opportunity\" to buy \"strong brands that resonate well with its customer base\".\n\n\"However, at this stage, there can be no certainty of a transaction and Asos will keep shareholders updated as appropriate,\" it added.\n\nLast week, a consortium including fashion chain Next dropped its bid to buy Topshop and Topman because it could not meet the price tag.\n\nOthers interested in some or all of Arcadia - which also owns Dorothy Perkins and Burton - include Mike Ashley's Frasers Group, a consortium including JD Sports, and the online retailer Boohoo.\n\nIn addition, the Issa brothers, who recently bought supermarket chain Asda, and Chinese fast fashion giant Shein are said to have made bids for Topshop.\n\nAsos has seen strong sales in the pandemic and is already one of the biggest wholesalers for Topshop, Topman, Burton and Miss Selfridge.\n\nAdministrators from Deloitte requested that final bids be submitted last Monday, with the auction expected to conclude at the end of January.\n\nSir Philip Green is under pressure to use his own money to plug an estimated £350m hole in Arcadia's pension fund, which has about 10,000 members.\n\nLast year the retail tycoon had an estimated fortune of £930m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.\n\nArcadia employed about 13,000 people and had 444 shops at the time of its collapse.", "27 of the 29 miners that died in tragedy\n\nThe Pike River mining disaster was a tragedy that shocked the world. Twenty-nine men who were in the New Zealand coal mine died when it collapsed in a series of explosions. The BBC's Phil Mercer covered the accident 10 years ago and has been talking to families of victims still coming to terms with their loss.\n\nThe day after his 17th birthday, Joseph Ray Dunbar began his first shift underground at the Pike River coal mine in New Zealand.\n\nHe was a \"strong-minded boy\" who wanted to carve his own path in life, but on that day in November 2010 he became the youngest victim of a mining disaster that killed 29 men.\n\nTheir bodies have never been recovered, and a decade later the teenager's father Dean is still looking for answers.\n\n\"In a modern society you don't wipe out 29 men and just walk away,\" he told the BBC. \"Joseph's legacy is righting the wrongs of the past whether it be by government agencies, police or politicians.\"\n\nJoseph Dunbar was the youngest among the victims\n\nIn 2012, a Royal Commission found the miners and contractors were exposed to \"unacceptable risk\" and that \"there were numerous warnings of a potential catastrophe at Pike River,\" but there have been no prosecutions.\n\nThe inquiry concluded the men \"died immediately, or shortly afterwards\" from a methane gas blast or the \"toxic atmosphere\". Two workers did manage to escape the blast and survived.\n\nNews of an accident at the mine in the Paparoa Ranges began to emerge in the middle of the afternoon on Friday, 19 November, 2010.\n\nFamily members soon gathered, and in the hours and days that followed, there was hope that the men might still be alive, although the authorities said a rescue mission was too dangerous. A nation prayed for another mining miracle.\n\nOn the right, the tags of the 29 miners who never made it out\n\nA few months earlier, 33 miners in Chile's Atacama Desert had been pulled out alive after being trapped underground for 69 days.\n\n\"That was totally on my mind the whole time,\" explained Anna Osborne, whose husband, Milton, died at Pike River.\n\n\"I saw how successfully those Chilean miners were rescued and I thought if they can all come out alive, it can happen to us. But little did I know that that mine (in Chile) wasn't a gassy one.\"\n\nFor five long days the families waited. As a reporter sent to cover the story at the time, it was excruciating for me to watch their anguish and frustration grow.\n\nThere would be no rescue, and on 24 November another explosion ripped through the mine, and all hope was gone.\n\nFire at the entrance to the mine\n\nMs Osborne told the BBC that she is \"still fighting to get the truth and still wondering why our guys were allowed underground when the mine was so volatile (and) was a ticking time bomb.\"\n\nNot all of the families want the men's remains to be recovered, but she said it would be a great comfort to bring her husband home.\n\n\"He was working in the south (part of the mine), which was flooded. My husband couldn't swim, so he hated the water and I close my eyes every night and visualise him floating in this water that he hated so much and I just thought I can't have him down there. If we can, I would like as many men to be retrieved,\" she added.\n\nI close my eyes every night and visualise him floating in this water\n\nThe Pike River Recovery Agency is a government department that has re-entered the so-called drift, a 2.3km (1.4 miles) tunnel that connects the entrance of the mine to the working areas and coal seams.\n\nIt is looking for clues that might help explain the explosions and to \"help prevent future mining tragedies.\" Re-entering the mine was delayed by safety concerns.\n\nThe end of the drift is blocked by a huge mass of fallen rock. This roof collapse was caused by the ignition of methane, and there are no plans for the agency to move further into the mine where most, if not all, of the bodies remain.\n\nRecovery teams only made it into an initial tunnel but not the mine proper\n\n\"The Agency's mandate from the government did not include recovering beyond the drift access tunnel,\" said a PRRA spokesperson. \"It remains less likely that we will recover human remains.\"\n\n\"That rockfall is impenetrable,\" said Tony Kokshoorn, the former mayor of the local Grey District. \"The 29 miners are in the coal mine proper. At least they are all together and that is their final resting place.\"\n\n\"Many of the families want them to be together in there because it would have been pretty tough on a lot of families if some had come out and the others couldn't come out.\"\n\nThe police inquiry into the disaster is continuing, with a spokesperson saying they \"remain committed to a full and thorough investigation into events\" and will everything they can to \"provide answers\".\n\nThe grief was felt far beyond New Zealand's rugged West Coast by bereaved families in Australia, Scotland and South Africa.\n\nThe mine will almost certainly never reopen, but Bernie Monk, whose 23-year old son Michael died in the disaster, wants one, final push to bring the men out.\n\n\"The times that I went up to the mine portal with anniversaries, I swore and declared and I looked down that tunnel, and I said to them, 'we're coming to get you guys out'. It was an emotional day for me when I first went down into the mine,\" he said.\n\n\"We're are only 50 to 100 metres away from them. I think we've got a right to go and get those men,\" Mr Monk told the BBC.\n\nOut of tragedy comes pain, anger and calls for accountability and change. It is 10 years since Anna Osborne's husband, affectionately known as Milt, never came home, and she continues to agitate for stronger health and safety laws, and for employers to be prosecuted when things go wrong.\n\n\"We have had 700 people lose their lives in workplace accidents since Pike River. That is like a Pike River every five months in New Zealand,\" she said.\n\nBut above all else there is a sadness that may never fade.\n\n\"I love him so much. It still hurts. It is still very, very raw.\"", "National Museum of the Royal New Zealand Navy Philip Gannaway (left) on the SS Demosthenes in 1916, when it was being used as a troop ship\n\nAn appeal has been made to trace the family of a sailor from New Zealand buried more than a century ago on an island off Anglesey.\n\nLt Philip Gannaway had recently married his wife Muriel when he enlisted during World War One.\n\nHe joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, serving on motor launches on the Menai Strait.\n\nBut he died aged 32 during the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, and is buried on Church Island in the strait.\n\nLocal historian Bridget Geoghegan says she has already had responses following a story about Lt Gannaway on the New Zealand news website Stuff.\n\nHowever, she is still waiting to hear from his direct relatives.\n\n\"I have met family members of some people I have researched, and that is always a delight - a bonus,\" she said.\n\nThe grave notes Lt Gannaway's military service with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve\n\nLt Gannaway's funeral took place on 9 November 1918 with full naval honours, just two days before the armistice that brought fighting to an end.\n\nNewspaper reports found by Ms Geoghegan said more than 200 men and officers joined the procession, with shipyard work pausing as a mark of respect.\n\n\"I found he had married his sweetheart not long before volunteering and coming over to UK,\" she said.\n\n\"It seemed like a bitter end to a love story.\"\n\nHe is buried at St Tysilio's on Church Island, which is linked to the rest of Anglesey by a short causeway.\n\nThe Australian and New Zealander are both remembered on the war memorial\n\nBut Lt Gannaway is not the only man on the island buried so far from home.\n\nRemembered alongside him on the war memorial is William Connington, a 23-year-old corporal in the Australian Flying Corps who died with flu in Buckinghamshire.\n\n\"Connington had family in the area - his father must have emigrated to Australia,\" Ms Geoghegan said.\n\n\"His aunt and cousin lived in Menai Bridge. I think it likely that he had been up to stay with the family and when he died his aunt brought him back to Menai Bridge from Aylesbury so that he would be buried amongst friends.\"\n\nSt Tysilio's sits on Church Island in the Menai Strait\n\nFor several years Ms Geoghegan has joined others in researching and commemorating the people named on local war memorials and graves.\n\nBefore the latest lockdown restrictions, she created a walk for Church Island with the stories behind the names.\n\n\"I devised a walk round St Tysilio to include the graves of those lost and the family commemorations for their loved-ones buried elsewhere or lost at sea - the pain is almost palpable,\" she said.\n\nThe inscription from Lt Gannaway's parents to their \"beloved son\" reads simply: \"In peace he lived, in peace he died\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Supporters of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny protest against his arrest across Russia\n\nRussian police have detained more than 3,000 people in a crackdown on protests in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, monitors say.\n\nTens of thousands of people defied a heavy police presence to join some of the largest rallies against President Vladimir Putin in years.\n\nIn Moscow, riot police were seen beating and dragging away protesters.\n\nMr Navalny, President Putin's most high-profile critic, called for protests after his arrest last Sunday.\n\nHe was detained after he flew back to Moscow from Berlin, where he had been recovering from a near-fatal nerve agent attack in Russia last August.\n\nOn his return, he was immediately taken into custody and found guilty of violating parole conditions. He says it is a trumped-up case designed to silence him.\n\nOVD Info, an independent NGO that monitors rallies, said about 3,100 people had been detained, more than 1,200 of them in Moscow alone. The Kremlin has not commented.\n\nThe unauthorised demonstrations were held in about 100 cities and towns from Russia's Far East and Siberia to Moscow and St Petersburg. Protesters ranged from teenage students to elderly people who demanded Mr Navalny's release.\n\nAt least 40,000 people joined a rally in central Moscow, Reuters news agency estimated. But Russia's interior ministry put the number of protesters at 4,000.\n\nObservers say the scale of the demonstrations across the country was unprecedented while the protest in the capital was the largest in almost a decade.\n\nRiot police used batons against protesters in Moscow\n\nIn the city's Pushkin square, some protesters chanted \"Freedom to Navalny\" and \"Putin go away!\" One woman told the BBC she had decided to join the demonstration because \"Russia has been turned into a prison camp\".\n\nSergei Radchenko, a 53-year-old protester in Moscow, told Reuters: \"I'm tired of being afraid. I haven't just turned up for myself and Navalny, but for my son because there is no future in this country.\"\n\nLyubov Sobol, a prominent aide of Mr Navalny who had already been fined for urging Russians to join the protests, tweeted a video of police roughly pulling her away from an interview with reporters.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Соболь Любовь This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMr Navalny's wife, Yulia, was briefly held at the rally. She posted an image on her Instagram account with the caption: \"Apologies for the poor quality. Very bad light in the police van.\"\n\nSome protesters marched on the high-security prison where Mr Navalny is being held, and many were arrested.\n\nMeanwhile, one independent news source, Sota, said at least 3,000 people had joined a demonstration in the city of Vladivostok, but local authorities there put the figure at 500.\n\nAFP footage showed riot police running into a crowd, and beating some of the protesters with batons.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police used batons to break up protests in Vladivostok\n\nIn the Siberian city of Yakutsk, attendees at a small protest saw temperatures dip as low as -50C (-58F).\n\nPrior to the rallies, Russian authorities had promised a tough crackdown. Several of Mr Navalny's close aides, including his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh, were arrested earlier in the week.\n\nHis supporters called for more protests next weekend.\n\nThere were reports of disruption to mobile phone and internet coverage on Saturday, though it is not known if this was related to the protests.\n\nThe social media app TikTok had been flooded with videos promoting the demonstrations and sharing viral messages about Mr Navalny.\n\nIn response, Russia's official media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, demanded that TikTok take down any information \"encouraging minors to act illegally\", threatening large fines. The education ministry had told parents not to allow their children to attend any demonstrations.\n\nProtesters ignored extreme cold and threats of arrest in Moscow and other cities and towns\n\nIn a push to gain support ahead of the protests, Mr Navalny's team released a video about a luxury Black Sea resort that they allege belongs to President Putin - an accusation denied by the Kremlin. The video has been watched by more than 65 million people.\n\nThe UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, condemned the \"use of violence against peaceful protesters and journalists\" on Saturday, calling on the authorities to release those detained during peaceful demonstrations.\n\nThe US state department condemned what it called \"harsh tactics\" used against protesters and journalists, saying: \"We call on Russian authorities to release all those detained for exercising their universal rights and for the immediate and unconditional release of Aleksey Navalny\".\n\nThe EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said the bloc's foreign ministers would discuss the Russian crackdown on Monday. \"I deplore widespread detentions, disproportionate use of force, cutting down internet and phone connections.\"", "British employers made plans to cut 795,000 jobs last year, a record number, as Covid lockdowns took their toll on the economy.\n\nMore than 10,000 firms planned job cuts, however the pace of planned cuts slowed at the end of the year.\n\nWithout the government's furlough scheme, designed to protect jobs, the numbers might have been higher still.\n\nThe figures were obtained in response to a BBC Freedom of Information request to the Insolvency Service.\n\nEmployers must notify the Insolvency Service when they plan to cut 20 or more jobs, giving an earlier indication of changes in the labour market than waiting for official joblessness statistics.\n\nLarge parts of the British economy were brought to a standstill for weeks on end during 2020 by the measures imposed to contain Covid-19, and many employers were forced to cut staff as a result.\n\nThe number of job cuts proposed through the year was well above the 530,000 seen the last time the UK was in recession, in 2010, and higher than any year in the records which go back to 2006.\n\nHowever, in recent months the pace of layoffs has slowed, even though the new Covid variant has seen surging case numbers and new lockdowns imposed across the UK.\n\nLast month employers notified government of plans to cut 23,100 job cuts, which is the lowest monthly figure for 2020, though still a third higher than December 2019.\n\nThe decision to extend the furlough scheme, where government pays most of a worker's wages if their employer can't, will have enabled more firms to keep their staff, believes Tony Wilson, Director of the Institute for Employment Studies.\n\n\"The question now though is where redundancy figures go next,\" he says.\n\n\"If they start to stabilise around these levels, then [job cuts] would be at least one third higher than what we've seen over most of the last decade, and it's possible that a combination of this lockdown and then furlough unwinding from May could see numbers creeping up.\"\n\nDespite that, Mr Wilson sees the situation as \"pretty positive\".\n\nEmployers planning to cut 20 or more staff have to notify the Insolvency Service of their plans at the start of the process.\n\nThese notifications give an earlier indication of the state of the labour market than data published by the Office for National Statistics, which appear with a time lag of a few months.\n\nInsolvency Service figures showed record levels in redundancies in June and July, which was confirmed when the ONS published its own figures three months later.\n\nThe latest figures, for the period from August to October, saw a new record of 370,000 redundancies across the UK.\n\nAs redundancy processes covering fewer than 20 workers aren't included, the total number of job cuts planned will be higher than the Insolvency Service totals.\n\nBut individual firms often make fewer cuts than the number they first propose to government.\n\nEmployers in Northern Ireland file HR1 forms with the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency and they are not included in these figures.", "Boohoo is set to buy the Debenhams brand and website, the BBC understands.\n\nHowever, the fast fashion retailer will not be taking on any of the company's remaining 118 High Street stores or its workforce.\n\nThe announcement could come as early as Monday morning.\n\nThe 242-year-old chain is already in the process of closing down, after administrators failed to secure a rescue deal for the business, with the likely loss of 12,000 jobs.\n\nA closing down sale at 124 Debenhams stores began in December, as administrators continued to seek offers for all, or parts of the business.\n\nIn the last week or so, the company announced that six shops would not reopen after lockdown, including its flagship department store on London's Oxford Street.\n\nBoohoo has already bought a number of High Street brands out of administration. It snapped up Oasis, Coast and Karen Millen, but not the associated stores.\n\nDebenhams has struggled for years with falling profits and rising debts, as more shopping has moved online. It called in administrators twice in two years, most recently in April.\n\nMike Ashley has bought other struggling businesses including House of Fraser and Evans Cycles\n\nHowever, its position became untenable during the coronavirus pandemic as non-essential retailers were forced to close for prolonged periods.\n\nThe firm had already trimmed its store portfolio and cut about 6,500 jobs since May, as it struggled to stay afloat.\n\nBusinessman Mike Ashley, who founded Sports Direct and also owns House of Fraser, had already made an offer for Debenhams after it was initially put up for sale in April.\n\nHowever the takeover offer, thought to be in the region of £125m, was rejected as being too low, leaving JD Sports as the last remaining bidder.\n\nMr Ashley had previously built up a 29% stake in the chain, but saw his £150m holding wiped out in 2019, when the company fell into administration and then ended up in the hands of its lenders - a consortium led by hedge fund Silverpoint.\n\nIn early December, the Frasers Group confirmed that it was working on a possible last minute rescue of Debenhams.\n\nThe announcement came five days after staff were informed and liquidators moved in to Debenhams' stores to start clearing stock, after a potential rescue deal with JD Sports fell through.\n\nBut Frasers said there was \"no certainty\" it could save the chain.\n\nOne of the biggest issues, it said, was the collapse into administration last week of another High Street giant, Arcadia, which is the biggest concession holder in Debenhams department stores.", "The UK has identified 77 cases of the coronavirus variant first detected in South Africa, the health secretary has said.\n\nCases are linked to travellers arriving in the UK, rather than community transmission, Matt Hancock added.\n\nHe told the BBC's Andrew Marr cases were under \"very close\" observation and enhanced contact tracing was under way.\n\nMinisters are due to meet on Monday to consider imposing tougher restrictions on people arriving from abroad.\n\nScientists have said there is a chance the South African variant may harm the effectiveness of current vaccines.\n\nMeanwhile, Mr Hancock said that \"three quarters of all the 80-year-olds in the country and a similar number of care homes\" have received their first doses of the vaccine.\n\nBoth the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines require two doses, and figures so far reflect those given the first dose.\n\nMr Hancock said that it was \"far too early to say\" what proportion of the population needed to be vaccinated before lockdown restrictions could be eased.\n\nAll viruses, including the one that causes Covid-19, mutate, and variants have been first located in the UK, South Africa and Brazil.\n\nThe South Africa variant has been found in at least 20 other countries, including the UK.\n\nMr Hancock said that all the South Africa variant cases in the UK were linked to travel.\n\n\"That's why we have got such stringent border measures in place against movement from South Africa,\" he added.\n\nThe UK closed all travel corridors last week until at least 15 February, with almost all travellers arriving in the country now required to show proof of a negative Covid-19 test to be allowed entry.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has not ruled out bringing in tougher measures at UK borders, telling a Downing Street news conference on Friday: \"We don't want to put that (efforts to control Covid) at risk by having a new variant come back in.\"\n\nMinisters are set to discuss whether to tighten border restrictions further, including the possibility of hotel quarantines for travellers.\n\nMr Hancock said: \"We have got to be cautious at the borders.\"\n\nAsked for a date on when lockdown restrictions might end, Mr Hancock said it was \"one of the many things that we don't yet know the answer to\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Matt Hancock on easing restrictions: \"We don't know the answer\"\n\nGovernment data on 14 January showed there were 35 confirmed cases of the South Africa variant identified in the UK, and a further 12 \"probable\" cases.\n\nMr Hancock said nine cases of the Brazil variant had been found in the UK, adding \"we are monitoring each and every one very closely\".\n\nShadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that Labour had been \"pushing the government to take tougher measures at the border since last spring\".\n\nShe said: \"We would fully expect the government to bring in tougher quarantine measures, we would expect them to roll out a proper testing strategy and we would expect them as well to start checking up on the people who are quarantining.\n\n\"Only three out of every hundred people who are asked to quarantine when they arrive into the UK actually face any checks at all - that's just simply not sufficient.\"\n\nOn Friday, Mr Johnson said there was \"some evidence\" the UK variant may be associated with \"a higher degree of mortality\".\n\nThe UK government's chief scientific officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, said there was \"a lot of uncertainty around these numbers\" but that early evidence suggested the variant could be about 30% more deadly.\n\nThe PM said on Friday that there was evidence that both the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine and Oxford-AstraZeneca jab were effective against the variant first detected in the UK.\n\nSir Patrick has warned that the variants in South Africa and Brazil might \"have certain features which means they might be less susceptible to vaccines\".\n\nBut he said \"there is no evidence\" that the two variants have transmission advantages over those already in the UK and so having cases here doesn't mean \"they will take off\".\n\nMeanwhile, England's deputy chief medical officer warned that people who have received a Covid-19 vaccine could still pass the virus on to others and should continue following lockdown rules.\n\nWriting in the Sunday Telegraph, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam stressed that scientists \"do not yet know the impact of the vaccine on transmission\".\n\nHe said vaccines offer \"hope\" but infection rates must come down quickly.\n\nIt's a key question but the fact is that no one can be sure.\n\nThat's because the trials of the vaccines explored the safety of the drugs and how well they prevent people from becoming ill - with good results for both.\n\nBut they did not investigate whether vaccination also stops infection and therefore whether people who've been immunised can still spread the virus to others.\n\nIf a vaccinated person did become infected, they probably wouldn't realise because they wouldn't have any symptoms. That's why health officials and ministers are so concerned.\n\nIt's possible that the antibodies boosted by the vaccine suppress the effects of the virus but don't eliminate it from the upper airway.\n\nMany scientists are cautiously hopeful that in this scenario, the amount of virus would be reduced but they're waiting for the results of studies under way now.\n\nAnd until there's an answer, it's difficult to calculate how and when it's safe to ease restrictions and allow people to mix again.\n\nA further 610 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test were reported in the UK on Sunday - down from 671 deaths last Sunday - in addition to 30,004 new infections.\n\nThe number of positive cases has fallen for the fourth day in a row and is the lowest figure since before Christmas.\n\nThe death figures tend to be lower on a Sunday and Monday because of weekend lags in reporting of the data.\n\nMeanwhile, more than six million people have had their first dose of a Covid vaccine - with the figure now standing at 6,353,321.\n\nNadhim Zahawi, the minister responsible for the vaccine rollout, said on Twitter that 6,353,321 of the \"most vulnerable and frontline heroes\" had received a first dose of the vaccine, but there was still \"much more to do\".\n\nThere were 4,076 Covid patients in mechanical ventilation beds in UK hospitals as of Friday, according to government data.\n\nThat is higher than during the first wave, when the peak was 3,301 on 12 April.", "Simon Spurrell (C) from the Cheshire Cheese Company says he was advised to set up an EU hub\n\nUK firms that export to the EU say they are being encouraged by the government to set up subsidiaries in the bloc to avoid disruption under new trade rules.\n\nFirms have been hit by extra charges, taxes and paperwork, leading some to stop exporting to the EU altogether.\n\nBut several say they have been told that setting up hubs in Europe would minimise the disruption, even if it means moving investment out of the UK.\n\nThe Department for International Trade said it was \"not government policy\".\n\n\"The Cabinet Office have issued clear guidance, available at www.gov.uk/transition, and we encourage all businesses to follow that guidance.\"\n\nThe Cheshire Cheese Company said it had been advised by an official to set up in the EU after it was forced to stop its exports to the bloc due to trade rules that came in on 1 January.\n\nThe firm, which sold £180,000 of cheese to the EU last year, found that every £25-30 gift box of cheese it sends to consumers on the Continent now needs a veterinary-approved health certificate costing £180.\n\n\"I spoke to someone at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for advice. They told me setting up a fulfilment centre in the EU where we could pack the boxes was my only solution,\" co-founder Simon Spurrell told the BBC.\n\nThe firm, which had been optimistic about Brexit, is now looking at setting up a hub in France where it would \"test the water\".\n\nBut it has also scrapped plans to build a new £1m warehouse in Macclesfield employing 20-30 people.\n\n\"Instead we might end up employing French workers and paying tax to the EU,\" Mr Spurrell said.\n\n\"I left the EU as a UK citizen but now they are suggesting I rejoin my company to the EU, so what was Brexit for?\"\n\nThe issue, he said, was that the under the post-Brexit trade deal, a vet must approve every consignment of fresh food that his company ships to the EU.\n\nIt is a complex and costly process that has hit exporters of fresh meat and fish as well, and was partly why the government set up a £23m support fund for UK fishing companies.\n\nUK retailers who export to the EU have also complained about being hit with unsustainable costs when customers in the bloc return goods bought online. This is due to new customs clearance charges incurred by shipping firms.\n\nSome retailers have even warned they could burn clothes stuck at borders as it is cheaper than bringing them home.\n\nUlla Vitting Richards, who runs her sustainable fashion brand Vildnis from the UK, told the BBC last week she had stopped exporting to the EU, which was her fastest growing market, because of the new processes.\n\nShe also said that she had been advised - this time by a Department for International Trade (DIT) representative - that setting up a subsidiary distribution hub might help.\n\n\"He told me we'd be best off moving stock to a warehouse in Germany and get them to handle it,\" she said.\n\nAs early as last October, trade consultants Blick Rothenberg warned that thousands of UK businesses might need to set up an EU presence in order to keep exporting to European markets.\n\nHowever, experts say EU firms exporting to the UK - which currently enjoy a grace period over the imposition of some rules - will soon face the same issues.\n\nIndeed, some EU exporters have already stopped deliveries to the UK because of new VAT related charges.\n\nThe DIT said it was not government policy to advise UK firms to set up EU hubs and that it was \"ensuring all officials are properly conveying\" the right information.", "Scientists say signs a new coronavirus variant is more deadly than the earlier version should not be a \"game changer\" in the UK's response to the pandemic.\n\nBoris Johnson has said there is \"some evidence\" the variant may be associated with \"a higher degree of mortality\".\n\nBut the co-author of the study the PM was referring to said the variant's deadliness remained an \"open question\".\n\nAnother adviser said he was surprised Mr Johnson had shared the findings when the data was \"not particularly strong\".\n\nA third top medic said it was \"too early\" to be \"absolutely clear\".\n\nAt a Downing Street coronavirus news conference on Friday, the prime minister said: \"In addition to spreading more quickly, it also now appears that there is some evidence that the new variant - the variant that was first identified in London and the South East - may be associated with a higher degree of mortality.\"\n\nSpeaking alongside the PM, the government's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said there was \"a lot of uncertainty around these numbers\" but that early evidence suggested the variant could be about 30% more deadly.\n\nFor example, Sir Patrick said if 1,000 men in their 60s were infected with the old variant, roughly 10 of them would be expected to die - but this rises to about 13 with the new variant.\n\nThe announcement followed a briefing by scientists on the government's New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) which concluded there was a \"realistic possibility\" that the variant was associated with an increased risk of death.\n\nBut one of the briefing's co-authors, Prof Graham Medley, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"The question about whether it is more dangerous in terms of mortality I think is still open.\"\n\n\"In terms of making the situation worse it is not a game changer. It is a very bad thing that is slightly worse,\" added Prof Medley, who is a professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.\n\nAnother 1,348 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test were reported in the UK on Saturday, in addition to 33,552 new infections, according to the government's coronavirus dashboard.\n\nThere is huge uncertainty in the evidence on how lethal the variant is.\n\nThe scientific experts that reviewed the data used a precise phrase saying it was a \"realistic possibility\" the new variant is more deadly.\n\nThat means there's a roughly 50-50 chance it will turn out to be true.\n\nWith time, and sadly more deaths, the picture will become clearer.\n\nWhile people debate the uncertainties though, we already know this variant has the ability to kill more people than the old ones.\n\nA virus that spreads faster (this one is 30-70% faster) will infect more people, more quickly, putting a greater strain on hospitals and leading to a sharper spike in deaths.\n\nIt is why viruses becoming more transmissible can be a bigger problem than ones becoming more deadly.\n\nNervtag's chairman Prof Peter Horby defended the government's \"transparency\" in making the announcement.\n\n\"Scientists are looking at the possibility that there is increased severity... and after a week of looking at the data we came to the conclusion that it was a realistic possibility,\" he said.\n\n\"We need to be transparent about that. If we were not telling people about this we would be accused of covering it up.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Patrick Vallance: \"There is evidence that there's an increased risk for those who have the new variant\"\n\nBut Dr Mike Tildesley, a member of Sage subgroup the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M), agreed it was too early to draw \"strong conclusions\" as the suggested increased mortality rates were based on \"a relatively small amount of data\".\n\nHe told BBC Breakfast he was \"actually quite surprised\" Mr Johnson had made the early findings public rather than monitoring the data \"for a week or two more\".\n\n\"I just worry that where we report things pre-emptively where the data are not really particularly strong,\" Dr Tildesley added.\n\nPublic Health England medical director Dr Yvonne Doyle also said it was not \"absolutely clear\" the new variant was more deadly than the original.\n\n\"There is some evidence, but it is very early evidence. It is small numbers of cases and it is far too early to say,\" she told the Today programme.\n\nMeanwhile, senior doctors are calling on England's chief medical officer to cut the gap between the first and second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine.\n\nThe British Medical Association told Prof Chris Whitty an extension to the maximum gap between jab from three weeks to 12 weeks, to get the first dose to more people, was \"difficult to justify\".", "The number of coronavirus patients on mechanical ventilation in the UK has passed 4,000 for the first time in the pandemic.\n\nA total of 4,076 Covid patients were in ventilator beds as of Friday, according to government data.\n\nThat is higher than during the first wave, when the peak was 3,301 on 12 April.\n\nIt comes as another 1,348 deaths and 33,552 new infections were reported on Saturday.\n\nThe UK's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, told a Downing Street news briefing on Friday: \"The death rate's awful and it's going to stay, I'm afraid, high for a little while before it starts coming down.\"\n\nMeanwhile, new figures show that a record number of seriously-ill Covid patients are being transferred from over-stretched hospitals because of a lack of bed space.\n\nAbout 1 in 10 patients admitted to intensive care are being sent to a different site, according to the body which audits critical care services.\n\nIn a series of reports in the past week, the BBC's Clive Myrie has been to a mortuary and the Royal London Hospital, where 12 out of 15 floors are occupied by Covid patients and staff are struggling to cope.\n\nMartin Freeborn's wife Helen, 64, died with Covid-19 at the hospital shortly before he spoke to the BBC.\n\nMr Freeborn urged people to \"be over-careful\" in taking precautions to stay safe from the virus because \"you don't want this to happen\".\n\n\"Nobody wants to go through this... Don't end up like us, please,\" he added.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Martin Freeborn's wife, Helen, died from Covid at the Royal London Hospital: 'Don't end up like us, please'\n\nThe number of people in mechanical ventilation beds has climbed every day since 18 December when it was 1,364 and now stands at 4,076.\n\nIt is one of the key figures the government considers when deciding its policy on when to ease coronavirus lockdown restrictions.\n\nWhen the pandemic first struck the UK, the government saw what had happened in hospitals in China and Italy and prioritised the provision of ventilators in British hospitals.\n\nIt set about buying as many ventilators as possible, and encouraged British manufacturers to design the machines to build stocks to cope with the worst-case Covid scenario. In September last year, a report found the NHS now had 30,000 ventilators available - about one for every 2,200 people in the UK.\n\nPeople in hospital are also being treated differently from the early days of the pandemic - which may explain why figures suggest slightly more people go on to recover after being on ventilation than back in March, April and May.\n\nA number of drugs are being tested as possible treatments for people with the disease, the BBC's health and science correspondent James Gallagher has said.\n\nThey include the steroid dexamethasone, which has been shown to reduce the risk of death by a third for ventilated patients and by a fifth for those on oxygen. Encouraging results have also been reported from two anti-inflammatory medications, tocilizumab and sarilumab.\n\nDr Ami Jones, intensive care consultant at Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, in Wales, said there had been \"carnage\" for the \"last few weeks\".\n\nSpeaking whilst on shift, she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"We're maybe at 150% capacity and I know London are much worse than that.\n\n\"We've a steady stream of fit, young patients requiring critical care and sadly we're losing some of those patients.\n\n\"We lost a patient overnight and I've replaced them with a patient of similar age.\n\n\"It's heartbreaking - and it's been going on for weeks and weeks and we haven't seen any kind of stop yet.\"\n\nDr Jones said the average Covid patient stays in hospital between two to four weeks \"and it really puts them through it\".\n\nShe added: \"You really want people who are going to be able to survive that three or four weeks and actually come out the other end and make a good recovery.\n\n\"We're not stopping people having care but we're giving it to the people we feel have the best chance of getting through what is a horrific situation we're going to put them through.\"\n\nDr Jones said nurses are \"broken\", both physically, from months of long shifts in personal protective equipment (PPE), and emotionally - partly due to the impact of the virus on them, their families and the community.\n\nDr Rupert Pearse, consultant in intensive care medicine at a London hospital, speaking on behalf of the Intensive Care Society, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that a \"huge number\" of patients were still attending hospital.\n\nHe said: \"Whilst we know the infection rate has probably now peaked, and we can be hopeful to soon be sure we've hit a hospital admissions peak, admissions to ICU [the intensive care unit] usually lag 48 hours behind that.\n\n\"So we're still very very worried that we're being pushed right up to the wire in terms of the resources we're able to deliver for patient care.\"\n\nDr Pearse added that there were three or four times more critical care beds in some hospitals than they would usually have.\n\nHe said: \"I can remember a time when it would take years for an intensive care unit to negotiate one extra bed on a complement of 14 or 15 beds.\n\n\"We, within a few weeks, have massively increased the number of beds and finding the staff - most importantly of all - to deliver that has been a huge logistical exercise.\"\n\nReacting to the ventilation figures, Dr Charlotte Hopkins, deputy chief medical officer for Barts Health NHS trust in east London, said on Twitter there had been a \"fast-paced increase\" since 18 December, and that more than a third of the 4,076 ventilated patients were in London.\n\nIt comes as some scientists said that signs a new Covid variant is more deadly than the earlier version should not be a \"game changer\" in the UK's response to the pandemic.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said on Friday that there was \"some evidence\" the variant that emerged in the UK may be associated with \"a higher degree of mortality\".\n\nBut Prof Graham Medley, the co-author of the study the PM was referring to, said the variant's deadliness remained an \"open\" question.\n\nDr Mike Tildesley, a member of Sage subgroup the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M), said he was \"surprised\" Mr Johnson had shared the findings when the data was \"not particularly strong\".\n\nPublic Health England medical director Dr Yvonne Doyle said it was \"too early\" to be \"absolutely clear\".\n\n\"There is some evidence, but it is very early evidence. It is small numbers of cases and it is far too early to say,\" she told the Today programme.\n\nUp to and including 22 January, 5,861,351 people have now had their first Covid jab and 468,617 have had their second dose.\n\nSenior doctors are calling on England's chief medical officer to cut the gap between the first and second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine.\n\nThe British Medical Association told Prof Chris Whitty an extension to the maximum gap between jab from three weeks to 12 weeks, to get the first dose to more people, was \"difficult to justify\".\n\nThe UK's four chief medical officers have previously defended the delay to the second jab in a letter to medical staff, saying: \"unvaccinated people are far more likely to end up severely ill, hospitalised [or] in some cases dying\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Video filmed in Tacoma, Washington, shows a police car apparently ploughing through a crowd of people\n\nA police officer is under investigation in the US after his vehicle ploughed into a group of people, running over at least one, in Tacoma, Washington.\n\nNobody was killed in the incident, although one person was rushed to hospital with injuries.\n\nA video shows a large group of people surrounding the police car as it revs its engine in an apparent effort to drive off.\n\nThe group refuses to move, and police say people started hitting the car.\n\nThe police officer then speeds through the group, hitting numerous people. One person is dragged under the car.\n\nTacoma Police Department said multiple vehicles and approximately 100 people were blocking an intersection when officers arrived on the scene. The group was apparently watching street racers doing \"burnouts\".\n\n\"During the operation, a responding Tacoma police vehicle was surrounded by the crowd. People hit the body of the police vehicle and its windows as the officer was stopped in the street,\" police said in a statement.\n\n\"The officer, fearing for his safety, tried to back up, but was unable to do so because of the crowd,\" it said.\n\n\"While trying to extricate himself from an unsafe position, the officer drove forward striking one individual and may have impacted others,\" it said.\n\nThe person who was run over was rushed to hospital. Their condition is as yet unclear.\n\nThe Pierce County Force Investigation Team is investigating the incident, the statement said. The police officer has not been identified.\n\n\"I am concerned that our department is experiencing another use of deadly force incident,\" Interim Police Chief Mike Ake said in the statement.\n\n\"I send my thoughts to anyone who was injured in tonight's event, and am committed to our department's full co-operation in the independent investigation and to assess the actions of the department's response during the incident.\"\n\nThe incident comes at a time of rising anger over the use of excessive force by police in the US.\n\nPeople across the world took to the streets last year to demonstrate their anger at the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis, and to demand an end to police brutality and what they see as systemic racism.", "It is hoped that vaccinating teenagers will allow them to sit exams\n\nIsrael has started vaccinating 16 to 18-year-olds against Covid-19, in an effort to enable them to sit exams.\n\nMore than a quarter of Israel's population of nine million have received at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine since 19 December, its health ministry says.\n\nIt started with the elderly and others at high risk, but people aged 40 and over can also now get the jab.\n\nIsrael hopes to start reopening its economy in February.\n\nThe inclusion of 16 to 18-year-olds - with parental permission - is meant \"to enable their return (to school) and the orderly holding of exams\", an education ministry spokeswoman said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe matriculation exams that Israeli students sit at the end of high school play an important role in deciding where they will go to university. Their results can also affect their placement in the military, where many young Israelis do compulsory service.\n\nThe education ministry has said it is too early to say whether schools will reopen next month.\n\nIsrael started its rapid vaccination drive - the fastest in the world - on 19 December, reaching 10% of its population by the end of 2020.\n\nIsrael has recorded more than 596,000 cases and 4,392 deaths with Covid-19, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.\n\nOn Sunday, the government said it would ban passenger flights in and out of the country from Monday night for the rest of January, in an effort to halt the spread of new virus variants.\n\n\"Other than rare exceptions, we are closing the sky hermetically to prevent the entry of the virus variants and also to ensure that we progress quickly with our vaccination campaign,\" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.\n\nForeigners have largely been blocked from entering Israel during the pandemic.", "The Department for Transport said \"smart motorways are as safe as, or safer than, the conventional ones\"\n\nA police and crime commissioner (PCC) has written to the government to say smart motorways are \"inherently unsafe and dangerous and should be abandoned\".\n\nSouth Yorkshire PCC Dr Alan Billings wrote his open letter to Grant Shapps, the Secretary of State for Transport.\n\nHis comments come after a coroner found two men had been unlawfully killed on a \"smart\" section of the M1.\n\nThe Department for Transport said \"smart motorways are as safe as, or safer than, the conventional ones\".\n\nOn 19 January coroner David Urpeth called for a review of the road schemes.\n\nMr Urpeth said smart motorways without a hard shoulder carry \"an ongoing risk of future deaths\".\n\nHe was speaking following the inquests for Jason Mercer, 44, from Rotherham and Alexandru Murgeanu, 22, of Mansfield, who died when a lorry crashed into their vehicles near Sheffield on 7 June 2019.\n\nNow Labour's Dr Billings has told Grant Shapps: \"I believe smart motorways of this kind - where what would be a hard shoulder is a live lane with occasional refuges - are inherently unsafe and dangerous and should be abandoned.\n\n\"The relevant test for us is whether someone who breaks down on this stretch of the motorway, where there is no hard shoulder, would have had a better chance of escaping death or injury had there still been a hard shoulder - and the coroner's verdict makes it clear that the answer to that question is - Yes.\"\n\nAlexandru Murgeanu (l) and Jason Mercer were killed in the crash on the M1 in South Yorkshire\n\nJason Mercer's widow, Claire, had previously told Nicky Campbell on BBC Radio 5Live she considered a government review of the smart motorway system \"was just a paperwork exercise and a PR exercise.\"\n\nTalking to BBC Look North Yorkshire after publishing the letter on Sunday, Dr Billings said: \"The Department for Transport and Highways England have argued all along that these sorts of motorways are actually safe, they even go as far as to say they are safer than ordinary motorways, now I think that whatever formula they are using to come to that conclusion is wrong.\n\n\"The coroner in his verdict has made it pretty clear that these two particular lives in South Yorkshire would not have come to such a sad end if there had been a hard shoulder there, so I think this is new evidence they have to take into account.\"\n\nHe added: \"If they thought this type of motorway was even smarter, or safer, than a conventional motorway, then why not convert the entire system to smart motorways, making it safer? As soon as you say it, I think you realise it's absurd.\n\n\"I think they (smart motorways) were done originally not because it was a safer way of doing a motorway, I think it was done in order to expand the capacity, get the traffic flowing by having an extra lane, but to do it cheaply, and I think we're trading cost - cheapness - for other people's lives.\"\n\nIn response to Dr Billings' open letter, the Department for Transport said: \"The stocktake [of smart motorways] showed that in most ways smart motorways are as safe as, or safer than, the conventional ones.\n\n\"The Transport Secretary has tasked Highways England with delivering an 18-point action plan to ensure they are safer still, and he has called an urgent meeting with the company to discuss their progress.\"\n\nFollow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.", "As high risk groups continue to be immunised there are growing concerns that people with learning disabilities have been missed out.\n\nDespite a recent Public Health England report warning they are six times more likely to die from coronavirus, as a group, they have not been prioritised for a vaccine.\n\nLegal action is being taken against the Department of Health and Social Care, which says it is working hard to vaccinate all those at risk.", "A Covid outbreak was declared at the DVLA's contact centre in December\n\nStaff are scared to work at the UK vehicle licensing agency's contact centre in Swansea where 500 workers have contracted coronavirus since the pandemic began, a union says.\n\nThe PCS union has urged ministers to intervene and described the numbers as a \"scandal\".\n\nA DVLA spokesperson insisted safety was a priority and it followed guidance to \"help keep our offices Covid secure\".\n\nThe Welsh Government said it had been \"worried about the DVLA for a while\".\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford said he has repeatedly raised concerns over case numbers at the offices.\n\nMinister Eluned Morgan said the decision to introduce tougher Covid regulations for workplaces in Wales was made, in part, due to the situation at the DVLA.\n\nIn December, a coronavirus outbreak was declared at the centre at Swansea Vale in Llansamlet after 352 cases of Covid-19 in the space of four months.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe DVLA has about 6,000 staff based in Swansea but said it was currently operating on a \"far reduced capacity\".\n\nA DVLA worker, who did not want to be identified, told BBC Wales News that close contacts of people testing positive are not always sent home to self-isolate, social-distancing is not being followed and homeworking is not always possible because of \"archaic\" systems.\n\n\"There are certain elements within management who are trying to bend the rules and regulations,\" they said.\n\n\"It has been mentioned that you don't need your track and trace [contact tracing app] on. If someone's off with Covid, the people who haven't had their app on haven't been sent home.\n\n\"They'll say 'your app hasn't pinged, you're not going home'.\"\n\nThe worker said it was difficult for staff to adhere to the two-metre distancing rule because of the way the office was laid out and some staff had resigned.\n\n\"The atmosphere sucks, people are scared. I have heard of some people walking out,\" they said.\n\nOne worker said two-metres distancing was not always being observed\n\n\"I think they have been raising concerns. They probably didn't get the answer they wanted. It's not necessarily the manager's fault, the managers are struggling too.\"\n\nPCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka said: \"It is a scandal that DVLA are not doing more to reduce numbers in the workplace when Covid infections are on the rise.\n\n\"Our members are telling us they are scared to enter the workplace for fear of catching Covid 19.\n\n\"Minsters must intervene and ensure DVLA are doing their utmost to enable staff to work from home and temporarily cease non-critical services.\"\n\nEluned Morgan told Radio Cymru the Welsh Government has been keeping an eye on the situation at the Swansea offices.\n\nEluned Morgan said the Welsh Government has been concerned at the situation at the DVLA for \"some time\".\n\nThe wellbeing minister said: \"We've been worried about the DVLA for a while, now. We've been putting pressure on them.\n\n\"It comes up time and again from the people who represent Swansea, and we're worried the pressure on people working there hasn't helped.\n\n\"The situation is one of the reasons why we've introduced new rules, new legislation, to tighten the restrictions on people at work.\"\n\nHealth Minister Vaughan Gething added: \"We're concerned about anecdotal reports we've heard from the trade union side, individuals, that all of the requirements weren't being followed.\"\n\nHe said there would be questions for management to answer if there had been a breach of the rules.\n\nThe DVLA said some staff have been able to work from home \"in line with government advice\", though others were required to be in the office due to their roles\n\n\"In view of the essential nature of the public services we provide, some operational staff are required to be in the office where their role means they cannot work from home,\" said a spokesman.\n\nThe DVLA said it has worked closely with Public Health Wales, Swansea council's environmental health staff and union officials to try to make its buildings Covid safe, including opening an additional site in Swansea.\n\nHowever, there were currently four Covid cases across its estate, with none at its contact centre.\n\n\"Before Christmas, when transmission infection rates were extremely high in the local community where most of our staff live, we saw a rise in staff testing positive for Covid,\" he said.\n\nSwansea MP Carolyn Harris said, during the first lockdown, she was in \"constant contact\" with the DVLA due to concerns raised by workers.\n\n\"Since Christmas, I've not been able to get hold of anyone from the DVLA,\" she told BBC Radio Wales' Sunday Supplement.\n\n\"Last night I spent a long time trying to hold of the chief executive.\n\n\"Some of the stuff that I am now reading, and some of the stuff I've had in over the last 24 hours, really worries me.\"\n\nThe Health and Safety Executive (HSE) said its inspector had been tackling \"a series of concerns\" since August and had spoken to the PCS, which it said was \"broadly supportive of DVLA's approach\".\n\nA spokesperson added: \"Most recently HSE joined Swansea Environmental Health Officers and Public Health Wales for some joint visits to premises, in our role to assist public health to assess the potential of work place transmission as part of their wider work to contain outbreaks.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "It is not clear if anyone not entitled succeeded in getting a Covid jab\n\nA health board boss has criticised council staff for potentially sharing Covid vaccine invites with colleagues.\n\nThe board meeting in North Wales heard some council staff, not within groups currently being vaccinated, booked appointments by following a link in an email only intended for the recipient.\n\nBetsi Cadwaladr health board's chairman Mark Polin said such actions could deprive someone else of a jab.\n\nDenbighshire council said it had warned staff the emails were not to be abused.\n\nIt is not clear if anyone not entitled succeeded in getting a Covid jab, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.\n\nOnly front-line social care and health workers, those over 80 and 70 years old, care home residents and their carers are currently being vaccinated.\n\nIndependent member Jackie Hughes spoke about the matter at Thursday's monthly health board meeting.\n\nAnswering her query, Dr Chris Stockport, the health board's executive director of primary care and community services, said: \"We are very clear with our local authority partners and teams of what frontline means in the same way we are elsewhere.\n\n\"When you arrive [for a vaccine] there's a process of validation.\n\n\"The likelihood is they will experience some difficulties working through the booking system [if they try to get into a higher vaccination cohort].\n\n\"It adds complications for a busy team and I would ask them not to do that when it's a clear effort to circumvent the cohort.\"\n\nAt Thursday's daily press briefing the UK Government Home Secretary Priti Patel said people who jumped the queue for the vaccine were \"morally reprehensible\" as they were putting the lives of vulnerable people at risk.\n\nShe said all the UK Government's measures were under review but \"our focus is getting that vaccine to the most vulnerable to make sure we can protect them and obviously protect others in the community\".\n\nMr Polin added: \"Whilst we understand the concerns people should not be doing what they are doing.\n\n\"The priority groups have been identified with clear medical guidance and sound reasoning behind it.\n\n\"So people jumping the queue are depriving someone else, potentially, of receiving the vaccine at the point at which they should.\"\n\nHe said it was a temporary problem, adding: \"We are changing the booking system, so this opportunity is not going to last much longer.\"\n\nHe said staff were looking out for any inappropriate bookings.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "More than five million people in the UK have now received the first dose of a coronavirus vaccine - thanks to an army of more than 80,000 volunteers and NHS workers who have been trained to give the jabs.\n\nMany of the vaccine volunteers have had no previous medical training and come from all walks of life. So why did they sign up? And how does it feel to stick a needle into a stranger's arm?\n\nYou could see their relief. A lot of them have been waiting 10 months without leaving the house\n\nCallum Finnegan, 23, has been juggling his 40-hour week as a Tesco delivery driver with giving Covid jabs at Manchester's Etihad tennis centre. A St John Ambulance volunteer, he completed extensive online and face-to-face training, which included practising administering jabs on silicon arms before giving them to patients. He says he'd never given an injection before.\n\nThe biomedical science graduate wanted to get involved in the vaccination effort as soon as the call was put out and says he feels \"grateful and privileged\" to be helping the rollout - an effort he hopes will save as many lives as possible.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by BBC Radio 5 Live This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nCallum, who volunteered for four weeks at London's Nightingale hospital at the beginning of the pandemic, says his first shift giving jabs was \"one of the best days\" he's had since Covid hit.\n\n\"They were incredibly emotional,\" he says of the people he has given the jab to. \"You could see their relief. A lot of them have been waiting 10 months without leaving the house, or seeing only one or two people. One of those could have been a Tesco delivery driver - there's a lot of people I deliver to who tell me that I'm the only person they're seeing face-to-face at the minute.\"\n\nIt just makes me feel better about the world, especially when it can get you down. It's nice to do something good for other people\n\nKate Donaghy, who runs an IT team for a travel company, was inspired to train as a vaccinator after seeing the impact of the disease first hand. A St John Ambulance volunteer for four years, Kate, 28, spent time at a London hospital last year helping to care for recovering Covid patients - before volunteering at an A&E department.\n\nAfter seeing just how desperate the situation was, she switched her focus to becoming a vaccinator. \"I just thought how can we stop this happening to people in the first place? If we can vaccinate people, that feels like a better way forward to solve the problem, and a great use of my time.\"\n\nShe says she overcame her initial nerves in giving the jabs thanks to some supportive colleagues and has already signed up for shifts at London's ExCel centre most weekends going forward.\n\nHer elderly patients were \"so happy it was the beginning of the end to their isolation\". \"It just makes me feel better about the world, especially when it can get you down. It's nice to do something good for other people.\"\n\nIt did feel good - it felt good to be fighting back\n\nDr Andy Bates, a 57-year-old dentist from North Yorkshire, recently gave his first vaccinations at Long Lee surgery, in Keighley. He is used to giving injections - albeit in the mouth - but he says helping to protect people against this virus \"did feel good - it felt good to be fighting back\".\n\nDr Bates is working as a paid vaccinator alongside a four-day week at his dental practice. He says both roles have served as a reminder that he could be the first person a patient has seen for months. And he says his day job - particularly calming people who are nervous about lying back in his dentist's chair - has helped him.\n\nHe says he managed to relax a \"very nervous\" lady in her 90s, who hadn't left the house since last March, by talking about their shared love of alpine cycling.\n\nAnd it's not just Dr Bates and his fellow vaccinators that have stepped up. He says after a \"huge dump\" of snow in the area, the community sprang into action to ensure elderly patients could safely come for their jabs - with a local farmer towing the van delivering the vaccines up the hill to the surgery, and volunteers clearing snow and ice from the car park.\n\nI just thought this is enough, this has got to stop. I wanted to help all the other elderly people who are so vulnerable to this virus\n\nWhen theatres closed last year, Amanda Baldwin's career as a full-time chorus member at London's Royal Opera House came to a \"heartbreaking\" standstill.\n\nStuck at home in south-east London with nothing to do, Amanda and her husband Julian Johnson, 55 - a freelance theatre stage manager - decided to volunteer for the NHS through the GoodSam app, which later connected them with the vaccinator training run by St John Ambulance.\n\nAmanda applied shortly after her 84-year-old mother tested positive for the virus - just before she was due to have the vaccine. \"Luckily she came through it, and she wasn't hospitalised. But I just thought this is enough, this has got to stop. I wanted to help all the other elderly people who are so vulnerable to this virus.\"\n\nAmanda recently passed her full SJA training in London and is now waiting for her first shift as a vaccinator. She thinks her performance background will help keep her nerves in check for when she administers her first jabs - joking that she hopes her patients \"don't wriggle about as much\" as her pet cat did when she had to give it injections for its diabetes.\n\nAfter feeling \"like a part of [her] soul was missing\" when theatres closed, she says training as vaccinator has given her a \"purpose\" again. \"I feel like I've now got [another] skill that can really help people.\"", "Researchers have been tracking changes to the \"spike\" of the virus\n\nThe new variant of Covid-19 is \"hugely\" more transmissible than the virus's previous version, a study has found.\n\nIt concludes the new variant increases the Reproduction or R number by between 0.4 and 0.7.\n\nThe UK's latest R number has been estimated at between 1.1 and 1.3. It needs to be below 1.0 for the number of cases to start falling.\n\nProf Axel Gandy of London's Imperial College said the differences between the viruses types was \"quite extreme\".\n\n\"There is a huge difference in how easily the variant virus spreads,\" he told BBC News. \"This is the most serious change in the virus since the epidemic began,\" he added.\n\nThe Imperial College study suggests transmission of the new variant tripled during England's November lockdown while the previous version was reduced by a third.\n\nCases of Covid-19 have begun to increase rapidly during the second spike, and the number of cases recorded in a single day reached a new high on Thursday.\n\nEarly results indicated that the virus was spreading more quickly among under-20s, particularly among secondary school age children.\n\nBut the very latest data indicates that it was spreading quickly across all age groups, according to Prof Gandy who was a member of the research team.\n\n\"One possible explanation is that the early data was collected during the time of the November lockdown where schools were open and the activities of the adult population were more restricted. We are seeing now that the new virus has increased infectiousness across all age groups.\"\n\nProf Jim Naismith, of Oxford University, said he believed that the new findings indicated that even tougher restrictions would soon be needed.\n\n\"The data from Imperial represent the best analysis to date and imply that the measures we have employed to date, would - with the new virus - fail to reduce the R number to below 1.\n\n\"In simpler terms, unless we do something different the new virus strain is going to continue to spread, more infections, more hospitalisations and more deaths.\"\n\nThe R number is the average number of people an infected person infects. If it is above 1 the epidemic is growing.\n\nThe most chilling finding from this piece of research is that the November lockdown in England, hard though it was for many people, would not have stopped the variant form of the virus spreading. The same severe restrictions that saw cases of the previous version of the virus fall by a third, would see a tripling of the new variant. This is why there has been such a sudden tightening of restrictions across the country.\n\nIt is unclear whether the current restrictions will be enough to control the spread of the virus. Given the fact that it has taken two lockdowns to stop the earlier version of the virus overwhelming the NHS, many scientists fear that further tightening will be necessary.\n\nInfection levels will begin to drop as enough people are vaccinated. But until then it is now more important than ever for people to follow social distancing guidelines, wear masks where required and to regularly wash their hands.\n\nThe new year brings with it hope of a more normal life in the next few months but also a new form of the virus that all of us will have to combat in the coming days and weeks.\n\nProfessor Lawrence Young, of Warwick University, said early indications suggested that vaccines would be effective against the new form of the virus.\n\n\"Variants virus have been around since the beginning of the pandemic and are a product of the natural process by which viruses develop and adapt to their hosts as they replicate.\n\n\"Most of these mutations have no effect on the behaviour of the virus but very occasionally they can improve the ability of the virus to infect and/or become more resistant to the body's immune response.\"\n\nFurther research is needed to understand why the variant is spreading so quickly. But early indications are that vaccines should be effective against it.\n\nThe new virus has been designated \"Variant of Concern 202012/01\" or VOC by Public Health England.\n\nIt was detected in November and thought to have originated in the south-east England in September.\n\nThere is no evidence to suggest that it is more deadly, but it will increase the number of cases which in turn will add further pressure on the NHS.\n\nThe variant can now be found across the UK, except Northern Ireland, but it is heavily concentrated in London, as well as south-east and eastern England.", "Appointments were brought forward or rescheduled for safety reasons\n\nFour vaccination centres were shut as snow caused some travel disruption in Wales.\n\nSunday appointments in Bridgend, Rhondda, Abercynon and Merthyr Tydfil were rescheduled for safety reasons, but centres will reopen on Monday, the Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board said.\n\nThe Met Office has extended a yellow weather warning to midnight on Sunday for all of Wales except Anglesey.\n\nA yellow warning for ice runs from midnight until 11:00 GMT on Monday.\n\nPolice have warned of difficult conditions due to snow and ice.\n\nUp to 3cm of snow is forecast to fall in most areas, with 10 to 15cm expected in the Brecon Beacons and Snowdonia.\n\nCwm Taf Morgannwg health board urged anyone with queries about Sunday's vaccination appointments to call the number on their appointment letters.\n\nSnow volunteers cleared pathways so a Covid vaccine pilot in Maesteg could keep running\n\n\"We can confirm that no vaccines have been wasted as a consequence of this temporary Sunday closure and we are grateful to all those who were able to turn up at such short notice yesterday as we brought forward a significant number of Sunday appointments during the course of Saturday,\" it said.\n\n\"Additionally, our 4x4 arrangements are enabling us to continue to reach care homes to vaccinate the staff and residents there.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Traffic Wales South #KeepWalesSafe This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nNorth Wales Police tweeted there was \"widespread snow this morning, particularly in some higher areas, making driving conditions difficult\".\n\nAnd Dyfed-Powys Police said some roads were \"impassable\" and advised people to \"stay home\".\n\nIn Bridgend, officers from South Wales Police were pelted with snowballs as they helped an injured sledger on Heol y Nant.\n\nNorth Wales Police warned of difficult conditions due to \"widespread snow\", particularly on high ground.\n\nIt said the A499 near Pwllheli had received heavy snowfall overnight.\n\nWelsh Ambulance Service boss Jason Killens tweeted, thanking the public for helping crews continue to work despite the conditions.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Jason Killens 💙 This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nVillages were dusted with snow, such as in Llanfynydd, Carmarthenshire\n\nNick Rolfe shared this garden view in Nercwys, near Mold, Flintshire\n\nThe Met Office warned travellers that \"longer journey times by road, bus and train services\" could be expected, although Wales is in a level four lockdown with all but essential travel banned.\n\nIt also said the snow could lead to power cuts and other services, such as mobile phone coverage, may be affected.\n\nThose going out for daily exercise have been warned there could be icy patches on some untreated roads, pavements and cycle paths.\n\nIn Powys, this was the view over Newtown on Sunday\n\nThe hills around Llangollen, Denbighshire, were covered in snow on Saturday\n\nPower cuts and travel delays are possible, the Met Office says\n\nThe drop in temperatures is likely to exacerbate problems after widespread flooding caused by Storm Christoph.\n\nTwo flood warnings issued by Natural Resources Wales remain in place, meaning flooding is expected.\n\nThese cover the River Ritec at Tenby in Pembrokeshire, which could affect the Kiln Park caravan site, and the lower Dee Valley from Llangollen to Trevalyn Meadows.\n\nPretty as a picture... Suzy shared this garden view in Snowdonia\n\nSun up: Heath in Cardiff awakes to a covering of snow\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "DUP leader Arlene Foster said people in NI need to \"come together to fight against Covid\"\n\nDUP leader Arlene Foster has said a potential vote on a united Ireland would be \"absolutely reckless\".\n\nShe was speaking after a poll commissioned by the Sunday Times in NI found 51% of people want a referendum on Irish unity in the next five years.\n\nSpeaking to Sky News, the first minister said \"we all know how divisive a border poll would be\".\n\nSinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill said there was an \"unstoppable conversation under way\" on the issue.\n\nThe deputy first minister called on the Irish government \"to step up preparations\" for a border poll.\n\nProvisions for a possible border poll on Irish reunification are included in the the Good Friday Agreement - the deal which led to peace in Northern Ireland after decades of violence.\n\nIt states that the Northern Ireland Secretary must call a border poll if it at any time it appears \"likely\" to that a majority of people in Northern Ireland would vote for a united Ireland.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Michelle O’Neill This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMrs Foster said she thought it was \"very disappointing\" that some nationalist parties in the UK were focusing on \"constitutional politics\" during the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\n\"We all know how divisive a border poll would be, and for us in Northern Ireland what we have to do is come together to fight against Covid, and not be distracted by what would be absolutely reckless at this time,\" she said.\n\nShe added if there was a vote on Irish unity, the arguments for the union are \"rational, logical, and they will win through\".\n\nThe polling was carried out by Lucidtalk in Northern Ireland, with similar polling in England, Scotland and Wales to gauge attitudes towards the union.\n\nIt found that in Northern Ireland, 47% still want to remain in the UK, with 42% in favour of a united Ireland and 11% undecided.\n\nHowever for those aged under 45, supporters of Irish reunification outnumber those who want to stay in the UK by 47% to 46%.\n\nRespondents also said they believed there would be a united Ireland within 10 years, by a margin of 48% to 44%.\n\nPolls like this come with the usual health warning - they are a snapshot in a moment in time.\n\nNonetheless there is some interesting reading here - not least the fact that it paints a picture of a disunited kingdom.\n\nWe shouldn't really be surprised about that because we have had very different approaches to the global Covid-19 pandemic with different outcomes.\n\nWe know that Brexit is starting to bite and there is a lot of frustration out there and uncertainty and that, I'm sure, has fed into these figures.\n\nThe big question for NI, unsurprisingly, is around constitutional change.\n\nIt shows that 51% of those polled would want to see a border poll within the next five years, compared to 44% who would not.\n\nHowever, if they flip that question around it's interesting to see that 42% would want to see a united Ireland, but 47% would want to remain, with 11% of don't knows.\n\nSo according to these figures there may be an appetite for a border poll - but if that question was posed the majority are saying they would stay in the UK.\n\nSDLP leader Colum Eastwood said the poll placed a \"solemn obligation\" on those seeking a united Ireland \"to engage with every community, sector and generation\".\n\n\"The United Kingdom may be coming to an end but we are all called to build a new future together. That's the work the SDLP is engaged in,\" said the Foyle MP.\n\nThe polling found 47% of people in Northern Ireland wish to remain in the UK, with 42% in favour of a united Ireland, and 11% undecided\n\nUlster Unionist leader Steve Aiken said \"all political energy should be focused on making Northern Ireland a better place to live and work rather than a divisive border poll\".\n\n\"We need to concentrate on the here and now, fostering better relationships and plotting a way through and out of the Covid-19 pandemic,\" he added.\n\n\"As Northern Ireland enters its second century, we should be talking about recovery, renewal and reconciliation.\"\n\nThe polls also found across the UK, respondents believed Scotland would become independent within the next 10 years.\n\nIn Scotland, it found a large poll lead for the Scottish National Party, with them potentially being on course to win 70 of 129 seats in Holyrood.\n\nThe SNP is set to reveal its 'roadmap to a referendum' to its national assembly on Sunday.\n\nIt outlines plans to pursue a vote after the pandemic if there is a pro-independence majority at Holyrood following May's election.\n\nThe research was carried out by Lucidtalk in Northern Ireland, Panelbase in Scotland, and YouGov in England and Wales.\n\nThe polling was carried out between 15 and 22 of January, with 2,392 people polled in Northern Ireland, 1,206 in Scotland, 1,416 in England, and 1,059 in Wales.", "Larry King, giant of US broadcasting who achieved worldwide fame for interviewing political leaders and celebrities, has died at the age of 87.\n\nKing conducted an estimated 50,000 interviews in his six-decade career, which included 25 years as host of the popular CNN talk show Larry King Live.\n\nHe died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to Ora Media, a production company he co-founded.\n\nEarlier this month, he was treated in hospital for Covid-19, US media say.\n\nThe talk show host, famous for his braces and rolled-up sleeves, had faced several health problems in recent years, including heart attacks.\n\nKing was married eight times to seven women and had five children. Two of them died last year within weeks of each other - daughter Chaia died from lung cancer and son Andy of a heart attack.\n\nKing carried out interviews with every sitting US president from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama and a number of world leaders. His other high-profile guests included Dr Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and Lady Gaga.\n\n\"For 63 years and across the platforms of radio, television and digital media, Larry's many thousands of interviews, awards, and global acclaim stand as a testament to his unique and lasting talent as a broadcaster,\" Ora Media said in a statement, without giving the cause of death.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Larry King: \"I like spontaneity. That's the kind of broadcaster I am\".\n\nBorn Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, King rose to fame in the 1970s with his radio programme The Larry King Show, on the commercial network Mutual Broadcasting System.\n\nIn 1985 he launched Larry King Live on the fledgling CNN, and became one of the network's biggest stars. The programme, broadcast around the world, was a success with audiences, with King answering thousands of phone calls from viewers.\n\nHe earned a number of honours, including two Peabody awards, but was also criticised for his non-confrontational approach and open-ended questions. King boasted of not doing much research for the interviews so, he said, he could learn along with viewers.\n\nBy 2010 his ratings had dropped significantly, with critics saying King's approach felt outdated in an era of more aggressive interviewing styles. King then announced his retirement, saying: \"It's time to hang up my nightly suspenders.\"\n\nIn his final programme on CNN, he told his viewers: \"I don't know what to say, except to you, my audience, thank you. Instead of goodbye, how about so long?\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by CNN Communications This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nCNN replaced him with British journalist and broadcaster Piers Morgan, whose programme King criticised for being \"too much about him\".\n\nMorgan, whose programme was cancelled three years later, said on Twitter on Saturday: \"Larry King was a hero of mine until we fell out after I replaced him at CNN & he said my show was 'like watching your mother-in-law go over a cliff in your new Bentley.' (He married 8 times so a mother-in-law expert).\"\n\nIn a statement, CNN president Jeff Zucker said: \"The scrappy young man from Brooklyn had a history-making career spanning radio and television. His curiosity about the world propelled his award-winning career in broadcasting, but it was his generosity of spirit that drew the world to him.\"\n\nMost recently, King hosted another programme, Larry King Now, broadcast on Hulu and RT, Russia's state-controlled international broadcaster.\n\nA Kremlin spokesman was quoted as saying by state RIA Novosti news agency: \"King repeatedly interviewed Putin. The president has always appreciated his great professionalism and unquestioned journalistic authority.\"\n\nOutside broadcasting, King founded the Larry King Cardiac Foundation in 1988, a charity which helps to fund heart treatment for those with limited financial means or no medical insurance.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA new world record has been set for the number of satellites sent to space on a single rocket.\n\nThe 143 payloads, of all shapes and sizes, rode to orbit on a SpaceX Falcon rocket that launched out of Florida.\n\nThe number beats the previous record of 104 satellites carried aloft by an Indian vehicle in 2017.\n\nIt's further evidence of the major structural changes taking place in space activity that are allowing many more actors to get involved.\n\nThis shift is the result of a revolution in robust, miniaturised, low-cost components - many taken direct from consumer electronics such as smartphones - that mean pretty much anyone can now build a capable satellite in a very small package.\n\nAnd with SpaceX offering to transport those packages to orbit for just $1m, the commercial opportunities will continue to open up.\n\nGuatemala's Santa María volcano: Planet is imaging the entire Earth daily with its Dove satellites\n\nSpaceX itself had 10 satellites on the Falcon - the latest additions to its Starlink telecommunications mega-constellation, which is going to deliver broadband internet connections around the globe.\n\nSan Francisco's Planet company had the most satellites of all on the flight - 48.\n\nThese were another batch of its SuperDove models that image the Earth's surface daily at a resolution of 3-5m. The new spacecraft take the firm's operational fleet now in orbit to more than 200.\n\n\"Internet of things\": SpaceBees will connect to all manner of objects on the ground\n\nThe SuperDoves are the size of a shoebox. Many of the other payloads on the Falcon rocket were little bigger than a coffee mug, however; and some were smaller even than a paperback book.\n\nSwarm Technologies is rolling out what it calls the SpaceBees. They're just 10cm by 10cm by 2.5cm.\n\nThey'll act as telecommunications nodes to connect devices that are attached to all manner of objects on the ground, from migrating animals to shipping containers.\n\nThe satellites were mounted on a dispenser that ejected them in sequence\n\nSome of the larger items on the Falcon rocket were suitcase-sized. Among these were several radar satellites. Radar has been one of the major beneficiaries of the revolution in componentry.\n\nTraditionally, radar satellites were big, multi-tonne objects that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fly, which essentially meant only the military or major space agencies could afford to operate them.\n\nBut the adoption of new materials and compact \"off the shelf\" parts have dramatically shrunk the size (to under 100kg) and price (a couple of million dollars) of these spacecraft.\n\niQPS artwork: The radar satellites unfurl large antennas once they are in space\n\nIceye from Finland, Capella from the US, and iQPS of Japan all took the ride to orbit on Sunday. These start-ups are establishing constellations in the sky that will return rapid, repeat imagery of the Earth.\n\nRadar has the advantage over standard optical cameras of being able to pierce cloud, and to sense the Earth's surface whether it is day or night. We're entering an age when any change on the planet, wherever it happens, will be picked up almost immediately.\n\nThe Falcon carried the 143 satellites into a 500km-high path that runs from pole to pole. This is one of the drawbacks of a big rideshare mission: you go where the rocket goes, and for some that might not be ideal.\n\nA number of satellite missions will want an orbit that's higher or lower in the sky, or on a different inclination to the equator.\n\nThis can be achieved by mounting the satellites on \"space tugs\" which, after coming off the top of the rocket, modify the final parameters for their \"passengers\" over the course of several weeks. Sunday's Falcon carried two such tugs.\n\nBut for some missions a bespoke ride is going to be the only satisfactory solution. It's why we're now witnessing a rush to produce small rockets that can run dedicated flights.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Watch: Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne rocket blasts its way to space\n\nThese smaller rockets will not be able to compete on cost with the big vehicles, such as SpaceX's Falcon-9, but they should attract the custom of those with very specific or urgent needs.\n\nDan Hart, the CEO of Virgin Orbit, which has developed a small rocket that can be launched from under the wing of a Boeing 747, says the start-ups are becoming more discerning.\n\n\"These small satellites used to be points of fascination and interest, and it was a case of finding the cheapest way possible to get into space,\" he explained.\n\n\"That's rapidly changing. These are now businesses with critical missions that risk losing revenue if they have to wait on others or go into an unsuitable orbit. And that's why you're going to see people who will pay that little bit more to get to where they want to go when they absolutely need to go there,\" he told BBC News.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Will Marshall: \"Our satellites 'phoned home' and they are healthy\"\n\nWith the roll call of satellites going into orbit now accelerating rapidly, the issue of traffic management is becoming a hot topic.\n\nFull-on collisions are currently rare, but a surprisingly large number (10%) of satellites will even now experience sudden, unexpected momentum changes, most probably the result of being hit by some small fragment from a previous mission.\n\nThe space sector needs to find smarter ways to track objects in orbit and to command timely avoidance manoeuvres, otherwise certain altitudes could ultimately become unusable because of the presence of dangerously dense debris fields.\n\nJonathan McDowell from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is a noted historian of astronautics.\n\nHe commented: \"There are now over 3,000 working satellites in orbit. The number of satellites launched last year at over 1,200 is over twice as many as in any previous year. And the ones launched today - that used to be the number you'd launch in a whole year. So it's getting really crowded up there.\"\n\nWill Marshall, the CEO of Planet, said his company, and indeed all of the companies on Sunday's flight, were accutley aware of the issue.\n\n\"We are seeing crowded areas in certain orbits,\" he told BBC News.\n\n\"Most of the crowded piece that is in danger of what they call Kessler Syndrome (runaway collisions) is quite high up. So one of the tricks that all of these satellites that were launched today use is to just stay really low where there's still a lot of atmospheric drag and eventually those satellites just come down.\"", "Pavithra Wanniarachchi (L) has become the fourth Sri Lankan minister to test positive\n\nSri Lanka's health minister, who endorsed herbal syrup to prevent Covid, has tested positive for the virus.\n\nPavithra Wanniarachchi tested positive on Friday, a media secretary at the Ministry of Health told the BBC.\n\nShe had promoted the syrup, manufactured by a shaman who claimed it worked as a life-long inoculation against the virus.\n\nSri Lanka recorded 56,076 cases and 276 deaths since the pandemic began, with cases surging in recent months.\n\nMs Wanniarachchi is the fourth minister to test positive. A junior minister, who also took the potion, tested positive earlier this week.\n\nThe health minister had publicly consumed and endorsed the syrup as a way of stopping the spread of the virus. The shaman who invented the syrup, which contains honey and nutmeg, said the recipe was given to him in a visionary dream.\n\nDoctors in the country have quashed claims the herbal syrup works, but AFP news agency reports thousands have travelled to a village to obtain it.\n\nMs Wanniarachchi took two Covid-19 tests and both returned positive results, Viraj Abeysinghe, media secretary at the Ministry of Health told the BBC.\n\nThe minister has been asked to self-isolate and all of her immediate contacts have gone into isolation.\n\nNews of Ms Wanniarachchi's positive test came hours after Sri Lanka approved the emergency use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. The first doses are expected to arrive in the country next week.\n\nSri Lanka isn't the only place where people in positions of power have promoted unproven treatments for Covid.\n\nLast year, Madagascar's President Andry Rajoelina was criticised for promoting a herbal concoction that he claimed could prevent the virus. He was pictured distributing the tonic to poor communities in the capital.\n\nSince the pandemic began, a number of world leaders and cabinet members have contracted Covid. French President Emmanuel Macron, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former President Donald Trump all caught the virus at various points last year.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The people who think Coronavirus is caused by 5G", "Mr Johnson raised the benefits of a UK-US trade deal during his phone call with Mr Biden\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has spoken to Joe Biden for the first time since the new US president was inaugurated.\n\nMr Johnson said on Twitter that he looked forward to \"deepening the longstanding alliance\" between the UK and the US as they drove a \"green and sustainable recovery from Covid-19\".\n\nMr Biden was sworn in as president and Kamala Harris as vice-president in a ceremony in Washington on Wednesday.\n\nThe PM said their inauguration was a \"step forward\" for the US.\n\nA Downing Street spokesman said Mr Johnson \"warmly welcomed\" the president's decision to rejoin the Paris Agreement on climate change and the World Health Organization - both abandoned by Mr Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump.\n\n\"The prime minister praised President Biden's early action on tackling climate change and commitment to reach net zero by 2050,\" the spokesman said.\n\nThe spokesman added that, in building on the two nations' \"long history of cooperation in security and defence, the leaders \"re-committed to the Nato alliance and our shared values in promoting human rights and protecting democracy\".\n\nThe two leaders also talked about \"the benefits of a potential free trade deal\" between the UK and the US, with Mr Johnson reiterating his intention \"to resolve existing trade issues as soon as possible\".\n\nAfter the inauguration of any American president, a political spectator sport immediately begins: the order in which the new occupant of the White House speaks to other world leaders.\n\nIt is a crude metric of relative importance, but a metric nonetheless.\n\nI understand the call lasted for around 35 minutes and was the first conversation Joe Biden has had with a European leader as president.\n\nThe focus on climate change makes political and diplomatic sense. It's a topic where a Conservative prime minister and Democrat president can agree, and it matters particularly to the UK as the host of the COP26 UN Climate Change Summit in Glasgow in November.\n\nBut when you compare what Downing Street said about the call and what the White House said, one thing leaps out.\n\nNo 10's readout refers to a conversation about a trade deal. President Biden's does not.\n\nIt's widely expected there'll be no such agreement any time soon.\n\nMr Johnson and Mr Biden \"looked forward to to meeting in person as soon as the circumstances allow\" and to working together during the forthcoming G7, G20 and COP26 summits, the spokesman added.\n\nA White House statement said Mr Biden \"conveyed his intention to strengthen the special relationship\" between the US and UK and \"revitalize transatlantic ties\".\n\nCongratulating Mr Biden and Ms Harris - who is the first woman and first black and Asian-American person to serve as vice-president - the PM said earlier that their inauguration was a \"step forward\" for the US, which had \"been through a bumpy period\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Johnson: \"It's a big moment for us - we have things we want to do together.\"\n\nMr Johnson said it was a \"big moment\" for the UK and the US and their \"joint common agenda\".\n\nThe BBC's political editor, Laura Kuenssberg has said the Biden Presidency \"brings some hope to government\" because No 10 believes \"there is a lot of overlap\" between what Mr Biden and Mr Johnson want to do.\n\nThe US president has previously said that he does not want a \"guarded border\" between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland following Brexit, and that any UK-US post-Brexit trade deal had to be \"contingent\" on respect for the Good Friday Agreement.\n\nThe PM and Mr Biden have never met in real life, but the new US president once referred to Mr Johnson as a \"physical and emotional clone\" of Mr Trump.\n\nAfter winning the presidential election, Mr Biden phoned Mr Johnson ahead of other European leaders and expressed his desire to strengthen the historic \"special relationship\" between the two countries.", "Keon Lincoln died from a gunshot and stab wounds police said\n\nThree more teenagers have been arrested on suspicion of murdering a 15-year-old who was attacked by a group of youths.\n\nKeon Lincoln was \"set upon\" at about 15:30 GMT on Thursday on Linwood Road in Handsworth, Birmingham, and died later in hospital, police said.\n\nA post mortem examination has revealed Keon died from a gunshot and stab wounds.\n\nDetectives have been granted extra time to question a 14-year-old boy arrested on Friday morning.\n\nAnother 14-year-old boy arrested later on Friday has been released under investigation.\n\nA boy, also aged 14, was arrested from his home in Birmingham on Saturday night, the force said.\n\nTwo other boys aged 15 and 16 were arrested from an address in Walsall in the early hours of Sunday.\n\nThe attackers fled the scene in a car which crashed into a house a short distance away\n\nDet Ch Insp Alastair Orencas, who is leading the murder inquiry, described the arrests as \"significant\".\n\n\"We are gathering a substantial amount of evidence which will take time to analyse, but we must be thorough to get justice for Keon's family.\n\n\"They have been fully updated with the latest developments.\"\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Andrew RT Davies has taken over as leader of the Welsh Conservatives for the second time\n\nAndrew RT Davies has been named as the new leader of the Welsh Conservatives in the Senedd for a second time.\n\nMr Davies succeeds Paul Davies who resigned from his post on Saturday after drinking with other politicians in the Senedd, four days into a Wales-wide alcohol ban in licensed premises.\n\nIn a statement, Andrew RT Davies said it was \"a great honour and privilege\".\n\nHe has already announced his shadow cabinet, which includes four women.\n\nThere are no responsibilities for Paul Davies or Darren Millar, who also previously apologised for being part of the group who were drinking at the Senedd.\n\nMr Davies said his party \"will put forward a positive plan to get Wales moving again\" and \"unleash our country's potential\" at the Senedd election, scheduled for May.\n\n\"I'm pleased to have moved quickly this afternoon and announce my Welsh Conservative shadow cabinet which is built on the strong foundations of experience, talent and vision,\" he said.\n\n\"We are in a moment like no other, and the Covid-19 pandemic has sadly only served to shine a spotlight on the challenges in people's everyday lives.\n\n\"We shouldn't doubt our country's potential. Wales is full of ambitious people and communities that crave the opportunity to succeed.\"\n\nThe Conservatives' shadow cabinet reshuffle sees Angela Burns MS replace the new leader as shadow health minister and Mark Isherwood MS replace Darren Millar MS as chief whip.\n\nDavid Melding MS has been appointed shadow minister for mental health, wellbeing, culture and sport.\n\nJanet Finch-Saunders MS remains as shadow minister for environment, energy and rural affairs, and Suzy Davies MS in education, skills and Welsh language.\n\nLaura Anne Jones MS stays as shadow minister for equalities, children and young people, but with extra responsibilities for housing and local government.\n\nRussell George MS remains in the shadow cabinet, responsible for the economy, transport and mid Wales.\n\nIn 2018, Mr Davies, the Member of the Senedd for South Wales Central, quit as leader of the Conservative group after seven years in charge.\n\nHe was given the unanimous backing of fellow Welsh Conservatives in the Senedd.\n\nWelsh secretary Simon Hart, MP for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, tweeted his congratulations to \"a formidable campaigner\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Simon Hart This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Welsh Labour Press This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAndrew RT Davies faced criticism earlier this month from former Tory politicians and Labour after comparing rioting in the US Congress to people who backed a second referendum on Brexit.\n\nThe deputy leader of the UK Labour Party said it was was a \"disgrace that the Welsh Conservatives\" had appointed \"this Donald Trump tribute act\" as leader.\n\nAngela Rayner MP said: \"Just weeks ago, Labour called on the Conservatives to suspend Andrew RT Davies and remove him as a candidate over his disgraceful and dangerous comments equating peaceful democratic debate in the UK with deadly violence at the US Capitol.\n\n\"The Conservative Party failed to act and he has refused to apologise.\n\n\"It is a disgrace that the Welsh Conservatives have just appointed him leader and their candidate for first minister of Wales.\n\n\"The people of Wales deserve so much better than this Donald Trump tribute act.\"\n\nPlaid Cymru leader Adam Price MS said: \"After a car crash the backseat driver returns to put Wales in reverse.\n\n\"Once rejected by his own Senedd team, he will now embark on his pet project of stripping our Senedd of powers and setting Welsh democracy back decades.\"\n\nHis appointment comes just a day after Paul Davies stood down along with Tory MS Darren Millar, who was chief whip, in connection with the same incident.\n\nBoth have apologised for drinking alcohol with their meals on 8 and 9 December but both deny having broken the Covid-19 rules in place at the time.\n\nWelsh Conservatives chairman Glyn Davies said: \"They've both been friends of mine a long time but I could see the way the story was developing and I must say I think it was inevitable in the end.\n\n\"Obviously, I've been pretty disappointed with the position that we find ourselves in but this is politics and it's a challenge.\"\n\nAn investigation by the Senedd's authorities found five people, including four members of the Welsh Parliament, drank alcohol on its premises during the Wales-wide alcohol ban.\n\nA third member of the Senedd, Labour's Alun Davies, apologised earlier in the week and has been suspended by his party.\n\nBBC Wales has asked for clarification as to the identity of the fourth Senedd member investigators have referred to.\n\nPaul Smith, the Tory group chief of staff, was the fifth person involved.\n\nThe Senedd has referred the \"possible breach\" of Covid rules to Cardiff council and its own standards watchdog.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section Mixed Martial Arts\n\nDustin Poirier (left) has had nine mixed martial arts fights since November 2016, while Conor McGregor has had just three Former two-weight world champion Conor McGregor was left stunned on his return to the UFC as Dustin Poirier claimed victory in their rematch at UFC 257. McGregor came out of retirement for a third time to face fellow 32-year-old Poirier at Abu Dhabi's Fight Island. And although the Irishman edged the first round, Poirier unleashed a flurry of punches to seal a technical knockout two minutes 32 seconds into round two. \"I'm gutted, it's a tough one to swallow,\" said McGregor. \"I felt stronger than him, but his leg kicks were good. I didn't adjust. My leg was badly compromised, I've never experienced those low calf kicks, and I wasn't as comfortable as I needed to be. \"I have no excuses. It was a phenomenal performance by Dustin. I have to dust it off and come back. I need activity, you don't get away with being inactive in this business.\"\n• None Trilogies, Pacquiao or YouTuber - what next for beaten McGregor?\n• None UFC 257 - All the action as it happened When the pair first met in a featherweight bout in September 2014, McGregor stopped the American inside 106 seconds, setting \"the Notorious\" on course for global stardom. He became the UFC's first simultaneous two-weight champion before facing Floyd Mayweather in one of the richest bouts in boxing history in 2017. Poirier, meanwhile, had to gradually work his way back into title contention and is now the number-two ranked lightweight contender, losing just two of his 13 fights since 2014. McGregor now has a 22-5 mixed martial arts record having lost three of his past six UFC fights McGregor has been relatively inactive though. Since losing to Khabib Nurmagomedov in 2018, he has had just 40 seconds in the octagon - beating Donald 'Cowboy' Cerrone in style last January. But McGregor seemed to start well in front of about 2,000 fans at the new 18,000-capacity Etihad Arena. He survived an early takedown and pinned Poirier against the fence for most of the first round, landing a few shoulder strikes like those that did so much damage against Cerrone. McGregor said before the fight that what motivates him now is building a \"highlights reel like a movie\", and he tagged Poirier with a couple of right-hand shots. But, unlike their first fight, Poirier was unmoved. Poirier admitted McGregor won the mind games before they met in 2014. This time round, instead of swapping verbal barbs before the fight, McGregor pledged to donate $500,000 (£367,000) to Poirier's charity and at the weigh-in Poirier presented McGregor with a bottle of his own brand of Louisiana hot sauce. And it was the American southpaw that brought the heat midway through the second round. Having replied to that early pressure with a series of leg kicks, he pounced to inflict the first TKO/KO defeat of McGregor's MMA career and take his own record to 27-6. \"It was a lot of things, but it wasn't payback. That wasn't the driving force,\" said Poirier. \"The first time I was a deer in the headlights. This time I was just fighting another man who bleeds like me. \"The goal was to be technical, pick my shots and not brawl at all. Then I had him hurt so I went a little crazy.\" What now for Poirier? Poirier's first world title shot - against Nurmagomedov - came 31 fights into his MMA career Since beating McGregor in 2018, lightweight champion Nurmagomedov won unification bouts against Poirier and Justin Gaethje to stay undefeated, announcing his retirement immediately after beating Gaethje in October. Nurmagomedov's title is yet to be vacated and UFC president Dana White said this week that the Russian may consider returning for a rematch with McGregor or Poirier if he \"saw something spectacular\". But speaking after UFC 257, White said: \"He said to me, 'be honest with yourself, I'm so many levels above these guys. I've beaten these guys'. \"I don't know, it doesn't sound very positive, but he won't hold the division up.\" In the co-main event, former Bellator world champion Michael Chandler marked his UFC debut with an impressive first-round knockout of sixth-ranked lightweight Dan Hooker, who Poirier beat last time out. Poirier said: \"It was a great win, but to come in and beat a guy I just beat and get a title shot? I've had more than 20 UFC fights, fighting the toughest of the toughest guys to get my hands on gold [a belt]. \"Let Chandler and Charles Oliveira go at it. That [Chandler] doesn't interest me at this point - or I'll go and sell hot sauce. A rematch with Conor interests me, and I've always wanted to beat Nate Diaz.\" \"Conor McGregor's not an old dog, he's definitely ready to keep going. \"Going around doing other things is not what Conor needs. He's young, fit and still ready to go. He'll 100% be back.\"\n• None All the goals, highlights and drama from Saturday's fourth-round ties are", "Watch: Vaccine plea to prioritise those with learning disabilities\n\nAs high risk groups continue to be immunised, there are growing concerns that people with learning disabilities have been missed out. \"Just because we've got a learning disability, doesn't mean we should sit in the corner and rot,\" says Amanda. \"We need help now.\" \"There are so many people that are going to die, and it's not fair.\" \"Even before Covid, more than four in 10 people with a learning disability died of a lung condition like pneumonia,\" says Professor Tuffney-Wijne, of Kingston University. \"As a group of people, they really are at risk.\" Legal action is being taken against the Department of Health and Social Care, which says it is working hard to vaccinate all those at risk. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation said it had made \"a clinical decision to prioritise those with profound and severe learning disabilities within our first six categories\".", "Last updated on .From the section FA Cup\n\nBruno Fernandes' superb 78th-minute free-kick gave Manchester United victory in a thrilling FA Cup tie with old rivals Liverpool at Old Trafford.\n\nLiverpool led a fantastic contest through Mohamed Salah, who then equalised after Mason Greenwood and Marcus Rashford had struck for the hosts either side of the break.\n\nBut in a game which had everything last week's drab stalemate between this pair at Anfield lacked, Fernandes came off the bench to have the final word after Fabinho had fouled Edinson Cavani on the edge of the area.\n• None Don't worry about us, says Reds boss Klopp\n\nFernandes might have been slightly off the pace in recent games but when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer needed his £47m inspiration to come up with another special moment, the Portuguese delivered, bending his shot round the wall and beyond Allison's reach.\n\nThe victory earns United a home meeting with an in-form West Ham side managed by former boss David Moyes in the fifth round.\n\nBut the search for form goes on for Liverpool, whose only win in seven games since that seven-goal hammering of Crystal Palace came against Aston Villa's kids in the last round, and who have a meeting with Jose Mourinho's Tottenham looming on Thursday.\n• None Watch all the goals from the FA Cup fourth round\n\nIt was not quite the ending Solskjaer served up when he won a previous fourth-round meeting between these sides but, as in 1999, they had to come from behind.\n\nAnd while Fernandes applied the devastating finish, that goal should not be allowed to overshadow Rashford's contribution to United's victory.\n\nSo much has been said about the England forward as a social crusader it is sometimes easy to forget he also needs to be judged as a footballer.\n\nAt only 23, he is still a long way off his prime but he is developing into an outstanding forward, with vision to match his speed and finishing ability.\n\nThe pass that created Greenwood's equaliser was superb. Taking possession just inside his own half, Rashford delivered a 60-yard pass with such accuracy all Greenwood needed to do was take one touch to control with his chest before drilling low into the far corner.\n\nRashford's raw pace put Liverpool's defence under constant stress and the delicate touch that took him past Rhys Williams by the touchline in a move that ended with Paul Pogba curling wide was sensational.\n\nAnd then there was his goal, which needed a perfectly-timed run to go beyond the Liverpool defence and reach Greenwood's through ball, and then a cool head to apply the finish.\n\nAt that point, it seemed United had the game under control. It did not quite work out that way and once again, Fernandes, who has won four Premier League player of the month awards out of the seven he has been eligible for since leaving Sporting Lisbon less than 12 months ago, underlined his credentials as English football's most influential player at present.\n\nSalah's effort was the first time Liverpool had been ahead at Old Trafford since January 2017, since when Liverpool have won both the Champions League and Premier League, a clear indication that whatever issues Jurgen Klopp is wrestling with at the moment, they are not insurmountable.\n\nThe finish for the striker's 18th goal of the season did not hint at a lack of confidence as he raced on to Roberto Firmino's precise through ball, having escaped the attentions of Victor Lindelof, and lifted his shot beyond the reach of Dean Henderson.\n\nEvidently, what Klopp needs is to find a solution in defence. Williams was shaky and at fault for Rashford's goal, while Fabinho was exposed by United in this game and Cavani exploited the Brazilian's defensive inexperience to earn the free-kick that won the game.\n\nEven so, after Salah equalised from close range after United had lost possession to James Milner and never recovered their position after working their way up-field from a short goal-kick, the visitors did have chances to win it themselves.\n\nBut Dean Henderson saved from Trent Alexander-Arnold and Salah before Fernandes struck - so Liverpool's wait for a first FA Cup win since 1921 at Old Trafford, and Jurgen Klopp's for a first win at United full stop, goes on.\n\nManchester United are next in action against Sheffield United in the Premier League at Old Trafford on Wednesday, 27 January (20:15GMT). Liverpool play at Tottenham on Thursday, 28 January (20:00GMT).\n• None Manchester United have eliminated Liverpool from the FA Cup proper for the 10th time; in the competition's history, only Liverpool themselves (12 v Everton) have knocked a particular side out more times (including finals).\n• None Liverpool have won just one of their past 15 matches at Old Trafford in all competitions (D4 L10), and are winless in their last eight at the ground (D4 L4).\n• None Manchester United have won each of their past eight home games in the FA Cup; only from 1908 to 1912 have they had a better winning run on home soil in the competition (9 games).\n• None Liverpool are the first reigning Premier League champion to be eliminated from the FA Cup as early as the fourth round since Manchester City in 2014-15.\n• None Liverpool have lost back-to-back games in all competitions for the first time since March 2020.\n• None Roberto Firmino has assisted Mohamed Salah for 18 goals in all competitions for Liverpool, the most any player has set up another for the Reds under Jurgen Klopp. Since they first played together in 2017-18, this is the most one player has assisted another for all Premier League sides in all competitions.\n• None Mason Greenwood scored his first goal for Man Utd in 11 appearances in all competitions, ending his longest run of games without a goal for the club. Aged 19 years and 115 days, he was the youngest Man Utd player to score against Liverpool since Wayne Rooney in January 2005 in the Premier League (19y 83d).\n• None Marcus Rashford has scored more goals at Old Trafford against Liverpool than he has against any other opponent on home soil for Manchester United (4).\n• None Since his Man Utd debut in February 2020, Bruno Fernandes has scored more goals than any other player for Premier League clubs (28).\n• None No player has scored more goals for Premier League clubs in all competitions this season than Salah for Liverpool (19, level with Harry Kane).\n• None Attempt missed. Mohamed Salah (Liverpool) left footed shot from the right side of the box misses to the right following a set piece situation.\n• None Paul Pogba (Manchester United) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Victor Lindelöf (Manchester United) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Edinson Cavani (Manchester United) hits the right post with a header from the centre of the box. Assisted by Bruno Fernandes with a cross.\n• None Attempt saved. Marcus Rashford (Manchester United) left footed shot from the centre of the box is saved in the top left corner. Assisted by Aaron Wan-Bissaka.\n• None Goal! Manchester United 3, Liverpool 2. Bruno Fernandes (Manchester United) from a free kick with a right footed shot to the bottom right corner. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None All the goals, highlights and drama from Saturday's fourth-round ties are", "A protester holds a poster that reads \"One for all and all for one\" in support of opposition leader Navalany\n\nTens of thousands of people rallied across Russia on Saturday in some of the largest demonstrations held against President Vladimir Putin in years.\n\nCrowds defied police to show support for opposition leader Alexei Navalny - who was arrested last weekend after returning to the country following a near-fatal nerve agent attack last year.\n\nMonitors say more than 3,000 were arrested for taking part in rallies in dozens of cities across the country.\n\nReuters estimated that some 40,000 gathered in Moscow alone, but authorities played down the figure and said only a tenth of that number showed up.\n\nRiot police were pictured dragging away and beating some protesters. The US and UK have condemned the heavy-handed response and called for the release of peaceful protesters.\n\nJosep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, also expressed concern and said foreign ministers would discuss \"next steps\" on Monday.\n\nOVD Info, an independent NGO that monitors rallies, said more than 1,200 had been detained in Moscow alone.\n\nDemonstrations, held from Russia's Far East to St Petersburg, were some of the biggest seen in years.\n\nIn Omsk protesters braced freezing temperatures of almost -30C (-22F) to protest against Mr Navalny's detention.\n\nAnd conditions were even colder, -52C (-62F), at another protest held in Yakutsk in Siberia.\n\nMr Navalny, a lawyer and blogger, has long been a thorn in the side of the Kremlin. He forged reputation as an anti-corruption campaigner and has become the most prominent face of the country's opposition.\n\nHe was arrested immediately on arrival into the country last Sunday after flying home from Germany, where he had been recovering from an attempted assassination attempt which he and investigative journalists have blamed on Russian authorities - a claim officials deny.\n\nPolice said Mr Navalny had violated parole conditions and have kept him in custody pending further hearings.\n\nMuch of the international community have condemned his arrest and called for his immediate release.\n\nMr Navalny called for street protests and his team further galvanised support this week after releasing an investigative documentary about an opulent Black Sea property allegedly owned by President Putin.\n\nThe investigation, now watched more than 70m times, alleges the property cost £1bn ($1.37bn) and was paid for \"with the largest bribe in history\" but the Kremlin denies it belongs to the president.\n\nRussian authorities had warned in advance of Saturday that any unauthorised demonstrations would be \"immediately suppressed\".\n\nSome demonstrators were pictured with injuries, including wounds to the head, following the promised crackdown.", "Vaccination appointments for people aged 70-79 are being delivered from Monday - but plans to use distinctive blue envelopes in some parts of the country have been delayed.\n\nThe aim is to have this group receive their first dose by mid-February.\n\nOn Sunday morning, the Scottish government said some letters would be sent out in blue envelopes and given Royal Mail priority.\n\nBut in a statement published later it said the envelopes were not yet ready.\n\nIt added that the change has no impact on the vaccination programme timetable.\n\nVaccinations for over-80s are continuing, with Nicola Sturgeon revealing on Sunday that about 40% of this age group had received a first dose of the vaccine.\n\nAll appointments will initially be sent out in white envelopes which will have a window and a black NHS logo on the right hand side.\n\nThe blue envelopes were due to be sent out in Fife, Forth Valley, Ayrshire and Arran, Lanarkshire, Greater Glasgow and Clyde, and Lothian as part of a new booking system.\n\nUnder the system, patients are scheduled in order of priority and more boards are expected to make use of the technology as the vaccination programme expands.\n\nA Scottish government spokesman said the blue envelopes would be introduced \"as quickly as possible\".\n\nHe added: \"The blue envelopes we hoped to use were not ready in time for the first tranche of vaccine appointment invitations so distinctive NHS branded white envelopes are being used as a temporary measure.\n\n\"The absolute priority remains the roll-out of vaccinations and this temporary change to the envelope colour has absolutely no impact to our timetable.\n\n\"We continue to strongly urge everyone in the 70-79 age group to check all their post in the coming weeks and take up the offer of the vaccine when it is received,\" he added.\n\nAccording to the Scottish government's vaccine deployment plan, the 470,000 people aged in the 70 and 79 age bracket should receive their first dose by mid-February.\n\nSome patients may receive a phone call from their local health board as part of the appointment process.\n\nAnd all patients aged 75 to 79 in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde will be invited via phone.\n\nA Royal Mail spokesman said \"clearly marked envelopes\" would be used to make it easier for the postal service to identify and prioritise this mail during sorting and delivery process.\n\nHe added: \"We are poised to make these letters even more noticeable in the coming weeks as we have agreed.\"\n\nMeanwhile, the Scottish government has said it is on track for all those aged 80 and over to have received their first dose of the vaccine by the end of the first week in February.\n\nThis age group are being contacted by telephone or another form of letter.\n\nMinisters have faced criticism over the pace of the vaccine rollout, and accusations that Scotland is \"lagging behind\" England on the vaccine roll-out.\n\nOpposition parties say vaccines are not being supplied to GPs' surgeries fast enough.\n\nAnd they point to the latest official figures which show that 13% of over 80s in Scotland had their first dose by Sunday 17 January, while 56.3% of same age group had been vaccinated in England.\n\nMs Sturgeon told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that, a week on, the figure had reached about 40%.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Nicola Sturgeon says the over 70s are to receive their vaccine date\n\nThe UK government Health Secretary Matt Hancock told Andrew Marr on Sunday that 75% of over-80s and three-quarters of UK care homes had received a first Covid vaccine in England.\n\nAbout 95% of Scottish care home residents have received their first dose, Ms Sturgeon told the Scottish government briefing on Friday.\n\nShe said the over-80s roll-out has been slower because the Scottish government has \"very deliberately\" concentrated on vaccinating care home residents first, which is \"more time consuming and labour intensive\".\n\nThis was designed to target the most vulnerable and was in line with the priority list compiled by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises on vaccine rollout across the UK, she said.\n\nScotland's national clinical director Prof Jason Leitch has defended the plan, which has been challenged by the British Medical Association (BMA) for not getting second doses out quickly enough.\n\nProf Leitch told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme: \"The difficulty with the BMA's position is that we would have to de-prioritise another group, either care home residents or the over-80s, in order to give a second dose to younger people.\n\n\"And that's what the Joint Committee on Vaccination have told us not to do.\n\n\"They have told us in very clear terms - give the first dose to as many vulnerable people as you can and that gives us the best chance of saving the most lives.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Deputy First Minister John Swinney told Politics Scotland that the Scottish government was \"actively exploring\" the possibility of stricter rules around facemasks.\n\nHe said the issue was being \"looked at\" after new rules announced in Germany last week required people to wear medical-grade facemasks on public transport and in shops.\n\nMr Swinney said progress was being made in reducing cases but hospitals were still under \"enormous pressure\" and it would be \"foolish\" to rule out strengthening restrictions further in the future.", "Last updated on .From the section FA Cup\n\nCheltenham Town came within nine minutes of one of the biggest shocks in recent FA Cup history before Manchester City staged a dramatic late rally to crush the dreams of the gallant League Two side.\n\nThe Robins, 72 places below City who sit second in the Premier League, threatened huge embarrassment for Pep Guardiola's side after Alfie May put Cheltenham ahead on the hour after a trademark long throw from captain Ben Tozer caused chaos in the area.\n\nCity, who made ten changes to the team that beat Aston Villa in the Premier League on Wednesday, spared their embarrassment when Phil Foden, the game's outstanding player, arrived at the far post to turn in substitute Joao Cancelo's long cross in the 81st minute.\n\nAnd the turnaround was complete three minutes later when a rare moment of slackness in the outstanding Cheltenham defence, with goalkeeper Josh Griffiths superb, switched off and Gabriel Jesus scored from Fernandinho's delivery.\n\nFerran Torres scored Manchester City's third with the last kick of the game to give the scoreline a cruel reflection on Cheltenham's heroic efforts.\n\nIt was so cruel on manager Michael Duff and his players, who now go back the battle for promotion from League Two, while City will be away at Swansea in the fifth round.\n\n\"I'm incredibly proud,\" the Robins boss said of his side's display. \"The players they brought on from the bench and they way they celebrated the goals tells you something. They know they've been in a game. They've done that to better teams than us.\"\n\nThe sight of Manchester City manager Guardiola disputing where Cheltenham could take a throw-in said everything about the way the League Two underdogs gave their mighty opponents a serious fright.\n\nTozer's throw-ins were causing all manner of problems and led to Cheltenham's goal but there was so much more to their performance than that set-piece weapon, a threat any manager in the game would utilise.\n\nCheltenham tried to play football when they got the chance, with goalscorer May, who has done the hard yards in non-league before playing for Doncaster and now Cheltenham, a leading light.\n\nRobins keeper Griffiths, who suffered the ignominy of being beaten from 71 yards by his Newport County opposite number Tom King in midweek, was in defiant form as he saved well from Riyad Mahrez and Torres, showing command throughout. Tozer's headed goalline clearance from Benjamin Mendy in the first half was also symbolic of their 'they shall not pass' approach.\n\nThere may have been no fans inside this compact stadium but there was still a real sense of occasion, the game being halted in the first half because of a firework display nearby.\n\nIn the end this will be a bitter disappointment to Cheltenham but they can be rightly proud and take huge confidence into their League Two promotion battle.\n\nDuff highlighted how financially important the cup run was for his club.\n\n\"It's essential,\" he added. \"Every pound coming in is probably worth a tenner in normal times.\n\n\"These games don't come around very often. It's a shame because [with fans] the place would've been bouncing. Would that have seen us through in the last 10 minutes? I'm not so sure - but the key is to enjoy it.\"\n\nGuardiola made 10 changes to his line-up to give Manchester City's shadow squad a chance to impress.\n\nSome, like the erratic Mendy, did not take that opportunity and it was someone establishing himself in City's side that spared the blushes of this expensively assembled squad.\n\nFoden was magnificent, so light on his feet with glorious ball control, endless creativity and the man pulling the strings for City even when they were struggling to break down resilient Cheltenham.\n\nThe 20-year-old was head and shoulders above his City team-mates. He was the one who was going to pull them out of their grim predicament if anyone was, and so it proved when he popped up with the crucial late equaliser that lifted Guardiola's team and deflated Cheltenham.\n\nFoden had already carved out chances for Mahrez and Gabriel Jesus that were not taken so it was a case of 'do it yourself' when he was the player on target.\n\nThe fact Guardiola was forced to use three subs in Ruben Dias, Ilkay Gundogan and Joao Cancelo once Cheltenham went ahead proved how worried the Premier League giants were.\n\nThis was an unimpressive, scratchy display from City's much-changed team, with Guardiola resting so many of the players who are giving them such an ominous look in the Premier League - luckily they had the brilliance of Foden to pull them out of a deep hole.\n\nGuardiola praised the England attacking midfielder for his impressive performance.\n\n\"Foden is in a great moment and with great confidence,\" he said.\n\n\"He is clinical in front of goal and he had a similar chance to the goal we scored at [Chelsea's] Stamford Bridge - he is playing really well.\"\n\nThe City manager suggested he was confident in the players he put out on the pitch.\n\n\"I didn't have regrets even when we were 1-0 down, we had clear chances from the first minute,\" he added.\n\n\"When they take advantage it gets complicated, but we got it to 1-1 and it was tight. We came here with humility and had the quality to make the difference.\"\n• None Cheltenham have lost all nine of their competitive meetings with Premier League sides, by an aggregate score of 6-23.\n• None City have won 10 consecutive games in all competitions for the first time since a run of 11 from August to October 2017.\n• None May's opener for Cheltenham was the first goal City had conceded in 509 minutes of action in all competitions, since Callum Hudson-Odoi's strike for Chelsea at the start of the month.\n• None Foden is City's top scorer in all competitions this season with nine goals in 25 appearances, one more than he netted in 38 games last season.\n• None Jesus has been involved in 12 goals in 13 FA Cup appearances for City, scoring eight and assisting four.\n• None May has scored four goals in his four FA Cup games for Cheltenham, with each of his eight goals in total in the competition coming in home games.\n• None Goal! Cheltenham Town 1, Manchester City 3. Ferran Torres (Manchester City) right footed shot from very close range to the centre of the goal. Assisted by Ilkay Gündogan.\n• None Attempt missed. Matty Blair (Cheltenham Town) right footed shot from the right side of the box is too high following a corner.\n• None Goal! Cheltenham Town 1, Manchester City 2. Gabriel Jesus (Manchester City) right footed shot from the centre of the box to the centre of the goal. Assisted by Fernandinho with a through ball.\n• None Goal! Cheltenham Town 1, Manchester City 1. Phil Foden (Manchester City) left footed shot from very close range to the bottom left corner. Assisted by João Cancelo with a cross.\n• None Attempt missed. João Cancelo (Manchester City) left footed shot from outside the box misses to the left. Assisted by Riyad Mahrez.\n• None Attempt missed. Phil Foden (Manchester City) header from the centre of the box is too high. Assisted by João Cancelo with a cross. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Hear from the former US president as he reflects on his time in office\n• None How can you eat well for £1 a portion?", "Some of the party-goers have travelled from Newcastle and London, police said\n\nA student party that attracted people from up to 200 miles away has been broken up by police.\n\nSome of the guests were found hiding in cupboards when officers raided the gathering in Lower Loveday Street, Birmingham, on Friday night.\n\nOne officer was assaulted as one guest made off but was not hurt, West Midlands Police said.\n\nParty-goers had travelled to the event from places such as Newcastle, Nottingham and London.\n\nThe flats are private accommodation but predominantly used by students from Aston University and University College Birmingham, West Midlands Police said.\n\nInsp Steve Barnes added: \"We understand that young people are frustrated at not being able to enjoy themselves and I do feel their pain, but we have to stick to the rules so that we can get back to some sort of normality sooner rather than later.\n\n\"People are dying and we have to prevent the spread of this virus.\"\n\nOfficers were also called to a party on Soho Road where shop owners had set up a sound system, and a 30th birthday party attended by about 20 people in Kingstanding.\n\nAcross 32 breaches of Covid-19 lockdown rules on Friday night, the force issued 58 fines of £200 and five of £1,000.\n\nThe West Midlands is under an England-wide lockdown with people not allowed to leave home to meet others socially.\n\nOn Thursday, the government said fines of £800 would be introduced in England this week for anyone attending a house party of more than 15 people.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "People made the most of the snowy slopes of Gold Hill in Shaftesbury, Dorset\n\nSevere weather warnings are in place across much of the UK after large parts of the country saw heavy snowfall.\n\nThe blanket of snow drew people outside for sledging and winter walks, but motorists have been warned to take extra care on icy roads with sub-zero temperatures forecast overnight.\n\nSeveral coronavirus vaccination and testing centres were closed in England and Wales due to the conditions.\n\nPolice reminded the public to keep to lockdown rules while out in the snow.\n\nOfficers in Wandsworth, south-west London, encouraged people with gardens to play in the snow at home.\n\nAnd police in Rutland, Leicestershire, were among several forces questioning why people were leaving their homes to go sledging.\n\nContinuing coronavirus lockdowns across the four UK nations mean most of the population must stay at home, except for a limited number of reasons.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. For cats Bonny and Freddy, the snow is a chance to explore. Credit: Rachel Prew\n\nAs well as four vaccination centres in Wales, six Covid testing centres in the West Midlands had to close due to heavy snow on Sunday.\n\nHighways England warned that the snow had caused collisions on the M3, M27 and M25 in southern England, with the agency urging drivers to only travel if absolutely necessary.\n\nThose using the roads for essential journeys have been urged to allow plenty of extra time for their travel and pedestrians and cyclists are also advised to be cautious.\n\nThe Met Office put a yellow weather warning for snow in place on Sunday, stretching from coast to coast in southern England and ending just south of Manchester.\n\nIt is also in place for western and northern areas of Scotland, most of Northern Ireland and all of Wales apart from Anglesey.\n\nAn amber warning for snow in Nottingham and Stoke meant travel disruption and power cuts were likely on Sunday evening.\n\nYellow weather warnings for ice are in place until 11:00 GMT Monday for all of Wales and Northern Ireland, northern and eastern Scotland and much of southern England and the Midlands.\n\nMany people swapped their usual daily bout of exercise for sledging on Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath, north London, but police urged people to stay at home\n\nGritters leapt into action near Touchen-end in Berkshire\n\nIn Wales, appointments at the Bridgend, Rhondda, Abercynon and Merthyr Tydfil coronavirus vaccination centres were rescheduled for safety reasons, the Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board said.\n\nUp to 1in (3cm) of snow was forecast to fall in most areas of Wales, with 4-6in (10-15cm) expected in the Brecon Beacons and Snowdonia.\n\nIn the West Midlands, coronavirus testing centres at Castle Vale Stadium, the Arcadian Centre and Maypole Youth Centre were closed, Birmingham City Council said.\n\nFacilities in Moat Street, Coventry and The Place in Oakengates in Shropshire also closed, along with one in Lichfield, Staffordshire, local MP Michael Fabricant said.\n\nAnd in Devon, a gritting lorry overturned on Dartmoor. Devon County Council urged people to avoid travel unless it was absolutely essential and not to travel to find snow.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Devon County Council This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMet Office forecaster Simon Partridge said a band of hail, sleet, snow and rain moved in through Wales and south-west England in the early hours before sweeping across the UK and stalling over the Midlands, which saw some of the heaviest snow.\n\nColeshill, near Birmingham, had seen had 3.5in (9cm) by Sunday lunchtime.\n\nThe snow clouds eased away on Sunday evening but overnight temperatures could be as low as -4C to -6C (25F to 21F) for a lot of the south of the UK, the forecaster added.\n\n\"Some localised spots, likely in the Midlands, could see it as low as -10C (14F),\" he said.\n\nSnowmen popped up in the grounds of Guildford Castle, Surrey\n\nAs shown on the M1 in Bedfordshire, the wintry showers have caused hazardous driving conditions\n\nChris Fawkes of BBC Weather said some stretches of the M4 and M5 had been completely covered in snow at some points on Sunday morning.\n\nHe said this was partly because traffic has been low due to lockdown restrictions - and vehicles are needed to help grit mix into snow to make it melt.", "People who have received a Covid-19 vaccine could still pass the virus on to others and should continue following lockdown rules, England's deputy chief medical officer has warned.\n\nWriting in the Sunday Telegraph, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam stressed that scientists \"do not yet know the impact of the vaccine on transmission\".\n\nHe said vaccines offer \"hope\" but infection rates must come down quickly.\n\nMatt Hancock said 75% of over-80s in the UK have now had a first virus jab.\n\nBoth the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines require two doses, and figures so far reflect those given the first dose.\n\nThe health secretary told the BBC's Andrew Marr that around three quarters of care homes had also been vaccinated.\n\nProf Van-Tam said \"no vaccine has ever been\" 100% effective, so there is no guaranteed protection.\n\nIt is possible to contract the virus in the two- to three-week period after receiving a jab, he said - and it is \"better\" to allow \"at least three weeks\" for an immune response to fully develop in older people.\n\n\"Even after you have had both doses of the vaccine you may still give Covid-19 to someone else and the chains of transmission will then continue,\" Prof Van-Tam said.\n\n\"If you change your behaviour you could still be spreading the virus, keeping the number of cases high and putting others at risk who also need their vaccine but are further down the queue.\"\n\nLast week, the person coordinating Israel's Covid response reportedly suggested a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine might not be as effective as reported.\n\nIsrael has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world against coronavirus, with scientists keenly watching data shared by the country for signs of how effective the vaccine is when given to the whole population.\n\nThe country's health minister Yuli Edelstein told the Andrew Marr Show that some people \"still get sick\" with coronavirus after getting the first dose of the vaccine, but said there were \"some encouraging signs of less severe diseases, less people hospitalised after the first dose\".\n\nSenior doctors have called on health officials in England to cut the gap between the first and second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.\n\nThe maximum wait was extended from three to 12 weeks in order to get the first jab to more people across the UK.\n\nBut the British Medical Association said the policy was \"difficult to justify\" and the gap should be reduced to six weeks.\n\nIts chair, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, told the BBC there were \"growing concerns\" that the vaccine could become less effective with doses 12 weeks apart.\n\nResponding to the criticism, Prof Van-Tam said: \"What none of these (who ask reasonable questions) will tell me is: who on the at-risk list should suffer slower access to their first dose so that someone else who's already had one dose (and therefore most of the protection) can get a second?\"\n\nA further 32 vaccine sites are set to open across England this week.\n\nMore than 5.8 million people in the UK have received their first dose of a vaccine, according to the government's coronavirus dashboard.\n\nNHS England said new vaccine sites were preparing to open across England from Monday.\n\nThey include Dudley's Black Country Living Museum, which doubled as a set for TV series Peaky Blinders, Plymouth Argyle FC's stadium Home Park and an old Ikea store in Stratford, London.\n\nThe 32 sites will prioritise health and social care staff on Monday, and other priority patients from Tuesday.\n\nThey will bring the number of mass vaccination sites across England to 49 - as well as 70 pharmacies, more than 1,000 GP surgeries and 250 hospitals offering the jab.\n\nScotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said on Friday that more than a third of over-80s had received their first dose of a vaccine.\n\nMore than half of over-80s in Northern Ireland have had the jab, though Health Minister Robin Swann said \"it will take time\" for the programme to have a \"major effect.\"\n\nIn Wales, four vaccination centres have been shut as officials brace for more snowy weather.\n\nProf Van-Tam stressed that the UK needs to \"bring the number of cases down as soon as we can whilst we vaccinate our most vulnerable\".\n\nAnother 1,348 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test were reported in the UK on Saturday, in addition to 33,552 new infections.\n\nThere were 4,076 Covid patients were on hospital ventilators in the UK as of Friday, according to government data.\n\nThat is higher than during the first wave, when the peak was 3,301 on 12 April.\n\nHow has coronavirus affected you? What have been your experiences of vaccination, lockdown, work or travel? Email: haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Rescuers in China have freed the first of a group of miners who have been trapped 600m underground for two weeks, state media report.\n\nAn explosion closed the entrance tunnel to the Hushan gold mine in Shandong province on 10 January.\n\nTV footage from China has shown the first miner being brought to the surface, as emergency workers applaud.", "Jim Haynes was both an icon and a relic of the Swinging Sixties, an American in Paris who was famous for inviting hundreds of thousands of strangers to dinner at his home. He died this month.\n\nLast February, I took my last trip abroad before lockdown closed in on us. I bought a last-minute ticket and jumped on the Eurostar to Paris, motivated by a sudden urge to have dinner with a friend. Jim Haynes had entered his late 80s and his health was declining, yet I knew he would welcome a visit. Jim always welcomed visitors.\n\nThe essence of that trip now feels like the antithesis of Covid times. I was far from the only guest wandering into the warm glow of his atelier in the 14th arrondissement on a wet winter's night. Inside, people were squeezing, shoulder to shoulder, through the narrow kitchen. Strangers struck up conversations, bunched together in groups, balancing their dinners on paper plates and reaching over each other to press the plastic spout on a communal box of wine.\n\nJim had operated open-house policy at his home every Sunday evening for more than 40 years. Absolutely anyone was welcome to come for an informal dinner, all you had to do was phone or email and he would add your name to the list. No questions asked. Just put a donation in an envelope when you arrive.\n\nThere would be a buzz in the air, as people of various nationalities - locals, immigrants, travellers - milled around the small, open-plan space. A pot of hearty food bubbled on the hob and servings would be dished out on to a trestle table, so you could help yourself and continue to mingle. It was for good reason that Jim was nicknamed the \"godfather of social networking\". He led the way in connecting strangers, long before we outsourced it all to Silicon Valley.\n\nA ballet dancer staying with Jim in the late 1970s suggested cooking for him and friends to repay the hospitality; the dinners became weekly for 40-plus years\n\nI only knew Jim in his later years, but his entire life was extraordinary. Born in Louisiana in 1933, he had lived in Venezuela as a teenager; founded the alternative culture centre Arts Lab in London, where he mixed with David Bowie, John Lennon and Yoko Ono; ran a sexual liberation magazine in Amsterdam, and all before becoming a university lecturer in sexual politics in Paris, his home since 1969.\n\nAnd yet he was often seen as a son of Scotland, following an influential stint there in the late '50s and late '60s, when he established Edinburgh's first paperback bookshop, co-founded the Traverse Theatre and helped kickstart the Fringe festival.\n\nWhen Jim died, at 87, earlier this month, a Herald obituary called him \"the unofficial agent for the beat generation in Scotland\".\n\nWhile a lot of highly regarded people tend to retreat into their own circles after finding success, Jim never stopped reaching out to new people. The first time I heard from him was an email out of the blue in 2008.\n\nI had written a newspaper article from Barcelona - not the one in Spain but the one on the coast of Venezuela - and it had brought back memories for him. His father worked in the oil business and had moved the family there when Jim was in his early teens.\n\nMy article was about meeting people through the Couchsurfing website, where locals opened their homes to strangers for free around the world. This was before AirBnB worked out how to monetise the idea, and the concept of non-commercial cultural exchange was right up Jim's street. \"When you are back in Europe, come to dinner,\" he wrote, promising to tell me about an old travel project of his own that he thought I might like.\n\nIntrigued, I headed to Paris soon after my return. I had imagined some sort of intimate dinner party with cultural elites, but what I found was more like a student house party - albeit with more mature attendees and only moderate alcohol consumption. (Jim was teetotal and proceedings ended strictly by 23:00.)\n\nJim never cooked himself, instead he invited guest cooks\n\nJim instantly greeted me like an old friend and, as we chatted, he reached up on to his living room shelves to offer me a book. People to People read the cover line. It was the project he had wanted to tell me about.\n\nHe explained that, in the late 1980s, he had founded a guidebook series for countries behind the Iron Curtain. Instead of the standard descriptions of sights and hotel listings, the format was like an address book, including the contact details for hundreds of in-country hosts. The idea was that if people could not easily see the Western world themselves, he would bring it to them via travellers. It was \"couchsurfing\", but offline.\n\nThe hand-sized copy he pressed into my palm centred on Poland. I loved it and decided to travel there to see if the participants were still up for receiving random visitors, even though so much had changed.\n\nJim created the People to People guidebooks for multiple Eastern European countries\n\nEach person was filed under the town where they lived, followed by two or three lines, including their address, date of birth, phone number and hobbies. Through a combination of Google and snail-mail, I managed to get hold of several of them. Most had all known Jim either personally or through friends of friends. All had fond memories of the project and all were still willing to act as local guides to show me around.\n\nIn Gdansk, I asked civil servant Krystyna Wróblewska why she had signed up originally. She told me she had been working as a media fixer, helping reporters cover the anti-communist shipyard strikes. \"They [the media] went looking for women with handkerchiefs on their heads and horses with carts, perpetuating the same old picture. I suppose I wanted to meet people to subvert stereotypes and show that not all the pictures you have in your head are real.\"\n\nKrystyna Wroblewska signed up in the late 1980s to show travellers around Gdansk\n\n\"It surprised me how easy it was,\" Jim insisted to me. He produced guides for Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Baltics and Russia, featuring thousands upon thousands of locals. Some of his contacts came from his personal, multi-volume address books, and he got new sign-ups after placing interviews in local papers and jazz magazines.\n\n\"Some of the older people in Russia were scared about being put on a Western list, because they thought it would be easier to be rounded up and carted away,\" he said. \"But a lot of younger people wanted to be in the book… I was getting sackfuls of mail. I'm sure the local postman wondered what the hell was going on.\"\n\nOver the years, the authorities often wondered what was going on at Jim's place. Not least during the period when he started issuing fake passports. It was back in the 1970s, after he had caught wind of an American traveller, who, 20 years before, had renounced his American citizenship and created his own \"world passport\".\n\nFor Jim, non-national passports seemed to encapsulate his ideals of peace and global freedom. So he turned his home into an \"embassy\" and started producing world passports for anyone who wanted one. The documents were so convincing that some people used them to cross borders.\n\n\"Look, you can't do this any more. You have to stop making passports,\" exasperated French police would say when they came to his door. But Jim continued until he ended up in court. Though he was eventually acquitted of fraud and counterfeiting, he was found guilty of \"confusing the public\".\n\nJim always dismissed the idea that it was a naïve undertaking, but he was trusting to a fault, according to some of his friends, and this led to financial mistakes and legal troubles over the years. He wouldn't deal with problems, waiting until they blew up instead.\n\n\"I often had to stop him signing things. Sometimes he didn't even read them,\" says Jesper, his son, who was born during Jim's marriage to Viveka Reuterskiold in the 1960s.\n\nJesper grew up in Stockholm after they separated, but visited Paris every summer from the age of 10.\n\n\"There were mattresses on every spare bit of floor, people sleeping everywhere,\" he says, as he recalls his earlier visits. \"It was exciting and fun, but sometimes I felt jealous. Lots of people did. People were very possessive of him. People wanted to claim him, but he was unclaimable.\"\n\nJesper credits his father with opening the world to him. He used Jim's contacts books extensively as he travelled and he is currently living with his own family in Bangkok, where he briefly replicated the Sunday dinners. \"Just for six months... It was a lot of work.\"\n\nDuring the 1990s, the crowds started to dwindle at the Paris dinners, as the original hippy crowd aged. But then a new wave of younger visitors started to get in touch. The bloggers had discovered him.\n\n\"The internet both ruined and saved the dinners,\" says Seamas McSwiney, a close friend who helped on Sunday evenings for decades. \"It became less spontaneous as people tried to book six months ahead - which was anathema to how Jim travelled and also annoying as those people were more likely to do a no-show - but at the same time, these online articles re-energised the idea. There was a younger crowd and new momentum.\"\n\nAt the dinners' peak, Jim would welcome up to 120 guests, filling his atelier and spilling out into the cobbled back garden. An estimated 150,000 people have come over the years.\n\n\"The door was always open,\" says Amanda Morrow, an Australian journalist who stayed with Jim for a year-and-a-half. \"It was a revolving door of guests - some who wanted to stay over, and others who just wanted to say hello. Jim never said no to anyone.\"\n\nThe only thing that really got Jim down was people leaving,\" says Jesper. \"He struggled with that. He didn't like being on his own... Though fortunately there was usually a new person to distract him.\"\n\nIn the final years, Jim would sit quietly, as others gravitated into his orbit. On my last visit, he looked frail and pained by his various ailments, but he also had an air of contentment, clearly never tiring of being the conduit for human interactions.\n\n\"I was wondering when you'd come back,\" he said to me, in the rasping American accent he somehow had never lost.\n\nHere was a man who had spent time with Lennon and Bowie, who was once friends with Sonia Orwell and used to walk round Paris with Samuel Beckett. And yet he made everyone feel special. Every connection mattered.\n\n\"It felt like politician's trick, but it was natural,\" says Seamas.\n\nIn very recent times, Covid restrictions reduced the dinners' clockwork schedule, but his friends say he was not depressed by the pandemic. He had figured the get-togethers would resume and, until then, had enjoyed a smaller stream of visiting carers and, whenever possible, friends.\n\nAmid the outpouring of online tributes since his death in his sleep on 6 January, these words from Jesper stand out: \"His goal from early on was to introduce the whole world to each other. He almost succeeded.\"\n\nYou may also be interested in:", "The EHIC card is making way for the GHIC card under a new agreement with the EU\n\nUK residents can apply for a Global Health Insurance Card (GHIC) to access emergency medical care in the EU when their current EHIC card runs out.\n\nUnder a new agreement with the EU, both cards will offer equivalent healthcare protection when people are on holiday, studying or travelling for business.\n\nThis includes emergency treatment as well as treatment needed for a pre-existing condition.\n\nThe new GHIC card is free and can be obtained via the official GHIC website.\n\nCurrent European Health Insurance Cards (EHIC) are valid as long as they are in date, and can continue to be used when travelling to the EU.\n\nYou don't need to apply for a GHIC until your current EHIC expires.\n\nPeople should apply at least two weeks before they plan to travel to ensure their card arrives on time.\n\nHealth Minister Edward Argar said: \"Our deal with the EU ensures the right for our citizens to access necessary healthcare on their holidays and travels to countries in the EU will continue.\n\n\"The GHIC is a key element of the UK's future relationship with the EU and will provide certainty and security for all UK residents.\"\n\nIf a UK resident is travelling without a card, they are still entitled to necessary healthcare, and should contact the NHS Business Services Authority (which covers the whole of the UK), which can arrange for payment should they require treatment when abroad.\n\nEHICs from EU member states will continue to be accepted by the NHS.\n\nIt is advised that anyone travelling overseas, whether to the EU or elsewhere in the world, should take out comprehensive travel insurance.", "A video featuring footage of a County Mayo man being consumed by fits of laughter while trying to record a birthday message for his son, has gone viral.\n\nVincent McDonnell was sending the message to his son David, who was celebrating his 40th birthday in Australia.\n\nHis younger son Paul got the video rolling, but the pair could not contain their laughter as they racked up the attempts.\n\nThe video has been viewed more than 1.5m times on Paul's Twitter account.", "The UK economy will \"get worse before it gets better\" as the country battles the pandemic, Chancellor Rishi Sunak has warned.\n\nThe chancellor told MPs the new national restrictions were necessary to control the spread of coronavirus.\n\nHowever, he said they would have a further significant economic impact,\n\n\"Even with the significant economic support we've provided, over 800,000 people have lost their job since February,\" he said.\n\n\"Sadly, we have not and will not be able to save every job and every business.\n\n\"But I am confident that our economic plan is supporting the finances of millions of people and businesses.\"\n\nThe chancellor said \"the road ahead will be tough\", but maintained that the government was \"taking the difficult but right long-term decisions for our country\".\n\nHe said that fiscal stimulus provided so far amounted to more than £280bn, while 1.2 million employers had furloughed almost 10 million employees.\n\nAt the same time, three million people had benefited from self-employment grants.\n\nMr Sunak said he would \"bear in mind\" calls to extend business rate relief and provide further support for the hospitality sector at the Budget in March.\n\nShadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds accused Mr Sunak of being \"out of ideas\" and providing \"nothing new\".\n\nShe said: \"The purpose of an update is to provide us with new information, not to repeat what we already know.\"\n\nThe chancellor's words reflect the fact that with a widespread lockdown, the first months of 2021 are likely to see a further contraction in the UK economy and probably an official double-dip recession. This reflects the physical shutdown nationwide of hospitality and retail, as well as the effect in the data of school shutdowns too.\n\nIn addition, consumers and workers are likely to be more cautious as the vaccine starts to be rolled out. So this is a very odd sort of economic tripwire. The challenge in the next weeks and months gets bigger, although not as big as it was last April. But beyond that, there is the hope of something normal.\n\nThe implication for the chancellor as he prepares a vital early March Budget, however, is further delay to the measures, such as tax rises, to deal with historic levels of pandemic government borrowing.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe UK is at the \"worst point\" of the pandemic, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has warned, but said the actions of the public \"could make a difference\".\n\nAt a No 10 briefing, Mr Hancock pleaded with people to follow the government's Covid rules until the vaccine could provide a \"way out\" of the pandemic.\n\nThe government earlier published its plan to immunise tens of millions of people by spring.\n\nSo far 2.3 million people in the UK have had a first Covid vaccine shot.\n\nAnd a total of 2.6 million doses have been given out across the country, with some people having received both doses.\n\nMr Hancock said the new variant of coronavirus was putting the NHS under \"significant pressure\", adding it was \"imperative\" that people limit their social contacts.\n\n\"The NHS, more than ever before, needs everybody to be doing something right now - and that something is to follow the rules,\" he said.\n\n\"I know there has been speculation about more restrictions, and we don't rule out taking further action if it is needed, but it is your actions now that can make a difference.\"\n\nThe health secretary said he could \"rule out\" tightening restrictions by removing support and childcare bubbles, however.\n\nHis comments follow similar warnings from Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and England's chief medical officer Prof Chris Whitty, who said that the next few weeks will be \"the worst\" of the pandemic for the NHS.\n\nAccording to the latest figures, there have been another 529 deaths within 28 days of a positive test in the UK, and another 46,169 cases reported. There are also more than 32,000 people in hospital with coronavirus, data shows.\n\nMatt Hancock has previously said he's learned to rule nothing out when it comes to dealing with the pandemic.\n\nBut today he took the unusual step of doing just that.\n\nSupport bubbles and childcare bubbles, hugely valued by so many, will stay.\n\nSenior Whitehall sources have previously told me bubbles were \"untouchable\" but for a minister to say as much, so explicitly and on the record, means there's now very little wriggle room for the government to change its mind.\n\nMinisters will know that scrapping bubbles, for those that rely on them, could have proved deeply unpopular. But this certainty is a rarity.\n\nWhilst the current emphasis is on compliance, the idea of toughening up controls in other areas is not being ruled out.\n\nThe vaccine delivery plan says it is expected to take until spring to give a first dose to all 32 million people in the UK's priority groups, including everyone over 55 and those who are clinically vulnerable.\n\nUnder the plan, the government has pledged to carry out at least two million vaccinations in England per week by the end of January, which it says will be made possible by rolling out jabs at 206 hospital sites, 50 vaccination centres and around 1,200 local vaccination sites.\n\nIt also reiterates the government's aim of offering vaccinations to around 15 million people in the UK - the over-70s, older care home residents and staff, frontline healthcare workers and the clinically extremely vulnerable - by mid-February.\n\nAccording to Mr Hancock, two fifths of over-80s have now received their first dose, and almost a quarter of care home residents have received theirs.\n\nAlso at the briefing, NHS England's national medical director, Prof Stephen Powis, said the NHS was aiming to vaccinate the rest of the top nine priority groups by April, with a final push to offer all adults over 18 a jab by the autumn.\n\nHe stressed it would take until February before there were \"early signs\" that vaccination was leading to a drop in hospitalisations.\n\nThe country has still not seen the full impact of the Christmas loosening of lockdown restrictions, Prof Powis added, although he noted there are now 13,000 more Covid patients in hospital than there were on Christmas Day.\n\nSpeaking in Bristol earlier, Mr Johnson warned the vaccination programme was in a \"race against time\" because of pressure on the NHS.\n\nHe said it was \"a very perilous moment because everyone can sense the vaccine is coming in - my worry is that will breed false complacency\".\n\nThe newly-published vaccination plan also says ministers are aiming to offer jabs at more than 2,700 sites across the UK.\n\nAnd it says that daily vaccination figures for England will be published from now on - showing the total number vaccinated to date, including first and second doses.\n\nEarlier, NHS England's chief executive, Sir Simon Stevens, told MPs that there was a \"strong case\" for asking the the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) to consider prioritising \"teachers and other key workers\" for vaccination after the \"first nine [priority] groups have been vaccinated\".\n\nA quarter of coronavirus admissions to hospital are for people under the age of 55, he added.\n\nIn the first four weeks of the vaccination campaign, the NHS did 1.3 million vaccinations.\n\nNews that in the past week almost the same again has been done shows progress is being made - even though there has been some concern rollout to care home residents has been slower than hoped.\n\nHitting two million doses a week is the next target - and is something the NHS is aiming to get close to this week.\n\nWith more vaccination sites opening by the day, it should be achievable as long as there is good supply.\n\nThere is already enough vaccine in the country to vaccinate all 15 million people in the highest at-risk groups that have been promised an offer of a vaccine by mid-February.\n\nHowever, not all of it has been through the final safety checks or been packaged up ready for distribution.\n\nChallenges remain, but even at this early stage it is clear there is growing optimism that the programme is on track.\n\nAs seven mass vaccination centres opened across England on Monday, NHS England said hundreds more GP-led and hospital services would also open later this week.\n\nBut with all centres, people will need to wait until they receive an invitation.\n\nTwo vaccines - Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca - are currently being administered in the UK.\n\nOn Friday, a third coronavirus vaccine - made by US company Moderna - was approved for use, although supplies are not expected to arrive until spring.\n\nVaccine programmes are also progressing in the UK's devolved nations.\n\nAll over-50s and everyone who is at greater risk from Covid in Wales will be offered a vaccine by spring, under new plans.\n\nAnd Scotland's health secretary has said every aged over 80 or over in the nation will be offered a jab by February, while care workers in Northern Ireland who provide services to ill or elderly patients living at home can now book an appointment to get a Covid-19 vaccine.\n\nEngland is currently under a national lockdown, meaning people must stay at home and can go out only for limited reasons such as food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home.\n\nSimilar lockdown measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has questioned why there are \"less restrictions in place\" now than there were last March.\n\nIn his first speech of the year, he said: \"I do think it's time to hear from the scientists [about] what else could be done and that probably should be done in the next few hours\".\n\nMeanwhile, the United Arab Emirates is being removed from the UK list of travel corridors amid a spike in Covid cases.\n\nAnd England's Test and Trace scheme has revised one of its definitions of a \"close contact\" - the people who need to be reached if they have been near to someone who has tested positive for Covid.\n\nThis now refers to anyone who has been within two metres of someone for more than 15 minutes, whether in a single period or cumulatively over the course of one day.\n\nPreviously the definition was just a single period of at least 15 minutes.", "Rani has co-hosted BBC One's Countryfile since 2015\n\nCountryfile host Anita Rani is to join Emma Barnett as a presenter of BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour.\n\nShe will present the Friday and Saturday editions of the long-running programme, beginning on 15 January.\n\nRani, 43, said she had \"long been a fan\" of the programme and that she was \"really looking forward to getting to know the listeners and discussing issues that matter to them the most\".\n\nLong-time hosts Jane Garvey and Dame Jenni Murray left the show last year.\n\nBarnett, 35, who made her name on Radio 5 Live and Newsnight, made her Woman's Hour debut on 4 January. She hosts the show from Monday to Thursday.\n\nWriting on Twitter, Rani said it was \"an honour\" to be joining Radio 4's \"mothership\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by anita rani This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nRani joined the BBC's Asian Network in 2005 and is a regular presenter on BBC Radio 2. She is also known for her appearances on The One Show and Watchdog, and for competing on the 2015 series of Strictly Come Dancing.\n\n\"Woman's Hour has always given a voice to people who may not be heard elsewhere and I want to continue that important tradition,\" she said.\n\nRadio 4 controller Mohit Bakaya said he wanted the station to \"better reflect and be relevant to the audience across the UK\". Rani will bring \"a wealth of broadcasting experience\" as well as a \"valuable\" perspective and insight, he added.\n\nComedian Shappi Khorsandi was among those to welcome her new role, saying she would be \"listening even more\".\n\nRani's appointment means the new Woman's Hour presenters are considerably younger than their predecessors. Dame Jenni was 70 when she left on 1 October, while Garvey was 56 when she signed off last month.\n\nEmma Barnett took the reins of Woman's Hour earlier this month\n\nBefore leaving, Garvey expressed a hope that whoever joined Barnett would be closer to her own age.\n\n\"Emma is in her 30s and that's great,\" she told the Daily Telegraph. \"It will give the programme a real energy, which I think is brilliant.\n\n\"So I think the person working alongside her should be somebody nearer my age to make sure we give the audience as broad a range of life experience and interests as possible. I would prefer it if the other presenter were in her 50s.\"\n\nBarnett had an eventful first week on the Radio 4 institution, opening her stint by reading out a message from The Queen.\n\nTwo days later, one of her guests dropped out of a discussion after objecting to remarks the presenter made about her off air.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "A twenty-year-old from Cambridgeshire who spent a week in intensive care with Covid-19 says he can't believe so many young people are in denial about the virus.\n\nJay Clack fell ill on December 27th and within five days, 80% of his lungs has stopped functioning.\n\nWhile in intensive care he had a goodbye phone call with his family.\n\nBut now, he's showing signs of recovery and spoke to the BBC's Jon Ironmonger.", "The police are stepping up enforcement because they believe many people breaking the Covid regulations are doing so because they are stubborn, not because they don’t understand what is allowed.\n\nThe public, police, and legal experts do struggle to keep up with the ever-changing rules.\n\nBut the organisers of a party on a boat in Hertfordshire, the passengers on a minibus heading for Wales, and the couple who travelled 120 miles to \"watch seals\" would have struggled to explain to the officers issuing them with fines that they were confused.\n\nThose were clear breaches. More complicated is the fine line between the law - which police officers can enforce - and the government guidance, which they can’t.\n\nNo law says exercise can only be conducted once a day, or for a specific duration. These are pieces of firm guidance, along with the request to \"stay local\", which resulted in criticism of the prime minister after his bike ride in east London.\n\nIt would be difficult to set a distance limit which would work for both people living in rural areas and inner cities. Impossible to prove that a 65-minute run was in breach of the law.\n\nWhich is why the success of the measures will rely on personal responsibility in the end.\n\nAnd why some experts are saying that different messages such as \"act like you’ve got it\" or \"thanks for doing the right thing\" might cut through better than a list of regulations to be obeyed.", "Seven new mass vaccination centres have opened up across England to help deliver the Coronavirus vaccine, as the Prime Minister says we are facing a \"perilous moment\" in the fight against the virus.\n\nThe Centre of Life in Newcastle is home to one of them, with others in Bristol, Epsom, London, Manchester, Stevenage and Birmingham.\n\nInitially they will be used to vaccinate the over 80's, alongside NHS staff and health and social care workers. It's part of a drive that the government hopes will see 15 million people vaccinated against the virus by mid-February.", "But it delivered a fascinating look behind the scenes at two cutting-edge ways the firm is creating video content.\n\nThe first involved the use of a giant screen which is matched with movement-sensors on a camera to create a fake backdrop that shifts in turn with the lens.\n\nA similar technique was pioneered by Industrial Light & Magic and used in the Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian, but this opens the door to other filmmakers.\n\nThe screens involved use Sony's Crystal LED technology, which the firm first unveiled at CES in 2012, but has been unable to bring low down enough in price to take mainstream.\n\nIn effect, this is its version of micro-LED tech, using millions of tiny light emitting diodes (LEDs) to match the number of pixels. The result is much greater brightness and contrast than a normal LCD or OLED display would be capable of.\n\nThe background footage moves in time with the camera to aid the illusion Image caption: The background footage moves in time with the camera to aid the illusion\n\nUntil now, the firm has marketed the tech at building owners wanting the ultimate video walls. But this has the potential to help film and advert-makers place actors within environments they can see, rather than relying on greenscreen effects.\n\nThe second innovation was the creation of an \"immersive reality\" performance, which uses body sensors to create a highly-detailed animated version of an artist.\n\nIt was demoed by the singer-songwriter Madison Beer.\n\nMotion capture has been used for years to add special effects to characters in movies and to place real-world actors into video games.\n\nBut the aim here is to create a lifelike representation of a performer on stage at a concert.\n\nThe footage shown didn't quite escape the \"uncanny valley\" - there's still some way to go before we can't tell the difference between a real person and even a highly detailed avatar.\n\nBut it's easy to imagine that the tech being more impressive when viewed in virtual reality, where users can move about and choose their view.\n\nThe computer-generated image looks less real the closer you get to the performer Image caption: The computer-generated image looks less real the closer you get to the performer\n\nUntil now, VR apps of concerts have either offered a pick of different static camera locations or involved much lower-resolution characters.\n\nWith Covid meaning it's impossible for artists to tour, this second-best experience could be very timely when it's offered to PlayStation VR headsets and other devices soon.", "John Lewis is suspending its click and collect services and tightening safety measures after a \"change in tone\" from the government over the virus.\n\nThe department store will also pause in-home services, unless they are \"essential to customers' wellbeing\".\n\nThe retailer said it felt the changes were right with the country at a \"critical point in the pandemic\".\n\nHowever customers will be able to collect John Lewis orders from Waitrose stores.\n\nWaitrose, which belongs to the John Lewis Partnership, is also tightening rules over face coverings, following moves from the other supermarkets to make face masks mandatory for shoppers unless they have a medical exemption.\n\n\"We've listened carefully to the clear change in tone and emphasis of the views and information shared by the UK's governments in recent days,\" said Andrew Murphy, Executive Director, Operations.\n\n\"While we recognise that the detail of formal guidance has not changed, we feel it is right for us - and in the best interests of our Partners and customers - to take proactive steps to further enhance our Covid-security and related operational policies.\"\n\nJohn Lewis said click and collect from its department stores would be switched off for new orders from the end of Tuesday.\n\nExisting orders and bookings for services, such as installing washing machines, will still be carried out, if customers wish to proceed, but there will be no further bookings for non-essential services.\n\nMany other shops from coffee chains to craft suppliers are offering click and collect services. However, with the continued rise in coronavirus cases the government is examining ways to reduce social contact further.\n\nThe book chain Waterstones stopped offering click and collect services from its shops at the start of the current lockdown.\n\nMarks and Spencer said it was continuing to offer customers the opportunity to collect other items at its food halls, which are still open for grocery shopping.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Gary Furlong described his son as \"an amazing, kind boy\"\n\nThe father of one of three men murdered in a park terror attack has called on the home secretary to \"tell us why\" the killer was deemed safe to be free.\n\nGary Furlong, whose son James, 36, was killed in Reading's Forbury Gardens attack in June, said it was \"beyond\" him why Khairi Saadallah was considered \"not a danger to the public\".\n\nSaadallah was jailed for the rest of his life over the murders.\n\nThe Home Office has not yet responded to a BBC request for comment.\n\nAt the time of the attack Home Secretary Priti Patel said: \"We must learn the lessons from what has happened... to prevent anything like this from happening again.\"\n\nDuring his trial, London's Old Bailey heard Saadallah \"executed\" James Furlong, David Wails, 49, and Joe Ritchie-Bennett, 39, as an \"act of religious jihad\" on the afternoon of 20 June.\n\nHe was jailed on Monday having previously admitted the three murders and the attempted murders of three other men.\n\nKhairi Saadallah admitted three counts of murder and three of attempted murder\n\nThe Ministry of Justice said a Serious Further Offence (SFO) review had been completed into how Saadallah was managed by the National Probation Service.\n\nThe victims' families would be offered a meeting to discuss the findings of the review, it added.\n\nIt comes after the killer had been subject to licence conditions at the time of the attack.\n\nThe court previously heard on the 18 June, two days before the attack, Saadallah's probation officer had emailed his mental health team as he had been talking about \"magic\".\n\nSaadallah also contacted the mental health crisis team himself, but he did not not open the door when they visited on 19 June.\n\nThe court heard Saadallah, who arrived in Britain from Libya in 2012, had previously been involved with militias who had been part of the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi, and was pictured handling weapons, including firearms.\n\nSince seeking asylum in Britain, he had been repeatedly arrested and convicted of various offences, including theft and assault, between 2013 and 2020.\n\nAnalysis of Saadallah's phone revealed an interest in extremist material and the court heard while at HMP Bullingdon in 2017, he was seen to associate with radical preacher Omar Brookes, who has connections with banned terrorist organisation Al-Muhajiroun.\n\nSpeaking after the sentencing, Gary Furlong, from Liverpool, said Ms Patel needed to \"tell us why this guy wasn't put into some form of detention centre before they could deport him\".\n\n\"He was not safe to be released back on the streets,\" he added.\n\nSaadallah, 26, had been told just before his release from prison that the Home Office wanted to deport him, but it was not legally possible due to the situation in Libya.\n\nIn law, what are known as the Hardial Singh principles place certain limits on the government's power to detain people ahead of deportation.\n\nThe Prime Minister's spokesman said the government \"always tries to remove foreign national offenders where possible\".\n\nHe was released from custody on 5 June, and proceeded to research the location for his attack online and carry out reconnaissance in the park.\n\n(L-R) David Wails, Joe Ritchie-Bennett and James Furlong were pronounced dead at the scene\n\nFollowing concerns from his brother, police visited the killer on 19 June, but he told officers he was \"alright\" while he stood near to a knife he bought from a supermarket.\n\nSaadallah's brother, Aiman, said he had asked for police to detain him under the Mental Health Act, and added \"lives would have been saved\" if more had been done.\n\nThames Valley Police has been contacted for comment.\n\nReading Refugee Support Group's (RRSG) also said it had raised concerns about his potential for radicalisation over three years and the possibility of a \"London Bridge\" scenario.\n\nIn a statement, it said Saadallah had a \"known, significant mental health problem\".\n\n\"This in no way excuses what he did. He murdered three innocent people. But there must be accountability on the part of services that should have supported him,\" it said.\n\nBut passing sentence Mr Justice Sweeney said it was \"clear that the defendant did not, and does not, have any major mental illness\".\n\nGary Furlong said: \"Given the volume of crimes he's committed and the information that they had on him, for an assessment to be done the night before to say that he's not a danger to the public - it is beyond me.\n\n\"How was he ever allowed to stay in this country? How was he allowed in, in the first place?\"\n\nHistory teacher James Furlong and pharmaceutical manager Mr Ritchie-Bennett each died from a single stab wound to the neck, while scientist Mr Wails was stabbed once in the back.\n\nDespite treatment from paramedics and doctors, all three friends, who were members of the LGBT community, died at the scene.\n\nGary Furlong described his son as \"an amazing, kind boy\" who was loved by family, friends and students.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Royal Mail has published a list of areas where there have been delivery delays due to its workforce being affected by the Covid pandemic.\n\nThe postal service said some areas will see a reduced service due to workers being off sick or self-isolating.\n\nRoyal Mail listed 28 areas where post might be late, with 27 in England and one in Northern Ireland.\n\nProblems with deliveries over Christmas had prompted shoppers to complain about parcels not arriving on time.\n\nRoyal Mail said: \"Despite our best efforts and significant investment in extra resource, some customers may experience slightly longer delivery timescales than our usual service standards.\n\n\"This is due to the exceptionally high volumes we are seeing, exacerbated by the coronavirus-related measures we have put in place in local mail centres and delivery offices to keep our people and customers safe.\"\n\nMany of the affected areas are in or near London, while others include Chelmsford in Essex, Leeds in West Yorkshire, Margate in Kent, and Widnes in Cheshire.\n\nLabour MP Wes Streeting, whose Ilford constituency is one of the areas affected, tweeted on Sunday that he was concerned about vaccination invitations getting caught up in Royal Mail delays.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Wes Streeting MP This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nBut Covid vaccine deployment minister Nadhim Zahawi replied that the government would work with Royal Mail to ensure that vaccine invitations were prioritised.\n\nCustomers have taken to Twitter to complain about delays to their postal service.\n\n\"Unfortunately I live in one of these areas.,\" wrote Matt S. \"N8 has been receiving an absolutely dreadful service since April 2020 - @RoyalMail what are you going to do to improve the situation?\"\n\nMark Harrison wrote: \"We could manage and expect a bit of disruption - but we've had only 2 deliveries in a month. Nothing for a fortnight. SE11 not even on the list of disrupted areas. Royal Mail need to get a grip.\"\n\nIn a service update on Tuesday, Royal Mail said: \"Due to resourcing issues, deliveries in the following areas are likely to be limited.\"", "Khairi Saadallah admitted three counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder\n\nA killer who stabbed three men to death in a Reading park has been handed a whole-life jail term.\n\nKhairi Saadallah murdered James Furlong, 36, David Wails, 49, and 39-year-old Joe Ritchie-Bennett, in June last year in Forbury Gardens.\n\nLondon's Old Bailey previously heard the 26-year-old \"executed\" the men as an \"act of religious jihad\".\n\nPassing sentence Judge Mr Justice Sweeney said it was a \"ruthless and brutal\" terror attack.\n\nSaadallah, who admitted the murders, had also pleaded guilty to the attempted murders of three other men who were also in the park.\n\nThe judge said the victims \"had no chance to react, let alone defend themselves\".\n\n(L-R) David Wails, Joe Ritchie-Bennett and James Furlong were pronounced dead at the scene\n\nHe said he was sure the attack \"involved a substantial degree of premeditation or planning\" and was carried out \"for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause\".\n\nBBC News correspondent Helena Wilkinson, who was in court, said the families of James Furlong and David Wails were present, while Joseph Ritchie-Bennett's loved ones watched via a link from America.\n\nSaadallah showed no emotion as Mr Justice Sweeney went through his sentencing remarks.\n\nOn the afternoon of 20 June, the park was busy due to the first lockdown restrictions being relaxed in England.\n\nAndrew Cafe, who witnessed the stabbings, said he saw Saadallah wielding the \"biggest kitchen knife\" and charging towards him shouting \"Allahu Akbar\".\n\nPharmaceutical manager Mr Ritchie-Bennett and teacher Mr Furlong died from single stab wounds to their necks, while scientist Mr Wails was stabbed once in the back.\n\nDespite treatment from paramedics and doctors, all three friends, who were members of the LGBT community, died at the scene.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Witness Andrew Cafe visited Forbury Gardens for the first time since the attack\n\nThree other people - Nishit Nisudan, Patrick Edwards and Stephen Young - were also injured, before Saadallah threw away the knife and fled the scene, pursued by police.\n\nFollowing his arrest, Saadallah initially said he wanted to plead guilty to the \"jihad that I done\", but the prosecution claimed he later feigned mental illness in police interviews.\n\nAt a previous hearing, the court heard he had developed an emotionally unstable and anti-social personality disorder, with his behaviour worsened by alcohol and cannabis misuse.\n\nBut the judge said it was \"clear that the defendant did not, and does not, have any major mental illness\".\n\nAn examination of Saadallah's phone revealed an interest in extremist material, including images of the flag of Islamic State and Jihadi John, the court previously heard.\n\nWhile at HMP Bullingdon in 2017, he was seen to associate with radical preacher Omar Brookes, who has connections with banned terrorist organisation Al-Muhajiroun.\n\nThe court heard Saadallah, who arrived in Britain from Libya in 2012, had previously been involved with militias who had been part of the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi, and was pictured handling weapons, including firearms.\n\nSince seeking asylum in Britain, he had been repeatedly arrested and convicted of various offences, including theft and assault, between 2013 and 2020.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. CCTV cameras captured Khairi Saadallah before and after the stabbing\n\nHe briefly came to the attention of MI5 in 2019, but the information provided did not meet the threshold of investigation.\n\nSaadallah had been released from prison on 5 June, days before the attack, the court heard.\n\nOn 17 June, he researched the location for his attack online and carried out reconnaissance in the park.\n\nThe following day his probation officer alerted his mental health team over comments he made about magic.\n\nA day later, Saadallah contacted the crisis team himself, but when they visited he did not answer.\n\nFollowing concerns from his brother, police visited the killer the same day, but he told officers he was \"alright\" while he stood near a knife he bought from a supermarket.\n\nAndrew Wails said losing his brother had been devastating\n\nAfter the sentencing, James Furlong's father, Gary, said: \"The secretary of state needs to tell us why this guy wasn't put into some form of detention centre before they could deport him.\n\n\"He was not safe to be released back on the streets.\"\n\nReferring to the fact that Saadallah had been visited by police the night before the attack, Mr Furlong said: \"Given the volume of crimes he's committed and the information that they had on him, for an assessment to be done the night before to say that he's not a danger to the public - it is beyond me.\"\n\nHe described Mr Furlong, originally from Liverpool, as \"a lovely man, loved by his family, idolised by his mother\".\n\nDavid Wails' brother Andrew said: \"For us as a family it's been devastating to lose our much loved son, brother and uncle.\"\n\nIn a statement, the Bennett family described Mr Ritchie-Bennett as a \"devoted and loving husband\" and \"a man who cared strongly about family\".\n\nThe park had been busy due to the first lockdown restrictions being relaxed in England\n\nDet Ch Supt Kath Barnes, head of Counter Terrorism Policing South East, described Saadallah as \"a committed jihadist\".\n\nShe said: \"He has caused unspeakable hurt and distress to the families of the three men who were brutally murdered as they were relaxing and enjoying socialising with friends on a Saturday evening.\n\n\"I'm sure there will also be lasting effects on those who were injured in the attack, who were fortunate not to have been even more seriously harmed.\"\n\nReading Borough Council leader Jason Brock described the attacks as \"horrific\" and \"senseless\" and said a permanent memorial to the victims was planned.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Vogue editor Anna Wintour said images of Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris were meant to celebrate her achievements\n\nUS Vogue editor Anna Wintour has defended the magazine following criticism of its front-cover portrait of Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris.\n\nThe image shows Ms Harris wearing an informal outfit including jeans and a pair of Converse trainers.\n\nSocial media users have criticised Vogue for the photo's \"washed out\" lighting and styling, saying it does not reflect Ms Harris's achievements.\n\nBut Ms Wintour said the photos were intended to highlight her success.\n\n\"We want nothing but to celebrate Vice-President-elect Harris's amazing victory and the important moment this is for America's history and particularly women of colour all over the world,\" Ms Wintour said in a statement to the New York Times' Kara Swisher.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Vogue Magazine This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nShe also defended Vogue's decision to use the picture for the print cover of its February issue, rather than an alternative portrait of her in a more formal suit.\n\nA member of Ms Harris's team told AP news agency that Vogue staff, including Ms Wintour, agreed to feature the blue-suited image on cover. But Ms Wintour denied that any formal agreement had been made.\n\n\"All of us felt very, very strongly that the less formal portrait of the vice-president-elect really reflected the moment that we were living in,\" said Ms Wintour.\n\n\"We felt to reflect this tragic moment in global history, a much less formal picture... really reflected the hallmark of the Biden/Harris campaign and everything they were trying to - and I'm sure they will - achieve,\" the editor - herself an influential supporter of the Democratic Party - added.\n\nSources at Vogue told the New York Times that the second, more formal image may be used as a cover for a separate print edition.\n\nBoth pictures were taken by Tyler Mitchell who, in 2018, became the first black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover.\n\nThe magazine has been criticised in the past over issues relating to race.\n\nSeveral former employees previously shared experiences of alleged racism in the workplace with the New York Times.\n\nEarlier this year, British Vogue editor Edward Enninful spoke out after he was allegedly \"racially profiled\" by a security guard at the magazine's UK offices.\n\nYou might also be interested in:\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. HBO's Insecure is making sure lighting people of colour is not an afterthought", "A deal has been agreed for the sale of the Edinburgh Woollen Mill, Ponden Home and Bonmarché chains, which were on the brink of closure.\n\nThe businesses went into administration last year after a collapse in sales due to the pandemic.\n\nAlmost 2,000 staff will be kept on but as many as 260 stores could close.\n\nThe buyers are a consortium of international investors who will inject fresh funds into the business, led by the existing management team.\n\nEdinburgh Woollen Mill, which sells mid-price knitwear and other clothing to older shoppers, is part of a stable of retail brands owned by billionaire businessman, Philip Day.\n\nIt is understood that Mr Day will effectively lend the group the money to buy the businesses which will be paid back over a number of years.\n\nThe deal also covers two other brands in the group, value retailer Bonmarché, and Ponden Home, an interiors chain based in the south east of England.\n\nThe new owners plan to operate 246 stores across both the Edinburgh Woollen Mill and Ponden Home brands, retaining 1,453 staff in those stores, the head office and distribution centres in Carlisle.\n\nHowever, 85 Edinburgh Woollen Mill stores and 34 Ponden Home stores have been closed permanently, with the loss of 485 jobs.\n\nWakefield-based Bonmarché will retain 72 of its stores and 531 staff including head office and distribution centre staff.\n\nThe majority of its stores, 148 outlets, remain under review with staff on furlough.\n\nAdministrators representing Edinburgh Woollen Mill and Ponden Home said the deal represented the best chance to save stores and jobs, given the difficult outlook for UK retail.\n\n\"We regret that not all of Edinburgh Woollen Mill and Ponden Home could be rescued,\" said Tony Wright, partner at FRP. \"This has resulted in a significant number of redundancies at a particularly challenging time of year and period of economic uncertainty.\"\n\nRetail has been particularly hard hit by measures to curb the spread of Covid-19. Even when shops have been open many shoppers stayed away, wary of the health risks.\n\nThe British Retail Consortium said consumers bought 5% less last year than the year before (not including food). Much of that custom switched from the High Street to online, making it harder for chains whose customers usually shop in person. Physical stores saw sales drop by a quarter, the BRC said.\n\nOther major brands including Topshop-owner Arcadia and Debenhams have also gone into administration, costing hundreds of jobs.\n\n\"Lockdowns have proved hugely damaging for mid-range fashion chains like Edinburgh Woollen Mill and Bonmarché whose traditional customer base has not adapted so quickly to online shopping as younger shoppers,\" said Susannah Streeter, analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.\n\n\"The backers of this rescue deal clearly believe there is pent-up demand amongst core customers which will be released once the doors are flung open once more,\" she added.\n\nOn Monday, Marks & Spencer announced it was buying Jaeger, another brand that had belonged to Philip Day's portfolio.\n\nPeacocks, another High Street fashion brand in the EWM group remains in administration.", "As major social media platforms crack down on accounts promoting US election conspiracy theories, many conspiracy and far-right groups in the US are looking for a new home online.\n\nTwitter hasn’t just kicked the president off the platform. It’s also closed down some 70,000 accounts associated with the QAnon conspiracy, while Facebook said it is continuing efforts to shut down “Stop the Steal” groups which allege, with no evidence, that Donald Trump was cheated of the presidency.\n\nOne of the most popular alternatives had been the self-styled “free speech” social media outlet Parler, but then over the weekend that was banned too for posts inciting violence.\n\nThen there’s Gab, a Twitter-like platform popular with right-wing groups, which is awash with extreme content and welcomes QAnon followers with open arms. It claims to have added 600,000 new users since the riots.\n\nIt’s thought Gab’s user base is far smaller than that of the now-closed Parler, which had around 16m users.\n\nOthers seem to be moving to MeWe, which is similar to Facebook.\n\nThere are some parallels with online jihadists, who also found their voices silenced after the rise of Islamic State in the Middle East.\n\nThe Islamic State group and al-Qaeda frequently have to re-establish their online presence after social media companies identify and close their accounts, leading to a nomadic online existence.\n\nThey have already adapted to life outside the big social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and have exploited less well known platforms and apps to get their messages out.\n• 65 days that led to chaos at the Capitol", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid in Scotland: Lockdown likely to extend to February\n\nScotland's first minister has said the country's current lockdown is \"very unlikely\" to be lifted at the end of the month.\n\nNicola Sturgeon was speaking as she confirmed that more than 5,000 people have now died after testing positive for the virus.\n\nA review of the current restrictions is due to be carried out at the end of January.\n\nMs Sturgeon said it was possible that there would be no easing at that point.\n\nA further 54 deaths have been recorded in the past 24 hours - bringing the total by that measure to 5,023.\n\nBut the most recent figures from the National Records of Scotland - which record all deaths registered in Scotland where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate - put the total at 6,686.\n\nMs Sturgeon told her daily briefing that the figures were a reminder of the toll the virus had taken.\n\nAnd she said every death had caused heartbreak to friends, families and loved ones across the country.\n\nThe first minister also said Scotland's NHS would be under far greater pressure if the current restrictions had not been put in place on Boxing Day.\n\nAnd she urged people not to raise their expectations about what will be announced when the lockdown review is completed in a fortnight as wholesale lifting of the restrictions was \"very unlikely\".\n\nShe added: \"There may not even be any lifting of these restrictions as soon as the end of January - we will have to consider all of that carefully and set it out in due course.\"\n\nAll of mainland Scotland and some islands were placed into level four restrictions on 26 December, with schools remaining closed to most pupils until at least the end of the month.\n\nA further 1,875 positive cases of the virus were recorded on Monday, bringing the total since the pandemic began to 153,423.\n\nThe number of people in hospital with the virus stands at 1,717 - an increase of 53 since yesterday and higher than the peak of about 1,500 in the first wave in April.\n\nOf these, 133 patients are intensive care units, with Ms Sturgeon saying that the virus was putting \"very acute pressure\" on hospitals.\n\nThe first minister also said that 175,942 people in Scotland had received their first vaccine dose by Monday.\n\nOpposition parties have claimed that the rollout of the vaccine has been \"sluggish\" in Scotland compared to south of the border - a charge that the government denies.\n\nAnd they have called for greater transparency over how many people are being given the jab every day.\n\nHealth Secretary Jeane Freeman said on Monday that the government was aiming to vaccinate about 560,000 people in Scotland by 31 January.\n\nNon-essential shops have been closed in Scotland since 26 December\n\nThe Scottish government has previously said it is concerned that too many people have not been following the \"stay at home\" rules that are in place across the whole of the mainland and some islands.\n\nMinisters have been discussing the possibility of imposing tougher rules on click and collect shopping and takeaway food, with an announcement expected to be made on Wednesday.\n\nRetail industry representatives have described click and collect services as a \"lifeline\" for struggling businesses amid the forced closure of all non-essential shops.\n\nAnd they said they had not been shown any evidence that click and collect was driving transmission of the virus.\n\nMs Sturgeon told her daily coronavirus briefing that the government may not stop click and collect services altogether.\n\nBut she added: \"If we are saying to people right now that you should not be out of your home for shopping unless it is essential, then do we need to have click and collect for non-essential services instead of having that for delivery?\"\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross told BBC Scotland that he did not want to see further restrictions put in place unless there was evidence that they would have the desired effect.\n\nHe also suggested that restricting click and collect would simply result in more people going back into supermarkets to do their shopping.\n\nThe Scottish government is also under pressure to lift the the current ban on public Sunday worship, with a group of 500 church leaders from across the UK - including 200 in Scotland - insisting that there is \"no evidence of any tangible contribution to community transmission through churches in Scotland\".\n\nIn a letter to the first minister, they claim that the ban may be unlawful and accuse the government of failing to understand that \"Christian worship is an essential public service, and especially vital to our nation in a time of crisis\".\n\nA Scottish government spokeswoman said: \"Test and Protect tells us where people were in their 48-hour infectious period.\n\n\"So we know that on one day last week the seven-day number for places of worship was 120, and data from yesterday shows the seven-day number for places of worship is 38, underlining the essential decision to require places of worship to close for public health reasons.\"\n\nMeanwhile, it has been confirmed that everyone arriving in Scotland from overseas will need to show proof of a negative test from Friday.\n\nThe test will need to be \"highly reliable\", the first minister said, and will need to have been from the previous three days - although young children may be exempt from the restriction.\n\nThose travelling from countries not on the quarantine exemption list will still need to self-isolate on arrival.\n\nThe new rules, which will also come into force in England, were first outlined last week.", "Sir David Attenborough has previously spoken of his support for the Covid-19 vaccines\n\nSir David Attenborough has become the latest well-known name to receive the Covid-19 vaccine, his representative has confirmed.\n\nThe news about the 94-year-old natural historian comes a few days after it was revealed the Queen had been vaccinated.\n\nIt's not known which vaccine Sir David has been given or exactly when he had it.\n\nThe Perfect Planet host is one of several stars to receive the first of two doses of the vaccine.\n\nThey include The Great British Bake Off's Prue Leith, actor Sir Ian McKellen, choreographer Lionel Blair, actor Brian Blessed and actress Dame Joan Collins.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThere are currently three vaccines approved for administration in the UK - Oxford-AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, although supplies of the latter are not expected to arrive until spring.\n\nSir David, who has been isolating at his London home, has previously talked about his support for the work in developing a means of protection from Covid-19.\n\nIn an interview with The Telegraph last month he said he would definitely accept an invitation to be vaccinated when his time came.\n\n\"At 94, I think I'm entitled!\" he told the newspaper.\n\n\"I'm sufficient of a scientist still, I hope, to realise this is the thing to do.\"\n\nHe added that the work that had gone into developing the vaccines showed the positive effects of international cooperation in combating global problems, such as the climate crisis.\n\n\"It (the virus) has drawn attention to the fact we aren't as omnipotent and all-controlling as we think we are,\" he told the paper.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "The United Arab Emirates is being removed from the UK list of travel corridors amid a spike in Covid cases.\n\nThat means anyone who arrives from the UAE after 04:00 GMT on Tuesday now needs to self-isolate for 10 days, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said.\n\nUK officials say Covid cases have risen 52% in the UAE in the last seven days and cite \"a significant acceleration in the number of imported cases\".\n\nIt comes after Scotland removed the UAE city Dubai from its safe travel list.\n\nThe Foreign Office has also updated its advice to advise against all but essential travel to the emirates.\n\nThe recent lockdown restrictions imposed across the UK mean leisure travel is currently banned.\n\nBut the UAE has been in particular focus in recent weeks after a number of UK reality TV and social media stars posted photographs of themselves holidaying there before the rules came into place.\n\nAnd a Celtic footballer tested positive for Covid-19 after the club took a trip to Dubai for a winter training camp.\n\nCeltic were allowed to go as a group under exemptions for elite athletes. As a result,15 playing and coaching staff are now required to self-isolate.\n\nDubai was added to Scotland's travel quarantine list from 04:00 GMT on Monday - with the rule also applying retrospectively for passengers who have arrived in Scotland from the city since January 3.\n\nThe Department for Transport said the removal of the whole of the UAE from the travel corridor is being adopted by all four UK nations.\n\nArrivals to the UK from most destinations now have to quarantine for 10 days.\n\nHowever, arrivals from some countries are exempt from the rules. Those countries make up the so-called travel corridor list.\n\nFrom this week, passengers arriving by boat, train or plane, including UK nationals, must also take a Covid test up to 72 hours before leaving the country of departure.\n\nAre you affected by the government decision to remove UAE from the UK travel corridor list? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "A Scottish earl has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a woman at his ancestral home in Angus.\n\nThe Earl of Strathmore, Simon Bowes-Lyon, forced his way into the sleeping woman's room during a weekend event he was hosting at Glamis Castle.\n\nHe repeatedly assaulted the 26-year-old victim and tried to pull off her nightdress during the 20-minute attack.\n\nBowes-Lyon, 34 - who is the Queen's first cousin twice removed - has been placed on the sex offenders register.\n\nHe was granted bail at Dundee Sheriff Court and sentence was deferred.\n\nSheriff Alistair Carmichael also ordered Glamis Castle be assessed for its suitability to house Bowes-Lyon while under a tagging order.\n\nThe court heard the woman fled the castle the morning after the attack on 13 February last year and flew home to report the matter to police.\n\nBoth Police Scotland and the Metropolitan Police were involved in the investigation.\n\nGlamis Castle was the childhood home of the Queen Mother\n\nOutside court, Bowes-Lyon said he was \"greatly ashamed\" of his actions.\n\nHe added: \"Clearly I had drunk to excess on the night of the incident. I should have known better. I recognise, in any event, that alcohol is no excuse for my behaviour.\n\n\"I did not think I was capable of behaving the way I did but have had to face up to it and take responsibility.\n\n\"My apologies go, above all, to the woman concerned, but I would also like to apologise to family, friends and colleagues for the distress I have caused them.\"\n\nGlamis Castle, near Forfar, has been the seat of the Bowes-Lyon family since 1372.\n\nIt was the childhood home of the Queen Mother, and the Queen's sister Princess Margaret was born there.\n\nBowes-Lyon was a great-great nephew of the Queen Mother.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid lockdown: Are supermarkets following the rules?\n\nSupermarket workers are facing abuse for challenging shoppers not wearing masks during the pandemic, staff say.\n\nOne Mold supermarket worker said she was challenging people every day and seeing \"loads of people walking around\" the store without masks and in groups.\n\nThe Welsh Government has hinted rules will be tightened amid concerns Covid-19 rules are not being followed.\n\n\"This is not a social event, come in on your own, not as a family of five,\" the supermarket worker said.\n\nSupermarket workers spoke to BBC Radio Wales as Health Minister Vaughan Gething said the \"onus\" was on supermarkets to make sure shoppers abided by the rules.\n\nThere has been an \"escalation of abuse\" towards supermarket staff in the last nine months, and the role of policing such rules must not fall on those on the shop floor, Nick Ireland Divisional Officer of the Union of Shop Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw) said.\n\nHe said measures in stores had \"rolled back\", with many no longer enforcing systems, and people walking the wrong way down one-way systems, and \"whole families\" shopping with just one basket.\n\nMeanwhile Bally Auluk, an area organiser in Cardiff and Barry for Usdaw, said abuse towards shopworkers was happening on \"a daily and weekly basis\".\n\nHe said retailers and the Welsh Government should \"start protecting shop workers\" after dealing with members himself who were \"threatened with physical violence and spat on\".\n\n\"Customers now are treating it almost like it was last year, that it's not a problem, that is where the big issues arises,\" he said.\n\nThe Welsh Government is in discussions about bringing in \"more visible\" coronavirus regulations.\n\nMorrisons and Sainsbury's had pledged to challenge shoppers not wearing face coverings in store, unless they have a medical exemption.\n\nTesco, Asda and Waitrose are the latest supermarkets to follow the move and challenge those who flout the rules.\n\nUnder coronavirus rules, people must wear face coverings in order to enter shops across the UK, while supermarkets should have social distancing and strict hygiene measures in place.\n\nThe Welsh Government has been in talks with retailers on how to improve safety and return to the strict observance of social distancing from the first lockdown, although no new guidance has been issued.\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford said he had heard concerns from people \"expressing anxiety\" about a lack of \"visible protections\" in supermarkets, such as limited numbers allowed in store, hand sanitiser and security on doors.\n\nThe Mold supermarket worker said staff had been told not to challenge people not wearing masks, and had seen people being yelled at.\n\nJane, who did not give her last name, told BBC Wales customers were offered a mask on the way in, but many did not want them.\n\n\"You do see a lot of customers walking around without a mask on,\" she said.\n\n\"Of course there are people with hidden disabilities who can't wear a mask but there can't be that many of them.\"\n\nJane said enforcement needed to be greater, but it should not be led by the shopfloor staff.\"We're told not to challenge people as we don't know someone's personal situation and we don't want to face any abuse if they don't want to wear it or don't agree with it,\" she said.\n\n\"At the moment people will ask politely, but I have witnessed quite a few occasions where customers have been verbally abusive to the person greeting them on their way in.\n\n\"There needs to be someone enforcing this, it can't be left to retail staff: whether its a police officer or a security guard.\"\n\nSupermarket aisles carrying non-essential items are closed off again, as they were during the firebreak lockdown\n\nOne security guard at a supermarket in Aberdare said he had had more \"hassle\" working in the past 10 months at the store, than from drinkers while working as a nightclub doorman for more than 20 years.\n\n\"The attitude towards yourself... they don't appreciate that you're standing there for 12 hours a day, they don't understand how hard it is to try and keep people distancing,\" he told Dot Davies on BBC Radio Wales.\n\n\"When they go inside the shop it all goes out the window... we keep the two metres outside, but we've got people coming outside to tell us we should be in there sorting it out.\"\n\nOne supermarket manager said the lengths people were going to in order to shop together were \"ridiculous\", with families coming in with a number of trolleys or baskets in order not to be challenged.\n\n\"We've seen families turning up to go shopping for a basket shop, it's just not on,\" said Mr Ireland, who called on supermarket staff to be prioritised for vaccines.\n\nHe suggested those who do not observe the rules should be banned and fined.\n\nBut one mother said that she had no choice but to shop with her children, and she had been unable to get a click and collect or delivery slot.\n\n\"It's easy to get caught up in the fear of it, but some people are at the shops as they have no choice,\" she said.\n\nOthers have spoken of shop staff themselves not wearing masks.\n\nJames Lowman, chief executive of the Association of Convenience Stores, said it was \"everyone's responsibility\" to abide by the rules, rather than for shop workers to enforce.\n\n\"Doing that [enforcement of rules] in a small store, where you don't have lots of colleagues around, has been a trigger for more abuse and even violence,\" he said.\n\nMr Lowman said making businesses Covid secure was down to the local authority, while individuals' behaviour was a matter for police, but \"in practicality\" it is everyone's responsibility.\n\nBut Mr Gething said the \"onus\" for getting shoppers to follow Covid-19 rules, such as wearing masks, social-distancing and cordoning off non-essential items, was on the supermarket managers.\n\n\"[It needs to be made] clear that you do need to wear a mask unless you can demonstrate that you have a particular exemption,\" he said.\n\n\"I don't think there's any lack of understanding. We've been through this before and I do think a number of supermarkets are going to go and make clear there are a range of items that are off-limits for shoppers coming in.\n\n\"Supermarkets understand what they need to do.\"", "London's Nightingale hospital was built in nine days, with the help of hundreds of soldiers\n\nLondon's Nightingale hospital has been reopened and is admitting patients to help with the coronavirus spread in the capital.\n\nMedical director Dr Vin Diwakar said the facility at London's ExCeL Centre also had a vaccination centre on site.\n\nIt was placed on standby in May after fewer than 20 patients were treated following a grand opening on 3 April.\n\nDr Diwakar said the Nightingale was being used to treat non-coronavirus patients.\n\nIn the Downing Street press conference, he explained it was taking non-Covid patients to help free up beds in London's hospitals.\n\nHe said: \"This means that hospitals have more beds to care for Covid-19 patients and for our very sickest patients. We cannot do this indefinitely.\n\n\"There comes a point where if the infection gets further out of control, more and more patients from London will need to be transferred elsewhere.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What does it mean if the NHS is overwhelmed?\n\nAt the start of November, he said, London had 1,000 Covid-19 patients.\n\nThis increased four-fold to 4,000 on Christmas Day and has doubled to just under 8,000 today, with more than 1,000 of those on critical care, he told the press conference.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by BBC News (UK) This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nBut Dr Diwakar said there was \"hope\", with one hall of the ExCel Centre having opened as London's first mass vaccination centre.\n\n\"I can tell you Covid-19 is a horrible, horrible disease that leaves so many, including young people, breathless and gasping for life,\" he said.\n\nOn Friday, the Mayor of London declared a \"major incident\" as he described the coronavirus spread in the capital as \"out of control\".\n\nMore than 120 firefighters and 75 Met Police officers have been drafted in to help the London Ambulance Service cope with demand.", "The data showed men were more likely to be admitted to intensive care units\n\nAround half of patients admitted to Welsh intensive care units during the second wave of the pandemic have died, a study has found.\n\nThe Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC) found men aged in their 60s were more likely to need intensive care.\n\nIt also found those from Asian backgrounds and deprived areas were disproportionately affected.\n\nBut a leading doctor said, overall, people were more likely to survive now.\n\nIntensive care consultant Matt Morgan said new treatments meant only the sickest patients were reaching intensive care, where outcomes were poorer.\n\nICNARC collected information on 431 Welsh patients who were critically ill with coronavirus from 1 September to 31 December 2020 as part of a UK-wide audit of intensive care patients.\n\nOf the patients who were admitted, 68% were men and 32% women. The average age of a patient was 59.5 years.\n\nIntensive care consultant Matt Morgan said, overall, patients were more likely to survive Covid now\n\nWhile the vast majority of patients were white (91.6%), the number of patients of Asian ethnicity was more than double the proportion of the Asian population, with 6.3% of patients recorded as being Asian, compared to an average of 2.4% in their local population.\n\nThe audit of patients found that, excluding those still being treated at the unit, half had died while half had been discharged.\n\nAlthough the numbers of patients surveyed is relatively low for statistical purposes, Dr Morgan said the survival rate reflected the situation in hospitals.\n\n\"We are putting fewer people, who are in the first stage of their illness, on to life support machines. And that is because we have treatments now that we know can help,\" he said.\n\n\"Overall, you are more likely now to survive Covid than ever before, and that is in every age group - sometimes by as much as 10% more.\n\n\"What we do know is that overall, out of every ten people who come to intensive care with Covid about six of them will survive and will leave the intensive care unit. Which means sadly four of them won't, four of them will die.\n\n\"That's similar overall to the first wave but that data is based on some patients who are still in the intensive care unit. So that may change and it's more likely to get worse rather than better.\"\n\n\"We also know patients who are on life support machines in the intensive care unit will do worse than those who come to the intensive care unit and are not on life support machines.\n\n\"For those people, it's probably five out of 10 people who will survive and five who will sadly die and that may be worse when we have the data on those who are still there.\n\n\"And there's a big effect of age. So for those over the age of 70 it may be as little as four people out of 10 who survive, maybe less. And for those over the age of 80 it may be as low as one or two people out of ten who survive.\n\nThe figures from ICNARC also highlight how people from poorer backgrounds were more likely to need treatment in intensive care.\n\nUsing a deprivation score from 1 to 5, more than half of patients scored 4 or 5, representing the most deprived postcodes in Wales.\n\nDr Morgan said: \"Sadly, disease is an illness of deprivation.\n\n\"And so that's why we feel it, particularly in Wales where the industrial scars of our past are still very much there - and our health is there.\"", "The men were arrested on suspicion of causing a public nuisance at hospitals in Birmingham and Worcestershire\n\nFour men have been arrested on suspicion of causing a public nuisance at hospitals in the West Midlands.\n\nThe men, aged between 31 and 37, were held in relation to incidents in Birmingham and Worcestershire between 31 December and 9 January.\n\nEarlier this month, police said they were investigating after people posted videos of supposedly empty hospital corridors on social media.\n\nThe videos claiming Covid-19 was a hoax sparked an outcry from medical workers.\n\nWest Mercia Police launched a joint investigation with West Midlands Police, after incidents were reported at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital and the Alexandra in Redditch.\n\nHospitals in Worcester and Kidderminster also featured, before the footage was deleted.\n\nThe West Mercia force confirmed it had arrested two men from Bromsgrove aged 31 and 34 as well as a 37 year-old man from Kidderminster and a fourth man, aged 34, from Droitwich.\n\nThey were also detained relating to incidents in a park in Bromsgrove as well as the town centre.\n\nAll four men have since been bailed with conditions not to enter any hospital in England unless they have a medical reason to do so.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Birmingham has one of the largest intensive care capacities in the whole country\n\nTwo hundred doctors will be redeployed to one of England's largest intensive care units amid fears it could be \"overwhelmed\".\n\nA leaked memo warned hospitals in Birmingham were \"in a position of extremis\" as Covid-19 cases rise.\n\nElective surgeries at the city's main Queen Elizabeth Hospital will stop as staff move to critical care duties.\n\nA spokesperson said the approach ensured \"the greatest good for the greatest numbers of people\".\n\nThe trust's decision to redeploy doctors was revealed in a leaked email to the Health Service Journal, which has been verified by the BBC.\n\nSent by consultant Peter Hewins, it said hospitals in Birmingham risked being \"overwhelmed\" amid a \"period of absolute emergency\".\n\nThe University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) said there were 873 patients with Covid-19 across its sites, with 125 in intensive care.\n\nThis was significantly more than in April 2020, it said, as it announced plans to double its intensive care capacity to more than 250 beds.\n\nTime-critical surgery, including cancer operations, will continue, the trust said, but elective procedures at the Queen Elizabeth will be paused, and reduced elsewhere.\n\nThere will also be a \"further reduction of outpatient activity\", a spokesperson said, adding: \"Every member of staff will be supported by the Trust in delivering the best care wherever they are working.\"\n\nThere are currently 873 Covid-19 patients being treated at the trust\n\nNeighbouring University Coventry and Warwickshire Hospitals Trust confirmed it had started taking Covid patients from Birmingham.\n\nUniversity Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) is one of the largest teaching hospital trusts in England.\n\nIt runs several hospitals, including Birmingham Heartlands, the Queen Elizabeth, Solihull Hospital and Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield. It also runs Birmingham Chest Clinic.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Boris Johnson - pictured here in 2013 - has long been a fan of cycling\n\nBoris Johnson has been criticised for travelling seven miles from Downing Street to go cycling during lockdown.\n\nThe Evening Standard reported the prime minister had been spotted in the Olympic Park in East London on Sunday.\n\nGovernment advice allows people to exercise outside, but says you should not travel outside your local area.\n\nA No 10 spokesman would not confirm if Mr Johnson had been driven to the park or cycled there, but said the PM had complied with Covid-19 guidelines.\n\nLabour's Andy Slaughter said: \"Once again it is do as I say, not as I do, from the prime minister.\"\n\nThe Hammersmith MP added: \"London has some of the highest infection rates in the country. Boris Johnson should be leading by example.\"\n\nIn response to the criticism, a Downing Street source told the BBC: \"The PM has exercised within the Covid rules and any suggestion to the contrary is wrong.\"\n\nA woman told the PA news agency she had seen the prime minister in the park: \"He was leisurely cycling with another guy with a beanie hat and chatting, while around four security guys, possibly more, cycled behind them.\n\n\"Considering the current situation with Covid I was shocked to see him cycling around looking so care-free.\n\n\"Also, considering he's advising everyone to stay at home and not leave their area, shouldn't he stay in Westminster and not travel to other boroughs?\"\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock was asked at Monday's Downing Street press conference whether travelling seven miles for a cycle ride was within the rules.\n\nMr Hancock said: \"It is OK, if you went for a long walk and ended up seven miles from home, that is OK, but you should stay local.\n\n\"It is OK to go for a long walk or a cycle ride or to exercise, but stay local.\"\n\nThe issue of travelling for exercise was highlighted at the weekend after two women said they were surrounded by police and fine £200 after driving five miles from home to take a walk.\n\nDerbyshire Police have now dropped the fine and apologised to the women, but the incident led to a debate over the guidance.\n\nGovernment advice for England says you can leave your home to exercise, but adds: \"This should be limited to once per day, and you should not travel outside your local area.\"\n\nThe guidance adds: \"Stay local means stay in the village, town, or part of the city where you live.\"\n\nIn Scotland, the advice is more precise, saying exercise can be taken if it \"starts and finishes at the same place, which can be up to five miles from the boundary of your local authority area\".\n\nFormer Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, who represents a constituency in the Lake District, has written to the PM calling for clearer guidance on exercise similar to that in Scotland.\n\nHe wrote: \"On the one hand, our local police force here in Cumbria are reporting that people... have travelled hundreds of miles to take their exercise in the Lake District.\n\n\"And on the other hand, I have constituents writing to me, worried whether they will be punished for driving five minutes up the road to go for a walk in their local park.\"\n\nMr Farron added: \"We need a solution that clearly deters people from making lengthy trips and potentially spreading the virus, but also that doesn't discourage people from keeping fit and healthy.\"", "Retailers suffered their worst annual sales performance on record in 2020, driven by slump in demand for fashion and homeware products, figures show.\n\nWhile food sales growth rose 5.4% on 2019, non-food fell about 5%, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) said.\n\nIt meant an overall fall of 0.3% in a year dominated by the Covid-19 impact, the worst annual change since the BRC began collating the figures in 1995.\n\nChristmas offered little cheer, with much of the High Street still closed.\n\n\"Physical non-food stores, including all of non-essential retail, saw sales drop by a quarter compared with 2019,\" said Helen Dickinson, BRC chief executive.\n\n\"Christmas offered little respite for these retailers, as many shops were forced to shut during the peak trading period,\" she said.\n\nThe 5.4% rise in food sales was fuelled by shoppers flocking to supermarkets and online grocers to ensure they were stocked up during the pandemic.\n\nIn December, total retail sales increased by 1.8% as shoppers spent more in the run-up to Christmas. Like-for-like sales for the month were up 4.8% as overall shop takings were still affected by restrictions and temporary closures.\n\nOnline non-food sales jumped by 44.8% in December, according to the new figures, as a higher proportion of shopping took place online.\n\nThe BRC's sales monitor is collated with the consultancy KPMG, whose UK head of retail, Paul Martin, said: \"In the most important month for the retail industry, there was some positive growth due to the ongoing shift of expenditure from other categories such as travel and leisure.\n\n\"Once again we saw big swings in the types of products being purchased and the channels used for shopping, with much of the growth taking place online, where nearly half of all non-food purchases were made.\"\n\nBut he warned that the new lockdown would worsen conditions for many non-essential shops and the High Street generally.\n\nLast week, a report from the Centre for Retail Research (CRR) said that 2020 was the worst for High Street job losses in more than 25 years, as the coronavirus accelerated the move towards online shopping.\n\nNearly 180,000 retail jobs were lost last year, up by almost a quarter from 2019, the CRR said.", "The Covid pandemic has caused excess deaths to rise to their highest level in the UK since World War Two.\n\nThere were close to 697,000 deaths in 2020 - nearly 85,000 more than would be expected based on the average in the previous five years.\n\nThis represents an increase of 14% - making it the largest rise in excess deaths for more than 75 years.\n\nWhen the age and size of the population is taken into account, 2020 saw the worst death rates since the 2000s.\n\nThis measure - known as age-standardised mortality - takes into account population growth and age.\n\nThe data is only available until November - so the impact of deaths in December have not yet been taken into account - but it shows the death rate at that stage was at its highest in England since 2008.\n\nThe data on deaths can be confusing.\n\nOn one hand, excess deaths are at their highest since World War Two, while on the other, death rates, once age and size of population are taken into account, are at their worst level for a little over a decade 'only'.\n\nHow should that be interpreted?\n\nExcess deaths are basically a measure of how many more people are dying than would be expected based on the previous few years.\n\nClearly, 2020 saw a huge and unexpected rise in deaths because of the pandemic, just as World War Two led to a sudden jump.\n\nBut in determining how much those jumps affected the chances of dying, a measure known as age-standardised mortality, which takes into account the age and size of the population, is important.\n\nIt shows the pandemic has undone the progress made in the last decade or so. That is significant - especially given this has happened despite lockdowns and social-distancing measures to stop the spread of the virus.\n\nBut it also helps put the death toll over the past 12 months in a wider context.\n\nKing's Fund chief executive Richard Murray said the picture was likely to worsen, given Covid deaths were rising following the surge in infections over recent weeks.\n\n\"The UK has one of the highest rates of excess deaths in the world, with more excess deaths per million people than most other European countries or the US,\" he said.\n\n'It will take a public inquiry to determine exactly what went wrong, but mistakes have been made.\n\n\"In a pandemic, mistakes cost lives. Decisions to enter lockdown have consistently come late, with the government failing to learn from past mistakes or the experiences of other countries.\n\n\"The promised 'protective ring' around social care in the first wave was slow to materialise and often inadequate, a contributing factor to the excess deaths among care home residents last year.\n\n'Like many countries, the UK was poorly prepared for this type of pandemic.\"\n\nMatthew Reed, of the end-of-life care charity Marie Curie said the focus on Covid should not hide the fact there has been a \"silent crisis\" of deaths at home.\n\nHe said people have died prematurely in 2020 from other causes - with a big jump in deaths at home.\n\n\"We are concerned many have not had the care they needed,\" he added.\n• None Lockdown needs to be stricter, scientists warn", "Officer Eugene Goodman is being celebrated for his heroics\n\nCapitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman is being called a hero for a second time after footage shown at the impeachment trial shows him directing Mitt Romney away from an advancing mob.\n\nIn the video, the officer is seen notifying Mr Romney that the rioters were heading in his direction and guiding him away.\n\nThe Utah senator, an unpopular figure among Trump supporters, said he looked forward to thanking the police officer for his actions.\n\nOfficer Goodman was already being praised for his bravery that day, after singlehandedly steering a mob away from the Senate chambers.\n\nVideo footage showed him just steps ahead of rioters as they chase him up a flight of stairs.\n\nMr Goodman is then seen glancing towards the Senate entrance before luring the men in the opposite direction.\n\nFive people, including a police officer, died as a result of the riots.\n\nThe officer was seen confronting a pro-Trump rioter during the attack\n\nMembers of the 2,000-person Capitol police department are tasked with protecting the Capitol building and those inside, it.\n\nA group of senators has introduced a bill to award Officer Goodman with the Congressional Gold Medal.\n\nNews of his additional heroics involving Senator Romney will only amplify calls for him to be recognised.\n\nThe senator said he was unaware of the danger he was in until he saw the footage at the trial on Wednesday.\n\nSenator Mitt Romney said he was looking forward to thanking Officer Goodman\n\nIt formed part of the Democratic prosecution in trying to underline the peril the heart of US government was under as Trump supporters ransacked the Capitol.\n\nSenator Romney said it was \"overwhelmingly distressing and emotional\" to see the violence again, six weeks after the attack.\n\nAnd reflecting on his own narrow escape, he added he was looking forward to thanking Officer Goodman \"when I next see him\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. See how close the mob got to Mike Pence, Mitt Romney and other lawmakers\n\nNew York Law School criminal law professor and 20-year veteran of the New York City Police Department Kirk Burkhalter called Mr Goodman's response to the rioters \"tremendous\".\n\n\"I don't think there was any type of training that would prepare you for that situation,\" Mr Burkhalter told the BBC, speaking days after the attack.\n\nIn the video shot by Huffington Post reporter Igor Bobic, Mr Goodman, who is black, is antagonised by the group of Trump supporters - who are all white men.\n\nThe man at the front of the pack, wearing a QAnon T-shirt, has been identified as Doug Jensen of Iowa. He was later arrested by local police and the FBI for his role in the riots.\n\nFootage shows Mr Jensen leading the mob that chased Mr Goodman up a flight of stairs - just a few feet away from the entrance to the Senate floor. As he is pursued, Mr Goodman shouts \"second floor!\" into his radio, seemingly alerting other officers of the group approaching the chamber.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Igor Bobic This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAfter Mr Goodman glances toward the Senate chamber entrance, he shoves Mr Jensen - a move seemingly designed to draw attention on to himself, luring the mob away from the chambers and those hiding inside.\n\nThe image of Mr Goodman trailed by a mob - some armed with Confederate flags, others with allusions to the Nazi flag - was extremely disturbing, Mr Burkhalter said.\n\n\"Police officer, not a police officer, to see a black man being chased by someone carrying a Confederate flag - there is something wrong with that picture. That should never happen again,\" he said.\n\n\"It just reeks of everything we need to correct.\"\n\nMr Goodman's standoff with the mob came just minutes before authorities were able to seal the chamber, according to reporting from the Washington Post.\n\nHis heroics were noted at the highest level - he was invited to the inauguration as a guest of Vice-President Kamala Harris.", "Naomi Campbell and Kenyan Tourism Minister Najib Balala sealed the deal over the weekend\n\nThe appointment of British supermodel Naomi Campbell as Kenya's tourism ambassador has caused a Twitter storm in the East African nation.\n\nMany queried why it had not been given to a prominent Kenyan like Hollywood actress Lupita Nyong'o.\n\nOthers leapt to her defence, saying the debate already justified her role.\n\nKenya's tourism sector has been badly hit by coronavirus, with visitor numbers down by 72% between January and October last year.\n\n\"The sector hence lost over 110bn Kenyan shillings [$1bn, £738m] of direct international tourists' revenue due to the Covid-19 pandemic,\" Kenya's Tourism Research Institute reported last month.\n\nThe country is famous for its wildlife safaris and beach resorts.\n\nKenyan Tourism Minister Najib Balala said the deal with Ms Campbell was done over the weekend after he met the model, who is currently on holiday in Kenya.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Ministry of Tourism & Wildlife-Kenya This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by Ministry of Tourism & Wildlife-Kenya\n\nThe 50-year-old style icon and philanthropist has been posting images of her stay on Instagram, where she has 10 million followers.\n\n\"We welcome the exciting news that Naomi Campbell will advocate for tourism and travel internationally for the Magical Kenya brand,\" Mr Balala said, without giving further deals of the contract.\n\nBut the statement, posted on Twitter on Tuesday, prompted instant outrage from some, and the supermodel's name has since been trending in the country.\n\nOne tweeter cited other Kenyan celebrities better suited to the ambassadorial role, including models Ajuma Nasenyana and Debra Sanaipei, as well as Nyong'o.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Syombua A. Kibue 🇰🇪 This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nOne tweeter said the backlash revealed an unhealthy attitude in Kenya: \"At the end of the day, it's all about who will get the job done. This mentality is what causes nepotism and tribalism in Kenyan institutions, it should be about the most suitable candidate not 'one of our own' thing.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMs Campbell's defenders praised her for visiting Kenya several times and said it was not only the model's social media following that made her the perfect appointment.\n\nHer circle of friends were equally important as she would attract wealthy tourists willing to spend money.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Mlolwa🐬 This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe tourism industry usually contributes about 8.8% to Kenya's annual Gross domestic product (GDP), according to Kenya's East African newspaper.\n• None The supermodel and the warlord", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Tuesday morning. We'll have another update for you at 18:00 BST.\n\nPolice patrols were stepped up around the Scotland-England border around Christmas\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. How to wear your mask. Hint: it's not any of these three options\n\nSo many of us are spending more time staring at a screen right now and an eye health charity is recommending we learn the \"20-20-20\" rule to protect our sight. Fight for Sight advises looking at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds, every 20 minutes you're working at a screen, in order to reduce eye strain. The charity also commissioned a survey of 2,000 people which found more than a third believed their eyesight had worsened in the past year. It says the number of us getting regular eye tests is also down and is urging people not to miss their appointments.\n\nIt sadly comes as no surprise to learn that 2020 was the worst year on record for UK retailers, especially those focused on clothing and homeware. Food bucked the trend, particularly over Christmas, with the highest ever festive spending on groceries. But overall, retail sales declined by 0.3% across the year, and non-food by nearly a quarter, the biggest annual dip since the British Retail Consortium began collating the figures in 1995. The BRC says many retailers are struggling to survive and the government should extend the business rates holiday to save jobs.\n\nA father who'd campaigned for a change in the coronavirus rules to make life easier for non-resident parents to see their children has welcomed a government rethink. Previously, parents could visit children they don't live with during lockdown, but restrictions prevented them from staying overnight in a hotel. Ex-BBC journalist Tom De Castella said the ban \"had a massive bearing on seeing my daughter\", who lives a three-and-a-half hour drive away from his home. Now the rules have been rewritten, he's relieved. \"This is about building a bond with your child, it's crucial to their development,\" he added.\n\nTom De Castella said the rethink was \"great news\" for parents like him\n\nFind more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nPlus, three vaccines are now approved for use in the UK, but there are many differences between them. BBC health correspondent Laura Foster explains.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "Lockdown rule-breakers are more likely to be fined as Covid laws will be enforced \"more quickly\", the UK's most senior police officer has said.\n\nLondon's Metropolitan Police commissioner Dame Cressida Dick said her officers have had to break up parties, despite hospitals struggling to cope with rising patient numbers.\n\nA minister confirmed her pledge that fines were \"increasingly likely\".\n\nKit Malthouse said people have a \"duty\" to make this lockdown \"the last one\".\n\n\"We are urging the small minority of people who aren't taking this seriously to do so now, and [are illustrating] to them that if they don't they are much more likely to get fined by the police,\" Mr Malthouse, the policing minister, told BBC Breakfast.\n\n\"These current measures should in theory, if we all stick by them, be enough to drive the numbers down so that we can start to move through the gears of tiers from mid-February,\" he added.\n\nAsked if tighter restrictions for England were on the way - something the health secretary has refused to rule out - Mr Malthouse said ministers were \"on tenterhooks\" watching the daily figures for Covid deaths, new cases and hospital admissions, as rules continue to be kept under review.\n\nHe said the government's ramped-up efforts to give vulnerable people the coronavirus vaccine should help the UK to \"get back to some sort of normality later this year\".\n\nThe BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg said there was currently no expectation that Westminster will impose more extensive restrictions.\n\nScotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she discussed possible tighter restrictions with members of her cabinet on Tuesday morning.\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel and chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council, Martin Hewitt, will hold a coronavirus press conference at Downing Street later.\n\nThe latest figures on Monday showed a further 529 people had died within 28 days of a positive test in the UK, while another 46,169 cases were reported.\n\nThere are also more than 32,200 people in hospital in the UK with coronavirus, data shows.\n\nDame Cressida told BBC Radio 4's Today programme some 75 police officers are joining 185 firefighters in being trained to drive ambulances in the capital, to help London Ambulance Service as the number of cases of the virus continues to rise.\n\nAnd writing in the Times, she said her officers had found people hosting raves, house parties and basement gambling events, despite clear laws that ban social gatherings.\n\n\"It is preposterous to me that anyone could be unaware of our duty to do all we can to stop the spread of the virus,\" she said, adding that people breaking Covid laws were \"increasingly likely to face fines\".\n\nPolice chiefs in other parts of England have also warned \"patience is running out\" with rule-breakers, with the public increasingly willing to report alleged rule breaches.\n\nSince March, some 32,000 penalties for breaching Covid laws have been issued in England and Wales - with a sharp rise in penalties during England's November lockdown.\n\nAlmost 6,500 penalty tickets were handed out in the weeks up to Christmas as police began moving more quickly from \"engage\", \"explain\" and \"encourage\" to the fourth \"e\" - \"enforcement\".\n\nExpect the rate of fines to continue upwards during January, given the scale of the emergency and the pressure from government on constabularies to enforce the law.\n\nBut there is also a tension here. Police chiefs have told their officers they will often have to use their own judgement because the list of \"reasonable excuses\" in the law for why someone can be outside is not fixed in stone.\n\nThere is a lot of wriggle room in the law to allow daily lives to continue.\n\nWhile ministers, scientists and health experts are all hammering home the message that people should stay at home as much as possible, the law is more liberal - for instance, there is no restriction on exercise in England.\n\nAnd that's why some police officers believe they are stuck between a rock and a hard place as people who don't want to be locked down find more and more creative ways to stretch the rules to breaking point.\n\nFines start at £200 in England and Northern Ireland, and £60 in Wales and Scotland. Large parties can be shut down by the police, with fines of up to £10,000.\n\nDame Cressida told the Today programme the move towards greater enforcement was \"common sense\" rather than a show of \"dictatorial policing\".\n\nShe also said Prime Minister Boris Johnson's cycle in east London at the weekend was \"not against the law\", but added the \"stay local\" guidance on exercise for England could be made more clear.\n\nUnder Scotland's lockdown restrictions, people must start and finish their exercise in the same place - and to do so, they may travel up to five miles from the boundary of their local authority area. People in Wales should start and finish exercising from their home, while those in Northern Ireland are advised not to go more than 10 miles from home when exercising.\n\nAsked if she would like to see similar detail in England's guidance, Dame Cressida said: \"That is certainly something the government could consider.\n\n\"Anything that brings greater clarity, for officers and the public, in general, will be a good thing.\"\n\nDame Cressida also said she was delighted that a proposal to prioritise frontline officers for vaccines was being discussed\n\nPolice chiefs have been under increasing pressure to enforce the lockdown laws - with a number of news reports about breaches of Covid rules in recent days.\n\nIn one case, Derbyshire Police withdrew penalties for two women who had been fined £200 each when they drove five miles for a walk together - following widespread media attention.\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel has defended the way police have handled breaches, saying there is a need for \"strong enforcement\".\n\nFour people were arrested in Edinburgh on Monday after anti-lockdown protesters clashed with police\n\nEngland is currently under a national lockdown, meaning people must stay at home and can go out only for limited reasons such as food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home.\n\nSimilar lockdown measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - which are in charge of making their own coronavirus restrictions.\n\nIn her article, Dame Cressida said she was \"delighted to hear\" that a proposal to prioritise frontline officers to get vaccinated was being \"actively discussed\", as the rate of officers self-isolating has risen.\n\nSo far 2.3 million people in the UK have had a first dose of the coronavirus vaccine, as part of the government's plan to vaccinate tens of millions of people by the spring.\n\nDefence Secretary Ben Wallace said members of the armed forces were working \"hand in hand with the NHS\" to help with the response to the UK's epidemic.\n\nSome 5,300 members of the armed forces are currently involved in the Covid response including personnel to help with vaccinations and community testing across the UK, he said.", "Rules governing the import of personal goods from the UK to the EU changed after Brexit formally came into effect\n\nA Dutch TV network has filmed border officials confiscating ham sandwiches and other foods from drivers arriving in the Netherlands from the UK, under post-Brexit rules.\n\nThe officials were shown explaining import regulations imposed since the UK formalised its separation from the EU.\n\nUnder EU rules, travellers from outside the bloc are banned from bringing in meat and dairy products.\n\nThe rules appeared to bemuse one driver.\n\n\"Since Brexit, you are no longer allowed to bring certain foods to Europe, like meat, fruit, vegetables, fish, that kind of stuff,\" a Dutch border official told the driver in footage broadcast by TV network NPO 1.\n\nIn one scene, a border official asked the driver whether several of his tin-foil wrapped sandwiches had meat in them.\n\nWhen the driver said they did, the border official said: \"Okay, so we take them all.\"\n\nSurprised, the driver then asked the officials if he could keep the bread, to which one replied: \"No, everything will be confiscated - welcome to the Brexit, sir. I'm sorry.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe UK officially finished its formal separation from the EU on 31 December, 2020.\n\nFrom 23:00 GMT on that date, the UK stopped following EU rules, with new arrangements for travel, trade, immigration and security co-operation coming into force.\n\nA trade deal with the EU was agreed on 24 December, and a week later, UK lawmakers voted in favour of the agreement.\n\nThe UK's departure means big changes for business - with the UK and EU forming two separate markets - the end of free movement, and new regulations, including those governing the import of personal goods.\n\nThe UK government has issued guidance to commercial drivers travelling to the EU, warning them to \"be aware of additional restrictions to personal imports\".\n\n\"You cannot bring POAO (products of an animal origin) such as those containing meat or dairy (e.g. a ham and cheese sandwich) into the EU,\" the guidance says. \"There are exceptions to this rule for certain quantities of powdered infant milk, infant food, special foods, or special processed pet feed.\"\n\nOn its website, the European Commission says the ban is necessary because such goods \"continue to present a real threat to animal health throughout the Union\".\n\n\"It is known, for example, that dangerous pathogens that cause animal diseases such as Foot and Mouth Disease and classical swine fever can reside in meat, milk or their products,\" the Commission says.\n\nSeparately, the Dutch customs agency shared a picture of foodstuffs it had confiscated from motorists in the ferry terminal the Hook of Holland.\n\n\"Since 1 January, you can't just bring more food from the UK,\" the agency said. \"So prepare yourself if you travel to the Netherlands from the UK and spread the word. This is how we prevent food waste and together ensure that the controls are speeded up.\"\n\nThe BBC's economics editor Faisal Islam described the confiscation of ham sandwiches and other foodstuffs at the EU's borders with the UK as \"a standard implication of [the] Brexit deal\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Faisal Islam This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The NHS Louisa Jordan was built in two weeks in April response to concerns over hospital capacity\n\nA shortage of NHS staff could prevent the opening of the NHS Louisa Jordan to Covid patients if capacity is exceeded elsewhere, a leading doctor has said.\n\nPresident of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, Prof Mike Griffin, said the increasing numbers off work was a \"major problem\".\n\nThe Scottish government says the NHS is not being \"overwhelmed\" and staffing plans are in place to deal with demand.\n\nThe NHS Louisa Jordan is currently being used for outpatient services.\n\nThe temporary hospital at the SEC in Glasgow was set up in April in response to concerns over hospital capacity.\n\nIt was not used for Covid care during the first surge of the pandemic and has since been made available for outpatient services, such as orthopaedics, plastic surgery and dermatology.\n\nIt is also being used for Covid vaccinations.\n\nProf Mike Griffin told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme that the pressure on the NHS workforce was particularly acute in the west of Scotland, where the number of cases was high.\n\n\"Particularly in Glasgow and Lanarkshire, there's been significant increases recently because of the new variant. Without any doubt, that new variant is increasing transmissibility, and therefore increasing infection rates and increasing hospital admissions,\" he said.\n\n\"But it's not just the admissions that's the problem. Our doctors, surgeons, nurses and everyone are really working extremely hard - but there is an increase in absenteeism because of illness and because of self-isolation amongst nursing staff.\"\n\nTwo of Scotland's health boards - NHS Ayrshire and Arran and NHS Lanarkshire - are currently over their capacity for Covid patients.\n\nNHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde has reached 85% capacity and NHS Tayside is at 81% capacity, according to the latest Scottish government figures.\n\nThe NHS Louisa Jordan has capacity for 1,000 Covid patients if it is needed, but Prof Griffin said that using it as a Covid facility could be dependent on retired or former staff returning to work for NHS Scotland.\n\n\"Opening the Louisa Jordan as a Covid institution without staff is impossible,\" he said.\n\n\"It is equipped to be able to do it. And if the staffing is there, if we get returners and so on, then perhaps that might happen.\"\n\nThe number of Covid patients in hospital across Scotland is now higher than it was in April, although the numbers in intensive care are lower.\n\nNumbers initially appeared to be declining in November, but never reached low levels and began to climb sharply again at the end of the year.\n\nProf Griffin added that it was likely that better treatments for Covid patients were also reducing mortality and so keeping those patients in hospital for longer.\n\nNHS Scotland has an overall capacity for 13,000 beds, with 2,400 assigned to Covid patients.\n\nThis is down from a capacity of about 3,600 in the autumn because of additional seasonal pressures on the NHS, including weather-related issues and increased staff absence.\n\nScotland's national clinical director, Prof Jason Leitch, accepted that having around 1,500 patients in hospital with Covid had forced the cancellation of procedures such as cataract operations and hip replacements.\n\nBut he said that ability to \"flex\" within the system meant that the NHS remained within capacity.\n\nProf Leitch also pointed to the situation in England where there have been reports of limits being put on the amount of oxygen that patients can receive and some intensive care patients having to be treated in non-ICU beds.\n\nSpeaking at the first minister's coronavirus briefing, he said: \"People shouldn't be scared that the health service is full or overwhelmed - it isn't.\n\n\"It is fragile, and you just have to look a few hundred miles south to see what happens when it is even more fragile.\n\n\"So we need to avoid that as much as we can in Scotland.\"", "The Northern Lights from Munlochy on the Black Isle in the Highlands\n\nDisplays of the Aurora Borealis were visible from north and north east Scotland overnight.\n\nAlso known as the Northern Lights, the aurora appear as shimmering waves of light when atoms in the Earth's high-altitude atmosphere collide with energetic charged particles from the sun.\n\nBBC Weather Watchers photographed the \"lights\" from Shetland, the Highlands and Moray.\n\nBrae, Shetland, was among the vantage points for observing the aurora overnight on Monday into Tuesday\n\nA view of the aurora from Hopeman on the Moray Firth coast\n\nA colourful scene at Nairn on the Highlands' Moray Firth coast\n\nThe aurora from Glenelg in the west Highlands\n\nThis stunning image was captured at Durness by Andy Walker\n\nClear skies over Moray offered opportunities to see the lights, including from Elgin\n\nFreck Fraser's image of the aurora from a snowy Belladrum near Beauly\n\nThe green glow of the aurora from Portmahomack in the Highlands\n\nAnother image of the aurora from Brae in Shetland\n\nBright lights of the aurora from Uig in the Highlands", "Meddyg Care Dementia Home was due to receive vaccinations last week\n\nA care home manager is \"frightened\" for the residents after its delivery of Covid vaccinations failed to arrive.\n\nLorna Jones said Meddyg Care Dementia Home in Criccieth, Gwynedd, was due to have a delivery of the new Oxford-AstraZeneca jab a week ago.\n\nHowever the vaccine has not arrived amid claims other people in the area have already had the jab.\n\nBetsi Cadwaladr University Health Board admitted there had been \"logistical problems\" in north west Wales.\n\nThe health board insisted it is \"committed\" to vaccinating those most vulnerable.\n\nOn Monday, it was announced that all over-50s in Wales are to be offered jab by spring, after criticism the rollout of the vaccine in Wales has been slower than in other parts of the UK.\n\nWith family visits suspended, the care home has not recorded a single Covid-19 case and a phone call on New Year's Eve to say it was to receive the vaccine was met with \"glee and happiness\".\n\nUnder the Welsh Government's vaccination rollout plan, care home residents and staff are first in line to get the immunisation - or priority one - ahead of elderly people within communities across Wales.\n\nHowever the vaccine has not arrived while, the home claimed, local GP surgeries have been administering the vaccine to over 80s in the community.\n\nLorna Jones is demanding answers as to why the vaccine has not arrived\n\nMs Jones said: \"I can't understand why Betsi Cadwaladr have veered away from the priority list.\n\n\"It's very clear. If there are vaccines coming into the local community, which there are, why have our residents not been vaccinated?\n\n\"I know some care homes have had it in Caernarfon, so why haven't we. What's the difference?\"\n\nMs Jones said the delay is causing concern among staff, residents and families.\n\n\"I'm frightened for our residents. I'm getting a lot of contact from families and I just can't give them anything,\" she said.\n\nThe home's owner said he had now taken matters into his own hands.\n\nKevin Edwards, managing director of Meddyg Care, said he had spent hours ringing around GP surgeries \"begging\" for spare vaccines.\n\nHe said the residents would now be vaccinated on Tuesday.\n\n\"We're a specialist dementia home, you can't just turn up one day and give the vaccine to the residents, there needs to be an element of preparation,\" he told BBC Radio Wales.\n\nBetsi Cadwaladr health board said it was working to ensure those with the highest priority are vaccinated.\n\nTeresa Owen, the health board's executive director of public health, said: \"Last week we vaccinated nearly 10,000 people in north Wales.\n\n\"This week, staff from primary care practices will be going into the local nursing and residential homes to administer the Oxford-Astra Zeneca vaccination to residents.\n\n\"The initial supply of vaccinations to the west of BCUHB has caused some logistical problems with commencing this programme, but vaccines have now been allocated for all the nursing and residential homes in the locality.\"", "Boris Johnson - pictured here in 2013 - is a keen cyclist\n\nDowning Street has defended Boris Johnson for riding his bicycle seven miles from home, saying he complied with Covid rules during his trip.\n\nLabour accused the prime minister of having double standards, after it was reported he had been spotted in the saddle at east London's Olympic Park.\n\nGovernment guidance says daily outdoor exercise is allowed but people should not travel outside their local area.\n\nThe PM's spokesman said any suggestion he had broken the rules was \"wrong\".\n\nBut he did not confirm whether Mr Johnson had been driven to the Olympic Park from Downing Street or cycled there.\n\nMetropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the trip had not been \"against the law - that's for sure\".\n\nPeople should go for exercise \"from your front door and come back to your front door\", she said, adding: \"That's my view of local.\"\n\nThe prime minister's press secretary said the Commissioner's words were \"wise\".\n\n\"The instruction is to stay local and for her a reasonable interpretation was to exercise from their front door but for some people it's more complicated. Everyone needs to exercise their own judgement\", she added.\n\nThe Evening Standard reported that the prime minister had been seen in the Olympic Park, with his security detail, on Sunday.\n\nThere's nothing in English lockdown law that says Boris Johnson shouldn't have pedalled around London's Olympic park on Sunday, seven miles from Downing Street.\n\nBut this comes at a time when the government is desperately pleading with people to take Covid-19 seriously and follow the rules.\n\nIn England that means leaving home only for essential work, shopping and exercise. The guidance also says \"stay local\" without defining how far people can roam.\n\nTravel for exercise is allowed \"a short distance within your area\" to access an open space.\n\nNumber 10 will insist that's precisely what Mr Johnson did.\n\nBut his ride highlights the problem everyone faces trying to interpret rules, and relying on people using common sense.\n\nThe outing certainly doesn't help ministers straining to tell the public - in clear, consistent, easy-to-understand terms - to stay at home.\n\nAndy Slaughter, Labour MP for Hammersmith, west London, criticised the prime minister for having a \"do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do\" attitude.\n\nSpeaking to Today, Policing Minister Kit Malthouse said: \"What we are asking people to do is when they exercise to stay local.\n\n\"Now local is, obviously, open to interpretation, but people broadly know what local means.\n\n\"If you can get there under your own steam and you are not interacting with somebody... then that seems perfectly reasonable to me.\"\n\nThe PM's official spokesman added: \"We have always trusted the public to exercise good judgement. We did throughout the first lockdown and continue to do so.\"\n\nDame Cressida Dick said Boris Johnson had not broken the law\n\nThe issue of travelling for exercise was highlighted at the weekend after police in Derbyshire fined two women £200 after they drove five miles from home to take a walk - a penalty that was later dropped.\n\nGovernment advice for England says people can leave home to exercise, but adds: \"This should be limited to once per day, and you should not travel outside your local area.\"\n\nThe guidance adds: \"Stay local means stay in the village, town, or part of the city where you live.\"\n\nThe government also states: \"The law is what you must do; the guidance might be a mixture of what you must do and what you should do.\"\n\nIn Scotland, the advice is that exercise can be taken if it \"starts and finishes at the same place, which can be up to five miles from the boundary of your local authority area\".\n\nIn Wales, exercise also has to start from and finish at home. There no limits on distance travelled, although the advice is that \"the nearer you stay to your home, the better\".\n\nPeople in Northern Ireland are advised not to go more than 10 miles from home when exercising.", "Fans of the University of Alabama football team gathered in the streets of Tuscaloosa in Alabama, ignoring social distancing.\n\nThey were celebrating the university's third national championship in the past six years.", "More than 12,500 people have died with coronavirus, since the first reported death in Scotland on 13 March 2020.\n\nHere are the stories of some of those who have lost their lives.\n\nIf you would like to pay tribute to a loved one lost to Covid, please use the form below or email newsonline-scotland@bbc.co.uk and ensure you have read our terms and conditions and privacy policy.\n\nJean was born in 1937 Maryhill and spoke often and fondly of her childhood in \"the Butney\". This involved real hardships - including war-time evacuation to Holytown - though Jean's memories were all good and Maryhill became a touchstone when dementia became a factor in recent years.\n\nWorking at Rolls-Royce Hillington, Jean was transferred to its Derby HQ where, as a young woman, she made small component parts for jet engines. Even in her 80s, Jean could still perform all the machinist actions (with sound effects).\n\nShe loved to paint landscapes and had a life-long passion for music, especially jazz (with Frankie and Ella being constants). She was a great singer and dancer, always up for fun and laughs, brightening up any party.\n\nHer family said Jean was a fabulous mum to two daughters, a brilliant friend, and a warm-hearted women with kindness for everyone and anyone. She died on 27 October 2020.\n\nRashelle Baird's family describe her as \"kind, bubbly, and always the life and soul of the party\".\n\nThe 27-year-old mother-of-three from Brechin had put off appointments to get the vaccine because she was busy with her children.\n\nHer family stressed she was not anti-vaccine. \"She wanted to get her vaccine but she put her kids first,\" her father Stephen said.\n\nRashelle, who had asthma, initially thought she had caught a cold from her children, but her symptoms worsened and she was admitted to hospital.\n\nShe died in November 2021 after several days in Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, having been placed in an induced coma in the intensive care unit.\n\nDavid Trower worked as a clerical officer in the A&E department of University Hospital Monklands in Airdrie before retiring in 2016.\n\nBut he was committed to the NHS and even in retirement he chose to continue to work shifts, through NHS Lanarkshire's staff bank, right up until February. He died on 9 March 2021, aged 67.\n\nHis colleagues thought highly of him, saying: \"We have many happy memories of shifts together, laughs, nights out, and listening to all his stories of his many holidays abroad. We will miss him.\"\n\nBernadette White, his sister, said he was a caring, gentle and loving man with a wicked sense of humour.\n\nShe added: \"The last seven years, I would say, is when David started to live his life, doing the things that made him happy without having to worry about anyone else.\"\n\nStephen Stewart met his future wife, Heather, at a youth club when he was just 14. They got engaged on his 17th birthday and he had just turned 20 when they married.\n\nThe couple, who lived in Motherwell, came from \"very different\" backgrounds but they grew up together during their 25-year marriage while raising their only child.\n\nStephen took pride in his work for concrete manufacturer FP McCann, latterly as a lab technician working out what strength the concrete needed to be for certain projects.\n\nOutside work, he loved fishing, computer games, gadgets and during the first lockdown he managed to build a hot tub shelter with the help of a series of YouTube videos.\n\nHe died of Covid pneumonia at University Hospital Wishaw on 19 February 2021, aged 45.\n\nNan Douglas worked her way up from shorthand typist to headteacher during a remarkable career.\n\nShe was already a mother of three when she left her job as a school secretary at West Calder High School to enrol at Moray House in Edinburgh where she qualified as a primary school teacher.\n\nAfter losing her husband John when she was just 43, she found solace in working with disabled children and went on to be appointed head of Pinewood Special School in Blackburn, West Lothian.\n\nFollowing a spell living in Cornwall during her retirement, she returned to Scotland where she hosted a \"living wake\" with 80 friends and family on her 90th birthday.\n\nShe lived independently in Milnathort, Kinross, and was admitted to hospital for a minor issue just before Christmas 2020. But she picked up Covid and never left. She died on 19 February 2021, aged 95.\n\nGraeme McGrath's greatest passions were rowing and the River Clyde.\n\nOn the day of his funeral, fellow rowers held oars in a guard of honour at Glasgow Green in a tribute appreciated by his wife Anne and their three sons.\n\nFor 40 years Graeme volunteered with the Glasgow Humane Society and was often called on to row rescue boats on the Clyde, or to help evacuate families during floods.\n\nAfter undergoing a kidney transplant in his 50s, he was unable to get out on the river as much. He retired from his job as a Thomas Cook travel agent and moved to Prestwick in Ayrshire.\n\nBut he still felt the pull of the Clyde and regularly returned to the city to meet friends and row safety boats at regattas.\n\nHe died with Covid on 15 February 2021 at Crosshouse Hospital in Kilmarnock, aged 66, after being admitted for an infection affecting his heart.\n\nTommy Morrow spent most of his life in the Maryhill area of Glasgow, where he met his partner Jackie and raised their children, Demi and Mark.\n\nHis family described him as a character and not a day went by without them laughing at his jokes.\n\nHe loved camping and fishing in places like Stornoway with his friends but the most important people in his life were his family, including grandchildren, Lacey and Louden.\n\nDuring his career he worked in various well-known hotels and restaurants in Glasgow but he had not worked for some years due to poor health, including COPD.\n\nHe died with Covid on 15 February 2021, aged 53. \"It was so cruel - he was so close to getting the vaccine,\" his family said.\n\nTommy Rooney was a bus driver for 36 years and hugely popular with colleagues at First Bus in Larbert.\n\nOn the day of his funeral they were among dozens of people who lined the streets and applauded as his cortege passed the depot.\n\nFirst Bus operations manager Jason Hackett told the Falkirk Herald that Tommy was the \"heart and soul\" of the Larbert station.\n\nMarried to Margaret, the Bonnybridge man had two daughters and a granddaughter who described him as a \"humble but proud family man who put everyone else's needs before his own\".\n\nAn avid Celtic fan, he spent much of the pandemic driving key workers to their essential duties. He died on 12 February 2021, aged 57.\n\nDavid Gray's first grandchild - a girl called Islay - was born in July 2020. The proud \"papa\" used to say that she was the love of his life and she gave him a reason to wake up in the morning.\n\nTragically, the 62-year-old only got to spend five months with her before falling ill with Covid. He died on 3 February 2021.\n\nDavid lived in Erskine and worked for BAE Systems for 20 years, first as a mechanical fitter then as records manager dealing with secret files for the Ministry of Defence.\n\nHis family describe him as \"music daft\" - he played guitar and he was performing a gig with his band in Glasgow when he met his wife, Joyce, 40 years ago.\n\nThey went on to have two children - Darren and Danielle - as well as his beloved Cocker Spaniels, Buster and Shimmer, who he described as his \"bairns\".\n\nHarry Osborne was a Dunkirk veteran whose life was full of adventures - his daughter said he was still able to recall stories until just a few days before he died.\n\nMr Osborne was deployed to France months after joining the Territorial Army in Glasgow, served with the 77th Highland Field Regiment of the Royal Artillery and later became a surveyor.\n\nFriends recall how upon joining, he promised his mother he would not swear and instead would say \"cricky jings\", which became his nickname in the forces.\n\nHe was also known as a keen golfer with a \"wicked sense of humour\".\n\nMr Osborne died from Covid-19 on 25 January, nine months after celebrating his 100th birthday.\n\nConnie Simpson's grandchildren say she was more like a pal than a granny - she was full of fun and laughter, and was always the first up to dance at a party.\n\nBorn in Kinning Park, Glasgow, she moved to the east end after marrying John who she met at the Barrowlands when they were teenagers.\n\nWhile John was away with the Merchant Navy, she brought up their four children in a house \"surrounded by love\", before taking work as a curtain consultant.\n\nShe was fabulous even in her 80s - she loved getting her hair, eyebrows and manicure done, meeting friends at Mecca Bingo in Parkhead and at a local pensioners' club.\n\nConnie died on 23 January 2021 at Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow, aged 82.\n\nSheila Gartly was as \"bright as a button\" and the \"heart of our family\", her loved ones said.\n\nShe was born and brought up in Deskford, Moray, before marrying and moving to Keith in 1954. Widowed in 1975, she remarried but lost her second husband in 2005.\n\nDuring her working life she had jobs in a florist and in a fish shop - both of which she thoroughly enjoyed.\n\nShe loved to watch the birds in her garden, read her daily newspaper, listen to traditional Scottish music, and the spring and summer when the nights were lighter and flowers bloomed.\n\nIn 2019 she had surgery on a broken leg but she was recovering well. She died with Covid on 19 January 2021, aged 86.\n\nAlex Goldie was an electrical engineer who latterly worked as a lecturer at Stow College in Glasgow before his retirement.\n\nHis family said he was a gregarious man, always interested in other people, who took great delight and pride in the antics and education of his two great-grandsons, Charlie and Joe.\n\nDuring his long life he enjoyed skiing, tennis, pottery, sailing, golf, holidays in Europe, Australia and North America, single malts and red wine.\n\nHe had been well cared for by Randolph Hill nursing home in Dunblane for 19 months after developing dementia. Covid restrictions meant he had not seen his family, other than by Skype, for a year.\n\nHe is thought to have contracted the virus on a trip to A&E after a fall. He died on 14 January, aged 100.\n\nVincent Logan became one of the youngest bishops in the world when he was ordained Bishop of Dunkeld in 1981, aged 39.\n\nHe served the Roman Catholic diocese for almost 32 years before his retirement in 2012.\n\nThe Scottish Catholic Church said he was \"dedicated and energetic\" and had \"an energy and zeal in all he did\".\n\nBorn in Bathgate in 1941, he was ordained a priest in Edinburgh in 1964. He died on 14 January, aged 79, the day after his friend the Archbishop of Glasgow, Philip Tartaglia.\n\n\"Both bishops succumbed to the lethal effects of the coronavirus,\" the current Bishop of Dunkeld, Stephen Robson, added.\n\nThe Archbishop of Glasgow, the Most Reverend Philip Tartaglia, died suddenly at his home in the city on 13 January - the Feast of St Mungo, the Patron Saint of Glasgow.\n\nHe had been self-isolating after testing positive for Covid shortly after Christmas.\n\nBorn in Glasgow in 1951, he was ordained a priest in 1975 and had served as leader of Scotland's largest Catholic community since 2012.\n\nScotland's Catholic bishops described Archbishop Tartaglia as a \"gentle, caring and warm-hearted pastor who combined compassion with a piercing intellect\".\n\nAmong those who paid tribute were First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Glasgow City Council leader Susan Aitken, who described the archbishop as \"a true Glaswegian\".\n\nLiz Shingleston was a well-known figure in the village of Dunragit and her death on 13 January had a big impact on the small community near Stranraer.\n\n\"Her hearse passed the bottom of the village and the amount of people who turned out to pay their respects was overwhelming,\" said her daughter, Lisa.\n\nLiz spent her early childhood in New Luce but moved to the railway station cottage in Dunragit where her father worked as a signalman.\n\nDuring a varied working life, Liz left school to work in the laboratory of the nearby Nestle factory and later replaced her own mother as the local school's dinner lady.\n\nThe 73-year-old was devoted to her grandchildren and great-grandson but she also liked to treat herself to afternoon tea (with Prosecco) at Trump Turnberry.\n\nHugh Polland, who was known as Shug to his friends and family, was born and raised in Glasgow's Easterhouse.\n\nHe was well known in the area where he ran the Casbah Pub for many years during the 1980s and early 90s.\n\nA huge Celtic fan, he loved to play golf and took up photography later in life - becoming \"unofficial photographer\" at many friends' weddings, christening and parties.\n\n\"Everyone wanted him at their party not just to take photos but because of his personality,\" said his son, Tony McAllister. \"Everyone loved him because what you seen is what you got.\"\n\nShug died at Glasgow Royal Infirmary on 5 January, aged 70. His sudden death has left his family heartbroken.\n\nFor more than 75 years George Wight lived on his dairy farm in the village of Drumoak in Aberdeenshire.\n\nBut he had more than one string to his bow - as well as being a dairy farmer, for 25 years he was also the publican of his local, the Irvine Arms.\n\nA loyal Aberdeen FC fan, he was one of the lucky ones - he was in Gothenburg in 1983 to see the his beloved Dons lift the European Cup Winners Cup.\n\nHe was devoted to his family, including wife Claire and their four children, and despite suffering a series of bereavements and health setbacks, he always bounced back.\n\n\"He was an inspiration and a hardy soul who kept going no matter what life threw at him,\" they said. George died at a nursing home on 4 January 2021, aged 85.\n\nHugh Bell loved to dance. As a young man, when he doing his national service with the RAF, he was a regular at the dancing at the YMCA in Paisley.\n\nIt was there he met the love of his life, Margaret. They were married for 63 years and had two children Alan and Stuart. Margaret passed away in 2013.\n\nA keen ballroom dancer, Hugh was often first on the dance floor and in his later years he enjoyed dancing to the entertainment at Southerness caravan park, near Dumfries, where Stuart and his friend had a holiday home.\n\nHe was a bright, bubbly sociable man who spent a career in logistics before working as a lollipop man in his retirement.\n\nHugh died on 31 December at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, aged 92.\n\nDavid Warnock was a keen sportsman who loved squash, tennis, rugby, football, cycling and climbing munros.\n\nIn fact, it was on the tennis courts in Aberdeen that he met his teenage sweetheart, Zena. He was 17 and she was 14 - they were married for 62 years.\n\nAn electrical engineer, he worked for Pye Communications, moving first to Cambridge and then Edinburgh.\n\nHe was a quiet man who never complained about anything and was happiest around his family - including four children, 11 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.\n\nHis second great-grandchild was born shortly after he died in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary on 31 December. He was 85.\n\nHenry Anderson, an SNP councillor on Perth and Kinross Council, died with Covid on 27 December.\n\nHe had represented the Almond and Earn ward since 2012 and colleagues said he would be \"hugely missed\".\n\nAmong those who paid tribute to the 68-year-old was Deputy First Minister John Swinney, who described him as \"a good, decent man and a faithful councillor\".\n\nMurray Lyle, the leader of Perth and Kinross Council, said Mr Anderson was an excellent advocate for his ward and \"passionate about local issues\".\n\n\"I had the pleasure of working with Henry for several years on the Local Review Body and always his enjoyed his company, good humour and sense of fun when we were out visiting planning sites.\"\n\nTeenage sweethearts Bryson Mitchell and his wife Irene were due to celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary in January,\n\nThey met when he was an 18-year-old apprentice electrician and was assigned to a contract with the company where Irene, who was 16, was working.\n\nAfter marrying in 1961, Bryson spent his adult life in Paisley and 35 years working as an aircraft electrician with British Airways.\n\nThe couple had two children and four grandchildren, who described him as a quiet man with a great sense of humour. \"He was kind and generous, very hardworking, and he lived for his family,\" they said.\n\nHe was in hospital being treated for an acute illness when he contracted Covid. He died on Christmas Eve, aged 82.\n\nAs a child, Sandy Adam survived pioneering surgery to remove his voice box - an operation that left him unable to speak normally.\n\nInstead he learned a different way to communicate - oesophageal speech (swallowing air) - by drinking lots of lemonade. He had a life-long hatred of the fizzy drink after that.\n\nAfter training to be a dentist in Dundee, he returned to his hometown of Aberdeen. In addition to surgeries around the city, at one time he worked at Craiginches Prison one afternoon a week.\n\nA father and a grandfather, he loved tinkering with cars, pranking his two children and sitting in the sun with a glass of red wine.\n\nThe 81-year-old, who had dementia, died on 16 December, shortly after testing positive for Covid.\n\nDavid Barr was born and grew up in Paisley and for more than 40 years he worked in the town's Anchor Mill.\n\nAs well as being a keen bowler, a church elder, and an active member of Martyrs Church Men's Club, he had a gift for carpentry.\n\nThe dolls houses and garages that he made for his children and grandchildren were much loved and they are still treasured.\n\nHis favourite place in the world was the East Neuk of Fife, where he spent many happy holidays.\n\nDavid had an underlying respiratory condition and he was admitted to hospital with shortness of breath in December. He died within days of being diagnosed with Covid on 16 December, aged 86.\n\nAna Lisa Sayson was a nurse who moved from the Philippines to work for the NHS in Scotland.\n\nShe was a staff nurse at Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow before she moved to Glasgow Royal Infirmary during the Covid crisis. The mother-of-two died on 15 December after testing positive for the virus.\n\n\"Ana Lisa was a much-loved member of the team and an incredibly compassionate nurse who was devoted to the care of her patients,\" said John Stuart, the chief nurse at Glasgow Royal Infirmary.\n\n\"Ana Lisa came to our country from the Philippines to care for our loved ones and my heart goes out to her family and especially her husband and children.\n\n\"My thoughts, and the thoughts of all of her NHS family here in Glasgow, are with them at this terribly sad time.\"\n\nBilly and May Fannin were married for 62 years after meeting at a ballroom in Glasgow in 1955.\n\nMay was a bookkeeper who gave up her job to look after her grandchildren in the 1980s. \"Her life revolved around her four grandchildren,\" their younger daughter Jennifer told BBC Scotland.\n\nBilly was a joiner by trade but his real passion was singing, performing under the name Scott Allan. And as a member of Equity, he also took on work as an extra on TV programmes like Take the High Road and Taggart.\n\nHe loved being the centre of attention and \"if he was chocolate he would have eaten himself\", Jennifer joked.\n\nWhen the couple from Barrhead caught Covid, their two daughters also fell ill with the virus and had to self-isolate. They were heartbroken they could not be with their 84-year-old mother when she died in hospital on 6 December.\n\nBut they chose not tell their 88-year-old father about her death, as he was also in hospital and had dementia. Jennifer was able to visit him to say goodbye before he slipped away just eight days after the passing of his wife.\n\nShe was president of the city's Bangladesh Association, a civil servant at Glasgow City Council and, according to her family, \"a pillar of the community\".\n\nThey said she was a \"devoted mother, daughter, aunt and friend [but] she would prefer to be remembered as a social activist, volunteer and community advocate\".\n\nBoth Mridula and her husband, Sarwar Hassan, were admitted to hospital with Covid in November. He was discharged but Mridula was moved to Aberdeen for specialist treatment.\n\nHer husband and two sons were able to spend time with her before she died at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary on 12 December, aged 50.\n\nBridget Turner and her husband Alan worked for years in the window blinds industry before setting up their own business, A&B Window Blinds, in 1992.\n\nThey lived next door to the shop in Paisley, where Bridget worked in the office and Alan went out to do the measuring. Their years of hard work paid off and the family business remains successful.\n\nThe mother-of-three \"loved a good gab and a good catch-up with friends\", according to her daughter, Lisa. \"She was amazing, such a good friend to lots of people.\"\n\nWhen the children were young, family holidays were spent at the Isle of Whithorn but later the couple, who moved to Greenock, spent winters in Gran Canaria where they made friends from around the world.\n\nBridget was treated for Covid at Inverclyde Royal Hospital, where she received \"amazing care\". She died, aged 71, on 7 December after saying goodbye to her family.\n\nAndrew Slorance was a civil servant in charge of the Scottish government's planning and response to crisis situations - including the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nHe grew up in Hawick and became a journalist before joining the Scotland Office. He led the new Scottish Parliament's media team when it opened in 1999, then became the official spokesman for First Minister Alex Salmond.\n\nA father-of-five, he was diagnosed with Mantle Cell Lymphoma in 2015. He documented his experience of the rare cancer - including six rounds of chemotherapy - in a blog he called \"The fight of my life\".\n\nHe relapsed in 2019 and a stem cell transplant scheduled for Easter 2020 was delayed by Covid. While shielding at home in Edinburgh, he spent the first part of the pandemic working on the government's response from a spare room.\n\nMr Slorance was finally admitted to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Glasgow for his stem cell transplant in October. He tested positive for Covid shortly after that and died on 5 December, aged 49.\n\nTributes from across the political spectrum, including First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, have been paid to Mr Slorance. His wife, Louise, told BBC Scotland: \"He was a proud family man who was the life and soul of any party, loving and loyal.\"\n\nAllan Harper was a salesman at Topps Tiles for 23 years, mainly in the Hillington branch.\n\nHe met Caroline through a dating website 21 years ago. They were due to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary in July.\n\nA father-of-one, he lived in Craigton, in the south-west of Glasgow, where he enjoyed computer games and playing pool with work colleagues.\n\nCaroline said they would spend their days off and holidays together with their three cats \"who sometimes got more attention than me\".\n\nHe was a kind man, a \"true gentleman\" and her \"forever love\", she added. He died on 1 December 2020, aged 60.\n\nEileen Terry was born and brought up in Renfrew before marrying Bob and moving to Milngavie in 1968.\n\nHe was a keen golfer and when their sons, Robert and David, reached secondary school she decided the time was right to join him on the golf course.\n\nIt led to a lifetime's love of the sport and she became the ladies captain of Clober Golf Club in 2001 - the club's centenary year.\n\nHer family say she was a kind and generous lady who was well-known in her local community, where she worked as a home help until her retirement.\n\nShe spent her final years in Mavisbank Nursing Home in Bishopbriggs after developing vascular dementia. She died in hospital on 25 November 2020, aged 84.\n\nDavie Burgess was one of 10 siblings born in the Townhead area of Glasgow, but he had a lifelong love of the fresh air and the scenery of the Scottish countryside.\n\nAs a young man, he worked as a fireman on the steam train to Crianlarich - a trip which included a two-hour stopover allowing him to explore the hills.\n\nLater in life he loved driving up to Acharacle to visit his son and his family, where he could go for long walks with his grandchildren and their dog, Mac.\n\nMarried for 60 years to May, the father-of-three worked for the Milk Marketing Board at Hogganfield Loch. He was a hard worker who even after he \"retired\" took on three jobs, including running a caravan park.\n\nHis family described him as a \"gentleman\" and a \"man of pride\". He died on 25 November, aged 86.\n\nRod Moore spent 40 years with the ambulance service, working as a technician, a paramedic, a trainer and then in managerial roles before returning to the front line and the job he loved.\n\nThe football fan from Falkirk was married to Clare for 31 years and they had a son, Craig.\n\n\"He was my best friend, he was always happy, joking around all the time, he was so funny... he made me laugh every day,\" Clare told BBC Scotland.\n\nAnd he was so close to their son \"you wouldn't have got a sheet of paper between them\", she added.\n\nAlthough they were not able to see Rod for four weeks while he was treated in hospital for Covid, they we allowed one final visit to say goodbye before he died on 21 November, aged 63.\n\nTom Kenmure was a manager at the Tesco distribution centre in Livingston, where he had worked for 28 years.\n\nThe 51-year-old was a friendly, sociable man and in normal times he liked nothing better than driving around the country exploring \"any little shop he could find\".\n\nAfter the restrictions came into force, the father-of-two from Carluke did everything he could to keep himself and his family safe from Covid.\n\nBut on the 6 October he felt a tightness in his chest on his way to work and had to get tested. It came back positive the next day.\n\nHe spent two weeks in Wishaw General before being transferred to an ECMO machine at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. He died on 17 November.\n\nAndrew, or \"Andra\", Kettrick was a porter at Stirling Royal Infirmary for 28 years.\n\nHe would take patients out on \"mystery tours\" in a \"big blue hospital ambulance bus\" his son, also Andrew, told BBC Scotland.\n\n\"The old people loved my dad as he would often stop and buy them all fish and chips or ice cream - all this was paid for out of his pocket,\" he said.\n\nMr Kettrick's work was recognised by hospital bosses and they put him forward for a British Empire Medal which he received in 1991.\n\nThe father-of-three, from Cowie, Stirling, died at Caledonia Court care home in Larbert on 17 November. He was 86.\n\nJim - Flocky - Flockhart was the public face of the firefighters' strike in Glasgow in 1973.\n\nA leading figure in the Fire Brigade Union, he regularly appeared on TV and in newspapers during the controversial 10-day strike over pay.\n\nFirefighting was a dangerous - sometimes fatal - job in the \"tinderbox city\" and Jim was hailed a hero by colleagues after the dispute ended with a famous victory for the strikers.\n\nHe retired to Darvel in Ayrshire where he enjoyed a pint in the Black Bull and spent many years driving friends and local elderly men on trips around Scotland and to Ireland.\n\nA father and grandfather, he died with Covid on 13 November with his daughters Yvonne and Julie by his side. He was 77.\n\nTom Maley never wanted for anything, but after enduring months of Covid restrictions this year the 73-year-old retired joiner set his heart on a big Christmas tree.\n\nIt had been a tough year for the normally sociable pensioner who was renowned for his jokes (good and bad) and was devoted to his wife of 53 years, Georgina, and their family.\n\nThey usually decorate a small table-top tree for the festive season, but this year Mr Maley ordered a 5ft showstopper illuminated with multi-coloured stars to fill the window of their Grangemouth home.\n\nThe great-grandfather will never get to see the tree in its full glory. He died at Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert on 12 November, shortly after falling ill with Covid-19.\n\nHis granddaughter Claire Taylor told BBC Scotland, said: \"My gran has made sure that the tree he ordered will go up and it will shine bright for Granda.\"\n\nTracey Donnelly was born and brought up in Edinburgh but she moved to the north-east of England after meeting her husband, George.\n\n\"I loved her the first time I saw her, and I always will,\" he said. \"She was so loving and kind - just an extra-special person in every way.\"\n\nTracey had four children, three step-children and eight grandchildren, and she worked as a support worker for the North East Autism Society.\n\nCare manager Michael Ross, said: \"She loved her family, and she loved the service-users in her care. This tragic news has ripped the heart out of the team and her colleagues are absolutely devastated.\"\n\nShe died at Sunderland General Hospital in mid-November after testing positive for coronavirus. She was 53.\n\nJim Grant was originally from Bo'ness but he spent most of his life in Grangemouth where he brought up two daughters, Margaret and Senga, with his wife Mary.\n\nHe worked as a labourer at BP before taking early retirement when he was 60.\n\nThe 88-year-old great-grandfather spent his last months at the Caledonian Court care home in Larbert before his death on 8 November. He was one of 20 residents who died in the space of a month after testing positive for Covid-19.\n\nHis granddaughter, Nicole Ritchie, said he was a gentleman who always had a huge smile on his face, and his death had had a huge impact on the family.\n\nShe told BBC Scotland \"As a family, we would like to thank Caledonian Court from the bottom of our hearts. They looked after my grandad for the last 11 months of his life and they couldn't have done a better job, he was so happy and very well looked after.\"\n\nFor more than 20 years until her retirement in February 2020, Liz Khan was a support worker for adults with learning and physical disabilities.\n\nShe also ran a drama group for them - it was always more than a job to her, her family said.\n\nLiz was also an elder at her local church, St Margaret's Parish Church in the Muirhouse area of Motherwell, North Lanarkshire.\n\n\"She devoted her life to her work, church and family,\" her children Stephen, Sonia and Lorraine told BBC Scotland.\n\nLiz died in hospital with Covid on 26 October 2020, aged 67 - eight months into her retirement.\n\nWhen Marie Ward broke her wrist in 2019, she asked her consultant whether she would be able to play the piano once it had healed.\n\nHe assured her she would, but when she replied \"that's great because I couldn't before\", the previously serious and solemn medic cracked up.\n\nShe was always laughing and joking, according to her granddaughter, Abby McNicol, and she enjoyed nothing more than knitting, shopping and a \"good blether\".\n\nMarried to Robert for 53 years, they started life together in a single-end tenement in Househillwood in Glasgow. Moving to a three-bedroom council house in Johnstone was \"like winning the lottery\".\n\nThe mother-of-three and grandmother-of-11 died on 18 October 2020, aged 83.\n\nFrances Brown spent lockdown shielding in her room in the Glasgow care home where she had lived for almost 10 years.\n\nAfter months of keeping in touch via video calls, the 76-year-old was finally able to meet up with her sister, Anne Turnbull, in August.\n\nMs Turnbull said her sister, who had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and bi-polar disorder, had a special bond with staff at the David Cargill care home.\n\nAnd she praised the home which remained Covid-free until a staff member tested positive on 4 October. Frances contracted the virus and died in hospital on 13 October.\n\nIn a statement, the care home described Frances as \"the most incredible woman, a real character, and an absolute pleasure to know and care for\".\n\nAfter a long battle against illness throughout the year, great grandfather Charlie Armstrong died on 10 October.\n\nThe 82-year-old retired property manager from Kirkintilloch, East Dunbartonshire, had been allowed home after receiving treatment at Glasgow Royal Infirmary for chest problems.\n\nEight days later he was readmitted to the hospital and tested positive for coronavirus. The family say they were told he must have contracted Covid during his earlier stay at the Infirmary.\n\nHis wife, Joyce, who was also treated in hospital for the virus, said: \"He was very generous, very loving and very funny and he hated seeing anybody being put down. He didn't like to see injustice. He would stand up for people.\n\n\"We were together for 40 years and he was a very good father and a very good husband to me.\"\n\nMargaret Kerrigan was a \"force to be reckoned with\", according to her family - a matriarch who commanded respect.\n\nShe was born in Plymouth but her family moved to Glasgow when she was young. Growing up in Govan in the 1950s, she learned to be a \"tough cookie\".\n\nIt meant she must have been perfectly suited to her job as bar manager at Curlers in Byres Road in the 1960s. And it was there she met Joe, a customer at the pub, who she married in 1970.\n\nHe worked as a school janitor during many of their 50 years of marriage, and they had four sons, 12 grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.\n\nClydebank Bowling Club provided Joe with a good social life, while Margaret loved having her family around her and going to the bingo.\n\nJoe had dementia and he died at Hill View care home in Dalmuir on 19 April 2020, aged 78. Margaret fell ill during the second wave and died in hospital on 8 October, aged 73.\n\nFormer ambulance technician George Cairns was a resident at LittleInch Care Home in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire.\n\nHis family said the move from his Renfrew flat to the home in January had reinvigorated him and brought out his mischievous sense of humour.\n\nDuring the lockdown period Mr Cairns, who was bipolar, even joked about topping up his tan in the garden.\n\nThe 71-year-old tested positive for Covid-19 on 8 May despite displaying no symptoms, but his condition deteriorated and he died in the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley nine days later.\n\nHis daughter, Gillian, paid tribute to his caring nature, saying: \"Even if you only met him once he would tell you a story, a terrible joke or offer a supportive ear when you needed it the most.\"\n\nRetired farmer Jock Brown was a keen ice hockey player in his youth, and he represented Scotland for six years in the 1950s.\n\nHe told his family that he was selected for the team because he was the only Scotsman who played as goal tender (goalkeeper) at the time. They insist this is not true.\n\nMarried to Mary for 48 years, they had two children and four grandchildren.\n\nHe farmed near Falkirk - on land next to what is now home to The Kelpies - until his retirement in the 1980s.\n\nMr Brown's family said he was a quiet man with a great sense of humour. He had dementia and he died with Covid-19 at Burnbrae care home in Falkirk on 14 May. He was 89.\n\nIna Beaton was a well-known figure on the Isle of Skye and she lived in her own home in Balmaqueen until two years ago.\n\nShe died on 11 May aged 103, the seventh resident of Home Farm care home in Portree to die after contracting Covid-19.\n\nIna lived through the Great War and the 1919 Spanish Flu outbreak. During World War Two she moved to Glasgow to work as a conductress on the trams and survived the Clydebank blitz.\n\nHer grandson, Ailean Beaton, said his loss was shared across the island, especially the north end \"where she was mum, granny, friend to more than just the Beatons.\n\n\"Her crystal memory and broad experience of life in Skye over several generations meant that she contributed to our shared knowledge of the place we're from, its language and culture,\" he added.\n\nBetty Steele grew up in Paisley but later moved to Corby, Northamptonshire - the town known as \"little Scotland\".\n\nShe had seven children, 11 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, and she lived for her family, according to her granddaughter, Debbie Smiley.\n\nHer house was always the meeting point, and she was the life and soul of the party.\n\n\"She had such a zest for life, and anything she did it was done with care and love for others,\" Debbie added.\n\nJohn Angus Gordon, 83, spent the last few years of his life at the Home Farm care home in Portree on Skye.\n\nHe had dementia and the sense of touch reassured him - he liked to shake a hand or hold the hand of the person he was talking to.\n\nUnable to visit the home, his family spoke to him for the last time in a video-call a few hours before he died on 5 May.\n\nAs he listened to their voices, he reached out to the hand of the carer sitting with him, dressed in full personal protective equipment.\n\n\"We found it quite poignant that my dad put out his hand to hers and she was wearing these blue protective gloves,\" said his son, John.\n\nPaul McCaffrey was an \"amazing dad\" of two children and two step-children who was always busy, according to his partner Caroline McNultry.\n\n\"He was always helping someone, whether he was in someone's house helping them out or just on-the-go in work all the time,\" she said.\n\nThe healthy 49-year-old from Glasgow fell ill after returning home from work at a care home where he was a highly-regarded maintenance manager.\n\nRather than the traditional coronavirus symptoms, he complained of a headache and aching limbs but he was eventually admitted to hospital in Glasgow where he tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nHe was transferred to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary where he could be hooked up to an ECMO machine, which performs the tasks of the lungs. After three weeks, he died on 4 May.\n\nHGV driver Jim Russell kept his lorries so spotlessly clean he was known as \"Big Gorgeous\" by colleagues who joked that he must have worn his slippers in his cab.\n\nHe was a big character who loved cars, trucks, motorbikes, lorries and going to Truckfest with his fiancée Connie McCready, who he affectionately nicknamed \"Isa\" after the Still Game character.\n\nThis photograph was taken at the last concert the couple attended together on 8 March 2020.\n\nThey met online in 2014 and were due to get married last summer but Mr Russell fell ill with Covid three weeks after the concert. He died on 4 May, aged 51.\n\n\"Everyone is talking about life getting back to normal when coming out of lockdown, however for myself and many many others we are terrified as our lives will never be normal again,\" Connie said.\n\nClive Andrews was born in Trinidad and in 1967 he moved to Edinburgh where he \"immediately felt like he belonged\", according to his daughter, Nadine.\n\nThe father-of-six worked as a senior lecturer in ergonomics at Napier College, but he was also committed to the arts.\n\nDevoted to promoting and supporting artists and musicians, he held committee roles with groups including Theatre Alba and the Scottish Arts Council.\n\nHe helped establish the Edinburgh International Harp Festival and volunteered every year for decades with the Edinburgh International Jazz Festival.\n\nClive was a lover of life (and of salsa dancing), his family said. He died at The Elms Care Home in Edinburgh on 3 May 2020, aged 86.\n\nRobert Black was a paramedic but he was also a talented musician and part of the team behind Argyll FM.\n\nPaying tribute to him on social media, the community radio station said he was \"a genuine good guy... everyone was his pal\".\n\nThe Mull of Kintyre Music Festival described him as \"one of our pals\" and a \"true gent, wonderful musician\".\n\nHe was a well-known and loved character in Campbeltown, according to Kintyre Community Resilience Group.\n\nThe father-of-two died in hospital in Glasgow on 2 May.\n\nKaren Hutton was a \"much-loved\" care home nurse who died with coronavirus days after her granddaughter was born.\n\nThe 58-year-old was a staff nurse in the dementia unit at Lochleven Care Home in Broughty Ferry, Dundee.\n\nHer only daughter, Lauren, gave birth to a girl just two weeks ago, according to care home operators Thistle Healthcare.\n\nCare home manager Andrew Chalmers-Gall said: \"Karen was a tenacious advocate for her residents and she always put their needs first.\"\n\nShe died at home in Carnoustie, Angus, on 28 April after testing positive for Covid-19.\n\nMark McCarron Gillan bought his wife, Jan, flowers every Friday - a small gesture but something that she still misses following his death on 27 April.\n\nThey were married for 23 years, after first meeting as teenagers, and they have three daughters - twins Ebony and Hope, who are 20, and Brenna, 19.\n\nWhen his colleagues at a soap factory in Queenslie, Glasgow, learned of his death, they stopped production for the first time since opening.\n\nThey were among dozens of people - including friends and neighbours - who lined the streets on the day of his funeral to say a final farewell to the 53-year-old.\n\nMark loved golf, football and hill walking but he was also a family man. \"There is a such a void left in each of us and every life that he touched,\" his wife said.\n\nAlastair Sinclair split his younger years between Reay in Caithness and Lanark before being called up for national service.\n\nBut his army career was cut short when he stood on a mine in Korea and lost a foot.\n\nHis son told BBC Scotland that he was persuaded to pursue a career in developing artificial limbs as he was being fitted for his own prosthetic.\n\nIn retirement, the father-of-three moved with his wife from Newtown Mearns in East Renfrewshire to Wishaw in North Lanarkshire.\n\nHe moved into Erskine Park care home in Bishopton shortly before lockdown and died, aged 87, five weeks later on 27 April.\n\nPearl Paterson grew up in Dennistoun in the east end of Glasgow and was just 10 years old when World War II broke out.\n\nShe was a teenager when she joined the Women's Land Army but it wasn't until she was in her 80s that she received official recognition - and a badge - for her efforts from the UK government.\n\nPearl spent much of her working life employed as a domestic assistant in hotels across Scotland, before settling in Largs, Ayrshire, with her daughter, Fiona.\n\nAn animal lover, she had a special Chihuahua called Flash, and she read the People's Friend magazine every week.\n\nOn her 91st birthday in March, her family was able wave to her in the conservatory at her care home in Glasgow. She died with Covid-19 on 26 April.\n\nAnnie Munro's home was always filled with people - her husband, six children and many nieces and nephews who would often come to visit.\n\nHer family used to joke that the house in Eaglesham must have \"rubber walls\" and they often had to share beds and would \"wake up with somebody's feet up their nose\".\n\nShe was a real homemaker who could as easily run up a set of curtains as make a batch of jam from fruit she had grown in her own garden. She never turned anyone away who needed help.\n\nA mild-mannered woman, she never had any need to raise her voice - a look over the top of her spectacles was enough to keep her children under control.\n\nIn later life she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and her daughter, Linda, became her main carer before she moved into a care home. Annie died on 25 April, aged 84.\n\nKnown to all as Gogs, Gordon Reid was a taxi driver from Edinburgh who loved football, played golf, enjoyed a pint and doted on his grandchildren.\n\nHe stopped working as a precaution four days before the lockdown came into force but within a week had fallen ill with Covid-19.\n\nHis wife, Elaine, and daughter Leemo Goudie, were able to spend some time with him in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary before he died on 24 April, aged 68.\n\nLeemo said: \"My dad was a normal guy, no health issues, a non-smoker, fairly fit. It can happen to anyone.\"\n\nAs only a small number of mourners could attend his funeral, people stood and applauded as his hearse passed some of his favourite places in the city.\n\nDavid Allan joined a local running club in Edinburgh in retirement, after spending 36 years as a science technician at the city's Trinity Academy.\n\nThe fit and healthy 64-year-old was training for a half marathon and was planning to take part in some Park Runs in Sydney during a trip to visit his nephew in Australia this year.\n\nWhen the holiday - including a trip to Fiji - was cancelled due to coronavirus restrictions, David was pragmatic and told his wife, Glenda, they could rearrange for a later date.\n\nIt was a shock when he tested positive for Covid-19 after being admitted to hospital with a chest infection. He died on 24 April after more than four weeks in ICU.\n\nGlenda took comfort from the funeral, when neighbours lined the streets, running club friends and former colleagues stood outside the crematorium, and hundreds watched the service online.\n\nAngie Cunningham worked for NHS Borders for more than 30 years before her death.\n\nThe 60-year-old from Tweedbank was a much-respected and valued colleague who provided \"amazing care\" to her patients, the health board said.\n\nAs well as being a much-loved mother, sister, granny and great-granny, she was proud to be a nurse, her family added.\n\nShe died in the intensive care unit at Borders General Hospital from Covid-19 on 22 April, NHS Borders confirmed.\n\nKirsty Jones, a healthcare support worker with NHS Lanarkshire, was a bubbly, larger than life character, according to her colleagues.\n\nShe joined the health board after leaving school at 17 and spent much of her career working with older patients.\n\nBut the 41-year-old recently took up a role on the frontline of the pandemic, working at an assessment centre in Airdrie.\n\nHer husband, Nigel, said she devoted her life to caring for others and was a wonderful wife and mother to their two sons.\n\nAndy McGinley used to say he didn't need to win the lottery - his family meant he was already a millionaire.\n\nHe was brought up by adoptive parents in Glasgow's Maryhill area during World War Two and went on to become a carpenter at John Brown's Shipyard.\n\nAlthough he first met his wife, Margaret, at primary school they lost touch and got together after meeting at the Barrowland Ballroom years later.\n\nThey spent almost all of their 62 years of married life in the same house in Barmulloch, where they had five children. They also had 15 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.\n\nHe loved his garden, bowls, and a sing-song at family gatherings - his party piece was \"I'm glad that I was born in Glasgow\". He died on 29 April 2020, aged 84.\n\nEvelyn Brown dedicated her life to her family and her community. Born and bred in Peterhead, she was married to Charles for 50 years and they had two children.\n\nShe gave up her job as a bank manager to care for her son Craig after he was born with Down's syndrome in the 1970s.\n\nHer daughter Emma, who was born two years later, said her mother was a selfless woman who loved spoiling her grandchildren with \"gifts and love\".\n\nMrs Brown was an adult Guide leader and later a district commissioner, she volunteered with Barnardo's and was an active member of the Church of Scotland.\n\nAfter her death at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary on 19 April, aged 75, her family raised £3,000 in her name for the hospital's staff garden.\n\nWaqar Hussain Choudhry was a popular shopkeeper in the north of Glasgow.\n\nThe 65-year-old ran a convenience store on Skerray Street in Milton where he was affectionately known as Wacca.\n\nFollowing his death on 17 April 2020, well-wishers left flowers outside the shop he ran for almost 40 years.\n\nThey told The Glasgow Times that the father-of-three served generations of school children and put an extra sweet in their bags.\n\nHis son Zeeshan Chaudhry told the BBC: \"My beloved father was the most amazing hardworking human and parent.\"\n\nJane Murphy was known as \"Mama Murphy\" by close friends and colleagues at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.\n\nShe worked at the city hospital for almost 30 years, first as a cleaner before retraining as a clinical support worker.\n\nThe 73-year-old, from Bonnyrigg, was placed on sick leave due to her age when the pandemic broke out.\n\nIt's understood the mother-of-two died on 16 April.\n\nHer friend Gerry Taylor said: \"She wasn't afraid to tell nurses, doctors or consultants if they were not pulling their weight and they loved her for it.\"\n\nMary McCann, 70, was a \"strong, wonderful woman\" who was dedicated to her family, according to her son, David.\n\nShe spent the last three months of her life in an East Kilbride care home, having being diagnosed with cancer last year.\n\nThe grandmother was doing well in the Whitehills home, where she was putting on weight and smiling again, David said.\n\nBut in early April she developed a urinary tract infection. Her condition deteriorated quickly and within days she was struggling to breathe.\n\nShe died in the care home on 16 April with her son, Derek, by her side.\n\nVerity Watson met her husband Adam (Adie) in a bible class and together they raised three sons, Alan, Gordon and Adam.\n\nThey lived in South Africa for a few years but returned to their beloved home of Rutherglen in 1970.\n\nShe worked at the local Coulls Bakers until retiring aged 72 but in her spare time she enjoyed bowls, knitting and - best of all - a cream cake with a cup of tea.\n\nHer family were unable to be with her when she died at Roger Park Care Home on 15 April 2020, after a short stay in hospital.\n\nHer son Adam said he couldn't thank staff enough for their \"invaluable support\", sitting with his mother in her final moments. She was 98.\n\nDavid Whittick joined the Royal Navy as a pilot on his 18th birthday in the midst of World War Two. Aged 19, as part of 835 Naval Air Squadron, he was flying off aircraft carrier HMS Nairana in the Arctic.\n\nAlmost 70 years later he received the Arctic Star for his role in Arctic Convoys - described by Sir Winston Churchill as \"the worst journey in the world\".\n\nHe survived two serious accidents during his long civilian career with Scottish Airways and later British Airways, before dedicating himself to supporting the Riding for the Disabled charity in his retirement.\n\nHis work - including helping to raise funds for a purpose-built facility at Summerston in Glasgow - led to him being appointed an OBE by the Queen for his services to charity.\n\nHe was married to Joyce for more than 60 years and they had four children. His son, Peter, said he lived a full and active life, even enjoying a trip on a seaplane in January this year. He died at Erskine care home in Bishopton on 14 April, aged 95, after falling ill with coronavirus.\n\nHer daughter Linda, a lawyer for the BBC, had hoped she would survive the virus as she was from \"strong stock\".\n\nShe last saw her mother in March when she travelled from London to warn her they may not be able to visit her during the pandemic.\n\nThe pensioner had been \"extremely distressed\" afterwards, Ms Duncan said.\n\nShe was taken to Edinburgh's Western General Hospital on 12 April and died three days later.\n\nDerek Wilkie worked for 27 years as a firefighter before retiring in December 2017.\n\nHe had senior roles in Badenoch and Strathspey, and Shetland before becoming station commander for Inverness and Nairn District.\n\nColleagues said he was a \"diligent and capable firefighter... with a larger than life personality\".\n\nHis wife and two sons - who all work for the NHS - thanked those who cared for Mr Wilkie and urged people to stay at home.\n\nHe died at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness on 12 April.\n\nFormer Merchant Navy engineer Bill Campbell died of suspected Covid-19 at Erskine Park care home in Bishopton.\n\nThe 86-year-old had dementia and carers initially thought he had a chest infection but he developed a cough and a high temperature.\n\nHis condition deteriorated and he died on Easter Sunday, with his daughter, Linda Verlaque - in full protective clothing - by his side.\n\nShe praised the work of carers at the home but she said his death was \"horrific\" as undertakers came to take away his body in full hazmat gear and goggles.\n\n\"Instead of having people surrounding me and giving me a hug to say everything was all right, everyone was just standing there and we were watching my dad being taken away, which was traumatic,\" she said.\n\nProud Welshman Glyn Edwards did not learn to speak English until he was five years old, but in adulthood he made Edinburgh his home.\n\nA contemporary of Neil Kinnock at Cardiff University, he worked as a civil servant in London before marrying and moving to Scotland.\n\nHe was a regular at Robbie's Bar on Leith Walk where he was known as \"McTaffy\" but he could be a solitary character who could easily lose himself in a book or a concert.\n\nClassical music, politics and poetry were his passions - as a teenager he won a major Welsh poetry contest and his daughter, Mhairi Jarvie, treasures a ring-binder full of his poems.\n\nShe affectionately described her father as a cross between Coronation Street's Ken Barlow and Victor Meldrew - \"intelligent, opinionated, political, but grumpy and a tad anti-social\".\n\nMaths teacher Gerry McHugh was a \"true gentleman\", able to inspire every single student who walked through his door.\n\nHis death would have a \"devastating effect\" on the Notre Dame High School community in Greenock, head teacher Katie Couttie said.\n\nUnable to attend his funeral due to the lockdown, past and current pupils found a unique way to pay tribute to the 58-year-old.\n\nThey wore red and posted images on social media in memory of the lifelong Manchester United fan.\n\nEileen McCarron died in Glasgow Royal Infirmary less than 24 hours after falling ill. She had no underlying health concerns.\n\nA mother of three daughters, she spent 18 years working as a nursery teacher at Save the Children's Charles Street playgroup in Glasgow's Germiston.\n\nShe gave up the job to look after her only grandson, Patrick. Her husband of more than 35 years, also Patrick, died suddenly in 1997, aged just 57.\n\nAs well as volunteering at a Barnardo's charity shop, she liked shopping, knitting, going out for coffees and lunches, and holidays with her family.\n\nShe was 79 when she died on 9 April, leaving her family devastated and unable to comfort each other during lockdown. They had still not been able to hold a memorial service nine months later.\n\nHelen McMillan was 10 days short of her 85th birthday when she died at Almond Court care home in Glasgow's Drumchapel on 9 April.\n\nShe spent most of her life in Summerston, where she widely known as \"Auntie Ellen\" - even to those she wasn't related to.\n\n\"Everybody loved my mum,\" her daughter, Jackie Marlow, told BBC Scotland. \"She knew everybody in the community and was the life and soul of the party.\"\n\nHelen worked in McLellan's rubber factory in Maryhill until she was in her 50s.\n\nA grandmother to Hayley and Josh, she developed dementia in later life but she was still \"pretty agile and loving life\", her daughter said.\n\nMary Martin and her husband, Alex, were keen ballroom dancers.\n\nAlthough their roots were firmly in Glasgow, they spent seven years in Dunblane where they were tasked with encouraging people on to the dancefloor at the Dunblane Hydro.\n\nBefore that, Mrs Martin brought up her family in Mount Vernon, later moving to Bearsden. She had three children, six grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and a great-great grandchild.\n\nHer daughter, Sandra O'Neill, told BBC Scotland she was \"just a wonderful person - gentle and kind\".\n\nIn her later years she had vascular dementia and she lived at the Almond Court care home in Drumchapel. She died there on 8 April, aged 88.\n\nVic and Maureen Sharp, who were both 74, had been together since they were teenagers.\n\nUnderlying health conditions meant the couple from Oakley in Fife were both asked to shield themselves during lockdown.\n\nBut their daughter, Yvonne Sharp, believes the letter came too late and they caught the virus during a weekly trip to the supermarket.\n\nMaureen died in hospital on 8 April and then, Yvonne said, her father \"just gave up\". He died the following day.\n\nOnly six members of the family could attend their funeral but a piper led the funeral cortege through Oakley, where locals lined the streets.\n\nWhen Ann Tonner left the Nazareth House orphanage in Glasgow as teenager, she was one of the few women of colour in the city, according to her son, Tony McCaffery.\n\nShe was \"exotic-looking and quite glamourous\" and was soon in demand as a model for local shops and boutiques before working as a celebrated hot-dog girl in an Odeon cinema.\n\nHer first husband tragically died and her second was largely absent, leaving her to bring up six children and - at times - hold down five jobs at once.\n\nShe was a \"remarkable, formidable woman with a strong work ethic\", Mr McCaffery told BBC Scotland, but she was also a \"gentle soul with an incredibly child-like sense of humour\".\n\nA grandmother and great-grandmother, Mrs Tonner died at a nursing home in Glasgow where she was living with Alzheimer's, on 8 April. She was 84.\n\nMary Nixon was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was just 18 but she was determined to never let it hold her back.\n\nBorn and raised in Greenock, she was a lone parent to four children who described her as a \"strong, independent woman who lived life to the full\".\n\n\"My mum made being a single parent look easy\", her daughter Alexis said. \"We were very happy kids growing up. Everyone loved her and always said she was a 'wee gem'.\"\n\nWhen she fell seriously ill in 2014, her family was told to prepare for the worst, but their \"invincible\" mum rallied, though she lost her mobility.\n\nShe died with Covid on 7 April 2020, aged 66. After everything she had been through in life, her family said they felt \"robbed... that this awful virus has taken her from us\".\n\nJanice Graham was the first NHS worker to die with coronavirus in Scotland.\n\nThe health care support worker and district nurse died at Inverclyde Royal Hospital on 6 April.\n\nOne colleague said she had a \"bright and engaging personality and razor sharp wit\".\n\nAnother said the 58-year-old was the \"most kind, caring and compassionate HCA I have had the privilege to work with\".\n\nHer son, Craig, told STV News he would miss everything about her.\n\nNewly-wed Andy Wyness developed a high temperature and a cough following a trip to Wales.\n\nWhen his symptoms worsened the 53-year-old drove himself from his Wishaw home to an appointment at an assessment centre.\n\nThat was the last time his wife, Sandra, saw him.\n\nThe grandfather, who was a keen bowler, was taken straight to hospital by ambulance. He died on 6 April.\n\n\"Even walking out the house that night, although I knew he wasn't well, I never imagined he would never walk back in,\" Sandra said.\n\nRita Hawthorn spent the first 35 years of her life in Hamilton, where she was born, grew up and had her own family.\n\nBut when her husband, Robert, lost his job as a miner the couple and their three children re-located from the west of Scotland to the far north in 1973.\n\nWhile Robert took up a new job at the Scottish Instruments Factory in Wick, she worked as a cleaner at a nearby job centre and became secretary of the Highlands and Islands Civil Service Union.\n\nShe was sadly widowed at 51 but she was \"fiercely independent\" and went on to fulfil her dreams of travelling - a trip up the Nile, a safari in South Africa, and solo bus tours to Austria and Paris.\n\nRita, who was a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, fell ill during the first week of lockdown. She died at Caithness General Hospital on 6 April, aged 82.\n\nBill Paul grew up in Giffnock on the south side of Glasgow and did his national service as a radar operator with the RAF in Malta.\n\nIn his youth he was an extremely accomplished tennis player and it was through the sport that he met his first wife, Frances, who died in 1984.\n\nWith his second wife, Liz, he loved to play golf and travel - hobbies that he continued after her death in 2012.\n\nAn extremely active man, he loved to go on cruises with a group of like-minded friends. However his last cruise to the Caribbean was cut short by the pandemic in March.\n\nHe returned home to Arran and fell ill with Covid within a week. He died at Lamlash Hospital on 5 April, aged 81.\n\nMofizul Islam was beginning a new life in Scotland after relocating from Bangladesh when he fell ill with coronavirus.\n\nHis family believe the 49-year-old caught the virus on his daily three-hour journeys between their Edinburgh home and his job at a pizza outlet in Midlothian.\n\nHe died on 5 April and was buried in the Muslim section of a city cemetery but his wife and children were in isolation and unable to attend.\n\nHis death has left the family \"completely helpless\", according to a family friend as they have no documents, no bank account and they are struggling for money.\n\n\"We are very worried about our future because we don't have our father,\" said Mofizul's 19-year-old son, Azahural. \"He was everything for us. And now we are just hopeless.\"\n\nCatherine Sweeney was a \"wonderful mother, sister and beloved aunty\", her family said after her death on 4 April.\n\nBorn and raised in Dumbarton, she worked as a home carer for more than 20 years.\n\nHer family said she would be sorely missed after a \"lifetime of service\" to the community.\n\nAnd they praised the medics at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley who \"heroically\" looked after her in her final days.\n\nJimmy Andrews was 17 years old when began his career in Glasgow Corporation's finance department in 1955.\n\nBy the turn of the century, he had risen to become chief executive of Glasgow City Council and in 2001 he was appointed CBE for services to local government - a \"career highlight\".\n\nHe was born in Kilsyth but spent much of his life living in Strathblane, Stirlingshire, with his wife of 52 years, Mary.\n\nIn retirement, he \"enjoyed life to the full\", spending time with his three children and six grandchildren, and visiting horse racing courses throughout the country.\n\nA gentle, intelligent man with a great sense of humour, he died at Glasgow Royal Infirmary on 3 April 2020, aged 81.\n\nLord Gordon of Strathblane was a former political editor of STV and he founded Radio Clyde.\n\nHe died at Glasgow Royal Infirmary on 31 March after contracting coronavirus, Radio Clyde reported. He was 83.\n\nHis family paid tribute to his \"generosity, his kindness and his enthusiasm for life\".\n\nFormer First Minister Jack McConnell said Lord Gordon had \"an outstanding career in business and public service\".\n\nRyan Storrie was in Scotland to celebrate his 40th birthday with a trip to a Rangers match when he fell ill.\n\nThe father-of-two was from Ardrossan but lived in Dubai.\n\nWhen he developed symptoms, the asthmatic isolated in his hotel room and waited for the virus to run its course.\n\nHis condition deteriorated but he wouldn't let his wife, Hilary, phone 999 as he was convinced he would recover and didn't want to bother the NHS.\n\nShe found him dead in his room on 31 March.\n\nMary and Andy Leaman began self-isolating at the end of March after falling ill with flu-like symptoms.\n\nTheir son, Andy, told the Glasgow Evening Times the couple were married 50 years and doted on their only granddaughter, nine-year-old Anna.\n\nMrs Leaman died at home in Castlemilk on 30 March - four days after the death of Anna's maternal grandfather, Dougie Chambers.\n\nThe schoolgirl lost her third grandparent almost three weeks later when Mr Leaman died in hospital on 19 April.\n\nHer mother, Lynsey Chalmers, told BBC Scotland: \"For a nine-year-old girl whose three grandparents were her world... why does a wee girl need to get punished like that over and over again?\"\n\nRobert Tarbet was \"self-opinionated and witty\", according to his daughter, Paula Karoly, but also \"hardworking, loyal and beautiful\".\n\nHe spent his working life as a plumber with Glasgow City Council before retiring in the early 2000s.\n\nIn his spare time, the sociable man was a mason who was a keen follower of Rangers FC. He loved country and western music and watching musicals in the theatre.\n\nA father and a grandfather-of-three, he was being treated for cancer when he contracted coronavirus.\n\nHe died on 29 March at Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, aged 76.\n\nSchool janitor Ian Wilson was at home in Coatbridge for two weeks with a high temperature and delirium before being admitted to hospital.\n\nDespite his worsening condition, doctors initially told his wife, Sandra, she would not be able to visit the 72-year-old who had a heart condition and diabetes.\n\nStaff eventually granted access provided she wore protective equipment - a decision which meant she could be at her husband's side when he died on 29 March.\n\nAlthough nurses were unable to comfort her with a hug due to social distancing protocols, Mrs Wilson is grateful they allowed her to be with her partner at the end.\n\n\"I was able to talk to him and just say goodbye. I've got strength from that,\" she said.\n\nDougie Chambers was one of several people who fell ill after the 40th birthday party of his daughter, Wendy, on 7 March.\n\nWithin days, the 66-year-old, who had an underlying health condition, went into hospital and tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nMr Chambers, who was from Castlemilk in Glasgow, died two weeks later, on 26 March.\n\nTwo other members of his extended family - Andy and Mary Leaman - also contracted the virus and later died.\n\nWendy said: \"If we knew then what we know now, we wouldn't have had the party. It wouldn't have happened.\"\n\nDanny Cairns was a healthy 68-year-old before he fell ill with coronavirus, according to his brother, Hugh.\n\nWhen he developed a cough and sore throat at the end of March, he isolated at home in Greenock.\n\nBut within days he was so ill he had to be taken to hospital by ambulance.\n\nIn a video call from his hospital bed, his last words to his brother were: \"I'm on my way out, mate\".\n\nHe died on 26 March, three days after arriving in hospital.\n\nMargaret Innes lived with her daughter, Sally McNaught, in Edinburgh for four years before her death at the very beginning of the pandemic.\n\nShe was housebound and very frail but she loved sitting with their pet cat and dog, doing crosswords and watching quiz shows.\n\nHer favourite soap was Neighbours and she used to say \"I'm off to Australia now\".\n\nMs McNaught said they stopped visitors coming to the house a week before lockdown, they washed their hands, cleaned everything and thought they would be safe.\n\nBut Ms Innes woke up on Mother's Day with severe breathing difficulties. She died on 25 March, three days after going into hospital. She was 93.\n\nHas one of your loved ones died recently after contracting Covid? We would like to pay tribute to some of them on the BBC Scotland website.\n\nIf you would like to see your relative or friend featured, use the form below to send us your details and we could be in touch.\n\nIn some cases your details will be published, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read the terms and conditions.\n\nIf you are reading this page on the BBC News app, you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question on this topic.", "England is currently under a third national lockdown, in an attempt to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed by coronavirus cases.\n\nBut there has been speculation that ministers could be considering tightening restrictions, amid concerns the \"stay-at-home\" message isn't being followed by enough people.\n\nAt Monday evening's Downing Street briefing, Health Secretary Matt Hancock urged people to follow the existing rules but added, \"we won't rule out taking further action if it's needed\". Other ministers have struck a similar tone.\n\nBut what is the case for more changes?\n\nIn March, nurseries closed to all but vulnerable children and those whose parents were key workers.\n\nBut so far this lockdown, early-years provision has remained open in England.\n\nScotland and Northern Ireland have chosen to keep nurseries closed to most children for now.\n\nBut England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, said keeping them open \"would allow people who need to go to work, or need to do particular activities, to do so\".\n\nYounger children carry a lower risk of transmission than adolescents, scientists say.\n\nBut according to Public Health England, 10% of coronavirus outbreaks or clusters in educational settings since September have been in early-years provision.\n\nEngland's three main nursery organisations have called on the government to provide clear scientific evidence on the risks to early-years staff now there is a more transmissible variant of Covid-19.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show he too would like to hear more from scientists about the risks - and nurseries should \"probably\" close.\n\nGoing out to exercise once a day is one of the \"reasonable excuses\" for leaving home during lockdown.\n\nPeople can walk, run, cycle or swim with those they live - or are in a support bubble - with.\n\nIn addition, they can exercise, on their own, with one person, each time, from another household - as long as they stay 2m (6ft) apart.\n\nHowever, Mr Hancock said, \"we've been seeing large groups and that is not acceptable\" and warned that, \"if too many people keep breaking this rule, then we are going to have to look at it\".\n\nThe rules say exercise should be \"local\" - in the village, town, or part of the city where you live - but do not currently specify how far people can travel.\n\nDerbyshire Police recently fined two women £200 each for driving five miles to meet for a walk, saying driving for exercise was \"not in the spirit\" of lockdown. They were told the hot drinks they had brought along were not allowed, either, as they were \"classed as a picnic\".\n\nThe penalties have now been withdrawn.\n\nProf Whitty, meanwhile, has urged people to \"double down\", avoid unnecessary contact and stick to the rules.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio 5 Live about coffee shops remaining open for takeaways, he advised against meeting up there.\n\n\"Really, please don't,\" he said.\n\nFace coverings must be worn in almost all public indoor settings - including shops - unless people are exempt.\n\nPremises \"should take reasonable steps to promote compliance with the law\", government guidance says.\n\nLast summer, when customer face coverings became law, many supermarkets said they would not make their staff responsible for enforcing the rules.\n\nHowever, Morrisons has now updated its policy to bar shoppers who refuse to cover their faces, unless they are medically exempt. Sainsbury's says security guards at its stores will challenge customers who do not comply.\n\nTesco, Asda and Waitrose have followed suit and say they too will deny entry to shoppers who do not wear face masks unless they have an exemption.\n\nThere have been suggestions face coverings should be required in outdoor public places.\n\nHowever, Sage has previously suggested it would have a \"very low impact\" on community transmission\n\nProf Whitty told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the risk posed by joggers, for example, was \"very low\" - but there \"might be some logic\" to people wearing masks in a busy outdoor queue or crowded around a market stall.\n\nOne change the government has ruled out is to support bubbles - which allow people living alone and single, or new parents to mix with another household of any size, without having to socially distance.\n\nAt the government briefing, Mr Hancock said: \"I can rule out removing the bubbles.\"\n\nThe official guidance says it's best if a support bubble is formed with a household who live locally.\n\nBut there is currently no limit to how far people can travel to visit their bubble, meaning they could go from areas with high infection rates to those with lower ones, potentially spreading the virus.\n\nWhen \"bubbling\" was first suggested, in May, Sage rejected it as too dangerous, because the reproduction (R) number - the average number of people each infected person passes the virus on to - was close to one.\n\nCurrently, the R number in England is between 1.1 and 1.4. Sage says stopping all indoor contact between different households could lower this by as much as 0.2.\n\n\"Active contract tracing should be a precondition of introducing bubbling\", Sage added.\n\nUnlike in March, places of worship are allowed to open in England, although they are closed in Scotland.\n\nThey provide spiritual leadership for many and bring communities together - but their \"communal nature\" also makes them \"vulnerable to the spread of coronavirus\", the government guidance for England says.\n\nWhen the latest lockdown was announced, the Archbishop of Canterbury tweeted: \"The government hasn't suspended public worship - but some may feel it better not to attend in person and some parishes are expected to offer online services only for now.\"\n\nSage has previously suggested places of worship pose a high risk to vulnerable groups but closing them would have a low to moderate impact on overall coronavirus transmission.", "Isabella Curry urged others to get the jab and said it was just a little \"prick in the arm\"\n\nA woman has celebrated her 100th birthday by getting a covid vaccination at home.\n\nIsabella Curry, known as Ella, from Cramlington, was among some of the most vulnerable people in Northumberland to receive the vaccine.\n\nMs Curry, who lives alone, urged others not to be afraid to get the jab and said it was just a little \"prick in the arm\" and she now felt safe.\n\nHer birthday was also marked by the arrival of a card from the Queen.\n\nShe said: \"This vaccine means I'll be able to go out, meet my friends soon and feel safe.\"\n\nIsabella Curry's nephew Neil Curry thanked the \"army\" of helpers who cared for his aunt\n\nMs Curry's nephew, Neil Curry from Bristol, said he was delighted she had had the vaccination but sad the whole family could not get together for the milestone birthday.\n\n\"We had a family reunion for Ella's 90th - we all got together in Newcastle. We would have all got together again to mark this occasion, but we couldn't,\" he said.\n\nHe also said he wanted to thank the \"army\" of people who looked after his aunt including Noreen and Jim Hutchinson, who did her shopping and cut her grass.\n\nHe also thanked June and Peter Marshall and all the other people who collected her prescriptions and mobile library books.\n\nKate Fraser, the community nurse who administered the vaccination, said: \"It's been an emotional time being able to give Isabella her vaccination.\"\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.", "People's reaction to a sonic boom heard across the East of England has been caught on camera.\n\nIt happened after a Typhoon aircraft took off from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire to escort a plane to Stansted Airport because it had lost communications at about 13:05 GMT.\n\nPeople in Cambridgeshire, Essex and parts of London posted videos on social media, with one person heard asking if it was thunder.\n\nHeather Eastlake, who was filming herself exercising near Cambridge, described her reaction as being like \"a deer in the highlights\".", "The three main Covid-19 vaccines are from Pfizer-BioNTech, the University of Oxford and Astra-Zeneca and Moderna.\n\nThe Pfizer, Oxford and Moderna vaccines each require two doses and you are not fully vaccinated until you have had both shots.\n\nBut there are many differences between them.\n\nThe BBC's Laura Foster looks at how much immunity they give, how they prevent infection and how they compare.", "Jessica Allen and Eliza Moore said their cars were surrounded by police when they arrived at the reservoir\n\nTwo women who were fined £200 each when they drove five miles for a walk have had the penalties withdrawn.\n\nJessica Allen and Eliza Moore were walking at Foremark Reservoir, Derbyshire, when they were \"surrounded\" by officers.\n\nAt the time Derbyshire Police insisted driving to exercise was \"not in the spirit\" of the most recent lockdown.\n\nBut new national guidance for police has led the force to quash the fines, and apologise to the women.\n\nChief Constable Rachel Swann said the fines \"have been withdrawn and we have notified the women directly, apologising for any concern caused\".\n\nThe two friends travelled the short distance to the reservoir from their homes in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, on Wednesday afternoon.\n\nThey said their cars were \"surrounded\" by police. They were then questioned on why they were there and told the hot drinks they had brought along were not allowed as they were \"classed as a picnic\".\n\nIn a statement, the women said: \"This afternoon we both received a phone call from Derbyshire Police.\n\n\"After reviewing our case, our fines have been rescinded and we have received an apology on behalf of the constabulary for the treatment we received.\n\n\"We welcomed this apology and we are pleased to draw a line under this event.\"\n\nAfter the incident gained media attention, the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) \"clarified the policing response concerning travel and exercise\".\n\nThe guidance said: \"The Covid regulations which officers enforce and which enables them to issue FPNs [fixed penalty notices] for breaches, do not restrict the distance travelled for exercise.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid: Fined women 'could have been dealt with differently'\n\nDerbyshire Police said: \"Having received clarification of the guidance issued by the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) on Friday, these FPNs as well as a small number of others issued, were reviewed in line with that latest advice, and so it is right that we have taken this action.\"\n\nThe county's police and crime commissioner Hardyal Dhinsda said: \"While the police are doing their absolute best to protect public safety during what is a critical time of the pandemic, the public should rightly expect a proportionate and balanced approach, taking full consideration of individual circumstances.\n\n\"We recognise that errors will occur in the face of complex guidance and legislation and it is important such situations are resolved quickly and fairly, as has been the case here.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Rhondda Cynon Taf has the highest death rate from coronavirus in Wales - with another 34 hospital deaths in the latest week\n\nThere have now been more than 5,100 deaths in Wales involving Covid-19 since the pandemic began.\n\nThe latest weekly figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show 310 deaths in the week ending 1 January, which is 32 more than the week before.\n\nThis is nearly 42.6% of all deaths.\n\nCwm Taf Morgannwg saw the highest numbers of weekly deaths in Wales, the most since the end of April at the peak of the first wave of the pandemic.\n\nThere were 76 deaths in the area - including 66 in hospitals and six in care homes.\n\nLooking at council areas, Rhondda Cynon Taf had the second highest number of hospital deaths across England and Wales, with 34. The London borough of Newham had 35.\n\nThe ONS again urged caution when interpreting this week's figures, due to the Christmas and new year holidays, which will affect the number of registrations.\n\nThe total number of Covid deaths in Wales, up to and registered by 1 January, was 4,963.\n\nBut when deaths registered over the following few days are included, there was a total of 5,169.\n\nThe Aneurin Bevan health board, with 68 deaths registered involving Covid, also had its highest number in a single week since the end of April.\n\nHywel Dda health board reported 37 deaths - its highest weekly figure since the pandemic began. Of these, 18 were patients in hospital from Carmarthenshire and 10 were hospital patients from Pembrokeshire.\n\nSwansea Bay health board had 61 deaths in this week. The Swansea council area itself had the seventh highest number of hospital deaths across England and Wales.\n\nThere were 36 deaths in Cardiff and Vale, 25 deaths in Betsi Cadwaladr in north Wales - 10 of which were hospital deaths in Wrexham - and seven in Powys.\n\nAll counties recorded at least one death involving Covid-19.\n\nThis map shows three valleys areas in south Wales among the highest for crude mortality rates involving Covid in the pandemic so far\n\nRhondda Cynon Taf, with 685 deaths, has the largest number of Covid-19 deaths in Wales up to the latest week, followed by Cardiff with 578.\n\nWhen looking at crude death rates - based on the number of deaths compared to local populations - Wales has three of the five worst across England and Wales.\n\nRhondda Cynon Taf has 283 deaths per 100,000 in total so far in the pandemic.\n\nMerthyr Tydfil is second with 253.6 and Blaenau Gwent is ranked fourth.\n\nSo-called excess deaths, which compare all registered deaths with previous years, continue to be above the five-year average.\n\nLooking at the number of deaths we would normally expect to see at this point in the year is seen as a useful measure of how the pandemic is progressing.\n\nIn Wales, the number of deaths fell from 825 to 727 in the latest week, but this was still 209 deaths (40.3%) higher than the five-year average for that week. This is the second highest proportion after London.\n\nThe ONS figures report where doctors mention Covid-19 on death certificates, including confirmed and suspected cases.\n\nThey include deaths occurring in all places, not only hospitals and care homes but also people's own homes.\n\nIt has been estimated that Covid is the underlying cause in around 90% of these deaths and not just a contributory factor.", "An eye health charity is recommending people learn the \"20-20-20\" rule to protect their sight, as lockdown has increased people's time using screens.\n\nFight for Sight advises looking at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds, every 20 minutes you look at a screen.\n\nOut of 2,000 people, half used screens more since Covid struck and a third (38%) of those believed their eyesight had worsened, a survey suggested.\n\nOpticians remain open for those who need them, the charity said.\n\nThe representative survey of 2,000 adults suggested one in five were less likely to get an eye test now than before the pandemic, for fear of catching or spreading the virus.\n\nRespondents reported difficulty reading, as well as headaches and migraines and poorer night vision.\n\nThe research charity, which commissioned a survey from polling company YouGov, said it wanted to emphasise the importance of having regular eye tests and to remind people \"the majority of opticians are open for appointments throughout lockdown restrictions\".\n\nFight for Sight chief executive Sherine Krause said: \"More than half of all cases of sight loss are avoidable through early detection and prevention methods. Regular eye tests can often detect symptomless sight-threatening conditions.\"\n\nBut even simple screen breaks can help to prevent eye strain, the charity suggested.\n\nGovernment guidance states that under lockdown people can leave home for medical appointments and to \"avoid injury, illness or risk of harm\".\n\nThe College of Optometrists said its members should continue to provide eye care under lockdown for people who experience any eyesight changes or problems.\n\nOptometrists are the professionals who will carry out your eye test when you visit an optician's practice.\n\nRoutine appointments can also be provided \"if capacity permits, and if it is in the patients' best interests\", the guidance states.\n\nClinical adviser Paramdeep Bilkhu said the college's own research suggested just under a quarter of people noticed their vision deteriorate during the first lockdown.\n\n\"Our research showed us that many people believe that spending more time in front of screens worsened their vision,\" he said.\n\n\"The good news is that this is unlikely to cause any permanent harm to your vision. However, it is very important that if you feel your vision has deteriorated or if you are experiencing any problems with your eyes, such as them becoming red or painful, you contact your local optometrist by telephone or online.\"\n\nUK health and safety legislation states employers must pay for eye tests for their employees if they have to use a screen for work for more than one hour a day.\n\nIn the summer, the UK Ophthalmology Alliance and the Royal College of Ophthalmologists calculated that at least 10,000 people had missed out on essential eye care in Britain.\n\nIn the most extreme cases, the Royal National Institute of Blind People said it feared some people were at risk of losing their sight because of a fear of attending hospital during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nA Royal College of Ophthalmologists spokesperson said: \"It is important that people who have found significant changes in their vision seek the advice of an optometrist who will examine, and determine if the changes require further investigation by an ophthalmologist - a medically-trained eye doctor.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Home Secretary Priti Patel: \"Our selfless police officers... will enforce the regulations and I will back them to do so\"\n\nPeople have been urged to \"play your part\" and follow Covid rules by Home Secretary Priti Patel, who says she will back police to enforce laws.\n\nAt a No 10 briefing, Ms Patel said a minority were \"putting the health of the nation at risk\" by flouting rules.\n\nPolice are \"moving more quickly to issuing fines\", she added, with nearly 45,000 fixed penalty notices issued across the UK.\n\nAnother 1,243 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid.\n\nAnd there have been a further 45,533 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK.\n\nMeanwhile, another 145,076 people have received a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and 20,768 a second dose, bringing the totals respectively to 2,431,648 and 412,167.\n\nAt the briefing, Ms Patel said: \"My message today to anyone refusing to do the right thing is simple: if you do not play your part, our selfless police officers - who are out there risking their own lives every day to keep us safe - they will enforce the regulations.\n\n\"And I will back them to do so, to protect our NHS and to save lives.\"\n\nIt comes after the UK's most senior police officer said lockdown rule-breakers were more likely to be fined as Covid laws would be enforced \"more quickly\".\n\nMetropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick said her officers had been forced to break up parties, despite hospitals in London struggling to cope with rising patient numbers.\n\nChairman of the National Police Chiefs' Council Martin Hewitt, who also spoke at the Downing Street briefing, said people should be asking themselves whether their reason for leaving home was \"truly essential\".\n\nHe stressed that police officers had been \"putting themselves at risk in order to keep people safe\", and said it had been \"disappointing\" to see some of the behaviour by rule-breakers.\n\nHe said examples of recent breaches included:\n\nMr Hewitt said he made \"no apology\" for police issuing fines, and warned people breaking rules - such as by organising parties or not wearing face coverings on public transport - to \"expect\" a fine.\n\nAsked if there needed to be more clarity on the guidance around exercise and staying local, Mr Hewitt said it would be wrong to put a \"particular distance\" on how far people could exercise from their home - as it would be too difficult for police to enforce.\n\nHe said it was right there was an exception to allow people to exercise, but insisted it was the public's responsibility to make sure they were doing so safely.\n\nThere is a big focus on adherence to lockdown rules. But what has almost gone unnoticed is the fact that cases may have actually started falling.\n\nThere has now been two consecutive days where newly diagnosed cases have hovered around the 46,000 mark. Up to the weekend, the average was close to 60,000.\n\nThe drop has largely been driven by falls in new cases in London, the south east and east of England.\n\nIn some regions, cases are still going up. The north west of England is causing particular concern.\n\nIt is too early for the vaccination programme to be having any significant impact, so a combination of the national lockdown on top of the tier four restrictions that were imposed in some areas before Christmas look like they may be beginning to have an impact.\n\nCare must be taken in reading too much into a couple of days' data.\n\nHospital cases are still rising - patients being admitted at the moment are the ones who were infected a week or so ago - but it does at least offer a glimmer of hope.\n\nLater in the news conference, NHS medical director for London Dr Vin Diwakar said the capital's Nightingale hospital has reopened and was admitting patients to help with the coronavirus spread.\n\nHe told reporters it was taking non-Covid patients to help free up beds in London's hospitals.\n\nDr Diwakar warned that if levels of hospitalisation in the capital continued to rise then more patients would need to be transferred out of London, adding that the NHS across the country was under pressure.\n\nIn Birmingham, 200 doctors are being redeployed to one of the country's largest intensive care units as it nears capacity.\n\nThe University Hospitals Birmingham Trust said there were 873 patients with Covid-19 in their hospitals, with 125 in intensive care.\n\nEarlier, crime and policing minister Kit Malthouse said people have a \"duty\" to make this lockdown \"the last one\".\n\n\"We are urging the small minority of people who aren't taking this seriously to do so now, and [we say] to them that, if they don't, they are much more likely to get fined by the police,\" he told BBC Breakfast.\n\nDame Cressida told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the move towards greater enforcement was \"common sense\" rather than a show of \"dictatorial policing\".\n\nFines start at £200 in England and Northern Ireland, and £60 in Wales and Scotland. Large parties can be shut down by the police, with fines of up to £10,000.\n\nEngland is currently under a national lockdown, meaning people must stay at home and can go out only for limited reasons such as food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home.\n\nSimilar lockdown measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - all of which are in charge of deciding and enforcing their own coronavirus restrictions.\n• None Could I be fined for exercising?", "New England Patriots's Bill Belichick is considered one of the most successful coaches in NFL history\n\nTop NFL coach Bill Belichick says he will not accept President Donald Trump's offer of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, citing the US Capitol riot.\n\nBelichick, of the New England Patriots, said he was flattered when he was first offered the medal - the top award given to civilians in the US.\n\nBut he said he changed his mind after a mob of Trump supporters stormed Congress last week. Five people died.\n\nThe celebrated coach had previously spoken of his friendship with Mr Trump.\n\n\"Recently, I was offered the opportunity to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which I was flattered by out of respect for what the honour represents and admiration for prior recipients,\" Belichick said in a statement.\n\n\"Subsequently, the tragic events of last week occurred and the decision has been made not to move forward with the award.\"\n\nBelichick, who has won a record six Super Bowl titles, is considered one of the most successful coaches in NFL history.\n\nThe Presidential Medal of Freedom recognises individuals who have made outstanding contributions to \"the security or national interests of America\".\n\nIn 2019 Mr Trump gave the award to golfer Tiger Woods, as well as radio personality Rush Limbaugh and posthumously Elvis Presley.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Super Bowl: How Tom Brady and Bill Belichick built a New England Patriots dynasty\n\nDonald Trump may only have recently made a career of politics, but he's always loved sport.\n\nHe owns 17 golf courses and once bought and ran the New Jersey Generals of the US Football League.\n\nJust last week, he awarded three presidential medals of freedom to professional golfers. This week he was planning to honour the most successful professional football coach in modern times, Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots.\n\nThe president seems to particularly enjoy the company of sport figures and revel in their achievements and prowess.\n\nSo for Belichick, a personal friend of the president's, to decline the award is a stinging rebuke.\n\nThe coach's decision reflects the depth of the political crisis president has created in the past week. It also highlights the troubled relationship Trump has had with the National Football League and its players, who he has disparaged for Black Lives Matter protests during the US national anthem.\n\nBelichick, a sometimes bristling, controversial figure with more than a few detractors, is used to public animosity. A coach can't win without the commitment of his players, however, and Belichick clearly believed his relationship with his team would be jeopardised by associating himself with Trump at this point.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nHundreds of people have joined a march organised following claims a man died hours after being released by police in Cardiff.\n\nThe family of Mohamud Mohammed Hassan, 24, claim he was assaulted in custody.\n\nMore than 300 people took part in a march from the city centre to Cardiff Bay police station.\n\nSouth Wales Police said it found no evidence of excessive force. The police watchdog said initial tests showed Mr Hassan was not killed by any injuries.\n\nThe Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said toxicology tests were now being carried out and it was awaiting the full post-mortem results.\n\nEarlier, First Minister Mark Drakeford said the reports of Mr Hassan's death were \"deeply concerning\".\n\nMr Hassan was arrested at his Roath home on Friday on suspicion of breach of the peace but released without charge on Saturday morning.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMr Hassan's aunt Zainab Hassan told BBC Wales she had seen Mr Hassan within an hour of his release.\n\n\"He was released on Saturday morning with lots of wounds on his body and lots of bruises,\" she said.\n\n\"He didn't have these wounds when he was arrested and when he came out of Cardiff Bay police station, he had them.\"\n\nIn a virtual session of the Welsh Parliament on Monday, Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price said: \"Every effort should be made to seek the truth of what happened.\"\n\nHe said he wanted to know why Mr Hassan was arrested and what happened during his arrest.\n\nMr Hassan's aunt Zainab Hassan said she saw him after his release\n\n\"Why did this young man die?,\" he added.\n\nMr Price said any inquiry should not be prejudged, but asked if the first minister would \"help the family find those answers\".\n\nIn response, Mr Drakeford said reports of the story were \"deeply concerning\".\n\n\"Our thoughts must be with the family of a young man who was... a fit and healthy individual,\" the Cardiff West MS said.\n\nMark Drakeford said he was deeply concerned by the reports\n\nMr Drakeford, who said the death must be \"properly investigated\", said the first step in any inquiry would be to allow the IOPC to carry out their work, which he said he expected \"to be done rigorously and with full and visible independence\".\n\nHe added that if there were things the Welsh Government could do \"I will make sure that we attend properly to those\".\n\nProtesters on Tuesday afternoon chanted \"no justice, no peace\" and called for the police force to release CCTV of Mr Hassan's time in custody.\n\nProtesters on Tuesday afternoon marched from the city centre to Cardiff Bay\n\nIn a statement on Monday, South Wales Police said Mr Hassan was arrested at his home in Newport Road on Friday night and taken to Cardiff Bay police station.\n\nHe was released at 08:30 GMT on Saturday and officers returned to the property at about 22:30 following his death.\n\nIt added: \"As part of the South Wales Police investigation CCTV and body-worn video has already been, and will continue to be, examined.\n\n\"This will assist in establishing and understanding the events that took place.\n\n\"Early findings by the force indicate no misconduct issues and no excessive force.\"\n\nProtesters were heard chanting \"no justice, no peace\"\n\nCatrin Evans, the IOPC's director for Wales, said its investigation would focus on Mr Hassan's arrest, the journey in a police van to custody and his time at Cardiff Bay police station, including whether relevant assessments were made before he was released.\n\nShe said they would be \"urgently examining the extensive relevant CCTV footage and body-worn video\" and would be speaking to the officers involved as well as witnesses who saw his arrest on Friday evening and his movements the next day after leaving custody.\n\nShe added: \"I send my condolences to Mr Hassan's family and friends, and to everyone affected by his sad death.\n\n\"We are aware of concerns being expressed and questions being asked about use of force by police officers. We will look carefully at the level of force used during the interaction and I would urge people show patience while our inquiries, which will take some time, are made.\"\n\nMs Evans added: \"An interim report from a post-mortem examination is awaited.\n\n\"Preliminary indications are that there is no physical trauma injury to explain a cause of death, and toxicology tests are required.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A 78-year-old French woman received the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in France\n\nA global race is on to vaccinate people against Covid-19 - and with infections soaring in Europe many have complained that the roll-out is too slow in the EU.\n\nMember states decide individually who to vaccinate, when and where, but the EU is coordinating strategy and buying vaccines in bulk. On Friday, the EU Commission agreed to buy an extra 300 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine - that would give the EU nearly half of the firm's global output for 2021.\n\nBBC reporters in seven European capitals explain how the vaccinations are going on their patch.\n\nIn an election year, the vaccine has become a political battleground, writes Jenny Hill, in Berlin.\n\nThe fact it was German scientists who developed the first effective Covid vaccine has been the source of great national pride. And, by and large, Germans appear to be reasonably comfortable with the idea of immunisation.\n\nA recent survey found 65% were prepared to have the vaccine. Other research indicates that less than a quarter of those surveyed would not. But politically - and perhaps unsurprisingly, given this is an election year - Germany's vaccination programme has become a battleground.\n\nVaccinations began here just under two weeks ago and prioritise the over 80s and care home workers. By Thursday evening, more than 477,000 first doses had been administered.\n\nGermany's share of the EU order amounts to 56 million doses. So far, 1.3 million doses have been delivered.\n\nBut some of the hundreds of specially prepared vaccination centres are still not in use and even the government has admitted there simply isn't enough to go around. Angela Merkel and her health minister Jens Spahn have been accused of failing to secure enough doses.\n\nMuch of the criticism has come from Mrs Merkel's own coalition partners but some within the scientific community have echoed their concerns - that Germany put European interests above its own by insisting on a joint EU procurement process. The scientists who developed the vaccine have said publicly that the EU originally turned down an offer for a further order.\n\nGermany's share of the EU order amounts to 56 million doses. So far, 1.3 million doses have been delivered and it's thought that by the end of the month a further 2.68 million will have followed.\n\nMr Spahn, whose assured performance through the pandemic led some to wonder whether he might be a potential successor to Mrs Merkel, has blamed the shortage on the inability of the manufacturers of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to meet global demand.\n\nGermany has now ordered an extra 30 million doses and, following the recent European approval of the Moderna vaccine, expects to start rolling that out next week. The government is sticking to its pledge that the vaccination programme will be complete by the end of the summer.\n\nThe Czech prime minister has hit out at apparent delays in distributing the vaccine, writes Rob Cameron, in Prague.\n\nThe Czech vaccination effort began on 27 December, when the prime minister, Andrej Babis, became the first person in the country to receive the jab. Mr Babis, who is 66, had previously questioned whether he would be eligible, as he'd had his spleen removed as a teenager.\n\nBut the country's programme has got off to a sluggish start. Mr Babis - a billionaire businessman who has been dogged by both European and Czech investigations into alleged misuse of EU funds - has lost no time venting his (figurative) spleen at the European Commission over the delay. \"We believed when we contributed €12m to the European fund in November that we'd receive the vaccine,\" he told a newspaper this week.\n\nThe health minister conceded this week that immunising the higher-risk groups will take months.\n\nThe country has received 30,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. So far, it has managed to administer it to 19,918 people. The government says it is ready to roll out the jab en masse as soon as supplies arrive from the manufacturers.\n\nIt has also published a strategy, which envisages a three-stage process. The first will see targeted vaccination of high-risk groups. This will gradually give way to mass vaccination in 31 centres, using an online reservation system that will be open to all from 1 February. And the final stage will see the country's GPs deployed, hopefully to administer the Oxford-AstraZeneca and other jabs, which unlike the previous two can be stored and transported at fridge temperature.\n\nHowever, the timing in the original strategy document now appears optimistic. The health minister conceded this week that immunising the higher-risk groups - all health and social care staff, teachers, everyone over 65, all those with serious health conditions - will take months. GPs may not begin vaccinating young, healthy members of society until late spring, or summer.\n\nA sluggish start is being blamed on bureaucracy and vaccine scepticism, writes Hugh Schofield, in Paris.\n\nFrance's boast of a big, effective state apparatus has been badly exposed by the sluggish start to the Covid vaccination programme. After the first week, when neighbouring Germany had inoculated around 250,000 people, France was on a mere 530. By Friday, the figure had gone up to 45,500 - still so small as to be statistically meaningless.\n\nSo why has it taken so long for France to put the plan into action? It is not as if the authorities did not have time to prepare. And it is certainly not a question of a lack of vaccine. In fact, more than a million Pfizer doses are already in cold storage, waiting to be used.\n\nPolls suggest as many as 58% of the public do not want to be given the jab.\n\nThe primary reason for the delay seems to be the cumbersome, over-centralised nature of France's health bureaucracy. A 45-page dossier of instructions issued by the ministry in Paris had to be read and understood by staff at old people's homes.\n\nEach recipient then had to give informed consent in a consultation with a doctor, held no less than five days before injection. The lengthy procedure is in theory to save lives - those of patients who might have an adverse reaction. But as the critics have been arguing, delay in inoculating the population is also costing lives.\n\nAnother problem in France is the high level of scepticism towards vaccination - product of a more general suspicion of government. Polls suggest as many as 58% of the public do not want to be given the jab. The effect - critics say - has been to make the government unduly cautious. When urgency was required, the authorities were reluctant to move fast for fear of galvanising the anti-vaxxers.\n\nAfter President Emmanuel Macron communicated his anger at the delays at the weekend, the pace is picking up. The procedure for consent is being simplified. By the end of January, the plan is to have 500-600 vaccination centres open across the country - either in hospitals or other big public buildings.\n\nPolitically a lot is at stake. The government has already come under fire for failings in providing masks and tests. With opposition voices calling the vaccine delay a \"state scandal\", President Macron needs a roll-out that is fast and problem-free.\n\nNational pride accelerated Russia's rollout, but one man is conspicuously absent from the list of people vaccinated, writes Sarah Rainsford, in Moscow.\n\nRussia registered its main Covid vaccine for domestic use way back in August, before mass safety and efficacy trials had even begun. In December, with those trials still underway, it began rolling out Sputnik V to the public ahead of mass vaccination launches everywhere else in Europe. The rush was driven by national pride as well as medical necessity.\n\nSputnik was initially offered to front line health and education workers but early take-up of the two-dose vaccination was slow and the list of those eligible soon expanded.\n\nA poll by the Levada Centre in late December showed only 38% of respondents were willing to get the jab: wary of domestic healthcare and medicines, Russians were sceptical of bold early claims made for the vaccine and nervous about possible adverse reactions. Even so, and despite similar delays scaling-up production as in other countries, Sputnik's backers announced this week that more than a million people had been vaccinated.\n\nRussia began rolling out its Sputnik V vaccine in December\n\nBut one man still conspicuously absent from the list of the vaccinated is Vladimir Putin, despite the Kremlin saying he will - eventually - get the jab. In the meantime, those who meet him in person are obliged to test for Covid first and even quarantine. The president may need to lead by example, though. Mr Putin has said repeatedly that protecting the economy is his priority so he's banking on mass vaccination to avoid a return to national lockdown.\n\nRussia has built giant, temporary hospitals since the start of the pandemic and the health minister said this week that 25% of Covid beds remain free. There's also been a fall in the number of new daily cases reported - around 25,000 for the past 5 days. But that's not down to the vaccine yet. The country is nearing the end of a 10-day New Year holiday period and the number of Covid tests has also dropped.\n\nAs infection rates grow in a country praised by many for its no-lockdown approach, a successful vaccine programme is crucial writes Maddy Savage, in Stockholm.\n\nAlmost two weeks since 91-year-old care home resident Gun-Britt Johnsson became the first Swede to get the initial dose of a Pfizer jab, there is still no official tally of how many others have received the vaccination.\n\nThe Public Health Agency of Sweden says it's in the process of compiling data from the country's 21 regional health authorities tasked with vaccinating the entire adult population - around eight million people - by 26 June. The date isn't arbitrary, it's the biggest public holiday weekend of the year, when Swedes traditionally hold Midsummer celebrations. Karin Tegmark, a senior manager at the agency, says the date remains \"feasible\". But she says it depends on the delivery of vaccines to the country.\n\nAfter months of high trust levels in the country's no-lockdown approach, support for the health agency has dwindled.\n\nAlongside 4.5 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, Sweden has ordered 3.6 million jabs from Moderna, the first of which are expected to arrive next week. The country also plans to roll-out the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as soon as possible after it is approved by the EU - ideally by February.\n\nSwedes initially appeared lukewarm to the idea of taking a speedily-developed coronavirus vaccine, although a poll at the end of December found 71% would take one. A key driver of the initial scepticism is thought to be the failure of a voluntary mass vaccination programme for swine flu in 2009. Hundreds of Swedish children and young adults under 30 developed the sleeping disorder narcolepsy, which was found to be a side effect of the Pandemrix vaccine.\n\nA successful vaccination programme will be crucial, not least because it comes at a time when Swedish authorities are struggling to maintain public confidence. After months of high trust levels in the country's no-lockdown approach, support for the health agency has dwindled as Sweden has struggled with the second wave of coronavirus.\n\nMeanwhile, several high profile officials have faced heavy criticism for breaching their own recommendations - including the head of the civil contingencies agency (pictured), who resigned after spending Christmas with his daughter in the Canary Islands.\n\nA new government in Belgium seems unified on the vaccine rollout - for now at least, writes Nick Beake, in Brussels.\n\nIt seemed fitting that the first person in Belgium to receive a Covid jab lives in the place where the world's first approved Covid vaccine is being produced. Jos Hermans, a 96-year-old from the municipality of Puurs, was given the injection on 28 December, in his care home. A further 700 elderly residents were also administered a dose in what was a small, initial trial.\n\nThe mass vaccination programme in Belgium began on 5 January, but has been criticised for starting slowly. Federal Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke had promised in November that the rollout would be \"seamless and fast\", tweeting: \"If that does not work, shoot me.\"\n\nThe first phase looks to vaccinate up to 200,000 nursing home residents by the end of this month, or early February. Healthcare professionals will be next in line and the aim was for the whole population to be inoculated by the end of September.\n\nJos Hermans, a 96-year-old from Puurs, was given the injection on 28 December\n\nYou may think the country would be at an advantage being the epicentre of the Pfizer-BioNTech production. While this clearly helps with distribution, Belgium cannot receive more doses - relative to its population - than other EU countries under strict Commission rules. That didn't stop the minister-president of the Flanders region, who admitted this week that he had contacted Pfizer directly in the hope of procuring more doses, only to be rebuffed.\n\nAfter getting a guarantee from Pfizer over supply of the jab, the federal Belgian authorities have adapted their strategy: they now propose giving as many available doses to as many people as they can - and no longer reserving vials for patients' second dose, given three weeks after the first. In general, the federal government, rather than the European Commission has faced any criticism for a delay and has defended its \"careful\" approach.\n\nAnd there appears to be an interesting regional or cultural discrepancy when it comes to whether people are willing to take the vaccine. Of the Flemish population interviewed in a poll, half have said they wanted the vaccine as soon as possible. Among French speakers - it was 20% fewer, which chimes with the deeper scepticism over the border in France.\n\nIn a country where politics are notoriously complicated and fractious - they've only recently agreed a government, after a 500-day vacuum - the Federal Coalition appears unified on its Covid vaccine strategy. For now, at least.\n\nRegional variances and political rows have marked the beginning of Spain's vaccination programme writes Guy Hedgecoe, in Madrid.\n\nSpain started administering the vaccine on 27 December. So far, 743,925 doses have been distributed to regional administrations, with 277,976 people vaccinated, according to the health ministry. The objective of the coalition government is to immunise 2.3 million people within 12 weeks. Priority is being given to elderly residents of care homes, those who look after them, and healthcare personnel.\n\nEach of the country's 17 regions has a high degree of control over healthcare and should receive the number of doses that corresponds to their populations. However, already there has been substantial geographical disparity.\n\nGovernment data showed, for example, that while the northern region of Asturias had used 55% of the doses it had received by 3 January, the Madrid region had only administered 5% by the same date. Some regions are holding back doses to administer a second follow-up jab to the same person in several weeks' time, and some have been vaccinating on national holidays while others have not.\n\nThe pandemic has been the cause of constant political conflict, with the right-wing opposition accusing the leftist government of incompetence.\n\nAlthough vaccination is voluntary, the government has said it is making a register of those who do not wish to be inoculated. That initiative has generated controversy, although the government has insisted the register will merely seek to clarify why people refuse the vaccination.\n\nHowever, the pandemic has been the cause of constant political conflict, with the right-wing opposition accusing the leftist government of Pedro Sánchez of incompetence, lack of transparency and using coronavirus to accumulate power.\n\nThe arrival of a vaccine has not stopped the rancour. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the conservative Popular Party (PP) president of Galicia, warned the number of doses being distributed to each region was being dictated by \"political affiliations or parliamentary needs\", a claim the central government has rejected.", "The US has placed Cuba back on a list of state sponsors of terrorism, citing the communist country's backing of Venezuela.\n\nPresident Donald Trump's administration made the announcement just days before he leaves the White House.\n\nPresident-elect Joe Biden, who takes office on 20 January, has previously said he wants to improve US-Cuban relations.\n\nMr Biden has said he is seeking closer ties between the long-term adversaries but Mr Trump's decision is likely to hinder a quick repair of relations.\n\nCuba's place on the list will require a formal review that could take months, analysts say.\n\nThe Caribbean island was removed from the list by President Barack Obama in 2015, but Mr Trump has taken a harder line towards the country.\n\nIn 2016 Barack Obama became the first US president to visit Cuba since 1928\n\nWhen explaining the decision, officials cited Cuba's support of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro who the US refuses to recognise.\n\n\"With this action, we will once again hold Cuba's government accountable and send a clear message: the Castro regime must end its support for international terrorism and subversion of US justice,\" US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement on Monday.\n\nIn response, Cuban Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Rodriguez tweeted: \"We condemn the cynical and hypocritical qualification of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, announced by the United States.\"\n\nIn advance of the announcement, House Democrat Gregory Meeks called it \"another stunt by President Trump and Pompeo, trying to tie the hands of the incoming Biden administration on their way out the door.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nPresident Obama began to normalise relations with Cuba in 2015. He called the decades-long US efforts to isolate the country \"a failure\".\n\nSince the Cold War era, the US had pursued various policies to undermine Cuba which it saw as a great threat.\n\nCuba now rejoins countries including Iran and North Korea on the list of sponsors of terrorism. The impact on the island country include severe limits on foreign investment.", "Mr Williamson says his department is doing all it can to support remote learning\n\nAn extra 300,000 laptops and tablets have been bought to help disadvantaged children in England learn at home, says Education Secretary Gavin Williamson.\n\nMr Williamson said the devices would be delivered to schools.\n\nHe also pledged to publish a remote education framework to support schools and colleges with delivering lessons during the latest national lockdown.\n\nIt comes as research says children from poorer families are likely to struggle more with remote learning.\n\nThe Department for Education said its data showed that over 700,000 devices had been delivered to schools in England so far during the pandemic - 100,000 of which were delivered last week.\n\nThe department says the additional 300,000 laptops and tablets lifts government investment by another £100m, meaning over £400m will have been invested in supporting disadvantaged children who need help with access to technology during the pandemic.\n\nBut the department has faced mounting criticism over huge percentages of pupils not having access to digital devices, nine months into the pandemic.\n\nMr Williamson said the DfE was \"doing everything in our power to support schools with high-quality remote education\".\n\nHe said: \"These additional devices, on top of the 100,000 delivered last week, add to the significant support we are making available to help schools deliver high-quality online learning, as we know they have been doing.\"\n\nOn top of this, the remote education framework would support schools and colleges with delivering education for pupils who are learning from home, he said.\n\nThe frameworks, which are voluntary and should be adapted for schools' individual circumstances, will \"help them to identify the strengths and areas for improvement in the lessons and teaching they provide remotely\".\n\nBut Geoff Barton, head of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: \"While we welcome the extra laptops and tablets announced, it is pretty poor that nearly a year after this crisis began we are only now inching up to the number of devices that are needed.\n\n\"The reality is that this extra provision is coming when we are already well into the new lockdown and after a heavily disrupted autumn term in which many children had to self-isolate in line with coronavirus protocols,\" he said.\n\n\"The government was slow off the mark to address the digital divide early in the crisis and is now trying to make up for lost time.\"\n\nMr Williamson's laptop announcement comes as research by the University of Sussex found that nearly one in five less advantaged parents said they struggled with home-learning during the first lockdown.\n\nThe research surveyed 3,409 parents in the UK between 5 May until 31 July last year and found families of lower socioeconomic status were more likely to report their home environment made it harder for pupils to complete schoolwork from home.\n\nThe study says secondary school pupils eligible for free school meals (39%) were more likely to report that a lack of technology - such as laptops and computers - made learning from home more difficult, compared to 19% of pupils who are not eligible for free school meals.\n\nThere are concerns poorer children will fall further behind\n\nPrimary school pupils from struggling households were found to be more likely to find home learning learning harder than their more comfortable off peers due to the environment - such as noise levels (59% to 50%), lack of space (45% to 22%), lack of technology (45% to 26%) and lack of internet (35% to 16%).\n\nThe researchers warned that educational inequalities were likely to increase due to further school closures this year.\n\nLead researcher Dr Matthew Easterbrook said: \"These results show that school closures disproportionately disrupt the education of those who are most economically disadvantaged, suggesting that educational inequalities are likely to rise because of the pandemic.\n\n\"The results show that parents of pupils from disadvantaged families - those who are eligible for free school meals, who have lower levels of education, or who are financially struggling - are much more likely to report that learning from home is challenging.\"\n\nReport co-author Lewis Doyle, doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex, added: \"School closures, while clearly necessary during this public health crisis, risk entrenching inequality.\"\n\nOn Tuesday the government also published figures on how many pupils were physically in schools across England before the Christmas holidays.\n\nThe data shows 79% of pupils in state schools were in class on Wednesday16 December - down from 85% on Thursday 10 December.\n\nIn secondary schools, attendance fell from 80% to 72% on 16 December, while pupil attendance in primary schools fell from 89% to 86%, the figures show.\n\nBetween 9% and 11% of pupils - up to 872,000 children - did not attend school for Covid-19 related reasons on 16 December.", "Tesco, Asda and Waitrose have become the latest supermarkets to say they will deny entry to shoppers who do not wear face masks unless they are medically exempt.\n\nIt follows a similar move by Morrisons, while Sainsbury's says it will challenge those who flout the rules.\n\nRetailers have been criticised for not doing enough to stop people breaking Covid rules as infections spread.\n\nBut enforcement of face coverings is officially a police responsibility.\n\nHowever, supermarkets can deny entry to their premises which is private property, and can call the police if someone refuses to follow the rules or becomes abusive.\n\nSenior police figures have reportedly said there is little officers can do to enforce the rules in shops because they are so busy.\n\nBut policing minister Kit Malthouse said that they would offer \"backup if things go seriously wrong\".\n\n\"What we hope is that in the vast majority of cases the enforcement, or the reminders if you like, put in place by the store owners will be enough,\" he told BBC News.\n\nA Tesco spokeswoman said the supermarket chain had decided to strengthen its policies.\n\n\"To protect our customers and colleagues, we won't let anyone into our stores who is not wearing a face covering, unless they are exempt in line with government guidance,\" she said.\n\n\"We are also asking our customers to shop alone, unless they're a carer or with children. To support our colleagues, we will have additional security in stores to help manage this.\"\n\nAn Asda spokesman said if customers had forgotten their face coverings, it would continue to offer them one free of charge.\n\nBut he added: \"Should a customer refuse to wear a covering without a valid medical reason and be in any way challenging to our colleagues about doing so, our security colleagues will refuse their entry.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. How to wear your mask. Hint: it's not any of these three options\n\nAndrew Murphy, executive director of operations at Waitrose, said: \"We've listened carefully to the clear change in tone and emphasis of the views and information shared by the UK's governments in recent days.\n\n\"By insisting on the wearing of face coverings, over and above the social distancing measures we already have in place, we aim to make our shops even safer for customers.\"\n\nOn Tuesday, Sainsbury's told the BBC it did not have the power to deny entry to shoppers without masks. However, trials showed customers complied more when asked to wear masks by security guards at the door, it said.\n\nIn an interview with the BBC, Sainsbury's boss, Simon Roberts, said \"we are not going to ban customers\".\n\nBut he urged shoppers to wear a mask and shop alone.\n\n\"By doing that we will help keep everybody safe,\" he said.\n\nThe Co-op also said it would not ban shoppers without masks from entering, and instead urged customers to take responsibility for wearing a face covering when visiting its stores, as it was mandatory by law.\n\nBoss of Co-op Food Jo Whitfield said: \"We've increased our in-store messaging to remind customers and government guidance does state that the police can take measures if members of the public don't comply with this law.\"\n\nIceland said it would take a similar approach, adding the vast majority of its customers continued to shop in compliance with the law.\n\n\"In view of the rising tide of abuse and violence being directed at our store colleagues, we do not expect them to confront the small minority of customers who aggressively refuse to comply with the law,\" a spokesman added.\n\nIn England, the police can issue a £200 fine to someone breaking the face covering rules. In Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, a £60 fine can be imposed. Repeat offenders face bigger fines.", "Many hospitals are still under intense pressure with the increasing number of Covid patients arriving.\n\nDoctors say they are seeing more younger patients in their thirties and forties compared to the first wave.\n\nThe overall pattern of those at risk of becoming seriously ill or dying has not changed significantly and the older someone is, the greater their risk from Covid-19 - particularly those over the age of 65.\n\nThe BBC's Health Editor Hugh Pym was given access to film at Croydon University Hospital in South London.", "Morrisons will bar customers who refuse to wear face coverings from its shops amid rising coronavirus infections.\n\nFrom Monday, shoppers who refuse to wear face masks offered by staff will not be allowed inside, unless they are medically exempt.\n\nSainsbury's also said it would challenge those not wearing a mask or who were shopping in groups.\n\nThe announcements come amid concerns that social distancing measures are not being adhered to in supermarkets.\n\nVaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said the government is \"concerned\" shops are not enforcing rules strictly enough.\n\n\"Ultimately, the most important thing to do now is to make sure that actually enforcement - and of course the compliance with the rules - when people are going into supermarkets are being adhered to,\" Mr Zahawi told Sky News.\n\n\"We need to make sure people actually wear masks and follow the one-way system,\" he said.\n\nMorrisons said it had \"introduced and consistently maintained thorough and robust safety measures in all our stores\" since the start of the pandemic.\n\nBut it said: \"From today we are further strengthening our policy on masks.\"\n\nSecurity guards at the UK's fourth-biggest supermarket chain will be enforcing the new rules.\n\nMorrisons' chief executive, David Potts, said: \"Those who are offered a face covering and decline to wear one won't be allowed to shop at Morrisons unless they are medically exempt.\n\n\"Our store colleagues are working hard to feed you and your family, please be kind.\"\n\nFollowing Morrisons' announcement, Sainsbury's said that it was also putting trained security guards at the front of its stores to challenge shoppers who did not comply.\n\nChief executive Simon Roberts said: \"I've spent a lot of time in our stores reviewing the latest situation over the last few days and on behalf of all my colleagues, I am asking our customers to help us keep everyone safe.\n\n\"The vast majority of customers are shopping safely, but I have also seen some customers trying to shop without a mask and shopping in larger family groups.\n\n\"Please help us to keep all our colleagues and customers safe by always wearing a mask and by shopping alone. Everyone's care and consideration matters now more than ever.\"\n\nEarlier on Monday, Mr Zahawi stopped short of saying that supermarket staff should be responsible for enforcing rules on face masks.\n\nEnforcement of face coverings is the responsibility of the police, not retailers. Wearing face masks in supermarkets and shops is compulsory across the UK.\n\nIn England, the police can issue a £200 fine to someone breaking the face covering rules. In Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, a £60 fine can be imposed. Repeat offenders face bigger fines.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. How to wear your mask. Hint: it's not any of these three options\n\nHowever, retail industry body the British Retail Consortium said that, workers have faced an increase in incidents of violence and abuse when trying to encourage shoppers to put them on.\n\nAndrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the British Retail Consortium, added: \"Supermarkets continue to follow all safety guidance and customers should be reassured that supermarkets are Covid-secure and safe to visit during lockdown and beyond.\n\n\"Customers should play their part too by following in-store signage and being considerate to staff and fellow shoppers.\"\n\nUnder current lockdown restrictions across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, people must only leave home for essential reasons, such as buying food or medicine.\n\nIn a bid to contain the spread of coronavirus, supermarkets introduced social distancing measures during the UK's first nationwide lockdown last March. They included limits on the numbers of customers in the shops at any one time, protective plastic screens at tills and \"marshals\" to ensure shoppers were maintaining a two-metre distance.\n\nBut amid rising numbers of infections, some have expressed concerns about a \"lack of visible protections\" implemented by supermarkets in recent weeks.\n\nThe First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, said on Saturday that he wanted to see stores policed as they were during the first lockdown as people were worried the strict enforcement of rules did not \"appear to be there this time\".\n\n\"Given the fact the new variant is so much easier to catch... we are looking at supermarkets and other places where people leave their homes, to make sure they are organised in a way that keeps their staff and customers safe,\" he said.\n\nSupermarket Waitrose said that it was taking a \"cautious approach\" to the virus, with marshals checking that customers are wearing face coverings on the door, hand sanitiser stations at its entrances and written communications to shoppers reminding them to maintain their distance.\n\nTesco said it was limiting the number of customers in store and was also reminding customers to wear masks.\n\n\"We have clear signage explaining this, and we have packs of face coverings available for purchase near the front of our stores for any customers who have forgotten them.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Asda announced last week that it would extend its marshals' hours to 08:00 to 20:00 and increase how often baskets and trollies are cleaned.\n\nShop workers' union Usdaw has also called for firms to apply more stringent measures again.\n\nThe union's general secretary, Paddy Lillis, said that it had received reports that \"too many customers are not following necessary safety measures like social distancing, wearing a face covering and only shopping for essential items\".\n\n\"It is going to take some time to roll out the vaccine and we cannot afford to be complacent in the meantime, particularly with a new strain sweeping the nation,\" Mr Lillis said.\n\nThe trade union also suggested that \"'one-in one-out\" policies and proper queuing systems should be reintroduced in supermarkets.\n\nIt added that these systems should be managed by trained security staff where necessary.", "Parler has hit back after Amazon pulled support for its so-called \"free speech\" social network.\n\nParler is suing the tech giant, accusing it of breaking anti-trust laws by removing it.\n\nParler had been reliant on the tech giant's Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing service to provide its alternative to Twitter.\n\nThe platform was popular among supporters of Donald Trump, although the president is not a user.\n\nAmazon took the action after finding dozens of posts on the service that it said encouraged violence.\n\nIn response, the platform has asked a federal judge to order Amazon to reinstate it.\n\n\"AWS's decision to effectively terminate Parler's account is apparently motivated by political animus,\" the complaint reads.\n\n\"It is also apparently designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter.\"\n\n\"There is no merit to these claims,\" it said.\n\n\"AWS provides technology and services to customers across the political spectrum, and we respect Parler's right to determine for itself what content it will allow. However, it is clear that there is significant content on Parler that encourages and incites violence against others, and that Parler is unable or unwilling to promptly identify and remove this content, which is a violation of our terms of service.\n\n\"We made our concerns known to Parler over a number of weeks and during that time we saw a significant increase in this type of dangerous content, not a decrease, which led to our suspension of their services Sunday evening.\"\n\nExamples Amazon had provided included posts calling for the killing of Democrats, Muslims, Black Lives Matter leaders, and mainstream media journalists.\n\nGoogle and Apple had already removed Parler from their app stores towards the end of last week saying it had failed to comply with their content-moderation requirements.\n\nHowever, it had still been accessible via the web - although visitors had complained of being unable to create new accounts over the weekend, without which it was not possible to view its content.\n\nParler has been online since 2018, and may return if it can find an alternative host.\n\nHowever, chief executive John Matze told Fox News on Sunday that \"every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too\".\n\n\"We're going to try our best to get back online as quickly as possible, but we're having a lot of trouble because every vendor we talk to says they won't work with us because if Apple doesn't approve and Google doesn't approve, they won't,\" he added.\n\nAWS's move is the latest in a series of actions affecting social media following the rioting on Capitol Hill last week.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Capitol riots: ‘We would have been murdered’\n\nFacebook and Twitter have also banned President Trump's accounts on their platforms, citing concerns that he might incite further violence.\n\nParler's users included the Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who had led an effort in the Senate to delay certifying Joe Biden's electoral college victory.\n\nHe had about five million followers on the platform - more than his tally on Twitter.\n\nParler's app now shows an error message and its website is offline\n\n\"Why should a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires have a monopoly on political speech?\" he tweeted over the weekend.\n\nParler's downfall appears to have benefited Gab - another \"free speech\" social network that is popular with far-right commentators.\n\nIt has claimed to have \"gained more users in the past two days than we did in our first two years of existing\".\n\nParler has long been a home for what you might call untouchables, people who had been excluded from mainstream services for offences such as blatant racism or incitement to violence.\n\nDuring a brief excursion onto the site over the weekend, I observed plenty of examples of such behaviour, with users exhibiting vile anti-Semitism, displaying Nazi symbols such as the swastika and uttering incoherent threats against those they perceive to be enemies of America.\n\nBut as Amazon's deadline approached something like panic took hold, with users desperately urging their followers to join them on other platforms.\n\nMost seemed to accept that Parler was doomed, while vowing to continue their fight elsewhere.\n\n\"Well this is the end,\" wrote one user, who proclaimed his support for the American Nazi Party.", "The disease is still spreading. There are more people in hospital with Covid-19 in the UK than at any other point in the pandemic.\n\nProf Chris Whitty, England's chief medical officer, hit the airwaves on Monday morning to tell us it's \"everyone's problem\".\n\nAnd a possible further increase in the numbers from those get-togethers that did take place over Christmas is yet to filter through.\n\nIt is cheering, and crucial, to see the elderly and vulnerable attending vaccine super-centres in huge numbers for their injections.\n\nBut there is no getting away from it: at this moment, the coronavirus situation seems pretty dire. And there is real concern in government that the public, this time round, is just not paying attention to the rules as closely as they did back in the spring.\n\nWhat is the government's answer? It is not, at least not yet, despite calls from the opposition, another big clampdown.\n\nIt might not feel like it, but it is only seven days since Boris Johnson took what used to be the rare step of making a national address, live on primetime TV, telling us, across the UK, once more to \"stay at home\".\n\nThere is hardly any political appetite to go even further.\n\nAs one senior minister said today: \"We have gone as far as we possibly can in terms of shutting things down\".\n\nThe prime minister was reluctant to go this far, only moving back to a lockdown in England when the evidence put forward by the government's top medics got worse, and worse and worse.\n\nThere are in fact even more limits that ministers, not just in Westminster but in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast too, could introduce.\n\nSchools could be forcibly closed to all pupils. Nurseries could shut.\n\nGovernment sources say the nurseries policy isn't going to change. Number 10 firmly denies they would ever take such a drastic step on schools which have always been open to key workers' children and it is hard to imagine that ever happening.\n\nIn extremis though there are measures that could be taken - in theory the government does not want to do any of this, but in practice there are other potential steps.\n\nBuilding sites could be made to lock their gates. Factories where machines are still whirring because they are operating under Covid guidelines could be made to pause.\n\nEngland, Scotland and Northern Ireland could follow Wales and ban people from seeing anyone they don't live with even outdoors.\n\nPlaygrounds, launderettes and chiropractors, could, along with many others on the list of premises allowed to stay open, have to shut up shop after all.\n\nBut while ministers have talked about squeezing the advice for takeaways to try to prevent big queues gathering at popular places, encouraged the supermarkets to make sure they are doing as much as they can to be safe, and even discussed the prospect of asking for masks to be worn outdoors, there is no expectation, at least at the start of this week, that a more extensive clampdown is coming from Westminster.\n\nAlthough, it's worth noting that the Scottish cabinet will discuss restrictions again on Tuesday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. On Monday Matt Hancock ruled out getting rid of support bubbles.\n\nOne reason for the reluctance to go much further is that every step that affects a business affects jobs and livelihoods too.\n\nThe chancellor told MPs on Monday that 800,000 people have lost their jobs since February, admitting the economy will get worse before it gets better.\n\nSo trying to preserve activity that can be done safely matters to the government too.\n\nThere's also a question in government circles about whether cranking up different rules bit by bit is really what would help.\n\nChris Whitty this morning bluntly suggested there was limited value in \"tinkering\" with the rules, and what is required instead is for all of us to realise how grave the situation really is.\n\nInstead of worrying about whether we are allowed to sit on a park bench at all, (and yes, this has been a lively conversation in Westminster today) , perhaps we should be asking ourselves whether we really need to be out at all.\n\nThe NHS has been under huge pressure dealing with a surge in Covid cases this winter.\n\nBut when what happens next will be in large part shaped by our behaviour as individuals, working out the dos and don'ts can get sticky fast.\n\nTwo women who hit the headlines for driving five miles to go for a snowy walk with a takeaway cuppa had their fines withdrawn today, just as the prime minister caused a stir when a newspaper revealed he'd gone seven miles to the other side of London for a cycle in the Olympic Park.\n\nYou might be a reader who feels, 'so what?'. In both cases they were exercising outside, within the law, so who cares?\n\nBut you might feel when the firm instruction is to stay at home, and stay local, that is pushing the rules.\n\nFor now though, with grimmer and grimmer medics' warnings ringing in our ears, and reminders about enforcement from the police coming too, ministers seem resolved to encourage the public to comply rather than crack down further.\n\nBut it is however, only a week since the lockdown the prime minister had so hoped to avoid returned. By now, it's not surprising, Boris Johnson would never quite rule anything out.\n\nP.S. In all the gloom, the cheerier news is that the vaccination programme across the UK is certainly getting going, with 2.3 million people having had their first jab.\n\nThe number of people getting vaccinated has been added to the list of statistics that the government publishes every day. The targets the government has set are tough, but the numbers so far, are growing fast.", "RAF Typhoons, similar to the aircraft pictured, took off from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire and escorted the civilian aircraft to London Stansted Airport\n\nA sonic boom has been heard across the East of England after RAF Typhoon aircraft were launched to intercept a plane that had lost communications.\n\nThe Typhoons took off from RAF Coningsby and \"safely escorted\" the civilian aircraft to Stansted Airport in Essex, an RAF spokesman said.\n\nThe boom, at about 13:05 GMT, was reported by people across social media.\n\n\"The Typhoon aircraft were authorised to transit at supersonic speed for operational reasons,\" the RAF said.\n\nPeople in Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire and parts of London heard the boom.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. People's reaction to the sonic boom was caught on camera\n\n\"We have received numerous calls from the public with reports of a sonic boom... between Huntingdon and Cambridge,\" Cambridgeshire police said, in a Facebook post.\n\n\"Nobody has been injured. Some callers reported the incident had shaken properties but no major damage is thought to have occurred.\"\n\nAn image from a police officer's body-worn camera captured the RAF Typhoon aircraft flying over Cambridgeshire\n\nCommunications with the aircraft were re-established after the Typhoons were launched and it was intercepted before being escorted to Stansted.\n\nA spokesman for the airport said the \"private jet\" was believed to have been flying from Germany to Birmingham.\n\nHe confirmed the plane had been brought into land at about 13:40.\n\nWhen an aircraft approaches the speed of sound, the air in front of the nose of the plane builds up a pressure front because it has \"nowhere to escape\", said Dr Jim Wild of Lancaster University.\n\nA sonic boom happens when that air \"escapes\", creating a ripple effect which can be heard on the ground as a loud thunderclap.\n\nThe speed of sound varies. It is about 770mph (1,200km/h) at sea level, but slower at higher altitudes. A plane flying at 30,000ft would reach the speed of sound at about 675mph (1,085km/h), according to NASA's educational website.\n\nIt can be heard over such a large area because it moves with the plane, rather like the wake of a boat spreading out behind the vessel.\n\nRAF jets are only given permission to go supersonic over populated areas in emergencies, usually when they are required to intercept another aircraft.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nLeicester City climbed to second in the Premier League as they won a keenly contested encounter with fellow top-four hopefuls Southampton at King Power Stadium.\n\nJames Maddison fired in from a tight angle after 37 minutes, the Foxes midfielder instructing his team-mates to stand back as he performed a socially distanced celebration, before Harvey Barnes added a second deep into second-half stoppage-time.\n\nVictory takes Leicester within one point of leaders Manchester United, who travel to third-placed Liverpool on Sunday, while Southampton are eighth, three points outside the top four.\n• None How Leicester followed guidance on celebrations - and others didn't\n• None Reaction to Leicester v Southampton, plus the rest of Saturday's Premier League action\n\nThe Saints dominated in the opening stages and created the first opening when Che Adams stretched the home defence on the counter-attack, while Leicester's Barnes' powerful drive forced Alex McCarthy into action with the game's first shot after 19 minutes.\n\nThe visitors, without talisman Danny Ings after the striker tested positive for Covid-19 last week, went close to a response through Ryan Bertrand and Will Smallbone either side of half-time but neither could find a way past Kasper Schmeichel.\n\nIn an entertaining conclusion, Stuart Armstrong rattled the Leicester crossbar with an excellent strike from the edge of the penalty area, while Jan Bednarek produced a superb goalline clearance to deny Barnes and the returning McCarthy saved from Jamie Vardy as both sides pushed for a late goal.\n\nIt took Leicester until the 95th minute to seal the three points, Barnes calmly slotting past McCarthy on the break.\n\nLeicester manager Brendan Rodgers challenged his side to \"disrupt the Premier League hierarchy\" after a 2-1 win over Newcastle in their last league outing maintained their top-four hopes.\n\nVictory in this stern test ensured they continue to do just that.\n\nEnjoying their longest unbeaten run of the season, their streak now at six matches in all competitions since defeat by Everton a month ago, Rodgers' side delivered an assured performance to remain firmly in contention at the top.\n\nDespite their lofty position as the halfway stage approaches, Leicester have struggled at home this campaign - their four defeats at King Power Stadium in 2020-21 is as many as they suffered in the entirety of last season.\n\nThough largely frustrated in the early exchanges as the visitors retained possession, Leicester's superior quality in attack eventually ensured that record was improved with Maddison turning sharply to meet Youri Tielemans' through-ball before drilling home.\n\nThe in-form Barnes once again impressed and eventually got the goal his performance deserved to equal his best season tally of 10 after just 24 games.\n\nUnlike last season's post-Christmas collapse, the Foxes are yet to show signs of falling away. Maddison - involved in six of Leicester's last 12 league goals - and Barnes are easing the pressure on Vardy to deliver every week and there appears the strength in depth to better maintain this challenge.\n\nThe only concern for Rodgers at the end of a pleasing night was the sight of Vardy appearing to limp off as he was replaced by Kelechi Iheanacho in the final minutes.\n\nWhen Southampton claimed victory in the corresponding fixture last January, the 2-1 win marked a remarkable short-term recovery from a club-record defeat by the Foxes less than three months earlier.\n\nOne year on, this match served as another reminder of how quickly the Saints are progressing under Ralph Hasenhuttl.\n\nThey were, however, unable to set a club top-flight record of seven consecutive away games without defeat in the absence of frontman Ings. That was despite their relative freshness, having not played for 12 days after their FA Cup tie against Shrewsbury Town was postponed last weekend because of a Covid-19 outbreak at the League One club.\n\nFollowing their impressive 1-0 victory over Liverpool on 4 January, a triumph which left Hasenhuttl with tears in his eyes, Southampton once again applied themselves with commendable determination but ultimately failed to produce in the final third.\n\nAdams ran out of space at the byeline after breaking clear from the halfway line in the game's first opening, and neither Bertrand nor Smallbone were able to place past Schmeichel as the equaliser their hard work perhaps deserved evaded them.\n\nAt the back, Bednarek produced the heroics to keep his side in the game and full-back Kyle Walker-Peters provided a regular outlet on the right, but Southampton, who named four teenagers on their bench because of an injury crisis, have now scored only once in five league games.\n\nThat is an obvious concern for Hasenhuttl as he looks to ensure his side do not fade after their promising start.\n\n'We took social distancing to the letter' - what the managers said\n\nLeicester boss Brendan Rodgers told BBC Sport: \"It's a very good win against a good team. We were too passive at the start, we took social distancing to the letter and didn't get close to them. After that we had some sustained attacks and ended up getting a brilliant goal.\n\n\"At half-time we had to reiterate the importance of fighting, you have to fight for every result and Southampton keep going. We were outstanding second half and should have scored more goals. We did the dirty work much better and Harvey Barnes showed again that he is a finisher now.\"\n\nOn Maddison's celebration: \"I said to them there is lots of negativity around it but see it as a positive and be creative. Supporters still want to see players celebrate, the happiness, so be creative with it.\"\n\nSouthampton boss Ralph Hasenhuttl said: \"It's never nice to lose a game but we had chances. We hit the bar, we fought with everything we have. We are definitely a team that is never giving up. The quality of the opponent was better than ours today.\n\n\"The first goal, you don't shoot at goal like that every day, it was fantastic from Maddison. We had good chances but we couldn't finish and that was the difference.\n\n\"It doesn't look good at the moment, we have a lot of injuries and not many alternatives. The good news is we have 29 points and they don't take them away from us. We did our best with the options we have. We have nine injured but we are fighting for everything.\"\n• None Leicester earned their first home league victory against Southampton since April 2016, ending a run of four without a win against the Saints at King Power Stadium.\n• None Southampton's first 12 Premier League games in 2020-21 witnessed 41 goals (24 scored) at an average of 3.4 per game. Their past six games have seen just six goals (two scored).\n• None Jamie Vardy had seven shots for Leicester, his highest tally without scoring in a single Premier League match in his career.\n• None Vardy has faced Southampton seven times at home in the Premier League, more than any other side at King Power Stadium without scoring in the competition.\n• None James Maddison scored in consecutive Premier League games for Leicester for the first time since October 2019, matching his goal tally at home from each of the previous two campaigns (three).\n\nBoth sides return to action on Tuesday. Leicester host Chelsea in the Premier League at 20:15 GMT, while Southampton welcome Shrewsbury to St Mary's in their postponed FA Cup third-round tie (20:00).\n• None Goal! Leicester City 2, Southampton 0. Harvey Barnes (Leicester City) right footed shot from the centre of the box to the centre of the goal. Assisted by Youri Tielemans following a fast break.\n• None Attempt missed. Stuart Armstrong (Southampton) right footed shot from outside the box is high and wide to the right following a corner.\n• None Offside, Leicester City. Marc Albrighton tries a through ball, but Ayoze Pérez is caught offside.\n• None Attempt missed. Wilfred Ndidi (Leicester City) right footed shot from outside the box is too high. Assisted by Marc Albrighton.\n• None Attempt saved. Jamie Vardy (Leicester City) left footed shot from the centre of the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by James Justin.\n• None Attempt missed. Daniel N'Lundulu (Southampton) header from the centre of the box misses to the left. Assisted by Kyle Walker-Peters with a cross.\n• None Offside, Leicester City. Timothy Castagne tries a through ball, but Ayoze Pérez is caught offside.\n• None Attempt blocked. Jamie Vardy (Leicester City) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Ayoze Pérez with a cross.\n• None Marc Albrighton (Leicester City) wins a free kick on the right wing.\n• None Attempt missed. James Ward-Prowse (Southampton) right footed shot from the centre of the box is high and wide to the right. Assisted by Stuart Armstrong. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Hear how David Bowie always managed to stay ahead of his time\n• None Joe Wicks and guests are here to bring positivity to your day", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Health workers are the first in line to get Covid jabs\n\nA sanitation worker became the first Indian to receive a Covid vaccine as the country began the world's largest inoculation drive.\n\nPrime Minister Narendra Modi launched the programme, which aims to vaccinate more than 1.3 billion people against Covid.\n\nHe paid tribute to front-line workers who will be the first to receive jabs.\n\nIndia has recorded the second-highest number of Covid-19 infections in the world after the United States.\n\nMillions of doses of two approved vaccines - Covishield and Covaxin - were shipped across the country in the days leading up to the start of the drive.\n\n\"We are launching the world's biggest vaccination drive and it shows the world our capability,\" Mr Modi, said, addressing the country on Saturday morning.\n\nA sanitation worker is the first Indian to receive a Covid vaccine\n\nHe added that India was well prepared to vaccinate its population with the help of an app, which would help the government track the drive and ensure that nobody was left out.\n\nMr Modi spoke at length about doctors, nurses and other front-line workers \"who showed us the light\" in \"dark times\".\n\n\"They stayed away from their families to serve humanity. And hundreds of them never went home. They gave their life to save others. And that is why the first jabs are being given to healthcare workers - this is our way of paying respect to them.\"\n\nDoctors and medical staff at Delhi's Max hospital tell me a lot of hope is being pinned on the vaccination drive. One official described it \"as a new dawn\" and said \"it's the beginning of Covid's end\".\n\nInside the waiting room, there are posters on the wall with information about the documents one needs to bring, how safe the vaccine is, and the precautions that need to be taken even after one's been vaccinated. Among those being vaccinated on Saturday are doctors, nurses and front-office staff from all departments.\n\nThe names have been been chosen alphabetically so those getting jabs are mostly those with names starting with the letter A.\n\n\"The pandemic has played havoc in the country. I hope the vaccine will rid us of the fears and we will be able to breathe easy,\" Dr Anil Dass said after getting the jab.\n\nAshutosh Chaturvedi, a 31-year-old male nurse described as a \"Covid warrior\" by hospital officials, became the first recipient of the vaccine at Max.\n\n\"I'm fine, I feel good,\" he told reporters as he came down the hospital ramp, which has been decorated with blue, green and white balloons.\n\nSince April, he told me, he's worked in the emergency wing of the Covid ward, tending to those afflicted with the coronavirus.\n\n\"I haven't seen my wife and nine-month-old daughter since then. A month later, once I've received the second dose, I'll visit my family,\" he said.\n\nMr Modi also appealed to people to continue adhering to Covid-19 safety protocols like wearing masks and following social distancing. He said the country cannot afford to be complacent as vaccinating the entire population will take time.\n\nHe also urged people not to believe any \"propaganda and rumours about the safety of the vaccines\".\n\n\"I want to tell people that the approval to these vaccines was given only after scientists and experts were satisfied about its safety,\" he said.\n\nAn estimated 10 million health workers will be vaccinated in the first round, followed by policemen, soldiers, municipal and other front-line workers.\n\nHealth workers have been queuing up at vaccination centres for their turn\n\nNext in line will be people aged over 50 and anyone under 50 with serious underlying health conditions. India's electoral rolls, which contain details of some 900 million voters, will be used to identify eligible recipients.\n\nThe government plans to vaccinate 300 million people by early August. This will happen in state-run health care centres, schools, colleges, community halls, municipal offices and wedding halls.\n\nSeveral hospitals across India are giving the first doses of the vaccine.\n\nThe government plans to vaccinate 300 million people by early August\n\nDr Atul Peters was among those who got the jab at Max hospital.\n\n\"It's a very big day. I'm grateful to those who worked hard to make this a reality. I was very very happy when I got a call informing me that my name was on the list.\n\n\"We worked hard during the pandemic to save lives and we are also taking the jab first to dispel fears in people's minds that the vaccine is not safe,\" he told the BBC.\n\nMillions of vaccine doses have been shipped across India\n\nIndia's drug regulator has given the green light to two vaccines - Covishield (the local name for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine developed in the UK) and Covaxin, locally-made by pharma company Bharat Biotech.\n\nBut concerns have been raised over the efficacy of Covaxin because the regulator's emergency approval came before the completion of Phase 3 clinical trials. The regulator and the manufacturer have said the vaccine is safe, and that the efficacy data would be available by February.\n\nBoth vaccines will be given as two injections, 28 days apart, with the second dose being a booster. Immunity would begin to kick in after the first dose but reaches its full effect 14 days after the second dose.\n\nThe status of the vaccines and recipients will be electronically tracked in real time - some 8 million people who will receive the early jabs have been already registered. More than 600,000 people have been trained for the drive.\n\nThe jabs will be voluntary, and recipients will be given a certificate of vaccination after they complete both doses.\n\n\"I expect India's vaccination programme will be run much better than most countries because of the considerable government investment and early preparedness,\" Dr Gagandeep Kang, one of India's best-known vaccine experts, told the BBC.\n\nWith more than 10 million cases, India has recorded the second-highest number of Covid-19 infections in the world, after the US.\n\nThe largest vaccination drive in the country, however, begins at a time when infections have fallen sharply, and much of life has returned to normal. A limited availability of doses in the initial phase, therefore, is not likely to pose a problem.\n\nMost scientists feel India is primed for the challenge as it is a vaccine-making powerhouse and has run, for decades, a well-oiled immunisation programme for tens of millions of new-borns and mothers-to-be.\n\nBut the real challenges will begin when the general population starts receiving the jabs.\n\nIndia will use its formidable election machinery to deliver and track doses to recipients in far corners of the country. It is also likely to use digital platforms and apps to enable people to register for the doses.\n\nHowever, not every Indian owns a smart phone or knows how to operate an app, so it will be interesting to see what the government does to make sure that there are no inadvertent exclusions.\n\nVaccine hesitancy is the other concern.\n\nHealth activists Seema Pal and Rama Negi say they have been busting misinformation about the vaccine\n\nThe recent controversy over the hurried approval of Covaxin, many feel, could undermine confidence. There's a history of hesitancy about receiving the polio vaccine in parts of northern India, triggered by rumours about vaccines being impure and affecting fertility. Similar disinformation is now circulating about Covid vaccines on social networking apps, such as WhatsApp.\n\nThe government will need consistent, clear-eyed communication to bolster vaccine acceptance and community perception of the programme.\n\nVaccines come with side effects for some people. India has a 34-year-old surveillance programme for monitoring such \"adverse events\" following immunisation.\n\nBut researchers have found that benchmarks for reporting side effects still remain weak. A failure to transparently report adverse effects could easily lead to fear-mongering around vaccines.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "The number of reported incidents of children dying or being seriously harmed after suspected abuse or neglect rose by a quarter after England's first lockdown last year, figures indicate.\n\nThe Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel received 285 serious incident notifications from April to September.\n\nThis is an increase of 27% from 225 in the same period the previous year.\n\nThe data also includes children who were in care and died, regardless of whether abuse or neglect was suspected.\n\nThe Children's Society described the figures as \"shocking\".\n\nThe serious incident notification system requires councils in England to report all incidents of death or serious harm involving children in their area to the Department for Education, which publishes the data.\n\nThey are also required to inform the education secretary and Ofsted if a looked-after child dies, regardless of whether they suspect abuse or neglect.\n\nChild deaths increased from 89 to 119 and those seriously harmed rose from 132 with 153 compared with the same period in 2019, according to the data.\n\nThe number of serious incidents involving children under one increased by 30% as did the harm suffered by those aged 16 and over.\n\nThe majority (54%) of incidents related to boys, and almost two thirds related to white children.\n\nIn two-thirds of the 285 cases reported, the harm occurred while children were living at home.\n\nThe number of serious incident notifications had fallen in 2019-20 compared with 2018-19 when there were 274 such notifications.\n\nIryna Pona, policy manager at the Children's Society, said the increase in incidents last year happened at a time when Covid-19 was having a \"huge impact on the well-being of children and families and disrupted help available to those who needed it most\".\n\nEngland's first lockdown began at the end of March last year and ended on 4 July.\n\nMs Pona said: \"During the first lockdown many vulnerable children were stuck at home in difficult, sometimes dangerous situations, often isolated from friends and support networks.\n\n\"Sadly, children also continued to be targeted and groomed by people outside their families for sexual and criminal exploitation like county lines drug dealing operations, which can lead to serious violence or death.\n\n\"At the same time, they were often hidden from view of professionals like social workers and teachers who are best placed to spot the signs if they may be in danger.\"\n\nShe added that in the current lockdown it was \"vital\" that social care and schools work together closely to ensure all vulnerable children, including those in care, have regular contact with a trusted professional.\n\nA government spokeswoman said: \"Every single incident of this nature is a tragedy and we are working to understand the impact the pandemic may be having.\n\n\"Throughout the past months, we have prioritised the most vulnerable children and their families and put in place support to protect babies.\n\n\"We've maintained vital frontline services because we know it has been a challenge for many, especially for new parents, and we've invested thousands of pounds in charities working with vulnerable children and their families.\n\n\"Today we have launched a wholescale review of children's social care to reform the system and think afresh about how we support the most vulnerable. This data will provide important information to the care review to help address major challenges.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. UK weather: Will it snow where you are?\n\nSnow and ice weather warnings are in place for much of England and Scotland after widespread recent snowfall.\n\nThe Met Office has issued yellow weather warnings across England and Scotland for Saturday and warned of possible travel disruption.\n\nParts of England and Scotland could see as much as 5-10cm of snow in higher areas, the weather service said.\n\nIt comes as hundreds of schools remain closed after heavy snow hit the north of England on Thursday.\n\nA snow warning is in place for south-east England, including London, the east of England and the East Midlands. The Met Office said East Anglia and parts of Kent and Sussex are most at risk of snow.\n\nSome 1-3 cm of snow may fall fairly widely over these areas, with 5-10 cm possible in places, mostly over parts of East Anglia and any higher ground.\n\nA snow and ice warning is in place for most of Scotland, north-west and north-east England, Yorkshire and Humber, the East Midlands and parts of the West Midlands.\n\nSnow is likely to fall to low levels over east Scotland and northern England.\n\nThe Met Office said 1-3 cm is possible at low levels in these areas but is more likely at higher elevations, where 5-10 cm of snow is possible above 200m - and even 20cm at the highest places.\n\nFog is also forecast for parts of the Midlands and the North, along with mist around Glasgow which may pose hazards for motorists.\n\nPolice forces in Yorkshire have urged people to stay at home unless their travel is essential\n\nTwo girls took their sledge to a golf course near Penicuik, Midlothian\n\nThe coronavirus vaccine rollout has been affected by the weather.\n\nOver-80s who were due to receive their jab at Newcastle's Centre for Life were told they could re-book rather than risk making a trip in the icy conditions.\n\nNewcastle Hospitals tweeted: \"There's enough vaccine for everyone, so don't worry about making a trip to Newcastle.\"\n\nAnd Leeds University has delayed the opening of its asymptomatic Covid-19 test centre.\n\nHeavy snowfall has already caused travel disruption across sections of northern England and Scotland.\n\nTemperatures were as low as -6C on Friday morning in parts of Yorkshire and Cumbria, with yellow warnings set to last through most of Friday.\n\nThere was a loss of gas supply to approximately 700 homes in the Hebden Bridge area after water got into the local gas network and froze.\n\nThe Met Office has published advice from the Department for Transport advising people to clear snow and ice from footpaths outside their homes, preferably in the morning.\n\n\"You can then cover the path with salt before nightfall to stop it refreezing overnight,\" the advice says.\n\nTemperatures in the Greater London area are expected to drop to 1C on Friday and parts of the South East could fall to -2C.\n\nIt comes after \"hazardous\" conditions on Thursday caused problems for the ambulance service in Yorkshire, which struggled to keep up with the high demand, while Covid vaccinations were also affected.\n\nMark Millins, of Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust, said the bad weather was having a \"severe impact\" on its operations and urged people to \"take extra care\" when out walking or driving.\n\nIn Scotland, heavy snow in some areas resulted in road closures.\n\nThe deepest snow on Thursday was in Bingley, West Yorkshire, and Strathallan in Perth, Scotland, both of which recorded 11cm.", "CBBC star Archie Lyndhurst, the son of Only Fools and Horses actor Nicholas Lyndhurst, died in his sleep from a brain haemorrhage, his mother has said.\n\nLucy Lyndhurst said a second post-mortem exam had revealed his death was caused by a condition called Acute Lymphoblastic Lymphoma/Leukaemia.\n\nShe described Archie as \"the most magical human being we have ever met\".\n\nThe 19-year-old's death on 22 September had had a \"catastrophic effect\" on their family, she wrote on Instagram.\n\nArchie with his father Nicholas and mother Lucy Smith in 2017\n\nLucy said she and husband Nicholas were assured by the doctor who explained the post-mortem results to them that there \"wasn't anything anyone could have done as Archie showed no signs of illness\". She said it was \"not leukaemia as we know it\" and that acute in medical terms meant \"rapid\".\n\nThe couple were \"utterly floored\" to think something like this could happen, she wrote, adding: \"It's very rare and around only 800 people a year die from it.\"\n\nShe said that just days earlier he had been celebrating his birthday with \"the love of his life Nethra\".\n\n\"Life is fragile, precious and sometimes incredibly cruel,\" Lucy wrote.\n\nShe also criticised some media outlets for attempting to garner information about how her son had died from the coroner, before they knew the results of the post mortem themselves.\n\n\"To have a coroner call you a few days after your child has died to say the press have been calling for the results of Archie's post mortem, I think stoops to an all time low for us,\" she noted.\n\n\"What gives the press the right to badger a coroner's office solely to find the cause of death before the parents? The complete lack of empathy is astounding. We released no information at the time as we had no idea what he had died from.\"\n\nNicholas appeared alongside his son in an episode of So Awkward in 2019\n\nArchie began his acting career at the Sylvia Young Theatre School at the age of 10 and was best known for playing Ollie Coulton in the CBBC comedy show So Awkward.\n\nHe appeared in the sitcom, which followed the lives of a group of friends in secondary school, from its first series in 2015.\n\nNicholas appeared alongside his son in a 2019 episode of the programme.\n\nArchie's other roles included recurring appearances as a younger incarnation of comedian Jack Whitehall in various TV programmes.\n\nThese included BBC Three sitcom Bad Education, in which he was seen as a younger version of Whitehall's Alfie Wickers character.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Irish hauliers have been bypassing ports in Wales because of Brexit, say industry leaders\n\nIrish hauliers are bypassing Welsh ports to avoid Brexit bureaucracy, industry leaders say.\n\nSo-called \"teething problems\" with new export rules are causing \"enormous strain on staff\", according to one haulage company.\n\nBut others warn of a longer-term shift by truck firms from using Holyhead, Fishguard and Pembroke Dock.\n\nGwynedd Shipping said it was operating at 65% normal volumes and the pressure of extra paperwork was challenging.\n\nAndrew Kinsella, the firm's managing director, said: \"It's an enormous strain on our staff in terms of processing bookings.\n\n\"We process around 400 or 500 bookings a week, the reality is we're operating at 65-70% of previous volumes.\n\n\"Whilst we see recovery in the number of clients and we're starting to get to a better pattern in terms of shipments I still think it's going to take several weeks for things to return to normal. Whether things return to pre-Christmas, pre-Brexit volumes remains to be seen.\"\n\nMr Kinsella thinks there will be long-term consequences for the ports.\n\nStena Line is among firms that have made changes to the routes its uses\n\n\"You can already see the shift in terms of the number of sailings,\" he said.\n\n\"I think you're seeing a shift away from Holyhead particularly in terms of weekend, off-peak traffic. I think longer term, the viability of all of these services will be something those ferry services will continue to scrutinise.\"\n\nThis week Stena Line moved its new ship to the route from Rosslare, in the Republic of Ireland, to Cherbourg, France.\n\nAccording to Irish public broadcaster RTÉ, a new weekend sailing from Dublin to Cherbourg will also begin on 23 January, resulting in a temporary reduction in weekend capacity on the Dublin to Holyhead route.\n\nIt also intends to sail the Belfast-to-Liverpool route.\n\n\"Due to the current Brexit-related shift for direct routes and increasing customer demand, Stena Line has decided to temporarily deploy the Stena Embla on Rosslare-Cherbourg,\" Stena Line said.\n\nAt Rosslare Europort, business is booming, says general manager Glenn Carr.\n\n\"We've seen unprecedented demand in the first two weeks of trading compared to last year,\" Mr Carr said.\n\n\"On our European routes there's a 500% increase in freight volume going through the port compared to last year.\"\n\nHe added that 18 months ago they would have had three sailings a week directly to mainland Europe from Rosslare Europort: \"Today we have 15.\"\n\nMr Carr says his customers want to bypass the UK because of Brexit.\n\n\"I think that's testament to demand, particularly from our exporters and importers, on the island of Ireland and the need to unfortunately bypass the UK because of Brexit to trade directly with the EU,\" he added.\n\nHe believes this change in operations will not be temporary.\n\nHe said decisions by ferry companies and businesses who trade with the EU to re-direct freight, have been made based on market analysis.\n\n\"The business case for the extra services out of Rosslare were not based on the first two weeks of this year,\" Mr Carr said.\n\n\"They were based on analysis of the market and conversations with our exporters and importers who were switching.\n\n\"So there is a genuine switch and we foresee services being maintained out of Rosslare.\"\n\nUK government ministers have played down concerns about the long term viability of Welsh ports.\n\nGiving evidence to the Welsh Affairs Select Committee this week, Wales Office Minister David TC Davies MP, said former haulage industry colleagues referred to the issues as \"teething problems\".\n\nSecretary of State for Wales Simon Hart MP, said: \"There is some evidence that things aren't looking necessarily, permanently bleak.\n\n\"It's one of those areas where we have to keep a very wary eye on it, but I think and hope that it is a temporary dip in the graph.\"\n\nBut transport expert Prof Stuart Cole, of the University of South Wales, thinks Brexit delays will be the incentive Irish companies needed to switch permanently to trading directly with the European mainland.\n\nProf Cole said the EU wanted to reduce congestion and pollution in parts of Europe.\n\nOne solution was to move freight by sea rather than road.\n\nThere have been problems with paperwork for drivers travelling to the European mainland\n\nUntil now there was no reason for Irish hauliers to move from using Welsh ports and Dover, Prof Cole said.\n\n\"The route worked perfectly, there was a predictable journey time and that's important for food and component parts going to factories,\" he said.\n\n\"That kind of change required a significant shift, and that's what's there now.\"\n\nBangor University economics lecturer, Dr Edward Thomas Jones, believes it is too soon to predict longer term changes.\n\n\"Because businesses stockpiled before Christmas in anticipation of Brexit, there is of course less use of the port [at Holyhead] since Brexit,\" he said.\n\n\"On top of that, coronavirus means there are fewer tourists going on holiday to Ireland.\n\n\"We'll have a better idea of the future of the port in six months when these businesses who have stockpiled start buying again.\n\n\"Hopefully, by the second half of the year coronavirus will have been resolved and tourists will once again be able to travel back and forth.\"\n\nPlaid Cymru warned if traffic continued to be diverted away from the UK then Wales would suffer.\n\n\"I urge the UK government to work with the Welsh Government to provide substantial investment into Welsh ports to secure their viability into the future,\" said MP Hywel Williams, Plaid's Cabinet Office spokesman.\n\n\"If the trend of rerouting traffic through direct routes continues, I fear that our local economies both in the north west and south west of Wales will suffer enormously.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The four main engines were fired in unison for the first time, but had to be shut down early\n\nA critical engine test for Nasa's new \"megarocket\" has ended early, but the agency denied it amounted to a failure.\n\nShortly before 22:30 GMT (17:30 EST) on Saturday, the four engines ignited, burning for more than a minute before the event was aborted.\n\nThe core stage of the Space Launch System (SLS) was being evaluated at Stennis Space Center, in Mississippi.\n\nThe engines were supposed to fire for eight minutes to simulate the rocket's climb to orbit.\n\nThe SLS is part of Nasa's Artemis programme, which aims to put Americans back on the lunar surface in the 2020s.\n\nWhen it makes its maiden flight - possibly later this year - the SLS will become the most powerful rocket ever to have flown to space.\n\nTeams at Stennis are still poring over the data to find out what happened. John Honeycutt, SLS program manager at Nasa's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, said there were \"a lot of dynamics going on\" when the engine shut down.\n\nThe engines' power levels were being throttled down and up again; they were also being prepared to pivot - or gimbal. This movement allows the rocket to be steered during flight.\n\nThe RS-25 engines are the same type that powered the space shuttle orbiter\n\n\"We did see a little bit of a flash come from around the interface between the thermal protection blanket on engine four at the time when we had initiated the gimbal,\" Honeycutt told reporters at a post-test briefing at Stennis.\n\nThe as-yet unknown problem triggered what Nasa calls a failure identification (Fid), followed by a major component failure (MCF). As a result of the fault, an onboard computer known as the engine controller sent a message to another computer called the core stage controller, which took a decision to shut down the vehicle.\n\n\"Any parameter that went awry on the engine could have sent that failure ID,\" said John Honeycutt.\n\nIt was the first time all four RS-25 engines had been ignited together, in a test known as a \"hotfire\".\n\nThe core stage of the rocket was anchored to a massive steel structure called the B-2 test stand on the grounds of the Stennis facility.\n\nTo prepare the core stage, engineers filled its tanks with more than 700,000 gallons (2.6 million litres) of super-cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellant.\n\nThis was the eighth and final test in the Green Run, a programme of evaluation carried out by engineers from Nasa and Boeing - the rocket's prime contractor.\n\nAlthough the test was intended to run for eight minutes, engineers would have received all the data required to certify the rocket for flight after 250 seconds.\n\nThey wanted to iron out any problems before the core stage is used for the first SLS launch, in which it will send Nasa's next-generation Orion spacecraft on a loop around the Moon.\n\nNasa's outgoing administrator Jim Bridenstine declined to call Saturday's event a failure: \"This is why we test,\" he said, adding: \"Before we put American astronauts on American rockets, that's when we need it to be perfect.\"\n\nOfficials have not yet decided whether to re-run the hotfire, or proceed with shipping the core stage to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida to prepare it for the rocket's uncrewed maiden flight, a mission called Artemis-1.\n\n\"It depends what the anomaly was and how challenging it's going to be to fix it,\" said Bridenstine.\n\nNasa administrator Jim Bridenstine said perfection wasn't a realistic expectation for the first engine test\n\nAsked whether a launch this year was still feasible, he added: \"I think it's too early to tell. As we figure out what went wrong, we're going to know what the future holds.\"\n\nHowever, if one or more of the engines needs to be replaced, there are spares waiting to be used at Stennis Space Center.\n\nThe Artemis-1 mission will evaluate how both the SLS and Orion capsule perform prior to Nasa staging a repeat of this lunar loop with astronauts in 2023.\n\nThis will be followed by the first landing on the Moon by humans since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.\n\nThe SLS consists of the 65m (212 ft) -long core stage with two smaller solid rocket boosters (SRBs) attached to the sides. Engineers at KSC have begun stacking the individual SRB segments for Artemis-1.\n\n\"This powerful rocket is going to put us in a position to be ready to support the agency and the country in deep space missions to the Moon and beyond,\" John Honeycutt said during a media briefing on Tuesday.\n\nArtwork: The initial version of the SLS - known as Block 1 - during the climb to orbit\n\nOfficials have been planning to ship the core stage to Florida in February.\n\nIts engines are of the same type that powered the spaceplane-like shuttle orbiter - America's crewed space vehicle for 30 years from 1981-2011.\n\nNasa is re-using flown hardware: the RS-25 engines used in this test helped launch 21 shuttle missions. Two were used on the last shuttle flight - STS-135 in 2011.\n\nThe four RS-25s can generate 1.6 million lbs (7 Meganewtons) of thrust - the force that propels a rocket through the air.\n\nWhen the solid rocket boosters are added to the core stage, the combined system will produce 8.8 million pounds (39.1 Meganewtons) of thrust. This will make it 15% more powerful than the giant Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s and 70s.\n\nPrior to Saturday's test, John Shannon, vice president and SLS program manager at Boeing praised teams at Stennis for keeping the Green Run on track despite the pandemic and this year's particularly active hurricane season.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nHomes have been evacuated as Storm Christoph batters Wales with a three-day rainstorm.\n\nNorth Wales Police were called to help some residents in Ruthin who were being told to leave their homes.\n\nThey tweeted that \"people who do not live locally are driving to the area to 'see the floods'\".\n\nA rain warning issued by the Met Office is in place until midday on Thursday, with an ice warning for parts of north and mid Wales.\n\nSouth Wales fire crews pumped out water from homes in Pontypridd and Porth, in Rhondda, and roads were blocked in Powys and Flintshire.\n\nVehicles were pulled from floods by firefighters in Tenby, Llandovery, Llandeilo and Whitland, Mid and West Wales fire service said.\n\nUp to 20cm (8in) of rain is expected to fall, with the heaviest rain forecast for the north west of Wales.\n\nThere were flood warnings in 58 areas as forecasters warned heavy rain and melting snow could affect roads. There were also 57 flood alerts - meaning flooding is possible.\n\nA yellow warning for ice was issued for the north and parts of mid Wales, starting at 01:00 on Thursday and lasting until 10:00, as rain clears.\n\nA minor landslip was reported on the mountainside above Pentre in Rhondda Cynon Taf. Natural Resources Wales, who have responsibility for the land, said there is no immediate threat after an initial inspection, but the council urged residents to keep away from the area.\n\nThe River Taf at Llanglydwen in Carmarthenshire\n\nFlood warnings are in Carmarthenshire - the River Towy and isolated properties between Llandeilo and Abergwili, the River Gwendraeth Fawr at Pontyates and Ponthenry, the River Hydfron at Llanddowror and the River Taf at Trevaughan in Whitland.\n\nThe other flood warnings cover the River Ely at Peterston-Super-Ely in Vale of Glamorgan, the River Vyrnwy in the Meifod area in Powys, the River Rhyd Hir at Riverside Terrace in Gwynedd, two for the River Wye at Glasbury and Builth Wells, the Lower Dee Valley from Llangollen to Trevalyn Meadows, the River Dyfi at Pont ar Dyfi, the River Usk from Brecon to Glangrwyne, two at the River Severn at Abermule to Fron and Aberbechan and the River Lower Clydach at Clydach Bridge, Swansea.\n\nIn River Aeron at Aberaeron, in Ceredigion, the River Loughor at Ammanford and Llandybie and the River Wye at Builth Wells, Powys, are also covered by the warning.\n\nA person had to be saved from a car stuck in floodwater in Corwen, Denbighshire, North East Wales Search and Rescue tweeted.\n\nRest centres have been opened in St Asaph and Ruthin after some localised flooding following heavy rainfall throughout the day. Denbighshire council invited affected residents to use the facilities at the towns' main leisure centres.\n\nAnd Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service said crews were called to help a motorist whose vehicle had become stuck in 3ft of water in Machynlleth.\n\nThe waters lapped the doors of Ruthin's Ocean Pearl restaurant\n\nIn Broughton, Flintshire, Ray and Jacqui Littler said they and their daughter waited all afternoon for help at their flooded bungalow after emergency services told them they were \"flat out\".\n\nThey eventually decided to leave their home on Main Road, which was under 10 inches of water, to stay with friends.\n\nNeighbours blamed a blocked culvert on the fields opposite the road. Police closed the road at about 16:00 GMT and Flintshire council attended, after three houses were affected, with the gardens of two pensioners' bungalows also under water.\n\nOverflowing banks of the River Usk at Brecon\n\nSouth Wales Fire and Rescue Service said it had been called to two incidents overnight with reports of water entering properties in Pontycymmer in Bridgend and Tredegar, Blaenau Gwent.\n\nOn Wednesday morning, it dealt with flooding at properties in Tyfica Road, Pontypridd, and Trebanog Road in Porth, Rhondda, where a crew was helping residents divert and pump out water.\n\nFirefighters also had to rescue 46 sheep from land surrounded by water at Merthyr Road, Llanfoist, Monmouthshire.\n\nCrews from Abergavenny and Ebbw Vale were called to help the stricken animals near the River Usk.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by South Wales Fire and Rescue Service This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by South Wales Fire and Rescue Service\n\nIn Rhondda Cynon Taf, there were also reports of flooding in properties at Pembroke Street, Aberdare and Clydach Vale, Tonypandy.\n\nA tweet from Pontypridd Plaid Cymru councillor Heledd Fychan showed fast-flowing water in the River Taff which runs through the town.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. 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The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nWater in the grounds of Gwydir Castle in Llanrwst\n\nJudy Corbett, owner of 16th Century Gwydir Castle in Llanrwst, Conwy, which flooded last year, told BBC Radio Wales things were \"looking pretty dire here this morning\".\n\nShe said: \"We've been obviously monitoring the levels overnight so we've had another sleepless night worrying about the weather but the levels are rising and the water is very violent this morning and of course, we've got another a whole day ahead of us.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Sabrina Lee This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSeveral roads have been hit by flooding, including the B5106 between Llanrwst and Trefriw\n\nThe Met Office warned spray and flooding could lead to \"difficult driving conditions and some road closures\" and the downpours could cause delays.\n\nTraffic Wales said restrictions were in place on the M48 Severn Bridge where traffic is coming off eastbound at junction two or westbound at junction one before being directed back on to cross the bridge, which remains open.\n\nIn Flintshire, the A548 Coast Road has been closed at Tan Lan and Mostyn, the A5118 at Padeswood, the A541 between Llong to Pontblyddyn, Bagillt High Street and the B5101 between Treuddyn and Llanfynydd.\n\nThe A485 in Garreg is also closed from the Brondaw Arms to Pont Aberglaslyn.\n\nThe Dyfi Bridge near Machynlleth is closed\n\nIn Powys, the A487 over the Dyfi Bridge, near Machynlleth, is closed while the A458 at Llanfair Caereinion is blocked in both directions from Bridge Street to Guilsfield turn-off because of flooding.\n\nThe A483 in Builth Wells at the station is also closed along with the bridge over the River Wye.\n\nCapel Bangor in Ceredigion has temporary traffic lights on the A44 at Lovesgrove Roundabout due to flooding, which is affecting traffic between Aberystwyth and Llangurig.\n\nIn Bridgend, New Inn Road has been closed in both directions at The Dipping Bridge, affecting traffic between Ewenny village and the A48.\n\nSouth Wales Police warned people not to attempt driving through floodwater after the A4118 at Llanddewi on Gower became blocked.\n\nIn Gwynedd, the council tweeted that Ffordd Siliwen, Bangor, had been closed following a landslip.\n\nA section of the A470 Dolgellau Bypass has also been closed along with the A4085 at Garreg.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by South Wales Police Swansea This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nNational Rail said some lines between North Llanrwst, Conwy, and Blaenau Ffestiniog in Gwynedd were blocked due to heavy rain while services were also disrupted between Shrewsbury and Machynlleth in Powys.\n\nAlterative road transport will run in place of cancelled services, it said.\n\nThe Met Office said 56mm (2.2in) of rain had fallen at Capel Curig in Snowdonia by 18:00 GMT on Tuesday.\n\nA yellow warning for rain is in place for virtually the whole of Wales until Thursday\n\nForecasters also said fast flowing and deep floodwater \"could cause a danger to life\".\n\nThe Met Office warned flooding could lead to some communities being cut off and possible power cuts.\n\nStrong winds will also follow the torrential rain, with forecasters predicting this may cause \"travelling difficulties across areas higher and more exposed routes\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Douglas Jones was fulfilling a lifelong dream when he became a pilot\n\nThe aviation industry has been among those hardest hit by the Covid pandemic.\n\nPilot Douglas Jones was working for Aegean Airlines, flying out of Athens, when it began.\n\nIt cost him his job and also prompted him to return to the small Scottish town where he grew up.\n\nNow he is now turning his hand to a very different line of work producing PPE, in a sector which is enjoying something of a boom.\n\nMr Jones saw much of Europe in his work with Easyjet and Aegean Airlines\n\nThe 27-year-old, who was born in Haywards Heath in Sussex but raised in Moffat in Dumfries and Galloway, was enjoying his dream job at the start of 2020.\n\nHaving gained a commercial pilot's licence, he was based in Berlin with Easyjet before landing a position in Greece.\n\n\"It is definitely what I have always wanted to do,\" he said.\n\n\"With Aegean I have flown a good way across all the major airports of Europe.\"\n\nHowever, life changed \"very quickly\" as coronavirus spread across the continent.\n\n\"I flew to Copenhagen and I flew back from Copenhagen and I was on unpaid leave when I landed back in Athens,\" he explained.\n\nFearing being stranded in Greece, he booked a flight home to Scotland and within a couple of weeks he received confirmation that his job was gone.\n\nMr Jones returned to Moffat amid fears of being stranded in Greece\n\nMr Jones said it took some time for him to fully appreciate that he would not be returning to the skies any time soon.\n\n\"Half of my stuff is still in Greece because we came back to our home countries thinking this will only be three to six months and that will be that,\" he said.\n\n\"We had just no concept of how bad this was ever going to be.\"\n\nIt meant he was back home in a region where he admits there are \"not a huge amount of options career-wise in normal times\".\n\n\"When you have been used to living in Berlin and Athens and you move back to Moffat, living with your dad, it is a bit of slowdown,\" he said.\n\n\"I was just desperate to do something, to have work.\"\n\nAlpha Solway is producing millions of masks for NHS Scotland\n\nIt was a relative of a friend who spotted south of Scotland firm Alpha Solway was hiring new workers to meet demand for personal protective equipment (PPE).\n\nAfter interview, he was offered a job in June which proved to be something of a change of pace from day one.\n\n\"I came in and I sat and cut elastic for visors for most of the day - I think I cut like something like 3km worth of elastic because one of the machines had a fault,\" he said.\n\nSince then he has helped make filter units for masks, developed standard work procedures and become a \"jack of all trades\" for the business.\n\nMr Jones said of his abilities as a pilot were useful at the PPE factory\n\nHe said he had been \"surprised\" by what parts of his old job he could bring to his new post.\n\n\"A lot in commercial aviation is about awareness - situational awareness - and a lot of that can be built into manufacturing as well,\" he said.\n\n\"When you are talking health and safety around large automated machinery you have to be aware of what things are doing and when and who is doing what.\n\n\"As a pilot - as you might like to think - we have quite a logical way of looking at things. The way we are trained to look at problems is very applicable to manufacturing.\"\n\nAn \"incredible\" summer helped ease the transition from Greece to Moffat\n\nSo how has the transition back to rural Scotland gone?\n\n\"We are so lucky that the summer we had here was quite incredible,\" said Mr Jones.\n\n\"To be out in Moffat, even during lockdown, you can access the hills, you don't have to drive outside a five-mile radius.\n\n\"You can just go out and walk and you will never see a soul.\"\n\nSome things, however, take more getting used to, like his more conventional nine to five day.\n\n\"I think that has probably been the biggest shock to my system, getting into that working routine,\" he said.\n\nAlpha Solway is taking in large numbers of new staff to cope with demand\n\nAlpha Solway secured a major contract to supply the NHS in Scotland earlier this year which has helped to keep Mr Jones \"extremely busy\".\n\nHowever, flying gets \"into your blood\" and he hopes to get back into a plane at some time in the future.\n\n\"My goal is when the jobs start to come - which they will - I will return to the sky in some capacity,\" he said.\n\n\"But it will be a double-edged sword in that I have learned a huge amount here and I have met a lot of very good people.\n\n\"I'm working with a really good team of people here - there are good people here doing a good job and I am helping at least with that.\"", "Disabled workers at one of the UK's oldest charitable enterprises, Clarity, have allegedly been denied £200,000 in wages by the new owner.\n\nThe company produces toiletries and beauty products under the Clarity, Beco and Soap Co brands.\n\nActress Joanna Lumley and Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP have spoken out strongly over the claims.\n\nNicholas Marks, who bought the company last year, says all currently employed staff have been paid.\n\nCommunity, the union which represents Clarity's workers, claims that a number of disabled employees at the firm have not been paid wages and furlough payments.\n\nStephen Steppens says he has received no money since September\n\nStephen Steppens, 60, has been blind since birth, and has worked at Clarity since 1985. He is officially on furlough until his redundancy is completed at the end of January.\n\nHe says he has received no money since September and has been relying on his savings to get by.\n\n\"I loved it,\" he says of working there. Losing the job, and the fight over the organisation's future, have taken a toll on his mental health, he says.\n\n\"I want to see justice done, not just for me, but also for my friends who are visiting food banks.\"\n\nA number of employees have brought successful employment tribunal claims for unauthorised deduction of wages against Clarity, including Mr Steppens. Clarity was ordered to pay him £706. A number of other employment tribunal claims are ongoing, according to Community.\n\nJoanna Lumley, who had been a supporter of Clarity, called it \"the best of the best\" and said she was \"shocked\" to learn of the allegations over treatment of workers. \"Justice must be done as soon as possible,\" she told BBC News.\n\nClarity was founded in 1854 by a wealthy blind woman, Elizabeth Gilbert, as the Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind, to provide opportunities for workers whom other employers overlooked because of their disabilities. Before the takeover, three-quarters of its staff were disabled people.\n\nA factory in London run by General Welfare of the Blind, about 1901\n\nIts supporters and patrons in the past have included Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria.\n\nClarity went into administration last year, as it was losing money and unable to fund the hole in its pension scheme, according to a spokesman for the administrators, FRP. In January, it was bought by Nicholas Marks.\n\nSir Iain Duncan Smith, whose London constituency is home to Clarity's headquarters, raised the issue in the House of Commons on 12 January.\n\n\"Staff have failed to receive national insurance contributions, with many failing to receive their wages or support while undertaking childcare,\" he told MPs.\n\n\"The total amount that these decent but very vulnerable people have failed to receive is now around £200,000. They cannot claim benefits because they are essentially employed.\"\n\nCommunity estimates that about 60 former employees of Clarity are still awaiting payment of their wages and furlough payments, most of them disabled workers.\n\nA spokesman for Nicholas Marks said that Sir Iain's remarks were \"highly inaccurate\" and the company \"does not recognise\" the £200,000 figure.\n\n\"The grievances echoed by Sir Iain Duncan Smith simply reflect disgruntled ex-employees. All employees currently working have been paid in full up-to-date and the company is dealing with redundancies and gross misconduct of former employees,\" he said.\n\nCommunity says it is not aware of any staff who have been dismissed for gross misconduct.\n\nThe spokesman for Mr Marks said that Mr Marks had \"saved this historic company from permanent failure\".\n\nHowever, other bids for Clarity were made, including one from the well-known social entrepreneur, Cemal Ezel, who runs the Change Please coffee business, which creates opportunities for homeless people.\n\nHe is still interested in buying the brands, he told BBC News.\n\nThough Mr Ezel's final bid was slightly higher, the administrators' report says they chose to sell to Mr Marks because he was in a better position to complete the deal by 31 January.\n\nMr Marks's spokesman said that he had to make \"some sensible commercial decisions to place it on to a proper business footing and regrettably some staff had to be let go\".\n\nOn Wednesday, Clarity's website was still running the Certified Social Enterprise mark, denoting an organisation devoted to \"creating positive social change\".\n\nThe spokesman said Clarity Products was not a social enterprise and was not \"purporting to clients\" that it was, though it retained the \"social enterprise ethos through the continued employment of fully paid disabled staff\".\n\nWrongly using the logo for nearly a year was \"simply an oversight\", and it is being removed. On Thursday morning, the website was unavailable - the company spokesman said he was not aware why.\n\nIn a response to Sir Iain's query, Treasury Minister Jesse Norman wrote that he had \"specifically asked HMRC to note the circumstances you describe, and to consider whether and how there may be a case for early intervention\".\n\nAnother company owned by Mr Marks, a Preston-based caravan maker called Lunar Automotive, was reported to HMRC by the local MP, Sir Mark Hendrick, for allegedly refusing to pay wages and pension contributions for its workers.\n\nThis company was also bought out of an administration run by FRP.\n\nMr Marks's spokesman was not able to comment in detail on the Lunar Automotive case, but said the company had not heard back from HMRC.", "The Daily Telegraph must publish a correction over a \"significantly misleading\" column written by Toby Young, press regulator Ipso has ruled.\n\nThe July 2020 article claimed the common cold could provide \"natural immunity\" to Covid-19 and London was \"probably approaching herd immunity\".\n\nBut on Thursday Ipso found the paper had \"failed to take care not to publish inaccurate and misleading information\".\n\nIpso said the paper \"did not accept it has breached the [Editors] Code\".\n\nIt said the newspaper said that Young's comments on immunity referred to \"cross-reactive T-cells\" that work to combat the virus.\n\nHowever, the media watchdog sided with the complainant, James Whitehead, in its decision, who said that while these cells \"may lessen the impact of Covid-19\" after infection, they \"would not confer 'natural immunity'\"\n\nThe ruling added Young's statement \"misrepresented the nature of immunity\".\n\nIpso also found Young's suggestion that \"London is probably approaching herd immunity, even though only 17% tested positive [for antibodies] in the most recent seroprevalence survey\" could be misleading.\n\nThere is an antibody response and a cellular response to the coronavirus\n\nThe Telegraph referred to surveys listed in an article on Young's own Lockdown Sceptics website in its defence, but the Ipso committee judged these did not accurately reflect \"how herd immunity is reached and whether it exists in London\".\n\nThe ruling concluded that the paper had breached accuracy standards on a topic of \"public importance\", but deemed a correction an appropriate sanction, given the level of \"significant scientific uncertainty\" at the time of publication.\n\nYoung told the BBC: \"I think Ipso has been put in a difficult position because our scientific understanding of the virus is constantly evolving and there is a great deal about it that scientists still disagree about.\n\n\"While some of the things I wrote in that article would be contested by some scientists, they would be confirmed by others... Have we achieved herd immunity in London? I think that's an open question and the 'case' data is unreliable because of the well-documented shortcomings of the PCR test.\n\n\"I may have been over-emphatic in putting the anti-lockdown case, but it's not as if the advocates of a pro-lockdown position are any less emphatic.\n\n\"Don't forget the WHO initially estimated the global IFR [infection fatality rate] of Covid-19 at 3.4%. The consensus now is that it's less than 1% and almost certainly a lot less. Lots of journalists faithfully reported that alarmist figure. Why hasn't Ipso reprimanded them?\"\n\nLast week Young told BBC Newsnight that some of his claims from an article he wrote in June had been \"wrong\", where he had said a second spike of Covid-19 had \"refused to materialise\" and that one-metre rule is \"unnecessary\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by BBC Newsnight This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAt the start of the year, Young, an associate editor at The Spectator and general secretary of the Free Speech Union, installed an app that auto-deletes tweets more than a week old.\n\nHe said he did so to protect against \"politically-motivated offence archaeologists\" - a move unrelated to the Ipso ruling.\n\nReacting to criticism of his past comments on coronavirus from Neil O'Brien, Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, after the deletion, Young then tweeted a defence of his stance against lockdowns.\n\n\"This is an important public debate to have,\" he wrote, \"both because it helps us assess the present government's management of the pandemic and because it will help us prepare better for the next one.\"\n\nThe UK entered a second national lockdown last week in a bid to control spiralling virus infection rates. On Wednesday, the UK saw its biggest daily death figure since the start of the pandemic, with 1,564 deaths.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Police said Graeme Perks had gone to investigate the sound of breaking glass when he was stabbed\n\nPlastic surgeons have expressed shock at the stabbing of \"one of the most highly regarded and respected surgeons\" in their profession.\n\nGraeme Perks, 65, was stabbed in his abdomen and chest during a break-in at his house in Halam, a village near Southwell in Nottinghamshire.\n\nPolice said the attack on Thursday morning had left him \"fighting for his life\" and left his family, who were upstairs at the time, \"extremely upset\".\n\nGraeme Perks has been described as \"one of the most highly regarded and respected surgeons in the profession\"\n\nMr Perks previously served as president of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons (BAPRAS).\n\nCurrent president Ruth Waters said BAPRAS had been contacted by colleagues all around the world as news of the attack spread.\n\n\"All have expressed their shock at what has happened and also their deep concern for his wellbeing and their hope for his speedy recovery,\" she said.\n\n\"It has been my good fortune and honour to know Graeme for many years. I have benefited from his kindness, generosity and extensive knowledge throughout my career in plastic surgery.\"\n\nBAPRAS described him as \"one of the most highly regarded and respected surgeons in the profession\".\n\nAs well as being a leading plastic surgeon, Mr Perks and his wife have raised thousands of pounds for charity by opening their garden to visitors. They were previously featured on BBC Radio Nottingham after raising more than £34,000.\n\nPolice were still outside the house in Halam more than 24 hours later\n\nPolice said Mr Perks had gone to investigate the sound of breaking glass at about 04:15 GMT, after an intruder is believed to have smashed his way into the house.\n\nThey said Mr Perks was stabbed and the suspect ran off.\n\nMr Perks was taken to the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham for surgery, where he remains in a serious condition.\n\nDet Insp Gayle Hart, who is leading the investigation, said: \"The swift arrest of this suspect we hope will provide some reassurance to local residents.\n\n\"This is a horrific incident which has left a man fighting for his life and his family who were upstairs at the time are extremely shocked and upset by the ordeal.\"\n\nMr Perks has served as president of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons (BAPRAS)\n\nMr Perks has previously worked in London, Sheffield, Newcastle and Melbourne, Australia.\n\nHe returned to the UK in the mid-1990s and started working in Nottingham, with a special interest in microsurgical reconstruction after cancer surgery.\n\nHe later became head of the department of Plastic, Reconstructive and Burns Surgery at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.\n\nOutgoing BAPRAS president Mark Henley said: \"Graeme is an amazing colleague who it has been my pleasure and privilege to work with over the last 26 years.\n\n\"His dedication to patients, family and friends is an inspiration to us all and with his wisdom, kindness and humanity he has enabled us to achieve many things that I would never have thought possible. We are all willing him on.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The international community has missed previous deadlines on ensuring access to school\n\nBoris Johnson says it is his \"fervent belief\" that improving girls' education in developing countries is the best way to \"lift communities out of poverty\".\n\nThe prime minister has announced MP Helen Grant as a special envoy for efforts to support girls' education.\n\nIt is expected to be a key theme of the UK's presidency this year of the G7 group of major industrial countries.\n\n\"It can change the fortunes of not just individual women and girls, but communities and nations,\" says the PM.\n\nEven before the pandemic, millions of children in developing countries did not have any access to school - and girls from disadvantaged families are particularly vulnerable to missing out on education. whether through poverty or prejudice.\n\nThe Covid pandemic has created even more barriers to education, with a peak of 1.6 billion children around the world having faced school closures.\n\nBoris Johnson wants girls' education to be a focus of the UK's G7 presidency\n\nMr Johnson, as foreign secretary and prime minister, has previously highlighted girls' education as a key to improving the health, wealth and security of the poorest countries.\n\nHe once described it as the \"Swiss army knife\" of development, as getting girls to stay in education could avoid early marriage, improve their chances of getting a job and provide more income for children to be better fed.\n\nThe prime minister said the international target of ensuring all girls can have 12 years of good quality education would be the \"simplest and most transformative thing we can do\" to tackle poverty and to \"end the scourge of gender-based violence\".\n\n\"The benefits of educating girls are enormous - a child whose mother can read is 50% more likely to live past the age of five and twice as likely to attend school themselves. With just one additional school year, a woman's earnings can increase by up to a fifth,\" said Mr Johnson.\n\nHelen Grant, now the special envoy for girls' education, said: \"High quality female education empowers women, reduces poverty and unleashes economic growth.\n\n\"I will be making it my mission to encourage a more ambitious approach to girls' education from the international community.\"\n\nThere has been a series of pledges from the international community over the past three decades to provide at least a primary school education for all children - all of which have been missed.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said hosting the G7 should be a chance for the UK to act as a \"moral force for good in the world\", but accused the Conservatives of engaging in \"a decade of global retreat\".\n\n\"We need to seize this chance to lead again, just as Blair and Brown did over global poverty and the financial crisis.\"", "Everyone has heard about doctors and nurses catching Covid-19 but some of the worst affected hospital staff have been cleaners and porters. Dr John Wright of Bradford Royal Infirmary tells the story of a cleaner who became ill, and is now stricken with guilt for taking the virus home.\n\nThe first person I see early each morning when I arrive at the hospital is our cleaner, Karen Smith. During 10 months of uncertainty, Karen has been the one constant, apart from a few weeks in spring, when she was ill with Covid-19.\n\nUsually Karen cleans the offices of the hospital's Institute for Health Research, but in the first wave of the pandemic she was called to the Covid wards. It was a frightening time for everyone, but Karen volunteered for an extra shift on Good Friday as there was a staff shortage - and on that day she thinks she was infected.\n\nWe know that working in hospitals increases your risk of infection by a factor of three, but this risk is not evenly spread. Antibody tests carried out in many NHS hospitals over the summer showed it was not the ICU consultants or infectious \"red zone\" clinical staff who had the highest rate of infection, but porters and cleaners working in those areas. Their risk of infection was double that of their clinical colleagues.\n\nThis heightened risk for hospital staff also applies to their household contacts.\n\nAs she cleaned the hospital in April, Karen was scared not for herself, but for her family. She and her husband, Mal, had moved into a caravan in Mal's parents' garden, while his mother was ill with cancer - and they stayed on after she died, to support Mal's 80-year-old father, Malcolm. Mal, a hospital porter, was shielding because he has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and Malcolm senior was clearly vulnerable because of his age.\n\nStopping work, however, was not a luxury Karen could afford. And unlike some hospital staff who were housed in hotels to protect their families, she went back home every night.\n\nShe became ill towards the end of April, followed by Mal at the beginning of May. The weather was hot, she remembers, as they coughed and wheezed in the caravan.\n\n\"It was like being in a tin box,\" she says. \"I got Covid and couldn't get over it properly. And then Mal got it and his was on another level compared to mine - and then his dad got ill, and that was a different ball game altogether.\"\n\nProf John Wright, a doctor and epidemiologist, is head of the Bradford Institute for Health Research, and a veteran of cholera, HIV and Ebola epidemics in sub-Saharan Africa. He is writing this diary for BBC News and recording from the hospital wards for BBC Radio.\n\nThe couple had to go inside the house to cook and to use the bathroom but did their best to keep away from the elderly Malcolm, who would go into a different room whenever they entered.\n\n\"We tried so, so hard not to give it to him - but then he got ill and he just went to his bed. Honestly, he was just like a little child, under the quilt looking all bewildered. He started with the shivers and we rang 111. They said to bring him to Accident and Emergency to get him tested, and we couldn't believe it when it came back positive,\" Karen says.\n\nLater, he was brought into hospital. I have fond memories of meeting Malcolm on the ward after he was admitted, acutely struggling with symptoms of cough and shortness of breath from his Covid infection. He was a kind and gentle man, stoical and patient.\n\nHe was adamant that he had been careful to keep his distance from Karen and Mal in the house, but admitted wandering over to show them articles in the Telegraph and Argus - Bradford's daily newspaper - whenever I was mentioned in it. I felt strangely culpable that I might have been the cause of the transmission.\n\nMalcolm made a good recovery and was eager to be discharged. But Covid is an unpredictable illness, and it can happen that improvements in a patient's condition are followed by a sharp deterioration. And this is what happened with Malcolm soon after he arrived home.\n\n\"He didn't want to go back into hospital - he said to get him some Tunes because they would help him breathe,\" says Karen. \"But nothing could help him, he was so, so ill. We had to say to him, 'No, you've got Covid and you need proper medical care.' He was such a lovely man, bless him.\"\n\nMalcolm was readmitted after two nights at home and died on 28 May.\n\nMalcolm as he turned 80, visiting his brother in Canada\n\nKaren returned to work. But like many people who have had this illness, she has been suffering the after-effects, both physically and mentally. She's now on an inhaler for breathlessness, can barely taste anything seven months later, and is constantly tired. She is also receiving medication for anxiety because of the fear that she will have to return to the Covid wards, where potentially she could get ill again.\n\nAnd in her case there is the added pain of having lost a loved one, mixed with feelings of guilt.\n\n\"When I start to think about him the tears come and sometimes I'll be crying almost all day - cleaning and crying. If I'm having a bad day, I won't be able to talk,\" she says.\n\n\"The guilt is always there, as I'll never know for sure where he picked it up. Mal's dad didn't set foot out of the door, and so in my head I feel such guilt, because we had to go into the house, we didn't have any choice. I go over it all but it's hard to escape from, because I got it, Mal got it and then his Dad got it. Deep down I think that's what's happened, and it will take time to come to terms with.\"\n\nKaren has been referred for counselling, but there is a long waiting list.\n\nBoth Karen and Mal also had to wait for the vaccine, though both had it on Wednesday. This was a huge relief for Karen, as anything that reduces her chance of reinfection also helps her cope with her anxiety. If NHS trusts are serious about following the science then arguably they should be vaccinating cleaners and porters first.\n\nThe fear of transmitting the virus to our loved ones at home is the ghost that haunts all front-line staff. Many went into isolation during the first wave, but this was never a sustainable approach, and with a virus that is so contagious and an environment in which it is so prevalent, transmission to family members is unfortunately common.\n\nKaren and Mal personify this occupational risk, and its potential deadly impact.", "Doctors and nurses need protection from prosecution over Covid-19 treatment decisions made under the pressures of the pandemic, medical bodies have said.\n\nGroups including the British Medical Association have written to ministers saying medical workers fear they could be at risk of unlawful killing charges.\n\nIt comes as the UK's chief medical officers said the NHS could be overwhelmed in weeks.\n\nThe government said staff should not have to fear legal action.\n\nThe letter from the health organisations points out that the prime minister warned in November that the NHS being overwhelmed would be a \"medical and moral disaster\", where \"doctors and nurses could be forced to choose which patients to treat, who would live and who would die\".\n\nIt said: \"With the chief medical officers now determining that there is a material risk of the NHS being overwhelmed within weeks, our members are worried that not only do they face being put in this position but also that they could subsequently be vulnerable to a criminal investigation by the police.\"\n\nCo-ordinated by the Medical Protection Society (MPS), the letter was signed by the British Medical Association, the Doctors' Association UK, the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin and Medical Defence Shield.\n\nIt calls for emergency legislation to protect doctors and nurses from \"inappropriate\" legal action when dealing with circumstances outside their control.\n\nExisting guidance for doctors and nurses on when to administer or withdraw treatment does not give legal protection, the letter says.\n\nIt also says the guidance does not consider the circumstances of the pandemic where demand for healthcare may outstrip supply.\n\n\"The first concern of a doctor is their patients and providing the highest standard of care at all times,\" the medical bodies said.\n\n\"We do not believe it is right that healthcare professionals should suffer from the moral injury and long-term psychological damage that could result from having to make decisions on how limited resources are allocated, while at the same time being left vulnerable to the risk of prosecution for unlawful killing.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What does it mean if the NHS is overwhelmed?\n\nThe medical organisations said no healthcare professional should be \"above the law\" and that the emergency legislation should only apply to decisions made \"in good faith\" and \"in circumstances beyond their control and in compliance with relevant guidance\".\n\nThey said the change in the law should be temporary and should apply retrospectively from the start of the pandemic.\n\nMedical staff in the NHS are protected financially from clinical negligence claims by indemnity schemes where the state pays the costs of claims.\n\nBut if someone dies as a result of a lack of treatment, doctors and nurses fear prosecutors could bring charges such as gross negligence manslaughter, which can carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.\n\nEarlier this month, a survey by the MPS of 2,420 of its members found that 61% were concerned about facing an investigation following a decision made in a high-pressure situation.\n\nAbout 36% were concerned about being investigated for a decision to withdraw or withhold life-prolonging treatment due to pressure on resources during the pandemic.\n\nA Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: \"Dedicated frontline NHS staff should be able to focus on treating patients and saving lives during the pandemic without fear of legal action.\"\n\nNHS staff have been told that existing indemnity arrangements will continue and will cover \"the vast majority of liabilities\", the spokesman said.", "Scottish fishermen have resorted to sailing to Denmark to land their catch as Brexit red tape continues to delay exports, an industry body has said.\n\nThe Scottish Fishermen's Federation, which campaigned to leave the EU, also said the Brexit trade deal was the worst of both worlds for the industry.\n\nMany fishermen \"now fear for their future\", it said.\n\nThe UK government said the deal would \"bring immediate gains to our fishermen and women across the whole UK\".\n\nLate last year, the Scottish Fishermen's Federation (SFF) said it was \"deeply aggrieved\" by the Brexit deal.\n\nFishing firms have also warned of impending bankruptcy as delays continue at ports following the introduction of post-Brexit regulations.\n\nOn Friday, the SFF kept up the pressure on the UK government.\n\nIn a letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, it said some fishermen \"are now making a 72-hour round trip to land fish in Denmark, as the only way to guarantee that their catch will make a fair price and actually find its way to market while still fresh enough to meet customer demands\".\n\nQuotas are used by many countries to manage shared fish stocks. They determine how many fish of each species each country's fleets are allowed to catch.\n\nThe SFF said that Brexit quota gains \"can hardly be claimed as a resounding success\" and that the Brexit deal \"actually leaves the Scottish industry in a worse position on more than half of the key stocks\".\n\n\"This industry now finds itself in the worst of both worlds,\" said SFF chief executive Elspeth Macdonald, accusing Prime Minister Boris Johnson of broken promises on quotas.\n\nThe \"desperately poor deal\" reached on quotas, under which the EU \"have full access to our waters\" means that the UK has \"no ability to leverage more fish from the EU\", she said.\n\n\"This, coupled with the chaos experienced since 1 January in getting fish to market, means that many in our industry now fear for their future, rather than look forward to it with optimism and ambition,\" Ms Macdonald added.\n\nThe Scottish National Party said the letter was \"an utterly devastating verdict on Brexit from Scotland's fishing industry\".\n\nAn SNP spokesperson said the Scottish fishing industry was \"right to be angry\" about the Brexit deal, which it said was costing Scotland's fishing communities millions of pounds.\n\nThe spokesman called on the prime minister to deliver \"a multi-billion pound package of Brexit compensation for Scotland\", adding: \"Communities across Scotland will never forgive the Tories for the damage they are doing to our country with their extreme Brexit obsession.\"\n\nA UK government spokesperson said the Prime Minister would respond to the SFF letter in due course.\n\nThe spokesperson said: \"We have now taken back control of our waters and the agreement we have reached with the EU secures a 25% transfer of quota from EU to UK vessels over five years, starting with 15% this year.\"\n\nThe spokesperson said the government was looking at providing additional financial support for the Scottish fishing industry, which it recognised was facing \"some temporary issues\".\n\n\"The Prime Minister has already committed to investing £100m in the UK's fishing industry and provided the Scottish government with nearly £200m to minimise disruption for businesses,\" the spokesperson added.", "Louis Godwin said receiving the vaccine was \"no trouble at all\" and encouraged others to have it as soon as they could\n\nSalisbury Cathedral has been transformed into a vaccination centre with an RAF veteran being one of the first to receive the Covid-19 jab.\n\nFormer Flight Sergeant Louis Godwin, 95, gave a thumbs-up after being vaccinated in the cathedral, which dates back more than 800 years.\n\n\"I was so pleased to get it, especially in a setting like this,\" he said.\n\nOrganisers were aiming to vaccinate 1,000 people aged over 80 with the Pfizer/BioNTech jab on Saturday.\n\nPeople queuing to receive their vaccines at Salisbury Cathedral on Saturday\n\nMr Godwin, a great-grandfather of 12, joined the RAF aged 18 in 1943 and served as an air gunner during World War Two.\n\n\"I've had many jabs in my time, especially in the RAF. After the war, I was sent to Egypt and I had a couple of jabs which knocked me over for a week,\" he said.\n\n\"This one, the doctor said to me 'well that's done' and I thought he hadn't started. So it's no trouble at all and no pain.\"\n\nA health worker prepares the vaccine to be administered at the cathedral\n\nStella Bennett, 88, said she felt \"safer\" after receiving the jab.\n\n\"It was easy. I live on my own so it has been hard but I've managed. At least I'm at home and not in hospital with it,\" she said.\n\nDerek Burnett was also among those inoculated against the virus on Saturday.\n\n\"I feel unbelievably relieved as lockdown has been a big strain. It takes a big weight off my mind,\" said the 81-year-old.\n\nOrganisers hoped to vaccinate 1,000 people aged over 80 during the day\n\nThe Very Rev Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury described the vaccines as \"a real sign of hope for us at the end of this very, very difficult year\".\n\n\"I doubt that anyone is having a jab in surroundings that are more beautiful than this so I hope it will ease people as they come into the building,\" he said.\n\nThe Very Rev Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury, described hosting the event as \"absolutely wonderful\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Parts of the UK were blanketed in snow on Saturday as forecasters warned of the potential for disruption.\n\nEast Anglia woke up to a thick layer that had settled overnight and there were warnings that rural communities could be \"cut off\", with up to 8cm (3in) of snow forecast.\n\nPeople in eastern England were warned to expect power cuts and travel delays.\n\nHowever, by midday snow had stopped falling across most parts of the UK, replaced by rain and sleet in places.\n\nSome further light snow is still expected in the hills and mountains of Scotland.\n\nParts of Wales and Northern Ireland were mostly cloudy, with some bands of rain in the northern regions.\n\nThe Met Office had predicted between 4-8cm (1.5-3in) of snow could fall in the worst-affected regions, and warned drivers to accelerate their cars \"gently\" and leave a large gap between surrounding vehicles.\n\nBut the worst of the wintry weather has passed and earlier amber and yellow weather warnings have been cancelled.\n\nA man trekking through the snow at a golf course in Gleneagles\n\nGreg Dewhurst, a Met Office forecaster, said earlier that Saturday was expected to be the colder of the two days over the weekend.\n\nHe said: \"Temperatures are unlikely to rise above 10C, with a lot of areas closer to freezing.\"\n\nThere were also 25 flood warnings across England on Saturday\n\nLuke Miall, meteorologist at the Met Office, said earlier patches of snow could reach parts of Greater London.\n\nHe said the snow had the potential to cause some \"fairly significant disruption\".\n\nThere were also 22 flood warnings across England on Saturday, stretching from the South East to the North East, meaning \"immediate action is required\", according to the Environment Agency.\n\nThis is expected to clear up in the evening, going into Sunday, when southern and eastern parts of the UK will see dry, sunny spells.\n\nNorth-western regions are expected to see showers, with a \"spell of more persistent rain\" later on in the day.\n\nThe coronavirus vaccine rollout has been affected by the weather.\n\nOn Friday, over-80s who were due to receive their jab at Newcastle's Centre for Life were told they could rebook rather than risk making a trip in the icy conditions.\n\nAnd Leeds University has delayed the opening of its asymptomatic Covid-19 test centre.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Prime Minister Boris Johnson: \"We will temporarily close all travel corridors from 0400 on Monday\"\n\nThe UK is to close all travel corridors from Monday morning to \"protect against the risk of as yet unidentified new strains\" of Covid, the PM has said.\n\nAnyone flying into the country from overseas will have to show proof of a negative Covid test before setting off.\n\nIt comes as a ban on travellers from South America and Portugal came into force on Friday over concerns about a new variant identified in Brazil.\n\nBoris Johnson said the new rules would be in place until at least 15 February.\n\nA further 1,280 people with coronavirus have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive test, taking the total to 87,291.\n\nThe latest government figures on Friday also showed another 55,761 new cases had been reported - up from 48,682 the previous day.\n\nMeanwhile, more than two million people around the world have now died with the virus since the pandemic began, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.\n\nSpeaking at a Downing Street press conference, the prime minister said it was \"vital\" to take extra measures now \"when day by day we are making such strides in protecting the population\".\n\n\"It's precisely because we have the hope of that vaccine and the risk of new strains coming from overseas that we must take additional steps now to stop those strains from entering the country.\"\n\nAll travel corridors will close from 04:00 GMT on Monday. After that, arrivals to the UK will need to quarantine for up to 10 days, unless they test negative after five days.\n\nMr Johnson, who said the rules would apply across the UK after talks with the devolved administrations, added that the government would be stepping up enforcement at the border and in the country.\n\nTravel corridors were introduced in the summer to allow people travelling from some countries with low numbers of Covid cases to come to the UK without having to quarantine on arrival.\n\nTrade body Airlines UK said it supported the latest restrictions \"on the assumption\" that the government would remove them \"when it is safe to do so\".\n\nChief executive Tim Alderslade said travel corridors were \"a lifeline for the industry\" last summer but \"things change and there's no doubting this is a serious health emergency\".\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was the \"right step\" but called the timing of the decision \"slow again\", adding that the public would be thinking \"why on earth didn't this happen before\".\n\nThe prime minister warned that the NHS was facing \"extraordinary pressures\", having had the highest number of hospital admissions on a single day of the pandemic earlier this week.\n\nHe said that came on Tuesday when there were 4,134 new admissions, while the UK currently has more than 37,000 Covid patients in hospitals.\n\nMr Johnson said that once the most vulnerable have been vaccinated by mid-February \"we will think about what steps we could take to lift the restrictions\".\n\nEngland is currently under a national lockdown, meaning people must stay at home and can go out only for limited reasons such as food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home.\n\nSimilar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nAlso speaking at the No 10 briefing, England's chief medical officer Prof Chris Whitty said the restrictions would need to be lifted gradually by \"testing what works, and then if that works going the next step\".\n\nHe said the peak of people entering hospital would be in the next week to 10 days for most places, but \"we hope\" the peak of infections \"already has happened\" in the south-east, east and London.\n\n\"The peak of deaths I fear is in the future, the peak of hospitalisations in some parts of the country may be around about now and beginning to come off the very, very top,\" he said.\n\nA ban on travellers from South America, Portugal and Cape Verde entering the UK came into force on Friday morning as a result of a new, potentially more infectious variant of coronavirus linked to Brazil.\n\nThe government's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance told the press briefing that some of the new variants may be able to \"get round\" the Covid vaccines but it was \"really quite easy\" to adjust the vaccines to deal with mutations in the virus.\n\nNew variants causing concern have previously been identified in the UK and South Africa, with many countries imposing restrictions on arrivals from both nations.\n\nPublic Health England said a total of 35 genomically confirmed and 12 genomically probable cases of the Covid-19 variant which originated in South Africa have been identified in the UK as of 14 January.\n\nEarlier, a leading scientist said one of the two variants first detected in Brazil had been found in the UK - but not the variant that was causing concern.\n\n\"I think it is likely that the vaccine we have now is going to protect against the UK variant and is going to provide protection I suspect against the other variants as well,\" said Sir Patrick. \"The question is to what degree.\"\n\nLatest figures show that more than three million people in the UK have now received the first dose of a vaccine - 3,234,946 - an increase of 316,694 from the previous day.\n\nSir Patrick said he expected the vaccines would reduce transmission of the virus but that \"we shouldn't go mad\" as jabs are rolled out because a risk would remain.\n\n\"Just because you've been vaccinated doesn't mean you can't catch this and pass it on, it means you're protected against severe disease,\" he added.\n\nMeanwhile, the latest estimate of the UK's R number - which is the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to on average - is 1.2 to 1.3, compared with 1-1.4 last week.\n\nBut in London, where tight restrictions came in earlier, the R number is lower - between 0.9 and 1.2.\n\nIn Wales, new laws for shoppers and staff are to be introduced after \"significant evidence\" coronavirus is being spread in supermarkets.\n\nAre you due to travel back to the UK from overseas? Share your experiences. Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "The French government has imposed a nationwide curfew from 6pm - 6am to fight the surge in cases of coronavirus.\n\nWhile some departments were already under these restrictions, the majority of France was under an 8pm - 6am curfew.\n\nFrench Prime Minister Jean Castex said the measures would be in place for at least 15 days.", "Northern Ireland's statistics agency has recorded its highest weekly Covid-19 related registered deaths since the pandemic began.\n\nNisra said 145 deaths were registered in the first week of 2021, although administrative delays over Christmas may have affected the number.\n\nThat brings the agency's death toll to 1,976 by 8 January.\n\nThe figures come as the chief medical officers from NI and the Republic issued a joint stay-at-home plea.\n\nDr Michael McBride and Dr Tony Holohan said they were \"gravely concerned\" about the \"unsustainably high level of Covid-19 infection\" across the island of Ireland.\n\nConcern was raised in the Republic of Ireland this week as figures showed it has the world's highest number of confirmed new Covid-19 cases per million people.\n\nOn Friday evening, the Irish Department of Health reported 50 further deaths with Covid-19 and 3,498 new cases of the virus. More than half (54%) of those newly diagnosed are under the age of 45.\n\nNorthern Ireland is in the third week of a six-week lockdown, with ministers scheduled to review measures next week.\n\nHowever, health officials have warned that an extension of the restrictions could be required to reduce pressure on the health service.\n\nOf the 2,019 deaths recorded by Nisra by 8 January, 1,247 (62%) occurred in hospital, 622 (31%) in care homes, 12 (0.6%) in hospices and 138 (7%) at residential addresses or other locations.\n\nPeople aged 75 and over account for just over three-quarters of all Covid-19 related registered deaths (77.6%) between 19 March 2020 and 8 January 2021.\n\nJust over a fifth (22.2%) of all Covid-19 related registered deaths have been of people with an address in the Belfast council area.\n\nMeanwhile, the Department of Health reported 26 further Covid-related deaths on Friday.\n\nFive of these deaths did not occur in the past 24 hours.\n\nThe Department of Health bases its figures on a positive test result being recorded, whereas Nisra figures are based on mentions of the virus on death certificates, so people may or may not have been confirmed to have contracted the virus prior to death.\n\nA further 1,052 individuals have tested positive for Covid-19 and 63 patients are being treated in intensive care units, 47 of whom are on ventilators.\n\nThe chief medical officers warned the high infection rate was having a \"significant impact\" on the health of the population and the \"safe functioning\" of the healthcare systems.\n\nThey said the public should avoid all unnecessary journeys, including cross-border travel.\n\nPointing out that many of the patients admitted to hospital in January have been younger than 65, they warned coronavirus could affect anyone, \"regardless of age or underlying condition\".\n\n\"It highlights the need for us all to protect one another by staying at home,\" said the medical officers.\n\nNorthern Ireland's spike in infections has been put down to an easing of restrictions over Christmas.\n\nAsked if he regretted being part of the decision to ease restrictions, Health Minister Robin Swann said the executive had tried to be balanced in its approach.\n\n\"I regret the pressures we see now in our hospitals, but let's remember it's caused by this virus, we have it in our power to bring it back under control and get us back to where we were in the summer,\" he told BBC News NI on Friday.\n\nMr Swann pleaded with people to follow the current restrictions.\n\n\"We're in the middle of a very tough six-week scenario, and how we come out of this will be a more graduated approach to make sure we get the benefits of what we've already done, and also the benefits of the vaccine.\"", "Holiday firms say they are expecting more people to take holidays in the UK this year\n\nStaycations are expected to boom in 2021 after lockdown ends, UK holiday firms have said.\n\nBosses at the Caravan and Motorhome Club said the lifting of restrictions would be like \"a cork popping from a bottle\".\n\nDirector general Nick Lomas said although coronavirus had hit the industry hard, they were optimistic about the coming season.\n\nOther firms said they also expected more people to holiday in the UK.\n\nMr Lomas said: \"2020 was a very difficult year for the tourism and hospitality sector.\"\n\nThe West Sussex-based Caravan and Motorhome Club had suffered \"significant financial losses\", he said.\n\nHowever, he added: \"When our campsites were allowed to be open last year we actually saw record levels of bookings, with new memberships up by 14%.\n\n\"Sadly, this surge does not make up for the losses we suffered during nearly six months of lockdown.\"\n\nDuring the first lockdown popular resorts like Skegness were largely deserted\n\nBut, despite the current restrictions, Mr Lomas said he had every reason to believe this year could finish as one of \"the best and busiest yet\", due to the appetite for outdoor UK holidays.\n\n\"In fact, we think that 2021 is going to be like a cork popping from a bottle,\" he said.\n\nOperators say people are keen to experience the \"great outdoors\" once restrictions are lifted\n\nExperience Freedom, which operates glamping holidays in the UK, said bookings for 2021 were already up as people looked to spend more time in the \"great outdoors\".\n\nLincoln-based Anne's Vans said they were expecting a \"bumper year\"\n\nSmaller operators such as Anne's Vans, based in Lincoln, are also expecting to benefit.\n\nOwner Anne Davies said so far they had no bookings, saying \"uncertainty over when lockdown will end\" was putting people off at the moment.\n\nHowever, she said: \"Based on last year's experience we are expecting a bumper year in 2021... once this latest lockdown is over.\"\n\nThe Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority said it was inundated with visitors after restrictions were lifted last year\n\nThe chief executive of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, David Butterworth, said visitor numbers after the first lockdown ended were \"unprecedented\".\n\n\"The challenge for 2021 is to capitalise on this trend, and capture the hearts and minds of the people who have experienced the Dales for the first time to make sure they keep coming back,\" he added.", "Boris Johnson has said there is still a very substantial risk of intensive care units in hospitals being overwhelmed by the spread of the coronavirus.\n\nIt comes on a day when the UK has recorded the highest number of deaths in a single day in Europe.\n\nFergal Keane last visited the Imperial Healthcare Trust’s St Mary’s and Charing Cross hospital in London last April.\n\nHe's been back to see how they're coping.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Saturday morning. We'll have another update for you on Sunday.\n\nThe UK will face short-term delays in delivery of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine, as the pharmaceutical company makes modifications to its plant in Belgium. But the government says it still plans on achieving its target of vaccinating all top four priority groups by 15 February. Six EU nations have called the situation \"unacceptable\" and warned it \"decreases the credibility of the vaccination process\". Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia urged the EU to apply pressure on Pfizer-BioNTech. Pfizer says the reduced deliveries are a temporary issue, and the changes being made to its plant will speed up production in the longer term. So will a vaccine give us our old lives back?\n\nNew tighter Covid restrictions have come into force in Scotland with changes for takeaway outlets and click and collect shopping. Among the six new rules announced by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, customers buying takeaway food and coffee are no longer allowed inside premises, and staff must serve from a hatch or doorway. Plus, only retailers selling essential items - clothing, footwear, baby equipment, homeware and books - can now provide click and collect services. Customer collections can only be made outdoors, with staggered pick-up times to avoid queues.\n\nEveryone has heard about doctors and nurses catching Covid-19, but some of the worst affected hospital staff have been cleaners and porters. Dr John Wright of Bradford Royal Infirmary tells the story of a cleaner who became ill while doing her job, and is now stricken with guilt for taking the virus home.\n\nIt is almost a month since Christmas was \"downsized\" across the country. But in most parts of the UK, people did meet in Christmas \"bubbles\" if only for just one day. So what impact did this have? The overall picture shows a sharp increase in cases around this time. However, a closer look at the numbers suggests this trend was already happening and was probably caused by the new, more infectious variant of the virus rather than increased contact between people. Take a closer look at what happened over Christmas.\n\nYou can find more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nAnd if you're wondering whether you can catch the virus outside, our science editor David Shukman considers the risks.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "Louis Godwin descibed the vaccine as \"no trouble at all\" Image caption: Louis Godwin descibed the vaccine as \"no trouble at all\"\n\nAn RAF veteran has been among hundreds of people over 80 to receive the Covid-19 vaccine at Salisbury Cathedral, in Wiltshire, today.\n\nFormer Flight Sergeant Louis Godwin described receiving the Pfizer/BioNTech jab as \"absolutely marvellous\".\n\nThe landmark cathedral is hosting a vaccination hub for five GP surgeries in the area, with the aim of vaccinating more than 1,000 elderly residents and staff.\n\nMr Godwin recalled having jabs in Egypt after the war \"which knocked me over for a week\".\n\n\"This one, the doctor said to me 'well that's done' - and I thought he hadn't started!\"\n\nThe veteran pilot, who has 12 great-grandchildren, said the pandemic could not be compared to the war.\n\n\"It was entirely different because this has divided people.\n\n\"The vaccine is nothing, you don't feel a thing... so anybody that needs one and can get one, I would say go ahead and do it quickly.\n\n\"It's the only way we're going to beat the virus.\"\n\nPatients queued for a short time around the cloisters on Saturday, before going into the cathedral where they were treated to a programme of music on the famous Father Willis organ.\n\n\"It is a bonus to be in such a iconic, wonderful place,\" said Dr Dan Henderson, co-clinical director for the Sarum South Primary Care Network.\n\n\"It's great to be getting the vaccine out there and getting them in people's arms and knowing that this is hopefully the start of some sort of normality again.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Cricket\n\nLahiru Thirimanne's unbeaten 76 frustrated England as Sri Lanka fought back on the third day of the first Test in Galle.\n\nBowled out for 135 in the first innings, Sri Lanka showed great spirit to reach 156-2 - trailing by 130 - after England had posted 421.\n\nJoe Root progressed to a magnificent fourth Test double century before he was last man out for 228 as England lost their last six wickets for 49 runs.\n\nSam Curran and Jack Leach took a wicket apiece in Sri Lanka's second innings, but off-spinner Dom Bess rarely threatened on a pitch that has offered assistance to spin since day one.\n\nKusal Perera contributed 62 to an opening stand of 101 with the patient Thirimanne, who was dropped on 51 by Dom Sibley at gully as he compiled his highest Test score since 2013.\n\nThe left-hander will resume alongside nightwatchman Lasith Embuldeniya at 04:15 GMT on Sunday.\n\nEngland all-rounder Moeen Ali, who tested positive for coronavirus upon arrival in Sri Lanka, spent time at the ground in the afternoon after finishing his quarantine period.\n\nFor the first time in two years, England failed to take a wicket in the first 30 overs - with seamers Curran, Stuart Broad and Mark Wood finding the going tough given the minimal swing or seam movement on offer.\n\nHowever, credit must be paid to the Sri Lanka openers. Thirimanne and Perera were criticised for their first-innings failures, but their century stand was the first time in six Tests that a Sri Lanka opening pair had survived longer than 10 overs.\n\nPerera showed restraint - he scored at a strike-rate of 57, compared to 74 over his Test career - but hit Leach over mid-wicket for six and swept and also drove well before slapping a Curran long hop to wide third man.\n\nThirimanne, who averaged 22 in 70 Test innings before this match, was happy to play second fiddle to Perera, although he did find the leg-side boundary with flicks and sweeps.\n\nHaving taken 5-30 in the first innings, Bess failed to maintain a consistent length and allowed Thirimanne and Perera to play off the back foot too often.\n\nLeft-arm spinner Leach, who bowled more accurately, failed with a review for lbw against Thirimanne on 61 before having Kusal Mendis caught behind off a beautiful delivery that turned and bounced in what proved to be the penultimate over of the day.\n\nResuming on 168, Root reached his fourth Test double century with the minimum of fuss.\n\nHe showed more intent than on day two - when he was happy for debutant Dan Lawrence to take more risks - hitting the third ball of the day to the cover boundary before driving down the ground for six.\n\nIt was almost fitting that Root reached 200 with a sweep for four - it was a productive shot throughout his innings, with 88 runs coming via sweeps and reverse sweeps.\n\nIn his 321-ball innings Root became the eighth Englishman to pass 8,000 Test runs - in 178 innings, two more than Kevin Pietersen, who holds the record.\n\nEngland passed 400 in the first innings for the sixth time in their past 12 Tests, having failed to do so in their previous 23.\n\nBut they lost their last six wickets in 13 overs as they chased quick runs, possibly with an eye on the rain forecast later in the game.\n\nSri Lanka were much more disciplined than on the previous two days, with pace bowler Asitha Fernando impressing, while off-spinner Dilruwan Perera mopped up the tail to finish with 4-109.\n• 372-6: Sam Curran is bowled first ball as Fernando gets one to nip back and crash into off stump.\n• 382-7: Dom Bess disagrees and is well short of his ground, a third wicket to fall in 12 balls.\n• 398-8: Jack Leach is trapped lbw for four by Dilruwan Perera.\n• 406-9: Mark Wood toe-ends a sweep straight up in the air to be caught by Niroshan Dickwella off Dilruwan Perera.\n• 421 all out: Joe Root holes out on the mid-wicket boundary.\n\n'Chasing anything will be tricky' - reaction\n\nEngland captain Joe Root on BBC Test Match Special: \"It feels good to be in the position we are.\n\n\"It would have been nice to get a couple more wickets tonight but that one late on is a real bonus for us.\n\n\"It gives us a great opportunity in morning to apply a lot of pressure and hammer home what is a strong advantage in this game.\"\n\nEngland all-rounder Sam Curran: \"It is a strange looking wicket. It played a bit better than we thought this evening.\n\n\"It didn't offer much for the seamers and there was real slow turn for the spinners. The two openers played really well.\"\n\nFormer England captain Michael Vaughan: \"Sri Lanka came back really well - they have shown fight and discipline.\n\n\"If Sri Lanka bat the whole day tomorrow things will get interesting. Chasing anything on last day becomes tricky.\n\n\"I expect England will take eight wickets tomorrow and win the game.\"\n\nFormer England batter Ebony Rainford-Brent: \"Sri Lanka really have fought back well. It is good to see.\n\n\"If weather plays a factor and there is some resistance from the lower order this could bubble into an exciting finish.\"\n• None Hear how David Bowie always managed to stay ahead of his time\n• None Joe Wicks and guests are here to bring positivity to your day", "The funeral of Gerry and the Pacemakers singer Gerry Marsden has been held at a church near his beloved River Mersey.\n\nMarsden died, aged 78, in hospital on 3 January following a blood infection.\n\nAs the frontman in the band Gerry and the Pacemakers, his hits included Ferry Cross The Mersey and a cover version of You'll Never Walk Alone.\n\nEx-Liverpool boss Sir Kenny Dalglish was among the mourners at the funeral which had to remain small because of Covid restrictions.\n\nSir Kenny managed the club at the time of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, which led to the deaths of 96 fans who were attending an FA Cup game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.\n\nGerry Marsden sings You'll Never Walk Alone before an Anfield match in 2010\n\nSir Kenny said: \"You'll Never Walk Alone has huge meaning to the lives of Liverpool supporters around the world and is synonymous with the club.\n\n\"He will be sadly missed by those who knew him and the millions he never got to meet.\"\n\nYou'll Never Walk Alone became a football terrace anthem for Marsden's hometown club soon after it topped the charts in 1963.\n\nThe song was played during the funeral by a guitarist while a version of Marsden singing Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying, a song he wrote for his wife Pauline, also featured.\n\nShe said: \"We, his family, are totally devastated and have been so moved and amazed at the extent of the respect, love and affection received from all over the world.\n\n\"When the time is right and we have come out of this terrible pandemic we hope a fitting memorial can be held for him in the city he loved so much.\"\n\nGerry and the Pacemakers was one of the biggest British bands in the 1960s\n\nReferring to the lyrics from Ferry Cross the Mersey, close friend Arthur Johnson said: \"He lived close to the banks of the Mersey for all his life and as the words of his song say: 'This land's the place I love and here I'll stay'.\"\n\nLiverpool City Region mayor Steve Rotheram said: \"I feel privileged he let me into his life, although that makes his passing even more painful.\"\n\nIn 1962, Beatles manager Brian Epstein signed up Gerry and the Pacemakers and, a year later, they became the first band to have their first three songs top the charts - How Do You Do It, I Like It and You'll Never Walk Alone.\n\nA flag on the Royal Iris Mersey ferry flew at half mast after the death of Gerry Marsden\n\nThey were one of the successes of the Merseybeat era, with former Beatles star Sir Paul McCartney saying at the time of Marsden's death that: \"Gerry was a mate from our early days in Liverpool\".\n\n\"He and his group were our biggest rivals on the local scene.\"", "Work to restore hundreds of thousands of fingerprint, DNA and arrest records accidentally wiped from police databases is ongoing, the Home Office has said.\n\nAround 400,000 records were lost, according to The Times, which first reported the story.\n\nThe Home Office did not comment on how many records were likely to be restored, or how long it would take.\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel said the issue was \"a result of human error\".\n\nData was wiped from the Police National Computer (PNC) - which stores and shares criminal records information across the UK - after being inadvertently flagged for deletion.\n\nThe PNC is used in police investigations and provides real-time checks on people, vehicles and crimes, as well as whether suspects are wanted for any unsolved offences.\n\nThe coding that caused the problem was introduced in November 2020, and the deletions started earlier this week.\n\nInitially, it was thought some 150,000 records were lost, but it since has emerged the number could be significantly higher.\n\nCommenting on the error, Ms Patel said: \"Engineers continue to work to restore data lost as a result of human error during a routine housekeeping process earlier this week.\n\n\"I continue to be in regular contact with the team, and working with our policing partners, we will provide an update as soon as we can.\"\n\nEarlier, Labour shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds called on Ms Patel to take responsibility for the error and be clear about the impact it had had.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Breakfast, he described the situation as \"extraordinarily serious\", adding: \"Priti Patel will be responsible for criminals walking free.\n\n\"We're not going to be able to link suspects to crime scenes without the DNA and fingerprint evidence.\"\n\nThe National Police Chiefs' Council said the lost data had resulted in a couple of \"near misses\" for serious crimes when trying to identify an offender.\n\nPolicing minister Kit Malthouse insisted the affected records \"apply to cases where individuals were arrested and then released with no further action\".\n\nHe added: \"We are working to recover the affected records as a priority. While we do so, the Police National Computer is functioning and the police are taking steps to mitigate any impact.\"", "Mr Laschet is now in a good position to stand for German chancellor\n\nCentrist Armin Laschet has been elected leader of Germany's Christian Democrats (CDU), the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel.\n\nMr Laschet, premier of North Rhine-Westphalia state, defeated two rivals in the party's virtual conference.\n\nHe is now in a good position in the race to succeed Mrs Merkel when she steps down as German chancellor in September, after 16 years in office.\n\nBut he faces a changed political landscape following the Covid pandemic.\n\nMr Laschet, 59, defeated conservative businessman Friedrich Merz in a run-off vote by 521 votes to 466. A third candidate, Norbert Röttgen, was eliminated in the previous round.\n\nHe replaces as chair of the party Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who failed to live up to her billing as Mrs Merkel's appointed successor after taking office more than two years ago.\n\nGermany goes to the polls in September, but the CDU leader is not guaranteed to become its candidate for chancellor.\n\nHealth Minister Jens Spahn, who has been elected as one of Mr Laschet's deputies, and Markus Söder, leader of the CDU's Bavarian sister party the CSU, could also step into the ring, though neither has yet said that they want the job.\n\nA final decision will be made in the spring.\n\nMr Laschet is a loyal supporter of Mrs Merkel, and said during the campaign that a change of direction for the party would \"send exactly the wrong signal\".\n\nIn his victory speech, he said: \"I want to do everything so that we can stick together through this year... and then make sure that the next chancellor in the federal elections will be from the [CDU/CSU] union.\"\n\nArmin Laschet is a short, cheerful chap. The popular premier of Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, he throws himself with gusto into traditional carnival celebrations.\n\nHe touts himself as a continuity candidate and, for a time at least, was thought to have been Angela Merkel's preferred candidate. He defended her stance during the 2015 refugee crisis and is known for his liberal politics, passion for the EU and ability to connect with immigrant communities.\n\nBut his call for an early relaxation of Covid restrictions last spring surprised many and reportedly infuriated Mrs Merkel. He has since retreated from that position but he's had to work to repair the damage to his political credibility.\n\nThe big question now is whether the CDU will put him up as their chancellor candidate in September's general election.\n\nGerman Health Minister Jens Spahn - who supported Mr Laschet in his leadership bid - is thought to harbour ambitions to the chancellory. And recent opinion polls suggest that Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder would be a popular choice too.", "The US is in a race to vaccinate its population amid a winter surge\n\nA highly contagious coronavirus variant first detected in the UK could become the dominant strain in the US by March, health officials have said.\n\nThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned of \"rapid growth\" of the variant in coming weeks.\n\nIt said such a spike could further threaten health systems already strained by a winter Covid surge.\n\nThe warning came on Friday as President-elect Joe Biden unveiled an ambitious plan to ramp up vaccinations.\n\nTo meet his target of inoculating 100 million Americans within his first 100 days in office, Mr Biden said his administration would take a more active role in accelerating the distribution of vaccines.\n\nHe outlined a plan to set up new mass vaccination centres, hire extra health workers, and ensure the shot is available to everyone, including minority communities that have been hit hardest by the epidemic.\n\nOfficial data shows that, so far, 12.2 million vaccine doses of have been administered in the US - a figure Mr Biden has criticised as insufficient. More than 30 million doses have been distributed to states.\n\nIn a speech on Friday, Mr Biden told Americans that \"we remain in a very dark winter\", admitting that \"things will get worse before they get better\".\n\n\"This is going to be one of the most challenging operational efforts ever undertaken by our country,\" Mr Biden, who takes office on 20 January, said of the vaccination drive.\n\nHis address came a day after he announced a $1.9tn (£1.4tn) stimulus package for the battered US economy that included a further $20bn for the vaccine roll-out. The plan will need to pass Congress.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Biden: \"I promise we will not forget you\"\n\nThe US has recorded the highest number of confirmed coronavirus infections - 23.5 million - of any country in the world. At about 391,000, the country's coronavirus deaths account for a fifth of the global total, which passed the two-million mark on Friday.\n\nThe crisis is particularly acute in the state of California, where deaths have surged by more than 1,000% since November.\n\nIn its report, the CDC said that the UK variant would spread quickly in the coming weeks.\n\nThe latest research by Public Health England (PHE) suggests the variant - now dominant in much of Britain - is between 30% and 50% more transmissible than previous strains. There is currently no evidence to suggest it causes any more serious illness.\n\nExperts have also played down the possibility that the current vaccines will not be as effective against it.\n\nSo far, 76 people from 10 US states have been confirmed to have been infected with the UK variant, known as B.1.1.7.\n\nBut the CDC said: \"The modelled trajectory of this variant in the US exhibits rapid growth in early 2021, becoming the predominant variant in March.\"\n\nTwo other variants - one from South Africa and one from Brazil - are also thought to be more contagious than the original one that started the pandemic. Studies are under way to assess the threat they pose.", "Exam results are likely to appear before the end of the summer term\n\nExam results for A-levels and GCSEs in England could be published in early July this year, according to proposals for replacing cancelled exams.\n\nA consultation launched by the exams watchdog and the Department for Education confirmed that grades will be decided by teacher assessment.\n\nBut results this summer are likely to be released much earlier than usual.\n\nEducation Secretary Gavin Williamson said pupils would receive \"a grade that reflects their ability\".\n\nThere are also likely to be written test papers set by exam boards, but marked by teachers, with some later checks if there are concerns about fairness.\n\nFor vocational qualifications, exams which use mostly written papers are also likely to use teachers' grades - but qualifications which need a test of practical, hands-on skills will have separate arrangements.\n\nOfqual and the Department for Education have formally launched a two-week consultation on a system for how results will be decided, after disruption from the pandemic forced the cancellation of exams.\n\nThis is the second year of exam results being disrupted by the pandemic\n\nFor A-levels and GCSEs this could see the scrapping of the traditional results days in August, with a proposal to publish the results in \"early July\", increasing the time for appeals and adding more time before the start of the university term.\n\nLast year the process of replacement results ended with U-turns and confusion, as an algorithm initially used for deciding grades was abandoned and teachers' assessments used instead.\n\nThis time there will be no algorithm, but from the outset the process will rely on the judgement of teachers, who will be asked to use evidence such as coursework, essays, homework and mock exams.\n\nThere are also proposals for test papers, or mini-exams, which would be set by examiners but which would be likely to be marked within schools by teachers.\n\nThese would inform teachers' decisions rather than be a fixed proportion of the final grade - and could be used as evidence for any scrutiny of the reliability of a school's results or if there were appeals over grades.\n\nThere is also a recognition they might have to be taken by some pupils at home.\n\nBut it has still to be decided whether it would be mandatory to take these exams, and whether there would be a single paper per subject or the option to take more.\n\nThe Department for Education has said pupils will not face tests in subject areas they have not covered.\n\nGeoff Barton, leader of the ASCL head teachers' union, said the proposals seemed \"sensible\".\n\nBut he said the written tests would have to be \"exceptionally well designed\" to make them fair between students \"whose learning has been disrupted by the pandemic to greatly varying extents\".\n\n\"There are still many questions left unanswered,\" said the National Education Union's co-leader Kevin Courtney, about how tests could be flexible enough and how appeals will be decided.\n\nThere will be a process of training teachers in how the grading system will operate and be consistent between different schools.\n\nFor vocational qualifications, the proposals say those closer to written A-level and GCSE exams will be graded in a similar way to the academic exams, using teacher assessment to replace written papers.\n\nThere will be different approaches for qualifications requiring proof of practical skills, but there will be arrangements to make this possible.\n\nSome BTec exams have already gone ahead this month and IGCSE exams are still planned to continue this summer.\n\nA-levels and GCSEs have been cancelled in Wales and Northern Ireland, and in Scotland the Nationals, Highers and Advanced Highers have also been scrapped.\n\nEngland's Education Secretary, Mr Williamson, said: \"Fairness to young people has been and will continue to be fundamental to every decision we take on these issues.\"", "Men who had already had the virus were asked to donate blood plasma for the trial\n\nA potential treatment for Covid using blood plasma does not reduce deaths among hospital patients, trials show.\n\nThe results are a blow to researchers and the NHS, which led the drive to collect plasma donations.\n\nThis arm of the Recovery trial, which is investigating a number of promising Covid treatments, has now been closed.\n\nThe Oxford researchers involved say they are \"incredibly grateful\" for the contribution of patients across the country.\n\nDonations of plasma were temporarily suspended, according to NHS Blood and Transplant.**\n\nThere had been huge international interest in the role of convalescent plasma as a possible treatment for hospital patients with Covid-19.\n\nThe treatment involves blood plasma being taken from people who have recovered from the disease - which contains antibodies to coronavirus - and transfused into seriously ill patients.\n\nIt was hoped the plasma donation would give the recipient's struggling immune system a boost to fight off Covid.\n\nThe NHS had been urging people to donate, particularly men who are thought to have higher levels of antibodies in their blood.\n\nBut early analysis of 1,873 deaths in a study of 10,400 UK patients shows the treatment made \"no significant difference\".\n\nIn the group treated with convalescent plasma, 18% of patients died within 28 days - the same figure for the group given standard treatment.\n\nPatients in the study are still being followed up and the final results will be published shortly.\n\nEarlier this week, a separate study showed no evidence that the same treatment improved outcomes for patients in intensive care.\n\nMartin Landray, chief investigator and professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, said the Recovery trial showed \"the value of large randomised trials to properly assess the role of potential treatments\".\n\nThe trial is still investigating other treatments, including tocilizumab, aspirin and an antibody cocktail.\n\nProf Peter Horby, who also worked on the trial, said the largest ever trial of convalescent plasma \"was only possible thanks to the generous donation of plasma by recovered patients and the willingness of current patients to contribute to advancing medical care\".\n\n\"While the overall result is negative, we need to await the full results before we can understand whether convalescent plasma has any role in particular patient sub-groups,\" he said.\n\n**NHS Blood and Transplant restarted donations of blood plasma on 20 January. They could be used to see whether particular groups of patients, such as those with low antibody levels, could benefit.\n\nInternational trials are also testing if plasma helps people when it's used much earlier in the disease, before people get to hospital.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Duke of Cambridge shared his own experiences of seeing \"death and so much bereavement\"\n\nThe Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have been told the pandemic will leave many emergency workers \"broken\".\n\nMany police and NHS workers are too concerned with battling the pandemic to look after their mental health, they were told.\n\nInsp Phil Spencer from Cleveland Police said staff did not engage enough with counselling \"because we don't want to take anybody else's valuable time\".\n\nPrince William said he \"really worries\" about the effect on front-line workers.\n\n\"When you're surrounded by that level of intense trauma and sadness and bereavement, it really does, it stays with you at home, it stays with you for weeks on end,\" he said.\n\nInsp Spencer said emergency workers \"run towards danger, run towards a terrorist attack, we run towards the pandemic\".\n\n\"Perhaps further down the line when all this is gone we're going to have some broken police officers and emergency services staff, because we're too busy focusing on protecting the most vulnerable,\" he said.\n\nThe couple also spoke to counsellors from Hospice UK's Harrogate-based Just B support line for NHS staff, social care workers, carers and emergency services, which their foundation helps financially.\n\nThe prince said he feared \"you're all so busy caring for everyone else that you won't take enough time to care for yourselves\".\n\nHe and Catherine said the stigma surrounding seeking help for mental health issues must end.\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.\n• None The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Police investigations have been compromised by an error that led to hundreds of thousands of records being deleted from UK-wide databases, according to a letter seen by the BBC.\n\nThe National Police Chiefs' Council said 213,000 records were deleted - more than the 150,000 first reported.\n\nThis resulted in a couple of \"near misses\" for serious crimes when trying to identify an offender, it said.\n\nThe Home Office has said it is assessing the impact of the mistake.\n\nData including fingerprint, DNA, and arrest histories was wiped from the Police National Computer (PNC) - which stores and shares criminal records information across the UK - after being inadvertently flagged for deletion.\n\nThe PNC is used in police investigations and provides real-time checks on people, vehicles and crimes, as well as whether suspects are wanted for any unsolved offences.\n\nThe Home Office said the lost entries related to people who were arrested and then released without further action.\n\nBut the letter from the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) says officers are aware of at least one instance where the DNA profile from a suspect in custody did not generate a match to a crime scene as expected, potentially impeding the investigation.\n\nIt says that some of the records had been marked for indefinite retention following earlier convictions for serious offences.\n\nAnd it reveals that a \"weeding system\", developed and deployed by a Home Office PNC team, started to delete records wrongly last November.\n\nThe process was only brought to a halt at the start of this week.\n\nThe letter was sent on Friday afternoon by Deputy Chief Constable Naveed Malik of the NPCC to chief constables and police and crime commissioners.\n\nThe deletion of the records has been blamed on a coding error.\n\nThis resulted in records that had been flagged for deletion being lost from the database before checks had been carried out to determine whether they could be lawfully held or not.\n\nPolicing minister Kit Malthouse said the problem had been identified and the process corrected so \"it cannot happen again\".\n\nHe said the Home Office, National Police Chiefs' Council and other law enforcement partners were working \"at pace\" to recover the data.\n\nThe Home Office said no records of criminal or dangerous persons had been deleted.\n\nBut Labour shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds called on Home Secretary Priti Patel to take responsibility for the error and be clear about the impact it had had.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Breakfast, he described the situation as \"extraordinarily serious\", adding: \"Priti Patel will be responsible for criminals walking free. We're not going to be able to link suspects to crime scenes without the DNA and fingerprint evidence.\"\n\nA home office source said the accusation was \"scaremongering and irresponsible\".\n\nFormer Cumbria Police Chief Constable Stuart Hyde told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Friday the \"very large\" loss of arrest records presented a \"risk to public safety\".\n\nThe records are linked to police investigations that were terminated before charge (No Further Action or NFA cases) or to those where an individual had been acquitted at court.\n\nIt is not yet known how many records of each type were lost and full extent of deletions is still being investigated. A minister is expected to update the House of Commons on Monday.\n\nIt comes after about 40,000 alerts relating to European criminals were removed from the PNC following the UK's post-Brexit security deal with the EU.", "A 24m section of the bridge parapet collapsed one mile from where a fatal crash took place\n\nPart of a rail bridge has collapsed near the site of the fatal Stonehaven train derailment.\n\nA 24m (79ft) section of the side wall has fallen from the bridge, about a mile north of where three people died when a train left the track and crashed last August.\n\nNetwork Rail said it was a \"structural fault\" and not caused by a landslip.\n\nThe line between Aberdeen and Dundee remains closed while structural engineers assess the fault.\n\nThe structure is located three miles north of Carmont signal box. The collapse was discovered just before 10:00 on Friday.\n\nThe rail company said the damage to the parapet was \"extensive\" and that the line was expected to be closed for a \"significant\" period of time while repairs to the bridge take place.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Network Rail Scotland This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe Network Rail Twitter account told followers engineers would be working around the clock to complete repairs.\n\nSpecialist staff are also checking similar bridges as a precaution.\n\nThe line between Aberdeen and Dundee had just reopened in November, nearly three months after the Stonehaven derailment.\n\nThe driver, a conductor and a passenger died when the Aberdeen to Glasgow service derailed near Stonehaven on 12 August after heavy rain.\n\nNetwork Rail Scotland carried out \"complex\" repairs at the scene of the derailment\n\nAn interim report said the train hit washed-out rocks and gravel.\n\nA Network Rail spokesman said: \"The line is currently closed while our engineers repair a damaged side wall on a bridge between Carmont and Stonehaven.\n\n\"Specialist structural engineers are currently assessing the fault and putting plans in place for its repair.\n\n\"Our engineers will be working around-the-clock to complete this work as quickly as possible.\"", "Police officers who were targeted by a pro-Trump mob have been speaking out about the \"medieval battle\" that unfolded on the steps of the Capitol and inside the halls of American democracy last week.\n\nPolice faced off against rioters equipped with clubs, shields, pitchforks, firearms, and metal poles stripped from seating set up for next week's inauguration.\n\nHere's what we've learned from their interviews with US media.\n\nMichael Fanone, a 40-year-old DC plainclothes narcotics detective who was told to wear his uniform that day, rushed to the West Terrace of the Capitol where he took turns holding back the crowd, and resting to rinse his face of the the chemical irritants that that crowd was spraying on police.\n\n\"We weren't battling 50 or 60 rioters in this tunnel,\" the MPD (Metropolitan Police Department of District of Columbia) veteran told the Washington Post. \"We were battling 15,000 people. It looked like a medieval battle scene.\"\n\nAfter he was grabbed by his helmet and dragged face-first down several steps, he said the crowd started stripping gear from his vest, including spare ammo, his radio and his badge - all while chanting \"USA!\".\n\nMichael Fanone, a DC detective, was dragged into the crowd and beaten\n\n\"We got one! We got one!\" Mr Fanone said he heard people shout, with others chanting: \"Kill him with his own gun!\"\n\nSome members of the crowd protected him after he started yelling that he has children, the father of four told CNN. He sustained only minor injuries but later found out in hospital that he had suffered a mild heart attack during the brawl.\n\nMPD Officer Daniel Hodges, 32, had already been on shift for several hours before the rioting began.\n\n\"We were battling, you know, tooth and nail for our lives,\" he told ABC News.\n\nIn one viral video, Mr Hodges is seen pinned in a glass doorway between officers and the crowd, as rioters strip his gas mask from his face and beat him with his own police-issued baton. One rioter tried to gouge his eyes.\n\n\"That was one of the three times that day where I thought: Well, this might be it,\" said Mr Hodges. \"This might be the end for me.\"\n\nAs he choked on tear gas, he is seen on video gasping for air to call out for help. Enough police were eventually able to push through the melee to extract him.\n\n\"I had conspiracy theorists and everyone you could think of yelling at me, saying, 'Why are you doing this, you're the traitor,'\" Mr Hodges told radio station WAMU.\n\n\"We're not the traitors. We're the ones who saved Congress that day, and we'll do it as many times as necessary.\"\n\nDespite fearing for his life, Mr Hodges says he decided not to use his gun on the crowd.\n\n\"I didn't want to be the guy who starts shooting, because I knew they had guns - we had been seizing guns all day,\" he told the Post.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nRobert Glover, the commander on scene for MPD, declared a riot at 13:50 local time, nearly two hours after Trump's speech at the White House where he instructed his followers to go to the Capitol.\n\nHe quickly told officers to retake the inauguration bleachers, to stop the crowd from raining down heavy objects on officers from above.\n\nMr Glover told the Post that some rioters may have been caught up in the moment, but others seemed to be moving in \"military formation\" as if they had prepared for the assault. He said that some appeared to be using hand signals to co-ordinate tactics.\n\nSeveral US military veterans, as well as off-duty police officers from Virginia, Maryland and Texas, have since been suspended or arrested for participating in the riot.\n\nMPD Officer Christina Laury, 32, was among the first city police officers to arrive on the scene. When she got to the Capitol, officers were already being brutally attacked by rioters attempting to storm the building.\n\n\"They had bear mace, which is literally used for bears. I got hit with it plenty of times that day and it just seals your eyes shut. You just would see officers going down trying to douse themselves with water, trying to open their eyes up so they can see again.\"\n\n\"The bravery and the heroism that I saw in these officers - the second they were able to open their eyes, they were back up front and they were just trying to stop these individuals from coming in.\"\n\nOne officer being lauded as a hero has yet to speak about his experience - Officer Eugene Goodman, a member of Congress' 2,100 member Capitol Police force.\n\nMr Goodman, an African American Iraq War veteran, was seen singlehandedly distracting a rampaging mob, giving lawmakers enough time to clear the chamber and get to safety.\n\nOn Thursday, a cross-party group of lawmakers introduced a bill calling for him to receive the Congressional Gold Medal for his effort to defend democracy.\n\nThe Capitol Police have been criticised over their response and preparation.\n\nSeveral top Capitol security officials, including the Capitol Police chief and the sergeants-at-arms for the House and Senate, resigned in the wake of the siege amid claims from lawmakers that they had not done enough to prepare for the mob.\n\nProtesters climbed the bleachers that were erected for Biden's inauguration\n\nOn Friday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced General Russel Honoré would be leading an immediate investigation of the Capitol's security infrastructure.\n\nVideo footage has also emerged showing an officer taking a selfie with a rioter inside the Capitol. Some officers reportedly gave directions to rioters telling them how to get to the offices of Democratic lawmakers.\n\nSeveral Capitol Police officers have been suspended for allegedly violating policies as the agency conducts an internal probe.", "A man accused of allegedly tricking a 92-year-old woman out of £160 for a fake coronavirus vaccination has been charged with fraud and common assault.\n\nDavid Chambers is accused of administering the fake vaccine at her Surbiton home in London last month.\n\nThe 33-year-old, also from Surbiton, is charged with five offences including fraud and going outside in a tier four area without a good reason.\n\nHe denied the charges when he appeared before magistrates on Friday.\n\nMr Chambers was remanded in custody until a hearing on 12 February.\n\nIn the UK, coronavirus vaccines are free of charge and available via the NHS.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Nóra Quoirin went missing from her room on 4 August 2019\n\nAn inquest into the death of a teenager who went missing during a holiday in Malaysia has left several questions unanswered, her family has said.\n\nNóra Quoirin, whose mother is from Belfast, disappeared from her room at the Dusun resort on 4 August 2019.\n\nHer body was found 10 days later about 1.6 miles (2.5km) away.\n\nEarlier this month a coroner ruled that she died as a result of misadventure, but her family said they were \"utterly disappointed\" with the verdict.\n\nIn an interview with Irish broadcaster RTÉ, Nóra's mother Meabh said there is \"compelling evidence\" that her daughter was abducted.\n\nSearch and rescue teams were deployed in an effort to locate Nóra\n\nNóra, who was born to Irish-French parents, lived with her family in London and was understood to be in Malaysia on an Irish passport.\n\nShe was born with holoprosencephaly, a disorder which affects brain development.\n\nSince her disappearance, her parents have believed that she was abducted. They have always maintained that wandering off was not something they could imagine their daughter doing.\n\nMeabh Quoirin told RTÉ: \"One of the most compelling things that we found out was that in a relatively small area, the plantation where Nóra was eventually found, there was vast numbers of specialist personnel deployed to find Nóra.\n\n\"Not only that, on four different occasions, trained personnel went to the plantation area and searched it and, in fact, some officers were even in the precise location Nóra's body was recovered.\n\n\"They had all reported that there were no signs of human life at any point. That for us is compelling evidence to say that she was not there by herself.\"\n\nNóra went missing the day after she and her family arrived in Malaysia in August 2019\n\nMrs Quoirin added that \"there was a lack of evidence around DNA and prints\".\n\nShe said that when the family went to the inquest, \"we had a lot of unanswered questions and while many of those questions cannot be answered, we actually found out a great deal about what went on during those 10 days when Nóra was missing\".\n\nMeabh and Sebastien Quorin, pictured during the search for Nóra\n\n\"In fact we felt it really strengthened our case, our belief, that Nóra was abducted and we found some compelling evidence to support our view on that.\"\n\nMrs Quoirin added that her daughter \"was not physically or mentally capable\" of leaving the chalet via the window.\n\n\"Not only that - we also learned that none of her fingerprints could be found on the window and yet other unidentifiable prints were found on that window.\"", "Smoke rises from Mount Semeru, the highest volcano on the Indonesian island of Java\n\nIndonesia's Mount Semeru has erupted, pouring ash an estimated 5.6km (3.4 miles) into the sky above Java, the country's most densely populated island.\n\nNo evacuation orders have so far been issued, and no casualties reported.\n\nThe National Disaster Mitigation Agency (NDMA) warned villagers living on the mountain's slopes to be alert for ongoing volcanic activity.\n\nFootage showed ash from the 3,676m (12,060ft) volcano looming over homes.\n\n\"The villages of Sumber Mujur and Curah Koboan [in Lumajang municipality] are located in the trajectory of the hot clouds,\" local official Thoriqul Haq said on Saturday.\n\nResidents of the Curah Kobokan river basin have been urged to watch for possible \"cold lava\" mudflow, which can be triggered by intense rainfall combining with volcanic material.\n\nMount Semeru erupted at about 17:24 local time (10:24 GMT), authorities said.\n\nA picture from the Indonesian National Board for Disaster Management shows ash rolling over the landscape\n\nIndonesia sits on the Pacific \"Ring of Fire\" where tectonic plates collide, causing frequent volcanic activity as well as earthquakes.\n\nSemeru - also known as \"The Great Mountain\" - is the highest volcano in Java and one of the most active. It is also one of Indonesia's most popular tourist hiking destinations.\n\nThe volcano previously erupted in December, when about 550 people were evacuated.", "A further 1,295 deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test have been reported in the UK, the third-highest daily total since the pandemic began.\n\nIt brings the total number of deaths by this measure to 88,590.\n\nThere have also been a further 41,346 lab-confirmed cases, and 4,262 more people have been admitted to hospital.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, medical director for Public Health England, said the \"continuous rise in cases and deaths should be a bitter warning for us all\".\n\n\"We must not forget the basics,\" she added. \"The lives of our friends and family depend on it.\n\n\"Keep your distance from others, wash your hands and wear a mask.\"\n\nThe latest figures come ahead of Monday's change in travel rules for the UK, with all travel corridors closing, meaning arrivals from every country will have to quarantine.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson announced the changes at Downing Street on Friday, saying they would \"protect against the risk of as yet unidentified new strains\" of Covid.\n\nWhile daily figures can fluctuate due to delays in reporting, the seven-day average of Covid deaths in the UK has now risen slightly to 1,103.\n\nFor cases, however, there has been a drop in the seven-day average, with the figure now at 48,565.\n\nThere are currently 37,475 people in hospital with the virus, government figures show, while a further 324,233 people have received their first vaccine dose.\n\nThe government has promised all the over-70s, the extremely clinically vulnerable and front-line health and care workers - about 15 million people - will be offered a jab by mid February.\n\nCurrently, just over 3.5 million doses have been administered.\n\nThe government has also announced £120m in funds for the social care sector to be used by local authorities to increase staffing levels.\n\nStaff absence rates have risen in care homes and among home care staff, due to them testing positive or having to self-isolate.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said the money would bolster staffing numbers in a \"controlled and safe way, whilst ensuring people continue to receive the highest quality of care\".\n\nA further £149m funding was announced in December to support rapid testing of care home staff.\n\nSpeaking alongside the PM on Friday, England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, said the number of patients being admitted to hospital with coronavirus was set to peak within the next 10 days, while the peak for deaths was also yet to come.\n\nHe added, however, that he hoped the peak in infections had already happened in the South East, East and London, where there was a surge in the new, more transmissible variant.\n\n\"The peak of deaths I fear is in the future, the peak of hospitalisations in some parts of the country may be around about now and beginning to come off the very, very top,\" he said.\n\n\"Because people are sticking so well to the guidelines we do think the peaks are coming over the next week to 10 days for most places in terms of new people into hospital.\"\n\nHowever, chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance stressed it was a \"suppressed peak\" that would \"boil over for sure\" if controls were eased.\n\nHe said: \"This is not the natural peak that's going to come down on its own, it's coming down because of the measures that are in place.\n\n\"Take the lid off now and it's going to boil over for sure and we're going to end up with a big problem.\"\n\nMeanwhile, on Saturday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer suggested he would back further coronavirus measures, as \"the tougher the restrictions now the quicker we get the virus back under control\".\n\nSir Keir said he was \"still worried\" by the number of infections, despite signs they are falling - and that the \"sense that we are through the worst\" of the third wave was wrong.\n\n\"Nobody likes restrictions but the tougher the restrictions now the quicker we get the virus back under control, the quicker we reduce the number of hospital admissions and the quicker we get that number of deaths, tragically, down,\" he added.", "A further 1,610 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test - the biggest figure reported in a single day since the pandemic began.\n\nIt means the total number of deaths by that measure is now above 90,000.\n\nA total of 4,266,577 people have now received the first dose of a vaccine, according to the latest government figures.\n\nAnother 33,355 positive Covid cases have been recorded - less than half the peak figure of 68,053 on 8 January.\n\nIt is the lowest number of daily cases seen since 27 December - before the start of England's third nationwide lockdown.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England, said: \"Whilst there are some early signs that show our sacrifices are working, we must continue to strictly abide by the measures in place.\"\n\nShe said reducing contact with others and staying at home will lead to \"a fall in the number of infections over time\".\n\nThe figures come as new estimates from the Office for National Statistics show about one in 10 people across the UK tested positive for Covid-19 antibodies in December - roughly double the October figure.\n\nThe rising number of deaths was to be expected, sadly, after the surge in cases during December.\n\nAnd it is likely that the coming weeks will see figures even higher than this.\n\nToday's numbers are, though, inflated by the fact that delays in registering deaths over the weekend tends to lead to higher figures being reported on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.\n\nOn average, the UK is recording more than 1,100 deaths a day.\n\nTo put that in context, at Christmas it was less than half of that.\n\nBut there are two rays of hope in the daily update.\n\nFirstly, the number of cases is below 40,000 for a third day in a row. Just two weeks ago we saw a few days above 60,000.\n\nThat means in the coming weeks we should start to see fewer people in hospital and eventually fewer deaths.\n\nThe number of vaccinations also continues to rise.\n\nIt seems unlikely the NHS will manage its target of two million doses a week just yet.\n\nBut each increase at least takes us one step closer to getting on top of the virus.\n\nMeanwhile, NHS England said 400 military personnel were now assisting in hospitals in London and the Midlands, as wards face \"unprecedented pressure\".\n\nOn Monday, Prof Stephen Powis, national medical director for NHS England, said it would be \"some time\" before the vaccination programme begins to reduce pressures on hospitals.\n\nAnd in other developments, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said he is self-isolating after being alerted by the UK's NHS Covid-19 app .that he had been in close contact with somebody who tested positive.\n\nHe said self-isolation was \"perhaps the most important part of all the social distancing\" and urged others to do the same if contacted.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Martin Freeborn's wife, Helen, died from Covid at the Royal London Hospital: 'Don't end up like us, please'\n\nThe previous highest number of daily deaths was last Wednesday, when 1,564 deaths were recorded.\n\nTuesday's figure brings the total number of deaths recorded during the pandemic in the UK to 91,470.\n\nThese government figures count people who died within 28 days of testing positive, but there are other ways of measuring the total number of deaths.\n\nAnother method is to count all deaths where coronavirus is mentioned on the death certificate. That figure has now officially reached 95,829, although that is only measured up to 8 January.\n\nThe UK has recorded the fifth-highest number of deaths globally, according to Johns Hopkins University - behind the US, Brazil, India and Mexico.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer tweeted: \"British people are paying the price for the government's serial incompetence.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Video footage showed the aftermath of the deadly explosion\n\nAt least three people have died following an explosion that caused a building to partially collapse in centre of the Spanish capital, Madrid.\n\nA fourth person was missing and several others were hurt, officials said.\n\nCity officials said the blast, which destroyed four floors of the building, had been caused by a gas leak.\n\nMayor José Luis Martínez Almeida told reporters after the blast that a fire was raging inside the building, which belongs to the Catholic Church.\n\nThe blast happened shortly before 15:00 local time (14:00 GMT) as gas workers were repairing a boiler at the back of the building in the central Puerta de Toledo area of Madrid.\n\nAn 85-year-old woman passer-by and two men were killed while a third man who had been working on the boiler was missing, Spanish media reported. One of the injured was in a serious condition and taken to hospital, according to officials.\n\nSpanish reports said the upper floors affected were being used to house local priests.\n\nRescue workers evacuated more than 50 people from a care home next-door to the building in Caille de Toledo, but a school on the other side was closed at the time of the blast.\n\nFour floors of the building were destroyed in the explosion, which could be heard in many areas of Madrid. Images shared on social media showed billowing smoke and debris strewn along the street.\n\nEmergency services said nine fire crews and 11 ambulances were at the scene and some of those caught up in the blast were treated on the street.\n\nFour floors of the building were destroyed in the explosion\n\nPolice officers cleared the area, closing it to all traffic and pedestrians, and appealed to local residents not to come near.\n\n\"The noise was very loud, very loud, really,\" Lorenzo Fomento, who was working from home at a nearby apartment, told AFP news agency. \"I never heard anything so loud before,\" he added.\n\nThe director of the nursing home, Antonio Berlanga, said all the elderly residents were fine and places were being found for them to spend the night.", "In Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, residents have prepared their homes and businesses ahead of the heavy rain\n\nEmergency services in the north of England are preparing for widespread flooding caused by Storm Christoph.\n\nThe Environment Agency has warned of a \"volatile situation\" as heavy rain combines with melting snow, while police in South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester declared major incidents.\n\nAn amber rain warning is in place for Yorkshire, the North West, East Midlands and the east of England.\n\nA yellow rain warning was issued for the rest of the country.\n\nGreater Manchester Police Assistant Chief Constable Nick Bailey said the force had declared a major incident to ensure it was \"as prepared as possible\".\n\n\"The safety of the public is our number one priority and we're continuing to work alongside partner agencies across the region,\" he said.\n\nA government spokesperson said it had provided additional advice to local agencies to help them manage any evacuations and shelter provision in a Covid-secure way.\n\n\"The government has robust plans in place to support any areas affected by extreme weather this winter,\" they added.\n\nSandbags were laid in at-risk areas, with up to 70mm (2.75in) of rain due.\n\nIn isolated spots, particularly in the northern Peak District and parts of the southern Pennines, 200mm (7.87in) could be possible.\n\nNorthern Rail said buses were being used instead of trains on services between Bolton and Blackburn due to flooding at Darwen.\n\nSome motorists attempted to drive through floodwater on Derby Road in Hathern, Leicestershire\n\nIn the amber warning area, the Met Office said there was a \"danger to life\" due to fast-flowing or deep floodwater, and told some communities they might be \"cut off\" by flooded roads.\n\nIt also predicted delays and cancellations to public transport, with the amber warning in place until 12:00 GMT on Thursday.\n\nRos Jones, mayor of Doncaster, said key risk areas had been inspected over the past 36 hours, with the delivery of sandbags continuing on Tuesday.\n\n\"I do not want people to panic, but flooding is possible so please be prepared,\" she said.\n\nResidents of Fishlake, South Yorkshire, which saw severe flooding hit 160 homes and businesses in November 2019, said they felt much better prepared this time round.\n\nFlood warden and parish councillor Peter Trimingham said the arrival of sandbags had been a welcome sight.\n\n\"It gives us confidence,\" he said.\n\nResidents in Fishlake, near Doncaster, say they are better prepared than when flooding hit in 2019\n\nMr Trimingham added: \"We're absolutely hoping it doesn't rise to the same level. But, if it does, we're reasonably comfortable we've still got a chance because the Environment Agency have done tremendous work here along with Doncaster Council.\"\n\nHe said new defences had been built and their team of flood wardens had been expanded to 22 people.\n\nOn Yarlborough Terrace in Bentley, Doncaster, many residents were out of their homes for months after the 2019 floods.\n\nAnna Booth, 37, who was forced to live in a caravan on her drive, said residents were worried about it happening again.\n\n\"Being in the pandemic doesn't help either. Morale's a bit down but I think we'll all pull together again like last time,\" she said.\n\n\"It breaks your heart, it's really sad, but we can't stop the weather.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe Environment Agency issued more than 30 flood warnings, meaning flooding is expected and immediate action required, covering parts of Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Merseyside, Staffordshire and Northamptonshire as of 03:00 GMT on Wednesday.\n\nThere are also more than 150 flood alerts, meaning flooding is possible, issued across northern England, the Midlands and the east.\n\nRiver levels in the Ouse, which flows through York in North Yorkshire, are high before the arrival of Storm Christoph\n\nCatherine Wright, acting executive director for flood and coastal risk management at the Environment Agency, said: \"That rain is falling on very wet ground and so we are very concerned that it's a very volatile situation and we are expecting significant flooding to occur on the back of that weather.\"\n\nShe said the agency would be working with local authorities to help with evacuation efforts should a severe flood warning be issued, adding: \"If you do need to evacuate then that is allowed within the Covid rules.\"\n\nWork took place on Tuesday morning to increase defences near the River Ouse\n\nDiscussing the different levels of flood warnings, she said: \"If you receive a flood alert, please pack valuables like medicines and insurance documents in a bag ready to go.\n\n\"If you receive a flood warning, please move valuables and precious possessions upstairs and be ready to turn off gas, electricity and water.\n\n\"If you receive a severe flood warning, which means you will be evacuated, please listen out and take heed of the advice from the local emergency services.\"\n\nSandbags have been used to help defend homes in Fishlake, Doncaster, which suffered devastating floods in November 2019\n\nBarry Greenwood, from the Upper Calder Valley Flood Prevention Group in West Yorkshire, has been \"sick\" with worry.\n\n\"I went round after the last [flood], people were there with their heads in their hands, thinking 'what am I going to do now?',\" he said.\n\nFlood sirens were sounded in Walsden on Tuesday evening after a flood warning was issued for the area.\n\nIn a tweet, Calderdale Council asked residents to put their flood plan into action and move valuables to a safe place.\n\n\"River levels across the Upper River Calder have risen and are now approaching levels where we expect properties to flood,\" it warned.\n\nEarlier it had said staff were on standby to respond overnight.\n\nThe amber rain warning is in place until Thursday, with yellow warnings covering most of the UK coming in over the next three days\n\nA yellow rain alert is also in place for Wales, Northern Ireland, central and northern England and southern Scotland on Tuesday.\n\nThis yellow warning extends to the rest of England from Wednesday, with a yellow alert for snow and ice in north east Scotland.\n\nHighways England advised drivers to take extra care on motorways and major A roads, while the RAC breakdown service said motorists should only drive if absolutely necessary.\n\nDrivers faced wet road conditions and reduced visibility on the A1(M) near Boston Spa, West Yorkshire, on Tuesday morning\n\nHebden Bridge's volunteer flood warden Keith Crabtree has been monitoring the river levels of Hebden Beck closely\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Israel is currently in its third lockdown since the pandemic began there last year Image caption: Israel is currently in its third lockdown since the pandemic began there last year\n\nA nationwide lockdown in Israel is to be extended until the end of the month amid a spike in cases - despite an intense vaccination campaign, with more than two of the nine million population already having received their first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.\n\nIt takes time for immunity to build up, so its expected to take several weeks for vaccines to have an impact on cases\n\nThe man coordinating Israel’s pandemic response, Nachman Ash, has warned that a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the country has been “less effective than we thought”.\n\nAccording to Israeli Army Radio, Prof Ash told cabinet members on Tuesday the data on the protective effect of a first dose against the virus was “lower than Pfizer presented”. Pfizer said its vaccine was roughly 52% effective two weeks after the first dose and reaches maximum efficacy of 95% after the second.\n\nIt’s not clear what data he is referring to, but a not-yet published study from Israel’s largest healthcare provider suggested a 33% fall in infections by day 14, at which point, full immunity would not have been reached.\n\nInfections continued to fall in the following days but the numbers were too small to put a percentage on it.\n\nIsrael saw its highest daily case figure on Monday with 10,000 new infections Image caption: Israel saw its highest daily case figure on Monday with 10,000 new infections\n\nThe health ministry said on Tuesday more than 12,400 Israelis had tested positive for Covid-19 ten days after being vaccinated – 69 of these had already received a second dose.\n\nThis was 6.6% of the 189,000 people who took Covid tests after being vaccinated, roughly tallying with the reported efficacy.\n\nHealth experts say they are analysing the new Israeli data closely but warn it may be too early to draw any conclusions on the single dose efficacy of the vaccine based on the initial data gathered in Israel, which began vaccinating its population on 19 December.", "Drug treatment services in England are to receive an extra £80m as part of government's efforts to cut crime.\n\nThis will mean more places for people released from prison and criminals handed community sentences.\n\nIt comes after warnings last year over government cuts to help for addicts.\n\nA further £40m is being earmarked for law enforcement to target drug gangs including so-called county lines operations in which young and vulnerable people act as couriers.\n\nThe investment will also see another £28m put into a three-year pilot project called ADDER - Addiction, Diversion, Disruption, Enforcement and Recovery - which will combine policing with treatment and recovery services.\n\nThe funding will see police target dealers, and local councils and health services help people with addictions, in five areas with high rates of drug use - Blackpool, Hastings, Middlesbrough, Norwich and Swansea Bay.\n\nAnnouncing the £148m package, Home Secretary Priti Patel said: \"The government's work to tackle county lines drugs gangs has already resulted in thousands more people being arrested and hundreds more vulnerable people being safeguarded, but we must do more to tackle the underlying drivers behind serious violence.\"\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock added: \"Addiction and crime are inextricably linked and to truly break the cycle we must make sure people can access the help they need to get their lives back on track for good.\"\n\nMs Patel told BBC Breakfast the government wanted to focus on rehabilitation and treatment for drug addicts as well as law enforcement, saying this was \"something we've not been doing enough of\".\n\n\"We have to do much more to support individuals whose lives have been blighted by years and years of drug abuse,\" she said.\n\nA Home Office-commissioned review into the drugs trade by Prof Dame Carol Black released last February put the total cost to society of illegal drugs at about £20bn a year in England and said treatment services have been curtailed by local government funding cuts.\n\nDame Carol welcomed the funding, saying: \"Drug treatment has a vital role to play in helping people to come off drugs and thereby reduce crime, from minor acquisitive crime right through to homicide.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Johnson: \"It's a big moment for us - we have things we want to do together.\"\n\nThe inauguration of President Joe Biden is a \"step forward\" for the United States, which has \"been through a bumpy period\", Boris Johnson has said.\n\nCongratulating Mr Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, the UK PM said it was a \"big moment\" for the UK and the US and their \"joint common agenda\".\n\nMr Johnson said he looked forward to working with the US on tackling climate change and the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nMaking his inaugural address, Mr Biden said \"democracy has prevailed\".\n\nHe promised to be a president \"for all Americans\" and said his \"whole soul is in putting America back together again\".\n\nOutgoing President Donald Trump, who has not formally conceded to Mr Biden, did not attend the ceremony.\n\nPresident Biden began work straight away on reversing a number of his predecessor's policies, including rejoining the Paris climate change agreement - gaining the praise of Mr Johnson.\n\nThe PM tweeted it was \"hugely positive news\", adding: \"I look forward to working with our US partners to do all we can to safeguard our planet.\"\n\nEarlier this week the former head of the civil service Lord Sedwill suggested Mr Johnson would be glad Mr Trump had not been re-elected for a second term as US president.\n\nWriting in the Daily Mail, Lord Sedwill said those who believed Boris Johnson would have preferred Mr Trump to win again were \"mistaken\".\n\nThe former cabinet secretary - who stepped down in September - said a second term for Mr Trump \"would not have been to the benefit of British or European security, to transatlantic trade, let alone the environmental agenda to which the prime minister is so committed\".\n\nBoris Johnson with Donald Trump at the G7 summit in 2019\n\nMr Johnson's public stance toward the former president has varied over the years.\n\nIn 2015, when he was Mayor of London, Mr Johnson accused Mr Trump of \"stupefying ignorance\" over his comments about violence in the city.\n\nBut as foreign secretary, following Mr Trump's election as president, he said there was a \"lot to be positive about\", and in 2019, praised his \"many good qualities\".\n\nFor his part, Mr Trump has appeared largely supportive of Mr Johnson, backing his flagship Brexit policy and at one point saying of the British PM: \"They call him Britain Trump.\"\n\nAnd echoing his predecessor, in 2019 Mr Biden described the UK prime minister as a \"physical and emotional clone\" of Mr Trump.\n\nAfter winning the presidential election Mr Biden phoned Mr Johnson ahead of other European leaders and expressed his desire to strengthen the historic \"special relationship\" between the two countries.\n\nSpeaking on Wednesday, Mr Johnson said it was the job of all UK prime ministers to have a \"good, close working relationship\" with US presidents but, right now, there were many things the two countries \"wanted to do together\".\n\n\"When you look at the issues which unite me and Joe Biden, the UK and the US right now, there is a fantastic joint common agenda,\" he said. \"For us and America, it is a big moment.\"\n\nHe said he hoped the UK could help the US commit to a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 in the run up to the climate change conference COP 26, to be held in Glasgow this year.\n\nUK prime ministers like to consider American presidents as their best diplomatic friend.\n\nThat relationship, particularly when it comes to security and defence, is unusually close.\n\nWhen, as with Donald Trump, that friend has been unpredictable and unconventional, that has made for some very awkward political moments.\n\nSo for the government, this a really important and positive turning of the page.\n\nThe terribly over-used phrase the 'special relationship', which provokes neurotic behaviour on this side of the Atlantic, has meant the most when there has been a genuine personal chemistry between the two leaders - whether Thatcher and Reagan, or Bush and Blair.\n\nThere is nothing automatic about Mr Biden and Mr Johnson developing that kind of political friendship.\n\nBut in the words of one former senior minister, for the UK Biden means \"we will lose exclusivity but gain predictability: easier to work with, less cringeworthy and more dependable, but we may not be the only girlfriend on speed dial\".\n\nSpeaking to the Guardian, shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy described Mr Biden as \"a woke guy\".\n\nAsked if he agreed, Mr Johnson said: \"I can't comment on that. What I know is that he's a firm believer in the transatlantic alliance and that's a great thing.\"\n\nHe added that there was \"nothing wrong with being woke - I put myself in the category of people who believe that it's important to stick up for your history, your traditions and your values, the things you believe in.\"\n\nOpposition leader Sir Keir Starmer also sent his congratulations to the new president and vice-president.\n\n\"The US begins a new chapter in its history, one of hope, decency, compassion and strength,\" the Labour leader said, adding \"together, our two nations can build a better, more optimistic future for our world.\"\n\nAnd First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon tweeted: \"Warm congratulations and best wishes to President Biden and Vice President Harris.\n\n\"Scotland and the USA share long-standing bonds of friendship and co-operation. We look forward to building on these in the years ahead.\"\n\nWriting in the Daily Mail, former UK Prime Minister Theresa May said Mr Biden's election presented the UK with a \"golden opportunity\" for Western democracies to reverse the trend towards \"absolutism\" - and a \"few strongmen facing off against each other\" - in global affairs.\n\nThe Queen sent a private message to Mr Biden before his inauguration, Buckingham Palace has said.", "Marion Dawson is the third oldest person in Scotland to be given the vaccine.\n\nA 108-year-old woman has received the Covid vaccination on her birthday.\n\nMarion Dawson, from Houston in Renfrewshire, is the third oldest person in Scotland to be given the vaccine.\n\nShe received her jab at Houston and Killellan Kirk, which is being used by the local GP surgery to deliver vaccinations to the community.\n\nBorn in 1913, Mrs Dawson has lived through two world wars and the Spanish flu pandemic.\n\nDr Diane Fisher, who gave the injection said: \"We are so excited to be starting vaccinations of our over-80s, and that our first patient to be vaccinated is doing so on her birthday.\"\n\nMrs Dawson is the most senior person in NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde to be given the vaccine.\n\nAfter receiving her injection, she said: \"I'm glad it's passed. I never felt a thing.\"\n\nKirk minister, Rev Gary Noonan said: \"Mrs Dawson is a local treasure in Houston, until the lockdown she never missed a week at church.\n\n\"It's fitting she can get her vaccine in the Kirk, a place she loves.\"\n\nDr Mark Storey, partner at Strathgryffe Medical Practice, added: \"It's been a very difficult year in general practice and society as a whole.\n\n\"In our practice we have a family of 10,000 patients, so we are delighted to start vaccinating, especially with Mrs Dawson.\"", "That's where we'll end our coverage of this week's PMQs.\n\nAs events get underway in Washington DC ahead of the Joe Biden's swearing in as the 46th President of the USA, our colleagues will bring you all the details of the inauguration here.\n\nOur coverage of this week's PMQs was brought to you by Gavin Stamp, Justin Parkinson, and Sinead Wilson. The editor was Johanna Howitt.\n\nThanks for joining us.", "The publication of a letter from the Duchess of Sussex to her father was a \"triple-barrelled invasion\" of her privacy, the High Court has been told.\n\nMeghan is suing the publisher of the Mail on Sunday and Mail Online over articles that reproduced parts of the private handwritten letter.\n\nShe claims her privacy and copyright were breached by the newspaper group.\n\nHer lawyers are asking for summary judgement - a dismissal of Associated Newspapers' defence instead of a trial.\n\nMeghan's lawyers argue Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) has \"no prospect\" of defending the privacy and copyright claims being brought against them.\n\nThey claim the publication of extracts from the private, handwritten letter to Thomas Markle was \"self-evidently... highly intrusive\".\n\nMeghan, 39, sent the letter to her father in August 2018, following her marriage to Prince Harry in May that year, which Mr Markle did not attend. The couple are now living in the US with their son Archie.\n\nThe five articles, published in February 2019, were a \"triple-barrelled invasion\" of the duchess's privacy, correspondence and family, the lawyers claim.\n\nMr Markle said in a witness statement provided to the remote hearing, which started on Tuesday, that he wanted the letter published to \"set the record straight\" about his relationship with his daughter - but one of Meghan's lawyers described this claim as \"ridiculous\".\n\nMeghan is seeking damages from the newspaper group for alleged misuse of private information, copyright infringement and breach of the Data Protection Act over the articles.\n\nThe Duke and Duchess of Sussex now live in the US with their son\n\nHer lawyers told the court the letter was written in sorrow rather than anger and was an attempt to get her father to stop talking to the press.\n\nBut the newspaper group said in its response to the court that Meghan had written the letter \"with a view to it being disclosed publicly at some future point\" in order to \"defend her against charges of being an uncaring or unloving daughter\".\n\nIn written submissions, the newspaper group's barrister Antony White said \"she must, at the very least, have appreciated that her father might choose to disclose it\" and pointed out that the Kensington Palace communications team had been shown the letter before it was sent.\n\n\"No truly private letter from daughter to father would require any input from the Kensington Palace communications team,\" said Mr White.\n\nBut Meghan's lawyers also pointed out the articles themselves had emphasised the private nature of the correspondence - and dismissed any argument that it was in the public interest for the newspaper to reproduce the letter, saying the public interest was at the \"very end of the bottom end of the scale\".\n\nJustin Rushbrooke, representing the duchess, described the handwritten letter as \"a heartfelt plea from an anguished daughter to her father\".\n\nHe said the \"contents and character of the letter were intrinsically private, personal and sensitive in nature\" and that Meghan \"had a reasonable expectation of privacy in respect of the contents of the letter\".\n\nThe effect of publishing the letter was \"self-evidently likely to be devastating for the claimant\", said Mr Rushbrooke.\n\nThe barrister argued that, even if ANL was justified in publishing parts of the letter, \"on any view the defendant published far more by way of extracts from the letter than could have been justified in the public interest\".\n\nMr White said that the newspaper group would argue that Meghan's status as a member of the royal family was relevant to the case.\n\nIn response to that point, Mr Rushbrooke said: \"Yes, she is in some senses a public figure, but that does not reduce her expectation of privacy in relation to information of this kind.\"\n\nIn Thomas Markle's evidence, he said the letter \"signalled the end\" of his relationship with his daughter, and instead of a reconciliation attempt, the letter was a \"criticism\" of him.\n\nHe said that he had to \"defend himself\" against an article in People magazine. It carried an interview with a \"long-time friend\" of his daughter, who suggested Meghan sent the letter to repair her relationship with her father - something he claimed was false.\n\nThe People article, he claimed, made him appear \"dishonest, exploitative, publicity-seeking, uncaring and cold-hearted\".\n\nHe said he had \"never intended to talk publicly about Meg's letter\" until he read the People magazine piece which, he claimed, suggested he was \"to blame for the end of the relationship\".\n\nThe full trial of the duchess's claim had been due to be heard at the High Court this month, but last year the case was adjourned until autumn 2021.\n\nThis interim remote hearing - to consider the request for summary judgement - is due to last two days. Mr Justice Warby, who is hearing the case, is expected to reserve his judgement to a later date.", "Low-deposit mortgages have made a return as the market emerges from a Covid-related slowdown.\n\nMortgage products for homeowners with a deposit of 10% of their property's value have risen more than fourfold compared with last summer's low.\n\nThe increase, based on figures from financial information service Moneyfacts, could offer some relief to first-time buyers.\n\nBut the cost of mortgages will remain an issue for many.\n\nIn early September last year, there were only 44 mortgage products available for those able to offer a 10% deposit. At the same time, first-time buyers putting money aside for a deposit were faced with pressures of poor savings rates and rising house prices.\n\nThat choice has now risen to 197 products, according to the Moneyfacts figures, with some big lenders returning in recent weeks.\n\nMortgage products for those able to offer a 15% deposit have also risen sharply, although the choice was already much greater.\n\n\"First-time buyers who may have been concerned that with record low savings rates and increasing house prices, their homeownership dreams may have had to be shelved, may have been pleased to note that we are now seeing some providers return products for those with 10% deposits,\" said Eleanor Williams, from Moneyfacts.\n\nLenders had been grappling with the practical effects that the coronavirus pandemic brought to their business.\n\nWhile some new businesses targeted first-time buyers on social media, many traditional lenders withdrew products from the market.\n\nStaff shortages, and employees working from home, meant they were unable to process applications as fast as they had before the pandemic.\n\nThere were also concerns among lenders that, despite strong activity in the housing market, riskier - and younger - first-time buyers could find it difficult to make mortgage repayments during an economic slowdown caused by the pandemic.\n\nResearch has shown that younger workers are more at risk of redundancy.\n\nAaron Strutt, from mortgage broker Trinity Financial, said lenders were now working more efficiently despite staff still being at home.\n\nHe said that some of the biggest mortgage lenders had returned to the market. Some of the mortgage rates they were offering were not as attractive as they had been, but competition would help push down costs.\n\n\"If you are planning to purchase a property and have a 10% deposit the mortgage rates are not as cheap as they used to be, but they are getting better,\" he said.\n\nMany thousands of existing mortgage-holders who had struggled to make their repayments during the pandemic had taken payment \"holidays\", which are deferrals on payments.\n\nThe latest figures from UK Finance, which represents lenders, show that 130,000 mortgage payment holidays were in place at the end of December 2020, down from a peak of 1.8 million in June last year.", "Mr Trump referred to his \"complete power to pardon\" in a tweet\n\nUS President Donald Trump has insisted he has the \"complete power\" to pardon people, amid reports he is considering presidential pardons for family members, aides and even himself.\n\nThe US authorities are probing possible collusion between the Trump team and Russia. Intelligence agencies think Russia tried to help Mr Trump to power.\n\nRussia denies this, and the president says there was no collusion.\n\nThe Washington Post reported on Thursday that Mr Trump and his team were looking at ways to pardon people close to him.\n\nPresidents can pardon people before guilt is established or even before the person is charged with a crime.\n\nDescribing the reports as disturbing, Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat who sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said \"pardoning any individuals who may have been involved would be crossing a fundamental line\".\n\nOn Saturday, Mr Trump tweeted: \"While all agree the U. S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us. FAKE NEWS.\"\n\nMr Trump also attacked \"illegal leaks\" following reports his attorney general discussed campaign-related matters with a Russian envoy.\n\nThe Washington Post gave an account of meetings Attorney General Jeff Sessions held with the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak. The newspaper quoted current and former US officials who cited intelligence intercepts of Mr Kislyak's version of the encounter to his superiors.\n\nOne of those quoted said Mr Kislyak spoke to Mr Sessions about key campaign issues, including Mr Trump's positions on policies significant to Russia.\n\nDuring his confirmation hearing earlier this year, Mr Sessions said he had no contact with Russians during the election campaign. When it later emerged he had, he said the campaign was not discussed at the meetings.\n\nAn official confirmed to Reuters the detail of the intercepts, but there has been no independent corroboration.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Commander in tweets: What we can learn from Trump's Twitter\n\nThe officials spoken to by the Post said that Mr Kislyak could have exaggerated the account, and cited a Justice Department spokesperson who repeated that Mr Sessions did not discuss interference in the election.\n\nBut the Post's story was the focus of one of many tweets the US president fired off on Saturday morning.\n\n\"A new INTELLIGENCE LEAK from the Amazon Washington Post, this time against A.G. Jeff Sessions. These illegal leaks, like Comey's, must stop!\" Mr Trump said.\n\nThe Washington Post is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has been an occasional sparring partner for Mr Trump. \"Comey\" refers to James Comey, the former FBI boss Mr Trump fired.\n\nEarlier this week, Mr Trump told the New York Times he regretted hiring Mr Sessions because he had stepped away from overseeing an inquiry into alleged Russian meddling in the US election.\n\nMr Sessions recused himself in March amid pressure over his meetings with Mr Kislyak. He says he plans to continue in his role as attorney general.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sessions said he loved the job and the department\n\nSeveral other regular targets for Mr Trump featured in his series of tweets.\n\nHe accused the \"failing\" New York Times of foiling an attempt to assassinate the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.\n\nIt is not clear what Mr Trump was referring to, but on Saturday a US general complained on Fox News that a \"good lead\" on Baghdadi was leaked to a national newspaper in 2015.\n\nA New York Times report at the time revealed that valuable information had been extracted from a raid, but the paper stressed on Saturday that no-one had taken issue with their reporting until now.\n\nAnd Mr Trump again urged Republicans to \"step up to the plate\" and repeal and replace President Obama's healthcare reforms, a key campaign pledge of his that has collapsed in Congress.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Donald J. Trump This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nDoris Hobday and her twin sister Lilian Cox, known as the Tipton Twins, were admitted to hospital after testing positive earlier this month.\n\nHer family said Mrs Hobday had died on 5 January, adding they were \"totally heartbroken to lose Doris in this way\".\n\nMrs Cox has since been discharged from hospital and is continuing to recover, the family said. The siblings were among the UK's oldest living twins.\n\nDoris Hobday died in hospital on 5 January, her family has announced\n\n\"We are so grateful for all the special memories we have created and got to share with you all,\" the family said in a statement.\n\nThe twins, from Tipton, West Midlands, became popular figures online with their positive outlook on life and sense of humour.\n\nTipton Twins Doris and Lilian both tested positive for Covid-19 earlier this month\n\nThey appeared on BBC Breakfast, ITV's Good Morning Britain and This Morning, charming presenters with jokes about wearing their drawers inside out and their love for actor Jason Statham.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Dan Walker This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Piers Morgan This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter���s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nLilian and Doris said they did everything together. They lived in the same street after getting married, worked together at an ale-making factory in Birmingham and more recently lived next to one another at sheltered accommodation in Tipton.\n\nSpeaking to the BBC on their 95th birthday, Lilian revealed her sister's secret to a long life was \"no sex and plenty of Guinness\" - her own being simply \"lemonade\".\n\nDoris Hobday's family said she had passed away peacefully and they were grateful for all their memories with her\n\n\"Doris will be laid to rest with her husband who she lost 11 years ago after 65 years of happy marriage,\" her family said.\n\nA crowdfunding page has been set up in Mrs Hobday's memory, with funds raised being donated to The Beacon Centre for the Blind, which supported her late husband Raymond for 20 years.\n\nDoris will be buried next to her husband Ray, who, along with half a Guinness, was \"her favourite thing\"\n\nThe family said Mrs Cox had only been told of her sister's death on Monday, \"once she was strong enough to take the news\".\n\n\"She is now being comforted by family and staying with her daughter Vivien while she fully regains her strength.\"\n\n\"Both were determined to live until 100, they had so much to look forward to,\" their family said. \"It's just so cruel that Covid has stopped Doris like this.\"\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Mr Bannon was once considered among the most influential men in Mr Trump's administration\n\nPresident Trump's former top advisor, Steve Bannon, has been suspended from Twitter over the \"glorification of violence\" amid the election aftermath.\n\nMr Bannon said a re-elected Mr Trump should fire the top infectious disease expert and the FBI director, and called for violence against them.\n\nIt comes as the tech firms continue a clampdown on misinformation.\n\nFacebook has shut down a large group which alleges fraud, and announced new measures to amplify genuine results.\n\nMr Bannon, once widely thought of as one of the most powerful men in Washington, served as the boss of Mr Trump's 2016 campaign, and as a top presidential advisor for the first several months of his presidency.\n\nOn Thursday, he posted a video podcast to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, in which he said both Dr Anthony Fauci - the face of the country's fight against coronavirus - and FBI Director Christopher Wray, should be fired after Mr Trump's re-election, but also said they should be subjected to violence.\n\nPresident Trump has expressed frustration with both men, clashing with Dr Fauci over the pandemic, and with Mr Wray over what he sees as a failure to investigate his opponent, Joe Biden.\n\nFacebook and YouTube both removed the video, but Twitter issued an outright suspension of Mr Bannon's \"war room pandemic\" account, for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.\n\nThe account has been permanently suspended, rather than banned for a limited amount of time, Twitter said in a statement.\n\nPresident Trump, meanwhile, had another of his tweets hidden and labelled by Twitter after falsely claiming victory and alleging the existence of \"illegal votes\".\n\nThe President responded by tweeting: \"Twitter is out of control\".\n\nThe Stop the Steal Facebook group had about 350,000 members when the social media giant removed it, something the social network admitted was an \"exceptional\" measure. It did so because it was \"creating real-world events\" and \"we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group\", Facebook said.\n\nThe social network is now taking further measures to restrict the flow of \"inaccurate claims\" in order \"to keep this content from reaching more people\".\n\n\"These include demotions for content on Facebook and Instagram that our systems predict may be misinformation, including debunked claims about voting. We are also limiting the distribution of live videos that may relate to the election on Facebook,\" the firm said in a statement.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Facebook Newsroom This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAs President Trump continues to allege, without evidence, that widespread voter fraud took place, Facebook also said it would alter its election banner notifications and spread news of the projected winner, once a majority of independent outlets projected the result.\n\nThe same notice will be put on posts from both candidates.\n\nSeparately, Bloomberg reports that Twitter will remove the \"special treatment\" it affords President Trump as a world leader, in the event of Joe Biden winning the presidency.\n\nTwitter has specific rules for world leaders, which means it will not ordinarily ban them for the same offences for which it would ban ordinary users. Twitter argues that such posts - even when violating its rules - are sufficiently newsworthy to stay up, with a handful of exceptions.\n\nInstead, Twitter can label the post of a world leader, hiding it from view and restricting engagement - but leaving it viewable to anyone who clicks through a warning message about the content.\n\nIt has repeatedly done this to Mr Trump's tweets, leading to high-profile arguments with the president and his supporters.\n\nBut Mr Trump would return to the status of a regular user if he loses the election, Bloomberg reported - meaning that his tweets could be deleted outright or his account suspended, for policy violations.", "Liam Gallagher, Sir Elton John and Nicola Benedetti have put their names to the letter\n\nSome of the UK's biggest music stars have written to the government demanding action to ensure visa-free touring in the European Union.\n\nSir Elton John, Liam Gallagher and Nicola Benedetti are among 110 artists who have signed the open letter.\n\nIt said they had been \"shamefully failed\" by the government over post-Brexit travel rules for UK musicians.\n\nThe government said the signatories should be asking the EU why they \"rejected the sensible UK proposal\".\n\nCulture Secretary Oliver Dowden will meet music industry representatives on Wednesday to address their concerns.\n\nEarlier this week, culture minister Caroline Dinenage said the EU's \"very broad\" offer \"would not have been compatible with the government's manifesto commitment to take back control of our borders\".\n\nHowever, she said \"the door is open\" if the EU was willing to consider the UK's proposals to reach an agreement for musicians.\n\nIn the meantime, she confirmed, musicians and artists touring the continent \"will be required to check domestic immigration and visitor rules for each member state in which they intend to tour\".\n\nThat may require them to have multiple visas or work permits, which some industry experts say will be expensive and potentially prohibitive - especially for musicians at the start of their careers.\n\nOther names on the open letter include Ed Sheeran, Sir Simon Rattle, Sting, Radiohead, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Kim Wilde, Roger Daltrey, Glastonbury organisers Michael and Emily Eavis, and Judith Weir, Master of the Queen's Music.\n\nThe letter was organised by the Incorporated Society of Musicians and the Liberal Democrats, and published in The Times.\n\n\"The reality is that British musicians, dancers, actors and their support staff have been shamefully failed by their government,\" it said.\n\n\"The deal done with the EU has a gaping hole where the promised free movement for musicians should be. Everyone on a European music tour will now need costly work permits for many countries they visit and a mountain of paperwork for their equipment.\"\n\nThe extra costs will \"tip many performers over the edge\", it claimed.\n\n\"We call on the government to urgently do what it said it would do and negotiate paperwork-free travel in Europe for British artists and their equipment,\" it added.\n\n\"For the sake of British fans wanting to see European performers in the UK and British venues wishing to host them, the deal should be reciprocal.\"\n\nThe Who frontman Daltrey signed despite telling the BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme in 2018: \"It's nothing that can't be solved. I mean, we used to work in Europe before the EU was even thought about. We had the golden period of the 60s and the 70s.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Who frontman Roger Daltrey gave his take on Brexit in 2018\n\nOn Wednesday, the veteran rocker said the two positions were compatible. \"I have not changed my opinion on the EU,\" he said in a statement to the PA news agency. \"I'm glad to be free of Brussels, not Europe.\n\n\"I would have preferred reform, which was asked for by us before the referendum and was turned down by the then president of the EU. I do think our government should have made the easing of restrictions for musicians and actors a higher priority.\n\n\"Every tour, individual actors and musicians should be treated as any other 'goods' at the point of entry to the EU with one set of paperwork. Switzerland has borders with five EU countries, and trade is electronically frictionless. Why not us?\"\n\nDeborah Annetts, chief executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, said: \"World-renowned performers, emerging artists from every genre and the most respected figures from leading organisations within our sector are now sending a clear message.\n\n\"It is essential for the government to negotiate a new reciprocal agreement that allows performers to tour in Europe for up to 90 days, without the need for a work permit.\"\n\nResponding to the letter, a UK government spokesperson said that musicians' concerns were being taken seriously.\n\n\"We absolutely agree that musicians should be able to work across Europe,\" they said in a statement.\n\n\"The UK Government put forward a proposal, based on feedback from the music sector, that would have allowed musicians to tour - but the EU repeatedly rejected this.\n\n\"The EU's offer in the negotiations would not have worked for touring musicians: it did not deal with work permits at all, and would not have allowed support staff to tour with artists. The signatories of this letter should be asking the EU why they rejected the sensible UK proposal.\"\n\nCulture Secretary Oliver Dowden is due to host a roundtable discussion with representatives from the music industry, addressing their concerns, on Wednesday.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Joe Biden has spent 50 years in politics working towards this moment, but he could never have expected such huge challenges would be facing him on his first day at the helm. What are his priorities?\n\nHe'll get started with a 10-day flurry of executive orders.\n\nThese are presidential directives that don't require congressional approval.\n\nTop of the list are rescinding a controversial travel ban, imposed by his predecessor Donald Trump against countries he viewed as a security threat, and rejoining the Paris climate deal.\n\nHere's what else we know about what will demand the new president's immediate attention.\n\nThe coronavirus has killed more than 400,000 people in the US - and the pandemic and its wide-ranging impact will be the new administration's top priority.\n\nMr Biden has called it \"one of the most important battles our administration will face\" and has vowed to implement his Covid strategy straight away.\n\nOne of his first moves will be executive action requiring social distancing and the wearing of masks on federal property nationwide and by federal employees and contractors.\n\nStill, there's no guarantee the state governors who've so far opposed mask mandates will suddenly change their minds - there appears to be no legal authority that grants a president the power to bring in a nationwide mask rule.\n\nMr Biden seems to have conceded that point, and says he'll personally try to persuade governors to come around.\n\nIf they're not receptive, he's vowed to make calls to mayors and municipal officials to recruit them to the cause. There's also no word yet on how a mandate will be enforced.\n\nMr Biden wants to speed up the vaccine rollout with the ultimate goal of vaccinating 100 million people with at least a first dose against Covid in his first 100 days in office.\n\nOne part of the acceleration plan is to release all available vaccine doses instead of holding some in reserve for the necessary second jab.\n\nHe is also expected to take executive action on efforts to develop and deploy rapid testing and to put in place a national supply chain for equipment, medications and personal protective equipment, or PPE.\n\nOn his agenda is a pledge to reverse the decision to have the US leave the World Health Organization (WHO).\n\nMr Trump announced plans over the summer to pull the country out of the WHO, accusing it of mismanaging Covid after the virus emerged in China and saying it failed to make \"greatly needed reforms\".\n\nMr Biden's team has said he has immediate plans to extend a moratorium on evictions and on foreclosures on home mortgages - both of which were paused early in the pandemic - as well as the current pause on federal student loan payments and interest.\n\nMr Biden's transition team said he plans to direct Cabinet agencies this week to \"take immediate action to deliver economic relief to working families\", though they did not offer more detail.\n\n$1.9tn for the US coronavirus economy\n\nLast week, Mr Biden announced a $1.9tn (£1.4tn) stimulus plan for the coronavirus-sapped US economy, saying that \"a crisis of deep human suffering is in plain sight and there's no time to waste\".\n\nIf passed by Congress, it would include direct payments of $1,400 to all Americans. He has also included funding to help schools safely reopen, which he wants to happen in the first 100 days.\n\nIt'll be in addition to a long-awaited $900bn stimulus package Congress passed in December, which Mr Biden had called a \"down payment\" on the larger proposed package.\n\nRepublicans lawmakers are likely to object to parts of the bill, which will add more debt to what the US has already spent dealing with the pandemic - and Mr Biden will need bipartisan support for the plan.\n\nDemocrats currently control both chambers of Congress, but only by narrow margins.\n\nCovid aid isn't the only priority on the incoming president's economic agenda. He has pledged to get rid of Mr Trump's signature tax cuts as soon as he takes office.\n\nMr Trump passed the cuts in 2017, early in his presidency, and the Biden team says they unfairly reward the wealthiest Americans and favour corporations over small businesses.\n\nMr Biden has also said he would swiftly double the taxes that US firms pay on foreign profits - part of his Made in America push - which would come in addition to a rise in corporate taxes.\n\nHis tax policy legislation will need to pass Congress.\n\nAnother move Mr Biden says he will make on his first day in office is to rejoin the Paris climate agreement, a global accord that includes the goal to keep temperatures below 2.0C (3.6F) above pre-industrial times and \"endeavour to limit\" them even more, to 1.5C.\n\nHis predecessor pulled the US out of the 2015 accord - it became official on 4 November - making it the first nation in the world to do so.\n\nThe US will officially be part of the agreement again within 30 days.\n\nMr Biden has also pledged to \"up the ante\" and aim for higher standards on climate mitigation measures, and to convene a climate world summit within the first 100 days in office.\n\nMr Biden has said he wants to work with Congress to enact legislation this year that will allow the US to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.\n\nIn a move that has already sparked alarm with his northern neighbours, Mr Biden is reportedly planning to immediately rescind the cross-border permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, a planned project from the oil sands of Canada's Alberta province, through Montana and South Dakota, to rejoin an existing pipeline to Texas.\n\nA further agenda item is a U-turn on much of Mr Trump's legacy of climate and energy deregulation, like the easing of vehicle emissions targets.\n\nMr Biden has said he will negotiate \"rigorous\" new emissions limits on cars and heavy-duty vehicles, to conserve 30% of US lands and waters by 2030, to ban new drilling on public lands, and to close the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.\n\nThe new administration says it plans also to bring in \"aggressive\" methane pollution limits for oil and gas operations and to ban new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters.\n\nThe travel ban, signed by Mr Trump just seven days after taking office in January 2017, will be among the first policies to be discarded.\n\nThe ban initially excluded people from seven majority-Muslim countries, but the list was modified following a series of court challenges.\n\nIt now restricts citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela and North Korea.\n\nIn another major immigration pledge, Mr Biden has said he'll swiftly send a bill to Congress laying out a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented immigrants.\n\n\"And all of those so-called dreamers, those Daca [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme] kids, they're going to be immediately certified again to be able to stay in this country and put on a path to citizenship,\" he said in late October.\n\nLate in the election, the campaign announced Mr Biden would create a task force to reunite some 545 migrant children separated from their parents at the US southern border.\n\nIn December, the Biden team conceded it would need more time to roll back one of Mr Trump's policies, the Migrant Protection Protocols that force thousands of asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for US immigration court hearings.\n\nOnce a \"Day One\" pledge, officials now say it could take about six months to address.\n\nMr Biden has vowed to halt construction of a project synonymous with Mr Trump's presidency - the border wall between the US and Mexico. His campaign had called it \"a waste of money\" that \"diverts critical resources away from the real threats\".\n\nThe administration says it will instead divert the federal funds towards efforts like new border screening measures.\n\nUS President Donald Trump tours and signs a section of the US-Mexico border wall\n\nThe national reckoning with race is the fourth crisis - alongside Covid, the economy and climate - Mr Biden says he must tackle quickly.\n\nSome of those policies - like addressing racial disparities in housing and healthcare - overlap with his other plans.\n\nMr Biden will sign an executive order on racial equality and call on all US agencies to create a plan to tackle any unequal barriers to opportunity. It will also rescind Mr Trump's executive order limiting the ability of federal government agencies to implement diversity and inclusion training.\n\nMr Biden has promised to set up a national police oversight body to assist in reforming police departments in his first 100 days in office, though details of that plan are scarce.\n\nHe has said he wants swift passage by Congress of the \"Safe Justice Act\", which includes measures on reforming mandatory minimum sentences and increasing funding for community based policing.\n\nHe has made commitments to the LGBT community as well, like directing resources towards helping prevent violence against transgender people, ending the ban on transgender people serving in the military, and restoring guidance for transgender students in schools.\n\nOne other priority is passing the Equality Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to existing federal civil rights laws, though how fast he can pass that legislation remains unclear.\n\nThe incoming president says he plans to quickly reach out to US allies to smooth ruffled feathers and promise that \"America has your back\", saying the US must \"prove to the world that [it] is prepared to lead again - not just with the example of our power but also with the power of our example\".\n\nHe has said on his first day in the Oval Office he would reach out to Nato allies with the message \"we're back and you can count on us again\".\n\nThough Mr Trump was not the first president to pressure other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation members to spend more on defence, he threatened at times to withdraw from the alliance that Mr Biden has called the \"bulwark of the liberal democratic ideal\".", "More than 127,000 people in the UK who contracted coronavirus have lost their lives - with the pandemic claiming more than 3.4 million deaths worldwide. As the UK marks a year since the first coronavirus lockdown was called, it's a time for reflection.\n\nWe have gathered tributes to more than 770 of those who have died. Below are words of remembrance from friends, family and colleagues.\n\nPlease enable JavaScript or upgrade your browser to see this interactive\n\nThe tributes are displayed at random, which means that you will see different faces each time you visit this page.\n\nIf we have used your tribute to your friend or family member, it will appear in the carousel above, or you can find it by entering their name in the search box below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. Enter a name to search the tributes\n\nFor more on NHS and healthcare workers, please see this page dedicated to 100 people who died while helping to look after others.\n\nFor more on how it has affected people's lives, from family tragedy to its impact on everyday life, we have a collection of personal stories about life in lockdown.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Many were taken by surprise by the events in Washington, but to those who closely follow conspiracy and extreme right groups online, the warning signs were all there.\n\nAt 02:21 Eastern Standard Time on election night, President Trump walked onto a stage set up in the East Room of the White House and declared victory.\n\n\"We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.\"\n\nHis speech came an hour after he'd tweeted: \"They are trying to steal the election\".\n\nHe hadn't won. There was no victory to steal. But to many of his most fervent supporters, these facts didn't matter, and still don't.\n\nSixty five days later, a motley coalition of rioters stormed the US Capitol building. They included believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory, members of \"Stop the Steal\" groups, far-right activists, online trolls and others.\n\nOn Friday 8 January - some 48 hours after the Washington riots - Twitter began a purge of some of the most influential pro-Trump accounts that had been pushing conspiracies and urging direct action to overturn the election result.\n\nThen came the big one - Mr Trump himself.\n\nThe president was permanently banned from tweeting to his more than 88 million followers \"due to the risk of further incitement of violence\".\n\nThe violence in Washington shocked the world and seemed to catch the authorities off guard.\n\nBut for anyone who had been carefully watching the unfolding story - online and on the streets of American cities - it came as no surprise.\n\nThe idea of a rigged election was seeded by the president in speeches and on Twitter, months before the vote.\n\nOn election day, the rumors started just as Americans were going to the polls.\n\nA video of a Republican poll watcher being denied entry to a Philadelphia polling station went viral. It was a genuine error, caused by confusion about the rules. The man was later allowed into the station to observe the count.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Will Chamberlain This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by Will Chamberlain\n\nBut it became the first of many videos, images, graphics and claims that went viral in the days that followed, giving rise to a hashtag: #StopTheSteal.\n\nThe message behind it was clear - Mr Trump had won a landslide victory, but dark forces in the establishment \"deep state\" had stolen it from him.\n\nIn the early hours of Wednesday 4 November, while votes were still being counted and three days before the US networks called the election for Joe Biden, President Trump claimed victory, alleging \"a fraud on the American public\".\n\nMr Trump did not provide any evidence to back up his claims. Studies carried out for previous US elections have shown that voter fraud is extremely rare.\n\nBy mid-afternoon a Facebook group called \"Stop the Steal\" was created and quickly became one of the fastest-growing in the platform's history. By Thursday morning, it had added more than 300,000 members.\n\nMany of the posts focused on unsubstantiated allegations of mass voter fraud, including manufactured claims that thousands of dead people had voted and that voting machines had somehow been programmed to flip votes from Mr Trump to Mr Biden.\n\nBut some of the posts were more alarming, speaking of the need for a \"civil war\" or \"revolution\".\n\nBy Thursday afternoon, Facebook had taken down Stop the Steal, but not before it had generated nearly half a million comments, shares, likes, and reactions.\n\nDozens of other groups quickly sprang up in its place.\n\nThe idea of a stolen election continued to spread online and take hold. Soon, a dedicated Stop the Steal website was launched in a bid to register \"boots on the ground to protect the integrity of the vote\".\n\nOn Saturday 7 November, major news organisations declared that Joe Biden had won the election. In Democratic strongholds, throngs of people took to the streets to celebrate. But the reaction online from Mr Trump's most ardent supporters was one of anger and defiance.\n\nThey planned a rally in Washington DC for the following Saturday, dubbed the Million MAGA (Make America Great Again) March.\n\nTrump tweeted that he might try to stop by the demonstration and \"say hello\".\n\nPrevious pro-Trump rallies in Washington had failed to attract large crowds. But thousands gathered at Freedom Plaza that sunny morning.\n\nOne extremism researcher called it the \"debut of the pro-Trump insurgency\".\n\nAs Trump's motorcade drove through the city, supporters screaming with delight rushed to catch a glimpse of the president, who beamed at them wearing a red MAGA hat.\n\nWhile mainstream conservative figures were present, the event was dominated by far-right groups.\n\nDozens of members of the far-right, anti-immigrant, all-male group Proud Boys, who have repeatedly been involved in violent street protests and were among those who would later break into the US Capitol, joined the march. Militia groups, far-right media figures and promoters of conspiracy theories were also there.\n\nAs night fell, clashes between Trump supporters and counter-protesters broke out, including a brawl about five blocks from the White House.\n\nThe violence - although largely contained by police on this occasion - was a clear sign of things to come.\n\nBy now, President Trump and his legal team had invested their hopes in dozens of legal cases.\n\nAlthough a number of courts had already dismissed fraud allegations, many in the pro-Trump online world became fascinated with two lawyers with close ties to the president - Sidney Powell and L Lin Wood.\n\nMs Powell and Mr Wood promised they were preparing cases of voter fraud so comprehensive that when released, they would destroy the case for Mr Biden having won the presidency.\n\nMs Powell, 65, a conservative activist and former federal prosecutor, told Fox News that the effort would \"release the Kraken\" - a reference to a gigantic sea monster from Scandinavian folklore that rises up from the ocean to devour its enemies.\n\nThe \"Kraken\" quickly became an internet meme, representing sprawling, unsubstantiated claims of widespread election fraud.\n\nMs Powell and Mr Wood became heroes to followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory - who believe President Trump and a secret military intelligence team are battling a deep state made up of Satan-worshipping paedophiles in the Democratic Party, media, business and Hollywood.\n\nThe lawyers became a conduit between the president and his most conspiracy-minded supporters - a number of whom ended up inside the Capitol on 6 January.\n\nMs Powell and Mr Wood were successful in whipping up sound and fury online, but their legal efforts came to nothing.\n\nWhen they released almost 200 pages of documents in late November, it became clear that their lawsuit consisted predominantly of conspiracy theories and debunked allegations that had already been rejected by dozens of courts.\n\nThe filings contained simple legal errors - and basic misspellings and typos.\n\nStill, the meme lived on. The terms \"Kraken\" and \"Release the Kraken\" were used more than a million times on Twitter before the Capitol riot.\n\nDeath threats were made against a Georgia election worker, and Republican officials in the state - including Governor Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and the official in charge of the state's voting systems, Gabriel Sterling - were branded \"traitors\" online.\n\nMr Sterling issued an emotional and prescient warning to the president in a press conference on 1 December.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"This has to stop... someone's gonna get killed\": Mr Sterling calls on President Trump to condemn the threats\n\n\"Someone's going to get hurt, someone's going to get shot, someone's going to get killed, and it's not right,\" he said.\n\nIn Michigan in early December, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, had just finished trimming her Christmas tree with her four-year-old son when she heard a commotion outside her Detroit home.\n\nAbout 30 protesters with banners stood outside, shouting \"Stop the steal!\" through megaphones.\n\n\"Benson, you are a villain,\" one person yelled.\n\nOne of the demonstrators live-streamed the protest on Facebook, stating that her group was \"not going away\".\n\nIt was just one of a rash of protests targeting people involved in the vote.\n\nIn Georgia, a constant stream of Trump supporters drove past Mr Raffensperger's home, honking their horns. His wife received threats of sexual violence.\n\nIn Arizona, demonstrators gathered outside of the home of Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, at one point warning: \"We are watching you.\"\n\nOn 11 December, the Supreme Court rejected an attempt by the state of Texas to throw out election results.\n\nAs the president's legal and political windows continued to close, the language in pro-Trump online circles became increasingly violent.\n\nOn 12 December, a second Stop the Steal rally was held in the capital. Once again, thousands attended, and once again prominent far-right activists, QAnon supporters, fringe MAGA groups and militia movements were among the demonstrators.\n\nMichael Flynn, Mr Trump's former national security advisor, likened the protesters to the biblical soldiers and priests breaching the walls of Jericho. This echoed the rally organisers' call for \"Jericho Marches\" to overturn the election result.\n\nNick Fuentes, the leader of Groypers, a far-right movement that targets Republican politicians and figures they deem too moderate, told the crowd: \"We are going to destroy the GOP!\"\n\nThe march once again turned violent.\n\nThen two days later, the Electoral College certified Mr Biden's victory, one of the final steps required for him to take office.\n\nOn online platforms, supporters were becoming resigned to the view that all legal avenues were dead ends, and only direct action could save the Trump presidency.\n\nSince election day, alongside Mr Flynn, Ms Powell and Mr Wood, a new figure had rapidly gained prominence among pro-Trump circles online.\n\nRon Watkins is the son of Jim Watkins, the man behind 8chan and 8kun - message boards filled with extreme language and views, violence and extreme sexual content. They gave rise to the QAnon movement.\n\nIn a series of viral tweets on 17 December, Ron Watkins suggested President Trump should follow the example of Roman leader Julius Caesar, and capitalise on \"fierce loyalty of the military\" in order to \"restore the Republic\".\n\nRon Watkins encouraged his more than 500,000 followers to make #CrossTheRubicon a Twitter trend, referring to the moment when Caesar launched a civil war by crossing the Rubicon river in 49BC. The hashtag was also used by more mainstream figures - including the chairwoman of Arizona Republican Party, Kelli Ward.\n\nIn a separate tweet, Ron Watkins said Mr Trump must invoke the Insurrection Act, which empowers the president to deploy the military and federal forces.\n\nMr Trump met Ms Powell, Mr Flynn and others at a strategy meeting at the White House the following day, 18 December.\n\nDuring the meeting, according to the New York Times, Mr Flynn called on Mr Trump to impose martial law and deploy the military to \"rerun\" the election.\n\nThe meeting further stoked online chatter about \"war\" and \"revolution\" in far-right circles. Many came to see the joint session of Congress on 6 January, normally a formality, as a last roll of the dice.\n\nA wishful story began to take hold among QAnon and some MAGA supporters. They hoped that Vice-President Mike Pence, who was set to preside over the 6 January ceremony, would ignore the electoral college votes.\n\nThe president, they said, would then deploy the military to quell any unrest, order the mass arrest of the \"deep state cabal\" who had rigged the election and send them to Guantanamo Bay military prison.\n\nBack in the land of reality, none of this was remotely feasible. But it launched a movement for \"patriot caravans\" to organise ride shares to help transport thousands from around the country to Washington DC on 6 January.\n\nLong processions of vehicles flying Trump flags and sometimes towing elaborately decorated trailers gathered in car parks in cities including Louisville, Kentucky, Atlanta, Georgia, and Scranton, Pennsylvania.\n\n\"We are on our way,\" one caravaner posted on Twitter with a picture of about two dozen supporters.\n\nAt an Ikea parking lot in North Carolina, another man showed off his truck. \"The flags are a little tattered - we'll call them battle flags now,\" he said.\n\nAs it became clear that Mr Pence and other key Republicans would follow the law and allow Congress to certify Mr Biden's win, the language towards them became vicious.\n\n\"Pence will be in jail awaiting trial for treason,\" Mr Wood tweeted. \"He will face execution by firing squad.\"\n\nOnline discussion reached boiling point. References to firearms, war and violence were rife on self-styled \"free speech\" social platforms such as Gab and Parler, which are popular with Trump supporters, as well as on other sites.\n\nIn Proud Boys groups, where members had once supported police, some turned against authorities, whom they deemed to no longer be on their side.\n\nHundreds of posts on a popular pro-Trump site, TheDonald, openly discussed plans to cross barricades, carry firearms and other weapons to the march in defiance of Washington's strict gun laws. There was open chatter about storming the Capitol and arresting \"treasonous\" members of Congress.\n\nOn Wednesday 6 January, Mr Trump addressed a crowd of thousands at the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House, for more than an hour.\n\nEarly on he encouraged supporters to \"peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard\", but he ended with a warning. \"We fight like hell, and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.\n\n\"So we're going to, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue… and we're going to the Capitol.\"\n\nTo some observers, the potential for violence that day was clear from the outset.\n\nMichael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security under President George W Bush, blamed the Capitol Police, who reportedly turned down offers of assistance from the much larger National Guard ahead of time. He characterised it as \"the worst failure of a police force I can think of\".\n\n\"I think it was a very foreseeable potential negative turn of events,\" Mr Chertoff said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\n\"To be blunt, it was obvious. If you read the newspaper and were awake, you understood that you've got a lot of people who have been convinced there was a fraudulent election. Some of them are extremists, and violent. Some of the groups openly said, 'Bring your guns'.\"\n\nStill, many Americans were astonished by Wednesday's scenes, like James Clark, a 68-year-old Republican from Virginia.\n\n\"I find it absolutely shocking. I didn't think it would come to this,\" he told the BBC.\n\nBut the signs were there for weeks. A hodgepodge of extreme and conspiratorial groups were convinced that the election was stolen. Online, they repeatedly talked about arming themselves, and violence.\n\nPerhaps the authorities didn't think their posts were serious, or specific enough to investigate. They now face pointed questions.\n\nFor Joe Biden's inauguration on 20 January, Mr Chertoff is expecting a \"much stronger showing\" by security services than last Wednesday night.\n\nBut that hasn't stopped many on extreme platforms calling for further violence and disruption on the day.\n\nThere are questions, too, for the major social media platforms, which enabled conspiracy theories to reach millions of people.\n\nLate on Friday, Twitter deleted the accounts of Mr Flynn, the former Trump advisor, the \"Kraken\" lawyers Ms Powell and Mr Wood, and Mr Watkins. Then Mr Trump himself.\n\nArrests of those who stormed the Capitol continue. But most of the rioters still live in a parallel online universe - a subterranean world filled with alternative facts.\n\nThey have already come up with fanciful explanations to dismiss Mr Trump's video statement, posted on Twitter the day after the riots, in which he acknowledged for the first time that \"a new administration will be inaugurated on 20 January\".\n\nHe can't possibly be giving up, they contend. Among their new theories - it's not really him in the video but a computer-generated \"deep fake\". Or perhaps the president is being held hostage.\n\nMany still believe Mr Trump will prevail.\n\nThere's no evidence behind any of this, but it does prove one thing.\n\nNo matter what happens to Donald Trump, the rioters who stormed the US Capitol are not backing down anytime soon.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid in Scotland: Schools to stay closed until mid-February at least\n\nScotland's Covid-19 lockdown has been extended until at least the middle of February, with most school pupils to continue learning from home.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon told MSPs that transmission of the virus appeared to be declining but was still too high to ease restrictions.\n\nBut she hopes schools will be able to at least begin a phased return to the classroom in the middle of next month.\n\nThe level four restrictions have been in place since Boxing Day.\n\nMeanwhile the islands of Barra and Vatersay are being moved into the top level of restrictions due to a \"significant outbreak\" there.\n\nThe current restrictions, which have closed non-essential shops and seen a \"stay at home\" message put down in law, had been due to expire at the end of this month.\n\nBut Scottish government ministers agreed they should be extended after a cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning.\n\nMs Sturgeon told MSPs that lockdown was \"beginning to have an impact\" on the number of new infections, but said Scotland remained in a \"very precarious position\".\n\nShe added: \"We need to be realistic that any improvement we are seeing is down, at this stage, to the fact that we are staying at home and reducing our interactions.\n\n\"Any relaxation of lockdown while case numbers, even though they might be declining, nevertheless remain very high, could quickly send the situation into reverse.\"\n\nThe vast majority of Scottish pupils have been home learning since the Christmas holiday\n\nThe announcement came as 1,165 new cases of Covid-19 were registered in Scotland, representing 11.1% of tests carried out.\n\nA total of 1,989 people are in hospital with the virus while a further 71 deaths of people who recently tested positive have been logged.\n\nMs Sturgeon said there was \"real and severe\" pressure on health services, with around 30% more patients in hospital than at the peak of the first wave in April 2020, and that this was \"almost certain to rise for a further period yet\".\n\nSchool buildings and nurseries have been closed to most pupils since the start of term, with all but the children of some key workers and vulnerable pupils learning from home.\n\nNot only will schools remain closed to most pupils until at least mid-February, they are unlikely to return to normal at that point.\n\nThe first minister has indicated that her aim is to begin a phased return, if coronavirus allows. So what might that mean?\n\nThe groups that will get back into class first are likely to include secondary school exam year pupils, the youngest primary school children and those in P7 getting ready to move to high school.\n\nFor others, online learning is likely to last a bit longer.\n\nBoth the return to school and the continuation of the wider lockdown will be reviewed again in a fortnight on 2 Feb.\n\nBy that week, first doses of vaccine should have been offered to all over 80s in Scotland as well as frontline NHS and social care staff and care home residents.\n\nWith only 15-20% of the over 80s reached so far, opposition parties think the programme is slipping behind schedule, which the first minister denies.\n\nMs Sturgeon said she knew how \"challenging and stressful\" home schooling was for families, but said community transmission was \"too high\" to allow a safe return to classrooms.\n\nShe said: \"If it is at all possible, as I very much hope it will be, to begin even a phased return to in-school learning in mid-February, we will.\n\n\"But I also have to be straight with families and say that it is simply too early to be sure about whether and to what extent this will be possible.\"\n\nStatistics released on Monday showed that Scotland had vaccinated 6% of its adult population so far - the same percentage as Wales, but lower than the 8% that have been vaccinated in England and 8.7% in Northern Ireland.\n\nEngland has also given a second dose of the vaccine to 427,386 people, compared to only 3,698 in Scotland.\n\nMs Sturgeon said approximately 100,000 people were being vaccinated per week in Scotland, and that health teams were \"on track\" to expand this to 400,000 per week by the end of February.\n\nStatistics have suggested the vaccination programme in Scotland is currently lagging behind England\n\nMore than 90% of care home residents have now been given a first dose, along with 70% of care home staff and 70% of all frontline health and care workers.\n\nThe first minister said the focus on care homes - where it is \"time consuming and labour intensive\" to give out jabs - was \"why overall figures are at this stage lower than in England\", where more over-80s have received the vaccine.\n\nShe said the \"pace of progress in the over-80s group is also now picking up\", and that the government remained on track to hit its target of completing everyone on the priority list by early May.\n\nScottish Conservative group leader Ruth Davidson said the Scottish government were \"lagging behind their own targets\" on vaccination, saying the focus on care homes \"doesn't explain how slowly the vaccine is reaching GP surgeries and the public\".\n\nShe read out a series of letters from elderly people who had not been contacted about getting a jab, saying they were \"anxious they don't get left behind\".\n\nMs Sturgeon said she would not apologise for \"prioritising the most vulnerable first\", saying all four UK nations were \"working to the same targets\".\n\nScottish Labour's interim leader Jackie Baillie asked if Ms Sturgeon was confident the government could hit its \"critical\" targets, saying GPs were still complaining about \"patchy\" distribution of vaccines.\n\nThe first minister replied that her government would hit its goals, saying it was \"always the intention\" to increase the pace of vaccination as infrastructure and supplies became available.\n\nThis would see care home residents, healthcare staff and all over-80s get a first dose by the start of February, with over-70s and those deemed \"extremely vulnerable\" by mid-February and all over-65s by the beginning of March.", "The last vestiges of the Trump presidency will be swept away on Wednesday, as the Bidens move into the White House. Desks will have been cleared out, rooms scrubbed clean and the president's aides will be replaced by a new team of political appointees. It's part of the massive transformation that a new presidency brings to the heart of government.\n\nOne evening last week, Stephen Miller, a policy adviser and central figure in the Trump White House, was lounging in the West Wing.\n\nMiller, who has crafted speeches and policies for the president since his early days in office, is also one of the few members of the president's initial team still with him at the end.\n\nLeaning against a wall and chatting with colleagues about a meeting scheduled for later that day, he seemed in no hurry to leave.\n\nThe West Wing usually hums with activity but it seemed deserted. The phones were quiet. Desks in empty offices were cluttered with papers and unopened letters, as if people had left in a hurry and would not be coming back. Dozens of senior officials and aides quit in the wake of the Capitol riots on 6 January. A handful of loyalists, like Miller, remain.\n\nAs the conversation began to wind down, he broke away from his colleagues. When I asked him where he was headed next, he smiled. \"Back to my office,\" he said and sauntered down the hall.\n\nOn inauguration day, Miller's office will have been cleaned out, swept of signs that he and his colleagues had ever been there, ready for the Biden team to move in.\n\nThe cleaning out of West Wing offices, and the transition between presidents, is part of a tradition that dates back centuries. It's a process that has not always been imbued with warmth.\n\nAnother impeached president, Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, snubbed Republican Ulysses S Grant in 1869 and skipped the inauguration. Grant, who had backed Johnson's removal from office, was hardly surprised.\n\nStaff have started moving paperwork and pictures out of the White House\n\nThis year, however, the transition stands out for its acrimony. The process usually starts straight after the election, but it started weeks late after Trump refused to accept the result. And the president has said he will not attend the inauguration. Most likely, he will instead travel to his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.\n\nStill, the handover is taking place, just as it has in the past. \"The system is holding,\" says Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University. \"It's very rocky, it's very bumpy, but nevertheless the transition is going to occur.\"\n\nEven in the best of times, the logistics of a transition are daunting, involving the transfer of knowledge and employees on a massive scale.\n\nStephen Miller is just one of 4,000 political appointees hired by the Trump administration who will lose their job and be replaced by individuals hired by Mr Biden.\n\nDuring an average transition, between 150,000-300,000 people apply for these jobs, according to the Center for Presidential Transition, a nonpartisan organisation based in Washington. About 1,100 of the positions also require Senate confirmation. Filling all of these positions takes months, even years.\n\nFour years of policy papers, briefing books and artefacts relating to the president's work will be carted off to the National Archives where they will be kept secret for 12 years, unless the president himself decides that portions may be released early.\n\nOn a weekday evening during Trump's last week in office, the door to the office of Kayleigh McEnany, the president's press secretary, was partly open.\n\nMcEnany has been one of the president's most high-profile defenders. Impeccably groomed, she is a precise speaker who maintains her composure amidst chaos.\n\nKayleigh McEnany has packed up her office in the White House\n\nHer office, too, was organised in a meticulous manner, even as she prepared to leave. A mirror stood on her desk, and several fireplace logs were wrapped in clear plastic and packed up.\n\nGenerally, the last few days are \"controlled chaos,\" says Kate Andersen Brower, who has written a book about the White House, The Residence.\n\nFurniture in the White House, such as the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, most of the artwork, china and other objects, belong to the government and will remain on the premises.\n\nBut other items, like photos of the president that hang in the hallway, will be taken down as the White House is transformed for its new occupants.\n\nStaffers are already moving some items out of the building. One White House staffer, a woman in sturdy heels, was lugging several images of First Lady Melania Trump out of the East Wing. The pictures are known as \"jumbos\" because of their extra-large size, she says, and they will be taken to the National Archives.\n\nThe Trumps' personal belongings, such as clothes, jewellery, and other items will be moved to their new residence, most likely at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.\n\nAnd this year, the place will be deep cleaned.\n\nPresident Biden is expected to make decorative changes to the Oval Office\n\nThe president, as well as Mr Miller and dozens of others at the White House, were infected with the coronavirus over the past several months, and the six-floor building, with its 132 rooms, will be thoroughly scrubbed down. Everything from handrails to elevator buttons to restroom fixtures will be wiped and sanitised, according to a spokeswoman for the General Services Administration, the federal agency that oversees the housekeeping effort.\n\nIncoming first families usually do some redecoration. Within days of arriving at the White House, Mr Trump had chosen a portrait of populist president Andrew Jackson for the Oval Office. He also replaced the drapes, couches and a rug in the office with ones that were gold-coloured.\n\nOn inauguration day, Vice-President Pence and his wife will also make way for Kamala Harris, and her husband, Doug Emhoff. They will be settling into their official residence, a 19th Century residence on the Naval Observatory grounds, a couple of miles from the White House.\n\nPolicy adviser Stephen Miller may have lingered in the West Wing, but others were ready to go. At the White House, people were lugging thick manila envelopes, framed photos and bags from a gift shop. \"It's my last day,\" says one man, smiling as he took a photo of his sons on the north lawn. A bulging backpack was slung over his shoulder.\n\nA group of National Security officials posed in front of the West Wing, asking me to take their picture. \"Make sure you get the marine guard,\" says one of the officials, referring to a marine who stands in front of the doorway when the president is in the Oval Office. The officials were in high spirits, joking and vamping for the camera.\n\nThe political appointees at the White House were in a good mood for a reason. For weeks, they had been caught in an in-between world. Their boss was denying the validity of the election, but they knew that their days were numbered. Now they could plan openly for their future, and they seemed almost giddy.\n\nOne political appointee, a man dressed in a dark suit, was already making plans. He ran into a colleague outside the Palm room, a reception area on the ground floor. \"See you on the flip side,\" he said, brightly. He was referring to the time after the inauguration, when they will both be out of their White House jobs. He mused about where they might meet again. \"Hopefully in the Greek isles or somewhere.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. That is for sure,\" said his colleague, laughing. They smacked a high-five and then parted ways.", "Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has confirmed the government is looking at scrapping some EU labour laws now it is no longer bound by the bloc's rules.\n\nBut he promised there would be no dilution of workers' rights.\n\nMeasures under consideration include relaxing the working time directive which enshrines a 48-hour week.\n\nShadow business secretary Ed Miliband warned the government wanted to take a \"wrecking ball\" to hard-won rights.\n\nEarlier this week Mr Kwarteng said he wanted to \"protect and enhance\" labour law after the Financial Times reported that some rules could be weakened.\n\nThe minister later told business leaders the UK had an opportunity to reform regulation derived from EU law, but would not deliberately antagonise the EU - its biggest trading partner - immediately after the Brexit deal.\n\nConfirming the review on Tuesday, Mr Kwarteng told MPs there would be no \"bonfire of rights\".\n\n\"I think the view was that we wanted to look at the whole range of issues relating to our EU membership and examine what we wanted to keep, if you like,\" he said.\n\nBut he said \"the idea that we are trying to whittle down standards, that's not at all plausible or true\".\n\nAppearing before MPs, the business secretary said: \"I'm very struck as I look at EU economies how many EU countries - I think it's about 17 or 18 - have essentially opted out of the working time directive.\n\n\"So even by just following that we are way above the average European standard and I want to maintain that. I think we can be a high-wage, high-employment economy, a very successful economy, and that's what we should be aiming for.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Kwasi Kwarteng This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMr Miliband said that after denying the FT's report, Mr Kwarteng had now \"let the cat out of the bag\" in admitting the government was conducting a review.\n\nHe warned that opting out of the 48-hour week would harm workers in key sectors like the NHS, road haulage and airlines from working excessive hours.\n\n\"A government committed to maintaining existing protections would not be reviewing whether they should be unpicked. This exposes that the government's priorities for Britain are totally wrong.\"\n\nDrew Hendry, the SNP's business spokesman, echoed the criticism, accusing the government of planning an \"assault\" on workers' rights.\n\nMeanwhile the boss of the UK's biggest recruitment firm, Reed, told the BBC's Today programme that there was \"no wish\" among employers to see \"a so-called bonfire of workers' rights.\n\n\"They must be protected because fair treatment is the bedrock of good workplace relations,\" James Reed said.\n\nThe chairman of the firm said the government should instead focus on lower-paid workers and measures that could be taken to improve unemployment, which is set to rise further into mid-2021.\n\n\"I would suggest two things are looked at before any EU rules: The apprenticeship levy, which is clearly failing... and also National Insurance on jobs. It's a tax on jobs - how can that be improved? Especially to help the low-paid back into work.\"\n\nUnder the post-Brexit trade deal with the EU, the UK has agreed to conditions that maintain fair competition, or a level playing field, between the two sides.\n\nHowever, the EU's ambassador to the UK, Joao Vale de Almeida, said Brussels could retaliate if Boris Johnson's government went too far in with deregulation.\n\n\"It will be for us to judge the extent to which it violates this principle of 'level playing field' and if that is the case there are mechanisms in the treaty, in the agreement, that allow us to discuss and eventually to come to an understanding,\" he said on Tuesday.\n\n\"If no understanding there are retaliation measures that can be applied on both sides.\"", "At 12:01, in the midst of his inaugural address, Joe Biden officially became the 46th president of the United States.\n\nHe was already well into outlining exactly how daunting a task he - and the nation - have ahead in what he called its \"winter of peril\".\n\nAmerica is facing a devastating pandemic which has resulted in massive job losses and business closures, a threatened environment, urgent cries for racial justice and resurgence in \"political extremism, white supremacy and domestic terrorism\".\n\nHis speech was not a laundry list of proposals and solutions. Those were reserved for his first 17 executive actions as president - on immigration, climate change, transgender rights and public health, among others.\n\nThe Biden administration has also frozen all of Trump's last-minute regulations pending further review.\n\nInstead, Biden used his speech to offer hope - and to argue, at times forcefully, that the nation must be united in facing the challenges ahead; that it has to move past its current \"uncivil war\".\n\n\"Without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury,\" he said. \"No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos.\"\n\n\"This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge,\" he continued. \"And unity is the path forward\".\n\nAt times, Biden's speech seemed a direct rebuttal to his predecessor's administration, although he did not mention Donald Trump by name.\n\nWhere Trump frequently spoke of American greatness and glorified its founders, Biden noted that the nation's history has been a \"constant struggle\" between its ideals and sometimes harsh realities.\n\nWhere Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway spoke of \"alternative facts\" almost four years ago, Biden said: \"There is truth and there are lies - lies told for power and for profit.\"\n\nBiden wrapped up his inaugural address by warning that America must not \"turn inward\" - both as individuals retreating into \"competing factions\" and as a nation on the world stage.\n\n\"We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again,\" he said.\n\nRhetorically, Biden turned the page from Trump's days of \"America first\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe first 100 days of any administration are always important to a new president. What are his priorities? What will he try to accomplish when his political capital is at its highest?\n\nJoe Biden and his presidential team have had nearly three months to plan out his first actions upon taking the oath of office, but executive action is the (relatively) easy part.\n\nHis speech reflected the reality that he enters office with his top priorities already determined for him.\n\nHis government will be responsible for distributing the coronavirus vaccine in an efficient and equitable way. After that, he will have to focus on the societal and economic disruptions caused by the pandemic.\n\nThe virus has exacerbated income inequality and pushed many households to the brink of economic ruin. It's devastated the travel and hospitality industries and placed incredible strain on the finances of state and local governments.\n\nHis pledge to seek unity will be tested early, as he pushes a sharply divided Congress to pass another, massive round of pandemic stimulus aid. If he wants to enact it quickly, he will need Republican support in the Senate, and already there are signs that some on the right may be lining up in opposition to more spending.\n\nThen there's Trump's Senate impeachment trial, which will present yet another challenge to national unity. It will keep Trump's name in the news for weeks, as his defenders rally to his side and his detractors call for consequences for his actions.\n\nAfter that, Biden's potential political paths diverge. He has said he wants to improve healthcare in the US, address growing college debt, make new investments in infrastructure and tackle climate change.\n\nHe's pledged to push immigration reform legislation that includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented migrants - a political lightning rod that helped fuel Trump's first presidential run.\n\nWhat he prioritises, and how successful his first efforts are, could determine the overall success of his administration. To make lasting change - policies that can't be undone by future presidents - he will have to work with Congress.\n\nThe inauguration ceremony is over. But, as Biden noted in his speech, the American people face one of the most challenging times in their nation's history.\n\n\"We will be judged by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era,\" he said.\n\nBiden campaigned against Trump for the opportunity to face those crises. Now he has his chance.", "Anyone going on a Saga holiday or cruise in 2021 must be fully vaccinated against Covid-19, the tour operator has said.\n\nSaga, which specialises in holidays for the over-50s, said it wanted to protect customers' health and safety.\n\nThe firm said it would delay restarting its travel packages until May to give customers enough time to get jabs.\n\nPeople over 50 in the UK have been rushing to book holidays as vaccinations boost confidence.\n\n\"The health and safety of our customers has always been our number one priority at Saga, so we have taken the decision to require everyone travelling with us to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19,\" Saga said in a statement.\n\n\"Our customers want the reassurance of the vaccine and to know others travelling with them will be vaccinated too.\"\n\nThe firm's holidays were due to restart in March and its cruises in April after a long hiatus, but they will now both be delayed.\n\nSaga said that meant all trips before May would no longer go ahead as planned, acknowledging it would be \"a huge disappointment\" to customers.\n\n\"We will be contacting all guests affected to discuss their options,\" it said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Singapore's 'cruises to nowhere' set back by Covid scare\n\nThe firm said its vaccination policy added to stronger safety processes already planned for when its holidays resume.\n\nThese include requiring cruise passengers to have a Covid-19 test before their trip, as well as a full medical screening.\n\nCapacity on its ships will also be kept to a maximum of 800 people.\n\nThere were some severe covid outbreaks on cruise ships early on the pandemic, before coronavirus restrictions were imposed.\n\nBritish-registered ship the Diamond Princess, owned by the company Carnival, was quarantined for nearly a month in February in the Port of Yokohama in Japan.\n\nMore than 700 of its 3,711 passengers and crew were infected, and 14 died.\n\nThe UK has embarked on a mass vaccination programme as Covid-19 cases surge.\n\nPeople in England are being vaccinated at a rate of 140 jabs per minute, NHS England boss Sir Simon Stevens said this week.\n\nExperts believe in future that airlines, concert venues and restaurants could routinely ask customers to prove that they have been vaccinated.\n\nAnd last week, London plumbing firm Pimlico Plumbers said that all of its staff would be contractually obliged to get the jab.", "The government does not know how many cases might be affected by hundreds of thousands of police records being accidentally wiped, the PM has said.\n\nBoris Johnson told the House of Commons the police were working \"round the clock\" to rectify the error.\n\nAround 400,000 fingerprint, DNA and arrest records were deleted from the police database.\n\nEarlier, Home Secretary Priti Patel said it was not yet known whether any of the data had been permanently lost.\n\nSpeaking during Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Johnson said: \"The Home Office is actively working to assess the damage and... they believe that they will be able to rectify the results of this complex incident and they hope very much that they'll be able to restore the data in question.\"\n\nAsked by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer how many convicted criminals had had their records wrongly deleted, Mr Johnson said: \"We don't know how many cases might be frustrated as a result of what has happened.\"\n\nHe added: \"Of course it is outrageous that any data should have been lost.\"\n\nLast week it was revealed that the information was wiped from the Police National Computer (PNC) - which stores and shares criminal records information across the UK - after being inadvertently flagged for deletion.\n\nThe PNC is used in police investigations and provides real-time checks on people, vehicles and crimes, as well as whether suspects are wanted for any unsolved offences.\n\nAn estimated 213,000 offence records, 175,000 arrest records and 15,000 records on people were potentially incorrectly deleted as a result of a defective code.\n\nMs Patel, who has launched an internal investigation, told ITV's Good Morning Britain that criminals would not get away with serious crimes as a result of the error.\n\n\"It is not about serious criminals getting away with anything. Multiple records are held on the same individuals on the same crimes on other profiling systems as well.\"\n\nShe told the BBC that officials could be instructed to re-submit the entries manually.\n\n\"I'm also clear with Home Office engineers and technicians that if we have to do manual uploads from other systems, that is effectively what we will do and that will potentially take time, but that is another option for us right now.\n\n\"We will absolutely provide updates once we know what has happened in terms of retrieving data. This will take time because it is a coding error.\"\n\nThe Home Office previously said that the faulty script was introduced in November 2020, but it did not run until earlier this month when the error within it immediately became apparent.", "After vowing to uphold and defend the Constitution of United States, Joe Biden has been officially sworn in as the 46th US president.\n\nThe new president's oath of office was administered by Chief Justice John G Roberts.\n\nRead more:Joe Biden becomes the 46th US president", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Hill We Climb: Watch 22-year-old Amanda Gorman's poem reading at Joe Biden's inauguration\n\nAmanda Gorman has become the youngest poet ever to perform at a presidential inauguration, calling for \"unity and togetherness\" in her self-penned poem.\n\nThe 22-year-old delivered her work The Hill We Climb to both the dignitaries present in Washington DC and a watching global audience.\n\n\"When day comes, we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade?\" her five-minute poem began.\n\nShe went on to reference the storming of the Capitol earlier this month.\n\n\"We've seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it, would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy,\" she declared.\n\n\"And this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.\"\n\nThe poet was applauded by Vice President Kamala Harris\n\nIn her poem, Gorman described herself as \"a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother [who] can dream of becoming president, only to find her self reciting for one\".\n\nAmerica's first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate did her job, which was to find the right words at the right time.\n\nIt was a beautifully paced, well-judged poem for a special occasion, but it will live long beyond the time and space of the moment.\n\nAmanda Gorman delivered her piece with grace, the words it contained will resonate with people the world over: today, tomorrow, and far into the future.\n\nThe writer and performer, who became the country's first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017, followed in the footsteps of such famous names as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou.\n\n\"I really wanted to use my words to be a point of unity and collaboration and togetherness,\" Gorman told the BBC World Service's Newshour programme before the ceremony.\n\n\"I think it's about a new chapter in the United States, about the future, and doing that through the elegance and beauty of words.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nUS broadcaster and actress Oprah Winfrey tweeted that she had \"never been prouder to see another young woman rise\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Oprah Winfrey This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAlso on Twitter, Joanne Liu, the former head of aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières, described the poem as \"the most inspiring 5:43 minutes for the longest time\".\n\nFormer First Lady Michelle Obama praised Gorman's \"strong and poignant words\" adding: \"Keep shining, Amanda!\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Michelle Obama This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nUS politician and rights activist Stacey Abrams said the poem was \"an inspiration to us all\".\n\nFormer presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted that Gorman had promised to run for president in 2036 and added: \"I for one can't wait.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Hillary Clinton This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIllinois poet laureate Angela Jackson said the recitation was \"so rich and just so filled with truth\".\n\n\"I was stunned that she was so young and so wise,\" Jackson told the Chicago Sun-Times.\n\nGorman said she \"screamed and danced her head off\" when she found out she had been chosen to read at President Biden's swearing-in ceremony.\n\nShe said she felt \"excitement, joy, honour and humility\" when she was asked to take part, \"and also at the same time terror\".\n\nAnd she added that she hoped her poem, completed on the day supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol, would \"speak to the moment\" and \"do this time justice\".\n\nGorman, pictured with actor Morgan Freeman in 2018, became LA's youth poet laureate at 16\n\nBorn in Los Angeles in 1998, Gorman had a speech impediment as a child - an affliction she shares with America's new president.\n\n\"It's made me the performer that I am and the storyteller that I strive to be,\" she said in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times.\n\n\"When you have to teach yourself how to say sounds [and] be highly concerned about pronunciation, it gives you a certain awareness of sonics, of the auditory experience.\"\n\nGorman became LA's youth poet laureate at 16. Three years later, while studying sociology at Harvard, she became National Youth Poet Laureate.\n\nShe published her first book, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, in 2015 and will publish a picture book, Change Sings, later this year.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Kamala Harris was sworn into office by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.\n\nKamala Harris has made history as the first female, first black and first Asian-American US vice-president.\n\nShe was sworn in just before Joe Biden took the oath of office to become the 46th US president.\n\nMs Harris, who is of Indian-Jamaican heritage, initially ran for the Democratic nomination.\n\nBut Mr Biden won the race and chose Ms Harris as his running mate, describing her as \"a fearless fighter for the little guy\".\n\nPrior to taking the oath at the US Capitol, Ms Harris paid tribute to the women who she says came before her.\n\n\"I stand on their shoulders,\" she said in a video.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Kamala Harris This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nEugene Goodman, the Capitol police officer who was hailed as a hero for steering a pro-Trump mob away from Senate chambers during the 6 January riot, escorted Ms Harris at the inauguration.\n\nMs Harris, 56, was born in Oakland, California, to two immigrant parents: an Indian-born mother and Jamaican-born father.\n\nKamala, left, as child with her mother and younger sister Maya\n\nShe went on to attend Howard University, one of the nation's preeminent historically black colleges and universities. She has described her time there as among the most formative experiences of her life.\n\nMs Harris says she's always been comfortable with her identity and simply describes herself as \"an American\".\n\nAfter four years at Howard, Ms Harris went on to earn her law degree at the University of California, Hastings, and began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney's Office.\n\nShe became the district attorney - the top prosecutor - for San Francisco in 2003, before being elected the first female and the first African American to serve as California's attorney general, the top lawyer and law enforcement official in America's most populous state.\n\nIn her nearly two terms in office as attorney general, Ms Harris gained a reputation as one of the Democratic party's rising stars, using this momentum to propel her to election as California's junior US senator in 2017. She was only the second black woman ever elected to the US senate.\n\nShe launched her candidacy for president to a crowd of more than 20,000 in Oakland at the beginning of 2019.\n\nBut Ms Harris failed to articulate a clear rationale for her campaign, and gave muddled answers to questions in key policy areas like healthcare.\n\nShe was also unable to capitalise on the clear high point of her candidacy: debate performances that showed off her prosecutorial skills, often placing Mr Biden in the line of attack, most notably criticising his praise for the \"civil\" working relationship he had with former senators who favoured racial segregation.\n\nShe dropped out of the presidential race in December 2019.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nBut Mr Biden chose her as his number two in August, calling her \"one of the country's finest public servants\".\n\nAfter Mr Biden was announced as the next president in November, Ms Harris tweeted a video of her congratulating her running mate.\n\n\"We did it, we did it Joe. You're going to be the next president of the United States!\" she beamed.", "Sophie Davies, from Shropshire, recovering from cervical cancer, says delays to screening could be a matter of life and death\n\nSmear-test delays during lockdown have prompted calls for home-screening kits.\n\nCervical cancer screening has restarted across the UK - but some women say they will not attend their appointments for fear of catching Covid.\n\nJo's Cervical Cancer Trust is urging \"faster action\" on home tests for HPV, which causes 99% of cervical cancers.\n\nAn NHS official said GP practices should continue screening throughout lockdown, and \"anyone invited for a cervical smear test should attend\".\n\nCancer Research UK said it was not yet known how effective and accurate self-sampling could be in cervical screening.\n\nScreenings in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have restarted after being halted during the first lockdown.\n\nIn England, the NHS told GPs and clinics not to halt smear tests - but, as the prime minister heard last week, some patients were experiencing cancellations and long waiting times.\n\nAbout 600,000 tests had failed to go ahead in the UK in April and May, Jo's Cervical Cancer Trust said, in addition to a backlog of 1.5 million appointments missed annually.\n\nIn March, Sophie Davies was told she needed a hysterectomy \"within the month\" but had to wait until December for surgery\n\nA survey by gynaecological cancer charity the Eve Appeal indicates nearly one in three missed smear tests are the result of people being \"put off\" by coronavirus.\n\nAnd a Jo's Cervical Cancer Trust survey during the pandemic suggests the same proportion would prefer to take their own human-papillomavirus (HPV) test rather than go to a GP.\n\nActing chief executive Rebecca Shoosmith said coronavirus had added \"more barriers\" to going for a smear test.\n\n\"Sadly those who found it difficult before are likely to be no closer to getting tested,\" she said.\n\nBoth charities emphasise smear tests are for \"women and anyone with a cervix\" and transgender and non-binary people may have additional barriers to going.\n\nJo's Cervical Cancer Trust said DIY tests could also help people who had been sexually assaulted and those with disabilities or from backgrounds where smear tests were taboo.\n\nSamantha Renke felt anxious about catching coronavirus when she went for her smear test\n\nSamantha Renke had received an abnormal test result and needed to go for a follow-up test during the pandemic.\n\nThe broadcaster and campaigner, who has brittle bones and uses a wheelchair, said a home-testing kit would have made things easier.\n\n\"I am at very high risk of getting seriously ill from Covid-19,\" the 35-year-old, from Lancashire, said.\n\n\"So I was incredibly anxious sitting in the waiting room for my test.\n\n\"Women with a physical disability are so much more likely to find cervical screening difficult, to the point where it can sometimes be impossible just to get through the door.\n\n\"We shouldn't have to fight to get this life-saving test.\n\n\"Self-sampling would be so much easier for people like me.\n\n\"It would allow me to take my health into my own hands.\"\n\nIshita Ranjan said talk of smear tests was taboo in traditional South Asian families\n\nIshita Ranjan finally went for her smear test in August, having put it off for a \"really long time\".\n\n\"In most traditional South Asian families, women's sexual health is not something you talk about openly,\" the 31-year-old, from London, said.\n\n\"Young women are left to figure this stuff out.\n\n\"Until you get married, older female relatives find it problematic to share that kind of information.\"\n\nA fear of catching coronavirus could be also stopping people belonging to ethnic minorities attending appointments.\n\n\"We have seen high Covid infection and death rates and people are genuinely scared,\" Ms Ranjan said.\n\n\"And it's really important that you do still go and do it.\n\n\"I was in and out in five minutes, no sitting around waiting rooms.\"\n\nHelen Austin founded At your Cervix, a support network for people who find smear tests difficult\n\nAfter experiencing sexual violence, it took Helen Austin 10 years to work up the courage to go for her smear test.\n\n\"When my first invite arrived through the post, years ago, my body froze, and I then ripped it up,\" she said.\n\nSelf-sampling would have given her time and privacy, the 35-year-old, from Lincolnshire, said.\n\n\"If my appointment had been during the pandemic and I could not have brought someone I trust with me to help me, I would never have gone,\" she said.\n\n\"Other trauma survivors I speak to find wearing a mask triggering and are putting off attending their test partly for this reason too.\"\n\nSophie Davies, 32, saw in the new year alone in hospital, after having a hysterectomy\n\nAfter developing a rare form of cervical cancer, Sophie Davies had a trachelectomy to remove her cervix, in April 2018, allowing doctors to save her ovaries and two-thirds of her womb.\n\nBut in March 2020, she was told the risk of cancer coming back meant she needed a hysterectomy and the removal of both ovaries.\n\n\"I was advised the operation needed to be done 'the sooner the better' and 'within the month',\" the 32-year-old, from Shropshire, said.\n\nAnd she had an \"agonising\" wait, until 30 December, for her surgery.\n\n\"I'm still awaiting my results, more than three weeks on, and praying I have not been left for the best part of a year with cancer growing inside me,\" Ms Davies said.\n\n\"These months of delay could be the difference in saving fertility or losing fertility.\n\n\"It could be the difference in needing chemotherapy or radiotherapy or not needing it, or could be the difference of life or death.\"\n\nCancer Research UK early diagnosis head Dr Jodie Moffat said research was under way to understand how effective and accurate self-sampling could be in cervical screening.\n\nBut getting more people screened \"is not the only hurdle to overcome\".\n\n\"The NHS is under immense pressure and would need more staff and equipment to ensure patients receive their results and any follow-up treatment as quickly as possible,\" she said.\n\nAn NHS official said: \"The NHS guidance that cervical screening should continue has not changed, which has been communicated to GP practices, which have adjusted the way they work to remain open and safe, while local NHS services across the country have put extra measures in place to protect people from coronavirus and so anyone invited for a cervical smear test should attend.\"", "The government has unveiled details of a £23m fund to support fishing firms as it tries to quell industry anger over Brexit border delays.\n\nThe money will help firms whose exports to the EU have fallen sharply since rules changed on 1 January.\n\nFishing firms say extra paperwork has made it difficult to deliver fresh produce to the EU before it goes off, hammering their businesses.\n\nOne trade group called the fund \"welcome\" but a \"sticking plaster\".\n\nOn Monday, fish exporters held demonstrations outside government departments in central London, warning their livelihoods were under threat.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson admitted many had experienced \"bureaucratic delays [and] difficulties getting their goods through\" to buyers on the other side of the channel.\n\nHaving left the EU's customs union and the single market, UK exports are subject to new customs and veterinary checks which have caused problems at the border.\n\nCovid has worsened the issue, with the industry also facing lower market prices and demand from restaurants due to the pandemic.\n\nThe government said the scheme would be targeted at small and medium-sized fishing businesses who will be able to claim a maximum of £100,000 to cover losses.\n\nChief Secretary to the Treasury Steve Barclay said: \"This further £23m package of support will help our hardworking fishing sector navigate the challenges of the next few months.\n\n\"It is vital that no community nor region within our United Kingdom is left behind as we continue to support British jobs and build back better from the coronavirus pandemic.\"\n\nIn addition to funding, the government will provide further training to help fishing businesses adapt to the new export processes.\n\nSeparately, the prime minister committed to providing a further £100m to help modernise UK fishing fleets and the fish processing industry.\n\nDonna Fordyce, chief executive of Seafood Scotland, said: \"After almost three weeks of voicing their concerns and frustrations, we welcome the fact that the Scottish seafood sector has been heard and action is being taken.\n\n\"This [fund] will offer a ray of light to some small and medium-sized companies that have experienced crippling losses over the past few weeks.\"\n\nHowever, while the money was \"a much-needed sticking plaster\", she said it would not \"completely staunch the wound\".\n\n\"The sector still needs a period of grace during which the [new trade] systems must be overhauled so they are fit for purpose.\"", "Under current rules, cafes and restaurants are only allowed to provide a takeaway service.\n\nNine Met Police officers have been fined for breaching lockdown rules to meet at a cafe while on duty.\n\nPictures emerged online showing the officers, from the South East Basic Command Unit, eating at The Chef House Kitchen Cafe, Greenwich, on 9 January.\n\nAll nine officers have been issued with a £200 fixed penalty notice.\n\nCh Supt Rob Atkin, said: \"It is right that they will pay a financial penalty and that they will be asked to reflect on their choices.\n\n\"Police officers are tasked with enforcing the legislation that has been introduced to stop the spread of the virus and the public rightly expect that they will set an example through their own actions.\n\n\"It is disappointing that on this occasion, these officers have fallen short of that expectation.\"\n\nThe group were spotted by a member of the public in the Greenwich cafe while their patrol vehicles were parked outside.\n\nUnder current rules, cafes and restaurants are only allowed to provide a takeaway service.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nPaul Pogba scored a superb winner as Manchester United reclaimed top spot in the Premier League by coming from behind for a club-record equalling away win at Fulham.\n\nIn what is becoming a familiar pattern for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's side outside Manchester this season, they fell behind early in the game, with Ademola Lookman beating the offside trap before firing in an angled drive.\n\nBut for the seventh time away from Old Trafford in 2020-21, United found a winning response - taking their run to 17 games unbeaten away in the Premier League - courtesy of a gift from their opponents and a bit of magic from their French midfielder.\n\nGoalkeeper Alphonse Areola has been a good addition for the Cottagers but in dropping Bruno Fernandes' cross at the feet of Edinson Cavani, he gifted his former Paris St-Germain team-mate the simplest of equalisers.\n\nAnd on the hour mark, Pogba stepped up to decide the contest, firing a superb angled drive across the diving Areola and into the far corner from 20 yards.\n\nThe France international has come in for criticism at times this season but received nothing but praise from his manager after his winner.\n\n\"I am very happy with his performances,\" said Solskjaer.\n\n\"I know what he can do. He does everything. Now he is putting all the elements together in his performances and it is great to see.\n\n\"It was about getting him fit. He is enjoying his football, he is happy and physically in a good shape.\"\n\nThe win takes United to 40 points, two more than both Leicester and Manchester City, who had briefly taken top spot from the Foxes with a 2-0 win over Aston Villa on Wednesday.\n\nSolskjaer, though, was reluctant to get drawn into discussing his side's title credentials with so much of the campaign to go.\n\n\"It is always going to be talked about that when you are halfway through and top of the league, but we are not thinking about this, we just have to go one game at a time,\" he added. \"It is such an unpredictable season.\"\n\nFulham remain in the bottom three, four points behind 17th-placed Burnley.\n• None Man Utd or Man City to end day top? Cassia bassist Lou Cotterill takes on Lawro\n\nSolskjaer felt his side missed a big opportunity to fully assert their title credentials in failing to make the most of their chances in Sunday's 0-0 draw at champions Liverpool.\n\nUnited were clearly in no mood to repeat such a mistake at a wet and windy Craven Cottage on Wednesday against a less daunting and defining opposition, but one that is far more robust now than they were in the season's first month.\n\nThe visitors fell behind, but this is par for the course for this side, who once again did not panic, wrestled control of the game away from their opponents and took the win.\n\nIt is a handy trick for a title-challenging side to have in their locker, although one they would rather not have to repeatedly pull.\n\nIn truth, they should have won more handsomely.\n\nThey had the far greater share of possession and territory and were well ahead of their opponents on shots taken until a frantic finale in which the Cottagers threw in all they had in pursuit of a point.\n\nFred felt he should have had a penalty in the first half courtesy of being caught in the box by a loose challenge from Ruben Loftus-Cheek, but both on-field and VAR officials disagreed.\n\nHarry Maguire twice headed wide from corners, the first from a far less forgivable, unmarked position than the second.\n\nEqually, though, it is a game that could have seen them drop points, especially in light of Fulham's late barrage, which saw David de Gea save superbly with his legs to deny Loftus-Cheek, and the ball pinballing around the United box on more than one occasion.\n\nThe Cottagers demonstrated that they are no pushover, but they are making of habit of being on the rough end of fine margins.\n\nFive straight draws followed by two defeats by a single goal suggests their battle against the drop will go right down to the wire.\n\n\"I'm really pleased but I'm disappointed at the same time, which shows how far we've come,\" said Cottagers boss Scott Parker.\n\n\"I saw a team today that looked threatening and tried their hardest to get back into the game, but we go again. The next challenge is to maintain where we are and don't let defeat sink us.\n\n\"No doubt we can win and operate in this division and we just need to push on and keep improving.\"\n\nUnited lead the way in early concessions\n• None No side has conceded more goals in the opening five minutes of Premier League games this season than Manchester United (4). Manchester United have won seven Premier League games having gone behind this season - only Newcastle in 2001-02 (10) and Man Utd themselves in 2012-13 (9) have done so more in a single campaign.\n• None Manchester United are unbeaten in their last 17 Premier League away games (W13 D4), equalling their longest ever unbeaten run on the road in top-flight history (17 between December 1998 and September 1999).\n• None This was the 41st different game in which Fulham had led in all competitions under Scott Parker, but the first time they had lost such a game (W34 D6).\n• None Edinson Cavani became the first Man Utd player whose first four Premier League goals for the club were all scored away from home.\n• None Since his return to the club in 2016, no Man Utd player has scored more league goals from outside the box than Paul Pogba (6).\n• None Ademola Lookman has been involved in more Premier League goals than any other Fulham player this season (6 - 3 goals, 3 assists).\n• None Bruno Fernandes has gone three Premier League games without a goal or assist for the first time since his Manchester United debut in February 2020.\n\nFulham's next game is in the FA Cup, against Burnley on Sunday (14:30 GMT). Their next league fixture, an away game on Wednesday, 27 January, is a big one. Opponents Brighton are two places and five points above them in the table.\n\nManchester United host Liverpool in the FA Cup on Sunday at 17:00, live on the BBC. They are also in league action the following Wednesday hosting the league's bottom club Sheffield United in a 20:15 kick-off.\n• None Attempt missed. Aleksandar Mitrovic (Fulham) header from the centre of the box is close, but misses to the right. Assisted by Kenny Tete with a cross following a corner.\n• None Attempt blocked. Ademola Lookman (Fulham) left footed shot from the left side of the box is blocked. Assisted by Mario Lemina.\n• None Offside, Fulham. Aboubakar Kamara tries a through ball, but Kenny Tete is caught offside.\n• None Attempt missed. Mario Lemina (Fulham) right footed shot from outside the box is high and wide to the right. Assisted by Aboubakar Kamara.\n• None Attempt blocked. Joe Bryan (Fulham) left footed shot from the left side of the box is blocked.\n• None Attempt missed. Ruben Loftus-Cheek (Fulham) right footed shot from the centre of the box is high and wide to the right following a fast break.\n• None Attempt blocked. Fred (Manchester United) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Harry Maguire with a headed pass. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None You can stream five fourth-round games live on the BBC this weekend, including Liverpool's trip to Manchester United. Find out more here.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThis is America's day. This is democracy's day. A day of history and hope, of renewal and resolve. Through a crucible for the ages, America has been tested anew and America has risen to the challenge. Today we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate but of a cause, a cause of democracy. The people - the will of the people - has been heard, and the will of the people has been heeded.\n\nWe've learned again that democracy is precious, democracy is fragile and, at this hour my friends, democracy has prevailed. So now on this hallowed ground where just a few days ago violence sought to shake the Capitol's very foundations, we come together as one nation under God - indivisible - to carry out the peaceful transfer of power as we have for more than two centuries.\n\nAs we look ahead in our uniquely American way, restless, bold, optimistic, and set our sights on a nation we know we can be and must be, I thank my predecessors of both parties for their presence here. I thank them from the bottom of my heart. And I know the resilience of our Constitution and the strength, the strength of our nation, as does President Carter, who I spoke with last night who cannot be with us today, but who we salute for his lifetime of service.\n\nI've just taken a sacred oath each of those patriots have taken. The oath first sworn by George Washington. But the American story depends not on any one of us, not on some of us, but on all of us. On we the people who seek a more perfect union. This is a great nation, we are good people. And over the centuries through storm and strife in peace and in war we've come so far. But we still have far to go.\n\nWe'll press forward with speed and urgency for we have much to do in this winter of peril and significant possibility. Much to do, much to heal, much to restore, much to build and much to gain. Few people in our nation's history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we're in now. A once in a century virus that silently stalks the country has taken as many lives in one year as in all of World War Two.\n\nMillions of jobs have been lost. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed. A cry for racial justice, some 400 years in the making, moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer. A cry for survival comes from the planet itself, a cry that can't be any more desperate or any more clear now. The rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism, that we must confront and we will defeat.\n\nTo overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America, requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy - unity. Unity. In another January on New Year's Day in 1863 Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. When he put pen to paper the president said, and I quote, 'if my name ever goes down in history, it'll be for this act, and my whole soul is in it'.\n\nMy whole soul is in it today, on this January day. My whole soul is in this. Bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation. And I ask every American to join me in this cause. Uniting to fight the foes we face - anger, resentment and hatred. Extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness, and hopelessness.\n\nWith unity we can do great things, important things. We can right wrongs, we can put people to work in good jobs, we can teach our children in safe schools. We can overcome the deadly virus, we can rebuild work, we can rebuild the middle class and make work secure, we can secure racial justice and we can make America once again the leading force for good in the world.\n\nI know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days. I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. But I also know they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal, that we are all created equal, and the harsh ugly reality that racism, nativism and fear have torn us apart. The battle is perennial and victory is never secure.\n\nThrough civil war, the Great Depression, World War, 9/11, through struggle, sacrifice, and setback, our better angels have always prevailed. In each of our moments enough of us have come together to carry all of us forward and we can do that now. History, faith and reason show the way. The way of unity.\n\nWe can see each other not as adversaries but as neighbours. We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity there is no peace, only bitterness and fury, no progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge. And unity is the path forward. And we must meet this moment as the United States of America.\n\nIf we do that, I guarantee we will not failed. We have never, ever, ever, ever failed in America when we've acted together. And so today at this time in this place, let's start afresh, all of us. Let's begin to listen to one another again, hear one another, see one another. Show respect to one another. Politics doesn't have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn't have to be a cause for total war and we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.\n\nMy fellow Americans, we have to be different than this. We have to be better than this and I believe America is so much better than this. Just look around. Here we stand in the shadow of the Capitol dome. As mentioned earlier, completed in the shadow of the Civil War. When the union itself was literally hanging in the balance. We endure, we prevail. Here we stand, looking out on the great Mall, where Dr King spoke of his dream.\n\nHere we stand, where 108 years ago at another inaugural, thousands of protesters tried to block brave women marching for the right to vote. And today we mark the swearing in of the first woman elected to national office, Vice President Kamala Harris. Don't tell me things can't change. Here we stand where heroes who gave the last full measure of devotion rest in eternal peace.\n\nAnd here we stand just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of our democracy, to drive us from this sacred ground. It did not happen, it will never happen, not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not ever. To all those who supported our campaign, I'm humbled by the faith you placed in us. To all those who did not support us, let me say this. Hear us out as we move forward. Take a measure of me and my heart.\n\nIf you still disagree, so be it. That's democracy. That's America. The right to dissent peacefully. And the guardrail of our democracy is perhaps our nation's greatest strength. If you hear me clearly, disagreement must not lead to disunion. And I pledge this to you. I will be a President for all Americans, all Americans. And I promise you I will fight for those who did not support me as for those who did.\n\nMany centuries ago, St Augustine - the saint of my church - wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love. Defined by the common objects of their love. What are the common objects we as Americans love, that define us as Americans? I think we know. Opportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honour, and yes, the truth.\n\nRecent weeks and months have taught us a painful lesson. There is truth and there are lies. Lies told for power and for profit. And each of us has a duty and a responsibility as citizens as Americans and especially as leaders. Leaders who are pledged to honour our Constitution to protect our nation. To defend the truth and defeat the lies.\n\nLook, I understand that many of my fellow Americans view the future with fear and trepidation. I understand they worry about their jobs. I understand like their dad they lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling thinking: 'Can I keep my healthcare? Can I pay my mortgage?' Thinking about their families, about what comes next. I promise you, I get it. But the answer's not to turn inward. To retreat into competing factions. Distrusting those who don't look like you, or worship the way you do, who don't get their news from the same source as you do.\n\nWe must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal. We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts, if we show a little tolerance and humility, and if we're willing to stand in the other person's shoes, as my mom would say. Just for a moment, stand in their shoes.\n\nBecause here's the thing about life. There's no accounting for what fate will deal you. Some days you need a hand. There are other days when we're called to lend a hand. That's how it has to be, that's what we do for one another. And if we are that way our country will be stronger, more prosperous, more ready for the future. And we can still disagree.\n\nMy fellow Americans, in the work ahead of us we're going to need each other. We need all our strength to persevere through this dark winter. We're entering what may be the darkest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation, one nation. And I promise this, as the Bible says, 'Weeping may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning'. We will get through this together. Together.\n\nLook folks, all my colleagues I serve with in the House and the Senate up here, we all understand the world is watching. Watching all of us today. So here's my message to those beyond our borders. America has been tested and we've come out stronger for it. We will repair our alliances, and engage with the world once again. Not to meet yesterday's challenges but today's and tomorrow's challenges. And we'll lead not merely by the example of our power but the power of our example.\n\nFellow Americans, moms, dads, sons, daughters, friends, neighbours and co-workers. We will honour them by becoming the people and the nation we can and should be. So I ask you let's say a silent prayer for those who lost their lives, those left behind and for our country. Amen.\n\nFolks, it's a time of testing. We face an attack on our democracy, and on truth, a raging virus, a stinging inequity, systemic racism, a climate in crisis, America's role in the world. Any one of these would be enough to challenge us in profound ways. But the fact is we face them all at once, presenting this nation with one of the greatest responsibilities we've had. Now we're going to be tested. Are we going to step up?\n\nIt's time for boldness for there is so much to do. And this is certain, I promise you. We will be judged, you and I, by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era. We will rise to the occasion. Will we master this rare and difficult hour? Will we meet our obligations and pass along a new and better world to our children? I believe we must and I'm sure you do as well. I believe we will, and when we do, we'll write the next great chapter in the history of the United States of America. The American story.\n\nA story that might sound like a song that means a lot to me, it's called American Anthem. And there's one verse that stands out at least for me and it goes like this:\n\n'The work and prayers of centuries have brought us to this day, which shall be our legacy, what will our children say?\n\nLet me know in my heart when my days are through, America, America, I gave my best to you.'\n\nLet us add our own work and prayers to the unfolding story of our great nation. If we do this, then when our days are through, our children and our children's children will say of us: 'They gave their best, they did their duty, they healed a broken land.'\n\nMy fellow Americans I close the day where I began, with a sacred oath. Before God and all of you, I give you my word. I will always level with you. I will defend the Constitution, I'll defend our democracy.\n\nI'll defend America and I will give all - all of you - keep everything I do in your service. Thinking not of power but of possibilities. Not of personal interest but of public good.\n\nAnd together we will write an American story of hope, not fear. Of unity not division, of light not darkness. A story of decency and dignity, love and healing, greatness and goodness. May this be the story that guides us. The story that inspires us. And the story that tells ages yet to come that we answered the call of history, we met the moment. Democracy and hope, truth and justice, did not die on our watch but thrive.\n\nThat America secured liberty at home and stood once again as a beacon to the world. That is what we owe our forbearers, one another, and generations to follow.\n\nSo with purpose and resolve, we turn to those tasks of our time. Sustained by faith, driven by conviction and devoted to one another and the country we love with all our hearts. May God bless America and God protect our troops.", "Father Lee Taylor said people have \"really missed communal singing\"\n\nOnline \"Pimm's and Hymns\" singalong sessions at a north Wales church have attracted people from as far away as South Africa, Brazil and Canada.\n\nFather Lee Taylor, from St Collen's Church, Llangollen, set up the Facebook Live shows when his pews fell silent due to Covid restrictions.\n\nThe former bartender said: \"People started to share it and the online audience just exploded.\"\n\nIt adds \"a real light in the darkness\" of lockdown and a \"few drinks\".\n\nThe sessions, which have been running since last March, are a homage to the summer garden party known as 'Pimm's and Hymns' Mr Taylor, 43, hosts each year.\n\n\"I get phone calls, emails and letters from people all over the world, saying, 'You've lifted my spirits', and asking me to pray for their loved ones who are sick with the virus,\" he said.\n\n\"I started the sessions as I was trying to think of ways to bring comfort reassurance and cheer to people at home.\n\n\"While I can't hear people joining in, I feel them there with me in the room.\"\n\nFather Lee Taylor hosted annual 'Pimm's and Hymns' garden parties before Covid restrictions came in last March\n\nBelting out everything from Abide With Me to Pack Up Your Troubles, the vicar, who lives with his partner of 14 years, Fabiano Duarte, is known for pouring a glass of wine or a cocktail before performing for his Facebook congregation.\n\n\"I like to keep a libation on the piano,\" he said.\n\n\"When we started, people tuning in could see a glass of wine one week and a gin and tonic the next, so began to join in and have a drink with me.\n\n\"Soon, this became a discussion in the Facebook comments and people would send in photos of themselves with a tipple, singing along.\n\n\"I've got a bit carried away on the piano after a few drinks and played all the wrong notes a couple of times - which is always quite funny. It's joyful, really.\"\n\nHe said \"losing the churches and restricting the number at funerals\" was painful and people were \"missing communal singing\".\n\n\"[So] I got some elderly people set up on the internet and sent out instructions via email, so they could watch the live stream singalongs,\" he said.\n\n\"People were soon chatting through the comments and it felt like we were all connected.\n\n\"I wanted to raise spirits through music and it's been a real light in the darkness.\"", "Louise worries about her prospects for the next 12 months\n\nFreelance TV and film sound editor Louise Burton is one of those who are unable to benefit from government pandemic support schemes, despite being out of work.\n\nLouise, 28, of St Albans, in Hertfordshire, has not had a single penny of assistance since her last job ended eight months ago.\n\n\"With the last production that I was on, I was hired as a PAYE freelancer, which means that I essentially do exactly the same job as what I do as a freelancer, but I was paying tax at source,\" she told the BBC.\n\n\"What often happens with film is that production companies are made for the sole purpose of the film. So they create these companies and everything goes through the company - and then once the film is completed, they then shut the company.\"\n\nThat means Louise fell foul of tax rules relating to self-employed people. And she could not go on furlough, because the company that had employed her no longer existed.\n\n\"I always feel guilty saying that I am one of the people who is suffering, because actually, I still have a roof over my head and I can just about put food on my table, but it's not easy,\" she says, adding that she fears for her prospects in the next 12 months.\n\nAccording to MPs, whole groups of people like Louise are falling through the cracks of Covid-19 support schemes because of out-of-date tax systems.\n\nSome freelancers and self-employed people have been particularly excluded, despite lockdowns and restrictions meaning they cannot work, the Public Accounts Committee said.\n\nOthers, meanwhile, are able to abuse the system, it said.\n\nThe government said its \"top priority\" was helping those who are struggling.\n\nSince March, HM Revenue and Customs has provided more than £80bn in support to companies and individuals through government coronavirus support schemes, the committee said.\n\nThey are also supporting the incomes of many of the self-employed.\n\nBut despite this, a report from the MPs says \"quirks in the tax system\" have meant that groups of workers - including freelancers and self-employed people who recently moved onto company payrolls or work on a series of short-term employment contracts with gaps in between - have been ineligible for furlough payments.\n\n\"As public spending balloons to unprecedented levels in response to the pandemic, out-of-date tax systems are one of the barriers to getting help to a significant number of struggling taxpayers who should be entitled to support,\" said MP Meg Hillier, chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).\n\nBy contrast, she said some large companies that had used government support schemes had continued to pay dividends to shareholders and high salaries to executives.\n\nShe added that HMRC was in many cases failing \"to capture or deal with those wrongly claiming\" support.\n\nThe tax agency should explain to freelancers and other groups why they have been excluded from receiving support and set out steps to fix the problem within six weeks, the MPs said.\n\nThe PAC also said that a lack of certainty about government coronavirus support schemes had made it difficult for businesses to plan effectively.\n\nFor example, HMRC could not provide clarity on whether the Job Retention Bonus scheme had been delayed or scrapped, the committee said.\n\nThe scheme was meant to pay employers an incentive for every worker they brought back from furlough and kept in employment until January.\n\n\"Such lack of clarity may lead to unnecessary hardships for some businesses, who in good faith were relying on the payments from the scheme to meet some of their needs,\" the MPs said.\n\nA government spokesperson said it had done \"all it can to help as many people as possible\".\n\n\"HMRC delivered Covid-19 support schemes at unprecedented speed, protecting the livelihoods of millions of people.\n\n\"We do not underestimate the challenges faced by individuals and businesses during the pandemic, and our top priority is getting financial support to those struggling... while protecting the taxpayer against fraud.\n\n\"Those not eligible for support through these schemes can still benefit from the strengthened welfare safety net, accessing help like universal credit.\"\n• None What extra help will the self-employed get?", "19 January is a special day for Orthodox Christians across Russia, including President Vladimir Putin. It's a day reserved for commemorating the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan, and it's called Epiphany. Though temperatures are as low as -20 Celsius, some celebrated this by submerging themselves in ice-cold water.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dame Louise Casey: \"The country has been torn to shreds by the pandemic\"\n\nThe government has been urged by its former homelessness adviser to extend benefit increases worth £20 a week beyond the end of March.\n\nDame Louise Casey said ending the universal credit top-up, introduced during the Covid pandemic, would be \"too punitive a policy right now\".\n\nShe said people would view the Tories as the \"nasty party\" if they did so.\n\nThe government said it was committed to supporting the lowest-paid families through the pandemic and beyond.\n\nA government spokesperson said: \"No decisions have yet been made on a range of Covid support measures that run through until the end of March and April, and it is right to wait until we know more about where we are in the vaccination process before making any decisions.\"\n\nLabour and anti-poverty campaigners are pressing for the increase, worth £1,000 a year, to remain in place beyond its scheduled end date of 31 March.\n\nOn Monday they were joined by six Conservative MPs, who defied party orders to abstain and backed a symbolic motion calling for an extension.\n\nIn an interview with BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, Dame Louise said the £20-a-week increase had proved a \"lifeline\" to poorer families.\n\n\"The Treasury need to step back and not feel this constant responsibility to close the books all the time, and fight and fight and fight,\" she said.\n\nOn the idea the top-up could end in March, she added: \"It's not the right thing to do.\"\n\nReferencing a phrase coined by Theresa May in 2002 about how the Conservatives were sometimes perceived, she added they would \"go back to being the nasty party\" if they did so.\n\nDame Louise added that the country had been \"torn to shreds\" by the pandemic, with an impact \"far deeper and greater than anything I've ever seen in my lifetime\".\n\n\"I think we will have to have a big plan to deal with the wounds inflicted by this pandemic once everybody's vaccinated,\" she added.\n\n\"And I think the government needs to turn its attention to that now, and not leave it until the summer.\"\n\nDame Louise, who was made a crossbench peer by the prime minister in July, also urged ministers to think about long-term reforms to the welfare system.\n\n\"Everybody is focused on the NHS and vaccinations, that I think everything else we see is incredibly reactive,\" she said.\n\nShe called on the government to take inspiration from the World War Two-era Beveridge report, which laid the foundations for the UK's welfare state, and draw up a long-term strategy for recovery after the pandemic.\n\n\"We're all in this storm, everybody's experienced it, just some people are in decent boats and some people are in rafts that are sinking.\n\n\"And that gives the prime minister the moment to say 'I am going to step into the shoes of a Beveridge moment'.\n\n\"If there's any reason for government to decide to actually rebuild Britain, so the divide between the rich and the poor isn't as big as it is... it's this pandemic\".\n\nUniversal credit can be claimed by both people who are in and out of work\n\nUniversal credit is a working-age benefit claimed by around 6m people, replacing six benefits and merging them into a single payment.\n\nPoverty campaign charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says 500,000 more people will be driven into poverty if the temporary £20 top-up is rolled back.\n\nHowever the Institute for Economic Affairs think tank has argued that \"across-the-board benefit increases are a wasteful use of taxpayers' money\".\n\nThe top-up, estimated to cost around £6bn a year, was brought in at the start of the pandemic as a temporary response due to lockdown.\n\nA government spokesperson said that support was being targeted by raising the living wage, spending on the furlough scheme, boosting welfare spending and introducing the £170m Covid Winter Grant Scheme.", "There is a photograph of Kamala Harris, taken in 1986, while she was a student at Howard University.\n\nShe and two other friends, all shoulder pads and plaid, are smiling and laughing, a crowd behind them. It's a picture brimming with energy and hope.\n\nIt's been used a lot in telling the extraordinary story of her rise to become the first black and Asian American woman to be vice-president and the first person who attended one of America's HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) to get to such a position.\n\nBut this is the story of the other women in the photograph, her two best friends - Valarie Pippen and Karen Gibbs - as well as of others who might have been milling about in the background there.\n\nThis was the 1980s, when the children of America's civil rights generation came of age. Being at Howard University, an HBCU at a time when solidarity with the global anti-apartheid movement was reaching fever pitch and at the height of Reaganism, was a formative experience for many of them.\n\nNow they are about to witness one of their own become vice-president. What have their journeys been like and what does this moment feel like?\n\nHistorically Black Colleges, like Howard University, were founded in order to educate African Americans who were otherwise prohibited from attending college, after slavery.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nAlthough that has now changed, a core part of the Howard message remains its focus on cultivating black leaders - it is not just about academic achievement, but social activism too.\n\nKamala Harris has made clear the influence Howard University had on her career and life goals. Last week, on the anniversary of her sorority's founding date, she posted on Instagram, paying homage to her Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, and referring to her days at Howard, attending anti-apartheid marches and being part of the debate team: \"Howard taught me that while you will often find that you're the only one in the room who looks like you, or who has had the experiences you've had, you must remember: you are never alone.\"\n\nLike Ms Harris, I also went to Howard University and became a member of that same sorority decades later.\n\nI became intrigued by the stories of the other women and graduates who ventured out into the same world during the same time as Kamala.\n\nIn that photograph, Valarie Pippen is on the right and smiling with confidence at the camera.\n\nHer parents attended historically black colleges after moving north with the great migration, which was the movement over decades of millions of African Americans to the North from the South, where economic uncertainty and segregation prevailed. They settled in the Chicago region and forged successful careers.\n\nShe was led to Howard, specifically, after her older brother attended and brought home a yearbook that intrigued her.\n\nHoward had a festive celebratory atmosphere that the friends made the most of while they were there\n\n\"The culture was festive and lively yet focused on academic and cultural advancement of oppressed people,\" says Ms Pippen. \"We knew that our generation would make a difference with our success.\"\n\nMs Pippen says that at Howard University \"we all had more of a striving to do well, a striving to live with integrity and to make your mark on the world\".\n\nComing from a high-achieving and proud black family with high expectations of their children, she was brought up knowing that her college experience was going to be important.\n\nShe is now a healthcare consultant, and after graduating from Howard she attended medical school at Yale.\n\nShe recalls the commitment to academic excellence, the need to prove your worth out there in the world and how that also translated into many nights studying with her good friend Kamala.\n\n\"There was one year at Howard, we both stayed for summer school. We worked during the day, did night classes and we studied together afterwards. We did that for the whole summer and we had fun.\n\n\"She was born for the job. Her dedication - like mine - was to academics, being an all around good person and to integrity.\"\n\nIn the 1990s, 52% of black pharmacy recipients, 30% of dentistry degree recipients, and 27% of theology degree recipients were all educated at HBCUs.\n\nToday, the two oldest HBCU medical schools - Meharry Medical College and Howard University - are responsible for more than 80% of black doctors and dentists practising in the US.\n\nHBCUs have educated three-quarters of all black people holding a doctorate; three-quarters of all black officers in the armed forces; and four-fifths of all black federal judges, according to the US Department of Education.\n\nThe culture they fostered was hugely important for many ambitious and successful middle- and upper-class class black families going out into a world to become leaders in their field, within one generation of getting the right to vote.\n\nKaren Gibbs, pictured on the left in that photo, remains best friends with the vice-president elect and Valarie Pippen.\n\nShe is now an attorney and speaks of her time at Howard in the same way Kamala Harris has in the past.\n\nThere was \"a lot of black pride and a lot of black love\" in the Howard community, says Ms Gibbs.\n\n\"We had black professors who loved us. That was the beauty of going to Howard. They nurtured us, they groomed us. They were realistic to tell us what we would confront when we left Howard - but they equipped us to realise and achieve our dreams.\"\n\nThat environment was especially important as an escape from the realities of society.\n\n\"I was raised in a rural area in Delaware, and the people there were really racist. I had been called bad names by a lot of people, despite having a black family and smaller community filled with educators and proud of their roots,\" says Ms Gibbs.\n\nThat is one of the reasons that she wanted to attend Howard University, to become a civil rights lawyer. She made the move so that she could be surrounded by \"love\" and \"support\".\n\n\"It was never a matter if I would go to an HBCU,\" it was just a matter of which she would go to.\n\nMs Gibbs and Ms Pippen's experience at Howard University strikes a chord with others who were also there in the 1980s.\n\nThey speak of the open fostering of social awareness and political activism in movements happening off campus.\n\nBeing in the nation's capital, Howard in particular had a front-row seat to some memorable episodes in politics.\n\nThe debate team in 1981 at Howard University. Kamala Harris was one of the few women to join the club.\n\nDexter Cole, a Howard alumnus and now top executive at TV One, told the BBC that \"our parents actively participated in the civil rights movements and were at the forefront, and we came to Howard with a sense of commitment to not only improve the lives of ourselves, but others as well\".\n\nAcross the nation, HBCUs were training a generation who would have a large impact on the world, and the progression of the broader African-American community.\n\n\"We understood that we were agents of change.\"\n\nMr Cole explained that \"social unrest was very prevalent, but as a student body we knew that we had a seat at the table because of those we saw who went before us\".\n\n\"I remember marching on Capitol Hill on the National Mall. There was a group of students going to protest to make Martin Luther King Jr's birthday a national holiday, and now I look there is a memorial just where I marched.\n\n\"We knew what our rights were and we were determined to invoke our right. That's why there were so many of us active in the anti-apartheid movement - we saw it play out in the US,\" says Ms Gibbs.\n\n\"It was a time when a lot of people from the era transcended into important places in different parts of society,\" says Lita Rosario-Richardson.\n\nMs Rosario-Richardson is currently an entertainment lawyer. On campus, she recruited Ms Harris on to the debate team.\n\n\"The election of Kamala Harris has really made crystal clear that Howard prepares you for anything,\" she adds.\n\nAlthough it is no surprise to those who knew Kamala Harris that she is now the vice-president of the United States, it feels like a vindication for their own personal journeys and the philosophy they took forward with them into the wider world.\n\n\"It was instilled that with your education comes a responsibility to improve the world - specifically our own people. And, we see that that has benefited everyone in America.\n\n\"Kamala is a child of desegregation, like myself. Her nomination seemed historically fit, and she's the right person for it,\" Ms Rosario-Richardson adds.\n\nDexter Cole is now a top executive at TV One\n\n\"Alumni like Thurgood Marshall - the first black Supreme Court Justice - who attended Howard laid the framework.\"\n\nEven during their time as students, these alumni felt that they were connected to greatness and expected to make big strides in the world.\n\nIt was not a feeling confined to Kamala Harris. The stories of these women show many have become movers and shakers in their own fields.\n\n\"All this has come full circle,\" says Andrea Holmes, a graduate who is now a marketing executive.\n\n\"The vice-presidency is where she belongs. She is the role model of the world and to all women and little girls.\"\n\nThe original photograph of Kamala, Valarie and Karen was taken in 1986 at Howard University's famous Homecoming.\n\nAt most schools in the US, homecoming is an annual tradition marked by an American football game and partying. At Howard University, homecoming is marked by a football game as well as a week of events where all generations come back to meet and celebrate. Notable graduates as well as celebrities and artists come to perform, join discussions, and be part of the week.\n\nAs a graduate, I know Homecoming remains a highly anticipated annual event, an experience like no other. That picture captures the energy, friendship and ambition of a group of women, at Howard in an electric era, who felt capable of anything.\n\nValarie Pippen remembers the moment: \"The weekend was truly exhilarating, and you can see from the looks and smiles on our faces we were having the time of our lives.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMore than 2,000 homes in parts of Manchester are being evacuated due to flooding caused by Storm Christoph.\n\nThe Environment Agency (EA) has issued two severe flood warnings, which means danger to life, for the Didsbury and Northenden areas.\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Nick Bailey of Greater Manchester Police has warned some of those affected would \"be Covid-positive or isolating at home\".\n\nHe said the government was working to ensure it was \"totally prepared\" for floods \"in every part of the UK\".\n\nA major incident was earlier declared for the Greater Manchester area where up to 3,000 properties were feared to be at risk.\n\nMr Johnson urged people not to stay in their homes if they were told to evacuate.\n\n\"If you are told to leave your home then you should do so.\n\n\"People may think this is a minor issue at the moment, still relevantly minor by standards of previous floods, but never underestimate the suffering, the misery, that floods can cause people.\"\n\nUnder government restrictions due to the current national lockdown people are allowed to leave their homes to escape harm.\n\nIn an alert to those affected, ACC Bailey said: \"A basin at Didsbury to take water from the Mersey is full. It will over-top in the next few hours. As a result we will be issuing a flood warning to homes.\n\n\"This will be through texted flood alerts to some people, and police officers, PCSOs, firefighters, and volunteers will be knocking on doors.\"\n\nHe said police will be supported by North West Ambulance, the British Red Cross and St John Ambulance.\n\n\"I think it's important to stress that if you are contacted and advised to evacuate then we would strongly urge you to do so,\" he added.\n\nWater levels in the area were expected to peak at about 23:00 GMT on Wednesday.\n\nA major incident has also been declared in Derbyshire, where authorities believe a small number of evacuations are \"likely\" on Thursday morning, when the River Derwent is expected to peak.\n\nCounty council leader Barry Lewis said it could rival levels seen in November 2019, depending on the weather overnight.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The PM says the government is making sure it is “totally prepared in every part of the UK” for flooding after Storm Christoph.\n\nSpeaking after a Cobra emergency meeting on Wednesday, Mr Johnson said work was under way to ensure transport and energy networks, and local council services, were prepared.\n\nHe added that work was also taking place to ensure the necessary numbers of sandbags were available.\n\n\"We want to make sure that we are totally prepared in every part of the UK for flooding, because it is coming on top of the stress people are already under fighting Covid,\" he said.\n\n\"We looked at particularly Manchester, we've got a situation potentially developing there,\" Mr Johnson said.\n\n\"We are looking at a pattern of rainfall possibly not as bad at the end of this week, maybe worse next week.\"\n\nPeople in Greater Manchester have also been advised not to travel.\n\nStephen Rhodes, from Transport from Greater Manchester, said there was disruption across the network.\n\n\"Let's work together and not put our emergency services and the NHS - who are already working extremely hard due to the Covid-19 pandemic - under any more pressure,\" he said.\n\nIn Merseyside, the M57 has been closed in both directions between junction 6 and 7 due to flooding.\n\nThe Environment Agency has issued more than 100 flood warnings, meaning flooding is expected and immediate action required, while there are also more than 200 flood alerts, meaning flooding is possible.\n\nRiver levels have risen rapidly in parts of northern England\n\nThe North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands have been preparing for widespread flooding following the Met Office's amber weather warning for heavy rain until midday Thursday.\n\nThe Met Office said some isolated areas could see up to 200mm (7.8in).\n\nSandbags have been distributed as Storm Christoph batters parts of England\n\n\"Once again the government's response to inevitable flood events has been slow and uncoordinated,\" the Barnsley East MP said.\n\n\"We must ensure councils are supported to protect people, businesses, and local communities, and that all of the necessary precautions are also in place to protect those fighting the floods in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The Gender Identity Service is based at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust\n\nThe NHS's child gender-identity service has been rated \"inadequate\" after inspectors identified \"significant concerns\".\n\nThe Care Quality Commission inspected the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in October.\n\nMore than 4,600 young people were on the waiting list and some had waited over two years for a first appointment.\n\nThe trust said it took the CQC report \"very seriously\".\n\nEngland and Wales' only children's gender-identity service was inspected after healthcare professionals and the children's commissioner for England raised concerns around \"clinical practice, safeguarding procedures, and assessments of capacity and consent to treatment\".\n\nThe children's commissioner had been provided evidence of staff concerns by BBC Newsnight.\n\nThe CQC's previous inspection, in 2016, had resulted in an overall \"good\" rating.\n\nBut in the latest inspection at clinics run by the trust in north London and Leeds, Gids was rated:\n\nOverall, the service is now rated as \"inadequate\".\n\nAnd the CQC has begun enforcement action, demanding monthly updates of the numbers on the waiting list and actions to reduce them.\n\nThe inspectors found Gids \"difficult to access\" and raised concerns over managing the risk to those on the waiting list, saying many of those waiting for or receiving a service were \"vulnerable and at risk of self-harm\".\n\n\"The size of the waiting list meant that staff were unable to proactively manage the risks to patients waiting for a first appointment,\" they added.\n\nRecord-keeping at Gids was also criticised, with the CQC noting that \"staff had not consistently recorded the competency, capacity and consent of patients referred for medical treatment before January 2020\".\n\nThis had changed since, but the CQC noted that in an audit of 10 records of young people referred for hormone blockers in March 2020, \"only three contained a completed consent form and checklist for referral\".\n\nA rating of inadequate is the lowest a healthcare provider can receive from the Care Quality Commission. It means that a service is \"performing badly\".\n\nGids had been rated good at its last inspection in 2016, but since then a number of concerns have been raised about the service.\n\nThe number of young people referred to Gids has increased significantly in recent years - leading to some of the delays in care highlighted by the inspection.\n\nBBC Newsnight has explored the standard of healthcare received by young people questioning their gender identity for the last 18 months.\n\nIn that time, NHS England has changed its guidance on the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, saying little is known about the long-term side effects, and an independent review of this area of health is under way.\n\nLast June we revealed how some Gids staff had raised serious concerns about safeguarding at the service, the speed of assessments, and whether patients' traumatic backgrounds and other difficulties were always adequately explored.\n\nThe comments were made as part of an official internal review into Gids, which also described how staff felt they had been \"shut down\". We also discovered that some of these concerns dated back to 2005.\n\nFurthermore, it was not possible to clearly understand why clinical decisions had been made.\n\nAfter reviewing 35 care records, the CQC found there was \"no clearly defined assessment process\" and \"many records did not demonstrate good practice\".\n\nThe records also appeared to be \"insufficient\" in considering the needs of young people with autism spectrum disorders.\n\nIn a sample of 22 records, the CQC found more than half mentioned autistic spectrum disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but \"records did not demonstrate consideration of the relationship between autistic spectrum disorder and gender dysphoria\".\n\nSignificant variation in the clinical approach of different staff members was also noted. Assessments of young people ranged from \"two or three sessions\" in some cases to over 25, or even more than 50.\n\nCQC deputy chief inspector of hospitals Kevin Cleary said his team continued to monitor the trust \"extremely closely\" and inspected the service again because \"we were extremely clear that there were improvements needed in providing person-centred care, capacity and consent, safe care and treatment, and governance\".\n\n\"In addition, vulnerable young people were not having their needs met as they were waiting too long for treatment.\"\n\nThe leadership at the trust knew \"exactly what improvements are needed\", he added.\n\nThe trust said: \"We take the CQC's report very seriously and would like to say sorry to patients for the length of time they are waiting to be seen, which was a critical factor in arriving at this rating.\"\n\nAccepting there was a \"need for improvements in our assessments, systems and processes\", the trust said it agreed with the CQC that the \"growth in referrals has exceeded the capacity of the service\".\n\nIt added improvements were being made, saying: \"We are already finalising plans to bring in senior clinical and operational expertise from outside the service to help us implement the necessary changes and consider how we can improve on current processes and practice - including how we standardise our assessment process.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned there will be \"tough weeks to come\" as the UK reported another all-time high of daily coronavirus deaths.\n\nA further 1,820 people have died within 28 days of a positive Covid test, according to government figures.\n\nIt means the total number of deaths by that measure is now 93,290.\n\nMr Johnson said there was now a \"race against time\" to vaccinate the vulnerable but he hoped there would be a \"real difference\" by spring.\n\nIn an interview with broadcasters, he said the high number of deaths was \"appalling\" and a reflection of the peak infection rates seen a couple of weeks ago.\n\nHe said: \"I must warn people there will be tough weeks to come, but as the vaccine goes in and that programme accelerates, there will be, I think, a real difference by spring.\"\n\nJust under half of the newly reported deaths occurred on Tuesday, while a further quarter took place on Monday or Sunday with the remainder last week or even earlier.\n\nThe previous highest number of daily deaths was the 1,610 reported on Tuesday.\n\nSome 4,609,740 people have now received the first dose of a vaccine - a rise of 343,163 from yesterday.\n\nThere were also a further 38,905 cases, with 3,887 more patients admitted into hospital.\n\nIt is the second consecutive day deaths have hit a new high.\n\nThat, sadly, was to be expected as it is a reflection of the surge in cases seen during December.\n\nIt takes a week or two from the point of infection for someone to become seriously ill - and they can then spend some time in hospital. The high number is also a result of delays reporting deaths - a quarter happened last week or even before.\n\nBut make no mistake the death toll is going up. If you look at the average over the course of a week, the numbers being reported at the moment are twice what they were just two weeks ago.\n\nHowever, we also know they should soon start coming down. Daily infections are falling, with signs lockdown is taking effect. For four days in a row new diagnoses have been below 40,000 - after averaging 60,000 at the start of year.\n\nIt could be another week or so before we start to see the impact of that in the death figures. The hope then would be that within a few weeks we could start seeing a more rapid fall as the impact of the vaccination programme begins to bite.\n\nBut before that happens the daily totals reported could, sadly, go even higher.\n\nNew coronavirus cases are down by 21.5% over the last seven days. But the number of patients being admitted into hospital in the same period has not yet fallen (up by 0.5%).\n\nThe prime minister said it looked as though infection rates across the country overall might now be peaking or flattening, but he cautioned that \"they're not flattening very fast\".\n\nAsked if daily deaths would continue to rise, he said it was \"difficult to predict\".\n\nHe added: \"We must hope that by getting the numbers of daily infections down in the way that perhaps has been happening since the lockdown that will feed through into a reduction in deaths as well.\n\n\"But I must stress that we have tough weeks to come now as we roll out the vaccine.\n\n\"The light will only really begin to dawn as we get those vaccination numbers up.\"\n\nEarlier, the government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, told Sky News: \"This is very, very bad at the moment, with enormous pressure, and in some cases it looks like a war zone in terms of the things that people are having to deal with.\"\n\nHe said there was \"light at the end of the tunnel\" in the form of the vaccination programme.\n\nBut he said vaccines were \"not going to do the heavy lifting for us at the moment, anywhere near it\".\n\nMilitary personnel are going to be deployed to a number of hospitals to help staff cope with high numbers of cases, including in Northern Ireland and Exeter.\n\nAnd this week 10 hospital trusts across England consistently reported having no spare adult critical care beds.\n\nIn other developments, Home Secretary Priti Patel said ministers were working to ensure police and other frontline workers were moved up the priority list for the Covid vaccine.\n\nMr Johnson said the government must rely on advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, but wanted front-line workers to be immunised \"as soon as possible\".\n\nHe also said the vaccination programme remained \"on track\" despite \"constraints on supply\".", "Theresa May has accused her successor Boris Johnson of \"abandoning\" the UK's moral leadership on the world stage.\n\nThe ex-prime minister said Mr Johnson's decision to cut the overseas aid budget below 0.7% of national income had reduced the UK's global \"credibility\".\n\nShe wrote in the Daily Mail the UK had to \"live up to its values\" and would be judged by its actions not its rhetoric.\n\nMr Johnson said the UK was \"embarking on a quite phenomenal year\" of global leadership.\n\nQuestioned about Mrs May's comments by the SNP's Westminster leader Ian Blackford at Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Johnson said: \"I think it's very important the prime minister of the UK has the best possible relationship with the president of the United States.\n\n\"That's part of the job description.\"\n\nHe cited the UK's hosting of a global vaccine summit, the upcoming COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, as well as the G7 summit of leading industrial nations, in Cornwall, and his pledge to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 as examples of the UK's global leadership.\n\nMr Blackford called on the PM to reverse \"his cruel policy of cutting international aid for the world's poorest\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The SNP Westminster leader called in the PM to reverse his \"cruel\" international aid policy\n\nLater on Wednesday, Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States, succeeding Donald Trump.\n\nIn advance of the event, Mr Johnson said he looked forward to working \"hand-in-hand\" with the new administration and that post-Covid challenges could only be tackled by \"international co-operation\".\n\nBut, in an article in the Daily Mail, Mrs May suggested Mr Johnson had squandered international goodwill by choosing not to meet the longstanding UN target of spending 0.7% of income on international development.\n\nThe government says it cannot meet the figure - enshrined in UK law - this year because of the strain placed on the public finances by the pandemic.\n\nTheresa May has made these criticisms - on overseas aid and the threat by the government to override international law - before.\n\nQuite often she gets a dig in when she stands up in the House of Commons.\n\nBut packaging it all up in this way, on this day, is, in the words of one of her close former advisers, \"quite punchy\".\n\nThe government would rather focus on the relationship it is going to forge with the new US president.\n\nMinisters feel they have quite a lot in common with Joe Biden when it comes to working together on the world stage, fighting climate change and co-operating on global security.\n\nMrs May also criticised Mr Johnson's support for legislation which could have allowed the UK to go back on parts of its Withdrawal Agreement with the EU, had it been passed.\n\nControversial clauses were ultimately removed from the Internal Market Bill in December, after the UK and EU reached an agreement.\n\nBut Mr Johnson's threat to break international law was criticised in Europe and the US - where Mr Biden warned it could imperil peace in Northern Ireland.\n\nMrs May said the UK was \"well placed to play a decisive role in shaping this more co-operative world but to lead we must live up to our values\".\n\n\"Other countries listen to what we say not simply because of who we are, but because of what we do. The world does not owe us a prominent place on its stage,\" she added.\n\n\"Whatever the rhetoric we deploy, it is our actions which count. So, we should do nothing which signals a retreat from our global commitments.\"\n\nMrs May suggested the end of the Trump presidency could be a catalyst for a change in world politics\n\nMrs May, who had a sometimes strained relationship with Mr Trump, said Mr Biden's election presented the UK with a \"golden opportunity\" for Western democracies to reverse the trend towards \"absolutism\" - and a \"few strongmen facing off against each other\" - in global affairs.\n\nThe UK holds the presidency of the G7 this year and hosts the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.\n\nMr Johnson said he looked forward to welcoming Mr Biden to the UK at least twice in 2021.\n\n\"In our fight against Covid and across climate change, defence, security, and in promoting and defending democracy, our goals are the same and our nations will work hand-in-hand to achieve them,\" he added.", "(From left to right) Janet Yellen, Lloyd Austin, Deb Haaland\n\nPresident Joe Biden's first cabinet is being described as the most diverse ever. The latest historic first is an openly gay cabinet secretary.\n\nWhen George Washington convened the first cabinet meeting two centuries ago - though he didn't call it by that name - he enshrined the idea of promoting diverse perspectives at the heart of US government. Of course, back in 1791, all the voices in the room were white and male.\n\nYou won't find the cabinet mentioned in the lines of the Constitution, but the first president saw the value of advisers who could guide him on major issues while bringing different viewpoints to the table.\n\nIn 2021, America has seen its first openly gay cabinet secretary in Pete Buttigieg - the latest Biden confirmation - as well as its first female treasury secretary, first black Pentagon chief and more.\n\nMr Biden has been under pressure from all sides to deliver on his promises of a cabinet that truly reflects the country rather than a line-up of familiar political faces.\n\nThe graphic above shows all of Mr Biden's nominees - those with black and white photos are white men, while those with colour photographs are in one or more of these categories: women; people belonging to ethnic minorities; member of the LGBT community.\n\n\"This cabinet will be more representative of the American people than any other cabinet in history,\" Mr Biden told reporters in December.\n\nIf approved by the Senate, it will include Congresswoman Deb Haaland as the first Native American cabinet secretary in US history and Miguel Cardona, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, as his education chief.\n\nMr Biden's first cabinet is even more diverse than that put together by Barack Obama, who came close to truly reflecting the country but fell short with seven women to 16 men, and just one black secretary.\n\nBut not everyone has been pleased with his choices. When Mr Biden chose General Lloyd Austin to lead the Pentagon - the first black man to do so - other activists were upset that the position was yet again denied to a woman. And Mr Biden picked two white men to head the state and agriculture agencies - Anthony Blinken and Tom Vilsack - when progressive groups would rather have seen him nominate black women to the roles.\n\nProgressive liberals have also criticised Mr Biden's selections as too safe, too moderate, too establishment and too old. For many of the supporters who delivered Mr Biden the presidency, he's not there just yet.\n\nSince 1933, only 11 presidents have named women to cabinet-level positions. No cabinets have ever matched the gender or racial balance of the country.\n\nThe cabinet size can vary depending on administration, but they're roughly composed of around 15 executives. In the last 30 years, the trend has been towards greater representation - or at least it was, until the Trump administration.\n\nOn the day of President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the Washington Post wrote that the new Democratic leader had assembled \"the most diverse Cabinet in history: five women, four blacks and two Latinos\".\n\nMr Clinton's small business administrator Aida Alvarez was the first-ever Latina appointed to a cabinet-level position.\n\nPresident George W Bush's first cabinet was lauded by the New York Times as \"a governing team every bit as ethnically and racially diverse as President Clinton's\".\n\nMr Bush chose Colin Powell, the son of Jamaican immigrants, to become the country's first black secretary of state. He also tapped Norman Mineta - a Democrat who became the first Asian American to hold a cabinet-level spot under Mr Clinton - to head his transportation department.\n\nLater on, the Bush administration made history again with the appointment of Condoleezza Rice: the first black woman to serve as secretary of state and then as national security adviser. Mr Bush also placed the first Pacific Islander and Asian American woman, Elaine Chao, in a cabinet role as labour secretary.\n\nPresident Barack Obama's history-making first cabinet was dubbed a \"majority-minority\". Mr Obama's inner circle had seven women, nine minorities and just eight white men.\n\nUnder Mr Obama, Susan Rice became the first black woman to serve as US ambassador to the United Nations, and Eric Holder became the first black US attorney general.\n\nIn a throwback to the Reagan era, President Donald Trump's inner circle was notably white, affluent and male - though he had more women in his White House than previous Republicans.\n\nAnd Mr Trump did appoint women to other roles in the administration. He named the first Indian-American, Nikki Haley, as UN ambassador.\n\nBut why has it taken this long for women and minorities to make it into the room where decisions happen?\n\n\"When we think about how you get to these roles, one way is to come through elected office,\" says Professor Kelly Dittmar of the Rutgers University Center for American Women and Politics.\n\n\"So if you have a dearth of women and women of colour in elective office, and that's where presidents are looking, in part, to identify cabinet officials, then you already start with an uneven pool.\"\n\nWe saw the first woman in US Congress in 1916, she explains, but it took nearly two more decades before President Franklin Roosevelt appointed the first woman to a cabinet role (that was Labor Secretary Frances Perkins).\n\nThe story for black and other ethnic minority Americans has taken even longer. The first black man took a seat in Congress in 1870, but we didn't see a black man in the cabinet until President Lyndon Johnson appointed Robert Weaver in 1966. It took until 1968 for the first black woman to be elected to Congress. The first black woman in the cabinet followed in 1977 (Patricia Roberts Harris, Housing Secretary).\n\nThe US has no formal rules requiring equal representation for these groups in government, either.\n\nCountries with quotas in government or at the political party level have made strides towards equality at leadership levels. For example, Rwanda in 2018 saw 61% women in its lower chamber.\n\nIn three key posts, the Defence, Treasury, and Veteran's Affairs departments, there has never been a woman in the job - until now.\n\nOn 25 January, Janet Yellen was confirmed as Treasury Secretary, breaking that particular glass ceiling.\n\nOld time stereotypes have given way in this sector. Surveys show people nowadays are more likely to rate the genders equal when it comes to handling the economy.\n\nProf Dittmar says there are more persistent stereotypes about men versus women's expertise when it comes to defence and national security matters, and public opinion polls have shown this divide. Women weren't allowed in the military until 1948.\n\n\"Even though we have certainly seen greater diversification, these fields are among the most male dominant, especially at the highest levels,\" says Prof Dittmar. \"There's all sorts of biases going on within those structures to prevent women's advancement, I'm sure. That helps explain why those gaps have been there at least historically.\"\n\nOhio State University political science and gender studies Professor Wendy Smooth says these appointments are a way of signalling broader initiatives and values - inextricably tied to policy, but also indicators of identity.\n\n\"One of the early ways that a presidential administration expresses that willingness to be accountable is through cabinet picks,\" Prof Smooth says.\n\n\"These are the first acts that demonstrate the will of the administration, the spirit of the administration, the values of the administration. It's an identity moment. It's going to be the who we are as the Biden administration and who we are interested in connecting with in the American public.\"\n\nIt may be difficult to directly measure the importance of symbolism, but turning preconceived notions of leadership upside down can have very tangible implications.\n\n\"If you see a woman as secretary of defence for the first time, does that start to disrupt expectations that men are better and more expert in areas of defence? Yes, inevitably it does,\" Prof Dittmar says.\n\nShe says the same is true for Vice-President Kamala Harris and her history-making appointment.\n\n\"I hope that after her tenure as vice-president, the next time we have women running for president that these questions about electability or qualifications or capability will be at least fewer than they were.\"\n\nAnd research from an increasingly diverse Congress has shown that women bring priorities and issues to the table that may otherwise have been ignored. \"And that, ultimately, is better for making policy that better speaks to the experiences of the population that they serve,\" Prof Dittmar explains.\n\n\"Unless you can tell me that living your life as a woman or as a black woman or as a South Asian woman in the United States is the same as living your life as a white man, then I don't at all understand why we wouldn't expect that to make a difference in the lens through which they see policy.\"", "Joy Morgan was a second year midwifery student at the University of Hertfordshire\n\nA student murdered by a fellow church member may have been given drugs without her knowing, an inquest heard.\n\nThe body of Joy Morgan, 20, was found in Hertfordshire woodland in October 2019, two months after Shohfah-El Israel was convicted of her murder.\n\nTraces of MDMA were found in her body and the inquest was told there was no evidence that Ms Morgan would have taken the drug herself voluntarily.\n\nIsrael, of Fordwych Road, north-west London, was jailed for life and ordered to serve a minimum term of 17 years for Ms Morgan's murder in August 2019, despite the fact her body had not been found.\n\nDuring sentencing, Judge Michael Soole said Israel's \"cruel and cowardly\" refusal to reveal her whereabouts caused \"continuing distress and suffering\" to her family.\n\nShohfah-El Israel was convicted by a jury at Reading Crown Court\n\nTwo months later, the remains of Ms Morgan were found in woodland off Chadwell Road, Norton Green, near Stevenage.\n\nPart of the police evidence showed the killer had been in the area of the woods shortly after Ms Morgan's disappearance in December 2018.\n\nShe was reported missing on 7 February 2019 after failing to return to her studies.\n\nBoth Israel and Ms Morgan, who was in her second year at the University of Hertfordshire studying midwifery, were worshippers at the Israel United in Christ Church in Ilford.\n\nAn inquest at Hatfield Coroner's Court heard her body was found badly decomposed, and wrapped in black plastic bin liners and gaffer tape.\n\nThe court heard toxicology tests showed MDMA in her body, and Det Insp Justine Jenkins said there was no evidence to indicate she would have voluntarily or knowingly taken illegal drugs.\n\n\"She was a church-goer, there is nothing to suggest [she took drugs] at all.\n\n\"We did, however, find MDMA in Israel's car, and it is likely that he was responsible for giving her these drugs.\"\n\nJoy Morgan's remains were found in woodland at Norton Green\n\nForensic pathologist Dr Charlotte Randall said there were three possible minor bruises on Ms Morgan's limbs. She added there was no evidence that Ms Morgan had been stabbed or shot, or restrained or suffered injuries consistent with a sexual assault.\n\nShe found evidence of a possible fracture to her hyoid bone, but there was nothing to suggest she had suffered compression of the neck.\n\nDr Randall said there was no evidence the student had suffered a head injury, but said she could have been rendered unconscious by a blow to the head that was \"non-fatal\".\n\nShe could not rule out suffocation as a cause of death, potentially following milder blunt force trauma to the head.\n\nCoroner Geoffrey Sullivan said: \"[The MDMA] is not something that she would have taken and one can't exclude that she was given that, and it in some way rendered her incapable or unconscious.\"\n\nHe said the cause of Ms Morgan's death could not be ascertained.\n\nAfter the inquest, her mother Carol Morgan described her daughter as \"an amazing person\".\n\n\"She's been cremated, I haven't decided where to put her ashes so at the moment she's still at home with me,\" she said.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "In the end, the master provocateur ended up provoking the wrong person in the wrong way at the wrong time.\n\nUntil August 2017, Steve Bannon was arguably the second most powerful man in Washington. The president's one-time chief strategist was the puller of strings, the Trump-whisperer, revelling in his role as an agent of chaos.\n\nAfter the 2016 election, he was among \"the best talent in politics\" - in Trump's words.\n\nThen he became \"Sloppy Steve\", a derogatory nickname used by the US president after Bannon was quoted in a book saying several things that appear to have made his former boss unhappy.\n\nOne example that made headlines was that the president's son, Donald Trump Jr, had committed a \"treasonous\" act in talking to Russians.\n\nBannon's backers cut their ties with him, he left the powerful right-wing media empire Breitbart, and the future of the man behind some of Trump's most headline-grabbing policies was left up in the air.\n\nAnd then in August 2020, more bad news. Bannon was arrested and charged with fraud over an online fundraising scheme to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.\n\nProsecutors said he received more than $1m - and used some of it to pay off personal expenses. He pleaded not guilty.\n\nEven in a White House where political careers have the life expectancy of a house fly, Bannon's sudden rise and fall over four years is remarkable. Here's how it came about.\n\nAs executive chairman of Breitbart - a combative conservative site with an anti-establishment agenda - Bannon was an early cheerleader for Trump and Trumpism.\n\nBut it was not until 15 months into the property tycoon's presidential race that Bannon joined his team.\n\nBy that point he was already, according to a profile on the Bloomberg website, \"the most dangerous political operative in America\", a man with Democrats and establishment Republicans in his crosshairs, and a knack for well-timed confrontation. A disruptive Trump presented Bannon with a golden opportunity.\n\nWithout Seinfeld, there is no Steve Bannon - it will become clear, don't worry\n\nBannon was born into a family of Irish Catholics - all Kennedy Democrats - in Virginia in November 1953.\n\nHe was not political, he said, until an eight-year stint with the Navy starting in 1977, when he became a Reagan Republican in response to President Carter's handling of the Iran conflict.\n\nA master of reinvention, he went on to work as an executive with the Goldman Sachs bank, before helping finance and produce Hollywood films and later emerging as a political Svengali.\n\nHis record in Hollywood can be described as patchy at best (\"The business runs on talent relationships,\" one former colleague told the New Yorker. \"He had this real will-to-power vibe that was so off-putting.\")\n\nBut Bannon did strike gold in one big way - by negotiating a share of the profits in a new television show, Seinfeld, in 1993. The show ran for nine seasons and was widely syndicated - in November 2016, Forbes estimated that Bannon, if he owned only a 1% share in the show's profits, would have earned $32.6m (£24m) by that point.\n\nAfter returning to the US from the Chinese city of Shanghai in 2008 feeling the Bush administration was a \"disaster\", Bannon was struck by what he described to the New Yorker as \"this phenomenon called Sarah Palin\". Bannon warmed to the brand of populism employed by the Alaskan governor picked as John McCain's Republican running mate in the 2008 presidential race.\n\nThat populist wave would come crashing to shore with Trump's participation in the 2016 election, a wave Bannon proudly rode the whole way. In Trump, he recognised a willing outlet for his idea that, according to Wolff, \"the new politics was not the art of compromise, but the art of conflict\".\n\nBannon had long talked up Trump's chances on Breitbart News Network, which he took over in 2012 after the death of its founder, Andrew Breitbart. Bannon considered Trump, according to Wolff's book, \"a big warm-hearted monkey\".\n\nLike many of the businessman's cheerleaders, Bannon was eventually invited into his inner circle, becoming the CEO of the Trump campaign in August 2016.\n\nDishevelled, regularly unshaven, and prone to wearing two shirts at the same time, he was an unlikely candidate to work closely with Trump, who places a high value on appearance. But somehow it worked.\n\nBannon's economic nationalist outlook and his eagerness for a \"deconstruction of the administrative state\" - a tearing apart of the system of taxes and regulations that he believed had hindered the US over years - chimed with Trump's \"Make America Great Again\" plea.\n\nTwo days after his arrival, Bannon replaced Paul Manafort as campaign chairman.\n\nBannon's counterpart in the Democratic camp, Robby Mook, responded furiously: \"Donald Trump has decided to double down on his most small, nasty and divisive instincts by turning his campaign over to someone who is best known for running a so-called news site that peddles divisive, sometimes racist... sometimes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.\"\n\nThe provocateur in Bannon will almost certainly have enjoyed the reaction to his appointment. Less than three months later, he'd have even more to celebrate.\n\nTrump and Bannon thought as one in the last weeks of the campaign, to the extent that the Republican candidate would often demand: \"Where's my Steve? Where's my Steve?\", according to one former Trump aide.\n\nIn interviews after the event, Bannon said he always believed Trump would win. But not everyone else did, according to Michael Wolff's book. Indeed, in the weeks after the billionaire won, \"he had come to credit Bannon with something like mystical powers\" for having predicted the victory.\n\nWhite House appointments aren't often met with wide protests - but then Steve Bannon's was no ordinary appointment\n\nDays after the election, Trump named his trusted lieutenant as \"chief strategist\" - a newly created role - in his cabinet.\n\nThere were wide protests against the decision, and 169 members of the House - all Democrats - sent a letter to the president-elect asking him to withdraw Bannon's nomination, saying \"bigotry, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia should have no place in our society, and they certainly have no place in the White House\".\n\nBannon's vision was made clear in Trump's bleak inaugural address, which he wrote. Wolff says in his book it was \"a Bannon-driven message to the other side that the country was about to undergo profound change... his take-back-the-country, America-first, carnage-everywhere vision of the country\".\n\nThe \"American carnage\" speech painted a vision of a US with \"mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation\".\n\nThe full ramifications of Bannon's America First policy were made clear a week later, with Trump signing an executive order dreamt up by his chief strategist that banned people from seven Muslim-majority countries from travelling to the US. It caught many White House staff unaware.\n\nBannon, Wolff writes, was \"satisfied\" at the move and the subsequent outrage. \"He could not have hoped to draw a more vivid line between the two Americas - Trump's and liberals',\" Wolff writes, adding that the timing of its release before a busy weekend was deliberate - so it could cause as much chaos as possible.\n\nOne word that regularly features in interviews with Bannon is \"war\". Trump HQ on election night was \"the war room\", the same name he gave to the Oval Office when Trump took over. When Bannon would go on to leave the White House, he said he was going to \"war\" on Trump's behalf.\n\nFor Bannon, disorder was the new order in the White House. He and Trump were creating conflict and confusion, and that suited Bannon just fine.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Steve Bannon's three goals for the Trump presidency\n\nA day after Trump's executive order on immigration was signed, there was another controversial announcement - the US president downgraded military chiefs of staff from his National Security Council and gave a regular seat to Bannon instead.\n\nOnly career diplomats and generals usually join the council, the main group advising the president on national security and foreign affairs. By being invited to be a member, Bannon - in his first government job, aged 63 - was allowed to join high-level discussions about national security.\n\nThe reaction was, predictably, one of shock.\n\nDemocrat former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called the move \"dangerous and unprecedented\", and Obama's former national security adviser Susan Rice tweeted: \"This is stone-cold crazy. After a week of crazy.\"\n\nThe White House, of course, defended their man as being more than capable enough to be on the council, pointing out his Navy service.\n\nBut in retrospect, this promotion is about as good as it got for Bannon in the White House.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Some of the people who have resigned or been fired under President Trump\n\nIn the end, Bannon lasted a little over two months on the National Security Council, leaving in April.\n\nIt was not a demotion, White House officials said, but the reasons for the change were not clear. Perhaps, just by shaking up the old order, the appointment had done its job.\n\nBut this change in his responsibilities became an indication of what was to come.\n\nAfter a summer of reports that Bannon was less and less visible in a White House suffering infighting and leaks, he left his position last August.\n\nIt was sold as a strategic move - Bannon would head back to Breitbart, where he would fight for Trump's agenda. \"I've got my hands back on my weapons,\" he said. \"It's Bannon the Barbarian.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Donald J. Trump This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nBreitbart welcomed back what it called its \"populist hero\", with editor-in-chief Alex Marlow saying Bannon had \"his finger on the pulse of the Trump agenda\".\n\nBut his departure from the White House came at the end of a week in which Bannon had come under fire from a number of quarters, and amid reports of tension with key aides including National Security Adviser HR McMaster.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Charlottesville was the culmination of months of protests by white supremacists\n\nClashes had taken place the previous weekend between far-right and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, after which Trump blamed \"both sides\" for the violence - Bannon had once said his Breitbart site was \"a platform for the alt-right\" who were responsible for the violence.\n\nTwo days before he left his job, an interview with Bannon in the American Prospect, a liberal magazine, reportedly infuriated the president. Bannon was quoted as dismissing the idea of a military solution in North Korea, undercutting Trump.\n\nThen, a day later, a BuzzFeed report that said that Trump was unhappy with the credit his adviser was taking for the election victory.\n\n\"He undermined Trump's ego,\" Joshua Green, the author of a book on Bannon's relationship with Trump, Devil's Bargain, told the BBC.\n\n\"Trump can't abide the thesis of my book and Michael Wolff's book, which is that Bannon is the brains of the operation and Trump is an erratic charlatan. That's what Trump won't abide.\"\n\nBannon backed Roy Moore in the Alabama senate race - it didn't end well for them\n\nNow on the outside looking in, Bannon was more than happy to tell Trump where he thought he was going wrong. He attacked him through Breitbart for reversing course and sending more troops to Afghanistan, and called Trump's firing of FBI director James Comey the biggest mistake in \"modern political history\".\n\nBut Bannon was back in his natural habitat as he gunned for the Republican establishment, putting his weight behind ultra-conservative populist candidate Roy Moore in a senate race in Alabama.\n\nMoore comfortably won the primary against Luther Strange, the incumbent backed by Trump and the Republican machine.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nBut Moore went on to face allegations of sexual misconduct with teenage girls, which he denied, and in December he lost the race to Doug Jones, who became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Alabama in 25 years.\n\nBannon's man, one eventually backed by Trump and the Republican party, had suffered a humiliating loss in what was supposed to be Bannon's first big victory. A win would have given him momentum in his campaign to field populist candidates against Republican senators in the 2018 mid-terms. A loss made that much harder.\n\nBannon - humbled, surprised - credited Democrats for having worked hardest, but the defeat risked grounding his populist movement to a halt.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Trump harsher on Bannon than he is on his 'worst enemies'\n\nTrump may once have been Bannon's \"big warm-hearted monkey\". But even cuddly monkeys can bite.\n\nAs details of Michael Wolff's book emerged, one key line stood out - Bannon described a meeting Donald Trump Jr held in New York with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential election campaign as \"treasonous\".\n\n\"They're going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,\" he told Wolff.\n\nThe reaction from the White House - reeling from a special-counsel investigation into possible collusion between the Trump team and Russia - was swift. Bannon had \"lost his mind\" after losing his White House position, the president said.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Donald J. Trump This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSoon after, Rebekah Mercer, a wealthy benefactor of Bannon's, said she had ended her support for his political efforts.\n\nBannon, left with fewer and fewer allies, insisted his comments were not directed at Mr Trump's son but at another former aide, Paul Manafort, who was also present at the meeting in Trump Tower.\n\nBut there was only one way left to go. The goodbye from Breitbart was polite, and Bannon was out.\n\nSomewhere, somehow, Bannon the master string-puller will re-emerge - possibly in a different guise.\n\nCould he and Trump ever reconcile?\n\n\"Trump has fired people before and then let them back in,\" Joshua Green, the author of Devil's Bargain, said.\n\n\"But I've never seen Trump bury somebody as forcefully as he did Bannon, both in his statement and the parade of White House officials who have come out to heap scorn and derision on Bannon.\n\n\"It's awfully hard to imagine how Bannon could recover from that.\"\n\nAn unexpected twist unfolded ahead of the November 2020 election when Bannon and three other people were arrested and charged with fraud over a fundraising campaign to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.\n\nYou'll remember that building this wall was a key pledge of Trump's 2016 campaign, which Bannon played a leading role in.\n\nBannon, Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors in connection with the \"We Build the Wall\" campaign, which raised $25m (£19m), the Department of Justice (DoJ) said.\n\nBannon received more than $1m, at least some of which he used to cover personal expenses, the DoJ said.\n\nEach of the two charges - conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering - carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.", "New legislation has been passed to protect Scottish shop workers from abuse from customers.\n\nThe Protection of Workers Bill will make it a new specific offence to assault, abuse or threaten staff.\n\nIncidents involving an age-restricted product, such as alcohol or cigarettes, could be treated more seriously.\n\nThe MSP behind the bill, Labour's Daniel Johnson, said attacks on retail workers had increased during the Covid pandemic.\n\nHe told Holyrood: \"Shop staff have been spat at for asking customers to socially distance, and stock has been smashed in retaliation for item limits being imposed.\n\n\"Violence, threats and abuse should not be just part of anyone's job.\"\n\nMr Johnson said that staff requesting age ID could be a \"trigger factor\" in many incidents of abuse.\n\nThe new legislation will also cover people working in bars, restaurants and hotels, and those delivering items bought online who may have to ask for proof of age.\n\nThe bill was supported by all parties at Holyrood, despite the government initially arguing that its provisions were already covered by existing criminal laws.\n\nThe Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service told MSPs that further legislation was not needed, noting that \"violence, threats and abuse against retail workers, or indeed any other person, are prosecuted every day in the courts in Scotland using offences which are commonly understood\".\n\nPolice Scotland meanwhile said there would be \"no significant change in how we go about our business\" as a result of it.\n\nCommunity safety minister Ash Denham said that while there was a \"wide range of existing criminal laws\" currently in place to protect staff, the new legislation could \"make the general public think more about their behaviour when they interact with retail workers\".\n\nThe Scottish Conservatives also backed the bill, although they argued that the presumption against short sentences in Scotland meant anyone convicted under the new law would ultimately not be jailed.\n\nPaul Gerrard, public affairs director for the Co-Op, told BBC Radio Scotland's Drivetime that the retailer had seen a 450% rise in violent incidents in the last few years.\n\n\"It is a huge problem,\" he said. \"We've seen an explosion in violence and abuse toward my colleagues.\n\n\"Now across 350 stores in Scotland we have someone attacked every day. And 10 colleagues are threatened or abused every day.\n\n\"Increasingly we have seen knives, syringes and axes all used against shopworkers.\"\n\nMr Gerrard added that previous incidents were centred on shoplifting or age-restricted sales, but staff were now facing more abuse around enforcing Covid shopping rules.\n\nThe new legislation was passed by 118 votes to 0 in the Scottish Parliament.\n\nThe Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw) is now urging the UK government to introduce similar legislation to protect retail staff in England - something Labour MP Alex Norris is pursuing at Westminster.\n\nUsdaw general secretary Paddy Lillis said: \"It is a great result for our members in Scotland, who will now have the protection of the law that they deserve.\n\n\"So we are looking for MPs to support key workers across the retail sector and help turn around the UK government's opposition.\"", "Donald Trump won a surprise victory in 2016 partly because he promised to shake things up. He leaves office with two impeachments and the nation on edge. But his supporters say he kept his promises.", "More than 100 medically-trained military personnel will be deployed\n\nMembers of the military are to be brought in to help medical staff in Northern Ireland in the fight against Covid-19.\n\nHealth Minister Robin Swann has asked the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to help out, primarily at a number of hospitals across NI.\n\nMore than 100 medically-trained military personnel will be deployed.\n\nThose brought in will assist nursing staff and help on the wards in a move designed to ease the pressure on staff.\n\nIn the past, the use of the military in Northern Ireland has provoked controversy.\n\nWhile military help has already been used during the pandemic to transport equipment and patients, this is the first time military staff will be used in hospitals.\n\nIt is thought the first military staff will be made available as early as next week.\n\nMr Swann said it would have been an abdication of responsibility if he did not avail of help from the military.\n\nHe said while coronavirus cases were lower than two weeks ago, the challenge posed remained \"intense\" and intensive care pressures were expected to increase further in the next eight to 10 days.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Brandon Lewis This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHe confirmed that a request for military assistance for NI's health service had been accepted by the MoD.\n\nThe health minister thanked the MoD for the Military Aid to the Civil Authorities agreement, which is being provided in other UK regions.\n\n\"The armed forces have provided invaluable support in this pandemic, including aeromedical evacuation, real-estate and ongoing logistical planning,\" he said.\n\n\"Our hospitals are under immense pressure and an additional staffing complement will be very welcome on the front line.\n\n\"This is a health decision and I am confident it will be supported on that basis.\"\n\nNI Secretary Brandon Lewis tweeted: \"Battling #COVID19 is a national effort. I'm pleased that 110 medically-trained personnel from our Armed Forces will support health and social care teams across Northern Ireland in their vital work on the frontline against coronavirus.\"\n\nThe move has been welcomed by the Democratic Unionist Party.\n\nWhen it was announced last April that the health minster had made requests for military help, Sinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill said Mr Swann had taken that decision unilaterally.\n\nHowever, she later said her party would not rule out any measure necessary to save lives.\n\nReacting to the latest request for help, Sinn Féin said its priority throughout the pandemic had been to save lives, keep people safe and protect the health service.\n\n\"The Minister of Health has made a request for staffing support from the British Ministry of Defence,\" the party said.\n\n\"We do not rule out any measures to do so, and any effort to make the threat posed by Covid-19 into a green and orange issue is divisive and a distraction.\"\n\nAs of Wednesday, there were 832 people in hospital in Northern Ireland with coronavirus, of whom 67 were in intensive care, with 57 ventilated.\n\nA further 22 people with coronavirus died, bringing the Department of Health's total to 1,671 while there were 905 new cases.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland, 61 new Covid-19-related deaths were recorded on Wednesday, bringing the country's death toll to 2,768.\n\nA further 2,488 new cases of the virus were also confirmed by the Irish Department for Health.\n\nSpeaking at Stormont's press briefing on Wednesday, Mr Swann confirmed the executive would review the current lockdown regulations on Thursday.\n\nNorthern Ireland began a six-week lockdown on 26 December, in a bid to bring the virus under control.\n\nMinisters promised to review the regulations after four weeks.\n\nMr Swann said he would not pre-empt the outcome of Thursday's meeting but confirmed he would bring recommendations from his officials to the meeting.\n\n\"This is not the time to open floodgates or take premature decisions that would lead to another spike in cases,\" he added.\n\n\"We must stay the course.\"\n\nThe minister also provided the latest update on the number of vaccinations - 160,396 doses have now been administered in NI, with 21,690 of those second doses.\n\nHe said he understood the frustration of some people that they were still waiting to hear when their elderly or vulnerable relatives would receive their vaccine, but he urged patience.\n\n\"We cannot go faster than supplies allow,\" he said.", "The National Audit Office has had full access to the BBC's accounts since 2010\n\nThe BBC faces \"significant\" uncertainty over its financial future due to changes in viewing habits, a National Audit Office report has found.\n\n\"While the BBC remains the most used media brand in the UK, its share of younger audiences has been under pressure,\" the spending watchdog said.\n\n\"Falling audience share poses a financial risk as people are less likely to pay the licence fee.\"\n\nThe BBC said it had already set out plans for \"urgent\" reforms.\n\nAccording to the NAO report, the BBC has seen \"a notable drop\" in audience viewing while its income from the licence fee has also declined.\n\nThe BBC \"faces considerable uncertainty\" about its licence fee income and should produce \"a long-term financial plan... as soon as possible\", it states.\n\nSuch a plan, the report recommends, should \"set out the detail for the next stage of its savings, and how it will fund its new strategic priorities\".\n\nIn 2019-20, the BBC generated total income of £4.94bn, of which £3.52bn was public funding from the licence fee. That was £310m less than the corporation received from the licence fee between 2017-18.\n\nThe current cost of an annual television licence is £157.50\n\nThe report also highlighted a 30% decline in BBC TV viewing over the past decade. On average, the amount of time an adult spent watching broadcast BBC television fell from 80 minutes a day in 2010 to 56 minutes in 2019.\n\nAnd the NAO said the BBC's financial health had been \"unexpectedly weakened\" by the impact of the coronavirus response.\n\nLast November, the BBC began negotiations with the government about the future funding it will receive from the licence fee. The fee, which is currently £157.50 annually, is due to stay in place until at least 2027, when the BBC's Royal Charter ends.\n\nIn response, the BBC said it had made \"significant savings and increased efficiencies, while maintaining our spending on content, and continuing to be the UK's most-used media organisation\".\n\nIt added: \"We have set out plans for urgent reforms focused on providing great value for all audiences and we will set out further detail on this in the coming months.\n\n\"The report also stresses the importance of stable funding for the future, which we welcome as we begin negotiations with government over the licence fee.\"\n\nThe National Union of Journalists said the report's findings \"come as no surprise\" and that the BBC needs \"a financially secure long-term deal that will guarantee its future.\"\n\nThe NAO scrutinises the finances of government departments and other public sector bodies. Last week Richard Sharp, the BBC's incoming chairman, said the licence fee was the \"least worst\" way of funding the corporation, but it \"may be worth reassessing\" in future.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "At noon on Wednesday, President Donald Trump's term will end. It's been a whirlwind four years, so what might the legacy be of such a history-making president?\n\nThere's a lot to consider, so we asked the experts to break it down for us.\n\nResponses have been edited for length and clarity.\n\nMatthew Continetti is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on the development of the Republican Party and the American conservative movement.\n\nDonald Trump will be remembered as the first president to be impeached twice. He fed the myth that the election was stolen, summoned his supporters to Washington to protest the certification of the Electoral College vote, told them that only through strength could they take back their country, and stood by as they stormed the US Capitol and interfered in the operation of constitutional government.\n\nWhen historians write about his presidency, they will do so through the lens of the riot.\n\nThey will focus on Trump's tortured relationship with the alt-right, his atrocious handling of the deadly Charlottesville protest in 2017, the rise in violent right-wing extremism during his tenure in office, and the viral spread of malevolent conspiracy theories that he encouraged.\n\nWhat else stands out to you?\n\nIf Donald Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader.\n\nA president who, before the pandemic, presided over an economic boom, re-oriented America's opinion of China, removed terrorist leaders from the battlefield, revamped the space program, secured an originalist (conservative) majority on the US Supreme Court, and authorised Operation Warp Speed to produce a Covid-19 vaccine in record time.\n\nLaura Belmonte is a history professor and dean of the Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. She is a foreign relations specialist and author of books on cultural diplomacy.\n\nHis attempt to surrender global leadership and replace it with a more inward-looking, fortress-like mentality. I don't think it succeeded, but the question is how profound has the damage to America's international reputation been - and that remains to be seen.\n\nThe moment I found jaw-dropping was the press conference he had with Vladimir Putin in 2018 in Helsinki, where he took Putin's side over US intelligence in regard to Russian interference in the election.\n\nI can't think of another episode of a president siding full force with a non-democratic society adversary.\n\nIt's also very emblematic of a larger assault on any number of multilateral institutions and treaties and frameworks that Trump has unleashed, like the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the withdrawal of the Iranian nuclear framework.\n\nWhat else stands out to you?\n\nTrump's applauding Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and meeting with North Korea's Kim Jong Un, really turning himself inside out to align the US with regimes that are the antithesis of values that the US says it wants to promote. That is something that I think was really quite distinctive.\n\nAnother aspect is extricating the US from any really assertive role in promoting human rights throughout the world, and changing the content of the annual human rights reports from the State Department and not including many topics, like LGBT equality, for instance.\n\nKathryn Brownell is a history professor at Purdue University, focusing on the relationships between media, politics, and popular culture, with an emphasis on the American presidency.\n\nBroadly speaking: Donald Trump, and his enablers in the Republican Party and conservative media, have put American democracy to the test in an unprecedented way. As a historian who studies the intersection of media and the presidency, it is truly striking the ways in which he has convinced millions of people that his fabricated version of events is true.\n\nWhat happened on 6 January at the US Capitol is a culmination of over four years during which President Trump actively advanced misinformation.\n\nJust as Watergate and the impeachment inquiry dominated historical interpretations of Richard Nixon's legacy for decades, I do think that this particular post-election moment will be at the forefront of historical assessments of his presidency.\n\nWhat else stands out to you?\n\nKellyanne Conway's first introduction of the notion of \"alternative facts\" just days into the Trump administration when disputing the size of the inaugural crowds between Trump and Barack Obama.\n\nPresidents across the 20th Century have increasingly used sophisticated measures to spin interpretation of policies and events in favourable ways and to control the media narrative of their administrations. But the assertion that the administration had a right to its own alternative facts went far beyond spin, ultimately foreshadowing the ways in which the Trump administration would govern by misinformation.\n\nTrump harnessed the power of social media and blurred the lines between entertainment and politics in ways that allowed him to bypass critics and connect directly to his supporters in an unfiltered way.\n\nFranklin Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan also used new media and a celebrity style to connect directly to the people in this unfiltered way, ultimately transforming expectations and operations of the presidency that paved the path for Trump.\n\nMary Frances Berry is a professor of American history and social thought at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on legal history and social policy. From 1980 to 2004, she was a member of the US Commission on Civil Rights.\n\nIn what he did with judges, Trump has made a long lasting change over the next 20 years, 30 years in how policies will stand up to legal tests and how they're able to be implemented - no matter what any particular president or administration proposes.\n\nThe courts are controlled by the Republican appointees. Sometimes judges surprise us, but for the most part, the historical evidence is that they pretty much do what their politics and their backgrounds say they will do.\n\nWhat else stands out to you?\n\nWhen he supported that package of measures that helped particular people in the black community, like First Step, pardoning people at the same time that he supported an amendment in the appropriations bill that gave a whole bunch of money to historically black colleges and universities for the first time.\n\nHe put all of these things together, as well as having the first stimulus programme making sure that black businessman and entrepreneurs get some of those loans they've had trouble getting before.\n\nThe effect of all of that, which we will see over time, was in the midterms, a lot more young black men voted for Trump than before. And if that's a trend, it may help the Republican party.\n\nTrump also made egregious comments about black people and other people of colour, tried to have protests against police abuse disrupted and in other ways appealed to his white supremacist base.\n\nHis lasting impact on race relations depends on what the Biden administration does on policy, and on healing and how long the pandemic and economic downturn lasts.\n\nMargaret O'Mara is history professor at the University of Washington, focusing on the political, economic, and metropolitan history of the modern US.\n\nContesting a very constitutionally and numerically clear election victory by Joe Biden.\n\nWe've had plenty of really unpleasant transitions. Herbert Hoover was incredibly unpleasant about his loss, but he still rode in that car down Pennsylvania Avenue at inauguration. He didn't talk to Franklin Roosevelt the whole time, but there still was a peaceful transfer of power.\n\nTrump is a manifestation of political forces that have been in motion for a half century or more. A culmination of what was not only going on in the Republican party, but also the Democratic party and more broadly in American politics - a kind of disillusionment with government and institutions and expertise.\n\nWhat else stands out to you?\n\nTrump is exceptional in many ways, but one of the things that really makes him stand out is that he is one of the rare presidents who was elected without having held any elected office before.\n\nTrump may go away, but there is this great frustration with the establishment, broadly defined. When you feel powerless, you vote for someone who's promising to do everything differently and Trump indeed did that.\n\nA presidency is also made by the people that the president appoints, and a great deal of experienced Republican hands were not invited to join the administration the first go round.\n\nOver time, his administration has diminished to a band of loyalists who are really not very experienced and are ideologically uninterested in wise governance of the bureaucracy. What has happened within the bowels of the bureaucracy is going to be a slow slog to rebuild.\n\nSaikrishna Prakash is a University of Virginia Law School professor focusing on constitutional law, foreign relations law and presidential powers.\n\nThe last gasps of his administration are the most consequential, as he exerts a control over his most devoted followers and he's talking about running again.\n\nHe forced people to consider what the presidency has become in a way that wasn't true I think either during the Bush or Obama administrations. Issues like the 25th Amendment and impeachment hasn't been thought of since Bill Clinton, really.\n\nIt's possible that people now when they think of the presidency are perhaps going to adopt a different stance going forward, knowing that someone like Trump could come along.\n\nIt's possible that Congress will delegate less to the president and take away some authority.\n\nWhat else stands out to you?\n\nThe president has demonstrated that there's a constituency who's opposed to a lot of these trade deals and that there are people willing to vote for those who will either extricate us from these trade deals or \"make them fairer\".\n\nThe president has also suggested that China has been taking advantage of the United States in ways that are deleterious to our economic and national security - and I think there's a consensus behind this view. No one wants to be accused of being soft on China, whereas no one cares if you're \"soft\" on Canada, right?\n\nI think people are going to fall all over themselves to be tougher or at least say they're tougher on China.\n\nDomestically the president had a populous tone to him. It wasn't ever fully realised in his policies, but we see more Republicans adopting populist ideas.", "Testing of close contacts of identified cases was due to start in secondary schools and colleges in England\n\nThe government has paused plans to roll out rapid daily coronavirus testing of close contacts, in all but a small number of secondary schools and colleges.\n\nTesting close contacts of a positive case as an alternative to isolation showed some benefits in trials.\n\nBut the emergence of a new variant means the risk of missing infections has risen, health officials say.\n\nRegular testing of staff will now increase to twice a week.\n\nMore research is needed on how daily contact testing would work given the new, more transmissible, coronavirus variant, Public Health England and NHS Test and Trace say.\n\nIn the meantime, routine testing to pick up asymptomatic cases in staff and pupils remains a key part of the government's plans.\n\nMass testing in schools, using pregnancy-style lateral flow tests to detect the virus, had been due to start in January.\n\nHowever, under new lockdown restrictions, schools have had to switch to providing online teaching until February - although children of key workers are still allowed to attend - and plans were postponed.\n\nHow testing of pupils will be organised once schools reopen is still not clear.\n\nThe original plan for rapid Covid testing in all secondary schools and colleges included:\n\nThe aim was to keep as many children in schools as possible by avoiding a whole bubble, class or year having to be sent home, and to reduce disruption from staff having to isolate.\n\nBut some scientists have consistently expressed concerns about the accuracy of the rapid tests, which do not need to be sent to a lab for the results.\n\nThey say the high number of false negatives means close contacts may wrongly think they are not infectious and go on to mix with more vulnerable people.\n\nAnd now PHE and NHS Test and Trace say the new variant, which \"increases the risk of transmission everywhere, including in school settings\", has made this a risk no longer worth taking.\n\n\"The balance between the risks (transmission of virus in schools and onward to households and the wider community) and benefits (education in a face-to-face and safe setting) for daily contact testing is unclear,\" their statement adds.\n\nA government spokesman said: \"NHS Test and Trace and Public Health England have reviewed their advice and concluded that, in light of the higher prevalence and rates of transmission of the new variant, further evaluation work is required to make sure it is achieving its aim of breaking chains of transmission and reducing cases of the virus in the community.\n\n\"There is no change to the main rollout of regular testing using rapid lateral flow tests in schools and colleges, which is already proving beneficial in finding teachers and students with coronavirus who do not have symptoms.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 'You wouldn’t want to give this to anybody'\n\nI was last here at University Hospital Monklands on 1 May when those dealing with the first wave of an unknown disease were already tired.\n\nAt that time, the deaths of 29,059 people had been registered in the UK within 28 days of a positive test for Covid-19.\n\nI returned 259 days later with the number of deaths at 89,230 to find that the staff are exhausted.\n\n\"We're all physically, mentally and emotionally drained now,\" says Fiona Bauld, an intensive care unit (ICU) staff nurse.\n\nIn the first wave, the Lanarkshire hospital was almost empty except for patients being treated for Covid or other critical and emergency needs.\n\nThis time there are just a handful of spare beds in the entire building. Staff who had helped out with critical care last year are back in their own departments, and the ICU specialists are alone once more.\n\n\"There's not really enough extra nurses to account for the extra patients so the amount of work everyone is doing is much more,\" says intensive care consultant Daniel Silcock.\n\nThe patients are changing too.\n\nIn the first wave, most patients were old and often ill before they contracted the virus, says ICU ward manager Margaret Harkins.\n\n\"This time the patients are a much younger age group and some have no underlying health conditions,\" she adds.\n\n\"We are getting people in in their 20s, 30s and 40s,\" Ms Bauld says. \"Younger people are catching this virus and becoming really critically ill with it.\"\n\nMae Mamaril (right) and her parents Jaramias and Sonia tested positive\n\nMae Mamaril is one of them. She is 26 and has no underlying health conditions.\n\nMae and her parents Jaramias and Sonia, from Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, tested positive for Covid within days of being vaccinated for their jobs.\n\nAll three ended up in Monklands but Mae was the sickest and the only member of her family admitted to intensive care.\n\nShe had to wear an oxygen mask and lie face down on a bed for three days, a treatment called proning which medics say can improve lung function in many patients.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Mae Mamaril, 26, was moved to intensive care at the start of the year\n\n\"I couldn't breathe,\" she says. \"It was really bad because they moved so quickly to give me oxygen and told me to lie on my stomach.\n\n\"All I could think about was wanting to come home, but then at the same time, I knew that if I didn't have enough oxygen, even if I went home, I would never survive.\"\n\nNot only is the hospital busy with younger people in this wave but senior doctors say a third of all patients here now have the virus.\n\nThere is another big difference outside the building.\n\nIn May, when I drove from Glasgow to the hospital in Airdrie the roads were empty, the streets silent.\n\nThat is no longer the case. Heading east to Monklands again, the M8 is the busiest I have seen it since the pandemic began.\n\nDoctors and nurses have noticed the increase in traffic too - and they are worried.\n\n\"Without a lockdown, I think it would just be a disaster,\" Dr Silcock says.\n\n\"We've had twice as many admissions this time as we did in the first wave.\"\n\nDr Sanjiv Chohan, who runs the intensive care department, says he too is worried.\n\nBut what about the many harmful side effects of lockdown - on other medical conditions, especially mental health, as well as the impact on education and the economy?\n\n\"I sympathise completely,\" says Dr Chohan, pointing out that the ICU staff are also affected by these issues.\n\n\"It's a really difficult balancing act. It's choosing the least harmful options,\" he says, adding: \"We have to preserve some ability to have functioning hospitals.\"\n\nAt times, Monklands has not been able to function normally.\n\nSince the autumn, around a third of all intensive care patients here have had to be transferred out of the hospital to other facilities — primarily to Wishaw and Hairmyres but sometimes out of Lanarkshire entirely.\n\nChief nurse Karen Goudie says she is worried about the coming weeks\n\nThe chief nurse at Monklands, Karen Goudie, says that was necessary to reduce pressure and create capacity for incoming patients.\n\nThere has not yet been a point when all Scotland's hospitals have been overwhelmed at the same time.\n\n\"No, not yet but we're worried about the coming weeks,\" says Ms Goudie. \"The projections look - scary, I guess, is the right word to use. \"\n\nStaff here believe a current increase in cases is attributable to families mixing at Christmas and to people not sticking to the current lockdown rules.\n\nStill, they have coped. Patients are now less likely than in the first wave to need the dangerous intervention of a ventilator as knowledge of how to treat the disease develops.\n\nFor many though, a Covid diagnosis can remain frightening and perilous.\n\nJim McShane, 56, works for a gas company in Motherwell. I leave intensive care to meet him on the Covid ward where he is being treated.\n\n\"You just don't know what's ahead,\" he tells me. \"It just destroys you sometimes. Brings you right down.\"\n\n\"I would tell people to stay out the road of one another,\" he says.\n\nAfter I leave, Jim is transferred to intensive care. He is now on a ventilator.\n\nThere may be some signs that Scotland's latest surge in hospital admissions may be easing.", "Gabriel is an ardent 'Latino for Trump' who is active in New York Republican circles. He wishes the Biden/Harris administration well but doesn't believe Democrats really want unity and thinks they'll reverse a lot of good Trump policies.\n\nHow did Joe Biden's inaugural speech on unity sit with you?\n\nI caught bits and pieces of the inauguration, but I did not watch the speech. I'll give it a watch when I'm not as busy. Hopefully, his message is not like what we saw on 6 January, when he tried to lambast people as white supremacists for showing up at the Capitol, because that will just alienate people.\n\nThis country has come a long way in terms of race relations and, if we really want unity, let's regain the sense of what an American is. An American isn't white, black or Jewish; it is a person within the United States that takes part in our republic.\n\nWhat do you think of the executive actions he is taking today?\n\nI knew Biden would come out swinging while he stills holds the majority in the legislative branch. It's certainly a statement in the same vein as President Trump's first few days of office, but I think it's horrible. As someone of Hispanic descent, the idea of potentially granting 11 million immigrants citizenship is a slap in the face to everyone who came through the legal process.\n\nJoining the Paris climate agreement again is widely regarded as a farce, even by some ecologists, because nations that are members in the agreement didn't actually hit their targets. The removal of the Keystone Pipeline is not only going to cost people jobs but it could potentially increase our carbon footprint. When it comes to the WHO, they failed us during the Covid pandemic. It's all just smoke and mirrors to undo what President Trump did and stick it in the face of Republicans.", "The former Western Daily Press journalist lived in the property from 1970 until 1994\n\nAn \"inspiring\" house previously owned by fantasy writer Sir Terry Pratchett has been put on the market.\n\nThe creator of the Discworld series lived in the 18th Century property, called Gaze Cottage, in the village of Rowberrow, Somerset, from 1970 until 1994.\n\nSir Terry died aged 66 in 2015, eight years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.\n\nHe wrote more than 70 books during his career and completed his final book in 2014.\n\nAt the turn of the century, Sir Terry was Britain's second most-read author, beaten only by JK Rowling.\n\nIn August 2007, it was reported he had suffered a stroke, but the following December he announced that he had been diagnosed with a very rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's disease.\n\nThe fitted kitchen is in the older half of the house\n\nRuth Treasure-Smith, from Robin King Estate Agent, said: \"He wrote most of his most famous novels in that house in the 80s.\n\n\"The house must have been inspiring. The current owner purchased the property from Terry Pratchett and has lived at the house since.\"\n\nShe said he had received letters to the house addressed to the \"Hogfather\", a quirky and satirical character from the Death collection in the Discworld series.\n\nThe sitting room has an inglenook fireplace complete with bread oven\n\nThe house is being sold at a guide price of £800,000\n\nThe first floor houses the master bedroom which overlooks the garden\n\nThe property has four bedrooms\n\nThe cottage sits on a plot comprising almost a third of an acre\n\nFollow BBC West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: bristol@bbc.co.uk", "The driver sat on his overturned van until rescuers arrived\n\nA supermarket delivery driver had to be rescued from his overturned van after he careered off the road and ended up in a fast-flowing ford, police said.\n\nFirefighters and police were called to the River Wear, Westgate, in Weardale, after reports that a Morrisons van was stuck at 17:00 GMT on Tuesday.\n\nPolice said the van had \"careered\" off the road and the man sat on top of the vehicle before being rescued.\n\nCounty Durham Fire and Rescue Service said the rescue was \"challenging.\"\n\nWater specialists from the fire service braved the river in a raft attached to a nearby footbridge and gave the man a life jacket.\n\nPolice said the driver was not injured but was taken to hospital as a precaution.\n\nThe fire service tweeted a video of the scene, and said they were \"so proud\" of the water rescue team.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by County Durham & Darlington Fire & Rescue Service This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nScott Bisset, who lives nearby, went to see if he could help after he was called by people who heard the driver shouting for help.\n\nMr Bisset, a member of the local mountain rescue team, said he thought the driver may have ended up there after being directed by his sat-nav.\n\nHe said: \"There's not a vehicle in the world that could have got through.\n\n\"The river was in flood - the snow here has melted and there was rain, so there was a lot of water in the river.\n\n\"The van was washed off and turned over on its side, luckily the front was pointing upstream, so it acted like a boat.\n\n\"If the water had been hitting the side of the van or the back, the driver would unfortunately have drowned.\n\n\"When I got there the driver was extremely distressed.\"\n\nThe van has not yet been recovered from the water\n\nHe also said that rescuers had put their lives at risk.\n\n\"I know they practice for this but in those conditions, with that freezing water travelling at great speed, in the dark and the pouring rain, it was very dangerous and they were very brave,\" he said.\n\nThe van has not yet been recovered from the water.\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "US President Joe Biden has officially announced his bid for re-election, asking Americans to help him \"finish the job\" he started more than two years ago.\n\nMr Biden, 80, faced a turbulent first two years in office marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, economic woes and geopolitical challenges including the US pull-out from Afghanistan and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.\n\nOn the campaign trail, Mr Biden - who served as Vice-President under Barack Obama - is likely to focus on his efforts to prop up the US economy after the pandemic, as well as his successes pushing through legislation focused on infrastructure, climate change and prescription drugs.\n\nBut a key argument for a second term will be what he has described as a turn towards authoritarianism from Donald Trump and his supporters in the \"Make America Great Again\" movement.\n\n\"The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer,\" he said in a video launching his new campaign. \"I know what I want the answer to be. This is not a time to be complacent. That's why I'm running for re-election.\"\n\nThe President, however, is also likely to face questions about his age and ability to serve, as well as about his handling of inflation, immigration and other issues that worry Americans.\n\nThe upcoming campaign is likely the last in a career in politics that has spanned more than four decades, and may again see him square off against Donald Trump.\n\nSo who is Joe Biden and how did he get to the White House?\n\nMr Biden ran for the Democratic 2008 nomination before dropping out and joining the Obama ticket.\n\nHis eight years in the Obama White House - where he frequently appeared at the president's side - has allowed Mr Biden to lay claim to much of Mr Obama's legacy, including passage of the Affordable Care Act, as well as the stimulus package and reforms enacted in response to the financial crisis.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. A look back at Joe Biden's life and political career\n\nAs a long-time Washington insider, Mr Biden had solid foreign affairs credentials, and helped balance Mr Obama's comparative lack of executive experience.\n\nThe so-called \"Middle Class Joe\" was also brought on board to help woo the blue-collar white voters who had proved a difficult group for Mr Obama to win over.\n\nHe made headlines in 2012 by saying he was \"absolutely comfortable\" with same-sex marriage, comments that were seen to undercut the president, who had yet to give full-throated support for the policy. Mr Obama ultimately did so, just days after Mr Biden.\n\nMr Biden's two terms supporting the first black president followed a long political career.\n\nThe six-term senator from Delaware was first elected in 1972. He ran for president in 1988 but withdrew after he admitted to plagiarising a speech by the then leader of the British Labour Party, Neil Kinnock.\n\nHis lengthy tenure in the nation's capital has given critics ample material for attacks.\n\nEarly in his career, he sided with southern segregationists in opposing court-ordered school bussing to racially integrate public schools.\n\nAnd, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991, he oversaw Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings and has been sharply criticised for his handling of Anita Hill's allegations that she was sexually harassed by the nominee.\n\nIn 1974, Biden was the youngest US senator\n\nMr Biden was also a fierce advocate of a 1994 anti-crime bill that many on the left now say encouraged lengthy sentences and mass incarceration.\n\nThe record made Mr Obama's moderate vice-president a sometimes uncomfortable fit for the modern Democratic Party.\n\nMr Biden's life has been dogged by personal tragedy.\n\nIn 1972, shortly after he won his first Senate race, he lost his first wife, Neilia, and baby daughter, Naomi, in a car accident. He famously took the oath of office for his first Senate term from the hospital room of his toddler sons Beau and Hunter, who both survived the accident.\n\nIn 2015, Beau died of brain cancer at the age of 46. The younger Biden was seen as a rising star of US politics and had intended to run for Delaware state governor in 2016.\n\nMr Biden garnered considerable goodwill following Beau's death, which served to highlight one of Mr Biden's central strengths: a reputation as a kind and relatable family man.\n\nThis perceived warmth is not without its pitfalls. After entering the 2020 race, he faced accusations of unwelcome physical contact during interactions with female voters - complete with uncomfortable accompanying footage.\n\nBut the avuncular politician responded by saying he was an empathetic person, though he accepted standards had changed. The episode, however, stoked a perception for some that he was out of touch.\n\nMr Biden's return to the White House came at a difficult time in US politics, with the country still reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nJust two weeks before his inauguration, the country had also seen supporters of former President Donald Trump storm Congress in a bid to thwart the certification of his election victory after Mr Trump falsely claimed that the election had been rigged.\n\nMr Biden's new campaign is likely to focus heavily on the fight against the ideology on display during the 6 January riot. The video announcing his re-election bid opens with images of a mob of Trump supporters storming the Capitol.\n\n\"Every generation of Americans has faced a moment when they've had to defend democracy,\" he said. \"This is ours. Let's finish the job.\"\n\nAs he campaigns, Mr Biden is likely to point to a number of accomplishments during his tenure, including job creation, efforts to prop up the economy in the wake of the pandemic and the passing of a bipartisan infrastructure law billed as a \"once-in-a-generation\" investment by the White House.\n\nBut he will face tough questions on his handling of immigration and the US-Mexico border, as well as on the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan.\n\nMr Biden has also acknowledged that many Americans have raised \"legitimate\" questions about his age and ability to serve as President.\n\n\"And the only thing I can say is, watch me,\" he said earlier this year.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Health workers can book an appointment at seven vaccination centres in operation across NI\n\nDoctors have insisted there is no postcode lottery when it comes to rolling out the coronavirus vaccines.\n\nNorthern Ireland's vaccination plan means all those over 80 should receive their first dose by the end of January.\n\nMore than 154,000 doses of a vaccine have now been administered, health officials said.\n\nDr Frances O'Hagan, deputy chairwoman of NI's GP committee, said practices had their own rollout plans but she expected them to meet official targets.\n\n\"As soon as we get the vaccine, we will get it to you,\" she told BBC News NI. \"But please, please wait until we contact you.\"\n\n\"We tailor our programmes to our individual patients and to our geography and to our surroundings.\n\n\"It's not actually a postcode lottery. It's the best way of doing it because we know what suits our patients.\"\n\nDr O'Hagan said she had not heard reports of some practices holding back vaccines until they received bigger amounts to allow for a larger number of vaccinations to be done.\n\nShe said rolling out the programme was a logistical challenge which fell on top of an already heavy workload but the jab would be given out in a \"safe and timely\" fashion.\n\nSinn Féin MP Órfhlaith Begley said doctors in her West Tyrone constituency were working above and beyond to administer the vaccine to as many people as possible.\n\n\"But unfortunately I am hearing that some GPs cannot access supplies of the vaccine,\" she said.\n\n\"There does appear to be, and it is a consistent message from GPs in my own constituency, a feeling the distribution of the vaccine has been unequal to date.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Health Minister Robin Swann has welcomed a further delivery of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine into Northern Ireland on Tuesday morning.\n\nIn a tweet, Robin Swann said: \"We now have the supply to complete all our over 80s and when that group is finished, there will be enough to start into the over 75 programme.\"\n\nPatricia Donnelly, the head of NI's vaccination programme said there had been 154,436 doses of the vaccine administered here, with 132,857 of those being first doses.\n\nOn Tuesday, she said three quarters of care home residents had already received both doses.\n\n\"With the arrival of additional vaccine today, which have been issued this afternoon and tomorrow to GPs, there will be enough to complete the over 80 population and to commence in the over 70 population,\" she added.\n\nA further 24 virus-related deaths and 713 more Covid-19 cases were reported in Northern Ireland on Tuesday.\n\nIt brings the total number of deaths recorded by the Department of Health to 1,649.\n\nThere are currently 842 people in hospital with the virus, 70 people in intensive care units (ICU) and 57 being ventilated.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland, a further 93 Covid-19 related deaths were reported on Tuesday, bringing the country's death toll to 2,708.\n\nA further 2,001 positive cases were also recorded in the latest figures from the Republic's Department of Health.\n\nNorthern Ireland's rate of Covid-19 infection is now below one and has been at that level for a couple of weeks, according to the chief medical officer.\n\nHowever, Dr Michael McBride warned the reproduction (R) number for hospital transmission remains above one.\n\nDr McBride said new variants of the virus had made the job of curtailing the spread even more difficult, and warned he did not foresee any relaxation of restrictions any time soon.\n\n\"We need to ensure that we have as many people who remain at risk of severe disease vaccinated and prioritised with the first dose as possible before we consider significant relaxations in the current restrictions,\" he said.\n\nMeanwhile concerns have been raised that \"social media myths\" are encouraging some care home staff to reject the Covid vaccine.\n\nPauline Shepherd, from the Independent Health and Care Providers, said young women were especially vulnerable to misinformation about the vaccine and fertility.\n\nLast week, the Department of Health said there had been an uptake level of about 80% among care home staff.\n\n\"We are very keen obviously that everyone takes the vaccine, that is really the only way that we are going to get through this,\" she told BBC Radio Foyle.\n\n\"Obviously there are myths going around on social media about the vaccine and some are opting not to take it.\n\n\"Particularly younger females seem to have the view through social media that it may impact fertility\".\n\nA consultant anaesthetist says there is a \"reluctance\" among members of the black, Asian and minority ethnic communities to take Covid-19 vaccines\n\nThere are currently 139 confirmed Covid-19 outbreaks in NI's 483 care homes.\n\nThe Public Health Agency (PHA) and Department of Health were now exploring how \"to dispel the myths\", Ms Shepherd added.\n\nDr Mukesh Chugh, a consultant anaesthetist at Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry, said there had been a \"reluctance\" among black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people to take Covid-19 vaccines.\n\nDr Chugh says this is because of \"anti-vaccine messages\" posted across various social media platforms and messenger apps \"targeted at certain ethnic and religious groups\".\n\n\"I encourage them not to believe the messages they are getting on WhatsApp - these are not scientific messages,\" he said.\n\nOn Tuesday, Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots said a number of groups of key workers should be given priority access to vaccinations.\n\nPrioritisation was decided by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises UK health departments on immunisation.\n\nEdwin Poots said meat plant workers should be among those given priority vaccine access\n\nAsked if he supported prioritisation for food workers in meat plants, Mr Poots told the assembly he did and had raised it with the executive.\n\n\"It's been identified as an essential service - those people working in them are there in cold, wet conditions where we have had a number of outbreaks,\" he said.\n\n\"We should seek to introduce those people somewhat earlier than is currently the case - I will continue to endeavour to press that case.\"\n\nHe said other groups of workers who should be prioritised included \"teachers and police officers\".", "Four royal aides say they do not wish to \"take sides\" over a letter from the Duchess of Sussex to her father, the High Court has been told.\n\nIn a letter lawyers for the four said they believed their clients could \"shed some light\" on the letter's drafting but the four were \"strictly neutral\".\n\nMeghan is suing the Mail on Sunday and Mail Online publisher over articles that reproduced parts of the letter.\n\nShe claims her privacy and copyright were breached by the newspaper group.\n\nHer lawyers are asking for summary judgement - a dismissal of Associated Newspapers' (ANL) defence instead of a trial.\n\nThe five articles, published in February 2019, were a \"triple-barrelled invasion\" of the duchess's privacy, correspondence and family, the lawyers claim.\n\nShe is seeking damages from the newspaper group for alleged misuse of private information, copyright infringement and breach of the Data Protection Act over the articles.\n\nANL claims Meghan wrote her letter \"with a view to it being disclosed publicly at some future point\" in order to \"defend her against charges of being an uncaring or unloving daughter\", which she denies.\n\nOn the second day of the hearing on Wednesday, ANL's barrister Antony White QC told the court that a letter from the so-called \"palace four\" showed that \"further oral evidence and documentary evidence is likely to be available at trial which would shed light on certain key factual issues in this case\".\n\nHe said it was \"likely\" there was also further evidence about whether Meghan \"directly or indirectly provided private information\" to the authors of an unauthorised biography of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Finding Freedom.\n\nThe four aides are: Jason Knauf, former communications secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Christian Jones, their former deputy communications secretary, Samantha Cohen, formerly the Sussexes' private secretary, and Sara Latham, their ex-director of communications.\n\n\"None of our clients welcomes his or her potential involvement in this litigation, which has arisen purely as a result of the performance of his or her duties in their respective jobs at the material time,\" their lawyers said in a letter sent on their behalf.\n\n\"Nor does any of our clients wish to take sides in the dispute between your respective clients. Our clients are all strictly neutral.\n\n\"They have no interest in assisting either party to the proceedings. Their only interest is in ensuring a level playing field, insofar as any evidence they may be able to give is concerned.\"\n\nTheir letter said that their lawyers' \"preliminary view is that one or more of our clients would be in a position to shed some light\" on \"the creation of the letter and the electronic draft\".\n\nIt also said they may be able to shed light on \"whether or not the claimant anticipated that the letter might come into in the public domain\" and whether or not the duchess \"directly or indirectly provided private information, generally and in relation to the letter specifically, to the authors of Finding Freedom\".\n\nBut Justin Rushbrooke QC, representing the duchess, said the letter from the four \"contains no information at all that supports the defendant's case on alleged co-authorship (of Meghan's letter), and no indication that evidence will be forthcoming that will support the defendant's case should the matter proceed to trial\".\n\nMeghan, 39, sent a handwritten letter to her father in August 2018, following her marriage to Prince Harry in May that year, which Mr Markle did not attend. The couple are now living in the US with their son Archie.\n\nThe full trial of the duchess's claim had been due to be heard at the High Court this month, but last year the case was adjourned until autumn 2021.\n\nAt the conclusion of the hearing on Wednesday afternoon, Mr Justice Warby reserved his judgement, which he said he would deliver \"as soon as possible\".", "When Joe Biden becomes US president on 20 January plenty of change is expected under his new administration.\n\nFor those who want to put Donald Trump in the rear view mirror, there's a lot to look forward to.\n\nOthers are not sure if he can bring unity to a divided country and enact lasting change.\n\nHere's what members of our BBC voter panel told us.\n\nPeyton Forte is a recent college graduate who now works as a reporter. She was not the big supporter of Biden and Kamala Harris, but says getting rid of Donald Trump is an urgent and necessary first step towards change.\n\nWhat are you hopeful the Biden administration can accomplish?\n\nFor starters, easing the pandemic and ensuring more collaboration between federal and state governments on vaccine distribution. I'm looking forward to his stimulus packages to kickstart the economy and make sure people are actually alive to reap the benefits of it. We can also look forward to a president whose main mode of communication is not Twitter. The biggest thing is undoing the damage of the prior administration, from immigration laws to our relationships with foreign allies.\n\nWhat are your fears for the Biden presidency?\n\nTo be honest, I haven't really gotten to that point because I'm so ready for the Trump administration to be gone. So ask me that question again in a few weeks. I'm really encouraged by Biden's financial and economic cabinet picks because I think he is trying to stunt the racial wealth gap. There will be a time and place to nitpick his choices, but not yet. As somebody who is black, I know he rejected calls to defund the police. The phrase is inflammatory, but that money is redirected into our communities, so I'd like for him to take another look at it and maybe he'll reconsider.\n\nWith so much talk of the need for unity and healing, where does the country go from here?\n\n'Unity and healing' is the new 'thoughts and prayers'. I know it has been kind of a calling card for Biden to contrast himself with Trump, but I'm going to have to see it to believe it. Are you just faking it or are you doing the work to actually unify people? Time will tell if people actually want unity or if some are just mad that their candidate lost.\n\nJim is a property manager and conservative Republican who no longer supports President Trump since his refusal to accept the results of the election. He wants the incoming administration to find common ground rather than be too left wing.\n\nWhat are your hopes for Biden?\n\nI'm hopeful for some stability and less drama. America's standing in the world, particularly in the last couple of weeks, has really diminished and I would hope they would be able to return us to our traditional position in the world. I would like to see the bill he puts forward on Covid relief. If we're going to put money into people's hands, we need to make sure it actually makes a difference. Six hundred dollars is a slap in the face when you look at how we're giving away billions of dollars to other countries.\n\nWhat are your fears about his presidency?\n\nI am worried they're going to overreach and placate the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and create deeper polarisation. I worry they will try to pack the Supreme Court. I am concerned about immigration policy. I would hope they have the courage to be more moderate in tone, action and policy, at least for the first few years. That way, things can level off and then we can have reasonable debate about issues on a case-by-case basis. One side is really having a hard time accepting the reality of [Trump's] loss; that's too many people to just ignore and it seems like there's a real mood for retaliation.\n\nCompromises will need to happen and both sides on the extreme right and left will not be happy with it. In the immediate moment, we need to have a good tone from the top that is conciliatory and respectful. I'm looking for Biden to reassure Americans their vote was secure and legitimate, restore a sense of public confidence and competence to the US government and spend serious time on rebuilding unity.\n\nLesley is a small business owner and an immigrant from Canada. Joe Biden was not her first choice for president by a long shot, but she now says he is \"the best person\" for this moment in the country's history and she hopes he can follow through.\n\nWhat are your hopes for Biden?\n\nI'm looking forward to real leadership and an administration that actually cares about getting things done. We need to get the virus under control. They have an actual plan; I hate that it's going to cost another $2tn, but it wouldn't have cost that if we had taken the time to do the hard work early. From climate change and fire management to infrastructure and renewable energy, they'll get us back on track. From a civil rights perspective, we have the greatest opportunity. The administration is diverse and he's trying to give everyone a seat at the table.\n\nWhat are your fears about his presidency?\n\nNothing comes to mind. I feel like this administration is going to reset, refocus and prioritise things that should be prioritised. There's so much that needs to be addressed at once, but like the rest of the world, they have to learn to multitask and do their jobs.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What do countries around the world want from Joe Biden?\n\nWe need our elected officials, when doing their jobs, to not just represent one segment of the population. They can see what has happened by turning a blind eye and not listening. For the Democrats, they need to find a way to communicate so the concerns they've raised are taken seriously but without turning off the other side. For the Republicans, they need to pay attention not just to the loudest people - just being loud doesn't mean they're right. Moving forward, everybody has to do their part to prioritise what is best for the country. We're never going to get rid of the element that attacked the Capitol, but it's like herd immunity. The only people who were surprised by what happened last week were the ones who were not paying attention.\n\nJazmin is a writer and youth voting rights activist who says the past four years have damaged the psyche of young people. She wants the new administration to rebuild trust and show people like her that government can be a force for good in their lives.\n\nWhat are your hopes for Biden?\n\nI hope that the Biden administration is bold on climate, an equitable Covid economic recovery and racial justice. Personally though, I think we fundamentally need to look at our broken system. Restoring voting rights, stronger ethics and anti-corruption measures, as well as campaign finance reform can restore balance and transparency within our government, so we can trust in our elections and elected officials.\n\nWhat are your fears about his presidency?\n\nI've been thinking a lot about the pace of change. There's so much that needs to be done but we're also looking at departments that have been gutted. The damage of the past three years has been so deep and the rolling back of it will take a lot of time, so we have to practise patience and we have to be realistic.\n\nOur government only works when people decide not to disengage and be cynical, but instead step up and figure out how to get involved. The events of the Capitol work were horrific and traumatising for so many people, but the day before it was a Georgia election with incredibly high youth voter turnout. There is a lot of vitriol and hate, but the majority of folks believe in working to ensure our country is serving the best interests of everyone.\n\nGabriel is a writer and the activism chair for the New York Young Republicans. He wishes the Biden administration good luck, but is concerned it will sow more division in a vulnerable moment for the country.\n\nWhat are your hopes for Biden?\n\nAs an American, I am hopeful that things go well under this administration. I don't wish for Joe Biden to fail because the president is like the pilot of a plane: if he goes down, so do we. I hope he can answer the renewable energy debate, create more nuclear power plants and allow the United States to remain the number one exporter of energy. Hopefully, we'll see some sort of voter ID laws enforced, for greater election integrity. I hope he doesn't fuel more divisions.\n\nWhat are your fears about his presidency?\n\nMy fear is that he will listen to people like AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and Bernie Sanders, who are trying to push him to accept more far left policies that will do more harm than good to the US in an economic sense. He may continue the harsh lockdowns and ignore censorship of conservatives. Under the Trump administration, we decreased our presence in the Middle East and were stopping the forever wars, so I really hope we don't return there.\n\nAfter what happened at the Capitol, Biden came out and started very well, then devolved into race-baiting rhetoric - that's not something our country needs right now. There are millions of people who feel as though they were cheated and did not get a fair election, and some of them might not even recognise Biden as president, so it's very important that he treads lightly and focuses on unity. Don't lump them together as insurgents or other labels because you're going to further alienate people. Speak to every American and say that it is time to come together.", "As Donald Trump comes towards the end of his presidency, we've put together a selection of striking moments from his four years in office.\n\nCrowds are seen gathered at Mr Trump's inauguration ceremony on 20 January 2017.\n\nJust days later, the new president accused the media of lying about the attendance. He was said to be angry that images appeared to show the crowds were lower than for Barack Obama's first inauguration in 2009.\n\nWhite House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told the media it had been \"the largest audience to ever see an inauguration, period\".\n\nFar-right supporters and white nationalists took part in a torch-lit rally through Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.\n\nThe following day a woman was killed and 19 were injured when a car ploughed into a crowd of counter-protesters in the city.\n\nIn response, President Trump condemned violence by \"many sides\", prompting a wave of criticism. Some 48 hours later, he denounced far-right extremists calling \"KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists repugnant to everything we hold dear\".\n\nJoe Biden has said it was the president's response to the tragedy that prompted his own decision to run against him.\n\nMr Trump's attendance at the G7 summit in Canada in June 2018 did not get off to a good start, when prior to the event, the president announced import tariffs on steel and aluminium from the EU, Mexico and Canada.\n\nOther images from the meeting showed more friendly relations between the leaders - but this photo was considered by many to reflect the underlying tensions of the gathering.\n\nMr Trump left the summit before other leaders and claimed that America was \"like the piggy bank that everybody is robbing\".\n\nFirst Lady Melania Trump is pictured wearing a jacket in June 2018 which reads \"I really don't care, do you?\" on the back, during a trip to a migrant child detention centre.\n\nThere was speculation over what message Mrs Trump intended to send by wearing the jacket on that trip, which came as the president was under fire for his policy of separating children from their parents at the border.\n\nThe First Lady later admitted it had been a message \"for the people and for the left-wing media who are criticising me. I want to show them I don't care. You could criticise whatever you want to say. But it will not stop me to do what I feel is right\".\n\nMr Trump called for compromise in politics during his State of the Union address in February 2019 but Nancy Pelosi was pictured giving what many saw as a sarcastic clap.\n\nHe broke protocol by not waiting for the customary introduction from the House Speaker before beginning his speech.\n\nThe image, termed the \"Pelosi clap\" quickly went viral and appeared to show the political rivalry between the two.\n\nMr Trump walks into the northern side of the military demarcation line that divides North and South Korea in June 2019. In doing so, he became the first US sitting president to cross the line.\n\nHis decision to meet Kim Jong-un without pre-conditions stunned the world.\n\nDespite the apparent warming of relations, little concrete progress was made on negotiations over North Korea's nuclear programme.\n\nKim Kardashian West speaks at a White House event about prison reform in June 2019.\n\nIn 2018, the celebrity activist lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of a grandmother jailed for life. Alice Johnson was later granted clemency in a high-profile decision by Mr Trump.\n\nPresident Trump has already given pardons to 94 people and there is speculation he may pardon 100 others before he leaves office.\n\nMr Trump holds a bible in front of St John's Episcopal Church, just across the road from the White House in June 2020.\n\nPeaceful anti-racism demonstrators had been cleared from nearby Lafayette Square with pepper spray and flash-bang grenades so that the president and his entourage could walk to the church.\n\nHis actions prompted shock and anger from many religious leaders, who accused him of using religion for political purposes.\n\nThe Trump family watch as Donald Trump debates with Joe Biden at their first presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio, on 29 September 2020.\n\nThey broke debate rules that all spectators wear masks - sparking the same criticism often aimed at their father for taking a cavalier attitude to the virus.\n\nA few days after the debate, the president tested positive himself.\n\nHe spent three nights in a hospital receiving treatment before returning to the White House and declaring he felt \"really good\" and urging others not to be afraid of the virus.\n\nCrowds of Trump supporters climb on the US Capitol in DC earlier this month following a \"Stop the Steal\" rally.\n\nIt followed a 70-minute address by the president in which he exhorted them to march on Congress where politicians were meeting to certify Democrat Joe Biden's win. The mob ransacked the Capitol building and attempted to enter the chambers where lawmakers were hiding.\n\nMr Trump has since been impeached, becoming the first president ever to be impeached twice. But he denies charges that he incited the mob to attack the Capitol.", "A tearful President-elect Joe Biden says goodbye to his home state before departing for Washington on the eve of his inauguration.", "Joe Biden has been sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, at a low key inauguration ceremony outside the US Capitol in Washington DC.\n\nIn his maiden speech as president, Mr Biden said: \"We've learned again that democracy is precious, democracy is fragile, and at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.\"\n\nRead more: Joe Biden replaces Trump as US president", "More than 60 flood warnings remain in place in northern, central and eastern England\n\nResidents have been evacuated, roads closed and rail services were suspended as Storm Christoph batters England.\n\nHouseboat residents were moved from Northwich, Cheshire, for their safety as Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to hold an emergency meeting later.\n\nNorthern, central and eastern England are braced for flooding which will be discussed at the Cobra meeting.\n\nMore than 60 flood warnings remain in place and three police forces have declared major incidents.\n\nThe North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands have been preparing for widespread flooding following the Met Office's amber weather warning for heavy rain until midday Thursday.\n\nPeople living in houseboats in Cheshire have been moved to hotels for their safety, say police\n\nCheshire Police has declared a major incident - along with forces in Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire - and moved 33 people from Hayhurst Marina for their safety as water levels rise.\n\nIn Greater Manchester up to 3,000 properties could be affected by flooding near the River Mersey where a peak is expected at 23:00 GMT.\n\nDowning Street said Covid-secure evacuation centres would be made available to those forced to leave their homes as a result of flooding.\n\n\"Preparations to create Covid-secure rest centres have been made by relevant agencies as a precautionary measure,\" the Prime Minister's official spokesman said.\n\n\"The important message for the public now is to continue to monitor the information the Environment Agency are providing and sign-up for flood alerts if they haven't already.\"\n\nThe River Eden has flooded Rickerby Park in Carlisle\n\nMore than 120mm (nearly 5in) of rain has already fallen in some parts of England, with 123.4mm at Honister Pass in Cumbria in the 24 hours up to 06:00 GMT on Wednesday.\n\nNearby Seathwaite saw the second highest total, with 107.2mm (4.2in), and some isolated spots could see up to 200mm (7.8in), the Met Office said.\n\nThe Environment Agency has issued more than 60 flood warnings, meaning flooding is expected and immediate action required, while there are also more than 180 flood alerts, meaning flooding is possible.\n\nA road in Lancashire was shut by police after six vehicles got stuck in surface water\n\nIn North Yorkshire, York is currently predicting the River Ouse could rise above 4m (13.1ft) but that is a level the defences can cope with.\n\nHowever, if people are forced out of their homes due to flooding they can stay with friends or family without the risk of a Covid fine during Storm Christoff, North Yorkshire Police has said.\n\nGreater Manchester Police Assistant Chief Constable Nick Bailey said the force declared it a major incident on Tuesday to ensure it was \"as prepared as possible\".\n\nHe believes up to 3,000 properties in the region could be affected by flooding in Didsbury, Northenden and Sale near the River Mersey.\n\nFlood sirens were sounded in Walsden, Todmorden on Tuesday\n\n\"This is a significant incident in terms of disruption to people and those people have been advised with regard to action to take,\" he said.\n\nThe Prime Minister's spokesman added: \"The Environment Agency is on the ground now working with local partners and stand ready to respond to any flooding.\n\n\"They have already ensured there are 40km (25 miles) of temporary barriers, which they are ready to deliver anywhere in the country and that is alongside high-powered pumps and trained staff who are ready to assist and provide information to local communities.\"\n\nWhen asked if local authorities would be given further financial support to deal with flooding, the Prime Minister's spokesman said: \"We have a number of flood recovery schemes that can be made available to those who are affected by flooding.\"\n\nFlood warden Keith Crabtree from Todmorden, West Yorkshire, said he was hoping improved flood defences had \"done the trick\" after checking river levels in Mytholmroyd.\n\n\"There appears to be plenty of rain about but it does not seem to be having and serious impact on the river levels,\" he said.\n\n\"We will see over the years to come how it performs in reducing the flood risk for the village. Things can change very quickly in the Calder Valley and we are not out of the woods yet.\"\n\nHow have you been affected by the floods? Email your experiences: haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Mr Biden took his oath on a Bible that has been in his family since 1893 and was also used each time he was sworn in as Delaware senator. The book itself is five inches (12.5cm) thick with a Celtic cross on the cover", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe fluttering flight patterns of butterflies have long inspired poets but baffled scientists.\n\nResearchers have struggled to understand how these delicate creatures can fly with their large but inefficient wings.\n\nNow, a new study shows that butterflies evolved an effective way of cupping and clapping their wings to generate thrust.\n\nThe scientists say that this ability helps them avoid dangerous predators.\n\nFlying species have evolved various methods of evading death. Some have developed powerful and efficient wings to speed them to safety.\n\nOthers survive by tasting awful when eaten.\n\nBut what about the slow-moving, meandering butterfly?\n\nThe problem for these creatures is that they have unusually large wings relative to their body size, which are aerodynamically inefficient for flight.\n\nBack in the 1970s, researchers developed a theory that their big wings allowed the butterfly to clap them together on the upstroke to power their take off.\n\nBut no one has shown how this works in natural flying conditions.\n\nNow, Swedish scientists, using a wind tunnel and high-speed cameras, have captured the butterfly's unique flying skill.\n\n\"The wings are behaving in quite an interesting way,\" co-author Dr Per Henningsson, from Lund University, in Sweden, told BBC News.\n\n\"The leading and the trailing edge are meeting before the central part, forming this pocket shape.\n\n\"We think that sort of behaviour is going to improve the clap because it forms an air pocket between the wings which, when the wings collapse, that makes the jet even stronger and more efficient.\"\n\nA butterfly in the wind tunnel for the experiment\n\nAs well as recording slow-motion video of the butterflies in flight, the researchers constructed two simple pairs of mechanical clappers to test their ideas. One was rigid, the other flexible and more akin to the butterfly wings observed in the wind tunnel tests.\n\nThe team found that the flexible wings dramatically increased the force created by the clap.\n\nIt also improved the efficiency by 28%, which the authors describe as a huge amount for a flying animal.\n\nThis leads them to conclude that the large wings and cupped, clapping action were an evolutionary advantage for butterflies when faced with predators.\n\n\"If you are a butterfly that is able to take off quicker than the others, that gives you an obvious advantage,\" said Per Henningsson.\n\n\"It's a strong selective pressure then, because it's a matter of life and death.\"\n\nA silver washed fritillary , one of the creatures used to show the mechanics of butterfly flight\n\n\"I don't really know if they use it in free flight, but I think they typically don't flap their wings together.\n\n\"But in the take-off phase, they definitely do it a lot.\"\n\nThe authors believe that their research might prove useful in other spheres.\n\nSome drone devices and underwater vehicles already use propulsion systems based on wing clapping motion, but with limitations.\n\nThe incorporation of the approach used by butterflies might bring major improvements, the scientists say.\n\n\"We're suggesting that the people that are working on these designs, they should look into this cup-shape behaviour, since there are lots of efficiency and effectiveness to be gained from it,\" said Per Henningsson.\n\n\"It's certainly something that would be worthwhile looking into.\"\n\nThe report has been published in the journal of the Royal Society Interface.", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nRelegation-threatened Fulham lost some of the momentum built up by their win at Everton but showed battling qualities to claim a point at Burnley.\n\nOf the three sides currently adrift at the bottom of the Premier League, the Cottagers seem the most capable of clawing their way to safety, as illustrated by their impressive win at Goodison Park on Sunday.\n\nBut they failed to repeat that bright and incisive display at Turf Moor against a typically hard-working and competitive Clarets side, who married their industry with the game's main moments of attacking ingenuity.\n\nIt was the visitors, though, who took the lead, as much through fortune as design, with Ola Aina's chested effort from a corner finding the net despite an attempted clearance from Robbie Brady on the line.\n\nCrucially, the visitors were denied the time to draw confidence from the opener, with Burnley hitting back three minutes later through a well-taken Ashley Barnes finish, following a superb low ball from Jay Rodriguez.\n\nThe same two strikers had both narrowly failed to get a goal-bound touch on a superb low cross from James Tarkowski in the first half, while Rodriguez saw a low drive kicked away by Alphonse Areola shortly after his side had levelled the score.\n\nThe draw represents an opportunity missed for Burnley to put further ground between themselves and the London side, with the gap between the two a sizeable but not yet entirely comfortable eight points.\n\nScott Parker's side remain six points shy of safety, with Newcastle the 17th-placed side most in danger of being reeled in.\n• None Follow live text commentary of Burnley v Fulham in the Premier League\n\nA point gained, or two lost for Fulham?\n\nEarning a result at Burnley against a side built to expose the mental and physical weaknesses in an opponent, especially a newly promoted one, is not an easy task.\n\nIn doing so, Fulham have further demonstrated their growth into a top-flight side, after claiming a number of creditable draws earlier in the campaign and then dispatching an aspiring big-hitter in Everton last weekend.\n\nUnfortunately, the Cottagers' development could have come too late.\n\nOnly wins will really eat into the gap between themselves and safety and they cannot afford to let one slip from their grasp when it is there to be had.\n\nIt is why Parker and his side will be so disappointed at the speed and manner with which they conceded the equaliser at Turf Moor, throwing away the lead and momentum they had seized by allowing Barnes a free run in on goal to finish.\n\nThey had been on the back foot for large periods before that and were indebted to a bit of fortune for their goal, but aesthetics come a distant second to actual points right now.\n\nThe biggest positive for Burnley will be that their advantage over the Cottagers remains the same as it was before kick-off.\n\nWith the likes of Newcastle and Palace in far worse form than they are, and Brighton a point worse off, they will feel relatively calm about their situation.\n\nWhat will worry manager Dyche is further injuries to his already depleted squad, with Johan Berg Gudmundsson having to depart, and his replacement Robbie Brady also needing to be replaced.\n\nThere is no respite for either side, with both facing further important fixtures at the weekend.\n\nBurnley host West Brom, the side a place below Fulham in the table, while Parker's men welcome bottom club Sheffield United to Craven Cottage.\n\n'When we get ahead we need to weather something'\n\nBurnley boss Sean Dyche talking to Sky Sports: \"Another point on the board, we are stripped to the bare bones. A committed performance.\n\n\"The reaction to their goal was excellent and I thought we defended well. It's remarkably unfortunate how many injuries we have had.\"\n\nFulham boss Scott Parker talking to Sky Sports: \"It is a tough place to come, the ball is in play not a lot, it is scrappy. We got our noses in front and disappointed with the goal we have conceded.\n\n\"We take the point though. That is four points so far this week. When we get ahead we need to weather something. There were a couple of mistakes for their goal.\n\n\"I thought we were solid, dealt with the threat of balls coming in but were not able to get our identity on it.\n\n\"We regroup, it has been a busy week. Every game is big for us. Six points. This team has honest belief and confidence.\"\n• None Burnley are unbeaten in their past 31 home meetings with Fulham in all competitions (W25 D6), extending their longest ever unbeaten run against an opponent at Turf Moor in their history. Their last such defeat was back in April 1951 (2-0).\n• None Fulham's 31-game winless streak away from home against Burnley in all competitions is their longest run without a victory on the road against an opponent in their history.\n• None There have been just 24 Premier League goals scored at Turf Moor this season (Burnley scoring 10 and conceding 14) - the joint-lowest total at a top-flight ground in 2020-21 (level with Craven Cottage).\n• None Fulham have gone six consecutive away games without defeat in the Premier League (W1 D5), their joint longest such run in the competition (also in August 2004 under Chris Coleman).\n• None Burnley have conceded the first goal of the game in eight of their 12 Premier League matches at Turf Moor this season, including each of the past five - only Sheffield United (10) have done so more often on home soil in the competition this campaign.\n• None There were just 224 seconds between Ola Aina's opener for Fulham and Ashley Barnes' equaliser for Burnley.\n• None Burnley's Jay Rodriguez has assisted in back-to-back Premier League games for the first time in his career, with this his 196th appearance in the competition.\n• None Burnley's Robbie Brady is the only player to have been substituted on and off in two separate Premier League games this season.\n• None Attempt missed. Ashley Barnes (Burnley) header from very close range misses to the left following a corner.\n• None Attempt missed. Ademola Lookman (Fulham) right footed shot from the left side of the box is close, but misses the top right corner. Assisted by Josh Maja.\n• None James Tarkowski (Burnley) wins a free kick on the right wing.\n• None Attempt missed. Josh Maja (Fulham) right footed shot from the centre of the box misses to the left. Assisted by Ruben Loftus-Cheek with a cross.\n• None Attempt missed. Ruben Loftus-Cheek (Fulham) header from the centre of the box misses to the left. Assisted by Ivan Cavaleiro with a cross. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Lifting the lid on the former president's 'America First' foreign policy\n• None Romesh returns with celebrity guests, a virtual nation and his mum...", "The editor of the British Medical Journal has asked the New York Times to correct an article that says UK guidelines allow two Covid-19 vaccines to be mixed.\n\nThe US publication reported that UK health officials would allow patients to be given a second dose that is a different vaccine to their first.\n\nFiona Godlee pointed out in her letter to the NYT that it was not a recommendation.\n\nShe said the NYT's headline claiming UK guidelines say such substitutions \"may happen\" was \"seriously misleading\".\n\nThe UK has approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab - but both require two doses which are now to be administered 12 weeks apart\n\nMs Godlee said the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) does not make any recommendation to mix and match - in other words, having a shot of one vaccine and then a different one 12 weeks later.\n\nDr Mary Ramsay, Public Health England's head of immunisations, said: \"We do not recommend mixing the Covid-19 vaccines - if your first dose is the Pfizer vaccine you should not be given the AstraZeneca vaccine for your second dose and vice versa.\"\n\nDr Ramsay added that on the \"extremely rare occasions\" where the same vaccine is unavailable or it is unknown which jab the patient received, it is \"better to give a second dose of another vaccine than not at all\".\n\nMs Godlee urged the New York Times to print a \"highly visible correction\" as soon as possible.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Princess Royal Hospital at Haywards Heath was among the hospitals receiving a delivery\n\nMeanwhile, health staff have criticised the paperwork needed to gain NHS approval to give the coronavirus vaccine, with some medics being asked for proof they are trained in areas such as preventing radicalisation.\n\nThe first doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine are due to be given on Monday after the jab was approved for use in the UK last week.\n\nThe Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was the first vaccine approved in the UK, and 944,539 people have had their first jab.", "Police tweeted this photo, which appears to show the vehicle severely damaged in the crash\n\nFour ponies have been killed in a collision with a vehicle in the New Forest National Park.\n\nThe animals were hit on Thursday night while licking freshly laid salt on Roger Penny Way, Hampshire Constabulary said.\n\nThree ponies died at the scene while a fourth was found dead later a short distance away.\n\nIn December, three donkeys were killed on the road, which is a black spot for animal accidents.\n\nMark Ferrett, whose daughter owned the ponies, said the deaths were \"unacceptable\"\n\nThe crash happened at about 21:00 GMT on a 40mph (64km/h) section of the road north of Brook.\n\nThe car, a Land Rover Discovery, appears to have been severely damaged in the collision, according to a police tweet, which gave no further details.\n\nMark Ferrett, whose daughter owned the ponies, said the deaths were \"unacceptable\".\n\nHe said: \"I would favour a reduction in the speed [limit]. Please, everyone needs to slow down and stop this carnage.\"\n\nThe New Forest is one of the largest remaining areas of unenclosed land where commoners' cattle, ponies and donkeys roam throughout the open heath.\n\nIn 2019, 58 animals were killed and 32 were injured, according to the New Forest National Park Authority.\n\nThe crash happened on Roger Penny Way, where donkeys, cattle and horses roam freely\n\nAndrew Napthine, a New Forest Agister who helps manage the area's free-roaming animals, attended the scene of the crash, and said the male driver was not injured.\n\nHe said three of the ponies were killed on the road while a fourth fled the scene and died behind a bush.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Officers dispersed the party at the Grade II* listed church before midnight\n\nA 500-year-old church was damaged during an illegal New Year's Eve party at the venue.\n\nAll Saints' Church in East Horndon, near Brentwood, was broken into before crowds entered, Essex Police said.\n\nOfficers were threatened and had objects thrown at them as they dispersed hundreds of people and seized equipment, the force said.\n\nTwo men from Harlow, aged 27 and 22, and a 35-year-old from Southwark were arrested.\n\nThey were held on suspicion of public order and drugs offences.\n\nAstrid Gillespie, a volunteer with the Friends of All Saints', said event organisers had smashed a window to put in an extractor fan unit and wired sound equipment into the church's fuse box.\n\nShe said: \"It was a professional set-up, they'd hired portable loos, they had a bar area where you had to exchange tokens... obviously it's a mess.\n\n\"It's such a beautiful church, to find out it's been damaged is devastating.\"\n\nThe conservation group believes it will cost at least £1,000 to repair the Tudor building.\n\nEquipment was seized and fines issued over three illegal parties broken up by officers\n\nPolice later dispersed about 100 people at an illegal party at an abandoned warehouse in Brentwood and made two arrests.\n\nA woman was also fined £10,000 for organising a house party with 100 guests at Bury Road, Sewardstonebury, in Epping Forest.\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Andy Prophet said: \"Unfortunately, there were [those] who decided to blatantly flout the coronavirus rules and regulations and, ultimately, they decided that partying was more important than protecting other people.\n\n\"We've seized their equipment, arrested five people, and issued a large number of fines to those who think this behaviour is acceptable.\"\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "Last updated on .From the section European Football\n\nFormer Tottenham and Southampton boss Mauricio Pochettino has been appointed head coach of Paris St-Germain.\n\nThe Argentine, 48, who succeeded Thomas Tuchel, has signed a deal until 30 June 2022, with the option of an extra year.\n\nPochettino, who played for PSG between 2001 and 2003, has been out of work since being sacked by Spurs in November 2019.\n\nPSG are third in Ligue 1 and will face Barcelona in the last 16 of the Champions League in February and March.\n\nGerman Tuchel was sacked on 29 December after two and a half years in charge.\n• None Pochettino is back - but why has he chosen PSG? Read Guillem Ballague's column\n\nPochettino will take his first training session on Sunday following the French league's winter break.\n\nHe said he was \"happy and honoured\" to take on the role and that the club \"has always held a special place in my heart\".\n\n\"I return to the club today with a lot of ambition and humility, and am eager to work with some of the world's most talented players,\" said Pochettino.\n\n\"This team has fantastic potential and my staff and I will do everything we can to get the best for Paris St-Germain in all competitions. We will also do our utmost to give our team the combative and attacking playing identity that Parisian fans have always loved.\"\n\nPSG chairman and chief executive Nasser Al-Khelaifi said Pochettino's return \"fits perfectly with our ambitions\", adding: \"It will be another exciting chapter for the club and one I am positive the fans will enjoy.\"\n\nPochettino began his managerial career at Espanyol and spent 18 months at Southampton before joining Tottenham in May 2014.\n\nHe guided them to the League Cup final in his first full season, while two third-placed finishes sandwiched a runners-up spot in the Premier League in 2016-17.\n\nA former Argentina defender, Pochettino led Spurs to the Champions League final in 2019, where they lost to Liverpool.\n\nHe was sacked five months later, with the club 14th in the Premier League, and replaced by Jose Mourinho.\n\nTuchel's final game in charge of PSG was a 4-0 win over Strasbourg on 23 December, which moved the reigning champions to within a point of Ligue 1 leaders Lyon and second-placed Lille before a two-week winter break.\n\nPSG have been linked with a January loan move for Tottenham's Dele Alli, who made his Premier League debut under Pochettino.\n\nWe all wanted to see him back and we all thought he was waiting for the Manchester United job. PSG is a massive job. There's a massive expectation there.\n\nWith the squad he can pick from and the players he can attract, it's a match made in heaven.\n\nPochettino has got the best out of Dele Alli in the past and it would probably be a clever move all round to get him out there with with the Euros looming.\n\nYou have to have success [at PSG]. They have moved Thomas Tuchel on because PSG are actually in a title race rather than winning at a canter. It's a great opportunity for Pochettino.\n• None A special and exclusive one-off chat with the music icon\n• None How has their rise come to define our culture?", "Arwel Morris said national park staff and police had been engaging with visitors\n\nBeauty spots have been \"disappointingly busy over the last few days\" despite restrictions meaning all but essential travel should be avoided.\n\nSnowdonia park warden Arwel Morris reiterated the message that people should not be driving to visit places.\n\nOn Saturday, police stopped people from Milton Keynes attempting to walk up Snowdon in breach of Covid rules.\n\nMr Morris blamed a \"perfect storm\" of good weather and people being off work for the number of visitors in the area.\n\n\"We try and enforce the fact that exercise should begin and end at home, meaning people should not try and drive to a location where they plan to exercise,\" he told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast.\n\n\"And this has been really difficult over the last few days.\n\n\"We have dealt with people from London, Birmingham… numerous people from north Wales travelling to beauty spots.\"\n\nMr Morris, a warden for Snowdonia National Park, said police had been doing their \"absolute best\" dealing with visitors despite other pressures, as wardens could not enforce breaches in lockdown rules.\n\nA breach of Covid rules can incur a £60 fine, which rises to £120 for a second breach.\n\nOn Saturday, North Wales Police said officers had \"turned away\" people who wanted to walk up Snowdon in breach of stay-at-home rules, including some some from Milton Keynes and London.\n\nOn New Year's Day, the force tweeted to say people had been reported for breaching travel restrictions.\n\nWales has been in a nationwide level four lockdown since 20 December.\n\nWales is in a tier four lockdown\n\nTravelling is only allowed for essential purposes, such as for work and for caring responsibilities. International travel is also not allowed.\n\nPeople are still allowed out of their homes to exercise for unlimited periods each day, but must maintain social distancing and not exercise with anyone outside their household.\n\nMore than three quarters of England is also under the strictest tier four coronavirus measures, putting restrictions on people's daily lives.", "The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has started to arrive in hospitals, with the first doses due to be given on Monday.\n\nThe Princess Royal Hospital at Haywards Heath in West Sussex was one of the hospitals taking a delivery on Saturday.\n\nThe UK has ordered 100 million doses of the new vaccine - enough to vaccinate 50 million people.", "Last updated on .From the section Olympics\n\nThe delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics will go ahead this summer despite concern over rising coronavirus cases, says Japan's prime minister.\n\nThe Olympics are due to begin on 23 July with the Paralympics following a month later from 24 August.\n\nCases have surged in Japan in recent days with Tokyo reporting over 1,000 daily infections for the first time.\n\nBut prime minister Yoshihide Suga said the \"Games will be held this summer\" and be \"safe and secure\".\n\nJapan is responding to cases of the new variant of coronavirus first found in the UK, with Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike warning the number of infections could \"explode\".\n\nThere were a record 1,337 cases in Tokyo on 31 December with 783 new infections announced on Friday.\n\nJapan has recorded 239,041 coronavirus cases and 3,337 deaths during the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.\n\nCosts for the Games have increased by $2.8bn (£2.1bn) because of measures needed to prevent the spread of coronavirus but organisers have ruled out a delay.\n\nThe Games could be the most expensive summer Olympics in history.\n\nA poll by national broadcaster NHK showed that the majority of the Japanese general public oppose holding the Games in 2021, favouring a further delay or outright cancellation of the event.\n\nSuga said the Games going ahead could serve as a \"symbol of global solidarity\".", "The next few weeks will be \"nail-bitingly difficult\" for the NHS, hospital bosses have warned.\n\nStaff absences and the new Covid variant are creating a \"challenging situation\", Saffron Cordery, of NHS Providers, which represents hospital trusts in England, said.\n\nDoctors are urging the public to \"take it seriously and follow the rules\" to protect the health service.\n\nThe year started with 53,285 more Covid cases and 613 deaths being reported.\n\nThe day's figures do not include data from Northern Ireland or Wales, or the numbers of deaths from Scotland - as these are not being published on certain days during the Christmas and New Year period.\n\nIt comes after the UK reported its highest daily cases on Thursday, with a record 55,892 infections.\n\nOn Friday evening, the government confirmed that all primary schools in London would remain closed for the start of the new term, following a review of Covid transmission rates.\n\nFrom Monday, all schools in the capital will now be required to provide remote learning.\n\nPrimaries in nine London boroughs and the City of London district had been set to reopen - while those in the remaining 23 boroughs would have stayed closed from 4 January.\n\nMeanwhile, new analysis by Imperial College London has confirmed the new variant of coronavirus has a much quicker rate of transmission than the original strain.\n\nAnd an analysis of NHS England data from 23 hospital trusts by the Health Service Journal shows that Covid-19 is putting intense pressure on adult acute care and general beds, as well as those in intensive care.\n\nIt found that more than a third of these beds were occupied by patients with Covid-19 on Tuesday, and in three trusts - North Middlesex in London, and Medway and Dartford and Gravesham in Kent - the figure was more than half.\n\nBased on the recent rise in numbers, the analysis suggests that all acute and general beds might soon be filled with Covid-19 patients.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Breakfast, Ms Cordery said the surging transmission and death rates were \"incredibly hard to deal with\".\n\n\"When we are seeing major London trusts saying they are under pressure, that's when we know we're in a very challenging space,\" she said.\n\nA leading intensive care doctor has urged people to follow restrictions until the vaccination programme is fully rolled out.\n\nProf Anthony Gordon, of Imperial College, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"There is light at the end of the tunnel so I would urge people to hold on for these few more months while the vaccination programme makes that difference and then we can truly get back to normal.\n\n\"But we can't overrun the health service because this will just lead to thousands more deaths.\"\n\nAdrian Boyle, vice-president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, urged people to follow guidance on hand washing, social distancing and face coverings to stop the \"entirely preventable\" spread of the virus.\n\nDr Boyle said staff are \"tired\" and at risk of \"burnout\", having \"worked really hard over the summer\" and \"put up with a lot of disruption\".\n\n\"This time people are frustrated, this is now an entirely preventable disease, we know what we did in spring made a lot of this go away. There's also now a vaccine,\" he added.\n\nMore than three-quarters of England is currently under the strictest tier four - \"stay at home\" - coronavirus measures, and other parts of the country have joined higher tiers.\n\nMainland Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are under lockdown.\n\nThere are also concerns the added pressures of rising numbers of Covid patients seen at London hospitals have begun to spread across the country.\n\nSpeaking on Today, Dr Alison Pittard, of the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine, said it was \"only a matter of time before it starts to spread to other parts of country\", adding that \"we're already starting to see that\".\n\nShe stressed it was \"really important that we try and stop the transmission in the community because that translates into hospital admissions\".\n\nIt comes as almost half the major hospital trusts in England are said to be dealing with more Covid-19 patients than at the peak of the first wave in April.\n\nAnd pressure has been so great on some hospitals in London and south-east England that some patients have been moved out of the area.\n\nLondon's Nightingale emergency hospital is ready to admit patients, the NHS has said, while other sites currently not in use are being readied.\n\nHowever, Mike Adams, director of the Royal College of Nursing, questioned whether there were the staff available to run the hospital.\n\n\"Nursing is already stretched beyond capacity so there is no magic pile of nurses we can call upon,\" he told BBC Radio 4's World at One programme.\n\n\"I think the real battle is reducing the spread of the virus and getting the vaccine rolled out.\"\n\nThe new coronavirus variant has driven a big rise in cases, with the worst effects felt so far in London.\n\nResearchers at Imperial College London have confirmed it increases the R number - the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to - by about 0.4 to 0.7.\n\nThe UK's latest R number has been estimated at between 1.1 and 1.3. It needs to be below 1.0 for the number of cases to start falling.\n\nProf Axel Gandy, from the statistic section of Imperial College London, told the Today programme this higher rate of infection means that transmission of the disease would have tripled even during England's November lockdown conditions.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. BBC's Laura Foster explains how to wear your mask correctly and help stop coronavirus spreading\n\nThe hunt is now on to find new ways to slow the spread of coronavirus, with the rules on mask wearing potentially coming up for review.\n\nBehavioural science group SPI-B (Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours), which reports to the Sage group of government advisers, has said that mandatory face coverings may be necessary in a wider number of settings, such as in workplaces and possibly outdoors.\n\nHowever, Dr Simon Clarke, associate professor of cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, told BBC Radio 4's World at One he was not convinced a move towards making the wearing of face coverings mandatory outdoors would make \"much difference\" to transmission rates.\n\nHe said the \"bigger problem\" was people touching their face covering or wearing it incorrectly, adding ministers should focus on ensuring people knew how to wear them and to change and wash them regularly.\n\nThe rollout of the newly approved Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will begin on Monday, almost a month after the Pfizer-BioNTech jab.\n\nSecond doses of either will now take place within 12 weeks rather than 21 days as had been initially planned with the Pfizer vaccine.", "The star started filming his role in secret last year\n\nComedian John Bishop is to join Jodie Whittaker for the 13th series of Doctor Who, the BBC has revealed.\n\nThe 54-year-old, who recently tested positive for coronavirus, said boarding the Tardis was a \"dream come true\".\n\nHe will play a character called Dan, who \"becomes embroiled in the Doctor's adventures\" and faces \"evil alien races beyond his wildest nightmares\".\n\nBishop fills the gap left by Bradley Walsh and Tosin Cole, who bowed out in a special New Year's Day episode.\n\nHe began filming his role last November, but the BBC kept the signing under wraps until the broadcast of Revolution Of The Daleks on Friday night.\n\nBishop, who grew up on a Merseyside council estate, had a brief career as a professional footballer before turning his hand to comedy.\n\nHe has previously acted in the Channel 4 drama Skins and the Ken Loach film Route Irish.\n\nEarlier this week, the comedian revealed that he and his wife had tested positive for Coronavirus over Christmas, saying he had been \"flattened\" by \"the worst illness I have ever had\".\n\nWriting on Instagram, he described his symptoms as including \"incredible headaches, muscle and joint point, no appetite, nausea, dizziness [and] chronic fatigue like I didn't know existed\".\n\nHe updated fans on New Year's Eve, saying he and his wife were \"getting a little stronger\" every day, and promising he would return to work in January.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by johnbish100 This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIt is not thought his illness will disrupt production on Doctor Who. The show is on a scheduled break for Christmas and not due to resume filming until later this month.\n\nThe 13th series of the rebooted sci-fi stalwart will see Whittaker return as the extra terrestrial Time Lord, alongside Mandip Gill, who returns as Yaz.\n\nIn a statement, Bishop said: \"If I could tell my younger self that one day I would be asked to step on board the Tardis, I would never have believed it.\n\n\"It's an absolute dream come true to be joining Doctor Who and I couldn't wish for better company than Jodie and Mandip.\"\n\nJodie Whittaker became the first female actress to play The Doctor in 2017\n\nProgramme boss Chris Chibnall added: \"It's time for the next chapter of Doctor Who, and it starts with a man called Dan. Oh, we've had to keep this one secret for a long, long time.\n\n\"Our conversations started with John even before the pandemic hit.\n\n\"The character of Dan was built for him, and it's a joy to have him aboard the Tardis.\"\n\nDoctor Who will return to BBC One later this year.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nArsenal continued their Premier League resurgence with a ruthless victory over strugglers West Brom at The Hawthorns.\n\nDefender Kieran Tierney's excellent solo run and curling finish put the Gunners in front in the first half, before the impressive Bukayo Saka rounded off a stunning passing move to make it 2-0.\n\nAlexandre Lacazette added the third and fourth goals after the break - smashing in a rebound from Emile Smith Rowe's shot before he was set up by Tierney.\n\nIt was Arsenal's third league victory in a row after they had failed to win their previous seven.\n\nWest Brom, playing their fourth match under new manager Sam Allardyce, remain second from bottom and six points from safety.\n• None Confidence? Youth? How have Arsenal turned relegation talk into European hopes?\n\nArsenal boss Mikel Arteta said he wanted his players to \"show confidence\" at The Hawthorns, and they certainly did that in a dominant and eye-catching display.\n\nHector Bellerin forced Sam Johnstone into a save within two minutes after Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang broke down the left, and Saka tormented full-back Dara O'Shea on the opposite wing constantly during the opening half.\n\nIt was Saka's ball that fizzed past the back post, inches away from the toe of Aubameyang, after the 19-year-old had got the better of O'Shea and hit it straight at Johnstone.\n\nWest Brom were being suffocated and Tierney's burst of pace to get around Darnell Furlong, before bending it into the far corner, was the perfect way to open the scoring.\n\nSaka made it 2-0 by rounding off a slick, one-touch passing move that former Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger would have been proud of.\n\nWest Brom could offer no response after the break either and Arsenal were 3-0 up on the hour when Lacazette eventually blasted in the rebound from a catalogue of errors by defender Semi Ajayi.\n\nThat was game over but Lacazette was allowed to add a fourth when he was left unmarked to divert Tierney's cross into the roof of the net four minutes later.\n\nArteta, knowing the job was done, was able to bring off Saka and Emile Smith Rowe following impressive performances from both youngsters, while Arsenal continued to create chances to round off a very enjoyable evening in the snow.\n\nAllardyce's first match in charge of West Brom - a 3-0 drubbing by Aston Villa after captain Jake Livermore had been sent off - was a sign of just how tough this job was going to be.\n\nThen that 1-1 draw with Liverpool at Anfield provided hope. The Baggies were resilient, organised and tireless.\n\nBut heavy back-to-back defeats by Leeds United and now Arsenal at home have brought things back down to earth.\n\nWest Brom were overawed in defence, out-run in midfield and frustrated by a lack of opportunities in attack throughout this confidence-crushing defeat.\n\nTheir rare sniffs at goal came from a Granit Xhaka error in the first half - Matheus Pereira chipping it through to Matt Phillips who struck it straight at Bernd Leno - before Callum Robinson's finish was ruled out for offside in the second half.\n\nSubstitute Rekeem Harper's long-range strike deep in stoppage time was also comfortably turned behind by Leno.\n\nIt was West Brom's third home loss in three under Allardyce and they have conceded 12 goals with no reply in those games.\n\n'Everything looks much better' - what they said\n\nWest Brom manager Sam Allardyce: \"Another game gone by where we learn more about the players we have. We have learnt an awful lot about what we can and cannot do.\n\n\"We need to work out a way of not trying to be as sloppy as we have been at conceding goals. It appears when we try to open up we leave opportunities for the opposition and we cannot cope.\"\n\nArsenal manager Mikel Arteta: \"We had a big week, three games in seven days, and we managed to win them and everything looks much better. It was difficult conditions but the team looked sharp from the start. It's a big win.\n\n\"After the results we had before we had to lift things straight away. Now we have got some discipline back. We look more creative in the final third and we look solid at the back.\"\n\nThe best of the stats\n• None West Brom are the first side to lose consecutive home Premier League games by at least four goals since Wigan in August 2010.\n• None Arsenal have scored in all 25 of their Premier League meetings with West Brom, the best 100% scoring record by one side against an opponent in the competition's history.\n• None There were 20 passes in the build-up to Arsenal's first goal scored by Kieran Tierney - since Mikel Arteta's first game in charge on Boxing Day 2019, the Gunners have scored more goals following a sequence of 20+ passes than any other Premier League side (3).\n• None Tierney became the first Scottish player to score an away Premier League goal for Arsenal and the first to do so in the top flight since Charlie Nicholas against Ipswich Town in March 1986.\n• None Alexandre Lacazette has scored five away Premier League goals in 2020-21, his best such tally in a single season in the competition.\n\nWest Brom travel to Blackpool for an FA Cup third-round tie on Saturday, 9 January (15:00 GMT kick-off), before returning to Premier League action on Saturday, 16 January against Wolves (12:30 GMT).\n\nArsenal host Newcastle in their FA Cup match on the same day (17:30 GMT), before facing Crystal Palace at home in the league on Thursday, 14 January (20:00 GMT).\n• None Offside, West Bromwich Albion. Charlie Austin tries a through ball, but Kyle Bartley is caught offside.\n• None Attempt saved. Rekeem Harper (West Bromwich Albion) left footed shot from outside the box is saved in the bottom right corner. Assisted by Matheus Pereira.\n• None Attempt saved. Willian (Arsenal) left footed shot from the right side of the box is saved in the bottom left corner. Assisted by Dani Ceballos.\n• None Attempt missed. Joseph Willock (Arsenal) header from the centre of the box misses to the left. Assisted by Willian with a cross.\n• None Attempt saved. Conor Gallagher (West Bromwich Albion) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Callum Robinson.\n• None Attempt blocked. Charlie Austin (West Bromwich Albion) right footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by Dara O'Shea.\n• None Dani Ceballos (Arsenal) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt saved. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (Arsenal) left footed shot from the left side of the box is saved in the bottom left corner. Assisted by Kieran Tierney.\n• None Attempt missed. Charlie Austin (West Bromwich Albion) right footed shot from the centre of the box is too high. Assisted by Matt Phillips. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None A special and exclusive one-off chat with the music icon\n• None How has their rise come to define our culture?", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nManchester United moved level on points with Premier League leaders Liverpool as a Bruno Fernandes penalty saw off stubborn Aston Villa.\n\nFernandes drilled his 11th league goal this season - and his fifth from the spot - into the bottom corner to punish Douglas Luiz's clip on Paul Pogba and hand United an eighth win in 10 games.\n\nBertrand Traore's calm finish underneath David de Gea had deservedly drawn Villa level, cancelling out Anthony Martial's stooping first-half header for the hosts.\n\nBut Fernandes' penalty extended United's hold over Villa - they have now won 32 and lost just one of the past 44 league meetings between the sides - and leaves Liverpool top only by virtue of goal difference.\n\nThe spot-kick award angered Aston Villa boss Dean Smith who claimed Pogba \"tripped himself\" and that the video assistant referee should have asked on-pitch official Michael Oliver to review his decision.\n\n\"I don't see why Michael couldn't have looked at it. That's what VAR is for isn't it?\" Smith told BBC Sport.\n\n\"I thought it was a penalty at the time, but I looked at it after the game and saw he tripped himself. I don't think it's a penalty.\n\n\"I think there's enough doubt there to send the referee over to the screen.\"\n\nSmith's side were perhaps unfortunate not to have left Old Trafford with at least a point from a thoroughly entertaining game but they also needed several fine saves from Emiliano Martinez to keep them in it.\n\nAfter Fernandes' spot-kick put United back in front, Martinez superbly tipped a stinging 25-yarder from the Portuguese on to the crossbar as well as denying Martial a second.\n\nMartinez's counterpart David de Gea was just as busy, with a late save from Matty Cash's long-range strike preserving the points, not long after Tyrone Mings had headed wide a glorious chance to level.\n\nOle Gunnar Solskjaer's side have displayed their ability to grind out points at Old Trafford in recent weeks, as evidenced in 1-0 home wins over both West Bromwich Albion and Wolves.\n\nBut they have also shown a willingness to go toe-to-toe with teams who are happy to open up the game and, while this was not quite the shootout of the 6-2 win over Leeds, it was just as easy on the eye.\n\nA number of fluid first-half moves produced chances before Martial's opener as the France forward saw a curler tipped over by Martinez, while Fernandes and Wan-Bissaka were narrowly off target with similar efforts.\n\nMartial stole between Mings and Ezri Konsa to nod the Red Devils ahead from Wan-Bissaka's inviting cross for only his second league goal of the season on his return to Solskjaer's starting line-up.\n\nWhile Luiz was unfortunate to be penalised for what might have been an accidental clip on Pogba, there was enough contact for the penalty to be given and Fernandes continued his excellent record from the spot.\n\nUnited were nine points behind Liverpool after a 1-0 defeat by Arsenal at Old Trafford on 1 November but have made up that gap in just two months to set an intriguing title race into motion.\n\nA minute's silence before the game paid tribute to former boss Tommy Docherty, who famously prevented Liverpool claiming the treble by leading United to an FA Cup win over the Reds in 1977.\n\nAnd while talk of foiling a second successive Liverpool title might be premature, moving alongside them at the Premier League's summit will give Solskjaer's side even more confidence as they eye up a trip to Anfield on 17 January.\n\nWhile Villa were ultimately outgunned by their hosts, their brave display was further evidence of the progress Smith's side have made this season.\n\nThey held their own in the first half, causing United a number of problems down the flanks, with playmaker Jack Grealish prompting and probing to show why the hosts have long considered a move for the Villa captain.\n\nBut they were even more impressive in the early stages of the second period, Grealish crossing for an Ollie Watkins header that was saved by De Gea before collecting a quick free-kick and finding Traore to tuck home the equaliser.\n\nLuiz's foul on Pogba came with Villa very much in the ascendancy and while they then had to ride a storm the visitors still came close to pinching a point as Mings beat fellow England centre-half Harry Maguire to a free-kick only to nod wide.\n\nWith Ross Barkley's return from a hamstring injury imminent, this performance should keep Villa optimistic even if defeat halted a five-game unbeaten run and saw them slip a place to sixth, behind Chelsea on goal difference.\n\nAnd while their rotten record at Old Trafford continues - just one win in 34 visits since 1983, which came courtesy of a Gabriel Agbonlahor header in 2009 - they have still only conceded five times in eight away games this campaign.\n\n'We have improved a lot in a year' - what they said\n\nManchester United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer told BBC Sport: \"You are always delighted with three points. The performance was good and we created chances.\n\n\"It was maybe a little too open and we wasted chances. We tried to play the Hollywood pass instead of securing the first one and using the space that was there.\n\n\"We are happy with what we are doing. We have shown we have improved a lot in a year. We lost to Arsenal away last New Year's Day. We have improved immensely.\"\n\nAston Villa boss Dean Smith told BBC Sport: \"I wasn't happy with the first half. We were miles off the levels where we have been. It felt like a testimonial pace then they deservedly had the lead at half-time. I told the players we needed to be upping our levels.\n\n\"We competed a lot better [in the second half], showed more quality and created chances. I'd take the second-half performance all day long. A dubious penalty has lost us the game.\n\n\"When you look at our performances and results, it shows we are very competitive in this league now, which is what we wanted it to be.\"\n\nUnited's hold over Villa goes on - the stats\n• None Manchester United are unbeaten in their past 16 Premier League matches against Aston Villa (W12 D4).\n• None Aston Villa have lost 13 of their past 15 away Premier League games against Manchester United at Old Trafford (W1 D1).\n• None In Premier League history, the only player to be directly involved in more goals in their first 30 appearances in the competition than Bruno Fernandes (33 - 19 goals, 14 assists) is Andrew Cole (37 - 28 goals, nine assists).\n• None Anthony Martial has now scored on all seven days of the week in the Premier League for Manchester United, becoming the fifth player to do so, after Ryan Giggs, Andrew Cole, David Beckham and Wayne Rooney.\n• None Only Tottenham's Harry Kane (10) has assisted more Premier League goals this season than Jack Grealish (7), while the last Aston Villa player to assist more than seven Premier League goals in a season was Ashley Young in 2010-11 (10).\n• None Since Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's first Premier League match in charge of Manchester United in December 2018, the Red Devils have taken (27) and scored (21) the most Premier League penalties.\n\nManchester United host local rivals Manchester City in the Carabao Cup semi-finals on Wednesday (19:45 GMT) and welcome Watford in the FA Cup on Saturday 9 January (20:00 GMT). Their next Premier League game is away at Burnley on Tuesday 12 January (20:15 GMT).\n\nAston Villa host Liverpool in the FA Cup next Friday (19:45 GMT) before returning to Premier League action at home to Tottenham on Wednesday 13 January (20:15 GMT).\n• None Attempt blocked. Keinan Davis (Aston Villa) left footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked.\n• None Attempt blocked. Keinan Davis (Aston Villa) header from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Ollie Watkins with a cross.\n• None Offside, Manchester United. Paul Pogba tries a through ball, but Marcus Rashford is caught offside.\n• None Attempt saved. Matthew Cash (Aston Villa) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the bottom left corner. Assisted by Jack Grealish.\n• None Nemanja Matic (Manchester United) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Luke Shaw (Manchester United) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None A special and exclusive one-off chat with the music icon\n• None How has their rise come to define our culture?", "London's Nightingale Hospital is ready to admit patients as hospitals in the capital struggle, the NHS has said.\n\nThe Excel Centre site in east London has been \"reactivated\" amid a rise in the number of Covid-19 patients.\n\nOther Nightingale hospital sites across England are also being readied, with the UK recording a record daily rise in coronavirus cases.\n\nAn NHS spokesman said hospitals in London remain under \"significant pressure\".\n\nHe said: \"In anticipation of pressures rising from the spread of the new variant infection, NHS London were asked to ensure the London Nightingale was reactivated and ready to admit patients as needed, and that process is under way.\"\n\nSeveral NHS hospitals in London and the south-east are now reporting they are under extreme pressure as a result of a surge in the number of people falling seriously ill with Covid-19.\n\nAn email to staff at the Royal London Hospital says they are operating in disaster medicine mode - warning they can no longer provide high-standard critical care.\n\nNightingale hospitals in Manchester, Bristol and Harrogate are in use currently for non-Covid patients, the spokesman added.\n\nThe Exeter site received its first Covid patients in November when it began accepting those transferred from the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust, which was described as \"very busy\".\n\nHe said: \"Covid inpatient numbers are rising sharply so the remaining Nightingales are being readied to admit patients once again should they be needed, in line with best clinical practice developed over the first and second waves of coronavirus.\"\n\nSenior intensive care doctor Prof Hugh Montgomery warned those who fail to follow the rules on social distancing, hand washing and wearing a face covering \"have blood on their hands\".\n\nNHS England medical director Stephen Powis has described the Nightingale hospitals as \"our insurance policy, there as our last resort\".\n\nLondon's Nightingale hospital was built in nine days, with the help of hundreds of soldiers\n\nHe told a Downing Street press conference on Wednesday: \"We asked all the Nightingale hospitals a few weeks ago to be ready to take patients if that was required.\n\n\"Indeed, some of them are already doing that, in Manchester taking step-down patients, in Exeter managing Covid patients, and in other places managing diagnostics, for instance.\n\n\"Our first steps though, in managing the extra demands on the NHS, are to expand capacity within existing hospitals - that's the best way to use our staff.\"\n\nLondon's Nightingale Hospital was opened on 3 April and placed on standby weeks later after fewer than 20 patients were treated there.", "Owen Thomas says metal detecting has been his escape from the stresses of the pandemic.\n\nThe writer from Tongwynlais, Cardiff started metal detecting after bumping into his long-time friend Bob Wiseman - an avid detectorist - during lockdown.\n\nAside from his first outing, when he followed his metal toe cap boots thinking he had found treasure, he has discovered artefacts dating back to the 13th Century.\n\nOwen says he has fallen in love with his new-found hobby and it is \"the link with a life that's gone” that appeals to him so much.", "A UK ticket-holder has started the new year by winning the EuroMillions jackpot of nearly £40m.\n\nOne ticket matched all five regular numbers and two lucky stars in the draw on Friday night to win the £39,774,466.40 prize.\n\nCamelot's Andy Carter, senior winners' adviser at the National Lottery, said: \"What an amazing start to 2021 for UK EuroMillions players.\"\n\nA ticket-holder has now come forward to claim their prize.\n\nCamelot, which operates the lottery, said checks were being made on the claim.\n\nMr Carter said: \"It is fantastic news that the jackpot winning lucky ticket-holder has now claimed this enormous prize. We will now focus on supporting the ticket-holder through the process.\"\n\nThe winning numbers were 16, 28, 32, 44 and 48 with the lucky stars 01 and 09.\n\nTen other ticket-holders each won £1m in the UK Millionaire Maker New Year's Day event.\n\nIn 2019, a UK ticket-holder won the full £170m EuroMillions jackpot, making them Britain's richest ever lottery winner.\n\nAnd last year, a £57m EuroMillions prize claim was validated just before the deadline. The ticket had been bought in South Ayrshire.\n\nThe winning ticket holder's newfound cash means they are now wealthier than former One Direction singer Zayn Malik, who is worth £36m, according to the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List.\n\nAnd if they have a bit more money in the bank, they could buy one of the UK's most expensive homes, which went on the market last year.\n\nNobody won the EuroMillons Hotpicks jackpot on Friday, which uses the same numbers as the main draw, but one winner scooped the Thunderball top prize of £500,000.\n\nThe Thunderball numbers were 13, 17, 30, 34, 35 and the Thunderball was 01.", "Lisa Montgomery is scheduled for execution in January 2021\n\nA US appeals court has lifted a stay of execution on the only woman awaiting a federal death penalty.\n\nLisa Montgomery strangled a pregnant woman in Missouri before cutting out and kidnapping the baby in 2004.\n\nIf the execution goes ahead, she will be the first female federal inmate to be put to death in almost 70 years.\n\nMontgomery's execution date was originally set for last month but a stay was put in place after her attorneys contracted Covid-19.\n\nIt was then rescheduled for 12 January by the Justice Department. But Montgomery's lawyers argued that the date could not be set while a stay was in place.\n\nA court sided with her attorneys, stopping an order from the director of the Bureau of Prisons scheduling her death.\n\nBut on Friday, a panel of judges concluded that the director had acted under the law, allowing the execution to take place.\n\nMontgomery's legal team said they will file a petition for the judges to reconsider their ruling.\n\nThe last woman to be executed by the US government was Bonnie Heady, who died in a gas chamber in Missouri in 1953, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.\n\nFederal executions had been on pause for 17 years before President Donald Trump ordered them to resume earlier last year.\n\nIf the remaining executions go ahead, Mr Trump will have overseen the most executions by a US president in more than a century.\n\nMontgomery's execution date is just days before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.\n\nMr Biden, who for decades was a fierce supporter of the death penalty as a Delaware senator, has now said he will seek to end federal executions once he takes office.\n\nIn December 2004, Montgomery drove from Kansas to the home of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, in Missouri, purportedly to purchase a puppy, according to a Department of Justice press release.\n\n\"Once inside the residence, Montgomery attacked and strangled Stinnett - who was eight months pregnant - until the victim lost consciousness,\" it says.\n\nMontgomery cut into Stinnett's body to remove the baby, which she took with her in an attempt to pass it off as her own.\n\nIn 2007, a jury found Montgomery guilty of federal kidnapping resulting in death, and unanimously recommended a death sentence.\n\nBut Montgomery's lawyers say she experienced brain damage from beatings as a child and is mentally unwell, so should not face the death penalty.\n\nUnder the US justice system, crimes can be tried either in federal courts, at a national level, or in state courts, at a regional level.\n\nCertain crimes, such as counterfeiting currency or mail theft, are automatically tried at a federal level, as are cases in which the US is a party or those which involve constitutional violations.\n\nThe death penalty was outlawed at state and federal level by a 1972 Supreme Court decision that cancelled all existing death penalty statutes.\n\nA 1976 Supreme Court decision allowed states to reinstate the death penalty and in 1988 the government passed legislation that made it available again at federal level.\n\nAccording to data collected by the Death Penalty Information Center, 78 people were sentenced to death in federal cases between 1988 and 2018 but only three were executed.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What's in store for US President-elect Biden in 2021? Senior North America reporter Anthony Zurcher looks ahead\n\nThe latest in a series of attempts by allies of President Donald Trump to overturn the November US election result has failed.\n\nA Texas judge rejected the case, brought by Republican Louie Gohmert, seeking to stop Vice-President Mike Pence from certifying the final result.\n\nLawyers for Mr Pence had asked for the case to be thrown out on Thursday.\n\nPresident-elect Joe Biden is due to take office on 20 January. Mr Trump is yet to concede.\n\nMr Gohmert, a Republican congressman, told Newsmax TV that he planned to appeal against the verdict.\n\nMr Trump's friends and colleagues in the Republican party have presented dozens of legal challenges to the November outcome which delivered a decisive win to Mr Biden.\n\nHis victory was announced after days of vote-counting that took longer than in recent years because of the huge number of postal ballots cast due to the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nMr Trump has made numerous unsubstantiated claims that Mr Biden's win, which saw the president-elect gain 306 electoral college votes to his rival's 232, was fraudulent.\n\nThe electoral college is a system whereby each US state has an allocated number of points that is granted to the overall winner in each state. The candidate who gains the majority wins the presidency.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Explaining the Electoral College and which voters will decide who wins\n\nCongressman Gohmert's case sought to allow Vice-President Mike Pence to reject some electoral college votes when they are ratified by Congress on 6 January.\n\nThe vice-president presides over the vote certification in Congress in a ceremonial role that involves opening and tallying the envelopes containing electoral college votes before announcing the result.\n\nMr Gohmert's case aimed to expand that role to allow Mr Pence to cast judgement on the validity of the votes and potentially replace votes for Mr Biden with ones for Mr Trump.\n\nBut Judge Jeremy Kernodle, who was appointed to the Texas court in 2018 by Mr Trump, rejected the case, saying it was based on speculative events.\n\nOn Thursday a lawyer from the US Justice Department representing Mr Pence urged Mr Gohmert to drop the case, suggesting that it was not the vice-president's office that should be scrutinising the outcome.\n\nAlthough most Republicans in Congress are expected to vote in favour of certifying the results, a small number including Senator Josh Hawley, say they plan to object. But their vote is not expected to change the outcome.\n\nMr Biden is due to be sworn in as president on 20 January at a scaled-back ceremony with just 1,000 tickets available due to Covid-19 precautions.", "All primary schools in London will remain closed for the start of the new term, the government has confirmed.\n\nLondon mayor Sadiq Khan said the government had \"finally seen sense and U-turned\" on its plan to allow pupils in some areas to return on Monday.\n\nLeaders of nine London local authorities had written to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson urging him to rethink the decision.\n\nMr Williamson said the city-wide closures were \"a last resort\".\n\nThe government said it had decided all primary schools in the capital would be required to provide remote learning after a further review of coronavirus transmission rates.\n\nVulnerable pupils and the children of key workers will continue to attend school, the government said.\n\nEarly years care, alternative provision and special schools will remain open, it added.\n\nSchools in nine London boroughs and the City of London district had been set to reopen - while those in the remaining 23 boroughs would have stayed closed from 4 January.\n\nThe decision was criticised and branded \"illogical\" by councillors and residents in the affected areas, who called for primary schools across the capital to move to online learning until 18 January.\n\nThey pointed out that Covid-19 infection rates were higher in some boroughs told to reopen schools than in others where they were not.\n\nIn a tweet, Mr Khan said a city-wide closure was \"the right decision\" and thanked education minister Nick Gibb for \"our constructive conversations over the past two days\".\n\n\"The government's original decision was ridiculous and has been causing immense confusion for parents, teachers and staff across the capital,\" Mr Khan said.\n\n\"It is right that all schools in London are treated the same, and that no primary schools in London will be forced to open on Monday\".\n\nDan Thorpe, leader of Greenwich council, said he was \"absolutely delighted\" to hear Mr Williamson had \"finally climbed down and reversed his decision\".\n\nKingston Council leader Caroline Kerr said she was \"dismayed\" at the government's handling of situation while a council statement added: \"It never made sense that neighbouring boroughs were being instructed to have different arrangements despite having similar rates of infection.\"\n\nIslington council leader Richard Watts said waiting until New Year's day to announce the further closures was \"unacceptable\".\n\nHe said the decision \"should have been made weeks ago, as the public health situation became clear\".\n\nMary Bousted, of the National Education Union, said the government was right to reverse its \"obviously nonsensical position\".\n\n\"What is right for London is right for the rest of the country,\" she said, and she called on ministers to \"do their duty\" by closing all primary and secondary schools nationwide for at least two weeks.\n\nPaul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders' union NAHT, accused the government of damaging public confidence with a \"confusing and last-minute approach\".\n\n\"Just at the moment when we need some decisive leadership, the government is at sixes and sevens,\" he said.\n\nShadow education secretary Kate Green said the move was \"yet another government U-turn creating chaos for parents just two days before the start of term\".\n\n\"Gavin Williamson must still clarify why some schools in tier 4 are closing and what the criteria for reopening will be,\" she said.\n\nGavin Williamson said closing schools across London was a \"last resort\"\n\nIn a statement, Mr Williamson said children's education and wellbeing remained \"a national priority\" and moving the whole of London to remote education \"really is a last resort and a temporary solution\".\n\n\"We will continue keep the list of local authorities under review, and reopen classrooms as soon as we possibly can,\" he said.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said the situation in London had continued to worsen in the past week and infections and hospital admissions had risen sharply.\n\n\"While our priority is to keep as many children as possible in school, we have to strike a balance between education and infection rates and pressures on the NHS,\" he said.\n\nThe Department for Education had previously said decisions on school closures and openings were based on new infections, positivity rates, and pressures on the NHS.\n\nA spokeswoman for the department said: \"In response to concerning data about the spread of coronavirus, we have implemented the contingency framework for education in a small number of areas of the country, requiring schools to provide remote learning to all but vulnerable and critical worker children and exam years.\n\n\"Decisions on which areas will be subject to the contingency framework are based on close work with PHE, the NHS, the Joint Biosecurity Centre and across government.\"\n\nAre you a parent or teacher who will be affected by the London primary school closures? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Bodycam footage shows the moments before a black man was killed by a police shooting in Minneapolis\n\nMinneapolis police have released bodycam footage of a fatal shooting by officers, the first death at the hands of police in the US city since that of George Floyd, a black man, in May.\n\nThe victim, Dolal Idd, 23, was a suspect in a felony and was stopped by police on Wednesday. He was also black.\n\nInitial witness statements and police say Mr Idd fired first and was shot dead when the officers returned fire.\n\nMinneapolis saw months of unrest after Mr Floyd's death in police custody.\n\nThe protests spread across the US amid allegations of police brutality.\n\nMr Floyd died after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.\n\nThe footage from Wednesday's fatal shooting, from the bodycam of one of the officers involved, was released late on Thursday.\n\nIt shows the officers' cars blocking a white vehicle at a petrol station on the city's south side, not far from where Mr Floyd died.\n\nThe police are heard shouting \"Stop your car, hands up, hands up!\" before shots are fired, including by the officers.\n\nA female passenger in the car with Mr Idd was not hurt, police said, nor were the officers.\n\nMinneapolis police chief Medaria Arradondo said a gun was found at the scene.\n\n\"When I viewed the video that everyone else is viewing - and certainly the real-time slow-down version - it appears the individual inside the vehicle fired his weapon at the officers first,\" he said.\n\nPeople including Mr Idd's father Bayle Gelle gathered at the scene the following day, prompting fears of renewed protests.\n\n\"He was just sitting in the car, and bullets were shot at him, and no reason,\" he said, quoted by CBS News.\n\n\"Why are we here?... Because of colour. He is a black man. We want to know why my sweet son gets shot and killed.\"\n\nGeorge Floyd's death led to violent protests in the city, including this police station set on fire in May\n\nCity mayor Jacob Frey said he was committed to getting the facts and pursuing justice.\n\n\"We know a life has been cut short tonight and that trust between communities of colour and law enforcement is fragile,\" he said in a statement.\n\n\"Rebuilding that trust will depend on complete transparency.\"\n\nMr Floyd's death in May led to calls for reform or even abolition of the city's police department, but those efforts have stalled.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. More than 2,500 people take part in an illegal rave in northern France, despite the nationwide curfew\n\nAn illegal warehouse rave that began on New Year's Eve in France in defiance of coronavirus precautions has been shut down by police after arrests and clashes.\n\nSome of the 2,500 ravers in Lieuron near Rennes in Brittany had planned to party until Tuesday.\n\nPolice issued fines to revellers found leaving and the organisers were being identified as the party ended.\n\nA number of party-goers were from the UK and Spain, police said.\n\nAttendees clashed with police, setting fire to a car and throwing objects at officers attempting to shut the event down. At least three officers were injured.\n\nPolice broke up the three-day party that defied a nationwide curfew\n\nA driver was apprehended with turntables, speakers and a generator in the boot of the vehicle, according to French TV station BFM TV.\n\nPolice trying to stop the event faced \"fierce hostility from many partygoers\", a statement from local authorities said.\n\nBut at 05:30 local time on Saturday the ravers began to accept the party was over and started to leave the two disused warehouse hangars, the local prefecture said.\n\nSome revellers said they were hoping to stay until Tuesday\n\nInterior Minister Gérald Darmanin said on Twitter that trucks, sound equipment and generators were seized at the scene and an investigation has been opened.\n\nMore than 1,200 fines were issued for non-compliance with the curfew, not wearing a mask and attending an illegal gathering, Mr Darmanin said.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Gérald DARMANIN This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nOn Friday authorities said they had opened a sanitary cordon around the party and anyone leaving the event was urged to self-isolate for seven days.\n\nOne of the party-goers, who gave his name as Jo, told the AFP news agency that \"very few had respected social distancing\" at the event.\n\nA number of people slept in their cars before returning to dance, Le Monde newspaper reports.\n\nOne reveller told Le Monde that the rave was \"very well organised\" with food stalls inside.\n\nAnother, who came with four friends from Finisterre in north-west France, told the newspaper that she had wanted to \"escape\" for a few hours.\n\nOn Friday an interior ministry crisis meeting was held and all vehicle exits from the rave were blocked as police sought to shut down the party.\n\nFrance introduced strict rules ahead of the New Year including a curfew from 20:00 until 06:00.\n\nMore than 100,000 police officers were deployed across the country to break up parties and enforce the curfew.\n\nOfficers were instructed to break up underground parties as soon as they were reported, fine participants and identify the organisers.\n\nFrance has recorded more than 2.6 million coronavirus cases and 64,892 deaths since the pandemic began.\n\nOfficers elsewhere in Europe have also had to break up events in recent days.\n\nPolice dispersed a mass gathering near the Spanish city of Barcelona on Saturday where 300 people had been partying for more than 40 hours.\n\nThree footballers from London-based football team Tottenham Hotspur were photographed at a Christmas party last week in breach of coronavirus regulations.\n\nAnd in Essex, an illegal New Year's Eve party damaged All Saints Church near Brentwood. Church authorities have since received hundreds of pounds to pay for repairs.\n\nOfficers in Spain broke up the rave near Barcelona, which had been going on for more than 40 hours", "Officers dispersed the party at the Grade II* listed church before midnight\n\nThousands of pounds has been raised to pay for repairs to a 500-year-old church that was \"trashed\" during an illegal New Year's Eve party.\n\nHundreds of revellers attended the party at All Saints Church in East Horndon, near Brentwood, after the building was broken into.\n\nThree people were arrested on suspicion of public order and drugs offences.\n\nVolunteer group Friends of All Saints said it was \"completely overwhelmed\" by peoples' \"support and generosity\".\n\nChurch volunteer Astrid Gillespie said the damage was \"devastating\"\n\nThe fundraising page was set up on Friday and aimed to raise £2,000, but in less than 24 hours it had raised more than £8,700.\n\nIt said a \"massive clean-up\" was needed at the \"much-loved\" church after \"hundreds of revellers trashed the place\".\n\nEquipment was seized by police at the illegal party\n\nAstrid Gillespie, a volunteer with the Friends of All Saints, said event organisers had smashed a window to put in an extractor fan unit and wired sound equipment into the church's fuse box.\n\nShe said: \"It was a professional set-up. They had a bar area where you had to exchange tokens.\n\n\"It's such a beautiful church. To find out it's been damaged is devastating.\"\n\nReferring to the money that was raised, she said: \"Faith in humanity restored\".\n\nThe church, which is owned and maintained by the Churches Conservation Trust, has not been used for religious services since 1970, but regularly houses community events.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "Researchers have been tracking changes to the \"spike\" of the virus\n\nThe new variant of Covid-19 is \"hugely\" more transmissible than the virus's previous version, a study has found.\n\nIt concludes the new variant increases the Reproduction or R number by between 0.4 and 0.7.\n\nThe UK's latest R number has been estimated at between 1.1 and 1.3. It needs to be below 1.0 for the number of cases to start falling.\n\nProf Axel Gandy of London's Imperial College said the differences between the viruses types was \"quite extreme\".\n\n\"There is a huge difference in how easily the variant virus spreads,\" he told BBC News. \"This is the most serious change in the virus since the epidemic began,\" he added.\n\nThe Imperial College study suggests transmission of the new variant tripled during England's November lockdown while the previous version was reduced by a third.\n\nCases of Covid-19 have begun to increase rapidly during the second spike, and the number of cases recorded in a single day reached a new high on Thursday.\n\nEarly results indicated that the virus was spreading more quickly among under-20s, particularly among secondary school age children.\n\nBut the very latest data indicates that it was spreading quickly across all age groups, according to Prof Gandy who was a member of the research team.\n\n\"One possible explanation is that the early data was collected during the time of the November lockdown where schools were open and the activities of the adult population were more restricted. We are seeing now that the new virus has increased infectiousness across all age groups.\"\n\nProf Jim Naismith, of Oxford University, said he believed that the new findings indicated that even tougher restrictions would soon be needed.\n\n\"The data from Imperial represent the best analysis to date and imply that the measures we have employed to date, would - with the new virus - fail to reduce the R number to below 1.\n\n\"In simpler terms, unless we do something different the new virus strain is going to continue to spread, more infections, more hospitalisations and more deaths.\"\n\nThe R number is the average number of people an infected person infects. If it is above 1 the epidemic is growing.\n\nThe most chilling finding from this piece of research is that the November lockdown in England, hard though it was for many people, would not have stopped the variant form of the virus spreading. The same severe restrictions that saw cases of the previous version of the virus fall by a third, would see a tripling of the new variant. This is why there has been such a sudden tightening of restrictions across the country.\n\nIt is unclear whether the current restrictions will be enough to control the spread of the virus. Given the fact that it has taken two lockdowns to stop the earlier version of the virus overwhelming the NHS, many scientists fear that further tightening will be necessary.\n\nInfection levels will begin to drop as enough people are vaccinated. But until then it is now more important than ever for people to follow social distancing guidelines, wear masks where required and to regularly wash their hands.\n\nThe new year brings with it hope of a more normal life in the next few months but also a new form of the virus that all of us will have to combat in the coming days and weeks.\n\nProfessor Lawrence Young, of Warwick University, said early indications suggested that vaccines would be effective against the new form of the virus.\n\n\"Variants virus have been around since the beginning of the pandemic and are a product of the natural process by which viruses develop and adapt to their hosts as they replicate.\n\n\"Most of these mutations have no effect on the behaviour of the virus but very occasionally they can improve the ability of the virus to infect and/or become more resistant to the body's immune response.\"\n\nFurther research is needed to understand why the variant is spreading so quickly. But early indications are that vaccines should be effective against it.\n\nThe new virus has been designated \"Variant of Concern 202012/01\" or VOC by Public Health England.\n\nIt was detected in November and thought to have originated in the south-east England in September.\n\nThere is no evidence to suggest that it is more deadly, but it will increase the number of cases which in turn will add further pressure on the NHS.\n\nThe variant can now be found across the UK, except Northern Ireland, but it is heavily concentrated in London, as well as south-east and eastern England.", "Amanda Quinn, who has early onset dementia, is cared for by her 23-year-old daughter Bethany\n\n\"It feels like you're being punished for something you didn't do.\"\n\nAmanda Quinn describes living through lockdown with early onset dementia as \"scary\" and \"feeling lost\".\n\nTwo years ago, she was diagnosed with the condition aged 49, and said the disease was a \"ticking time bomb\" for her husband and four children.\n\nAlzheimer's Society Cymru support worker Lorraine Davies said lockdown had brought a \"great sense of loss\" to many families.\n\nSince her diagnosis, Amanda says she has lost her sense of what day it is, her concentration, and she struggles with speech occasionally and suffers more with incontinence.\n\nWhen Wales went into a UK national lockdown on 23 March, Amanda said she did not leave her home in Treorchy, Rhondda Cynon Taf, for weeks.\n\nShe said her children have noticed a \"big change\" in her.\n\n\"I used to have a wicked sense of humour - I still have one, but it's not how I used to be,\" she said.\n\nBut for Amanda one of the worst parts of her condition is \"losing so many friends\" whom she said \"would rather cross the road\" than talk to her.\n\n\"They don't know how to interact with me anymore,\" she said.\n\nAmanda says her children have noticed a \"big change\" since she was diagnosed aged 49\n\nHer 23-year-old daughter Bethany Kingsley, who cares for her, said the pandemic has caused caring work to increase ten-fold.\n\n\"I have to keep an eye on mum a lot more now, because she doesn't know what to do with herself.\n\n\"But I have also got to look after my mental health side of it as well. There are days where I'm struggling,\" she said.\n\nNow Amanda does activities at home such as adult colouring books, baking with Bethany, and watches movies.\n\n\"It is like being a child,\" Amanda explained.\n\n\"My daughter says it's like we've switched roles and she has become the adult as she holds my hand when we cross the road.\n\n\"Although I can see a car, it doesn't register to me that it is not safe to walk out, all I can think is that I need to be on the other side of the road.\"\n\nBefore the pandemic, she attended dementia support groups in person, such as Memoria, a theatrical group of people with dementia and carers, whereas now she does this virtually.\n\nBethany says Covid has had a big impact on caring for her mother\n\nLast year, before the pandemic, Bethany put off moving away to study midwifery at university in Bristol.\n\nAlthough she said it was a \"difficult\" decision as she had wanted to do it for years, she said she was glad she was home to care for her mother during the pandemic.\n\nInstead she chose to study for an Open University course in health and social care from home.\n\n\"I thought my mother is the only person I've got at the end of the day and I would rather make sure she is safe and happy, rather than go off and leave her,\" she said.\n\nBut Amanda said she was concerned about how her condition will progress and affect her family more.\n\nThe 51-year-old said it was \"not fair\" that her daughter had to stay home because of her condition.\n\n\"It worries me how it will affect my children. I'm fortunate, I suppose, that I'm not going to know.\n\n\"I say I don't want to go into a care home but that wouldn't be fair on them - they have still got their whole lives to lead\".\n\nAmanda was still in her 40s when she was diagnosed\n\nAlzheimer's Society Cymru support adviser for younger people Lorraine Davies said there was a stigma attached to younger people with the disease and a \"lack of public awareness\".\n\n\"Some have mortgages, some have young families, and often they also care for older adults - so it has a different impact on them, and their social network of people.\n\n\"A lot of people living with dementia don't always feel they will have next year, so 2020 has been a great sense of loss to them because of the lockdown and restrictions,\" she said.\n\nThe charity estimates that there are between 2,000 to 3,000 people with young onset dementia in Wales, according to 2018 figures from the first Welsh Government national dementia action plan.\n\nHowever Lorraine said the figure was likely to be higher as getting a dementia diagnosis can be harder for younger people, and can take more than a year to have it confirmed.\n\n\"It is also more common for younger people to have rarer forms of dementia, so rather than being a typical Alzheimer's disease, associated with memory loss, a patient might have behavioural changes, but you might just think they are upset, stressed, or put it down to mood swings.\n\n\"Some people have been accused of being drunk, because they have slurred speech, but actually that is a symptom.\"\n\nShe said the Alzheimer's Society has organised virtual support groups for people with the condition and their carers during lockdown.\n\n\"Often younger people want to meet people like them, because it helps them not to feel so alone in this. Knowing that brings people comfort.\"\n\nSimon Hatch, the director of Carers Trust Wales, said the pandemic had highlighted the \"crucial role unpaid carers play both in providing exceptional, expert care to family and friends\".\n\nMr Hatch said the trust found that 44% of young adult carers it spoke to felt overwhelmed by the pressures they were facing.\n\nHe said although there was support available to carers they would need \"sustainable\" forms of this in the future.\n\nThere are about 45,000 people with dementia in Wales, according to the Alzheimer's Society.\n\nThe disease is considered \"early onset\" when it affects people under 65, according to Young Dementia UK.\n\nLorraine said the age distinction was made to mark the difference in financial support, as 65 was state pension age at the time.\n\nDementia itself refers to a set of symptoms caused by many diseases of the brain. The most common symptom is memory loss and difficulty concentrating.\n\nOther symptoms can include struggling to remember recent events, changes to behaviour, mood, becoming lost in familiar places or being unable to find the right word in a conversation.\n\nSpecific symptoms will depend on the parts of the brain that are damaged and the disease that is causing the dementia.", "Police made 17 arrests at the demonstration in Hyde Park\n\nPolice have made arrests at an anti-lockdown demonstration in central London.\n\nCrowds of between 200 to 300 people began to gather in Hyde Park, which is in a tier four coronavirus area, at about 13:30 GMT on Saturday, the Metropolitan Police said.\n\nSeventeen people were arrested on suspicion of breaching public health regulations.\n\nMost demonstrators had left the park by 16:45, police said.\n\nThe Met tweeted: \"Officers continue to engage with groups of people who have gathered in the Hyde Park area.\n\n\"A number of people have been arrested under health protection regulations and taken into custody.\n\n\"We urge those in the area to leave immediately.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Metropolitan Police Events This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMore than two people are generally not allowed to meet in public under tier four rules.\n\nThe police force added: \"Officers will take enforcement action where we see clear breaches of the tier four rules.\n\n\"It's up to all of us to make the right choices and slow the spread of the virus.\"\n\nA group called The People's Lockdown, Stand For Your Human Rights, had said it was going to hold a event at Hyde Park on Saturday afternoon.\n\nIn an online post, it called on people to \"stand with your loved ones\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"I wish I could switch place with my daughter\" - Odd Steinar Sørengen's daughter is missing\n\nA body has been found shortly after rescuers and dog handlers began a risky ground search for 10 people missing in a hillside collapse in Norway.\n\nInitially it was thought too dangerous to send rescuers on to the site, after flowing mud sent homes toppling into a giant chasm in the village of Ask.\n\nHelicopters and drones spent two days searching the scene.\n\nBut on Friday police commander Roy Alkvist said one or two houses appeared safe to enter.\n\nRescuers, who included a Swedish specialist team, began moving into the danger zone on Styrofoam boards. The bright orange boards were laid down on the mud in a domino-effect as rescuers tried to reach one of the wrecked homes, which are 25km (15 miles) north-east of the capital Oslo.\n\nA missing Dalmatian dog was rescued on Thursday and police believe there is still a chance survivors could be found.\n\nHowever, on Friday afternoon an air ambulance helicopter landed near the site and police said a body had been found at 14:30 (13:30 GMT) without giving further details.\n\nRescuers are using orange Styrofoam boards to move around the landslide area\n\nPrime Minister Erna Solberg said her thoughts went out to the victim's family, and to those waiting for news of the other nine people who were missing.\n\nIn Friday's operation the rescuers also prepared a giant army vehicle called a \"paver\", which has a giant steel bridge on which rescuers can move.\n\nHowever, conditions were not yet good enough for the 50-tonne machine to be deployed.\n\nThe plan is to deploy a Norwegian army bridge-laying vehicle as soon as conditions are good enough\n\nFriday's search was a race against time, as the rescuers only had a few hours of daylight in the Norwegian winter. Medics and geologists were reportedly part of the ground rescue team.\n\nThe ground search was called off for the night at 17:30 and police said drones and heat-seeking cameras would continue overnight until rescue crews could return on Saturday morning.\n\nAbout 1,000 people have been evacuated from Gjerdrum municipality, which contains Ask village. Dozens more were moved out of their homes on New Year's Eve.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Aerial footage shows the scale of the landslide\n\nAlthough police have not given details of the missing, they are believed to include men, women and children.\n\nAmong them is a woman who was talking to her husband on the phone while walking the dog when the line went dead, according to Bergens Tidende newspaper.\n\nFurther reports say a couple and their small child are also missing, as well as a woman in her 50s and her adult son.\n\nMore than 30 homes have been destroyed, but officials say more could be lost as the edges of the crater left by the landslide are still breaking away.\n\nThe conditions have proved challenging, with temperatures dropping to -1C (30F) and the clay ground proving too unstable for emergency workers to walk on.\n\nThe scale of the landslide is shown by this aerial view of the disaster site\n\nThe landslide began early on Wednesday, with residents calling emergency services and telling them that their houses were moving, police said.\n\n\"There were two massive tremors that lasted for a long while and I assumed it was snow being cleared or something like that,\" Oeystein Gjerdrum, 68, told broadcaster NRK.\n\n\"Then the power suddenly went out, and a neighbour came to the door and said we needed to evacuate, so I woke up my three grandchildren and told them to get dressed quickly.\"\n\nA spokeswoman for the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) told AFP that the landslide was a so-called \"quick clay slide\" measuring about 300m by 700m (985ft by 2,300ft).\n\n\"This is the largest landslide in recent times in Norway, considering the number of houses involved and the number of evacuees,\" Laila Hoivik said.\n\nQuick clay is a kind of clay found in Norway and Sweden that can collapse and behave as a fluid when it comes under stress.\n\nBroadcaster NRK said heavy rainfall may have made the soil unstable, but questions have since emerged over why construction was permitted in the area.\n\nA 2005 geological survey labelled the area as at high risk of landslides, according to a report seen by the broadcaster TV2. Despite this, the homes were built three years later in 2008.", "Hospitals across the UK are being told to prepare to face the same Covid pressures as the NHS in London and south-east England.\n\nSenior doctor Prof Andrew Goddard said the virus's highly infectious new variant was spreading nationwide.\n\nCase numbers were \"mild\" compared with where he expected them to be next week, he said, with doctors \"really worried\".\n\nIt comes as a further 57,725 people have tested positive for Covid - a new daily high.\n\nThis is the fifth day in a row new daily cases have been over 50,000 and brings the total number of cases to 2,599,789.\n\nAnother 445 deaths, of people who had tested positive within the previous 28 days, were reported on Saturday - bringing the total number of deaths to 74,570, according to government figures.\n\nThe UK-wide total for people in hospital with Covid has already passed the spring peak.\n\nHalf of the major hospital trusts in England are said to be dealing with more Covid-19 patients than at the worst point of the first wave in April, with the NHS facing its \"busiest winter ever\".\n\nProf Goddard, of the Royal College of Physicians, told BBC Breakfast: \"There's no doubt that Christmas is going to have a big impact, the new variant is also going to have a big impact, we know that is more infectious, more transmissible, so I think the large numbers that we're seeing in the South East, in London, in south Wales, is now going to be reflected over the next month, two months even, over the rest of the country.\"\n\nHe said: \"It seems very likely that we are going to see more and more cases, wherever people work in the UK, and we need to be prepared for that.\"\n\nPressure has been so great on hospitals in London and south-east England that some patients have been moved out of the area.\n\nLondon's weekly rate of coronavirus cases is 858 per 100,000 people, double the UK figure.\n\nDominic Harrison, director of public health for Blackburn and Darwen, said a decision on a new lockdown had to be decided \"in the next week\" - instead of waiting for the North to get to the same rates as the capital \"and 'call it late' which has been our pattern of response too often\".\n\nThe most recent UK-wide statistics, from 28 December, showed there were 23,823 people in hospital with Covid. That was already significantly higher than the spring peak, which saw 21,683 in hospital on 12 April.\n\nOnly English hospitals have released figures for the final three days of December - and these show that a further 2,302 Covid patients were occupying hospital beds on 31 December.\n\nLondon's Nightingale emergency hospital is ready to admit patients, the NHS has said, while other sites currently not in use are being readied.\n\nSorry, your browser cannot display this map\n\nProf Goddard said it was vital the public did not \"let their guard down\" and continued to follow government guidelines, including wearing a face mask, maintaining social distancing and washing hands.\n\n\"Until the vaccination hits and does its job - that's what our best defence is going to be,\" he said.\n\nDr Ami Jones, an intensive care consultant in Wales, told BBC Breakfast that \"hospitals are absolutely bursting\", adding that a quarter of her staff were currently off sick or self-isolating, making managing patients even more challenging.\n\n\"When we see the daily figures - we know that will sting us in about 10-12 days' time in the hospital,\" she said. \"We are not even at day 10 post-Christmas yet and it's already exceedingly busy.\n\n\"We are going to get to the point where we physically don't have the staff to look after people safely anymore.\"\n\nDr Jones also urged the public to \"please just obey the rules\", adding: \"Stop mixing with other households because it is spreading like wildfire - and we haven't got much more space in the hospitals left.\"\n\nDo you work in a hospital? Have you recently been treated in a hospital, or due to be treated? Email your experiences: haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Last updated on .From the section Tottenham\n\nTottenham manager Jose Mourinho says he is \"disappointed\" after three of his players breached coronavirus rules by attending a party over Christmas.\n\nA picture on social media showed Argentina forward Erik Lamela, Spain defender Sergio Reguilon and Argentina midfielder Giovani lo Celso at a party.\n\n\"We are not happy - it was a negative surprise for us,\" said Mourinho.\n\nIn a statement, Tottenham said they were \"extremely disappointed\" and \"the matter would be dealt with internally\".\n\nWest Ham reminded Argentina forward Manuel Lanzini, who also attended the party, of his responsibilities.\n\nLanzini apologised in a tweet on Saturday, saying he made a \"bad mistake\".\n\n\"I take full responsibility for my actions,\" he said. \"I know people have made difficult sacrifices to stay safe and I should be setting a better example.\"\n\nLamela and Lo Celso were not involved in Saturday's 3-0 Premier League win at home to Leeds, while Reguilon, who joined from Real Madrid in September, was on the bench.\n\n\"I gave an amazing gift to Reguilon - Portuguese piglet,\" Mourinho said. \"Amazing for Portuguese and Spanish. I was told he would spend Christmas on his own. He was not alone as you could see.\n\n\"We, the club, feel disappointed because we gave the players all the education and conditions. We know what we are internally. We don't need to open the door to you and let you know what is going on internally.\n\n\"What are going to be the consequences and how deeply we approach that negative surprise? I feel disappointed.\"\n\nThe Spurs statement added: \"We strongly condemned the image showing some of our players with family and friends together at Christmas, particularly as we know the sacrifices everybody around the country made to stay safe over the festive period.\n\n\"The rules are clear, there are no exceptions, and we regularly remind all our players and staff about the latest protocols and their responsibilities to adhere and set an example.\"\n\nLamela has made two league starts and Lo Celso four this season.\n\nLanzini has featured in nine of West Ham's 17 league games, coming on as a substitute in Friday's 1-0 win at Everton.\n\nA West Ham spokesperson said: \"The club has set the highest possible standards with its protocols and measures relating to Covid-19 so we are disappointed to learn of Manuel Lanzini's actions.\n\n\"The matter has been dealt with internally and Manuel has been strongly reminded of his responsibilities.\"\n\nTottenham's home league game with Fulham, scheduled to take place on 30 December, was called off three hours before kick-off after a number of Fulham players tested positive for coronavirus or showed symptoms.\n\nMeanwhile, Fulham told BBC Sport they are looking into claims Aleksandar Mitrovic broke coronavirus rules by attending a New Year's party with Crystal Palace midfielder Luka Milivojevic.\n\nImages on social media, reported in the Sun , allegedly show the Serbia team-mates celebrating in London with at least seven other adults.\n\nThe mixing of households indoors is banned in London under the UK government's tier four restrictions.\n\n'Mourinho must be so angry'\n\nMourinho has been so critical and vocal of how the Premier League handled their situation [the Fulham postponement], which I totally disagree with him.\n\nYou have to accept we're in strange and difficult times - if it has to be called off at whatever time then it has to be called off.\n\nTo then see some of his players breaking the rules and laws, particularly when millions of people are sacrificing so much not only in this country but around the world, Mourinho must be so angry.\n• None A special and exclusive one-off chat with the music icon\n• None How has their rise come to define our culture?", "Liam Reilly fronted Bagatelle for more than 40 years\n\nIrish Eurovision singer and frontman of the rock band Bagatelle, Liam Reilly, has died aged 65.\n\nA family statement confirmed that Mr Reilly \"passed away suddenly but peacefully at his home\" on 1 January.\n\nMr Reilly fronted Bagatelle for more than 40 years and they had success with songs including Summer in Dublin and Second Violin.\n\nHe also came joint second at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1990 with the song Somewhere in Europe.\n\nThe song finished on 132 points, joint with France's entry sung by Joëlle Ursull, in the contest in Zagreb.\n\nMr Reilly, from Dundalk, County Louth, also composed Ireland's Eurovision entry for the contest in Rome in 1991, when Kim Jackson performed his song Could It Be That I'm In Love, which was placed 10th.\n\n\"We know that his many friends and countless fans around the world will share in our grief as we mourn his loss, but celebrate the extraordinary talent of the man whose songs meant so much to so many.\" the family statement added.\n\nJoe Gallagher, the band's promoter from Strabane, County Tyrone, told BBC Radio Ulster \"the talent that Liam brought to the music industry in Ireland is second to none\".\n\n\"Some of the songs that he has written are up there with some of the better songs written in Ireland,\" he said.\n\n\"He is one of the best singer-songwriters Ireland has ever seen or produced.\"\n\nMr Reilly also wrote songs for others, including The Wolfe Tones. The Irish group paid tribute to him on social media, describing him as \"a master songwriter\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by The Wolfe Tones 🇮🇪 This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by The Wolfe Tones 🇮🇪\n\nStephen Travers, a member of the Miami Showband, said Mr Reilly was a \"national treasure\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Stephen Travers This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Bitcoin's value has soared over the past year\n\nBitcoin's value surged above $34,000 (£24,850) for the first time on Sunday as the leading cryptocurrency continued to soar.\n\nIt put the gain this year at almost $5,000, although by 17:00 GMT the price had drifted lower to about $33,000, according to the Coindesk website.\n\nThe rise was put down to interest from big investors seeking quick profits.\n\nIt comes after Bitcoin soared 300% last year, with the price of many other digital currencies also rising sharply.\n\nEthereum, the second biggest cryptocurrency, gained 465% in 2020\n\nSome analysts think Bitcoin's value could rise even further as the US dollar drops further.\n\nWhile the value of the US currency rose in March at the start of the coronavirus pandemic as investors sought safety amid the uncertainty, it has since dropped due to major stimulus from the US Federal Reserve. The currency ended last year with its biggest annual loss since 2017.\n\nBitcoin is traded in much the same way as real currencies like the US dollar and pound sterling.\n\nRecently it has won growing support as a form of payment online, with PayPal among the most recent adopters of digital currencies.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nBut the cryptocurrency has also proved to be a volatile investment.\n\nThe soaring price has raised concerns that Bitcoin is due for a dramatic correction, as happened three years ago when the value collapsed after a bull run.\n\nDuring the rally in 2017 Bitcoin came close to breaking through the $20,000 level, only to hit extreme lows and fall below $3,300.\n\nIt passed $19,000 in November last year before dropping sharply again.\n\nIn October, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey cautioned over Bitcoin's use as a payment method.\n\n\"I have to be honest, it is hard to see that Bitcoin has what we tend to call intrinsic value,\" he said. \"It may have extrinsic value in the sense that people want it.\"\n\nMr Bailey added that he was \"very nervous\" about people using Bitcoin for payments pointing out that investors should realise its price is extremely volatile.", "The aftermath of an attack in August in Niger, which has suffered a number claimed by jihadist groups\n\nSuspected Islamist militants have attacked two villages in Niger, with reports of dozens of civilians killed.\n\nAround 49 died and 17 were injured in the village of Tchombangou, while another 30 died in Zaroumdareye - both near Niger's western border with Mali, Reuters reports.\n\nThere have been several recent violent incidents in Africa's Sahel region, carried out by militant groups.\n\nFrance said on Saturday that two of its soldiers were killed in Mali.\n\nHours earlier, a group with links to al-Qaeda said it was behind the killing of three French troops in a separate attack in Mali on Monday.\n\nFrance has been leading a coalition of West African and European allies against Islamist militants in the Sahel.\n\nBut the region continues to be affected by ethnic violence, banditry, and human and drug trafficking.\n\nIn light of Saturday's attacks, Interior Minister Alkache Alhada said soldiers had been sent to the area, according to French outlet RFI. But Mr Alhada did not say how many casualties there had been across the two villages.\n\nA local official, quoted by AFP news agency, said many people were killed, and a local journalist spoke of up to 50 deaths.\n\nNiger's Tillabéri region, where the villages are situated, lies within the so-called tri-border area between Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, which has been plagued by jihadi attacks in recent years.\n\nTravel by motorbike has been banned in the region for a year, as part of efforts to stop incursions by Islamic militants, who often launch attacks from the vehicles.\n\nAreas of Niger are also facing repeated attacks by jihadists from Nigeria, where the government is fighting an insurgency by Boko Haram.\n\nLast month, members of the group killed at least 27 people in Niger's south-eastern Diffa region.\n\nThe latest attacks in Tillabéri come amid national elections in Niger, as President Mahamadou Issoufou steps down after two five-year terms.\n\nElection officials announced provisional results on Saturday, showing a lead for Mohamed Bazoum - a former minister and a member of Niger's ruling party.\n\nA second round of votes is expected to be held on 21 February, once ballots have been validated by the country's constitutional court.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\"."], "link": ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55732301", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-55742664", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55752373", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-55738183", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-55741990", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-55747064", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55736160", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-55746745", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-55743084", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-55750944", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-55735178", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-manchester-55745825", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55733527", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-55752056", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55742569", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55745714", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-55718070", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-55741985", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55746293", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54373904", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55656823", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55738918", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55738564", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55738741", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55736239", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-55753606", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-55755159", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55757807", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55734277", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55688932", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/55642375", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55656824", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55751915", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-55750776", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55751598", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-us-canada-55745861", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-northern-ireland-55753796", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55739974", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55757934", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/55657090", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55690001", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-55740965", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55748645", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55738174", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55742583", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-55735237", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55739973", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-55749175", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-us-canada-55730500", 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"http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-55521541", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-55523137", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-55520915", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55523587", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55515455", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/horse-racing/55522152", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/55450393", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-55508141", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-55520658", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-55525269", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55514792", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54373904", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55523447", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-55503852", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-55521732", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55524795", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-55521687", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55507012", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-55497274", 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"http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-55660807", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42636667", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-55726381", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55683896", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-55735237", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55731099", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55640427", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55733327", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-55718525", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-us-canada-55730500", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-55739271", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-55732938", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51682000", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-55719860", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55740365", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55683899", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55708411", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55727445", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55739803", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-55730322", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-55730480", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-55719955", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/55456854", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55519042", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-55506891", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-55506681", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/55466395", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55514504", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55515831", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/55506388", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55505722", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55509582", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/55450393", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/55444188", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-55503536", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55506661", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55514792", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55513158", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55514153", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-55511169", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55509694", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55513167", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-55514853", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55507012", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55396492", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-55518304", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55506734", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55514363", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/55515555", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55515455", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55515529", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-55497274", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/us2020"]}
\ No newline at end of file
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- BBC News", "Covid: Greater Manchester to move to tier 3 restrictions from Friday - BBC News", "Premiership: Wasps cleared to play Exeter Chiefs in final despite Covid-19 cases - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: Gyms can reopen in Liverpool City Region - BBC News", "Paris St-Germain 1-2 Man Utd: Marcus Rashford hits late winner - BBC Sport", "Rishi Sunak to unveil new rescue deal for jobs and firms - BBC News", "Covid: 2021 exam students facing 'difficult situation' - BBC News", "Brexit: UK 'ready to welcome EU' to continue trade talks - BBC News", "Transport for Wales rail services to be nationalised - BBC News", "'We didn't have exact measures' in place for Covid says ex-civil service head - BBC News", "Chinnor crash death family: Father feels 'abundance of loss' - BBC News", "Angela Rayner apologises for 'scum' remark in Commons - BBC News", "Elation as Nasa's Osiris-Rex probe tags asteroid Bennu in sample bid - BBC News", "Nicola Sturgeon: 'Buck stops with me' on Scottish Covid tiers - BBC News", "Covid: South Yorkshire to move into tier 3 from Saturday - BBC News", "Covid: Greater Manchester given £60m support package - BBC News", "Covid-19: Nottingham party students fined £40,000 - BBC News", "Southall: Two people killed in shop gas explosion - BBC News", "The Chop: Sky pulls TV woodwork show over contestant's tattoos - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Hospitality curbs extended for another week - BBC News", "Machines to 'do half of all work tasks by 2025' - BBC News", "Ajax 0-1 Liverpool: Own goal gives injury-hit Reds victory - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: November GCSE exams in NI postponed for two weeks - BBC News", "As it happened: US election 2020: Melania pulls out of rally as Covid cough lingers - BBC News", "UK inflation rises after Eat Out to Help Out ends - BBC News", "Covid: Bolsonaro says Brazil will not buy Chinese-made vaccine - BBC News", "Pupils sent home in half of England's secondary schools - BBC News", "Covid: 'Heartbreak' at Greater Manchester tier 3 status - BBC News", "Spencer Davis, one of rock's elder statesmen, dies aged 81 - BBC News", "Trump's White House event in focus over Covid spread - BBC News", "Missing cockatiel returned after singing Addams Family - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Senator who hugged White House guests has Covid-19 - BBC News", "Covid-19: Boris Johnson says everybody got 'complacent' over virus - BBC News", "Heavy rain across UK brings flood risk warning - BBC News", "As it happened: Trump returns to White House from hospital - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Brexit: PM and EU chief agree importance of finding trade deal - BBC News", "Covid-19: President Trump's doctor 'extremely happy' with progress - BBC News", "Airbnb blocks US Halloween bookings over party fears - BBC News", "Prince Louis joins George and Charlotte to quiz Sir David Attenborough - BBC News", "Storm Alex: Floods and landslides hit France and Italy - BBC News", "Everton 4-2 Brighton: Calvert-Lewin scores again as Toffees go top - BBC Sport", "Covid lockdown: 'Race' drivers fined for breaking rules - BBC News", "Conservatives to set up second HQ in Leeds - BBC News", "Mother found after Reedley house fire died from 'pressure to neck' - BBC News", "Trump's Covid contacts: Who has he met and who's tested positive? - BBC News", "Release of James Bond film No Time To Die delayed - again - BBC News", "Covid: Faith groups' singing studied for coronavirus risk - BBC News", "Margaret Ferrier: Police launch investigation into Covid trip MP - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Sadio Mane: Liverpool forward isolating after positive coronavirus test - BBC Sport", "Cardigan family trapped in burning house after arson attack - BBC News", "President Trump has Covid-19: How global media responded - BBC News", "Coronavirus: New restrictions for swathes of northern England - BBC News", "Trump and the virus: A day of turmoil in the White House - BBC News", "Police investigate Dunstable funeral attended by hundreds - BBC News", "Wheelchair user pulls himself up steps to sit DVSA test - BBC News", "Missing cockatiel returns after singing Addams Family - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Brierley Hill shootings: Man charged with murders - BBC News", "Covid: Pandemic job hunt putting young lives 'on pause' - BBC News", "Actor Rick Moranis randomly attacked in Manhattan - BBC News", "Covid: Northumbria University confirms 770 cases among students - BBC News", "Harvey Weinstein faces six new sexual assault charges - BBC News", "Covid-19: Ipswich nurse's triplets pregnancy 'could've been so different' - BBC News", "What older voters make of Trump Covid story - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'I really worried we might lose PM', Dominic Raab says - BBC News", "Zef Eisenberg: Maximuscle founder was 'true genius' - BBC News", "Brexit trade talks: Deal can and must be made, says CBI boss - BBC News", "Covid: UK announces 12,872 new cases after technical glitch - BBC News", "Brexit trade deal: What do the UK and EU want? - BBC News", "School meals: Labour backs Marcus Rashford campaign - BBC News", "Covid patients 'less likely to die than in April' - BBC News", "Covid: 'Dark days' for tourism in Wales, but some 'silver lining' - BBC News", "Covid: What the tier rules say about the split between science and politics - BBC News", "Champions Cup: Exeter beat Racing 92 31-27 to lift first Champions Cup title - BBC Sport", "Covid in Scotland: Deaths from virus increase by 15 - BBC News", "Covid: Tighter rules kick in for millions in England - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Covid: Lancashire to move to highest alert level - BBC News", "Covid-19 means Welsh laws can be drafted 'within hours' - BBC News", "Coronavirus infections still rising rapidly - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Dutch royals return amid anger over Covid holiday - BBC News", "Paris attacks: France grapples with freedom of speech - BBC News", "Azerbaijan at war: Reporter’s journal - BBC News", "Manic Street Preachers help disabled singer Ali Hirsz pay for surgery - BBC News", "Man City 1-0 Arsenal: Raheem Sterling scores winner - BBC Sport", "As it happened: More than half of England under extra coronavirus rules - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Fans urged to watch Old Firm match at home - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Lockdown year 'worst ever' for dog thefts - BBC News", "Hundreds queue in Yiwu, China for experimental Covid-19 vaccine - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Covid: Boris Johnson appears confused over single parent rules - BBC News", "US election 2020: Early voting records smashed amid enthusiasm wave - BBC News", "Rare rufous bush chat in UK for first time in 40 years - BBC News", "Man denied £1.7m payout by Betfred takes fight to High Court - BBC News", "Brother of Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson dies with Covid - BBC News", "Everton 2-2 Liverpool: Dominic Calvert-Lewin earns Toffees point - BBC Sport", "Covid: PM warns he may 'need to intervene' on Manchester - BBC News", "Covid: Confusion over fresh talks in Manchester tier row - BBC News", "Cardiff murder investigation after 54-year-old man dies - BBC News", "Brexit: Trade talks with the EU are over, says No 10 - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Deaths at West Lothian care home rise to 11 - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Police get access to NHS Test and Trace self-isolation data - BBC News", "Cannabis crop at former Coventry nightclub 'worth £1m' - BBC News", "Military Wives Choirs and The Hepworth Wakefield get share of £76m fund - BBC News", "Covid: Chris Christie 'was wrong' to not wear masks - BBC News", "Banksy claims Nottingham hula-hooping girl artwork - BBC News", "Salisbury Novichok-poisoned officer Nick Bailey quits - BBC News", "Coronavirus drives shop closures to new record - BBC News", "Paris attacks: 'I am not Charlie' - BBC News", "Covid: 'Clear guidance needed' as lockdown talks continue - BBC News", "Covid: Threat of England hotspot travel ban to Wales - BBC News", "Belarus protests: Police authorised to use lethal weapons - BBC News", "Covid outbreak at Swansea's Morriston Hospital - BBC News", "Cristiano Ronaldo: Portugal and Juventus forward tests positive for coronavirus - BBC Sport", "Coronavirus: How the PM's lockdown decisions were shaped - BBC News", "Covid: Health secretary defends three-tier strategy - BBC News", "Agriculture bill: Bid to protect post-Brexit food standards rejected - BBC News", "Covid apprentices: 'Mum made me redundant' - BBC News", "Belly Mujinga's death: Searching for the truth - BBC News", "Ferry firms handed £77.6m post-Brexit contracts - BBC News", "Covid: Sage scientists called for short lockdown weeks ago - BBC News", "Peru opens Machu Picchu for single tourist stranded by Covid - BBC News", "British Gymnastics chief executive Jane Allen to retire in December - BBC Sport", "Gal Gadot's Cleopatra film sparks 'whitewashing' claims - BBC News", "Kent Police officer sent 'flirtatious' messages to victim - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Harvester owner consulting on job cuts - BBC News", "Shielding not needed yet, despite rising Covid rate - BBC News", "As it happened: 'Huge concern' over surge in coronavirus deaths - BBC News", "Privacy watchdog to probe Klarna after email backlash - BBC News", "Covid-19: Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer calls for circuit breaker - BBC News", "Covid-19: 'I lost my apprenticeship with my mum because of coronavirus' - BBC News", "The Wanted's Tom Parker 'overwhelmed' by support after tumour diagnosis - BBC News", "Covid reinfection: Man gets Covid twice and second hit 'more severe' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Ethnic-minority vaccine volunteers needed - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Bournemouth A&E prepares for winter spike - BBC News", "Lockdown: 'I've got women working for me who are sobbing' - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Local lockdown UK: Do city-wide curbs work? It's not clear - BBC News", "Rising numbers of secondary pupils sent home in Covid cases - BBC News", "iPhone 12: Apple makes jump to 5G - BBC News", "Tax rises of more than £40bn a year 'all but inevitable' - BBC News", "Darlington Harriers: Eighty-five-year-old runner sets mile record - BBC News", "A40 crash: Mother and three young children killed in Oxfordshire - BBC News", "Unemployment rate in Wales rises sharply to 3.8% - BBC News", "David Starkey: Police investigate historian over slavery comments - BBC News", "Coronavirus: WHO head calls herd immunity approach 'immoral' - BBC News", "Ikea to buy back used furniture in recycling push - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Can Johnson hold out against more restrictions? - BBC News", "Covid: Bid to reopen homeless night shelters criticised - BBC News", "WW2 'earthquake' bomb explodes in Poland during attempt to defuse it - BBC News", "Covid-19: Why is Essex County Council pleading for tighter restrictions? - BBC News", "Covid-19: Labour's Starmer calls for short 'circuit break' lockdown - BBC News", "Facebook bans Holocaust denial content - BBC News", "Black man led by white police on horseback sues for $1m - BBC News", "Covid-19: Are we still listening to the science? - BBC News", "NHS Covid app updated to 'fix' phantom messages - BBC News", "Trump Covid post deleted by Facebook and hidden by Twitter - BBC News", "Fleetwood fishmonger saves 'one in 30 million' orange Canadian lobster - BBC News", "September was world's 'hottest on record' - BBC News", "Islamic State 'Beatles' in court over US hostages' deaths - BBC News", "Covid-19: New restrictions for parts of England likely next week - BBC News", "Patients' access to vital NHS tests delayed by warehouse failure - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Nicola Sturgeon 'not proposing return to full lockdown' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'Rule of six' doesn't make sense, say rebel Tory MPs - BBC News", "Covid: Pubs and restaurants in central Scotland to close - BBC News", "PureGym personal trainer sorry for 'very ill-judged' slavery post - BBC News", "Phone bill charges of £1,200 added 'without permission' - BBC News", "Facebook bans QAnon conspiracy theory accounts across all platforms - BBC News", "Man found dead after Abergwyngregyn river search named - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Navalny poisoning: Kremlin critic recalls near-death Novichok torment - BBC News", "Covid: PM challenged to publish evidence behind 10pm pub closing time - BBC News", "VP debate 2020: Kamala Harris and Mike Pence row over taxes and clsimate - BBC News", "Councils warning on plan to relax developer rules - BBC News", "Greene King cuts 800 jobs as pub curfew hits trade - BBC News", "Billionaires see fortunes rise by 27% during the pandemic - BBC News", "Scottish National 5 exams to be cancelled in 2021 - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Scientists to map hospital spread - BBC News", "David Lammy MP criticises Twitter over 'death threat' tweet - BBC News", "East Kent Hospitals Trust: Covid-19 practice failings revealed by inspection - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Manchester universities move teaching online - BBC News", "Covid: Brazil's coronavirus cases pass five million - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Tighter restrictions on Scottish pubs expected - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Nottinghamshire residents told not to mix indoors - BBC News", "Covid: Wales' top doctor Frank Atherton warns of difficult winter - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Nuclear power: Hitachi pull out of Wylfa Newydd leaves family 'bitter' - BBC News", "Covid-19 updates: Pub closures and exam cancellations in Scotland - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Tourism and hospitality in 'circuit breaker' fears - BBC News", "Being black at Cambridge University - BBC News", "Donald Trump retweets criticism of Welsh 'rolling lockdowns' - BBC News", "Trump ends Covid budget stimulus relief talks - BBC News", "Covid: Taskforce to look at virus testing for UK arrivals - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Specialist 'long Covid' clinics to be set up in England - BBC News", "Unite decides to cut Labour affiliation money amid frustrations - BBC News", "Tesco profits surge as online orders double - BBC News", "Children not able to give 'proper' consent to puberty blockers, court told - BBC News", "Abergwyngregyn: Man's body found after river search - BBC News", "Shutting Scotland's pubs - what's the evidence? - BBC News", "Unexplained Wealth Orders: Suspected money launderer gives up £10m of property - BBC News", "Could English pubs follow in Scotland's steps? - BBC News", "Covid hospital cases jump nearly 25% in England - BBC News", "Brentford deaths: Boy, 3, and his mother found dead in flat - BBC News", "East London burst pipe leaves homes without water - BBC News", "Essex lorry deaths: Gheorghe Nica admits people-smuggling role - BBC News", "PMQs: As it happened - Johnson faces Starmer - BBC News", "Police apologise after telling wrong family about teenager's death - BBC News", "Covid: 23 deaths linked to three hospital outbreaks - BBC News", "Covid: 13 deaths linked to Royal Glamorgan Hospital outbreak - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Nottingham mixing ban 'likely' after spike - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Central belt pubs shut & exams off - BBC News", "Bounce back loans: Taxpayers may lose £26bn on unpaid loans - BBC News", "Victory in battle against 'thuggish' debt letters - BBC News", "Belarus protests: National opposition strike gains momentum - BBC News", "‘I owe £180,000 in tax and I haven’t told my wife’ - BBC News", "Nigeria protests: Police chief deploys 'all resources' amid street violence - BBC News", "Covid-19: Call for 'exit strategy' as South Yorkshire enters tier 3 - BBC News", "Is there really no money for free school meals? - BBC News", "School meals: Pressure mounts on government to reverse decision - BBC News", "Covid: 'Staggered return' for students after Christmas break - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Giro d'Italia: Tao Geoghegan Hart wins first Grand Tour - BBC Sport", "School meals: 'I remember going to bed with hunger pains' - BBC News", "Brexit: Cost of everyday goods 'could rise' without a deal, hauliers warn - BBC News", "'Murder hornet': First nest found in US eradicated with vacuum hose - BBC News", "Lewis Hamilton breaks Michael Schumacher's win record at the Portuguese Grand Prix - BBC Sport", "Watlington Hill: Arrest after woman's body found at beauty spot - BBC News", "Tanker stowaways: Seven detained off Isle of Wight - BBC News", "Rashford's free meal tweets made into Google map - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Covid-19: Arrests at London anti-lockdown protest - BBC News", "Covid-19: Schools may need to close to some year groups, scientist warns - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 14-day quarantine for Covid contacts could be reduced - BBC News", "Covid: The NHS workers 'still recovering' as second wave looms - BBC News", "Joan Hocquard: Oldest person in Britain dies aged 112 - BBC News", "Black Lives Matter: New hidden slave trade sites in Wales revealed - BBC News", "Wales national lockdown in new year 'likely', says minister - BBC News", "Post-Brexit trade talks extended - BBC News", "Climate change: Technology no silver bullet, experts tell PM - BBC News", "Frank Bough: Former Grandstand and Breakfast Time presenter dies aged 87 - BBC News", "Royal Mail seeks record number of Christmas temps - BBC News", "France recalls Turkey envoy after Erdogan says Macron needs 'mental check' - BBC News", "Long Covid: 'I thought I'd get over this no problem' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Lloyds staff to work from home until spring - BBC News", "Paul Harvey: Single gives 'new lease of life' to composer with dementia - BBC News", "Covid: New infections in Scotland increase by 1,303 - BBC News", "Covid-19: Possible changes to quarantine and a review of Wales' shopping rules - BBC News", "Marcus Rashford: Horseboxes, chip shops and cafes back school meals campaign - BBC News", "Europe's streets empty... again - BBC News", "iPhone 12 launch causes NHS Covid-19 app confusion - BBC News", "Samsung Group titan Lee Kun-hee dies aged 78 - BBC News", "Strictly Come Dancing: NHS tribute as live shows begin - BBC News", "Royal British Legion launches Poppy Appeal from veterans' homes - BBC News", "Homes evacuated and cars stranded after Aberdeenshire flooding - BBC News", "Nagorno-Karabakh: The three-year-old orphaned by war - BBC News", "Trump's lawyer Giuliani dismisses 'compromising' clip from new Borat film - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Spain passes one million Covid-19 cases - BBC News", "As it happened: US election: Biden promises free vaccine as Trump renews attack - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Boris Becker accused of not handing over tennis trophies to pay debts - BBC News", "Rishi Sunak to unveil new rescue deal for jobs and firms - BBC News", "Viagogo may have to sell all or part of StubHub, regulator says - BBC News", "Angela Rayner apologises for 'scum' remark in Commons - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Licensed trade warns of 'battle' to survive - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Canary Islands added to UK's safe travel list - BBC News", "Conservative MP quits government job over free school meals - BBC News", "Martin Bashir: BBC journalist 'seriously unwell' from Covid - BBC News", "Transport for Wales: KeolisAmey fined £2.3m for poor performance - BBC News", "Coronavirus: France extends overnight curfew as cases surge - BBC News", "Covid: Barnsley shoppers react to South Yorkshire tier 3 move - BBC News", "Banksy painting Tube carriage shows London Underground 'not safe', RMT says - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "US election 2020: Has Trump delivered on his promises? - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Rail boss urges patience after Transport for Wales' first year - BBC News", "Brexit: UK to ban more EU citizens with criminal records - BBC News", "Transport for Wales rail services to be nationalised - BBC News", "Brexit: UK 'ready to welcome EU' to continue trade talks - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Inside Europe’s most infected area - BBC News", "Clydach murders: Potential doubts over conviction of David Morris - BBC News", "Ed Sheeran gives personal items to Suffolk charity auction - BBC News", "Covid: Welsh firms 'left in the dark' over firebreak lockdown - BBC News", "Michael Jackson: Court dismisses lawsuit from accuser James Safechuck - BBC News", "Covid: No safety concerns found with Oxford vaccine trial after Brazil death - BBC News", "Coronavirus in Wales: Up to 8% of trains overcrowded - BBC News", "As it happened: US election 2020 latest: Early votes in US election 'already top 40m' - BBC News", "English Channel migrants 'being detained in unfit conditions' - BBC News", "US election 2020: Trump's impact on immigration - in seven charts - BBC News", "As it happened. UK coronavirus developments for Thursday 22 October - BBC News", "FBI says Iran and Russia have US voter information - BBC News", "Wales lockdown: Supermarkets told to sell only essential items - BBC News", "US election 2020: Trump's impact on immigration - in seven charts - BBC News", "Wrecks visible in River Severn 60 years after disaster - BBC News", "Covid: South Yorkshire to move into tier 3 from Saturday - BBC News", "Covid: NHS Test and Trace needs to improve, PM concedes - BBC News", "Covid: Do all tier 3 area workers get 80% of their wages? - BBC News", "Covid rules: Stoke, Coventry and Slough face tighter restrictions in tier 2 - BBC News", "Furlough fraudsters 'may have stolen more than £3bn' - BBC News", "US election 2020: Trump's impact on immigration - in seven charts - BBC News", "LGBT students attacked in university Zoom meeting - BBC News", "Covid: Sheffield publican says hospitality sector thrown under a bus - BBC News", "'We had more than 60 calls from test-and-trace' - BBC News", "US election 2020: What are Trump's and Biden's policies? - BBC News", "Covid-19: Nottingham party students fined £40,000 - BBC News", "Southall: Two people killed in shop gas explosion - BBC News", "Brexit: Trade talks continue as negotiators meet in London - BBC News", "Covid circuit breakers 'doomed to fail', says disease expert - BBC News", "Asos adds three million customers as profits soar amid pandemic - BBC News", "Gal Gadot's Cleopatra film sparks 'whitewashing' claims - BBC News", "New Shepard: Jeff Bezos' rocket tests Nasa Moon landing tech - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Patient has sudden permanent hearing loss - BBC News", "Vatican: Italian woman arrested in fraud scandal - BBC News", "England 0-1 Denmark: Harry Maguire sent off as hosts lose in Nations League at Wembley - BBC Sport", "John Leslie says sex assault allegations 'crazy' - BBC News", "Breonna Taylor: Boyfriend Kenneth Walker recalls night she was killed - BBC News", "PureGym trainer received racist abuse after slave post - BBC News", "Covid-19: New three-tier restrictions come into force in England - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "iPhone 12: Apple makes jump to 5G - BBC News", "Drug deaths: Surge in fatalities of female cocaine users - BBC News", "Laughing gas 'can cause paralysis', warns Wales' top doctor - BBC News", "'I was mistaken for a security guard at my first banking job' - BBC News", "David Starkey: Police investigate historian over slavery comments - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Hundreds wish Edwin, 100, happy birthday - BBC News", "Coronavirus: YouTube bans misleading Covid-19 vaccine videos - BBC News", "Stormont Live: Wednesday 14 October 2020 - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Liverpool crowds 'shame our city' - BBC News", "EU to reject UK plea for Brexit electric car deal - BBC News", "Philippines: Anger over death of baby separated from jailed mother - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "HS2 costs rise again weeks after work begins - BBC News", "Covid-19: Travel to Wales from UK hotspots to be banned - BBC News", "Brexit: Banks warned over expat account closures - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Nicola Sturgeon warns Scots against travel to Blackpool - BBC News", "Sir Elton John and ex-wife Renate Blauel resolve legal dispute - BBC News", "Covid: School insurance fears for cancelled overnight trips - BBC News", "Morrisons and Waitrose ditch glitter for Christmas - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Can Johnson hold out against more restrictions? - BBC News", "Little Mix The Search: BBC talent show halted by positive Covid tests - BBC News", "Premier League says clubs will not back 'Project Big Picture' - BBC Sport", "Hospital staff held cloth over elderly patient's head - BBC News", "New Zealand will not travel to England for Wembley friendly - BBC Sport", "New MI5 chief says UK facing 'nasty mix' of threats - BBC News", "Covid-19: Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer calls for circuit breaker - BBC News", "Used coronavirus tests handed out by mistake in Birmingham - BBC News", "Tributes to 'delightful' Chinnor family killed in crash - BBC News", "Meghan avoids 'controversial' topics for fear of putting family 'at risk' - BBC News", "Twitter suspends accounts claiming to be black Trump supporters - BBC News", "Quality Street missing 'the Chocolate Brownie one' - BBC News", "Central Park: Amy Cooper 'made second racist call' against birdwatcher - BBC News", "Shakespeare First Folio fetches a record $10m at auction - BBC News", "Soyuz rocket reaches ISS in record time - BBC News", "BBC Breakfast's Naga Munchetty to join Radio 5 Live - BBC News", "Covid Sage documents: The scientific evidence and what No 10 then did - BBC News", "Boy sleeps in tent for months in memory of friends - BBC News", "Covid: Boris Johnson questioned as England's 'tier' system begins - BBC News", "Covid-19 lockdown: Llanelli shoppers 'making their own rules up' - BBC News", "Brexit: PM 'disappointed' with progress ahead of EU summit - BBC News", "Covid-19: Boris Johnson defends regional curbs but 'rules nothing out' - BBC News", "Rising numbers of secondary pupils sent home in Covid cases - BBC News", "Norway blames Russia for cyber-attack on parliament - BBC News", "A40 crash: Mother and three young children killed in Oxfordshire - BBC News", "Ikea to buy back used furniture in recycling push - BBC News", "Covid: How is Europe lifting lockdown restrictions? - BBC News", "PMQs: Johnson and Starmer - 14 October - BBC News", "WW2 'earthquake' bomb explodes in Poland during attempt to defuse it - BBC News", "'Red Wall' Tories form group to campaign for northern England - BBC News", "Trump's White House event in focus over Covid spread - BBC News", "North Korea displays 'massive' ICBM at military parade - BBC News", "Billionaire Issa brothers honoured after Asda takeover - BBC News", "Iga Swiatek wins French Open by beating Sofia Kenin - BBC Sport", "Donald Trump holds first public event since Covid diagnosis - BBC News", "Islamic State group 'Beatles' plead not guilty over US hostage deaths - BBC News", "Dilys Price: World's oldest female skydiver dies - BBC News", "Middlesbrough library book returned 57 years late - BBC News", "Covid cases increase rapidly as next steps planned - BBC News", "Planet Mars is at its 'biggest and brightest' - BBC News", "Job Support Scheme: Concern mounts at Covid shutdown 'ripple effect' - BBC News", "Spain's Canary Islands see new influx of African migrants - BBC News", "Giro d'Italia: Simon Yates out of race with Covid-19 - BBC Sport", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "North Korea hosts military spectacle - BBC News", "Paul Heaton praised for 'lovely' Q Magazine gesture - BBC News", "France plane crash: Five killed after mid-air collision near Tours - BBC News", "London homicides reach 100 for sixth consecutive year - BBC News", "Covid-19: UK workers to get 67% of pay if firms told to shut - BBC News", "'Real and imminent' extinction risk to whales - BBC News", "Covid-19: Father shares antibodies after daughter's death - BBC News", "Kevin de Bruyne: England have potential for major titles - BBC Sport", "Covid in Scotland: Barlinnie prisoners locked down after outbreak - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Mary Berry and Dizzee Rascal on Queen's Birthday Honours list - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Bar workers dump leftover ice in closure protest - BBC News", "UK recalls ambassador to Belarus amid unrest - BBC News", "Transgender women in rugby union: Mixed reaction to World Rugby decision - BBC Sport", "Coronavirus: Bangor enters local lockdown restrictions - BBC News", "Covid-19: Financial support from government 'insufficient' - Andy Burnham - BBC News", "Covid: Student anger over 'junk' food parcels in isolation - BBC News", "Coronavirus: We won't surrender North to hardship, mayor vows - BBC News", "Covid-19: PM to detail new measures to MPs on Monday - BBC News", "Unwanted cat brothers, 21, need 'twilight' Northamptonshire home - BBC News", "Hurricane Delta makes landfall in storm-battered Louisiana - BBC News", "Birthday Honours 2020: Marcus Rashford given MBE - BBC News", "Trump's White House event in focus over Covid spread - BBC News", "Covid: 16,000 coronavirus cases missed in daily figures after IT error - BBC News", "Heavy rain brings flooding and travel disruption - BBC News", "Stumble, the one-legged duck given wheelchair - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Senator who hugged White House guests has Covid-19 - BBC News", "Heavy rain across UK brings flood risk warning - BBC News", "Covid-19: Andrew Marr challenges PM over 'complacency' comment - BBC News", "Royal Opera House to sell Hockney portrait to raise funds - BBC News", "Met Police officer stabbed in Westminster trying to detain armed robbers - BBC News", "Trump makes 'surprise visit' to supporters outside hospital - BBC News", "Covid: Undetected breast cancer warning for thousands of women - BBC News", "As it happened: Trump returns to White House from hospital - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Covid-19: President Trump's doctor 'extremely happy' with progress - BBC News", "Reedley deaths: Tributes paid to Dr Saman Mir Sacharvi - BBC News", "Weather in Wales: Warning of floods and travel problems - BBC News", "Trump in hospital: 'We're here to tell him that we love him' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'Winter of discontent' faces North, warns Andy Burnham - BBC News", "Storm Alex: Floods and landslides hit France and Italy - BBC News", "Covid: UK announces 12,872 new cases after technical glitch - BBC News", "London Marathon 2020: Eliud Kipchoge beaten as Shura Kitata takes title - BBC Sport", "In Pictures: Trump supporters hold rallies for the president - BBC News", "Covid: Six months' shielding 'enough to drive you insane' - BBC News", "Ola: London Uber rival Ola faces ban over safety issues - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Rapid antigen test rolled out in Madrid - BBC News", "Mother found after Reedley house fire died from 'pressure to neck' - BBC News", "Zef Eisenberg: Maximuscle founder was 'true genius' - BBC News", "Trump's Covid contacts: Who has he met and who's tested positive? - BBC News", "Stone marks Liverpool's first recorded black resident - BBC News", "Cineworld to shut down UK screens after Bond film delay - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Covid: PM has 'lost control of virus', says Labour leader - BBC News", "Covid: Care homes policies violated human rights, says Amnesty - BBC News", "Reedley deaths: Two held on suspicion of mum and daughter murders - BBC News", "Priti Patel pledges to fix 'broken' asylum system in UK - BBC News", "Prince Louis joins George and Charlotte to quiz Sir David Attenborough - BBC News", "Nagorno-Karabakh conflict: Civilians and BBC team flee shelling - BBC News", "Coronavirus: New restrictions for swathes of northern England - BBC News", "Trump and the virus: A day of turmoil in the White House - BBC News", "Wheelchair user pulls himself up steps to sit DVSA test - BBC News", "Brierley Hill shootings: Man charged with murders - BBC News", "Brazilian takes Welsh test to become British citizen - BBC News", "Donald Trump tells America: 'I'm starting to feel good' - BBC News", "Kenzo Takada: Japanese designer dies after catching Covid-19 - BBC News", "Covid-19: Ipswich nurse's triplets pregnancy 'could've been so different' - BBC News", "Samantha Morton: 'Abused women aren't allowed to be angry' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'I really worried we might lose PM', Dominic Raab says - BBC News", "Brexit: PM and EU chief agree importance of finding trade deal - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Executive considering 'new interventions' on Covid - BBC News", "What older voters make of Trump Covid story - BBC News", "Covid: Things 'bumpy to Christmas and beyond' - PM - BBC News", "Covid: Nottingham to move into tier 3 - BBC News", "Ex-paratrooper attempts record jump without parachute - BBC News", "Tanker stowaways: Seven men arrested over ship's ‘hijacking’ - BBC News", "Manchester Arena bomber 'smiled' as he walked to his death - BBC News", "Emiliano Sala: David Henderson appears in court on flight charges - BBC News", "Belarus protests: National opposition strike gains momentum - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Local lockdowns 'stifling jobs recovery' - BBC News", "Is there really no money for free school meals? - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "School meals: 'I remember going to bed with hunger pains' - BBC News", "US election 2020: What the US election will mean for the UK - BBC News", "Covid: 'No touring West End shows in Cardiff until vaccine' warning - BBC News", "Post Office says a third of its cash machines will close - BBC News", "Troubles legacy: MPs dismiss proposals as 'unhelpful' - BBC News", "Lewis Hamilton breaks Michael Schumacher's win record at the Portuguese Grand Prix - BBC Sport", "Hay Festival director and co-founder Peter Florence suspended - BBC News", "Covid: Back to intensive care, where I notice one major change - BBC News", "Tanker stowaways: Seven detained off Isle of Wight - BBC News", "Nabil Abdulrashid: Ofcom rejects 3,000 Britain's Got Talent complaints - BBC News", "Covid-19: Welsh Government update - BBC News", "Wales lockdown: Tesco 'wrong' to say period products 'not essential' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Free meals row, 'Generation Covid' and Oliviers' message of hope - BBC News", "US election 2020: What are Trump's and Biden's policies? - BBC News", "Boots to offer 12-minute turnaround on Covid nasal swab test - BBC News", "Boris Johnson and Priti Patel 'should apologise for lawyer attacks' - BBC News", "Urology review leads to patients being recalled - BBC News", "US election 2020: What we can learn from Trump and Biden's musical choices - BBC News", "Covid: Belgian doctors with coronavirus asked to keep working - BBC News", "Ex-paratrooper attempts record jump from helicopter without parachute - BBC News", "Frank Bough: Former Grandstand and Breakfast Time presenter dies aged 87 - BBC News", "Stock markets slide as Covid-19 cases rise - BBC News", "Paul Harvey: Single gives 'new lease of life' to composer with dementia - BBC News", "Jack Ma's Ant Group set for record $34bn market debut - BBC News", "Covid: Hundreds of thousands more face Tier 3 virus rules - BBC News", "Prue Leith: NHS can serve 'delicious' food on a budget - BBC News", "School meals: Boris Johnson refuses to move on school meal vouchers - BBC News", "The explosive problem of 'zombie' batteries - BBC News", "HMP Rye Hill prison officer 'failed to notice' dead sex offender - BBC News", "As it happened: US election 2020 latest: Biden hits out at Trump over pandemic - BBC News", "Cat's return after three years 'takes the Biscuit' - BBC News", "Covid circuit-breaker: Wales lockdown plan 'weighs heavily' - BBC News", "Covid: 'Dark days' for tourism in Wales, but some 'silver lining' - BBC News", "Covid: What the tier rules say about the split between science and politics - BBC News", "Elephants: 'My mission to stop poachers in Zimbabwe' - BBC News", "Hay Festival severs UAE ties after sex assault claim by employee - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Tory MPs clash over Manchester restrictions - BBC News", "Covid-19: Firms warn of 'catastrophic' impact of new coronavirus rules - BBC News", "Hedgehog road deaths in UK 'as high as 335,000' - BBC News", "Dozens of migrants cross English Channel in 12 boats - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Dutch royals return amid anger over Covid holiday - BBC News", "Paris attacks: France grapples with freedom of speech - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Dutch PM concedes 'wrong assessment' over royal holiday - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'Tier one ends at my garden wall' - BBC News", "Fallon Sherrock misses out on PDC World Championship at Alexandra Palace - BBC Sport", "'Je suis Samuel' - France rallies for beheaded teacher - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Tax-free support call for self-isolation - BBC News", "Rare rufous bush chat in UK for first time in 40 years - BBC News", "Construction of second Trump golf course at Menie approved - BBC News", "Circuit breaker: What is a circuit-breaker lockdown? - BBC News", "Covid: PM warns he may 'need to intervene' on Manchester - BBC News", "Brexit: Door 'still ajar' for EU trade talks, says Gove - BBC News", "Brother of Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson dies with Covid - BBC News", "Large 2,000-year-old cat discovered in Peru's Nazca lines - BBC News", "Covid: Confusion over fresh talks in Manchester tier row - BBC News", "Paralympics 2012 opening ceremony dancer Dave Toole dies - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Police get access to NHS Test and Trace self-isolation data - BBC News", "London Bridge attack: Steven Gallant up for early release after confronting knifeman - BBC News", "Coronavirus: UK facing 'tough' Christmas, Sage scientist warns - BBC News", "Salisbury Novichok-poisoned officer Nick Bailey quits - BBC News", "Coronavirus drives shop closures to new record - BBC News", "Coronavirus: People to get emergency help to pay energy bills - BBC News", "Covid-19: Andy Burnham urges Boris Johnson to break Greater Manchester 'impasse' - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Nicola Sturgeon plays down row over testing delays - BBC News", "Theresa May attacks 'ill-conceived' planning reforms - BBC News", "Ex-Journalist Allegra Stratton to lead No 10 TV briefings - BBC News", "New Welsh minister for mental health in cabinet shake-up - BBC News", "Stolen Mao Zedong scroll 'worth millions' found cut in half - BBC News", "Covid: MPs call for more clarity on local lockdowns - BBC News", "Islamic State 'Beatles' in court over US hostages' deaths - BBC News", "Manchester Arena attack: Abedi's brother Ismail refuses to engage with inquiry - BBC News", "Carole Packman murder: Appeal against killer's release rejected - BBC News", "Harry and Meghan: News agency apology over 'drone photos' of son - BBC News", "Covid: Pubs and restaurants in central Scotland to close - BBC News", "Asda launches 'first of its kind' flu jab service - BBC News", "Covid-19: New restrictions for parts of England likely next week - BBC News", "Lockdown city living 'wasn't the best idea' - BBC News", "Covid updates: Warnings in Europe amid spike in cases - BBC News", "Concern over UK cattle slaughtered in Middle East - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Louise Glück wins Nobel Prize for Literature - BBC News", "Facebook bans Cornwall therapist's 'sexual' nipple tattoo ads - BBC News", "VP debate 2020: Kamala Harris and Mike Pence row over taxes and clsimate - BBC News", "Film-going could 'become extinct' warns director - BBC News", "Nicola Sturgeon 'has nothing to hide' over Alex Salmond inquiry - BBC News", "Billionaires see fortunes rise by 27% during the pandemic - BBC News", "Let depressed teens postpone exams, say researchers - BBC News", "David Lammy MP criticises Twitter over 'death threat' tweet - BBC News", "Huawei: MPs claim 'clear evidence of collusion' with Chinese Communist Party - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Minimum fine for Covid law breach to rise to £200 - BBC News", "Covid: Brazil's coronavirus cases pass five million - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Nottinghamshire residents told not to mix indoors - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Curbs 'a blessing in disguise for prisons' - BBC News", "Covid cases: Welsh patients in hospital returns to June level - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Local lockdown UK: Do city-wide curbs work? It's not clear - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Bars to shut in four more French cities with alert level raised - BBC News", "Covid: 'My name was stolen to claim a self-employed grant' - BBC News", "Could English pubs follow in Scotland's steps? - BBC News", "England 3-0 Wales: Dominic Calvert-Lewin scores debut goal in win - BBC Sport", "Government to pay £2m to settle coronavirus testing case - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Nottingham has highest Covid infection rate in UK - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Masks made mandatory outdoors across Italy - BBC News", "Scotland 0-0 Israel (5-3 pens): Scots one game from Euro 2020 after shootout - BBC Sport", "Essex lorry deaths: Gheorghe Nica admits people-smuggling role - BBC News", "VP debate: Voters pleased with candidates' civility - BBC News", "Oscars update rules to allow drive-in screenings - BBC News", "Covid-19: New restrictions to be announced for parts of England 'within days' - Jenrick - BBC News", "Covid: How is Europe lifting lockdown restrictions? - BBC News", "Bianca Williams stop-and-search: Met PCs face probe - BBC News", "Covid-19: Councils get millions of pounds for marshals - BBC News", "NHS Covid-19 app: Why are some teachers being told not to use it? - BBC News", "Covid deaths three times higher than flu and pneumonia - BBC News", "Bearded vulture: Crowds flock to see rare bird over Lincolnshire fens - BBC News", "PureGym sorry for 'unacceptable' slavery post - BBC News", "Trump's White House event in focus over Covid spread - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Sturgeon to meet advisers over further restrictions - BBC News", "Student drug deaths: Four young people die in North East - BBC News", "Covid: 16,000 coronavirus cases missed in daily figures after IT error - BBC News", "Grindr accounts could be easily hacked with email address - BBC News", "Supreme Court President Lord Reed wants more diversity in Supreme Court - BBC News", "Boris Johnson urged to intervene to 'save outdoor education' - BBC News", "Met Police officer stabbed in Westminster trying to detain armed robbers - BBC News", "Trump makes 'surprise visit' to supporters outside hospital - BBC News", "As it happened: Trump returns to White House from hospital - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Family agony at Welsh Ambulance Service delay for burns victim - BBC News", "Weather in Wales: Warning of floods and travel problems - BBC News", "Trump in hospital: 'We're here to tell him that we love him' - BBC News", "Rishi Sunak vows to 'balance books' despite pandemic - BBC News", "Highgate pupils ill after eating 'cannabis-laced sweets' - BBC News", "MPs back bill to authorise MI5 and police crimes - BBC News", "Kayleigh McEnany: What do we know about White House press secretary? - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'Winter of discontent' faces North, warns Andy Burnham - BBC News", "In Pictures: Trump supporters hold rallies for the president - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'World's best airport' warns of prolonged crisis - BBC News", "Lana Del Rey criticised for wearing mesh mask to meet fans - BBC News", "Home working here to stay, study of businesses suggests - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Trump's health, Paris bars, and test and trace glitch - BBC News", "Ola: London Uber rival Ola faces ban over safety issues - BBC News", "Covid-19: 'How lockdown stopped me from breastfeeding' - BBC News", "Trump's Covid contacts: Who has he met and who's tested positive? - BBC News", "Flawless 102-carat diamond a 'bargain' at $16m - BBC News", "Covid: Test error 'should never have happened' - Hancock - BBC News", "False coronavirus claims and rumours about Trump - BBC News", "Michael O'Leary death: Husband guilty of murdering wife's lover - BBC News", "Cineworld to shut down UK screens after Bond film delay - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Covid could cause 'tsunami of cancelled NHS operations' - BBC News", "Manchester Arena Inquiry: Terror threat 'not adequately assessed' - BBC News", "Reedley deaths: Two held on suspicion of mum and daughter murders - BBC News", "Priti Patel pledges to fix 'broken' asylum system in UK - BBC News", "Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven copyright battle is finally over - BBC News", "Trump doctor: 'He's back' - BBC News", "Nagorno-Karabakh conflict: Civilians and BBC team flee shelling - BBC News", "Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to Hepatitis C discovery - BBC News", "Worst September for UK car sales this century - BBC News", "England: Tammy Abraham, Ben Chilwell & Jadon Sancho set to miss Wales game - BBC Sport", "Excel: Why using Microsoft's tool caused Covid-19 results to be lost - BBC News", "Trump Covid: How his experience compares with Boris Johnson's - BBC News", "England cricketer Ian Botham introduced to House of Lords - BBC News", "Boris Johnson: Wind farms could power every home by 2030 - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Soft play owners 'angry' at continued lockdown - BBC News", "Tammy Abraham: Chelsea striker apologises for coronavirus guidelines breach - BBC Sport", "State pension age hits 66 and set to rise further - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Executive considering 'new interventions' on Covid - BBC News", "Thomas Partey: Arsenal complete £45m deal for Atletico Madrid midfielder - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: Government launches £238m scheme for jobseekers - BBC News", "Ballet surprise for young cancer patient Izzy Fletcher - BBC News", "Amy Coney Barrett: Who is Trump's Supreme Court pick? - BBC News", "UK farmers to need 'thousands of foreign workers' next summer - BBC News", "Amy Coney Barrett: The Supreme Court nominee on abortion, healthcare and her faith - BBC News", "HSBC says it could charge for current accounts - BBC News", "Coronavirus: People 'rediscovering books' as lockdown sales jump - BBC News", "Covid Christmas: Rapid tests could get students home - BBC News", "Urology review leads to patients being recalled - BBC News", "Claire Parry death: PC Timothy Brehmer cleared of murder - BBC News", "Lord Janner inquiry: Blair defends granting ex-MP peerage - BBC News", "Sir Keir Starmer involved in road collision with cyclist - BBC News", "Christian Coleman banned for two years for missing drugs test - BBC Sport", "Ex-paratrooper attempts record jump without parachute - BBC News", "Kazakhstan adopts Borat phrase for tourism campaign - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'Bosses should be more open-minded about hiring disabled people' - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Traveller families win court battle over living on land they own - BBC News", "School meals: 'I remember going to bed with hunger pains' - BBC News", "Ex-paratrooper's jump from helicopter was 'higher than planned' - BBC News", "Troubles murder case: 'Renewed hope' for families of murdered RUC trio - BBC News", "Wales lockdown: Tesco 'wrong' to say period products 'not essential' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Scotland to ease pub and restaurant restrictions - BBC News", "Manchester Arena Inquiry: Security 'did not approach bomber over racism fears' - BBC News", "Mobile networks banned from selling locked phones - BBC News", "Jamie Foxx's 'heart shattered' after sister dies aged 36 - BBC News", "As it happened: UK records highest daily Covid-19 deaths since May - BBC News", "Covid-19: Patient rise halts non-essential operations in Leeds - BBC News", "Covid: Nottingham to move into tier 3 - BBC News", "Liverpool mayor would back Covid tier 4 in England - BBC News", "Black History Month: Expert demands justice inquiry in Wales - BBC News", "'Transphobic bullies nearly cost me my life' - BBC News", "As it happened: US election 2020 latest: Biden condemns ‘rushed’ Supreme Court appointment - BBC News", "Covid-19: Warrington moves into tier 3 restrictions - BBC News", "Channel crossings: Sudanese man who died trying to reach UK is named - BBC News", "Chrissy Teigen explains why she shared her baby loss photos - BBC News", "Covid: Back to intensive care, where I notice one major change - BBC News", "Covid: Belgian doctors with coronavirus asked to keep working - BBC News", "Covid: Don't let north get 'left behind' Tory MPs warn PM - BBC News", "Stock markets slide as Covid-19 cases rise - BBC News", "Covid: Antibodies 'fall rapidly after infection' - BBC News", "Channel migrants: Four dead as boat sinks near Dunkirk - BBC News", "Woolworths High Street 'relaunch' proves a hoax - BBC News", "School meals: Boris Johnson refuses to move on school meal vouchers - BBC News", "Don't hold home firework displays, urge doctors - BBC News", "Wales lockdown: Baby clothes join essentials list - BBC News", "Covid has thrived on racial discrimination, says Baroness Doreen Lawrence - BBC News", "Manchester Arena bomber 'smiled' as he walked to his death - BBC News", "Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson's loss after brother's Covid death - BBC News", "More children in England missing school over Covid-19 - BBC News", "Video shows racist attack after failed Met probe - BBC News", "Covid lockdown: Supermarket rules 'causing fear and frustration' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Cwm Taf Morgannwg hospital deaths reach 69 - BBC News", "Covid Wales: 'Urgent clarity' needed on rules after firebreak - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Antrim Hospital 'beyond capacity' amid Covid surge - BBC News", "Syria: Inside a refugee camp where Covid is spreading - BBC News", "Family courts: 'We're treated with contempt' - BBC News", "Covid: Staffordshire and Dudley set to move to tier 2 - BBC News", "Alistair Wilson murder: Son recalls Nairn banker shooting - BBC News", "Republic of Ireland 0-0 Wales: Nations League game ends goalless in Dublin - BBC Sport", "Trump's White House event in focus over Covid spread - BBC News", "Dilys Price: World's oldest female skydiver dies - BBC News", "Belarus: Dozens arrested as police blast protesters with water cannon - BBC News", "Migrant crisis: Dinghies to UK could be 'disabled using nets' - BBC News", "Planet Mars is at its 'biggest and brightest' - BBC News", "Thailand crash: Bus collides with train, killing 18 - BBC News", "Job Support Scheme: Concern mounts at Covid shutdown 'ripple effect' - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Robert Jenrick dismisses call for constituency fund probe - BBC News", "Nations League: Five more Republic of Ireland players miss Wales game after new positive Covid-19 case - BBC Sport", "France plane crash: Five killed after mid-air collision near Tours - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: 'No guarantee' pubs will reopen in two weeks - BBC News", "Covid: Brazil's coronavirus death toll passes 150,000 - BBC News", "Margaret Ferrier: Covid MP says virus 'makes you act out of character' - BBC News", "Police station near Paris attacked with fireworks - BBC News", "André do Rap: Brazil crime boss goes on the run after release from prison - BBC News", "Covid: UK at 'tipping point', top scientist warns - BBC News", "Kevin de Bruyne: England have potential for major titles - BBC Sport", "Covid in Scotland: Barlinnie prisoners locked down after outbreak - BBC News", "Penally: Homophobic attacks for welcoming asylum seekers - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Local lockdown UK: Do city-wide curbs work? It's not clear - BBC News", "UK economy: Shoppers aid growth but slowdown ahead, says report - BBC News", "England 2-1 Belgium: Mason Mount secures comeback win - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: Wales close to a tipping point, first minister says - BBC News", "Transgender women in rugby union: Mixed reaction to World Rugby decision - BBC Sport", "Premier League: Radical reform plans could have 'damaging impact' - BBC Sport", "French Open: Rafael Nadal beats Novak Djokovic to win 13th Roland Garros title - BBC Sport", "Covid: Second national lockdown possible, says top UK scientist - BBC News", "BCG: Can a vaccine from 1921 save lives from Covid-19? - BBC News", "Covid: Three-tier lockdown system to be unveiled in England - BBC News", "Sturgeon: Salmond may be angry I refused to collude - BBC News", "Covid: Student anger over 'junk' food parcels in isolation - BBC News", "Coronavirus: We won't surrender North to hardship, mayor vows - BBC News", "Eifel Grand Prix: Lewis Hamilton equals Michael Schumacher record with 91st win - BBC Sport", "Twitter: Major outage affects users around the world - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Gym owner fined for refusing to close in Covid shutdown - BBC News", "Southampton police officer stabbed several times - BBC News", "England 0-1 Denmark: Harry Maguire sent off as hosts lose in Nations League at Wembley - BBC Sport", "Breonna Taylor: Boyfriend Kenneth Walker recalls night she was killed - BBC News", "Covid: Southall wedding venue hosts 100-guest reception - BBC News", "Photographer 'devastated' by government-backed 'Fatima' dancer advert - BBC News", "Coronavirus testing lab 'chaotic and dangerous', scientist claims - BBC News", "Covid alert level: London, Essex, York and other areas moving to Tier 2 - BBC News", "Covid: All alcohol sales to be banned in House of Commons - BBC News", "Superconductors: Material raises hope of energy revolution - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Boy, 12, discovers rare dinosaur skeleton - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Bride 'refused £16k deposit for cancelled wedding' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Liverpool mayor considers extra half-term week - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Covid: UK 'faces period of destitution', warns Louise Casey - BBC News", "Afghan-Taliban conflict: Fears grow for families trapped in Helmand - BBC News", "Post Malone wins nine Billboard Music Awards, including best artist - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Hospital admissions rise in NI Covid hotspot - BBC News", "Queen carries out first public engagement outside royal residence since March - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Housing upgrades urged to create thousands of jobs - BBC News", "'I fear being a forgotten casualty of pandemic' - BBC News", "Morrisons and Waitrose ditch glitter for Christmas - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Can Johnson hold out against more restrictions? - BBC News", "Coronavirus: NI Nightingale hospital to reopen due to Covid-19 pressures - BBC News", "Binky Felstead: 'We need to break the stigma around miscarriage' - BBC News", "New MI5 chief says UK facing 'nasty mix' of threats - BBC News", "Coronavirus and homelessness: 'No one will have to go back' - BBC News", "EU leaders weigh up hard choices over Brexit trade deal - BBC News", "'Game-changer' drug to tackle addiction - BBC News", "Quality Street missing 'the Chocolate Brownie one' - BBC News", "Central Park: Amy Cooper 'made second racist call' against birdwatcher - BBC News", "Marcus Rashford welcomes extra free school meals in Wales - BBC News", "Margaret Ferrier: Met Police to take no further action against Covid MP - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Altnagelvin Hospital visits suspended by Western Trust - BBC News", "Covid: NHS staff testing 'dismantled' in virus hotspots - BBC News", "Pieces of orbiting space junk 'avoid collision' - BBC News", "Colorado wildfire: Huge smoke plumes from Cameron Peak Fire, largest in state history - BBC News", "US election 2020: Harris halts travel after aide tests positive for coronavirus - BBC News", "Italy and Vatican City added to UK quarantine list - BBC News", "As it happened: More areas of UK under new coronavirus restrictions - BBC News", "Brexit: EU leaders call for UK trade talks to continue - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: No 'return to normal' when pubs reopen - BBC News", "Brexit: PM 'disappointed' with progress ahead of EU summit - BBC News", "Covid-19: Talks continue over new restrictions for parts of England - BBC News", "Covid-19: Boris Johnson defends regional curbs but 'rules nothing out' - BBC News", "Covid: Sir Keir Starmer calls for travel restrictions agreement - BBC News", "Marcus Rashford to fight on after new school meals plea rejected - BBC News", "Essex lorry deaths: 'People jumped from lorry' days before bodies found - BBC News", "East Kent Hospitals: 'Toxic culture risks patients' lives' - BBC News", "Housing: Empty homes are a 'wasted resource' - BBC News", "Covid: Decision on pausing in-person university lectures due 'shortly' - DfE - BBC News", "Covid alert level: No Tier 3 agreement yet, say Greater Manchester leaders - BBC News", "Rashford: Hungry children still worrying about next meal - BBC News", "Nagorno-Karabakh: The three-year-old orphaned by war - BBC News", "As it happened: US election: Biden promises free vaccine as Trump renews attack - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Boris Becker accused of not handing over tennis trophies to pay debts - BBC News", "Australia child abuse: Police arrest 44 suspects and rescue 16 children - BBC News", "Covid-19 confirmed cases in half of Northern Ireland schools - BBC News", "Gap considers closing all its UK stores - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Canary Islands added to UK's safe travel list - BBC News", "Covid restrictions: Sturgeon unveils new system - BBC News", "England v Barbarians called off after players breach Covid rules - BBC Sport", "Covid in Scotland: What are the differences between alert levels? - BBC News", "Extinction Rebellion activists block entrances to Ineos refinery - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Your pictures of Scotland 16 - 23 October - BBC News", "Coronavirus infections continue to rise across UK - BBC News", "Covid-19: Boris Johnson hopes families can have Christmas together - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Chester drive-in movie bogged down by lockdown loos - BBC News", "PSNI finds man wanted for two years hiding in Belfast attic - BBC News", "Kristen Welker: Presidential debate moderator was 'clear winner' on social media - BBC News", "As it happened: Wales' 17-day coronavirus firebreak begins - BBC News", "Presidential debate: Trump and Biden clash on Covid response - BBC News", "Coronavirus: North Korea warnings over 'yellow dust coming from China' - BBC News", "Presidential debate 2020: Voters react to final Trump-Biden clash - BBC News", "Wales lockdown: Supermarkets covering up non-essential items - BBC News", "Piers Corbyn 'specifically targeted by police' at anti-lockdown protest court heard - BBC News", "Portsmouth University halls 'street party' broken up by police - BBC News", "Presidential debate: Key takeaways from the Trump-Biden showdown - BBC News", "Virapro hand sanitiser: NI health service checks after Irish safety recall - BBC News", "Man charged with right-wing terror plot to kill immigration solicitor - BBC News", "Britain and Japan sign post-Brexit trade deal - BBC News", "Marcus Rashford: Communities back school meals campaign - BBC News", "Presidential debate: Trump and Biden spar in final showdown - BBC News", "English Channel migrants 'being detained in unfit conditions' - BBC News", "Emily in Paris: Netflix hit's creator Darren Star 'not sorry' for 'clichés' - BBC News", "Wales lockdown: Supermarkets told to sell only essential items - BBC News", "Presidential debate 2020: Why Abraham Lincoln starred in the final clash - BBC News", "Covid: Scotland to enter new five-level alert system - BBC News", "Wrecks visible in River Severn 60 years after disaster - BBC News", "Susan Nicholson's parents win appeal for fresh inquest - BBC News", "Covid: NHS Test and Trace needs to improve, PM concedes - BBC News", "Covid: Teacher trapped in Italy quarantine happy to be home - BBC News", "Covid-19: England and Wales begin tougher rules for millions - BBC News", "Covid-19: Welsh Government update - BBC News", "Covid: Sewage sites to test for more traces of virus - BBC News", "Essex lorry deaths: Woman in France 'saw migrants get in lorry' - BBC News", "Furlough fraudsters 'may have stolen more than £3bn' - BBC News", "Covid: Warrington to move to tier 3 restrictions - BBC News", "Covid: The NHS workers 'still recovering' as second wave looms - BBC News", "Aston Villa 0-3 Leeds: Patrick Bamford hat-trick ends hosts' 100% start - BBC Sport", "Covid in Scotland: Sturgeon to set out five-tier alert system - BBC News", "Shoppers defy economic gloom in September - BBC News", "Boats herd whales from Gare Loch ahead of military exercise - BBC News", "Chrissy Teigen and John Legend speak of 'deep pain' of losing baby - BBC News", "Covid: 170 test positive at Cornwall meat plant - BBC News", "Duffield deaths: Man jailed for murdering wife and new partner - BBC News", "Sir Keir Starmer condemns 'inhuman' asylum ferries idea - BBC News", "Plastic straw ban in England comes into force - BBC News", "Wylfa: Fresh talks to save £20bn nuclear plant revealed - BBC News", "Covid: Vaccine will 'not return life to normal in spring' - BBC News", "Matiu Ratana death: Met Police sergeant 'died from gunshot to chest' - BBC News", "PM's father Stanley Johnson pictured in shop without face covering - BBC News", "Covid-19: Tighter restrictions extended across North of England - BBC News", "Australian jailed for Islamophobic attack on pregnant woman - BBC News", "'I'm sending my gran some love in an envelope' - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: No new virus restrictions announced - BBC News", "Covid: Poland and Turkey added to UK's quarantine list as fines rise - BBC News", "Covid-19: Edinburgh Christmas festivals cancelled - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Restrictions for England to be standardised into three tiers - BBC News", "Harry and Meghan call to end 'structural racism' - BBC News", "Margaret Ferrier speaks in Commons while awaiting test result - BBC News", "Ministers were warned of 'high risk' of Covid loans fraud - BBC News", "Emergency powers adopted to require schools to teach online - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Covid 19: More restrictions expected in Merseyside - BBC News", "Berlin patient: First person cured of HIV, Timothy Ray Brown, dies - BBC News", "Madrid coronavirus: Spain orders lockdown amid rise in cases - BBC News", "LA police 'ambush': Deonte Lee Murray charged with attempted murder - BBC News", "Joyce Echaquan: Trudeau decries 'systemic racism' after indigenous woman death - BBC News", "Google Pixel phone 'designed for economic downturn' - BBC News", "Manchester Arena Inquiry: Bomber linked to six MI5 'subjects of interest' - BBC News", "Penally asylum seekers criticise military camp housing - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Asylum seekers could be processed on old ferries - BBC News", "Strictly Come Dancing: Graham Norton questions need for same-sex couples - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Middlesbrough business mixing ban 'unacceptable' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Paris poised for maximum Covid alert - BBC News", "Alexei Navalny blames Vladimir Putin for poisoning him - BBC News", "Technical glitch halts trading on Japan's exchanges - BBC News", "Coronavirus: MPs promised vote on new rules 'wherever possible' - BBC News", "Derek Mackay still claiming expenses for Edinburgh accommodation - BBC News", "Subway rolls ruled too sugary to be bread in Ireland - BBC News", "Archie Lyndhurst: CBBC star and son of Nicholas Lyndhurst dies aged 19 - BBC News", "Liverpool 0-0 (4-5) Arsenal: Gunners into quarter-finals of Carabao Cup on penalties - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: Funding crisis threatens zoos' vital conservation work - BBC News", "Blackbaud: Bank details and passwords at risk in giant charities hack - BBC News", "Stricter Covid rules in Liverpool, Warrington, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough - BBC News", "Covid: Row over test bookings at shut Rhondda site - BBC News", "Man, 41, loses 'unprecedented' legal bid for parents' financial support - BBC News", "Land speed record attempt: Driver dies at Elvington airfield - BBC News", "Smart plugs sold on Amazon a 'fire risk', Which? warns - BBC News", "Children's gender identity clinic concerns go back 15 years - BBC News", "Manchester Arena Inquiry: Bomber 'missed by seconds' by patrol - BBC News", "MP Margaret Ferrier's Covid Parliament trip 'indefensible' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Loss of smell may be clearer sign than cough - BBC News", "Covid: Woman 'heartbroken' after terminating baby alone - BBC News", "Covid: Cwm Taf leads dramatic rise in Wales hospital cases - BBC News", "Covid cases increase rapidly as next steps planned - BBC News", "Tory Lanez and Megan Thee Stallion: Rapper charged with assault with firearm - BBC News", "Met Police restraint contributed to ill man's death - BBC News", "Firms say fresh wage subsidy may 'cushion blow' - BBC News", "'Real and imminent' extinction risk to whales - BBC News", "Covid: Pubs in Wales 'could close' if coronavirus cases rise - BBC News", "Australian boss fined over Belgian backpacker's fruit-picking death - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Mary Berry and Dizzee Rascal on Queen's Birthday Honours list - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Deaths in Edinburgh cancer ward after outbreak - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Reaction as UK announced support for firms made to close - BBC News", "England 3-0 Wales: Dominic Calvert-Lewin scores debut goal in win - BBC Sport", "Coronavirus: Nottingham has highest Covid infection rate in UK - BBC News", "Covid: Warrington woman fined £1,000 for failing to quarantine - BBC News", "Baba ka dhaba: Teary video brings Delhi crowds to struggling food stall - BBC News", "Covid-19: Eight Bangor wards set to go into local lockdown - BBC News", "Bianca Williams stop-and-search: Met PCs face probe - BBC News", "Royal Ballet back on stage with social distancing - BBC News", "Covid: Betsi Cadwaladr health board facing extremely difficult winter - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Rapid bedside test shows promise in hospitals - BBC News", "Covid-19: UK workers to get 67% of pay if firms told to shut - BBC News", "Papa John's investigating claims of £250,000 Eat Out to Help Out fraud - BBC News", "Essex lorry deaths: Victims 'tried to break through roof' - BBC News", "U2's Joshua Tree voted the best album of the 1980s - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Cases in north of England 'getting out of control', minister says - BBC News", "Peacocks owner on brink putting 21,000 jobs at risk - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Extra police patrols as pubs prepare to shut at 18:00 - BBC News", "NHS Covid-19 app: Why are some teachers being told not to use it? - BBC News", "Your pictures of Scotland 2 - 9 October - BBC News", "Davina McCall to present Changing Rooms reboot - BBC News", "Covid: Northern leaders say jobs package 'only a start' - BBC News", "Harry Richford: East Kent NHS Trust charged over baby's death - BBC News", "Billionaire Issa brothers honoured after Asda takeover - BBC News", "Islamic State group 'Beatles' plead not guilty over US hostage deaths - BBC News", "Paul Heaton praised for 'lovely' Q Magazine gesture - BBC News", "US radio station signs Hertfordshire's 'one listener' shed DJ Deke Duncan - BBC News", "US man avoids jail in Thailand over bad resort review - BBC News", "'I thought I was going to die' in homophobic attack - BBC News", "No on-site counselling in half of schools, research says - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Bars to shut in four more French cities with alert level raised - BBC News", "Could English pubs follow in Scotland's steps? - BBC News", "Scotland 0-0 Israel (5-3 pens): Scots one game from Euro 2020 after shootout - BBC Sport", "Premier League: Games not selected for broadcast in October will be available to fans on a pay-per-view basis - BBC Sport", "Covid in Scotland: Updates - BBC News", "Covid-19: Rishi Sunak to announce help for shut down businesses - BBC News", "Covid-19: PM to detail new measures to MPs on Monday - BBC News", "Birthday Honours 2020: Marcus Rashford given MBE - BBC News", "Bearded vulture: Crowds flock to see rare bird over Lincolnshire fens - BBC News", "Covid: MPs call for more clarity on local lockdowns - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Shutters come down on pubs and restaurants in central belt - BBC News", "Manchester Arena attack: Abedi's brother Ismail refuses to engage with inquiry - BBC News", "Harry and Meghan: News agency apology over 'drone photos' of son - BBC News", "Mali hostages: Sophie Pétronin and Soumaïla Cissé freed in prisoner swap - BBC News", "Local lockdown UK: Do city-wide curbs work? It's not clear - BBC News", "Travel writer Simon Calder has 'no further plans' to visit Wales after abuse - BBC News", "Coronavirus: More north-south co-operation needed on Covid-19, Coveney says - BBC News", "Covid: How is Europe lifting lockdown restrictions? - BBC News", "'Obsessed' dentist stalker found outside surgery - BBC News", "Geek Retreat: Retailer of 'all things geeky' to open 100 new shops - BBC News", "As it happened: US Election 2020 latest: Early voting begins in key swing state of Florida - BBC News", "Birmingham pub bombings: Priti Patel to look at case for inquiry - BBC News", "China's economy continues to bounce back from virus slump - BBC News", "Covid-19: Wales to go into 'firebreak' lockdown from Friday - BBC News", "Covid in Wales: Updates from Monday 19 October - BBC News", "Covid: Noon deadline for Manchester coronavirus deal - BBC News", "Grenfell Tower inquiry: Refurbishment notebooks 'binned' - BBC News", "Covid circuit-breaker: Wales lockdown plan 'weighs heavily' - BBC News", "Mysterious 'Robin Hood' hackers donating stolen money - BBC News", "Covid: What the tier rules say about the split between science and politics - BBC News", "Hay Festival severs UAE ties after sex assault claim by employee - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: University outbreaks were ‘accident waiting to happen’ - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Shapps aims for new test system for arrivals - BBC News", "John Leslie trial: Ex-Blue Peter presenter cleared of sex assault - BBC News", "Dozens of migrants cross English Channel in 12 boats - BBC News", "Hedgehog road deaths in UK 'as high as 335,000' - BBC News", "Shanghai zoo fatal bear attack: Visitors see worker being killed - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'Tier one ends at my garden wall' - BBC News", "Flu vaccine: NI to 'pause' vaccination programme for under-65s - BBC News", "Fallon Sherrock misses out on PDC World Championship at Alexandra Palace - BBC Sport", "'Je suis Samuel' - France rallies for beheaded teacher - BBC News", "EU investigates Instagram over handling of children's data - BBC News", "New name for a Canadian town called Asbestos - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Strictly Come Dancing: Covid-secure launch show seen by 8.6m viewers - BBC News", "Virgil van Dijk: Liverpool defender needs knee surgery and faces lengthy lay-off - BBC Sport", "Manchester Arena Inquiry: Police officer was on 'unacceptable' two-hour break - BBC News", "Rape case prosecutors must disregard sext messages - BBC News", "Brentford tower block residents evacuated over safety fears - BBC News", "Baby born in lorry cab meets staff who saved her life - BBC News", "Deaths at home: More than 26,000 extra this year, ONS finds - BBC News", "Tokyo Olympics: Russian hackers targeted Games, UK says - BBC News", "'Pilot universal basic income and shorter working weeks in Wales' - BBC News", "Covid: 'Clear guidance needed' as lockdown talks continue - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Call for DUP's Edwin Poots to apologise - BBC News", "Bank boss: UK facing 'unprecedented economic uncertainty' - BBC News", "Covid: England boosting plasma stocks for patients - BBC News", "Circuit breaker: What is a circuit-breaker lockdown? - BBC News", "Covid lockdown: Wales poised for decision on circuit-breaker - BBC News", "Leicester 0-1 Aston Villa: Ross Barkley praises club doctor after scoring winner - BBC Sport", "Covid-19: First UK airport coronavirus testing begins - BBC News", "Covid-19: Children 'top priority' in Wales firebreak - BBC News", "Brexit: UK calls for change as EU makes trade talks pledge - BBC News", "Covid-19: Andy Burnham urges Boris Johnson to break Greater Manchester 'impasse' - BBC News", "Covid: Bolton MP Yasmin Qureshi in hospital after positive test - BBC News", "Bletchley Park’s contribution to WW2 'over-rated' - BBC News", "Covid: Latest Greater Manchester talks end with no agreement - BBC News", "Long Covid: St Annes man 'never recovered' from long-term effects - BBC News", "Matt Hancock seen in chauffeur-driven car without mask - BBC News", "Coronavirus: UK facing 'tough' Christmas, Sage scientist warns - BBC News", "Coronavirus: People to get emergency help to pay energy bills - BBC News", "Royal Navy nuclear submarine officer arrived 'drunk' for duty - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Nicola Sturgeon plays down row over testing delays - BBC News", "Northern Cyprus: Right-wing nationalist Ersin Tatar elected president - BBC News", "Trump Covid post deleted by Facebook and hidden by Twitter - BBC News", "Fleetwood fishmonger saves 'one in 30 million' orange Canadian lobster - BBC News", "Covid: Train passengers left out of pocket by local lockdowns - BBC News", "Student drug deaths: Four young people die in North East - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'Rule of six' doesn't make sense, say rebel Tory MPs - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Nicola Sturgeon 'not proposing return to full lockdown' - BBC News", "Patients' access to vital NHS tests delayed by warehouse failure - BBC News", "Westminster Holocaust memorial would be 'trophy site' for terrorists - BBC News", "Dominic Raab does not rule out Winter Olympics boycott over Uighur Muslims - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Cinema crisis: Dune and The Batman delayed - BBC News", "Anti-virus creator John McAfee arrested over tax evasion charges - BBC News", "Afua Hirsch: 'Don't sell off history with slave links - use it to educate' - BBC News", "What's in Boris Johnson's climate in tray? - BBC News", "Trump Covid: US president under fire for upbeat statements - BBC News", "Credit Suisse apologises over black performer at party - BBC News", "Highgate pupils ill after eating 'cannabis-laced sweets' - BBC News", "MPs back bill to authorise MI5 and police crimes - BBC News", "Covid: Swansea prisoners make hundreds of PPE items - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Manchester universities move teaching online - BBC News", "Geraint Thomas pulls out of Giro d'Italia with fractured hip - BBC Sport", "Covid hospital cases jump nearly 25% in England - BBC News", "Covid: Test error 'should never have happened' - Hancock - BBC News", "Being black at Cambridge University - BBC News", "Unite decides to cut Labour affiliation money amid frustrations - BBC News", "PE teacher sets Over-50s high jump record - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: Tourism and hospitality in 'circuit breaker' fears - BBC News", "Margaret Ferrier: Covid breach MP 'went to church while showing symptoms' - BBC News", "Covid could cause 'tsunami of cancelled NHS operations' - BBC News", "Kyrgyzstan election: Protesters storm parliament over vote-rigging claims - BBC News", "Paul Cleeland: ‘Gun error’ claim over 1972 murder case - BBC News", "Trump doctor: 'He's back' - BBC News", "Abergwyngregyn: Man's body found after river search - BBC News", "Brentford deaths: Boy, 3, and his mother found dead in flat - BBC News", "Can Boris Johnson's levelling-up mission survive Covid? - BBC News", "Trump Covid: How his experience compares with Boris Johnson's - BBC News", "Police apologise after telling wrong family about teenager's death - BBC News", "Covid-19: 'Silent killer being weaponised by offenders' - BBC News", "England cricketer Ian Botham introduced to House of Lords - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Nottingham mixing ban 'likely' after spike - BBC News", "Boris Johnson: Wind farms could power every home by 2030 - BBC News", "Thomas Partey: Arsenal complete £45m deal for Atletico Madrid midfielder - BBC Sport", "State pension age hits 66 and set to rise further - BBC News", "Covid can be airborne, US CDC guidelines now say - BBC News", "As it happened: Johnson's Conservative conference speech - BBC News", "'My firm may fold because I can't get a bounce back loan' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Europe experiencing 'pandemic fatigue' - BBC News", "Children persuade Comic Relief to make Red Nose Day plastic free - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Clashes in Naples over tightening restrictions - BBC News", "Nigeria protests: Police chief deploys 'all resources' amid street violence - BBC News", "Covid: More coronavirus vaccine trials in Wales 'within weeks' - BBC News", "Osiris-Rex: Nasa probe risks losing asteroid sample after door jams - BBC News", "Covid-19: Call for 'exit strategy' as South Yorkshire enters tier 3 - BBC News", "Man charged with right-wing terror plot to kill immigration solicitor - BBC News", "School meals: Pressure mounts on government to reverse decision - BBC News", "Marcus Rashford: Communities back school meals campaign - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Covid: 'Staggered return' for students after Christmas break - BBC News", "Essex lorry deaths: Woman in France 'saw migrants get in lorry' - BBC News", "Man fined £10,000 after 50 attend Manchester party - BBC News", "US election 2020: President Trump casts his vote - BBC News", "Coronavirus infections continue to rise across UK - BBC News", "Walthamstow stabbing: Teenage boy killed in street - BBC News", "George Floyd protests: 'Boogaloo' member held in precinct attack - BBC News", "Covid: Deaths increase by 11 in Scotland - BBC News", "Watlington Hill: Arrest after woman's body found at beauty spot - BBC News", "Covid-19: Arrests at London anti-lockdown protest - BBC News", "Covid-19: Schools may need to close to some year groups, scientist warns - BBC News", "Covid: The NHS workers 'still recovering' as second wave looms - BBC News", "Shakespeare's Globe among venues to get slice of Culture Recovery Fund - BBC News", "Aston Villa 0-3 Leeds: Patrick Bamford hat-trick ends hosts' 100% start - BBC Sport", "Coronavirus: Chester drive-in movie bogged down by lockdown loos - BBC News", "Covid-19: Stoke-on-Trent and Coventry move into tier 2 - BBC News", "Covid-19: Poland President Duda tests positive for virus - BBC News", "Long Covid: 'I thought I'd get over this no problem' - BBC News", "Covid-19 confirmed cases in half of Northern Ireland schools - BBC News", "Conservative MPs 'faced abuse' over Angela Rayner's 'scum' remark - BBC News", "Covid: Policing lockdown 'challenging' because of public's 'fatigue' - BBC News", "iPhone 12 launch causes NHS Covid-19 app confusion - BBC News", "Strictly Come Dancing: NHS tribute as live shows begin - BBC News", "Portsmouth University halls 'street party' broken up by police - BBC News", "Covid: Threat of England hotspot travel ban to Wales - BBC News", "Alistair Wilson murder: Son recalls Nairn banker shooting - BBC News", "Agriculture bill: Bid to protect post-Brexit food standards rejected - BBC News", "Belarus protests: Police authorised to use lethal weapons - BBC News", "Homescapes and Gardenscapes ads banned as misleading - BBC News", "Do-not-resuscitate order: care home use reviewed - BBC News", "Belarus: Dozens arrested as police blast protesters with water cannon - BBC News", "Covid: Sage scientists called for short lockdown weeks ago - BBC News", "Tom Parker: The Wanted singer diagnosed with inoperable brain tumour - BBC News", "Premier League: West Ham are against radical Big Picture plans - BBC Sport", "Kent Police officer sent 'flirtatious' messages to victim - BBC News", "Turkish ship at centre of Greece row to return to Mediterranean - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Harvester owner consulting on job cuts - BBC News", "Brexit: Time for trade deal getting short, PM warns - BBC News", "John Leslie: Ex Blue Peter presenter 'laughed after groping woman' - BBC News", "Downing Street joins criticism of 'crass' job ad - BBC News", "Covid-19: New lockdown system, pregnancy risk and football shake-up - BBC News", "Tesco blackmail plot: Nigel Wright jailed for 14 years - BBC News", "Bank of England questions banks over negative rates - BBC News", "André do Rap: Brazil crime boss goes on the run after release from prison - BBC News", "Police station near Paris attacked with fireworks - BBC News", "British Airways' boss replaced amid industry's 'worst crisis' - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Local lockdown UK: Do city-wide curbs work? It's not clear - BBC News", "Nobel: US auction theorists win Economics Prize - BBC News", "UK economy: Shoppers aid growth but slowdown ahead, says report - BBC News", "England 2-1 Belgium: Mason Mount secures comeback win - BBC Sport", "Covid restrictions: Liverpool faces 'ominous winter ahead' - BBC News", "Covid: Michael Rosen shares his intensive care nightmare - BBC News", "Manchester Arena Inquiry: Man with 'bulging rucksack' seen days before blast - BBC News", "Premier League: Radical reform plans could have 'damaging impact' - BBC Sport", "Coronavirus: Bangor enters local lockdown restrictions - BBC News", "Coronavirus: WHO head calls herd immunity approach 'immoral' - BBC News", "Covid updates: PM does not want national lockdown 'right now' - BBC News", "Covid: Nightingale hospitals in northern England told to get ready - BBC News", "War of the Worlds: Cameras roll as actors wear face masks - BBC News", "Covid: Three-tier lockdown system to be unveiled in England - BBC News", "Daniel Horton admits stabbing Central London Mosque prayer leader - BBC News", "German ship completes historic Arctic expedition - BBC News", "BTS in trouble in China over Korean War comments - BBC News", "Hospitality firms threaten legal action over lockdown - BBC News", "Nagorno-Karabakh: Civilians and churches under fire - BBC News", "Facebook bans Holocaust denial content - BBC News", "Black man led by white police on horseback sues for $1m - BBC News", "Covid-19: Are we still listening to the science? - BBC News", "Lord Janner inquiry: Alleged victims felt 'fear and shame' - BBC News", "Twitter: Major outage affects users around the world - BBC News", "Extreme weather: October downpour sees UK's wettest day on record - BBC News", "Southampton police officer stabbed several times - BBC News", "Jacinda Ardern's key leadership moments - BBC News", "Covid-related patients in NHS in Wales up by 49% in a week - BBC News", "Covid: Southall wedding venue hosts 100-guest reception - BBC News", "Photographer 'devastated' by government-backed 'Fatima' dancer advert - BBC News", "Coronavirus testing lab 'chaotic and dangerous', scientist claims - BBC News", "Covid alert level: London, Essex, York and other areas moving to Tier 2 - BBC News", "Covid: All alcohol sales to be banned in House of Commons - BBC News", "Scottish women return after stem cell transplants in Russia - BBC News", "Superconductors: Material raises hope of energy revolution - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: New face covering rules come into force - BBC News", "British Airways fined £20m over data breach - BBC News", "'Hasty' furlough scheme 'left room for fraud' say MPs - BBC News", "Brexit: Trade talks with the EU are over, says No 10 - BBC News", "Paris attacks: 'I am not Charlie' - BBC News", "How President Trump can still win the US election - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Hospital admissions rise in NI Covid hotspot - BBC News", "Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt confirms he has cancer - BBC News", "Covid: Anglesey man 'almost blind' after cataract eye op wait - BBC News", "Covid: PM warns he may 'need to intervene' on Manchester - BBC News", "DJ Sideman says BBC cannot push race issues 'under the rug' - BBC News", "Covid patients 'less likely to die than in April' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: NI Nightingale hospital to reopen due to Covid-19 pressures - BBC News", "Top US journalist suspended after false Twitter hacking claims - BBC News", "Covid: Lancashire to move to highest alert level - BBC News", "Coronavirus infections still rising rapidly - BBC News", "Pub chain JD Wetherspoon reveals first loss since 1984 - BBC News", "Paris attacks: France grapples with freedom of speech - BBC News", "Covid: Boris Johnson appears confused over single parent rules - BBC News", "Covid: Scottish government's £40m fund a 'drop in the ocean' for pubs - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Altnagelvin Hospital visits suspended by Western Trust - BBC News", "Military Wives Choirs and The Hepworth Wakefield get share of £76m fund - BBC News", "Covid Sage documents: The scientific evidence and what No 10 then did - BBC News", "Pieces of orbiting space junk 'avoid collision' - BBC News", "High school pupils in Scotland to wear face coverings from 31 August - BBC News", "Italy and Vatican City added to UK quarantine list - BBC News", "Disney updates content warning for racism in classic films - BBC News", "Manic Street Preachers help disabled singer Ali Hirsz pay for surgery - BBC News", "Covid in Scotland: No 'return to normal' when pubs reopen - BBC News", "Brexit: EU leaders call for UK trade talks to continue - BBC News", "Fishmonger's Hall attack: Prevent officers for Usman Khan 'lacked training' - BBC News", "Belfast attacks: Man arrested over assaults on women - BBC News", "Headie One tops chart with album named after mum - BBC News", "Covid-19: Cwm Taf Morgannwg has most hospital patients - BBC News", "US election 2020: Early voting records smashed amid enthusiasm wave - BBC News", "Man denied £1.7m payout by Betfred takes fight to High Court - BBC News", "Covid: Row over regional rules 'damaging to public health', scientist warns - BBC News", "New Covid restrictions 'necessary' - Boris Johnson - BBC News", "Covid: Burn-out fears of 'exhausted' unpaid carers - BBC News", "Jeff Bridges: Oscar-winning US actor reveals he has lymphoma - BBC News", "Covid: Noon deadline for Manchester coronavirus deal - BBC News", "Stormzy's stab-proof vest up for major design award - BBC News", "Covid: London 10pm curfew should be scrapped, mayor says - BBC News", "Mysterious 'Robin Hood' hackers donating stolen money - BBC News", "Jamal Khashoggi: Journalist's fiancee sues Saudi crown prince - BBC News", "Couple posed on rail line for wedding shoot - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "Covid: Call to cut VAT for beauty businesses 'to survive' - BBC News", "Covid-19: Welsh Government update - BBC News", "Robert Redford: Retired actor mourns the death of his son James aged 58 - BBC News", "Fake naked photos of thousands of women shared online - BBC News", "John Leslie trial: Ex-Blue Peter presenter cleared of sex assault - BBC News", "Grenfell Tower: Police to look into 'binned' refurbishment records - BBC News", "Visa and Mastercard accused of charging 'excessive' fees - BBC News", "France teacher attack: Pupil's father 'exchanged texts with killer' - BBC News", "UK plan to be first to run human challenge Covid trials - BBC News", "Covid: Greater Manchester facing 'winter of hardship' without support - Burnham - BBC News", "Coronavirus: 'Tier one ends at my garden wall' - BBC News", "New name for a Canadian town called Asbestos - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Covid: Greater Manchester to move to tier 3 restrictions from Friday - BBC News", "Paris St-Germain 1-2 Man Utd: Marcus Rashford hits late winner - BBC Sport", "'We had more than 60 calls from test-and-trace' - BBC News", "Marathon walk for 104-year-old inspired by Captain Tom - BBC News", "Manchester Arena Inquiry: Police officer was on 'unacceptable' two-hour break - BBC News", "Drink and drugs driver jailed over Lesmahagow crash - BBC News", "European Premier League: Talks take place over new £4.6bn tournament - BBC Sport", "Google hit by landmark competition lawsuit in US over search - BBC News", "Nasa's Osiris-Rex probe aims for daring 'high five' with asteroid Bennu - BBC News", "Parole system in England and Wales 'secretive' - BBC News", "Chinnor crash death family: Father feels 'abundance of loss' - BBC News", "Nicola Sturgeon: 'Buck stops with me' on Scottish Covid tiers - BBC News", "Covid-19: New Manchester rules, and a world-first vaccine trial - BBC News", "Circuit breaker: What is a circuit-breaker lockdown? - BBC News", "Birmingham prison inmates' letters laced with drugs - BBC News", "Covid-19: UK PM imposes strictest measures on Greater Manchester - BBC News", "As it happened: US election 2020: Melania pulls out of rally as Covid cough lingers - BBC News", "Andy Burnham: Who is the Greater Manchester mayor? - BBC News", "Covid-19: November GCSE exams in NI postponed for two weeks - BBC News", "Durex condom sales jump after virus rules relaxed - BBC News", "Covid-19: First UK airport coronavirus testing begins - BBC News", "Pupils sent home in half of England's secondary schools - BBC News", "Brexit: UK calls for change as EU makes trade talks pledge - BBC News", "Mark Milsome inquest: Cameraman killed when stunt went wrong - BBC News", "Bletchley Park’s contribution to WW2 'over-rated' - BBC News", "Long Covid: St Annes man 'never recovered' from long-term effects - BBC News", "Covid: 'Heartbreak' at Greater Manchester tier 3 status - BBC News", "Spencer Davis, one of rock's elder statesmen, dies aged 81 - BBC News", "Working lunch 'loophole' hope for pubs and restaurants - BBC News", "Covid-19: Boris Johnson says everybody got 'complacent' over virus - BBC News", "Matiu Ratana death: Met Police sergeant 'died from gunshot to chest' - BBC News", "Covid: Vaccine will 'not return life to normal in spring' - BBC News", "Margaret Ferrier speaks in Commons while awaiting test result - BBC News", "Margaret Ferrier: Who is the MP who broke Covid rules? - BBC News", "Trump's Covid contacts: Who has he met and who's tested positive? - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Subway rolls ruled too sugary to be bread in Ireland - BBC News", "Zef Eisenberg: Maximuscle founder dies in speed bid - BBC News", "Margaret Ferrier: Commons speaker angry at 'reckless' Covid trip MP - BBC News", "MP Margaret Ferrier's Covid Parliament trip 'indefensible' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Loss of smell may be clearer sign than cough - BBC News", "US Election 2020 - BBC News", "As it happened: Trump returns to White House from hospital - BBC News", "Parliament building work delays cost '£2m a week' - BBC News", "'It's hypocritical' - Constituents react to MP's Covid journey - BBC News", "Sadio Mane: Liverpool forward isolating after positive coronavirus test - BBC Sport", "President Trump has Covid-19: How global media responded - BBC News", "Archie Lyndhurst's mum remembers 'most wonderful unique' son - BBC News", "Covid: Northumbria University confirms 770 cases among students - BBC News", "Harvey Weinstein faces six new sexual assault charges - BBC News", "Margaret Ferrier's covid breach is embarrassing for Nicola Sturgeon - BBC News", "What older voters make of Trump Covid story - BBC News", "Covid: Poland and Turkey added to UK's quarantine list as fines rise - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "E-scooters should be legalised says Transport Committee - BBC News", "Asylum seekers: UK considered floating barriers in Channel - BBC News", "Trump condemns all white supremacists after Proud Boys row - BBC News", "Storm Alex brings heavy rain and high winds to parts of UK - BBC News", "Avoiding war in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict - BBC News", "Emergency powers adopted to require schools to teach online - BBC News", "Delphine Boël: Belgium ex-king's love child wins royal titles - BBC News", "Covid lockdown: 'Race' drivers fined for breaking rules - BBC News", "Joyce Echaquan: Trudeau decries 'systemic racism' after indigenous woman death - BBC News", "Nearly 20,000 Covid-19 cases among Amazon workers - BBC News", "Release of James Bond film No Time To Die delayed - again - BBC News", "False coronavirus claims and rumours about Trump - BBC News", "Margaret Ferrier: Police launch investigation into Covid trip MP - BBC News", "Cardigan family trapped in burning house after arson attack - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Paris poised for maximum Covid alert - BBC News", "Police investigate Dunstable funeral attended by hundreds - BBC News", "Brexit: Trade deal with UK 'up to EU', says Boris Johnson - BBC News", "Covid rules: What are the restrictions in your area? - BBC News", "Gender-fluid worker wins £180k in Jaguar Land Rover tribunal case - BBC News", "Actor Rick Moranis randomly attacked in Manhattan - BBC News", "Land speed record attempt: Driver dies at Elvington airfield - BBC News", "Covid: How is Europe lifting lockdown restrictions? - BBC News", "Children's gender identity clinic concerns go back 15 years - BBC News", "Covid: Castle Bromwich hotel manager fined £10k over '200 at funeral' - BBC News", "Coronavirus: Australia opens 'travel zone' to New Zealanders - BBC News", "Peter Webster: The 80-year-old footballer preparing to retire - BBC News"], "published_date": ["2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", "2020-10-21", 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chief negotiators for a post-Brexit trade deal spoke on the phone earlier on Wednesday.", "Ministers step in to \"stabilise the network and keep it running\" as income plummets due to Covid.", "Lord Sedwill, former civil service head, talks to the BBC about coronavirus, Dominic Cummings and Donald Trump.", "Josh Powell says he faces an \"uncertain future\" following the loss of his wife and three children.", "Labour's deputy leader made the comment while Tory MP Chris Clarkson spoke on virus restrictions.", "Osiris-Rex makes brief contact with asteroid Bennu in an effort to pick up fragments of rock.", "The Scottish first minster says she will not be getting into \"standoffs\" with councils over local restrictions.", "The mayor for the Sheffield City Region calls it the \"responsible route\" to stem the spread of Covid-19.", "Local leaders requested £90m but lowered their demand to £65m during talks to move into tier three.", "Officers find people hiding in the kitchen, upstairs bedrooms and basement of the house in Nottingham.", "Four adults and a child are known to have been rescued by firefighters following the blast.", "The channel says it will not air the programme until it has investigated their \"nature and meaning\".", "Restrictions targeted chiefly at bars and restaurants in the central belt will continue until November.", "Millions more jobs will be lost to robots with Covid accelerating the trend, says the World Economic Forum.", "Premier League champions Liverpool are helped by an own goal from Ajax's Nicolas Tagliafico to get off to a winning start in the Champions League.", "Education Minister Peter Weir says the decision is due to the extended mid-term break for schools.", "The BBC asked what the rest of the world wants from America.", "The inflation rate increased to 0.5% in September after the discount meals scheme ended, figures show.", "The health minister had announced the Sinovac vaccine would be included in the immunisation programme.", "Attendance figures show 46% of secondary schools had pupils isolating because of Covid outbreaks.", "Business owners express frustration and upset as they warn of a tough winter under new Covid rules.", "The Welsh musician was behind transatlantic hits such as Keep On Running and Somebody Help Me.", "At least eight people who attended a crowded Rose Garden event last Saturday have tested positive.", "A bird who flew from his cage is found after farmers heard him singing the TV theme.", "Senator Mike Lee, who later tested positive for Covid-19, seen hugging other attendees at a White House event.", "Boris Johnson says there was a \"fraying of people's discipline and attention to\" Covid rules over the summer.", "A family is rescued after their car became trapped in floods, as motorists are warned to take care.", "The president is discharged from the Walter Reed facility following three days of Covid treatment.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Progress has been made in talks but \"significant gaps\" remain between the EU and UK, they say.", "Physicians looking after Donald Trump said they were \"cautiously optimistic, but he's doing great\".", "The company wants to crack down on house parties after concerns of a second Covid wave.", "Prince Louis, two, is heard speaking for the first time, asking: \"What animal do you like?\"", "At least two die as strong winds and heavy rain batter north-western Italy and south-eastern France.", "Dominic Calvert-Lewin scores his ninth goal of the season and James Rodriguez nets twice as Everton beat Brighton to make it four Premier League wins from four this season.", "A group of men are hit with penalty fines for driving out of a lockdown county to go \"car racing\".", "The announcement of the new site, expected to open in 2021, was made at the party's conference.", "Dr Saman Mir Sacharvi and Vian Mangrio were found dead after a fire at their home.", "President Donald Trump attended multiple large events in the days before his coronavirus diagnosis.", "The release of No Time To Die has now been pushed back to 2 April after being delayed once already.", "The findings could be used to shape government guidance on safe use of places of worship.", "The Metropolitan Police says officers are investigating possible breaches of coronavirus rules by Margaret Ferrier.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "Liverpool forward Sadio Mane tests positive for coronavirus and joins midfielder Thiago Alcantara in self-isolating.", "A family's home was targeted by mistake by an arsonist, a court hears.", "News outlets around the world report on the president's announcement with sympathy - but also blame.", "Tighter rules come into effect in five further areas amid a rising number of new coronavirus cases.", "Friday 2 October began with President Trump announcing he had Covid-19. It ended with him in hospital.", "Dunstable's MP says he is very angry at the \"flagrant breach\" of rules at a \"traveller funeral\".", "Sam Law says the experience at the DVSA driving theory test centre left him angry and disappointed.", "A cockatiel who flew from his cage is reunited with owner after farmers heard him singing the theme.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "William Henry and Brian McIntosh were found dead in a car park off Moor Street in Brierley Hill.", "A charity which helps get young people into work says the pandemic has \"magnified\" the challenge.", "The 67-year-old Ghostbusters actor was punched in broad daylight near Central Park, police say.", "Northumbria University in Newcastle says 770 students have tested positive and are now isolating.", "The disgraced film mogul was sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault in March.", "The new mum, however, says hospital staff were \"supportive every step of the way\".", "We asked some older US voters for their reactions to the president's Covid-19 diagnosis.", "The foreign secretary tells the Tory Party conference Covid nearly \"took the life\" of Boris Johnson.", "Zef Eisenberg who died in a land speed record bid \"injected his positivity into everyone\".", "The head of the Confederation of British Industry urges a \"spirit of compromise\" as trade talks resume.", "The 12,872 Covid cases are recorded, but a \"technical issue\" is blamed for the high figure.", "The UK and EU have set out their stalls for negotiations on their future relationship.", "The shadow education secretary says \"now is the time to act\" as Labour threatens to force a vote by MPs.", "Patients admitted to intensive care have a better chance of surviving now than they did in the first wave.", "Despite the grim period for the sector, some see it as a chance to improve sustainability.", "Why does the divergence between science and politics appear to be wider than it has ever been?", "Exeter Chiefs have just enough to keep Racing 92 at bay and clinch their first Champions Cup title in a thrilling final at Ashton Gate.", "The Scottish government confirmed 1,167 more people had tested positive within the same 24-hour period.", "But a stalemate continues in Manchester as local leaders resist central government's proposals.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "The move to tier three, after intensive talks, sees pubs and car boot sales closed but gyms stay open.", "First Legislative Counsel Dylan Hughes says it would usually take \"several weeks or even months\".", "The R number has crept up to 1.3-1.5, with growth of the epidemic still widespread.", "The family flew back from Greece after just a day on holiday there, amid intense criticism.", "After the murder of 17 people in Paris last week, several people have been jailed, raising questions about freedom of speech in France.", "A BBC team spent a week looking at the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict from the Azerbaijani side.", "The band donated money to disabled singer Ali Hirsz, after Covid-19 left her out of work.", "Raheem Sterling scores the winner as Manchester City edge past Arsenal to climb up to 10th in the Premier League.", "People living in London and York are among those now facing high alert restrictions.", "Neil Lennon and Steven Gerrard have joined Nicola Sturgeon in asking supporters to follow Covid restrictions.", "Experts say the demand for dogs during lockdown is causing a significant increase in animals being stolen.", "The vaccine is available to the public in the city of Yiwu but is still in the final trial stages.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "Boris Johnson initially suggests parents living apart from their children may face restrictions.", "Huge numbers of voters are casting ballots with less than three weeks to go until the election.", "The rufous bush chat was spotted at Stiffkey, Norfolk, and up to 100 birders came to see it.", "Andy Green is suing bookmaker Betfred after it refused to pay up, citing a software error.", "Joe Anderson has said his brother, who was admitted to hospital with coronavirus, has died.", "Everton twice come from behind to draw with Liverpool and maintain their three-point lead at the top of the Premier League.", "Boris Johnson urges local leaders to \"engage constructively\" with the government over tougher rules.", "Downing Street says talks will resume on Sunday - but local leaders deny knowledge of a call.", "A 21-year-old man is in custody after police were called to St Mellons on Friday evening.", "\"No point\" in further discussions with the EU unless it changes course, Downing Street says.", "Redmill in East Whitburn also has 35 residents and 20 staff who have tested positive for the virus.", "Forces in England will have access on a \"case-by-case basis\" to data on whether a person has been told to self-isolate.", "The National Crime Agency says the 1,000-plant haul in Coventry is among the largest it has ever seen.", "The cash grants for arts venues and organisations is part of the government's Cultural Recovery Fund.", "Chris Christie says he was \"wrong\" to shun masks after battling Covid-19 in intensive care for days.", "A photograph of the artwork has been posted on the guerrilla artist's Instagram page.", "Det Sgt Nick Bailey \"had to admit defeat\" after the 2018 attack saying he \"can no longer do the job\".", "More than 11,000 stores shut between January and June in the UK, according to research.", "Some French Muslims disgusted by the shootings in Paris may nonetheless have reasons for not embracing the slogan “I am Charlie”, the BBC's Patrick Jackson reports.", "It is \"important we keep the public on board\" with new plans to tackle Covid, a council leader says.", "The first minister says he is giving Boris Johnson a final opportunity to impose curbs before he acts.", "A top official says police can open fire on \"violent radicals\" protesting against the government.", "Swansea Bay health board say 10 patients and five staff had tested positive at Morriston Hospital.", "Portugal and Juventus forward Cristiano Ronaldo tests positive for coronavirus, the Portuguese Football Federation announces.", "But Boris Johnson could be facing the same accusation again - that he did too little, too late.", "Another 143 deaths are reported as ministers defend rules after criticism expert advice was ignored.", "MPs overturn a Lords amendment requiring trade deals to meet post-Brexit UK food standards.", "Rena Platt was working as an apprentice childminder for her mother's business - until Covid-19 hit.", "A BBC investigation into the death of transport worker Belly Mujinga raises questions about the inquiries carried out by her employer and the police.", "The firms will have the job of ensuring the smooth flow of vital supplies whatever happens in trade talks.", "The government took \"robust action\" at the time, such as the rule of six, a cabinet minister says.", "A Japanese man waited almost seven months to enter the site after it was closed because of Covid.", "British Gymnastics chief executive Jane Allen is to retire in December despite ongoing investigation into allegations of mistreatment in the sport.", "Critics on social media say the role of Egypt's famed ruler should go to an Arab or African actress.", "Det Sgt Jonathan Pearce sent a topless photograph to the victim of attempted rape, a panel hears.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Mitchells & Butlers, the pubs and restaurants group, has not disclosed how many jobs are at risk.", "The most clinically vulnerable people in England will get a letter to explain how to stay safe.", "A further 143 people have died across the UK within 28 days of testing positive for the coronavirus.", "The Information Commissioner's Office has been contacted by people over how the payments firm got their details.", "Sir Keir Starmer says the government has lost control of coronavirus, as daily deaths rise to 143.", "Rena Platt is one of nearly 300 apprentices to have been made redundant since the pandemic began.", "Tom Parker's bandmates rally round after he is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour.", "The report raises questions about how much immunity can be built up to the virus and how long it may last.", "Scientists need more recruits belonging to ethnic minorities, to make sure the vaccine works for all.", "Staff at the Royal Bournemouth Hospital are preparing for an expected rise in coronavirus cases.", "Hospitality businesses warn of hardship and confusion as they battle with the latest restrictions.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "One in four people in the UK is currently subject to local interventions to prevent the spread of Covid.", "Latest figures show increasing number of secondary schools in England sending home pupils in Covid cases.", "Analysts say the new iPhone line-up could trigger a \"super-cycle\" of consumer upgrades.", "Rises of more than £40bn a year will be needed to stop government debt getting out of control, warns think tank.", "Ian Barnes, who lives in Darlington, recorded a time of eight minutes 10.40 seconds.", "Zoe Powell and three of her children aged under nine die in a crash between a car and a lorry.", "15,000 more people were looking for work between June and August than the preceding three months.", "Historian Dr David Starkey says he did not \"intend to stir up racial hatred\" in the June interview.", "Dr Ghebreyesus said allowing coronavirus to spread unchecked would cause unnecessary suffering and death.", "World's biggest furniture firm to resell second-hand Ikea items in bid to be 'climate positive'.", "The PM calls himself \"freedom-loving\", but circumstances could push him towards harsher measures.", "Reopening communal shelters this winter will put rough sleepers at risk of Covid, a charity warns.", "The blast of the WW2 bomb in a canal in Poland was not unexpected and divers were unharmed.", "The decision to apply for tougher measures comes amid concerns over an \"exponential\" rise in cases.", "The Labour leader said the prime minister's plan to combat coronavirus “simply was not working”.", "Mark Zuckerberg says his \"thinking has evolved\" as the social network changes strategy.", "Donald Neely was led down a Texas street \"as though he was a slave\", court documents say.", "Sage and Prof Chris Whitty appear at odds with the political decisions made by government.", "People will still see alerts but will now get a follow-up message telling them to ignore it.", "Twitter hid an identical post saying virus was less lethal than the flu season in most populations.", "The unusually-coloured Canadian lobster turned up in a delivery to a Fleetwood fishmonger.", "Scientists say it is a clear indication of temperatures rising because of emissions from our society.", "Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh appear via video link from prison at a hearing in Virginia.", "Closing pubs and restaurants and banning overnight stays in the worst-affected areas are being discussed.", "Covid swabs and key tests for cancer could be unavailable after problems at diagnostics firm Roche.", "The first minister will announce new restrictions on Wednesday - but says it will not be a return to full lockdown.", "The government wins a vote to keep the restriction in England despite rebels clashing with a minister.", "The new rules will apply to all licensed premises in the central belt of the country - including Glasgow and Edinburgh.", "Matt Simpson's post on PureGym's Facebook account said the workout was to mark Black History Month.", "Sally Giles says a subscription service charged her £4.50 each week for more than five years without her consent.", "The social network is deleting groups, pages and accounts linked to the conspiracy theory movement.", "The body of Openreach engineer Alun Owen was found following reports a man had fallen in the river.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Alexei Navalny tells the BBC his poisoning has left him struggling with sleep and muscular control.", "Labour's Sir Keir Starmer says the early closing time in England must be reviewed if it isn't justified.", "Kamala Harris calls the US response to the virus \"the greatest failure\" of any president in history.", "A local government group says exempting small sites from affordable housing rules is a \"huge concern\".", "The pub giant blames tighter coronavirus restrictions and the winding down of the furlough scheme.", "Billionaires have grown their wealth by 27% during the crisis, with industrial and tech bosses earning most.", "Pupils' grades will be based on teacher assessments and coursework - but Higher exams will still take place.", "UK researchers want to pin down how Covid-19 can spread in hospitals despite best efforts to stop it.", "Police said the social media giant had not disclosed details of the account that sent the tweet.", "Staff wore PPE incorrectly and sanitiser bottles were left empty at the William Harvey Hospital.", "The move in Manchester comes after hundreds of students in the city tested positive for coronavirus.", "Brazil is the third worst-hit country, after the US and India, with deaths approaching 150,000.", "The new rules are likely to be focused on licensed premises in areas with higher levels of the virus.", "Authorities say they are acting ahead of an expected government tightening of rules.", "Frank Atherton says further restrictions cannot be ruled out as cases rise.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "Mared Edwards says their sacrifice was \"all for nothing\" now developers have pulled out.", "Central Scotland pubs will close for 16 days, others will have 6pm curfews, and National 5s are cancelled.", "Industry leaders warn that some businesses may never reopen if further lockdown restrictions are introduced.", "The BBC has followed three black students during their first year at the UK’s University of Cambridge.", "It comes as Wales' top doctor warns people not to follow coronavirus messages from Mr Trump.", "The president and Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi trade blame for the collapse of negotiations.", "Travellers to the UK may soon be able to get a Covid-19 test to end their 14-day quarantine early.", "They will offer support for people with long-term health problems after infection with coronavirus.", "The 10% cut in funding comes amid anger in the union about the direction of Labour under Sir Keir Starmer.", "Profits jumped as people bought more food during lockdown, but clothing sales fell almost 20%.", "The UK's only children's NHS gender clinic is facing a legal challenge at London's High Court.", "Emergency services searched for the man in a river which burst it banks earlier this week.", "The figures and advice from clinical experts that guided the decision to close pubs and restaurants.", "A suspected money launderer gives up 45 properties after investigators used an Unexplained Wealth Order.", "While we expect more moves from No 10 to tackle Covid, there are many questions still to be settled.", "There were 478 people admitted to hospital on Sunday - the largest daily figure since early June.", "Kailash Kuha Raj and Poorna Kaameshwari Sivaraj are found dead at a flat in Brentford, west London.", "Panic buying of bottled water is reported following the burst in Hackney Marshes in London.", "The Old Bailey hears how the 39 victims died in \"unbearable\" heat in a lorry container last October.", "Boris Johnson defended the government response to local lockdowns and virus infections at universities.", "The family of an injured teenager were incorrectly told he had died in a crash on the A90 near Crimond.", "Outbreaks have been confirmed at the Royal Glamorgan, Prince Charles, and Princess of Wales hospitals.", "There are also 94 cases linked to the outbreak at the Royal Glamorgan, in Rhondda Cynon Taf.", "Restrictions similar to those in northern England could be announced later this week.", "More than 3.4 million people in Scotland will experience some of the harshest measures with pubs and restaurants closed for at least the next three weekends.", "Fraud among reasons up to 60% of the government's loans may never be repaid, says National Audit Office.", "Letters using block capitals and sent to those falling seriously behind on debts will be \"less threatening\".", "A strike by workers and students puts more pressure on President Lukashenko to quit.", "How tax avoidance left one man struggling with debt and with secrets.", "The shooting of unarmed protesters this week sparked the worst street violence in two decades.", "The new rules are needed but ministers must set out an exit strategy, Sheffield City Region's mayor says.", "Do government arguments against extra free school meals and more money for Manchester add up?", "Tory MPs join some 2,000 doctors in voicing concern, as Labour threatens to push for another vote.", "The use of testing, plus staggering the return to campus will form a strategy to get students home for Christmas.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Tao Geoghegan Hart becomes only the second British man to win the Giro d'Italia as he takes the title in Milan.", "A woman who grew up relying on free school meals says \"hunger doesn't go\" in the holidays.", "Freight industry body warns the lack of an agreement on tariffs could make things more expensive.", "The Asian giant hornets can wipe out a colony of honeybees in hours.", "Lewis Hamilton passes Valtteri Bottas to take a commanding victory in the Portuguese Grand Prix and break Formula 1's all-time win record.", "The body was found at a National Trust estate and the arrested man is being treated for serious injuries.", "Special forces are involved in the operation on board the vessel off the Isle of Wight.", "A man has made a Google map showing businesses offering free food for children during half term.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "Eighteen people are arrested as police disperse crowds protesting against coronavirus restrictions.", "Sending some children home may be the only way to control infection rates, Prof Neil Ferguson says.", "It comes as a senior Conservative MP criticises leaders of NHS Test and Trace, urging \"decisive\" change.", "As the second wave of the pandemic takes deep root across parts of the UK, thousands of NHS workers are struggling to recover from what they have already been through.", "Joan Hocquard, who drove ambulances during World War Two, died at her home on Saturday.", "Two new locations in Wales linked to the slave trade are now marked by high-tech history barcodes.", "The current 17-day lockdown could be followed by another in January or February, minister says.", "The EU's Michel Barnier will stay in London, rather than returning to Brussels later.", "Boris Johnson's techno-optimism ignores the need for big societal changes, experts warn.", "The former Grandstand presenter was one of the most familiar faces on BBC television from the 1960 to '80s.", "A surge in demand from online shoppers means the company is looking for 33,000 temporary workers.", "France recalls its ambassador after President Erdogan suggests French leader needs \"mental check\".", "Rebecca Logan, a 39-year-old fitness instructor. says she was \"completely floored\" by coronavirus.", "Staff currently working from home because of the pandemic will be asked to do so until spring 2021.", "The BBC Philharmonic orchestra records Paul Harvey's song after a clip of his piano playing went viral.", "One further death linked to coronavirus was registered in the last 24 hours, Scottish government figures show.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic today.", "Offers to feed children for free in the school holidays soar in response to the footballer's campaign.", "With infections rising across Europe, tighter Covid restrictions are being enforced.", "Some owners of Apple's new phones get an error message when trying to run the contact-tracing app.", "Mr Lee helped to grow his father's small trading business into a global industrial powerhouse.", "Hosts Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly pay tribute to frontline workers before the dancing begins.", "The Royal British Legion's annual Poppy Appeal is launching differently due to the Covid pandemic.", "The heavy rain also forced the closure of the train line between Inverness and Aberdeen on Thursday afternoon.", "Hadija’s mum, dad and older sister were killed in the Azerbaijaini town of Ganja.", "Rudy Giuliani describes as a \"fabrication\" a scene appearing to show him with hands down his trousers.", "Spain is the first western European country and the sixth in the world to pass the landmark figure.", "Joe Biden outlined how he would tackle Covid-19 as President Trump goes on the attack at a Florida rally.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "The former world number one and six-time Grand Slam champion denies all the charges against him.", "The chancellor is to announce more support for firms and workers as Covid restrictions increase.", "The UK's competition watchdog says the merger between the ticketing firms could lead to higher fees.", "Labour's deputy leader made the comment while Tory MP Chris Clarkson spoke on virus restrictions.", "Bars and restaurants face an uncertain future after Covid restrictions were extended until 2 November, warn industry leaders.", "UK tourists will also no longer need to quarantine after visiting Mykonos, the Maldives and Denmark.", "Caroline Ansell has resigned after voting for a Labour plan to offer free school meals in the holidays.", "The journalist, best known for his 1995 interview with Princess Diana, has complications from the virus.", "Economy minister Ken Skates says the penalty notices are \"vital\" to improve services.", "The 21:00 to 06:00 curfew will apply from Friday and two-thirds of French people will be affected.", "Shoppers in Barnsley react to the news South Yorkshire will move into tier 3 on Saturday.", "Transport for London refuses to release a report into a Banksy artwork, citing security concerns.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Donald Trump made voters a number of promises before they elected him. But has he kept his word?", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Transport for Wales' chief executive says he understands passengers' frustration.", "From January, EU citizens sentenced to more than a year in prison will be barred.", "Ministers step in to \"stabilise the network and keep it running\" as income plummets due to Covid.", "The two chief negotiators for a post-Brexit trade deal spoke on the phone earlier on Wednesday.", "Gavin Lee reports from the epicentre of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, which is in Belgium.", "Experts give hope to campaign for David Morris’s conviction to be re-examined.", "Fans can bid for handwritten lyrics to his song Perfect and a £3 ticket for his first gig.", "Business leaders say companies have been given just hours to prepare for the national lockdown.", "James Safechuck claimed the star's companies allowed the star to abuse him and other children.", "The Brazilian volunteer did not receive the vaccine being tested by AstraZeneca and Oxford University.", "Transport for Wales says between 5% and 8% of its 689 daily services were overcrowded since July.", "The surge is being driven by fears over the coronavirus, and it could affect the way results play out.", "So far, some 7,444 migrants have crossed in boats during 2020 - the third annual jump in arrivals.", "Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 with a pledge to bring down immigration. Did it happen?", "Boris Johnson says test and trace system must improve after chancellor announces help for business.", "Intelligence officials say Iran was behind threatening emails sent to Democrats earlier this week.", "Retailers will be barred from selling items like clothes when Wales goes into a two-week lockdown.", "Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 with a pledge to bring down immigration. Did it happen?", "New drone footage shows the remains of two barges involved in the Severn Railway Bridge disaster.", "The mayor for the Sheffield City Region calls it the \"responsible route\" to stem the spread of Covid-19.", "Boris Johnson says he shares people's frustrations at the turnaround times for results in England.", "The prime minister claims workers will get 80% of their wages. Will they?", "In all of these areas the infection rate is over 100 per 100,000 people, the health secretary says.", "The National Audit Office spending watchdog says a scheme designed to protect jobs was open to abuse.", "Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 with a pledge to bring down immigration. Did it happen?", "Durham University online welcome meeting for LGBT students is \"hijacked\" by \"homophobic slurs\".", "Businesses fear for the future as South Yorkshire faces the highest level of Covid restrictions.", "One family in London say they received scores of long, repetitive calls from contact tracers.", "Some of President Trump's and Joe Biden's key policies explained and compared.", "Officers find people hiding in the kitchen, upstairs bedrooms and basement of the house in Nottingham.", "Four adults and a child are known to have been rescued by firefighters following the blast.", "The EU's Michel Barnier has warned \"every day counts\" ahead of December's deadline to reach a deal.", "It comes as the Welsh Government says a short lockdown is under consideration in Wales.", "The online retailer now has 23.4 million customers, helping sales and profits to jump.", "Critics on social media say the role of Egypt's famed ruler should go to an Arab or African actress.", "The New Shepard rocket carried technology designed to return humans to the Moon in four years.", "UK doctors say it is the first such case they have seen linked to the pandemic coronavirus.", "The 39-year-old says she was paid €500,000 by a former top Vatican official accused of embezzlement.", "Harry Maguire and Reece James are sent off as England lose to Denmark in the Nations League at Wembley.", "The former Blue Peter presenter is accused of grabbing a woman's breasts at a party in 2008.", "Kenneth Walker says he's \"a million per cent sure\" officers did not identify themselves before entering.", "Personal trainer Matt Simpson apologised for the \"slave\" workout but has since been trolled online.", "Most of the country is in the lowest tier but millions in the North and the Midlands face extra curbs.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "Analysts say the new iPhone line-up could trigger a \"super-cycle\" of consumer upgrades.", "Drug-related fatalities reach record levels as deaths of women involving cocaine rise by 26.5%.", "Nitrous oxide is the second most popular recreational drug in the UK for 16-24-year-olds.", "As racism persists, firms face growing calls to make their senior leadership teams more diverse.", "Historian Dr David Starkey says he did not \"intend to stir up racial hatred\" in the June interview.", "A care home is swamped with cards and gifts for a resident turning 100 in isolation from his family.", "The initiative follows Facebook's earlier pledge to ban ads that discourage vaccinations.", "First Minister Arlene Foster delivered a statement to the assembly on increased coronavirus restrictions.", "Footage shows people dancing in the streets hours before new rules come into effect in Liverpool.", "The European Union is about to formally reject a UK plea for special allowances for exports of electric cars.", "A Filipina newborn died two months after she was separated from her mother, a political detainee.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Ministers admit an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos discoveries and complexities at London Euston.", "Latest update on the coronavirus pandemic in Wales on Wednesday 14 October.", "Banks must ensure closing expats' UK bank accounts does not leave customers in \"undue financial hardship\".", "Nicola Sturgeon says the town has been linked to a \"large and growing number\" of Scottish Covid cases.", "Renate Blauel sought £3m in damages amid claims the singer broke the terms of their divorce deal.", "The Association of British Insurers website no longer says schools are covered for lost trips.", "The supermarkets won't use glitter in own-brand crackers and cards as part of sustainability efforts.", "The PM calls himself \"freedom-loving\", but circumstances could push him towards harsher measures.", "Saturday's episode of the BBC One show is postponed after a \"small number of people\" test positive.", "Premier League clubs have \"unanimously agreed\" that 'Project Big Picture' will not be \"endorsed or pursued\".", "Nursing staff ordered security to restrain a 77-year-old man on 19 occasions in order to treat him.", "New Zealand will not travel to Wembley to face England in a friendly next month because of travel and player availability complications.", "The boss of the security service says terrorism, hostile states and Covid are having an impact on its work.", "Sir Keir Starmer says the government has lost control of coronavirus, as daily deaths rise to 143.", "One student who was given a used kit said some people had opened and used the testing kits.", "Zoe Powell and three of her children died in Oxford just months after losing everything in a house fire.", "The Duchess of Sussex says she sticks to \"straight forward\" topics to avoid putting her family at risk.", "The social media giant says the accounts broke its rules on spam and platform manipulation.", "Manufacturing problems mean some tins don't include the full range of chocolates.", "Prosecutors say the calls by Amy Cooper, a white woman, were designed to intimidate a birdwatcher.", "It is the first time in 19 years that a complete copy of the rare book has gone under the hammer.", "The trip took just three hours and three minutes – half the usual journey time.", "She will host on 5 Live from Monday to Wednesday, and on Breakfast from Thursday to Saturday.", "The government did not take the recommendation of a \"circuit breaker\" lockdown.", "Max Woosey has been sleeping in his back garden for 200 days to raise money for North Devon Hospice.", "The UK Prime Minister defends his approach to tackling coronavirus as new England restrictions begin.", "There has been a dramatic drop in trade since a Llanelli lockdown was announced nearly three weeks ago.", "Boris Johnson has previously set Thursday's EU meeting as the deadline for a post-Brexit deal.", "England's new three-tier system can both control the virus and prevent economic harm, Boris Johnson says.", "Latest figures show increasing number of secondary schools in England sending home pupils in Covid cases.", "Moscow said there was no evidence for the accusation, calling it a \"serious and wilful provocation\".", "Zoe Powell and three of her children aged under nine die in a crash between a car and a lorry.", "World's biggest furniture firm to resell second-hand Ikea items in bid to be 'climate positive'.", "Europe is gradually easing lockdown measures ahead of the tourist season.", "Boris Johnson tells MPs: 'I rule nothing out in combating the virus'", "The blast of the WW2 bomb in a canal in Poland was not unexpected and divers were unharmed.", "The MPs say they want to use their \"collective muscle\" to ensure the PM delivers on his promises.", "At least eight people who attended a crowded Rose Garden event last Saturday have tested positive.", "The rare night-time military parade comes weeks before the US presidential election.", "The brothers from Blackburn are among the business leaders named on the Queen's Birthday Honours list", "Polish teenager Iga Swiatek becomes the lowest-ranked woman to win the French Open with a stunning victory over Sofia Kenin.", "US President Donald Trump hosted his first public event since testing positive for coronavirus last Thursday.", "Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh deny involvement in the murder of four US hostages.", "Dilys Price has also been praised for \"transforming\" the lives of disabled people.", "The copy of Geoffrey Faber's poetry anthology The Buried Stream is \"pristine\", the council says.", "There has been a marked increase in cases over recent weeks in England, especially in the north.", "The Red Planet is unmissable in the night sky right now as its orbit aligns with Earth's.", "The Labour Party and business groups fear workers will fall through gaps in the expanded support scheme.", "More than 1,000 have arrived in recent days and this year has seen a big increase from 2019.", "Britain's Simon Yates withdraws from the Giro d'Italia before stage eight after testing positive for coronavirus.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "As North Korea celebrates its military arsenal, leader Kim Jong-un says his country is \"healthy and sound\" in terms of coronavirus.", "The Beautiful South star helped pay staff's wages after the magazine was shut down.", "A witness says one of the planes burst into flames after coming down not far from the city of Tours.", "Data gathered by the BBC finds there have been 55 fatal stabbings in the capital so far this year.", "The chancellor says his Job Support Scheme \"expansion\" comes ahead of \"what may be a difficult winter\".", "A letter signed by hundreds of scientists calls for global action to protect whales, dolphins and porpoises.", "Alan Mack believes he caught Covid-19 from his daughter, Rebecca, who died waiting for an ambulance.", "Belgium's Kevin de Bruyne says England should be contenders at next year's European Championship and the 2022 World Cup.", "More than 250 inmates and 12 staff are isolating after positive cases were reported at Glasgow's Barlinnie prison.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "The celebrity cook is made a dame while the grime star is made an MBE on the Queen's honours list.", "Piles of unused ice cubes are dumped in protest at Scottish government curbs on the hospitality sector.", "Tensions are growing in Europe following a crackdown on protests against the country's president.", "World Rugby's decision to prevent transgender women from competing at the highest levels of the women's game has been criticised by LGBT charity Stonewall.", "A local lockdown has begun in the city but it will not be extended elsewhere in Gwynedd yet.", "The mayor of Greater Manchester says many people in Northern communities will be left in \"severe hardship\".", "University students self-isolating in the UK criticise the cost and quality of food parcels on campus.", "The warning comes amid plans to bring in a three-tier local lockdown system to slow the spread of Covid.", "But regional leaders say there has been little consultation and imposing more change could sow confusion.", "Black cats Leon and Nikita are \"lovely boys\" in need of a quiet \"retirement home\".", "The state is still recovering from the damage caused by another storm, Hurricane Laura, in August.", "The England player's award came for services to vulnerable children in the UK during lockdown.", "At least eight people who attended a crowded Rose Garden event last Saturday have tested positive.", "Those who tested positive were told and their contacts are being traced, the prime minister says.", "Flood warnings are in place after some areas see a month of rainfall in less than two days.", "Stumble the duck lost a leg in an accident with a fishing line. But he is not one of life's quitters.", "Senator Mike Lee, who later tested positive for Covid-19, seen hugging other attendees at a White House event.", "A family is rescued after their car became trapped in floods, as motorists are warned to take care.", "Boris Johnson was also asked by the BBC One presenter Andrew Marr whether he thought the 10pm pub curfew works.", "The institution says selling a portrait of its former boss is a \"tough call\" but could raise up to £18m.", "The officer was injured trying to detain two teenagers but has since been discharged from hospital.", "The president briefly leaves the hospital where he is being treated with Covid-19 to greet supporters.", "Covid-19 disrupted screening, meaning many cases will have been missed, a charity warns.", "The president is discharged from the Walter Reed facility following three days of Covid treatment.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Physicians looking after Donald Trump said they were \"cautiously optimistic, but he's doing great\".", "The bodies of Dr Sacharvi and Vian Mangrio were found in a house fire and a murder probe is under way.", "Communities could be \"cut off\", with 25-50mm of rainfall in most places, the Met Office says.", "One couple among hundreds of Trump fans outside the hospital say they travelled all the way from Arizona.", "Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham calls for control of furlough schemes and test and trace.", "At least two die as strong winds and heavy rain batter north-western Italy and south-eastern France.", "The 12,872 Covid cases are recorded, but a \"technical issue\" is blamed for the high figure.", "World record holder Eliud Kipchoge is beaten in the London Marathon as Shura Kitata wins a thrilling sprint finish to claim an unexpected victory.", "Supporters gathered outside Walter Reed National Military Hospital and elsewhere on Saturday.", "Tuesday Gale says writing poetry and her dog's companionship have \"got her through\" the pandemic.", "Transport for London has not renewed Ola's licence, but the firm will continue to operate while it appeals.", "The test gives results in 15 minutes and costs less than five euros.", "Dr Saman Mir Sacharvi and Vian Mangrio were found dead after a fire at their home.", "Zef Eisenberg who died in a land speed record bid \"injected his positivity into everyone\".", "President Donald Trump attended multiple large events in the days before his coronavirus diagnosis.", "Records show that the man, known only as Abell, lived in the city in the early 18th Century.", "The cinema chain says it will have to temporarily close following delays to big-budget film releases.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "Sir Keir Starmer calls on the government to fix test and trace, and produce a \"road map to vaccination\".", "Amnesty International calls for an inquiry, saying some residents were denied access to medical help.", "The bodies of Dr Saman Mir Sacharvi and Vian Mangrio, 14, were found inside a fire-damaged house.", "The home secretary says those who attack the government's plan are \"defending the indefensible\".", "Prince Louis, two, is heard speaking for the first time, asking: \"What animal do you like?\"", "Jonah Fisher reports on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, where people are \"under attack day and night\".", "Tighter rules come into effect in five further areas amid a rising number of new coronavirus cases.", "Friday 2 October began with President Trump announcing he had Covid-19. It ended with him in hospital.", "Sam Law says the experience at the DVSA driving theory test centre left him angry and disappointed.", "William Henry and Brian McIntosh were found dead in a car park off Moor Street in Brierley Hill.", "Dr Rodolfo Piskorski becomes the first person to take a Welsh language citizenship exam.", "President Trump says \"I'm starting to feel good,\" a day after being taken to hospital.", "Kenzo Takada was the first Japanese designer to gain prominence on the Paris fashion scene.", "The new mum, however, says hospital staff were \"supportive every step of the way\".", "The Oscar-nominated actress says she is \"fuming\" about how society treats traumatised women.", "The foreign secretary tells the Tory Party conference Covid nearly \"took the life\" of Boris Johnson.", "Progress has been made in talks but \"significant gaps\" remain between the EU and UK, they say.", "Health Minister Robin Swann said he did not want a return to a long-term or indefinite lockdown.", "We asked some older US voters for their reactions to the president's Covid-19 diagnosis.", "Boris Johnson says there is \"hope\" in fighting the virus, but it could be \"a very tough winter\".", "Some parts of the surrounding county will also face the toughest Covid rules.", "John Bream attempted to break two world records after jumping from a helicopter without a parachute.", "The stowaways had posed \"a clear threat to life on the ship\", the Defence Secretary says.", "Salman Abedi was on his mobile phone when he made his \"final walk\" as crowds emerged from concert.", "David Henderson denies offences related to the plane crash which killed footballer Emiliano Sala.", "A strike by workers and students puts more pressure on President Lukashenko to quit.", "Job vacancies fail to return to pre-pandemic levels in many towns, according to new research.", "Do government arguments against extra free school meals and more money for Manchester add up?", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "A woman who grew up relying on free school meals says \"hunger doesn't go\" in the holidays.", "After four ragged years, the relationship is unlikely to improve no matter who sits in the White House.", "The Lion King was due to play over the summer, but has been postponed until 2022.", "The move raises concerns that rural and deprived communities face being cut off from access to cash.", "NI Affairs Committee members are \"dismayed\" at a lack of consultation over government plans.", "Lewis Hamilton passes Valtteri Bottas to take a commanding victory in the Portuguese Grand Prix and break Formula 1's all-time win record.", "Peter Florence was suspended at the start of October pending the outcome of grievance proceedings.", "In April Fergus Walsh was the first UK journalist to report from a Covid ICU. What's changed?", "Special forces are involved in the operation on board the vessel off the Isle of Wight.", "Britain's Got Talent finalist Nabil Abdulrashid joked about his experiences as a black Muslim.", "Details and reaction to today's televised briefing by Health Minister Vaughan Gething.", "It had cordoned off the aisle after a break-in, but told a customer it was due to lockdown rules.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Monday morning.", "Some of President Trump's and Joe Biden's key policies explained and compared.", "The £120 nasal swab test will be available to people not showing any symptoms.", "More than 800 legal professionals accuse ministers of \"hostility\" which they claim jeopardises safety.", "The Southern Trust says \"clinical concerns\" have been raised about the work of a consultant urologist.", "From Tina Turner to Stevie Wonder, what do we learn from Trump and Biden's musical choices?", "A top doctor tells the BBC they had no choice, to avoid the hospital system collapsing within days.", "John Bream jumped out of a helicopter at 130ft and hit the water in The Solent at about 80mph.", "The former Grandstand presenter was one of the most familiar faces on BBC television from the 1960 to '80s.", "The Dow falls as much as 3.3% before ending down 2.3% - its sharpest decline in weeks.", "The BBC Philharmonic orchestra records Paul Harvey's song after a clip of his piano playing went viral.", "The Chinese firm is set for the biggest stock market listing ever, beating Saudi Aramco's $29bn flotation.", "It means pubs will shut unless they can operate as a restaurant and people will face tight curbs on mixing.", "Prue Leith leads a review into hospital meals, suggesting digital menus and 24-hour food service.", "The prime minister insists he has the right approach and no child will go hungry this winter.", "Batteries that power mobile phones and other devices are causing fires because they are not disposed of properly.", "A prison officer was dismissed after failing to spot a man who had been \"dead for some time\".", "Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump campaigned in Pennsylvania, a key state, eight days before the vote.", "Keith Bigland's cat, Biscuit, vanished in 2017 after escaping from his home, in March, Cambs.", "Officials are \"not blind\" to impact a new lockdown would have on Wales, the health minister says.", "Despite the grim period for the sector, some see it as a chance to improve sustainability.", "Why does the divergence between science and politics appear to be wider than it has ever been?", "Welshman Nick Murray has been working to protect Zimbabwe's wildlife for nearly 25 years.", "Abu Dhabi's minister of tolerance has denied allegations he sexually assaulted a festival organiser.", "The MPs want the mayor to \"engage\" with the government' - but draw fire from their own colleagues.", "More financial support is needed to avoid mass redundancies and closures, businesses say.", "Three times as many are dying than in 2016, a Nottingham Trent University study estimates.", "The body of a man found on a French beach is confirmed by authorities as that of a migrant.", "The family flew back from Greece after just a day on holiday there, amid intense criticism.", "After the murder of 17 people in Paris last week, several people have been jailed, raising questions about freedom of speech in France.", "Facing strong criticism, the royals cut short a trip to Greece they began during a partial lockdown.", "The street split down the middle by the government's new coronavirus rules.", "Fallon Sherrock, who made history by beating two men at the PDC World Darts Championship last year, misses out on qualification this time.", "Rallies are held across France in support of murdered teacher Samuel Paty.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "The Scottish government wants those isolating after a positive coronavirus test to be exempt from tax on a support payment.", "The rufous bush chat was spotted at Stiffkey, Norfolk, and up to 100 birders came to see it.", "The 18-hole MacLeod course is to be built to the south and west of the controversial original course at Menie.", "The BBC's Laura Foster explains what a circuit-breaker is and how it could help tackle Covid-19.", "Boris Johnson urges local leaders to \"engage constructively\" with the government over tougher rules.", "The UK will continue to engage but only if the EU changes its position in key areas, says Michael Gove.", "Joe Anderson has said his brother, who was admitted to hospital with coronavirus, has died.", "The 37m feline figure, said to have been created some 2,000 years ago, escaped notice for centuries.", "Downing Street says talks will resume on Sunday - but local leaders deny knowledge of a call.", "Dave Toole's routine high above the Olympic Stadium has been described as \"mighty and beautiful\".", "Forces in England will have access on a \"case-by-case basis\" to data on whether a person has been told to self-isolate.", "Convicted murderer Steven Gallant was on day release when he helped stop a knifeman's rampage.", "But there is \"light at the end of the tunnel\" as a vaccine may be ready early next year, the expert says.", "Det Sgt Nick Bailey \"had to admit defeat\" after the 2018 attack saying he \"can no longer do the job\".", "More than 11,000 stores shut between January and June in the UK, according to research.", "Ofgem will require suppliers to offer emergency credit and put people on 'realistic' repayment plans.", "Andy Burnham has called on Boris Johnson and other leaders to help end a deadlock over stricter Covid curbs.", "The Scottish government says there have been capacity issues, but the UK government says this is \"categorically untrue\".", "The former PM says the government must \"think again\" about using a formula to assess housing need.", "No 10 announced earlier this year it plans to hold daily White House-style press conferences.", "The health minister will stay in charge on Covid - but some of his roles will go to Eluned Morgan.", "The 2.8m-long (9ft) artwork was cut up as it was too long to display, say Hong Kong police.", "Pubs and restaurants in worst-hit areas could close next week in an effort to stall rising infection rates.", "Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh appear via video link from prison at a hearing in Virginia.", "The BBC asks the Manchester Arena attacker's brother why he is not co-operating with a public inquiry.", "Russell Causley, who murdered Carole Packman 35 years ago, refuses to say where he put her body.", "Prince Harry and Meghan said Archie was pictured at their California home in an invasion of privacy.", "The new rules will apply to all licensed premises in the central belt of the country - including Glasgow and Edinburgh.", "The supermarket is offering free jabs to eligible people and an £8 charge for everyone else,", "Closing pubs and restaurants and banning overnight stays in the worst-affected areas are being discussed.", "Caroline Langton chose Ramsgate over London as more people search for homes away from cities.", "Several countries report record rises in confirmed cases as officials urge people to remain vigilant.", "Undercover footage shows British livestock being transported from Spain to the Middle East.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "The US poet is recognised for the \"austere beauty\" of her work, says the Swedish Academy", "Vicky Morgan is trained to draw tattoos for cancer survivors who lost breasts through a mastectomy.", "Kamala Harris calls the US response to the virus \"the greatest failure\" of any president in history.", "Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins gives a stark warning as more movies are delayed.", "The first minister says that \"all sorts of nonsense\" is being levelled at her over the Alex Salmond inquiry.", "Billionaires have grown their wealth by 27% during the crisis, with industrial and tech bosses earning most.", "Depressed teenagers do worse at GCSE than they should and need extra support, say researchers.", "Police said the social media giant had not disclosed details of the account that sent the tweet.", "A parliamentary inquiry says the UK may need to remove firm's 5G kit two years earlier than planned.", "The wearing of mandatory face masks is also being extended to other settings.", "Brazil is the third worst-hit country, after the US and India, with deaths approaching 150,000.", "Authorities say they are acting ahead of an expected government tightening of rules.", "Keeping inmates in groups to cut infection has also reduced violence and bullying, a union says.", "The number of patients needing care for confirmed Covid-19 returns to levels not seen since June.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "One in four people in the UK is currently subject to local interventions to prevent the spread of Covid.", "Bars and restaurants are to close in Lyon, Lille, Grenoble and Saint-Etienne, as infections spike.", "Upto £258m in grants for the self-employed could have been fraudulent or paid in error, HMRC says.", "While we expect more moves from No 10 to tackle Covid, there are many questions still to be settled.", "Dominic Calvert-Lewin scores on his senior international debut as an inexperienced England side beat Wales in a friendly at Wembley.", "The UK has settled a lawsuit brought by a tech firm over the government's contract bidding process.", "Data shows the infection rate is 689.1 per 100,000, with restrictions yet to be imposed in the city.", "Masks will also need to be worn in most indoor places, as Italy tries to stem a rise in infections.", "Scotland are one game away from their first major finals in 23 years after a nerve-shredding penalty shootout win over Israel.", "The Old Bailey hears how the 39 victims died in \"unbearable\" heat in a lorry container last October.", "The BBC watched the stand-off between Harris and Pence with four US voters. What did they make of it?", "A seven-day run at an outdoor cinema is now enough to be considered for best picture.", "Minister Robert Jenrick did not rule out closing pubs and restaurants in the worst-affected areas.", "Europe is gradually easing lockdown measures ahead of the tourist season.", "Bianca Williams accused the Met of racial-profiling after she and her partner were pulled over.", "Marshals will advise people of virus rules while police forces share £30m to help with enforcement.", "Some school heads are telling teachers to ignore or switch off contact tracing, BBC News has learned.", "Office for National Statistics data looked at the underlying cause of death in England and Wales.", "The rare raptor, seen only a handful of times in the UK, was spotted at Moulton West Fen earlier.", "The gym said the workout routine was to mark Black History Month.", "At least eight people who attended a crowded Rose Garden event last Saturday have tested positive.", "The first minister warns that fresh measures \"may well be needed\" in Scotland \"in the near future\".", "Newcastle University student Jeni Larmour was named as one of four young people who died.", "Those who tested positive were told and their contacts are being traced, the prime minister says.", "The vulnerability was fixed before being exploited by any malicious parties, the LGBT dating app says.", "Lord Reed says the court's lack of black, Asian, and ethnic minority justices needs to be addressed.", "Outdoor centres warn coronavirus rules mean they cannot reopen and could fold.", "The officer was injured trying to detain two teenagers but has since been discharged from hospital.", "The president briefly leaves the hospital where he is being treated with Covid-19 to greet supporters.", "The president is discharged from the Walter Reed facility following three days of Covid treatment.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Chris Williams-Ellis, who has severe injuries, was rescued by his partner from under a burning car.", "Communities could be \"cut off\", with 25-50mm of rainfall in most places, the Met Office says.", "One couple among hundreds of Trump fans outside the hospital say they travelled all the way from Arizona.", "The chancellor told party members the Conservatives had a \"sacred duty\" to spend responsibly.", "Thirteen school children began to feel unwell after eating what they believed were sweets.", "Backbenchers were divided over the human rights and civil liberties implications of the new legislation.", "President Trump appointed his campaign spokeswoman to be his fourth White House press secretary.", "Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham calls for control of furlough schemes and test and trace.", "Supporters gathered outside Walter Reed National Military Hospital and elsewhere on Saturday.", "Singapore's Changi Airport says “battle with Covid-19 has just begun” as it paints a bleak picture.", "\"Please wear a real mask,\" plead the star's fans, after she attends a meet-and-greet in Los Angeles.", "A survey of nearly 1,000 firms shows that 74% plan on maintaining the increase in home working.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Monday morning.", "Transport for London has not renewed Ola's licence, but the firm will continue to operate while it appeals.", "One in three mums quit breastfeeding in lockdown due to a lack of face-to-face help, a study finds.", "President Donald Trump attended multiple large events in the days before his coronavirus diagnosis.", "Sotheby's auction house said it was difficult to overstate the diamond's \"rarity and purity\".", "The error meant that although those who tested positive were told about their results, their close contacts were not traced.", "The President's diagnosis caused a wave of rumour, speculation and misinformation online.", "Andrew Jones is found guilty of luring Michael O'Leary to a farm and shooting him.", "The cinema chain says it will have to temporarily close following delays to big-budget film releases.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "NHS surgeons say hospital beds must be kept open for \"usual business\", not just Covid-19.", "The risk of an attack at the Manchester Arena should have been \"crystal clear\", inquiry hears.", "The bodies of Dr Saman Mir Sacharvi and Vian Mangrio, 14, were found inside a fire-damaged house.", "The home secretary says those who attack the government's plan are \"defending the indefensible\".", "The US Supreme Court refuses to hear an appeal, meaning the long-running copyright case is over.", "White House physician Sean Conley said the team was 'cautiously optimistic' about the president's recovery.", "Jonah Fisher reports on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, where people are \"under attack day and night\".", "The virus is a major cause of liver cancer and can lead to people needing a liver transplant.", "New UK car registrations fell 4.4% last month from a year earlier, the motor industry says.", "Tammy Abraham, Ben Chilwell and Jadon Sancho set to miss England's game against Wales after being told to stay away from St George's Park.", "The decision to use a spreadsheet format that dates back to the 1980s has proved to be unwise.", "Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have a lot in common - now that includes a brush with coronavirus.", "Sir Ian Botham takes his seat in the House of Lords where he will sit as a cross bencher.", "Boris Johnson is promising to \"build back greener in his leader's speech to the Conservative conference.", "While indoor sports and children's play centres opened in England in mid-August they remain closed in Scotland.", "Chelsea and England striker Tammy Abraham apologises \"for the naivety shown\" after he breached coronavirus guidelines.", "Men and women now receive their state pension at 66, as the chancellor vows the triple lock is safe.", "Health Minister Robin Swann said he did not want a return to a long-term or indefinite lockdown.", "Arsenal complete the signing of Thomas Partey from Atletico Madrid for 50m euros (£45.3m).", "Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey says it will give unemployed people a \"helping hand\".", "Five-year-old Izzy is treated to a performance by her doctors as she undergoes leukaemia treatment.", "A favourite of social conservatives, Judge Barrett's confirmation swings the highest US court further right.", "Despite trying to recruit domestic workers, foreign labour will be vital for next year's harvest, farmers say.", "What kind of justice might Amy Coney Barrett be? We take a look at her own words to find out.", "The bank says it is considering charging for basic bank services after its profits dived 35%.", "The publisher Bloomsbury, best known for the Harry Potter titles, has seen profits rocket since March.", "Covid testing pilot projects are launched in universities - as plans begin to get students home at Christmas.", "The Southern Trust says \"clinical concerns\" have been raised about the work of a consultant urologist.", "Timothy Brehmer, who worked for Dorset Police, strangled Claire Parry but says it was an accident.", "Tony Blair said he was aware of abuse allegations but there had not been any charges.", "Police are investigating the incident, which saw a cyclist taken to hospital.", "World 100m champion Christian Coleman is suspended for two years after missing three drugs tests.", "John Bream attempted to break two world records after jumping from a helicopter without a parachute.", "The film initially caused outrage - but now the tourism board sees it as the perfect marketing tool.", "Firms are reportedly hiring fewer disabled applicants amid concerns about supporting them properly.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "A judge quashed a decision which would force them to stop living on the land they own.", "A woman who grew up relying on free school meals says \"hunger doesn't go\" in the holidays.", "John Bream jumped out of a helicopter from 140ft (42m) and hit the water in the Solent at 80mph.", "A new investigation is looking at the deaths of three policemen killed by the IRA 38 years ago.", "It had cordoned off the aisle after a break-in, but told a customer it was due to lockdown rules.", "Licensed premises in many areas of Scotland will be able to serve alcohol indoors again from next week.", "A security guard says he \"had a bad feeling\" about Salman Abedi, Manchester inquiry hears.", "The watchdog Ofcom says the move should encourage more people to switch and save money.", "The Hollywood star said sister Deondra, who was 36, \"is in heaven now dancing with her wings on\".", "A further 367 people have died in the UK with Covid-19, the government's daily figures show.", "The trust running hospitals in Leeds expects an increase in intensive care patients in the coming days.", "Some parts of the surrounding county will also face the toughest Covid rules.", "Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson would support such a move if it meant halting coronavirus's spread.", "There are disproportionate levels of black and ethnic minorities in Wales' justice system, studies find.", "Figures show reported transphobic hate crimes almost trebling in London in the past nine years.", "Democrat Joe Biden campaigned in Georgia, a traditionally Republican state, a week from election day.", "The Cheshire town is the latest area to be moved into the top tier of Covid-19 restrictions.", "Abdulfatah Hamdallah died trying to cross the English Channel in a dinghy, French authorities say.", "\"I cannot express how little I care that you hate the photos,\" she writes in a blog post.", "In April Fergus Walsh was the first UK journalist to report from a Covid ICU. What's changed?", "A top doctor tells the BBC they had no choice, to avoid the hospital system collapsing within days.", "More than 50 Tory MPs call for a \"clear road map\" out of lockdown restrictions for northern England.", "The Dow falls as much as 3.3% before ending down 2.3% - its sharpest decline in weeks.", "This is likely to mean immunity levels decline and raises the risk of reinfection, researchers say.", "Two children - aged five and eight - and a man and a woman have died off the coast of France.", "The Twitter account @UKWoolworths, which now has more than 4,000 followers, misspelled the shop's name.", "The prime minister insists he has the right approach and no child will go hungry this winter.", "Plastic surgeons implore people to think twice about DIY back garden displays, to avoid injuries.", "Ministers also say people should be able to ask for non-essentials in exceptional circumstances.", "Labour's review says ethnic minorities are \"over-exposed\" and have worse healthcare than white people.", "Salman Abedi was on his mobile phone when he made his \"final walk\" as crowds emerged from concert.", "Joe Anderson spoke to BBC Breakfast's Louise Minchin after his eldest brother's death in October.", "The percentage of pupils in England's schools fell last week from 89% to 86%, statistics show.", "Footage is passed to police after they reopen an inquiry into an assault on three Somali women.", "One shop worker says staff face daily abuse and she has been intimidated by a customer.", "A further 12 deaths are reported which are connected with Covid-19 outbreaks at hospitals.", "Wales' tourism industry says it is struggling to plan for the future when lockdown is lifted.", "The ambulance service and Southern Heath Trust also warn they are \"extremely busy\".", "Doctors say Covid-19 is now rampant in the refugee camps of Idlib, north-west Syria.", "Many parents have to take part by phone - and some cannot follow what's happening, a survey suggests.", "Households will not be able to mix indoors, in line with restrictions elsewhere in the West Midlands.", "Andrew Wilson was just four when he saw his father lying on the ground moments after being shot.", "Wales remain unbeaten in the Nations League after they are held to a 0-0 draw away to the Republic of Ireland, who have James McClean sent off.", "At least eight people who attended a crowded Rose Garden event last Saturday have tested positive.", "Dilys Price has also been praised for \"transforming\" the lives of disabled people.", "Police are accused of using brutal tactics at another Sunday rally against President Lukashenko.", "The potential strategy is being considered by the Home Office, the Sunday Telegraph reports.", "The Red Planet is unmissable in the night sky right now as its orbit aligns with Earth's.", "Passengers on the bus were on their way to celebrate the end of Buddhist Lent, police say.", "The Labour Party and business groups fear workers will fall through gaps in the expanded support scheme.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Labour presses Robert Jenrick over a £25m grant, but he insists the process was \"perfectly normal\".", "Five more Republic of Ireland players miss Sunday's Nations League draw with Wales after a new positive Covid-19 case in the squad.", "A witness says one of the planes burst into flames after coming down not far from the city of Tours.", "Scotland's hospitality minister defends the current closure of pubs and restaurants as part of Covid restrictions.", "The country, which recently passed five million cases, has the world's second-highest number of dead.", "Margaret Ferrier calls the decision to travel from London to Glasgow after testing positive a 'blip'.", "Police say at least 40 people armed with metal bars attacked the building, causing damage to windows and cars.", "André Oliveira Macedo went on the run after being released from prison into house arrest by a judge.", "England's deputy chief medical officer says the country will see more deaths over the coming weeks.", "Belgium's Kevin de Bruyne says England should be contenders at next year's European Championship and the 2022 World Cup.", "More than 250 inmates and 12 staff are isolating after positive cases were reported at Glasgow's Barlinnie prison.", "Joshua Beynon has been subjected to abuse after supporting asylum seekers at a local refugee camp.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "One in four people in the UK is currently subject to local interventions to prevent the spread of Covid.", "The UK economy may have grown by as much as 17% in the three months to September, says a forecaster.", "England recover from a goal down to beat Belgium in the Nations League at Wembley.", "The number of NHS beds occupied by patients with coronavirus is steadily rising, he says.", "World Rugby's decision to prevent transgender women from competing at the highest levels of the women's game has been criticised by LGBT charity Stonewall.", "Radical proposals for the reform of English football could have a \"damaging impact\" on the game, says the Premier League.", "Rafael Nadal produces one of his finest French Open displays to stun Novak Djokovic and equal Roger Federer's record of 20 Grand Slam men's titles.", "The UK is at a \"precarious point\" as coronavirus cases continue to rise, warns Prof Peter Horby.", "Vaccines may cause wide-scale changes in the immune system which can boost the body's protection.", "The Liverpool City Region is expected to face the tightest Covid restrictions under the new system.", "Nicola Sturgeon says her predecessor may be angry she did not \"collude\" to make sexual misconduct allegations \"go away\".", "University students self-isolating in the UK criticise the cost and quality of food parcels on campus.", "The warning comes amid plans to bring in a three-tier local lockdown system to slow the spread of Covid.", "Lewis Hamilton equals Michael Schumacher's record of 91 race victories during an eventful Eifel Grand Prix at the Nurburgring.", "The company says the issue was caused by an \"inadvertent change\" it made to its internal systems.", "The Merseyside gym stayed open despite the area facing the highest level of coronavirus restrictions.", "A 51-year-old man is arrested on suspicion of attempting to murder the officer in Southampton.", "Harry Maguire and Reece James are sent off as England lose to Denmark in the Nations League at Wembley.", "Kenneth Walker says he's \"a million per cent sure\" officers did not identify themselves before entering.", "The owner of the venue in west London faces a possible £10,000 fine for breaching coronavirus rules.", "The ad was criticised for encouraging \"Fatima\" to give up on dancing and \"reskill\" in cyber security.", "One experienced virologist raises concerns about safety protocols and a lack of training.", "Millions of people face more restrictions from Saturday, including a ban on households mixing indoors.", "Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle ordered the move as some MPs represent areas where pubs are closed.", "Scientists find a material that displays a much sought-after property at room temperature.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "He was hiking with his father in Alberta, Canada, when he stumbled upon the Hadrosaur remains.", "Official guidelines say couples are entitled to refunds except for services already provided.", "Almost 500 teaching staff and 8,000 pupils are currently self-isolating in Liverpool.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Ex-government adviser Dame Louise Casey demands help to avoid pushing many workers into poverty.", "Aid groups say civilians must be given safe passage amid clashes between Taliban and government forces.", "Billie Eilish, BTS and Harry Styles were also big winners, with many urging fans in the US to vote.", "Extra wards at Londonderry's Altnagelvin Hospital are being opened to treat coronavirus patients.", "It is the first time since March she has carried out an engagement outside a royal residence.", "Fitting thousands of homes with new energy technology could create 50,000 jobs, housing bodies say.", "Heart-disease deaths among younger adults have risen - Sarah Fisher fears she could be next.", "The supermarkets won't use glitter in own-brand crackers and cards as part of sustainability efforts.", "The PM calls himself \"freedom-loving\", but circumstances could push him towards harsher measures.", "The facility at Belfast City Hospital will be reinstated for admission of Covid patients from across NI.", "Made in Chelsea's Binky Felstead speaks to Radio 1 Newsbeat about losing her baby.", "The boss of the security service says terrorism, hostile states and Covid are having an impact on its work.", "Homeless people given a bed in the pandemic will not be returned to Welsh streets, a minister says.", "As EU leaders gather for a summit in Brussels, will they find unity over a Brexit trade deal?", "Dougie is taking a new drug which blocks his craving for heroin and helps him break the cycle of drugs and crime.", "Manufacturing problems mean some tins don't include the full range of chocolates.", "Prosecutors say the calls by Amy Cooper, a white woman, were designed to intimidate a birdwatcher.", "£11m will be spent extending the scheme to include all school holidays up to Easter 2021.", "The force says laws on self-isolation were not in effect when Margaret Ferrier was tested for the virus.", "The trust says it is suspending visits due to the \"continuing rise in Covid-19 cases\" in the area.", "Health leaders' representative says it has taken a \"herculean effort\" to restore capacity.", "There is \"no indication of collision\" between bits of discarded Russian and Chinese space hardware.", "More than 164,000 acres of the US state has burned since the Cameron Peak Fire ignited in August.", "The vice-presidential candidate was not exposed to Covid positive staff, the campaign said.", "Travellers from Italy must self-isolate for 14 days as of Sunday, the government says.", "The health secretary warned that \"things will get worse before they get better\" as he set out new measures.", "The UK's negotiator accused the EU of expecting the UK to make \"all future moves\" towards a deal.", "Nicola Sturgeon says the expiry of existing rules on 26 October will not signal a return to complete normality.", "Boris Johnson has previously set Thursday's EU meeting as the deadline for a post-Brexit deal.", "Greater Manchester and Lancashire are among the areas that could be placed under \"very high alert\".", "England's new three-tier system can both control the virus and prevent economic harm, Boris Johnson says.", "It comes as First Minister Mark Drakeford plans a ban on travel from UK Covid hotspots to Wales.", "The footballer says his efforts to combat child hunger will continue despite the government's response.", "Thirty-nine Vietnamese nationals were found dead in a lorry container, jurors have heard.", "\"Bullying\" senior management left staff fearful at East Kent Hospitals Trust, the BBC has been told.", "A charity says councils have not used their powers to take over homes to bring them back into use.", "The move will help students return home for Christmas safely, the Department for Education says.", "Greater Manchester is among the areas that could be moved to the \"very high\" coronavirus alert level.", "Marcus Rashford calls for urgent action on child hunger, saying food poverty is never the child's fault.", "Hadija’s mum, dad and older sister were killed in the Azerbaijaini town of Ganja.", "Joe Biden outlined how he would tackle Covid-19 as President Trump goes on the attack at a Florida rally.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "The former world number one and six-time Grand Slam champion denies all the charges against him.", "The arrests took place across the country and 16 children were \"removed from harm\", police say.", "There have been 2,030 confirmed Covid cases in schools since the start of term, says the Public Health Agency.", "Thousands of jobs could be at risk as the US clothing chain mulls closing its company-owned shops.", "UK tourists will also no longer need to quarantine after visiting Mykonos, the Maldives and Denmark.", "First Minister Nicola Sturgeon gives details of a new five-tier alert system of Covid-19 restrictions.", "England's match against the Barbarians at Twickenham on Sunday is called off after 12 players breached Covid rules.", "The five-level system has been in force since 2 November - with a weekly review of how it applies to council areas.", "The Extinction Rebellion protesters accuse the petrochemical manufacturer of being Scotland's biggest climate change polluter.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "A selection of your pictures of Scotland sent in between 16 and 23 October.", "The highest levels continue to be in the north of England, says the Office for National Statistics.", "But a government scientific adviser warns that without action a normal Christmas is \"wishful thinking\".", "Movie-goers cannot cross the Welsh border to use toilet facilities at the drive-in cinema.", "A search of the house on the Donegall Road in south Belfast was carried out on Friday morning.", "The NBC correspondent is labelled \"clear winner\" for the way she led the final presidential debate.", "The Welsh lockdown means people should stay at home and non-essential shops must close until 9 November.", "During the final presidential debate, Trump and Biden clashed on the response towards the coronavirus pandemic.", "There is no known link between the seasonal dust clouds and Covid-19 but Pyongyang is on high alert.", "Two Biden voters. Two Trump voters. Two undecided voters. Did the final debate change anyone's mind?", "Some shops are blocking off clothing and decorations after being told to stop selling them.", "Ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's brother is accused of breaking coronavirus regulations.", "Hampshire Constabulary says it stopped two gatherings outside Portsmouth University student flats.", "The mute button changed the tone but did not stop the candidates from launching stinging attacks.", "There are warnings a batch of Virapro may cause skin problems, eye irritation and headaches.", "Prosecutors allege he was equipped with a knife and handcuffs, as well as Nazi and Confederate flags.", "The countries formally sign a deal described by the UK's international trade secretary as \"ground-breaking\".", "It comes after MPs rejected calls to extend free school meals over holidays amid the Covid-19 crisis.", "Their last time together on stage featured a much more subdued debate with real policy discussions.", "So far, some 7,444 migrants have crossed in boats during 2020 - the third annual jump in arrivals.", "Darren Star says he intended the critically lambasted show to be \"a love letter\" to the French city.", "Retailers will be barred from selling items like clothes when Wales goes into a two-week lockdown.", "Trump's comparison of himself with the 16th president on race issues draws Biden's mockery.", "The new system for setting Covid restrictions in Scotland adds two levels to the three tiers used in England.", "New drone footage shows the remains of two barges involved in the Severn Railway Bridge disaster.", "Susan Nicholson was murdered by Robert Trigg five years after he killed his previous partner.", "Boris Johnson says he shares people's frustrations at the turnaround times for results in England.", "Rhys James and his three friends were kept in isolation in a Florence Covid facility for two months.", "\"We all hope to be in a position\" to allow families to spend Christmas together, a government minister says.", "Details and reaction to the first minister's briefing on the day Wales goes into lockdown again.", "The aim is to create an early warning system to detect local outbreaks before they spread.", "Nine people were seen in France a day before 39 migrants were found dead in the lorry, a court hears.", "The National Audit Office spending watchdog says a scheme designed to protect jobs was open to abuse.", "The Cheshire borough with \"stubbornly high\" infection rates agrees to enter the very high category.", "As the second wave of the pandemic takes deep root across parts of the UK, thousands of NHS workers are struggling to recover from what they have already been through.", "Leeds end Aston Villa's winning start and deny them top spot in the Premier League table thanks to a Patrick Bamford hat-trick.", "It will include a top level of measures more rigorous than those south of the border.", "The amount of retail sales saw a 1.5% rise last month, boosted by DIY and garden items.", "Experts want to move the northern bottlenose whales from Gare Loch before a huge military exercise begins.", "The model and TV presenter was expecting her third child with singer husband John Legend.", "Most of those who tested positive at the Cornish factory were unaware they had coronavirus.", "Helen Hancock and Martin Griffiths were killed in the early hours of New Year's Day.", "Ministers are considering converting disused ferries to process people seeking asylum in the UK.", "Businesses can no longer sell or supply the single-use items as part of efforts to reduce pollution.", "Letters to the UK government suggest a bid to build a new nuclear plant on Anglesey is not over.", "Leading scientists call for realism about what a vaccine against Covid can achieve next year.", "Coroner Sarah Ormond-Walshe opened and adjourned the inquest into Sgt Matiu Ratana's death.", "Stanley Johnson has apologised - as has former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who broke the \"rule of six\".", "Households are told not to mix indoors in Liverpool, Warrington, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough.", "Stipe Lozina punched and stamped on the woman at least 15 times in a suspected Islamophobic attack.", "Lucy Mein from Edinburgh has become a pen-pal with her 86-year-old gran after lockdown and coronavirus measures kept them apart.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Nicola Sturgeon says she will not hesitate to take further action in the coming weeks if it is needed.", "There will also be tougher fines of up to £10,000 for those who fail to self-isolate as required.", "The council and event organisers say the decision follows advice from public health experts.", "The BBC understands a three-tier system will aim to replace the current patchwork of local lockdowns.", "Duke and duchess say there have been changes but \"sufficient progress\" has not been made.", "SNP MP Margaret Ferrier spoke in the Commons on Monday while awaiting the result of a coronavirus test.", "The government was told in May its bounce back loans were at \"very high risk of fraud\" from organised crime.", "The government adopts emergency powers under the Coronavirus Act to ensure schools offer remote learning.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "There are \"serious concerns\" about managing the virus amid a spike in cases, Liverpool mayor says.", "Mr Brown, known as the Berlin patient, was cured after a bone marrow transplant to treat leukaemia.", "The central government imposes restrictions in the capital region as Covid-19 cases continue to rise.", "Deonte Lee Murray is accused of shooting two officers in their car, an attack that was caught on video.", "A video of a dying indigenous woman being insulted by hospital staff is being widely condemned.", "The Pixel 5 loses several headline features of last year's flagship phone to hit a lower price tag.", "Arena bomber Salman Abedi was identified associating with six people under M15 investigation.", "Men who have fled war-torn countries say the training camp brings back \"scary\" memories.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "Labour describes proposals being considered by the government as \"unconscionable\".", "The chat show host says Strictly judges will not be able to \"compare like with like\".", "Andy Preston says new restrictions for Middlesbrough and Hartlepool will \"destroy viable jobs\".", "France's health minister has warned that new measures could be introduced by Monday.", "Germany says Alexei Navalny was poisoned by a Novichok agent but the Kremlin denies any involvement.", "Stock markets in Tokyo and other cities suffered a day-long suspended trading session on Thursday.", "The health secretary's promise comes as the government is warned not to treat MPs \"with contempt\".", "Derek Mackay has not been seen at Holyrood since quitting government in February but claimed for rent in July.", "A court says the bread used in the firm's hot sandwiches must be taxed because of its sugar content.", "His dad, Only Fools and Horses actor Nicholas, says his family are \"utterly grief stricken\".", "Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta says his side \"are on the right path\" after beating Liverpool on penalties to reach the EFL Cup quarter-finals.", "The body that represents British zoos says they are facing the biggest cash crisis in their history.", "The National Trust is among those believed to be affected by the latest development.", "Stricter measures will be introduced in Liverpool, Warrington, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough.", "People needing coronavirus tests have been sent to a centre that is now closed, an MP says.", "A judge described the case of the unemployed man with mental health disabilities as \"unprecedented\".", "A fatal accident occurs during attempts to break the speed record at a former RAF base near York.", "People should immediately stop using the Hictkon smart plug with dual USB ports, the watchdog warns.", "Some doctors felt children were referred for puberty blockers too quickly, it has emerged.", "The inquiry hears of \"missed opportunities\" in the hours leading up to the terror attack.", "SNP MP Margaret Ferrier is facing calls to resign after she was suspended by her party.", "Four out of five people reporting loss of sense of smell or taste had coronavirus antibodies.", "Partners are still not able to attend terminations at most hospitals amid coronavirus restrictions.", "Deaths due to an outbreak at Royal Glamorgan rise to 10, as the valleys lead a dramatic rise in hospital cases.", "There has been a marked increase in cases over recent weeks in England, especially in the north.", "Court proceedings will start next week and the rapper faces up to 23 years in prison.", "Jurors say it is highly likely at least one officer heard Kevin Clarke say: \"I can't breathe.\"", "Business groups welcome a new plan to pay two-thirds of wages when firms are forced to close.", "A letter signed by hundreds of scientists calls for global action to protect whales, dolphins and porpoises.", "Health Minister Vaughan Gething warns the impact on the sector would be significant.", "Olivier Max Caramin collapsed from heat stress after picking fruit for hours in the sun.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "The celebrity cook is made a dame while the grime star is made an MBE on the Queen's honours list.", "A number of deaths are reported at Edinburgh's Western General, while a ward is also closed at Glasgow Royal Infirmary.", "Workers at UK firms told to close will receive two-thirds of their pay, Chancellor Rishi Sunak says.", "Dominic Calvert-Lewin scores on his senior international debut as an inexperienced England side beat Wales in a friendly at Wembley.", "Data shows the infection rate is 689.1 per 100,000, with restrictions yet to be imposed in the city.", "The woman returned from Mykonos and made three visits to a gym when she should have been quarantining.", "Kanta Prasad's food stall in Delhi was making losses - until a viral tweet changed everything.", "Eight wards in the city will be placed under further Covid-19 restrictions from 18:00 on Saturday.", "Bianca Williams accused the Met of racial-profiling after she and her partner were pulled over.", "The performances will be different to before - with social distancing on stage and off.", "Non-emergency operations were cancelled during the first wave but bosses hope to now maintain them.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "The rapid test could help combat the spread of the virus in hospitals, researchers say.", "The chancellor says his Job Support Scheme \"expansion\" comes ahead of \"what may be a difficult winter\".", "The Daily Mail has accused a Papa John's UK franchisee of a suspected fraud by claiming cash from HMRC.", "Thirty-nine people may have died in a lorry because people smugglers got \"greedy\", the Old Bailey hears.", "The record beat Michael Jackson's Thriller and George Michael's Faith to top a Radio 2 poll.", "Action is needed, Gillian Keegan says, as Labour calls for local leaders to be included in decisions.", "Edinburgh Woollen Mill says it plans to appoint an administrator amid \"brutal\" trading conditions.", "Police Scotland says \"highly visible\" patrols will ensure pubs and restaurants close at 18:00.", "Some school heads are telling teachers to ignore or switch off contact tracing, BBC News has learned.", "A selection of your pictures of Scotland sent in between 2 and 9 October.", "The home improvement show will return on Channel 4, with interior designer Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen.", "Regional mayors warn of real \"hardship\" despite chancellor's plan to support wages of closed firms.", "Harry Richford died seven days after his emergency delivery at Margate's QEQM hospital.", "The brothers from Blackburn are among the business leaders named on the Queen's Birthday Honours list", "Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh deny involvement in the murder of four US hostages.", "The Beautiful South star helped pay staff's wages after the magazine was shut down.", "After years of broadcasting to just his wife, an amateur radio presenter goes stateside.", "Wesley Barnes had posted several reviews allegedly accusing the resort of \"modern day slavery\"", "New figures reveal reported homophobic hate crimes have almost trebled in the past five years.", "Research suggests there is no on-site counselling in half of England's schools.", "Bars and restaurants are to close in Lyon, Lille, Grenoble and Saint-Etienne, as infections spike.", "While we expect more moves from No 10 to tackle Covid, there are many questions still to be settled.", "Scotland are one game away from their first major finals in 23 years after a nerve-shredding penalty shootout win over Israel.", "All Premier League fixtures will be available to watch live until the end of October, with some costing £14.95 per game on pay-per-view basis.", "Nicola Sturgeon leads the Scottish government's daily Covid-19 briefing.", "The chancellor will outline the next stage of the Job Support Scheme later.", "But regional leaders say there has been little consultation and imposing more change could sow confusion.", "The England player's award came for services to vulnerable children in the UK during lockdown.", "The rare raptor, seen only a handful of times in the UK, was spotted at Moulton West Fen earlier.", "Pubs and restaurants in worst-hit areas could close next week in an effort to stall rising infection rates.", "New Covid rules mean many licensed premises in Scotland's central belt will be closed for at least two weeks.", "The BBC asks the Manchester Arena attacker's brother why he is not co-operating with a public inquiry.", "Prince Harry and Meghan said Archie was pictured at their California home in an invasion of privacy.", "Sophie Pétronin and Soumaïla Cissé are among four people released by their hostage-takers.", "One in four people in the UK is currently subject to local interventions to prevent the spread of Covid.", "Simon Calder had described areas of mid and north Wales as his \"absolute top tip\" for a visit.", "Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney says more north-south co-operation is needed.", "Europe is gradually easing lockdown measures ahead of the tourist season.", "Thomas Baddeley pleaded guilty to breaching a restraining order by going to Dr Hutchinson's surgery.", "Games and entertainment retailer Geek Retreat says loyal customers helped it thrive in lockdown.", "The US election is entering its frantic final fortnight.", "Families say a public inquiry would establish \"truth, justice and accountability\" for victims.", "The world's second-biggest economy saw growth of almost 5% in the third quarter of the year.", "All household mixing will be banned and non-essential shops and leisure services must close.", "A round-up of reaction to the first minister's announcement of a \"short, sharp\" lockdown.", "If agreement on new restrictions is not reached, the PM could impose tier three rules.", "A former project manager tells the inquiry she threw away material about her work after the fire.", "Officials are \"not blind\" to impact a new lockdown would have on Wales, the health minister says.", "Experts and charities are puzzled by hackers who've started donating stolen money.", "Why does the divergence between science and politics appear to be wider than it has ever been?", "Abu Dhabi's minister of tolerance has denied allegations he sexually assaulted a festival organiser.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "A BBC investigation finds universities did not reduce capacity in halls and changed guidance on remote working.", "The UK transport secretary hopes to have it in place from December, but BA's boss is sceptical.", "The former Blue Peter presenter was accused of grabbing a woman's breasts at a party.", "The body of a man found on a French beach is confirmed by authorities as that of a migrant.", "Three times as many are dying than in 2016, a Nottingham Trent University study estimates.", "The fatal attack in Shanghai Wild Animal Park's \"wild beast area\" is under investigation.", "The street split down the middle by the government's new coronavirus rules.", "The Public Health Agency says that 'phenomenal demand' has put pressure on stocks.", "Fallon Sherrock, who made history by beating two men at the PDC World Darts Championship last year, misses out on qualification this time.", "Rallies are held across France in support of murdered teacher Samuel Paty.", "Facebook could face a large fine if Instagram is found to have broken European Union privacy laws.", "Town residents pick Val-des-Sources to replace the moniker that paid homage to its mining history.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "The show revealed the celebrity and professional pairings, including the first same-sex pairing.", "Liverpool centre-back Virgil van Dijk wants to return stronger after learning he needs surgery on the knee injury sustained in the draw at Everton.", "Jessica Bullough admits she was away from duty for two hours, missing Salman Abedi by 10 minutes.", "Changing digital behaviour must be considered when deciding if a case should go to court, new guidance says.", "Residents of the high-rise Paragon complex in Brentford will be moved out later this week.", "Gemma Greensmith gave birth to daughter Raelyn in a lorry cab outside her Staffordshire home.", "Far more people are dying at home in England and Wales than normal from heart disease and dementia.", "UK officials say Russian intelligence took aim at the 2020 Olympics before they were delayed.", "A policy influencer says the next Welsh Government should also pilot a universal basic income.", "It is \"important we keep the public on board\" with new plans to tackle Covid, a council leader says.", "Sinn Féin calls for an apology after Mr Poots said coronavirus was more common in nationalist areas.", "Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey warns there is significant risk of lower economic growth.", "Fourteen new donation centres are to open around the country in November and December.", "The BBC's Laura Foster explains what a circuit-breaker is and how it could help tackle Covid-19.", "The Welsh Government is expected to announce its decision on a \"firebreak\" lockdown later.", "Ross Barkley dedicates his winning goal to Aston Villa's medical staff as Dean Smith's side maintain their 100% start to the season by edging victory at Leicester.", "The aim is to help people travelling to destinations where a negative result is required on arrival.", "First Minister Mark Drakeford said children would be the top priority in the \"short, sharp\" lockdown in Wales.", "No 10 says there is \"no basis to resume talks\" without changes, after the EU offers to \"intensify\" talks.", "Andy Burnham has called on Boris Johnson and other leaders to help end a deadlock over stricter Covid curbs.", "Yasmin Qureshi says she started to feel unwell about two weeks ago and immediately self-isolated.", "The code-breaking hub is not \"the war winner\" many people think it is, says a history of spy agency GCHQ.", "A meeting between ministers and local leaders about Covid restrictions ended \"abruptly\", a source says.", "Roehl Ribaya was discharged from hospital in August but had a cardiac arrest and died in October.", "The health secretary appeared to be going against the advice of No 10.", "But there is \"light at the end of the tunnel\" as a vaccine may be ready early next year, the expert says.", "Ofgem will require suppliers to offer emergency credit and put people on 'realistic' repayment plans.", "An officer is sent back to Faslane from the US after arriving to take charge of a submarine's nuclear missiles while unfit for duty.", "The Scottish government says there have been capacity issues, but the UK government says this is \"categorically untrue\".", "Ersin Tatar, who is pro-Turkey and wants Cyprus to be two separate states, is elected president.", "Twitter hid an identical post saying virus was less lethal than the flu season in most populations.", "The unusually-coloured Canadian lobster turned up in a delivery to a Fleetwood fishmonger.", "Customers are angry at being unable to get refunds for tickets they can't use because of Covid rules.", "Newcastle University student Jeni Larmour was named as one of four young people who died.", "The government wins a vote to keep the restriction in England despite rebels clashing with a minister.", "The first minister will announce new restrictions on Wednesday - but says it will not be a return to full lockdown.", "Covid swabs and key tests for cancer could be unavailable after problems at diagnostics firm Roche.", "A memorial next to Parliament would be a \"self-evident terrorism risk\", a planning inquiry is told.", "The foreign secretary says his \"instinct is to separate sport from diplomacy\" but it \"might not be possible\".", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "The sci-fi epic is now delayed until 2021, while The Batman is pushed back to 2022.", "The anti-virus creator faces extradition to the US for allegedly failing to file tax returns.", "Broadcaster and writer Afua Hirsch is fronting the documentary Enslaved with actor Samuel L Jackson.", "The PM promises he won't be caught \"lagging\" on green polices.", "Political rivals and medics are critical after the US president says \"don't be afraid of Covid\".", "The bank says no offence was intended, after reports that black ex-chief Tidjane Thiam walked out.", "Thirteen school children began to feel unwell after eating what they believed were sweets.", "Backbenchers were divided over the human rights and civil liberties implications of the new legislation.", "A prison previously branded not fit for purpose makes \"good progress\" during the Covid-19 pandemic.", "The move in Manchester comes after hundreds of students in the city tested positive for coronavirus.", "Britain's Geraint Thomas withdraws from the Giro d'Italia because of a fractured hip suffered on stage three.", "There were 478 people admitted to hospital on Sunday - the largest daily figure since early June.", "The error meant that although those who tested positive were told about their results, their close contacts were not traced.", "The BBC has followed three black students during their first year at the UK’s University of Cambridge.", "The 10% cut in funding comes amid anger in the union about the direction of Labour under Sir Keir Starmer.", "Julia Machin, who was also a junior champion as a teenager, broke the previous record by 5cm.", "Industry leaders warn that some businesses may never reopen if further lockdown restrictions are introduced.", "Margaret Ferrier attended Mass in Glasgow before travelling to Westminster where she received a positive test result.", "NHS surgeons say hospital beds must be kept open for \"usual business\", not just Covid-19.", "Footage shows people throwing papers from windows and entering President Sooronbai Jeenbekov's office.", "Suspected gangland boss Terry Clarke was killed in Stevenage after returning home from a bar.", "White House physician Sean Conley said the team was 'cautiously optimistic' about the president's recovery.", "Emergency services searched for the man in a river which burst it banks earlier this week.", "Kailash Kuha Raj and Poorna Kaameshwari Sivaraj are found dead at a flat in Brentford, west London.", "Will the Conservatives' big plan to address regional inequalities in England weather the pandemic?", "Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have a lot in common - now that includes a brush with coronavirus.", "The family of an injured teenager were incorrectly told he had died in a crash on the A90 near Crimond.", "One force has seen the number of spitting and coughing assaults against its officers double.", "Sir Ian Botham takes his seat in the House of Lords where he will sit as a cross bencher.", "Restrictions similar to those in northern England could be announced later this week.", "Boris Johnson is promising to \"build back greener in his leader's speech to the Conservative conference.", "Arsenal complete the signing of Thomas Partey from Atletico Madrid for 50m euros (£45.3m).", "Men and women now receive their state pension at 66, as the chancellor vows the triple lock is safe.", "The US has updated its guidance to reflect how the virus can linger in the air, sometimes for hours.", "Boris Johnson pledges the coronavirus pandemic will be a \"catalyst\" for major change in the UK.", "Several banks are not accepting new business customers making it hard for small firms trying to get help.", "WHO urges people to redouble efforts to fight virus in spite of understandable exhaustion.", "Schoolchildren persuade Comic Relief to switch to a natural alternative for Red Nose Day 2021.", "Hundreds protested in the southern Italian city, some throwing firecrackers and smoke bombs.", "The shooting of unarmed protesters this week sparked the worst street violence in two decades.", "Pilots for different coronavirus vaccines will be trialed across parts of Wales \"very soon\".", "The Osiris-Rex spacecraft collected so much rock from asteroid Bennu that bits are leaking out.", "The new rules are needed but ministers must set out an exit strategy, Sheffield City Region's mayor says.", "Prosecutors allege he was equipped with a knife and handcuffs, as well as Nazi and Confederate flags.", "Tory MPs join some 2,000 doctors in voicing concern, as Labour threatens to push for another vote.", "It comes after MPs rejected calls to extend free school meals over holidays amid the Covid-19 crisis.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "The use of testing, plus staggering the return to campus will form a strategy to get students home for Christmas.", "Nine people were seen in France a day before 39 migrants were found dead in the lorry, a court hears.", "Greater Manchester Police says it has issued 52 fines since tier three rules came into force.", "President Donald Trump votes early in the US election, while on a campaign visit in Florida.", "The highest levels continue to be in the north of England, says the Office for National Statistics.", "The 17-year-old boy was pronounced dead at the scene in east London on Friday night.", "A member of an extremist group has been charged with rioting during the May George Floyd protests.", "A further 1,433 positive cases were registered in the past 24 hours with largest increases in Glasgow and Lanarkshire.", "The body was found at a National Trust estate and the arrested man is being treated for serious injuries.", "Eighteen people are arrested as police disperse crowds protesting against coronavirus restrictions.", "Sending some children home may be the only way to control infection rates, Prof Neil Ferguson says.", "As the second wave of the pandemic takes deep root across parts of the UK, thousands of NHS workers are struggling to recover from what they have already been through.", "The London venue is one of 35 venues to get millions of pounds from the Culture Recovery Fund.", "Leeds end Aston Villa's winning start and deny them top spot in the Premier League table thanks to a Patrick Bamford hat-trick.", "Movie-goers cannot cross the Welsh border to use toilet facilities at the drive-in cinema.", "Households in the two cities can no longer mix indoors, including in pubs and restaurants.", "Andrzej Duda, 48, contracts coronavirus as his country hits a daily record of new cases.", "Rebecca Logan, a 39-year-old fitness instructor. says she was \"completely floored\" by coronavirus.", "There have been 2,030 confirmed Covid cases in schools since the start of term, says the Public Health Agency.", "The party wants the Labour leader to apologise for Angela Rayner's \"unparliamentary behaviour\".", "People must take responsibility to keep to Wales' coronavirus lockdown rules, a police chief warns.", "Some owners of Apple's new phones get an error message when trying to run the contact-tracing app.", "Hosts Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly pay tribute to frontline workers before the dancing begins.", "Hampshire Constabulary says it stopped two gatherings outside Portsmouth University student flats.", "The first minister says he is giving Boris Johnson a final opportunity to impose curbs before he acts.", "Andrew Wilson was just four when he saw his father lying on the ground moments after being shot.", "MPs overturn a Lords amendment requiring trade deals to meet post-Brexit UK food standards.", "A top official says police can open fire on \"violent radicals\" protesting against the government.", "The UK advertising authority tells a developer to change its mobile gaming ads.", "Concern that care homes have blanket orders in place covering a number of residents.", "Police are accused of using brutal tactics at another Sunday rally against President Lukashenko.", "The government took \"robust action\" at the time, such as the rule of six, a cabinet minister says.", "\"I’m going to be here, I’m going to fight this,\" says the 32-year-old, who is having radiotherapy.", "West Ham would be against radical plans by Liverpool and Manchester United to reform the English football pyramid, according to a club insider.", "Det Sgt Jonathan Pearce sent a topless photograph to the victim of attempted rape, a panel hears.", "The seismic research vessel Oruc Reis was at the centre of a row with Greece in August.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Mitchells & Butlers, the pubs and restaurants group, has not disclosed how many jobs are at risk.", "The UK and EU say they are making progress, but remain at loggerheads on fishing and help for firms.", "The former Blue Peter presenter denies assaulting a woman in London's West End in 2008.", "Downing Street and the culture secretary disown an ad suggesting a ballerina retrain in cyber security.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Monday morning.", "Nigel Wright is sentenced to 14 years after putting metal shards into food and demanding £1.4m.", "The UK would be following in the footsteps of countries like Japan if it cuts the cost of borrowing.", "André Oliveira Macedo went on the run after being released from prison into house arrest by a judge.", "Police say at least 40 people armed with metal bars attacked the building, causing damage to windows and cars.", "Alex Cruz leaves British Airways after four years with the airline, replaced by Aer Lingus' Sean Doyle.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "One in four people in the UK is currently subject to local interventions to prevent the spread of Covid.", "The work of Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson is used in the sale of airport slots and radio spectrums.", "The UK economy may have grown by as much as 17% in the three months to September, says a forecaster.", "England recover from a goal down to beat Belgium in the Nations League at Wembley.", "The Liverpool City Region is the first in England to be put on the \"very high\" Covid alert level.", "Michael Rosen says the nurses who cared for him showed 'overwhelming devotion' while he was in hospital.", "The man was suspected of carrying out \"hostile reconnaissance\" the Manchester Arena Inquiry hears.", "Radical proposals for the reform of English football could have a \"damaging impact\" on the game, says the Premier League.", "A local lockdown has begun in the city but it will not be extended elsewhere in Gwynedd yet.", "Dr Ghebreyesus said allowing coronavirus to spread unchecked would cause unnecessary suffering and death.", "Boris Johnson says many people think country-wide restrictions are \"extreme\" and would harm the economy.", "Advisers say the situation is \"hotting up\", and hospitals in England must prepare for more Covid patients.", "Shooting of War of the Worlds and other dramas restarts in Wales as actors adapt to a new normal.", "The Liverpool City Region is expected to face the tightest Covid restrictions under the new system.", "Daniel Horton targeted Raafat Maglad as he held prayers at Central London Mosque in February.", "The German Research Vessel Polarstern returns to port after drifting for a year in Arctic sea-ice.", "Chinese social media users vent anger over a speech singer RM made while accepting an award.", "Industry leaders will challenge new local restrictions that could force pubs and other venues to close.", "Some of those displaced in Nagorno-Karabakh shelter in churches but even those are targeted.", "Mark Zuckerberg says his \"thinking has evolved\" as the social network changes strategy.", "Donald Neely was led down a Texas street \"as though he was a slave\", court documents say.", "Sage and Prof Chris Whitty appear at odds with the political decisions made by government.", "Lawyers representing alleged victims said the prosecution of the former Leicester MP came \"too late\".", "The company says the issue was caused by an \"inadvertent change\" it made to its internal systems.", "Persistent rain on Saturday 3 October breaks the record for the wettest day across the entire UK.", "A 51-year-old man is arrested on suspicion of attempting to murder the officer in Southampton.", "A look back at the New Zealand prime minister's first term in office.", "The chief executive of the Welsh NHS says demand for beds will continue to increase in weeks ahead.", "The owner of the venue in west London faces a possible £10,000 fine for breaching coronavirus rules.", "The ad was criticised for encouraging \"Fatima\" to give up on dancing and \"reskill\" in cyber security.", "One experienced virologist raises concerns about safety protocols and a lack of training.", "Millions of people face more restrictions from Saturday, including a ban on households mixing indoors.", "Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle ordered the move as some MPs represent areas where pubs are closed.", "Two Scottish women have returned home after what they hope will be life-changing treatment in Russia.", "Scientists find a material that displays a much sought-after property at room temperature.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "People must now cover their face in workplace canteens - but no longer need to if they are getting married.", "The fine is the largest ever issued by the Information Commissioner's Office.", "'Hastily drawn up' furlough scheme may have lost billions to fraud and error, MPs say", "\"No point\" in further discussions with the EU unless it changes course, Downing Street says.", "Some French Muslims disgusted by the shootings in Paris may nonetheless have reasons for not embracing the slogan “I am Charlie”, the BBC's Patrick Jackson reports.", "Down in the polls, but far from out - five reasons why the US president can pull off another surprise.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "Extra wards at Londonderry's Altnagelvin Hospital are being opened to treat coronavirus patients.", "Sanjay Dutt said he will 'beat the disease soon' and would begin shooting his next film in November.", "Carer Terry Thomas, 72, has given his seriously ill partner the wrong medication due to his sight.", "Boris Johnson urges local leaders to \"engage constructively\" with the government over tougher rules.", "The DJ, who quit the BBC over a racist slur in a news report, says it must improve its diversity.", "Patients admitted to intensive care have a better chance of surviving now than they did in the first wave.", "The facility at Belfast City Hospital will be reinstated for admission of Covid patients from across NI.", "Veteran reporter Steve Scully had denied seeking advice from a prominent Trump critic on Twitter.", "The move to tier three, after intensive talks, sees pubs and car boot sales closed but gyms stay open.", "The R number has crept up to 1.3-1.5, with growth of the epidemic still widespread.", "Chairman Tim Martin criticises the government's \"confusing\" Covid restrictions as sales tumble.", "After the murder of 17 people in Paris last week, several people have been jailed, raising questions about freedom of speech in France.", "Boris Johnson initially suggests parents living apart from their children may face restrictions.", "The Scottish government's funding package for pubs and restaurants is not nearly enough, industry leaders warn.", "The trust says it is suspending visits due to the \"continuing rise in Covid-19 cases\" in the area.", "The cash grants for arts venues and organisations is part of the government's Cultural Recovery Fund.", "The government did not take the recommendation of a \"circuit breaker\" lockdown.", "There is \"no indication of collision\" between bits of discarded Russian and Chinese space hardware.", "Students will be asked to use masks in corridors, school buses and communal areas where physical distancing is difficult.", "Travellers from Italy must self-isolate for 14 days as of Sunday, the government says.", "Films such as Dumbo and Peter Pan now warn of \"negative depictions... of people or cultures\".", "The band donated money to disabled singer Ali Hirsz, after Covid-19 left her out of work.", "Nicola Sturgeon says the expiry of existing rules on 26 October will not signal a return to complete normality.", "The UK's negotiator accused the EU of expecting the UK to make \"all future moves\" towards a deal.", "Officers handling a convicted terrorist who killed two people had \"no specific training\", a court hears.", "A man is being questioned by detectives investigating several assaults on women in Belfast on Monday night .", "The first British rap debut to top the charts this year is dedicated to the star's late mother Edna.", "Hospital outbreaks mean the health board has more Covid-19 patients than at any time, figures show.", "Huge numbers of voters are casting ballots with less than three weeks to go until the election.", "Andy Green is suing bookmaker Betfred after it refused to pay up, citing a software error.", "Divisions between No 10 and local leaders in England are \"very dangerous\", a Sage scientist says.", "Some council leaders have accused Downing Street of bullying them into accepting new Covid restrictions.", "Many of those looking after vulnerable relatives or friends wonder how they will cope this winter.", "The Big Lebowski actor acknowledges it \"is a serious disease\" but says his prognosis is good.", "If agreement on new restrictions is not reached, the PM could impose tier three rules.", "The grime star wore the Banksy-designed piece during his 2019 Glastonbury headline performance.", "Sadiq Khan says the 10pm curfew \"does not make sense\" and puts hospitality venues at risk.", "Experts and charities are puzzled by hackers who've started donating stolen money.", "Hatice Cengiz files a lawsuit against Mohammed bin Salman over the journalist's murder in Istanbul.", "Network Rail says taking photos on a stretch of track was \"plain stupidity\".", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "There are calls for the beauty sector to have a VAT cut to match the hospitality sector.", "Details and reaction to what Economy Minister Ken Skates said at today's televised briefing.", "The film star's son James dies aged 58, after being diagnosed with liver cancer.", "Fake naked images of thousands of women are being made from social media photos.", "The former Blue Peter presenter was accused of grabbing a woman's breasts at a party.", "The Met will assess whether a crime has been committed after a project manager threw away her notes.", "Retail groups say the fees charged by credit card firms have almost doubled in two years.", "The father of a pupil at the school where Samuel Paty worked was in touch with the killer, reports say.", "Volunteers will be deliberately exposed to the virus in trials due to start in January.", "Greater Manchester's mayor says more financial help is needed as the region is set to enter tier three rules.", "The street split down the middle by the government's new coronavirus rules.", "Town residents pick Val-des-Sources to replace the moniker that paid homage to its mining history.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "Boris Johnson says he \"regrets\" a deal over financial support could not be reached with local leaders.", "Marcus Rashford scores a late winner again as Manchester United start their Champions League campaign with a fine win at Paris St-Germain.", "One family in London say they received scores of long, repetitive calls from contact tracers.", "At 104, Ruth Saunders is walking a charity marathon after being inspired by Captain Sir Tom Moore.", "Jessica Bullough admits she was away from duty for two hours, missing Salman Abedi by 10 minutes.", "Kanad Basi is sentenced to four years and eight months over a crash that killed 16-year-old Jack Frame.", "Talks have taken place over the creation of a new £4.6bn European Premier League, involving the top sides from across the continent.", "The US Justice Department accuses Google of disadvantaging its rivals in search and advertising.", "Osiris-Rex will make the briefest of contacts with Asteroid Bennu to try to pick up rock samples.", "The grandson of a man who killed his wife calls for \"greater scrutiny\" of Parole Board hearings.", "Josh Powell says he faces an \"uncertain future\" following the loss of his wife and three children.", "The Scottish first minster says she will not be getting into \"standoffs\" with councils over local restrictions.", "Five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Tuesday evening.", "The BBC's Laura Foster explains what a circuit-breaker is and how it could help tackle Covid-19.", "The material, purportedly from prisoners' legal teams, was intercepted by HMP Birmingham staff.", "The region moves into Tier 3 from Friday, says Boris Johnson, after talks with local leaders failed.", "The BBC asked what the rest of the world wants from America.", "The ex-New Labour minister has found political influence outside Westminster.", "Education Minister Peter Weir says the decision is due to the extended mid-term break for schools.", "The maker of Dettol and Cillit Bang previously reported a big drop in demand for condoms across Europe.", "The aim is to help people travelling to destinations where a negative result is required on arrival.", "Attendance figures show 46% of secondary schools had pupils isolating because of Covid outbreaks.", "No 10 says there is \"no basis to resume talks\" without changes, after the EU offers to \"intensify\" talks.", "Mark Milsome was hit by a Land Rover while filming a scene for a BBC drama, an inquest hears.", "The code-breaking hub is not \"the war winner\" many people think it is, says a history of spy agency GCHQ.", "Roehl Ribaya was discharged from hospital in August but had a cardiac arrest and died in October.", "Business owners express frustration and upset as they warn of a tough winter under new Covid rules.", "The Welsh musician was behind transatlantic hits such as Keep On Running and Somebody Help Me.", "Hospitality chiefs are seeking clarity over whether business lunches are exempt from Covid restrictions.", "Boris Johnson says there was a \"fraying of people's discipline and attention to\" Covid rules over the summer.", "Coroner Sarah Ormond-Walshe opened and adjourned the inquest into Sgt Matiu Ratana's death.", "Leading scientists call for realism about what a vaccine against Covid can achieve next year.", "SNP MP Margaret Ferrier spoke in the Commons on Monday while awaiting the result of a coronavirus test.", "The MP was suspended for breaking Covid rules and has now lost her seat after a recall petition.", "President Donald Trump attended multiple large events in the days before his coronavirus diagnosis.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "A court says the bread used in the firm's hot sandwiches must be taxed because of its sugar content.", "Zef Eisenberg is killed when his car \"went out of control at high speed at the end of a run\".", "Sir Lindsay Hoyle condemns Margaret Ferrier for putting people's health at risk in the Commons and on public transport.", "SNP MP Margaret Ferrier is facing calls to resign after she was suspended by her party.", "Four out of five people reporting loss of sense of smell or taste had coronavirus antibodies.", "All the latest news and results for the US Election 2020 from the BBC.", "The president is discharged from the Walter Reed facility following three days of Covid treatment.", "Spending watchdog urges repairs body to get on with it - but they say rethink is needed to save money.", "People in Margaret Ferrier's constituency give their reaction to the MP's trip from London to Scotland while positive for Covid-19.", "Liverpool forward Sadio Mane tests positive for coronavirus and joins midfielder Thiago Alcantara in self-isolating.", "News outlets around the world report on the president's announcement with sympathy - but also blame.", "Lucy Smith says the actor, who has died aged 19, brought \"us nothing but joy in our lives\".", "Northumbria University in Newcastle says 770 students have tested positive and are now isolating.", "The disgraced film mogul was sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault in March.", "For the MP who has committed the most egregious breach to be one of her own is acutely embarrassing.", "We asked some older US voters for their reactions to the president's Covid-19 diagnosis.", "There will also be tougher fines of up to £10,000 for those who fail to self-isolate as required.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "But the Transport Committee also says riding on pavements is \"dangerous\" and should be prohibited.", "The Home Office looked at the idea to deter asylum seekers crossing, according to latest leaks.", "The president explicitly condemned the Proud Boys group that he had previously urged to \"stand by\".", "Gale-force winds reach 61mph in southern England, as drivers are urged to be \"cautious\".", "Ros Atkins explains why despite calls for a ceasefire, fighting over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh continues to intensify.", "The government adopts emergency powers under the Coronavirus Act to ensure schools offer remote learning.", "A court has ruled that Daphne Boël and her children can claim the title of Princess of Belgium.", "A group of men are hit with penalty fines for driving out of a lockdown county to go \"car racing\".", "A video of a dying indigenous woman being insulted by hospital staff is being widely condemned.", "The tech giant said the rate is lower than in the wider population and defended its control measures.", "The release of No Time To Die has now been pushed back to 2 April after being delayed once already.", "The President's diagnosis caused a wave of rumour, speculation and misinformation online.", "The Metropolitan Police says officers are investigating possible breaches of coronavirus rules by Margaret Ferrier.", "A family's home was targeted by mistake by an arsonist, a court hears.", "France's health minister has warned that new measures could be introduced by Monday.", "Dunstable's MP says he is very angry at the \"flagrant breach\" of rules at a \"traveller funeral\".", "The PM calls for Brussels to be \"commonsensical\" ahead of crucial talks with the EU Commission president.", "Use our search tool to find out about coronavirus rules and restrictions where you live.", "Her barrister says she has been \"vindicated\" after winning a tribunal against Jaguar Land Rover.", "The 67-year-old Ghostbusters actor was punched in broad daylight near Central Park, police say.", "A fatal accident occurs during attempts to break the speed record at a former RAF base near York.", "Europe is gradually easing lockdown measures ahead of the tourist season.", "Some doctors felt children were referred for puberty blockers too quickly, it has emerged.", "The gathering was the latest of several breaches of Covid-19 rules at the hotel, police say.", "It is the first opening of borders by either nation since Covid restrictions were imposed.", "British man Peter Webster has played for decades in Australia, but says it's time to hang up his boots."], "section": ["Entertainment & Arts", "Latin America & Caribbean", "UK", "UK", null, "Birmingham & Black Country", "London", "Middle East", "London", "US Election 2020", "Europe", "Family & Education", "Reality Check", "Wales", "Technology", "Entertainment & Arts", "UK Politics", "US Election 2020", "Europe", "UK", "UK", "Africa", "Europe", "South Scotland", "Sheffield & South Yorkshire", "UK", "UK", null, "Liverpool", null, "Business", "Wales", "UK Politics", "Wales", "UK Politics", "Oxford", "UK Politics", "Science & Environment", "Scotland", "UK", "Manchester", "Nottingham", "London", "Entertainment & Arts", "Scotland", "Business", null, "Northern Ireland", "US Election 2020", "Business", "Latin America & Caribbean", "Family & Education", "Manchester", "Entertainment & Arts", "US Election 2020", null, null, "UK", "UK", "World", "US Election 2020", "UK Politics", null, "Technology", "UK", "Europe", null, "Wales", "UK Politics", "Lancashire", "US Election 2020", 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"US Election 2020", "Wales", "Wales", "Entertainment & Arts", "Technology", "London", "UK", "Business", "Europe", "Health", "UK", "Nottingham", "US & Canada", "UK", "UK", null, "Health", null, "Manchester", "Glasgow & West Scotland", null, "Business", "Science & Environment", "UK", "Oxford", "Scotland", "UK", null, "Birmingham & Black Country", "UK", "US Election 2020", "UK Politics", "Northern Ireland", "Business", "Business", "Family & Education", "UK Politics", "Wales", "UK", "Lancashire", "Manchester", "Entertainment & Arts", "Business", "UK", "London", "Health", null, "Scotland", "US Election 2020", "UK", "Business", "England", "Scotland", "Scotland", "Health", "US Election 2020", "World", "UK Politics", null, null, "US & Canada", "Entertainment & Arts", "Tyne & Wear", "US & Canada", "Scotland", "US Election 2020", "UK", "UK", "UK Politics", "UK Politics", "US Election 2020", "UK", null, "Family & Education", "Europe", "Wales", null, "Business", "Entertainment & Arts", "BBC Trending", "Scotland politics", "Wales", "Europe", "Beds, Herts & Bucks", "UK Politics", "UK", "Coventry & Warwickshire", "US & Canada", "York & North Yorkshire", "Explainers", "UK", "Birmingham & Black Country", "Australia", "Australia"], "content": ["A US judge has dismissed a lawsuit from one of Michael Jackson's accusers, who claimed Jackson's companies allowed the star to abuse him and other children.\n\nJames Safechuck has said the singer started abusing him when he was 10.\n\nIn 2014, he sued MJJ Productions and MJJ Ventures, and has alleged they \"were created to, and did, facilitate Jackson's sexual abuse of children\".\n\nBut the judge dismissed the case, saying the companies didn't have a duty of care for Mr Safechuck.\n\nJonathan Steinsapir and Howard Weitzman, representing MJJ Productions and MJJ Ventures, told the BBC: \"We are pleased that the court agreed that Mr Safechuck had no grounds to pursue his lawsuit.\"\n\nMr Safechuck was one of two men who accused the late pop star of abuse in last year's Leaving Neverland documentary.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. James Safechuck (left) and Wade Robson told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire about the abuse in 2019\n\nIn his lawsuit, he said Jackson abused him hundreds of times at his homes and on tour in the late 1980s and early 90s.\n\nMJJ Productions and MJJ Ventures were set up by Jackson to run his career. But in the lawsuit it was claimed: \"The thinly-veiled, covert second purpose of these businesses was to operate as a child sexual abuse operation, specifically designed to locate, attract, lure and seduce child sexual abuse victims.\"\n\nMr Safechuck also featured with Jackson in a Pepsi commercial and often appeared on stage with the singer.\n\nMr Safechuck's lawyer Vince Finaldi told BBC News: \"He was an employee that was working on behalf of them as a dancer and entertainer on the stage with Michael.\n\n\"Because he was a minor, and he was an employee working for them, they had a duty to protect him. That's our argument.\"\n\nCalifornia judge Mark Young disagreed, saying the companies weren't directly responsible for causing emotional distress, and were not able to control Jackson, because he controlled the companies and everyone they employed. Corporations cannot be direct perpetrators, he said.\n\nMr Safechuck, who is seeking unspecified damages, will appeal.\n\nJackson vehemently denied the abuse. Mr Safechuck (a child at the time) reportedly gave a witness statement defending Jackson when allegations against the singer first emerged in 1993.\n\nMr Finaldi is also representing Wade Robson, who appeared in Leaving Neverland too, in a separate lawsuit, which is expected to reach trial next summer.\n\nLeaving Neverland director Dan Reed is reportedly making a sequel about the pair's legal battles. Deadline reported on Wednesday that Jackson's companies had taken legal action against the film-maker.", "Brazil has been conducting trials of the vaccine\n\nTrials of a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University will continue, following a review into the death of a volunteer in Brazil.\n\nBrazil's health authority has given no details about the death, citing confidentiality protocols.\n\nOxford University said a \"careful assessment\" had revealed no safety concerns.\n\nThe BBC understands that the volunteer did not receive the vaccine.\n\nOnly around half the volunteers in the trial are given the actual Oxford University Covid-19 vaccine. The second group are being given an existing licensed vaccine for meningitis.\n\nNeither the participants nor their families know which vaccine they are being given.\n\nThis enables the researchers to compare the results for the two groups in order to measure whether the vaccine is effective.\n\nAstraZeneca said in a statement that it could not comment on individual cases but it \"can confirm that all required review processes have been followed\".\n\n\"All significant medical events are carefully assessed by trial investigators, an independent safety monitoring committee and the regulatory authorities,\" it said. \"These assessments have not led to any concerns about continuation of the ongoing study.\"\n\nThere are high hopes that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine could be one of the first to make it onto the market.\n\nIt had successful phase 1 and 2 testing, while phase 3 testing is being carried out on participants in countries including the UK, Brazil and India.\n\nTrials of the Oxford vaccine were paused last month after a reported side effect in a patient in the UK, but were resumed days later when it was deemed safe to continue.\n\nPhase 3 trials in the US remain on hold while the regulator there conducts its own assessment. A senior official was quoted by Bloomberg on Wednesday as saying he expected US trials to restart later in the week.\n\nBrazil's health authority Anvisa said it was informed of the Brazilian volunteer's death on 19 October.\n\nBrazilian media report that the volunteer was a 28-year-old doctor who died of Covid-19 complications. They say the doctor had worked with infected patients.\n\nThis has not been publicly confirmed by Anvisa.\n\nIn a statement, Oxford University said: \"All significant medical incidents, whether participants are in the control group or the Covid-19 vaccine group, are independently reviewed.\n\n\"The independent review, in addition to the Brazilian regulator, have both recommended that the trial should continue,\" it said.\n\nBrazil has plans to purchase the vaccine if it is approved.\n\nThe country has had nearly 5.3 million confirmed coronavirus cases - the third highest tally in the world after the US and India - and is second only to the US in terms of deaths, with nearly 155,000 registered so far, according to data collated by Johns Hopkins University.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Wednesday evening. We'll have another update for you tomorrow morning.\n\nIt's been another day focused on local coronavirus restrictions in England. South Yorkshire will face the toughest Covid rules from Saturday, with tier three measures for all four of the local authority areas - Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield. Meanwhile, ministers have offered a £60m package to support businesses and employees in Greater Manchester, which is to move into tier three from Friday. And gyms and leisure centres will be able to reopen across Liverpool after the government bowed to pressure to bring it in line with other areas under tier three measures. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has said large parts of England face \"months of prolonged agony\" with no route out of Covid restrictions and inadequate support, but PM Boris Johnson has insisted his regionalised approach to restrictions is working.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. People in Barnsley town centre react to tier three restrictions being announced\n\nBars and restaurants in Scotland's central belt - an area containing about 3.4 million people - are to remain closed for another week after short-term Covid-19 restrictions were extended. They were closed on 9 October as part of what First Minister Nicola Sturgeon called a \"short, sharp action to arrest a worrying increase in infection\". These measures were originally meant to expire on 26 October, but Ms Sturgeon said they would now continue until a new \"strategic framework\" comes into force. Scotland is due to move to a five-tier system of virus alert levels from 2 November. Hospitality venues in other parts of the country can only serve alcohol outdoors.\n\nThe restrictions rollover will continue into the start of November\n\nRoyal Mail is to start collecting parcels and mail from people's homes. The firm is trying to capitalise on a rise in online shopping, which has been accelerated by the coronavirus crisis. Royal Mail has seen parcel deliveries increase in recent years but is still on track to make a loss in 2020. The move to collecting could be beneficial if the company can work out logistical issues, an analyst said. Its Parcel Collect service will be available every day except Sunday, and there will be 72p charge per parcel, plus postage costs. Pre-paid return packages can be collected for 60p per item.\n\nFour university students in Nottingham have been fined £10,000 each after telling police who broke up their house party they were \"spoiling their fun\". Nottingham Trent University said the third-year students involved in the breach of coronavirus restrictions had been suspended. Officers on patrol spotted a party in Lenton on Tuesday night but were told everyone had left. But inside they found more than 30 people hiding and, when challenged, organisers complained they should be having the \"time of their lives\". With the exception of support bubbles, the mixing of households indoors has been banned since Nottingham went into tier two restrictions on 14 October.\n\nThe students were fined after officers spotted a house party in Kimbolton Lane\n\n\"I always wanted to set up my own business, because I needed to have something that was mine,\" says Suzanne Pattinson, 35, from Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. She's managed to do that in lockdown, despite the challenges of childcare during Covid restrictions. She and her husband, who's in the RAF, have two boys, aged two and three. Suzanne was balancing working as a freelance PR consultant with looking after the toddlers at home before the pandemic hit. She was forced to rethink her career goals when the freelance work dried up during lockdown. Read how she set up her own business creating handmade jewellery.\n\nSuzanne set up her own jewellery brand during the coronavirus pandemic\n\nFind more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nPlus, we take a closer look at whether all employees unable to work in tier three areas will get 80% of their wages.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "BBC journalist Martin Bashir is \"seriously unwell\" with complications from coronavirus, the corporation has said.\n\nThe 57-year-old, who made headlines across the world with his 1995 interview with Princess Diana, is currently BBC News religion editor.\n\n\"Everyone at the BBC is wishing him a full recovery,\" a spokeswoman said.\n\nMr Bashir is also known for interviews with pop star Michael Jackson and the suspects in the Stephen Lawrence case.\n\n\"We are sorry to say that Martin is seriously unwell with Covid-19 related complications,\" the BBC spokeswoman said.\n\n\"We'd ask that his privacy, and that of his family, is respected at this time.\"\n\nMr Bashir worked as a BBC news correspondent from 1987 to 1992, before joining the BBC's investigative programme Panorama.\n\nOn that programme in 1995, he interviewed Diana, Princess of Wales, who admitted to having had an affair - and spoke of Prince Charles's relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles, now Duchess of Cornwall.\n\n\"There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,\" she said, in a programme watched by one of the largest-ever audiences for the BBC.\n\nThe interview has seen renewed interest following a Channel 4 documentary examining the story behind Princess Diana's revelations, which was broadcast on Wednesday night.\n\nLater, Mr Bashir worked for Tonight on ITV before moving to the US in 2004, where he hosted ABC's Nightline programme and worked as a news anchor on MSNBC.\n\nHe resigned from MSNBC in 2013 with an apology for calling former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin a \"world-class idiot\".\n\nIn 2016, Mr Bashir rejoined the BBC as religious affairs correspondent. A former student of theology, he covers events in the UK and around the world affecting people of different faiths.", "With tier three restrictions set to be introduced for South Yorkshire from Saturday, people in Barnsley spoke about what they think of the new rules.\n\nPeople had mixed reactions with some saying they were \"worried\" and others saying stricter measures were \"good\" because people were breaking the rules.\n\nThe new restrictions will apply to all four local authority areas in South Yorkshire - Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield.\n\nLabour Mayor Dan Jarvis said the move to tier three followed \"extensive discussions\" with ministers.", "Emergency services were called to The Arcade in Upper Gornal on Tuesday\n\nFifteen people have been treated for breathing difficulties after an unknown substance was sprayed inside branches of Pizza Hut, Tesco and McDonald's.\n\nEmergency services were called to The Arcade in Upper Gornal, Dudley, shortly after 19:00 BST on Tuesday.\n\nOne person was taken to hospital, but none have suffered any lasting effects, West Midlands Police said.\n\nA 20-year-old man has been arrested after he handed himself in at Brierley Hill police station.\n\nWest Midlands Police said it believed the substance to be a type of pepper spray and forensics experts are working to identify it.\n\nPhilip White said he raised the alarm after himself suffering effects\n\nPizza Hut manager Philip White said he raised the alarm after himself suffering difficulties.\n\n\"I went to answer a phone, couldn't actually physically talk to the person who was taking an order, I ran around the back because my throat was just seizing up and I was like I don't know what is going on.\n\n\"I ran around the back to grab a bottle of water as soon as I came back I tried to work again, inhaled it again, then I ran around the front and was nearly throwing and it happened to two other of my colleagues as well.\"\n\nWest Midlands Ambulance Service said 14 people were discharged at the scene while one man was taken to Russells Hall Hospital for further assessment.\n\nA Tesco spokesperson said its Dudley Gornal Express store was temporarily closed for a deep clean but has reopened, and staff are helping the police and fire service with their investigation.\n\nPizza Hut said it was working with the relevant authorities.\n\nThe McDonald's branch was closed temporarily but reopened on Wednesday morning \"following an extensive clean\", a spokesman said.\n\n\"We continue to assist the police with their investigation,\" he added.\n\nOfficers have urged anyone with information to come forward.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Sadiq Khan said the curfew does not \"make sense\"\n\nThe 10pm curfew should be scrapped in London to help venues deal with Tier 2 coronavirus restrictions, the Mayor of London has said.\n\nSince 27 September all pubs, bars and restaurants in England must shut no later than 10pm.\n\nCurrent restrictions also prevent Londoners from meeting friends or family in pubs and restaurants.\n\nSadiq Khan said the curfew does not \"make sense\" and extending hospitality opening hours will boost cash flow.\n\nIn a statement, Mr Khan said: \"Now London and other parts of the country have moved into Tier 2 the current 10pm curfew policy makes even less sense and should be scrapped.\n\nScrapping the policy \"would allow more sittings of single households in restaurants throughout the evening\", Mr Khan said.\n\nThis would \"boost cash flow at a time when venues need all the support they can get\".\n\n\"Ministers must give businesses the support they need to survive while restrictions remain in place,\" Mr Khan added.\n\nA legal challenge is under way against the 10pm curfew\n\nUnder the Tier 2 restrictions, household mixing is still permitted outside, including at pubs and restaurants with outdoor seating, although the rule of six applies.\n\nThe 10pm curfew is subject to a legal challenge, led by nightclub chain owner Jeremy Joseph.\n\nLast week, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the curfew was a \"matter of policy choice\" rather than driven by scientific advice.\n\nHe claimed there is \"direct and proximate evidence\" for the positive impact of the limits on pubs and restaurants, citing a fall in alcohol-related A&E admissions late at night.\n\nBut Mr Hancock said the government's desire to protect education and work \"as much as is possible\" meant they had to take measures against socialising to try to slow the spread of Covid-19 transmission.\n\nThe Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy said: \"The restrictions for pubs and bars, which the mayor originally called for, are carefully judged to achieve the maximum reduction in the R number with the minimum impact on jobs and livelihoods. However, we keep all measures under review.\"", "The fiancee of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has filed a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia's crown prince, accusing him of ordering the killing.\n\nHatice Cengiz and the rights group Khashoggi formed before his death are pursuing Mohammed bin Salman and more than 20 others for unspecified damages.\n\nKhashoggi was killed by a team of Saudi agents during a visit to the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2018.\n\nThe crown prince has denied ordering the killing.\n\nKhashoggi was a prominent critic of the Saudi government and had been living in self-imposed exile in the US, frequently writing for the Washington Post.\n\nIn the civil lawsuit filed in Washington DC on Tuesday, Turkish citizen Ms Cengiz claims personal injury and financial losses over Khashoggi's death.\n\nKhashoggi's human rights group, Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn), says its operations were hampered.\n\nThe lawsuit alleges that Khashoggi was murdered \"pursuant to a directive of defendant Mohammed bin Salman\".\n\n\"The objective of the murder was clear - to halt Mr Khashoggi's advocacy in the United States... for democratic reform in the Arab world,\" the lawsuit says.\n\nIn a video conference on Tuesday, lawyers for Ms Cengiz and Dawn said the focus of the lawsuit was to have a US court hold the crown prince liable for the killing and to obtain documents that reveal the truth, the Washington Post newspaper reports.\n\n\"Jamal believed anything was possible in America and I place my trust in the American civil justice system to obtain a measure of justice and accountability,\" Ms Cengiz said in a statement.\n\nA prominent Saudi journalist, Khashoggi covered major stories, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the rise of the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, for various Saudi news organisations.\n\nFor decades, the 59-year-old was close to the Saudi royal family and also served as an adviser to the government.\n\nBut he fell out of favour and went into self-imposed exile in the US in 2017. From there, he wrote a monthly column in the Washington Post in which he criticised the policies of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the son of King Salman and Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler.\n\nIn his first column for the Post in September 2017, Khashoggi said he had feared being arrested in an apparent crackdown on dissent overseen by the prince.\n\nHe was last seen entering the Saudi consulate on 2 October 2018 to obtain papers he needed in order to marry Ms Cengiz.\n\nAfter listening to purported audio recordings of conversations inside the consulate made by Turkish intelligence, UN special rapporteur Agnes Callamard concluded that Khashoggi was \"brutally slain\" that day.\n\nThe Saudi public prosecution concluded that the murder was not premeditated.\n\nIt said the killing was ordered by the head of a \"negotiations team\" sent to Istanbul to bring Khashoggi back to the kingdom \"by means of persuasion\" or, if that failed, \"by force\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe journalist was forcibly restrained after a struggle and injected with a large amount of a drug, resulting in an overdose that led to his death, according to the Saudi prosecution. His body was then dismembered and handed over to a local \"collaborator\" outside the consulate. The remains were never found.\n\nTurkish prosecutors concluded that Khashoggi was suffocated almost as soon as he entered the consulate, and that his body was destroyed.\n\nIn December 2019, the Riyadh Criminal Court sentenced five people to death for \"committing and directly participating in the murder of the victim\". Three others were handed prison sentences totalling 24 years for \"covering up this crime and violating the law\".\n\nThree people were found not guilty, including Saudi Arabia's former deputy intelligence chief, Ahmad Asiri.\n\nSaud al-Qahtani, a former senior adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed, was investigated by the Saudi public prosecution but not charged.\n\nLast month, state media reported that the five death sentences were commuted to 20-year jail terms.", "A two-week extension to TfL's emergency bailout was secured on Friday\n\nBoris Johnson has claimed Transport for London (TfL) was \"effectively bankrupted\" even before Covid-19.\n\nThe comments come after Sadiq Khan accused the government of \"draconian\" demands in return for a second bailout.\n\nBut the prime minster said any need to increase fares was \"entirely the responsibility\" of the London mayor.\n\nMr Khan responded by calling the PM a \"liar\" and said he had cut the operations deficit, left by Mr Johnson when he was mayor in 2016, by 71%.\n\nA spokesperson for 10 Downing Street told the BBC Mr Johnson \"stands by his comments in the House of Commons\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sadiq Khan rejects Boris Johnson’s claims in the Commons that TfL was “effectively bankrupt”, saying the PM had “lied”\n\nThe mayor told the BBC: \"It gives me no pleasure in saying so, but our prime minister today, on the floor of the House of Commons, has lied.\n\n\"We as a transport authority rely hugely on transport fares from Londoners, and more than 90% of that has dried up, which is why we need a Covid bailout from the government.\n\n\"What the government is doing instead is punishing Londoners by imposing all sorts of draconian conditions.\"\n\nThe mayor previously said ministers aimed to impose a \"triple whammy\" of measures in return for rescue funding to cover the losses incurred through Covid-19.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson says any measures needed to rescue the finances of TfL are “entirely down” to the Mayor of London\n\nThe proposals include higher council taxes, an expanded congestion charge zone and a hike in Tube and bus fares.\n\nMr Johnson told the Commons on Wednesday: \"The current mayor of London had effectively bankrupted TfL before coronavirus had even hit and left a massive black hole in its finances.\n\n\"Any need to make up that deficit is entirely down to him, it is entirely his responsibility.\n\n\"Any expansion of the congestion charge or any other measure taken to improve the finances of TfL are entirely the responsibility of the bankrupt current Labour mayor of London.\"\n\nThe 10 Downing Street spokesperson said TfL's debt has increased 30% since Mr Khan became mayor.\n\n\"TfL debt is now a record high of £12bn and now spends £402m a year on debt interest,\" the spokesperson said.\n\nThe Department for Transport said talks over a settlement were continuing.\n\nSadiq Khan said the proposal \"singles out Londoners for punishment\"\n\nLabour's deputy leader Angela Rayner said: \"We now have a prime minister so determined to punish a Labour mayor that he wants to whack a transport tax on his own constituents.\n\n\"Yet still they refuse to take the decisive national action needed; instead, they have tried to play people off against each other. Divide and misrule.\"\n\nMr Khan told a TfL board meeting: \"Now is not the time for the government to play party political games or be vindictive towards London. This is far too serious a matter.\n\n\"I intend to stand firm and fight for a fair deal for Londoners and do what's right for our city.\"\n\nMr Khan said he intends to stand firm and fight for a fair deal for Londoners\n\nTfL bosses have asked for a £5.7bn package to prop up services for the next 18 months, after passenger numbers and revenues plummeted in the aftermath the March lockdown.\n\nIn May, the government granted TfL £1.6bn in emergency funding to keep services running. Then on Friday, a last-minute extension of that bailout was secured to cover another two weeks.\n\nAs part of the package of new measures, according to Mr Khan's office, ministers want to:\n\nUnion leaders have criticised the proposals, with some highlighting what they say is a discrepancy in the government's treatment of private rail companies and TfL.\n\nThe virus has ripped the heart out of TfL's finances - with fares down 90%.\n\nThe government is adopting a tough negotiating stance with the mayor on how money can be recouped and transport should be funded now in the absence of usual income.\n\nThere's a condition that Sadiq Khan extend the congestion charge zone to within the north and south circular.\n\nHe's being pressured to agree to big fare hikes and removal of concessionary travel for children and pensioners.\n\nA plan has now emerged for a precept - an extra component to the council tax as exists currently for the police.\n\nIt would mean the cost of public transport spread across all Londoners whether they use it or not - but apparently no charge for the millions of users who live outside the capital.\n\nThere's been a ministerial threat to take direct control of TfL, and there are ominous rumblings from the unions.\n\nA pugnacious and provocative approach is emerging towards Labour-run devolved administrations.\n\nFor Boris Johnson, metro mayors are currently proving the real enemy.\n\nRail, Maritime and Transport union general secretary Mick Cash said: \"It is appalling that the government are targeting staff pensions amongst a range of other savage measures in this short-term funding deal.\n\n\"I put them on notice that any attempt to hack away at our members' pension rights will be met by an all-out campaign of political and industrial resistance.\"\n\nA Department for Transport spokeswoman said: \"We have agreed an extension to the support period and to roll over unspent funding from the Transport for London Extraordinary Funding Agreement, allowing further time for negotiations for a new settlement.\n\n\"These discussions will ensure London has a safe, reliable network. It would be inappropriate to disclose further details at this stage.\"", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Prosecutor Jean-François Ricard said the two students had described Samuel Paty to the killer\n\nTwo students were paid to identify a teacher to the man who beheaded him last Friday in an attack that shocked France, prosecutors have alleged.\n\nSamuel Paty was targeted close to his school near Paris for showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.\n\nHis killer, 18-year-old Abdullakh Anzorov, was shot dead by police shortly after the attack.\n\nOn Wednesday, prosecutors said Anzorov had paid two teenage students around €300 (£270; $355) to identify Mr Paty.\n\nThe killer told the students he wanted to \"film the teacher [and] make him apologise for the cartoon of the Prophet [Muhammad]\", anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-François Ricard said at a press conference.\n\nHe said Anzorov had told them he wanted \"to humiliate him, to hit him\".\n\nThe students, aged 14 and 15, are alleged to have described Mr Paty, 47, to Anzorov and stayed with him for more than two hours outside the school until the teacher appeared, Mr Ricard said.\n\nThe pair, who cannot be named for legal reasons, are two of seven people the French authorities are seeking to prosecute over the brutal attack.\n\nThe prosecutor also said there was a \"direct causal link\" between the killing and an online hate campaign that was orchestrated against Mr Paty.\n\nThe campaign was allegedly launched by the father of one of his pupils. The man, 48, who has been named in French media only as Brahim C, is accused of issuing a \"fatwa\" against the teacher.\n\nOn Wednesday, Mr Ricard confirmed reports that Brahim C, who is also facing prosecution, had exchanged a number of text messages with Mr Paty's killer prior to the attack.\n\nSamuel Paty, a well-liked teacher, had faced threats for showing the cartoons\n\nHe also posted videos denouncing Mr Paty after he showed the cartoons in two lessons about free speech earlier this month\n\nBut Mr Ricard said the father's anger and statements in the videos were based on \"inaccurate facts\" because his daughter had not been in the relevant lessons.\n\nThe prosecutor's revelations come ahead of a national memorial service in Paris for Mr Paty.\n\nPresident Emmanuel Macron will attend the event at the Sorbonne University on Wednesday evening, along with the teacher's family and some 400 guests.\n\nHe is expected to posthumously give Mr Paty France's highest award, the Legion d'Honneur,\n\nEarlier, the president held a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin and urged co-operation in fighting terrorism. Mr Putin described the attack as a \"barbarous murder\".\n\nMr Paty's killer, Anzorov, was born in Moscow and his family is from Russia's Muslim-majority Chechnya region in the North Caucasus. He had lived in France since 2008.\n\nMr Macron said he wanted to see a \"strengthening of Franco-Russian co-operation in the fight against terrorism and illegal immigration\", the French presidency said.\n\nRussia has played down any association with the attacker. \"This person had lived in France for the past 12 years,\" a spokesman for the Russian embassy in Paris told the Tass news agency on Saturday.\n\nPolice have raided some 40 homes following the attack, and the government also ordered a mosque to close for six months.\n\nThe Pantin mosque, just north of Paris, was closed after it emerged it had shared videos on Facebook calling for action against Mr Paty.\n\nIn one clip, posted just days before the attack, it also shared his school's address.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. French minister: Lessons on freedom of expression will continue\n\nThe mosque later expressed \"regret\" over the videos, which it has deleted, and condemned the teacher's killing.\n\nMeanwhile, mosques in the south-western cities of Bordeaux and Beziers were put under police protection after they reported threats.\n\n\"Such actions are unacceptable on the soil of the Republic,\" Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said in a tweet on Wednesday.\n\nOn Tuesday, President Macron said the Sheikh Yassin Collective - an Islamist group named after the founder of the Palestinian militant group Hamas - would be outlawed for being \"directly involved\" in the killing.\n\nHe said the ban was a way of helping France's Muslim community from the influence of radicalism.\n\nMr Ricard said Mr Paty had been the target of threats since he showed the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class on 6 October.\n\nThe history and geography teacher advised Muslim students to leave the room if they thought they might be offended.\n\nDepictions of the Prophet Muhammad can cause serious offence to Muslims because Islamic tradition explicitly forbids images of Muhammad and Allah (God).\n\nThe issue is particularly sensitive in France because of the decision by satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.\n\nA trial is currently under way over the killing of 12 people by Islamist extremists at the magazine's offices in 2015 following their publication.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Rallies in Paris, Toulouse, Lyon and other French cities in support of Samuel Paty\n\nFrance's Muslim community, which is Europe's largest, comprises about 10% of the population.\n\nSome French Muslims say they are frequent targets of racism and discrimination because of their faith - an issue that has long caused tension in the country.", "Marcus Rashford's campaign over the summer forced the government to U-turn on free school meals\n\nConservative MPs have criticised a campaign for free school meals to be offered over the holidays.\n\nLast week England footballer Marcus Rashford launched a petition urging government to make the change.\n\nSome Tory MPs criticised the campaign, with Brendan Clarke-Smith calling for less \"celebrity virtue signalling on Twitter\".\n\nBut five Tory MPs rebelled against the government to support extending free school meals over the holidays.\n\nMr Rashford has argued that the number of children with little access to food had grown due to families losing income amid Covid-19 restriction measures.\n\nMPs voted to reject Labour's motion - which called for free school meals to be offered over the school holidays until Easter 2021 - by 322 votes to 261.\n\nFollowing the vote, Mr Rashford issued a statement that said: \"A significant number of children are going to bed tonight not only hungry but feeling like they do not matter because of comments that have been made today.\n\n\"We must stop stigmatising, judging and pointing fingers - our views are being clouded by political affiliation.\"\n\nEarlier on Wednesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he would not change his policy on free school meals, arguing that poor families were supported by the benefits system.\n\nAt Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Johnson told MPs: \"We support kids of low incomes in school and we will continue to do so.\n\nBut he added that the government would \"continue to use the benefit system and all the systems of income support to support young people and children throughout the holidays as well.\"\n\nEarlier this year, a campaign by Mr Rashford pushed the government into a dramatic U-turn when it agreed to extend free school meals over the summer holidays.\n\nThe political debate on how to deal with coronavirus has moved a lot since the summer and we're seeing a different tone from the government.\n\nIt's now clear that the virus isn't going away for some time yet and after a summer of big spending, the government seems less willing to put money into one-off temporary solutions.\n\nThat feels like part of a broader shift by the Conservatives to try to move away from a fire-fighting \"government-by-bailout\" approach to something more sustainable.\n\nBut there is a big risk in applying that strategy to this issue in particular.\n\nFirstly, nobody wants to see children going hungry over half term or Christmas, so the government needs to be confident they won't slip through the net.\n\nSecondly, Marcus Rashford's high profile campaign means a lot of people are watching.\n\nCompared with some other coronavirus spending, extending free school meals wouldn't cost that much.\n\nSo the risk for the government is of a public backlash or as one Conservative MP put it to me, a bit more bluntly, \"another self-inflicted and entirely predictable wound\".\n\nResponding to the defeat, Labour's shadow education secretary Kate Green said: \"Boris Johnson and the Conservatives have badly let down more than one million children and their families.\n\n\"No child should go hungry over the holidays, but the government is blocking the action needed to prevent this.\n\n\"We pay tribute to Marcus Rashford and others for shining a spotlight on this incredibly important issue. This campaign is not over and the government must reconsider.\"\n\nLabour point to a \"double whammy\" of challenges as the furlough job support scheme comes to an end and coronavirus restrictions increase in areas which already have high levels of poverty.\n\nAnd the party claims nearly 900,000 children in such Covid hotspots will go hungry, unless the government extends a food scheme.\n\nChief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group Alison Garnham said: \"We've reached a low point if in the midst of a pandemic we decide we can't make sure children in the lowest income families have a nutritious meal in the middle of the day.\"\n\nSome Conservative MPs also criticised the government's approach.\n\nA debate on free school meals took place on Wednesday\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Harlow MP Robert Halfon said: \"I'm not arguing it should go on forever, but the free school meals should at least go on at least until we are out of the coronavirus [pandemic], we hope, God willing, by next spring.\"\n\nMr Halfon added that there was significant support for extending the scheme among his fellow Conservative MPs.\n\nAnd former Conservative former minister, Paul Maynard, said he was \"very deeply disappointed\" by the government's response.\n\nFive Conservative MPs - Caroline Ansell, Mr Halfon, Jason McCartney, Anne Marie Morris and Holly Mumby-Croft - voted to support Labour's proposal.\n\nBut other Conservative MPs criticised the Labour motion.\n\nBassetlaw MP Mr Clarke-Smith asked: \"Where is the slick PR campaign encouraging absent parents to take some responsibility for their children?\n\n\"I do not believe in nationalising children, instead we need to get back to the idea of taking responsibility.\n\n\"This means less celebrity virtue signalling on Twitter by proxy and more action to tackle the real causes of child poverty.\"\n\nDavid Simmonds, MP for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, said: \"What does it say about the opposition's priorities that all of their interests are simply swept aside in favour of currying favour with wealth and power and celebrity status, spending taxpayers' money to curry favour with celebrity status, wealth and power?\n\n\"Now I have no doubt that Mr Rashford is an expert in his own experience, but we should not forget that the experiences he so movingly described took place under a Labour government then supposedly at the peak of its powers in tackling child poverty in this country.\"\n\nThe Welsh government, which recently ordered a three-week lockdown, announced a move to offer food support to struggling families until next spring. Northern Ireland has also extended support for its children to a lesser degree.", "The claim: Employees unable to work in tier 3 areas will get a combination of Job Support Scheme and Universal Credit, which will mean they get 80% of their wages.\n\nVerdict: While that will be the case for some workers, especially those on very low incomes, some workers will get less than 80% under the new scheme.\n\nThe prime minister has repeatedly claimed that employees of closed businesses in tier 3 areas will get 80% of their income.\n\nThis is important because the furlough scheme, which closes at the end of October, made sure such workers received 80% of their wages up to a maximum of £2,500.\n\nBut the Job Support Scheme, which will replace it in November, will provide 67% of normal salary up to a maximum of £2,100 a month.\n\nGreater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and several MPs have called for the support to be increased to 80%.\n\nBut Boris Johnson claims that the addition of Universal Credit (UC) means that it is already worth 80%.\n\n\"Combine the Universal Credit with the Job Support Scheme that we've just announced and workers will be getting 80% of their existing salary,\" he said at Prime Minister's Questions on 21 October.\n\nWhether a worker gets Universal Credit on top of the job support scheme depends on a number of factors such as the level of their income, whether they have savings and whether they have children.\n\nWhen the prime minister made the claim on 16 October he specified that he was talking about those on low incomes - clearly those on higher incomes will not qualify for Universal Credit and may be above the £2,100 a month limit for the Job Support Scheme.\n\nIt is certainly the case that some workers on low incomes will get at least 80% of their usual wages. In particular, people whose wages were low enough for them to qualify for Universal Credit before their employers were forced to close, are likely to get at least 80% of their wages.\n\nBut it is also the case that some workers will get less than 80%.\n\nWe asked the Department for Work and Pensions how the prime minister had reached this figure and were told: \"Those on low incomes getting the full entitlement [of Universal Credit] will receive at least 80% of their normal income.\"\n\nThe DWP said that the full entitlement meant the amount that you would get without reductions for having savings.\n\nThe point is that the prime minister failed to mention those who do not get UC at all, or only get a bit of it, who would receive less than 80% of their usual income.\n\nAn example comes from from the Institute for Fiscal Studies - a single person with no children who owns their own home and earns £11,000 a year, would be entitled to a bit of UC if they were put on the Job Support Scheme, but not much, so they would end up on 73% of their usual income.\n\nAlso, the amount of UC you are eligible for starts reducing once you have £6,000 in savings and a worker who has £16,000 in savings will not qualify for any UC, regardless of any other factors. So such a worker would not get 80%.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Nadia Sapphire was \"harassed and groomed\" as a teenager\n\n\"Everyone knew when I turned 16... they all pulled things out [of a hat] to see who would get to sleep with me first.\"\n\nNadia Sapphire from Cardiff began wrestling when she was 14. At 15 she was drawn into an intimate relationship with an older wrestler. By 16 she was \"too anxious\" to continue training in Wales.\n\nShe is one of a growing number of female wrestlers speaking out about abuse and misogyny in the industry.\n\nWrestling fan and Pontypridd MP Alex Davies-Jones has started a parliamentary inquiry to investigate its lack of regulation and governance.\n\n\"Looking back, I can see I was obviously harassed… and I was groomed,\" says Nadia.\n\n\"[Back] then I had all these guys messaging me in Wales - if anything I felt loved, I felt special.\"\n\nNadia says at first the attention made her feel special\n\nNadia, from Cardiff, now 29, fell in love with wrestling from a young age and had ambitions to become a top UK wrestler.\n\nAfter joining a training school as a teenager, she says she received numerous messages from fellow wrestlers - some teenagers themselves but others 10 to 15 years older.\n\nShe says low self-esteem meant she was initially flattered by the attention but after becoming \"sexually involved\" with a wrestler in his twenties, she was left \"embarrassed\" that her reputation had been tarnished.\n\n\"Even though I was underage... I was a 'ring rat' which is a term that's used in wrestling a hell of a lot... it's like a groupie,\" she explained.\n\nNadia said she felt like there was no-one she could speak to inside or outside the sport.\n\n\"I felt like I couldn't go to my mum because she would have stopped me wrestling... and like the people in wrestling I didn't want to say to them I'm being called a ring rat because I'd be scared they'd believe it\".\n\nNadia is one of many female wrestlers who joined the SpeakingOut campaign this summer.\n\nNadia says wrestlers \"pulled things out of a hat\" to decide who would sleep with her at 16\n\nIt is described as the wrestling industry's MeToo moment with many sharing their personal experiences online.\n\nMs Davies-Jones said she saw the \"horrendous stories\" on social media and wanted to use her position to help.\n\nShe has now launched a parliamentary inquiry to find out \"how we can best improve the industry to make it better, safer\".\n\nThe MP says she has been \"overwhelmed\" with the response.\n\n\"It's truly shocking - some of the stories we've heard are from women as young as 13, 14 who were threatened with rape and sexual violence if they wanted to wrestle,\" she said.\n\n\"We heard stories of male wrestlers competing to see who would be the first to take a female wrestler's virginity for example - truly harrowing tales.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMs Davies-Jones, who is co-chairwoman of the group, said she did not want to \"pre-empt\" the inquiry but the evidence suggests a regulatory governing body for the industry is needed.\n\n\"I think the problem we've got with wrestling is that it falls in that grey area... it's not classed as a sport, it's not really classed as a performance... and it's been left to run itself,\" she explained.\n\nThe MP said people from all aspects of the industry had contacted the inquiry.\n\nIn the wake of the SpeakingOut movement, several promoters and training schools in Wales have voiced their support for the female wrestlers affected and called for an overhaul of safeguarding in the industry.\n\nSome UK promoters also paused their lives shows.\n\nProgress Wrestling said: \"We've all got to be great for this industry to work and to prevent another SpeakingOut movement happening. Because if we're on the same level, we're on the same page, it's going to be safer for everyone.\"\n\nRevolution Pro Wrestling chief executive Andy Quildan said it wanted \"an independent body and we want to be held accountable\".\n\n\"British wrestling needs to focus on the word 'professional' in professional wrestling. In terms of fundamentally changing people's mindsets it's a change that needs to be made from the grassroots up,\" he said.\n\nFor Nadia, her safe place was finding a new training school in Swindon when she was 16.\n\nShe is now back home in Wales but still feels \"anxious\" about training here.\n\n\"My wrestling career is nearly over now... I'm not going to go to the places I wanted to but if this can help other girls who want to pursue wrestling in the future and if this can change something, I may as well speak about it.\"\n\nInformation and advice is available from the BBC Action Line", "More than 100,000 women have had their clothes digitally removed from images\n\nFaked nude images of more than 100,000 women have been created from social media pictures and shared online, according to a new report.\n\nClothes are digitally removed from pictures of women by Artificial Intelligence (AI), and spread on the messaging app Telegram.\n\nSome of those targeted \"appeared to be underage\", the report by intelligence company Sensity said.\n\nBut those running the service said it was simply \"entertainment\".\n\nThe BBC has tested the software and received poor results.\n\nSensity claim the technology used is a \"deepfake bot\".\n\nDeepfakes are computer-generated, often realistic images and video, based on a real template. One of its uses has been to create faked pornographic video clips of celebrities.\n\nBut Sensity's chief executive Giorgio Patrini said the shift to using photos of private individuals is relatively new.\n\n\"Having a social media account with public photos is enough for anyone to become a target,\" he warned.\n\nThe artificial intelligence-powered bot lives inside a Telegram private messaging channel. Users can send the bot a photo of a woman, and it will digitally remove her clothes in minutes, at no cost.\n\nThe BBC tested multiple images, all with the subjects' consent, and none were completely realistic - our results included a photo of a woman with a belly button on her diaphragm.\n\nA similar app was shut down last year, but it is believed there are cracked versions of the software in circulation.\n\nThe administrator running the service, known only as \"P\" said: \"I don't care that much. This is entertainment that does not carry violence.\n\n\"No one will blackmail anyone with this, since the quality is unrealistic.\"\n\nHe also said the team looks at what photos are shared, and \"when we see minors we block the user for good.\"\n\nIllustrations from the report show how messaging the bot will result in a modified version being sent back\n\nBut the decision on whether to share the photo with others is up to whoever used the bot to create it in the first place, he said.\n\nDefending its relative level of harm, he added: \"There are wars, diseases, many bad things that are harmful in the world.\" He has also claimed he will soon remove all of the images.\n\nTelegram has not responded to a request for comment.\n\nSensity reported that between July 2019 and 2020, approximately 104,852 women have been targeted and had fake naked images of them shared publicly.\n\nIts investigation found that some of the images appeared underage, \"suggesting that some users were primarily using the bot to generate and share paedophilic content.\"\n\nSensity said the bot has had significant advertising on the Russian social media site VK, and a survey on the platform showed that most users were from Russia and ex-USSR countries.\n\nBut VK said: \"It doesn't tolerate such content or links on the platform and blocks communities that distribute them.\"\n\nTelegram was officially banned in Russia until earlier this year.\n\n\"Many of these websites or apps do not hide or operate underground, because they are not strictly outlawed,\" said Sensity's Giorgio Patrini.\n\n\"Until that happens, I am afraid it will only get worse.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Actress Bella Thorne opens up about her experience of deepfake abuse\n\nThe authors of the report say they have shared all their findings with Telegram, VK and relevant law enforcement agencies, but have not had a response.\n\nNina Schick, author of the book Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse, said deepfake creators were all over the world, and that legal protections were \"playing catch-up\" with the technology.\n\n\"It's only a matter of time until that content becomes more sophisticated. The number of deepfake porn videos seems to be doubling every six months,\" she said.\n\n\"Our legal systems are not fit for purpose on this issue. Society is changing quicker than we can imagine due to these exponential technological advances, and we as a society haven't decided how to regulate this.\n\n\"It's devastating, for victims of fake porn. It can completely upend their life because they feel violated and humiliated.\"\n\nLast year the US state of Virginia became one of the first places to outlaw deepfakes\n\nThe current UK law around fake nude images has recently been criticised for being \"inconsistent, out-of-date and confusing\" in a university report.\n\nDespite progress on issues like revenge porn and upskirting, \"there remain many glaring gaps in the law\", says Lucy Hadley of the Women's Aid charity.\n\nWhile these statistics show how widespread deep-fake images can be, it is not currently a specific offence.\n\nThe government has instructed the Law Commission to review the law around the issue in England and Wales. Its findings are due in 2021.", "Dr Starkey said he had made \"a serious error for which I have already paid a significant price\"\n\nPolice have dropped their investigation into an interview in which historian Dr David Starkey made controversial comments about slavery.\n\nDr Starkey made the remarks on YouTube to conservative commentator Darren Grimes, who was also investigated.\n\nThe historian accused the police of a \"misconceived, oppressive\" attempt to curtail freedom of expression.\n\nHe has previously apologised for saying in June that slavery was not genocide because \"so many damn blacks\" survived.\n\n\"It was a serious error for which I have already paid a significant price,\" he said last week.\n\n\"I did not, however, intend to stir up racial hatred and there was nothing about the circumstances of the broadcast which made it likely to do so.\"\n\nThe Metropolitan Police opened the investigation at the end of September, almost three months after an allegation of a public order offence was passed to them by Durham Police.\n\nLast week, the Met said a senior officer had been appointed to review the investigation.\n\nIn a statement on Wednesday, Cdr Paul Brogden said: \"It is the duty of police to assess and, if appropriate, fully investigate alleged offences and the public would expect us to investigate an allegation of this nature.\n\n\"We conducted initial inquiries to establish the full circumstances and sought early advice from the CPS. Having had the opportunity to review this, it is no longer proportionate that this investigation continues.\n\n\"We have made direct contact with the individuals involved and updated them on this decision.\"\n\nIn response, Dr Starkey said: \"The investigation should never of course have begun. From the beginning it was misconceived, oppressive and designed to misuse the criminal law to curtail the proper freedom of expression and debate.\n\n\"This freedom is our birthright; and it is more important than ever at this critical juncture in our nation's history.\" The outcome was also \"a personal vindication\", he added.\n\nWriting on Twitter, Mr Grimes described it as a \"vexatious charge\" that had involved the \"unprecedented use of the Public Order Act to regulate speech & debate\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Darren Grimes This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nDuring the original discussion, Dr Starkey told Mr Grimes that slavery \"was not genocide\" because \"otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or Britain would there? An awful lot of them survived.\"\n\nThe subsequent outcry led Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam College, Canterbury Christ Church University, The Mary Rose Trust and publisher HarperCollins to cut ties with him.", "Boris Johnson's allies blamed Andy Burnham's \"pride\" for the failure to reach a deal\n\nAfter Monday's will-they-won't-they and political tit-for-tat, the back-and-forth between the Westminster government and the leaders of Greater Manchester is at an end.\n\nBut it's a messy one, and a politically risky one for them both. And, given what could be at stake, a situation that already looks like a political failure.\n\nTuesday started with more conversations between the two sides - actually, this time, starting to talk in detail about the money.\n\nGreater Manchester was offered £60m from central government to help support businesses under the new Tier 3 limits, the BBC understands.\n\nBut in a conversation with the prime minister, Mayor Andy Burnham suggested it was not possible to accept less than £65m.\n\nGreater Manchester leaders originally submitted a request for £90m, which had been costed by a former Treasury official. On Tuesday morning, they discussed £75m with government officials, which would have covered the period until the end of the financial year.\n\nAndy Burnham's team accused the PM of \"trying to grind us into submission\"\n\nIt's understood Boris Johnson and Mr Burnham themselves discussed a figure of £60m but were unable to agree.\n\nMinisters were reluctant to set a precedent of giving one region more proportionately than another, especially given ongoing talks with several other parts of the country which could also face tougher restrictions.\n\nA Greater Manchester source said: \"We had costed what people needed. Rather than give us what people needed, they were only willing to give us what they would offer.\"\n\nBut government sources have suggested Mr Burnham was intransigent, with one saying: \"Other local leaders in GM were more reasonable and constructive, but Burnham was too proud to make a deal.\"\n\nIn response, a Greater Manchester source said there had been \"unanimity\" and accused the government of \"trying to grind us into submission\".\n\nIt is now not clear what financial support the region will receive.\n\nSo after 10 days of talks (of a kind) and billions spent during this crisis, it is quite something that the deal fell over a gap of £5m - a figure not disputed by either side.", "'The only wasted vote is the one never cast'\n\nBrandon Swearengin is a law student. He has worked for state government officials and ran earlier this year for a local school board seat in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and will vote for the Libertarian Party nominee in the upcoming election. Why does this election matter to you? This election matters to me because political power at all levels of government is up for grabs. I feel that many people overemphasize the presidential election. Though the Executive does have considerable powers, many of those powers, like war powers and regulation-making for example, are only exercised by virtue of congressional enactment. The federal government also has less impact in the day-to-day lives of everyday Americans than state and local government. So while many Americans are paying close attention to the presidential race, I’m more interested in my state legislative/judicial, county commissioner, and city council races as well as in competitive congressional elections around the country. Why do you support your chosen candidate? In the presidential election, I’m voting for the Libertarian Party nominee, Jo Jorgensen. I’m a registered Libertarian voter, and I strongly agree with roughly 80% of her campaign platform. I’m opposed to the de-facto two-party system, I want a smaller federal government in favor of stronger states’ rights, and I refuse to vote for a “lesser of two evils” between the major party nominees. Many Americans will make the fallacious statement that voting for a third party is a “wasted vote,” but my response is that the only wasted vote is the one never cast. Brandon is a member of our US election voter panel. You'll hear more from him, and many of our other voters, throughout the week.\n• We want to hear from you -what questions do you have about the US election?\n• In five words, tell us what's at stake in this election.", "Spain is the sixth nation worldwide to record more than one million cases\n\nSpain has recorded more than one million coronavirus cases, becoming the first western European country to pass that landmark figure.\n\nOn Wednesday the country reported 16,973 infections and 156 deaths in the previous 24 hours.\n\nSince its first diagnosed case on 31 January, Spain has now recorded a total of 1,005,295 infections.\n\nIt is the sixth nation worldwide to report one million cases after the US, India, Brazil, Russia and Argentina.\n\nEurope has seen a surge in new infections over the last few months, forcing governments to bring in strict new regulations to try and control outbreaks and ensure hospitals do not become overwhelmed.\n\nSpain was hit hard by coronavirus in the first months of the pandemic, and brought in some of the strictest measures to tackle it - including banning children from going outside.\n\nLike most European countries, the country lessened its regulations as case numbers dropped. Politicians highlighted the need to bring back tourists as a way to boost the struggling economy.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nBut by the end of August new daily case numbers were rising by 10,000 a day. Hospital admissions have ticked up by 20% in the past two weeks alone, while deaths have also begun to rise, with the toll climbing by 218 on Tuesday.\n\nIn total, 34,366 Covid-related deaths have been recorded.\n\nLawmakers however are bitterly divided over how to handle the situation. Politicians in the national parliament were debating a no-confidence motion in Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Wednesday filed by the far-right Vox Party, while central government has clashed repeatedly with regional leaders over how best to proceed.\n\nEarlier this month, Madrid's centre-right authorities successfully had a partial lockdown imposed on the capital overturned in court. But the Spanish government then ordered a 15-day state of emergency in the city.\n\nThe health minister will meet with regional leaders on Thursday to discuss next steps.", "A major plank of the UK's strategy for removing failed migrants has been ruled illegal because it prevents the courts from considering their cases.\n\nIn a significant ruling, the Court of Appeal said the policy risked removing people from the UK even if they had a right to be in the country.\n\nThe policy has been used in 40,000 removal cases.\n\nCampaigners who brought the challenge said the Home Office had endangered lives by short-cutting the law.\n\nThe unanimous judgment against the Home Office was taken by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett, and two other senior judges.\n\nIt's not clear whether ministers will attempt to go to the Supreme Court but a Home Office spokesman said it is going to reform a failing immigration system.\n\nThe controversial policy which has been ruled illegal was introduced in 2015 in an attempt to prevent last-minute applications to stop removals - sometimes at the steps of the plane.\n\nIt has been suspended for 18 months during the legal battle. Removals have been carrying on under a far slower and complicated procedure that allows more time for appeals.\n\nUnder the 2015 policy, officials told failed applicants - whether they were asylum seekers, economic migrants or people making other claims - that they had 72 hours to make final representations. After that, they could be flown out of the UK, without notice, on any date in the following three months.\n\nCharity Medical Justice said the rules meant people with a genuine case to be in the UK simply could not present their arguments in time to a judge.\n\nHome Office: Policy was designed to speed up removals by ending late claims to stay\n\nIn examples submitted to the court, the charity said the Home Office had repeatedly removed people - only to bring them back again.\n\nIn one case, a man who had evidence that relatives had been murdered in his home country, had to be flown back to the UK and he was later found to be a genuine refugee.\n\nThe three Court of Appeal judges said the Home Office's aspiration to speed up removals was not in itself illegal - but in practice the policy had prevented effective appeals and that had risked serious injustices.\n\n\"The right to access the court is an absolute and inviolable right,\" said the court.\n\n\"The right to access to the court is not a relative right to be balanced against other rights and interests, the convenience of the executive or the courts, or the risks of abuse of process.\"\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel has repeatedly accused what she has called \"activist lawyers\" of slowing down immigration removals.\n\nAnd in the judgment, the Lord Chief Justice said there were \"endemic\" problems of false and fanciful late claims, some of which involved a \"minority of lawyers\", unconnected to the case before them.\n\nBut the judges stressed that the Home Office's solution had prevented judges from considering genuine cases because someone could be put on a flight before they had had a chance to go to court.\n\nA spokesman for Medical Justice said the policy had unfairly treated many of its sick clients.\n\n\"One of our society's most precious treasures is access to justice,\" said the spokesman.\n\n\"Chillingly, away from the public gaze, this policy denied that fundamental right on a massive scale causing serious harm to extremely vulnerable people and risking life.\n\n\"It was effectively a shortcut to removal. Quashing the policy brings us back towards equal access to justice for all.\"", "Weeks before we know if restrictions are working - expert\n\nWe've been hearing today about the stricter coronavirus measures coming into place for South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester. But the effects will take two or three weeks to show if top-tier coronavirus restrictions are working in a region, MPs have heard. Dr Clare Gardiner, director general of the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) told two select committees that it would take that long for the data to come through, with part of the lag due to the virus having a 10-day incubation period. She added: \"We also are looking really keenly at the number of people being admitted to hospital. \"We are particularly concerned and will be looking closely at case rates in the over-60s and watching quite carefully the information about outbreaks in care homes, so looking to protect and being able to protect the vulnerable.\" When asked about the criteria used to raise an area from tier two to tier three, Dr Gardiner said there were a \"basket of indicators\" which were looked at with the chief medical officer who would then make recommendations to ministers. These included having a rate of more than 100-150 cases a week per 100,000 people, case rates among the over-60s, a positivity rate in tests of more than 7.5% and the number of people being admitted to hospital.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. There were violent clashes at an End Sars demonstration and protestors claim the army opened fire 'to kill'.\n\nBuildings have been set aflame and there are reports of gunfire in Nigeria's biggest city after demonstrators were shot at a protest.\n\nRights group Amnesty International said at least 12 people were killed by soldiers and police in Lagos on Tuesday.\n\nNigeria's army dismissed the reports as \"fake news\" in a post on Twitter.\n\nAuthorities have imposed an indefinite round-the-clock curfew on the city and elsewhere, but some defied the order.\n\nProtests against a police unit have been taking place for two weeks. Demonstrators have been using the social media hashtag #EndSars to rally crowds against the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (Sars).\n\nPresident Muhammadu Buhari disbanded Sars on 11 October. But protests have continued, with demands for more changes in the security forces, as well as reforms to the way the country is run.\n\nWitnesses have told the BBC what they saw when men in military camouflage opened fire on Tuesday evening.\n\nOn Wednesday, buildings were set alight across Lagos and police put up roadblocks. A major Nigerian TV station with links to a ruling party politician was on fire after people attacked it with petrol bombs.\n\nPolice in different districts of the city fired shots in the air to disperse protesters defying the curfew, the BBC's Nduka Orjinmo reports from the capital, Abuja. He also reports that the palace of the most senior traditional leader in the city was looted, though the leader had been evacuated beforehand.\n\nWitnesses said uniformed men opened fire on a crowd of around 1,000 demonstrators in the wealthy Lekki suburb on Tuesday.\n\nSoldiers were seen barricading the protest site moments before the shooting, BBC Nigeria correspondent Mayeni Jones reports. Social media footage streamed live from the scene shows protesters tending to the wounded.\n\nA witness who did not want to be named told BBC News that shortly before 19:00 local time (18:00 GMT) soldiers \"pulled up... and they started firing directly\" at peaceful protesters.\n\n\"They were firing and they were advancing straight at us. It was chaos. Somebody got hit straight beside me and he died on the spot,\" he said.\n\nThe protesters had gathered at the Lekki toll gate for the last two weeks to block cars from using the road.\n\nShortly before a curfew was due to start, officers turned up and began to kettle in the demonstrators. The street lights were then shut off before the shooting began.\n\nIn a statement, Amnesty International Nigeria said at least 12 protesters were killed in Lagos on Tuesday.\n\nEvidence from hospital records and witnesses showed \"the Nigerian military opened fire on thousands of people who were peacefully calling for good governance and an end to police brutality\" at Lekki toll gate, the organisation said.\n\nApart from the shooting in Lekki, at least two people were killed and one \"critically injured\" in the Alausa district by \"a team of soldiers and policemen\" at about 20:00, the group added.\n\n\"Soldiers clearly had one intention - to kill without consequences,\" said Osai Ojigho, Amnesty International Nigeria country director.\n\nThis morning we drove over the Lekki-Ikoyi toll bridge, passing through gates that had been burned out the night before. Broken glass from a number of businesses was scattered on the floor, cash machines burned out.\n\nCloser to Lekki, where there are a number of shopping centres, the streets were mainly empty. It's a bustling area usually, but no cars were on the road, just young men on foot.\n\nAt the Lekki toll gate itself there were around 200 people, who crowded round us, wanting to tell their stories of the night before, angry but also determined to stand their ground. Pools of blood could be seen on the floor.\n\nProtesters were waving flags that looked covered in blood - they told me that the Nigerian flag, usually green-white-green, turned green-red-green yesterday from all the killing. Many of them had been at the site of the shooting the night before and recounted horrifying stories of seeing other protesters shot before their eyes.\n\nThe calls for police reform have morphed into chants that President Buhari must go. Demonstrators say they are sick and tired of the status quo.\n\nSmoke was seen rising over Lagos on Wednesday\n\nLagos state governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu said about 25 people had been wounded, adding that authorities were investigating the death of one man by \"blunt force trauma to the head\". It is unclear if he was a demonstrator.\n\nOn Wednesday he called for flags to be lowered at government buildings and an \"immediate suspension\" of all state activities over the next three days.\n\n\"There are no excuses for the unfortunate incident that took place last night, and as the governor, I apologize for every action and inaction,\" he tweeted.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMr Sanwo-Olu told the BBC's Newshour programme that the military had been present at the scene, despite public assurances that soldiers would not deploy until after the start of a curfew at 21:00.\n\n\"I think about seven o'clock or thereabouts there was a small unit of the military that went [to Lekki] and we heard that gunshots were fired,\" he said.\n\nPresident Buhari did not directly refer to the shootings in a statement on Wednesday, but called on people to have patience as police reforms \"gather pace\", and appealed for \"understanding and calm\".\n\nProtests have taken place in the UK, South Africa and Kenya against police brutality in Nigeria, while officials around the world condemned Tuesday's events.\n\nEU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said it was \"alarming to learn that several people have been killed and injured during the ongoing protests\", adding it is \"crucial\" to bring those responsible to justice.\n\nUN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on police \"to act at all times with maximum restraint while calling on protestors to demonstrate peacefully and to refrain from violence\", his spokesman said on Wednesday.\n\nFormer US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on President Buhari and the army \"to stop killing young #EndSARS protesters\" in a tweet.\n\nAnd US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden also urged authorities to end the \"violent crackdown on protesters\".\n\nNigerians in Kenya protested outside the Nigerian embassy in Nairobi on Wednesday", "A silent march was held in honour of Mr Paty on Tuesday evening in the suburbwhere he was killed\n\nThe father of a pupil accused of launching an online campaign against Samuel Paty, the teacher beheaded in France, sent messages to the killer before the attack, French media report.\n\nMr Paty, who was killed on Friday, had earlier shown controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to his pupils.\n\nThe 48-year-old father, who has not been officially named, is accused of issuing a \"fatwa\" against the teacher.\n\nThe brutal murder of Mr Paty, 47, has shocked France.\n\nTens of thousands of people took part in rallies across France at the weekend to honour him and defend freedom of speech. A silent march was held on Tuesday evening in the suburb north-west of Paris where he was killed.\n\nA man named as 18-year-old Abdoulakh A was shot dead by police after killing Mr Paty on Friday.\n\nThe father of the pupil is reported to have exchanged a number of text messages with Mr Paty's killer prior to the attack close to the teacher's school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.\n\nHe is accused, along with a preacher described by French media as a radical Islamist, of calling for Mr Paty to be punished by issuing a so-called \"fatwa\" (considered a legal ruling by Islamic scholars).\n\nInterior Minister Gérald Darmanin said the two men had been arrested and were being investigated for an \"assassination in connection with a terrorist enterprise\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. French minister: Lessons on freedom of expression will continue\n\nPolice launched a series of raids targeting Islamist networks on Monday, and some 40 homes were targeted.\n\nOn Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron said the Sheikh Yassin Collective - an Islamist group named after the founder of the Palestinian militant group Hamas - would be outlawed for being \"directly involved\" in the killing.\n\nHe said the ban was a way of helping France's Muslim community, Europe's largest, from the influence of radicalism.\n\nThe group's leader is among 16 people who were taken into custody in the aftermath of the murder.\n\nSix have now been released after questioning including the killer's grandfather, parents and 17-year-old brother. Four school students are believed to remain in detention.\n\nMr Darmanin earlier said 51 French Muslim organisations, including charities and NGOs, would be inspected by government officials and closed down if they were found to be promoting hatred.\n\nHe said police would also be interviewing about 80 people who were believed to have posted messages in support of the killing.\n\nAlso on Tuesday, the French government ordered a mosque to close for sharing videos on Facebook calling for action against Mr Paty and sharing his school's address in the days before his death.\n\nThe Pantin mosque, which has about 1,500 worshippers and is situated just north of Paris, will close for six months on Wednesday. The mosque expressed \"regret\" over the videos, which it has deleted, and condemned the teacher's killing.\n\nBeneath the public outrage there is a divided nation. A growing number of people believe France's rules on secularism and freedom of speech need to change.\n\nAround 29% of Muslim respondents told a recent poll that Islam was incompatible with the values of the French Republic - a sharp increase over the past few years. And among those under 25, the figure was much higher.\n\nThe number of people who think violence is justified in response to cartoons of Muhammad is very small. But teachers in some areas say that view is growing among their pupils.\n\nThe roots of this rebellion against French national values are complex - conflicts abroad, racism, lack of opportunity and government policy all play a role.\n\nIt's hard to support the values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity if they don't appear to apply to you.\n\nBefore this attack, President Macron had already promised a new law to target \"separatism\". But will it tackle the growing chasm or deepen the fault-lines once more?\n\nOn Monday, anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-François Ricard said Mr Paty had been the target of threats since he showed the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class about freedom of speech earlier in October.\n\nThe history and geography teacher advised Muslim students to leave the room if they thought they might be offended.\n\nMr Ricard said that the killer went to the school on Friday afternoon and asked students to point out the teacher. He then followed Mr Paty as he walked home from work and used a knife to attack him.\n\nSamuel Paty, a well-liked teacher, had been threatened over showing the cartoons\n\nTuesday evening's silent vigil in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine was attended by thousands. Earlier in the day, the French parliament observed a minute of silence.\n\nMr Macron will attend a ceremony with Mr Paty's family on Wednesday.\n\nThe teacher will also be posthumously given France's highest award, the Legion d'Honneur.\n\nDepictions of the Prophet Muhammad can cause serious offence to Muslims because Islamic tradition explicitly forbids images of Muhammad and Allah (God).\n\nThe issue is particularly sensitive in France because of the decision by satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. A trial is currently under way over the killing of 12 people by Islamist extremists at the magazine's offices in 2015 following their publication.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Rallies in Paris, Toulouse, Lyon and other French cities in support of Samuel Paty\n\nFrance's Muslim community comprises about 10% of the population.\n\nSome French Muslims say they are frequent targets of racism and discrimination because of their faith - an issue that has long caused tension in the country.", "A full decontamination has been carried out at the care home\n\nFive residents of a care home in south-west Scotland have died following an outbreak of Covid-19.\n\nThe deaths were at the Charnwood Lodge Care Home in Dumfries.\n\nThe charity which runs the home, Community Integrated Care, said a full decontamination of the facility was carried out as soon as the outbreak was detected.\n\nIt paid tribute to the \"efforts and professionalism\" of staff in dealing with the situation.\n\nStaff have been praised for their dedication in dealing with the outbreak\n\nMartin McGuigan, managing director at CIC, said it had implemented a \"number of additional robust infection control measures\".\n\n\"We will continue to work closely with the local authority and public health teams to ensure that we are taking all necessary steps to protect everyone within the home and provide the practical and emotional support needed,\" he said.\n\nA spokesman for Dumfries and Galloway Health and Social Care Partnership said it was a \"very difficult and concerning situation\" and praised the dedication of staff in their response.\n\n\"Work was undertaken to contain the spread of Covid-19, and this has not been an easy task against this highly infectious virus,\" he said.\n\n\"This outbreak has again demonstrated just how highly transmissible the Covid-19 virus is, even when the correct protocols are being observed.\"\n\nSince the start of the pandemic, about half (1,986) of those who have died with coronavirus have died in care homes.\n\nThe latest Scottish government figures showed that, as of 14 October, 101 adult care homes (9%) had a current case of suspected Covid-19.\n\nA total of 12 deaths of care home residents confirmed to have had Covid-19 were reported to the Care Inspectorate between 5 to 11 October - about 5% of all care home deaths in that period.", "Pubs in South Yorkshire will only be allowed to stay open if they serve a \"substantial meal\"\n\nBusiness owners in South Yorkshire fear for their survival prospects as they face tighter coronavirus restrictions.\n\nTier three restrictions will apply in the area from 00:01 on Saturday, it has been confirmed.\n\nThe rules impose further restrictions on households mixing, while pubs that do not serve substantial meals must close.\n\nOne pub owner in Sheffield says the hospitality sector has been \"thrown under a bus\".\n\nJamie Hawksworth, who owns the Sheffield Tap, said he saw the new restrictions coming.\n\n\"I think I speak for most of my staff, and certainly the management team, that it's devastating. We've had the entire business pulled from under us.\"\n\nHe added that the knock-on effect would be fewer orders for local breweries, abattoirs and other suppliers.\n\n\"Hospitality only accounts to 3% of the Covid risk at the moment,\" he said.\n\n\"We pay the most to the government and receive the least. We're basically being thrown under the bus, we're the scapegoat.\"\n\nPub owner Jamie Hawksworth says businesses like his have become \"the scapegoat\"\n\nThe Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) said publicans had done everything to make their premises Covid-secure and the news would be \"absolutely devastating\" for pubs and breweries.\n\nChief executive Tom Stainer said: \"If pubs across South Yorkshire are to avoid becoming a sacrificial lamb then they need a decent, long-term financial support package.\n\n\"This must properly compensate pubs for having to either close altogether or stay open with extremely low footfall whilst they serve food.\"\n\nHe said help would also be needed after restrictions were lifted to avoid pubs having to \"close their doors for good before Christmas\".\n\nThe family-run Acorn Brewery in Wombwell, Barnsley, is facing similar worries to other businesses.\n\nThe microbrewery's managing director Dave Hughes said the business was operating at about 20% of the level it was at before the pandemic.\n\n\"The whole hospitality sector seems to have been hit very hard compared to other places,\" he said.\n\nThe team of 11 at the brewery has been reduced to four.\n\n\"Our team has been broken up and it causes a lot of stress and anxiety,\" Mr Hughes said.\n\nHe said about 95% of his business was supplying pubs, bars and restaurants - like most microbreweries.\n\nMicrobrewery manager Dave Hughes says the restrictions mean a lot of \"stress and anxiety\"\n\nMr Hughes also runs a real ale pub which would have to close under the new restrictions.\n\n\"We can't offer a substantial meal. A lots of pubs that don't have a food offering will suffer and those that do, will they get the footfall?\n\n\"I suppose, in a sense, tier three for our pub, at least there is funding that we can now tap into.\"\n\nHe also has concerns about how trade will recover when the restrictions end.\n\n\"People find the new norm and go to different outlets and when you do reopen you have to battle to get them back.\"\n\nPubs that close under tier three rules will be eligible for financial support\n\nPaul McNicholas runs three bars in Barnsley and welcomed the tier three restrictions as it means financial support.\n\nHe said people were not coming out due to the 22:00 curfew and social mixing restrictions and he had only been opening at the weekend.\n\n\"We were finding it difficult to operate under the present restrictions on level two so there was a likelihood we would have closed anyway.\n\n\"We were opening the bars and they were running at a loss.\"\n\nOn the new restrictions he said he thought he could cope with the initial 28-day period, but was hopeful they would reopen before Christmas.\n\n\"We are reliant a lot on Christmas and I am trying to be optimistic but we feel that we do need that period,\" he said.\n\nFollow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk or send video here.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson says Greater Manchester will move into Tier 3\n\nGreater Manchester will move to England's highest tier of coronavirus restrictions from Friday at 00:01 BST, the prime minister has announced.\n\nSpeaking at No 10, Boris Johnson said \"not to act now\" would put the lives of Manchester's residents \"at risk\".\n\nHe said a \"generous\" offer of financial support had been made to the region but that Mayor Andy Burnham had refused it.\n\nMr Burnham said he had not been offered enough to \"protect the poorest people in our communities\".\n\nUnder tier three rules - currently only applied to Lancashire and the Liverpool City Region - pubs and bars not serving substantial meals have to close, while household mixing is banned indoors and outdoors in hospitality settings and private gardens.\n\nBetting shops, casinos, bingo halls, adult gaming centres and soft play areas will also have to close, while there is guidance against travelling in or out of the area.\n\nGreater Manchester is currently under tier two rules, meaning pubs and restaurants must close at 22:00, there is no household mixing indoors and the rule of six applies outdoors.\n\nAhead of the Downing Street press conference, Mr Burnham - speaking alongside other local leaders - said that without a \"bare minimum\" of £65m in additional business support, tighter measures \"would be certain to increase levels of poverty, homelessness and hardship\" among the region's 2.8 million population.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock later told the House of Commons that a £60m offer previously made to local leaders remained \"on the table\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Burnham: 'It can't be right to close businesses without support'\n\nOn the inability to agree on financial help, Mr Johnson said: \"I do regret this. As I said last week, we would have a better chance of defeating the virus if we work together.\"\n\nHe added Greater Manchester would receive £22m in funding as part of a \"comprehensive package of support\" but that the \"door was open to continue the conversation\" about further aid, so long as it was in line with that offered to other areas in same position.\n\nThe £22m mentioned by Mr Johnson - which is for expenses such as local enforcement and test and trace - is separate to the £60m that Mr Hancock spoke of.\n\nIn addition, the new Job Support Scheme will cover 67% of the wages - funded by employers and the government - of people affected by tier three closures.\n\nBoris Johnson says he can't give Greater Manchester disproportionately more money than other tier three areas.\n\nAndy Burnham says that he won't accept a deal that will lead to increased levels of hardship and homelessness.\n\nBut there are political risks on all sides here.\n\nCould Boris Johnson look like a Whitehall bean-counter who can't bring himself to stump up an extra £5m?\n\nDoes Andy Burnham look like he's overplayed his part as \"King of the North\" (as some now call him)?\n\nAll the while, those living in Greater Manchester might wonder what on earth is actually going to happen on Friday, in terms of financial support, as new measures kick in.\n\nThat surely is now the next deadline. And I suspect political leaders on all sides won't want to have to explain to people, on Friday morning, why they couldn't reach an agreement in time.\n\nExplaining the decision to impose tougher restrictions on Greater Manchester, Mr Hancock said hospital admissions in the region were higher now than at the end of March.\n\n\"There are now more Covid-19 patients in Greater Manchester hospitals than in the whole of the South West and the South East combined,\" he added.\n\nShadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth, meanwhile, said residents of Manchester would be \"watching the news in disbelief\".\n\nHe said they would be asking: \"Why was it right to cover 80% of wages in March and then now, in the run-up to Christmas, cover just two-thirds of their wages in October?\"\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the party would force a Commons vote on Wednesday, demanding a \"fair deal\" for areas facing tier three restrictions.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Keir Starmer This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nConservative MP Chris Green, who represents Bolton West, wrote on Facebook that Bolton had \"been through a far tougher lockdown than Tier 3 and it didn't work\".\n\nHe added: \"The government believes that three weeks of closing pubs and soft play centres will make a dramatic difference. It hasn't and it won't.\"\n\nHowever, six other Conservative MPs from the region have written to Mr Burnham to express their \"concern and deep disappointment\" about what they called \"his failure to come to an agreement with the Government\" on a support package.\n\nThe signatories ask Mr Burnham to \"make way\" for \"local MPs and council leaders\" to \"have a go at getting a sensible settlement\".\n\nKate Nicholls - the head of industry body UKHospitality - described the move to tier three as \"another huge blow for our sector and a very bitter disappointment for hospitality businesses in Manchester\".\n\n\"We need a practical and workable package of support for the whole of Manchester's hospitality sector in order to keep these businesses afloat and jobs alive,\" she said. \"Jobs, once lost, are not always easily revived and businesses closed not easily reopened.\"\n\nMeanwhile, the PM confirmed that conversations were ongoing with leaders in South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and the North East about the possibility of moving to the very high alert level, tier three.\n\nThe leaders of West Yorkshire's council later said a decision had been made to maintain tier two status in the county this week.\n\nIt comes as the latest government figures showed that, on Tuesday, the UK recorded a further 21,330 coronavirus cases and a further 241 deaths within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nThe rising case numbers in England have led some scientists and politicians to call for a so-called \"circuit breaker\" - a short, sharp lockdown such as that being brought in for Wales.\n\nBut speaking alongside Mr Johnson at Downing Street, England's deputy chief medical officer, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, said this approach would be \"inappropriate\" for parts of England where the disease was lower and \"very hard to justify for some communities\".\n\nIn Wales, people will be told to stay at home from Friday, while pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops will shut as part of the \"short, sharp\" national lockdown until 9 November.\n\nA two-week school closure has begun in Northern Ireland as part of a tightening of restrictions.\n\nAnd in Scotland, the tightest restrictions are in place in the central belt, and there are plans for a three-tier framework of measures, similar to England's.", "Wasps will take part in Saturday's Premiership final against Exeter Chiefs at Twickenham, despite 11 Covid-19 cases within the club in the past week.\n\nPremiership Rugby confirmed Lee Blackett's side were clear to play after the latest round of testing.\n\nBristol were on stand-by if Wasps, who beat them in the semi-finals, had been unable to fulfil the fixture.\n\nThe decision was taken by the Rugby Football Union, Premiership Rugby and Public Health England officials.\n\nThis will be Wasps' first final since 2017, when they were beaten by the Chiefs in extra time.\n\nSeven players and four backroom staff had been diagnosed with coronavirus before further tests were undertaken on Tuesday.\n\nBut in a statement, Wasps confirmed that \"no further players or staff have tested positive\", although a coaching staff test was damaged in transit and that member will now self-isolate as a precaution.\n\nThey also reiterated the need to maintain their \"rigorous\" protocols around track and trace as the players return to training for the game.\n\n\"I would like to place on record my sincere thanks to Premiership Rugby, the RFU, Public Health England and Public Health Warwickshire for their clarity and assistance throughout this whole process,\" Wasps group chief executive Stephen Vaughan said.\n\n\"As a club, we are delighted that we can now take our rightful place in this Saturday's Premiership Rugby final. To all of our fans and well-wishers, thank you for your many messages of support, this final is for you.\"\n\nChiefs director Rob Baxter, whose squad have been given the all-clear following their own latest round of testing, said Wasps being allowed to play was \"the news I think most people wanted\".\n\n\"Everyone was getting concerned with the Wasps situation, but we were getting concerned with ourselves, making sure we came through it,\" Baxter, whose side were crowned European champions after beating Racing 92 in Saturday's Champions Cup final, told BBC Sport.\n\n\"We anticipated we would be and that was the case, and it was great to have a message from Lee (Blackett) this morning to say that their testing had gone well.\"\n\nAnalysis - 'The credibility of the competition was on the line'\n\n\"There's relief all round, the testing has shown this hasn't spread further through the Wasps squad, no more cases.\n\n\"It has been a nervous few days, not just for Wasps, but also for Premiership Rugby as they would have known the whole credibility of the competition was on the line here.\n\n\"Bristol were on stand-by but they can go back to their celebrations having won the Challenge Cup against Toulon at the weekend.\n\n\"Who knows, maybe after a season compromised by the World Cup, the Saracens salary cap saga and the infinite challenges and issues thrown up by the pandemic, it may, after all that, finish with a fitting final at Twickenham?\n\n\"Let's hope that is the case and Wasps are able to be somewhere near their best despite all the disruption.\"", "Gym owner Ashley Hughes said the decision was a relief\n\nGyms and leisure centres will be able to reopen across Liverpool after the government bowed to pressure to bring it in line with other areas under tier three measures.\n\nThey were ordered to close when the area was placed into the \"very high\" level of coronavirus restrictions.\n\nLiverpool Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram said they would be allowed to reopen on Friday but soft play areas would close.\n\nAshley Hughes, who owns a gym in Knowsley, said it was \"great news\".\n\nIt has been illegal for gyms in the Liverpool City Region to open since the region went into the toughest Covid-19 restrictions on 14 October.\n\nMr Rotheram told BBC Radio Merseyside talks with the government continued until late on Tuesday after he appealed to bring them in line with other areas under tier three restrictions like Lancashire, where gyms remain open.\n\n\"The government have agreed with the case I put forward on behalf of city region leaders and that they would now bring us in line with other tier three areas,\" he said.\n\nThe Labour mayor said the government would put legislation before Parliament on Thursday to rescind the original decision to close gyms and leisure centres which will allow them to reopen on Friday.\n\nThea Holden says she was \"overwhelmed, humbled and thankful\" to everyone who helped \"to get justice for gyms\"\n\nDozens of gyms in the area remained open despite the rules ordering them to shut, including Body Tech Fitness in Moreton, Wirral, which was fined £1,000.\n\nIts owner Nick Whitcombe had urged gyms to \"unite together\" and stay open, with a GoFundMe page set up to help gyms mount a legal challenge to closures raising more than £50,000.\n\nHe said he was \"elated\" the decision had been overturned and credited it to the industry and the region \"sticking together\" and \"generating noise\" on social media.\n\nHe said gyms should never have been closed because people's health and well-being was \"paramount\".\n\nMr Whitcombe said he hoped the fines could be written off and said the money raised would be donated to a local mental health charity.\n\nBody Tech Fitness owner Nick Whitcombe said the U-turn was \"phenomenal news\"\n\nThea Holden, co-owner of Empowered Fit in Wirral, said she was \"overwhelmed, humbled and thankful\" to everyone who helped \"to get justice for gyms\".\n\nMr Hughes, who owns Bodytorque in Huyton, had signed a petition to reverse the decision and said the government U-turn was a relief as it had been worrying times for businesses in the area.\n\nWhile the decision has been welcomed by gym owners, the assistant manager of Kidz Fantasy Land in Liverpool said it was \"devastating\" for soft play areas.\n\n\"We were already struggling to pay the bills and had to cut staff hours,\" Angelina Hyland said.\n\n\"We were fully booked for Halloween and were hoping it would give us a boost. Staff had worked so hard to make it safe and a fun event for kids.\"\n\nShe said it was \"really unfair\" to allow gyms and leisure centres to open but now shut indoor play areas for youngsters, adding: \"It's exercise in a safe indoor environment for children.\"\n\nGyms in Lancashire were allowed to stay open when it entered tier three\n\nConnor O'Brien, the owner and founder of Absolute Body Solutions in Liverpool, said it had been on the verge of going into debt.\n\n\"It is great we will be able to prevent that,\" he added.\n\nMr O'Brien said it was vital for people to have access to gyms, for both physical and mental support.\n\n\"It is massive for people's physical health, it keeps them fit, healthy and their immune system up,\" he said.\n\n\"But people also use the gym as their escape if they have had a stressful day at work.\n\n\"It gives them that release and with people working from home it might be the only time they leave the house.\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section European Football\n\nMarcus Rashford repeated his late heroics against Paris St-Germain with a superb winner as Manchester United marked their return to the Champions League with a fine win at the home of last season's beaten finalists.\n\nRashford's stoppage-time penalty sealed a famous victory at the Parc des Princes 18 months ago and the England striker was again on target to ensure Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's side took maximum points from their opening match in a formidable group.\n\nThe visitors had excelled in a first half which saw Bruno Fernandes stroke them ahead with a twice-taken penalty.\n\nBut the multiple French champions were far stronger and threatening in the second half and deservedly drew level when United striker Anthony Martial headed into his own net.\n\nDavid de Gea had to put in a much-improved display in United's goal, making strong saves to deny PSG's superstar duo Kylian Mbappe and Neymar.\n\nAnd the sides looked set to share the points when Rashford collected a pass from substitute Paul Pogba, rolled away from a defender and fired in off the base of the post from 20 yards.\n• None Reaction to all of Tuesday's Champions League action\n• None Quiz: Name the teams in the group stage\n\nRashford's penalty completed a stunning comeback in 2019 which all but cemented the case for Solskjaer's temporary reign to be made permanent, turning a delighted Rio Ferdinand - the former United defender turned BT Sport pundit - into a meme in the process.\n\nSolskjaer has not been able to maintain that blistering success since becoming full-time manager, but once again the Norwegian was able to conjure a victory against the odds.\n\nWithout captain Harry Maguire and midfielder Pogba, United played a back five - with defender Axel Tuanzebe being summoned from the wilderness and shining on his first appearance of 2020.\n\nTwice the 22-year-old kept stride with the rapid Mbappe and made fine challenges in an impressive display.\n\nAt the other end, United's opener came from a more familiar route - Fernandes converting a penalty after Martial was tripped. It was, remarkably, the 27th spot-kick awarded to United since the start of last season.\n\nFernandes, the captain on the night, actually missed for the second time in three days, but Keylor Navas was clearly off his line before the save and the video assistant referee called it back. Fernandes went the same way; the goalkeeper went the other.\n\nPSG looked far more like their old selves after the break and United had to defend well - but Rashford was guilty of wasting a couple of chances on the counter-attack before his brilliant late winner.\n\nThe rebuilding of Paris St-Germain has long been aimed solely at European glory - with domestic monopoly tied up years ago - and the run to the final just 58 days ago looked like a key juncture.\n\nThomas Tuchel's side is packed with blistering talent, but question marks over their consistency have long been raised and this was another frustrating display.\n\nThey moved the ball far too slowly in the first half and deserved to find themselves behind, even if De Gea was called into a double save from Angel di Maria and Layvin Kurzawa.\n\nTuchel moved Di Maria deeper at half-time, sending on Everton loanee Moise Kean up front, and his side were better. De Gea again made a flying save to deny Mbappe after a typically brilliant run, and Kurzawa hit the crossbar with a miscued cross.\n\nMartial gave them a route back into the match when he nodded Neymar's inswinging corner into his own net, but United improved when Pogba came on.\n\nWith RB Leipzig - semi-finalists last season - up and running with a win, it is now Tuchel's side who need to click into gear fast just to make it out of Group H.\n• None Paris St-Germain suffered a home defeat in a Champions League group game for the first time in 25 games, since losing 1-3 to CSKA Moscow in December 2004.\n• None Manchester United have scored nine own goals in the Champions League, more than any other side.\n• None Since the start of last season, United have been awarded 27 penalties and scored 22 of them, both highs among sides in Europe's big five leagues (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain) in that time.\n• None Since his debut for Manchester United in February, Bruno Fernandes has been directly involved in more goals than any other Premier League player (27 - 16 goals, 11 assists).\n• None Fernandes has scored 11 of his 12 penalties for United, more than any other player from Europe's big five leagues in that time.\n• None Anthony Martial is the second French player to score an own goal in the Champions League against French opposition, after Jeremy Mathieu for Barcelona, also against Paris St-Germain, in April 2015.\n• None PSG's Neymar has failed to score in four consecutive Champions League appearances for the first time since November 2013 (his first five games in the competition).\n• None Offside, Paris Saint Germain. Keylor Navas tries a through ball, but Kylian Mbappé is caught offside.\n• None Moise Kean (Paris Saint Germain) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt missed. Neymar (Paris Saint Germain) right footed shot from outside the box is high and wide to the right. Assisted by Pablo Sarabia.\n• None Goal! Paris Saint Germain 1, Manchester United 2. Marcus Rashford (Manchester United) right footed shot from the right side of the box to the bottom left corner. Assisted by Paul Pogba.\n• None Attempt blocked. Paul Pogba (Manchester United) right footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by Scott McTominay.\n• None Danilo Pereira (Paris Saint Germain) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt saved. Neymar (Paris Saint Germain) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Rafinha. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None How effective is it for weight loss?", "Demand in pubs and restaurants has collapsed after bans on households mixing were introduced in many areas\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak is to unveil new support for workers and firms hit by restrictions imposed as coronavirus cases rise across the UK.\n\nHe is due to update the Job Support Scheme, which replaces furlough in November, in the Commons on Thursday.\n\nCritics say not enough is being done for firms in tier two areas that have seen demand collapse without being formally required to shut.\n\nIn tier three areas, firms ordered to shut get emergency support.\n\nTalks were held throughout Wednesday, with the government said to have acknowledged that while there are three tiers of alert level - medium, high, and very high - there are only two tiers of support.\n\nBusinesses in tier two areas, particularly in the hospitality sector, have complained that they would be better off if they were under tier three restrictions. They argue that although they would be forced to close, they would benefit from greater government support.\n\nTop London-based chef Yotam Ottolenghi said conditions for his restaurants were \"terrible\".\n\n\"We are on our knees now,\" he told the BBC. \"We just don't have customers coming through the door.\"\n\nHe said that before tier two restrictions were imposed in London, his restaurants were operating at 50% of capacity, but that this had now fallen to between 10% and 20%.\n\n\"This is just not a viable place for a restaurant to be,\" he said, describing tier two as a \"cursed\" category that \"deprives us of oxygen\".\n\nIn tier three areas, the government will pay 67% of affected workers' wages, up to £2,100 a month, from 1 November (\"lockdown Job Support Scheme\" in the chart below). Some workers can also claim Universal Credit.\n\nBut in tier two regions, the only help available will be the standard JSS (\"part-time Job Support Scheme\" in the chart below), which is more costly for employers.\n\nBusiness groups and unions say this means many firms will not be able to use it and will have to lay off workers instead.\n\nThe chancellor's spokesperson said: \"What we have always said is that our package of support is always flexible, and always up for review, to make sure that it is dealing with the situation as it evolves.\"\n\nAreas in tier two - the second-highest risk level - include London, Essex, much of the West Midlands, Leicester, Nottinghamshire, Cheshire, West Yorkshire and north-east England.\n\nCoventry is to move to tier two Covid restrictions from midnight on Friday, the city council has said.\n\nIn addition to national restrictions meaning pubs and restaurants must close by 22:00, people in tier two areas are banned from mixing with other households indoors - hammering demand in many leisure industries.\n\nKey Conservative figures, such as West Midlands Mayor Andy Street, have been critical of the disparities, along with a raft of Labour local leaders and MPs.\n\nFurlough and redundancy are cutting incomes - and millions of people's finances are not in a position to cope.\n\nSome 12 million people in UK have low financial resilience - meaning they find it hard to pay bills or make loan repayments, according to research by the City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority.\n\nIt found that those from a black and minority ethnic background have been more likely than most to be affected by Covid-related falls in income, with 37% of those surveyed taking a hit.\n\nAlso, people aged between 25 and 34 were the most likely, by far, to have had a change in employment as a result of the pandemic.\n\nThat has led thousands of people to take payment \"holidays\" - deferrals on household bills such as rent or energy bills.\n\nFrom 31 October, anyone who arranges a break on repayments of mortgages, loans and credit cards will see their credit record marked - potentially making it harder to borrow more from then on.\n\nPaul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told the BBC it was \"one of the oddities of the system\" that pubs and restaurants in tier three areas which had been forced to close were in a better position than those in tier two areas which remained open.\n\n\"You get full support, whereas if you're in tier two, you get no more support than similar businesses in the rest of the country and yet demand for your products is clearly massively reduced,\" he added.\n\nMr Johnson said it was clearly right that the government should seek to close that support gap with new measures.\n\nTorsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, told the BBC: \"We have a big distinction between tier one, tier two and tier three restrictions in theory, but the economic support packages don't go alongside those restrictions.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. People in Barnsley town centre react to tier three restrictions being announced\n\nAs more parts of the country are placed in tier two, critics say the standard JSS is likely to fall short, with many fewer firms than expected signing up.\n\nOptions being discussed in Whitehall include more generous taxpayer wage support for businesses in these regions, up from the current level of 22%, and grants offered through local authorities.\n\nWith so much of England now in tier two, even small increases in support could end up being very expensive. Business and union leaders will be briefed on the changes on Thursday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nIt comes amid warnings that unemployment could rise as high as 8.5% in the first half of next year without more government support for struggling businesses.\n\nIn the three months to August, redundancies rose to their highest level since 2009, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.\n\nThe number claiming work-related benefits, meanwhile, hit 2.7 million in September - an increase of 1.5 million since the beginning of the crisis in March.", "GCSE and A level students missed time in school over the summer and continue to face disruption\n\nThe \"huge disruption\" to education is being taken into account ahead of decisions about next summer's exams, the qualifications watchdog has said.\n\nThe boss of Qualifications Wales said the firebreak meant those with exams in 2021 faced a \"more difficult situation\" than pupils who sat exams this summer.\n\nPhilip Blaker said it was looking at \"moving away from timetabled exams\" to offer a \"performance experience\".\n\nPlans for summer 2021 exams are due to be announced next month.\n\nChildren in Year 9 and above, including those studying for GCSEs and A-levels, will be learning from home for a week as part of the measures announced by First Minister Mark Drakeford on Monday.\n\nMr Blaker said Qualifications Wales would publish its advice to the education minister on the summer 2021 exams next week.\n\n\"Last year we had the issue of not being able to hold timetabled examinations,\" he said.\n\n\"This year, on top of that, is the disruption to teaching and learning.\n\n\"What we want to do is to find a means of assessment which is fair, robust and removes that dependency as far as possible on timetables, but allows them to have that performance experience.\"\n\nAlice Barrell said the disruption had caused a lot of anxiety among students\n\nAlice Barrell, head girl in Year 13 of Monmouth Comprehensive School, is doing A levels in chemistry, biology, and maths in the hope of studying medicine at university.\n\nHer teacher-assessed AS levels will not count towards her A-level marks.\n\nShe said last year was \"definitely difficult… because we had to learn so much of the course content on our own in lockdown with some online lessons\".\n\nThe disruption has caused \"a lot of anxiety\", but she would like exams to go ahead with reduced content because of pupils' time away from school.\n\n\"We've been studying to pass exams our whole time at secondary school... so it's not really the time to have a whole new method of assessment.\"\n\nShe said the most important thing was that \"right now... students know exactly what's going to happen next year.\"\n\nResults in summer 2020 descended into chaos after uproar about \"downgrading\" of teacher estimates, resulting in pupils being awarded grades given by their schools and colleges.\n\nMr Blaker said the watchdog \"could have done things differently\" but insisted he did not consider stepping down, like his English counterpart.\n\n\"I didn't consider it to be an error that would lead to me considering my position,\" he said.\n\nBut he acknowledged the row had dented trust.\n\n\"We know that we're in a position of having to rebuild confidence in the qualifications system and confidence in us as a regulator and we're committed to doing that.\n\n\"And that's why we're thinking very hard about different solutions for summer 2021.\"\n\nJohn Kendall, head teacher at Risca Community Comprehensive School, thinks GCSEs should be assessed by teachers throughout term\n\nMeanwhile, the head teacher of Risca Community Comprehensive School, John Kendall, does not want GCSE exams to go ahead.\n\nHe has written an open letter to the education minister, saying there should be a system of moderated teacher assessments for GCSE pupils throughout the term.\n\nHe said this would make things \"different\" but not \"easier\" for students, and would give them an incentive to keep working through any disruption to their schooling.\n\n\"I think Year 13 exams probably do need to take place in some form, supported by centre assessments,\" he added.\n\nHe also said students need clarity as soon as possible.\n\nNext summer's exams will go ahead in England and Northern Ireland, but the Scottish government said National 5 exams, equivalent to GCSEs, would be replaced by teacher assessments and coursework.\n\nThe Qualifications Wales chief executive said decisions in other parts of the UK would \"play into the thinking\" in order to make sure learners in Wales are not at a disadvantage.\n\nIn a Twitter video on Monday, Education Minister Kirsty Williams said she was waiting for important advice related to exams, including the findings of an independent review, and would make an announcement after the firebreak had ended and all year groups had returned to school.\n\nSome pupils will be sitting GCSEs in core subjects in November.\n\nPlaid Cymru said it would reiterate its call for the summer exams to be cancelled in a Senedd debate on the future of education.\n\n\"If it wasn't already apparent from the high numbers of pupils having to self-isolate, it should be clear from the announcement this week that the 2020-21 school year will be as equally - if not more - disrupted than the last academic year,\" said Siân Gwenllian MS.\n\n\"The Welsh Government must ensure that the A-level fiasco of summer 2020 is not repeated, by making an immediate statement that exams will not be held in summer 2021.\"", "The UK is \"ready to welcome the EU team\" to continue negotiations over a post-Brexit trade deal, says No 10.\n\nThe two sides' chief negotiators, Lord David Frost and Michel Barnier, spoke on the phone earlier after talks stalled last week.\n\nFollowing the conversation, Downing Street said the pair had \"jointly agreed a set of principles for handling this intensified phase of talks\".\n\nLord Frost said talks would begin again in London on Thursday.\n\nThe full statement from No 10 said it was \"clear that significant gaps remain between our positions in the most difficult areas\" and it was \"entirely possible that negotiations will not succeed\".\n\nBut, it added: \"We are ready, with the EU, to see if it is possible to bridge them in intensive talks.\"\n\nEarlier, Mr Barnier said a deal would possible \"if we are both ready to work constructively and in a spirit of compromise over the next days, on the basis of legal texts. Time is short.\"\n\nBoth the UK and EU are calling on each other to compromise ahead of the looming December deadline for a deal.\n\nFrom 1 January 2021, the so-called transition period will be over, which has seen the UK continue to follow EU trading rules while a deal was negotiated.\n\nIf an agreement is not reached, the UK will move onto trade with the EU according to the default rules set by the World Trade Organization.\n\nKey areas of disagreement that remain between the two sides include fishing rights and post-Brexit competition rules.\n\nLord Frost said these \"intensive talks\" will take place \"every day\" while the two sides see if a deal can be done.\n\nYou could be forgiven for thinking that what we've witnessed over the past few days is a bit of political theatre.\n\nCover for the government - post chest-beating- to return to the negotiating table where they know the time has now come for tough compromises to be made.\n\nEU leaders also went out of their way to sound tough on Brexit at their summit last week. Privately, a number of EU figures now admit it was a misstep.\n\nBut EU leaders play to the domestic gallery too. They wanted to show they were \"standing up to the UK\" - that leaving the EU doesn't pay and that EU interests would be defended.\n\nThey accept they must compromise too now, if this trade and security deal with the UK has a chance of being agreed.\n\nTime is short and trust is in low supply.\n\nThe EU had previously set the end of October as a deadline to reach a deal, but Boris Johnson had pledged to walk away if it was not agreed by 15 October.\n\nThe day after the prime minister's deadline, Mr Johnson said it was time to \"get ready\" to leave without a deal, with No 10 going further by saying the talks were \"over\".\n\nA face-to-face meeting between the negotiators was cancelled for Monday and replaced by a phone call, which still left a stalemate between the two sides.\n\nBut Wednesday's conversation appeared to have been more fruitful.\n\nLord Frost (left) and Mr Barnier (right) have met several times since negotiations began in March\n\nNo 10 said Mr Barnier had \"acknowledged\" the UK's demands for the EU to be \"serious about talking intensively, on all issues, and bringing the negotiation to a conclusion\" and that he had accepted he was dealing with \"an independent and sovereign country\".\n\nIt also said the EU chief negotiator had accepted \"movement would be needed from both sides in the talks if agreement was to be reached\".\n\nThe statement added: \"On the basis of that conversation we are ready to welcome the EU team to London to resume negotiations later this week. We have jointly agreed a set of principles for handling this intensified phase of talks.\n\n\"It is clear that significant gaps remain between our positions in the most difficult areas, but we are ready, with the EU, to see if it is possible to bridge them in intensive talks.\"\n\nDowning Street reiterated its pledge to leave the transition period without a deal - or on \"Australian terms\" - and called on businesses and travellers to prepare \"since change is coming, whether an agreement is reached or not\".", "KeolisAmey has run Transport for Wales rail services since October 2018\n\nThe Transport for Wales rail service is to be brought under Welsh Government control from next February.\n\nMinisters have confirmed the takeover from KeolisAmey, with day-to-day services to be run by a publicly-owned company.\n\nIt follows significant falls in passenger numbers during the pandemic.\n\nThe Welsh Tories questioned how much nationalisation will cost taxpayers, while Plaid Cymru called for the Senedd to be recalled.\n\nEconomy Minister Ken Skates said the government had stepped in \"to stabilise the network and keep it running\".\n\n\"The last few months have been extremely challenging for public transport in Wales and across the UK. Covid has significantly impacted passenger revenues,\" he said.\n\nKeolisAmey was awarded the franchise in 2018, taking over from Arriva Trains Wales.\n\nIt covers most of Wales' trains - including key commuter services such as the Valley Lines.\n\nTransport for Wales will run Wales and Borders services from February\n\nThe financial risk of the Wales and Borders rail franchise, which is branded Transport for Wales (TfW), had already been taken over by taxpayers under a £65m agreement signed in May.\n\nBut from February next year KeolisAmey staff working on rail services will be transferred over to a publicly owned company, currently called Transport for Wales Rail Ltd.\n\nIt is happening under a part of railway law that allows for the creation of operators of \"last resort\".\n\nOfficials say the time gap between now and the start of the new operator will allow the Welsh Government to prepare the new operator for service.\n\nA part of the original agreement is staying - Amey Keolis Infrastructure Ltd will continue to be responsible for infrastructure on the Core Valley Lines, where the South Wales Metro upgrade is taking place.\n\nKeolis and Amey will also work with the Welsh Government quango Transport for Wales on improvements to the service - like rolling stock and ticketing.\n\nKevin Thomas, chief executive of KeolisAmey Wales, said: \"In light of Covid-19, we recognise the need for Welsh Government to have a sustainable way forward for delivering its ambitious objectives for rail.\"\n\nKeolisAmey took over from Arriva Trains Wales in 2018\n\nChallenged on the decision later on Thursday, Mr Skates told a Senedd committee that if the existing arrangements had continued it would have \"led to a collapse by the operator and a catastrophic transfer then to the operator of last resort [Transport for Wales Rail Ltd].\n\n\"What we're able to do now is manage a careful transition, which will take us through to February, and then beyond, with the establishment of TfW rail limited,\" he said.\n\nDeputy Transport Minister Lee Waters said: \"The whole business model collapsed in the face of Covid because the revenue was not coming in and Keolis in effect were not prepared to shoulder their share of the pain.\"\n\nAsked about the long-term costs of propping up the network, he said: \"It depends on Covid. We don't know.\"\n\nMinisters pledged to honour commitments worth more than £1bn to buy new trains and build the south Wales Metro.\n\n\"That will be delivered,\" Mr Skates said.\n\nJames Price, chief executive of Welsh Government quango Transport for Wales which oversaw the franchise and shared branding with it, said that rolling stock is \"on the way\" and \"in essence is paid for already\".\n\n\"What this allows us to do is to reduce the profit we pay to the private sector massively over time, and make sure that when the revenue comes back, it comes back in to the taxpayer.\"\n\nRussell George, economy spokesman for the Welsh Conservatives, said: \"Given the track record of the Welsh Labour-led Government, its decision to take control of our vital train industry has not filled me with any hope.\"\n\nHe said ministers should have consulted the Senedd on \"how much this decision is going to cost the Welsh taxpayer\".\n\n\"Eyebrows will be raised, too, on why any support is being left until February 2021,\" Mr George added.\n\nPlaid Cymru transport spokeswoman Helen Mary Jones said it \"could well be the right decision\", saying her party \"has always maintained that our railways should be brought into public hands and the government put passengers before profit\".\n\nBut she said there were \"crucial questions\" on financial implications and the nature of the subsidiary.\n\n\"Decisions of this importance should be announced in the Senedd so that members can ask questions on behalf of the people of Wales,\" she said.\n\nKeolisAmey already runs the Docklands Light Railway in London\n\nKeolisAmey is a joint-venture between two European companies, and was awarded the Wales and Borders franchise in May 2018 in a £5bn contract.\n\nIt was the first time the Welsh Government had awarded the franchise.\n\nKeolis is France's largest private sector public transport operator - but its major shareholder is state-owned French railway SNCF.\n\nAmey is a former one-time UK company owned by Spanish infrastructure giant Ferrovial.\n\nKeolisAmey took over services in October 2018. In January it emerged it had been fined £3.4m over the performance of services.\n\nRMT general secretary Mick Cash said: \"There is huge public support for public ownership because privatisation and profiteering has never been an efficient way to provide value for money, and this is even more the case when extra funding has been needed during the coronavirus pandemic.\"\n\nManuel Cortes, general secretary of the TSSA, said: \"This is a welcome and positive step from the Welsh Government, which will put our railways back in public hands and again shows the abject failure of privatisation.\"\n\nWe are told passengers will not notice the changeover. The same trains, staffed by the same drivers and conductors, will arrive at platforms.\n\nBut there are new risks for the taxpayer.\n\nTicket sales have plummeted. So in May the Welsh Government announced £65m and an emergency agreement to help the service cope.\n\nIn practice, that means almost all the financial risks associated with the railway are borne by the government.\n\nProfits and losses have moved from the private sector into the public sector.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Lord Sedwill discusses President Trump's leadership, Covid and whether Dominic Cummings should have quit\n\nThe UK didn't have the \"exact measures\" in place to deal with Covid, the ex-head of the civil service has said.\n\nLord Sedwill, who left his job last month, told the BBC there is \"a genuine question\" about whether the UK could have been \"better prepared\" for the pandemic.\n\nHe also said Dominic Cummings' journey to County Durham during lockdown had been a mistake.\n\nAnd he admitted to feeling \"troubled\" by attacks on the civil service.\n\nLord Sedwill stepped down as the UK's top civil servant following reports of tensions between him and senior members of Boris Johnson's team.\n\nThe former chief - then Sir Mark, now Lord Sedwill - with Boris Johnson after he became prime minister\n\nIn a wide-ranging interview with BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg he also talked about the \"ups and downs\" of President Trump's leadership and the UK's relationship with Russia and China.\n\nReflecting on the government's handling of coronavirus, he said: \"Although we had exercised and prepared for pandemic threats, we didn't have in place the exact measures, and we hadn't rehearsed the exact measures\" for the challenge Covid-19 presented.\n\n\"I think there is a genuine question about whether we could have been better prepared in the first place and that is obviously a very legitimate challenge.\"\n\nHe said any future inquiry would have to look at whether decisions were taken at the right time, if the lockdown was imposed fast enough and what capabilities the state had to deploy to tackle the virus.\n\nLord Sedwill, who contracted the virus himself, said he was \"really proud of a great deal that we did\" including setting up the Nightingale Hospitals.\n\nDominic Cummings said he did not regret driving 260 miles from his London home during the coronavirus lockdown\n\nIn May, the prime minister's chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, said he had acted \"reasonably\" when he drove to County Durham after his wife developed Covid-19 symptoms.\n\nAsked about the incident Lord Sedwill said that \"it was clearly a difficult moment for the government\".\n\n\"It was a mistake - whether everyone should quit every time they make a mistake, I don't think is right.\n\n\"But it clearly undermined the government's coherent narrative about people following the rules.\"\n\nIn his first interview since leaving one of the biggest jobs in the country, the man who was paid to give quiet careful advice is diplomatic with his language, certainly, but clear nonetheless.\n\nWhile he takes pride in some of the government's response to the pandemic, he said there is a genuine question about whether it could have been better prepared and admitted it lacked the \"exact measures\" for a disease of this kind.\n\nThe picture he gives of the heart of government in the most intense moments in the crisis is of a tense place, where ministers and officials were scrambling to keep up with a changing reality where the nation's health and economy were both genuinely in danger.\n\nAnd frankly, with all the uncertainty of handling a new disease, no-one could be quite sure of the right thing to do.\n\nFor all that ministers have fumed privately, and hinted publicly, he is adamant that the government coped fairly well during a once in a generation crisis, not withstanding \"genuine questions\" about just how prepared the UK really was.\n\nLord Sedwill also said he was \"troubled\" by attacks on the civil service and that speculation about his own future had been \"unpleasant\".\n\nCriticism of the civil service's integrity and capability was unfair, he said, while off-the-record briefings against senior civil servants, over Brexit and other issues, had been \"damaging\".\n\n\"It is damaging to good governance and those responsible should recognise the damage they're doing, even if they're indulging themselves in some short-term tactical ploy,\" he said.\n\nHe dismissed suggestions that the government's enthusiasm to reform the civil service had led to six civil servant heads stepping down, arguing that the truth was \"more complex\" than the departures being \"part of a campaign\".\n\n\"Governments want people they have confidence in, of course,\" he said.\n\n\"We go through periods of this kind when there's perceived to be an attack on the underlying values of the civil service but actually, those values and the institutions serving governments with impartiality have always prevailed and I'm confident they will continue to do so.\"\n\nCommenting on the forthcoming US presidential election he said that while American politics is \"pretty volatile\" the UK-US relationship is \"stable\".\n\n\"President Trump is a very unusual occupant of that office in his personal style and the way he articulates the US position but the underlying alliance is based on much more than the individual relationships at the top.\n\n\"You have some ups and downs sometimes at the political level but the fundamentals are really strong in my view.\"\n\nHe praised the Trump administration for its diplomatic efforts in the Middle East.\n\nHe also warned that the UK mustn't be \"naive\" when dealing with Russia and China\n\n\"I think when we've allowed the rhetoric to suggest that countries with very different political systems, essentially authoritarian political systems, are edging towards our values and viewing the world, then we've probably been mistaken and have overstated the natural alignment,\" he said.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Residents gathered at Chinnor Community Church on Monday to remember the Powell family\n\nA man who survived a crash which killed his wife and three of their children says he feels an \"abundance of loss\".\n\nJosh Powell's wife Zoe, 29, died with Phoebe, eight, when their people carrier collided with a lorry in Oxfordshire.\n\nSimeon, six, and four-year old Amelia, died at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, where their father and 18-month-old sister Penny remain.\n\nIn a tribute to his family, Mr Powell said he faced an \"uncertain future\".\n\nThe crash happened on the A40, near a railway bridge between Oxford and Cassington, on 12 October.\n\nZoe Powell and her three eldest children died in the crash\n\nMr Powell, from Chinnor, said: \"As I look to an uncertain future, I reflect on the fun that we had as a family, with feelings of sadness that it was cut so short.\n\n\"Before the adventure of starting a family nobody truly knows what to expect.\n\n\"All of life's preconceptions and what we see in the world around us meant that life as a family man was so much better than I expected it to be.\n\n\"I had been blessed with four wonderful children, whose thirst for life and hunger of adventure kept me busy but in the best possible way.\"\n\nThe 30-year-old described Phoebe as the \"model of her mother but with a thirst to always know more\" and that she was \"clever and able to make great jumps of imagination - her great creations in Lego are testament to this\".\n\nHe said Simeon \"was just like his father, with a mischievous sense of humour [and] a keen sportsman\" who had been shortly due to play his first football match.\n\nAmelia was \"kind and spirited\", he said, with a \"tenderness and thoughtfulness much more advanced than her years\".\n\nHe added: \"Myself and Zoe were as different as we were alike. Despite the frequent tensions this would bring, it was of immense benefit having such differing world views.\n\n\"Zoe was a dreamer; with a head spinning of new things to do or tales to tell. More than anything, we made a great partnership to raise a family.\"\n\nMrs Powell, who had lived in Chinnor since the mid-2010s but was previously from Sheffield, was a blogger who wrote about motherhood, family life and the challenges of having young children.\n\nThe crash happened on the A40, between Oxford and Cassington\n\nThe deaths came just months after the family lost everything in a blaze at their home.\n\nMr Powell thanked well-wishers for the support now that he had lost his \"immediate nuclear family\" and said there were \"many battles to come\".\n\nA candlelit vigil was held in their home village on Monday evening for the family.\n\nThe 1st Chinnor Scout Troop, where Mr Powell is a leader, marched to the private vigil, while residents in the cul-de-sac where the family lived illuminated their houses with green lights to show support.\n\nJosh Powell says he faces an \"uncertain future\" following the loss of his wife and three older children\n\nA JustGiving page set up by a railway worker colleague of Mr Powell has raised more than £120,000.\n\nThe 56-year-old driver of the lorry involved in the crash suffered minor injuries.\n\nNo arrests have been made, police said.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner is rebuked after making the comment\n\nLabour's deputy leader has apologised for using the word \"scum\" during a debate over coronavirus restrictions.\n\nAngela Rayner made the comment in the Commons on Wednesday during a speech by Tory MP Chris Clarkson.\n\nThe MP questioned her remark, while the deputy speaker reprimanded her for her language.\n\nMs Rayner has now issued a statement, saying: \"I apologise for the language that I used in a heated debate in Parliament earlier.\"\n\nThe debate was brought to the Commons by Labour, to discuss \"fair economic support\" for areas of England being moved into tier three restrictions - also known as the \"very high\" Covid alert level.\n\nMs Rayner, who represents Ashton-under-Lyne in Greater Manchester, opened the debate, speaking about her aunt who had recently died from the virus.\n\nLater, Mr Clarkson - also a Greater Manchester MP - gave a speech saying he was \"genuinely worried about the people and businesses we serve\".\n\nBut he criticised the area's Metro Mayor Andy Burnham and accused the Labour Party of \"opportunism\".\n\nAt this point, Ms Rayner was overheard saying scum from her seat on Labour's frontbench.\n\nShe was then rebuked by the Deputy Speaker Dame Eleanor Laing.\n\n\"We will not have remarks like that - not under any circumstances,\" said Dame Eleanor.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Controllers at Lockheed Martin celebrate the touch and go\n\nAmerica's Osiris-Rex spacecraft has completed its audacious tag-and-go manoeuvre designed to grab surface rock from an asteroid.\n\nRadio signals from 330 million km away confirm the probe made contact with the 500m-wide object known as Bennu.\n\nBut the Nasa-led mission will have to wait on further data from Osiris-Rex before it's known for sure that material was actually picked up.\n\nThe aim was to acquire at least 60g, perhaps even a kilo or more.\n\nBecause Bennu is a very primitive space object, scientists say its surface grit and dust could hold fascinating clues about the chemistry that brought the Sun and the planets into being more than 4.5 billion years ago.\n\n\"The team is exuberant; emotions are high; everyone is really proud,\" said principal investigator Dante Lauretta from the University of Arizona, Tucson.\n\n\"This was the key milestone of this mission. Now it's a few days to figure out how much of this amazing sample we got that we've been thinking about for decades,\" added Thomas Zurbuchen, Nasa's associate administrator for science.\n\nBoth men were following events from mission control at spacecraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by NASA This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAssuming there is a suitable sample safely aboard, the probe will be able to package it for return to Earth, scheduled for 2023.\n\nIf not, the mission team will have to configure Osiris-Rex for another go.\n\nThe spacecraft made its sample bid in a narrow patch of northern terrain on Bennu dubbed Nightingale.\n\nThe probe descended slowly to the 8m-wide target zone over a period of four-and-a-half hours, squeezing past some imposing boulders on the way, including a two-storey-high block that had been dubbed Mount Doom.\n\nOsiris-Rex used what some have described as a \"reverse vacuum cleaner\" to make its surface grab.\n\nMore properly called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, or Tag-Sam, this device is a long boom with a ring-shaped collection chamber on the end.\n\nThe idea was to push the ring into the surface and at the same moment express a stream of nitrogen gas to kick up small fragments of rock.\n\nSensors on Osiris-Rex reported back to mission controllers that all the actions in the sampling sequence had been completed successfully, and that the spacecraft had backed away from Bennu as planned after a few seconds of contact.\n\nBut the science and engineering team will need time to assess what exactly might have been caught in the collection chamber.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by OSIRIS-REx Mission This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nOne way to do this is to photograph the ring head. This will be done in the coming days.\n\nBut controllers will also command the spacecraft to spin itself around with the boom and Tag-Sam ring outstretched. Any extra mass on board will change the amount of torque required to turn the probe, compared with the amount needed to perform the same rotation exercise prior to sample acquisition.\n\nThis measurement technique will give a quantity precise to within a few 10s of grams.\n\nThe Tag-Sam during testing at Lockheed Martin prior to Osiris-Rex's launch in 2016\n\nOsisris-Rex took pictures all the way through its descent but could not send any of these home at the time because its high-gain antenna was not pointed at Earth.\n\nOnce the probe has re-established this connection, the data can be downlinked.\n\n\"Those images are going to tell us an enormous amount of information about how the events of today went,\" said Prof Lauretta. \"For one thing they will tell us about the likelihood of sample collection, a kind of probabilistic assessment.\"\n\nNasa promises to release some of these pictures on Wednesday.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Jim Bridenstine This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nNumerous scientists, including in the UK, are hoping to get the chance to analyse any materials brought back from Bennu - among them Sara Russell from London's Natural History Museum.\n\n\"Asteroids like Bennu formed in the very, very earliest times of the Solar System. They are basically the building blocks of the planets - a time capsule that will tell us how the Sun and the planets came into being and evolved. Bennu can really help us to drill down into how that process actually happens,\" she told BBC News.\n\nBennu contains chemistry preserved from the dawn of the Solar System", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid in Scotland: FM wants to avoid Manchester lockdown situation\n\nNicola Sturgeon has insisted she will have the final say on local Covid-19 restrictions in different parts of Scotland, saying \"the buck stops here\".\n\nThe Scottish first minister said she would not \"offload\" decisions about local alert levels onto councils.\n\nA lengthy row has played out between UK ministers and leaders in Manchester over imposing stricter rules there.\n\nMs Sturgeon said it was her \"driving ambition\" not to repeat this when a new multi-tier system begins in Scotland.\n\nShe said the government would \"consult and be as collaborative as possible\", but would ultimately make the decisions and would not be getting into \"standoffs\".\n\nSome 2.8 million people in Greater Manchester were left in limbo for more than a week during talks between ministers, mayors and MPs over whether the region would move into the top tier of England's Covid alert system.\n\nThe talks broke down after 10 days amid disagreements over financial support, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has now confirmed the region will be placed in the \"very high\" alert level from Friday even without a deal.\n\nScotland is due to implement its own multi-tier system of restrictions after a set of short-term measures expires later in October.\n\nMs Sturgeon said she made no criticism of anyone involved in the \"tough decisions\" in Manchester, but said she would be aiming to avoid such a dispute.\n\nThe UK government has been in a standoff with local leaders in Greater Manchester over Covid-19 restrictions\n\nThe first minister said: \"I believe it's really important that the buck for these difficult decisions stops here, with me and government.\n\n\"We are asking people to do extraordinary things right now, and it's not fair for me and the government to try to offload those onto other people, be it local authorities or health boards.\n\n\"We have to consult and be as collaborative as possible - we will absolutely be engaging with local authorities. And as we take decisions about which levels apply in which parts of the country we will want that to be collaborative.\n\n\"But ultimately we have to be able to take the decisions.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon said her government was \"not in a position to get into standoffs over money\", stressing the \"finite resources\" available to her.\n\nShe said: \"What we are trying to do is give as much clarity and certainty as we can, have as much collaboration and discussion with those that need to be involved in these decisions as we can, not shy away from responsibility and ultimately me bearing the accountability for these decisions, and retaining a degree of flexibility in the face of an infectious virus.\n\n\"That is the balance we are trying to strike.\"\n\nPubs in Scotland's central belt have been shut down by the current set of short-term restrictions\n\nAt her daily coronavirus briefing, Ms Sturgeon also hinted that the current short-term restrictions on bars and restaurants - which are chiefly focused on the central belt - could be extended for another week until the multi-tier system has been signed off by MSPs.\n\nRules clamping down on the hospitality trade are due to expire on 26 October, but MSPs will not vote on the government's \"strategic framework\" before then as Holyrood is in recess.\n\nThe first minister is to discuss the restrictions with her cabinet on Wednesday.\n\nAsked if the current measures would be extended to cover the gap, she said: \"If you look at the numbers across the central belt right now and the sequencing over the next week of moving to a new system, you might expect it might make sense from a public health point of view to see that rolled over.\n\n\"That is one option cabinet is looking at tomorrow.\n\n\"The regulations currently expire on Monday, so another option would be for that to be allowed to happen - we will look at the data and I will give the outcome of that tomorrow.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon is to hold talks with opposition party leaders about the next steps on Tuesday afternoon, including Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross.\n\nThe Tory MP said he would \"look at everything as constructively as possible\", but said there had been a \"lack of clear guidance\" from the Scottish government to firms.\n\nHe said: \"When they were given just 50 hours' notice to introduce these further restrictions, what was the guidance from the Scottish government to businesses about how they could change and adapt to make sure they could open again safely?\n\n\"It seems nothing has happened, nothing has been developed in that area and businesses are once again hearing through the daily briefing that these restrictions may last far longer.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. People in Barnsley town centre react to tier three restrictions being announced\n\nSouth Yorkshire will move into tier three from 00.01 on Saturday, meaning 7.3 million people in England will be living under the toughest Covid rules.\n\nSheffield City region mayor Dan Jarvis said the move followed \"extensive discussions\" with ministers.\n\nThe rules will apply to all council areas in South Yorkshire - Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield.\n\nGreater Manchester will be placed in the same tier on Friday, against local leaders' wishes.\n\nUnder tier three - England's \"very high\" level of alert which is already in place in Lancashire and Liverpool City Region - pubs and bars that do not serve substantial meals have to close, and there are further restrictions on households mixing.\n\nAdditional rules in South Yorkshire include the closure of betting shops, adult gaming centres, casinos, soft play centres and gym classes - though gyms will remain open.\n\nMeanwhile, Coventry is to move to tier two from midnight on Friday, the city council has said, which will prevent households from mixing in homes and hospitality venues.\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak is expected to make an announcement relating to support for workers and businesses affected by tier two restrictions in the House of Commons on Thursday.\n\nBBC economics editor Faisal Islam said the government is understood to have acknowledged the reality that there are three tiers of pandemic shutdowns but only two tiers of support, with some firms suffering a collapse in business without being able to benefit from the Job Support Scheme.\n\nIt comes as a further 26,688 new coronavirus cases were recorded on Wednesday, while another 191 people were reported to have died within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nIt is the highest ever number of recorded daily cases. However, mass testing was not available during the peak of the pandemic, when daily cases were estimated to have reached as many as 100,000.\n\nHealth minister Edward Argar told MPs there have been more than 12,000 cases in South Yorkshire so far in October - more than in July, August and September combined - while the number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care has reached more than half that seen at the height of the pandemic.\n\nHe said he was aware the measures would \"entail further sacrifice\", but \"bearing down hard\" would help to slow the spread of coronavirus.\n\nDoncaster's infection rate was 316 cases per 100,000 people in the week ending 17 October, compared to 370 in Rotherham, 395 in Sheffield and 415 in Barnsley.\n\nLocal leaders in South Yorkshire have agreed to a financial package of £41m, which includes £30m to support the region's businesses and £11m for local authorities to support public health measures like contact tracing.\n\nMr Jarvis said it was the \"responsible route\" and that \"inaction was not an option\" after its hospital admissions doubled in 10 days.\n\nHe insisted he had \"moved heaven and earth to secure the maximum amount\" of support for the region, which he said would help to reduce the re-infection rate and pressure on the NHS, while supporting the local economy.\n\nIt comes a day after new restrictions were imposed on Greater Manchester after talks with local leaders, who had called for at least £65m, broke down.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said the £60m offered to Greater Manchester to support businesses and workers affected by the new restrictions would be distributed to the region's boroughs.\n\nWe all knew it was coming. But I was still surprised when the announcement leapt into my inbox at 09:02 BST this morning.\n\nOver a million people in South Yorkshire are to go into tier three on Saturday. The phone started ringing and it hasn't stopped yet.\n\nAgreed - or imposed? It depends who you talk to. It has been signed off by South Yorkshire but it doesn't mean all the leaders are happy about how it happened.\n\nChris Read, the Rotherham Council leader, is angrier than I've ever seen him.\n\nHe says it wasn't a negotiation at all - just the government telling South Yorkshire what it was prepared to offer. His point is if that was the case, why not do it a week earlier?\n\nMiriam Cates, the Conservative Penistone and Stocksbridge MP, says it's a fair deal and heaped praise on Labour mayor Dan Jarvis.\n\nWe're all digesting how it will affect us day to day. People will be working out how to run their businesses, provide childcare and take care of their mental health.\n\nA review is coming in 28 days but there is no magic number for when an area comes out of tier three.\n\nPeople in South Yorkshire are being asked to bear the toughest restrictions, without knowing when they'll end.\n\nThe government's three-tier strategy of regional measures is designed to avoid a national lockdown.\n\nAny areas in tier three will have its status reviewed after 28 days, the prime minister said.\n\nThe simplest way for areas to get out of those restrictions was to get the reproduction number, the rate at which the virus is spreading, down to one or below, Boris Johnson told MPs. Rates of admission to hospital and other data would also be taken into account, he added.\n\nMr Jarvis said it would be \"very challenging\" for his region to come out of tier three in 28 days \"given the pressures of winter\", but urged people to renew their efforts to ensure all local authorities had a \"fighting chance\" of coming out by then.\n\nOther areas in tier two but known to be in discussions about tighter restrictions are West Yorkshire, the North East, Teesside and Nottinghamshire.\n\nTalks between council leaders and No 10 about moving the North East into tier three have been \"paused\" following a fall in the region's infection rate over the past week.\n\nDavid Mellen, leader of Nottingham City Council, said no \"serious conversations\" have been scheduled with ministers or senior civil servants, but he would expect any economic deal to be as good as other areas have received.\n\nJamie Hawksworth, who owns the Sheffield Tap, said he saw the new restrictions coming - but that won't lessen the impact.\n\n\"I think I speak for most of my staff, and certainly the management team, that it's devastating. We've had the entire business pulled from under us.\"\n\nHe added that the knock-on effect would be fewer orders for local breweries, abattoirs and other suppliers.\n\nMeanwhile, Prof John Edmunds, a scientist advising the government, warned there was \"very little chance\" that Covid-19 would be eradicated.\n\nHe told two MPs' committees that people would have to learn to live with the virus \"forever more\" but it was an \"almost certainty\" that a vaccine could be ready in the \"not-too-distant future\", possibly towards the end of winter.\n\nHow have you been affected by the issues relating to coronavirus? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Greater Manchester is set to move to the highest Covid-19 alert level\n\nA £60m support package for businesses affected by new coronavirus restrictions in Greater Manchester will be distributed across the region.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson confirmed the government will be giving the extra funding as the region goes into the highest tier on Friday.\n\nThe move follows a breakdown in talks with local leaders who requested £90m but lowered their demand to £65m.\n\nLabour Mayor Andy Burnham told ITV News he has \"no regrets for taking a stand\".\n\n\"This wasn't a negotiation, this was basically bulldozed through and we took a stand,\" the Greater Manchester mayor said.\n\n\"So no regrets for taking that stand because the point is they were imposing an arbitrary formula one-by-one on places.\"\n\nGreater Manchester is the first area to be forced into tier three, England's highest level of alert, against the wishes of local leaders.\n\nThe £65m figure was described by Mr Burnham as the \"bare minimum to prevent a winter of real hardship\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson clash on the money offered to regions in the coronavirus crisis\n\nDuring Prime Minister's Question Time, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer criticised Mr Johnson for not being able to \"find\" £5m, adding \"stop bargaining with people's lives\".\n\n\"I think the Prime Minister has crossed a Rubicon here,\" he said.\n\n\"Not just with the miserly way he's treated Greater Manchester but in the grubby 'take it or leave' way these local deals are being done - it's corrosive to public trust.\"\n\nBut Mr Johnson said he was \"very proud that this government has already given Greater Manchester £1.1bn in support for business, £200m in extra un-ringfenced funding, £50m to tackle infections in care homes, £20m for test and trace, another £22m for local response that we announced yesterday\".\n\nCommunities Secretary Robert Jenrick has since written to the region's council leaders inviting them \"to work with us at pace to design their business support schemes\".\n\nHe added that this will \"ensure the funding reaches the people and businesses who need it\".\n\nThe Conservative leader of Bolton Council said he is willing to look at an individual deal over the government's offer of £60m.\n\nThe government's three-tier strategy of regional measures is designed to avoid a national lockdown\n\nDavid Greenhalgh said: \"It is clear the amount on the table, which is what has been accepted in Liverpool [City Region], Lancashire and now South Yorkshire, and I am not prepared for Bolton businesses to miss out on this extra financial help.\n\n\"This is not the time for posturing and politics. This is about getting the best deal available for Bolton business and those who work in the sectors worst affected.\"\n\nMeanwhile Manchester's night time economy adviser Sacha Lord has started the process to launch a legal challenge of the government's decision to put the region into the top tier.\n\nHe tweeted: \"Last night we started the judicial review into the legality of implementing emergency restrictions on Greater Manchester's hospitality sector, without scientific evidence.\"\n\nHe said a \"pre-action letter has been filed\" and he is waiting for a response from Health Secretary Matt Hancock.\n\nAndy Burnham said he hoped to set a Covid-19 funding template for other areas to use\n\nAfter talks broke down between local leaders and the government, six Tory MPs wrote to Mr Burnham accusing him of putting his \"ego\" above the people of Greater Manchester.\n\nOldham Council leader Sean Fielding said: \"It wasn't just Andy Burnham that rejected the offer of £60m, it was collectively the 10 council leaders and Andy Burnham.\"\n\n\"£60m was not enough and it remains not enough,\" added the Labour councillor.\n\nThe Labour leader of Bury Council Eamonn O'Brien also responded to the letter, saying: \"This is about our collective fight to get the best possible deal for our businesses and residents, especially those on the lowest pay.\"\n\nBut Mr Burnham said \"we asked for £90m - which is the cost of an 80% furlough & self-employed scheme\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Andy Burnham This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk", "The students were fined after officers spotted a house party in Kimbolton Avenue\n\nFour university students have been fined £10,000 each after telling police who broke up their house party they were \"spoiling their fun\".\n\nOfficers on patrol spotted a party in Lenton, Nottingham, on Tuesday night but were told everyone had left.\n\nBut inside they found more than 30 people hiding and, when challenged, organisers complained they should be having the \"time of their lives\".\n\nNottingham Trent University said the third-year students had been suspended.\n\nMixing of households indoors has been banned since Nottingham went into tier two restrictions on 14 October.\n\nOn Tuesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said talks over moving Nottinghamshire into tier three were \"ongoing\" but the city council's leader said no discussions had started.\n\nNottingham had the highest level of infection in England for nine days running, with many of the cases centring on areas with a high student population.\n\nPolice said after being told the party in Kimbolton Avenue had ended, officers found people hiding in the kitchen, upstairs bedrooms and basement.\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Kate Meynell said the people at the property had shown a \"blatant disregard for the safety of those around them\".\n\n\"This needs to stop. The claims that police presented as a barrier to the students' fun are astounding,\" she said.\n\n\"How many fines do we have to give before the message is understood? We do not take pleasure in handing out fines and would much rather be in a situation where students could enjoy themselves but the reality is that if people do not follow the Covid-19 restrictions, more people will die.\"\n\nA spokesperson for Nottingham Trent University said: \"Any student who is found to have breached our disciplinary regulations can face a range of sanctions, up to and including expulsion.\"\n\nThe coronavirus infection rate for Nottingham has dropped again compared to the same time a week earlier.\n\nIn the seven days up to 18 October there were 2,012 new cases, down from 3,085 in the previous weekly period.\n\nThe rate of infection per 100,000 people has also gone down from 926.7 in the week up to 11 October to 604.4.\n\nFor a third day, the city has the second highest rate in England, behind Knowsley in Merseyside.\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. More than a dozen people have been evacuated from nearby properties\n\nTwo people have been killed in a suspected gas explosion at a shop in west London, firefighters have said.\n\nThe blast happened in a hair salon and mobile phone shop on King Street, Southall, just after 06:30 BST.\n\nFour adults and a child are known to have been rescued by the London Fire Brigade (LFB).\n\nEarlier, the Metropolitan Police said one man was found injured. The blast is not being treated as suspicious, the force said.\n\nThe explosion has damaged the Dr Phone shop and the Chandla Hair Salon on King Street\n\nStation Commander Paul Morgan said: \"Our crews continue to search the property using specialist equipment including the use of urban search-and-rescue dogs.\n\n\"We can confirm that sadly two people have died at the scene.\n\n\"The explosion caused substantial damage to the shop and structural damage throughout.\n\n\"It is a painstaking and protracted incident with firefighters working systematically to stabilise the building and search for people involved.\"\n\nLondon Fire Brigade sent about 40 firefighters to the scene\n\nLFB said search and rescue operations have finished for the evening and will restart in the morning.\n\nJatinder Sing, the owner of Dr Phone, said he was in \"total shock\" when he received a call about the blast.\n\nThe 36-year-old said: \"They have closed off everything. It seems like an explosion of a gas cylinder and there is a flat upstairs and my shop is downstairs.\n\n\"I was shocked because my shop looks totally dead, finished and the same with the barber.\n\n\"I can't see anything from where I am standing apart from the the shutter and the main door, which is all trashed.\n\n\"I have lost my everything. We were struggling from the coronavirus period as well - too much stock in the shop and no sales for a long time so I don't know how we will survive.\"\n\nRescuers are involved in a \"complex\" search for anyone who might still be inside the collapsed building\n\nResident Nurmila Hamid who lives nearby said she felt the blast as she was getting her children ready for school.\n\nThe 38-year-old said: \"The house shook, and I turned to my husband and said 'what is that?'\n\n\"And he said, 'It's a blast' and he went to look after taking the children to school - he said it was at a phone shop.\"\n\nMohammad Rafiq, 78, who lives two streets away, said he and his 76-year-old wife felt \"shocked\" and \"scared\" when the noise from the King Street blast woke them at their home.\n\nHe said: \"I heard it in the morning - it woke me up, it was scary. It sounded like a very dangerous blast so I was scared.\n\n\"We didn't sleep after that.\"\n\nSixteen people are known to have been evacuated from nearby properties\n\nI have counted 25 firefighters here sifting through the wreckage on King Street with the police this morning.\n\nThe explosion has also shut off a number of streets, with the police on the scene to prevent people approaching the scene.\n\nIt is a clear scene of devastation of several shops and flats, which the London Fire Brigade have called a \"structural collapse\". Sadly, it looks as though the explosion may have claimed a few lives.\n\nA further 14 adults and two children evacuated themselves from nearby properties after the blast.\n\nLFB was called at 06:38 and sent about 40 firefighters to the scene. It advised people to avoid the King Street area while the search continues.\n\nA London Ambulance Service spokeswoman said paramedics had treated and discharged one person.\n\nEaling Council said it had switched off the electricity and gas supply to some homes and businesses in the area and warned more properties might need to be evacuated.\n\nFor more London news follow on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.", "Promotional image for The Chop featuring Rick Edwards, Lee Mack and carpenter William Hardie\n\nA TV contest for carpenters has been pulled from Sky schedules over concerns about one of its contestant's tattoos.\n\nOne participant, Darren Lumsden, was accused of having a Nazi symbol on his face after the Sky History channel posted a clip from the show online.\n\nThe channel initially said the tattoos had \"no political or ideological meaning whatsoever\".\n\nHowever it then said it would not air the programme until it had investigated their \"nature and meaning\".\n\nThe Chop: Britain's Top Woodworker, hosted by Lee Mack and Rick Edwards, began on Thursday, with the second episode due to be aired this Thursday.\n\nThe series sees 10 contestants compete over nine weeks of carpentry challenges.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Sky HISTORY This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIn the promotional clip, Mr Lumsden, from North Somerset, is seen with the number 88 inked on his cheek. As H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, the number can be used by white supremacists as numerical code for \"Heil Hitler\".\n\nIn a statement on Tuesday, Sky History said his tattoos denoted \"significant events in his life and have no political or ideological meaning whatsoever\". It said the number 88 on Mr Lumsden's cheek referred to 1988, the year of his father's death.\n\nViewers also raised concerns about some of his other markings, claiming they included other numerals that could be associated with white supremacist slogans.\n\nIrish historian Elizabeth Boyle wrote on Twitter that she could see at least five potential Nazi and white power tattoos on his face.\n\nIn its initial statement, the channel said producers had carried out \"extensive background checks\" on all contestants and \"confirmed Darren has no affiliations or links to racist groups, views or comments\". It added: \"Any use of symbols or numbers is entirely incidental and not meant to cause harm or offence.\"\n\nHowever, that statement was deleted and a separate announcement said: \"While we further investigate the nature, and meaning, of Darren's tattoos, we have removed the video featuring him from our social media pages, and will not be broadcasting any episodes of The Chop: Britain's Top Woodworker until we have concluded that investigation.\n\n\"Sky History stands against racism and hate speech of all kinds.\"\n\nMr Lumsden has not responded to BBC requests for comment. Speaking to the Bristol Post about his tattoos in an article published on Monday, before the furore erupted, he said: \"I have my daughter on the back of my head and my son on my cheek.\n\n\"When some people first meet me they are a bit shocked, admittedly. But they soon warm to me after a few minutes.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "The restrictions rollover will continue into the start of November\n\nBars and restaurants in Scotland's central belt are to remain closed for another week after short-term Covid-19 restrictions were extended.\n\nThe move comes as a further 28 deaths linked to the virus were recorded.\n\nScotland is due to move to a five-tier system of virus alert levels from 2 November.\n\nThe temporary restrictions targeting hospitality venues in the central belt in particular will continue until then to enable a \"smooth transition\".\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it would \"not be safe\" to ease any restrictions in the short term, but said \"we believe they may already be making a difference\" to the spread of the virus.\n\nBusiness and hospitality leaders said they were \"extremely disappointed\" with the extension, which they described as a \"hammer blow to pubs and breweries across the country\".\n\nBars and restaurants in Scotland's central belt - an area containing about 3.4m people - were closed on 9 October as part of what Ms Sturgeon called a \"short, sharp action to arrest a worrying increase in infection\".\n\nHospitality venues in other parts of the country can only serve alcohol outdoors.\n\nThese measures were originally meant to expire on 26 October, but Ms Sturgeon said they would now continue until a new \"strategic framework\" comes into force.\n\nThis multi-tier system will involve different levels of restrictions that can be applied nationally or regionally depending on the level of infection. It is due to be published on Friday, and debated by MSPs after Holyrood's half term recess.\n\nMs Sturgeon said she had agreed with her cabinet on Wednesday that the short-term restrictions should remain in place in the interim to ensure a \"smooth transition to the new system\".\n\nMs Sturgeon said the rise in infections was \"clearly concerning\" but insisted restrictions were having an effect\n\nBusiness groups hit out at the move, with Liz Cameron of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce saying the hospitality sector in particular would be \"absolutely devastated that restrictions now look to be in place indefinitely\".\n\nJoe Crawford from the Campaign for Real Ale group said the move was a \"hammer blow\" to pubs and breweries \"who feel like they're being offered up as a sacrificial lamb without sufficient evidence\".\n\nAnd Andrew McRae from the Federation of Small Businesses said the current measures had a \"disproportionate\" impact on smaller firms, adding: \"This new strategy must have meaningful input from the business community.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon said the move was \"first and foremost a public health decision\", having earlier set out rising numbers of cases, people being treated in hospitals, and deaths.\n\nMeanwhile, and figures from the National Records of Scotland said Covid-19 had been mentioned on 75 death certificates in the week to Sunday, an increase of 50 on the week before.\n\nIn her briefing, the first minister set out details of how the new five-tier system will work, saying the middle three would be \"broadly equivalent\" to the three-tier system in use in England.\n\nThe Scottish system will add an extra tier at the bottom - which Ms Sturgeon said will be \"the closest to normality we can reasonably expect to live with until we have a vaccine\" - and one at the top.\n\nShe said: \"When England published their system the chief medical officer at the time said he thought the top level was not enough to necessarily, in all circumstances, get the virus down.\n\n\"We think we need one above that, not identical to but perhaps close to a full lockdown, if things got to be that serious.\"\n\nBars and restaurants in Scotland's central belt were closed on 9 October\n\nThe new five-tier framework will include details of financial support for businesses hit by enforced closures, which Ms Sturgeon said will be \"broadly similar\" to that on offer in other parts of the UK.\n\nShe said: \"While the level of support we set out will be the maximum that the Scottish government is able to provide within the resources available to us, it is the minimum we think is necessary.\n\n\"In common with other devolved administrations and many councils in England we will continue to pursue urgent discussions with the Treasury about provision of adequate support to help businesses and individuals through the restrictions likely to be necessary in the time ahead.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon said the continuing rise in infections and deaths was \"clearly concerning\", but she believed it \"should not be taken as an indication that the current restrictions we are living under are not having any impact\".\n\nShe said: \"We do believe these restrictions will make a difference, and we believe they may already be making a difference. Even allowing for today's figures, we may be seeing a reduction in the rate at which new cases are increasing.\"\n\nHospitality owners have protested about the current curbs\n\nThe first minister discussed the new strategic framework with opposition party leaders on Tuesday.\n\nThe Scottish Conservatives said the government must stop \"stalling\" and get support to businesses, saying they had been given \"barely any notice\" of the changes.\n\nLeader Douglas Ross said: \"There's a very real risk that the SNP take so long to get support out to these businesses that it will too little, too late. Promises of support sometime in the future won't protect Scottish jobs today.\"\n\nScottish Labour's Richard Leonard said Ms Sturgeon's administration \"must take the right action to control the virus\" as positive cases, hospital patients and deaths increase.\n\nHe added that it was \"clear\" that the test and protect system was not working \"well enough\" to contain the virus, saying: \"We need the government to step up and ensure our testing and tracing system is fit for purpose\".\n\nLib Dem leader Willie Rennie said he was worried about \"how things are developing\" and said the government needed to \"get on top of this situation\" if the virus was going to be curbed.\n\nHe said: \"We have had four strategies in three weeks, starting with the route map then the 16 days of restrictions that has now turned into 23 days, and we will have the new strategy announced on Friday. It doesn't look like we're in control of the situation.\"", "Half of all work tasks will be handled by machines by 2025 in a shift likely to worsen inequality, a World Economic Forum report has forecast.\n\nThe think tank said a \"robot revolution\" would create 97 million jobs worldwide but destroy almost as many, leaving some communities at risk.\n\nRoutine or manual jobs in administration and data processing were most at threat of automation, WEF said.\n\nBut it said new jobs would emerge in care, big data and the green economy.\n\nThe Forum's research spanned 300 of the world's biggest companies, who between them employ eight million people around the world.\n\nMore than 50% of employers surveyed said they expected to speed up the automation of some roles in their companies, while 43% felt they were likely to cut jobs due to technology.\n\nWEF said the pandemic had sped up the adoption of new technologies as firms looked to cut costs and adopt new ways of working. But it warned workers now faced a double threat from \"accelerating automation and the fallout from the Covid-19 recession\".\n\n\"[These things have] deepened existing inequalities across labour markets and reversed gains in employment made since the global financial crisis in 2007-2008,\" said Saadia Zahidi, managing director at WEF.\n\n\"It's a double disruption scenario that presents another hurdle for workers in this difficult time. The window of opportunity for proactive management of this change is closing fast.\"\n\nWEF said currently around a third of all work tasks were handled by machines, with humans doing the rest, but by 2025 the balance would shift.\n\nRoles that relied on human skills such as advising, decision-making, reasoning, communicating and interacting would rise in demand. There would also be a \"surge\" in demand for workers to fill green economy jobs, and new roles in areas like engineering and cloud computing.\n\nBut it said millions of routine or manual jobs would be displaced by technology, affecting the lowest paid, lowest skilled workers the most.\n\nIt said millions would need to be re-skilled to cope with the change, while governments would have to provide \"stronger safety nets\" for displaced workers.", "Last updated on .From the section Champions League\n\nPremier League champions Liverpool were helped by an own goal from Nicolas Tagliafico to get off to a winning start in the Champions League against Ajax.\n\nJurgen Klopp's injury-hit side, who were without talisman Virgil van Dijk, were tested by Ajax but did enough to leave Amsterdam with a clean sheet.\n\nTagliafico sliced Sadio Mane's cross into his own net with 10 minutes of the first half remaining, moments after Liverpool keeper Adrian denied Quincy Promes from close range.\n\nLiverpool's Fabinho then acrobatically cleared Dusan Tadic's lob off the line, before Davy Klaassen's powerful effort bounced off the inside of the post in the second half.\n\nThe Reds, who also face Atalanta and Midtjylland in Group D, were returning to Europe as English champions for the first time since 1984-85.\n• None Who will win the Champions League?\n\nAll eyes were on Liverpool's defence in the absence of Van Dijk and the injured Joel Matip.\n\nBrazilian midfielder Fabinho, who started at centre-back in the victory over Chelsea last month, lined up alongside Joe Gomez in defence, while Adrian continued to deputise for number one keeper Alisson.\n\nThere were nerves early-on - Gomez and Adrian had a mix-up which resulted in the keeper clearing it against the England international inside their own area within three minutes.\n\nAnd Ajax looked to exploit any weakness out of possession by dropping deep, encouraging Liverpool's defence to have the ball and forcing them to use Adrian as a passback option.\n\nThey had some success in the first half, as Liverpool rode periods of pressure - Fabinho had to produce a smart tackle to block Tadic, while Tagliafico almost escaped from Gomez before Adrian pushed him wide in the box.\n\nLiverpool boss Jurgen Klopp reacted frantically on the touchline, waving his arms and shouting at his players as he demanded more urgency and communication.\n\nBut as the game wore on, Liverpool looked more comfortable out of possession, with midfielder James Milner dropping deep to provide added support.\n\nAdrian's smart save from Promes and Fabinho's goalline heroics ultimately proved crucial and Klopp will no doubt be delighted with a clean sheet and a win in their first group game of what has been a frustrating week for his squad.\n\nKlopp's tactics and rotation were put to the test in Amsterdam as he managed the injuries in defence with a weaker squad.\n\nLiverpool-born teenager Curtis Jones was handed a first European appearance in midfield, while Milner made his third start this season.\n\nIt meant Liverpool's well-practised defensive high line was more conservative and the front three of Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino and Mane were more reliant on opportunities on the break.\n\nThe goal came from nothing - Mane turning sharply in the box and scuffing his cross before getting a fortunate touch from Tagliafico - but Liverpool maintained that threat from the counter-attack throughout.\n\nKlopp, who gambled slightly with his midfield selection - leaving skipper Jordan Henderson on the bench - took another risk with the slim lead when he pulled all three of his forwards off on the hour.\n\nBut the risk paid off and as Ajax pushed for an equaliser, substitutes Diogo Jota and Takumi Minamino showed glimpses of quality and both had chances to score late-on.\n\n\"Fabinho was immense. Everything he did. He stepped into the play and broke things up, he stepped in at the right times when he knew there was a danger and headed everything that came into the box.\n\n\"What I liked about it was he didn't have the attitude of 'I have to be Virgil van Dijk, where I pull things down and play out from the back.' If it needs to go, it goes.\n\n\"He just dealt with situations comfortably and cleared his lines and that sounds really easy at times but it's knowing your limits and knowing how to play.\"\n\n'Good enough to win the game'\n\nLiverpool manager Jurgen Klopp, speaking to BT Sport: \"It was good enough to win the game. That's what you need. I think both teams could play better football. At moments it was wild. The pitch was deep and muddy. Three days ago it looked completely different and in training yesterday it looked different.\n\n\"But we did not take our chances which was a shame. Ajax had a big one which hit the post. When you're 1-0 up, these things can happen. But overall I'm happy with the game. It was not sunshine football but we wanted three points and we got it.\"\n\nThe best of the stats\n• None Liverpool are unbeaten in their last seven away trips against Dutch opponents, keeping a clean sheet in five of those encounters (W4 D3).\n• None Ajax have won only one of their previous seven games against English opponents in European competition (D2 L4), remaining winless in the most recent four encounters since a 1-0 victory against Tottenham in the UEFA Champions League semi-final first leg in 2018/19.\n• None Liverpool kept just their second clean sheet in the Champions League since the start of last season, with the other coming in their last group stage game of 2019/20 at Red Bull Salzburg.\n• None Jurgen Klopp substituted Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané and Robert Firmino in the same game for only the 5th occasion in his reign as Liverpool manager.\n• None Nicolas Tagliafico is the first Ajax player to score an own goal in the Champions League since Vurnon Anita against Real Madrid in September 2010. Indeed, it was only the second own goal Liverpool have benefited from in the Champions League after Deportivo de La Coruña's Jorge Andrade in November 2004.\n• None At 34 years and 291 days, James Milner became the 3rd oldest player to appear for Liverpool in the European Cup/Champions League, after Gary McAllister (37y 84d) and Ian Callaghan (35y 353d). In contrast, Curtis Jones became the 5th youngest Champions League outfielder to start for Liverpool (19y 265d).\n\nLiverpool return to Premier League action on Saturday, 24 October (20:00 BST kick-off) when they host Sheffield United at Anfield. They next face Midtjylland in the Champions League on Tuesday, 27 October (20:00 BST).\n• None Attempt missed. Jurgen Ekkelenkamp (Ajax) right footed shot from the centre of the box is too high.\n• None Attempt blocked. Xherdan Shaqiri (Liverpool) left footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Takumi Minamino.\n• None Quincy Promes (Ajax) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt saved. Takumi Minamino (Liverpool) right footed shot from a difficult angle on the right is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Xherdan Shaqiri.\n• None Attempt saved. Georginio Wijnaldum (Liverpool) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Diogo Jota.\n• None Attempt saved. Lassina Traoré (Ajax) with an attempt from the centre of the box is saved in the top centre of the goal. Assisted by Klaas Jan Huntelaar with a headed pass.\n• None Attempt blocked. Georginio Wijnaldum (Liverpool) right footed shot from outside the box is blocked.\n• None Attempt blocked. Diogo Jota (Liverpool) left footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked.\n• None Ryan Gravenberch (Ajax) wins a free kick on the right wing. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None How effective is it for weight loss?", "GCSE exams due to take place in early November have been postponed for almost two weeks.\n\nEducation Minister Peter Weir made the decision due to the closure of schools for an extended mid-term break.\n\nGCSE exams run by the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment (CCEA) will now begin on 23 November.\n\nAlmost 1,500 positive cases of coronavirus have been recorded in NI schools since they reopened to pupils at the end of August.\n\nThousands of Year 11 and Year 12 pupils taking GCSEs in science are due to sit exams in November.\n\nThere are exam papers in biology, chemistry and physics on three consecutive days.\n\nThose exams had been due to take place from 11 to 13 November.\n\nHowever, schools have now been told they will be postponed until 23 to 25 November.\n\nIn a statement, CCEA said that the decision had been taken by Mr Weir \"following the Northern Ireland Executive's recent decision that all schools should close for an extended mid-term break, due to the ongoing health situation in Northern Ireland\".\n\nPupils are also due to sit maths and English language GCSE exams in January 2021 and more science GCSE exams in February 2021.\n\nMr Weir had previously decided that the main summer A-level, AS and GCSE exams in Northern Ireland will start one week later in 2021, but will still finish by 30 June.\n\nThe minister said he had asked the Northern Ireland exams board CCEA to consider what he called \"back-up\" arrangements.\n\nPupils are due to sit fewer exams in many GCSEs in 2021 but CCEA has not yet provided final details of precise changes to individual subjects.", "Today we're featuring members of our voter panel who are US military veterans. You met Rom yesterday. Today we're featuring his answers on why being a veteran impacts his vote.\n\nRom served as a US Marine for seven years and now works in business development. After backing Trump in 2016, he is more enthusiastically supporting his re-election this year as a check on the “rampant liberalism” of Democrats.\n\nWhy does this election matter to you?\n\nAs an avid historian, a follower of current events since I was very young, and a veteran, I have become quite startled at the lurch towards the left by one of the two major political parties in our country. There was a time not long ago when the differences between the two parties were not that great. Both parties, Republican and Democrat, were aligned on the same goals, albeit, their methods for achieving those goals is what differentiated them.\n\nHowever, there has never been such a great divergence in goals between the two parties, with one - Democrats - appearing to make a steep and staggering lurch towards the left and intent on altering the fundamental values that the United States was built upon, and which allowed it to become the world's leader and economic powerhouse. There's never been a time in our country's recent history when one major party has pushed so hard to turn the United States into a socialist-like country.\n\nHow does your background as a veteran influence your vote?\n\nService members are trained to put their lives on the line for their country. In order to be willing to die for your country, you have to believe in its core values. I believed in the core values of my country when I served for seven years in the US Marine Corps, just as I continue to believe in those core values today.\n\nNotwithstanding his caustic and unconventional demeanor and personality, there are three primary reasons I support Mr Trump:\n• He holds dear the values that have made this country great.\n• He follows through on his campaign promises - unlike other politicians of the past, both Republican and Democrat, who made promises while campaigning but rarely followed through.\n• Mr Trump has shaken the establishment class to its core - he's the Disruptor-in-Chief and I, as well as many others, believe disruption has been in order for a long time because the establishment class - Washington - has been out of touch with the general working-class population.\n\nRom is a member of our US election voter panel. You'll hear more from him, and many of our other voters, throughout the week.\n• We want to hear from you - what questions do you have about the US election?\n• In five words, tell us what's at stake in this election.", "The end of cheaper restaurant meals pushed UK prices up last month after the Eat Out to Help Out scheme expired.\n\nThe UK's inflation rate, which tracks the prices of goods and services, climbed to 0.5% in September, from 0.2% in August.\n\nThe Consumer Prices Index (CPI) began rising more quickly in September after the discount meals scheme ended, pushing up restaurant and café prices,\n\nTransport costs also went up as demand for second-hand cars increased.\n\nIn catering services, prices rose 4.1% between August and September 2020, compared with a rise of 0.2% between the same two months in 2019.\n\nTransport costs rose for the first time since March, partly because the price of second-hand cars was boosted by increased demand as people, reportedly, looked to reduce their reliance on public transport, said the Office for National Statistics (ONS).\n\nThe price of second-hand cars, climbed 2.1% between August and September 2020, compared with a 1.4% fall between the same two months a year ago.\n\nAverage petrol prices also rose to 113.3p per litre in September 2020, up from 113.1 pence in August. However, that was still some way below the 127.3p recorded in September 2019.\n\nThe drop in the cost of air fares usually seen in the September inflation index had much less effect this year, according to Jonathan Athow, deputy national statistician for economic statistics at the ONS.\n\n\"Air fares would normally fall substantially at this time due to the end of the school holidays, but with prices subdued this year, as fewer people have been travelling abroad, the price drop has been less significant,\" he said.\n\nPaul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics, said that in the light of continued low inflation, the Bank of England was likely to increase its monetary stimulus measures next month to boost the ailing economy.\n\n\"With CPI inflation just 0.5% in September, it's hard to think of reasons why the Bank of England won't launch another £100bn or so of QE at the November meeting. And despite public borrowing still jumping, the government may yet spend more,\" he said.\n\nInflation is the rate at which the prices for goods and services increase.\n\nIt affects everything from mortgages to the cost of our shopping and the price of train tickets.\n\nIt's one of the key measures of financial well-being, because it affects what consumers can buy for their money. If there is inflation, money doesn't go as far.\n\nSeptember's CPI is used in the calculation for state pensions, but the government's triple-lock rule means the increase will be 2.5%, as it's the highest figure out of CPI, earnings growth for the year to July (which was actually negative), or 2.5%.\n\nState benefits are also decided by the September inflation figure, meaning payments will rise 0.5% next April, which is far less than this year's 1.7% increase.\n\nThe September figure is also used to decide the annual increase in business rates.\n\n\"Today's headline rate of inflation of 0.5% signals that gross business rates bills next year for 2021-22 will increase by £159.42m in England,\" said real estate adviser Altus Group.\n\nBusiness rates are devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nThe UK state pension is expected to rise by 2.5% in April, owing to calculations guiding the government's triple-lock promise.\n\nWith average earnings lower than a year earlier (based on official figures for May to July), and now the inflation rate only having risen slightly, the backstop of a 2.5% increase kicks in.\n\nThis follows three years of higher rises and is well down on the 3.9% increase seen in April this year.\n\nAlthough it is still to be officially confirmed, it should mean:\n\nThe expected increase could reignite debate over fairness between the generations. On one hand, the rise will seem high to those who have lost jobs during the pandemic, but the UK state pension remains one of the least generous in western economies.\n\nThe age at which people now start to receive the UK state pension recently hit 66 for men and women.", "Companies around the world have been developing coronavirus vaccines\n\nBrazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has said his government will not buy a Chinese-made Covid-19 vaccine, a day after his health minister said it would be added to the immunisation programme.\n\nResponding to a supporter on social media who urged him not to buy the Sinovac vaccine, Mr Bolsonaro said: \"We will not buy the Chinese vaccine.\"\n\nThe president said the vaccine had not yet finished its trials.\n\nBrazil has been one of the countries worst affected by coronavirus.\n\nIt has had nearly 5.3 million confirmed cases - the third highest tally in the world after the US and India - and is second only to the US in terms of deaths, with nearly 155,000 registered so far, according to data collated by Johns Hopkins University.\n\nOn Tuesday, Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello said the federal government had reached a deal with São Paulo state to buy 46 million doses of the vaccine CoronaVac, which is being tested by the state's research centre Butantan Institute.\n\nThe vaccine - which will be produced by Butantan - still needs to be approved by the health regulator to be used in the population.\n\nSão Paulo Governor João Doria - an ally-turned-critic of President Bolsonaro - said the immunisation programme could begin as soon as January 2021, making it one of the first such efforts in the world to fight the pandemic.\n\nBut on Wednesday, President Bolsonaro - whose handling of the pandemic has been widely criticised - said on Twitter that any vaccine would have to be approved by the health regulator and have its effectiveness verified by the health ministry before being made available.\n\n\"The Brazilian people will not be anyone's guinea pig,\" he said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Coronavirus vaccine: How close are you to getting one?\n\nMr Doria has previously touted Sinovac's experimental vaccine, announcing plans to use it to inoculate residents of São Paulo.\n\nThe Butantan Institute announced on Monday that the two-dose vaccine appeared to be safe in a late-stage clinical trial. However, it warned the result was only preliminary, with testing ongoing. It said data on how effective the vaccine is will not be released until the trial is over.\n\nApart from the CoronaVac, Brazil also plans to administer a vaccine being created by England's Oxford University and the drug giant AstraZeneca.\n\nTrials with the Sinovac vaccine are also being conducted in Turkey and Indonesia.", "Almost half of secondary schools in England sent home one or more pupils because of Covid incidents last week, the latest attendance figures show.\n\nIt meant pupils isolating in 46% of secondary and 16% of primary schools.\n\nThe updated figures show 5% - or about 400,000 pupils - are out of school because of Covid outbreaks.\n\nDisruption from Covid has been increasing in schools - but the way of counting has changed which prevents comparisons with previous weeks.\n\nSince the start of term, the Department for Education (DfE) has published a figure showing how many schools were only partially open because of having to send home groups of pupils - which had risen to 21%.\n\nBut the latest weekly figures use a different way of showing how attendance has been affected during the pandemic - based on one or more pupils having to self-isolate.\n\nThis shows 21% of all schools, primary and secondary, sending home a pupil - with up to 13% sending home 30 or more pupils.\n\nBelow this overall average, secondary schools continue to face much more significant problems - three times more likely to send home pupils than in primary.\n\nOverall attendance has worsened from 90% to 89% - but very few schools, about 0.3%, have been completely closed.\n\nJulie McCulloch of the ASCL head teachers' union said the latest figures showed the \"high level of disruption\" from Covid outbreaks.\n\nShe said schools \"haven't received enough support from the government\" over access to testing and health advice - and a helpline set up for schools by the DfE had proved \"patchy\" in its usefulness.\n\nBut the DfE said the attendance figures showed \"a small proportion of pupils are self-isolating\" which was \"similar to previous weeks\".\n\nAppearing before the Education Select Committee on Tuesday morning, England's Schools Minister Nick Gibb said the change in data published on attendance provided more \"granular detail\".\n\n\"So the attendance data that's published this afternoon will be on a different timeline from the data we've published so far, because the data we've collected so far asks schools to report whether they have sent home groups of pupils.\"\n\nThere have been concerns about how pupils missing school will be able to take GCSE and A-level exams next summer.\n\nMr Gibb said exams remained the fairest system - but there was a particular concern about how exams could be fair between pupils who have missed different amounts of time in school, with those in high infection areas likely to have missed the most.\n\nMr Gibb said GCSEs and A-levels would go ahead next summer\n\n\"The other issue that really worries me more than any other issue we're having to grapple with at the moment is the unfairness and unevenness, where different students have had a different experience of missing education during this period.\n\n\"And that is something that is something that we're working with the exam boards and Ofqual to seek to address.\"\n\nHe acknowledged that \"some students will have suffered greater lockdowns, greater propensity to be self-isolating than students in other schools\".\n\n\"That does worry me,\" he said.\n\nMr Gibb said it was important that all year groups were \"able to catch up as swiftly as possible on the lost education that has been caused by this pandemic\".\n\n\"We do not want this generation of schoolchildren to suffer long term as a consequence of having to close schools to most pupils from March to the summer.\"\n\nPressed about exams, he told MPs he expected GCSEs and A-levels to go ahead next summer.\n\n\"We expect all schools to sit exams, we expect all students in Year 11 and Year 13 who are studying for exams to take those exams.\n\n\"We've been working very closely with Ofqual and the exam boards certainly to begin with on the timing issue and we've already announced that there'll be a three week delay to the timing.\"\n\nHe said there was no plan to shorten the school holidays, saying teachers and students needed a break.", "Greater Manchester is set to move to the top level of England Covid restrictions\n\nBusinesses in Greater Manchester fear some may not survive as the area is moved into the top tier of Covid-19 restrictions.\n\nIt has followed Liverpool City Region and Lancashire into tier three.\n\nBusinesses including pubs and bars, unless they serve substantial meals, as well as soft play facilities, betting shops and casinos will have to close on Friday just after midnight.\n\nThe move has been met with anger, frustration and upset by businesses.\n\nThe owner of a Menagerie Restaurant and Bar, on the outskirts of Manchester city centre, said consumer confidence had been knocked by the confusion over coronavirus restrictions.\n\nKarina Jadhav said she was allowed to stay open, but have to close anyway as people stay away\n\n\"We have been operating under restrictions, which are close to tier three for three months now,\" said Karina Jadhav.\n\n\"While we are allowed to stay open, the restrictions, the confusion and the communication coming from the government has really reduced consumer confidence.\n\n\"This has resulted - for us - in a lot of cancellations, people not booking, people wanting refunds.\n\n\"So while we are allowed to stay open, we are being restricted to the point where it is difficult to keep the business open in the current circumstances.\"\n\nThe managing director of Wythenshawe-based Whitehouse Event Crockery said the situation was \"heartbreaking\".\n\nMarc Gough said he had a viable business but had been forgotten by government\n\nThe business, which supplies goods including plates and glassware for weddings and events, will not be forced to close down in tier three.\n\nHowever, the move to the toughest tier of measures would have a direct effect on the number of bookings, said Marc Gough.\n\n\"Weddings cannot take place in a tier three environment, so effectively they are stopping us from working with no financial support,\" he said.\n\n\"This is a viable business - a very successful, viable business - and we have just had no support from the government.\n\n\"We have been simply forgotten and it's heartbreaking.\"\n\nGreater Manchester recorded almost 11,000 new cases in the week to 16 October, according to data updated on Monday.\n\nLatest figures show cases rose across most of Greater Manchester in the week to 16 October.\n\nHowever, the city of Manchester has so far seen a fall compared with the week before.\n\nEven so, it still has a high rate of new cases, with just under 404 per 100,000 people in the week to last Friday.\n\nStockport and Trafford have the lowest rates in Greater Manchester, with 266 per 100,000 and 310 per 100,000 respectively.\n\nThe managing director of a bar in Burnage said it was going to be a \"tough winter\" as the hospitality industry adjusted to the new three-tier system.\n\nElena Rowe, pictured right with her colleague Sean Gregson, said it had been a frustrating time for the business\n\n\"It's really sad. We have done everything we can to keep safe,\" said Elena Rowe, from Reasons to be Cheerful.\n\nReasons to be Cheerful will be among the pubs to close under tier three.\n\n\"We have regulars and a lot of them drink on their own, and the space we provide is their bubble and it's sad that this is going to end for people.\n\n\"It's going to be a tough winter. I'm frustrated and upset,\" said Ms Rowe.\n\nThe owner of a bar in the heart of Manchester's gay village said tier three would also force him to close.\n\nJohn Hamilton warned that businesses were fading away and he called for help\n\nJohn Hamilton, who runs Bar Pop and employees 60 members of staff, said: \"I am so upset. The city centre will be like a deserted island.\n\n\"We need help. We are independent businesses but slowly and surely we are fading away.\"\n\nHe said tier two restrictions were \"bad enough\" and his weekly takings had plummeted from £35,000 to £11,500 and he was struggling to pay the bills.\n\nMr Hamilton said: \"I am decimated - we have nothing.\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk", "Spencer Davis, one of the key figures of the 1960s beat scene, has died at the age of 81.\n\nThe Welsh guitarist was the driving force behind The Spencer Davis Group, who scored transatlantic hits with Keep On Running and Somebody Help Me.\n\nThe band, which also featured a teenage Stevie Winwood, toured with The Who and The Rolling Stones in the 60s.\n\nDavis died in hospital on Monday, while being treated for pneumonia, his agent told the BBC.\n\n\"He was a very good friend,\" said Bob Birk, who had worked with the musician for more than 30 years.\n\n\"He was a highly ethical, very talented, good-hearted, extremely intelligent, generous man. He will be missed.\"\n\nThe son of a paratrooper, Davis was born in Swansea in 1939 and first started learning harmonica and the accordion at the age of six.\n\nHe moved to London to work for the civil service at the age of 16, but later relocated to Birmingham, where he taught German by day, and played in local clubs at night.\n\nInspired by blues and skiffle, he formed a band called The Saints with Bill Wyman, later a member of the Rolling Stones; and performed folk music with Christine Perfect - who, as Christine McVie, became a core member of Fleetwood Mac's classic line-up.\n\nBut it was with his eponymous rock group that he struck gold. Formed in 1963, The Spencer Davis Group featured Davis on guitar, a teenage Stevie Winwood on organ and vocals, his brother Muff on bass and Peter York on drums.\n\nOriginally called The Rhythm & Blues Quartette, they changed their name in 1964 when Muff pointed out that Davis was the only one who enjoyed doing interviews - the logic being that the rest of the band could slope off to the pub while he handled the press.\n\nKeep on Running knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts\n\nTheir breakout hit, Keep On Running, was a cover of a song by West Indian performer Jackie Edwards.\n\nWhen it topped the UK charts in 1966, it knocked the double A-sided Beatles single We Can Work It Out/Day Tripper from the top slot - and Davis received a telegram from the band congratulating him on the achievement.\n\n\"It's in a pile of papers somewhere,\" he told the BBC in 2009. \"It said, 'Congratulations on reaching number one - The Beatles.'\"\n\nThe follow-up was delayed when Davis bashed his head on a car windscreen after braking to avoid a dog - but Somebody Help Me, another Jackie Edwards cover, gave the quartet a second number one in March 1966.\n\nThe band went on to prove they had songwriting chops of their own, with hit singles like I'm A Man and Gimme Some Lovin', which was later covered by The Blues Brothers.\n\nThe Spencer Davis Group also recorded the theme song for the long-running children's TV show Magpie, under the pseudonym The Murgatroyd Band - a reference to the show's mascot, a fat magpie named Murgatroyd.\n\nBy 1966, the band had starred in their own film, a musical comedy called The Ghost Goes Gear, which found the band stranded in a haunted manor. Davis also made a cameo in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, as a bus passenger.\n\nHits followed in the US, although the band never toured there; while Davis's ability with languages (he was fluent in German, French and Spanish) helped the band further their career in Europe.\n\nThose linguistic capabilities even led to Davis recording a German version of The Age Of Aquarius (Aquarius Der Wassermann) in 1968, and earned him a lasting nickname: \"The Professor\".\n\nThe Spencer Davis Group - and Nicholas Parsons - in their 1966 comedy musical The Ghost Goes Gear\n\nHowever, the Spencer Davis Group came to an untimely end in 1967 when, at the height of their fame, Winwood quit to form Traffic, leaving Davis without his dynamic frontman.\n\nThe band recorded a few more minor hits, but broke up soon after, with Davis moving to California, where he embarked on a short-lived solo career.\n\nAt the time, he later claimed, he was near to bankruptcy, thanks to a punitive contract with Island Records.\n\n\"I didn't realise what had been going on. I'd sold millions of records and hadn't seen a penny from them,\" he told Music Mart magazine in 2005.\n\n\"In 1970, I was considering declaring bankruptcy, but I'd written a track with Eddie Hardin, called Don't Want You No More, which the Allman Brothers put on their Beginnings album. The damned thing sold six million copies. Suddenly a cheque for £5,000 arrived through the door and I'd never seen so much money in all my life.\n\n\"I saw more money from that one song than I saw from all the stuff that had been an Island production.\"\n\nAfter confronting Island Records' owner Chris Blackwell over the issue, he was given a job in artist development at the label in the mid-70s.\n\nThere, he helped to promote newcomers like Bob Marley, Robert Palmer and Eddie And The Hot Rods, as well as working alongside Winwood, who was now establishing himself as a solo artist.\n\nThe Spencer Davis Group pictured in the mid-1960s (L-R): Spencer Davis, Peter York, Steve Winwood, Muff Winwood\n\nDavis returned to songwriting with 1984's Crossfire, which featured contributions from Dusty Springfield and Booker T.\n\nHe subsequently reformed the Spencer Davis Group - minus the Winwood brothers - with whom he toured the world for the rest of his career, often playing more than 200 shows a year.\n\nBirmingham International Jazz Festival founder Jim Simpson, who was told about Davis' passing by drummer Pete York, said: \"Spencer was a lovely man - always very courteous and a purist about music.\n\n\"The Spencer Davis Group stuck more to the blues and never became a fully-fledged rock band. Spencer was scholarly and well educated, very gentle and kind and his tastes in music were spot on.\"\n\nThe musician is survived by his long-time partner June, and three adult children.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Senator Mike Lee, who later tested positive for Covid-19, seen hugging other attendees\n\nUS President Donald Trump's tweet on Friday confirming that he and his wife had tested positive for coronavirus shocked the world.\n\nWith Mr Trump now in hospital, there are growing questions about how the pair were exposed to the virus.\n\nA crowded Rose Garden event is coming under intense focus - the ceremony on 26 September where Mr Trump formally announced his nomination of the conservative Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court. The World Health Organization says it commonly takes around five to six days for symptoms to start after contracting the virus.\n\nFootage from the scene showed few attendees wearing masks. The seating was not set two metres (six feet) apart, while some bumped fists, shook hands or even hugged one another in greeting.\n\nEight people who attended are now confirmed to have the virus - although it is unclear exactly where and when they caught it. Aside from the president and the First Lady:\n\nMr and Mrs Trump tested positive after the president's communications director, Hope Hicks, contracted the virus. She did not attend the Rose Garden event.\n\nGuidelines published by the Centers for Disease Control recommend six feet of distance between people outside your home, and covering your nose and mouth when others are around you.\n\nDozens of lawmakers, family members and staff from the White House were at the event. Those who have tested positive were seated in the first few rows of the crowd.\n\nThose who have tested positive were sat in the first few rows of the packed event\n\nGatherings of more than 50 people at an event are banned under Washington DC coronavirus regulations, although federal property like the White House is exempt.\n\nThe Washington Post reports that authorities have left contact tracing efforts to the Trump administration. An official from Mayor Muriel Bowser's office told the paper that if all eight people were infected at the event, it would be one of the highest community spread incidents Washington DC has experienced.\n\nCity council member Brooke Pinto told the Washington Post it was \"disappointing that the White House has flaunted not wearing masks and gathering large crowds\".\n\n\"That is not only dangerous messaging for the country, but it is directly threatening to our efforts to decrease our spread across the district,\" she said.\n\nSome of the event last Saturday also took place inside.\n\nSome of the event took place inside the White House\n\nThe president stood next to Amy Coney Barrett as she delivered her speech. Ms Barrett tested negative on Friday, according to a White House spokesperson.\n\nVice-President Mike Pence and his wife Karen also tested negative. Mr Pence sat across the aisle from Mrs Trump at the ceremony.\n\nAttorney General William Barr sat in the same row as the vice-president. A Department of Justice spokesperson announced on Friday that Mr Barr had tested negative.\n\nJohns Hopkins University coronavirus trackers say that 7.3 million people in the US have contracted the virus, the highest figure in the world.\n\nThe country also has the highest death toll, with more than 209,000 people killed.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. President Trump's seven days before his Covid-positive test", "A cockatiel who flew from his cage has been returned to his owner after he was heard singing The Addams Family theme by farmers.\n\nSix-month-old Smidge escaped from his travel cage, which was accidentally left open by his owner Rhys Owen, in Hoylake, Merseyside, on Tuesday.\n\nThe bird was found after he was heard singing his favourite song - the catchy, finger-snapping theme to The Addams Family - in a tree at a farm nearby.", "Senator Mike Lee, who later tested positive for Covid-19, was seen hugging other attendees at a White House event on 26 September.\n\nSeveral people who also attended are now confirmed to have the virus – including President Trump – although it is unclear exactly where and when they caught it.\n\nRead more: White House event under scrutiny over virus spread", "PM Boris Johnson has suggested the recent spike in coronavirus cases in the UK is a result of a \"fraying of people's discipline\" over the summer.\n\nHe said compliance with the virus restrictions had been \"high at first\" but then \"probably... everybody got a bit, kind of complacent and blasé\".\n\nCases have increased sharply across the UK since the end of August.\n\nAfter starting to relax restrictions before the summer, the government has since had to toughen its measures.\n\nIt comes as the latest UK figures show there have been a further 6,968 cases and another 66 deaths.\n\nThe R number - a measure of how many other people each person with the virus is infecting - has risen to between 1.3 and 1.6.\n\nHowever, there is more evidence that new coronavirus infections may be increasing more slowly than in previous weeks.\n\nIn total, at least 16.8 million people in the UK - about one in four people - face extra coronavirus measures on top of the national rules, including two-thirds of people in the north of England.\n\nThe prime minister, who has been speaking to BBC journalists from around the country, denied that a lack of testing in north-east England had caused the virus to get out of control in the region.\n\n\"That's not the reality… the nation came together in March and April, what happened over the summer was a bit of sort of fraying of people's discipline and attention to those rules,\" he said.\n\nThe government has faced strong criticism for its mixed messages since it started easing the national lockdown in late spring.\n\nAfter a steady decline in confirmed cases since the first peak in April, cases began rising again in July, with the rate of growth increasing sharply from the end of August.\n\nIn a separate interview with BBC Scotland, Mr Johnson said: \"You saw what happened in March and April in Scotland, across the country, we came together and got the virus down.\n\n\"Alas, probably what happened since then is that everyone got a bit, kind of complacent and a bit blasé about transmission.\n\n\"The rules on social distancing weren't perhaps obeyed in the way they could have been, or enforced in the way they could have been, and that's why we've had to put in measures both in Scotland and elsewhere to bring it down again.\"\n\nNew rules, such as restricting gatherings to a maximum of six people and limiting opening hours for hospitality venues, are among the national measures that have been introduced around the UK.\n\n\"I'm afraid some of the muscle memory has faded and people are not following the guidance in the way that they should,\" Mr Johnson added.\n\nAsked about comments from the mayor of Middlesbrough who said there had been a \"frightening lack of communication with local government\" over local lockdowns, Mr Johnson disagreed, adding: \"We work very closely with local government across the country.\"\n\nBoris Johnson hired a personal trainer after ending up in hospital with coronavirus\n\nThe prime minister also described concerns that he has not been \"the old Boris\" since contracting coronavirus in March as \"sinister disinformation\".\n\nHe said he felt \"considerably better\" and, thanks to \"recent efforts\", he was about two stones lighter than he was a year ago.\n\nMr Johnson has previously revealed he has hired a personal trainer to lose weight after acknowledging he was \"too fat\" when he caught Covid-19.\n\nHe also declined to comment when asked about the future of MP Margaret Ferrier, who travelled from Glasgow to London with Covid-19 symptoms then returned home after testing positive.\n\n\"I'm going to leave that one very much to the SNP and to their whips - that's for them to decide but it's very important that everyone obeys the rules and the guidance,\" he said.\n\nThe Metropolitan Police has launched an investigation into Ms Ferrier, who has been suspended by the SNP and faces calls to quit as an MP.", "Heavy rain is continuing to fall, amid warnings that parts of the UK face the risk of flooding.\n\nThe Met Office has issued amber warnings for parts of eastern Scotland, the West Midlands, south-west England and most of Wales.\n\nPolice warned motorists to take care, while in Essex, firefighters rescued a family of four when their car became trapped in floodwater.\n\nYellow, less severe, warnings for rain affect much of the rest of the country.\n\nRain is forecast to continue overnight, with warnings in force until 06:00 BST on Sunday.\n\nThe last time amber warnings for rain were issued was in March, the Met Office said.\n\nThe places worst hit so far on Saturday include parts of Exmoor, with 84mm of rain recorded in 36 hours in Liscombe and 74.4mm recorded in Brendon Hill.\n\nScotRail tweeted there would be reduced train services in amber warning areas, with \"a controlled shut down of the network\" around 19:00 BST.\n\nIt comes after Storm Alex, which has caused chaos in France and Italy on Saturday, brought gale-force winds and rain to southern England on Friday.\n\nA gust of 71mph (114km/h) was recorded at Berry Head on the Devon coast during the day.\n\nThe wind direction associated with the weekend's rainfall is \"unusual\" and rainfall was likely to occur in some areas that are normally well sheltered and drier, the Met Office said.\n\nDrains could also become blocked with debris as trees are now in full leaf.\n\nIn areas covered by amber weather warnings, the Met Office warned deep and fast-flowing floodwater may pose a \"danger to life\" in some areas and there was a \"good chance\" communities could be cut off.", "The debate will take place in Salt Lake City in Utah on Wednesday Image caption: The debate will take place in Salt Lake City in Utah on Wednesday\n\nOn Wednesday night, Republican Vice-President Mike Pence will face Democratic Senator Kamala Harris for the only vice-presidential debate ahead of November's election.\n\nThis election cycle has seen increased scrutiny on Pence and Harris, as they support the campaign of two presidential candidates in their 70s.\n\nWith President Trump now receiving treatment for Covid-19, and more members of the White House announcing positive virus tests, there’s a new emphasis on precautions from event organisers.\n\nFor one, the vice-presidential candidates will stand more than 3m (9.8ft) apart (podiums at the first Trump-Biden debate last week were 2m apart). They will be separated by plexiglass, CNN reports.\n\nCovid testing is already under way for reporters and others planning on attending the debate in Salt Lake City, Utah.\n\nWhether everyone will be required to wear a mask this time remains to be seen.\n\nNow, we want to know: What questions do you have about the vice-presidential debate? You tell us here and we’ll get to work finding the answers.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen spoke via video conference on Saturday\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have \"agreed the importance\" of finding a post-Brexit trade deal, Downing Street has said.\n\nThey agreed progress has been made in talks between the EU and UK but \"significant gaps\" remain, No 10 said.\n\nBoth have instructed their chief negotiators to \"work intensively\" in order to try to bridge those gaps.\n\nNegotiations between the UK and EU broke up on Friday without agreement.\n\nBoth sides are calling on the other to compromise on key issues, including fishing and government subsidies.\n\nMr Johnson and Mrs von der Leyen spoke during a phone call on Saturday and agreed to speak on a regular basis.\n\nA Downing Street spokesperson said the two had agreed on the importance of finding an agreement \"as a strong basis for a strategic EU-UK relationship in future.\"\n\nThe UK's chief negotiator, Lord Frost, tweeted that work to resolve differences between the UK and EU \"begins as soon as we can next week\".\n\nSpeaking earlier, while on a visit to Leeds, Mr Johnson said he wants a deal like one struck between the EU and Canada, but reiterated the UK was ready should it have to leave without a deal.\n\n\"We're resolved on either course, we're prepared for either course and we'll make it work but it's very much up to our friends and partners,\" Mr Johnson said.\n\nIt comes after Mrs von der Leyen called for talks to \"intensify\", as both sides set an October deadline to settle their differences.\n\nThe significance of today's call between Boris Johnson and the head of the EU commission is that both sides have agreed to keep talking.\n\nAlthough formal negotiations ended yesterday without agreement, instead of throwing in the sponge - as Boris Johnson would put it - talks will now intensify.\n\nBut a Downing Street statement made clear that while there are notable (and well-known) differences over fishing rights and subsidies to businesses, these aren't the only issues that need to be solved.\n\nThere is the potential to compromise - for example, on phasing in new fishing arrangements and on having state aid provisions similar to other free trade agreements - but it's not clear the political willingness is yet there on both sides.\n\nThe EU has to satisfy the demands of 27 different states.\n\nAnd Boris Johnson has to convince Brexit-supporting backbenchers that he hasn't sold out.\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab aimed to reassure them by stating today that the days of being \"held over a barrel\" by Brussels are long gone.\n\nAsked about potential compromises that could be made, Mr Johnson said: \"The balance of trade is overwhelmingly on the side of the EU in the sense that they export much more to us than we do to them, certainly in manufacturing goods, and so we think there is a big opportunity for both sides to do well.\"\n\nHe pointed out that Canada is \"some way away\" but had managed to strike a deal with the EU while the UK remained the bloc's biggest trading partner.\n\nBut he acknowledged a no-deal outcome where the UK would follow mainly World Trade Organization rules on trade with the EU was possible and would \"work very well\" - describing it as an Australia-style arrangement.\n\nSpeaking at the virtual Conservative Party conference, Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove said the talks with the EU had been \"a tough process\" but \"with goodwill we should be able to get a deal\".\n\nHe added: \"Recognising that we share the same high environmental and workforce standards as they do, but we want to do things in our own way, is a bit difficult for them and also there is the very vexed issue to do with fisheries.\"\n\nHowever, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told the conference the \"days of being held over a barrel by Brussels are long gone\", as he stressed any trade deal must be \"fair\".\n\nThe EU wants access to UK fishing grounds for its boats and says reaching a \"fair deal\" is a pre-condition of a deal, while the UK says they should be \"first and foremost for British boats\".\n\nThe prime minister has set the deadline of the EU Council meeting on 15 October for securing a deal.\n\nAfter six months of trade talks with the EU, Lord Frost has claimed the outlines of an agreement are visible, but he warned that, without further compromise from the EU, differences over the contentious topic of fishing may be impossible to bridge.\n\nHe described the final round of negotiations as \"constructive\" but \"familiar differences remain\".\n\nOn fishing, the gap was \"unfortunately very large\" and he called for the EU to \"move further before an understanding can be reached\" on state aid.\n\nHis EU counterpart, Michel Barnier, agreed the negotiations had been conducted in a \"constructive and respectful atmosphere\", with some \"positive new developments on some topics\" - such as aviation safety and police co-operation.\n\nBut he said there was \"a lack of progress on some important topics\", such as climate change commitments, \"as well as persistent serious divergences on matters of major importance for the European Union\", including state aid and fishing.\n\nThe UK formally left the EU in January, but entered a transition period - where the UK has kept to EU trading rules and remained inside its customs union and single market - to allow the two sides to negotiate a trade deal.\n\nFormal talks began in March and continued throughout the pandemic, but there have been concerns over whether a plan would be agreed before that period runs out on 31 December.\n\nIssues that have become particular sticking points between negotiators are state aid - where governments give financial support to businesses - and fishing rules.\n\nThe EU has said a deal must be reached before the end of October to allow it to be signed off by the member states before the end of the year, while Mr Johnson has said both sides should \"move on\" if agreement was not reached by the middle of the month.\n\nIf a deal is not done, the UK will go on to trade with the bloc on World Trade Organization rules.", "Donald Trump's personal physician has told reporters he's \"extremely happy with the progress the president has made\" after starting treatment for Covid-19.\n\nDr Sean Conley and other doctors from Mr Trump's medical team spoke from outside Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington on Saturday morning.\n\nThey said he was doing \"very well\" and in \"exceptionally good spirits\".\n\nHowever, their account was later disputed.", "Airbnb will prohibit one-night bookings in the US and Canada over Halloween.\n\nThe platform was concerned the properties were being targeted for large Halloween house parties.\n\nA spokesperson for the company said the actions were designed to \"help protect\" communities from Covid.\n\nGuests and hosts who have had their bookings cancelled will be reimbursed, and Airbnb's neighbourhood support line will be on call throughout the weekend to respond to complaints.\n\nThe company said it would also deploy more stringent restrictions on two and three night reservations that may pose a heightened risk for parties.\n\nIt will also \"significantly expand\" restrictions on last-minute bookings by guests without a history of positive reviews on Airbnb.\n\nGuests will be subject to removal from Airbnb or legal action if they violate Airbnb's rules.\n\nThe action comes a year after a deadly shooting at an Airbnb in Orinda, California.\n\nFive people were killed at an unauthorised Halloween party.\n\nAirbnb said the reasoning for the move was a reaction to Covid-19.\n\nThe company said it wanted to \"do our part to help protect public health in North America in this particular moment\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Two-year-old Prince Louis: \"What animal do you like?\"\n\nNaturalist Sir David Attenborough has revealed his favourite animal is the monkey, when quizzed by the children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.\n\nPrince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis were given the chance to ask the 94-year-old broadcaster one question about the natural world.\n\nIt is the first time Prince Louis, two, has been heard speaking in public.\n\nThe young prince asked: \"What animal do you like?\" \"I like monkeys best because they are such fun,\" Sir David replied.\n\n\"Mind you, you can't have monkeys sitting around the home because that's not where they live,\" he cautioned, mindful perhaps of the duke and duchess's domestic life at Kensington Palace.\n\n\"So what can you have at home that you like? Well, which would you choose - a puppy or a kitten?\" said Sir David, before continuing: \"It's a very difficult question. I think I'd go for a puppy.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Other children put their questions to Sir David Attenborough earlier in the week\n\nPrince George, the eldest son of Prince William and Catherine, wanted to know: \"What animal do you think will become extinct next?\"\n\n\"Well, let's hope there won't be any,\" said Sir David.\n\n\"There are lots of things we can do when animals are in danger of extinction. We can protect them.\"\n\nHe related how the population of mountain gorillas in central Africa, which were \"very, very rare\" 40 years ago, had grown from 250 animals to more than 1,000, thanks to public awareness and global fund-raising.\n\n\"So you can save an animal if you want to and you put your mind to it,\" the famous naturalist told the seven-year-old prince.\n\n\"People around the world are doing that because animals are so precious, \" he added. \"So let's hope there won't be any more that go extinct.\n\nLike her brother, Princess Charlotte, five, began her question with a confident: \"Hello David Attenborough!\"\n\n\"I like spiders, do you like spiders too?\" she asked\n\n\"I love spiders. I am so glad you like them!\" said Sir David. \"I think they're wonderful things.\"\n\n\"Why is it that people are so frightened of them? I think it's because they have actually got eight legs, which are much more than us. And if you've got eight legs you can move in any direction - so you can never be quite sure which way that spider is going to go!\n\n\"But spiders are so clever. Have you ever watched one try to build its web? That is extraordinary. How does it make this circular web like that... how do they do it? Try and watch and see how they do it - it's marvellous.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Storm Alex: See the moment a building is swept into raging flood waters\n\nAt least two people have died and up to 20 are still missing after a powerful storm hit south-eastern France and north-western Italy.\n\nA number of villages north of Nice in France suffered serious damage from floods and landslides, with roads, bridges and homes destroyed.\n\nIn north-western Italy, flooding was described as \"historic\". A section of a bridge over the Sesia river collapsed.\n\nFrench Prime Minister Jean Castex has deployed the army and released emergency funds to tackle the worst floods for decades in south-eastern France.\n\nUp to 20 people are either missing or have not checked in with relatives.\n\n\"There are very many people of whom we have no news,\" Mr Castex said.\n\nFlood damage in Saint-Martin-Vesubie in the Alpes-Maritimes of south-eastern France\n\nBernard Gonzalez, prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes region, said: \"Just because their loved ones haven't been able to get in touch doesn't mean that they have been taken by the storm.\"\n\nHe said the prospect of more rain was \"a worry\".\n\nMeteorological agency Météo-France said 450mm (17.7in) of rain fell in some areas over 24 hours - the equivalent of nearly four months at this time of year, reports Reuters news agency.\n\nThe southern Alps region appeared the worst hit, with serious damage in the Roya, Tinée, Esteron and Vésubie valleys.\n\nThe villages of Saint-Martin-Vésubie and Rimplas were cut off, with roads inaccessible.\n\nA collapsed bridge after heavy rains hit the village of Roquebillière in southern France\n\nA road in Roquebillière was partially washed away during the storm\n\nOne 29-year-old resident of Roquebillière told Agence France-Presse: \"I lost everything but we are alive. There must be one room left in my house.\"\n\nTwo elderly people were swept away as their house collapsed in the village and their fate is unknown.\n\nOn Friday, the storm also buffeted France's western Atlantic coast, causing tens of thousands of homes to lose power.\n\nWinds of more than 180km/h (112mph) were recorded in Brittany on Thursday and Friday.\n\nThe two fatalities were a 53-year-old firefighter in the Aosta Valley who died during a rescue operation, and a 36-year-old man whose car was swept into a river in the Piedmont region. His brother managed to get out of the car.\n\nA section of a key bridge over the Sesia river in Piedmont's Vercelli province collapsed shortly after it had been reopened on Saturday afternoon.\n\nDamaged caused to a road near Cuneo in Italy's Piedmont region\n\nIn the rest of Piedmont, several villages were cut off after the rains made roads impassable. The situation there was described as \"extremely critical\" by officials.\n\nPiedmont President Alberto Cirio told La Stampa that 630mm of rain had fallen in 24 hours, an amount \"unheard of since 1954\".\n\nHundreds of aid workers have been sent to help rescue efforts in the cut-off villages.\n\nThe storm also affected the north-western regions of Lombardy and Liguria. The Roja river in Ventimiglia has also flooded.\n\nFlood alerts remain for sections of the Po river which have swollen by 3m in 24 hours.\n\nOne good piece of news was the rescue of about 20 people reported missing by Italian authorities just over the border in France.\n\nThe city of Venice, which had been braced for high waters after suffering violent storms in August, was successfully protected by a flood barrier system recently declared fully operational.\n\nDo you live in regions affected by the adverse weather and flooding? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Dominic Calvert-Lewin scored his ninth goal of the season and James Rodriguez netted twice as Everton beat Brighton to make it four Premier League wins from four for the impressive table-topping Toffees.\n\nHowever, it was another game that will prompt questions about the quality of goalkeeper Jordan Pickford for both club and country.\n\nAll was going well for the home side after Calvert-Lewin rose highest to head in at the back post to cap another excellent week that saw him score his second hat-trick of the season and earn a first call-up to the senior England squad.\n\nBut in the closing stages of a first half in which he had barely been tested, England keeper Pickford dropped a tame bouncing ball at the feet of Neal Maupay, who then slotted the ball in on the turn.\n\nThe heavy rain during the match was undoubtedly a contributing factor but the poor error comes not long after the shocking mistake he made in the Carabao Cup win at Fleetwood.\n\nThankfully for the home side, they were able to reclaim the lead before the break when Rodriguez picked out fellow Colombian Yerry Mina, who headed in from a free-kick.\n\nAnd it was Rodriguez who put the game beyond Albion, firstly sliding in to finish off Alex Iwobi's chipped cross at the back post then finding space in the same area to tap home Abdoulaye Doucoure's pass.\n\nBrighton were able to claim a consolation through a superb Yves Bissouma strike in added time but they have now lost three of their first four games.\n\nThey can argue they deserved to take something from the defeats by Chelsea and Manchester United, but they can have no complaints about this.\n\nAside from Pickford's form, the only other negative for Carlo Ancelotti's side was losing forward Richarlison to injury in the first half.\n\nEverton lead the division, having taken 12 points from 12, but could be overtaken this weekend by Leicester and Liverpool, who both play on Sunday.\n• None Action and reaction from Everton v Brighton, plus the rest of Saturday's Premier League action\n\nBrilliant at one end, but issues at the other\n\nSince joining Everton from Sheffield United in August 2016, Calvert-Lewin has played under six managers, the first of which, Ronald Koeman, occasionally played him at right wing-back and tasked him with providing opportunities for others.\n\nNow, though, under the tutelage of Ancelotti, he is developing into a supreme finisher and the side is set up to supply him.\n\nEarlier in the season, in reference to the striker, Ancelotti harked back to his time as boss of AC Milan, when Filipo Inzaghi made the predatory one-touch finish an artform.\n\nCalvert-Lewin is not at that level yet, but you can see the shared DNA. One early chance, gifted to him by an error from Bissouma, saw him quickly get the ball out of his feet and fire a shot that Mat Ryan had to palm away.\n\nHis opening goal - converted at the back post from Gylfi Sigurdsson's cross - looks simple on the surface, but is a testament to positioning, prowess and the ever-growing understanding of the service he needs from a team that has come a long way from some of the limp, directionless displays of last season.\n\nRodriguez is a big factor in that and the Colombian has now been directly involved in six goals in his five games for Everton in all competitions this season.\n\nThe Toffees have scored 24 goals in their seven games of the campaign, currently more than any other side in Europe's top five leagues.\n\nThings are not quite so rosy at the other end of the pitch, though.\n\nPickford, who looked shaky throughout the game, gifted Brighton their equaliser and could easily have presented them with another goal when he palmed out a cross to Maupay for a shot that Tom Davies blocked.\n\nAnd it is not a new problem - Pickford has made 11 errors leading to goals in the Premier League since his debut for Everton in August 2017, more than any other goalkeeper in that time.\n\nEverton's superb attacking talent compensated for his big mistake on Saturday, but his form will be a concern to Ancelotti and England manager Gareth Southgate with three international fixtures coming up this month.\n\n'This is the moment of Dominic Calvert-Lewin now'\n\nEverton boss Carlo Ancelotti, speaking to MOTD: \"Brighton played well. We played well also. We managed the situation of the game well. We had composure defensively and had opportunities on the counter attack. The performance was complete and this was the reason we deserved to win.\"\n\nOn James Rodriguez: \"As I said on the first day, the players with quality have not a problem with that (settling in). The quality is there because football is not so complicated. The pitch is always the same, the opponents are always 11, the ball is the same, the goal doesn't move. Football is simple. It is not complicated.\"\n\nOn Dominic Calvert-Lewin's impressive start to the season: \"There is not just one reason. He is confident, we are seeing him improving and he is scoring goals and that is the most important motivation for a striker. This is the moment of Dominic Calvert-Lewin now.\"\n\nBrighton boss Graham Potter: \"I don't think Everton had so many chances but we helped them, second half certainly. To concede just before half time was a blow for us and then we didn't start the second half so well.\n\n\"I think we contributed a little bit to our downfall today and that is something we need to be better at.\n\n\"We have conceded all our goals against Chelsea, Manchester United and Everton and they are want you consider to be top sixish teams.\"\n• None Everton have won each of their opening four games to a top-flight season for the first time since 1969-70, when they went on to win the title.\n• None Everton have won their first seven games in all competitions in a season for the first time since 1894-95 (won first eight).\n• None Brighton remain winless away at Everton in all competitions, drawing two and losing seven of their nine visits.\n• None This game saw three Colombians start a Premier League match for the first time (James Rodríguez and Yerry Mina for Everton and Steven Alzate for Brighton), with Mina's goal the first in the competition scored and assisted (Rodríguez) by two Colombians.\n• None Since the start of last season, Everton striker Calvert-Lewin has scored seven headed goals in the Premier League, more than any other player.\n• None Since his Everton debut in August 2017, Gylfi Sigurdsson has registered 13 assists in the Premier League, more than any other player for the Toffees (Digne next on 12).\n• None Maupay has scored four goals in his last three Premier League appearances, as many as he managed in his previous 22 in the competition.\n• None Attempt missed. Leandro Trossard (Brighton and Hove Albion) left footed shot from outside the box is too high following a corner.\n• None Goal! Everton 4, Brighton and Hove Albion 2. Yves Bissouma (Brighton and Hove Albion) right footed shot from outside the box to the bottom left corner. Assisted by Solly March with a headed pass.\n• None Attempt blocked. Neal Maupay (Brighton and Hove Albion) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Leandro Trossard.\n• None Attempt blocked. Leandro Trossard (Brighton and Hove Albion) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Solly March.\n• None Neal Maupay (Brighton and Hove Albion) wins a free kick in the defensive half. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page", "The group were stopped near Brynamman in the Black Mountains\n\nA group of men who ignored local lockdown rules to go \"car racing\" have been hit with penalty fines.\n\nThe group had travelled from Caerphilly to near Brynamman in the Brecon Beacons National Park.\n\nCaerphilly is under extra Covid restrictions, making it illegal to leave the county without good reason.\n\nDyfed-Powys Police said the four men refused to co-operate with officers over lockdown, and were all handed fines.\n\nThe Carmarthenshire Roads Policing Unit had come across the group of racers congregating for a \"rallying-type event\".\n\n\"Officers tried to engage with the group, who had travelled from Caerphilly, and explained several times that were not allowed to be in this area,\" said Insp Andy Williams.\n\n\"After lengthy attempts at asking them to leave and make their way back to their home addresses, they were still refusing to co-operate.\"\n\nCaerphilly has been in local lockdown since 8 September\n\nIt comes as a number of cases where fixed penalty Covid fines were not paid headed to court in the force area.\n\nHearings at Llanelli Magistrates' Court have included people who drove over 100 miles from Newport to Pembroke Dock while travel was banned, and others who had broken rules by entering people's homes at the height of lockdown.\n\nIn two cases, people were ordered to pay more than £800 in fines and costs, after failing to pay the initial fixed penalty notice.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The Conservatives plan to open a second headquarters in Leeds, the party's co-chairman has announced.\n\nThe new HQ - a northern counterpart to Conservative Campaign Headquarters in London - is expected to open next year, Amanda Milling said, as she opened the party's virtual conference.\n\nSome MPs have urged the PM to set out a broad post-Brexit vision for the party.\n\nIt comes as Boris Johnson has promised low-deposit mortgages to help young people get onto the housing ladder.\n\nIn an interview with the Daily Telegraph ahead of his party's four-day conference, the prime minister said he had asked ministers to work up plans for encouraging long-term fixed-rate mortgages with 5% deposits.\n\n\"We need mortgages that will help people really get on the housing ladder even if they have only a very small amount to pay by way of deposit, the 95% mortgages,\" he said.\n\n\"I think it could be absolutely revolutionary, particularly for young people.\"\n\nThe Conservative Campaign Headquarters, in Westminster, London, is where general election campaigns are run.\n\nIt was known for many years as Conservative Central Office.\n\nAccording to BBC political correspondent Iain Watson, it houses press officers who undertake the more political tasks which civil servants cannot do - including attacking opponents and rebutting opponents' attacks.\n\nIt also liaises with the \"voluntary party\" - the grassroots foot soldiers - and raises funds for national campaigning.\n\nThe Conservatives argue that the new Leeds headquarters will reinforce their commitment to deliver for those in northern constituencies who voted for the party for the first time at the general election in December.\n\n\"This new headquarters will provide the party with a base at the heart of the blue wall,\" Ms Milling said.\n\nAlso speaking at the conference, Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove said the government wanted to move more Civil Service jobs outside of London.\n\n\"Far too many government jobs tend to be in the Westminster and Whitehall village,\" he said.\n\n\"We have an amazing Civil Service and it has drawn its resources and people from lots of different communities - I think we now need to give back to those communities as well.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Downing Street has set out the details of an independent review of transport connections across the UK.\n\nThe review, led by Network Rail chairman Sir Peter Hendy, will look at improving road and rail networks and will also examine the \"cost, practicality and demand\" of building a bridge or tunnel between Northern Ireland and Scotland.\n\nThe transport study will set out advice on a \"wide range of possible options\" to improve the quality and availability of links across the UK, Downing Street said.\n• None 3out of eight constituencies are held by the Conservatives\n• None 23out of 99 council seats are held by the Conservatives\n\nOne of the stated aims of the Tories' virtual conference is to demonstrate that the party is listening to those voters who said they were merely lending their support to the Conservatives.\n\nThere will be a lot of talk about \"levelling up\" - in other words, doing more to spread investment and opportunity beyond London and the South East.\n\nBut some recently-elected Conservative MPs believe the term is vague and not easily understood by voters.\n\nOne of the 2019 intake told our correspondent: \"We need to put flesh on the bones of this agenda - it has be about more than a couple of shiny new rail stations.\"\n\nAnother said the prime minister had to \"raise his sights\" and provide a longer-term vision, amid concerns over narrowing polls.\n\nMr Johnson told the Telegraph that he was determined to press ahead with a \"massive domestic agenda\" and deliver on Conservative manifesto promises, despite the ongoing coronavirus crisis.\n\nThe prime minister has promised to create \"Generation Buy\" with low-deposit mortgages to help get young people onto the housing ladder.\n\nHe has also insisted he remains a low-tax, libertarian Conservative who will pay for the cost of the pandemic through a \"free market-led recovery\".\n\nMeanwhile, Mr Johnson dismissed newspaper reports that he and Chancellor Rishi Sunak were now rivals as \"genuinely untrue\".\n\n\"We are as one,\" he said.\n\nBoris Johnson hired a personal trainer after ending up in hospital with coronavirus\n\nAsked about his coronavirus strategy, the prime minister said \"all of this is being kept under constant review\".\n\n\"If we make progress, all of these measures are capable of being changed,\" he said.\n\nNew rules, such as restricting gatherings to a maximum of six people and limiting opening hours for hospitality venues, are among the national measures that have been introduced around the UK.\n\nMr Johnson also offered some weight loss advice, after losing more than two stone following his experience contracting coronavirus earlier this year.\n\nAccording to the paper, he now weighs 15st 8lbs - having been 17st 6lbs - and said his top tip was \"eat less, move more, weigh less\".\n\nMr Johnson has previously revealed he has hired a personal trainer to lose weight after acknowledging he was \"too fat\" when he caught Covid-19.\n\nYou may remember that the Conservatives pledged to build 40 new hospitals in their 2019 election manifesto.\n\nOn the eve of the party conference, the prime minister confirmed £3.7bn in funding for the project - an increase on the £2.8bn previously announced.\n\nSix Hospital Trusts had already been promised £2.7bn in funding while 21 others were given a share of £100m in seed funding to develop proposals.\n\nOn Friday those Trusts were told they will all be fully-funded to deliver 25 new hospitals.\n\nA new hospital at Shotley Bridge in Durham has been added to the list and the government is also inviting bids for a further eight schemes.\n\nThey say these new schemes mean 48 hospitals will be delivered by 2030.", "A double murder inquiry has been launched after the deaths of Vian Mangrio and Dr Saman Mir Sacharvi\n\nA woman who was found dead with her daughter after a fire at their home \"died as a result of pressure to the neck\", police have said.\n\nDr Saman Mir Sacharvi and Vian Mangrio, 14, were found inside a house in Colne Road, Reedley, Lancashire on Thursday.\n\nA post-mortem examination also found Dr Sacharvi, 49, had been assaulted. Tests to establish Miss Mangrio's cause of death are under way.\n\nMiss Mangrio, a pupil at Marsden Heights School in Nelson, was found badly burnt inside the house, police said.\n\nSupt Jon Holmes said they were \"following a number of lines of enquiry\".\n\n\"This is a truly harrowing set of circumstances and my thoughts are very much with the loved ones of Dr Sacharvi and Miss Mangrio.\"\n\nPolice are appealing for information and extra patrols are taking place in the area to reassure residents.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. President Trump's seven days before his Covid-positive test\n\nPresident Donald Trump's coronavirus diagnosis came after a busy week running his administration and campaigning for November's election.\n\nThe president announced that he and his wife and his wife, Melania has tested positive for Covid-19, in a tweet sent on Friday at around 01:00 local time (05:00 GMT).\n\nThis followed a positive test for his close aide, Hope Hicks, who reportedly started feeling symptoms on Wednesday.\n\nSince the president's diagnosis, several people close to him have tested positive too, including his press secretary.\n\nSo far the majority of publicly released results have been negative. However, test accuracy can vary depending on when a sample is taken during the course of the illness. One taken very soon after exposure may not give an accurate result.\n\nThe White House says it has begun contact-tracing. Here's a look at some of the people we know Mr Trump has crossed paths with during the last week - starting with an event that is being investigated as a possible \"super-spreader\":\n\nPresident Trump announced his Supreme Court pick, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, in front of a crowd of about 200 people on the White House lawn.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Senator Mike Lee, who later tested positive for Covid-19, seen hugging other attendees\n\nJudge Coney Barrett said on Friday that she had tested negative. Sources told US media she had the virus earlier this year.\n\nAlong with Mr Trump and his wife, at least seven other people who attended the Rose Garden event say they have tested positive - although it's not known where they caught the virus.\n\nThey are: White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany; former White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway; Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who are both on the judiciary committee; the president of the University of Notre Dame, John Jenkins; and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who said he checked himself into a hospital on Saturday as a precaution.\n\nThe White House Correspondents' Association said an unnamed reporter at the event had also tested positive with symptoms.\n\nDuring the evening, President Trump held a rally at Harrisburg International Airport in Middletown, Pennsylvania.\n\nSince the afternoon's ceremony, Judge Coney Barrett has held meetings with various senators - including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell - ahead of her much-anticipated confirmation hearing, due to take place on 12 October.\n\nThe president played golf at his club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, in the morning and led a White House reception for the families of military veterans during the evening.\n\nOn Monday, President Trump held a news briefing in the White House Rose Garden - giving an update on his administration's coronavirus testing strategy.\n\nIt was attended by Vice-President Mike Pence, Health Secretary Alex Azar, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the chief executive of Abbott Laboratories, Robert Ford, among others.\n\nLater, Trump viewed a model of a new pickup truck - being built at a factory in Ohio - on the White House lawn. Representatives from the company, Lordstown Motors, attended, as well as two members of Congress.\n\nThe White House regularly tests officials who come in contact with the president. However, US media has noted that mask-wearing and social distancing around him is less common - suggesting that people may be too reliant on the testing system, which is not foolproof.\n\nThe president faced his election rival, Joe Biden, at their first face-to-face debate in Cleveland, Ohio on Tuesday evening.\n\nPresident Trump flew there on his presidential plane, Air Force One, alongside his wife, adult children and multiple aides. Many were seen not wearing masks when boarding or disembarking.\n\nAlso on the plane were: White House Chief of staff Mark Meadows; campaign strategist Jason Miller; policy adviser Stephen Miller; Robert C O'Brien, the national security adviser who tested positive for the virus in July; and Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan.\n\nAfter landing, the president's campaign manager, Bill Stepien, was spotted getting into a staff van with Ms Hicks, the New York Times reports. Late on Friday, it was announced that Mr Stepien had tested positive for Covid-19 and was experiencing mild flu-like symptoms.\n\nThe debate was held at Cleveland Clinic's Health Education Campus, a shared facility with Case Western Reserve University.\n\nThe organisers, the Commission on Presidential Debates, brought in numerous Covid-era safety precautions. There were no handshakes between the two candidates and everyone attending - including the 80 or so audience members - was tested before the event and asked to wear masks throughout.\n\nIn the run-up, Mr Trump's eldest daughter, Ivanka, posted a picture of herself backstage in a mask, alongside her sister Tiffany, sister-in-law Lara and stepmother Melania.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by ivankatrump This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHowever, during the event itself, Ivanka Trump and other family members, including siblings Don Jr and Eric, were pictured mask-less. Moderator Chris Wallace has since told Fox News that they were offered masks by event staff but they refused them.\n\nObservers said those on Mr Biden's side of the room kept their masks on.\n\nMr Trump and Mr Biden kept a distance during the debate, at podiums on opposite sides of the stage.\n\nMr Trump and Mr Biden loudly spoke over each other throughout the contentious debate\n\nWhen the candidates were greeted by the wives on stage afterwards, Jill Biden wore a mask and Melania Trump didn't.\n\nAt a separate campaign event in Pennsylvania, Vice-President Mike Pence said he had been in the Oval Office with President Trump earlier that day. It is thought to be their last in-person meeting.\n\nPresident Trump and much of his entourage flew back to Washington DC on Tuesday night.\n\nThe day after the debate, President Trump was straight back into campaign business, flying to Minnesota. Ms Hicks was among those accompanying him.\n\nAt a press conference on Saturday, the president's physician Dr Sean Conley said Mr Trump had been diagnosed 72 hours previously, which would place his diagnosis on Wednesday. But the White House later clarified that he was diagnosed on Thursday.\n\nHe attended a closed-door fundraiser at a private home in Minneapolis, and later held a rally at an airport in Duluth, in front of a crowd of thousands. Few wore masks but there was distance between them and the president.\n\nMinnesota Congressman Kurt Daudt tweeted a picture of himself close to Mr Trump, with neither wearing masks.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Kurt Daudt This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nOn Wednesday evening, Mr Trump and various aides returned to Washington DC on Air Force One again.\n\nMeanwhile Ms Hicks, who was feeling unwell, was isolated in a separate cabin, according to US media. She reportedly disembarked from the back of the plane, instead of the front alongside the other passengers.\n\nThe following day, Ms Hicks tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nPresident Trump flew to his Bedminster golf resort in New Jersey for a private fundraiser. Several aides who were in proximity to Ms Hicks scrapped their plans to accompany the president, according to the Associated Press.\n\nKayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, is thought to have been in close contact with Ms Hicks. Ms McEnany held a briefing for reporters at the White House on Thursday, without mentioning her colleague's test and without wearing a mask. She has since said she did not know about the diagnosis.\n\nThat night, in pre-taped remarks to the annual Al Smith dinner in New York City - held virtually this year - Mr Trump said that \"the end of the pandemic is in sight\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"The end of the pandemic is in sight,\" President Trump told a dinner on Thursday\n\nHe later announced in an interview on Fox News that he and the first lady were being tested for the virus.\n\nIt is not known how many supporters he came into contact with in recent days, he but told Fox presenter Sean Hannity that people were always wanting to get close to him. \"They want to hug you, and they want to kiss you,\" he said.\n\nPresident Trump announced that he and Mrs Trump had tested positive, adding that they will begin the \"quarantine and recovery process immediately\".\n\nJust before 11:00, his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told reporters the president has \"mild symptoms\" but remains in \"good spirits\".\n\nMrs Trump tweeted to say she also had mild symptoms.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The president has \"mild symptoms\" but will \"remain on the job\", says White House chief of staff Mark Meadows\n\nThat day, several other people announce that they've tested positive: Kellyanne Conway, former White House counsellor; Bill Stepien, Mr Trump's campaign manager; Mike Lee, Utah senator; Thom Tillis, a senator for North Carolina; Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee; Rev John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame University; and Senator Ron Johnson, head of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.\n\nMeanwhile Joe Biden, the Democrats' presidential candidate, tests negative, as does: Jill Biden, his wife; Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen Pence; Kamala Harris, the Democrats' vice-presidential candidate; Amy Coney Barrett, Supreme Court nominee; Mike Pompeo, secretary of state; Steve Mnuchin, treasury secretary; Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services; William Barr, attorney general; Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr, the president's daughter and son; and Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law.\n\nFormer New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Nicholas Luna, a White House presidential aide, both test positive.\n\nMr Trump waved to well-wishers from behind the glass of a sealed car after tweeting that he would pay a \"surprise visit\" to \"patriots\" outside the hospital.\n\nInside the car, at least two people could be seen wearing protective gear in the front seats, with Mr Trump sat in the back.\n\nThere were concerns that the president who wore a mask, may have endangered others inside the car. But White House spokesperson Judd Deere said the trip had been \"cleared by the medical team as safe\".\n\nWhite House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany announces on Twitter that she has tested positive.", "No Time To Die marks Daniel Craig's swansong as James Bond\n\nThe release of the new James Bond film has been delayed again.\n\nThe premiere of No Time To Die had already been moved from April to November because of the pandemic.\n\nThe film has now been further delayed until 2 April 2021 \"in order to be seen by a worldwide theatrical audience\", a statement on the film's website said.\n\n\"We understand the delay will be disappointing to our fans but we now look forward to sharing No Time To Die next year.\"\n\nNo Time To Die, the 25th instalment in the Bond franchise, marks Daniel Craig's final appearance as British secret service agent, 007.\n\nTrailers for the film, as well as Billie Eilish's title song, have already been released - with the Eilish video debuting mere days ago - before Friday's last-minute decision to delay.\n\nIndustry insiders had been speculating whether the studio would stand by the November release date, following lacklustre box office returns for the Christopher Nolan blockbuster Tenet, which was released last month.\n\nThe sci-fi epic, which cost approximately $200m to make, has so far made $243 million internationally, but only $41m in the US - where cinemas in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco largely remain closed.\n\nA significant part of Bond film earnings come from the UK and European market, where coronavirus is once again on the rise and there may be been concern by the studio that potential restrictions could limit box office earnings in November.\n\nThe previous Bond film, 2015's Spectre, took almost $900m (£690m) at worldwide box offices - winning an Oscar for best original song. The latest film will no longer be in contention for the 2021 Oscars under current guidelines.\n\nThe postponement of No Time to Die comes after both two major autumn releases, Wonder Woman: 1984 and Marvel Studios' Black Widow - starring Scarlett Johansson - were both pushed back.\n\nWith Steven Spielberg's West Side Story and Kenneth Branagh's Death of the Nile remake also delayed, it could spell disaster for many struggling cinema chains, which rely on big budget releases for much of their income.\n\nOscar-winning Rami Malek plays the latest Bond villain Safin in the forthcoming film.\n\nIn the US, the National Association of Theatre Owners, the Directors Guild of America and the Motion Picture Association wrote an open letter last week calling on Congress to bail out \"our country's beloved movie theatres\".\n\nThe letter stated that if the current situation continued without additional support, 69% of small and mid-sized cinemas in the US would likely go bankrupt or close. The letter was signed by a string of Hollywood directors, including James Cameron, Clint Eastwood and Britain's Steve McQueen.\n\nBut John Fithian, head of the National Association of Theatre Owners, told Variety it was also essential that the studios played their part in supporting cinemas - by continuing to release films.\n\n\"If we don't have any movies until we're fully vaccinated as a world, a lot of the theatre companies are going to be gone and the theatres themselves won't be there,\" he said.\n\n\"This idea of waiting out the pandemic to make your movies more profitable doesn't make sense to me. There won't be as much of an industry left to play your movies in if you do that.\"\n\nIn China, cinemas reopened in July - with restricted numbers - while in India they are due to partially reopen in mid-October, ahead of the Diwali holiday in November.\n\nCinemas in the UK were given the go-ahead to reopen in July, with social distancing measures in place, staggered start and finish times and pre-ordered popcorn, among the measures.\n\nHowever many sites did not open immediately. Cineworld, the world's second-largest cinema chain, reopened many of its locations across the UK in early September. It recently reported a $1.6bn loss in the first six months of the year.\n\nOn Friday, Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden urged the British public to \"support your local cinema\" as he announced a government cash boost of £650,000 to 42 independent cinemas across England as part of the £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund.\n\nSome fans on Twitter have called for the latest franchise to be released digitally rather than delaying the release date to next Easter. Earlier this week, Warner announced that the big budget remake of Roald Dahl's The Witches, starring Anne Hathaway, will debut on the streaming platform HBO Max in the US.", "Faith communities are being invited to take part in a study of the role singing plays in spreading coronavirus.\n\nParticipants will be asked to sing at different volumes, and lasers will be used to detect and measure the droplets they produce.\n\nResearchers will then look into how many droplets are blocked by different types of face covering.\n\nThe hope is this can inform guidance to allow worshippers to return to communal singing safely.\n\nThe team will also collect information about how Covid-19 has affected the experiences of prayer for different faith groups.\n\nProf Laurence Lovat, professor of gastroenterology and biophotonics at University College London (UCL), is asking participants to complete a questionnaire on how their practice of worship has changed during the pandemic.\n\nThey will be asked about their usual involvement in communal prayer and their experiences of worship since March, when restrictions on meeting and travel were introduced.\n\nFrom the respondents, a group of people will be selected to \"sing, chant or hum\" in front of a bright laser light and a high-speed camera, which will detect tiny droplets of moisture - aerosol - hanging in the air.\n\nThere is evidence that coronavirus can be spread through these particles.\n\nThe light will enable the droplets to be seen, and a camera that flashes 7,000 times a second will record them.\n\nMichelle Sint says not being able to sing as a congregation at her synagogue \"draws away from the atmosphere\"\n\nSinging was suggested as a high-risk activity for spreading coronavirus after outbreaks were linked to choir groups.\n\nCurrent guidance states singing should be \"limited to the performers, and worship should not include congregational singing\".\n\nIt continues: \"People should avoid singing, shouting and raising voices. This is because of the potential for increased risk of transmission from aerosol and droplets.\"\n\nBut more recent research has suggested it might be the volume, rather than the activity of singing itself, that determines the risk level.\n\nProf Lovat plans to test this by asking participants to sing at different volumes and measuring the differences in the aerosols they produce.\n\nHe plans to recruit people of different sizes, heights, sexes, ages and ethnicities - as well as those with and without facial hair.\n\n\"Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly changed many people's daily or weekly worshipping routines, affecting their ability to pray, enjoy group discussion or take part in singing or chanting,\" he said.\n\n\"Our study aims to establish how the practice of worship has changed and find out what the risk of Covid-19 transmission is when singing, chanting or humming with or without a face mask.\n\n\"We'll have a better understanding of what's acceptable and what isn't,\" he said.\n\nMichelle Sint, who is Jewish and has already enrolled in the study, said she wanted to take part to find out whether it was possible to \"sing without putting people at risk\".\n\n\"There's something very uplifting about singing as a community in one voice,\" she said, adding that it was \"an integral part of the atmosphere and the worship\".\n\nFor Junaid Shah, singing and communal prayer does not play such a large role in his Muslim faith, but he wanted to contribute in order to aid other communities.\n\nAnd he said it was important to him to \"highlight the importance of communal worship, even in these times\".\n\n\"More than anything it's a support network. It's about not feeling isolated.\"", "Police are investigating the actions of MP Margaret Ferrier, who travelled from Glasgow to London with Covid-19 symptoms then returned home after testing positive.\n\nThe Met said it was looking at possible offences related to the Health Protection Regulations.\n\nMs Ferrier has been widely condemned for risking the health of people in parliament and on public transport.\n\nShe has been suspended by the SNP and faces calls to quit as an MP.\n\nThe Met said in a statement that an MP had contacted Police Scotland on Thursday to say she may have breached legislation and guidance relating to coronavirus.\n\nIt said this had related to actions including a train journey on Tuesday between London and Glasgow, following a positive Covid-19 test.\n\n\"Following consultation with Police Scotland, officers from the Metropolitan Police, working with British Transport Police, are conducting an investigation into potential offences,\" said the Met.\n\n\"The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards has been informed.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nCommons speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle had earlier spoken of his disbelief at Ms Ferrier's \"reckless\" actions, which he said had put other people's health at risk.\n\nAnd Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, said she had spoken to Ms Ferrier and urged her to \"do the right thing\" and stand down as an MP.\n\nShe said Ms Ferrier had been guilty of the \"worst breach imaginable\" and that her \"reckless, dangerous and completely indefensible\" actions had undermined the public health message.\n\nDUP MP Jim Shannon, who was seated at the same socially-distanced dining table as Ms Ferrier on Monday evening, is self-isolating but received a negative test result on Thursday afternoon.\n\nAn Assistant Serjeant at Arms was close to Ms Ferrier when she spoke in the Commons on Monday but has not been advised to self-isolate.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Lindsay Hoyle says he is \"really very angry\" about the behaviour of MP Margaret Ferrier.\n\nIn an interview with BBC Scotland, Prime Minister Boris Johnson would not be drawn on whether he thought Ms Ferrier should stand down as an MP.\n\nHe said it was important that \"everyone obeys the rules and guidance\".\n\nMs Ferrier, the MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, travelled by train to London on Monday despite being tested for Covid at the weekend after experiencing mild symptoms.\n\nShe spoke in the Commons chamber during a coronavirus debate, but was told later that evening that she had tested positive for the virus.\n\nDespite this, Ms Ferrier took a train back to Scotland on Tuesday, with SNP whips in the Commons being told about her positive test on Wednesday.\n\nIt became public knowledge on Thursday evening when Ms Ferrier tweeted an apology and said she \"deeply regretted\" her actions.\n\nShe has not yet given any indication of whether or not she intends to continue sitting as an independent MP.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Last updated on .From the section Liverpool\n\nLiverpool forward Sadio Mane has tested positive for coronavirus and is self-isolating.\n\nThe news comes three days after the club said midfielder Thiago Alcantara had tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nLiverpool say the Senegal winger has \"displayed minor symptoms of the virus but feels in good health overall\".\n\nMane, 28, played for the Reds in a 3-1 win over Arsenal on Monday but was not in the squad for the EFL Cup defeat on penalties by the Gunners on Thursday.\n\nA statement on Liverpool's website added: \"Like with Thiago Alcantara, Liverpool are - and will continue to - following all protocols relating to Covid-19 and Mane will self-isolate for the required period of time.\"\n\nMane, who has scored three goals for the Anfield club this season, will miss the Premier League game against Aston Villa on Sunday prior to the international break.\n\nThe club's first game after that will be the Merseyside derby at Everton on 17 October.\n\nOn Monday, the Premier League announced 10 people had tested positive for coronavirus in the latest round of testing - the highest number of positive tests since the season began.", "Police said Jones had tried to put out the blaze but it had already spread trapping the family inside\n\nA family of four were trapped in their burning house after an arsonist \"mistakenly\" targeted their home.\n\nNathan Lee Jones, of Golwg y Castell, Cardigan, set bin bags alight outside their home on Castle Street on 16 June 2020.\n\nPolice later found out that Jones had intended to set fire to a different house, but got the address wrong.\n\nJones pleaded guilty to arson with intent to endanger life, and was jailed for four years at Swansea Crown Court.\n\nDyfed Powys Police said Jones had gone back and tried to put out the blaze, which was started in the early hours of the morning.\n\nDet Con Damon Watmough said: \"However it appears a black bag was still smouldering, and spread to the other refuse outside the house.\n\n\"By the time the occupants were aware, they had no means of escape, and a gas pipe had been damaged and was leaking into their home.\"\n\nMr Watmough said it was initially thought the fire had been caused by a lit cigarette, but it was later proven it was started deliberately.\n\nPolice said Jones was caught with the help of CCTV\n\nJones was spotted on CCTV at the house at around the time of the fire, and was identified through conversations on social media, he added.\n\n\"This was a very serious and traumatic incident, which could have had devastating consequences for the victims,\" Det Con Watmough added.\n\n\"The defendant was determined to cause fear or harm by starting the fire, and put the lives of a family with two young children at risk.\n\n\"We hope this sentence will provide reassurance to the community and victims following this distressing incident.\"", "President Trump and his wife Melania plan to recover at the White House\n\nAs news emerged that US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania had tested positive for coronavirus, the story shot to the top of every news agenda worldwide.\n\nIt's just 32 days until Americans cast their votes in the race for the White House - and this is a seismic development.\n\nWorld leaders were quick to send the Trumps their well-wishes, with India's Twitter-loving Prime Minister Narendra Modi among the first.\n\n\"Wishing my friend @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and @FLOTUS a quick recovery and good health,\" he wrote.\n\nIsrael's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted: \"Like millions of Israelis, Sara and I are thinking of President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump and wish our friends a full and speedy recovery.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"Hang on, Peter\": How US news reacted to Trump's Covid diagnosis\n\nRussia's Vladimir Putin sent a message by telegraph, according to the Interfax News Agency, writing: \"I am certain that your inherent vitality, good spirits and optimism will help you cope with this dangerous virus.\"\n\nIn much international media, however, the news was accompanied by criticism of what was said to be the US president's \"botched\" response to the coronavirus pandemic, and his \"open scepticism\" over the use of face masks and social distancing.\n\nGerman media seemed somewhat unsurprised. \"Trump usually does not wear a mask in public\", wrote the centre-right Die Welt, while the centrist Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung pointed out that the pandemic did not deter him from making numerous major election campaign appearances.\n\nMedia in France echoed the sentiment that Mr Trump undermined his own health by underestimating the virus. \"After months of catastrophic handling of the pandemic in the USA, after months of lies and contradictory messages to his supporters… Donald Trump has tested positive for Covid-19,\" wrote Libération.\n\nIran's international-facing English-language Press TV observed that Trump \"has been somewhat cavalier\" about the Covid-19 threat, adding that \"it was only a matter of time\" before the US president caught the virus.\n\nAn anchor on Iranian state television broke the news \"with an unflattering image of the US president surrounded by what appeared to be giant coronaviruses\", the Associated Press reports.\n\nElsewhere, questions have been asked about what the news could actually mean for the US presidential election. The India Today website anticipated that Trump's quarantine would bring his election campaign to a standstill, stating: \"The [presidential] debates and the entire Republican campaign now comes under a shadow.\"\n\nThe website quoted predictions by analysts that Trump may hope to get sympathy votes now that he has tested positive himself. But others, like Hindi-language daily the Navbharat Times, predicted that \"Trump's diagnosis and his attitude towards the pandemic will harm him in the election.\"\n\nAn artist in Mumbai, India, paints a mural of the ailing couple\n\nPakistan's Geo News carried an online report reading: \"The future of Trump's re-election campaign is in doldrums due to his illness and inability to address the rallies before the crucial November 3 vote.\"\n\n\"The president, who is tested regularly for Covid-19, has kept up a rigorous travel schedule across the country in recent weeks, holding rallies with thousands of people in the run-up to the November 3 election, despite warnings from public health professionals against having events with large crowds.\"\n\nIn China, which Mr Trump has repeatedly blamed for the spread of the coronavirus, news of his illness was one of the most searched topics on Weibo, the popular (if heavily censored) social media app.\n\nThe editor of the state-owned Global Times newspaper, Hu Xijin, tweeted in English: \"President Trump and the First Lady have paid the price for his gamble to play down the Covid-19.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nDomestically, some of Mr Trump's favoured outlets took a gentler tone. \"Get through this together!\" reads a headline on Fox News's website, where the story is leading the news.\n\n\"Trump, first lady send messages of calm, resilience from White House after testing positive for Covid,\" it adds.\n\nThe site's sympathetic coverage includes an article on people it calls \"a number of the president's fiercest critics\", sending their best wishes for his recovery. The network's medical expert Marc Siegel said his sources had described the couple as \"absolutely asymptomatic\".\n\nElsewhere in the US press, the Wall Street Journal noted a fall in US stock futures and said \"the diagnosis throws up a host of uncertainties for markets to process\", including the question \"will the US government be able to function normally?\"\n\nThe Washington Post has dropped its paywall to allow people to read its live updates on the situation.\n\nPolitico described Mr Trump as \"the world's highest-profile patient of a disease that has killed more than one million people\".\n\n\"A person familiar with the situation said the president was not showing symptoms yet on Thursday,\" the site reported. \"Still, Vice-President Mike Pence may need to step in for some tasks if Trump is confined to the White House grounds,\" it quoted the source as saying.\n\nOn that score, there is some good news for the Trump administration: Mr Pence and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both tested negative.", "More than a third of the UK is now under heightened restrictions\n\nTighter restrictions have come into force in parts of northern England after a spike in coronavirus cases.\n\nIt is now illegal to meet people indoors from other households in the Liverpool City Region, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough and Warrington.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said it was \"necessary\" to bring the new measures, which includes places like pubs and restaurants, into force.\n\nMore than a third of the UK is now under heightened restrictions.\n\nThe new rules come as hundreds of Northumbria University students are self-isolating after testing positive for Covid.\n\nMiddlesbrough has been on the government's watchlist following an increase in cases\n\nThe new rules have split opinion in Hartlepool.\n\nSteven Brittan said: \"This could have been stopped a long time ago but people haven't stuck to the restrictions so now we are all having to suffer the consequences.\"\n\nShelia Calvert said: \"It's absolutely totally wrong, [the rules] are far too harsh.\n\n\"People have suffered enough with not seeing their families.\"\n\nAndy Bostwick said: \"It's very frustrating that you can go to work with people but you then can't go for a beer with them after work, which is something I do quite a lot on Friday with the lads.\"\n\nPeople in Hartlepool are among those who have to abide by new restrictions\n\nAfter a steady decline since the first peak in April, confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK have been rising again since July, with the rate of growth increasing sharply from the end of August.\n\nOn Friday, another 6,968 people tested positive, slightly down from more than 7,000 a day earlier in the week.\n\nMeanwhile, Germany has issued a warning to its citizens against travelling to Scotland and northern England because of increases in infections.\n\nThey were also tightened up this week in Newcastle, Northumberland, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Sunderland and County Durham, as well as four areas of north Wales.\n\nAnnouncing the latest restrictions, Mr Hancock told the House of Commons \"cases continue to rise fast\" in Teesside and the north-west of England.\n\nKnowsley, an area in the Liverpool City Region, had the second highest infection rate in the country at 262 per 100,000 on 27 September.\n\nLiverpool's weekly infection rate rose to 258, Warrington's was 163 and Hartlepool and Middlesbrough both had 121 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nBurnley, where no further restrictions are yet to be imposed beyond the Lancashire-wide ones already introduced, has the highest infection rate in England at 327 per 100,000.\n\nMr Hancock also \"recommended against all social mixing between households\", but said he wanted the restrictions to stay in place for \"as short a time as possible\".\n\nPeople in those areas should also:\n\nThe independent mayor of Middlesbrough said the changes would damage the local economy and people's mental health.\n\nBut people in Liverpool had been expecting the tighter measures.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Matt Ashton, director of public health for Liverpool, acknowledged there were \"so many different rules, so many different regulations, it is confusing for people to understand\".\n\nHe added: \"We need to move the conversation now to people really understanding the risk of Covid in our communities... to do the right thing and just to minimise their contact with other people as much as possible.\"\n\nAndy McDonald, Labour MP for Middlesbrough, said it was \"imperative\" people \"accept and abide by\" the new measures but called for \"improvement in communication\" between the government and local councils.\n\nHe said: \"These restrictions have been imposed without due consideration or dialogue.\n\n\"We have no idea of what exit strategy is planned or what achievements have to be attained in order to see these restrictions lifted.\n\n\"It is simply not good enough.\"\n\nAlice Wiseman, director of public health for Gateshead, said introducing new restrictions was a \"tricky balance\" but was about putting a \"package of measures together that enable us to keep as much of the economy open while reducing the transmission of the virus\".\n\nA spokesman for Northumbria University, in Newcastle, confirmed 770 students had tested positive for coronavirus, 78 of whom are symptomatic.\n\nAll infected students and their close contacts are self-isolating for 14 days in line with government guidance.\n\nIt comes as people arriving in the UK from Turkey and Poland now have to quarantine for two weeks.\n\nThe new rules - which also apply to the Caribbean islands of Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba - came into force at 04:00 BST on Saturday.", "For months US President Donald Trump and his aides have regularly gone without masks, often appearing to behave as if there was no pandemic. Then the president tested positive, and their world changed. This is the story of a seismic day.\n\nEarly on Friday evening, it was peaceful at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, nine miles (14km) from the White House, and so quiet you could hear an acorn drop. But the mood was tense. Police tape was stretched from a tree to a basketball hoop, marking the landing zone for Marine One, the president's helicopter, and a dog sniffed for explosives. Donald Trump would arrive soon, and no-one knew quite what to expect.\n\nA security official tried to tell his colleagues where they should stand for the arrival of the president's helicopter. The official admitted that his plan was a work in progress. \"I don't think anyone knows what's going on,\" he said.\n\nIt was an accurate observation outside the hospital - and for much of the day at the White House, too.\n\nThe uncertainty began in the early morning hours, just before 01:00 in Washington, with the president's announcement on Twitter that he had tested positive. Afterwards, White House aides and staffers did their best to maintain a sense of normality in the midst of a chaotic environment, but the mood spiralled into something that looked a lot like chaos. There was anxiety, shouting and a few tears.\n\nThe president had long managed to project a sense of optimism about the US health crisis - as if he could will the pandemic away. More than 200,000 people have died with Covid-19 in the US, yet he has been saying recently that the pandemic is \"getting under control\".\n\nIn a pre-recorded address to a charity event on Thursday, Mr Trump asserted that \"the end of the pandemic is in sight\". Meanwhile at a presidential debate earlier this week, he made fun of his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, for always wearing a mask.\n\nThe president's claims and the language that he uses to talk about the virus alienate many Americans. However, his approach appeals to his base of supporters, men and women who are conservative and mostly white - a group of individuals who resent the Democratic elites in Washington and other cities.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. US President Donald Trump on Covid-19 in his own words\n\nThe president's casual language about the virus over the last few months has been amplified by his aides and staffers in both their words and actions. They often seemed to exist in a pre-Covid era. Few of them wore masks at their offices in the West Wing, and they crowded together at small lunch tables next door at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. They invited hundreds of guests onto the south lawn at the White House for events.\n\nThe administration relied on rapid Covid-19 testing machines to screen those in contact with the president. But experts have raised questions about the reliability of the quick turnaround tests, suggesting they might have given officials a false sense of security.\n\nNow the president is sick, and his aides are struggling to cope with the reality of the virus as it unfolds around them and invades their offices. One of the president's top advisors, Hope Hicks, has tested positive, as has his campaign manager Bill Stepien, two Republican senators, and Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman.\n\nSenior White House staffers are now in isolation. Junior staff members were frantically fielding calls as part of a massive contact tracing programme. News about the president's visit to the hospital leaked accidentally - by someone who sent an email before reading it.\n\nIn the midst of the confusion, White House aides have tried to put on a brave face. The president's economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, assured me and other journalists on Friday morning that the president was working hard and that there was plenty of good economic news.\n\nBesides, Mr Kudlow pointed out, the president was not the first world leader to become infected - the leaders of Britain and Brazil had both had the virus. \"Prime Minister Boris Johnson in London, who's a longtime friend of mine, had a very rough time of it - a very rough time,\" Mr Kudlow said. \"I hope and pray that President Trump does not.\"\n\nIn addition, Kayleigh McEnany, Mr Trump's press secretary, insisted that the White House was operating smoothly. The president was taking care of business, she said, adding: \"He's had mild symptoms, but he is hard at work. We're having to slow him down a little bit.\"\n\nShe said that the president had spoken on the phone with senators including Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham.\n\nMeanwhile in the West Wing, people were shouting. \"You're in here without a mask,\" someone yelled at a journalist, telling him to leave the premises. A junior staffer, exhausted and overworked, broke down in tears. A miasma of uncertainty hung over the offices known as \"lower press\", a warren of desks cluttered with bottles of hand sanitiser, newspapers, a baseball and a hair straightener.\n\nWhite House officials sought to reassure the public and the media on Friday\n\nThe anxiety of those of us who spend time in the West Wing is palpable: for months, almost no-one wore a mask while sitting at their desks in the lower press office. Now everyone in the room has one on. Journalists came here on Friday to ask officials about additional testing. Others wanted to know more about the president's condition.\n\nOn Friday three journalists who cover the White House tested positive, reported CNN. The reporters who remained at the White House wanted to know if they, too, had the virus. (I was tested in the morning - 10 quick swabs - and got a clean bill of health.)\n\nBy mid-afternoon, it was clear things were not going well. A staffer told me and other members of a small press pool, the journalists who follow the president, to gather for a trip to the military hospital, where we would wait for the president.\n\nWe climbed into a black van, one with government plates and dark windows. As we arrived at the hospital, the \"wig-wags\", or flashing lights, came on. The van pulled to a stop near the emergency entrance.\n\nI know how powerfully the president's messages resonate with his base and how much they admire the way he has handled the health crisis (\"Millions more would have died\" without him, one of his supporters told me). But standing outside the hospital's emergency room, I could see that the world the president has described - one of health and prosperity, with him as its creator - was in jeopardy.\n\nAs Marine One hovered near the landing zone, yellow leaves scattered in the air. Mr Trump walked down the stairs, holding the rail, and climbed into an SUV. From the glimpse I got, he seemed subdued. It was the end of a long day for the president - and for the nation too.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. President Trump's seven days before his Covid-positive test", "Police said large crowds congregated outside the church\n\nPolice are investigating a funeral attended by \"between 400 to 500 people\", despite government guidance stating only 30 mourners are allowed.\n\nBedfordshire Police dispatched officers to the area when \"large crowds\" gathered outside a church in Dunstable.\n\nConservative MP for the town Andrew Selous said he was very angry about the \"flagrant breach\" of rules at the \"traveller funeral\".\n\nThe force said it will review evidence and consider taking action.\n\nCh Insp Lee Haines said: \"We worked with the local authority, the cemetery and the funeral directors prior to this event so people could attend to pay their respects while following social distancing measures.\n\n\"The funeral was initially attended by lower numbers of people, as planned, but larger crowds subsequently started gathering outside the church where the funeral was taking place.\"\n\nAndrew Selous MP said the large number of people attending the funeral blocked a road in the town\n\nMr Selous, the MP for South West Bedfordshire, said the number of people attending the funeral at St Mary's Church in West Street was \"completely unacceptable\".\n\n\"Bedfordshire Police tell me they estimate that there were between 400 to 500 people present when only 30 are allowed at a funeral,\" he said.\n\n\"We are all under the law and it is simply not right or acceptable for the rest of the population who have made such sacrifices to see others getting away with such behaviour.\"\n\nBedfordshire Police said officers \"understand that people wish to pay their respects to their loved ones... but everyone needs to follow the rules\".\n• None COVID-19- guidance for managing a funeral during the coronavirus pandemic The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Sam Law said the situation left him feeling angry and \"completely left out\"\n\nA man who uses a wheelchair said he pulled himself up three flights of stairs to take his driving theory test as the centre had no disabled access.\n\nSam Law, 21, from Cardigan, Ceredigion, said the experience left him feeling angry and \"completely left out\".\n\nHis mother took photos of what happened at the centre in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire on Thursday.\n\nThe Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) said it was \"extremely sorry for the unacceptable distress\".\n\nA spokesman said it was investigating as a matter of urgency, adding: \"We want everyone who is able, to take any driving test and will always make reasonable adjustments for people who are disabled and want to pass their theory or practical exam.\"\n\nService providers have to make reasonable adjustments for people who have a disability so they are not put at a substantial disadvantage compared to those who are not disabled when accessing services.\n\nMr Law said he specified he used a wheelchair when he booked his test online and requested to have it in Aberystwyth as he knew the centre there had wheelchair access.\n\nHe said he tried calling the Haverfordwest centre on the morning of the test to check access but no-one picked up.\n\nMr Law said he found climbing the steps \"very hard work\"\n\n\"I was very disappointed and angry,\" he said.\n\nHe said staff at the centre advised he return home and book another test, but he did not want to delay the test so decided to climb the steps with his brother's assistance.\n\nMr Law said he specified he used a wheelchair when he booked his test online\n\n\"It was very, very hard work - lifting yourself. Because I sit down all the time, I break bones easily,\" he said.\n\nMr Law, who has used a wheelchair since having a spinal stroke when he was 16, said he was shocked a building used by a government department did not have disabled access.\n\n\"It shouldn't be a case of 'you need to go to another centre',\" he said.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. A bird who flew from his cage is found after farmers heard him singing the TV theme.\n\nA cockatiel who flew from his cage has been returned to his owner after he was heard singing The Addams Family theme.\n\nSix-month-old Smidge escaped from his travel cage which was accidentally left open by his owner Rhys Owen, in Hoylake, Merseyside, on Tuesday.\n\nIn an effort to get him back, Mr Owen drove around his estate playing the show's theme, which he says is the bird's \"favourite song\".\n\nAfter a Facebook post about Smidge, the bird was returned by a local farm.\n\nMr Owen said he was \"in shock\" after the cockatiel flew through an opening in his travel cage, while he was trying to put it in his car.\n\n\"I watched him in slow motion going away.\n\n\"He sings The Addams Family - that's his favourite song - so I put it on full blast in my car and blare it out and drive around the estate, all the windows down, hoping to get him back.\"\n\nThe Addams Family has featured in a number of theatre and screen productions\n\nAfter Mr Owens posted about the missing bird on local Facebook groups, a user commented that the bird had been found in a tree at a farm about a mile away.\n\n\"Everyone in the farm heard The Addams Family song over and over again,\" Mr Owens said.\n\n\"They knew something wasn't right so they sent this lad up to see what it was.\n\n\"He goes right up to it. It doesn't fight and he just grabs hold of it.\n\n\"Apparently the chances of finding a cockatiel are very slim so we were heartbroken. We thought he had disappeared so when I got him, it was like finding your kid, it was amazing.\"\n\nThe Addams Family featured a fictional household of macabre oddballs, first seen in magazine cartoons in the 1930s and later TV series and movies, which were famed for their catchy finger-snapping theme.\n\nMr Owens said he has now got a new travel cage so Smidge can continue to travel with him to his work at a gym.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "William Henry and Brian McIntosh were found shot dead in the car in Brierley Hill on Wednesday afternoon\n\nA man has been charged with murdering two men found shot dead in a car.\n\nWilliam Henry, 31, and Brian McIntosh, 29, both from Bartley Green, were found in a car park off Moor Street in Brierley Hill, Dudley, just before 15:30 BST on Wednesday.\n\nA post-mortem examination found both men died from gunshot wounds, West Midlands Police said.\n\nJonathan Houseman, 32, from Stourbridge, has been charged with two counts of murder.\n\nMr Houseman, of Quarry Park Road, is set to appear at Birmingham Magistrates' Court on Monday, police said.\n\nA second person arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender has been released without charge, the force added.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"It's a case of applying for literally everything I can find\"\n\nThe Covid-19 pandemic has \"magnified\" barriers facing young people getting into work, a charity has said.\n\nA survey for the Prince's Trust, which helps get young people into jobs, education and training, found 44% of 16 to 25-year-olds questioned said their aspirations were now lower.\n\nHalf of those from poorer backgrounds said their future goals now seemed \"impossible\" to achieve.\n\nOne 25-year-old said she was applying for any role after losing her job.\n\nAriane Brumwell was furloughed from a local newspaper in Cowbridge, Vale of Glamorgan, in March.\n\nShe was then told in August the newspaper was \"no longer viable\" and she was being made redundant.\n\n\"I have no doubt in my mind that had it not been for Covid that I would still be in work and still reporting,\" she said.\n\n\"I started off applying for the roles I was interested in, so journalism, PR, social media-based roles.\n\n\"But it's got to a point now where because I've got outgoings, and I'm very aware Christmas is around the corner as well, it's a case of applying for literally anything I can find.\"\n\nMs Brumwell said there were so many people in the same position as her that she often does not get feedback from job rejections or has been told she is \"overqualified\" for positions.\n\n\"In terms of my career aspirations, it's destroyed my motivation to an extent because I worked so hard in university and to find a journalism job years ago in the first place,\" she added.\n\nUnder the UK government's Job Support Scheme, a replacement for the furlough scheme, the government will subsidise wages of employees who can work at least a third of their usual hours.\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak said the new scheme would \"support only viable jobs\" - but some people say their jobs were viable if it were not for the pandemic.\n\nThe most recent data showed the unemployment rate in Wales was 3.1%, lower than the overall UK rate of 4.1%.\n\nBut unemployment among young people has risen faster, reaching 13.4% of 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK.\n\nUsing data on the uptake of universal credit and jobseeker's allowance, BBC analysis found the proportion of young people on the benefits had doubled between March and June.\n\nThe retail job Caitlyn Morgan was expecting disappeared because of the pandemic\n\nCaitlyn Morgan, 20, from Caerphilly, said her life was \"on pause\".\n\nBefore lockdown, she was on a retail training programme in Cardiff, at a business that said it would have offered her a job to stay on if the virus had not hit.\n\n\"You see how many people are now unemployed, not just young people,\" Ms Morgan said.\n\n\"I haven't got as much experience as some people do in the workplace. I'm less likely to get a job.\n\n\"It just puts your life on pause and you just feel like you're stuck and there's no way of getting out,\" she said.\n\nUnemployment has risen in Wales, but remains lower than the UK rate\n\nPhilip Jones, director of Prince's Trust Cymru, said the pandemic had \"magnified\" issues among young people including \"low aspirations\", \"low self-confidence\" and \"low self-esteem\".\n\n\"To think that over half of young people think that their life goals are not just going to be difficult, not just going to be challenging, not just going to be laden with multiple hurdles but 'impossible' is something we need to stand up and have a good look at,\" Mr Jones said.\n\nHe said some young people in Wales felt a \"geographic dislocation\" between where they live and \"where the opportunity is\" as well as feeling \"the mere notion of success is something they don't feel attached to\".\n\nProgrammes run by groups like the Prince's Trust have helped people like Lauren Hughes build confidence.\n\nThe 20-year-old acting student from Rhondda Cynon Taf has been made redundant from two student jobs.\n\nLauren Hughes says young people fear unemployment and are questioning their futures\n\n\"Obviously the world of theatre looks very different to what it did before the start of the pandemic,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm not going to stop myself following my dreams to become an actress. My opinion has changed about how I'm going to get into it, how hard it's going to be.\n\n\"I think a lot of young people like myself are questioning our futures, and there are a lot of young people who say 'I'm scared about my future, I think I'm going to be unemployed'.\n\n\"I think we need a lot more support from the government.\"\n\nA UK Treasury spokesman said: \"The Job Support Scheme is designed to protect jobs in businesses facing lower demand over the winter due to Covid, and is just one form of support on offer to employers during this difficult period.\"\n\nHe also said it was \"continuing to innovate in supporting incomes and employment through our Plan for Jobs, announced in July, helping employees get back to work through a £1,000 retention bonus and creating new roles for young people with our Kickstart Scheme\".\n\nYou can see more on this story on Politics Wales on BBC One Wales at 13:15 BST on Sunday 4 October, and on the BBC iPlayer.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Rick Moranis's last on-screen film role was in 1997\n\nRick Moranis, who starred in Honey I Shrunk the Kids is recovering after being attacked in New York City.\n\nThe 67-year-old Ghostbusters actor was walking on Central Park West near 70th Street at 7:30 am local time when he was punched in the head, police said.\n\nThe video shows a man running up and knocking Mr Moranis to the ground before walking away.\n\nPolice have not yet made any arrests and have asked for the public's help in identifying the suspect.\n\nMr Moranis went to hospital and reported pain in his head, hip and back before reporting the crime at the precinct.\n\nHis management team told CBS News he is \"fine, but grateful for everyone's thoughts and well wishes\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by NYPD Crime Stoppers This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe Canadian actor rose to fame in the 1980s as a member of the cast of Second City Television (SCTV). He became a household name around the world after appearing in the blockbuster smash Ghostbusters.\n\nBut he has mostly kept a low profile since his wife's death from cancer in 1991, choosing to focus on raising his children.\n\nHe is set to reprise his role as the mad inventor and family man Wayne Szalinski in Shrunk, a sequel to Honey I Shrunk the Kids.", "Hundreds of students at Northumbria University are self-isolating after testing positive for Covid-19\n\nHundreds of students at Northumbria University are self-isolating after testing positive for Covid-19.\n\nA spokesman for the university, in Newcastle, confirmed 770 students had tested positive since returning in mid-September, 78 of whom are symptomatic.\n\nAll infected students, and their close contacts, have self-isolated for 14 days in line with government guidance.\n\nMeanwhile, Newcastle University confirmed it has had 94 students and seven staff test positive.\n\nA Newcastle spokeswoman said the \"overwhelming majority of cases\" were from \"social and domestic settings\".\n\nUniversity and College Union (UCU) said it warned Northumbria University it was \"far too soon for a mass return to campus\".\n\nIn a statement the UCU, which represents lecturers, said: \"We told Northumbria University they had a civic duty to put the health of staff, students and the local community first and we take no pleasure in now seeing another preventable crisis play out.\n\n\"We warned last month that, given the current restrictions in the region, the direction of the infection rate and the problems with test and trace, it was clearly far too soon for a mass return to campus.\"\n\nNorthumbria University said self-isolating students were being provided with food, laundry, cleaning materials and welfare support by the university, working alongside the students' union and Newcastle City Council.\n\nEllie Burgoyne, 19, who studies social sciences, has been isolating since one of her flatmates tested positive a week ago.\n\nShe said: \"The uni and accommodation have been great in providing support and keeping us as comfortable as possible as not leaving our flat for two weeks isn't the most fun.\n\n\"I moved a couple of weeks ago and immediately noticed how strict our accommodation was being when it came to students meeting with other flats, trying to have parties.\n\n\"I think it's a common misconception that students haven't been listening to the guideline, my accommodation has been quiet aside from the odd flat having a few people over.\"\n\nMeanwhile, students will also receive additional academic support if they miss out on face-to-face tuition during their isolation period.\n\nThe university spokesman added: \"The increase in numbers comes in the week after students returned to university and reflects the good access to and availability of testing, as well as rigorous and robust reporting systems.\n\n\"In parts of the UK where universities started term earlier, numbers of student cases surged in induction week, and then reduced.\n\n\"We are making it clear to students that if they break the rules they will be subject to fines from police and disciplinary action by the universities which may include fines, final warnings or expulsion.\n\n\"Both Northumbria and Newcastle universities have Covid response teams on call that are working closely with NHS Test and Trace, Public Health England North East and the City to identify and get in touch with anyone who has been in close contact with those affected.\"\n\nAround 56 universities across the UK have had at least one confirmed case of Covid-19.\n\nThere have been more than 200 cases at the University of Sheffield and 177 University of Liverpool staff and students have tested positive, according to a PA news agency survey which contacted 140 institutions.\n\nApproximately 2,500 positive cases of Covid-19 have been identified at these universities, the analysis suggests.\n\nAre you a student at Northumbria University? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Harvey Weinstein now faces 11 charges involving five victims in Los Angeles County\n\nDisgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein has been charged with six further counts of sexual assault, the Los Angeles District Attorney confirmed.\n\nFriday's charges involve two victims of alleged incidents that occurred more than 10 years ago.\n\nWeinstein now faces 11 sexual assault charges in Los Angeles County involving five women, District Attorney Jackie Lacey said in a statement.\n\nIn March, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault.\n\nDuring that trial in New York, the 68-year-old was found guilty of committing a first-degree criminal sexual act against one woman and third-degree rape of another woman.\n\nThe latest charges allege that he raped a woman at a hotel in Beverly Hills between 2004 and 2005, and raped another woman twice - in November 2009 and November 2010.\n\nIn January, Weinstein was charged with sexually assaulting two women in 2013. Then in April, a further charge alleging that he assaulted a woman at a Beverly Hills hotel in 2010 was added.\n\nLos Angeles officials have already started extradition proceedings, however this has been delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Another extradition hearing is set to take place in December.\n\nIn March, Weinstein himself was said to have tested positive for coronavirus in a prison in upstate New York.\n\nA spokesman for Weinstein said: \"Harvey Weinstein has always maintained that every one of his physical encounters throughout his entire life have been consensual. That hasn't changed.\"\n\nThe spokesman said they would not comment on the additional charges.\n\nAllegations against Weinstein began to emerge in 2017 when The New York Times first reported incidents dating back over decades.\n\nHe issued an apology acknowledging that he had \"caused a lot of pain\", but disputed the allegations.\n\nAs dozens more emerged, Weinstein was sacked from the board of his company and all but banished from Hollywood.\n\nA criminal investigation was launched in New York in late 2017, but Weinstein was not charged until May 2018 when he turned himself in to police.\n\nWhen he was sentenced to prison in March this year, jurors acquitted him of the most serious charges of predatory sexual assault, which could have seen him given an even longer jail term.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Reaction to the court's decision to sentence Harvey Weinstein to 23 years in jail (file image from 24 February 2020)", "Shannon and Matthew Steele said staff at Ipswich Hospital provided \"excellent care\"\n\nA nurse who shared her journey of having triplets on social media said her pregnancy \"could've been so different\" if it were not for Covid-19.\n\nShannon Steele, from Ipswich, gave birth to Ronnie, Maddison and Emilia on 24 August after an emergency Caesarean.\n\nShe said what was her first and will be her only pregnancy felt \"stolen\" due to measures in place due to coronavirus.\n\nAs reported, she shared her story on Instagram to help others with fertility battles after her own.\n\nMrs Steele said she felt like her pregnancy was \"stolen\" because there were many things the couple missed out on that first-time soon-to-be parents would normally experience - especially given they will not be having any more children after having triplets.\n\nBut the NHS nurse said her experience at Ipswich Hospital was \"excellent\" and staff there were \"supportive every step of the way\".\n\nShe added: \"They provided excellent care for the babies but took time to ensure I was OK as well as my husband - they are an outstanding group of passionate people.\"\n\nMrs Steele said she did not meet the triplets for two days as she had become \"very poorly\"\n\nMrs Steele started her Instagram feed our.triplets.journey with the aim of helping others going through \"fertility battles\".\n\nShe was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) at the age of 15 and a thyroid condition about three years ago.\n\nShe said she and her 35-year-old husband were \"one step\" away from going down the IVF route.\n\nShe said it was \"almost poetic\" that her husband got to have a lot of \"firsts\" with the babies\n\nThen in March they discovered they were due to have not only one baby but three.\n\nAlthough the wait to get pregnant had been long, when it came to the babies' arrival, she said it was a \"rush to get them out\" at Ipswich Hospital.\n\nOne of the triplets was in \"a lot of distress\" and Mrs Steele herself became \"very poorly\".\n\nRonnie, left, and Maddison, middle, were born two minutes after their sister Emilia\n\n\"I didn't see them for two days after they were born,\" said Mrs Steele.\n\n\"My husband was the first to see and cuddle them.\n\n\"Considering he missed out on the scans and coming to the hospital with me, he got to have a lot of firsts with the babies which was nice and almost poetic.\"\n\nThe triplets were born at almost 33 weeks, Emilia first, with Maddison and Ronnie following two minutes later together.\n\nThey spent four weeks in hospital before, along with their mother, they were able to go home.\n\nMrs Steele shared a photo of her scan on Instagram\n\nThe triplets spent four weeks at Ipswich Hospital before they were able to go home\n\nWhile Mr and Mrs Steele have been enjoying the early days of parenting and establishing a new routine, Mrs Steele said it had been hard for other family members who have not been able to be with them as coronavirus restrictions are still in place.\n\n\"There have been a lot of tears, especially from my mum and sister,\" she said.\n\n\"Not only did they want to see the babies but they wanted to be there to support me.\n\n\"It's been tough for everybody but the services at the hospital were fantastic and made it such a positive experience.\"\n\nAccording to the NHS website, about one in 65 births in the UK are twins, triplets or more.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "With a month to go before the presidential election, voters around the US are digesting the news that President Donald Trump is infected with Covid-19.\n\nMr Trump is currently experiencing mild symptoms - but aged 74 and within the clinical definition of obesity, he has risk factors that raise his chance of having a severe reaction.\n\nWe asked some older members of the BBC voter panel how they felt when they heard the news.\n\nMark Falbo is a retired higher education administrator who recently moved to Windham, Maine. He is a Democrat voting for Joe Biden.\n\nI am very concerned when anyone gets a diagnosis of being Covid positive - being someone my age and my size, I know how bad that can be for them, so I'm hoping that the president and first lady, and all those who may have been exposed, will recover well.\n\nI'm also hoping that it will create an area of seriousness around the president about this, because this still is a very dangerous situation and hopefully [this will be] his way of having to learn how leaders need to respond to threats to their population.\n\nI don't think he underestimated the crisis - it's pretty clear that he was aware of the threat. I personally think he mismanaged. And I think that's been a huge disservice to not simply Americans, but to the world.\n\nHere in Maine, we are pretty sensitive about Covid-19 and I'm fortunate to be in a state where the governor and our CDC director has taken this very seriously, with the exception of some silly activities by a few families.\n\nLaura Powers is a materials scientist from Wilmot, Wisconsin. She identifies as Independent and will vote for Joe Biden.\n\nWhen I woke up this morning and listened to the news, and heard that he had tested positive, my first thought was that maybe this is a wake-up call to his followers who think that this is all a hoax.\n\nMy second thought was that unless he has symptoms that are a little more severe - and I don't wish that on anyone including him and Melania - he's going to pull out and broadcast to his followers that Covid-19 is nothing to worry about, and even at his age he got through it.\n\nI have been extremely careful and I do take the health situation very seriously. I don't have underlying conditions but I know many people who do. I worry about people who are not, and I think that this will be a wake-up call. But as I said, I think that if [Trump has only a mild case], he will convince his followers that Covid has been blown out of proportion by the media.\n\nKathleen McClellan from Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, is a Republican voting for Donald Trump.\n\nI'm very sorry that [Donald and Melania Trump] caught the infection. I hope they do well. But my brother also caught it and he said he's had flus that felt worse. So, I know that it varies quite a bit. But I think that's just the way a virus works - it has to infect a certain number of people before it's going to go away.\n\nI don't think he's underestimated the crisis. I think he's in a position where he has seen people die, but he has a different philosophy, where you push forward. It's an individual decision for each person and I don't think anybody really knows that much about the virus. But it seems like at this point in time we may need to just get on with our lives, protect people who are especially vulnerable.\n\nIt's just a reminder that [Covid-19] is not something anyone should take for granted. But you can't be paranoid. It's not like back in April, when a complete shutdown made sense because we didn't know what we were dealing with.\n\nEric Scholl, 65, is a media coordinator from Tulsa, Oklahoma. He voted for Trump in 2016, but will vote for Joe Biden this year.\n\nCovid is not a Republican issue, it's not a United States issue, it's a global health issue. Unfortunately, and I do mean very unfortunately, the president never [listened to] the medical experts, let alone the fact that he totally blew off first protecting the country. So, it's sad - I'm just very sad for him and his wife and I hope they recover, but that's not gonna change who I vote for.\n\nI respect that there will be a small percentage [of the population] that will be more proactive in protecting themselves [after the president got the virus]. But here where I live in Oklahoma, the attitude is \"Hey I'm bulletproof. It's not going to affect me.\"\n\nThe president has greatly underestimated the power of Covid-19.\n\nJim Hurson from the San Francisco Bay Area in California is a Republican voting for Donald Trump.\n\nMy first reaction was, obviously, I thought it's very unfortunate. My second reaction is wondering what his opposition is going to do, to try and leverage this into making him look bad again. I think for sure they will play a game of \"we told you so\".\n\nWe have to remember that we have the benefit of hindsight.\n\nIf you listen to purely health oriented people, they want to make things as safe as they can from the standpoint of virology. But the president also has to deal with the consequences of disastrous economic fallout, what are the mental health problems of sequestering people in their homes... what is the society as a whole going to suffer from, and the government spending money that it frankly does not have?\n\nIt's an incredibly complicated situation when you look at it from a national standpoint. Given that, I don't think anybody could have done any better.\n\nIf you don't assume that the government can solve all of this, and you look at individuals and say how they are behaving, we're all going through this nicely.\n\nAre you an American voter? Join Jim, Kathleen, Mark, Eric and Laura on our US election voter panel.\n\nUse this form to get in touch.\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your response.", "Boris Johnson spent three nights in intensive care after contracting coronavirus\n\nDominic Raab has said he was \"really worried\" the PM could have died from Covid-19 after he was admitted to intensive care in the spring.\n\nThe foreign secretary stood in for Boris Johnson during his time in intensive care and while he recovered.\n\nSpeaking to the Conservative Party conference, Mr Raab said the virus \"nearly took the life\" of the PM.\n\nMr Raab also said he worried for the PM's fiancee Carrie Symonds but \"always had faith\" he would \"pull through\".\n\nMr Johnson spent three nights in intensive care at London's St Thomas' Hospital in April after contracting coronavirus.\n\nSpeaking about his experience after leaving hospital, the PM said it \"could have gone either way\" and thanked healthcare workers for saving his life.\n\nMr Raab told the virtual conference that coronavirus had \"hit us hard, taking lives on a tragic scale\".\n\n\"It nearly took the life of our prime minister, our friend as well as our leader.\n\n\"I get asked a lot how I felt, when I covered for him.\n\n\"Well, I really worried we might lose him, and I was worried for Carrie (Symonds), pregnant with baby Wilf.\n\n\"But I always had faith that with the outstanding NHS care he received and his fighting spirit, he'd pull through.\"\n\nAdmitting there would be \"lessons to be learnt\" following the government's handling of the crisis, the foreign secretary added: \"I have to say, for every hurdle we faced, with every heart-rending loss, there was also a tale of courage, a moment of inspiration.\"\n\nDominic Raab stepped in for the prime minister during his sickness\n\nMr Raab also spoke about the prospect of a post-Brexit trade deal between the UK and the EU.\n\nThe UK and the EU have pledged to \"work intensively\" in order to resolve their differences and reach a deal.\n\nBut Mr Raab said that although the government wanted a free trade deal with the EU, \"any deal must be fair\".\n\n\"The days of being held over a barrel by Brussels… are long gone,\" the foreign secretary said.\n\nHe added there was \"no question the government will control our fisheries\".\n\nBoth sides have been calling on the other to compromise on key issues, which include fishing and government subsidies.\n\nAlso speaking at the conference, Michael Gove outlined the government's plans to move more Civil Service jobs outside of London - part of its \"levelling up\" agenda to spread investment and opportunity beyond London and south-east England.\n\nThe Cabinet Office minister said \"far too many government jobs\" were based in Westminster and Whitehall.\n\nMr Gove added: \"We have an amazing Civil Service and it has drawn its resources and people from lots of different communities - I think we now need to give back to those communities as well.\"\n\nPlans to open a second headquarters in Leeds were also announced.\n\nThe new headquarters will provide the party with \"a base at the heart of the blue wall\", party co-chairman Amanda Milling said, referring to the northern constituencies who voted for the party for the first time at the general election in December.", "Zef Eisenberg \"dedicated himself\" to \"pushing the boundaries of both human and machine\", said his family\n\nA millionaire fitness firm founder who died attempting a British land speed record was a \"true genius with unique talents\", his family has said.\n\nMaximuscle founder Zef Eisenberg died at Elvington Airfield, near York, on Thursday where in 2006 ex-Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond crashed.\n\nHis car \"went out of control at high speed at the end of a run\".\n\nPaying tribute his family said the 47-year-old \"injected his positivity into everyone he came into contact with\".\n\nIn the tribute on Facebook, they said the father of two left people \"feeling upbeat and in an enlightened mood\".\n\nMotorsport UK said his 1,200 horsepower Porsche car \"went out of control at high speed at the end of a run\".\n\nLondon-born and Guernsey-based Mr Eisenberg set more than 90 speed records on two wheels and four including the holding the iconic \"flying mile\" record.\n\nZef Eisenberg sold his Maximuscle firm to pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in 2011 for £162m\n\nThe former competitive weightlifter and bodybuilder had honed his knowledge of sports nutrition with research at the British Medical Library and founded company Maximuscle in 1995.\n\nFifteen years later it was selling £80m worth of products a year. It was sold to pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in 2011 for £162m.\n\nMr Eisenberg moved to Guernsey after he sold Maximuscle and \"dedicated himself\" to \"pushing the boundaries of both human and machine\", said his family.\n\nHis \"infectious enthusiasm and his unique ability to explain in layman's terms the most complex subjects\" led to him presenting Speed Freaks on ITV, focusing on the design, build and engineering of extreme cars.\n\nHe also became a champion of a £200,000 restoration of a much-loved children's playground and helped create Guernsey's first skate park.\n\nMr Eisenberg leaves behind his partner Mirella D'Antonio and two children.\n\nHis family said his parents and four siblings \"all adored him\" and followed his progress with \"great admiration\".", "Dame Carolyn will step down as CBI boss in November\n\nA post-Brexit trade deal \"can and must be made\", the organisation representing British businesses has said ahead of further UK-EU trade talks on Monday.\n\nDame Carolyn Fairbairn, the boss of the Confederation of British Industry, said it was the time for \"the spirit of compromise to shine through\".\n\nThe Brexit transition period, in which the UK has kept to EU trading rules, ends on 31 December.\n\nThe UK and EU are yet to agree a deal that will govern their future trade.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has said a trade agreement with the EU must be done by 15 October if it is going to be ready for the start of 2021.\n\nBut despite this, talks have run into problems. There are still key points of disagreement - including, for example, on fishing.\n\nThe next official round of talks - the ninth since March - begins on 28 September.\n\nThe CBI carried out a survey of 648 companies which found only 4% said they would prefer no deal to be agreed on trade.\n\nAnd half of firms said the impact of dealing with the coronavirus had negatively affected their preparations for next year, when the transition period ends.\n\n\"Next week Brexit talks enter the 11th hour,\" said Dame Carolyn. \"Now must be the time for political leadership and the spirit of compromise to shine through on both sides. A deal can and must be made.\n\n\"Businesses face a hat-trick of unprecedented challenges - rebuilding from the first wave of Covid-19, dealing with the resurgence of the virus and preparing for significant changes to the UK's trading relationship with the EU.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Why is it so hard to reach a Brexit deal?\n\nShe added: \"A good deal will provide the strongest possible foundation as countries build back from the pandemic.\n\n\"It would keep UK firms competitive by minimising red tape and extra costs, freeing much-needed time and resource to overcome the difficult times ahead.\"\n\nAccording to BBC Europe editor Katya Adler, one EU diplomat said the two sides were \"90% there\" on agreeing technical issues.\n\nThe diplomat said the \"remaining 10% is political\" and \"if that can't be solved, then the 90% is irrelevant\".\n\nAny trade agreement will aim to eliminate tariffs and reduce other trade barriers. It will also aim to cover both goods and services.\n\nIf negotiators fail to reach a deal, the UK faces the prospect of trading with the EU under the basic rules set by the World Trade Organization (WTO).\n\nIf the UK has to trade under WTO rules, tariffs will be applied to most goods which UK businesses send to the EU.\n\nThis would make UK goods more expensive and harder to sell in Europe. The UK could also do this to EU goods, if it chooses to.", "The UK has announced more than 10,000 new coronavirus cases for the first time since mass testing began.\n\nThere were 12,872 new cases, while a further 49 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19.\n\nHowever, the government said a technical issue meant some cases this week were not recorded at the time so these were included in Saturday's data.\n\nIt comes after data earlier this week had suggested infections may be rising more slowly than in previous weeks.\n\nThat data was based on weekly testing among a sample of people in the community to get an idea of how many people in England have the virus at any time.\n\nThe government also closely watches the daily number of positive cases, as it provides the most up-to-date snapshot.\n\nHowever, it published a cautionary message on its \"data dashboard\", explaining that the totals reported over the coming days would include some cases from the previous week, \"increasing the number of cases reported\".\n\nA Department of Health spokesman said the issue did not affect people receiving test results, and all those who tested positive have been informed in the normal way.\n\nThe announcement of the apparent glitch in the daily count comes \"at an awkward moment\", according to BBC health editor Hugh Pym, \"when there is intense scrutiny of daily Covid-19 data as ministers and health chiefs try to assess the rate of spread of the virus\".\n\nHe added: \"After criticism in recent months over the way total tests are counted, ministers and officials will now face more questions over the compilation of daily case data.\"\n\nThe daily total saw a significant rise from 4,044 on Monday to a then-high of 7,143 on Tuesday. However, over the next four days the daily total remained stable - varying between 6,914 and 7,108 - at a time when continued increases might have been expected.\n\nAnd then came the big leap in numbers announced on Saturday, a far bigger day-on-day increase than at any time in the entire pandemic, which were announced five hours later than the usual time and were accompanied by the government explanation.\n\nThe figures announced on Saturday would also have been partially inflated by the fact that 264,979 tests were processed the previous day, the third highest there has been so far in a single 24-hour period.\n\nSaturday's figure brings the total number of recorded cases in the UK to 480,017.\n\nThe increase in the UK is largely reflected across Europe.\n\nMiddlesbrough has been on the government's watchlist following an increase in cases\n\nOn Saturday tighter restrictions came into force in parts of northern England after a spike in coronavirus cases.\n\nIt is now illegal to meet people indoors from other households in the Liverpool City Region, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough and Warrington.\n\nIt means than a third of the UK is now under heightened restrictions.\n\nThey were also tightened this week in Newcastle, Northumberland, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Sunderland and County Durham, as well as four areas of north Wales.\n\nThe new rules come as hundreds of Northumbria University students are self-isolating after testing positive for Covid.\n\nThe Mayor of Greater Manchester, Labour's Andy Burnham, called for \"local control\" on measures to tackle the virus, telling Sky News' Sophy Ridge: \"At least our own destiny would be in our hands. It feels we are a little powerless.\"\n\nElsewhere, people arriving in the UK from Turkey and Poland now have to quarantine for two weeks.\n\nThe new rules - which also apply to the Caribbean islands of Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba - came into force at 04:00 BST on Saturday.\n\nAfter a steady decline since the first peak in April, confirmed coronavirus daily cases in the UK have been rising again since July, with the rate of growth increasing sharply from the end of August.\n\nSage, the body which advises the UK government, say it is still \"highly likely\" the epidemic is growing exponentially across the country.\n\nTheir latest R number estimate - indicating how fast the epidemic is growing or falling - rose to between 1.3 and 1.6.\n\nBut an Office for National Statistics (ONS) survey estimates there were 8,400 new cases per day in England in the week to 24 September - slightly down on the previous week's estimate of 9,600 daily cases.\n\nThe ONS's estimates of how much of the population is currently infected are based on testing a representative sample of people in households with or without symptoms.\n\nIt is different to the number published daily by the Department of Health. That records positive cases in people with potential Covid symptoms who request tests.", "Trade negotiations tend not to begin with two sides in agreement - otherwise there would be nothing to negotiate.\n\nSo it's not surprising to see the UK and EU set out rather different positions before talks begin in earnest.\n\nThere are some broad similarities. The two sides agree they want a free-trade agreement, with no tariffs (border taxes on goods) or quotas (limits on the amount of goods). They are also keen to include as much of the service sector as possible.\n\nBut that's the easy bit and this is likely to become a bruising experience for all involved.\n\nTerms and conditions always apply - and there are several possible flashpoints.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nFirst and foremost, the EU wants the UK to sign up to strict rules on fair and open competition, so if British companies are given tariff-free access to the EU market, they cannot undercut their rivals.\n\nThese are known as level playing field guarantees and they have been a constant theme in the EU's negotiating position for nearly two years.\n\nMost importantly, its negotiating directives, adopted on 25 February 2020, say a future partnership must \"ensure the application\" in the UK of EU state-aid rules on subsidies for business.\n\nThe UK would also be required to stay in line with the EU's rules on environmental policy and workers' rights in a way that would \"stand the test of time\".\n\nBut the government has now rejected this approach entirely. The political declaration it agreed with the EU last year did speak of level playing field commitments but, armed with a big majority in the House of Commons, it has toughened up its language.\n\nIn a document outlining the UK's approach to negotiations published on 27 February 2020, it said: \"we will not agree to any obligations for our laws to be aligned with the EU's\".\n\nInstead, Boris Johnson has said he would create an independent system that would uphold the UK's international obligations and not undermine European standards.\n\n\"There is no need for a free-trade agreement to involve accepting EU rules on competition policy, subsidies, social protection, the environment or anything similar,\" he said.\n\nHe has also pointed out that there are areas such as maternity rights in which the UK has higher standards than the EU and that the UK spent far less money on state aid than Germany or France.\n\nThe EU says without a level playing field, it cannot offer any kind of basic free-trade agreement along the lines of the one it has negotiated with Canada.\n\nThe UK's response? A Canada-style deal would be its preference, but if that is not available, it will settle for what Australia has with the EU. In other words, no free-trade deal at all.\n\nThe government says it will decide in June 2020 \"whether good progress has been possible on the least controversial areas of the negotiations\" (which it defines as things like financial services and data) and if not, it will start to focus on preparing for a new relationship without a formal free-trade deal.\n\nEither way, says Mr Johnson, a new relationship will begin on 1 January 2021.\n\nHis critics accuse him of recklessness, but the prime minister says he has \"no doubt that in either case the UK will prosper\".\n\nThe EU has said an agreement on fisheries must be concluded before any free-trade deal is finalised. That's because UK fishing waters are among the best in Europe.\n\nThe UK says it's happy to consider a deal on fisheries but it must be based on the notion \"British fishing grounds are first and foremost for British boats\".\n\nIts negotiating directives say a future deal should \"aim to avoid economic dislocation for [European] Union fishermen that have traditionally fished in United Kingdom waters\".\n\nThe EU wants to \"uphold\" existing access on both sides to fishing waters - language that has strengthened under pressure from EU countries with big fishing fleets.\n\nThe EU also seems prepared to link access to fishing waters to the UK's ability to sell its fish in the EU market.\n\nBut the UK also rejects that. Michael Gove told Parliament: \"We will take back control of our waters, as an independent coastal state, and we will not link access to our waters to access to EU markets. Our fishing waters are our sovereign resource.\"\n\nFishing is a tiny part of both sides' economies - in the UK it's well below 1% - but it has always been an emotional issue. And coastal communities depend on it on both sides of the Channel.\n\nWhen it comes to product standards and other regulations, the EU is a bit more flexible.\n\n\"We're not asking for alignment, I know it's a red rag to the UK, so I won't really mention it,\" the EU's chief negotiator, Michel Barnier said.\n\n\"What I am looking for is consistency.\"\n\nThe UK says it must have the right to diverge from EU rules when it chooses to do so, but it won't do that just for the sake of doing things differently.\n\nThe more it diverges, the more checks there will be and the more barriers to trade will emerge.\n\nOne late addition to the EU's negotiating document is the demand that the UK should stick close to EU rules on food safety and animal health, which is seen by some as a reference to whether the UK might import chlorine-washed chicken from the US in the future.\n\nSimilar trade-offs will have to be made in the services sector. UK financial services companies, for example, will lose the passporting rights that gave them unfettered access to the rest of the EU.\n\nInstead, the UK is hoping for a system of what's known as enhanced equivalence, which would give companies plenty of notice if the rules were about to change.\n\nBut talk in government circles of frictionless trade has gone. The UK now accepts that will not be possible outside the EU single market and customs union.\n\nThe EU's negotiating mandate recalls a statement made back in 2018, in which the other 27 member states agreed Gibraltar would not be included in any post-Brexit agreement between the UK and the EU.\n\nIt doesn't rule out a separate deal between the UK and the EU that does cover Gibraltar, but that in turn would have to be agreed by the UK and Spain.\n\nThis is another hot-button issue pretty much guaranteed to generate tabloid headlines.\n\nMr Johnson has said he would be negotiating for what he called the whole UK family, including Gibraltar.\n\nGaining independence from the rulings of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) was an important part of the argument for Brexit.\n\nNow, the EU is demanding the ECJ be given a legal role in policing any free-trade agreement.\n\nIt wants the court to be able to issue binding rulings on disputes between the two sides, when they \"raise a question of interpretation of [European] Union law\".\n\nBut the government's outline says it will not allow \"the EU's institutions, including the Court of Justice, to have any jurisdiction in the UK\".\n\nThe ECJ does play a limited role in the withdrawal agreement, both in the special arrangements for Northern Ireland and in resolving any disputes over citizens' rights for the next few years.\n\nBut a future trade deal is a different matter.\n\nDevising a dispute-resolution system that satisfies both sides will not be easy.\n\nIt's not just about trade, it's about internal security co-operation and access to databases too.\n\n\"Where a partnership is based on concepts derived from European law,\" Michel Barnier said, \"obviously the ECJ should be able to continue to play its role in full\".\n\nThe EU's mandate also says there should be \"automatic termination\" of law enforcement and judicial co-operation in criminal matters if the UK were to opt out of the European Convention on Human Rights.\n\nThe bottom line for the UK? The ECJ and the EU's legal order \"must not constrain the autonomy of the UK's legal system in any way\".\n\nSo there are some big divides to be bridged.\n\nBoth sides are accusing the other of moving the goalposts and backing away from commitments made in the non-binding political declaration.\n\nMany observers expect a serious row and a possible breakdown in the talks sooner rather than later.\n\nOn the other hand, both the UK and the EU say they would settle for a free-trade agreement. The difficult part will be working out how to get there and how to implement it.\n\nIt is also worth recalling the government's own internal analysis from November 2018 suggested a Canada-style deal would leave the economy 4.9% smaller after 15 years than if the UK had stayed in the EU.\n\nThere is a long way to go in a short period of time.\n\nUPDATE: This piece was originally published on 4 February 2020 and updated when the UK and EU released their negotiating mandates.", "Labour has given ministers 72 hours to agree to provide free school meals during the holidays, warning that one million children could be left hungry.\n\nShadow education secretary Kate Green said \"now is the time to act\", and Labour warned would force a vote by MPs if the programme is not extended.\n\nFootballer Marcus Rashford pledged to continue his free school meals campaign after the government rejected it.\n\nNumber 10 said it was not for schools to provide meals during the holidays.\n\nIt comes after former prime minister Gordon Brown called for Boris Johnson to give 1.5 million children free meals outside term time.\n\nMr Brown said it would cost about £20m a week to provide the 1.5 million worst-off children with free meals during half-term and Christmas.\n\nThe Welsh government has pledged to provide free school meals during the holidays until Easter next year.\n\nBut Downing Street has indicated that free meals will not be provided to children in England over Christmas.\n\nA Number 10 spokesman said: \"It's not for schools to regularly provide food to pupils during the school holidays.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMs Green said: \"Millions of families face the prospect of losing their livelihoods because the government has lost control of the virus.\n\n\"Its sink-or-swim plans for support could leave more than one million children at risk of going hungry over the school holidays.\n\n\"Now is the time to act. Labour will not stand by and let families be the victims of the government's incompetence.\"\n\nShe said that if the PM did not change course, the party would force a vote and \"give his backbenchers the chance to do the right thing\".\n\nGeoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, backed Labour's call.\n\nHe said: \"Schools are working incredibly hard to help children catch-up with lost learning amidst ongoing disruption caused by rising Covid infection rates, and the pupils who need the greatest degree of support are often those from disadvantaged backgrounds.\n\n\"To then have a situation where they are potentially going hungry through holiday periods is very obviously detrimental to both their welfare and educational progress.\"\n\nMarcus Rashford's campaign over the summer forced the government to U-turn on free school meals\n\nA government spokeswoman said \"substantial action\" had been taken to ensure children do not go hungry.\n\nMeasures include extending free school meals while schools were closed, increasing welfare support by £9.3bn, and giving councils £63m to provide emergency support to families for food and other essentials, she said.\n\nIn June, Mr Rashford prompted a government U-turn over free meals in the summer holidays, a campaign that saw the England and Manchester United striker become an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list earlier this month.\n\nMore than 200,000 people have added their names to his petition, which says that all under-16s in England whose parent or guardian receives Universal Credit should get free school meals - including during the holidays.\n\nAfter securing enough signatures, Mr Rashford's decision will be considered for debate by MPs.", "Coronavirus patients admitted to intensive care have a better chance of surviving now than they did in April, according to the dean of the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine.\n\nBut these gains levelled off over the summer, Dr Alison Pittard said.\n\nThe proportion of patients admitted to critical care who die fell by almost a quarter from the peak and as much as half in hospitals overall.\n\nIt is too soon to know the survival rate for patients admitted this autumn.\n\nA better understanding of the disease has allowed doctors to treat patients better, including using the steroid dexamethasone and less invasive types of ventilation.\n\nThe Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC), which reports on the outcomes of patients who end up in critical care units, has begun separating out the cases of people admitted after 1 September.\n\nThe Health Service Journal reported these figures, which it said suggested a dramatic fall in the proportion of patients dying between the first wave (up until the end of August) and the second (from 1 September).\n\nOn average, 39% of patients admitted to critical care died between the start of the pandemic and the end of August and this appears to have fallen to just under 12%.\n\nBut while this appears a dramatic fall at first glance, Dr Pittard cautioned this was most likely to be a product of the fact that not enough time has passed to know the outcomes of patients admitted to hospital since the beginning of September.\n\nMany will remain in intensive care and until a patient is either discharged or dies, they do not appear in the data.\n\nThough it is too soon to know what mortality will look like in the second wave, we do know that mortality was higher at the beginning of the first wave than it was at the end, she said.\n\nThe BBC previously reported this fall in the death rate among patients admitted to hospital with coronavirus, when University of Oxford researchers estimated it had fallen from 6% to 1.5% between the peak in April and June.\n\nIt is difficult to match deaths to hospital admissions in general, though, whereas critical care patients' outcomes are regularly reported.\n\nLooking at the outcomes of patients admitted to critical care, more than half were dying around the peak of the epidemic in April.\n\nBy the beginning of July it had fallen to about 40% and remained roughly at that level until the end of the summer.\n\nBased on a much smaller number of patients admitted between the 1 September and the start of October, the death rate now appears to be about a quarter of that level.\n\nHowever, Dr Pittard believes it is too soon to say whether this is a genuine fall.\n\n\"There are lots of reasons why the mortality rate reduced over time but the biggest thing is we have learnt more about the disease,\" Dr Pittard said.\n\n\"In the early days we were, almost immediately that people were admitted, putting them in ICU, sedating them and putting them on a ventilator.\n\n\"We started to use more non-invasive ventilation and patients were doing very well,\" she said.\n\nThat means more patients are treated using things like CPAP machines - a face mask with a pump that controls airflow - rather than being sedated and having a tube put into their airway.\n\n\"We saw the effect on blood clotting. We recognise the disease a lot earlier,\" Dr Pittard added.\n\nThe use of a steroid called dexamethasone which reduces inflammation is also thought to have contributed to falling death rates, although it is hard to say how much.\n\nAnd the type of patients ending up in hospital may be a factor too, as a much higher proportion were in the 30-59 age bracket in September, compared with the peak.\n\nBut it has been suggested that if intensive care units get too full, the death ratio could rise again.", "Helen Pye said there had been shift toward staycations, resulting in more visitors to Snowdonia\n\nWales' tourism sector faces \"very dark days\", with firms closing and hotels \"mothballed\" amid the coronavirus pandemic, an industry body has said.\n\nWales Tourism Alliance (WTA) said a Covid resurgence meant hopes of making up for several \"lost months\" had faded.\n\nBut some in the sector said it could be a chance to attract new visitors and improve sustainability.\n\nThe Welsh Government said a £1.7bn support package had helped and it was committed to delivering sustainability.\n\n\"If things pick up and businesses do make it through, then I think we're very well-placed to pick up customers that would normally have gone overseas,\" said Adrian Greason-Walker of the WTA, which represents thousands of firms.\n\n\"However, we've probably had five weeks of trade this year instead of what would normally be 20 solid weeks over the summer.\n\n\"At the moment things are dark.\"\n\nIt comes after the Welsh Government announced a ban on visitors travelling from coronavirus hotspots elsewhere in the UK, which came into effect on Friday.\n\nThat followed mounting tension over fears from some residents around an \"influx\" of tourists to areas not currently subject to lockdown restrictions in Wales, such as Ceredigion, most of Carmarthenshire, Powys, Pembrokeshire and Gwynedd.\n\nA two-week \"fire break\" - a period with tighter restrictions to help break the trajectory of coronavirus cases rising in Wales - is also expected within days.\n\nMr Greason-Walker said about half of tourism businesses surveyed by the WTA feared they might not survive the next six months, with some facing the \"worst possible scenario\".\n\n\"If we can pick up any silver lining from this awful situation then it's that we can still offer people some respite from it all.\n\n\"I think we've seen a return to family holidays to Wales, whereas before they might have caught a flight to Spain and spent a week on a beach over there.\n\n\"We've got a fantastic landscape and environment here. We're going to have to come out of this crisis at some point.\"\n\nOne area significantly bucking the trend for reduced footfall was Snowdonia, with figures from Visit Wales suggesting more people intended to visit the national park than anywhere else in Wales over the next few months.\n\nWish you were here? Visit Wales said Snowdon was top of most people's to-do list in Wales\n\n\"I would say it's been the busiest summer that we have ever seen,\" said Helen Pye, the park's engagement officer.\n\n\"August was incredibly busy - and September the figures were up by about 40 to 50% compared to a normal year.\"\n\nHowever, having large numbers of visitors concentrated in certain areas has heightened fears about over-tourism.\n\n\"The tourism industry is incredibly important to us, but we've been seeing a huge increase in the challenges we already had,\" said Ms Pye.\n\n\"There's been an increase in traffic, pollution and noise in the national park. We've also seen huge amounts of litter in the area and anti-social behaviour and fly camping.\"\n\nHowever, she and others in the industry hope Wales can follow the lead of countries such as New Zealand and Iceland in introducing a sustainable tourism model - which would aim to spread visitors more evenly by promoting less well-known places.\n\nLouise Dixey would like to see a change to the way Wales is seen and treated as a destination\n\n\"Sustainable tourism is about reducing the negative impacts of tourism and maximising the benefits,\" explained Louise Dixey, from Cardiff Metropolitan University's Next Tourism Generation project.\n\n\"It's not about the number of visitors, but it's about how much they spend and whether their visit can benefit local communities.\n\n\"There needs to be an emphasis on almost de-marketing some of these hotspots like Snowdonia and marketing unheard of places in Wales to try and spread the visitor load and make it more manageable.\"\n\nA winter break centred around long walks and dining out can be seen as bringing in far more benefit for less impact than a daytrip to the beach in the height of summer, for example, where the only expenses may be car parking and an ice cream.\n\nHowever, for some, the strategy still would not go far enough.\n\nHoward Huws, from Welsh language group, Cylch yr Iaith, said some Welsh-speaking communities had been feeling \"overwhelmed\" by the tourist trade for decades.\n\n\"We're constantly being told that the only way to deal with tourism is to bolster it further - but we are in a situation where it's already wreaking damage,\" said Mr Huws.\n\n\"People find themselves with few job opportunities - and any opportunities in tourism are seasonal and low paid.\n\n\"The cost of having those jobs is people then find themselves priced out of the housing market. We find ourselves unable to access the sites within our own landscape where tourism has taken control.\n\n\"They are talking about diversifying it and spreading it - but not about controlling it. Without controlling it - nothing is sustainable.\"\n\nWales' travel ban bars visitors from Northern Ireland, England's tier two and three areas and the Scottish central belt\n\nAcross the industry there is an acknowledgement coronavirus may have created a strange paradox, simultaneously crippling businesses while potentially increasing their future demand - as people switch from foreign holidays to staycations.\n\n\"There is a slight concern given the current situation that many tourism and hospitality businesses might not survive until spring 2021,\" said Ms Dixey.\n\n\"But there has been a surge in domestic demand. So we might actually be in a situation next year where market demand exceeds supply, particularly in relation to accommodation, which would limit the number of visitors.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government said its £1.7bn support package was the \"most generous\" in the UK and included a £500m economic resilience fund which had \"helped protect the livelihoods of more than 100,000 people\".\n\nA spokesman added: \"Over the course of the pandemic and in the coming years we will continue to listen closely to the people of Wales, the industry and visitors to ensure what we're delivering is sustainable and provides prosperity for everyone.\"", "Manchester has resisted being put into the \"very high risk\" tier\n\nEarly in the pandemic, the government consistently said it was \"following the science\" - but what does that really mean, and is the divergence between politics and science now wider than it has ever been?\n\nSome with heels clacking on the cobbles, others capturing the moment on their phones - it's like the aftermath of a big win in the football, or the Saturday after pay day. The videos show Concert Square in Liverpool heaving with crowds.\n\nAnd this in a city on the crest of a second wave of coronavirus, where almost all the intensive care beds in the hospitals are full.\n\nIt was Tuesday night, hours away from the Liverpool City Region entering the toughest restrictions in the country. But the footage sparked anger, and on Twitter there was a fight over the damage to the city's reputation.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Crowds gather in Liverpool on eve of new Covid rules\n\nDozens of tweets insisted that those present must have been students, that no true Liverpudlian would set foot in Concert Square, let alone behave like that. The tweeters were adamant - these people came from outside.\n\nThe mayor and the metro mayor condemned the scenes - but that wasn't the only thing they were angry about.\n\nThey accused the government at Westminster of not providing enough financial support - workers affected by the closure of businesses such as bars and gyms will only get two-thirds of their wages.\n\nOn the first day of lockdown, one gym owner showed his defiance by remaining open and was fined for it.\n\nGyms have indeed provided a source of confusion. Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson questioned why gyms in the Liverpool City Region had to close when the area moved into tier three - very high alert - but those in Lancashire, which went into tier three on Saturday, were allowed to stay open.\n\nLiverpool was the first place in England to go into the strictest measures\n\nIn Blackburn, with 438 cases per 100,000 (in the week to 13 October), you can work out, but in Wirral, with 284 cases per 100,000, you can't.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has acknowledged inconsistencies. \"There are anomalies, that's inevitably going to happen in a complex campaign against a pandemic like this.\"\n\nBut do these discrepancies encourage those who feel the government's decision-making sometimes veers away from the science?\n\n\"Following the science\" was a phrase we heard a lot of earlier in the year. It's what, we were repeatedly told, the government at Westminster was doing.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe reality was always more nuanced. There was a range of scientific views on a topic about which precious little was known at the outset, and there are still vast amounts to learn.\n\nAdded to that, from the perspective of ministers, this could never only be about scientific advice.\n\nThere was a constant swirl of broader considerations, what we might call the three Ls - lives, liberties and livelihoods. Ministers have been tussling with the three Ls from the start of the pandemic. But the divergence has never been wider than it is now.\n\nClaire Hamilton is the BBC's political reporter for Merseyside @chamiltonbbc\n\nThe critical moment in recent weeks can be traced back to 21 September, when Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK's chief scientific adviser and Prof Chris Whitty, the UK's chief medical adviser, warned of the need for immediate action.\n\nIn a televised briefing, Sir Patrick warned cases could reach 50,000 a day by mid-October if they doubled every seven days, as had happened in recent weeks.\n\nWe now know that on that same day, the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) met and suggested the \"immediate introduction\" of a \"short period of lockdown,\" and a series of longer term measures, including:\n\nA day later, what actually happened?\n\nThe prime minister said people should work from home if they could and a 22:00 curfew for pubs and restaurants was introduced. In other words, not a lot of change.\n\nWhat happened to \"following the science\"?\n\nPlenty at Westminster whispered, even before we had seen the minutes from the Sage meeting, that this was a victory for those in government, like Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who worried about the pandemic's crippling economic consequences.\n\nMr Sunak has been consistent - warning again, just this week, of the danger of \"rushing to another lockdown\". He warned, instead, of the \"economic emergency\", touching on another of the three Ls - livelihoods.\n\nWhen you speak to people in the Treasury, you get an insight into what informs this outlook.\n\n\"We have to keep an eye on the medium term. There may not be a vaccine. Listening to the scientists recently, the mood music has changed. They're more pessimistic,\" says one.\n\nThis is no longer about dealing with a short-term emergency, but being resilient through a medium or long-term slog of a crisis.\n\nAnd that means the Treasury is well aware of what is going out - in public spending - and what is coming in, in taxes.\n\n\"There isn't the headroom there was,\" an insider says - a reference to the £200bn already spent.\n\nAnd there is a keen awareness of the economic consequences of shutting pubs. \"Our economy is comparatively very reliant on social consumption,\" is how it is described.\n\nThe experts know the ministers have to take into account a variety of factors. One Sage member said: \"Our job is to give clear unvarnished science advice so they can do that with their eyes open.\"\n\nOn Tuesday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer advocated a short, limited lockdown - the circuit-breaker suggested by the scientific advisers.\n\nBut does Sir Keir calling for a circuit-breaker make it more or less likely to happen?\n\nSince then, the government - to quote Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab - has been \"leaning in\" to its regional response for England.\n\nPolitical convention says, everything else being equal, it is harder to adopt a policy advocated by your opponents than it is by independent advisers.\n\nThen there's the last of the three Ls. Liberties.\n\nAmong the most influential Conservative backbench voices is Sir Graham Brady, who said ministers had got used to \"ruling by decree\" and \"the British people aren't used to being treated like children\".\n\nThis unease at how the pandemic has, in their view, swept away some of the checks and balances on those in power, is widely held in Parliament.\n\nThen there's the question of geography. First there was devolution for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but now we're all aware of the big English cities that have metro mayors because they are fighting back against Westminster.\n\nAccording to well-placed sources, Health Secretary Matt Hancock had argued for tougher measures in private. But the need to get local leaders on board has meant the tiered system has had to leave some wriggle room for negotiation.\n\nMinisters were stung when Middlesbrough mayor Andy Preston said he flatly rejected the restrictions that the government announced there in early October. \"It was a real problem for us - it undermined the public health message and threatened to undo what we were trying to achieve,\" one government source said.\n\nSteve Rotheram, Metro Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, had been asking for a lockdown circuit-breaker for at least two weeks - but he said any measures must come with a bespoke financial support package for businesses. It appears this hasn't been forthcoming.\n\nBut the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has gone much further than his colleague in Liverpool. On Friday, he was described as \"effectively trying to hold the government over a barrel\" by Mr Raab.\n\nMr Burnham, a former Labour cabinet minister, who lost out to Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 Labour leadership contest, is suddenly back on the national stage. He is demanding noisily and frequently the need for more generous support for those unable to work because of tier three restrictions.\n\nThere is nervousness within the Labour Party nationally, and elsewhere in the north of England, about this stance. Some worry it imperils people's health, others that it's become \"the Andy show\" - as one figure put it.\n\nThe idea of \"metro mayors\" voted for directly by the people of the region has long been championed by the Conservatives. David Cameron was a particular fan.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Top SAGE scientist tells us the regional restriction row is dangerous\n\n\"Some Conservatives are now realising you've got to be careful what you wish for,\" an early advocate of them says.\n\n\"And remember this, Boris Johnson was a mayor. There is a path to Downing Street that can pass via a town hall. Perhaps Andy Burnham has realised that too.\"\n\nWhat we are seeing is how different parts of the UK have tilted in different directions. Loyalty to region, to nation, to party. The legacies of past perceived slights and injustices. The realities of perceived injustices now.\n\n\"We owe a big thanks to George Osborne for bequeathing us this incredible standoff,\" a senior Conservative says about the row.\n\nSome Conservative ministers ponder privately that - in the end - Mr Sunak will be forced to be more generous to those unable to work under tier three restrictions. They don't think it'll be politically sustainable to pay people normally on the minimum wage, less than the minimum wage, for months on end.\n\nThe rows between local and central government leaders are \"very dangerous\" and \"very damaging to public health\", according to Prof Sir Jeremy Farrar, Sage member, and director of the Wellcome Trust.\n\nBut these are not the only rows that have been taking place. Across the scientific and medical community tempers are frayed and the pandemic is taking its toll.\n\nThere is a network of committees that feed into Sage, bringing together a wide range of experts from sociologists and public health directors to epidemiologists.\n\nMany are not paid for their advice and instead are fitting it in around their day jobs. \"We do it because we care and it's our life's work,\" said Prof Devi Sridhar, an expert in global public health at Edinburgh University, who has been advising the Scottish government.\n\nTalk to these experts and it is clear they are exhausted.\n\n\"The requests just keep coming in,\" one said. \"We're fed up, especially when we hear that test-and-trace consultants are getting paid £7,000 a day, and we have to put up with MPs going on the TV telling the world we are naïve and don't live in the real world. It's demoralising.\"\n\nBut it is not just between politicians and scientists that disputes have developed. Rival camps of scientists are clashing. Two online petitions have now been established: the Great Barrington declaration for those who want to see controlled spread of the virus and protection of the vulnerable, and the John Snow Memorandum for those arguing for outright suppression until a vaccine is developed.\n\nProf Francois Balloux, director of the UCL Genetics Institute, says the toxic atmosphere that is developing is really \"unhelpful\".\n\nBrought together, it has created a climate where almost every utterance or development is examined for double-meaning.\n\nThe problem facing advisers and decision-makers is two-fold. First, the nature of the virus means it is a lose-lose situation - whatever decision is taken has negative consequences either for the spread of the virus, or for the economy, education and wider health and well-being. What's more, there is not a simple binary choice of one thing or the other.\n\nFor example, much has been made in recent weeks about the need for the NHS to also focus on non-Covid work, which has taken a terrible hit during the pandemic.\n\nReferrals for urgent cancer check-ups and the number of people starting treatment have dropped, while the amount of routine surgery being done is still half the level it was before the pandemic.\n\nThis can have tragic consequences. This week the British Heart Foundation warned the number of younger adults dying of heart disease had increased by 15% during the pandemic.\n\nThe argument put forward by some is that the government should choose to do more non-Covid work. But, and this is a point the health secretary has been making week after week, if hospitals fill up with coronavirus patients, it makes non-Covid work harder to do.\n\nThe second key issue - and this goes to the heart of the disagreements we have seen bubble up in recent weeks among the scientific and medical community - is that there are huge gaps in the evidence and knowledge.\n\nThis is true on everything from the numbers infected already and the level of immunity exposure brings to the true impact of \"long Covid\", and exactly what effect any restrictions beyond a full lockdown actually have.\n\nIn normal times, the scientific and medical community is able to reach more of a consensus off the back of rigorous randomised controlled trials and painstaking peer review.\n\nBut in a fast-moving pandemic with a new virus, that has simply not been possible. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, says it means there is such \"uncertainty in the science\" that he does not think any plan is guaranteed to work.\n\nAnd then there is the human factor - the unintended consequences of actions that are impossible to take into account in the modelling. Hence the prospect of scenes like the ones we saw in Liverpool, which were not taken into account by Sage in its latest advice.\n\nBut Prof Keith Neal, an infectious disease expert at Nottingham University, says it shouldn't come as a surprise that people react in the way they do. Both young and old are suffering, he says, from not being able to meet up with people. \"This degree of isolation is not allowed in prisons under human rights legislation.\"\n\nPeople from different households will not be able to drink together inside, after London went into tier two\n\nIt is, he says, therefore natural that some people will ignore the rules. Closing pubs may sound good on paper, he says, but it could lead to an increase in house parties where people are \"far more at risk\".\n\nSo where has this left us?\n\nThe complexity of competing interests, uncertainty in the science and general exhaustion across society both among decision-makers and the public has, some fear, left us in the worst of both worlds.\n\nDelay and deliberation, says Sir Jeremy Farrar is a \"decision in itself\".\n\nBut by reaching a decision by default there is a risk - another adviser says - of making the same mistakes we made at the start of the pandemic.\n\n\"In March we toyed with the Swedish model of limited restrictions with the hope of developing immunity and then hesitated. But we then went for a lockdown, but it was introduced bit by bit and it was too late anyway.\n\n\"The same thing has happened again - we have delayed and then gone for some half measures. I can understand why. This is bloody difficult.\"\n\nThe government is now hoping it will be just enough that we can get through this wave without a devastating number of deaths or hospitals being overwhelmed. But it's a big risk - it could all unravel.", "Last updated on .From the section Rugby Union\n\nExeter Chiefs had just enough to keep Racing 92 at bay and clinch their first Heineken Champions Cup title in a thrilling final at Ashton Gate.\n\nLuke-Cowan Dickie, Sam Simmonds and Harry Williams barged over to give Exeter a nine-point lead at the break.\n\nBut Racing roared back with Simon Zebo's second try and Camille Chat's surge bringing them within a point.\n\nExeter, down to 14 men after Tomas Francis' late yellow card, held out heroically to lift the title.\n\nA breathless final 10 minutes featured Racing turning down the drop-goal opportunity as they went through the phases within five metres of the line, Exeter replacement Sam Hidalgo-Clyne securing a turnover under the shadow of his own posts and captain Joe Simmonds landing a penalty with the last act of the match.\n\nEven then the drama was not over.\n\nThe match clock initially showed that three seconds remained for Racing to restart and mount a final assault. However, after consulting with his team officials, referee Nigel Owens confirmed that the clock had not restarted when Simmonds was lining up his penalty and that he could blow up, sparking delirious celebrations.\n\nThe victory marks the culmination of a remarkable decade for Exeter, who won promotion to the Premiership for the first time back in 2010 in a play-off match across Bristol at the city's Memorial Stadium.\n\nRob Baxter's side will attempt to complete a double next weekend when they take on Wasps in the Premiership final.\n• None Emotional Baxter hails Exeter's 'ability to stick at it'\n• None Reaction and analysis after Exeter clinch first Champions Cup\n\nThe clash of styles was clear as soon as the teams emerged into a coronavirus-enforced empty Ashton Gate.\n\nRacing 92 trotted onto the pitch wearing pink bow-ties, in a nod to the Parisians' fast-living free-running past.\n\nExeter marched out in business-like fashion, grim-faced and forward looking, through a gauntlet of their replacements and backroom staff.\n\nRacing brought bursts of colour and panache, but the Chiefs' mastery of close-range trench warfare ultimately kept them one step ahead throughout a thrilling contest.\n\nRacing scrum-half Teddy Iribaren had the chance to give his side an early platform. Instead he screwed a penalty dead as he aimed for the corner and five minutes later Cowan-Dickie forced his way through the middle of a driven maul for the first try.\n\nIribaren's eccentricities continued as he passed blind to put Juan Imhoff under pressure before Russell juggled in his own in-goal area. Racing put themselves under pressure and Exeter gleefully pressed them beyond breaking point.\n\nSam Simmonds barged through opposite number Antonie Claassen at the end of a series of short-range bursts from his fellow forwards.\n\nFourteen points ahead with only 16 minutes gone, Exeter chairman Tony Rowe looked like he was struggling to keep his delight in check in the stands.\n\nBut Racing refused to go quietly.\n\nRussell's cut-out pass tempted Tom O'Flaherty out of position and opened a route to the corner for Zebo before Imhoff ghosted through the fringe defence to cut the gap to two points.\n\nHarry Williams crossed on the stroke of half-time for Chiefs but Zebo, out of contract next summer, showed his quality with another powerful finish to keep the French side within a score early in the second half.\n\nTwo minutes after Zebo's second, with the momentum with the French side, Scotland fly-half Russell threw a looping mis-pass just outside his own 22m. It could have sprung a counter-attack. Instead it was picked off by an alert Jack Nowell who put Henry Slade under the posts.\n\nThat score moved Exeter to 28 points, a total Racing could never overhaul despite Chat's bulldozing try and their late pressure.\n\nBritish and Irish Lions coach Warren Gatland was one of the handful of spectators in attendance at the behind-closed-doors final.\n\nThe performance of Russell will have given him plenty to ponder.\n\nThe Scotland fly-half's brilliant chip created a dramatic late score that undid defending champions Saracens in the semi-final and there were moments of vision and precision against Exeter.\n\nHowever, his high-risk, high-reward game means costly errors are also inevitable. Even before his pass was intercepted for Slade's try, his juggle behind his own line had almost gifted Exeter a score in the first half.\n\nWill Gatland feel he can afford that trade-off in the white heat of a Test series against world champions South Africa next summer?\n\nReaction - 'the best team in Europe by some distance'\n\nFormer England scrum-half Matt Dawson on BBC Radio 5 Live: \"It's an amazing achievement for Exeter. There can't have been another winning team that have only been in the top flight of their league for 10 years. And they deserve it because they have been the best team in Europe by some distance.\n\n\"I don't think I've seen a final like that - they tend to be more cagey. When a team goes as far ahead as Exeter did you think this is a one-way show, but it was Exeter who were hanging on at the end.\n\n\"Sport does some strange things to your emotions and there was massive tension and drama even in an empty stadium.\"\n\nFormer England centre Jeremy Guscott: \"Well done Racing for coming back into the match but the difference was that Exeter are a team whereas Racing have individuals. Exeter finished the match with 14 players on the field but backed themselves in a defensive position and have won it together.\"\n\nReplacements: Moon for Hepburn (56), Yeandle for Cowan-Dickie (56), Francis for Williams (56), Kirsten for Vermeulen (56), Skinner for Gray (59), Devoto for Whitten (59), Hidalgo-Clyne for Maunder (65)\n\nReplacements: Machenaud for Iribaren (41), Kolingar for Ben Arous (51), Baubigny for Chat (51), Oz for Colombe (51), Beale for Zebo (65), Klemenczak for Vakatawa (76), Palu for Claassen (76).", "Covid hospital admissions in Scotland are continuing to increase\n\nA further 15 people have died from coronavirus, bringing the total number of fatalities in Scotland under the measure to 2,609.\n\nThe Scottish government confirmed 1,167 more people had tested positive within the same 24-hour period, representing 17.6% of people who were newly tested.\n\nMeanwhile the number of people admitted to hospital with Covid is increasing.\n\nScotland's chief nursing officer Prof Fiona McQueen said there was \"concern\" at the overall rise in figures.\n\nOn Friday 675 people were in hospital with a recently confirmed case of the virus - an increase of 46 from the previous day.\n\nOf those people, 62 were in intensive care - a figure which is also increasing.\n\nThe first minister warned football fans to stay at home during Saturday's Old Firm clash.\n\nPeople were also told not to travel to other parts of Scotland or to England to watch the game in pubs and to avoid gathering outside Celtic Park.\n\nNicola Sturgeon said on Friday: \"Nobody likes the fact that these restrictions have to be in place but they are vital to protecting all of us and keeping us safe.\n\n\"So please comply with restrictions - by doing that you will be playing your part in helping us get the virus under control and you'll be helping hasten the day when we can all watch and enjoy the things that we love doing, whether that's football or the many things that we find ourselves not able to do normally.\"\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nTemporary restrictions to bring the outbreak back under control in the central belt have led to the closure of most licensed premises in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire, Lothian, Forth Valley and Ayrshire and Arran NHS boards.\n\nThose living in these areas have been warned not to travel to other parts of Scotland or to areas in England where such restrictions are not in force.\n\nProf McQueen told BBC Scotland that before any restrictions were eased, the Scottish government would want to see a reduction in virus transmission.\n\n\"We are concerned about that increase in hospitalisation, intensive care and deaths,\" she said.\n\n\"We put restrictions in in September and we'd hoped to see improvements. It's a bit early to see the full impact of that.\n\n\"We are very keen to limit the number of changes - that's why we've kept gyms, cafes and in some areas of the country, some hospitality open\"", "An artist works on a mural in Manchester, where an argument over virus restrictions continues between local and national leaders\n\nMillions of people have seen Covid-19 rules tighten as areas have moved up England's new three-tier alert system.\n\nLondon and York are among those moving up to tier two, meaning people cannot mix with other households indoors.\n\nA stalemate continues between Greater Manchester's local leaders and central government over stricter new measures.\n\nBoris Johnson has said infection rates in Manchester are \"grave\" and he may \"need to intervene\" if a row over moving into tier three is not resolved.\n\nMore than half of England - in excess of 28 million people - is now under extra coronavirus restrictions.\n\nLancashire has joined the Liverpool City Region in the top tier - tier three. Pubs must close and the ban on mixing households extends to many outdoor settings.\n\nLondon, Essex, York, Elmbridge, Barrow-in-Furness, North East Derbyshire, Erewash and Chesterfield have moved into tier two, meaning they can no longer mix inside with those from other households, including in pubs and restaurants.\n\nAreas of England in the lowest tier must keep to the nationwide virus rules such as group sizes being capped at six people, and the hospitality industry closing at 22:00.\n\nPubs, restaurants and cafes across Northern Ireland have closed to sit-in customers for the next four weeks.\n\nIn Wales, a two-week \"fire break\" - a period with tighter restrictions to help break the trajectory of coronavirus cases rising - is expected within days.\n\nMost licensed premises in Scotland's central belt are closed under temporary restrictions, which are expected to be replaced by a similar multi-tiered system to the one in England by the end of the month.\n\nCeltic and Rangers football fans are being urged not to cross the border into England to watch the Old Firm game in pubs on Saturday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. There were scuffles between police and pub goers in Soho ahead of London moving to Tier 2\n\nGreater Manchester's local leaders are resisting a move from tier two to tier three's strict rules on hospitality - pressing instead for more shielding measures for the vulnerable, extra financial aid and stricter local powers to shut down venues breaking virus guidelines.\n\n\"We firmly believe that protecting health is about more than controlling the virus and requires proper support for people whose lives would be severely affected by a tier three lockdown,\" the deputy mayors and council leaders said in a joint statement.\n\n\"We can assure the prime minister that we are ready to meet at any time to try to agree a way forward.\"\n\nMr Johnson warned on Friday that the situation in Manchester was worsening and that he may intervene if the new measures cannot be agreed with the region's leaders.\n\nBut Kate Green, Labour MP for Stretford and Urmston said there had been no talks between the government and Greater Manchester's leaders on Friday because \"No 10 did not pick up the phone\" - with no further meetings expected until Monday.\n\nRochdale council leader Allen Brett told BBC Newsnight: \"I stood by all day waiting for a meeting which never took place.\"\n\nLocal leaders in north-east England said they were committed to \"ongoing, constructive dialogue\" with central government.\n\nIn a joint statement, council leaders in Northumberland, Newcastle, South and North Tyneside, Gateshead, Sunderland and County Durham urged residents to \"do their bit\" to avoid being put under tier three restrictions.\n\nMeanwhile, calls for a circuit-breaker - a short but strict national lockdown - have been supported by Labour as well as some Conservative MPs.\n\nKate Green told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"The Labour leaders in Greater Manchester support the call for a national circuit-break because what we're seeing in Manchester today - the rest of the country is coming along behind. The rate is rising everywhere.\"\n\nMs Green, who is also shadow education secretary, added that extra restrictions would not be effective without a package of support to \"enable people to close their businesses [and] to isolate at home if they need to\".\n\nConservative MP and former health secretary Jeremy Hunt called for an end to the \"public war of words\" between local and national leaders on Saturday, but added he had \"sympathy\" for the idea of a circuit-breaker.\n\nBritain's largest teachers' union, the National Education Union, has called for secondary schools in England to shut for two weeks at half term, rather than the traditional one week.\n\nMr Johnson has said that while he could not \"rule anything out\", he wants to avoid a national lockdown because of \"the damaging health, economic and social effects it would have\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"Time is of the essence\" for Manchester - Boris Johnson\n\nIt comes as the hospitality industry warned of widespread job losses if businesses do not receive further financial support from the government.\n\nSome 750,000 hospitality jobs could be lost by February 2021, according to an industry survey by three trade bodies in the UK.\n\n\"Without urgent sector-specific support for our industry, massive business failure is imminent,\" a spokesman for UK Hospitality, the British Institute of Innkeeping and the British Beer & Pub Association said.\n\nPublic Health England's medical director Yvonne Doyle told the Today programme that officials from local and national public health services were working \"extremely hard... to try and ensure that we do the right thing at the right time with the maximum amount of agreement\".\n\nShe also urged the public to abide by the rules and \"understand why that's important\".\n\nMeanwhile, county councils in England are calling for the government to give local authorities more control over the test-and-trace system.\n\nThe County Councils Network, which represents local authorities in mainly rural parts of the country, hopes to avoid the prospect of greater restrictions in these areas.\n\nThe PM said on Friday that the UK was developing the capacity to manufacture millions of tests that could deliver results in just 15 minutes.\n\nThe new tests are \"faster, simpler and cheaper\", Mr Johnson said, adding that work is being carried out to ensure they can be manufactured and distributed in the UK.\n\nThe government has set a target of 500,000 tests a day by the end of the month.\n\nOxford University's Sir John Bell, who has advised the government on its testing programme, told the Today programme it could be \"possible\" for the UK to carry out a million tests a day by Christmas - but added that logistics such as getting swabs to testing centres quickly were \"the limiting factor\".", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "People in Blackpool will be among those affected by the new rules\n\nLancashire has agreed to move into tier three - the top level of England Covid restrictions - from Saturday.\n\nThe \"very high\" alert level measures include pub closures and bans on household mixing indoors, in private gardens and most outdoor venues.\n\nHowever, gyms and leisure centres would not close, unlike in Liverpool City Region - the other area in tier three.\n\nSome local council leaders said they had been \"bullied\" into accepting the deal by Downing Street.\n\nHowever, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the government had \"worked intensively with local leaders\" to agree the move.\n\nHe added that an \"unrelenting rise in cases\" in the north-west England county had meant \"we must act now\".\n\nAround 1.5 million people, including those living in Blackburn, Blackpool, Burnley, Lancaster and Preston, will be affected by the new rules.\n\nThe Labour leaders of Preston, Pendle and South Ribble councils released statements saying they had been forced to accept a deal that would not be enough to stop the virus.\n\nPaul Foster, of South Ribble said: \"We have been bullied, harassed, threatened and blackmailed into moving into tier three.\"\n\nHe added: \"The discussions with government were a complete shambles and we were basically told if we didn't accept the restrictions we would have even more draconian measures imposed on us.\"\n\nHowever, Geoff Driver, the Conservative leader of Lancashire County Council, told the BBC: \"It's been a long drawn out process but I think we've got a good deal.\"\n\nHe said it involved a support package worth £42m, the area having initially been promised £12m, with £30m to help the businesses affected.\n\nMr Driver said Lancashire had also been promised more support for local test and trace and a specific ministerial team to deal with the outbreak in the county.\n\n\"What we've been able to do is to convince government that the measures we have in place to monitor such things as the gyms and the leisure centres are sufficient to ensure that they're not a source of infection,\" he added.\n\nThe new measures, which will be reviewed every two weeks, cover all parts of Lancashire:\n\nFurther restrictions may be agreed for particular regions in the top tier and in the Liverpool City Region, gyms and leisure centres have also been forced to close.\n\nMayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson tweeted: \"Liverpool City Region has demanded immediate clarification on why Lancashire gyms are allowed to stay open and Liverpool's close.\n\n\"Inconsistent mess - we now have tier three A and tier three B.\"\n\nSteve Rotheram, the mayor of the Liverpool City Region, said he was \"concerned that there appear to be differences between the two packages of measures, particularly the opening of gyms\".\n\n\"We have always been clear that we were given no choice about the specific package of measures that would be applied to us,\" he said.\n\nHowever, the prime minister's official spokesman said it was up to regional leaders to decide whether gyms should be closed.\n\n\"The purpose of the very high level is to allow for local, tailored interventions and they are determined on the basis of discussions with local authorities and based on local evidence,\" he said.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIt comes as talks between Greater Manchester leaders and central government over putting the region into tier three of England's three-tier system have stalled.\n\nGreater Manchester's mayor Andy Burnham wants more financial support for people affected before bringing in tougher rules.\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab accused Mr Burnham of \"effectively trying to hold the government over a barrel over money and politics\".\n\nOn Thursday, London, Essex, York and parts of Surrey, Derbyshire and Cumbria were moved up to tier two and will face tougher measures from Saturday.\n\nMore than half of England's population will now be living under high or very high-alert restrictions.\n\nMeanwhile, First Minister Mark Drakeford said Wales was facing a two-week national lockdown, calling it a \"fire break\".\n\nHe said a decision was likely to be made on Monday, with discussions continuing with health officials, scientific advisors and councils over the weekend.\n\nIt comes as a ban on travelling to Wales from coronavirus hotspots elsewhere in the UK comes into effect on Friday evening.\n\nIn Northern Ireland, pubs, restaurants and cafes will only be allowed to offer takeaway and delivery services for four weeks from 18:00 BST on Friday.\n\nTighter rules around face coverings have come into effect in Scotland, making them mandatory in workplace setting such as canteens.\n\nOn Thursday, a further 18,980 cases and 138 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were reported across the UK.", "\"Welsh law affects the Welsh people in a way it's never done before,\" according to the Welsh Government's top legislative lawyer\n\nWelsh laws can be drafted within hours as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Welsh Government's top legislative lawyer.\n\nFirst Legislative Counsel Dylan Hughes said it was a process which would usually take \"several weeks or months\".\n\nHe leads the Office of the Legislative Counsel, a team of specialist lawyers who draft Welsh laws.\n\nIn the past six months, Mr Hughes said 115 pieces of Welsh legislation had been made relating to restrictions.\n\nOn Friday, a law came into force which banned people from travelling to Wales from coronavirus hotspots elsewhere in the UK.\n\nAnd on Monday, the Welsh Government is expected to announce a national lockdown described as a \"short, sharp\" circuit-breaker to slow down the spread of the virus.\n\nDylan Hughes says legislation implementing a lockdown in Bangor had to be drafted late on a Friday evening\n\nMr Hughes's team do no not always get a lot of notice.\n\nFor example, when Bangor went into a local lockdown last Saturday, Mr Hughes said the legislation had to be drafted late on the Friday.\n\nBefore the pandemic, he said implementing such a ministerial decision could have taken \"several weeks or even months\".\n\n\"But these days it can take a couple of hours,\" Mr Hughes explained.\n\n\"Even in quite a common situation at the moment it takes around three days between taking the decision and drafting and publishing the legislation.\"\n\nHe argued such a shift in the legislative process represented a significant change to the way people were governed in Wales\n\n\"Welsh law affects the Welsh people in a way it's never done before.\n\n\"The fact that people's daily habits are regulated by it is very unusual and Welsh law has to be an important part now of people's lives.\"\n\nDespite a very busy period for him and his team, he said he would \"never compare\" their work with that of NHS staff.\n\n\"It's been a a difficult time for those of us who work for the Welsh Government,\" he concluded.\n\n\"At times, the hours have been long seven days a week and things move very quickly, which means there's a lot of pressure on everyone.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Coronavirus infections are continuing to rise rapidly, with an estimated 27,900 new cases a day in England, the Office for National Statistics says.\n\nThis figure is far higher than the number of confirmed cases announced by the government each day.\n\nThe R number has risen slightly to 1.3-1.5, with growth of the epidemic still widespread across the country.\n\nIt comes as the highest level of restrictions are introduced in more of the UK.\n\nSir Patrick Vallance, the government's chief scientific adviser, said 'R' was not growing as fast as it would be without the measures people were following.\n\nBut he said \"we are not where we need to be\", adding there was \"more work to do\".\n\nThe increase in people testing positive in recent weeks is being driven by high rates in older teenagers and young adults, the ONS infection survey says.\n\nIt found steep increases in infection rates in the north west, the north east, Yorkshire and the Humber.\n\nNew cases of the virus have gone up by 60% in a week, according to the ONS, based on its survey of people in random households with or without symptoms.\n\nIt estimates that one in 160 people in England had the virus in the week to 8 October - an increase on one in 240 the previous week.\n\nFor the same week, the ONS estimates one in 390 people had the virus in Wales and one in 250 in Northern Ireland - both an increase on the week before.\n\nThe ONS survey doesn't cover Scotland. As confirmed cases and hospital admissions rise there, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says Scotland is in a \"precarious\" position in its fight to contain Covid-19.\n\nAn app which tracks the Covid symptoms of four million users estimates there are more than 27,000 new cases per day in the UK.\n\nIts latest figures, for the two weeks to 11 October, found the fastest acceleration of cases in the north west, while Scotland, Wales, London and the Midlands were also increasing, but more slowly.\n\nProf Tim Spector from King's College London, who founded the Covid Symptom study app, said there was no longer the \"exponential increases\" of a couple of weeks ago - but the data still shows \"new cases continuing to rise\".\n\nOther estimates, from a large study by Imperial College London and a group of scientists advising government, suggest new cases could be even higher - up to 74,000 a day.\n\nA different measures of cases - the number of people with symptoms to test positive for coronavirus - rose by 15,650 on Friday, the lowest for four days.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid symptoms: What are they and how long should I self-isolate for?\n\nThe R number is the average number of people infected by each person testing positive for the virus. An R number above 1 means the epidemic is growing.\n\nAt the peak of the epidemic back in April, the R number is thought to have been around 3.\n\nFrom May up until mid-August after the national lockdown, it stayed below 1, but has been rising steadily since. All the restrictions in place around the UK are now an attempt to reduce transmission of the virus between people and get it back to below 1.\n\nHow have you been affected by the issues relating to coronavirus? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n• None How will the vulnerable be protected from Covid? And other questions", "A vehicle carrying the royal family arrives back at Huis ten Bosch palace in The Hague\n\nThe Dutch royal family is back in the country after a holiday that lasted just one day, following a coronavirus-related public backlash.\n\nKing Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima headed off to the Greek sun on Friday but flew back on Saturday evening.\n\nThey left as a new partial lockdown was introduced and although they did not break any rules they said they had been affected by intense criticism.\n\nPM Mark Rutte is under pressure to explain any advice he may have given.\n\nThe royals flew out on a government plane but were immediately criticised for going on holiday when the population was being advised to stay at home as much as possible to curb the spread of Covid-19.\n\nThey flew back on a scheduled KLM flight and the royal standard was flying over the palace in The Hague on Saturday evening.\n\nThe royal statement read: \"We do not want to leave any doubts about it: in order to get the Covid-19 virus under control, it is necessary that the guidelines are followed. The debate over our holiday does not contribute to that.\"\n\nThere appeared to be some confusion about who in government knew about the trip and whether advice was given.\n\nThe Dutch monarchy has no formal role in the day-to-day running of the Netherlands. But the Ministry of General Affairs, headed by the prime minister, is responsible for what the monarchy says and does.\n\nAs a result, several MPs are calling on Mr Rutte to explain why he did not advise the royals to cancel their holiday.\n\n\"If Rutte had said that this was a bad idea, you can assume that the king would have changed his plans,\" said Peter Rehwinkel of the PvdA party.\n\nThe GroenLinks leader also called the trip \"an error in judgment\" and abandoning the trip was the \"only correct decision\".\n\nThe daily tally of coronavirus infections continues to grow in the Netherlands. On Saturday, more than 8,000 new cases were recorded for the first time since the country's outbreak began.\n\nMark Rutte is facing questions over any advice he gave\n\nBars, restaurants and cannabis \"coffee shops\" have been ordered to close for four weeks.\n\nIt is not the first time the royal couple have been in the spotlight for their conduct. In August, they were pictured breaking social distancing rules with a restaurant owner during another trip to Greece.\n\nThe royal family's annual budget is under review amid growing pressure from opposition lawmakers.", "A statue on Place de la Republique, Paris, symbolically \"gagged\" by protesters after the Charlie Hebdo attacks\n\nWhen French President Francois Hollande gave a sombre televised address to the nation, hours after the shocking attack on Charlie Hebdo, he vowed to protect the message of freedom that the magazine's journalists represented.\n\nCharlie Hebdo's \"heroes\" had defended freedom of speech and this was an attack on the entire republic, he said.\n\nBut since the start of the week, 54 people have been detained and several jailed for a variety of remarks, shouted out in the street or posted on social media, and France's judiciary has been lampooned for what appear to be double standards.\n\nThe so-called comic Dieudonne M'bala M'bala will face trial for writing \"I feel like Charlie Coulibaly\", hours after 3.7 million French citizens had taken to the streets behind the \"je suis Charlie\" rallying cry.\n\nHe said the posting was meant to be humorous. But in the context of his past convictions for anti-Semitism, the authorities saw it as a voice of support for one of the gunmen, Amedy Coulibaly, who had murdered four Jewish men in a kosher supermarket.\n\nDieudonne could face up to seven years in jail for his Facebook comment\n\nPrime Minister Manuel Valls set it out plainly: freedom of speech should not be confused with anti-Semitism, racism and Holocaust denial.\n\nBut Dieudonne has plenty of young fans who watch his shows and follow his social media posts, however tasteless they may be, and many in France saw his arrest as an example of double standards.\n\nAfter all, Charlie Hebdo's entire ethos has been tasteless lampooning of the establishment.\n\n\"Extremely clumsy to detain Dieudonne when you've just made the whole world march for freedom of speech,\" read one tweet.\n\nBut the crackdown extends way beyond a notorious comic with a string of convictions.\n\nThe justice ministry has revealed that a number of fast-track custodial sentences have been handed down in cities across France in the past few days for expressions of support for the gunmen.\n\nIn Toulouse alone, three men in their early twenties have been jailed, two of them for 10 months, for shouting obscenities at police.\n\nOne threatened to attack police with a Kalashnikov while another said the Kouachi brothers were \"just the start\".\n\nIt was in Toulouse that Islamist gunman Mohamed Merah killed seven people in a series of attacks in 2012, including one on a Jewish school.\n\nIn Nanterre, east of Paris, a man was sent to prison for a year for posting a video on Facebook that mocked policeman Ahmed Merabet, who was shot at point-blank range by one of the Kouachis.\n\nThe French government tightened anti-terror laws in November, clamping down on online comments\n\nHuman rights groups have been less than impressed with what would seem to be a knee-jerk response by the authorities after what Mr Valls admitted had been clear failings by the security services.\n\nFrance's League of Human Rights (LDH) has condemned the fast-track sentences, which it argues are handed down in dreadful conditions and largely apply to drunks or fools.\n\nBut while the sentences may look startling and in some cases even draconian, they are following the letter of an anti-terror law that was passed by the National Assembly as recently as last November.\n\nDirectly provoking or publicly condoning terrorism in France now commands a five-year jail term and a fine of €75,000. And if it is done online, the penalty can be extended to seven years and €100,000 (£76,000; $116,000).\n\nSo for the many French who did not feel \"je suis Charlie\", where does France now see the boundary between freedom of speech and condoning terrorism?\n\nThe right to say, write or print what you want is rooted in the declaration of rights that came with the 1789 French Revolution, but even then abuse of that freedom was limited by law.\n\nThose exceptions were defined in 1881 (in French) as defamation, slander and incitement to hate. There is also explicit reference to condoning crimes of war, crimes against humanity or collaboration with the enemy.\n\nNot everyone has felt comfortable with the \"je suis Charlie\" message in France\n\nHowever, not since the revolution has blasphemy been against the law in France, and according to Mr Valls it never will.\n\nThe restrictions on freedom of speech go well beyond those in the US. A former editor of Charlie Hebdo had to defend himself against incitement in 2007 after reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.\n\nSince November those restrictions have gone further still. What was previously a law against condoning terrorism in the media has been extended to social media too.\n\nAnd it will not just be careless tweets or Facebook posts that are caught in the crosshairs. US-based social media companies will be required to police their sites too.", "The BBC has been covering the bloodshed over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh from both sides - in Azerbaijan and in Armenia. BBC International Correspondent Orla Guerin, producer Zeynep Erdim and cameraman Goktay Koraltan have spent a week looking at the conflict from the Azerbaijani side.", "Ali Hirsz says she was \"shocked\" when the donation appeared.\n\nA singer from Cambridge will be able to have vital surgery, thanks to the Manic Street Preachers.\n\nAli Hirsz needs the trapezius muscle that runs from her neck to her shoulder rebuilt, in an operation that isn't available on the NHS.\n\nAfter Covid-19 robbed her of income from live music, she had to ask fans to help raise the money for the operation.\n\nHer initial crowd-funding goal was £1,000 - but once she reached £500, the Manics stepped in and paid the rest.\n\nWhen the donation arrived, \"I was in tears,\" she tells the BBC.\n\n\"I love them anyway, they're such a great band, but £500 is so unbelievably generous. I thought, 'I can't believe they've done that.'\n\nRepresentatives for the Manic Street Preachers confirmed to the BBC that the donation had come from the band.\n\nHirsz, who sings with an indie band called Idealistics, has an incurable connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.\n\nThe condition means \"my skin is like tissue paper, it tears really easy,\" says the 20-year-old. A vascular compression on her small intestine also requires her to be fed via a tube.\n\nShe needs corrective surgery on her shoulder after a previous operation severed the nerve to her trapezius muscle, causing it to waste away. As a result, her shoulder blade dropped, affecting the blood supply to her arm.\n\nThe condition has already forced her to stop playing bass, as she has little feeling in her left hand.\n\nShe says she has \"never asked for money before\" and was \"sweating with nerves\" before posting her crowd-funding request last week.\n\nBut the campaign became necessary after coronavirus wiped out her band's concert diary; and Hirsz had to leave her day job as a horse trainer because she was shielding.\n\nIn the the meantime, she says, she received no financial support from the government's furlough or self-employment support schemes.\n\n\"It is very, very stressful, particularly in times where you don't have money lying around anyway,\" she says.\n\nAli (left) formed Idealistics as a teenager with her partner George Gillott and sister, Dom, on drums.\n\nThe response to her campaign has been \"overwhelming\", however. Hirsz hit the £1,000 goal within 24 hours, and has since increased her target to £5,000.\n\n\"Because the surgery's not been done before, we don't know exactly how much it's going to cost,\" she explains.\n\n\"I know it's a hard time for everyone,\" she adds, \"so all these donations mean everything.\"\n\nHirsz says her story is typical of disabled musicians, who have found themselves left high and dry by the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nSinger-songwriter Chloe Mogg, who has both fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, agrees the last six months have been \"really, really tough\".\n\n\"The NHS is doing an amazing job at the moment but, especially with chronic fatigue syndrome, it seems like all the invisible illnesses have been pushed to the side,\" she says.\n\n\"We're walking on a tightrope and we don't know if we're going to fall off at any stage.\"\n\nMogg says she has faced discrimination from venues and promoters because of her condition\n\nBut Mogg, like Hirsz, has approached the pandemic with imagination and resilience, channelling her energies into organising an online music and arts festival.\n\nCalled The 7 Arts Still Exist, it highlights the work created by artists, designers, sculptors, writers, musicians, dancers and photographers during the pandemic. Mogg is already lining up its third event with her childhood friend Amy Crouch.\n\nThe musician says the pandemic has taught her to \"live more in the present moment\", even when \"it felt like I've been put on pause\".\n\n\"It's been tough for me and it's been tough for a lot of musician friends who have anxiety problems,\" she says.\n\n\"It's something we're learning to adapt to - but I don't feel like we should be needing to adapt. It's really, really tough.\"\n\nFor visually-impaired sitar player Baluji Shrivastav, adaptability has been the watchword for the last six months.\n\nThe 70-year-old, who has played with Oasis, Stevie Wonder, Massive Attack, Kylie Minogue and Coldplay, cannot travel during the pandemic, making it \"very difficult to perform anywhere\".\n\n\"But we still meet sometimes,\" he says. \"We are allowed to meet six people in one place, and we have a garden so we rehearse there sometimes - but it will be difficult in the winter.\"\n\nBaluji Shrivastav played at the Paralympic closing ceremony with Coldplay\n\nShrivastav was appointed an OBE in 2016 for his services to music, after founding the Inner Vision Orchestra, whose players are all blind or partially-sighted.\n\nHe says live-streamed concerts are harder for blind musicians, because communication between players is reliant on physical proximity. Meeting up for socially-distanced concerts poses other problems.\n\n\"Even if we can reach the venue without help, we need help within the venue itself,\" he says. \"It's a constant difficulty for visually-impaired people.\n\n\"And, of course, financially, we are not earning at all.\"\n\nAccording to the UK Disability Arts Alliance #WeShallNotBeRemoved, the pandemic has had a particularly negative impact on disabled people working in the creative industries.\n\nIn an open letter to the secretary of state for culture, Oliver Dowden MP, the alliance warned that \"many disabled artists are facing long term shielding, a total loss of income, compromised independent living and the risk of invisibility in wider society\".\n\nSeparately, the Audience Access Alliance - which represents 12 disability charities in the UK - says it is \"deeply concerned\" that disabled people will miss out on access to gigs, theatre and sport when venues reopen because of extra Covid-related precautions and restrictions.\n\n\"If we want to 'build back better', it's vital that we build back for all,\" the organisation wrote in an open letter to the live music industry earlier this month.\n\nThe fear for both organisations is that the progress made since the UK's equality act came into force 10 years ago will be lost.\n\nHirsz and Mogg both have horror stories about the discrimination they faced before Covid.\n\nOne promoter refused to work with Idealistics because of Hirsz's condition. \"They said, 'You've got all these [feeding] tubes and nobody wants to see that. You're just going to deter a crowd,'\" she recalls.\n\nMogg was also berated by a promoter last year, after a flare-up of fibromyalgia forced her to pull out of a show.\n\n\"He was like, 'You're a massive disappointment,'\" she says. \"It was so embarrassing. I felt really ridiculed and ashamed of my illness, even though it's part of me.\"\n\nDespite the challenges like those, Hirsz, Mogg and Shrivastav are determined to stay active throughout the pandemic.\n\nThe Idealistics have just released their new single Memory River (inspired, naturally, by the Manic Street Preachers), while Hirsz is working as an advocate for disability charity Attitude is Everything.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by Idealistics This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nOn Monday, Shrivastav's Inner Vision Orchestra launched their first studio album, Indian Classical Interactions - one of three records the musician recorded in the space of a week before lockdown earlier this year. A documentary about his life will also be screened at the Bloomsbury festival this weekend.\n\nAnd Mogg is busy finalising the third edition of The 7 Arts Still Exist, which will feature country artists Katy Hurt and Roisin O'Hagan.\n\nIn the meantime, she says its crucial that everyone looks out for the people around them, and asks for help when they need it.\n\n\"Just be kind, be bold and, especially if you're suffering, talk to someone and tell them how you're feeling. Because they would rather hear it now than listen to your story at a funeral.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nStand-in skipper Raheem Sterling scored the only goal as Manchester City returned to winning ways in their Premier League clash with Arsenal.\n\nSterling, given the armband by manager Pep Guardiola with Fernandinho on the bench and Kevin de Bruyne injured, finished off the rebound after Phil Foden's 23rd-minute shot had been saved.\n\nArsenal had chances to level but City keeper Ederson denied them with three excellent first-half saves and both David Luiz and Pepe were off target with free-kicks in good positions after the break.\n\nThe result extended a miserable run of away results against their fellow 'top six' members for Arsenal. They have now failed to win in their last 29 such meetings, since a success at City in 2015.\n\nGuardiola is yet to drop a point against the Gunners in five encounters at Etihad Stadium since he succeeded Manuel Pellegrini as City manager in 2016.\n\nMore importantly for his side, after picking up a single point from their last two games, they were able to claim maximum points in this one.\n\nThe three points came even without De Bruyne and with the returning Sergio Aguero restricted to an hour's action on his first appearance since June after recovering from a knee injury.\n\nAguero escaped a caution after placing his arm on assistant referee Sian Massey-Ellis' neck as he argued against a decision.\n\nAs might have been expected from a meeting between Guardiola and the man he spent three-and-a-half years alongside in the City dug-out, Mikel Arteta, this was a tactical blitz.\n\nAt one point, Willian was operating as centre-forward and Sterling was sitting deep in midfield. After Aguero's exit, Bernado Silva briefly went into the false nine role as both men tried to keep the other guessing.\n\nArteta was able to bring on £45m new-boy Thomas Partey for his debut near the end but the truth is, he doesn't have the strength in depth afforded to Guardiola.\n\nBoth sides suffered disruption in the build-up, although the loss of Aymeric Laporte and Mendy to injury had less of an impact on City as the delay in finding out the Premier League were prepared to allow Kieran Tierney to play had on the Gunners.\n\nThe Arsenal defender had been told to isolate by the local health authority in Scotland due to a 'close contact' breach on international duty.\n\nIf that wasn't bad enough, the Gunners then lost defender Rob Holding to a hamstring injury in the warm-up.\n\nThis all contributed to a slow start they never really recovered from as City kept their first clean sheet of the season with a defensive performance far removed from the one which saw them concede five against Leicester in their previous home game.\n\nWhen it comes to debating who has been Guardiola's best signing as City boss, for all the excellence of Kyle Walker, Bernardo Silva and - briefly - Leroy Sane, Ederson must surely come out on top.\n\nA £35m purchase from Benfica after Joe Hart had been ditched and Claudio Bravo had flopped, Ederson won Premier League titles in his first two seasons and the Golden Glove last term, even though City's only silverware was the EFL Cup.\n\nWith new signing Ruben Dias still settling in, Laporte missing and Nathan Ake only making his fifth Blues appearance, Guardiola needs the Brazilian to be a steady presence.\n\nIt may have been that Bukayo Saka's shot from an angle was going over as the visitors tried to respond to Sterling's opener but Ederson took no chances.\n\nHowever, his two saves at the end of the opening period were superb. Saka was again the man denied by a feet-first stop when the teenager found himself clean through after playing a one-two with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.\n\nWithin minutes, Ederson was denying Aubameyang with an even better save. As the flag immediately went up to signal offside, there appeared nothing in it. The true value of Ederson's work was not apparent until TV replays showed the assistant referee's ruling was incorrect. Without the keeper's intervention, Arsenal would have been level.\n\nEderson made another save, from a Pepe header, at the start of the second period, although compared to what had gone before, that was fairly routine.\n\nWith Arsenal unable to find their range with a couple of free-kicks either, Ederson's efforts mean the Gunners have now lost seven league matches in a row against City, the first time they have done that against any opponent since Ipswich in the 1970s.\n\nBoss Guardiola said post-game that full-back Benjamin Mendy will be out injured for three to four weeks, while centre-back Aymeric Laporte could return within a week.\n\nGuardiola also defended striker Aguero, who put his arm on the shoulder of assistant referee Massey-Ellis after disputing a throw-in call which went against him early in the second half.\n\nAfter arguing his case with Massey-Ellis, Aguero put his arm on her shoulder as she began to walk away - actions which drew attention on social media and led his former team-mate Micah Richards to say on Sky Sports that Aguero should \"know better\".\n\nPlayers can be cautioned or sent off for touching match officials if done in an in an \"aggressive, confrontational or violent manner\".\n\nIn his post-match news conference, Guardiola said: \"Come on, guys. Sergio is the nicest person I ever met in my life. Look for problems in other situations, not in this one.\"\n\n'I am upset' - what they said:\n\nMan City manager Pep Guardiola: \"It was difficult but we have won 1-0 and Ederson again was incredibly active like he was against Leeds.\n\n\"We are still a little bit away from our best performance that we are wishing but for many reasons it is not possible. The victory helped us a lot, we defended really well deep and up front and it's a good three points against an impressive opponent.\"\n\nArsenal manager Mikel Arteta: \"I am upset as I feel we deserved more. I am extremely happy with the performance though, which we put in against a top team.\n\n\"I cannot demand more from players apart from we had three chances and had to score.\n\n\"Every goal the opponent scores there is something we can do better, we cannot change that. We know everything has to be perfect in both boxes to beat Manchester City.\"\n\nAsked if his side need to change their dismal record away at the top six, Arteta said: \"Absolutely. You want to go to every ground and win.\n\n\"To get into the position you have to do so many good things, throughout 96 minutes, and we did a lot of them but in the end, games are decided in the boxes.\n\n\"Against big teams, when you get there, you have to put them away.\"\n\nCity are next in action against FC Porto at the Etihad in the Champions League on Wednesday (kick-off 20:00 BST) before taking on West Ham at the London Stadium next Saturday, 24 October (12:30).\n\nArsenal also have a European engagement, in Austria against Rapid Vienna in the Europa League on Thursday (17:55 BST). The Gunners entertain Leicester in the league next Sunday (19:15).\n• None Manchester City are unbeaten in their last 10 Premier League encounters with Arsenal (W8 D2), since a 2-1 loss in December 2015.\n• None Arsenal are winless in their last 29 Premier League away games against \"big six\" opponents (D10 L19) since a 2-0 win v Manchester City in January 2015.\n• None Manchester City have conceded just one goal in their last six Premier League games against Arsenal, keeping a shut out v four different managers in this run (Arsene Wenger, Unai Emery, Fredrik Ljungberg and Mikel Arteta x2).\n• None Arsenal have lost each of their last seven league games against Manchester City, their longest such run against an opponent since losing seven in a row v Ipswich between 1974-1977.\n• None Pep Guardiola has won 500 games in all competitions as a manager (including Barcelona B), winning 172 as Manchester City boss.\n• None Manchester City goalkeeper Ederson has kept 53 clean sheets in the Premier League since his debut in August 2017; 15 more than any other goalkeeper in this time.\n• None Raheem Sterling has had a hand in each of Manchester City's last five goals in all competitions (4 goals, 1 assist).\n• None Man City's Sterling has been directly involved in six goals in his last five Premier League appearances against Arsenal (4 goals, 2 assists).\n• None Thomas Partey (Arsenal) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Riyad Mahrez (Manchester City) wins a free kick on the right wing.\n• None Offside, Arsenal. Bukayo Saka tries a through ball, but Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang is caught offside.\n• None Attempt missed. Nicolas Pépé (Arsenal) left footed shot from outside the box is close, but misses to the left from a direct free kick.\n• None Attempt blocked. Phil Foden (Manchester City) left footed shot from the right side of the box is blocked. Assisted by João Cancelo. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Behind the scenes of his presidency\n• None All episodes are streaming now", "Analysis: How long can stand-off last?\n\nAt least 48 hours have passed since there was any discussion between the government and leaders in Greater Manchester. It's not complete radio silence - I understand conversations have continued between officials in Whitehall and the region's local authorities. But there won't be a breakthrough until politicians on one side pick up the phone. Both camps have indicated they're ready to talk, but neither seems willing to make the first move. The prime minister did not put a time limit on his pledge to impose restrictions if no agreement can be reached, but he will only be able to wait so long. One thing everyone involved agrees on is that something needs to be done as coronavirus cases continue to rise . Given the political fault lines this row has exposed - Conservative vs Labour, north vs south, local vs national - deciding exactly what is proving far more difficult.", "Football fans have been urged to abide by local lockdown restrictions and watch the Old Firm match at home.\n\nThe managers of Celtic and Rangers have joined First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in appealing to their supporters to help curb the spread of the virus.\n\nFans who flout rules on households mixing are \"putting others at risk\", one public health chief warned.\n\nAnd those hoping to watch the game in Blackpool pubs were warned there would be a high police presence in the town.\n\nCeltic are due to play Rangers at Celtic Park at 12:30.\n\nThe Scottish Premiership clash will take place in an empty stadium due to coronavirus restrictions which ban crowds from watching live sport.\n\nIt will be televised but pubs in the central belt are currently closed due to the pandemic.\n\nDuring the Scottish government daily coronavirus briefing on Friday, Ms Sturgeon told Old Firm fans:\n\nShe added: \"Nobody likes the fact that these restrictions have to be in place but they are vital to protecting all of us and keeping us safe.\n\n\"So please comply with restrictions - by doing that you will be playing your part in helping us get the virus under control and you'll be helping hasten the day when we can all watch and enjoy the things that we love doing, whether that's football or the many things that we find ourselves not able to do normally.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid in Scotland: Old Firm fans urged to stay home\n\nDuring the same briefing, she announced there had been nine more deaths of coronavirus patients recorded in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total number of fatalities under this measure to 2,594.\n\nA total of 1,196 people tested positive for coronavirus over the same time period, while the number of people being admitted to hospital with the virus is increasing.\n\nTemporary restrictions to bring the outbreak back under control in the central belt have led to the closure of most licensed premises in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire, Lothian, Forth Valley and Ayrshire and Arran NHS boards.\n\nThose living in these areas have been warned not to travel to other parts of Scotland or to areas in England where such restrictions are not in force.\n\nEarlier this week the first minister said football fans should avoid going to Blackpool, after about 180 people with coronavirus told contact tracers that they had recently been to holiday resort.\n\nPolice in Lancashire have echoed her plea.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nSpeaking ahead of the county entering the \"very high\" Tier 3 level of restrictions on Saturday, Supt Damian Kitchen said football fans should stay at home.\n\nHe added: \"We will have a very visible policing presence throughout the weekend and we'll be working with our partners and council wardens to ensure that licensed premises are sticking to the rules.\n\n\"The rules are there to keep everyone, both residents and visitors, safe and we will enforce them where we need to.\"\n\nA similar appeal has been made by police in Cumbria amid fears some fans would cross the border to watch the game in pubs in Carlisle.\n\nSteven Gerrard and Neil Lennon have asked fans to stay at home\n\nMeanwhile both teams' managers have encouraged fans to watch the match from home.\n\nCeltic's Neil Lennon said: \"Please enjoy the game at home. Stay with your family and don't put yourself or anyone else in jeopardy with every that's going on.\n\n\"Hopefully we can put in a performance that you can be proud of and enjoy the game, but please, don't travel.\"\n\nSteven Gerrard said he could understand the frustration of those who wanted to see their team play, but said fans' safety was priority.\n\nHe urged them to stay at home to keep themselves and their families safe.\n\nPublic health officials from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde have also asked fans to abide by the restrictions.\n\nDr Linda De Caestecker said fans who broke the guidelines were \"putting others at risk\".\n\nShe said: \"The current restrictions are in place to minimise the spread of the virus.\n\n\"If you do not follow them, this will increase the rate of transmission of Covid-19 in the community and in turn, the number of people who being hospitalised by the virus.\n\n\"Sadly, this will also mean more people will die.\"", "For many dog owners, the coronavirus pandemic has meant more time at home with their canine companions.\n\nHowever, some experts are claiming the demand for dogs during lockdown has led to a significant increase in pets being stolen, with one - Wayne May from the organisation Dog Lost - saying: \"I've been doing this for 30 years now and it's the worst ever year I've known\".\n\n\"Unfortunately, due to lockdown, people are at home more and they're looking for companion animals to take up their time.\n\n\"Sadly the criminals capitalised on this. It's pushed the price of dogs and puppies up in general, which has inadvertently sparked a high rise in dog thefts.\"\n\nHis view is shared by Beverley Cuddy, editor of Dogs Today magazine, who said: \"Unfortunately in lockdown everyone wanted a dog and the prices went up and up.\n\n\"The criminals looked at those figures... and put two and two together.\"\n\nIn July, Jessica Palmer had five puppies stolen from her back garden in Melton Mowbray.\n\nThe sprocker spaniels were from a litter of seven that Ms Palmer's springer spaniel had given birth to eight weeks earlier.\n\nShe said she was \"devastated\" and her three-year-old daughter was \"absolutely heartbroken\".\n\nMs Palmer had listed the puppies for sale at £1,000 each.\n\n\"I know they were going to go to new homes eventually anyway, but not like this. It's really traumatic for everyone,\" she said.\n\nIn May, Jon Gaunt had three female springer spaniels stolen from his garden in Brightling, East Sussex.\n\nHe said thieves broke the padlock on his kennels to take them.\n\n\"It wasn't until the next morning, when I went to exercise the dogs, clean them out and give them their breakfast, I saw the chain hanging down and I just had that horrible feeling,\" he said.\n\nMr Gaunt, 46, said he felt \"angry, gutted, upset and sick\".\n\n\"You have such a rollercoaster of emotions - you feel like somebody has just taken your legs out from underneath you,\" he said.\n\nOne of his spaniels was found several weeks later in Kent.\n\nMr Gaunt also suspects a dog recovered during a police raid could be one of his and he's working with authorities to get her back.\n\nHe believes \"without a shadow of a doubt\" there is a connection with dog thefts and the pandemic lockdown.\n\n\"Everybody was at home, they were bored, and thought, 'Lets get a puppy'.\n\n\"The demand for puppies was so high, it drove prices through the roof and that's why we're in this situation,\" he said.\n\nMore than 30 puppies, thought to have been stolen, were found in a van by police in Cheltenham in August\n\nThe Kennel Club reported a 168% increase in people searching for puppies for sale on its website from the beginning of lockdown until the end of May, compared to the same period in 2019.\n\nMr May said most of the dogs being stolen are female and are used for breeding, so criminal gangs can maximise their profits.\n\n\"We've recovered several this year that have been pregnant,\" he said.\n\nThis theory was also shared by Suffolk Police in July, when 17 dogs were stolen from a kennels in Barton Mills.\n\nMr May said the theft of a dog can have a \"massive\" impact on owners, and some were now suffering from depression, anxiety and PTSD.\n\n\"I [was in touch with] one lady recently that just never went to bed. She slept on the sofa with the back door open all summer, hoping her dog would walk home,\" he said.\n\nCriminals are thought to be targeting puppy litters\n\nDr Daniel Allen, an animal expert from Keele University, is campaigning for stricter sentencing guidelines for pet theft, via a petition which is due to be debated by MPs at Westminster Hall on Monday.\n\nHe said the crime had changed dramatically over the decades.\n\n\"Years ago, it was people nicking dogs from outside shops,\" he said. \"Now it's people targeting breeders, taking the mum and the pups in one fell swoop.\"\n\nHe said breeders were generally more rural-based, hence the rise recorded in police force areas such as Northumbria and Devon and Cornwall.\n\n\"As well as breeding mums, working dogs, such as sheep dogs and shooting dogs also attract a high value - they are a ready-made, sellable product,\" he said.\n\n\"During lockdown, people wanted that canine companionship but there is an increasing risk of our pets being taken away from us.\"\n\nThe results of a BBC freedom of information request showed that five policing areas saw a double-digit increase in the number of dog thefts reported between January and July 2020, compared with the previous year.\n\nOverall, about half of the 26 forces that responded to the BBC's data request saw an increase over the last seven months, while the rest saw fewer reports.\n\nFive forces had more reports between January and July 2020 than the whole of the previous year.\n\nThere was a significant increase across Northumbria, Devon and Cornwall and Leicestershire - compared to the same period in the previous year.\n\nNorthumbria Police saw the largest increase of reported dog thefts, rising from 27 to 67 reports.\n\nIn Leicestershire, there were 41 reports compared to 22, which was also more than the total for the whole of 2016, 2017 and 2018.\n\nThe RSPCA said the figures were \"really concerning\".\n\nA spokesperson said: \"We'd urge all dog owners to take extra precautions to protect their pets from thieves by neutering them, ensuring they are microchipped and ensuring they wear a collar with contact details.\"\n\nPolice forces in the affected areas also urged owners to take extra precautions.\n\n\"Dog owners are also advised not to leave their pets alone outside where possible and to ensure gardens are secure,\" a Leicestershire Police spokesperson said.\n\nA Northumbria Police spokesperson said the chances of pet owners being targeted remains \"incredibly rare\".\n\nA Devon and Cornwall Police spokesperson said: \"We take all matters of animal theft seriously and we appreciate the distress and heartache that dog thefts cause.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A city in eastern China has started offering a coronavirus vaccine to the general public - although it has not yet completed clinical trials.\n\nHundreds of people have been queuing outside a hospital in Yiwu, where nurses are administering the injections for a fee of around $60 (£45).\n\nThe BBC's Robin Brant is there.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: You may find there are restrictions\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson appeared confused over the rules for single parents living apart from their children during a Covid briefing.\n\nA questioner called Christopher, from Margate, Kent, asked what would happen where one parent lives in a high alert level area and the other medium.\n\nHe was told to check the government's website for guidance but that there are restrictions on such movements.\n\nBut government advice says there are exceptions for childcare arrangements.\n\nChristopher had asked if he could see his son, who lives in Essex, if either area moves from the medium level of restrictions to the higher tier two - as Essex will on Saturday.\n\nSpeaking at Downing Street, Mr Johnson said: \"Christopher, I think the guidance alas is that - you should go on the website obviously and check - but when cases go to a higher tier from the basic medium then there are restrictions on household contact.\n\n\"So depending on how you define your household you may find there are restrictions, but you really need to go onto the website to find out what's going on in Kent and what's going on in Essex in order to be absolutely sure.\"\n\nThe government advice for both areas in the \"high\" and \"very high\" Covid alert level specifies that there are exceptions to travel restrictions where children do not live in the same household as both their parents or guardians.\n\nThe regulations state that there is an exception for \"the purposes of arrangements for access to, and contact between, parents and children where the children do not live in the same household as their parents or one of their parents\".\n\nIt comes after an earlier incident, last month, when the prime minister apologised after making a mistake when talking to media about the rule of six in the north-east of England.", "Pensioners queuing to vote in Indiana earlier this month\n\nState election officials across the US are reporting record numbers of voters casting their ballots ahead of election day on 3 November.\n\nMore than 29 million had voted early by Monday, either in person or by mail, according to the US Election Project.\n\nAt the same point in the 2016 race, about 6m votes had been cast.\n\nExperts say the surge in early voting correlates to the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused many people to seek alternatives to election day voting.\n\nOn Tuesday, Texas, a state that has relatively tight restrictions on who can qualify for postal voting, set a record for most ballots cast on the first day of early voting.\n\nOn 12 October, the Columbus Day federal holiday, officials in Georgia reported 126,876 votes cast - also a state record.\n\nIn Ohio, a crucial swing state, more than 2.3 million postal ballots have been requested, double the figure in 2016.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Early voters have formed long queues in several states across the US\n\nReports indicate that registered Democrats have so far outvoted registered Republicans - casting more than double the number of ballots. And of these early voting Democrats, women and black Americans are voting in particularly high numbers. Some are motivated by dislike for Donald Trump, while others have been energised by racial justice protests throughout the summer following the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.\n\nBut this early advantage does not mean that Democrats can already claim victory. Republicans, who claim postal voting is vulnerable to fraud, say Democrats may win the early vote, but that Republicans will show up in large numbers on election day.\n\nAccording to a 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, the rate of voting fraud overall in the US is between 0.00004% and 0.0009%.\n\nRepublicans have also made gains in voter registration efforts in the key states of Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, though Democrats still lead overall.\n\nIn Florida, that registration margin has narrowed to a little over 134,000 voters - less than 1%. Mr Trump won Florida by just under 113,000 votes in 2016.\n\nThese states are known as battlegrounds in the election as voters are more likely to switch parties in these regions than elsewhere in the country. As a result, states like Florida are where the campaigns tend to focus their efforts.\n\nThe enormous numbers of voters have led to long lines, with some people waiting for up to 11 hours for an opportunity to vote.\n\nYounger people, who historically have been difficult to get to the polls, appear to be turning out in larger numbers this year. The youth vote may be the highest its been since 2008 for the election of Barack Obama - the country's first black president.\n\nA recent survey by Axios found that four in 10 university students said they planned to protest if Mr Trump wins. Six in 10 said they would shame friends who could vote but choose not to.\n\nBy contrast, only 3% of surveyed students said they would protest if Joe Biden was elected.\n\nWhat questions do you have about the US election?\n\nIn just three weeks, Americans head to the polls to cast their vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden. What questions do you have for American voters? Submit your questions here and we'll put them to our voter panel.\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.", "The rufous bush chat is rarely seen in northern Europe\n\nBirdwatchers have descended on a salt marsh to see a bird not seen in Britain for 40 years.\n\nThe rufous bush chat was spotted at Stiffkey, north Norfolk, prompting up to 100 birdwatchers to go to see it.\n\nNative to southern Spain, Africa and the Balkans the bird, also known as the rufous warbler and rufous bush robin, is rarely seen in northern Europe.\n\nDick Filby, of Rare Bird Alert, said it \"would have been heading for a tropical climate and went the wrong way.\"\n\nHe said the last time the bird was spotted in Britain was at Prawle Point in Devon in 1980.\n\nThe bird was first spotted on the Stiffkey marshes on Saturday morning\n\n\"In 1998, one was seen in Jersey (part of the British Isles but not classed as part of Britain).\"\n\nMr Filby said he hoped birdwatchers would be wearing masks and keeping socially-distanced as they enjoyed the view.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by BBC Look East This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by BBC Look East\n\nNorfolk Police called on birdwatchers visiting the site in the hope of seeing the rare visitor to keep to Covid regulations.\n\nBirdwatchers in the British Isles last caught a glimpse of the bird when it was seen in Jersey in 1998\n\nCh Supt Chris Balmer said: \"People may arrive on their own but some have started to gather in groups larger than six to be able to see the bird. This is a breach of the law.\n\n\"In the first instance officers will engage, explain and encourage people to leave but enforcement is an option and we will be issuing fixed penalty notices should people not comply.\"\n\nScores of birdwatchers descended on Stiffkey on the Norfolk coast\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Andy is suing a betting company after it refused to pay him his £1.7 million winnings.\n\nA man who was refused a payout of £1.7m after his online betting company account was credited with the money has taken his case to the High Court.\n\nAndy Green, 53, from Lincolnshire, said he hit the jackpot in January 2018 playing a blackjack game from bookmaker Betfred on his phone.\n\nBetfred said there was a software error and the company's terms and conditions meant it could withhold the payment.\n\nBut lawyers for Mr Green say they have been given no proof of the problem.\n\nAfter a long night playing the Betfred Frankie Dettori Magic Seven Blackjack in January 2018, Mr Green's online account was credited with £1,722,923.54 which he tried to withdraw - but the request was declined.\n\nAfter placing some more bets with his winnings he took a screenshot to prove what had happened.\n\nHowever, a Betfred director called him to say there had been a \"software error\" and it was rejecting the claim.\n\nAs a token of \"goodwill\" the company was willing to pay £30,000, but Mr Green would have to agree not to talk about it ever again.\n\nMr Green refused and the company increased its offer to £60,000, which he also rejected.\n\nMore than two years later he has gone to the High Court to sue Betfred and its parent company, Gibraltar-based Petfre for £2m, including the interest he would have earned from the win.\n\nMr Green said \"the last two and a half years have felt like hell on earth\".\n\n\"You wouldn't treat an animal like I've been treated by Betfred,\" he said.\n\n\"Hopefully the judge will accept the arguments put forward by my legal team and this nightmare will be over. My champagne remains on ice!\"\n\nMr Green is in poor health and has suffered four heart attacks - one of them since the money was credited to his online account in 2018.\n\nThe legal argument centres on 49 pages of terms and conditions, and game rules which Mr Green ticked when signing up for Betfred.\n\nThey include a clause that all \"pays and plays\" would be void in the event of a \"malfunction\", and Betfred argues that by ticking the box, Mr Green was agreeing.\n\nHis solicitor Peter Coyle said \"whilst Betfred's betting terms and conditions are incredibly complicated and span across numerous different documents, we are confident that, on their proper construction, the terms simply don't allow for Betfred to withhold payment\".\n\nMr Coyle pointed out that if \"all pays and plays\" were void, then Betfred would have refunded other customers, but the company had produced no evidence that had happened. It only wanted to withhold Mr Green's enormous win, he said.\n\nBetfred licences the software for its online games from another company Playtech, which has refused to confirm the nature of the software glitch.\n\nBy law, Playtech has to notify the Gambling Commission of Great Britain of the fault, known as a \"key event\". Mr Coyle says the description of what happened is only four lines long and does not describe the nature of the problem.\n\nDespite repeated requests, Mr Green's lawyers say Betfred has been unable to prove there was a software problem at all. Neither has the company attempted to drag its supplier Playtech into the case.\n\nIf the court rules in Mr Green's favour, other gamblers denied their winnings due to technical problems could be able to make similar claims.\n\nMr Green's lawyers have asked for a summary judgment, which would mean the facts are not at issue and the judge could decide the case without a trial.\n\nThe judge has reserved judgement, which could mean one of three outcomes at a later date: deciding the case without a trial in Mr Green's favour, deciding in Betfred's favour, or ordering a trial.\n\nA Betfred spokesman said \"the case is currently progressing at court and it is therefore inappropriate for us to comment further\".", "The eldest brother of Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson has died in hospital with coronavirus.\n\nThe politician confirmed the news in a Tweet and thanked staff at Liverpool Hospital's intensive care unit.\n\nHe said his brother had died at 22:45 BST on Friday.\n\nLiverpool has since Wednesday been in tier three of the new lockdown system, which has the strictest rules, after a rise in coronavirus cases in the area.\n\nHe urged people to \"follow the rules\", which include the closure of pubs not serving meals, along with gyms, leisure centres, betting shops and casinos.\n\nIn the social media post, Mr Anderson wrote: \"We want to thank the dedicated [hospital] staff risking their lives for us.\n\n\"Thank you all for your messages of love and support. Let's stick together and support each other and win this battle.\"\n\nLiverpool has the highest number of cases in England, with 3,204 cases recorded on Tuesday, slightly more than the 3,191 cases registered a week before.\n\nEarlier this week, Mr Anderson criticised crowds that gathered in the city just before the new rules came into effect, saying the images \"shame our city\" and \"our health service is creaking\".", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nEverton came from behind twice to maintain their unbeaten start to the Premier League in a Merseyside derby thriller as Liverpool were denied a stoppage-time winner by the video assistant referee.\n\nSadio Mane put the visitors ahead in the third minute but they were furious soon afterwards when a wild challenge by Everton keeper Jordan Pickford on Virgil van Dijk, committed after an offside decision, saw the defender having to go off injured with VAR failing to review the tackle.\n\nEverton, who had won their previous seven games in all competitions, equalised swiftly at Goodison Park when Michael Keane headed in a corner from the outstanding James Rodriguez.\n\nLiverpool, with Thiago Alcantara at the heart of everything, were back in front with 18 minutes left when Mohamed Salah volleyed in Yerry Mina's poor clearance to set up a frantic finale, with only Pickford's magnificent save from Joel Matip's header keeping Everton in the hunt.\n\nDominic Calvert-Lewin's towering header restored parity with nine minutes left but Everton were then reduced to 10 men when Richarlison was sent off for a wild challenge on Thiago.\n\nLiverpool thought they had won it in stoppage time when Pickford could not keep out Jordan Henderson's shot - but in a finish to match the chaotic nature of the game, Mane was adjudged to be offside after a lengthy wait for the VAR decision.\n• None 'Everton lucky but show grit in derby of chaos and controversy'\n• None Reaction to Everton v Liverpool, plus the rest of Saturday's Premier League action\n\nEverton and England keeper Pickford has been unable to stay out of the headlines this season as the spotlight has fallen on his faltering form - and he was the central figure in this eventful Merseyside derby.\n\nWhen Everton were 1-0 down, he somehow escaped a red card for a challenge on Van Dijk that was dangerous enough to force Liverpool's defender off, with the Dutchman looking in much discomfort as he made his way around the pitch.\n\nHe was then in more traditional action as he made a fine save from Trent-Alexander Arnold's free-kick and then - with Liverpool no doubt feeling he should not even be on the pitch - he made a world-class save diving away to his right to keep out Matip's header when it looked a certain goal with the score 2-1 in favour of Jurgen Klopp's side.\n\nEven then his afternoon was not over as he scrambled back in vain after failing to hold Henderson's shot - the relief clear when VAR ruled out the goal.\n\nEverton may still not have beaten their great rivals in a decade but Carlo Ancelotti's side will take great comfort from the manner in which they fought back twice and while Liverpool were the more consistent threat, there is a serious menace about this team that was not present last season.\n\nLiverpool's Thiago and Everton's Rodriguez sailed serenely above the chaos in this match, showing the time and class that simply did not seem to be available to others.\n\nIn Thiago, Liverpool have added a midfield controller to the side that won the Premier League at a canter last season.\n\nHe was composed and some of his picked passes were of the highest standard, looking an absolute snip at £20m from Bayern Munich.\n\nSalah's unforgiving finishing was on show once again, scoring his 100th goal for the club, and Liverpool will feel disappointed they could not close out the victory after leading so late on.\n\nThey mounted an expected recovery from that 7-2 thrashing at Aston Villa but they have now dropped five points in their past two away games and - even allowing for Van Dijk's early injury - do not look as impregnable as they did last season.\n\nKlopp will hope Van Dijk's injury is not serious as, perhaps helped by the manner in which Leeds United troubled Liverpool on the opening weekend and that humiliation at Villa, there is a belief in opponents that they can be got at.\n\n'We were dominant against a flying side'\n\nLiverpool manager Jurgen Klopp told Match of the Day: \"Performance-wise very, very happy. Best away game we've played here since I started managing. We gave away two goals on set-pieces after changing formation.\n\n\"We were dominant against a flying side. Different things happened today. This type of offside I didn't see in the Virgil and Pickford incident.\n\nOn the Henderson ruled-out goal: \"I don't know where the line is where you can do offside.\n\n\"Yes, we should have won this game. The boys played a super game. against a side with quality and confidence. Dominating from the first second is absolutely exceptional.\"\n\nEverton goalscorer Dominic Calvert-Lewin: \"As you'd expect in derbies, got tackles flying in 50-50, so there's always a chance the ref might bring out a yellow or red.\n\n\"Disappointed we didn't kick on at 1-1. We knew we would have spells where we wouldn't have the ball. I managed to put one away but I genuinely thought it would be coming [the win], but it wasn't to be.\n\n\"I'm disappointed we didn't win the game. In that respect it was frustrating. In terms of the bigger picture, it's a point and we'll take it.\"\n• None Liverpool are unbeaten in their past 23 meetings against Everton in all competitions, their longest run against a single opponent in history.\n• None Everton haven't led in any of their past 14 Premier League matches against Liverpool - only Crystal Palace have had a longer run against an opponent without going ahead in the competition (17 v Manchester United between 1992-2017).\n• None Everton v Liverpool has seen more red cards than any other fixture in Premier League history (22), with Everton's 15 in this fixture also a record for one side against another.\n• None Liverpool have conceded 13 goals in their five Premier League games this season - they conceded as many after 15 games last term. Thirteen goals is the most Liverpool have shipped after five league games since 1953-54 (also 13).\n• None Mohamed Salah's goal was his 100th for Liverpool in all competitions, in his 159th game for the club - only Roger Hunt (144) and Jack Parkinson (153) have reached the milestone in fewer appearances for the Reds.\n• None Dominic Calvert-Lewin is the first player to score in each of Everton's first five league games in a season since Tommy Lawton in 1938-39.\n• None Calvert-Lewin is just the fourth player to score in each of his side's first five Premier League games in a season, after Arsenal's Jose Antonio Reyes (2004-05), Manchester United's Wayne Rooney (2011-12) and Manchester City's Sergio Aguero (2019-20).\n• None Sadio Mane's goal after two minutes and 15 seconds was Liverpool's fastest goal in a Premier League Merseyside derby, while it was the second quickest goal overall in this fixture in the competition (Olivier Dacourt for Everton, one minute in April 1999).\n\nEverton visit Southampton in the Premier League on Sunday, 25 October (14:00 GMT), while Liverpool face Ajax in Amsterdam in the Champions League on Wednesday (20:00 BST) before hosting Sheffield United in the Premier League on Saturday (20:00 BST).\n• None Alex Iwobi (Everton) wins a free kick on the right wing.\n• None GOAL OVERTURNED BY VAR: Jordan Henderson (Liverpool) scores but the goal is ruled out after a VAR review.\n• None Offside, Liverpool. Thiago tries a through ball, but Sadio Mané is caught offside.\n• None Attempt missed. Trent Alexander-Arnold (Liverpool) right footed shot from outside the box is close, but misses the top left corner from a direct free kick.\n• None Allan (Everton) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Fabinho (Liverpool) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt missed. Sadio Mané (Liverpool) header from very close range misses to the left. Assisted by Diogo Jota.\n• None Attempt blocked. Diogo Jota (Liverpool) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked.\n• None Attempt saved. Sadio Mané (Liverpool) right footed shot from the centre of the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Mohamed Salah with a through ball.\n• None Goal! Everton 2, Liverpool 2. Dominic Calvert-Lewin (Everton) header from the centre of the box to the bottom left corner. Assisted by Lucas Digne with a cross. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Behind the scenes of his presidency\n• None All episodes are streaming now", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"Time is of the essence\" for Manchester - Boris Johnson\n\nBoris Johnson says the spread of coronavirus in Greater Manchester is \"grave\" and he may \"need to intervene\" if new measures are not agreed.\n\nThe prime minister urged mayor Andy Burnham to \"engage constructively\" with the government over the region entering \"very high\" tier three measures.\n\nHe said the situation was worsening every day and \"time is of the essence\".\n\nMr Burnham, who wants more financial aid for workers affected, said regional leaders will meet No 10 at \"any time\".\n\nMeasures under tier three include pub closures and a ban on household mixing indoors, in private gardens and in most outdoor venues. Liverpool City Region was the first of England's regions to enter the very high alert level.\n\nLancashire has agreed to move into tier three from Saturday with a financial support package worth £42m. Around 1.5 million people, including those living in Blackburn, Blackpool, Burnley, Lancaster and Preston, will be affected by the new rules.\n\nSpeaking at a Downing Street briefing on Friday, Mr Johnson said he understood the \"reluctance\" of local leaders to put the region under tougher restrictions and said it would be \"far from a pain-free course of action\".\n\nHe warned: \"Of course, if agreement cannot be reached I will need to intervene in order to protect Manchester's hospitals and save the lives of Manchester's residents.\n\n\"But our efforts would be so much more effective if we work together.\"\n\nRevealing that a deal had not been reached between No 10 and the region's leaders, Mr Johnson said it was time for action to be taken.\n\n\"Each day that passes before action is taken means more people will go to hospital, more people will end up in intensive care and tragically more people will die,\" he said.\n\nIn a joint statement with Greater Manchester's deputy mayors and council leaders, Mr Burnham said they had sought a further meeting with Downing Street officials - and this did not happen.\n\n\"We can assure the prime minister that we are ready to meet at any time to try to agree a way forward,\" they said.\n\nThey said they had done \"everything within our power to protect the health of our residents\" but are not convinced that closing pubs and bars is the only way to protect hospitals.\n\nInstead, they want other measures like shielding to be considered, and tougher penalties on venues that do not comply to Covid regulations, including instant closure powers.\n\n\"We firmly believe that protecting health is about more than controlling the virus and requires proper support for people whose lives would be severely affected by a tier three lockdown,\" they said, adding that the current proposals do not \"provide adequate support\".\n\nAndy Burnham says northern England has been treated with contempt\n\nThe latest government figures showed there were 15,650 new cases reported on Friday, bringing the total to 689,257.\n\nThere were a further 136 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test, bringing the total to 43,429.\n\nMr Johnson said he hoped the most stringent \"very high\" restrictions could be lifted as quickly as possible for the affected regions.\n\nHe said: \"The amount by which we need to reduce the R is not as big as it was right back in the beginning of the spread of this disease.\n\n\"If we all work together on the measures we have outlined we can definitely do it.\"\n\nThe reproduction (R) number has risen slightly to 1.3-1.5, with growth of the epidemic still widespread across the country.\n\nThe PM said he wanted to avoid another national lockdown \"if at all possible\" amid calls for a circuit-breaker - a short, limited lockdown - across the country.\n\nHe said he disagreed with those who argued in favour of a national lockdown \"instead of targeted local action\", insisting: \"Closing businesses in Cornwall where transmission is low will not cut transmission in Manchester\".\n\nMr Johnson said that while he could not \"rule anything out\", he wanted to avoid a national lockdown because of \"the damaging health, economic and social effects it would have\".\n\nThe UK government's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said during the briefing that the nation is in a \"different situation\" from when the Sage group of scientists recommended a two-to-three week national \"circuit break\" to stop the spread of coronavirus.\n\nHe said the situation had changed, adding: \"We recommended in September taking a circuit break. The idea there was that actually a two-week interruption would set cases back probably to the levels they were in August and then at those levels, test and trace is more effective to keep control.\n\n\"Where we are now is of course a different situation. It's crucial that where the R is above 1 and the numbers are high we get R below 1 for all the reasons that have been outlined, including of course the hospitalisations which are increasing. So it's crucial that's done, and there are a number of ways that can be done.\"\n\nHe added that would only be achieved by combining \"tier three baseline conditions\" suggested by the government with some extra measures agreed in an affected region using \"local knowledge and local insight\".\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nThe PM said accepting increased coronavirus restrictions was the \"right and responsible\" measure to protect the NHS.\n\nHe added: \"Without action, there is no doubt that our NHS would soon be struggling to treat the sheer number of people seriously ill with Covid.\n\n\"Non-Covid treatments and surgeries would need to be cancelled to cope and many more people would die.\"\n\nLabour's shadow health minister Alex Norris MP said it was \"damaging\" for Mr Johnson to avoid a full lockdown and that the regional approach is not enough.\n\n\"We need this circuit-breaker to give us time to sort these significant problems in testing and tracing,\" he said. \"We've had the worst week last week for tracing. The system's falling over. The prime minister is desperate to avoid lockdown just as he was at the beginning of the pandemic - but we know that that delay at the beginning was really damaging.\"\n\nOn Thursday, London, Essex, York and parts of Surrey, Derbyshire and Cumbria were moved up to tier two and will face tougher measures from Saturday.\n\nMore than half of England's population will now be living under high or very high-alert restrictions.\n\nThe PM also revealed that the UK is developing the capacity to manufacture millions of new fast turnaround tests for coronavirus - with some saliva tests able to deliver results in 15 minutes.\n\nHe said distribution and trials of the tests would start over \"the next few weeks\" and would enable NHS and care home staff to be tested \"more frequently\".\n\nSchoolchildren and university students would also be able to be tested, he said, to help keep education \"open safely over the winter\".", "People in Greater Manchester are facing confusion over possible changes to Covid-19 rules, as local leaders denied Downing Street's claim that talks have been arranged to resolve a row.\n\nNo 10 told the BBC it had arranged a call with the region's mayor, Andy Burnham, on Sunday morning.\n\nBut Mr Burnham's office said no such call had been scheduled.\n\nTighter rules kicked in for millions of people in England on Saturday as areas moved up a tier in a new alert system.\n\nBBC political correspondent Jonathan Blake said the conflicting information could be as a result of negotiating tactics.\n\nThe Department for Health and Social Care confirmed 16,171 more people had tested positive for coronavirus in the UK as of Saturday and a further 150 people had died within 28 days of a positive test - taking the total to 43,579.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said on Friday that infection rates in Greater Manchester were \"grave\" and added: \"Each day that passes before action is taken means more people will go to hospital, more people will end up in intensive care and tragically more people will die.\"\n\nMr Burnham and other local leaders have so far resisted a move from tier two to tier three's strict rules on hospitality - pressing instead for more shielding measures for the vulnerable, extra financial aid and stricter local powers to shut down venues breaking virus guidelines.\n\n\"We firmly believe that protecting health is about more than controlling the virus and requires proper support for people whose lives would be severely affected by a tier three lockdown,\" the deputy mayors and council leaders said in a joint statement.\n\nWhen two sides cannot even agree on the arrangement of a phone call, it doesn't bode well for the bigger picture.\n\nAfter 48 hours of stand-off between Downing Street and the mayor of Greater Manchester, it seemed there might be some progress.\n\nDowning Street claimed they had \"reached out\" and a call had been arranged between Andy Burnham and No 10 for Sunday morning. But soon after that Mr Burnham's spokesperson said nothing had been agreed.\n\nThese moves could be seen as negotiating tactics, the result of a breakdown in communication or a lack of trust between the two sides.\n\nThey may also seem like a tedious running commentary on the logistics of negotiations, and on one level it is.\n\nBut as coronavirus cases continue to rise there is a lot riding on these discussions, or lack thereof.\n\nPeople in Greater Manchester may be wondering how long it will be before action of some sort is taken, and what restrictions they'll be asked to endure when it is.\n\nMore than half of England - in excess of 28 million people - is now under extra coronavirus restrictions, under the new three-tier alert system.\n\nLancashire has joined the Liverpool City Region in the top tier - tier three. Pubs have closed and households cannot mix indoors or in many outdoor settings.\n\nLondon, Essex, York, Elmbridge, Barrow-in-Furness, North East Derbyshire, Erewash and Chesterfield have moved into tier two, meaning they can no longer mix inside with those from other households, including in pubs and restaurants.\n\nAreas of England in the lowest tier must keep to the nationwide virus rules such as group sizes being capped at six people, and the hospitality industry closing at 22:00.\n\nMeanwhile, calls for a circuit-breaker - a short but strict national lockdown - have been supported by Labour as well as some Conservative MPs.\n\nKate Green, Labour MP for Stretford and Urmston, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"The Labour leaders in Greater Manchester support the call for a national circuit-break because what we're seeing in Manchester today - the rest of the country is coming along behind. The rate is rising everywhere.\"\n\nMs Green, who is also shadow education secretary, added that extra restrictions would not be effective without a package of support to \"enable people to close their businesses [and] to isolate at home if they need to\".\n\nConservative MP and former health secretary Jeremy Hunt called for an end to the \"public war of words\" between local and national leaders on Saturday, but added he had \"sympathy\" for the idea of a circuit-breaker.\n\nBritain's largest teachers' union, the National Education Union, has called for secondary schools in England to shut for two weeks at half term, rather than the traditional one week.\n\nMr Johnson has said that while he could not \"rule anything out\", he wants to avoid a national lockdown because of \"the damaging health, economic and social effects it would have\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. There were scuffles between police and pub goers in Soho ahead of London moving to Tier 2\n\nAs coronavirus cases continue to rise rapidly across the UK, the devolved nations are taking their owns steps to curb the spread of infections.\n\nPubs, restaurants and cafes across Northern Ireland have closed to sit-in customers for the next four weeks while in Wales, talks continue over a potential two-week \"fire break\" - a period with tighter restrictions to help slow the spread.\n\nMost licensed premises in Scotland's central belt are closed under temporary restrictions, which are expected to be replaced by a similar multi-tiered system to the one in England by the end of the month.\n\nHow have you been affected by coronavirus? What do the current restrictions mean for you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "A forensic search is underway at the scene in Cypress Crescent in St Mellons\n\nA murder investigation is under way in Cardiff after the death of a 54-year-old man.\n\nEmergency services were called to Cypress Crescent in St Mellons at about 20:00 BST on Friday - the man died at the scene.\n\nSouth Wales Police said a woman was also taken to hospital with serious, but not life-threatening, injuries.\n\nA 21-year-old man, who is known to the victims, was arrested on Newport Road shortly afterwards and is in custody.\n\nDetectives said they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the investigation, but have appealed for any witnesses to come forward.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The PM says it is time to \"get ready” for trading arrangements with the EU to be \"more like Australia's\" from 1 January.\n\nTalks between the UK and EU over a post-Brexit trade agreement are \"over\", Downing Street has said.\n\nNo 10 argued there was \"no point\" in discussions continuing next week unless the EU was prepared to discuss the detailed legal text of a partnership.\n\nUK chief negotiator Lord Frost said he had told EU counterpart Michel Barnier there was now no \"basis\" for planned talks on Monday.\n\nNumber 10 said the two sides had agreed to talk again next week - by phone.\n\nEarlier, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted that the Brussels negotiating team would go to London after the weekend to \"intensify\" discussions.\n\nFrance's Europe minister Clément Beaune told BBC Newsnight that, while the EU would not pursue a deal at any cost, \"we will listen to what the UK side wants to say to us\".\n\nMeanwhile, ratings agency Moody's has downgraded the UK's credit status, citing falling economic strength due to the coronavirus pandemic and uncertainty over Brexit.\n\nThe prime minister had set this week's EU summit as the deadline for the two sides to agree a deal.\n\nBut there are still major disagreements over fishing rights and state help for businesses.\n\nAnd the UK government hardened up its message to the EU over the course of Friday.\n\nIn the morning, Boris Johnson said the country had to \"get ready\" to trade next year without an agreement, although he did not say the talks were over.\n\nHe suggested the EU was unwilling to consider seriously the UK's preferred option of a comprehensive free trade agreement based on the bloc's existing arrangement with Canada.\n\nThe UK, he added, must look at the \"alternative\" - which he suggested was Australia's much-more limited set of agreements with the EU.\n\nAs statements go, those four words from the prime minister's spokesman this afternoon were something of a bombshell.\n\nBut Michel Barnier, due to come to London next week to continue talks, might not be unpacking his briefcase just yet.\n\nThere's no doubt that Downing Street is sending the clearest signal possible that it expects the EU to make the next move.\n\nAnd the rhetoric accompanying the talks has reached a new level.\n\nBut both sides still want a deal, the process has not broken down and there is still time to reach an agreement.\n\nIt's one thing to declare the talks over; it's another thing to refuse to continue talking.\n\nThe prime minister's official spokesman took a tougher line with Brussels later in the day.\n\n\"There is only any point in Michel Barnier coming to London next week if he's prepared to address all the issues on the basis of a legal text in an accelerated way, without the UK required to make all the moves or to discuss the practicalities of travel and haulage,\" he said.\n\n\"If not, there is no point in coming.\"\n\nHe added: \"Trade talks are over. The EU have effectively ended them by saying they do not want to change their negotiating position.\"\n\nThe UK and EU had been hoping for a \"zero-tariff\" agreement to govern their trading relationship once the UK's post-Brexit transition period ends on 31 December.\n\nIf no deal is reached, they will operate on World Trade Organization rules, meaning tariffs are imposed.\n\nMrs von der Leyen (R) left the summit early after exchanging views with EU leaders\n\nBoris Johnson's public declaration that the UK should prepare for no deal did not cause great concern within EU circles.\n\nThe immediate response came in a tweet from Commission President Ursula von der Leyen who said it was full steam ahead for trade talks next week and that EU negotiators would be getting on the Eurostar to London as planned.\n\nBut the subsequent statement from the prime minister's official spokesman that the \"trade talks are over\" has left senior diplomats \"deeply unimpressed\", as one put it.\n\nAlthough \"we're getting used to being part of Johnson's pantomime\", they added.\n\nSome EU figures fear Boris Johnson still doesn't know if he actually wants a deal and is trying to buy time while he grapples with the Covid crisis.\n\nFollowing the hardening of the British position by No 10, France's President Macron called on the prime minister to make up his mind, while there was still time.\n\nMany in Brussels remain \"cautiously optimistic\" some sort of deal can be agreed, but any route there is now even harder to see.\n\nAfter the EU summit concluded on Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said it would be best to get a deal and that compromises on both sides would be needed.\n\nFrench President Emmanuel Macron said the UK needed a Brexit deal more than the EU did.\n\nFor Labour, shadow Cabinet Office minister Rachel Reeves urged the UK government to \"step back from the brink\" and \"stop posturing\".\n\n\"Any tariffs or any delays at the border will make it harder for goods to flow freely, whether those are foods or medicines,\" she said.\n• None What are the sticking points in Brexit trade talks?", "The operators of a care home in West Lothian have said 11 residents have died in a coronavirus outbreak.\n\nThe Redmill care home in East Whitburn has a further 35 residents and 20 members of staff who have tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nThe deaths represent an increase of four on those reported by operators HC-One last week.\n\nA spokesman for the company said staff at Redmill were \"doing everything they can to care for residents\".\n\nThe spokesman said: \"We have a comprehensive coronavirus contingency plan in place and we are working closely with NHS Lothian and public Health to ensure we are doing all we can to respond to and overcome this outbreak.\n\n\"A very significant amount of resource and senior leadership time is being dedicated to this home so that we can help as many residents as possible to return to good health.\n\n\"The home continues to be well supplied with the medical equipment and PPE needed to protect residents and colleagues. We have additional senior management supporting the home and our colleagues seven days a week. We also engage with the NHS daily to ensure that residents can access the healthcare they need.\"\n\nHe added: \"We are very proud of our colleagues and the bravery and dedication they show to supporting our residents.\"\n\nScottish Labour MSP for Lothian Neil Findlay said: \"With so many residents testing positive it is clear that action must be taken to keep staff and residents safe at Redmill.\n\n\"I am calling on the Care Inspectorate to begin an urgent investigation into the situation at Redmill and for all support necessary to be given to the staff at the home.\"\n\nScotland's chief nursing officer Prof Fiona McQueen told BBC Scotland the deaths at care homes were a \"great tragedy\".\n\nShe added: \"Looking at that level of transmission in staff is why the Scottish government has weekly testing of care home staff supported with PPE. But we know when any disease is in the community and in our hospitals, it also goes into our care homes.\n\n\"That's why across the central belt we've asked for increased restrictions on care home visiting so that we can wrap a protection around our care homes.\"", "People in England who have been told to self-isolate through NHS Test and Trace could have their details shared with the police on a \"case-by-case basis\".\n\nForces will have access to information telling them if an individual has been told to self-isolate, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said.\n\nBut the British Medical Association said it was worried police involvement might put people off being tested.\n\nIn England there is a legal requirement to isolate after a positive test.\n\nPolice will not have access to data from the NHS Covid-19 app. The app is anonymous so the government does not know who has been sent instructions to self-isolate.\n\nJust under 11% of people traced as a close contact of someone with coronavirus said they self-isolated for 14 days, according to a government-commissioned study.\n\nReasons given for breaking self-isolation included believing there was no point isolating from strangers if you cannot properly distance from those in your household; not developing symptoms; or visiting shops or a pharmacy.\n\nThe DHSC updated its guidance about how testing data will be handled on Friday.\n\nA memorandum of understanding was issued between the DHSC and National Police Chiefs' Council to allow forces to access information that tells them if a \"specific individual\" has been told to self-isolate, as first reported by the Health Service Journal.\n\nThose who fail to do so face fines starting at £1,000, which can increase to £10,000 for serial offenders or serious breaches.\n\nA DHSC spokesman said it was a legal requirement for people who had tested positive and their close contacts to self-isolate when formally notified to do so.\n\n\"The memorandum of understanding ensures that information is shared with appropriate safeguards and in accordance with the law. No testing or health data is shared in this process,\" he said.\n\nA spokesman for the British Medical Association, which represents doctors in the UK, said the test-and-trace system needed \"the full confidence of the public\" to be effective.\n\nHe said: \"We are already concerned that some people are deterred from being tested because they are anxious about loss of income should they need to self-isolate - and we are worried should police involvement add to this.\n\n\"Therefore, the government's emphasis should be on providing support to people - financial and otherwise - if they need to self-isolate, so that no-one is deterred from coming forward for a test.\"\n\nA National Police Chiefs' Council spokesperson said forces would continue to encourage \"voluntary compliance\" but would enforce regulations and issue fines where appropriate.\n\n\"Officers will engage with individuals to establish their circumstances, using their discretion wherever it is reasonable to do so,\" they said.\n\nSir Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, said ministers should \"reverse the policy urgently\".\n\n\"Anything that further undermines the public's dwindling trust in this government's handling of the pandemic is damaging, and few things could have been better designed to do that, than this,\" he said.\n\nMeanwhile, Baroness Dido Harding, the head of NHS Test and Trace, has told the Sunday Times that the Test and Trace service was not a \"silver bullet\".\n\n\"It has never been and it never will be,\" she said, adding it is one of a number of different interventions needed to control Covid-19.", "The 1,000-plant haul was found over three floors at a former nightclub\n\nA three-floor cannabis factory has been discovered in a former nightclub, with the crop said to have a street value of more than £1m.\n\nThe National Crime Agency (NCA) said its officers found about 1,000 plants at the Coventry premises, one of the largest hauls it had ever seen.\n\nThe growing and irrigation uncovered at the Trinity Street property were described as sophisticated.\n\nThree men have been charged with drugs offences following the NCA's raid.\n\nOfficers had to smash through several reinforced doors to access the plants during Thursday's operation at the unnamed city centre site, in which growing equipment valued at about £150,000 was also found.\n\nNCA branch commander Adam Warnock said the seizure of drugs would dent the profit of organised crime which benefited from large-scale drug-growing.\n\n\"The size of the cannabis factory was significant and sophisticated, spread across three floors of a large building,\" he said.\n\n\"It is certainly one of the largest grows ever uncovered by the NCA.\"\n\nThe NCA said two men, aged 24 and 31, had been charged with production of a class B drug and appeared before magistrates on Friday.\n\nA third man, 28, accused of the same offence, was subject of an extradition hearing, the NCA added.\n\nWest Midlands Police assisted with the operation, using drones to help detain two suspects.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n• None Cannabis crop with street value of £3m found\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Kristin Scott Thomas, Gareth Malone and Sharon Horgan appeared with the Combined Military Wives Choir at their London UK film premiere in February\n\nVenues and organisations including the Military Wives Choirs, The Hepworth Wakefield and Night and Day in Manchester are to receive a share of £76m government arts funding.\n\nWhitby's Gothic Festival, London's Somerset House and Kneehigh Theatre in Cornwall are also set to benefit.\n\nThe latest raft of grants, for 588 organisations, will come out of the wider £1.57bn Cultural Recovery Fund.\n\nIt follows Monday's £257m injection, which helped The Cavern Club and LSO.\n\nCulture Secretary Oliver Dowden said that Saturday's new round of \"vital funding\" would go to \"protect cultural gems across the country, save jobs and prepare the arts to bounce back\".\n\nIt will cover comedy clubs, circuses, festivals, regional theatres and local museums, across England.\n\n\"These awards build on our commitment to be here for culture in every part of the country,\" he added.\n\nWhile July's announcement of the wider support package was welcomed by the arts and entertainment industries, Mr Dowden did admit that it would not be enough to save every job or cultural establishment.\n\nThe Military Wives Choir rose to fame through the BBC documentary series with Gareth Malone and was recently the subject of a film starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan.\n\nDirector Melanie Nightingale said they were \"incredibly grateful\" for the \"much-needed support,\" at a time when many arts organisations have been struggling due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\n\"We are thrilled that this funding enables our 73 choirs to sing, share and support one another and feel stronger together through music,\" she said.\n\nThe grants of under £1m have also been awarded to the West End's longest running play, The Mousetrap; the Shangri-La stage at Glastonbury Festival; and grassroots music venues, including Night & Day Cafe.\n\nNight & Day Cafe in Manchester has hosted gigs by the likes of the Arctic Monkeys, Elbow, and Jessie J\n\nJennifer Smithson, director of the latter Manchester venue, explained that the financial help \"enables us to plan for the future when we look forward to having live music back at the venue once again\".\n\nJoe Wright, who directed films including Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, is also a Kneehigh associate. He said he was delighted the Cornwall theatre had been successful in round two, and will now be able to reopen in December with the aim of providing safe, socially distanced outdoor artistic experiences.\n\n\"Kneehigh remain an inspiration for many throughout the sector, they've never got 'stuck' and have always been quick to adapt to new challenges,\" he said.\n\n\"Their mission to remain local whilst telling stories that reflect all our lives is vital in helping us all through these unprecedented times.\"\n\nFurther round of funding from the Cultural Recovery Fund pot are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.\n\nOrganisations that will be receiving funding part of the £76m include:\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Chris Christie, pictured here (C) at a White House event in September, said Covid-19 ought to be taken \"very seriously\"\n\nFormer New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has urged Americans to take coronavirus \"seriously\" after spending days in intensive care with Covid-19.\n\nMr Christie, a Trump administration ally, revealed on Thursday he had recovered from the disease.\n\nHe was one of several virus cases confirmed at the same time as President Donald Trump in early October.\n\nThe infections have been linked to a \"superspreader event\" at the White House.\n\nMore than a dozen cases have been traced to the Rose Garden event on 26 September, including two senators, the White House press secretary and President Trump's former counsellor Kellyanne Conway. All appear to have recovered.\n\nMr Christie said he attended the event, a ceremony where Mr Trump formally announced his nomination of the conservative Judge Amy Coney Barrett for a Supreme Court vacancy, believing he had \"entered a safe zone\".\n\n\"I was wrong,\" Mr Christie, who is in a high-risk category for Covid-19 because of his weight and asthma, said in a statement.\n\n\"I was wrong to not wear a mask at the Amy Coney Barrett announcement and I was wrong not to wear a mask at my multiple debate prep sessions with the President and the rest of the team.\"\n\nMr Christie said he hoped his experience would encourage Americans to follow virus guidelines \"in public no matter where you are and wear a mask to protect yourself and others\".\n\nBy contrast, Mr Trump left hospital after three nights of treatment for Covid-19, urging Americans not to let the virus \"dominate\" them.\n\nMr Christie, 58, was admitted to the Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey on 3 October as a precaution.\n\nHe said he ended up spending seven days in the intensive care unit of the hospital. He said he recovered thanks to the \"skilful care\" of doctors and \"extraordinary treatments\", including an antibody cocktail given to President Trump.\n\nMr Christie said his stint in \"isolation\" gave him time to do some thinking about the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Four Covid rules broken by Trump and the White House\n\n\"It is something to take very seriously,\" Mr Christie said of the virus, which has killed more than 217,000 people in the US to date.\n\n\"The ramifications are wildly random and potentially deadly. No one should be happy to get the virus and no one should be cavalier about being infected or infecting others.\"\n\nIn his first TV interview since contracting Covid-19, Mr Christie called on President Trump to encourage the wearing of face masks among Americans.\n\nMr Trump expressed approval of masks at a televised town-hall event on Thursday, as he faced a grilling from the public before he takes on Democratic challenger Joe Biden in November's presidential election.\n\nBut Mr Christie said that President Trump's messaging wasn't explicit enough, telling ABC's Good Morning America: \"I think we should be even more affirmative about it. That's why I put out the statement I did.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Good Morning America This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIn his statement, the former governor said: \"Every public official, regardless of party or position, should advocate for every American to wear a mask in public, appropriately socially distance and to wash your hands frequently every day.\"\n\nMasks have turned into a divisive political issue in the US. President Trump has previously mocked Mr Biden and some journalists for wearing masks, and many of his supporters have attended his rallies without face coverings.\n\nIn contrast, Mr Biden has taken a cautious approach to coronavirus during the election campaign, regularly wearing a mask in public while urging others to do so.", "The artwork was not claimed by Banksy for several days\n\nThe graffiti artist Banksy has confirmed a piece of art that appeared in Nottingham was created by him.\n\nThe work, outside a beauty salon, shows a girl hula-hooping with a bicycle tyre. It went up on Tuesday, next to a bicycle that is missing its back wheel.\n\nAmid speculation over whether the piece was a Banksy, a screen was fitted to it. In an ironic twist, soon afterwards the screen was sprayed with graffiti.\n\nA picture of the work was posted on Banksy's Instagram on Saturday morning.\n\nKlaye, aged four, posed for a photograph next to the the artwork\n\nThe salon the artwork appeared outside is on the junction of Rothesay Avenue and Ilkeston Road in Lenton, a popular residential area for students.\n\nAfter Bansky's confirmation he was the creator, people began arriving to have their photographs taken with the artwork, with about 30 people there at one point, as well as police officers.\n\nNicola Marshall, 39, from Clifton, Nottingham, came with her son Klaye to see the work. She said: \"It's a bit of positivity with all this coronavirus going on.\"\n\nDanial Ahmer, 23, a student who lives on Rothesay Avenue, said: \"I think it's eye-catching. It was a bit surreal and random to see it here though.\"\n\nPolice officers kept an eye on the art fans\n\nBanksy expert Prof Paul Gough, from Arts University Bournemouth - who initially doubted whether it was the real deal - said he was \"really pleased\" the work was by the artist.\n\nTalking about the meaning behind the artwork, he said: \"It is curious. The last four or five [Banksy pieces] have all related to Covid or something in the news. This is much more whimsical and much more of the moment. It is someone enjoying themselves.\n\n\"Perhaps that is the message: 'we are in difficult times, let's try to make the most of it and get some fun out of something which is broken'.\n\n\"The hoop is holistic. The circle is a positive and life-affirming. Even with a knackered bicycle, she is finding something she can play with.\"\n\nHe added: \"The Nottingham picture is a different kind of [Banksy] painting to what I have seen before. There is less fluidity and a more pixelated effect, especially around the chin and parts of the face.\"\n\nThe plastic covering protecting the artwork has been defaced twice, but has since been cleaned\n\nBanksy began spray-painting trains and walls in his home city of Bristol in the 1990s, and before long was leaving his artistic mark all over the world.\n\nHe is famed for poking fun at big companies and sending political messages through his work.\n\nSilvestro Biondi, who was taking advantage of the crowds to sell a few ice creams, said: \"I'm from Lenton and it's just great that it's here. It'll bring joy to people\"\n\nOn an unassuming street off the edge of the city of Nottingham there's an almost seaside atmosphere.\n\nThe excitement has brought people of all ages, backgrounds and parts of the city together, with a constant stream of people queuing to take a picture with the artwork.\n\nThere's even an ice cream van and a hula-hooper to complete the picture.\n\nMany are just happy to have something else to talk about other than the rising levels of coronavirus, and something to put the city in a more positive light - although maintaining social distancing is definitely a challenge.\n\nA spokesman from Nottingham City Council said it was \"amazing\" Banksy had confirmed the work was his, adding \"we obviously don't know why he chose Nottingham but we're a city famous for our rebels, like Robin Hood of course\".\n\nHe said: \"The fact that the artwork features a bike could be a reference to the Raleigh factory that used to be nearby, famous for its role in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the novel by local author Alan Sillitoe and iconic 1960 film starring Albert Finney.\"\n\nThe council asked people to avoid large gatherings at the site to protect themselves and others\n\nThe council fitted the temporary cover to the work earlier in the week and now it is known to be a genuine Banksy, advice will be taken on what should happen next, said the spokesman.\n\nHe added: \"We know people will be tempted to come and see it for themselves but we need to avoid large gatherings during the current pandemic, so we would urge everyone to please stay away.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"I was petrified\" - Det Sgt Nick Bailey on being poisoned by Novichok\n\nA police officer who was poisoned in the Salisbury Novichok attack has quit because he \"can no longer do the job\".\n\nDet Sgt Nick Bailey was contaminated with the nerve agent at the home of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, the targets of the poisoning operation.\n\nAfter returning to duty last year, he said the aftermath took \"so much from me\" and \"I [have] had to admit defeat\".\n\nHe worked for the police for 18 years and said he was \"so sad\" after wanting to be an officer since his teens.\n\nAngus Macpherson, police and crime commissioner for Wiltshire, where Det Sgt Bailey worked, said throughout his career the officer has symbolised \"dedication and a sense of public duty\".\n\nAnd in a statement, the force said he represents the \"determination that all of us want to see in police officers across the country\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Nick Bailey This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nDet Sgt Bailey and two Wiltshire Police colleagues were sent to Mr Skripal's home in March 2018, after the former Russian spy and his daughter, who was staying with him, were found seriously ill on a bench in Salisbury.\n\nHe was contaminated when he touched the door handle of Mr Skripal's home in the city.\n\nThe Skripals survived the attack after spending several weeks in hospital\n\nThe Skripals survived the attack, which prompted then Prime Minister Theresa May to tell the House of Commons the operation had \"almost certainly\" been approved by the Russian state.\n\nIn a series of tweets earlier, Det Sgt Bailey said the impact on him of the attack \"shouldn't be underestimated\".\n\n\"I wanted to be a police officer since I was a teenager, I couldn't envisage doing anything else, which is why this makes me so sad,\" he said.\n\n\"Like most police officers, I've experienced my fair share of trauma, violence, upset, injury and grief.\n\n\"Although I've tried so hard to make it work, I know that I won't find peace whilst remaining in that environment. For me, it's time for a change.\"\n\nMr Macpherson thanked Det Sgt Bailey for his \"service and dedication to Wiltshire Police\".\n\n\"Nick found himself at the centre of an international, criminal incident which not only affected his health but I am certain changed the course of his family's lives too,\" he said.\n\n\"The events in Salisbury and Amesbury back in 2018 remain unprecedented and Nick, himself, has found himself in a situation that no other police officer in this country has been through.\n\n\"I know that the force has offered as much welfare support to Nick as possible but I hope today brings Nick and his family some sense of closure and allows them to start to look to the future.\"\n\nIn the months after the attack two Russian nationals were accused of travelling to the UK to try to murder Mr Skripal with novichok.\n\nThe pair - known by their aliases Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov - were caught on CCTV in Salisbury the day before the attack.\n\nThe alarm was raised about the Novichok attack when Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found very ill on a bench in the centre of Salisbury\n\nDet Sgt Bailey was one of the first to be involved after the alarm about the attack was raised.\n\n\"These shocking and unprecedented events changed his life and his family's lives significantly,\" the force said in a statement.\n\n\"It is impossible for any of us to fully understand the impact this event has had on Nick and his family, and the sacrifices they made in trying to come to terms with the situation.\"\n\n\"Day in and day out, officers put themselves directly into harm's way in order to help and protect others,\" the statement continued.\n\n\"Nick should be incredibly proud of all that he has achieved and will always be considered to be part of the Wiltshire Police family.\n\n\"I am sure that as one chapter closes, another opportunity will open up for Nick.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A record number of shops closed on UK high streets during the first half of this year as the coronavirus lockdown hit many stores hard, data shows.\n\nSome 11,120 chain store outlets shut between January and June, according to research by the Local Data Company and accountancy firm PwC.\n\nAlthough more than 5,000 shops opened during the same period it was not enough to fill the gaps, resulting in a net decline of 6,001 stores.\n\nThe final total could even be higher.\n\nResearchers did not count outlets that had yet to reopen after the coronavirus lockdown ended. Many never will.\n\nThe data includes shops, hospitality chains, and services such as post offices and banks, but it does not include small independent businesses.\n\nHigh streets were already experiencing upheaval long before the pandemic struck.\n\nShops were closing at an average rate of 16 per day in 2019, according to the Local Data Company, which tracks vacancies rates.\n\nBut the pandemic is turbo-charging change as more people shop online. The research found that York has been the worst affected area, with a net loss of 55 outlets.\n\nHarpenden, in Hertfordshire, meanwhile has fared better than any other location with a net increase in stores.\n\nHigh streets have borne the brunt of the closures. Retail parks have proved far more resilient. Standalone stores mean units which are out of town, but not in a retail park or shopping centre, for instance a large supermarket or an Ikea.\n\nThe Local Data Company and PwC have been analysing the changes in the top 500 shopping locations for the past decade. This year's findings include all high streets, shopping centres and retail parks in Britain. They've reviewed existing data to allow comparisons with the previous five years.\n\nThese new figures show the profound impact the pandemic is having on our town centres and high streets.\n\n\"For local authorities, it's now critical how they respond to this significant and growing decline in store occupants,\" says Lucy Stainton, head of retail and strategic partnerships at the Local Data Company.\n\nWhilst many city centres remain quiet, the pandemic has prompted something of a resurgence in local high streets with people increasingly wanting to shop locally if they're working from home.\n\nLisa Hooker, consumer markets leader at PwC, says amid the turmoil, there continues to be a steady flow of openings: \"With the continued roll out of value retailers, the boom in takeaways and pizza delivery shops and demand for services that can still only be delivered locally, such as tradesmen outlets, building products or locksmiths, shows that despite the stark numbers there remains a future for physical stores.\n\n\"It's likely that whatever happens retail will come out of this smaller and stronger,\" she believes.\n\nMore closures are still to come, however. Retailers and hospitality chains are continuing to restructure their businesses, cutting stores and many thousands of jobs to survive.\n\nMany have done deals with landlords to reduce rent bills, but billions of pounds of rent still remains unpaid thanks to the government ban on evictions to give struggling firms some breathing space, arrears which have only been postponed.\n\nAnother key factor is business rates. Thanks to the government's rates holiday, retail and hospitality firms don't have to start paying this tax again till April next year.\n\nThey say if it isn't extended, this could deal a final blow for the viability of many stores.\n\nCorrection: an earlier version of the first graphic showed the worst performing cities in the wrong order.", "Police have been deployed to guard Sarcelles' synagogue\n\nFrench Muslims disgusted by the shootings in Paris may nonetheless have reasons for not embracing the slogan \"I am Charlie\".\n\n\"For a Muslim, the Prophet Muhammad is more important than their own parents,\" says the young man I meet in Sarcelles, his face twisted with contempt for the caricatures Charlie Hebdo published.\n\nHis friend, also 18, nods in agreement as we stand on a street in this Paris dormitory town, famous in France for its large Sephardic Jewish community.\n\n\"They were warned but they kept on mocking the prophet,\" he continues. \"But you cannot kill for that. You cannot go against press freedom in France. Still, they will have to answer to God.\"\n\n\"Real Muslims condemn these attacks,\" adds a third man, 22 and also Muslim. \"Those who committed them were insane. The attack on the kosher supermarket was a catastrophe for France and for the world. If you kill one man it is like you kill all of humanity. That is how we think.\"\n\nWe stand chatting openly on the pavement but nobody wants to be identified.\n\nMistrust of the media runs deep since an outburst of violence last July when police held rioters back from entering the town's Jewish area as they raged at Israel's bombardment of Gaza.\n\nAn invisible line marks the beginning of the Jewish area on Avenue Paul Valery, scene of the confrontation with the police. It starts just before a Holocaust monument and a synagogue.\n\nThere is no sign of trouble but it has been guarded by CRS riot police since last week.\n\nDavid, a kosher businessman I encounter, is so dismayed by the deterioration he perceives in community relations in France that he foresees a time when the \"great majority\" of its half-million or so Jews will emigrate.\n\nBut the Muslim teenager accuses French media of exaggerating the divisions in Sarcelles, where Jews now make up about a quarter of the 60,000-strong population. \"We say one thing, you might write another,\" he suggests, smiling.\n\nWhen I ask how he and his friends relate to the town's Jewish community, they say they have Jewish friends and \"nothing has changed\". \"Mosques get attacked but that doesn't make the news,\" he adds.\n\nThe older of the three speaks with real warmth of the French values of liberty, equality and fraternity which were schooled into him.\n\nSolidarity rallies were staged across France on Sunday, gathering millions of people\n\n\"When I go on holiday to Morocco, I know I could never live there because people make me feel French,\" he says of his ancestral country. \"But in France I am made to feel Moroccan,\" he adds.\n\n\"Am I going up to the Jewish area?\" asks the younger man. The Jews got the nice part of Sarcelles, he explains, a little sourly, while we got this, gesturing back to the long blocks of uniform five-storey council flats stretching down to the railway station.\n\nActually, there was a time when Jewish immigrants from the former French colonies lived there themselves in numbers, and some Jews still do, but the demographic has changed.\n\nBy the mosque near the station, old men sit and chat in Arabic.\n\nA Tunisian Muslim pensioner I meet gives two reasons why he shunned Sunday's national unity march in Paris, while condemning the attacks.\n\nLike the teenagers, he is indignant at the cartoons Charlie Hebdo published: \"It set out to provoke people for its own amusement.\n\n\"It attacked their religion. Make fun of yourselves if you will, but leave others alone. The media is like a car: you need to have a licence to be on the road, otherwise you will be a danger to others. Charlie had no licence to put people's lives at risk with their provocations.\"\n\nHis other reason is the presence at the march of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whom he calls \"the biggest terrorist in the world\" because of the Gaza conflict.\n\nHe insists he is not anti-Jewish, saying he had Jewish friends back in Tunisia.\n\nAnother Muslim pensioner I meet separately, a man from Morocco, says he has Jewish friends too, here in France, men he will \"have a coffee or beer with\".\n\nHe takes a rather detached view of Charlie Hebdo, dismissing it as a fringe paper he never wanted to read. \"But I am 200% in support of freedom of expression,\" he declares.\n\nMore Muslims might have attended the march had they not felt \"shame\", he suggests, at the actions of gunmen claiming to defend Islam. \"Muslims may also fear retaliation by jihadists if they take to the streets,\" he adds.\n\nHe himself is uneasy after the attacks. \"Nobody is safe now,\" he says before directing me to the nearest tram stop.\n\nAs my tram glides out of Sarcelles, I reflect that I have not seen a single \"I am Charlie\" poster or pencil symbol since my arrival yet the quiet battle of ideas here is no less intense than in Paris itself.", "Seventeen areas in Wales currently have local lockdown rules in place\n\n\"Clear guidelines\" are needed if a new national lockdown goes ahead in Wales, a council leader has said.\n\nHugh Evans said it was \"important that we keep the public on board\" with any new plans to tackle a rise in Covid-19 cases.\n\nThe Denbighshire council leader and others held talks with the Welsh Government on Friday \"to consider what is going to happen next week\".\n\nDiscussions on a \"fire-break\" lockdown are continuing over the weekend.\n\nMr Evans told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast he wanted the Welsh Government to \"come up with clear guidelines, and a clear understanding, if this does happen\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BBC's Laura Foster explains what a circuit breaker is and how it could help tackle Covid-19\n\nMr Evans said he was told on Friday that \"no decision has been made yet\".\n\nDenbighshire is one of 17 areas in Wales with local lockdown rules in place to try to reverse an increase in coronavirus cases.\n\nMovement is restricted in and out of these places without a reasonable excuse, such as going to work.\n\nOn Friday, First Minister Mark Drakeford said a \"short, sharp\" circuit-breaker could slow down the virus.\n\nHe said a decision was likely to be made on Monday, while talks continued with health officials, scientific advisors and councils over the weekend.\n\n\"Doing nothing is not an option,\" he said.\n\nPeople from Covid-19 hotspots in England are banned from visiting Wales, under Welsh Government rules\n\nMeanwhile, businesses face an anxious wait to hear if any changes will affect them.\n\nJonathan Greatorex, owner of The Hand hotel at Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog, near Llangollen, Denbighshire, said he had already borrowed money to cover costs, with a wage bill of £5,000 a week.\n\n\"Coming into winter with fuel bills going up, costs going up, it's completely, completely, worrying for everyone,\" he said.\n\nKathryn Jones, sales and marketing director at food wholesaler Castell Howell in Carmarthenshire, said the firm had faced a \"nightmare\" since the first national lockdown in March and feared \"it's just about to get worse\".\n\n\"We have placed orders for produce to come in next week for half term. Are schools involved… are we going to end up throwing produce away?\" she said.\n\nNail and beauty salon owner Kelli Gwiliam, from Pencoed, Bridgend, said she felt \"numb\" due to the possible effects on her business from a second lockdown.\n\n\"If there is no help, I really do think this is the beginning of the end,\" said the mother-of-four.\n\nShe said her 11-year-old son told her \"not to worry about Christmas this year\".\n\n\"That's heart-breaking,\" she said.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Liz Saville Roberts MP questions how people from Liverpool can still visit Anglesey\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford has threatened a travel ban in Wales on people from English Covid hotspots if the prime minister does not impose his own.\n\nHe said he is giving UK ministers \"one final opportunity\" before he makes changes in Welsh law.\n\nThe UK government announced on Monday that it will advise against non-essential travel from Merseyside.\n\nBut it stopped short of making it illegal, angering Welsh ministers.\n\nMr Drakeford said he could close the border with England, but that is not his preferred option.\n\nWelsh ministers have asked for travel from areas with high rates of coronavirus in England to be restricted, to prevent people visiting parts of Wales where lockdowns are not in force and where rates are lower.\n\nIn 17 Welsh areas under local lockdown, people are subject to travel restrictions and cannot go in or out of the areas concerned except for a limited set of reasons, including to go to work or school.\n\nThey are not allowed to leave to go on holiday.\n\nThe Liverpool City Region will be placed on the \"very high risk\" Covid alert level from Wednesday, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned people in the area not to go on holiday to Wales.\n\nHowever, UK government ministers who govern Covid rules in England have not made it illegal to travel.\n\nWales and England have different coronavirus rules\n\nSpeaking on BBC Wales Today, Mr Drakeford said he would be writing a letter to the prime minister spelling out the powers he has.\n\n\"If he doesn't act, we will use them,\" he said.\n\n\"I want to offer him one final opportunity to do the right thing, because that would be fair to people in Wales, and people across our border.\n\n\"I don't want it to be a border issue. People in England in high incidence areas should not be going to low incidence areas in England, either.\"\n\nHe said the prime minister's solution of guidance \"simply will not do\", saying North Wales Police cannot turn people away on the basis of it.\n\n\"We need rules that prevent people from high incidence areas coming into Wales to low incidence areas,\" he said.\n\nHe said the letter will provide evidence, requested by UK government ministers, that people moving from areas with high levels of the virus to areas with low levels spread the virus.\n\nA Welsh Government spokesman said they want to receive a reply \"within days\".\n\nMark Drakeford said he will write a further letter to the prime minister\n\nIt is the second time the first minister has written to the PM asking for a travel ban.\n\nAfter the first time, the Mr Johnson rejected the proposal in an interview with BBC Wales.\n\n\"I don't want to impose travel restrictions within the UK generally,\" he said at the time.\n\nIt came after a coach of holidaymakers from Bolton travelled to Pembrokeshire after a lockdown was imposed in Bridgend, where they were originally due to go for an Elvis festival.\n\nIn the Commons on Monday Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts asked if it is fair that people in Liverpool can holiday in Gwynedd and Anglesey, when people in neighbouring Conwy cannot make non-essential journeys outside of the county.\n\nMr Johnson replied: \"The guidance is very clear that people from very high areas such as Merseyside should not be making those journeys.\"\n\nMr Drakeford and Health Minister Vaughan Gething spoke to the prime minister on Monday morning in a Cobra meeting.\n\nAfterwards the Welsh Government said Mr Drakeford had \"expressed deep disappointment at the inadequate proposals for travel restrictions in high infection areas in England\".\n\nAt a press conference Mr Gething outlined how travel restrictions between Wales and English Covid hotspots could work.\n\n\"We should, if needed, be able to identify those areas where the risk is such that we should have restrictions on travel,\" he said.\n\n\"It would not be a reasonable excuse for those people to enter Wales because of the risk that they present because of the area of the country that they come from.\"\n\nThe prime minister has already refused to introduce a travel ban in English Covid hotspots.\n\nSo why is the first minister asking again, rather than simply using the powers the Welsh Government has?\n\nIt probably reflects ideological as well as practical difficulties.\n\nWelsh Labour is a pro-union party and the idea of legislation banning some people from England crossing the Welsh border might sit uncomfortably.\n\nRemember that, during the national lockdown, the Welsh \"stay local\" rule applied across Wales - it didn't single out any particular group of people.\n\nThe practical problems include messaging and enforceability - the border sees millions of crossings every week and filtering lawful from unlawful journeys could be a major headache.", "Pensioners argue with a law enforcement officer on Monday during an anti-government rally\n\nPolice in Belarus have been authorised to use lethal force if necessary against anti-government protesters, a senior government official says.\n\nThe move was in response to increasingly radicalised, violent anti-Lukashenko groups, he said.\n\nSeparately, EU foreign ministers have said they are ready to impose sanctions against President Alexander Lukashenko.\n\nProtests have swept the country since Mr Lukashenko claimed victory in an August poll widely viewed as rigged.\n\nBelarusian authorities have been accused of brutality and torture in their suppression of the mass street protests that followed.\n\nOn Monday, the interior ministry confirmed police fired stun grenades and tear gas during an unauthorised rally in the capital, Minsk, which involved a large number of pension-age protesters.\n\nA spokesperson said action was taken after \"citizens started to show aggression\". An unconfirmed number of demonstrators were also arrested.\n\nReferring to protests in the city on Sunday, First Deputy Interior Minister Gennady Kazakevich said they had \"become organised and extremely radical\", adding they now mainly centred on Minsk and were less widespread.\n\nWhereas protesters hurled stones and bottles in the afternoon, as well as wielding knives, by nightfall they had moved on to building barricades and burning tyres, he said.\n\n\"This has nothing to do with civil protests. We're confronted not just by aggression, but by groups of militants, radicals, anarchists and football hooligans,\" he said in a video statement.\n\n\"On behalf of the interior ministry, I say that we will not leave the streets and will guarantee the law in the country. Law enforcement personnel and interior troops will use special equipment and lethal weapons if need be.\"\n\nPolice deployed water-cannon trucks in Minsk on Sunday, spraying protesters with brightly coloured dye\n\nEuropean Union foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg said they were ready to expand sanctions to take in Mr Lukashenko, according to a statement.\n\nBut the ministers say the president's refusal to consider new elections as a way out of the crisis leaves the bloc with no choice.\n\n\"This is an answer to the evolving situation in Belarus,\" EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters. \"There has not been any kind of signal from the Belarus authorities to engage in any kind of conversation.\"\n\nBelarus police have been accused of disproportionate violence\n\nOn Sunday, demonstrators turned out across the country for the ninth successive weekend in protest at the disputed re-election of Mr Lukashenko.\n\nCritics of Mr Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, said Sunday saw police use some of the most brutal tactics against protesters since the immediate aftermath of the election. Riot police again used water cannon and stun grenades to break up the latest rally in Minsk, and many protesters were beaten with police batons.\n\nMore than 700 people were arrested on Sunday, the interior ministry said.\n\nProtesters are demanding the release of all political prisoners and a free and fair re-run of the election.\n\nInternational observers including the European Union have characterised the demonstrations as peaceful.\n\nThe EU, the UK and the US have refused to recognise Mr Lukashenko's new term. Mr Lukashenko denies fixing the poll and has received support from Russia, his country's closest ally.\n\nPresident Vladimir Putin has said he is prepared to send Russian police to help Mr Lukashenko if the protests get \"out of control\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Mass arrests as crowds chant 'go away' to Belarus president last month", "Ten patients and five staff have tested positive for coronavirus at Morriston Hospital in the past few days\n\nA coronavirus outbreak has been declared at another hospital in Wales.\n\nSwansea Bay health board said 10 patients and five staff had tested positive at Morriston Hospital in the past few days.\n\nThe health board said most cases were connected to cardiac services and announced a temporary suspension of routine cardiac surgery.\n\nAt the city's other hospital, Singleton, nine members of maternity staff had also tested positive.\n\nThey are self-isolating and no patients had tested positive, the health board said, adding wards and beds at Singleton Hospital were all open as normal.\n\nIt comes after an outbreak was declared at Newport's Royal Gwent Hospital on Monday.\n\nCwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board is also dealing with outbreaks at three of its hospitals - Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant, Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil and Bridgend's Princess of Wales Hospital.\n\nLast Thursday, Betsi Cadwaladr health board said 24 patients were being treated as part of a Covid-19 outbreak at hospitals including Glan Clwyd in Denbighshire, Colwyn Bay and Llandudno.\n\nMost had been receiving care for more than two weeks and were said to be recovering.\n\n\"The safety of our patients and staff is paramount and we are doing all we can to contain the spread of the virus while minimising the impact on our services,\" said Prof Richard Evans, Swansea Bay health board's executive medical director.\n\n\"We will continue to closely monitor and manage the situation.\"", "Last updated on .From the section European Football\n\nPortugal and Juventus forward Cristiano Ronaldo has tested positive for coronavirus, the Portuguese Football Federation (FPF) has announced.\n\nThe 35-year-old is \"doing well, without symptoms, and in isolation\", the FPF said in a statement.\n\nThe remainder of Fernando Santos' Portugal squad have tested negative for Covid-19 and are available for selection.\n\nPortugal played out a 0-0 draw with France in Paris on Sunday and are top of the group, level on points with the world champions.\n\nThe Portugal captain became the first European to score 100 international goals in men's football when his side beat Sweden in the reverse Nations League fixture in September.\n\nAs a result of his period of quarantine, Ronaldo is also set to miss Juventus' Serie A fixture at Crotone on 17 October and his side's opening Champions League group game against Dynamo Kiev on 20 October.\n\nThe Italian champions then face Verona in the league on 25 October and Barcelona in their second European group game on 28 October.\n\nRonaldo posted a selfie with the Portugal squad on social media on Monday night with the caption \"United on and off the field!\"\n• None David Attenborough on the future of our planet: 'We have to believe it's possible'\n• None What was it like to deliver the Premier League trophy?", "\"Save lives, protect the NHS and shelter the economy.\"\n\nIf you were paying close attention at the end of September when the prime minister made his latest announcements about the limits on our lives, you'd have spotted the change in the slogan, as we reported here.\n\nIt was obvious then that the government was trying to grapple, not just with the threat to health, but with the very real prospect of spreading economic misery caused by the initial lockdown earlier this year - and the reality that any new restrictions will cause further harm.\n\nAt that point on the 22 September, we had already revealed a few days earlier that the government's scientific committee, Sage, had put forward the idea of a short, sharp lockdown, the so-called \"circuit break\".\n\nWhat we now know is the influential committee had directly recommended ministers take that action the day before.\n\nReading the Sage minutes in black and white, the split between their proposals and the prime minister's eventual decision seems to portray a dramatic sudden split.\n\nIt is no surprise, however, the situation is more complicated than that.\n\nFirst off, despite the political rhetoric at the start of the pandemic, there has never been such a thing as \"the\" science.\n\nSage is one important part of the government machine, but among its members there have long been arguments and disagreements before they \"grind out a consensus\", as it was memorably described.\n\nAnd indeed, some of its members have spoken out frequently over a period of many months.\n\nYou'll remember initial concerns that the government and its chief advisers weren't acting fast enough to lock down in the middle of March.\n\nAnd the discussions about the testing regime being advanced enough in May.\n\nAnd other members of Sage warning that the country was still on a \"knife edge\" when the restrictions started to be rolled back.\n\nThe difference between the Sage consensus, however, and the government's decision at the end of last month is now fully on display.\n\nIt's the political environment, and the difference of opinion inside government, that has developed too.\n\nAt the same time, in the third week of September, there were senior figures inside government arguing for further action, believing that to watch and wait might be a mistake.\n\nBut Boris Johnson's decisions were ultimately shaped more strongly by reluctance, not just from the chancellor, but a strong push back from the Tory backbenches, and a fear of public fatigue too.\n\nDon't forget either that the PM himself \"hates\" having to impose any kind of limits on people's lives, according to one of his team, and recently he's been at pains to point this out too - describing himself on several occasions recently as a \"freedom-loving Tory\".\n\nThe prime minister still wants to do everything he can to avoid another national lockdown.\n\nBut depending how bad things get in the next few weeks, the revelations in the Sage documents could leave him open to the same accusation levelled at him first time round - that ministers did too little, and too late.", "The Liverpool City Region faces the toughest restrictions from Wednesday\n\nMeasures to tackle a rise in Covid cases were \"guided by science\", the health secretary has said, amid criticism expert advice was ignored.\n\nDocuments have revealed government scientific advisers called for a short lockdown, or \"circuit-breaker\", in England, three weeks ago.\n\nMatt Hancock defended the government's new three-tier system, saying it aimed to \"protect lives and livelihoods\".\n\nAnother 143 people have died in the UK after testing positive for coronavirus.\n\nThis compares with 50 deaths announced on Monday and was the highest daily total since 164 deaths on 10 June.\n\nThe data also shows another 17,234 people have tested positive for Covid, compared with 13,792 cases the day before.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, Public Health England's medical director, called the rising number of deaths \"hugely concerning\".\n\n\"We have seen cases increasing, especially in older age groups, which is leading to more hospital admissions. This is a stark reminder for us to follow the guidelines,\" she said.\n\nThe Liverpool region will enter a \"very high\" Covid alert level from Wednesday, the highest of the new three-tier system for coronavirus restrictions in England.\n\nEvery area will be classified as being on medium, high or very high alert under the system. It is not clear what the specific criteria is for each alert level.\n\nMost parts of England are the lowest tier, but Essex has asked to be moved to \"high\" level restrictions.\n\nMeanwhile, London could be put in a stricter lockdown within days, Mayor Sadiq Khan has warned.\n\nShielding is not being reintroduced in England yet, but people who were on the list will receive a letter with updated advice to avoid getting Covid.\n\nThe latest Office for National Statistics figures showed there were 343 deaths involving coronavirus registered in the week to 2 October - a figure that has been doubling every fortnight over the last month.\n\nAs MPs began a debate in the Commons on the three-tier system on Tuesday, Mr Hancock said the virus posed \"a formidable threat\" until a vaccine could be found.\n\nThe government would not rule out further restrictions in the hospitality, leisure, entertainment and personal care sectors, the health secretary said.\n\nHe said the government makes \"decisions that are guided by the science, taking into account all of the different considerations\", adding \"protecting our economy and protecting our health are not alternatives\", but that action was required to \"protect lives and livelihoods\".\n\nDocuments detailing advice from scientists on the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) were released on Monday night.\n\nTheir views and evidence feed into the government's decision making.\n\nLabour called the documents alarming. Shadow health spokesman Jonathan Ashworth said a \"clear plan\" was now needed.\n\nHe told the Commons: \"After the prime minister spoke, we see yet again he is being advised to take action and has so far refused. But it's the same virus, the same delays, the same country and the same government making the same mistakes again.\"\n\nAt a press conference on Monday evening, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the alert system for England could succeed in driving cases down if it was implemented \"very effectively\", and he rejected the \"extreme route\" of a full nationwide lockdown \"right now\".\n\nBut at the same briefing, England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, voiced concerns over the impact of the new rules, saying he was not confident the \"base measures\" in the highest tier \"would be enough to get on top of\" the virus.\n\n\"That is why there's a lot of flexibility for local authorities [...] to do significantly more,\" he said.\n\nReleased shortly after Monday's press conference, minutes from the Sage meeting said the advisers had called for the immediate introduction of a short national lockdown three weeks ago.\n\nThey also showed the scientists suggested:\n\nOf all the measures proposed by the advisory group, just one - advising those who can work from home to do so - was implemented by the government at the time.\n\nIn the document from 21 September, Sage warned that \"not acting now to reduce cases will result in a very large epidemic with catastrophic consequences\".\n\nIt also said a two to three week \"circuit-breaker\" - a short period of tightened restrictions - could \"put the epidemic back by approximately 28 days or more\", if it was \"as strict and well-adhered to as the restrictions in late May\".\n\n\"Multiple circuit-breaks might be necessary to maintain low levels of incidence,\" it added.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nSpeaking to BBC Breakfast, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said the government had introduced measures such as the rule of six at the time, and stressed the Sage papers had contributed to the measures the PM announced on Monday.\n\nHe said they had taken \"balanced judgements\" that weighed up the effect on the economy and \"all the other unintended consequences\" of measures, such as the impact on mental health and delayed surgeries.\n\nOn the new three-tiered system, he said: \"We are now able to have a very clear and consistent framework across the whole country, so people will be able to understand approximately what the rate of infections is in their own area and what the rules are accordingly.\"\n\nCases are increasing across the whole of the country and the number of people in hospital is now higher than before the full lockdown in March. We are at a critical stage in the epidemic.\n\nIt is at this moment the gulf between the official scientific advice and the decisions made by government has been laid bare.\n\nIt is the case that \"advisers advise and ministers decide\". When considering new measures to stop Covid, government must also take into account the harms they cause to our health and the economy.\n\nBut there is some concern the government is doing too little, too late.\n\nAnd that we can either choose the terms for controlling the virus now, or wait and the virus will force our hand as it did with lockdown in March.\n\nThe government has also defended its latest compensation package for people forced to stop work as a result of new coronavirus restrictions.\n\nUnder the programme, those who qualify will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the state.\n\nChief Secretary to the Treasury Steve Barclay told the House of Commons that it was a \"generous\" scheme.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson explains a three-tiered level of rules to fight the coronavirus pandemic in England.\n\nUnder the three-tiered system, most areas in England are in the medium alert level - meaning current restrictions continue, including the 10pm hospitality curfew and the rule of six.\n\nAreas already under additional local restrictions are automatically in the high alert level - meaning bans on household mixing indoors are extended to include hospitality venues.\n\nThe city of Nottingham, which has the highest rate in the country, will start in this category alongside the rest of Nottinghamshire, East and West Cheshire and a small area of High Peak, as well as Greater Manchester, parts of South Yorkshire, and north-east England. Around 4.4 million people will be in high alert areas.\n\nThe Liverpool City Region - home to 1.5 million people - becomes the first area to enter the very high alert level, which - at a minimum - sees pubs and bars close if they do not serve \"substantial meals\", almost all household contacts banned and advice against travel. The rule of six will continue to apply in outdoor public spaces such as parks.\n\nAreas in the highest tier are able to impose further restrictions, and in the Liverpool City Region this will mean the closure of betting shops, gyms, leisure centres and casinos.\n\nThe government has issued details of the full restrictions for each alert level.\n\nMeanwhile, the Scottish government is drawing up its own three-tier framework of restrictions to be implemented later this month.\n\nIn Wales, a second national lockdown is being considered and First Minister Mark Drakeford has threatened a travel ban on people from English Covid hotspots if the prime minister does not impose his own.\n\nMinisters in Northern Ireland's devolved government are meeting later to decide on further coronavirus restrictions.\n\nA further 13,972 confirmed coronavirus cases were reported across the UK on Monday, with 50 more deaths within 28 days of a positive test recorded.", "MPs have rejected the latest attempt to require imported food to meet domestic legal standards from 1 January.\n\nThey struck down a Lords amendment to the Agriculture Bill to force trade deals to meet UK animal welfare and food safety rules.\n\nCampaigners have warned the UK could be forced to accept lower standards to secure a future US trade deal.\n\nBut Farming minister Victoria Prentis said the government was \"absolutely committed to high standards\".\n\nExisting laws would safeguard them, she told the House of Commons, adding that these were \"of more use than warm words\" in maintaining animal welfare, food standards and environmental protections.\n\nThe bill - designed to prepare the farming industry for when the UK no longer has to follow EU laws and rules next year - returned to the Commons on Monday following amendments by the House of Lords.\n\nThe government says EU rules banning imports of chlorine-washed chicken and other products will be automatically written into UK law once the post-Brexit transition period ends on 31 December.\n\nBut peers made a number of changes, including one which would give MPs a veto over sections in trade deals relating to food imports, which would be required to comply with \"relevant domestic standards\".\n\nThey argued these changes were necessary to make it impossible for the US or other countries to export so-called chlorinated chicken or beef fattened with hormones.\n\nHowever, MPs voted by 332 votes to 279 - a majority 53 - to back government plans to reject the amendment.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Jamie Oliver accuses the government of using \"back door\" secondary legislation to avoid scrutiny of post-Brexit food standards\n\nHowever, Conservative MPs Sir Roger Gale and George Freeman said they would vote for the amendment to remain in the bill, saying it was in line with their party's 2019 manifesto pledge to maintain welfare standards.\n\nNeil Parish, the Conservative chairman of the Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, told the Commons that Brexit meant UK agriculture could move in a \"much more environmental direction\", including planting more trees and cutting the use of nitrates.\n\nThe country should be a \"beacon\" of high animal welfare and countryside-protection standards, he added.\n\nBut Conservative MP John Lamont supported the government, saying the amendments were \"not in the interests\" of food producers or standards and would be \"bad for trade\".\n\nParty colleague Anthony Mangnall said there had been a \"huge amount of fear-mongering\" over the importation of chlorinated chicken and hormone-injected beef, and that \"has to stop\".\n\nIn the Commons, Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Tim Farron said the controversy over chlorinated chicken was not \"about the quality of food\" but the \"integrity of our farming industry\".\n\nFor Labour, shadow environment secretary Luke Pollard said this was a \"crucial moment for British agriculture\", adding that high standards could all be \"thrown away\".\n\nHe urged the government to \"show some leadership\" and \"back British farmers\".\n\nThe bill must include guarantees that UK farmers would not be \"undercut\" in post-Brexit trade deals, Mr Pollard said.\n\nHowever another potential rebellion by backbench Tory MPs was avoided by the government when the deputy speaker ruled out an amendment to strengthen the new Trade and Agriculture Commission.", "Child care apprentice Rena Platt started working in February - but within a couple of months she was on furlough and then made redundant - by her own mother.\n\nThe 19-year-old was one of almost 300 apprentices in Wales who found themselves out of work and out of training because of the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nThere are still 3,000 apprentices on furlough and there are concerns for their future when the UK government's job retention scheme ends on 31 October.\n\nRena's mother Alison said having to let her own daughter go was one of the hardest things she has ever had to do.", "The death of transport worker Belly Mujinga following reports she had been spat at by a customer, sparked calls for justice from millions of people. Now a BBC investigation raises questions about the inquiries carried out by her employer and the police.\n\nIt was a chilly morning when Belly Mujinga caught the bus to Victoria station in central London. Shivering, the 47-year-old ticket office worker pulled on her favourite gloves and sat down. It was 04:45 and outside the sky was a murky grey; the sun had yet to rise.\n\nIt was Saturday 21 March, and fears about Covid-19 were intensifying. The government had advised against unnecessary travel and non-essential contact with others. Schools had closed to all but vulnerable children and those of key workers.\n\nDays earlier, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had announced that by the weekend those with the \"most serious health conditions\" must be \"largely shielded from social contact\".\n\nBelly, who had severe health problems that had affected her lungs and throat, was anxious about coronavirus. She'd previously had treatment on her throat after having difficulty breathing.\n\nThe 47-year-old had stressed the importance of social distancing in a recent video she had made on the station concourse for her family in Congo. \"There's no people. People are afraid. People are home. See the ticket office is empty, everyone is afraid because of Covid. Stay at home,\" she says, her face peeping out from under her black scarf.\n\n\"But we are here, we have to work. I love you and be safe.\"\n\nOn the morning of 21 March, Belly and her colleague Motolani Sunmola, were working on the concourse. At around 11:20, they were approached by a male customer. What happened next is disputed. Four people were present at the time: Belly, Motolani, a male colleague, and the customer.\n\nMotolani - who is speaking publicly for the first time - says the man, who was casually dressed in blue jeans and a tan jacket, sharply asked them twice what they were doing. She describes him as being agitated and aggressive. \"He was screaming and shouting at us,\" the 52-year-old says.\n\n\"We told the gentleman, 'Please we're just here to help you, that's all why we're here'.\" She said the man then turned and took a few steps towards the ticket office. \"Out of nowhere he came back again and said: 'You know I have the virus',\" Motolani alleges. As he came closer, Motolani said she and Belly retreated and asked him to \"behave\" himself.\n\nMotolani says he was \"coughing and spitting like an old man who has no teeth,\" and they ran away. She says Belly rushed into the reception to wash the spray of saliva from her face.\n\nWhen Belly later returned home, her husband Lusamba says she was unusually quiet. \"She was sad. She told me, 'Darling, someone spat on me'. It really shook her.\"\n\nIn the days that followed, Motolani and Belly began to feel unwell.\n\nBelly's last day at work was 25 March. One of her consultants called a manager at her request to say she needed to self-isolate immediately.\n\nHer symptoms started to escalate and on 2 April, when she was struggling to breathe, Lusamba called an ambulance. \"On her way out, she waved our daughter and me goodbye,\" he says.\n\nBelly was diagnosed with Covid-19 at the Barnet Hospital in north London.\n\nLusamba says she was scared and \"knew that was the end\".\n\nDuring a video-call on Saturday 4 April, she spoke to her family but refused to show her face. She didn't want her daughter Ingrid, who was 11 at the time, to see her in such a weak state.\n\nShortly afterwards, she called her cousin Agnes Ntumba and asked her to look after Ingrid for her. Later that evening, Lusamba tried calling his wife. But she didn't pick up.\n\nLusamba struggled to understand when the doctor told him over the phone. English is not his first language, as he mainly speaks French and the Congolese-dialect Lingala, so Agnes had to break the news to him hours later.\n\nA funeral was held three weeks later, but only 10 people were allowed to attend.\n\n\"It feels like she's just gone somewhere and will come back,\" Lusamba says. \"Since I didn't see her body, it's as if my brain can't process it. It will haunt me for the rest of my days.\"\n\nIt would be seven weeks before a police investigation was launched.\n\nIt came after the Transport Salaried Staffs' Association (TSSA) issued a press release on 12 May stating that Belly and a colleague had been assaulted.\n\nReports that a ticket officer had died of coronavirus after being spat at while on duty made newspaper headlines.\n\nBritish Transport Police (BTP) opened an investigation, and on 13 May, Boris Johnson mentioned Belly's death in Parliament. \"The fact that she was abused for doing her job [was] utterly appalling,\" he said.\n\nBTP traced and interviewed a 57-year-old man through ticket sales records at Victoria station. He denied spitting and saying he had the virus. He said he had coughed, but not on purpose.\n\nAfter an investigation lasting 19 days, the police concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone with a crime.\n\nLusamba says this came as a shock. \"It was a hard pill to swallow, especially after such a short investigation.\"\n\nThe police decision coincided with the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, while in police custody. Global outrage followed and anti-racism protests that had swept across cities in the US were heading to the UK. Belly's death was caught up in the aftermath.\n\nAgnes at the 'Justice for Belly' rally\n\n\"Black lives matter. Belly's life mattered,\" protestors shouted at a march in London on 3 June.\n\nNaomi Omokhua, 21, helped to organise a \"Justice for Belly\" rally. \"We see people like Belly every day when we're going through Victoria station,\" she says. \"She's a black woman, a normal black woman just doing her job.\"\n\nLusamba attended with Ingrid and Agnes. \"We laughed and cried,\" he says. \"We felt pain and joy. I'll never forget that day.\"\n\nIn the wake of the protests, on 5 June, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was asked by the British Transport Police to review the case.\n\nAnd as that inquiry opened, so did mine for BBC Panorama.\n\nWhat happened at Victoria station has been the subject of a police investigation and an internal inquiry carried out by GTR. The facts remain bitterly contested, so I've been back over some of the evidence and taken expert opinion from doctors, scientists and lawyers.\n\nFirst, I wanted to know why it took so long for the police to investigate. It's possible that if they had been alerted sooner, they may have been able to secure more evidence.\n\nMotolani has left Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) and begun a claim for constructive dismissal. In her police statement of 13 May, she says she reported the incident to her managers immediately, asking for the police to be called.\n\nLusamba says Belly told him the man had said he had coronavirus and was going to infect them and that she had reported the incident to a supervisor. Motolani told the BBC she had described what happened as an \"assault\". She says she did not tell GTR on the day that the man said \"I have the virus\" but says Belly did.\n\n\"I felt the assault was even more serious,\" Motolani explains. \"Belly felt more scared [of the word Covid] because she had respiratory problems.\"\n\nA GTR spokesperson told the BBC that while a \"coughing incident\" had been logged on 21 March, a spitting incident had not and that's why the police hadn't been called.\n\nOn 8 April, Belly's union wrote to GTR saying there was evidence that a passenger had deliberately coughed in Belly's face. GTR says it started its own investigation. The company did not call the police. An allegation of deliberate coughing can be enough for the police to consider opening an assault investigation.\n\nWhen BTP was eventually called, the man said he'd had an antibody test - which checks whether someone has previously been exposed to the virus - and that he had tested negative. Police said the man had been tested on 25 March \"as part of his occupation\" and the result shared with them. Detectives concluded, therefore, that the incident had not led to Belly contracting Covid-19.\n\nI spoke to a number of scientists about antibody tests. They said not all commercially available antibody tests back in March were considered reliable. The NHS didn't start offering antibody tests to all staff until May.\n\n\"The quality of the tests available in March were really no better than tossing a coin,\" says Alex Richter, a Professor of Clinical Immunology at the University of Birmingham, who had studied some of the early tests back then.\n\nA negative result did not necessarily mean there had been no infection.\n\nJon Deeks, Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Birmingham, believes the police made a mistake in their interpretation of this part of the evidence.\n\nIn a statement, BTP told the BBC: \"While the man was able to share a negative antibody test with officers, substantiated by his GP, it is important to be clear that this was not the basis of our conclusion. The test did not change the fact there was insufficient evidence to substantiate any criminal offences taking place.\"\n\nOne of the problems with the case is that CCTV evidence was not sufficiently clear to show whether or not a crime had taken place. There are hundreds of security cameras at Victoria station but Network Rail, which operates them, told the BBC that only one captured footage of the incident.\n\nThe footage has not been released, but I've spoken to a number of people who have seen it. I've also listened to a covert audio recording of a meeting in which police officers showed it to Lusamba and two of his friends.\n\nThey say it shows a man approaching close to Belly, and her retreating, before running away.\n\n\"We're in no doubt that something has happened there,\" the police officer tells Lusamba. \"If nothing had happened, they would have stayed there,\" the officer continues. \"When he comes back it's clear that's when something happens.\"\n\nCCTV footage at the station is routinely only stored for around 28 days, and the footage from 21 March had been wiped by the time the police started their investigation.\n\nBut officers were told that six minutes had been saved at the request of GTR. The BBC has learnt that GTR asked for footage on 9 April as part of its own investigation and received a copy the following day.\n\nThe police say that even after they had had the footage enhanced, it was still not clear enough to show whether a crime had been committed.\n\nBelly Mujinga suffered from a severe form of sarcoidosis, a rare inflammatory condition that causes small patches of red and swollen tissues to develop in the body's organs.\n\n\"We were dealing with people from all around the world,\" Motolani said. \"She was scared of catching the flu, then imagine this happening.\"\n\nThe company told the BBC that on 13 March, local managers had issued a staff questionnaire to identify any health conditions that might restrict their ability to work in public facing areas. But said Belly had only recorded \"blood pressure\" on her form. According to GTR she had asked Occupational Health to keep her condition confidential.\n\nIn its internal investigation report after her death, the company said that her managers were aware she had some health conditions that meant Belly had regular medical check-ups but \"did not know the exact details and nature of these\".\n\nBut in a different version of the report, which had been shared with Belly's union and seen by the BBC, it suggested they may have known more.\n\n\"Managers at the station were aware that Mrs Mujinga had undergone surgery on her throat some years previously and that she had regular check-ups in relation to this,\" it said.\n\n\"I think it arouses a degree of disquiet in me because here, there's such a contrast between those versions,\" says Martin Forde QC.\n\nGTR told the BBC that Belly's sarcoidosis would have been on the records of its in-house medical team, but said it was not at that time on the government's list of high-risk conditions.\n\nBelly was taking immunosuppressants for her sarcoidosis. On the day of the incident itself, the government was issuing guidance for people taking immunosuppressants, saying that they should shield.\n\nBarrister Elaine Banton said she would have expected more collaboration between the occupational health team and managers to identify vulnerable staff.\n\n\"It would help them to determine which employees should not be in front-facing, key worker roles, but be placed out of harm's way.\"\n\nA GTR spokesperson says had sarcoidosis been on the government's shielding list at the time of the incident, it would have told Belly to shield as it did with nearly 400 colleagues.\n\nBut was there a need for Belly to be on the concourse that day? Passenger numbers were down.\n\n\"She left home thinking she was going to be working in the ticket office,\" Lusamba said. \"When she arrived, her supervisor told her that she must work outside.\"\n\nRotas from the 21 March, seen by the BBC, confirm that Belly was due to work in the ticket office. Motolani says she felt safer there.\n\nGTR says all ticket office staff at Victoria undertake concourse duties as part of their normal ticket selling and customer assistance role.\n\nBelly loved her job, but I've discovered she wasn't always happy at work.\n\nEight weeks before she died, she'd raised a grievance against GTR, claiming discrimination and victimisation.\n\nIn 2019, Belly had been suspended for six weeks after leaving her cash bag on a supervisor's desk rather than handing it into the cashier.\n\n\"She was devastated,\" recalls Lusamba. \"That really broke her.\" He says GTR conducted an investigation to see whether money was missing but they didn't find anything.\n\nGTR said Belly had a responsible cash handling role, that she was suspended on full pay and later returned to work.\n\nHowever, Belly claimed a white colleague who had made a similar mistake had not faced the same sanction.\n\nIn her grievance letter she wrote, \"The whole process has left me feeling stressed, ill, victimised and terrified that I might lose my job.\"\n\nLusamba says Belly was the \"centre of his universe\", and he believed that fate had brought them together. It later turned out that he had been living very near to one of Belly's close friends in Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, where he grew up.\n\nHe and Belly met at a church they both attended after she moved to London in 2001. \"It was love at first sight,\" he says.\n\nTheir daughter Ingrid turned 12 and returned to school in September. Only this time it was her dad buying her ice-cream, and gently laying out her school uniform on her bed.\n\nLusamba says all he wants to do is tell her what really happened to her mum.\n\nWe may never know what really happened on the concourse of Victoria Station that day. Or whether Belly caught coronavirus then.\n\nFollowing its review, the CPS agreed with the police that in: \"The absence of any persuasive medical or forensic evidence, together with inconclusive CCTV footage and inconsistent witness accounts, no criminal charges could be considered.\"\n\nBut for Lusamba, many questions remain unanswered.\n\nBarristers spoken to by the BBC believe an inquest into Belly's death could help her family in their search for truth. \"I feel there are sufficient doubts and conflicts around the facts of this case to justify an investigation,\" says Martin Forde, QC.\n\nLusamba says he will keep on fighting. \"May she rest wherever she is, but it's really hard.\"", "Four ferry firms have landed government contracts worth a total of £77.6m to provide post-Brexit freight capacity.\n\nBrittany Ferries, DFDS, P&O Ferries and Stena Line will have the job of ensuring medical supplies and other vital goods continue to get to the UK.\n\nThe government says it wants a smooth flow of freight \"whatever the outcome of negotiations with the EU\",\n\nThe contracts will be in place for up to six months after the Brexit transition period ends on 31 December.\n\nFreight operators have warned about potential delays to cross-Channel trade at major ports such as Dover and Folkestone from 1 January.\n\nThe government says it \"continues to work with key local stakeholders and industry to prepare for the end of the transition period\".\n\nThe additional capacity will be on quieter ferry routes between mainland Europe and UK ports in Felixstowe, Harwich, Hull, Newhaven, Poole, Portsmouth, Teesport and Tilbury.\n\nIn 2018, the government awarded contracts worth a total of £87m to ferry companies for similar contracts, which were not needed in the end because Brexit was postponed.\n\nThe then Transport Secretary Chris Grayling faced calls to quit after it emerged one of the contracts, worth £13.8m, had gone to Seaborne Freight, a company which had never run a ferry service and had no trading history. Seaborne Freight recently went bust.\n\nNo money was paid to Seaborne Freight - but the Department for Transport paid Eurotunnel £33m in an out-of-court settlement after the firm claimed it had been unfairly overlooked for the work and that the contracts had been awarded in a \"secretive\" way.\n\nThe government said the latest ferry contracts have been awarded from a shortlist of \"experienced freight operators\" entering bids.\n\nChris Grayling's successor, Grant Shapps, said: \"As the transition period comes to an end, we are putting the necessary measures in place to safeguard the smooth and successful flow of freight.\n\n\"Securing these contracts ensures that irrespective of the outcome of the negotiations, life-saving medical supplies and other critical goods can continue to enter the UK from the moment we leave the EU.\"\n\nBut Best for Britain, which campaigned against Brexit, questioned the wisdom of relying on ferry operators to secure essential medical supplies.\n\nThe campaign group's chief executive Naomi Smith said: \"Supply chains are already experiencing unprecedented levels of disruption due to Covid and a no-deal Brexit could create huge new logistical problems for medicine suppliers and those relying on them, particularly given how late these arrangements have been made.\n\n\"With time and money now in very short supply, the government would do well to channel its energy into securing an agreement with the EU to prevent the possibility of shortages in the new year.\"", "The news comes as bars and pubs in Liverpool that do not serve meals prepare to close from Wednesday\n\nThe government's scientific advisers called for a short lockdown in England to halt the spread of Covid-19 last month, newly released documents show.\n\nThe experts said an immediate \"circuit breaker\" was the best way to control cases, at a meeting on 21 September.\n\nCommunities Secretary Robert Jenrick insisted the government had taken \"robust action\" that \"balanced\" the impact on the economy.\n\nBut Labour has described the documents as \"alarming\".\n\nIt comes as the Liverpool region prepares to enter a \"very high\" Covid alert level from Wednesday, the highest of a new three-tier system for coronavirus restrictions in England.\n\nEvery area will be classified as being on medium, high or very high alert under the system. It is not clear what the specific criteria is for each alert level.\n\nMost parts of England are the lowest tier, but Essex has asked to be moved to \"high\" level restrictions.\n\nShielding is not being reintroduced in England yet, but people who were on the list will receive a letter with updated advice to avoid getting Covid.\n\nMeanwhile, the latest Office for National Statistics figures showed there were 343 deaths involving coronavirus registered in the week to 2 October - a figure that has been doubling every fortnight over the last month.\n\nAt a press conference on Monday evening, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the alert system for England could succeed in driving cases down if it was implemented \"very effectively\", and he rejected the \"extreme route\" of a full nationwide lockdown \"right now\".\n\nBut at the same briefing, England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, voiced concerns over the impact of the new rules, saying he was not confident the \"base measures\" in the highest tier \"would be enough to get on top of\" the virus.\n\n\"That is why there's a lot of flexibility for local authorities [...] to do significantly more,\" he said.\n\nReleased shortly after Monday's press conference, minutes from the meeting of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) - which feeds into UK government decision-making - stated the advisers had called for the immediate introduction of a short national lockdown three weeks ago.\n\nThe papers also showed the scientists suggested:\n\nOf all the measures proposed by the advisory group, just one - advising those who can work from home to do so - was implemented by the government at the time.\n\nIn the documents, Sage warned that \"not acting now to reduce cases will result in a very large epidemic with catastrophic consequences\".\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nSpeaking to BBC Breakfast, Mr Jenrick said the government had introduced measures such as the rule of six at the time, and stressed the Sage papers had contributed to the measures the PM announced on Monday.\n\nHe said they had taken \"balanced judgements\" that weighed up the effect on the economy and \"all the other unintended consequences\" of measures, such as the impact on mental health and delayed surgeries.\n\nOn the new three-tiered system, he said: \"We are now able to have a very clear and consistent framework across the whole country, so people will be able to understand approximately what the rate of infections is in their own area and what the rules are accordingly.\"\n\nHe later told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that there were no plans for other parts of the country to go into the highest tier this week, but plans would be \"kept under review\".\n\nLabour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth told BBC Breakfast he was \"alarmed\" by the Sage papers, and called for ministers to explain why the advice was \"rejected\".\n\nHe also insisted the government was going to have to go further than the latest measures, saying things were getting \"really serious\" as winter approaches.\n\nCases are increasing across the whole of the country and the number of people in hospital is now higher than before the full lockdown in March. We are at a critical stage in the epidemic.\n\nIt is at this moment the gulf between the official scientific advice and the decisions made by government has been laid bare.\n\nIt is the case that \"advisers advise and ministers decide\". When considering new measures to stop Covid, government must also take into account the harms they cause to our health and the economy.\n\nBut there is some concern the government is doing too little, too late.\n\nAnd that we can either choose the terms for controlling the virus now, or wait and the virus will force our hand as it did with lockdown in March.\n\nThe newly released Sage documents also showed advisers said NHS Test and Trace was only having a \"marginal impact\" and this would \"likely decline further\" unless the system expanded to keep up with the rise in cases and people were given support to enable them to self-isolate.\n\nA separate document from 17 September stated that Sage believed curfews in bars, pubs, cafes and restaurants were also \"likely to have a marginal impact\".\n\nA 22:00 closing time was introduced for all hospitality venues in England from 24 September.\n\nA Sage document from 21 September warned that \"single interventions by themselves are unlikely to be able to bring the R below one\" and both local and national measures are needed.\n\nHowever, a document examining measures including a two to three week \"circuit-breaker\" - a short period of tightened restrictions - said this step, if it was \"as strict and well-adhered to as the restrictions in late May\", could \"put the epidemic back by approximately 28 days or more\".\n\n\"Multiple circuit-breaks might be necessary to maintain low levels of incidence,\" it added.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson explains a three-tiered level of rules to fight the coronavirus pandemic in England.\n\nMost areas in England are in the medium alert level - meaning current restrictions continue, including the 10pm hospitality curfew and the rule of six.\n\nAreas already under additional local restrictions are automatically in the high alert level - meaning bans on household mixing indoors are extended to include hospitality venues.\n\nThe city of Nottingham, which has the highest rate in the country, will start in this category alongside the rest of Nottinghamshire, East and West Cheshire and a small area of High Peak, as well as Greater Manchester, parts of South Yorkshire, and north-east England. Around 4.4 million people will be in high alert areas.\n\nThe Liverpool City Region - home to 1.5 million people - becomes the first area to enter the very high alert level, which - at a minimum - sees pubs and bars close if they do not serve \"substantial meals\", almost all household contacts banned and advice against travel. The rule of six will continue to apply in outdoor public spaces such as parks.\n\nAreas in the highest tier are able to impose further restrictions, and in the Liverpool City Region this will mean the closure of betting shops, gyms, leisure centres and casinos.\n\nMr Johnson said he had agreed some of the measures with the region's Labour Mayor Steve Rotheram - but Mr Rotheram said that was \"totally false\" and that the new measures had been \"dictated to us by the government\".\n\nThe government has issued details of the full restrictions for each alert level.\n\nMeanwhile, the Scottish government is drawing up its own three-tier framework of restrictions to be implemented later this month.\n\nIn Wales, a second national lockdown is being considered and First Minister Mark Drakeford has threatened a travel ban on people from English Covid hotspots if the prime minister does not impose his own.\n\nMinisters in Northern Ireland's devolved government are meeting later to decide on further coronavirus restrictions.\n\nA further 13,972 confirmed coronavirus cases were reported across the UK on Monday, with 50 more deaths within 28 days of a positive test recorded.", "Jesse Katayama was originally due to visit Machu Picchu in March\n\nPeru has opened the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu for a single Japanese tourist who had waited almost seven months to visit the world heritage site.\n\nJesse Katayama was due to visit Machu Picchu in March but it closed because of coronavirus.\n\nCulture Minister Alejandro Neyra said Mr Katayama was granted access after submitting a special request.\n\nThe ancient Inca citadel - Peru's top tourist attraction - is expected to re-open at reduced capacity next month.\n\nNo exact date has been given.\n\nMr Katayama planned to spend only a few days in Peru, but became stranded in the town of Aguas Calientes, near Machu Picchu, in mid-March because of coronavirus travel regulations.\n\n\"He had come to Peru with the dream of being able to enter,\" Mr Neyra said in a virtual press conference on Monday.\n\nMachu Picchu has been closed to tourists since March\n\nMr Katayama was permitted to enter the ruins on Saturday with the head of the park \"so that he can do this before returning to his country\", Mr Neyra said.\n\nIn a video recorded on top of Machu Picchu mountain, the tourist celebrated the long-awaited trip.\n\n\"This tour is truly amazing, thank you,\" said Mr Katayama.\n\nPeru has reported more than 849,000 coronavirus cases and 33,000 deaths since the pandemic began, according to data collated by Johns Hopkins University.", "Last updated on .From the section Gymnastics\n\nBritish Gymnastics chief executive Jane Allen is to retire in December, despite an ongoing investigation into allegations of mistreatment of gymnasts at all levels of the sport.\n\nAllen told BBC Sport a plan was put together in March for her to retire after the 2020 Olympics, which were postponed because of coronavirus.\n\nShe said it is \"quite upsetting\" for her to leave with the sport in turmoil, but believes it is \"appropriate\" to allow a new CEO to \"move the sport forward\" after a decade in charge.\n\nSpeaking exclusively to BBC sports editor Dan Roan, Allen said: \"This is my decision. It's part of my retirement plan. I've had the support of the board, and nobody else has played a hand in this decision.\"\n\nAllen, previously the CEO of Gymnastics Australia for 13 years, added: \"While these last three months have been devastating to me, I don't believe that that should absolutely define the last 10 years.\"\n\nMike Darcey, chair of British Gymnastics, said: \"The whole board would like to thank Jane for her dedicated service to the sport.\n\n\"We had originally agreed with Jane that she would retire following the Tokyo Olympic Games in the summer of 2020, but that was extended to help British Gymnastics through the initial impact of coronavirus and then the subsequent worrying news about abuse claims.\n\n\"Prior to her departure, Jane will be working with our legal team on our initial submission to the Whyte review.\"\n\nReacting to the news of her retirement, Olympic medallist Nile Wilson posted a video on Instagram calling it \"a great day for the sport\".\n\nAnd 2012 Olympian Hannah Whelan said it was a \"good start for her to step down but far more change is needed\".\n\nWhat is the background?\n\nSince July, BBC Sport has revealed a series of stories of former and current gymnasts alleging mistreatment at all levels of the sport - including Olympic medal-winning gymnasts Amy Tinkler and Wilson, plus Olympians Becky and Ellie Downie.\n\nAn independent review, led by Anne Whyte QC and co-commissioned by Sport England and UK Sport, is ongoing, with its call for evidence closing last Friday.\n\nA support helpline set up for gymnasts by the British Athletes Commission and the NSPCC received more than 120 calls in its first five weeks.\n\nAsked if she should have waited for the outcome of the Whyte Review to be published before retiring, Allen - who was appointed in 2010 - said: \"I've thought about that. But as this has been my plan to retire in December, I think that it's appropriate that I keep that plan.\n\n\"I think that it will be a good opportunity for a new CEO to come in and help with the outcomes of the Whyte Review and move the sport forward.\"\n\nShe added: \"I feel that during the 10 years of my tenure as CEO that I have worked hard, I have put everything I can into the sport, and with a great team behind me, I think we've achieved a great deal.\"\n\nBut she admitted the organisation had \"fallen short\" in protecting its athletes, adding \"there are things that as CEO, I take full responsibility for\".\n\nShe said the governing body needed to look at the \"barriers\" that stop athletes from speaking out \"when and where allegations of abuse occur\", as well as helping athletes through the transition of leaving the sport.\n\n\"I would apologise to any athlete who feels that at any time that any of our actions have hurt them in any way,\" she said.\n\n\"I feel devastated by what they've gone through. They've been very brave to stand up and speak out.\n\n\"They've found their voice, I think the athletes are probably the best people that could speak out on these matters. I think them speaking up will make things better for the next generation.\n\n\"But I also implore them to think about bringing together the sport with the coaches, because we have some terrific coaches in the sport, both at the community level and at high-performance level, and they're so important to the sport as well.\n\n\"So I really urge athletes and coaches to come together to really improve on these cultural issues that we have in gymnastics.\"\n\nAfter a series of athlete welfare scandals in other British sports in recent years, Allen said the time had come for an independent process to be established to deal with complaints from athletes.\n\n\"It's just become too hard for sport\" she said. \"We represent both athletes and coaches. And when we're dealing with compliance and safeguarding issues there's always somebody that's aggrieved out of that process. And where do they go? It's just too hard. There needs to be a sports ombudsman.\"\n• 7 July - Former gymnast Nicole Pavier is one of several British gymnasts to speak to BBC Sport about what they called a \"culture of fear\" within the \"mentally and emotionally abusive\" sport of gymnastics\n• 7 July - British Gymnastics announces an independent review will take place.\n• 9 July say abusive behaviour in gymnastics training became \"ingrained\" and \"completely normalised\".\n• 10 July - British Gymnastics boss Jane Allen says she is following allegations of abuse within the sport.\n• 14 July to British Gymnastics in December 2019 about her \"experiences as a club and elite gymnast\".\n• 16 July steps away from the independent review to \"remove any doubt\" over the \"integrity or independence\" of the process.\n• 20 July - The British Athletes Commission and NSPCC join forces to\n• 7 August temporarily stands down from her role with UK Sport\n• 7 August . She said she was \"fully cooperating\" with the investigation, adding gymnasts' welfare is her \"absolute priority\".\n• 10 August , saying athletes are \"treated like pieces of meat\".\n• 24 August - Two gymnasts make allegations of mistreatment by\n• 25 August while an investigation into claims about her conduct takes place. She said she \"refuted\" claims made against her.\n• 26 August . They say the \"welfare and wellbeing\" of their gymnasts was \"paramount at all times\".\n• 16 September failing to give an explanation as to why her formal complaint was dismissed\n• 17 September - Tinkler says she has \"no confidence\" in British Gymnastics' integrity unit's \"ability to be honest and moral\"\n• 30 September . British Gymnastics say the emails were \"very worrying\".\n• 13 October - Allen announces she will retire in December.\n\nDan Roan: Some might say you leave BG in a state of disrepute. Is it broken beyond repair?\n\nJane Allen: Absolutely not. It's a fabulous organisation, I want the members to know and I want the public to know, that it's a very strong organisation with dedicated staff, highly skilled staff, all working for the good of the sport.\n\nDR: You say it's your decision to leave, but you must accept that after everything that has happened, after so many allegations, that your leadership has become toxic? There was no way you could stay?\n\nJA: I don't agree with that. I led the organisation for 10 years and retirement plans were already in place. It's time, at 65 years of age and after 10 years of working hard for British Gymnastics for me to step aside now and to allow the next generation to take over.\n\nDR: You haven't been pushed? You haven't been sacked?\n\nDR: You're not jumping before you are pushed?\n\nIn July, Olympic floor bronze medallist Tinkler revealed she had made a formal complaint to British Gymnastics in December 2019 about her \"experiences as a club and elite gymnast\".\n\nHer complaint was dismissed in August, for which she say the governing body failed to give an explanation.\n\nIn September, she released a series of emails that showed national coach Colin Still refer to her as \"heavy\" and saying he was relieved she wasn't \"turning into a fat dwarf\" after she had taken a break from the sport following the Rio Olympics in 2016.\n\nBritish Gymnastics said the emails were \"very worrying\".\n\n\"Amy is an Olympic medallist, she has a special place in British gymnastics history,\" said Allen. \"I was absolutely floored by some of the allegations that came through.\n\n\"Last week, there were some emails that came out that I was absolutely shocked by and immediately I sent Amy an apology. It was unacceptable and unprofessional.\"\n\nAllen admitted British Gymnastics \"could have done more\" for Tinkler after the Olympics, and added that if an investigation into her complaint finds reason for an apology, \"it will be given\".", "Gal Gadot played Wonder Woman in the 2017 Hollywood film\n\nPlans for a new movie about Cleopatra have sparked a controversy before filming has even started.\n\nThe role of the famed ancient Egyptian ruler is to be played by Israeli actress Gal Gadot, best known for her Hollywood depictions of Wonder Woman.\n\nThe announcement has led to a row on social media with some alleging \"cultural whitewashing\", where white actors portray people of colour.\n\nSome have said the role should instead go to an Arab or African actress.\n\nCleopatra was descended from an Ancient Greek family of rulers - the Ptolemy dynasty. She was born in Egypt in 69BC and ruled the Nile kingdom when it was a client state of Rome.\n\nGadot herself reportedly commissioned the film and will co-produce it.\n\nThe row reflects a growing debate in Hollywood over casting and identity, and whether actors should play characters of different ethnicities to themselves.\n\nWriter on Africa, James Hall, said he thought the filmmakers should find an African actress, of any race.\n\nUS writer Morgan Jerkins tweeted that Cleopatra should be played by someone \"darker than a brown paper bag\" as that would be more \"historically accurate\".\n\n\"Gal Gadot is a wonderful actress, but there is an entire pool of North African Actresses to pick from. Stop whitewashing my history!\" posted another user..\n\nOther social media users argued that Cleopatra was more Greek or Macedonian than Arab or African.\n\nThe row over Gal Gadot as Cleopatra draws on contemporary arguments over national culture, religion and gender politics.\n\nBut the ancient Middle East wouldn't conform to many of our modern views of identity.\n\nCleopatra was on the throne well before Christianity, for example, and centuries ahead of the Arab conquests of North Africa - she was the last of the Ptolemaic rulers; born in Egypt, descended from Ancient Greeks and dominated by Rome.\n\nBut there are plenty more problems with popular depictions of the ancient Nile Queen - often cast as a powerful seductress replete with a sensual, oriental mystique.\n\nThat image - including Elizabeth Taylor's famous portrayal - is likely a myth handed down to us by Latin love poets years after Cleopatra's death.\n\nThe thousands of depictions of her through the ages are \"based on a perilous series of deductions from fragmentary or flagrantly unreliable evidence\" according to the British historian Mary Beard.\n\nSo little is really known, she adds, that Cleopatra should appear to us today as \"the queen without a face\".\n\nStatues of Cleopatra have been preserved but historians say we cannot be sure exactly how she looked\n\nIsraeli commentators suggested some criticism was based in anti-Semitism.\n\nThe Jerusalem Post journalist Seth Frantzman said it made no sense to exclude Jews from playing roles from the Middle East, \"when Jews are primarily a people from the Middle East either with distant or recent roots.\n\nYou might also be interested in:\n\n\"The idea that casting should exclude Jews is shameful and shows a lack of education for the commentators,\" he said.\n\nIsrael's embassy in Washington tweeted: \"One icon playing another! Excited for this new take on Cleopatra!\"\n\nGal Gadot's spokesperson declined to comment on the row.", "A detective sent \"flirtatious\" messages to a victim of attempted rape, a misconduct panel heard.\n\nDet Sgt Jonathan Pearce could be dismissed by Kent Police over the Facebook messages, which included a topless photograph.\n\nThe pair had met online and started messaging before she told him of the attempted rape in October 2019, the panel heard.\n\nHe denies trying to begin a sexual or emotional relationship with the woman.\n\nHours after telling Det Sgt Pearce about the attempted assault, she said to him \"you want me\", the panel heard.\n\nHe replied: \"Maybe a little bit.\"\n\nIn other messages he told the woman that if he were \"20 years younger\" he would have asked her out, and sent her a topless photograph including his head and shoulders.\n\nDavid Mesling, setting out the allegations, said while \"knowing or believing [the woman] to be a vulnerable person\" Det Sgt Pearce had \"continued to attempt to enter into a sexual or emotional relationship with her\".\n\nThe officer, in his 40s, said the messages were \"light-hearted banter, never anything serious\".\n\nThe messages were an attempt to \"make her feel better about herself\" and he wanted to bring the alleged perpetrator to justice, Det Sgt Pearce said.\n\nHe is accused of a \"serious failure\" to secure evidence, after deleting their online exchange.\n\nMr Mesling said the detective had given a \"changing account\" of how the messages were deleted.\n\nDet Sgt Pearce told the panel it was \"purely accidental\" and he had meant to archive them.\n\n\"I deleted them because I was stupid and pressed the wrong button,\" he added.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Mitchells & Butlers, the pubs and restaurants group, has begun redundancy consultations with a number of staff as it struggles with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nM&B, whose chains include Harvester and All Bar One, has about 1,700 pubs and restaurants and 44,000 employees.\n\nIt has not yet disclosed how many jobs are at risk.\n\nA spokesperson for the company described it as \"a difficult and regrettable decision\".\n\nM&B would \"seek to redeploy affected staff wherever possible\", the spokesperson added.\n\n\"Our industry is operating in exceptionally challenging and uncertain circumstances.\n\n\"While we have worked incredibly hard to make sites Covid-19 secure and keep staff and customers safe, we are facing significant difficulties from the recently introduced 10pm curfew for pubs, bars and restaurants, new enforced closures and tapering government support that doesn't go far enough.\"\n\nM&B's spokesperson also called for further government support for the hospitality sector.\n\n\"With trading restrictions and uncertainty likely to continue for the foreseeable future, we strongly urge the government to step up the level of support it is offering to an industry which has been repeatedly singled out and taken the full brunt of restrictions.\"\n\nOther well-known brands in the M&B stable include Toby Carvery and O'Neill's.\n\nThe move comes after warnings by the hospitality industry that the new coronavirus restrictions will come as a huge blow to bars and restaurants across much of England.\n\nBars and pubs in Liverpool have been instructed to close from Wednesday and will receive financial support.\n\nBut venues in \"tier 2\" areas, including large parts of the North and Midlands, will lose custom, with households no longer allowed to mix indoors.\n\nTrade body the Night Time Industries Association is pressing for a judicial review of the restrictions.\n\nAre you a Mitchells and Butler employee? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Cancer patients need to take extra care\n\nShielding is not being reintroduced in England, despite rising levels of coronavirus across most of the nation.\n\nGovernment advisers say that, unlike in March, there are other protective measures in place - such as the rule of six and the wearing of face coverings in shops - to help reduce the spread.\n\nBut people should take precautions to avoid getting Covid.\n\nThose who were on the shielding list will receive a letter about the advice with tips on how they should do this.\n\nCharities said the recommendations were not enough on their own, without financial and mental health support for the most vulnerable.\n\nThe advice is tailored according to the local Covid alert level the person lives in, using the new three-tier system:\n\nShielding advice will not automatically be triggered by an area going into tier three.\n\nBut it may be reintroduced in the future in hotspot areas in exceptional circumstances.\n\nIf that happens, people at high risk would again be advised to stay at home, not go to work or school and limit social interactions to their own household and support bubble.\n\nThe aim is to strike a balance - protecting health but not being too stringent with measures that can take a toll on people's wellbeing.\n\nDeputy Chief Medical Officer for England Dr Jenny Harries said: \"Whilst advisory, I would urge all those affected to follow the guidance wherever they can and to continue to access health services for their medical conditions.\n\n\"We will continue to monitor the evidence closely and fine-tune this approach to make sure everyone in this group is clear about the safest way to go about their daily lives, particularly over the coming winter months.\"\n\nShielding is paused in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland too, and the devolved nations are expected to take similar approaches to England.\n\nDr Stephen Griffin from the University of Leeds, said shielding should not be seen as a long term strategy: \"The psychological, societal and sometimes physical cost of the process was, and is, not to be underestimated.\"\n\nGemma Peters, chief executive of Blood Cancer UK, said: \"The Government needs to urgently revise this guidance and give financial support to people with blood cancer who cannot work from home.\n\n\"This guidance also fails to offer specific mental health support. The mental health toll of the pandemic on people who have been shielding has been great, and so it is extremely disappointing that, six months on, there is no extra mental health support for people who are vulnerable to the coronavirus.\"\n\nThe MS Society said vulnerable people deserved to know they will be supported through the crisis.\n• None I was shielding, what should I do from 19 July?\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Bars and restaurants are hoping the government will provide support Image caption: Bars and restaurants are hoping the government will provide support\n\nNew targeted restrictions designed to curb the rapidly increasing infection rates are expected to be introduced in the Netherlands this evening.\n\nThe rules appear to be focused on limiting social contacts, concentrating on places like bars and restaurants while schools and vital professions will remain virtually unaffected.\n\nExperts at the Dutch Outbreak Management Team (OMT), who help to shape the Dutch government's approach to tackling Covid-19, consider the hospitality industry a hub where many infections still occur, especially among young people.\n\nIn an effort to stop house parties, shops are likely to be banned from selling alcohol after 20:00. Ordering drinks for delivery online is expected to be off limits too. This goes beyond the measures put in place during the first wave.\n\nLimits will probably be placed on the number of visitors you can have at home, with a maximum of four people, both inside and outdoors.\n\nAdult team sports are expected to be prohibited. Youth and professional games can apparently continue.\n\nTraveling by public transport will be restricted to essential journeys. Only those considered to be working in the vital professions should leave home for work. Everyone else will be told to work from home.\n\nThe Netherlands recorded 6,854 new infections in the 24 hours to Monday morning. Approximately 1,298 patients are being treated in hospital, 252 in intensive care.\n\nPrime Minister Mark Rutte is scheduled to hold a press conference at 19:00 (18:00 BST) and it is anticipated that the more stringent measures will come into effect from Wednesday.\n\nHospitality industry groups have said it could prove a \"fatal blow\" for some restaurants. But bar and cafe owners I've been speaking to in The Hague are still holding their breath and hoping the total closures will come with compensation from the state that will cushion the blow.", "Klarna was launched in the UK in 2014\n\nThe Information Commissioner's Office said it will make enquiries into Klarna after scores of angry people questioned why it had their details despite never doing business with the payments firm.\n\nThe data protection watchdog said numerous people had made it aware of a marketing email Klarna had sent out.\n\nIt was followed by a message the email had been sent in error, and they had not been added to a marketing database.\n\nBut recipients asked how the firm had their email address in the first place.\n\nOne Twitter user, vlogger Christine Armstrong, tweeted: \"Now why would Klarna have 'accidentally' sent me their newsletter when I have never used their services. Who sold them my email?\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Christine Armstrong This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe company apologised and in a blog said: \"The email was sent to Klarna consumers who have recently used one of Klarna's products or services including Klarna's checkout technology.\"\n\nThe Swedish financial services group provides checkout technology for a large number of retailers such as Asos, TopShop and online beauty store Feelunique.\n\nCustomers can either choose to pay for their goods in 30 days via Klarna. Or they can pay with a credit or debit card which is processed by Klarna's software on behalf of the retailer.\n\nThe company said: \"Klarna's checkout technology is a product some retailers use to process payments on their website. This means that Klarna processes all credit and debit card transactions for these retailers.\"\n\nAn ICO spokesperson told the BBC: \"Businesses should only contact individuals for electronic marketing purposes where consent has been provided or, in limited circumstances, where they have an existing relationship with a customer.\n\n\"Some members of the public have made us aware of an email sent by Klarna and we will be making enquiries.\"\n\nA number of people on Twitter reported that they had never used Klarna products at all.\n\nNicole Krystal Crentsil, chief executive of platform Black Girl Fest, tweeted: \"Hmmm... how & why do you have access to my email address? I know Klarna is used by some online shops I shopped from, but I'm 100% sure I've never used it.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Nicole Krystal Crentsil This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nBut a spokesperson for Klarna said: \"Whenever anyone uses Klarna's checkout technology they agree to the terms and conditions and our privacy notice, which allows Klarna to promote its products and services to them.\"\n\nHe said: \"Klarna's marketing team has access to these emails,\" however: \"Consumers normally do not receive newsletters unless they have opted in or downloaded our app.\"\n\nHe said: \"We are currently investigating how this happened, and will take all necessary action to ensure nothing like this can happen again in the future.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Keir Starmer says a two to three week “circuit break” in England will require “significant sacrifices”\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has called for a short lockdown or \"circuit-breaker\" in England of two to three weeks to bring the rising rate of coronavirus under control.\n\nHe said measures were not working and another course was needed to prevent a \"sleepwalk into... a bleak winter\".\n\nHis comments come after documents revealed government scientific advisers called for such action three weeks ago.\n\nAnother 143 people have died in the UK after testing positive for the virus.\n\nMPs have approved the legislation to write a new three-tier system for coronavirus restrictions in England into law - with every area of the country classified as being on medium, high or very high alert.\n\nSir Keir said his lockdown proposal would \"not mean schools closing\" but it should \"run across half-term to minimise disruption\".\n\nHowever, he said it would mean that \"all pubs, bars and restaurants would be closed\" and compensated \"so that no business loses out because of the sacrifices we all need to make\".\n\n\"The government has not got a credible plan to slow infections. It has lost control of the virus and it's no longer following scientific advice,\" Sir Keir said.\n\nHe suggested it would also provide a chance for the government to \"fix\" problems by handing over track and trace responsibilities to local authorities.\n\nDocuments detailing advice from scientists on the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) were released on Monday night. Their views and evidence feed into the government's decision making.\n\nSir Keir said his proposals were \"in line with Sage's recommendation\" for a circuit breaker to lower the reproduction number, or R value, of the virus - but acknowledged they would require significant sacrifices.\n\nMeanwhile, Wales' first minister has said he had asked Prime Minister Boris Johnson for a special Cobra meeting \"specifically to discuss the circuit-breaker idea\" earlier in the week - and repeated that call in a letter on Wednesday.\n\n\"I think it's an idea that will need further examination and needs to be shared in perspective between the four UK nations,\" Mark Drakeford added.\n\nMr Johnson has rejected Mr Drakeford's demand for a travel ban on people coming to Wales from England's virus hotspots.\n\nMinisters in Northern Ireland's devolved government have been warned that Covid-19 infection rates will keep rising if both schools and the hospitality sector remain open, the BBC has learned.\n\nThe Scottish government is to implement its own three-tier framework of restrictions later in October. In the meantime, pubs and restaurants in Scotland's central belt, including Edinburgh and Glasgow, were closed on Friday until 25 October as part of a package of short-term measures.\n\nThe daily figure of 143 deaths follows 50 deaths announced on Monday and was the highest daily total since the 164 deaths recorded on 10 June.\n\nThe latest government figures also show another 17,234 people have tested positive for Covid in the UK, compared with 13,792 cases the day before.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, Public Health England's medical director, said the rising number of deaths was \"hugely concerning\".\n\n\"We have seen cases increasing especially in older age groups which is leading to more hospital admissions. This is a stark reminder for us to follow the guidelines,\" she said.\n\nThe Labour leader's call has added to the volume of demand for extra caution - marking the end of the phase of what he used to describe as constructive opposition.\n\nSir Keir Starmer has been inching away from the broad front bench consensus on how to handle coronavirus for weeks.\n\nTo the frustration of some on his own side, rather than scream down the government's plans he has developed an attack on the government's ability to handle the situation and to act quickly enough.\n\nBut his call for a circuit-breaker means he believes the government has simply got it wrong.\n\nPolling suggests too that there is public desire for tougher action to prevent a terrible second wave. Some senior figures in government agree.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock earlier defended the new measures, telling MPs that Covid-19 posed \"a formidable threat\" until a vaccine can be found.\n\nBut he said the government makes \"decisions that are guided by the science, taking into account all of the different considerations\".\n\n\"Protecting our economy and protecting our health are not alternatives\", he added, but said action was required to \"protect lives and livelihoods\".\n\nSir Keir said Labour would not vote against the measures - even though they did not go far enough.\n\n\"We are not going to vote down a package of restrictions because restrictions are needed,\" he said.\n\nA senior government source branded Sir Keir a \"shameless opportunist\", saying he was \"playing political games in the middle of a global pandemic\".\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nThe Liverpool region will enter a \"very high\" Covid alert level from Wednesday, the highest of the new three-tier system for coronavirus restrictions in England.\n\nMost parts of England are on the lowest tier, but Essex has asked to be moved to \"high\" level restrictions.\n\nMeanwhile, London could be put in a stricter lockdown within days, Mayor Sadiq Khan has warned.\n\nThe prime minister's official spokesman said the government examines a \"wide range of different data\" and takes advice from health experts before deciding which tier applies to an area.\n\n\"We look not only at infection rates but also the rate of positive tests, admissions to hospitals, and admissions to intensive care units,\" they said.\n\nA committee of senior government health officials have been considering putting Greater Manchester and Lancashire into the highest level of restrictions and will hold a further meeting on Wednesday.\n\nAndy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, said the government \"risks confusing people\" in the region just days after it was put in the second highest tier, adding \"unfunded restrictions are unfair\".\n\nThe highest tier of restrictions are set to come into force in Liverpool on Wednesday\n\nThe 143 new deaths reported is clearly a concern.\n\nIt is the highest daily figure since early June and feels significant, even taking into account the impact of the delayed reporting at the weekend which often pushes up the figures on a Tuesday.\n\nBut to understand what is happening you have to rewind a month or so and look at cases.\n\nCases were rising rapidly then - it is what promoted the government's senior advisers to warn there could be 50,000 cases a day by mid-October.\n\nThat has not happened. Just over 17,000 were announced today.\n\nThe trajectory has not been as steep as it could have been.\n\nWe have seen a similar pattern happen with hospital admissions. They are rising, but over the last week the rate of increase has slowed just a little.\n\nDeaths will, sadly, continue to go up in the coming days and weeks, but if the patterns seen with cases and hospital admissions are sustained those rises will slow too.\n\nIt is very, very different from the rapid surge we saw in the spring.\n\nBut a gradual and slow continual rise could still have a devastating impact over the long autumn and winter period.\n\nThat is why we are seeing politicians and scientists argue about what is the best way to contain the virus, while limiting the impact restrictions have on wider society and the economy.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThere are fears for thousands of apprentices in Wales as the end of furlough approaches.\n\nFigures from the Welsh Government show nearly 3,000 are on the job retention scheme, while almost 300 have been made redundant since the pandemic began.\n\nThe furlough scheme has been helping fund up to 80% of wages for workers - including apprentices - at firms unable to trade due to Covid-19.\n\nBut it is due to end on October 31 and be replaced by new support scheme.\n\nApprenticeships in Wales are open to anyone aged 16 and over who are not in full-time education.\n\nThe apprentice programmes combine on-the-job learning and formal study and training, while being paid by employers.\n\nBut as 19-year-old Rena Platt found out - if your firm goes out of business, just like other staff, you will find yourself unemployed.\n\nRena, from Monmouthshire, was working for her mother's childcare company when she was first furloughed in April due to coronavirus.\n\nThen restrictions meant the Abergavenny venture could no longer operate.\n\n\"The business closed permanently in July and I went onto Universal Credit,\" Rena said.\n\n\"My mum was very open about it, and said that due to the circumstances they would have to close down, but that I would then be on furlough.\n\n\"When she told me they would have to close permanently, that was when I went onto Universal Credit.\"\n\nThe apprenticeship would have helped Rena get her level two childcare qualification.\n\nNow she is looking for more childcare work so she can continue with that.\n\nRena was initially furloughed by Mother's Little Helper but after a few months it had to close permanently\n\n\"I was very disappointed for a while and was wondering what I would do for other jobs,\" Rena said.\n\n\"I was worried about what would happen in the future.\"\n\nHengoed-based training providers Educ8 helped her update her CV and look for work - which she is still doing.\n\nAccording to the Welsh Government's latest figures, the number of apprentices made redundant has almost doubled in a month.\n\nIt went from 50 to 95 places, while a further 180 apprentices were officially made redundant from their jobs, but were continuing their formal training in the hope new placements can be found.\n\nThose affected mostly tended to be young, male and white or of mixed race.\n\nAlso among the most affected were people with a primary disability - one resulting from a brain injury - or a learning difficulty.\n\nBarry Walters, of education charity Colleges Wales, said: \"The figures paint a bleak picture for the work-based learning sector in Wales, and one which is likely to worsen come the end of October.\n\n\"Providers continue to work tirelessly to source alternative employment for learners who have been furloughed or made redundant.\"\n\nCareers Wales' chief executive Nikki Lawrence said it was an \"extremely difficult and uncertain time\" for apprentices and employers\n\nCareers Wales' chief executive, Nikki Lawrence, said it was an \"extremely difficult and uncertain time\" for employers and apprentices.\n\nThe impact of the pandemic meant that for some employers \"redundancy is the only option\".\n\n\"Our Working Wales team can provide one-to-one support to individuals who have been made redundant from their apprenticeship.\"\n\nThat includes helping find opportunities to finish their training, getting funding or other financial support.\n\nMs Lawrence said if redundancies were anticipated, support could be offered in advance.\n\nFears have also been raised for the future of those apprentices who remain on furlough\n\nNational Training Federation for Wales director, Jeff Protheroe, said it was \"worrying\" that nearly 3,000 apprentices remained on furlough.\n\n\"As we know that is due to come to an end at the end of October,\" Mr Protheroe said.\n\n\"We have already seen a lot of redundancy notices served.\n\n\"The worry is about what is coming down the line.\n\n\"Unless there is a relaxation or concession in certain industries, particularly things like retail and tourism. we are looking at seeing more redundancies, including more apprentices being made redundant.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government said it was on target to reach its goal of creating 100,000 apprenticeships this government term.\n\n\"Our recent £40m jobs and skills announcement will also be crucial in incentivising employers to recruit and retain up to 5,000 apprentices,\" a spokesman said.\n\n\"While this pandemic is a challenge for everyone, we continue to work closely with our partners to achieve our ambitions.\"", "The Wanted singer Tom Parker has said he has been \"overwhelmed\" by support after revealing he has an inoperable brain tumour.\n\nOn Monday, the 32-year-old pop star said he found out six weeks ago that he has a grade IV glioblastoma.\n\nHe later posted on Instagram: \"We truly are overwhelmed with everyone's love, support and positivity.\n\n\"We have had so many people reach out with positive stories and it's been incredible.\"\n\nHe added: \"We are fighting this - thanks to everyone behind us fighting alongside us. Let's do this.\"\n\nHis bandmate Max George replied with the words: \"You got this\", having posted a longer message of support on his Instagram account on Monday.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by maxgeorge This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHis other bandmates also rallied round, with Siva Kaneswaran saying \"we are with you all the way\".\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post 2 by sivaofficial This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nJay McGuinness replied to Parker's original Instagram post with the words: \"You've always been one in a million. I love you Tom, let's get popping.\"\n\nNathan Sykes also tweeted words of encouragement, writing: \"Tom will attack this with the same vigour that he has with everything he has ever set his mind to.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Nathan Sykes This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nOther messages came from the likes of Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington, who wrote: \"Sending so much love and support always.\"\n\n\"We love you Tom!\" added The Only Way Is Essex's James \"Arg\" Argent, who appeared with Parker on ITV's cancer fundraiser The Real Full Monty in 2018. \"We got this brother, No doubt about it!\"\n\nPresenter Rylan Clark-Neal described Parker as a \"gent\" on Twitter.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Rylan Clark-Neal This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nParker achieved fame with the boy band in the early 2010s, reaching number one with the singles All Time Low and Glad You Came.\n\nSince they went on hiatus in 2014, he has played Danny Zuko in a touring production of Grease, and made the semi-finals of Celebrity Masterchef.\n\nThe Wanted sold more than 10 million records worldwide\n\nHe married actress Kelsey Hardwick in 2018. The couple have a 16-month-old daughter, Aurelia, and are expecting their second child.\n\nParker suffered a seizure in July and was put on a waiting list for an MRI scan. Six weeks later he had another, more serious seizure during a family trip to Norwich and was rushed to hospital.\n\nAfter three days of tests, he was diagnosed with cancer.\n\nOn Monday, the couple posted a message on Instagram telling fans that Parker had begun chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment.\n\n\"We are gonna fight this all the way,\" they said. \"We don't want your sadness, we just want love and positivity and together we will raise awareness of this terrible disease and look for all available treatment options.\"\n\nGlioblastoma is the most aggressive of brain tumours in adults.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A man in the United States has caught Covid twice, with the second infection becoming far more dangerous than the first, doctors report.\n\nThe 25-year-old needed hospital treatment after his lungs could not get enough oxygen into his body.\n\nReinfections remain rare and he has now recovered.\n\nBut the study in the Lancet Infectious Diseases raises questions about how much immunity can be built up to the virus.\n\nThe man from Nevada had no known health problems or immune defects that would make him particularly vulnerable to Covid.\n\nScientists say the patient caught coronavirus twice, rather than the original infection becoming dormant and then bouncing back. A comparison of the genetic codes of the virus taken during each bout of symptoms showed they were too distinct to be caused by the same infection.\n\n\"Our findings signal that a previous infection may not necessarily protect against future infection,\" said Dr Mark Pandori, from the University of Nevada.\n\n\"The possibility of reinfections could have significant implications for our understanding of Covid-19 immunity.\"\n\nHe said even people who have recovered should continue to follow guidelines around social distancing, face masks and hand washing.\n\nScientists are still grappling with the thorny issue of coronavirus and immunity.\n\nDoes everyone become immune? Even people with very mild symptoms? How long does any protection last?\n\nThese are important questions for understanding how the virus will affect us long-term and may have implications for vaccines and ideas such as herd immunity.\n\nSo far, reinfection seems to be rare - there have been only a few examples out of more than 37 million confirmed cases.\n\nReports in Hong Kong, Belgium and the Netherlands said they were no more serious than the first. One in Ecuador mirrored the US case in being more severe, but did not need hospital treatment.\n\nHowever, it is still early into the pandemic, and the history of other types of coronavirus means protection is expected to wane.\n\nAs countries endure a second wave of the virus, we may start to get clearer answers.\n\nIt had been assumed that a second round of Covid would be milder, as the body would have learned to fight the virus the first time around.\n\nIt is still unclear why the Nevada patient became more severely ill the second time. One idea is he may have been exposed to a bigger initial dose of the virus.\n\nIt also remains possible that the initial immune response made the second infection worse. This has been documented with diseases like dengue fever, where antibodies made in response to one strain of dengue virus cause problems if infected by another strain.\n\nProf Paul Hunter, from the University of East Anglia, said the study was \"very concerning\" because of the small gap between the two infections, and the severity of the second.\n\n\"Given the fact that to date over 37 million people have had the infection, we would have expected to have heard of many more incidents if such very early reinfections with severe illness were common.\n\n\"It is too early to say for certain what the implications of these findings are for any immunisation programme. But these findings reinforce the point that we still do not know enough about the immune response to this infection.\"", "Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch has volunteered to be vaccinated\n\nResearchers want more British people belonging to ethnic minorities to sign up for coronavirus vaccine trials.\n\nThe large UK studies need diverse groups of volunteers to check if the jabs will work for all populations.\n\nBut of the 270,000 already recruited, only 7% are people belonging to ethnic minorities, who are at higher risk of complications if they develop Covid-19.\n\nElderly people are also vulnerable - and researchers want more over-65s to volunteer for vaccine trials too.\n\nThese groups would be among the first offered a vaccine if one becomes available.\n\nScientists hope to recruit 500,000 volunteers in total for the studies, including the Oxford trial recently resumed.\n\nOxford Vaccine Group principal investigator Dr Maheshi Ramasamy: \"We know that people from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds are disproportionately affected by Covid in terms of severe disease and mortality.\n\n\"So when we do have a vaccine that we roll out to the general population, it's really important that we can demonstrate to people from these communities that we have evidence that the vaccine works.\"\n\nThe UK has secured access to six different possible vaccines, which fall into four categories:\n\nEqualities Minister Kemi Badenoch, who is herself volunteering, said: \"The UK is leading the world in the search for a Covid-19 vaccine.\n\n\"At home, we have to ensure every community trusts a future vaccine to be sage and that it works across the entire population.\n\n\"But with less than 0.5% of people on the NHS Vaccine Registry from a black background, we have a lot more work to do.\n\n\"That is why I am urging more people from the ethnic-minority backgrounds to join me in signing up to the NHS Vaccine Registry and taking part in a trial.\n\n\"Together, we can be part of the national effort to end this pandemic for good.\"\n\nKate Bingham, who chairs the government's Vaccine Taskforce, said: \"The only way to check how well a coronavirus vaccine works is to carry out large-scale clinical trials involving thousands of people.\n\n\"Researchers need data from different communities and different people to improve understanding of the vaccines.\n\n\"The only way to get this is through large clinical trials.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Hospital accident and emergency departments are making preparations for a surge in patients this winter.\n\nThe Royal Bournemouth Hospital is already busy, despite doubling the number of beds since the beginning of the pandemic.\n\nIt is now preparing for a further rise in admissions, with more people now in hospital with Covid-19 than before restrictions were announced in March.", "Bars and restaurants across much of England are working out how to operate amid new coronavirus restrictions.\n\nLiverpool venues, which are in the strictest \"tier 3\" zone, have been instructed to close from Wednesday.\n\nKate Stewart, who runs The Sandon pub next to Liverpool FC, said: \"The amount of uncertainly is just crippling.\n\n\"I've got women who are working for me who are coming in and actually sobbing to me because they don't know whether they are going to have a job.\"\n\nMrs Stewart told the BBC she wasn't sure whether to open at all: \"Is it going to be worth me even opening the doors because people are going to be so scared and so worried they probably aren't going to come out anyway?\n\n\"The amount of uncertainly and unknowing is just crippling, and it's crippling people's mental health as well.\"\n\nIndustry body UK Hospitality (UKH) said that many were already \"reaching the point of no return\".\n\nNew rules announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday divided the country into three zones.\n\nVenues in \"tier 3\" will receive financial support.\n\nThose in the \"tier 2\" areas, including large parts of the North and Midlands, will lose custom, with households no longer allowed to mix indoors.\n\nAnd these businesses would experience \"the worst of both worlds\", not being eligible for the extra assistance outlined last week, the industry group said.\n\nNick MacKenzie, chief executive of the Greene King pub chain, which has about 2,700 pubs across the country, told the BBC his employees were working flat out to adjust: \"We are going to do everything we can to get our pubs back open, but it's getting harder and harder.\n\n\"We need further support from government for those pubs in tier 2.\" He said some of his staff faced losing their homes, as they lived in the pub.\n\nUKH has warned a lack of support for hospitality businesses in tiers 1 and 2 could threaten more than half a million jobs.\n\nThe chief executive of Best Western hotel Group, Rob Paterson, said the ban on households mixing meant his firm was now bracing itself for \"some pretty difficult times\".\n\n\"With each restriction, it feels like death by a thousand cuts, because each strikes at the confidence of customers,\" he said.\n\n\"Even with a curfew of 10pm and groups of six, bookings haven't happened. We've started to write off a big amount of trade. Work office parties can't have a table of six. It's only going to get worse and worse. We've written off Christmas.\"\n\nThe government's new three-tier system of restrictions mean in parts of England worst hit by the coronavirus bars will close, although restaurants may remain open.\n\nIn \"tier 2\" areas, which include Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham and many other cities, socialising is restricted to members of your own household or bubble. Tier 1 areas continue with lighter restrictions: the rule of six and the 22:00 curfew.\n\n\"For those businesses in tier 3 areas, forced to close their doors again, things look bleak, but the support announced last week for closed businesses will hopefully give them the breathing room they need to survive another lockdown,\" said UK Hospitality chief executive Kate Nicholls.\n\n\"There is currently a concerning lack of support on offer for hospitality businesses in tier 2, and to a lesser extent tier 1, despite their facing restrictions that is seeing trade down by between 40% to 60%.\"\n\nBars, gyms, casinos, leisure centres and betting shops across Liverpool must close from Wednesday, leaving businesses there \"bewildered, frustrated and angry\", according to Liverpool Chamber of Commerce Chief Executive Paul Cherpeau.\n\nBut it wasn't only those businesses that will feel the impact, he said.\n\n\"Whilst our visitor economy will bear the brunt of these new restrictions, the percolating effect on supply chains is hugely concerning.\"\n\nHouseholds can no longer mix inside pubs in 'tier 2' areas\n\nFirms from taxi companies to food and beverage suppliers are likely to feel the impact of the new measures.\n\n\"Brewery sales have collapsed because of the uncertainty of further restrictions, as pubs fear they will be closed,\" said Ian Fozard, chairman of the Society of Independent Brewers.\n\n\"While pubs that are legally closed are being offered financial support, this does not seem to apply to small breweries that will lose more than 80% of their sales.\"\n\nAndrew Selley, chief executive of Bidfood, which supplies food to a range of outlets from pubs and cinemas to schools and hospitals, said the government had failed to recognise the knock-on impact on firms like his.\n\n\"They have supported hospitality and it's warranted, because hospitality is under pressure. What they haven't done is give any support to the supply chain that supports hospitality, education and healthcare. We've had no direct grants, no business rates relief, no rent assistance.\"", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Liverpool is one of many cities where there are extra restrictions\n\nIn many areas under local lockdown, cases and hospital admissions have continued to soar. Does that mean restrictions don't work?\n\nConsider the national lockdown in the spring. While it feels like it was one single policy, it was in fact a package of different measures. Schools, universities and offices shut. Pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops closed. No-one could mix with people from outside their household. People were advised not to use public transport and to limit the number of times they visited essential shops.\n\nTogether these had a dramatic impact on cases, and the number of coronavirus patients in hospital plummeted from 20,000 to about 800.\n\nHow much each part of that lockdown contributed is hard to say.\n\nThe rules were relaxed but then, at the end of June, Leicester became the first place to go into a local lockdown. Other cities, and whole regions, have followed. But so far, Leicester's lockdown is the only one to have come close to the strictness of the national policy. Shops and pubs were stopped from opening. Households were barred from mixing indoors. And new cases of the virus dropped by 60% during July. People in hospital beds with coronavirus fell from 88 to 18.\n\nSince Leicester, local lockdowns have multiplied. More than 15 million people - very roughly, a quarter of the UK population - have come under new curbs, in some form.\n\nAnd it's become harder to see whether they are working or not.\n\nAfter the first changes, cases continued to rise, throughout August. Then, after pub and restaurant closures, case rates dropped sharply. It is, however, too soon to say for sure that the stricter measures led directly to the decline.\n\nIn the rest of Greater Manchester, gatherings with other households were banned but shops, pubs and restaurants remained open. Cases have mostly kept climbing throughout these local restrictions.\n\nHowever, the latest week's data will be welcome news - suggesting the sharp increases might be levelling off. The rise in cases in many areas under local lockdown appears to be slowing, in line with the national picture.\n\nThis may be a sign that the England-wide \"rule of six\" is working.\n\nA large national study, published last week, confirmed the growth in cases was slowing across England, although overall levels remained high. But restrictions on households meeting - which have been seen at a local level - don't always lead to a slowing case rate. And this change in impact highlights the many factors involved which make it difficult to isolate the precise effect of local lockdowns.\n\nPeople don't necessarily change their behaviour exactly in line with rule changes.\n\nWhen concerns about cases rising begin to be reported, some people alter their behaviour before any law change. Other people, even when the rules come into place, don't obey them.\n\nSo it may be a question of timing: are people more ready to restrict their movements now than they were in August?\n\nTo complicate the figures further, other things have been going on at the same time as local lockdowns were being introduced, including summer holiday season and schools reopening.\n\nIn Leicester, cases fell when restrictions were introduced. When they were progressively eased in August and September, cases started to rise. But this rise coincided with more people travelling abroad. And with children going back to school.\n\nIn Greater Manchester, cases also rose over those months despite the area being in lockdown - albeit a looser version than Leicester's had been.\n\nUnpicking these different factors is a big challenge.\n\nLooking at \"positivity rates\" - the proportion of all tests that are positive, adjusting for different levels of testing - shows there have been increases in cases across England, with particularly sharp spikes in the North West and North East between the end of August and the end of September. Restrictions in those regions were only introduced between the middle of September and the beginning of October, making it too soon to see the impact of these rules.\n\nBut in Blackburn, which has been in lockdown long enough for an effect to be seen, there was also a rise in cases - though this has come back down in recent weeks.\n\nRecent increases in hospitalisations from coronavirus have highlighted the extent of the challenge facing the north of England. Though without up-to-date localised data, it is difficult to judge whether the impact on a local level - such as those in Blackburn - have helped prevent serious cases.\n\nThere's no doubt the national lockdown had a considerable impact on cases.\n\nFundamentally, the virus needs people to be in close contact and mixing between circles to spread through the population. How tight the restrictions are makes a difference - look at the experience of Leicester, compared with Oldham or Blackburn.\n\nBut so do the crucial issues of timing and compliance. A lockdown only works if people stick to it.\n\nThe data also indicates that any impact lockdowns do have is far from permanent - relax the restrictions and allow more contact, and the virus will quickly start to spread again.\n\nUnless and until a viable vaccine becomes available, government will be faced with the same choice: shut down large chunks of society or allow the virus to tear through communities, with little idea of the true toll that either will exact.", "The number of secondary schools in England sending home pupils because of Covid is increasing rather than diminishing, the latest official figures show.\n\nThere are 21% of secondary schools counted as not fully open - up from 18% the previous week and 8% in mid-September.\n\nThis is usually because they have sent home pupils in response to Covid cases.\n\nAbout 7% of primary schools had to send home pupils, up from 5%.\n\nThese weekly figures from the Department for Education show a worsening picture for secondary schools being disrupted by the pandemic, with the highest figure for groups of pupils being sent home since schools went back in the autumn.\n\nIt follows the government announcing it would press ahead with a full set of GCSE and A-level exams next summer, prompting warnings about unfairness for those missing out on school.\n\nGeoff Barton, leader of the ASCL head teachers' union, said the continuing fall in the number of fully open secondary schools showed how difficult it was to \"operate amidst rising Covid infection rates\".\n\nHe says schools are having to try to balance \"managing complex control measures while delivering education for those in school as well as those who are at home self-isolating\".\n\n\"The pressure is immense,\" he said - and he raised concerns about the well-being of school staff.\n\nThe figures on secondary schools not being fully open were, based on previous Thursdays:\n\n\"It is essential that government gets a grip on the testing system so that no pupil or teacher is out of school for longer than they need to be,\" said Paul Whiteman, leader of the National Association of Head Teachers.\n\nBut there are suggestions that when schools send home pupils, it is now a smaller number, and not necessarily a whole year group, as attendance in secondary school has slightly risen, from 86% to 87%.\n\nOverall attendance, including primary schools, has remained at about 90%.\n\nThere are also very few schools completely closed - only 0.2% of schools.\n\nThere is no regional breakdown to show where problems are concentrated - but secondary schools seem to be more adversely affected than primary schools, with a rate of sending home pupils three times higher than primary schools.\n\nAttendance in primary schools went down slightly, from 93% to 92%, but remains higher than in secondary.\n\nFigures in special needs schools are even lower, at 82% attendance, and in state-funded alternative provision, such as for pupils who might have been excluded from mainstream schools, attendance is 60%.\n\nEngland's Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said schools were able to provide more online lessons and \"only a small minority of pupils are self isolating\".\n\n\"Regular and full-time attendance in school is absolutely essential to help pupils catch up on time out of the classroom.\n\n\"It is encouraging to see the vast majority of schools are open,\" he said.", "Apple has confirmed its iPhone 12 handsets will be its first to work on faster 5G networks.\n\nThe company has also extended the range to include a new \"Mini\" model that has a smaller 5.4in screen.\n\nThe US firm bucked a wider industry downturn by increasing its handset sales over the past year.\n\nBut some experts say the new features give Apple its best opportunity for growth since 2014, when it revamped its line-up with the iPhone 6.\n\n\"5G will bring a new level of performance for downloads and uploads, higher quality video streaming, more responsive gaming, real-time interactivity and so much more,\" said chief executive Tim Cook.\n\nThere has also been a cosmetic refresh this time round, with the sides of the devices getting sharper, flatter edges.\n\nThe higher-end iPhone 12 Pro models also get bigger screens than before and a new sensor to help with low-light photography.\n\nLidar sensors are commonly used in self-driving car prototypes, but Apple is using one to help focus photos\n\nHowever, for the first time none of the devices will be bundled with headphones or a charger. Apple said the move was to help reduce its impact on the environment.\n\n\"Tim Cook [has] the stage set for a super-cycle 5G product release,\" commented Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.\n\nHe added that about 40% of the 950 million iPhones in use had not been upgraded in at least three-and-a-half years, presenting a \"once-in-a-decade\" opportunity.\n\nIn theory, the Mini could dent Apple's earnings by encouraging the public to buy a product on which it makes a smaller profit than the other phones. But one expert thought that unlikely.\n\n\"Apple successfully launched the iPhone SE in April by introducing it at a lower price point without cannibalising sales of the iPhone 11 series,\" noted Marta Pinto from IDC.\n\n\"There are customers out there who want a smaller, cheaper phone, so this is a proven formula that takes into account market trends.\"\n\nThe iPhone is already the bestselling smartphone brand in the UK and the second-most popular in the world in terms of market share.\n\nIf forecasts of pent up demand are correct, it could prompt a battle between network operators, as customers become more likely to switch.\n\n\"Networks are going to have to offer eye-wateringly attractive deals, and the way they're going to do that is on great tariffs and attractive trade-in deals,\" predicted Ben Wood from the consultancy CCS Insight.\n\nApple typically unveils its new iPhones in September, but opted for a later date this year. It has not said why, but it was widely speculated to be related to disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nThe firm's shares ended the day 2.7% lower. This has been linked to reports that several Chinese internet platforms opted not to carry the livestream, although it was still widely viewed and commented on via the social media network Sina Weibo.\n\nApple said the iPhone 12 has the same 6.1in (15.5cm)-sized screen as its predecessor, but it now uses OLED rather than LCD technology for richer colours. This has also helped the firm make the device 11% thinner and have smaller bezels.\n\nThe OLED display is shielded by a new material that should be harder to damage\n\nIt added that the screen was also higher resolution and used a \"ceramic shield\" to protect its display to offer \"four times better drop performance\".\n\nA new A14 Bionic chip - the first to be built on a five nanometre process - is being used to carry out more advanced enhancements to photos.\n\nThe firm said it would deliver night-mode selfies without using the flash, as well as better deal with colour, contrast and noise in challenging settings.\n\nIt showed off a forthcoming mobile version of League of Legends as an example of the \"console-quality games\" it could now run smoothly.\n\nLeague of Legends: Wild Rift will launch later this year\n\nThe addition of a magnet array inside the phone's back will allow compatible chargers to \"snap on\" and renew the battery more quickly, as well as accessories including a wallet to be held in place.\n\nThe iPhone Mini shares these features but in a smaller form.\n\n\"The Mini is an interesting move from Apple, which I would have expected [to come] next year - but the smaller phone trend is clearly picking up,\" commented Carolina Milanesi from Creative Strategies.\n\nThe iPhone 12 will start at £799 - a £70 gain on last year - and go on sale on 23 October.\n\nThe iPhone 12 Mini will start at £699 and be released on 13 November.\n\nTwo steel-sided higher-end models have also been redesigned to feature bigger displays - the iPhone Pro goes from 5.8in to 6.1in, while the Pro Max goes from 6.5in to 6.7in.\n\nThe iPhone 12 Pro has three cameras and a Lidar sensor\n\nThey carry over the improvements made to the lower-end devices.\n\nBut they also gain a Lidar (light detection and ranging) scanner.\n\nThis creates depth-maps of the immediate environment, making autofocus in dim settings \"up to six times faster\". It can also be used for augmented-reality tasks, although these were given less emphasis.\n\nThe Pro Max's wide-angle rear camera lens has also been given a bigger sensor to improve low-light performance.\n\nFilming in high dynamic range (HDR) video, using Dolby Vision, is offered at a higher frame rate on the Pro phones\n\nBoth new Pro models now have at least 128 gigabytes of storage and are £50 cheaper than last year's devices, starting at £999 and £1,099.\n\nSamsung first launched a 5G-enabled Galaxy S10 phone back in February 2019, and Huawei, OnePlus and Google are among others to have added the capability too.\n\nBut experts say there has only been limited interest in the feature to date.\n\n\"Apple is rarely the first to launch new technologies but waits for a technology to be mature enough to build new customer experiences on top of it,\" commented Thomas Husson from the research company Forrester.\n\n\"I think we're slowly reaching this tipping point.\"\n\nApple said it had tested its devices at peak 5G speeds of 3.5 gigabits per second - which means a 20 gigabyte 4K movie could be theoretically downloaded in about 45 seconds.\n\nHowever, it warned that users' experiences would vary by network and region, and the 5G facility would not always be switched on.\n\n\"The ability of the iPhone 12 to switch between 5G and 4G when the consumer needs, in order to preserve battery, does highlight that 5G connectivity clearly isn't necessary 100% of the time for consumers,\" remarked Stephen Mears from the consultancy Futuresource.\n\nEach jump in communications tech has taken different mobile device behaviours mainstream\n\nThe UK was the second European nation to start rolling out 5G.\n\nBut while this has helped give it a lead, coverage remains sporadic.\n\nIn the US - Apple's largest market - 5G speeds are particularly slow. In fact, according to one study, downloads over Canada's 4G networks are typically faster,\n\nIn some countries, 5G has not yet become available to the public.\n\nHowever, in China - Apple's second-biggest market - the government has encouraged its rapid deployment, and recently announced both Beijing and Shenzhen had achieved \"full coverage\".\n\n\"There's no question that a large part of Apple's decision to settle a legal dispute with [5G modem chip-maker] Qualcomm was predicated on the fact that it couldn't afford not to have 5G in 2020,\" Mr Wood told the BBC.\n\n\"China would have been the driving force behind that.\n\n\"But there will also have been pressure from major operators across the world who are investing heavily in 5G networks and recognise the fact that the iPhone is a strategically important product.\"\n\nThe really interesting announcements here all came down to speed: 5G-ready phones with faster chips inside them.\n\nBut Apple arguably failed to sell what you can actually do with all this power.\n\nThe one area it will definitely help with is mobile gaming, with quicker response times for multiplayer titles as well as better graphics.\n\nAnd what else can 5G do? Well it could let you watch sporting events from multiple angles on your phone - one example the firm gave was of watching American football from seven camera feeds.\n\nOr - using augmented reality - you could design a room with virtual furniture in real-time.\n\nApple said the Lidar scanner could help with AR, video, and room scanning applications\n\nBut as the chief of US network Verizon noted during a guest spot during the presentation: \"Until now most people have taken a wait-and-see approach to 5G.\"\n\nAnd the question is whether the public saw anything that would make them want to rush out and add it to their lives now.\n\nMoreover, 5G networks in most countries are at best patchy - you won't be able to take advantage of the promised speed gains in many places.\n\nIn time, there are likely to be popular apps and games that are dependent on the tech.\n\nAnd many gadget enthusiasts will be tempted to upgrade to an iPhone 12 or Android equivalent to be ready.\n\nBut they will be investing in the promise of what's to come, rather than what they can do today.\n\nApple also launched a new version of its smart speaker - the HomePod Mini.\n\nIt supports a wider range of voice commands than before as well as introducing a home intercom system.\n\nApple promised the device would work with a wider range of third-party services than before\n\nThe £99 voice-controlled device also adds a facility that detects when an iPhone is nearby to produce visual and vibration effects that simulate the effect of music flowing between the gadgets.\n\nThe first HomePod was launched in 2018, and has lagged far behind Amazon and Google's rival speakers to date.\n\nThere was no mention, however, of a Mac computer set to run off the A14 chip.\n\nNor was there mention of Bluetooth-based tracking tags or over-ear headphones, which have both been rumoured to launch soon.\n\nThis will likely lead to speculation that Apple will hold a further event before the end of 2020.", "Taxes rises of more than £40bn a year are 'all but inevitable' to protect UK government debt from spinning out of control, a think tank has warned.\n\nThe Institute for Fiscal Studies said borrowing this year will hit levels not seen in peacetime due to the pandemic.\n\nIt said the state had pumped an extra £200bn into the economy to support jobs, businesses and incomes this year.\n\nThis was necessary but would mean big tax hikes into the middle of the next decade, the IFS said.\n\nTo pay for the services it provides, the UK government borrows from pension funds, insurance companies and investors around the world, then tries to balance its books through taxes.\n\nBut in an update originally meant to accompany the chancellor's now scrapped Autumn Budget, the IFS said this would become harder as the crisis rolled on.\n\nIt said the economy was forecast to be 5% smaller in 2024-25 than was projected back in March, which would leave the country with a £100bn hit to its finances from lower tax revenues.\n\nAt the same time, it said \"higher borrowing will be with us for some time to come\".\n\nThe government will not, as the chancellor promised just a week ago, \"always balance the books\" and the Conservative manifesto commitment on lower debt is impossible, says the Institute for Fiscal Studies in its annual audit of the public finances.\n\nAnnual government borrowing this year will reach levels only previously reached during world wars, while the national debt will be bigger than the economy, reaching 110% of GDP by 2025.\n\nHowever, the IFS warns that now is not the time for tax rises or spending cuts. The economy will continue to need support because of one of the worst pandemic hits to growth in the world, alongside the prospect of new post-Brexit trade barriers with the EU.\n\nFor now, extra borrowing is helped by extraordinarily low rates of interest paid by the government. But the IFS outlines a scenario where even significant tax rises, worth £40bn a year from the middle of this decade, will fail to get the size of the national debt below 100% of GDP.\n\nRepaying the Covid support spending is, the institute suggests, going to be a delayed and then very gradual programme of tax-and-spend restraint that could last a generation.\n\nPaul Johnson, director of the IFS, said the government had no choice but to ramp up spending in the short term, and there was little it could do \"fully to protect the economy into the medium run\".\n\n\"We are heading for a significantly smaller economy than expected pre-Covid and probably higher spending too.\n\n\"Without action, debt - already at its highest level in more than half a century - would carry on rising. Tax rises, and big ones, look all but inevitable, though likely not until the middle years of this decade.\"\n\nThe UK's national debt - how much it owes investors and lenders - rose above £2 trillion for the first time in August.\n\nThe think tank said it expects debt will be just over 110% of national income by 2024-25. This would be up from 80% before the pandemic and 35% in the years leading up to the 2007-08 financial crisis.\n\nThe IFS said the UK had benefited from historically low interest rates during the crisis, which made it cheaper to borrow.\n\nBut it warned any increase in rates could, if not accompanied by stronger growth, be \"hugely problematic for the public finances\".\n\nThe forecast comes as the UK economy remains under stress. In an accompanying analysis, Citibank said every major economy bar China shrank in the first half of this year, mostly by historically large margins.\n\nSpain and the UK did the worst, with output drops of roughly 20%, more than double the hit in the US or Germany.\n\nThe bank warned that even if another round of major lockdowns can be avoided, most economies will not return to pre-pandemic levels of output until 2021 or 2022.\n\nAnd even when the pandemic is over, there will be lingering effects on consumer demand due to increased caution, shifts in behaviour and rising unemployment.\n\nCitibank forecasts the unemployment rate in the UK is likely to increase to about 8% to 8.5% - or 2.7 to 2.9 million people out of work - in the first half of 2021.\n\nThat could see unemployment at its highest level since the early 1990s.", "An 85-year-old runner has set a new record for his age group in the mile.\n\nIan Barnes, who lives in Darlington, recorded a time of eight minutes 10.40 seconds in a race against seven other runners at the Eastbourne athletics track.\n\nHe is a retired legal executive and joint president of Darlington Harriers running club.", "Zoe Powell and her three eldest children died in the crash. Josh Powell was critically injured\n\nA mother and her three young children have died in a crash in Oxfordshire.\n\nPolice said a people carrier and a lorry collided near a railway overbridge on the A40 between Oxford and Cassington at 21:50 BST on Monday.\n\nThe mother, named locally as Zoe Powell, 29, died at the scene with her eight-year-old daughter Phoebe. Six-year-old Simeon and Amelia, four, died at John Radcliffe Hospital.\n\nTheir father Josh, 30, and an 18-month-old girl were critically injured.\n\nOxfordshire Fire and Rescue Service said it worked with police and paramedics to free the father and daughter, who are from Chinnor in Oxfordshire, from the silver Subaru car.\n\nThe driver of the lorry, a 56-year-old man, suffered minor injuries and is helping officers with their investigation.\n\nNo arrests have been made, Thames Valley Police said.\n\nZoe Powell, 29, from Chinnor and three of her young children died after a crash with a lorry\n\nMrs Powell was a blogger who wrote about motherhood, family life and the challenges of having young children.\n\nShe created a specialised diary called the Mama Book to help young mothers find \"mental space in the midst of motherhood\".\n\nThe road reopened at about 13:00 after being closed both ways for accident investigation work.\n\nIn a statement on Facebook, Chinnor Parish Council said: \"As a close Chinnor community, we are all so saddened and shocked to hear about the tragic accident last night.\"\n\nA member of the parish told the BBC: \"At the moment it's just so raw. The community are very upset.\"\n\nSt Andrew's Church said it would be open daily from 11:00 to 17:00 \"for private prayer and lighting of a candle\".\n\nOxford City Council leader Susan Brown said: \"Horrible, horrible news and my thoughts are not just with the family and friends but with all those professionals doing their jobs who have seen sights they will sadly never forget.\"\n\nThe crash happened near a bridge where the A40 crosses a railway\n\nSgt Dominic Mahon, senior investigating officer, asked people \"not to speculate as to the cause of this horrendous incident\".\n\n\"We will leave no stone unturned to ascertain what has caused this tragedy,\" he said.\n\nSgt Mahon said officers and colleagues from the other emergency services were dealing with \"an extremely upsetting scene\".\n\nHe said the family's next of kin were being supported.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The unemployment figures do not include people who were furloughed as part of the UK government's Covid-19 response\n\nWales' unemployment rate rose significantly between June and August to 3.8%, compared with 4.5% for the whole of the UK, according to the latest figures.\n\nThere were 15,000 more people counted as jobless compared with March to May.\n\nThe number of people employed in the three months to August was 37,000 fewer than the previous quarter.\n\nWorkers furloughed under the Treasury's scheme to support jobs through the Covid-19 pandemic count as employed.\n\nDuring August the furlough scheme began to reduce support paid to employers to pay workers.\n\nWales' unemployment is at the same level as September 2019, but it rose at twice the UK rate in the last quarter.\n\nThe rate of working age people deemed \"economically inactive\" has climbed to 24.4% in Wales - the UK rate is 20.8%.\n\nThese are people not looking for work, normally because they are full-time carers or students, are on long-term sick or have taken early retirement.\n\nThe Office for National Statistics survey suggested there were 36,000 more people in this bracket in Wales compared with the same period last year. It is the second highest rate of economic inactivity in the UK after Northern Ireland.\n\nThe UK unemployment rate stands at its highest level in over three years as the pandemic continues to hit jobs.\n\nThe figures suggested there were 57,000 people in Wales who were unemployed, meaning they were out of work and looking for a job. Between March and May it was 42,000.\n\nThere were 1,452,000 people in work from June to August and 466,000 people who were deemed economically inactive.\n\nThese figures do not include people who were furloughed.\n\nIn June, 316,500 employees in Wales were paid 80% of their salaries under the UK government's furlough scheme, figures from the Treasury showed.\n\nThe support provided to employers for wages began to reduce in August.\n\nFurlough - which paid up to 80% of workers' wages - will end completely on 31 October and is being replaced with the Job Support Scheme.\n\nSarah Eddolls is trying \"anything and everything\" to find a job\n\nEarlier in the summer BBC Wales spoke to Owen Davies from Pill in Newport.\n\nHe lives with his 31-year-old partner Sarah Eddolls, who has asthma, and his parents, who both have health problems.\n\nWhen Covid-19 hit, they began to shield and Owen and Sarah decided to quit their jobs to keep the family safe.\n\nShe had been working for an agency on a zero-hours contract, taking the food trolley around the wards of the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport.\n\nHe had been working for an agency as a call logger, supporting transport and sending work on to nurses and porters.\n\nSix months on, Owen has managed to get a job, working night shifts at Amazon's regional distribution centre a few miles away, but Sarah is still unemployed. They both had been claiming Universal Credit but now that he is earning, she is no longer eligible and has no income herself.\n\nShe said she spends all day applying for \"anything and everything\", with no success so far - and companies have told her they are inundated with applications.\n\nChristine Griffiths, operations manager at Vibe Recruit, which has offices in Cwmbran, Bridgend, Caerphilly and Swansea, said she had seen a \"dramatic rise in the amount of people who are applying for the roles that we advertise\".\n\n\"Since the national lockdown in March, we have seen a shift in the type of contracts that are being offered by our clients. Whilst the permanent recruitment market has slowed down, the temporary market is thriving, with clients preferring the flexibility that hiring a candidate on a temporary basis can bring.\"\n\nMore optimistically, she said there had been a \"clear sign\" of the permanent recruitment market picking back up again.\n\nEconomic trends, such as an increase in unemployment, tend to affect Wales later than the UK as a whole.\n\nThat is reflected in the fact these jobless figures are the worst the UK has seen for three years, but Wales experienced the same level of unemployment as recently as September 2019.\n\nThat makes the steep rise in unemployment in Wales in the three months to August even more concerning.\n\nWelsh unemployment grew at twice the speed of that seen across the UK, even though as a proportion of the population, fewer Welsh workers are unemployed at the moment.\n\nMore worryingly still, the reduction in the number of jobs in Wales between June and August, compared with the previous three months, was five times greater than the decline in employment levels across the UK.\n\nMeanwhile, the rate of working-age people who are not in the jobs market at all in Wales, because they are economically inactive, has gone up 0.7 percentage points to 24.4% - the UK as a whole has remained steady at 20.8%.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Dr Starkey said he had made \"a serious error for which I have already paid a significant price\"\n\nHistorian Dr David Starkey has said he is being investigated by police over an interview in which he made controversial comments about slavery.\n\nDr Starkey made the remarks on YouTube to conservative commentator Darren Grimes, who is also being investigated.\n\nDr Starkey has apologised for saying in June that slavery was not genocide because \"so many damn blacks\" survived.\n\nHe said he did not \"intend to stir up racial hatred\" and would \"defend myself robustly\" against the allegation.\n\nThe Metropolitan Police said it was investigating \"a public order offence relating to a social media video\".\n\nIn a statement, the TV historian said: \"I have apologised unreservedly for the words used and I do so again today. It was a serious error for which I have already paid a significant price.\n\n\"I did not, however, intend to stir up racial hatred and there was nothing about the circumstances of the broadcast which made it likely to do so.\"\n\nHe said he only discovered he was under investigation on Tuesday, six days after the Met sent an email to notify him and Mr Grimes of the action, because the email had not been forwarded on to him.\n\nScotland Yard sent it to the Bow Group conservative think tank, of which he is vice-president, who thought it was a hoax, he said.\n\n\"The effect of this delay and confusion has been to throw the focus of the police investigation wholly on Mr Grimes. This is unfortunate and grossly unfair,\" Dr Starkey added.\n\nHis interviewer was \"a young, aspiring journalist and his role in the affair is - at most - secondary\", he said, and the focus on him \"raised fundamental questions\" about the freedom of the press and public debate.\n\nIn a statement, the Met said: \"On July 4, the Metropolitan Police Service was passed an allegation from Durham Police of a public order offence relating to a social media video posted on June 30.\n\n\"The matter was reviewed by officers and on July 29 a file was submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service for early investigative advice.\n\n\"On September 25 early investigative advice was received and officers began an investigation. This will remain under review. No arrests have been made.\"\n\nDuring the original discussion, Dr Starkey said slavery \"was not genocide\" because \"otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or Britain would there? An awful lot of them survived.\"\n\nThe subsequent outcry led Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam College, Canterbury Christ Church University, The Mary Rose Trust and publisher HarperCollins to cut ties with him.\n\nUpdate: On Wednesday the Metropolitan Police said: \"On Monday, 12 October a senior officer was appointed to conduct a review of the investigation to ensure it remains proportionate and that all appropriate lines of inquiry are being considered. Whilst this process takes place, two scheduled interviews have been postponed. We remain in contact with the CPS.\"", "Dr Ghebreyesus said allowing the virus to spread would cause 'unnecessary' suffering\n\nThe head of the World Health Organization has ruled out a herd immunity response to the pandemic.\n\nHerd immunity occurs when a large portion of a community becomes immune to a disease through vaccinations or through the mass spread of a disease.\n\nSome have argued that coronavirus should be allowed to spread naturally in the absence of a vaccine.\n\nBut WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus said such an approach was \"scientifically and ethically problematic\".\n\nThere have been more than 37 million confirmed cases of coronavirus across the globe since the pandemic began. More than one million people are known to have died.\n\nWhile hundreds of vaccines are currently under development, with a number in advanced trials, none has yet received international approval.\n\nSpeaking at a news conference on Monday, Dr Tedros argued that the long-term impacts of coronavirus - as well as the strength and duration any immune response - remained unknown.\n\n\"Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it,\" he said.\n\n\"Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic.\"\n\nThe WHO head added that seroprevalence tests - where the blood is tested for antibodies - suggested that just 10% of people had been exposed to coronavirus in most countries.\n\n\"Letting Covid-19 circulate unchecked therefore means allowing unnecessary infections, suffering and death,\" he said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Coronavirus vaccine: How close are you to getting one?", "Ikea will soon be selling pre-used versions of some of its best sellers\n\nThe Swedish giant will next month launch a scheme to buy back your unwanted Billy bookcases, and certain other of its furniture items you no longer need or want.\n\nUnder the plan, it will offer vouchers worth up to 50% of the original price, to be spent at its stores.\n\nThe \"Buy Back\" initiative will launch to coincide with Black Friday.\n\n\"By making sustainable living more simple and accessible, Ikea hopes that the initiative will help its customers take a stand against excessive consumption this Black Friday and in the years to come,\" it said in reference to 27 November, when lots of retailers offer discounts on their products.\n\nThe international scheme will see customers given vouchers to spend at Ikea stores, the value of which will depend on the condition of the items they are returning.\n\nCustomers must log the item they wish to return and will then be given an estimate of its value.\n\n\"As new\" items, with no scratches, will get 50% of the original price, \"very good\" items, with minor scratches, will get 40% and \"well used\", with several scratches, will get 30%.\n\nThey should then return them - fully assembled - to the returns desk where they will be checked and the final value agreed.\n\nThe offer, which will run in 27 countries, applies to furniture typically without upholstery, such as the famous Billy bookcases, chairs, stools, desks and dining tables.\n\nIkea said that anything that cannot be resold will be recycled.\n\nIkea plans to have dedicated areas in every store where people can sell back their old furniture and find repaired or refurbished furniture.\n\nThe company started its first collection in 1948 and some vintage Ikea products have become collectable in recent years.\n\nAuction websites carry a number of Ikea designs from previous decades, and some are on sale for thousands of pounds.\n\nThe company has been testing out furniture reselling in Edinburgh and Glasgow for more than a year.\n\nIkea, which has been taking steps to become more environmentally friendly, says it aims to become \"a fully circular and climate positive business by 2030\".\n\nA \"circular\" business is one which reuses or recycles materials and products.\n\nEarlier this month the group announced plans to open a record number of stores this year.\n\nThe Swedish company and its franchisees will open 50 stores worldwide - including in the UK - adding to the 445 stores currently run by the brand.\n\nIkea's biggest franchisee said demand was rising after lockdown as people seek to do up their homes.\n\nIts latest figures showed sales in the year to August were €39.6bn (£36bn).", "Boris Johnson has been at pains to use every chance recently to say how much restricting our lives bothers him.\n\nBranding himself a \"freedom-loving Tory\", time and again his reluctance for further clamp downs is clear.\n\nBut can he, should he, hold out? It's clear in black and white now that the scientific advisers he used to boast of following think it is maybe even past the time to act.\n\nMinutes from Sage (the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) and the very public view from England's Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, that the national measures aren't adequate made that plain.\n\nAnd the BBC understands that health officials have been considering putting Greater Manchester and Lancashire into the highest level of restrictions, although a decision won't come on Tuesday.\n\nThe Labour leader's call for a \"circuit-breaker\" has added to the volume of demand for extra caution - marking the end of the phase of what he used to describe as constructive opposition.\n\nSir Keir Starmer has been inching away from the broad frontbench consensus on how to handle coronavirus for weeks.\n\nTo the frustration of some on his own side, rather than scream down the government's plans, he has developed an attack on the government's ability to handle the situation and to act quickly enough.\n\nSir Keir Starmer has become increasingly critical of Boris Johnson's performance\n\nBut his call for a circuit-breaker means he believes the government has simply got its wrong.\n\nPolling suggests too that there is public desire for tougher actions to prevent a terrible second wave. Some senior figures in government agree.\n\nYet the balance of desire in the Conservative Party has shifted, with more pleading for finding ways to live with the virus, rather than lock down again. The point has been made time and again on the back benches.\n\nNow a junior member of the government, Chris Green, has resigned in protest at the restrictions in his Bolton constituency, attacking the government's strategy completely. (If you have been paying VERY close attention to politics you might remember it's not the first time Mr Green has quit, and the last time round, Simon Hart, who is now Welsh secretary, was less than flattering about whether it mattered very much.)\n\nBut many ministers are cautious about anything that goes beyond the regional tiered approach that was announced only on Monday.\n\nAnd the Treasury in particular is reluctant to budge - fearing the economic savagery of even a short, sharp national period of more restrictions.\n\nAs we've discussed before, none of this is easy. There is no precedent for how to handle the situation. Nor is there a parallel universe where the government or MPs can judge what would have happened if they hadn't taken the actions they've done already.\n\nBut as cases continue to rise, one Whitehall insider told me that people are preparing for what looks logical on paper - a short period of more intense restrictions everywhere in England.\n\nIt's not what No 10 wants to have to do, but to use Whitehall cliché, the discussions are \"live\" - in other words, it may well happen.\n\nThe prime minister may boast about his love of liberty, but he'll be reluctant too to leave himself open to a repeat of the allegations he faced at the start of the pandemic - that government action to protect people's health was too little, and too late.", "A homeless charity has criticised government plans to allow communal night shelters for rough sleepers to reopen this winter.\n\nMinisters published safety guidance on Tuesday detailing how the shelters, closed earlier this year due to Covid, could reopen if required.\n\nAn extra £10m has also been announced to help councils in England provide individual accommodation.\n\nBut Crisis said the funding \"falls short of the bold action we need\".\n\nThe charity was among 18 health and homeless organisations who last week warned social distancing in shelters would prove \"all but impossible\".\n\nThey are worried that, without more funding for councils, people will be forced into communal accommodation with a higher risk of transmission.\n\nNight shelters - mostly run by charities and volunteer groups - were closed during the Covid-19 lockdown earlier this year.\n\nUsing extra funding provided to councils, thousands were moved into emergency self-contained accommodation such as hotels.\n\nCouncils in England are now set to receive £10m under the Cold Weather Fund, originally set up in 2018, to help provide emergency accommodation.\n\nFaith and community groups will also receive £2m to help provide more individual emergency accommodation.\n\nThe government says this comes on top of £3.7bn in funding earlier this year, which councils could put towards homeless services among other areas.\n\nThe new guidance says there should be a \"balanced risk assessment\" before re-opening night shelters, and they \"should only be used as a last resort to protect against the risk to health and life of individuals remaining on the streets when other alternative options are unavailable\".\n\nThe shelters will also be exempt from the so-called \"rule of six\", limiting the number of people who can gather, but the advice says contact between staff and those sleeping there \"should be minimised\" and staff should ensure groups do not gather inside the shelter.\n\nThe government says the \"default\" for the centres should be self-contained rooms with individual washing facilities, and there should be contacts taken so people can be traced in case of infection.\n\nCommunities Secretary Robert Jenrick said the guidance, alongside the extra funding, would mean \"some of the most vulnerable people in society are given support and a safe place to stay this winter\".\n\nHomeless Link, an umbrella organisation for homelessness groups that helped produce the guidance, agreed night shelters should only open as a last resort.\n\nIts chief executive, Rick Henderson, said the new rules would \"help make shelters open as safely as possible if they do become a necessity\".\n\nBut Jon Sparkes, chief executive of Crisis, urged the government to \"see sense\" and keep night shelters closed.\n\n\"Back in March, the government rightly decided that night shelters and hostels were not a safe environment for people during the pandemic,\" he said.\n\n\"It's completely unacceptable that this approach should now change as we go into winter when the threat remains the same.\n\n\"We must not force people to choose between freezing on the street or a shelter, when both needlessly put lives at risk.\"\n\nHe added councils should instead get the \"crucial funding\" required to provide all rough sleepers with self-contained accommodation.\n\nLabour said the £10m in funding for the Cold Weather Fund represented a fall from the figure last year.\n\nThe party's shadow housing secretary, Thangam Debbonaire, said: \"As we enter a second Covid spike, the government's failure to prepare for a winter homelessness crisis risks lives and public health.\n\n\"We need strong leadership from the government to keep its promise to end rough sleeping for good.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Moment WW2 bomb explodes during attempt to defuse it\n\nThe largest unexploded World War Two bomb ever found in Poland has detonated during the defusing process, a Polish Navy spokesman said.\n\nThe chance the bomb - at the bottom of a Baltic Sea shipping canal - would detonate had been put at 50-50 and all the divers were unharmed.\n\nAbout 750 residents had been evacuated near the port city of Swinoujscie.\n\nThe RAF dropped the Tallboy or \"earthquake\" bomb in a raid in 1945 which sank the German cruiser Lützow.\n\nSwinoujscie was part of Germany and called Swinemünde at the time of the bombardment.\n\nThe shock of the latest detonation was reportedly felt in parts of the city and a video shows the blast throwing up a large column of water into the air.\n\nThe bomb was 6m (19ft) long and weighed 5.4 tonnes, nearly half of which was its explosives.\n\nThe bomb was embedded at a depth of 12m and only its nose was sticking out.\n\nNaval forces used a remote-controlled device to try to \"deflagrate\" the bomb - a technique that if successful burns the explosive charge without causing a detonation, the BBC's Adam Easton reports from Warsaw.\n\n\"The deflagration process turned into detonation. The object can be considered neutralised, it will not pose any more threat to the Szczecin-Swinoujscie shipping channel,\" said Lt Cmdr Grzegorz Lewandowski, spokesman for the Polish Navy's 8th Coastal Defence Flotilla.\n\n\"All divers were outside the danger zone.\"", "The Tendring district, which includes Walton-on-the-Naze, has seen its rate of Covid-19 cases treble in the past week\n\nAs much of England was processing exactly what Monday's government announcement on new coronavirus restrictions meant for them, leaders in one county were finishing plans to request tighter restrictions. Why?\n\nLast Friday, MPs and council leaders in Essex were shown Covid-19 data for the county which, according to those present, warned of an exponential rise in cases for the weeks ahead.\n\nAction was needed, they were told by Dr Mike Gogarty, director of public health and wellbeing at Essex County Council.\n\nThe number of cases in Essex has risen from just over 700 in the week to 2 October to just over 1,000 in the week to 9 October.\n\nOn Tuesday, the council formally asked the government to raise Essex's status in the three-tier alert system from Medium (lowest tier) to High (middle tier), thereby asking for tighter social restrictions on its 1.4 million inhabitants.\n\nIt will mean households cannot visit each other in their homes. It is thought Essex is the only local authority in England to have requested tighter restrictions.\n\nDavid Finch, Essex County Council leader, said \"making these painful decisions now will, we hope, bring dividends later\"\n\nDavid Finch, leader at the Conservative-controlled council, said: \"By acting now, we can hope to stem this increase, limiting the time that we are in these enhanced restrictions and - above all - avoiding further escalation into Very High.\n\n\"All of this will limit the damage to the economy. A healthy economy is critical to everyone having better lives in future.\n\n\"We already have one of the best track and trace operations in the country, but we will also be aiming to push its performance still higher alongside strengthening enforcement capacity and visibility.\n\n\"Making these painful decisions now will, we hope, bring dividends later.\"\n\nDr Gogarty said: \"Across the county we have moved from gradual to exponential growth with the number of cases rising exponentially.\"\n\nEssex is also home to two unitary authorities - Southend Council and Thurrock Council - that do not fall under the remit of Essex County Council.\n\nRob Gledhill, leader at Thurrock, has voiced dismay at the Essex move and warned it could have far-reaching implications.\n\n\"I cannot believe that Essex County Council would make this proposal without appearing to fully consider the evidence of the impact of further restrictions it potentially also imposes on the people of Thurrock,\" he said.\n\n\"The simple facts are the government have announced we are in tier one (medium alert), we have a far lower number of infections than most Essex districts and councils in the country, fortunately we have very few of our residents in hospital and even more fortunately we have had no residents die of Covid-19 since the middle of July.\"\n\nSouthend has not asked to be placed in a higher risk category at the current time.\n\nGraham Bedford, landlord at The Bell Inn in Panfield, near Braintree, told BBC Essex a shift from Medium to High risk tier, which would prevent household mixing, could affect his business \"big time\".\n\nHe said the recently-introduced 22:00 BST closing time restrictions, had already cost him thousands of pounds in takings.\n\n\"Where does it stop? It [being placed in a higher tier] would affect us even more. I don't even want to think about it. I am taking every day as it comes.\"\n\nGavin Callaghan, Labour leader at Basildon Council, said: \"Nobody wants to put restrictions on any resident or business.\n\n\"When we met last week to listen to what the director of public health was telling us about the situation, my view is we are seeing the number [of infections] doubling as each week goes by.\n\n\"One of the key questions I asked the director was if we do not go up a gear in terms of restrictions, how long will it be until the intensive care beds in Essex hospitals reach the 70-80% capacity mark? The reply was just four or five weeks.\n\n\"With that in mind, my view is we should look to nip this in the bud quicker, and save more people's lives.\"\n\nIf this is granted by the government it would mean a ban on households mixing with another household indoors. It would put Essex on a par with the likes of Nottinghamshire and Greater Manchester where the infection rates are much higher than in Essex.\n\nWe understand that councillors, council leaders and MPs have been briefed over the weekend and it does have cross-party support.\n\nThere are concerns about the impact this will have on businesses, especially hospitality, and also how the restrictions could affect people's mental health.\n\nThe feeling though is that the sooner Essex goes into Tier Two, the faster Essex gets out. It would also mean, it is claimed, that the county might avoid a harder lockdown later in the year.\n\nAlthough the request has been backed by the various council leaders in the county, not all have offered whole-hearted support.\n\nThe Tendring district, which includes Clacton, Harwich and Manningtree, has seen its rate of cases increase from 25.9 per 100,000 people (in the week to 2 October) to 80.5 per 100,000 (week to 9 October).\n\nThe Tendring Show, which takes place in Lawford, was one of many events cancelled in the summer\n\nNeil Stock, Conservative leader at Tendring District Council, said: \"I don't think lockdowns work. We shut the entire country down back in March to protect the NHS.\n\n\"We built new hospitals which were not used and in the meantime we've been destroying people's livelihoods, the suicide rate has gone up through the roof, we've got people not having cancer referrals, we heard last week that a million people have not had breast cancer screenings because of the lockdown.\n\n\"This is not a credible way of running the country and we've got to have a better way of dealing with Covid. It is out there and it is bad and you don't want to get it, but we need a different approach to it.\n\n\"We've got to learn to live with it. We can't keep shutting the country down. If we go into the higher tier what will happen when we come out of it? I think we'll just go back into it again.\n\n\"Tendring has the highest number in the country at the moment. A few weeks ago it had the lowest. The number is going to go up and it is going to go down. We cannot simply keep locking down forever and forever.\"\n\nHe said if Essex pursued going into Tier Two, he would \"have to grudgingly accept it\".\n\nHarlow's Conservative MP Robert Halfon said the figures he had seen showed Essex was two or three weeks behind the north of England.\n\n\"I have been in meetings since Friday. I think the approach looking at all the statistics suggests unless we take action in the next two or three weeks we could be in a similar situation to the north. In order to avoid that it may be necessary to have further restrictions.\n\n\"I think the tier system is the right one.\"\n\nIt is understood the government's decision on Essex's bid could be made as early as Thursday.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Sir Keir Starmer has called for a short lockdown or \"circuit-breaker\" in England of two to three weeks to bring the rising rate of coronavirus under control.\n\nThe Labour leader backed the advice of scientific experts from Sage, who have called for a short lockdown to halt the spread of Covid-19.\n\nHe said the the prime minister's plan “simply was not working”.", "The gates of Auschwitz concentration camp, now a memorial, where more than one million people died\n\nFacebook has explicitly banned Holocaust denial for the first time.\n\nThe social network said its new policy prohibits \"any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust\".\n\nFacebook boss Mark Zuckerberg wrote that he had \"struggled with the tension\" between free speech and banning such posts, but that \"this is the right balance\".\n\nTwo years ago, Mr Zuckerberg said that such posts should not automatically be taken down for \"getting it wrong\".\n\n\"I'm Jewish and there's a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened,\" he told Recode at the time.\n\n\"I find it deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don't believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong.\"\n\nBut on Monday, as Facebook changed its policies, he wrote that he had changed his mind.\n\n\"My own thinking has evolved as I've seen data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence, as have our wider policies on hate speech,\" he wrote in a public Facebook post.\n\nMr Zuckerberg had previously said he did not want to ban mistaken beliefs\n\n\"Drawing the right lines between what is and isn't acceptable speech isn't straightforward, but with the current state of the world, I believe this is the right balance.\"\n\nEarlier this year, Facebook banned hate speech involving harmful stereotypes, including anti-Semitic content. But Holocaust denial had not been banned.\n\nFacebook's vice-president of content policy, Monika Bickert, said the company had made the decision alongside \"the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people\".\n\nShe said that later this year, searching for the Holocaust - or its denial - on Facebook would direct users to \"credible\" information.\n\nBut she also warned change would not happen overnight, and training its employees and automated systems would take time.\n\nThe World Jewish Congress - which had conferred with Facebook on anti-Semitism - welcomed the move.\n\n\"Denying the Holocaust, trivializing it, minimizing it, is a tool used to spread hatred and false conspiracies about Jews and other minorities,\" the group said in a statement.\n\nBut it also noted that it had campaigned for the removal of Holocaust denial content from the platform \"for several years\".\n\nJonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, tweeted: \"This has been years in the making.\"\n\n\"Having personally engaged with Facebook on the issue, I can attest the ban on Holocaust Denial is a big deal... glad it finally happened.\"\n\nThis was a bit of a \"wait, they don't do this already?\" moment.\n\nPerhaps that's because Facebook has quite radically shifted its position on removing hate speech and fake news in recent months.\n\nWe're still seeing loopholes from an old moderating regime being closed.\n\nCritics, though, argue this isn't happening fast enough.\n\nThe combined platforms of Facebook and Instagram - which is owned by Facebook - have an extraordinary reach of billions of users worldwide.\n\nThat influence has to be used responsibly, and Facebook acknowledges this.\n\nThe advertising boycott in July also helped cement the view internally that more had to be done to tackle hate speech.\n\nMark Zuckerberg's instincts have always been to champion freedom of speech - the best way to fight bad speech is good speech he's always said.\n\nBut this latest move appears to indicate Facebook now accepts it needs to be more proactive in combating hate speech.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA black man who was led by a rope down a Texas street by two white officers on horseback has sued the city and its police department for $1m (£750,000).\n\nGalveston Police apologised last year after footage emerged of Donald Neely, 44, arrested for criminal trespassing.\n\nA lawsuit filed this week alleged the officers' conduct was \"extreme and outrageous\" and caused Mr Neely injury and emotional and mental anguish.\n\nThe trespass charges against Mr Neely were later dismissed in court.\n\nMany people on social media compared the footage of Mr Neely to the slavery era, an allusion referenced explicitly in the lawsuit. According to the lawsuit, the officers should have been aware that Mr Neely, \"being led with a rope and by mounted officers down a city street as though he was a slave, would find this contact offensive\".\n\nAccusing both the city and the Galveston police department of negligence, the suit says that Mr Neely \"suffered from handcuff abrasions, suffered from the heat, and suffered from embarrassment, humiliation and fear\".\n\nCity officials declined to comment on the lawsuit to US media.\n\nLast year, after an outcry over images of Mr Neely, police clarified that he was not tied with the rope but was \"handcuffed and a line was clipped to the handcuffs\".\n\nGalveston's police chief Vernon Hale said at the time that the technique was acceptable in some scenarios but that \"officers showed poor judgment in this instance\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The USA's history of racial inequality has paved the way for modern day police brutality\n\nThere was no \"malicious intent\", he said, and apologised to Mr Neely for the \"unnecessary embarrassment\". Department policy was changed to prevent the use of this technique.\n\nMr Neely - who was homeless at the time - was sleeping on a sidewalk, US media reported, when he was arrested for criminal trespass and led around the block to a mounted police patrol staging area. The charges were later dismissed.\n\nFollowing an investigation into the encounter, the department released body camera footage of the arrest. In it, the officers can be heard commenting on the appearance of Mr Neely's arrest.\n\n\"This is going to look so bad. I'm glad you're not embarrassed, Mr Neely,\" one officer is heard saying.\n\nA status conference is currently scheduled for 7 January, 2021. Mr Neely is requesting a trial by jury, according to court documents.", "We have entered a crucial phase in the epidemic.\n\nCases are increasing across the whole of the country and the number of people in hospital is now higher than before the full lockdown.\n\nIt is at this critical moment that the gulf between the official scientific advice and the political decisions made by government has been laid bare.\n\nDocuments released by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) reveal a call to action three weeks ago.\n\n\"The re-imposition of a package of measures is required urgently,\" it warned on 21 September.\n\nIt added: \"The more rapidly these interventions are put in place the greater the reduction in Covid-related deaths and the quicker they can be eased.\n\n\"Not acting now to reduce cases will result in a very large epidemic with catastrophic consequences.\"\n\nSage said government should consider the following policies immediately:\n\nThe government has to balance not only the impact of measures on the virus, but also their damaging impact on people's health, wellbeing and the economy.\n\nThere was official advice to work from home, but none of the other measures have been implemented nationally.\n\nThe documents were published shortly after Boris Johnson's televised briefing on Monday night, during which the chief medical officer for England, Prof Chris Whitty, openly declared nobody thought the current tier-three measures being introduced around Liverpool would stop the virus.\n\n\"I am not confident and nor is anybody confident that the tier-three proposals for the highest rates, if we did the absolute base case and nothing more would be enough to get on top of it,\" he said.\n\nHe said it would take \"significantly more\" to achieve control and powers to do so had been given to local authorities.\n\nProf Calum Semple, who was at the Sage meeting on 21 September, said the three-tier system had come too late and he believes that a short national lockdown could be needed within weeks.\n\nSage is also damning of the government's supposedly world-beating test-and-trace system.\n\nTest-and-trace is at the heart of the government's plans - a way of avoiding the need for a national lockdown by targeting restrictions where the virus is.\n\nSage says \"this system is having a marginal impact on transmission\" and that unless its resources grow faster than the epidemic then test-and-trace \"will further decline in the future\".\n\nThe documents say a two-week circuit break in October could drive cases down, essentially rewinding the clock by 28 days. This could buy time for test-and-trace to catch up.\n\nThe Sage papers also reveal how the widely supported decision to keep schools open means a \"wide range of other measures will be required\".\n\nThe national R number - the number of people each infected person passes the virus on to on average - is between 1.2 and 1.5. Anything above 1.0 means the epidemic is growing.\n\nOne set of Sage documents reveals how much individual policies may cut the R number by:\n\nFor each measure aimed at targeting the virus, Sage also details the damaging effect the measures are likely to have.\n\n\"Government will continue to have to juggle social freedom, economic activity and transmission for many months. It is imperative, therefore, that a consistent series of measures is adopted over the next 6-9 months,\" it says.\n\nNine months from that meeting would be June.\n\nThe current situation has been widely predicted, including in a major report in July that warned there could be more deaths in the second wave than the first.\n\n\"We're on track to have 100 deaths a day in next week or so, that's very much tracing some of those worst case scenarios, if the outbreak's increasing it doesn't bode well for November/December,\" said Dr Adam Kucharski, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the modelling group that feeds advice to Sage, told me.\n\nThere is also mounting angst about what the government is trying to achieve.\n\nThe R number is thought to be comfortably above 1 in every region of England, not just parts of the North West.\n\nJeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and Sage member, tweeted: \"Objective has to be to get R<1, if that is not the objective [then we] need clarity on what [the] objective is.\"\n\nThe University of Warwick's Dr Mike Tildesley, who sits on one of the Sage sub-groups, told BBC News: \"It is extremely important the government says what the objective is, what they're trying to achieve, then the science group can be much more useful in advising government.\n\n\"If they tell us, it will be much easier.\"\n\nThe fear among some scientists advising the government is that many of the fundamentals have not changed. This is a virus that thrives on human contact and to which the vast majority of us have no immunity to.\n\nTreatment has improved, but not by enough to prevent large numbers of deaths in a significant outbreak.\n\nThe concern is either we choose the terms for controlling the virus now, or we wait and the virus will force our hand as it did with lockdown in March.", "The NHS Covid-19 app has been updated to fix an issue with confusing alerts that pop up suggesting exposure to the virus and then disappear.\n\nUsers have complained that the notifications are scary and confusing.\n\nIn fact, the messages are a default privacy notification from either Apple or Google, which provide the underlying contact-tracing technology.\n\nThe alerts will still appear, but now a follow-up message from the government will tell people to ignore them.\n\nNHS Covid-19 is targeted at users living in England and Wales.\n\nAmong other functions, the software is designed to warn users if they have recently been in close proximity to someone later diagnosed with the virus for long enough for there to be a high risk of contagion. If this is the case, it instructs the handset owner to go into self-isolation.\n\nScotland and Northern Ireland have apps of their own, which have not experienced the \"phantom alert\" problem.\n\nThe update, which became available on Monday night for iOS and Android phones, seeks to reassure users over the vanishing notifications.\n\nTypical messages read: \"Possible Covid-19 exposure. Someone you were near reported having Covid-19. Exposure date, duration and signal strength have been saved.\"\n\nWhen users click on the notifications they disappear, and when they open the app, there is nothing to be seen and no new advice.\n\nThe new message urges people not to worry or to take any action\n\nNow anyone receiving the alert will also get a second message which will say: \"Covid-19 Exposure Check Complete. Don't worry, we have assessed your risk and there is no need to take action at this time. Please continue to stay alert and follow the latest advice on social distancing.\"\n\nThe Department of Health explained that these messages were \"default privacy notifications from Apple and Google, who provide the underlying framework on which this and many other countries' Bluetooth contact tracing apps are based.\"\n\nIt added that the only messages that matter are the ones inside the app, particularly those advising people that they have been in contact with someone infected with coronavirus and need to self-isolate.\n\nThe update to the app also introduces support for two more languages, Polish and Somali.\n\nThe team behind the app, which has been downloaded more than 16 million times, is working on a more substantial update which will involve moving to version two of the Apple-Google framework.\n\nThis could stop the confusing notifications appearing altogether but will also improve the way the app uses Bluetooth to measure distance between two phones.\n\nThe Alan Turing Institute, which advises the app team, has been working on ways to refine this proximity measurement.", "Facebook has deleted a post in which President Trump had claimed Covid-19 was \"less lethal\" than the flu.\n\nMr Trump is at the White House after three days of hospital treatment having tested positive for the virus.\n\nHe wrote the US had \"learned to live with\" flu season, \"just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!\"\n\nTwitter hid the same message behind a warning about \"spreading misleading and potentially harmful information\".\n\nUsers have to click past the alert to read the tweet.\n\n\"We remove incorrect information about the severity of Covid-19, and have now removed this post,\" said Andy Stone, policy communications manager at Facebook.\n\nAn exact mortality rate for Covid-19 is not known, but it is thought to be substantially higher - possible 10 times or more - than most flu strains, according to Johns Hopkins University.\n\nThe President has reacted by posting: \"REPEAL SECTION 230!!!\"\n\nThis is a reference to a law that says social networks are not responsible for the content posted by their users.\n\nBut it allows the firms to engage in \"good-Samaritan blocking\", including the removal of content they judge to be offensive, harassment or violent.\n\nIf the law were to be repealed, social media companies would face being sued over the edits and changes of user content they made.\n\nThis is the second time that Facebook has deleted a post from the president. Twitter has intervened more often with deletions and warnings.\n\nUsers do not see Trump's tweet in his timeline unless they click on the View link\n\nBoth social networks have vowed to combat potentially dangerous misinformation around the virus.\n\nBut Mr Trump has taken issue with what he sees as editorialising by the companies.\n\nShortly after Twitter put a warning label on his posts for the first time in May, Mr Trump signed an executive order to repeal Section 230.\n\nThe proposal has attracted cross-party support - but for different reasons.\n\nThe Republicans say there is a bias against or even outright censorship of conservative views online and want this to stop. The Democrats say they are more interested in the spread of misinformation.\n\nLast week, the US Senate Commerce Committee issued subpoenas for the heads of Facebook, Twitter and Google to probe the matter further.\n\nPressure has been mounting on Facebook and Twitter to do more to tackle misinformation both about the pandemic and the US election. For that reason, their decisive action on Trump's recent post promoting false claims about the severity of coronavirus will be welcomed.\n\nThat said, Trump's comments about the flu - and those yesterday saying \"Don't be afraid of Covid\" - have already started to fuel conspiracy theories online.\n\nPosts in pro-Trump and anti-mask Facebook groups have shared the comments with captions about the pandemic not being real, or not very serious. They have also used it to encourage others not to follow health guidance like wearing a mask or social distancing.\n\nEarly on in the pandemic, the BBC investigated the human cost of misinformation, including those who fell seriously ill because social media posts led them to doubt the reality or severity of the pandemic and ignore advice.\n\nThe hope will be that this action from social media sites could reduce the risk of that happening - but those who may have already been exposed to this disinformation could be impacted.\n\nAnd all eyes will be on social media sites to see if they keep up this approach to tackling disinformation - coronavirus, political or otherwise - especially from the US Election candidates as polling day nears.", "The \"extremely rare\" orange-coloured lobster was saved by a fishmonger in Lancashire\n\nA \"one in 30 million\" orange Canadian lobster has been saved from the pot by a fishmonger and sent to live out its days in an aquarium.\n\nThe apricot-hued arthropod, which are normally a speckled dark brown colour, was found by Steve Atkinson in a delivery to his shop in Fleetwood.\n\nHe said he called Sea Life Blackpool after spotting the crustacean, which \"stood out dramatically\" in the box.\n\nSea Life curator Scott Blacker said its colouring was \"extremely rare\".\n\n\"Its striking and extremely unusual orange colour is actually only found in one in 30 million,\" he said.\n\n\"It really is something very special.\"\n\nThe lobster will now permanently live in the main tank at Sea Life Blackpool\n\nHe said the lobster, which Mr Atkinson found in September, had completed a 21-day quarantine and would now go \"on permanent display to the public in one of our main tanks\".\n\n\"We will, of course, be ensuring it has a forever caring and loving home,\" he added.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The elevated heat globally contributed to record wildfires in California\n\nSeptember was the warmest on record globally, according to the weather service Copernicus.\n\nIt was 0.05C hotter than September last year, which in turn set the previous record high for the month.\n\nScientists say it’s a clear indication of temperatures being driven up by emissions from human society.\n\nCopernicus, which is the European Union's Earth observation programme, said warmth in the Siberian Arctic continues way above average.\n\nAnd it confirmed that Arctic sea ice is at its second lowest extent since satellite records began.\n\nThis year is also projected to become the warmest on record for Europe, even if temperatures cool somewhat from now on.\n\nThe elevated heat globally contributed to record wildfires in California and Australia.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Why forest fires in Siberia, Russia threaten us all\n\nIt also helped fuel the hottest day on record - a searing 54.4C (130F) in Death Valley.\n\nAnd it had a hand in the torrential downpours that inundated the south of France with more than half a metre of rain in a day.\n\nMétéo-France, the French met office, said a downpour like this was expected once in 100 years – they had two in a month.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nSamantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, told BBC News: \"Some of these events are extraordinary – although we mustn't create a false expectation that temperatures will go up year on year.\n\n“Climate and weather are highly variable. But we predicted that these sort of events would happen, given our effect on the climate.”\n\nWeather records are always being broken naturally, but meteorologists say they’re disturbed by some of the new extremes.\n\nThe UK is not immune. It enjoyed its sunniest Spring on record; August saw a record number of days overtopping 34C; and the town of Reading has just endured its wettest ever 48-hour period.\n\nEd Hawkins, from Reading University, told us: “We have been saying this for decades – more and more greenhouse gases will lead to more and more warming.”\n\nCrowds flocked to beaches across Britain during the summer heat\n\nHe warned these events are being experienced with just one degree of warming globally above the long-term average, while under current rates of decarbonisation the world is heading for three degrees.\n\n“One degree of heating is dangerous for some people, as we've seen,” he said. “Two degrees is more dangerous still, and three degrees even more dangerous. We really don’t want to find out what that’ll be like.”\n\nThe records were released as the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the UK would combat climate change by becoming the Saudi Arabia of wind energy.\n\nHis speech was welcomed by environmentalists, but critics said he needed to back up his promises with policies and budgets.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Five ways that show the scale of California's 2020 wildfires", "Alexanda Kotey (left) and El Shafee Elsheikh were captured by Syrian Kurdish forces\n\nTwo ex-British alleged Islamic State (IS) suspects have appeared in a US court charged over the killing of four American hostages.\n\nAlexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh are accused of belonging to an IS cell dubbed \"The Beatles\" involved in kidnappings in Iraq and Syria.\n\nThe pair appeared via video link from prison at a hearing in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.\n\nThe men, who had been in US custody in Iraq, previously denied the charges.\n\nA detention hearing and arraignment were scheduled for Friday but the lawyer appointed to represent the pair, who grew up in London, said he might ask for a delay to allow time to go over the charges with the defendants.\n\nUS Assistant Attorney General John Demers told a press conference the charges were \"the result of many years of hard work in pursuit of justice\" for the four Americans who died - James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig.\n\nAddressing the families of the victims, he said: \"Although we cannot bring back your children, we will do all that we can do: obtain justice for them, for you, and for all Americans.\"\n\nHe added: \"These men will now be brought before a United States court to face justice for the depraved acts alleged against them in the indictment.\"\n\nThe charges carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.\n\nClockwise from top left: Aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig, and journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley\n\nThe pair are alleged to have been members of an IS gang - nicknamed by hostages after the 1960s pop group due to their British accents - which was responsible for the death of hostages in Iraq and Syria in 2014.\n\nSome of the victims - who included American journalists and UK and US aid workers - were beheaded and their deaths filmed and broadcast on social media.\n\nJames Foley's mother, Diane Foley, said the charges were \"only a first step\" and that she was \"praying that justice will be served\".\n\nShe added that she hoped the trial might \"implicate others\" and lead to further arrests.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"If you harm an American, you will face American justice\": US Assistant Attorney General John Demers' warning to terrorists\n\nKotey and Elsheikh, originally from west London, were previously stripped of their UK nationality.\n\nThe charges they face are:\n\nThe IS group's alleged ringleader, Mohammed Emwazi, known as \"Jihadi John\" died in a drone strike in 2016.\n\nReferring to his death, Mr Demers said he had \"faced a different kind of American resolve - the mighty reach of our military, which successfully targeted him in an air strike several years ago\".\n\nThe assistant attorney general was asked by reporters whether the death penalty was not being sought solely because the UK government had made it a requirement in return for its co-operation.\n\n\"The attorney general decided that we should provide the death penalty assurance in order to get the British evidence and see that justice could be done more expeditiously than if we had to continue to litigate this issue in the courts in the United Kingdom,\" Mr Demers said.\n\n\"The decision was to try to keep the option (of seeking the death penalty) open at first but ultimately that didn't work.\"\n\nLast month the UK sent evidence to the US following assurances the two men would not face the death penalty.\n\nMr Demers added: \"We decided that if we were going to do this case, we were going to tell the fullest story we could of what these defendants did and we were going to put on the strongest case possible. And with the British evidence I think we can do that very well.\"\n\nMs Foley said she was \"hugely grateful\" the death penalty was not being sought, as she wanted alleged IS members to have \"an opportunity to come to terms with what they've done\".\n\nFBI director Christopher Wray told the press conference: \"We mourn not only our American victims but also the British victims David Haines and Alan Henning, and victims of all nations who suffered unimaginable cruelty at the hands of Isis.\"\n\nMike Haines, whose aid worker brother David was killed by the IS cell in 2014, said he was relieved \"the fate of these two men is closer to being decided but this is just the beginning\".\n\n\"The pain we experienced as families was excruciating when we lost our loved ones and the last three years have been a long, horrible waiting game,\" he said.\n\n\"It was a big win for us knowing that the US courts would be taking this forward because we have been waiting years since they were first detained.\"\n\nBritish photojournalist John Cantlie was kidnapped with Mr Foley, and his fate is still unknown.\n\nIt has taken nearly eight years to reach this moment - from the day that James Foley and John Cantlie were taken hostage in Syria to the reading out of the indictment against two of the alleged perpetrators, both now in US custody.\n\nThe eight charges against them are so serious that each one carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.\n\nThe defendants have previously denied the charges linked to their alleged involvement in the murder of US and British hostages.\n\nBut both the US and British governments appear confident that there is a strong case for the prosecution.\n\nOver the course of the coming trial the court is likely to hear some harrowing testimony from those who survived IS captivity - men whose freedom was ransomed in exchange for millions of Euros while their fellow prisoners from the US and Britain suffered horrific deaths at the hands of their captors.\n\nIS once controlled 88,000 sq km (34,000 sq miles) of territory stretching from western Syria to eastern Iraq and imposed its brutal rule on almost eight million people.\n\nThe liberation of that territory exposed the magnitude of the abuses inflicted by the jihadist group, including summary killings, torture, amputations, ethno-sectarian attacks, rape and sexual slavery imposed on women and girls. Hundreds of mass graves containing the remains of thousands of people have been discovered.\n\nUN investigators have concluded that IS militants committed acts that may amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.", "Covid restrictions are to be further tightened in parts of England early next week, with the closure of pubs and restaurants a possibility in the worst-affected areas, the BBC has been told.\n\nThere could also be a ban on overnight stays away from home in these areas.\n\nA final decision on the time period or extent of potential closures has not yet been made.\n\nThe government is also likely to introduce a three-tier system for local lockdowns.\n\nUnder the system, different parts of the country would be placed in different categories - although ministers are still discussing the precise details of the toughest level of restrictions over the next couple of days.\n\nA formal announcement is not likely to come until Monday, according to BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg.\n\nMeanwhile, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has challenged the government to publish the scientific evidence behind the 22:00 closing time for pubs and restaurants - and refused to say whether his party would vote in support of the measure in Parliament next week.\n\nCommunities Secretary Robert Jenrick said there was \"evidence hospitality plays a role\" in spreading the virus.\n\nBut pressed on whether the government would publish this evidence, he told the BBC: \"It is commonsensical that the longer you stay in pubs and restaurants, the more likely you are to come into contact with other individuals.\n\n\"The more drinks that people have, the more likely that some people are to break the rules.\"\n\nHe added that it was right to \"take action decisively, rather than waiting for the most detailed epidemiological evidence to emerge\".\n\nOn the possibility of additional restrictions for some parts of England, Mr Jenrick said the government was \"currently considering what steps to take\" and the precise measures for different areas would be announced \"in the coming days\".\n\nHe did not rule out pubs being closed but said measures would be \"proportionate and localised\".\n\nHe added that the government was trying to give \"greater consistency on rules so they're easier to understand\" and was working on \"slightly broader canvases of regions or cities and counties to avoid differences in people's daily lives if they drive over the border\".\n\nPubs and restaurants across Central Scotland have already been told they will have to close\n\nIt comes as significant new measures are introduced in Scotland.\n\nFrom Friday, all pubs and restaurants across central Scotland, including Glasgow and Edinburgh, are to close, while in the rest of Scotland hospitality venues must shut at 18:00 BST and alcohol can only be served outdoors.\n\nIndustry leaders are warning the measures could be the final straw for many businesses.\n\nOn Wednesday the number of UK cases rose by 14,162, with a further 70 deaths reported.\n\nThe planned tightening of restrictions in parts of England follows rising infection rates across much of the country, with medical leaders warning the NHS is at risk of becoming overwhelmed.\n\nLiverpool, Manchester and Newcastle upon Tyne have the highest infection rates in the country.\n\nA government source told the BBC the situation in the north-west and north-east of England was \"very troubling\", with growing numbers of hospital admissions and more elderly people in intensive care.\n\nThese areas will be placed into the top tier of restrictions, with an announcement possibly as early as Monday, in a new system called the Local Covid Alert Level.\n\nBut there remains a debate within cabinet over how far the restrictions in the top tier should go, with some in No 10 arguing for measures like those in Scotland.\n\nThe plan is for schools to remain open in all circumstances.\n\nThe Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, reacted angrily to the reports, tweeting: \"No discussion. No consultation. Millions of lives affected by Whitehall diktat. It is proving impossible to deal with this government.\"\n\nIt's a complicated equation. The Department of Health is worried about the spread of the disease, as well as other patients losing out on other treatments because of the focus on Covid.\n\nNo 11 is fearful about the impact on the economy, which has already had a profound shock.\n\nAnd it's No 10's job to worry about all of it, then reach a conclusion.\n\nBut Boris Johnson also knows that his own MPs and the opposition parties are more and more sceptical as each day passes about what the government proposes.\n\nIt's clear that shutting pubs and restaurants is a possibility - the \"circuit breaker\" that we have talked about on here lots of times.\n\nBut there are many questions still to be settled.\n\nRead more from Laura here.\n\nUnder the new system, all areas would be subject to the current England-wide restrictions, but there would be much more robust measures for the top tier - the one with the highest infection rates.\n\nThere are already tighter restrictions in parts of the north-east and north-west of England, Birmingham and Leicester, where the rate of infection has been rising.\n\nBut there are currently no extra restrictions for hospitality venues in these areas beyond those in force nationally, such as the 22:00 closing time for pubs and restaurants.\n\nThe Treasury is looking at providing financial support to the industry in the worst-hit areas, and a memo seen by the BBC shows plans for additional money for local authorities. They would get £1 per head of population if placed into tier two, and £2 per head for tier three.\n\nKate Nicholls, chief executive of UK Hospitality, said if venues were forced to close the industry would need a return to a full furlough scheme and additional financial support.\n\nShe said the £40m of support announced for hospitality venues by the Scottish government, when shared between 16,000 premises, equated to just over £2,000 each, which \"barely keeps the lights on, let alone saving jobs\".\n\nThe planned changes come as medical leaders warn that rising infection levels across the country could leave the NHS \"unable to cope\".\n\nThe Academy of Medical Colleges, which represents the UK and Ireland's 24 medical royal colleges, called on people to abide \"strictly\" to coronavirus measures to prevent NHS services from becoming overwhelmed.\n\nHelen Stokes-Lampard, chair of the academy, said: \"Given the recent dramatic spike in both the number of cases and hospital admissions it is clear that we could soon be back to where we were in April if we are not all extremely careful.\"\n\nShe told BBC Breakfast that while there were hotspots in the north-east and north-west of England, a lot of cities were now seeing \"serious problems\" and the virus was \"working further south\".", "Doctors are being told to \"think carefully\" before ordering any tests for their patients, amid shortages caused by a supply chain failure at a major diagnostics company.\n\nSwiss pharmaceutical firm Roche said problems with a move to a new warehouse had led to a \"very significant\" drop in its processing capacity.\n\nA spokesman said Covid-19 tests would be prioritised.\n\nBut the backlog could affect tests including for cancer and heart disease.\n\nOne NHS trust in the south west has already advised its GPs to stop all non-urgent blood tests.\n\nA memo seen by the BBC, sent to clinicians within a large hospital trust in London, said leaders were \"preparing for a sustained disruption\".\n\n\"We urgently need all clinical teams to only send tests that are absolutely essential for immediate patient care, delaying testing where possible,\" it said.\n\nThyroid and cortisol tests were unavailable, while certain cholesterol, liver function and inflammation tests were \"severely restricted\".\n\nIn a statement, Roche said: \"We deeply regret that there has been a delay in the dispatch of some products.\n\n\"We are prioritising the dispatch of Covid-19 PCR [diagnostic] and antibody tests and doing everything we can to ensure there is no impact on the supply of these to the NHS.\"\n\nIt did not comment on the impact on other specific tests including for kidney, liver and thyroid function, sepsis and infection.\n\nDr Tom Lewis, lead clinician for pathology at North Devon District Hospital, said his hospital's trust had sent out communications that all non-urgent blood tests in the community should be stopped.\n\nWithout rationing these non-urgent tests, he said, they would run out of swabs in \"three to four days\".\n\nEven with rationing, essential equipment could run short by next week, he said.\n\nA scientist at a major London hospital's lab said they had already stopped doing thyroid tests, and expected an important test of liver function, and another for inflammation, to run out within the day.\n\nMany of the London labs are supplied by Roche, he said, with reagents - substances used to analyse test results - proving a particular problem.\n\nAllan Wilson, president of the Institute of Biomedical Science, said if the problem continued for days \"it probably will have minimal impact, but if it's weeks then yes it could have a considerable impact on our ability to deliver tests,\" across a whole range of conditions in the UK.\n\nThe main issue appears to be with the supply of reagents - used to detect the presence of a substance whether that's pregnancy hormones, blood glucose or coronavirus.\n\nBecause these have such wide application, the number of different diagnostic tests that could be affected is vast.\n\nIf you go to your GP with a hormonal imbalance, chest infection or sexually-transmitted infection (STI), your test will end up being processed in the lab using these materials.\n\nIf you're admitted to hospital, you will have your electrolytes tested again relying on the same kind of materials. And your organ function may also be monitored in the same way.\n\nKit supplied by Roche is crucial in testing the health of your liver, heart and kidneys.\n\nThey also supply antibodies which are used in cancer diagnosis.\n\nFor NHS trusts which use the company as their main supplier of these types of diagnostic equipment, the work of whole departments could be at risk.\n\nRoche initially told trusts it could take more than a fortnight to resolve the problem.\n\nBut a spokesperson later said they were confident there would be \"significant improvements by the weekend\" and that they would be \"well on the way to resolution by the end of next week\".\n\nThe company is one of the main suppliers of diagnostic testing equipment and materials in the UK.\n\nThe affected warehouse in West Sussex is Roche's only distribution centre in the UK and covers the whole country.\n\nIn September it moved from another warehouse in East Sussex as part of its Brexit preparations, the BBC understands.\n\nIt is \"not a problem with the volume of product available\" but a logistical issue affecting their ability to distribute it, a spokesperson said.\n\nDr Lewis said perhaps most concerning was the shortage of electrolyte tests supplied by Roche, since these were \"the key test\" for critically ill patients, as well as being extremely commonly used by GPs to check people's medications were safe.\n\nOne virologist in the Midlands tweeted that her service had not received Hepatitis C testing kits, and was now running short.\n\nMaterials used in cancer diagnostics could also be affected.\n\nIn a letter sent to NHS trusts, seen by the BBC, Roche said: \"In September we moved from our old warehouse to a new automated warehouse capable of much higher volumes.\n\n\"However, during the transition we encountered some unforeseen issues and a very significant drop in our processing capacity. Since then we have worked around the clock to prioritise and manage orders as well as increase this capacity\".\n\nThe letter went on to advise local NHS services to \"activate [their] local contingency plans\" and \"look to prioritise essential services only\".\n\nBut one clinician pointed out that local contingency plans often involve sending tests to a nearby lab, which in this case might also be affected.\n\nAn NHS spokesperson said:\"Roche has alerted hospitals to an issue with their supply chain, and they will be working urgently to resolve this issue.\"\n\nHave you been affected by any issues around testing? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The first minister says new measures will not amount to the lockdown seen in March\n\nNew coronavirus restrictions for Scotland will be announced on Wednesday - but it will not be another full lockdown, Nicola Sturgeon has said.\n\nOptions for a so-called \"circuit-breaker\" to slow the spread of the virus were discussed by the Scottish cabinet on Tuesday morning.\n\nBut the first minister said people would not be told to stay at home, and there would be no national travel ban.\n\nAnd schools will only close for the October holidays.\n\nHowever, the first minister did not rule out local travel restrictions being introduced, or the possible closure of pubs and restaurants, in areas with higher rates of the virus.\n\nMs Sturgeon was speaking as 800 new cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in Scotland.\n\nThe number of people in hospital with the virus rose by 44 overnight and now stands at 262, with 25 patients being treated in intensive care.\n\nThe virus is continuing to spread across Scotland, but particularly in central belt areas such as Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire, Lothian, Forth Valley and Ayrshire and Arran.\n\nSome parts of the country are currently seeing infection levels higher than 50 per 100,000 people. A local lockdown was imposed in Aberdeen in August when it had 20 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nWhen new measures barring people from visiting each other inside their homes were imposed two weeks ago, an average of 285 new cases were being reported each day.\n\nThat figure now stands at 729 cases per day, which Ms Sturgeon said showed how the pandemic had \"accelerated\".\n\nThe first minister said Scotland was facing \"the most difficult decision point yet\" if it wanted to suppress the virus ahead of winter.\n\nShe said the country was facing a \"sharply rising rate of infection again\", with cases spreading from younger age groups into the older and more vulnerable population.\n\nHowever she said the government needed to \"strike a balance\" between the public health toll and the wider costs of lockdown to the economy and people's lives.\n\nSome tourism and hospitality businesses have warned that they may never recover from the effects of any further restrictions that impact on them.\n\nMs Sturgeon said the wider harms of lockdown \"weigh very heavily\" on her, and said she hoped the fact this was being \"carefully considered\" would reassure businesses.\n\nThe first minister will set out new measures in the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday after further talks with ministers and advisors - but has stressed that \"we are not going back to where we were in March\".\n\nShe said: \"We are not proposing another lockdown at this stage, not even on a temporary basis.\n\n\"We are not going to ask you to stay inside your own homes the way we did in March.\n\n\"And while we have been asking people to think carefully about non-essential travel, and while restrictions on travel may sometimes be an option and necessary for hotspot areas, we are not about to impose restrictions on the whole of the country.\n\n\"We are not about the shut down the whole economy or halt the remobilisation of the NHS.\n\n\"And apart from the October holidays, we are not proposing to close schools even partially.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon refused to be drawn on what specific measures are being considered, but said her statement would address whether they would need to be imposed Scotland-wide or more locally.\n\nShe said she would \"set out the rationale\" and scientific basis for any decisions in her speech to MSPs.\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said any further restrictions would need to be supported by further action to safeguard jobs and businesses.\n\nMr Ross said: \"There hasn't been a single policy from the SNP anywhere near as ambitious as what (UK Chancellor) Rishi Sunak has delivered.\n\n\"All the SNP have done is try to pass the buck back to the UK government. So far, they've given businesses and people fearful of losing their jobs nothing but empty words.\n\n\"The money is there for the SNP to act. We heard this week the £500m Growth Scheme delivered half of the promised funding. The missing millions should be delivered to businesses now, this week, before it's too late.\"", "Rebel Tories have clashed with a health minister over the ban on gatherings of more than six people in England, arguing it doesn't make sense.\n\nThe government easily won a vote on retaining the rule by 287 votes to 17.\n\nSir Graham Brady - one of 14 Tories to oppose the rule - told minister Helen Whately the \"rule of six\" was not based on scientific evidence.\n\nMs Whately hit back, saying the government could not allow coronavirus to \"rip\" through communities.\n\nBut the comment angered Tory former minister Mark Harper.\n\nHe said all MPs \"want the government to be successful\" in combating coronavirus, but they did not appreciate being accused of \"wanting to let it rip and kill tens of thousands of people\" every time they suggested an alternative strategy.\n\nLabour agreed with many of the backbenchers' points in the Commons debate, but the party abstained in the vote on the restrictions, which came into force three weeks ago.\n\nHowever, five DUP MPs joined the Tory rebels in voting against the restriction.\n\nThere could be a bigger rebellion coming if MPs vote on England's 22:00 hospitality curfew.\n\nTory rebels are confident that dozens of backbenchers would be prepared to retrospectively vote down the measure.\n\nIn the Commons debate leading up to the vote on the rule of six, MPs on all sides demanded to know why children had not been excluded from the restriction - as they have in Scotland and Wales.\n\nSir Graham, who chairs the influential 1922 committee of Tory MPs, said: \"Can she (Ms Whately) share with us her estimate of the efficacy of the rule of six compared to that of a rule of eight, had that been introduced instead?\n\n\"Is the rule of six more or less effective than a ban on household mixing?\"\n\nHe added: \"These rules are a massive intrusion into the liberty and private lives of the whole British people, and they're having a devastating economic effect as well, which will result in big job losses and masses of business failures.\"\n\nTory MP Huw Merriman said he feared the rule of six would \"do more harm than good\" as people might end up ignoring rules \"that do make sense\" - adding he had not seen any evidence it would reduce rates of Covid-19.\n\nTory former minister Steve Baker added: \"We're hearing about people who are being destroyed by this lockdown. Strong, confident people, outgoing people, gregarious people, who are being destroyed and reduced to repeated episodes of tears on the phone.\n\n\"This is a devastating social impact on our society and I believe that people would make different choices were they the ones able to take responsibility for themselves.\"\n\nShadow health minister Justin Madders reeled off a list of questions to Ms Whately on the policy, echoing many of the criticisms made by Tory and Lib Dem MPs.\n\nHe said Labour would support \"whatever reasonable steps are necessary to protect the NHS and save lives\", but said the government was guilty of \"mixed messages and confused communications\".\n\nBut Ms Whately said the rule of six gave \"a clear steer\" and made the guidance \"simple and absolutely clear for everybody\".\n\nShe added: \"We are also taking a path of on the one hand trying to enable a level of socialising for the sake of people's quality of life, while taking steps to control the virus.\n\n\"That is where we have taken the position that the rule of six achieves that balance.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nAll pubs and restaurants across central Scotland are to be closed under new measures aimed at tackling a surge in coronavirus cases.\n\nThe new rules will apply to licensed premises across the central belt, including Glasgow and Edinburgh.\n\nPubs and restaurants will be able to open in other parts of Scotland - but can only serve alcohol outdoors.\n\nThe new rules, which will be in force from 18:00 on Friday until 25 October, apply to about 3.4 million people.\n\nThey cover people living in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire, Forth Valley, Lothian and Ayrshire and Arran health board areas.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the restrictions were \"intended to be short, sharp action to arrest a worrying increase in infection\".\n\nShe warned that without taking action, the country risks \"returning to the peak level of infection by the end of the month\".\n\nBut she admitted that the new rules would be disruptive to many businesses and would be unwelcome to many people.\n\nThe Scottish Hospitality Group, which includes many of the the country's best known pubs and restaurants, accused the first minister of \"effectively signing a death sentence\" for many businesses.\n\nAnd the Federation of Small Businesses said the move would have a major knock on impact across other parts of the economy, including tourism.\n\nOpposition parties have called for more detail on a £40m support package for affected business that was announced by Ms Sturgeon, and have questioned the need for the blanket closure of pubs and restaurants.\n\nThe new rules for the five central belt areas are:\n\nThere will be no travel ban in any of the areas, but people in the central belt have been urged to avoid public transport unless it is \"absolutely necessary\".\n\nAnd they have also been advised not to travel outside of the health board area they live in if they do not need to.\n\nThroughout the pandemic Scotland has tended to adopt a slightly more cautious approach than England.\n\nIt has imposed more restrictions and lifted them more slowly in general. The latest move is in line with that trend.\n\nThere is little difference in overall infection rates. Scotland has seen 85 cases per 100,000 in the past week, compared to England's 109.\n\nThe measures imposed by the Scottish government are focussed on areas with the highest infection rates.\n\nBut those places are some way below the levels seen in England's hotspots.\n\nCities such as Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle have seen around 500 cases per 100,000 people over the past week - that is more than twice the level of infection in Glasgow for example.\n\nBut the differences between the two nations should not mask the growing concern there is in England about the infection rates, particularly in the north of country.\n\nSenior ministers and their advisers are today discussing whether extra steps are needed south of the border.\n\nThe problem is action to supress the virus has negative consequences too.\n\nThis much can be seen in the growing number of scientists and health experts who are signing the Great Barrington Declaration warning about the impact of Covid lockdown policies.\n\nIn other parts of the country, pubs, bars, restaurants and cafes will be able to open indoors until 18:00 - but only to serve food and non-alcoholic drinks.\n\nHowever, they will be able to serve alcohol in outdoor settings such as beer gardens until 22:00, with the current rules on no more than six people from two households remaining in place.\n\nAnd the existing rules will continue to apply to weddings that have already been booked, and funerals, in all parts of Scotland.\n\nMs Sturgeon said regulations would be introduced to extend the mandatory use of face coverings in indoor communal settings such as staff canteens and workplace corridors.\n\nShops across Scotland will be asked to return to 2m physical distancing from this weekend, and to reintroduce measures such as one-way systems.\n\nIt comes as Scotland recorded more than 1,000 new confirmed cases of the virus in a single day for the first time - although the country is doing far more testing now than at the height of the pandemic earlier in the year.\n\nThe R number is currently believed to be higher in Scotland than in other UK nations, and the number of people dying or in hospital with the virus has increased over the past week.\n\nThe number of UK cases rose by 14,162 on Wednesday. This was a slight drop on Tuesday's figure, but the seven-day rolling average is still pointing upwards.\n\nSpeaking in the Scottish Parliament, Ms Sturgeon said the \"vast majority\" of pubs and restaurants had worked hard to ensure the safety of their staff and customers.\n\nBeer gardens outside of the central belt will be able to serve alcohol until 22:00\n\nBut she added: \"Indoor environments, where different households from different age groups can mix, inevitably present a risk of transmission.\n\n\"That risk can be increased in some hospitality premises if good ventilation is difficult, and if it is hard to control the movement of people.\n\n\"And the presence of alcohol can of course affect people's willingness to physically distance.\"\n\nScottish Conservative group leader Ruth Davidson criticised a lack of detail over the £40m support package that was announced by the first minister.\n\nMs Davidson said: \"These businesses deserve better. They need to know how much they can apply for, when they can apply for it and how long they will have to wait before support reaches them.\n\n\"Those answers could have been provided today, but Nicola Sturgeon failed to do that.\"\n\nAnd Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said the government should target premises which break the rules \"instead of shutting down every single business\".\n\nThe temporary shutdown of pubs and restaurants across central Scotland with a new 6pm curfew elsewhere are significant new restrictions.\n\nTogether with the existing Scotland-wide ban on visiting other households, these add up to the toughest combination of measures in place across any of the four UK nations.\n\nThe Scottish government has decided to take further action because it fears case numbers are rising so fast that without further action, spread would be back to March/April levels by the end of this month.\n\nThe hospitality industry is not convinced there is sufficient evidence to justify pubs and restaurants being so heavily targeted.\n\nThe new measures are temporary, partly because the Scottish government has limited scope to compensate businesses.\n\nIt hopes the UK government can be persuaded to offer additional support for hard hit sectors in the coming weeks and that all four nations can agree a new system for assessing and responding to the coronavirus threat on a more localised basis.\n\nAre you a pub or restaurant worker in central Scotland? Share your stories by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Personal trainer Matt Simpson, said he was trying to \"bind my history\" with his passion for fitness\n\nA personal trainer who launched a gym workout based on the theme of slavery has \"wholeheartedly\" apologised.\n\nMatt Simpson admitted he posted the \"very-ill judged 12 years of slave workout\", which appeared on the PureGym Luton and Dunstable's Facebook account.\n\nThe post, which said \"slavery was hard and so is this\" did not come from \"a place of malice\", he said.\n\nPureGym called it \"wholly unacceptable\" at the time, on Monday, and has not commented further.\n\nThe workout entitled \"12 Years of Slave\" after an Oscar-winning movie from 2013 with a similar title, included 12 different moves such as burpees, push ups and box jumps. The post said it had been designed to \"celebrate black history month\".\n\nPureGym said the post \"was removed as soon as it was brought to our attention\"\n\nIn a statement at the time, PureGym apologised \"unreservedly\" and said it was \"not approved or endorsed by the company\" and had been removed \"as soon as it was brought to our attention\".\n\nOn his Instagram account, Mr Simpson said: \"I apologise wholeheartedly to anybody who has felt - in any way, shape or form - angered, felt upset, felt racially abused, indirectly or directly.\n\n\"Where the post came from was not a place of malice, it was me as an individual trying to bind my history that I'm a part of, as a person of colour, with my passion which is fitness.\"\n\nMany users had responded angrily to the gym's Facebook post with one saying it was \"wrong, insensitive and horrendous on all levels\".\n\nMr Simpson said it was unfair for people to criticise the gym chain and brand it as racist because he had \"never experienced anything of the sort\" in the year he had worked there.\n\n\"Can we please not deem a company racist through one person's actions,\" he said.\n\n\"I for one am definitely not racist and my actions shouldn't wholly reflect on the company and again I apologise.\"\n\nThe film 12 Years A Slave, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, was based on the memoirs of Solomon Northup - a black musician sold into slavery in the US in 1841.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "Sally Giles says £1,206 of charges were added to her phone bill over five years without her consent\n\n\"I was absolutely horrified and I actually felt quite violated\".\n\nThat's how Sally Giles describes the moment she discovered she'd been charged £4.50 each week, every week for more than five years \"without [her] knowledge or permission\".\n\nThe charge - which totalled more than £1,200 - was added to her phone bill by her provider, EE, allowing her to take part in a competition run by Xinion, owned by BMCM Group.\n\nXinion says Sally signed up to their service in July 2015.\n\n\"They haven't given me any proof whatsoever that I signed up. They insist I must have gone onto a website and entered my phone number. I have never, ever done that. I would never do something like that.\"\n\nSally says she only found out about the charge when she called her provider about a different query in September 2020 - and the adviser asked her if she knew about this weekly charge she'd been paying for so many years.\n\n\"I don't gamble, I don't even buy a lottery ticket so no, [I didn't sign up],\" she says.\n\n\"The proof is I have never played the game, why would I pay £4.50 a week and never play the game?\"\n\nSally says she did occasionally check her phone bill, but the extra charges weren't clearly defined so she assumed they were charity donations she made or when she bought more data.\n\nXinion did send Sally a text each week though asking her a competition question which also explained she was being charged, but she just thought it was a spam text message.\n\n\"You have to open the text to see you're being charged,\" she says. \"I don't open texts from unknown sources for obvious reasons because that's what you're told all the time. 'Do not click on links you don't recognise, just delete it straight away'.\n\n\"When I realised what was happening I opened [the text] and at the bottom, right at the bottom, if you scroll down it says you are being charged £4.50. But as I say you have to open the text to see it.\"\n\nPaul Muggleton, founder of the Phone-paid Services Consumer Group says it's irrelevant whether or not people technically sign up - what matters is whether or not people have knowingly signed up for a service.\n\n\"People who are tricked into, or who unwittingly sign up to a contract, are not bound by the terms of that contract. That's basic consumer law. People have to know what they're getting into.\n\n\"The burden of proof always rests with the third party service provider to show that consumers knowingly signed up.\n\n\"For example, if someone has never once taken part in one of these text message competitions but has been charged, the likelihood is if it ever got to court they would be able to get their money back by showing they didn't even know they'd been signed up.\"\n\nSally refused to open the text messages as she thought they were spam, but you can only tell you're being charged if you fully open them\n\nAfter finding out what happened Sally got in touch with the company involved, Xinion, explained her situation and asked for her money back. It refused.\n\nThen she got in touch with the regulator, the Phone Paid Services Authority, or PSA. \"When I rang them originally I got a very lackadaisical reply saying we'll look into it saying it might take months or even a year. I personally don't think that's good enough. It's time the PSA got their act together.\"\n\nThe next step was the small claims court, but before that Sally got in touch with Money Box.\n\nWe started digging and discovered there have been thousands of complaints to the regulator about these types of charges over the last few years.\n\nWe also heard from Sally's mobile phone provider, EE. It told us it had been in touch with Xinion and that as a gesture of goodwill Xinion had changed its mind and decided to refund Sally after all.\n\nThe PSA said no-one was available for an interview but instead told us how it tightened up regulations on these subscription services last November and since then the number of complaints has dramatically reduced.\n\nHowever, the new regulations do not apply retrospectively, so people who may have found themselves signed up to similar \"competitions\" before the changes came into effect haven't got that extra protection.\n\nWe never heard back from Xinion, but EE said it's toughened up its own procedures on these subscription services including making customers' bills clearer, going above and beyond what the regulator requires.\n\nYou can hear more on BBC Radio 4's Money Box programme by listening again here.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Facebook has banned all accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory movement from its platforms.\n\n\"Starting today, we will remove Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts,\" the company said on Tuesday.\n\nThe move is a significant escalation to Facebook's earlier decision to remove or restrict groups and accounts sharing and promoting QAnon material.\n\nQAnon is a conspiracy theory that says President Trump is waging a war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles.\n\nIn a statement released on Tuesday, Facebook said its staff had begun removing content and deleting groups and pages, but that \"this work will take time and will continue in the coming days and weeks\".\n\n\"Our Dangerous Organizations Operations team will continue to enforce this policy and proactively detect content for removal instead of relying on user reports,\" the statement added.\n\nFacebook said it was updating measures implemented in August, which aimed to \"disrupt the ability of QAnon\" to organise through - and operate on - its networks.\n\nThat policy - introduced to limit the risks to public safety posed by QAnon, \"offline anarchist groups\" and US-based militia organisations - resulted in restrictions on more than 1,950 Facebook groups and over 10,000 Instagram accounts.\n\nThis is a big move from Facebook, which has laid out how it plans to proactively remove all evolving QAnon content from its platforms.\n\nIt comes after I asked Facebook's vice-president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, why the site still allows QAnon to spread political disinformation to US voters and beyond using hashtags like #SaveOurChildren.\n\nFacebook's first crackdown on this dangerous conspiracy theory focused on violent content plugged by those supporting it, removing a number of groups and pages.\n\nBut those supporting QAnon soon adapted, using new palatable hashtags to reach parent groups, local forums and the average Instagram feed. And the movement kept growing.\n\nThis latest move will be welcomed - but will also be very hard to enforce, especially since QAnon has become so big and spread under new guises.\n\nI recently spoke to US voters about how QAnon disinformation about candidates and child trafficking rings could already have impacted their friends and neighbours ahead of polling day.\n\nThey explained how people they know now believe totally unfounded claims they've seen on Instagram and Facebook about the Democrats running a child-trafficking ring or presidential candidate Joe Biden abusing children.\n\nCould this move - like the last - also be too late?\n\nFacebook is not the only social media giant to look at tackling the QAnon conspiracy movement.\n\nIn July, Twitter banned thousands of accounts and said it would stop recommending content linked to QAnon in an attempt to help prevent \"offline harm\". It also said it would block URLs associated with the group from being shared on the platform.\n\nIn October 2017, an anonymous user put a series of posts on the message board 4chan. The user signed off as \"Q\" and claimed to have a level of US security approval known as \"Q clearance\".\n\nThese messages became known as \"Q drops\" or \"breadcrumbs\", often written in cryptic language peppered with slogans, pledges and pro-Trump themes.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Trump on QAnon: 'They do like me'\n\nThe amount of traffic to mainstream social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube has exploded since 2017, and indications are that numbers have increased during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nJudging by social media, there are hundreds of thousands of people who believe in at least some of the bizarre theories offered up by QAnon.\n\nQAnon followed on from the \"pizzagate\" saga in 2016 - a fake theory about Democratic Party politicians running a paedophile ring out of a Washington pizza restaurant.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "The search involved police, firefighters, coastguard staff and search and rescue volunteers\n\nA man whose body was recovered following a major river search has been named as 32-year-old Alun Owen.\n\nEmergency services found the Openreach engineer's body in the river at Abergwyngregyn, Gwynedd, just before 19:15 BST on Tuesday.\n\nMr Owen was known to family and friends as \"Al Bonc\".\n\nThe Health and Safety Executive and North Wales Police said they were working together to establish the sequence of events which led his death.\n\nDet Insp Andrew Gibson, of North Wales Police, said the force's \"heartfelt sympathies\" were with the man's family, friends and colleagues.\n\nIn a statement, the force said it and the Health and Safety Executive were \"working together to establish the sequence of events which led to this tragic incident which resulted in the death of a well-respected local man\".\n\nThe coroner has also been informed.\n\nSeveral emergency services searched for Mr Owen on Tuesday\n\nClive Selley, Chief Executive of Openreach, said: \"We're extremely shocked and saddened to have lost Alun Owen, one of our Openreach family, last night.\n\n\"Our thoughts and deepest sympathies are with Alun's family and friends.\n\n\"Alun was an extremely popular member of the team and had been working as an engineer in and around north Wales for five years.\n\n\"We're now working closely with the North Wales Police while they carry out their investigation.\"\n\nA major search for Mr Owen began at about 16:00 on Tuesday and involved police, firefighters, the coastguard and search and rescue volunteers.\n\nTwo specialist water rescue teams and three fire crews from North Wales Fire and Rescue Service searched the river, along with members of Ogwen Valley Search and Rescue Team.\n\nThe coastguard helicopter attended and two coastguard rescue teams were sent from Bangor and Llandudno to assist in the search.\n\nEarlier this week, homes in the village were flooded after the River Aber burst its banks following heavy rain.\n\nResidents saw the helicopter flying over the river", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Alexei Navalny is now out of hospital - shown here with his wife Yulia and son Zakhar in Berlin\n\nThe poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny says recovering from nerve agent is a long haul, with sleepless nights and clumsy movements.\n\nBut he told BBC Russian that \"I'm doing much, much better\" and insisted that eventually he would go back to Russia.\n\nThe BBC met him at a tightly-guarded Berlin hotel, after he spent 32 days in Berlin's Charité Hospital, mostly in intensive care.\n\nHe felt cold shivers initially and no pain, \"but it felt like the end\".\n\n\"It doesn't hurt at all, it's not like a panic attack or some sort of upset. At the beginning you know something is wrong, and then really your only thought is: that's it, I'm going to die.\"\n\nHe collapsed on a flight from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow on 20 August, and only survived because the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, where he was rushed to intensive care.\n\nLater, after top-level negotiations with the Russian authorities, he was airlifted to Berlin and treated there while being kept in a medically induced coma.\n\nThe inter-governmental Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has confirmed that Mr Navalny, 44, was poisoned with a Novichok-type nerve agent.\n\nIn a statement, it pointed to the similarities between traces found in his urine and blood samples and chemical weapons on the banned list.\n\nGermany says French and Swedish laboratories also agreed with its scientists that Mr Navalny was \"beyond doubt\" poisoned with a nerve agent.\n\nNovichok agents, developed by Soviet scientists during the Cold War, are extremely toxic - a tiny amount can kill.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nLast week, in his first video interview since leaving hospital in late September, Mr Navalny said he believed the Russian authorities poisoned him to remove the threat he posed to their dominance in next year's parliamentary elections.\n\nThe Russian government has denied any involvement in his poisoning. Russian doctors who treated Mr Navalny said they found no poison.\n\n\"I assert that [President Vladimir] Putin is behind this act, I don't see any other explanation,\" he told German news magazine Der Spiegel last week.\n\nHe fell ill after campaigning in Siberia to get fellow anti-corruption campaigners elected to local councils.\n\nHe is one of Russia's best-known critics of President Putin, with millions of followers on social media, where he exposes official corruption and denounces the pro-Putin United Russia party as \"thieves\".\n\nMr Navalny was airlifted to Berlin two days after he fell into a coma on 20 August\n\nHe refuses to accept a life of exile, and told the BBC: \"They've been striving for a long time to force me out of the country\".\n\n\"I don't know how events will develop, I'm not going to take risks. I have my cause, I have my country.\" He said there was no point thinking about events he had no power to control.\n\nHe told the BBC that on the plane, as the poison took effect, he felt unable to focus on anything, though people and objects around him were not swaying or blurred in the way that alcohol affects the brain.\n\nFor weeks Yulia was unsure whether her husband would pull through\n\nMuch later in hospital \"there were several phases of reawakening, and that was the most hellish period\".\n\n\"For a long time I had hallucinations,\" he said. He believed his wife Yulia, doctors and his fellow activist Leonid Volkov were telling him he had been in an accident, he had lost his legs, \"the surgeon was going to give me new legs and a new spine\".\n\nHe was convinced that this was \"totally real\" and he was \"tormented by hallucinations at night\".\n\n\"My main problem is sleeping. I've lost the sleeping habit, and I find it difficult without sleeping pills. I never used to have that problem.\n\n\"I also have tremors in my hands, they're unpredictable.\" He said he was having frequent medical checks, including cognitive tests, and \"physically I'm recovering quite quickly\".\n\n\"Sometimes I feel sort of spaced out, I go for walks twice daily, and can walk for quite some time. For me the hardest part is getting in and out of the car.\"\n\nHe expressed relief that he was not in any pain, but frustration that even a simple thing like throwing a little ball \"feels like shot-putting\" in athletics.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Keir Starmer says it is getting “ridiculous” with the prime minster unable to explain coronavirus restrictions\n\nBoris Johnson has been challenged to publish the scientific evidence behind the 10pm closing time for English pubs ahead of a vote by MPs next week.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the public \"deserved to know\" the basis for the restriction and if it could not be justified the rule must be reviewed.\n\nTory MPs opposed to the move may rebel in the Commons vote.\n\nThe PM said the rationale behind it had not changed and it was designed to reduce the spread of the virus.\n\nThe two party leaders clashed over the effectiveness and fairness of national and local Covid restrictions at Prime Minister's Questions, with Sir Keir accusing the PM of incompetence and the PM saying Labour had supported the government's position, then changed its stance.\n\nAll pubs, bars, restaurants and other hospitality venues in England have been required to close at 10pm since 24 September, as part of a package of measures to try and contain a surge of new cases in the North of England.\n\nMinisters argue it has had a \"beneficial effect\" on the spread of the virus in areas where the restriction had already been tried - but it has become a lighting rod for dissatisfaction on the Tory benches about Covid restrictions.\n\nAnd regional leaders, including the mayors of Greater Manchester and London, have called for it to be reviewed amid concerns it has led to large crowds gathering outside venues in some cities after closing time.\n\nHowever you look at the blizzard of statistics about the coronavirus, the disease is still spreading - despite town after town being placed under extra limits.\n\nEven before Nicola Sturgeon's moves on Wednesday to try to break the spread in Scotland, ministers in SW1 were looking at the next steps they would need to take to stop the acceleration of the virus.\n\nAs we've reported, the government is likely to introduce a tiered approach to put different parts of the country with different spreads of the diseases into different categories.\n\nBut the exact nature of the strictest form of restrictions are yet to be set in stone.\n\nLabour has said a vote on whether to keep or scrap the 10pm closing time is expected on Monday, although the government has not confirmed the date.\n\nSir Keir refused to say which way Labour would vote, telling the BBC the PM \"needs to make his case\" about how the 10pm cut-off reduces transmission and \"the ball very firmly is in his court\".\n\nSpeaking earlier in Parliament, he said: \"Is there a scientific basis for the 10pm rule?\n\n\"The public and Parliament deserve to know. If there is, why does the government do itself a favour and publish it?\n\n\"If not, why does the government not review the rule?\"\n\nIn response, Mr Johnson said \"the basis on which we set out the curtailment of hospitality was the basis on which he accepted it two weeks ago.\n\n\"And that is the reduce the spread of the virus and that is our objective.\"\n\nThe prime minister accused Labour of withdrawing its support for other restrictions, after its MPs were told to abstain in a vote on Tuesday on maintaining the rule of six limit on social gatherings.\n\n\"What kind of signal does this send to the people of the country about the robustness of the Labour Party and their willingness to enforce the restrictions?\" he added.\n\nDuring heated exchanges, the Labour leader urged the PM to be straight with the public about whether local lockdowns were working and to explain why some areas of the country were not being subject to restrictions despite having a higher proportion of cases than those targeted.\n\nHe said cases were continuing to rise in 19 of the 20 local council areas which had been to subject to restrictions between the end of July and start of August - including Bradford, Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport and Wigan.\n\nThe Labour leader said that in Burnley, infection rates were 21 per 100,000 people when restrictions were introduced, while now it is 434. In Bolton, it was 18 per 100,000, while now it is 255.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by BBC Politics This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAt the same time, he said no extra restrictions were being applied in the London borough of Hillingdon - which is home to the PM's Uxbridge and Ruislip constituency - despite it having recorded weekly figures as high as 62 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nThis, he said, was a far higher figure than the rate of infection in Kirklees in West Yorkshire - 29 cases per 100,000 people - when restrictions were imposed there on 30 July\n\n\"The prime minister really needs to understand that local communities are angry and frustrated,\" he said.\n\n\"So will he level with the people of Bury, Burnley and Bolton and tell them: what does he think the central problem is that's causing this?\n\n\"The prime minister can't explain why an area goes into restrictions. He can't explain what the different restrictions are, and he can't explain how restrictions end.\"\n\nMr Johnson said the combination of local and national measures in place were needed to deal with the continued sharp rise in cases in Manchester and Liverpool but also the uptick in infections in the Midlands and London.\n\n\"The local and regional approach, combined with national measures, remains correct because two thirds of those admitted into hospital on Sunday were in the North East, North West and Yorkshire,\" he said.\n\nSir Keir grilled the prime minister on the effectiveness and fairness of local restrictions.\n\n\"Twenty local areas have been under restrictions for two months, in 19 of those 20 areas infections rates have gone up,\" he said, citing new Labour Party analysis.\n\nThe trends highlighted in the report for those areas are correct.\n\nIn fact, only in Leicester did we see sustained declines in case rates during a local lockdown, but those rates quickly increased when restrictions were loosened.\n\nThe issue with the Labour analysis is that a handful of the places mentioned have not actually been in local lockdowns for two complete months.\n\nFor example, Oadby and Wigston did face additional restrictions at the end of June, but these were lifted after a month. They were only placed under restrictions again on 22 September.\n\nOn another point, Sir Keir said areas in parts of the north of England had been placed into local restrictions at rates lower than those experienced in parts of the south which are not under any kind of lockdown.\n\nThis is true: Bury, Tameside, Stockport and Wigan (to name a few) had case rates of between 20 and 30 per 100,000 people when they first went into lockdown.\n\nThe London borough of Hillingdon - the prime minister's constituency - had rates of 46 cases per 100,000, while Redbridge had 57 and Barking and Dagenham 53, in the week ending the 27 September, according to Public Health England.\n\nAnd analysis by the BBC data team suggests that these rates have increased in the past week.", "Video caption: 'Mr Vice-President, I am speaking' - Harris and Pence clash at VP debate 'Mr Vice-President, I am speaking' - Harris and Pence clash at VP debate\n\nThis vice-presidential debate gave the Americans who chose to watch a look at US politics present and future.\n\nFor the current election, both candidates did their best to defend their running mate and land shots on the top of the opposing ticket.\n\nThe participants in this debate were also looking beyond November, however.\n\nPence - like most vice-presidents - has his eyes on a presidential bid of his own. To do that, he'll have to win over Trump's base while also casting a wider net to Republicans and right-leaning independents who may have become disaffected with Trumpian politics.\n\nHarris, who at this point last year was running for president herself, tried to prove that she can be a capable standard-bearer for the Democrats once Joe Biden exits the political stage. When given the chance, she spoke about her upbringing and background, taking the opportunity to introduce herself to a larger US audience.\n\nBoth Pence and Harris live to fight another day - and that day could come in just four years.\n\nRead more: Five takeaways from the VP debate", "Government plans to relax development rules could result in the loss of much-needed homes, council leaders say.\n\nSites of up to 40 or 50 houses could be temporarily exempted from affordable housing contributions under proposals put forward last month.\n\nThe Local Government Association said if the plan had been in place over the last 18 months, it would have led to nearly 10,000 fewer affordable homes.\n\nBut ministers say the move will help small firms recover from Covid.\n\nThe current rules in England mean developers which have sites with more than 10 houses either have to build or pay towards affordable housing, while those with 10 homes or fewer are exempt from the contribution.\n\nThe government is consulting on raising this threshold for 18 months to help \"minimise the economic pressure\" on small developers in the wake of coronavirus.\n\nThe proposal - which ministers say could be confirmed this autumn - forms part of sweeping changes to the planning system in England.\n\nThe government has acknowledged a higher threshold would lead to a reduction in contributions towards affordable housing via so-called Section 106 agreements.\n\nThese deals see developers negotiate with a council to build a certain number of affordable homes, or contribute cash towards them.\n\nBut the government argues removing the need for these negotiations to take place will make more sites financially viable for smaller developers.\n\nThe LGA, which represents councils in England and Wales, said the plan could lead to a significant reduction in affordable housing.\n\nIt commissioned analysis that estimated the proposals would have led to 9,072 fewer affordable homes built on sites of 10 to 49 units in the last 18 months.\n\nOver the the last five years, this figure would have been nearly 30,000, the body warned.\n\nDavid Renard, a Conservative councillor and housing spokesman for the LGA, said the government proposal was of \"huge concern\".\n\nHe said it risked allowing developers to \"game the system\" by putting forward schemes just below the new threshold to avoid building affordable housing.\n\n\"With rising housing waiting lists and record numbers in temporary accommodation, we desperately need to be building more affordable housing, not less,\" he said.\n\n\"We need to build homes that are affordable to local people and help to reduce homelessness, rather than contributing additional funds to developers' and landowners' profits.\"\n\nThe Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said a temporary change would help small builders deliver housing more quickly.\n\nA spokesperson added plans to replace Section 106 agreements with a new infrastructure levy would \"ensure developers pay their way\".\n\nThey added that the new national charge - also announced last month - would deliver \"at least as much, if not more, onsite affordable housing than today\", and that the the £11.5bn Affordable Homes Programme \"will deliver up to 180,000 new affordable homes across the country.\"", "Pub giant Greene King is cutting 800 jobs after deciding that tighter lockdown restrictions mean some pubs will have to close.\n\nIt said 79 sites will stay closed for the time being, with about one third of these expected to be shut permanently.\n\nCoronavirus restrictions, such as the 10pm curfew, and the winding down of the furlough scheme was a \"challenge\" to trading, Green King said.\n\nIt urged the government to do more for the struggling hospitality sector.\n\nScotland's hospitality sector received a jolt on Wednesday when its government said it would close all pubs and restaurants across central Scotland under new measures aimed at tackling a surge in coronavirus cases in the region.\n\nThe 10pm closing time remains in place in England and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been challenged to publish the scientific evidence behind that.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the public \"deserved to know\" the basis for the restriction and if it could not be justified the rule must be reviewed.\n\nTory MPs opposed to the move may rebel in the Commons vote, which is scheduled for next week.\n\nAn industry body warned on Tuesday that half a million hospitality jobs could go by the end of the year.\n\nA spokeswoman for Greene King said: \"The continued tightening of the trading restrictions for pubs, which may last another six months, along with the changes to government support was always going to make it a challenge to reopen some of our pubs.\n\n\"Therefore, we have made the difficult decision not to reopen 79 sites, including the 11 Loch Fyne restaurants we announced last week.\n\n\"Around one-third will be closed permanently and we hope to be able to reopen the others in the future.\"\n\nShe added: \"We are working hard with our teams to try and find them a role in another of our pubs wherever possible.\"\n\nSuffolk-based Greene King, which was bought by a Hong-Kong real estate giant last year, is one of the UK's biggest hospitality firms, with 3,100 pubs, restaurants and hotels across the UK.\n\nThe hospitality sector has been struggling with government restrictions designed to slow the spread of coronavirus, including 10pm closing time for pubs, social distancing measures, and mandatory table service for food in licensed premises.\n\nUnder the government's furlough scheme, workers put on leave have been able to get 80% of their pay, up to a maximum of £2,500 a month.\n\nBut that scheme has been winding down and at the end of October will be replaced by the Job Support Scheme - a less generous wage support scheme.\n\nThere are fears this will trigger large scale job cuts among businesses struggling to cover their costs.\n\nThe company said it had a strong track record of redeploying people across its business, and had already identified a number of other opportunities for Loch Fyne employees from the 11 restaurants it said it would be closing last week.\n\nLast week, the boss of rival Fuller's said that about a tenth of its almost-5,000 employees could face redundancy without further state support.\n\nThe bosses of London-focused groups Young's and City Pub Group also warned that they might have to get rid of hundreds of roles when furlough ends later this month.\n\nAre you a Greene King employee? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Billionaires have seen their fortunes hit record highs during the pandemic, with top executives from technology and industry earning the most.\n\nThe world's richest saw their wealth climb 27.5% to $10.2trn (£7.9trn) from April to July this year, according to a report from Swiss bank UBS.\n\nThat was up from the previous peak of $8.9trn at the end of 2017 and largely due to rising global share prices.\n\nUBS said billionaires had done \"extremely well\" in the Covid crisis.\n\nIt also said the number of billionaires had hit a new high of 2,189, up from 2,158 in 2017.\n\nIt comes as a World Bank report on Wednesday showed extreme poverty is set to rise this year for the first time in more than two decades due to the pandemic.\n\nAmong the billionaires, the biggest winners this year have been industrialists, whose wealth rose a staggering 44% in the three months to July.\n\n\"Industrials benefited disproportionately as markets priced in a significant economic recovery [after lockdowns around the world],\" UBS said.\n\nTech billionaires have also had a good pandemic, seeing their wealth soar 41%. UBS said this was \"due to the corona-induced demand for their goods and services\" and social distancing accelerating \"digital businesses [and] compressing several years' evolution into a few months\".\n\nHealthcare billionaires also benefited as the crisis put drug makers and medical device companies in the spotlight.\n\nThe rise in fortunes reflects the generally strong performance of global stock markets since late March, despite most countries continuing to suffer sharp recessions.\n\nAmazon boss Jeff Bezos and Tesla founder Elon Musk - both multi-billionaires - saw their wealth hit new highs this summer thanks to growth in the price of their companies' stock.\n\nIn the last 11 years China's billionaires have increased their wealth by the biggest percentage, climbing 1,146% between 2009 and 2020, according to UBS.\n\nBy comparison, over the same period the wealth of British billionaires has risen by just 168%.\n\nBut the biggest accumulation of wealth remains in the US where American billionaires have $3.5trn, compared to China's $1.7trn.\n\nThe UK's wealthy have just $205bn, compared to Germany's $595bn and France's $443bn.\n\nUBS said many billionaires had donated some of their wealth to help with the fight against Covid-19.\n\n\"Our research has identified 209 billionaires who have publicly committed a total equivalent to $7.2bn from March to June 2020,\" the report said.\n\n\"They have reacted quickly, in a way that's akin to disaster relief, providing unrestricted grants to allow grantees to decide how best to use funds.\"\n\nBut it revealed that UK billionaires donated less than those from other countries.\n\nIn the US, 98 billionaires donated $4.5bn, in China 12 billionaires gave $679m, and in Australia just two billionaires donated $324m. But in the UK, nine billionaires donated just $298m.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Education Secretary John Swinney said a full 2021 exam diet was \"too big a risk\"\n\nNational 5 exams are to be cancelled in Scotland in 2021 and replaced with teacher assessments and coursework.\n\nEducation Secretary John Swinney said going ahead with all exams during the continuing Covid pandemic was \"too big a risk\".\n\nHigher and Advanced Higher exams will go ahead as usual - but will start on 13 May, two weeks later than planned.\n\nThe move came as new restrictions were imposed across Scotland in response to a sharp rise in new coronavirus cases.\n\nSchools are to remain open but Mr Swinney said it was likely students would still face disruption - meaning an \"alternative approach\" was needed.\n\nHe said National 5 qualifications - which account for about half of all exams sat in Scotland and are roughly equivalent to GCSEs in England - would be judged on \"teacher judgement supported by assessment\".\n\nOpposition parties have been split on whether exams should go ahead, with the Greens calling for them to be axed entirely - but the Scottish Conservatives saying Mr Swinney had \"thrown in the towel\".\n\nScotland's school exams were cancelled for the first time ever in 2020, with the country locked down due to the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nThe Scottish Qualifications Authority initially drew up results using a system which took teacher estimates for each pupil, then moderated them based on results from previous years.\n\nHowever, this sparked an outcry after 125,000 results were downgraded, with claims the moderation system unfairly penalised children at schools which had historically not performed as well.\n\nThe government subsequently agreed to accept the original teacher estimates of grades, and commissioned an independent review of the row.\n\nProf Mark Priestly recommended the new approach to National 5 exams and the development of a new approach to assessments, and this was accepted by ministers.\n\nResults will again be moderated to \"maintain standards\", but Mr Swinney stressed that \"awards will not be given or taken away on the basis of a statistical model or on the basis of a school's past performance\".\n\nMr Swinney has suggested that exams could be held later in the year in Scotland in 2021\n\nWe are already eight weeks in to this academic year and teachers, pupils and parents had been calling for clarity about what would happen with the 2021 exams.\n\nIf they planned for \"normality\" next summer it risked last-minute changes close to exam time and a repeat of the problems of this summer.\n\nThe decision to scrap the final exams for National 5 students, which are usually taken by 15 and 16-year-olds, means their grades will be decided by continuous assessment throughout the year. Teachers and pupils can now prepare for this.\n\nThe decision to scrap the largest group of exams means there will be more space and time for Highers and Advanced Higher to take place under exam conditions in as close a way to normal as possible.\n\nThey will be pushed back slightly later to allow for extra teaching time, but will still be completed before the end of the school term.\n\nThis will allow papers to be graded and marks sent to pupils at the beginning of August, meaning applications for university and college places can continue as they normally would.\n\nThe education secretary said: \"The risk remains that there may be further disruptions for individual pupils, schools, college, or more widely across the country during the course of this academic year.\n\n\"Due to the level of disruption already caused by Covid, and due to the likely disruption faced by some or all pupils and students this academic year, a full exam diet is simply too big a risk - it would not be fair.\"\n\nHe added that a \"contingency plan\" was in place should Highers and Advanced Highers need to be called off, which could see grades again being awarded on teacher judgement.\n\nThe Scottish Conservatives said a full exam diet \"could and should\" have taken place, with MSP Jamie Greene saying \"it does feel like the towel has been thrown in\".\n\nLabour's Iain Gray said the decision had come late, with staff \"months in to teaching courses already\".\n\nThe Scottish Greens have backed calls for all exams to be cancelled, asking why the same approach could not be applied to Highers and Advanced Highers.\n\nMr Swinney replied that the \"significant weight\" attached to Highers in university admissions meant they should be maintained if at all possible.", "Scientists are to map the spread of Covid in over 15 UK hospitals, to see how it can defeat even the best infection-control defences.\n\nThe work, which has been given urgent status by government, will use genetic material to track how the virus moves between staff, patients and wards.\n\nIt could help break more chains of transmission.\n\nHospitals already use tried and tested methods to minimise spread, including separating Covid patients from others.\n\nThe study, led by scientists at University College London, will evaluate if rapid viral genomic sequencing data can help locate and reduce the spread of Covid-19 within hospitals.\n\nThat means taking lots of nose and throat swabs from patients and hospital staff and looking at the genetic make-up of any coronavirus found.\n\nVirus genomes constantly alter or mutate, changing a tiny bit at a time as they divide and spread by infecting more people.\n\nAnd these changes can be exploited to track the spread of the virus.\n\nScientists can tell from these fingerprints whether infections from two different people are identical, meaning one of the individuals transmitted it to the other.\n\nIf the fingerprints are different, it rules this out.\n\nProf Judith Breuer, who is leading the work, said: \"By sequencing Covid-19 viruses rapidly, we hope to establish how hospital staff and patients became infected.\n\n\"This will allow hospitals to put effective measures in place faster, to try to interrupt onward transmission of the virus and reduce the number and size of outbreaks.\"\n\nThat might include more regular deep cleans, rechecking the effectiveness of personal protective equipment and moving other vulnerable patients out of the hospital to another setting, she said.\n\nMany of the small genetic changes will have no significant effect on the severity of the disease the virus causes or how we should fight it.\n\nSo far, coronavirus has not had mutations that might make any future vaccine for it ineffective.\n\nBut experts say it is important to keep a close check on it just in case.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "David Lammy said the Met's investigation into the tweet was dropped because \"Twitter refused to assist\"\n\nAn MP has asked Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey to \"explain himself\" after a police inquiry into a \"racist death threat\" was halted when the social media giant did not co-operate.\n\nThe Metropolitan Police said they had been unable to get details from Twitter of the account which sent the tweet to Tottenham MP David Lammy.\n\nMr Lammy tweeted Mr Dorsey asking why Twitter was \"shielding vile racists\".\n\nTwitter said it was now co-operating with the police inquiry.\n\nEarlier on Wednesday the Met said a \"thorough investigation\" had been carried out into the tweet.\n\nA spokesman said: \"All lines of inquiry were explored as far as possible, however, due to the owner of the suspected social media account living outside the UK and the fact we were unable to obtain the subscription details of the individual from Twitter, we were unable to continue the investigation.\"\n\nMr Lammy reacted to the Met's announcement by tweeting direct to Mr Dorsey.\n\nHe tweeted: \"Please explain why you are shielding vile racists who make death threats on your platform? #BlackLivesMatter.\n\n\"You should not be able to push race hate and send death threats with impunity online.\n\n\"Shame on Twitter for failing to act with Met Police to identify who sent this threat.\n\n\"#BlackLivesMatter has to be more than a slogan to drive traffic and ad revenue on your website.\"\n\nA Twitter spokesperson later said it was co-operating with police \"having now received and processed the correct information\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The William Harvey Hospital was inspected in August\n\nInspectors have demanded improvements from a hospital after a report highlighted a number of failings over Covid-19 precautions.\n\nThe Care Quality Commission inspected the emergency department and medical wards at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent, on 11 August.\n\nStaff were seen to be wearing masks incorrectly, not using hand sanitiser and not adhering to social distancing.\n\nThe East Kent Hospitals Trust said it acted immediately to address concerns.\n\nInspection teams visited a ward where patients showed symptoms and were awaiting test results as well as a ward caring for patients who had Covid-19.\n\nA ward for patients without the virus and a fourth ward where there had been an outbreak of Covid-19 were also inspected.\n\nThe CQC said it took urgent enforcement action, telling the trust to ensure there was an \"effective system to manage the health and safety of people using the hospital\".\n\nThe report revealed staff did not always wear PPE or face coverings correctly in medical wards. One member of the nursing team was seen to be wearing a mask incorrectly in the ward where there had been an outbreak of the coronavirus.\n\nAt least seven members of staff were seen entering and leaving the ward caring for people who were suspected of having Covid-19 without adhering to hand hygiene practices.\n\nStaff did not always remove PPE upon entering a new clinical area of the emergency department. Nor did they always put on or take off their PPE when entering and leaving patient bays.\n\nWhile equipment was said to have been cleaned on the day, inspectors found this was not always recorded.\n\nThe report also detailed that five members of staff were seen in one room that was too small to enable the practised social distancing in that space.\n\nInspectors found staff and patients did not always have access to hand gel or hand washing facilities in the emergency department. It was also found that sanitiser bottles at the entrances to the assessment centre were empty.\n\nTed Baker, Chief Inspector of Hospitals, said: \"It is extremely disappointing to find that despite being warned about their hygiene, not enough work had been carried out to address infection control issues within the trust.\n\n\"It is particularly concerning during a time when infection control could never have been more important.\n\n\"Following the inspection, we reported our findings to the trust so its leaders know what they must address. We used our enforcement powers by imposing conditions on the trust's registration, to ensure people are safe.\"\n\nEast Kent Hospitals Trust chief executive Susan Acott said: \"In August, a CQC inspection team visited the William Harvey Hospital and saw examples of practice which falls short of the high standard we all want to provide for our patients.\n\n\"Keeping our patients and staff safe is our priority. We have responded to the CQC with the actions we are taking and we are committed to the care and safety of every patient in our hospitals.\"\n\n\"Rapid, long-lasting improvements are being led by our new, highly experienced, Interim Director of Infection, Prevention and Control - Dr Sara Mumford.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The universities said the majority of its teaching will be done online until at least 30 October\n\nThe two main universities in Manchester are teaching online until \"at least\" the end of the month after a coronavirus outbreak among students.\n\nManchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and the University of Manchester (UM) said it was a \"collaborative decision\" with public health bosses and \"won't impact\" on teaching quality.\n\nIt comes after 1,700 students were told to self-isolate at MMU on 26 September.\n\nUM said the move was to \"protect the health\" of students and staff.\n\nFace-to-face teaching is also being suspended at the University of Sheffield after it saw its biggest rise in cases on Monday.\n\nManchester has the highest rate of infections in England with 561 cases per 100,000 of the population.\n\nThe University of Manchester said more than 1,000 students and 20 staff members have reported testing positive for the virus while the figure is understood to be over 500 at Manchester Metropolitan University.\n\nDavid Regan, the director of public health for Manchester, said: \"Clearly we need to introduce a contain approach with the universities just to manage transmission over the next three weeks.\"\n\nManchester has the highest rate of infections in England with 561 cases per 100,000 of the population\n\nThe universities said teaching will be done online until at least 30 October, but there will be a review on 23 October. Exceptions to the online teaching include accredited and professional programmes, and laboratory, clinical and practice-based subjects.\n\nThe University and College Union welcomed the move towards virtual learning but said Covid-19 outbreaks \"could have been prevented had the decision been taken earlier\".\n\n\"Hundreds of students that did not have to move into student accommodation are now self-isolating without their familiar support network,\" Martyn Moss, from the UCU said.\n\nAll teaching will be moved online at the University of Sheffield, with the exception of clinical teaching and research, from Friday until 19 October.\n\nA spokesperson said it would be \"working hard to resume these activities as soon as possible\".\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk", "The streets of São Paulo, where most Brazilian deaths have been recorded, remain busy with shoppers\n\nConfirmed cases of coronavirus in Brazil have passed five million, with deaths in the country approaching 150,000, officials say.\n\nBrazil's health ministry reported 31,553 new cases on Tuesday, bringing the total infections to 5,000,694.\n\nThe country is the third worst hit for infections, after the US and India.\n\nPresident Jair Bolsonaro has been accused of downplaying the risks of the virus throughout the pandemic, ignoring expert advice on restrictive measures.\n\nMr Bolsonaro has rejected criticism of his handling of the pandemic, but his decision to oppose lockdowns and focus on the economy has been hugely divisive.\n\nOn Tuesday, Brazil recorded 734 new fatalities, bringing the death toll to 148,228, the ministry said.\n\nBrazil has the highest number of deaths in Latin America.\n\nThe state of São Paulo has been the worst hit, with around 36,000 deaths, followed by Rio de Janeiro, with about 19,000.\n\nIt is another milestone but the picture is not as grim here as it was a few weeks ago. The numbers of cases and deaths have been falling, although we are still talking around 5,000 fatalities a week - down from around 7,000 at the peak.\n\nThe absolute numbers are still far worse than in Europe, but life here feels like it is returning to normal - shops, restaurants and some schools are starting to re-open.\n\nDespite initial criticism over President Jair Bolsonaro's handling of the crisis - his downplaying of the virus from the very start - his approval ratings have actually risen, thanks to generous government handouts to around 60 million informal workers.\n\nThe question is whether that support will continue as the government starts to reduce the payments while unemployment soars.\n\nIn August, Brazil's Vice-President Hamilton Mourão defended the government's handling of the pandemic, instead blaming a lack of discipline among Brazilians for the failure to limit the spread of Covid-19 through social distancing measures.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Brazil's vice-president says the authorities have struggled to enforce social distancing measures", "Pubs, restaurants and visitor attractions are concerned about the possible impact of new restrictions on their businesses\n\nThe Scottish government is expected to announce stricter restrictions on licensed premises as part of efforts to slow a surge in coronavirus cases.\n\nIt is thought that the new rules may be focused on pubs and restaurants in areas with higher levels of the virus.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon has already said the new measures will not be a return to full lockdown.\n\nThe virus has been spreading particularly quickly in the central belt of Scotland.\n\nIt is expected that the new rules will be primarily focused on \"hotspot\" areas, such as the Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire, Lothian, Forth Valley and Ayrshire and Arran health board areas.\n\nThe Scottish Sun newspaper has said that a series of documents apparently giving details of the new rules for the hospitality sector have been leaked to its journalists.\n\nMs Sturgeon will confirm the new measures in a speech to the Scottish Parliament at about 14:50 BST.\n\nThe licensed trade has called on the Scottish government to provide financial support for any businesses that are affected.\n\nThe first minister said in June that she believed Scotland was \"not far away\" from eliminating the virus.\n\nBut the number of people testing positive has increased sharply in recent weeks - in keeping with some other parts of the UK and Europe - despite Scotland generally taking a more cautious approach to the virus than England.\n\nFigures released on Wednesday showed that Scotland recorded more than 1,000 new confirmed cases of the virus in a single day for the first time - although the country is doing far more testing now than at the height of the pandemic earlier in the year.\n\nAbout 730 new cases are being recorded every day in Scotland on average - compared with 285 a fortnight ago - with the number of people dying or being admitted to hospital also increasing.\n\nAcross the UK, a further 14,542 cases were confirmed on Tuesday - a figure that has trebled in a fortnight.\n\nLast month, people in Scotland were banned from visiting other homes, with strict limits also in force for outdoor meetings and a 22:00 curfew imposed for pubs and restaurants.\n\nMs Sturgeon said on Tuesday that the rising number of cases meant \"additional targeted steps\" were now needed if the country was to attempt to bring the virus back under control before winter.\n\nWhen the 10pm pub curfew was announced a fortnight ago, Nicola Sturgeon made clear she would like to go further in restricting hospitality.\n\nThe reason she gave for not doing so was the limited capacity of the Scottish government to financially support affected businesses.\n\nTalks with the UK government have not resolved that issue yet, but the Scottish government is sufficiently alarmed by rising case numbers that it has decided to act anyway.\n\nThe trading hours and licensing conditions for pubs and restaurants are likely to be restricted further and these restrictions may be heaviest in the central belt of Scotland, where the prevalence of the virus is strongest.\n\nThe details were being debated and decided at a special meeting of the Scottish cabinet this morning.\n\nAffected businesses are likely to be offered some additional financial help from the Scottish government, while it continues to press for further Treasury support.\n\nToday's Scotland-only measures may not amount to the \"short, sharp, shock\" of the much discussed \"circuit-breaker\" - but they may not be the last restrictions to be imposed this autumn either.\n\nTourism and hospitality industry leaders have warned that many businesses will never recover from the impact of any further restrictions.\n\nBut the first minister has said the new measures would seek to strike a balance between protecting health and the economy.\n\nShe has already ruled out a nationwide travel ban or the possibility of people being told to stay at home, and has pledged that schools will only close for the duration of the October holidays.\n\nIt seems likely the new restrictions will primarily be targeted at \"hotspot\" areas with high levels of the virus, potentially alongside some new but possibly less stringent national measures.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The first minister said on Monday the new measures would not amount to the lockdown seen in March\n\nThe rising number of cases in some cities was partly driven by a series of major outbreaks on university campuses - although the virus is increasingly being transmitted to older people too.\n\nMany more rural areas have seen far fewer cases - and have questioned the need for any new rules to apply to them.\n\nPaul Waterson, of the Scottish Licensed Trade Association, said the prospect of tighter restrictions following the 22:00 closure time for pubs and restaurants was already affecting the industry \"very badly\".\n\nHe told BBC Breakfast that Scotland could lose about a third of its pubs and about 25% of staff - or 12,500 people.\n\nBut he predicted that new restrictions could see these figure increase to two-thirds of premises and half of staff.\n\n\"To have more restrictions would really be a disaster, not only for pubs and bars but for the whole hospitality industry,\" he said.\n\nThe Federation of Small Businesses said days of uncertainty about what new measures would be imposed had been \"unhelpful\" and had caused more emotional strain for employers and staff.\n\nIt called on the Scottish government to outline what new support it would be offering to firms impacted by the restrictions, and warned not doing so would further erode the trust of the business community.\n\nThe Scottish Conservatives have also called on the Scottish government to offer more than \"empty words\" to businesses, and said it was time for it to \"stop passing the buck back to the UK government\".", "Everyone living in Nottinghamshire has been asked to avoid mixing with other households indoors after a \"dramatic\" rise in coronavirus cases.\n\nThe government has not introduced tougher measures but local authorities have urged residents to start taking precautions now.\n\nNottingham currently has the fourth-highest infection rate in England, and the wider county has also seen a rise.\n\nLocal authorities expect a government decision by the end of the week.\n\nOn Tuesday, Nottingham City Council asked residents not to mix indoors with people from other households apart from within their bubble.\n\nThis includes in the home and at leisure and hospitality venues.\n\nOn Wednesday, Nottinghamshire County Council made the same request.\n\nIt added it expects the government to impose new restrictions on every part of the county.\n\nThe rate of infection for the city currently stands at 496.8 per 100,000 after cases increased from 314 in the week up to 27 September to 1,654.\n\nThe rate of infection for the county is 106 per 100,000 but varies from 53 to 150 across the districts, the county council said.\n\nFigures released on Wednesday show four districts out of seven - Broxtowe, Gedling, Rushcliffe and Newark and Sherwood - have rates above the England average.\n\nNottinghamshire's director of public health, Jonathan Gribbin, said: \"Covid-19 does not recognise geographical boundaries.\n\n\"The rapid and sustained increase in the numbers of positive cases is a serious cause for concern and the very dramatic rates in the city are a clear sign that action is needed now across the whole of Nottingham and Nottinghamshire.\n\n\"We must now ask every resident to do their bit and not mix indoors with people from other households.\"\n\nNottinghamshire's care homes are also being advised to restrict visits to \"exceptional circumstances only\".\n\nThe University of Nottingham has confirmed 425 of its students have tested positive for the virus\n\nThe rise in cases coincides with the return of students to the city.\n\nNottingham City Council leader David Mellen said this has \"undoubtedly had a significant bearing on the increase in cases\".\n\nBut he added there has been a \"substantial rise in cases and infections across all parts of the city and in all age groups\".\n\nHis counterpart at Nottinghamshire County Council, Kay Cutts, added: \"No one group is responsible for the spread.\n\n\"If we want to see a return to normal life; to see our families again, to see our businesses flourish again, we must act now.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nWales needs to prepare itself for \"quite a difficult winter\", the country's top doctor has warned.\n\nFrank Atherton told a press conference that further restrictions could not be ruled out as cases rise.\n\n\"We are going to have to learn to live with it,\" the chief medical officer said.\n\nHe also said he hoped \"most people in Wales don't take\" US president Donald Trump \"as their guide to how to deal with coronavirus\".\n\nHis comments came on the same day that Mr Trump separately retweeted criticism of Dr Atherton's rolling lockdown strategy.\n\nCases in Wales had gone from 20-30 cases a day in August to 752 on Tuesday, he said.\n\n\"Although all of us would like to see the back of coronavirus, it's going to be with us for some time and we're going to have to learn to live with it to some degree,\" he said.\n\nWales has 15 counties and one town under local lockdowns, with travel restrictions imposed.\n\n\"The situation is still very fluid in Wales as it is across the UK and rest of Europe and the world, in fact, and we can't rule out further restrictions.\"\n\nBut he added: \"I think we need to prepare ourselves for quite a difficult winter\".\n\n\"While we wait for and hope for a vaccine to become available we have to really look after ourselves and keep viral transmission low\".\n\nDr Atherton emphasised that the government was sticking to the local lockdown arrangements for the time being.\n\n\"At the moment, we're looking to the local health protection area arrangements to try to guide us through the current situation,\" he said.\n\nHe said there was \"some evidence\" for the arrangements working and improvements had been seen in Rhondda Cynon Taf.\n\nThis was also the case in Blaenau Gwent and Merthyr Tydfil, he said, but high rates of transmission and new cases continued there.\n\nIn Newport a \"decline\" had been slowed because of an increase in cases \"related to house parties\".\n\n\"We're working on how we can now remove the restrictions in those areas, so that people can pick up their lives as usual,\" he said.\n\nHe warned of a \"rolling programme\" of putting restrictions in place and removing them.\n\nBut he said there are \"no plans\" for extra so called \"circuit break\" restrictions across Wales to coincide with schools' autumn half term.\n\nBangor is under \"active watch\", Frank Atherton said\n\nDr Atherton said Bangor is under \"active watch\" while Gwynedd is being \"considered\" for local lockdown, after a rise in cases in the city.\n\n\"An incident management team has been meeting on a daily basis up there and they are providing reports and suggestions into Welsh Government\", he said.\n\nOn a vaccine, Dr Atherton said he was \"more optimistic... about the prospect of an effective vaccine becoming available then I probably was six months ago\".\n\nHowever he said the timeframe was \"really difficult to judge\".\n\nFinding a vaccine would not follow a \"smooth journey\" and even though the UK had placed advance orders, global demand would be \"enormous\", he said.\n\nLocal health boards were planning how to deliver a vaccine if one becomes available, he added.\n\nPlaid Cymru leader Adam Price said the Welsh Government should look at what was happening in Scotland where Nicola Sturgeon is expected to announce tougher Covid restrictions.\n\nHe said: \"I think the latest figures from yesterday show more people in critical care in Wales than in Scotland, with more people hospitalised recently with Covid in Wales than in Scotland.\n\n\"The next few days is going to be critical because at some point, we may need to pull that emergency cord, as the Scottish Government has already decided to do\".", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Mared Edwards' family home used to sit around a mile from the existing Wylfa power station\n\nA family whose home was demolished to help make way for a nuclear power station have been left \"angry\" and \"bitter\" at the decision not to go ahead with the project.\n\nMared Edwards, of Cemlyn on Anglesey, said they felt their sacrifice had been \"all for nothing\".\n\nHitachi announced in September it would be pulling out of the £20bn Wylfa Newydd project due to funding problems.\n\nIts UK subsidiary Horizon said work was always carried out \"in good faith\".\n\nMs Edwards was still a child when she and her family heard of the plans to buy the land surrounding their property.\n\nAround a mile from the original Wylfa plant, the family home looked straight out to the site.\n\nMs Edwards was a child when the family left the house\n\n\"It started off with someone coming along and wanting to buy Wylfa and all of a sudden there was a public meeting,\" said Ms Edwards.\n\n\"There was talk that we had to pack up and move out.\"\n\n\"I remember as a child it was over the basis of two years. We heard about it, moved out and that's it.\"\n\nShe had fond memories of the house which overlooked the old nuclear site\n\nTheir home and several others have now been demolished.\n\n\"We're angry and frustrated,\" Ms Edwards said.\n\n\"Why was there a need to knock down our home, and several other homes, and ruin the community?\n\n\"There's so much nature that has been ruined and now nothing's coming out of it.\"\n\nWhen Hitachi pulled out work had already been on hold for a year and a half.\n\nThe UK government has deferred its decision on the site's future until the end of the year.\n\nLetters sent by Horizon requesting the delay said talks with other \"third parties\" over the project were continuing.\n\nThe family home was demolished along with several others\n\nAlthough it is 12 years since Ms Edwards left the family home she has fond memories.\n\n\"It was a lovely home and such a nice place to be,\" she said.\n\n\"A lovely location and we knew everyone in the area.\"\n\nHorizon said it was not \"the end of the story\"\n\nHorizon said it understood local people's disappointment but said their work was carried out \"in good faith\".\n\nIt said the decision by Hitachi not to go ahead was not \"the end of the story\".\n\n\"Our work isn't done and as we explore options for the site we remain committed to working closely with the community to respect its wishes too,\" a spokesman said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nUntil 2012, Horizon was owned by German power companies E.On and RWE.\n\nThey sold the company to Hitachi after they decided to pull out of the UK nuclear industry.\n\nIt includes a second development site at Oldbury in South Gloucestershire.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Pence's team had resisted the installation of plexiglass panels Image caption: Pence's team had resisted the installation of plexiglass panels\n\nAnticipation is building for the first and only vice-presidential debate between Vice-President Mike Pence and Democratic challenger Kamala Harris in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Wednesday night.\n\nWhen the pair lock horns on stage, there’ll be more than just political divisions on display.\n\nWearing masks, Harris and Pence will be seated more than 3.7m (12ft) apart, each with a plexiglass screen in front of them to mitigate the risk of coronavirus transmission.\n\nEvent staff were seen erecting the plexiglass partitions on the debate stage.\n\nHarris requested for there to be panels between her and Pence Image caption: Harris requested for there to be panels between her and Pence\n\nPence's team had opposed the barriers, deeming them unnecessary, but on Tuesday night agreed to have them installed.\n\nThe dispute came amid a growing number of positive cases among the inner circle of President Trump, who is continuing his recovery from Covid-19 at the White House.\n\nBoth Pence and Harris have tested negative for coronavirus in recent days.\n\nAt their debate, guests will be required to wear masks at all times and undergo coronavirus checks upon entry to the venue.\n\nThe BBC will be running a live page of tonight's debate, so check back in with the website a few hours from now if you want live coverage of all the twists and turns.\n\nRead more: Who has Trump met and who's tested positive?\n\nThe debate will take place in Salt Lake City on Wednesday night Image caption: The debate will take place in Salt Lake City on Wednesday night", "Some tourism and hospitality businesses may never recover from the effects of more coronavirus restrictions, industry leaders have warned.\n\nThe first minister will announce any further Covid curbs in the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday.\n\nSome government advisers have backed the idea of a \"circuit breaker\" lockdown as a \"short, sharp shock\".\n\nAt her daily briefing Nicola Sturgeon said no final decisions had been taken but there would no return to lockdown.\n\nShe said schools would remain open, the remobilisation of the NHS would not be halted and there would be no nationwide restriction on travel.\n\nBut she did not rule out local travel limits or further controls on people meeting in bars or restaurants.\n\nStephen Leckie, the owner of the Crieff Hydro Hotel in Perthshire, said the developments made \"extremely harrowing reading\" for people working in hotels, restaurants, self-catering businesses or visitor attractions.\n\nHe told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme that the next three weeks - covering many schools' October break - was the last chance for these businesses to make money before the end of the year.\n\n\"Any form of travel restriction would in effect be a lockdown those in this industry,\" he said.\n\n\"If we had to close for the remainder of this month for example, we'd walk from the frying pan straight into the fire.\n\n\"From November for the next five months, this industry, these people, our businesses, would simply lose money and many just wouldn't reopen next year.\"\n\nMr Leckie, who also chairs the Scottish Tourism Alliance, said consumer confidence had been knocked and people were cancelling bookings every time there are reports of possible further Covid restrictions.\n\nHe added: \"If we were to lockdown this Friday, we have our rotas seven days in advance.\n\n\"We cannot simply say to our people - and there will be 700 people working this weekend across our company - we cannot simply say to them, 'Look we're locking down, we're not going to pay you, we don't need you to come to work'.\"\n\nBusinesses also face a \"mammoth amount of work\" in paying back deposits to people if all the bookings are cancelled, he said.\n\n\"Surely there must be other levers that we can pull in order to restrict the spread of this virus,\" he said.\n\n\"Surely the blanket travel restriction, or circuit breaker or lockdown, as we're understanding it, surely that's not the answer. There must be other levers they can pull in order to halt this virus.\"\n\nCarina Contini, a restaurateur in Edinburgh, questioned whether the closure of hospitality was a \"fait accompli\". \"Is this absolutely the alternative?\" she asked.\n\nA further lockdown - however short - would have \"devastating consequences for many, many businesses\", she added.\n\nThe Scottish Hospitality Group (SHG), which represents nine of the country's largest independent hospitality operators, warned a two-week lockdown would cost its members £10m and harm their 6,000-strong workforce, including 1,500 under-25s.\n\nNic Wood, who runs the Signature Pubs chain and is a member of SHG, said: \"Not only does a bar or restaurant job provide much-needed money for young Scots, it gives them the people skills and experience that are vital in building their careers.\n\n\"It will be heartbreaking if we are forced to make redundancies because the government has shut us down again.\n\n\"Young people in Scotland will once again bear a disproportionate amount of the burden and coming on top of all the issues that students and young people are facing already, this will be a step too far.\"\n\nDuring her daily briefing, Ms Sturgeon said she hoped that her statement outlining what would not happen during a \"circuit-breaker\" would reassure the hospitality industry.\n\nShe added: \"Hopefully the fact that we are carefully weighing all of these factors and thinking about economic impact and how we mitigate that will also give a degree of reassurance.\n\n\"I understand how horrendously difficult this is for people like Stephen Leckie who has watched a business that has been built up with a lot of blood, sweat and tears over the years struggle in the way so many businesses have.\n\n\"I, like everyone does, find that heartbreaking, I find so many aspects of dealing with this pandemic utterly heartbreaking. I can't magic the virus away - I wish I could.\"", "As the new academic year begins at Cambridge, the university has exclusively revealed to the BBC that they have admitted a record number of 137 black UK students, the highest figure ever for the university and up 46 students on last year, which was also a record year.\n\nWhilst this is a step in the right direction for Cambridge, they admit there is still a way to go. BBC reporter Ashley John-Baptiste has followed three black students who started last year through what turned out to be quite an extraordinary year.", "Donald Trump sent the retweet on Wednesday afternoon\n\nUS president Donald Trump has retweeted criticism of plans for \"rolling lockdowns\" in Wales over the winter.\n\nFox News host Laura Ingraham tweeted it would be America's future \"under Biden\", with a link to a news story reporting comments from senior Welsh doctor Frank Atherton.\n\nCurrently 15 counties and one town in Wales are under local lockdown.\n\nSeparately on Wednesday Dr Atherton warned people in Wales not to follow coronavirus messages from Mr Trump.\n\nAt a press conference the chief medical officer hoped \"most people in Wales don't take President Trump as their guide to how to deal with coronavirus\".\n\n\"I think people are perhaps a little more thoughtful than that,\" he added.\n\nMr Trump, who returned to the White House after three days in hospital being treated for Covid-19, was criticised after he called on followers on social media not to be \"afraid of Covid\".\n\nFacebook also deleted a social media post from the president claiming the illness was less lethal than flu, while Twitter hid the same message.\n\nDonald Trump returned to the White House after three days in hospital\n\nDr Atherton said earlier this week that Wales could be \"going in and out of those restrictions over the next few months\".\n\nHe said: \"If the number of cases per 100,000 over a seven day period, comes down to below the 50 per 100,000 level, we can start to think with the local authority, in partnership with them, about lifting the restrictions.\"\n\nLocal lockdowns in Wales require people to stay in their county area, except for a limited set of reasons.", "Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been in budget talks with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin\n\nUS President Donald Trump has said he is ending negotiations over a Covid-19 relief bill, and will only resume talks after the election.\n\nHe predicted he would win next month's election and pass a bill afterwards. US stocks fell after the announcement.\n\nBudget talks between Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin began in July.\n\nDemocratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said Mr Trump had \"turned his back\" on the American people.\n\n\"Make no mistake: if you are out of work, if your business is closed, if your child's school is shut down, if you are seeing layoffs in your community, Donald Trump decided today that none of that - none of it - matters to him,\" Mr Biden said in a statement on Tuesday.\n\nThe Republican president - who is himself currently being treated for Covid-19 - countered: \"Crazy Nancy Pelosi and the Radical Left Democrats were just playing 'games' with the desperately needed Workers Stimulus Payments.\n\n\"They just wanted to take care of Democrat failed, high crime, Cities and States. They were never in it to help the workers, and they never will be!\"\n\nHe said he had instructed Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to focus efforts on confirming his Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.\n\nMr McConnell later told reporters he supported the president's move because he believed a deal with the Democrats was looking too difficult. \"We need to concentrate on the achievable,\" he said.\n\nLawmakers from both parties had hoped for another round of Covid-19 relief spending to pass ahead of the 3 November election, but Mr Trump's tweet appears to have abruptly suspended that prospect.\n\nIt comes as coronavirus cases rise in several parts of the country, the outbreak widens among White House staff and Republican senators, and hits Pentagon top brass.\n\nDonald Trump's decision to kill Covid-19 relief negotiations may be a brave stand on principle, ultimately siding with conservatives who are against more massive deficit-financed spending, but it is also a very risky political move.\n\nA multi-trillion-dollar deal would have pumped stimulus into the economy at a time when the unemployment and business growth outlook is trending downward. A jobs and spending boost - or even the prospect of one - would have helped the president make the case that he, not Joe Biden, would be the best steward of the American economy for the next four years.\n\nInstead, the stock market dropped precipitously on the president's announcement, and the massive permanent layoffs that have already started in the travel and entertainment industries will continue apace.\n\nThis isn't good news for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, either, as her hardline negotiating strategy ended up with nothing to show for it. More moderate Democrats, who were already expressing frustration with the lack of a deal, will only sharpen their criticism of the Democratic leadership.\n\nWhoever wins the elections in November won't have long to savour their victories before having to face what is sure to be a large and growing economic crisis.\n\nIn an all-too-familiar story of Washington gridlock, both Republicans and Democrats refused to compromise enough to meet in the middle.\n\nThe White House said it would back a Covid-19 relief bill of $1.6 trillion. But Mrs Pelosi was holding out for a more generous package.\n\nHer House Democrats last week passed a $2.2tr stimulus bill, though that measure had no chance of advancing in the Republican-controlled Senate.\n\nThe Senate leader had indicated he would not support any legislation with a price tag of more than $2tr.\n\nMr Trump begrudgingly offered $250bn of funding for state and local governments. Mrs Pelosi was holding out for more than $400bn.\n\nRepublicans accused her of simply seeking a bail-out for Democratic-run states facing budgetary problems stemming from before the pandemic.\n\nThe White House said last week it favoured a $400 per week pandemic jobless benefit, but Democrats wanted $600.\n\nWhat is the economic situation in the US?\n\nAnalysts have warned that the economic recovery risks stalling without further aid. While the US has regained about half the jobs lost in March and April, more than 10 million people remain unemployed.\n\nIn a speech on Tuesday, the head of America's central bank, Jerome Powell, warned of \"tragic\" consequences should policymakers do too little and the pace of progress slow further.\n\n\"The expansion is still far from complete,\" he said. \"Even if policy actions ultimately prove to be greater than needed, they will not go to waste.\"\n\nMr Trump's unexpected announcement comes as many of the individual benefits previously approved by Congress have already run out.\n\nThe new Congress will not reconvene until January, following the November elections.\n\nMrs Pelosi accused Mr Trump of \"putting himself first at the expense of the country\".\n\n\"He shows his contempt for science, his disdain for our heroes… and he refuses to put money in workers' pockets, unless his name is printed on the cheque,\" she added.\n\n\"Clearly, the White House is in complete disarray,\" she said, calling on Trump officials to heed Mr Powell's advice.", "People arriving in the UK from abroad may soon be able to end their 14-day self-isolation early, as part of plans to be considered by a new taskforce.\n\nTransport Secretary Grant Shapps said the taskforce will look at introducing a Covid-19 testing system for travellers to the UK.\n\nPeople would have to pay for their own tests to avoid impacting NHS capacity.\n\nAirline and airport bosses reiterated calls to replace quarantine altogether, with a comprehensive testing system.\n\nThe aviation industry has struggled with the drop in passenger numbers since the start of the UK's epidemic, with industry figures repeatedly lobbying for testing at ports and airports - something ministers have rejected.\n\nAnyone arriving to the UK from abroad must currently self-isolate for two weeks, unless they have come from an exempt destination.\n\nThe plans to be considered by the Global Travel Taskforce include giving travellers the option of paying for a coronavirus test a few days after they arrive.\n\nA negative result would mean people could end their quarantine period early.\n\nThe taskforce will also consider whether people could self-isolate before travelling abroad, instead of upon arrival.\n\nIf you were running an airline or owned a travel agency I don't think you'd be jumping for joy.\n\nYou would probably be relieved that the government has eventually done what you've been calling for for months and given a firmer commitment to testing, as a way to allow people to avoid quarantining for the full 14 days.\n\nBut Heathrow had a facility for taking passengers' saliva swabs ready to go in mid-August.\n\nThat facility now appears redundant because the government has rejected the scientific rationale behind testing passengers at airports on arrival - on the basis that asymptomatic people who recently caught the virus could still produce negative results.\n\nAnd even though ministers have made their firmest commitment yet to privately-funded testing, travel bosses will, to some extent, be pulling their hair out that key details still haven't been worked out.\n\nNamely, after how many days of quarantine would someone be able to pay for a test? Between five and eight days is what the government is considering.\n\nWhat airlines really want is the option of people having a test two or three days before they arrive. With a second test after you arrive in the UK that could reduce quarantine even further.\n\nThe government has crucially indicated that it's willing to explore that idea. But aviation bosses just want ministers to get on with it - the creation of a taskforce wasn't the announcement they wanted on Wednesday.\n\nAnnouncing the plans, Mr Shapps said: \"The current measures at the border have saved lives. Our understanding of the science now means we can intensify efforts to develop options for a testing regime and help reinvigorate our world-leading travel sector.\n\n\"This new taskforce will not only help us move towards safer, smoother international travel as we continue to battle this virus but will also support global connectivity - helping facilitate more Covid-secure travel whilst protecting the population from imported cases.\"\n\nMr Shapps and Health Secretary Matt Hancock will lead the taskforce to consider:\n\nThe group is expected to report back to No 10 in November.\n\nOfficials from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will all be involved in the taskforce's work. But as health matters are devolved, decision making and implementation may differ across the four nations.\n\nWhile industry figures called the announcement a \"step in the right direction\", many also reiterated their belief that a testing programme should replace quarantine altogether.\n\nA spokeswoman for British Airways added: \"Although every step to improve the current situation is welcome, we do not believe quarantine is the solution. The best way to reassure people is to introduce a reliable and affordable test before flying.\"\n\nKaren Dee, chief executive of the Airport Operators Association - a trade association for UK airports - said: \"We believe that from a health perspective a testing regime can be far preferable to just relying on quarantine.\"\n\nAnd a Virgin Atlantic spokesperson said: \"Removing quarantine is the only way to truly open up the skies and enable the UK's economic recovery to take off.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Coronavirus: How to fly during a global pandemic (this video reflects the rules before the hotel quarantine was introduced in the UK)\n\nOne airline trade body says testing people before they travel - an idea known as \"pre-departure testing\" - was becoming the \"international norm\" and should be adopted in the UK too \"as soon as practically possible\".\n\n\"Aviation is at a critical juncture and we have no time to lose,\" added Airlines UK's chief executive, Tim Alderslade.\n\nMany industry figures also called for the taskforce to bring in changes - rather than just recommendations - within weeks.\n\nA joint statement from the CEOs of Easyjet, Heathrow, Manchester Airports Group (MAG) and Virgin Atlantic said a testing regime must be in place by early November because without \"rapid\" action, \"the UK will fall even further behind our competitors and the economic recovery will fail to get off the ground\".\n\nAlmost 900 jobs are at risk at MAG's three UK airports - Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands Airport - after the pandemic resulted in the \"toughest summer ever\".\n\nShadow transport secretary Jim McMahon said the government had been \"incompetently slow to react\".\n\n\"They've had months to set up a taskforce, months to look into airport testing and months to sort out the flaws of their quarantine proposals,\" the Labour MP added.\n\nHe also called for a financial support package for the aviation sector.", "People with \"long Covid\" symptoms will be offered specialist help at clinics across England, the head of NHS England has announced.\n\nSir Simon Stevens said there were \"tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands\" of patients affected.\n\nPeople with relatively mild coronavirus infections as well as those who have been treated in intensive care can have persistent health problems for months.\n\nThe most common symptom of long Covid is crippling fatigue.\n\nBut breathlessness, joint pain, anxiety, brain fog and many other symptoms have also been reported.\n\nAnd some estimates suggest one in 10 of those infected with the virus could be affected.\n\nSir Simon said £10m would be invested this year in setting up long-Covid clinics in every area across England, to provide one-stop services for physical and mental health issues.\n\nPatients will have access to assessments for health issues, memory problems or mental health conditions such as depression or anxiety.\n\nThey can then be referred to other specialist clinics if required.\n\nStudent Evie Connell used to go to the gym four times a week\n\nDundee student Evie Connell, 23, was going to the gym four times a week before she caught the virus, in March.\n\nHer symptoms were mild at first - a migraine, cough and temperature.\n\nBut they did not go away.\n\nAnd months later, she had a racing heart rate and worrying chest pain, which turned into chronic fatigue.\n\n\"I would come home and go to bed and sleep, then get up just in time to work again the next day,\" Evie says.\n\n\"I couldn't tell you anything I did outside of going to work.\"\n\nEvie was signed off work after her GP referred her to a Covid rehab team at her local hospital, where she is seeing a physiotherapist who is teaching her how to pace herself.\n\n\"It's completely changed my life,\" she says of long Covid.\n\nNow back at university, Evie has to take breaks during classes because she cannot concentrate.\n\nAnd she has been unable to focus on reading a book in six months.\n\n\"I don't know when I'll ever go back to the gym again,\" she says.\n\n\"I'm just hoping I can get back to work soon, otherwise the money will run out.\"", "Len McCluskey (pictured) has expressed concern about the direction the Labour Party is taking\n\nA meeting of the Unite union executive has decided to cut its affiliation money to the Labour Party by about 10%, BBC Newsnight understands.\n\nUnite is the Labour Party's single biggest donor, providing the party with millions in funding every year.\n\nBut there is anger in the union about Labour's direction under Sir Keir Starmer with a source saying he and his inner team were \"just not listening\".\n\nSir Keir said he enjoyed \"strong relations\" with Unite.\n\nThe party and the union would \"continue campaigning side-by-side and shoulder-to-shoulder\" on \"important\" issues facing workers, he added.\n\nUnite general secretary Len McCluskey was a major ally of the former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and is a stalwart of the party's Left. He is due to stand down as general secretary in 2022.\n\nAhead of the meeting of Unite's executive, he told Newsnight another cut in funding might happen if the party changed course too drastically under its new leader.\n\nHe said: \"I have no doubt if things start to move in different directions and ordinary working people start saying, 'Well, I'm not sure what Labour stand for,' then my activists will ask me, 'Why are we giving so much money'?\"\n\nHe went on to express dismay that Unite funds had been spent by Labour paying damages to whistle-blowers who contributed to a Panorama programme about Labour's handling of the anti-Semitism crisis.\n\nMr McCluskey said his executive was angry about the decision \"because they thought it was an absolute mistake and wrong to pay out huge sums of money to individuals who were suing the Labour Party based on the Panorama programme, when Labour's own legal people were saying that they would lose that case if it went to court. So we shouldn't have paid them anything.\"\n\nBut, when the payout was announced, Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner said it was a \"prudent move\" which was \"part of that healing process\" that the party needed.\n\nAnd, in a statement read out in the High Court, Labour said it unreservedly apologised and was determined to root out anti-Semitism in the party and the wider Labour movement.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the decision was \"for Unite as a union.\"\n\nThere is some frustration on the Labour left that Sir Keir ran for the leadership on the party's left but has quickly tacked to the centre since winning the contest in April this year.\n\nA Unite source said: \"Keir and his inner circle are just not listening.\n\n\"There's a lot of anger from the people who knock on the doors and man the phones. They don't want to be taken for granted.\"\n\nThe source went on to say that Mr McCluskey was likely to redirect the money to left-wing grassroots organisations to support a socialist programme, \"which he sees as vital to produce a Labour victory in 2024\".\n\nResponding to Mr McCluskey's comments, Sir Keir said: \"The decision was a decision for Unite as a union.\"\n\nHe added: \"I haven't spoken to Len in the last 24 hours but I speak to him on a regular basis. We've got a very good relationship with Unite and will continue to work with them.\"\n\nLast month, TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady told the BBC: \"Keir has had a really strong start. You only have to look at the opinion polls to see that.\n\n\"I hear Keir talking about decency, dignity. Those are really important values, along with people looking after each other.\"\n\nThe campaign to choose Mr McCluskey's successor begins next year.", "Supermarket giant Tesco has seen first-half profits rise by more than a quarter as customers bought more food during the pandemic and online orders doubled.\n\nPre-tax profit for the 26 weeks to 29 August was £551m, 28.7% up on 2019.\n\nIt is Tesco's first set of results under its new chief executive, Ken Murphy, who started last week.\n\nHe replaces Dave Lewis, who had been running the UK's biggest retailer since 2014.\n\nWith more customers turning to online shopping, Tesco more than doubled delivery capacity to 1.5 million slots a week during the first half, including serving 674,000 vulnerable customers.\n\nWhile demand for food rose, clothing fared less well, with sales down 17.2%.\n\nLike many of its rivals, Tesco was forced to overhaul its strategy in-store and online amid the coronavirus lockdown.\n\nMr Murphy told a conference call with journalists the first half of this year had \"tested our business in ways we had never imagined\", but employees had \"risen brilliantly to every challenge\".\n\nHe said he felt \"very comfortable in my own skin and my ability to lead this business\".\n\n\"I'm really happy with the strategy and direction of the company,\" he added. \"My job is to maintain momentum in the business and deliver a fantastic Christmas.\"\n\nTesco is in the process of selling its businesses in Thailand, Malaysia and Poland, but Mr Murphy said there was currently \"no plan for further retrenchment\".\n\nWhen Dave Lewis was parachuted into the top job in Tesco in 2014, the business was in crisis. Now Ken Murphy is presiding over his first set of results and Britain's biggest retailer is doing rather well.\n\nThe business, he says, is in \"great shape\". But his job is going to be far from easy.\n\nHe's got to steer Tesco through the ongoing Covid-19 crisis during the key festive trading period. Then there's the impact of a potential no-deal Brexit looming on the horizon.\n\nAnd as the job losses start to mount, shoppers' budgets will be coming under increasing pressure. The battle for our wallets is set to become even more intense.\n\nFinally, now that Tesco's turnaround is complete, Mr Murphy will have to focus in the longer term on how to grow the business. A new chapter begins.\n\nOperating profit figures told a different story, however, falling 15.6% to £1.037bn. One of the items dragging down the balance sheet was Tesco Bank, which made a loss of £155m.\n\nTesco said sales in the UK and Ireland rose 8.6% to £24.3bn, with overall revenue of £28.7bn. But it added that coronavirus-related costs had hit £533m.\n\nUK food sales went up 9.2% during the period, the retailer said.\n\nThe supermarket said it was increasing its interim dividend by 21% to 3.2p a share.\n\nIt also named a new chief financial officer, Imran Nawaz, who is joining from Tate & Lyle. He will succeed Alan Stewart, who is retiring in April.\n\n\"In spite of these positive results, Tesco will still have concerns after its valuation dropped below Ocado,\" said Julie Palmer, partner at Begbies Traynor.\n\nAnd even though Dave Lewis had left \"a well-oiled machine\" behind him, it would not be an easy ride for Mr Murphy as the new chief executive, she added.\n\n\"Facing a pandemic, an economic recession and an exit from the EU all at once is not the ideal recipe for success in anyone's book.\n\n\"However, add in growing competition from challenger brands such as Aldi with a new click-and-collect service, the M&S partnership with Ocado and the looming juggernaut of Amazon entering the field of play, and getting through this period with its position intact will be no mean feat.\"", "Children are not able to properly understand the lifelong consequences of taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, the High Court has been told.\n\nThe case has been brought by Keira Bell, who began taking puberty blockers when she was 16, and the mother of a 16-year-old awaiting treatment.\n\nThey are taking action against the UK's only children's NHS gender clinic, run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust.\n\nThe landmark hearing in London is expected to last two days.\n\nThe Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), based in Hampstead, north-west London, is a specialised unit for young people who have difficulties with their gender identity.\n\nLawyers representing Ms Bell, 23, and Mrs A, whose autistic child is currently on the waiting list for treatment at the service, argue that children going through puberty are \"not capable of properly understanding the nature and effects of hormone blockers\".\n\nThey argue there is \"a very high likelihood\" that children who start taking hormone blockers will later begin taking cross-sex hormones, which they say cause \"irreversible changes\".\n\nMs Bell and Mrs A are asking the High Court to rule that it is unlawful for children who wish to undergo gender reassignment to be prescribed hormone blockers without an order from the court that such treatment is in their \"best interests\".\n\nJeremy Hyam QC, who is representing the pair at the hearing, said: \"The use of hormone blockers to address gender dysphoria does not have any adequate evidence base to support it.\"\n\nHe said the effect of hormone blockers \"on the intensity, duration and outcome of adolescent development is largely unknown\", adding: \"There is evidence that hormone blockers can have significant side-effects, including loss of fertility and sexual function and decreased bone density.\"\n\nIn written submissions, Mr Hyam said: \"That children are not capable of giving informed consent to undergo a type of medical intervention about which the evidence base is poor, the risks and potential side-effects are still largely unknown, and which is likely to set them on a path towards permanent and life-altering physical, psychological, emotional and developmental consequences... is the common-sense and obvious position.\"\n\nHe told the court that referrals to GIDS had seen a \"20-fold increase\", rising from 97 in 2009 to 2,590 in 2018.\n\nKeira Bell, 23, is taking action against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust\n\nIn a witness statement before the court, Ms Bell, who began \"detransitioning\" last year, said: \"I made a brash decision as a teenager, as a lot of teenagers do, trying to find confidence and happiness, except now the rest of my life will be negatively affected.\"\n\nShe added: \"Transition was a very temporary, superficial fix for a very complex identity issue.\"\n\nFenella Morris QC, lawyer for the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, said the contention that children could not give informed consent to being prescribed hormone blockers was \"a radical proposition\".\n\nShe argued in written submissions that the claimants sought to \"impose a blanket exclusion\" on children under the age of 18 to be able to consent to medical treatment.\n\nMs Morris added the majority of children referred to GIDS between March 2019 and 2020 were over 12, with only 13 of the children referred being under the age of 13.\n\nIn a written submission, she added their use \"has been widely researched and debated for three decades\", adding: \"It is a safe and reversible treatment with a well-established history.\"\n\nThis is a controversial case with deeply held views on all sides.\n\nAt the heart of it is the complex question of whether a child under the age of 18 can give informed consent to treatment that Keira Bell's lawyers describe as \"experimental\" and \"life-altering\".\n\nThey say that with some children prescribed puberty blockers as young as nine or 10 (although this is rare), they can't possibly know how they will feel as an adult if they face difficulties having a child or having a fulfilling sexual relationship.\n\nLawyers for the Tavistock maintain there are careful checks and balances and, for years, such drugs have successfully given young people space to reflect before they transition.\n\nThey are also likely to point to the many young transgender people who already have to wait years just to see a gender specialist and the deep distress that causes.\n\nMs Morris also said the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust referred children and young people experiencing gender dysphoria to University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust or Leeds Teaching Hospital NHS Trust.\n\nShe argued that those two trusts were \"responsible\" for prescribing hormone blockers to children with gender dysphoria - not the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust.\n\nLawyers representing London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Leeds Teaching Hospital NHS Trust are expected to address the court on Thursday.\n\nIt is expected that the judges hearing the case - Dame Victoria Sharp, Mr Justice Lewis and Mrs Justice Lieven - will reserve judgment to a later date.\n\nCorrection 10th October 2020: This article originally included a quote from Fenella Morris QC about the use of hormone blockers, from agency reporting, which was subsequently found to be inaccurate. As a result we have removed this line from the story.\n• None NHS gender clinic 'should have challenged me more'", "The search involved police, firefighters, coastguard staff and search and rescue volunteers\n\nA man's body has been recovered following a major search of a river in north Wales.\n\nEmergency services had searched the river at Abergwyngregyn, Gwynedd, after reports a telephone engineer had fallen in at about 16:00 BST on Tuesday.\n\nA body was found just before 19:15, North Wales Police said.\n\nDet Ch Insp Alun Oldfield said the man's next of kin had been informed and his family were being supported.\n\n\"Our heartfelt sympathies are with the man's family and friends at this incredibly difficult time,\" he said.\n\n\"An investigation is now under way to establish what happened.\"\n\nA major search was launched with police, firefighters and the coastguard, and search and rescue volunteers.\n\nTwo specialist water rescue teams and three fire crews from North Wales Fire and Rescue Service searched the river, along with members of Ogwen Valley Search and Rescue Team.\n\nResidents saw the helicopter flying over the river\n\nThe coastguard helicopter attended and two coastguard rescue teams were sent from Bangor and Llandudno to assist in the search.\n\nEarlier this week homes in the village were flooded after the River Aber burst its banks following heavy rain.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Repair work from previous flooding was still under way when these properties were hit again", "Pubs and restaurants across central Scotland are to be closed under the new measures\n\nThe Scottish government has published the evidence of its senior clinical advisers that guided strict new restrictions, especially on pubs and restaurants.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon told the Scottish Parliament that the estimated total number of cases in Scotland is currently just 13% of the peak level back in March. But she warned that cases are rising quickly.\n\nThe evidence paper states that \"at the current rate of growth (7% increase per day), the number of infections would be at the level of the March peak by the end of October\".\n\nAlthough the increase is across Scotland, certain areas across the central belt were giving particular concern.\n\nThe clinical advisers said: \"Several health board areas including Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire and Lothian have been tracking rates in excess of 100 positive cases per 100,000 population over the past seven days.\"\n\nNHS Ayrshire and Arran and NHS Forth Valley also have rates which are a concern and are included in the central belt restrictions.\n\nThe rate of 86 cases per 100,000 in NHS Western Isles represents 23 cases over the past week.\n\nThe evidence paper - from Chief Medical Officer Gregor Smith, Chief Nursing Officer Fiona McQueen and National Clinical Director Jason Leitch - said Scotland is continuing to closely track the situation in France with a four-week lag - and six weeks behind Spain.\n\nDeath rates in Spain increased significantly in mid-September and are now at a level 10 times the rate in Scotland.\n\nBoth France and Spain have introduced strict new measures to reduce their rising numbers of infections and deaths, including the closure of all bars in Paris for two weeks from 6 October.\n\nThe resurgence in these countries was initially concentrated among younger people but spread to other age groups.\n\nMs Sturgeon told the Scottish Parliament that the single most effective step to reduce transmission was taken 12 days ago when meeting in each other's home was stopped.\n\n\"That measure is vital, but the clinical advice I have received now is that it is not sufficient,\" she said.\n\nIn deciding what to do next there were some things she was not prepared to do.\n\n\"We are not closing schools, colleges or universities,\" she said. \"We are not halting the remobilisation of the NHS for non-Covid care. And we are not asking people to stay at home.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon said she wanted a more \"targeted approach\" than the March lockdown.\n\nThis involves pubs, bars, restaurants and cafes closing in the central belt and operating under greatly reduced circumstances in the rest of the country, with no alcohol being served indoors.\n\nThe evidence paper says hospitality was closed during the lockdown and opened again on 15 July.\n\nModelling of the R value (reproduction number) at that time shows that about three weeks later it rose above 1, the level at which the virus begins to spread much more rapidly.\n\nThe clinical advisors said \"this cannot be entirely attributed to hospitality\" but it was likely to have played a significant role.\n\nFrom the details of interviews that have been completed as part of Test and Protect, about 26% of individuals who have tested positive for Covid-19 since July have reported \"exposure\" to pubs, restaurants or cafes.\n\nAll ages are included but half of these people were 20-39.\n\nThe clinical advisers admitted that the data do not indicate where people who have tested positive were infected.\n\nUnless there is a \"clear and bounded outbreak\" linked to a pub it is not usually possible to say exactly where someone picked up the virus.\n\n\"However it does highlight that people who have been infected have been in hospitality settings where they could have spread the virus to others,\" the paper says.\n\nThe evidence paper says that pubs and restaurant settings are difficult places to maintain physical distancing and other factors, such as poor ventilation and noise, make them places that could spread the virus.\n\n\"Generally this setting involves people of different ages with different individual risk profiles mixing with other households, or being seated in close proximity to other households, for more than 15 minutes,\" it says.\n\nThe paper also mentions the \"disinhibiting impact of alcohol\", which may make people less inclined to strictly follow the rules.\n\n\"For all of these reasons, significantly restricting licensed premises for 16 days temporarily removes one of the key opportunities the virus has to jump from household to household,\" Ms Sturgeon said.\n\n\"It is an essential part of our efforts to get the R number significantly below 1.\"\n\nThe choice of measures is a decision that the data cannot make for us.\n\nThe evidence shows that the current measures are not controlling the virus.\n\nThe number of people going into hospital with coronavirus is doubling roughly every fortnight and, if that pattern continues, the pressure would surely mount.\n\nBut the evidence cited by the first minister in support of the effectiveness of the measures announced today is not watertight.\n\nShe listed all of the reasons why indoor hospitality is a place where it is easy for the virus to spread and some data that support, but do not prove, that point.\n\nThe R value did rise above 1 about three weeks after pubs opened and just over 20% of people recently infected report having been to a pub, restaurant or café in the preceding week.\n\nThis doesn't prove that closing licensed venues after 6pm will turn the tide, or be more effective than doing so after 10pm.\n\nBut there is no single dataset or number that will map out a precise path through this epidemic.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The Leeds businessman Manni Hussain handed over 45 properties after investigators used an Unexplained Wealth Order\n\nAround £10m of property has been surrendered in a major victory against some of northern England's most dangerous criminals.\n\nThe apartments and homes were given up to the National Crime Agency by a Leeds businessman who investigators suspect of being a major money-launderer.\n\nThe NCA says Mansoor Mahmood Hussain acted for gangsters, including a murderer and drug trafficker.\n\nThe agency believes he laundered their profits through a property empire.\n\nOver two decades, Mr Hussain, known as Manni, developed his portfolio across West Yorkshire, Cheshire and London while posing as a legitimate businessman.\n\nHis social media accounts show him living a luxury lifestyle involving high-performance cars, executive jets, super-yachts and appearances at VIP events attended by celebrities. He filled his timeline with pictures of the famous - although there is no suggestion that any of VIPs he posed with knew who he was.\n\nVIP events: Mr Hussain showed off his purported lifestyle on social media. Here with Beyoncé...\n\nWhile the 40-year-old has never been convicted of a crime, investigators say they had intelligence linking him to serious gangsters - but could not obtain the detailed evidence needed for charges of money laundering.\n\nInstead, in 2019, they turned to the relatively new power of an Unexplained Wealth Order which required the businessman to open his books and show how his wealth had come from legitimate sources.\n\nThe NCA has now announced that Mr Hussain has given up fighting the case against him and has agreed a settlement in which he has handed over the vast majority of his empire - 45 properties, apartments, offices and homes. The settlement also includes the brand name Poundworld, which Mr Hussain bought after the original chain's demise.\n\nAs part of the settlement, the NCA has left him with four small properties that are still mortgaged, and cash in a bank account that was not part of the original investigation.\n\nGraeme Biggar, head of economic crime at the NCA, said: \"This case is a milestone, demonstrating the power of Unexplained Wealth Orders, with significant implications for how we pursue illicit finance in the UK.\n\n\"This ground-breaking investigation has recovered millions of pounds worth of criminally-obtained property.\n\n\"It is crucial for the economic health of local communities such as Leeds, and for the country as a whole, that we ensure property and other assets are held legitimately.\"\n\nThe biggest single property handed over to the NCA is a high-specification apartment and office development, Cubic, on the outskirts of Leeds, which Mr Hussain wholly owned through one of his many companies.\n\nThe other properties include a home on one of the city's most expensive roads, an apartment opposite Harrods in London and terraced housing in Leeds and Bradford.\n\nOnce all the property is eventually sold, the profits will be split 50/50 between the investigatory agency and central government.\n\nIn High Court legal papers, the NCA said it believed the seed money for Cubic's development and other property purchases must have come from Mr Hussain's criminal associates because they could find no legitimate source for his wealth. He had paid virtually no income tax in some years and many of his 77 companies were dormant.\n\nThe court was told Mr Hussain was thought to be a \"clean skin\" - a businessman free of convictions, acting as a professional money-launderer.\n\nToday the NCA said one of the developer's closest associates was Bradford gangster Mohammed Nisar Khan, known on the street as \"Meggy\".\n\nLast year he was jailed for life for murder - and investigators have long considered him one of the most significant organised crime bosses in northern England, involved in drug and firearms trafficking operations.\n\nMr Hussain has been close to Mohammed Khan since 2005 and frequently drove him to and from court, according to evidence gathered by investigators.\n\nHe also paid a £134,000 confiscation order for Khan's brother, Shamsher, who had been separately convicted of money laundering.\n\nThe NCA also said that Dennis Slade, who once headed an armed robbery gang, stayed rent-free in Mr Hussain's seven-bedroom Leeds home - one of the properties he's now surrendered.\n\nThis seven-bedroom home on Sandmoor Drive in Leeds has been handed over to the NCA\n\nThe highly unusual outcome of the investigation - including the settlement leaving the target with some property - comes after the future of the UWO powers was in doubt.\n\nOf the four cases launched since the orders were created, two are still being fought through the courts while the NCA lost the third after the High Court ruled the individuals being targeted had no case to answer.\n\nThe NCA today defended the decision to settle the Hussain case, saying Manni Hussain had been left with virtually nothing other than heavily mortgaged properties - and it had saved the taxpayer time and money by discouraging him from launching a potentially long and expensive legal battle. Investigators say that the settlement included no promise to Mr Hussain that he would not be investigated again in the future.\n\nDuncan Hames of Transparency International, an anti-corruption and white collar crime campaign group that lobbied for the introduction of UWOs, welcomed the outcome of the case.\n\n\"What's important is that there is a high level of transparency so people can see justice being done,\" said Mr Hames. \"Given the challenges on the court system, we need to be grateful when cases are brought to a conclusion - but we need to see many more of them.\"\n\nThe BBC has attempted to contact Mr Hussain for comment.", "However you look at the blizzard of statistics about the Coronavirus, the disease is still spreading - despite town after town being placed under extra limits.\n\nEven before Nicola Sturgeon's moves on Wednesday to try to break the spread in Scotland, ministers in SW1 were looking at the next steps they would need to take to stop the acceleration of the virus.\n\nAs we've reported, the government is likely to introduce a tiered approach to put different parts of the country with different spreads of the diseases into different categories.\n\nBut the exact nature of the strictest form of restrictions are yet to be set in stone.\n\nIt's a complicated equation. The Department of Health is worried about the spread of the disease, as well as other patients losing out on other treatments because of the focus on Covid.\n\nNo 11 is fearful about the impact on the economy, which has already had a profound shock.\n\nAnd it's No 10's job to worry about all of it, then reach a conclusion.\n\nBut Boris Johnson also knows that his own MPs and the opposition parties are more and more sceptical as each day passes about what the government proposes.\n\nIt's clear that shutting pubs and restaurants is a possibility - the \"circuit breaker\" that we have talked about on here lots of times.\n\nBut there are many questions still to be settled.\n\nWould that happen everywhere? Or just in the most affected parts of the country?\n\nWould closures be total or for a certain period of time only?\n\nWould they be temporary? Or put in place until an indeterminate time?\n\nA lot is unknown, but the discussions are serious. The Treasury is already looking at financial support for the different options, including not just closing pubs in the most affected areas, but potentially well beyond.\n\nThere is a lot yet to settle, and the next formal announcement is likely (as things stand) not to come until Monday.\n\nBut more action is clearly on the way.", "The number of people admitted to hospital with Covid-19 on one day has jumped by nearly a quarter in England.\n\nThere were 478 people admitted to hospital on Sunday - the largest daily figure since early June - up from 386.\n\nMore than two-thirds of those were in the North West, North East and Yorkshire.\n\nIt comes as a further 14,542 cases were confirmed across the whole of the UK on Tuesday. That daily figure has trebled in a fortnight.\n\nExtra restrictions have been introduced in many areas of the UK to try to contain the spread of the virus - including across the whole of Scotland and Northern Ireland.\n\nOn top of these national measures, parts of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and areas in the Midlands, Lancashire, Merseyside, West Yorkshire and the North East of England have seen additional rules imposed.\n\nBut Prof John Edmunds, who advises the government's coronavirus response as part of Sage, said more stringent national lockdown restrictions were needed to bring the pandemic under control.\n\nHe told BBC Newsnight local restrictions in the north of England had not been very effective, and the government's \"light tough\" measures were just \"delaying the inevitable\".\n\n\"We will at some point put very stringent measures in place because we will have to when hospitals start to really fill up,\" he said.\n\n\"Frankly, the better strategy is to put them in place now.\"\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said new coronavirus restrictions would be announced on Wednesday - but it will not be another full lockdown.\n\nAnd households could be banned from mixing in Nottingham after a surge in cases, a city health official has said.\n\nThe BBC understands that the government will push ahead with a new \"three-tier\" approach to restrictions in local areas of England, in an effort to replace the patchwork of existing measures.\n\nUnder the system, local areas would be put under one of three levels of restrictions based on the number of cases per 100,000 people.\n\nHowever, the mayors in Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Manchester - where cases are soaring - said a \"more nuanced approach\" than this was needed.\n\nThe current restrictions \"are not working, confusing for the public and some, like the 10pm rule, are counter-productive\", they said, in a letter to the health secretary.\n\nThey are demanding more powers for local police and councils to try to address the rising infection rates \"based on local knowledge\".\n\n\"Our response should consider broader local impacts than absolute numbers of infections: impacts on jobs and business; effects on poverty and deprivation; and relative infection rates in different sections of the population,\" they said.\n\nAs always, we should be cautious about reading too much into one day's change.\n\nBut of all the measurements of Covid, hospital admissions are perhaps the most reliable and they had been rising quite gradually before the jump on Sunday.\n\nSadly, we should expect cases to continue rising.\n\nThis is the time of year when emergency admissions for respiratory illness do go up.\n\nIn a normal year, we can expect 1,000 admissions a day for flu and respiratory viruses by December.\n\nWhat we don't know is to what extent the normal illnesses are adding to this Covid total.\n\nThese new admissions mean about 3% of hospital beds are now occupied with Covid patients.\n\nThere are reports that hospitals, particularly in northern England, are very busy.\n\nBut elsewhere beds are free. The reduction in other services, from cancer care to routine operations, means bed occupancy levels are about a quarter lower than normal.\n\nHowever, unions would point out that a shortage of staff means there are not always the doctors and nurses available to care for patients.\n\nCases and hospital admissions have been rising sharply in cities in the north of England, but are substantially lower in the south.\n\nIn Manchester, where the rate of infection is 529 cases per 100,000 people, the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University have said they will teach online only until \"at least\" the end of the month. More than a thousand students in the city have already been told to self-isolate.\n\nFace-to-face teaching is also being suspended at the University of Sheffield, after the city's rate increased to 287 per 100,000.\n\nIn Liverpool the rate is 487 per 100,000 and in Newcastle Upon Tyne it is 435. There are 60 cases per 100,000 people in London, 46 in Bristol and 32 in Norwich.\n\nAcross the UK, the latest daily figures show a further 76 people have died within 28 days of testing positive.\n\nThat is a long way off the death tolls reached in April, but BBC medical editor Fergus Walsh said there was concern hospital admissions and eventually deaths would \"just keep rising\", unless coronavirus cases were brought under control in the north of England.\n\nIn total, nearly 2,800 patients are in hospital with Covid in England, compared with more than 17,000 at the epidemic's peak. A total of 2,783 Covid-19 patients spent Monday night in England's hospitals - the highest daily total since 25 June. There were also 349 patients in mechanical ventilation beds.\n\nThe latest hospital admissions figures, released for Sunday, show there were 478 new patients admitted - the highest daily figure since 3 June.\n\nIn Scotland, 262 people confirmed to have Covid-19 are in hospital - a rise of 44. In Wales, 92 admissions were recorded on the government's coronavirus dashboard - but that figure includes people who are suspected to have coronavirus, as well as those who have tested positive. There were no admissions in Northern Ireland.\n\nMeanwhile, the government won a vote on retaining the \"rule of six\" in England by 287 votes to 17.\n\nAmong the MPs who voted against it were 12 rebel Tories, one of whom called it a \"massive intrusion\" into people's lives that does not \"make sense\".\n\nThe prime minister's spokesman earlier described it as a \"sensible and helpful\" measure.", "Poorna Kaameshwari Sivaraj, 36, and her son Kailash Kuha Raj were last seen on 21 September\n\nA three-year-old boy and his parents have died at a flat in west London.\n\nThe bodies of Poorna Kaameshwari Sivaraj, 36, and son Kailash Kuha Raj were found at Golden Mile House on Clayponds Lane, Brentford.\n\nScotland Yard said it believed both had been dead for some time. They were last seen on 21 September.\n\nIt is thought Kuha Raj Sithamparanathan, Kalish's father and Ms Sivaraj's husband, fatally injured himself when officers forced entry.\n\nThe 42-year-old was found with stab injuries and pronounced dead by paramedics at the scene.\n\nThe family's deaths mean London has recorded 100 violent deaths this year.\n\nPolice remain at the scene in Clayponds Lane, Brentford\n\nScotland Yard said officers initially received a phone call on Sunday from a family member raising concerns about the welfare of Ms Sivaraj.\n\nOfficers attended the address several times early on Monday but did not receive a reply.\n\nConcerns heightened after speaking to neighbours and officers decided to force entry just after midnight on Tuesday.\n\nA mandatory referral has been made to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.\n\nNext of kin have been informed and post-mortem examinations are set to take place on Thursday.\n\nLead investigator, Det Ch Insp Simon Harding, said it was being treated as a murder investigation.\n\n\"We know the family often walked their dog, a poodle cross breed, in and around the local area and I would ask anyone who saw them at any time in the last month to contact police so we can begin to build a full picture of their lives,\" he added.\n\nOfficers were called to the property after receiving concerned calls from neighbours\n\nWest Area BCU Commander, Peter Gardner said: \"This horrific incident has understandably caused enormous shock and concern among local residents and across the borough. All our thoughts are with the family and friends of those affected.\n\n\"Local residents can expect to see officers at the scene and patrolling the local area to provide reassurance, and if they have any concerns, I would urge them to speak to our officers.\"\n\nNeighbours earlier told of their shock after the deaths of the family of three.\n\nSheri Diba said the family were \"very friendly\" and she used to regularly see them taking their dog for walks.\n\n\"I've always seen them in the lift. They were very friendly. They said 'Hi, how are you?' I always saw them together going for walks.\n\n\"I feel really bad (hearing the news) because they were very friendly, nice people.\"\n\nMs Diba, a mother of one, said she had lived in the building for seven years and described it as a \"nice area\", but said she had not seen the family for a number of months.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Panic buying of bottled water was reported in some local supermarkets on Tuesday\n\nResidents across large parts of east London have been without water following a \"major burst\" in a pipe.\n\nPeople in nine postcodes had no water or low pressure after a main ruptured at Hackney Marshes on Tuesday afternoon, Thames Water said.\n\nSome people complained that bottled water in shops had sold out and being unable to wash their hands created a coronavirus risk.\n\nThames Water said it expected supplies to improve during the day.\n\nThames Water said the picture above shows the extent of the challenge its staff are dealing with\n\nThe burst flooded an area of woodland 300m x 300m to a depth of 1m, Thames Water said\n\nThe 42in (106cm) diameter pipe burst in a woodland area on Hackney Marshes, causing problems in surrounding areas including Barking, Forest Gate, Leytonstone, Ilford, Plaistow and Stratford.\n\nThe utility firm said it had received about 1,000 calls by Tuesday evening from people who had no water or low pressure.\n\nMary Davies, a teacher from Forest Gate, told the BBC she had returned home just before 17:00 BST on Tuesday to find she had no water.\n\n\"It's been a tough night. We've had no water so things like cooking vegetables, making cups of tea, going to the toilet, having a shower, even the new Covid precautions... were impossible\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Vivi K. This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThames Water said engineers had been working throughout the night and tankers had been used to pump water into the system which had meant pressure was \"starting to build across our network\".\n\n\"It's likely some homes will continue to experience low pressure and this may come and go, particularly during the period of high demand early this morning,\" it said.\n\nThe firm added it expected \"supplies to improve as we move towards midday\".\n\nPeople on Twitter said shelves in some shops had been cleared of bottled water and reported panic buying in supermarkets on Tuesday evening.\n\nOne tweeted: \"Family members coming back from work struggling to at least wash their hands. Supermarkets and shops are being emptied by those who have cars and can get quantities of bottles of water.\"\n\nPeople took to social media to complain that bottled water in some shops had sold out\n\nThames Water apologised for the lack of running water, saying it understood \"how worrying and inconvenient this disruption is, particularly at this difficult time\".\n\nIt added it was prioritising vulnerable customers by delivering water to them while sites providing bottled water were being set up.\n\nThe company is also dealing with \"supply problems\" in Reading which began on Tuesday and left parts of the town with no running water or low pressure.\n\nThames Water said \"improvements\" had been made overnight with water being pumped into the area meaning it \"should start to return to affected homes throughout the morning\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The container had \"become a tomb\" the Old Bailey heard\n\nA lorry container became a \"tomb\" as 39 desperate men, women and children suffocated inside, a court has heard.\n\nTemperatures in the unit reached an \"unbearable\" 38.5C as the Vietnamese nationals were sealed inside for at least 12 hours, jurors were told.\n\nTheir bodies were found when the container was eventually opened in Purfleet, Essex, on 23 October, 2019.\n\nLorry driver Eamonn Harrison and Gheorghe Nica are on trial at the Old Bailey accused of manslaughter.\n\nThe pair are also accused of being part of a people-smuggling conspiracy with another lorry driver, Christopher Kennedy, and Valentin Calota.\n\nOpening their Old Bailey trial, Bill Emlyn Jones told jurors it was a \"sad and unavoidable truth\" that some people were prepared to go to great lengths to come to the UK \"for a better life\", adding the cost was some £10,000 per person.\n\nHe told jurors: \"Obviously, any time you fill an airtight container with a large number of people, where they will be left for hours and hours, with no means of escape and no means of communication with the outside world - well, it is fraught with danger.\"\n\nMr Emlyn Jones said the victims - aged between 15 and 44 - were \"husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters\".\n\nVictim Pham Thi Ngoc Oanh, 28 from Nghe An, wrote a text message that was never sent\n\nHe told how Mr Harrison drove them to Zeebrugge in Belgium, where the container was loaded on to a cargo ship bound for the UK.\n\nAnother lorry driver, Maurice Robinson, then collected the trailer from Purfleet in Essex when it arrived just after midnight on 23 October, the court heard.\n\nThe prosecutor said that by then it had been some 12 hours at least since \"any meaningful amount of fresh air had been let into the sealed container\".\n\nRobinson had been sent a message from his boss to \"give them air quickly, but don't let them out\", the court heard.\n\n\"What he found must haunt him still,\" Mr Emlyn Jones said. \"For the 39 men and women inside, that lorry had become their tomb.\"\n\nThe refrigerator had not been turned on during the journey, meaning the temperature inside the trailer rose to 38.5C, he added.\n\nWhen Mr Kennedy learned of the deaths, he told a friend there \"must have been too many and run out of air\", the court heard.\n\nThe bodies of 39 Vietnamese nationals were discovered in a refrigerated trailer\n\nMr Emlyn Jones said: \"What it must have been like inside that lorry does not bear thinking about. In fact, we do have some direct evidence of what the victims were going through, recovered from some of their mobile phones.\"\n\nOne victim - 28-year-old Pham Thi Ngoc Oanh - had written a text message that was never sent, saying: \"Maybe going to die in the container, can't breathe any more dear.\"\n\n\"They had no signal inside the container, so could not call for help or alert the outside world to their plight. But naturally, in desperation, they tried,\" Mr Emlyn Jones said.\n\nNica, 43, of Basildon, Essex, and Mr Harrison, 23, of Mayobridge, Co Down, Northern Ireland, deny 39 counts of manslaughter.\n\nNica has admitted conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration between 1 May 2018 and 24 October 2019.\n\nMr Harrison, Mr Calota, 37, of Birmingham, and Mr Kennedy, 24, of Co Armagh, Northern Ireland, deny the conspiracy charge.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "During PMQs, Keir Starmer criticised the way local restrictions are being managed.\n\n“Twenty local areas have been under restrictions for two months, in 19 of those 20 areas infections rates have gone up,” he said.\n\nThe Labour party compiled a list of local authorities, and it looks like the increases are correct.\n\nBut their list also includes areas which haven’t actually faced local restrictions for two complete months.\n\nFor example, Oadby and Wigston did face additional restrictions at the end of June, but these were lifted after a month. They were only placed under restrictions again on 22 September.\n\nOn another point, Sir Keir said areas in parts of the north of England had been placed into local restrictions at rates lower than those experienced in parts of the south which are not under any kind of lockdown.\n\nBury, Tameside, Stockport and Wigan (to name a few) had case rates of between 20 and 30 per 100,000 people when they first went into lockdown.\n\nThe London borough of Hillingdon – the prime minister’s constituency – had rates of 46 cases per 100,000, while Redbridge had 57 and Barking and Dagenham 53, in the week ending the 27 September, according to Public Health England.\n\nAnd analysis by the BBC data team suggests that these rates have increased in the past week.", "19-year-old Dylan Irvine died in a crash near Crimond on Monday\n\nPolice have apologised to the family of a teenager after they were incorrectly told he had died in a car crash.\n\nThe 18-year-old was critically injured in an incident on the A90 near Crimond in Aberdeenshire at about 07:30 on Monday but his family were told he had been killed.\n\nIn fact, it was 19-year-old Dylan Irvine who had died in the crash.\n\nCh Insp Neil Lumsden said incorrect information had been given to police at the scene.\n\nHe said officers were \"faced with a confused scene including incorrect information provided by a witness\".\n\n\"Officers at the scene of a crash use every avenue available to help identify those involved as quickly and accurately as possible,\" he said.\n\nHe said this included using personal effects found at the scene, using police systems to find out who the registered keeper of a vehicle is, looking at who is insured to drive it and checking for any other information through the agencies such as the DVLA.\n\n\"Finally, crash investigators will also use the information gathered from those involved who are able to identify themselves and others\", Ch Insp Lumsden said.\n\n\"On this occasion, officers were faced with a confused scene including incorrect information provided by a witness.\n\n\"Once identified, the error was promptly corrected and the families of those involved were spoken to and were understanding of the circumstances.\n\n\"We have apologised to the families for any unintended upset and will review to identify any learning.\"\n\nMr Irvine's family said he was \"a loving son, brother and grandson, and was loved by all that had the pleasure of knowing him\".\n\n\"He had an adventurous and outgoing soul and had the biggest heart,\" they said.\n\nPolice are appealing for anyone with information about the crash to contact them.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The Royal Glamorgan Hospital is based in Rhondda Cynon Taf, where a local lockdown is in place\n\nTwenty-one patients have now died with coronavirus following an outbreak at a hospital.\n\nTo date 127 cases have been linked to an outbreak at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant, Rhondda Cynon Taf.\n\nTwo people have also died amid outbreaks at Prince Charles Hospital, and the Princess of Wales Hospital.\n\nCwm Taf Morgannwg Health Board said \"immediate measures\" had been taken to stop the virus spreading.\n\nMedical Director Dr Nick Lyons said there was no evidence of Covid transmission between the three hospitals, and the rise in cases was \"inevitable\".\n\nAs of Tuesday, 17 cases had been linked to an outbreak at Prince Charles Hospital, in Merthyr Tydfil, and one person had died.\n\nFigures also show 15 cases have been linked to Princess of Wales Hospital, Bridgend, and one person has died.\n\nVisiting has been suspended at Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, among others\n\nVisits to the hospitals were suspended in September, following concerns in a rise in coronavirus cases in communities.\n\nRhondda Cynon Taf, Bridgend and Merthyr Tydfil, are all currently subject to local lockdown restrictions, with people banned from socialising indoors and from entering or leaving the areas without a \"reasonable excuse\".\n\nOfficial Public Health Wales statistics show that as of Wednesday, 360 people were known to have died with coronavirus in the Cwm Taf health board area.\n\nIn addition, 194 new cases were confirmed in the area, with 93 in RCT, 33 in Bridgend and 23 in Merthyr Tydfil.\n\nMerthyr Tydfil now has the highest case rate of coronavirus in Wales, with 200.6 cases per 100,000 of the population over the last seven days.\n\nDr Lyons said all of the confirmed cases linked to the outbreak had tested positive for Covid-19 within 14 days of attending one of the hospitals, but some patients may have caught it elsewhere.\"If we look at other outbreaks in other parts of the country, it was inevitable,\" he said.\n\n\"It's too early to say we've reached the top of the curve. It's too early to draw conclusions, and the focus needs to be on making the hospital safe.\"\n\nHe added: \"The safety of our patients and staff remains our first priority and immediate measures to contain the spread of the virus have been put in place.\n\n\"We are taking the outbreaks extremely seriously and the stringent and robust mitigating actions which have been taken across our sites are being closely observed.\n\n\"However given the nature of Coronavirus, there is an inevitable time delay when we will see the positive impact of these measures. \"\n\nThe Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend has also seen an outbreak of Covid\n\nAll routine surgery had already been cancelled at Royal Glamorgan, with patients attending the A&E sent elsewhere, while a field hospital is being used for patients to rehabilitate before being sent home.\n\nA helpline has been set up for any relatives or people living in the communities who have concerns, which can be reached on 01685 726464.\n\nDr Lyons said infection rates in communities were \"continuing to rise\" and appealed to people to not break social distancing and lockdown rules.\n\n\"We remain grateful to all members of our community who are continuing to adhere to the guidance in order to help control this virus,\" he said.\n\nLocal MP Alex Davies-Jones and Member of the Senedd (MS) Mick Antoniw said the rise in the number of deaths at the Royal Glamorgan was deeply troubling.\"It is an incredibly worrying deterioration in what was already a major incident and we know that local people will share our concern,\" they said. \"We are seeking urgent clarification from the health board on why this has happened and more importantly, what measures are being implemented to ensure that the outbreak is fully contained.\"", "Thirteen patients have now died with coronavirus following an outbreak at a hospital.\n\nBy Friday, 94 cases had been linked to the outbreak of Covid-19 at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant, Rhondda Cynon Taf.\n\nPlanned surgeries have been temporarily stopped, and non-Covid patients are due to be moved to a field hospital.\n\nCwm Taf Morgannwg health board said restrictions would remain until the virus was contained.\n\nOn Wednesday the health board cancelled all planned surgeries, and patients attending A&E are being sent elsewhere.\n\nThe health board also announced the Tirion birth centre which was due to reopen on Monday had been delayed as it could not \"safely reopen\" at this time.\n\nA field hospital, Ysbyty'r Seren, will be opened in Bridgend on Thursday for patients who do not have Covid-19 and are \"medically fit to be discharged but need extra care\".\n\nProf Kelechi Nnoaham, director of public health, said the temporary restrictions would remain in place until the board was \"absolutely sure we have contained the spread of the virus on the site\".\n\n\"The opening of our field hospital next week will create capacity at the hospital for patients who need the most specialist care, and enable others to relocate to a Covid-free setting.\"He added: \"The safety of our patients and staff across all of our sites remains our first priority and we remain grateful to all members of our community who are continuing to adhere to the guidance in order to help control the spread of this virus.\"", "A surge in cases has seen Nottingham rise to fifth in England for coronavirus rates\n\nHouseholds could be banned from mixing in Nottingham after a surge in cases, a city health official has said.\n\nDirector of public health Alison Challenger said rules were likely to be similar to those already in place in parts of northern England.\n\nThis would mean people from different households would no longer be able to meet.\n\nIt follows a surge in the city's Covid rate to 440.1 per 100,000, giving it the fifth highest rate in England.\n\nNo new rules have yet been imposed, but Nottingham City Council is urging residents to \"follow stricter restrictions\", and not to mix indoors with people from other households apart from their bubble.\n\nThis includes in the home, others' homes and at leisure and hospitality venues.\n\nMs Challenger said: \"Rather than waiting for a national message to come through, it makes sense for people to address those issues now and look at reducing their household contact.\"\n\nThe government is expected to announce tougher rules for the city this week, similar to those introduced in Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds.\n\nEvery area in England with a higher rate of positive tests already has local restrictions in place.\n\nThe city has already seen its historic Goose Fair cancelled due to the virus\n\nMs Challenger told BBC Radio Nottingham the city had seen a \"dramatic\" rise in rates, from 71.2 per 100,000 in the week ending 26 September.\n\nIn the same period, the number of confirmed cases increased from 237 to 1,465.\n\n\"It's a worrying trend and it means the measures we have in place are no longer enough to stop the spread of the virus in the city.\n\n\"So we are going to have to do more to keep people safe,\" she said.\n\nThe \"sudden and very sharp\" rise has coincided with students returning to the city.\n\nThe University of Nottingham said there had been 425 confirmed cases among its student population in the week to 2 October, including 226 students in private accommodation and 106 others living in halls of residence.\n\nBut Ms Challenger said the reasons behind the surge were more complex.\n\nShe said: \"Cases were going up before students came back, but of course large numbers of people living in close proximity, then that's inevitable we will see an increase in a number of cases.\n\n\"But that's not the whole picture, cases are going up everywhere.\"\n\nPublic Health England was now looking at the situation closely, Ms Challenger said.\n\n\"We do expect later this week that the government will be introducing more restrictions in Nottingham, so we can expect to see tighter restrictions,\" she said.\n\n\"The sort of measures we will be looking at are very much around the households mixing in particular.\n\n\"So we may find we are returning to that situation where we are in bubbles and we're asking people not to mix in their households.\"\n\nDetails of any restrictions are currently unclear, including exact boundaries of affected areas and whether it will apply outdoors as well as indoors.\n\nMs Challenger felt, however, it was possible the limit on gatherings may be changed.\n\nThe city council has also said the regional Covid-19 testing site in London Road may need to be moved as the current location has poor drainage.\n\nProvisional applications have also been made for nine additional testing sites in Nottingham.\n\nA Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: \"We work closely with local leaders and public health teams to inform decisions on local interventions, taking into account a range of factors.\n\n\"PHE and NHS Test and Trace are constantly monitoring the levels of infection across the country.\n\n\"We discuss measures with local directors of public health and local authorities, constantly reviewing the evidence and we will take swift targeted action where necessary.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Pubs and restaurants across central Scotland are to be closed under the new measures Image caption: Pubs and restaurants across central Scotland are to be closed under the new measures\n\nThe Scottish government has published the evidence of its senior clinical advisers that guided strict new restrictions, especially on pubs and restaurants.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon told the Scottish Parliament that the estimated total number of cases in Scotland is currently just 13% of the peak level back in March. But she warned that cases are rising quickly.\n\nThe evidence paper states that \"at the current rate of growth (7% increase per day), the number of infections would be at the level of the March peak by the end of October\".\n\nAlthough the increase is across Scotland, certain areas across the central belt were giving particular concern.", "The BBC revealed how criminal gangs had set up fake companies to claim loans.\n\nUp to 60% of emergency pandemic loans made under the Bounce Back scheme may never be repaid, a report by the government's spending watchdog says.\n\nThe National Audit Office (NAO) said taxpayers could lose as much as £26bn, from fraud, organised crime or default.\n\nThe lending scheme carried lighter checks than others and was aimed at small businesses unable to access other pandemic funding support.\n\nA recent BBC investigation revealed how fraudsters were using the loan system.\n\nMany of those affected will have no idea their names have been used until repayment letters begin arriving in early summer.\n\nOne of the victims spoken to by the BBC, Mark Telling, said he was worried \"to death\" to discover a company set up in his name by a criminal had \"borrowed\" £50,000 from the bail-out scheme.\n\nThe BBC also spoke to Sue Burden, who had also found her identity had been stolen to set up a bogus company to access the scheme. She said she had gone \"from tears to anger... now I'm going to be scared to do anything\".\n\nThe BBC reported last week that the government was warned back in May that the scheme was at \"very high risk of fraud\" from \"organised crime\".\n\nThe government said it has tried to minimise fraud through lenders' background checks.\n\nThe scheme provides firms with 100% government-backed finance worth up to £50,000.\n\nDemand has been greater than anticipated, and the total value of these loans is now expected to be £38bn-£48bn, up from an estimate of £18bn-£26bn.\n\nThey do not have to be paid off for 10 years and offer a range of flexible payment options.\n\nThe loan scheme is an extension of earlier offers which some businesses complained they could not access as the lending criteria was too strict.\n\nThe NAO report warned that the speed with which the scheme was rolled out heightened the fraud risk. It took a month to ensure businesses could not receive more than one loan.\n\nThe Public Accounts Committee said it was the government's largest and most risky business support scheme.\n\nIt says it will not assess the value-for-money of the scheme, as the loans will not start being paid back until May next year.\n\nThe NAO analysis said losses from the scheme are likely to reach \"significantly above\" normal estimates for public-sector fraud of 0.5% to 5%.\n\nThe report also said the UK's five biggest banks will make nearly £1bn between them from the scheme.\n\nMeg Hillier, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said the loans had been a vital lifeline for many businesses.\n\nBut she added that \"the government estimates that up to 60% of the loans could turn bad - this would be a truly eye-watering loss of public money\".\n\n\"The bounce back loan scheme got money into the hands of small businesses quickly, and will have stopped some from going under.\n\n\"But the scheme's hasty launch means criminals may have helped themselves to billions of pounds at the taxpayer's expense.\n\n\"Sadly, many firms won't be able to repay their loans and the banks will be quick to wash their hands of the problem.\n\nToday's report confirms what many people had suspected.\n\nIn May, the government had to get money to small businesses as quickly as possible, before tens of thousands of them went bust.\n\nBut to do that, they had to make compromises on credit and fraud checks. This opened the doors to a whole range of problems - including fraud by organised criminal gangs.\n\nWe've found evidence of more than 100 bogus firms set up by scammers to make fraudulent applications - getting the maximum £50,000 each time.\n\nThey've used the stolen, personal details of innocent victims to set up the fake companies - victims who won't know anything about it until the letters demanding repayment start arriving through their doors next summer.\n\nThe taxpayer is in the same position - waiting to find out how much the scheme will ultimately cost us. The warning from the National Audit Office is clear - it has the potential to be \"very high\".\n\nSue and Dave Burden, from the south of England, were shocked to find that Sue's identity had been stolen to set up a company and claim a bounce back loan.\n\n\"I've gone from tears to anger,\" she told the BBC. \"Now I'm going to be scared to do anything.\"\n\nThe state-owned British Business Bank (BBB), which supervises the bounce back loan scheme, twice raised concerns, firstly in May.\n\nThe BBB expects it will pay out £1.07bn in interest payments to the high street lenders that provided the cash.\n\nMost of this will go to UK's five biggest banks, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest and Santander, which provided £31.3bn of funding.\n\nAccording to latest Treasury figures, there have been 1.55 million applications for the loans, with 1.26 million approvals.\n\n\"We targeted this support to help those who need it most as quickly as possible and we won't apologise for this,\" a government spokesperson said.\n\n\"We've looked to minimise fraud - with lenders implementing a range of protections including anti-money laundering and customer checks, as well as transaction monitoring controls.\n\n\"Any fraudulent applications can be criminally prosecuted for which penalties include imprisonment or a fine or both.\"\n\nHave you been affected by the issues raised in this story? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Warning letters sent to those falling seriously behind on debts are to be toned down to make them less \"thuggish\", under government plans.\n\nLong-standing laws require warnings about potential court action to be written in bold or in block capitals.\n\nA campaign by the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute claimed the letters were counter-productive and worsened mental health problems.\n\nNow the Treasury has vowed they should be \"less threatening\".\n\nHowever, the changes may not be fully implemented until mid-2021.\n\nUnder the rules of the Consumer Credit Act from 1974, warnings in these letters should be written in capitals or in bold.\n\nFor example, the letter states: \"IF YOU DO NOT TAKE THE ACTION REQUIRED BY THIS NOTICE BEFORE THE DATE SHOWN THEN THE FURTHER ACTION SET OUT BELOW MAY BE TAKEN AGAINST YOU.\"\n\nThe institute said that this \"complex and intimidating\" language risked adding further distress to those already facing mental health difficulties.\n\nAccording to estimates produced by the institute, about 100,000 people in problem debt in England attempted suicide last year.\n\nRachel Edwards is among those who have received debt letters after bouts of depression led to financial problems.\n\n\"You get these letters and they make you bury your head even further - and that makes both your mental health and your debt problems worse,\" Mrs Edwards, from Bridgend, told BBC News in June.\n\n\"You know what they are, you open them to look at what you owe, then put them on the side and leave them there.\"\n\nShe said the proposed changes announced by the Treasury were vitally important.\n\n\"It will make a big difference, especially for people like me who have mental health problems as well as debt,\" she said.\n\nThe Treasury said the new rules should make the letters less threatening by restricting the amount of information that must be made prominent, and required lenders to use bold or underlined text rather than capital letters.\n\nLenders would also be able to replace legal terms with more everyday language, and letters would clearly signpost people to the best sources of free debt advice.\n\nEconomic secretary to the Treasury John Glen said: \"These new rules will help to take the fear out of finance by ensuring that letters are easier to understand, less threatening, and empower people to take control of their finances.\"\n\nMartin Lewis, who founded the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, said: \"It is no exaggeration to say that this change could save lives.\n\n\"The last thing people struggling with debt need is a bunch of thuggish letters dropping through the letterbox, in language they can't understand, written in shouty capitals alongside threats of court action.\n\n\"The timing is crucial, with millions of people facing debt and distress due to the pandemic, the sooner we end these out-of-date laws which force lenders to send intimidating letters the better.\"\n\nLegislation should see the new rules in place in December, but lenders would then have six months to implement the changes.\n\nUK Finance, which represents lenders, said the letters - which are required to be sent - would now be \"more appropriate and supportive\".\n• None Six money-saving ideas for lockdown and beyond", "Students are rallying again in Minsk, backing the opposition\n\nGroups of workers and students in Belarus have heeded a nationwide strike call by exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, to press for the president's resignation.\n\nWorkers at some state-run plants downed tools and chanted slogans outside the gates.\n\nHundreds of students also marched out of several universities in Minsk clapping, chanting and linking arms.\n\nHowever, the government says key enterprises are still running smoothly.\n\nPresident Alexander Lukashenko ignored the opposition's midnight deadline for him to step down. Protests have gripped Belarus since he claimed victory in an August poll widely viewed as rigged.\n\nThe interior ministry says police arrested 523 people during mass anti-government demonstrations on Sunday, 352 of whom are still in custody.\n\nOn Monday, at least 155 people were arrested for supporting the strike action in Minsk, Borisov, Brest, Grodno, Mogilev and Novopolotsk, human rights group Vesna reports.\n\nThe full scale of the protests on Monday is not yet clear, partly because of the authorities' media restrictions.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police targeted protesters with stun grenades and raided flats in October 2020\n\nVideos posted to independent media site Tut.by show empty factories and students walking out of their universities.\n\nA source in Minsk following the protests told the BBC that the strike was affecting some major state enterprises, including the Grodno Azot chemical plant and Minsk Tractor Plant, but they had not been brought to a standstill.\n\nDozens of shops, cafes and restaurants are closed in Belarus, in solidarity with the strike. Many other small businesses are also supporting the strike, our source says. But big supermarkets and public transport are still running normally.\n\nThousands of pensioners walked through central Minsk, eventually merging with a procession of students. Pensioners have held protest rallies every Monday. Students have also been very active, despite threats of expulsion.\n\nEarlier an estimated 100,000 demonstrators marched for the 11th successive Sunday of protests. Many waved the opposition's red and white flags and chanted \"strike\" as they marched.\n\nAccording to Russian news agencies, citing their correspondents at the scene, at least 10 stun grenades went off. There were also reports that riot police had fired rubber bullets.\n\nSecurity forces also blocked roads in central Minsk and water cannon were put in place.\n\nBelarusian police blocked roads in central Minsk as tens of thousands of protesters marched on Sunday\n\nMs Tikhanovskaya issued her ultimatum on 13 October, threatening a mass walkout by workers if Mr Lukashenko - who has ruled Belarus for 26 years - ignored their demands.\n\nShe said that Belarus had \"had enough\" after two months of \"political crisis, violence and lawlessness\".\n\nShe issued three demands from a location in Lithuania, where she has been in exile since August. In addition to Mr Lukashenko's resignation, she demanded an immediate end to police brutality and the release of all political prisoners.\n\nEarlier anti-Lukashenko protests at state enterprises, in support of the opposition, were not sustained. There are reports of workers being warned they will lose their jobs if they go on strike.\n\nThe BBC's source in Minsk says fear is widespread, after many protesters were beaten up and tortured by police. It is common for masked men with batons to grab protesters, drag them into unmarked vans and drive off.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Mass arrests in September as crowds chant 'go away' to Belarus president", "\"It's a massive amount of pressure. I've sort of kept it to myself. My family don't know about this and I've often thought: 'Is that the right decision?' But I wouldn't want to put them through all this.\"\n\nJohn is not his real name but he didn't want to be identified. After all, he has spent more than two years keeping his financial worries hidden from his wife.\n\nHe is one of an estimated 50,000 people who have been hit by a controversial tax policy known as the loan charge. As a result, he now owes £180,000 to HMRC.\n\nThe pressure of the last two years has been enormous. He told BBC Radio 4's File on 4: \"It's really tough. I can't tell you the last time I slept and it's difficult. It's just relentless, with no real end in sight.\"\n\nThis substantial tax bill stems from how John was paid when he worked as a contractor for a number of years.\n\nHe used a company to manage his admin and also his tax affairs. It promised him he could take home 85% of his earnings and still be compliant with UK tax law.\n\nA number of different companies offered these tax schemes. Workers would be paid a small amount of salary as a standard, taxable income. Then they would receive a larger payment as a loan via an offshore trust.\n\nOnly a very small amount of tax was paid on these loans and there was no expectation they would be repaid. The government has closed this loophole and used the loan charge to demand large sums in backdated taxes from the freelancers and contractors who used them.\n\nThe policy effectively adds up third-party loans paid since 2010 and taxes them as income. This has meant substantial bills for many workers.\n\n\"There's a lot of people who just think I was a tax dodger and that's not the case,\" says John.\n\n\"It was more about the ease. If someone had said to me: 'You can take 90% [of earnings] but it's illegal,' would I have done it? Absolutely not.\n\n\"I've regretted it for the last two and a half years but I did nothing illegal and we've been made out to be criminals and we're not. We're just normal people earning a living.\"\n\nA government spokesperson said: \"The loan charge was introduced to ensure those who used disguised remuneration schemes to pay themselves income through loans, often via offshore trusts, contributed their fair share of tax.\n\n\"It is right that we continue to tackle these type of schemes.\"\n\nNow John is now considering bankruptcy and says that will be the moment he tells his wife.\n\n\"I guess at that point I've got a plan, I've got a way out, even though it'd be difficult. It's a bitter-sweet one, really. If I get the closure I need, it'll be a relief.\n\n\"It'll be a relief because I don't know how much longer I can keep doing what I'm doing and, you know, keep the fight up, I guess.\"\n\nA number of MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith's constituents have been affected\n\nBut while he's dealing with the ramifications of his tax bill he's angry that similar action isn't being taken against the firm that signed him up to the scheme.\n\n\"The only person getting hit with this is me, there's no liability whatsoever with these promoters. Everybody knows who they are, but it's the small people who are getting destroyed.\"\n\n\"I think the government and HMRC go after the wrong target, because it's the easy target to go after,\" says MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who has a number of constituents who have been affected by the charge.\n\n\"But they're not really going after the promoters.\"\n\nMary Aiston, director of the counter avoidance directorate at HMRC, says that it has become harder for tax avoidance promoters to operate and around 20 have left the sector. Meanwhile, the government recently consulted on new laws to strengthen HMRC's ability to tackle promoters sooner, before taxpayers owe such huge sums in backdated tax.\n\nIn the meantime, taxpayers should make sure they understand any tax or payroll systems they are signed up to.\n\n\"The main message is, if it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is,\" Ms Aiston says.\n\n\"Somebody telling you that part of your income can come as a loan and that you keep it forever but you won't have to pay any tax or pay any tax on it. That is too good to be true.\"\n\nOne additional frustration for John is that loan-based and other potentially risky tax avoidance schemes are still being marketed, meaning growing numbers of people are potentially at risk of a large tax bill in the future.\n\n\"It makes me so angry you know. They're out there, you can Google, it's so simple to find where these people are. I'd tell anybody, just please, please, please stay clear. It's just not worth it.\"\n\nFile on 4: Taxing Situations will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 20 October at 20:00 BST or listen again on BBC Sounds", "Crowds looted a warehouse believed to be storing food supplies for distribution during Covid lockdowns\n\nNigeria's chief of police has ordered the immediate mobilisation of all police resources to put an end to days of street violence and looting.\n\nMohammed Adamu said criminals had hijacked anti-police brutality protests and taken over public spaces.\n\nA new wave of looting was reported on Sunday, a day after Mr Adamu ordered police to end the \"violence, killings, looting and destruction of property\".\n\nProtests calling for an end to police brutality began on 7 October.\n\nThe demonstrations, dominated by young people, started with calls for a police unit, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (Sars), to be disbanded.\n\nPresident Muhammadu Buhari dissolved the Sars unit - accused of harassment, extortion, torture and extrajudicial killings - days later, but the protests continued, demanding broader reforms in the way Nigeria is governed.\n\nThey escalated after unarmed protesters were shot in the nation's biggest city, Lagos, on Tuesday. Rights group Amnesty International said security forces killed at least 12 people. Nigeria's army has denied any involvement.\n\nLagos has in recent days seen widespread looting of shops, malls and warehouses, and property has been damaged, with the businesses of prominent politicians targeted. A number of buildings have been torched and prisons attacked.\n\nOn Sunday, there were reports of government warehouses being ransacked in the central city of Jos, as well as in Adamawa and Taraba states, with people taking away food and agricultural supplies.\n\nThere were similar reports of looting from warehouses in Bukuru city, near Jos, on Saturday.\n\nThe warehouses were said to have stored food supplies for distribution during lockdowns imposed to help control the spread of Covid-19.\n\nThe images of people carrying sacks of supplies from a warehouse in Bukuru were posted on social media\n\nPresident Buhari has said that at least 69 people have died in street violence since the protests across Nigeria began - mainly civilians but also police officers and soldiers.\n\nOn Saturday, the Nigerian police force tweeted that Mr Adamu, the inspector general of police, had told them \"enough is enough\" and ordered officers to \"use all legitimate means to halt a further slide into lawlessness\".\n\nA group that has been key in organising the demonstrations in Lagos had on Friday urged people to stay at home.\n\nThe Feminist Coalition also advised people to follow any curfews in place in their states.\n\nThe group said it would no longer be taking donations for the #EndSARS protests.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. An organiser of protests against police brutality in Nigeria tells the BBC he saw soldiers shoot people dead", "More than 1.4 million people in South Yorkshire are the latest to move to England's top level of restrictions.\n\nTier three measures came into effect at midnight affecting areas including Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield.\n\nSheffield City Region's mayor said the measures were needed but called on the government to \"define precisely what the exit criteria is\" from tier three.\n\nMeanwhile, Wales entered the first full day of a national lockdown amid border patrols to stop non-essential travel.\n\nGloucestershire Constabulary said it will patrol routes into the Forest of Dean area and pull over vehicles suspected of making unnecessary journeys out of Wales.\n\nDrivers without a valid excuse will be advised to turn around and, if they do not, will be reported to police in Wales who can issue fines, the force added.\n\nIt comes as another 174 deaths and 23,012 new confirmed cases were recorded on Saturday.\n\nAnd a leading epidemiologist has warned sending some children home from schools may be the only way to control infection rates.\n\nProf Neil Ferguson, a former government scientific adviser, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the current restrictions on household mixing \"should have a significant effect\".\n\nBut he said beyond that there was a \"limit to what we can do\" without sending some school year groups home.\n\nProf Ferguson, whose advice led to the lockdown in March, also said it was \"too early to say\" what impact the restrictions were having, adding: \"I think we'll have to wait another week or two.\"\n\nAsked what the impact would be of relaxing lockdown rules for one or two days on Christmas, Mr Ferguson, who quit his role in May after an \"error of judgement\", said it was a \"balancing act\" and \"a political judgement\".\n\n\"It risks some transmission and there will be consequences of that,\" he said. \"But if it's only one or two days the impact is likely to be limited.\"\n\nSome 7.3 million people are now living under England's tightest restrictions.\n\nAs the Sheffield City region entered tier three - very high alert - mayor Dan Jarvis, urged people to \"do their bit\" and stick to the new rules.\n\nHe told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that he was \"clear what it takes our end\" to get out of tier three, such as a drop in new cases - but the government \"do have to be clear and transparent about the exit strategy\".\n\nElsewhere, Stoke-on-Trent, Slough and Coventry moved into tier two - high alert level - at midnight.\n\nIn Wales, a 17-day \"firebreak\" has started, meaning most non-essential businesses are closed, with people only able to leave home for limited reasons.\n\nIn line with new guidance, supermarkets removed non-essential items from sale - including clothing, kitchen electrical items and crockery - using barriers and plastic sheets to cover products.\n\nShoppers in Wales will not be allowed to buy non-essential items, such as clothing and tableware, in stores\n\nIn Scotland, a five-level system will be introduced from 2 November. The top level would be close to a full lockdown, but the aim is for schools to remain open at all levels.\n\nIn Northern Ireland, schools have been closed for two weeks as part of an extended half-term break. This is part of a four-week \"circuit-breaker\" lockdown, with some businesses being told to close temporarily.\n\nUnder England's tier three rules, pubs and bars not serving substantial meals have to close, while household mixing is banned indoors and outdoors in hospitality settings and private gardens.\n\nAdditional rules in South Yorkshire include the closure of betting shops, adult gaming centres, casinos, and soft play centres. However, gyms will remain open.\n\nThe new measures will be reviewed after 28 days, but Sheffield's director of public health, Greg Fell, said he feared four weeks \"will not be long enough\".\n\nIn a letter to residents, Mr Jarvis, who is also the Labour MP for Barnsley Central, said there was light at the end of the tunnel and the restrictions would \"help us reach it sooner, and at a lower cost\".\n\nHe warned South Yorkshire communities now have some of the highest numbers of cases in the north of England and infection rates are still going up.\n\nIn Barnsley the infection rate in the seven days to 19 October was 486 cases per 100,000 people, in Sheffield 415, in Rotherham 407 and in Doncaster 393. The average area in England had 117.\n\nMr Jarvis wrote: \"It's tempting to think that because new restrictions are not a silver bullet they are not worth the disruption.\n\n\"We don't have the luxury of easy choices. But I have no doubt this was the right one to make.\n\n\"The alternatives carry far too great a risk of causing more deaths, and ultimately more harm to our economy.\"\n\nSouth Yorkshire joins Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region and Lancashire in tier three.\n\nTier three rules will also come into force in Warrington on Tuesday, two days earlier than initially planned, to \"urgently\" reduce coronavirus cases, according to the local council.\n\nNottingham and parts of Nottinghamshire are expected to be moved into the highest tier next week, with the finer details such as whether or not gyms can stay open still to be decided.\n\nMeanwhile, Office for National Statistics data estimates cases in England have risen to more than 35,200 a day.\n\nThe ONS survey tests a representative sample of the general population to provide an estimate of the true spread of the virus, as it picks up asymptomatic cases that would not necessarily be identified in the daily figures.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nHow are the restrictions affecting you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Marcus Rashford's campaign over the summer forced the government to U-turn on free school meals\n\nAmid the talks over Manchester's request for an extra £30m a month for jobs support, or indeed the tens of millions for half-term free school meals in England, and the debate over a tougher lockdown, the government and its top supporters are citing the idea that there is no money left.\n\nCertainly, this morning's public finances showed the government borrowing in the first half of the financial year at a record high, the highest levels of government debt in 60 years and the deficit this year heading for its highest ever level outside of a world war.\n\nThis is before the statisticians have accounted for likely losses from tens of billions of government-guaranteed lending to businesses.\n\nSeptember's numbers alone saw a fivefold increase in borrowing, up from £7.7bn last September to £36.1bn, driven by more spending on the furlough scheme, health and self-employment, as well as far less VAT and income taxes received.\n\nThe Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) this afternoon also published a chart showing that of the £262bn that the Treasury has borrowed by issuing gilts, £246bn has been bought by the Bank of England.\n\nThe central bank has indirectly created and lent most of the extra money required by the government.\n\nOverall, the government has not had to raise the funds from the private sector or abroad.\n\nSo, no, we aren't really running out of cash.\n\nThe best evidence for that is that the government will indeed be announcing more borrowed money for some of its schemes in the coming days and weeks.\n\nAnd there is ample evidence that market demand for government debt is still strong.\n\nFor example, the European Union found huge demand this week for its new \"social bonds\" to help Spain and Italy fund pandemic jobs support.\n\nHowever, these Bank of England purchases do, in theory, have to be sold back into the market after the crisis.\n\nWith a large stock of debt, the government's finances are now very sensitive to even relatively small rises in the rate at which it borrows.\n\nIt seems unlikely right now, but is far from unthinkable over the next several years.\n\nThe government had already planned to borrow more to invest in infrastructure as part of its \"levelling-up agenda\".\n\nMuch higher levels of spending on health and pensions are already baked in to the spending cake as society ages.\n\nSo getting the public finances in shape does matter, as a medium-term priority.\n\nRight now, though, it is difficult to argue that \"no money\" is the constraint on extending free school meals, or furlough support.\n\nParticularly not on a day when it was confirmed pensions will rise by two percentage points more than inflation, at a time when average earnings are negative.\n\nThe cost of that triple lock policy, just as an example, is about £1.5bn in extra state pension costs in the coming year, according to Carl Emmerson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.\n\nThese are political decisions to allocate money where the government feels an obligation to prioritise.", "Pressure is mounting on the government to reverse its decision not to provide free school meals over the holidays in England.\n\nSeveral Conservative MPs are opposing No 10's stance, as Labour threatens to push for another Commons vote and some 2,000 doctors call for a U-turn.\n\nIt comes as the PM faces calls to meet footballer Marcus Rashford to discuss his free school meals campaign.\n\nThe government has said it has increased welfare support.\n\nDowning Street has also highlighted tens of millions of pounds in funding for councils to help vulnerable families during the pandemic.\n\nBut there is increasing criticism from within Tory ranks over the government's decision to rule out extending meal vouchers for around 1.3 million vulnerable children in England to cover holidays.\n\nFormer Tory children's minister Tim Loughton, who did not support Labour's motion, said he would lobby ministers to reverse the decision for the Christmas break.\n\nAnd Tobias Ellwood, a former defence minister, said the free school meals scheme was \"well received\" and a \"simple and practical\" way of supporting families.\n\nJohnny Mercer, a defence minister, admitted on Twitter that the government had dealt with the issue \"poorly\".\n\nAnd more than 2,000 paediatricians who work with young people have signed a letter saying England should follow Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in providing meals during the holidays.\n\nMarcus Rashford has led a viral social media campaign highlighting organisations providing food during half term\n\nMeanwhile, chairman of the education select committee Robert Halfon said a meeting would help ministers create a long-term strategy to combat child food hunger.\n\nLabour has said it will force a new Commons vote on the issue if the government does not change its position before the Christmas Commons recess.\n\nTulip Siddiq, shadow minister for children, said she was sorry the issue had \"become a political football\" but some Conservative MPs \"are realising this is principles before party\" and she appealed for more to stand against the government.\n\nShe told BBC Breakfast that, with some local councils agreeing to supply meal vouchers during the holidays, the issue had become \"a postcode lottery\" because not every council had \"stepped up\".\n\nOn Wednesday, Conservative MPs rejected Labour's Opposition Day motion to extend free school meals by 322 votes to 261, with five Tory MPs rebelling.\n\nOne of those rebels, Mr Halfon, called on Mr Johnson to meet Rashford, telling the BBC: \"It may be that they don't agree with everything that Marcus Rashford is proposing, but it would give us a chance to come up with a long-term plan to combat child food hunger once and for all.\"\n\nOn Saturday, Rashford, 22, tweeted to condemn the \"unacceptable\" abuse some MPs had received for voting against the motion.\n\nThe government extended free school meals to eligible children during the Easter holidays earlier this year.\n\nFollowing the Manchester United striker's campaign, it bowed to pressure to do the same throughout the summer holiday.\n\nBut this time it has refused to do so, saying it has given councils £63m for families facing financial difficulties due to pandemic restrictions, as well as increasing welfare support by £9.3bn.\n\nBusinesses have been offering to provide children with food during half-term\n\nThis puts it at odds with the other UK nations, which have all extended the policy beyond term time.\n\nHowever, hundreds of cafes, restaurants and some local councils have since pledged to help feed children facing hardship during the October half term - prompting Rashford to say he \"couldn't be more proud to call myself British\".\n\nRashford's petition on child food poverty was approaching 800,000 names on Sunday morning.\n\nMeanwhile, two Conservative MPs have said comments they made about the issue were \"taken out of context\" after their remarks were criticised.\n\nCommenting on a school in Mansfield, Ben Bradley said that \"one kid lives in a crack den, another in a brothel\". Another Twitter user responded, saying that \"£20 cash direct to a crack den and a brothel sounds like the way forward with this one\", to which Mr Bradley replied: \"That's what FSM [free school meal] vouchers in the summer effectively did...\"\n\nMr Bradley said the tweet, which has since been deleted, had been \"totally taken out of context\".\n\nSimilarly, Conservative MP, Selaine Saxby, used the same defence after writing in a since-deleted Facebook post that she hoped businesses who were giving away food for free \"will not be seeking any further government support\".\n\nHave you been affected by any of the issues raised here? You can share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nStaggering the return to universities after Christmas and the use of testing will form the strategy to get students home in December.\n\nScotland's Education Secretary John Swinney has given more details of the plan to allow students to return home.\n\nIt follows a spike in coronavirus infections in September when students moved into university accommodation.\n\nHundreds tested positive across the UK, with thousands told to self-isolate in halls.\n\nSpeaking on Politics Scotland, the deputy first minister said the Scottish government was in discussions with the UK government and the other devolved administrations to learn lessons from the experience of early autumn.\n\nHe said: \"Some of the points we are looking at are staggered returns of students, arrangements for how testing can be part of the architecture of how we handle that return.\n\n\"Also, what expectations we have of students when they are returning home and when they return to universities, and how their learning will be undertaken.\"\n\nThe Scottish government is working with the rest of the UK nations to manage the movement of students at Christmas\n\nHe said the discussions involved \"intense detail\" to make sure the movement of students both home for Christmas and returning back to university was handled safely to prevent spread of the virus in other parts of the UK.\n\nHe said testing programmes would be involved.\n\n\"These are some of the options being looked at,\" he added. \"Practicalities are eased if return of students is staggered over a longer period and we are working with institutions because they have to be partners with us on how the learning is undertaken over that period.\n\n\"We want to avoid any situation where there is not too much strain on the testing system or on the possibility of the circulation of the virus when students return or when they return to their homes in the first place.\"\n\nMatt Crilly, president of the National Union of Students (NUS) Scotland, said it wanted to see a \"clear and coherent\" plan from the Scottish government \"urgently\".\n\n\"In terms of a return to campus in the new year, we must avoid a repeat of the mass outbreaks we saw among the student population in the autumn,\" he said.\n\n\"Universities and Colleges need to clearly communicate with their students on what their next semester is going to look like, so that students can make an informed decision on whether they wish to return.\n\n\"NUS Scotland continues to call for remote learning to be the default position. That way no student has to go back to campus unless absolutely necessary. No student should be left asking themselves, again, why they've been asked to return for no good reason.\"\n\nHe added: \"We welcome that the Scottish government and institutions are looking at mass asymptomatic testing for the student population. We would welcome further discussion on this issue.\"\n\nScottish Liberal Democrat Leader Willie Rennie also welcomed the asymptomatic testing which he said could \"hunt down and drive out the virus from campuses\".\n\nOn Saturday he told the BBC the Scottish government was doing everything it could to get students home for Christmas.\n\nHe said he recognised the importance of family and community occasions but that suppressing the virus was paramount.\n\nStudents were asked to stay away from parties, pubs and restaurants for a weekend and were only allowed to return home if they could self-isolate and their households went into quarantine.\n\nAt the time Nicola Sturgeon said it was \"absolutely our priority\" to make sure that students are able to return home for Christmas.\n\nIt comes after children in Scotland were asked to stay at home this Halloween.\n\nStudents in Edinburgh staged a protest against their treatment by the university\n\nMeanwhile, students from Edinburgh University staged a protest over their \"mistreatment\" by the institution during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nProtesters claimed the university made a \"false promise\" of hybrid learning and said many students would not have taken out leases on flats if they had known most learning would be online.\n\nThey also claimed the university's treatment of first years had been \"terrible\", saying the university had \"locked them in halls of residences with zero regard for their mental health and wellbeing\".\n\nStudents gathered to protest in the city's Bristo Square on Saturday, calling for better treatment and services and an \"actual provision of hybrid learning\", saying if the university cannot provide this then a cut in fees for the online semester is needed.\n\nThe university said academic and support staff had been working \"tirelessly\" to provide students with the world-class education that they expect from the institution.\n\nStudents were unhappy at what they saw as a lack of support when cases soared at halls of residence\n\nA spokeswoman said: \"We have been working closely with the Students' Union and other student groups to ensure that their views are heard at the highest level.\n\n\"Students are receiving a hybrid learning experience, in line with Scottish government guidance, with some in-person teaching taking place on campus. We are delivering more than 95,000 hours of teaching this semester and more than 35,000 hours of these are scheduled to take place on campus.\"", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Last updated on .From the section Cycling\n\nTao Geoghegan Hart became only the second British man to win the Giro d'Italia as he took the title in Milan.\n\nThe 25-year-old won Saturday's stage 20 to share the lead with Jai Hindley before the final stage, the first such instance in the race's history.\n\n\"Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine this would be possible when we started,\" said Geoghegan Hart.\n• None From Hackney to Milan - Britain's new cycling star\n\nChris Froome is the only other British man to win the Giro, in 2018.\n\nGeoghegan Hart is the fifth British man - alongside Froome, Bradley Wiggins, Geraint Thomas and Simon Yates - to win a Grand Tour.\n\nIn only his fourth Grand Tour, Geoghegan Hart began the race as one of Geraint Thomas' domestiques and was in 126th place after the opening stage.\n\nGeoghegan Hart described his victory as \"bizarre\", adding: \"All of my career I've dreamed of trying to be top 10 - top five maybe - in a race of this stature, so this is something completely and utterly different to that and it's going to take a long time to sink in.\"\n\nGeoghegan Hart grew up in Hackney in east London, where he joined Cycling Club Hackney.\n\nHe is also a keen swimmer and at the age of 13 was part of a group of teenagers who swam across the English Channel.\n\nAs a fan, he attended an event in London to mark Team Sky's launch in 2010 and would later sign for the British team, competing full-time on the top-tier World Tour since 2017.\n\nHe has remained with the team, who became Ineos in 2019, ever since.\n\nHis previous best finish at a Grand Tour was 20th at the Vuelta a Espana in 2019.\n\nAfter winning the Giro he shared a kiss with girlfriend Hannah Barnes, also a professional British cyclist.\n\n\"Tao bunked off school to come and ride behind the other guys [when Team Sky launched] and he has gone and won a Grand Tour,\" team boss Sir Dave Brailsford said.\n\n\"It is the stuff of comic books.\"\n\nHow the race was won\n\nGeoghegan Hart was not the leading contender in his team, let alone the race, when the Giro began.\n\nHe took on the role of Ineos leader after Thomas, the pre-race favourite, pulled out with a fractured hip suffered in a crash on stage three.\n\nOther expected contenders for the pink jersey, Yates and Steven Kruijswijk withdrew after testing positive for coronavirus over a remarkable three weeks which also featured team protests and withdrawals.\n\nGeoghegan Hart won stage 15 - his first Grand Tour victory - but at that point was still almost three minutes off the overall lead.\n\nHe followed that with a stunning performance in the mountains, catapulting himself into contention with second place over the Stelvio Pass on stage 18 and winning a gruelling stage on Saturday.\n\nThe final stage time trial saw the riders setting off in reverse order with the Brit starting three minutes before Australian Hindley on Sunday, Geoghegan Hart was always ahead at the intermediate time checks and finished in 18 minutes 14 seconds.\n\nHe became the first Giro winner to have never held the leader's pink jersey until the final finishing line.\n\n\"My DS (director sportif) told me I was 10 seconds up and then he kept giving me a few seconds,\" he said.\n\n\"I only knew we must be in a pretty good situation when they were screaming not to take any risks in the last kilometre.\"\n\nIneos' Filippo Ganna won the stage by 32 seconds, his fourth stage win of the race.\n\nWith seven stage wins, it was Ineos' most successful Grand Tour since they were formed.\n\nWilco Kelderman, who lost the overall lead to Sunweb team-mate Hindley on stage 20, took third place overall, 1min 29secs down.\n\nJoao Almeida, who led for 15 days, finished fourth and Pello Bilbao fifth.\n\nVincenzo Nibali was seventh, leaving Italy without a rider in the top five for the first time in Giro history.", "Danielle (right) and her sister\n\n\"I find it hard to remember ever having a cooked meal at home,\" says Danielle, who relied on free school meals as a child.\n\n\"I would eat spaghetti hoops cold out of the tin.\n\n\"We would have sliced white bread because it was 13p from [discount supermarket] Kwik Save, then put margarine on it and put it under the grill.\n\n\"Me and my sister thought we were going to open a café.\"\n\nDanielle, 39, is now a successful senior manager for a charity, living in London, but growing up she lived with food insecurity.\n\nShe has told the BBC how, as a child, she often had to resort to shoplifting or \"bin-diving\" for essential food at weekends or during the school holidays - once, when she was as young as 10.\n\n\"Food poverty in Britain isn't really spoken about because of shame,\" she says.\n\n\"When the holidays hit, hunger doesn't go.\"\n\nDanielle is calling on the government to \"support young people\" as the row about the decision not to extend free school meals for children in England into the half-term holiday continues.\n\nThe government extended free school meals to eligible children during the Easter holidays earlier this year and, after a campaign by footballer Marcus Rashford, did the same for the summer holiday.\n\nMinisters say that providing help through councils is the best way to reach those that need it.\n\n\"I was brought up in a household where we didn't have food at home,\" Danielle recalls.\n\nHer mother was ill, and couldn't work. A single-parent household, Danielle says she and her two siblings were often left to \"fend for themselves\", in addition to caring for their mum.\n\n\"Some days it was hard for her to get out of bed. She really put in a lot of effort but she couldn't cope. I don't hold it against her because she tried,\" Danielle stresses.\n\nThey would usually receive child benefits payments on a Monday. \"So we would often take a day off school and have lots of food then,\" says Danielle, \"but nothing afterwards.\"\n\nPackets of jelly were common because they cost 20p and \"would go quite far\", or instant custard - \"things to fill you up\".\n\nAt the weekend, meals would frequently consist of dry cereal and dry bread.\n\n\"I remember going to bed with hunger pains and coming home to an empty fridge,\" she says.\n\n\"You learn to shut off the signals from your brain that tell you you're hungry.\"\n\nThis habit stayed with her into adult life. \"I don't realise I'm hungry, and then it gets to 4pm and I realise I've been dissociating and suddenly have to eat.\n\n\"As a young adult I didn't know how to cook, so would just eat for survival. Something to take away the hunger.\"\n\nDanielle could sometimes eat at friends' houses or at Sunday school as a child, but her main source of hot meals was school.\n\nShe explains that because her mum was on benefits, that qualified her and her siblings for free school meals - which were limited to certain children.\n\n\"I have really strong memories of them,\" she says.\n\n\"Apple crumble and custard [her favourite pudding to this day], baked potatoes, roast dinners.\n\n\"I also have fond memories of sitting at the table with all of my friends.\"\n\nBut beyond that, she was forced to find other ways of sourcing food, when they had run out of essentials and she was \"starving\".\n\nThis included \"bin-diving\" for surplus food behind supermarkets, paying 10p for scraps from the local fish and chip shops, and shoplifting.\n\n\"It wasn't frequent, but when we were desperate,\" she says.\n\nDanielle was caught shoplifting a jar of Marmite aged 10 - carefully selected from the shelves because it could \"last weeks\" by only spreading a small bit on each piece of bread.\n\nAnd, while on the earlier occasion she was only told not to return to the shop, at 14-years-old she had her fingerprints taken, was placed in a police cell and later cautioned over shoplifting.\n\n\"I think that was for stealing jelly.\"\n\nDanielle says the incident came up on her record when she was applying for a job in later life, leaving her devastated.\n\n\"I feel like I'm quite a moral person. For it to tarnish your career when all you are trying to do is eat,\" she says.\n\n\"I'm not proud of it and I would never do it now, but it was survival.\"\n\nAs soon as Danielle was old enough to get various part-time jobs, she stopped shoplifting, and went on to get three \"A\" grade A-Levels and a First-class degree at university.\n\nBut she says that she could have gone \"either way\".\n\n\"I did have a supportive education system and that enabled me to not continue down the wrong path,\" she says.\n\n\"Because of the support that we have in the UK it allows people to go from poverty into middle class and be able to earn a living.\n\n\"Unless we support young people, give them opportunities, like food and education, then that wouldn't be able to happen.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Marcus Rashford and his mother Melanie helped out at FareShare Greater Manchester\n\nResponding to the row over free school meals, Danielle argues that those who are making the decisions are doing so from \"a place of privilege\" without an understanding of \"what it's like to be a child and to be hungry\".\n\nShe also stresses that there are \"all sorts\" of family dynamics that can lead to financial difficulty, including debt, mental health issues, and addiction.\n\n\"It can happen to anyone,\" she says.\n\nAs Danielle hit her 30s, she developed a new relationship with food - teaching herself to cook from scratch and eventually batch cooking for the week.\n\n\"One of my friends set up a supper club and said I was their inspiration,\" she said.\n\n\"I just thought it's funny going from no food, to all my friends saying I was such an amazing cook.\"", "A no-deal Brexit could see import costs for some everyday items rise by almost a third, making them \"much more expensive\", a business group has said.\n\nThe cost of moving goods could also rise due to tariffs, and inflation could be driven up, Logistics UK added.\n\nIn a letter to the Sunday Times, David Wells, the group's chief executive, urged the PM to work towards a deal.\n\nA government spokesperson said a negotiated outcome by 31 December \"remains our preference\".\n\nMinisters have warned firms to \"get ready\" for change at the end of the transition period.\n\nIn the letter, Mr Wells said everyday household items imported will get more expensive under World Trade Organisation tariffs - some by 30% or more.\n\n\"This will make the household shopping basket much more expensive, particularly in the early part of 2021 when we rely on imports for much of our fresh food,\" he added.\n\nThe head of Logistics UK, previously known as the Freight Transport Association, and which represents hauliers, warned that restrictions to the number of lorry access permits available to enter the EU could put businesses across the country at risk.\n\n\"The permit quota available to UK operators will fall short by a factor of four, putting businesses at risk right across the country,\" he said.\n\n\"We are urging government to keep pressing for a deal with Brussels, to protect not only our industry but the economy as a whole.\"\n\nNegotiations have resumed following a week-long standoff, with the UK side agreeing to continue with talks after EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier said \"compromises on both sides\" were needed.\n\nAt a summit in Brussels earlier this month, EU leaders called on the UK to \"make the necessary moves\" towards a deal.\n\nCabinet Office Minister Michael Gove has acknowledged that leaving the EU without a trade deal would cause \"some turbulence\".\n\nBut Mr Wells said that the potential impact on logistics businesses would be \"more than 'turbulence'\".\n\nResponding to the letter, a government spokesperson said: \"The prime minister has been clear that a negotiated outcome at the end of the transition period remains our preference.\"\n\nThere will be an \"intensification of negotiations\", with talks taking place daily, the spokesperson added.\n\n\"At the end of the year we will be outside the single market and the customs union and intensive planning is underway to help ensure that businesses are ready to seize the opportunities that it will bring.\"", "Scientists in Washington state fitted a tracking device to the insects using dental floss\n\nThe first nest of Asian giant hornets found in the US has successfully been destroyed by scientists.\n\nThe nest, in the state of Washington, was found by putting tracker devices on the hornets and it was sucked out of a tree using a vacuum hose.\n\nThe invasive species insects, known as \"murder hornets\", have a powerful sting and can spit venom.\n\nThey target honeybees, which pollinate crops, and can destroy a colony in just a matter of hours.\n\nThe nest in Washington was found when entomologists, scientists that study insects, used dental floss to tie tracking devices to three hornets.\n\nThe nest of around 200 insects was then discovered in the city of Blaine close to the Canadian border.\n\nOn Saturday, a crew of scientists wearing protective suits vacuumed the insects from the tree, which will now be cut down to remove any further nests.\n\nThe nest of around 200 Asian giant hornets was found in a tree in the city of Blaine\n\nAsian giant hornets are among the world's largest wasps - the queens can reach over 5cm (2in) long.\n\nTheir venomous sting can penetrate humans' protective clothing but the number of people they kill each year is low - about 40 annually in Asia, according to the Smithsonian museum in Washington D.C.\n\nNormally their natural habitat is in areas of Asia from China to Japan, but in 2019 there were several sightings of single \"murder hornets\" in North America.\n\nGlobally, conservationists are deeply concerned about falling insect populations. But it can be permissible to kill some insects if they are an invasive species - one that is not native to an area and preys on other insects there.\n\nHoneybees are under threat due to loss of food after habitat destruction, pesticides, and disease.\n\nWhen an Asian giant hornet enters a honeybee colony, it begins a \"slaughter phase\" in which it kills bee after bee and can destroy the colony in a few hours.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Climate change can significantly reduces the habitats in which bees can survive", "Lewis Hamilton passed Valtteri Bottas to take a commanding victory in the Portuguese Grand Prix and break Formula 1's all-time win record.\n\nHamilton dropped to third in a manic first two laps that ended with McLaren's Carlos Sainz leading, but fought back to crush Bottas' hopes.\n\nAfter both Mercedes passed Sainz, Hamilton tracked Bottas before taking the lead on lap 20.\n\nFrom there, Hamilton dominated to take his 92nd career Grand Prix victory.\n\nHamilton received a standing ovation from the socially distanced crowd, before celebrating with team members and then a long embrace with father Anthony.\n\nHamilton said he \"owed it all\" to his Mercedes team, adding: \"I could only ever have dreamed of being where I am today.\n\n\"I didn't have a magic ball when I chose to come to this team and partner with these great people, but here I am.\n\n\"Everything we do together - we are all rowing in the same direction and that's why we're doing what we're doing.\n\n\"And my dad's here and my step mum Linda, and Roscoe [Hamilton's dog]. It is going to take some time for it to fully sink in. I was still pushing flat out as I came across the line. I can't find the words at the moment.\"\n\nHow did it all unfold?\n\nHis victory, on a humiliating day for team-mate Bottas, gave Hamilton a 77-point advantage in the championship as he moves ever closer to a seventh world title, which would match Schumacher's other surviving record.\n\nHamilton had to do it the hard way, cool temperatures and a sprinkling of rain at the start leaving his Mercedes grip-less on its medium tyres on the opening lap, on which he was passed by both Bottas and Sainz.\n\nSainz, using his soft tyres to great advantage over the medium-shod Mercedes, produced a stellar opening lap from seventh on the grid and passed Bottas for the lead at Turn Five on the second lap.\n\nBut once the Mercedes' tyres were up to temperature, they wasted no time in dispatching the McLaren and disappeared into a race of their own.\n\nHamilton never let Bottas get much more than a couple of seconds ahead and then after 15 laps started to pour on the pace, setting fastest lap after fastest lap to close in on the Finn and then pass for the lead into Turn One.\n\nOnce ahead, Hamilton left his team-mate behind, pulling out a lead of more than seven seconds in the next 10 laps, and continuing to inch further clear over the remainder of the race.\n\nHamilton extended his lead even further after they made their pit stops, as he was able to get the hard tyres into their temperature window more effectively than his team-mate.\n\nThe 35-year-old's only concern was cramp in the final 10 laps but it did not seem to affect him unduly, and he still crossed the line 25 seconds clear of his team-mate.\n\nIt was a masterful performance, befitting the monumental nature of his achievement, supplanting Schumacher at the head of the all-time win lists, where the German had been for 19 years.\n\nIt was an exciting race on a new track to F1, with overtaking and incident aplenty throughout the field.\n\nRed Bull's Max Verstappen was third, after slipping down to fifth on the opening lap, while Charles Leclerc was impressive in recovering fourth place in the Ferrari after he, too, struggled for grip in the opening laps on the medium tyres and dropped to eighth.\n\nAlpha Tauri's Pierre Gasly was outstanding in taking fifth, grabbing the place with a lovely move around the outside of Racing Point's Sergio Perez with two laps to go.\n\nPerez, too, drove a strong race, recovering from a first-lap collision with Verstappen and spin, which required him to stop for fresh tyres and drop to last.\n\nPerez came under further pressure on the last lap, this time from Sainz, who passed him to take sixth place, with the Renaults of Esteban Ocon and Daniel Ricciardo and Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel all close behind.\n\nKimi Raikkonen was just outside the points, after an outstanding first lap, rising from 16th on the grid to seventh place on his soft tyres, and then passing Leclerc's Ferrari for sixth, before the lack of pace of his Alfa told once the race settled down and he began to slip back.\n\nWhat happens next?\n\nNext weekend, F1 moves on to Imola in Italy, an historic, challenging and popular track which holds a race for the first time since 2006.\n\nWhat they said\n\nHamilton: \"I really owe it all to[Mercedes team] for their teamwork, continually innovating and pushing the barrier even higher every year. It's such a privilege working with them. It really is absolutely incredible.\"\n\nBottas: \"The opening lap was pretty good, some cars behind with the soft tyre had the upper-hand but I was really pleased I could get the lead but after that, I just had no pace today. I don't understand why.\"\n\nVerstappen: \"It was very low grip at the start. I tried to stay out of trouble but had a touch with Sergio Perez. He didn't give me enough space so he took himself out. I did my own race after that.\"", "The body of the woman, believed to be in her 60s, was found at a National Trust estate\n\nA man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after the body of a woman was discovered at a National Trust estate.\n\nPolice found the body in woodland on the Watlington Hill estate, Oxfordshire, just before 18:00 BST on Friday.\n\nThe arrested man is being treated in hospital for serious injuries.\n\nThames Valley Police said it was linking the murder to reports of a man seen acting suspiciously near a pub a few hours earlier.\n\nThe victim is believed to be in her 60s, the force added.\n\nOfficers have appealed for anyone who saw a man behaving strangely near the Fox and Hounds pub in the Christmas Common area of Oxfordshire at about 15:30 to get in touch.\n\nAnyone who saw anything suspicious in the Watlington Hill area at about 17:30 has also been asked to contact detectives.\n\nDet Supt Craig Kirby said: \"We are carrying out a thorough investigation to piece together what has happened to lead to this woman's death.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The suspects were detained on board the Nave Andromeda (in the middle of the three boats)\n\nSeven suspects have been detained after a suspected hijacking involving stowaways on a tanker off the Isle of Wight.\n\nUK special forces completed the operation in nine minutes, BBC Defence Correspondent Jonathan Beale said.\n\nMilitary assistance had been requested after the stowaways on board the Liberian-registered Nave Andromeda reportedly became violent.\n\nAll 22 crew members, who were locked in the ship's citadel, are safe.\n\nThe Ministry of Defence called the incident a \"suspected hijacking\" and said Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and Home Secretary Priti Patel authorised the operation in response to a police request.\n\nThe operation took place under the cover of darkness\n\nMr Wallace said: \"I commend the hard work of the armed forces and police to protect lives and secure the ship.\n\n\"In dark skies, and worsening weather, we should all be grateful for our brave personnel. People are safe tonight thanks to their efforts.\"\n\nMrs Patel tweeted she was \"thankful for the quick and decisive action of our police and armed forces who were able to bring this situation under control, guaranteeing the safety of all those on board\".\n\nMr Beale said the individuals were detained after they were met with \"overwhelming force\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Footage of the oil tanker situated off the Isle of Wight\n\nHe said members of the Special Boat Service based at Poole, in Dorset, were involved in the operation, which also featured six helicopters.\n\nA team of Royal Navy divers were also flown in one of the Royal Navy helicopters in case the vessel had been mined but it had not.\n\nConcerns over the crew's welfare were raised at 10:04 GMT when the vessel was six miles off Bembridge, police said.\n\nA spokesman said \"verbal threats\" had been made towards the crew.\n\nA three-mile exclusion zone was put in place around the vessel.\n\nRichard Meade, editor of shipping news journal Lloyd's List, had earlier said there were thought to have been seven stowaways on board.\n\nHe said it was believed they had become violent towards the crew after they attempted to detain them in a cabin.\n\nThe tanker Andromeda, owned by Greek shipping company Navios, was en route from Lagos in Nigeria to Fawley oil refinery on Southampton Water.\n\nIt had not stopped anywhere else.\n\nAccording to a source close to the shipping company, the crew were aware of stowaways on board, but the stowaways became violent towards the crew while it was off the Isle of Wight.\n\nThe crew retreated to the ship's citadel, a secure area in which they can lock themselves, making it impossible for attackers to get in.\n\nThis is standard procedure during a terrorist or pirate attack, but there is no suggestion the crew were doing more than protecting themselves from the stowaways.\n\nThe crew contacted the coastguard, which then alerted police.\n\nThe 748ft-long (228m) ship is known to have left Lagos in Nigeria on 5 October and was south of the Isle of Wight when the police were called.\n\nLawyers for the vessel's owners said they had been aware of the stowaways on board for some time.\n\nTobias Ellwood, chairman of the Commons Defence Committee, said the boarding of the tanker was a \"good outcome\".\n\nHe said: \"Seven stowaways on board taking over a ship or causing the ship not to be in full command would have triggered a multi-agency alarm and then well-rehearsed classified protocols were then put into action.\"\n\nHampshire police said after the suspects were detained that all 22 crew members of the tanker were safe.\n\nIn December 2018, four stowaways were detained after they ran amok on a container ship in the Thames Estuary.\n\nThe men, from Nigeria and Liberia, waved metal poles and threw faeces and urine after being found hiding on the Grande Tema.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Footballer Marcus Rashford's campaign to provide free meals for children over half term has been turned into an interactive Google Map.\n\nJoe Freeman has so far been manually inputting each individual venue offering to help provide food.\n\nHe is using tweets by Rashford, who is sharing messages from local businesses which have pledged to support his campaign.\n\nMinisters have ruled out extending free meals beyond term time.\n\n\"I was eating my lunch, reading Marcus Rashford's tweets and thinking, 'This is amazing, wouldn't it be great if we could see them all in one place,'\" Mr Freeman said.\n\n\"It was easy to do - I started off just by searching by each restaurant and the place they were from.\"\n\nMr Freeman is a father-of-two from south London. He says that while his family does not require free meals, there are some children in his local school who do.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Joe Freeman This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHe is now working on a website where restaurants will be able to fill in a form and request to be included in the map - and he hopes this will become a more automated process. Data is also starting to be pulled automatically from Rashford's twitter feed rather than being added by hand.\n\nA growing number of councils in England have also pledged to provide free meals for children of families facing hardship during the half-term school holidays.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Police clashed with some protesters as they tried to disperse the crowds\n\nEighteen people have been arrested at a protest in central London over coronavirus lockdown restrictions.\n\nLarge crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace, where police were stationed, before moving on to Trafalgar Square.\n\nSome protesters carried placards calling for \"freedom\" and an end to the \"tyranny\" of Covid-19 restrictions.\n\nThe Metropolitan Police said the crowds had been dispersed but urged people to continue social distancing.\n\nThere was some disruption on Westminster Bridge as officers tried to break up demonstrators.\n\nThe force said three officers had suffered minor injuries.\n\nArrests were made for a variety of offences, including breaching coronavirus regulations, assaulting an emergency service worker and for violent disorder.\n\nThe capital was placed into tier two lockdown restrictions earlier this week.\n\nCommander Ade Adelekan, of the Met, said he had become \"increasingly concerned that those in the crowd were not maintaining social distancing or adhering to the terms of their own risk assessment\".\n\nHe added: \"Organisers did not take reasonable steps to keep protesters safe which then voided their risk assessment. At this point, officers then took action to disperse crowds in the interests of public safety.\n\n\"I am grateful that the vast majority of people listened to officers and quickly left the area. Frustratingly, a small minority became obstructive, deliberately ignoring officers' instructions and blocking Westminster Bridge.\n\n\"Although the majority of protests have concluded, our policing operation will continue into the night and I would urge Londoners to stick to the regulations, avoid gathering in large numbers and maintain social distancing.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Schools may need to close to some year groups in order to get control over the coronavirus infection rate, a leading epidemiologist has warned.\n\nProf Neil Ferguson, who modelled the epidemic's impact for the government, said restrictions on household mixing \"should have a significant effect\".\n\nBut he said beyond that there was a \"limit to what we can do\" without sending some school year groups home.\n\nProf Ferguson also said if rules were relaxed, deaths would increase.\n\nIt comes as the UK government announced on Saturday there had been a further 23,012 confirmed cases and 174 new deaths.\n\nMore than seven million people in England are now living under the top level of coronavirus restrictions, with South Yorkshire the latest region to have new rules come into force.\n\nThe whole of Wales - 3.1 million people - is also seeing its first full day of national lockdown, which is due to last for 17 days.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Prof Ferguson - who quit his role from the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies in May after breaking lockdown rules - said the situation was \"worrying\".\n\n\"We now have 8,000 people in hospital with Covid. That is about a third of the level we were at at the peak of the pandemic in March,\" he said.\n\n\"If the rate of growth continues as it is, it means that in a month's time we'll be above that peak level in March and that is probably unsustainable.\n\n\"We are in a critical time right now. The health system will not be able to cope with this rate of growth for much longer.\"\n\nProf Ferguson, who leads Imperial College London's Covid-19 response team, said it was \"too early to say\" if current restrictions were having an effect and \"we'll have to wait another week or two\".\n\nHe said while there were \"little hints\" of slowing, for example in the North East of England, \"we're not seeing the sort of slowing that we really need to get on top of this\".\n\n\"What we're seeing is case numbers coming down quite quickly in a narrow age band, in 18-21 year olds,\" he said.\n\n\"Unfortunately in every other age group case numbers continue to rise at about the same rate they were.\"\n\nProf Neil Ferguson's modelling of the spread of coronavirus was key to the government's decision to bring in the lockdown\n\nHe said the impact of rules on households mixing should be \"significant\" - although \"as yet we haven't been able to see it definitively\".\n\nHe added: \"If we go beyond that there is a limit to what we can do in terms of reducing contacts, short of starting to target, for instance, the older years in schools and sixth form colleges where we know older teenagers are able to transmit as adults.\n\n\"Of course, nobody wants to start moving to virtual education and closing schools even partially. The challenge may be that we are not able to get on top of the transmission otherwise.\"\n\nThe UK government has been keen not to close schools again, with Boris Johnson saying it was a \"national priority\" for children to be in school.\n\nProf Ferguson was also asked about Christmas and what the impact would be of relaxing lockdown rules for one or two days.\n\n\"It's always a balancing act,\" he said. \"It risks some transmission and there will be consequences of that. Some people will die because of getting infected on that day.\n\n\"But if it's only one or two days the impact is likely to be limited. So that really is a political judgement of the costs versus the benefits.\"\n\nIt comes after No 10 said it was Prime Minister Mr Johnson's \"ambition\" for people to celebrate Christmas with their families.\n\nThe PM was \"hopeful\" that some aspects of our lives could be \"back to normal\" by then, No 10 added.\n\nBut that differed to comments made by other politicians and scientists.\n\nProf John Edmunds, who sits on Sage, said the idea that people could \"carry on as we are\" and then have a normal Christmas with friends and family was \"wishful thinking in the extreme\".\n\nAnother Sage scientist said last week that Christmas was unlikely to be the \"usual celebration\" of \"families coming together\".\n\nMeanwhile, Scotland's national clinical director Jason Leitch has said people should prepare for \"digital celebrations\", while Wales' first minister said the priority was \"saving lives not saving Christmas\".", "The two-week quarantine period for contacts of those who test positive for Covid-19 could be cut to 10 or seven days, amid criticism of Test and Trace.\n\nWriting in the Telegraph, Conservative MP Sir Bernard Jenkin said a \"vacuum of leadership in Test and Trace\" was affecting compliance.\n\nTests could be offered to people after a week of isolation, the paper said.\n\nNorthern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis told the BBC the government would be \"led by the science\" on the issue.\n\nAnd Prof Sir Ian Diamond, a member of the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), added there was \"work going on\" to look at the length of self-isolation period and \"certainly it has been discussed at various times\".\n\nResearch by King's College London suggested just 10.9% of those traced as contacts of someone with Covid-19 remained at home for the full quarantine period.\n\nEarlier this month, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said he was \"very hopeful\" of reducing the amount of time people needed to spend in quarantine on arrival in the UK from abroad and this could be done by testing them a week later.\n\nSir Bernard, chairman of the Commons liaison committee, said public consent and co-operation with England's system was \"breaking down\".\n\nHe added there should be a \"visible and decisive\" change, with a senior military figure put in charge of the system.\n\nBaroness Dido Harding, currently at the helm, should be \"given a well-earned break\" so she and others could \"reflect on the lessons learned so far\", he wrote in the paper.\n\n\"There is a spaghetti of command and control at the top, which is incapable of coherent analysis, assessment, planning and delivery,\" he added. \"People lack faith that there is a coherent plan.\"\n\nA Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) spokesperson said NHS Test and Trace had contacted more 1.1 million people and asked them to self-isolate.\n\n\"Dido Harding and her leadership team - drawn from the military, public and private sectors - have built the largest diagnostic industry the UK has ever seen,\" they said.\n\n\"It is the equivalent of building an operation the size of Tesco in a matter of months. We need to improve in areas and we are very much focused on that, but we should be talking it up not down.\"\n\nLast month, it was announced that former Sainsbury's chief executive Mike Coupe would be taking over as director of Covid-19 testing at England's NHS Test and Trace agency.\n\nMore than 20,000 tracers were recruited by the service, but many have complained they were given little or nothing to do.\n\nBoris Johnson said on Thursday that NHS Test and Trace required improvements so results were provided quicker. The government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, also acknowledged a need for change.\n\nFigures for the week ending 14 October reveal that just 15.1% of those who were tested received their results within 24 hours - dropping from 32.8% in the previous week.\n\nThe figures also showed a fall to 59.6% in the proportion of close contacts reached of people who tested positive.\n\nAccording to Sage, at least 80% of contacts would need to isolate for it to work properly.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock has previously said up to 500,000 tests a day could be carried out by 31 October. Latest data showed 340,132 tests were processed on 22 October, with capacity at 361,573.\n\nMeanwhile, cabinet minister Mr Lewis told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that \"teams were looking\" at whether the self-isolation period cut be cut from 14 days but he added that \"any final decision on this will be led by the science and we're not in a position to make on a decision on that just yet\".\n\nProf Diamond told the same programme that identifying \"the optimal times for self-isolation is critical\" because it was an \"incredibly important part of the way in which we will control this virus\".\n\nIt comes as First Minister Mark Drakeford said the government would review the decision to prohibit supermarkets from selling non-essential items such as clothes and microwaves during Wales' 17-day lockdown.\n\nWales' health minister Vaughan Gething defended the ban, saying it was in place to ensure fairness to businesses that are closed during the 17-day lockdown and reduce the opportunities for people to \"go out and mix\".\n\nHe told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show: \"We're reviewing with supermarkets the understanding and the clarity of the policy because there's been different application in different parts.\"\n\nA further 19,790 new coronavirus cases were reported on Sunday, with a further 151 deaths within 28 days of a positive test recorded.", "\"I still have nightmares most nights about being completely out of my depth.\"\n\nGemma, a ward nurse in Northern Ireland, was redeployed to a critical care unit at the end of March when the first wave of coronavirus struck.\n\n\"I had never looked after a critically ill intensive care patient in my life,\" she says.\n\n\"I just thought, I'm coming in here and I'm going to die. I'm going to catch Covid and I'm going to be one of those patients in the beds.\"\n\nAs the second wave of the pandemic takes deep root across parts of the UK, thousands of NHS workers are struggling to recover from what they have already been through.\n\n\"We were all in PPE all the time,\" recalls Nathan, a senior intensive care nurse at a hospital in the Midlands. \"All you can see is people's eyes, you can't see anything else.\"\n\nHe describes trying to help junior members of staff survive long and difficult days.\n\n\"And I'd see these eyes as big as saucers saying help me, do something. Make this right. Fix this.\"\n\n\"The pressure was insane, and the anxiety just got me,\" he says. \"I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't eat, I was sick before work, I was shaking before I got into my car in the morning.\"\n\nNathan ended up having time off with severe anxiety, but he is now back at the hospital, waiting for the beds to fill up again.\n\nWe've spoken to a number of nurses and doctors across the UK who are deeply apprehensive about what lies ahead this winter.\n\nWe're not using their real names because they shared their views on condition of anonymity, in order to speak freely.\n\nAll believe it is important that the general public hears first-hand about the enormous strain the health service and its staff have been under.\n\nIt has not just been about coping with the devastating effects of a new and deadly disease.\n\nPressure to deal with the huge backlog of other medical treatments, which had been put on hold, meant some health care workers didn't have much of a break during the summer either.\n\n\"I finally went on holiday in September and it was like I came out of a fog,\" says Danny, an intensive care doctor and anaesthetist based in Yorkshire.\n\n\"Almost the last six months of my life was just some kind of haze that I don't remember very well. You just became all about Covid and nothing else,\" he says. \"And I think that got us through the first wave, but obviously it isn't a sustainable mechanism to carry on.\"\n\nThat widely shared feeling of exhaustion has been heightened by long-standing concerns about staff shortages, and by deep resentment - particularly among nurses - about pay and conditions.\n\nOne of the lasting images of the first wave of Covid is of the weekly \"clap for carers\" - that moment of national unity that took place on doorsteps at 20:00 every Thursday night.\n\nHealth care workers have been very appreciative of public support, but many say they would prefer a proper pay settlement to another round of applause.\n\nAnd Jo Billings, a psychologist from the Covid Trauma Response Working Group at University College London, says \"the narrative of health care workers being heroes or angels has largely been really unhelpful.\"\n\nIt painted a picture that people do this because they're special, not because they're simply doing their job, for which they should be adequately paid and protected.\n\n\"It's also been a real barrier to people seeking help with their own problems,\" Dr Billings says, \"because they feel heroes don't struggle. An angel doesn't get PTSD.\"\n\nThe first wave of Covid-19 could have been much worse than it was. In fact, many doctors expected it to be. A lot of the extra capacity that was created so quickly in the health system, in temporary Nightingale hospitals and elsewhere, was not needed.\n\nBut health care staff speak of an \"all hands on deck\" mentality, when people were doing long shifts and were often away from home for extended periods to protect their families.\n\n\"It was mentally draining, and we've not really had a proper downtime,\" says Moussa, a respiratory consultant from Greater Manchester. \"As soon as the first wave finished, we started catching up with the backlog of other cases. So, there was another mountain to climb.\"\n\nThat sense of fatigue and frustration, in a health service already stretched to the limit before Covid struck, is captured in data put together by the Covid Trauma Response Working Group.\n\nIts Frontline Covid study of nearly 1200 health care workers from across the UK between May and July found that nearly 60% of them met the criteria for at least one of three things - anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.\n\nVarious risk factors were identified, including fear of transmitting Covid to others, unreliable access to Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) at the time, feeling stigmatised due to their role, and not feeling able to talk to a manager about how they were coping.\n\nConversations with NHS staff reveal a system of support for staff welfare and mental health which is patchy - fantastic in some places, not so in others.\n\n\"A junior doctor I spoke to the other day was talking about what a difficult time she'd found in another hospital,\" says Dorothy Wade, a psychologist at University College Hospital in London. \"And I said, 'Didn't you have anything like this at the other hospital?' And she said, 'No, absolutely nothing. There was nothing on offer at all.'\n\nShe says quite a lot of hospitals still don't have a staff psychologist, and didn't have resources to offer any provisions.\n\nIt has been a similar story in intensive care units, says Nicki Credland of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses.\n\n\"In some places there have been significant amounts of psychological support,\" but in others \"staff are reporting that they're needing to go to their GP.\"\n\nNHS England says nearly half a million staff were given extra support with their health and mental wellbeing needs during the first wave, via self-help apps, text services, online forums and telephone helplines.\n\nBut in most cases, it is down to local management, and sometimes support isn't available at the time that shift workers need it.\n\n\"Members of staff in our ward have been permanently scarred by Covid,\" says Jacqui, a nurse at a small community hospital in London. \"They sometimes struggle now doing some of the more minor tasks. [But] we were very lucky that we're in a very good, small trust,\" she says, \"which has taken all that on board and is supporting them.\"\n\nA large number of health care workers, however, were redeployed into new hospitals or new wards, or even into entirely new areas with very little training and very little preparation.\n\nAnd the Frontline Covid survey reveals that many of them were distressed by what they saw.\n\nThat is partly because even at the best of times in critical care, a lot of patients are going to die.\n\n\"You have to have this slight disconnect with what's going on because you have to accept that you can do everything right, and the patient still might not survive,\" says Danny, the ICU doctor in Yorkshire. \"But people coming from elsewhere in the hospital haven't had the time to develop that kind of mentality.\"\n\nIn Northern Ireland, Gemma was asked recently by her manager if she would like to volunteer to go back into an ICU.\n\n\"I laughed in her face and said no,\" she admits. \"I don't know if I'll be made to go. But as soon as you walk over the threshold of a hospital, you cannot refuse to look after a patient. And the thought is, you've done it before, you can do it again.\"\n\nThere's little doubt that morale in the NHS would be higher if staff felt they were being rewarded more fairly.\n\nThe Royal College of Nursing (RCN) surveyed more than 40,000 of its members in the aftermath of the first Covid wave, and found that pay, and feeling under-valued, was their number-one concern.\n\n\"It may feel like now is not the time to talk about pay, with so many people in lockdown and in serious financial difficulty,\" says Mike Adams of the RCN, \"but we've thought about this very carefully.\n\n\"If you want to do one thing for nurses who need a boost to get through the rest of this year, and through the winter, it would be to show you value them with a meaningful pay rise.\"\n\nMany staff are frustrated because they know that is unlikely to happen.\n\nNearly three quarters of respondents to the RCN survey said they thought they were more valued by the general public after the onset of Covid-19. But less than one fifth thought they were more valued by the government in their part of the UK.\n\n\"All that clapping, and all that goodwill,\" says Nathan, \"and now it's back to normal.\"\n\nDoctors earn more money than nurses, but express similar sentiments.\n\n\"We've lost 40% of our pension pot in the last five years,\" says Jack, a consultant in London. \"And everyone is looking at it and wondering whether they should get out now before we lose any more.\n\n\"I think by next March, it's going to be a great deal worse,\" he says\n\nThat in turn highlights another message delivered by members of the RCN. In the aftermath of the first Covid wave, 35% of more than 40,000 people said they were actively considering leaving the profession.\n\nAn NHS spokesperson told the BBC that there are now more than 300,000 nurses in England, including 13,000 who joined recently.\n\n\"And this year there was a 22% increase in applications for nursing degrees, on top of our £28m fund to boost international recruitment,\" the spokesperson continued.\n\nIt takes years to train new recruits, however, and there were more than 40,000 nursing vacancies across the NHS at the beginning of the year.\n\nNow, with Covid an ever-present danger, many experienced members of staff are thinking of leaving, and many of them are not coming back.\n\n\"Nurses approaching retirement used to - in significant numbers - retire, and then return on a smaller number of hours,\" says Mike Adams at the RCN. \"But that is just not happening as much. We're losing the guides and mentors for the student nurses and the newly qualified nurses.\"\n\nGemma in Northern Ireland says she plans to leave the NHS when this next Covid phase is over, and get a job in the private sector where she won't be redeployed at a moment's notice.\n\n\"A lot of what got us through is the camaraderie, informal chats in the tearoom,\" she explains. \"But we're not even allowed to chat in the tearoom anymore. We have to sit apart with masks on.\n\n\"I'd say a large proportion of my team feel the same. A couple of nurses have just taken early retirement saying, 'No, not doing it anymore.'\"\n\nMany people in the NHS think the public aren't always aware of how acute staff shortages could become.\n\n\"The focus during the first wave was all on ventilators and the Nightingales and beds and things like that,\" says Danny in Yorkshire. \"But the actual thing we need is staff.\"\n\nHe highlights a concern raised by a number of NHS staff that we talked to - an awful lot of people were so burnt out by the first wave that they may not be able to commit so much this time.\n\nStaffing up of ICU became a focus in the early months of the pandemic\n\n\"We've noticed there's a real reluctance among doctors, nurses, everyone to pick up these extra shifts now,\" he says. \"People are realising the importance of family, the pandemic has encouraged everyone to make life simpler, and they want to do something more sustainable second time around.\"\n\nThe challenge could be particularly acute in intensive care.\n\nIn south-west London, Jacqui worked in an ICU during the first wave, and has the rights skills and experience. But she doesn't think she can do it again.\n\n\"Intensive care is incredibly physical, and I hurt my shoulder last time trying to roll a patient over,\" she says. \"Psychologically, I'm not sure I could completely cope with it again.\"\n\n\"It has actually made me go, 'Right, next year, I really will take my pension, I won't work full time anymore.' I've done my bit.\"\n\nBack in March and April, staff were redeployed in large numbers from other parts of the health system, particularly from operating theatres, to bolster intensive care.\n\nBut if the government wants things like elective surgery and operations elsewhere in the health system to continue, many of those extra staff may not be available.\n\n\"We haven't miraculously managed to find an extra 10,000 ICU nurses over the past five months,\" says Nicki Credland. \"That gives us a problem, which is compounded by staff that are off sick because of the psychological and physical response to the first wave of Covid.\"\n\nThere are potential solutions to ease serious staff shortages if the virus strikes specific areas hard. Seriously-ill patients could be moved to hospitals under less pressure, or experienced staff, based in areas where the virus is spreading more slowly, could be moved into hotspots.\n\n\"We're taking a much more local approach,\" the medical director of NHS England Stephen Powis said last week, \"and we are determined to keep the capacity for non-Covid services open for as long as possible.\n\n\"That involves hospitals helping each other, the use of independent sector hospitals where we can, and it might involve some of the Nightingale hospitals.\"\n\nA doctor at an NHS trust near Liverpool - which is in tier three - confirmed that her hospital was on standby to take patients from Liverpool City Region, even though its ICU was already full.\n\nAmbulances stand by in Strasbourg in March to load patients with Covid-19 into a medicalised train\n\nBut if the pandemic gets a lot worse, the effectiveness of local cooperation like this could be limited. And there is no national plan for moving people or resources around the country.\n\n\"In France, they reconditioned trains and made carriages into mobile intensive care units,\" says Jack, the consultant in London. \"In Holland, they had a big double-decker bus, a mobile ICU to move large numbers around. But I'm not aware that we've got anything other than fleets of ambulances.\"\n\nWhen you look back to March, there is no doubt some things have changed for the better. There is far more testing of NHS staff, including testing staff without symptoms in hotspot areas, and there is far less anxiety about the supply of personal protective equipment.\n\nDoctors also know more about the disease and ways to try to treat it, which should have a positive effect on staff morale.\n\n\"We still don't have a cure, but seeing people get better obviously makes staff stronger psychologically,\" says consultant Jack. \"We're only human after all.\"\n\n\"We will put our best foot forward, and we'll do the best for the patients,\" says Nathan, the ICU nurse in the Midlands, \"but I can genuinely say all of my colleagues, including senior management, are terrified.\"\n\n\"We're not sure how, in terms of resilience, we are going to be able to get through this.\"\n\nAcross the NHS you can hear similar concerns - a determination to step up to the plate again, but also the knowledge that adrenalin only gets you so far.\n\nThe desire to continue with business as usual in the NHS - treating other conditions and diseases as normal - is a laudable, and probably an essential, aim.\n\nBut that may not prove possible - some hospitals are cancelling operations already.\n\n\"The pressure to still run all the normal functions of the NHS and deal with a Covid second wave that's got the potential to be bigger than the first one,\" says Moussa, \"that's a harsh, harsh thing when we feel we need to prioritise.\"\n\nMany doctors were expecting a second wave to start around November, so it has come in some places a little earlier than predicted. And even in a normal year, the onset of winter and the flu season puts huge additional capacity pressure on the NHS.\n\nThe government argues that the system has shown extraordinary resilience in the face of a pandemic unprecedented in living memory.\n\nBut Moussa argues that as a country, \"we could have done more to be ready for the second wave\".\n\n\"When you think about it,\" he says, \"it's a bit of a perfect storm.\"", "The oldest person in Britain has died at the age of 112.\n\nJoan Hocquard shared her birthday, 29 March 1908, with the world's oldest man Bob Weighton, who died in Hampshire in May.\n\nShe died at her home in Dorset on Saturday, her nephew Paul Reynolds said.\n\nMr Reynolds said his aunt believed there was no secret to a long life and \"enjoyed butter and cream and she scoffed at idea of dieting\".\n\nMrs Hocquard spent her early life in Kenya where her father was a British colonial officer.\n\nShe went to boarding school in Sussex and later worked as a cook at a hotel in Geneva.\n\nMrs Hocquard moved to the south coast after World War Two\n\nAt the start of World War Two she drove an ambulance in London, before moving to the south coast where she became a keen sailor, having learnt to sail on the Solent as a child while visiting her grandmother in Lymington.\n\nShe married Gilbert Hocquard, who shared her love of sailing and travelling. When he died in 1981, she moved to Lilliput, near Poole.\n\n\"She has always had an independent spirit and it was typical of her that on her 100th birthday she refused a card from the Queen because she did not want people to know how old she was,\" Mr Reynolds told the Bournemouth Echo in August.\n\nMrs Hocquard was filmed with Mr Weighton in March as they celebrated their 112th birthdays.", "Britain finally outlawed all slavery across its Empire in 1833\n\nTwo sites linked to Wales' hidden slave trade have been revealed by a high-tech history project.\n\nA former mansion in Swansea and the remains of a vicar's home in a Denbighshire seaside resort now boast plaques with QR codes that can be scanned by smart phones.\n\nIt is part of the HistoryPoints venture to help the public learn more about places of importance around them.\n\nThe latest additions have been unveiled as past of Black History Month events.\n\nThe first is the former home of copper baron Pascoe St Leger Grenfell at Kilvey Hill in Swansea.\n\nA well-respected member of the community, he was regarded as one of the architects of the city.\n\nThe remains of Maesteg House at Kilvey Hill in Swansea now reveal the hidden links to the slave trade\n\nBut his Maesteg House home was built with the proceeds of slave exploitation in Jamaica.\n\nHe received the equivalent of £500,000 in compensation when slavery was abolished by Britain in 1833 when he was forced to free his captive workers.\n\n\"Pascoe St Leger Grenfell had a major influence on Swansea's development and was praised for his model housing for local workers,\" said Rhodri Clark, the editor of the HistoryPoints.org project.\n\n\"However, his hundreds of workers in distant Jamaica were paid nothing and received no compensation when they were eventually released from slavery.\"\n\nThe spot where ruins of the former mansion stand now have a plaque with a QR code, which when scanned by a phone reveals details of the hidden history of the house and Grenfell's role in slavery.\n\nWhile Grenfell's slave trade credentials were public knowledge, in north Wales a vicar and his family kept their past secret.\n\nThe Reverend Benjamin Winston was a parish priest in Kent when he changed his name to inherit his grandfather's estate and slaves in Dominica.\n\nLater he made Rhyl in Denbighshire his home, at a house called Bodannerch, today an unremarkable looking property that blends in to the seaside resort.\n\nHis son Thomas became something of a local celebrity when he became the town's first railway stationmaster.\n\nBut the truth about the plantations and 179 slaves were kept in the family.\n\nThe home of a former vicar in Rhyl, Denbighshire, hides a family secret linked to slavery\n\nThe history may have remained hidden, as large parts of the Winston home was demolished to build flats.\n\nBut Rhyl couple Christine and Michael Johnson saved about a third of the property and restored it.\n\nWorking with HistoryPoints and the Centre for the Study of Legacies of British Slave-ownership, it too now has a QR-code plaque.\n\n\"We're proud to have saved this piece of Rhyl's heritage for future generations. It's wonderful that people can now read the fascinating story of our house as they walk past,\" said Christine Johnson.\n\nRachel Lang, from the study centre added: \"The legacies of colonial slavery are all around us, from the houses built using the proceeds of slave-ownership to the challenges we face today in overcoming the deep-rooted racist policies we upheld for so long.\n\n\"This is a history we have all been shaped by, albeit unequally.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Wales is under lockdown until 9 November\n\nA second Wales-wide lockdown in the new year is looking increasingly likely, according to a cabinet minister.\n\nDeputy Economy and Transport Minister, Lee Waters, said the current firebreak was unlikely to be the last in Wales - with England \"expected\" to follow.\n\nPreviously the Welsh Government had only gone as far as saying it \"could not rule out\" another lockdown.\n\nThe current national 17-day lockdown is due to be reviewed when it comes to an end on 9 November.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio Wales' Sunday Supplement Mr Waters said previous projections show pandemics have \"more than one peak\".\n\nHe added: \"This is not the last lockdown we are likely to see. The projections we published in a worst case scenario show it's likely we are going to need another firebreak in January or February.\"\n\nHe added that Wales is now witnessing a second peak, with critical care admissions increasing by 57% this week alone, and that was why the Welsh Government has introduced this \"short, sharp\" intervention.\n\nMr Waters said the UK was \"too late\" with the first lockdown\n\nMr Waters said he expected England to follow Wales with a firebreak \"before too long\" while the Welsh Government was trying to be \"consistent and cautious\" in trying to flatten the curve of cases.\n\n\"We are doing our best to flatten the curve. We can't stop the curve, we can't stop the virus spreading. Our best hope is to wait for a vaccine to help us bring it under control.\"\n\nEconomists have warned the lockdown may cost the economy more than £500m and the Conservatives have accused ministers of having \"no exit plan\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Mixed views on the firebreak in Wales' first local lockdown area\n\nPlaid Cymru said it was vital the test and trace system was improved during this firebreak to break the cycle of \"devastating\" national lockdowns.\n\n\"It is concerning to hear talk of plans for future firebreaks at the start of this reset,\" said shadow health minister Rhun ap Iorwerth.\n\n\"If the Welsh Government puts effective measures in place over the next fortnight, a new strategy for the months ahead, it should be aiming to avoid having to return to these tight nationwide restrictions.\"\n\nMeanwhile Mr Waters said the Welsh Government will sit down with supermarket companies on Monday to review how the first weekend of restrictions over the sale of 'non-essential' items.\n\nPressure has mounted on ministers to reverse the decision with more than 55,000 people signing the largest-ever Senedd petition to allow the sale of items, such as clothes and kitchen items, during lockdown.\n\nThe Welsh Conservatives accused the Labour-led government of \"incompetence and mixed messaging\".\n\nMr Waters said: \"We're not reviewing the requirements for supermarkets not to sell non-essential. We are going to review how it's working in practice, because clearly there are some bumps.\"\n\nMore than a hundred protesters gathered in Llandudno, Conwy, on Sunday, to demonstrate against the current lockdown.\n\nThe crowd marched along the seaside town's promenade demanding restrictions are lifted.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Brandon Lewis MP says Michel Barnier staying in London is \"hopefully a very good sign\"\n\nThe chief negotiators for the UK and EU will continue post-Brexit trade talks in London until Wednesday.\n\nMichel Barnier arrived in the UK on Thursday to restart negotiations with Lord David Frost after they stalled last week - but he was due to return home on Sunday.\n\nEU sources told the BBC more talks are also planned in Brussels from Thursday.\n\nNorthern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis said the extended talks were \"a very good sign\" a deal can be done.\n\nBut he told the BBC's Andrew Marr: \"We have got to make sure it is a deal that works, not just for our partners in Europe... but one that works for the United Kingdom.\"\n\nThe two sides are thought to be working on legal texts, but Whitehall sources have indicated major sticking points - like fishing rights and competition rules - remain unresolved.\n\nThe UK left the EU on 31 January but has been in a so-called transition period - continuing to follow EU rules and pay into the bloc - while the two sides hammer out a post-Brexit trade agreement.\n\nThe transition period is due to end on 31 December, but if a deal is not reached, the UK will trade with the EU on World Trade Organisation rules.\n\nSome critics fear a no-deal scenario will cause problems for businesses, but the government insists the UK will prosper.\n\nThe EU had said a deal needed to be agreed by the end of October to allow time for it to be ratified by all the relevant parliaments, but UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had warned of walking away from talks on 15 October.\n\nAfter strong words from both sides and calls for \"fundamental changes\" to the approach to negotiations, a return to the table was agreed and Mr Barnier has been holding talks with UK chief negotiator Lord David Frost since Thursday.\n\nOn his arrival, Mr Barnier told reporters \"every day counts\" and the two sides shared a \"huge common responsibility\" in the talks.\n\nThe discussions had been expected to wrap up later on Sunday with the possibility of consequent conversations, but EU sources have told the BBC they will now continue in London for three more days, before moving to Brussels.\n\nMr Lewis said he was \"always an optimist\" around reaching a free trade agreement and he believed there was \"a good chance we can get a deal\".\n\nBut he told Andrew Marr: \"The EU need to understand it is for them to move as well, so that we can get a deal that works for the UK as well - a proper free trade agreement that recognises us as the UK being a sovereign nation.\"\n\nIn line with a demand made by the UK, the talks resumed on all subjects based on proposed legal texts prepared by officials.\n\nThey also said that \"nothing is agreed\" until progress has been reached in all areas - which has been a key demand of the EU.\n\nThe two sides have been at odds over the issue of so-called \"state aid\" rules, which limit government help for industry in the name of ensuring fair economic competition.\n\nThe UK has rejected an EU demand made earlier in the year for it to continue following the bloc's rules on such subsidies as part of a trade agreement.\n\nLord Frost has suggested the UK could instead agree \"principles\" for how subsidies are spent - something welcomed by Mr Barnier on Wednesday.\n\nThe two sides are also haggling over how much European fishing boats should be able to catch in British waters from next year.\n\nThe EU has so far resisted UK demands for annual talks to decide stock limits, as well as a reduction in access for its vessels to British fishing grounds.", "Can we trust the silver bullet of technology to fix climate change? The prime minister seems to think so.\n\nIn a speech due soon, he is expected to pledge his faith in offshore wind power, solar, carbon capture, hydrogen, clean cars, and zero-emission aviation.\n\nClean technologies are clearly a huge part of any solution.\n\nBut the PM is being accused of techno-optimism bias, because he does not mention other key factors in reducing emissions.\n\nIn fact, experts say, tackling climate change will need action right across society and the economy - with a host of new incentives, laws, rules, bans, appliance standards, taxes and institutional innovations.\n\nThey also warn that citizens’ behaviour must shift, with people probably driving and flying less, and eating less meat and dairy produce.\n\nIn other words, when it comes to cutting carbon emissions, there’s no silver bullet – it’s more like silver buckshot.\n\nBut Boris Johnson still seems to have a bandolero stuffed with technologies resembling silver bullets. Let’s see whether they’ll go with a bang.\n\nTake cars. The prime minister is due to accelerate the transition towards battery- and hydrogen-powered vehicles.\n\nBut Professor Jillian Anable from Leeds University warns that even electric cars pose \"their own problems that politicians seem reluctant to acknowledge.\"\n\n“Producing electricity and hydrogen requires huge numbers of wind farms or the like, and the cars themselves need resource-hungry tyres, and batteries.\n\n\"They also need roads and parking spaces that could otherwise be used for gardens and trees that soak up carbon dioxide,\" she said.\n\n“The harsh reality is that we have to find ways to limit the number of cars and the amount that we drive them”\n\nThere is widespread agreement that hydrogen will play a role in reducing climate change – but how much, and in what industrial sectors, is another matter.\n\nA key question is whether it’s sourced from natural gas – which is expensive and, depending on the process used, can yield troublesome carbon dioxide as a by-product - or by using surplus wind energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The latter process does the job cleanly but at still greater cost.\n\nJess Ralston, from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think tank, said: “Hydrogen can power cars, but electricity seems to have won that technology race. It could heat homes, but electric heat pumps are emerging as a better bet.\n\n“Hydrogen could be really useful, though, in industries such as steelmaking and in heavy transport – including buses that we’re already seeing. But it’s no silver bullet.”\n\nOn aviation, the prime minister has launched his ambition to devise clean planes. He calls the project “jet zero”.\n\nIndustry figures appreciate his boosterish support, but critics warn \"jet zero\" mustn’t divert attention from the short-term need for rules and taxes to hold down aviation emissions after Covid.\n\nCait Hewitt from the Aviation Environment Federation told us: “No zero-carbon technology options are currently available for commercial aviation.\n\nShe explains: \"Planes use masses of energy. Batteries aren’t powerful enough except for tiny planes, and we can only produce biofuels sustainably in small quantities.\n\n“We need a major rollout of radical new technologies, and we need the capacity to remove remaining aircraft emissions from the atmosphere.\n\nBut she says that “given how far we are from delivering these things, we’ll also probably need to fly less.”\n\nUK governments have agonised for decades about nuclear energy, but Boris Johnson recently gave it the nod.\n\nThat means he’s likely to either agree a financial package for a new station at Sizewell or for small modular reactors, or both.\n\nThe existing nuclear power plant at Sizewell could be expanded.\n\nBut nuclear is still a divisive issue. While it \"could definitely help to reduce emissions,\" said Professor Jim Watson, from UCL, \"it’s very expensive.\"\n\n“To play a major role, the cost of new nuclear plants will really need to fall, especially when the costs of other technologies like wind and solar have dropped so far.\n\n“And nuclear developers will need to show that they can build their plants more quickly because we need all electricity to be low carbon within the next 10 years.”\n\nHe agreed that mini reactors might bring down costs – but said it was far too soon to be certain.\n\nThe prime minister has professed himself “an evangelist\" for the technology that captures carbon dioxide as it is emitted from factories and power stations and either stores it in underground rocks or uses it for new chemicals.\n\nTwo decades ago it was touted as a climate saviour, but it's very expensive and has never taken off.\n\nThe main climate authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says the technology must be used to capture the emissions from trees being burned for energy.\n\nThis way, the plants suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and the emissions are buried - helping to turn climate change into reverse. It's known as Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS).\n\nBut the IPCC's Professor Jim Skea says there are \"potential problems.\"\n\nHe explained: \"If the trees are grown on land that would otherwise be used for producing food then there are problems with food security. And if we plant acres and acres of land with the same type of tree there are implications for wildlife.”\n\nSo much for silver bullets. But what about the silver buckshot I mentioned earlier?\n\nWell, a long list of policies requires government attention, including: standards for new homes; green recovery; food production; planning rules; peat; heat and buildings; meat eating; infrastructure statement; road building; carbon dioxide in soil; medium-term emissions targets; tree planting; energy storage; industrial strategy; appliance standards; and the comprehensive spending review.\n\nI’ll examine some of the non-technology innovations for tackling climate change in a future article.", "Frank Bough, one of the most familiar faces on BBC television from the 1960s to 1980s, has died at the age of 87.\n\nHe joined the BBC as a reporter on what was to become Look North, and went on to present some of the corporation's most popular shows, including Grandstand and Breakfast Time.\n\nBut his career was brought to an abrupt end after a scandal involving drugs and prostitutes.\n\nBough died last Wednesday in a care home, a family friend told the BBC.\n\nA talented sportsman, Bough began presenting Sportsview in 1964, taking over from Peter Dimmock before moving onto Grandstand - the BBC's leading sports show on a Saturday afternoon.\n\nOver the next two decades, he would become one of TV's best-known presenters, including with an 18-year stint as host of the BBC's Sports Review of the Year, which later became Sports Personality of the Year.\n\nHis reputation for a calm and unflappable style once prompted Michael Parkinson's remark that \"if my life depended on the smooth handling of a TV show he'd be the one I'd want in charge\".\n\nBough was the tranquil centre in a maelstrom of live sport\n\nIn 1983, Bough was involved in the launch of the BBC's new breakfast service, Breakfast Time. He proved a natural on the show, with his laid-back and comfortable style becoming an immediate hit with the early morning audience.\n\nFed up with early morning starts, he quit Breakfast Time in 1987 to present the Holiday programme.\n\nBut he was sacked by the BBC in 1988 after tabloid revelations about sex and drugs. The story came as a particular shock, given Bough's hitherto clean-cut family-man image.\n\nHe eventually returned to broadcasting, including fronting ITV's Rugby World Cup coverage, but this came to an end after a further scandal. Bough later spoke of his regret over his actions, saying his behaviour had been \"exceedingly stupid\".\n\nIn 2014, after years out of the spotlight, he contributed to a BBC documentary looking at 30 years of breakfast TV in the UK.\n\nMatch of the Day host Gary Lineker paid tribute, writing on Twitter: \"Sorry to hear that Frank Bough has passed away. Grew up watching him present Grandstand on Saturdays. He was a brilliant presenter who made it all look so easy. RIP Frank.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Gary Lineker This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nGood Morning Britain presenter Piers Morgan tweeted: \"RIP Frank Bough, 87. Star of Grandstand, Nationwide and Breakfast Time. His career was ruined by scandal, but he was one of the great live TV presenters. Sad news.\"\n\nAstrologer Russell Grant, a regular on Breakfast Time, said Bough was \"a great man to work with\" and was \"always there for advice and support\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Russell Grant This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nNick Owen, who went up against Bough in Britain's breakfast TV battle on ITV's TV-AM in the 1980s, remembered him as \"the ultimate broadcaster who combined news and sport brilliantly\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Nick Owen This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA BBC spokesperson said: \"Frank excelled as a live presenter with the BBC for many years and we are very sorry to hear of his passing. We send our condolences to his family and friends.\"\n\nSky Sports presenter Jeff Stelling remembered meeting Bough as a young reporter. \"He was kind, helpful and generous with his time,\" he wrote, adding that the presenter was \"one of the very best in the business\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by Jeff Stelling This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Royal Mail is looking to fill a record number of temporary seasonal jobs due to a surge in online shopping during the pandemic.\n\nIt aims to hire 33,000 additional workers for the Christmas period - two-thirds more than usual.\n\nThe postal service typically employs between 15,000 and 23,000 extra staff between October and January.\n\nThe temporary workers will mainly work in sorting offices, delivery vans and data centres.\n\nRoyal Mail says that a higher number of workers is needed to help sort Christmas deliveries of letters, cards and parcels this year because many consumers are staying at home under Covid-19 restrictions and shopping online.\n\nMore than 13,000 mail centre sorting posts are available in England, about 1,400 posts in Scotland, 700 posts in Wales and 500 posts in Northern Ireland.\n\nThe temporary workers will support more than 115,000 postmen and women in permanent roles. About 1,000 of the new recruits will work for the company's new Covid-19 testing kit collection team.\n\nThe Royal Mail's Sally Ashford said: \"During these unprecedented times we believe it is critical that Royal Mail continues to deliver.\n\n\"We want to do our best to deliver Christmas for our customers and support the effort on the pandemic.\n\n\"This helps the whole country to celebrate and stay safe during these difficult times.\"\n\nRoyal Mail has been trying to capitalise on the rise in online shopping, which has been accelerated by the coronavirus crisis.\n\nEarlier in October, the firm announced it would start collecting parcels and mail from people's homes.\n\nIts \"Parcel Collect\" service, which has been trialled in parts of the west of England, will be available every day except Sunday, and there will be a 72p charge per parcel, plus postage costs.\n\nPre-paid return packages can be collected for 60p per item.\n\nThe new scheme will help online shoppers send back unwanted items and was described by Royal Mail as \"one of the biggest changes to the daily delivery since the launch of the post box in 1852.\"\n\nThe wider online retail industry has also been gearing up for an uptick in demand for deliveries in the run-up to Christmas.\n\nIn September, the industry body for online retailers warned that firms may struggle to cope if consumers leave ordering presents until the last minute.\n\nAndy Malcahy of the IMRG stressed that there was no need for shoppers to panic buy, but said: \"If you can spread out your shopping and do quite a lot of it in November, maybe even a bit of it now, then that would really help.\"\n\nMike Hancox, boss of the delivery firm Yodel, also told the BBC: \"It's been like Christmas for the last six months for us\".\n\nIt is adding 2,500 self-employed drivers and nearly 500 staff in its sorting centres across the UK to bolter its operations.\n\n\"We think it will be the biggest online Christmas ever, by some way,\" Mr Hancox said. \"Certainly at Yodel it will be our biggest ever year. We're planning for success and I think every other delivery carrier will be expecting the same.\"\n\nRoyal Mail has seen parcel deliveries increase in recent years but is still on track to make a loss in 2020.", "Mr Macron has hailed Samuel Paty, who was beheaded for showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, as \"the face of the Republic\"\n\nFrance has recalled its ambassador to Turkey for consultations after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insulted his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.\n\nHe said Mr Macron needed a mental health check for pledging to defend secular values and fight radical Islam.\n\nMr Macron has spoken out forcefully on these issues after a French teacher was murdered for showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.\n\nFrance \"will not give up our cartoons\", he said earlier this week.\n\nDepictions of the Prophet Muhammad can cause serious offence to Muslims because Islamic tradition explicitly forbids images of Muhammad and Allah (God).\n\nBut state secularism - or laïcité - is central to France's national identity. Curbing freedom of expression to protect the feelings of one particular community, the state says, undermines the country's unity.\n\nResponding to Mr Macron's campaign to defend such values - which began before the teacher was murdered - Mr Erdogan asked in a speech: \"What's the problem of the individual called Macron with Islam and with the Muslims?\"\n\nHe added: \"Macron needs treatment on a mental level.\n\n\"What else can be said to a head of state who does not understand freedom of belief and who behaves in this way to millions of people living in his country who are members of a different faith?\"\n\nIn the wake of the remarks, a French presidential official told AFP news agency that France's ambassador to Turkey was being recalled for consultations, and would be meeting Mr Macron.\n\n\"President Erdogan's comments are unacceptable. Excess and rudeness are not a method. We demand that Erdogan change the course of his policy because it is dangerous in every respect,\" the official was quoted as saying.\n\nErodgan is a pious Muslim who has sought to move Islam into Turkey's mainstream politics since his Islamist-rooted AK Party came to power in 2002.\n\nPresident Erdogan said: \"Macron needs treatment at a mental level\"\n\nThe diplomatic spat is latest issue to strain relations between France and Turkey, who are allies under Nato but disagree on a range of geo-political issues, including the civil wars in Syria and Libya, and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over disputed Nagorno-Karabakh.\n\nSeven people, including two students, have been charged over the beheading of French teacher Samuel Paty on 16 October near Paris. His killer, 18-year-old Abdullakh Anzorov, was shot dead by police shortly after the attack, which took place near Mr Paty's school.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Rallies have been held in Paris, Toulouse, Lyon and other French cities in support of Samuel Paty\n\nIn 2015, 12 people were killed in an attack on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The publication was targeted by extremists for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.\n\nEarlier this month, Mr Macron described Islam as a religion \"in crisis,\" and announced plans for tougher laws to tackle what he called \"Islamist separatism\" in France.\n\nHe said a minority of France's estimated six million Muslims were in danger of forming a \"counter-society\".\n\nSome in Western Europe's largest Muslim community have accused Mr Macron of trying to repress their religion and say his campaign risks legitimising Islamophobia.", "Six months after getting coronavirus, Rebecca Logan is still feeling the effects\n\n\"We all thought we would get Covid. but we never really thought it would be a bad thing.\n\n\"I was young, I was fit, I was healthy.\"\n\nRebecca Logan, a fitness instructor and part-time nurse, began to feel unwell in April.\n\nThe 39-year-old mother of two felt dizzy and lost her sense of taste and smell.\n\n\"When I got the positive test, I thought: 'Okay, this is maybe how it's going to be for the next few days and then I'll pick up.'\n\n\"What happened to me was that, by day 14, whenever you usually expect to feel better, I actually was a lot worse.\"\n\nFive weeks later, however, and Rebecca was still not feeling better.\n\nNow, more than six months later, she still suffers from breathlessness, \"brain fog\" and has to take daily naps.\n\nRebecca believes she has so-called long Covid - a term being used to describe a range of symptoms identified in people months after they have had the virus.\n\nThere is no medical definition or list of symptoms shared by all patients - two people with long Covid can have very different experiences.\n\nHowever, the most common feature is crippling fatigue.\n\nOthers symptoms include: breathlessness, a cough that won't go away, joint pain, muscle aches, hearing and eyesight problems, headaches, loss of smell and taste as well as damage to the heart, lungs, kidneys and gut.\n\nMental health problems have been reported including depression, anxiety and struggling to think clearly.\n\nIt is estimated that as many as 60,000 people in England could have post-Covid conditions and NHS England has committed £10m to fund specialist clinics.\n\nNothing like this has been announced yet for Northern Ireland, but Stormont's Department of Health said it had set up a Strategic Clinical Advisory Cell to establish a clinical working group.\n\nIt said it expected \"a regional multidisciplinary working group will be formed to provide continuing guidance\" on the future needs of patients.\n\nBBC Radio Ulster's Evening Extra revealed this week that none of Northern Ireland's health bodies are collating data on the number of people who are still suffering with symptoms associated with the virus.\n\nThe Department of Health said \"an agreed clinical definition of long Covid is required before numbers can be officially recorded\".\n\nThis definition is being developed by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) which advises GPs on how to treat medical conditions.\n\nDr Toby Hillman is a respiratory consultant at one of the UK's first post-Covid clinics, based at University College Hospital in London. He is also helping NICE to define the condition.\n\n\"We accept the evidence is not great at the moment, that it's starting to be generated in ever greater depth and quality but the definition is going to change,\" he said.\n\n\"The definition is likely to include clinical diagnoses of this disease because we're aware of the difficulties of accessing testing and the problems with confirmatory testing, so it's going to be a fairly broad church.\"\n\nRebecca said she needs support now: \"People need to recognise that long Covid is a condition and that people need help physically and mentally because you feel so alone.\n\n\"People look at you whenever you say you're still not feeling great and you're still not able to do things because they think: 'Sure Covid, you get it and you're better in 14 days, what's the problem?'\n\n\"It's a very lonely position to be in.\"", "Lloyds Banking Group is to ask staff currently working from home as a result of the coronavirus pandemic to continue doing so until at least next spring.\n\nThe group said the decision was \"in line with guidance\". At present, the UK government recommends people work from home to limit the spread of Covid-19.\n\nLloyds has 65,000 staff, the majority of whom are presently working remotely.\n\nLast month, the group said it was cutting 865 jobs as part of plans to restructure the business.\n\n\"In line with guidance from the UK and national governments, and given the majority of our colleagues are working from home, we have asked them to continue to do so until at least spring,\" a spokesperson for Lloyds Banking Group said in a statement.\n\nLloyds Banking Group encompasses many household names including Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and Scottish Widows.\n\nTwo thirds of Lloyds employees are understood to be working from home at the moment, although staff continue to operate in high street bank branches.\n\nIn September, Catherine McGuinness, policy chair of the City of London, told the BBC she was \"disappointed\" by the \"blanket call\" by government for office workers to return to working from home where possible.\n\nShe said the virus was in danger of crippling the economy, adding \"we need to find a way of living with it\".\n\n\"This is important not so much for the big institutions that can work very well from home, but for the jobs that depend on them,\" Ms McGuinness said.\n\nLast week, Deloitte announced it would close four UK offices and offer the 500 employees who work in their offices in Gatwick, Liverpool, Nottingham and Southampton work-from-home contracts.\n\nIn September, Barclays also told the BBC that \"hundreds\" of UK staff who had gone back to the office would be asked to return to working from home.\n\nMore home working is likely to be a permanent fixture for many firms, according to a recent study by the Institute of Directors.\n\nA survey of just under 1,000 firms by the group found that 74% plan on maintaining the increase in home working.\n\nMore than half planned on reducing their long-term use of workplaces.\n\nCompanies are not likely to switch fully to home working permanently though, it said.", "Paul Harvey, 80, said it had been \"thrilling\" to hear the BBC Philharmonic orchestra perform his composition\n\nA piece of music composed by a former music teacher with dementia is to be released as a single after he recorded it with the BBC Philharmonic orchestra.\n\nPaul Harvey, 80, originally improvised the composition after being given four notes to play by his son.\n\nA clip of the performance, which went viral, was intended to show how musical ability can survive memory loss.\n\nOn Sunday, the single of Four Notes - Paul's Tune was aired on Radio 4's Broadcasting House for the first time.\n\nDespite being diagnosed with dementia late last year, Harvey, a composer from Sussex, has continued to be able to play piano pieces from memory and create new ones.\n\nHis son, Nick, who posted the video in September, said it had been an \"old party trick\" of his father's to request four random notes and then improvise a song.\n\nIn the video, which has had more than 60,000 likes, Nick picked F natural, A, D and B natural for his father to play.\n\nAfter the clip went viral, the performance was aired on Broadcasting House for World Alzheimer's Day on 21 September.\n\nThis prompted listeners to ask the BBC to have the performance orchestrated, which led to the BBC Philharmonic's involvement.\n\nHearing the recording of the single for the first time, Paul, who was joined by his son on the programme, said: \"It was very, very moving and very thrilling at the same time...\n\n\"It's quite amazing that all this has happened, and in my 81st year. It's fantastic.\n\n\"It's given me a new lease of life and after we've all finished here I'll go to the piano and find another four notes.\"\n\nNick said: \"It was amazing - it was absolutely gorgeous.\"\n\nArlene Phillips, the choreographer and former Strictly Come Dancing judge whose father had Alzheimer's, and is an Alzheimer Society's ambassador, said the piece was \"so beautiful\".\n\nShe said: \"It's just incredible that four notes can stir so many mixed emotions.\"\n\nJason Warren, professor of neurology at the Dementia Research Centre at University College London, said one reason people with dementia can continue to play music is because it \"makes sense on its own terms\".\n\n\"So unlike a lot of the tests and the things we might ask people with dementia to do in the clinic, for example, or in their everyday lives, music to some extent is almost self-contained.\"\n\nHowever, he said what Paul did in his piece was \"remarkable by any standard, because what that also shows is his creativity\".\n\nNick said it was hoped the single would be released on all major steaming platforms on Sunday, 1 November. All proceeds will be split between the Alzheimer's Society and Music for Dementia.", "Scotland has recorded 1,303 new coronavirus infections in the past 24 hours.\n\nThe daily statistics from the Scottish government showed the most affected health boards were Greater Glasgow and Clyde with 437 new cases and Lanarkshire with 341 new cases.\n\nLothian had 155 infections and Ayrshire and Arran recorded 132 new cases.\n\nThe death of one more person who had tested positive for the virus has been registered.\n\nHowever, register offices are now generally closed at weekends.\n\nThe number of new cases represents 19% of newly tested individuals.\n\nThe daily update showed that 86 people were in intensive care with recently confirmed Covid-19 on Saturday, that is two more than the previous day. And a total of 1,016 people were in hospital, an increase of 31.\n\nOf the 18,026 new tests carried out that reported results, 7.9% of these were positive.\n\nThe death toll under the measure of people who first tested positive for the virus within the previous 28 days has risen to 2,700.\n\nEarlier, the UK's national statistician said there was \"no question\" that the UK was experiencing a second wave of coronavirus cases.\n\nProfessor Sir Ian Diamond, from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), told the BBC's Andrew Marr show: \"I think there is no question we are in a second wave. We are seeing infections rise very quickly.\"\n\nHe said that in England about one in 130 people had the virus, with estimates for Scotland and Wales being \"a little lower\" and in Northern Ireland \"a little higher\".\n\nAsked if recent data suggesting a slowing growth in cases meant the country would leave a second wave earlier than previously expected, he said: \"I'd very much like to hope so. However, I am extremely nervous about taking just initial data and pushing things forward, and say 'it's fine'.\n\n\"Because, let's be clear, we might see the rate of increase slow a little as we get further data over the next few weeks, but we're still at a relatively high level. What we really need to do is to bring that level down.\n\n\"Even if we were to get R in the north to around about one, it would continue to have infections at a high rate.\n\n\"I really do think it's too early to say on slowing down.\"", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Sunday morning. We'll have another update for you at the same time on Monday morning.\n\nMinisters are considering reducing the 14-day quarantine period for contacts of those who test positive for Covid-19 amid criticism of NHS Test and Trace. Sources told the BBC the period could be cut to 10 or seven days. It comes after concerns were raised over compliance and amid intense criticism of the agency's leadership from a senior Conservative MP.\n\nThe government is facing mounting pressure to reverse its decision not to provide free school meals to children over the holidays in England. More Conservative MPs are opposing No 10's stance, as Labour threatens to push for another Commons vote. Meanwhile, some 2,000 children's doctors are calling on Boris Johnson to U-turn. The government argues it has increased welfare support as well as giving additional funding to councils to help vulnerable families during the pandemic.\n\nWales will review its ban on supermarkets selling non-essential items during the country's two-week lockdown, First Minister Mark Drakeford has said. It comes after government guidance said shops must close parts of their stores that sell products such as clothes, shoes, toys and bedding during the 17-day \"firebreak lockdown\".\n\nDog welfare charities in Wales are concerned the high demand for new pets during the pandemic will lead to an increase in \"dogfishing\" - where dog lovers are misled into buying a dog with no clear provenance, which has often come from overseas or an illegal puppy farm. It comes amid a fivefold increase in people searching for puppies online. Between the start of lockdown in March and the end of September, the Dogs Trust charity rescued 140 puppies illegally imported from central and eastern European countries.\n\nThis year has seen the cancellation of many events, but one farm in Hampshire is determined people do not miss out on traditional Halloween activities, such as picking pumpkins. In honour of the season, Sunnyfields Farm in Totton, has created a giant mural out of hundreds of the colourful vegetable.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Hampshire farm has created a huge mural out of pumpkins\n\nYou can find more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page. Here's our summary of how changes to the furlough replacement scheme affect your job or business.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "Marcus Rashford said he was \"blown away\" by news of local businesses stepping up\n\nCafes and restaurants across England have promised to feed children in the school holidays, despite the industry struggling to survive coronavirus restrictions.\n\nResponses to Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford's child food poverty campaign escalated after the government voted against extending free meal vouchers out of term time.\n\nIt said there was enough support available through the benefits system for families facing hardship.\n\nThe England international has turned his Twitter feed into a network of restaurants, cafes and communities who will help feed children during the October school holidays.\n\nFrom horseboxes to beach cafes, high-end restaurants to chip shops, here are just a few of the many willing to help.\n\nLaura's Little Bakery and Cupcake Maker has decided to donate a birthday cake a week\n\nLaura, who has a baking business in Liverpool, said she understands how children in food poverty feel. After her father died, she and her siblings \"had bare cupboards, begged local shops to give us food or just plain went hungry\".\n\nLaura's Little Bakery and Cupcake Maker has decided to donate a birthday cake a week to a family who would otherwise be unable to afford it.\n\nSince making the announcement on Facebook, she says she has a list of about 80 other bakers keen to join in.\n\n\"It is just insane and amazing, a fair few of these are around the country too - Durham, Leeds, Manchester, Kendal, Warrington, St. Helens, Southport, Surrey, Glasgow, Preston and so on.\"\n\nAny child between the ages of 4 and 16 in the community can collect a free meal\n\nPaul and Harry run vegan restaurant Vutie Beets in Letchworth Garden City. They said they will do their bit to help in their area.\n\nAny child between the ages of 4 and 16 can collect a free meal throughout the school holiday.\n\n\"We stand with Marcus Rashford in making sure no child in our local community goes hungry this half term.\"\n\nLa Tabella is also asking people to nominate anyone too shy to come forward\n\nRob and Liza Smallman at La Tabella in Churchtown are offering free pasta dishes which can be warmed up at home to any children who need them during the October half term holiday.\n\nThey are also asking people to nominate anyone who may be too shy to come forward themselves.\n\n\"We couldn't sit back and let children in our local area go hungry,\" the couple said.\n\nA converted horsebox has been turned into a food bank\n\nThe team at Rosa restaurant in Westhoughton provides and delivers free holiday meals for children living in poverty.\n\nIt has now opened its converted horsebox as a food bank.\n\n\"We are offering free meals for children and essentials to help support families who are struggling over the school holidays - we would like to do something to help.\"\n\nFiona Crump said she thought she was doing a \"local, small thing\"\n\nThe owner of Castle Beach Cafe in Falmouth will be offering free lunch bags to children who normally get a free school meal.\n\nFiona Crump said she thought she was doing a \"local, small thing\", but was surprised by \"the sheer volume\" of social media shares of her announcement.\n\n\"It reminds you in times of doom and gloom that the vast majority of people are delightful, helpful, caring people and the world needs to be reminded of that.\"\n\nAndrew and May Mahon run the Aubergine Cafe in West Kirby. They are offering a free sandwich, cup of soup and piece of fruit to children.\n\nMr Mahon said they were \"dumbstruck\" by the government's decision. He said for every request for help they have had, they have received more than 20 times as many offers of support, with people asking to donate money to help pay for the meals.\n\nHe said: \"It's very heartening. We weren't expecting it.\"\n\nRashford said he was \"blown away\" by news of local businesses who had offered to help.\n\n\"Selflessness, kindness, togetherness, this is the England I know.\"", "With infections rising across Europe, tighter Covid restrictions are being enforced.\n\nMany countries have introduced a night-time curfew to try to curb the spread of the disease, meaning places usually filled with people are empty.", "Some owners of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro handsets have reported being shown an error message when trying to use the NHS Covid-19 app.\n\nApple's devices - which were released on Friday - can in fact run England and Wales' contact-tracing software.\n\nBut the issue arises if apps are transferred from an older iPhone via an iCloud Backup data transfer, which is common practice.\n\nThis can easily be addressed by making a change within the Settings menu.\n\nWhen users install the app from scratch, they are prompted to give the required permission.\n\nBut in what appears to be an oversight, when Apple transfers apps over, the phone does not ask owners to enable the permission and it is not obvious that it needs to be done.\n\nAs a result, the app cannot enable the Bluetooth-based matching functionality it needs to work.\n\nThe requirement is designed to protect user's privacy.\n\nHowever, the alert shown by the app suggested other factors might be at play.\n\nAnd to confuse matters further, when questioned about the matter the app's official Twitter account responded by highlighting that the iPhone 12 was not among devices checked for compatibility with the software.\n\nSome users had got round the problem by deleting the app and then downloading it again from the App Store, which triggered the exposure notification permission request.\n\nHowever, this technique results in all information previously stored by the app on the phone being wiped, including places the user had checked in to.\n\nAbout 18 million people have installed the NHS Covid-19 app so far. In addition to contact tracing, it is also used to log visits to restaurants and other leisure facilities, as well as to check symptoms and order a coronavirus test.\n\nThe BBC revealed last week that Huawei is also working with NHS Test and Trace officials to try and get the app working on some of its newer phones.", "Lee Kun-hee helped to grow Samsung Group into an economic powerhouse in South Korea\n\nLee Kun-hee, the chairman of South Korea's largest conglomerate, Samsung Group, has died aged 78.\n\nMr Lee helped to grow his father's small trading business into an economic powerhouse, diversifying into areas like insurance and shipping.\n\nDuring his lifetime, Samsung Electronics also became one of the world's biggest tech firms.\n\nHe was the richest person in South Korea, according to Forbes, with a net worth of nearly $21bn (£16bn).\n\nSamsung said Mr Lee died on Sunday with family by his side, but did not state the exact cause of death. A heart attack in 2014 had left him living in care.\n\n\"All of us at Samsung will cherish his memory and are grateful for the journey we shared with him,\" the firm said in a statement.\n\nMr Lee was the third son of Lee Byung-chul, who founded Samsung Group in 1938. He joined the family firm in 1968 and took over as chairman in 1987 after his father's death.\n\nAt the time, Samsung was seen as a producer of cheap, low-quality products. But under his leadership radical reforms were introduced at the company.\n\nMr Lee became famous for telling employees in 1993: \"Let's change everything except our wives and kids.\" The firm then burned its entire mobile phone stock, consisting of 150,000 handsets.\n\nMr Lee, pictured with his parents as a child, was the third son of Lee Byung-chul, who founded Samsung Group\n\nMr Lee rarely spoke to the media and had a reputation for being a recluse, earning him the nickname \"the hermit king\".\n\nSamsung is by far the largest of South's Korea's chaebols - the family-owned conglomerates that dominate the country's economy.\n\nChaebols helped to drive South Korea's economic transformation after World War Two, but have long been accused of murky political and business dealings.\n\nMr Lee was twice convicted of criminal offences, including the bribing of former President Roh Tae-woo.\n\nHe stepped down as Samsung chairman in 2008 after he was charged with tax evasion and embezzlement. He was handed a three-year suspended jail sentence for tax evasion but was given a presidential pardon in 2009 and went on to lead South Korea's successful bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics.\n\nHe returned as chairman of Samsung Group in 2010, but was left bedridden by the 2014 heart attack.\n\nMr Lee's son, Lee Jae-yong, has served jail time for his role in a bribery scandal which triggered the ousting of then-President Park Geun-hye from office in 2017. Last month, prosecutors laid fresh charges against him over his role in a 2015 merger deal.", "The first live episode of this year's Strictly Come Dancing got under way with a tribute to frontline NHS staff.\n\nHosts Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly thanked the workers, who were seated in the audience, before the celebrities took to the dance floor.\n\nReality TV star Jamie Laing was the first to dance live, performing the cha cha cha with his partner, Karen Hauer.\n\nStringent Covid measures are in place for this year's show, including judges sitting separately from each other.\n\n\"Thank you so much for everything you have done for us and everything you continue to do and we really hope you enjoy tonight,\" Winkleman said to the NHS staff, who sat at a social distance.\n\nOlympic boxer Nicola Adams (right) and Katya Jones made history as Strictly's first same-sex couple, dancing the quickstep\n\nMade In Chelsea star Jamie Laing was the first to dance live, dancing the cha cha cha with Karen Hauer\n\nLaing was invited back for a second year after having to leave the last series when he was injured.\n\n\"I've been waiting a whole year to do the Strictly training,\" he said. \"Now I'm here, I'm feeling the pressure.\"\n\nJudge Craig Revel Horwood called Laing's performance \"flat-footed, very tight and restricted\", and added: \"That might have something to do with those lovely trousers you are wearing, don't leave much to the imagination, do they!\"\n\nLaing said afterwards he was \"nearly physically sick\" at the prospect of dancing first, doing the cha cha cha with Karen Hauer.\n\n\"I had to go to the bathroom - I thought I was going to throw up. I gagged a little bit but I was fine,\" he said.\n\nActress Caroline Quentin became emotional after performing the American Smooth with her professional partner Johannes Radebe\n\nActress Caroline Quentin was in tears after performing the American Smooth with her professional partner Johannes Radebe.\n\nJudge Shirley Ballas told her she was \"graceful, charming, elegant and you have the most exquisite sense of timing... You did yourself so proud today\".\n\nFormer home secretary Jacqui Smith and Anton Du Beke took to the dancefloor with top hats, performing the foxtrot\n\nFormer Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and Anton Du Beke took to the dance floor with top hats, performing the foxtrot.\n\n\"This is my chance to show you can have a new adventure, even when you're getting on a bit,\" Smith said.\n\nShe played on her former career as a politician, with a dance which began with Smith pretending to be a candidate sitting next to a ballot box.\n\nAfter spelling out his criticisms, Revel Horwood had some good news.\n\n\"When you consider [former prime minister] Theresa May and her dancing, I think you're 10 times better than that,\" he said.\n\nThe pair were awarded a three, five, and five from the judges.\n\nTV presenter and former marine JJ Chalmers with professional dancer Amy Dowden\n\nThey won a standing ovation from judges Motsi Mabuse and Ballas, with Smith called an \"absolute firecracker\".\n\nSinger HRVY and Janette Manrara closed the show with a jive\n• None 'It feels so good to be back dancing'", "The coronavirus pandemic means selling poppies and collecting donations for the Royal British Legion's annual Poppy Appeal will have to happen a little differently this year.\n\nThe charity has released a series of portraits of veterans, poppy collectors and serving members of the armed forces to coincide with the launch of this year's appeal.\n\nThe photographs, taken in the homes, doorways and streets of the subjects, provide a snapshot into the lives lived in lockdown and the impact of Covid-19 on the Poppy Appeal.", "Pictures posted on social media showed roads had been affected\n\nEmergency services were called out to rescue people stranded by overnight flooding in the north east of Scotland.\n\nResidents were evacuated from flooded properties in Ellon, and cars were stranded in water in Angus following heavy rain in the area.\n\nThe heavy rain forced the closure of the train line between Inverness and Aberdeen on Thursday afternoon.\n\nScotRail said reports of flooding, at locations including between Nairn and Elgin, required a full inspection.\n\nA Met Office yellow warning for heavy rain was in force until 11:00 for Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Angus, and Perth and Kinross.\n\nOne for Moray and the Inverness area expired at 08:00.\n\nThe Scottish Fire and Rescue Service said it was called to reports of flooding in Ellon, Aberdeenshire, from about 04:50.\n\nResidents were rescued from six properties.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Davy Shanks This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nPeople were out in the streets of Ellon from the early hours, helping with sandbags and sweeping away flood water.\n\nThe heavy rainfall has also led to problems on the roads.\n\nIn Angus, the A92 was closed following flooding after three cars were stuck in water between Arbroath and Montrose at about 04:10.\n\nThe fire service went to the scene, however there were no reports of any injuries.\n\nThere was also flooding on the A90 at Toll of Birness in Aberdeenshire. Police advised motorists to drive with care in the area.", "Three-year-old Hadija is now an orphan. Her mum, dad and older sister were killed in a missile strike by Armenian forces on their house.\n\nArmenia and Azerbaijain are fighting a war for control of the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.\n\nBut civilians on both sides are also caught up in the conflict.", "Rudy Giuliani: \"At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate\"\n\nDonald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani has dismissed as a \"complete fabrication\" a clip from a new Borat film appearing to show him with hands down his trousers.\n\n\"I was tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment,\" the former New York City mayor tweeted.\n\nHe was referring to an episode in the film, starring UK comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, where he is interviewed by an actress posing as a TV journalist.\n\nThe actress plays Borat's daughter in the comedy Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.\n\nThe film - which is due to be released on Friday - is the sequel to Cohen's 2006 hit Borat, where he played a fictional reporter from Kazakhstan.\n\nIn the follow-up filmed earlier this year, Baron Cohen again tries to ambush US politicians and members of the public.\n\nThe scene with Mr Giuliani sees him being interviewed in a hotel room about the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus outbreak.\n\nThe young actress then invites Mr Giuliani, 76, to join her for a drink. After his microphone is taken off, he lies down on the bed and appears to be putting his hands inside his trousers.\n\nReferring to that clip, Mr Giuliani tweeted: \"At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate. If Sacha Baron Cohen implies otherwise he is a stone-cold liar.\"\n\nIn July, Mr Giuliani said he had first thought he had been asked to do a serious interview.\n\n\"As soon as I realised it was a set up I called the police,\" he explained in another tweet on Wednesday.\n\n\"This is an effort to blunt my relentless exposure of the criminality and depravity of Joe Biden and his entire family.\"\n\nThe Trump camp has accused his Democratic White House challenger and his son Hunter of wrongdoing in regards to Ukraine and China while he was vice-president - a claim Mr Biden denies.\n\nNeither Baron Cohen nor his representatives have so far made any public comments regarding Mr Giuliani's latest tweets about the forthcoming film.", "Spain is the sixth nation worldwide to record more than one million cases\n\nSpain has recorded more than one million coronavirus cases, becoming the first western European country to pass that landmark figure.\n\nOn Wednesday the country reported 16,973 infections and 156 deaths in the previous 24 hours.\n\nSince its first diagnosed case on 31 January, Spain has now recorded a total of 1,005,295 infections.\n\nIt is the sixth nation worldwide to report one million cases after the US, India, Brazil, Russia and Argentina.\n\nEurope has seen a surge in new infections over the last few months, forcing governments to bring in strict new regulations to try and control outbreaks and ensure hospitals do not become overwhelmed.\n\nSpain was hit hard by coronavirus in the first months of the pandemic, and brought in some of the strictest measures to tackle it - including banning children from going outside.\n\nLike most European countries, the country lessened its regulations as case numbers dropped. Politicians highlighted the need to bring back tourists as a way to boost the struggling economy.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nBut by the end of August new daily case numbers were rising by 10,000 a day. Hospital admissions have ticked up by 20% in the past two weeks alone, while deaths have also begun to rise, with the toll climbing by 218 on Tuesday.\n\nIn total, 34,366 Covid-related deaths have been recorded.\n\nLawmakers however are bitterly divided over how to handle the situation. Politicians in the national parliament were debating a no-confidence motion in Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Wednesday filed by the far-right Vox Party, while central government has clashed repeatedly with regional leaders over how best to proceed.\n\nEarlier this month, Madrid's centre-right authorities successfully had a partial lockdown imposed on the capital overturned in court. But the Spanish government then ordered a 15-day state of emergency in the city.\n\nThe health minister will meet with regional leaders on Thursday to discuss next steps.", "Is President Trump right about US carbon emissions?\n\nIn the final presidential debate last night, Donald Trump said the US has had the \"best carbon emission numbers\" in the last 35 years. He went on to claim that countries such as China, Russia and India were \"filthy\". Last year, the US's carbon emissions per capita were at their lowest point in the past 35 years - if this is what Trump was referring to. The data shows that, in recent decades, total carbon emissions have been on a general downward trend, with some fluctuations. There's been a shift to both gas and renewable energy sources, and away from coal, largely because of cost. Trump would have burned more coal (which would have increased emissions), but it proved uneconomic to do so. As far as other countries are concerned, China has higher total CO2 emissions than the US, although emissions from the US are still much bigger than both India and Russia. And as far as emissions per capita go, the US is still ahead of China, Russia and India. Emissions from the US per capita in 2017 were over 16 tonnes while India's were the lowest – at fewer than two tonnes.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Mr Becker appeared at Southwark Crown Court where he denied all 28 charges against him\n\nEx-tennis champion Boris Becker has appeared in court accused of failing to hand over trophies from his playing days so they could be sold to pay debts.\n\nThe three-time Wimbledon winner was declared bankrupt in 2017 over money owed to a bank.\n\nHe is accused of not complying with obligations to disclose information.\n\nMr Becker denied all 28 charges against him at a Southwark Crown Court hearing in London on Thursday.\n\nThe 28-count indictment includes mention of his 1985 All England Club trophy, his 1989 silverware from the same tournament, and his Australian Open trophies from 1991 and 1996.\n\nBoris Becker was the youngest ever Wimbledon men's singles champion, aged 17\n\nThe 52-year-old German national is also accused of concealing more than £1m held in bank accounts, in addition to property in the UK and abroad.\n\nThe court heard that he failed to declare his property interest in an address in Chelsea, south-west London, with similar charges for two properties in his home town of Leimen.\n\nMr Becker is also accused of removing hundreds of thousands of pounds by transferring it to other accounts, including to former wife Barbara Becker, and estranged wife Sharlely \"Lilly\" Becker.\n\nIt is also alleged he hid his holding of shares in a firm called Breaking Data Corp.\n\nMr Becker appeared to record himself on his mobile phone at Southwark Crown Court\n\nMr Becker was released on bail ahead of his trial next September, which is set to last up to four weeks.\n\nProsecutor Rebecca Chalkley said the retired sportsman and television presenter may face further charges at a later date.\n\nDefence counsel Jonathan Caplan said: \"He (Mr Becker) is determined to face and contest these charges and restore his reputation in relation to the allegations made against him.\"\n\nThe former world number one and six-time Grand Slam champion collected 49 singles titles out of 77 finals during his 16 years as a professional tennis player.\n\nHe was picked to enter the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2003, and has been a commentator on the BBC and at tennis tournaments around the world.", "Demand in pubs and restaurants has collapsed after bans on households mixing were introduced in many areas\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak is to unveil new support for workers and firms hit by restrictions imposed as coronavirus cases rise across the UK.\n\nHe is due to update the Job Support Scheme, which replaces furlough in November, in the Commons on Thursday.\n\nCritics say not enough is being done for firms in tier two areas that have seen demand collapse without being formally required to shut.\n\nIn tier three areas, firms ordered to shut get emergency support.\n\nTalks were held throughout Wednesday, with the government said to have acknowledged that while there are three tiers of alert level - medium, high, and very high - there are only two tiers of support.\n\nBusinesses in tier two areas, particularly in the hospitality sector, have complained that they would be better off if they were under tier three restrictions. They argue that although they would be forced to close, they would benefit from greater government support.\n\nTop London-based chef Yotam Ottolenghi said conditions for his restaurants were \"terrible\".\n\n\"We are on our knees now,\" he told the BBC. \"We just don't have customers coming through the door.\"\n\nHe said that before tier two restrictions were imposed in London, his restaurants were operating at 50% of capacity, but that this had now fallen to between 10% and 20%.\n\n\"This is just not a viable place for a restaurant to be,\" he said, describing tier two as a \"cursed\" category that \"deprives us of oxygen\".\n\nIn tier three areas, the government will pay 67% of affected workers' wages, up to £2,100 a month, from 1 November (\"lockdown Job Support Scheme\" in the chart below). Some workers can also claim Universal Credit.\n\nBut in tier two regions, the only help available will be the standard JSS (\"part-time Job Support Scheme\" in the chart below), which is more costly for employers.\n\nBusiness groups and unions say this means many firms will not be able to use it and will have to lay off workers instead.\n\nThe chancellor's spokesperson said: \"What we have always said is that our package of support is always flexible, and always up for review, to make sure that it is dealing with the situation as it evolves.\"\n\nAreas in tier two - the second-highest risk level - include London, Essex, much of the West Midlands, Leicester, Nottinghamshire, Cheshire, West Yorkshire and north-east England.\n\nCoventry is to move to tier two Covid restrictions from midnight on Friday, the city council has said.\n\nIn addition to national restrictions meaning pubs and restaurants must close by 22:00, people in tier two areas are banned from mixing with other households indoors - hammering demand in many leisure industries.\n\nKey Conservative figures, such as West Midlands Mayor Andy Street, have been critical of the disparities, along with a raft of Labour local leaders and MPs.\n\nFurlough and redundancy are cutting incomes - and millions of people's finances are not in a position to cope.\n\nSome 12 million people in UK have low financial resilience - meaning they find it hard to pay bills or make loan repayments, according to research by the City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority.\n\nIt found that those from a black and minority ethnic background have been more likely than most to be affected by Covid-related falls in income, with 37% of those surveyed taking a hit.\n\nAlso, people aged between 25 and 34 were the most likely, by far, to have had a change in employment as a result of the pandemic.\n\nThat has led thousands of people to take payment \"holidays\" - deferrals on household bills such as rent or energy bills.\n\nFrom 31 October, anyone who arranges a break on repayments of mortgages, loans and credit cards will see their credit record marked - potentially making it harder to borrow more from then on.\n\nPaul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told the BBC it was \"one of the oddities of the system\" that pubs and restaurants in tier three areas which had been forced to close were in a better position than those in tier two areas which remained open.\n\n\"You get full support, whereas if you're in tier two, you get no more support than similar businesses in the rest of the country and yet demand for your products is clearly massively reduced,\" he added.\n\nMr Johnson said it was clearly right that the government should seek to close that support gap with new measures.\n\nTorsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, told the BBC: \"We have a big distinction between tier one, tier two and tier three restrictions in theory, but the economic support packages don't go alongside those restrictions.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. People in Barnsley town centre react to tier three restrictions being announced\n\nAs more parts of the country are placed in tier two, critics say the standard JSS is likely to fall short, with many fewer firms than expected signing up.\n\nOptions being discussed in Whitehall include more generous taxpayer wage support for businesses in these regions, up from the current level of 22%, and grants offered through local authorities.\n\nWith so much of England now in tier two, even small increases in support could end up being very expensive. Business and union leaders will be briefed on the changes on Thursday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nIt comes amid warnings that unemployment could rise as high as 8.5% in the first half of next year without more government support for struggling businesses.\n\nIn the three months to August, redundancies rose to their highest level since 2009, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.\n\nThe number claiming work-related benefits, meanwhile, hit 2.7 million in September - an increase of 1.5 million since the beginning of the crisis in March.", "Ticketing site Viagogo may need to sell all or part of StubHub after an investigation by the UK's competition watchdog found the merger of the two firms could lead to higher fees.\n\nThe Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said the deal would reduce competition as the two firms have a combined market share of more than 90%.\n\nViagogo said it would work with the CMA to find a solution.\n\nThe CMA's findings are from its provisional report. Its final report is due in December.\n\n\"The evidence we've seen so far consistently points in the same direction - that Viagogo and StubHub have a market share of more than 90% combined and compete closely with each other,\" said Stuart McIntosh, chairman of the CMA inquiry group.\n\n\"We are therefore concerned that their merger could lead to secondary ticketing customers facing higher fees and lower quality services.\n\nThe CMA said its concerns would be addressed by a full sale of StubHub, while a partial sale would have to include \"at least the assets and operations of either StubHub or Viagogo that cover the relevant market - the supply of uncapped secondary ticketing platform services for the resale of tickets to UK events\".\n\nThe watchdog added: \"The CMA is mindful of the significant impact that the coronavirus (Covid-19) is currently having on the live events industry.\n\n\"However, the evidence is that Viagogo and StubHub would remain important competitors for the foreseeable future without the merger.\"\n\nA spokesperson for Viagogo said: \"Whilst we disagree with the provisional conclusion that the deal would reduce competition, we look forward to working with the CMA to deliver a comprehensive solution which addresses their concerns.\"\n\nThis is not the first time Viagogo has come under the eye of the competition watchdog.\n\nLast year, Viagogo dodged CMA legal action after improving what it tells customers about tickets, including seating information and whether the venue had banned ticket resales.\n\nThe CMA welcomed the changes but criticised the site's slowness to respond.\n\nThis summer, Viagogo was criticised for refusing to give refunds to people who had bought tickets on its site to events hit by the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nConsumer organisation Which? said the ticketing site had added a clause to its cancellation policy which had left some customers unable to claim their money back.\n\nBut Viagogo said the claim was \"fundamentally inaccurate\" since their policy on refunding customers had not changed.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner is rebuked after making the comment\n\nLabour's deputy leader has apologised for using the word \"scum\" during a debate over coronavirus restrictions.\n\nAngela Rayner made the comment in the Commons on Wednesday during a speech by Tory MP Chris Clarkson.\n\nThe MP questioned her remark, while the deputy speaker reprimanded her for her language.\n\nMs Rayner has now issued a statement, saying: \"I apologise for the language that I used in a heated debate in Parliament earlier.\"\n\nThe debate was brought to the Commons by Labour, to discuss \"fair economic support\" for areas of England being moved into tier three restrictions - also known as the \"very high\" Covid alert level.\n\nMs Rayner, who represents Ashton-under-Lyne in Greater Manchester, opened the debate, speaking about her aunt who had recently died from the virus.\n\nLater, Mr Clarkson - also a Greater Manchester MP - gave a speech saying he was \"genuinely worried about the people and businesses we serve\".\n\nBut he criticised the area's Metro Mayor Andy Burnham and accused the Labour Party of \"opportunism\".\n\nAt this point, Ms Rayner was overheard saying scum from her seat on Labour's frontbench.\n\nShe was then rebuked by the Deputy Speaker Dame Eleanor Laing.\n\n\"We will not have remarks like that - not under any circumstances,\" said Dame Eleanor.", "Scottish pub and restaurant businesses have been shut down by the coronavirus lockdown\n\nScotland's licensed trade is facing a \"battle\" to survive after short-term Covid restrictions were extended, according to industry leaders.\n\nThe country is due to move to a five-tier system of virus alert levels from 2 November.\n\nUntil then the temporary regulations, targeting the central belt in particular, will continue.\n\nThe Scottish Hospitality Group warned the extension would have \"devastating consequences\".\n\nThe Scottish government said it had made a range of grants available to help businesses weather the financial pressures.\n\nBut campaigners are demanding wider ranging support for the embattled industry after First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it would \"not be safe\" to ease any restrictions in the short term.\n\nPaul Waterson, of the Scottish Licensed Trade Association, told BBC Radio Scotland's Drivetime: \"I don't think there is any doubt that very many successful businesses will not be able to ride this out and might not be able to open again.\n\n\"The battle is on to save the licensed trade in all its different forms.\"\n\nNeil Douglas, who runs the Ardnamurchan restaurant, said the sector was \"enormously frustrated\" and added: \"If we get to the end of the year without losing people I would be amazed.\"\n\nBars and restaurants in five NHS health board areas - containing about 3.4m people - were closed on 9 October as part of what Ms Sturgeon called a \"short, sharp action to arrest a worrying increase in infection\".\n\nHospitality venues in other parts of the country can only serve alcohol outdoors.\n\nThese measures were originally meant to expire on 26 October, but on Wednesday the first minister said they would now continue until a new \"strategic framework\" comes into force.\n\nThis multi-tier system will involve different levels of restrictions that can be applied nationally or regionally depending on the level of infection.\n\nIt is due to be published on Friday, and debated by MSPs after Holyrood's half term recess.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Neil Douglas, who runs Ardnamurchan, says: \"If we get to the end of the year without losing people I would be amazed.\"\n\nIn the meantime the Scottish government has pledged additional funding for businesses affected by the temporary restrictions:\n\nEconomy Secretary Fiona Hyslop said: \"While the extension of the restrictions is based on the fundamental need to reduce transmissions of the virus, I understand that many business owners will be very disappointed that they cannot reopen next week.\n\n\"Our funding plan will help these grants reach businesses as quickly as possible to protect jobs over this period and I encourage business owners to apply for support.\"\n\nShe added that the grants are \"the maximum level of support\" that can be provided before the new system is introduced next month but confirmed more help is being sought from the Treasury.\n\nStaff wore protective visors as they served pints at the SWG3 beer garden in Glasgow when it reopened in July after lockdown\n\nStephen Montgomery, spokesman for the Scottish Hospitality Group, said: \"Recent restrictions were framed as a 'temporary' short, sharp shock, but the extension is an indication that we can only expect a continued government stranglehold on hospitality that will have devastating consequences.\"\n\nMr Montgomery said the proposed £40m funding package, which was announced to coincide with the initial 16-day closure, was a \"drop in the ocean\" for the country's 16,700 licensed hospitality businesses.\n\nIn Manchester he said business owners could receive up to £31,000 per licensed premises from the UK government's £60m support package compared to the Scottish government's \"woefully inadequate\" grants.\n\nMr Montgomery added: \"Without further financial support, Scotland's hospitality industry will be crippled to the point of no return.\"\n\nAfter the first minister's announcement the Save our Jobs campaign demanded support from Holyrood and Westminster to protect jobs in bars and restaurants across the country when the furlough scheme ends on 31 October.\n\nMichelin star chef Tom Kitchin said: \"Our industry is in a real need of help, especially having only just partly recovered from the first lockdown.\n\n\"We have worked so hard to keep our guests and diners safe in hospitality settings, taking all safety precautions needed to remain safe while enjoying good food and drink.\n\n\"Eliminating the risks of the virus is obviously our greatest concern, but there needs to be a balance for the hospitality future of Scotland.\"\n\nSignature Group boss Nic Wood said he hopes the campaign would highlight the \"plight\" of the young hospitality workforce, with 50% of all staff aged between 16 and 24.\n\nThe Campaign for Real Ale described the week-long extension as a \"hammer blow\" to pubs and breweries across the country.\n\nJoe Crawford, director for Scotland, said: \"These businesses feel like they are being offered up as a sacrificial lamb without sufficient evidence that pubs - who have done everything they have been asked to track and trace customers and make their venues Covid-secure - are responsible for transmission of the virus.\"\n\nIndustry leaders have warned many pubs forced to close may not reopen.\n\nScottish Chambers of Commerce chief executive Liz Cameron said many employers have invested heavily to create safe and controlled environments in a bid to reduce the spread of the virus.\n\nMs Cameron added: \"We have been living with this virus for seven months now. We should be able to deliver the capacity to provide test and protect in every business premises and in every airport in Scotland.\"\n\nMeanwhile, the Scottish drinks industry charity has issued a warning about the mental health impact of the pandemic on the \"unbelievable\" number of workers who now face an uncertain future.\n\nJohn Hutchinson, president of The Ben, told Drivetime: \"The stories are harrowing.\n\n\"It can genuinely bring you to tears when you hear that people are living week to week with under £1 in their bank accounts, trying to support their families and keep their house warm.\n\n\"As we get into winter and times are getting tough people are now looking at eviction and really just losing their house as well.\"\n\nMr Hutchison said the charity has teamed up with Breathing Space and urged those struggling to contact the free support service.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "UK tourists seeking winter sun have been given a boost, after Spain's Canary Islands and the Maldives were added to the government's safe travel list.\n\nIt means visitors will no longer need to quarantine for 14 days on their return, with the Greek island of Mykonos and Denmark also deemed safe.\n\nThe changes apply to anyone arriving in the UK after 04:00 BST on Sunday.\n\nBut Liechtenstein has been taken off the list, so arrivals must isolate.\n\nThe changes apply to citizens from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.\n\nThe Canary Islands are popular with winter holidaymakers, being one of the few parts of Europe warm enough for beach holidays at that time.\n\nHowever, the rest of Spain, including the Balearic Islands, remain subject to quarantine restrictions amid a surge in infections.\n\nBeyond having to fill in passenger locator forms, visitors to the Canaries and Mykonos currently face no restrictions to entry.\n\nBut all visitors to the Maldives are required to prove they have had a negative Covid test within 96 hours of arrival.\n\nAnd any UK citizen visiting Denmark must prove they have a \"worthy purpose\" for visiting, such as work or study, as Denmark deems Britain to be a high risk country.\n\nTourism is not considered a worthy purpose, although people with second homes in the country may visit.\n\nThe Department for Transport said the new additions to the safe list had seen a decrease in confirmed cases of coronavirus.\n\nHowever, it said \"a significant change in both the level and pace of confirmed cases of coronavirus in Liechtenstein\" had led to it being removed from the current list of \"travel corridors\".\n\nAfter so much doom and gloom, travel companies can suddenly see the sunshine. The Canaries are a key destination for UK airlines and tour operators.\n\nAnd it is not an exaggeration to say that the removal of the quarantine will help these companies make it through the winter.\n\nThe government has, in effect, dialled-up the tourism \"on switch\".\n\nHowever it will be a real test case for whether, in these uncertain Covid times, there is demand for travel.\n\nWith plenty of time for people to make winter bookings it's a timely moment.\n\nBritish Airways recently scheduled a direct flight to the Maldives, so maybe they knew something we didn't.\n\nTravel companies, which have seen demand slump due to the quarantine rules, welcomed the decision on the Canaries.\n\n\"The Canaries are a hugely important market for winter travel - representing over 50% of bookings for some tour operators - so this is very welcome news for the whole sector,\" said industry body Airlines UK.\n\nAndrew Flintham, managing director of TUI, said the holiday operator had not been able to take people on a holiday to the Canaries for 89 days.\n\n\"We're therefore delighted that UK flights will now resume from Saturday 24 October. The first flights will depart to Fuerteventura and Lanzarote this weekend, with many more added in the coming days.\"\n\nThere are now only a handful of places travellers from the UK can visit without facing restrictions - either when they arrive at their destination, or return.\n\nThere are hopes coronavirus testing for passengers could make travel to more destinations possible, by providing proof of a negative result before travellers leave the UK.\n\nTransport Secretary Grant Shapps, meanwhile, has said he is \"hopeful\" a new testing regime for arrivals to Britain can be in place by 1 December, reducing the amount of time people need to spend in quarantine.\n\nHowever, new British Airways boss Sean Doyle last week called for tests for returning Britons before departure, warning the UK would \"get left behind\" without more radical action.\n\nEarlier on Monday the airline cut flight numbers again, saying it would operate fewer planes than planned for the rest of the year as the pandemic continues to hit demand.\n\nThe Foreign Office still advises British nationals against all but essential international travel due to the pandemic.", "A Tory MP has quit her government job after voting for a Labour motion to offer free school meals during holidays until Easter 2021.\n\nCaroline Ansell said vouchers were not a long-term solution - but they helped families struggling with the pandemic.\n\nFootballer Marcus Rashford, who is leading a campaign on child hunger, urged MPs to \"unite\" and stop being influenced by \"political affiliation\".\n\nOn Wednesday evening, MPs rejected the Labour motion by 322 votes to 261.\n\nHome Office Minister Kit Malthouse insisted the government was helping low-income families through the welfare system.\n\nHe said the government had raised Universal Credit by £20 a week, adjusted housing benefit to help people with their rent and given £63m to councils to help with hardship funding.\n\nHe acknowledged the decision on free school meals was \"a tough one\" and praised Mr Rashford for his campaign to tackle child hunger.\n\nResponding to the vote, Mr Rashford said \"child food poverty has the potential to become the greatest pandemic the country has ever faced\" and called on MPs to \"face this head on\".\n\n\"I don't have the education of a politician... but I have a social education having lived through this,\" he said.\n\n\"These children matter... and for as long as they don't have a voice, they will have mine.\"\n\nFive Conservative MPs rebelled against their party by voting with Labour - including Ms Ansell who has now stepped down as parliamentary private secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.\n\nExplaining her decision, she said: \"In these unprecedented times I am very concerned to be doing all we can to help lower income families and their children who are really struggling due to the impact of the virus.\"\n\nShe said that food vouchers were \"not perfect\" arguing that it is better to link meals to activities so children \"can also benefit from extra-curricular learning and experience\".\n\nHowever. she added that vouchers could help families in her Eastbourne constituency who were struggling as a result of the pandemic.\n\nThe government's stance has also been criticised by Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, who tweeted: \"If the government can subsidise Eat Out to Help Out, not being seen to give poor kids lunch in the school holidays looks mean and is wrong.\"\n\nBut Conservative MP for Bassetlaw MP Brendan Clarke-Smith - who says he was a recipient of free school meals when he was a child - opposed the motion.\n\n\"Where is the slick PR campaign encouraging absent parents to take some responsibility for their children?\", he asked.\n\n\"I do not believe in nationalising children, instead we need to get back to the idea of taking responsibility.\n\n\"This means less celebrity virtue signalling on Twitter by proxy and more action to tackle the real causes of child poverty.\"\n\nTory MP Ben Bradley posted a series of tweets defending his decision to vote against the motion after getting into a row on Twitter on Wednesday over his opposition to the plan.\n\nHe said the vote was not \"help poor kids, yes or no\" but a promise to \"roll out a huge expansion of long term state dependency to millions, when a large [percentage] of those on [free school meals] are not impoverished and don't want or need it.\"\n\nMr Bradley defended the support the government offers to poorer families and attacked the Labour, saying: \"You'd think a truly 'caring' Labour party could recognise the huge difference between the majority of kids on [free school meals] who are not wealthy by any stretch, but who have good parents and are managing, and impoverished kids who are desperate.\"\n\nHowever, the former deputy leader of the Labour Party, Tom Watson, said he could see a U-turn from the government on its decision to go against the campaign, due to wide support in the country.\n\nHe told BBC Two's Politics Live: \"They don't want a recurring commitment for free school means 52 weeks a year, but we are in a national crisis and there are kids going hungry.\"\n\nMr Watson said it was \"one of the saddest days of my life\" when he listened to a child in his old constituency describe the \"feeling in their stomach\" when they were going hungry.\n\n\"It is a tricky one for the government,\" he added, \"[but] I have got a feeling that if the pressure continues they may have to concede this one.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Tom Watson, who left the Commons, last year, says hearing from the child was “one of the saddest days of my life”.\n\nChildren of all ages living in households on income-related benefits may be eligible for free school meals.\n\nIn England, about 1.3 million children claimed for free school meals in 2019 - about 15% of state-educated pupils.\n\nAnalysis by the Food Foundation estimates a further 900,000 children in England may have sought free school meals since the start of the pandemic.\n\nIn Scotland, the government has made £10m available to local councils to continue to fund free school meals over the Christmas, February and Easter breaks. Local authorities that offered provision over the October school break can apply to be reimbursed.\n\nThe Welsh government has also pledged to extend free school meal provision to every school holiday until Easter 2021, spending £11m on doing so.\n\nIn England and Northern Ireland, however, the scheme will only run during term time.", "BBC journalist Martin Bashir is \"seriously unwell\" with complications from coronavirus, the corporation has said.\n\nThe 57-year-old, who made headlines across the world with his 1995 interview with Princess Diana, is currently BBC News religion editor.\n\n\"Everyone at the BBC is wishing him a full recovery,\" a spokeswoman said.\n\nMr Bashir is also known for interviews with pop star Michael Jackson and the suspects in the Stephen Lawrence case.\n\n\"We are sorry to say that Martin is seriously unwell with Covid-19 related complications,\" the BBC spokeswoman said.\n\n\"We'd ask that his privacy, and that of his family, is respected at this time.\"\n\nMr Bashir worked as a BBC news correspondent from 1987 to 1992, before joining the BBC's investigative programme Panorama.\n\nOn that programme in 1995, he interviewed Diana, Princess of Wales, who admitted to having had an affair - and spoke of Prince Charles's relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles, now Duchess of Cornwall.\n\n\"There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,\" she said, in a programme watched by one of the largest-ever audiences for the BBC.\n\nThe interview has seen renewed interest following a Channel 4 documentary examining the story behind Princess Diana's revelations, which was broadcast on Wednesday night.\n\nLater, Mr Bashir worked for Tonight on ITV before moving to the US in 2004, where he hosted ABC's Nightline programme and worked as a news anchor on MSNBC.\n\nHe resigned from MSNBC in 2013 with an apology for calling former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin a \"world-class idiot\".\n\nIn 2016, Mr Bashir rejoined the BBC as religious affairs correspondent. A former student of theology, he covers events in the UK and around the world affecting people of different faiths.", "Poor performance has been blamed for the fines\n\nThe train company contracted to run Transport for Wales services, KeolisAmey, has been fined £2.3m by the Welsh Government for poor performance.\n\nEconomy minister Ken Skates said the penalty notices were \"vital\", saying the company had not lived up to what was agreed.\n\nRecent improvements must continue, he added. The company took over the £5bn franchise in October 2018.\n\nKeolisAmey apologised for the disruption of the last few months.\n\nIt is not clear when the fines were imposed. Transport for Wales said it was a \"overall sum\" imposed over \"different periods\", with fines issued on a periodic basis.\n\nThe company was awarded the Wales and Borders franchise by the Welsh Government in 2018.\n\nThe day-to-day contract is managed by Transport for Wales - a part of Welsh Government which also provides the branding the train services use.\n\nIn December the organisation saw cancellations following the introduction of a new timetable. The company blamed staff shortages.\n\n\"So far, something in the region of £2.3m in penalty notices have been issued to KeolisAmey,\" Mr Skates told the assembly's economy committee.\n\nHe said the money would be reinvested in rail services.\n\nTransport for Wales said the fines were triggered because the operator had not met agreements for the subsidy it gives it.\n\nThe cash has been paid by deducting it from the subsidy, TfW said.\n\n\"A key challenge has been due to a shortage of fleet available to operate on a day-to-day basis,\" a spokesman added.\n\nTrains have been out of service due to modifications for people with reduced mobility, internal and external refurbishments and work to install wheel slip protection before the Autumn leaf fall.\n\nRecently extra capacity has been provided for 6,500 more passengers.\n\nKeolisAmey has been running services since October 2018\n\nVikki Howells, Labour AM for Cynon Valley, told the committee she was dealing with constituents who faced disciplinary action in work because of their lateness, have lost wages and had to spend cash on bus fares because of recent disruption.\n\nSimon Jones, Welsh Government director of economy infrastructure, told her a measure called \"passenger time lost\" had \"driven\" some of the penalty notices.\n\nHe said it focuses on the \"busiest journeys\" - creating more of a problem for the train company if there were problems at rush hour.\n\nMr Skates said the proportion of trains arriving within three minutes of the scheduled time had improved by 6% in the \"latest period\".\n\nThat has increased to 76.1%, but the minister said that was against a target of 77%.\n\nHe did not want to be issuing penalty notices. \"However it is something I feel is absolutely vital in order to incentivise better performance and to ensure passengers know when performance is not what people expect money is being returned.\n\n\"Performance has not been what has been expected and has not lived up to what the contract stated and what was agreed.\"\n\nHe told the committee the contract with KeolisAmey includes a break clause.\n\n\"If failure was to be seen in the future of course we would have to respond accordingly by looking at the contract,\" he added.\n\nKevin Thomas, chief executive of KeolisAmey Wales, apologised for the disruption of the past few months.\n\n\"We recognise that we have not been able to deliver the quality of service that we aim to and that our passengers across the network deserve,\" he said.\n\n\"It is encouraging to report that we are starting to see some improvements, with a 24% reduction in network delay minutes following the introduction of our December timetable.\n\n\"We have welcomed the arrival of the Class 170's, the recruitment of over 200 additional train crew and the introduction of more than 186 new Sunday services.\"\n\nCaerphilly Labour AM Hefin David welcomed the fines: \"I have had assurances from Transport for Wales that things are set to get better through 2020 and I will be monitoring this as a committee member and in my constituency.\"", "The curfew is already in place in Paris and eight other major cities\n\nFrance will extend an overnight curfew to dozens more areas in a bid to slow the spread of coronavirus, Prime Minister Jean Castex has announced.\n\n\"The second wave is now under way,\" he said, shortly before the country announced a record 41,622 new cases.\n\nThe 21:00 to 06:00 curfew will come into force at midnight on Friday, and some 46 million people will now be affected by the measure.\n\nCountries around Europe are struggling with rising infection rates.\n\nFrance, Italy, Spain and the UK are all hotspots.\n\n\"The coming weeks will be hard and the number of deaths will continue to rise,\" Mr Castex told a press conference on Thursday. Over the last 24 hours France recorded 162 more deaths.\n\n\"If we fail to stop the pandemic, we will be facing a dire situation and we will have to mull much tougher measures,\" he added.\n\n\"We still have time to avoid that but we don't have much time,\" he said.\n\nThe prime minister's announcement came less than a week after the same curfew was applied to the Paris region and eight other cities, including Marseille, Lyon, Lille and Toulouse.\n\nThe restrictions will be extended to 38 more administrative departments as well as the overseas territory of Polynesia, and will remain in place for six weeks.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Gavin Lee reports from the epicentre of Europe's second wave, which is in Belgium\n\nThe overnight curfew has drawn complaints from restaurant owners, whose businesses are already suffering after the two-month lockdown in the spring.\n\nBut President Emmanuel Macron has said they are necessary to avoid the risk of hospitals being overrun.\n\nFrance has reported more than 20,000 new cases over the past six days, and the total number of confirmed infections now stands at nearly one million.\n\nNew \"level 5\" rules have come into force in Ireland - the highest level of Covid restrictions there. Its five million people have been ordered to stay at home for six weeks\n\nA second lockdown is in force in the Czech Republic which is facing a big surge in cases. Prime Minister Andrej Babis said the harsh restrictions were needed to avoid hospitals being overwhelmed\n\nSlovakia is closing schools until 27 November, imposing a week-long lockdown on its four most affected districts, a partial lockdown on the rest of the country, and embarking on two rounds of testing for the whole population, PM Igor Matovic said on Thursday\n\nGreece's prime minister has declared a night curfew in Athens and other areas. It will come into force from Saturday and applies between 00:30 and 05:00\n\nGermany has announced a record 11,287 daily number of infections. Health Minister Jens Spahn has himself caught coronavirus. The country also added the UK to its list of high risk countries from which visitors must quarantine\n\nIn the UK, officials announced that the urban areas of Stoke-on-Trent, Coventry and Slough would move into tier two restrictions on Saturday. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in all of these areas the infection rate was over 100 per 100,000 people\n\nItaly's Lazio region around Rome has joined two other Italian regions in declaring overnight curfews. Lombardy in the north starts its curfew at 23:00 (21:00GMT) on Thursday, and Campania and Lazio will follow suit on Friday. Prof Walter Ricciardi, who advises the government on health, has warned that \"some metropolitan areas like Milan, Naples and probably Rome are already out of control\"\n\nSpain is the first EU country to record one million infections and the northern region of Navarre has imposed restrictions on movement. The Rioja wine region says it will do the same\n\nBelgium's 45-year-old Foreign Minister Sophie Wilmes has been admitted to intensive care after testing positive for Covid-19 last week. Her spokeswoman said she was in a \"stable\" condition. Meanwhile, health workers have raised concerns over the rising number of cases in the country, with the head of a coronavirus testing centre in the city of Liège warning that the \"situation is close to catastrophe\"\n\nThe Netherlands may begin transferring patients to Germany within two days as its health system faces increasing strain from coronavirus admissions, the hospital association LNAZ said. The Netherlands also registered more than 9,000 new cases in a new daily record\n\nScroll table to see more data Please update your browser to see full interactive", "With tier three restrictions set to be introduced for South Yorkshire from Saturday, people in Barnsley spoke about what they think of the new rules.\n\nPeople had mixed reactions with some saying they were \"worried\" and others saying stricter measures were \"good\" because people were breaking the rules.\n\nThe new restrictions will apply to all four local authority areas in South Yorkshire - Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield.\n\nLabour Mayor Dan Jarvis said the move to tier three followed \"extensive discussions\" with ministers.", "A man purporting to be Banksy asked an assumed onlooker to move away\n\nBanksy's spray painting of a Tube carriage showed London Underground was \"not safe\", the RMT union has said.\n\nA video posted on the artist's Instagram in July showed a man, thought to be Banksy, disguised as a cleaner.\n\nHe was wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) and used equipment Tube staff would use to disinfect trains.\n\nTransport for London said the Tube was safe but the RMT, which many Tube staff belong to, said it was not a lapse in security but showed \"there wasn't any\".\n\nThe work by Banksy, called If You Don't Mask, You Don't Get, featured a number of rats in pandemic-inspired poses and wearing face masks.\n\nIt was removed by TfL cleaning crews who were said to be unaware it was a Banksy artwork and treated it \"like any other graffiti on the network\".\n\nThe transport authority has now confirmed to the BBC, in response a Freedom of Information Act request, that it had completed an investigation into the incident but would not release its findings because of security concerns and not wanting to encourage copycats.\n\nTfL said the artist carried out the graffiti between Barbican and Paddington on the Hammersmith and City Line between 05:24 and 06:31 on 10 July.\n\nIt also confirmed it had no involvement with either the artist, his staff or lawyers.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe footage also showed the artist painted the words \"I get lockdown\" on a wall right at the end of a station platform. TfL would not say which station it was but confirmed the artist did not go on the tracks.\n\nA spokesperson for the RMT said some stations had no gate-line staff at certain times of the day so people could \"literally walk on there with anything they like\".\n\n\"You can have a coffin under your arm let alone a canister full of paint,\" he said.\n\nHe said the union had been campaigning over staffing levels because the stations were unstaffed for \"long periods of time and the end result is anything could happen\".\n\n\"What happened with a canister full of paint is actually very minor, considering what could have happened.\"\n\nSafety has been a point of contention between the unions and TfL over the past few years, when the service underwent job cuts as ticket offices were closed.\n\nOn its website, TfL says it funds 2,500 police officers to work across London's transport network to keep people safe.\n\nThe BBC has approached TfL for a statement.\n\nSecurity consultant Will Geddes said it was difficult for Tube staff to check everyone to make sure they were who they appeared to be - for example, a cleaner. He said a balance had to be struck as TfL did not want to hold people up by having airport-style security.\n\n\"It's a bit of a human rights issue,\" he said. \"If you were to go to the Tube station, you would be very affronted if someone was asking you questions about why you were wearing that particular jacket today, or that hat or whatever it might be.\"\n\nMr Geddes said the wearing of face masks on the Tube was a security risk as it meant criminals were harder to spot.\n\nBrian Woodhead, Director of Customer Service for London Underground, said: \"The safety of our customers and staff is always our primary concern, and ensuring the security of our network is a key part of that.\n\n\"We work closely with our station staff, our trade unions and with partners including the British Transport Police to ensure that the network is as secure as possible.\"\n\nA Banksy spokesperson said they had no comment to add.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "It's been four years since Donald Trump made a string of promises during his long 2016 campaign to be the 45th president of the United States. Four years later, his supporters often cite \"promises made, promises kept\" as a reason why they're backing him again.\n\nMany of them made headlines - from banning all Muslims entering the US, to building a border wall paid for by Mexico.\n\nBut others went a little under the radar, like his pledge to eliminate the national debt.\n\nSo how has he done in keeping his promises?\n\nBefore election: Trump promised to lower the corporate tax rate and bring in huge tax cuts for working Americans.\n\nAfter: The Republican tax plan passed in December 2017, and it largely ticks the box for the president although its merits are hotly disputed. He has had to compromise on his pledge to bring corporation tax down from 35% to 15% (it will be 21% instead).\n\nAnd the tax cuts for individuals will expire, although Republicans say future governments will simply renew them. But wealthy Americans are expected to benefit more than poorer ones.\n\nNot everyone saw their taxes lowered. For some higher earners in urbanised, mostly Democratic states, taxes went up due to a cap on state and local property and income tax deductions.\n\nBefore: As a candidate, Mr Trump derided climate change as a hoax concocted by China, and the regulations of Paris as stifling to American growth.\n\nAfter: After three months of hemming and hawing behind the closed doors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the president came down decisively on the side near the exits. Quitting the Paris deal, signed by nearly 200 countries, is unequivocally a promise kept. The exit officially takes effect 4 November, the day after the US election.\n\nBefore: \"I am looking for judges and have actually picked 20 of them. They'll respect the Second Amendment and what it stands for and what it represents.\"\n\nAfter: He vowed to appoint a conservative justice and he has appointed two - Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.\n\nMr Gorsuch's appointment required a procedural change to Senate rules, but it was Mr Kavanaugh's appointment that was particularly controversial.\n\nMr Kavanaugh faced sexual assault allegations - which he denied - and was eventually voted through by 50-48 - the tightest nomination vote since 1881.\n\nWhat's more, his third nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, is on course to be confirmed. If approved by the Republican-controlled Senate, she could ensure a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for decades to come.\n\nIn addition to making his mark on the top court, Mr Trump has appointed nearly 200 conservative judges to lower federal courts.\n\nIf approved, Amy Coney Barrett would be the third justice President Trump has successfully nominated for the top court\n\nBefore: One of Mr Trump's trademark rally pledges was to repeal and replace Obamacare - his predecessor's attempt to extend healthcare to the estimated 15% of the country who are not covered.\n\nIt is widely hated by Republicans, who say the law imposes too many costs on business, with many describing it as a \"job killer\" and decrying the reforms - officially the Affordable Care Act - as an unwarranted intrusion into the affairs of private businesses and individuals.\n\nAfter: Republicans have been unable to pass a repeal or reform bill.\n\nThat said, the Trump administration has managed to dismantle parts of the law - enrolment periods have been shortened, some subsidies have been axed, and the fine for people who did not purchase health insurance has been eliminated as part of the 2017 tax plan.\n\nAnd in December 2018, a federal judge in Texas ruled that repealing this penalty, an \"essential\" part of the law, meant the entirety of Obamacare is therefore unconstitutional.\n\nThe law, however, remains in place as an appeal heads to the US Supreme Court, with a ruling expected sometime in 2021.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Trump's battles with Obamacare - in his own words\n\nBefore: His vow to build a wall along the US-Mexican border was one of the most controversial of Mr Trump's campaign promises. Mr Trump also insisted that Mexico would pay for it.\n\nAfter: Mexico poured scorn on the claim that it would pay for such a barrier, and even Mr Trump appears to have dropped that idea.\n\nDemocrats are vociferously opposed to a wall, whereas some Republicans have baulked at a bill that could reach $21.5bn (£17bn), according to a Department of Homeland Security internal report.\n\nIn December 2018 the US government went into shutdown after Democrats resisted Mr Trump's demands for $5bn to fund the wall. He has since redirected defence and some other funds to build or replace sections of the wall, a decision that has faced legal challenges.\n\nAs of late May, 194 miles of wall system had been built, mostly to shore up dilapidated or outdated designs of the barrier already in place - just three miles construction was part of an entirely new system.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Many Trump voters are happy with his progress\n\nBefore: During a speech in Iowa in November 2015, Mr Trump warned that he would, using an expletive, bomb the so-called Islamic State group into obliteration.\n\nAfter: The president dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal on an IS-stronghold in Afghanistan. He also takes credit for driving IS out of parts of Iraq and Syria, saying the group has been \"largely defeated\", although that process was under way under Obama. Last year, IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed himself during a raid by US commandos.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Is this the end for Islamic State?\n\nBefore: Mr Trump pledged during his campaign to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a divided city which both Israelis and Palestinians claim.\n\nAfter: In 2017, he said he formally recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and approved moving the US embassy. It opened in May 2018 to coincide with Israel's 70th anniversary. The construction of a permanent US embassy building in Jerusalem was approved in 2019.\n\nBefore: \"I'm going to build a military that's going to be much stronger than it is right now. It's going to be so strong, nobody's going to mess with us,\" Donald Trump said on the campaign trail in October 2015.\n\nHe promised to reverse defence cuts brought in by President Barack Obama in 2013. \"We want to deter, avoid and prevent conflict through our unquestioned military dominance,\" he said.\n\nAfter: Defence spending has indeed risen steadily throughout the Trump presidency - although overall levels remain below the first years of the Obama administration.\n\nMilitary spending increased dramatically from 2002 as the US entered protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It peaked in 2010 as a percentage of GDP - the value of all goods and services - after which the US began stepping back from its engagement in the Middle East and Central Asia.\n\nBefore: Just a month before his election win in November 2016, Mr Trump said he could cut as many as 70% of US federal regulations if elected.\n\n\"It's just stopping businesses from growing,\" he told an audience in New Hampshire.\n\nThe promise drew him support from large and small businesses, who helped him to victory that year.\n\nAfter: The president has slashed through regulations on everything from labour to the environment.\n\nJust days after taking office he signed the Presidential Executive Order on Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs, which mandated that when government departments asked for a federal regulation, they had to specify two others they would drop.\n\nThroughout his term he has continued to slash back red tape. In January 2020 he scrapped protections for US wetlands and streams, and in July he announced changes to the National Environmental Protection Act in a bid to speed up infrastructure projects.\n\n\"We are reclaiming America's proud heritage as a nation that gets things done,\" he said.\n\nBefore: Mr Trump has long called for the US to leave the Middle East. On the 2016 campaign trail, he said the region was a \"total and complete mess\" and wished the government had spent the trillions of dollars in the US instead.\n\nHis talk of an end to US military deployments overseas predates his presidential run. In 2013, he tweeted: \"Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.\" That same year, he said the US should \"stay the hell out\" of the Syrian war.\n\nAfter: In September 2017, the Trump administration announced the deployment of 3,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Mr Trump said his approach would be based on conditions on the ground. In Syria, the US had led a coalition against IS along with Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters, with around 2,000 troops on the ground.\n\nBy December 2018, Mr Trump ordered the withdrawal of all US troops from Syria, though about half the troops, approximately 500, still remain.\n\nMr Trump recently said he has plans to further cut troops in Afghanistan - after reducing them to 8,600 from 13,000 over the spring and summer - before the 3 November election. In February, US and Nato allies agreed to withdraw all troops from the country within 14 months if Taliban militants uphold a new peace agreement.\n\nThe president's efforts to pull down troops has at times been met with criticism from his own officials. Following Mr Trump's announcement of a Syria withdrawal in part prompted the resignation of US Defence Secretary James Mattis.\n\nBefore: Mr Trump called Nafta \"a disaster\" and warned that the TPP \"is going to be worse, so we will stop it\". He also pledged to correct the trade deficit with China.\n\nAfter: Mr Trump followed through in his first few days on his pledge to withdraw from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). He later said he would consider re-joining the TPP if he got a better deal.\n\nOn 30 November, after protracted negotiations, the US, Canada and Mexico signed the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which was designed to replace Nafta and recently came into force. However, the US has reimposed aluminium tariffs on Canada, and Ottawa reciprocated with retaliatory tariffs.\n\nThe US and South Korea also signed a revised trade pact in September 2018.\n\nThe US and China, meanwhile, became embroiled in an escalating trade battle - with both sides imposing tariffs on billions of dollars' worth of goods.\n\nDespite ongoing tensions, in August the US and China held talks over their so-called \"phase-one\" trade deal - signed early this year - that is aimed at easing the trade war.\n\nBefore: Mr Trump initially promised to ban all Muslims entering the US - a \"total and complete\" shutdown should remain until the US authorities \"can figure out what's going on\".\n\nBut he switched to \"extreme vetting\" after he became the party's presidential candidate.\n\nAfter: As president, he introduced two travel bans which became ensnarled in the courts - but the third had more luck. The US Supreme Court ruled President Trump's ban on six mainly Muslim countries can go into full effect, pending legal challenges.\n\nThe current ban restricts travellers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela and North Korea.\n\nAnd in January, the US has announced it was expanding its curbs on immigration to include six more countries. Citizens from Nigeria, Eritrea, Sudan, Tanzania, Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar will now be blocked from obtaining certain types of visas.\n\nBefore: Mr Trump said in September 2016 that he would reverse the deal President Barack Obama had struck to reopen diplomatic relations and improve trade.\n\nAfter: As president, he told an audience in Miami that he was \"cancelling the Obama administration's one-sided deal.\"\n\nIn 2017, Mr Trump reimposed some trade and travel restrictions lifted by his predecessor. He kept the embassy open in Havana, although without naming an ambassador to the country.\n\nLast year, the administration announced a ban on travel to Cuba for American group tours as well as cruise ships journeying to the island\n\nUntil then, US tourism to Cuba was not permitted, but certain forms of organised group travel, known as \"people-to-people\" travel, had been allowed.\n\nThis month the US administration announced further restrictions, saying it would suspend all private charter flights between the United States and Cuba, to increase economic pressure on Havana. The suspension comes into force on 13 October.\n\nBefore: Mr Trump repeatedly pledged to label Beijing a \"currency manipulator\" on his first day in office, during an election campaign when he also accused the Asian powerhouse of \"raping\" the US. China has been accused of suppressing the yuan to make its exports more competitive with US goods.\n\nAfter: In August 2019, the administration officially named China as a \"currency manipulator\". The US Treasury department defines currency manipulation as when countries deliberately influence the exchange rate between their currency and the US dollar to gain \"unfair competitive advantage in international trade\".\n\nBut in January, the US reversed its decision when China had agreed to refrain from devaluing its currency to make its own goods cheaper for foreign buyers.\n\nBefore: \"I know the Wall Street people probably better than anybody knows them,\" Donald Trump told the Washington Post in 2016, and promised to clear the country's then-$19tn national debt \"over a period of eight years\".\n\nAfter: Halfway through that eight-year promise, the US national debt has ballooned by more than a third, hitting $27tn in October 2020. Mr Trump increased the national debt ceiling in 2017, before suspending it until after the 2020 election in July 2019.\n\nIt is predicted the debt will rise even further once the full economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic becomes apparent.\n\nBefore: Mr Trump repeatedly told his supporters that every single undocumented immigrant - of which there are estimated to be more than 11.3 million - \"have to go\".\n\nAfter: As polling day approached, his stance began to soften slightly, then after the election he scaled it back to some two to three million deportations of people who \"are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers\".\n\nIn fiscal year 2019 deportations were at 267,000, a slight rise on the year before, though not as high as the 2012 peak of 410,000 under the Obama administration.\n\nMr Trump's plans for immigration reform faced defeat this summer when the Supreme Court ruled against his administration's bid to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), which protects about 650,000 young people who entered the US without documents as children.\n\nBefore: The country's infrastructure \"will become, by the way, second to none, and we will put millions of our people back to work as we rebuild it\", he said in his victory speech in November.\n\nAfter: Has repeated his vow to spend big on the country's roads, rail and airports, but as yet, there is little sign of action. By March 2018 Congress had allocated $21bn for infrastructure spending - far short of the $1.5tn Mr Trump has called for. The money will be spent on a wide range of upgrades and investments, according to a congressional graphic.\n\nIn April 2019, Mr Trump and Democratic leaders agreed to spend $2tn on infrastructure, an agreement that later fell apart. This June there were reports the Trump administration had a $1tn plan in the works, but no announcement has been made.\n\nBefore: Mr Trump repeatedly questioned the military alliance's purpose, calling it \"obsolete\". One issue that irked him was whether members were pulling their weight and \"paying their bills\". In one New York Times interview in July 2016, he even hinted that the US would not come to the aid of a member invaded by Russia.\n\nAfter: But as he hosted Nato's secretary general at the White House in April 2018, the US president said the threat of terrorism had underlined the alliance's importance. \"I said it [Nato] was obsolete,\" Mr Trump said. \"It's no longer obsolete.\"\n\nIn July 2018, Mr Trump reiterated his support at the Nato summit, but suggested the US might still leave if allies did not acquiesce to his budget demands.\n\nMr Trump has continued to argue that Canada and European members of Nato are not spending enough to support the alliance, and recently said the US will move nearly 12,000 troops out of Germany.\n\nBefore: Mr Trump said he would approve waterboarding \"immediately\" and \"make it also much worse\", adding \"torture works\".\n\nAfter: But after his inauguration, the president said he would defer to the countervailing belief, espoused by former Defence Secretary James Mattis and then-CIA director Mike Pompeo, who is now secretary of state.\n\nMr Pompeo said during his CIA confirmation hearing that he would \"absolutely not\" reinstate such methods.\n\nBefore: \"Lock her up\" was one of the main rallying cries of Mr Trump's supporters.\n\nThey wanted to see Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in prison over the use of her private email server while secretary of state.\n\nAnd Mr Trump was more than willing to back their calls for, at the very least, a fresh investigation. During the debates, he told Mrs Clinton: \"If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation.\"\n\nAfter: The president-elect's tone changed almost as soon as he had won, describing the woman he had said was \"such a nasty woman\" as someone the country owed \"a debt of gratitude\". Later, he said he \"hadn't given [the prosecution] a lot of thought\" and had other priorities.\n\nIn November 2016 Mr Trump's spokeswoman said he would not pursue a further investigation - to help Mrs Clinton \"heal\".", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "New trains like these are expected to run between Cheltenham, Cardiff and Maesteg from December\n\nThe boss of Transport for Wales has admitted he understands passengers' frustration as TfW marks the first year of running the nation's rail services.\n\nOverall, 82% of passengers are satisfied, the same as 2018, according to the latest official survey.\n\nBut travellers reported seeing an improvement in how delays have been dealt with since TfW took over from Arriva Trains Wales.\n\n\"We've tried very hard,\" said TfW chief executive James Price.\n\nHe recognised there was frustration at the pace of change, with operators \"playing catch-up\" after damage to trains in last autumn's storms.\n\nTfW brought in trains from elsewhere to plug the gaps, although there will be delays in bringing in 10 new four-car trains for the valleys lines.\n\n\"We've delivered everything we said we'd deliver, sometimes in a slightly different way, because the mix of rolling stock is different,\" Mr Price said.\n\n\"The thing I'd really like to see us focus on is unit availability - and then moving into transforming the network, particularly the Metro, in the coming year.\"\n\nTfW chairman Scott Waddington said: \"There is a lot of expectation out there and rightly so. The service hasn't been where it should be in the past.\n\n\"But the scale of project we have is going to take time to deliver properly and effectively.\"\n\nHe appealed for patience and said he was confident people would see \"real change\" over the next four to five years.\n\nChristine Boston, Wales director of the Community Transport Association and chairwoman of advocacy body Transport Cymru, said positive steps had been made, but it was not easy, with rural communities to serve too.\n\n\"It's a tough job, they got off to a particularly difficult start, they have an extremely broad and challenging remit and public expectation is very, very high.\n\n\"I think we have to be realistic, we can't expect transformation in transport overnight.\"\n\nShe said she was \"really disappointed\" the Welsh Government was requesting a delay in introducing new regulations to make trains accessible for people with disabilities due to a UK-wide backlog in train orders.\n\nCommuter Matthew Marshman - and standing room only on his train into Cardiff\n\nBut passenger Matthew Marshman, who travels daily from Ebbw Vale to his IT job in Cardiff, said it was \"disheartening\" change had not been felt yet, while fares have gone up.\n\n\"It's business as usual for me - no difference in my daily routine, still particularly busy, often late, often limited in carriage numbers.\n\n\"We looked forward to change happening and it hasn't happened. Fingers crossed it will be coming soon.\"\n\nTfW oversees public transport strategy for the Welsh Government and is working in partnership with train operator KeolisAmey, which was awarded the 15-year, £5bn contract.\n\nEconomy and Transport Minister Ken Skates said: \"It's clear that there are significant challenges and this journey will take time, but we have ambitious plans to transform transport across Wales to deliver a fully integrated network, with customers at the heart of everything.\"\n\nWhat questions do you have about Wales, or its people and places?\n\nIs there anything you've always wanted to know?\n\nUse this form to send us your questions:\n\nIf you are reading this page on the BBC News app, you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question on this topic.\n\nWe may get in touch if we decide to follow up on your suggestion.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Losing access to EU databases could make identifying people with a criminal history harder\n\nMany more EU citizens with criminal records will be barred from entering the UK from January, the Home Office has said.\n\nPeople sentenced to more than a year in prison will be turned away, in line with other foreign nationals.\n\nPreviously, officials had to show EU offenders presented a serious threat.\n\nBut there are concerns a no-deal Brexit could make it harder to identify foreign criminals, BBC home editor Mark Easton said.\n\nWith the UK in a transition period since it formally left the EU in January, an EU citizen can currently only be refused entry if they present a genuine, present and serious threat.\n\nRegulations being laid in Parliament on Thursday set out the new rules for when the transition period ends, which treat EU and non-EU citizens the same.\n\nThe new rules mean from 1 January:\n\nPeople involved in a sham marriage could be banned from entry, and anyone breaching customs regulations could also be turned away.\n\nThe changes also mean EU citizens found rough sleeping could be deported if they refuse support from authorities, such as the offer of accommodation, as is already the case for non-EU citizens.\n\nOfficials said this could apply to people living on the streets who commit crimes or act in anti-social ways, such as aggressively begging.\n\nBut they said it would be a last resort and checks would be carried out to ensure the rough sleepers were not victims of modern slavery or trafficking.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe regulations could mean tens of thousands of people from Europe can no longer enter the UK.\n\nBut with no long-term agreement on trade and other areas of co-operation with the EU when the transition agreement expires, the UK faces losing access to the European Criminal Records Information System and the EU's passenger database.\n\nThat could make it harder to identify arrivals with a criminal history.\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel said the rules would be \"firmer and fairer\", applying the same rules on criminality to people from all countries.\n\nEU citizens living in Britain who have immigration status under the EU Settlement Scheme, or any others who are protected by the Withdrawal Agreement, are exempt from these rules.\n\nHowever, the Home Office said that their status could be revoked if they commit a crime after 1 January if it results in a prison sentence of more than a year.", "KeolisAmey has run Transport for Wales rail services since October 2018\n\nThe Transport for Wales rail service is to be brought under Welsh Government control from next February.\n\nMinisters have confirmed the takeover from KeolisAmey, with day-to-day services to be run by a publicly-owned company.\n\nIt follows significant falls in passenger numbers during the pandemic.\n\nThe Welsh Tories questioned how much nationalisation will cost taxpayers, while Plaid Cymru called for the Senedd to be recalled.\n\nEconomy Minister Ken Skates said the government had stepped in \"to stabilise the network and keep it running\".\n\n\"The last few months have been extremely challenging for public transport in Wales and across the UK. Covid has significantly impacted passenger revenues,\" he said.\n\nKeolisAmey was awarded the franchise in 2018, taking over from Arriva Trains Wales.\n\nIt covers most of Wales' trains - including key commuter services such as the Valley Lines.\n\nTransport for Wales will run Wales and Borders services from February\n\nThe financial risk of the Wales and Borders rail franchise, which is branded Transport for Wales (TfW), had already been taken over by taxpayers under a £65m agreement signed in May.\n\nBut from February next year KeolisAmey staff working on rail services will be transferred over to a publicly owned company, currently called Transport for Wales Rail Ltd.\n\nIt is happening under a part of railway law that allows for the creation of operators of \"last resort\".\n\nOfficials say the time gap between now and the start of the new operator will allow the Welsh Government to prepare the new operator for service.\n\nA part of the original agreement is staying - Amey Keolis Infrastructure Ltd will continue to be responsible for infrastructure on the Core Valley Lines, where the South Wales Metro upgrade is taking place.\n\nKeolis and Amey will also work with the Welsh Government quango Transport for Wales on improvements to the service - like rolling stock and ticketing.\n\nKevin Thomas, chief executive of KeolisAmey Wales, said: \"In light of Covid-19, we recognise the need for Welsh Government to have a sustainable way forward for delivering its ambitious objectives for rail.\"\n\nKeolisAmey took over from Arriva Trains Wales in 2018\n\nChallenged on the decision later on Thursday, Mr Skates told a Senedd committee that if the existing arrangements had continued it would have \"led to a collapse by the operator and a catastrophic transfer then to the operator of last resort [Transport for Wales Rail Ltd].\n\n\"What we're able to do now is manage a careful transition, which will take us through to February, and then beyond, with the establishment of TfW rail limited,\" he said.\n\nDeputy Transport Minister Lee Waters said: \"The whole business model collapsed in the face of Covid because the revenue was not coming in and Keolis in effect were not prepared to shoulder their share of the pain.\"\n\nAsked about the long-term costs of propping up the network, he said: \"It depends on Covid. We don't know.\"\n\nMinisters pledged to honour commitments worth more than £1bn to buy new trains and build the south Wales Metro.\n\n\"That will be delivered,\" Mr Skates said.\n\nJames Price, chief executive of Welsh Government quango Transport for Wales which oversaw the franchise and shared branding with it, said that rolling stock is \"on the way\" and \"in essence is paid for already\".\n\n\"What this allows us to do is to reduce the profit we pay to the private sector massively over time, and make sure that when the revenue comes back, it comes back in to the taxpayer.\"\n\nRussell George, economy spokesman for the Welsh Conservatives, said: \"Given the track record of the Welsh Labour-led Government, its decision to take control of our vital train industry has not filled me with any hope.\"\n\nHe said ministers should have consulted the Senedd on \"how much this decision is going to cost the Welsh taxpayer\".\n\n\"Eyebrows will be raised, too, on why any support is being left until February 2021,\" Mr George added.\n\nPlaid Cymru transport spokeswoman Helen Mary Jones said it \"could well be the right decision\", saying her party \"has always maintained that our railways should be brought into public hands and the government put passengers before profit\".\n\nBut she said there were \"crucial questions\" on financial implications and the nature of the subsidiary.\n\n\"Decisions of this importance should be announced in the Senedd so that members can ask questions on behalf of the people of Wales,\" she said.\n\nKeolisAmey already runs the Docklands Light Railway in London\n\nKeolisAmey is a joint-venture between two European companies, and was awarded the Wales and Borders franchise in May 2018 in a £5bn contract.\n\nIt was the first time the Welsh Government had awarded the franchise.\n\nKeolis is France's largest private sector public transport operator - but its major shareholder is state-owned French railway SNCF.\n\nAmey is a former one-time UK company owned by Spanish infrastructure giant Ferrovial.\n\nKeolisAmey took over services in October 2018. In January it emerged it had been fined £3.4m over the performance of services.\n\nRMT general secretary Mick Cash said: \"There is huge public support for public ownership because privatisation and profiteering has never been an efficient way to provide value for money, and this is even more the case when extra funding has been needed during the coronavirus pandemic.\"\n\nManuel Cortes, general secretary of the TSSA, said: \"This is a welcome and positive step from the Welsh Government, which will put our railways back in public hands and again shows the abject failure of privatisation.\"\n\nWe are told passengers will not notice the changeover. The same trains, staffed by the same drivers and conductors, will arrive at platforms.\n\nBut there are new risks for the taxpayer.\n\nTicket sales have plummeted. So in May the Welsh Government announced £65m and an emergency agreement to help the service cope.\n\nIn practice, that means almost all the financial risks associated with the railway are borne by the government.\n\nProfits and losses have moved from the private sector into the public sector.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The UK is \"ready to welcome the EU team\" to continue negotiations over a post-Brexit trade deal, says No 10.\n\nThe two sides' chief negotiators, Lord David Frost and Michel Barnier, spoke on the phone earlier after talks stalled last week.\n\nFollowing the conversation, Downing Street said the pair had \"jointly agreed a set of principles for handling this intensified phase of talks\".\n\nLord Frost said talks would begin again in London on Thursday.\n\nThe full statement from No 10 said it was \"clear that significant gaps remain between our positions in the most difficult areas\" and it was \"entirely possible that negotiations will not succeed\".\n\nBut, it added: \"We are ready, with the EU, to see if it is possible to bridge them in intensive talks.\"\n\nEarlier, Mr Barnier said a deal would possible \"if we are both ready to work constructively and in a spirit of compromise over the next days, on the basis of legal texts. Time is short.\"\n\nBoth the UK and EU are calling on each other to compromise ahead of the looming December deadline for a deal.\n\nFrom 1 January 2021, the so-called transition period will be over, which has seen the UK continue to follow EU trading rules while a deal was negotiated.\n\nIf an agreement is not reached, the UK will move onto trade with the EU according to the default rules set by the World Trade Organization.\n\nKey areas of disagreement that remain between the two sides include fishing rights and post-Brexit competition rules.\n\nLord Frost said these \"intensive talks\" will take place \"every day\" while the two sides see if a deal can be done.\n\nYou could be forgiven for thinking that what we've witnessed over the past few days is a bit of political theatre.\n\nCover for the government - post chest-beating- to return to the negotiating table where they know the time has now come for tough compromises to be made.\n\nEU leaders also went out of their way to sound tough on Brexit at their summit last week. Privately, a number of EU figures now admit it was a misstep.\n\nBut EU leaders play to the domestic gallery too. They wanted to show they were \"standing up to the UK\" - that leaving the EU doesn't pay and that EU interests would be defended.\n\nThey accept they must compromise too now, if this trade and security deal with the UK has a chance of being agreed.\n\nTime is short and trust is in low supply.\n\nThe EU had previously set the end of October as a deadline to reach a deal, but Boris Johnson had pledged to walk away if it was not agreed by 15 October.\n\nThe day after the prime minister's deadline, Mr Johnson said it was time to \"get ready\" to leave without a deal, with No 10 going further by saying the talks were \"over\".\n\nA face-to-face meeting between the negotiators was cancelled for Monday and replaced by a phone call, which still left a stalemate between the two sides.\n\nBut Wednesday's conversation appeared to have been more fruitful.\n\nLord Frost (left) and Mr Barnier (right) have met several times since negotiations began in March\n\nNo 10 said Mr Barnier had \"acknowledged\" the UK's demands for the EU to be \"serious about talking intensively, on all issues, and bringing the negotiation to a conclusion\" and that he had accepted he was dealing with \"an independent and sovereign country\".\n\nIt also said the EU chief negotiator had accepted \"movement would be needed from both sides in the talks if agreement was to be reached\".\n\nThe statement added: \"On the basis of that conversation we are ready to welcome the EU team to London to resume negotiations later this week. We have jointly agreed a set of principles for handling this intensified phase of talks.\n\n\"It is clear that significant gaps remain between our positions in the most difficult areas, but we are ready, with the EU, to see if it is possible to bridge them in intensive talks.\"\n\nDowning Street reiterated its pledge to leave the transition period without a deal - or on \"Australian terms\" - and called on businesses and travellers to prepare \"since change is coming, whether an agreement is reached or not\".", "With the worst infection rate in western Europe, Belgium’s government has warned that parts of the country could soon see a “tsunami of cases” with the virus spreading uncontrollably.\n\nBrussels and Wallonia are at the epicentre of this second wave of the Covid-19 epidemic.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Prof Mike Berry casts doubt on the conviction of David Morris for Clydach murders\n\nFresh doubts have been cast on the conviction of the man jailed for the horrific Clydach murders in 1999.\n\nDavid Morris was found guilty of murdering an entire family of four including two young girls.\n\nBut potential new witnesses, along with the views of experts, have given campaigners calling for his release fresh hope.\n\nSouth Wales Police say Morris was convicted twice at two trials after an \"extensive investigation\".\n\nRelatives of the victims say they have no doubt Morris was responsible, and say the suffering caused by the deaths still affects them.\n\nThere may be disagreement over the details, but nobody disputes that an almost unspeakable crime was committed at 9 Kelvin Road in Clydach on the night of Saturday 26 into the morning of Sunday 27 June 1999.\n\nBeginning at about midnight on the Saturday, extreme violence was unleashed on Mandy Power, her 80-year-old mother Doris and Mandy's children Katie, aged 10, and Emily, aged eight.\n\nAll four were beaten to death with a metal pole and fires were started in different parts of the house.\n\nGrandmother Doris was found murdered in her bed\n\nNeighbours called the fire service and the scene was initially dealt with as a fatal blaze before the full horror of the murders emerged.\n\nIt wasn't until August 2006 that David Morris, also known as Dai Morris, was jailed for the final, decisive time for the crimes and sentenced to life, a term that was later reduced to 32 years.\n\nIn the years between the killings and his jailing, other suspects - including serving South Wales Police officers - had been investigated and Morris was convicted and jailed only to have that sentence quashed and a fresh trial ordered. He was then found guilty by a second jury.\n\nHe has always maintained his innocence and a campaign to free him is gathering pace.\n\nNow, BBC Wales Investigates has spoken to people who were not called to give evidence at either of his trials, along with experts who were either involved in the original investigation or have studied the case extensively.\n\nWhat they said raises questions about the strength of his conviction.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe campaign to quash Morris's conviction has grown in size and volume over the years but while his family remain convinced he was not capable of the crime, his own actions at the time undermined his claims of innocence.\n\nThe investigation into the murders was given fresh impetus in 2001 when an off-duty police officer overheard a conversation about Morris having had sex with Mandy.\n\nHis name had been mentioned in the weeks immediately after the killings and he had given a statement to police but had been put on the back burner. Now he was front and centre.\n\nMorris initially withheld the fact he had been in a sexual relationship with Mandy. He also told a lie that would come back to haunt him.\n\nMorris's family have always maintained he is innocent\n\nIn police interview he was asked if a gold chain found at 9 Kelvin Road was his. He swore it wasn't. \"On the lives of my children,\" were his exact words.\n\nBut the chain was his, and when he finally admitted that it helped seal his fate.\n\nMorris says he hid his fling with Mandy from police because his then girlfriend Mandy Jewell was her best friend and it would have ended their relationship.\n\nMorris said he was afraid his then girlfriend Mandy Jewell would be furious about him having sex with Mandy Power\n\nThere were also issues with his alibi. Morris had been drinking at the New Inn on the edge of Clydach and said he had wandered the streets for hours, first towards his home then towards Swansea, before eventually getting home about 03:00 when he claimed his girlfriend Mandy Jewell let him in.\n\nMandy initially told police Morris had arrived home between 22:30 and 23:00 and she didn't let him in, but in court said she didn't know what time he came back, but that she did let him in.\n\nThe juries were also told Morris had previous convictions for violence, and at both trials - the first in 2002 and the second in 2006 - he was found guilty of all four murders.\n\nBut Morris wasn't the first suspect. The police had originally looked at two of their own.\n\nStephen Lewis, his wife Alison and his twin brother Stuart were arrested in July 2000, the married couple on suspicion of murder and Stuart on suspicion of perverting the course of justice.\n\nStephen's wife Alison Lewis, a former officer with South Wales Police, had been in a lesbian affair with Mandy, and suspicion had fallen on Stuart because of events on the night.\n\nAlison Lewis and her husband Stephen were initially suspects\n\nHe was then an Acting Inspector and was not only on duty the night of the murders but was the most senior officer to arrive at the scene.\n\nStuart stayed at 9 Kelvin Road for less than 10 minutes, failed to preserve the scene and his log book for that night went missing. He also didn't fill in his pocket book until the Monday.\n\nBut despite the initial suspicion over the trio, it was decided there was insufficient evidence linking them to the crime and they were not charged, eventually being ruled out as suspects in January 2001.\n\nThere is no DNA evidence or fingerprints linking Morris to 9 Kelvin Road, and no witnesses could place him there on the night of the murders.\n\nBut speaking for the first time, a potential witness has told the BBC they saw a man or men close to the house that night.\n\nStuart Lewis was one of the first police officers to arrive at the murder scene\n\nTaxi driver Mike claims he was driving down Vardre Road, a short walk from Kelvin Road, between 02:00 and 02:30 when he noticed two men walking along the pavement.\n\n\"What struck me was they were very, very similar,\" he said. \"Both had dark hair, cropped.\"\n\nWhen he heard about the murders the next day, he says he called the police to tell them.\n\n\"They took my details and said that person dealing with it, or that team, would be in touch,\" the driver said. But nobody called him back.\n\nTwo weeks later the driver says he called police again to say not only had he seen the men but he could now identify them - as Stephen and Stuart Lewis.\n\n\"When their pictures appeared in the press I realised that it was them that I'd seen that morning,\" said the man, who maintains he is \"100% convinced\" it was the Lewis brothers he saw.\n\nThe taxi driver was never called to give evidence at either trial.\n\nStephen Lewis and his wife Alison were arrested but never charged in connection with the murders\n\nOn the night of the murders, Nicola Williams was driving on Gellionnen Road in the early hours of Sunday 27 June 1999, and also thinks she saw Stephen Lewis near Kelvin Road around 02:30.\n\nNot only did Ms Williams pick Stephen out of a video identity parade, she also provided police with an e-fit. But it was never released to the public and in court the prosecution dismissed her account.\n\nHer evidence also doesn't appear to have affected the jury's decision about David Morris' guilt.\n\nThe most damaging fire in the house was started in the kitchen\n\nMs Williams says the man she saw was wearing a bomber jacket and carrying a rolled-up bundle under his arm - the same description another new potential witness has given the BBC.\n\nJohn Allen never came forward at the time of the murders, however he now claims that he saw a man in his headlights in a bomber jacket carrying a bundle as he drove down Gellionnen Road into Clydach between 04:00 and 04:30.\n\nHe says he is sharing his story now to \"get justice for the community and everybody that was involved\" and has \"no vendetta\" against the police despite his own criminal past.\n\nMorris's defence team say this sighting needs further investigation.\n\nIn a statement, Stephen Lewis told the BBC he had no part in the murders and that his alibi - that he was at home with his wife Alison - suggests that witnesses who suggested he was in Clydach the night of the killings were mistaken.\n\nAlison has always maintained that she was at home with Stephen and he was beside her in bed all night.\n\nStuart Lewis, questioned on previous occasions, said he did not see Stephen or Alison that night.\n\nMorris may have given a muddled account of his movements the night of the murders, but more than one expert thinks the official timeline undermines his conviction.\n\nMorris admits he drank eight pints at the New Inn, which witnesses say he left about 23:30. The prosecution said he also took amphetamines - something he denied.\n\nFrom the pub it's a walk of around 15 minutes to 9 Kelvin Road, and Mandy Power and her daughters are believed to have arrived home about 23:48 after they had been babysitting.\n\nUniversity lecturer and journalist Brian Thornton, one of the founders of the Crime and Justice Research Centre at the University of Winchester, has studied the Clydach murders for a decade.\n\nHe says those timings, and understanding who was killed first, are critical.\n\nThe campaign for David Morris's conviction to be overturned has gathered pace\n\n\"There are two areas that make us very confident that Doris died first,\" he said.\n\n\"First of all is the murder weapon.\"\n\nThe pole used to murder the family had traces of blood from Mandy and the two girls. However there was no blood from Doris suggesting she was killed first then later use of the bar removed traces of her.\n\n\"The second is the sequence. We know that Doris was upstairs in bed and then what the forensic scientists have worked out is that somebody has come in and for whatever reason has killed Doris in her bed.\n\n\"But in the process, the killer has smashed a light bulb which has caused at least the top floor of the house to go dark because it's been fused.\"\n\nThe metal pole used to kill the four victims\n\nBlood found on the murder weapon led one expert to conclude it was Doris who was killed first\n\nMr Thornton says the evidence indicates the killer went into the children's bedroom, removed a TV from a chair and took that chair downstairs to use it to reach the fuse box in the bathroom, fixed the lights and then waited for Mandy and the two girls to come home.\n\nThe sequence of events combined with the timeline of Morris's known movements have led Mr Thornton to conclude it's \"nearly impossible\" for him to have carried out the murders.\n\n\"He left the pub at half past 11, Mandy and the girls came back just before 12,\" he said.\n\n\"It means that he [Morris] will have had to walk to Kelvin Road, kill Doris, change the fuses - he'll have had to have done all those things.\n\n\"There simply isn't enough time to do that.\"\n\nForensic scientist Clair Galbraith was one of the first people to arrive at 9 Kelvin Road the night of the killings, and it was she who found the murder weapon.\n\nShe was one of only a handful of experts to express an opinion on who was killed first - she believes it was Doris.\n\nThe timeline of the killings is another angle Morris's defence team want to explore, as it was not something used in his defence at either trial.\n\nProfessor Mike Berry is a consultant forensic psychologist who has helped police forces in high profile killings - including the murder of Geraldine Palk in Cardiff.\n\nHe has studied the Clydach files and has raised a number of questions about the killer's behaviour and says he finds it hard to believe Morris was behind what happened afterwards.\n\nWhen all four residents of the house were dead, the killer did not flee but stayed to perform bizarre acts including taking Mandy's body to the bathroom and apparently washing it.\n\nSmall fires were started in various parts of the house, the main one in the kitchen.\n\nAlthough Emily and Katie Power were murdered, one expert says their mother was the main target\n\n\"The attack on Mandy shows that she was a target,\" said Prof Berry. \"The girls I think, to use that awful expression, were collateral.\n\n\"I think the motive for murder here is anger. The killer clearly is angry with Mandy by the amount of violence used on her.\"\n\nIf Morris had drunk a considerable amount of alcohol and taken drugs, Professor Berry doubts he would have behaved as the killer did after the murders.\n\nProf Berry concluded there were a number of people who might have carried out the murders - and he couldn't rule out David Morris as a strong contender.\n\nThe investigation into the Clydach murders was vast. Some 4,500 statements were taken and there were 4,000 exhibits.\n\nBut not all of that evidence was made available to the defence due to court orders made under Public Interest Immunity or PII.\n\nIt's a method by which the prosecution can justify the non-disclosure of material which assists the defence, and is therefore supposed to be used sparingly.\n\nBarrister and civil liberties expert Simon McKay is concerned about the use of PII in the Clydach trials.\n\nHe said there appears to be a \"significant volume of material\" which was withheld using PII and he cannot see an \"obvious reason\" to justify it.\n\n\"When one looks at the entire context of the case… then it's understandable that one walks away with serious concerns that justice has been done,\" said Mr McKay.\n\nMorris's defence team are planning to take the potential new evidence to the Criminal Cases Review Commission - the first step in getting any conviction quashed.\n\nSouth Wales Police says it acknowledges the \"significant impact\" the case continues to have on the victims' families and the wider community. It says it carried out an extensive investigation into the murders and points out Morris was convicted twice by a jury.\n\nA statement released this week on behalf of Mandy's family said the continued campaign for Morris's release was \"very upsetting\".\n\n\"Every day we live with the heartbreak of the loss of our family,\" it said.\n\n\"Katie and Emily were only 10 and eight when they were murdered they were never given the chance to grow up and have their own families, unlike Morris who has the privilege of seeing his children and grandchildren.\n\n\"We have always said we will fight for our family, but we never expected to be fighting 21 years on.\"\n\nSpeaking for the first time since the murders, Michael Power, Mandy's former husband and Katie and Emily's father, said time had not healed his pain.\n\n\"I miss my girls every day and not a day goes by that I don't think about them,\" he said.\n\n\"Both trials ended with the same verdict which we believe as a family was the right decision.\"\n\nBBC Wales Investigates The Clydach Murders: Beyond Reasonable Doubt on Thursday, 22 October at 21:00 GMT on BBC One Wales and afterwards on iPlayer\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Ed Sheeran started performing publicly in 2005, aged 14, with his first gig taking place in his hometown of Framlingham\n\nEd Sheeran has donated personal items including handwritten lyrics to his hit song Perfect to a charity auction.\n\nIt was organised with help from his parents to support youngsters in his home county of Suffolk, including redeveloping a playground in Ipswich.\n\nFans can also bid for his childhood Lego and a £3 ticket to his first ever gig in Framlingham.\n\nDavid Beckham, Kylie Minogue and Usain Bolt also donated items to the online auction, which runs until 8 November.\n\nA ticket to his first gig, with a £3 entry price, is among the auction lots...\n\n... and 14 years later, Sheeran played four nights at Chantry Park in Ipswich in front of 160,000 fans\n\nThe auction's end date coincides with the final day of the Ed Sheeran: Made in Suffolk exhibition, which tells the story of his rise to global stardom.\n\nIt opened at the Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich, in the week leading up to Sheeran's homecoming gigs last August.\n\nThe 29-year-old's parents John and Imogen Sheeran wanted to create a lasting legacy from the exhibition.\n\nEd Sheeran fans can also bid on handwritten lyrics to his hit song Perfect\n\nProceeds will help charity GeeWizz to redevelop a playground for children with special educational needs and disabilities at the Thomas Wolsey Ormiston Academy in Ipswich, estimated to cost up to £300,000.\n\nFunds will also benefit the town's St Elizabeth Hospice, which aims to help teenagers and young adults with incurable illnesses live their lives to the full.\n\nJohn Sheeran said: \"Imogen and I send our thanks to everyone who has organised, supported and donated to the auction.\n\n\"We cannot think of a better legacy for the exhibition to leave.\"\n\nDavid Beckham provided a signed photograph and England shirt for the auction\n\nAuction proceeds will support children and young adults in Sheeran's home county of Suffolk\n\nAmong the auction lots are guitars from John Mayer, Snow Patrol and Cockney Rebel frontman Steve Harley.\n\nThere is also a Rolling Stones gold disc and signed Pink Floyd memorabilia from drummer Nick Mason.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Non-essential business in Wales are being told to shut on Friday evening\n\nBusiness leaders say companies in Wales have been given just hours to finalise plans for the firebreak lockdown.\n\nAll non-essential businesses will have to shut for two weeks from 18:00 BST on Friday.\n\nBut the list of the types of business being forced to close was only published on Thursday morning.\n\nThe Welsh Government said there was only a \"small window\" to act to slow the spread of coronavirus and there were \"no easy options\".\n\nThe Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) in Wales said the Welsh Government had left it \"far too late in the day\" to provide the detailed information.\n\n\"Waiting until the day before the lockdown comes into force does not give businesses the time that they need to prepare,\" said Ben Francis, the FSB Wales policy chair.\n\n\"This week should have been spent engaging with staff, contacting suppliers and informing customers, but many firms simply spent this time in the dark.\"\n\nThe federation said it was still fielding questions from its members in Wales who are worried about what they need to do to comply with the lockdown\n\n\"Welsh Government needs to take steps to be more responsive to the needs of the business community as we move through the coming weeks, or they risk making an already difficult period even worse for the business community,\" added Mr Francis.\n\nThe 46-page document setting out the legal rules behind the firebreak lists the type of businesses that must shut, those that can remain open but with limited access, and those that can continue to trade.\n\nThe FSB said many will be \"incredibly relieved\" to have the rules in black-and-white.\n\nIt is last orders again for pubs and bars\n\nPubs, restaurants and cafes must close for consumption on the premises but takeaway food sales are allowed.\n\nHoliday and camping sites, along with hotels and B&Bs, holiday apartments and hostels must also shut - unless a resident cannot move elsewhere, or it is their permanent residence.\n\nPlaces of worship can only open for wedding vows or funerals, and crematoriums for funerals.\n\nBut there has also been some disquiet expressed by some sectors.\n\nThe Horticultural Trades Association, which represents businesses such as garden centres, said it was disappointed to learn those areas must shut.\n\n\"Back in May, Wales was the first UK administration to take the decision to reopen garden centres and we expected this to be a sign of support for the industry,\" said James Barnes, chair of the association.\n\n\"With no evidence to show why garden centres should be closed, we were crushed to see them included yet again as 'non-essential retail' for this Friday's lockdown.\"\n\nBangor has witnessed a series of closures including clothing retailer Peacocks, which has gone into administration\n\nTraders in Bangor plan on voicing their concerns over the Covid restrictions on Thursday by protesting outside their shops on what is Wales' longest high street.\n\nMost of the city has been under a local lockdown since 10 October, following a spike in coronavirus cases.\n\n\"Local businesses have seen a huge drop in trade, they've stayed open while customers are being instructed to stay way,\" said Danielle Asquith, who works at a tattoo parlour.\n\n\"The message is simple, allow us to work to normal capacity or fund our temporary closure. It is simply not viable to continue the way things are.\"\n\nResponding to business concerns across Wales, a Welsh Government official said: \"There are no easy options and we recognise this firebreak period will have an impact on businesses at the end of what has been an incredibly difficult year for us all.\n\n\"We have doubled the third phase of the Economic Resilience Fund, making nearly £300 million available to support businesses. This phase will open next week and we will work hard to get money out to businesses as quickly as we can.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A US judge has dismissed a lawsuit from one of Michael Jackson's accusers, who claimed Jackson's companies allowed the star to abuse him and other children.\n\nJames Safechuck has said the singer started abusing him when he was 10.\n\nIn 2014, he sued MJJ Productions and MJJ Ventures, and has alleged they \"were created to, and did, facilitate Jackson's sexual abuse of children\".\n\nBut the judge dismissed the case, saying the companies didn't have a duty of care for Mr Safechuck.\n\nJonathan Steinsapir and Howard Weitzman, representing MJJ Productions and MJJ Ventures, told the BBC: \"We are pleased that the court agreed that Mr Safechuck had no grounds to pursue his lawsuit.\"\n\nMr Safechuck was one of two men who accused the late pop star of abuse in last year's Leaving Neverland documentary.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. James Safechuck (left) and Wade Robson told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire about the abuse in 2019\n\nIn his lawsuit, he said Jackson abused him hundreds of times at his homes and on tour in the late 1980s and early 90s.\n\nMJJ Productions and MJJ Ventures were set up by Jackson to run his career. But in the lawsuit it was claimed: \"The thinly-veiled, covert second purpose of these businesses was to operate as a child sexual abuse operation, specifically designed to locate, attract, lure and seduce child sexual abuse victims.\"\n\nMr Safechuck also featured with Jackson in a Pepsi commercial and often appeared on stage with the singer.\n\nMr Safechuck's lawyer Vince Finaldi told BBC News: \"He was an employee that was working on behalf of them as a dancer and entertainer on the stage with Michael.\n\n\"Because he was a minor, and he was an employee working for them, they had a duty to protect him. That's our argument.\"\n\nCalifornia judge Mark Young disagreed, saying the companies weren't directly responsible for causing emotional distress, and were not able to control Jackson, because he controlled the companies and everyone they employed. Corporations cannot be direct perpetrators, he said.\n\nMr Safechuck, who is seeking unspecified damages, will appeal.\n\nJackson vehemently denied the abuse. Mr Safechuck (a child at the time) reportedly gave a witness statement defending Jackson when allegations against the singer first emerged in 1993.\n\nMr Finaldi is also representing Wade Robson, who appeared in Leaving Neverland too, in a separate lawsuit, which is expected to reach trial next summer.\n\nLeaving Neverland director Dan Reed is reportedly making a sequel about the pair's legal battles. Deadline reported on Wednesday that Jackson's companies had taken legal action against the film-maker.", "Brazil has been conducting trials of the vaccine\n\nTrials of a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University will continue, following a review into the death of a volunteer in Brazil.\n\nBrazil's health authority has given no details about the death, citing confidentiality protocols.\n\nOxford University said a \"careful assessment\" had revealed no safety concerns.\n\nThe BBC understands that the volunteer did not receive the vaccine.\n\nOnly around half the volunteers in the trial are given the actual Oxford University Covid-19 vaccine. The second group are being given an existing licensed vaccine for meningitis.\n\nNeither the participants nor their families know which vaccine they are being given.\n\nThis enables the researchers to compare the results for the two groups in order to measure whether the vaccine is effective.\n\nAstraZeneca said in a statement that it could not comment on individual cases but it \"can confirm that all required review processes have been followed\".\n\n\"All significant medical events are carefully assessed by trial investigators, an independent safety monitoring committee and the regulatory authorities,\" it said. \"These assessments have not led to any concerns about continuation of the ongoing study.\"\n\nThere are high hopes that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine could be one of the first to make it onto the market.\n\nIt had successful phase 1 and 2 testing, while phase 3 testing is being carried out on participants in countries including the UK, Brazil and India.\n\nTrials of the Oxford vaccine were paused last month after a reported side effect in a patient in the UK, but were resumed days later when it was deemed safe to continue.\n\nPhase 3 trials in the US remain on hold while the regulator there conducts its own assessment. A senior official was quoted by Bloomberg on Wednesday as saying he expected US trials to restart later in the week.\n\nBrazil's health authority Anvisa said it was informed of the Brazilian volunteer's death on 19 October.\n\nBrazilian media report that the volunteer was a 28-year-old doctor who died of Covid-19 complications. They say the doctor had worked with infected patients.\n\nThis has not been publicly confirmed by Anvisa.\n\nIn a statement, Oxford University said: \"All significant medical incidents, whether participants are in the control group or the Covid-19 vaccine group, are independently reviewed.\n\n\"The independent review, in addition to the Brazilian regulator, have both recommended that the trial should continue,\" it said.\n\nBrazil has plans to purchase the vaccine if it is approved.\n\nThe country has had nearly 5.3 million confirmed coronavirus cases - the third highest tally in the world after the US and India - and is second only to the US in terms of deaths, with nearly 155,000 registered so far, according to data collated by Johns Hopkins University.", "Transport for Wales says 500 people were refused travel last week due to restrictions\n\nAs many as 8% of Transport for Wales (TfW) trains have been overcrowded since late July despite restrictions on travel, a leaked document shows.\n\nFrom the start of lockdown in March until Monday, only essential travel was allowed on public transport as trains operated at 20% capacity.\n\nBut an internal document seen by the BBC reveals challenges faced by staff.\n\nTfW said safety was a \"top priority\", adding 500 people were refused travel last week.\n\nIncidents described in the report, based on the accounts of conductors, include a 09:23 Holyhead to Birmingham two-carriage train which was carrying 67 passengers at Llandudno Junction, but then had 89 by the time it left Flint.\n\nMany of the incidents involved trains travelling to and from Barry Island, with one service from Pontypridd carrying 99 passengers by the time it reached Cogan.\n\nAn 08:40 train to Cardiff Central left Ebbw Vale Town with 56 passengers, including 30 children, mainly travelling to Barry Island.\n\nAnd a 12:31 Manchester Piccadilly to Carmarthen train with three carriages had 70 passengers when it reached Llanelli.\n\nTfW said that, on average, it is currently operating about 689 services every day, and that between 5% and 8% of trains have exceeded the permitted capacity.\n\nTfW says it has seen \"more people ignoring the essential travel message\" during hot weather\n\n\"The number of people (or capacity) we can safely have on board is worked out using a worst case scenario, aimed at keeping everyone 2m apart,\" a TfW spokesman said.\n\n\"In reality, families and those from the same household can sit together, which effectively raises the numbers over the capacity indicator allocated for each unit (without necessarily making it less safe).\n\n\"During the hot weather, we have seen more people ignoring the essential travel message.\"\n\nPeople are still required to wear face coverings on public transport in Wales, although there are some exceptions.", "'The only wasted vote is the one never cast'\n\nBrandon Swearengin is a law student. He has worked for state government officials and ran earlier this year for a local school board seat in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and will vote for the Libertarian Party nominee in the upcoming election. Why does this election matter to you? This election matters to me because political power at all levels of government is up for grabs. I feel that many people overemphasize the presidential election. Though the Executive does have considerable powers, many of those powers, like war powers and regulation-making for example, are only exercised by virtue of congressional enactment. The federal government also has less impact in the day-to-day lives of everyday Americans than state and local government. So while many Americans are paying close attention to the presidential race, I’m more interested in my state legislative/judicial, county commissioner, and city council races as well as in competitive congressional elections around the country. Why do you support your chosen candidate? In the presidential election, I’m voting for the Libertarian Party nominee, Jo Jorgensen. I’m a registered Libertarian voter, and I strongly agree with roughly 80% of her campaign platform. I’m opposed to the de-facto two-party system, I want a smaller federal government in favor of stronger states’ rights, and I refuse to vote for a “lesser of two evils” between the major party nominees. Many Americans will make the fallacious statement that voting for a third party is a “wasted vote,” but my response is that the only wasted vote is the one never cast. Brandon is a member of our US election voter panel. You'll hear more from him, and many of our other voters, throughout the week.\n• We want to hear from you -what questions do you have about the US election?\n• In five words, tell us what's at stake in this election.", "Facilities where migrants have been detained include containers where it is not possible to socially distance\n\nThe Home Office did not prepare for a predictable rise in English Channel migrant crossings, leaving men, women and children detained in unfit conditions, the prisons watchdog says.\n\nChief Inspector of Prisons Peter Clarke said migrants were often held in what looked like an unsafe building site.\n\nFacilities included containers where it was not possible to socially distance.\n\nThe Home Office said it has since improved facilities and the way it deals with arrivals.\n\nSo far, some 7,444 migrants have crossed in boats during 2020 - the third annual jump in arrivals.\n\nWhen the numbers began to rise in 2018, Sajid Javid, the then home secretary, described it as a \"major incident\".\n\nMigrants are generally taken to two facilities in Dover before being transferred to other units or released on immigration bail.\n\nWhile these facilities are not jails, the prisons watchdog has the power to inspect them because they are used to detain people.\n\nOne of the facilities, Tug Haven, received 2,500 migrants between June and August - but Mr Clarke said the facilities were completely unsuitable.\n\nOnce inside, there were a number of gazebos and three containers with chemical toilets - but no means to socially distance and reduce the risk of the spread of coronavirus.\n\nThe facilities at Tug Haven were described as \"completely unsuitable\" by the prisons watchdog\n\nThe migrants - mostly from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria and Eritrea - tended to be wet and cold but during the inspection, the facility ran out of both dry clothes and mugs for hot drinks.\n\nThe detainees - 200 of whom arrived on one day - then spent hours in the open air or in the container units.\n\nDespite the conditions, the detainees were positive about the way they were treated by the staff.\n\n\"We met detainees who had been extremely traumatised after their long journeys, and their positive feedback on the decency shown to them by many individual staff cannot be underestimated,\" said Mr Clarke.\n\n\"However, the detention facilities in Dover were very poorly equipped to meet their purpose and important processes had broken down.\n\n\"It is hard to understand this failure to prepare properly for what must have been a predictable increase in migrant numbers.\n\n\"Just because numbers are unprecedented, that does not mean they are unpredictable or cannot be planned for.\"\n\nThe Home Office said it has made improvements to Tug Haven since the inspection.\n\nThe nearby Kent Intake Unit - a larger facility - had better facilities, said the report.\n\nBut it was also not suitable for detaining the migrants for long periods - not least because social distancing was not possible.\n\nThe inspectors said measures to protect children were weak.\n\nMore than 70 unaccompanied children had been held in the unit in the three months to August, but often they had to wait a long time for an assessment because Kent County Council's social services was overloaded.\n\nOne 12-year-old boy and his 18-year-old brother were told to go to a London hotel but records did not show whether the local social services were aware of the pair's arrival.\n\nThe Home Office said it took the welfare of people in its care \"extremely seriously\" and ensured its facilities were \"decent and humane\".\n\n\"These crossings are dangerous, illegally-facilitated and unnecessary,\" the spokesperson added. \"We are committed to fixing the asylum system, to make it fairer and firmer, compassionate to those who need help and welcoming people through safe and legal routes.\"", "Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency in 2016 with a pledge to bring down illegal immigration, famously blaming undocumented migrants from Mexico for a host of problems, including drugs and crime. In the four years since, how has this rhetoric translated into a wider immigration policy?\n\nThe number of foreign-born people living in the US has risen by about 3% from 43.7 million the year before Mr Trump's election to about 45 million last year.\n\nBut this rise conceals a big shift in the largest group by far within this population - those who have moved to the US from Mexico. Having remained at nearly the same level for years, the number of people living in the US who were born in Mexico has fallen steadily since Mr Trump's election.\n\nWhile this dip was more than offset by an increase in the number of people who have moved to the US from elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, demographers at the US Census Bureau have estimated that net migration - the number of people moving to the US minus those moving out of the US - has fallen to its lowest level for a decade.\n\nThis is partly due to lower levels of immigration, but also because more people who were born outside the US are moving back overseas, according to Anthony Knapp of the US Census Bureau.\n\nBeneath this trend there are some important changes to the visa system.\n\nMr Trump has allowed more people to come to the US temporarily for work, but made it harder for people to settle permanently in the US. The reduction in permanent visas, from about 1.2 million in 2016 to about 1 million in 2019, has primarily affected family members of US citizens and residents hoping to join their relatives, with the number of permanent visas sponsored by employers largely unchanged.\n\nAlthough more people are affected by this, in percentage terms his most significant change to immigration policy has been to lower the number of refugees admitted to the US.\n\nThe number of people admitted to the US as refugees each year is determined by a system of quotas, the size of which are ultimately defined by the president. People seeking to move to the US as refugees must make their applications from outside the country, and need to convince US officials that they are vulnerable to persecution at home.\n\nMr Trump's hostility to any immigration from Muslim-majority countries is well known - he once pledged to enact a \"complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States\" - and a reduction in refugee quotas proved easier to implement than an outright ban, which became mired in legal challenges.\n\nAs a result, the number of refugees admitted from a number of majority-Muslim countries, including Iraq, Somalia, Iran and Syria, fell almost to zero soon after he took office.\n\nCurbing visas and refugee admissions is not the only way to reduce the number of people entering the country, and Mr Trump has also sought to make it harder to move to, or remain in, the US without any relevant documentation.\n\nHowever, this is more difficult than it might seem. To understand what has happened during President Trump's tenure, we first need to get to grips with what the official statistics on deportation mean, and they are broken down into two categories.\n\nPeople are said to be \"removed\" if they are taken out of the country under the authority of a court order, and people are \"returned\" if they are refused admission while trying to cross the border, or asked to leave the country without a court order.\n\nBeing removed has a lasting legal consequence, making it much harder to gain re-entry to the country. But many people who have been returned across the US-Mexico border simply tried to enter the US again at a later date. President Obama escalated a policy enacted by his predecessor, President George W Bush, to step up removals - particularly of those who had been accused or convicted of criminal offences.\n\nPresident Trump has not brought about any significant changes to the number of people in either deportation category compared with his predecessor.\n\nThe US Immigration, Customs and Enforcement agency, which handles most deportations, has described the current rate of removals as \"extremely low\", blaming a lack of resources and \"judicial and legislative constraints\", among other things.\n\nThe agency is also under pressure at the Mexican border, where the administration's changes to asylum policy have resulted a long backlog of cases, sometimes with families separated and children held in detention centres, and asylum seekers being returned to Mexico to await the processing of their claims.\n\nDespite widespread media coverage of the border crisis, the data for 2019 suggests that would-be migrants have not been deterred - the number of detentions at the border was more than double the number for the previous year, driven largely by a large rise in the number of families attempting to get across.\n\nThis shift is likely to translate into a significant rise in the returns numbers for 2019, which are due to be released in the next few months.\n\nOne interesting question is whether President Trump's tough stance on immigration is still a major selling point among his supporters. The number of people telling pollsters that immigration is a bad thing has fallen steadily since he took office, with many former detractors apparently now believing it is generally good for the US.\n\nAlthough there remains a gulf between Democratic and Republican voters on the issue, with Republicans far less likely to see immigration in a positive light, and far more likely to want stricter curbs on illegal immigration, the trend among both groups is the same.\n\nMr Trump will be hoping that there remain enough Republican supporters of his approach to help push him past the winning post on election night.", "Lastly, Jane Kirby of the Press Association asked Sir Patrick Vallance if a decent level of roll-out of a potential vaccine is achieved by next spring, how soon people might be able to stop social distancing and wearing face coverings.\n\nShe asked the PM if he would reconsider his opposition to a national circuit break - a short, sharp lockdown - if those in Northern Ireland and Wales are shown to be more effective than tier three restrictions in England.\n\nSir Patrick replies first, insisting he will not speculate on how effective the vaccines are going to be, but says once we know how effective they are, it could be determined \"how to use them best\".\n\n\"Clearly the aim of vaccination is to try to take most of the load of the infection spread onto the vaccine in order to be able to relieve other measures and that's got to be an aim we would all wish for,\" he adds.\n\nThe PM said a national circuit break would be \"very damaging\" economically, socially and mentally for the country.\n\n\"We do think the local measures are right, and I repeat my gratitude to local leadership across the country, people who are helping to get the R rate down across their neighbourhoods... and that's what we're going to continue with.\"", "Millions of Americans have already cast their ballots in early voting\n\nUS national security officials say Iran was responsible for sending threatening emails to Democratic voters ahead of next month's presidential election.\n\nThe emails appeared to come from a far-right pro-Trump group and were meant to \"incite unrest\", National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe said.\n\nMr Ratcliffe also said US officials found Iran and Russia had obtained \"some voter registration information\".\n\nBoth Iran and Russia denied the accusations of election interference.\n\n\"Iran's strong rejection of American officials' repetitive, baseless and false claims was conveyed to the Swiss ambassador [who represents US interests in Tehran],\" Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh told state TV.\n\n\"As we have said before, it makes no difference for Iran who wins the US election,\" he added.\n\nKremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the BBC: \"We think this is unfortunate. These accusations come every day, they are all completely groundless, they are based on nothing.\"\n\n\"They are most likely some sort of internal political process connected with the upcoming elections.\"\n\nMr Ratcliffe's decision to hold a briefing so close to the presidential election was seen as a testament to the government's concerns over voting interference and disinformation campaigns from foreign actors.\n\nThe intelligence chief said Iran's \"spoof emails\" claimed to be sent by the far-right Proud Boys group in order to \"intimidate voters, incite unrest and damage\" President Donald Trump.\n\nHe added that the voter data could be used in attempts to \"communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will sow confusion chaos and undermine your confidence in American democracy\".\n\nMr Ratcliffe said officials \"have not seen the same actions from Russia\", but are aware they have some voter information.\n\nIn many states, voter data is available upon request, though each state has different requirements on who can request voter information, what data is available and how this data might be used, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.\n\n\"If you receive an intimidating or manipulative email in your inbox, don't be alarmed and do not spread it,\" Mr Ratcliffe said, calling the actions to influence US voters \"desperate attempts by desperate adversaries\".\n\nThis announcement inevitably has shades of the 2016 Russian interference in the US election.\n\nIn that election thousands of fake bots were created on social media pretending to be American voters.\n\nFrom this announcement, though, it's unclear how Iran and Russia obtained the information - and exactly what info they have.\n\nYou only have to look at your spam filter to see that many people have your email address.\n\nThe main charge against Iran is it has sent \"spoof emails\" to voters in swing states. If true, this is unlikely to be a sophisticated attack.\n\nIn many states too, voter registration information is publicly available.\n\nAnd nowhere in the announcement was there any further information about how widescale the emails have been.\n\nFBI Director Christopher Wray joined Mr Ratcliffe at the news conference. He said that US election systems were still secure and \"resilient\".\n\n\"You should be confident that your vote counts,\" Mr Wray said. \"Early, unverified claims to the contrary should be viewed with a healthy dose of scepticism.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. US election 2020: How to spot disinformation\n\nThe officials did not offer further details on how the voter data was obtained or what the Russians may be doing with the information.\n\nUS intelligence agencies concluded in 2016 that Kremlin-backed hackers were behind an effort to undermine Hillary Clinton's presidential run, using both cyber attacks and fake news stories planted on social media.\n\nIran has not managed to successfully hack US systems.\n\nThe emails in question were addressed to registered Democratic voters in several states, including the key battleground of Florida, and urged them to vote for Mr Trump - or else.\n\n\"You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you,\" the emails said, according to US media.\n\n\"Change your party affiliation to Republican to let us know you received our message and will comply.\"\n\nAs of Wednesday, over 40 million Americans have cast early votes in the presidential contest between Mr Trump and Democrat Joe Biden.", "Supermarkets will only be able to sell items like food\n\nSupermarkets will be unable to sell items like clothes during the 17-day Covid firebreak lockdown in Wales.\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford said it would be \"made clear\" to them they are only able to open parts of their business that sell \"essential goods\".\n\nMany retailers will be forced to shut but food shops, off-licences and pharmacies can stay open when lockdown begins on Friday at 18:00 BST.\n\nRetailers said they had not been given a definition of what was essential.\n\nThe Association of Convenience Stores and the Welsh Retail Consortium have written urgently to the first minister, expressing alarm over the new regulations.\n\nSara Jones, head of the Welsh Retail Consortium, said they wanted the Welsh Government to abandon the \"essential items\" rules.\n\n\"Compelling retailers to stop selling certain items, without them being told clearly what is and what isn't permitted to be sold, is ill-conceived and short-sighted,\" she said.\n\nWelsh Conservative Andrew RT Davies tweeted: \"The power is going to their heads.\"\n\nBut Plaid Cymru's Helen Mary Jones said \"smaller businesses should not be put at an unfair disadvantage during the firebreak lockdown\".\n\nBusiness leaders say companies in Wales have been given just hours to finalise plans for the firebreak lockdown, which ends at midnight on 9 November.\n\nMr Drakeford told a Senedd committee on Friday that \"in the last lockdown, people were reasonably understanding of the fact that supermarkets didn't close all the things that they may have needed to\".\n\n\"I don't think people will be as understanding this time.\n\n\"We will make sure there is a more level playing field in those next two weeks.\"\n\nClothes shops will have to close during the lockdown\n\nThe first minister was responding to Conservative Member of the Senedd Russell George, who said it was \"unfair\" to force independent clothing and hardware retailers to close while similar goods were on sale in major supermarkets.\n\n\"It felt very wrong and disproportionate to the small businesses,\" Mr George said.\n\nMr Drakeford said: \"We will be making it clear to supermarkets that they are only able to open those parts of their business that provide essential goods to people.\n\n\"And that will not include some of the things that Russell George mentioned, which other people are prevented from selling.\"\n\nThere is no precise list of non-essential goods in the law coming into force on Friday, but any business selling goods or services for sale or hire in a shop will have to close.\n\nBut there are exceptions for food retailers, newsagents, pharmacies and chemists, bicycle shops, petrol stations, car repair and MOT services, banks, laundrettes, post offices, pet shops and agricultural supplies shops.\n\nUnder the law firms conducting a business that provides a mixed set of services will be allowed to open if they cease conducting the service that must close.", "Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency in 2016 with a pledge to bring down illegal immigration, famously blaming undocumented migrants from Mexico for a host of problems, including drugs and crime. In the four years since, how has this rhetoric translated into a wider immigration policy?\n\nThe number of foreign-born people living in the US has risen by about 3% from 43.7 million the year before Mr Trump's election to about 45 million last year.\n\nBut this rise conceals a big shift in the largest group by far within this population - those who have moved to the US from Mexico. Having remained at nearly the same level for years, the number of people living in the US who were born in Mexico has fallen steadily since Mr Trump's election.\n\nWhile this dip was more than offset by an increase in the number of people who have moved to the US from elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, demographers at the US Census Bureau have estimated that net migration - the number of people moving to the US minus those moving out of the US - has fallen to its lowest level for a decade.\n\nThis is partly due to lower levels of immigration, but also because more people who were born outside the US are moving back overseas, according to Anthony Knapp of the US Census Bureau.\n\nBeneath this trend there are some important changes to the visa system.\n\nMr Trump has allowed more people to come to the US temporarily for work, but made it harder for people to settle permanently in the US. The reduction in permanent visas, from about 1.2 million in 2016 to about 1 million in 2019, has primarily affected family members of US citizens and residents hoping to join their relatives, with the number of permanent visas sponsored by employers largely unchanged.\n\nAlthough more people are affected by this, in percentage terms his most significant change to immigration policy has been to lower the number of refugees admitted to the US.\n\nThe number of people admitted to the US as refugees each year is determined by a system of quotas, the size of which are ultimately defined by the president. People seeking to move to the US as refugees must make their applications from outside the country, and need to convince US officials that they are vulnerable to persecution at home.\n\nMr Trump's hostility to any immigration from Muslim-majority countries is well known - he once pledged to enact a \"complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States\" - and a reduction in refugee quotas proved easier to implement than an outright ban, which became mired in legal challenges.\n\nAs a result, the number of refugees admitted from a number of majority-Muslim countries, including Iraq, Somalia, Iran and Syria, fell almost to zero soon after he took office.\n\nCurbing visas and refugee admissions is not the only way to reduce the number of people entering the country, and Mr Trump has also sought to make it harder to move to, or remain in, the US without any relevant documentation.\n\nHowever, this is more difficult than it might seem. To understand what has happened during President Trump's tenure, we first need to get to grips with what the official statistics on deportation mean, and they are broken down into two categories.\n\nPeople are said to be \"removed\" if they are taken out of the country under the authority of a court order, and people are \"returned\" if they are refused admission while trying to cross the border, or asked to leave the country without a court order.\n\nBeing removed has a lasting legal consequence, making it much harder to gain re-entry to the country. But many people who have been returned across the US-Mexico border simply tried to enter the US again at a later date. President Obama escalated a policy enacted by his predecessor, President George W Bush, to step up removals - particularly of those who had been accused or convicted of criminal offences.\n\nPresident Trump has not brought about any significant changes to the number of people in either deportation category compared with his predecessor.\n\nThe US Immigration, Customs and Enforcement agency, which handles most deportations, has described the current rate of removals as \"extremely low\", blaming a lack of resources and \"judicial and legislative constraints\", among other things.\n\nThe agency is also under pressure at the Mexican border, where the administration's changes to asylum policy have resulted a long backlog of cases, sometimes with families separated and children held in detention centres, and asylum seekers being returned to Mexico to await the processing of their claims.\n\nDespite widespread media coverage of the border crisis, the data for 2019 suggests that would-be migrants have not been deterred - the number of detentions at the border was more than double the number for the previous year, driven largely by a large rise in the number of families attempting to get across.\n\nThis shift is likely to translate into a significant rise in the returns numbers for 2019, which are due to be released in the next few months.\n\nOne interesting question is whether President Trump's tough stance on immigration is still a major selling point among his supporters. The number of people telling pollsters that immigration is a bad thing has fallen steadily since he took office, with many former detractors apparently now believing it is generally good for the US.\n\nAlthough there remains a gulf between Democratic and Republican voters on the issue, with Republicans far less likely to see immigration in a positive light, and far more likely to want stricter curbs on illegal immigration, the trend among both groups is the same.\n\nMr Trump will be hoping that there remain enough Republican supporters of his approach to help push him past the winning post on election night.", "It is 60 years since the Severn Railway Bridge disaster which saw two tanker barges - the Wastdale H and the Arkendale H - collide in fog near to Sharpness.\n\nThe two barges were then caught in the tide and collided with a railway bridge which collapsed. Five men lost their lives.\n\nNew drone footage gives us a close-up view of the remains of the shipwrecked vessels.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. People in Barnsley town centre react to tier three restrictions being announced\n\nSouth Yorkshire will move into tier three from 00.01 on Saturday, meaning 7.3 million people in England will be living under the toughest Covid rules.\n\nSheffield City region mayor Dan Jarvis said the move followed \"extensive discussions\" with ministers.\n\nThe rules will apply to all council areas in South Yorkshire - Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield.\n\nGreater Manchester will be placed in the same tier on Friday, against local leaders' wishes.\n\nUnder tier three - England's \"very high\" level of alert which is already in place in Lancashire and Liverpool City Region - pubs and bars that do not serve substantial meals have to close, and there are further restrictions on households mixing.\n\nAdditional rules in South Yorkshire include the closure of betting shops, adult gaming centres, casinos, soft play centres and gym classes - though gyms will remain open.\n\nMeanwhile, Coventry is to move to tier two from midnight on Friday, the city council has said, which will prevent households from mixing in homes and hospitality venues.\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak is expected to make an announcement relating to support for workers and businesses affected by tier two restrictions in the House of Commons on Thursday.\n\nBBC economics editor Faisal Islam said the government is understood to have acknowledged the reality that there are three tiers of pandemic shutdowns but only two tiers of support, with some firms suffering a collapse in business without being able to benefit from the Job Support Scheme.\n\nIt comes as a further 26,688 new coronavirus cases were recorded on Wednesday, while another 191 people were reported to have died within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nIt is the highest ever number of recorded daily cases. However, mass testing was not available during the peak of the pandemic, when daily cases were estimated to have reached as many as 100,000.\n\nHealth minister Edward Argar told MPs there have been more than 12,000 cases in South Yorkshire so far in October - more than in July, August and September combined - while the number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care has reached more than half that seen at the height of the pandemic.\n\nHe said he was aware the measures would \"entail further sacrifice\", but \"bearing down hard\" would help to slow the spread of coronavirus.\n\nDoncaster's infection rate was 316 cases per 100,000 people in the week ending 17 October, compared to 370 in Rotherham, 395 in Sheffield and 415 in Barnsley.\n\nLocal leaders in South Yorkshire have agreed to a financial package of £41m, which includes £30m to support the region's businesses and £11m for local authorities to support public health measures like contact tracing.\n\nMr Jarvis said it was the \"responsible route\" and that \"inaction was not an option\" after its hospital admissions doubled in 10 days.\n\nHe insisted he had \"moved heaven and earth to secure the maximum amount\" of support for the region, which he said would help to reduce the re-infection rate and pressure on the NHS, while supporting the local economy.\n\nIt comes a day after new restrictions were imposed on Greater Manchester after talks with local leaders, who had called for at least £65m, broke down.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said the £60m offered to Greater Manchester to support businesses and workers affected by the new restrictions would be distributed to the region's boroughs.\n\nWe all knew it was coming. But I was still surprised when the announcement leapt into my inbox at 09:02 BST this morning.\n\nOver a million people in South Yorkshire are to go into tier three on Saturday. The phone started ringing and it hasn't stopped yet.\n\nAgreed - or imposed? It depends who you talk to. It has been signed off by South Yorkshire but it doesn't mean all the leaders are happy about how it happened.\n\nChris Read, the Rotherham Council leader, is angrier than I've ever seen him.\n\nHe says it wasn't a negotiation at all - just the government telling South Yorkshire what it was prepared to offer. His point is if that was the case, why not do it a week earlier?\n\nMiriam Cates, the Conservative Penistone and Stocksbridge MP, says it's a fair deal and heaped praise on Labour mayor Dan Jarvis.\n\nWe're all digesting how it will affect us day to day. People will be working out how to run their businesses, provide childcare and take care of their mental health.\n\nA review is coming in 28 days but there is no magic number for when an area comes out of tier three.\n\nPeople in South Yorkshire are being asked to bear the toughest restrictions, without knowing when they'll end.\n\nThe government's three-tier strategy of regional measures is designed to avoid a national lockdown.\n\nAny areas in tier three will have its status reviewed after 28 days, the prime minister said.\n\nThe simplest way for areas to get out of those restrictions was to get the reproduction number, the rate at which the virus is spreading, down to one or below, Boris Johnson told MPs. Rates of admission to hospital and other data would also be taken into account, he added.\n\nMr Jarvis said it would be \"very challenging\" for his region to come out of tier three in 28 days \"given the pressures of winter\", but urged people to renew their efforts to ensure all local authorities had a \"fighting chance\" of coming out by then.\n\nOther areas in tier two but known to be in discussions about tighter restrictions are West Yorkshire, the North East, Teesside and Nottinghamshire.\n\nTalks between council leaders and No 10 about moving the North East into tier three have been \"paused\" following a fall in the region's infection rate over the past week.\n\nDavid Mellen, leader of Nottingham City Council, said no \"serious conversations\" have been scheduled with ministers or senior civil servants, but he would expect any economic deal to be as good as other areas have received.\n\nJamie Hawksworth, who owns the Sheffield Tap, said he saw the new restrictions coming - but that won't lessen the impact.\n\n\"I think I speak for most of my staff, and certainly the management team, that it's devastating. We've had the entire business pulled from under us.\"\n\nHe added that the knock-on effect would be fewer orders for local breweries, abattoirs and other suppliers.\n\nMeanwhile, Prof John Edmunds, a scientist advising the government, warned there was \"very little chance\" that Covid-19 would be eradicated.\n\nHe told two MPs' committees that people would have to learn to live with the virus \"forever more\" but it was an \"almost certainty\" that a vaccine could be ready in the \"not-too-distant future\", possibly towards the end of winter.\n\nHow have you been affected by the issues relating to coronavirus? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"We do need to see faster turnaround times\"\n\nEngland's NHS Test and Trace system needs to improve to provide faster results, Boris Johnson has conceded.\n\nAt Thursday's coronavirus briefing, he said he shared \"people's frustrations\" at the turnaround times for results.\n\nThe government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said it was \"very clear there's room for improvement\" in the system.\n\nIt comes as figures showed just 15.1% of people who were tested received their result within 24 hours.\n\nThese figures, for the week ending 14 October, are the lowest since the system began.\n\nThe PM previously pledged that all tests would be processed within 24 hours - unless there were issues with postal tests - by the end of June.\n\nSpeaking at a press conference at Downing Street, Mr Johnson said: \"I share people's frustrations and I understand totally why we do need to see faster turnaround times and we need to improve it.\n\n\"We need to make sure that people who do get a positive test self-isolate - that's absolutely crucial if this thing is going to work in the way that it can.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance says there is \"room for improvement\" in test and trace\n\nSir Patrick Vallance said the capacity for testing had increased, but \"it's really important to concentrate on numbers of contacts, isolation, as quickly as you can and getting things (results) back as quickly as you can. Ideally you get the whole process done within 48 hours\".\n\n\"It's very clear there's room for improvement on all that and therefore that could be diminishing the effectiveness of this.\"\n\nHe also said the the high number of infections diminished the effectiveness of the system.\n\nThe percentage of people who received a test result within 24 hours has dropped from 32.8% in the previous week.\n\nThe figures also showed a fall to 59.6% in the proportion of close contacts reached of people who tested positive.\n\nThis is also the lowest weekly percentage since the system began and is down from 63% in the previous week.\n\nThe UK recorded another 21,242 cases on Thursday and 189 more deaths within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nSir Patrick also told the briefing some coronavirus measures would be needed for some time to come.\n\n\"The numbers (of cases) speak for themselves. They are increasing and they are not going to decrease quickly,\" he told the No 10 news conference.\n\n\"I think it is likely that some measures of restriction are going to need to be in place for a while to try and get those numbers down.\"\n\nSir Patrick added that \"a lot depends now on what happens over the next few weeks\".\n\n\"At the moment, the numbers are heading in the wrong direction but there are some signs in some places of a potential flattening off of that.\n\n\"We need to wait and see and monitor the numbers very carefully.\"\n\nEarlier the government released a job advert looking for a \"VP of operations\" to start immediately, with experience of \"turning around failing call centres\" on a day rate of up to £2,000.\n\nHours later, the Department of Health withdrew the advert, saying it was being redrafted and the text had not been approved.\n\nShadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said the statistics on test and trace \"have been bad every week\", while his colleague, shadow health minister, Justin Madders said: \"To have over 40% of people not even being contacted by the test and trace system is an interstellar-sized black hole in the government's plan to reduce transmission.\"\n\nProf James Naismith, director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute at the University of Oxford, said the numbers showed \"a system struggling to make any difference to the epidemic\".\n\nHe said he worried the increasing percentage of household contacts indicated \"a tick-box system rather than proper tracing\" with the value of the system being in reaching non-household contacts who are infectious but asymptomatic.\n\nMr Naismith added the system \"has given a bird's eye view of the pandemic and done very little to halt it\".", "The claim: Employees unable to work in tier 3 areas will get a combination of Job Support Scheme and Universal Credit, which will mean they get 80% of their wages.\n\nVerdict: While that will be the case for some workers, especially those on very low incomes, some workers will get less than 80% under the new scheme.\n\nThe prime minister has repeatedly claimed that employees of closed businesses in tier 3 areas will get 80% of their income.\n\nThis is important because the furlough scheme, which closes at the end of October, made sure such workers received 80% of their wages up to a maximum of £2,500.\n\nBut the Job Support Scheme, which will replace it in November, will provide 67% of normal salary up to a maximum of £2,100 a month.\n\nGreater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and several MPs have called for the support to be increased to 80%.\n\nBut Boris Johnson claims that the addition of Universal Credit (UC) means that it is already worth 80%.\n\n\"Combine the Universal Credit with the Job Support Scheme that we've just announced and workers will be getting 80% of their existing salary,\" he said at Prime Minister's Questions on 21 October.\n\nWhether a worker gets Universal Credit on top of the job support scheme depends on a number of factors such as the level of their income, whether they have savings and whether they have children.\n\nWhen the prime minister made the claim on 16 October he specified that he was talking about those on low incomes - clearly those on higher incomes will not qualify for Universal Credit and may be above the £2,100 a month limit for the Job Support Scheme.\n\nIt is certainly the case that some workers on low incomes will get at least 80% of their usual wages. In particular, people whose wages were low enough for them to qualify for Universal Credit before their employers were forced to close, are likely to get at least 80% of their wages.\n\nBut it is also the case that some workers will get less than 80%.\n\nWe asked the Department for Work and Pensions how the prime minister had reached this figure and were told: \"Those on low incomes getting the full entitlement [of Universal Credit] will receive at least 80% of their normal income.\"\n\nThe DWP said that the full entitlement meant the amount that you would get without reductions for having savings.\n\nThe point is that the prime minister failed to mention those who do not get UC at all, or only get a bit of it, who would receive less than 80% of their usual income.\n\nAn example comes from from the Institute for Fiscal Studies - a single person with no children who owns their own home and earns £11,000 a year, would be entitled to a bit of UC if they were put on the Job Support Scheme, but not much, so they would end up on 73% of their usual income.\n\nAlso, the amount of UC you are eligible for starts reducing once you have £6,000 in savings and a worker who has £16,000 in savings will not qualify for any UC, regardless of any other factors. So such a worker would not get 80%.", "Stoke-on-Trent, Coventry and Slough are to move into tier two restrictions on Saturday, the government has announced.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said in all of these areas the infection rate was over 100 per 100,000 people.\n\nMr Hancock also said discussions were under way over moving Warrington into the highest level of restrictions.\n\nIt comes as a minister said people should inform themselves about which rules apply to their area amid complaints the system is confusing.\n\nMr Hancock told the House of Commons the new restrictions would come into force in Stoke-on-Trent, Coventry and Slough on 00:01 on Saturday.\n\nStoke-on-Trent City Council had asked Mr Hancock for the area to be placed into \"high\" tier two restrictions amid a rise in infection rates.\n\nUnder the high alert level, there is a ban on households mixing indoors, including in pubs and restaurants, and people are encouraged to reduce their use of public transport.\n\nMr Hancock said cases in the areas moving into tier two were doubling around every fortnight - \"and we're seeing a concerning increase of cases among the over-60s\".\n\nSpeaking about Warrington, he said: \"We will formally start the talks and I hope that we can reach an agreement and a resolution soon.\"\n\nEarlier, the minister for crime and policing, Kit Malthouse, said England's three alert categories involves some \"complexity\" and recommended people go online to look up the measures.\n\nHe said everyone has an \"individual duty towards\" collective public health.\n\nPolice have said the new system makes the rules harder to enforce.\n\nMr Malthouse told BBC Breakfast that most people were complying and the number of fines issued by police was \"tiny\".\n\nHowever, he said officers were enforcing the rules where there are people \"taking the mickey\" - particularly those holding unlicensed music events.\n\n\"There's plenty of information out there on the internet where people can go and inform themselves about what the regulations are in their area and that fundamentally is what we would recommend everybody has to do,\" he said.\n\n\"We all need to recognise we have an individual duty towards our collective health and that means informing ourselves about what the regulations are in our area and complying with the rules.\"\n\nIan Hopkins, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, told BBC Radio Manchester that officers are still called to around 400 house parties a week - but do not want to give out fines for breaches of coronavirus rules.\n\nHe said crime was back at levels last seen before the pandemic.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nOn Wednesday, police officers told the Home Affairs Select Committee that coronavirus restrictions were clear and easy to enforce in the spring, but the tier system introduced this month has made it harder.\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Owen Weatherill, one officer leading the response to the pandemic in England, said he has asked the government to simplify its messages to make them easier for the public to understand.\n\nHe told MPs he initially thought there would be \"simplified, consistent tiers\" under the new alert system - but nuances were \"creeping in\".\n\nThat, he said, leads to people becoming \"worn down, confused and less likely to comply\" because \"they don't know what to comply with\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMr Weatherill said there was further confusion because recent changes mixed regulations, which are enforceable by the police, with guidance, which is not.\n\nSometimes the police had not seen regulations drafted by the Department of Health until they had come into force, he said.\n\n\"I think introducing them in the way that we have done has introduced greater confusion,\" Mr Weatherhill added.\n\nThe committee was also told that only around half of the fixed penalty notices issued during the pandemic have been paid.\n\nOfficers told MPs they are focusing on clear breaches of the law, like illegal raves, rather than fining members of the public who are confused.\n\nAndy Rhodes, Chief Constable of Lancashire said his area had been through up to five changes in the rules - and that breaches increased as it moved from tier two to tier three.\n\n\"It was almost as if people felt we'll have a last blast,\" he said.", "More than £3bn of furlough job protection money could have been stolen by criminal gangs and employers, the National Audit Office (NAO) has said.\n\nThe spending watchdog said up to £2bn of taxpayer money may have gone to criminals using fake companies.\n\nFirms also claimed for workers not on furlough or inflated the money needed.\n\nThe NAO, which has already warned about \"bounceback\" business loan fraud, said nearly one in 10 workers on furlough had been asked to work by their boss.\n\nThe government defended the scheme as a \"lifeline\" without which lives would have been ruined during lockdown.\n\nBut in a report on Friday, the NAO said it was brought in so rapidly in March that \"considerable levels of fraud and error\" were likely.\n\nDesigned to help those who could not work due to lockdown, the Coronavirus Jobs Retention Scheme scheme supported more than 9.6 million workers at its peak.\n\nWorkers on leave have been paid 80% of their salaries, in full or part by the government, although it will be replaced by a less generous jobs scheme from 1 November.\n\nThe NAO said that a fraud hotline set up by the tax authorities, HMRC, received over 10,000 reports of contraventions, while its own survey, conducted by Ispos Mori, found 9% of furloughed workers had continued to work at the request of their boss.\n\nLondon's usually bustling Regent Street in June. Large parts of the economy were forced to shut down during lockdown.\n\nSome employers had also claimed furlough payments but not passed them on in full to employees, the NAO said.\n\nBy May about a third of the UK workforce was on furlough, while at least 2.6 million self-employed were also given state support via a separate programme.\n\nHowever, the NAO said as many as 2.9 million people were unable to access any help, \"either because of ministerial decisions about where to focus support, or because HMRC did not have data needed to properly guard against the risk of fraud\".\n\nThe civil service had done well to launch the job protection schemes so quickly, said Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, but due to the pace at which they were introduced it had not been able to follow standard procedures.\n\nHe said the tax office should have done more to prevent fraud including informing employees whether their employer was part of the furlough scheme.\n\n\"In future, the departments should do more while employment support schemes are running to protect employees and counter acts of fraud,\" Mr Davies said.\n\nEarlier this month MPs on the Public Accounts Committee also warned that setting up the schemes at such short notice had left \"unacceptable room for fraud\".\n\nThe NAO is recommending that any future support schemes should consider how to ensure more people are eligible, if they have suffered loss of income, as well as how to prevent further fraud.\n\nThe Treasury and HMRC should also focus on assessing fraud and error and recovering overpayments.\n\nA government spokesperson said it made \"no apology\" for the speed at which the schemes were delivered.\n\n\"The government's priority from the start of the outbreak has been on protecting jobs and getting support to those who need it as quickly as possible, and our employment support schemes have provided a lifeline to millions of hardworking families across the UK.\n\n\"Our schemes were designed to minimise fraud from the outset and we have rejected or blocked thousands of fraudulent claims. We will not tolerate those who seek to defraud taxpayers and will take action against perpetrators, including criminal prosecution.\"", "Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency in 2016 with a pledge to bring down illegal immigration, famously blaming undocumented migrants from Mexico for a host of problems, including drugs and crime. In the four years since, how has this rhetoric translated into a wider immigration policy?\n\nThe number of foreign-born people living in the US has risen by about 3% from 43.7 million the year before Mr Trump's election to about 45 million last year.\n\nBut this rise conceals a big shift in the largest group by far within this population - those who have moved to the US from Mexico. Having remained at nearly the same level for years, the number of people living in the US who were born in Mexico has fallen steadily since Mr Trump's election.\n\nWhile this dip was more than offset by an increase in the number of people who have moved to the US from elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, demographers at the US Census Bureau have estimated that net migration - the number of people moving to the US minus those moving out of the US - has fallen to its lowest level for a decade.\n\nThis is partly due to lower levels of immigration, but also because more people who were born outside the US are moving back overseas, according to Anthony Knapp of the US Census Bureau.\n\nBeneath this trend there are some important changes to the visa system.\n\nMr Trump has allowed more people to come to the US temporarily for work, but made it harder for people to settle permanently in the US. The reduction in permanent visas, from about 1.2 million in 2016 to about 1 million in 2019, has primarily affected family members of US citizens and residents hoping to join their relatives, with the number of permanent visas sponsored by employers largely unchanged.\n\nAlthough more people are affected by this, in percentage terms his most significant change to immigration policy has been to lower the number of refugees admitted to the US.\n\nThe number of people admitted to the US as refugees each year is determined by a system of quotas, the size of which are ultimately defined by the president. People seeking to move to the US as refugees must make their applications from outside the country, and need to convince US officials that they are vulnerable to persecution at home.\n\nMr Trump's hostility to any immigration from Muslim-majority countries is well known - he once pledged to enact a \"complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States\" - and a reduction in refugee quotas proved easier to implement than an outright ban, which became mired in legal challenges.\n\nAs a result, the number of refugees admitted from a number of majority-Muslim countries, including Iraq, Somalia, Iran and Syria, fell almost to zero soon after he took office.\n\nCurbing visas and refugee admissions is not the only way to reduce the number of people entering the country, and Mr Trump has also sought to make it harder to move to, or remain in, the US without any relevant documentation.\n\nHowever, this is more difficult than it might seem. To understand what has happened during President Trump's tenure, we first need to get to grips with what the official statistics on deportation mean, and they are broken down into two categories.\n\nPeople are said to be \"removed\" if they are taken out of the country under the authority of a court order, and people are \"returned\" if they are refused admission while trying to cross the border, or asked to leave the country without a court order.\n\nBeing removed has a lasting legal consequence, making it much harder to gain re-entry to the country. But many people who have been returned across the US-Mexico border simply tried to enter the US again at a later date. President Obama escalated a policy enacted by his predecessor, President George W Bush, to step up removals - particularly of those who had been accused or convicted of criminal offences.\n\nPresident Trump has not brought about any significant changes to the number of people in either deportation category compared with his predecessor.\n\nThe US Immigration, Customs and Enforcement agency, which handles most deportations, has described the current rate of removals as \"extremely low\", blaming a lack of resources and \"judicial and legislative constraints\", among other things.\n\nThe agency is also under pressure at the Mexican border, where the administration's changes to asylum policy have resulted a long backlog of cases, sometimes with families separated and children held in detention centres, and asylum seekers being returned to Mexico to await the processing of their claims.\n\nDespite widespread media coverage of the border crisis, the data for 2019 suggests that would-be migrants have not been deterred - the number of detentions at the border was more than double the number for the previous year, driven largely by a large rise in the number of families attempting to get across.\n\nThis shift is likely to translate into a significant rise in the returns numbers for 2019, which are due to be released in the next few months.\n\nOne interesting question is whether President Trump's tough stance on immigration is still a major selling point among his supporters. The number of people telling pollsters that immigration is a bad thing has fallen steadily since he took office, with many former detractors apparently now believing it is generally good for the US.\n\nAlthough there remains a gulf between Democratic and Republican voters on the issue, with Republicans far less likely to see immigration in a positive light, and far more likely to want stricter curbs on illegal immigration, the trend among both groups is the same.\n\nMr Trump will be hoping that there remain enough Republican supporters of his approach to help push him past the winning post on election night.", "Durham University says such behaviour \"will not be tolerated\"\n\nStudents have been left feeling \"threatened\" and unsafe after a LGBT university association Zoom meeting was \"hijacked\" by more than 15 people shouting \"homophobic slurs\".\n\nThe online meeting at Durham University was disrupted with loud music, shouted abuse and \"sexually explicit videos\", say LGBT groups at the university.\n\nThe event was for new students who are already facing Covid restrictions.\n\nDurham University said such behaviour \"will not be tolerated\".\n\n\"To hijack an event like this in such an aggressive and targeted way is nothing less than a hate crime,\" said a statement from LGBT groups at the university, including St Mary's College, where the incident took place earlier this month.\n\nThe anonymous attackers were able to join the Zoom meeting through an address shared within the college for the welcoming event.\n\nSuch \"malicious behaviour\" was even worse when the pandemic made it difficult for students to meet in person and support each other, said the LGBT associations' statement.\n\n\"The fact that this was not simply an individual acting alone, but rather a co-ordinated attack from a number of people, is a reminder of how routinely unsafe and unwelcome our community is made to feel,\" said the LGBT groups, which warned of a \"toxic culture\" at the university.\n\nEarlier this week, the Guardian reported on claims that students at Durham were being bullied and mocked over their northern accents and coming from poorer backgrounds.\n\nLast month, Durham University condemned what it called \"utterly abhorrent\" comments on social media by students set to start at the university.\n\nIt included references to competing to have sex with \"the poorest girl\".\n\nSam Dale, the university's director of student support and wellbeing, said the university knew of the \"Zoom bombing\" and how it had left participants feeling \"distressed\".\n\n\"Such behaviour is not acceptable at Durham University and will not be tolerated. Incidents will be reported to the police.\n\n\"Every member of the university is expected to treat others with respect and tolerance so that every member of our community can live, study and work in a safe and inclusive environment,\" said Mr Dale.", "Pubs in South Yorkshire will only be allowed to stay open if they serve a \"substantial meal\"\n\nBusiness owners in South Yorkshire fear for their survival prospects as they face tighter coronavirus restrictions.\n\nTier three restrictions will apply in the area from 00:01 on Saturday, it has been confirmed.\n\nThe rules impose further restrictions on households mixing, while pubs that do not serve substantial meals must close.\n\nOne pub owner in Sheffield says the hospitality sector has been \"thrown under a bus\".\n\nJamie Hawksworth, who owns the Sheffield Tap, said he saw the new restrictions coming.\n\n\"I think I speak for most of my staff, and certainly the management team, that it's devastating. We've had the entire business pulled from under us.\"\n\nHe added that the knock-on effect would be fewer orders for local breweries, abattoirs and other suppliers.\n\n\"Hospitality only accounts to 3% of the Covid risk at the moment,\" he said.\n\n\"We pay the most to the government and receive the least. We're basically being thrown under the bus, we're the scapegoat.\"\n\nPub owner Jamie Hawksworth says businesses like his have become \"the scapegoat\"\n\nThe Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) said publicans had done everything to make their premises Covid-secure and the news would be \"absolutely devastating\" for pubs and breweries.\n\nChief executive Tom Stainer said: \"If pubs across South Yorkshire are to avoid becoming a sacrificial lamb then they need a decent, long-term financial support package.\n\n\"This must properly compensate pubs for having to either close altogether or stay open with extremely low footfall whilst they serve food.\"\n\nHe said help would also be needed after restrictions were lifted to avoid pubs having to \"close their doors for good before Christmas\".\n\nThe family-run Acorn Brewery in Wombwell, Barnsley, is facing similar worries to other businesses.\n\nThe microbrewery's managing director Dave Hughes said the business was operating at about 20% of the level it was at before the pandemic.\n\n\"The whole hospitality sector seems to have been hit very hard compared to other places,\" he said.\n\nThe team of 11 at the brewery has been reduced to four.\n\n\"Our team has been broken up and it causes a lot of stress and anxiety,\" Mr Hughes said.\n\nHe said about 95% of his business was supplying pubs, bars and restaurants - like most microbreweries.\n\nMicrobrewery manager Dave Hughes says the restrictions mean a lot of \"stress and anxiety\"\n\nMr Hughes also runs a real ale pub which would have to close under the new restrictions.\n\n\"We can't offer a substantial meal. A lots of pubs that don't have a food offering will suffer and those that do, will they get the footfall?\n\n\"I suppose, in a sense, tier three for our pub, at least there is funding that we can now tap into.\"\n\nHe also has concerns about how trade will recover when the restrictions end.\n\n\"People find the new norm and go to different outlets and when you do reopen you have to battle to get them back.\"\n\nPubs that close under tier three rules will be eligible for financial support\n\nPaul McNicholas runs three bars in Barnsley and welcomed the tier three restrictions as it means financial support.\n\nHe said people were not coming out due to the 22:00 curfew and social mixing restrictions and he had only been opening at the weekend.\n\n\"We were finding it difficult to operate under the present restrictions on level two so there was a likelihood we would have closed anyway.\n\n\"We were opening the bars and they were running at a loss.\"\n\nOn the new restrictions he said he thought he could cope with the initial 28-day period, but was hopeful they would reopen before Christmas.\n\n\"We are reliant a lot on Christmas and I am trying to be optimistic but we feel that we do need that period,\" he said.\n\nFollow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk or send video here.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Martin Usborne's family spent a lot of time in isolation answering phone call after phone call\n\nTwo weeks ago, Martin Usborne, a publisher who lives in east London, found out a close family contact had coronavirus. A few days later his wife, Ann, and their one-year-old daughter, also tested positive.\n\nFrom that moment on, Martin says his wife's phone would not stop ringing. Over the course of 10 days, Ann had 30 separate calls from NHS Test and Trace that she managed to pick up. On top of this were another 27 calls that were missed. And then there were the half a dozen calls her husband received.\n\n\"At one point she would finish one call and as soon as she put the phone down - literally seconds later - another contact tracer would ring. And as soon as that call was over, test-and-trace would call my phone.\n\n\"This really was not the easiest situation to deal with, particularly while looking after our two small children,\" Mr Usborne told the BBC.\n\nSome calls were made because Ann had been in contact with the family acquaintance, who works in her home, while others were to tell her that her young girls (one and three years old) had been near the same person.\n\nNext came the calls because Ann had tested positive, calls because her little one had tested positive and then calls to alert her older toddler that she had been in contact with someone else one who had the virus (this time her mother).\n\nThe family understands some of these calls were necessary and is keen to stress that everyone they spoke to was kind and considerate and did their job well, but Mr Usborne is very concerned there has been a significant waste of resources.\n\n\"The majority of calls were long and repetitive, with different callers reading out the same script each time, asking the same questions and giving the same answers,\" he says.\n\nAnd the family say when they told contact tracers they had heard the exact same thing several times already, the callers apologised but said they would have to complete the entire phone call or it would not register and someone else would simply ring again.\n\nMr Usborne told the BBC: \"Essentially we were dealing with a broken excel spreadsheet, personified by a very nice person.\n\n\"In a way it was quite impressive as they were really persistent - but it was like a dog who had got the wrong bone.\"\n\nLater in the week, calls from contact tracers became more helpful, with some checking the family were OK and giving them information on when their isolation would end.\n\nBut Mr Usborne says they received conflicting advice about how long they had to remain at home. The NHS Covid-19 app recommended his wife stay indoors a few days longer than contact tracers suggested, for example.\n\nHe added: \"The people were super-nice about it but one contact tracer admitted they worked on a different system to the app and would continue to use theirs. Which one is right?\"\n\nThey are now not quite certain when exactly it is safe to go out and are isolating for the longest suggested time. And, more crucially, they say they are not sure if they can trust the advice at all.\n\nThe family feels there needs to be a lot more done to join up the dots, so that contact tracers are alerted if someone has already been called and the system recognises when callers have already spoken to parents or carers responsible for small children in the same household.\n\nMr Usborne also feels there should be a way for the hard-working humans on the other end of the phone to override the computer system if a family tells them they have received multiple, repetitive calls, all week long.\n\nAccording to the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS Test and Trace has reached a total of 901,151 people since it was started.\n\nThe first week of October saw the service successfully reach 76.8% of people who tested positive and 76.9% of contacts where communication details were provided.\n\nBut there have been issues over the time taken for test results to be returned.\n\nAnd the system had its worst week for reaching close contacts who were not in the same household as the person testing positive. Just 62% were reached in the week to 7 October, down from 67% the week before.\n\nIn the same week, the number of people transferred to test-and-trace more than doubled, to 88,000.\n\nA spokesperson said the government's test-and-trace programme \"is working hard to break chains of transmission, with over 900,000 people who may otherwise have unknowingly spreading coronavirus contacted and told to isolate\".\n\n\"We all have a crucial part to play in keeping the number of new infections down, which is why there is now a legal duty to self-isolate, and steps have been taken to make sure that people are complying with the rules.\"\n• None Who can still get free Covid tests?", "American voters will face a clear choice for president on election day, between Republican incumbent Donald Trump and Democratic hopeful Joe Biden.\n\nHere's a look at what they stand for and how their policies compare on eight key issues.\n\nPresident Trump set up a coronavirus task force at the end of January which he says has now shifted its focus to \"safety and opening up our country\".\n\nThe president is also prioritising the speedy development of coronavirus treatments and vaccines, directing $10bn towards such projects.\n\nMr Biden wants to set up a national contact-tracing programme, establish at least 10 testing centres in every state, and provide free coronavirus testing to all.\n\nHe supports a nationwide mask mandate, which would require face coverings to be worn on federal property.\n\nPresident Trump is a climate change sceptic, and wants to expand non-renewable energy. He aims to increase drilling for oil and gas, and roll back further environmental protections.\n\nHe has committed to withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord - the international agreement on tackling climate change - which the US will formally leave later this year.\n\nMr Biden says he would immediately re-join the Paris climate agreement if elected.\n\nHe wants the US to reach net zero emissions by 2050, and proposes banning new leases for oil and gas drilling on public lands, as well as a $2tn investment in green energy.\n\nPresident Trump has pledged to create 10 million jobs in 10 months, and create one million new small businesses.\n\nHe wants to deliver an income tax cut, and provide companies with tax credits to incentivise them to keep jobs in the US.\n\nMr Biden wants to raise taxes for high earners to pay for investment in public services, but says the increase will only impact those earning over $400,000 a year.\n\nHe supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15 (£11.50) an hour from the current rate of $7.25 (£5.50).\n\nPresident Trump wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed under President Obama, which increased the federal government's regulation of the private health insurance system, including making it illegal to deny coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions. He says he wants to improve and replace it, although no details of the plan have been published.\n\nThe president also aims to lower drug prices by allowing imports of cheaper ones from abroad.\n\nMr Biden wants to protect and expand the ACA.\n\nHe wants to lower the eligibility age for Medicare, the policy which provides medical benefits to the elderly, from 65 to 60. He also wants to give all Americans the option to enrol in a public health insurance plan similar to Medicare.\n\nPresident Trump has reiterated his promise to bring down US troop levels overseas, while continuing to invest in the military.\n\nThe president says he will continue to challenge international alliances and maintain trade tariffs on China.\n\nMr Biden has promised to repair relationships with US allies.\n\nHe says he would do away with unilateral tariffs on China, and instead hold them accountable with an international coalition that China \"can't afford to ignore\".\n\nPresident Trump says he doesn't believe racism is a systemic problem within US police forces.\n\nHe has positioned himself as a firm advocate of law enforcement, but has opposed chokeholds and offered grants for improved practices.\n\nMr Biden views racism as a systemic problem, and has set out policies to address racial disparities in the justice system, such as grants to incentivise states in reducing incarceration rates.\n\nHe has rejected calls to defund police, saying additional resources should instead be tied to maintaining proper standards.\n\nPresident Trump has an expansive interpretation of the US constitution's Second Amendment protections giving Americans the right to bear arms.\n\nHe did propose tightening background checks on gun buyers after a string of mass shootings in 2019, but nothing came of the plan and no further legislation has been put forward.\n\nMr Biden has proposed banning assault weapons, universal background checks, limiting the number of guns a person can purchase to one per month, and making it easier to sue negligent gun manufacturers and sellers.\n\nHe would also fund more research into preventing gun violence.\n\nPresident Trump says it's his constitutional right to fill the vacancy on the court during the remainder of his first term in office, and has put forward conservative judge, Amy Coney Barrett.\n\nOne issue that the Supreme Court could soon rule on is the legal right to abortion in the US - something the president and Judge Barrett have opposed in the past.\n\nMr Biden wants the vacancy to be filled after the next president enters office.\n\nHe says if elected he would work to pass legislation to guarantee a woman's right to an abortion if the Supreme Court rules against it.", "The students were fined after officers spotted a house party in Kimbolton Avenue\n\nFour university students have been fined £10,000 each after telling police who broke up their house party they were \"spoiling their fun\".\n\nOfficers on patrol spotted a party in Lenton, Nottingham, on Tuesday night but were told everyone had left.\n\nBut inside they found more than 30 people hiding and, when challenged, organisers complained they should be having the \"time of their lives\".\n\nNottingham Trent University said the third-year students had been suspended.\n\nMixing of households indoors has been banned since Nottingham went into tier two restrictions on 14 October.\n\nOn Tuesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said talks over moving Nottinghamshire into tier three were \"ongoing\" but the city council's leader said no discussions had started.\n\nNottingham had the highest level of infection in England for nine days running, with many of the cases centring on areas with a high student population.\n\nPolice said after being told the party in Kimbolton Avenue had ended, officers found people hiding in the kitchen, upstairs bedrooms and basement.\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Kate Meynell said the people at the property had shown a \"blatant disregard for the safety of those around them\".\n\n\"This needs to stop. The claims that police presented as a barrier to the students' fun are astounding,\" she said.\n\n\"How many fines do we have to give before the message is understood? We do not take pleasure in handing out fines and would much rather be in a situation where students could enjoy themselves but the reality is that if people do not follow the Covid-19 restrictions, more people will die.\"\n\nA spokesperson for Nottingham Trent University said: \"Any student who is found to have breached our disciplinary regulations can face a range of sanctions, up to and including expulsion.\"\n\nThe coronavirus infection rate for Nottingham has dropped again compared to the same time a week earlier.\n\nIn the seven days up to 18 October there were 2,012 new cases, down from 3,085 in the previous weekly period.\n\nThe rate of infection per 100,000 people has also gone down from 926.7 in the week up to 11 October to 604.4.\n\nFor a third day, the city has the second highest rate in England, behind Knowsley in Merseyside.\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. More than a dozen people have been evacuated from nearby properties\n\nTwo people have been killed in a suspected gas explosion at a shop in west London, firefighters have said.\n\nThe blast happened in a hair salon and mobile phone shop on King Street, Southall, just after 06:30 BST.\n\nFour adults and a child are known to have been rescued by the London Fire Brigade (LFB).\n\nEarlier, the Metropolitan Police said one man was found injured. The blast is not being treated as suspicious, the force said.\n\nThe explosion has damaged the Dr Phone shop and the Chandla Hair Salon on King Street\n\nStation Commander Paul Morgan said: \"Our crews continue to search the property using specialist equipment including the use of urban search-and-rescue dogs.\n\n\"We can confirm that sadly two people have died at the scene.\n\n\"The explosion caused substantial damage to the shop and structural damage throughout.\n\n\"It is a painstaking and protracted incident with firefighters working systematically to stabilise the building and search for people involved.\"\n\nLondon Fire Brigade sent about 40 firefighters to the scene\n\nLFB said search and rescue operations have finished for the evening and will restart in the morning.\n\nJatinder Sing, the owner of Dr Phone, said he was in \"total shock\" when he received a call about the blast.\n\nThe 36-year-old said: \"They have closed off everything. It seems like an explosion of a gas cylinder and there is a flat upstairs and my shop is downstairs.\n\n\"I was shocked because my shop looks totally dead, finished and the same with the barber.\n\n\"I can't see anything from where I am standing apart from the the shutter and the main door, which is all trashed.\n\n\"I have lost my everything. We were struggling from the coronavirus period as well - too much stock in the shop and no sales for a long time so I don't know how we will survive.\"\n\nRescuers are involved in a \"complex\" search for anyone who might still be inside the collapsed building\n\nResident Nurmila Hamid who lives nearby said she felt the blast as she was getting her children ready for school.\n\nThe 38-year-old said: \"The house shook, and I turned to my husband and said 'what is that?'\n\n\"And he said, 'It's a blast' and he went to look after taking the children to school - he said it was at a phone shop.\"\n\nMohammad Rafiq, 78, who lives two streets away, said he and his 76-year-old wife felt \"shocked\" and \"scared\" when the noise from the King Street blast woke them at their home.\n\nHe said: \"I heard it in the morning - it woke me up, it was scary. It sounded like a very dangerous blast so I was scared.\n\n\"We didn't sleep after that.\"\n\nSixteen people are known to have been evacuated from nearby properties\n\nI have counted 25 firefighters here sifting through the wreckage on King Street with the police this morning.\n\nThe explosion has also shut off a number of streets, with the police on the scene to prevent people approaching the scene.\n\nIt is a clear scene of devastation of several shops and flats, which the London Fire Brigade have called a \"structural collapse\". Sadly, it looks as though the explosion may have claimed a few lives.\n\nA further 14 adults and two children evacuated themselves from nearby properties after the blast.\n\nLFB was called at 06:38 and sent about 40 firefighters to the scene. It advised people to avoid the King Street area while the search continues.\n\nA London Ambulance Service spokeswoman said paramedics had treated and discharged one person.\n\nEaling Council said it had switched off the electricity and gas supply to some homes and businesses in the area and warned more properties might need to be evacuated.\n\nFor more London news follow on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.", "Michel Barnier resumed talks on Friday after arriving in the UK on Thursday evening.\n\nTalks over a post-Brexit trade deal have resumed in London, after negotiators returned to the table following a week-long standoff.\n\nInternational Trade Secretary Liz Truss insisted a deal can still be done with the EU, as officials began a new round of \"intensified\" daily talks.\n\nEU chief negotiator Michel Barnier has warned that \"every day counts\" ahead of a looming December deadline.\n\nHe said both sides share a \"huge common responsibility\" as talks restarted.\n\nNegotiations stalled last week after a summit in Brussels where EU leaders called on the UK to \"make the necessary moves\" towards a deal.\n\nBut the UK side agreed to resume talks after Mr Barnier said \"compromises on both sides\" were needed, in a speech on Wednesday.\n\nBoth sides are seeking an agreement to govern their trading relationship once the UK's post-Brexit transition period ends in January 2021.\n\nKey areas of disagreement include fishing rights, post-Brexit competition rules and how any deal would be enforced.\n\nSpeaking after the UK formally signed its post-Brexit trade deal with Japan, Ms Truss said the UK also wanted to strike a \"good deal with the EU\".\n\n\"We're in intense negotiations with the EU. We've made real progress,\" she told reporters on Friday.\n\nIn an interview with the BBC, she added any agreement would have to be based \"on the principle that the UK is a sovereign nation\".\n\nAt a signing ceremony in Tokyo, Japan's foreign minister also called on the EU and UK to reach a deal, which he said was important to Japanese firms.\n\nArriving in the UK on Thursday, ahead of a meeting with UK counterpart Lord David Frost, Mr Barnier told reporters it was \"important to be back at the table\".\n\nThe pair will meet again on Friday, during an \"initial\" renewed negotiation round running until Sunday, with subsequent talks planned in both Brussels and London.\n\nThese later talks could either take place in person or be held via video link if Covid restrictions apply, if both sides agree.\n\nIn line with a demand made by the UK, both sides will resume talks on all subjects based on proposed legal texts prepared by officials.\n\nThey have also agreed that \"nothing is agreed\" until progress has been reached in all areas - which has been a key demand of the EU.\n\nYou could be forgiven for thinking that what we've witnessed over the past few days is a bit of political theatre.\n\nCover for the government - post chest-beating- to return to the negotiating table where they know the time has now come for tough compromises to be made.\n\nEU leaders also went out of their way to sound tough on Brexit at their summit last week. Privately, a number of EU figures now admit it was a misstep.\n\nBut EU leaders play to the domestic gallery too. They wanted to show they were \"standing up to the UK\" - that leaving the EU doesn't pay and that EU interests would be defended.\n\nThe two sides have been at odds over the issue of so-called \"state aid\" rules, which limit government help for industry in the name of ensuring fair economic competition.\n\nThe UK has rejected an EU demand made earlier in the year for it to continue following the bloc's rules on such subsidies as part of a trade agreement.\n\nLord Frost has suggested the UK could instead agree \"principles\" for how subsidies are spent - something welcomed by Mr Barnier on Wednesday.\n\nThe two sides are also haggling over how much European fishing boats should be able to catch in British waters from next year.\n\nThe EU has so far resisted UK demands for annual talks to decide stock limits, as well as a reduction in access for its vessels to British fishing grounds.\n\nBy remaining in the bloc's single market and customs union, the UK has continued to follow EU trading rules during its post-Brexit transition period.\n\nThis 11-month period is due to end in December, and the UK has ruled out seeking an extension.\n\nFormal talks began in March and continued throughout the pandemic, initially via video link before in-person discussions resumed over the summer.\n\nIf a deal is not done, the UK will trade with the EU according to the default rules set by the Geneva-based World Trade Organization.", "Covid circuit breakers are \"doomed to fail\", according to a disease expert.\n\nIt comes as Health Minister Vaughan Gething said a circuit lockdown was being \"actively considered\" for Wales.\n\nThe short-term measures could include closing pubs and restaurants.\n\nBut Dr Roland Salmon, former director of communicable diseases at Public Health Wales, said: \"I simply don't think a circuit breaker will work.\"", "Online fashion group Asos added three million customers in the past year, with annual profits jumping thanks to cost-cutting and buyers returning fewer items amid the pandemic.\n\nIt now has 23.4 million customers, with more than seven million in the UK, where it makes the bulk of profits.\n\nWorldwide sales were up 19%, and pre-tax profits 329% at £142.1m, driven partly by fewer returned goods.\n\nBut Asos said it was worried about unemployment hitting young customers.\n\nIt singled out those in their 20s, for whom it said life was unlikely to return to normal for \"quite some time\".\n\nThe company's chief executive, Nick Beighton, also said he was expecting a \"very promotional\" trading period, starting at Halloween.\n\nHe also warned his company could take a hard hit from Brexit: \"If there is a Brexit deal with tariffs we would have to suck up a substantial amount of operating cost.\"\n\nSusannah Streeter, investment analyst at stockbrokers Hargreaves Lansdown, said the company was vulnerable in the face of continuing coronavirus restrictions: \"A depressed economic outlook may push down demand to refresh wardrobes.\n\n\"With venues forced to close at 10pm and the Christmas party season cancelled, profits from party wear will be thin. Job prospects are uncertain for its core group of customers in their 20s and so the company will have to be very choosy about the ranges and prices it offers.\"\n\nInvestors had marked the shares down 10% by lunchtime on worries trading could be tougher in the next few months.\n\nAs an online retailer, Asos is one of the few retailers that have benefitted from lockdown.\n\nThe company said in August it was expecting to see growth in profits and sales and these figures are at the higher end of the forecasts given then.\n\nIt also said buying habits had changed to reflect lifestyle changes enforced by the pandemic, and its customers were buying less special occasion-wear and more face products and leisurewear, fewer of which were likely to be returned.\n\nLike other online players, Asos had struggled with large volumes of returns in the past and had even threatened to block serial returners in 2019.\n\nHowever, its profit margin dipped slightly and it was cautious over the outlook for consumer demand as it said \"economic prospects and lifestyles of 20-somethings remain disrupted\" due to the coronavirus crisis.\n\nNick Beighton said: \"After a record first half which saw us make progress in addressing the performance issues of the previous financial year, the second half will always be defined by our response to Covid-19.\"\n\nHe added: \"I am pleased by the improvements we have made this year but there is still more for us to do to continue our progress.\n\n\"Whilst life for our 20-something customers is unlikely to return to normal for quite some time, Asos will continue to engage, respond and adapt as one of the few truly global leaders in online fashion retail.\"", "Gal Gadot played Wonder Woman in the 2017 Hollywood film\n\nPlans for a new movie about Cleopatra have sparked a controversy before filming has even started.\n\nThe role of the famed ancient Egyptian ruler is to be played by Israeli actress Gal Gadot, best known for her Hollywood depictions of Wonder Woman.\n\nThe announcement has led to a row on social media with some alleging \"cultural whitewashing\", where white actors portray people of colour.\n\nSome have said the role should instead go to an Arab or African actress.\n\nCleopatra was descended from an Ancient Greek family of rulers - the Ptolemy dynasty. She was born in Egypt in 69BC and ruled the Nile kingdom when it was a client state of Rome.\n\nGadot herself reportedly commissioned the film and will co-produce it.\n\nThe row reflects a growing debate in Hollywood over casting and identity, and whether actors should play characters of different ethnicities to themselves.\n\nWriter on Africa, James Hall, said he thought the filmmakers should find an African actress, of any race.\n\nUS writer Morgan Jerkins tweeted that Cleopatra should be played by someone \"darker than a brown paper bag\" as that would be more \"historically accurate\".\n\n\"Gal Gadot is a wonderful actress, but there is an entire pool of North African Actresses to pick from. Stop whitewashing my history!\" posted another user..\n\nOther social media users argued that Cleopatra was more Greek or Macedonian than Arab or African.\n\nThe row over Gal Gadot as Cleopatra draws on contemporary arguments over national culture, religion and gender politics.\n\nBut the ancient Middle East wouldn't conform to many of our modern views of identity.\n\nCleopatra was on the throne well before Christianity, for example, and centuries ahead of the Arab conquests of North Africa - she was the last of the Ptolemaic rulers; born in Egypt, descended from Ancient Greeks and dominated by Rome.\n\nBut there are plenty more problems with popular depictions of the ancient Nile Queen - often cast as a powerful seductress replete with a sensual, oriental mystique.\n\nThat image - including Elizabeth Taylor's famous portrayal - is likely a myth handed down to us by Latin love poets years after Cleopatra's death.\n\nThe thousands of depictions of her through the ages are \"based on a perilous series of deductions from fragmentary or flagrantly unreliable evidence\" according to the British historian Mary Beard.\n\nSo little is really known, she adds, that Cleopatra should appear to us today as \"the queen without a face\".\n\nStatues of Cleopatra have been preserved but historians say we cannot be sure exactly how she looked\n\nIsraeli commentators suggested some criticism was based in anti-Semitism.\n\nThe Jerusalem Post journalist Seth Frantzman said it made no sense to exclude Jews from playing roles from the Middle East, \"when Jews are primarily a people from the Middle East either with distant or recent roots.\n\nYou might also be interested in:\n\n\"The idea that casting should exclude Jews is shameful and shows a lack of education for the commentators,\" he said.\n\nIsrael's embassy in Washington tweeted: \"One icon playing another! Excited for this new take on Cleopatra!\"\n\nGal Gadot's spokesperson declined to comment on the row.", "Tuesday's launch took place from Blue Origin's test facility in West Texas\n\nA rocket built by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' space company has tested technology designed to return humans to the Moon in 2024.\n\nThe New Shepard booster, developed by Blue Origin, can land vertically on the ground after returning from space.\n\nThe rocket was carrying sensors, a computer and software designed to help space vehicles perform precision landings on other planetary bodies.\n\nNasa wants to try the technology on Earth before it's sent to the Moon.\n\nTuesday's test launch was the seventh for Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle, which is designed to carry space tourists on short \"sub-orbital\" trips.\n\nIt will eventually take passengers up to around 100km (62 miles) above the Earth, allowing them to experience microgravity. They will be carried up in a crew capsule mounted on top of New Shepard.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by NASA Technology This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis pressurised capsule features the largest windows ever sent into space, according to the company. After reaching space, the capsule separates from the booster and both vehicles fall to Earth.\n\nDuring Tuesday's test (known as NS-13), the capsule gently parachuted down, while the rocket performed a perfect powered landing.\n\n\"Today's flight was inspiring. Using New Shepard to simulate landing on the Moon is an exciting precursor to what the Artemis programme will bring to America,\" said Bob Smith, Blue Origin's chief executive.\n\nThe payload it was carrying for Nasa is called Splice, which stands for Safe and Precise Landing - Integrated Capabilities Evolution.\n\nIt consists of two sensor systems, a computer and advanced algorithms - sets of instructions designed to be implemented by a computer.\n\nThe purpose of sending it up on New Shepard was to test how the different elements of the payload work together.\n\n\"We're taking the best of Nasa sensor developments across the agency, one or two commercial offerings, putting them on the propulsion module (rocket) of New Shepard,\" said Stefan Bieniawski, senior engineer at Blue Origin.\n\nInside the crew capsule: It features the largest windows ever flown in space\n\n\"What's really valuable about the propulsion module is coming all the way back from space and doing a propulsive landing, which is very akin to what we want to do with the lunar landing.\"\n\nThe first of the Splice sensor systems was developed by Draper, a research organisation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's designed to perform \"terrain relative navigation\", in which cameras gather real-time information about the surroundings. The images are then compared with pre-loaded maps to determine the vehicle's precise location.\n\nBack in the 1960s, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin almost came down in a boulder field during the historic Apollo 11 landing.\n\nThe space agency wants to avoid something like this happening again, so sensor systems like Draper's are intended to make landings safer.\n\n\"[The Apollo missions'] landing target was on the order of miles, our landing target is 100 metres - or less,\" said Stefan Bieniawski.\n\nBlue Origin is leading a team that has won a contract from Nasa to start developing a lunar lander\n\nThe second sensor system is called a Navigation Doppler Lidar, which was developed at Nasa's Langley Research Center in Virginia. It is also designed to help vehicles land precisely, but instead sends laser beams to the surface of the planetary body and detects the reflected signal to determine the vehicle's velocity and altitude.\n\nBlue Origin is part of a team that was awarded a Nasa contract to start developing a lander capable of returning humans to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.\n\nUnder its Artemis programme, Nasa plans to send a man and a woman to the lunar South Pole. But that would be just an early step in a bigger plan to establish a long-term presence on the Moon.\n\nThe 18m-tall New Shepard rocket blasted off at 14:36 BST (09:36 EDT) on Tuesday from Blue Origin's test facility near Van Horn, Texas. The vehicle reached a maximum altitude of 105km (346,000ft) above the ground.", "A 45-year-old British man has been left with permanent hearing loss after developing Covid-19.\n\nUK doctors say it is the first such case they have seen linked to the pandemic coronavirus.\n\nAlthough rare, sudden hearing loss can follow other viral infections, such as flu.\n\nThe ear-nose-and-throat experts told BMJ Case Reports journal steroid drugs could help avoid this damage if given early enough.\n\nThe patient, who has asthma, had been admitted to a London hospital with Covid-19 symptoms and transferred to intensive care after struggling to breathe.\n\nTests confirmed he had coronavirus and he was put on a ventilator machine.\n\nHe also needed various drugs and a blood transfusion before beginning to recover and coming off the ventilator 30 days later.\n\nBut a week after the breathing tube was removed and he left intensive care, he noticed tinnitus (a ringing or buzzing noise) followed by sudden hearing loss in his left ear.\n\nA hearing test suggested the loss was linked to damage to the hearing nerve, the middle ear, or both, rather than inflammation or a blockage to the ear canal.\n\nDoctors could find no explanations for his hearing problem, other than his recent Covid-19 illness.\n\nThey gave him steroid tablets as well as injections into the ear, which helped a little, but he has some irreversible hearing loss.\n\n\"Given the widespread presence of the virus in the population and the significant morbidity of hearing loss, it is important to investigate this further,\" the team, from University College London and the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital, said\n\nThe virus is thought to enter and infect a particular type of cell found in the lungs, by zoning in on a surface receptor they possess.\n\nThe researchers say this same receptor is found on the cells that line the middle ear.\n\nAnd they are recommending medics look out for hearing complications in Covid-19 patients and refer any with sudden hearing loss to an expert for urgent care.", "Cardinal Giovanni Becciu was removed from his post last month\n\nPolice in Milan say they have arrested a 39-year-old Italian woman, who has worked for Cardinal Angelo Becciu, a senior Vatican official who was demoted last month over embezzlement claims.\n\nCecilia Marogna says she was paid €500,000 ($587,000; £454,000) by Cardinal Becciu.\n\nMs Marogna was arrested after an Interpol warrant was issued at the Holy See's request, according to reports.\n\nBoth Ms Marogna and Cardinal Becciu have denied any wrongdoing.\n\nIn interviews with Italian media in recent days, Ms Marogna confirmed that she had been paid €500,000 by Cardinal Becciu through a company she operated in Slovenia. She said she received the money to provide \"parallel diplomacy\" to help missionaries in conflict areas.\n\nA senior Vatican source told Reuters news agency that Ms Marogna was suspected of \"embezzlement and aggravated misappropriation in complicity with others\".\n\nThe cardinal allegedly authorised the payments to Ms Marogna while serving as number two in the Vatican's Secretariat of State, which manages the Church's donations.\n\nShe has also denied allegations that she is the cardinal's mistress, telling the newspaper Corriere della Sera that she is a \"political analyst and intelligence expert\" with \"a network of relationships in Africa and the Middle East\" to protect the Vatican's representatives abroad.\n\nCardinal Becciu, 72, unexpectedly resigned last month, revealing he was told to do so by Pope Francis.\n\nHe said he was suspected of giving Church money to his brothers.\n\nThe cardinal was involved in a controversial deal to invest in a luxury London building with Church funds, which has since been the subject of a financial investigation.\n\nThe cardinal has denied any wrongdoing and has defended the London property deal.\n\nResignations at this level of the Vatican are extremely rare.", "Last updated on .From the section Football\n\nHarry Maguire's miserable start to the season continued with a red card as England had two men sent off for the first time in their Nations League defeat by Denmark.\n\nManchester United's captain suffered a 31-minute nightmare, shown a yellow card for a reckless early challenge on Yussuf Poulsen and then dismissed by Spanish referee Jesus Gil Manzano after he brought down Kasper Dolberg trying to retrieve his own poor touch.\n\nEngland's night got worse four minutes later when Christian Eriksen scored his 34th goal for Denmark on his 100th appearance after Kyle Walker was harshly adjudged to have fouled Thomas Delaney.\n\nChelsea defender Reece James was shown a red card after the final whistle for confronting referee Manzano.\n\nIn a low-key affair, England had their moments and it took a magnificent save from Kasper Schmeichel to claw away Mason Mount's close-range header as Denmark closed out the win.\n\nEngland are now third in their group, with only the winners progressing to the Nations League finals in 2021.\n• None Maguire has my full support, says Southgate\n• None Does Maguire need a break for club and country?\n• None Who would you pick in England's best XI?\n• None Misery for Maguire and England at Wembley - listen to Football Daily podcast\n• None All the reaction from England v Denmark here\n\nMaguire endured what must have been one of the most miserable nights of his career before he was sent off after only 31 minutes.\n\nIt was bad from the opening moments when he needlessly left his foot in on Poulsen, and the rest of his performance was distracted and chaotic.\n\nMaguire was ill-at-ease with England's three-man defensive system, often out of position, even pulling up holding the top of his hamstring at one point before his fate was sealed by a shocking first touch which he tried to retrieve with a lunge that injured Dolberg.\n\nHe looks like a player suffering mentally as well as physically following his recent arrest in Greece and it would be no surprise if he was also taken out of the line of fire at club level given his recent poor form.\n\nHe made an error that led to Tottenham's first goal in United's 6-1 home defeat before the international break and his display earned him a rating of just 1.85 out of 10 by BBC Sport readers - which was still higher than he carded for this defeat.\n\nEngland never seriously troubled Denmark apart from a couple of late scares, Harry Kane looking out of sorts and the failure of manager Gareth Southgate to introduce the creativity of Jack Grealish ahead of Jordan Henderson - which is no slight on the Liverpool captain - a mystery.\n\nThere was also more uncertainty involving goalkeeper Jordan Pickford and Walker that led to a somewhat dubious penalty award - summing up what was a very unsatisfactory and disjointed night for England and Southgate.\n\nChelsea's James was arguably England's best player on his full debut - only to ruin all that good work after the final whistle when he got verbally involved with referee Manzano and was shown a red card.\n\nIt was a moment of frustration for the 20-year-old but also inexcusable ill-discipline, which has been a trend in England's recent games given Walker's sending-off in Iceland last month and the two dismissals here.\n\nThis was a bad night for England but James was one of those who could have held his head high, until he unwisely showed dissent to the officials.\n\nJames had been solid in defence and a real threat in attack, on a night when England were struggling with reduced numbers and were being held at bay by a resilient Danish rearguard.\n\nSadly for James, a fine performance will now be remembered for the wrong reasons.\n\n'Very proud of the performance'\n\nEngland manager Gareth Southgate talking to Sky Sports: \"I was very proud of the performance. I thought we were excellent with 11 men and causing them all sorts of problems down our right-hand side. The sending off alters everything and the penalty - it's a foul on Kyle Walker and I don't see the foul at all. The less said the better.\n\n\"We showed resilience and showed a great example of how to play with 10 pragmatically, and when to press. Their keeper made an amazing save to keep it at 1-0. I couldn't be prouder of the boys in the last 10 days, they are learning and improving. We've had any number of changes to our preparation and showed resilience.\"\n\nThree defeats in 50 - the stats\n• None This was only England's third home defeat in their past 50 competitive internationals on home soil.\n• None Denmark have lost just two of their past 40 international matches, keeping clean sheets in nine of their past 11 games.\n• None Christian Eriksen has been directly involved in 32 goals in his past 35 appearances for his national side (24 goals, eight assists).\n• None This was Marcus Rashford's 40th England cap, making him only the third player to reach that tally before the age of 23, after Michael Owen in 2002 and Wayne Rooney in 2007.\n• None Attempt blocked. Conor Coady (England) header from the right side of the six yard box is blocked. Assisted by Harry Kane.\n• None Attempt missed. Dominic Calvert-Lewin (England) header from the centre of the box misses to the left. Assisted by Reece James with a cross following a set piece situation.\n• None Reece James (England) wins a free kick on the right wing. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Can the scene now make it big outside of London?", "John Leslie is accused of carrying out the assault in December 2008\n\nFormer Blue Peter presenter John Leslie has described sexual assault allegations against him as \"crazy\" and \"ludicrous\".\n\nGiving evidence at his trial at Southwark Crown Court the 55-year-old denied grabbing a woman's breasts at a Soho party in 2008.\n\nEarlier, a friend of the alleged victim said Mr Leslie's friend had apologised for his behaviour afterwards.\n\nMr Leslie has denied the charge of sexual assault.\n\nIn the years before the alleged incident, he told jurors, he had been made out in the tabloid press to be an \"aggressive, sexual monster\".\n\nGiving evidence, he said: \"The idea that I would do that is just crazy, especially the way that I was with everything that had been going on.\n\n\"I was paranoid, I was aware and conscious of wherever I was.\n\n\"To go up to a total stranger I had never met and do that is just ludicrous.\"\n\n\"I would have said 'hello', I would have talked to her. I would not have touched her like some mannequin and walked off.\"\n\nThe jury also heard how separate sex charges against him were dropped in 2003.\n\nOn the third day of Mr Leslie's trial the friend of the accuser said she had attended the party on 5 December and, while she did not remember seeing a sexual assault, she described what she remembered of \"the aftermath\".\n\n\"John's demeanour did not change,\" said the witness, who cannot be identified for legal reasons.\n\n\"He was still very excitable and very happy to be there, but there seemed to be a sudden shift of atmosphere from [the complainant].\n\n\"And there was almost disbelief and sort of a galled feeling.\"\n\nThe witness said a woman who was also at the party, who she believed might have been an old friend of Mr Leslie's, approached her later in the evening and apologised for his behaviour.\n\nThe witness told the jury: \"The gist was, 'sorry about John, he's very excited to be here, it's been a long time since he has been to a party like this and sometimes he just gets over-excited and goes over the top'.\"\n\nThe complainant alleges Mr Leslie grabbed her breasts and laughed immediately after they shook hands.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker has recalled the night that she was shot and killed by police in her home.\n\nSpeaking to CBS This Morning, Mr Walker said he is \"a million per cent sure\" officers did not identify themselves before entering.\n\nMs Taylor, a 26-year-old black hospital worker, was shot six times when police forced their way into her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, on 13 March.\n\nNone of the three officers have been charged directly over the killing.", "PureGym trainer Matt Simpson says he's struggled with racist abuse since posting a \"slave\" workout on Facebook to mark Black History Month.\n\nIt was heavily criticised at the time and he apologised \"wholeheartedly\".\n\nBut he says he's continued to be trolled about it online with many comments referencing the fact he's black.\n\n\"It was wrong, I totally get that, and I'm sorry, but now I'm receiving racist abuse,\" he says.\n\nSpeaking exclusively to Radio 1 Newsbeat, Matt says he recognises the post was unacceptable and ill-judged, but the comments he's been getting are \"heart-breaking\".\n\nThe workout was put up on PureGym Luton and Dunstable's Facebook account on 1 October.\n\nHe called it 12 Years of Slave, referencing the Oscar-winning movie from 2013 with a similar name.\n\nIt said: \"Slavery was hard and so is this\", and included 12 different moves such as burpees, push ups and box jumps.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by mattsimpt This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMatt says the reaction to the post has left him struggling.\n\n\"Some of the abuse has been things I am ashamed to say out loud. The most common theme has been in reference to slavery, and my skin colour.\"\n\nHe says some online comments have used racist language against him, including the N-word and some of them have come from black people.\n\n\"I have been told 'keep to your white company' and 'we're going to take his black card off him',\" Matt says.\n\n\"It's heart-breaking when you look at the sender and the sender resembles you.\n\n\"Things like that - there's no word to describe how that makes any person of an ethnic minority feel.\"\n\nMatt says the frequency and volume of the abuse has slowed down but there are over 1500 comments on his Instagram post and his mental health is suffering.\n\n\"I've stopped going out as much, my appetite has changed and I'm nowhere near as lively or as positive.\n\n\"I'm trying not to let it get on top of me but it's really hard. There's no shield at the moment.\n\n\"Those people attacking and trolling need to know it has an effect, it can put people into a spiral of negativity.\n\nPureGym said the post \"was removed as soon as it was brought to our attention\"\n\nPureGym removed the post at the time and apologised \"unreservedly\", saying it was \"not approved or endorsed by the company\".\n\nMatt also posted his own apology on Instagram the following day, but he says things have spiralled from there.\n\n\"There was a huge naivety on my part when I posted the workout,\" he says.\n\n\"I was thinking about raising awareness of Black History Month, as an Afro-Caribbean man, but I totally get now how badly it came across.\n\n\"Unfortunately I can't rewind time and take it back - it's my mistake and it's a big one.\n\n\"I made a poor judgement in a post and I've apologised. I don't know what else I can do.\"\n\nListen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.", "In Liverpool, revellers took to the city centre the night before new restrictions came into force\n\nThe new three-tier system of Covid-19 restrictions has begun in England.\n\nMost of the country is in the lowest tier - medium - but millions of people in the North and the Midlands face extra curbs on households mixing.\n\nThe Liverpool region is the only area to be under the toughest rules, with pubs and bars not serving meals closed.\n\nGovernment health officials are due to meet later to discuss the possibility of Greater Manchester, Lancashire and some other areas joining the top tier.\n\nHours before the top tier rules came into force in Liverpool, police were forced to disperse large crowds in the city.\n\nMeanwhile, Northern Ireland has announced an extension of the half-term holidays for schools, from Monday, alongside other new measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus.\n\nAnd in Wales a short circuit breaker lockdown is being \"actively considered\" by the Welsh Government.\n\nThe Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, tweeted that he had not spoken with the government about the new restrictions since Friday, claiming pressure was being \"piled on via media briefings\".\n\nA statement from Mr Burnham, his deputy and leaders of all 10 councils in the area, said the current evidence around infection rates and hospital admissions did not support the area going into Tier 3 (the top tier).\n\nThe financial package accompanying Tier 3 restrictions was \"nowhere near sufficient to prevent severe hardship, widespread job losses and business failure\", the statement added.\n\nIt comes after Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer called for a two to three-week \"circuit-breaker\" lockdown in England to bring the infection rate under control.\n\nThe new three-tier system sees every area of England classed as being on medium, high or very high alert.\n\nAreas on medium alert are subject to the national restrictions currently in force, including the rule of six on indoor and outdoor gatherings and the 22:00 closing time for pubs, bars and restaurants.\n\nIn addition to these restrictions, in areas on high alert - including north-east England, much of the North West and parts of the Midlands, along with West and South Yorkshire - different households are not allowed to mix indoors.\n\nAreas on very high alert face extra curbs, with different households banned from mixing indoors or outdoors in hospitality venues or private gardens.\n\nPubs and bars will be closed unless they are serving substantial meals and there is also guidance against travelling in and out of the area.\n\nFurther restrictions may be agreed for particular regions in the top tier and in the Liverpool City Region gyms, leisure centres, betting shops and casinos will also close.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson defended the system at Prime Minister's Questions, saying the regional approach aimed to \"seize this moment now to avoid the misery of a national lockdown\".\n\nBut Labour's Sir Keir Starmer told the Commons the measures did not go far enough - a view he said was echoed by the government's scientific advisers.\n\nAnd MPs in Liverpool said the city \"risks being dragged back to the 1980s\" without proper financial support alongside the new restrictions.\n\nParliament has approved the legislation to write a new three-tier system into law, but 42 Tory MPs rebelled in a vote to express their disapproval of the 22:00 closing time for pubs and restaurants in England.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nMeanwhile, the Scottish government is to implement its own three-tier framework of restrictions later in October. In the meantime, pubs and restaurants in Scotland's central belt, including Edinburgh and Glasgow, were closed on Friday until 25 October as part of a package of short-term measures.\n\nIn Northern Ireland, hospitality businesses will only be allowed to offer takeaway and delivery services for four weeks from Friday, alongside a raft of new restrictions.\n\nThe country's First Minister, Arlene Foster, said the decisions had not been taken lightly, adding: \"I don't shy away from the fact that a lot of these decisions will have huge impacts - we're very determined this will be a time-limited intervention.\"\n\nAnd in Wales, the Welsh Government is considering bringing in deeper lockdown measures over a short period of time, including closing pubs and restaurants during the school half-term holiday.\n\nThe government sees its three-tier system of localised restrictions as striking a balance between fighting the virus and protecting the economy.\n\nHowever, Sir Keir Starmer's decision to back a much tougher England-wide temporary lockdown does mean there is now an alternative plan on the table. And it is a plan that came recommended by the government's own scientists.\n\nDowning Street has not ruled out a \"circuit break\" completely - to do so, it maintains, would be irresponsible. But it has been very clear that it does not want to get there.\n\nA senior government source accused Labour of playing politics but the move will increase the pressure on Mr Johnson to show that his alternative works - and does so quickly.\n\nHe is likely to have the backing of his own MPs - many of whom are not keen to go further for now at least. The former minister Andrew Mitchell - who has voiced criticism in recent days - said the three tier system must be given time to show results.\n\nOutlining his call for a \"circuit breaker\" at a press conference on Tuesday evening, Sir Keir said current measures to curb the spread of coronavirus were not working.\n\nHe proposed that schools would remain open, with the circuit breaker taking place across half-term to \"minimise disruption\".\n\nHowever he said it would mean all pubs, bars and restaurants would be closed and compensated. Non-essential retail businesses would also shut.\n\nHis comments came after documents revealed government scientific advisers called for such action three weeks ago.\n\nOn Tuesday, a further 17,234 coronavirus cases were recorded in the UK, while 143 more people have died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus.\n\nHow will the new restrictions affect you? Tell us by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Apple has confirmed its iPhone 12 handsets will be its first to work on faster 5G networks.\n\nThe company has also extended the range to include a new \"Mini\" model that has a smaller 5.4in screen.\n\nThe US firm bucked a wider industry downturn by increasing its handset sales over the past year.\n\nBut some experts say the new features give Apple its best opportunity for growth since 2014, when it revamped its line-up with the iPhone 6.\n\n\"5G will bring a new level of performance for downloads and uploads, higher quality video streaming, more responsive gaming, real-time interactivity and so much more,\" said chief executive Tim Cook.\n\nThere has also been a cosmetic refresh this time round, with the sides of the devices getting sharper, flatter edges.\n\nThe higher-end iPhone 12 Pro models also get bigger screens than before and a new sensor to help with low-light photography.\n\nLidar sensors are commonly used in self-driving car prototypes, but Apple is using one to help focus photos\n\nHowever, for the first time none of the devices will be bundled with headphones or a charger. Apple said the move was to help reduce its impact on the environment.\n\n\"Tim Cook [has] the stage set for a super-cycle 5G product release,\" commented Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.\n\nHe added that about 40% of the 950 million iPhones in use had not been upgraded in at least three-and-a-half years, presenting a \"once-in-a-decade\" opportunity.\n\nIn theory, the Mini could dent Apple's earnings by encouraging the public to buy a product on which it makes a smaller profit than the other phones. But one expert thought that unlikely.\n\n\"Apple successfully launched the iPhone SE in April by introducing it at a lower price point without cannibalising sales of the iPhone 11 series,\" noted Marta Pinto from IDC.\n\n\"There are customers out there who want a smaller, cheaper phone, so this is a proven formula that takes into account market trends.\"\n\nThe iPhone is already the bestselling smartphone brand in the UK and the second-most popular in the world in terms of market share.\n\nIf forecasts of pent up demand are correct, it could prompt a battle between network operators, as customers become more likely to switch.\n\n\"Networks are going to have to offer eye-wateringly attractive deals, and the way they're going to do that is on great tariffs and attractive trade-in deals,\" predicted Ben Wood from the consultancy CCS Insight.\n\nApple typically unveils its new iPhones in September, but opted for a later date this year. It has not said why, but it was widely speculated to be related to disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nThe firm's shares ended the day 2.7% lower. This has been linked to reports that several Chinese internet platforms opted not to carry the livestream, although it was still widely viewed and commented on via the social media network Sina Weibo.\n\nApple said the iPhone 12 has the same 6.1in (15.5cm)-sized screen as its predecessor, but it now uses OLED rather than LCD technology for richer colours. This has also helped the firm make the device 11% thinner and have smaller bezels.\n\nThe OLED display is shielded by a new material that should be harder to damage\n\nIt added that the screen was also higher resolution and used a \"ceramic shield\" to protect its display to offer \"four times better drop performance\".\n\nA new A14 Bionic chip - the first to be built on a five nanometre process - is being used to carry out more advanced enhancements to photos.\n\nThe firm said it would deliver night-mode selfies without using the flash, as well as better deal with colour, contrast and noise in challenging settings.\n\nIt showed off a forthcoming mobile version of League of Legends as an example of the \"console-quality games\" it could now run smoothly.\n\nLeague of Legends: Wild Rift will launch later this year\n\nThe addition of a magnet array inside the phone's back will allow compatible chargers to \"snap on\" and renew the battery more quickly, as well as accessories including a wallet to be held in place.\n\nThe iPhone Mini shares these features but in a smaller form.\n\n\"The Mini is an interesting move from Apple, which I would have expected [to come] next year - but the smaller phone trend is clearly picking up,\" commented Carolina Milanesi from Creative Strategies.\n\nThe iPhone 12 will start at £799 - a £70 gain on last year - and go on sale on 23 October.\n\nThe iPhone 12 Mini will start at £699 and be released on 13 November.\n\nTwo steel-sided higher-end models have also been redesigned to feature bigger displays - the iPhone Pro goes from 5.8in to 6.1in, while the Pro Max goes from 6.5in to 6.7in.\n\nThe iPhone 12 Pro has three cameras and a Lidar sensor\n\nThey carry over the improvements made to the lower-end devices.\n\nBut they also gain a Lidar (light detection and ranging) scanner.\n\nThis creates depth-maps of the immediate environment, making autofocus in dim settings \"up to six times faster\". It can also be used for augmented-reality tasks, although these were given less emphasis.\n\nThe Pro Max's wide-angle rear camera lens has also been given a bigger sensor to improve low-light performance.\n\nFilming in high dynamic range (HDR) video, using Dolby Vision, is offered at a higher frame rate on the Pro phones\n\nBoth new Pro models now have at least 128 gigabytes of storage and are £50 cheaper than last year's devices, starting at £999 and £1,099.\n\nSamsung first launched a 5G-enabled Galaxy S10 phone back in February 2019, and Huawei, OnePlus and Google are among others to have added the capability too.\n\nBut experts say there has only been limited interest in the feature to date.\n\n\"Apple is rarely the first to launch new technologies but waits for a technology to be mature enough to build new customer experiences on top of it,\" commented Thomas Husson from the research company Forrester.\n\n\"I think we're slowly reaching this tipping point.\"\n\nApple said it had tested its devices at peak 5G speeds of 3.5 gigabits per second - which means a 20 gigabyte 4K movie could be theoretically downloaded in about 45 seconds.\n\nHowever, it warned that users' experiences would vary by network and region, and the 5G facility would not always be switched on.\n\n\"The ability of the iPhone 12 to switch between 5G and 4G when the consumer needs, in order to preserve battery, does highlight that 5G connectivity clearly isn't necessary 100% of the time for consumers,\" remarked Stephen Mears from the consultancy Futuresource.\n\nEach jump in communications tech has taken different mobile device behaviours mainstream\n\nThe UK was the second European nation to start rolling out 5G.\n\nBut while this has helped give it a lead, coverage remains sporadic.\n\nIn the US - Apple's largest market - 5G speeds are particularly slow. In fact, according to one study, downloads over Canada's 4G networks are typically faster,\n\nIn some countries, 5G has not yet become available to the public.\n\nHowever, in China - Apple's second-biggest market - the government has encouraged its rapid deployment, and recently announced both Beijing and Shenzhen had achieved \"full coverage\".\n\n\"There's no question that a large part of Apple's decision to settle a legal dispute with [5G modem chip-maker] Qualcomm was predicated on the fact that it couldn't afford not to have 5G in 2020,\" Mr Wood told the BBC.\n\n\"China would have been the driving force behind that.\n\n\"But there will also have been pressure from major operators across the world who are investing heavily in 5G networks and recognise the fact that the iPhone is a strategically important product.\"\n\nThe really interesting announcements here all came down to speed: 5G-ready phones with faster chips inside them.\n\nBut Apple arguably failed to sell what you can actually do with all this power.\n\nThe one area it will definitely help with is mobile gaming, with quicker response times for multiplayer titles as well as better graphics.\n\nAnd what else can 5G do? Well it could let you watch sporting events from multiple angles on your phone - one example the firm gave was of watching American football from seven camera feeds.\n\nOr - using augmented reality - you could design a room with virtual furniture in real-time.\n\nApple said the Lidar scanner could help with AR, video, and room scanning applications\n\nBut as the chief of US network Verizon noted during a guest spot during the presentation: \"Until now most people have taken a wait-and-see approach to 5G.\"\n\nAnd the question is whether the public saw anything that would make them want to rush out and add it to their lives now.\n\nMoreover, 5G networks in most countries are at best patchy - you won't be able to take advantage of the promised speed gains in many places.\n\nIn time, there are likely to be popular apps and games that are dependent on the tech.\n\nAnd many gadget enthusiasts will be tempted to upgrade to an iPhone 12 or Android equivalent to be ready.\n\nBut they will be investing in the promise of what's to come, rather than what they can do today.\n\nApple also launched a new version of its smart speaker - the HomePod Mini.\n\nIt supports a wider range of voice commands than before as well as introducing a home intercom system.\n\nApple promised the device would work with a wider range of third-party services than before\n\nThe £99 voice-controlled device also adds a facility that detects when an iPhone is nearby to produce visual and vibration effects that simulate the effect of music flowing between the gadgets.\n\nThe first HomePod was launched in 2018, and has lagged far behind Amazon and Google's rival speakers to date.\n\nThere was no mention, however, of a Mac computer set to run off the A14 chip.\n\nNor was there mention of Bluetooth-based tracking tags or over-ear headphones, which have both been rumoured to launch soon.\n\nThis will likely lead to speculation that Apple will hold a further event before the end of 2020.", "Twice as many men die from drug-related deaths, but cocaine deaths among women surged last year\n\nDrug-related deaths reached their highest level for a quarter of a century last year as the number of women who died after using cocaine surged.\n\nFigures showed 4,393 people died in England and Wales from drug poisoning.\n\nCocaine deaths increased for the eighth year running, rising by 7.7% for men and 26.5% for women.\n\nThe Office for National Statistics said the overall death rate for men was twice as high as for women, however.\n\nAbout two-thirds of all deaths from drug poisoning were due to drug misuse, the ONS said - meaning the underlying cause was drug abuse or addiction, or they involved illegal drugs.\n\nOverall, deaths rose only slightly from 4,359 registered in 2018 to 4,393 registered in 2019. But that figure is the highest since records began in 1993.\n\nMen accounted for 2,968 drug-related deaths - more than two out of three - while 1,425 were women.\n\nOpiates such as heroin and morphine were involved in more than half of deaths where the drug type was known.\n\nThe ONS said rates of drug poisoning have been on a \"steep upward trend\" since 2012 due to rises in heroin and cocaine deaths.\n\nIn 2018, there were 637 registered deaths involving cocaine - including 117 women and 520 men. In 2019 there were 708 deaths - 148 women and 560 men.\n\nTaking age into account, the death rate for men declined slightly in 2019, while for women it increased for the tenth consecutive year.\n\nProf Julia Sinclair, chairwoman of the addictions faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said years of cuts had left services ill-equipped to prevent drug deaths.\n\n\"The tragic number of drug-related deaths should be all the evidence the government needs to substantially invest in addiction services, before more lives are needlessly lost,\" she said.\n\nNiamh Eastwood, director of drug policy charity Release, said two Parliamentary committees - the Health and Social Care Select Committee and the Scottish Affairs Select Committee - had called for reform of drug policy to tackle these deaths.\n\nThe health committee recommended \"non-judgemental harm reduction\" policies and called for a consultation on decriminalising drug possession for personal use.\n\nShe said the prime minister and home secretary should \"stop playing politics and listen to the evidence\".\n\nDeath rates were highest in deprived areas, with people in their 40s living in the poorest neighbourhoods at least five-and-a-half times more likely to die from drugs than those in the least deprived, the ONS said.\n\nThe north-east of England had the highest drug-related death rate, almost three times higher than the area with the lowest rate in 2019, the east of England.\n\n\"Investment in these communities, adequate housing, restoring benefits to a decent level, along with drug policy and harm reduction initiatives can save lives,\" Ms Eastwood said.\n\nThe age at which most people died from drug use is increasing, the ONS said, from 20 to 29-year-olds from 1993 to 2002 to 40 to 49-year-olds today.\n\nIt is \"possible\" that a generation born in the 1960s and 1970s, Generation X, has been dying in greater numbers from drug misuse over time, the ONS said.\n\nThe figures include deaths from all drugs, including prescription and over-the-counter medications.\n\nThey also include accidents and suicides involving drugs, as well as complications from injecting drugs such as deep vein thrombosis and blood poisoning.\n\nAbout half of the deaths registered last year will have occurred in previous years, statisticians believe, due to the time it can take for an inquest to be held.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Nitrous oxide is sold in metal canisters often discarded in the street\n\nLaughing gas is \"not just a bit of harmless fun\" and can cause paralysis, Wales' chief medical officer has warned.\n\nNitrous oxide - as it is also known - is the second most commonly used recreational drug in the UK after cannabis for those aged 16-24.\n\nChief medical officer Dr Frank Atherton said the costs of misuse can be \"astronomical\".\n\n\"We see people who are no longer able to walk or use their arms or legs.\"\n\nHe added: \"Sadly that can be irreversible.\"\n\nAlthough it is illegal to sell nitrous oxide - or 'nos' - for the purposes of recreational use, it is legal to sell it for catering and medicinal use.\n\nTwenty-year-old Connor (not his real name) used to inhale laughing gas on a regular basis.\n\nHe said the \"buzz\" he would feel lasted for about 30 seconds so \"when you do one, it could be a minute after that and you want another one, and then another one\".\n\nProf Gino Martini, chief scientist at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, and Dr Amira Guirguis of Swansea University Medical School have been working together to raise awareness of the dangers.\n\n\"We think that what happens is that chronic use of nitrous oxide stops you absorbing vitamin B12,\" said Dr Martini.\n\n\"If you get a depletion, it erodes this protective covering and it damages your spinal cord.\n\n\"That's why we see people get issues like numbness, tingling, problems with walking, and in severe cases paraplegia, which is a type of paralysis.\"\n\nDr Atherton is concerned that young people don't know enough about the potential risks.\n\n\"I think the challenge is to get information to people to help them to understand that it is not just a harmless bit of fun. There are potentially significant consequences, particularly for people who are heavy users,\" he said.\n\n\"Even if you have just one case of paralysis... the lifetime costs of that to society, let alone the personal cost to that individual, are absolutely astronomical.\"\n\nEye On Wales is on air on Wednesday, 14 October at 18:30 BST on BBC Radio Wales and BBC Sounds.", "Many company boards look like nothing has changed since the 1970s, says Nels Abbey\n\n\"On my first day in my first banking job I was waiting in the reception area and was mistaken by the entire company for a security guard,\" says author and satirist Nels Abbey.\n\n\"They all showed me their ID cards one by one as they came in.\"\n\nIt was just one of many examples of racism he experienced as a black man working in the City and later for big media companies, including shocking pay disparities and few opportunities for promotion.\n\nMr Abbey, who has written a book about his experiences, Think Like a White Man, says the lack of black people at the top in business is a big part of the problem, and like others he is calling for change.\n\nBritain's biggest business lobby group, the CBI, has just unveiled a campaign to get at least one ethnic minority person onto every FTSE 100 board and every FTSE 250 one by 2024.\n\nIt says that more than a third of the boards of the biggest listed UK businesses are still all-white, with that rising to two thirds in smaller public companies.\n\nMeanwhile, one of the UK's biggest investment firms L&G says it will use its vote to put pressure on bosses who don't make their top teams more diverse by 2022, putting the people responsible for board appointments in the firing line.\n\n\"You need people on the board who actually reflect your customers and society, but a lot of boards look like nothing has changed since the 1970s,\" says Mr Abbey.\n\n\"You think, there are almost two million black people in the country, surely one of those people are good enough to be on your board.\"\n\nBoards help direct a company's affairs, so making them more diverse helps to change attitudes across the whole company, experts say.\n\nIt makes business sense too. Those with more ethnically diverse senior leadership teams are on average 36% more profitable, according to research from consultancy McKinsey.\n\nLord Karan Bilimoria, the CBI's president and co-founder of the well-known beer brand Cobra, says he's seen the benefits first hand, both in his own business and in other firms whose boards he has sat on.\n\n\"In the early days of building up Cobra our company literally was a mini United Nations. We had Americans, Europeans, people from different parts of South Asia, different religions, races and creeds,\" he tells the BBC.\n\nBut the British-Indian businessman says too few firms offer such an \"amazing melting pot\" and change has been \"painfully slow\".\n\nThat is why he is spearheading the group's Change the Race Ratio campaign, which also calls for companies to set tough targets to improve diversity and publish them within 12 months.\n\nIt won't be easy. The CBI's 2021 goal for ethnic diversity on FTSE 100 boards was actually recommended by the government-commissioned Parker Review back in 2016, and earlier this year that report's author said it would be \"challenging\" to meet.\n\nBut Lord Bilimoria thinks the appetite for change is growing, with this summer's Black Lives Matter protests lending a new urgency to the cause.\n\n\"We had the Davies Review [on improving the gender balance on boards] in 2011, and just last week we heard in the FTSE 350 there is only one company now that does not have a woman on their board,\" he says.\n\n\"Our aim is to do the same for ethnicity.\"\n\nMr Abbey thinks the CBI is sincere but believes it will take \"more muscle\" to fix the problem. He prefers L&G's approach, saying that \"things change when money talks\".\n\nFor many, however, there won't be real change until the government steps in - something Theresa May's government promised to do after the Parker Review.\n\nShe launched a consultation on making it mandatory for companies with over 250 staff to report their ethnicity pay gaps - the difference between what white members of staff get in average pay versus those from black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds (BAME).\n\nA similar requirement to publish gender pay gaps came into effect in 2017, with the first reports being due in April 2018. But the results of Mrs May's consultation on ethnicity have never been published.\n\nSandra Kerr CBE says the death of George Floyd has \"turbo charged the issue\"\n\nSandra Kerr CBE, race equality director at the charity Business in the Community, and a former Cabinet Office adviser, says the government has had a lot on its plate but now needs to act.\n\nPay reporting would not be a \"silver bullet\" but would \"focus minds and improve accountability\", she says.\n\n\"I have had countless conversations with government ministers about this... Everybody agrees we want inclusion, can we just move it along?\"\n\nSome companies fear asking staff for information about their ethnicity could infringe their privacy, but Ms Kerr is not convinced.\n\nShe adds that the desire for change is only getting stronger after the death of George Floyd in the US in May \"turbo-charged the issue\".\n\nThe charity's own Race at Work Charter, which helps big firms devise plans to improve diversity, now has 480 signatories, up from 250 before the summer.\n\n\"Things were changing before George Floyd. But the protests have seen white and black people out there asking for change, that was the real difference.\"\n\nThe government says it is still looking at ways to strengthen requirements around reporting on diversity. It also plans to launch a cross-government commission to examine continuing racial inequalities.\n\nA business department spokesman said: \"Building a fairer economy means ensuring the UK's organisations reflect the nation's diversity - from factory floor to boardroom. We are working closely with businesses to consider what steps can be taken to build more inclusive workplaces, including reporting on diversity.\"", "Dr Starkey said he had made \"a serious error for which I have already paid a significant price\"\n\nHistorian Dr David Starkey has said he is being investigated by police over an interview in which he made controversial comments about slavery.\n\nDr Starkey made the remarks on YouTube to conservative commentator Darren Grimes, who is also being investigated.\n\nDr Starkey has apologised for saying in June that slavery was not genocide because \"so many damn blacks\" survived.\n\nHe said he did not \"intend to stir up racial hatred\" and would \"defend myself robustly\" against the allegation.\n\nThe Metropolitan Police said it was investigating \"a public order offence relating to a social media video\".\n\nIn a statement, the TV historian said: \"I have apologised unreservedly for the words used and I do so again today. It was a serious error for which I have already paid a significant price.\n\n\"I did not, however, intend to stir up racial hatred and there was nothing about the circumstances of the broadcast which made it likely to do so.\"\n\nHe said he only discovered he was under investigation on Tuesday, six days after the Met sent an email to notify him and Mr Grimes of the action, because the email had not been forwarded on to him.\n\nScotland Yard sent it to the Bow Group conservative think tank, of which he is vice-president, who thought it was a hoax, he said.\n\n\"The effect of this delay and confusion has been to throw the focus of the police investigation wholly on Mr Grimes. This is unfortunate and grossly unfair,\" Dr Starkey added.\n\nHis interviewer was \"a young, aspiring journalist and his role in the affair is - at most - secondary\", he said, and the focus on him \"raised fundamental questions\" about the freedom of the press and public debate.\n\nIn a statement, the Met said: \"On July 4, the Metropolitan Police Service was passed an allegation from Durham Police of a public order offence relating to a social media video posted on June 30.\n\n\"The matter was reviewed by officers and on July 29 a file was submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service for early investigative advice.\n\n\"On September 25 early investigative advice was received and officers began an investigation. This will remain under review. No arrests have been made.\"\n\nDuring the original discussion, Dr Starkey said slavery \"was not genocide\" because \"otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or Britain would there? An awful lot of them survived.\"\n\nThe subsequent outcry led Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam College, Canterbury Christ Church University, The Mary Rose Trust and publisher HarperCollins to cut ties with him.\n\nUpdate: On Wednesday the Metropolitan Police said: \"On Monday, 12 October a senior officer was appointed to conduct a review of the investigation to ensure it remains proportionate and that all appropriate lines of inquiry are being considered. Whilst this process takes place, two scheduled interviews have been postponed. We remain in contact with the CPS.\"", "Edwin Connington has not had human contact with his family since March\n\nHundreds of strangers have wished a care home resident happy birthday after learning he would turn 100 in isolation from his family.\n\nWell-wishers have sent cards and presents to Edwin Connington, who has not hugged his daughter since March.\n\n\"The post lady turned up this morning with another load,\" said Phil Potter, of Aran Court care home in Birmingham.\n\nDaughter Pam Stallard-Connington said her father would be \"emotional and overwhelmed\" by people's generosity.\n\nMr Connington, a former electrical engineer in the RAF, has also been sent Lancaster Bomber memorabilia, as he worked on the aircraft during World War Two.\n\nNews of his 100th birthday was shared on BBC Radio WM as part of the station's Make a Difference campaign, which was set up to help people through the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nHundreds of people sent messages of congratulations on social media to be included in a giant birthday card.\n\n\"I have been absolutely flabbergasted at the response,\" said Mrs Stallard-Connington, who will sing a socially-distanced Happy Birthday outside her father's room along with his sister, Betty, 93.\n\n\"There's a box full of stuff for him - it's just kept coming.\"\n\nEdwin on his wedding day with wife Joan\n\nCrystal & Glass, an engraving firm near the home in Tile Cross, sent a personalised glass for Mr Connington to enjoy his nightly whisky and ginger in.\n\nAnd worshippers at St Peter's Church in Coleshill, where Mr Connington rang bells for 50 years, have recorded a special video of bell-ringing and a tour of the church for him.\n\nThe kindness shown by strangers has been welcome after a difficult year keeping residents safe, said Mr Potter.\n\n\"It's hard - they need their families but they need to stay safe,\" he said.\n\n\"But we had to make a fuss of Edwin, he's the biggest character in the home.\"\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk", "YouTube has pledged to delete misleading claims about coronavirus vaccines as part of a fresh effort to tackle Covid-19 misinformation.\n\nIt said any videos that contradict expert consensus from local health authorities, such as the NHS or World Health Organization, will be removed.\n\nIt follows an announcement by Facebook that it would ban ads that discourage people from getting vaccinated.\n\nHowever, that restriction will not apply to unpaid posts or comments.\n\nYouTube had already banned \"medically unsubstantiated\" claims relating to coronavirus on its platform.\n\nBut it is now explicitly expanding the policy to include content relating to vaccines.\n\n\"A Covid-19 vaccine may be imminent, therefore we're ensuring we have the right policies in place to be able to remove [related] misinformation,\" the Google-owned service said in a statement.\n\nIt said it would remove any suggestions that the vaccine would:\n\nYouTube said it had already removed 200,000 dangerous or misleading videos about the virus since February.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nFacebook's new policy is designed to stop it facing accusations of profiting from the spread of anti-vaccination messages.\n\nThe social network had previously allowed ads to express opposition to vaccines if they did not contain false claims.\n\nIt said the new rules would be enforced \"over the next few days\", but some ads would still run in the meantime.\n\nIt added that it was launching a campaign to provide users information about the flu vaccine, including where to get flu shots in the US.\n\n\"Our goal is to help messages about the safety and efficacy of vaccines reach a broad group of people, while prohibiting ads with misinformation that could harm public health efforts,\" the company blogged.\n\nAnti-vaccination groups will still be allowed on its platform.\n\nUnpaid posts or comments that discourage people from getting a vaccination are also still permitted.\n\nEarlier in the year, Facebook's public policy manager Jason Hirsch told Reuters the company believed users should be able to express personal anti-vaccine views. He said that more aggressive censorship could push people hesitant about vaccines towards the anti-vaccine camp.\n\nThe subsequent change is one of many that have recently been made to its free speech principles.\n\nOn Monday, Facebook banned posts denying the Holocaust, following years of pressure.\n\nAnd last week it also banned content related to the QAnon conspiracy theory ahead of the US election.\n\nThe moves come as the UK government faced renewed criticism over the amount of time it is taking to pass a new law to tackle online misinformation and other issues involving the social media giants.\n\nThe chair of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport Committee Julian Knight said that delays to passing the Online Harms Bill were \"unjustifiable\" and attacked the government for failing to empower a regulator to handle related complaints,\n\nMinisters have previously suggested Ofcom take on the role, but have yet to confirm the appointment.\n\nThe culture secretary Oliver Dowden was questioned by the committee about the bill.\n\nHe said draft legislation would be published in 2021, and added it should include \"tough penalties\" for those who break the rules.\n\nBut one expert raised concern that the tech companies would be left to self-regulate themselves in the meantime.\n\n\"The volume of content defined as misinformation overrides the number of employees to oversee such things, or [the automated] functionalities the platforms have,\" said Unsah Malik, a social media advisor.\n\n\"We should probably have stronger consequences for those who publish misinformation - make it unlawful and fine people.\"\n\nAs the possibility of a coronavirus vaccine edges closer, disinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding it increasingly circulate on social media.\n\nThat includes everything from false claims that a vaccine is a tool for mass genocide to baseless conspiracy theories about Bill Gates micro-chipping the world population.\n\nFor that reason, moves taken by YouTube and Facebook will be welcomed. Social media sites were widely criticised for not acting quickly enough to tackle health misinformation early on in the pandemic - and many will be reassured they're looking ahead.\n\nBut an entirely different question is how well these new measures will be enforced, how effective they will prove to be - and whether they could be too late.\n\nVaccine disinformation has thrived in large Facebook groups and YouTube videos from notorious pseudoscientists for months now. And it has spilled over into parent chats and community forums.\n\nIt's that gradual exposure to conspiracy theory content that could sow seeds of doubt in the minds of many about a coronavirus vaccine.\n\nPlus this disinformation undermines legitimate concerns that any available vaccine is safe and properly approved.", "Christopher Stalford of the DUP asks about support for those working in the hospitality sector.\n\nMrs Foster says she is aware that any in that sector are working on limited contracts, often for a “minimum wage”.\n\n“There is a need for us to be aware of that,” she says, adding she is due to meet with representatives from Hospitality Ulster later today.\n\nSinead McLaughlin of the SDLP says the decisions being taken have “to be right”.\n\nShe says “Derry is nine days into these restrictions already” and reads a letter she has received from a business leader in the area before asking the first minister for her thoughts.\n\nMrs Foster says “I hear what she’s saying in relation to the lowest paid”.\n\n“I accept that footfall is down,” says Mrs Foster, with regard to shops.\n\n“You can still travel in a taxi with all of the appropriate safeguards, but I do accept that there are people who will take this and will not want to be out and about,” she adds.\n\n“We need to get that balance of keeping the economy going, I accept at a lesser level than we would like,” says Mrs Foster.\n\nRobbie Butler of the UUP asks the first minister to confirm there will be support for online learning and student support, if required.\n\nMrs Foster says, “I have been clear that the last thing we want to do is get into that awful phrase yet again, of blended learning”.\n\nShe pays tribute to teachers for their efforts, adding “we should always try and ensure our children have an education and our children are at school”.\n\n“We have to take into account the impact this will have on their life chances in the future,” says the first minister.\n\nSDLP MLA Pat Catney asks the first minister to provide businesses with “clarity” and wants an outline of the support to be put in place.\n\nMrs Foster says she accepts businesses need clarity, adding that is why they will be in place on Friday.\n\nShe hopes the support package will be signed off tomorrow, she adds.\n\nRachel Woods of the Green Party says there are \"so many questions” in relation to the regulations announced today.\n\nMrs Foster says “I know there are a lot of people who are vulnerable, or who are perhaps older and who are very, very worried at present”.\n\n“I don’t have all of the answers,” she adds.\n\n“We’re dealing with a pandemic, we’re working at speed, and we’re trying to work through all of the answers.”\n\n“Six o’clock on Friday is the target for when these regulations will take effect.”\n\nMatthew O’Toole of the SDLP says the statement today doesn’t make clear that it’s “not to beat the virus in the short term”.\n\nHe says “the blunt truth is this is about buying time for our health service not to be overwhelmed”.\n\nMrs Foster responds, “what we’re trying to do is push down the transmission of the virus”.\n\nShe says the R rate, or rate of transmission is at present about 1.5, adding that the aim is to reduce it to below 1.\n\n“We have to take these interventions now. Mr Speaker. as the virus has got out of control in some places,” says the first minister.\n\n“We’re interfering with people’s lives,” she says, adding that is not something she wants to do.\n\nSinéad Bradley, also of the SDLP, asks about enforcement of the regulations.\n\nMrs Foster says “we will continue to work with those people who want to help us with compliance and enforcement of the regulations”.\n\n“Personal responsibility is a wonderful thing,” she says.\n\n“If people do what we’re asking them to do, then it has a consequence,” says the first minister.\n\nDolores Kelly of the SDLP says there are “still some concerns around schools” and wants to know if the two-week period will be “used constructively by the education minister and others” to ensure “more deprived children” get additional support if required.\n\nMrs Foster says “it is those children who don’t have access to the internet, who don’t have access to wi-fi, whose parents don’t have an interest in education” that suffer when schools are not sitting.\n\nThat concludes questions on the first minister's statement to the assembly.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"Idiots\" gather in Liverpool on eve of new Covid rules\n\nPictures of large crowds gathering in Liverpool two hours before new Covid-19 restrictions came into effect \"shame our city\", its mayor has said.\n\nFootage on social media showed people dancing and surrounding a police car in Concert Square at 22:00 BST.\n\nLiverpool City Region is the only area in the top tier of the government's new system of restrictions.\n\nMayor Joe Anderson said ignoring facts about the virus was \"why we are in Tier 3 measures\".\n\nThe new rules mean pubs in the city region not serving meals must stay shut, along with gyms, leisure centres, betting shops and casinos.\n\nThe crowds gathered as nearby bars closed but police said they were dispersed quickly and safely, although 38 fixed penalty notices were issued for breaching coronavirus legislation.\n\nLiverpool City Region is the only area in the top tier of the government's new system of coronavirus restrictions\n\nLiverpool has the third highest infection rate in England\n\nMerseyside Police Chief Constable Andy Cooke said he was \"absolutely livid\" when he saw the scenes and described those involved as \"selfish, dangerous and childish\".\n\nHe said the \"vast majority\" of people were abiding by the rules but those who were \"blatantly disregarding the law\" were putting extra pressure on the force.\n\nLiverpool currently has the third highest rate of infections in England with 635 cases per 100,000 of population up until 10 October, behind Nottingham which has 880 and Knowsley with 667.5.\n\nPaul Brant, cabinet member for adult health and social care, said intensive care beds in the city were at more than 90% capacity and were soon expected to reach or exceed the levels of occupancy seen during the first wave.\n\nHe added: \"At the current rate of increase, we would expect Liverpool to surpass the peak of the first wave probably within the next seven to 10 days.\"\n\nMr Anderson, reacting to footage circulating of the crowds on social media, tweeted: \"These pictures shame our city.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Joe Anderson This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHe added: \"Our health service is creaking, 300 in hospital & 30 people dead in [a] week. Ignoring these facts is why we are in Tier 3 measures.\"\n\nMr Anderson, who previously called for a circuit-breaker lockdown, questioned whether the measures would be enough to tackle the \"uncontrollable\" spread of the virus and called for unity.\n\n\"This city is in a Covid crisis. It's an enemy we are really finding it hard to get on top of and defeat,\" he said.\n\n\"We need to keep working together and pulling together.\"\n\nCity councillor Nick Small said those involved were \"idiots putting themselves, their friends, families and everyone else at risk, destroying jobs and our hospitality sector while they do it\".\n\nCalum Semple, professor of outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, said hospitals in the city faced a \"dire situation\".\n\nHe appeared in a video message issued by the city council and urged the public to \"please pay great attention to the regulations that are being brought in\".\n\nProf Semple said: \"We have got over 300 patients in beds and our intensive care capacity is currently running at 90%.\n\n\"At this rate we are looking at exceeding healthcare capacity in the next week or so.\"\n\nIn the top tier of the new restrictions pubs not serving meals must stay shut\n\nRichard Kemp, leader of the city's Liberal Democrat group, warned against scapegoating Liverpool's young people for something involving \"at most 300\" people.\n\n\"What they did was wrong and they should be ashamed of their behaviour,\" he said.\n\n\"However, we have 60,000 students in our city and a very large number of our resident population under 25.\n\n\"This means that 99.99% of the city's young people behaved themselves last night and should be congratulated for their restraint.\"\n\nLiverpool musician Ian McNabb took to social media to support youngsters \"partying loud and hard on the last night before the shutdown\".\n\n\"If I was 18 I'd be right there with them,\" the former frontman of the Icicle Works posted on his Facebook page.\n\nCh Supt Peter Costello, of Merseyside Police, said: \"While we understand the new rules are frustrating for some, we would continue to advise everyone to abide by them - including keeping social distancing - for the safety of everyone.\"\n\nMeanwhile, a number of gyms in Merseyside are defying the order to close.\n\nChris Ellerby-Hemmings, co-owner of EmpoweredFit gym in the Wirral, said: \"We are not staying open for financial gain but more for our members' mental and physical well-being.\"\n\nGym owner Mick Povall says if gyms do not get to open soon he might never reopen\n\nOne gym owner who has closed his business said it was a \"huge blow not just for myself but for the people in the local community who come here\".\n\nMick Povall, owner of Gravity Health and Fitness in Upton, Wirral, said: \"The government carries on about the importance of improving mental health and avoiding obesity during the pandemic and then in the same breath shuts down one of the best tools to achieve those goals.\n\n\"If we don't reopen soon, we might never reopen.\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The European Union is about to formally reject a UK plea for special allowances for exports of electric cars in a post-Brexit trade deal.\n\nA draft addition to the deal says electric and hybrid cars will only get zero tariffs if a majority of the parts' value is from the two areas.\n\nThe draft, seen by the BBC, means that even if there is a deal, some UK car exports to the EU will not be eligible.\n\nAnd this means tariffs of 10% will apply from January.\n\nThe draft, was circulated among EU member states on Tuesday, says that Annex II of the agreement on \"Product Specific Rules of Origin\" will specify the \"maximum content of non-originating [that is non EU and UK] materials of 45% of the ex-works price of the vehicle\" for \"electrified vehicles\" from January 1st 2021.\n\nLast month, the UK circulated a proposal, also seen by the BBC, that in the case of electric and hybrid cars, only a minority of parts would at first need to be either from the UK or the EU - and up to 70% could come from elsewhere.\n\nThis had been requested by key car export factories, dependent on electric batteries, hybrid systems, and other technology, mainly from Japan.\n\nProf David Bailey, automotive specialist at the Birmingham Business School and UK in a Changing Europe, told the BBC: \"This will catch out some UK based car assemblers, particularly as the industry electrifies.\n\n\"The car industry is going through fundamental change, the EU see a threat from China, Korea and Japan, and is trying to build an electric vehicle supply chain in Europe.\"\n\nNissan, Toyota and Honda all have substantial manufacturing facilities in the UK, although Honda says it will close its Swindon factory next year with the loss of about 3,500 jobs.\n\nAlongside a separate but related request to treat Japanese parts as if they were British, which Lord Frost, the UK's chief Brexit negotiator, told the car industry he \"obviously cannot insist upon\", the BBC understands that some in the car industry are planning for the introduction from January of tariffs on some of their vehicle exports to the EU, even with an agreed deal.\n\nThese more relaxed arrangements had been requested by both the British and EU automotive sector in a letter last month.\n\nThe draft annexe to the deal also goes even further from 2027, only allowing the use of car batteries manufactured either in the EU or the UK in tariff free vehicle trade between the two.\n\nBoth sides are in a race to build \"gigafactories\" to service exploding demand for electric vehicles. The EU position would prevent the UK using a trade deal with the EU to become an offshore assembly hub for the export into the Single Market using mainly Asian or American parts, whilst guaranteeing long term tariff free access to the UK for EU manufacturers.\n\n\"A strong stable and predictable battery supply is of strategic importance for the long term competitiveness of the EU automotive sector,\" the draft annexe says. The terms of the proposal seeks to phase out reliance on non-European batteries.\n\nThe European Commission and Number 10 have been approached for comment.\n• None Blow to UK car industry in hunt for EU trade deal", "Baby River with her mother Reina Mae Nasino at hospital on the day of her birth\n\nThe death of a three-month-old baby separated from her jailed mother despite pleas to keep the pair together has shocked the Philippines, reports the BBC's Preeti Jha.\n\nReina Mae Nasino, a human rights worker, didn't know she was pregnant when she was arrested last year in Manila. She put her missed period down to the stress of a night-time police raid in which she was arrested, alongside two fellow activists.\n\nIt was only during a medical examination in prison that the 23-year-old found out she was in her first trimester.\n\nThe death of Ms Nasino's newborn last week - less than two months after the baby was removed from her care - has raised questions about the treatment of Philippine mothers in custody as many voiced their anger at the justice system for failing the child.\n\nMs Nasino, who worked for the urban poverty group Kadamay, was arrested in November 2019 with two fellow activists after police raided an office where they lived at the time.\n\nThey were charged with the illegal possession of firearms and explosives - charges all three have denied. They say the ammunition was planted by authorities amid a widening crackdown against left-leaning activists.\n\nDespite the circumstances, Ms Nasino \"was quite excited to be a mother\", her lawyer Josalee Deinla said. She was prepared for the challenge of giving birth in custody and aware the legal proceedings were likely to be lengthy.\n\nBut as the Covid-19 pandemic hit the Philippines, her concerns grew rapidly. The National Union of Peoples' Lawyers, a legal aid group representing Ms Nasino, filed a series of motions calling for her release.\n\nThe first one in April urged the temporary release of 22 political prisoners most vulnerable to contracting the coronavirus, including Ms Nasino. Later motions asked the court to allow the activist and her baby to remain together in hospital or at the Manila City Jail where she was detained.\n\n\"We were shocked that the court would deny such a plea. The judge only needed to consider the motions from her own perspective as a human. But unfortunately compassion and mercy were not extended to mother and child,\" said Ms Deinla.\n\nRiver Masino was born on 1 July. Her birth weight was low but after a few days she and Ms Nasino returned to Manila City Jail where they stayed in a makeshift room reserved for them.\n\nUnder Philippine law a child born in custody can remain with the mother for only the first month of their life, though exceptions can be made. By comparison, children born to mothers detained in Malaysia are permitted to remain with them until the age of three or four. In the UK, mother and baby units enable women to stay with their infants till they reach 18 months.\n\nCampaigners persisted in pressing authorities to release Ms Masino and her baby.\n\n\"We would tie blue ribbons to the the poles of the Supreme Court gates. They stood for River, the essence of life. We placed candles outside. But they didn't listen,\" said Fides Lim, who heads Kapatid, a support group of families and friends of political prisoners in the Philippines.\n\nMs Nasino's mother (in blue) had been fighting for the right of her daughter and granddaughter to remain together\n\nMs Nasino's mother, assisted by Kapatid, also delivered photos and letters to authorities nearly every week, pleading for her daughter's release\n\n\"We knew how important it was for baby River to be breast fed,\" said Ms Lim, who has also been campaigning for the urgent release of her husband, a political prisoner aged 70.\n\nThe hospital where Ms Nasino gave birth recommended the baby be kept with her mother, said Ms Nasino's lawyer, Ms Deinla. \"But the prison authorities said they lacked the resources. They came up with a lot of excuses, violating the child's right to her mother's breast milk,\" she said.\n\nUnder the \"Bangkok Rules\" - UN guidelines for the treatment of female prisoners - decisions on when a child is separated from its mother should be based on the best interests of the child.\n\nThe BBC has approached the Philippine prison authorities for comment but has not yet received a response.\n\nOn August 13, baby River was separated from her mother. Ms Nasino was \"inconsolable\", said Ms Deinla. \"She didn't want to give up her baby. She was actually pleading that the baby be allowed to stay longer.\"\n\nBecause of Covid-19 rules restricting access to prisoners, Ms Deinla and her colleagues have only been able to keep in touch with Ms Nasino by phone.\n\nBaby River's health began to deteriorate the following month, according to Ms Lim. The newborn had been passed into the care of her grandmother, Ms Nasino's mother, who told the support group that the family were \"very worried because the baby was having diarrhoea\", said Ms Lim.\n\nCalls to reunite the mother and child grew more urgent as River was hospitalised on 24 September and her condition worsened. But Ms Nasino was still not permitted to see her baby.\n\nLast week, River died from pneumonia, just over three months old. Her death has shocked many in the Philippines, where tributes and sympathies have flowed on social media.\n\nMany have also expressed their anger at the justice system, with some comparing the recent pardon granted to a US marine convicted of killing a transgender woman in the Philippines with the court's refusal to allow Ms Nasino to see her dying baby. \"*Selective* justice is served,\" wrote a Twitter user.\n\nMs Nasino was permitted to briefly attend her daughter's wake on Wednesday\n\nOthers highlighted the difference in how the young activist was treated compared to higher profile and more wealthy prisoners who have been allowed temporary release to attend events such as their children's weddings or graduations.\n\nOn Tuesday, a local court granted Ms Nasino a three-day furlough to attend the wake and funeral of her daughter.\n\nBut after prison officials intervened to reduce the length of her release she was only permitted to leave jail for three hours on Wednesday and Friday - the day of River's burial.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "The costs associated with building HS2, the high speed railway linking northern and southern England, have risen again.\n\nThe news comes less than two months after construction officially began.\n\nMinisters have admitted an extra £800m is needed due to more asbestos being discovered and the complexities of bringing the railway into a new hub station at London Euston.\n\nEarlier this year the government gave HS2 a revised budget of £98bn after previous costings became unrealistic.\n\nThe Department for Transport said it was \"relentlessly focused on controlling costs\" and still expects HS2 Ltd to complete the first stretch of the railway within its target cost of £40bn.\n\nThe latest admission over cost pressures came in the government's first six-monthly update on HS2 to parliament, since the government gave 'notice to proceed' with construction in April.\n\nIn the past HS2 Ltd, the public company charged with delivering the project, and the Department for Transport have been accused of misleading MPs about the true cost of the project.\n\nA letter written in May 2016, by the then Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin, showed that ministers knew the scheme was over budget. However, at the time, it was not made public.\n\nFormer HS2 directors alleged that the project's ballooning budget was \"covered-up\", something HS2 Ltd denied.\n\nThe current government has admitted that more transparency over the progress of the project, which has been deeply divisive, is necessary.\n\nIn his first six-monthly review of HS2, the Transport Minister, Andrew Stephenson, claimed the government now had \"a stronger grip on delivery to time and budget\".\n\nMajor construction projects such as HS2 are fraught with risk and uncertainty, and the government has set aside £5.3bn of funding to cover any unknown costs which arise on Phase 1.\n\nHowever, ministers admit the latest £0.8bn overspend does not include the impact of the pandemic, which is likely to have driven costs up further.\n\nThe first stretch of the railway, between London and Birmingham, is not expected to be completed until 2029 at the earliest.\n\nPhase 2, which will create a 'Y-shape' linking Birmingham to Manchester and to Leeds might not be finished until 2040.\n\nThe project has also faced scrutiny over its impact on natural environments along the route.\n\nEnvironmental protestors have tried to prevent HS2 Ltd from cutting down trees along the route in ancient woodlands in Warwickshire.\n\nThe government says HS2 Ltd will set up a new Environmental Sustainability Committee which will publish its first report on the environmental impact of the project next year.", "First Minister Mark Drakeford wrote to the prime minister twice to ask if people living in Covid hotspots in England could be banned from travelling to Welsh communities.\n\nMr Drakeford said he had \"asked for the necessary work to be brought forward, which would allow for devolved powers to be used to prevent people from travelling into Wales from high prevalence areas of the United Kingdom\".\n\nThe first minister said if Boris Johnson did not implement travel restrictions in England the Welsh Government would use its powers to bring in its own ban on Friday evening.\n\n\"The timetable for the powers that we have in Wales is to do it by the end of the week,\" he said.\n\n\"That gives more time for the prime minister, the UK government, to do the things that we have asked him to do, to do the same thing for people who live in England as we have done for people who live in Wales.\n\n\"We've already heard from the first minister in Scotland, and she is eager to support what we're trying to do here.\n\n\"Now is the time for the prime minister to do the same thing.\n\n\"If he isn't willing to do so the timetable is for us to use the powers in Wales by the end of the week.\"", "Banks have told expat customers to close their accounts within months\n\nBanks must ensure closing expats' UK bank accounts does not leave customers in \"undue financial hardship\".\n\nThousands of expats living in the EU have been told their bank accounts will be closed owing to Brexit.\n\nThe Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has stressed to banks that they must give at least two months' notice of plans to close any accounts in credit.\n\nIt said some were not informing customers in good time, but only certain banks plan to shut accounts.\n\nFollowing the UK's full departure from the EU, UK banks will no longer be allowed to provide services to customers in the EU without the right banking licences.\n\nThis is known as passporting, a system for banks in the EU which allows them to trade freely in any other state in the European Economic Area (EEA) without the need for more authorisation.\n\nSome, but not all, banks have decided it is not in their commercial interests to jump through these hoops and continue accounts for expats.\n\nSharon, who lives in The Netherlands, was shocked to receive a letter saying her current account will be closed unless she can provide a UK address\n\nThe effect on individuals was revealed by BBC Radio 4's Money Box last month.\n\nIt heard from people like Sharon Clarke, a Briton who has been living in the Netherlands for 20 years and who had banked with Lloyds for decades without any financial problems.\n\n\"I was shocked to receive a notification saying that my bank account is going to be closed in two months,\" she told the programme.\n\n\"They said that unless I provide a UK address, my account will be closed and I'll have to cut up my card.\"\n\nShe said she was given until early November to close her account and transfer all monies, standing orders and regular payments to another bank.\n\nThe issue was taken up by Mel Stride, who chairs the Commons Treasury Committee.\n\nIn response to Mr Stride's questions, the new FCA chief executive Nikhil Rathi said banks were being reminded of their responsibilities.\n\n\"This includes identifying whether closing accounts would cause any particular customers or classes of customer undue financial hardship, taking into account the availability of alternative products,\" he said.\n\nMr Stride described this as a \"welcome move\" and said his committee would continue to monitor the situation closely.\n\nHowever, there seems little chance of many, if any, of these banks reversing their decision to close accounts - leaving many expats needing to switch current account providers.\n• None 'My bank is shutting my account because of Brexit'", "People from Scotland have been warned against travelling to Blackpool after it was linked to a \"large and growing\" number of Scottish coronavirus cases.\n\nAbout 180 Scots have tested positive for the virus in the past month after travelling to the seaside town.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she would write to the prime minister seeking urgent talks over UK-wide travel restrictions.\n\nAnd she warned against travelling for non-essential reasons.\n\nBlackpool Council said \"stringent Covid secure measures\" were in place, while local hoteliers said Ms Sturgeon singling out the town was \"a real kick in the teeth\".\n\nCoronavirus cases have been surging in Scotland in recent weeks, with a further 1,429 positive tests being recorded on Wednesday.\n\nA further 15 deaths of people who had tested positive have also been registered.\n\nMs Sturgeon said the country was at a \"really critical moment\", and said the government \"will not shy away from doing what we think is necessary to keep the people of Scotland as safe as possible\".\n\nShe said trips to Blackpool - and in particular coach parties - had been linked to \"a large and growing number of cases\" of the virus in Scotland, with a specific incident management team set up to deal with them.\n\nOver the past month, around 180 people have told contact tracing teams that they had recently been in the Lancashire holiday resort, with 94 of them in the past week.\n\nMs Sturgeon said the town was being \"mentioned in Test and Protect conversations far more than any other location outside of Scotland\", with a particular concern about coach trips.\n\nShe said she knew many people would have trips planned for the half-term holidays in October, but said: \"If you don't have to travel right now, do not travel.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid: Nicola Sturgeon urges Scots to not travel to Blackpool\n\nMs Sturgeon made an appeal to football fans in particular, saying supporters of Rangers and Celtic should not travel south to watch Saturday's derby match between the Glasgow rivals.\n\nPolice in England had already warned Old Firm fans about making a cross-border visit for the match while pubs and bars in Glasgow are closed.\n\nThe first minister said people should \"watch the football at home\", adding: \"Do not travel to Blackpool this weekend to watch the Old Firm match in a pub. If you do that you will be putting yourselves and other people at risk please do not do that this weekend.\"\n\nBlackpool attracts 18 million visitors each year, around a million of them said to be from Scotland.\n\nA spokesperson for Blackpool Council said there had not been outbreaks in the local tourism industry, or in the rest of the UK which had been linked back to the town.\n\nAnd Claire Smith of the StayBlackpool group of hoteliers said Scottish visitors were \"absolutely critical to the town's success\".\n\nShe said: \"It's demoralising when so many people have worked so hard to make their product safe. It's a real kick in the teeth when a town is mentioned so specifically.\"\n\nThe director of public health at Blackpool Clinical Commissioning Group said other parts of the north west of England have much higher rates of infection.\n\nDr Arif Rajpura told BBC Radio Scotland's Drivetime: \"We are not necessarily a hotspot for Covid, as is being portrayed by the first minister.\"\n\nHe added that the seaside town has about 60 Covid marshalls active at weekends to make sure people are social distancing.\n\nDr Rajpura said: \"We have a lot going on in terms of making our town Covid secure so, from that point of view, the experience is safe.\"\n\nHe also told the programme Blackpool has not had any \"big hotel-based outbreaks\" and household transmission is the main driver of infections in the area.\n\nNo fans will be present at Celtic Park for Saturday's derby with Rangers - and Glasgow's pubs will be closed\n\nMeanwhile, Ms Sturgeon said she was seeking \"urgent talks\" with Mr Johnson about UK-wide travel restrictions following calls from the Welsh government.\n\nWelsh First Minister Mark Drakeford has been leading calls for travel restrictions to be imposed on virus hotspots across the UK, to stop people from carrying the virus from higher prevalence areas into other parts of the country.\n\nMr Drakeford said he had written to Mr Johnson twice without any formal reply, and that he was \"preparing new regulations to protect the health of people in Wales\" that would come into force on Friday.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Mark Drakeford This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThere was a political row over the summer when Ms Sturgeon refused to rule out the idea of requiring visitors from areas with outbreaks to quarantine - with Mr Johnson calling the idea \"astonishing and shameful\".\n\nMs Sturgeon tweeted in support of Mr Drakeford's move, stressing that \"these are public health decisions and nothing to do with constitutional or political debates\".\n\nAnd she said at her daily coronavirus briefing that she had written to Mr Johnson seeking a \"sensible agreement\" between the four nations about new rules.\n\nThe first minister said she would not hesitate to put \"formal travel restrictions in place if necessary\", but said she hoped people would choose to \"do the right thing\".\n\nShe said: \"It is people's good sense and good will and sense of solidarity with each other that should still guide us through this.\n\n\"I'm not expecting you to obey these rules just because I stand here and ask you to, I'm asking you to obey these rules because they are about keeping you and your loved ones safe and keeping the whole country safe.\"\n• None Sturgeon says virus not just killing the elderly", "Elton John and Renate Blauel got married in 1984 and divorced four years later\n\nSir Elton John and his ex-wife Renate Blauel have resolved a legal dispute that was triggered by the star's autobiography and the film Rocketman.\n\nMs Blauel sued Sir Elton in June, claiming he'd broken the terms of their divorce deal by discussing their four-year marriage, which ended in 1988.\n\nShe initially asked for an injunction to prevent future disclosures, as well as damages in the region of £3m.\n\nThe case has now been settled amicably, a spokesman for Sir Elton said.\n\nA joint statement on behalf of Ms Blauel and Sir Elton said: \"The parties are happy to announce that they have resolved this case, in a way that acknowledges Renate's need for privacy.\n\n\"For her part, Renate acknowledges that Elton has acted in a dignified and respectful way towards her in the last 30 years and has been always happy to help her.\n\n\"They will not be discussing each other, or their marriage, in future and will be making no further comment about the case.\"\n\nMs Blauel had claimed Sir Elton made \"repeated and flagrant\" breaches of their divorce agreement in both his book and the Oscar-winning biopic.\n\nHer lawyers said the disclosures had exacerbated longstanding mental health problems, including \"depression and anxiety\", and that her condition was \"exacerbated by press interest in her\" following the publication of Sir Elton's memoir, Me, a year ago.\n\nIn papers filed in his defence, the singer's legal team argued that the details in the book and film were public knowledge and that the divorce agreement applied \"only to private and confidential matters\".\n\nFive scenes from Rocketman were referenced in Ms Blauel's claim, including scenes showing their wedding day as well as the couple sleeping in separate bedrooms.\n\nAnother scene depicted Sir Elton in a group therapy session discussing the failure of his marriage \"on account of his unhappiness and in particular his sexuality\", the claim read.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Schools and residential trip providers fear they will no longer be covered by insurance for visits cancelled because of coronavirus.\n\nAfter changes last week, advice on the Association of British Insurers website no longer says schools will be covered for the loss of trips.\n\nIt now says schools should \"seek a refund from the venue\".\n\nThe ABI says the advice was amended to reflect exclusions in policies as the pandemic continues.\n\nOutdoor education centres across the UK have been closed since March under government coronavirus restrictions.\n\nLast week providers wrote to the prime minister asking him to save outdoor education, which they said \"faces an existential threat\".\n\nAdvising schools to ask for refunds rather than claim on their insurance for cancelled trips is another blow, according to Vanessa Fox, chief executive of the charity Farms for City Children.\n\nMs Fox says she spotted changes to the ABI's Frequently Asked Questions section last week after following a link from the Department for Education website.\n\nShe told the BBC she had copied and pasted the section into an email to a colleague on 6 October.\n\nAt the time it promised: \"In general, most schools will be covered under their insurance policy.\"\n\nThe guidance advised schools to first seek a refund from the venue or tour provider - but said if the venue could no longer host the trip \"because of official government guidance, the closure of the venue, or their reluctance to accept school trips due to their stated concerns about the spread of coronavirus, the school will be covered\".\n\nHowever, she says the following day, the mention of cover had disappeared, with the answer just saying \"the school should seek a refund from the venue\".\n\n\"For the ABI to have changed that advice and put the burden on us is so disappointing,\" she said.\n\n\"Thousands of children who have spent months in isolation, including many who live in high-rise flats with no outdoor space to play, have already missed out on the week of discovery at our farms, and now their schools and parents face having to shoulder the cost...\n\n\"We would like to see the ABI do the right thing, honour the cover that schools believed they had in place, and help ensure the outdoor learning sector survives so that children across the country can look forward to spending time exploring the great outdoors, reconnecting with their peers, and reigniting their passion for learning.\"\n\nFarms for City Children was founded 45 years ago by War Horse author, Michael Morpurgo\n\nFarms for City Children was set up 45 years ago by War Horse author Michael Morpurgo.\n\nFor some young visitors, their week-long trip to one of the charity's three working farms might be the first time they have ever left their neighbourhood, let alone fed chickens or helped harvest their own dinner, says Ms Fox.\n\nThe charity pays 60% of the cost but schools and families must find the rest.\n\nMs Fox says a quarter of the schools who had booked visits over the past seven months have managed to secure insurance payouts.\n\nMost of the others have rescheduled and she is hoping business will pick up in the spring, but says she is \"very nervous about how quickly it's coming round\".\n\nEd and Sara Jones, directors of Rhos y Gwaliau outdoor centre in Snowdonia, have refunded all fees and deposits but say their business interruption insurance does not cover a pandemic.\n\n\"The majority of schools have not been able to claim on their insurance policies either,\" they say.\n\n\"Schools are now rebooking in the hope that we will be open for 2021 but are worried about their money being safe.\n\n\"We are not taking deposits and we have had to rewrite our booking conditions to offer a full refund if Covid-19 forces the trip to be cancelled.\n\n\"This is the only way we can reassure our customers that they can book in confidence.\n\n\"We are doing the best by our customers but who is looking out for us?\"\n\nAndy Robinson of campaign group UK Outdoors said businesses in the sector were being destroyed.\n\n\"Government have pulled the rug from under schools and providers and this move by insurers only makes it worse.\n\n\"It can't go on,\" said Mr Robinson.\n\nIn a statement, the ABI said: \"If schools are planning trips they should check current government advice, the refund policies with venues or the tour operator, and the scope of their insurance cover.\n\n\"In the event of cancellation, schools should first seek a refund from the venue or tour operator.\n\n\"For any cost that cannot be recovered, schools should check the type and scope of their insurance cover. Claims will be paid if policy terms are met, however there may be Covid-19 exclusions in place for trips booked after the pandemic was declared.\n\n\"Where a tour operator has taken out a group travel insurance policy instead of the school, it is likely that the tour operator will be responsible to cover cancellations due to a change in government advice, as this will be considered a business risk which that company has taken on.\"", "Morrisons, Waitrose and John Lewis have said they won't be using glitter in own-brand Christmas products this year.\n\nThe tiny pieces of plastic can wash into the environment, harm wildlife, and get into the food chain.\n\nThe move is part of a wider push by retailers to try to reduce festive plastics pollution.\n\nBoots said it would be cutting out single-use plastic packaging from Christmas gifts, taking 2,000 tonnes of plastic from its ranges.\n\nAsda announced in September that it would launch its first sustainable Christmas range, and Tesco uses only edible glitter.\n\nSainsbury's said that this year \"customers will find no glitter on our Christmas cards, wrapping paper or gift bags.\" It has also removed glitter used on a range of crackers, decorations, and flowers.\n\nBetween four and 12 million tonnes of plastic waste makes its way into oceans every year, mainly through rivers, according to estimates.\n\nThat plastic then breaks down into smaller, toxic pieces, which can be ingested by creatures, harming and potentially killing them, if it fills their stomachs.\n\nMorrisons will ditch glitter on own brand Christmas products\n\nMorrisons said on Wednesday that it would completely remove glitter from all of its own brand Christmas ranges including cards, crackers, wrapping paper, present bags, flowers, plants and wreaths.\n\nIt will also include only paper, metal or wooden toys in its Christmas crackers, which will be completely plastic-free, it said.\n\nGlitter is an \"ecological hazard\" which \"takes hundreds of years to degrade\" once it gets into rivers and oceans, Morrisons said.\n\nMorrisons said its decision would remove 50 tonnes of plastic from its shelves during the festive period.\n\nChristine Bryce, Morrisons home director, said: \"Every time a cracker is pulled, or a card is opened, plastics have been used... but just the once.\n\n\"So, we've taken glitter and plastic out of our festive range this year - so that our customers can enjoy their festivities without worrying about the environmental impact.\"\n\nWaitrose and John Lewis will also remove glitter from all single-use products this Christmas.\n\n\"All own-brand cards, crackers, wrapping paper, gift bags are now 100% glitter-free,\" it said in a statement.\n\nWaitrose has been phasing out glitter over the past few years, and has a target to make its own brand packaging widely recycled, reusable or home compostable by 2023.\n\nBoots said searches for ecologically friendly products on its website had grown by almost a third in a year.\n\nIt said that it would completely ditch single-use plastic packaging this year, and that gift packaging \"is intended to be recycled or reused.\"\n\nRetailers \"are right to ditch unnecessary plastic this Christmas\" said campaign group Friends of the Earth.\n\n\"People can still enjoy the festive season without the glitter and pointless packaging that add to the waves of plastic pollution that pour into our environment every year and threaten our wildlife,\" said Friends of the Earth campaigner Tony Bosworth.\n\nBut he said \"we must go much further to end the scourge of plastic pollution\" and called for the UK government to set targets for firms to phase out the use of unnecessary plastic.", "Boris Johnson has been at pains to use every chance recently to say how much restricting our lives bothers him.\n\nBranding himself a \"freedom-loving Tory\", time and again his reluctance for further clamp downs is clear.\n\nBut can he, should he, hold out? It's clear in black and white now that the scientific advisers he used to boast of following think it is maybe even past the time to act.\n\nMinutes from Sage (the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) and the very public view from England's Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, that the national measures aren't adequate made that plain.\n\nAnd the BBC understands that health officials have been considering putting Greater Manchester and Lancashire into the highest level of restrictions, although a decision won't come on Tuesday.\n\nThe Labour leader's call for a \"circuit-breaker\" has added to the volume of demand for extra caution - marking the end of the phase of what he used to describe as constructive opposition.\n\nSir Keir Starmer has been inching away from the broad frontbench consensus on how to handle coronavirus for weeks.\n\nTo the frustration of some on his own side, rather than scream down the government's plans, he has developed an attack on the government's ability to handle the situation and to act quickly enough.\n\nSir Keir Starmer has become increasingly critical of Boris Johnson's performance\n\nBut his call for a circuit-breaker means he believes the government has simply got its wrong.\n\nPolling suggests too that there is public desire for tougher actions to prevent a terrible second wave. Some senior figures in government agree.\n\nYet the balance of desire in the Conservative Party has shifted, with more pleading for finding ways to live with the virus, rather than lock down again. The point has been made time and again on the back benches.\n\nNow a junior member of the government, Chris Green, has resigned in protest at the restrictions in his Bolton constituency, attacking the government's strategy completely. (If you have been paying VERY close attention to politics you might remember it's not the first time Mr Green has quit, and the last time round, Simon Hart, who is now Welsh secretary, was less than flattering about whether it mattered very much.)\n\nBut many ministers are cautious about anything that goes beyond the regional tiered approach that was announced only on Monday.\n\nAnd the Treasury in particular is reluctant to budge - fearing the economic savagery of even a short, sharp national period of more restrictions.\n\nAs we've discussed before, none of this is easy. There is no precedent for how to handle the situation. Nor is there a parallel universe where the government or MPs can judge what would have happened if they hadn't taken the actions they've done already.\n\nBut as cases continue to rise, one Whitehall insider told me that people are preparing for what looks logical on paper - a short period of more intense restrictions everywhere in England.\n\nIt's not what No 10 wants to have to do, but to use Whitehall cliché, the discussions are \"live\" - in other words, it may well happen.\n\nThe prime minister may boast about his love of liberty, but he'll be reluctant too to leave himself open to a repeat of the allegations he faced at the start of the pandemic - that government action to protect people's health was too little, and too late.", "Around two million viewers have been tuning in to each episode of Little Mix The Search\n\nFilming on Little Mix's BBC One talent show has been halted after a \"small number of people\" involved in the series tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nSaturday's broadcast of Little Mix The Search has been postponed as a result.\n\nIts producers said they hoped to be back on air by the following Saturday, 24 October.\n\nThey have not revealed who has tested positive or how many, but did confirm that none of the four members of the UK girl band had contracted the virus.\n\nThose who have tested positive \"are now self-isolating following the latest government guidelines,\" a statement said.\n\n\"Due to the format of the show we have made the decision to postpone Saturday's programme. There are rigorous protocols in place to manage Covid-19 as the safety of all those involved in the production is paramount.\"\n\nThe news comes a day after the Britain's Got Talent Christmas special postponed its filming because at least three crew members tested positive.\n\nAnother BBC TV talent show, Strictly Come Dancing, filmed its launch show on Monday, and will hope to avoid similar problems in the weeks ahead.\n\nOne contestant, YouTube star and singer HRVY, tested positive 10 days before the launch show, but was later given the all-clear.\n\nAround two million viewers have been tuning in to each episode of Little Mix The Search, which follows the chart-topping pop group as they look to create their own arena-filling pop group.\n\nThe task for Leigh-Anne Pinnock, Perrie Edwards, Jesy Nelson and Jade Thirlwall is to assemble six bands from thousands of wannabes, and eventually choose one group to support them on tour.\n\nThis Saturday's episode, which was due to be filmed on Friday, was due to be the first time the bands had performed head-to-head.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by BBC This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nThe series has been praised by reviewers for taking \"a kinder approach\" to the age-old talent show model.\n\nSpeaking to BBC News in September, Little Mix said they insisted on aftercare for contestants, having seen first hand how the music industry treats young hopefuls.\n\n\"We didn't have that, really, on the show that we came from,\" said Pinnock, referring to the band's experiences on The X Factor.\n\n\"We want to make sure that they're looked after properly and support them,\" added Thirlwall.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Last updated on .From the section Football\n\nPremier League clubs have \"unanimously agreed\" that 'Project Big Picture' will not be \"endorsed or pursued\".\n\nThe controversial plans, proposed by Liverpool and Manchester United, were rejected at a meeting of the 20 clubs in England's top flight on Wednesday.\n\nInstead, the clubs agreed to \"work together\" on a new \"strategic plan\" for the \"financing of English football\".\n\nThey also decided on a £50m rescue package for League One and Two clubs at the meeting.\n\nA Premier League statement said \"discussions will also continue with the EFL\" over financial support for the Championship.\n\n'Project Big Picture' involved reducing the Premier League from 20 to 18 clubs and scrapping the EFL Cup and Community Shield.\n\nIn addition, the English Football League would have got 25% of all future TV deals, which would have been negotiated jointly, plus a £250m bail-out.\n\nHowever, it would also have seen more power transferred to the so-called 'big six' Premier League clubs.\n\nIn its statement, the Premier League said its members had \"agreed to work together as a 20-club collective on a strategic plan for the future structures and financing of English football, consulting with all stakeholders to ensure a vibrant, competitive and sustainable football pyramid\".\n\nIt added: \"Clubs will work collaboratively, in an open and transparent process, focusing on competition structure, calendar, governance and financial sustainability.\n\n\"This project has the full support of the FA and will include engagement with all relevant stakeholders including fans, government and, of course, the EFL.\"\n• None The Premier League cut from 20 to 18 clubs, with the Championship, League One and League Two each retaining 24 teams.\n• None The bottom two teams in the Premier League relegated automatically with the 16th-placed team joining the Championship play-offs.\n• None A £250m rescue fund made immediately available to the EFL & 25% of all future TV deals.\n• None £100m paid to the FA to make up for lost revenue.\n• None Nine clubs given 'special voting rights' on certain issues, based on their long time in the Premier League.\n\n\"Clearly there's some frustration that a proposal that hadn't had the input from the clubs has been pushed so hard in public,\" said Premier League chief executive Richard Masters.\n\n\"We don't have any beef with the EFL. We have a historic relationship - we want that to be constructive.\n\n\"It was a candid, positive and - in the end - a unanimous meeting.\n\n\"We decided to move on from 'Big Picture' and move on to a new review process.\n\n\"Solidarity is incredibly strong so while there's been a lot said, I don't think it's irreparably damaged the Premier League.\"\n\nFA chairman Greg Clarke had said a breakaway league was suggested \"as a threat\" by the organisers of 'Project Big Picture'.\n\nMasters added: \"I don't think anyone has been talking about breaking away.\n\n\"We acknowledge the English model is a huge success but it hasn't been reviewed for a long time, so maybe there are some systemic issues that haven't been dealt with.\"\n\nThe League One and Two rescue package\n\nThe Premier League said the financial package for League One and Two clubs was intended to make sure they \"will not go out of business as a result of the financial impact of Covid-19 and be able to complete the 2020-21 season\".\n\nIt conceded they were at more risk than Premier League and Championship clubs as they \"rely more heavily on matchday revenue and have fewer resources at their disposal\".\n\n\"This offer will consist of grants and interest-free loans totalling a further £50m on top of the £27.2m solidarity payments already advanced to League One and League Two this year, making a total of £77.2m,\" added the Premier League statement.\n\nThe EFL will meet all its clubs on Thursday to discuss the Premier League's proposal and said it was \"encouraging that there is an acknowledgment that a review of the current status quo is required\".\n\nIts statement went on: \"The EFL welcomes the opportunity to contribute to any wider debate with colleagues across the game as we seek to finally address impossible economic pressures and deliver on the objective of having a sustainable EFL in the long term.\"\n\nCulture Secretary Oliver Dowden, who described 'Project Big Picture' as 'Project Power Grab', has previously called on the Premier League to look after those lower down the football pyramid.\n\n\"This morning I reiterated calls of many in the football family for bigger clubs to look after smaller clubs,\" he said.\n\n\"An offer has been made by the Premier League to EFL League One and Two which is a good start.\n\n\"I urge them to work together and stay focused on helping clubs through this crisis.\"\n\nThe wording of the Premier League statement is interesting.\n\nOn the one hand, Project Big Picture is not being endorsed; on the other, all 20 clubs have agreed to work on a strategic plan \"in an open and transparent process, focusing on competition structure, calendar, governance and financial sustainability\".\n\nSo, depending on how you look at it, the work of Liverpool owner John Henry and Manchester United counterpart Joel Glazer is either dead in the water or has opened discussion on something the EFL in particular has been calling for desperately.\n\nI was told the reaction to Liverpool and Manchester United in today's meeting was tame compared to what it might have been.\n\nHowever, there has been no apology and some clubs believe there is now a lack of trust between the 'big six' and the rest, which probably underlines why \"all 20 clubs\" and \"open and transparent\" were so high up in the Premier League's statement.\n\nWe can never know whether there would have been this new commitment to reform had Project Big Picture not made its way into the public domain. Its authors are sceptical that there would have been and hence feel justified - nor do they view their ideas as being over.\n\nEvidently though, the suggestion that the voting mechanism within the Premier League could be changed so six clubs out of a 'special' nine would have to power to create, change or block any issue has no support and will have to be changed.\n\nThe other interesting aspect of the past 72 hours surrounds EFL chairman Rick Parry.\n\nThere were some EFL clubs who were not entirely happy with Parry before this news came out. Now they are solidly behind him. It is fair to say this enthusiasm is not shared by his Premier League counterparts. The relationship between the two leagues now will be fascinating.\n• None Can the scene now make it big outside of London?", "An elderly patient with dementia was restrained on 19 separate occasions to allow hospital staff to forcibly treat him, BBC News has learned.\n\nThe man was repeatedly bruised by security guards and his requests for the restraints to be stopped ignored.\n\nOne incident, at Kent's William Harvey Hospital, saw a cloth held over his head while his arms and legs were held so nurses could insert a catheter.\n\nThe hospital apologised \"unreservedly\" to the patient and his family.\n\nThe East Kent Hospitals Trust, which runs the William Harvey, is at the centre of an independent investigation into maternity failures and was charged last week over the death of baby Harry Richford.\n\nIt has also been the subject of legal action by hospital inspectors over its failure to stop the spread of Covid-19 in the hospital.\n\nAccording to an internal investigation seen by BBC News, the man was admitted from his care home to the hospital, in Ashford, last November, with urinary retention.\n\nThe patient's condition, the reports say, could make him confused and aggressive, occasionally shouting and hitting out at staff and refusing treatment.\n\nBut the investigation shows staff rarely tried to de-escalate the situation and repeatedly failed to sedate him effectively.\n\nInstead, over the course of nearly three weeks at the hospital, the 77-year-old, who we are not naming at his family's request, was physically restrained 19 times, with the hospital's security guards assisting on 18 occasions, under orders from nursing staff on the ward.\n\nBBC reconstruction: Security guards were called to restrain the patient for treatment\n\nIn the first restraint, on 29 November, the guards \"held down arms and legs\", causing \"broken skin, redness to wrists and knees\", the investigation report says.\n\nBetween 6 and 15 December, security guards were called 15 times to control the patient, often in the middle of the night.\n\nOn another occasion, nursing staff managed to restrain him themselves.\n\nThe report records this as \"restraint by nursing staff for catheterisation without sedation, 20 minute restraint, intermittent release\".\n\nSecurity guards filmed the restraints, on their body-worn cameras, at least twice.\n\nAnd it was the review of the footage of the second restraint that prompted senior management to take action.\n\nA whistleblower who has seen the video said \"it is truly appalling\" as it showed \"22 minutes of silence\" with no-one speaking to the patient.\n\nThe staff member said the patient had been lifted from a sitting position, thrown on to a bed and had his arms and legs restrained by two security guards and four carers, a mix of healthcare assistants and nurses.\n\nThe patient had been struggling and repeatedly asking staff to stop.\n\nAt one point, he had spat out and a carer had responded by putting a cloth over his head.\n\nThe aim of the restraint was to insert a catheter.\n\nOn occasion, some members of staff had realised what had been happening had been wrong, the investigators found.\n\nOn 9 December, a security guard raised concerns about being asked to restrain the man.\n\n\"The security guard spoke to the patient about the procedure,\" the report says.\n\n\"And the patient said he did not want this.\n\n\"The security guard… felt uncomfortable about continuing and told the nurses he would stop the restraint.\"\n\nLater that same day, during another restraint, a supervisor \"threatened to stop assisting, as he felt we were denying human rights\".\n\nBut he was told there was a \"clinical need and [it was in the] best interest of patient\".\n\nA separate incident report, paints a damning picture of the Cambridge J ward, where the man was a patient, describing it \"chaotic\" with a \"poor\" reputation that had affected staff recruitment and retention.\n\nIt was often understaffed and \"unsafe on most shifts,\" this report says.\n\nMedicines \"would be left on lockers or tables\", so staff did not know whether patients had taken them.\n\nAnd the \"fundamental and basic nutritional needs of the patients were not always met\".\n\nThree days after the final restraint, the patient was moved to another hospital, the Kent and Canterbury.\n\nHe is now well and settled in a different care home.\n\nIn a statement, his family said: \"What happened to our dad should never have been allowed to happen and should never be allowed to happen again.\"\n\nAn investigation by Kent Police into the patient's care has ended without any charges.\n\nThe company that supplies the hospital's security guards, RightGuard, told BBC News: \"We did nothing wrong.\n\n\"Security staff will only ever act under the instructions of clinicians.\"\n\nCardiff University dementia-care researcher Dr Katie Featherstone said: \"It's a really shocking and extreme case.\n\n\"He was just seen as someone with dementia.\n\n\"And his wishes were totally ignored.\"\n\nIn a statement, East Kent Hospitals Trust said: \"We apologise unreservedly to the patient and his family for the failings in his care.\n\n\"This fell far short of what patients should expect.\n\n\"We are rolling out a programme of dementia training for every member of staff, which more than half of staff have completed.\n\n\"One member of staff has been referred to the Nursing and Midwifery Council.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Football\n\nNew Zealand will not play England at Wembley in an international friendly next month, because of travel and player availability complications.\n\nEngland were due to host the All Whites on 12 November but New Zealand Football (NZF) say the game could \"potentially jeopardise\" their players' careers.\n\n\"A number of the team would be subject to quarantine or restrictions on their return home,\" said NZF.\n\n\"This would heavily disrupt their domestic seasons.\"\n\nNew Zealand have not played an international match since their friendly defeat by Lithuania last November.\n\nSubsequent friendlies against Oman and Bahrain, scheduled for March this year, were cancelled because of restrictions amid the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\n\"The shifting nature of travel restrictions and commercial flight availability under Covid means that we do not have certainty we could assemble a squad at Wembley,\" the NZF statement continued.\n\n\"Defaulting on this fixture at the last minute is not an option.\n\n\"Prior to Covid, we had a full calendar of fixtures planned and we have been proactive in seeking out matches but, unfortunately, it just isn't possible to make the games we have scheduled this year.\"\n\nEngland and New Zealand have not met in an international match since the late Graham Taylor managed the Three Lions to a 2-0 friendly victory in Wellington on 8 June 1991.\n• None Can the scene now make it big outside of London?", "Ken McCallum took up his role in April\n\nBritain is facing a \"nasty mix\" of national security threats, from hostile state activity by Russia and China to fast-growing right-wing terrorism, the new director general of MI5 has said.\n\nKen McCallum said terrorism remains the biggest threat - with Northern Irish and Islamist extremism also a concern.\n\nThe Covid lockdown raised the risk of online contact between groups, and made covert surveillance harder, he added.\n\nMr McCallum was speaking at his first media briefing as head of the service.\n\nThe new man at the top of the UK's domestic intelligence agency since April is a slim, youthful Glaswegian mathematician by training. He likes hiking up mountains when his parenting and work allows.\n\nAfter 24 years at MI5, some of it seconded to industry, he is surprisingly comfortable in front of the camera and he is setting about making parts of his organisation more visible to the public.\n\n\"We need to be increasingly visible, opening up new partnerships,\" Mr McCallum said, adding: \"MI5's operational successes are mostly invisible.\"\n\nMr McCallum said empty streets in lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic have made covert surveillance far harder.\n\nFewer crowds give adversaries fewer opportunities to attack but make the job of MI5's watchers more conspicuous.\n\n\"We spend our days and nights planting microphones in attics - with warrants - and meeting covert informants,\" said Mr McCallum, \"so we are used to operating in secret with extreme care.\"\n\nWith MI5's key workers being tasked with safeguarding national security it has had to try to maintain staff levels inside its headquarters building at Thames House with social distancing.\n\nData analysts, scientists, researchers and medically-qualified staff have been seconded to help the NHS and with vaccine research.\n\nTheir work, said Mr McCallum, has included protecting vaccine research from theft and combating deliberate disinformation.\n\nOn the threat from jihadists, Mr McCallum said there are still tens of thousands of people committed to that ideology.\n\nThe challenge was to make the difficult judgements on the small numbers amongst them who are going to turn to violence.\n\nMore terrorists these days, he said, have opted for fast, simple plots, giving away fewer clues and less time to find them.\n\nAround 950 UK-linked extremists travelled to war zones in Syria, he said.\n\nOn average, most of those who have returned did so early on and tended to be less extreme.\n\nA significant number of those who remained have been killed, others are in third countries, some are interned in camps in Syria while yet more are still at large in north-west Syria.\n\nMr McCallum said jihadist plots form the bulk of UK investigations.\n\nThe new threat is from right-wing terrorism, where MI5 took over the lead from the police in April.\n\nOut of 27 terrorist plots disrupted in the last four years, eight have involved right-wing extremists.\n\nMany of the adherents around the world are very young, indicating the problem may be around for some time.\n\nMI5 regularly compares notes with its counterparts in the FBI, European agencies and the other nations in the Five Eyes grouping - US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand .\n\nBut so far there has not emerged a single, global, unifying ideology in the way the Islamic State group or al-Qaeda have had.\n\nRussian, Chinese and Iranian espionage and disruption is all growing in severity and complexity, said Mr McCallum.\n\nThe threats are to people, the economy, infrastructure, academic research and democracy.\n\nMI5 has an operational role in investigating certain individuals and disrupting their activities, and a protective role building up UK's resilience in the cyber and physical spheres.\n\nDealing with China requires a complicated balance, he said.\n\nHe said there is a need to work with China on issues like climate change, but at the same time to be robust in confronting its covert activity.\n\nNew legislation is expected to make a big difference in bringing the law up to date in criminalising what foreign espionage agents get up to inside Britain.\n\nMr McCallum used a meteorological analogy, saying Russia was like bad weather but China was a far greater challenge in the long-term and more like climate change.\n\nSince 2018 Mr McCallum has spent part of career focusing on new technology and Artificial Intelligence, or machine learning.\n\nHe said when a suspect is arrested there are multiple digital devices to be trawled through, often containing terabytes of data.\n\nWith police allowed to hold a suspect for 14 days it can become a race against time to find court-usable evidence such as photographs of guns or proscribed IS flags.\n\nAI helps pluck these out far faster than humans can. It can also help with translations of vast tracts of text.\n\nAnd then there is CCTV footage.\n\nWhen a covert camera is placed watching a door, for example, it might only be opened after hours of no activity. AI will save someone having to trawl through all those hours of nothing.\n\n\"AI has massive applicability for our business,\" Mr McCallum said.\n\nThe Manchester bombing of 2017 prompted public criticism that MI5 should have done more to stop it.\n\nThe bombing was followed by two in-depth reviews looking at both the facts of the case and how MI5 can improve in the future, and the bomber's brother Hashem Abedi was successfully prosecuted.\n\nThere have been sweeping changes but the hardest thing for anyone in MI5 is that \"we cannot stop every single attack\", Mr McCallum said.\n\nMr McCallum, who spent years running covert informants and later led investigative teams before the 2012 London Olympics, is well used to a disrupted home life.\n\nAnd yet, he said: \"When my phone rings late in the evening my stomach still lurches.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Keir Starmer says a two to three week “circuit break” in England will require “significant sacrifices”\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has called for a short lockdown or \"circuit-breaker\" in England of two to three weeks to bring the rising rate of coronavirus under control.\n\nHe said measures were not working and another course was needed to prevent a \"sleepwalk into... a bleak winter\".\n\nHis comments come after documents revealed government scientific advisers called for such action three weeks ago.\n\nAnother 143 people have died in the UK after testing positive for the virus.\n\nMPs have approved the legislation to write a new three-tier system for coronavirus restrictions in England into law - with every area of the country classified as being on medium, high or very high alert.\n\nSir Keir said his lockdown proposal would \"not mean schools closing\" but it should \"run across half-term to minimise disruption\".\n\nHowever, he said it would mean that \"all pubs, bars and restaurants would be closed\" and compensated \"so that no business loses out because of the sacrifices we all need to make\".\n\n\"The government has not got a credible plan to slow infections. It has lost control of the virus and it's no longer following scientific advice,\" Sir Keir said.\n\nHe suggested it would also provide a chance for the government to \"fix\" problems by handing over track and trace responsibilities to local authorities.\n\nDocuments detailing advice from scientists on the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) were released on Monday night. Their views and evidence feed into the government's decision making.\n\nSir Keir said his proposals were \"in line with Sage's recommendation\" for a circuit breaker to lower the reproduction number, or R value, of the virus - but acknowledged they would require significant sacrifices.\n\nMeanwhile, Wales' first minister has said he had asked Prime Minister Boris Johnson for a special Cobra meeting \"specifically to discuss the circuit-breaker idea\" earlier in the week - and repeated that call in a letter on Wednesday.\n\n\"I think it's an idea that will need further examination and needs to be shared in perspective between the four UK nations,\" Mark Drakeford added.\n\nMr Johnson has rejected Mr Drakeford's demand for a travel ban on people coming to Wales from England's virus hotspots.\n\nMinisters in Northern Ireland's devolved government have been warned that Covid-19 infection rates will keep rising if both schools and the hospitality sector remain open, the BBC has learned.\n\nThe Scottish government is to implement its own three-tier framework of restrictions later in October. In the meantime, pubs and restaurants in Scotland's central belt, including Edinburgh and Glasgow, were closed on Friday until 25 October as part of a package of short-term measures.\n\nThe daily figure of 143 deaths follows 50 deaths announced on Monday and was the highest daily total since the 164 deaths recorded on 10 June.\n\nThe latest government figures also show another 17,234 people have tested positive for Covid in the UK, compared with 13,792 cases the day before.\n\nDr Yvonne Doyle, Public Health England's medical director, said the rising number of deaths was \"hugely concerning\".\n\n\"We have seen cases increasing especially in older age groups which is leading to more hospital admissions. This is a stark reminder for us to follow the guidelines,\" she said.\n\nThe Labour leader's call has added to the volume of demand for extra caution - marking the end of the phase of what he used to describe as constructive opposition.\n\nSir Keir Starmer has been inching away from the broad front bench consensus on how to handle coronavirus for weeks.\n\nTo the frustration of some on his own side, rather than scream down the government's plans he has developed an attack on the government's ability to handle the situation and to act quickly enough.\n\nBut his call for a circuit-breaker means he believes the government has simply got it wrong.\n\nPolling suggests too that there is public desire for tougher action to prevent a terrible second wave. Some senior figures in government agree.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock earlier defended the new measures, telling MPs that Covid-19 posed \"a formidable threat\" until a vaccine can be found.\n\nBut he said the government makes \"decisions that are guided by the science, taking into account all of the different considerations\".\n\n\"Protecting our economy and protecting our health are not alternatives\", he added, but said action was required to \"protect lives and livelihoods\".\n\nSir Keir said Labour would not vote against the measures - even though they did not go far enough.\n\n\"We are not going to vote down a package of restrictions because restrictions are needed,\" he said.\n\nA senior government source branded Sir Keir a \"shameless opportunist\", saying he was \"playing political games in the middle of a global pandemic\".\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nThe Liverpool region will enter a \"very high\" Covid alert level from Wednesday, the highest of the new three-tier system for coronavirus restrictions in England.\n\nMost parts of England are on the lowest tier, but Essex has asked to be moved to \"high\" level restrictions.\n\nMeanwhile, London could be put in a stricter lockdown within days, Mayor Sadiq Khan has warned.\n\nThe prime minister's official spokesman said the government examines a \"wide range of different data\" and takes advice from health experts before deciding which tier applies to an area.\n\n\"We look not only at infection rates but also the rate of positive tests, admissions to hospitals, and admissions to intensive care units,\" they said.\n\nA committee of senior government health officials have been considering putting Greater Manchester and Lancashire into the highest level of restrictions and will hold a further meeting on Wednesday.\n\nAndy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, said the government \"risks confusing people\" in the region just days after it was put in the second highest tier, adding \"unfunded restrictions are unfair\".\n\nThe highest tier of restrictions are set to come into force in Liverpool on Wednesday\n\nThe 143 new deaths reported is clearly a concern.\n\nIt is the highest daily figure since early June and feels significant, even taking into account the impact of the delayed reporting at the weekend which often pushes up the figures on a Tuesday.\n\nBut to understand what is happening you have to rewind a month or so and look at cases.\n\nCases were rising rapidly then - it is what promoted the government's senior advisers to warn there could be 50,000 cases a day by mid-October.\n\nThat has not happened. Just over 17,000 were announced today.\n\nThe trajectory has not been as steep as it could have been.\n\nWe have seen a similar pattern happen with hospital admissions. They are rising, but over the last week the rate of increase has slowed just a little.\n\nDeaths will, sadly, continue to go up in the coming days and weeks, but if the patterns seen with cases and hospital admissions are sustained those rises will slow too.\n\nIt is very, very different from the rapid surge we saw in the spring.\n\nBut a gradual and slow continual rise could still have a devastating impact over the long autumn and winter period.\n\nThat is why we are seeing politicians and scientists argue about what is the best way to contain the virus, while limiting the impact restrictions have on wider society and the economy.", "Birmingham City Council said about 25 kits had been given out by mistake in the student area of Selly Oak\n\nUsed coronavirus swab tests were accidentally given out to households in Birmingham, council officials said.\n\nBirmingham City Council said about 25 kits had been given out by mistake in the student area of Selly Oak as part of its \"drop-and-collect\" service.\n\nIt said the error was quickly realised, the kits remained intact and there was no evidence of cross-contamination.\n\nHowever, student David Lewes, 21, said he and four housemates used the tests without realising they were not new.\n\n\"We are really distressed, shocked, violated and one of my friends threw up after finding out they had been used before,\" he said.\n\nThe third-year University of Birmingham student said the council team dropped the test off at their home in Tiverton Road on Tuesday evening saying they would return a few minutes later to collect them.\n\n\"We are not familiar with the testing procedure and were a bit concerned there were no leaflets or information packs inside, but they came back and we said about the leaflets not being there and is that a concern?\n\n\"They said there's been a mistake and they'd rectify it. Then my housemate was asked if he'd done the test and he said yes and they said, 'OK, put it in the bag' and they left.\"\n\nStudents David Lewes (left) and George Scott (right) both used the testing kits they were given\n\nMr Lewes said they only found out later what happened via social media.\n\n\"The very least we expect is an apology and we have since spoken to the council and they have [apologised],\" he added.\n\n\"We know it's human error, but someone must be held accountable.. it's shambolic.\"\n\nThere are 237 Covid-19 cases currently in Selly Oak and neighbouring Edgbaston South and University wards, making them two of the worst hotspots in the city.\n\nVolunteers and RAF personnel distributed kits to households in those areas on Tuesday.\n\nStudent Sophie Dunne, who was given a used kit, said test tubes and swabs in sealed bags inside the box they were given \"had already been snapped off, so obviously it had been used\".\n\nAs soon as she and her housemate Natasha Ashbridge realised they \"went running up the street to notify the workers handing out the tests\".\n\nHousemates Sophie Dunne (left) and Natasha Ambridge (right) said they went running out of their house when they realised the testing kits were used\n\nMs Dunne said others had also come out of their homes with the kits, some of which had other people's addresses on.\n\nShe said she was \"in disbelief\" that such a thing could happen.\n\n\"I now know the council is saying apparently 25 tests were given out [but] from what we saw being collected in, [it] was a greater figure [or] number than that and people have used them and they have been opened which they've [the council] also said they've not.\"\n\nMs Ashbridge added: \"Obviously students have sort of been blamed for the spike and now it's probably going to rise potentially further because of this mix-up and it's not our fault.\"\n\nA city council spokesperson said: \"As soon as it became apparent that the wrong tests had been given out, steps were taken immediately to rectify the mistake.\n\n\"Drop and collect is a vital part of helping to tackle the spread of Covid in our city, with 100,000 tests being undertaken to date. The circumstances around this incident are being fully reviewed and any required changes to process will be implemented.\"\n\nDr Justin Varney, the city's public health director, said a seal had been broken on only one of the 25 kits and there was \"no evidence that that test tube was opened so we think that the risk of contamination from the sample itself is very, very unlikely\".\n\nHe said teams had been back out at the properties again on Wednesday \"to double check\" no-one had been put at risk. The risk of contamination from handling the boxes was also \"very, very low\", he added.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n• None Who can still get free Covid tests?\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Zoe Powell and her three eldest children died in the crash while Josh Powell was critically injured\n\nTributes have been paid to a \"lovely\" mother and her three young children who were killed in a crash.\n\nZoe Powell, 29, died with Phoebe, eight, when their people carrier collided with a lorry in Oxfordshire.\n\nTheir deaths on Monday night came just months after the family lost everything in a blaze at their home in Chinnor.\n\nMrs Powell's son Simeon, six, and four-year old Amelia, died at John Radcliffe Hospital where their father, Josh, 30, and 18-month-old sister remain.\n\nMr Powell and his daughter are in a serious condition but showing signs of improvement and \"expected to make a recovery\", Thames Valley Police said.\n\nReverend Dr Jacky Barr said the tragedy had shocked the community in Chinnor, where the Powells had been living in temporary accommodation since the electrical fire in June.\n\nThe crash happened on the A40, near a railway bridge between Oxford and Cassington, at 21:50 BST on Monday.\n\nDr Barr, of St Andrew's Church, said the Powells were a \"delightful family\" and had attended the church's after-school sessions.\n\n\"They were just a lovely family, they really were. This has come as such a shock and loss to us all in the area,\" she said.\n\nThe vicar opened the church for prayers, candles to be lit, and so a book of condolence could be signed in tribute.\n\nThe crash happened on the A40, between Oxford and Cassington,on Monday\n\nChinnor Community Church said the family were \"much-loved members\" who had attended worships regularly and played an active role.\n\n\"The family placed their belief in Jesus as Lord and Saviour, and we are confident that Zoe and the children are now safe in the arms of God,\" it said in a statement.\n\n\"Our thoughts are with the family as we pray for healing and recovery for Josh and Penny.\"\n\nA friend and neighbour of the Powells said the \"whole family would do anything for anybody\".\n\nThe woman, who asked not to be named, said Mrs Powell was a \"great neighbour and a lovely person\".\n\nZoe Powell, 29, and three of her young children died after a crash with a lorry\n\n\"She did a lot for the community, not just through the church,\" she added.\n\n\"I just can't believe what's happened, I'm too upset to talk any more about it really.\"\n\nMrs Powell, who had lived in Chinnor since the mid-2010s but was previously from Sheffield, was a blogger who wrote about motherhood, family life and the challenges of having young children.\n\nShe created a specialised diary called the Mama Book, which was written to help young mothers find \"mental space in the midst of motherhood\".\n\nAnother of the Powells' neighbours talked of how \"incredibly sad\" she felt, especially after the house fire.\n\nThe woman, who asked not to be named, said: \"It was a hard enough year for them regardless, and now this... it's just incredible.\n\n\"It's rather raw and it's horrendous. They were all absolutely lovely - the children were a delight, they were bouncy, bubbly, just really happy children.\n\n\"I can't imagine how any of the family are feeling right now.\"\n\nMaureen Dyroff, a supervisor at a pre-school one of the children had attended, said the family had \"lost everything in the fire\" and had been living in temporary accommodation since.\n\n\"They were a beautiful family and it was such a wonderful honour to work with the three older children,\" she said.\n\n\"We are all in deep shock and mourning over such a sad loss of so many members of that beautiful family.\"\n\nA JustGiving page set up by a railway worker colleague of Mr Powell already raised more than £10,000.\n\nThe 56-year-old driver of the lorry involved in the crash suffered minor injuries and is helping officers with their investigation.\n\nNo arrests have been made.\n• None Mother and three young children killed in crash\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The Duchess of Sussex has said she avoids saying anything too \"controversial\" for fear of putting her family \"in a position of risk\".\n\nSpeaking at a virtual summit, Meghan said she instead chose to talk about \"fairly straight forward\" topics \"like exercising your right to vote\".\n\nBut she said she would not feel proud as a mother if she had not tried to \"make this world better\" for her son.\n\nThe duke and duchess recently urged US voters to \"reject hate speech\".\n\nThe Duke of Sussex made the remarks in a television broadcast alongside his wife last month - their first joint TV appearance since they ceased being working members of the Royal Family earlier this year.\n\nThe couple also urged US citizens to vote in the country's upcoming presidential election.\n\nA spokesperson for the Sussexes said the comments did not refer to any specific political party or candidate, but were instead \"a call for decency\".\n\nAppearing at Fortune's members-only Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit on Tuesday, Meghan was asked whether motherhood had made her more courageous or more cautious.\n\nSpeaking from her home in California, she replied: \"It's interesting because my gut is that it makes you more courageous.\n\n\"It makes you so concerned for the world they're going to inherit, and so the things that you're able to tolerate on your own are not the same.\n\n\"You go every single day: 'How can I make this better for him? How can I make this world better for Archie?' And that is a shared belief between my husband and I.\n\n\"At the same time, I am cautious of putting my family in a position of risk by certain things, and so I try to be rather very clear with what I say and to not make it controversial, but instead to talk about things that seem fairly straight forward - like exercising your right to vote.\"\n\nShe added: \"As a parent I can enjoy all the fun and silliness and games with my son, but I wouldn't be able to feel proud of myself as a mom if I didn't know that I wasn't doing my part to make it a better place for him.\"\n\nMeghan's son Archie was born in May last year\n\nAsked about her views on social media she compared it to an \"addiction\" for some, which could be \"unhealthy\", adding that she does not have any online accounts for her \"own self-preservation\".\n\nThe duchess closed her personal Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts four months before she married the Duke of Sussex, while her lifestyle blog thetig.com shut down in 2017.\n\nSince stepping back as a working member of the Royal Family in March, Meghan has spoken out on issues including racism and the death of African-American George Floyd in the US.\n\nThe couple gave up their roles as senior royals in a bid for personal and financial freedom. They now live in the US but are still members of the Royal Family.", "Donald Trump is campaigning for the 3 November election\n\nTwitter has suspended a number of fake accounts purporting to be owned by black supporters of US President Donald Trump.\n\nThe social media giant said the accounts broke its rules on spam and platform manipulation.\n\nMany of the accounts used identical language, including the phrase: \"YES IM BLACK AND IM VOTING FOR TRUMP!!!\"\n\nTwitter has not specified the number of accounts suspended so far or the source of them.\n\nIt said it was continuing to investigate the activity and may suspend additional accounts if they were found to be violating its policies.\n\nThe investigation was first reported by the Washington Post newspaper.\n\nDarren Linvill, a social media disinformation researcher at Clemson University, found more than two dozen such accounts, which had generated some 265,000 retweets or Twitter mentions.\n\nSome of the accounts used photos of black men that had appeared in news articles. Several had tens of thousands of followers.\n\nMr Linvill told Reuters news agency that most of the accounts were created in 2017, but had become more active in the past two months.\n\nHe said all of the accounts he had been monitoring had now been suspended but that they had \"already had their impact\".\n\nTwitter forbids using the platform \"to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behaviour that manipulates or disrupts people's experience\" on the site.\n\nIts action comes weeks ahead of the 3 November US presidential election.\n\nPolls suggest about 10% of black voters are supporting Mr Trump, according to polling website FiveThirtyEight.\n\nThis kind of alleged disinformation is much more akin to what we saw in the 2016 US elections.\n\nThese were fake accounts - often sourced from countries like Russia - deliberately stirring up discord on social media, or claiming to be genuine Americans with grievances when they were anything but.\n\nWe don't know the full details yet - Twitter has not revealed anything more about the source of the accounts.\n\nAnd it's worth saying that these accounts have been suspended pending further investigation. But all the evidence supplied so far suggests there was some level of co-ordination behind these accounts. It appears the same techniques were used to glean pictures from the internet. And the real smoking gun here is boilerplate tweets used over and over again.\n\nIf true, this really is quite damaging to Twitter - you obviously want to know that the people you're hearing from are authentic.\n\nIt's also worrying that Twitter didn't appear to pick this up itself, but rather was alerted to it.", "Disappointed Quality Street customers have taken to social media to complain that the selection is lacking a crucial ingredient.\n\n\"Where are the Chocolate Caramel Brownies?! My 8yr old son is devastated,\" wrote one.\n\nAnother customer complained they had been given extra Orange Cremes.\n\nThe company said that its manufacturing process was adversely affected during lockdown, resulting in a narrower range in some tins.\n\n\"In order to keep Quality Street production going during the Covid-19 lockdown period, we made some temporary changes to the way we operated, such as running fewer lines for a time,\" a spokesperson for Nestle said.\n\nWhile there was no change to the overall weight being sold, the range had been affected, she said.\n\n\"As a result, some consumers may find that they do not have all 12 varieties of Quality Street sweets in their mix.\"\n\nThe full range of chocolates was being produced and incorporated into more recent boxes, she added.\n\n\"We apologise for any disappointment caused but hope consumers understand why it was necessary to make these changes during such unprecedented conditions,\" the spokeswoman said.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Matthew Tindale This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe limited edition Chocolate Caramel Brownies were removed from production for four weeks earlier this year.\n\nWhen the lockdown was at its height, a number of factory workers were shielding or looking after children, which was why Nestle made the change.\n\nThe Quality Street chocolates that are normally in a tin include a mix of:\n\nOther manufacturers have also been affected by the coronavirus crisis.\n\nIn June, Marmite-owner Unilever said production of its spread was hit by a shortage of brewer's yeast after pubs were closed in March during lockdown.\n\nBut in the main, food producers around the world have said they have too much stock as restaurants and others areas of hospitality close for business.", "Christian Cooper filmed Amy Cooper after she refused to stop her dog running through woodland\n\nA white woman who called police on a black man bird watching in New York's Central Park made a second call accusing him of attempted assault, prosecutors say.\n\nAmy Cooper appeared in court on Wednesday charged with falsely reporting an incident.\n\nA viral video showed Ms Cooper threatening Christian Cooper, no relation, with the police when he asked her to put her dog on a lead.\n\nThis happened on 25 May, Memorial Day.\n\nThis was also the day that unarmed black man George Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis, triggering weeks of national and global anti-racism protests.\n\nMs Cooper lost her job and dog after the incident, and publicly apologised.\n\nManhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr said in a statement on Wednesday: \"We will hold people who make false and racist 911 calls accountable.\"\n\nMs Cooper did not enter a plea when she appeared before the judge.\n\nThe charge of filing a false report is punishable by up to one year in jail.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Melody Cooper This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nChristian Cooper, who is prominent in the New York bird watching community, filmed his encounter with Ms Cooper, 41, after he asked her to put her dog on a lead to keep it from scaring away birds.\n\nMr Cooper, 57, said he offered the dog treats, as a way to convince Ms Cooper to contain her dog.\n\nIn response, Ms Cooper called emergency services. She told them: \"I'm in the Ramble,\" - a wooded area in Central Park - \"there is a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet and he is recording me and threatening me and my dog,\" as her tone rose in apparent distress.\n\n\"I am being threatened by a man in the Ramble, please send the cops immediately!\" she said.\n\nProsecutors said that, in the second, previously unreported call, Ms Cooper repeated her accusation and said he had \"tried to assault her\".\n\n\"Amy Cooper engaged in racist criminal conduct when she falsely accused a Black man of trying to assault her in a previously unreported second call with a 911 dispatcher,\" District Attorney Vance said.\n\n\"Fortunately, no one was injured or killed in the police response to Ms Cooper's hoax.\"\n\nShe admitted to the police who responded to her call that the male had made no physical contact with her.\n\nMr Cooper, in a statement to CNN on Wednesday, said his focus \"has been and continues to be on fixing policing and addressing systemic racism like we saw in that incident\".", "The book had been owned by a private US college since the 1960s\n\nA copy of William Shakespeare's First Folio has been sold for a record $9.98m (£7.6m) at auction in New York.\n\nThe 1623 book, published seven years after the Bard's death, was the first collected edition of his plays.\n\nAbout 235 copies of the book exist, but only a handful of complete versions are known to be in private hands.\n\nThe edition sold on Wednesday was the first complete copy to go under the hammer since 2001, when one fetched $6.1m (£4.9m) - the previous record.\n\nIt was sold by Mills College in Oakland, California - a private college that has owned it since the 1960s. The identity of the buyer was not immediately known.\n\nThe book was sold at Christie's action house in New York\n\nAuction house Christie's had conservatively estimated its value at between $4m-$6m.\n\nThe First Folio brought together 36 plays, 18 of which would otherwise not have been recorded. Without its publication there would be no copy of such plays as Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar and The Tempest.\n\nMost of the 235 copies known to exist are incomplete. One, owned by Oxford University, sold for £3.5m in 2003. Five or six complete versions are believed to be in private hands.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Russia's Soyuz rocket has travelled from Earth to the International Space Station in record time.\n\nThe spacecraft, carrying two Russian cosmonauts and a Nasa astronaut, made the trip in just three hours and three minutes – half the usual journey time.", "BBC Breakfast presenter Naga Munchetty is to join Radio 5 Live, presenting three days a week in the mid-morning slot formerly filled by Emma Barnett.\n\nMunchetty will host the radio show from 10:00-13:00 on Mondays to Wednesdays, and will keep her spot on the Breakfast sofa from Thursdays to Saturdays.\n\nBarnett is leaving the radio station to move to Woman's Hour on Radio 4.\n\n\"5 Live has one of the most passionate, engaged audiences in radio,\" said Munchetty, who will start in January.\n\n\"The prospect of talking to those listeners every week really excites me.\"\n\nThe presenter was a stand-in host on the station over the summer. \"I have always wanted to work more in radio and after such an enjoyable experience presenting on the station recently, I jumped at this opportunity,\" she added.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Naga Munchetty This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n5 Live controller Heidi Dawson described Munchetty as a \"brilliant broadcaster and a fearless journalist\".\n\n\"She impressed us while working briefly at the station in the summer, when our listeners loved her warmth, wit and straight-talking interview style,\" she said.\n\nLast year, Munchetty found herself at the centre of a BBC crisis when the corporation partially upheld a complaint against comments she made about Donald Trump, before the ruling was later overturned.\n\nAdrian Chiles will continue to host 5 Live's mid-morning slot on Fridays, with the presenter for Thursdays still to be announced.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "New measures announced by Boris Johnson this week fell short of advice provided by scientists\n\nDocuments have revealed the UK government did not follow the advice given to it by scientists as coronavirus cases began to surge.\n\nThe Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage) is a committee attended by scientists across a range of fields. While its members may not individually agree, their role is to look at the evidence, work out what it is suggesting, and present an agreed view to the government. It's then for the politicians to decide what rules to make.\n\nThe papers, which date from 21 September, were published on Monday night. They set out in black and white what scientists thought should happen on a number of important topics.\n\nWhat scientists recommended: They did not go as far as recommending a full lockdown on the scale of the one in the spring. This was also an outcome Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been extremely keen to avoid.\n\nTheir evidence said: The effect of a full lockdown, including closing non-essential businesses and banning contact between households, was clear: it would have had a big impact on coronavirus cases and deaths. But it would also have had a large knock-on impact - hurting people in other ways, such as their ability to work and socialise.\n\nWhat happened: The government opted for a three-tier system in England, with household mixing indoors banned only in the areas of highest concern. Businesses will broadly remain open.\n\nWhat they recommended: Sage said government should consider a short lockdown of two or three weeks, immediately, to bring down the number of cases.\n\nTheir evidence said: There were solid grounds to suggest this would have had \"similar levels of effectiveness\" to that of the national spring lockdown, in turning the tide of the pandemic. But its shorter period would have limited the overall effects - there would almost certainly have been fewer deaths but the line on the graph would look less dramatic. You would also have had to wait until after the restrictions had been lifted to see any benefit, since it takes time for the infections that would have been prevented to translate to lower hospital admissions and deaths.\n\nWhat happened: This idea was rejected by No 10 in favour of an option that keeps businesses open and household contact going for most of the country, but with the threat that such privileges could be taken away if cases rise. Now Labour leader Keir Starmer has called on the government to think again.\n\nMultiple anecdotal reports of outbreaks linked to bars in the UK, Europe, US... curfews likely to have a marginal impact\n\nWhat they recommended: The scientists recommended people be advised to work from home if they could.\n\nTheir evidence said: This would have been likely to make a significant dent in transmission as about a third of people's total contacts are made at work. But this will vary drastically by industry - and how much it would have dented the current transmission depends on how many people currently at work could have done their job from home.\n\nWhat happened: Those who can are once again being advised to work from home, in a reversal of the government's drive over summer to encourage more people back to the workplace .\n\nWhat they recommended: The advisory group said government should consider immediately putting a stop to contact between households, unless they were part of a support bubble.\n\nTheir evidence said: Being in an enclosed space, breathing the same air and touching the same surfaces, makes mixing indoors a high risk activity. Much of this risk is shared with people you live with, where cutting contact is not really possible. But spreading the virus to other households is what allows the epidemic to be sustained - though scientists say restrictions on different mixing would have been less effective in areas with lots of intergenerational households, where young and old mix within the same bubble.\n\nWhat happened: Mixing with other households indoors has been banned for people living in areas on \"high\" or \"very high\" alert. Outdoor mixing is allowed in groups of no more than six.\n\nWhat they recommended: Sage said government should consider the immediate closure of closure of all bars, restaurants, cafes, indoor gyms, and \"personal services\", for example hairdressers.\n\nThe evidence said: The risk in bars, restaurants and cafes was \"likely to be higher than many other indoor settings\" as people sit close together for long periods without wearing face coverings, and potentially talk loudly, risking spraying more virus into the air. Alcohol also affects people's behaviour. The scientists pointed to multiple outbreaks linked to bars - but also indicated the evidence suggested curfews were likely to have only a \"marginal impact\".\n\nWhat happened: The government largely rejected the advice. Most of England can continue going to pubs and restaurants, although since cases began to spike, a 22:00 curfew has been ordered. In \"very high\" alert areas, pubs and bars must close unless they are operating like a restaurant and only serving alcohol as part of a sit-down meal.\n\nWhat they recommended: Sage recommended all university and college teaching should be carried out online \"unless absolutely essential\", but schools should continue in person. It's possible a \"circuit-breaker\" could be timed to coincide with school holidays.\n\nThe evidence said: Closing schools, particularly secondary schools, might have had a moderate impact on transmission but would come with a high level of harm for children's education and their own and their parents' wellbeing. For adult students, the impact on transmission was considered to be higher and the harm to health and social equality lower.\n\nWhat happened: Schools and universities remain open - although many universities are beginning to move teaching online anyway due to outbreaks.", "Max Woosey has been sleeping in his back garden since the beginning of lockdown\n\nA 10-year-old boy has been sleeping outside in a tent for more than 200 days in memory of two family friends.\n\nMax Woosey, from Braunton, was inspired to sleep out every night in a tent left to him by his friend and neighbour Rick, who died in February.\n\nRick, who was 74, told Max \"promise me you'll have an adventure in here\", before he died from cancer.\n\nMax has raised more than £16,000 for the North Devon Hospice that cared for Rick and his wife in their final days.\n\nMax started his \"adventure\" after hearing fundraising for the hospice was getting cancelled\n\nThe 10-year-old said the best part of sleeping outside was \"escaping\" parents and getting to \"read the Beano for as long as you want\".\n\nAnd he added the worst bits had been the weather and finding an ants' nest underneath the tent.\n\n\"I sometimes get a bit freaked out when it's stormy weather, but I wouldn't say I get scared.\"\n\nHowever, Max said he now preferred sleeping in a tent to indoors and enjoyed listening to the birds and the weather \"battering\" against the tent.\n\nMax said staying up late and reading was one of the best things about sleeping in a tent\n\nMax began his adventure on 28 March after hearing hospice fundraising events were being cancelled.\n\nHe has since decided to try to extend the challenge and sleep outside for a year.\n\nMax has thanked everyone who has supported him and \"all the key workers\" fighting the coronavirus.\n\nNorth Devon Hospice cared for Rick and Sue in their final days\n\nRachael, Max's mum, said the hospice supported neighbour Sue when she died in 2017 and enabled Rick's friends to \"keep him at home and let him die peacefully\".\n\nUnfortunately Rick's tent did not last long and had to be replaced and the family were now looking for winter camping gear, she added.\n\nThe hospice's chief executive Stephen Roberts thanked Max for his \"phenomenal\" efforts and said the money raised \"could not come at a better time\".\n\nMax has been sleeping outside for more than 200 days\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "We've been hearing today about the new \"tier\" levels of coronavirus alert in England, which put areas in medium, high and very high categories of risk and restriction.\n\nThe Liverpool City Region is the only area to be under the toughest Tier Three Covid-19 restrictions which came into effect at midnight, making it illegal for gyms in the area to open.\n\nBut some gyms in Liverpool are staying open - despite being ordered to close.\n\nChris Ellerby-Hemmings, co-owner of EmpoweredFit gym in the Wirral, said: \"We are not staying open for financial gain but more for our members' mental and physical wellbeing. The reason for doing it is to be listened to.\"\n\nThe gym, which has 14,000 members, is one of dozens in Merseyside that have remained open.\n\nSome medical experts say gyms could encourage the virus to spread, as they are humid and confined spaces with shared equipment.\n\nBut Mr Ellerby-Hemmings told the BBC his gym was Covid secure.\n\nThe BBC has contacted the Liverpool City Regional Combined Authority and Merseyside Police for comment.", "Cafe owner Diane Cheshire said people were confused about the rules\n\nBusiness owners in Llanelli say people are \"making their own rules up\" because of confusion over Covid-19 restrictions.\n\nShops and cafes have seen a dramatic drop in trade since the first town-only lockdown in Wales was announced nearly three weeks ago.\n\nDiane Cheshire, from Joly's Cafe in the town centre, said people were \"not sure what is the right thing to do\".\n\nPublic Health Wales said restrictions would last at least another week.\n\nMs Cheshire, who has has owned and run the cafe for more than 20 years, said she has never seen the town so quiet.\n\n\"I'm very worried to be honest. I don't want total lockdown but that's the only way to stop this,\" she said.\n\nShe said the differences in rules in different areas meant people were \"making their own rules up because they're not sure what is the right thing to do\".\n\n\"I can't see an end to it. It's going to take a long time to even remotely get back to normal.\"\n\nThe case rate in Llanelli has reduced from 152 per 100,000 of the population to 99.9.\n\nBut this compares with a 58.8 per 100,000 case rate for the county of Carmarthenshire as a whole.\n\nPublic Health Wales said that while the signs are encouraging, the restrictions need to stay in place in the town for at least another week.\n\nBusiness owners said the uncertainty was crippling their trade.\n\nLlanelli was the first town-only lockdown in Wales\n\nAndrew Jones, who owns the D&A Heel Bar in Llanelli market, said: \"I know people are afraid to come out because they're shielding but it doesn't help business for me.\n\n\"I do have an older customer base here. I can understand they're afraid to come out. We're doing as much as we can to help them, offering collections service where possible, but people are frustrated - they can't see an end in sight.\"\n\nLlanelli town councillor Sean Rees said people living in his ward of Glanymor were confused about the rules.\n\n\"We need much clearer communication coming through to the community, particularly for our businesses,\" he said.\n\n\"Our town centre is very much open for business for people within the area and I'd encourage people to shop locally to support family-run businesses and market traders, because they need our help right now.\"\n\nCarmarthenshire County Council said social distancing and behaviour inside licensed premises like pubs and clubs continued to cause concern.\n\nThe authority confirmed it had issued temporary closure notices for 10 premises within the last two weeks.", "Boris Johnson will decide on the \"next steps\" for post-Brexit trade talks after an EU summit later this week, Downing Street has said.\n\nNo 10 said the PM expressed \"disappointment\" at recent progress in a call with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday.\n\nMr Johnson has previously set Thursday's meeting of EU leaders as the deadline for a deal.\n\nMrs von der Leyen said the EU wanted a deal, \"but not at any price\".\n\nBoth sides are calling on the other to compromise on key issues, including fishing and limits on government subsidies to businesses.\n\nThey are locked in talks over striking an agreement to govern their trading relationship once the UK's post-Brexit transition period ends in December.\n\nA No 10 spokesperson said Mr Johnson \"noted the desirability of a deal\" during his pre-summit call with Mrs von der Leyen.\n\nHowever, the PM also \"expressed his disappointment that more progress had not been made over the past two weeks,\" they added.\n\n\"The prime minister said that he looked forward to hearing the outcome of the European Council and would reflect before setting out the UK's next steps.\"\n\nEarlier, a No 10 spokesman said fishing rights remained the \"starkest\" point of difference ahead of Thursday's two-day EU leaders' summit.\n\nThe government's chief Brexit negotiator Lord David Frost was seen going into Downing Street on Thursday morning.\n\nBackbench Conservative Peter Bone told MPs Lord Frost was briefing the prime minister \"on whether to continue the negotiations or whether to call it a day and prepare for a no-trade deal Brexit\".\n\nSpeaking after her call with the prime minister, Mrs von der Leyen said: \"The EU is working on a deal, but not at any price.\"\n\nShe added that \"conditions must be right\" on fishing, post-Brexit competition rules and how a deal is enforced for the EU to sign an agreement.\n\nShe added: \"Still a lot of work ahead of us.\"\n\nEuropean Council President Charles Michel also joined the call with Mrs von der Leyen and the Mr Johnson on Wednesday evening.\n\nIn a letter to EU leaders ahead of Thursday's meeting, Mr Michel said reaching a deal before December was \"in the interests of both sides\".\n\nHe added that as well as fishing rights, \"key issues\" for a deal included post-Brexit rules on competition and how a deal would be enforced.\n\nEU leaders are not yet all on the same page when it comes to how much they should give up or give in to get a deal.\n\nBrussels keeps calling on the UK to make concessions but a successful outcome will require compromises on both sides.\n\nWill France's Emmanuel Macron relinquish his hard-line position about keeping current fishing quotas in UK waters? He'll have to, to get a UK deal.\n\nWill Germany's Angela Merkel give way on some demands on competition regulations (aka the level playing field) yet still grant the UK zero tariff, zero quota access to the single market?\n\nEU leaders must agree all this amongst themselves and it won't be straightforward.\n\nOver the summer, both the UK and EU seemed to agree the end of October was the final date to get a deal done - allowing enough time for it to be ratified before 31 December.\n\nBut come 7 September, Boris Johnson decided to shorten the deadline.\n\nHe said if a deal wasn't reached by 15 October, \"then I do not see that there will be a free trade agreement between us, and we should both accept that and move on\".\n\nThursday is that day - but Downing Street appears to have moved back from it as a hard deadline.\n\nFormal negotiations ended at the start of October, but Mr Johnson and Mrs von der Leyen pledged to \"intensify talks\" over the coming weeks.\n\nPressed on whether the UK would walk away on 15 October, the government's chief negotiator Lord Frost said it was his job to \"advise the prime minister\" on whether a deal was on the cards by then.\n\nSpeaking on Tuesday, France's foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian suggested EU leaders do not see this week as a hard deadline for a breakthrough.\n\n\"The date of 15 October, it's Prime Minister Boris Johnson who announced that, it is not the position of the European Council,\" he told French MPs.\n\nHe added that \"everything should be played out\" between October 15 and \"mid-November\".\n\nHe warned that the prospect of no deal was \"unfortunately very likely,\" but the EU was \"prepared for all eventualities\".\n\nBy remaining in the bloc's single market and customs union, the UK has continued to follow EU trading rules during its post-Brexit transition period.\n\nThis 11-month period is due to end in December, and the UK has ruled out seeking an extension.\n\nFormal talks began in March and continued throughout the pandemic, initially via video link before in-person discussions resumed over the summer.\n\nIf a deal is not done, the UK will trade with the EU according to the default rules set by the World Trade Organization.\n• None What are the sticking points in Brexit trade talks?", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The prime minister and Labour leader clashed over coronavirus policy\n\nA new three-tier system of regional Covid-19 restrictions in England \"is the right way forward\", Boris Johnson has said.\n\nThe PM told the House of Commons the policy \"can bring down the virus\" but that he did not rule out going further.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer again called for a \"circuit-breaker\" - a short, limited lockdown in England to bring the virus under control.\n\nHe said such a move was supported by government science advisers.\n\nThe PM said he hoped the three-tier system would \"avoid the misery of a national lockdown\".\n\nHe added: \"I rule out nothing of course in combating the virus, but we are going to do it with the local, the regional approach that can drive down and will drive down the virus, if it is properly implemented.\"\n\nIt comes as Wales prepares to ban people from parts of the UK that have high rates of coronavirus from travelling to the country from 18:00 BST on Friday.\n\nOn Wednesday, a further 19,724 coronavirus cases were recorded in the UK, while 137 more people have died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus.\n\nThe new tier system has begun in England, with the Liverpool region the first to enter the highest alert level.\n\nThe BBC understands that a meeting of the Joint Biosecsurity Centre (JBC) has suggested that Greater Manchester alongside much of north-west and north-east England, large parts of Yorkshire and parts of the Midlands should also be moved into the highest tier.\n\nThe JBC recommendations will not necessarily be enforced and discussions are likely to continue between local and national politicians and officials over the coming days.\n\nGreater Manchester's mayor Andy Burnham had a meeting with deputy chief medical officer, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, and said further talks are to take place on Thursday morning with the \"PM's team\".\n\nMost of the country is in the lowest tier - medium - but millions of people in the North and the Midlands are currently in the second highest tier and face extra curbs on households mixing.\n\nSchools, close-contact services and all retail outlets will remain open under basic measures, even in the highest alert areas.\n\nLocal politicians in Greater Manchester have argued against the region being put into the highest tier saying that without increased financial support they would prefer a circuit-breaker.\n\nMr Burnham said he would consider a legal challenge if the government placed the area in Tier 3 restrictions, adding such a move would be \"by imposition, not consent\".\n\nBut Bolton Council leader David Greenhalgh said he was not in support of a circuit-breaker at this time.\n\nSteve Rotheram, mayor of the Liverpool City Region, said he and Mr Burnham were also considering legal action against the new job support scheme.\n\nHe said it appeared \"discriminatory\" that No 10 had offered to pay 80% of workers' pay in March under the furlough scheme while the latest help is providing two-thirds of wages to employees of businesses made to close under the restrictions.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nThe approach of targeting different restrictions at different parts of England has exposed a rift between Westminster and some local politicians, who have called for more say over what's happening in their areas.\n\nUnder pressure to say why he has so far rejected the idea of a national \"circuit-break\" period, Boris Johnson was keen to stress that the current package of measures could bring down transmission IF there was co-operation at a local level and proper enforcement.\n\nMore involvement for local leaders means more responsibility for things going well - or badly.\n\nFor now, the PM seems determined to continue to try to tread this middle path - mindful also perhaps of the chunk of his own MPs concerned about even the current range of restrictions and the impact on the economy.\n\nThe risk is that he may have lost valuable time, if he does decide to change course.\n\nThe Labour leader's initial call for a circuit-breaker in England came on Tuesday.\n\nSir Keir said such a course of action would help buy time to \"save lives, fix testing, and save the NHS\".\n\nSchools would kept open as normal because it would be timed to coincide with the October half term. However, Sir Keir said \"all pubs, bars and restaurants would be closed\" and compensated.\n\nSpeaking at Prime Minister's Questions, he said Mr Johnson had rejected the advice of government science advisers, who had suggested a circuit-breaker when they met on 21 September.\n\nSeparately, a scientific report has suggested a two-week circuit-breaker at the end of this month may halve coronavirus deaths between now and the end of the year. The researchers said the measure \"buys more time to put other controls in place\", but there is huge uncertainty over some of their predictions.\n\nBut, responding to Sir Keir's comments, the PM told MPs the three-tier system was an \"opportunity to keep things going, to keep our kids in schools, to keep our businesses going\" and the \"logical thing to do\".\n\n\"That, I think, is what the people of this country want to do. This is our opportunity to do that and suppress the virus where it is surging,\" he said.\n\nThe PM said the disease was now \"appearing much more strongly\" in some parts of the country than others so a different approach was needed to that taken earlier in the year.\n\nHe highlighted the fact there were 670 coronavirus cases per 100,000 residents in the Liverpool region, compared with 33 per 100,000 in Cornwall.", "The number of secondary schools in England sending home pupils because of Covid is increasing rather than diminishing, the latest official figures show.\n\nThere are 21% of secondary schools counted as not fully open - up from 18% the previous week and 8% in mid-September.\n\nThis is usually because they have sent home pupils in response to Covid cases.\n\nAbout 7% of primary schools had to send home pupils, up from 5%.\n\nThese weekly figures from the Department for Education show a worsening picture for secondary schools being disrupted by the pandemic, with the highest figure for groups of pupils being sent home since schools went back in the autumn.\n\nIt follows the government announcing it would press ahead with a full set of GCSE and A-level exams next summer, prompting warnings about unfairness for those missing out on school.\n\nGeoff Barton, leader of the ASCL head teachers' union, said the continuing fall in the number of fully open secondary schools showed how difficult it was to \"operate amidst rising Covid infection rates\".\n\nHe says schools are having to try to balance \"managing complex control measures while delivering education for those in school as well as those who are at home self-isolating\".\n\n\"The pressure is immense,\" he said - and he raised concerns about the well-being of school staff.\n\nThe figures on secondary schools not being fully open were, based on previous Thursdays:\n\n\"It is essential that government gets a grip on the testing system so that no pupil or teacher is out of school for longer than they need to be,\" said Paul Whiteman, leader of the National Association of Head Teachers.\n\nBut there are suggestions that when schools send home pupils, it is now a smaller number, and not necessarily a whole year group, as attendance in secondary school has slightly risen, from 86% to 87%.\n\nOverall attendance, including primary schools, has remained at about 90%.\n\nThere are also very few schools completely closed - only 0.2% of schools.\n\nThere is no regional breakdown to show where problems are concentrated - but secondary schools seem to be more adversely affected than primary schools, with a rate of sending home pupils three times higher than primary schools.\n\nAttendance in primary schools went down slightly, from 93% to 92%, but remains higher than in secondary.\n\nFigures in special needs schools are even lower, at 82% attendance, and in state-funded alternative provision, such as for pupils who might have been excluded from mainstream schools, attendance is 60%.\n\nEngland's Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said schools were able to provide more online lessons and \"only a small minority of pupils are self isolating\".\n\n\"Regular and full-time attendance in school is absolutely essential to help pupils catch up on time out of the classroom.\n\n\"It is encouraging to see the vast majority of schools are open,\" he said.", "Ine Eriksen Soreide did not say what evidence there was for Russian involvement\n\nNorway has blamed Russia for a cyber-attack on the email system in the Norwegian parliament in August.\n\nForeign Minister Ine Eriksen Soreide called it a serious incident affecting the country's \"most important democratic institution.\"\n\n\"Based on the information available to the government it is our assessment that Russia stood behind this activity\" she said without giving any evidence.\n\nMoscow has rejected the claim, calling it a \"serious and wilful provocation.\"\n\nMs Soreide said in a statement that Norway's security and intelligence services were \"co-operating closely to deal with this matter at the national level.\"\n\nIn response, Russia's embassy in Oslo hit back at the \"unacceptable\" announcement, saying no evidence had been presented.\n\n\"Millions of cyber attacks are annually committed from abroad against Russian state internet resources... but this does not give us the right to indiscriminately blame authorities of the countries of their possible origin,\" the embassy added.\n\nIn September, Norwegian authorities said that email accounts belonging to several officials had been compromised during a cyber-attack, and some information had been downloaded. But the full extent of damage caused by the hack has not been made public.\n\nNorway's allegation comes during a time of increasingly strained relations with Russia. Both countries share an Arctic border, and Norway is a member of Nato.\n\nThe email accounts of several officials were compromised during the attack on Norway's parliament\n\nIn August, Norway expelled a Russian diplomat on suspicion of spying. Russia retaliated by expelling a Norwegian diplomat days later.\n\nNorway also arrested a Russian national in 2018 who was suspected of gathering information on the country's parliamentary network. The individual was later released due to a lack of evidence.\n\nIn a report earlier this year, Norway's military intelligence agency warned that Russia was trying to fuel discord in the country through so-called influence operations, aimed at weakening public trust in the government, election processes and the media.\n\nNational legislatures are a key source of policy-related information, and so are frequently targeted by hacking campaigns.\n\nIn January, the personal details of hundreds of German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, were stolen and published online.\n\nAnd last year, Australia's cyber-intelligence agency blamed China after hackers tried to break into the Australian parliament, something Chinese officials denied.", "Zoe Powell and her three eldest children died in the crash. Josh Powell was critically injured\n\nA mother and her three young children have died in a crash in Oxfordshire.\n\nPolice said a people carrier and a lorry collided near a railway overbridge on the A40 between Oxford and Cassington at 21:50 BST on Monday.\n\nThe mother, named locally as Zoe Powell, 29, died at the scene with her eight-year-old daughter Phoebe. Six-year-old Simeon and Amelia, four, died at John Radcliffe Hospital.\n\nTheir father Josh, 30, and an 18-month-old girl were critically injured.\n\nOxfordshire Fire and Rescue Service said it worked with police and paramedics to free the father and daughter, who are from Chinnor in Oxfordshire, from the silver Subaru car.\n\nThe driver of the lorry, a 56-year-old man, suffered minor injuries and is helping officers with their investigation.\n\nNo arrests have been made, Thames Valley Police said.\n\nZoe Powell, 29, from Chinnor and three of her young children died after a crash with a lorry\n\nMrs Powell was a blogger who wrote about motherhood, family life and the challenges of having young children.\n\nShe created a specialised diary called the Mama Book to help young mothers find \"mental space in the midst of motherhood\".\n\nThe road reopened at about 13:00 after being closed both ways for accident investigation work.\n\nIn a statement on Facebook, Chinnor Parish Council said: \"As a close Chinnor community, we are all so saddened and shocked to hear about the tragic accident last night.\"\n\nA member of the parish told the BBC: \"At the moment it's just so raw. The community are very upset.\"\n\nSt Andrew's Church said it would be open daily from 11:00 to 17:00 \"for private prayer and lighting of a candle\".\n\nOxford City Council leader Susan Brown said: \"Horrible, horrible news and my thoughts are not just with the family and friends but with all those professionals doing their jobs who have seen sights they will sadly never forget.\"\n\nThe crash happened near a bridge where the A40 crosses a railway\n\nSgt Dominic Mahon, senior investigating officer, asked people \"not to speculate as to the cause of this horrendous incident\".\n\n\"We will leave no stone unturned to ascertain what has caused this tragedy,\" he said.\n\nSgt Mahon said officers and colleagues from the other emergency services were dealing with \"an extremely upsetting scene\".\n\nHe said the family's next of kin were being supported.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Ikea will soon be selling pre-used versions of some of its best sellers\n\nThe Swedish giant will next month launch a scheme to buy back your unwanted Billy bookcases, and certain other of its furniture items you no longer need or want.\n\nUnder the plan, it will offer vouchers worth up to 50% of the original price, to be spent at its stores.\n\nThe \"Buy Back\" initiative will launch to coincide with Black Friday.\n\n\"By making sustainable living more simple and accessible, Ikea hopes that the initiative will help its customers take a stand against excessive consumption this Black Friday and in the years to come,\" it said in reference to 27 November, when lots of retailers offer discounts on their products.\n\nThe international scheme will see customers given vouchers to spend at Ikea stores, the value of which will depend on the condition of the items they are returning.\n\nCustomers must log the item they wish to return and will then be given an estimate of its value.\n\n\"As new\" items, with no scratches, will get 50% of the original price, \"very good\" items, with minor scratches, will get 40% and \"well used\", with several scratches, will get 30%.\n\nThey should then return them - fully assembled - to the returns desk where they will be checked and the final value agreed.\n\nThe offer, which will run in 27 countries, applies to furniture typically without upholstery, such as the famous Billy bookcases, chairs, stools, desks and dining tables.\n\nIkea said that anything that cannot be resold will be recycled.\n\nIkea plans to have dedicated areas in every store where people can sell back their old furniture and find repaired or refurbished furniture.\n\nThe company started its first collection in 1948 and some vintage Ikea products have become collectable in recent years.\n\nAuction websites carry a number of Ikea designs from previous decades, and some are on sale for thousands of pounds.\n\nThe company has been testing out furniture reselling in Edinburgh and Glasgow for more than a year.\n\nIkea, which has been taking steps to become more environmentally friendly, says it aims to become \"a fully circular and climate positive business by 2030\".\n\nA \"circular\" business is one which reuses or recycles materials and products.\n\nEarlier this month the group announced plans to open a record number of stores this year.\n\nThe Swedish company and its franchisees will open 50 stores worldwide - including in the UK - adding to the 445 stores currently run by the brand.\n\nIkea's biggest franchisee said demand was rising after lockdown as people seek to do up their homes.\n\nIts latest figures showed sales in the year to August were €39.6bn (£36bn).", "The pace of Europe's Covid-19 vaccination campaign has picked up and in many countries infection rates have been falling.\n\nLockdowns are gradually being eased as the summer tourist season gets under way, and there are plans for an EU-wide digital vaccination certificate to be in place by 1 July.\n\nNationwide curfew ended on 20 June, 10 days earlier than planned. Face masks are no longer required outdoors.\n\nRestaurants, cafes and bars can serve customers indoors, with 50% capacity and up to six people per table.\n\nStanding concerts will resume on 30 June and nightclubs on 9 July (with 75% capacity). People attending will need a health pass which shows either full vaccination, a negative test within the previous 72 hours, or else a previous coronavirus infection.\n\nMedical grade masks are compulsory in shops and on public transport.\n\nFrom 30 June, working from home will no longer be compulsory.\n\nOn 21 June, Italy's curfew was scrapped and the whole country, except for the northwest region of Valle d'Aosta, became \"white zone\" - the country's lowest-risk category.\n\nAmong the measures still in place are social distancing (1m) and the wearing of masks indoors (and in crowded outdoor places), and a ban on house parties and large gathering.\n\nNightclubs and discos are also closed.\n\nAll indoor businesses, with the exception of nightclubs, are open.\n\nThe government introduced a \"corona pass\" in April, the first to do so in Europe.\n\nThis shows - either on a phone or on paper - that you have been vaccinated, previously infected or that you have had a negative test within 72 hours.\n\nPeople need to show it for entry to cinemas, museums, hairdressers or indoor dining.\n\nThe Greek government is welcoming tourists from many countries, if they are fully vaccinated or can provide a negative coronavirus test.\n\nFace coverings must be worn in all public places and there is a curfew from 01:30-05:00, but bars, restaurants, museums and archaeological sites are all open.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Greek island of Milos is aiming to become \"Covid-free\" so it can welcome back tourists\n\nCinemas, theatres, museums and restaurants are open at 50% capacity. From 26 June, this increases to 75%.\n\nNightclubs and discos will also be allowed to reopen, with a limit of 150 people.\n\nFace coverings must be worn in enclosed spaces and 1.5m social distancing observed.\n\nShops, bars, restaurants and museums are open, although face coverings remain compulsory in most public places.\n\nNightclubs can now reopen in parts of Spain with low infection rates.\n\nIn Barcelona, they are restricted to 50% of capacity and can stay open until 03:30 - dancers have to wear masks.\n\nSpain began welcoming vaccinated tourists from 7 June. Most European travellers still have to present a negative Covid test on arrival.\n\nBrussels: Outdoor dining resumed in Belgium on 8 May\n\nShops, cinemas, gyms, cafes and restaurants are open, with restrictions. Households can invite up to four people inside.\n\nFrom 1 July, working from home will no longer be mandatory, if the situation continues to improve.\n\nCultural performances, shows and sports competitions can also go ahead, with limited numbers, and more people will be allowed at weddings and other ceremonies and parties.\n\nPortugal has lifted many of its restrictions but face coverings must still be worn in indoor public spaces and some outdoor settings.\n\nBars and nightclubs remain closed, and it's illegal to drink alcohol outdoors in public places, except for pavement cafés and restaurants.\n\nAlcohol cannot be sold after 21:00 unless it is with a meal.\n\nRestaurants, cafes and cultural venues have to close at 01:00 and have capacity limits.\n\nA weekend travel ban is in force in the Lisbon area, starting at 15:00 on Friday, with residents only allowed to leave for essential journeys.\n\nIn Lisbon and in Albufeira (Algarve), cafes, restaurants and non-essential shops have to close by 15:30 at the weekend and 22:30 on weekdays.\n\nPortugal's summer season looks uncertain, yet its Covid figures have improved\n\nRestaurants, cafes, museums and historic buildings have reopened with capacity limits.\n\nFrom 26 June, a number of restrictions are being lifted.\n\nAlcohol can be sold after 22:00, and nightclubs can open, with an entry pass system.\n\nEvents held in public venues such as cinemas, conference centres and concert halls will be allowed, subject to social distancing.\n\nMasks will no longer be compulsory except on public transport, airports and in secondary schools.\n\nOutdoor services in restaurants and bars returned in June. Theme parks, funfairs, cinemas and theatres, gyms and swimming pools, have reopened as well.\n\nFrom 5 July, restaurants and bars will be able to serve customers indoors. Weddings and other indoor events for up to 50 people will be permitted and the numbers at outdoor organised events will increase.\n\nSince June, pubs have been able to stay open until 22:30 and more people are now allowed at sports events, outdoor concerts, cinemas and markets.\n\nOn 1 July, limits on private gatherings will be raised, and the recommendation to interact with a small circle of people removed.\n\nFurther easing is planned on 15 July and in September.", "The prime minister was asked how people prevented from working by Covid restrictions would make ends meet.\n\nHe said: “whatever happens, a combination of the Job Support Scheme and Universal Credit will mean that nobody gets less than 93% of their current income.”\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak gave an example on Monday of a worker in their late twenties, renting privately and working 35 hours a week.\n\nThe chancellor said that if that if Jack's employer was forced to close by restrictions, Jack would receive just over 90% of his previous income after taxes and benefits, even though the Job Support Scheme would only be getting him two thirds of his wages.\n\nHow much he would actually receive would depend on a number of factors including how much he earns and the rent he pay.\n\nIt is possible to come up with a scenario in which Jack would receive about 90% of his usual income because he would not pay as much tax and could be entitled to Universal Credit.\n\nBut the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out that if you took a worker making £12 an hour rather than the £8.72 minimum wage then their earnings would probably still be too high to qualify for Universal Credit even if their wages were cut by one third, so although they would pay less tax, they would still have to live on only about 70% of their previous income.\n\nWe can’t find the evidence for the PM’s 93% claim though and have contacted the Treasury. We'll let you know if they come back to us\n\nIn the meantime you can read more on this here.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Moment WW2 bomb explodes during attempt to defuse it\n\nThe largest unexploded World War Two bomb ever found in Poland has detonated during the defusing process, a Polish Navy spokesman said.\n\nThe chance the bomb - at the bottom of a Baltic Sea shipping canal - would detonate had been put at 50-50 and all the divers were unharmed.\n\nAbout 750 residents had been evacuated near the port city of Swinoujscie.\n\nThe RAF dropped the Tallboy or \"earthquake\" bomb in a raid in 1945 which sank the German cruiser Lützow.\n\nSwinoujscie was part of Germany and called Swinemünde at the time of the bombardment.\n\nThe shock of the latest detonation was reportedly felt in parts of the city and a video shows the blast throwing up a large column of water into the air.\n\nThe bomb was 6m (19ft) long and weighed 5.4 tonnes, nearly half of which was its explosives.\n\nThe bomb was embedded at a depth of 12m and only its nose was sticking out.\n\nNaval forces used a remote-controlled device to try to \"deflagrate\" the bomb - a technique that if successful burns the explosive charge without causing a detonation, the BBC's Adam Easton reports from Warsaw.\n\n\"The deflagration process turned into detonation. The object can be considered neutralised, it will not pose any more threat to the Szczecin-Swinoujscie shipping channel,\" said Lt Cmdr Grzegorz Lewandowski, spokesman for the Polish Navy's 8th Coastal Defence Flotilla.\n\n\"All divers were outside the danger zone.\"", "Conservative MPs in northern England seats are launching a campaign to ensure Boris Johnson sticks to his promise to boost their regions.\n\nThe PM has made \"levelling up\" - spreading money and power around the country - one of his key priorities.\n\nBut the 35-strong Tory group say they want to ensure the government delivers.\n\nIt includes several MPs who won seats in traditional Labour heartlands - the so-called \"Red Wall\" - at last year's general election.\n\nPaul Howell, who won Tony Blair's old seat, in Sedgefield, Simon Fell, the MP for Barrow-in-Furness and Sara Britcliffe, who at 24 became the youngest Conservative MP when she won Hyndburn, in Lancashire, are among those who have signed up to the group provisionally named the Northern Research Group.\n\nMs Britcliffe said: \"I don't need to join a group to speak up for Hyndburn but I have also the responsibility of making sure that we do deliver on our promise.\"\n\nThe group's leader Jake Berry, who has been the Conservative MP for Rossendale and Darwen since 2010, said it was not \"about giving government a bad time\".\n\nHe told BBC Radio 4's The Week in Westminster: \"There are arguments that we collectively as northern MPs make together, to create a compelling case for the government to invest in the north\".\n\nThese include \"making sure that this government delivers on its promise to 'level up' the north, deliver that Northern Powerhouse and create wealth across the north of England,\" he added.\n\n\"We don't form a government unless we win the north.\"\n\nMr Berry is the former minister for Northern Powerhouse, which was set up by former Chancellor George Osborne to redress the North-South economic imbalance, and to attract investment into northern cities and towns.\n\nHe has recently accused Mr Johnson of \"enjoying\" his Covid-19 powers \"a little bit too much\" - and suggested the government had \"fallen into that fatal trap of making national decisions based on a London-centric view with London data.\"\n\nLast month Conservative MPs launched a \"levelling up taskforce\" which said the government should aim to increase wages and employment rates in the poorest areas.\n\nThe promise to \"level up\" the country was a key part of the Conservative's 2019 general election campaign which saw the party win a number of seats in northern England and the Midlands traditionally held by Labour.\n\nListen to the full interview on The Week in Westminster on BBC Radio 4, Saturday 10th October at 11:00 BST.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Senator Mike Lee, who later tested positive for Covid-19, seen hugging other attendees\n\nUS President Donald Trump's tweet on Friday confirming that he and his wife had tested positive for coronavirus shocked the world.\n\nWith Mr Trump now in hospital, there are growing questions about how the pair were exposed to the virus.\n\nA crowded Rose Garden event is coming under intense focus - the ceremony on 26 September where Mr Trump formally announced his nomination of the conservative Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court. The World Health Organization says it commonly takes around five to six days for symptoms to start after contracting the virus.\n\nFootage from the scene showed few attendees wearing masks. The seating was not set two metres (six feet) apart, while some bumped fists, shook hands or even hugged one another in greeting.\n\nEight people who attended are now confirmed to have the virus - although it is unclear exactly where and when they caught it. Aside from the president and the First Lady:\n\nMr and Mrs Trump tested positive after the president's communications director, Hope Hicks, contracted the virus. She did not attend the Rose Garden event.\n\nGuidelines published by the Centers for Disease Control recommend six feet of distance between people outside your home, and covering your nose and mouth when others are around you.\n\nDozens of lawmakers, family members and staff from the White House were at the event. Those who have tested positive were seated in the first few rows of the crowd.\n\nThose who have tested positive were sat in the first few rows of the packed event\n\nGatherings of more than 50 people at an event are banned under Washington DC coronavirus regulations, although federal property like the White House is exempt.\n\nThe Washington Post reports that authorities have left contact tracing efforts to the Trump administration. An official from Mayor Muriel Bowser's office told the paper that if all eight people were infected at the event, it would be one of the highest community spread incidents Washington DC has experienced.\n\nCity council member Brooke Pinto told the Washington Post it was \"disappointing that the White House has flaunted not wearing masks and gathering large crowds\".\n\n\"That is not only dangerous messaging for the country, but it is directly threatening to our efforts to decrease our spread across the district,\" she said.\n\nSome of the event last Saturday also took place inside.\n\nSome of the event took place inside the White House\n\nThe president stood next to Amy Coney Barrett as she delivered her speech. Ms Barrett tested negative on Friday, according to a White House spokesperson.\n\nVice-President Mike Pence and his wife Karen also tested negative. Mr Pence sat across the aisle from Mrs Trump at the ceremony.\n\nAttorney General William Barr sat in the same row as the vice-president. A Department of Justice spokesperson announced on Friday that Mr Barr had tested negative.\n\nJohns Hopkins University coronavirus trackers say that 7.3 million people in the US have contracted the virus, the highest figure in the world.\n\nThe country also has the highest death toll, with more than 209,000 people killed.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. President Trump's seven days before his Covid-positive test", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Kim Jong-un: \"I feel very grateful for all our people being healthy and sound\"\n\nThe parade marked the 75th anniversary of the Workers' Party.\n\nCorrespondents say that previously unseen \"massive\" long range ballistic missiles were displayed. North Korea typically uses its parades to show off new missiles and weaponry.\n\nIt is the country's first parade in two years and comes just weeks ahead of the US presidential election.\n\nNorth Korea had not featured ballistic missiles in its parades since President Donald Trump and Mr Kim held their first summit in 2018.\n\nAccording to South Korea's military, the parade took place before dawn on Saturday. The reason for its early timing is not yet known.\n\nNo foreign media or foreigners were allowed to attend, so analysts are relying on edited state-media footage which is being released to assess the parade.\n\nDuring the parade, none of those involved appeared to be wearing masks\n\nIn a speech, he said North Korea would continue to \"strengthen\" its military for \"self-defence and deterrence\".\n\nHe also said he was grateful that no North Koreans have contracted Covid-19.\n\n\"I wish good health to all the people around the world who are fighting the ills of this evil virus,\" he said.\n\nDespite claiming the country has no cases of coronavirus, Mr Kim continues to hold high-level meetings to ensure tight restrictions remain in place.\n\nAnalysts have said it is highly unlikely that North Korea has not experienced any coronavirus cases at all.\n\nKim Jong-un ended his speech with a cry of \"long live our great people!\", but only after conceding that his country was struggling economically.\n\nBut from seeing the military hardware trundling across Kim Il-sung Square on state television, it's clear there has been no expense spared on North Korea's armed forces.\n\nAnalysts watching the highly choreographed event online will have noticed soldiers armed with new assault weapons, along with what look like new air defence systems and armoured vehicles.\n\nHowever, it is the sight of new ballistic missiles that will cause the most concern in foreign capitals.\n\nFirst came the Pukguksong 4A submarine-launched missile, followed by a huge Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) on a launcher vehicle with a colossal eleven axles, so new we don't even know what name it's been given.\n\nNorth Korea has spent the last year or so saying it would build up its nuclear capabilities, and the show of the new ICBM at Saturday's parade is designed to bolster this message. Where that takes the prospects for peace and diplomacy on the Korean peninsula is anybody's guess.\n\nThere was no sign of anyone wearing masks during the parade. However, there were far fewer people involved in the event than usual, AFP news agency reports.\n\nNorth Korea closed its borders to the outside world in January to prevent an outbreak of Covid-19 spreading from neighbouring China.\n\nAuthorities have reportedly issued \"shoot-to-kill\" orders along the border and created a buffer zone to stop anyone entering the country.\n\nLast month Mr Kim apologised for the fatal shooting of a South Korean. South Korea said the 47-year-old man was found by troops while floating in the North's waters. He was then shot dead and his body was set alight, according to Seoul.\n\nFor weeks, satellite imagery has shown thousands of people practising for Saturday's parade.\n\nForeign officials in Pyongyang had been told to avoid travelling through the city, going near the event venue and taking photos of the event.", "Two billionaire brothers from Blackburn have been made CBEs a week after clinching a £6.8bn deal to buy the Asda supermarket chain from Walmart.\n\nMohsin and Zuber Issa were among a number of business bosses on the Queen's Birthday Honours list.\n\nGlaxoSmithkline chief executive Emma Walmsley was made a dame for services to the pharmaceutical industry.\n\nThe drugs firm is one of about 20 that is part of a global race to develop a coronavirus vaccine.\n\nThe billionaire Issa brothers started their business 20 years ago with one rented petrol station and grew it into a network of nearly 6,000 forecourts across 10 countries.\n\nIt was announced last week that the Issa brothers and private equity firm TDR Capital would take a majority stake in Asda.\n\nWalmart said that, under the new owners, Asda will invest £1bn in the supermarket over the next three years.\n\nA number of honours were awarded to people for their work during the coronavirus pandemic, including Ms Walmsley.\n\nShe was given a damehood for services to the pharmaceutical industry and business after leading the UK's biggest drugs manufacturer for the past three years.\n\nEmma Walmsley has been chief executive of GlaxoSmithkline since 2017\n\nGlaxoSmithkline (GSK) is part of the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine, and said last week it had started clinical trials with fellow drugs firm Sanofi.\n\nAs chief executive, Ms Walmsley has been instrumental in the company's involvement in international efforts to develop a vaccine.\n\nProperty tycoon Tony Gallagher was given a knighthood in relation to his service to \"land development and the property business\".\n\nThe Gallagher Estates founder is a friend of former Prime Minister David Cameron and a major donor to the Conservative party.\n\nAndrew Mackenzie, the former chief executive officer of mining giant BHP Billiton, was made a Knight Bachelor for services to business, science, technology and to UK and Australia relations.\n\nClare Woodman the chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley International was given a CBE for services to finance.\n\nFashion entrepreneur Sir Paul Smith was also recognised on the annual list, being named as a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour.\n\nThere were also honours for a number of utilities bosses.\n\nRichard Flint, who recently retired as Yorkshire Water's chief, Olivia Garfield, chief executive at Severn Trent, and Chris Jones, who stepped down as chief of Welsh Water last year, all become CBEs.", "Last updated on .From the section Tennis\n\nPolish teenager Iga Swiatek completed a stunning rise by becoming the lowest-ranked woman to win the French Open after beating American Sofia Kenin.\n\nSwiatek, 19, is a former junior Wimbledon champion but the world number 54's rise to Roland Garros history has been swift and surprising.\n\nShe showed few nerves to beat fourth seed Kenin 6-4 6-1, lifting the trophy without losing a set in the tournament.\n\n\"I don't know what is going on, I'm so happy,\" a smiling Swiatek said.\n\nSwiatek is the first player from Poland to win a Grand Slam singles title.\n\nShe is the youngest French Open women's champion since Monica Seles lifted the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen in 1992.\n\n\"It is crazy. Two years ago I won a junior Grand Slam and now I'm here,\" added Swiatek, who was laughing before her voice cracked with emotion.\n\n\"It feels like such a short time. I'm so overwhelmed.\"\n\nSwiatek dropped to her haunches and cupped her mouth in disbelief after cracking a forehand winner on her first match point.\n\nAfter asking the umpire for permission, she ran across Court Philippe Chatrier to find her nearest and dearest, eventually being pointed in the right direction to run up to her support team and family in the players' box.\n\nWho is Iga Swiatek? - some quick facts about the newest French Open champion\n• None Father is former rower Tomasz Swiatek, who competed at the 1988 Olympics\n• None She won the Wimbledon junior title in 2018 and the French Open girls' doubles alongside Caty McNally in the same year\n• None Said earlier in the tournament she might step away from the tour to go to university\n• None Employs a sports psychologist, Daria Abramowicz, to travel with her on tour\n\nAnother new name wins a women's Grand Slam title\n\nThe women's game has long been unpredictable and few would have backed Swiatek, even those who were already aware of her huge potential, to win Roland Garros.\n\nThe teenager is the ninth woman to win her maiden Grand Slam in the past 14 major tournaments.\n\nBut from the moment she shocked Romanian top seed Simona Halep in the fourth round, more began to believe it would be the fearless Swiatek who lifted the trophy on Saturday.\n\nAs well as Halep, Swiatek has also beaten Czech 2019 runner-up Marketa Vondrousova and now Kenin as her ability to hit powerfully and precisely off either flank paid dividends.\n\nOne question mark going into the final was whether she would not - in her words - \"choke\". She did not seem to think she would and so it proved.\n\nThe magnitude of the occasion did not faze her as she raced into an early 3-0 lead and, after Kenin fought back to level, she regained control to win the first set.\n\nKenin struggled to handle Swiatek's heavy and free hitting, with the Pole's confidence increasing as the match went on.\n\nAnother sign of Swiatek's calmness was the way she casually waved to Polish fans and practised a few serves when Kenin took a medical timeout for treatment on a heavily-strapped left thigh after the third game of the second set.\n\nSoon it was back to business, though. Swiatek ruthlessly won 16 of the next 19 points from when Kenin returned as she became the first woman to win the title without dropping a set since Belgium's Justine Henin in 2007.\n\n\"I was just mentally consistent. I just wanted to play aggressive as in previous rounds,\" said Swiatek, who hit 25 winners and made 13 unforced errors.\n\n\"It was really stressful for me, so kind of hard. I don't know what made the difference. I won the match point and that is important enough.\n\n\"It had to be like that that another underdog won a Grand Slam in women's tennis. It is so often right now that it is crazy.\"\n\nNot to be for Kenin\n\nWhile Kenin was the higher ranked player and had won her maiden Grand Slam title at the Australian Open in January, it is easy to forget the 21-year-old's own rapid progress in light of Swiatek's achievement.\n\nThe American said she \"hated\" clay courts up to last year, when she announced her arrival at Roland Garros by beating 23-time major champion Serena Williams in the third round.\n\nThere did not seem to be too much she liked about the surface when her preparation for the French Open started and finished with a 6-0 6-0 humbling by former world number one Victoria Azarenka in Rome last month.\n\nBut the feisty New Yorker, who has unashamedly told how winning is what she loves most about the sport, has repeatedly shown how she will never back down from a challenge and proved it again in Paris by reaching the final.\n\nThis was one step too far for Kenin, however, who could not reach her best level as a total of 23 unforced errors contributed to her defeat.\n\nWhile she could not become the first woman aged 21 or under to win two majors in the same season since Henin and Williams in 2003, she will reflect on a wonderful year where she has emerged as one of the biggest talents in the game.\n\n\"I'm not going to use this as an excuse, but my leg obviously was not the best,\" said Kenin, who is set to move up to fourth in the world.\n\n\"After the first set I just felt it was so tight, I couldn't move. That's why I had to call the trainer. It just got worse.\"\n\nThree-time Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka, who is friends with Swiatek, led the congratulations on social media...\n\nAnd also a message from Poland's biggest sporting superstar...\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "US President Donald Trump hosted his first public event since testing positive for Coronavirus last Thursday.\n\nAddressing supporters from the White House Balcony, he thanked the public for their support before taking the opportunity to criticise Democratic rival Joe Biden.", "El Shafee Elsheikh (l) and Alexanda Kotey (r) were flown to the US on Wednesday\n\nTwo Islamic State (IS) suspects from the UK have pleaded not guilty in a US court to charges of conspiring to murder four American hostages.\n\nEl Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey are accused of belonging to an IS cell dubbed \"The Beatles\" involved in kidnappings in Iraq and Syria.\n\nAppearing by videolink, they both pleaded not guilty at a hearing in Alexandria, Virginia.\n\nThey had been flown from US custody in Iraq to face charges on Wednesday.\n\nElsheikh, 32, and Kotey, 36, are facing trial for involvement in the murders of US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and relief workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller.\n\nBoth of the accused waived their right to a fast trial.\n\nSetting the date of the next hearing for 15 January, Judge TS Ellis described the case as \"complex and unusual\" and said it may involve classified information.\n\n\"Time is required in order to achieve the ends of justice in this case,\" the judge said.\n\nElsheikh and Kotey are suspected of involvement in the deaths of other hostages, including Alan Henning - a taxi driver from Salford, Greater Manchester, who was delivering aid - and Scottish aid worker David Haines, from Perth, as well as two Japanese nationals.\n\nThey are also face charges of supporting terrorism and conspiring to commit hostage taking.\n\nOriginally from west London, their alleged IS gang was given its 1960s pop group nickname by hostages due to their British accents. They were stripped of their UK nationality in 2018.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dilys Price said she felt free when she was jumping out of planes all over the world\n\nA woman who became the world's oldest female skydiver has died, aged 88.\n\nFormer teacher Dilys Price, from Cardiff, was scared of heights when she did her first jump in her fifties.\n\nBut she went on to complete hundreds of parachute jumps all over the world, and set the Guinness World Record for the oldest female solo parachute jump.\n\nShe also founded the Touch Trust charity championing art and creative movement programmes for disabled people.\n\nIts chief executive Bev Garside said she was always struck by Ms Price's \"intelligence, her energy and her warmth\".\n\n\"Always with a twinkle in her eye, she grabbed life with both hands until the end,\" she said.\n\n\"She has had a positive impact on the lives of so many and leaves the world a better place.\"\n\nIn 2018 Ms Price told BBC Wales: \"Skydiving is my passion, there you have the ultimate beauty of the sky... you just feel so free.\"\n\nAfter taking up the sport when she was 54, she went on to complete over 1,139 solo jumps all over the world.\n\nShe was no ordinary skydiver - with a background in drama and dance, she specialised in air acrobatics and freestyling.\n\nDilys Price setting her Guinness World Record for the oldest female solo parachute jump\n\nThe University of Wales Trinity Saint David, where she was an honorary fellow, said she was a \"remarkable, amazing and inspiring\" woman.\n\nMark James Parry tweeted: \"Very very sad that my Aunt ⁦@DilysPriceOBE⁩ has passed away. She touched many with her incredible personality and truly lived life to the full. An inspiration to all. Truly grateful that I got to call her my Aunt. We will miss you.\"\n\nLearning Disability Wales said she \"transformed the lives of thousands of people with profound multiple disabilities and people with autism\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Cardiff Metropolitan University This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by GuinnessWorldRecords This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Superwoman Network This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAged 80, the former Cardiff College of Education lecturer set the Guinness World Record for the oldest solo parachute jump (female).\n\nAt 86 she sold her parachute, but went on to do a tandem skydive with former Wales rugby star Gareth Thomas.\n\nShe was awarded an OBE for services to people with special needs in 2003, and was honoured for her work at the Pride of Britain awards in 2017.\n\nIn 2018, she was included on a list of the 100 women who have influenced Welsh life.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dilys Price said she was \"amazed\" to be included on a list of the most influential Welsh women\n\nBack in 2018, Ms Price, who went on to model for Helmut Lang, said she wanted to inspire older people to keep active.\n\nShe said: \"We only get one shot at life\".", "Whoever had the book appears to have looked after it as the council said it was \"pristine\"\n\nAn overdue library book has been returned nearly 60 years late.\n\nIt was left in Middlesbrough Central Library's returns box this week but was due back in December, 1962.\n\nThe copy of Geoffrey Faber's poetry anthology The Buried Stream was still \"pristine\", Middlesbrough Council said.\n\nThe fine would have been more than £500 but charges have been suspended during the pandemic and there would be \"no questions asked\", a council spokesperson said.\n\nThe identity of the borrower is not known.\n\nLibrarian David Harrington said they were \"really grateful to the anonymous person who returned this book to us as it will be added back to our stock and placed in the Reference Library for future generations to enjoy\".\n\nHe urged anyone else with overdue books to return them while the library was not imposing fines.\n\nAround the time Middlesbrough Library was expecting the return of The Buried Stream:\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Cases are highest in the North West, North East and Yorkshire and The Humber\n\nCoronavirus cases in England have \"increased rapidly\", data shows, as ministers grapple with what to do next.\n\nEstimates suggest between one-in-170 and one-in-240 people you meet in the street has the virus.\n\nBoth current cases, and the speed at which they are increasing, are much higher in the north of England than the national average.\n\nScientific advisers warn hospital admissions are \"very close\" to levels in early March.\n\nThe official government statistics do not capture the full pattern of the number of people infected.\n\nMeanwhile, the largest study of coronavirus, by Imperial College London, has also reported its analysis of 175,000 people, with the last samples taken on Monday.\n\nAcross England, it says cases are continuing to increase, but not as aggressively as at the beginning of September.\n\nBut this masks a stark regional picture - with cases doubling around twice as fast in the North West, Yorkshire and the West Midlands compared to the whole of England.\n\nIt also shows there has been an eight-fold increase in cases in people over 65 as the epidemic surge that started in younger age groups bleeds into the rest of the population.\n\nProf Steven Riley, from Imperial, said: \"I think it's clear that the prevalence is still increasing\" and that if new, tougher measures were needed in northern England, then they should come in \"sooner rather than later\".\n\nThe rise in cases and people being admitted to hospital is causing mounting political concern. New rules are expected to be announced on Monday and come into force on Wednesday.\n\nThe precise details are still being debated, but measures including closing pubs and restaurants, or a ban on overnight stays, are on the table.\n\nData presented to MPs by England's Chief Medical Officer, Prof Chris Whitty, appears to put the hospitality sector in the firing line, given that parts of society such as schools and universities are being kept open.\n\nA slide shown at the meeting lists hospitality as the most frequent setting for coronavirus exposure.\n\nIt says pubs, restaurants and the hospitality sector as a whole are a major area where people testing positive for the virus have been mixing.\n\nGillian Keegan, minister for skills and apprenticeships, said the government had to act to stem the rise in cases.\n\n\"This is serious - it is getting out of control, and we have to do something to bring it back under control,\" she said.\n\nThe Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) says it is \"almost certain that the epidemic continues to grow exponentially across the country and is confident that the transmission is not slowing\".\n\nSir Mark Walport, a member of Sage, told the BBC: \"On the 19 March, just before the first set of widespread restrictions, hospital admissions were 586 in England and on the 6 October they were 524.\n\n\"So we are very close to the situation at the beginning of March.\"\n\nHospital admissions are around one fifth of the level at the peak in spring, but are currently doubling every fortnight.\n\nSir Jeremy Farrar, another Sage member and director of the Wellcome Trust, says: \"We are back to choices faced in the early March... the longer the decisions are delayed, the harder and more draconian are the interventions needed to change trajectory of [the] epidemic.\"", "In all its glory: Mars pictured by Damian Peach on 30 September\n\nGet out there and look up!\n\nMars is at its biggest and brightest right now as the Red Planet lines up with Earth on the same side of the Sun.\n\nEvery 26 months, the pair take up this arrangement, moving close together, before then diverging again on their separate orbits around our star.\n\nTuesday night sees the actual moment of what astronomers call \"opposition\".\n\nAll three bodies will be in a straight line at 23:20 GMT (00:20 BST).\n\n\"But you don't have to wait until the middle of the night; even now, at nine or 10 o'clock in the evening, you'll easily see it over in the southeast,\" says astrophotographer, Damian Peach. \"You can't miss it, it's the brightest star-like object in that part of the sky,\" he told BBC News.\n\nEven though this coming week witnesses the moment of opposition, it was Tuesday of last week that Mars and Earth actually made their closest approach in this 26-month cycle.\n\nA separation of 62,069,570km, or 38,568,243 miles. That's the narrowest gap now until 2035.\n\nAt the last opposition, in 2018, Earth and Mars were just 58 million km apart, but what makes this occasion a little more special for astrophotographers in the Northern Hemisphere is the Red Planet's elevation in the sky. It's higher, and that means telescopes don't have to look through quite so much of the Earth's turbulent atmosphere, which distorts images.\n\nExperienced practitioners like Damian use a technique called \"lucky imaging\" to get the perfect shot. They take multiple frames and then use software to stitch together the sharpest view.\n\nDamian's picture at the top of this page shows up clearly the \"Martian dichotomy\" - the sharp contrast between the smooth lowland plains of the Northern Hemisphere and the more rugged terrain in the Southern Hemisphere. Evident too is Mars' carbon dioxide ice cap at the southern pole.\n\nThe image was captured using a 14-inch Celestron telescope.\n\n\"That's quite a serious bit of equipment; it's not something you get on a whim,\" says Damian. \"But even a telescope half that size will show up all the major features on Mars quite easily. And if you've got a good pair of binoculars, you'll certainly be able to make out that it's actually a planet and not a star.\"\n\nArtwork: The UAE's Hope probe will study Mars' atmosphere from next year\n\nIt's around opposition that space probes are launched from Earth to Mars. Obviously - the distance that needs to be travelled is shorter, and the time and energy required to make the journey is less.\n\nThree missions are currently in transit, all of which were sent on their way in July: The United Arab Emirates' Hope orbiter; China's Tianwen orbiter and rover; and the Americans' Perseverance rover.\n\nEurope and Russia had hoped to despatch their ExoMars \"Rosalind Franklin\" rover, too, but they missed the launch window and will now have to wait until late 2022. That's the penalty you pay when the planets align only every 26 months.\n\nHope, Tianwen and Perseverance are all on course to arrive at Mars in February.\n\nIn 2003, Mars made its closest approach to Earth around opposition in nearly 60,000 years - a separation of just 56 million km.\n\nThe distance between the two at opposition can be over 100 million km, as happened in 2012.\n\nThe variation is a consequence of the elliptical shape of the orbits of both Mars and Earth.\n\nJonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos", "Workers at companies told to close as part of virus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages\n\nThe Labour Party and business groups have voiced concern at the \"ripple effect\" of Covid shutdowns that are expected to be announced on Monday.\n\nOn Friday, the chancellor said staff at UK companies told to close would get 67% of their wages from the government under the expanded Job Support Scheme.\n\nBut no specific help was announced for workers who may be indirectly affected - for example, those in supply chains.\n\nThe Treasury denied firms that are not fully closed would not receive help.\n\nLabour claims close to one million workers will be at risk, including 500,000 people in the wedding industry, 369,000 in the sports industry, and 142,000 event caterers.\n\nShadow business secretary Ed Miliband said: \"There are massive holes in the new safety net.\"\n\nA spokesperson for the Treasury said: \"We do not recognise these figures,\" adding that Labour had \"incorrectly\" listed some sectors as not benefitting from the scheme.\n\nThe spokesperson added: \"Companies that are open can use the other element of the Job Support Scheme which is aimed at those able to open but at lower levels of demand.\n\n\"And of course they can also access the other help we have made available, including billions of pounds of grants, loans and tax cuts.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe Job Support Scheme was announced by Mr Sunak on 24 September and will replace the \"furlough\" scheme from 1 November for six months.\n\nIt \"tops up\" the wages of employees who can't work their normal hours.\n\nThe expanded scheme, announced on Friday and available to firms ordered to shut down, will provide two-thirds of wages to employees unable to work.\n\nOn Monday, Boris Johnson is expected to announce a tiered system of measures for England in an effort to stall rising infection rates.\n\nUnder the new system, different parts of the country would be placed in one of three categories.\n\nThe worst-affected areas - which may include much of northern England - could see its pubs and restaurants closed.\n\nShadow Business Secretary Ed Miliband claimed the government had been \"forced into a climbdown\" over supporting shut-down businesses.\n\nBut he said businesses including weddings, theatres, cinemas, events, and many suppliers would be left out \"on a technicality\" because they have been \"forced to shut in all but name\", he said.\n\nMr Miliband added: \"Ministers must urgently rethink their damaging sink or swim approach which consigns whole sectors of our economy to the scrapheap.\"\n\nRoger Barker, Director of Policy at the Institute of Directors said the new measures set out by the chancellor on Friday were a \"useful step\" towards supporting businesses affected by the lockdown.\n\nBut he said their impact would be limited because they \"don't account for the ripple effects of restrictions across the economy\".\n\nHe added: \"It is becoming increasingly clear that the chancellor's previous strategy of phasing out business support and allowing supposedly 'unviable' companies to fail was premature in the face of a resurgent virus.\n\n\"Friday's measures should be seen as the start of renewed efforts to sustain the survival of companies and jobs if long-term damage to the economy is to be prevented.\"\n\nAdam Marshall, Director General of the British Chamber of Commerce, also said the new support did not go far enough to protect firms in supply chains and town and city centres and urged: \"Their cash flow concerns and worries about future demand must be heeded.\"", "Some of those who arrived last week needed to get treatment in hospital\n\nMore than 1,000 migrants from Africa have arrived in the Spanish Canary Islands over the last 48 hours, the Red Cross says.\n\nThese are figures that have not been seen for more than a decade.\n\nOn a visit to the islands, Spain's Migration Minister José Luis Escrivá promised a \"comprehensive response\".\n\nThis route from West Africa has grown in popularity since 2018. A previous peak, in 2006, saw 35,000 migrants arrive in the archipelago, the UN says.\n\nMany of the migrants would have set sail from Senegal, more than 1,600km (1,000 miles) away, where this week two boats carrying 186 people were intercepted by Senegalese marines, the AFP news agency reported quoting a military statement.\n\nThe passengers were reported to have been from Senegal and The Gambia.\n\nThe migrants who arrived in the Canary Islands since Thursday were rescued from 37 boats, Spanish news agency EFE reports.\n\nMany are being looked after by the Spanish Red Cross in camps near where they disembarked.\n\nA Red Cross spokesman told AFP that barring a few mild cases of hypothermia, all were in good health and had been tested for coronavirus.\n\nThe Spanish Red Cross is helping the migrants once they arrive\n\nMr Escrivá has been on a trip to three of the archipelago's main islands - Tenerife, Fuerteventura and Gran Canaria - to see the situation for himself.\n\nBut he was criticised by local council leader Blas Acosta for not offering any solutions to how the migrants should be housed, El Mundo newspaper reports.\n\nBetween January and the end of July this year, 3,269 migrants made the crossing from West Africa to the Canary Islands, which is nearly a 600% increase on the same period in 2019, the UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM) says.\n\nThis year so far, more than 250 people have died trying to reach the islands, the IOM adds.", "Last updated on .From the section Cycling\n\nBritain's Simon Yates is out of the Giro d'Italia after testing positive for coronavirus.\n\nThe Tirreno-Adriatico champion will not start Saturday's eighth stage of the Grand Tour.\n\nYates, 28, was tested after he \"developed very mild symptoms\" following Friday's seventh stage, his Mitchelton-Scott team said.\n\nTeam staff and riders have also received rapid tests and been cleared to continue racing.\n\nYates, however, will remain under quarantine \"where the team can offer its best possible care\", Mitchelton-Scott added.\n\n\"Simon's health remains our main concern and, thankfully, his symptoms remain very mild and he is otherwise in good health,\" said team doctor Matteo Beltemacchi.\n\nYates was in 21st position in the race, three minutes 52 seconds behind the leader, Joao Almeida of Portugal.\n\nVictory at the Giro d'Italia was supposed to be a shoo-in for a British rider. Coming into the race Yates' form seemed slightly better than Geraint Thomas of Ineos Grenadiers.\n\nFrom a sporting perspective, it's an absolute disaster for this close-knit Australian team Mitchelton-Scott whose main objective this year was to win the Giro. And while Yates' symptoms are said to be mild, he is the first rider to contract coronavirus during a Grand Tour.\n\nFor organisers of the Giro, RCS, this is an unwanted milestone and a warning. They took a similar approach to Tour de France organisers ASO - testing riders and staff before the race and on rest days. But, while the Tour was seen as a success, this is proof the 'bubble' is not impermeable - and that Covid-19 has made it into the peloton.\n\nAs Yates' team boss Matt White said himself before the start of this hastily rearranged road cycling season: \"You have to have your head in the clouds if you think we'll cruise though this next three-and-a-half-month period scot-free.\"\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Speaking to the crowd about the coronavirus pandemic, he said \"I feel very grateful for all our people being healthy and sound.\"", "The singer has recorded dozens of hits with the Housemartins, The Beautiful South and Jacqui Abbott\n\nSinger Paul Heaton has been praised for his generosity, after the final editor of Q Magazine revealed how he supported staff when the publication closed.\n\nWriting on Twitter, Ted Kessler explained how the star made a large donation to the magazine, which was shared amongst 40 staff.\n\n\"It really was the most amazingly kind, selfless, generous act,\" he said. \"For some, it meant a bill could be paid.\"\n\nIn thanks, the staff commissioned a Q Award to honour the star.\n\nReceiving it on Friday, Heaton thanked the magazine for its support and the \"kind words\" about his donation.\n\n\"It was just meant to make sure people weren't left on their arse,\" he said in a video posted to Twitter.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Paul Heaton This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nKessler, who was at the helm of Q Magazine when it closed in July, shared the story on what would have been the date of the annual Q award ceremony.\n\n\"We had the Roundhouse booked for two nights for the Q Awards next week,\" he wrote on Twitter. \"We didn't have talent sorted when we had to Covid cancel in April, but Nadine Shah was presenting and the two gigs were Liam Gallagher one night, Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott the other.\n\n\"The only award we knew for sure was to Paul Heaton, as we'd heard he'd never won one.\n\n\"Think of all the brilliant songs he's written for The Housemartins, Beautiful South, etc. Millions of records sold. No Q award (or Brit) for his songwriting. So we knew he'd be Classic Songwriter.\n\n\"Then, a few days after Q closed, we got a message from him saying that to thank Q for all the support we'd given him over 35 years, he was going to donate a large sum to thank us in our turmoil. Obviously, I politely declined.\n\n\"He was insistent. I accepted the donation and shared it amongst over 40 staff and freelancers working for Q at the time, all of whose minds - like mine - were blown.\"\n\nPosting a photo of Heaton's award, Kessler concluded: \"We got him that award in the end. Britain's greatest living pop star. A true legend.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Ted Kessler This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nFans welcomed the anecdote with an outpouring of joy and gratitude.\n\n\"Such a non-2020 thing to happen,\" said Mat Osman, bassist for Suede. \"A musician who I love is suddenly trending and it turns out that it's just because he's a lovely guy.\"\n\n\"This kind of thing is just enough to retain faith in human nature. What a wonderful thing to do,\" added BBC 6 Music's Shaun Keaveny.\n\n\"A proper working class hero,\" added one fan, while another commented: \"Paul Heaton and his songs have pulled me out of very dark times. He deserves all the kudos, awards and love that goes his way,\" added another user.\n\nHeaton, who was formerly a member of the Housemartins and The Beautiful South, is known for his generosity.\n\nIn 2017, he revealed that he had offered all the royalties from his back catalogue to the government - meaning that every time a hit like Happy Hour, Rotterdam or Perfect 10 was played, the money would be used to fund schools and the NHS.\n\n\"I felt I'd made enough money from them, I didn't want to nationalise my savings, as such, I was just saying this was a gift to the British public,\" he told Channel 5's Matthew Wright programme.\n\nHowever, he said, the offer was turned down.\n\nThe star was also due to play a free concert for NHS staff on the frontline of the coronavirus crisis next week, along with his current singing partner Jacqui Abbott.\n\nThe show, in Nottingham's Motorpoint Arena, has been rescheduled for April, due to ongoing restrictions on live events.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "The cause of the mid-air collision over Loches, Indre-et-Loire is under investigation\n\nTwo small planes have collided in mid-air before crashing in western central France, killing five people, local officials say.\n\nThe collision between two light aircraft happened south-east of the city of Tours at about 16:30 local time (15:30 BST) on Saturday.\n\nEmergency crew, including about 50 firefighters, were called to the scene. They cordoned off the crash sites.\n\nNo-one else was harmed when the planes came down.\n\nThe smaller aircraft, a microlight carrying two people, landed on a fence around a house in the town of Loches, situated about 46km (29 miles) south-east of Tours.\n\nPolice have cordoned off the crash sites\n\nA witness told AFP news agency it burst into flames after landing on the house's electricity meter.\n\nThe larger plane, a Diamond DA40, landed more than a 100m (328ft) away in an uninhabited area. It had three tourists on board.\n\n\"All five people involved died,\" local government official Nadia Seghier told AFP.\n\n\"Air emergency staff from Lyon were brought in at first to track down the plane, which was quickly found.\"\n\nThere were no immediate details about the identities of the victims or the cause of the collision.\n\nLocal police have launched an investigation into the incident.\n\nThe crash sites have been blockaded and residents have been told to stay in their homes, a witness said.\n\nThe mayor called the collision an \"unbelievable accident\"\n\nWitness Genevieve Allouard-Liebert, who lives in the area, said she had heard a \"big crash\" when the planes came down. She said she and her husband saw a man fall from the larger plane as it skimmed nearby rooftops.\n\nMid-air collisions between small aircraft are considered to be rare. One fatal incident in France happened over Quiberon Bay off the coast of Brittany in 1998, when a Beechcraft 1900D collided in mid-air with a light aircraft, killing 15 people.\n\n\"There's never any air traffic around Loches, it's an unlikely and unbelievable accident,\" the town's mayor Marc Angenault said.", "(From left to right) Li Qing Wang, Takieddine Boudhane, David Gomoh, Sgt Matiu Ratana, Sayagi Sivanantham and Louis Johnson have all been killed in London this year\n\nThe number of killings in London has exceeded 100 for a sixth consecutive year, BBC research has found.\n\nThe deaths of Poorna Kaameshwari Sivaraj and her son in Brentford mean there have been 101 homicides in 2020.\n\nNinety-nine of those murder and manslaughter investigations have been launched by the Met, while British Transport Police has recorded two.\n\nData gathered and analysed by the BBC found there had been 55 fatal stabbings so far this year.\n\nOther findings over the last 10 months include that 12 teenagers have been killed - all of them male - while six homicide victims were children aged 10 and under.\n\nThe data also showed 18 people were killed while the capital was put into lockdown as part of drastic measures to stop the spread of coronavirus.\n\nHavering is the only London borough which has not seen a murder investigation launched in 2020, the BBC has also found.\n\nCharges have been brought in more than two-thirds of all investigations and there have been convictions in a number of cases, including the stabbing of teenager Louis Johnson who was killed at East Croydon station in January.\n\nSophie Linden, London's deputy mayor for policing and crime, said the milestone brought \"deep sadness and deep regret\".\n\nShe said: \"It is always sad that we have lost so many people in the last six years, and we have to remember that there are people and families behind these statistics.\n\n\"The difference in murders really shows the complexity, and ranges from young children to teenagers to violence on the street and women being killed in their own home.\"\n\nLast year London saw its deadliest year in a decade with more than 150 people killed in the capital. City Hall data showed that about 10% of those homicides were related to domestic violence.\n\nAdditionally during the lockdown period City Hall said there was a 25% increase in calls to the National Domestic Abuse helpline as well as a rise in domestic abuse-related incidents in the capital.\n\nLatest figures show that more than 440 people, mainly women, have been referred to an emergency programme to support individuals fleeing domestic violence and abuse.\n\nPoorna Kaameshwari Sivaraj, 36, and her son Kailash Kuha Raj were last seen on 21 September\n\nLooking at murders in the capital as statistics is always grim, but the most recent name on the list from 2020 is particularly poignant - Kailash Kuha Raj was just three years old.\n\nHe was stabbed to death in Brentford, his body discovered near that of his 36-year-old mother on Tuesday. Their deaths are a reminder that there are many different narratives underlying London's homicide figures, and while stabbings are still responsible for by far the highest number of deaths, the ages of those killed and where they lived in the capital vary greatly. Last year the number of domestic violence-related homicides reached a five-year high in the UK, and London charities have warned that many of the risk factors which can lead to women being abused have increased during the Covid 19 pandemic.There has been an increase in fatal shootings too - 13 so far this year compared with 10 in the whole of 2019.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nEmployees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions are to get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.\n\nThe scheme, announced by Rishi Sunak, begins on 1 November for six months and a Treasury source said it could cost hundreds of millions of pounds a month.\n\nA restrictions update, which could see pubs and restaurants shut in the worst-affected areas, is expected on Monday.\n\nLeaders in areas now under restrictions said the scheme did not go far enough.\n\nIn a statement, the mayors of Greater Manchester, North Tyne, Sheffield and Liverpool said: \"We are pleased that the government has listened and recognised that any new system of restrictions must come with a substantial package of financial support.\"\n\nBut they said it was only a \"start\" and more help was needed \"to prevent genuine hardship, job losses and business failure this winter\".\n\nThe announcement comes just a fortnight after the government unveiled its Job Support Scheme - replacing the furlough scheme - to top up the wages of staff who have not been able to return to the workplace full time.\n\nThe latest scheme will only apply to businesses told to close - rather than those who choose to shut because of the broader impact of Covid restrictions.\n\nThe support will be reviewed in January. Until November businesses that are asked to close can continue to use the existing furlough scheme.\n\nThe grants will be paid up to a maximum of £2,100 per employee a month and the Treasury said they would protect jobs and enable businesses to reopen quickly once restrictions are lifted.\n\nOne pub manager in Otley, West Yorkshire, said the scheme \"doesn't even touch the sides\" in terms of its impact on pubs.\n\n\"Two-thirds of somebody's wage isn't going to cut it,\" said Mel Green, 41, of The Black Bull.\n\n\"We're in a trade where everyone's on national minimum wage pretty much. They're the ones that are losing out. A lot of them are living hand to mouth already and they've already had hours reduced.\"\n\nThe chancellor said the latest measures for companies forced to shut would provide \"reassurance and a safety net for people and businesses in advance of what may be a difficult winter\".\n\nIn addition, for businesses forced to close in England, Mr Sunak announced an increase in business grants - with up to £3,000 a month paid every fortnight.\n\nThe Treasury says the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will receive increased funding allowing them to bring in similar measures if they choose to.\n\nIt is a sign of how quickly the coronavirus situation has soured that the chancellor is having to return to a policy he thought he'd parked less than two weeks ago when he announced his Winter Economic Plan.\n\nThe government insists this is not a retread of the furlough scheme, which is due to expire at the end of this month, but in all important aspects this is furlough mark two.\n\nThe crucial bit is that small employers will not have to make any contribution to their workers' wages if they are legally forced to shut down.\n\nLarger businesses will have to contribute about 5% of employee costs in the form of National Insurance and pension contributions.\n\nThat is much more generous than the expiring furlough scheme and way more generous than the Job Support Scheme Mr Sunak announced 10 days ago, which requires employers to pay 55% of active workers' salaries.\n\nThe reason for that is simple - those measures applied to businesses that were allowed to be open. This new scheme only applies to businesses which are not.\n\nOther questions are not simple - who will be eligible? What about businesses that were never allowed to reopen since March?\n\nWill it be applied by postcode? Will you be able to walk 10 minutes down the road to go to the pub that is open but having to pay 55% of staff wages when it's less than half full?\n\nAnd perhaps most importantly for the expected \"beneficiaries\" of this scheme - the hospitality industry - how strong is the evidence on which this policy is based and can we see it in detail?\n\nLabour said the government's \"rather slow, incompetent, dithering response\" had caused \"unnecessary anxiety and job losses\".\n\nShadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds welcomed the measures but called for further changes to the scheme to incentivise employers to keep more of their staff on.\n\nThe CBI business lobby group said the scheme \"should cushion the blow for the most affected and keep more people in work\".\n\n\"But many firms, including pubs and restaurants, will still be hugely disappointed if they have to close their doors again after doing so much to keep customers and staff safe,\" added CBI boss Dame Carolyn Fairbairn.\n\nFederation of Small Businesses boss Mike Cherry said the extra help for closed businesses would be \"welcomed by thousands of small businesses\".\n\nShop workers' trade union Usdaw said it was concerned retailers facing reduced business in an area subject to the new restrictions would not benefit from the scheme.\n\nMeanwhile, the number of people in the UK to have tested positive for coronavirus rose by 13,864 - a decrease of 3,676 on Thursday's figures - with a further 87 deaths reported on the government's dashboard.\n\nThe chancellor described his announcement as \"a very different scheme to what we've had before, this is not a universal approach, this is an expansion of the job support scheme specifically for those people who are in businesses that will be formally or legally asked to close\".\n\nAsked whether the announcement suggested the government was going to ask businesses, such as those in hospitality, to shut, Mr Sunak said: \"The rise in cases and hospital admissions in certain parts of the country is a concern.\n\n\"It's right the government considers a range of options... but it's also right they engage with local leaders.\n\n\"That is what's happening this afternoon and over the weekend so those conversations can happen and collectively we can decide on the appropriate response.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The shadow chancellor welcomes a “U-turn” by the government to pay workers made to stay at home in any new lockdowns.\n\nThe Job Support Scheme, which will replace the furlough scheme from 1 November, will see eligible workers get three quarters of their normal salaries for six months.\n\nTo qualify, employees must be in a ''viable job'' where they can work for at least one-third of their normal hours.\n\nFor the hours not worked, the government and employer will each pay one-third of the remaining wages. This means the employee would get at least 77% of their pay.\n\nPubs and restaurants could be closed in the worst-affected areas under new measures\n\nA tiered system of measures for England is expected to be announced by Monday, in an effort to stall rising infection rates, to replace the patchwork of existing rules across the country.\n\nUnder the new system, different parts of the country would be placed in different categories - although ministers are still discussing the precise details.\n\nPubs and restaurants could be closed in the worst-affected areas, including parts of northern England and the Midlands, while a ban on overnight stays is also being considered.", "Only a few hundred North Atlantic right whales remain\n\nMore than 350 scientists and conservationists from 40 countries have signed a letter calling for global action to protect whales, dolphins and porpoises from extinction.\n\nThey say more than half of all species are of conservation concern, with two on the \"knife-edge\" of extinction.\n\nLack of action over polluted and over-exploited seas means that many will be declared extinct within our lifetimes, the letter says.\n\nEven large iconic whales are not safe.\n\n\"Let this be a historic moment when realising that whales are in danger sparks a powerful wave of action from everyone: regulators, scientists, politicians and the public to save our oceans,\" said Mark Simmonds.\n\nThe visiting research fellow at the University of Bristol, UK, and senior marine scientist with Humane Society International, has coordinated the letter, which has been signed by experts across the world.\n\n\"Save the whales\" was a familiar green slogan in the 1970s and 1980s, part of a movement that helped bring an end to commercial whaling.\n\nWhile stricken populations in most parts of the world have had a chance to recover from organised hunting, they are now facing myriad threats from human actions, including plastic pollution, loss of habitat and prey, climate change and collisions with ships.\n\nBy far the biggest threat is becoming accidently captured in fishing equipment and nets, which kills an estimated 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises a year.\n\nRally in Mexico to draw attention to the vaquita\n\nHundreds of scientists have expressed the same concern - that we are moving closer to a number of preventable extinctions. And unless we act now, future generations will be denied the chance to experience these intelligent social and inspiring creatures.\n\nThey point to the decline of the North Atlantic right whale, of which only a few hundred individuals remain, and the vaquita, a porpoise found in the Gulf of California, which may be down to the last 10 of its kind.\n\nAnd they say it is almost inevitable that these two species will follow the Chinese river dolphin down the path to extinction. The dolphin, also known as the baiji, was once a common sight in the Yangtze River but is now thought to have died out.\n\nThe letter, which has been signed by experts in the UK, US, Mexico, South Africa and Brazil, among others, points out that these \"dramatic\" declines could have been avoided, but that the political will has been lacking.\n\nDr Susan Lieberman of the Wildlife Conservation Society said she signed the letter to help scientists raise these issues more widely.\n\n\"It is critical that governments develop, fund, and implement additional needed actions to better protect and save these iconic species - so they don't end going the way of the baiji,\" she told BBC News.\n\nThe scientists say that more than half of the 90 living species of whales, dolphins and porpoises, are of conservation concern, and the trend of acting \"too little, too late\" must end.\n\nThey are calling on countries with whales, dolphins and porpoises (cetaceans) in their waters to act to monitor threats and do more to protect them.\n\nSarah Dolman of Whale and Dolphin Conservation, UK, said accidental capture in fishing gear, known as bycatch, is an issue around UK waters, causing the deaths of thousands of cetaceans and other animals, including seals and birds, a year.\n\nThese include harbour porpoises and common dolphins, and increasing numbers of minke and humpback whales off the coast of Scotland.\n\nShe said entanglement in fishing nets was a \"horrible way to die\" with some animals surviving with broken teeth or beaks, or losing their young.\n\nShe told BBC News: \"We have a long way to go before we can be confident the fish we are eating is not causing bycatch of protected species like whales and dolphins.\"\n\nThe letter is part of a growing movement by scientists and conservationists to raise awareness of the threats faced by whales and their smaller relatives, the dolphins and porpoises.\n\nThe matter was discussed in September at a meeting of the scientific conservation committee of the International Whaling Commission, which has a core mission to prevent extinctions.\n\nMembers have set up an \"extinction initiative\" to work out how many extinctions we may be facing and what more we can do to prevent them.", "Rebecca Mack and her father Alan were ill at the same time\n\nA father who caught coronavirus from his daughter before she died from Covid-19 is donating plasma to help other people with the virus.\n\nAlan Mack, whose daughter Rebecca died in April, is part of a clinical trial of so-called \"convalescent\" plasma.\n\nThe hope is that antibodies built up by people who have had the virus will help others recover.\n\n\"I don't want anybody, if at all possible, to go through what we had to go through,\" Mr Mack said.\n\n\"There are so many people, I think, who just think it won't happen to them - and it can.\"\n\nAlan Mack has donated plasma eight times so far\n\nRebecca Mack, 29, who worked in the children's cancer unit at Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary and for NHS 111, had been self-isolating at home.\n\nShe had called an ambulance but died before it arrived.\n\nMr Mack and his wife Marion believe they contracted the virus driving their daughter home from a course shortly before lockdown, so she would not have to travel on public transport.\n\nRebecca, from Morpeth, Northumberland, had no symptoms at the time but both she and Mr Mack later became very ill. Mrs Mack also had the virus but her condition was not as severe.\n\n\"It was just horrendous,\" Mr Mack said.\n\n\"Rebecca herself, when she was working for the 111 service, she just thought it was a glorified flu bug.\n\n\"A lot of people did think that but it isn't, it's nasty.\"\n\nMr Mack has donated blood plasma eight times and has been told he can continue while he has sufficient antibodies.\n\nOnly about 20 people have donated this many times, NHS Blood and Transplant said.\n\nMr and Mrs Mack are fundraising for the Great North Children's Hospital in their daughter's memory.\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section Football\n\nBelgium's Kevin de Bruyne believes England should be leading candidates at next year's European Championship and the 2022 World Cup.\n\nThe Manchester City midfielder will be part of the Belgium side against England in the Nations League at Wembley on Sunday (17:00 BST kick-off).\n\nBoth teams reached the World Cup semi-finals in Russia two years ago.\n\n\"They should be very excited,\" the 29-year-old said of England. \"It's a very young team with a lot of potential.\"\n• None Who made your England XI for Belgium?\n\nEngland have not won a major trophy since the 1966 World Cup but De Bruyne, who was voted last season's Professional Footballers' Association Player of the Year, said: \"They should aim to win the next Euros and World Cup. I think they have that potential.\n\n\"There are always a lot of teams who want to win it, but I think the team they have - the players who play in top clubs - they should do that.\"\n\nBelgium manager Roberto Martinez agreed that England counterpart Gareth Southgate has an impressive squad at his disposal.\n\n\"His players are as good as anyone individually in world football and it is just a matter of time that they will get that trophy or major result in a major tournament,\" said former Swansea, Wigan and Everton boss Martinez.\n\nEngland, ranked fourth in the world, warmed up for Sunday's match with a 3-0 victory against Wales at Wembley on Thursday, with goals from Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Conor Coady and Danny Ings, while Jack Grealish impressed on his first senior start.\n\nBelgium, top of the Fifa rankings, beat England twice at the 2018 World Cup, but they will be without key forwards Dries Mertens and Eden Hazard on Sunday.\n\nDe Bruyne has revealed he is open to a new contract with Manchester City but says no discussions have taken place.\n\nHe joined City from Wolfsburg for £55m in August 2015 and has two and a half years to run on his existing deal.\n\nThere has been recent speculation in the media over a new two-year contract at Etihad Stadium.\n\nDe Bruyne has won two Premier League titles, four League Cups and the FA Cup during his spell with City.\n\n\"I have not spoken once to the club so I don't know why people are saying I have already agreed to something,\" he said.\n\n\"I always told everybody I am really happy at the club and I feel comfortable, so if the people at the club want to talk to me I am open to that and we will see what happens.\n\n\"But at the moment nothing has happened.\"\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "Another member of staff at Glasgow's Barlinnie prison has tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nTwo inmates and five staff at the jail have already been confirmed as having Covid-19.\n\nOn Saturday the Scottish Prison Service said more than 250 inmates were put into lockdown, with 12 staff from the jail's A hall also isolating.\n\nAll visits to A hall have been suspended until at least the end of October.\n\nAn SPS spokesman said the rest of the prison was not affected by the outbreak or visiting ban.\n\nHe added that contact tracing was being carried out for staff members.\n\nEarlier this year, the Scottish government approved new early release regulations to help the prison system cope with Covid cases.\n\nThe move, designed to free up more cells for single-use occupancy, could allow up to 450 inmates to get out of prison early.\n\nBut only those sentenced to 18 months or less and with 90 days or less left to serve are potentially eligible. Some serious offences are excluded.\n• None Up to 450 prisoners to be released early", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Celebrity cook Mary Berry and grime pioneer Dizzee Rascal have been honoured in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.\n\nBerry, who has earned the status of national treasure over a six-decade career, was \"overwhelmed\" at being made a dame for services to broadcasting, the culinary arts and charity.\n\nIt is \"such a huge honour\", she said.\n\nDizzee Rascal, real name Dylan Kwabena Mills, has been made an MBE for services to music.\n\nReacting to the news, Dame Mary added: \"When I was first told that I was going to be a dame you don't really believe it. And then it's so exciting, and you feel very proud.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Mary Berry on damehood: \"I'll still be the same person\"\n\n\"For most of my life I have been lucky enough to follow my passion to teach cookery through books and the media.\n\n\"To be a dame is really the icing on the cake.\"\n\nThe former Great British Bake Off judge joked: \"I just wish my parents and brothers were here to share my joy, as my only achievement at school was just one O-Level - in cookery of course.\"\n\nDame Mary is no stranger to the Royal Family, having made meringue roulades with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge last year, for her Berry Royal Christmas TV special.\n\nThe much-loved broadcaster, baker and food writer is also a patron of Child Bereavement UK, after having lost her son William aged 19 in a car crash in 1989.\n\nIn 2018, she told The Graham Norton Show she was once arrested at an airport after baking ingredients were mistaken for drugs.\n\nDizzee Rascal has had five UK number one singles\n\nDizzee Rascal is considered to have been one of the founding fathers of grime - a UK-based electronic rap genre which grew out of the English capital at the start of the century.\n\nIn 2003, aged 19, the East London MC became the youngest artist to win the Mercury Prize, with his debut album Boy in da Corner.\n\nThe elder statesman of the British rap game, who drops his seventh album E3 AF at the end of October, told the BBC in 2017 that he deserved to be given top billing at Glastonbury Festival.\n\n\"I've toured this festival for years, never disappointed,\" he said. \"You can always count on me.\"\n\n\"I'm basically at the stage where they need to make me headline this thing - because they ain't had no British rappers headline this festival.\"\n\nHis drive and success helped to pave the way for modern superstar Stormzy to eventually become the first black solo headliner in the history of the Worthy Farm event last year, bringing UK hip-hop and grime into the mainstream in the process.\n\nDame Mary is joined by veteran actress and Coronation Street star Maureen Lipman and The Woman in Black author Susan Hill, in being made a dame commander. The former played the title character's mother in Roman Polanski's Oscar-winning 2002 drama The Pianist.\n\nThere were knighthoods for one of the country's first rock 'n' roll icons Tommy Steele, for services to entertainment and charity, along with Brookside, Grange Hill and Hollyoaks creator Professor Phil Redmond, for services to broadcasting and arts in the regions. Hercule Poirot actor David Suchet was also knighted for services to drama and charity.\n\nDerrick Evans - more commonly known as Mr Motivator - has also been made an MBE after creating online home exercises during lockdown and hosting a week-long workout with Linda Lusardi to raise money for Age UK's Emergency Coronavirus Appeal.\n\nAnother English music star, singer Mica Paris, was also made an MBE, as well as performer and vocal coach Carrie Grant.\n\nDavid Attenborough and Lorraine Kelly also make the Queen's latest list\n\nElsewhere, broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough added to his legacy by being made a GCMG - one the country's highest honours.\n\nSir David, who has spoken to a big Glastonbury crowd himself in recent years, is considered to be an inspiration for people of all ages in the UK and beyond, for a lifetime spent warning world leaders of the need to protect the planet and of ongoing issues around climate change.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nSir Paul Smith, the chairman of the clothing label Paul Smith, was made a Companion of Honour, for services to fashion.\n\nLongstanding daytime ITV presenter and journalist Lorraine Kelly was made a CBE alongside Judy Craymer, the woman behind the movie Mamma Mia! and singer-songwriter/campaigner Joan Armatrading - for services to music, charity and equal rights.\n\nProfessor Brian Cox, scientist and presenter of BBC shows including The Wonders of the Universe, was also made a CBE alongside actor Adrian Lester, who is currently starring in BBC drama series Life and appeared in the films Primary Colors and The Day After Tomorrow.\n\nBernardine Evaristo was made an OBE and Professor Brian Cox was made a CBE\n\nOBEs went to ELO singer and music producer Jeff Lynne; and Tony Hatch - the man who wrote the theme tunes for Neighbours, Crossroads, Emmerdale and Petula Clark's Downtown; as well as Last Tango in Halifax screenwriter Sally Wainwright - for services to television.\n\nBooker Prize-winning-author Bernardine Evaristo was also appointed at the same level.\n\nThe Girl, Woman, Other novelist became the first black woman to win the award, when she shared it with Margaret Atwood in 2019, after the judges broke their rules by declaring a tie.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Atwood and Evaristo become the first authors to jointly win the Booker Prize since 1992\n\nHow to Train Your Dragon writer Cressida Cowell was made an MBE for services to children's literature, while ITV's Dr Hilary Jones was made an MBE too, for services to broadcasting, public health information and charity.\n\nRapper Lady Leshurr was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to music and charity.\n\nThe freestyle performer, whose real name is Melesha Katrina O'Garro, performed her distinctive rap, Quarantine Speech, for a YouTube fundraiser during lockdown.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by Lady Leshurr This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nRap duo Krept and Konan, real names Casyo Johnson and Karl Wilson, were also awarded the British Empire Medal for services to music and the community in Croydon.\n\nThey launched the Positive Direction Foundation three years ago, which offers activities including including workshops in music production, engineering and songwriting for young people.\n\nLast year they also judged the first series of BBC Three's The Rap Game UK.\n\nKrept and Konan: Honoured for their music and work in their community\n\nThe Queen's Birthday Honours list is usually revealed in June, but it was delayed this year by several months due to coronavirus.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nBar and restaurant workers have dumped piles of leftover ice outside the Scottish Parliament in protest at being forced to close by Covid restrictions.\n\nDemonstrations also took place outside the City Chambers in Glasgow after pubs in Scotland's central belt were told to close for 16 days.\n\nThe closures form part of new Scottish government rules to try and suppress the spread of coronavirus.\n\nAbout 3.4 million people are currently subject to the strictest curbs.\n\nThey involve licensed premises in Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lothian, Lanarkshire, Forth Valley and Ayrshire and Arran being closed until 25 October - although they can still serve takeaways.\n\nA truckload of ice was dumped outside the City Chambers in Glasgow\n\nPeople wearing masks cheered as dozens of Glasgow hospitality workers took part in the protest outside the City Chambers at George Square on Friday evening.\n\nBucket-loads of ice were thrown on the street before a truck dumped a huge pile in the road.\n\nCaitlin Lee, a worker at Blythswood Square Hotel in the city, said the ban on alcohol sales had brought uncertainty to the entire hospitality industry.\n\nShe said: \"Our occupancy within the hotel is obviously expecting to drop because people can't go out.\n\n\"We're now in a position where we don't know what's going to happen. Hospitality and everyone in hospitality has already went through the first wave of not being able to work and now we're coming into a second wave of it.\n\n\"Are we going to be able to work into Christmas and New Year?\"\n\nBar workers showed their contempt for the new rules\n\nChloe Fraser, who previously worked in hospitality for 10 years, said the industry was being punished. She blamed those attending illegal house parties for causing the virus to spread.\n\nShe said: \"It's clearly seen that people are not obeying the law or caring about the bigger picture.\n\n\"Hospitality is having to spend a lot of money putting the screens up, having to do all of these extra things which they've been abiding by in Glasgow. What's happening afterhours is the issue.\n\n\"These independent companies can't afford these losses. That's why we're seeing this.\"\n\nScotland's national clinical director, Prof Jason Leitch, said he had \"absolute sympathy for every sector that has had to take a hit\".\n\nBut he told BBC Scotland's Off The Ball programme: \"I also have sympathy for the thousand people who caught the virus yesterday, and the five people who died and their families. So all things are relative.\n\n\"Yes, we absolutely want every industry to get back to normal - football, elite sport, pubs and hospitality, oil and gas, everything.\n\n\"But there comes a time when the numbers reach a certain point and you've got to do things you don't want to do.\"\n\nHospitality venues in the rest of Scotland are allowed to open, but are only permitted to serve non-alcoholic drinks and food indoors between 06:00 and 18:00.\n\nLicensed premises in these areas are still able to serve alcohol in outdoor areas, such as beer gardens, up to the 22:00 curfew introduced in September.\n\nThe Scottish government has published details of a £40m support package for businesses forced to close due to Covid restrictions.\n\nAnd UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak has said employees who work for firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions are entitled to get two-thirds of their wages paid by the government.\n\nThe scheme is due to begin on 1 November for six months.\n\nIt comes ahead of a UK government update on Monday, which could also see pubs and restaurants shut in the worst-affected areas of England.", "Belarus police detained hundreds of people this week and used water cannon at protests against Mr Lukashenko\n\nThe UK has temporarily recalled its ambassador from Belarus amid growing tensions over political unrest there.\n\nAuthorities in Minsk have cracked down on protests against President Alexander Lukashenko, who claimed victory in disputed elections in August.\n\nThe opposition says he must quit but he says they are Western \"puppets\" trying to overthrow him.\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab said the move was in solidarity with Poland and Lithuania - critics of Mr Lukashenko.\n\nOn Friday, Belarus expelled 35 diplomats from those two neighbouring countries.\n\nMr Raab condemned that as a \"completely unjustified\" decision, which, he said on Twitter, would \"only isolate the Belarusian people\" further.\n\nHe said the UK would temporarily recall its ambassador, Jacqueline Perkins, in solidarity.\n\nSeven other European countries, including Germany, Romania and the Czech Republic, have also withdrawn their ambassadors.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"We want a new president!\" Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Minsk\n\nThe diplomatic stand-off marks a further deterioration in relations between European capitals and Minsk.\n\nLast week, the EU followed Britain and Canada in imposing sanctions on senior figures in Belarus who they say are responsible for human rights abuses against opposition campaigners.\n\nWhere is Belarus? It has Russia - its former imperial master - to the east and Ukraine to the south. To the north and west lie EU and Nato members Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.\n\nWhy does it matter? Like Ukraine, this nation of 9.5 million is caught in rivalry between the West and Russia. President Lukashenko, an ally of Russia, has been nicknamed \"Europe's last dictator\". He has been in power for 26 years, keeping much of the economy in state hands, and using censorship and police crackdowns against opponents.\n\nWhat's going on there? Now there is a huge opposition movement, demanding new, democratic leadership and economic reform. They say Mr Lukashenko rigged the 9 August election - officially, he won by a landslide. His supporters say his toughness has kept the country stable.\n\nThis week, Belarus police detained 317 people and deployed water cannon during mass protests against Mr Lukashenko, whose re-election was widely seen as fraudulent.\n\nMany opposition activists have been beaten up by police and thousands have been arrested during months of unrest. They are demanding the release of all political prisoners and a free and fair re-run of the election.\n\nMr Lukashenko remains defiant, accusing the opposition of being Western \"puppets\" intent on overthrowing his government. He is backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.\n\nThe main opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya - who stood against Mr Lukashenko in August's election - was forced to go into exile in Lithuania after receiving threats following the disputed vote.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 'Human life is the most precious thing': Svetlana Tikhanovskaya speaks out from exile\n\nBelarus says Lithuania and Poland are interfering in its internal affairs by hosting Ms Tikhanovskaya and other opposition figures and refusing to accept the election result.\n\nIt asked both countries to scale back the number of staff at their embassies amid tensions over the crackdown.\n\nBoth countries had initially refused to comply with the demand to cut staffing but then recalled their ambassadors in Belarus for consultations in the hope of reducing tensions.\n\n\"The Belarusian authorities requested us to limit the number of our diplomatic personnel in Belarus. That means that more than 30 diplomats are leaving Belarus right now and coming back to Warsaw,\" Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz told Reuters.\n\nLithuanian Foreign Ministry spokesman Rasa Jakilaitiene said the country had recalled five diplomats \"in hope that the step is sufficient to keep the possibility of a dialogue\".", "Last updated on .From the section Rugby Union\n\nWorld Rugby's decision to prevent transgender women from competing at the highest levels of the women's game has provoked a mixed reaction.\n\nThe move has been criticised by LGBT charity Stonewall, while some women's rights and gay rights campaigners have welcomed the decision.\n\nNew guidelines published on Friday \"do not recommend\" transgender women play contact rugby \"on safety grounds\".\n\nNational unions can be flexible in their application of the guidelines at community level.\n\nStonewall says it is \"deeply disappointed\" with the decision, but Fair Play for Women - which \"works to protect the rights of women and girls in the UK\" - thanked World Rugby \"for not trading away women's safety\".\n\n\"The proposals were based on hypothetical data modelling that has little relevance to the questions of fairness and safety in rugby that the policy review sought to address,\" said Stonewall chief executive Nancy Kelley.\n\n\"Important policies like this should be based on robust, relevant evidence and work closely with trans people playing in the sport.\"\n\nHowever, Bev Jackson, co-founder of the LGB Alliance, said the organisation \"applauds World Rugby for conducting a thorough, evidence-based study and making a decision on that basis to protect safety in women's rugby. We are very pleased that they resisted political pressure and kept to scientific facts. Many lesbians play this sport and they are enormously relieved.\"\n\nShe added that \"judging by the reactions we have received, a great many LGB people and indeed many trans people think this was the right decision\".\n\nDr Nicola Williams, director of Fair Play For Women, said: \"World Rugby have taken a transparent and evidence-based approach and we welcome their decision to prioritise safety and fairness for elite female players.\n\n\"We now look to Rugby's national governing bodies to follow their lead and guarantee the same protections for the thousands of women and girls who play at club level.\"\n\nTransgender men remain permitted to play men's contact rugby union, but the sport's governing body says a review of its existing guidelines had concluded that \"safety and fairness cannot presently be assured for women competing against trans women in contact rugby\".\n\nWorld Rugby chairman Bill Beaumont said: \"We recognise that the science continues to evolve and we are committed to regularly reviewing these guidelines, always seeking to be inclusive.\"\n\nSpeaking to BBC Sport in August, Grace McKenzie, a trans woman who plays for Golden Gate Women's rugby club in San Francisco, said she was worried \"that other sporting federations will look at World Rugby and begin to second-guess the existing science that supports trans women's inclusion in sport, and begin to make policies based out of a place of fear instead of a place of logic and reason\".\n\n\"I want to be able to participate fully with my team and in the sport that I love. I think that there is still a path forward to allow us to do that,\" she said.\n\nFormer Great Britain swimmer Sharron Davies, who has been vocal on the issue of trans women in elite sport, also welcomed World Rugby's decision.\n\nThe 57-year-old, a silver medallist at the 1980 Olympics, posted on social media: \"If we, as a fair society, want equal opportunities for females to medals, team places, safe sport and scholarships, with all the associations, rewards and careers, sport must be based on biological sex.\"\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "The city of Bangor has gone into local lockdown from 18:00 BST on Saturday.\n\nIt means that about 16,000 people there cannot go in or out of the area without good reason, such as work or study.\n\nBangor's restrictions will affect eight wards in the city: Garth, Hirael, Menai, Deiniol, Marchog, Glyder, Hendre and Dewi.\n\nThe city had seen a significant cluster of coronavirus cases and the incident rate stands at about 400 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nIt becomes the second area to face a local lockdown while the rest of its county does not, following Llanelli in Carmarthenshire.\n\nDiscussions were held earlier but it was decided not to extend restrictions to anywhere else in Gwynedd.\n\nA Welsh Government spokeswoman said: \"We will continue to closely monitor the situation in Gwynedd and will meet with the local authority and with neighbouring local authority leaders at the start of the week to discuss the developing situation further.\"\n\nBangor's cases appear to be associated with young people and its student population, officials have said\n\nSeventeen areas around Wales are now facing local lockdown restrictions, affecting more than two million people.\n\nIn north Wales, the whole counties of Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire and Wrexham are already in lockdown.\n\nThe Welsh Government said cases in Bangor appeared to be closely associated with young people and the student population.\n\nBangor Students' Union president Henry Williams said it was \"working hard... to ensure that students are aware of the new restrictions\". \"We understand it is a difficult time for us all,\" he said.\n\n\"We must continue to support each other to deal with what lies ahead.\"\n\nMeanwhile, the Department for Work and Pensions confirmed its Bangor service centre was temporarily closed on Friday due to coronavirus but would reopen on Monday.\n\nTattooist Jules Lee says it is \"difficult\" to make people abide by social distancing\n\nJules Lee, who runs a tattoo shop in Bangor, said it was \"very difficult to get people to follow the rules\" on social distancing.\n\n\"We've got massive signs saying one person at a time, and the amount of time that we'll have to tell them 'I'm sorry' [because] they come three or four people at the same time.\n\n\"It's really awkward. It's difficult to get people to comply,\" she told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast.\n\nGwynedd council leader Dyfrig Siencyn said he appreciated the lockdown would impact residents and businesses, but steps had to be taken to \"avoid stricter and more disruptive measures down the line\".Mr Siencyn said the situation was \"serious\" and being monitored closely.\"Put simply, there is no room for complacency for any Gwynedd resident,\" he said.\n\n\"We must all play our part as individuals in following the national Covid-19 guidelines to protect ourselves, our loved ones and the wider community,\" he said.\n\nMeanwhile, First Minister Mark Drakeford defended the local restrictions in place in Conwy.\n\nIt follows a letter from council leader Sam Rowlands requesting some measures be lifted to help its tourism industry.\n\nMr Drakeford said restricting travel to or from an area with rising community infections was \"more likely to prevent uncontrolled spread into nearby areas\".", "The Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham has said that many people will be in \"severe hardship\" under the government's financial support package for businesses forced to close.\n\nEmployees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions are to get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.\n\nDuring a press conference with other leaders from the north of England, Mr Burnham said that the package is \"insufficient to protect our communities\".", "A student isolating in Nottingham was given bread, jam and an apple for breakfast\n\nUniversities are facing anger from students over conditions some have faced while self-isolating in campus accommodation.\n\nStudents have criticised the cost and quality of food provided to them by universities while in isolation.\n\nUndergraduates say food parcels have often been filled with \"junk\", meaning they have had to request fresh fruit and vegetables from parents.\n\nInstitutions said they were working hard to provide students with supplies.\n\nPeople told to self-isolate because of coronavirus must stay at home for at least 10 days under rules punishable by fines.\n\nUniversities UK has issued guidance on best practice for supporting students who are required to self-isolate.\n\nFirst-year economics and politics student Tess Bailie, 18, began a social media campaign after hearing of especially poor conditions for those isolating on her campus.\n\nOut-of-date food and a lack of catering for religious and dietary requirements are among the complaints at the University of Edinburgh's Pollock Halls, dubbed the \"UK's most expensive prison\".\n\n\"Students are saying the only thing saving them was the fact that half of them have Covid and they can't taste it anyway,\" Ms Bailie said, referring to a common Covid-19 symptom.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by pollockprisoner This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe University of Edinburgh admitted there had been a \"few occasions when students' needs have not been met\". But it said these were addressed quickly with work taking place to improve its systems.\n\nIn a statement, the university said: \"Ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our students continues to be our absolute priority.\n\n\"We have teams of staff working 24 hours a day to provide those who are self-isolating in our catered and self-catered residences with three meals a day - including ready-to-heat meals - in line with their dietary requirements and preferences. Essential items are also being delivered on request.\"\n\nAt the University of York, students are given the option of a £70 meal deal providing a sandwich, crisps, chocolate bar and water for every day they are in self-isolation.\n\nWhile the university said the food was freshly made, Claire Baseley, a registered nutritionist, said a daily sandwich would be unlikely to provide adequate nutrition for those self-isolating.\n\n\"It is important that people do get a variety of vitamins and minerals to support their immune system,\" she said.\n\nFor three meals a day, including breakfast, lunch and a hot evening meal, students are charged £170 for the isolation period.\n\nA first-year psychology student at the University of Birmingham said she and her flatmates must now spend their weekly catering allowance on boxes of food that have included Pot Noodles and frozen ready meals.\n\nThey received an initial box free of charge as soon as they reported their self-isolation, but future supplies are uncertain and will come at a cost of £28 per person for six days.\n\nStudents in Birmingham received one free box full of essentials but must now pay £28 each for similar supplies\n\nShe said: \"We don't know if that is enough food to last for our period of isolation in terms of fresh food and vegetables which are lacking. It's a lot of just like frozen stuff in there.\n\n\"We don't know what will be in the next box but because of the [first box] people from my flat have contacted home and asked for them to send things like vegetables.\"\n\nWhile online teaching has been working well, there are shortages of things such as toilet paper and a £30 charge for washing 7kg of clothes has gone down badly with many students, she added.\n\nThe University of Birmingham said its initial food boxes were designed to last two to three days and include ready meals cooked by in-house chefs, which are designed to be nutritious. It said responses to surveys of students were \"very positive\" and that the laundry service is offered at a discount by a local dry cleaning company.\n\nSome universities are not charging for providing food and toiletries however, as this bundle of provisions from Lancashire's Edge Hill University shows:\n\nPart of the weekly provisions for a group of six to eight students\n\nVice Chancellor John Cater said anyone isolating was being given free food whether they were in catered halls or not.\n\nAt the University of Nottingham, one history student said the university should have been more prepared for possible cases - and students having to isolate - after it took a week for issues with food supplies to be resolved.\n\nThe teenager is in catered halls with breakfast and dinner usually provided and £25 for lunches each week - but she has been self-isolating after testing positive for coronavirus.\n\nMeals have been provided - but she said some days, lunches weren't brought. And one day, her breakfast was crisps, a chocolate bar, an apple and a juice box - while the person in a neighbouring room had bread, butter and jam.\n\n\"It was really bad,\" she said. \"They kept missing days. I tried calling as well, but no-one answered.\"\n\nThings have improved in recent days, she added.\n\nA spokesperson for the University of Nottingham said it apologised to a small number of students in halls who had experienced issues with their catering and was working on a new process.\n\nThey said: \"Our staff have been working hard to support our students who are self-isolating, along with their households, in accordance with public health guidelines.\n\n\"We recognise how difficult this will be for all our students who are affected, many of whom are away from home for the first time, and we thank them for their co-operation in following the rules, doing the right thing, and helping to contain the virus.\"\n\nOne 18-year-old who recently started Durham University and told not to come into contact with anyone else said food boxes there were filled with \"junk food and a lot of dry food\".\n\n\"I've been going to bed with stomach pains because I'm hungry. It's making my throat hurt and making me dehydrated,\" she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.\n\nDurham pro-vice-chancellor Jeremy Cook said he apologised to those students who felt they had not been given sufficient, or healthy, food. \"But we have acted fast, listened to our students and recognised their concerns.\"\n\nMore than 1,000 people have signed a petition accusing Lancaster University of \"profiting\" from self-isolating students with food deliveries, while the University of East Anglia cut the cost of its food supplies after a backlash.\n\nHillary Gyebi-Ababio, vice-president of higher education at the National Union of Students, said students were being seen as \"pounds not people\" and universities need to remember their \"duty of care\" towards them.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Andy Burnham: \"This package is insufficient to protect our communities\"\n\nPeople will not be surrendered to hardship, Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has said, as the government prepares to bring in new restrictions in England to slow the spread of Covid.\n\nLabour mayor Mr Burnham said the chancellor's pledge to pay two-thirds of workers' wages if restrictions force UK firms to close was \"insufficient\".\n\nThe government is planning to bring in a three-tier local lockdown system.\n\nIt could mean tougher rules in parts of northern England and the Midlands.\n\nLiverpool, where there are currently 600 cases per 100,000 people, is expected to be placed under the most severe set of restrictions, with all the city's pubs forced to close.\n\nOn Saturday, 15,166 people in the UK were reported to have tested positive for coronavirus - an increase of 1,302 on Friday's figure - according to the government's dashboard.\n\nThere were a further 81 deaths - a decrease of six on Friday.\n\nIn a joint press conference with other mayors from northern England, Mr Burnham said negotiations about the lockdown in the North of England were ongoing but he was told by a \"senior figure in Number 10\" that the proposed financial help was \"non-negotiable\".\n\n\"I'm angry actually about being told the effect on people's lives is non-negotiable,\" he said.\n\nHe added that the chancellor's plans would hit the lowest paid - those on minimum or living wages. \"These people can't choose to pay two-thirds of their rent or two-thirds of their bills,\" he said.\n\n\"To accept the chancellor's package would be to surrender our residents to hardship and our businesses to failure or collapse - and we are not prepared to do that,\" he added.\n\nReferring to the chancellor's previous furlough scheme, Steve Rotheram, the Labour mayor of Liverpool City Region, said: \"If 80% was right in March, it's right now. You can't do lockdown for the North on the cheap.\"\n\nHe said if the new restrictions were as severe as during the national lockdown in March, a similar sort of package was needed.\n\nMr Burnham said he wanted the minimum package to be 80% of workers' wages, in line with the initial national furlough scheme.\n\nMr Burnham and Mr Rotheram, together with mayors from Sheffield and North of Tyne, have written to all MPs in northern England asking them to call for a separate vote in Parliament on the chancellor's latest package - and to reject it.\n\nThose who have long argued that mayors provide the best model for the leadership of a city often point to what they see as their principal advantage: a widely known figurehead locally, who can stand up for you nationally.\n\nToday, we have seen that in action.\n\nParty politics plays something of a role here: all four of the mayors making their case today represent the Labour Party, all four have sharpening critiques of the Conservative government at Westminster.\n\nBut, at the same time, about 30 Tory MPs from northern England have got together.\n\nThey are the intriguingly named Northern Research Group of Conservative MPs.\n\nIf that name sounds a little bit familiar, maybe you're remembering the European Research Group of Conservative MPs, who proved to be a never ending political migraine for former Prime Minister Theresa May.\n\nBut they pointedly observe: \"We don't form a government unless we win the North.\"\n\nMinisters counter that financial support for the North of England and elsewhere is unprecedented and wide ranging.\n\nThe big question now is what happens on Monday when the prime minister addresses the Commons: what do the restrictions look like, what support will be offered, and to whom?\n\nMr Burnham said he would not rule out a legal challenge and did not accept hospitality workers were \"somehow second-class citizens\".\n\n\"This goes to the heart of everything we care about - the north of England is staring the most dangerous winter for years right in the face.\n\nThe chancellor's announcement that the government would pay two-thirds of employees' wages for six months from next month if their firm is forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions came on Friday afternoon.\n\nIn response to the criticism from some mayors of the scheme, a government spokesman said: \"Ministers are continuing to work closely with local leaders on how we can combat coronavirus together.\n\n\"We will keep all financial support under review to support businesses who need it most and protect jobs over the coming weeks and months.\"\n\nUnder the new restrictions, expected to be detailed by the prime minister in a statement to MPs on Monday, pubs and restaurants could be closed in areas where some of the highest numbers of cases are occurring and a ban on overnight stays is also being considered.\n\nA senior adviser to Boris Johnson has written to MPs representing constituencies in the North of England to confirm that some areas were \"very likely\" to be placed under \"further restrictions\".\n\nIn the letter seen by the BBC, Sir Edward Lister said ministers would hold discussions with local authorities in the region during the weekend.\n\nIt has been suggested that the most severe measures - imposed for areas in tier three - would be agreed with local leaders in advance. However, on Saturday, northern mayors said there had been conversations with Downing Street but little consultation.\n\nThe details of each tier, including the level of infection at which an area would qualify for it and the nature of the restrictions, are being debated this weekend.\n\nIt comes as the British Medical Association (BMA), a doctor's trade union, has called on the government to bring in clearer and stronger measures to stem the spread of Covid-19.\n\nIt is recommending actions including modifying the current \"rule of six\" so only two households can meet and for the wearing of face masks to be made mandatory in all offices and workplaces.\n\nHow are the restrictions affecting you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Liverpool is expected to be placed under severe new restrictions next week\n\nThe prime minister is to make a statement to MPs on Monday giving details of new restrictions to slow the spread of coronavirus in England.\n\nA letter from Boris Johnson's adviser to MPs in the North West seen by the BBC says it is \"very likely\" some areas will face further restrictions.\n\nBut some regional leaders warn the new plan for a three-tier local lockdown system will only create more confusion.\n\nIt comes as a doctors' union calls for clearer and more stringent rules.\n\nUnder the new restrictions, pubs and restaurants could be closed in parts of northern England and the Midlands - where some of the highest numbers of cases are occurring - while a ban on overnight stays is also being considered.\n\nIt is understood that the most severe measures - imposed for areas in tier three - would be agreed with local leaders in advance.\n\nThe details of each tier, including the level of infection at which an area would qualify for it and the nature of the restrictions, are being debated this weekend.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was grossly irresponsible for anonymous government sources to tell newspapers on Thursday about plans for further restrictions on millions of people, without any detail, consultation or statement from the prime minister.\n\nThe letter to the MPs from Downing Street's chief strategic adviser Sir Edward Lister says the government is hoping to \"finalise these details as soon as possible\" amid \"rising incidence in parts of the country\".\n\nIt also cites the \"engagement that is taking place today and during the course of the weekend with local authority leaders in your region\".\n\nSir Edward says the set of measures being discussed \"present difficult choices. We must seek to strike the right balance between driving down transmission, and safeguarding our economy and society from the worst impact\".\n\nIn the face of pressure from MPs, elected mayors and council leaders, the prime minister has signalled he wants \"much closer engagement\" with local politicians.\n\nAs a senior government source said, they will bring \"expertise on what will work in their regions\".\n\nThe hope is for \"top tier\" restrictions in the new multi-level system to be agreed between the government and local leaders in advance.\n\nThere is an acknowledgement from inside government that this marks a change in approach. It is a shift away from what Labour described as a \"Whitehall knows best\" attitude.\n\nIt will allow local politicians, some of whom until now have complained of being frozen out, to have a greater input.\n\nBut it will also mean they are accountable, alongside government ministers, for the success or failure of the measures introduced.\n\nThey will have to share the responsibility, perhaps blame, if measures don't work or prove unpopular.\n\nAnd amid calls for clarity, it seems the new tiered system could vary region by region, making clear national messaging more difficult.\n\nSusan Hopkins, deputy director of Public Health England's national infection service, said the number of cases was rising all over the country, but more quickly in the North East, North West and Yorkshire and Humber than the South.\n\nShe said it was concerning that cases were rising \"quite fast\" in pockets of north-west England among the over-60s, the group most likely to need to be admitted to hospital.\n\nA number of areas in the North West, the North East and the Midlands are already subject to stricter restrictions. A tiered system of measures is designed to replace the patchwork of existing rules across the country.\n\nHousing Secretary Robert Jenrick told BBC Radio 4's Any Questions there needed to be \"greater freedom for local areas to design measures for themselves\".\n\nHe said there was \"a merit to simplicity\", adding that in local areas \"local leaders will know best\".\n\nLiverpool's Labour Mayor Joe Anderson said he expected Liverpool - where there are currently 600 cases per 100,000 people - to be placed in tier three, under the highest set of restrictions.\n\nHe told the BBC's Today programme he understood this would involve the lockdown of all the city's pubs from Wednesday.\n\nHe said the government was wrong to allow Liverpool's bars and pubs to stay open this weekend, with infection rates so high.\n\nHe accepted people in the city should take individual responsibility and said he was \"angry and frustrated\" at those flouting the rules, but added: \"I'm not convinced people trust the government's decisions.\"\n\nAsked what his role would be in setting the restrictions, he said there had been conversation with Downing Street, but no consultation. It was clear the decisions had already been made, he said, but they were listening to his suggestions about how spikes in the city could best be dealt with.\n\nMartin Gannon, Labour leader of Gateshead Council, said there had been \"warm words\" in a meeting with civil servants but ultimately the laws would be made by government.\n\nHe said he would oppose any further restrictions placed on the North East, saying they could be \"counter-productive\" and lead to resistance from the public. Current measures were starting to bring down case numbers, he insisted, and the government needed to help local authorities win people's confidence.\n\nAnd Glen Sanderson, Conservative leader of Northumberland County Council, said he did not want blanket restrictions on Northumberland, which has large rural areas \"virtually unaffected\" by the virus as well as towns where case numbers were rising.\n\n\"I don't think the argument is there to bring in much tougher restrictions - we have to take people with us. If we can't get people to conform, we won't make any progress,\" he told BBC News.\n\nMeanwhile, the British Medical Association (BMA) said the government's measures to reduce the spread of the virus had not worked, given the uncontrolled escalation, and has made its own recommendations.\n\nIt wants to see masks worn in all offices and outdoors where two-metre distancing is not possible; free medical grade masks for the over-60s and vulnerable groups; financial support for businesses to become Covid-secure; and the \"rule of six\" tweaked to allow only two households to meet in groups of no more than six.\n\nChairman Dr Chaand Nagpaul said: \"The infection has risen following rapid relaxation of measures and with the Westminster government letting down its guard - as recently as August, the government was encouraging people to travel, go to work and mix in restaurants and pubs.\"\n\nSpeaking at the Co-operative Party virtual conference, Labour leader Sir Keir accused the government of serial incompetence, saying a test, trace and isolate system was \"critical\". Without that, \"thousands and thousands of people are walking around today who should be in self-isolation\", he warned.\n\nOn Friday the number of people in the UK to have tested positive for coronavirus rose by 13,864 - a decrease of 3,676 on Thursday's figure - with a further 87 deaths reported on the government's dashboard.\n\nHow have you been affected by coronavirus? What have restrictions meant for you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Leon and Nikita are brothers who need a \"retirement home\" at the age of 21\n\nTwo elderly feline fellows are hoping to find a new owner, at the grand old age of 21.\n\nThe cats, Leon and Nikita, are \"bonded\" brothers, meaning they do everything together, and are very affectionate, the Northamptonshire RSPCA branch said.\n\nThe average age a domestic cat lives to is about 14, but the oldest on record lived to an amazing 38 years.\n\nThe black cats now need a home to live out their twilight years, as the Northampton Chronicle reported.\n\n\"Poor Leon and Nikita find themselves in our care at the grand age of 21,\" the RSPCA wrote on its branch website.\n\n\"They are bonded brothers and were signed over to be rehomed as they were not coping with family life,\" Michelle Billingham, from the Northamptonshire adoptions team, said.\n\nThis \"affectionate pair... enjoy chin tickles and human company\" and would need a quiet \"retirement home\" with no children.\n\nNikita's fur was very matted when he arrived at the RSPCA branch last month\n\nThe brothers have been together their entire lives, and came into the branch \"through no fault of their own\", Ms Billingham told the BBC.\n\nDespite their age - which could equate to more than 100 years each in human terms - they are in \"fairly good health\", although Nikita has been diagnosed with hyperthyroidism.\n\n\"He will need blood tests over the next few weeks or months at our vet's to check how he is responding to medication,\" said the RSPCA, which will offer support to a new owner within the county.\n\nA report by the Royal Veterinary College states the average life expectancy of a domestic cat in the UK is about 14 years, although many can live far longer.\n\nElderly gentleman Leon will need to be rehomed with his brother\n\nAccording to Guinness World Records Creme Puff was the oldest cat on record, and lived to the age of 38.\n\nCreme Puff was born in August 1967 and died in Austin, Texas, USA on 6 August 2005 - three days after her 38th birthday.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Hurricane Delta is the 10th named storm to make US landfall so far this year\n\nHurricane Delta has made landfall in the US state of Louisiana, which is still recovering from the damage caused by a previous hurricane in August.\n\nThis is the 10th named storm to make US landfall so far this year, breaking a record that has stood since 1916.\n\nDelta hit Creole, Louisiana as a Category 2 hurricane at 18:00 local time (00:00 BST) on Friday, with winds of 100 mph (155 km/h).\n\nIt weakened to a Category 1 as it moved inland, causing widespread power cuts.\n\nThe US National Hurricane Center (NHC) also warned of an eight-foot-high \"life-threatening storm surge\" across the Louisiana coast, caused by high winds from Delta.\n\nThe hurricane first made landfall near Puerto Morelos on Mexico's Caribbean coast on Wednesday, forcing thousands of tourists and residents to move into shelters for safety.\n\nHaving crossed the Gulf of Mexico, Delta is now moving across central and north-eastern Louisiana, and will enter northern Mississippi and the Tennessee Valley on Saturday.\n\n\"Rapid weakening is expected overnight and Saturday,\" the NHC said. \"Delta is forecast to weaken to a tropical storm tonight and to a tropical depression on Saturday.\"\n\nMany residents left home in order to avoid the hurricane's path\n\nSchools and government offices shut their doors and officials in a dozen parishes called for evacuations.\n\nLouisiana Governor John Bel Edwards previously said that 2,400 National Guard personnel were being mobilised to help the state's residents.\n\nMany people left their homes to try to get out of the storm's path.\n\nParts of the state were already severely storm-damaged from the more powerful Category 4 Hurricane Laura, which ripped through homes and uprooted trees when it hit on 20 August.\n\nMore than 6,000 people are still displaced and living in temporary accommodation, such as hotels, after their homes were destroyed.\n\nStreets in cities such as Lake Charles, which was particularly badly-hit by Hurricane Laura, remain littered with debris.\n\nThe streets in many cities are still littered with debris from Hurricane Laura\n\nLake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter told Reuters news agency that Hurricane Laura \"is still very fresh and very raw, and I think that had something to do with more people evacuating for Delta\".\n\n\"In this community, there are a lot of homes that were damaged and so a lot of people are concerned about staying in that structure again,\" he added.\n\nGovernor Edwards also previously warned that although Delta was less strong than Laura, it could sweep up debris from the previous hurricane and hurl it like missiles.", "England player Marcus Rashford was named in the Queen's delayed birthday honours list for services to vulnerable children in the UK during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nThe 22-year-old Manchester United forward successfully campaigned to extend free school meals over the summer after pressing the government into a U-turn on the issue.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Senator Mike Lee, who later tested positive for Covid-19, seen hugging other attendees\n\nUS President Donald Trump's tweet on Friday confirming that he and his wife had tested positive for coronavirus shocked the world.\n\nWith Mr Trump now in hospital, there are growing questions about how the pair were exposed to the virus.\n\nA crowded Rose Garden event is coming under intense focus - the ceremony on 26 September where Mr Trump formally announced his nomination of the conservative Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court. The World Health Organization says it commonly takes around five to six days for symptoms to start after contracting the virus.\n\nFootage from the scene showed few attendees wearing masks. The seating was not set two metres (six feet) apart, while some bumped fists, shook hands or even hugged one another in greeting.\n\nEight people who attended are now confirmed to have the virus - although it is unclear exactly where and when they caught it. Aside from the president and the First Lady:\n\nMr and Mrs Trump tested positive after the president's communications director, Hope Hicks, contracted the virus. She did not attend the Rose Garden event.\n\nGuidelines published by the Centers for Disease Control recommend six feet of distance between people outside your home, and covering your nose and mouth when others are around you.\n\nDozens of lawmakers, family members and staff from the White House were at the event. Those who have tested positive were seated in the first few rows of the crowd.\n\nThose who have tested positive were sat in the first few rows of the packed event\n\nGatherings of more than 50 people at an event are banned under Washington DC coronavirus regulations, although federal property like the White House is exempt.\n\nThe Washington Post reports that authorities have left contact tracing efforts to the Trump administration. An official from Mayor Muriel Bowser's office told the paper that if all eight people were infected at the event, it would be one of the highest community spread incidents Washington DC has experienced.\n\nCity council member Brooke Pinto told the Washington Post it was \"disappointing that the White House has flaunted not wearing masks and gathering large crowds\".\n\n\"That is not only dangerous messaging for the country, but it is directly threatening to our efforts to decrease our spread across the district,\" she said.\n\nSome of the event last Saturday also took place inside.\n\nSome of the event took place inside the White House\n\nThe president stood next to Amy Coney Barrett as she delivered her speech. Ms Barrett tested negative on Friday, according to a White House spokesperson.\n\nVice-President Mike Pence and his wife Karen also tested negative. Mr Pence sat across the aisle from Mrs Trump at the ceremony.\n\nAttorney General William Barr sat in the same row as the vice-president. A Department of Justice spokesperson announced on Friday that Mr Barr had tested negative.\n\nJohns Hopkins University coronavirus trackers say that 7.3 million people in the US have contracted the virus, the highest figure in the world.\n\nThe country also has the highest death toll, with more than 209,000 people killed.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. President Trump's seven days before his Covid-positive test", "A technical glitch that meant nearly 16,000 cases of coronavirus went unreported has delayed efforts to trace contacts of people who tested positive.\n\nPublic Health England said 15,841 cases between 25 September and 2 October were left out of the UK daily case figures.\n\nThey were then added in to reach Saturday's figure of 12,872 new cases and Sunday's 22,961 figure.\n\nPHE said all those who tested positive had been informed. But it means others in close contact with them were not.\n\nThe issue has been resolved, PHE said, with outstanding cases passed on to tracers by 01:00 BST on Saturday.\n\nThe technical issue also means that the daily case totals reported on the government's coronavirus dashboard over the past week have been lower than the true number.\n\nBBC health editor Hugh Pym said daily figures for the end of the week were \"actually nearer 11,000\", rather than the about 7,000 reported.\n\nLabour has described the glitch as \"shambolic\".\n\nThe BBC has been told by senior public health officials in the north-west of England that a significant proportion of the unreported cases are from the area.\n\nCities such as Liverpool and Manchester already have among the highest infection rates in the country, at about 10 times the national average.\n\nBBC analysis found the number of cases reported for the week to 1 October increased by 92.6% in the north west after taking in the missing tests - with similar rises reflected across England.\n\nThe increase is mostly down to the missing tests, but the figures also included some results which came back after 2 October.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"I can't give you those figures but all those people are being contacted\"\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said the cases data had been \"truncated\" and \"lost\", but added all people who had tested positive had been contacted and the tracers were \"now working through all the contacts\".\n\nMeanwhile, the head of the government's vaccine taskforce, Kate Bingham, has told the Financial Times that less than half of the UK population could be vaccinated against coronavirus.\n\n\"There is going to be no vaccination of people under 18,\" she said. \"It's an adult-only vaccine for people over 50, focusing on health workers, care home workers and the vulnerable.\"\n\nMr Johnson has warned it could be \"bumpy through to Christmas\" and beyond as the UK deals with coronavirus.\n\nSpeaking to the BBC's Andrew Marr on Sunday, the PM said there was \"hope\" of beating Covid, and called on the public to \"act fearlessly but with common sense\".\n\nIn an interview with the Sun, Rishi Sunak has defended his Eat Out to Help Out scheme, saying he had \"no regrets\", after suggestions it may have helped fuel the second wave of coronavirus cases.\n\nAt a time when the testing system has come under intense scrutiny after reports of delays and a system struggling to keep up with demand, the latest revelation could not have come at a more awkward moment for the government at Westminster.\n\nBecause the nearly 16,000 extra positive test results had been not entered into the test and trace system, their recent contacts were not immediately followed up.\n\nExperts advise that ideally contacts should be tracked down within 48 hours.\n\nOfficials say the technical problem - thought to be IT related - has been resolved, with all the new cases added into totals reported over the weekend.\n\nBut all this will hardly improve public confidence in the testing system in England.\n\nAnd it muddies the waters for policy makers and officials trying to track the spread of the virus at what the prime minister has called a \"critical moment\".\n\nOn Sunday, the government's coronavirus dashboard said that, as of 09:00 BST, there had been a further 22,961 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK, bringing the total number of cases in the UK to 502,978.\n\nAnother 33 people were reported to have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Sunday.\n\nPublic Health England's interim chief executive Michael Brodie said a \"technical issue\" was identified overnight on Friday, 2 October in the process that transfers Covid-19 positive lab results into reporting dashboards. He said the majority of the unreported cases had occurred in the \"most recent days\".\n\nIt was caused by some data files reporting positive test results exceeding the maximum file size.\n\nMr Brodie said they worked with NHS Test and Trace to \"quickly resolve the issue and transferred all outstanding cases immediately into the NHS Test and Trace contact tracing system\".\n\n\"We fully understand the concern this may cause and further robust measures have been put in place as a result,\" he said.\n\nTest and Trace and Public Health England joint medical adviser Susan Hopkins said a thorough risk assessment had been undertaken \"to ensure outstanding cases were prioritised for contact tracing effectively\".\n\nPHE said NHS Test and Trace have made sure there are enough contact tracers working, and are working with local teams to ensure they also have sufficient resources to be urgently able to contact all cases.\n\nThe number of call attempts is being increased from 10 to 15 over 96 hours.\n\nThere have been clear problems with the government's Test and Trace data, but they do not change our view of the UK's trajectory.\n\nCases surged at the beginning of September, they may still be climbing, but not as quickly as anticipated just a few weeks ago.\n\nThis perspective comes from three key sets of data - the Office for National Statistics, the React study by Imperial College London and the Covid symptom tracker app.\n\nNone are blighted by either the current issues with the Test and Trace data or by people struggling to access a test.\n\nThe real fallout of the weekend's statistical chaos is not the numbers, but the people who should have been contact-traced, told to quarantine and instead may have been unwittingly passing on the virus.\n\nLabour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: \"This is shambolic and people across the country will be understandably alarmed.\"\n\nHe called for Health Secretary Matt Hancock to explain \"what on earth has happened\" and what he plans to do to fix test and trace.\n\nMr Hancock is due to update MPs about coronavirus on Monday afternoon.\n\nBridget Phillipson, shadow chief secretary to the treasury, told BBC Breakfast she wanted to know whether it had had \"any impact on government decision making around local restrictions\".\n\nPHE data shows Manchester now has the highest rate of infection in England, at 495.6 cases per 100,000 people in the week to 1 October, from 223.2 the week before. Liverpool has the second highest rate, up to 456.4 from 287.1 per 100,000. Knowsley in Merseyside, Newcastle, Nottingham, Leeds and Sheffield have also seen sharp rises.\n\nNews of the glitch in the daily count first emerged late on Saturday, when the UK announced more than 10,000 new coronavirus cases for the first time since mass testing began.\n• None 1,980cases per day, on average, were missed in that time\n\nThe government said the technical issue meant some cases during the week were not recorded at the time, so were included in Saturday's data.\n\nThe daily total rose from 4,044 on Monday to a then-high of 7,143 on Tuesday. However, over the next four days the daily total remained stable at a time when continued increases might have been expected.\n\nThen came the big leap in numbers - a far bigger day-on-day increase than at any time in the entire pandemic - which was announced on Saturday, five hours later than usual, and was accompanied by the government explanation.\n\nHave you recently tested positive? Have you been contacted by test and trace? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Heavy rain has brought flooding and travel disruption to parts of the UK.\n\nThe Met Office said parts of Somerset and Hampshire saw a month's worth of rainfall in 42 hours, while homes were flooded in Hemel Hempstead, Herts.\n\nThe River Coquet burst its banks at Rothbury in Northumberland, and there are now more than 40 flood warnings in place in England, Scotland and Wales.\n\nSafety checks are being carried out on rail lines and bridges following heavy rain overnight in parts of Scotland.\n\nTrain passengers have been warned to expect disruption after Network Rail inspectors discovered flooding on lines in Fife, Aberdeenshire and Angus.\n\nThe Met Office said it expected between 25-50mm (1-2in) of rain to fall on Sunday, with as much as 70-90mm over higher ground.\n\nIt said delays or cancellations to train and bus services were possible, while spray and flooding could lead to difficult driving conditions and some road closures.\n\nA yellow warning for rain remains in effect in Northern Ireland until 18:00 BST.\n\nAn amber warning for parts of the West Midlands, west and south-west England and most of Wales, and a yellow warning affecting eastern Scotland, northern, central, southern and western England came to an end at midday.\n\nThere had been 116mm of rain at Blackpitts Gate in Somerset, and 101mm at Princes Marsh in Hampshire by 18:00 BST on Saturday.\n\nHomes in Abergwyngregyn in Gwynedd have been flooded for the second time in six weeks after a river burst its banks.\n\nThe River Brue near Westhay in Somerset flooded\n\nFlooding has hit homes at Abergwyngregyn for a second time\n\nThe River Coquet burst its banks in Rothbury, Northumberland\n\nMeanwhile, Flood barriers have been put in place in the Aberdeenshire towns of Stonehaven and Kemnay.\n\nBBC weather forecaster Chris Fawkes said the number of flood warnings have risen as the rain works its way into already high river levels.\n\nThere are currently 17 flood warnings in England, including on the River Ure in North Yorkshire, the River Stour in Warwickshire and the River Aller in Somerset.\n\nThe Scottish Environmental Protection Agency has 30 flood warnings and 12 flood alerts covering areas across the whole of the country.\n\nIn Wales there are two warnings for the River Aeron at Aberaeron and the River Rheidol in Aberystwyth.\n\nThe London Marathon got under way in rainy conditions\n\nThe London Marathon got under way on Sunday morning in heavy rain at St James' Park - although around 45,000 runners are taking part in a virtual London Marathon around the world.\n\nThe rainy weather affecting the UK comes after Storm Alex struck brought devastation to south-eastern France and northern Italy. At least three people have died and dozens more are missing.\n\nHave you been affected by the adverse weather and flooding? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "A one-legged duck has been given a wheelchair to help improve his quality of life.\n\nStumble lost a leg in an accident with a fishing line and now lives at a sanctuary for disabled animals in Nottinghamshire.\n\nDi Slaney, founder of the Manor Farm Charitable Trust, said she decided to order a custom-made wheelchair for the 12-year-old bird to help relieve the pressure on his remaining leg.\n\n“The fact that he won’t quit means that I won’t quit,” she said.\n\nIt is hoped Stumble will one day be able to use the wheelchair independently.\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.", "Senator Mike Lee, who later tested positive for Covid-19, was seen hugging other attendees at a White House event on 26 September.\n\nSeveral people who also attended are now confirmed to have the virus – including President Trump – although it is unclear exactly where and when they caught it.\n\nRead more: White House event under scrutiny over virus spread", "Heavy rain is continuing to fall, amid warnings that parts of the UK face the risk of flooding.\n\nThe Met Office has issued amber warnings for parts of eastern Scotland, the West Midlands, south-west England and most of Wales.\n\nPolice warned motorists to take care, while in Essex, firefighters rescued a family of four when their car became trapped in floodwater.\n\nYellow, less severe, warnings for rain affect much of the rest of the country.\n\nRain is forecast to continue overnight, with warnings in force until 06:00 BST on Sunday.\n\nThe last time amber warnings for rain were issued was in March, the Met Office said.\n\nThe places worst hit so far on Saturday include parts of Exmoor, with 84mm of rain recorded in 36 hours in Liscombe and 74.4mm recorded in Brendon Hill.\n\nScotRail tweeted there would be reduced train services in amber warning areas, with \"a controlled shut down of the network\" around 19:00 BST.\n\nIt comes after Storm Alex, which has caused chaos in France and Italy on Saturday, brought gale-force winds and rain to southern England on Friday.\n\nA gust of 71mph (114km/h) was recorded at Berry Head on the Devon coast during the day.\n\nThe wind direction associated with the weekend's rainfall is \"unusual\" and rainfall was likely to occur in some areas that are normally well sheltered and drier, the Met Office said.\n\nDrains could also become blocked with debris as trees are now in full leaf.\n\nIn areas covered by amber weather warnings, the Met Office warned deep and fast-flowing floodwater may pose a \"danger to life\" in some areas and there was a \"good chance\" communities could be cut off.", "Andrew Marr has challenged the prime minister over comments in which he said \"probably... everybody got a bit, kind of complacent and blasé\" over Covid-19.\n\nThe BBC One presenter also asked Boris Johnson whether the 22:00 curfew on pubs and bars was working.\n\nRead more: Act fearlessly but with common sense on Covid - PM", "The Royal Opera House is to sell a David Hockney portrait of its former boss in a bid to raise money to plug a shortfall caused by the pandemic.\n\nThe painting of Sir David Webster will be auctioned at Christie's this month and is expected to fetch up to £18m.\n\nCurrent chief executive Alex Beard said it was \"tough call\" to sell the picture, but there was no alternative if the organisation was to survive.\n\n\"We have to face the situation we are in... and get through this,\" he said.\n\nThe London venue, home of international opera and the Royal Ballet, is the UK's biggest arts employer.\n\nIt says it has lost £3 in every £5 of its income since the national lockdown forced it to close its doors in March.\n\nThe sale of the Hockney portrait is part of a four-pronged plan to help the venue balance the books. There will also be significant redundancies and a fundraising appeal for public donations.\n\nIn addition, the opera house has applied for a loan to the government's culture recovery fund.\n\n\"We knew we had to look at any assets we had,\" said Mr Beard. \"And there is only really one of any note that stands out and that is this portrait.\"\n\n\"If we can remain viable and get through this, then we can get back to employing people in the future.\"\n\nSir David Webster ran the Royal Opera House between 1945 and 1970 and played a key role in the establishment of the Royal Ballet and Royal Opera companies at Covent Garden.\n\nHockney was commissioned to paint his portrait - which in recent years hung in the Covent Garden venue - after he stepped down in the 1970s.\n\nIt depicts Sir David sitting in profile, in front of a glass-topped coffee table and a vase of pink tulips.\n\nAccording to the Christie's catalogue, the picture was \"the first of a rare handful of commissions completed by Hockney: he would not accept another until three decades later, when he painted Sir George and Lady Mary Christie of Glyndebourne for the National Portrait Gallery\".\n\nMr Beard said the artist had been notified of the impending sale: \"We have a good relationship, but he does not much like it when any of his work is auctioned,\" he told the Observer.\n\nThe Royal Opera House reopened in June with a concert which was broadcast on TV, radio and online - but without a live audience.\n\nAt the time, Mr Beard said the venue, in common with many theatres and arts venues, was facing \"unprecedented financial stress\". Mr Beard was understood to have taken \"a significant reduction\" in pay, while music director Sir Antonio Pappano waived his salary during lockdown.\n\nLast week, the Royal Opera House announced a limited return of public performances of ballet and opera, in front of a reduced audience, beginning later this month.\n\nAmong the productions it is hoping to stage is The Nutcracker, a traditional part of its Christmas programme since 1984.", "Two teenagers armed with knives were trying to rob a grocery store in Chapter Street, Westminster, police said\n\nA police officer has been stabbed as she tried to detain two armed robbers.\n\nTwo officers were in Chapter Street, Pimlico, at 15.42 BST on Sunday when they spotted armed suspects attempting to rob a shop.\n\nThe shopkeeper managed to push the two teenagers out of the Westminster store. Officers then tried to detain the pair.\n\nDespite being stabbed in the abdomen, the officer chased the suspects along Vauxhall Bridge Road, a spokesperson for the Met Police said.\n\nThe suspects, both believed to be 15 years old, were detained a short time later with the assistance of firearms officers.\n\nThe injured officer was taken to hospital, and she was discharged on Sunday evening.\n\nCh Insp Simon Brooker said: \"For this officer to be stabbed on duty is unacceptable but, fortunately, she does not appear to be seriously injured.\"\n\nMayor of London Sadiq Khan said: \"Every day our courageous police officers put themselves in harm's way to keep Londoners safe.\n\n\"Attacks on our police are utterly unacceptable and perpetrators will feel the full force of the law.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "US President Donald Trump has made a short trip to wave to the crowds of people lining the streets outside the hospital where he is being treated for coronavirus.\n\nOn Twitter, the president said he would \"pay a little surprise to some of the patriots we have out on the street\".\n\nMr Trump, who wore a face mask, waved and clapped to his supporters.\n\nBBC's Jon Sopel was reporting live from the scene at the time.", "Tenovus Cancer Care estimates 30,000 people missed out on mammograms between March and July\n\nHundreds of women in Wales have \"undetected breast cancer\" because screening was suspended during lockdown, according to a charity.\n\nTenovus Cancer Care estimates 30,000 people missed out on mammograms between March and July, and fear a repeat as coronavirus cases rise again.\n\nClaire Williams, 39, was told she might not have survived breast cancer if she had not been treated when she was.\n\nThe Welsh Government said it had worked hard to ensure screening can continue.\n\nBreast cancer screening was suspended by NHS Wales in March as the health service was gripped by the pandemic.\n\nThe service resumed in August, but Judi Rhys, chief executive of Tenovus Cancer Care, said 30,000 people missed out on a screening appointment during this time.\n\n\"That actually means there are 300 women in Wales walking around with undetected breast cancer at the moment.\"\n\nWomen should contact their GP if they notice any changes to their breasts, Judi Rhys said\n\nMs Rhys said it was a \"potentially very serious\" situation for those women.\n\n\"We do know that if breast cancer is diagnosed at a very early stage then the prognosis is far, far better and the outcomes are far, far better than if it is picked up at a later stage,\" she added.\n\n\"If people notice anything at all we are urging them to make an appointment with their GP.\"\n\nClaire Williams was told she might not have survived breast cancer if she had not been treated when she was\n\nThings could have been very different for Claire Williams, from Swansea, who went to see her GP when she found a lump on her breast last year.\n\nShe was told she would have to wait nine weeks for further tests on the NHS, but was able to access private healthcare through her employer.\n\n\"Within two hours\" of her consultation she was told she had breast cancer and would need chemotherapy, a mastectomy and radiotherapy.\n\n\"Looking back on the last 18 months and the experience I have had, I am grateful that I am here,\" Ms Williams said.\n\n\"And I am grateful the children will be growing up with me in their lives.\"\n\nPeople should be \"familiar with their bodies\", says Ms Williams\n\nMs Williams said the number of people who had missed out on screening during lockdown was \"astounding\".\n\n\"It's scary for the women who might have missed them,\" she added.\n\nShe called on people to \"be familiar with your bodies\" and get checked if they were concerned about anything.\n\nMs Rhys said the health service was in the process of clearing a \"backlog\" of 30,000 screening appointments.\n\nBut she said it was vital that people continued to be screened, even in the event of another lockdown.\n\n\"We are worried that with Covid on the rise again that people are either too scared to come forward or that some services may need to be paused again,\" she added.\n\nA spokeswoman for the Welsh Government said it had taken action to ensure staff and patients were safe from coronavirus, and encouraged women to attend their screening appointments.\n\n\"The NHS has undertaken extensive work to ensure as much cancer care as possible can continue during the pandemic,\" she added.", "The debate will take place in Salt Lake City in Utah on Wednesday Image caption: The debate will take place in Salt Lake City in Utah on Wednesday\n\nOn Wednesday night, Republican Vice-President Mike Pence will face Democratic Senator Kamala Harris for the only vice-presidential debate ahead of November's election.\n\nThis election cycle has seen increased scrutiny on Pence and Harris, as they support the campaign of two presidential candidates in their 70s.\n\nWith President Trump now receiving treatment for Covid-19, and more members of the White House announcing positive virus tests, there’s a new emphasis on precautions from event organisers.\n\nFor one, the vice-presidential candidates will stand more than 3m (9.8ft) apart (podiums at the first Trump-Biden debate last week were 2m apart). They will be separated by plexiglass, CNN reports.\n\nCovid testing is already under way for reporters and others planning on attending the debate in Salt Lake City, Utah.\n\nWhether everyone will be required to wear a mask this time remains to be seen.\n\nNow, we want to know: What questions do you have about the vice-presidential debate? You tell us here and we’ll get to work finding the answers.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Donald Trump's personal physician has told reporters he's \"extremely happy with the progress the president has made\" after starting treatment for Covid-19.\n\nDr Sean Conley and other doctors from Mr Trump's medical team spoke from outside Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington on Saturday morning.\n\nThey said he was doing \"very well\" and in \"exceptionally good spirits\".\n\nHowever, their account was later disputed.", "The 49-year-old mother died \"as a result of pressure to the neck\", Lancashire Police said\n\nA doctor who was found dead with her daughter has been described as a \"joy to work with\" by colleagues.\n\nThe bodies of Dr Saman Mir Sacharvi and Vian Mangrio, 14, were found after a fire at their home in Colne Road, Reedley on Thursday.\n\nThe 49-year-old mother died \"as a result of pressure to the neck\", Lancashire Police said.\n\nDetectives have launched a double murder inquiry and appealed for anyone with information to contact them.\n\nIn a social media post, Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust said: \"Our thoughts are with Dr Sacharvi's family and friends at this terribly sad time.\n\n\"She was a well-loved and well-liked colleague here at the Trust, described as 'brilliant' and a 'joy to work with'.\"\n\nA post-mortem examination also found Dr Sacharvi had been assaulted.\n\nTests to establish Miss Mangrio's cause of death are under way.\n\nPolice said the 14-year-old, who was a student at Marsden Heights School in Nelson, was found badly burnt inside the house.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The warning says areas which are usually drier could face peak rainfall levels over the weekend\n\nHomes and businesses are likely to face flooding and some communities could be \"cut off\" as heavy rain is expected to hit Wales.\n\nThe Met Office issued an amber rain warning across most of Wales from midday on Saturday to 12:00 BST on Sunday.\n\nIt said fast-flowing or deep flood-water could cause \"danger to life\".\n\nMany places will see 1-2in (25-50mm) of rainfall, with totals of 2.5-3.5in (70-90mm) expected on higher ground.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Gwent Police | Monmouthshire Officers This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMore than 4.5in (120mm) is expected in some of the most exposed high ground of Snowdonia.\n\nThe warning, which also covers large areas of south-west England and parts of the West Midlands, comes after a day of downpours on Friday, as Storm Alex moved in from France.\n\nThe amber warning also now covers parts of Anglesey and Pembrokeshire\n\nThere are several flood warnings in place, according to Natural Resources Wales.\n\nThe Met Office warned that delays and cancellations to train and bus services were likely and conditions would make driving difficult.\n\n\"The unusual wind direction associated with the rainfall will mean that the peak rainfall totals are likely to occur in some areas that are usually well sheltered and drier during unsettled spells of weather,\" its forecast warned.\n\nRoad police in Powys tweeted they had been dealing with a crash on the A40 Brecon bypass which has now been cleared.\n\nHowever they added: \"With the heavy rainfall we are experiencing today please drive to the road conditions.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Powys Roads Policing This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nTwo temporary water pumps have been set up in a Rhondda Cynon Taf village already hit four times by flooding this year.\n\nThe pumps are to provide \"added protection and reassurance\" for residents of Pentre.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by RCT Council This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Supporters of the president spent hours outside the hospital where he is being treated, and they were rewarded when he drove past on Sunday evening. Before that, they told the BBC's Lebo Diseko why it was important to be there.\n\n\"Donald Trump FOREVER!\" shout his supporters gathered outside Walter Reed military hospital where the US president is being treated.\n\nAs passing cars and trucks hoot support, there are cheers and whoops from the the crowd of MAGA-hat wearers and Trump-Pence 2020 flag-wavers.\n\nThe crowd and the hooting seem to grow every hour - as the world's media stand across the road.\n\nA convoy of cars and trucks honking their horns and waving US flags streams past us.\n\n\"This feels like a soccer parade after a win!\" my colleague remarked.\n\nIt's just a couple of hours since Donald Trump's medical team gave an update on his health, and said that they hope he will be back at the White House on Monday. The crowd and their convoys have grown steadily since.\n\n\"We're cheering for his good health,\" says an African-American supporter called Barbara. \"We want him back as soon as possible, so we're here to tell him that we love him, we're praying for him and we need him in America.\"\n\n\"In America and the WORLD!\" her friend Wanji chips in.\n\nBarbara and Wanji show their love for Trump\n\nShe says the president's critics are persecuting him because he stands up for Christians. \"He has been taking all the stress of America and the world.\"\n\nHis sickness just shows the country is sick, she adds, and like him it is recovering.\n\nNo-one has done as much for African Americans as Donald Trump, they say. That's echoed by a Latino gentleman standing next to them.\n\nWaving two flags - a blue one, which is his and a pink one belonging to his wife, Maurio says: \"I'm very much for such a good president - he's done a lot of stuff for the Spanish people.\"\n\nA little further down the line are a couple who say they flew in from Arizona - a journey of about 2,400 miles, which took them more than four hours. \"We support our president 100%\" says Danny Carroll, who adds they would have travelled even further if they needed to.\n\n\"That's our president - we're all in it together, red, yellow , black and white - we're all precious in his sight.\"\n\nHis wife Jeanie says she doesn't always like the way the president expresses himself but she appreciates his results. She says the couple drive across the country a lot and six years ago, the country was dying economically but now he's brought it back. They plan to stay until he's back at the White House - then make the long journey home.\n\nMauro and Jeanie travelled all the way from Arizona\n\nOf course, the president is no ordinary patient, and when he does go home he will be monitored by his medical team 24/7. But there are still questions left unanswered after Sunday's briefing from his medical team.\n\nThey admitted he his oxygen levels had dipped twice in the last few days - Friday and Saturday - but pressed for details on the second round of oxygen Dr Sean Conley said he would have to check with the nurses.\n\nAnd when it came to possible damage to the president's lungs. Dr Conley said there were some \"expected findings\" but didn't expand on that.\n\nThis comes a day after mixed messages from the medical team and his chief of staff on Saturday.\n\nHe admitted the was trying to present an \"upbeat attitude\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\n\"I didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction and in doing so, you know, it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn't necessarily true.\"\n\nThe fact that last sentence was considered necessary shows an awareness that for at least some Americans, there is a trust gap when it comes to the president's medical team.\n\nBut that's certainly not the view of the crowd gathered here.\n\nFamilies with children joined senior citizens in the festival of well wishers.\n\nThe president knows they're there and rewarded them with an unexpected appearance. His supporters know he appreciates them and they appreciate him.", "The difference in rules for Oldham and Manchester has drawn criticism\n\nNorthern England faces a \"winter of dangerous discontent\" unless the test and trace system improves, the mayor of Greater Manchester has warned.\n\nAndy Burnham said the system was the \"first line of defence against the virus\" and the government were \"over-relying\" on restrictions.\n\nExtra rules are now in force for a growing number of areas in the North.\n\nSpeaking to the BBC's Andrew Marr, Boris Johnson said it was \"too early to say\" if the restrictions were working.\n\nThe prime minister said: \"The advice that we're getting is that, in these areas where we have got stringent local lockdowns, we need to wait and see whether the R [infection rate] starts to come down because some of these things have been intensified […] just in the last few days.\"\n\nMr Burnham said: \"If there are to be local restrictions, they must come with local control of test and trace, a local furlough scheme, and support for our councils and businesses.\n\n\"Put it under local control because the government are using call centres to try and contact people, but we will put boots on the ground and I am absolutely certain that that approach will be more successful.\"\n\nHe also urged the government to consult more with local authorities and clarify rules for neighbouring areas, which he said were \"inconsistent\".\n\nIn Greater Manchester, funerals are limited to 30 people, except Oldham, where they are restricted to 20 people since further rules were enforced in August to curb the spread of coronavirus.\n\nHowever, the rate of cases has recently risen to 336 per 100,000 people in Manchester, while dropping to 177 per 100,000 in Oldham.\n\nBoris Johnson was speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr show\n\nThe prime minister said he \"understands people's frustrations\", adding: \"No one has come up with any better proposals that I am aware of.\"\n\nMr Burnham also voiced concern the North West would be \"levelled down by not just the virus but by the government's failure to support us\".\n\n\"It was frankly unforgiveable that businesses in Bolton were closed down without the people working given support with their wages. That is going to cause massive damage if that approach continues.\n\n\"This could be a winter of dangerous discontent here in the north of England and I think the prime minister needs to wake up to that.\n\n\"I think there's a very real and present danger that Covid-19 is going to widen the north-south divide because we are heading into a winter where the north of England is under restrictions unlike the south.\"\n\n\"It's got be a change moment where the government says if we put you under restrictions, this is the guaranteed support you get in return. We haven't got that at the moment.\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Storm Alex: See the moment a building is swept into raging flood waters\n\nAt least two people have died and up to 20 are still missing after a powerful storm hit south-eastern France and north-western Italy.\n\nA number of villages north of Nice in France suffered serious damage from floods and landslides, with roads, bridges and homes destroyed.\n\nIn north-western Italy, flooding was described as \"historic\". A section of a bridge over the Sesia river collapsed.\n\nFrench Prime Minister Jean Castex has deployed the army and released emergency funds to tackle the worst floods for decades in south-eastern France.\n\nUp to 20 people are either missing or have not checked in with relatives.\n\n\"There are very many people of whom we have no news,\" Mr Castex said.\n\nFlood damage in Saint-Martin-Vesubie in the Alpes-Maritimes of south-eastern France\n\nBernard Gonzalez, prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes region, said: \"Just because their loved ones haven't been able to get in touch doesn't mean that they have been taken by the storm.\"\n\nHe said the prospect of more rain was \"a worry\".\n\nMeteorological agency Météo-France said 450mm (17.7in) of rain fell in some areas over 24 hours - the equivalent of nearly four months at this time of year, reports Reuters news agency.\n\nThe southern Alps region appeared the worst hit, with serious damage in the Roya, Tinée, Esteron and Vésubie valleys.\n\nThe villages of Saint-Martin-Vésubie and Rimplas were cut off, with roads inaccessible.\n\nA collapsed bridge after heavy rains hit the village of Roquebillière in southern France\n\nA road in Roquebillière was partially washed away during the storm\n\nOne 29-year-old resident of Roquebillière told Agence France-Presse: \"I lost everything but we are alive. There must be one room left in my house.\"\n\nTwo elderly people were swept away as their house collapsed in the village and their fate is unknown.\n\nOn Friday, the storm also buffeted France's western Atlantic coast, causing tens of thousands of homes to lose power.\n\nWinds of more than 180km/h (112mph) were recorded in Brittany on Thursday and Friday.\n\nThe two fatalities were a 53-year-old firefighter in the Aosta Valley who died during a rescue operation, and a 36-year-old man whose car was swept into a river in the Piedmont region. His brother managed to get out of the car.\n\nA section of a key bridge over the Sesia river in Piedmont's Vercelli province collapsed shortly after it had been reopened on Saturday afternoon.\n\nDamaged caused to a road near Cuneo in Italy's Piedmont region\n\nIn the rest of Piedmont, several villages were cut off after the rains made roads impassable. The situation there was described as \"extremely critical\" by officials.\n\nPiedmont President Alberto Cirio told La Stampa that 630mm of rain had fallen in 24 hours, an amount \"unheard of since 1954\".\n\nHundreds of aid workers have been sent to help rescue efforts in the cut-off villages.\n\nThe storm also affected the north-western regions of Lombardy and Liguria. The Roja river in Ventimiglia has also flooded.\n\nFlood alerts remain for sections of the Po river which have swollen by 3m in 24 hours.\n\nOne good piece of news was the rescue of about 20 people reported missing by Italian authorities just over the border in France.\n\nThe city of Venice, which had been braced for high waters after suffering violent storms in August, was successfully protected by a flood barrier system recently declared fully operational.\n\nDo you live in regions affected by the adverse weather and flooding? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "The UK has announced more than 10,000 new coronavirus cases for the first time since mass testing began.\n\nThere were 12,872 new cases, while a further 49 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19.\n\nHowever, the government said a technical issue meant some cases this week were not recorded at the time so these were included in Saturday's data.\n\nIt comes after data earlier this week had suggested infections may be rising more slowly than in previous weeks.\n\nThat data was based on weekly testing among a sample of people in the community to get an idea of how many people in England have the virus at any time.\n\nThe government also closely watches the daily number of positive cases, as it provides the most up-to-date snapshot.\n\nHowever, it published a cautionary message on its \"data dashboard\", explaining that the totals reported over the coming days would include some cases from the previous week, \"increasing the number of cases reported\".\n\nA Department of Health spokesman said the issue did not affect people receiving test results, and all those who tested positive have been informed in the normal way.\n\nThe announcement of the apparent glitch in the daily count comes \"at an awkward moment\", according to BBC health editor Hugh Pym, \"when there is intense scrutiny of daily Covid-19 data as ministers and health chiefs try to assess the rate of spread of the virus\".\n\nHe added: \"After criticism in recent months over the way total tests are counted, ministers and officials will now face more questions over the compilation of daily case data.\"\n\nThe daily total saw a significant rise from 4,044 on Monday to a then-high of 7,143 on Tuesday. However, over the next four days the daily total remained stable - varying between 6,914 and 7,108 - at a time when continued increases might have been expected.\n\nAnd then came the big leap in numbers announced on Saturday, a far bigger day-on-day increase than at any time in the entire pandemic, which were announced five hours later than the usual time and were accompanied by the government explanation.\n\nThe figures announced on Saturday would also have been partially inflated by the fact that 264,979 tests were processed the previous day, the third highest there has been so far in a single 24-hour period.\n\nSaturday's figure brings the total number of recorded cases in the UK to 480,017.\n\nThe increase in the UK is largely reflected across Europe.\n\nMiddlesbrough has been on the government's watchlist following an increase in cases\n\nOn Saturday tighter restrictions came into force in parts of northern England after a spike in coronavirus cases.\n\nIt is now illegal to meet people indoors from other households in the Liverpool City Region, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough and Warrington.\n\nIt means than a third of the UK is now under heightened restrictions.\n\nThey were also tightened this week in Newcastle, Northumberland, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Sunderland and County Durham, as well as four areas of north Wales.\n\nThe new rules come as hundreds of Northumbria University students are self-isolating after testing positive for Covid.\n\nThe Mayor of Greater Manchester, Labour's Andy Burnham, called for \"local control\" on measures to tackle the virus, telling Sky News' Sophy Ridge: \"At least our own destiny would be in our hands. It feels we are a little powerless.\"\n\nElsewhere, people arriving in the UK from Turkey and Poland now have to quarantine for two weeks.\n\nThe new rules - which also apply to the Caribbean islands of Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba - came into force at 04:00 BST on Saturday.\n\nAfter a steady decline since the first peak in April, confirmed coronavirus daily cases in the UK have been rising again since July, with the rate of growth increasing sharply from the end of August.\n\nSage, the body which advises the UK government, say it is still \"highly likely\" the epidemic is growing exponentially across the country.\n\nTheir latest R number estimate - indicating how fast the epidemic is growing or falling - rose to between 1.3 and 1.6.\n\nBut an Office for National Statistics (ONS) survey estimates there were 8,400 new cases per day in England in the week to 24 September - slightly down on the previous week's estimate of 9,600 daily cases.\n\nThe ONS's estimates of how much of the population is currently infected are based on testing a representative sample of people in households with or without symptoms.\n\nIt is different to the number published daily by the Department of Health. That records positive cases in people with potential Covid symptoms who request tests.", "Last updated on .From the section Athletics\n\nWorld record holder Eliud Kipchoge was beaten in the London Marathon as Shura Kitata won a thrilling sprint finish to claim an unexpected victory.\n\nFour-time winner Kipchoge was the favourite, but fell behind with two laps to go and finished eighth.\n\nEthiopian Kitata pushed ahead of Kenya's Vincent Kipchumba on the home straight to finish in two hours five minutes and 41 seconds.\n\nBrigid Kosgei, who holds the women's world record, defended her title.\n\nBoth races were run in cold and wet conditions on a specially designed closed-loop course because of coronavirus restrictions.\n\nThe women's race started at 07:15 BST with the men's following three hours later and the wheelchair races, with male and female athletes competing at the same time, coming after.\n\nGreat Britain's David Weir was denied a ninth London Marathon wheelchair title as Canada's Brent Lakatos emerged victorious in the men's race, while Manuela Shar suffered a shock defeat to Nikita den Boer in the women's.\n\nKipchoge, who last lost a marathon in 2013, said: \"I am really disappointed. I don't know what happened.\n\n\"The last 15km, I felt my right ear was blocked. I had cramp in my hip and leg.\n\n\"It just happened in the race. I started well. It's really cold but I don't blame the conditions.\"\n\nIt was supposed to be a straightforward victory for defending champion Kipchoge, with Kenenisa Bekele pulling out injured on Friday.\n\nBut the 35-year-old Kenyan, who set a world record of 2:01.39 in 2018, never took the opportunity to pull away from an eight-strong leading pack in a slow start.\n\nKitata pushed the pace with 15 minutes to go and Kipchoge looked increasingly uncomfortable as he fell back.\n\nOthers dropped off too and eventually Kitata rounded the final corner into the home straight with compatriot Sisay Lemma and Kipchumba.\n\nThe 24-year-old managed to surge ahead and finish one second before Kipchumba, with Lemma three seconds further back.\n\n\"I prepared very well for this race,\" Kitata said. \"Kenenisa Bekele helped me. I am very happy to win the race.\"\n\nBritain's Mo Farah, a four-time Olympic champion on the track who was working as a pacemaker, said he was surprised by the result.\n\n\"It was a shock for all of us. We had expected him to win by miles, considering what times he has run,\" Farah told the BBC.\n\n\"But it was a good field. It's part of racing, it's part of sport, it happens.\"\n\nKosgei, 26, went clear of world champion Ruth Chepngetich after mile 18 and finished in 2:18.58, three minutes and three seconds ahead of American Sara Hall.\n\nShe was almost five minutes outside her world record set in Chicago last year.\n\n\"The weather was not good, so we struggled,\" Kosgei, who earned $30,000 (£23,200) in prize money with her win, told BBC Sport. \"I struggled up to the moment I finished.\n\n\"We have not prepared well due to the pandemic. I will be prepared for good results next year.\"\n\nThe London Marathon, rescheduled from its traditional April date because of the coronavirus pandemic, took place for elite runners only over 19 laps around St James's Park.\n\nThe usual mass participation event happened virtually because of covid-19 restrictions, while there were no spectators cheering on the elite runners.\n\nGiven a stellar lead-out by Farah, marathon debutant Ben Connor slowed on the home straight, but managed to cross the line 10 seconds inside the Olympic qualifying time.\n\nJonny Mellor, who had achieved the marker before, claimed the British title as he finished in 2:10.38.\n\nIn the women's race, Steph Twell, who reached world finals and won a European medal on the track, missed out on the Olympic qualifying time of 2:29:30.\n\nThe 31-year-old limped out around mile 16 as she failed to repeat her rapid time from Frankfurt last year. Lily Partridge, the 2018 British champion, also could not finish, suffering from cramp and later saying on social media that she had never been so cold out running.\n\nIn their absence, Natasha Cockram and Naomi Mitchell fought for the domestic title, with Cockram finishing four seconds ahead of her rival in 2:33:19.\n\nMeanwhile, around the world\n\nWhile the elite competed in London, 45,000 people aged from 18-87 are covering the 26.2 miles from 109 countries across the world.\n\nRunners had 24 hours to complete the distance on a course of their choosing, logging their progress on the event app and raising thousands for pounds for charity.\n\nThe oldest participant was 87-year-old Ken Jones, who has run every London Marathon since the inaugural race in 1981. Jones will be running 26.2 miles near his home in Strabane, Northern Ireland with his daughter, Heather.\n\nBBC Sport and Public Health England's Couch to 5K challenge aims to have you confidently running 5km in nine weeks - even if you have never run before. Find out more here.\n• None Me, My Brother and Our Balls:\n• None New series of the quirky comedy is streaming now", "Supporters of Donald Trump have gathered with placards and flowers outside the Walter Reed National Military Hospital near Washington where the president is being treated for coronavirus, and across the United States.\n\nMr Trump's positive Covid-19 diagnosis was made public early on Friday, and that evening he was transported to the hospital for treatment.\n\nHis medical team said late on Saturday that he had made \"substantial progress since diagnosis\" but was \"not out of the woods yet\".\n\nThe diagnosis has upended the 3 November presidential election campaign.\n\nSupporters outside Walter Reed send their best wishes to the president.\n\nCounter-protesters were also in attendance outside the military hospital.\n\nAround the country rallies were held on Saturday where people wished the president a speedy recovery. In California, they held a pro-Trump car caravan....\n\nElsewhere in the country, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, they took to their boats...\n\nPeople also gathered in the New York City borough of Staten Island. The pro-Trump rally had been organised prior to the president's diagnosis.", "Tuesday Gale said she felt frustrated some people did not respect her decision to continue shielding\n\nA young woman with a life-limiting condition who has been shielding alone for six months has said the challenges have been \"enough to drive you insane\".\n\nTuesday Gale, 31, who has rare immune disorder chronic granulomatous disease, has been largely confined to a one-bedroom flat with no garden in Newquay, Cornwall, since March.\n\nShe has relied on writing poetry and the companionship of her dog.\n\nShielding advice was paused in August, but medics advised Ms Gale to continue.\n\nMs Gale, who was told two years ago she \"would be lucky to live into her early 30s\", said shielding had affected every aspect of her life, including her physical and mental health and relationships.\n\nTuesday says her dog, who is regularly walked, has provided essential companionship\n\nThe possibility of a bone marrow transplant to prolong her life has been put on hold due to the impact of the virus.\n\n\"All I've done is wake up, move from my bedroom to the living room and back to bed - it is enough to drive you insane,\" she said.\n\nThe government relaxed advice from 1 August for 2.2 million people in England who had been shielding due to being deemed extremely vulnerable to Covid-19.\n\nBut many, like Ms Gale, chose to continue on consultants' advice.\n\n\"It's like being punished for something that is completely out of your control,\" she said.\n\nShe \"wanted to scream and shout\" at some public reactions to recent national government restrictions.\n\n\"You can still go to the pub, you just have to leave at 10pm,\" she said.\n\nTuesday lives a short walk from Newquay's beaches but has had to avoid them all summer\n\nMs Gale described how the sense of community and camaraderie in lockdown had disappeared.\n\n\"My friendships have deteriorated a lot. We haven't seen each other face-to-face - their lives have begun again... but I am still stuck here in my prison cell,\" she said.\n\nShe has been \"battling with feelings of isolation, loneliness\", feeling judged by some as over-cautious, and \"struggling to get mental health help from services\".\n\nHer shielding has no end in sight, she said, but there were rays of hope.\n\nJoining a weekly online poetry-writing group has \"fulfilled that human need of connection\" and given her \"distraction, confidence and new friendships\".\n\nOne of the few social interactions she has had this year was a recent small family garden barbecue for her birthday - which she described as her \"best ever birthday\".\n\nMs Gale is due to move to a house with a garden this month and said she \"cannot wait\".\n\nIf you have been affected by the issues in this story, find out what help is available for mental health here.", "Transport for London (TfL), the capital's transport authority, has not renewed the licence of Indian taxi app Ola over public safety concerns.\n\nThe cab company has been operating in London since February.\n\nTfL said the firm reported a number of failings including more than 1,000 trips made by unlicensed drivers.\n\nOla said it will appeal the decision and has 21 days to do so. It can operate in the meantime, according to the appeal rules.\n\nThe transport authority said Ola did not report the failings as soon as it knew about them.\n\n\"Through our investigations we discovered that flaws in Ola's operating model have led to the use of unlicensed drivers and vehicles in more than 1,000 passenger trips, which may have put passenger safety at risk,\" Helen Chapman, TfL's director of licensing, regulation and charging, said.\n\n\"If they do appeal, Ola can continue to operate and drivers can continue to undertake bookings on behalf of Ola. We will closely scrutinise the company to ensure passengers safety is not compromised.\"\n\nThe ride-hailing company began operating in Cardiff in 2018 and has since spread to other UK locations.\n\n\"We have been working with TfL during the review period and have sought to provide assurances and address the issues raised in an open and transparent manner,\" Marc Rozendal, Ola's UK Managing Director, said in a statement.\n\n\"Ola will take the opportunity to appeal this decision and in doing so, our riders and drivers can rest assured that we will continue to operate as normal, providing safe and reliable mobility for London.\"\n\nLast week, major rival Uber secured its right to continue operating in London after a judge upheld its appeal against TfL.\n\nThe ride-hailing giant has been granted a new licence to work in the capital, nearly a year after TfL rejected its application, also over safety concerns because of unlicensed drivers.\n\nWestminster Magistrates' Court heard that 24 Uber drivers shared their accounts with 20 others which led to 14,788 unauthorised rides.", "As Spain experiences the worst second wave in Europe, a new rapid antigen test to diagnose Covid-19 is being used.\n\nIts manufacturer says it's 93% accurate in detecting Covid-19 infection.", "A double murder inquiry has been launched after the deaths of Vian Mangrio and Dr Saman Mir Sacharvi\n\nA woman who was found dead with her daughter after a fire at their home \"died as a result of pressure to the neck\", police have said.\n\nDr Saman Mir Sacharvi and Vian Mangrio, 14, were found inside a house in Colne Road, Reedley, Lancashire on Thursday.\n\nA post-mortem examination also found Dr Sacharvi, 49, had been assaulted. Tests to establish Miss Mangrio's cause of death are under way.\n\nMiss Mangrio, a pupil at Marsden Heights School in Nelson, was found badly burnt inside the house, police said.\n\nSupt Jon Holmes said they were \"following a number of lines of enquiry\".\n\n\"This is a truly harrowing set of circumstances and my thoughts are very much with the loved ones of Dr Sacharvi and Miss Mangrio.\"\n\nPolice are appealing for information and extra patrols are taking place in the area to reassure residents.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Zef Eisenberg \"dedicated himself\" to \"pushing the boundaries of both human and machine\", said his family\n\nA millionaire fitness firm founder who died attempting a British land speed record was a \"true genius with unique talents\", his family has said.\n\nMaximuscle founder Zef Eisenberg died at Elvington Airfield, near York, on Thursday where in 2006 ex-Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond crashed.\n\nHis car \"went out of control at high speed at the end of a run\".\n\nPaying tribute his family said the 47-year-old \"injected his positivity into everyone he came into contact with\".\n\nIn the tribute on Facebook, they said the father of two left people \"feeling upbeat and in an enlightened mood\".\n\nMotorsport UK said his 1,200 horsepower Porsche car \"went out of control at high speed at the end of a run\".\n\nLondon-born and Guernsey-based Mr Eisenberg set more than 90 speed records on two wheels and four including the holding the iconic \"flying mile\" record.\n\nZef Eisenberg sold his Maximuscle firm to pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in 2011 for £162m\n\nThe former competitive weightlifter and bodybuilder had honed his knowledge of sports nutrition with research at the British Medical Library and founded company Maximuscle in 1995.\n\nFifteen years later it was selling £80m worth of products a year. It was sold to pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in 2011 for £162m.\n\nMr Eisenberg moved to Guernsey after he sold Maximuscle and \"dedicated himself\" to \"pushing the boundaries of both human and machine\", said his family.\n\nHis \"infectious enthusiasm and his unique ability to explain in layman's terms the most complex subjects\" led to him presenting Speed Freaks on ITV, focusing on the design, build and engineering of extreme cars.\n\nHe also became a champion of a £200,000 restoration of a much-loved children's playground and helped create Guernsey's first skate park.\n\nMr Eisenberg leaves behind his partner Mirella D'Antonio and two children.\n\nHis family said his parents and four siblings \"all adored him\" and followed his progress with \"great admiration\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. President Trump's seven days before his Covid-positive test\n\nPresident Donald Trump's coronavirus diagnosis came after a busy week running his administration and campaigning for November's election.\n\nThe president announced that he and his wife and his wife, Melania has tested positive for Covid-19, in a tweet sent on Friday at around 01:00 local time (05:00 GMT).\n\nThis followed a positive test for his close aide, Hope Hicks, who reportedly started feeling symptoms on Wednesday.\n\nSince the president's diagnosis, several people close to him have tested positive too, including his press secretary.\n\nSo far the majority of publicly released results have been negative. However, test accuracy can vary depending on when a sample is taken during the course of the illness. One taken very soon after exposure may not give an accurate result.\n\nThe White House says it has begun contact-tracing. Here's a look at some of the people we know Mr Trump has crossed paths with during the last week - starting with an event that is being investigated as a possible \"super-spreader\":\n\nPresident Trump announced his Supreme Court pick, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, in front of a crowd of about 200 people on the White House lawn.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Senator Mike Lee, who later tested positive for Covid-19, seen hugging other attendees\n\nJudge Coney Barrett said on Friday that she had tested negative. Sources told US media she had the virus earlier this year.\n\nAlong with Mr Trump and his wife, at least seven other people who attended the Rose Garden event say they have tested positive - although it's not known where they caught the virus.\n\nThey are: White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany; former White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway; Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who are both on the judiciary committee; the president of the University of Notre Dame, John Jenkins; and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who said he checked himself into a hospital on Saturday as a precaution.\n\nThe White House Correspondents' Association said an unnamed reporter at the event had also tested positive with symptoms.\n\nDuring the evening, President Trump held a rally at Harrisburg International Airport in Middletown, Pennsylvania.\n\nSince the afternoon's ceremony, Judge Coney Barrett has held meetings with various senators - including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell - ahead of her much-anticipated confirmation hearing, due to take place on 12 October.\n\nThe president played golf at his club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, in the morning and led a White House reception for the families of military veterans during the evening.\n\nOn Monday, President Trump held a news briefing in the White House Rose Garden - giving an update on his administration's coronavirus testing strategy.\n\nIt was attended by Vice-President Mike Pence, Health Secretary Alex Azar, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the chief executive of Abbott Laboratories, Robert Ford, among others.\n\nLater, Trump viewed a model of a new pickup truck - being built at a factory in Ohio - on the White House lawn. Representatives from the company, Lordstown Motors, attended, as well as two members of Congress.\n\nThe White House regularly tests officials who come in contact with the president. However, US media has noted that mask-wearing and social distancing around him is less common - suggesting that people may be too reliant on the testing system, which is not foolproof.\n\nThe president faced his election rival, Joe Biden, at their first face-to-face debate in Cleveland, Ohio on Tuesday evening.\n\nPresident Trump flew there on his presidential plane, Air Force One, alongside his wife, adult children and multiple aides. Many were seen not wearing masks when boarding or disembarking.\n\nAlso on the plane were: White House Chief of staff Mark Meadows; campaign strategist Jason Miller; policy adviser Stephen Miller; Robert C O'Brien, the national security adviser who tested positive for the virus in July; and Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan.\n\nAfter landing, the president's campaign manager, Bill Stepien, was spotted getting into a staff van with Ms Hicks, the New York Times reports. Late on Friday, it was announced that Mr Stepien had tested positive for Covid-19 and was experiencing mild flu-like symptoms.\n\nThe debate was held at Cleveland Clinic's Health Education Campus, a shared facility with Case Western Reserve University.\n\nThe organisers, the Commission on Presidential Debates, brought in numerous Covid-era safety precautions. There were no handshakes between the two candidates and everyone attending - including the 80 or so audience members - was tested before the event and asked to wear masks throughout.\n\nIn the run-up, Mr Trump's eldest daughter, Ivanka, posted a picture of herself backstage in a mask, alongside her sister Tiffany, sister-in-law Lara and stepmother Melania.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by ivankatrump This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHowever, during the event itself, Ivanka Trump and other family members, including siblings Don Jr and Eric, were pictured mask-less. Moderator Chris Wallace has since told Fox News that they were offered masks by event staff but they refused them.\n\nObservers said those on Mr Biden's side of the room kept their masks on.\n\nMr Trump and Mr Biden kept a distance during the debate, at podiums on opposite sides of the stage.\n\nMr Trump and Mr Biden loudly spoke over each other throughout the contentious debate\n\nWhen the candidates were greeted by the wives on stage afterwards, Jill Biden wore a mask and Melania Trump didn't.\n\nAt a separate campaign event in Pennsylvania, Vice-President Mike Pence said he had been in the Oval Office with President Trump earlier that day. It is thought to be their last in-person meeting.\n\nPresident Trump and much of his entourage flew back to Washington DC on Tuesday night.\n\nThe day after the debate, President Trump was straight back into campaign business, flying to Minnesota. Ms Hicks was among those accompanying him.\n\nAt a press conference on Saturday, the president's physician Dr Sean Conley said Mr Trump had been diagnosed 72 hours previously, which would place his diagnosis on Wednesday. But the White House later clarified that he was diagnosed on Thursday.\n\nHe attended a closed-door fundraiser at a private home in Minneapolis, and later held a rally at an airport in Duluth, in front of a crowd of thousands. Few wore masks but there was distance between them and the president.\n\nMinnesota Congressman Kurt Daudt tweeted a picture of himself close to Mr Trump, with neither wearing masks.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Kurt Daudt This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nOn Wednesday evening, Mr Trump and various aides returned to Washington DC on Air Force One again.\n\nMeanwhile Ms Hicks, who was feeling unwell, was isolated in a separate cabin, according to US media. She reportedly disembarked from the back of the plane, instead of the front alongside the other passengers.\n\nThe following day, Ms Hicks tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nPresident Trump flew to his Bedminster golf resort in New Jersey for a private fundraiser. Several aides who were in proximity to Ms Hicks scrapped their plans to accompany the president, according to the Associated Press.\n\nKayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, is thought to have been in close contact with Ms Hicks. Ms McEnany held a briefing for reporters at the White House on Thursday, without mentioning her colleague's test and without wearing a mask. She has since said she did not know about the diagnosis.\n\nThat night, in pre-taped remarks to the annual Al Smith dinner in New York City - held virtually this year - Mr Trump said that \"the end of the pandemic is in sight\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"The end of the pandemic is in sight,\" President Trump told a dinner on Thursday\n\nHe later announced in an interview on Fox News that he and the first lady were being tested for the virus.\n\nIt is not known how many supporters he came into contact with in recent days, he but told Fox presenter Sean Hannity that people were always wanting to get close to him. \"They want to hug you, and they want to kiss you,\" he said.\n\nPresident Trump announced that he and Mrs Trump had tested positive, adding that they will begin the \"quarantine and recovery process immediately\".\n\nJust before 11:00, his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told reporters the president has \"mild symptoms\" but remains in \"good spirits\".\n\nMrs Trump tweeted to say she also had mild symptoms.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The president has \"mild symptoms\" but will \"remain on the job\", says White House chief of staff Mark Meadows\n\nThat day, several other people announce that they've tested positive: Kellyanne Conway, former White House counsellor; Bill Stepien, Mr Trump's campaign manager; Mike Lee, Utah senator; Thom Tillis, a senator for North Carolina; Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee; Rev John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame University; and Senator Ron Johnson, head of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.\n\nMeanwhile Joe Biden, the Democrats' presidential candidate, tests negative, as does: Jill Biden, his wife; Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen Pence; Kamala Harris, the Democrats' vice-presidential candidate; Amy Coney Barrett, Supreme Court nominee; Mike Pompeo, secretary of state; Steve Mnuchin, treasury secretary; Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services; William Barr, attorney general; Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr, the president's daughter and son; and Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law.\n\nFormer New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Nicholas Luna, a White House presidential aide, both test positive.\n\nMr Trump waved to well-wishers from behind the glass of a sealed car after tweeting that he would pay a \"surprise visit\" to \"patriots\" outside the hospital.\n\nInside the car, at least two people could be seen wearing protective gear in the front seats, with Mr Trump sat in the back.\n\nThere were concerns that the president who wore a mask, may have endangered others inside the car. But White House spokesperson Judd Deere said the trip had been \"cleared by the medical team as safe\".\n\nWhite House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany announces on Twitter that she has tested positive.", "The stone marks the life of a man, known only as Abell, who died in 1717\n\nA stone commemorating the first recorded black resident in Liverpool has been unveiled more than 300 years after his death.\n\nRecords show the man, known only as Abell, was buried at St Nicholas' Church on 1 October 1717.\n\nThousands of enslaved Africans crossed the Atlantic on Liverpool-registered ships in the 18th Century transatlantic slave trade.\n\nWritten evidence shows there was also a rising population of black residents at the time.\n\nMuch of the city's 18th Century wealth came from the slave trade\n\nThe stone, which marks the anniversary of Abell's funeral and coincides with Black History Month, was unveiled by Councillor Anna Rothery, who became Liverpool's first black lord mayor last year.\n\nShe said: \"As a city we are facing up to the grim injustices of our past and, by setting them in their context, we are a better place.\"\n\nHundreds of people joined a Black Lives Matter protest in Liverpool this summer\n\nMore than 12.5m Africans were traded as slaves between 1515 and the mid-19th Century.\n\nSome two million of the enslaved men, women and children died en route to the Americas.\n\nRector of Liverpool, Revd Canon Dr Crispin Pailing, said: \"We cannot hide from our past, and there is no institution from this era of our history which is free from the taint of this horrific trade.\n\n\"We cannot give justice to Abell and other enslaved Africans, but we can give them the dignity of naming them when we can, and we can give them status within the history of our city.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Liverpool City Council This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nLaurence Westgaph, who is historian-in-residence at National Museums Liverpool, said: \"This gesture by St Nicholas Church records in stone the presence of black people in this town for more than 300 years and at a time when Liverpool's population was less than 10,000 people.\"\n\nFollowing Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer, the city's council launched a project to ensure streets named after affluent slavers were given special plaques to explain their links to the trade.\n\nThe city also launched its own Race Equality Taskforce.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk", "Cineworld is set to temporarily close its UK cinemas in the coming weeks.\n\nAs first reported in the Sunday Times, the firm is writing to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden to say the industry is now \"unviable\".\n\nThe firm says it has been hit by delays in the release of big-budget films, putting 5,500 jobs at risk.\n\nThe premiere of James Bond film No Time To Die has been postponed twice and is now due for release in April 2021.\n\nIt is hoped that the Cineworld cinemas will be able to reopen next year, with staff being asked to accept redundancy in the hope of rejoining the company when theatres open again.\n\nThe head of the UK Cinema Association said he feared the Cineworld closure was \"indicative of challenges faced by the entire UK cinema industry at the moment\".\n\nPhil Clapp said: \"Although cinemas opened in July and have been able to deliver a safe and enjoyable experience, without major new titles then we understand we aren't able to get as many people out of the home as we'd like.\"\n\nThe Bectu union says the delay in releasing the new Bond film has hit cinemas\n\nHe said no-one would be \"untouched by the current challenges\".\n\nPhilippa Childs of entertainment and broadcasting union Bectu said: \"The delay in the release of the Bond film along with the other delayed releases has plunged cinema into crisis.\n\n\"Studios will have to think carefully when considering release dates about the impact that will have for the long-term future of the big screen.\"\n\nWhen approached by the BBC, major UK chains Vue and Odeon refused to comment on how many cinemas they might be keeping open.\n\nThe Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said it was supporting cinemas through a VAT cut on tickets and concessions, business rates holiday and bounce-back loans.\n\n\"We urge the British public to support their local cinema and save jobs by visiting and enjoying a film in accordance with the [Covid-19] guidance.\"\n\nCineworld's sites in the US, where it operates 546 theatres, could also be forced to close.\n\nCineworld said in a statement: \"We can confirm we are considering the temporary closure of our UK and US cinemas, but a final decision has not yet been reached.\n\n\"Once a decision has been made we will update all staff and customers as soon as we can.\"\n\nIn September the firm reported a $1.6bn (£1.3bn) loss for the six months to June as its cinemas had to close because of coronavirus lockdowns.\n\nAnd it warned at the time that it might need to raise more money in the event of further restrictions - or film delays - due to Covid-19.\n\nCineworld is the world's second largest cinema operator, and the largest in the UK with 120 sites. It also owns the Picturehouse chain of smaller venues.\n\nIts other theatres globally include the Regal, Cinema City, and Yes Planet brands.\n\nAccording to the UK Cinema Association, operators should \"organise seating to ensure two-metre distancing can be maintained; where two metres is not viable, one metre with risk mitigation is acceptable. Mitigations should be considered and those introduced set out in the risk assessment\".\n\nBut in Scotland they must \"organise seating to ensure two-metre distancing can be maintained\".\n\nIt also says cinemas should introduce one-way flow through auditoriums, and provide floor markings and signage to remind customers to \"follow social distancing wherever possible.\"\n\nThe film industry had hoped the release of No Time To Die would spark a movie-going revival in the UK, with so many cinemas having been mothballed for months following the Covid-19 lockdown in March.\n\nBut on Friday the movie's release was further delayed until 2 April 2021 \"in order to be seen by a worldwide theatrical audience\".\n\nRob Arthur, an industry analyst at cinema strategists The Big Picture, said \"the current market is broken\".\n\n\"It has been a very challenging year both for Cineworld, and the world's largest cinema group AMC,\" he added.\n\n\"Film release schedules are being changed on a daily, never mind weekly, basis. It has been a catastrophic, devastating, year for operators.\"\n\nHe said the decision by Cineworld to put their UK operation \"into hibernation\" until next year made sense.\n\n\"You can't keep meeting the fixed operating costs of electricity, gas, air conditioning, staff, social distancing measures, and so forth when audience numbers are only a small percentage of what they were before,\" he said.\n\n\"Meanwhile, customer confidence in visiting cinemas has to be restored and I don't see that at the moment,\" Mr Arthur added.\n\n\"The crowds you used to see in London for example going from work directly to the cinema are not there.\"\n\nHe also said Cineworld's cash reserves were running low and that both they and AMC had a high percentage of financial liabilities compared with their assets.\n\nHe added: \"Landlords to date have acted reasonably and the deferral of rent has helped the cinema industry, but that comes to an end as does furlough payments so the operators will have to seek remedies to restructure their businesses.\"\n\nAs lockdown restrictions around the world were gradually lifted in mid-to-late summer Cineworld had been able to reopen 561 out of 778 sites worldwide.\n\nBut lockdown closures meant its group revenues sank to $712.4m in the first six months of the year, compared with $2.15bn a year earlier.\n\nThe group loss this year also marked a huge fall from the pre-tax profits of $139.7m seen in the first six months of 2019.\n\nHowever, when it released those financial figures, Cineworld said recent trading had been \"encouraging considering the circumstances\", with solid demand for Christopher Nolan's spy film Tenet which was released in September.\n\nIn June, Cineworld pulled out of a $2.1bn deal to buy the Canadian cinema chain Cineplex, a move which could lead to a legal battle.\n\nIt is not just Cineworld which has struggled this year, with independent London cinema Peckhamplex closing its doors on 25 September due to falling visitor numbers and delayed releases.\n\nIt had hoped to reopen in November, around the time the next James Bond film was due to be released.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Boris Johnson's government has \"lost control\" of coronavirus, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has said.\n\nSpeaking to the Observer, Sir Keir accused the prime minister of \"serial incompetence\" over the virus.\n\nHe has called for ministers to set out a new \"road map\" for dealing with Covid-19 until a vaccine is rolled out.\n\nA Downing Street spokesman said the prime minister had already set out \"a package of measures\" that could be in place for the next six months.\n\nThe package \"balances the need to suppress the virus while also protecting the NHS, keeping children in schools and keeping the economy moving over what is going to be a challenging winter\", the spokesman added.\n\nIn a wide-ranging interview, the Labour leader laid out a five-point plan to fight rising infection rates.\n\nThe proposals urge the government to:\n\nSir Keir said the prime minister was guilty of \"governing in hindsight\", as he ramped up his attack on the government's handling of the pandemic.\n\nThe choice of words echoes Mr Johnson's own frequent criticism of Sir Keir during Prime Minister Questions, having labelled him \"Captain Hindsight\" for criticising the government's actions.\n\nThe Labour leader, who was elected in April, added: \"I think they've lost control of the virus.\n\n\"And I don't want to see death rates go up. Nobody does.\n\n\"But this is serial incompetence.\"\n\nSir Keir blames divisions in the top of government and says that local health officials should have been more involved in tackling outbreaks, according to the paper.\n\nSpeaking about his plans for returning Labour to power after four election defeats, Sir Keir said: \"We have a mountain to climb.\"\n\nBut he said he is breaking his leadership into \"phases\", with the next six months involving answering the question: \"What's our positive vision for the country?\"\n\nHe added: \"This is going to take four years. And we're going to have to be at this every day, every week, every month for the whole of the four years.\"\n\nThe Labour leader's comments come as one in three people in the UK are now living under tougher social restrictions.\n\nMerseyside became the latest area to enter into a local lockdown on Saturday. Similar restrictions were also applied in Warrington, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough to tackle the spread of the illness.\n\nShadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said there were \"no clear guidelines as to why an area goes into restrictions\" and local authorities in England needed to be \"properly involved\" before new measures started.\n\nHe told BBC One's Andrew Marr Show it was \"not clear why\" some areas with high case rates escaped tighter restrictions.\n\nHe said these include locations with Tory ministers as their MPs, adding: \"There is a suspicion that there is political interference - I hope there isn't. But until the government publish clear guidelines, that suspicion will always linger.\"\n\nOn Saturday, the UK announced another 12,872 new cases of coronavirus, and reported a further 49 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19.\n\nMeanwhile, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), which advises the UK government, say it is still \"highly likely\" the epidemic is growing exponentially across the country.\n\nIts latest R number estimate - indicating how fast the epidemic is growing or falling - rose to between 1.3 and 1.6.", "Sending thousands of older untested patients into care homes in England at the start of the coronavirus lockdown was a violation of their human rights, Amnesty International has said.\n\nA report says government decisions were \"inexplicable\" and \"disastrous\", affecting mental and physical health.\n\nMore than 18,000 people living in care homes died with Covid-19 and Amnesty says the public inquiry promised by the government must begin immediately.\n\nAccording to Amnesty's report, a \"number of poor decisions at both the national and local levels had serious negative consequences for the health and lives of older people in care homes and resulted in the infringement of their human rights\" as enshrined in law.\n\nResearchers for the organisation interviewed relatives of older people who either died in care homes or are currently living in one; care home owners and staff, and legal and medical professionals.\n\nAmnesty said it received reports of residents being denied GP and hospital NHS services during the pandemic, \"violating their right to health and potentially their right to life, as well as their right to non-discrimination\".\n\nIt adds that care home managers reported to its researchers that they were \"pressured in different ways\" to accept patients discharged from hospital who had not been tested or had Covid-19.\n\nAmnesty says the public inquiry into the pandemic should begin with an \"interim phase\".\n\n\"The pandemic is not over,\" it added. \"Lessons must be learned; remedial action must be taken without delay to ensure that mistakes are not repeated.\"\n\nIn July, care homes in England were allowed to reopen again for family visits - as long as local authorities and public health teams said it was safe. That was followed by a similar reopening of homes in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nThe report said regular testing needs to be made available for care home residents, staff and visitors to ensure visits can take place safely.\n\n\"Regular testing can help break the isolation that is so damaging to people's physical and mental health and could mean the difference between families being torn apart for months again,\" Amnesty said.\n\nThe report added that all the families interviewed whose relatives are currently in care homes said the current restrictions on visits - that there can only be one visitor per resident and no possibility of holding hands - made little sense.\n\nThey argue that staff can interact normally in the community and are only tested once a week at most, while having sustained physical contact with residents.\n\nThe report criticises the initial government advice in March against the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) \"if neither the care worker nor the individual receiving care and support was symptomatic, describing it as \"heedless at best\".\n\nIt also highlights concerns that \"do not attempt resuscitation\" orders - designed to communicate a resident's wishes to healthcare professionals - were adopted inappropriately during the pandemic.\n\nA spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care stressed it was \"completely unacceptable\" to apply such orders in a blanket fashion and it had taken \"consistent action\" to prevent this from happening.\n\nThey added: \"From the start of the pandemic we have been doing everything we can to ensure care home residents and staff are protected.\n\n\"This includes testing all residents and staff, providing over 228 million items of PPE, ring-fencing over £1.1bn to prevent infections in care homes and making a further £3.7bn available to councils to address pressures caused by the pandemic - including in adult social care.\"", "The bodies of Dr Saman Mir Sacharvi and Vian Mangrio, 14, were found on Thursday\n\nTwo men have been arrested on suspicion of murdering a mother and her daughter whose bodies were discovered inside a fire-damaged house.\n\nDr Saman Mir Sacharvi and Vian Mangrio, 14, were found dead at their home in Reedley, Lancashire on Thursday.\n\nThe men, from Burnley, aged 51 and 56, were both held on suspicion of two counts of murder, two of rape and one of arson with intent to endanger life.\n\nThe 56-year-old was released without charge. The other remains in custody.\n\nDr Sacharvi was described as a \"well-loved and well-liked colleague\"\n\nLancashire Police has urged anyone with information to contact them and said there were \"a number of lines of inquiry\".\n\nDet Supt Jon Holmes, head of major crime, said: \"Our thoughts remain with Dr Sacharvi and Miss Mangrio's family and friends at this awful time and we send them our deepest condolences.\n\n\"We have a team of detectives dedicated to the investigation and we will leave no stone unturned.\"\n\nDr Sacharvi, 49, was described as a \"well-loved and well-liked colleague\" in a tribute issued by Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust.\n\nShe had worked in the trust's specialist perinatal community mental health team since February and most recently at its Daisyfield site in Blackburn.\n\nPerinatal lead consultant Gill Strachan said: \"She was approachable, diligent and had formed good working relationships with the team.\n\n\"She was empathic and well-liked by the women and families that she worked with.\n\n\"During lockdown when Covid-19 restrictions were in place, she went out of her way to support the care of women, personally delivering prescriptions to women isolating at home.\n\n\"The team are shocked and saddened, and she will be greatly missed.\"\n\nFloral tributes have been left outside the family home\n\nAlyson Littlewood, the head teacher of Marsden Heights Community College where Vian was a student, said: \"We are heartbroken by the tragic deaths of Vian and her mother and our whole school is mourning the loss of two much-loved members of our community.\"\n\nShe said Vian was an \"outstanding student\" who had a \"wonderful mix of academic ability coupled with an enthusiasm for everything else that school can offer\".\n\n\"She was very popular and was extremely supportive of her friends, was generous to all and had a smile that could fill a room.\n\n\"We were all very fortunate to have her in our lives and we will miss her on a daily basis.\"\n\nFloral tributes have been left outside the family home by well-wishers.\n\nOne card read: \"RIP Gorgeous. Thank you for everything you have done for me and made me a better person.\n\n\"You'll always be in my heart. I miss you so much. May you and your mom rest in peace. Love from Sky xxx\"\n\nAnother unsigned message said: \"May some good love come out of this horrendous crime. May people learn tolerance.\n\n\"My thoughts and prayers are with you both. Stupid, stupid. So sad, bad, wrong.\"\n\nDr Sacharvi died \"as a result of pressure to the neck\" and had been assaulted, police said.\n\nVian was found badly burnt inside the house but the cause of her death has yet to be determined, the force added.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Priti Patel: \"We will address the moral, legal, and practical problems with the asylum system\"\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel has pledged to fix the \"fundamentally broken\" asylum system in the UK to make it \"firm and fair\".\n\nSpeaking at the Conservative Party conference, she promised to introduce legislation next year for the \"biggest overhaul\" of the system in \"decades\".\n\nAnd she said those against her plans were \"defending the indefensible\".\n\nIt comes after it emerged this week that the UK considered sending asylum seekers to an island in the Atlantic.\n\nMs Patel said changes \"would take time\" and she would \"accelerate the UK's operational response\" to the issue in the meantime.\n\nThe chief executive of charity Refugee Action, Stephen Hale, said it was a \"positive step\" for the home secretary to \"realise what we've been trying to tell her - the asylum system is not fair or effective\".\n\nBut he urged her to push for \"quicker decisions and better support\" for those seeking asylum in the UK.\n\nLabour's shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds accused the Conservatives of being \"the political party that broke\" the asylum system, having been in power for 10 years.\n\nHe added: \"Recent experience suggests they have not learned any lessons at all, with unconscionable, absurd proposals about floating walls and creating waves in the English Channel to push back boats and sending people thousands of miles away to process claims.\n\n\"The truth is the Tories are devoid of compassion and competence.\"\n\nMs Patel pledged to introduce a new asylum system that welcomed people through \"safe and legal routes\" and stopped those arriving illegally \"making endless legal claims to remain\".\n\nThe system will include expediting the removal of those \"who have no claim for protection\", she said.\n\nShe added: \"After decades of inaction by successive governments, we will address the moral, legal, practical problems with this broken system. Because what exists now is neither firm nor fair.\n\n\"I will take every necessary step to fix this broken system amounting to the biggest overhaul of our asylum system in decades.\"\n\nThe promised overhaul follows record numbers of people making the journey across the English Channel to the UK in September, which Ms Patel has vowed to stop.\n\nAccording to Refugee Action, 35,566 asylum applications were made in the UK in 2019 - down from a peak of 84,000 in 2002.\n\nAt the same time, delays in processing UK asylum applications have increased significantly.\n\nFour out of five applicants in the last three months of 2019 waited six months or more for their cases to be processed.\n\nMs Patel said the UK would make more \"immediate returns\" of people who arrived illegally \"and break our rules, every single week\".\n\nIt emerged this week the government considered building an asylum processing centre at Ascension Island - a remote UK territory in the Atlantic Ocean\n\nRefugee Action's Stephen Hale said to make the system fair her \"immediate priority\" should be to \"honour her words and commit long-term to creating safe and legal routes for refugees to reach the UK\" - including restarting settlement schemes that were paused during the coronavirus outbreak.\n\nPre-empting criticism of her proposals, Ms Patel said she expected some would \"lecture us on their grand theories about human rights\".\n\nBut, she added: \"Those defending the broken system - the traffickers, the do-gooders, the lefty lawyers, the Labour Party - they are defending the indefensible\".\n\nIt comes after it emerged this week that the government had considered building an asylum processing centre on a remote UK territory in the Atlantic Ocean.\n\nMs Patel asked officials to look at asylum policies which had been successful in other countries, the BBC was told.\n\nLabour said the \"ludicrous idea\" was \"inhumane, completely impractical and wildly expensive\".\n\nDuring her speech, the home secretary said the government would \"explore all practical measures and options to deter illegal migration\".\n\nShe added: \"A reformed system will prosecute the criminals and protect the vulnerable. That is what a firm and fair system should look like.\"\n\nAndy Hewett, head of advocacy at the Refugee Council, said he agreed with Ms Patel that the current system was \"broken\" and \"leaves vulnerable people languishing for months on end, fearful for their future and unable to start rebuilding their lives\".\n\nBut he said it was wrong to say it was illegal for people to arrive in the UK via small boats for the purpose of seeking asylum - which is covered in the UN Refugee Convention - although they would like to see fewer people attempting the dangerous journey.\n\n\"To this end, we're calling on the home secretary to restart the resettlement programme without delay, dismantle the inhumane family reunion rules that prevent parents from being reunited with their children in the UK, and introduce humanitarian visas so that refugees can travel safely to the UK,\" added Mr Hewett.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Two-year-old Prince Louis: \"What animal do you like?\"\n\nNaturalist Sir David Attenborough has revealed his favourite animal is the monkey, when quizzed by the children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.\n\nPrince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis were given the chance to ask the 94-year-old broadcaster one question about the natural world.\n\nIt is the first time Prince Louis, two, has been heard speaking in public.\n\nThe young prince asked: \"What animal do you like?\" \"I like monkeys best because they are such fun,\" Sir David replied.\n\n\"Mind you, you can't have monkeys sitting around the home because that's not where they live,\" he cautioned, mindful perhaps of the duke and duchess's domestic life at Kensington Palace.\n\n\"So what can you have at home that you like? Well, which would you choose - a puppy or a kitten?\" said Sir David, before continuing: \"It's a very difficult question. I think I'd go for a puppy.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Other children put their questions to Sir David Attenborough earlier in the week\n\nPrince George, the eldest son of Prince William and Catherine, wanted to know: \"What animal do you think will become extinct next?\"\n\n\"Well, let's hope there won't be any,\" said Sir David.\n\n\"There are lots of things we can do when animals are in danger of extinction. We can protect them.\"\n\nHe related how the population of mountain gorillas in central Africa, which were \"very, very rare\" 40 years ago, had grown from 250 animals to more than 1,000, thanks to public awareness and global fund-raising.\n\n\"So you can save an animal if you want to and you put your mind to it,\" the famous naturalist told the seven-year-old prince.\n\n\"People around the world are doing that because animals are so precious, \" he added. \"So let's hope there won't be any more that go extinct.\n\nLike her brother, Princess Charlotte, five, began her question with a confident: \"Hello David Attenborough!\"\n\n\"I like spiders, do you like spiders too?\" she asked\n\n\"I love spiders. I am so glad you like them!\" said Sir David. \"I think they're wonderful things.\"\n\n\"Why is it that people are so frightened of them? I think it's because they have actually got eight legs, which are much more than us. And if you've got eight legs you can move in any direction - so you can never be quite sure which way that spider is going to go!\n\n\"But spiders are so clever. Have you ever watched one try to build its web? That is extraordinary. How does it make this circular web like that... how do they do it? Try and watch and see how they do it - it's marvellous.\"", "Civilians are being forced to flee the city of Stepanakert as clashes continue over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.\n\nThe enclave is officially part of Azerbaijan but run by ethnic Armenians.\n\nMore than 200 people are now known to have been killed, including civilians, since the fighting between troops from Armenia and Azerbaijan began a week ago.", "More than a third of the UK is now under heightened restrictions\n\nTighter restrictions have come into force in parts of northern England after a spike in coronavirus cases.\n\nIt is now illegal to meet people indoors from other households in the Liverpool City Region, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough and Warrington.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said it was \"necessary\" to bring the new measures, which includes places like pubs and restaurants, into force.\n\nMore than a third of the UK is now under heightened restrictions.\n\nThe new rules come as hundreds of Northumbria University students are self-isolating after testing positive for Covid.\n\nMiddlesbrough has been on the government's watchlist following an increase in cases\n\nThe new rules have split opinion in Hartlepool.\n\nSteven Brittan said: \"This could have been stopped a long time ago but people haven't stuck to the restrictions so now we are all having to suffer the consequences.\"\n\nShelia Calvert said: \"It's absolutely totally wrong, [the rules] are far too harsh.\n\n\"People have suffered enough with not seeing their families.\"\n\nAndy Bostwick said: \"It's very frustrating that you can go to work with people but you then can't go for a beer with them after work, which is something I do quite a lot on Friday with the lads.\"\n\nPeople in Hartlepool are among those who have to abide by new restrictions\n\nAfter a steady decline since the first peak in April, confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK have been rising again since July, with the rate of growth increasing sharply from the end of August.\n\nOn Friday, another 6,968 people tested positive, slightly down from more than 7,000 a day earlier in the week.\n\nMeanwhile, Germany has issued a warning to its citizens against travelling to Scotland and northern England because of increases in infections.\n\nThey were also tightened up this week in Newcastle, Northumberland, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Sunderland and County Durham, as well as four areas of north Wales.\n\nAnnouncing the latest restrictions, Mr Hancock told the House of Commons \"cases continue to rise fast\" in Teesside and the north-west of England.\n\nKnowsley, an area in the Liverpool City Region, had the second highest infection rate in the country at 262 per 100,000 on 27 September.\n\nLiverpool's weekly infection rate rose to 258, Warrington's was 163 and Hartlepool and Middlesbrough both had 121 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nBurnley, where no further restrictions are yet to be imposed beyond the Lancashire-wide ones already introduced, has the highest infection rate in England at 327 per 100,000.\n\nMr Hancock also \"recommended against all social mixing between households\", but said he wanted the restrictions to stay in place for \"as short a time as possible\".\n\nPeople in those areas should also:\n\nThe independent mayor of Middlesbrough said the changes would damage the local economy and people's mental health.\n\nBut people in Liverpool had been expecting the tighter measures.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Matt Ashton, director of public health for Liverpool, acknowledged there were \"so many different rules, so many different regulations, it is confusing for people to understand\".\n\nHe added: \"We need to move the conversation now to people really understanding the risk of Covid in our communities... to do the right thing and just to minimise their contact with other people as much as possible.\"\n\nAndy McDonald, Labour MP for Middlesbrough, said it was \"imperative\" people \"accept and abide by\" the new measures but called for \"improvement in communication\" between the government and local councils.\n\nHe said: \"These restrictions have been imposed without due consideration or dialogue.\n\n\"We have no idea of what exit strategy is planned or what achievements have to be attained in order to see these restrictions lifted.\n\n\"It is simply not good enough.\"\n\nAlice Wiseman, director of public health for Gateshead, said introducing new restrictions was a \"tricky balance\" but was about putting a \"package of measures together that enable us to keep as much of the economy open while reducing the transmission of the virus\".\n\nA spokesman for Northumbria University, in Newcastle, confirmed 770 students had tested positive for coronavirus, 78 of whom are symptomatic.\n\nAll infected students and their close contacts are self-isolating for 14 days in line with government guidance.\n\nIt comes as people arriving in the UK from Turkey and Poland now have to quarantine for two weeks.\n\nThe new rules - which also apply to the Caribbean islands of Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba - came into force at 04:00 BST on Saturday.", "For months US President Donald Trump and his aides have regularly gone without masks, often appearing to behave as if there was no pandemic. Then the president tested positive, and their world changed. This is the story of a seismic day.\n\nEarly on Friday evening, it was peaceful at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, nine miles (14km) from the White House, and so quiet you could hear an acorn drop. But the mood was tense. Police tape was stretched from a tree to a basketball hoop, marking the landing zone for Marine One, the president's helicopter, and a dog sniffed for explosives. Donald Trump would arrive soon, and no-one knew quite what to expect.\n\nA security official tried to tell his colleagues where they should stand for the arrival of the president's helicopter. The official admitted that his plan was a work in progress. \"I don't think anyone knows what's going on,\" he said.\n\nIt was an accurate observation outside the hospital - and for much of the day at the White House, too.\n\nThe uncertainty began in the early morning hours, just before 01:00 in Washington, with the president's announcement on Twitter that he had tested positive. Afterwards, White House aides and staffers did their best to maintain a sense of normality in the midst of a chaotic environment, but the mood spiralled into something that looked a lot like chaos. There was anxiety, shouting and a few tears.\n\nThe president had long managed to project a sense of optimism about the US health crisis - as if he could will the pandemic away. More than 200,000 people have died with Covid-19 in the US, yet he has been saying recently that the pandemic is \"getting under control\".\n\nIn a pre-recorded address to a charity event on Thursday, Mr Trump asserted that \"the end of the pandemic is in sight\". Meanwhile at a presidential debate earlier this week, he made fun of his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, for always wearing a mask.\n\nThe president's claims and the language that he uses to talk about the virus alienate many Americans. However, his approach appeals to his base of supporters, men and women who are conservative and mostly white - a group of individuals who resent the Democratic elites in Washington and other cities.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. US President Donald Trump on Covid-19 in his own words\n\nThe president's casual language about the virus over the last few months has been amplified by his aides and staffers in both their words and actions. They often seemed to exist in a pre-Covid era. Few of them wore masks at their offices in the West Wing, and they crowded together at small lunch tables next door at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. They invited hundreds of guests onto the south lawn at the White House for events.\n\nThe administration relied on rapid Covid-19 testing machines to screen those in contact with the president. But experts have raised questions about the reliability of the quick turnaround tests, suggesting they might have given officials a false sense of security.\n\nNow the president is sick, and his aides are struggling to cope with the reality of the virus as it unfolds around them and invades their offices. One of the president's top advisors, Hope Hicks, has tested positive, as has his campaign manager Bill Stepien, two Republican senators, and Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman.\n\nSenior White House staffers are now in isolation. Junior staff members were frantically fielding calls as part of a massive contact tracing programme. News about the president's visit to the hospital leaked accidentally - by someone who sent an email before reading it.\n\nIn the midst of the confusion, White House aides have tried to put on a brave face. The president's economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, assured me and other journalists on Friday morning that the president was working hard and that there was plenty of good economic news.\n\nBesides, Mr Kudlow pointed out, the president was not the first world leader to become infected - the leaders of Britain and Brazil had both had the virus. \"Prime Minister Boris Johnson in London, who's a longtime friend of mine, had a very rough time of it - a very rough time,\" Mr Kudlow said. \"I hope and pray that President Trump does not.\"\n\nIn addition, Kayleigh McEnany, Mr Trump's press secretary, insisted that the White House was operating smoothly. The president was taking care of business, she said, adding: \"He's had mild symptoms, but he is hard at work. We're having to slow him down a little bit.\"\n\nShe said that the president had spoken on the phone with senators including Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham.\n\nMeanwhile in the West Wing, people were shouting. \"You're in here without a mask,\" someone yelled at a journalist, telling him to leave the premises. A junior staffer, exhausted and overworked, broke down in tears. A miasma of uncertainty hung over the offices known as \"lower press\", a warren of desks cluttered with bottles of hand sanitiser, newspapers, a baseball and a hair straightener.\n\nWhite House officials sought to reassure the public and the media on Friday\n\nThe anxiety of those of us who spend time in the West Wing is palpable: for months, almost no-one wore a mask while sitting at their desks in the lower press office. Now everyone in the room has one on. Journalists came here on Friday to ask officials about additional testing. Others wanted to know more about the president's condition.\n\nOn Friday three journalists who cover the White House tested positive, reported CNN. The reporters who remained at the White House wanted to know if they, too, had the virus. (I was tested in the morning - 10 quick swabs - and got a clean bill of health.)\n\nBy mid-afternoon, it was clear things were not going well. A staffer told me and other members of a small press pool, the journalists who follow the president, to gather for a trip to the military hospital, where we would wait for the president.\n\nWe climbed into a black van, one with government plates and dark windows. As we arrived at the hospital, the \"wig-wags\", or flashing lights, came on. The van pulled to a stop near the emergency entrance.\n\nI know how powerfully the president's messages resonate with his base and how much they admire the way he has handled the health crisis (\"Millions more would have died\" without him, one of his supporters told me). But standing outside the hospital's emergency room, I could see that the world the president has described - one of health and prosperity, with him as its creator - was in jeopardy.\n\nAs Marine One hovered near the landing zone, yellow leaves scattered in the air. Mr Trump walked down the stairs, holding the rail, and climbed into an SUV. From the glimpse I got, he seemed subdued. It was the end of a long day for the president - and for the nation too.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. President Trump's seven days before his Covid-positive test", "Sam Law said the situation left him feeling angry and \"completely left out\"\n\nA man who uses a wheelchair said he pulled himself up three flights of stairs to take his driving theory test as the centre had no disabled access.\n\nSam Law, 21, from Cardigan, Ceredigion, said the experience left him feeling angry and \"completely left out\".\n\nHis mother took photos of what happened at the centre in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire on Thursday.\n\nThe Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) said it was \"extremely sorry for the unacceptable distress\".\n\nA spokesman said it was investigating as a matter of urgency, adding: \"We want everyone who is able, to take any driving test and will always make reasonable adjustments for people who are disabled and want to pass their theory or practical exam.\"\n\nService providers have to make reasonable adjustments for people who have a disability so they are not put at a substantial disadvantage compared to those who are not disabled when accessing services.\n\nMr Law said he specified he used a wheelchair when he booked his test online and requested to have it in Aberystwyth as he knew the centre there had wheelchair access.\n\nHe said he tried calling the Haverfordwest centre on the morning of the test to check access but no-one picked up.\n\nMr Law said he found climbing the steps \"very hard work\"\n\n\"I was very disappointed and angry,\" he said.\n\nHe said staff at the centre advised he return home and book another test, but he did not want to delay the test so decided to climb the steps with his brother's assistance.\n\nMr Law said he specified he used a wheelchair when he booked his test online\n\n\"It was very, very hard work - lifting yourself. Because I sit down all the time, I break bones easily,\" he said.\n\nMr Law, who has used a wheelchair since having a spinal stroke when he was 16, said he was shocked a building used by a government department did not have disabled access.\n\n\"It shouldn't be a case of 'you need to go to another centre',\" he said.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "William Henry and Brian McIntosh were found shot dead in the car in Brierley Hill on Wednesday afternoon\n\nA man has been charged with murdering two men found shot dead in a car.\n\nWilliam Henry, 31, and Brian McIntosh, 29, both from Bartley Green, were found in a car park off Moor Street in Brierley Hill, Dudley, just before 15:30 BST on Wednesday.\n\nA post-mortem examination found both men died from gunshot wounds, West Midlands Police said.\n\nJonathan Houseman, 32, from Stourbridge, has been charged with two counts of murder.\n\nMr Houseman, of Quarry Park Road, is set to appear at Birmingham Magistrates' Court on Monday, police said.\n\nA second person arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender has been released without charge, the force added.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Dr Rodolfo Piskorski moved to Wales to study in 2013 and has fallen in love with his adopted country\n\nA Brazilian man hoping to become a UK citizen has become one of the first to pass a citizenship test using Welsh.\n\nDr Rodolfo Piskorski said Wales was the only place he had lived in the UK - so he wanted to take the exam in his adopted country's language.\n\nHis passion for Wales also paid off when he asked for help to crowdfund the £1,500 needed to pay citizenship fees.\n\nMost of the cash was raised within a week - and he now hoped to finish the process before Brexit is completed.\n\n\"It's a silly test, like a pub quiz, and it doesn't integrate you so I thought 'how can I make the process more Welsh and give myself the challenge to do it in Welsh?'\" the Cardiff University lecturer said.\n\n\"I've heard people talk about Welsh as something quaint, but for me it's exciting, cool and young - that's been my experience in Cardiff.\"\n\nThe 34-year-old moved to the Welsh capital in 2013 to study for his PhD, and began learning Welsh two years later.\n\nCelebrating the language when Cardiff hosted the National Eisteddfod in 2018\n\nEven though he has EU settled status through his Italian partner, he wanted to become a citizen because of uncertainty over the UK's exit from the European Union.\n\n\"The right is there and it's important to use language rights,\" said Dr Piskorski, who is originally from Florianόpolis in south Brazil.\n\n\"I wanted to make a stand and show that there are different ways of being British.\n\n\"I wanted to show a different element to British identity and make those in power acknowledge that fact and acknowledge the right.\"\n\nHe took the £50 multiple choice test in January, and learned he was the first to pass the Welsh language version when he was given the results.\n\nThen he faced his second challenge, raising the rest of the money he needs to pay for the full citizenship application.\n\nFollowing a friend's advice, he set up an internet funding appeal - and within a week had already hit £1,400.\n\n\"The response has been amazing,\" said the Portuguese-language lecturer.\n\n\"It's one thing to be accepted as a citizen but it' a special feeling to be supported by the people of your country.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "President Trump says that when he came to a military hospital near Washington for coronavirus treatment a day ago, he was not feeling well, but now felt much better.\n\nHe said the next few days would be the real test.\n\nRead more: Trump says he is doing well, but next couple of days the 'real test'", "Kenzo was known for his love of graphics and bright colours\n\nThe Japanese founder of popular fashion brand Kenzo has died aged 81, from complications linked to coronavirus.\n\nTributes have poured in from all across the world for Kenzo Takada who died at the American Hospital in Paris.\n\nKnown for his bright graphics, jungle inspired prints and eclectic use of colour, he was the first Japanese designer to gain prominence on the Paris fashion scene.\n\nHe settled in France in the 1960s and spent the rest of his career there.\n\nWith his \"nearly 8,000 designs\", the Japanese designer \"never stopped celebrating fashion and the art of living\", his spokesman said.\n\nParis Mayor Anne Hidalgo paid tribute to him on Twitter: \"Designer of immense talent, he had given colour and light their place in fashion. Paris is now mourning one of its sons.\"\n\n\"I was a fan of the brand in the 1970s when he started. I think he was a great designer,\" fashion news website WWD.com quoted Sidney Toledano, CEO of luxury conglomerate LVMH which owns the Kenzo brand, as saying.\n\nMany Japanese Twitter users posted their condolences on the platform, some of whom shared that their first ever luxury product was one from Kenzo.\n\n\"The first wallet I ever owned was from Kenzo,\" said one Twitter user. \"Even though it's a small thing - I'll always remember it. Rest in Peace.\"\n\n\"I have a Kenzo [outfit] passed down from my mum,\" said another. \"I still wear it.\"\n\nMany others said they owned Kenzo handkerchiefs - an accessory which is still popular in Japan.\n\nBorn in 1939 in Himeji, near the city of Osaka, Kenzo Takada decided to make his way by boat to Paris in 1965, despite hardly speaking any French.\n\nAt first he sold sketches to fashion houses but later decided to strike it out on his own, with a small store called Jungle Jap.\n\n\"I decorated the shop myself with little money,\" Takada told the South China Morning Post newspaper recently, in what was one of his last media interviews. \"One of the first paintings I saw in Paris and fell in love with was a jungle painting... and that was the inspiration for the shop.\"\n\nHis clothes were heavily influenced by Japanese designs. Takada said he didn't want to \"do what French designers were doing\".\n\n\"His native Japan remained [the] source of inspiration for every collection he did. He kept the use of vibrant colours and volumes present at all times,\" said Circe Henestrosa, head of the school of fashion at Singapore's Lasalle College of the Arts.\n\n\"I think he was ahead of his time and was one of the first designers to experiment with the idea of genderless fashion. He would never conform to the stereotypical idea of masculine and feminine fashion,\" said Ms Henestrosa.\n\nKenzo Takada during his autumn-winter 1983-1984 fashion show in Paris\n\nTakada's \"big break\" finally came when fashion magazine Elle put one of his looks on their cover, and when international fashion magazine editors attended his fashion show in 1971, he told SCMP.\n\nThere was controversy over the brand initially, as Takada had called himself and his label \"Jap\" - a term that some in the United States found offensive, which he discovered when he started reaching out to the American market.\n\n\"I knew it had a pejorative meaning,\" he told the New York Times in a 1972 interview. \"But I thought if I did something good, I would change the meaning.\"\n\nTakada rechristened the label with his first name - and thus Kenzo the brand was born.\n\nIt flourished and became an internationally known fashion label, adding a menswear line in 1983 and then more casual sportswear lines Kenzo Jeans and Kenzo Jungle. Kenzo fragrances and eyewear soon followed.\n\nThen, at the height of the brand's success in the 1990s, Takada sold it to LVMH.\n\n\"The hardest year of my life was 1990, when my life partner Xavier died and my business partner had a stroke,\" he told SCMP. \"That's why I sold the company to LVMH [in 1993]. I felt I couldn't do it on my own.\"\n\nHe stayed at the label for a few years and retired from fashion in 1999 at the age of 60.\n\nBut even in his retirement he remained active creatively, designing costumes for opera productions and taking up painting.\n\n\"He was supposed to be in Paris only for two years [but] spent the rest of his life there. He took Paris by storm,\" said Ms Henestrosa.\n\n\"As [fashion journalist] Suzy Menkes said, 'he wanted to make happy clothes'. His work was avant-garde... it is sad when creative minds like Kenzo leave this world.\"", "Shannon and Matthew Steele said staff at Ipswich Hospital provided \"excellent care\"\n\nA nurse who shared her journey of having triplets on social media said her pregnancy \"could've been so different\" if it were not for Covid-19.\n\nShannon Steele, from Ipswich, gave birth to Ronnie, Maddison and Emilia on 24 August after an emergency Caesarean.\n\nShe said what was her first and will be her only pregnancy felt \"stolen\" due to measures in place due to coronavirus.\n\nAs reported, she shared her story on Instagram to help others with fertility battles after her own.\n\nMrs Steele said she felt like her pregnancy was \"stolen\" because there were many things the couple missed out on that first-time soon-to-be parents would normally experience - especially given they will not be having any more children after having triplets.\n\nBut the NHS nurse said her experience at Ipswich Hospital was \"excellent\" and staff there were \"supportive every step of the way\".\n\nShe added: \"They provided excellent care for the babies but took time to ensure I was OK as well as my husband - they are an outstanding group of passionate people.\"\n\nMrs Steele said she did not meet the triplets for two days as she had become \"very poorly\"\n\nMrs Steele started her Instagram feed our.triplets.journey with the aim of helping others going through \"fertility battles\".\n\nShe was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) at the age of 15 and a thyroid condition about three years ago.\n\nShe said she and her 35-year-old husband were \"one step\" away from going down the IVF route.\n\nShe said it was \"almost poetic\" that her husband got to have a lot of \"firsts\" with the babies\n\nThen in March they discovered they were due to have not only one baby but three.\n\nAlthough the wait to get pregnant had been long, when it came to the babies' arrival, she said it was a \"rush to get them out\" at Ipswich Hospital.\n\nOne of the triplets was in \"a lot of distress\" and Mrs Steele herself became \"very poorly\".\n\nRonnie, left, and Maddison, middle, were born two minutes after their sister Emilia\n\n\"I didn't see them for two days after they were born,\" said Mrs Steele.\n\n\"My husband was the first to see and cuddle them.\n\n\"Considering he missed out on the scans and coming to the hospital with me, he got to have a lot of firsts with the babies which was nice and almost poetic.\"\n\nThe triplets were born at almost 33 weeks, Emilia first, with Maddison and Ronnie following two minutes later together.\n\nThey spent four weeks in hospital before, along with their mother, they were able to go home.\n\nMrs Steele shared a photo of her scan on Instagram\n\nThe triplets spent four weeks at Ipswich Hospital before they were able to go home\n\nWhile Mr and Mrs Steele have been enjoying the early days of parenting and establishing a new routine, Mrs Steele said it had been hard for other family members who have not been able to be with them as coronavirus restrictions are still in place.\n\n\"There have been a lot of tears, especially from my mum and sister,\" she said.\n\n\"Not only did they want to see the babies but they wanted to be there to support me.\n\n\"It's been tough for everybody but the services at the hospital were fantastic and made it such a positive experience.\"\n\nAccording to the NHS website, about one in 65 births in the UK are twins, triplets or more.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Samantha Morton starred in I Am Kirsty last year\n\nOscar-nominated British actress Samantha Morton has said she is \"fuming\" about how society treats abused women, like her late mother.\n\nThe star reflected on her difficult childhood, in and out of care homes, and her relationships with her parents for BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.\n\nShe said she \"wouldn't be who I am today\" without her mum Pamela, whom she was unable to live with as a child.\n\n\"But I am fuming at how society behaves around mental health issues for women.\"\n\nShe added: \"My mum had a very, very traumatic childhood. And it's fascinating now as a mother and as a woman growing up to go 'wow'.\"\n\nShe described her mother, whom she said was abused as a child, as \"kind, subservient. vulnerable, funny\" and \"beautiful\", but noted how nobody else had a good word to say about her.\n\n\"She is a saint in a way to me,\" said Morton, who lost her to cancer several years ago.\n\n\"There's something fascinating in what I did get from her from not getting what I thought I wanted from her.\"\n\n\"I was not privy to seeing her when she was very poorly when I was very small with her mental health issues,\" she continued. \"That's what people were rude about and mean about.\n\n\"Women aren't allowed to be angry if they'd been raped or sexually abused - things weren't talked about.\"\n\nMorton pictured here in Cider with Rosie in 2015\n\nMorton was Oscar-nominated in her early 20s for best supporting actress in 2000, for the film Sweet and Lowdown. She was listed again in 2004 for the best actress Oscar for In America, and later won a Bafta - this time as a director on The Unloved in 2010.\n\nShe told Desert Island Discs host Lauren Laverne that as well as being given \"a good hiding\" by her father when she was younger, and being repeatedly expelled from school, she was also sexually abused in a care home.\n\n\"People abused positions of power,\" said the 43-year-old Nottingham actress and director, who apologised on the programme for having \"snapped\" at one point and threatened a bully herself while in one of her riotous care homes.\n\nMorton confirmed she had still been in the care home system when she got her big break as an actress, on Peak Practice, fittingly playing \"a runaway\", she joked.\n\nShe concluded by saying that she has \"absolute forgiveness\" and understanding for everybody who mistreated her, but had not forgotten.\n\n\"I think that people in a professional role have a duty of care, not only to the children that they're looking after, to do their jobs properly,\" she said.\n\n\"And I think a lot of people failed in those jobs in regards to me and many of my friends, my foster siblings, my siblings, and I just wish certain individuals would put their hands up and say, 'Yeah, we were wrong, we could have done better.'\n\n\"But people don't want to admit any liability in the culture that we are now because it's like, people get sued or... what's that gonna achieve?\n\n\"Unless people say, 'We got it wrong, we want to get it right', how are we going to change?\"\n\nSamantha Morton's Desert Island Discs is on Radio 4 at 11:00 BST on Sunday 4 October, after which you can listen back on BBC Sounds.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Boris Johnson spent three nights in intensive care after contracting coronavirus\n\nDominic Raab has said he was \"really worried\" the PM could have died from Covid-19 after he was admitted to intensive care in the spring.\n\nThe foreign secretary stood in for Boris Johnson during his time in intensive care and while he recovered.\n\nSpeaking to the Conservative Party conference, Mr Raab said the virus \"nearly took the life\" of the PM.\n\nMr Raab also said he worried for the PM's fiancee Carrie Symonds but \"always had faith\" he would \"pull through\".\n\nMr Johnson spent three nights in intensive care at London's St Thomas' Hospital in April after contracting coronavirus.\n\nSpeaking about his experience after leaving hospital, the PM said it \"could have gone either way\" and thanked healthcare workers for saving his life.\n\nMr Raab told the virtual conference that coronavirus had \"hit us hard, taking lives on a tragic scale\".\n\n\"It nearly took the life of our prime minister, our friend as well as our leader.\n\n\"I get asked a lot how I felt, when I covered for him.\n\n\"Well, I really worried we might lose him, and I was worried for Carrie (Symonds), pregnant with baby Wilf.\n\n\"But I always had faith that with the outstanding NHS care he received and his fighting spirit, he'd pull through.\"\n\nAdmitting there would be \"lessons to be learnt\" following the government's handling of the crisis, the foreign secretary added: \"I have to say, for every hurdle we faced, with every heart-rending loss, there was also a tale of courage, a moment of inspiration.\"\n\nDominic Raab stepped in for the prime minister during his sickness\n\nMr Raab also spoke about the prospect of a post-Brexit trade deal between the UK and the EU.\n\nThe UK and the EU have pledged to \"work intensively\" in order to resolve their differences and reach a deal.\n\nBut Mr Raab said that although the government wanted a free trade deal with the EU, \"any deal must be fair\".\n\n\"The days of being held over a barrel by Brussels… are long gone,\" the foreign secretary said.\n\nHe added there was \"no question the government will control our fisheries\".\n\nBoth sides have been calling on the other to compromise on key issues, which include fishing and government subsidies.\n\nAlso speaking at the conference, Michael Gove outlined the government's plans to move more Civil Service jobs outside of London - part of its \"levelling up\" agenda to spread investment and opportunity beyond London and south-east England.\n\nThe Cabinet Office minister said \"far too many government jobs\" were based in Westminster and Whitehall.\n\nMr Gove added: \"We have an amazing Civil Service and it has drawn its resources and people from lots of different communities - I think we now need to give back to those communities as well.\"\n\nPlans to open a second headquarters in Leeds were also announced.\n\nThe new headquarters will provide the party with \"a base at the heart of the blue wall\", party co-chairman Amanda Milling said, referring to the northern constituencies who voted for the party for the first time at the general election in December.", "Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen spoke via video conference on Saturday\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have \"agreed the importance\" of finding a post-Brexit trade deal, Downing Street has said.\n\nThey agreed progress has been made in talks between the EU and UK but \"significant gaps\" remain, No 10 said.\n\nBoth have instructed their chief negotiators to \"work intensively\" in order to try to bridge those gaps.\n\nNegotiations between the UK and EU broke up on Friday without agreement.\n\nBoth sides are calling on the other to compromise on key issues, including fishing and government subsidies.\n\nMr Johnson and Mrs von der Leyen spoke during a phone call on Saturday and agreed to speak on a regular basis.\n\nA Downing Street spokesperson said the two had agreed on the importance of finding an agreement \"as a strong basis for a strategic EU-UK relationship in future.\"\n\nThe UK's chief negotiator, Lord Frost, tweeted that work to resolve differences between the UK and EU \"begins as soon as we can next week\".\n\nSpeaking earlier, while on a visit to Leeds, Mr Johnson said he wants a deal like one struck between the EU and Canada, but reiterated the UK was ready should it have to leave without a deal.\n\n\"We're resolved on either course, we're prepared for either course and we'll make it work but it's very much up to our friends and partners,\" Mr Johnson said.\n\nIt comes after Mrs von der Leyen called for talks to \"intensify\", as both sides set an October deadline to settle their differences.\n\nThe significance of today's call between Boris Johnson and the head of the EU commission is that both sides have agreed to keep talking.\n\nAlthough formal negotiations ended yesterday without agreement, instead of throwing in the sponge - as Boris Johnson would put it - talks will now intensify.\n\nBut a Downing Street statement made clear that while there are notable (and well-known) differences over fishing rights and subsidies to businesses, these aren't the only issues that need to be solved.\n\nThere is the potential to compromise - for example, on phasing in new fishing arrangements and on having state aid provisions similar to other free trade agreements - but it's not clear the political willingness is yet there on both sides.\n\nThe EU has to satisfy the demands of 27 different states.\n\nAnd Boris Johnson has to convince Brexit-supporting backbenchers that he hasn't sold out.\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab aimed to reassure them by stating today that the days of being \"held over a barrel\" by Brussels are long gone.\n\nAsked about potential compromises that could be made, Mr Johnson said: \"The balance of trade is overwhelmingly on the side of the EU in the sense that they export much more to us than we do to them, certainly in manufacturing goods, and so we think there is a big opportunity for both sides to do well.\"\n\nHe pointed out that Canada is \"some way away\" but had managed to strike a deal with the EU while the UK remained the bloc's biggest trading partner.\n\nBut he acknowledged a no-deal outcome where the UK would follow mainly World Trade Organization rules on trade with the EU was possible and would \"work very well\" - describing it as an Australia-style arrangement.\n\nSpeaking at the virtual Conservative Party conference, Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove said the talks with the EU had been \"a tough process\" but \"with goodwill we should be able to get a deal\".\n\nHe added: \"Recognising that we share the same high environmental and workforce standards as they do, but we want to do things in our own way, is a bit difficult for them and also there is the very vexed issue to do with fisheries.\"\n\nHowever, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told the conference the \"days of being held over a barrel by Brussels are long gone\", as he stressed any trade deal must be \"fair\".\n\nThe EU wants access to UK fishing grounds for its boats and says reaching a \"fair deal\" is a pre-condition of a deal, while the UK says they should be \"first and foremost for British boats\".\n\nThe prime minister has set the deadline of the EU Council meeting on 15 October for securing a deal.\n\nAfter six months of trade talks with the EU, Lord Frost has claimed the outlines of an agreement are visible, but he warned that, without further compromise from the EU, differences over the contentious topic of fishing may be impossible to bridge.\n\nHe described the final round of negotiations as \"constructive\" but \"familiar differences remain\".\n\nOn fishing, the gap was \"unfortunately very large\" and he called for the EU to \"move further before an understanding can be reached\" on state aid.\n\nHis EU counterpart, Michel Barnier, agreed the negotiations had been conducted in a \"constructive and respectful atmosphere\", with some \"positive new developments on some topics\" - such as aviation safety and police co-operation.\n\nBut he said there was \"a lack of progress on some important topics\", such as climate change commitments, \"as well as persistent serious divergences on matters of major importance for the European Union\", including state aid and fishing.\n\nThe UK formally left the EU in January, but entered a transition period - where the UK has kept to EU trading rules and remained inside its customs union and single market - to allow the two sides to negotiate a trade deal.\n\nFormal talks began in March and continued throughout the pandemic, but there have been concerns over whether a plan would be agreed before that period runs out on 31 December.\n\nIssues that have become particular sticking points between negotiators are state aid - where governments give financial support to businesses - and fishing rules.\n\nThe EU has said a deal must be reached before the end of October to allow it to be signed off by the member states before the end of the year, while Mr Johnson has said both sides should \"move on\" if agreement was not reached by the middle of the month.\n\nIf a deal is not done, the UK will go on to trade with the bloc on World Trade Organization rules.", "The executive is actively considering \"additional planned interventions\" to deal with the spread of Covid-19, the health minister has said.\n\nRobin Swann said he did not \"want a return to a long-term or indefinite lockdown\".\n\nMeanwhile public health experts in the Republic of Ireland have recommended the highest level of restrictions be applied to the entire country.\n\nIt is expected politicians will meet the chief medical officer on Monday.\n\nA further 462 cases of Covid-19 were announced by the Department of Health on Sunday.\n\nOne person has died in the past 24 hours after testing positive.\n\nThere are 65 people in hospital after testing positive for the virus, of whom nine are in intensive care.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland, 364 new Covid-19 cases were recorded on Sunday, with no new deaths reported.\n\nDeputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill said \"any notion of a circuit breaker only works if it's across the Island of Ireland\".\n\nThe executive's Chief Scientific Advisor, Prof Ian Young, said \"other levers are likely to be needed\" in addition to NI-wide restrictions on household gatherings.\n\nIn a statement issued on Sunday evening, he said the hospitality sector was the \"second most important\" for interventions \"to reduce adult contacts\".\n\nHe said contacts in this sector \"tend to be closer and longer\" than in many other settings, while alcohol consumption \"will also be a factor in failure to comply with social distancing\".\n\nProf Young added there had been a \"number of identified clusters associated with the hospitality sector\", however, minister will have to weigh up measures \"while also seeking to mitigate adverse consequences for society and the economy\".\n\nEarlier, Stormont Finance Minister Conor Murphy told BBC's Sunday Politics that \"all options\" would be discussed when the executive meet on Monday.\n\nFinance Minister Conor Murphy said \"all options\" would be considered by the executive\n\nMeanwhile, a 46-year-old woman has been charged with breaching coronavirus regulations in Strabane.\n\nThe woman is the first person in Northern Ireland to be charged under the new legislation.\n\nShe is due appear at Londonderry Magistrates' Court on Monday.\n\nMr Murphy said he was \"concerned\" about the rising cases, adding \"as are all of the executive\".\n\n\"The primary focus of the executive is to protect life and whatever steps have to be taken we will take them,\" he said.\n\n\"We have to take a balanced view and one which we are sure the population will come along with us.\"\n\nRobin Swann said NI's hospitals were \"already under growing pressure and this will intensify in the coming weeks given the extent of the new cases\".\n\n\"Concrete action has been taken by the executive on a number of fronts and I will not hesitate to recommend further restrictions,\" he continued.\n\n\"Saving lives and protecting our health service must come first.\"\n\nThe health minister also urged people not to \"look for loopholes or grey areas in the regulations\".\n\nNew restrictions for the Derry City and Strabane Council area were announced by the Stormont executive on Thursday in an effort to stem spiralling infection numbers.\n\nThey include hospitality businesses being limited to takeaway, delivery and outdoor dining, and a call to avoid unnecessary travel.\n\nSpeaking about the rise in cases across NI, Dr Gerry Waldron of the Public Health Agency said a circuit-breaker lockdown was \"almost inevitable\".\n\nA circuit breaker is a short, sharp period of tightened restrictions for everyone to curb the spread of coronavirus.\n\n\"It's not a place we expected to be at this time of the year, at the beginning of October, we thought, if anything, we might be seeing that maybe middle of October,\" he told Radio Ulster's Sunday with Steven Rainey show.\n\n\"We are absolutely insisting that people follow the advice of maintaining a social distance from other individuals, as far as possible, of two metres.\n\n\"We'll just have to brace ourselves and see how things pan out over the next few days and the next week.\"\n\nHe stressed the need to stick to the basics - keep a social distance, wear a face mask and keep washing your hands.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"It's going to continue to be bumpy through to Christmas\"\n\nSpeaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr show, Boris Johnson urged people to behave \"fearlessly but with common sense\" in their approach to the coronavirus.\n\nThe prime minister warned of a \"bumpy ride\" until Christmas and beyond, saying the winter could be \"very tough\" for everyone.\n\nHe added there had to be a balance between saving lives and protecting the economy.", "With a month to go before the presidential election, voters around the US are digesting the news that President Donald Trump is infected with Covid-19.\n\nMr Trump is currently experiencing mild symptoms - but aged 74 and within the clinical definition of obesity, he has risk factors that raise his chance of having a severe reaction.\n\nWe asked some older members of the BBC voter panel how they felt when they heard the news.\n\nMark Falbo is a retired higher education administrator who recently moved to Windham, Maine. He is a Democrat voting for Joe Biden.\n\nI am very concerned when anyone gets a diagnosis of being Covid positive - being someone my age and my size, I know how bad that can be for them, so I'm hoping that the president and first lady, and all those who may have been exposed, will recover well.\n\nI'm also hoping that it will create an area of seriousness around the president about this, because this still is a very dangerous situation and hopefully [this will be] his way of having to learn how leaders need to respond to threats to their population.\n\nI don't think he underestimated the crisis - it's pretty clear that he was aware of the threat. I personally think he mismanaged. And I think that's been a huge disservice to not simply Americans, but to the world.\n\nHere in Maine, we are pretty sensitive about Covid-19 and I'm fortunate to be in a state where the governor and our CDC director has taken this very seriously, with the exception of some silly activities by a few families.\n\nLaura Powers is a materials scientist from Wilmot, Wisconsin. She identifies as Independent and will vote for Joe Biden.\n\nWhen I woke up this morning and listened to the news, and heard that he had tested positive, my first thought was that maybe this is a wake-up call to his followers who think that this is all a hoax.\n\nMy second thought was that unless he has symptoms that are a little more severe - and I don't wish that on anyone including him and Melania - he's going to pull out and broadcast to his followers that Covid-19 is nothing to worry about, and even at his age he got through it.\n\nI have been extremely careful and I do take the health situation very seriously. I don't have underlying conditions but I know many people who do. I worry about people who are not, and I think that this will be a wake-up call. But as I said, I think that if [Trump has only a mild case], he will convince his followers that Covid has been blown out of proportion by the media.\n\nKathleen McClellan from Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, is a Republican voting for Donald Trump.\n\nI'm very sorry that [Donald and Melania Trump] caught the infection. I hope they do well. But my brother also caught it and he said he's had flus that felt worse. So, I know that it varies quite a bit. But I think that's just the way a virus works - it has to infect a certain number of people before it's going to go away.\n\nI don't think he's underestimated the crisis. I think he's in a position where he has seen people die, but he has a different philosophy, where you push forward. It's an individual decision for each person and I don't think anybody really knows that much about the virus. But it seems like at this point in time we may need to just get on with our lives, protect people who are especially vulnerable.\n\nIt's just a reminder that [Covid-19] is not something anyone should take for granted. But you can't be paranoid. It's not like back in April, when a complete shutdown made sense because we didn't know what we were dealing with.\n\nEric Scholl, 65, is a media coordinator from Tulsa, Oklahoma. He voted for Trump in 2016, but will vote for Joe Biden this year.\n\nCovid is not a Republican issue, it's not a United States issue, it's a global health issue. Unfortunately, and I do mean very unfortunately, the president never [listened to] the medical experts, let alone the fact that he totally blew off first protecting the country. So, it's sad - I'm just very sad for him and his wife and I hope they recover, but that's not gonna change who I vote for.\n\nI respect that there will be a small percentage [of the population] that will be more proactive in protecting themselves [after the president got the virus]. But here where I live in Oklahoma, the attitude is \"Hey I'm bulletproof. It's not going to affect me.\"\n\nThe president has greatly underestimated the power of Covid-19.\n\nJim Hurson from the San Francisco Bay Area in California is a Republican voting for Donald Trump.\n\nMy first reaction was, obviously, I thought it's very unfortunate. My second reaction is wondering what his opposition is going to do, to try and leverage this into making him look bad again. I think for sure they will play a game of \"we told you so\".\n\nWe have to remember that we have the benefit of hindsight.\n\nIf you listen to purely health oriented people, they want to make things as safe as they can from the standpoint of virology. But the president also has to deal with the consequences of disastrous economic fallout, what are the mental health problems of sequestering people in their homes... what is the society as a whole going to suffer from, and the government spending money that it frankly does not have?\n\nIt's an incredibly complicated situation when you look at it from a national standpoint. Given that, I don't think anybody could have done any better.\n\nIf you don't assume that the government can solve all of this, and you look at individuals and say how they are behaving, we're all going through this nicely.\n\nAre you an American voter? Join Jim, Kathleen, Mark, Eric and Laura on our US election voter panel.\n\nUse this form to get in touch.\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your response.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"It's going to continue to be bumpy through to Christmas\"\n\nBoris Johnson has warned it may be \"bumpy through to Christmas\" and beyond as the UK deals with coronavirus.\n\nSpeaking to the BBC's Andrew Marr, the PM said there was \"hope\" in beating Covid, and called on the public to \"act fearlessly but with common sense\".\n\nHe said the government was taking a \"balanced\" approach between saving lives and protecting the economy.\n\nIt comes as a further 22,961 UK cases are reported, as previously unreported cases are added amid a technical issue.\n\nPublic Health England said an investigation into a technical glitch with the government's coronavirus dashboard identified 15,841 cases which were not included in the daily reports between 25 September and 2 October.\n\nIt said more than 75% of those cases - 11,968 - should have been reported between 30 September and 2 October.\n\n\"Every one of these cases received their Covid-19 test result as normal and all those who tested positive were advised to self-isolate,\" Public Health England's interim chief executive Michael Brodie said.\n\n\"NHS Test and Trace and PHE have worked to quickly resolve the issue and transferred all outstanding cases immediately into the NHS Test and Trace contact tracing system.\"\n\nThe prime minister said: \"The best thing we can do now for all those who have suffered in the course of this pandemic is bring it to an end in the speediest possible way.\"\n\nMr Johnson said he believed over the \"next few weeks and months\" the \"scientific equation will change whether that is vaccines or testing\" and there will be \"progress\" in beating the virus.\n\nAs a result, he said there was \"hope\" and \"things can be significantly different by Christmas\", as well as being \"radically different\" by spring.\n\nBut, the prime minister warned there could be \"a very tough winter for all of us\", adding: \"I tell you in all candour, it will continue to be bumpy through to Christmas and may even be bumpy beyond.\"\n\nLabour's shadow health minister, Alex Norris, criticised the interview as a \"wasted opportunity\" to set out a \"serious strategy to improve public confidence in the government's handling of this crisis\".\n\nHe said: \"Instead [the PM] waffled and ducked every question. His serial incompetence is holding Britain back.\"\n\nLabour has been a long-standing critic of the performance of the Test and Trace system, with its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, accusing the government of having \"lost control\" of the virus.\n\nMr Johnson said the system was \"not perfect\" and that he was \"frustrated with it\".\n\nBut he defended its \"massive increase in capacity\", saying it had \"made a huge difference\" in tackling Covid-19.\n\nIs Boris Johnson optimistic or pessimistic about the fight against Covid? He seems to be a bit of both.\n\nThe prime minister's prediction for the next few months is gloomy - winter will be \"bumpy\".\n\nRestrictions of varying degrees could be with us for months.\n\nBut at the same time, he is urging people to be fearless if they use common sense - and believes a \"radically different\" spring is around the corner.\n\nThe short-term forecast is downbeat. But the PM wants to retain hope that things could improve again in the not so distant future.\n\nMr Johnson also stood by the Eat Out to Help Out restaurant discount introduced in August, which some critics have said added to the rise in coronavirus cases in September.\n\n\"In so far as that scheme may have helped to spread the virus then obviously we need to counteract that and we need to counteract that with the discipline and the measures that we're proposing,\" he said.\n\nBut he insisted it was \"right to reopen the economy\" as the government tries to \"strike the right balance\".\n\nMr Johnson said he took \"full responsibility for everything that has happened since the pandemic began\".\n\nAsked about how effective the latest local lockdowns were in tackling the growing number of cases, the prime minister said it was \"too early to say\".\n\nMr Johnson said he understood the \"frustrations\" of people living in the affected areas - as well as a number of his own backbench MPs - but defended the action, saying: \"I'm a freedom-loving Tory. I don't want to have to impose measures like this, are you crazy?\n\n\"This is the last thing we want to do. But I also have to save life. And that's our priority.\"\n\n\"And I also think, by the way, that's the priority of the British people and I think they will want to see their government continue to work, continuing to fight the virus and that's what we're doing.\"\n\nLabour's shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth earlier called for the government to publish guidelines on what criteria they used to impose local lockdowns, and to involve local council leaders and health officials.\n\nHe said there were questions as to why current areas have extra restrictions, while the constituencies of cabinet ministers with higher case numbers remained unchanged.\n\n\"Because there are no clear guidelines as to why an area goes into restrictions, and how an area comes out of restrictions, then there is a suspicion that there is political interference,\" he told Andrew Marr.\n\n\"I hope there isn't. But until the government publish clear guidelines, that suspicion will always linger.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Andrew Marr challenged the PM over his comments about people becoming \"complacent\" over Covid-19\n\nMr Johnson was also asked about his health following his own experience of fighting coronavirus in March and April - and in light of US President Donald Trump testing positive.\n\nThe prime minister said when he had the virus he was \"too fat\" and it was a \"teachable moment for our great country\" to get on top of the issue of obesity.\n\nBut he claimed it was \"balderdash\" that he was still suffering from the effects of coronavirus, known as \"long Covid\".\n\nHe said the claim was \"drivel\", adding: \"It is balderdash and nonsense. I can tell you I'm fitter than several butchers' dogs.\"\n\nThe Conservatives are currently holding their first virtual party conference due to coronavirus restrictions on mass gatherings.", "Nottingham has consistently recorded one of the highest infection rates in England\n\nNottingham and parts of the surrounding county will move into the top tier of Covid restrictions, it has been confirmed.\n\nPeople living in the city, along with Rushcliffe, Gedling and Broxtowe, face the toughest restrictions.\n\nThe measures come into force at one minute past midnight on Thursday and will expire after 28 days.\n\nIt comes after the city consistently recorded one of the highest infection rates in the country.\n\nAbout eight million people in England will be living in the tier three - \"very high\" alert level by the end of the week.\n\nThis means pubs that do not serve substantial meals have to close, and there are further restrictions on households mixing.\n\nThe affected parts of Nottinghamshire join Liverpool City Region, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, South Yorkshire and Warrington in the highest tier.\n\nDetails of the lockdown will be formally announced on Tuesday, but in a joint statement local councils said the measures \"have been agreed to achieve a sustained reduction in infection rates\" and to \"protect our vulnerable residents, the NHS and social care services\".\n\nResidents and businesses who are affected will receive \"a package of support similar to those secured in other parts of the country\".\n\nThough it did have the highest figures in the UK earlier this month, Nottingham's seven-day rate of infection has dropped again, according to the latest data.\n\nThe city had the 24th highest rate of infection per 100,000 people in England, at 443.7, in the week up to the 23 October, down from 677.4 the previous week.\n\nIt is still the highest in the county, but the surrounding boroughs are all seeing an increase, with Broxtowe's infection rate having risen from 310.4 to 342.9, Gedling's up from 373.2 to 418.2 and Rushcliffe rising from 359.1 to 393.5.\n\nDavid Mellen, leader of Nottingham City Council, appealed to residents to \"work together\" and stick to \"very difficult\" restrictions.\n\nThough the seven-day infection rate for the city has dropped steadily after being the highest in the UK earlier this month, he said there were still concerns over rising rates among older age groups and hospital occupancy levels.\n\n\"We've got a growing number of people, way over 200 people, in our hospitals with Covid, and an increasing number in [intensive care units], so we are concerned about those numbers,\" he told BBC Radio Nottingham.\n\n\"Obviously we had many people die in Nottingham [and] Nottinghamshire earlier in the year and we don't want to add to that number with many more deaths as a result of this.\"\n\nMr Mellen also said the level of financial support from the government - which is to cover additional track and trace costs, enforcement and extra support to affected businesses - is \"not enough\".\n\nHe said he did not feel Nottingham had been \"fully funded by the government, and we do believe that if we do a really good job on track and trace, which is absolutely necessary, it will cost us more than what is being offered\".\n\n\"We tried to argue for more money, but the kind of formula that's been applied in four other [local] authority areas wasn't going to be changed for Nottingham and Nottinghamshire.\"\n\nJason Weston from Ye Olde Salutation Inn said it was \"looking very, very dark\" for the pub\n\nNottingham South MP Lilian Greenwood criticised the government for what she said was \"woeful\" communication over the move into the toughest restrictions.\n\n\"It's more than a week since Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock said they were talking to [Nottinghamshire] about going into tier three, yet talks didn't even begin until Thursday and MPs weren't even briefed until Friday,\" she tweeted.\n\nJason Weston, who runs Ye Olde Salutation Inn in the centre of Nottingham, said he will not have to close because the pub serves meals, but with capacity already down to 20% of what it was in summer because of the 22:00 curfew he said it was \"almost irrelevant\" whether they were allowed to open or not.\n\n\"I'm very worried,\" he said.\n\n\"We're watching the bank balance go down week by week - it's looking very, very dark.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.", "A former paratrooper has attempted to break two world records after jumping from an aircraft into the sea.\n\nJohn Bream, 34, nicknamed \"the Flying Fish\", dropped about 130ft (40m) from a helicopter off Hayling Island on the Hampshire coast.\n\nSupport divers said he was briefly unconscious when he hit the water and was taken to hospital as a precaution.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The stowaways had posed \"a clear threat to life on the ship\", the Defence Secretary said\n\nSeven people have been arrested on suspicion of seizing control of an oil tanker, police have said.\n\nThe men were detained when military forces stormed the Nave Andromeda which was thought to have been hijacked off the Isle of Wight on Sunday night.\n\nSixteen members of the Special Boat Service (SBS) ended a 10-hour stand-off which started when stowaways on board the ship reportedly became violent.\n\nDefence Secretary Ben Wallace said there had been a \"threat to life\".\n\nHampshire Constabulary said the seven men were being held on suspicion of \"seizing or exercising control of a ship by use of threats or force under Sections 9(1) and (3) of the Aviation and Maritime and Security Act 1990\".\n\n\"All 22 crew members are safe and well and the vessel is now alongside in the port of Southampton,\" a spokesman said.\n\nInvestigators are now speaking to the ship's crew to establish what happened.\n\nThe Nave Andromeda docked in Southampton after seven people were detained by military forces\n\nThe stowaways, believed to be Nigerians, were handed over to Hampshire police on Sunday night.\n\nMr Wallace said: \"What was emerging was a clear threat to life on the ship and at that point the police made representation to the Ministry of Defence that they didn't have the capability to do what was needed in these challenging circumstances.\n\n\"We were under the awareness that the suspects were also threatening to do something with the ship.\n\n\"If they were threatening to take control of the ship then, of course, that is a hijack and the threat to the environment and, more importantly, to the lives of people on the ship is something the state can't tolerate.\"\n\nThe nine-minute operation took place during darkness\n\nBBC defence correspondent Jonathan Beale said British forces descended on to the vessel by rope from four Royal Navy helicopters after nightfall.\n\n\"The seven stowaways - believed to be Nigerians seeking asylum in the UK - were detained and handed over to Hampshire Police,\" he said.\n\nFormer Royal Navy officer Rear Adm Chris Parry said the operation to take control of the ship was over in \"under nine minutes\".\n\nHe said; \"From the time the helicopters went in and the SBS roped on to the ship, they rounded up the people pretty quickly.\n\n\"I think the stowaways themselves accepted this was probably the end of the journey for them and there probably wasn't any point in resisting heavily armed men approaching them.\"\n\nNavios Tanker Management, operator of the crude oil tanker, said the master of the Liberian-registered vessel became concerned for the safety of the crew \"due to the increasingly hostile behaviour of the stowaways\" who had \"illegally boarded\" in Lagos, Nigeria.\n\nIn a statement released on Monday, the company thanked the UK authorities for their \"timely and professional response\".\n\n\"Navios would also like to pay tribute to the master of the Nave Andromeda for his exemplary response and calmness and to all the crew for their fortitude in a difficult situation,\" it added.\n\nThe operation by Special Boat Service commandos is exactly what this elite and secretive unit trains intensively for.\n\nThe SBS, headquartered at Poole in Dorset, is less well-known than its Hereford-based counterpart, the Special Air Service (SAS), but both units have been called on over the years for delicate counter-terrorism and hostage rescue missions, often in arduous conditions.\n\n\"Fast-roping\" down from helicopters at sea and at night can be fraught with dangers but it often results in taking assailants by surprise - this operation took just nine minutes.\n\nIt would not have been possible though, if the crew had not followed a maritime drill enshrined in the manual called BMP5 - Best Management Practice 5th edition.\n\nWithdrawing to the ship's strong room known as \"the citadel\" and locking themselves inside meant they were able to call for assistance from a secure space.\n\nIn most cases of maritime piracy off Somalia hostage rescues were only ever undertaken if all the crew were safely inside the citadel.\n\nThe Ministry of Defence called the incident a \"suspected hijacking\" and said Mr Wallace and Home Secretary Priti Patel had authorised the operation in response to the police request.\n\nMrs Patel tweeted she was \"thankful for the quick and decisive action of our police and armed forces who were able to bring this situation under control, guaranteeing the safety of all those on board\".\n\nMr Beale said along with the SBS squad, a team of Royal Navy divers was deployed in one of the Royal Navy helicopters in case the vessel had been mined - but it had not.\n\nMr Beale said a defence source confirmed the master of the ship was on the bridge and in control of the vessel at all times, while the rest of the crew was locked away safely in a secure area.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Footage of the oil tanker situated off the Isle of Wight\n\nThe 748ft-long (228m) ship left Lagos on 5 October bound for Southampton.\n\nAs it approached the Isle of Wight on Sunday morning it was reported that seven stowaways on board had become violent.\n\nConcerns over the crew's welfare were raised at 10:04 GMT when the vessel was six miles off Bembridge, police said.\n\nThe 22 crew members locked themselves in the ship's citadel - secure area - and were safe.\n\nA three-mile exclusion zone was put in place around the vessel.\n\nTobias Ellwood, chairman of the Commons Defence Committee, said the boarding of the tanker was a \"good outcome\".\n\nHe said: \"Seven stowaways on board taking over a ship or causing the ship not to be in full command would have triggered a multi-agency alarm and then well-rehearsed classified protocols were then put into action.\"\n\nBob Sanguinetti, chief executive of the UK Chamber of Shipping, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"Nothing at this stage suggests that this was hijacking and in fact hijacking of this nature is extremely uncommon.\"\n\nIn December 2018, four stowaways were detained after they ran amok on a container ship in the Thames Estuary.\n\nThe men, from Nigeria and Liberia, waved metal poles and threw faeces and urine after being found hiding on the Grande Tema.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Mohammed Agha told the inquiry he had worked at more than 30 concerts at the arena\n\nSuicide bomber Salman Abedi was smiling as he walked to his death and murdered 22 bystanders by detonating his home-made bomb, a public inquiry has heard.\n\nAbedi, 22, was on his mobile phone as he made his \"final walk\" after waiting for crowds to emerge at the end of a concert at Manchester Arena in 2017.\n\nSeconds later he detonated his device packed with 3,000 nuts and bolts.\n\nShowsec security guard Mohammed Agha told the inquiry he was not initially suspicious of Abedi.\n\nMr Agha had seen Abedi outside the Ariana Grande concert on 22 May 2017, dressed in black and carrying a big, bulky rucksack, three times earlier that night, but he did not think him suspicious until minutes before the bombing when he agreed it \"crossed his mind\" Abedi might be a suicide bomber.\n\nHe denied he \"fobbed off\" a member of the public, Christopher Wild, who came to him to report his suspicions about Abedi at about 22:15 BST.\n\nFifteen minutes later Abedi left his position at the back of the City Room, a CCTV \"blind spot\", to detonate his device.\n\nPaul Greaney QC, counsel to the inquiry said: \"How did the man seem to be at that stage as he made that final walk?\"\n\nMr Agha replied: \"He was on the phone, mobile phone, he was smiling.\"\n\nMr Agha said he had passed on Mr Wild's comments about Abedi to a colleague, Kyle Lawler, at 22:25, some eight minutes after Mr Wild had first raised his concerns.\n\nTop row (left to right): Alison Howe, Martyn Hett, Lisa Lees, Courtney Boyle, Eilidh MacLeod, Elaine McIver, Georgina Callander, Jane Tweddle - Middle row (left to right): John Atkinson, Kelly Brewster, Liam Curry, Chloe Rutherford, Marcin Klis, Angelika Klis, Megan Hurley, Michelle Kiss - Bottom row (left to right): Nell Jones, Olivia Campbell-Hardy, Philip Tron, Saffie-Rose Roussos, Sorrell Leczkowski, Wendy Fawell\n\nMr Agha, aged 19 at the time and being paid the minimum wage of £7.90 an hour, said that night his job was to stand by a fire exit.\n\nHe had no radio and said if he left his post, except for an emergency, he might lose his job.\n\nFamilies of some of the victims wiped away tears and others shook their heads as the witness continued his evidence.\n\nMr Agha said he tried but failed to attract the attention of his boss, standing 30 metres away across the room, by raising his hand.\n\nWhen Mr Lawler passed by him, he spoke to the fellow Showsec steward, who had a radio, in order to report what Mr Wild had said to his superiors in the control room.\n\nAs he and Mr Lawler looked at Abedi, he described the bomber as, \"kind of looking nervous, or kind of looking fidgety. He was playing with his hands\".\n\nMr Greaney asked the witness if he thought one possibility was that the suspicious man with the backpack might be a suicide bomber.\n\nMr Agha replied: \"Not, not like, I did think about it, but it was not fully in my head.\"\n\nMr Greaney continued: \"Do you agree, it did cross your mind that this man might be a bomber?\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Emiliano Sala died when his plane crashed into the English Channel in January 2019\n\nA man has appeared in court charged with offences related to a plane crash which killed footballer Emiliano Sala.\n\nThe plane carrying 28-year-old Sala and pilot David Ibbotson crashed into the English Channel in January 2019.\n\nDavid Henderson, 66, of the East Riding of Yorkshire, appeared via video link at Cardiff Crown Court on Monday.\n\nMr Henderson denies endangering the safety of an aircraft and attempting to discharge a passenger without valid permission or authorisation.\n\nMr Henderson is alleged to have arranged the flight of 21 January 2019, which was bringing the striker from Nantes in France to Cardiff, when it crashed into the English Channel near Guernsey.\n\nOn Monday, the court heard how Mr Ibbotson was not licensed to fly an aircraft commercially, and a rating to enable him to fly the Piper Malibu aircraft had expired months before the crash.\n\nThe Air Accidents Investigations Branch (AAIB) reported at the start of the year that the plane had been leaking carbon monoxide during the flight and a final manoeuvre by Mr Ibbotson to pull up the plane had caused it to break up mid-air.\n\nLast week the senior coroner for Dorset, Rachael Griffin, said the full jury inquest - which had been scheduled to take place in March 2021 - would now be adjourned until the conclusion of Mr Henderson's trial.\n\nDefence counsel Stephen Spence questioned whether Cardiff was an \"appropriate venue\" for the trial, given the level of support for Cardiff City FC in the area.\n\nHe added it would be \"unsatisfactory to have anyone on the jury who's a fan\".\n\nJudge Tracey Lloyd Clark asked that any application for a change of trial venue should be submitted by 23 November.\n\nMr Henderson, who denies all charges, was granted bail and will go on trial on 18 October 2021.", "Students are rallying again in Minsk, backing the opposition\n\nGroups of workers and students in Belarus have heeded a nationwide strike call by exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, to press for the president's resignation.\n\nWorkers at some state-run plants downed tools and chanted slogans outside the gates.\n\nHundreds of students also marched out of several universities in Minsk clapping, chanting and linking arms.\n\nHowever, the government says key enterprises are still running smoothly.\n\nPresident Alexander Lukashenko ignored the opposition's midnight deadline for him to step down. Protests have gripped Belarus since he claimed victory in an August poll widely viewed as rigged.\n\nThe interior ministry says police arrested 523 people during mass anti-government demonstrations on Sunday, 352 of whom are still in custody.\n\nOn Monday, at least 155 people were arrested for supporting the strike action in Minsk, Borisov, Brest, Grodno, Mogilev and Novopolotsk, human rights group Vesna reports.\n\nThe full scale of the protests on Monday is not yet clear, partly because of the authorities' media restrictions.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police targeted protesters with stun grenades and raided flats in October 2020\n\nVideos posted to independent media site Tut.by show empty factories and students walking out of their universities.\n\nA source in Minsk following the protests told the BBC that the strike was affecting some major state enterprises, including the Grodno Azot chemical plant and Minsk Tractor Plant, but they had not been brought to a standstill.\n\nDozens of shops, cafes and restaurants are closed in Belarus, in solidarity with the strike. Many other small businesses are also supporting the strike, our source says. But big supermarkets and public transport are still running normally.\n\nThousands of pensioners walked through central Minsk, eventually merging with a procession of students. Pensioners have held protest rallies every Monday. Students have also been very active, despite threats of expulsion.\n\nEarlier an estimated 100,000 demonstrators marched for the 11th successive Sunday of protests. Many waved the opposition's red and white flags and chanted \"strike\" as they marched.\n\nAccording to Russian news agencies, citing their correspondents at the scene, at least 10 stun grenades went off. There were also reports that riot police had fired rubber bullets.\n\nSecurity forces also blocked roads in central Minsk and water cannon were put in place.\n\nBelarusian police blocked roads in central Minsk as tens of thousands of protesters marched on Sunday\n\nMs Tikhanovskaya issued her ultimatum on 13 October, threatening a mass walkout by workers if Mr Lukashenko - who has ruled Belarus for 26 years - ignored their demands.\n\nShe said that Belarus had \"had enough\" after two months of \"political crisis, violence and lawlessness\".\n\nShe issued three demands from a location in Lithuania, where she has been in exile since August. In addition to Mr Lukashenko's resignation, she demanded an immediate end to police brutality and the release of all political prisoners.\n\nEarlier anti-Lukashenko protests at state enterprises, in support of the opposition, were not sustained. There are reports of workers being warned they will lose their jobs if they go on strike.\n\nThe BBC's source in Minsk says fear is widespread, after many protesters were beaten up and tortured by police. It is common for masked men with batons to grab protesters, drag them into unmarked vans and drive off.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Mass arrests in September as crowds chant 'go away' to Belarus president", "Deserted High Streets and home working are stifling the British job market's recovery, new research suggests.\n\nUrban areas in Scotland and southern England have seen the biggest declines in job postings, according to the Centre for Cities (CfC) think tank.\n\nVacancies have failed to return to pre-pandemic levels across all 63 towns and cities it analysed across the UK.\n\nCfC boss Andrew Carter said local lockdowns, while necessary, will exacerbate the situation over winter.\n\nThe slow jobs recovery is linked to a \"collapse\" in the number of jobs in services being advertised, CfC said.\n\nAberdeen, where the oil industry has struggled during the pandemic, recorded the steepest fall, with a 75% decline in job vacancies at the beginning of October, compared to the same time last year.\n\nIt is followed by Edinburgh at 57%, and both Belfast and Crawley, a West Sussex town near Gatwick Airport, at 55%.\n\nLondon has seen the sixth biggest fall in job postings at 52%. Overall, UK vacancies are 46% behind last year's level, said the report from the think tank and jobs website Indeed.\n\nAndrew Carter, chief executive of Centre for Cities, said: \"This could have potentially catastrophic long-term consequences for people and the economy.\n\n\"The government has told us to expect a tough winter and while local lockdowns are necessary to protect lives, it is vital that ministers continue to listen and reassess the level of support given to help people and places to cope with the months ahead.\"\n\nThe think tank's analysts said in general, the lag in hiring was concentrated in sectors exposed to Covid-19 restrictions, such as retail, arts and leisure. Stricter coronavirus rules are now in force for nearly six million Britons.\n\nThey also said working from home was stifling industries which depended on High Street footfall.\n\nAreas where footfall has returned to normal more quickly, such as Birkenhead, Chatham and Hull, have seen a faster recovery in the number of jobs advertised.\n\nPawel Adrjan, UK economist at Indeed, said: \"The timid recovery in job vacancies is a portent of the distress towns and cities could face if restrictions continue to spring up in parts of the country already reeling from imposed lockdowns and reduced footfall.\"\n\n\"With the remote work trend showing no sign of abating, and entire regions being placed under stricter control, service jobs in large towns and cities could become scarcer still and pull the UK into a jobs spiral,\" Mr Adrjan said.\n\n\"That could mean a very long winter ahead for the millions of people currently unemployed,\" he added.\n\nThe UK unemployment rate stood at 4.5% in the three months to August - the highest level seen in over three years.\n\nAccording to the Office for National Statistics, an estimated 1.5 million people were out of work and job hunting between June and August.\n\nA spokesperson for the Treasury said it had put in place a comprehensive plan to protect and create jobs in every region of the UK, and increased the generosity of its winter support schemes.\n\n\"We are also providing additional funding for local authorities and devolved administrations to support local businesses,\" they added.", "Marcus Rashford's campaign over the summer forced the government to U-turn on free school meals\n\nAmid the talks over Manchester's request for an extra £30m a month for jobs support, or indeed the tens of millions for half-term free school meals in England, and the debate over a tougher lockdown, the government and its top supporters are citing the idea that there is no money left.\n\nCertainly, this morning's public finances showed the government borrowing in the first half of the financial year at a record high, the highest levels of government debt in 60 years and the deficit this year heading for its highest ever level outside of a world war.\n\nThis is before the statisticians have accounted for likely losses from tens of billions of government-guaranteed lending to businesses.\n\nSeptember's numbers alone saw a fivefold increase in borrowing, up from £7.7bn last September to £36.1bn, driven by more spending on the furlough scheme, health and self-employment, as well as far less VAT and income taxes received.\n\nThe Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) this afternoon also published a chart showing that of the £262bn that the Treasury has borrowed by issuing gilts, £246bn has been bought by the Bank of England.\n\nThe central bank has indirectly created and lent most of the extra money required by the government.\n\nOverall, the government has not had to raise the funds from the private sector or abroad.\n\nSo, no, we aren't really running out of cash.\n\nThe best evidence for that is that the government will indeed be announcing more borrowed money for some of its schemes in the coming days and weeks.\n\nAnd there is ample evidence that market demand for government debt is still strong.\n\nFor example, the European Union found huge demand this week for its new \"social bonds\" to help Spain and Italy fund pandemic jobs support.\n\nHowever, these Bank of England purchases do, in theory, have to be sold back into the market after the crisis.\n\nWith a large stock of debt, the government's finances are now very sensitive to even relatively small rises in the rate at which it borrows.\n\nIt seems unlikely right now, but is far from unthinkable over the next several years.\n\nThe government had already planned to borrow more to invest in infrastructure as part of its \"levelling-up agenda\".\n\nMuch higher levels of spending on health and pensions are already baked in to the spending cake as society ages.\n\nSo getting the public finances in shape does matter, as a medium-term priority.\n\nRight now, though, it is difficult to argue that \"no money\" is the constraint on extending free school meals, or furlough support.\n\nParticularly not on a day when it was confirmed pensions will rise by two percentage points more than inflation, at a time when average earnings are negative.\n\nThe cost of that triple lock policy, just as an example, is about £1.5bn in extra state pension costs in the coming year, according to Carl Emmerson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.\n\nThese are political decisions to allocate money where the government feels an obligation to prioritise.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Danielle (right) and her sister\n\n\"I find it hard to remember ever having a cooked meal at home,\" says Danielle, who relied on free school meals as a child.\n\n\"I would eat spaghetti hoops cold out of the tin.\n\n\"We would have sliced white bread because it was 13p from [discount supermarket] Kwik Save, then put margarine on it and put it under the grill.\n\n\"Me and my sister thought we were going to open a café.\"\n\nDanielle, 39, is now a successful senior manager for a charity, living in London, but growing up she lived with food insecurity.\n\nShe has told the BBC how, as a child, she often had to resort to shoplifting or \"bin-diving\" for essential food at weekends or during the school holidays - once, when she was as young as 10.\n\n\"Food poverty in Britain isn't really spoken about because of shame,\" she says.\n\n\"When the holidays hit, hunger doesn't go.\"\n\nDanielle is calling on the government to \"support young people\" as the row about the decision not to extend free school meals for children in England into the half-term holiday continues.\n\nThe government extended free school meals to eligible children during the Easter holidays earlier this year and, after a campaign by footballer Marcus Rashford, did the same for the summer holiday.\n\nMinisters say that providing help through councils is the best way to reach those that need it.\n\n\"I was brought up in a household where we didn't have food at home,\" Danielle recalls.\n\nHer mother was ill, and couldn't work. A single-parent household, Danielle says she and her two siblings were often left to \"fend for themselves\", in addition to caring for their mum.\n\n\"Some days it was hard for her to get out of bed. She really put in a lot of effort but she couldn't cope. I don't hold it against her because she tried,\" Danielle stresses.\n\nThey would usually receive child benefits payments on a Monday. \"So we would often take a day off school and have lots of food then,\" says Danielle, \"but nothing afterwards.\"\n\nPackets of jelly were common because they cost 20p and \"would go quite far\", or instant custard - \"things to fill you up\".\n\nAt the weekend, meals would frequently consist of dry cereal and dry bread.\n\n\"I remember going to bed with hunger pains and coming home to an empty fridge,\" she says.\n\n\"You learn to shut off the signals from your brain that tell you you're hungry.\"\n\nThis habit stayed with her into adult life. \"I don't realise I'm hungry, and then it gets to 4pm and I realise I've been dissociating and suddenly have to eat.\n\n\"As a young adult I didn't know how to cook, so would just eat for survival. Something to take away the hunger.\"\n\nDanielle could sometimes eat at friends' houses or at Sunday school as a child, but her main source of hot meals was school.\n\nShe explains that because her mum was on benefits, that qualified her and her siblings for free school meals - which were limited to certain children.\n\n\"I have really strong memories of them,\" she says.\n\n\"Apple crumble and custard [her favourite pudding to this day], baked potatoes, roast dinners.\n\n\"I also have fond memories of sitting at the table with all of my friends.\"\n\nBut beyond that, she was forced to find other ways of sourcing food, when they had run out of essentials and she was \"starving\".\n\nThis included \"bin-diving\" for surplus food behind supermarkets, paying 10p for scraps from the local fish and chip shops, and shoplifting.\n\n\"It wasn't frequent, but when we were desperate,\" she says.\n\nDanielle was caught shoplifting a jar of Marmite aged 10 - carefully selected from the shelves because it could \"last weeks\" by only spreading a small bit on each piece of bread.\n\nAnd, while on the earlier occasion she was only told not to return to the shop, at 14-years-old she had her fingerprints taken, was placed in a police cell and later cautioned over shoplifting.\n\n\"I think that was for stealing jelly.\"\n\nDanielle says the incident came up on her record when she was applying for a job in later life, leaving her devastated.\n\n\"I feel like I'm quite a moral person. For it to tarnish your career when all you are trying to do is eat,\" she says.\n\n\"I'm not proud of it and I would never do it now, but it was survival.\"\n\nAs soon as Danielle was old enough to get various part-time jobs, she stopped shoplifting, and went on to get three \"A\" grade A-Levels and a First-class degree at university.\n\nBut she says that she could have gone \"either way\".\n\n\"I did have a supportive education system and that enabled me to not continue down the wrong path,\" she says.\n\n\"Because of the support that we have in the UK it allows people to go from poverty into middle class and be able to earn a living.\n\n\"Unless we support young people, give them opportunities, like food and education, then that wouldn't be able to happen.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Marcus Rashford and his mother Melanie helped out at FareShare Greater Manchester\n\nResponding to the row over free school meals, Danielle argues that those who are making the decisions are doing so from \"a place of privilege\" without an understanding of \"what it's like to be a child and to be hungry\".\n\nShe also stresses that there are \"all sorts\" of family dynamics that can lead to financial difficulty, including debt, mental health issues, and addiction.\n\n\"It can happen to anyone,\" she says.\n\nAs Danielle hit her 30s, she developed a new relationship with food - teaching herself to cook from scratch and eventually batch cooking for the week.\n\n\"One of my friends set up a supper club and said I was their inspiration,\" she said.\n\n\"I just thought it's funny going from no food, to all my friends saying I was such an amazing cook.\"", "If you want to see one of the great monuments to what is called \"the special relationship\" between Britain and the United States, take a stroll to Grosvenor Square, a leafy haven in the heart of London.\n\nThere you will find a grand statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the great wartime American president, set high on a stone pedestal, dominating the square. Below it there is a surprise, an inscription revealing that the statue, unveiled in 1948, was paid for by \"small sums from people in every walk of life throughout the UK\".\n\nThink of it: at a time of grim post-war austerity and food rationing, 160,000 Britons were so admiring of America they were willing to pay five shillings each - about 8 pounds in today's money - to erect a statue in memory of its former president.\n\nThis memorial marks perhaps the zenith of US-UK relations. It is doubtful today many Britons would fork out hard-earned cash to raise a likeness of Donald Trump.\n\nA survey last month by the Pew Research Center found only 19% of Britons have confidence in Mr Trump to do the right thing in world affairs. Transatlantic relations over the past four years have been ragged.\n\nPresident Trump publicly criticised Theresa May's Brexit negotiations; on Twitter he accused British intelligence of spying on him; down the phone he shouted at Boris Johnson about the UK's approach to the Chinese tech giant, Huawei.\n\nThere have been \"ups and downs at a political level\", the ever-diplomatic Lord Sedwill, Britain's recent national security adviser, told the BBC. \"President Trump is a very unusual occupant of that office.\"\n\nPresident Barack Obama meeting Prince George at Kensington Palace in London in 2016...\n\nAnd Donald Trump and his wife Melania meeting the Queen at Windsor Castle in 2018\n\nOf course, the official relationship between Britain and the US endures; the military, diplomatic and intelligence links that run deep into the fabric of both nations.\n\nBut the occupant of the White House shapes that relationship, and that is why the election on November 3 matters.\n\nThe big question about a second Trump term is whether he would double down, unconstrained by electoral concerns, or moderate his behaviour as he looked to his legacy.\n\nSome reckon there might just be more of the same. For the UK, that would mean reasonably warm personal relations at the top between the president and a prime minister he once called \"Britain Trump\". There would be more positive noises about Brexit and a future trade deal. But there would likely also be more disputes over policy such as relations with China or Iran.\n\nIn terms of substance, the big unknown is whether Trump mark 2 would withdraw the US even further from the defence alliance Nato. In recent interviews, John Bolton, Trump's former National Security Adviser, has said there was real risk of this.\n\nOthers say it would be resisted by the US political establishment. But if the US did step back from Nato, Britain and the rest of Europe would have to spend more on their own defence and that could mean substantial tax rises.\n\nOn Iran, a second Trump administration would push harder for the collapse of the deal Tehran agreed to curb its nuclear ambitions. Britain would come under more pressure to split from European allies or risk tougher US sanctions that apply indirectly to British businesses and banks. The transatlantic divide on this and other issues would likely grow if Mr Trump gets four more years.\n\nIf Joe Biden were to win, the US would be less hostile towards the international organisations that Britain values so much, such as the United Nations. It would try to repair global partnerships. He's promising a \"summit of the democracies\". Transatlantic relations would be easier, less unpredictable, with fewer unexpected tweets.\n\nRelations between the US and the UK over some policy issues would improve. Take climate change. Next year Britain is hosting a big UN summit - known as COP26 - where it is hoped the world will agree new carbon reduction targets. President Trump, who pulled the US out of the previous Paris climate accord, is unlikely to help get a deal, whereas Mr Biden has promised to re-join Paris and push for even more ambitious targets.\n\nBoth Mr Biden and Mr Johnson share a tough approach towards Russia. They are closer on China, agreeing on the need to challenge malign behaviour but also allow for engagement on global issues. Divisions over Iran may become less stark as Mr Biden has promised to re-engage with the nuclear deal.\n\nThat is not to say a Biden presidency would not pose difficulties for the UK.\n\nHe is not a natural fan of the prime minister, describing him last December as \"a physical and emotional clone\" of President Trump. He strongly opposed Brexit. And as someone with a strong sense of his Irish heritage, Mr Biden has expressed concern about the potential impact Britain's departure from the European Union could have on Ireland's economy and Northern Ireland's security.\n\nPresidential candidate Joe Biden outside Downing Street in 2013, when he was vice-president\n\nMany analysts believe a Biden presidency would shift its focus towards Germany and France, seeing them and the EU as America's primary transatlantic partners.\n\nSir Peter Westmacott, former UK ambassador in Washington, said: \"Biden will lean towards Paris and Berlin not because he has anything intrinsic against the UK, but because we will count for less in Washington because of Brexit. Our importance to the US has always been linked to the difference we can make to US interests in Europe, and vice versa.\"\n\nRegardless of who wins on November 3, many observers believe some trends will continue: the gradual US retreat from global leadership and military intervention as the country rediscovers its isolationistic instincts. Mr Biden might be more internationalist in outlook than Mr Trump, but he too is promising to end US involvement in \"forever wars\", focus his foreign policy on improving the lives of America's middle classes, and protect US jobs from the tide of globalisation.\n\nAccording to Sophia Gaston, director of the British Foreign Policy Group, that means Britain will come under pressure to fill that vacuum and defend the multilateral organisations that have served the West so well.\n\n\"Even if Biden wins,\" she says, \"Britain is going to have to take a bigger role in those international institutions and a bigger role in leadership on issues like climate change, democracy and human rights because the US president is going to be more concerned by a fractious domestic landscape.\"", "The Lion King was due for a run in Cardiff this summer - it will now be back in 2022\n\nHit West End shows may not return to the Wales Millennium Centre \"without a Covid-19 vaccine\", it has been warned.\n\nVisiting tours of The Lion King and Phantom of the Opera to Cardiff have been cancelled as the £125m venue, which shut in March, remains closed.\n\nArtistic director Graeme Farrow said it hoped to stage \"test events\" with about 150 people in the audience in January.\n\nHowever he said the venue cannot \"flick a switch\" and fill a 1,800 capacity hall.\n\nMr Farrow has said discussions with Welsh Government had started in a bid to allow test events to take place, involving about 150 people sat at cabaret tables spread across the venue's main stage.\n\nProductions were cancelled when the UK shut down because of the Covid-19 crisis in March and the WMC remains shut to the general public \"until April 2021 at the earliest\".\n\nIt estimated the venue would lose £20m in commercial income this year and said in June that 250 jobs were at risk.\n\nThe WMC received £3.9m from the Arts Council of Wales's cultural recovery fund earlier in the week to help them through the pandemic.\n\nBut the venue has now made 63 permanent members of staff redundant due to the financial impact of the coronavirus crisis.\n\nWales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay is one of Wales' top arts venues\n\nBut Mr Farrow hopes performances can return in the new year.\n\n\"We want to run a series of test events for live performance with audiences,\" he said.\n\nThe Wales Millennium Centre has released all of its casual staff during the Covid-19 crisis\n\n\"We think we can start testing that from January with the audience on the stage and not in the stalls.\n\n\"Because come the summer or the autumn, without a vaccine we won't be able to just flick a switch and have 1,800 people back in this auditorium.\n\n\"We need to be able to plan through for that from early in the new year with small audiences, then we need to test 250, 500, 1,000 before we can even think about reopening for big shows.\n\n\"At the minute we are thinking May at the very earliest for that, and that may move back. But we will plan for every scenario, and what the money gives us is the ability to do that with people.\"\n\nPeople watched outside as Mared Williams performed in a pilot at Theatr Clwyd in August\n\nSix and Everybody's Talking About Jamie are set to become the first musicals back in London's West End in mid-November, eight months after the curtain came down.\n\nOther theatres are also experimenting while Covid restrictions prevent them resuming traditional shows.\n\nTheatr Clwyd in Mold has held outdoor performances and has begun experimenting with streamed online events, while Sherman Theatre in Cardiff has made a series of audio plays by new and established writers.\n\nBut while Welsh Government guidelines currently prevent theatre shows from going ahead, Theatr Clwyd's artistic director Tamara Harvey said she hoped the rules would change after the firebreak lockdown.\n\n\"The frustrating thing for us is that we had a whole autumn season ready to go,\" she said.\n\n\"The theatre is laid out as a cabaret space with socially distanced seating. We are able to bring people into our cinema, so we know we can do that safely, and where pubs and restaurants are still allowed to stay open that has been really frustrating.\n\n\"We are really good, in theatres, at keeping people safe and keeping them in their seats.\"\n\nWales Millennium Centre has called for similar rules for live events as those which exist in hospitality.\n\n\"How can cinemas open but this place can't? Even if we were to put 50 people in this auditorium, we could have them 10 metres apart. But we can't,\" added Mr Farrow.\n\n\"I think we need to start asking the question 'Why not?' rather than 'Why?'.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government said its programme of pilot events with spectators at both outdoor and indoor events has \"been put on hold, the public health position takes precedence\".\n\n\"We understand this is a very difficult time for the sector and we will continue to work in partnership towards a safe reopening when the time is right,\" said a spokesperson.", "The Post Office is to cut a third of its cash machines in the next 18 months with 600 ATMs to be shut by March 2022.\n\nThe move has raised concerns that rural and deprived communities face being cut off from access to cash.\n\nATMs set for closure are little-used and have other free cash facilities close by, the Post Office said.\n\nIt added that in areas where it is closing cash machines, customers can still withdraw cash over the counter free of charge.\n\nMartin Kearsley, banking director at the Post Office, said the business was keeping 60 non-commercially viable ATMs \"to serve the community's needs\".\n\nCurrently the Post Office does not run any of the cash machines at its branches; they are operated by Bank of Ireland, which is pulling out of the business.\n\nThat has prompted the review, which will mean closing 600 ATMs, while the Post Office has said it will spend £16m to maintain and upgrade other machines.\n\nIt said by mid-2023 all ATMs it keeps will be replaced with new devices that have the latest cash dispensing technology and security measures.\n\n\"This is one of the largest investment programmes in the free to use ATM market for over a decade,\" said Mr Kearsley.\n\nThe Post Office will also become a member of the Link ATM network.\n\nCash use has declined sharply during the coronavirus pandemic, with many businesses asking customers to pay by alternatives such as cards.\n\nCorrespondingly the use of cash machines has slumped. In central London it has fallen by up to 80%, according to figures published by Link, the cash machine network.\n\nAcross the UK, cash machine withdrawals between April and September fell by 48% compared to the same time last year.\n\nIn London and Westminster the number of withdrawals dropped 81%, while there were 71% fewer in Saffron Walden and Glasgow Central.\n\n\"Every city, town and village has a different story,\" said Link's head of financial inclusion Nick Quin. \"In places like city centres, it's less busy overall, so there are fewer people using ATMs.\n\n\"In some rural areas, though, there have been fewer tourists or perhaps the local shop, where the ATM is hosted, temporarily closed.\"\n\nThere are currently 42,000 free-to-use ATMs across the UK and 13,000 charging ATMs.\n\nIn the early stages of the pandemic around 7,200 ATMs closed. These were mainly in premises that shut due to government restrictions, such as shops, airports, garden centres, pubs, or they were closed for social distancing purposes, such as at train stations and supermarkets.\n\nBy the end of September more than half of them had reopened.\n\n\"What's clear is that there are places around the country, where more people rely on cash,\" said Link's Nick Quin.\n\n\"They're often some of the most deprived places in the country. That's important because while there are more people who prefer to use cards and shop online, there are a lot of people out there where digital payments still don't work.\"\n\nThe Access to Cash Review revealed eight million people were at risk in the UK from the demise of cash.\n\n\"Our research demonstrates that the majority of people are uncomfortable at the pace at which we are moving towards a cashless society,\" said David Fagleman, from financial consultancy Enryo.\n\n\"Not everyone is comfortable with making digital payments and we have to ensure that the rush to digitise does not leave people behind. Cash is still a very important payment method.\"\n\nBut going cashless also has benefits, said Amy Gavin from fintech consultancy 11:FS. \"Electronic payments are faster, some feel safer not carrying cash around, and electronic payments can also help consumers with budgeting.\"\n\nHowever, she added: \"It remains true that a reduction in cash use in society disproportionately negatively impacts its most vulnerable segments - such as older people and those with very low incomes who use cash to manage their budgets.\"\n\nThe government has proposed to legislate to protect cash and one option is for cashback to become more widely available in shops.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The roots of Northern Ireland’s Troubles lie deep in Irish history\n\nGovernment proposals for dealing with the legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles are under fresh attack, with MPs dismissing them as \"unhelpful\".\n\nThe Northern Ireland Affairs Committee also said it was \"dismayed\" at a lack of consultation.\n\nIts report stated the plan to permanently close cases of serious crimes \"raises profound legal, ethical and human rights issues\".\n\nLast March, the government set out new thinking on dealing with the past, which radically departed from what had been proposed in 2014 in the Stormont House Agreement.\n\nVictims' group WAVE recently claimed Secretary of State Brandon Lewis was \"dangerously deluded\" if he thought the ideas will help reconciliation.\n\nThe committee said the lack of detail around the proposals was \"deeply concerning\" and urged the government to conduct \"meaningful and transparent\" consultations with parties and victims' groups.\n\nSimon Hoare MP said the proposals were a unilateral departure from the Stormont House Agreement\n\nThe Conservative chairman of the committee, Simon Hoare, said: \"The Stormont House Agreement, not without its weaknesses, had appeared to be the basis on which we could move forward.\n\n\"But the government's new proposals are a unilateral departure from that.\n\n\"We are calling on the government to urgently introduce legislation based on the core principles of the Stormont House Agreement and return to a collaborative approach, engaging with victims' groups, parties and where necessary the Irish government.\"\n\nMr Hoare told BBC NI's Good Morning Ulster that there was an opportunity for the Irish government to give their views, as the issue required \"partnership and collaboration\".\n\n\"We will wait to hear from them, very often they don't respond to these sorts of things, given the fact that it is a different country and we are a parliamentary committee in a different jurisdiction.\n\n\"But I think on this issue, given the need for cross-border co-operation and of course given the views that have been expressed by some ministers in the Irish government in response to what the UK government has been proposing then I certainly think it would be very helpful to our deliberations to receive their views.\"\n\nMr Hoare also said that following the committee's interim report, there was an opportunity for the Northern Ireland Office to \"set out where it is and what its next steps are\".\n\nJude Whyte, whose mother, Peggy, was murdered in a UVF bomb attack at the front of her home in Belfast's University Street in 1984, said that Northern Ireland was \"22 years into a peace process\" and \"we are no further on with victims\".\n\n\"That simply reflects the body politic I suppose in Westminster, that this place is a total irrelevance, it's somewhere out there and 'we have bigger things to deal with in this Covid-19 pandemic that we are in the middle of'.\n\n\"It is interesting when you read the report. Many of the comments are very solid and the critique of government policy is very solid, but people here have to realise that nobody really cares too much about what goes on here.\"\n\nMr Whyte told BBC NI's Good Morning Ulster it was an \"intractable\" issue the government was dealing with.\n\n\"People do not even agree on what a victim is,\" he said.\n\n\"This society really needs to stand up, take a serious look in the mirror and either deal with this issue or don't deal with it and the only way, in my view, to deal with this issue is very straightforward - we have to learn to forgive each other, we have to learn to deal with the past as a group of people - nobody is going to do it for us.\"\n\nRev David Clements, whose policeman father, William, was murdered by the IRA in 1985 at the gates of Ballygawley police station, said he was \"glad\" the NI Affairs Committee had issued an interim report but that it was \"a shame\" the NI Secretary had not appeared before the committee in September.\n\nRev Clements said the Stormont House proposals were built on \"very solid principles\" and he was \"glad\" that the committee had \"reiterated\" those \"at least three times in the report\".\n\nHe said the principles, which included \"promoting reconciliation, upholding the rule of law, acknowledging and addressing the suffering of victims\" were \"very good ones on which to build\".\n\n\"If the secretary of state, the Northern Ireland Office can come up with a better model and better suggestions then let them crack on with it and do it,\" he added.\n\n\"It will be almost impossible to find a scheme that everyone will buy into 100%, but surely we can do better than we are doing at the moment.\"\n\nDUP MP Gregory Campbell and SDLP MP Claire Hanna both sit on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee.\n\nMr Campbell said that the UK government needed to \"take account of the many victims that there are\" and that people needed to see \"much more\" than a written ministerial statement.\n\n\"That's what has caused the degree of anger that there has been, we need to see the substantive nature of the proposals to take us forward, that is what needs to happen so that the range of victims' groups know their views have been taken seriously and progress is going to be made,\" he said.\n\nSDLP MP Claire Hanna said that \"criticism\" was not only \"of the silence from the UK government\", but that the proposals were \"flimsy\".\n\n\"They depart so massively from what was agreed among both governments and among nearly all parties and with support from victims' groups at Stormont House,\" she said.\n\nThe Shadow NI Secretary of State Louise Haigh accused Brandon Lewis of a \"cavalier approach\" which has \"undermined trust with victims\".\n\nShe added: \"He must urgently re-think his approach before it is too late.\"\n\nNorthern Ireland Secretary of State Brandon Lewis was previously criticised by victims' group WAVE for a failure to consult on the proposals\n\nAs part of the New Decade New Approach deal in January, the government had pledged, within 100 days, to introduce legislation implementing the Stormont House Agreement.\n\nInstead, however, it set out new proposals which have been seen, in part, as a way of curtailing future investigations into killings carried out by the Army during the Troubles.\n\nThe committee said its report was an interim one because the government had not yet provided a fuller explanation of its plan beyond a two-page written statement on 18 March.\n\nIt said the NI secretary had also pulled out of a planned oral evidence session in September.\n\nThe report stated: \"While acknowledging the challenges caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, we would have expected further detail to be made available on the government's plans by this point.\"\n\n\"Delay and uncertainty perpetuate an unacceptable situation that has already gone on too long.\"\n\nThe MPs also called on the NI Executive Office to fill the victims' commissioner position vacated by Judith Thompson in the summer.", "Lewis Hamilton passed Valtteri Bottas to take a commanding victory in the Portuguese Grand Prix and break Formula 1's all-time win record.\n\nHamilton dropped to third in a manic first two laps that ended with McLaren's Carlos Sainz leading, but fought back to crush Bottas' hopes.\n\nAfter both Mercedes passed Sainz, Hamilton tracked Bottas before taking the lead on lap 20.\n\nFrom there, Hamilton dominated to take his 92nd career Grand Prix victory.\n\nHamilton received a standing ovation from the socially distanced crowd, before celebrating with team members and then a long embrace with father Anthony.\n\nHamilton said he \"owed it all\" to his Mercedes team, adding: \"I could only ever have dreamed of being where I am today.\n\n\"I didn't have a magic ball when I chose to come to this team and partner with these great people, but here I am.\n\n\"Everything we do together - we are all rowing in the same direction and that's why we're doing what we're doing.\n\n\"And my dad's here and my step mum Linda, and Roscoe [Hamilton's dog]. It is going to take some time for it to fully sink in. I was still pushing flat out as I came across the line. I can't find the words at the moment.\"\n\nHow did it all unfold?\n\nHis victory, on a humiliating day for team-mate Bottas, gave Hamilton a 77-point advantage in the championship as he moves ever closer to a seventh world title, which would match Schumacher's other surviving record.\n\nHamilton had to do it the hard way, cool temperatures and a sprinkling of rain at the start leaving his Mercedes grip-less on its medium tyres on the opening lap, on which he was passed by both Bottas and Sainz.\n\nSainz, using his soft tyres to great advantage over the medium-shod Mercedes, produced a stellar opening lap from seventh on the grid and passed Bottas for the lead at Turn Five on the second lap.\n\nBut once the Mercedes' tyres were up to temperature, they wasted no time in dispatching the McLaren and disappeared into a race of their own.\n\nHamilton never let Bottas get much more than a couple of seconds ahead and then after 15 laps started to pour on the pace, setting fastest lap after fastest lap to close in on the Finn and then pass for the lead into Turn One.\n\nOnce ahead, Hamilton left his team-mate behind, pulling out a lead of more than seven seconds in the next 10 laps, and continuing to inch further clear over the remainder of the race.\n\nHamilton extended his lead even further after they made their pit stops, as he was able to get the hard tyres into their temperature window more effectively than his team-mate.\n\nThe 35-year-old's only concern was cramp in the final 10 laps but it did not seem to affect him unduly, and he still crossed the line 25 seconds clear of his team-mate.\n\nIt was a masterful performance, befitting the monumental nature of his achievement, supplanting Schumacher at the head of the all-time win lists, where the German had been for 19 years.\n\nIt was an exciting race on a new track to F1, with overtaking and incident aplenty throughout the field.\n\nRed Bull's Max Verstappen was third, after slipping down to fifth on the opening lap, while Charles Leclerc was impressive in recovering fourth place in the Ferrari after he, too, struggled for grip in the opening laps on the medium tyres and dropped to eighth.\n\nAlpha Tauri's Pierre Gasly was outstanding in taking fifth, grabbing the place with a lovely move around the outside of Racing Point's Sergio Perez with two laps to go.\n\nPerez, too, drove a strong race, recovering from a first-lap collision with Verstappen and spin, which required him to stop for fresh tyres and drop to last.\n\nPerez came under further pressure on the last lap, this time from Sainz, who passed him to take sixth place, with the Renaults of Esteban Ocon and Daniel Ricciardo and Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel all close behind.\n\nKimi Raikkonen was just outside the points, after an outstanding first lap, rising from 16th on the grid to seventh place on his soft tyres, and then passing Leclerc's Ferrari for sixth, before the lack of pace of his Alfa told once the race settled down and he began to slip back.\n\nWhat happens next?\n\nNext weekend, F1 moves on to Imola in Italy, an historic, challenging and popular track which holds a race for the first time since 2006.\n\nWhat they said\n\nHamilton: \"I really owe it all to[Mercedes team] for their teamwork, continually innovating and pushing the barrier even higher every year. It's such a privilege working with them. It really is absolutely incredible.\"\n\nBottas: \"The opening lap was pretty good, some cars behind with the soft tyre had the upper-hand but I was really pleased I could get the lead but after that, I just had no pace today. I don't understand why.\"\n\nVerstappen: \"It was very low grip at the start. I tried to stay out of trouble but had a touch with Sergio Perez. He didn't give me enough space so he took himself out. I did my own race after that.\"", "Peter Florence was made a CBE in 2018 for services to literature and charity\n\nThe director and co-founder of the Hay literary festival has been suspended after a complaint by a member of staff.\n\nPeter Florence was suspended at the start of October pending the outcome of grievance proceedings, the festival has confirmed.\n\nMr Florence set up the festival with his parents in 1988. It is one of the biggest events in world literature.\n\nThe matter is unrelated to a claim that a festival employee was sexually assaulted by a senior Gulf royal.\n\nThe Hay Festival has attracted many leading writers and public figures to Hay-on-Wye, in Powys, including former US President Bill Clinton, who called it the \"Woodstock of the mind\".\n\nMr Florence was made a CBE in 2018 for services to literature and charity, and he chaired the jury of the 2019 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.\n\nCaroline Michel, the festival chairwoman, said Mr Florence had been signed off sick, which had delayed the conclusion of the grievance procedure.\n\nTania Hudson has been appointed interim chief executive, alongside the international director, Cristina Fuentes La Roche.\n\nThe Hay Festival was not held as a physical event this year because of the pandemic\n\nMs Michel added: \"The Hay Festival Board would like to reassure all supporters and sponsors that the festival is in good hands.\n\n\"We are not at liberty to offer any further comment on personnel issues until this matter is resolved.\"\n\nNormally the festival brings thousands of visitors to Hay every spring, but this year it was forced to go online because of the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nFestival officials say the claim against Mr Florence is a separate matter to allegations made by one of its employees, Caitlin McNamara, who has said she was sexually assaulted by Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan while in Abu Dhabi.\n\nMs Michel has said that the festival will not work in Abu Dhabi again while Sheikh Nahyan remains minister of tolerance.", "Brian Clamp says he's had a traumatic few days\n\nWe are standing in full PPE, in one of the two hospital intensive care units which are solely for Covid patients. This is a bright, modern ward - sunlight pouring in.\n\nAt one end there is a large black plastic barrier taped across an opening. On the other side, none of the patients has Covid-19. The makeshift divider is a reminder that all this is still relatively new. It is the first winter where the NHS's response to the usual heavy demands will have to be adjusted for coronavirus.\n\nOn the Covid unit, something else is immediately apparent: the sound of conversation.\n\nWhen I first reported from a Covid intensive care unit in April, I was left haunted by what I'd seen. All but one patient had been on a ventilator, in a medically induced coma. It was eerily quiet, just the rhythmical sound of machines pumping air into lungs.\n\nThe medical teams were at a loss to know how best to treat a savage condition which was ravaging victims' lungs and other organs. Lives hung in the balance, often for weeks on end. In early April, two out of three ventilated patients did not survive.\n\nToday, in this intensive care unit (ICU) at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne, only one of the five patients is on a ventilator. The others are sitting up, engaging with the nurses, reading or watching TV.\n\n\"The Jedi is my nickname,\" says Brian Clamp. The 62-year-old is a steward at a social club, where he works behind the bar.\n\nHe had been getting better but was readmitted to intensive care when his breathing worsened. It is still a little laboured, despite the nasal oxygen supply, but his sense of humour and laughter are intact. Brian admits the experience has been \"absolutely terrifying\", but adds, with a smile, \"they will get us better, I know that\".\n\nHe is determined to get home to watch his granddaughter, Millie, play football.\n\nI’m lucky to have got it in the second wave - the doctors know so much more\n\nAt least half the patients here are on clinical trials. Brian has received convalescent plasma, packed with antibodies against coronavirus, donated by someone who recovered from the infection. It's not clear whether blood plasma works against Covid-19, but trials are ongoing. I donated plasma earlier this year and there's still an urgent need for more adults to do so.\n\nFurther down the ward is Edmund Derrick, who is relieved to have his sense of taste back. He is savouring an egg sandwich.\n\n\"I had this foul, acrid, burnt taste in my mouth for days, which invaded absolutely everything,\" he says. His other symptoms included violent uncontrollable shuddering and sudden temperature swings.\n\nThe 71-year-old retired local government worker is, like everyone here, keen to get home to his family. His wife contracted coronavirus at the same time as him but didn't fall seriously ill. Men are still twice as likely as women to end up in intensive care with Covid-19.\n\n\"I think I'm lucky to have got it in the second wave,\" he says, \"now the doctors know so much more.\"\n\nThere's no doubt more patients are surviving Covid-19, although it's too early to give precise figures. Ventilators are used more sparingly and there is greater reliance on other, non-invasive means of giving oxygen.\n\nAbout 1,000 Covid patients a day are being admitted to hospitals across the UK, roughly a third of the numbers at the peak. Covid-related deaths are running at about a fifth of the level in early April.\n\n\"Now, we know the beast that is Covid pneumonia,\" says Dr Lewis Gray, a consultant in intensive care. \"We know how it develops, how it's treated, how people can and do recover.\"\n• None 173Covid patients in Newcastle NHS Trust, at peak of first wave, with...\n• None 71Covid patients, when BBC visited in October, with...\n\nPatients are given dexamethasone, a cheap steroid which is proven to cut the risk of dying by up to a third. They also receive remdesivir, an antiviral drug which has been fully approved in the US, although its effectiveness is still under review.\n\nPatients are also given increased doses of anti-coagulant medication, to prevent blood clots, which can be a serious complication of Covid. And they are often nursed on their front, prone, as this helps with breathing.\n\nBut the impact of Covid is felt in the hospital way beyond the ICU. The more Covid there is, the greater the impact on other non-emergency care - hip replacements, eye operations, myriad other conditions.\n\nIn March, there was concern that hospitals would be overwhelmed, so all non-urgent surgery was cancelled. This time, the aim is to ensure that non-Covid patients don't lose out. But every bed allocated to Covid care requires specialist nurses. Already, the Royal Victoria Infirmary (RVI) has had to close four of its 50 operating theatres to reallocate the nurses to intensive care.\n\nDame Jackie Daniel, chief executive of Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust and a former nurse, says the situation in the hospital is finely balanced.\n\nIf you are a frail, elderly person, isolated and fearful, we are pushing them into deeper anxiety\n\n\"At the moment we're managing, but are not complacent, because it's going to be tough.\"\n\nLike other trusts, waiting times for non-life threatening surgery, from hips to hernias, have increased. The Newcastle trust has maintained cancer services, but elsewhere there is a backlog of \"tens of thousands of patients\", says Dame Jackie.\n\n\"Cataracts are a good example - a relatively simple procedure, but if you are a frail, elderly person, isolating, fearful, we are pushing those patients into deeper anxiety.\"\n\nKathleen Lawson, from Durham, had been due a thyroid operation in March. Only now has the 67-year-old had the surgery.\n\n\"I feel fortunate it's happened. I'm absolutely elated,\" she says.\n\nOn another ward I spoke to several patients who were recovering from a serious Covid infection.\n\nEpifania Garcia, a 66-year-old care worker, and her husband, are on separate wards. Epi is positive they will both get better but worries about her two grown-up daughters, both nurses.\n\n\"I feel emotional because I cannot see them. I have never left them this long,\" she says.\n\nA few beds along lies Mohammed Siddique, a former mill worker, bus and taxi driver. Aged 87, he suffers confusion, so his daughter Shamim - who's had Covid - is allowed to stay with him. She sits by his bedside, stroking his hands.\n\n\"He was very close to dying. It was very scary,\" says Shamim, who lives in the next street to him, with her family. Her husband spent two weeks in hospital, including time in ICU. Covid has swept through the extended family.\n\nAlbert Brown, 67, still has a slight tan from his holiday in Turkey. He says he thinks got infected on his return, while on a local night out. At home one night, two weeks later, he collapsed on his hands and knees gasping for breath.\n\n\"I was very afraid,\" he says.\n\nWhile at the RVI, he has witnessed several younger people being admitted with Covid complications.\n\n\"It can attack anybody, it doesn't pick and choose, but it's certainly not a joke. We need to take it seriously.\n\nI'm the BBC's medical editor. Since 2004 I have reported on a huge range of topics from cancer, genetics, malaria, and HIV, to the many significant advances in medical science which have improved people's health. I've also followed pandemic threats such as bird flu as well as Sars and Mers. Now I'm focusing on Covid-19 and its immense global impact.", "The suspects were detained on board the Nave Andromeda (in the middle of the three boats)\n\nSeven suspects have been detained after a suspected hijacking involving stowaways on a tanker off the Isle of Wight.\n\nUK special forces completed the operation in nine minutes, BBC Defence Correspondent Jonathan Beale said.\n\nMilitary assistance had been requested after the stowaways on board the Liberian-registered Nave Andromeda reportedly became violent.\n\nAll 22 crew members, who were locked in the ship's citadel, are safe.\n\nThe Ministry of Defence called the incident a \"suspected hijacking\" and said Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and Home Secretary Priti Patel authorised the operation in response to a police request.\n\nThe operation took place under the cover of darkness\n\nMr Wallace said: \"I commend the hard work of the armed forces and police to protect lives and secure the ship.\n\n\"In dark skies, and worsening weather, we should all be grateful for our brave personnel. People are safe tonight thanks to their efforts.\"\n\nMrs Patel tweeted she was \"thankful for the quick and decisive action of our police and armed forces who were able to bring this situation under control, guaranteeing the safety of all those on board\".\n\nMr Beale said the individuals were detained after they were met with \"overwhelming force\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Footage of the oil tanker situated off the Isle of Wight\n\nHe said members of the Special Boat Service based at Poole, in Dorset, were involved in the operation, which also featured six helicopters.\n\nA team of Royal Navy divers were also flown in one of the Royal Navy helicopters in case the vessel had been mined but it had not.\n\nConcerns over the crew's welfare were raised at 10:04 GMT when the vessel was six miles off Bembridge, police said.\n\nA spokesman said \"verbal threats\" had been made towards the crew.\n\nA three-mile exclusion zone was put in place around the vessel.\n\nRichard Meade, editor of shipping news journal Lloyd's List, had earlier said there were thought to have been seven stowaways on board.\n\nHe said it was believed they had become violent towards the crew after they attempted to detain them in a cabin.\n\nThe tanker Andromeda, owned by Greek shipping company Navios, was en route from Lagos in Nigeria to Fawley oil refinery on Southampton Water.\n\nIt had not stopped anywhere else.\n\nAccording to a source close to the shipping company, the crew were aware of stowaways on board, but the stowaways became violent towards the crew while it was off the Isle of Wight.\n\nThe crew retreated to the ship's citadel, a secure area in which they can lock themselves, making it impossible for attackers to get in.\n\nThis is standard procedure during a terrorist or pirate attack, but there is no suggestion the crew were doing more than protecting themselves from the stowaways.\n\nThe crew contacted the coastguard, which then alerted police.\n\nThe 748ft-long (228m) ship is known to have left Lagos in Nigeria on 5 October and was south of the Isle of Wight when the police were called.\n\nLawyers for the vessel's owners said they had been aware of the stowaways on board for some time.\n\nTobias Ellwood, chairman of the Commons Defence Committee, said the boarding of the tanker was a \"good outcome\".\n\nHe said: \"Seven stowaways on board taking over a ship or causing the ship not to be in full command would have triggered a multi-agency alarm and then well-rehearsed classified protocols were then put into action.\"\n\nHampshire police said after the suspects were detained that all 22 crew members of the tanker were safe.\n\nIn December 2018, four stowaways were detained after they ran amok on a container ship in the Thames Estuary.\n\nThe men, from Nigeria and Liberia, waved metal poles and threw faeces and urine after being found hiding on the Grande Tema.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Nabil Abdulrashid joked that he had \"kept workers at Ofcom from being made redundant\"\n\nMore than 3,000 complaints about comedian Nabil Abdulrashid's routines on Britain's Got Talent have been rejected by media watchdog Ofcom.\n\nAbdulrashid's jokes about race and religion took him to the final.\n\nOfcom said it took freedom of expression into account when deciding not to launch an investigation.\n\n\"The comedian's satirical take on his life experiences as a black Muslim was likely to have been within audience expectations,\" a spokesperson said.\n\nAlmost 1,000 people complained about Abdulrashid's performance in the semi-final on 3 October, in which he joked about police treatment of black people, and about what \"angry far-right guys\" would think about someone joking about being black and Muslim.\n\n\"We just tell jokes about our lives because they matter - right?\" the Croydon comic said.\n\nAnother 2,200 complained about the final on 10 October, when he laughed off the \"snowflakes\" who had objected to the previous week's routine.\n\n\"They complained because we said black lives matter - thousands of complaints,\" he said. \"To be honest I'm shocked that many of them know how to write.\n\n\"They sent in thousands of angry letters. Hopefully if I annoy them today they can progress onto words.\"\n\nHe also joked that Winston Churchill was black, because \"when was the last time you met a white man called Winston?\" and \"What colour is his statue? Eh?\"\n\nAnd Abdulrashid suggested ITV should have had a different response to the 24,500 people who complained about dance troupe Diversity's Black Lives Matter-inspired performance in September.\n\n\"I would have sent an email to everyone who complained. It would just say: 'We understand you viewers are offended. But all viewers matter.' Let's see how they like it then.\"\n\nResponding to the number of complaints on Twitter, he joked: \"I'm just happy I've kept workers at Ofcom from being made redundant. I'm a hero and should be appreciated for my contribution to the economy. @Ofcom you're welcome.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Tesco were “simply wrong” to tell a woman she could not buy period products during lockdown, Wales' health minister has said.\n\nThe supermarket has since apologised and admitted it had incorrectly applied rules that say they can only sell essential items until November 9.\n\nIt later said an area of its store in St Mellons, Cardiff had been cordoned off due to a break-in.\n\nThe issue has prompted protests and calls for the Senedd to be recalled.\n\nSpeaking at a Welsh Government briefing, Health Minister Vaughan Gething said meetings would be held with the supermarkets this afternoon to make clear they could use “some discretion” to sell non-essentials to those in “genuine need”.\n\nHe said he was “very sorry” a woman was wrongly told sanitary products could not be sold.\n\n“It’s an incorrect reading of both the regulations and the guidance. And I’m very sorry this woman was given this information.”\n\nDuring the lockdown supermarkets are unable to sell items other high-street stores can’t provide as they have been told to close.\n\nTesco later said the aisle in question had been cordoned off due to a break-in Image caption: Tesco later said the aisle in question had been cordoned off due to a break-in", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Plaid Cymru said the Welsh Government had \"made a mess of the messaging\" over the essential items issue\n\nTesco was \"simply wrong\" to tell a woman she could not buy period products during lockdown, Health Minister Vaughan Gething has said.\n\nThe supermarket apologised after saying it could not sell sanitary towels and tampons from a store in Cardiff.\n\nThe Welsh Government has banned the sale of non-essential items in supermarkets during a 17-day lockdown.\n\nOpposition parties have called that \"absolute madness\" and said better communication was needed with shops.\n\nThe Welsh Government said revised guidance will be published on Tuesday.\n\nMr Gething told the Welsh Government briefing that supermarkets would now be able to use their \"discretion\".\n\nTesco had blocked off the aisle after a \"break-in\" at the store in St Mellons, Cardiff\n\nThey have been told to close parts of their stores that sell items such as clothes, bedding and toys during Wales' firebreak lockdown.\n\nUnder Welsh Government guidance, shops which have been allowed to remain open are not allowed to sell goods classed as \"non-essential\" during the 17 days, which would normally be sold by businesses that have been made to close.\n\nThis includes homeware, electrical goods, telephones, clothes, toys and games, and garden products.\n\nThe policy has been criticised in a petition signed by more than 60,000 people.\n\nHomeware and bedding has been taped off in Tesco in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan\n\nOne customer wrote on Twitter she was \"raging and in tears\" after not being able to buy period products at Tesco's St Mellons store in Cardiff, after the aisle was blocked off.\n\nIn a tweet that was later deleted, Tesco responded to the complaint by saying it had been told not to sell the items during the lockdown.\n\n\"This is wrong - period products are essential,\" the Welsh Government tweeted in response.\n\nThe supermarket later issued a statement saying the area had been closed off following a break-in at the store, which the police were investigating.\n\nSouth Wales Police confirmed it was investigating a burglary which happened between 02:30 GMT and 04:30 on Monday when an estimated \"£20,000 worth of beauty products were stolen\".\n\nTesco said the reply to the customer, which had implied sanitary towels were non-essential, \"was sent by mistake\".\n\nIn Tesco's Penarth store, carbon Monoxide and smoke alarms were covered in sheeting\n\nIn Tesco in Penarth shelves containing smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors were covered in plastic sheeting, with the store putting up a sign saying they were \"non essential\".\n\nBut under the Welsh Government guidelines shops can sell products you can normally buy from food and drink stores, newsagents, pharmacies and DIY and hardware stores - as they remain open.\n\nOn Monday, Health Minister Vaughan Gething said meetings would be held with the supermarkets to make clear they could use \"some discretion\" to sell non-essentials to those in \"genuine need\".\n\nSpeaking at the Welsh Government's coronavirus briefing he said he was \"very sorry\" a woman had been incorrectly told she could not buy sanitary products.\n\nMr Gething said shoppers and retailers should use \"common sense\" and there would be a \"very small number\" of cases where there would be a genuine need to buy a non-essential item in a supermarket.\n\n\"For the great majority of us though of course, we will be able to manage for the next two weeks - with the hardship, with the interruption that causes, yes - but to avoid the much greater hardship and much greater interruption to people's lives and their ability to still see family and friends in the future,\" he said.\n\nBooks have been covered in cellophane\n\nThe Welsh Government has come under pressure to abandon the measure and a petition against the ban is now the largest ever submitted to the Senedd.\n\nSecretary of State for Wales Simon Hart has urged Mr Drakeford to \"scrap the policy\" while Welsh Conservative leader Paul Davies called for Members of the Senedd to be recalled \"virtually\" to debate the matter.\n\n\"This is absolute madness by the Welsh Government, preventing people from buying the products which they want to buy,\" he said.\n\nPlaid Cymru's leader Adam Price called on ministers to admit they had sent out confused messaging about a policy, and the public health message had got \"lost\".\n\n\"If they'd had the conversations with the retail sector earlier, so we heard from the minister that they had a meeting on Thursday, I would suggest that was too late,\" he said.\n\n\"That has eroded public trust over the weekend and obviously that is concerning because it's the public support, the public health message is ultimately the one thing that keeps us all safe.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Andrew RT Davies This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nTim Batcup, who has had to close his Swansea book shop during the lockdown, said the Welsh Government had made the \"right call\".\n\nBut he said that while some supermarkets had stopped selling books, others were still selling them, and the messaging was a \"bit mixed\".\n\n\"I don't really understand the fuss... I don't know why people can't go a couple of weeks without a pair or pants or a candle,\" he told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast.\n\n\"I think it's a sincere attempt at levelling up, how effective it will be I don't know. It might drive people towards the online giants, but they all seem to clean up anyway.\"\n\nThe toy aisle at Tesco on Western Avenue in Cardiff has been blocked off\n\nNicky Small, who has had to close her craft shop in Llandudno, said she believed wool and other craft items were essential as the hobbies were helping many through the pandemic.\n\n\"I think there's a balance, what is one person's non-essential could be another person's essential,\" she said.\n\n\"The difficulty is anybody trying to dictate what essential is, because that will depend on who you are, what you are needing to get, if you have been waiting for payday.\"\n\nHead of the Welsh Retail Consortium, Sara Jones, said the rules were confusing, and banning people from buying certain items set a dangerous precedent.\n\n\"I think this policy is the wrong way to go about it, because rather than levelling the playing field, it's just creating winners and losers, it's pushing people online,\" she said.\n\nShe said allowing an element of discretion would go against the purpose of the policy, as people would have to approach staff for items and spend more time in store.\n\n\"It's distorting competition, which I think is setting a bit of a dangerous precedent,\" she said.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Monday morning. We'll have another update for you at 18:00 BST.\n\nThe government is continuing to insist it will not bow to pressure, including from some Conservative MPs, to fund free meals for school children in England over half-term. More than 800,000 people have signed a petition, started by footballer Marcus Rashford, calling for provision to continue. Some local councils have promised to supply meal vouchers and, thanks to Rashford, scores of pubs, cafes and restaurants have also offered free food. However, Labour says a postcode lottery means many will lose out. One woman, Danielle, told the BBC what holiday hunger felt like for her as a child.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Marcus Rashford and his mother Melanie helped out at FareShare Greater Manchester\n\nPeople aged 16 to 25 are more than twice as likely as older workers to have lost their job during this time BBC Panorama has found. Research seen by the programme also suggests the education gap between privileged and disadvantaged young people has widened further. Elsewhere, a report suggests deserted high streets caused by local lockdowns and home working are taking a toll on the number of job vacancies.\n\nRoberta, aged 16, says it has been a struggle to keep up with her peers from privately educated backgrounds\n\nPeople without symptoms who want to get a coronavirus test will now be able to pay for one at Boots stores across the UK. The firm says a nasal swab test which gives results in 24 to 48 hours is being introduced now, and within weeks an even faster test will offer customers results in just 12 minutes. The initial cost will be £120, but Boots says it hopes that price will fall significantly if there is sufficient demand for the service. People with one of three key coronavirus symptoms - a fever, a new continuous cough or a loss of smell or taste - should seek a free NHS test.\n\nTough new coronavirus measures are being introduced in Italy and Spain. Madrid has declared a national state of emergency and imposed a night-time curfew country-wide. Restrictions have also been imposed on travel between regions. In Italy, bars and restaurants will close for table service at 6pm, and gyms, cinemas and theatres will shut. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told the nation he hoped that \"by gritting our teeth\" for a month \"we'll be able to breathe again in December.\" Case numbers, hospital admissions and deaths have been increasing across Europe - see our global tracker for more.\n\nIt's a hugely difficult time for theatres and others arts venues, but at Sunday night's Olivier Awards, some of the biggest stars of the stage tried to encourage those working in the industry to stay positive. Fleabag's Andrew Scott urged them to \"keep the faith\" as he accepted his best actor trophy by video link. Another winner, director Marianne Elliott, said the event must remind everyone \"what theatre is, what it can do, and how it can touch hearts, minds and souls\".\n\nAndrew Scott said a sense of humour had helped many in the theatre world get through this period\n\nFind more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nPlus, mother-and-baby units provide vital support for new mothers and pregnant women with serious psychological problems. Find out why they are facing unique challenges right now.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "American voters will face a clear choice for president on election day, between Republican incumbent Donald Trump and Democratic hopeful Joe Biden.\n\nHere's a look at what they stand for and how their policies compare on eight key issues.\n\nPresident Trump set up a coronavirus task force at the end of January which he says has now shifted its focus to \"safety and opening up our country\".\n\nThe president is also prioritising the speedy development of coronavirus treatments and vaccines, directing $10bn towards such projects.\n\nMr Biden wants to set up a national contact-tracing programme, establish at least 10 testing centres in every state, and provide free coronavirus testing to all.\n\nHe supports a nationwide mask mandate, which would require face coverings to be worn on federal property.\n\nPresident Trump is a climate change sceptic, and wants to expand non-renewable energy. He aims to increase drilling for oil and gas, and roll back further environmental protections.\n\nHe has committed to withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord - the international agreement on tackling climate change - which the US will formally leave later this year.\n\nMr Biden says he would immediately re-join the Paris climate agreement if elected.\n\nHe wants the US to reach net zero emissions by 2050, and proposes banning new leases for oil and gas drilling on public lands, as well as a $2tn investment in green energy.\n\nPresident Trump has pledged to create 10 million jobs in 10 months, and create one million new small businesses.\n\nHe wants to deliver an income tax cut, and provide companies with tax credits to incentivise them to keep jobs in the US.\n\nMr Biden wants to raise taxes for high earners to pay for investment in public services, but says the increase will only impact those earning over $400,000 a year.\n\nHe supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15 (£11.50) an hour from the current rate of $7.25 (£5.50).\n\nPresident Trump wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed under President Obama, which increased the federal government's regulation of the private health insurance system, including making it illegal to deny coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions. He says he wants to improve and replace it, although no details of the plan have been published.\n\nThe president also aims to lower drug prices by allowing imports of cheaper ones from abroad.\n\nMr Biden wants to protect and expand the ACA.\n\nHe wants to lower the eligibility age for Medicare, the policy which provides medical benefits to the elderly, from 65 to 60. He also wants to give all Americans the option to enrol in a public health insurance plan similar to Medicare.\n\nPresident Trump has reiterated his promise to bring down US troop levels overseas, while continuing to invest in the military.\n\nThe president says he will continue to challenge international alliances and maintain trade tariffs on China.\n\nMr Biden has promised to repair relationships with US allies.\n\nHe says he would do away with unilateral tariffs on China, and instead hold them accountable with an international coalition that China \"can't afford to ignore\".\n\nPresident Trump says he doesn't believe racism is a systemic problem within US police forces.\n\nHe has positioned himself as a firm advocate of law enforcement, but has opposed chokeholds and offered grants for improved practices.\n\nMr Biden views racism as a systemic problem, and has set out policies to address racial disparities in the justice system, such as grants to incentivise states in reducing incarceration rates.\n\nHe has rejected calls to defund police, saying additional resources should instead be tied to maintaining proper standards.\n\nPresident Trump has an expansive interpretation of the US constitution's Second Amendment protections giving Americans the right to bear arms.\n\nHe did propose tightening background checks on gun buyers after a string of mass shootings in 2019, but nothing came of the plan and no further legislation has been put forward.\n\nMr Biden has proposed banning assault weapons, universal background checks, limiting the number of guns a person can purchase to one per month, and making it easier to sue negligent gun manufacturers and sellers.\n\nHe would also fund more research into preventing gun violence.\n\nPresident Trump says it's his constitutional right to fill the vacancy on the court during the remainder of his first term in office, and has put forward conservative judge, Amy Coney Barrett.\n\nOne issue that the Supreme Court could soon rule on is the legal right to abortion in the US - something the president and Judge Barrett have opposed in the past.\n\nMr Biden wants the vacancy to be filled after the next president enters office.\n\nHe says if elected he would work to pass legislation to guarantee a woman's right to an abortion if the Supreme Court rules against it.", "A Covid test that can provide a result in 12 minutes will be made available at high street pharmacy Boots.\n\nThe nasal swab test, which will cost £120, will be available in selected stores in the UK to people who are not showing symptoms.\n\nThe company says the aim is to offer customers peace of mind.\n\nAnyone in the UK who thinks they have symptoms should stay at home and contact the NHS to book a Covid test in the usual way.\n\nThe technology has been developed by LumiraDx, which has also struck a deal to provide supplies to the NHS in Scotland.\n\nTrials suggest it is accurate enough to identify cases, although, like any Covid test, there are some false results meaning they are not 100% reliable.\n\nThe Lumira tests, due to lauch at 50 Boots stores in November, take minutes to give a result, analysing a nose swab sample on the spot, via a small, portable machine.\n\nAnyone who tests positive should then isolate to avoid spreading the infection to others.\n\nOther rapid tests, which give results within 90 minutes, are also being trialled by the NHS.\n\nProf Paul Hunter from the University of East Anglia said while the test could give peace of mind at the time it was taken: \"A negative test today tells you nothing really about whether you are going to be positive a day or two later.\"\n\nSpeedy and comprehensive testing is thought vital to efforts to contain the second wave of the virus while the world waits for an effective vaccine.\n\nBut figures released last week showed that just 15.1% of people are currently receiving results within 24 hours through the official system in place in the UK.\n\nSir Patrick Vallance, the government's chief scientific adviser, admitted there was \"room for improvement\" in the NHS Test and Trace system.\n\nBoris Johnson previously pledged that all tests would be processed within 24 hours - unless there were issues with postal tests - by the end of June.\n\nResearch suggests that on average people develop symptoms of Covid 5.1 days after they were infected.\n\nWhile a small proportion develop symptoms within three days, others may take nearly two weeks to become ill.", "More than 800 former judges and legal professionals have signed a letter accusing Boris Johnson and Priti Patel of \"hostility\" towards lawyers representing migrants seeking asylum.\n\nIn a letter to the Guardian, they claimed the PM and home secretary \"endanger\" lawyers' safety with their comments and undermine the rule of law.\n\nThe signatories called for them to \"behave honourably\" and apologise.\n\nNo 10 said lawyers were \"not immune from criticism\".\n\nIn August, the Home Office removed a video posted on social media accusing lawyers representing migrants of being \"activists\".\n\nThe Law Society, which represents solicitors in England and Wales, branded the video \"misleading and dangerous\".\n\nEarlier this month at the Conservative Party conference, Ms Patel referred to \"do-gooders\" and \"lefty lawyers\" in a speech on what she called the \"broken\" asylum system.\n\nHer comments came after it emerged that the UK considered sending asylum seekers to an island in the Atlantic.\n\nMs Patel promised to introduce legislation next year for the \"biggest overhaul\" of the system in \"decades\" and said those opposed to her plans were \"defending the indefensible\".\n\nMr Johnson went on to say he would stop the whole criminal justice system being \"hamstrung\" by \"lefty human rights lawyers\".\n\nAmong those to sign the letter were three former justices of the UK supreme court - Lords Collins, Dyson and Walker - retired appeal court judges, former high court judges and scores of QCs and law professors, plus the directors of Liberty and Justice.\n\nThe letter stated: \"We are all deeply concerned at recent attacks, made by the home secretary and echoed by the prime minister, on lawyers seeking to hold the government to the law.\n\n\"Such attacks endanger not only the personal safety of lawyers and others working for the justice system, as has recently been vividly seen; they undermine the rule of law, which ministers and lawyers alike are duty-bound to uphold.\n\n\"We invite both the home secretary and the Prime minister to behave honourably by apologising for their display of hostility, and to refrain from such attacks in the future.\"\n\nOne of those to sign the letter, the former director of public prosecutions Lord Ken Macdonald, said lawyers were being \"crudely and dangerously vilified\".\n\nA No 10 spokesperson said that, while lawyers played an important role in upholding the law, \"they are however not immune from criticism\".\n\nThe spokesperson said the government is clear that any form of violence is unacceptable.", "The Irish News reported the review focuses on the work of a consultant urologist at Craigavon Area Hospital\n\nA number of patients are being recalled after a review was started into the work of a consultant urologist in the Southern Health Trust.\n\nThe trust said \"clinical concerns\" were raised and the consultant \"no longer works in the health service\".\n\nIt said \"a small number\" of patients are affected.\n\nThe Irish News reported that an investigation began in the summer and focuses on care at Craigavon Area Hospital.\n\nThe newspaper also said the consultant retired in June. However, the trust told BBC News NI it had no further comment to make on the matter.\n\nThe trust said the patients were being contacted \"so that their care can be reviewed\".\n\n\"The Department of Health is being kept updated on the progress of the review and the potential impact on patients,\" a statement added.\n\n\"If anyone is concerned and would like information please phone us on 0800 4148520 between 10am and 3pm.\"\n\nThe Department of Health confirmed it is \"being kept apprised\" on the review and said Health Minister Robin Swann \"plans to make a statement to the assembly very shortly\".", "When he was seven years old, President Donald Trump punched his school music teacher.\n\n\"I actually gave a teacher a black eye,\" he wrote in his 1987 book The Art Of The Deal, \"because I didn't think he knew anything about music.\"\n\nMr Trump says he was \"almost expelled\" over the incident, and it suggests he's as opinionated about music as he is about trade or taxes.\n\nThe president is a big fan of The Rolling Stones, Eminem and Elton John (a decidedly one-way relationship), but his favourite song is Peggy Lee's Is That All There Is? It's an interesting choice: Lee's nihilistic ballad essentially says life is a series of meaningless disappointments, so you might as well drink away your sorrows and forget about the rest of the world.\n\nMr Trump sees it differently. \"It's a great song because I've had these tremendous successes and then I'm off to the next one. Because, it's like, 'Oh, is that all there is?'\" he told his biographer Michael D'Antonio, in 2014.\n\nSo what about his Democratic rival, Joe Biden? Well, his tastes are no more up-to-date. His favourite band is traditional Irish folk outfit The Chieftains, he told People Magazine in 2012, adding: \"I would sing Shenandoah if I had any musical talent.\"\n\nShenandoah, which The Chieftains recorded in 1998, actually dates back to the early 19th Century. The story of a fur trapper who falls in love with the daughter of a Native American chief, it's steeped in romanticism for the early days of America.\n\nNone of these songs have been played on the campaign trail this year - but the candidates' musical preferences at rallies and in advertisements offer a glimpse into what they think works for their supporters.\n\nMr Trump's playlist leans heavily on classic rock songs that project power and combative self-confidence.\n\nHe frequently plays Queen's We Are The Champions - whose refrain, \"No time for losers,\" could almost be the president's inner monologue.\n\nTina Turner's The Best (\"you're better than all the rest\") and Survivor's pugnacious Eye Of The Tiger (\"just a man and his will to survive\") fulfil similar functions - conveying the idea of Mr Trump as a lone wolf, fighting the political establishment.\n\nMr Trump often seems to be trolling critics with his choices. Why else would he play Gnarls Barkley's Crazy, or The Rolling Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want? And his perceived persecution by the media gets a musical airing, too, through songs like Michael Jackson's Beat It.\n\n\"They told him, don't you ever come around here,\" sings the star, who once kept a home in one of Mr Trump's buildings in New York. \"Don't want to see your face, you'd better disappear.\"\n\nBut the song actually advocates retreat. \"You'd better leave while you can,\" Jackson advises, the message being: You think you're tough, but your opponents are tougher... so be the better man and walk away.\n\nMr Trump's song choices are usually based on how they feel, rather than a scholarly analysis of the lyrics. His pre-speech playlist is designed to keep the audience pumped up. They often stand for hours before he comes on stage, so the focus is on timeless sing-alongs, seemingly targeted at white voters in their 50s and 60s.\n\nThat means songs like Elton John's Tiny Dancer and Laura Branigan's Gloria, mixed with rousing classical numbers like Nessun Dorma and the patriotic Battle Of The Hymn Republic (Glory, Glory, Hallelujah).\n\nIn recent months, as the president has courted black voters (\"I did more for the Black community in 47 months than Joe Biden did in 47 years\") he has also started including a few soul classics in his set. James Brown's Please, Please, Please and Barry White's My First, My Last, My Everything were given an airing during last week's rally in Erie, Pennsylvania.\n\nMr Biden's playlist has been almost evenly divided between black and white artists since he announced his candidacy in April 2019.\n\nRecently, his walk-on music has been The Staple Singers' deep cut We The People - an uplifting, soulful hymn to unity, whose title was lifted from the preamble to the US Constitution.\n\n\"You may have the black blood / Or you may have the white blood,\" sing the gospel group, \"But we are all living on blood / So don't let nobody slip into the mud.\"\n\nIt's the sort of message Mr Biden has sought to build his campaign around, calling for harmony and stability.\n\nHe tends to favour feel-good songs like Bill Withers' Lovely Day or Jackie Wilson's (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher. But for those paying attention, there's often a message hidden in the lyrics.\n\n\"Powers keep on lyin' / While your people keep on dyin,'\" sings Stevie Wonder in campaign staple Higher Ground - a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the Trump administration's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nAfter speaking, Mr Biden usually leaves the stage to the strains of Bruce Springsteen's We Take Care Of Our Own. Like Born In The USA, the song is actually a critique of America, originally written in response to President Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina.\n\n\"There ain't no help, the cavalry stayed home,\" sings The Boss, who says he's \"looking for the map that leads me home\". Mr Biden is, presumably, trying to align himself with Springsteen - a working-class hero who's determined to set America back on the right path.\n\nBut sometimes, the candidates select songs that make you wonder if they've paid attention to the words at all.\n\nWhat is Mr Trump trying to say when he blasts out Sympathy For The Devil, a song literally written from the perspective of Satan?\n\nAnd, wonderful though Haim's The Wire is, does Mr Biden realise he's being welcomed onto the stage with the lyrics: \"I fumbled it when it came down to the wire\"?\n\nMr Biden suffered another musical misfire last month, when he attempted to woo a large Puerto Rican audience in Florida by playing the Reggaeton song Despacito from his phone, while dancing awkwardly behind the podium (Luis Fonsi, who recorded the song, had just introduced him to the crowd).\n\nAs right-wing pundits gleefully pointed out, Despacito is Spanish for \"slowly\" - a perfect descriptor for the candidate they refer to as Sleepy Joe.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Sarah Mucha This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAfter his brush with Covid-19 earlier this month, Mr Trump has also been keen to prove he's neither slow nor sleepy, and TikTok is awash with memes of him dancing to The Village People's YMCA.\n\nIn fact, the president seems functionally incapable of staying still when the song strikes up - pumping his fists back and forth, and lurching from side to side like a priest at a wedding. His supporters have even recorded a new version of the track, where YMCA becomes MAGA.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Abigail Marone 🇺🇸 This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe 70s disco classic has been part of Mr Trump's playlist since at least last year, but it got bumped up the running order in June when the Rolling Stones threatened to sue the campaign over the use of their song You Can't Always Get What You Want.\n\nThey're not the only ones to object: Neil Young, Adele, Aerosmith, Pharrell Williams, Rihanna, Guns N' Roses and Phil Collins have all demanded not to be played at Mr Trump's rallies, with varying degrees of success.\n\nThe Village People were more relaxed. \"Like millions of Village People fans worldwide, the President and his supporters have shown a genuine like for our music,\" they wrote on Facebook in February. \"Our music is all-inclusive and certainly everyone is entitled to do the YMCA dance, regardless of their political affiliation.\"\n\nMr Trump also has the endorsement of country star Lee Greenwood, whose sentimental ballad God Bless the USA has been his walk-on music since 2016.\n\n\"That made me very proud,\" Greenwood told the Taste of Country website in 2017. \"I love the model 'Keep America Great' and 'Let's make it great again' so I'm all on board for that.\"\n\nRapper Cardi B is among the stars who've endorsed Joe Biden's campaign\n\nBut Mr Trump enjoys very little support from the current crop of pop stars, with Cardi B, Taylor Swift, Lizzo, Frank Ocean and DaBaby all endorsing Mr Biden this year.\n\nAnd the Democratic candidate has deployed pop music to take down his opponent in campaign ads targeted at younger voters.\n\nOne video posted to social media in May featured Mr Trump complaining about his treatment by the press, set to a soundtrack of Justin Timberlake's Cry Me A River.\n\nBut in the end, music can only set a mood. Voters won't decide who wins based on the candidates' CD collections.\n\nIn fact, a 2016 Ohio survey concluded that star endorsements had no effect on most voters' intentions in that year's presidential race - and some celebrities actually put people off. An endorsement from Beyonce was, apparently, the biggest turn-off.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What does the music used in both Biden and Trump's campaign trail tell us?\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Hospitals in Liège are transferring patients elsewhere and cancelling non-urgent surgeries as coronavirus admissions surge\n\nDoctors in the Belgian city of Liège have been asked to keep working even if they have coronavirus amid a surge in cases and hospital admissions.\n\nAbout a quarter of medical staff there are reportedly off sick with Covid-19.\n\nNow 10 hospitals have requested that staff who have tested positive but do not have symptoms keep working.\n\nThe head of the Belgian Association of Medical Unions told the BBC they had no choice if they were to prevent the hospital system collapsing within days.\n\nDr Philippe Devos acknowledged that there was an obvious risk of transferring the virus to patients.\n\nOne in three people tested are coming back positive with the virus in the eastern Belgian city. Hospitals are transferring patients elsewhere and cancelling non-urgent surgeries, days after Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke warned the country was close to a \"tsunami\" of infections where authorities \"no longer control what is happening\".\n\nThe decision comes as governments across Europe try to tackle fresh waves of coronavirus infections.\n\nAt a news conference on Monday, World Health Organization (WHO) officials suggested travel restrictions, stay at home orders or even national lockdowns may be needed across the continent to tackle the fresh outbreaks.\n\n\"Right now we are well behind this virus in Europe, so getting ahead of it is going to take some serious acceleration in what we do,\" warned WHO emergencies head Dr Mike Ryan.\n\nItaly - hit hard by the virus in March - has closed gyms, theatres and swimming pools in a bid to bring down case numbers. The country reported more than 21,200 new infections on Sunday.\n\nThe Italian government has warned that the rise in cases was putting a huge strain on health services, but Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said that a full lockdown would be catastrophic for the economy.\n\nRestaurants, bars and cafes must stop table service at 18:00 and offer only take-away until midnight. Contact sports are prohibited but shops and most businesses will remain open.\n\nThe new restrictions, which are in force until 24 November, will also see 75% of classes at Italy's high schools and universities conducted online instead of in a classroom.\n\nRegional governments had asked for all classes to be conducted via distance learning, Italian media reported, but the move was opposed by Education Minister Lucia Azzolina.\n\nBars and cafes across Italy must end table service by 18:00\n\nThe government is also urging people not to travel outside their home towns or cities unless absolutely necessary and to avoid using public transport if possible.\n\n\"We think that we will suffer a bit this month but by gritting our teeth with these restrictions, we'll be able to breathe again in December,\" Mr Conte told a news conference on Sunday.\n\nThe latest restrictions have triggered demonstrations in cities including Naples, Turin and Rome.\n\nGyms and pools have also closed in the Belgian capital Brussels, and shops must shut at 20:00. Masks are now compulsory in public spaces. These rules will remain in force until 19 November.\n\nIn the UK, people aged 16 to 25 are more than twice as likely as older workers to have lost their job during the pandemic, BBC Panorama has found. Research seen by the programme also suggests the education gap between privileged and disadvantaged young people has widened further.\n\nIn France, health experts have warned that the number of new Covid-19 cases per day could be about 100,000 - twice the official figure.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nProf Jean-Francois Delfraissy, the head of France's scientific council which advises the government on the pandemic, said the estimated figure included undiagnosed and asymptomatic cases.\n\nHe told RTL radio he was surprised by the \"brutality\" of the second wave which he expected to be much worse than the first, adding: \"Many of our fellow citizens have not yet realised what awaits us.\"\n\nFrance has already imposed night-time curfews on major cities, including Paris. The country has recorded more than 1.1 million cases in total and 34,780 deaths.\n\nThe Czech Republic has also introduced a night-time curfew, which came into effect on Tuesday at midnight for a week. Nobody will be allowed to leave the house between 21:00 and 04:59 each night except to travel to and from work, for medical reasons or a few other exceptions. All shops will be shut on Sundays and will close at 20:00 on other days.\n\nAnd Spain has declared a national state of emergency and imposed a night-time curfew amid a new spike in Covid-19 infections.\n\nPrime Minister Pedro Sánchez said the curfew, which came into force on Sunday night, would be in place between the hours of 23:00 and 06:00.\n\nUnder the measures, local authorities can also ban travel between regions. Spain has seen more than one million cases and 34,750 deaths.\n\nRussia has registered a record 17,347 new daily coronavirus cases, officials said on Monday. Total reported cases have surpassed 1.5 million - but the mayor of the worst-hit city, Moscow, said that while \"there is still growth... it is slower\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Gavin Lee reports from the epicentre of Europe's second wave, which is in Belgium\n• None How the Czech Covid response went wrong", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. John Bream leapt from a helicopter into the sea without a parachute\n\nA former paratrooper has attempted a new world record for jumping from an aircraft into water without a parachute.\n\nJohn Bream, 34, nicknamed \"the Flying Fish\", dropped about 130ft (40m) from a helicopter off Hayling Island on the Hampshire coast.\n\nSupport divers said he was briefly unconscious when he hit the water and was taken to hospital as a precaution.\n\nHe was raising money for mental health charities for services personnel.\n\nThe former member of the Parachute Regiment from Havant, Hampshire, fell about four seconds before hitting the Solent at about 80mph (130km/h).\n\nDivers who reached Mr Bream after the jump said he had landed awkwardly and was briefly unconscious after hitting his head.\n\nHe was later seen walking and chatting with paramedics as he was being checked over.\n\nJohn Bream was picked up by his support boat after the jump\n\nCash raised from Mr Bream's attempt will be donated to the All Call Signs and the Support Our Paras charities.\n\nSpeaking in July, he said knowing veterans who had taken their own lives was \"so painful\".\n\n\"The transition from the military is difficult but I want to show that we don't need to live in the past and we all can still achieve brilliance,\" he said.\n\nA spokesperson for Guinness World Records said it was still awaiting evidence of Mr Bream's attempt and could not verify it until then.\n\nJohn Bream, from Havant, Hampshire, is nicknamed the Flying Fish\n• None Ex-paratrooper to tackle jump with no parachute", "Frank Bough, one of the most familiar faces on BBC television from the 1960s to 1980s, has died at the age of 87.\n\nHe joined the BBC as a reporter on what was to become Look North, and went on to present some of the corporation's most popular shows, including Grandstand and Breakfast Time.\n\nBut his career was brought to an abrupt end after a scandal involving drugs and prostitutes.\n\nBough died last Wednesday in a care home, a family friend told the BBC.\n\nA talented sportsman, Bough began presenting Sportsview in 1964, taking over from Peter Dimmock before moving onto Grandstand - the BBC's leading sports show on a Saturday afternoon.\n\nOver the next two decades, he would become one of TV's best-known presenters, including with an 18-year stint as host of the BBC's Sports Review of the Year, which later became Sports Personality of the Year.\n\nHis reputation for a calm and unflappable style once prompted Michael Parkinson's remark that \"if my life depended on the smooth handling of a TV show he'd be the one I'd want in charge\".\n\nBough was the tranquil centre in a maelstrom of live sport\n\nIn 1983, Bough was involved in the launch of the BBC's new breakfast service, Breakfast Time. He proved a natural on the show, with his laid-back and comfortable style becoming an immediate hit with the early morning audience.\n\nFed up with early morning starts, he quit Breakfast Time in 1987 to present the Holiday programme.\n\nBut he was sacked by the BBC in 1988 after tabloid revelations about sex and drugs. The story came as a particular shock, given Bough's hitherto clean-cut family-man image.\n\nHe eventually returned to broadcasting, including fronting ITV's Rugby World Cup coverage, but this came to an end after a further scandal. Bough later spoke of his regret over his actions, saying his behaviour had been \"exceedingly stupid\".\n\nIn 2014, after years out of the spotlight, he contributed to a BBC documentary looking at 30 years of breakfast TV in the UK.\n\nMatch of the Day host Gary Lineker paid tribute, writing on Twitter: \"Sorry to hear that Frank Bough has passed away. Grew up watching him present Grandstand on Saturdays. He was a brilliant presenter who made it all look so easy. RIP Frank.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Gary Lineker This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nGood Morning Britain presenter Piers Morgan tweeted: \"RIP Frank Bough, 87. Star of Grandstand, Nationwide and Breakfast Time. His career was ruined by scandal, but he was one of the great live TV presenters. Sad news.\"\n\nAstrologer Russell Grant, a regular on Breakfast Time, said Bough was \"a great man to work with\" and was \"always there for advice and support\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Russell Grant This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nNick Owen, who went up against Bough in Britain's breakfast TV battle on ITV's TV-AM in the 1980s, remembered him as \"the ultimate broadcaster who combined news and sport brilliantly\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Nick Owen This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nA BBC spokesperson said: \"Frank excelled as a live presenter with the BBC for many years and we are very sorry to hear of his passing. We send our condolences to his family and friends.\"\n\nSky Sports presenter Jeff Stelling remembered meeting Bough as a young reporter. \"He was kind, helpful and generous with his time,\" he wrote, adding that the presenter was \"one of the very best in the business\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by Jeff Stelling This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "US stock markets suffered their sharpest drop in weeks as concerns about the economic impact of surging coronavirus cases sent shares tumbling.\n\nThe Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 2.3%, after dropping more than 3% earlier in the day. The S&P 500 fell 1.8% and the Nasdaq 1.6%.\n\nStocks in Europe, where a rise in virus cases has prompted new restrictions, also declined.\n\nShares in travel and energy firms took some of the heaviest losses.\n\nIn the United States, cruise lines Royal Caribbean Group, Carnival and Norwegian all dropped more than 8%, while in the UK, British Airways owner IAG closed 7.6% lower.\n\nTravel firms have been some of the most sensitive to warnings about the virus, which experts worry will intensify as winter approaches.\n\nOn Monday, Michael Ryan, an emergencies expert for the World Health Organization, said that Europe would need \"much more comprehensive\" measures to get the virus under control.\n\n\"Right now we're well behind this virus in Europe, so getting ahead of it is going to take some serious acceleration in what we do,\" he said.\n\nOn Monday, France's CAC 40 ended 1.9% lower, while Germany's Dax index dropped 3.7%. In the UK, the FTSE 100 fell nearly 1.2%.\n\nUS President Donald Trump has vowed to avoid widespread restrictions on activity, similar to the lockdown restrictions seen this spring, saying such limits are not worth the economic cost.\n\nBut such decisions are typically handled by local leaders in America, some of whom, such as the mayors of El Paso, Texas and Newark, New Jersey, tightened rules on Monday.\n\nOver the last week, the number of new virus cases reported daily in the US has repeatedly passed 80,000, sending the seven day average to a new high of nearly 69,000 - roughly double what it was in September.\n\nThe number of hospitalisations has jumped 40% in the past month and death rates are also rising, though more slowly.\n\nOn a per capita basis, the number of new cases in the US over the past seven days remains lower than some other countries, including the UK, Spain and France, which have announced new restrictions recently.\n\nBut analysts say the economy is unlikely to mend until concerns about Covid-19 are resolved.\n\nAmid those strains, investors are also worried about the impasse in Washington over the need to fund additional coronavirus economic relief.\n\nOn Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who has been trying to broker a deal for the White House, said the two sides remained far apart. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, who leads Democrats in the House of Representatives made similar comments.\n• None Covid map: Where are cases the highest?", "Paul Harvey, 80, said it had been \"thrilling\" to hear the BBC Philharmonic orchestra perform his composition\n\nA piece of music composed by a former music teacher with dementia is to be released as a single after he recorded it with the BBC Philharmonic orchestra.\n\nPaul Harvey, 80, originally improvised the composition after being given four notes to play by his son.\n\nA clip of the performance, which went viral, was intended to show how musical ability can survive memory loss.\n\nOn Sunday, the single of Four Notes - Paul's Tune was aired on Radio 4's Broadcasting House for the first time.\n\nDespite being diagnosed with dementia late last year, Harvey, a composer from Sussex, has continued to be able to play piano pieces from memory and create new ones.\n\nHis son, Nick, who posted the video in September, said it had been an \"old party trick\" of his father's to request four random notes and then improvise a song.\n\nIn the video, which has had more than 60,000 likes, Nick picked F natural, A, D and B natural for his father to play.\n\nAfter the clip went viral, the performance was aired on Broadcasting House for World Alzheimer's Day on 21 September.\n\nThis prompted listeners to ask the BBC to have the performance orchestrated, which led to the BBC Philharmonic's involvement.\n\nHearing the recording of the single for the first time, Paul, who was joined by his son on the programme, said: \"It was very, very moving and very thrilling at the same time...\n\n\"It's quite amazing that all this has happened, and in my 81st year. It's fantastic.\n\n\"It's given me a new lease of life and after we've all finished here I'll go to the piano and find another four notes.\"\n\nNick said: \"It was amazing - it was absolutely gorgeous.\"\n\nArlene Phillips, the choreographer and former Strictly Come Dancing judge whose father had Alzheimer's, and is an Alzheimer Society's ambassador, said the piece was \"so beautiful\".\n\nShe said: \"It's just incredible that four notes can stir so many mixed emotions.\"\n\nJason Warren, professor of neurology at the Dementia Research Centre at University College London, said one reason people with dementia can continue to play music is because it \"makes sense on its own terms\".\n\n\"So unlike a lot of the tests and the things we might ask people with dementia to do in the clinic, for example, or in their everyday lives, music to some extent is almost self-contained.\"\n\nHowever, he said what Paul did in his piece was \"remarkable by any standard, because what that also shows is his creativity\".\n\nNick said it was hoped the single would be released on all major steaming platforms on Sunday, 1 November. All proceeds will be split between the Alzheimer's Society and Music for Dementia.", "Chinese financial technology giant Ant Group looks set to make the world's largest stock market debut.\n\nAnt, backed by Jack Ma, billionaire founder of e-commerce platform Alibaba, is to sell shares worth about $34.4bn (£26.5bn) on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock markets.\n\nAdvisers to Ant set the share price on Monday amid reports of very strong demand from major investors.\n\nThe previous largest debut was Saudi Aramco's $29.4bn float last December.\n\nAnt, an online payments business, is only selling about 11% of its shares. But the pricing values the whole business at about $313bn.\n\nMr Ma's Ant shares are reportedly worth about $17bn, taking his net worth to close to $80bn and confirming him as China's richest man.\n\nAnt runs Alipay, the dominant online payment system in China, where cash, cheques and credit cards have long been eclipsed by e-payment devices and apps.\n\nIn fact, Alipay says the total volume of payments on its platforms in China for the year ending in June was a massive $17.6tn.\n\nAccording to Alibaba's most recent annual report, Alipay has 1.3 billion users. Most are in China, with the rest coming from its nine e-wallet partners elsewhere in Asia.\n\nThe company is expected to make its dual listing in Shanghai and Hong Kong next week, underlining the latter exchange's growing importance as a financing hub.\n\nThe Trump administration has threatened to limit Chinese firms' access to US capital markets, a move that is part of the long-running trade row between Washington and Beijing. In response, China called on its flagship tech giants to list on domestic stock markets.\n\nChinese tech firms, including NetEase and JD.Com, have already raised billions by selling their shares via the Hong Kong stock market.\n\nAccording to the Bloomberg news agency, Mr Ma told a conference in China on Saturday that the flotation would be of huge significance for Shanghai and Hong Kong.\n\n\"This was the first time such a big listing, the largest in human history, was priced outside New York City,\" he told the Bund Summit.\n\n\"We wouldn't have dared to think about it five years, or even three years ago,\" said Mr Ma.\n\nMajor investors to have signed up to the share offering ahead of flotation, scheduled for 5 November, include Singapore state investor Temasek Holding and Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds GIC and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.\n\nAnalysts said the flotation offered investors a chance to secure a slice of Asia's fast-growing tech sector.\n\n\"Digital commerce and infrastructure platforms in Asia provide an unprecedented opportunity for Asian and global investors to be part of the next wave of value creation in Asia,\" said Varun Mittal, an emerging markets expert at consultancy EY, in Singapore.\n\n\"Earlier this year, India saw a rush of international investors keen to invest in infrastructure and platforms ecosystem, which is being replicated in the Chinese ecosystem now.\"", "Letnany, near Prague, is now home to a field hospital, built by the army in just seven days Image caption: Letnany, near Prague, is now home to a field hospital, built by the army in just seven days\n\nThe Czech Republic was praised for its swift response to the coronavirus crisis back in spring, but seven months on it's now recording 15,000 new cases a day and has the second highest per capita death rate over seven days in the world.\n\nColonel Ladislav Slechta, a commander in the Czech Army, has just overseen the building of a field hospital.\n\nHe is used to building such hospitals in Afghanistan or Iraq. Not on the outskirts of Prague.\n\n\"There's no time at this moment to think about emotions. But I'm sure they're coming, because it's really an unusual situation,\" he told me.\n\n\"We were discussing it, and going back in history, we think the last time this type of facility was deployed in this country was during the First World War.\" So what went wrong?\n\nThousands of people celebrated the end of coronavirus in the city of Prague in the summer Image caption: Thousands of people celebrated the end of coronavirus in the city of Prague in the summer\n\nCzech efforts to fight the virus haven't been helped by the man who wrote the rules being caught in the act of breaking them.\n\nCzech Health Minister Roman Prymula says he will resign as soon as his successor is named, after the tabloid Blesk published a late-night photograph of him emerging maskless from a restaurant, holding his wallet.\n\nAll pubs and restaurants are supposed to be closed to customers, and can only provide hatch service until 8pm.\n\nRead more from Rob here.", "Prue Leith, right, with the prime minister at the Royal Berkshire Hospital\n\nFood served around the clock and digital menus are among the recommendations in a review of hospital meals led by celebrity chef Prue Leith.\n\nIt is possible to serve \"delicious, nutritious\" food on a budget, the Great British Bake Off judge said.\n\nThe review was launched after a deadly outbreak of listeriosis in hospitals last year was linked to pre-packaged sandwiches and salads.\n\nBoris Johnson said it was \"therapeutic\" for patients to have good food.\n\nA group of advisers, tasked with reviewing hospital food, set out ways NHS trusts can prioritise food safety and provide healthier meals.\n\nRecommendations included upgrading kitchens to provide 24/7 service that caters for a variety of needs, from new mothers in a maternity ward, to patients hungry after a long fast due to surgery, and staff working overnight.\n\nLeith said: \"The review provides best-in-class examples of how hospitals can serve delicious, nutritious and nicely presented meals on a budget.\n\n\"Food is not only important to health, but to morale. Hospital mealtimes should be a moment of enjoyment and a pleasure to serve. They should inspire staff, patients and visitors to eat well at home.\"\n\nThe prime minister said: \"It's massively important for patients and for staff that they should have hot and nutritious meals available in the wards and across hospitals at all times of the day.\"\n\nIt is \"therapeutic, it's beneficial\" for patients to have good quality food, he added.\n\nHe visited the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading with Leith and Health Secretary Matt Hancock on Monday to mark the launch of the review. On the visit, he said that in the 40 new hospitals being constructed or rebuilt \"there will be kitchens and facilities on the wards so people can get hot toast at all times of the day\".\n\nThe review said introducing digital menus and food ordering systems that factor in a patient's needs could improve communication between dieticians and caterers, reduce food waste and provide patients with the right food for recovery.\n\nAn agreed set of national professional standards for NHS chefs - with mandatory professional development, including appropriate compulsory food hygiene and allergen training - was also recommended in the review.\n\nIncreasing the role of nurses, dieticians, caterers and staff wellbeing leads in overseeing food services could help to make sure nutritious meals are part of patients' recovery plans, the report said.\n\nHenry Dimbleby, co-founder of Leon Restaurants and independent lead on the National Food Strategy, said hospitals must be a \"guiding light\" in efforts to \"get to grips with the slow-motion disaster that is the British diet\".\n\nNHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens said \"every meal that patients get in hospital should be appetising and nutritious\" and that the NHS should play its part in tackling the nation's obesity crisis.\n\nThe government is putting together an expert group of caterers, dieticians and nurses to decide on next steps.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: 'We don't want to see children going hungry'\n\nBoris Johnson has defended his refusal to extend free school meals for children in England over the half-term holiday, saying he was \"very proud\" of the government's support so far.\n\n\"I totally understand the issue of holiday hunger,\" he said. \"The debate is, how do you deal with it.\"\n\nHe said the government will \"do everything in our power to make sure that no kid, no child goes hungry\".\n\nPressure has risen on the PM, including from his own MPs, to rethink the issue.\n\nMr Johnson also said he had not spoken to Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford - who has been leading a high-profile campaign to extend free school meals into the holidays - since the summer.\n\nThe UK government extended free school meals to eligible children during the Easter holidays earlier this year and, after Rashford's campaigning, did the same for the summer holiday.\n\nBut it has refused to do so again. A petition created by the England striker calling for provision to continue in the holidays had gained more than 900,000 signatures by Monday evening.\n\nScotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have already introduced food voucher schemes.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Marcus Rashford and his mother Melanie helped out at FareShare Greater Manchester\n\nSpeaking during a visit to a hospital in Reading to launch a review of hospital food, Mr Johnson said \"I totally salute and understand\" where Rashford was coming from.\n\nBut he said the government was supporting families with a Universal Credit increase of £20 a week, introduced in April.\n\nThe government also said it gave £63m to councils - first announced in June - to help people who are struggling to afford food and essentials.\n\nHowever, the Local Government Association said this funding was intended to be spent before the end of September and had been \"outstripped\" by demand.\n\nMr Johnson said: \"We are very proud of the support we have given, I have said repeatedly throughout this crisis that the government will support families and businesses, jobs and livelihoods, across the country.\n\n\"We're going to continue to do that.\n\n\"We don't want to see children going hungry this winter, this Christmas, certainly not as a result of any inattention by this government - and you are not going to see that.\"\n\nDowning Street doesn't want to do a U-turn; at least not in too obvious a fashion.\n\nSo it isn't stumping up the cash to extend holiday food vouchers in England.\n\nBut listen carefully to Boris Johnson and it's clear that he might stump up cash in other ways, for pretty much the same purpose.\n\nSo, for example, could councils be given further funds to help struggling families?\n\nThen ministers can try and argue that they're simply carrying on with an existing policy that they believe is more effective.\n\nThe PM was at pains today to show that he both recognises and cares about this issue.\n\nBut some Tories fear that, because of cack-handed communications, Downing Street lost the PR battle on compassion days ago.\n\nOne mother, Nicola Palmer from Leicestershire, said the meal vouchers had been an \"absolute lifeline\" for her family during the Easter and summer holidays.\n\nShe receives Universal Credit but said that, after paying bills, she and her partner and their two children \"would be lucky\" to have £40 a month to live on.\n\n\"Me and my partner have been disabled. I've been disabled since 2017 with multiple sclerosis. My partner has been disabled for a lot longer than that with Crohn's disease and a few other health issues,\" she said.\n\nMs Palmer said the vouchers helped her and her partner feed their two children when they were struggling with money\n\nShe said one day last week - which was their half-term - she and her partner had no dinner at all, to make sure the children could eat.\n\n\"Yes, we are in receipt of Universal Credit, however due to our low income and having to pay for bills as well as trying to put a meal on the table, the very slight increase on this has not made any difference for us whatsoever.\"\n\nLucy Houghton, 36, from Norfolk, also relies on free school meal vouchers and said there are times she will not eat so her children can.\n\n\"It's going to be tough this week,\" she said.\n\n\"It's all very well businesses offering free food, but I'm in a rural location and would need fuel to get there. And it's humiliating. I hate asking for help from anybody and I know I'm not alone in that.\"\n\nDefence Secretary Ben Wallace said the government had been \"incredibly generous\" during the pandemic, with support such as wage subsidies, increases to benefits and business rates relief.\n\nHe added: \"If there is still need or if this Covid crisis continues to kick in and more lockdowns happen, of course the government will look at other alternatives, or other solutions. We're not going to sit there in a static environment.\"\n\nLabour said Mr Johnson's \"warm words\" would \"do nothing\" for the children at risk of going hungry this week.\n\n\"Labour will not not give up on the children and families let down by this government, and we will hold the prime minister to his word, forcing another vote in Parliament if necessary,\" said shadow education secretary Kate Green.\n\nRashford's campaign has led to businesses including fish and chip shops, pubs, restaurants and cafes promising to dish out free food to eligible children over half-term, which began on Monday in many areas.\n\nAnd Manchester United says it will distribute 5,000 meals - cooked at the Old Trafford kitchen facilities - to children eligible for free school meals across Greater Manchester.\n\nSome charities have set up websites and maps allowing parents to search for places nearby providing free meals.\n\nDavid Pickard, head of community operations at Midland Mencap, said he expected \"hundreds\" of families to access free lunches from its community centre in Birmingham this week.\n\nMother-of-three Aisha, who spoke to a reporter as she collected food donations from a community centre in Birmingham, said: \"I am usually really good with my budget. Their father, who I'm divorced from, usually pays for their uniforms but he got ill and he couldn't work, so I bought them this time.\n\n\"But the £200 I used came from money I use to pay my bills, because the school said if I brought in the receipts I could get some help from them.\n\n\"I did that - but it's been seven or eight weeks now, and I haven't heard anything back from the school, so I'm struggling.\"\n\nSome councils - including several Tory-run local authorities - have promised to supply meal vouchers or food parcels for children facing hardship.\n\nCafe staff in Liverpool prepare sandwich bags for children, as businesses offer to help\n\nLast week, Conservative MPs voted against Labour's attempt to extend free school meals by 322 votes to 261, with five Tory MPs rebelling and voting for Labour's motion.\n\nStuart Anderson, Tory MP for Wolverhampton South West, said he had received threats and his office had been vandalised after he opposed the plan to offer free school meals in the holidays.\n\nChildren of all ages living in households on income-related benefits may be eligible for free school meals.\n\nIn England, about 1.4 million children qualified for free school meals in January 2020 - about 17.3% of state-educated pupils.\n\nAnalysis by the Food Foundation estimates a further 900,000 children in England may have sought free school meals since the start of the pandemic.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe stress levels rocketed for Ian Scott-Browne earlier this month, when one of his colleagues radioed him and told him to call the fire brigade.\n\nSmoke had been spotted coming from one of the sorting machines at the Smallmead recycling centre, just outside Reading in southern England.\n\nHe knew that a fire in one of the machines could be catastrophic as burning plastic, paper and cardboard could be quickly spread by conveyor belts which connect all the machines in the facility.\n\n\"My concern was that we'd lost control of where the fire was,\" says Mr Scott-Browne, who is an operations manager at the recycling facility.\n\nFor him there was a tense 15 minutes while firefighters, helped by some of his staff, urgently took heavy metal panels off the side of the sorting machines to track down and extinguish the fire.\n\nSmall fires like that are surprisingly common at recycling centres. Somewhere in the UK there is one every day, on average.\n\nAs a result the industry has become good at extinguishing them, but they would rather not deal with them at all, particularly as recycling centres are full of combustible materials.\n\nLike all recycling centres Smallhead has piles of combustible materials\n\nThe problem is that however attentive staff might be to the threat of fire, they can't control what people put in their recycling bins.\n\nThe Environmental Services Association (ESA), which represents waste firms like Biffa, Veolia and Suez, says too many batteries are going into either recycling bins or black rubbish bags, where they are easily damaged by sorting equipment and start to burn - so-called \"zombie\" batteries.\n\nThe ESA has launched a campaign called Take Charge which encourages people to dispose of batteries properly.\n\n\"Unfortunately, the majority of batteries thrown away in the UK at the moment are not put in the proper recycling bins. Fires caused by carelessly discarded zombie batteries endanger lives, cause millions of pounds of damage and disrupt waste services,\" says Jacob Hayler, executive director of ESA.\n\nLithium-ion batteries, which power mobile phones, tablets and toothbrushes, can be extremely volatile if damaged. CCTV footage taken at several recycling centres shows explosions sending flames and debris shooting across sorting areas.\n\nAnd those sorts of batteries are a growing menace. Between April 2019 and March 2020, lithium-ion batteries were suspected to have caused around 250 fires at waste facilities. That is 38% of all fires, up from 25% compared to the previous year, according to the latest data from ESA.\n\nIn many cases the precise cause of a fire is never established but ESA says it is likely that lithium-ion batteries account for an even bigger proportion of fires.\n\nWaste sorters have to watch for hidden batteries\n\nPaul Christensen, professor of pure and applied electrochemistry at the University of Newcastle, has deliberately damaged lithium-ion batteries in experiments to make them explode.\n\nThe experiments are part of his work to help fire brigades tackle fires involving lithium-ion batteries.\n\nProf Christensen is a \"massive fan\" of the batteries and points out that they are perfectly stable under normal conditions.\n\nHowever, he says that even small lithium-ion batteries, similar to the ones in your mobile phone, would explode \"with a rocket flame\" if punctured.\n\nHis real concern though is with the much bigger batteries found in electric cars, or used to store electricity in homes and businesses.\n\nBatteries for electric cars are made up of lots of individual cells\n\nThey are generally divided into many small cells and managed by software that keeps the battery running smoothly. But if a car crashes and some of those cells are damaged, the chemicals inside can generate huge of amounts of heat, damaging and igniting other cells.\n\n\"An electric vehicle will burn for much longer than an internal combustion vehicle. They give off potentially explosive and toxic fumes. They can reignite hours, days or weeks after the incident,\" says Prof Christensen.\n\nElectric cars are still relatively rare on the roads, but that will change in the coming years.\n\nIn February the UK government brought forward a ban on selling new petrol, diesel or hybrid cars from 2040 to 2035 at the latest.\n\nGovernments elsewhere in the world are also encouraging electric car sales - in China the government wants 25% of new cars sold to be electrified by 2025.\n\n\"That means not just more electric vehicles, but the production facilities will get more and bigger... the storage facilities are going to get more and bigger,\" Prof Christensen says.\n\nHe wants planning and safety regulations to take account of the risks of having so many more powerful batteries. He also wants better training for firefighters.\n\nEurobat represents European Automotive and Industrial Battery Manufacturers. It says safety is always \"high on the agenda\", and is supporting a colour-coding system for batteries that would make sorting them easier.\n\nIn the meantime the UK waste industry just wants people to be more careful when disposing of any battery.\n\n\"We urge consumers to please recycle their batteries responsibly by using battery recycling points in shops and recycling centres, or a separate battery kerbside collection if available,\" ESA's Jacob Hayler says.", "A prison officer was dismissed after she \"failed to notice\" a sex offender was dead on the floor when unlocking his cell, a report said.\n\nStephen Maddock, 59, died at HMP Rye Hill on the Northamptonshire and Warwickshire border on 7 December.\n\nA report said an officer opened his cell but did not check on him, \"which meant that no-one realised [he] was dead for another half an hour\".\n\nHMP Rye Hill's director said it \"fully accepted\" the report's recommendations.\n\nThe Prisons and Probation Ombudsman (PPO) report said Maddock was serving a 16-year sentence, having been convicted of sexual offences in 2015.\n\nMaddock, who was clinically obese, had diabetes and high blood pressure, which he received medication for.\n\nOn the morning of 7 December, the report said, officers at the G4S-operated Category B prison for sex offenders carried out roll checks of inmates on Maddock's wing twice before an officer unlocked his cell at 08:00 GMT.\n\nThe report said: \"About half an hour later, prisoners called for staff after they had found Maddock on his cell floor.\n\n\"He had rigor mortis, which indicated that he had been dead for some time.\"\n\nYou may also be interested in:\n\nA post-mortem examination discovered he died from acute pancreatitis and the ombudsman found the healthcare he received \"was of a standard equivalent to that he could have expected to receive in the community\".\n\nBut the report added the officer, who was later dismissed after a disciplinary investigation, \"failed to notice that he was dead on the floor\".\n\n\"When unlocking a prisoner's cell, the officer is supposed to get a response from the prisoner to satisfy themselves that they are alive and well.\n\n\"This did not happen, which meant that no-one realised that Maddock was dead for another half an hour.\"\n\nThe PPO also recommended \"that all staff understand what is expected of them when conducting roll checks and that all staff adhere to these expectations\".\n\nPeter Small, director at HMP Rye Hill, said: \"Mr Maddock's family and friends remain in our thoughts at this difficult time.\n\n\"We have fully accepted the recommendations made by the PPO; staff conducting welfare checks do so with regular managerial supervision, and daily reports are issued to the deputy director.\"\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "Some say America is now a house divided. In many American families, their houses are indeed divided by political differences, putting strains on their relationships.\n\nBut a Chinese American family in Maryland made it work.\n\nThirty-one-year-old Cathy Shao has decided to vote for Biden in the US presidential election, while her husband Chenren Shao, 35, will be voting for Trump a second time.\n\nThe couple has been married for eight years, raising their three daughters together.\n\n“I know she's Democrat, and she knows that I'm a Republican,” Mr Shao says the political difference has never been a problem for their marriage. “I think being humble is the key of not being offended,” he says, “We're not trying to persuade each other.”\n\nWhen Mr Shao speaks, Mrs Shao looks at him lovingly. Other than agreeing to disagree, Mrs Shao believes their common goal bonds the family together. “We want to provide a better environment for our children.”\n\nThough Americans have become less willing to date their political opponents in the Trump era, politically mixed marriages are not uncommon. A high-profile example is Kellyanne Conway, a former counselor to President Trump, and George Conway, who is a harsh critic of the President.\n\nWhat does managing a politically divided but happy marriage tell us about how to govern a politically divided country?\n\nAs American politics has become more polarised, Mrs Shao says she always appreciates a different perspective from her spouse.\n\n“All Republicans should get married with Democrats, then we naturally have different views,” she says with a laugh.\n\nMrs Shao hopes the two major political parties will recognise that their common goal is “to make the country better, rather than attacking each other”.", "Biscuit is also known as Bikkit, and has returned close to the anniversary of the death of Keith Bigland's mother, who originally owned him\n\nThe return of a family cat after going missing three years ago really \"takes the biscuit\", its owners say.\n\nKeith Bigland's pet cat, Biscuit - originally owned by his late mother Shirley - had escaped from their home in March, Cambridgeshire.\n\nBut last Wednesday, Mr Bigland and his wife Su were left in disbelief when a local vet called them to say their gold and white pet, now 14, had been found.\n\nAnd, he was spotted just a mile away from their house.\n\n\"I still can't quite believe it, I had totally given up hope, we never thought the call would come. When he arrived at our house my wife threw her arms around the vet in relief,\" Mr Bigland, 53, said.\n\n\"What makes it even more special is that Biscuit was handed in just a few days after the third anniversary of my mother's death, which makes you wonder if she's watching over us.\"\n\nMr Bigland and his wife Su were in disbelief when a local vet called them last Wednesday to say their fluffy gold-and-white moggy, now aged 14, had been handed in\n\nBiscuit, nicknamed Bikkit by the family, was captured on CCTV escaping the house at 04:00 GMT on 1 December 2017.\n\nMr Bigland confessed he probably went \"overboard\" during the \"frantic\" search, distributing posters around the local area and looking everywhere he could.\n\nHe said: \"I had hope at first, for months afterwards I was calling his name around every corner. Biscuit is the last link I have left to my mother.\"\n\nBiscuit was caught on CCTV escaping the house at 04:00 GMT on 1 December 2017\n\nOn his return Biscuit \"was not in great shape\" and was found to have problems with his breathing and heart.\n\nMr Bigland estimates Biscuit's veterinary care costs will be about £1,500, and has launched a GoFundMe page to help cover the costs.\n\nHe said: \"Although he looks and acts differently to before, I recognised him straight away, and he recognised me and hasn't stopped purring since.\"", "Welsh Government ministers are meeting again on Sunday to discuss a 'fire-break' national lockdown\n\nOfficials are \"not blind\" to the impact another national lockdown would have on the economy, Wales' health minister has said.\n\nVaughan Gething said the concern being voiced \"weighs heavily\" on ministers.\n\nA decision on a two or three-week \"fire-break\" lockdown is expected on Monday.\n\nHowever, Conservative leader in the Senedd Paul Davies said he would not support the measure \"until I know what the details are\".\n\nMr Gething told BBC Politics Wales he recognised a circuit-breaker lockdown to slow the infection rates would have real impacts \"in terms of people being able to pay their bills\".\n\n\"We're also not blind to the fact that doing nothing means that Covid will continue to grow and we will continue to see harm,\" he added.\n\n\"We want to be able to get to the end of the year with a pattern that people can live with.\n\n\"What we can't do though is give people a guarantee that things will not happen during the winter. That depends on all the choices that we make.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government cabinet met on Sunday afternoon to continue its discussions, and agreed to meet again on Monday ahead of the expected announcement from First Minister Mark Drakeford.\n\nA Welsh Government spokesperson said: \"Ministers have held a number of meetings over the weekend with senior Welsh Government officials, scientists and public health experts to consider their advice on a potential need for a 'fire break' set of measures to control the virus.\n\n\"The Welsh cabinet met this evening to consider that advice. The cabinet will meet again tomorrow morning to make a final decision. The first minister will update the people of Wales on any decisions taken tomorrow.\"\n\nSeventeen areas in Wales currently have local lockdown rules in place\n\nPrior to the cabinet meeting, Mr Gething insisted no final decision had been taken on lockdown measures.\n\nIt follows the publication of a letter on possible dates for a short, Wales-wide lockdown.\n\nIt prompted calls from the Welsh Conservatives for an emergency recall of the Senedd on Monday.\n\n\"They should come now to the Senedd tomorrow to make a statement to explain that (letter), and also to explain what their plans are, because it's unacceptable that they are actually briefing organisations and the media,\" said Mr Davies.\n\n\"They should be making the decisions and making the announcements in the Senedd, that's the point we're making.\"\n\nThe letter was sent to all Confederation of Passenger Transport members by the Welsh director\n\nIn the letter to members of the Confederation of Passenger Transport, Wales director John Pockett said lockdown would start at 18:00 on 23 October and end on 9 November.\n\nBut Mr Pockett has since told PA Media he was assuming what would happen.\n\n\"The letter is genuine and it contains what I assume or surmised would be the position,\" he said.\n\n\"It was me advising my bus operator members to be prepared for something and this is what it may well be.\n\n\"It could be more - it could be anything. I think other associations have communicated with their members in the same way.\"\n\nThe speculation over the possible lockdown has led to \"frustration\", said one of Wales' police and crime commissioners.\n\nDyfed-Powys Police and Crime Commissioner Dafydd Llywelyn told BBC Radio Wales' Sunday Supplement: \"We have had meetings last week in relation to the preparation for what may be happening in the future.\n\n\"The reality, and I will be very open about this, the detail of that has not necessarily been shared in a huge amount with us and there is sometimes - and has been during the whole period - some frustration on the part of policing.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BBC's Laura Foster explains what a circuit breaker is and how it could help tackle Covid-19\n\nPlaid Cymru Member of the Senedd Sian Gwenllian said the Welsh Government \"must urgently set out its plans for a national fire-break\".\n\n\"We are concerned about the lack of clarity and anxiety caused by a drip-feed of information circulating in the media and elsewhere over the weekend,\" she added.\n\nBaroness Wilcox, the former head of the Welsh Local Government Association, said there was a \"growing consensus that we need a different set of measures\".\n\n\"We need different actions to respond to the virus,\" she said.\n\nThe Welsh Government said: \"The measures we have put in place at both a local and a national level, with help from the public, have kept the spread of the virus under check.\n\n\"However, there is a growing consensus that we now need to introduce a different set of measures and actions to respond to the virus as it is spreading across Wales more quickly through the autumn and winter.\n\n\"We are actively considering advice from SAGE and our TAC Group.\n\n\"A 'fire-break' set of measures to control Covid-19, similar to that described in the SAGE papers, is under consideration in Wales. But no decisions have been made.\"", "Helen Pye said there had been shift toward staycations, resulting in more visitors to Snowdonia\n\nWales' tourism sector faces \"very dark days\", with firms closing and hotels \"mothballed\" amid the coronavirus pandemic, an industry body has said.\n\nWales Tourism Alliance (WTA) said a Covid resurgence meant hopes of making up for several \"lost months\" had faded.\n\nBut some in the sector said it could be a chance to attract new visitors and improve sustainability.\n\nThe Welsh Government said a £1.7bn support package had helped and it was committed to delivering sustainability.\n\n\"If things pick up and businesses do make it through, then I think we're very well-placed to pick up customers that would normally have gone overseas,\" said Adrian Greason-Walker of the WTA, which represents thousands of firms.\n\n\"However, we've probably had five weeks of trade this year instead of what would normally be 20 solid weeks over the summer.\n\n\"At the moment things are dark.\"\n\nIt comes after the Welsh Government announced a ban on visitors travelling from coronavirus hotspots elsewhere in the UK, which came into effect on Friday.\n\nThat followed mounting tension over fears from some residents around an \"influx\" of tourists to areas not currently subject to lockdown restrictions in Wales, such as Ceredigion, most of Carmarthenshire, Powys, Pembrokeshire and Gwynedd.\n\nA two-week \"fire break\" - a period with tighter restrictions to help break the trajectory of coronavirus cases rising in Wales - is also expected within days.\n\nMr Greason-Walker said about half of tourism businesses surveyed by the WTA feared they might not survive the next six months, with some facing the \"worst possible scenario\".\n\n\"If we can pick up any silver lining from this awful situation then it's that we can still offer people some respite from it all.\n\n\"I think we've seen a return to family holidays to Wales, whereas before they might have caught a flight to Spain and spent a week on a beach over there.\n\n\"We've got a fantastic landscape and environment here. We're going to have to come out of this crisis at some point.\"\n\nOne area significantly bucking the trend for reduced footfall was Snowdonia, with figures from Visit Wales suggesting more people intended to visit the national park than anywhere else in Wales over the next few months.\n\nWish you were here? Visit Wales said Snowdon was top of most people's to-do list in Wales\n\n\"I would say it's been the busiest summer that we have ever seen,\" said Helen Pye, the park's engagement officer.\n\n\"August was incredibly busy - and September the figures were up by about 40 to 50% compared to a normal year.\"\n\nHowever, having large numbers of visitors concentrated in certain areas has heightened fears about over-tourism.\n\n\"The tourism industry is incredibly important to us, but we've been seeing a huge increase in the challenges we already had,\" said Ms Pye.\n\n\"There's been an increase in traffic, pollution and noise in the national park. We've also seen huge amounts of litter in the area and anti-social behaviour and fly camping.\"\n\nHowever, she and others in the industry hope Wales can follow the lead of countries such as New Zealand and Iceland in introducing a sustainable tourism model - which would aim to spread visitors more evenly by promoting less well-known places.\n\nLouise Dixey would like to see a change to the way Wales is seen and treated as a destination\n\n\"Sustainable tourism is about reducing the negative impacts of tourism and maximising the benefits,\" explained Louise Dixey, from Cardiff Metropolitan University's Next Tourism Generation project.\n\n\"It's not about the number of visitors, but it's about how much they spend and whether their visit can benefit local communities.\n\n\"There needs to be an emphasis on almost de-marketing some of these hotspots like Snowdonia and marketing unheard of places in Wales to try and spread the visitor load and make it more manageable.\"\n\nA winter break centred around long walks and dining out can be seen as bringing in far more benefit for less impact than a daytrip to the beach in the height of summer, for example, where the only expenses may be car parking and an ice cream.\n\nHowever, for some, the strategy still would not go far enough.\n\nHoward Huws, from Welsh language group, Cylch yr Iaith, said some Welsh-speaking communities had been feeling \"overwhelmed\" by the tourist trade for decades.\n\n\"We're constantly being told that the only way to deal with tourism is to bolster it further - but we are in a situation where it's already wreaking damage,\" said Mr Huws.\n\n\"People find themselves with few job opportunities - and any opportunities in tourism are seasonal and low paid.\n\n\"The cost of having those jobs is people then find themselves priced out of the housing market. We find ourselves unable to access the sites within our own landscape where tourism has taken control.\n\n\"They are talking about diversifying it and spreading it - but not about controlling it. Without controlling it - nothing is sustainable.\"\n\nWales' travel ban bars visitors from Northern Ireland, England's tier two and three areas and the Scottish central belt\n\nAcross the industry there is an acknowledgement coronavirus may have created a strange paradox, simultaneously crippling businesses while potentially increasing their future demand - as people switch from foreign holidays to staycations.\n\n\"There is a slight concern given the current situation that many tourism and hospitality businesses might not survive until spring 2021,\" said Ms Dixey.\n\n\"But there has been a surge in domestic demand. So we might actually be in a situation next year where market demand exceeds supply, particularly in relation to accommodation, which would limit the number of visitors.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government said its £1.7bn support package was the \"most generous\" in the UK and included a £500m economic resilience fund which had \"helped protect the livelihoods of more than 100,000 people\".\n\nA spokesman added: \"Over the course of the pandemic and in the coming years we will continue to listen closely to the people of Wales, the industry and visitors to ensure what we're delivering is sustainable and provides prosperity for everyone.\"", "Manchester has resisted being put into the \"very high risk\" tier\n\nEarly in the pandemic, the government consistently said it was \"following the science\" - but what does that really mean, and is the divergence between politics and science now wider than it has ever been?\n\nSome with heels clacking on the cobbles, others capturing the moment on their phones - it's like the aftermath of a big win in the football, or the Saturday after pay day. The videos show Concert Square in Liverpool heaving with crowds.\n\nAnd this in a city on the crest of a second wave of coronavirus, where almost all the intensive care beds in the hospitals are full.\n\nIt was Tuesday night, hours away from the Liverpool City Region entering the toughest restrictions in the country. But the footage sparked anger, and on Twitter there was a fight over the damage to the city's reputation.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Crowds gather in Liverpool on eve of new Covid rules\n\nDozens of tweets insisted that those present must have been students, that no true Liverpudlian would set foot in Concert Square, let alone behave like that. The tweeters were adamant - these people came from outside.\n\nThe mayor and the metro mayor condemned the scenes - but that wasn't the only thing they were angry about.\n\nThey accused the government at Westminster of not providing enough financial support - workers affected by the closure of businesses such as bars and gyms will only get two-thirds of their wages.\n\nOn the first day of lockdown, one gym owner showed his defiance by remaining open and was fined for it.\n\nGyms have indeed provided a source of confusion. Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson questioned why gyms in the Liverpool City Region had to close when the area moved into tier three - very high alert - but those in Lancashire, which went into tier three on Saturday, were allowed to stay open.\n\nLiverpool was the first place in England to go into the strictest measures\n\nIn Blackburn, with 438 cases per 100,000 (in the week to 13 October), you can work out, but in Wirral, with 284 cases per 100,000, you can't.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has acknowledged inconsistencies. \"There are anomalies, that's inevitably going to happen in a complex campaign against a pandemic like this.\"\n\nBut do these discrepancies encourage those who feel the government's decision-making sometimes veers away from the science?\n\n\"Following the science\" was a phrase we heard a lot of earlier in the year. It's what, we were repeatedly told, the government at Westminster was doing.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe reality was always more nuanced. There was a range of scientific views on a topic about which precious little was known at the outset, and there are still vast amounts to learn.\n\nAdded to that, from the perspective of ministers, this could never only be about scientific advice.\n\nThere was a constant swirl of broader considerations, what we might call the three Ls - lives, liberties and livelihoods. Ministers have been tussling with the three Ls from the start of the pandemic. But the divergence has never been wider than it is now.\n\nClaire Hamilton is the BBC's political reporter for Merseyside @chamiltonbbc\n\nThe critical moment in recent weeks can be traced back to 21 September, when Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK's chief scientific adviser and Prof Chris Whitty, the UK's chief medical adviser, warned of the need for immediate action.\n\nIn a televised briefing, Sir Patrick warned cases could reach 50,000 a day by mid-October if they doubled every seven days, as had happened in recent weeks.\n\nWe now know that on that same day, the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) met and suggested the \"immediate introduction\" of a \"short period of lockdown,\" and a series of longer term measures, including:\n\nA day later, what actually happened?\n\nThe prime minister said people should work from home if they could and a 22:00 curfew for pubs and restaurants was introduced. In other words, not a lot of change.\n\nWhat happened to \"following the science\"?\n\nPlenty at Westminster whispered, even before we had seen the minutes from the Sage meeting, that this was a victory for those in government, like Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who worried about the pandemic's crippling economic consequences.\n\nMr Sunak has been consistent - warning again, just this week, of the danger of \"rushing to another lockdown\". He warned, instead, of the \"economic emergency\", touching on another of the three Ls - livelihoods.\n\nWhen you speak to people in the Treasury, you get an insight into what informs this outlook.\n\n\"We have to keep an eye on the medium term. There may not be a vaccine. Listening to the scientists recently, the mood music has changed. They're more pessimistic,\" says one.\n\nThis is no longer about dealing with a short-term emergency, but being resilient through a medium or long-term slog of a crisis.\n\nAnd that means the Treasury is well aware of what is going out - in public spending - and what is coming in, in taxes.\n\n\"There isn't the headroom there was,\" an insider says - a reference to the £200bn already spent.\n\nAnd there is a keen awareness of the economic consequences of shutting pubs. \"Our economy is comparatively very reliant on social consumption,\" is how it is described.\n\nThe experts know the ministers have to take into account a variety of factors. One Sage member said: \"Our job is to give clear unvarnished science advice so they can do that with their eyes open.\"\n\nOn Tuesday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer advocated a short, limited lockdown - the circuit-breaker suggested by the scientific advisers.\n\nBut does Sir Keir calling for a circuit-breaker make it more or less likely to happen?\n\nSince then, the government - to quote Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab - has been \"leaning in\" to its regional response for England.\n\nPolitical convention says, everything else being equal, it is harder to adopt a policy advocated by your opponents than it is by independent advisers.\n\nThen there's the last of the three Ls. Liberties.\n\nAmong the most influential Conservative backbench voices is Sir Graham Brady, who said ministers had got used to \"ruling by decree\" and \"the British people aren't used to being treated like children\".\n\nThis unease at how the pandemic has, in their view, swept away some of the checks and balances on those in power, is widely held in Parliament.\n\nThen there's the question of geography. First there was devolution for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but now we're all aware of the big English cities that have metro mayors because they are fighting back against Westminster.\n\nAccording to well-placed sources, Health Secretary Matt Hancock had argued for tougher measures in private. But the need to get local leaders on board has meant the tiered system has had to leave some wriggle room for negotiation.\n\nMinisters were stung when Middlesbrough mayor Andy Preston said he flatly rejected the restrictions that the government announced there in early October. \"It was a real problem for us - it undermined the public health message and threatened to undo what we were trying to achieve,\" one government source said.\n\nSteve Rotheram, Metro Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, had been asking for a lockdown circuit-breaker for at least two weeks - but he said any measures must come with a bespoke financial support package for businesses. It appears this hasn't been forthcoming.\n\nBut the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has gone much further than his colleague in Liverpool. On Friday, he was described as \"effectively trying to hold the government over a barrel\" by Mr Raab.\n\nMr Burnham, a former Labour cabinet minister, who lost out to Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 Labour leadership contest, is suddenly back on the national stage. He is demanding noisily and frequently the need for more generous support for those unable to work because of tier three restrictions.\n\nThere is nervousness within the Labour Party nationally, and elsewhere in the north of England, about this stance. Some worry it imperils people's health, others that it's become \"the Andy show\" - as one figure put it.\n\nThe idea of \"metro mayors\" voted for directly by the people of the region has long been championed by the Conservatives. David Cameron was a particular fan.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Top SAGE scientist tells us the regional restriction row is dangerous\n\n\"Some Conservatives are now realising you've got to be careful what you wish for,\" an early advocate of them says.\n\n\"And remember this, Boris Johnson was a mayor. There is a path to Downing Street that can pass via a town hall. Perhaps Andy Burnham has realised that too.\"\n\nWhat we are seeing is how different parts of the UK have tilted in different directions. Loyalty to region, to nation, to party. The legacies of past perceived slights and injustices. The realities of perceived injustices now.\n\n\"We owe a big thanks to George Osborne for bequeathing us this incredible standoff,\" a senior Conservative says about the row.\n\nSome Conservative ministers ponder privately that - in the end - Mr Sunak will be forced to be more generous to those unable to work under tier three restrictions. They don't think it'll be politically sustainable to pay people normally on the minimum wage, less than the minimum wage, for months on end.\n\nThe rows between local and central government leaders are \"very dangerous\" and \"very damaging to public health\", according to Prof Sir Jeremy Farrar, Sage member, and director of the Wellcome Trust.\n\nBut these are not the only rows that have been taking place. Across the scientific and medical community tempers are frayed and the pandemic is taking its toll.\n\nThere is a network of committees that feed into Sage, bringing together a wide range of experts from sociologists and public health directors to epidemiologists.\n\nMany are not paid for their advice and instead are fitting it in around their day jobs. \"We do it because we care and it's our life's work,\" said Prof Devi Sridhar, an expert in global public health at Edinburgh University, who has been advising the Scottish government.\n\nTalk to these experts and it is clear they are exhausted.\n\n\"The requests just keep coming in,\" one said. \"We're fed up, especially when we hear that test-and-trace consultants are getting paid £7,000 a day, and we have to put up with MPs going on the TV telling the world we are naïve and don't live in the real world. It's demoralising.\"\n\nBut it is not just between politicians and scientists that disputes have developed. Rival camps of scientists are clashing. Two online petitions have now been established: the Great Barrington declaration for those who want to see controlled spread of the virus and protection of the vulnerable, and the John Snow Memorandum for those arguing for outright suppression until a vaccine is developed.\n\nProf Francois Balloux, director of the UCL Genetics Institute, says the toxic atmosphere that is developing is really \"unhelpful\".\n\nBrought together, it has created a climate where almost every utterance or development is examined for double-meaning.\n\nThe problem facing advisers and decision-makers is two-fold. First, the nature of the virus means it is a lose-lose situation - whatever decision is taken has negative consequences either for the spread of the virus, or for the economy, education and wider health and well-being. What's more, there is not a simple binary choice of one thing or the other.\n\nFor example, much has been made in recent weeks about the need for the NHS to also focus on non-Covid work, which has taken a terrible hit during the pandemic.\n\nReferrals for urgent cancer check-ups and the number of people starting treatment have dropped, while the amount of routine surgery being done is still half the level it was before the pandemic.\n\nThis can have tragic consequences. This week the British Heart Foundation warned the number of younger adults dying of heart disease had increased by 15% during the pandemic.\n\nThe argument put forward by some is that the government should choose to do more non-Covid work. But, and this is a point the health secretary has been making week after week, if hospitals fill up with coronavirus patients, it makes non-Covid work harder to do.\n\nThe second key issue - and this goes to the heart of the disagreements we have seen bubble up in recent weeks among the scientific and medical community - is that there are huge gaps in the evidence and knowledge.\n\nThis is true on everything from the numbers infected already and the level of immunity exposure brings to the true impact of \"long Covid\", and exactly what effect any restrictions beyond a full lockdown actually have.\n\nIn normal times, the scientific and medical community is able to reach more of a consensus off the back of rigorous randomised controlled trials and painstaking peer review.\n\nBut in a fast-moving pandemic with a new virus, that has simply not been possible. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, says it means there is such \"uncertainty in the science\" that he does not think any plan is guaranteed to work.\n\nAnd then there is the human factor - the unintended consequences of actions that are impossible to take into account in the modelling. Hence the prospect of scenes like the ones we saw in Liverpool, which were not taken into account by Sage in its latest advice.\n\nBut Prof Keith Neal, an infectious disease expert at Nottingham University, says it shouldn't come as a surprise that people react in the way they do. Both young and old are suffering, he says, from not being able to meet up with people. \"This degree of isolation is not allowed in prisons under human rights legislation.\"\n\nPeople from different households will not be able to drink together inside, after London went into tier two\n\nIt is, he says, therefore natural that some people will ignore the rules. Closing pubs may sound good on paper, he says, but it could lead to an increase in house parties where people are \"far more at risk\".\n\nSo where has this left us?\n\nThe complexity of competing interests, uncertainty in the science and general exhaustion across society both among decision-makers and the public has, some fear, left us in the worst of both worlds.\n\nDelay and deliberation, says Sir Jeremy Farrar is a \"decision in itself\".\n\nBut by reaching a decision by default there is a risk - another adviser says - of making the same mistakes we made at the start of the pandemic.\n\n\"In March we toyed with the Swedish model of limited restrictions with the hope of developing immunity and then hesitated. But we then went for a lockdown, but it was introduced bit by bit and it was too late anyway.\n\n\"The same thing has happened again - we have delayed and then gone for some half measures. I can understand why. This is bloody difficult.\"\n\nThe government is now hoping it will be just enough that we can get through this wave without a devastating number of deaths or hospitals being overwhelmed. But it's a big risk - it could all unravel.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\n\"We've gone 12 months without an elephant being shot and killed by poachers at Mana Pools National Park, which is a huge result.\"\n\nFor Nick Murray, a conservationist born in Pontypridd, this result has followed years of hard work.\n\nNick now runs a conservation project with his wife Desiree covering the Lower Zambezi Valley of Zimbabwe, an area of 10,000 sq km (3,800 sq miles).\n\nOver the past 23 years, he has seen the wildlife populations of the valley decrease rapidly. In particular, the elephant population at the Unesco World Heritage site has nearly halved in the past two decades from 20,000 to 12,000.\n\nNick said poaching had \"hammered\" the elephant population, and the drop in tourists caused by the coronavirus pandemic was expected to lead to an increase in the illegal practice. Thankfully that has been avoided.\n\nThe anti-poaching work of Bushlife Conservancy - the project Nick runs - is complex and dangerous, training armed national park rangers to protect the animals, and keeping rangers mobile via boats and jeeps to track wild animals.\n\nNick Murray has worked with Sir David Attenborough, advising a BBC crew filming in Zimbabwe\n\nThe 52-year-old said: \"In 2008 and 2009 it was really bad. Poachers would put cyanide in trees targeting elephants, but when that was too slow they'd poison the watering holes.\n\n\"The aim was to kill elephants but the results were it would kill all wildlife which drank from it, from a little bird to a leopard or a lion.\n\n\"On one occasion a pack of wild dogs, which are an endangered species, eight elephants and a number of other animals were killed at a poisoned watering hole. That really brought it home that we needed to up our game.\n\n\"It wasn't just a case of listening out for gun shots and tracking poachers down anymore, you've got to be proactive and be there to prevent them getting to the watering holes.\n\n\"Thankfully, with the hard effort we've put in with Zimbabwe national park rangers, we've curbed that.\"\n\nWalking with elephants is a \"unique experience\", says Nick\n\nNick studied Zoology at university in South Africa and has guided in many African countries. He has spent the past 23 years canoeing the Zambezi River and working in all the wildlife areas of Zimbabwe.\n\n\"I got interested in wildlife at a very young age. I remember being in Swansea with my grandfather, who played rugby for Wales - a gentleman called Dai Thomas - and he gave me a BBC wildlife magazine from 1971. That was my earliest stimulation into my passion for wildlife.\n\n\"An elephant is such an intelligent animal so it's about spending time with them because they can smell you and recognise your voice, but they also know who you are by a vibe from your body and you can just sense each other's mood. Some will seek out human company.\n\n\"It's a unique experience and Mana is one of the few places you can get out and walk with these amazing creatures.\"\n\nThe conservation project constantly monitors the herds by first collaring the animal.\n\nA vet will fire an anaesthetic dart, then the team works quickly to attach the tracker before an antidote is injected.\n\n\"A lot of the big bulls [male elephants] were wiped out by poaching. If they leave the national park and go into hunting areas, we can act on that now.\n\n\"If the collar is reading stationary, that triggers an alarm that alerts us to the animal and we can go and investigate, and if he's been poached we can follow that up.\"\n\nElephants are poached for their ivory tusks\n\nCoronavirus has hit Zimbabwe's tourism industry hard and fewer tourists usually leads to an increase in poaching, but the rangers and conservation teams have been working hard to prevent it.\n\n\"Tourism is a major factor toward conservation and without the tourist camps being open there's been no presence.\n\n\"The park has been an empty shell except for a few rangers, but they have managed to keep poaching at bay, which is a fantastic success.\"\n\nElephants use their tusks to protect themselves, move objects and gather food, but their ivory is highly lucrative on the illegal market.\n\nA study published in 2016 estimated up to 40,000 elephants were being killed by poachers - who remove the tusks with an axe - every year.\n\nIn 2018, all trade in ivory in China was banned, but the illegal market is still thriving. The price can be as much as $2,000 (about £1,500) a kilogram.\n\n\"Ivory has been sought after by man for thousands of years, but it's the market in the Far East which drives the poaching,\" said Nick.\n\n\"China has done a lot recently to try and stop the trade but it's just driven it further underground.\n\n\"A large well-carved ivory tusk in China could go for $100,000.\n\n\"The poacher on the ground, who is risking his life, will get around $500. So the further away from Africa it goes the higher the price goes.\"\n\nHe said poaching was indiscriminate, killing of all sexes and ages of elephant.\n\n\"But over the last five years there have been over 300 arrests and 1,500 years of jail time handed down, so this has also been a massive deterrent.\"\n\nNick got involved in conservation work after seeing the results of poaching for himself\n\nIt was seeing the effects of poaching for himself that got Nick involved in his current role.\n\n\"I was guiding one backpacking photography safari 10 years ago and we got surrounded by poachers at a watering hole.\n\n\"There were vultures all around this amphitheatre at the spring, so you could tell from that how many elephants had been killed there.\n\n\"It was a dozen and we found another bunch of dead elephants in the next valley. We alerted the park rangers and luckily the poachers were caught.\n\n\"So, just from that one walk 30 pairs of elephant tusks were recovered and 11 poachers arrested. It was from that one safari that it really brought it home to me that the level of poaching was horrendous and that's what made me so determined to start this conservation work and do what we've been doing.\"\n\nNick is due to start advising on a new series with Sir David Attenborough\n\nIn 2017, Nick finished guiding and advising a BBC crew on a film shoot capturing wild dogs (also known as painted wolves) for Sir David Attenborough's Dynasties series.\n\nHe will start working on a new Attenborough series called Green Planet this month, while continuing to focus on his conservation work.\n\n\"We are proud of what we've done and the impact it has had. It's been far greater than I thought we would be able to achieve,\" Nick said.\n\n\"We were losing an elephant a day in the valley through poaching and now we have not lost one in Mana for 12 months - that's unbelievable. At this rate it means the elephant population here will increase by 5% per annum.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan's lawyers say he is \"surprised and saddened\" by the allegations\n\nThe Hay literary festival has accused a senior Gulf royal of an \"appalling violation\" after he allegedly sexually assaulted one of their employees.\n\nCaroline Michel, Hay chair, said they would not work in Abu Dhabi again while Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan remains minister of tolerance.\n\nTheir employee, Caitlin McNamara, claims he attacked her earlier this year and is seeking legal redress.\n\nMs McNamara, 32, told the Sunday Times that the alleged attack happened on 14 February at a remote private island villa where she had been summoned, she thought, to discuss preparations for the first-ever Hay Festival in Abu Dhabi, which was opening 11 days later.\n\nShe said she told both her employer and embassy officials soon after the attack, and went to the police in the UK when coronavirus lockdown restrictions lifted.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Hay Festival This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAccording to the Sunday Times, Ms McNamara is waiting to hear whether the Crown Prosecution Service will take up her case, and said she had decided to waive her right to anonymity because \"I feel I have nothing to lose\".\n\n\"I want to do this because I want to highlight the effect of powerful men like him doing things like that and thinking they can get away with it,\" she told the newspaper.\n\n\"It seemed clear from the set up I was not the first or last. It really took a massive mental and physical toll on me for what to him was probably just a whim.\"\n\nThe Sunday Times said Sheikh Nahyan had not responded to its approach for a comment on the allegations, but had received a statement from London libel lawyers Schillings which said: \"Our client is surprised and saddened by this allegation, which arrives eight months after the alleged incident and via a national newspaper. The account is denied.\"\n\nSchillings declined to give further comment to the BBC.\n\nIn a statement, posted on Twitter, Hay Festival Chair Caroline Michel, said: \"What happened to our colleague and friend Caitlin McNamara in Abu Dhabi last February was an appalling violation and a hideous abuse of trust and position.\n\n\"Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan made a mockery of his ministerial responsibilities and tragically undermined his government's attempt to work with Hay Festival to promote free speech and female empowerment\".\n\n\"We continue to support Caitlin in seeking legal redress for this attack and we urge our friends and partners in the UAE to reflect on the behaviour of Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan and send a clear signal to the world that such behaviour will not be tolerated. Hay Festival will not be returning to Abu Dhabi while he remains in position.\"", "A group of Tory MPs have urged Greater Manchester's mayor to \"engage\" with the government's regional approach to restrictions - prompting anger from some of their own colleagues.\n\nIn a letter to Andy Burnham and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, 20 MPs said a national lockdown would impose \"severe costs\" on areas with low transmission.\n\nBut four Conservative MPs for the region said the letter was unhelpful.\n\nMinisters say Greater Manchester needs to be in the top tier of restrictions.\n\nThe letter was organised by Jerome Mayhew, MP for Broadland in Norfolk, and was signed by MPs representing constituencies currently at the lowest tier of Covid restrictions.\n\n\"It does not make sense to shut down the whole country when the virus is spiking in particular locations,\" the letter reads.\n\n\"Our constituents, like yours, have made many sacrifices to get - and keep - the virus under control in our areas,\" it adds.\n\nMeanwhile, Liverpool City Region's metro mayor Steve Rotherham announced his area will receive an additional £44m from the government to \"support local jobs and businesses\" and fund a local test-and-trace service after its move to tier three - very high.\n\nA similar package worth £42m was given to local leaders in Lancashire as part of negotiations over its move to the highest alert level.\n\nSir Keir has backed calls for a shorter but stricter national lockdown - also known as a circuit-breaker.\n\nThe MPs lending their names to the letter argue that a regional approach offers protection to businesses in low prevalence areas.\n\nBut Christian Wakeford, the Conservative MP for Bury South, tweeted to say the intervention was \"neither wanted nor helpful\".\n\nJames Daly, MP for Bury North, described the letter as \"deeply disappointing... unnecessary and ill-advised\".\n\nAnd fellow Conservative William Wragg, MP for Hazel Grove in Greater Manchester, suggested colleagues focus on their own constituencies and asked for \"time and space\" to work on improving the situation in Greater Manchester.\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak said the government will pay two thirds of staff wages if businesses are forced to close under new restrictions\n\nMeanwhile, Mr Burnham has accused Chancellor Rishi Sunak of being \"the problem\" as the Manchester mayor reiterated his call for greater financial support for workers and businesses in the area.\n\nHe told the New Statesman magazine: \"I think the problem now is, to a large degree, the chancellor. I think he's made wrong judgements throughout this.\"\n\nMr Sunak has offered a 66% subsidy for those whose businesses are forced to shut by tier three restrictions.\n\nBut Mr Burnham wants a return of the original furlough scheme, which saw the Treasury pay 80% of workers wages.\n\nHe said the cost of the Eat Out to Help Out meal subsidy programme should have been paying for the furlough now.\n\nHowever, the responsibility ultimately lies with the PM, Mr Burnham added.\n\nNo 10 told the BBC it had arranged a call with Mr Burnham on Sunday morning, but the Greater Manchester Mayor's office said no such call had been scheduled.", "Firms are calling for more financial support to avoid \"catastrophic consequences\" from tougher coronavirus restrictions.\n\nWithout more help there could be mass redundancies and business failures, the British Chambers of Commerce warns.\n\nIts call for a new approach comes as tougher restrictions are imposed on large parts of the UK.\n\nThe government said it had already put in place support worth more than £200bn to help firms cope.\n\n\"We know this continues to be a very difficult period for businesses,\" a spokesman said. \"That's why we have put in place a substantial package of support.\"\n\nThe government has already announced extra supportfor firms affected by new measures to control the virus, including providing two thirds of workers' wages where firms have been told to close. Firms will also receive grants of up to £3,000 per month.\n\nThere is additional funding for local authorities and devolved administrations.\n\nThe director general of the BCC, which represents 75,000 firms of varying sizes across the UK, has written to the prime minister calling for a new set of criteria to be applied before imposing tougher restrictions.\n\n\"The situation for business grows graver by the day,\" Adam Marshall wrote.\n\n\"Enhanced support must be given to those facing the indirect impacts of restrictions and closures - in supply chains, tourist destinations and town and city centres.\"\n\nThe letter outlines a set of conditions firms would like to see in place before restrictions are imposed.\n\nIt says there should be evidence of the effectiveness of the proposed measures, businesses should be given time to prepare, and financial support should be available, both for firms forced to closed, and those indirectly affected.\n\nWhile some businesses are required to close in areas under the strictest measures, many more firms say their business will be badly affected by a drop in demand as people are asked to limit some activities, travel and socialise less.\n\nSome businesses in England say they would rather be closed down under the tier three (very high alert) measures and receive financial support, than see demand for their services destroyed in a tier two (high) area, the BCC said.\n\nThe prime minister announced the new three tier system for England last week - pointing to sharply-rising transmission rates for the virus in some parts of the country.\n\nMr Johnson told the House of Commons: \"This is not how we want to live our lives but this is the narrow path we have to tread between the social and economic trauma of a full lockdown and the massive human, and indeed, economic cost of an uncontained epidemic.\"\n\nThe government has introduced the toughest tier three restrictions in Liverpool and Lancashire, which means pubs and bars not serving food must close and households are not permitted to mix.\n\nMany other parts of England, including London, York and Essex, are now in tier two, the second highest level of measures. This means people from different households may not meet indoors including inside cafes and restaurants.\n\nIn Northern Ireland, pubs, restaurants and cafes have closed to sit-in customers for the next four weeks, while in Scotland's central belt most licensed premises are closed under temporary restrictions.\n\nIn Wales, a two-week \"fire break\" - a period with tighter restrictions to help break the trajectory of coronavirus cases rising - is expected within days.\n\nThe BCC is also calling for changes to the NHS Test and Trace system.\n\n\"The need for additional restrictions cannot be blamed on a lack of care by hardworking people in businesses across the country,\" the letter said.\n\n\"Instead it represents a failure of the test and trace system, which must be urgently improved and expanded.\"\n\nIt suggests any period of enhanced restrictions should be used to speed up the effectiveness of NHS Test and Trace, including putting a focus on rapid testing and low-cost testing in workplaces.\n\nCabinet minister Michael Gove told the BBC's Andrew Marr programme that the number of people being tested was higher than ever before and that \"contact-tracing was improving all the time\".\n\nBut he said that \"any test and trace system has less utility as the virus grows\".\n\nSince the start of the pandemic, the number of people employed across the UK is down by around half a million, according to the Office for National Statistics, while some self-employed workers and entrepreneurs have lost significant amounts of work.\n\nThe government provided support to employees and businesses at the start of lockdown in March, including VAT cuts, business rates holidays, extended loan schemes and the furlough scheme which provided 80% of wages for those unable to continue working.\n\nHowever, the furlough scheme is being phased out, and will be replaced at the end of this month by a less generous job support scheme.", "The team have been monitoring road crossings, roadkill and use of tunnels\n\nUp to 335,000 hedgehogs are dying each year on UK roads, a study suggests.\n\nThe figure represents a three-fold mortality rate on 2016 data, described as \"alarming\" by a team at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) researchers.\n\nA study in 2016 put the UK road death figure at 100,000 but experts suggested that was a \"mid-line estimate\".\n\nResearchers said measures such as tunnels and speed bumps \"could\" protect the animals but ultimately relied on drivers' behaviour to change.\n\nPhD student Lauren Moore led the review, which has been jointly funded by wildlife charity People's Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) and NTU.\n\nNew research suggests as many as 335,000 hedgehogs are killed on UK roads each year\n\nRecent estimates put the hedgehog population in England, Wales and Scotland at about one million, compared with 30 million in the 1950s.\n\n\"Hedgehog roadkill is sadly a very familiar sight both in the UK and in Europe,\" Ms Moore said.\n\nThe research considered a number of measures to protect the creatures, including speed bumps, road signs and tunnels, but concluded none would be effective without help from drivers.\n\n\"Although we know some hedgehogs use road-crossing structures, we don't yet know how effective these solutions are,\" Ms Moore continued.\n\n\"Changing drivers' behaviour has been shown to be difficult to achieve and sustain, reducing the potential for meaningful reductions in roadkill.\"\n\nNew signs featuring a picture of a hedgehog started to appear in 2019\n\nShe thought the solution may lie in a combination of measures constructed \"in carefully chosen locations\" close to hedgehog hotspots.\n\nNida Al-Fulaij, grants manager at PTES, said: \"With thousands of hedgehogs killed on UK roads every year, the continuous development of road networks, without any mitigation, puts this already endangered species at even further risk.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.", "Vessels carrying migrants were intercepted by Border Force and brought to Dover\n\nUp to 170 migrants in 12 boats have crossed the English Channel after days of choppy sea conditions improved.\n\nA further 222 people were stopped from making the \"perilous\" journey by French authorities, the Home Office said.\n\nThe authorities later confirmed the body of a man in a lifejacket, found on a beach near Calais at 08:00 BST, was that of a migrant.\n\nSix migrants on two kayaks tied together were also rescued by the French navy off the coast of Calais.\n\nThe man, who was found dead on the beach at Sangatte, had almost certainly been trying to cross the Channel, said Pascal Marconville, the prosecutor of nearby town Boulogne-sur-Mer.\n\nThe number of people reaching the UK by boat had fallen in October amid harsher conditions in the Channel.\n\nMr Marconville said initial examinations of the man's body indicated there was no third party involvement in his death.\n\nSix migrants were rescued from a makeshift raft in French waters\n\nThere was also no suggestion he had been in the water for any length of time - washing up just a few hours after attempting to make the crossing.\n\nOfficers investigating his death would work with the migrant communities based in Calais and Dunkirk to try to establish his identity and the circumstances around his death, he added.\n\nAbout 260 people have successfully made the crossing this month, compared to a record 1,951 in September.\n\nHome Office minister Chris Philp said the government was \"taking action at every step of these illegally-facilitated journeys to make this route unviable\".\n\nThe National Crime Agency this week arrested 12 people alleged to be responsible for smuggling migrants into the UK, he said.\n\nA 30-year-old man was arrested in Hastings on Friday on suspicion of sourcing boats in the UK and transporting them to France, where they were allegedly used to cross the Channel.\n\nA demonstration was held in support of asylum-seekers outside a barracks in Folkestone\n\nMeanwhile, about 250 people gathered in Folkestone, Kent, to show support for asylum-seekers being housed inside a former army barracks.\n\nIt followed claims that far-right activists were using the arrival of asylum-seekers at the Napier barracks to \"fuel hate\".\n\n\"There's a narrative that has been put forward by a group of people saying that these fellow human beings aren't wanted in Folkestone and we know that isn't the case,\" said Bridget Chapman, of charity Kent Refugee Action Network.\n\nAnd Clare Moseley, co-founder of refugee charity Care4Calais, said they were only risking crossing the Channel \"because they are frightened, fleeing appalling horrors in some of the most dangerous places on earth\".\n\n\"They [also] do it because of the grim and unsanitary conditions in Calais, where they are constantly harassed and abused by the authorities,\" she continued.\n\n\"They do it because there is no safe and legal way to have their UK asylum claim heard.\"\n\nKent Police thanked \"the vast majority of the attendees\" at the Folkestone protest at what it described as a \"peaceful event\".\n\nOne man was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage following a confrontation with a small counter demonstration.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A vehicle carrying the royal family arrives back at Huis ten Bosch palace in The Hague\n\nThe Dutch royal family is back in the country after a holiday that lasted just one day, following a coronavirus-related public backlash.\n\nKing Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima headed off to the Greek sun on Friday but flew back on Saturday evening.\n\nThey left as a new partial lockdown was introduced and although they did not break any rules they said they had been affected by intense criticism.\n\nPM Mark Rutte is under pressure to explain any advice he may have given.\n\nThe royals flew out on a government plane but were immediately criticised for going on holiday when the population was being advised to stay at home as much as possible to curb the spread of Covid-19.\n\nThey flew back on a scheduled KLM flight and the royal standard was flying over the palace in The Hague on Saturday evening.\n\nThe royal statement read: \"We do not want to leave any doubts about it: in order to get the Covid-19 virus under control, it is necessary that the guidelines are followed. The debate over our holiday does not contribute to that.\"\n\nThere appeared to be some confusion about who in government knew about the trip and whether advice was given.\n\nThe Dutch monarchy has no formal role in the day-to-day running of the Netherlands. But the Ministry of General Affairs, headed by the prime minister, is responsible for what the monarchy says and does.\n\nAs a result, several MPs are calling on Mr Rutte to explain why he did not advise the royals to cancel their holiday.\n\n\"If Rutte had said that this was a bad idea, you can assume that the king would have changed his plans,\" said Peter Rehwinkel of the PvdA party.\n\nThe GroenLinks leader also called the trip \"an error in judgment\" and abandoning the trip was the \"only correct decision\".\n\nThe daily tally of coronavirus infections continues to grow in the Netherlands. On Saturday, more than 8,000 new cases were recorded for the first time since the country's outbreak began.\n\nMark Rutte is facing questions over any advice he gave\n\nBars, restaurants and cannabis \"coffee shops\" have been ordered to close for four weeks.\n\nIt is not the first time the royal couple have been in the spotlight for their conduct. In August, they were pictured breaking social distancing rules with a restaurant owner during another trip to Greece.\n\nThe royal family's annual budget is under review amid growing pressure from opposition lawmakers.", "A statue on Place de la Republique, Paris, symbolically \"gagged\" by protesters after the Charlie Hebdo attacks\n\nWhen French President Francois Hollande gave a sombre televised address to the nation, hours after the shocking attack on Charlie Hebdo, he vowed to protect the message of freedom that the magazine's journalists represented.\n\nCharlie Hebdo's \"heroes\" had defended freedom of speech and this was an attack on the entire republic, he said.\n\nBut since the start of the week, 54 people have been detained and several jailed for a variety of remarks, shouted out in the street or posted on social media, and France's judiciary has been lampooned for what appear to be double standards.\n\nThe so-called comic Dieudonne M'bala M'bala will face trial for writing \"I feel like Charlie Coulibaly\", hours after 3.7 million French citizens had taken to the streets behind the \"je suis Charlie\" rallying cry.\n\nHe said the posting was meant to be humorous. But in the context of his past convictions for anti-Semitism, the authorities saw it as a voice of support for one of the gunmen, Amedy Coulibaly, who had murdered four Jewish men in a kosher supermarket.\n\nDieudonne could face up to seven years in jail for his Facebook comment\n\nPrime Minister Manuel Valls set it out plainly: freedom of speech should not be confused with anti-Semitism, racism and Holocaust denial.\n\nBut Dieudonne has plenty of young fans who watch his shows and follow his social media posts, however tasteless they may be, and many in France saw his arrest as an example of double standards.\n\nAfter all, Charlie Hebdo's entire ethos has been tasteless lampooning of the establishment.\n\n\"Extremely clumsy to detain Dieudonne when you've just made the whole world march for freedom of speech,\" read one tweet.\n\nBut the crackdown extends way beyond a notorious comic with a string of convictions.\n\nThe justice ministry has revealed that a number of fast-track custodial sentences have been handed down in cities across France in the past few days for expressions of support for the gunmen.\n\nIn Toulouse alone, three men in their early twenties have been jailed, two of them for 10 months, for shouting obscenities at police.\n\nOne threatened to attack police with a Kalashnikov while another said the Kouachi brothers were \"just the start\".\n\nIt was in Toulouse that Islamist gunman Mohamed Merah killed seven people in a series of attacks in 2012, including one on a Jewish school.\n\nIn Nanterre, east of Paris, a man was sent to prison for a year for posting a video on Facebook that mocked policeman Ahmed Merabet, who was shot at point-blank range by one of the Kouachis.\n\nThe French government tightened anti-terror laws in November, clamping down on online comments\n\nHuman rights groups have been less than impressed with what would seem to be a knee-jerk response by the authorities after what Mr Valls admitted had been clear failings by the security services.\n\nFrance's League of Human Rights (LDH) has condemned the fast-track sentences, which it argues are handed down in dreadful conditions and largely apply to drunks or fools.\n\nBut while the sentences may look startling and in some cases even draconian, they are following the letter of an anti-terror law that was passed by the National Assembly as recently as last November.\n\nDirectly provoking or publicly condoning terrorism in France now commands a five-year jail term and a fine of €75,000. And if it is done online, the penalty can be extended to seven years and €100,000 (£76,000; $116,000).\n\nSo for the many French who did not feel \"je suis Charlie\", where does France now see the boundary between freedom of speech and condoning terrorism?\n\nThe right to say, write or print what you want is rooted in the declaration of rights that came with the 1789 French Revolution, but even then abuse of that freedom was limited by law.\n\nThose exceptions were defined in 1881 (in French) as defamation, slander and incitement to hate. There is also explicit reference to condoning crimes of war, crimes against humanity or collaboration with the enemy.\n\nNot everyone has felt comfortable with the \"je suis Charlie\" message in France\n\nHowever, not since the revolution has blasphemy been against the law in France, and according to Mr Valls it never will.\n\nThe restrictions on freedom of speech go well beyond those in the US. A former editor of Charlie Hebdo had to defend himself against incitement in 2007 after reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.\n\nSince November those restrictions have gone further still. What was previously a law against condoning terrorism in the media has been extended to social media too.\n\nAnd it will not just be careless tweets or Facebook posts that are caught in the crosshairs. US-based social media companies will be required to police their sites too.", "Mark Rutte is facing questions over any advice he gave\n\nDutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has conceded he \"made the wrong assessment\" by not intervening against plans by the royal family to holiday in Greece.\n\nKing Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima headed off on Friday but flew back a day later, following a public backlash.\n\nThey left as the Dutch government introduced a new partial lockdown - which included discouraging unnecessary travel - but did not break any rules.\n\nMr Rutte has acknowledged that he had been aware of the royal plans.\n\nIn a letter to parliament, the prime minister said he had \"realised too late\" that the holiday \"could no longer be reconciled with the increasing infections and the stricter measures.\n\n\"This should have prompted me to reconsider the intended holiday. I bear full ministerial responsibility,\" he added.\n\nThe royals flew out on a government plane but were immediately criticised for going on holiday when people were being advised to stay at home as much as possible to curb the spread of Covid-19.\n\nThey flew back on a scheduled KLM flight on Saturday evening.\n\nIn a statement, the royals said: \"We do not want to leave any doubts about it: in order to get the Covid-19 virus under control, it is necessary that the guidelines are followed. The debate over our holiday does not contribute to that.\"\n\nInitially there appeared to be some confusion about who in government knew about the trip and whether advice had been given.\n\nThe Dutch monarchy has no formal role in the day-to-day running of the Netherlands. But the Ministry of General Affairs, headed by the prime minister, is responsible for what the monarchy says and does.\n\nAs a result, several MPs are calling on Mr Rutte to explain why he did not advise the royals to cancel their holiday.\n\n\"If Rutte had said that this was a bad idea, you can assume that the king would have changed his plans,\" said Peter Rehwinkel of the PvdA party.\n\nThe Green party's leader called the trip \"an error in judgment\" and abandoning the trip was the \"only correct decision\".\n\nThe daily tally of coronavirus infections continues to grow in the Netherlands. On Saturday, more than 8,000 new cases were recorded for the first time since the country's outbreak began.\n\nBars, restaurants and cannabis \"coffee shops\" have been ordered to close for four weeks.\n\nIt is not the first time the royal couple have been in the spotlight for their conduct. In August, they were pictured breaking social distancing rules with a restaurant owner during another trip to Greece.\n\nThe royal family's annual budget is under review amid growing pressure from opposition lawmakers.", "Kath Sharpe says the division is \"crackers\"\n\nPeople across the country have opposing views about the government's new coronavirus tier system.\n\nBut in the case of Langwith, on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border, the division is somewhat more literal.\n\nThe county boundary runs down the middle of Portland Road, meaning houses on one side have \"tier one\" restrictions, while the other side is \"tier two\".\n\nIt's caused some amusement among residents, but also much frustration due to the difficulty of living in a community with two sets of rules.\n\nThe division between the two tiers runs right down the middle of Portland Road\n\nPeople on the Derbyshire side of the street, currently in tier one, can meet socially in groups of six indoors, while those on the other side are subject to more stringent restrictions - due to the fact Nottinghamshire became tier two this week.\n\nKath Sharpe, a 72-year-old parish councillor who lives in the village, said people had been joking about building a wall down the middle of the road.\n\n\"It's crackers,\" she said. \"As far as I'm aware, we've not had any cases of Covid in the village.\n\n\"People here have been very good at following the rules but I don't think they're going to stick to this - plus, who's going to come and enforce it?\n\n\"It should have been looked at as a whole community, not some of it lumped in with what's happening miles away.\"\n\nDave Mather says tier one ends at his garden wall\n\nDave Mather, 69, a retired miner who lives on the Derbyshire side of Portland Road, said: \"It's absolutely crazy - Derbyshire and tier one ends at my garden wall.\n\n\"They should have realised you can't divide a village up.\"\n\nDawn Wakeling doubts people in the village will follow the different restrictions\n\nDawn Wakeling, 49, lives on the tier one side of the road but her mother, whom she helps look after, lives across the street.\n\nShe said they will remain unaffected, as they are in a bubble, but added: \"People aren't going to follow it.\n\n\"I wouldn't be going to Nottingham but I won't be avoiding parts of the village. It has to be done on a village-by-village basis.\"\n\nBeverley Booker, 54, lives on the tier two side.\n\n\"When the border is just a walk to the other side of the street, it's a bit daft, isn't it?\" she said.\n\nKath McCormack, 66, who lives on the Nottinghamshire side, said: \"I know we're technically in Nottinghamshire, but Derbyshire is just a road away.\n\n\"It doesn't make sense to split a village in two.\"\n\nIt's not just people on the street that are feeling divided - the split has affected the whole village.\n\nJanice Mitchell, 64, said she will not be able to see her seven-year-old granddaughter because she lives in tier two.\n\n\"It's difficult to understand,\" she said. \"I know they have to have borders but why not go to the end of the road, rather than cut through the middle?\n\n\"I'll follow the rules but now I can't have my granddaughter to stay.\"\n\nThe village's pubs also fall into different tiers.\n\nBev Plumb, landlady of the Jug and Glass Inn, which is in tier two, said she had already had customers contacting her to cancel bookings.\n\nShe said the fact people can meet in pubs just a short walk down the road is an issue, and questioned how she would be able to enforce the ban on households mixing.\n\n\"People are trying to do the right thing, trying not to break the law, but it does affect our business,\" she said.\n\n\"There shouldn't be a blanket approach for the whole of Nottinghamshire.\"\n\nThe village pub that falls into tier two has had cancellations\n\nDerbyshire Labour councillor Joan Dixon drew attention to the anomaly on social media.\n\nShe said: \"There is some local amusement but there is also the sense that the rules are becoming very complicated and people are weary now.\n\n\"There are a lot of close-knit families in that community who will be affected.\"\n\nBoth Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire county councils urged residents to stick to the restrictions.\n\nA Nottinghamshire spokesperson said: \"If they are in Nottinghamshire, it will be a legal requirement not to mix with other people indoors unless they live with them, have a support bubble with them or fall under one of the other exceptions.\"\n\nA Derbyshire spokesperson said: \"These are government restrictions and we would urge people to follow all the latest guidelines.\"\n\nIt added it was the government that decided which tier areas were placed in.\n\nA Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said decisions were made in \"close consultation\" with local leaders.\n\n\"We... constantly review the evidence and will take swift action where necessary,\" she said.\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, or on Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section Darts\n\nFallon Sherrock, who made history by beating two men at the PDC World Darts Championship, has narrowly failed to qualify for the 2021 tournament.\n\nShe lost out despite winning the last of four women's events which offered two spots for the championship, which starts at Alexandra Palace in December.\n\nDeta Hedman edged through on a total of 85 legs to 83 for the second place, after Lisa Ashton had sealed her spot.\n\nShe played in the 2019 World Championship while Hedman will make her debut.\n• None Insight: Hedman's life on and off the oche\n\nSherrock earned the nickname 'Queen of the Palace' after becoming the first woman to win a match en route to the third round of the 2020 tournament.\n\nBut the 26-year-old from Milton Keynes finished just outside the top two in the PDC Women's Series Order of Merit despite reaching two finals, a semi-final and a quarter-final over four events in Barnsley.", "Rallies are held across France in support of Samuel Paty, the teacher beheaded after showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a lesson.\n\nBanners reading \"Je suis enseignant\" (I am a teacher) and \"Je suis Samuel\" (I am Samuel) were on display in solidarity.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "The Scottish government has called on the Treasury to exempt the new self-isolation payment from tax.\n\nSocial security secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville has written to Chancellor Rishi Sunak saying people may not apply for the £500 because of tax concerns.\n\nApplications for the payment, intended to help those on low incomes who are Covid-positive, opened this week.\n\nThe Treasury has said tax arrangements throughout the UK will be \"fair to everyone\".\n\nIn Scotland, the payments will be made through the Scottish Welfare Fund and administered by local authorities.\n\nInitially, the money will go to those on Universal Credit or similar benefits.\n\nMs Somerville said: \"I welcome your consideration of an exemption from National Insurance contributions (NICs) and I believe a similar approach should be taken in respect of income tax.\n\n\"Subjecting these payments to tax risks detracting from the important public health measures they are intended to support.\n\n\"In a worst case scenario, the prospect of a future tax liability may prevent a person from applying, leading to them having to make the difficult choice between self-isolating and returning to work so they can support themselves financially.\"\n\nShe added: \"I would ask that you consider an income tax exemption in respect of payments made under the self-isolation support grant scheme, similar to the exemption you have put in place for NICs and the test and trace support payment scheme in England.\"\n\nA Treasury spokeswoman said: \"We have treated the Scottish government scheme exactly the same as we have similar schemes in the rest of the UK by making it subject to income tax but also exempting it from National Insurance Contributions. That's fair to everyone.\n\n\"We have also ensured that it has no detrimental impact when calculating Universal Credit and tax credits so that no-one receiving these payments will see their welfare payments reduced.\"", "The rufous bush chat is rarely seen in northern Europe\n\nBirdwatchers have descended on a salt marsh to see a bird not seen in Britain for 40 years.\n\nThe rufous bush chat was spotted at Stiffkey, north Norfolk, prompting up to 100 birdwatchers to go to see it.\n\nNative to southern Spain, Africa and the Balkans the bird, also known as the rufous warbler and rufous bush robin, is rarely seen in northern Europe.\n\nDick Filby, of Rare Bird Alert, said it \"would have been heading for a tropical climate and went the wrong way.\"\n\nHe said the last time the bird was spotted in Britain was at Prawle Point in Devon in 1980.\n\nThe bird was first spotted on the Stiffkey marshes on Saturday morning\n\n\"In 1998, one was seen in Jersey (part of the British Isles but not classed as part of Britain).\"\n\nMr Filby said he hoped birdwatchers would be wearing masks and keeping socially-distanced as they enjoyed the view.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by BBC Look East This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by BBC Look East\n\nNorfolk Police called on birdwatchers visiting the site in the hope of seeing the rare visitor to keep to Covid regulations.\n\nBirdwatchers in the British Isles last caught a glimpse of the bird when it was seen in Jersey in 1998\n\nCh Supt Chris Balmer said: \"People may arrive on their own but some have started to gather in groups larger than six to be able to see the bird. This is a breach of the law.\n\n\"In the first instance officers will engage, explain and encourage people to leave but enforcement is an option and we will be issuing fixed penalty notices should people not comply.\"\n\nScores of birdwatchers descended on Stiffkey on the Norfolk coast\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The construction of a second golf course at President Donald Trump's Aberdeenshire resort has been approved.\n\nThe 18-hole MacLeod course is to be built to the south and west of the controversial original course at Menie, built in 2012.\n\nIt is named after his mother Mary Anne MacLeod, who was born on Lewis but emigrated to New York.\n\nCouncillors gave construction the go-ahead on Friday, despite local objections.\n\nThere were 15 conditions, mainly focused on environmental issues such as preventing pollution, protecting wet dunes and safeguarding bird habitats.\n\nPermission for the resort - including houses, holiday homes and a hotel - was granted in 2008 while plans for the second course were approved last year.\n\nThe Menie resort has made losses in the last seven consecutive years.\n\nIt was blamed for \"destroying\" the sand dune system, causing permanent habitat loss.\n\nThe Trump Organisation previously reacted to the suggestion the area should lose its protected status by calling the move a \"stitch-up\".\n\nThe construction of the second course was met with disapproval from locals who said it would \"severely affect the natural habitat and landscape\" and \"restrict resident access\" on the beach.\n\nOne local claimed there had been \"little meaningful public consultation\" on the matter.\n\nThe Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) also objected to the application, saying the water management plan was inadequate and the environmental management plan was not appropriate.\n\nSarah Malone, executive vice president of Trump International Scotland, said: \"We continue to remain focused on the long-term vision for our magnificent estate and are moving steadily forward with our infrastructure and development plans for the next phase of construction at our world-class resort.\n\n\"Golf, more so now than ever, is the sport of choice for many people, including families, and we are delighted to have the support of Aberdeenshire Council to move forward with our second golf course.\n\n\"The MacLeod Course, will be built to the highest specifications and standards to complement our award-winning championship links. The course will be constructed alongside our estate residencies, cottages and country homes that were approved at the end of last year. \"", "Health Secretary Sajid Javid says there are \"no guarantees\" when it comes to ruling out new restrictions or another circuit breaker before Christmas.\n\nBut what exactly is a circuit breaker in Covid terms?\n\nThe UK, Northern Ireland, Singapore and Israel have all previously used circuit breakers to try to reduce their coronavirus cases.\n\nBut how do they work? How long is a Covid circuit breaker? How can it help tackle Omicron?\n\nBBC health correspondent Laura Foster explains it all in a minute.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"Time is of the essence\" for Manchester - Boris Johnson\n\nBoris Johnson says the spread of coronavirus in Greater Manchester is \"grave\" and he may \"need to intervene\" if new measures are not agreed.\n\nThe prime minister urged mayor Andy Burnham to \"engage constructively\" with the government over the region entering \"very high\" tier three measures.\n\nHe said the situation was worsening every day and \"time is of the essence\".\n\nMr Burnham, who wants more financial aid for workers affected, said regional leaders will meet No 10 at \"any time\".\n\nMeasures under tier three include pub closures and a ban on household mixing indoors, in private gardens and in most outdoor venues. Liverpool City Region was the first of England's regions to enter the very high alert level.\n\nLancashire has agreed to move into tier three from Saturday with a financial support package worth £42m. Around 1.5 million people, including those living in Blackburn, Blackpool, Burnley, Lancaster and Preston, will be affected by the new rules.\n\nSpeaking at a Downing Street briefing on Friday, Mr Johnson said he understood the \"reluctance\" of local leaders to put the region under tougher restrictions and said it would be \"far from a pain-free course of action\".\n\nHe warned: \"Of course, if agreement cannot be reached I will need to intervene in order to protect Manchester's hospitals and save the lives of Manchester's residents.\n\n\"But our efforts would be so much more effective if we work together.\"\n\nRevealing that a deal had not been reached between No 10 and the region's leaders, Mr Johnson said it was time for action to be taken.\n\n\"Each day that passes before action is taken means more people will go to hospital, more people will end up in intensive care and tragically more people will die,\" he said.\n\nIn a joint statement with Greater Manchester's deputy mayors and council leaders, Mr Burnham said they had sought a further meeting with Downing Street officials - and this did not happen.\n\n\"We can assure the prime minister that we are ready to meet at any time to try to agree a way forward,\" they said.\n\nThey said they had done \"everything within our power to protect the health of our residents\" but are not convinced that closing pubs and bars is the only way to protect hospitals.\n\nInstead, they want other measures like shielding to be considered, and tougher penalties on venues that do not comply to Covid regulations, including instant closure powers.\n\n\"We firmly believe that protecting health is about more than controlling the virus and requires proper support for people whose lives would be severely affected by a tier three lockdown,\" they said, adding that the current proposals do not \"provide adequate support\".\n\nAndy Burnham says northern England has been treated with contempt\n\nThe latest government figures showed there were 15,650 new cases reported on Friday, bringing the total to 689,257.\n\nThere were a further 136 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test, bringing the total to 43,429.\n\nMr Johnson said he hoped the most stringent \"very high\" restrictions could be lifted as quickly as possible for the affected regions.\n\nHe said: \"The amount by which we need to reduce the R is not as big as it was right back in the beginning of the spread of this disease.\n\n\"If we all work together on the measures we have outlined we can definitely do it.\"\n\nThe reproduction (R) number has risen slightly to 1.3-1.5, with growth of the epidemic still widespread across the country.\n\nThe PM said he wanted to avoid another national lockdown \"if at all possible\" amid calls for a circuit-breaker - a short, limited lockdown - across the country.\n\nHe said he disagreed with those who argued in favour of a national lockdown \"instead of targeted local action\", insisting: \"Closing businesses in Cornwall where transmission is low will not cut transmission in Manchester\".\n\nMr Johnson said that while he could not \"rule anything out\", he wanted to avoid a national lockdown because of \"the damaging health, economic and social effects it would have\".\n\nThe UK government's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said during the briefing that the nation is in a \"different situation\" from when the Sage group of scientists recommended a two-to-three week national \"circuit break\" to stop the spread of coronavirus.\n\nHe said the situation had changed, adding: \"We recommended in September taking a circuit break. The idea there was that actually a two-week interruption would set cases back probably to the levels they were in August and then at those levels, test and trace is more effective to keep control.\n\n\"Where we are now is of course a different situation. It's crucial that where the R is above 1 and the numbers are high we get R below 1 for all the reasons that have been outlined, including of course the hospitalisations which are increasing. So it's crucial that's done, and there are a number of ways that can be done.\"\n\nHe added that would only be achieved by combining \"tier three baseline conditions\" suggested by the government with some extra measures agreed in an affected region using \"local knowledge and local insight\".\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nThe PM said accepting increased coronavirus restrictions was the \"right and responsible\" measure to protect the NHS.\n\nHe added: \"Without action, there is no doubt that our NHS would soon be struggling to treat the sheer number of people seriously ill with Covid.\n\n\"Non-Covid treatments and surgeries would need to be cancelled to cope and many more people would die.\"\n\nLabour's shadow health minister Alex Norris MP said it was \"damaging\" for Mr Johnson to avoid a full lockdown and that the regional approach is not enough.\n\n\"We need this circuit-breaker to give us time to sort these significant problems in testing and tracing,\" he said. \"We've had the worst week last week for tracing. The system's falling over. The prime minister is desperate to avoid lockdown just as he was at the beginning of the pandemic - but we know that that delay at the beginning was really damaging.\"\n\nOn Thursday, London, Essex, York and parts of Surrey, Derbyshire and Cumbria were moved up to tier two and will face tougher measures from Saturday.\n\nMore than half of England's population will now be living under high or very high-alert restrictions.\n\nThe PM also revealed that the UK is developing the capacity to manufacture millions of new fast turnaround tests for coronavirus - with some saliva tests able to deliver results in 15 minutes.\n\nHe said distribution and trials of the tests would start over \"the next few weeks\" and would enable NHS and care home staff to be tested \"more frequently\".\n\nSchoolchildren and university students would also be able to be tested, he said, to help keep education \"open safely over the winter\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Michael Gove: \"We hope the EU will change their position\"\n\nThe door is \"still ajar\" for talks with the EU over a post-Brexit trade deal but only if it moves ground in key areas, Michael Gove has said.\n\nHe said the EU must speed up the negotiations and offer better terms.\n\nIt comes as the EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier will not travel to London for talks tomorrow but will join \"remotely, as planned\", his team said.\n\nNegotiations between the UK and the EU have stalled amid disagreements over fishing access and competition issues.\n\nThe EU has said it is prepared to \"intensify\" talks but it would not agree a deal at \"any price\".\n\nThe CBI and other business organisations urged the UK government to focus on bridging its differences with the EU, saying a deal was vital to help the post-Covid recovery.\n\nThey warned that uncertainty about the UK's future trading relationship with its largest market was \"chipping away at business resilience\" at a time when many firms were being battered by coronavirus.\n\nDowning Street said on Friday that official negotiations over a future economic partnership were \"over\" and the UK should \"get ready\" to trade with the EU from 1 January without a specific agreement.\n\nBoris Johnson has accused the EU of resisting the UK's preferred outcome of a deal based on the one the bloc has with Canada.\n\nThe prime minister has said the UK should now be prepared for the alternative of a much more limited relationship, based on the EU's existing arrangements with Australia.\n\nHowever, this would see tariffs applied on goods crossing the channel once the UK leaves the EU's single market at the end of the year, pushing up the cost of imports and exports.\n\nThe EU's chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, was due in London for talks with his counterpart, David Frost, on Monday, but the UK said this would be pointless without a fundamental change in direction from the bloc.\n\nSenior EU sources had indicated on Friday that Mr Barnier would be attending in person. But it is now expected that he will hold a video conference call with Lord Frost to discuss the structure of any future talks.\n\nMr Gove told the BBC's Andrew Marr that the EU \"effectively ended the current round of talks\" when its 27 leaders met in Brussels on Thursday to take stock of progress and said more was required from the UK.\n\n\"It was the case we were making progress but then the EU retreated from that,\" he said.\n\n\"We have drawn the conclusion that unless their approach changes, they are not interested and they have in effect drawn stumps.\"\n\nMichael Gove said the EU \"effectively ended the current round of talks\" in Brussels\n\nMr Johnson previously indicated that the UK would walk away from the talks unless EU leaders agreed an outline deal at last week's summit in Brussels.\n\nAsked by Andrew Marr whether the UK was engaging in sabre-rattling or the door was still ajar to further discussions, Mr Gove replied: \"It is still ajar. We hope the EU will change their position and we are certainly not saying if they do change their position we can't talk to them.\"\n\nMr Gove said the UK was preparing for a range of outcomes, including leaving on what he described as \"Australian terms\", which would see trade between the two partners default to World Trade Organization rules.\n\n\"That is not going to be a picnic,\" he said on this scenario. \"The key thing is we are taking the steps alongside business to be ready for that outcome.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"We've left, now we need to decide some important trade aspects\": Michael Gove says UK still holds cards for negotiations\n\nAnd he said he was \"not embarrassed\" by comments he made during the 2016 EU referendum campaign, when he was a key figure in the Vote Leave campaign, when he claimed that reaching a trade deal would \"not be any more complicated or onerous than the day-to-day work\" of the UK's diplomats.\n\nHe said the remarks, and comments in a March 2019 newspaper interview in which he said the British public did not vote for Brexit in order to leave without a deal, should be placed \"in context\", given the UK had since negotiated a withdrawal agreement and left the EU.\n\nBusinesses have warned that a failure to reach a deal will accentuate the damage done by the Covid pandemic. Trade bodies representing 190,000 firms have written to Mr Gove urging him to reach an agreement.\n\n\"With each day that passes, business resilience is chipped away,\" the CBI and other groups said.\n\n\"A swift deal is the single most effective way to support recovery in communities across Europe.\n\n\"After four years of debate, there must be a resolution. 2021 can then be a year to rebuild, rather than regret.\"", "The eldest brother of Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson has died in hospital with coronavirus.\n\nThe politician confirmed the news in a Tweet and thanked staff at Liverpool Hospital's intensive care unit.\n\nHe said his brother had died at 22:45 BST on Friday.\n\nLiverpool has since Wednesday been in tier three of the new lockdown system, which has the strictest rules, after a rise in coronavirus cases in the area.\n\nHe urged people to \"follow the rules\", which include the closure of pubs not serving meals, along with gyms, leisure centres, betting shops and casinos.\n\nIn the social media post, Mr Anderson wrote: \"We want to thank the dedicated [hospital] staff risking their lives for us.\n\n\"Thank you all for your messages of love and support. Let's stick together and support each other and win this battle.\"\n\nLiverpool has the highest number of cases in England, with 3,204 cases recorded on Tuesday, slightly more than the 3,191 cases registered a week before.\n\nEarlier this week, Mr Anderson criticised crowds that gathered in the city just before the new rules came into effect, saying the images \"shame our city\" and \"our health service is creaking\".", "The feline is about 37m long\n\nThe figure of a relaxing cat has been discovered in the Nazca desert in Peru.\n\nThe Nazca lines, a Unesco World Heritage site, is home to designs on the ground - known as geoglyphs - created some 2,000 years ago.\n\nScientists believe the cat, as with other Nazca animal figures, was created by making depressions in the desert floor, leaving coloured earth exposed.\n\nThe cat then went unnoticed until plans were recently drawn up for a new path leading to an observation platform.\n\nThe platform would have provided a vantage point for visitors to see many of the other geoglyphs.\n\nIn a statement, Peru's culture ministry said: \"The figure was scarcely visible and was about to disappear, because it's situated on quite a steep slope that's prone to the effects of natural erosion.\"\n\nIt added that the geoglyph, which is about 37m (120ft) long, has been cleaned and conserved over the past week.\n\nThe geoglyphs mostly depict different animals\n\nJohny Isla, Peru's chief archaeologist for the Nazca lines, told Efe news agency that the cat pre-dates the Nazca culture - which created most of the figures from 200 to 700 AD.\n\nThe cat, he said, was actually from the late Paracas era, which was from 500 BC to 200 AD.\n\n\"We know that from comparing iconographies,\" he said. \"Paracas textiles, for example, show birds, cats and people that are easily comparable to these geoglyphs.\"", "People in Greater Manchester are facing confusion over possible changes to Covid-19 rules, as local leaders denied Downing Street's claim that talks have been arranged to resolve a row.\n\nNo 10 told the BBC it had arranged a call with the region's mayor, Andy Burnham, on Sunday morning.\n\nBut Mr Burnham's office said no such call had been scheduled.\n\nTighter rules kicked in for millions of people in England on Saturday as areas moved up a tier in a new alert system.\n\nBBC political correspondent Jonathan Blake said the conflicting information could be as a result of negotiating tactics.\n\nThe Department for Health and Social Care confirmed 16,171 more people had tested positive for coronavirus in the UK as of Saturday and a further 150 people had died within 28 days of a positive test - taking the total to 43,579.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said on Friday that infection rates in Greater Manchester were \"grave\" and added: \"Each day that passes before action is taken means more people will go to hospital, more people will end up in intensive care and tragically more people will die.\"\n\nMr Burnham and other local leaders have so far resisted a move from tier two to tier three's strict rules on hospitality - pressing instead for more shielding measures for the vulnerable, extra financial aid and stricter local powers to shut down venues breaking virus guidelines.\n\n\"We firmly believe that protecting health is about more than controlling the virus and requires proper support for people whose lives would be severely affected by a tier three lockdown,\" the deputy mayors and council leaders said in a joint statement.\n\nWhen two sides cannot even agree on the arrangement of a phone call, it doesn't bode well for the bigger picture.\n\nAfter 48 hours of stand-off between Downing Street and the mayor of Greater Manchester, it seemed there might be some progress.\n\nDowning Street claimed they had \"reached out\" and a call had been arranged between Andy Burnham and No 10 for Sunday morning. But soon after that Mr Burnham's spokesperson said nothing had been agreed.\n\nThese moves could be seen as negotiating tactics, the result of a breakdown in communication or a lack of trust between the two sides.\n\nThey may also seem like a tedious running commentary on the logistics of negotiations, and on one level it is.\n\nBut as coronavirus cases continue to rise there is a lot riding on these discussions, or lack thereof.\n\nPeople in Greater Manchester may be wondering how long it will be before action of some sort is taken, and what restrictions they'll be asked to endure when it is.\n\nMore than half of England - in excess of 28 million people - is now under extra coronavirus restrictions, under the new three-tier alert system.\n\nLancashire has joined the Liverpool City Region in the top tier - tier three. Pubs have closed and households cannot mix indoors or in many outdoor settings.\n\nLondon, Essex, York, Elmbridge, Barrow-in-Furness, North East Derbyshire, Erewash and Chesterfield have moved into tier two, meaning they can no longer mix inside with those from other households, including in pubs and restaurants.\n\nAreas of England in the lowest tier must keep to the nationwide virus rules such as group sizes being capped at six people, and the hospitality industry closing at 22:00.\n\nMeanwhile, calls for a circuit-breaker - a short but strict national lockdown - have been supported by Labour as well as some Conservative MPs.\n\nKate Green, Labour MP for Stretford and Urmston, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"The Labour leaders in Greater Manchester support the call for a national circuit-break because what we're seeing in Manchester today - the rest of the country is coming along behind. The rate is rising everywhere.\"\n\nMs Green, who is also shadow education secretary, added that extra restrictions would not be effective without a package of support to \"enable people to close their businesses [and] to isolate at home if they need to\".\n\nConservative MP and former health secretary Jeremy Hunt called for an end to the \"public war of words\" between local and national leaders on Saturday, but added he had \"sympathy\" for the idea of a circuit-breaker.\n\nBritain's largest teachers' union, the National Education Union, has called for secondary schools in England to shut for two weeks at half term, rather than the traditional one week.\n\nMr Johnson has said that while he could not \"rule anything out\", he wants to avoid a national lockdown because of \"the damaging health, economic and social effects it would have\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. There were scuffles between police and pub goers in Soho ahead of London moving to Tier 2\n\nAs coronavirus cases continue to rise rapidly across the UK, the devolved nations are taking their owns steps to curb the spread of infections.\n\nPubs, restaurants and cafes across Northern Ireland have closed to sit-in customers for the next four weeks while in Wales, talks continue over a potential two-week \"fire break\" - a period with tighter restrictions to help slow the spread.\n\nMost licensed premises in Scotland's central belt are closed under temporary restrictions, which are expected to be replaced by a similar multi-tiered system to the one in England by the end of the month.\n\nHow have you been affected by coronavirus? What do the current restrictions mean for you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Dave Toole's performance at the 2012 Paralympics was watched by millions on television around the world\n\nA dancer who appeared in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Paralympics Games in London has died at the age of 56.\n\nDave Toole, from Leeds, was watched by a TV audience of millions as he performed an aerial routine suspended high above the Olympic Stadium.\n\nHe was born without the use of his legs, which were amputated when he was 18 months old.\n\nAlan Lane, artistic director of the Slung Low theatre company, described Mr Toole as an \"extraordinary talent\".\n\nMr Toole was a professional dancer for almost 30 years and toured the world in a number of productions.\n\nHe was appointed OBE in January for services to dance and disabled people.\n\nAs well as Slung Low, Mr Toole worked in Leeds with the StopGap Dance Company and DV8.\n\nSpeaking to the BBC in 2013, he said his dance routines were built on his everyday movement.\n\n\"I got around on my hands at home, standing on one hand to reach up to turn lights on and off and things, so I used things like that in performing,\" he said.\n\n\"It looked amazing, but to me it was no big deal. But it looked good. Things like that worked in my favour and I never questioned it because I seemed to be good at something.\"\n\nThe Paralympics opening ceremony was watched by a TV audience of 146 million, as well as 80,000 people inside the stadium.\n\nPaying tribute in a blog post, Mr Lane described the dancer's 2012 performance as \"mighty, beautiful and with a grace utterly beyond the ordinary human\".\n\nHe added: \"We are all so sad to hear of Dave Toole's passing. It was such a privilege to make so many adventures with him.\n\n\"He had an extraordinary talent; he was a brilliant actor and the very finest dancer we've ever seen.\"\n\nFollow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk or send video here.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "People in England who have been told to self-isolate through NHS Test and Trace could have their details shared with the police on a \"case-by-case basis\".\n\nForces will have access to information telling them if an individual has been told to self-isolate, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said.\n\nBut the British Medical Association said it was worried police involvement might put people off being tested.\n\nIn England there is a legal requirement to isolate after a positive test.\n\nPolice will not have access to data from the NHS Covid-19 app. The app is anonymous so the government does not know who has been sent instructions to self-isolate.\n\nJust under 11% of people traced as a close contact of someone with coronavirus said they self-isolated for 14 days, according to a government-commissioned study.\n\nReasons given for breaking self-isolation included believing there was no point isolating from strangers if you cannot properly distance from those in your household; not developing symptoms; or visiting shops or a pharmacy.\n\nThe DHSC updated its guidance about how testing data will be handled on Friday.\n\nA memorandum of understanding was issued between the DHSC and National Police Chiefs' Council to allow forces to access information that tells them if a \"specific individual\" has been told to self-isolate, as first reported by the Health Service Journal.\n\nThose who fail to do so face fines starting at £1,000, which can increase to £10,000 for serial offenders or serious breaches.\n\nA DHSC spokesman said it was a legal requirement for people who had tested positive and their close contacts to self-isolate when formally notified to do so.\n\n\"The memorandum of understanding ensures that information is shared with appropriate safeguards and in accordance with the law. No testing or health data is shared in this process,\" he said.\n\nA spokesman for the British Medical Association, which represents doctors in the UK, said the test-and-trace system needed \"the full confidence of the public\" to be effective.\n\nHe said: \"We are already concerned that some people are deterred from being tested because they are anxious about loss of income should they need to self-isolate - and we are worried should police involvement add to this.\n\n\"Therefore, the government's emphasis should be on providing support to people - financial and otherwise - if they need to self-isolate, so that no-one is deterred from coming forward for a test.\"\n\nA National Police Chiefs' Council spokesperson said forces would continue to encourage \"voluntary compliance\" but would enforce regulations and issue fines where appropriate.\n\n\"Officers will engage with individuals to establish their circumstances, using their discretion wherever it is reasonable to do so,\" they said.\n\nSir Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, said ministers should \"reverse the policy urgently\".\n\n\"Anything that further undermines the public's dwindling trust in this government's handling of the pandemic is damaging, and few things could have been better designed to do that, than this,\" he said.\n\nMeanwhile, Baroness Dido Harding, the head of NHS Test and Trace, has told the Sunday Times that the Test and Trace service was not a \"silver bullet\".\n\n\"It has never been and it never will be,\" she said, adding it is one of a number of different interventions needed to control Covid-19.", "Jack Merritt, right, who died in the London Bridge attack, worked with Steve Gallant, left, on the Learning Together rehabilitation course\n\nA convicted murderer who helped thwart an attack on London Bridge will be considered for parole 10 months early.\n\nSteven Gallant, 42, was jailed for 17 years in 2005 for the murder of ex-firefighter Barrie Jackson in Hull.\n\nHe was on day release attending a prisoner rehabilitation event when he confronted Usman Khan with a narwhal tusk after the 28-year-old began stabbing people in November 2019.\n\nGallant's Parole Board will decide whether he can be released early.\n\nA Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: \"The lord chancellor has granted Steven Gallant a Royal Prerogative of Mercy reducing his minimum tariff by 10 months in recognition of his exceptionally brave actions at Fishmongers' Hall, which helped save people's lives despite the tremendous risk to his own.\"\n\nKhan, who killed Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt, was later shot dead by police.\n\nMr Merritt's father David told the Daily Mirror: \"Steve fully deserves this pardon, or reduction in sentence.\n\n\"It is fantastic. He was very close to Jack and he turned his life around and reformed. I am really pleased for him.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. This video has been removed for rights reasons\n\nGallant was one of two men convicted of the murder of Jackson, 33.\n\nDuring the trial, Hull Crown Court heard the attack was carried out because Gallant wrongly believed Mr Jackson had attacked his girlfriend.\n\nMr Jackson's student son Jack, 21, told the Mirror: \"In my mind, Gallant has nearly done his time and if someone has undergone rehabilitation and change, which it seems he has, then it's fair enough.\"\n\nGallant was one of three people who were filmed restraining Khan on the bridge during the attack.\n\nHe said earlier this year that he \"did not hesitate\" to intervene.", "Christmas is unlikely to be the \"usual celebration\" of \"families coming together\", a leading scientist has said.\n\nJeremy Farrar, who sits on the Sage committee that advises the government, warned it would be a \"tough\" Christmas.\n\nThe Wellcome Trust director also told Sky News there was \"light at the end of the tunnel\" as he believed a vaccine would be ready early in 2021.\n\nPM Boris Johnson has warned things will be \"bumpy to Christmas and beyond\".\n\nEarlier this week, Prof Farrar told BBC Newscast arguments between Westminster and local leaders were \"very dangerous\" and also that a circuit-breaker, or a short, limited lockdown, was needed now.\n\nSpeaking to Sky News' Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme, Prof Farrar said the UK faces a \"very, very difficult\" period.\n\n\"Christmas will be tough this year. I don't think it's going to be the usual celebration it is and all families coming together, I'm afraid,\" he said.\n\n\"I think we have to be honest and realistic and say that we are in for three to six months of a very, very difficult period.\n\n\"The temperatures drop, we are all indoors more often, we have the other infections that come this time of year.\n\n\"It's much better for us to be upfront and honest now, and say we are in for a really difficult time, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.\"\n\nProf Farrar said he thought a vaccine and effective treatment would be ready early next year.\n\n\"I do believe the vaccines will be available in the first quarter of next year, I do believe that monoclonal antibodies to treat patients and save lives will be available in the coming months,\" he said.\n\n\"It's with that context that I think we need to reduce transmission now and we need to get ourselves back to the beginning of September as a country, not in piecemeal, not in fragments across the country, but as a whole country.\"\n\nSpeaking further about the need for a circuit-breaker, Prof Farrar claimed there could be 50,000 cases per day in England.\n\nThe government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, warned in a press conference on 21 September that the UK could face 50,000 cases a day by mid-October if no action was taken.\n\nProf Farrar said an Office for National Statistics (ONS) survey, which he described as the \"best data in the country at the moment\", showed that 27,000 people were getting infected each day in England as of 10 October, but he said, given a time lag, it would actually be more than 50,000 by now.\n\nThe ONS survey tests a representative sample of the general population to provide an estimate of the true spread of the virus, as it picks up asymptomatic cases that would not necessarily be identified in the daily figures.\n\nThe ONS figures are far higher than the number of confirmed cases announced by the government each day.\n\nOn Sunday, the government figures showed 16,982 people tested positive for the virus and a further 67 people had died.\n\nProf Farrar said the \"best time\" to have introduced the short, limited lockdown would have been around 20 September, but said the \"second best time is now\".\n\nHe said the worst time would be at the end of November when things had got worse.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has also called for a circuit-breaker but the prime minister has said its three-tier system of regional restrictions avoids the \"misery of a second national lockdown\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"I was petrified\" - Det Sgt Nick Bailey on being poisoned by Novichok\n\nA police officer who was poisoned in the Salisbury Novichok attack has quit because he \"can no longer do the job\".\n\nDet Sgt Nick Bailey was contaminated with the nerve agent at the home of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, the targets of the poisoning operation.\n\nAfter returning to duty last year, he said the aftermath took \"so much from me\" and \"I [have] had to admit defeat\".\n\nHe worked for the police for 18 years and said he was \"so sad\" after wanting to be an officer since his teens.\n\nAngus Macpherson, police and crime commissioner for Wiltshire, where Det Sgt Bailey worked, said throughout his career the officer has symbolised \"dedication and a sense of public duty\".\n\nAnd in a statement, the force said he represents the \"determination that all of us want to see in police officers across the country\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Nick Bailey This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nDet Sgt Bailey and two Wiltshire Police colleagues were sent to Mr Skripal's home in March 2018, after the former Russian spy and his daughter, who was staying with him, were found seriously ill on a bench in Salisbury.\n\nHe was contaminated when he touched the door handle of Mr Skripal's home in the city.\n\nThe Skripals survived the attack after spending several weeks in hospital\n\nThe Skripals survived the attack, which prompted then Prime Minister Theresa May to tell the House of Commons the operation had \"almost certainly\" been approved by the Russian state.\n\nIn a series of tweets earlier, Det Sgt Bailey said the impact on him of the attack \"shouldn't be underestimated\".\n\n\"I wanted to be a police officer since I was a teenager, I couldn't envisage doing anything else, which is why this makes me so sad,\" he said.\n\n\"Like most police officers, I've experienced my fair share of trauma, violence, upset, injury and grief.\n\n\"Although I've tried so hard to make it work, I know that I won't find peace whilst remaining in that environment. For me, it's time for a change.\"\n\nMr Macpherson thanked Det Sgt Bailey for his \"service and dedication to Wiltshire Police\".\n\n\"Nick found himself at the centre of an international, criminal incident which not only affected his health but I am certain changed the course of his family's lives too,\" he said.\n\n\"The events in Salisbury and Amesbury back in 2018 remain unprecedented and Nick, himself, has found himself in a situation that no other police officer in this country has been through.\n\n\"I know that the force has offered as much welfare support to Nick as possible but I hope today brings Nick and his family some sense of closure and allows them to start to look to the future.\"\n\nIn the months after the attack two Russian nationals were accused of travelling to the UK to try to murder Mr Skripal with novichok.\n\nThe pair - known by their aliases Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov - were caught on CCTV in Salisbury the day before the attack.\n\nThe alarm was raised about the Novichok attack when Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found very ill on a bench in the centre of Salisbury\n\nDet Sgt Bailey was one of the first to be involved after the alarm about the attack was raised.\n\n\"These shocking and unprecedented events changed his life and his family's lives significantly,\" the force said in a statement.\n\n\"It is impossible for any of us to fully understand the impact this event has had on Nick and his family, and the sacrifices they made in trying to come to terms with the situation.\"\n\n\"Day in and day out, officers put themselves directly into harm's way in order to help and protect others,\" the statement continued.\n\n\"Nick should be incredibly proud of all that he has achieved and will always be considered to be part of the Wiltshire Police family.\n\n\"I am sure that as one chapter closes, another opportunity will open up for Nick.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A record number of shops closed on UK high streets during the first half of this year as the coronavirus lockdown hit many stores hard, data shows.\n\nSome 11,120 chain store outlets shut between January and June, according to research by the Local Data Company and accountancy firm PwC.\n\nAlthough more than 5,000 shops opened during the same period it was not enough to fill the gaps, resulting in a net decline of 6,001 stores.\n\nThe final total could even be higher.\n\nResearchers did not count outlets that had yet to reopen after the coronavirus lockdown ended. Many never will.\n\nThe data includes shops, hospitality chains, and services such as post offices and banks, but it does not include small independent businesses.\n\nHigh streets were already experiencing upheaval long before the pandemic struck.\n\nShops were closing at an average rate of 16 per day in 2019, according to the Local Data Company, which tracks vacancies rates.\n\nBut the pandemic is turbo-charging change as more people shop online. The research found that York has been the worst affected area, with a net loss of 55 outlets.\n\nHarpenden, in Hertfordshire, meanwhile has fared better than any other location with a net increase in stores.\n\nHigh streets have borne the brunt of the closures. Retail parks have proved far more resilient. Standalone stores mean units which are out of town, but not in a retail park or shopping centre, for instance a large supermarket or an Ikea.\n\nThe Local Data Company and PwC have been analysing the changes in the top 500 shopping locations for the past decade. This year's findings include all high streets, shopping centres and retail parks in Britain. They've reviewed existing data to allow comparisons with the previous five years.\n\nThese new figures show the profound impact the pandemic is having on our town centres and high streets.\n\n\"For local authorities, it's now critical how they respond to this significant and growing decline in store occupants,\" says Lucy Stainton, head of retail and strategic partnerships at the Local Data Company.\n\nWhilst many city centres remain quiet, the pandemic has prompted something of a resurgence in local high streets with people increasingly wanting to shop locally if they're working from home.\n\nLisa Hooker, consumer markets leader at PwC, says amid the turmoil, there continues to be a steady flow of openings: \"With the continued roll out of value retailers, the boom in takeaways and pizza delivery shops and demand for services that can still only be delivered locally, such as tradesmen outlets, building products or locksmiths, shows that despite the stark numbers there remains a future for physical stores.\n\n\"It's likely that whatever happens retail will come out of this smaller and stronger,\" she believes.\n\nMore closures are still to come, however. Retailers and hospitality chains are continuing to restructure their businesses, cutting stores and many thousands of jobs to survive.\n\nMany have done deals with landlords to reduce rent bills, but billions of pounds of rent still remains unpaid thanks to the government ban on evictions to give struggling firms some breathing space, arrears which have only been postponed.\n\nAnother key factor is business rates. Thanks to the government's rates holiday, retail and hospitality firms don't have to start paying this tax again till April next year.\n\nThey say if it isn't extended, this could deal a final blow for the viability of many stores.\n\nCorrection: an earlier version of the first graphic showed the worst performing cities in the wrong order.", "Energy regulator Ofgem is introducing new rules from 15 December to help vulnerable customers who struggle to pay their energy bills this winter.\n\nSuppliers will be required to offer emergency credit to customers who cannot top up prepayment meters.\n\nAnd if customers are in debt, suppliers must put them on \"realistic and sustainable\" repayment plans.\n\nIn March, suppliers voluntarily agreed with the government to support people affected by the pandemic.\n\nNow Ofgem has updated its licence rules to formally require suppliers to help customers in financial difficulty.\n\nThe industry watchdog said those in financial distress would get some breathing space, but ultimately all customers will need to pay for the energy they use.\n\nThis follows Ofgem cutting the price cap on default tariffs and prepayment meters, due to falling gas wholesale prices, which means cheaper energy bills for millions of people this winter.\n\n\"Suppliers have stepped up to the challenge of supporting their customers during the Covid-19 crisis, especially those in vulnerable situations,\" said Ofgem's director of retail Philippa Pickford.\n\n\"Customers who are struggling to pay their bills should contact their supplier as soon as possible. The extra protections we have announced today will help ensure they get some breathing space this winter.\"\n\nFrom 15 December, suppliers will be required to offer emergency credit or extra prepayment credit to households in vulnerable circumstances.\n\nThis could be because people are temporarily unable to afford to top up their prepayment meters, or are unable to visit their local shop due to having to self-isolate or having a mobility issue.\n\nEnergy suppliers need to offer emergency credit to people on prepayment meters who are temporarily unable to top them up\n\nOfgem wants to reduce the number of prepayment customers who run out of credit and end up being without energy.\n\nThe regulator also wants to make sure that suppliers have appropriate credit management policies, make proactive contact with customers, and set repayment rates based on their ability to pay.\n\nIn September, Citizens Advice estimated that 6 million people in the UK have fallen behind on paying at least one household bill during the pandemic, and that many more are on the cusp of being unable to afford to make ends meet.\n\n\"This raft of new protections from Ofgem should help more people who are struggling to stay afloat,\" said Citizen Advice's chief executive Dame Gillian Guy.\n\n\"Energy is an essential service and everyone should be confident they can adequately heat their home and protect their health - especially during a global pandemic.\n\n\"We've been pressing for the measures agreed between government and energy suppliers to help people through the coronavirus pandemic to be extended and widened, so we're very pleased to see this announcement from the regulator.\"\n\nHowever, she warned that many consumers will still struggle to \"pay for the basics\", even with help from energy suppliers.\n\nDame Gillian added: \"Government needs to do more to support those who need it most, including making the temporary uplift to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit permanent.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Andy Burnham: \"This is not just Greater Manchester's fight\"\n\nGreater Manchester's mayor has called on Boris Johnson for help in \"breaking the impasse\" over stricter Covid-19 curbs in the region.\n\nAndy Burnham said in a letter to the PM and other party leaders that Parliament should hold an urgent debate to end the deadlock.\n\nLater the mayor said he had a \"constructive call\" with Mr Johnson's chief strategic adviser.\n\nEarlier, minister Michael Gove said: \"We hope to agree a new approach.\"\n\nMr Gove said the government wanted the best for Greater Manchester and that he hoped \"we can find a way through together\".\n\nBut he criticised what he described as the \"incoherence\" of politicians in that region and warned that if an agreement could not be reached the government would \"look at\" having to impose restrictions.\n\nLeaders in Greater Manchester, including Mr Burnham, have rejected a move to England's tier three alert level without better financial support.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has said he may \"need to intervene\" if local leaders do not accept a move to tier three curbs.\n\nA further 16,982 people tested positive for the virus as of Sunday, the Department of Health figures showed, with a further 67 deaths occurring within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nScottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted that the figure for positive Covid cases in Scotland should be \"treated with some caution\" due to \"a delay within the UK lab system\". Cases rose by 316 in Scotland with no further deaths recorded.\n\nThe UK government said there was no capacity issue at a Lighthouse laboratory in Glasgow and that rerouting of tests to other laboratories was routine practice.\n\nMr Burnham has said he would be \"ready to speak to the prime minister at any time\" to discuss the situation. The mayor's spokesman confirmed Mr Burnham had spoken to Sir Edward Lister, a No 10 official, in a phone call on Sunday afternoon.\n\nIn the letter, Mr Burnham said the prospect of tier three - very high - restrictions on hospitality and other areas \"is not just a Greater Manchester issue\".\n\nHe wrote: \"Establishing clear national entitlements of the kind we had during the first lockdown will create a sense of fairness which in turn would help build public support for, and compliance with, any new restrictions.\"\n\n\"As leaders of the main political parties in Westminster, I urge you to work together to help resolve this current dispute and establish a fair financial framework for local lockdowns that the whole country will be able to support,\" he added.\n\nIn the language of negotiation, it seems the government and mayor of Greater Manchester may have stepped back from the brink.\n\nBoth sides softened their tone in interviews this morning, there was talk of ending the war of words and finding a new way through.\n\nBut it's important to remember this is not just a two-way row.\n\nThe most telling intervention of the last 24 hours has not been from Andy Burnham or Michael Gove, but the senior Conservative MP Sir Graham Brady.\n\nHe represents a constituency in the region and says MPs, council leaders and mayor are \"united\" across party lines in resisting tier 3 restrictions.\n\nSo, while the argument plays out in public between the government and Mr Burnham, it may be won or lost in private between ministers and their own backbenchers whose support is crucial to the government's approach.\n\nEarlier, Mr Burnham told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show there had been \"exaggeration\" by the prime minister of rising case numbers in Greater Manchester.\n\nMr Johnson said on Friday cases in the region had doubled over the previous nine days. Mr Burnham said that while cases were \"up slightly\" they were \"certainly not doubling every nine days\".\n\nSir Graham Brady, a senior backbench Conservative and MP for Altrincham and Sale West in Greater Manchester, described the region's Labour and Tory MPs as \"pretty united\" and said positive tests were \"flattening\".\n\nThe latest data on infection rates in the city of Manchester itself show they have fallen slightly, to around 458 cases per 100,000 of the population.\n\nAcross Greater Manchester as a whole - which includes another nine boroughs including Salford, Stockport and Bury - the infection rate is slightly up.\n\nSo it is a mixed picture, but the region as a whole is still a long way off other areas such as Derry, Nottingham and Liverpool.\n\nBut in many ways it is not the infection rate that matters. What counts are the number of people who are falling so seriously ill they end up in hospital.\n\nWe know that lots of otherwise fit and healthy students falling ill with Covid-19 is not going to have a significant impact on the local health service, but lots of older people falling ill would change the picture quickly.\n\nLast week it was reported that, in Liverpool, around 95% of intensive care beds were occupied.\n\nBut Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham told the BBC on Sunday morning there were only 64 occupied beds in the city region.\n\nAcross Greater Manchester, leaders accept there is a serious problem. But they question whether it is serious enough to warrant the kind of economic impact - not to mention the effect on people's mental health - that moving to tier three - very high - would have.\n\nMr Burnham also described \"side deals\" with councils in regions moving into tier three - very high - as not \"good enough for me\".\n\nLiverpool City Region's metro mayor Steve Rotherham announced his area will receive an additional £44m and a similar package worth £42m was given to local leaders in Lancashire.\n\n\"Let's remember, the places they're trying to close in tier three - pubs, bookies, gyms - these are places where people are on low wages. And what we're saying is you cannot take away their place of work and not give them support,\" Mr Burnham said.\n\nHe called on the government to re-introduce the 80% furlough scheme used previously in the pandemic to support the low paid affected by tier three closures. Currently, a less generous scheme to provide two-thirds of wages is on offer.\n\nThe Labour mayor added: \"The truth is health, protecting health, is about more than controlling the virus.\"\n\nA letter from Tory MPs representing areas on the lowest tier of England's Covid alert system called on Mr Burnham to accept a move to tier three - very high - rather than allow national restrictions through a so-called \"circuit-breaker\".\n\n\"It does not make sense to shut down the whole country when the virus is spiking in particular locations,\" it said.\n\nBut four Conservative MPs representing seats in Greater Manchester hit back, describing the letter as \"deeply disappointing... unnecessary and ill-advised\", \"neither wanted nor helpful\" and a \"No 10 approved communication\".\n\nAnd Mr Burnham said: \"I'm not sure a sort of 'we're alright, Jack' letter from a group of southern Conservative MPs is going to cut much ice [in Greater Manchester].\"\n\nMeanwhile, Prof Jeremy Farrar, a scientific adviser to the government, said Christmas will be \"tough\" this year with traditional family celebrations unlikely.\n\n\"Christmas will be tough this year. I don't think it's going to be the usual celebration it is and all families coming together, I'm afraid,\" he told Sky News.\n\n\"I think we have to be honest and realistic and say that we are in for three to six months of a very, very difficult period.\"\n\nBut the Wellcome Trust director said there is \"light at the end of the tunnel\", as he believes a Covid-19 vaccine and effective treatment will be ready in the first quarter of 2021.", "Nicola Sturgeon has played down a row with the UK government over delays to Covid-19 tests in Scotland, saying she has no interest in a \"war of words\".\n\nOnly 316 new cases of the virus were reported on Sunday - a dramatic drop from 1,167 on Saturday.\n\nThe Scottish government said this was due to tests being diverted from the UK government's Lighthouse lab in Glasgow to other sites across the country.\n\nThe UK government spokeswoman insisted this was \"categorically untrue\".\n\nHowever Ms Sturgeon said the governments were \"working very hard\" to improve turnaround times for tests and did not disagree on the \"substance\" of the issue.\n\nShe said there were \"intermittent frustrations\" about the testing system, but said people should have confidence that it \"does work\".\n\nThe number of positive tests registered jumped back to 993 on Monday, with the number of people in hospital also continuing to rise.\n\nAfter the figures for Sunday bucked the recent trend, a post on the Scottish government website claimed that \"demand from outwith Scotland\" had caused a delay in test results coming back from the Lighthouse lab in Glasgow, with swabs being redirected elsewhere.\n\nThe UK government issued a response insisting there was \"no capacity issue at the UK government's Glasgow Lighthouse lab\", and that \"rerouting tests to other laboratories is a routine practice to ensure timely processing\".\n\nAt her daily coronavirus briefing, the first minister said it was \"not in anybody's interest to have a war of words\".\n\nShe said: \"We are working very hard with the UK government to ensure turnaround times, particularly for tests that are already taking longer than we would want, are as quick as possible.\n\n\"When I looked at the UK government statement I'm not sure they are denying or challenging the substance of what I am saying - it recognises that a large number of tests have been diverted to labs elsewhere in the UK.\n\n\"We hope that redirection will have stopped as of yesterday.\"\n\nThe Lighthouse laboratory is based at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Glasgow\n\nMs Sturgeon said tests from drive-through centres - which are usually taken by people who have symptoms and are thus more likely to return positive results - were among those diverted, which she said \"might explain\" why Sunday's figures were \"probably artificially low\".\n\nAllan Wilson, who is president of the Institute of Biomedical Science, based at Monklands hospital in North Lanarkshire, told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme the problem was that no one understood how the Lighthouse laboratories operate.\n\nHe said: \"The issue we have with the Lighthouse lab is that there is a lack of transparency to what happens in that lab because it is not part of the NHS testing, it is delivered through the UK government and it is difficult to find out what the actual issues are until we actually hit problems like we just hit.\n\n\"They work as a network, so they move samples around the country if there are problems. That in itself increases turnaround time and delays results getting back. They did have an issue with staffing, certainly when staff returned to academic institutions, when universities started back, and we know they are actively recruiting.\n\n\"What we are calling for is more transparency. If the Lighthouse labs worked more in collaboration with the NHS labs we would be able to work between the two more easily and focus on those samples and results that are needed urgently.\"\n\nPeople across Scotland are currently banned from visiting other people's homes, and tougher restrictions on licensed premises were introduced earlier this month.\n\nTemporary measures in the central belt have led to the closure of pubs and restaurants in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire, Lothian, Forth Valley and Ayrshire and Arran NHS board areas.\n\nThose living in these areas have been warned not to travel to other parts of Scotland or to areas in England where such restrictions are not in force.\n\nThese measures are due to expire on 26 October, to be replaced by a new \"strategic framework\" for suppressing the virus.\n\nMs Sturgeon is drawing up plans for a \"three-tier framework\" of alert levels which would trigger different restrictions, either on a local or national basis.\n\nThis will be set out at the end of the week, with MSPs set to debate and vote on the plans when Holyrood returns from the half term recess.\n\nMs Sturgeon said this was an \"important step as we look ahead to winter\", which would be a \"very challenging period\".", "Theresa May has criticised the government's proposed changes to the planning system for being \"ill-conceived\" and \"mechanistic\".\n\nThe former prime minister said the use of a formula to assess housing need in England \"does not guarantee a single extra home being built\".\n\nThe Commons debated a motion from another Tory MP, asking ministers to think again about its reforms.\n\nThe government said the plan was still part of a consultation.\n\nIt needed to reform a system that was \"opaque, painfully slow and almost uniquely discouraging for all but the most expert navigators\", it added.\n\nThe motion, proposed by Isle of Wight MP Bob Seely, urged the government to delay the introduction of the new system - which has raised concerns among Tory backbenchers - until the Commons has a chance to fully debate and hold a meaningful vote on it.\n\nMPs backed the motion, which is non-binding on the government.\n\nDuring the debate, Mr Seely said it was time to \"stop the drift of jobs and opportunities to the South, to the shires and suburbs\".\n\nHe added that using an algorithm to plan housing supplies would \"hollow out our cities, urbanise our suburbs and suburbanise the countryside\".\n\nMr Seely gave the Commons some examples, saying that - over 15 years - the algorithm would mean 14,000 fewer homes being built in Manchester, but 10,000 more in east Cheshire.\n\nThe number for Nottingham would fall by 3,700, while the number for Nottinghamshire would rise by 25,000, he said.\n\nAnd in Southampton the number would fall by 2,500, compared with a 26,000 increase for Hampshire.\n\nMr Seely said the \"glaring exception\" among cities was London, where house building would have to rise by an \"astonishing\" amount.\n\nMrs May, who is MP for Maidenhead, said: \"This is a mechanistic approach and it's ill-conceived.\"\n\nThe planning system needed to \"ensure the right number of homes are built in the right places\", she added, arguing that the algorithm \"builds up planning permissions, but not houses\".\n\n\"The government does need to think again on this and it needs to understand the impact the proposals it's put forward is going to have,\" Mrs May said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson has defended his proposals for overhauling the planning system.\n\nFor Labour, shadow housing minister Mike Amesbury said councils, rather than central government, \"must be in the driving seat if we are to create decent, safe, affordable housing for all\".\n\nThe government's consultation on the algorithm closed last week, but its consultation on its wider proposals is open until 29 October.\n\nResponding, Housing Minister Chris Pincher said owning a home was a \"fundamental Conservative value\" and he wanted \"more people, especially young people, to realise that aspiration\".\n\nHe added that the proposals would encourage more community involvement and stronger environmental protections.\n\nMr Pincher said the current way of calculating housing need was \"inconsistent\" with the Conservative election manifesto promise to build 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s.\n\nThe figures \"being bandied about\" were \"entirely speculative\" until the government responded to the findings of its consultation, he told MPs.", "Stratton left the BBC in 2015 to work for ITV News\n\nFormer journalist Allegra Stratton will lead No 10's new daily televised press briefings, BBC sources understand.\n\nStratton - who has worked for both ITV and the BBC and is Chancellor Rishi Sunak's spokeswoman - will become the government's new press secretary.\n\nThe daily updates, similar to the format used by the White House in the United States, will start next month.\n\nBoris Johnson has said the briefings will allow the public more \"direct engagement\" with the government.\n\nThe change comes after a raft of televised press conferences from Downing Street during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nCurrently, political journalists are able to question the prime minister's official spokesperson - who is a civil servant - off camera every day.\n\nThese briefings are on the record, meaning they can be quoted and attributed to the spokesperson, who is never named. Under the changes, the briefings will be on camera.\n\nStratton's role, however, is a political appointment by the Conservative Party, although as a special adviser her wages will be paid by the taxpayer.\n\nBoris Johnson and cabinet ministers fronted press conferences throughout the coronavirus pandemic\n\nThe BBC's deputy political editor, Vicki Young, said the government wanted to introduce the briefings to \"try and get their message out there to viewers\".\n\nBut she said the idea was controversial, as it would not be updates from an elected official.\n\nAfter the plan was announced in July, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it could risk \"unbalancing the political discourse\" and was \"obviously a political move\".\n\nLabour announced that their leader would take questions from the media at monthly press conferences, with a spokesman saying Sir Keir \"doesn't duck the difficult questions or hide from the press\".\n\nBut Downing Street said ministers would make regular appearances at the briefings to be led by Stratton.\n\nStratton graduated from Cambridge university and began her journalistic career as a producer at the BBC.\n\nShe then became a political correspondent for the Guardian, before returning to the BBC as the political editor of Newsnight.\n\nShe left the BBC to become the national editor at ITV News, and co-presented Peston on Sunday.\n\nBut earlier this year, she quit journalism to become the director of strategic communications for Chancellor Rishi Sunak.\n\nWhen the job was advertised on the Conservative Party LinkenIn page it said the salary would be \"based on experience\", but the Daily Telegraph suggested it was likely to be more than £100,000-a-year.\n\nStratton will be employed as a special adviser - a temporary class of civil servant allowed to give political advice to ministers.\n\nThis means she will be free to attack the opposition parties, as well as setting out the government's position.\n\nHer daily briefings will take place in a redeveloped 9 Downing Street, which in recent years has been used by the chief whip and the Brexit secretary.", "Eluned Morgan is minster for mental health, wellbeing and the Welsh language\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford has given some of his health minister's responsibilities to Eluned Morgan in a Welsh Government shake-up.\n\nVaughan Gething will retain responsibility for Wales' coronavirus response, and the delivery and performance of NHS services.\n\nBut Ms Morgan will be put in charge of a range of health issues, including mental health, dementia and autism.\n\nMr Drakeford said the changes mean Mr Gething can focus on coronavirus.\n\nMs Morgan's previous role overseeing international relations will be transferred to the first minister, but she will retain responsibility for Welsh language policy.\n\nBoth sit in the Welsh Government cabinet.\n\nVaughan Gething will retain responsibility for the Covid-19 response\n\nMr Drakeford, himself a former health minister, said: \"The changes I am making to my cabinet team will mean [Mr Gething] can focus all his time and effort on coronavirus and ensuring our NHS is able to treat people with the virus as well as respond to the population's wider health needs.\"\n\nPaul Davies, Welsh Conservative Senedd leader, said he was delighted \"that the first minister has heeded my call in getting rid of the international relations minister position\".\n\n\"The Welsh Labour-led Government now needs to get on with actually delivering in areas it has responsibility for.\"\n\nMs Morgan will be responsible for mental health services, dementia, autism, substance misuse, veterans' health, patient experience and Wales' obesity strategy.\n\n\"Covid-19 has highlighted the impact of isolation on people's mental health, and we will stand by individuals who continue to suffer in these difficult times,\" the new minster for mental health, wellbeing and Welsh language said.\n\nThis is a big change to the health portfolio and moves significant responsibilities away from Health Minister Vaughan Gething.\n\nBut a Welsh Government source says this is \"absolutely not\" a demotion for him but a \"strengthening of the team\" to deal with the continuing public health emergency that is the Covid pandemic.\n\nI'm told this is about emphasising delivery in mental and physical health.\n\nIn subsuming the international relations brief into the first minister's portfolio it also has the side effect of neutralising criticism that the some of the government focus has been misdirected.", "A stolen calligraphy scroll said to be worth millions has been found in Hong Kong, after it was cut in half.\n\nThieves had stolen the scroll by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong from an art collector's home in a burglary last month.\n\nThey then sold it at a fraction of its value. It was apparently cut up as the 2.8m-long (9ft) scroll was deemed too long to display, said Hong Kong police.\n\nThe original owner says the artwork's value has been \"definitely affected\".\n\nThe scroll contains stanzas of poetry handwritten by the founder of the People's Republic of China. Its owner has claimed it is estimated to be worth around $300m (£230m), though it is not known how the valuation was obtained.\n\nThe scroll was stolen in a massive heist on 10 September, when three men broke into the home of Fu Chunxiao, a well-known collector of stamps and revolutionary art.\n\nThey also made off with antique stamps, copper coins and other pieces of calligraphy by Mao. The total haul was worth HK$5bn ($645m; £500m) according to Mr Fu, who was reportedly in mainland China when the burglary took place.\n\nThe thieves sold one of the pieces to another art collector for just HK$500 ($64; £50) to a purchaser who, according to The South China Morning Post, believed the artwork was a fake.\n\nThe buyer then saw a public appeal by police, and surrendered himself with both pieces of the scroll on 22 September.\n\nIt is unclear who exactly had cut the artwork. Senior superintendent Tony Ho of the Hong Kong police said: \"Someone thought the calligraphy was too long... and difficult to show and display. That's why it was cut in half.\"\n\n\"It was heartbreaking to see it be torn into two pieces,\" Mr Fu told the Post. \"It will definitely affect its value but the impact remains to be seen.\"\n\nIn 2019, a calligraphic autograph letter written by Mao Zedong was auctioned off by Sotheby's for £519,000.\n\nPolice later arrested the 49-year-old buyer on suspicion of handling stolen property, though he has now been released on bail.\n\nOne suspected burglar has also been arrested, but the other two burglars who broke into Mr Fu's home still remain at large.", "MPs from the Midlands and northern England are calling for more detail on possible plans to close restaurants and pubs in areas worst-hit by coronavirus.\n\nThey met ministers earlier, with some venting frustration about potential restrictions appearing in newspapers before being announced in Parliament.\n\nA tiered system of measures could be introduced next Wednesday, in an effort to stall rising infection rates.\n\nThe government said it was trying to create \"greater consistency on rules\".\n\nThere were 17,540 new cases of coronavirus recorded in the UK on Thursday, up from the 14,162 reported the day before, government data showed. A further 77 people died after testing positive for the virus within 28 days.\n\nMPs took part in a video call with health ministers Nadine Dorries and Edward Argar - and England's chief medical officer Chris Whitty - earlier on Thursday.\n\nThe chief medical officer presented evidence to the MPs that a \"significant proportion\" of exposure to coronavirus was happening in the hospitality sector - but nothing more was shown on the scope, severity, timing or precise location of any new restrictions.\n\nYet again, ministers are wrestling with grim trade-offs where no decision is pain-free.\n\nBut they're also wrestling with a communications challenge: what do you do when newspapers have been briefed that \"Restaurants and pubs in North forced to shut again\", as the Times front page headline reads today, but it hasn't yet been formally decided and announced?\n\nWell, a cabinet minister ends up doing a round of interviews where he or she can't answer any of the key questions directly: precisely which parts of the country will be affected by the new regulations, when, for how long, and how severe will they be?\n\nCue noisy grumbles from local leaders in those cities with sky-high infection rates, who don't know what is going to happen.\n\nYes, most of those leaders are Labour politicians not averse to complaining about a Conservative government, but ministers are left with an announcement that appears half-made: the prospect that various businesses may have to close or significantly scale back what they do, but without it being clear which ones, or where.\n\nProfound changes affecting millions of people hover as an imminent prospect. But ask a specific question, and the answer is we don't know.\n\nShadow health minister Alex Norris, an MP for Nottingham North - now the city with the highest case numbers in England - told BBC News: \"It was not the most convincing call to be part of.\"\n\n\"When pressed about Nottingham, the advice that came back was, 'We've not decided yet,' which is hard to understand when I have then talked to local journalists and they are getting better briefings than we are.\"\n\nHe said he understood new restrictions would be coming in next week, adding he believed they should come in immediately \"given we are top of the list now\".\n\nBen Bradley, Conservative MP for Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, who took part in the call, said: \"There are some really challenging circumstances.\n\n\"We talked about the North West and North East in particular, where we were talking about - in three weeks' time - having hospitalisation levels higher than in the original peak.\"\n\nHe said ministers had told the MPs to expect new measures to be announced on Monday and implemented on Wednesday.\n\nThe meeting came amid growing anger among politicians about the way the government has handled new restrictions in parts of the country with high infection rates.\n\nLabour's mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, told the BBC he had been \"having discussions with ministers this week. At no point did somebody say, 'We're closing all hospitality in the north of England on Monday.'\"\n\nFormer minister Jake Berry, the Conservative MP for Rossendale and Darwen, has accused the prime minister of enjoying his emergency powers \"a little bit too much\" and of being \"London-centric\".\n\nThe Conservative MP for Bishop Auckland, Dehenna Davidson, said in the Commons that the government was \"exactly right to take a localised approach\".\n\nBut she said the public in some areas of her constituency did not understand why they faced local restrictions when case numbers were low.\n\nA slide shown at the meeting lists hospitality as the most frequent setting for coronavirus exposure.\n\nLiverpool's Labour Metro Mayor, Steve Rotheram, said the \"North should not be a petri dish for experimentation by central government\".\n\nMPs have also expressed unease about the \"rule of six\" and the 10pm curfew for pubs and restaurants, calling for the scientific rationale behind the measure to be made public.\n\nBut Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has said his party will not be \"voting down\" the curfew next week, instead saying the rule \"needs to be reformed\".\n\nOthers on the left of the Labour Party, including former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, want a more \"severe\" lockdown. One told the BBC they wanted a \"zero Covid approach - hard, fast and backed up by comprehensive testing and financial support\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Cllr David Mellen says a lack of coronavirus restrictions this weekend could mean a “last chance to party' in Nottingham.\n\nCommunities Secretary Robert Jenrick has not ruled out pubs being closed but said the response would be \"proportionate and localised\".\n\nHe told the BBC the precise measures for different areas would be announced \"in the coming days\".\n\nMr Jenrick added that the government was trying to give \"greater consistency on rules so they're easier to understand\" and was working on \"slightly broader canvases of regions or cities and counties to avoid differences in people's daily lives if they drive over the border\".\n\nThe government is expected to introduce a new \"three-tier\" approach to coronavirus restrictions in local areas of England in an effort to simplify the system and avoid public confusion, the BBC understands.\n\nBut details of how severe restrictions will be in each tier have yet to be confirmed.\n\nThe BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg said there were \"whispers in Whitehall of a 'firewall' approach\" to new restrictions expected next week.\n\nThis could mean extra limits to be turned on and off again to allow for Christmas, with the possibility of more being introduced in January and February to help the NHS cope.\n\nBut Laura Kuenssberg said the situation was \"still unclear with so many unknowns\" and final decisions have not been made.\n\nThe Liberal Democrats have written a letter to Chancellor Rishi Sunak, calling for the furlough scheme to be extended before enforcing any shutdowns of industries, such as hospitality and retail.", "Alexanda Kotey (left) and El Shafee Elsheikh were captured by Syrian Kurdish forces\n\nTwo ex-British alleged Islamic State (IS) suspects have appeared in a US court charged over the killing of four American hostages.\n\nAlexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh are accused of belonging to an IS cell dubbed \"The Beatles\" involved in kidnappings in Iraq and Syria.\n\nThe pair appeared via video link from prison at a hearing in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.\n\nThe men, who had been in US custody in Iraq, previously denied the charges.\n\nA detention hearing and arraignment were scheduled for Friday but the lawyer appointed to represent the pair, who grew up in London, said he might ask for a delay to allow time to go over the charges with the defendants.\n\nUS Assistant Attorney General John Demers told a press conference the charges were \"the result of many years of hard work in pursuit of justice\" for the four Americans who died - James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig.\n\nAddressing the families of the victims, he said: \"Although we cannot bring back your children, we will do all that we can do: obtain justice for them, for you, and for all Americans.\"\n\nHe added: \"These men will now be brought before a United States court to face justice for the depraved acts alleged against them in the indictment.\"\n\nThe charges carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.\n\nClockwise from top left: Aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig, and journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley\n\nThe pair are alleged to have been members of an IS gang - nicknamed by hostages after the 1960s pop group due to their British accents - which was responsible for the death of hostages in Iraq and Syria in 2014.\n\nSome of the victims - who included American journalists and UK and US aid workers - were beheaded and their deaths filmed and broadcast on social media.\n\nJames Foley's mother, Diane Foley, said the charges were \"only a first step\" and that she was \"praying that justice will be served\".\n\nShe added that she hoped the trial might \"implicate others\" and lead to further arrests.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"If you harm an American, you will face American justice\": US Assistant Attorney General John Demers' warning to terrorists\n\nKotey and Elsheikh, originally from west London, were previously stripped of their UK nationality.\n\nThe charges they face are:\n\nThe IS group's alleged ringleader, Mohammed Emwazi, known as \"Jihadi John\" died in a drone strike in 2016.\n\nReferring to his death, Mr Demers said he had \"faced a different kind of American resolve - the mighty reach of our military, which successfully targeted him in an air strike several years ago\".\n\nThe assistant attorney general was asked by reporters whether the death penalty was not being sought solely because the UK government had made it a requirement in return for its co-operation.\n\n\"The attorney general decided that we should provide the death penalty assurance in order to get the British evidence and see that justice could be done more expeditiously than if we had to continue to litigate this issue in the courts in the United Kingdom,\" Mr Demers said.\n\n\"The decision was to try to keep the option (of seeking the death penalty) open at first but ultimately that didn't work.\"\n\nLast month the UK sent evidence to the US following assurances the two men would not face the death penalty.\n\nMr Demers added: \"We decided that if we were going to do this case, we were going to tell the fullest story we could of what these defendants did and we were going to put on the strongest case possible. And with the British evidence I think we can do that very well.\"\n\nMs Foley said she was \"hugely grateful\" the death penalty was not being sought, as she wanted alleged IS members to have \"an opportunity to come to terms with what they've done\".\n\nFBI director Christopher Wray told the press conference: \"We mourn not only our American victims but also the British victims David Haines and Alan Henning, and victims of all nations who suffered unimaginable cruelty at the hands of Isis.\"\n\nMike Haines, whose aid worker brother David was killed by the IS cell in 2014, said he was relieved \"the fate of these two men is closer to being decided but this is just the beginning\".\n\n\"The pain we experienced as families was excruciating when we lost our loved ones and the last three years have been a long, horrible waiting game,\" he said.\n\n\"It was a big win for us knowing that the US courts would be taking this forward because we have been waiting years since they were first detained.\"\n\nBritish photojournalist John Cantlie was kidnapped with Mr Foley, and his fate is still unknown.\n\nIt has taken nearly eight years to reach this moment - from the day that James Foley and John Cantlie were taken hostage in Syria to the reading out of the indictment against two of the alleged perpetrators, both now in US custody.\n\nThe eight charges against them are so serious that each one carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.\n\nThe defendants have previously denied the charges linked to their alleged involvement in the murder of US and British hostages.\n\nBut both the US and British governments appear confident that there is a strong case for the prosecution.\n\nOver the course of the coming trial the court is likely to hear some harrowing testimony from those who survived IS captivity - men whose freedom was ransomed in exchange for millions of Euros while their fellow prisoners from the US and Britain suffered horrific deaths at the hands of their captors.\n\nIS once controlled 88,000 sq km (34,000 sq miles) of territory stretching from western Syria to eastern Iraq and imposed its brutal rule on almost eight million people.\n\nThe liberation of that territory exposed the magnitude of the abuses inflicted by the jihadist group, including summary killings, torture, amputations, ethno-sectarian attacks, rape and sexual slavery imposed on women and girls. Hundreds of mass graves containing the remains of thousands of people have been discovered.\n\nUN investigators have concluded that IS militants committed acts that may amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BBC asks Ismail Abedi why he's not co-operating with the public inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing\n\nThe elder brother of the Manchester Arena suicide bomber has refused to say why he is not co-operating with the public inquiry into the atrocity.\n\nThe inquiry has heard that Ismail Abedi has declined to answer questions in case he incriminates himself.\n\nThe BBC located the 27-year-old in Manchester, where he still lives, and approached him to ask why. He refused to engage and drove away.\n\nTwenty-two people were killed and many more injured in the May 2017 attack.\n\nSalman Abedi detonated a bomb at the end of an Ariana Grande concert.\n\nEarlier this year, younger brother Hashem Abedi was jailed after being convicted of murdering all those who died.\n\nThe bombing after an Ariana Grande concert killed 22 people and injured hundreds more\n\nSalman and Hashem had spent months preparing the attack - buying bomb-making chemicals, transporting their purchases around Manchester, and renting a flat to make explosives.\n\nA public inquiry is investigating every aspect of the bombing.\n\nIsmail Abedi told Sky News in August that he wanted to \"apologise for the pain\" his brothers had caused and said he had \"no idea they had taken this path\".\n\nBut he was not questioned on any of the evidence from the trial. His refusal to co-operate with the inquiry emerged soon afterwards.\n\nLast month, Paul Greaney QC, counsel to the inquiry, said: \"Ismail Abedi, the brother of the killers, has been required by the inquiry legal team to answer a series of questions relating to what might in general terms be described as the issue of radicalisation.\n\n\"To date, he has declined to answer those questions on the basis that he maintains that his answers may tend to incriminate him.\"\n\nMr Greaney said that none of the Abedi family - the brothers' parents live in Libya - had provided a \"substantive response\", adding that it was \"most unhelpful\" and he hoped the family would \"reflect and understand that they have a moral obligation to provide the information we require\".\n\nInquests into the Westminster and London Bridge attacks of 2017 did hear evidence from family members of the attackers. The Arena inquiry is the equivalent process for the Manchester attack.\n\nThe Abedi parents moved to the UK after fleeing Col Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, with their children born in Britain and brought up in Manchester.\n\nAt the time of the attack the parents had moved back to Libya. The family had regularly travelled to the country following the 2011 revolution.\n\nHashem Abedi was arrested in Libya the day after the bombing\n\nIsmail had purchased one-way tickets to Libya for his two brothers in April 2017. Salman returned five days before the bombing, while Hashem stayed there and was only extradited to the UK over two years later.\n\nBut Ismail Abedi, who is married, has remained in Manchester. He was arrested the morning after the Arena bombing, but later released without charge.\n\nThe inquiry has heard that in 2015 he was stopped by police after arriving at Heathrow Airport and that his mobile phone had contained recruitment videos and literature produced by the Islamic State group.\n\nThe inquiry has also been told that his Facebook account had earlier been viewed by MI5 and seen to show, among other things, a picture of Ismail holding a machine gun with an IS logo imprinted on the image.\n\nThe inquiry is looking at a number of things, including the emergency response to the attack\n\nEvidence presented during the Hashem Abedi trial also raises questions for Ismail.\n\nIsmail's name was used to buy car insurance for Salman and Hashem, neither of whom had a driving licence, for a car they bought to transport materials around Manchester during the preparations.\n\nA bank card in the name of the brothers' mother - which received over £1,000 in benefits each month despite her being in Libya - was used by Salman and Hashem to buy relevant items during their attack preparations, but it was found in Ismail's possessions when he was arrested following the bombing.\n\nThe public inquiry was told that a Libyan number was texting both Salman and Ismail on the evening of the attack.\n\nSalman received texts a few minutes apart saying \"call\" and \"ASAP\".\n\nBetween the messages, the number wrote to Ismail saying: \"Allah's peace and blessings be upon you.\"\n\nMr Greaney, during the inquiry opening, said: \"This message and the coincidence of its timing with what was happening in Manchester may be innocent, but do serve to indicate that... the inquiry will need to explore whether, and if so to what extent, the Abedi family or members of it were a radicalising influence on Hashem Abedi and Salman Abedi.\"\n\nBut BBC research shows the Libyan number in question was Hashem Abedi's.\n\nEvidence at Hashem's trial linked him to the number. The evidence included a text from Ismail to a contact saying whose number it was.\n\nSalman called Hashem later that night - the last call he made before the bombing.\n\nPete Weatherby QC, representing seven bereaved families at the inquiry, told the BBC there had to be \"maximum transparency\" from all those called on to assist.\n\n\"If there is a lack of openness and transparency that is much for difficult for the public inquiry to achieve its ends, delivering truth and justice to the families and ultimately trying to prevent an outrage of this kind happening again,\" he added.", "A murderer who refuses to reveal the whereabouts of his wife's body will be freed from prison despite a last-ditch appeal to keep him behind bars.\n\nThe justice secretary had asked the Parole Board to reconsider its decision to release Russell Causley, who killed Carole Packman in Bournemouth in 1985.\n\nMrs Packman's family argued that he posed an ongoing risk to their safety.\n\nHowever, the Parole Board said Causley, who is 77, was in poor health and unlikely to be able to cause harm.\n\nCausley evaded justice for almost a decade after his wife went missing and was only exposed when he made a botched attempt to fake his own death as part of an elaborate insurance fraud.\n\nHe was twice jailed for Mrs Packman's murder - in 1996 and, after a quashed conviction, again in 2004.\n\nHis family said he had \"taunted\" them by repeatedly changing his account of what happened.\n\nThey joined calls to introduce a law which would prevent murderers from being freed who have not revealed the whereabouts of their victim's body.\n\nCausley, pictured in the 1980s, was jailed for fraud after a botched attempt to fake his own death\n\nJustice Secretary Robert Buckland intervened when the Parole Board decided to release Causley and asked for the decision to be \"reconsidered\".\n\nUpholding its original ruling, the board said: \"It does not follow that because [Causley] has shown callousness to them by not disclosing the whereabouts of the body that he will cause them serious harm if released.\"\n\nMrs Packman's grandson, Neil Gillingham, said the Parole Board should \"hang their heads in shame\".\n\nHe said the decision was a \"slap in the face for justice\" and would \"undermine the faith\" victims have in the system.\n\n\"It is the measure of the man that he still tries to inflict as much psychological trauma as possible,\" Mr Gillingham added.\n\n\"So do I believe he poses a risk to my mother and I? Absolutely... let's just hope that Russell doesn't prove me right.\"\n\nA spokesman for the Parole Board said: \"A senior judge of the Parole Board has rejected the application for reconsideration and found that the decision of the original panel was a rational one, with ample evidence on which the panel could base its decision.\n\n\"In rejecting reconsideration the judicial member of the board member commented that the panel were entitled to consider that the prisoner's age (77) and poor health were likely to reduce the risk of causing serious harm.\"\n\nCausley is expected be released within the next few days.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have won an apology from a US news agency after drones were allegedly used to take pictures of their son, Archie.\n\nThe couple's case at Los Angeles County Superior Court said the 14-month-old was photographed at their home in the city by an unnamed person during the coronanvirus lockdown.\n\nThey described the incident as an invasion of privacy.\n\nThe X17 agency will also reimburse some of the royal couple's legal fees.\n\nIt has agreed to hand over the photos, destroy any copies it holds and stop distributing the images.\n\nPrince Harry and Meghan are now based in Santa Barbara, California, having stepped back as senior royals at the end of March.\n\nAccording to court documents, they were living at the home of a friend in Los Angeles when the photographs were taken of Archie and Meghan's mother, Doria Ragland.\n\nTheir lawyer Michael Kump said: \"Over the summer, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex took action against intrusive and illegal paparazzi photos taken of their family at a private residence...\n\n\"This is a successful outcome. All families have a right, protected by law, to feel safe and secure at home.\"\n\nAccording to the legal action filed in July, the royal couple were constantly being followed by paparazzi, who tracked them down following their move to the US, flying helicopters overhead and cutting holes in their security fences.\n\nCalifornia privacy laws make photographing or filming anyone in their homes by use of drone or telephoto lenses illegal.\n\nIn a statement, X17 said: \"We apologise to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their son for the distress we have caused.\n\n\"We were wrong to offer these photographs and commit to not doing so again.\"\n\nIn a separate legal action in London, against the publisher of the Mail on Sunday and Mail Online, Meghan is suing for breach of privacy and copyright infringement over the publication of a letter she wrote to her father. The publisher denies the claims.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nAll pubs and restaurants across central Scotland are to be closed under new measures aimed at tackling a surge in coronavirus cases.\n\nThe new rules will apply to licensed premises across the central belt, including Glasgow and Edinburgh.\n\nPubs and restaurants will be able to open in other parts of Scotland - but can only serve alcohol outdoors.\n\nThe new rules, which will be in force from 18:00 on Friday until 25 October, apply to about 3.4 million people.\n\nThey cover people living in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire, Forth Valley, Lothian and Ayrshire and Arran health board areas.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the restrictions were \"intended to be short, sharp action to arrest a worrying increase in infection\".\n\nShe warned that without taking action, the country risks \"returning to the peak level of infection by the end of the month\".\n\nBut she admitted that the new rules would be disruptive to many businesses and would be unwelcome to many people.\n\nThe Scottish Hospitality Group, which includes many of the the country's best known pubs and restaurants, accused the first minister of \"effectively signing a death sentence\" for many businesses.\n\nAnd the Federation of Small Businesses said the move would have a major knock on impact across other parts of the economy, including tourism.\n\nOpposition parties have called for more detail on a £40m support package for affected business that was announced by Ms Sturgeon, and have questioned the need for the blanket closure of pubs and restaurants.\n\nThe new rules for the five central belt areas are:\n\nThere will be no travel ban in any of the areas, but people in the central belt have been urged to avoid public transport unless it is \"absolutely necessary\".\n\nAnd they have also been advised not to travel outside of the health board area they live in if they do not need to.\n\nThroughout the pandemic Scotland has tended to adopt a slightly more cautious approach than England.\n\nIt has imposed more restrictions and lifted them more slowly in general. The latest move is in line with that trend.\n\nThere is little difference in overall infection rates. Scotland has seen 85 cases per 100,000 in the past week, compared to England's 109.\n\nThe measures imposed by the Scottish government are focussed on areas with the highest infection rates.\n\nBut those places are some way below the levels seen in England's hotspots.\n\nCities such as Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle have seen around 500 cases per 100,000 people over the past week - that is more than twice the level of infection in Glasgow for example.\n\nBut the differences between the two nations should not mask the growing concern there is in England about the infection rates, particularly in the north of country.\n\nSenior ministers and their advisers are today discussing whether extra steps are needed south of the border.\n\nThe problem is action to supress the virus has negative consequences too.\n\nThis much can be seen in the growing number of scientists and health experts who are signing the Great Barrington Declaration warning about the impact of Covid lockdown policies.\n\nIn other parts of the country, pubs, bars, restaurants and cafes will be able to open indoors until 18:00 - but only to serve food and non-alcoholic drinks.\n\nHowever, they will be able to serve alcohol in outdoor settings such as beer gardens until 22:00, with the current rules on no more than six people from two households remaining in place.\n\nAnd the existing rules will continue to apply to weddings that have already been booked, and funerals, in all parts of Scotland.\n\nMs Sturgeon said regulations would be introduced to extend the mandatory use of face coverings in indoor communal settings such as staff canteens and workplace corridors.\n\nShops across Scotland will be asked to return to 2m physical distancing from this weekend, and to reintroduce measures such as one-way systems.\n\nIt comes as Scotland recorded more than 1,000 new confirmed cases of the virus in a single day for the first time - although the country is doing far more testing now than at the height of the pandemic earlier in the year.\n\nThe R number is currently believed to be higher in Scotland than in other UK nations, and the number of people dying or in hospital with the virus has increased over the past week.\n\nThe number of UK cases rose by 14,162 on Wednesday. This was a slight drop on Tuesday's figure, but the seven-day rolling average is still pointing upwards.\n\nSpeaking in the Scottish Parliament, Ms Sturgeon said the \"vast majority\" of pubs and restaurants had worked hard to ensure the safety of their staff and customers.\n\nBeer gardens outside of the central belt will be able to serve alcohol until 22:00\n\nBut she added: \"Indoor environments, where different households from different age groups can mix, inevitably present a risk of transmission.\n\n\"That risk can be increased in some hospitality premises if good ventilation is difficult, and if it is hard to control the movement of people.\n\n\"And the presence of alcohol can of course affect people's willingness to physically distance.\"\n\nScottish Conservative group leader Ruth Davidson criticised a lack of detail over the £40m support package that was announced by the first minister.\n\nMs Davidson said: \"These businesses deserve better. They need to know how much they can apply for, when they can apply for it and how long they will have to wait before support reaches them.\n\n\"Those answers could have been provided today, but Nicola Sturgeon failed to do that.\"\n\nAnd Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said the government should target premises which break the rules \"instead of shutting down every single business\".\n\nThe temporary shutdown of pubs and restaurants across central Scotland with a new 6pm curfew elsewhere are significant new restrictions.\n\nTogether with the existing Scotland-wide ban on visiting other households, these add up to the toughest combination of measures in place across any of the four UK nations.\n\nThe Scottish government has decided to take further action because it fears case numbers are rising so fast that without further action, spread would be back to March/April levels by the end of this month.\n\nThe hospitality industry is not convinced there is sufficient evidence to justify pubs and restaurants being so heavily targeted.\n\nThe new measures are temporary, partly because the Scottish government has limited scope to compensate businesses.\n\nIt hopes the UK government can be persuaded to offer additional support for hard hit sectors in the coming weeks and that all four nations can agree a new system for assessing and responding to the coronavirus threat on a more localised basis.\n\nAre you a pub or restaurant worker in central Scotland? Share your stories by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Supermarket Asda has launched a free NHS drive-through flu jab service for eligible people at 13 UK stores.\n\nAnyone entitled to free jabs - such as the elderly, frontline NHS staff, and pregnant women - can use the service.\n\nPeople regarded as non-vulnerable can get jabs for £8, which Asda claims is the cheapest on the market.\n\nThe drive-through jabs will be offered in Asda car parks, and come after reports people are put off visiting GPs and pharmacies due to Covid-19 worries.\n\nAsda says the initiative, which began on Thursday, is the first of its kind in the UK. But other retailers, including the Boots and Lloyds Pharmacy chemist chains, also offer jabs.\n\nThe supermarket's move comes amid news that flu jabs have been limited by pharmacists and health clinics due to high demand.\n\nHowever, NHS England says enough stocks are available. This year, up to 30 million people can be vaccinated in England, the government says.\n\nMaq Din, lead pharmacist at Asda Pharmacy, said: \"The sad truth is that there is an increased mortality risk if you catch Covid-19 when you already have the flu.\n\n\"We are putting a number of measures in place at our drive-through flu jab centres , so patients can be assured that it is safe to visit - and they won't even need to leave their car to get a jab.\n\nCustomers must pre-book, and will be given a time slot and a bay to park when turning up.\n\nAsda said its own research had shown that 28% of UK adults said they were currently putting off getting a flu jab over concerns about visiting GPs and pharmacies for fear of coming into contact with someone suffering from Covid-19.\n\nThe service is available at these Asda stores: Accrington; Bodmin; Eastbourne; Gosport; Hartlepool; Hyde; Nuneaton; Old Kent Road (London); Oldbury; Pilsworth; Sheffield; South Shields; Wakefield Durkar.", "Covid restrictions are to be further tightened in parts of England early next week, with the closure of pubs and restaurants a possibility in the worst-affected areas, the BBC has been told.\n\nThere could also be a ban on overnight stays away from home in these areas.\n\nA final decision on the time period or extent of potential closures has not yet been made.\n\nThe government is also likely to introduce a three-tier system for local lockdowns.\n\nUnder the system, different parts of the country would be placed in different categories - although ministers are still discussing the precise details of the toughest level of restrictions over the next couple of days.\n\nA formal announcement is not likely to come until Monday, according to BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg.\n\nMeanwhile, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has challenged the government to publish the scientific evidence behind the 22:00 closing time for pubs and restaurants - and refused to say whether his party would vote in support of the measure in Parliament next week.\n\nCommunities Secretary Robert Jenrick said there was \"evidence hospitality plays a role\" in spreading the virus.\n\nBut pressed on whether the government would publish this evidence, he told the BBC: \"It is commonsensical that the longer you stay in pubs and restaurants, the more likely you are to come into contact with other individuals.\n\n\"The more drinks that people have, the more likely that some people are to break the rules.\"\n\nHe added that it was right to \"take action decisively, rather than waiting for the most detailed epidemiological evidence to emerge\".\n\nOn the possibility of additional restrictions for some parts of England, Mr Jenrick said the government was \"currently considering what steps to take\" and the precise measures for different areas would be announced \"in the coming days\".\n\nHe did not rule out pubs being closed but said measures would be \"proportionate and localised\".\n\nHe added that the government was trying to give \"greater consistency on rules so they're easier to understand\" and was working on \"slightly broader canvases of regions or cities and counties to avoid differences in people's daily lives if they drive over the border\".\n\nPubs and restaurants across Central Scotland have already been told they will have to close\n\nIt comes as significant new measures are introduced in Scotland.\n\nFrom Friday, all pubs and restaurants across central Scotland, including Glasgow and Edinburgh, are to close, while in the rest of Scotland hospitality venues must shut at 18:00 BST and alcohol can only be served outdoors.\n\nIndustry leaders are warning the measures could be the final straw for many businesses.\n\nOn Wednesday the number of UK cases rose by 14,162, with a further 70 deaths reported.\n\nThe planned tightening of restrictions in parts of England follows rising infection rates across much of the country, with medical leaders warning the NHS is at risk of becoming overwhelmed.\n\nLiverpool, Manchester and Newcastle upon Tyne have the highest infection rates in the country.\n\nA government source told the BBC the situation in the north-west and north-east of England was \"very troubling\", with growing numbers of hospital admissions and more elderly people in intensive care.\n\nThese areas will be placed into the top tier of restrictions, with an announcement possibly as early as Monday, in a new system called the Local Covid Alert Level.\n\nBut there remains a debate within cabinet over how far the restrictions in the top tier should go, with some in No 10 arguing for measures like those in Scotland.\n\nThe plan is for schools to remain open in all circumstances.\n\nThe Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, reacted angrily to the reports, tweeting: \"No discussion. No consultation. Millions of lives affected by Whitehall diktat. It is proving impossible to deal with this government.\"\n\nIt's a complicated equation. The Department of Health is worried about the spread of the disease, as well as other patients losing out on other treatments because of the focus on Covid.\n\nNo 11 is fearful about the impact on the economy, which has already had a profound shock.\n\nAnd it's No 10's job to worry about all of it, then reach a conclusion.\n\nBut Boris Johnson also knows that his own MPs and the opposition parties are more and more sceptical as each day passes about what the government proposes.\n\nIt's clear that shutting pubs and restaurants is a possibility - the \"circuit breaker\" that we have talked about on here lots of times.\n\nBut there are many questions still to be settled.\n\nRead more from Laura here.\n\nUnder the new system, all areas would be subject to the current England-wide restrictions, but there would be much more robust measures for the top tier - the one with the highest infection rates.\n\nThere are already tighter restrictions in parts of the north-east and north-west of England, Birmingham and Leicester, where the rate of infection has been rising.\n\nBut there are currently no extra restrictions for hospitality venues in these areas beyond those in force nationally, such as the 22:00 closing time for pubs and restaurants.\n\nThe Treasury is looking at providing financial support to the industry in the worst-hit areas, and a memo seen by the BBC shows plans for additional money for local authorities. They would get £1 per head of population if placed into tier two, and £2 per head for tier three.\n\nKate Nicholls, chief executive of UK Hospitality, said if venues were forced to close the industry would need a return to a full furlough scheme and additional financial support.\n\nShe said the £40m of support announced for hospitality venues by the Scottish government, when shared between 16,000 premises, equated to just over £2,000 each, which \"barely keeps the lights on, let alone saving jobs\".\n\nThe planned changes come as medical leaders warn that rising infection levels across the country could leave the NHS \"unable to cope\".\n\nThe Academy of Medical Colleges, which represents the UK and Ireland's 24 medical royal colleges, called on people to abide \"strictly\" to coronavirus measures to prevent NHS services from becoming overwhelmed.\n\nHelen Stokes-Lampard, chair of the academy, said: \"Given the recent dramatic spike in both the number of cases and hospital admissions it is clear that we could soon be back to where we were in April if we are not all extremely careful.\"\n\nShe told BBC Breakfast that while there were hotspots in the north-east and north-west of England, a lot of cities were now seeing \"serious problems\" and the virus was \"working further south\".", "Caroline Langton opted to move to Ramsgate rather than east London\n\nCaroline Langton was on the cusp of exchanging on a flat in East London earlier this year - and then came the coronavirus lockdown.\n\nInstead, she ended up buying a property in Ramsgate near the sea.\n\nShe's not alone - property website Rightmove says homebuyers are looking to escape crowded cities and big towns by moving to the country or the coast.\n\nCoronavirus has meant more people are working from home while lockdown made them realise they wanted more space.\n\nRightmove said that searches have doubled for homes in small towns and villages with populations less than 11,000.\n\nFor Ms Langton, the pandemic \"changed everything\".\n\nShe was renting a property in Margate as she and a friend were just about to exchange on a flat in Leyton, East London when the lockdown began in March.\n\nIt made her think again about moving to the capital.\n\n\"In Margate you've got that huge panoramic beach, and you get that sense of space, which you just don't get in London,\" she says.\n\n\"Living with a friend in a small property wasn't the best idea,\" she adds, especially as both potential flatmates have partners.\n\nInstead, Ms Langton decided to buy a property in Ramsgate. The economics added up. To get a small two-bedroom flat in Leyton would have cost twice as much as a bigger place in Ramsgate.\n\nBuying next to the sea also worked for her job as co-founder of an interior planting design company which can deal with clients remotely.\n\nAccording to Rightmove, seaside resorts have seen the biggest rise in sales, as people sought more space during lockdown.\n\n\"The desire to move to the country has turned into a trend from a short-term shift,\" said Rightmove's Tim Bannister.\n\n\"Back in May when the market reopened in England we wondered how long the desire to move to the country or to smaller towns and villages would last.\"\n\nHe said there are two main reasons for the trend: some buyers are more willing to have a country commute a few times a week, while others are preparing for social distancing to be here for some time and so are being drawn to places with more outdoor space.\n\nBut anyone buying now should expect prices to be lower next year, estate agents have warned.\n\nThe latest RICS UK Residential Survey has revealed expectations that prices will move into negative territory over the next 12 months.\n\n\"There is increasing concern that the combination of significant job losses over the coming months allied to the scaling back of policy initiatives in early 2021 will have an adverse impact on transaction levels,\" warned Simon Rubinsohn, chief economist at The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.\n\nHowever, despite warning of negative prices next year, RICS reported strong house sales in September.\n\nHalifax reported earlier in the week that house prices jumped by 7.3% in September - the strongest annual increase since June 2016.\n\nIt took the average UK house price to just below quarter of a million pounds, at £249,870, Halifax said.\n\nThese reports encapsulate the difference between vision and reality for many potential homebuyers.\n\nThe pandemic has led some people to reassess their domestic priorities, with space inside and out becoming more attractive for some than the buzz of a town or city.\n\nBut actually making that move may not be so easy. Demand may not be matched by countryside properties coming on the market - whether it be a two-bedroom terrace or a detached property in its own grounds.\n\nThen there is the question of how easy it is to sell an existing urban home, particularly during dark autumn and winter months.\n\nOn top of that, lenders are restricting mortgages for those without lots of equity, to reduce their own exposure to an economic downturn.\n\nAnd, as always, jobs and pay are key in giving people the confidence and financial security to move - and with heavy redundancies on the cards, that may slow activity in the housing sector.\n\nAccording to Rightmove, searches for properties in nine areas in England have doubled, and all have populations under 11,000.\n\nSearches for homes in Lightwater in Surrey have risen the most - up 130% in the past year.\n\nThe village has a population of less than 7,000 people, and house prices range from a studio flat on offer for £155,000 to a five-bed house with an asking price of more than £3.6m.\n\nOther small villages and market towns have proved popular with searches up 128% for Bruton in Somerset and up 111% for Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds.\n\nThe other locations where searches have doubled are:\n\nThe latter harbour town also tops the table for the biggest increase in the number of sales agreed, up by 179% in the past year.\n\nSt Ives in Cornwall posted a 170% rise in sales with Buckhurst Hill, Essex up 164% and Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire up 156%.", "Kennedy and Nixon debated with 4,828km (3,000 miles) between them in 1960 Image caption: Kennedy and Nixon debated with 4,828km (3,000 miles) between them in 1960\n\nAs we reported earlier, US presidential debate organisers have decided to change the format of the next TV clash between President Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden, opting for a virtual rather than an in-person event.\n\nTrump has scoffed at the proposal, dismissing the idea of a virtual debate as “ridiculous”.\n\nHowever, the format was acceptable to two former presidents, Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy, when they were vying for the White House in 1960. There was no coronavirus then, of course.\n\nBut in their third debate of the campaign, Nixon and Kennedy went head-to-head, albeit via video link from different cities on the west and east coasts of the US.\n\n\"The two candidates will not be sharing the same platform,\" moderator Bill Shadel said when opening the debate. \"In New York, the Democratic presidential nominee Senator John F Kennedy. Separated by 3,000 miles, in a Los Angeles studio, the Republican presidential nominee Vice-President Richard M Nixon.\"\n\nAmerican TV network C-SPAN has a recording of the debate on its website .", "A UK bullock arriving in the port of Cartagena, which campaigners said was later loaded onto a vessel destined for Libya\n\nLivestock from the UK is being shipped to the Middle East and slaughtered in \"dreadful, terrifying\" ways, animal welfare charities claim.\n\nOver the summer, the charities tracked cattle on long journeys via Spanish fattening farms and ports.\n\nIn footage, shared with the BBC, a dead bullock at an abattoir in Lebanon in August is seen to have a UK ear-tag.\n\nThe Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) said it was committed to improving animal welfare.\n\nUK livestock is protected by EU laws during transport. Britain does not export animals to third countries for slaughter or fattening where welfare standards are lower.\n\nBut undercover filming by Animals International and the German Animal Welfare Foundation (AWF) provided video evidence suggesting British livestock is being re-sold in Europe to the Middle East.\n\nOne UK bullock, believed to be from Northern Ireland, is recorded at the port of Cartagena in Spain in July before being loaded onto a vessel destined for Libya.\n\n\"In 30 years of working, nothing compares with the horrors of a slaughter house in North Africa or the Middle East\", said Peter Stevenson from Compassion in World Farming.\n\n\"Footage from the facility in Lebanon shows the same, awful methods we have seen before,\" he said.\n\n\"Animals are hacked at repeatedly until they die. Often they are winched up by a leg or their tendons are slashed to disable them.\"\n\nAnimals International said it was \"appalling\" to find British cattle being killed in Lebanon by \"poorly equipped, untrained workers, while fully conscious and terrified\".\n\nThe charity found livestock carriers took around a week to sail from Cartagena to Libya or Lebanon.\n\nA landmark veterinary report into the transport of livestock in 2016 concluded that animals suffered every day at sea in filthy, cramped conditions.\n\nA UK calf which charity investigators said was dying and had been moved outside of its pen at a fattening farm in Catalonia in June\n\nCalves in particular were found to die frequently of disease, thirst or heat-related illnesses.\n\nThe former Environment Secretary Theresa Villiers said: \"It is stomach-churning to think of cattle from the UK being subjected to such horrific treatment.\n\n\"This footage should be a wake-up call,\" she said.\n\n\"Now we have left the EU, the government needs to ban live exports for slaughter or fattening.\"\n\nThe UK currently exports some livestock to third countries for breeding. EU rules, which apply in the UK until at least January, limit the number of hours animals can travel without being rested and also the density of stock. They also require various vet checks at borders.\n\nUnweaned male calves are by-products of the dairy industry. The UK exported around 17,000 last year to Spain, the majority from Northern Ireland.\n\nHowever, consignments have fallen this year and in September Scotland agreed to stop shipping calves through the port of Ramsgate in Kent.\n\nHaving reached Spain calves are typically fattened on farms before being slaughtered or re-exported.\n\nAt a facility in Catalonia in June, charity workers say they filmed a UK calf that had been moved outside of its pen and left to die.\n\nMaria Boada, an AWF vet, who gathered the footage, said: \"The calf was suffering from a respiratory illness, which is common after long, stressful journeys with little food or milk replacement.\n\n\"For many farmers, sick calves are seen as disposable due to their low value and ready availability.\"\n\nRecent Lords amendments to the Agriculture Bill to ban live exports have been defeated.\n\nA Defra spokesman said: \"Now that we have left the EU, we will be taking forward the manifesto commitment to end excessively long journeys for animals going to slaughter and fattening.\"\n\nThe National Farmers Union said the standards seen in the abattoir were \"appalling\" and fell far below what is required of British farmers.\n\nA spokesperson said it had developed its own proposals for a live export assurance scheme.\n\n\"We will be looking to work with the government to implement it so that we can maintain this important trade under the highest standards of animal welfare,\" he said.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "This year's Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to the US poet Louise Glück.\n\nGlück was recognised for \"her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal\" said the Swedish Academy, which oversees the award.\n\nThe Academy added she was \"surprised\" when she received their phone call.\n\nGlück, born 1943 in New York, lives in Massachusetts and is also professor of English at Yale University.\n\nThe Academy's permanent secretary Mats Malm said he had spoken to Glück just before making the announcement.\n\n\"The message came as a surprise, but a welcome one as far as I could tell,\" he said.\n\nIn 2016 she received the National Humanities Medal from former US President Barack Obama\n\nShe is the fourth woman to win the prize for literature since 2010, and only the 16th since the Nobel prizes were first awarded in 1901. The last American to win was Bob Dylan in 2016.\n\nGlück won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris and the National Book Award in 2014. Her other honours include the 2001 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, given in 2008, and a National Humanities Medal, awarded in 2015. She was also editor of the anthology The Best American Poetry 1993.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Matt Haig This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHer poetry focuses on the painful reality of being human, dealing with themes such as death, childhood, and family life.\n\nShe also takes inspiration from Greek mythology and its characters, such as Persephone and Eurydice, who are often the victims of betrayal.\n\nThe Academy said her 2006 collection Averno was a \"masterly collection, a visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone's descent into Hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death\".\n\nOlga Tokarczuk won for 2018 and Peter Handke was 2019's winner\n\nThe chair of the Nobel prize committee, Anders Olsson, also praised the poet's \"candid and uncompromising\" voice, which is \"full of humour and biting wit\".\n\nHer 12 collections of poetry are \"characterised by a striving for clarity\", he added, comparing her with Emily Dickinson with her \"severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith\".\n\nThe prize is given to the person who has \"produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction\".\n\nEven in their own country, few poets achieve true fame with the public in their own lifetime. But Louise Glück has been awarded almost every prize an American poet might hope for.\n\nAmong many other awards she took a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and spent a year as America's poet laureate in 2003/4 - though perhaps with a degree of reluctance at first.\n\nLouise Glück (it's pronounced Glick) has made clear she sees herself as a private person. When she was given the Poet Laureateship she told the Boston Globe newspaper: \"I have very little taste for public life.\" She added that she had thought she wasn't \"the sort of person they'd ever look at\".\n\nHer first volume of verse - Firstborn - came out in 1968. Many of her works since have dealt with human emotion, childhood and the nature of life - often family life.\n\nTo sample her work, head for the short lyric Nostos (a Greek term meaning Homecoming).\n\nThe first lines are characteristic, being about memory:\n\nThere was an apple tree in the yard —\n\nAnd the powerful last lines state one of her strongest beliefs:\n\nWe look at the world once, in childhood.\n\nHer collection Ararat was described in the New York Times a few years ago as \"the most brutal and sorrow-filled book of American poetry published in the last 25 years\". Sadness and grief are certainly a frequent part of what she writes - yet she's seldom a depressing writer.\n\nGlück's name was not widely touted this year as a possible Nobel laureate. Until now she has not been much read outside the US. At the age of 77, Glück can look forward to many new readers - and they can look forward to discovering a poet of insight and humanity.\n\nLast year's choice of Austrian novelist Peter Handke led to wide criticism.\n\nHandke was a known supporter of the Serbs during the 1990s Yugoslav war and spoke at the funeral of former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, who was accused of genocide and other war crimes.\n\nLast year also saw Polish author Olga Tokarczuk belatedly announced as the winner of the 2018 literature prize which had been suspended for a year after a sexual assault scandal and financial misconduct allegations rocked the Academy.\n\nNormally, winners receive their Nobel from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, but the pandemic means it has been replaced with a televised ceremony showing the laureates receiving their awards in their home countries.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "One of the images that was rejected when Vicky Morgan tried to advertise on Facebook\n\nA beauty therapist who helps cancer patients has been banned from posting pictures of her work on Facebook ads.\n\nVicky Morgan, from Wadebridge in Cornwall, is trained to draw tattoos for women and men who have lost their breasts through a mastectomy.\n\nBut Facebook has censored her adverts, saying pictures of nipples, or areola, were \"sexual content and nudity\".\n\nMs Morgan said it was \"disappointing and frustrating when I'm reaching out to amazing breast cancer survivors\".\n\nOne of the ads to be rejected by Facebook\n\nAfter working as a beauty therapist for 18 years, she has diversified into tattoo treatment for cancer patients who have had their breasts removed.\n\nHer work would involve tattooing areola on a woman's reconstructed breasts if they have had surgery or, in the case of women without reconstructed breasts and men, on to flat skin.\n\nPictures of her new line of work on artificial reconstructed breasts have been uploaded on her Facebook page without any problems.\n\nBut when she tried to promote pictures of her work with paid-for ads, they were rejected.\n\nMs Morgan said: \"I understand the need for them to be strict when it comes to adverts which may cause offence but feel there should be provisions in place when it comes to posts made to help people by offering services that are in the paramedical field, like mine.\n\n\"This is for breast cancer survivors who may need my services to help them claim back their confidence and make them feel like themselves again post-mastectomy and breast reconstruction surgery.\"\n\nVicky Morgan: \"There should be provisions in place when it comes to posts like mine\"\n\nA Facebook spokesperson said the site allowed images of post-mastectomy areola tattoos on a page or profile but not within advertising.\n\n\"We do not allow people to run ads which include adult content, including nudity or implied nudity, because ads are governed by a stricter set of policies,\" they said.\n\n\"We recognise the important work Vicky is doing and hope she continues to use the platform to promote this.\"", "Video caption: 'Mr Vice-President, I am speaking' - Harris and Pence clash at VP debate 'Mr Vice-President, I am speaking' - Harris and Pence clash at VP debate\n\nThis vice-presidential debate gave the Americans who chose to watch a look at US politics present and future.\n\nFor the current election, both candidates did their best to defend their running mate and land shots on the top of the opposing ticket.\n\nThe participants in this debate were also looking beyond November, however.\n\nPence - like most vice-presidents - has his eyes on a presidential bid of his own. To do that, he'll have to win over Trump's base while also casting a wider net to Republicans and right-leaning independents who may have become disaffected with Trumpian politics.\n\nHarris, who at this point last year was running for president herself, tried to prove that she can be a capable standard-bearer for the Democrats once Joe Biden exits the political stage. When given the chance, she spoke about her upbringing and background, taking the opportunity to introduce herself to a larger US audience.\n\nBoth Pence and Harris live to fight another day - and that day could come in just four years.\n\nRead more: Five takeaways from the VP debate", "Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins has said that movie-going is facing a real threat of extinction.\n\nHer new superhero movie has been delayed three times during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nShe is among dozens of top Hollywood directors appealing to the US government to provide a financial lifeline to cinemas.\n\nMs Jenkins's warning comes as cinemas in the UK are also struggling with a recent spate of delayed film releases.\n\n\"If we shut this down, this will not be a reversible process,\" she said in an interview with Reuters news agency. \"We could lose movie theatre-going forever.\"\n\nCinemas across the world are struggling financially with tough Covid-19 social restrictions limiting customers, along with a lack of blockbuster movies to attract them.\n\nIn the US, the National Association of Theatre Owners said 69% of small and mid-sized cinema companies could be forced to file for bankruptcy or shut down permanently.\n\nAmerica is the world's biggest movie market in terms of box office revenues, with China catching up rapidly.\n\nMs Jenkins said widespread closures would lead Hollywood studios to stop investing in films for cinemas, and turn to online streaming instead.\n\n\"It could be the kind of thing that happened to the music industry,\" she added. \"Where you could crumble the entire industry by making it something that can't be profitable.\"\n\nSome of this year's major Hollywood films, including Walt Disney's Mulan, skipped cinemas and went straight to streaming.\n\nMs Jenkins said that there is no option for her sequel, Wonder Woman 1984, to go straight to streaming.\n\nThe superhero movie, starring Gal Gadot, is now scheduled for release on Christmas Day. That is a delay of six months from its original premiere date in June.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. As ever more people sign up to streaming services, are fewer going to the movies?\n\nLast week it was announced that the release of the new James Bond film has been delayed again.\n\nThe premiere of No Time To Die had already been moved from April to November because of the pandemic. It is now scheduled for April 2021.\n\nBlockbuster remake Dune has also seen its release date delayed. The Warner Bros sci-fi epic was due for release in December but has been been pushed back to October 2021.\n\nWarner Bros has also delayed The Batman, now due in March 2022.\n\nIn the UK, Odeon is cutting the opening hours for some of its cinemas to weekends only because of delays to new film releases.\n\nThe chain, which operates 120 theatres, said it will affect a quarter of its cinemas, which will now open between Friday and Sunday.\n\nIt comes as Cineworld said it will temporarily close its UK and US venues, affecting 45,000 jobs.", "Nicola Sturgeon has insisted she has \"nothing whatsoever to hide\" over Holyrood's Alex Salmond inquiry.\n\nMSPs are looking into the government's botched handling of complaints against the former first minister.\n\nMs Sturgeon said in written evidence that she forgot about a meeting where she believes she was told about the complaints against her predecessor.\n\nTory group leader Ruth Davidson said Ms Sturgeon's \"sudden memory loss\" was \"beyond belief\".\n\nSpeaking during first minister's questions, she said Ms Sturgeon's explanation \"does not bear the lightest scrutiny\".\n\nShe claimed Ms Sturgeon had \"misled parliament\" over when she had first learned of the complaints against Mr Salmond.\n\nAnd she suggested that Ms Sturgeon had done so because she knew she had broken the ministerial code by not having the meeting with Geoff Aberdein - a former aide to Mr Salmond - minuted.\n\nMs Sturgeon replied that she understood why people \"raise an eyebrow\" at her initially forgetting about the meeting.\n\nBut she said it had been overshadowed in her memory by a later meeting with Mr Salmond.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Ruth Davidson said Nicola Sturgeon's version of how she remembers hearing allegations about Alex Salmond does not bear scrutiny\n\nShe said: \"There is something seared on my memory, it is the meeting that took place when Alex Salmond himself sat in my own home and gave me the details of the complaints that were made against him and gave me his response to aspects of those complaints.\n\n\"That is what is seared in my memory and I think most reasonable people would understand that - if it has somehow overwritten in my mind a more fleeting, opportunistic meeting, that's just how it is.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon said she was \"pretty shocked and upset\" about the meeting with Mr Salmond, and said she was willing to testify about it to the Holyrood inquiry under oath.\n\nMs Sturgeon added: \"I have nothing to hide in this, nothing whatsoever.\n\n\"All sorts of nonsense has been levelled at me on this. I have had two years or more of people making accusations about my conduct - it's not my conduct that sparked any of this.\n\n\"I have tried to act in the proper way. If I have made mistakes along the way, I will say that and people can make their judgement.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon said the meeting with Mr Salmond in April 2018 was \"seared\" on her memory\n\nThe first minister had previously told MSPs that the first she learned of harassment complaints against Mr Salmond had been at a meeting with him at her home in Glasgow on 2 April, 2018.\n\nShe had insisted she held this meeting in her capacity as SNP leader, not as first minister, meaning no official record had to be taken.\n\nHowever, in her written evidence to the committee, Ms Sturgeon confirmed she had met Mr Aberdein in her Holyrood office on 29 March.\n\nShe said Mr Aberdein had asked her to meet Mr Salmond, and that she believed the conversation \"did cover the suggestion that the matter might relate to allegations of a sexual nature\".\n\nBut she said she \"had forgotten this meeting had taken place\" because it took place \"in the midst of a busy day\".\n\nLeslie Evans insisted that the government was not out to \"get\" Mr Salmond\n\nThe exchanges at Holyrood took place shortly after the inquiry committee published correspondence from Mr Salmond's lawyers, who claimed the government was trying to have \"unlawful\" documents produced by the courts - including the report from the original investigation.\n\nThe former first minister successfully had the internal investigation declared unlawful after raising a judicial review action at the Court of Session, and won a £500,000 payout for legal costs from the government.\n\nLawyer David McKie wrote that it was \"extraordinary\" that the government intended to produce \"material that has been reduced as unlawful by court order\".\n\nHe said: \"The only possible explanation for seeking to take such a step appear to our client to be a desire unjustifiably to malign his reputation, rather than account for their own unlawful actions.\"\n\nPrevious inquiry witnesses such as Permanent Secretary Leslie Evans - Scotland's top civil servant - have insisted that the government is not out to \"get Alex Salmond\", saying that investigating the complaints against him was \"the right thing to do\".\n\nMs Sturgeon echoed this at Holyrood, saying: \"I understand why it may suit some to say this is some great conspiracy, but I'm not sure why anybody would see this as anything other than complaints being investigated and everybody trying to do the right thing in very difficult circumstances.\"", "Billionaires have seen their fortunes hit record highs during the pandemic, with top executives from technology and industry earning the most.\n\nThe world's richest saw their wealth climb 27.5% to $10.2trn (£7.9trn) from April to July this year, according to a report from Swiss bank UBS.\n\nThat was up from the previous peak of $8.9trn at the end of 2017 and largely due to rising global share prices.\n\nUBS said billionaires had done \"extremely well\" in the Covid crisis.\n\nIt also said the number of billionaires had hit a new high of 2,189, up from 2,158 in 2017.\n\nIt comes as a World Bank report on Wednesday showed extreme poverty is set to rise this year for the first time in more than two decades due to the pandemic.\n\nAmong the billionaires, the biggest winners this year have been industrialists, whose wealth rose a staggering 44% in the three months to July.\n\n\"Industrials benefited disproportionately as markets priced in a significant economic recovery [after lockdowns around the world],\" UBS said.\n\nTech billionaires have also had a good pandemic, seeing their wealth soar 41%. UBS said this was \"due to the corona-induced demand for their goods and services\" and social distancing accelerating \"digital businesses [and] compressing several years' evolution into a few months\".\n\nHealthcare billionaires also benefited as the crisis put drug makers and medical device companies in the spotlight.\n\nThe rise in fortunes reflects the generally strong performance of global stock markets since late March, despite most countries continuing to suffer sharp recessions.\n\nAmazon boss Jeff Bezos and Tesla founder Elon Musk - both multi-billionaires - saw their wealth hit new highs this summer thanks to growth in the price of their companies' stock.\n\nIn the last 11 years China's billionaires have increased their wealth by the biggest percentage, climbing 1,146% between 2009 and 2020, according to UBS.\n\nBy comparison, over the same period the wealth of British billionaires has risen by just 168%.\n\nBut the biggest accumulation of wealth remains in the US where American billionaires have $3.5trn, compared to China's $1.7trn.\n\nThe UK's wealthy have just $205bn, compared to Germany's $595bn and France's $443bn.\n\nUBS said many billionaires had donated some of their wealth to help with the fight against Covid-19.\n\n\"Our research has identified 209 billionaires who have publicly committed a total equivalent to $7.2bn from March to June 2020,\" the report said.\n\n\"They have reacted quickly, in a way that's akin to disaster relief, providing unrestricted grants to allow grantees to decide how best to use funds.\"\n\nBut it revealed that UK billionaires donated less than those from other countries.\n\nIn the US, 98 billionaires donated $4.5bn, in China 12 billionaires gave $679m, and in Australia just two billionaires donated $324m. But in the UK, nine billionaires donated just $298m.", "Teenagers who struggle with depression significantly underachieve at GCSE, according to new long-term study.\n\nThe King's College, London, team suggested pupils affected be allowed to stagger or postpone their exams.\n\nIt comes at a time when rates of children's mental health are expected to increase due to experiences during the Covid lockdown.\n\nData on rates of children's mental health referrals during the lockdown period is not yet available.\n\nBut many voluntary agencies working with young people say they have seen requests for support increase.\n\nAnd ministers are currently deciding how they can hold exams, including GCSEs, next year that are fair to those who have missed out on education during the lockdown and beyond.\n\nThe research, led by King's PhD student Alice Wickersham, tracked the educational results of about 1,500 children over seven years between 2007 and the end of 2013.\n\nAll had received a diagnosis of depression before the age of 18, with the most common age being 15.\n\nThe findings showed a worrying picture of children who did well at primary school, but whose attainment dipped in secondary as they progressed towards GCSEs.\n\nSome 83% reached the expected level of attainment at age six or seven, and over three-quarters met it at the end of primary school.\n\nBut by the time these children reached Year 11, only 45% achieved the then benchmark of five good GCSEs including English and maths.\n\nMs Wickersham, from the National Institute for Health Research at the Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre, said previous studies had found depression in childhood is linked to lower school performance.\n\nShe said: \"What we've observed is that a group of children and adolescents who developed depression at secondary school had performed quite well when they were in primary school.\n\n\"It is only when they sat their GCSEs that they tended to show a drop in their school performance, which also happened to be around the time that many of them were diagnosed.\"\n\nShe added that while this would not be the case for all teenagers with depression, it does mean many find themselves at a disadvantage for \"this pivotal educational milestone\".\n\n\"It highlights the need to pay close attention to teenagers who are showing early signs of depression,\" she said.\n\n\"For example, by offering them extra educational support in the lead up to their GCSEs, and working with them to develop a plan for completing their compulsory education.\"\n\nThe study suggests allowing such candidates to stagger their exams or even delay them, if necessary.\n\nA Department for Education spokesman said: \"Testing has always been an important part of education, but it should never be at the expense of a young person's wellbeing.\n\n\"The government has invested significantly in mental health charities and in support for teachers and young people, including a new £8 million training programme run by experts to tackle the impact of coronavirus on pupils, parents and staff.\n\n\"We trust schools to make sure that pupils get the help and support they need, when they need it, working with parents to do this.\"\n\nBut Julie McCulloch, director of policy at the Association of School and College Leaders, said funding pressures had reduced the amount of money available for pastoral and mental health support in schools.\n\nShe added: \"There have also been significant problems in accessing local mental health services for young people who are in need of specialist treatment.\n\n\"It is very likely that the Covid crisis will have led to more young people experiencing mental health issues.\n\n\"Schools are doing their very best to support these pupils but the pressures on the system are hardly the best starting point.\n\n\"We recognise that the government is endeavouring to improve mental health support for young people, but we remain concerned that schools just do not have the funding they need for this and many other tasks.\"\n\nCampaigns director at Young Minds Tom Madders said: \"We know many children and young people have struggled with their mental health as a result of the pandemic, and ensuring that effective support is available in the coming months is crucial.\n\n\"If the government wants children to catch up academically after months away from school, it should provide ring-fenced funding for schools to support student mental health.\"", "David Lammy said the Met's investigation into the tweet was dropped because \"Twitter refused to assist\"\n\nAn MP has asked Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey to \"explain himself\" after a police inquiry into a \"racist death threat\" was halted when the social media giant did not co-operate.\n\nThe Metropolitan Police said they had been unable to get details from Twitter of the account which sent the tweet to Tottenham MP David Lammy.\n\nMr Lammy tweeted Mr Dorsey asking why Twitter was \"shielding vile racists\".\n\nTwitter said it was now co-operating with the police inquiry.\n\nEarlier on Wednesday the Met said a \"thorough investigation\" had been carried out into the tweet.\n\nA spokesman said: \"All lines of inquiry were explored as far as possible, however, due to the owner of the suspected social media account living outside the UK and the fact we were unable to obtain the subscription details of the individual from Twitter, we were unable to continue the investigation.\"\n\nMr Lammy reacted to the Met's announcement by tweeting direct to Mr Dorsey.\n\nHe tweeted: \"Please explain why you are shielding vile racists who make death threats on your platform? #BlackLivesMatter.\n\n\"You should not be able to push race hate and send death threats with impunity online.\n\n\"Shame on Twitter for failing to act with Met Police to identify who sent this threat.\n\n\"#BlackLivesMatter has to be more than a slogan to drive traffic and ad revenue on your website.\"\n\nA Twitter spokesperson later said it was co-operating with police \"having now received and processed the correct information\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The inquiry focused on Huawei's telecoms kit rather than its consumer handset business\n\nThere is \"clear evidence of collusion\" between Huawei and the \"Chinese Communist Party apparatus\", a parliamentary inquiry has concluded.\n\nAnd the MPs say the government may need to bring forward a deadline set for the Chinese firm's 5G kit to be removed from the UK's mobile networks.\n\nHuawei has responded by saying \"this report lacks credibility as it is built on opinion rather than fact\".\n\nBut the latest accusation poses a further challenge to its business.\n\nAlthough the company's options in the UK are now limited, it is still trying to sell its 5G telecoms infrastructure to other parts of Europe and beyond, having invested heavily in the technology.\n\n\"We're sure people will see through these accusations of collusion and remember instead what Huawei has delivered for Britain over the past 20 years,\" a spokesman for the company said.\n\nThe House of Commons defence committee based its findings on the testimony of academics, cyber-security experts and telecom industry insiders, among others. These included some long-term critics of the company.\n\nHauwei's executives did not testify, although they did appear before a separate parliament committee in July.\n\nThe report cites a venture capitalist who claimed the Chinese government \"had financed the growth of Huawei with some $75bn [£57bn] over the past three years\", which he said had allowed it to sell its hardware at a \"ridiculously low price point\".\n\nAnd it highlights a claim made by a researcher who specialises in corporate irregularities within China, who alleged that Huawei had \"engaged in a variety of intelligence, security, and intellectual property activities\" despite its repeated denials.\n\n\"It is clear that Huawei is strongly linked to the Chinese state and the Chinese Communist Party, despite its statements to the contrary,\" the committee concludes.\n\n\"This is evidenced by its ownership model and the subsidies it has received.\"\n\nThe report warns that the West should not \"succumb to ill-informed anti-China hysteria\", but suggests some policy changes may be necessary.\n\nAt present, the government has said mobile networks must not buy new Huawei 5G equipment after the end of this year, and then must remove any they have installed by 2027.\n\nBut the committee says ministers should consider bringing the latter deadline forward to 2025 if relations with China deteriorate or pressure from the US and other allies makes it necessary.\n\nThe MPs acknowledge being told by BT and Vodafone that such a move could cause signal blackouts in parts of the country. But they say operators could be compensated to minimise delays.\n\nThey also say Beijing had exerted pressure through \"covert and overt threats\" to keep Huawei in the UK's 5G network.\n\nThese are said to have included a suggestion it might block Chinese investment in the UK's nuclear industry.\n\nThe committee says that if further threats follow, the government should \"carefully consider China's future presence in critical sectors of the economy\".\n\nAnd it recommends the forthcoming National Security and Investment Bill gives ministers the power to ban investments they deem risky.\n\nMore work is needed to work with allies to ensure there are other suppliers of telecoms equipment, the report adds.\n\nAnd it calls on the government to avoid any further delay in introducing a telecoms bill to end what it describes as the current situation of \"commercial concerns trumping national security\".\n\nThe MPs reject claims that Huawei's continued presence in the UK affects the country's ability to share sensitive information with partners.\n\nLast year, one US congressman suggested the US and UK might have to resort to using paper instead of electronic-based communications.\n\nBut the committee says it is \"content\" that Huawei is sufficiently distanced from sensitive defence and national security sites, and in any case it would not be able to decipher encrypted data sent via its equipment.\n\nIt does, however, urge GCHQ to continue its work with the firm at the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC), where the firm's equipment is checked for flaws.\n\nHuawei funds the work done there by government experts and has indicated it is willing to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.\n\nThe MPs say the government should now consider assessing equipment from \"other vendors in a similar fashion\".\n\nThey also back proposals to form a D10 group of democracies to provide alternatives to Chinese technology.\n\nLittle detail has been provided about what this might actually look like, and the committee calls on the government to consult allies to set out exactly what it would entail.", "The use of mandatory face coverings in Northern Ireland is also to be extended\n\nPeople in Northern Ireland caught breaching coronavirus regulations will now face a minimum fine of £200 under plans agreed by the executive.\n\nThursday's meeting saw ministers sign off on proposals brought by Justice Minister Naomi Long.\n\nAt present, fixed penalty notices start at £60, but can rise to £960 for repeat offenders.\n\nFirst Minister Arlene Foster also confirmed that the use of mandatory face coverings in NI is to be extended.\n\nFace coverings are already compulsory on public transport and for customers in shops, but will now become mandatory in the following settings:\n\nThe usual exemptions from wearing a face covering will still apply, the executive has said.\n\nMrs Foster told a press briefing at Stormont that there would be a \"new regime\" of penalties to strengthen existing measures to try and curb the spread of Covid-19.\n\n\"The consequences from today will be more serious,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm saying to everyone - how far and how hard the executive will have to go depends on your actions today, tomorrow, over the weekend and the week ahead.\"\n\nThe executive has also agreed to introduce three new offences: not closing a business as required, breaching closing times and not implementing social distancing.\n\nBreaches will incur a fixed penalty notice of £1,000, or up to £10,000 on conviction.\n\nThe justice minister told BBC News NI's The View that \"encouragement, engagement and explanation can work\".\n\n\"But we're also clear that enforcement matters,\" said Naomi Long.\n\n\"There will be those who defy the law, who refuse to take it seriously and enforcement has to follow.\n\n\"But that enforcement is going to be the last of the four options we have available to us.\"\n\nA further 923 confirmed cases of Covid-19 were reported by the Department of Health on Thursday. In the last seven days, 4,674 people in Northern Ireland have tested positive.\n\nThe department also confirmed the death of another person who died following a positive test, bringing its death toll to 587.\n\nThere are 120 people with Covid-19 in hospital - 15 are in intensive care.\n\nDespite speculation, the executive has agreed not to impose new local restrictions in the Newry, Mourne and Down or Belfast council areas, where cases have been rising sharply in recent days.\n\nMrs Foster said the executive had been advised that \"the growth of infections has been blunted\" in those areas, while Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill said the executive was keeping that decision \"under review\".\n\nThe Department of Health used this slide at their briefing on Wednesday to show case rates across Northern Ireland\n\nShe added that the executive is \"united\" in its decision to ask for additional financial support from the British government to take further action to tackle the virus.\n\n\"It is clear the executive is fast approaching a point on making significant difficult decisions that will help us arrest the rise in infections,\" she said.\n\nMs O'Neill said ministers would not take any decisions lightly, and that they would try to maintain the \"balanced approach\" regarding saving people's lives and their livelihoods.\n\nShe and Mrs Foster have asked for \"an urgent conversation\" with Mr Johnson due to cases rising \"at an alarming rate\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Michelle O’Neill This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nEarlier, Taoiseach (Irish PM) Micheál Martin and Prime Minister Boris Johnson expressed concerns about the situation in Northern Ireland.\n\nThe two leaders spoke by phone on Thursday morning.\n\nMr Martin said that he told Mr Johnson that the situation in Northern Ireland was \"very, very worrying in terms of the growing numbers\" of positive cases.\n\nThe taoiseach added that the Northern Ireland Executive \"needed support\" and he asked Mr Johnson to \"give consideration in terms of financial support to underpin any efforts or any restrictions that they themselves might decide to bring in\".\n\nAccording to an Irish government spokesperson, Mr Johnson also raised concerns about the impact of \"restrictions on the economy\".\n\nThe two leaders agreed to monitor the situation and remain in touch.\n\nOn Wednesday, Northern Ireland Chief Scientific Adviser Prof Ian Young said of the coronavirus clusters identified, more than half of them had been linked to the hospitality sector.\n\nStormont ministers have not ruled out bringing in a circuit breaker over the half-term holidays, if localised restrictions do not help to halt the rise in infections.\n\nA circuit breaker is a lockdown for a short period of time, possibly two weeks, to slow the spread of the virus.\n\nIt would likely see all pubs and restaurants in Northern Ireland forced to close for the two weeks.\n\nBut Economy Minister Diane Dodds said it would only be viable with additional financial support from Westminster.\n\nDrinks only bars only reopened on 23 September after nearly six months of closure\n\nIt is thought there could be further announcements next week from the Treasury about providing support to the hospitality industry in the worst hit areas of England, where pub closures are being explored.\n\nThat could automatically lead to some extra funding for Northern Ireland through what is known as a Barnett consequential.\n\nMeanwhile, figures obtained by BBC News NI show there are almost 1,200 health care staff off work as a result of coronavirus in Northern Ireland - either self-isolating or directly affected by the virus.\n\nThe highest figure was recorded in the Western Trust area, which runs Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry, where 386 staff are isolating.\n\nIn Belfast, the figure is at least 384, while there is a further 193 staff affected at the Southern Trust, 117 in the South Eastern Trust and 116 at the Northern Trust.\n\nAt the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service (NIAS), 68 people are off work.\n\nThe interim chief executive of the South Eastern Health Trust, Seamus McGoran, said now is \"a critical time\" for the NHS and the public.\n\n\"It feels rather like March, when we were not really in the foothills of the surge, but one third to half way up the mountain,\" he said.\n\n\"Unless we make dramatic changes to our behaviours within the community, we're going to be exactly where we were in about two to three weeks' time.\"", "The streets of São Paulo, where most Brazilian deaths have been recorded, remain busy with shoppers\n\nConfirmed cases of coronavirus in Brazil have passed five million, with deaths in the country approaching 150,000, officials say.\n\nBrazil's health ministry reported 31,553 new cases on Tuesday, bringing the total infections to 5,000,694.\n\nThe country is the third worst hit for infections, after the US and India.\n\nPresident Jair Bolsonaro has been accused of downplaying the risks of the virus throughout the pandemic, ignoring expert advice on restrictive measures.\n\nMr Bolsonaro has rejected criticism of his handling of the pandemic, but his decision to oppose lockdowns and focus on the economy has been hugely divisive.\n\nOn Tuesday, Brazil recorded 734 new fatalities, bringing the death toll to 148,228, the ministry said.\n\nBrazil has the highest number of deaths in Latin America.\n\nThe state of São Paulo has been the worst hit, with around 36,000 deaths, followed by Rio de Janeiro, with about 19,000.\n\nIt is another milestone but the picture is not as grim here as it was a few weeks ago. The numbers of cases and deaths have been falling, although we are still talking around 5,000 fatalities a week - down from around 7,000 at the peak.\n\nThe absolute numbers are still far worse than in Europe, but life here feels like it is returning to normal - shops, restaurants and some schools are starting to re-open.\n\nDespite initial criticism over President Jair Bolsonaro's handling of the crisis - his downplaying of the virus from the very start - his approval ratings have actually risen, thanks to generous government handouts to around 60 million informal workers.\n\nThe question is whether that support will continue as the government starts to reduce the payments while unemployment soars.\n\nIn August, Brazil's Vice-President Hamilton Mourão defended the government's handling of the pandemic, instead blaming a lack of discipline among Brazilians for the failure to limit the spread of Covid-19 through social distancing measures.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Brazil's vice-president says the authorities have struggled to enforce social distancing measures", "Everyone living in Nottinghamshire has been asked to avoid mixing with other households indoors after a \"dramatic\" rise in coronavirus cases.\n\nThe government has not introduced tougher measures but local authorities have urged residents to start taking precautions now.\n\nNottingham currently has the fourth-highest infection rate in England, and the wider county has also seen a rise.\n\nLocal authorities expect a government decision by the end of the week.\n\nOn Tuesday, Nottingham City Council asked residents not to mix indoors with people from other households apart from within their bubble.\n\nThis includes in the home and at leisure and hospitality venues.\n\nOn Wednesday, Nottinghamshire County Council made the same request.\n\nIt added it expects the government to impose new restrictions on every part of the county.\n\nThe rate of infection for the city currently stands at 496.8 per 100,000 after cases increased from 314 in the week up to 27 September to 1,654.\n\nThe rate of infection for the county is 106 per 100,000 but varies from 53 to 150 across the districts, the county council said.\n\nFigures released on Wednesday show four districts out of seven - Broxtowe, Gedling, Rushcliffe and Newark and Sherwood - have rates above the England average.\n\nNottinghamshire's director of public health, Jonathan Gribbin, said: \"Covid-19 does not recognise geographical boundaries.\n\n\"The rapid and sustained increase in the numbers of positive cases is a serious cause for concern and the very dramatic rates in the city are a clear sign that action is needed now across the whole of Nottingham and Nottinghamshire.\n\n\"We must now ask every resident to do their bit and not mix indoors with people from other households.\"\n\nNottinghamshire's care homes are also being advised to restrict visits to \"exceptional circumstances only\".\n\nThe University of Nottingham has confirmed 425 of its students have tested positive for the virus\n\nThe rise in cases coincides with the return of students to the city.\n\nNottingham City Council leader David Mellen said this has \"undoubtedly had a significant bearing on the increase in cases\".\n\nBut he added there has been a \"substantial rise in cases and infections across all parts of the city and in all age groups\".\n\nHis counterpart at Nottinghamshire County Council, Kay Cutts, added: \"No one group is responsible for the spread.\n\n\"If we want to see a return to normal life; to see our families again, to see our businesses flourish again, we must act now.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Prisons in England and Wales are now safer than before coronavirus because of rules brought in to reduce mixing by inmates, a union has claimed.\n\nThe Prison Officers' Association (POA) said staff and prisoners were getting on better and gang violence was down.\n\nIt argued that separated living groups, put in place to restrict infection, were a \"blessing in disguise\" and should become permanent.\n\nBut HM Prison Service said allowing inmates \"association\" was \"important\".\n\nIt promised to \"consider what lessons we can learn from the pandemic\".\n\nPrisons in England and Wales went into full lockdown in March, with visitors banned.\n\nSince then restrictions have eased, but many inmates are being housed - and allowed to socialise - in groups of around 15 to 20 to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Normally they would be able to mix in much larger numbers when not in their cells.\n\nUnder the new regime, officers are generally assigned to work with specific smaller groups, rather than dealing with entire wings.\n\nAnd prisoners are reportedly being locked up for longer - sometimes for more than 23 hours a day - as access to communal areas, such as exercise yards, showers and dining halls, becomes more time-limited.\n\nThe Prisons Reform Trust, which campaigns to improve jail conditions, has raised concerns that violence and self-harm will increase if restrictions continue.\n\nLast month it was reported that the coronavirus-prevention regime at HMP Erlestoke, Wiltshire, had made it \"less safe\". Inspectors found \"troubling conditions\", with inmates saying they were \"frustrated\" by a lack of activity.\n\nBut POA national chairman Mark Fairhurst told the BBC that prisons across England and Wales had, according to his union's members, become \"less violent and more safe\", adding: \"We've also been able to forge better staff-prisoner relations.\"\n\nMr Fairhurst said: \"If you let out 200 prisoners at one time, an entire wing, you are putting people at risk from another 199 people - from threats, attacks and bullying.\n\n\"It's much easier to deal with these problems if there are only 15 to 20 people at a time. Gang violence, in particular, is cut down.\"\n\nMr Fairhurst said it was important, where prisoners were being locked up for longer each day, to organise \"purposeful, constructive activities\", such as education and workshops.\n\n\"The government should listen to the experts in prisons - the staff - who say the situation is now safer and more stable,\" he said.\n\n\"It's been a blessing in disguise. It's given us an opportunity to reassess our regimes. We can't go back to the chaos of the system before coronavirus.\"\n\nRecorded violence among the inmate population has increased sharply in recent years.\n\nAccording to the Ministry of Justice, there were 267 prisoner-on-prisoner assaults per 1,000 prisoners in England and Wales in 2019-20 - up from 130 in 2012-13.\n\nThe figure for assaults on staff was 118 per 1,000 prisoners - up from 35 in 2012-13.\n\nOver the same period, the number of recorded incidents of self-harm per 1,000 prisoners almost trebled - from 266 to 777.\n\nThe published figures go up to March this year, when the lockdown began.\n\nPeter Dawson, director of the Prisons Reform Trust, said there would \"undoubtedly be lessons to learn\" from the pandemic and this would mean \"listening carefully to the people who live in prison as well as the people who work there\".\n\n\"But safety, security and rehabilitation all depend on building good relationships,\" he added, \"and that can't be done through a cell door\".\n\nAn HM Prison Service spokesperson said: \"We have taken unprecedented action to keep those who live and work in our prisons safe and will continue to do so.\n\n\"We will absolutely consider what lessons we can learn from the pandemic, but association will always form an important part of prison life.\"", "The number of hospital patients being treated for confirmed Covid is now at June levels\n\nThe number of patients in hospital beds in Wales with confirmed Covid-19 are at the highest since June.\n\nThere are now 473 patients being treated for suspected or confirmed coronavirus in hospital, including 46 who are recovering.\n\nNHS data shows 28 of those individuals need intensive care on ventilators - down by six over the week.\n\nA third of the Covid patients are in hospitals in the Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board region.\n\nThere are 260 patients being treated in Welsh hospitals with confirmed Covid, which is the highest number since 18 June.\n\nMerthyr still has the highest rate of infection in Wales, at more than 220 cases per 100,000 of the population.\n\nRCT has the second highest rate at 177 cases per 100,000.\n\nIn total, there are 157 patients from the region in hospital for Covid-19 related treatment.\n\nThe latest report on Covid patients comes as health officials in the Cwm Taf Morgannwg board confirmed 26 patients have now died in three hospitals, during outbreaks of the infection on wards.\n\nThere have been 129 cases alone at Llantrisant's Royal Glamorgan Hospital, with 24 deaths.\n\nTwo patients have also died at the Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr and the Bridgend's Princess of Wales Hospital.\n\nThere have been 24 Covid deaths at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in the outbreak on its wards\n\nMedical director Nick Lyons said the health board was closely monitoring the cases in conjunction with Public Health Wales.\n\n\"The safety of our patients and staff remains our first priority and immediate measures to contain the spread of the virus have been put in place.\n\n\"We are taking the outbreaks extremely seriously and the stringent and robust mitigating actions which have been taken across our sites are being closely observed.\n\nAcross Wales, there are now an average of 78 patients every day being hospitalised due to coronavirus, up from 73 in the previous week.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Liverpool is one of many cities where there are extra restrictions\n\nIn many areas under local lockdown, cases and hospital admissions have continued to soar. Does that mean restrictions don't work?\n\nConsider the national lockdown in the spring. While it feels like it was one single policy, it was in fact a package of different measures. Schools, universities and offices shut. Pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops closed. No-one could mix with people from outside their household. People were advised not to use public transport and to limit the number of times they visited essential shops.\n\nTogether these had a dramatic impact on cases, and the number of coronavirus patients in hospital plummeted from 20,000 to about 800.\n\nHow much each part of that lockdown contributed is hard to say.\n\nThe rules were relaxed but then, at the end of June, Leicester became the first place to go into a local lockdown. Other cities, and whole regions, have followed. But so far, Leicester's lockdown is the only one to have come close to the strictness of the national policy. Shops and pubs were stopped from opening. Households were barred from mixing indoors. And new cases of the virus dropped by 60% during July. People in hospital beds with coronavirus fell from 88 to 18.\n\nSince Leicester, local lockdowns have multiplied. More than 15 million people - very roughly, a quarter of the UK population - have come under new curbs, in some form.\n\nAnd it's become harder to see whether they are working or not.\n\nAfter the first changes, cases continued to rise, throughout August. Then, after pub and restaurant closures, case rates dropped sharply. It is, however, too soon to say for sure that the stricter measures led directly to the decline.\n\nIn the rest of Greater Manchester, gatherings with other households were banned but shops, pubs and restaurants remained open. Cases have mostly kept climbing throughout these local restrictions.\n\nHowever, the latest week's data will be welcome news - suggesting the sharp increases might be levelling off. The rise in cases in many areas under local lockdown appears to be slowing, in line with the national picture.\n\nThis may be a sign that the England-wide \"rule of six\" is working.\n\nA large national study, published last week, confirmed the growth in cases was slowing across England, although overall levels remained high. But restrictions on households meeting - which have been seen at a local level - don't always lead to a slowing case rate. And this change in impact highlights the many factors involved which make it difficult to isolate the precise effect of local lockdowns.\n\nPeople don't necessarily change their behaviour exactly in line with rule changes.\n\nWhen concerns about cases rising begin to be reported, some people alter their behaviour before any law change. Other people, even when the rules come into place, don't obey them.\n\nSo it may be a question of timing: are people more ready to restrict their movements now than they were in August?\n\nTo complicate the figures further, other things have been going on at the same time as local lockdowns were being introduced, including summer holiday season and schools reopening.\n\nIn Leicester, cases fell when restrictions were introduced. When they were progressively eased in August and September, cases started to rise. But this rise coincided with more people travelling abroad. And with children going back to school.\n\nIn Greater Manchester, cases also rose over those months despite the area being in lockdown - albeit a looser version than Leicester's had been.\n\nUnpicking these different factors is a big challenge.\n\nLooking at \"positivity rates\" - the proportion of all tests that are positive, adjusting for different levels of testing - shows there have been increases in cases across England, with particularly sharp spikes in the North West and North East between the end of August and the end of September. Restrictions in those regions were only introduced between the middle of September and the beginning of October, making it too soon to see the impact of these rules.\n\nBut in Blackburn, which has been in lockdown long enough for an effect to be seen, there was also a rise in cases - though this has come back down in recent weeks.\n\nRecent increases in hospitalisations from coronavirus have highlighted the extent of the challenge facing the north of England. Though without up-to-date localised data, it is difficult to judge whether the impact on a local level - such as those in Blackburn - have helped prevent serious cases.\n\nThere's no doubt the national lockdown had a considerable impact on cases.\n\nFundamentally, the virus needs people to be in close contact and mixing between circles to spread through the population. How tight the restrictions are makes a difference - look at the experience of Leicester, compared with Oldham or Blackburn.\n\nBut so do the crucial issues of timing and compliance. A lockdown only works if people stick to it.\n\nThe data also indicates that any impact lockdowns do have is far from permanent - relax the restrictions and allow more contact, and the virus will quickly start to spread again.\n\nUnless and until a viable vaccine becomes available, government will be faced with the same choice: shut down large chunks of society or allow the virus to tear through communities, with little idea of the true toll that either will exact.", "Bars and restaurants are to be shut in another four French cities where Covid-19 is spreading\n\nThe French government has imposed tighter coronavirus restrictions in four more cities with high infection rates, as a number of European countries see a surge in cases.\n\nThe cities of Lyon, Lille, Grenoble and Saint-Etienne will become zones of maximum alert from Saturday.\n\nBars and restaurants will have to close, as they did in Paris earlier this week and Marseille last month.\n\nThe measures were announced as France saw a near-record 18,129 new cases.\n\n\"The situation has deteriorated in several metropolises in recent days,\" French Health Minister Olivier Veran said at a news conference on Thursday. \"Every day, more and more people are infected.\"\n\nFrance's maximum-alert level comes into force when the infection rate in a locality exceeds 250 infections per 100,000 people and at least 30% of intensive care beds are reserved for Covid-19 patients.\n\nHospitals in the Paris region moved into emergency mode on Thursday, as coronavirus patients took up almost half of intensive-care beds.\n\nFrance's coronavirus situation mirrors that of other European countries, including the Netherlands, Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic, which all reported record increases in daily cases on Thursday.\n\nEven Germany, a relative success story of the pandemic in Europe, has started to see what its health minister has called a worrying rise in cases.\n\nA large proportion of the rise in coronavirus cases globally is being driven by outbreaks in Europe, the Americas and South-East Asia.\n\nOn Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a record one-day increase in global coronavirus cases, with the total rising by 338,779 in 24 hours.\n\nGermany saw its highest daily rise in infections since April, with confirmed cases rising by almost a third to more than 4,000.\n\nIt has now recorded a total of 310,144 cases with a death toll of 9,578, according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI). The UK in contrast has registered 544,275 cases and 42,515 deaths. On Thursday 17,540 new cases were recorded in the UK.\n\nAt a news conference, RKI President Lothar Wieler said Germans must be wary of what he called the \"prevention paradox\" - the feeling that measures were no longer needed because case numbers were relatively low.\n\n\"The current situation worries me a lot. We don't know how the situation in Germany will develop in the coming weeks. It's possible we'll see more than 10,000 new cases a day, it's possible the virus will spread out of control,\" he said.\n\nGerman Health Minister Jens Spahn praised the German people for their \"prudent actions\" in integrating the rules into their day-to-day lives, but added: \"We must not gamble away this achievement.\"\n\nHe pointed the finger at large groups of socialising young people, who \"think they are invincible\", for failing to follow the rules on social distancing and hygiene and welcomed the curfews on evening entertainment introduced by Berlin and Frankfurt.\n\nAs the autumn school holidays get under way in Germany, rules for domestic travel have also been tightened and include a ban on overnight stays in hotels or holiday apartments for anyone coming from \"risk zones\" where infection rates top 50 per 100,000 inhabitants.\n\nGermans have also been urged to avoid travelling abroad during the holiday period.\n\nThere are already bans on large gatherings in areas with high infection rates, testing at airports for people arriving from high-risk countries and fines for anyone failing to wear face coverings in shops or on public transport.", "Andy Charles, pictured with his son Ben, suffered months of delays after a fraudulent claim\n\nSelf-employed environmental consultant Andy Charles has no idea how fraudsters were able to claim thousands of pounds from a government scheme in his name.\n\nBut his case is just the tip of the iceberg, the BBC's Money Box has found.\n\nHM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) says up to £258m in grants for the self-employed could have been fraudulent or paid in error.\n\nMr Charles, from Exeter, only found out about the fraudulent claim when he put in a genuine one.\n\n\"My initial reaction was just complete shock really,\" he told the BBC. \"The application process is quite long and includes a lot of personal details, so to come to the end and be told this payment had already been applied for was quite shocking... the mind boggles really.\"\n\nDespite two fraudulent claims being made in his name, Andy was eventually able to get two grants from the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) paid out, which has helped him get through the tough economic times caused by the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nHowever, he still has concerns about how his personal details were used by criminals to make the fraudulent claims.\n\n\"I'm still, in the background of my mind, a little bit worried about what else people can get into. So can they just get into my personal tax details, [or] is there anything else I'm not aware of?\" he said.\n\n\"So some real big questions about how the online system works and how HMRC are dealing with this type of stuff at their end.\"\n\nIn documents seen by Radio 4's Money Box programme, HMRC says it estimates that 1-2% of all cases are bogus.\n\nWith £12.9bn allocated in 4.7 million grants, that would mean £258m could have been paid out in error or fraud.\n\nHMRC says the system was designed to prevent large-scale fraud and is confident it has done so.\n\nHMRC says it is confident it has already prevented large amounts of fraud\n\nSEISS is significantly smaller than its counterpart, the Job Retention Scheme, which placed millions of people on furlough.\n\nIt has faced criticism for excluding too many self-employed workers, but with the first grant alone worth up to £7,500, for many the scheme has been a lifeline.\n\nBut accidental overpayments or fraudulent claims made by criminals using someone else's name are thought to be two examples of how incorrect payments may have been made.\n\nHMRC does say the figure is an estimate and should be treated with caution: \"We built controls into the application process, including limiting eligibility for the scheme to those who already had a tax footprint with HMRC, to stop fraudulent claims and we're confident that we've prevented large amounts of fraud.\n\n\"Our post-payment compliance checks to recover money paid out are set to begin, with the focus on those who claimed despite having no active business.\"\n\nAndrew Chamberlain from the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed, says the misallocation of government funds is always a serious matter.\n\n\"Here it's particularly concerning because this is grant money that could be helping the more than a million struggling self-employed people who are excluded from government support,\" he told the BBC.\n\n\"It's important to put this in context, however. When compared to the Bounce Back Loan Scheme, where £26bn has been lost from fraud or default, or the Job Retention Scheme, which has lost £3.5bn through default or error, these numbers are comparatively low.\"\n\nHe added that it was \"clear\" the government needed to address fraudulent SEISS claims.\n\n\"Doing so, and plugging the leaks particularly in the BBLS and JRS schemes, would allow it to divert much-needed support to the UK's forgotten freelancers and self-employed.\"\n\nYou can hear more on BBC Radio 4's Money Box programme by listening again here.", "However you look at the blizzard of statistics about the Coronavirus, the disease is still spreading - despite town after town being placed under extra limits.\n\nEven before Nicola Sturgeon's moves on Wednesday to try to break the spread in Scotland, ministers in SW1 were looking at the next steps they would need to take to stop the acceleration of the virus.\n\nAs we've reported, the government is likely to introduce a tiered approach to put different parts of the country with different spreads of the diseases into different categories.\n\nBut the exact nature of the strictest form of restrictions are yet to be set in stone.\n\nIt's a complicated equation. The Department of Health is worried about the spread of the disease, as well as other patients losing out on other treatments because of the focus on Covid.\n\nNo 11 is fearful about the impact on the economy, which has already had a profound shock.\n\nAnd it's No 10's job to worry about all of it, then reach a conclusion.\n\nBut Boris Johnson also knows that his own MPs and the opposition parties are more and more sceptical as each day passes about what the government proposes.\n\nIt's clear that shutting pubs and restaurants is a possibility - the \"circuit breaker\" that we have talked about on here lots of times.\n\nBut there are many questions still to be settled.\n\nWould that happen everywhere? Or just in the most affected parts of the country?\n\nWould closures be total or for a certain period of time only?\n\nWould they be temporary? Or put in place until an indeterminate time?\n\nA lot is unknown, but the discussions are serious. The Treasury is already looking at financial support for the different options, including not just closing pubs in the most affected areas, but potentially well beyond.\n\nThere is a lot yet to settle, and the next formal announcement is likely (as things stand) not to come until Monday.\n\nBut more action is clearly on the way.", "Last updated on .From the section Football\n\nDominic Calvert-Lewin marked his England debut with a goal as Gareth Southgate's side eased to victory in the friendly against Wales at Wembley.\n\nEverton's in-form striker rose to head his 10th goal of the season after 26 minutes from Jack Grealish, delivering an impressive all-round display until he was substituted just before the hour.\n\nThe outstanding Grealish was at the heart of England's best work, drawing the foul that led to England's second goal eight minutes after the break. Kieran Trippier delivered a perfect free-kick that was turned in by an ecstatic Conor Coady for his first international goal.\n\nEngland were now in control against a Wales side defending an eight-match unbeaten run and Danny Ings, making his first start, showed superb athleticism to add a third in the 63rd minutre with a perfectly-executed overhead kick after Tyrone Mings had headed down a Kalvin Phillips corner.\n• None Best action and reaction from England v Wales\n\nCalvert-Lewin was the Premier League's striker in form with nine goals for Everton - so it was no surprise this was an England debut bursting with confidence.\n\nThe 23-year-old has matured rapidly and all that development was on show as he delivered further illustration that he has what it takes to become the complete striker.\n\nCalvert-Lewin's attitude and workrate have never been in question but his goals output has. Now, with Everton top of the Premier League under manager Carlo Ancelotti, he cannot stop scoring.\n\nHere, he was the beneficiary of brilliant work by Grealish, whose cross from the right was the sort any striker dreams of, Calvert-Lewin soaring to power in the header.\n\nHe was taken off just before the hour but his power in the air, close control, hold-up play and strong running made this an impressive bow.\n\nEngland's other contender for the man-of-the-match award was Grealish, who had waited so long for his international debut and finally got on for 14 minutes in the dismal goalless draw against Denmark in Copenhagen in early September.\n\nHere, given his first start, Aston Villa's captain ran the show from midfield, drifting into dangerous positions, creating danger and constantly drawing fouls in dangerous positions.\n\nGrealish gave a top-class performance and his contribution, along with that of debutant Calvert-Lewin, will have delighted Southgate.\n\nThe added bonus came with all three goalscorers getting off the mark with their first goals for England.\n\nWales were missing their two big stars, the injured Gareth Bale and the unavailable Aaron Ramsey - who will now join up with the squad. Ramsey missed this game under coronavirus protocols, with Juventus having put their squad in a bubble last Saturday after two non-playing staff tested positive.\n\nThose absences showed as they had a fair amount of possession in the first half but created little - it might have been different had those two been present.\n\nGiggs will have been casting his eyes towards the Uefa Nations League games against the Republic of Ireland and Bulgaria - so one of his biggest concerns would have been the injury that forced off key striker Kieffer Moore in the first half.\n\nHe will have been worried too by Wales' vulnerability to crosses and set-piece deliveries, which brought England's three goals.\n\nWales have more important tests ahead and while this was an experimental night for Giggs, it was still a disappointing outcome.\n\nSix on the bounce against Wales for England - key stats\n• None England have won six consecutive matches against Wales for the first time since a run of seven between March 1908 and March 1914.\n• None Wales suffered their worst defeat against England since May 1973, also a 3-0 defeat.\n• None Three players all scored their first England goals in this game (Calvert-Lewin, Coady and Ings), the first time that's happened since June 1963 against Switzerland (Tony Kay, Johnny Byrne and Jimmy Melia).\n• None Dominic Calvert-Lewin became the 188th player to score on his England debut and the first Everton player to do so since Fred Pickering in 1964.\n• None Conor Coady ended a run of 111 games for club and country with a goal, scoring his first goal since April 2018 for Wolves against Bolton in a Championship match. It was the first time he'd had two shots in a match since March 2017 for Wolves against Reading.\n• None England gave four players (Saka, Calvert-Lewin, Barnes, James) their England debuts, the second game running four players have earned their debuts. It's the first time since April/May 1933 that England have given four or more debuts in consecutive internationals.\n• None There were just 54 caps between the players in the England starting XI before kick-off, the fewest for an international since 1976, when the XI for a game against Wales had just 47 caps between them.\n• None The starting XI featured players from 10 different clubs (Burnley, Atletico Madrid, Arsenal, Liverpool, Wolves, Everton, Spurs, Leeds, Southampton and Aston Villa), the most for a match since May 1997 against South Africa.\n• None Kieran Trippier captained England for the first time, becoming the first outfield player since David Beckham in June 2008 against Trinidad & Tobago to captain England while playing for a non-English club (Atletico Madrid).\n• None Attempt saved. James Ward-Prowse (England) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the bottom right corner. Assisted by Danny Ings.\n• None Attempt saved. Danny Ings (England) right footed shot from the centre of the box is saved in the top right corner. Assisted by Ainsley Maitland-Niles. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page", "The UK has agreed to settle a lawsuit over how it selected an IT contract for coronavirus testing at its Lighthouse labs.\n\nThe BBC understands that the settlement will cost the government up to £2m.\n\nBritish company Diagnostics AI claimed it lost out to a European rival UgenTec despite spotting some positive coronavirus cases its rival missed.\n\nIt sued the government over the decision, claiming the selection process was \"unfair and unlawful\".\n\nLighthouse labs are a UK-wide network of specialist coronavirus laboratories managed by the government and run by private firms. When the labs were set up, companies pitched to analyse the test results.\n\nThe dispute was due to be played out in court. It would have meant a public examination of the accuracy and speed of the testing system, at a time when it has come under serious criticism.\n\nBut the government has decided to settle the case and will pay Diagnostics AI compensation and most of its legal fees.\n\nHowever, despite agreeing to the payout, the government has refuted the claims made by Diagnostics AI, saying they are \"inaccurate\".\n\n\"The tests are reliable and effective, the laboratories that undertake them have been reviewed and assessed by experts and the percentage of false negatives or positives is tiny,\" said a Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson.\n\n\"This was a commercial dispute over a software contract where a number of factors were considered before it was awarded, which is still subject to final agreement over costs.\"\n\nAs the contract was worth more than £1m, the BBC understands the settlement including legal costs could amount to around £2m.\n\nSwabs are taken from people at testing sites or home tests and treated with a chemical process that produces a graph. The software is used to determine whether the graphs show the sample was positive or negative for coronavirus.\n\nSoftware is used to analyse swabs to determine whether a sample is positive or negative for coronavirus\n\nDiagnostics AI claimed UgenTec's analysis of a trial run of 2,000 samples was flawed. In some cases, it claimed UgenTec found negative coronavirus results, when the results were actually positive or inconclusive.\n\n\"The system that they ultimately went with and decided to pay for missed around 50 out of 800 positive [results], so that's around one in 15, or so, one in 16 - to be precise - positives,\" Diagnostics AI's chief executive Aron Cohen told the BBC.\n\n\"Obviously when that translates to hundreds of thousands of samples a day, that's potentially thousands of missed positives going out every day. So that was really worrying for us.\"\n\nUgenTec in return claimed that no patients were affected at all as it was a trial run.\n\n\"We provide crucial covid interpretation services to the Lighthouse Labs to help them manage the vast amounts of data they generate. These claims are inaccurate and misleading,\" UgenTec's chief executive Steven Verhoeven told the BBC.\n\n\"None of these samples refer to actual results given to patients or the public and to imply any public health impact is wrong. Live tests were not being supported by our software at the time which was in the process of being implemented. As illustrated by independent tests, we have every confidence in our software and the services we provide.\"\n\nTwo non-profit companies owned and funded by the government were also sued by Diagnostics AI - namely UK Biocentre and Medicines Delivery Catapult (MDC), which ran the process to decide which company to use.\n\nCourt papers show that between 31 March and 14 April, Diagnostics AI repeatedly requested information about exactly what services were required and how their bid would be evaluated.\n\nDiagnostics AI say it never received the information it asked for. This is refuted by UK Biocentre, which says both providers were given the same information.\n\nLocal authorities are permitted to purchase services without engaging in a competitive process if there is a significant risk to life\n\nWhen the two bids were being considered in early April, the UK was facing what Boris Johnson had called a \"moment of national emergency\".\n\nIn such urgent circumstances, the law does make provision for the government to buy services without a competitive process, if certain conditions are met.\n\nHowever, it is understood that both Diagnostics AI and Ugentec had been recommended to UK Biocentre, and so a decision was made to evaluate both offers.\n\nDiagnostics AI says this process was unfair and flawed, but UK Biocentre insists it was fair to both bidders.\n\nA spokesperson for UK Biocentre said: \"The allegations are groundless; this was a commercial dispute. The software in question is being used widely in the Lighthouse Laboratories, in some NHS laboratories and abroad.\n\n\"External quality assurance has confirmed that the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing in the Lighthouse Laboratories, of which the automated diagnostic software forms part, is performing well.\"\n\nA spokesperson for MDC also provided the BBC with a statement: \"The full results of evaluation identified UgenTec as a safe and quality provider, able to deliver in high volumes, and with a comprehensive support system in place. It has performed superbly over the past six months, analysing over eight million test results for the nation. The litigation was purely a commercial dispute.\"\n\nThe BBC understands that investigations were carried out into the claims made by Diagnostics AI, but concluded that concerns over the safety of UgenTec's software were unsubstantiated.\n\nHowever Mr Cohen disagrees: \"The government is paying out a lot of money. And they're paying this out, you know, to avoid it at least in part, to avoid having to have these issues aired in court, and to have discussions over the accuracy of the testing.\"", "Nottingham has the highest Covid-19 infection rate in the UK, according to the latest data.\n\nPublic Health England figures show that 689.1 per 100,000 people tested positive for the virus in the city over the past week.\n\nDocuments leaked earlier today indicate that new social distancing rules for Nottinghamshire are due to be announced on Monday.\n\nLocal politicians have criticised the delay in imposing restrictions.\n\nNottingham City Council leader David Mellen said the government's lack of action on new measures in Nottingham \"makes absolutely no sense\" and that \"strict interventions are needed urgently\".\n\nThe Labour politician said: \"The delay leaves this weekend open to potential abuse of the existing rules, which could result in yet more Covid cases in our city.\"\n\nHe called on the government to \"act urgently and decisively or, better still, give us the powers to let us get on with taking action ourselves\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. David Mellen says a lack of coronavirus restrictions this weekend could mean a “last chance to party\" in Nottingham\n\nIn the week up to 5 October, Nottingham recorded 2,294 cases, up from 407 the previous week.\n\nEarlier, the county council said the rate of infection for Nottinghamshire was 106 per 100,000, much lower than the rate in Nottingham.\n\nAlthough the government has yet to introduce formal measures, local authorities have asked people in the county to avoid mixing indoors with other households indoors following the \"dramatic\" rise in cases.\n\nNottingham's director of public health Alison Challenger said: \"Everyone needs to stick rigidly to their social bubbles and not mix with other households.\n\n\"There is no need to wait for additional government restrictions.\"\n\nGedling MP Tom Randall said he would \"wholly support calls\" for people to follow stricter guidelines, while Nottingham South MP Lilian Greenwood has called the delay in introducing measures \"reckless and indefensible\".\n\nMs Greenwood added: \"It's outrageous that [MPs] only found out about this decision from the media.\"\n\nOn Thursday evening, the government released a statement urging residents to follow \"the advice of the local authority\", as well as practising social distancing, wearing face coverings, and getting tested if they exhibited symptoms.\n\nA spokesperson added: \"The local authority has our full backing and support.\"\n\nBut Nottingham North MP Alex Norris, who was briefed about the government's strategy during a call with health minister Edward Argar, said he was sceptical about the government's strategy.\n\nHe said: \"When pressed about Nottingham, the advice that came back was, 'We've not decided yet', which is very hard to understand.\n\n\"They won't support us because they won't bring in the restriction we're appealing for them to bring in.\n\n\"We're trying to get ahead of those restrictions by suggesting them to people ourselves, but of course we don't have the legal backing to enforce those.\"\n\nBen Bradley, MP for Mansfield - which has a lower infection rate of 62.2 - called on the government to reconsider blanket restrictions for the whole of the county.\n\nThe Conservative politician added: \"It would be really frustrating to have restrictions imposed when, locally, we might not need them.\"\n\nAccording to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, leaked documents show Nottinghamshire is expected to go into level two of a new \"three-tier\" system next week.\n\nThey indicate people will still be able to go on holiday outside the county, but only with people from their own household or support bubble.\n\nHouseholds would still be able to meet indoors if they are in a support bubble.\n\nJo Cox-Brown, founder of Night Time Economy, which works with businesses and local authorities to create safer nights out in English cities, said further restrictions could have a devastating effect on jobs.\n\n\"[Businesses] are terrified. The night-time economy is worth 14,000 jobs in Nottingham alone,\" she said.\n\n\"They were closed for three months, they have been trading for two months but at 50-75% of normal occupancy levels, so financially these venues are on their knees.\"\n\nAcross England, bars and restaurants could be forced to close as the government prepares to tighten restrictions for the worst-affected areas.\n\nIt follows the announcement that similar outlets across central Scotland are to be closed for 16 days.\n\nLocal restrictions have yet to be imposed in the city\n\nHousing Secretary Robert Jenrick has refused to say whether pubs and restaurants in the north and in Nottingham will be forced to close.\n\nHe said: \"We are currently considering what steps we should take, obviously taking the advice of our scientific and medical advisers, and a decision will be made shortly.\"\n\nAsked if there will be an announcement linked to the hospitality industry, he said: \"We are considering the evidence. In some parts of the country, the number of cases are rising very fast and we are taking that very seriously.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.", "Rome has already made masks mandatory in busy outdoor areas\n\nItaly has made it mandatory to wear face masks in outdoor spaces across the country in an attempt to contain the spread of the coronavirus.\n\nItalians must also wear masks indoors everywhere except in private homes.\n\nAlthough Covid-19 cases are much lower in Italy than in many other European countries, there has been a steady rise in infections.\n\nMeanwhile, Germany reported a spike in its infection rate to more than 4,000 daily cases.\n\nAlthough this figure is lower than in many European countries, it is Germany's highest number of cases in 24 hours since April. Testing has increased, however, so more cases are being recorded.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid symptoms: What are they and how long should I self-isolate for?\n\nGermany has seen fewer than 10,000 coronavirus-related deaths so far, out of a population of 83 million. But new restrictions are being introduced, including a ban on people from high-risk regions staying in hotels in the rest of the country.\n\nItalian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said tougher measures were needed to avoid returning to an economically devastating lockdown in Italy.\n\n\"From now on, masks and protective gear have to be brought with us when we leave our house and worn. We have to wear them all the time unless we are in a situation of continuous isolation,\" he said.\n\nMasks must also be worn in shops, offices, on public transport, and in bars and restaurants when not seated at a table.\n\nThe measures have already been put in place in some parts of Italy that have seen an increase in infections, such as Rome, but the latest announcement makes them nationwide.\n\nItalians were subject to some of the strictest lockdown measures in the world when the country became the first in Europe to be overwhelmed by the coronavirus earlier in the year.\n\nAlthough it has managed to keep the virus in check more successfully than many other European countries in recent months, cases in the last 24 hours have surged past the 3,000 mark for the first time since 24 April, registering 3,678 new infections, data from the health ministry shows.\n\nItaly also took action on Wednesday to stem the number of cases coming in from Europe, announcing compulsory testing for anyone travelling from the UK, Netherlands, Belgium and the Czech Republic.", "Last updated on .From the section Scotland\n\nScotland are one game away from their first major finals since 1998 after a nerve-shredding win on penalties against Israel at Hampden.\n\nKenny McLean scored the pivotal spot-kick in the depleted Scots' first ever shootout, with only a victory in Serbia on 12 November now separating Steve Clarke's men from Euro 2020.\n\nIt was a turgid affair at an empty national stadium between two below-par teams, but five perfect penalties from the hosts have a nation daring to dream of reaching a long-awaited tournament.\n\nScotland, without a clutch of players after call-offs due to Covid-19 protocols and injury, are now on a six-game unbeaten run.\n\nSerbia lie in wait in the play-off finals after they defeated Norway 2-1 in extra time in Oslo.\n• None What could still ruin Scotland's dream?\n\nHoping for the best, fearing the worst. The mantra of every Scotland fan following the match across the land. Was it now, or would it continue to be never?\n\nAs the Tartan Army dared to whisper of the former, the preamble silenced much of the chatter.\n\nStuart Armstrong, Kieran Tierney, Ryan Christie, Scott McKenna, Liam Palmer, James Forrest and Oliver Burke all ruled out - the first three amid Covid controversy.\n\nWhat followed in the fledgling moments of this encounter would have offered modest reassurance. While seeing plenty of the ball, Scotland struggled to serve the front two of Oli McBurnie and Lyndon Dykes.\n\nInstead, the hosts' best efforts came from set-pieces. Andy Robertson arced a free-kick wide in a half chance before Scott McTominay missed a jaw-dropping chance, steering a header the wrong side of the post from six yards when left all alone.\n\nThe noise of the Manchester United man - playing again in a back three - chastising himself for the miss walking off at the break the only thing cutting through the Hampden silence.\n\nScotland captain Robertson was four years old the last time the country graced a major tournament, and the pressure seemed to suffocate him and his team-mates.\n\nWhile the back three looked steady, there was little intensity going forward, minimal width and nothing for Ofir Marciano to do in the Israel goal.\n\nInstead, the team ranked 93rd in the world were the ones to get the only shot of the 90 minutes on target, Eran Zahavi's zinger from distance being dealt with by David Marshall.\n\nThe game limped over the line into extra time - Scotland's first added half hour since 1961 - with what was likely to have been a unified sigh of resignation across the country.\n\nSubstitute Ryan Fraser brought intent and conviction to the side, the Newcastle winger sparking flickers of intent, but again Marciano's gloves remained immaculate. Twenty two years of hurt down, 15 minutes to play.\n\nThe agonising torture of Scotland's first penalty shootout seemed inevitable, but Israel offered one huge heart-in-mouth moment.\n\nCeltic's Hatem Elhamed's cross was missed by Liam Cooper. Lurking behind was Shon Weissman, but the Real Valladolid striker's outstretched leg missed it too. The cracks in the fingers contracted tighter.\n\nThen the nerves were shredded further. A last-gasp Robertson corner found the head of Cooper. His connection was true, but the ball crashed off an upright and out of play to signal penalties.\n\nScotland were now into uncharted waters. Nothing up until this point suggested how plain sailing it would be.\n\nJohn McGinn, Callum McGregor, McTominay, Lawrence Shankland and McLean all scored, with Marshall saving Zehavi's opening spot kick. It trigger delirium on the pitch, at homes everywhere, and no doubt on streets outside of pubs that closed - or were supposed to, at least - halfway through extra time.\n\nIt's safe to come out from the back of the sofa, but best keep the spot warm for next month.\n\nWhat did we learn?\n\nNot as much what did we learn, but what were we reminded of? Watching Scotland should come with a health warning.\n\nThis is a national team that for so many years has threatened to be consumed by the beast of a two-decade burden of regret, angst and humiliation. While Israel didn't threaten for the most part, the group of players in dark blue struggled to find their rhythm.\n\nBut, it wouldn't be Scotland unless it was done the hard way. While Clarke will say Slovakia and Czech Republic in the Nations League in coming days will get due respect, the focus internally will surely be on preparing for Serbia. With an influx of players returning, you just never know...\n• None This was Scotland's first goalless draw in 55 matches, since November 2013 against United States.\n• None Scotland have gone six games without defeat in all competitions (W4 D2) for the first time since being unbeaten in seven matches under Gordon Strachan in October 2017.\n• None Only one of the game's 29 shots was on target - Eran Zahavi's attempt for Israel in the 72nd minute.\n• None It was the first time Scotland have not had a shot on target at home since the game against Belgium in September 2013.\n\nScotland's focus now falls to Sunday's visit of Slovakia to Hampden in the Nations League, then the arrival of the Czechs on Wednesday. Honestly...\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(5), Israel 0(3). Kenny McLean (Scotland) converts the penalty with a left footed shot to the bottom left corner.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(4), Israel 0(3). Mohammad Abu Fani (Israel) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the bottom right corner.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(4), Israel 0(2). Lawrence Shankland (Scotland) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the bottom left corner.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(3), Israel 0(2). Shon Weissman (Israel) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the centre of the goal.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(3), Israel 0(1). Scott McTominay (Scotland) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the bottom left corner.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(2), Israel 0(1). Nir Bitton (Israel) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the high centre of the goal.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(2), Israel 0. Callum McGregor (Scotland) converts the penalty with a left footed shot to the bottom right corner.\n• None Penalty saved! Eran Zahavi (Israel) fails to capitalise on this great opportunity, right footed shot saved in the bottom left corner.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(1), Israel 0. John McGinn (Scotland) converts the penalty with a left footed shot to the bottom left corner.\n• None Liam Cooper (Scotland) hits the right post with a header from the centre of the box. Assisted by Andrew Robertson with a cross following a corner.\n• None Attempt blocked. Andrew Robertson (Scotland) left footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by John McGinn.\n• None Offside, Israel. Nir Bitton tries a through ball, but Shon Weissman is caught offside. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Exploring how it defines the way we feel\n• None What We're Not Taught In Schools", "The container had \"become a tomb\" the Old Bailey heard\n\nA lorry container became a \"tomb\" as 39 desperate men, women and children suffocated inside, a court has heard.\n\nTemperatures in the unit reached an \"unbearable\" 38.5C as the Vietnamese nationals were sealed inside for at least 12 hours, jurors were told.\n\nTheir bodies were found when the container was eventually opened in Purfleet, Essex, on 23 October, 2019.\n\nLorry driver Eamonn Harrison and Gheorghe Nica are on trial at the Old Bailey accused of manslaughter.\n\nThe pair are also accused of being part of a people-smuggling conspiracy with another lorry driver, Christopher Kennedy, and Valentin Calota.\n\nOpening their Old Bailey trial, Bill Emlyn Jones told jurors it was a \"sad and unavoidable truth\" that some people were prepared to go to great lengths to come to the UK \"for a better life\", adding the cost was some £10,000 per person.\n\nHe told jurors: \"Obviously, any time you fill an airtight container with a large number of people, where they will be left for hours and hours, with no means of escape and no means of communication with the outside world - well, it is fraught with danger.\"\n\nMr Emlyn Jones said the victims - aged between 15 and 44 - were \"husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters\".\n\nVictim Pham Thi Ngoc Oanh, 28 from Nghe An, wrote a text message that was never sent\n\nHe told how Mr Harrison drove them to Zeebrugge in Belgium, where the container was loaded on to a cargo ship bound for the UK.\n\nAnother lorry driver, Maurice Robinson, then collected the trailer from Purfleet in Essex when it arrived just after midnight on 23 October, the court heard.\n\nThe prosecutor said that by then it had been some 12 hours at least since \"any meaningful amount of fresh air had been let into the sealed container\".\n\nRobinson had been sent a message from his boss to \"give them air quickly, but don't let them out\", the court heard.\n\n\"What he found must haunt him still,\" Mr Emlyn Jones said. \"For the 39 men and women inside, that lorry had become their tomb.\"\n\nThe refrigerator had not been turned on during the journey, meaning the temperature inside the trailer rose to 38.5C, he added.\n\nWhen Mr Kennedy learned of the deaths, he told a friend there \"must have been too many and run out of air\", the court heard.\n\nThe bodies of 39 Vietnamese nationals were discovered in a refrigerated trailer\n\nMr Emlyn Jones said: \"What it must have been like inside that lorry does not bear thinking about. In fact, we do have some direct evidence of what the victims were going through, recovered from some of their mobile phones.\"\n\nOne victim - 28-year-old Pham Thi Ngoc Oanh - had written a text message that was never sent, saying: \"Maybe going to die in the container, can't breathe any more dear.\"\n\n\"They had no signal inside the container, so could not call for help or alert the outside world to their plight. But naturally, in desperation, they tried,\" Mr Emlyn Jones said.\n\nNica, 43, of Basildon, Essex, and Mr Harrison, 23, of Mayobridge, Co Down, Northern Ireland, deny 39 counts of manslaughter.\n\nNica has admitted conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration between 1 May 2018 and 24 October 2019.\n\nMr Harrison, Mr Calota, 37, of Birmingham, and Mr Kennedy, 24, of Co Armagh, Northern Ireland, deny the conspiracy charge.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Vice-President Mike Pence and Democratic challenger Kamala Harris were under the microscope in Wednesday's vice-presidential debate.\n\nPresident Donald Trump is currently ill with Covid 19, a virus that's claimed over 200,000 American lives, bringing renewed attention to the vice-presidential role.\n\nMany voters were frustrated by last week's chaotic presidential debate, and were pleased with tonight's calmer exchange between Pence and Harris.\n\nHere's what members of the voter panel thought about the vice-presidential debate.\n\nShloka Ananthanarayanan, 33, is a progressive voter from New York City who works for an international bank. She is backing Joe Biden but more enthusiastically supporting Kamala Harris as the second on the ticket.\n\nWhat moment stood out to you?\n\nI wouldn't necessarily say there was one moment that stood out, but what stood out was the tone and the fact that no one was yelling at each other during this debate. The last question felt particularly impactful - it ended on such a note of civility. We can agree to disagree, but at the end of the day we are all just Americans.\n\nWho do you think 'won' the debate?\n\nThe winner is based completely on where you were coming at to begin with. Ultimately I don't think there was one person who came out as dominating the debate over the other, but they both got the chance to make their case and now it's up to the voters to decide.\n\nIs there something that you wanted to see that didn't?\n\nThe question [on election integrity] was very interesting. [The moderator] kept pushing them and the question did not get answered. I don't think Kamala Harris had a plan for what would happen if Trump refused to leave the White House and Pence just said we're going to win, so it was a non-starter. That is a significant concern for a lot of people because there is a continuing rhetoric [from Trump] of 'we won't leave' [the White House] or 'even if we lose, it's because it's rigged'.\n\nJim Sullivan is a fiscal conservative who \"holds his nose\" to vote Trump but finds the leftward tilt of the Democrats too \"radical and jolting\". He considers Mike Pence more conservative than him, but a decent man who would make a good president.\n\nWhat moment stood out to you?\n\nIt was a lot more civil and flowed much better than the last debate. In the very beginning, Pence's defence of the Trump administration's efforts on coronavirus stood out to me. With regard to what Vice-President Pence said to Kamala Harris later about packing the court, I feel like that was an important question and did not feel like that was answered.\n\nWho do you think 'won' the debate?\n\nThis was such an amazing leap forward and it is to the benefit of the country, re-instilling some confidence that we aren't completely broken, can have a functioning government and can have a civil conversation hashed out in a respectful way. Both candidates did really well, but I'm going to go with Pence. He had a very good way of addressing things and the way he presents things will resonate across the country. I think it may have made some people think again if they were going in another direction.\n\nIs there something that you wanted to see that didn't?\n\nPence asked about packing the court and Democrats have talked about adding DC and Puerto Rico as states, and abolishing the electoral college. I would have liked to hear what Harris' thoughts were on those things. Healthcare also is still an important issue and they did not dive into that enough. With Pence, I would have liked to hear more what the plans were for the economy going forward.\n\nWhy did this debate matter to you?\n\nI am a Republican who is going to support the president, but there's been times in this season I've felt a little undecided. Vice-President Pence gave me a certain sense of assurance about my decision, reaffirming that it's a good choice. Given the age of the two candidates, the vice-presidential pick this time around is pretty significant. Last week was just distressing, so this was a real breath of fresh air. I don't agree with Kamala Harris on a lot of things, but they both handled themselves well and I liked the format.\n\nAkayla Sellers is a Democratic college student at the University of Charleston studying public health and pre-med. She is enthusiastically behind the Biden/Harris ticket and excited to see Harris bring the issues of black America to the table.\n\nWhat moment stood out to you?\n\nAt the very end, the eighth grader posed a great question because the image typically shown in the American media is of a polarised country. At the end of the day, whether Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, we need a presidency that exercises compassion, empathy and love. We need leaders that respect individual human life and strive for the best in humanity.\n\nWho do you think 'won' the debate?\n\nPence has a strategic way of saying a lot while oddly saying nothing. Harris' direct, eloquent and stern way of answering questions provided knowledge and information, and that's what I think is a successful debate - actually talking about policies, answering the questions wholeheartedly and [tackling] her controversial past. I feel like she won as a whole because she has a more intersectional approach that's going to help everyone.\n\nIs there something that you wanted to see that didn't?\n\nI didn't see a lot of things that [young people] are passionate about. They could have discussed a lot more in depth about healthcare, education and the racial uproar. You see a lot of people crowding the streets, they are the younger generation and they didn't discuss that in depth.\n\nWhy did this debate matter to you?\n\nIt brought back a sense of tranquillity after the circus last week made a lot of us feel that, if the Trump administration were to have another term, it would be chaotic. So it matters because I wanted to hear, in an eloquent way, what Pence's stances were on certain issues, as well as Kamala's, so that I can have knowledge, be aware and not be fearful, so I can spread that information on to others.\n\nGordon Kou is a Christian engineering graduate student at the University of Utah, where Wednesday's debate is being held. He is still undecided in who to vote for and is considering voting third party, as he did in 2016.\n\nWhat moment stood out to you?\n\nThe fly on Mike Pence's head was pretty memorable, but the last question [about why the country is so polarised] was probably the brightest part of the debate. It reminded me of one of the debates in 2016, where the moderator asked Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to compliment each other.\n\nWho do you think 'won' the debate?\n\nBoth presidential candidates chose very well in their VP picks. They did a better job of defending their candidates than the actual candidates did. Overall, the winner was America because we somewhat saved face after the debacle last week.\n\nIs there something that you wanted to see that didn't?\n\nI definitely wanted to hear more about what would happen if Trump doesn't accept the results of the election. I also wanted to hear more about things proposed by Democrats such as packing the Supreme Court and getting rid of the filibuster. Trump talks about mass voter fraud and Democrats talk about election hacking - I wanted to hear more about election security because that is central to who we are as Americans.\n\nWhy did this debate matter to you?\n\nIt's better when America hears what the actual policy stances are and we actually have something to base our votes on rather than sheer political partisanship. The debate actually makes it harder for me to decide who to vote for. I am a conservative person turned off by Trump and his conduct, but Vice-President Pence made a very good argument for a Trump presidency because he does speak to a lot of things conservatives care about.\n\nSam Cabral, Silvia Martelli and Marianna Brady contributed to this reporting.\n\nWhat questions do you have for our voters?\n\nVoters across the country will go to the polls in four weeks. What questions do you have for our voter panel? What questions can BBC journalists help answer about the US election?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Why this black drive-in cinema has become a big hit\n\nThe Academy has updated its Oscars rules to allow films shown at drive-in cinemas to qualify for best picture and general entry categories.\n\nThe new rules also state that a theatrical run of seven days would meet the eligibility criteria.\n\nIt follows their decision in April to allow films without traditional cinematic releases, as long as they are uploaded to the Academy Screening Room.\n\nNext year's event has been delayed until 25 April 2021, due to Covid-19.\n\nThe closing date for films up for consideration to be submitted is now 28 February.\n\n\"With the gradual re-opening of theatres, an addendum was added to clarify the two methods for qualification in the best picture and general entry categories moving forward through the end of this exceptional awards year \" the organisers said in a statement on Variety.\n\nRebel Wilson and James Corden joked about Cats' visual effects at last year's Oscars\n\nOutdoor drive-in cinemas have long been a tradition in the US and have proved popular during the pandemic.\n\nThey have been trialled across the UK too, as many actual cinemas battle to stay open.\n\nLast year's winners: Best supporting actress Laura Dern with best actress Renee Zellweger\n\nThis week Cineworld decided to shut its doors until spring, following the news that the upcoming James Bond movie has been pushed back again.\n\nOdeon soon followed suit, announcing that some of its screens would open at weekends only, for now. But Showcase Cinemas, which started reopening its cinemas in July, said it is \"committed to keeping them open\".\n\nIn July, a major drive-in music and comedy tour was cancelled, however, due to fresh fears around local outbreaks of the virus and its ongoing financial implications.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "New measures to tackle coronavirus are to be announced \"in the coming days\", a minister says, after the BBC was told pubs and restaurants could be closed in the worst-affected areas of England.\n\nThere could also be a ban on overnight stays away from home in the locations - which include the North and Midlands.\n\nCommunities Secretary Robert Jenrick said the government was \"currently considering what steps to take\".\n\nA three-tier system for local lockdowns is also likely to be announced.\n\nUnder the system, different parts of the country would be placed in different categories - although ministers are still discussing the precise details of the toughest level of restrictions over the next couple of days.\n\nA final decision on the time period or extent of potential closures has not yet been made and a formal announcement is not likely to come until Monday, BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said.\n\nIt comes as North of England and Midlands MPs have been briefed by health ministers and chief medical officer Chris Whitty about the latest coronavirus data.\n\nThe number of people in the UK to have tested positive for coronavirus rose by 17,540 - an increase of 3,378 on Wednesday's figures - with a further 77 deaths reported.\n\nSome politicians in the North of England and the Midlands have shared their frustration about the plans appearing in newspapers before being announced in Parliament.\n\nThe Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, told the BBC: \"If it's urgent, give us the detail, give us the evidence behind the proposals. Let's discuss it and let's agree it quickly.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Labour has challenged the government to publish the scientific evidence behind the 22:00 BST closing time for pubs and restaurants in England.\n\nLeader Sir Keir Starmer said his party would not be \"voting down\" the measure in the Commons next Tuesday but the policy \"needs to be reformed\".\n\nDowning Street said that early data suggested a \"significant proportion\" of coronavirus exposure was seen in the hospitality sector, especially in younger age groups.\n\nBut pressed on whether the government would publish evidence on the issue, Mr Jenrick told the BBC: \"It is commonsensical that the longer you stay in pubs and restaurants, the more likely you are to come into contact with other individuals.\n\n\"The more drinks that people have, the more likely that some people are to break the rules.\"\n\nHe added that it was right to \"take action decisively, rather than waiting for the most detailed epidemiological evidence to emerge\".\n\nOn the possibility of additional restrictions for some parts of England, Mr Jenrick did not rule out pubs being closed but said the response would be \"proportionate and localised\".\n\nHe added the government was trying to give \"greater consistency on rules so they're easier to understand\" and was working on \"slightly broader canvases of regions or cities and counties to avoid differences in people's daily lives if they drive over the border\".\n\nIt's a complicated equation. The Department of Health is worried about the spread of the disease, as well as other patients losing out on other treatments because of the focus on Covid.\n\nNo 11 is fearful about the impact on the economy, which has already had a profound shock.\n\nAnd it's No 10's job to worry about all of it, then reach a conclusion.\n\nBut Boris Johnson also knows that his own MPs and the opposition parties are more and more sceptical as each day passes about what the government proposes.\n\nIt's clear that shutting pubs and restaurants is a possibility - the \"circuit breaker\" that we have talked about lots of times.\n\nBut there are many questions still to be settled.\n\nRead more from Laura here.\n\nThe planned tightening of restrictions in parts of England follows rising infection rates across much of the country, with the Academy of Medical Colleges warning the NHS is at risk of becoming overwhelmed.\n\nNottingham, Knowsley, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle upon Tyne have the highest infection rates in England, according to the latest Public Health England data.\n\nFrom Friday, all pubs and restaurants across central Scotland, including Glasgow and Edinburgh, are to close, while in the rest of Scotland hospitality venues must shut at 18:00 BST and alcohol can only be served outdoors.\n\nBut industry leaders are warning the measures could be the final straw for many businesses.\n\nHealth minister Nadine Dorries tweeted that further measures were needed in England because hospital admissions could be at \"a critical stage\" in about 10 days' time.\n\nA government source told the BBC the situation in the North West and North East of England was \"very troubling\", with growing numbers of hospital admissions and more elderly people in intensive care.\n\nThese areas will be placed into the top tier of restrictions - with an announcement possibly on Monday - in a new system called the Local Covid Alert Level.\n\nThere remains a debate within cabinet over how far the restrictions in the top tier should go, with some in No 10 arguing for measures like those in Scotland.\n\nThe plan is for schools to remain open in all circumstances.\n\nUnder the new system, all areas would be subject to the current England-wide restrictions, but there would be much more robust measures for the top tier.\n\nThere are already tighter restrictions in parts of the North East and North West of England, Birmingham and Leicester - including on households mixing.\n\nThe Treasury is looking at providing financial support to the hospitality industry in the worst-hit areas, and a memo seen by the BBC shows plans for additional money for local authorities. They would get £1 per head of population if placed into tier two, and £2 per head for tier three.\n\nKate Nicholls, chief executive of UK Hospitality, said if venues were forced to close the industry would need a return to a full furlough scheme and additional financial support.", "The pace of Europe's Covid-19 vaccination campaign has picked up and in many countries infection rates have been falling.\n\nLockdowns are gradually being eased as the summer tourist season gets under way, and there are plans for an EU-wide digital vaccination certificate to be in place by 1 July.\n\nNationwide curfew ended on 20 June, 10 days earlier than planned. Face masks are no longer required outdoors.\n\nRestaurants, cafes and bars can serve customers indoors, with 50% capacity and up to six people per table.\n\nStanding concerts will resume on 30 June and nightclubs on 9 July (with 75% capacity). People attending will need a health pass which shows either full vaccination, a negative test within the previous 72 hours, or else a previous coronavirus infection.\n\nMedical grade masks are compulsory in shops and on public transport.\n\nFrom 30 June, working from home will no longer be compulsory.\n\nOn 21 June, Italy's curfew was scrapped and the whole country, except for the northwest region of Valle d'Aosta, became \"white zone\" - the country's lowest-risk category.\n\nAmong the measures still in place are social distancing (1m) and the wearing of masks indoors (and in crowded outdoor places), and a ban on house parties and large gathering.\n\nNightclubs and discos are also closed.\n\nAll indoor businesses, with the exception of nightclubs, are open.\n\nThe government introduced a \"corona pass\" in April, the first to do so in Europe.\n\nThis shows - either on a phone or on paper - that you have been vaccinated, previously infected or that you have had a negative test within 72 hours.\n\nPeople need to show it for entry to cinemas, museums, hairdressers or indoor dining.\n\nThe Greek government is welcoming tourists from many countries, if they are fully vaccinated or can provide a negative coronavirus test.\n\nFace coverings must be worn in all public places and there is a curfew from 01:30-05:00, but bars, restaurants, museums and archaeological sites are all open.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Greek island of Milos is aiming to become \"Covid-free\" so it can welcome back tourists\n\nCinemas, theatres, museums and restaurants are open at 50% capacity. From 26 June, this increases to 75%.\n\nNightclubs and discos will also be allowed to reopen, with a limit of 150 people.\n\nFace coverings must be worn in enclosed spaces and 1.5m social distancing observed.\n\nShops, bars, restaurants and museums are open, although face coverings remain compulsory in most public places.\n\nNightclubs can now reopen in parts of Spain with low infection rates.\n\nIn Barcelona, they are restricted to 50% of capacity and can stay open until 03:30 - dancers have to wear masks.\n\nSpain began welcoming vaccinated tourists from 7 June. Most European travellers still have to present a negative Covid test on arrival.\n\nBrussels: Outdoor dining resumed in Belgium on 8 May\n\nShops, cinemas, gyms, cafes and restaurants are open, with restrictions. Households can invite up to four people inside.\n\nFrom 1 July, working from home will no longer be mandatory, if the situation continues to improve.\n\nCultural performances, shows and sports competitions can also go ahead, with limited numbers, and more people will be allowed at weddings and other ceremonies and parties.\n\nPortugal has lifted many of its restrictions but face coverings must still be worn in indoor public spaces and some outdoor settings.\n\nBars and nightclubs remain closed, and it's illegal to drink alcohol outdoors in public places, except for pavement cafés and restaurants.\n\nAlcohol cannot be sold after 21:00 unless it is with a meal.\n\nRestaurants, cafes and cultural venues have to close at 01:00 and have capacity limits.\n\nA weekend travel ban is in force in the Lisbon area, starting at 15:00 on Friday, with residents only allowed to leave for essential journeys.\n\nIn Lisbon and in Albufeira (Algarve), cafes, restaurants and non-essential shops have to close by 15:30 at the weekend and 22:30 on weekdays.\n\nPortugal's summer season looks uncertain, yet its Covid figures have improved\n\nRestaurants, cafes, museums and historic buildings have reopened with capacity limits.\n\nFrom 26 June, a number of restrictions are being lifted.\n\nAlcohol can be sold after 22:00, and nightclubs can open, with an entry pass system.\n\nEvents held in public venues such as cinemas, conference centres and concert halls will be allowed, subject to social distancing.\n\nMasks will no longer be compulsory except on public transport, airports and in secondary schools.\n\nOutdoor services in restaurants and bars returned in June. Theme parks, funfairs, cinemas and theatres, gyms and swimming pools, have reopened as well.\n\nFrom 5 July, restaurants and bars will be able to serve customers indoors. Weddings and other indoor events for up to 50 people will be permitted and the numbers at outdoor organised events will increase.\n\nSince June, pubs have been able to stay open until 22:30 and more people are now allowed at sports events, outdoor concerts, cinemas and markets.\n\nOn 1 July, limits on private gatherings will be raised, and the recommendation to interact with a small circle of people removed.\n\nFurther easing is planned on 15 July and in September.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Footage of the stop was shared widely on Twitter after being posted by former Olympic 100m champion Linford Christie, who questioned why the vehicle had been targeted\n\nFive police officers are facing an investigation over the stop and search of British athlete Bianca Williams and her partner in west London.\n\nMs Williams and Ricardo dos Santos, whose baby son was in the car, believe they were racially profiled when they were stopped in Maida Vale, on 4 July.\n\nThe Met referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) after footage was widely shared.\n\nSal Naseem said a \"threshold for a misconduct investigation\" had been met.\n\nThe IOPC's regional director added: \"Decisions on any further action will only be made once our investigation is complete.\"\n\nThe Met had said officers were patrolling the area in which Ms Williams was stopped because of an increase in youth violence.\n\nCommonwealth Games gold medallist Ms Williams, 26, accused the Met of racially profiling her partner, who was driving a black Mercedes.\n\nThree days after the incident, the Met apologised to Ms Williams.\n\nBianca Williams won European and Commonwealth gold in the 4x100m relay in 2018\n\nThe force also referred itself to the IOPC, despite two reviews by the force's directorate of professional standards concluding there had been no misconduct.\n\nThe five officers will now be investigated for potential breaches of police standards of professional behaviour relating to use of force; duties and responsibilities; and authority, respect and courtesy, the IOPC said in a statement.\n\nThe IOPC said its independent investigation would focus on seven points including why Mr Dos Santos's car was followed and stopped and whether the force used against Mr Dos Santos and Ms Williams was lawful, necessary, reasonable and proportionate.\n\nIt is also being questioned why a Merlin report, a Met-run database that stores information on children who have become known to the police for any reason, was created for Ms Williams's son.\n\nMr Dos Santos and Ms Williams say police handcuffed them while their son was in the car\n\nInvestigators will also look at whether Ms Williams and Mr Dos Santos \"were treated less favourably because of their race\" as well as the accuracy of the accounts provided by the officers and the \"appropriateness of the communications\" issued by the Met.\n\nThe IOPC statement said it would look at whether there were grounds for Mr Dos Santos to be kept in handcuffs after he had been searched.\n\nIt added: \"In relation to Ms Williams the potential breaches, which will all be thoroughly investigated, include taking hold of her without first having sought her co-operation with the search; handcuffing her initially and continuing to handcuff her after she had been searched; her continued detention and whether there were grounds to do so.\"\n• None Police 'willing to learn' after athlete stopped\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Local councils in England will receive £30m to fund measures including Covid marshals, to ensure the public and businesses follow coronavirus rules.\n\nA further £30m in government funding will be split between police forces in England and Wales to aid enforcement.\n\nMarshals will not have powers to enforce the law but will advise people on how to follow the rules, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said.\n\nThe Local Government Association warned authorities are at \"tipping point\".\n\nThe government said the funding would help step up enforcement of coronavirus rules in a bid to tackle the rise of infections.\n\nMr Jenrick told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Covid marshals could knock on doors, as they had done in places such as Leicester, but would not be able to enter properties.\n\nHe said: \"They won't have the power to enforce the law so if there are particularly egregious examples they would need to escalate that to the police and I think that is the right thing to do. We are not expecting local council officers to get involved in that.\"\n\nSome of the funding will go towards environmental health officers who do have enforcement powers to ensure businesses obey the restrictions, Mr Jenrick said.\n\nHe said he expected the funding to be \"used sensitively to help to educate, inform and engage members of the public\".\n\nNesil Caliskan, from the Local Government Association (LGA), welcomed the funding, but said in many areas regulatory services are already \"at tipping point\".\n\nHe said with councils leading local work to tackle Covid-19 the government needed to ensure they had the funding to maintain \"vital trading standards and environmental health services over the next six months and beyond\".\n\nThe additional funding for police forces comes after calls from Martin Hewitt, chairman of the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC), for more support for \"specific Covid patrolling activity\".\n\nNPCC figures showed that after a 28% drop in crime at the height of lockdown, in the four weeks to 30 August levels were at 3% below those in the same period last year.\n\nMr Hewitt said: \"This additional funding will go some way to covering the cost of this at a time when crime and demand on policing is almost back to the levels seen before the pandemic.\"\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel said the government had been clear with infections rising \"we will not allow a small minority of people to reverse our hard-won progress\" and said the funding would strengthen the police's role in enforcing the law.\n\nJohn Apter, chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, said officers must keep their discretion about how best to use resources with forces already \"overstretched\".\n\nLabour's shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said the funding was not enough for forces and councils already under pressure even before the pandemic.\n\n\"They have come under huge strain, not least as they went into this crisis weakened by a decade of cuts that saw officer numbers fall and council funding slashed,\" he said.\n\nThe Home Office has also launched a scheme to allow police forces to recover losses due to the pandemic from income generating work, such as policing sporting events.\n\nThey will be able to recoup 75p in every £1 of budgeted income after absorbing 5% of the losses.", "Two weeks in, the NHS Covid-19 app for England and Wales seems to have got off to a good start, with more than 16 million downloads so far - but a range of employers are actively discouraging their staff from using it.\n\nEarlier this week, both the pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline and a Hull-based fuel supplier told staff the app should be switched off at work - both said it was unnecessary in their \"Covid-secure\" workplaces.\n\nAnd now, there are numerous reports teachers are being told they should not use the app in school.\n\nI have received a message from a teacher in north-west England who wants to remain anonymous.\n\nThis person downloaded the app on the day it was released and then, last Monday, tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nAs the test had been booked through the app, it then triggered alerts telling three colleagues at the school to go into isolation.\n\nBut then, according to the teacher, the secondary school's business manager told the three people involved to ignore the messages and delete the app if they felt they had not been within 2m (6ft) for at least 15 minutes.\n\nOne of the teachers ignored that advice, went into isolation and had a test.\n\nBut when that proved negative, they returned to work - which is contrary to the government advice to complete your period of isolation even if you have a negative test.\n\nMy anonymous contact told me: \"Too many schools want to keep staff in, even if it means breaking the law.\n\n\"I am in a school with about 75-80% black African heritage intake, so our demographic is at very high risk.\"\n\nWe have also heard of a school in Eastbourne, in Sussex, telling teachers not to use the app \"in school time\".\n\nOne head teacher told his colleagues there was a danger a staff member could receive an alert relating to their external activities, which would then trigger more alerts affecting the school.\n\nEast Sussex County Council said it had not issued any guidance on the matter, but suggested the school might have based its policy on an interpretation of a national guidance document.\n\nThe prime minister visited a secondary school in his constituency last week\n\nAnd more cases keep coming in.\n\nA teacher in the Midlands messaged me to say it had been suggested he and his colleagues \"delete the app and ignore messages so [as] not to interfere [or] risk A-level resits\".\n\nOne teacher, however, had a different story.\n\n\"Our headmaster has advised staff and pupils over 16 to use the app,\" he said.\n\n\"This is what persuaded me to use it.\n\n\"Our head has been amazing.\n\n\"I feel looked after, like he cares about the staff as well as the kids.\"\n\nA Department of Health official said: \"We want as many people to download and use the app as possible.\n\n\"It is important to use the NHS Covid-19 app at all times unless in specific scenarios which are set out in our guidance.\"\n\nThat guidance says contact tracing should be turned off at work when:\n\nBut while some teachers may be locking their phones away some of the time, these exemptions do not appear to justify a blanket ban on using the app in schools – or indeed at GlaxoSmithKline's labs and factories.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Watch: How to install the NHS Covid-19 app\n\nPart of the issue seems to be a lack of understanding of how the app works.\n\nIt is only if a member of staff tests positive and the app determines they have had close contact with another app user for a significant period that alerts will be sent telling those people to isolate.\n\nSo employers need to ask themselves if a member of staff tests positive, why would you not want colleagues at risk of spreading the infection alerted as swiftly as possible?", "Three times as many people have died from Covid-19 than from flu and pneumonia in England and Wales this year, according to official figures.\n\nBetween January and August 2020, there were 48,168 deaths due to Covid-19 compared to 13,600 from pneumonia. Only 394 were due to flu.\n\nThe Office for National Statistics analysis looked at the underlying cause of death.\n\nDeaths from flu have been particularly low this year.\n\nThe highest number of deaths from flu and pneumonia occurred in January, during winter, when there is usually lots of flu around.\n\nBut deaths due to Covid-19 were higher between March and June - after the epidemic started and lockdown began.\n\n\"The mortality rate for Covid-19 is also significantly higher than influenza and pneumonia rates for both 2020 and the five-year average,\" said Sarah Caul, from the ONS.\n\nThe figures show that Covid-19 is a bigger risk to people than flu, partly because there is a vaccine that protects those at risk against the flu strain circulating every year. The coronavirus is a brand new infection and there is, as yet, no vaccine.\n\nProf Rowland Kao, from the University of Edinburgh, said the much larger number of deaths from Covid \"may be due to either increased numbers of infections or increased mortality amongst those infected, or both\".\n\nSome of those who died this year from Covid-19 may have died from flu in a normal year, thereby reducing the flu death figures.\n\nLow numbers of Covid, flu and pneumonia deaths in July and August reflect low levels of all three diseases during the summer months. The latest data from Public Health England shows flu is still at very low levels. Colds are the most common respiratory virus in circulation just now.\n\nFlu and pneumonia are often lumped together because many cases of pneumonia are actually caused by flu.\n\nLike Covid-19, deaths from flu and pneumonia are linked to respiratory infections. The people at risk of all three conditions are similar too.\n\nBetween January and August, people dying from Covid-19 made up 12% of all deaths for that period - which was 389,835 in total.\n\nIn the same period, pneumonia was responsible for 3.5% and flu 0.1% of all deaths.\n\nCovid-19 was the underlying cause of death in 95% of cases when flu and pneumonia were also mentioned on the death certificate.\n\nWhile men were more likely to die of Covid-19, women were likely to die from pneumonia. This was true in both England and Wales.", "The rare raptor, seen only a handful of times in the UK, was spotted at Moulton West Fen earlier\n\nAn enormous bone-eating vulture, rarely seen in the UK, has been spotted in the skies over Lincolnshire.\n\nThe bearded vulture, or lammergeier, is normally found in Alpine regions, and has a wing span of 2.5m (8.2ft).\n\nThe rare raptor was captured on film by Mark Hawkes at Moulton West Fen earlier after news of its arrival circulated on social media.\n\nIt was recently spotted in Norfolk, having spent the summer roosting in the Peak District.\n\nMr Hawkes, who lives in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, said he drove to the area after reading the news on the \"birder grapevine\".\n\nHe was lucky enough to see the it flying around with crows, and later \"sitting tight in a field\", he said.\n\nMr Hawkes added that about 200 other enthusiasts had also made the trip.\n\nAnother birder, Will Bowell, said it was an amazing sight to see, adding he was looking forward to seeing where it went from here.\n\nThe bird was first captured on film earlier this year in the Peak District.\n\nTeenager Indy Kiemel Greene photographed the bird in the Peak District in July\n\nAt the time, Tim Birch, from Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, said the bird - dubbed \"Vigo\" - was about two years old and had flown over to the UK from the Alps, where the endangered species is being reintroduced.\n\nPreviously, the only other reported sighting of a bearded vulture in the UK was in 2016, around Dartmoor and Monmouthshire.\n\nBut despite its enormous size, the bird is not dangerous to people or farm animals, and feeds on scavenged bones, Mr Birch added.\n\nBearded vultures are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List - meaning they are a \"near threatened\" species.\n\nThey get their name from a distinctive tuft of feathers under their lower beak.\n\nFollow BBC East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.", "PureGym said the post \"was removed as soon as it was brought to our attention\"\n\nFitness centre operator PureGym has apologised \"unreservedly\" for an \"unacceptable\" Facebook post from one of its gyms about slavery.\n\nThe Luton and Dunstable gym said \"slavery was hard and so is this\" regarding a workout designed to \"celebrate black history month\".\n\nIn a statement PureGym said the post was \"wholly unacceptable\" and \"was not approved or endorsed by the company\".\n\nPureGym added it was removed \"as soon as it was brought to our attention\".\n\nThe company is the UK's largest gym chain by membership.\n\nThe workout, entitled \"12 Years of Slave\" after the Oscar-winning movie with a similar title, included 12 different moves such as burpees, push ups and box jumps.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by PureGym This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMany users responded angrily to the gym's Facebook post with one saying PureGym had an \"offensively tone-deaf marketing team\" while another said it was \"wrong, insensitive and horrendous on all levels\".\n\nPureGym said: \"Each of our 271 gyms has its own social media channels which are run locally.\n\n\"We take this matter extremely seriously and are urgently investigating how and why this post was made.\"\n\nThe 2013 film 12 Years A Slave, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, was based on the memoirs of Solomon Northup - a black musician sold into slavery in the US in 1841.\n\nThe Labour MP for Luton North, Sarah Owen, said on Twitter the \"offensive advert shows exactly why we need Black History Month and why the Black Lives Matter movement is so important\".\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Senator Mike Lee, who later tested positive for Covid-19, seen hugging other attendees\n\nUS President Donald Trump's tweet on Friday confirming that he and his wife had tested positive for coronavirus shocked the world.\n\nWith Mr Trump now in hospital, there are growing questions about how the pair were exposed to the virus.\n\nA crowded Rose Garden event is coming under intense focus - the ceremony on 26 September where Mr Trump formally announced his nomination of the conservative Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court. The World Health Organization says it commonly takes around five to six days for symptoms to start after contracting the virus.\n\nFootage from the scene showed few attendees wearing masks. The seating was not set two metres (six feet) apart, while some bumped fists, shook hands or even hugged one another in greeting.\n\nEight people who attended are now confirmed to have the virus - although it is unclear exactly where and when they caught it. Aside from the president and the First Lady:\n\nMr and Mrs Trump tested positive after the president's communications director, Hope Hicks, contracted the virus. She did not attend the Rose Garden event.\n\nGuidelines published by the Centers for Disease Control recommend six feet of distance between people outside your home, and covering your nose and mouth when others are around you.\n\nDozens of lawmakers, family members and staff from the White House were at the event. Those who have tested positive were seated in the first few rows of the crowd.\n\nThose who have tested positive were sat in the first few rows of the packed event\n\nGatherings of more than 50 people at an event are banned under Washington DC coronavirus regulations, although federal property like the White House is exempt.\n\nThe Washington Post reports that authorities have left contact tracing efforts to the Trump administration. An official from Mayor Muriel Bowser's office told the paper that if all eight people were infected at the event, it would be one of the highest community spread incidents Washington DC has experienced.\n\nCity council member Brooke Pinto told the Washington Post it was \"disappointing that the White House has flaunted not wearing masks and gathering large crowds\".\n\n\"That is not only dangerous messaging for the country, but it is directly threatening to our efforts to decrease our spread across the district,\" she said.\n\nSome of the event last Saturday also took place inside.\n\nSome of the event took place inside the White House\n\nThe president stood next to Amy Coney Barrett as she delivered her speech. Ms Barrett tested negative on Friday, according to a White House spokesperson.\n\nVice-President Mike Pence and his wife Karen also tested negative. Mr Pence sat across the aisle from Mrs Trump at the ceremony.\n\nAttorney General William Barr sat in the same row as the vice-president. A Department of Justice spokesperson announced on Friday that Mr Barr had tested negative.\n\nJohns Hopkins University coronavirus trackers say that 7.3 million people in the US have contracted the virus, the highest figure in the world.\n\nThe country also has the highest death toll, with more than 209,000 people killed.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. President Trump's seven days before his Covid-positive test", "Further restrictions could be introduced \"in the near future\" to stop the spread of Covid-19 in Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon has said.\n\nThe first minister was due to meet advisers and ministers on Monday and Tuesday to discuss fresh measures.\n\nShe said it was \"vital that we do everything we can\" to slow the virus and that \"not acting costs lives\".\n\nSome advisers have backed the idea of a \"circuit breaker\" lockdown as a \"short, sharp shock\" to the spread of Covid-19.\n\nNational Clinical Director Jason Leitch told BBC Scotland that two weeks of heightened restrictions could push the course of the pandemic back by 28 days and \"buy time\" ahead of winter.\n\nHowever, Ms Sturgeon stressed that the term circuit breaker could mean \"a number of things\", and said she would give the public and parliament \"as much notice as possible\" about any changes.\n\nA further 697 cases of coronavirus were reported in Scotland on Monday, with 12.8% of people newly tested returning a positive result.\n\nThere has been a sharp increase in the number of people in hospital being treated for the virus over recent weeks, with 218 currently in hospital and 22 in intensive care.\n\nMs Sturgeon said this meant ministers had to take \"very difficult decisions\" about imposing fresh restrictions.\n\nThe government has consistently warned that fresh measures might need to be introduced ahead of the winter, when the NHS is under greater pressure.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Scotland's Seven Days programme, Mr Leitch said a circuit-breaker - a short period of tightened restrictions - was about \"buying yourself more time\" and reducing the \"R number\" or reproduction rate of the virus.\n\nThis measure tracks the average number of people an individual who has Covid-19 would be expected to infect, and which the government believes currently could be as high as 1.7.\n\nMr Leitch said a circuit breaker would not be a full lockdown like the one introduced across the country in March.\n\nHe said there might be \"some choices in there about schools or about further education - but fundamentally a short, sharp shock to the R number.\n\n\"You get the R number down, you get the numbers down to a reasonable level and then you can begin to reintroduce some of the things that you've closed.\n\n\"So the idea is that a two-week, roughly, circuit-breaker, would buy you 28 days. You don't know that for sure, because it's not an exact science, but it would buy you about a month in the pandemic.\"\n\nAs cases rise, it doesn't take much to go from dealing with small outbreaks successfully to the virus spreading out of control. It becomes much harder to spot where outbreaks start, stretching the Test and Protect system.\n\nThis is why some favour the idea of a \"circuit breaker\". Introducing a lot of restrictions all at once - perhaps for a couple of weeks - means you can successfully drive infection rates down and you regain control.\n\nBut most experts will say that a circuit breaker only buys you time and may have to be done several times to have an impact. It goes without saying, the stricter the conditions, the bigger the difference in denting that R number, the rate of transmission.\n\nIt would make sense to do it when the schools are off and when there is still some economic support through the furlough scheme, but the October break comes at different times in Scotland - and also earlier than the rest of the UK. The first minister has also said she would prefer a four nations approach to major changes in restrictions.\n\nThis is the dilemma for the government now. Officials have to decide just how far to go and if, or when, to push the button.\n\nAt her daily coronavirus update, Ms Sturgeon said she was \"hopeful\" that the recent curbs introduced in September - including a ban on people visiting each other in their homes - would \"help us stem the increase of the virus\".\n\nHowever, she said: \"There may well be a need for some further restrictions in the near future.\"\n\nThe first minister is to meet advisers to study the latest clinical advice later on Monday afternoon, and will then hold discussions with her cabinet on Tuesday.\n\nShe could potentially announce any changes at Holyrood as soon as Tuesday afternoon.\n\nMs Sturgeon said: \"If we do decide more restrictions are necessary, I want to assure you that we will give the public and the parliament as much notice as possible.\n\n\"If we decide extra restrictions are necessary, it is because we deem it vital to get the virus under control and avoid unnecessary loss of life.\"\n\nAt Monday's briefing, Chief Medical Officer Dr Gregor Smith said that \"applying measures in a short, sharp way\" could bring down the growth rate of the pandemic while also reducing the number of cases in circulation.\n\nMs Sturgeon said such a move would be about \"buying some time that gets you through winter\". She said it was important to suppress the virus \"while we're waiting on other things to happen\" - such as the development of a vaccine.\n\nThe first minister also said \"four nation\" talks with the UK government and other devolved administrations were due to be held on Monday afternoon.\n\nDuring the briefing, Ms Sturgeon also announced a relaxation to the rules on the number of adults who can attend parent and baby groups.\n\nUp to 10 adults will now be able to gather at the same time when their babies are under a year old, although the existing limit of five parents remains when the children are over 12 months.", "Jeni Larmour from County Armagh was named as one of the students who died\n\nThree university students and a man have died in suspected drugs-related incidents in the north-east of England.\n\nTwo 18-year-old women and a 21-year-old man died in Newcastle, and another man, who was also 18, died in Washington, Northumbria Police said.\n\nOne of those who died has been been named as Newcastle University student Jeni Larmour, 18, from County Armagh.\n\nPolice said ketamine and MDMA were \"suspected to have been a factor in the deaths of the students.\"\n\nA large-scale investigation has been launched and officers have been searching student accommodation with sniffer dogs.\n\nTen people have been arrested and released on bail as inquiries continue.\n\nEmergency services were called to student accommodation on Newcastle's Richardson Road twice over the weekend\n\nMs Larmour had been \"a model pupil\" and deputy head girl at The Royal School Armagh, the school said in a statement.\n\n\"Her outstanding qualities as a pupil were recognised in her final year when she was appointed deputy head girl, a role she carried out to a very high standard,\" it said.\n\nNewcastle University said its students had been in the city for less than 48 hours when they died.\n\nVice-chancellor Chris Day has written to all students warning them about the two tragedies.\n\n\"We are all heartbroken and our thoughts and condolences are with their families, friends and loved ones at this most difficult of times.\n\n\"We know that many of you will be affected by this distressing news.\n\n\"Whatever difficulties you have gone through, we have ample support both at the university and in the city,\" he said\n\n\"Whatever those problems are, please do not turn to excessive alcohol or drugs to solve them because you have seen the potential consequences.\"\n\nThe university's students' union urged students, and all young people in the area, to \"look out for each other\".\n\nOne of those who died was a student at Northumbria University\n\nMs Larmour was pronounced dead at a building on Richardson Road shortly after 06:00 BST on Saturday.\n\nLater on Saturday, at about 16:00, emergency services were called to a man on the Coach Road Estate in Washington who had suffered a cardiac arrest after reportedly taking MDMA, police said.\n\nOn Sunday, at about 08:15, police were called to Newcastle's Melbourne Street when a 21-year-old Northumbria University student became ill. It is believed he had taken MDMA. He died in hospital.\n\nThen just after 13:00 on Sunday, another 18-year old female student was found dead at the same student building where Ms Larmour had died the previous day. Police said it was \"believed ketamine had been present at the address\".\n\nCh Insp Steve Wykes said it was \"too early\" to say whether a \"bad batch of drugs\" was involved.\n\nHe added: \"What we must remember is illegal drugs are never safe and so that message is incredibly important.\n\n\"But we are conducting significant inquiries to try and understand what the substances involved do contain.\"\n\nProfessor Fiona Measham, chair in criminology at Liverpool University and co-founder of the harm-reduction charity The Loop, said she believed lockdown restrictions were of \"concern\".\n\n\"Particularly because nightclubs are closed and the pubs are closing early,\" she told BBC Radio Newcastle.\n\n\"I think the reason it's a concern about nightclubs in particular is that nightclubs often have paramedics, they have harm-reduction services and they have security staff that help keep people safe.\n\n\"So if you close the nightclubs, you lose that safety net.\"\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A technical glitch that meant nearly 16,000 cases of coronavirus went unreported has delayed efforts to trace contacts of people who tested positive.\n\nPublic Health England said 15,841 cases between 25 September and 2 October were left out of the UK daily case figures.\n\nThey were then added in to reach Saturday's figure of 12,872 new cases and Sunday's 22,961 figure.\n\nPHE said all those who tested positive had been informed. But it means others in close contact with them were not.\n\nThe issue has been resolved, PHE said, with outstanding cases passed on to tracers by 01:00 BST on Saturday.\n\nThe technical issue also means that the daily case totals reported on the government's coronavirus dashboard over the past week have been lower than the true number.\n\nBBC health editor Hugh Pym said daily figures for the end of the week were \"actually nearer 11,000\", rather than the about 7,000 reported.\n\nLabour has described the glitch as \"shambolic\".\n\nThe BBC has been told by senior public health officials in the north-west of England that a significant proportion of the unreported cases are from the area.\n\nCities such as Liverpool and Manchester already have among the highest infection rates in the country, at about 10 times the national average.\n\nBBC analysis found the number of cases reported for the week to 1 October increased by 92.6% in the north west after taking in the missing tests - with similar rises reflected across England.\n\nThe increase is mostly down to the missing tests, but the figures also included some results which came back after 2 October.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"I can't give you those figures but all those people are being contacted\"\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said the cases data had been \"truncated\" and \"lost\", but added all people who had tested positive had been contacted and the tracers were \"now working through all the contacts\".\n\nMeanwhile, the head of the government's vaccine taskforce, Kate Bingham, has told the Financial Times that less than half of the UK population could be vaccinated against coronavirus.\n\n\"There is going to be no vaccination of people under 18,\" she said. \"It's an adult-only vaccine for people over 50, focusing on health workers, care home workers and the vulnerable.\"\n\nMr Johnson has warned it could be \"bumpy through to Christmas\" and beyond as the UK deals with coronavirus.\n\nSpeaking to the BBC's Andrew Marr on Sunday, the PM said there was \"hope\" of beating Covid, and called on the public to \"act fearlessly but with common sense\".\n\nIn an interview with the Sun, Rishi Sunak has defended his Eat Out to Help Out scheme, saying he had \"no regrets\", after suggestions it may have helped fuel the second wave of coronavirus cases.\n\nAt a time when the testing system has come under intense scrutiny after reports of delays and a system struggling to keep up with demand, the latest revelation could not have come at a more awkward moment for the government at Westminster.\n\nBecause the nearly 16,000 extra positive test results had been not entered into the test and trace system, their recent contacts were not immediately followed up.\n\nExperts advise that ideally contacts should be tracked down within 48 hours.\n\nOfficials say the technical problem - thought to be IT related - has been resolved, with all the new cases added into totals reported over the weekend.\n\nBut all this will hardly improve public confidence in the testing system in England.\n\nAnd it muddies the waters for policy makers and officials trying to track the spread of the virus at what the prime minister has called a \"critical moment\".\n\nOn Sunday, the government's coronavirus dashboard said that, as of 09:00 BST, there had been a further 22,961 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK, bringing the total number of cases in the UK to 502,978.\n\nAnother 33 people were reported to have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Sunday.\n\nPublic Health England's interim chief executive Michael Brodie said a \"technical issue\" was identified overnight on Friday, 2 October in the process that transfers Covid-19 positive lab results into reporting dashboards. He said the majority of the unreported cases had occurred in the \"most recent days\".\n\nIt was caused by some data files reporting positive test results exceeding the maximum file size.\n\nMr Brodie said they worked with NHS Test and Trace to \"quickly resolve the issue and transferred all outstanding cases immediately into the NHS Test and Trace contact tracing system\".\n\n\"We fully understand the concern this may cause and further robust measures have been put in place as a result,\" he said.\n\nTest and Trace and Public Health England joint medical adviser Susan Hopkins said a thorough risk assessment had been undertaken \"to ensure outstanding cases were prioritised for contact tracing effectively\".\n\nPHE said NHS Test and Trace have made sure there are enough contact tracers working, and are working with local teams to ensure they also have sufficient resources to be urgently able to contact all cases.\n\nThe number of call attempts is being increased from 10 to 15 over 96 hours.\n\nThere have been clear problems with the government's Test and Trace data, but they do not change our view of the UK's trajectory.\n\nCases surged at the beginning of September, they may still be climbing, but not as quickly as anticipated just a few weeks ago.\n\nThis perspective comes from three key sets of data - the Office for National Statistics, the React study by Imperial College London and the Covid symptom tracker app.\n\nNone are blighted by either the current issues with the Test and Trace data or by people struggling to access a test.\n\nThe real fallout of the weekend's statistical chaos is not the numbers, but the people who should have been contact-traced, told to quarantine and instead may have been unwittingly passing on the virus.\n\nLabour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: \"This is shambolic and people across the country will be understandably alarmed.\"\n\nHe called for Health Secretary Matt Hancock to explain \"what on earth has happened\" and what he plans to do to fix test and trace.\n\nMr Hancock is due to update MPs about coronavirus on Monday afternoon.\n\nBridget Phillipson, shadow chief secretary to the treasury, told BBC Breakfast she wanted to know whether it had had \"any impact on government decision making around local restrictions\".\n\nPHE data shows Manchester now has the highest rate of infection in England, at 495.6 cases per 100,000 people in the week to 1 October, from 223.2 the week before. Liverpool has the second highest rate, up to 456.4 from 287.1 per 100,000. Knowsley in Merseyside, Newcastle, Nottingham, Leeds and Sheffield have also seen sharp rises.\n\nNews of the glitch in the daily count first emerged late on Saturday, when the UK announced more than 10,000 new coronavirus cases for the first time since mass testing began.\n• None 1,980cases per day, on average, were missed in that time\n\nThe government said the technical issue meant some cases during the week were not recorded at the time, so were included in Saturday's data.\n\nThe daily total rose from 4,044 on Monday to a then-high of 7,143 on Tuesday. However, over the next four days the daily total remained stable at a time when continued increases might have been expected.\n\nThen came the big leap in numbers - a far bigger day-on-day increase than at any time in the entire pandemic - which was announced on Saturday, five hours later than usual, and was accompanied by the government explanation.\n\nHave you recently tested positive? Have you been contacted by test and trace? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "A hack on Grindr allowed anyone with the email address linked to a valid account to reset the user's password and take over their profile.\n\nSecurity experts revealed the vulnerability online - and reported it the LGBT dating app.\n\nIt enabled full access to an individual's account, including images, messages and HIV status.\n\nGrindr said: \"Thankfully, we believe we addressed the issue before it was exploited by any malicious parties.\"\n\nThe flaw was discovered by French security researcher Wassime Bouimadaghene and documented by security experts Troy Hunt and Scott Helme.\n\nHackers could find a reset-password link within the website's code\n\nGrindr chief operating officer Rick Marini told news website TechCrunch: \"We are grateful to the researcher who identified a vulnerability.\n\n\"The reported issue has been fixed.\"\n\nGrindr was working to improve reporting procedure and incentives for security researchers to flag these issues, Mr Marini added.\n\nIn 2018, the app was criticised for sharing data, including HIV status, with two external companies.\n\nIt said the information had been shared to help test and improve the app.", "Lord Reed has spoken to the BBC about the lack of people from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds among the Supreme Court's 12 justices\n\nThe new Supreme Court president says he hopes a justice from an ethnic minority background will be appointed before his retirement in six years' time.\n\nLord Reed said the lack of diversity among the 12 Supreme Court justices was a situation \"which cannot be allowed to become shameful if it persists\".\n\nOnly 4% of senior judges appointed to the High Court or above are from ethnic minority backgrounds.\n\nLord Reed has taken over as president of the Supreme Court from Lady Hale.\n\nIn his first media interview since taking on the role, and when asked when there might be a justice from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background appointed to the court, Lord Reed told the BBC: \"I hope that will be before I retire which is in six years' time.\"\n\nLast month black barrister Alexandra Wilson was mistaken for a defendant three times in the same morning at a magistrates' court.\n\n\"I thought that was appalling,\" Lord Reed said.\n\n\"Alexandra Wilson is a very gifted young lawyer, an Oxford graduate who has won umpteen scholarships, and for her to be treated like that was extremely disappointing to say the least,\" he said.\n\nMs Wilson received an apology from Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service for \"the totally unacceptable behaviour\".\n\nAsked about a judge of South Asian heritage who was mistaken on numerous occasions for the court clerk, he said: \"That is down to ignorance and unconscious bias which has to be addressed by the courts service.\"\n\nAlexandra Wilson, who specialises in family and criminal law, said she did not expect to \"constantly justify my existence at work\"\n\nDiversity has remained a stubbornly difficult issue for the judiciary which has often been described as \"stale, male and pale\".\n\nCurrently just 4% of senior judges appointed to the High Court or above are from a black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.\n\nThe figure rises to 8% of lower court judges and 12% of tribunal judges, a 2% increase compared with 2014 in both cases.\n\nThe representation of women is better, but still unequal.\n\nCurrently 32% of court judges and 47% of tribunal judges are women.\n\nThe proportion has increased in recent years, but remains lower in senior court appointments with women making up just 26% of High Court and more senior judges.\n\nUntil Lady Hale's departure there were three female Supreme Court justices.\n\nOften called the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court is a big beast.\n\nIt is the final court of appeal for all UK civil cases and criminal cases from England, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as hearing appeals on points of law of great public and constitutional importance.\n\nUnlike its more powerful US counterpart, it cannot strike down legislation, but it can judicially review the actions of ministers and other public bodies and decide if they are lawful.\n\nThat gives it huge power, seen to the full last year when the court unanimously declared \"unlawful\" the advice Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave the Queen to suspend Parliament in the lead up to the Brexit deadline.\n\nLord Reed succeeded Lady Hale as President of the Supreme Court\n\nIt showed that independent judges can halt the might of government in its tracks if ministers have acted unlawfully and that no-one is above the law. That led some to accuse the court of judicial activism.\n\n\"What we are doing isn't activism. It's giving effect to the law,\" Lord Reed said.\n\n\"The fact that some of the topics can be politically sensitive is something which we cannot allow to deter us from applying the law which Parliament has enacted. That's what we're here for.\"\n\nThe government has set up a panel to examine judicial review.\n\nIt will consider whether certain executive decisions should be decided on by judges, and which grounds and remedies should be available in bringing claims against the government.\n\nLord Reed was not impressed with a Home Office video, tweeted in August, which described \"activist\" lawyers who represent migrants arguing they have a right to remain in the UK.\n\nThe animated video said current regulations were open to abuse allowing \"activist lawyers\" to delay and disrupt returns.\n\n\"I think that was unfortunate and I understand that the government has acknowledged that.\n\n\"There is no question of people being activist simply because they are doing their job,\" he said - underscoring that the lawyer's job is to see clients get the treatment they are entitled to by law.\n\nThe government took down the video, but some saw its posting as as a deliberate attempt to pick a fight with lawyers, in order to deflect attention from the fact that migrants claiming asylum are sometimes unlawfully removed from the UK in breach of international human rights laws.\n\nLord Reed acknowledged there was a risk in applying the label \"activist\" to lawyers and then withdrawing it because it can lodge in the public's mind.\n\n\"It's important that people are careful in the language that they use,\" he said.\n\nLord Reed wants to maintain the standing of the Supreme Court as \"one of the very top courts in the world whose judgements are cited and followed by other courts around the world\".\n\nHowever, at a time when the government has placed the constitutional role of judges under intense scrutiny, he is keen to strengthen the relationship between the court and Parliament.\n\n\"Some of the reaction to the judgements that we gave relating to actions government was taking in the course of the Brexit negotiations revealed a lack of understanding of what our role was or how we operate - and perhaps a degree of suspicion of what our motives might be,\" he acknowledged.\n\nSo, he is exploring with the Speaker's office how to enable members of Parliament to question and discuss with the justices how they decide cases.\n\nUnderstandably, Lord Reed would not be drawn on the Internal Market Bill which enables the government to break its international treaty obligations under the EU Withdrawal Agreement.\n\nIt is, after all, still before Parliament.\n\nBut in the next six years the Supreme Court is likely to remain locked into what is perhaps the constitutional clash of our times, between a powerful government that wants to get its way on policy decisions, and independent judges whose role is to scrutinise the lawfulness of those decisions.", "Boris Johnson is being urged to end a lockdown block on residential school visits or risk destroying the \"great British tradition\" of outdoor education.\n\nSchools have reopened, as have hotels, but official guidance still advises against overnight educational trips.\n\nOutdoor learning \"faces an existential threat\", providers have told the Prime Minister in a letter.\n\nThe rules are under review, governments in England, Wales and Scotland say.\n\nBut according to the letter from UK Outdoors, which represents 15,000 people and organisations, the continuing freeze on residential school trips could cost almost 6,000 jobs before January.\n\nThe letter adds: \"We cannot warn the government in strong enough terms that any decision to prevent residential trips for the rest of the academic year, without support, will permanently close the whole sector.\"\n\nKris Shipway and Kristina Timms are the only two staff members at PGL Marchants Hill, who have not been furloughed\n\nPGL, perhaps the best known company in the business, has announced 670 job losses, a quarter of its workforce.\n\nIts Marchants Hill centre in Surrey would normally be buzzing with the excitement of more than 750 school children and their teachers - but last Friday, as on every day since the start of the lockdown, it was eerily silent.\n\nMost of the 160 staff have been furloughed, leaving managers Kris Shipway and Kristina Timms to keep the site ticking over, ready to reopen.\n\n\"The sadness, that's the biggest thing,\" says Kris.\n\n\"It's about the experiences we're able to give to children... and not to be able to do that has been really hard.\"\n\nIt's a similar story at Rhos y Gwaliau, in Snowdonia, North Wales.\n\n\"We've been completely empty for six months now. We've had no children at the site and we've really missed having them here,\" says instructor Eve Shrimpton.\n\nRhos y Gwaliau has been welcoming children to the mountains from schools in and around Reading, for 40 years.\n\n\"It's something the children look forward to from the beginning of their school careers,\" says Eve, and for some, \"it might be the only opportunity they have in their lifetime to do something like this\".\n\nExploring a mine: Smaller centres like Rhos y Gwaliau can offer more specialised experiences\n\nThe guidelines allow schools to run daytrips - but Rhos y Gwaliau is just too remote for this to work, says Eve's boss Sara Jones.\n\nEven for bigger operations like PGL, day trips cannot compensate for the loss of their core business.\n\n\"Without overnight accommodation, the sector is effectively shut,\" says PGL chief executive Anthony Jones.\n\n\"For us, about 97% of our business relies on overnight accommodation.\"\n\nAbout two million visits have already been lost, says Penrith-based Andy Robinson, chief executive of the Institute of Outdoor Learning and one of the signatories of the letter.\n\nMany have been cancelled completely, with others postponed, but without a reopening date, the new dates might not hold.\n\nAnd the loss is not just of the activities, whether rock climbing, wild camping or the opportunity to ride a zip-wire, it is the chance to be outside for hours in the middle of a wood and to stay away from home without your parents, perhaps for the first time - experiences that help build the soft-skills and resilience so prized by employers.\n\n\"It's not having that building of self confidence at key moments, for example the transition from primary to secondary,\" says Mr Robinson.\n\nOr perhaps \"losing a moment that can spark a lifetime interest in a particular outdoor pursuit\".\n\nHealth and safety is essential to a sector which specialises in taking young people into challenging environments, so all members have signed up to extensive Covid-safe policies and procedures to keep school groups in their separate \"bubbles\".\n\nThese \"make it quite clear that bubbles will not come in contact with other bubbles\", says Anthony Jones.\n\n\"We will put in place segregation, one way systems, staggered meal times separate activities, separated accommodation.\"\n\nHe hopes these measures will convince both parents and policy makers that outdoor education trips are safe.\n\nThe sector feels unfairly penalised, he says: \"We've answered every question that has been put to us.\"\n\nIn Snowdonia, Sara Jones wants government to engage fully with the sector's plans for Covid-safe operating and to set a date for reopening.\n\nShe fears that once furlough ends this month, and without a firm reopening date, she will be unable to keep her highly skilled staff who are often qualified teachers as well as mountain activity specialists.\n\n\"We also ask that while outdoor education centres face this enforced closure that we are appropriately and adequately funded in a targeted way to ensure that we survive this crisis and are here for generations of children in the future,\" she says.\n\nMany staff are qualified specialist instructors as well as teachers, says Sara Jones\n\nAnthony Jones says the sector is ideally placed to help children and young people recover from the lockdown. .\n\n\"We've got these amazing assets, we've got amazing staff that are desperate to show what they can do and how they can help.\"\n\nIn a statement, England's Department for Education said: \"Since the start of term, schools have been able to run non-residential trips.\n\n\"We keep our guidance on both residential and non-residential trips under review, in line with Public Health England advice.\"\n\nThe Welsh government said it was also keeping the issue \"under review\", with non-overnight visits allowed, subject to thorough risk assessments.\n\nThe Scottish government said it was not possible to set out an exact date for a review of the guidance, as this would depend on the trajectory of virus transmission in Scotland between now and the new year.", "Two teenagers armed with knives were trying to rob a grocery store in Chapter Street, Westminster, police said\n\nA police officer has been stabbed as she tried to detain two armed robbers.\n\nTwo officers were in Chapter Street, Pimlico, at 15.42 BST on Sunday when they spotted armed suspects attempting to rob a shop.\n\nThe shopkeeper managed to push the two teenagers out of the Westminster store. Officers then tried to detain the pair.\n\nDespite being stabbed in the abdomen, the officer chased the suspects along Vauxhall Bridge Road, a spokesperson for the Met Police said.\n\nThe suspects, both believed to be 15 years old, were detained a short time later with the assistance of firearms officers.\n\nThe injured officer was taken to hospital, and she was discharged on Sunday evening.\n\nCh Insp Simon Brooker said: \"For this officer to be stabbed on duty is unacceptable but, fortunately, she does not appear to be seriously injured.\"\n\nMayor of London Sadiq Khan said: \"Every day our courageous police officers put themselves in harm's way to keep Londoners safe.\n\n\"Attacks on our police are utterly unacceptable and perpetrators will feel the full force of the law.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "US President Donald Trump has made a short trip to wave to the crowds of people lining the streets outside the hospital where he is being treated for coronavirus.\n\nOn Twitter, the president said he would \"pay a little surprise to some of the patriots we have out on the street\".\n\nMr Trump, who wore a face mask, waved and clapped to his supporters.\n\nBBC's Jon Sopel was reporting live from the scene at the time.", "The debate will take place in Salt Lake City in Utah on Wednesday Image caption: The debate will take place in Salt Lake City in Utah on Wednesday\n\nOn Wednesday night, Republican Vice-President Mike Pence will face Democratic Senator Kamala Harris for the only vice-presidential debate ahead of November's election.\n\nThis election cycle has seen increased scrutiny on Pence and Harris, as they support the campaign of two presidential candidates in their 70s.\n\nWith President Trump now receiving treatment for Covid-19, and more members of the White House announcing positive virus tests, there’s a new emphasis on precautions from event organisers.\n\nFor one, the vice-presidential candidates will stand more than 3m (9.8ft) apart (podiums at the first Trump-Biden debate last week were 2m apart). They will be separated by plexiglass, CNN reports.\n\nCovid testing is already under way for reporters and others planning on attending the debate in Salt Lake City, Utah.\n\nWhether everyone will be required to wear a mask this time remains to be seen.\n\nNow, we want to know: What questions do you have about the vice-presidential debate? You tell us here and we’ll get to work finding the answers.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Chris Williams-Ellis remains in an induced coma with life-changing injuries\n\nThe family of a man seriously ill in hospital with severe burns has demanded to know why it took an hour and a half for an ambulance to arrive.\n\nChris Williams-Ellis, 40, suffered 45% burns to his body following the blaze at his home near Corwen, Denbighshire.\n\nHis family said it took \"several\" 999 calls for an ambulance to arrive before he was air-lifted to hospital.\n\nThe Welsh Ambulance Service Trust has apologised for the \"unacceptable delay\" and is investigating.\n\nMr Williams-Ellis was in a mechanic pit working on a car in the garage of his home at Bryn Saith Marchog when the car caught fire above him.\n\nTrapped under the vehicle, his partner Catherine Stewart helped pull him free before dialling 999. She suffered minor injuries and smoke inhalation during the rescue.\n\nThe blaze on 8 September destroyed the couple's garage and three cars\n\n\"I asked for an ambulance and told them 'he's on fire, he can't breathe' and that we needed a fire engine,\" said Ms Stewart.\n\n\"They called me back two minutes later and told me to put him under water for his burns.\n\n\"The fire engine arrived after 25 minutes but when I asked where the ambulance was they had not been told there was a casualty and they didn't have the training to deal with burns victims.\n\n\"Chris was lying there, very white and shaking. It was so stressful. I kept phoning 999 asking where the ambulance was. The firemen were ringing as well.\n\n\"It was only because one of the fireman happened to have the contact number for the Welsh Air Ambulance service and the helicopter arrived at the same time as the ambulance.\"\n\nMr Williams-Ellis had been in the mechanic pit when the fire broke out above him\n\nTwo hours after the initial 999 call, Mr Williams-Ellis was taken to Whiston Hospital, in Merseyside, where he underwent skin grafts.\n\nHowever, he developed pneumonia and was transferred to Wythenshawe Hospital, Greater Manchester, and placed on an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) machine to take over his heart and lung functions.\n\n\"I was told there was a 50-50 survival rate for people with that significant amount of burns to be on that machine,\" said Ms Stewart.\n\nHe is now in an induced coma and his family are unsure how his life-changing injuries will affect him.\n\nCatherine Stewart said Mr Williams-Ellis was \"such a fighter\"\n\nHis mother Philomene Williams-Ellis wants members of the Wales Ambulance Service NHS Trust (WAST) to be held accountable.\n\n\"I want justice for my son. To me he was left like a charred piece of meat and he deserves better,\" she said.\n\n\"It was three hours from when the accident happened to him having treatment in hospital.\n\n\"The Welsh Ambulance Service left my son burning, cold, dehydrated and in agony for hours.\n\n\"My son is only alive because a member of the fire crew rang the Wales Air Ambulance.\n\n\"I have no faith in the ambulance service and I want the board to be held responsible so this never happens to any other family again.\"\n\nPhilomene Ellis-Williams said she wants the WAST board to \"stand down\"\n\nWAST said it was looking into the \"distressing\" events.\n\nChief executive Jason Killens said: \"Given the very serious nature of what happened, an investigation to determine the exact sequence of events and the cause of the unacceptable delay - for which we are very sorry - is being prioritised and concluded as swiftly as possible.\n\n\"We are an organisation committed to learning and improvement, and have offered to meet the Williams-Ellis family to take them through our findings and any lessons identified in full.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The warning says areas which are usually drier could face peak rainfall levels over the weekend\n\nHomes and businesses are likely to face flooding and some communities could be \"cut off\" as heavy rain is expected to hit Wales.\n\nThe Met Office issued an amber rain warning across most of Wales from midday on Saturday to 12:00 BST on Sunday.\n\nIt said fast-flowing or deep flood-water could cause \"danger to life\".\n\nMany places will see 1-2in (25-50mm) of rainfall, with totals of 2.5-3.5in (70-90mm) expected on higher ground.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Gwent Police | Monmouthshire Officers This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMore than 4.5in (120mm) is expected in some of the most exposed high ground of Snowdonia.\n\nThe warning, which also covers large areas of south-west England and parts of the West Midlands, comes after a day of downpours on Friday, as Storm Alex moved in from France.\n\nThe amber warning also now covers parts of Anglesey and Pembrokeshire\n\nThere are several flood warnings in place, according to Natural Resources Wales.\n\nThe Met Office warned that delays and cancellations to train and bus services were likely and conditions would make driving difficult.\n\n\"The unusual wind direction associated with the rainfall will mean that the peak rainfall totals are likely to occur in some areas that are usually well sheltered and drier during unsettled spells of weather,\" its forecast warned.\n\nRoad police in Powys tweeted they had been dealing with a crash on the A40 Brecon bypass which has now been cleared.\n\nHowever they added: \"With the heavy rainfall we are experiencing today please drive to the road conditions.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Powys Roads Policing This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nTwo temporary water pumps have been set up in a Rhondda Cynon Taf village already hit four times by flooding this year.\n\nThe pumps are to provide \"added protection and reassurance\" for residents of Pentre.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by RCT Council This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Supporters of the president spent hours outside the hospital where he is being treated, and they were rewarded when he drove past on Sunday evening. Before that, they told the BBC's Lebo Diseko why it was important to be there.\n\n\"Donald Trump FOREVER!\" shout his supporters gathered outside Walter Reed military hospital where the US president is being treated.\n\nAs passing cars and trucks hoot support, there are cheers and whoops from the the crowd of MAGA-hat wearers and Trump-Pence 2020 flag-wavers.\n\nThe crowd and the hooting seem to grow every hour - as the world's media stand across the road.\n\nA convoy of cars and trucks honking their horns and waving US flags streams past us.\n\n\"This feels like a soccer parade after a win!\" my colleague remarked.\n\nIt's just a couple of hours since Donald Trump's medical team gave an update on his health, and said that they hope he will be back at the White House on Monday. The crowd and their convoys have grown steadily since.\n\n\"We're cheering for his good health,\" says an African-American supporter called Barbara. \"We want him back as soon as possible, so we're here to tell him that we love him, we're praying for him and we need him in America.\"\n\n\"In America and the WORLD!\" her friend Wanji chips in.\n\nBarbara and Wanji show their love for Trump\n\nShe says the president's critics are persecuting him because he stands up for Christians. \"He has been taking all the stress of America and the world.\"\n\nHis sickness just shows the country is sick, she adds, and like him it is recovering.\n\nNo-one has done as much for African Americans as Donald Trump, they say. That's echoed by a Latino gentleman standing next to them.\n\nWaving two flags - a blue one, which is his and a pink one belonging to his wife, Maurio says: \"I'm very much for such a good president - he's done a lot of stuff for the Spanish people.\"\n\nA little further down the line are a couple who say they flew in from Arizona - a journey of about 2,400 miles, which took them more than four hours. \"We support our president 100%\" says Danny Carroll, who adds they would have travelled even further if they needed to.\n\n\"That's our president - we're all in it together, red, yellow , black and white - we're all precious in his sight.\"\n\nHis wife Jeanie says she doesn't always like the way the president expresses himself but she appreciates his results. She says the couple drive across the country a lot and six years ago, the country was dying economically but now he's brought it back. They plan to stay until he's back at the White House - then make the long journey home.\n\nMauro and Jeanie travelled all the way from Arizona\n\nOf course, the president is no ordinary patient, and when he does go home he will be monitored by his medical team 24/7. But there are still questions left unanswered after Sunday's briefing from his medical team.\n\nThey admitted he his oxygen levels had dipped twice in the last few days - Friday and Saturday - but pressed for details on the second round of oxygen Dr Sean Conley said he would have to check with the nurses.\n\nAnd when it came to possible damage to the president's lungs. Dr Conley said there were some \"expected findings\" but didn't expand on that.\n\nThis comes a day after mixed messages from the medical team and his chief of staff on Saturday.\n\nHe admitted the was trying to present an \"upbeat attitude\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\n\"I didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction and in doing so, you know, it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn't necessarily true.\"\n\nThe fact that last sentence was considered necessary shows an awareness that for at least some Americans, there is a trust gap when it comes to the president's medical team.\n\nBut that's certainly not the view of the crowd gathered here.\n\nFamilies with children joined senior citizens in the festival of well wishers.\n\nThe president knows they're there and rewarded them with an unexpected appearance. His supporters know he appreciates them and they appreciate him.", "The chancellor has vowed to \"always balance the books\", despite increased spending in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nIn a speech to party members, Rishi Sunak said the Conservatives had a \"sacred duty\" to \"leave the public finances strong\".\n\nHe vowed the use the \"overwhelming might of the British state\" to help people find new work.\n\nBut he said debt and spending needed controlling \"over the medium term\".\n\nIn an online speech during the Conservatives' annual party conference, he said: \"I won't stop trying to find ways to support people and businesses.\"\n\nHowever, he added the party could not argue there was \"no limit on what we can spend\", nor that \"we can simply borrow our way out of any hole\".\n\nMr Sunak cited the furlough scheme and its successor, the jobs support scheme, as examples of government action to support employment during the crisis.\n\nHe said though that, although the government would \"keep striving to be creative\" on employment support, he would also have to be \"pragmatic\".\n\nHe told members that \"no chancellor\" would be able to save every job or business, adding changes to the economy due to Covid-19 \"can't be ignored\".\n\nOfficial figures published in September show government borrowed £35.9bn in the previous month, its highest amount for August since records began in 1993.\n\nBorrowing between April and August totalled £173.7bn, as ministers spent billions on coronavirus-related schemes to support the economy.\n\nGovernment borrowing is at stratospheric levels because of the pandemic.\n\nIt is not clear precisely what the chancellor means, promising to get it under control in the \"medium term\".\n\nNor was there even a whisper of how that could be done.\n\nTreasury sources suggested it's unlikely to happen by the time of the next election, likely to be in 2024.\n\nBut while the chancellor's first few months in the job have been characterised by enormous crisis-level spending, that is a characteristic that he is keen to shrug off.\n\nIn an interview after his speech, the chancellor said government debt - which passed £2 trillion for the first time in history in August - was vulnerable to increases in borrowing costs.\n\n\"Now that we have so much debt, it doesn't take a lot for suddenly 'yikes' - we have to come up with X billion pounds a year to pay for higher interest,\" he said.\n\nMr Sunak - who has been touted as a potential future Tory leader - also said he did not want to become PM, and described his \"close personal friendship\" with Boris Johnson.\n\nAsked if he eventually wants to replace Mr Johnson, he replied: \"No. Definitely not seeing what the prime minister has to deal with, this is a job hard enough for me to do.\"\n\nBBC economics editor Faisal Islam said: \"The chancellor knows that just days after his Winter Economic Plan, with unemployment set to go above 5%, and social restrictions intensifying, not loosening, there is now further backroom pressure to increase the generosity of his worker subsidy schemes.\n\n\"This is a continuation of the pattern we have seen in the past few weeks since the cancellation of the Budget. There'll be more support for the economy, but with the really tough decisions - for example, on tax, - put off.\n\nMinisters have pledged additional support to help people find new work.\n\nIn response to his speech, shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds said Mr Sunak had \"nothing to say\" to millions of people whose jobs were at risk.\n\nShe told reporters more \"targeted support\" was required for sectors of the economy that have been hardest hit by restrictions during the pandemic.\n\n\"Sadly there was nothing from the chancellor today to suggest that he grasped the magnitude of the jobs crisis we're facing,\" she added.\n\nDame Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general of business lobby group the CBI, said the best way to balance the books was by \"protecting our economy's ability to recover\".\n\nAdding that the costs of the pandemic had fallen \"deeply and unevenly,\" she said it was vital to protect at-risk sectors such as aviation, manufacturing, and hospitality.\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak told the virtual Conservative Party conference: \"This Conservative government will always balance the books.\"\n\nIf it does, that would be an unusual achievement.\n\nBalancing the books usually means that a government has repaid more than it has borrowed in a year - ie it's in surplus.\n\nThe government can still have debt overall, but the debt hasn't risen during the year.\n\nThe last time that a government balanced the books was under the Labour government in 2000-01, and for the two years before that.\n\nThe most recent Conservative government to achieve that was under Margaret Thatcher in 1988-89 and 1989-90.\n\nAnother measure that recent governments have liked to talk about is whether the economy is growing faster than the debt. If it is, the government can say that debt is falling as a proportion of GDP (which is the value of everything produced by the economy in a year).\n\nThat happened in both 2017-18 and 2018-19.\n• None Coaching and advice for jobseekers in £238m scheme\n• None What jobs are available post-lockdown?", "London Ambulance Service sent five ambulances to the school\n\nThirteen children at a north London school were taken to hospital when they fell ill after eating what they believed were \"sweets\".\n\nThe pupils from La Sainte Union Catholic School, Highgate, were taken by ambulance to hospital for treatment just after midday.\n\nPolice said the sweets were believed to contain tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), an active ingredient of cannabis.\n\nInvestigations are under way to establish the quantity in each sweet.\n\nNo-one is believed to be seriously unwell and the children's parents have been informed.\n\nNo arrests have been made but inquiries have begun to establish what happened.\n\nThe school, which is a girls' Roman Catholic secondary, has not been evacuated.\n\nA spokesman for the school said: \"The students became ill after eating what they believed were sweets.\n\n\"The contents of what the students ate and how they came into possession of them is being investigated by the police.\n\n\"We have made parents aware of this incident.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "MPs have backed the latest stage of a bill to allow undercover agents to commit crimes on operations.\n\nThe government says the legislation will give a \"sound legal footing\" for those who work to \"protect the public\".\n\nBut backbenchers are divided over the implications for human rights and civil liberties, and many have concerns over if the right safeguards are in place.\n\nFormer Tory minister David Davis has warned the bill could \"impinge on innocent people\".\n\nDuring a debate on the bill, shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said Labour would not oppose it at this stage.\n\nBut he said the party would \"seek to improve [it] on the vital issue of safeguards, so the public can have confidence in the process and our law enforcement bodies can carry out that vital work of keeping us all safe\".\n\nHowever, a number of Labour MPs broke party orders to abstain on the vote including former leader Jeremy Corbyn and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell who voted against the bill.\n\nSpeaking in the Commons, another Labour MP Apsana Begum said: \"There is a grave, serious and very real danger [the bill] could end up providing informers and agents with a license to kill.\"\n\nBBC home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani said the legislation would explicitly authorise MI5, the police, the National Crime Agency and other agencies that use informants or undercover agents to commit a specific crime as part of an operation.\n\nThe law will require MI5 officers and others to show the crime is \"necessary and proportionate\", but security officials will not say which crimes they will consider authorising, as it could lead to terrorists and other serious criminals working out who is undercover.\n\nHowever, the legislation stresses agencies must not breach the Human Rights Act, which requires the government to protect life.\n\nA senior judge will report on how the power is used and there will be no role for the Crown Prosecution Service in reviewing the crimes.\n\nOpening the debate earlier on Monday, Home Office minister James Brokenshire said the bill would \"help keep our country safe\".\n\nHe said it would \"ensure operational agencies and public authorities have access to tools to keep us safe from terrorists, safe from serious organised crime groups and safe from those who wish to cause harm to our country and citizens\".\n\nAnd he also pointed to comments by the new director general of MI5, Ken McCallum, that claimed such operations had thwarted 27 terror attacks in the country since March 2017.\n\nBut a number of MPs from across the House raised concerns around safeguards to ensure agents would not be able to commit crimes such as murder or torture.\n\nTory MP Steve Baker said: \"For those of us who like the red meat of law and order, it has forced us to look inside the abattoir and we don't like what we see.\n\n\"I can't imagine ministers will be authorising killing or torture, but [that should be] on the face of the bill so the public can have confidence.\"\n\nLabour's Yvette Cooper, who chairs the Home Affairs Select Committee, also said the safeguards were \"very vague and very broad\", calling for them to be \"strengthened to get this legislation right\".\n\nThe bill will return to the Commons for its next stages on 15 October.", "White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany says she has tested positive for Covid-19. What do we know about the former Trump campaign spokeswoman?\n\nAfter taking the job in April, she immediately made the White House press secretary job more visible by holding regular briefings.\n\nHer predecessor, Stephanie Grisham, did not conduct a single press briefing during her nine-month tenure.\n\nBefore she took the role, Ms McEnany, 31, was a seasoned defender of the president.\n\nShe made frequent television appearances to promote his policies, some of which made headlines for the Harvard Law School graduate.\n\nAs the nation grappled with Covid-19, she came under fire for her early statements on the virus, including suggesting opposition Democrats were \"rooting\" for the pandemic to \"take this President down\".\n\nIn a February appearance on a Fox Business show, she said: \"We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here, we will not see terrorism come here, and isn't that refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama?\"\n\nMs McEnany also previously worked as a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee and in 2018 published a book on the movement behind Mr Trump's 2016 election win.\n\nShe has been criticised for her past support of the \"birther\" conspiracy theory questioning former President Barack Obama's birthplace.\n\nAfter her appointment, former President Bill Clinton's press secretary Joe Lockhart shared a 2012 tweet from McEnany where she said Mr Obama's brother was in \"that hut in Kenya\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Joe Lockhart This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIt is unclear whether Ms McEnany will continue to defend the president from behind the press secretary podium, or if she will opt for Ms Grisham's approach of communicating through tweets and interviews.\n\nIn the days after Trump's diagnosis, many staffers who work at the White House began to wear a mask consistently - a departure from how it had been before the president was infected.\n\nKayleigh McEnany was not one of them.\n\nShe spoke with me and others on the day of Trump's Covid-19 announcement outside of the West Wing, and she chose not to wear a mask in that moment. She was following the example of Larry Kudlow, the director of Trump's National Economic Council, who had spoken with us earlier in the day, also without a mask.\n\nIn this way, they were conveying the president's upbeat assessment of the virus and how it was nearly under control.\n\nBoth McEnany and Kudlow stood two metres from us, following guidelines on social distancing. Yet it was striking to see them go about their daily lives in a way that seemed largely unaffected by the virus. The fact that she has tested positive is a reminder of just how dangerous - and contagious - the virus is.\n\nIt is also a reminder that conveying the president's message through words and actions - whether about the virus or other matters - is a risky undertaking\n\nMs McEnany works alongside Alyssa Farah, the White House's director of strategic communications and Ben Williamson, senior communications adviser.\n\nSarah Huckabee Sanders, who filled the press secretary post before Ms Grisham, has described Ms McEnany and Ms Farah as \"smart and capable women who have been loyal fighters\" for Mr Trump.\n\n\"Their promotions are another example of the president empowering strong women to senior roles in his administration,\" she said.", "The difference in rules for Oldham and Manchester has drawn criticism\n\nNorthern England faces a \"winter of dangerous discontent\" unless the test and trace system improves, the mayor of Greater Manchester has warned.\n\nAndy Burnham said the system was the \"first line of defence against the virus\" and the government were \"over-relying\" on restrictions.\n\nExtra rules are now in force for a growing number of areas in the North.\n\nSpeaking to the BBC's Andrew Marr, Boris Johnson said it was \"too early to say\" if the restrictions were working.\n\nThe prime minister said: \"The advice that we're getting is that, in these areas where we have got stringent local lockdowns, we need to wait and see whether the R [infection rate] starts to come down because some of these things have been intensified […] just in the last few days.\"\n\nMr Burnham said: \"If there are to be local restrictions, they must come with local control of test and trace, a local furlough scheme, and support for our councils and businesses.\n\n\"Put it under local control because the government are using call centres to try and contact people, but we will put boots on the ground and I am absolutely certain that that approach will be more successful.\"\n\nHe also urged the government to consult more with local authorities and clarify rules for neighbouring areas, which he said were \"inconsistent\".\n\nIn Greater Manchester, funerals are limited to 30 people, except Oldham, where they are restricted to 20 people since further rules were enforced in August to curb the spread of coronavirus.\n\nHowever, the rate of cases has recently risen to 336 per 100,000 people in Manchester, while dropping to 177 per 100,000 in Oldham.\n\nBoris Johnson was speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr show\n\nThe prime minister said he \"understands people's frustrations\", adding: \"No one has come up with any better proposals that I am aware of.\"\n\nMr Burnham also voiced concern the North West would be \"levelled down by not just the virus but by the government's failure to support us\".\n\n\"It was frankly unforgiveable that businesses in Bolton were closed down without the people working given support with their wages. That is going to cause massive damage if that approach continues.\n\n\"This could be a winter of dangerous discontent here in the north of England and I think the prime minister needs to wake up to that.\n\n\"I think there's a very real and present danger that Covid-19 is going to widen the north-south divide because we are heading into a winter where the north of England is under restrictions unlike the south.\"\n\n\"It's got be a change moment where the government says if we put you under restrictions, this is the guaranteed support you get in return. We haven't got that at the moment.\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk", "Supporters of Donald Trump have gathered with placards and flowers outside the Walter Reed National Military Hospital near Washington where the president is being treated for coronavirus, and across the United States.\n\nMr Trump's positive Covid-19 diagnosis was made public early on Friday, and that evening he was transported to the hospital for treatment.\n\nHis medical team said late on Saturday that he had made \"substantial progress since diagnosis\" but was \"not out of the woods yet\".\n\nThe diagnosis has upended the 3 November presidential election campaign.\n\nSupporters outside Walter Reed send their best wishes to the president.\n\nCounter-protesters were also in attendance outside the military hospital.\n\nAround the country rallies were held on Saturday where people wished the president a speedy recovery. In California, they held a pro-Trump car caravan....\n\nElsewhere in the country, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, they took to their boats...\n\nPeople also gathered in the New York City borough of Staten Island. The pro-Trump rally had been organised prior to the president's diagnosis.", "Singapore's Changi Airport has warned of a \"daunting period\" ahead as the impact from the Covid-19 pandemic shows no signs of abating.\n\nThe Asian transit hub has been voted world's best airport for the eighth consecutive year.\n\nChangi has suspended operations in two terminals as flights have dropped to the lowest levels in its history.\n\nIt has also suspended the construction of a fifth terminal for at least two years.\n\n\"The battle with Covid-19 has only just begun,\" Changi Airport Group said in its annual report. \"The future does appear daunting with the situation showing no signs of abatement.\"\n\nThe company's yearly results cover the period up until the end of March 2020. This misses out on the much of the severe downturn in passengers since the pandemic took hold in January. Singapore barred the entry and transit of short-term visitors on 23 March.\n\nBut the impact from those months still had a big impact, wiping out earlier gains built up over much of 2019. Profits plunged 36% to S$435m ($319m, £246m).\n\nFor 2020 Changi was voted the world's best airport for an eighth consecutive year, according to rankings by UK-based analysts Skytrax.\n\nLast year, Changi Airport opened Jewel, a shopping and entertainment complex covering 1.5m square feet (14ha). It includes stores and attractions including a rainforest, hedge maze and the world's highest indoor waterfall.\n\nThis new complex has helped cushion the blow from the downturn in visitors, boosting revenue 2.6% to S$3.1bn.\n\n\"Jewel is a new icon for Singapore and has redefined what it means to be an airport,\" Changi Airport Group added.\n\nBut the group still paints a grim picture of the international travel hub and says the recovery is \"highly dependent on how countries around the world manage border controls, the relaxation of air travel requirements and the development of viable medical treatments for the virus.\"\n\nLast week, US airlines began laying off thousands of workers after efforts to negotiate a new economic relief plan in Congress stalled.\n\nAnd this month the aviation trade body, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), downgraded its 2020 traffic forecasts, after \"a dismal end to the summer travel season\".\n\nThe IATA estimates that it will be at least 2024 before air traffic reaches pre-pandemic levels.", "The star read from her new poetry book at the event in Los Angeles\n\nLana Del Rey has upset some of her fans due to her choice of face mask at a recent book signing in California.\n\nThe star appeared at a branch of Barnes and Noble in Los Angeles, where she read passages from her new poetry book Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass.\n\nAt the event, Del Rey wore a glittery, mesh face mask that she'd previously used in a cover shoot for Interview magazine.\n\nIt would appear that the mask provided no barrier to the spread of Covid-19.\n\nThe BBC has contacted Lana Del Rey's team for a comment.\n\n\"Lana, please wear a real mask. I'm begging you be safe,\" wrote a concerned fan, under an Instagram photo of the star at the book signing.\n\n\"I love Lana but this is incredibly irresponsible,\" said another. \"Girl, we're in the middle of a pandemic,\" added a third.\n\nDel Rey's sister, Caroline \"Chuck\" Grant, who livestreamed the poetry reading on Instagram, said the singer had \"tested negative\" and was remaining six feet away from her fans.\n\nHowever, pictures posted on the pop culture Twitter account @Popcrave showed the star posing next to fans after the reading. At least one was not following California's social distancing guidelines.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Pop Crave This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n\"Please tell me that there's some sort of see through/sheer, woven (or clear plastic?) liner under the mesh?\" responded one fan.\n\nIt is possible that there was a transparent, protective layer to the mask. Some stores offer see-through coverings that enable the hard of hearing to lip-read; while other ranges cater to fashion-conscious consumers.\n\nThe star has yet to address the criticism but, on Sunday, posted a video on Instagram in which she read a poem while wearing a camouflage mask, which she removed at the end of the clip.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by lanadelrey This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nFace coverings reduce the spread of coronavirus droplets from coughs, sneezes and speaking.\n\nThey should mainly be worn to protect other people from coronavirus, rather than yourself.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "More home working is likely to be a permanent fixture for a majority of businesses, according to a study.\n\nA survey of just under 1,000 firms by the Institute of Directors (IoD) shows that 74% plan on maintaining the increase in home working.\n\nMore than half planned on reducing their long-term use of workplaces.\n\nA smaller survey of bosses whose firms had already cut workplace use suggested 44% of them thought working from home was proving \"more effective\".\n\n\"Remote working has been one of the most tangible impacts of coronavirus on the economy. For many, it could be here to stay,\" said Roger Barker, director of policy at the IoD.\n\n\"Working from home doesn't work for everyone, and directors must be alive to the downsides. Managing teams remotely can prove far from straightforward, and directors must make sure they are going out of their way to support employees' mental wellbeing.\"\n\nCompanies are not likely to switch fully to home working, he continued.\n\n\"The benefits of the office haven't gone away. For many companies, bringing teams together in person proves more productive and enjoyable. Shared workspace often provides employees the opportunity for informal development and networking that is so crucial, particularly early on in a career.\"\n\nThe UK's oldest business lobby group said 958 company directors were surveyed between 11 and 30 September, mostly from smaller businesses.\n\nThe study follows a BBC survey in August which suggested that 50 of the biggest UK employers had no plans to return all staff to the office full-time in the near future.\n\nThe BBC questionnaire found that 24 firms did not have any plans in place to return workers to the office.\n\nHowever, 20 have opened their offices for staff unable to work from home.\n\nNine in 10 workers who have worked from home during lockdown would like to continue in some form, researchers found in an academic study.\n\nA report published in August by academics at Cardiff and Southampton universities suggests the majority of people working from home are as productive, if not more.\n\nThousands of people were surveyed three times between April and June.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Monday morning. We'll have another update for you at 18:00 BST.\n\nDonald Trump remains in hospital with Covid-19, but on Sunday night, the president, wearing a mask, surprised what he called the \"patriots\" outside the medical centre with a drive-past. The move was strongly criticised by his political rivals and by one doctor at the hospital, who called it \"insanity\". Questions remain about the severity of Mr Trump's illness - the White House originally said he was experiencing \"mild symptoms\", but he's been given oxygen twice and and has received the steroid dexamethasone, normally reserved for serious cases.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nPublic Health England has admitted nearly 16,000 cases of coronavirus diagnosed last week weren't entered into the test and trace system because of a technical glitch. Although the people who tested positive were informed, there was a delay in tracing their contacts. Labour is calling for the health secretary to give a full explanation to MPs. BBC health editor Hugh Pym said the admission couldn't have come at a more awkward moment, given the criticism the system was already facing.\n\nThose out of work for three months or more because of the pandemic will be offered coaching and advice on moving into \"growing sectors\" under a new government scheme - sectors like these. Labour, though, said \"piecemeal\" programmes were \"too little too late\". Where jobs are being created there's a good chance they'll involve home working - and according to businesses, the shift in working practices brought about by the pandemic is here to stay.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"It's going to continue to be bumpy through to Christmas\"\n\nParis will shut all bars and cafes completely from Tuesday as the French government raises the capital's coronavirus alert to maximum. They'll remain closed for at least two weeks. France has been struggling to contain a rising rate of infection which started to grow exponentially in late August. The city of Marseille closed bars, restaurants and gyms last week, despite protestations from local officials.\n\nParis restaurants will be allowed to stay open if they introduce strict anti-viral measures\n\nWhat does touch mean to you, and has coronavirus changed that? BBC Radio 4's Claudia Hammond looks at the results of a new global study about the importance of touch and speaks to people about its role in their lives, especially in these trying times. Elsewhere, much focus recently has been on students and how freshers, in particular, are managing right now. Anoushka Mutanda Dougherty, a second year at Manchester University, tells us it's been tough for many but she's still seeing a lot of optimism.\n\nCovid restrictions have made meeting up for a cuddle difficult for John Marriott and his first grandson, Ollie\n\nFind more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page and get all the latest via our live page.\n\nPlus, with a patchwork of different lockdown rules now in place across the UK, look up the situation in your area with our postcode tool.\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "Transport for London (TfL), the capital's transport authority, has not renewed the licence of Indian taxi app Ola over public safety concerns.\n\nThe cab company has been operating in London since February.\n\nTfL said the firm reported a number of failings including more than 1,000 trips made by unlicensed drivers.\n\nOla said it will appeal the decision and has 21 days to do so. It can operate in the meantime, according to the appeal rules.\n\nThe transport authority said Ola did not report the failings as soon as it knew about them.\n\n\"Through our investigations we discovered that flaws in Ola's operating model have led to the use of unlicensed drivers and vehicles in more than 1,000 passenger trips, which may have put passenger safety at risk,\" Helen Chapman, TfL's director of licensing, regulation and charging, said.\n\n\"If they do appeal, Ola can continue to operate and drivers can continue to undertake bookings on behalf of Ola. We will closely scrutinise the company to ensure passengers safety is not compromised.\"\n\nThe ride-hailing company began operating in Cardiff in 2018 and has since spread to other UK locations.\n\n\"We have been working with TfL during the review period and have sought to provide assurances and address the issues raised in an open and transparent manner,\" Marc Rozendal, Ola's UK Managing Director, said in a statement.\n\n\"Ola will take the opportunity to appeal this decision and in doing so, our riders and drivers can rest assured that we will continue to operate as normal, providing safe and reliable mobility for London.\"\n\nLast week, major rival Uber secured its right to continue operating in London after a judge upheld its appeal against TfL.\n\nThe ride-hailing giant has been granted a new licence to work in the capital, nearly a year after TfL rejected its application, also over safety concerns because of unlicensed drivers.\n\nWestminster Magistrates' Court heard that 24 Uber drivers shared their accounts with 20 others which led to 14,788 unauthorised rides.", "Leonie Williams and six-month-old Marley who has grown to 17lb\n\nLike a lot of new mums, Leonie Williams wanted to breastfeed her baby as the advice she had was \"breast is best\".\n\nBut like many newborn babies, little Marley found it tough and Leonie \"struggled\" to get professional support as the Covid-19 crisis gripped the UK.\n\nA new study has suggested 30% of breastfeeding mums gave up before they wanted to during lockdown because of a \"lack of face-to-face support\".\n\nThe Welsh Government urged women with concerns to talk to maternity staff.\n\nSwansea University researchers said some health visitors were redeployed to help the NHS in its fight against coronavirus in March while house visits were stopped as the UK went under lockdown and \"vital\" breastfeeding support groups shut.\n\nApart from phone advice with her health visitor and video calls to a family with young children, Leonie felt \"isolated\".\n\n\"Add the fact you're exhausted having a newborn, you're in pain through trying to breastfeed, it's our first baby so it's a big adjustment and your hormones are all over the place - it was really tough,\" said the 29-year-old.\n\n\"Then on top of that, you're dealing with a global pandemic.\"\n\nLittle Marley was born just a few days before the UK went under total lockdown\n\nDespite Leonie's best efforts, she \"couldn't continue breastfeeding\" as it was \"too much\" so she switched to feeding Marley formula full-time after about two weeks.\n\nBefore coronavirus, the UK has some of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world - now the lack of support during the pandemic is \"worrying\" experts who say some new mums \"have been let down\".\n\nA worldwide study published in the Lancet in 2016 showed 81% of UK mothers had tried breastfeeding at some point, but only 34% were breastfeeding at six months and 0.5% at 12 months.\n\nIt was below other European countries, and the US, where 79% started, 49% were still going after six months and 27% after a year.\n\nThe latest research, led by Swansea University's Professor of Child Public Health, Amy Brown, said some parents had been left \"isolated\" as \"what little in-person support available disappeared\".\n\nMothers living in high-rise flats, with no private garden or green space nearby, or who didn't have high-speed wifi \"struggled the most\", the study suggested.\n\n\"The whole of maternity services has been completely let down across the board,\" Prof Brown said.\n\n\"There are groups of women whose experiences were destroyed because they couldn't get any help.\n\n\"Health visitors didn't come because of lockdown, maternity staff were redeployed to help the Covid fight and new mums didn't know where else to find support.\"\n\nEmma Elias said she couldn't have continued breastfeeding Dahlia without support\n\nShe added: \"It's like it doesn't matter. Maternity service help isn't just a nice-to-have; it is a major support for parents that shouldn't have been taken away.\"\n\nAlmost one in three of the 1,200 new mums spoken to said lockdown had a \"very negative impact on them\" and they felt \"abandoned and overwhelmed at the intensity of being alone with their baby\".\n\nLeonie can sympathise as, after Marley was born a healthy 7lb 11oz in Bridgend on 10 March, the world \"seemed to just shut down and you felt like you were on your own\".\n\n\"It was a bit manic,\" she recalled. \"The health visitor phoned after two weeks - and I still haven't seen one face to face - and I wanted to continue breastfeeding but I gave up as it was too much.\"\n\nLeonie Williams' first baby Marley started having formula milk regularly after about two weeks\n\n\"It was disappointing but I couldn't,\" she said.\n\n\"I feel guilty as they say breast is best and I tried my best but I was exhausted, in agony and had no support.\"\n\nAlmost two months had passed and the UK was deep into lockdown when Emma Elias gave birth to her second daughter, weighing 7lbs 13.5oz, in Bridgend on 3 May - but Dahlia had \"difficulties with latching\".\n\nJames, Emma, Elodie and Dahlia would only leave the house in lockdown to visit breastfeeding appointments\n\nEmma's experience, however, was slightly different as her health visitor referred the 34-year-old biomedical scientist to the area's breastfeeding coordinator.\n\n\"They were wonderful. It was the only time we'd leave the house to go to that appointment once a week - and they were completely invaluable, I don't think we could've continued without them.\"\n\nEmma Elias has praised breastfeeding support services for helping her through \"difficulties\"\n\nThe new study showed that 40% of new mums surveyed did have a positive experience of breastfeeding in lockdown as their \"new baby took to breastfeeding well, they had supportive partners and weren't inundated with visitors\".\n\nEmma added: \"They are trying their best but there's no replacement for face-to-face support.\"\n\nProf Amy Brown has written six infant feeding and parent books\n\nProf Brown now wants health boards and governments to make \"significant improvements\" and ensure the mothers who struggled are \"supported appropriately\", as the number of coronavirus cases increases again across the UK.\n\n\"Governments and health boards need to come up with a way to work out how groups can meet safely as it seems daft to me that it's easier to meet in a pub than get breastfeeding support,\" she said.\n\n\"Health visitors also need to be allowed into homes with the correct protection.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe Welsh Government said all new mothers had \"continued to receive support to help establish breastfeeding\".\n\n\"Once at home, midwives and health visitors will work with women to assess their needs and provide tailored support and targeted visits accordingly,\" a spokesman said.\n\n\"Anyone with any concerns or who requires breastfeeding support should contact their midwife or health visitor directly.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. President Trump's seven days before his Covid-positive test\n\nPresident Donald Trump's coronavirus diagnosis came after a busy week running his administration and campaigning for November's election.\n\nThe president announced that he and his wife and his wife, Melania has tested positive for Covid-19, in a tweet sent on Friday at around 01:00 local time (05:00 GMT).\n\nThis followed a positive test for his close aide, Hope Hicks, who reportedly started feeling symptoms on Wednesday.\n\nSince the president's diagnosis, several people close to him have tested positive too, including his press secretary.\n\nSo far the majority of publicly released results have been negative. However, test accuracy can vary depending on when a sample is taken during the course of the illness. One taken very soon after exposure may not give an accurate result.\n\nThe White House says it has begun contact-tracing. Here's a look at some of the people we know Mr Trump has crossed paths with during the last week - starting with an event that is being investigated as a possible \"super-spreader\":\n\nPresident Trump announced his Supreme Court pick, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, in front of a crowd of about 200 people on the White House lawn.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Senator Mike Lee, who later tested positive for Covid-19, seen hugging other attendees\n\nJudge Coney Barrett said on Friday that she had tested negative. Sources told US media she had the virus earlier this year.\n\nAlong with Mr Trump and his wife, at least seven other people who attended the Rose Garden event say they have tested positive - although it's not known where they caught the virus.\n\nThey are: White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany; former White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway; Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who are both on the judiciary committee; the president of the University of Notre Dame, John Jenkins; and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who said he checked himself into a hospital on Saturday as a precaution.\n\nThe White House Correspondents' Association said an unnamed reporter at the event had also tested positive with symptoms.\n\nDuring the evening, President Trump held a rally at Harrisburg International Airport in Middletown, Pennsylvania.\n\nSince the afternoon's ceremony, Judge Coney Barrett has held meetings with various senators - including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell - ahead of her much-anticipated confirmation hearing, due to take place on 12 October.\n\nThe president played golf at his club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, in the morning and led a White House reception for the families of military veterans during the evening.\n\nOn Monday, President Trump held a news briefing in the White House Rose Garden - giving an update on his administration's coronavirus testing strategy.\n\nIt was attended by Vice-President Mike Pence, Health Secretary Alex Azar, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the chief executive of Abbott Laboratories, Robert Ford, among others.\n\nLater, Trump viewed a model of a new pickup truck - being built at a factory in Ohio - on the White House lawn. Representatives from the company, Lordstown Motors, attended, as well as two members of Congress.\n\nThe White House regularly tests officials who come in contact with the president. However, US media has noted that mask-wearing and social distancing around him is less common - suggesting that people may be too reliant on the testing system, which is not foolproof.\n\nThe president faced his election rival, Joe Biden, at their first face-to-face debate in Cleveland, Ohio on Tuesday evening.\n\nPresident Trump flew there on his presidential plane, Air Force One, alongside his wife, adult children and multiple aides. Many were seen not wearing masks when boarding or disembarking.\n\nAlso on the plane were: White House Chief of staff Mark Meadows; campaign strategist Jason Miller; policy adviser Stephen Miller; Robert C O'Brien, the national security adviser who tested positive for the virus in July; and Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan.\n\nAfter landing, the president's campaign manager, Bill Stepien, was spotted getting into a staff van with Ms Hicks, the New York Times reports. Late on Friday, it was announced that Mr Stepien had tested positive for Covid-19 and was experiencing mild flu-like symptoms.\n\nThe debate was held at Cleveland Clinic's Health Education Campus, a shared facility with Case Western Reserve University.\n\nThe organisers, the Commission on Presidential Debates, brought in numerous Covid-era safety precautions. There were no handshakes between the two candidates and everyone attending - including the 80 or so audience members - was tested before the event and asked to wear masks throughout.\n\nIn the run-up, Mr Trump's eldest daughter, Ivanka, posted a picture of herself backstage in a mask, alongside her sister Tiffany, sister-in-law Lara and stepmother Melania.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by ivankatrump This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHowever, during the event itself, Ivanka Trump and other family members, including siblings Don Jr and Eric, were pictured mask-less. Moderator Chris Wallace has since told Fox News that they were offered masks by event staff but they refused them.\n\nObservers said those on Mr Biden's side of the room kept their masks on.\n\nMr Trump and Mr Biden kept a distance during the debate, at podiums on opposite sides of the stage.\n\nMr Trump and Mr Biden loudly spoke over each other throughout the contentious debate\n\nWhen the candidates were greeted by the wives on stage afterwards, Jill Biden wore a mask and Melania Trump didn't.\n\nAt a separate campaign event in Pennsylvania, Vice-President Mike Pence said he had been in the Oval Office with President Trump earlier that day. It is thought to be their last in-person meeting.\n\nPresident Trump and much of his entourage flew back to Washington DC on Tuesday night.\n\nThe day after the debate, President Trump was straight back into campaign business, flying to Minnesota. Ms Hicks was among those accompanying him.\n\nAt a press conference on Saturday, the president's physician Dr Sean Conley said Mr Trump had been diagnosed 72 hours previously, which would place his diagnosis on Wednesday. But the White House later clarified that he was diagnosed on Thursday.\n\nHe attended a closed-door fundraiser at a private home in Minneapolis, and later held a rally at an airport in Duluth, in front of a crowd of thousands. Few wore masks but there was distance between them and the president.\n\nMinnesota Congressman Kurt Daudt tweeted a picture of himself close to Mr Trump, with neither wearing masks.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Kurt Daudt This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nOn Wednesday evening, Mr Trump and various aides returned to Washington DC on Air Force One again.\n\nMeanwhile Ms Hicks, who was feeling unwell, was isolated in a separate cabin, according to US media. She reportedly disembarked from the back of the plane, instead of the front alongside the other passengers.\n\nThe following day, Ms Hicks tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nPresident Trump flew to his Bedminster golf resort in New Jersey for a private fundraiser. Several aides who were in proximity to Ms Hicks scrapped their plans to accompany the president, according to the Associated Press.\n\nKayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, is thought to have been in close contact with Ms Hicks. Ms McEnany held a briefing for reporters at the White House on Thursday, without mentioning her colleague's test and without wearing a mask. She has since said she did not know about the diagnosis.\n\nThat night, in pre-taped remarks to the annual Al Smith dinner in New York City - held virtually this year - Mr Trump said that \"the end of the pandemic is in sight\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"The end of the pandemic is in sight,\" President Trump told a dinner on Thursday\n\nHe later announced in an interview on Fox News that he and the first lady were being tested for the virus.\n\nIt is not known how many supporters he came into contact with in recent days, he but told Fox presenter Sean Hannity that people were always wanting to get close to him. \"They want to hug you, and they want to kiss you,\" he said.\n\nPresident Trump announced that he and Mrs Trump had tested positive, adding that they will begin the \"quarantine and recovery process immediately\".\n\nJust before 11:00, his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told reporters the president has \"mild symptoms\" but remains in \"good spirits\".\n\nMrs Trump tweeted to say she also had mild symptoms.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The president has \"mild symptoms\" but will \"remain on the job\", says White House chief of staff Mark Meadows\n\nThat day, several other people announce that they've tested positive: Kellyanne Conway, former White House counsellor; Bill Stepien, Mr Trump's campaign manager; Mike Lee, Utah senator; Thom Tillis, a senator for North Carolina; Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee; Rev John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame University; and Senator Ron Johnson, head of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.\n\nMeanwhile Joe Biden, the Democrats' presidential candidate, tests negative, as does: Jill Biden, his wife; Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen Pence; Kamala Harris, the Democrats' vice-presidential candidate; Amy Coney Barrett, Supreme Court nominee; Mike Pompeo, secretary of state; Steve Mnuchin, treasury secretary; Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services; William Barr, attorney general; Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr, the president's daughter and son; and Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law.\n\nFormer New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Nicholas Luna, a White House presidential aide, both test positive.\n\nMr Trump waved to well-wishers from behind the glass of a sealed car after tweeting that he would pay a \"surprise visit\" to \"patriots\" outside the hospital.\n\nInside the car, at least two people could be seen wearing protective gear in the front seats, with Mr Trump sat in the back.\n\nThere were concerns that the president who wore a mask, may have endangered others inside the car. But White House spokesperson Judd Deere said the trip had been \"cleared by the medical team as safe\".\n\nWhite House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany announces on Twitter that she has tested positive.", "Experts say the diamond sold for a 'bargain' price\n\nA rare 102-carat white diamond has sold at auction for $15.7m (£12.1m) in what experts say is a \"bargain\".\n\nThe gemstone went to an unnamed telephone bidder. The auction was held online by Sotheby's in Hong Kong due to the pandemic.\n\nThe diamond was taken from a 271-carat stone which was discovered at a Canadian mine in 2018.\n\nOnly seven other diamonds larger than 100 carats and of the same quality have gone under the hammer.\n\nThe stone did not have a reserve price - a minimum price that the seller is willing to accept for an item.\n\nIt is the first time in history that a diamond has sold at auction this way.\n\nSotheby's described the diamond as \"flawless\" and said it was \"difficult to overstate its rarity and beauty\".\n\nTobias Kormind, managing director of online jeweller 77 Diamonds, said the buyer had \"bagged a bargain\".\n\nHe said that by not having a reserve price, the seller had made a \"brave decision that has come back to bite them\".\n\nIn 2017, a necklace featuring a 163-carat diamond fetched $33.7m at a Christie's event in Geneva. The diamond, taken from a 404-carat stone in Angola, is said to be the largest diamond ever presented at auction. The buyer's identity was not revealed.\n\nThe same year, a rare pink diamond weighing just under 19 carats fetched 50.3m Swiss francs (£42.3m) at auction, a record price per carat.\n\nThe price of around $2.6m per carat marked a world record for a pink diamond, according to the Europe head of auction house Christie's.\n\nCanada - among the world's major diamond producers - is no stranger to big gems, even though large-scale mining for the stones only began there in the 1990s.\n\nTwo years ago, the Dominion Diamond Mines company announced the discovery of a 552-carat yellow gemstone, a North American record, at its site in the Northwest Territories, 135 miles (215km) south of the Arctic Circle.\n\nThe previous record-holding diamond was found at the same mine in 2015.\n\nThat stone - the Foxfire, a two-billion-year-old 187.7-carat diamond - was displayed around the world, including for a few weeks at Kensington Palace in London.\n\nCanadian diamonds, often found in the remote northern reaches of the country, have a reputation for being conflict-free and more sustainably sourced than stones from some other nations.\n\nThat reputation is promoted and protected by the industry and local governments, though environmental campaigners argue the mines are damaging to the fragile northern ecosystem.", "The health secretary has said a technical glitch that saw nearly 16,000 Covid-19 cases go unreported in England \"should never have happened\".\n\nThe error meant that although those who tested positive were told about their results, their close contacts were not traced.\n\nBy Monday afternoon, around half of those who tested positive had yet to be asked about their close contacts.\n\nLabour said the missing results were \"putting lives at risk\".\n\nExperts advise that ideally contacts should be tracked down within 48 hours.\n\nThe technical error was caused by some Microsoft Excel data files exceeding the maximum size after they were sent from NHS Test and Trace to Public Health England.\n\nIt meant 15,841 cases between 25 September and 2 October were left out of the UK daily case figures.\n\nPHE said the error itself, discovered overnight on Friday, has been fixed, and outstanding cases had been passed on to tracers by 01:00 BST on Saturday.\n\nBut Health Secretary Matt Hancock told MPs the incident as a whole had not yet been resolved - with only 51% of those whose positive results were caught up in the glitch now reached by contact tracers.\n\nHe said it had \"not substantially changed\" the government's assessment of the epidemic, however, and had \"not impacted the basis on which decisions about local action were taken\".\n\nHe also said outbreak control in care homes, schools and hospitals had not been directly affected, as they do not rely on the data in question.\n\n\"This incident should never have happened. But the team have acted swiftly to minimise its impact,\" he added.\n\nThe BBC has confirmed the missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Microsoft's Excel software. Furthermore, PHE was to blame, rather than a third-party contractor.\n\nThe issue was caused by the way the agency brought together logs produced by the commercial firms paid to carry out swab tests for the virus.\n\nThey filed their results in the form of text-based lists, without issue.\n\nPHE had set up an automatic process to pull this data together into Excel templates so that it could then be uploaded to a central system and made available to the NHS Test and Trace team as well as other government computer dashboards.\n\nThe problem is that the PHE developers picked an old file format to do this - known as XLS.\n\nAs a consequence, each template could handle only about 65,000 rows of data rather than the one million-plus rows that Excel is actually capable of.\n\nAnd since each test result created several rows of data, in practice it meant that each template was limited to about 1,400 cases. When that total was reached, further cases were simply left off.\n\nLabour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said the missing results were \"putting lives at risk\".\n\nHe said the unreported cases meant as many as 48,000 contacts had not been traced and therefore not been isolating, with \"thousands blissfully unaware they've been exposed to Covid, potentially spreading this deadly virus\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Matt Hancock tells MPs the late reporting of test results was a “serious issue that is being investigated fully”.\n\nPaul Wells said the NHS Covid-19 app allowed him to \"carry on as normal\" even after his husband had uploaded a positive test result and been told to self-isolate.\n\n\"It's very frustrating to hear that processes or systems are not working correctly, especially with something that is high risk,\" he told BBC News.\n\n\"The knock-on effect is damaging to not only myself and my husband, but the ripple effect it has to family and friends and our neighbours.\"\n\nOn Monday afternoon, the government's coronavirus dashboard announced a further 12,594 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK, bringing the total number of cases in the UK to 515,571.\n\nAnother 19 people were reported to have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19.\n\nThe earlier technical error meant the daily case totals reported on the government's coronavirus dashboard over the past week have been lower than the true number.\n\nDaily figures for the end of the week were about 10,000 rather than the roughly 7,000 that had been reported.\n\nBBC analysis found the number of cases reported for the week to 1 October increased by 92.6% in the North West after taking in the missing tests - with similar rises reflected across England.\n\nThe increase, of 8,348 cases, is mostly down to the missing tests, but the figures also included some results which came back after 2 October.\n\nYou can look at the case numbers two ways: we normally count them on the date they're reported, which today would be 12,594.\n\nBut today's news has shown how reporting lags can skew those trends.\n\nIf you arrange the figures by the date the tests were taken, you can get a clearer picture.\n\nIn that analysis, we reached an average of 10,000 new cases a day towards the end of last week.\n\nThat's about double what it was a fortnight ago.\n\nIt's hard to say for sure what's happened since then, since it takes a few days for tests to be reported and for these figures to settle down.\n\nBut that pattern is consistent with other data: the number of people going into hospital, or official surveys and symptom trackers.\n\nThey all paint a picture of an epidemic that's growing - not doubling every week, but growing.\n\nThere's hope in some parts of the data that the pace of growth may be slowing slightly, but there's no evidence that it's shrinking.\n\nMr Hancock suggested that the error did not impact the introduction of local restrictions last week.\n\nHowever, Liverpool Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram said the measures brought in there were \"predicated on\" figures that were \"underestimated by a considerable sum\".\n\n\"We understand that there needed to be further restrictions because of those increases in transmission rates, but we've not received any of the scientific evidence that backs that up,\" he told the BBC.\n\n\"It seems that the restrictions were predicated on a false promise that the figures that we were provided with were the basis for the announcement.\"\n\nPHE data shows Liverpool has the second highest rate of infection in England, at 456.4 cases per 100,000 people in the week to 1 October, from 287.1 the week before. Knowsley in Merseyside, Newcastle, Nottingham, Leeds and Sheffield have also seen sharp rises.\n\nManchester has the highest rate of infection, at 495.6 cases per 100,000 people, from 223.2 the week before.\n\nThe BBC's Danny Savage said the head of public health in Manchester estimates the infection rate among the city's student population is as high as 3,000 cases per 100,000.\n\n\"We'll have to watch closely at what those figures are like in student populations across the country in areas with a high number of infection,\" he said.\n\nPHE said NHS Test and Trace has made sure there are enough contact tracers working, and is working with local teams to ensure they also have sufficient resources to be urgently able to contact all cases.\n\nThe number of call attempts is being increased from 10 to 15 over 96 hours.\n• None 1,980cases per day, on average, were missed in that time\n\nHave you recently tested positive? Have you been contacted by test and trace? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "President Trump's treatment for Covid-19 has spawned baseless rumours and conspiracy theories - about body doubles, oxygen tanks and more.\n\nMany appear to be politically motivated and conflicting information from the White House over the weekend hasn't helped.\n\nOfficials gave varying answers on when the president had been given oxygen. Unanswered questions remain over when Mr Trump last tested negative for the virus.\n\nThis left the internet to fill in the gaps with unfounded speculation. Here are some of the most viral rumours - and what we know about them.\n\nRepublican supporters - in some cases tweeting from verified accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers - have spread a baseless rumour that the president was somehow deliberately infected with Covid-19 at some point during last week's debate.\n\nThis goes well against the tide of early evidence showing that several top officials who have been infected, all attended a White House event announcing Mr Trump's supreme court nominee, held several days before the debate.\n\nMeanwhile, the suggestion that Mr Trump tested positive earlier than was originally suggested has led to rumours that he's more ill than doctors have let on - and even that his most recent public appearances were staged with a body double.\n\nTweets to this effect from accounts mostly supporting the Democratic Party accumulated thousands of retweets.\n\n\"Body double\" conspiracy theories are fairly common - in 2016, similar allegations were hurled at the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.\n\nA video which claims to show bikers praying for President Donald Trump outside the Walter Reed Medical Center in suburban Washington isn't from this weekend, and wasn't even filmed in the United States.\n\nThe clip, shared more than 25,000 times on Twitter and viewed over 1.3 million times, was uploaded onto video-sharing platform TikTok on Friday.\n\nHowever, detective work by fact-checking website Lead Stories, verified by the BBC, reveals that the video was actually shot in South Africa and shows bikers protesting against farm murders.\n\nThe original clip was uploaded to TikTok on 29 August, and comparison with Google Street View shows it was shot outside the Union Building in Pretoria.\n\nAnother rumour being spread suggested that the president was wearing a secret oxygen tank when he was seen leaving the White House on Friday.\n\nA number of accounts supporting the Democrats circled close-up images of Trump claiming they could see he was hooked up to some kind of device - and using it as evidence that the White House was downplaying how ill the President really is.\n\nPresident Donald Trump waves to supporters as he briefly rides in front of Walter Reed Medical Center\n\nLike the baseless claim that Joe Biden was wearing an ear piece to help him during last week's debate - which was used by Trump's campaign in a series of Facebook adverts - this particular rumour appears to have been started by people getting overly excited by folds and creases.\n\nBut even if he wasn't toting a hidden tank, we do now know that the president was given supplemental oxygen at several points over the weekend.\n\nRumours that the President is pretending to be ill for votes continue to spread online, pushed by some high-profile opponents of Mr Trump.\n\nAnd at the extreme fringes, some QAnon supporters have gathered outside the hospital. They are pushing the baseless conspiracy that Trump is \"pretending\" to have Covid-19 in a bid to trick the \"deep state\" and have powerful people arrested.\n\nHow can you spot disinformation on your social media feed when there are conflicting messages coming from the top and various political agendas online?\n\n1) Think about bias. Why was a post shared? Remember, this is happening during a hotly contested election.\n\n2) How does it make you feel? Big news events can lead to worry, confusion, panic and anger - especially when those we would expect to inform us are not doing so. Pause before sharing.\n\n3) Interrogate the source. Where has a post come from? If something is unconfirmed or there's no evidence to support it, it's often better not to share potential misinformation.\n\nCoins commemorating \"Donald Trump defeating Covid\" on sale from an online outlet called the White House Gift Shop have no connection with the US President.\n\nMuch-shared but false posts on social media suggest that President Trump is selling the $100 (£77) coins to make money on the back of his diagnosis.\n\nIn fact, the White House Gift Shop has nothing to do with the President nor the Trump family. The website came to our attention in May when it sold coins \"commemorating\" the Covid-19 outbreak, and a BBC Reality Check investigation found it was not an official product.\n\nThe store was set up in 1946 by President Harry S Truman in the basement of the White House, but it was subsequently transferred to a private company which now holds the \"White House Gift Shop\" trademark.\n\nWith reporting by Upasana Bhat, Alistair Coleman, Christopher Giles, and Olga Robinson.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Andrew Jones arranged to meet his victim using his wife's mobile phone\n\nA man accused of shooting his wife's lover after luring him to a remote farm has been convicted of his murder.\n\nAndrew Jones, 53, of Bronwydd Road, Carmarthen, used his wife Rhiannon's secret mobile phone to meet Michael O'Leary, his trial heard.\n\nJones took a rifle to confront Mr O'Leary, 55, of Nantgaredig, but denied planning to murder him.\n\nSwansea Crown Court had heard Jones claim the gun went off accidentally and he tried to cover up the killing.\n\nJones was found guilty by a majority verdict on Monday.\n\nMichael O'Leary had been having an affair with Rhiannon Jones\n\nJones lured Mr O'Leary to Cincoed Farm, in Cwmffrwd, which he owned, by texting him from his wife Rhiannon's phone, asking for a \"cwtch\" or cuddle.\n\nAfter Mr O'Leary arrived, Jones shot him with a .22 Colt rifle.\n\nJones took Mr O'Leary's car to a river and tried to make it look as if he killed himself, then disposed of his body on his farm, the trial was told.\n\nUpon leaving the car, Jones sent a text from Mr O'Leary's phone to the victim's wife and children, which said \"I am so sorry x\".\n\nJones (right) killed Mr O'Leary after discovering he was having an affair with his wife\n\nA piece of intestine belonging to Mr O'Leary was later found at Jones' property.\n\nCCTV footage showed a fire near a quarry face at the farm on 29 January, two days after father-of-three Mr O'Leary had been reported missing.\n\nPathologists told the court it was possible that discolouration on the piece of tissue suggested it had been exposed to heat.\n\nMr O'Leary's body has never been found.\n\nA forklift with blood on its blades was found in a shed on Mr Jones' farm\n\nA forklift with Mr O'Leary's blood was also found at Jones' farm.\n\nJones had used it to move his body before burning it, the trial previously heard.\n\nThe two men had known each other for about 20 years.\n\nJurors were told Mr O'Leary started having an affair with Jones' wife - who went to the same gym as him - sometime in 2019.\n\nThe judge, Mrs Justice Nerys Jefford, said the \"the only sentence that I can pass is one of life imprisonment\".\n\nA date for sentencing has not yet been set.\n\nCCTV footage showed Mr Jones carrying items at his home on the day he is accused of murdering Mr O'Leary\n\nSpeaking after the trial, Det Ch Insp Paul Jones, from Dyfed-Powys Police, said the case had been a challenging one for officers.\n\nHe said: \"It took a huge amount of resilience to get through the mental and physical challenges, through the initial search for Mr O'Leary and then as they sifted through material to find each tiny piece of evidence.\n\n\"There was pressure to prove what had happened to Mr O'Leary, to get answers quickly and charge the person responsible so they could be tried.\n\n\"Without a body this can be very difficult, you have to build significant evidence to support your theory they had been murdered.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Cineworld is set to temporarily close its UK cinemas in the coming weeks.\n\nAs first reported in the Sunday Times, the firm is writing to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden to say the industry is now \"unviable\".\n\nThe firm says it has been hit by delays in the release of big-budget films, putting 5,500 jobs at risk.\n\nThe premiere of James Bond film No Time To Die has been postponed twice and is now due for release in April 2021.\n\nIt is hoped that the Cineworld cinemas will be able to reopen next year, with staff being asked to accept redundancy in the hope of rejoining the company when theatres open again.\n\nThe head of the UK Cinema Association said he feared the Cineworld closure was \"indicative of challenges faced by the entire UK cinema industry at the moment\".\n\nPhil Clapp said: \"Although cinemas opened in July and have been able to deliver a safe and enjoyable experience, without major new titles then we understand we aren't able to get as many people out of the home as we'd like.\"\n\nThe Bectu union says the delay in releasing the new Bond film has hit cinemas\n\nHe said no-one would be \"untouched by the current challenges\".\n\nPhilippa Childs of entertainment and broadcasting union Bectu said: \"The delay in the release of the Bond film along with the other delayed releases has plunged cinema into crisis.\n\n\"Studios will have to think carefully when considering release dates about the impact that will have for the long-term future of the big screen.\"\n\nWhen approached by the BBC, major UK chains Vue and Odeon refused to comment on how many cinemas they might be keeping open.\n\nThe Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said it was supporting cinemas through a VAT cut on tickets and concessions, business rates holiday and bounce-back loans.\n\n\"We urge the British public to support their local cinema and save jobs by visiting and enjoying a film in accordance with the [Covid-19] guidance.\"\n\nCineworld's sites in the US, where it operates 546 theatres, could also be forced to close.\n\nCineworld said in a statement: \"We can confirm we are considering the temporary closure of our UK and US cinemas, but a final decision has not yet been reached.\n\n\"Once a decision has been made we will update all staff and customers as soon as we can.\"\n\nIn September the firm reported a $1.6bn (£1.3bn) loss for the six months to June as its cinemas had to close because of coronavirus lockdowns.\n\nAnd it warned at the time that it might need to raise more money in the event of further restrictions - or film delays - due to Covid-19.\n\nCineworld is the world's second largest cinema operator, and the largest in the UK with 120 sites. It also owns the Picturehouse chain of smaller venues.\n\nIts other theatres globally include the Regal, Cinema City, and Yes Planet brands.\n\nAccording to the UK Cinema Association, operators should \"organise seating to ensure two-metre distancing can be maintained; where two metres is not viable, one metre with risk mitigation is acceptable. Mitigations should be considered and those introduced set out in the risk assessment\".\n\nBut in Scotland they must \"organise seating to ensure two-metre distancing can be maintained\".\n\nIt also says cinemas should introduce one-way flow through auditoriums, and provide floor markings and signage to remind customers to \"follow social distancing wherever possible.\"\n\nThe film industry had hoped the release of No Time To Die would spark a movie-going revival in the UK, with so many cinemas having been mothballed for months following the Covid-19 lockdown in March.\n\nBut on Friday the movie's release was further delayed until 2 April 2021 \"in order to be seen by a worldwide theatrical audience\".\n\nRob Arthur, an industry analyst at cinema strategists The Big Picture, said \"the current market is broken\".\n\n\"It has been a very challenging year both for Cineworld, and the world's largest cinema group AMC,\" he added.\n\n\"Film release schedules are being changed on a daily, never mind weekly, basis. It has been a catastrophic, devastating, year for operators.\"\n\nHe said the decision by Cineworld to put their UK operation \"into hibernation\" until next year made sense.\n\n\"You can't keep meeting the fixed operating costs of electricity, gas, air conditioning, staff, social distancing measures, and so forth when audience numbers are only a small percentage of what they were before,\" he said.\n\n\"Meanwhile, customer confidence in visiting cinemas has to be restored and I don't see that at the moment,\" Mr Arthur added.\n\n\"The crowds you used to see in London for example going from work directly to the cinema are not there.\"\n\nHe also said Cineworld's cash reserves were running low and that both they and AMC had a high percentage of financial liabilities compared with their assets.\n\nHe added: \"Landlords to date have acted reasonably and the deferral of rent has helped the cinema industry, but that comes to an end as does furlough payments so the operators will have to seek remedies to restructure their businesses.\"\n\nAs lockdown restrictions around the world were gradually lifted in mid-to-late summer Cineworld had been able to reopen 561 out of 778 sites worldwide.\n\nBut lockdown closures meant its group revenues sank to $712.4m in the first six months of the year, compared with $2.15bn a year earlier.\n\nThe group loss this year also marked a huge fall from the pre-tax profits of $139.7m seen in the first six months of 2019.\n\nHowever, when it released those financial figures, Cineworld said recent trading had been \"encouraging considering the circumstances\", with solid demand for Christopher Nolan's spy film Tenet which was released in September.\n\nIn June, Cineworld pulled out of a $2.1bn deal to buy the Canadian cinema chain Cineplex, a move which could lead to a legal battle.\n\nIt is not just Cineworld which has struggled this year, with independent London cinema Peckhamplex closing its doors on 25 September due to falling visitor numbers and delayed releases.\n\nIt had hoped to reopen in November, around the time the next James Bond film was due to be released.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "There could be a \"tsunami\" of cancelled operations this winter as the NHS copes with rising numbers of coronavirus patients, leading surgeons are warning.\n\nMembers of the Royal College of Surgeons of England say they doubt the NHS can meet targets to restore surgery back to near pre-pandemic levels.\n\nPlanned procedures such as hip replacements were paused to free up beds during lockdown in the spring.\n\nAnd hospitals have since been dealing with a backlog.\n\nIn July, NHS England boss Sir Simon Stevens told trusts hospitals should by September 2020 be performing at least 80% of their September 2019 rates of:\n\nAnd by October, this proportion should rise to 90%.\n\nBut data suggests more than two million people have been waiting longer than 18 weeks for routine operations, with 83,000 waiting more than a year - up from 2,000 before the pandemic.\n\nMore than 140,000 operations such as knee and hip replacements were performed in July 2020, up from 41,000 in April.\n\nBut that is less than half the level seen in July 2019.\n\nThe Royal College of Surgeons of England surveyed nearly 1,000 members in September and found:\n\nPresident of the college Prof Neil Mortensen said: \"This is a national crisis requiring a truly national effort across all hospitals - private and NHS alike.\n\n\"As the virus becomes more prevalent again, there is a real risk of a tsunami of cancelled operations unless surgical beds are funded and protected.\n\n\"That means building up theatre capacity and designating beds exclusively for those who need an operation.\"\n\nAn NHS spokesman said the survey underestimated the amount of surgery now happening in the NHS, adding that goals for the end of August were met.\n\n\"The NHS has flexed its hospital capacity and community services as needed throughout the pandemic, treating over 110,000 severely ill people for Covid-19, and doubling the number of non-urgent operations since April. More people are set to benefit from the deal struck with independent hospitals also to make use of their bed capacity.\n\n\"Covid inpatient numbers are rising and much depends on keeping the virus under control through continued public action on hands-face-space, Test and Trace service, and rapid action to control local outbreaks,\" he said.\n\nHave you had an operation cancelled? How long have you been waiting? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Top row (left to right): Alison Howe, Martyn Hett, Lisa Lees, Courtney Boyle, Eilidh MacLeod, Elaine McIver, Georgina Callander, Jane Tweddle - Middle row (left to right): John Atkinson, Kelly Brewster, Liam Curry, Chloe Rutherford, Marcin Klis, Angelika Klis, Megan Hurley, Michelle Kiss - Bottom row (left to right): Nell Jones, Olivia Campbell-Hardy, Philip Tron, Saffie-Rose Roussos, Sorrell Leczkowski, Wendy Fawell\n\nFour risk assessments carried out prior to Manchester Arena attack \"failed to adequately assess\" the terror threat at the venue, an inquiry has heard.\n\nSecurity expert Colonel Richard Latham said the risk of a suicide bombing at a venue like the Manchester Arena should have been \"crystal clear\".\n\nThe terror threat level at the time of the 2017 bombing was classed as severe.\n\nThe public inquiry, scheduled to last into next spring, is looking at events before, during and after the attack.\n\nTwenty two people were killed and many more injured when Salman Abedi detonated an explosive as fans left the Ariana Grande concert.\n\nThe inquiry, which is taking place at Manchester Magistrates' Court, heard how Mr Latham along with Dr David BaMaung have jointly analysed more than 1,000 documents relating to the Manchester Arena attack.\n\nThis has accumulated in three reports, which review the adequacy and effectiveness of security at the arena, what lessons ought to be learned and what changes need to be made.\n\nSalman Abedi was caught on CCTV in the City Room just seconds before he blew himself up\n\nThe operators of the arena, SMG, had responsibility for safety and security in the City Room, where the bombing happened on the evening of 22 May 2017.\n\nBut as the City Room was classed as \"public space,\" this meant arena security staff could interact with people but did not have the power to eject an individual and would need to escalate any suspicions to the police, the inquiry heard.\n\nAt the time of the explosion, there was not a single police officer in the City Room.\n\nThe inquiry was told if SMG wanted specific policing resources for the arena then they could have paid the police for this service.\n\nThe public inquiry follows a trial in which a jury found Hashem Abedi guilty of helping his older sibling to plan the atrocity.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The bodies of Dr Saman Mir Sacharvi and Vian Mangrio, 14, were found on Thursday\n\nTwo men have been arrested on suspicion of murdering a mother and her daughter whose bodies were discovered inside a fire-damaged house.\n\nDr Saman Mir Sacharvi and Vian Mangrio, 14, were found dead at their home in Reedley, Lancashire on Thursday.\n\nThe men, from Burnley, aged 51 and 56, were both held on suspicion of two counts of murder, two of rape and one of arson with intent to endanger life.\n\nThe 56-year-old was released without charge. The other remains in custody.\n\nDr Sacharvi was described as a \"well-loved and well-liked colleague\"\n\nLancashire Police has urged anyone with information to contact them and said there were \"a number of lines of inquiry\".\n\nDet Supt Jon Holmes, head of major crime, said: \"Our thoughts remain with Dr Sacharvi and Miss Mangrio's family and friends at this awful time and we send them our deepest condolences.\n\n\"We have a team of detectives dedicated to the investigation and we will leave no stone unturned.\"\n\nDr Sacharvi, 49, was described as a \"well-loved and well-liked colleague\" in a tribute issued by Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust.\n\nShe had worked in the trust's specialist perinatal community mental health team since February and most recently at its Daisyfield site in Blackburn.\n\nPerinatal lead consultant Gill Strachan said: \"She was approachable, diligent and had formed good working relationships with the team.\n\n\"She was empathic and well-liked by the women and families that she worked with.\n\n\"During lockdown when Covid-19 restrictions were in place, she went out of her way to support the care of women, personally delivering prescriptions to women isolating at home.\n\n\"The team are shocked and saddened, and she will be greatly missed.\"\n\nFloral tributes have been left outside the family home\n\nAlyson Littlewood, the head teacher of Marsden Heights Community College where Vian was a student, said: \"We are heartbroken by the tragic deaths of Vian and her mother and our whole school is mourning the loss of two much-loved members of our community.\"\n\nShe said Vian was an \"outstanding student\" who had a \"wonderful mix of academic ability coupled with an enthusiasm for everything else that school can offer\".\n\n\"She was very popular and was extremely supportive of her friends, was generous to all and had a smile that could fill a room.\n\n\"We were all very fortunate to have her in our lives and we will miss her on a daily basis.\"\n\nFloral tributes have been left outside the family home by well-wishers.\n\nOne card read: \"RIP Gorgeous. Thank you for everything you have done for me and made me a better person.\n\n\"You'll always be in my heart. I miss you so much. May you and your mom rest in peace. Love from Sky xxx\"\n\nAnother unsigned message said: \"May some good love come out of this horrendous crime. May people learn tolerance.\n\n\"My thoughts and prayers are with you both. Stupid, stupid. So sad, bad, wrong.\"\n\nDr Sacharvi died \"as a result of pressure to the neck\" and had been assaulted, police said.\n\nVian was found badly burnt inside the house but the cause of her death has yet to be determined, the force added.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Priti Patel: \"We will address the moral, legal, and practical problems with the asylum system\"\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel has pledged to fix the \"fundamentally broken\" asylum system in the UK to make it \"firm and fair\".\n\nSpeaking at the Conservative Party conference, she promised to introduce legislation next year for the \"biggest overhaul\" of the system in \"decades\".\n\nAnd she said those against her plans were \"defending the indefensible\".\n\nIt comes after it emerged this week that the UK considered sending asylum seekers to an island in the Atlantic.\n\nMs Patel said changes \"would take time\" and she would \"accelerate the UK's operational response\" to the issue in the meantime.\n\nThe chief executive of charity Refugee Action, Stephen Hale, said it was a \"positive step\" for the home secretary to \"realise what we've been trying to tell her - the asylum system is not fair or effective\".\n\nBut he urged her to push for \"quicker decisions and better support\" for those seeking asylum in the UK.\n\nLabour's shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds accused the Conservatives of being \"the political party that broke\" the asylum system, having been in power for 10 years.\n\nHe added: \"Recent experience suggests they have not learned any lessons at all, with unconscionable, absurd proposals about floating walls and creating waves in the English Channel to push back boats and sending people thousands of miles away to process claims.\n\n\"The truth is the Tories are devoid of compassion and competence.\"\n\nMs Patel pledged to introduce a new asylum system that welcomed people through \"safe and legal routes\" and stopped those arriving illegally \"making endless legal claims to remain\".\n\nThe system will include expediting the removal of those \"who have no claim for protection\", she said.\n\nShe added: \"After decades of inaction by successive governments, we will address the moral, legal, practical problems with this broken system. Because what exists now is neither firm nor fair.\n\n\"I will take every necessary step to fix this broken system amounting to the biggest overhaul of our asylum system in decades.\"\n\nThe promised overhaul follows record numbers of people making the journey across the English Channel to the UK in September, which Ms Patel has vowed to stop.\n\nAccording to Refugee Action, 35,566 asylum applications were made in the UK in 2019 - down from a peak of 84,000 in 2002.\n\nAt the same time, delays in processing UK asylum applications have increased significantly.\n\nFour out of five applicants in the last three months of 2019 waited six months or more for their cases to be processed.\n\nMs Patel said the UK would make more \"immediate returns\" of people who arrived illegally \"and break our rules, every single week\".\n\nIt emerged this week the government considered building an asylum processing centre at Ascension Island - a remote UK territory in the Atlantic Ocean\n\nRefugee Action's Stephen Hale said to make the system fair her \"immediate priority\" should be to \"honour her words and commit long-term to creating safe and legal routes for refugees to reach the UK\" - including restarting settlement schemes that were paused during the coronavirus outbreak.\n\nPre-empting criticism of her proposals, Ms Patel said she expected some would \"lecture us on their grand theories about human rights\".\n\nBut, she added: \"Those defending the broken system - the traffickers, the do-gooders, the lefty lawyers, the Labour Party - they are defending the indefensible\".\n\nIt comes after it emerged this week that the government had considered building an asylum processing centre on a remote UK territory in the Atlantic Ocean.\n\nMs Patel asked officials to look at asylum policies which had been successful in other countries, the BBC was told.\n\nLabour said the \"ludicrous idea\" was \"inhumane, completely impractical and wildly expensive\".\n\nDuring her speech, the home secretary said the government would \"explore all practical measures and options to deter illegal migration\".\n\nShe added: \"A reformed system will prosecute the criminals and protect the vulnerable. That is what a firm and fair system should look like.\"\n\nAndy Hewett, head of advocacy at the Refugee Council, said he agreed with Ms Patel that the current system was \"broken\" and \"leaves vulnerable people languishing for months on end, fearful for their future and unable to start rebuilding their lives\".\n\nBut he said it was wrong to say it was illegal for people to arrive in the UK via small boats for the purpose of seeking asylum - which is covered in the UN Refugee Convention - although they would like to see fewer people attempting the dangerous journey.\n\n\"To this end, we're calling on the home secretary to restart the resettlement programme without delay, dismantle the inhumane family reunion rules that prevent parents from being reunited with their children in the UK, and introduce humanitarian visas so that refugees can travel safely to the UK,\" added Mr Hewett.", "The final possible legal challenge to Led Zeppelin's ownership of Stairway To Heaven has been defeated.\n\nThe band were sued for copyright in 2014 over claims they had stolen the song's opening riff from Taurus, by a US band called Spirit.\n\nLed Zeppelin won the case in 2016, but it was revived on appeal in 2018.\n\nA court of appeals upheld the original verdict earlier this year. Now, the US Supreme Court has declined to hear the case, definitively ending it.\n\nStairway To Heaven regularly appears on lists of the greatest rock songs ever written, and the case has been one of the music industry's most closely-watched disputes.\n\nMillions of dollars were potentially at stake, with the song estimated to have earned $3.4m (£2.6m) in the five-year period that was at issue during the trial.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by Led Zeppelin This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nThe copyright dispute was originally lodged by journalist Michael Skidmore in 2014 on behalf of the estate of Randy Wolfe, the late frontman of Spirit.\n\nLawyers for Wolfe's estate argued that Led Zeppelin became familiar with Spirit's song after singer Robert Plant saw them play at a club in Birmingham in 1970, a year before Stairway to Heaven was released.\n\nIn the original trial, Spirit's bassist Mark Andes testified that he met Plant at the show and played snooker with him afterwards.\n\nPlant insisted he had no memory of the night, partially attributing his lack of memory to a bad car crash on his way home. Both he and his wife suffered head injuries in the accident, he told the court, after the windscreen of his Jaguar was left \"buried\" in his face.\n\nGuitarist Jimmy Page testified he had been unaware of Spirit's song until people started posting online comparisons in the early 2010s. \"I knew I had never heard that before,\" he said. \"It was totally alien to me.\"\n\nThe jury rejected Page and Plant's argument that they would not have been familiar with Taurus, saying they had \"access\" to it.\n\nHowever, they found evidence from musicologists more convincing. Experts who testified said the descending musical pattern shared by both songs had been a common musical device for centuries. One example cited was Chim Chim Cher-ee, from the 1964 Disney musical Mary Poppins.\n\nThe jury, which concluded the two songs were \"not intrinsically similar\", were not allowed to listen to Taurus during the trial. This and other alleged errors led to an appeal.\n\nBut in March, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the original verdict, saying the errors did not warrant a new trial.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "This video can not be played\n\nTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "Civilians are being forced to flee the city of Stepanakert as clashes continue over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.\n\nThe enclave is officially part of Azerbaijan but run by ethnic Armenians.\n\nMore than 200 people are now known to have been killed, including civilians, since the fighting between troops from Armenia and Azerbaijan began a week ago.", "The announcement was made at a press conference at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden\n\nThree scientists who discovered the virus Hepatitis C have won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology.\n\nThe winners are British scientist Michael Houghton and US researchers Harvey Alter and Charles Rice.\n\nThe Nobel Prize committee said their discoveries ultimately \"saved millions of lives\".\n\nThe virus is a common cause of liver cancer and a major reason why people need a liver transplant.\n\nIn the 1960s, there was huge concern that people receiving donated blood were getting chronic hepatitis (liver inflammation) from an unknown, mysterious disease.\n\nThe Nobel Prize committee said a blood transfusion at the time was like \"Russian roulette\".\n\nHighly sensitive blood tests mean such cases have now been eliminated in many parts of the world, and effective anti-viral drugs have also been developed.\n\n\"For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating Hepatitis C virus from the world,\" the prize committee said.\n\nHowever, there are 70 million people currently living with the virus, which still kills around 400,000 a year.\n\nThe viruses Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B had been discovered by the mid-1960s.\n\nBut Prof Harvey Alter, while studying transfusion patients at the US National Institutes of Health in 1972, showed there was another, mystery, infection at work.\n\nPatients were still getting sick after receiving donated blood.\n\nHe showed that giving blood from infected patients to chimpanzees led to them developing the disease.\n\nThe mysterious illness became known as \"non-A, non-B\" hepatitis and the hunt was now on.\n\nProf Michael Houghton, while at the pharmaceutical firm Chiron, managed to isolated the genetic sequence of the virus in 1989. This showed it was a type of flavivirus and it was named Hepatitis C.\n\nAnd Prof Charles Rice, while at Washington University in St. Louis, applied the finishing touches in 1997. He injected a genetically engineered Hepatitis C virus into the liver of chimpanzees and showed this could lead to hepatitis.\n\nProf Houghton, now at the University of Alberta in Canada, told the BBC: \"We had limited tools available to us then, so it was rather like searching for a needle in a haystack.\n\n\"The amount of virus present in the liver and the blood was very low, and the sensitivity of our techniques was not high enough, so we were sailing very close to the wind all the time.\n\n\"We tried a lot of methods, probably 30 or 40 different methodological approaches over seven years, and eventually one worked.\"\n\nCommenting on the announcement, Dr Claire Bayntun, a clinical consultant in global public health and vice-president of Royal Society of Medicine, said the discovery was an \"extraordinary achievement\".\n\nShe said: \"[In] unlocking the door to the development of effective treatment and screening of blood transfusions, and protecting populations in many regions of the world, millions of lives have been saved.\"", "New UK car registrations fell 4.4% in September from a year earlier, according to the motor industry.\n\nThat made it the worst September this century in what is normally the industry's second most important month.\n\nThere were just 328,041 new registrations in the month, said the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).\n\nThe car sector has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, which closed factories and showrooms.\n\nSeptember is normally second to March as the industry's most important sales month, because licence plate changes typically prompt a spike in demand.\n\nBut the SMMT said last month saw the lowest volume in new cars since the current licence plate system began in 1999.\n\nThese figures are unlikely to generate much optimism in an industry which, in the SMMT's own words, has just gone through one of the bleakest periods in its history.\n\nThere had been hope that pent-up demand from buyers unable to head out during lockdown would produce a spike in sales later in the year. It hasn't happened. It seems as though the economic uncertainty caused by Covid is making buyers wary of buying or leasing big-ticket items - such as cars.\n\nThere is some good news for the industry, though. Sales of electric cars are rising fast, even as the market for diesels continues to collapse.\n\nCarmakers have ploughed huge sums into developing electric vehicles, effectively forced to do so by policymakers intent on cutting pollution and phasing out traditional cars.\n\nRight now, they are expensive to build and not very profitable. But if enough people buy them, then economies of scale will kick in and carmakers can hope to recoup some of their investment.\n\n\"During a torrid year, the automotive industry has demonstrated incredible resilience, but this is not a recovery,\" said SMMT chief executive Mike Hawes.\n\n\"Unless the pandemic is controlled and economy-wide consumer and business confidence rebuilt, the short-term future looks very challenging indeed.\"\n\nThe SMMT said the relaxation of Covid lockdown restrictions from June had seen consumers return to showrooms and factories restart production lines, after one of the bleakest periods in the sector's history.\n\nBut it added that the market faced \"continued pressure\", including Brexit uncertainty and the threat of tariffs. while the shift towards zero emission-capable vehicles required huge investment.\n\n\"Additionally, consumer and business confidence is threatened by the forthcoming end of the government's furlough scheme, an expected rise in unemployment and continuing restrictions on society as a result of the pandemic,\" the SMMT said.\n\nThe SMMT added: \"With little realistic prospect of recovering the 615,000 registrations lost so far in 2020, the sector now expects an overall 30.6% market decline by the end of the year, equivalent to some £21.2bn in lost sales.\"\n\nHowever, not all carmakers had a bad month.\n\nHistoric UK car marque MG, now Chinese-owned, said it had notched up 3,668 sales in September 2020 - 169% up on the same month in 2019.", "Last updated on .From the section England\n\nAbraham, Chilwell and Sancho have not joined the squad at St George's Park Tammy Abraham, Ben Chilwell and Jadon Sancho could miss England's game with Wales on Thursday after being told to stay away from St George's Park. It is understood they were among more than six people at Abraham's surprise 23rd birthday party on Saturday - breaking coronavirus rules in England. They could now miss the game at Wembley because of Uefa's testing protocols. To have any chance of playing they need to complete a coronavirus test 48 hours before Thursday's 20:00 BST kick-off. However, having already been told by the Football Association (FA) to delay their arrival at England's training camp, completing a test in time appears unlikely. The FA says the delay is a precaution while it assesses if there is any risk to the wider group. Police will not be taking any action against the trio. \"As a matter of course we are not investigating Covid-related issues retrospectively,\" said a Metropolitan Police spokesperson. Chelsea forward Abraham, Chelsea left-back Chilwell, 23, and Borussia Dortmund winger Sancho, 20, have all apologised for the breach. Abraham said he was unaware the party was planned but \"deeply regrets\" it and has apologised for \"the naivety shown\". In a post on Instagram, Sancho wrote: \"I would like to apologise for breaking the government guidelines and although I was unaware upon arriving of the numbers attending, I take full responsibility for my actions. \"I will make sure moving forward that I learn from this.\" The party, which was first reported by the Sun, happened hours after Abraham played in Chelsea's 4-0 win over Crystal Palace on Saturday. Police have the power to break up groups larger than six and those who ignore officers could be fined £100 - doubling with each offence to a maximum of £3,200. It is understood those at the party were close friends and family who had their temperatures checked on arrival. \"On Saturday evening I arrived home to find a small surprise gathering had been organised for me with family and close friends to celebrate my birthday,\" Abraham said. \"Although I was totally unaware this was planned, I would like to wholeheartedly apologise for the naivety shown by all for the organisation and attending of this gathering. \"I recognise that I have a responsibility both in my professional and personal life to honour and respect the guidelines and deeply regret that this took place. \"All I can do now is learn from it, apologise to everyone and ensure it never happens again.\" On Monday, Chilwell also posted on social media, saying: \"I would like to apologise for my lack of judgement over the weekend. \"I have a responsibility to respect the guidelines. I will ensure I learn from this and will not put myself in this position in future.\" The rest of England manager Gareth Southgate's squad have arrived at St George's Park to prepare for three games in a week at Wembley. After the friendly against Wales, England host Nations League fixtures against Belgium and Denmark on 11 and 14 October respectively. Last month, Manchester City midfielder Phil Foden and Manchester United forward Mason Greenwood were dropped from an England squad after an \"unacceptable\" breach of Covid-19 quarantine guidelines in Iceland. Southgate was already planning to talk to his squad this week about \"what it means to wear the shirt\", following the incident involving Foden and Greenwood. Southgate plans to give his players \"some reminders on how we work\". \"That's not a case of reading the riot act,\" he said last week. \"That's a case of asking the players what sort of team they want to be involved in and be a part of.\" Manchester City forward Raheem Sterling has been ruled out because of injury, with Chelsea full-back Reece James promoted to the senior squad from England Under-21s. Wales will be without Juventus midfielder Aaron Ramsey because the Serie A side have put their squad into a bubble after two non-playing staff members tested positive for Covid-19. *not currently with squad\n• None Me, My Brother and Our Balls:\n• None New series of the quirky comedy is streaming now", "The badly thought-out use of Microsoft's Excel software was the reason nearly 16,000 coronavirus cases went unreported in England.\n\nAnd it appears that Public Health England (PHE) was to blame, rather than a third-party contractor.\n\nThe issue was caused by the way the agency brought together logs produced by commercial firms paid to analyse swab tests of the public, to discover who has the virus.\n\nThey filed their results in the form of text-based lists - known as CSV files - without issue.\n\nPHE had set up an automatic process to pull this data together into Excel templates so that it could then be uploaded to a central system and made available to the NHS Test and Trace team, as well as other government computer dashboards.\n• None 1,980cases per day, on average, were missed in that time\n\nThe problem is that PHE's own developers picked an old file format to do this - known as XLS.\n\nAs a consequence, each template could handle only about 65,000 rows of data rather than the one million-plus rows that Excel is actually capable of.\n\nAnd since each test result created several rows of data, in practice it meant that each template was limited to about 1,400 cases.\n\nWhen that total was reached, further cases were simply left off.\n\nFor a bit of context, Excel's XLS file format dates back to 1987. It was superseded by XLSX in 2007. Had this been used, it would have handled 16 times the number of cases.\n\nAt the very least, that would have prevented the error from happening until testing levels were significantly higher than they are today,\n\nBut one expert suggested that even a high-school computing student would know that better alternatives exist.\n\n\"Excel was always meant for people mucking around with a bunch of data for their small company to see what it looked like,\" commented Prof Jon Crowcroft from the University of Cambridge.\n\n\"And then when you need to do something more serious, you build something bespoke that works - there's dozens of other things you could do.\n\n\"But you wouldn't use XLS. Nobody would start with that.\"\n\nSpeaking in the House of Commons, the Health Secretary Matt Hancock suggested that the problem had emerged as a result of PHE using a \"legacy system\" and a decision had been taken two months ago to replace it.\n\nMr Hancock acknowledged the flaw without going into the specifics of why an old Excel file format had been used\n\nPresumably, however, this specific problem had not been spotted. Otherwise PHE would have realised that the flaw would come into effect before the upgrade was complete.\n\nMr Hancock was challenged to put other relevant data-process diagrams into the public domain, so other hidden failings in the government's digital apparatus could be found.\n\nBut while the minister said he would see what was possible, he added: \"The challenge of a maximum file size error is that it wouldn't necessarily appear on those sorts of flowcharts.\"\n\nPHE is confident that test results were not missed until last week, because of the flaw.\n\nAnd in its defence, the agency would note that it caught most of the cases within a day or two of the records slipping through its net.\n\nThe glitch did not prevent patients getting their results, but delayed contact tracers from seeing the details\n\nBut Labour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said lives had still been put at risk because the contact-tracing process had been delayed.\n\n\"Thousands of people [were] blissfully unaware they've been exposed to Covid, potentially spreading this deadly virus at a time when hospital admissions are increasing,\" he told the House of Commons.\n\n\"This isn't just a shambles. It's so much worse.\"\n\nTo handle the problem, PHE is now breaking down the test result data into smaller batches to create a larger number of Excel templates. That should ensure none hit their cap.\n\nBut insiders acknowledge that the current clunky system needs to be replaced by something more advanced that excludes Excel, as soon as possible.\n• None Test error 'should never have happened' - Hancock", "Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have a lot in common - distinctive hairstyles, larger-than-life personalities and a habit of creating controversy.\n\nAnd now they share the unwanted experience of being leaders taken to hospital with coronavirus.\n\nThe US president is currently being treated for the disease, six months after UK Prime Minister Mr Johnson fell victim to the same virus.\n\nBut how do their experiences compare - and what, if anything, can the US learn from the UK's experience?\n\nOn 27 March, the UK Prime Minister announced he had tested positive for Covid. It was not hugely unexpected given the virus had ripped its way through the top levels of UK government - infecting ministers and senior advisers.\n\nIn a Twitter video Mr Johnson said he had experienced \"mild symptoms\" but insisted he was - \"thanks to the wizardry of modern technology\" - still leading the government's response despite self-isolating.\n\nOne week later he announced that a persistent temperature meant he would have to continue self-isolating.\n\nBoris Johnson looked noticeably unwell when he appeared outside Downing Street a few days before going into hospital\n\nTwo days later, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said his boss had \"very much got his hand on the tiller\". But that evening Mr Johnson was admitted to hospital - although Downing Street stressed this was \"a precautionary step\".\n\nTwenty-four hours later the shocking news came that his condition had \"worsened\" and the prime minister had been moved to the intensive care unit.\n\nThere are parallels between Mr Johnson's experience and Mr Trump's. Like the prime minister, Mr Trump has been keen to emphasise that he is still at work, posting pictures of himself at a desk with documents.\n\nBoth their visits to hospital were described as precautionary - Mr Trump's team said it had been motivated by an \"abundance of caution\".\n\nAnd both leaders - being male, over 50 and overweight - are in an at-risk category.\n\nHowever, there are also differences. Updates on Mr Johnson's condition came solely from the Downing Street spokesperson, rather than the hospital or his doctor, whereas in the US, the president's doctors have held press conferences.\n\nIn some ways this caused confusion - particularly when Dr Sean Conley's account conflicted with briefings from White House staff.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dr Sean Conley said he was trying to \"reflect the upbeat attitude\" of his team by not revealing the president received oxygen\n\nBut unlike in the UK, US journalists were able to question the medical team - and perhaps as a result Americans got a broader picture of their leader's health.\n\nIt speaks to a wider difference between the two countries. In America, a whole medical unit based in the White House is devoted to the care of the president and candidates to the presidency are now expected to release medical records\n\nNo such set-up exists in Downing Street and if you Google medical records plus Jeremy Corbyn (the former leader of the opposition) you are more likely to get hits for stories about the National Health Service, than any personal information.\n\nTwo blonde leaders get Covid and end up in hospital.\n\nBut that's where the similarities end.\n\nThere are vast constitutional and cultural differences between British and American politics.\n\nThe cultural first: men in white coats in front of a microphone. We've seen that in Washington.\n\nUpdates from the doctors, in front of the cameras. Updates with detail too: the drugs the president's on, the days he's getting them.\n\nThere is no way medics at St Thomas's Hospital in London were ever going to offer a running, public commentary on the prime minister's health, let alone the content of their syringes.\n\nOh, and an American president has a medical team and facilities on hand at the White House.\n\nIn contrast, Boris Johnson was holed up on his own, upstairs in Downing Street, his tea left at the door of his flat.\n\nAnd now the constitutional: in short, America has one, the UK doesn't.\n\nSo while the question of who takes over isn't easily answered in the UK, there's a long established plan in the US.\n\nOnce the prime minister was admitted into intensive care, his Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, was asked to deputise \"where necessary\".\n\nIn the US, the 25th Amendment sets out the conditions for a vice-president assuming power from his boss, but in the UK, with its unwritten constitution and enthusiasm for precedents over codified rules, there is no formal power that allows for such a transfer of responsibility.\n\nWe knew very little about the exact extent of Mr Raab's authority - and opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer suggested Mr Raab, was \"reluctant\" to take decisions, leaving the government in a kind of limbo while the Prime Minister recuperated.\n\nConstitutional expert Dr Catherine Haddon of the Institute for Government said at the time: \"The lack of a plan for who can take over when the prime minister is incapacitated looks extraordinary to many in the country and abroad.\"\n\nDominic Raab deputised for the prime minister as he was moved to intensive care.\n\nSince his admission to hospital, there has been speculation about how Mr Trump's poll ratings will be affected - particularly with the presidential election one month away.\n\nLooking at the UK example - not much is the answer.\n\nBBC political analyst Peter Barnes says Boris Johnson's personal approval ratings went up - hitting 50% and above - when government introduced measures to tackle coronavirus.\n\nThe high ratings continued throughout the period that the prime minister was ill, and into May, before starting to fall back.\n\nMr Johnson came out of hospital on 12 April and returned to work after a two-week break.\n\nYet six months on, there has been some speculation over whether the Prime Minister is fully recovered. However, when asked if he was suffering from long Covid, Mr Johnson insisted he was \"as fit as several butchers' dogs\".\n\nHis spell in hospital has prompted at least one change in his behaviour. The prime minister has acknowledged he was \"too fat\" when he caught the virus and has hired a personal trainer to get him fit.\n\nSo in a few months' time, Americans may get used to seeing pictures of Mr Trump running laps round the Rose Garden.", "Sir Ian Botham has taken his seat in the House of Lords.\n\nThe Brexit-backing former England cricketer wore the traditional scarlet and ermine-trimmed robe for the brief formal introduction ceremony.\n\nBaron Botham, of Ravensworth in the county of North Yorkshire was nominated for a life peerage in the 2020 Political Honours and will sit as a cross bencher.\n\nThe proceedings were delayed due to a technical problem, prompting groans from peers when Lord Speaker Lord Fowler told them: \"I think rain has stopped play just for the moment.\"", "Offshore wind farms will generate enough electricity to power every home in the UK within a decade, Boris Johnson has pledged.\n\nSpeaking to the Conservative party conference, the PM announced £160m to upgrade ports and factories for building turbines to help the country \"build back greener\".\n\nThe plan aims to create 2,000 jobs in construction and support 60,000 more.\n\nHe said the UK would become \"the world leader in clean wind energy\".\n\n\"Your kettle, your washing machine, your cooker, your heating, your plug-in electric vehicle - the whole lot of them will get their juice cleanly and without guilt from the breezes that blow around these islands,\" he said.\n\nMr Johnson's speech comes after he made a pledge at a UN biodiversity summit in New York to protect 30% of UK land for nature as a \"boost for biodiversity\".\n\nThe scheme will see the money invested into manufacturing in Teesside and Humber in northern England, as well as sites in Scotland and Wales.\n\nMr Johnson said the government was raising its target for offshore wind power capacity by 2030 from 30 gigawatts to 40 gigawatts.\n\nThe commitments are the first stage of a 10-point plan for a \"green industrial revolution\" from the government, with No 10 promising the rest of the details later this year to \"accelerate our progress towards net zero emissions by 2050\".\n\nThe net zero target means greenhouse gas emissions would be dramatically slashed and any remaining emissions offset, neutralising environmental impacts and slowing climate change.\n\nMr Johnson's speech comes amid a \"fractious\" mood on the Conservative backbenches about his handling of the Covid-19 crisis, BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg says.\n\nShe said the occasion could provide the prime minister with an opportunity to sell his vision of the country post-pandemic to party members.\n\nBut she added this year's speech - to be delivered virtually without a live audience - would not allow him to plug into the energy of a crowd as he normally would.\n\nThe Beatrice offshore wind farm in Scotland generates enough power for more than 450,000 properties\n\nMr Johnson told the conference he believes that in 10 years' time, \"offshore wind will be powering every home in the country\".\n\n\"Far out in the deepest waters we will harvest the gusts, and by upgrading infrastructure in places like Teesside and Humber and Scotland and Wales, we will increase an offshore wind capacity that is already the biggest in the world.\"\n\nThe PM also repeated his pledge for the UK to become the \"Saudi Arabia of wind power\", adding: \"As Saudi Arabia is to oil, the UK is to wind - a place of almost limitless resource, but in the case of wind without the carbon emissions and without the damage to the environment.\"\n\nThe PM's enthusiastic windy rhetoric has been welcomed by the renewables industry - but there's nothing new about the 40GW figure.\n\nIt was previously announced in the Conservative Party manifesto.\n\nWhat's important today is the promise of cash to improve ports to support the offshore industry in Scotland and the north of England.\n\nIt won't just create jobs to replace some of those being lost in the shrinking oil sector.\n\nIt could also support the onset of floating offshore wind power, which would allow wind farms anchored in deep water far west of Scotland, where the conditions are challenging but the winds are strong and consistent.\n\nThe advances in wind power are momentous, but shouldn't be exaggerated.\n\nThe PM is promising enough power all UK homes - but remember, homes only account for a third of electricity demand. The rest goes to offices and factories.\n\nAnd there's a long way to go before the economy is decarbonised.\n\nThe industry is now waiting for the government's long-delayed energy white paper.\n\nThat will set the course for onshore wind, solar, and the two latest objects of prime ministerial desire - hydrogen produced by surplus off-peak wind energy; and carbon capture, where emissions are caught and pumped into underground rocks.\n\nMinisters will also have to decide how they can fund the new nuclear stations that Mr Johnson says will be part of the UK energy mix.\n\nThe prime minister has previously said the UK should embrace a range of new technologies to achieve its goal of net zero emissions by 2050.\n\nLast month, Mr Johnson said he wanted the UK to take the lead in carbon capture and storage technology, in which greenhouse gas emissions are captured from sources such as power stations and then stored underground.\n\nHe also said the UK government was thinking of bringing forward the date for phasing out new petrol and diesel cars from 2035 to 2030.\n\nGreenpeace UK executive director John Sauven said: \"The prime minister's recognition that last year's Tory manifesto commitment on offshore wind can generate jobs whilst cutting energy bills and carbon is a great lightbulb moment.\n\n\"If carried through it would help cement the UK's global leadership in this key technology.\n\n\"But delivering 40 gigawatts of power on to the grid by 2030 requires action in this Parliament.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Craig Meikle: \"I feel angry when I wake up in the morning, angry when I go to bed at night and angry every hour in between.\"\n\nThe owners of soft play and indoor sports facilities have warned they face financial ruin.\n\nWhile such businesses opened in England in mid-August they remain closed in Scotland.\n\nMany soft play centres, theatres and nightclubs had hoped to open on Monday but some fear they now never will.\n\nLast week First Minister Nicola Sturgeon confirmed that the date of their reopening had been postponed until at least 15 October.\n\nShe said it would not be sensible to ease restrictions while infection rates were rising.\n\nThe sectors had previously been given indicative reopening dates of 14 September and 5 October.\n\nCraig Meikle, who owns Saltire soft play and football centre in Dalkeith, has run out of patience.\n\n\"I feel angry when I wake up in the morning, angry when I go to bed at night and angry every hour in between,\" he said.\n\n\"My wife and I have spent six years building this business up to be a sustainable business.\n\n\"We're not going to get rich from this but our staff would have said they were in a stable secure job.\"\n\nSaltire Soft Play in Dalkeith is close to financial disaster\n\nHe says the business is six to eight weeks away from collapse.\n\nIn six months of closure, he says £166,000 has left his business bank account with just £49,000 in furlough payments coming in.\n\nHis business took a £100,000 loan to survive which is almost gone.\n\nMr Meikle says he is now at the mercy of his creditors but thanks to an understanding landlord, he is still hopeful for his business.\n\nHe told BBC Scotland: \"So when you hear the chancellor talking about support packages for viable businesses it drives me absolutely nuts.\n\n\"When I think we have got a viable business that offers an important service to the community and it's not a business that either the Scottish government or the UK government are seeing fit to support financially, rage is probably the best feeling I could explain.\"\n\nSaltire has had no financial help outside the job retention scheme and the business did not qualify for any grants.\n\nMr Meikle has seen other businesses receive awards of up to £25,000 which have been allowed to reopen and earn money.\n\nHis frustration is in getting no financial help and still being unable to earn.\n\nMike Ferguson runs Forfar Indoor Sports. He says his phone never stops ringing asking if they are open. And he has had to watch his customers go elsewhere to venues that can open.\n\nHe said: \"We are praying that on the 15th we get going. Heading towards something and not getting there is demoralising.\n\n\"The furlough scheme has been excellent for staff but we now have to think seriously about letting staff go.\n\n\"We can't carry on paying even a share of staff wages and the new rules don't assist.\"\n\nMr Ferguson says he is now trying to plan for reopening without a date.\n\nCancellation of the 15 September deadline hit hard with training completed, deep cleans paid for and food wasted.\n\nHe said: \"If they are not coming to us they are going somewhere else. That's the most frustrating point of all of this.\"\n\nFrosty's Fun centre in Forfar has not seen customers since Lockdown began on 23 March\n\nA spokeswoman for the Scottish government said it understood the severe impact of the pandemic, but that Scotland was at a \"critical point\" as the virus continues to rise.\n\nShe said: \"Our absolute focus has been to help businesses survive and retain as much employment as possible - using the limited powers available to us and we have repeatedly urged the UK government to transfer to us the financial powers needed to fully respond to the pandemic.\n\n\"Throughout this unprecedented economic crisis we have listened to businesses and business organisations and acted quickly to offer support which now exceeds £2.3bn.\n\n\"Our support for businesses includes almost £900m of non-domestic rates relief for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses including soft play centres; the small business grant fund and the retail, hospitality and leisure grant fund worth over £1bn; the culture organisations and venues recovery fund which includes nightclubs.\n\n\"We also created hardship and resilience funds unique to Scotland, with a value of £185m targeted at support for SMEs and the self-employed.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Football\n\nChelsea and England striker Tammy Abraham has apologised \"for the naivety shown\" after a breach of coronavirus guidelines.\n\nIt is understood a group of more than six people, including England team-mates Ben Chilwell and Jadon Sancho, attended a surprise party for Abraham's 23rd birthday at his home on Saturday.\n\nGatherings of more than six people are banned in England.\n\nAbraham said he was unaware the party was planned but \"deeply regrets\" it.\n\nThe party, which was first reported by the Sun, happened hours after Abraham played in Chelsea's 4-0 win over Crystal Palace on Saturday and before he was due to join up with the England squad this week.\n\nPolice have the power to break up groups larger than six and those who ignore officers could be fined £100 - doubling with each offence to a maximum of £3,200.\n\nIt is understood those at the party were close friends and family who had their temperatures checked on arrival.\n\n\"On Saturday evening I arrived home to find a small surprise gathering had been organised for me with family and close friends to celebrate my birthday,\" Abraham said.\n\n\"Although I was totally unaware this was planned, I would like to wholeheartedly apologise for the naivety shown by all for the organisation and attending of this gathering.\n\n\"I recognise that I have a responsibility both in my professional and personal life to honour and respect the guidelines and deeply regret that this took place.\n\n\"All I can do now is learn from it, apologise to everyone and ensure it never happens again.\"\n\nLast month, Manchester City midfielder Phil Foden and Manchester United forward Mason Greenwood were dropped from an England camp after an \"unacceptable\" breach of Covid-19 quarantine guidelines in Iceland.\n\nEngland manager Gareth Southgate was already planning to talk to his squad this week about \"what it means to wear the shirt\", following the incident involving Foden and Greenwood.\n\nSouthgate plans to give his players \"some reminders on how we work\".\n\n\"That's not a case of reading the riot act,\" he said last week. \"That's a case of asking the players what sort of team they want to be involved in and be a part of.\"\n\nEngland play a friendly against Wales on 8 October, plus Nations League fixtures against Belgium and Denmark on 11 and 14 October respectively. All three games will be played at Wembley.\n• None Me, My Brother and Our Balls:\n• None New series of the quirky comedy is streaming now", "The age at which most people start to receive the state pension has now officially hit 66 after steady rises in the qualifying age in recent years.\n\nMen and women born between 6 October, 1954, and 5 April, 1960, will start receiving their pension on their 66th birthday.\n\nFor those born after that, there will be a phased increase in state pension age to 67, and eventually 68.\n\nIt comes as the chancellor vowed the \"triple lock\" pledge is safe.\n\nUnder this pledge, the state pension increases each year in line with the highest of average earnings, prices (as measured by inflation) or 2.5%.\n\nCoronavirus and the furlough scheme is set to distort the calculations for average wages and could mean one bumper year of pension increases. This has led MPs and economists to discuss how this could be smoothed out.\n\nBut, when asked by LBC radio whether the triple lock was safe, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said: \"Yes, our manifesto commitments are there and that is very much the legislative position.\n\n\"We care very much about pensioners and making sure they have security and that's indeed our policy.\"\n\nThe full state pension for new recipients is worth £175.20 a week.\n\nTo receive the full amount, various criteria including 35 qualifying years of national insurance must be satisfied.\n\nThe age at which people receive the state pension has been increasing as people live longer, and the government has plans for the increase to 68 to be brought forward.\n\nHowever, the increases have been controversial, particularly for women who have seen the most significant rise.\n\nCampaigners took their fight to court\n\nCampaigners claim women born in the 1950s have been treated unfairly by rapid changes and the way they were communicated to those affected.\n\nSome of those involved in the campaign recently lost a legal challenge, claiming the move was unlawful discrimination.\n\nThe coronavirus crisis has led many people to reconsider retirement plans, especially those who feel they are more at risk from the outbreak.\n\nFormer pensions minister Ros Altmann argued that the crisis meant there was a \"strong case\" for people to be given early access to their state pension, even if it were at a reduced rate.\n\nShe also pointed out the large differences in life expectancy in different areas of the UK.\n\nMillions of people who will rely on their state pension in retirement need to know two things: how much will they receive, and when.\n\nThe future for both is not entirely clear.\n\nFirstly, the age at which the state pension begins has been rising, and will continue to do so. MPs will decide on how quickly this happens, fully aware of the strength of feeling from the WASPI (Women Against State Pension Inequality) campaign over how this has been handled in the past.\n\nSecondly, there is always plenty of debate over the future of the triple lock - the pledge to ensure the state pension rises by a minimum of 2.5% each year.\n\nAnd if young workers think this has nothing to do with them, they should think again. How long we work before we receive state financial support in retirement is a vital issue for long-term financial planning.\n\nYounger workers have also been urged by pension providers to consider their retirement options, with a strong likelihood of state pension age rising further as time passes.\n\n\"As people live longer, it's clear many will also have to work for longer,\" said Pete Glancy, head of policy at Scottish Widows.\n\n\"The increase to the state pension age provides a timely reminder to everyone to check your pension pots and ask yourself whether the savings you've built up are enough for the kind of life you want in retirement.\"\n\nTom Selby, senior analyst at AJ Bell, said: \"As average life expectancy continues to increase, the state pension age will inevitably follow suit.\n\n\"This means younger savers probably need to plan assuming they might not reach their state pension age until 70 or even beyond. Anyone who aspires to more than the bare minimum in retirement needs to take responsibility as early as possible to build their own retirement pot.\"", "The executive is actively considering \"additional planned interventions\" to deal with the spread of Covid-19, the health minister has said.\n\nRobin Swann said he did not \"want a return to a long-term or indefinite lockdown\".\n\nMeanwhile public health experts in the Republic of Ireland have recommended the highest level of restrictions be applied to the entire country.\n\nIt is expected politicians will meet the chief medical officer on Monday.\n\nA further 462 cases of Covid-19 were announced by the Department of Health on Sunday.\n\nOne person has died in the past 24 hours after testing positive.\n\nThere are 65 people in hospital after testing positive for the virus, of whom nine are in intensive care.\n\nIn the Republic of Ireland, 364 new Covid-19 cases were recorded on Sunday, with no new deaths reported.\n\nDeputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill said \"any notion of a circuit breaker only works if it's across the Island of Ireland\".\n\nThe executive's Chief Scientific Advisor, Prof Ian Young, said \"other levers are likely to be needed\" in addition to NI-wide restrictions on household gatherings.\n\nIn a statement issued on Sunday evening, he said the hospitality sector was the \"second most important\" for interventions \"to reduce adult contacts\".\n\nHe said contacts in this sector \"tend to be closer and longer\" than in many other settings, while alcohol consumption \"will also be a factor in failure to comply with social distancing\".\n\nProf Young added there had been a \"number of identified clusters associated with the hospitality sector\", however, minister will have to weigh up measures \"while also seeking to mitigate adverse consequences for society and the economy\".\n\nEarlier, Stormont Finance Minister Conor Murphy told BBC's Sunday Politics that \"all options\" would be discussed when the executive meet on Monday.\n\nFinance Minister Conor Murphy said \"all options\" would be considered by the executive\n\nMeanwhile, a 46-year-old woman has been charged with breaching coronavirus regulations in Strabane.\n\nThe woman is the first person in Northern Ireland to be charged under the new legislation.\n\nShe is due appear at Londonderry Magistrates' Court on Monday.\n\nMr Murphy said he was \"concerned\" about the rising cases, adding \"as are all of the executive\".\n\n\"The primary focus of the executive is to protect life and whatever steps have to be taken we will take them,\" he said.\n\n\"We have to take a balanced view and one which we are sure the population will come along with us.\"\n\nRobin Swann said NI's hospitals were \"already under growing pressure and this will intensify in the coming weeks given the extent of the new cases\".\n\n\"Concrete action has been taken by the executive on a number of fronts and I will not hesitate to recommend further restrictions,\" he continued.\n\n\"Saving lives and protecting our health service must come first.\"\n\nThe health minister also urged people not to \"look for loopholes or grey areas in the regulations\".\n\nNew restrictions for the Derry City and Strabane Council area were announced by the Stormont executive on Thursday in an effort to stem spiralling infection numbers.\n\nThey include hospitality businesses being limited to takeaway, delivery and outdoor dining, and a call to avoid unnecessary travel.\n\nSpeaking about the rise in cases across NI, Dr Gerry Waldron of the Public Health Agency said a circuit-breaker lockdown was \"almost inevitable\".\n\nA circuit breaker is a short, sharp period of tightened restrictions for everyone to curb the spread of coronavirus.\n\n\"It's not a place we expected to be at this time of the year, at the beginning of October, we thought, if anything, we might be seeing that maybe middle of October,\" he told Radio Ulster's Sunday with Steven Rainey show.\n\n\"We are absolutely insisting that people follow the advice of maintaining a social distance from other individuals, as far as possible, of two metres.\n\n\"We'll just have to brace ourselves and see how things pan out over the next few days and the next week.\"\n\nHe stressed the need to stick to the basics - keep a social distance, wear a face mask and keep washing your hands.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"It's going to continue to be bumpy through to Christmas\"\n\nSpeaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr show, Boris Johnson urged people to behave \"fearlessly but with common sense\" in their approach to the coronavirus.\n\nThe prime minister warned of a \"bumpy ride\" until Christmas and beyond, saying the winter could be \"very tough\" for everyone.\n\nHe added there had to be a balance between saving lives and protecting the economy.", "Last updated on .From the section Arsenal", "Jobseekers will be offered coaching and advice on moving into \"growing sectors\" as part of a £238m employment programme, the government has said.\n\nJob Entry Targeted Support is aimed at helping those out of work because of Covid-19 for three months.\n\nWork and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey said it would give people \"the helping hand they need\".\n\nBut Labour said the scheme \"offers very little new support\" and it was \"too little too late\".\n\nLast month, official figures showed that the UK unemployment rate had risen to its highest level for two years, with young people particularly hard hit.\n\nThe Job Entry Targeted Support (JETS) scheme will \"boost the prospects of more than a quarter of a million people across Britain\", Ms Coffey said.\n\nThe Department for Work and Pensions says it is recruiting an additional 13,500 \"work coaches\" to help deliver the new scheme.\n\nSpeaking to the BBC, Ms Coffey said JETS is aimed more at helping \"adults beyond the age of 25\" learn how their skills \"can be used in different parts of the economy\" - and she cited construction and care as examples of growing sectors.\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak said the scheme would \"provide fresh opportunities to those that have sadly lost their jobs, to ensure that nobody is left without hope\".\n\n\"Our unprecedented support has protected millions of livelihoods and businesses since the start of the pandemic, but I've always been clear that we can't save every job,\" he said.\n\n\"I've spoken about the damaging effects of being out of work, but through JETS we will provide fresh opportunities to those that have sadly lost their jobs, to ensure that nobody is left without hope.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"It's going to continue to be bumpy through to Christmas\"\n\nHowever, Labour's shadow work and pensions secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said: \"By the government's own admission at least four million people could lose their jobs during the crisis. All it can muster in response are piecemeal schemes and meaningless slogans.\n\n\"This new scheme offers very little new support and relies on already overstretched work coaches on the ground, while many of the new work coaches promised have yet to materialise.\n\n\"It's too little too late again from a government that simply can't get a grip on this jobs crisis.\"\n\nMr Sunak is due to address the Conservative Party Conference later, saying the government has been faced with \"difficult trade-offs and decisions\" during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nHe will say that while he cannot protect every job, \"the pain of knowing it only grows with each passing day\".\n\nMr Sunak will say his \"single priority\" as chancellor is \"to create support and extend opportunity to as many people as I can\".\n\n\"We will not let talent wither, or waste, we will help all who want it, find new opportunity and develop new skills,\" he is expected to say.\n\nIn an interview with the Sun ahead of his speech, Mr Sunak also defended his Eat Out to Help Out scheme after suggestions it may have helped fuel the second wave of coronavirus cases.\n\nThe chancellor said the scheme had helped prop-up two million jobs and that he had no regrets about paying for it.\n\nMr Sunak also strongly pushed back on the idea of further lockdowns, which he said would be detrimental not just to the economy but to society as well.\n\n\"Lockdowns obviously have a very strong economic impact, but they have an impact on many other things,\" he said.\n\nOn the 22:00 curfew on pubs and restaurants, Mr Sunak said ministers were implementing such rules \"to try and nip this in the bud\", but he acknowledged it was \"frustrating\".\n\n\"Everyone is very frustrated and exhausted and tired about all of this,\" he told the paper.\n\nLabour's shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds said her party had urged Mr Sunak to introduce a wage support scheme that incentivised employers to keep more staff on, but \"he ignored these calls and now nearly a million jobs are at risk when the furlough scheme ends in a few weeks' time\".\n\n\"When he speaks at Conservative Party Conference, Rishi Sunak must promise to get a grip of the jobs crisis before it's too late,\" she said.\n\n\"If he doesn't, Britain risks an unemployment crisis greater than we have seen in decades - and Rishi Sunak's name will be all over it.\"\n\nIt comes as the furlough scheme ends this month, to be replaced by the government's new wage subsidy programme, the Job Support Scheme, on 1 November.\n\nUnder the Job Support Scheme, if bosses bring back workers part time, the government will help top up their wages with employers to at least three-quarters of their full-time pay.\n\nNearly three million workers - or 12% of the UK's workforce - are currently on partial or full furlough leave, according to official figures.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nDancing doctors donned their tutus to treat a ballet-mad young patient to a performance of Swan Lake.\n\nFive-year-old Izzy Fletcher from Worcester, who is being treated for cancer for a second time, was delighted by their dancing.\n\nDr Baylon Kamalarajan and Emma Maunder dressed in bright-coloured tutus to dance while Izzy gave instructions.\n\nThe Royal Ballet replied to the video, tweeting: \"Get well soon Izzy! We hope to see you dancing again soon.\"\n\nIzzy is being treated by paediatricians at the Worcester Royal Hospital.\n\nIzzy has acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. She first started treatment in 2017 and completed her treatment in May 2019.\n\nHowever, she relapsed earlier this year and now requires further treatment and chemotherapy.\n\nHer mother, Vicky Fletcher, said: \"She's been through a really tough time the last few months, and it's something [the doctors] wanted to do for a while, but she's been so poorly, so it was a nice special treat for her.\"\n\nIzzy spent some time in intensive care because of an infection but is \"a lot better now\" and back in school.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by The Royal Ballet This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by The Royal Ballet\n\nIzzy is about to start another month of treatment, her mum said, adding: \"She's doing ever so well, but [there is] still a long road to come.\n\n\"We just want to thank [the hospital] so much and it does make such a difference to families to have that source of fun things to do, when there is a lot less fun things going on.\"\n\nHospital staff picked up on Izzy's love of ballet while she was in for treatment and spent time reading ballet stories.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to the US Supreme Court came as little surprise.\n\nThe long-term academic, appeals court judge and mother of seven was the hot favourite for the Supreme Court seat.\n\nDonald Trump - who as sitting president gets to select nominees - reportedly once said he was \"saving her\" for this moment: when elderly Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and a vacancy on the nine-member court arose.\n\nIt took the president just over a week to fast-track the 48-year-old conservative intellectual into the wings, and after a four-day confirmation hearing in the Senate, she was confirmed just over a week before the presidential election by 52 votes to 48.\n\nIn prepared remarks released ahead of the hearings, Judge Barrett thanked Mr Trump for \"entrusting me with this profound responsibility\", which she called the \"honour of a lifetime\".\n\nMr Trump has succeeded in tipping the court make-up even further to the right, just ahead of the presidential election, when he could lose power.\n\nJudge Barrett's record on gun rights and immigration cases imply she would be as reliable a vote on the right of the court, as Ginsburg was on the left, according to Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University.\n\n\"Ginsburg maintained one of the most consistent liberal voting records in the history of the court. Barrett has the same consistency and commitment,\" he adds. \"She is not a work-in-progress like some nominees. She is the ultimate 'deliverable' for conservative votes.\"\n\nAnd her vote, alongside a conservative majority, could make the difference for decades ahead, especially on divisive issues such as abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act (the Obama-era health insurance provider).\n\nJudge Barrett's legal opinions and remarks on abortion and gay marriage have made her popular with the religious right, but earned vehement opposition from liberals.\n\nBut as a devout Catholic, she has repeatedly insisted her faith does not compromise her work.\n\nJudge Barrett lives in South Bend, Indiana, with her husband, Jesse, a former federal prosecutor who is now with a private firm. The couple have seven children, including two adopted from Haiti. She is the oldest of seven children herself.\n\nBarrett with her family at an event to announce Trump's nominee\n\nKnown for her sharp intellect, she studied at the University of Notre Dame's Law School, graduating first in her class, and was a clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, who, in her words, was the \"staunchest conservative\" on the Supreme Court at the time.\n\nLike her mentor Justice Scalia, she is an originalist, which is a belief that judges should attempt to interpret the words of the Constitution as the authors intended when they were written.\n\nMany liberals oppose that strict approach, saying there must be scope for moving with the times.\n\nJudge Barrett has spent much of her career as a professor at her alma mater, Notre Dame, where she was voted professor of the year multiple times. One of her students, Deion Kathawa, who took a class with her earlier this year, told the BBC she was popular because she involved everyone in discussions. He found her \"collegial, civil, fair-minded, intellectually sharp, and devoted to the rule of law secured by our Constitution\".\n\nAnother student told the WBEZ new site: \"I feel somewhat conflicted because … she's a great professor. She never brought up politics in her classroom... But I do not agree with her ideologies at all. I don't think she would be good for this country and the Supreme Court.\"\n\nJudge Barrett was selected by President Trump to serve as a federal appeals court judge in 2017, sitting on the Seventh Circuit, based in Chicago. She regularly commutes to the court from her home - more than an hour and half away. The South Bend Tribune once carried an interview from a friend saying she was an early riser, getting up between 04:00 and 05:00. \"It's true,\" says Paolo Carozza, a professor at Notre Dame. \"I see her at the gym shortly after then.\"\n\nJudge Barrett has continued to teach at Notre Dame Law School\n\nProf Carozza has watched Judge Barrett go from student to teacher to leading judge, and speaks about her effusively. \"It's a small, tight-knit community, so I know her socially too. She is ordinary, warm, kind.\"\n\nA religious man himself, he thinks it is reasonable to question a candidate about whether their beliefs would interfere with their work. \"But she has answered those questions forcefully... I fear she is now being reduced to an ideological caricature, and that pains me, knowing what a rich and thoughtful person she is.\"\n\nA Hall of Fame picture of Amy Coney Barrett (right) hangs in Rhodes College, Tennessee, where she got her undergraduate degree\n\nJudge Barrett has defended herself on multiple occasions against charges that her religious faith might influence her in court. \"I would stress that my personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge,\" she once said.\n\nHowever, her links to a particularly conservative Christian faith group, People of Praise, have been much discussed in the US press. LGBT groups have flagged the group's network of schools, which have guidelines stating a belief that sexual relations should only happen between heterosexual married couples.\n\nLGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign has voiced strong opposition to Judge Barrett's confirmation, declaring her an \"absolute threat to LGBTQ rights\".\n\nThe Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research organisation, declined comment on Judge Barrett specifically, but said appointing any new conservative Supreme Court justice would \"be devastating for sexual and reproductive health and rights\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 2016 vs 2020: What Republicans said about choosing a Supreme Court justice in an election year", "Some farmers say many UK workers could not cope with the hard labour\n\nFarmers are warning they will still need thousands of foreign workers for the UK harvest next year despite a campaign to attract domestic workers.\n\nNational Farmers Union (NFU) figures, given exclusively to the BBC, reveal only 11% of seasonal workers in the 2020 season were UK residents.\n\nThat is despite a high profile Pick for Britain campaign during the summer.\n\nThe NFU now wants government assurances about labour for next year after the Brexit transition period ends.\n\nThe Horticulture Seasonal Worker Survey covered 244 growers, recruiting more than 30,000 people - equating to nearly half the workforce. The NFU said the worker response was promising, but was not enough to sustain the industry long term.\n\nVegetable farmer Martin Haines employs 150 seasonal workers in the Cotswolds, picking pumpkins, beans and broccoli.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Generation Harvest: What it's like for the new fruit and veg picking Brits\n\nThis year, facing the twin challenges of Brexit and Covid-19, he tried to find more local workers. However he only managed to recruit five British pickers - and they left before the end of the season to prepare for going to university.\n\n\"We're quite happy to have British workers,\" Mr Haines said. \"We will invest in their training to be able to do the job, but they just don't come and apply for the jobs. A lot of the work we do is on bonus - it's above minimum wage, so I'm not sure what we could do to attract more people.\"\n\nCampaigns like the government-backed Pick For Britain saw a huge initial interest. But John Hardman, from Hops Labour Solutions, one of the biggest recruiters, said of around 30,000 applications they had from Britons, only 4% took up jobs and around 1% stayed past the initial six weeks.\n\nMr Hardman said many domestic workers had an unrealistic 'Darling Buds of May' view of working on the land. \"It's hard physical labour. There is very little appetite in the domestic labour market for seasonal agricultural work because of the nature of the work.\n\n\"To be honest, EU citizens and those keen to work here are far more productive than the domestic labour force.\"\n\nDefra says it is working closely with the Home Office to ensure there is a long term strategy for the farming workforce\n\nMr Hardman added that, at this time of year, HOPS would normally be starting the process of finding overseas workers for next summer, but it is now halting recruitment until it knows more about the government's plans.\n\n\"It's like selling off an empty shelf. We are suspending recruiting people from Romania and Bulgaria for 2021 purely based on uncertainty,\" Mr Hardman said.\n\nNFU vice president Tom Bradshaw said: \"We are at a critical time in recruitment for many growers. As freedom of movement ends on December 31, those growers of iconic British daffodils, asparagus, and soft fruits still don't know where they will recruit experienced workers from.\"\n\nThe Seasonal Workers Pilot, which allows recruitment of a limited number of temporary migrants for specific seasonal roles in the horticultural sector, was extended from 2,500 to 10,000. But the industry wants assurances over whether it will run next year.\n\nIn a statement, a spokesperson for the Department Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), said: \"Seasonal workers are essential to bring in the harvest every year, which is why we are continuing to work hard to ensure our farmers and growers have the support and workforce they need.\n\n\"Now the UK has left the EU, Defra is working closely with the Home Office to ensure that there is a long term strategy for the food and farming workforce as part of future immigration policy.\"", "The US Supreme Court is often the last say on major cases that impact public life. So what kind of justice might President Trump's nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett be?\n\nFrom abortion to gun rights, here's a look at what she's said about major issues in the past.\n\nSpeaking in 2016 at Jacksonville University's Public Policy Institute, she told students judges should not be appointed based on policy preferences. \"We should be putting people on the court who want to apply the Constitution.\"\n\nIn her opening statement on 12 October, she tied herself once more to the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who she worked for as a clerk.\n\n\"His judicial philosophy was straightforward: A judge must apply the law as written, not as the judge wishes it were. Sometimes that approach meant reaching results that he did not like.\n\n\"But as he put it in one of his best known opinions, that is what it means to say we have a government of laws, not of men.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Amy Coney Barrett: \"I will meet the challenge with both humility and courage\"\n\nShe added that \"courts have a vital responsibility to enforce the rule of law\" but they are not meant to \"solve every problem or right every wrong in our public life\".\n\n\"The policy decisions and value judgments of government must be made by the political branches elected by and accountable to the people.\"\n\nFor many, Judge Barrett's views on abortion (and the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that protected the procedure nationally) are at the centre of their support or condemnation of her nomination.\n\nShe has not ruled specifically on abortion before, but she has reviewed two abortion restrictions cases while on the appeals court.\n\nJudge Barrett voted in favour of a law that would have mandated doctors to inform the parents of a minor seeking an abortion, with no exceptions. She also called for a state law that sought to ban abortions related to sex, race, disability or life-threatening health conditions to be reheard.\n\nShe was also one of five appeals judges who argued that an Indiana state law requiring burial or cremation for foetal remains may have been constitutional.\n\nShe wrote in a 2013 Texas Law Review article that the \"public response to controversial cases like Roe reflects public rejection of the proposition that [precedent] can declare a permanent victor in a divisive constitutional struggle rather than desire that the precedent remain forever unchanging\".\n\n\"Court watchers embrace the possibility of overruling, even if they may want it to be the exception rather than the rule.\"\n\nAnti-abortion supporters in Washington DC during the confirmation hearing\n\nTalking about abortion in 2016 at Jacksonville University, Judge Barrett said she did not think \"abortion or the right to abortion would change\".\n\n\"I think some of the restrictions would change,\" she said. \"The question is how much freedom the court is willing to let states have in regulating abortion.\"\n\nJudge Barrett's abortion views aside, perhaps the more important is the question of how she views precedent - and what that might mean for Roe v Wade and other established rulings.\n\n\"Does the Court act lawlessly - or at least questionably - when it overrules precedent?\" she wrote in a 2013 Texas Law Review article.\n\n\"I tend to agree with those who say that a justice's duty is to the Constitution and that it is thus more legitimate for her to enforce her best understanding of the Constitution rather than a precedent she thinks is clearly in conflict with it.\"\n\nA devout Catholic, Judge Barrett has been asked about her faith as it relates to her work during past confirmation hearings.\n\nShe has been asked in particular about a 1998 article she co-wrote with a professor about Catholic judges.\n\nShe wrote that Catholic judges are \"obliged by oath, professional commitment and the demands of citizenship to enforce the death penalty\", while also being obliged \"to adhere to their church's teaching on moral matters\".\n\nDuring her 2017 confirmation hearing for the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Judge Barrett said she still \"vehemently\" believes that if there is a conflict between a judge's \"personal conviction and that judge's duty under rule of law, that it is never ever permissible for that judge to follow their personal convictions in the decision of a case rather than what the law requires\".\n\nIn the same hearing, she said she is a \"faithful Catholic\", but stressed her affiliation \"would not bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge\".\n\n\"I would decide cases according to rule of law, beginning to end, and in the rare circumstance that might ever arise - I can't imagine one sitting here now - where I felt that I had some conscientious objection to the law, I would recuse,\" the judge said.\n\n\"I would never impose my own personal convictions upon the law.\"\n\nAnother major issue for voters is how a Justice Coney Barrett might rule on the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's landmark healthcare law that brought insurance coverage to millions.\n\nThe Supreme Court is to rule on the legality of that law in November.\n\nProtesters who support Obamacare stand outside the Supreme Court during the hearing\n\nIn a 2017 law review essay, Judge Barrett criticised Chief Justice John Roberts's 2012 opinion on the act's individual mandate (which imposed a penalty for anyone who did not sign up for insurance).\n\nShe wrote: \"Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute.\n\n\"He construed the penalty imposed on those without health insurance as a tax, which permitted him to sustain the statute as a valid exercise of the taxing power; had he treated the payment as the statute did - as a penalty - he would have had to invalidate the statute as lying beyond Congress's commerce power.\"\n\nThere's just one ruling on the right to bear arms we can reference from Judge Barrett's record, but it is a controversial one.\n\nGun rights supporters have praised her 37-page dissent in the case of a man who pleaded guilty to mail fraud, served his time and then challenged state laws that barred him as a felon from owning a gun again.\n\nSaying \"history is consistent with common sense\", she argued that the government can only prohibit individuals shown to be dangerous from possessing guns.\n\n\"Founding-era legislatures did not strip felons of the right to bear arms simply because of their status as felons,\" she wrote.\n\n\"Nor have the parties introduced any evidence that founding-era legislatures imposed virtue-based restrictions on the right; such restrictions applied to civic rights like voting and jury service, not to individual rights like the right to possess a gun.\"\n\nSpeaking about her dissent to students at Hillsdale College last year, Judge Barrett said while it \"sounds kind of radical to say felons can have firearms\", she found no \"blanket authority\" to take guns away from Americans without showing the individual was a danger.\n\nDuring her Senate confirmation hearings, Judge Barrett said she and her family own a gun.\n\nThe killing of black American George Floyd sparked mass demonstrations across the US and the world in 2020.\n\nSenator Dick Durbin asked Judge Barrett during the confirmation hearings whether she had seen the video of his death, in which he repeatedly told white police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck that he could not breathe.\n\n\"As I have two black children that was very, very personal for my family,\" she said, adding that she and her 17-year-old daughter \"wept together in my room\" after the video became public.\n\nAs a result, she said it was an \"entirely uncontroversial and obvious statement [that] racism persists in our country\".\n\nHowever, as with other controversial issues she was asked about during the hearings, she refused to express her views on how she would rule on cases surrounding the issue.\n\n\"Those things are policy questions. Hotly contested policy questions,\" she said. While she was happy to talk about her personal experience, giving her view on how to tackle the issue of racism \"is kind of beyond what I'm capable of doing as a judge\".\n• None What's at stake in US Supreme Court fight", "Europe's biggest bank, HSBC, has said it could start charging for \"basic banking services\" in some countries after it reported a 35% fall in quarterly profits.\n\nIt said it was considering charging for products such as current accounts, which are free to UK customers.\n\nThe bank said it was losing money on a \"large number\" of such accounts.\n\nA spokesman later told the BBC it was committed to continuing to provide free \"basic bank accounts\" in the UK .\n\nBut they added: \"We always keep under review the pricing for our standard current accounts and associated services.\"\n\nVery few banks charge for standard bank accounts, but experts say this could change if the UK falls into negative interest rates due to the pandemic.\n\nThat would see the Bank of England take interest rates below zero to help boost consumer spending and revive the economy.\n\nHSBC reported a 35% fall in pre-tax profit during the third quarter of the year to $3.1bn (£2.3bn), while revenues fell 11%.\n\nAlong with other banks, it has seen earnings hit amid an environment of rock bottom interest rates, and so is now considering other ways of boosting revenues.\n\nThe lender also said it would accelerate its restructuring plan, cutting costs further than previously suggested.\n\nBut HSBC, which is in the midst of cutting 35,000 jobs, did not say whether more jobs would now go. It said it would provide details on the plan with its full-year results next February.\n\nDespite the tough environment, HSBC chief executive Noel Quinn said there were some bright spots.\n\n\"These were promising results against a backdrop of the continuing impacts of Covid-19 on the global economy,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm pleased with the significantly lower credit losses in the quarter, and we are moving at pace to adapt our business model to a protracted low interest rate environment.\"\n\nHSBC had set aside between $8bn and $13bn for bad loans as it expects more people and businesses to default on their repayments because of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nHowever, it now says its expenses are likely to be at the lower end of that range.\n\nIn September, HSBC's share price fell to its lowest level since 1995 amid allegations that the bank had allowed fraudsters to transfer millions of dollars around the world, even after learning of the scam.\n\nThe bank has also faced recent criticism from the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for supporting China's controversial security legislation in Hong Kong.\n\nEven before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, HSBC was restructuring with a plan to cut $4.5bn (£3.6bn) of costs by 2022.\n\nAt its peak, the bank employed more than 300,000 people, but since the global financial crisis, the bank has trimmed its operations significantly.", "Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood was one of Bloomsbury's best selling titles\n\nPeople have \"rediscovered the pleasure of reading\" in lockdown, publisher Bloomsbury has said, after reporting its best half-year profits since 2008.\n\nThe firm, best known for publishing the Harry Potter books, said profits jumped 60% to £4m from February to August.\n\nOnline book sales and e-book revenues were both \"significantly higher\".\n\nIt said bestsellers during the period included \"Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race\" and \"Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood\".\n\nOther popular consumer books during the period included \"White Rage\", \"Humankind\" and \"Such A Fun Age\".\n\nNigel Newton, founder and chief executive of Bloomsbury, said the firm initially feared lockdown would batter the business after it shut all its shops in March.\n\nBut he told the BBC: \"As we cycled through the month there became a real uptake in reading, perhaps people tired of watching streamed movies which they binged on to begin with and turned to books.\"\n\nHe said people's book choices had reflected the mood of the people throughout the past six months: \"In June we published 'Humankind' by Rutger Bregman, people wanted hope and a positive view of humanity, which he gave, and in June itself the biggest social issue of our time, with 'Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race'.\n\n\"[That was] unpinned all the while by the desire to make good food, so the Dishoom cookbook and others really sold terrifically well.\"\n\nDuring the period total sales across the group rose by 10% to £78.3m.\n\nRose Cole outside Daunt Books in London's Marylebone: \"Customers are enjoying browsing more than ever.\"\n\nBloomsbury also said its digital resources division had seen a 47% rise in sales as academic institutions had switched to digital products to support remote learning.\n\nPhilip Jones, editor of the industry publication the Bookseller, said the last six months had thrown up some interesting trends in book buying behaviour.\n\n\"Initially when the stores closed at the start of lockdown in March, online sales were largely brand names, things that were easily searchable, celebrity authors or high-profile TV series. 'Normal People' for example went back to the top of the bestseller lists after being dramatised on TV, but when the shops reopened in June we saw the charts go back to normal.\"\n\nHe told the BBC the renewed enthusiasm for books during the pandemic had continued, and bookshops were unseasonably busy.\n\n\"We are seeing an early Christmas for bookshops. November's book sales are happening in October. Normally the bookshop market gets up to £40m per week in November, but it has already happened.\"\n\nIn Marylebone in central London, Rose Cole, general manager of independent bookseller Daunt Books, said shops such as hers were a long way from normal as visitors continue to stay out of major cities: \"We are acutely feeling the effects of people staying away from central London and there's obviously a lot to deter customers from shopping on high streets in the way in which they used to.\n\n\"But what we are seeing is that those customers coming in are enjoying the experience of browsing and discovering books more than ever.\"", "Covid tests with results within an hour are being piloted in universities - which could help students in England get home for Christmas.\n\nMore than a million students will have to travel from their term-time accommodation in December.\n\nThis has raised concerns about spreading coronavirus as students move across the country between areas with different levels of infection.\n\nIn Scotland universities could switch to more online teaching in January.\n\nUniversities have called for a testing system with a rapid turnaround of results.\n\nBut there have been questions about the feasibility of how quickly this could be scaled up - and how to avoid what the SAGE scientific advisory group calls the \"significant risk\" of students causing outbreaks by moving for Christmas and New Year.\n\nDe Montfort and Durham universities are now running pilot projects for rapid Covid testing, including identifying those who might be infectious but have no symptoms.\n\nIn England, about 1.2 million students are expected to move in December from a university to a home address in another region, where there might be different levels of infection and restrictions.\n\nThis includes 200,000 students travelling away from universities in London, 235,000 from the south east, 120,000 leaving the north west, 123,000 out of Yorkshire and Humber and 120,000 from the West Midlands.\n\nIn Scotland, 150,000 students will be travelling home.\n\nStudents in Scotland have protested about how they are being treated in the pandemic\n\nA decision, involving all four devolved governments and education ministries in the UK, is awaited on the logistics of getting students home for Christmas, in a way that will not cause Covid outbreaks.\n\nSo far this term there have been virus cases in 118 universities across the UK, according to tracking by the Unicovid website, with tens of thousands of students having to self-isolate.\n\nEngland's Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has proposed an early end to teaching in person, creating a two-week buffer in which to get students home for the holidays.\n\nIn Scotland, Education Secretary John Swinney has suggested a staggered end of term and has not ruled out students being kept in universities over the break, if \"we have a situation where the virus has not been controlled\".\n\nUniversities, who would face the challenge of keeping students in Christmas isolation, have called for a faster system of mass testing.\n\nUniversities want tests with a rapid turnaround of results\n\n\"Enhanced testing capacity - including faster turnaround of results and effective contact tracing - will help to contain outbreaks at universities and limit transmission to the wider community,\" says a Universities UK spokesman.\n\nThe 'lateral flow tests' now being piloted are intended to find out whether someone has \"high enough levels of Covid-19 in their body to make them infectious to others\", says a statement from Durham University.\n\nUsing a nose and throat swab, the tests would be self-administered and would not need a laboratory to process the results.\n\nThe Department for Health and Social Care says the aim of the pilots would be to \"turn around rapid results within an hour at the location of the test\".\n\nAnd the DHSC says the pilots at Durham and De Montfort will see how such tests could be used \"at scale\".\n\nDurham says the pilot project, beginning this week for staff and students in two of its colleges, will be able to deliver results within 20 to 30 minutes.\n\nOnce students have been safely removed from university in December there will then be questions about how they can be brought back in January, without triggering another wave of campus outbreaks.\n\nThe Scottish government says there could be more online teaching at the start of next term and in areas of \"high prevalence\" of infection in-person teaching might be reserved for those taking subjects which needed hands-on training.\n\nThe UCU lecturers' union has threatened legal action against the continuing use of in-person teaching, while the SAGE advisory group has called for as much teaching as possible to be online.\n\nThe DHSC says the testing pilots are \"building the foundations for a mass testing programme\" which could also help reduce the number of school pupils having to be sent home in Covid outbreaks.", "The Irish News reported the review focuses on the work of a consultant urologist at Craigavon Area Hospital\n\nA number of patients are being recalled after a review was started into the work of a consultant urologist in the Southern Health Trust.\n\nThe trust said \"clinical concerns\" were raised and the consultant \"no longer works in the health service\".\n\nIt said \"a small number\" of patients are affected.\n\nThe Irish News reported that an investigation began in the summer and focuses on care at Craigavon Area Hospital.\n\nThe newspaper also said the consultant retired in June. However, the trust told BBC News NI it had no further comment to make on the matter.\n\nThe trust said the patients were being contacted \"so that their care can be reviewed\".\n\n\"The Department of Health is being kept updated on the progress of the review and the potential impact on patients,\" a statement added.\n\n\"If anyone is concerned and would like information please phone us on 0800 4148520 between 10am and 3pm.\"\n\nThe Department of Health confirmed it is \"being kept apprised\" on the review and said Health Minister Robin Swann \"plans to make a statement to the assembly very shortly\".", "Brehmer was dismissed by Dorset Police after admitting manslaughter\n\nA police officer who strangled his long-term lover after she exposed their affair to his wife has been cleared of murder.\n\nTimothy Brehmer, a constable with Dorset Police, killed nurse Claire Parry, 41, in a pub car park on 9 May.\n\nThe two had been having a secret relationship for more than 10 years, a trial at Salisbury Crown Court heard.\n\nBrehmer, 41, of Hordle, Hampshire, had previously admitted manslaughter and said Mrs Parry's death was an accident.\n\nHe will be sentenced at the same court on Wednesday.\n\nThe trial heard mum-of-two Mrs Parry, who was married to another Dorset Police officer, had become angry after discovering Brehmer had had an affair with another woman while she was involved with him.\n\nThe defendant told jurors he agreed to meet her outside the Horns Inn in West Parley, Dorset, after she messaged him \"relentlessly\".\n\nMrs Parry took his phone to look through his social media messages before sending a text to his wife revealing the affair, the court heard.\n\nClaire Parry died in hospital after being strangled, a court has heard\n\nBrehmer said he strangled her by accident during a \"kerfuffle\" in his car.\n\nHe said when Mrs Parry refused to leave his car he tried to pull her out before he \"bundled\" into the vehicle in an attempt to push her.\n\nThe defendant said his arm \"must have slipped up in all the melee\" and that he left the car without realising Mrs Parry was \"poorly\".\n\nMrs Parry, from Bournemouth, died in hospital the following day from a brain injury caused by compression of the neck.\n\nJurors were shown the car in which Mrs Parry suffered fatal injuries\n\nBrehmer told his trial the affair with Mrs Parry had been \"a little bubble of niceness\" but he had rarely seen her during the coronavirus lockdown.\n\nHe said Mrs Parry's husband called him in March after becoming suspicious the two were having an affair and she had sent him messages so they could keep their stories straight.\n\nHowever, in the days before her death Mrs Parry started to believe that both her marriage and her relationship with Brehmer were coming to an end, the court heard.\n\nShe had carried out research into Brehmer using an alias on Facebook and became convinced he had conducted affairs with at least two other women.\n\nMrs Parry made contact with a police officer called Kate Rhodes, who told her she had an affair with Brehmer in late 2011, and this made her see him \"in a very different light\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMs Rhodes, a detective constable, told the court Brehmer used \"grooming\" techniques to exert \"coercive and controlling behaviour\" over women.\n\nShe had been mentored by Brehmer when she joined Dorset Police and was in a brief relationship with him which ended when she found out he was married.\n\nShe explained to the court how she was contacted on Facebook Messenger by Mrs Parry, who used the name Louisa Morgan, in the days before her death.\n\nMs Rhodes said they discussed \"womaniser\" Brehmer, whom she described as \"Mr Smooth\", and how he had conducted affairs while married.\n\nTimothy Brehmer admitted killing his lover Claire Parry but told the court it was an accident\n\nMrs Parry's husband, Andrew, told the court Brehmer was the \"worst kind of thief\" and described the pain of telling their children that their mother was dead.\n\n\"It was like a physical weight crushing down on my chest,\" he said.\n\nAfter the hearing, Det Ch Insp Richard Dixey said: \"Our thoughts remain with the family of Mrs Parry and I would like to pay tribute to the dignified way in which they have conducted themselves throughout the investigation.\"\n\nFollowing Brehmer's guilty plea to manslaughter on 8 July, Dorset Police commenced misconduct proceedings and, on 16 September, Chief Constable James Vaughan ruled the officer would be dismissed with immediate effect and would be placed on the national barred list.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Former PM Tony Blair said no concerns were raised about Greville Janner's nomination for peerage\n\nFormer Prime Minister Tony Blair has defended granting a peerage to a Labour politician accused of child sex abuse.\n\nGreville Janner, Leicester West MP for 27 years, was given the peerage in 1997 after he was initially investigated.\n\nHe was not prosecuted until 2015, shortly before he died.\n\nMr Blair told the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) he was aware of the allegations but it was not \"a bar\" as Lord Janner had denied them and there had not been any charges.\n\n\"In 1997 I would have known of allegations (against Lord Janner), the police inquiry, Lord Janner's denial and the fact that no charges were brought,\" a statement from Mr Blair said.\n\n\"It was public knowledge. I would have expected such allegations to be considered as part of the process.\n\n\"In view of his denial and the fact that there were no charges, I do not consider those allegations to be a bar.\"\n\nThe Prime Minister had nominated Lord Janner in his capacity as leader of the Labour party.\n\nHe said as part of the procedure, the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee (PHSC) was required to advise him on the suitability of all nominees and whether they were considered \"fit and proper persons\" to recommend to the Queen for peerage.\n\nHe said he would expect the PHSC would consider any allegations made against a nominee.\n\nLord Janner, who was a Leicester MP for 27 years, died in 2015\n\nThe investigation also heard that Lord Janner had been recommended for a knighthood in 1992, but that was turned down - although the reasons for this were not known.\n\nOn Monday, the inquiry heard that Ratcliffe Road children's home in Leicester burned all its records when a paedophile ex-employee was arrested.\n\nFormer senior policeman Mick Creedon, who ran the investigation, said he was \"haunted\" knowing runaways were sent to the home, described as a \"hell-hole\" and sexually abused.\n\nHe also described being \"disappointed\" when refused permission to arrest MP Greville Janner.\n\nThe home was \"immediately closed down\" when they arrested a prime suspect, and a senior worker at the home \"immediately burned all the files\".\n\nMr Creedon said several people he spoke to for the investigation had killed themselves, and three former residents eventually said they were also abused by Lord Janner.\n\nMick Creedon told the inquiry the Ratcliffe Road children's home was a \"hell-hole\"\n\nMr Creedon told the inquiry he was refused permission to arrest the politician in the 1990s and instead of arresting the MP he was invited to Leicestershire Police's headquarters to be interviewed.\n\nHowever, his home was not searched and he answered \"no comment\" to questions, so the case was dropped.\n\nThe inquiry's asking whether a prominent politician received preferential treatment, but these hearings have shone new light on an old children's home scandal in Leicestershire.\n\nThat's because allegations against Lord Janner first emerged during a huge investigation into abuse by care workers in the 1970s and 80s.\n\nWe've heard that Lord Janner was seen as a distraction. Under-resourced detectives were told to focus on the job in hand.\n\nBy the time he was charged, years later, he was too ill to stand trial.\n\nMr Creedon denied going too easy on Lord Janner and said one account that questions were sent in advance \"categorically didn't happen\".\n\n\"I still think there was a justifiable case for his arrest,\" he said.\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Police are investigating a road collision involving Sir Keir Starmer, which saw a cyclist taken to hospital.\n\nThe Labour leader is understood to have been driving in the Kentish Town area of north London when the incident happened around midday on Sunday.\n\nA spokesman for Sir Keir said he stayed at the scene until an ambulance arrived and reported the incident at a police station later that day.\n\nThe Met Police said the driver was not arrested nor interviewed under caution.\n\nThey added that the male cyclist suffered a minor injury to his arm and was taken to hospital by ambulance \"as a precaution\".\n\nSir Keir, a former director of public prosecutions, is not believed to have been injured.\n\nA spokesman for the Labour leader said: \"Keir was involved in a minor road traffic accident on Sunday.\n\n\"He spoke to a British Transport Police officer who attended the scene and swapped details with the officer and the other individual involved.\"\n\n\"Since the incident, Keir has also been in touch with the other individual involved,\" he added.\n\nThe Met Police said it was alerted by the London Ambulance Service at about 12:20 GMT to a report of a collision between a cyclist and a car in Grafton Road.\n\n\"The driver of the car had stopped at the scene and exchanged details with the cyclist but had left before officers arrived,\" the force said in a statement.\n\nOfficers from the Roads and Transport Policing Command were investigating the collision, the statement added.", "Last updated on .From the section Athletics\n\nWorld 100m champion Christian Coleman has been banned for two years after missing three drugs tests.\n\nThe 24-year-old American, who is suspended from 14 May 2020, will miss the postponed Tokyo Olympics next year.\n\nColeman won 100m gold at the World Championships in Doha in 2019.\n\nRepresentative Emanuel Hudson confirmed the indoor 60m world record holder will appeal against the Athletics Integrity Unit's (AIU) ruling to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas).\n\nHudson described the decision as \"unfortunate\", adding: \"Mr Coleman has nothing further to say until such time as the matter can be heard in the court of jurisdiction.\"\n\nTwo-time world champion Coleman, who also won 4x100m relay gold in Doha, has 30 days to file an appeal.\n\nHe was provisionally suspended in June after missing a third test in December 2019.\n\nThree whereabouts failures in a 12-month period can result in a ban of up to two years.\n\nColeman did not contest his first missed test on 16 January 2019 but disputed his filing failure on 26 April 2019 and whereabouts failure on 9 December.\n\nThe investigation into his rule violations said there was no suggestion he had ever taken a banned substance.\n\nHowever, Coleman's attitude towards his anti-doping obligations was described as \"entirely careless, perhaps even reckless\" by the AIU.\n\nAccording to the AIU's out-of-competition testing guidelines, athletes are accountable for missed tests if they are not at their specified location for the one-hour period they have stated. The tester must wait for the full 60 minutes before leaving.\n\nColeman said he was Christmas shopping \"five minutes away\" from home, and that the tester made no effort to contact him during his third whereabouts failure.\n\nHe also said on social media that he would be \"willing to take a drug test every single day for the rest of my career\" to prove his innocence.\n\nDoping control officers said they waited outside for a full hour, ringing and knocking every 10 minutes.\n\nThe AIU said shopping receipts belonging to Coleman suggested he was \"obviously\" not at his home for the entirety of the one-hour period.\n\nColeman said he returned home before the one-hour period ended at 8:15pm because he \"recalled watching the kick-off of the Monday night football game\".\n\nHowever, the AIU said receipts showed Coleman purchased items at 7:53pm and 8:22pm and that it was \"simply impossible\" for him to have returned home in between, while the officers took a photo of his residence at 8:21pm to show it was empty before leaving.\n\nThe US Anti-Doping Agency (Usada) initially charged Coleman with missing three drugs tests in 12 months, before his world 100m victory in September 2019.\n\nIt withdrew the case after it was proved there had been a filing irregularity regarding the date of the first missed test.", "A former paratrooper has attempted to break two world records after jumping from an aircraft into the sea.\n\nJohn Bream, 34, nicknamed \"the Flying Fish\", dropped about 130ft (40m) from a helicopter off Hayling Island on the Hampshire coast.\n\nSupport divers said he was briefly unconscious when he hit the water and was taken to hospital as a precaution.", "The first Borat film, released in 2006, was banned in Kazakhstan\n\nKazakhstan's tourism board has adopted the Borat catchphrase \"very nice\" in its new advertising campaign.\n\nThe phrase is used by the film character Borat, a fictional journalist from Kazakhstan.\n\nThe first Borat film caused outrage in the country, and authorities threatened to sue creator Sacha Baron Cohen.\n\nBut the country's tourism board has now embraced Borat as a perfect marketing tool - particularly as a second Borat film has just been released.\n\nIt has released a number of short advertisements that highlight the country's scenery and culture. The people in the video then use Borat's catchphrase \"very nice\".\n\n\"Kazakhstan's nature is very nice. Its food is very nice. And its people, despite Borat's jokes to the contrary, are some of the nicest in the world,\" Kairat Sadvakassov, deputy chairman of Kazakh Tourism, said in a statement.\n\nThe tourism board were persuaded to use the catchphrase by American Dennis Keen and his friend Yermek Utemissov. They pitched the idea and produced the advertisements, according to the New York Times.\n\nThe response from social media users has been positive with many saying the advertisements capitalise on the film and send a positive message.\n\nOne said: \"Well done. Great way to take the publicity created by a comedian and turn it to a positive message.\"\n\nThe second film itself has had a mixed reception. The Kazakh American Association has slammed the film for promoting \"racism, cultural appropriation and xenophobia\".\n\nIn a letter sent to Amazon, which has distribution rights to the film, the group asked: \"Why is our small nation fair game for public ridicule?\"\n\nIn Kazakhstan, more than 100,000 people signed an online petition demanding a cancellation of the film after a trailer was released.\n\n\"They completely desecrate and humiliate Kazakhstan and the dignity of the Kazakh nation,\" the petition said.\n\nOthers on social media branded the film as a \"stupid American comedy\".\n\nWhen the first Borat film was released in 2006, authorities banned the film and release of it on DVD and people were blocked from visiting its website.\n\nOfficials felt the movie portrayed Kazakhstan as a racist, sexist and primitive country.\n\nIn the film Borat bragged about incest and rape. He also joked that the former Soviet nation had the cleanest prostitutes in the world.\n\nThe film also caused outrage in Romania where an entire village said they were \"humiliated\" by the film.\n\nThe village was used as the backdrop for Borat's house. Residents said they were told the film was going to be a documentary, but instead were portrayed as backward people and criminals.\n\nYears later, however, the Kazakhstan government thanked Sacha Baron Cohen for boosting tourism in the country.\n\nIn 2012, the foreign minister at the time, Yerzhan Kazykhanov, said he was \"grateful\" to Borat for \"helping attract tourists\" to the country, adding that 10 times more people were applying for visas to go there.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Emma Jones reports from Kazakhstan on the country's new wave of films", "Emma Dobson, 23, says it is \"soul destroying\" that she hasn't got beyond a first interview yet.\n\nShe has cerebral palsy and has been job-hunting since completing her Masters degree at Aston University this summer. But despite making about 40 applications since July, she has had little success.\n\n\"Because I live by myself and like lots of people, I haven't done much socialising recently... I'm desperate to find something,\" Emma tells the BBC.\n\nShe and many other disabled people are facing a \"jobs crisis\" amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Leonard Cheshire disability charity.\n\nIt says about 7 in 10 disabled people have seen a hit to their income, been furloughed or feared redundancy due to Covid-19.\n\nThe charity also said some employers were discouraged from hiring disabled people, fearing they would not be able to provide the right support during the crisis.\n\nEmma, who has been applying for jobs in everything from academia to retail, urges employers to do whatever they can to support disabled candidates - in the application process and at work.\n\n\"Covid has shown us that a lot of the things that disabled employees have been asking for, such as flexible hours, remote working, hosting meetings online - are all very doable,\" she says.\n\n\"Lots of bosses managed to bring in these new measures at the drop of a hat - so there's no excuse for not fixing any roadblocks to hiring a disabled person, or maintaining those new ways of working, as we've been asking for them for years.\"\n\nThe Leonard Cheshire charity surveyed 1,170 working age disabled people and 500 employers. It found two in five hiring managers saw \"being able to support\" disabled people properly during the coronavirus pandemic as a barrier.\n\nMeanwhile, a fifth of employers said they were less likely to hire a disabled candidate overall.\n\nOf the 7.7 million disabled people of working age in the UK, 53.6% are currently in work, in comparison with 81.7% of those who are not disabled, according to the Office for National Statistics.\n\nMore than half (57%) of disabled 18-24 year olds surveyed by the charity said they felt that the pandemic had affected their ability to work. The majority also felt that it had hit their future earnings potential.\n\nLeonard Cheshire described its findings as \"stark\".\n\n\"But we should see them not as gloomy forecasts for policymakers but as motivators for immediate, wide-ranging action,\" said its head of policy, Gemma Hope.\n\nThe charity is calling on the government to extend the furlough scheme for working people who are shielding, and to make statutory sick pay available from the first day of employment.\n\nIn September, charity Scope also said that disabled people had been \"hardest-hit\" by the pandemic.\n\nIn an open letter, addressed to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, it pointed to \"a looming recession and disabled people at the sharp end of poverty\".\n\nScope called for the government to prioritise the publication of the National Disability Strategy, ensuring \"it provides a clear plan to mitigate existing inequalities the pandemic has further magnified\".\n\nThe government committed to publishing the strategy - which aims to improve disabled people's access to opportunities - in the last Queen's Speech.\n\n\"We understand this has been a very challenging time for many disabled people and we remain committed to supporting their safe return to work,\" a government spokesperson said.\n\n\"We are working to support and protect disabled people with one of the most comprehensive economic responses in the world.\n\n\"In addition, we have boosted welfare support by £9.3bn to help those who need it most.\"", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Six Traveller families have won a High Court appeal against a decision which would stop them living on land they own in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire.\n\nCharlotte Smith and her five neighbours were told by the local council to move off the land because they didn't have planning permission to live there.\n\nThe families initially appealed to the Planning Inspectorate - which sided with the local authority.\n\nBut that decision was quashed by the High Court earlier this month.\n\nThe families' fight is not over and they still don't have planning permission to live on the land but say they feel they \"can relax a little bit now\".\n\n\"My first initial reaction at the result was I did have a little tear,\" mum-of-four Charlotte tells me. \"Even though we've still got a fight, it feels like a weight has been lifted.\"\n\nCharlotte and the five other families have lived on the land for more than two-and-a-half years now\n\nThe families say they bought the land to give them \"a place to call home\" after previously living on the roadside.\n\nBut Newark and Sherwood District Council says the site isn't suitable to live on because it's at risk of flooding.\n\nLocal authorities in England are expected to have a five-year plan which sets out how they will deliver enough sites in the area for their Gypsy and Traveller communities.\n\nNewark and Sherwood council doesn't have one.\n\nThe families' lawyers argued the Planning Inspectorate's decision was flawed because it failed to treat the lack of a plan as \"a significant material consideration\".\n\nThe High Court agreed and quashed the original ruling at a hearing on 16 October.\n\nCharlotte's daughter wrote a letter to the PM asking to stay on the land\n\nCharlotte says the weeks leading up to the High Court hearing have been \"emotional\" for all of the families - as they didn't know which way the decision would go.\n\nShe tells me how her daughter surprised her with a letter to read in the car as she travelled down to London for the hearing.\n\nAddressed to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, it read: \"I am a 10-year-old girl in year five and I am a traveller. Can we live at Old Winthorpe Road Stable Yard? The council won't let us live there and I live in Newark.\"\n\nShe says her kids were \"jumping for joy\" when she returned home to tell them they'd won their appeal.\n\n\"I did tell my daughter it was because of her letter,\" Charlotte laughs. \"Obviously she doesn't know the legal side of things and I just thought it would build her spirits.\n\n\"Everyone is just ecstatic. I can't put into words how it actually makes me feel.\"\n\nCharlotte says the children who live on the land have \"their freedom but in a safe environment\"\n\nSince I wrote about the families' fight back in September I've had quite a few emails about it - and there's been a mix of opinions.\n\n\"I admire their desire to give the children the stability they now have to enable them to receive full-time education without losing their cultural identity,\" one reader said.\n\n\"We would all love to buy a field and build a home for our family on it, but for those of us that actually abide by the law, it's not an option,\" another wrote.\n\n\"Are they really integrating into the community? They sound just like our local site here in Kent,\" one email read.\n\n\"Reality is they do what they like, don't care about anybody else, steal what they like and generally are horrible people.\"\n\nI ask Charlotte how she feels about this.\n\nCharlotte says the six families \"want to be part of the local community\"\n\n\"Just because you've had a bad experience with a couple of families that live locally, that doesn't mean everybody's the same,\" she says.\n\n\"I'm happy to welcome anybody down and make them a cup of tea. You'll find we're actually lovely people, we're working class people, we pay our taxes, we're not sponging off the government.\n\n\"We didn't break into a local park or anything like that, we bought our land. Yes we put in our planning application retrospectively but we're trying our best, otherwise we'd still be on the roadside now. We want to be part of the community.\"\n\nThe land is separated from the village of Winthorpe by the A1 road and Charlotte says the families have the backing of the Winthorpe Estate Residents' Group - which has been posting messages of support on Twitter.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Winthorpe Estate Residents Group. 🍃💚🍃 This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe Planning Inspectorate now has 28 days from the High Court ruling to appeal against the decision. If it doesn't, the families' original appeal will need to be reheard by the inspectorate again.\n\nA spokesman said: \"The quality and accuracy of our decisions is very important to the Planning Inspectorate. We have been informed of the judgement and are awaiting a copy of the court order before deciding whether to seek leave to appeal.\"\n\nNewark and Sherwood District Council has found it needs to deliver 77 sites for the Gypsy and Traveller community by 2024 - and 118 sites by 2033.\n\nIt says maintaining a deliverable five-year supply of Gypsy and Traveller sites is \"challenging for many local authorities across England\".\n\n\"The council is working proactively to allocate land for future development, so these needs can be met,\" it added.\n\nIt says local landowners are being asked to put their land forward for consideration as potential sites and it will continue to consider individual planning applications from all sections of the community.\n\nCherry Wilson is a proud northerner who lives in Stockport, Greater Manchester, where she grew up.\n\nShe studied journalism in Sheffield and was the first in her family to go to university. Her passion is telling the stories of the people and communities behind the headlines, exploring issues that matter to them. She has a great love for cups of tea, jerk chicken, chips and gravy and Coronation Street.", "Danielle (right) and her sister\n\n\"I find it hard to remember ever having a cooked meal at home,\" says Danielle, who relied on free school meals as a child.\n\n\"I would eat spaghetti hoops cold out of the tin.\n\n\"We would have sliced white bread because it was 13p from [discount supermarket] Kwik Save, then put margarine on it and put it under the grill.\n\n\"Me and my sister thought we were going to open a café.\"\n\nDanielle, 39, is now a successful senior manager for a charity, living in London, but growing up she lived with food insecurity.\n\nShe has told the BBC how, as a child, she often had to resort to shoplifting or \"bin-diving\" for essential food at weekends or during the school holidays - once, when she was as young as 10.\n\n\"Food poverty in Britain isn't really spoken about because of shame,\" she says.\n\n\"When the holidays hit, hunger doesn't go.\"\n\nDanielle is calling on the government to \"support young people\" as the row about the decision not to extend free school meals for children in England into the half-term holiday continues.\n\nThe government extended free school meals to eligible children during the Easter holidays earlier this year and, after a campaign by footballer Marcus Rashford, did the same for the summer holiday.\n\nMinisters say that providing help through councils is the best way to reach those that need it.\n\n\"I was brought up in a household where we didn't have food at home,\" Danielle recalls.\n\nHer mother was ill, and couldn't work. A single-parent household, Danielle says she and her two siblings were often left to \"fend for themselves\", in addition to caring for their mum.\n\n\"Some days it was hard for her to get out of bed. She really put in a lot of effort but she couldn't cope. I don't hold it against her because she tried,\" Danielle stresses.\n\nThey would usually receive child benefits payments on a Monday. \"So we would often take a day off school and have lots of food then,\" says Danielle, \"but nothing afterwards.\"\n\nPackets of jelly were common because they cost 20p and \"would go quite far\", or instant custard - \"things to fill you up\".\n\nAt the weekend, meals would frequently consist of dry cereal and dry bread.\n\n\"I remember going to bed with hunger pains and coming home to an empty fridge,\" she says.\n\n\"You learn to shut off the signals from your brain that tell you you're hungry.\"\n\nThis habit stayed with her into adult life. \"I don't realise I'm hungry, and then it gets to 4pm and I realise I've been dissociating and suddenly have to eat.\n\n\"As a young adult I didn't know how to cook, so would just eat for survival. Something to take away the hunger.\"\n\nDanielle could sometimes eat at friends' houses or at Sunday school as a child, but her main source of hot meals was school.\n\nShe explains that because her mum was on benefits, that qualified her and her siblings for free school meals - which were limited to certain children.\n\n\"I have really strong memories of them,\" she says.\n\n\"Apple crumble and custard [her favourite pudding to this day], baked potatoes, roast dinners.\n\n\"I also have fond memories of sitting at the table with all of my friends.\"\n\nBut beyond that, she was forced to find other ways of sourcing food, when they had run out of essentials and she was \"starving\".\n\nThis included \"bin-diving\" for surplus food behind supermarkets, paying 10p for scraps from the local fish and chip shops, and shoplifting.\n\n\"It wasn't frequent, but when we were desperate,\" she says.\n\nDanielle was caught shoplifting a jar of Marmite aged 10 - carefully selected from the shelves because it could \"last weeks\" by only spreading a small bit on each piece of bread.\n\nAnd, while on the earlier occasion she was only told not to return to the shop, at 14-years-old she had her fingerprints taken, was placed in a police cell and later cautioned over shoplifting.\n\n\"I think that was for stealing jelly.\"\n\nDanielle says the incident came up on her record when she was applying for a job in later life, leaving her devastated.\n\n\"I feel like I'm quite a moral person. For it to tarnish your career when all you are trying to do is eat,\" she says.\n\n\"I'm not proud of it and I would never do it now, but it was survival.\"\n\nAs soon as Danielle was old enough to get various part-time jobs, she stopped shoplifting, and went on to get three \"A\" grade A-Levels and a First-class degree at university.\n\nBut she says that she could have gone \"either way\".\n\n\"I did have a supportive education system and that enabled me to not continue down the wrong path,\" she says.\n\n\"Because of the support that we have in the UK it allows people to go from poverty into middle class and be able to earn a living.\n\n\"Unless we support young people, give them opportunities, like food and education, then that wouldn't be able to happen.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Marcus Rashford and his mother Melanie helped out at FareShare Greater Manchester\n\nResponding to the row over free school meals, Danielle argues that those who are making the decisions are doing so from \"a place of privilege\" without an understanding of \"what it's like to be a child and to be hungry\".\n\nShe also stresses that there are \"all sorts\" of family dynamics that can lead to financial difficulty, including debt, mental health issues, and addiction.\n\n\"It can happen to anyone,\" she says.\n\nAs Danielle hit her 30s, she developed a new relationship with food - teaching herself to cook from scratch and eventually batch cooking for the week.\n\n\"One of my friends set up a supper club and said I was their inspiration,\" she said.\n\n\"I just thought it's funny going from no food, to all my friends saying I was such an amazing cook.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. John Bream leapt from a helicopter into the sea without a parachute\n\nA former paratrooper attempted a new world record for jumping from an aircraft into water without a parachute from a higher altitude than first thought.\n\nJohn Bream, 34, nicknamed \"the Flying Fish\", dropped from a helicopter off Hampshire coast on Monday.\n\nInstruments showed he jumped from 140ft (42m) - 9ft higher than planned.\n\nDespite being briefly unconscious when he hit the water, he said he was now \"all good\".\n\nHe was taken to hospital as a precaution after being hauled from the water by support divers.\n\nJohn Bream leapt from a helicopter into the sea off the Hampshire coast\n\nMr Bream had been in training for two years in order to set new records for the highest jump from an aircraft into water and the highest jump into British waters.\n\nSpeaking from his home in Havant he said: \"It's all good - I've just got a bit of a sore backside\".\n\nDescribing the moment when he leapt from the helicopter hovering off Hayling Island, he said: \"It's a bit out-of-body - you've got the adrenalin flowing and then you are flying.\n\n\"It was very quick, but in your mind it's a long time.\n\n\"Half way down I was hit by a gust of wind so I didn't get the best entry. But I didn't go horizontal which would have been fatal.\"\n\nThe former member of the Parachute Regiment fell for about four seconds before hitting the Solent at about 80mph (130km/h).\n\nJohn Bream was picked up by his support boat after the jump\n\nThe stunt was carried out to raise awareness of veterans' mental health issues and has currently raised more than £5,000 for the All Call Signs and the Support Our Paras charities.\n\n\"The whole aim is to help prevent veterans suicide. I did what I set out to which was to put a smile on people's faces,\" he said.\n\nHe added that he would be attempting \"many, many more daredevil stunts\" in the future.\n\nA spokesperson for Guinness World Records said it would verify any record when it received evidence of Mr Bream's attempt.\n\n\"Due to the nature of this activity, we only accept applications from experienced stunt people or rely on research to verify the record retrospectively,\" she said.\n\nJohn Bream, from Havant, Hampshire, is nicknamed the Flying Fish\n• None Ex-paratrooper to tackle jump with no parachute\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Police officers Sean Quinn, Allan McCloy and Paul Hamilton were killed when their car was blown up near Lurgan in 1982\n\nThe families of three policemen murdered in an IRA attack 38 years ago have said they have \"renewed hope\" those involved will be identified.\n\nA new investigation is looking to trace witnesses and use advances in technology to provide breakthroughs not available at the time.\n\nSean Quinn, Allan McCloy and Paul Hamilton were in a car blown up at Kinnego Embankment near Lurgan in 1982.\n\nTheir families said progress in the investigation was \"encouraging\".\n\nThe investigation is being run by John Boutcher, the retired chief constable of Bedfordshire police, who is heading up a number of outside investigations into killings from the Troubles.\n\n\"The legacy of what happened is an acute and permanent sense of loss and pain,\" the policemen's relatives said in a joint statement.\n\n\"In a single moment of barbaric carnage, faceless cowards changed our lives forever.\"\n\nPart of Mr Boutcher's investigation will involve MI5 and Army intelligence who had bugged a hay shed the IRA used to store the explosives.\n\nHowever, the listening device failed, enabling the IRA to mount the attack.\n\nTwo people suspected of involvement at the time were shot dead two weeks later by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in so-called shoot-to-kill incidents.\n\nMr Boutcher's inquiry, known as Operation Turma, will not look into the aftermath, only the deaths of the three RUC officers.\n\nHe said: \"Six children have lived their lives without knowing their fathers.\n\n\"They deserve the truth. They have been told hardly anything.\"\n\nInvestigators have released this image of motorbike helmets found discarded after the bomb attack\n\nHe said there have been new scientific tests done on material recovered from the time \"which has given a much better understanding of the people responsible\".\n\nThe investigation is hoping to trace people who witnessed the getaway of those who set off the bomb, a 1,000lb landmine device detonated by a remote control.\n\nThey abandoned a motorbike on Francis Street in Lurgan and images of the helmets they discarded have been released to help jog the memories of witnesses.\n\nMr Boutcher said there was \"understandable fear\" about coming forward in 1982, but circumstances have changed.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Plaid Cymru said the Welsh Government had \"made a mess of the messaging\" over the essential items issue\n\nTesco was \"simply wrong\" to tell a woman she could not buy period products during lockdown, Health Minister Vaughan Gething has said.\n\nThe supermarket apologised after saying it could not sell sanitary towels and tampons from a store in Cardiff.\n\nThe Welsh Government has banned the sale of non-essential items in supermarkets during a 17-day lockdown.\n\nOpposition parties have called that \"absolute madness\" and said better communication was needed with shops.\n\nThe Welsh Government said revised guidance will be published on Tuesday.\n\nMr Gething told the Welsh Government briefing that supermarkets would now be able to use their \"discretion\".\n\nTesco had blocked off the aisle after a \"break-in\" at the store in St Mellons, Cardiff\n\nThey have been told to close parts of their stores that sell items such as clothes, bedding and toys during Wales' firebreak lockdown.\n\nUnder Welsh Government guidance, shops which have been allowed to remain open are not allowed to sell goods classed as \"non-essential\" during the 17 days, which would normally be sold by businesses that have been made to close.\n\nThis includes homeware, electrical goods, telephones, clothes, toys and games, and garden products.\n\nThe policy has been criticised in a petition signed by more than 60,000 people.\n\nHomeware and bedding has been taped off in Tesco in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan\n\nOne customer wrote on Twitter she was \"raging and in tears\" after not being able to buy period products at Tesco's St Mellons store in Cardiff, after the aisle was blocked off.\n\nIn a tweet that was later deleted, Tesco responded to the complaint by saying it had been told not to sell the items during the lockdown.\n\n\"This is wrong - period products are essential,\" the Welsh Government tweeted in response.\n\nThe supermarket later issued a statement saying the area had been closed off following a break-in at the store, which the police were investigating.\n\nSouth Wales Police confirmed it was investigating a burglary which happened between 02:30 GMT and 04:30 on Monday when an estimated \"£20,000 worth of beauty products were stolen\".\n\nTesco said the reply to the customer, which had implied sanitary towels were non-essential, \"was sent by mistake\".\n\nIn Tesco's Penarth store, carbon Monoxide and smoke alarms were covered in sheeting\n\nIn Tesco in Penarth shelves containing smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors were covered in plastic sheeting, with the store putting up a sign saying they were \"non essential\".\n\nBut under the Welsh Government guidelines shops can sell products you can normally buy from food and drink stores, newsagents, pharmacies and DIY and hardware stores - as they remain open.\n\nOn Monday, Health Minister Vaughan Gething said meetings would be held with the supermarkets to make clear they could use \"some discretion\" to sell non-essentials to those in \"genuine need\".\n\nSpeaking at the Welsh Government's coronavirus briefing he said he was \"very sorry\" a woman had been incorrectly told she could not buy sanitary products.\n\nMr Gething said shoppers and retailers should use \"common sense\" and there would be a \"very small number\" of cases where there would be a genuine need to buy a non-essential item in a supermarket.\n\n\"For the great majority of us though of course, we will be able to manage for the next two weeks - with the hardship, with the interruption that causes, yes - but to avoid the much greater hardship and much greater interruption to people's lives and their ability to still see family and friends in the future,\" he said.\n\nBooks have been covered in cellophane\n\nThe Welsh Government has come under pressure to abandon the measure and a petition against the ban is now the largest ever submitted to the Senedd.\n\nSecretary of State for Wales Simon Hart has urged Mr Drakeford to \"scrap the policy\" while Welsh Conservative leader Paul Davies called for Members of the Senedd to be recalled \"virtually\" to debate the matter.\n\n\"This is absolute madness by the Welsh Government, preventing people from buying the products which they want to buy,\" he said.\n\nPlaid Cymru's leader Adam Price called on ministers to admit they had sent out confused messaging about a policy, and the public health message had got \"lost\".\n\n\"If they'd had the conversations with the retail sector earlier, so we heard from the minister that they had a meeting on Thursday, I would suggest that was too late,\" he said.\n\n\"That has eroded public trust over the weekend and obviously that is concerning because it's the public support, the public health message is ultimately the one thing that keeps us all safe.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Andrew RT Davies This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nTim Batcup, who has had to close his Swansea book shop during the lockdown, said the Welsh Government had made the \"right call\".\n\nBut he said that while some supermarkets had stopped selling books, others were still selling them, and the messaging was a \"bit mixed\".\n\n\"I don't really understand the fuss... I don't know why people can't go a couple of weeks without a pair or pants or a candle,\" he told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast.\n\n\"I think it's a sincere attempt at levelling up, how effective it will be I don't know. It might drive people towards the online giants, but they all seem to clean up anyway.\"\n\nThe toy aisle at Tesco on Western Avenue in Cardiff has been blocked off\n\nNicky Small, who has had to close her craft shop in Llandudno, said she believed wool and other craft items were essential as the hobbies were helping many through the pandemic.\n\n\"I think there's a balance, what is one person's non-essential could be another person's essential,\" she said.\n\n\"The difficulty is anybody trying to dictate what essential is, because that will depend on who you are, what you are needing to get, if you have been waiting for payday.\"\n\nHead of the Welsh Retail Consortium, Sara Jones, said the rules were confusing, and banning people from buying certain items set a dangerous precedent.\n\n\"I think this policy is the wrong way to go about it, because rather than levelling the playing field, it's just creating winners and losers, it's pushing people online,\" she said.\n\nShe said allowing an element of discretion would go against the purpose of the policy, as people would have to approach staff for items and spend more time in store.\n\n\"It's distorting competition, which I think is setting a bit of a dangerous precedent,\" she said.", "Pubs and restaurants in many areas of Scotland will be able to serve alcohol indoors again from next week, the first minister has announced.\n\nNicola Sturgeon said the move would allow licensed premises in level two of the country's new five-tier system to serve alcohol with a meal until 20:00.\n\nIn level three areas - likely to be much of the central belt - they can reopen until 18:00 but cannot serve alcohol.\n\nThe new rules will start on Monday.\n\nThe level that each of the 32 council areas in Scotland will fall under is expected to be confirmed on Thursday.\n\nThe new system will add two levels to the three-tier system currently in use in England, adding a \"level zero\" at the bottom - where life can return almost to normal - and strict measures similar to a full lockdown in level four.\n\nIt is expected that most of the central belt - which is currently under tighter restrictions than the rest of the country - will be placed in level three.\n\nThe exceptions could be North and South Lanarkshire, which could go into the highest level four category due to concerns about high numbers of cases and hospital admissions there.\n\nIn level four all pubs and restaurants would be closed, along with non-essential stores, visitor attractions, gyms, libraries and hairdressers.\n\nHowever Ms Sturgeon said there had been \"encouraging signs\" in Lanarkshire, and that it would only be placed in the top tier \"if absolutely necessary\".\n\nShe also voiced concerns about the spread of the virus in Dundee, which could be moved into level three.\n\nMuch of the rest of the country is likely to go into level two - although rural areas including the Highlands, Orkney, Shetland, the Western Isles and Moray could be moved down to level one.\n\nWhile level one could allow up to six people from two households to meet in homes again, Ms Sturgeon said this would not happen immediately as an \"extra precaution\" while the country transitions to the new system.\n\nPeople will still be banned from meeting in other homes in levels two, three and four.\n\nMs Sturgeon said the new system would avoid the need for a \"one size fits all\" approach, and would allow areas with lower transmission of the virus to live under fewer restrictions than those with more cases.\n\nThe first minister said the government would be \"deliberately cautious\" when choosing levels, saying: \"The situation is fragile and could go in the wrong direction, so we must take care.\"\n\nThe rules for hospitality businesses look set to be relaxed in all but level four areas, after changes to the strategy were agreed following consultations over the weekend.\n\nThey will be allowed to serve alcohol indoors in level two areas, as long as it accompanies a main meal.\n\nIndoor areas will have to close at 20:00, but alcohol can continue to be served outdoors until 22:30.\n\nMeanwhile in level three areas, premises will be allowed to open until 18:00 as long as no alcohol is sold.\n\nPeople will have to sit at a table to eat or drink in all areas at all levels, and takeaways will still be allowed.\n\nMs Sturgeon said she hoped the changes would be welcome, adding that an advisory group has been set up to study whether venues should be allowed to reintroduce background music.\n\nBars and restaurants across Scotland's central belt had to close on 9 October as part of a \"short, sharp action to arrest a worrying increase in infections\", while tight restrictions were placed on those in the rest of the country.\n\nA further 1,327 cases of coronavirus were registered in Scotland on Tuesday, alongside 25 deaths of people who had tested positive in the previous 28 days.\n\nThe number of people in hospital rose to 1,100, which Ms Sturgeon said was now just 400 short of the peak during the first wave of the virus in April.\n\nHowever the first minister said it was thought that the current restrictions were \"having an effect\" and were \"slowing\" the increase in new cases.\n\nShe said: \"If we dig in now and get Covid under more control, we perhaps open the door not to 100% normality by Christmas, but hopefully to more than we have now.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon announced the changes at the beginning of a Holyrood debate, ahead of MSPs discussing whether to back the general principles of the new system.\n\nOn Tuesday evening, MSPs agreed to back the Scottish government's strategic framework for tackling the virus.\n\nScottish Conservative group leader Ruth Davidson welcomed many of the measures, but called for a business advisory council to be involved in making decisions and shaping restrictions to \"help keep Scottish jobs safe\".\n\nLabour leader Richard Leonard said the framework did not have his party's \"unquestioning support\", calling for \"persuasive evidence\" to be published and for MSPs to be given more opportunities to scrutinise the government's strategy.\n\nThis led Ms Sturgeon to reply that she had \"probably answered more questions than any leader of any government anywhere in the world\".\n\nScottish Green MSP Alison Johnstone said \"we cannot continue to lurch from one lockdown to another until an effective vaccine becomes available\", saying the goal must be to eliminate the virus rather than suppress it.\n\nAnd Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie said the government had \"missed the opportunity\" to prepare for the second wave with greater testing and tracing systems while the virus was at a lower level over the summer.\n\nBut Health Secretary Jeane Freeman hit back by saying that \"it is entirely wrong to say that we were complacent or foolish in what we said and did over the summer months\".", "Kyle Lawler worked at Showsec events for £4.24 per hour\n\nA security guard had a \"bad feeling\" about suicide bomber Salman Abedi but did not approach him for fear of being branded a racist, an inquiry has heard.\n\nKyle Lawler, who was 18 at the time of the Manchester Arena attack, was standing 10 or 15ft away from Abedi.\n\nHe later told police he was conflicted because he thought something was wrong but could not put his finger on it.\n\nAbout five minutes later, at 22:31 BST on 22 May 2017, Abedi detonated a bomb packed with 3,000 nuts and bolts.\n\nAbedi, 22, dressed all in black and carrying a large rucksack, had been reported to security by a member of the public at 22:15.\n\nAround eight minutes before the bombing, Showsec steward Mohammed Ali Agha alerted Mr Lawler to the report and both began observing Abedi.\n\nIn his statement prepared for the inquiry, Mr Lawler said: \"I just had a bad feeling about him but did not have anything to justify that.\"\n\nThe witness added that Abedi was \"fidgety and sweating\".\n\nTop row (left to right): Alison Howe, Martyn Hett, Lisa Lees, Courtney Boyle, Eilidh MacLeod, Elaine McIver, Georgina Callander, Jane Tweddle - Middle row (left to right): John Atkinson, Kelly Brewster, Liam Curry, Chloe Rutherford, Marcin Klis, Angelika Klis, Megan Hurley, Michelle Kiss - Bottom row (left to right): Nell Jones, Olivia Campbell-Hardy, Philip Tron, Saffie-Rose Roussos, Sorrell Leczkowski, Wendy Fawell\n\nMr Lawler said he attempted to use his radio to alert the security control room but claimed he could not get through due to radio traffic.\n\nHe then left the arena and took up his position outside the City Room and made no further attempt to raise the alarm.\n\nMr Lawler agreed he simply \"gave up\" trying to use the radio and just got on with his job.\n\nIn his prepared statement to the inquiry, the Showsec security guard also said: \"I felt unsure about what to do.\n\n\"It's very difficult to define a terrorist. For all I knew he might well be an innocent Asian male.\n\n\"I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race.\n\n\"I was scared of being wrong and being branded a racist if I got it wrong and would have got into trouble. It made me hesitant.\n\n\"I wanted to get it right and not mess it up by over-reacting or judging someone by their race.\"\n\nMr Lawler agreed that on five separate occasions after the bombing, he made statements, verbally or in writing, where he \"deliberately shortened\" the time between him leaving the City Room to the bomb going off, \"so no one would say, why didn't you do something?\" the inquiry was told.\n\nHe added he \"had a guilty feeling, I had a lot of blame on myself\".\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "EE will have to stop selling smartphones locked to its network\n\nThe UK's mobile networks are to be forbidden from selling phones locked to their services from December 2021.\n\nRegulator Ofcom said unlocking handsets could often be a complicated process, and this was discouraging owners from switching providers at the end of their contracts.\n\nThe networks have previously suggested that locking devices helps deter theft and fraud.\n\nBut the watchdog noted some companies had already abandoned the practice.\n\nAmong those companies affected are:\n\nO2, Sky, Three and Virgin already only sell unlocked handsets.\n\n\"[It] will save people time, money and effort - and help them unlock better deals,\" said Ofcom's connectivity director Selina Chadha.\n\nVodafone has already responded: \"We stand ready to implement these changes when they come into force.\"\n\nEE added: \"We'll work with Ofcom to comply with its guidelines.\"\n\nIt typically costs about £10 to get a smartphone unlocked to let it work on any network.\n\nHowever, according to a study by Ofcom, about half of all those who try to do so experience difficulties.\n\nThese can include facing a long wait to receive the code needed to trigger the process, as well as then finding that the code does not work.\n\nOfcom suggests 35% of those who do not switch are put off from doing so by their phone being locked\n\nThe regulator added that some owners do not realise their devices are locked in the first place, causing them to suffer a loss of service when they try to switch.\n\nThe ban means the UK remains compliant with wider European rules, but Ofcom noted that it was already looking into the problem before the EU introduced the regulations in 2018.\n\nThe UK government has said it will adhere to the European Electronic Communications Code, despite planning to complete the Brexit transition period this year.\n\nThe locked handsets ban is one of several new measures that telecoms providers will have to follow.\n\nIn addition, the regulator plans to make it easier to switch broadband providers by December 2022.\n\nThe regulator has still to finalise changes to broadband-switching rules\n\nAt present, if customers switch from one provider reliant on BT's Openreach network to another - for instance from Sky to TalkTalk - all they need to do is contact the new supplier, which makes all the arrangements.\n\nBut if they want to move to another broadband network - for example from BT to Virgin Media or CityFibre - they have to manage it themselves.\n\nOfcom had asked the industry to come up with a process to end this discrepancy.\n\nBut after it failed to do so, officials are now working on their own solution, although they say they will consult the public and the companies involved first.", "Foxx once said that he wished for Deondra to 'live her life with no boundaries, like she’s living it now. There’s nothing she can’t do'.\n\nHollywood actor Jamie Foxx said \"my heart is shattered into a million pieces\" following the death of his younger sister at the age of 36.\n\nFoxx said Deondra Dixon, who had Down's syndrome and was an ambassador for the Global Down Syndrome Foundation, \"is in heaven now dancing with her wings on\".\n\nThe Oscar-winning star, 52, shared an emotional tribute to his sister on Instagram.\n\nFoxx, 52, posted: \"Deondra... I love you with every ounce of me.\"\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by iamjamiefoxx This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAlongside pictures of the pair together, the Ray and Django Unchained star wrote: \"My heart is shattered into a million pieces... my beautiful loving sister Deondra has transitioned... I say transitioned because she will always be alive. Anyone who knew my sis knew that she was a bright light.\n\n\"I can't tell you how many times we have had parties at the house where she has got on the dance floor and stolen the show.\"\n\nHe added: \"Deondra you have left a hole in my heart... but I will fill it with all of the memories that you gave me. I love you with every ounce of me... our family is shattered but we will put the pieces back together with your love... and y'all please keep my family in your prayers.\"\n\nThe Global Down Syndrome Foundation said Dixon died on 19 October.\n\nFoxx and Dixon attended the Be Beautiful Be Yourself fashion show last year\n\nA tribute published on the Foundation's website read: \"Deondra was brought into this world in a loving family who treated her like any other family member. They gave her the gifts of complete acceptance, confidence, and knowledge. They empowered her to graduate with a regular diploma from high school and to take life by storm, which, if you knew Deondra, she absolutely did.\n\n\"We have lost our talented, intelligent, feisty, beautiful, kind, loving, caring, pure and giving heart, DeOndra Dixon. Our Down syndrome community has lost a beacon of hope, a true leader, and role model whose aim was to always help others. She was a bright light in this world of ours.\"\n\nDixon's profile on the foundation's website reads: \"I feel I was born to dance. I want to be a professional dancer. My brother has given me a chance to do some special things. I danced in his video Blame It. I've danced on stage at some of his concerts all over the country. And guess what? I've danced at the Grammys!\n\n\"I know my family loves me. They never set limits and always make me feel I can touch the sky.\"\n\nDixon was very involved in the foundation's Be Beautiful Be Yourself fashion shows which raise money for the foundation and walked the catwalk with the likes of Eva Longoria - who has a sister with Down's syndrome - and Queen Latifah.\n\nMessages of support have been posted since Foxx broke the news, including some from the celebrity world.\n\nFoxx's Just Mercy co-star Michael B Jordan wrote: \"Here for you brother! No words can ease what you're going through but the Jordans are here for you and your family!\"\n\nOscar winner Viola Davis also offered condolences: \"So so sorry Jamie. I know how much you loved your sis. She was so blessed to have you. Rest well Deondra!\"\n\nWriter, director and actress Lena Waithe said: \"I'm so sorry for your loss. Sending you so much love right now.\"\n\nAnd Jurassic World actor Chris Pratt commented: \"So sorry for you loss Jamie. Prayers up for your sweet sister.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Anglesey was one of the few places in north Wales to avoid local lockdown, but has been impacted by the current firebreak lockdown Image caption: Anglesey was one of the few places in north Wales to avoid local lockdown, but has been impacted by the current firebreak lockdown\n\nThe tourism industry in Wales needs urgent clarity on rules after the national Covid firebreak lockdown ends, say industry insiders.\n\nEmotions in the sector are turning from \"anxiety to anger\" in some parts of the country.\n\nJim Jones, managing director of North Wales Tourism, called the decision to introduce the national firebreak \"draconian\".\n\nHe said the economic impact was being felt across the whole of the hospitality sector in the region, including the supply chain behind the tourism industry.\n\n\"We're already hearing of redundancies, or job losses, and questions of whether businesses will open,\" said Mr Jones.\n\n\"It's the uncertainty going forward - and the anxiety, which is now turning to anger.\n\n\"It's the lack of information, the lack of engagement that we are having at this moment in time with Welsh Government and business.\n\n\"We are the last to find out, yet we're the ones dealing with the brunt of it all.\"\n\nThe tourism industry in Wales was worth an estimated £6.3bn in spending by visitors in 2018, according to government figures.\n\n\"Tourism is extremely important to our economy and we know this is an incredibly challenging time for businesses,\" a Welsh Government official said and stressed engagement with the industry was ongoing.", "Most non-essential operations in Leeds are being postponed after the number of hospitalised Covid-19 patients rose to a higher level than at the first wave's peak.\n\nLeeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust said it had 263 Covid patients on Tuesday, with 22 in intensive care units (ICU).\n\nThe trust runs Leeds General Infirmary and St James' Hospital and expects ICU numbers to go up in the next 48 hours.\n\nIt said \"only essential operations are going ahead in most cases\".\n\nHospital staff have been told the rapid rise of admissions means that it is \"looking even more likely\" that Leeds will be moved into tier three of coronavirus restrictions.\n\nThe trust, which has about 1,800 beds, said there were 148 Covid patients in its hospital on Tuesday last week, a rise of 115, or 78%, in a week.\n\nA spokesperson said: \"We are standing down some planned operations due to current pressures which means that some patients will have their treatments postponed.\"\n\nIn an internal statement obtained by The Independent, the trust's deputy chief medical officer David Berridge said: \"This also means that it is looking even more likely that Leeds will move into tier three, following discussions across the city and with the government.\n\nThe trust statement continued: \"Not only is the number of Covid cases increasing but so is the rate of increase.\n\n\"Local modelling based on prevalence data indicates that it may continue to rise for the next two weeks.\"\n\nLeeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust said the majority of admissions over the weekend were older people with respiratory conditions.\n\nWest Yorkshire is yet to have any tier three restrictions imposed, unlike the surrounding counties of South Yorkshire, Lancashire and Greater Manchester.\n\nTalking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, Huddersfield MP Barry Sheerman believed tier three restrictions in nearby Kirklees were \"inevitable\", and could be imposed on the borough \"quite soon\".\n\nBut a statement by Kirklees Council's Outbreak Control Board, including Labour and Conservative MPs and cross-party councillors, said entering stricter measures would have a \"devastating effect\".\n\nIt said: \"The closure of our pubs and bars will have a devastating impact on our economy and people's livelihoods, and we have not seen the evidence that this will directly impact on infection rates.\n\n\"We instead need to continue the work we are doing at a local level, on the ground, in our communities. We are already seeing positive results from this work, with Kirklees now having the lowest rates in West Yorkshire.\n\n\"We're urging the government to give us more resources to build on this.\"\n\nOn Monday, a trust running three hospitals in South Yorkshire and north Nottinghamshire said the number of patients it had admitted with Covid-19 had doubled in a week.\n\nRotherham Hospital also reported a jump in cases to beyond the spring peak.\n\nFollow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk or send video here.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Nottingham has consistently recorded one of the highest infection rates in England\n\nNottingham and parts of the surrounding county will move into the top tier of Covid restrictions, it has been confirmed.\n\nPeople living in the city, along with Rushcliffe, Gedling and Broxtowe, face the toughest restrictions.\n\nThe measures come into force at one minute past midnight on Thursday and will expire after 28 days.\n\nIt comes after the city consistently recorded one of the highest infection rates in the country.\n\nAbout eight million people in England will be living in the tier three - \"very high\" alert level by the end of the week.\n\nThis means pubs that do not serve substantial meals have to close, and there are further restrictions on households mixing.\n\nThe affected parts of Nottinghamshire join Liverpool City Region, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, South Yorkshire and Warrington in the highest tier.\n\nDetails of the lockdown will be formally announced on Tuesday, but in a joint statement local councils said the measures \"have been agreed to achieve a sustained reduction in infection rates\" and to \"protect our vulnerable residents, the NHS and social care services\".\n\nResidents and businesses who are affected will receive \"a package of support similar to those secured in other parts of the country\".\n\nThough it did have the highest figures in the UK earlier this month, Nottingham's seven-day rate of infection has dropped again, according to the latest data.\n\nThe city had the 24th highest rate of infection per 100,000 people in England, at 443.7, in the week up to the 23 October, down from 677.4 the previous week.\n\nIt is still the highest in the county, but the surrounding boroughs are all seeing an increase, with Broxtowe's infection rate having risen from 310.4 to 342.9, Gedling's up from 373.2 to 418.2 and Rushcliffe rising from 359.1 to 393.5.\n\nDavid Mellen, leader of Nottingham City Council, appealed to residents to \"work together\" and stick to \"very difficult\" restrictions.\n\nThough the seven-day infection rate for the city has dropped steadily after being the highest in the UK earlier this month, he said there were still concerns over rising rates among older age groups and hospital occupancy levels.\n\n\"We've got a growing number of people, way over 200 people, in our hospitals with Covid, and an increasing number in [intensive care units], so we are concerned about those numbers,\" he told BBC Radio Nottingham.\n\n\"Obviously we had many people die in Nottingham [and] Nottinghamshire earlier in the year and we don't want to add to that number with many more deaths as a result of this.\"\n\nMr Mellen also said the level of financial support from the government - which is to cover additional track and trace costs, enforcement and extra support to affected businesses - is \"not enough\".\n\nHe said he did not feel Nottingham had been \"fully funded by the government, and we do believe that if we do a really good job on track and trace, which is absolutely necessary, it will cost us more than what is being offered\".\n\n\"We tried to argue for more money, but the kind of formula that's been applied in four other [local] authority areas wasn't going to be changed for Nottingham and Nottinghamshire.\"\n\nJason Weston from Ye Olde Salutation Inn said it was \"looking very, very dark\" for the pub\n\nNottingham South MP Lilian Greenwood criticised the government for what she said was \"woeful\" communication over the move into the toughest restrictions.\n\n\"It's more than a week since Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock said they were talking to [Nottinghamshire] about going into tier three, yet talks didn't even begin until Thursday and MPs weren't even briefed until Friday,\" she tweeted.\n\nJason Weston, who runs Ye Olde Salutation Inn in the centre of Nottingham, said he will not have to close because the pub serves meals, but with capacity already down to 20% of what it was in summer because of the 22:00 curfew he said it was \"almost irrelevant\" whether they were allowed to open or not.\n\n\"I'm very worried,\" he said.\n\n\"We're watching the bank balance go down week by week - it's looking very, very dark.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.", "Mayor Joe Anderson said he appreciates the huge impact Covid has had on families\n\nLiverpool's city mayor has said he would support more robust Covid-19 restrictions if it meant halting the spread of the virus.\n\nJoe Anderson, whose brother Bill was one of 61 people to die with the virus in the city in one week, said he would \"back tougher measures if necessary\".\n\nHe wants to monitor the impact of tier three over the next two weeks before considering a possible tier four.\n\nHe told BBC Breakfast his brother died of a virus that \"takes no prisoners\".\n\nThe Labour mayor said the virus has had \"an enormous impact\" on families and businesses in Liverpool.\n\n\"It has taken untold damage on people's wellbeing and a huge toll on families where people have died. If anything was required to bring it down faster I would do that,\" Mr Anderson said.\n\n\"However, I want to make sure that we are giving tier three a chance to see if the measures have an impact.\"\n\nHe said he would review the results in 14 to 16 days' time.\n\nThe mayor's brother Bill (right) died within eight hours of admission to hospital\n\nMr Anderson said the death of his \"larger-than-life\" brother who \"inspired\" him was a \"great blow\".\n\n\"Bill was taken so suddenly we never got chance to say goodbye,\" he said.\n\n\"Six weeks prior to that we lost our brother [Henry] to cancer - a traumatic time to say the least.\n\n\"My eldest son was also going through cancer treatment during the pandemic.\n\n\"We weren't even able to give him a hug or be with him.\"\n\nMr Anderson was embroiled in negotiations over restrictions to combat infection rates when Bill was admitted to hospital. Within eight hours he had died.\n\n\"It's a disease that takes no prisoners,\" the mayor said, \"It is heartless in the way it deals with people.\"\n\nLiverpool has the third highest number of infections in England\n\nHis experience has left him \"acutely aware of the pain that people are going through\" and \"frustrated and annoyed\" with people who dismiss the virus as fake or ignore government guidelines.\n\nHe added: \"This virus isn't going to go away until we get a vaccine.\"\n\nUnlike neighbouring Greater Manchester, Mr Anderson did not enter protracted negotiations over an aid package for tier three.\n\nHe said without student cases Manchester's infection rates are lower \"but when you take our student figures out - the rest stayed stubbornly high\".\n\n\"We had to take action because people were dying, getting infected and our hospitals were being overwhelmed.\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Aaron Rees says he has been stopped and searched by police a number of times after finishing work late\n\nA leading academic has asked Welsh law makers to hold an inquiry into black and ethnic minority (BAME) individuals in the criminal justice system.\n\nDr Robert Jones has warned a disproportionate number of BAME communities continue to be criminalised.\n\nThe expert said he has uncovered \"a wide range of problems that require urgent attention\".\n\nThe Senedd's equalities committee will consider his letter next week.\n\nThe field of criminal justice is not a devolved issue in Wales, which Dr Jones said was one of the reasons the issue has yet to receive detailed scrutiny.\n\n\"As it currently stands, there is no clear or authoritative understanding of how different communities across Wales experience and interact with the criminal justice system,\" said Dr Jones, who has been carrying out research at Cardiff University's Wales Governance Centre, in its School of Law and Politics.\n\n\"It is also unknown what steps could and should be taken by the Welsh Government to promote fairness and tackle discrimination within the Welsh criminal justice system.\"\n\nHe added that his findings, as part of the Justice and Jurisdiction project, \"underscore just how important an inquiry into racial disproportionality within the criminal justice in Wales is at this time\".\n\nRocio Cifuentes, from the Ethnic Minorities and Youth Support Team Wales (EYST), said she believed the Welsh Government can and should be doing more.\n\n\"There's an absolute danger that we will absolve ourselves of responsibility,\" said the body's chief executive.\n\n\"In Wales we can and should invest much more heavily in youth support services, in young people's education, in mentoring support schemes.\n\n\"If this pandemic has shown us anything, it's that we can and should try to tackle longstanding and entrenched inequalities in a much more robust and urgent way.\"\n\nAaron Rees and Tyrone Cristo say they feel they have been stopped due to their colour\n\nAaron Rees says he has been stopped three or four times by the police, often when finishing a late shift from work.\n\n\"The first time I was stopped I was 16, in London, but now I'm used to it,\" said the 20-year-old.\n\n\"That's just life. There's no point in me getting angry over the situation [when white friends aren't stopped] - you've just got to ignore it and be the better man.\"\n\nTyrone Cristo, 19, said: \"I've been stopped quite a few times as well, and I personally think it's because of my colour.\n\n\"I'm more used to it now, but I'm still not happy about that.\"\n\nHe said while some use social media to respond negatively to high rates of stop and search, he takes a different stance.\n\n\"It influences me to be a good person, because I don't want that to happen to me.\"\n\nBoth young men have been taking part in a project run by Cardiff City FC Foundation, where free football sessions are provided in a bid to steer young people away from criminal and anti-social behaviour.\n\nAli Abdi, from Race Council Cymru, spoke to them and others as part of Black History Month events.\n\n\"We need to start to make things fairer for our young people. The data shows they're unfairly treated and the racial disparity appears to be higher - we can't let this continue, we need to do something about this now,\" said Mr Abdi.\n\n\"There are young people we engage with who might get into trouble with their friend.\n\n\"But because they're black they might get a harsher sentence, or are treated differently. That can't be fair. It has a long-term impact on the young person and their relationship with the criminal justice system and the police.\"\n\nResponding, a Welsh Government spokesperson said: \"Keeping young black or ethnic minority people from entering the criminal justice system is a clear priority, and we are working hard in our devolved areas of influence within crime and justice.\n\n\"Our Race Equality Action Plan will be guided by the experience of Bame communities in Wales, and we are developing a new educational curriculum which emphasises BAME culture and identity.\n\n\"We are funding a number of projects to promote positive engagement for young people at risk of offending, including the Youth Justice Blueprint, and Children and Communities Grant, which are helping to address the needs of some of the most vulnerable children in our communities.\"\n\nThe Black Lives Matter campaigns have highlighted concerns over the justice system\n\nThe findings of Cardiff University mirror the comprehensive Lammy Review published in 2017, which highlighted the disproportionate number of BAME individuals in the criminal justice system across both Wales and England.\n\nEarlier this year, the UK government published a progress report on the review, which made it clear that systemic disproportionality will take time to change.\n\nIt also acknowledged that work was needed to understand why these disparities are far more widespread than just criminal justice alone.\n\nOn the policing front, forces in Wales have various initiatives to improve trust in BAME communities.\n\nIn some, special advisory panels invite in members from a wide range of communities to scrutinise their work - suggesting improvement when necessary.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"We're just trying to have basic human rights, at the end of the day,\" says Tyler\n\nAt the age of 15, Tyler tried to take his own life after he was teased and abused for being transgender.\n\nThe student from east London, now aged 19, said bullies would follow him home and throw things at him after he began identifying as male in 2015.\n\n\"I experienced a lot of hate, a lot of fear. There was a couple of times where I was followed home and a couple of times where I could feel things being thrown at me,\" he said.\n\n\"I did not have any desire to be alive at all and I was hospitalised after a number of suicide attempts.\"\n\nTyler, 19, from east London, came out as trans in 2015 after struggling with his gender identity for some time\n\nTyler's abuse came amid a surge in transphobic hate crimes in London.\n\nIn 2011, 59 transphobic attacks were reported to the Met Police. By 2015 the number of annual reports increased to 151, and by the end of 2019, 283 attacks had been recorded in a year.\n\nThe numbers included physical and verbal attacks as well as incitement to hatred.\n\nSpecialist officers from the Met Police hate crime unit said they believed the figures reflected fewer hate crimes than were actually taking place.\n\n\"The numbers are not reflective of the amount of actual transgender hate crime that there is,\" she said.\n\n\"I can understand why people may be reticent to come forward, but not maybe because of the personal experience they've had with the police but maybe because of something they've seen on television or they've heard.\n\n\"We're trying to do our best so that when people do come forward, they get to speak to someone that really does understand their issues.\"\n\nTyler's mother, Johanna, who watched her child struggle with transphobic abuse, urged similar victims to come forward.\n\n\"As a parent, I've seen first-hand how common transphobic abuse is,\" she said.\n\n\"My son experienced such frequent abuse and threats, I'd say on a daily basis for more than two years - people in the street, people on buses, kids at his school and then college, even people he'd known when he was younger tracking him down on social media - calling him names and threatening him.\n\n\"It massively impacted his mental health. I think the police now take this much more seriously and its important to report this as soon as it happens.\"\n\nLeni Morris, CEO of the LGBT+ anti-hate charity Galop said most transgender people experienced at least one form of hate crime every year.\n\n\"Trans people are suffering very high levels of physical and sexual violence,\" she said.\n\n\"We also have cases where people are blackmailed about their identity. We know of examples where people have searched for personal information about people and threatened to, or actually published private information about people online.\n\n\"There is a practice such as deadnaming and misgendering. Treating trans people as if they're diseased. It's a really wide spectrum of the kinds of things trans people are experiencing right now.'\"\n\nThe Met said it was appointing 250 advisers specialising in LGBT+ hate crime who would be trained to recognise the issues faced by London's transgender community.\n\nMost transgender people experience at least one form of hate crime every year, according to charity Galop\n\nAfter several years on hormone blockers and testosterone, Tyler now has his Gender Recognition Certificate, which means he has satisfied government criteria to have his true gender legally recognised.\n\nHe will soon have an operation to remove his breast tissue and later a hysterectomy.\n\nAfter dropping out of school before his GCSEs, he has been studying at college to try and catch up on the education he missed out on.\n\n\"I'm just not going to not live my life. I'm not going to not live authentically for other people,\" he said.\n\n\"Because we live among everyone else, we breathe the same air as you, we're not a different part of the human race, we're just like everyone else.\"\n\nIf you have been affected by the issues raised in this article, the BBC Action Line website has details of organisations which can provide support and advice.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Joe Biden is due to appear in Atlanta, Georgia for his second campaign stop of the day in the state, but earlier, he drew on the memory of former US President Franklin D Roosevelt as he campaigned in Warm Springs.\n\nFDR, the Democrat who led the US during the Great Depression and through World War Two, retreated to the town to seek treatment for polio.\n\nBiden spoke of the significance of the small town (population 400). \"This place represented a way forward,\" he said. \"A way of restoration, of resilience, of healing\".\n\nIt \"is a reminder that though broken, each of us can be healed… That as a people and a country, we can overcome a devastating virus. That we can heal a suffering world. That, yes, we can restore our soul and save our country.”\n\nBiden also quoted a speech FDR drafted before his death.\n\n“To live together and work together. That’s how I see America. That’s how I see the presidency, and that’s how I see the future,” he said.\n\nGeorgia has not backed a Democrat in a presidential election since 1992. But polls suggest a close race this year and Biden says he has a \"fighting chance\".", "Extra restrictions on socialising have come into force in Warrington\n\nWarrington is the latest area to move into the top tier of Covid-19 measures as infection rates continue to rise.\n\nTier three restrictions came into force at midnight in the Cheshire town - two days earlier than originally planned.\n\nCouncil leader Russ Bowden said it was the right decision to move Warrington into the \"very high\" Covid alert level.\n\n\"This is a public health imperative. What we need to do is protect the lives of our residents,\" he said.\n\n\"And - obviously alongside that - [it is about] protecting businesses and jobs here in the town\".\n\nHe added that one of the main concerns was the \"way the cases have propagated into the older working age population and particularly those people above 60\".\n\nWarrington, which is home to about 210,000 people, joins the Liverpool City Region, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire in tier three.\n\nNottingham and parts of Nottinghamshire will move into the top tier from Thursday.\n\nHealth and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock said the decision to move Warrington into tier three was agreed with local leaders as \"it's time to take action\" due to rising infection rates.\n\n\"Please remember - now is the time for us all to work together to get this virus under control,\" he said.\n\nWarrington is the latest area to move into the most stringent measures\n\nMr Bowden told Radio 4's Today programme that cases remained \"stubbornly high\" and he was worried about \"Covid fatigue\" with people unable to see a way out of the tougher restrictions.\n\nHe said: \"There are no clear rules about what the success criteria are with the tiers and how you move between the different tiered layers.\"\n\nMr Bowden added: \"The vast majority of people have applied themselves to the rules and we are asking people again to step up and take responsibility for their actions to protect their loved ones. \"\n\nPlaced between Greater Manchester and the Liverpool City Region, Warrington currently has an infection rate similar to areas on the lower end of tier three, but it is rising.\n\nThe latest government figures to the 23 October suggest 399 people for every 100,000 had Covid, not far off double the rate seen a month ago and the 36th highest rate of England's 315 local authorities.\n\nGeographically, its infection rate is closer to areas like St Helens to the north-west (437 per 100,000) and Trafford to the east (428 per 100,000) rather than other parts of Cheshire, where the rate is around 200 per 100,000.\n\nSince the start of the pandemic Warrington has seen 189 deaths due to coronavirus, with 14 of those in the week to the 23 October. As it stands, only 19 other authorities saw more deaths over the same period.\n\nCommunities Secretary Robert Jenrick has confirmed the tier three measures for Warrington will be reviewed in 28 days' time.\n\n\"The restrictions we have agreed together will only be in place for as long as they are absolutely necessary,\" he said.\n\nAs part of the tier three move, the council has received a £5.9m support package from the government, incorporating £1.68m for public health and £4.2m for business and employment support.\n\nThe Lower Angel pub in Warrington town centre will be forced to close under the tightened measures.\n\nLandlord Andrew Wharfe, who has worked there for 13 years, said he has never seen it so quiet.\n\nLandlord Andrew Wharfe said the pub had been quiet in recent weeks\n\n\"We're not big enough to serve food so we have to shut,\" he said, adding it had been an upsetting time.\n\nMr Wharfe said he had been planning to step down from the job next year - a decision he made before the pandemic - but this was now uncertain.\n\n\"This has put a nail in the coffin - we have had enough,\" he said.\n\nPauline Mellor, 56, who lives in Warrington, said: \"My first grandchild was born in July and it is killing me not being able to see him.\"\n\nShe said she knew the rules but believed \"they won't work\".\n\nPauline Mellor said \"it is killing\" her not being able to see her three-month-old grandchild\n\n\"I work in a supermarket, and so many customers, even with a mask, come up close to you.\n\n\"I know we can meet outdoors in tier three but it is too cold - especially for a three-month-old baby,\" she added.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Abdulfatah Hamdallah had been living in makeshift camps in Calais for two months\n\nA Sudanese man who died while trying to reach the UK in a small boat has been named as Abdulfatah Hamdallah.\n\nFrench authorities said the 28-year-old attempted to cross the English Channel in a dinghy, using shovels as oars.\n\nHis body was found on Sangatte beach, near Calais, on Wednesday, three hours after a rescue operation ended.\n\nInvestigators have been told by a friend that he had earlier sought asylum in France, but said they did not know the outcome of the application.\n\nAdam Ali, who lived with Mr Hamdallah in Nantes, said he had applied for asylum in France in 2018 and only recently learnt that it been \"rejected by the court\".\n\nAfter learning of the rejection, Mr Hamdallah would speak everyday about how he \"wants to go to the UK, any way [he can]\", Mr Ali said.\n\nHe had been living in a makeshift camp in Calais for two months, prosecutor Philippe Sabatier said.\n\nA search and rescue operation began at about 02:00 BST on Wednesday after a Sudanese teenager with hypothermia was found on the beach.\n\nHe told authorities that his friend was missing and could not swim.\n\n\"It would seem from the statements made by [the survivor] that he applied for asylum in France,\" Mr Sabatier said, adding that he did not know if the request had been granted.\n\nMr Sabatier said the pair had fallen into the water after their inflatable dinghy had been punctured by one of the shovels.\n\n\"In terms of a personal initiative taken by these two migrants, no connection could be established with any immigration network,\" Mr Sabatier said.\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel was criticised on Wednesday after saying the death was a \"brutal reminder of the abhorrent criminal gangs and people smugglers who exploit vulnerable people\".\n\nLabour MP Nick Thomas-Symonds, the shadow home secretary, said the government's response to the rise in crossings had been \"lacking in compassion and competence\".\n\nDan O'Mahoney, a former Royal Marine appointed early this month to the new role of \"clandestine Channel threat commander\", met French authorities in Paris and Calais on Thursday.\n\nHe held \"positive discussions about enhancing operations with increased surveillance, aerial support, further intelligence sharing and patrols in northern France\", he said.\n\n\"This week's incident, where a Sudanese migrant lost his life attempting to cross the Channel, served as a tragic reminder of the vital importance of the work the UK and France are engaged in to make this route completely unviable,\" he added.\n\nOn Friday, five men in a boat were picked up by Border Force amid high winds in the Channel.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Teigen and husband John Legend had been documenting her pregnancy on social media\n\nAmerican model Chrissy Teigen has described the pain of losing her baby earlier this month.\n\nAt the time Teigen shared photos on Instagram of herself crying in hospital after learning that the baby boy she had been carrying was stillborn.\n\nThe photos - taken by her husband, singer John Legend - were praised by many, but also criticised by some.\n\nIn a blog post Teigen addressed her critics: \"I cannot express how little I care that you hate the photos.\"\n\nTeigen, a model, TV personality and cookbook author, has two children with singer Legend. In mid-August they were revealed they were expecting a third.\n\nIn her Instagram post at the time, Teigen revealed that they had named the baby Jack.\n\nIn the Medium post, she writes that she asked her mum and husband to take photos of the moment, \"no matter how uncomfortable it was\".\n\n\"I explained to a very hesitant John that I needed them, and that I did NOT want to have to ever ask,\" she says.\n\n\"He hated it. I could tell. It didn't make sense to him at the time. But I knew I needed to know of this moment forever, the same way I needed to remember us kissing at the end of the aisle, the same way I needed to remember our tears of joy after [children] Luna and Miles. And I absolutely knew I needed to share this story.\"\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by chrissyteigen This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nShe also directly addresses criticism she received at the time for sharing photos of the moment on Instagram.\n\n\"I cannot express how little I care that you hate the photos,\" she writes. \"How little I care that it's something you wouldn't have done. I lived it, I chose to do it, and more than anything, these photos aren't for anyone but the people who have lived this or are curious enough to wonder what something like this is like.\n\n\"These photos are only for the people who need them,\" she adds. \"The thoughts of others do not matter to me.\"\n\nTeigen, who is also a TV presenter, had been documenting her pregnancy on social media.\n\nShe was taken to hospital on 27 September with excessive bleeding, but had reassured fans she and the baby were healthy.\n\nIn the later Instagram post, however, she revealed that \"we were never able to stop the bleeding and give our baby the fluids he needed\".\n\nTeigen then thanked her followers for their \"positive energy, thoughts and prayers\" and expressed gratitude for the \"amazing\" life she enjoyed with her family.\n\n\"But every day can't be full of sunshine,\" she continued. \"On this darkest of days, we will grieve, we will cry our eyes out. But we will hug and love each other harder and get through it.\"\n\nLegend, 41, is a multiple Grammy-winning artist whose 2013 track All of Me - a song he dedicated to his wife - spent 92 weeks in the UK singles chart.\n\nHis parallel careers in film, music and TV work have seen him become an EGOT - one of only 16 people who've won a competitive Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award.", "Brian Clamp says he's had a traumatic few days\n\nWe are standing in full PPE, in one of the two hospital intensive care units which are solely for Covid patients. This is a bright, modern ward - sunlight pouring in.\n\nAt one end there is a large black plastic barrier taped across an opening. On the other side, none of the patients has Covid-19. The makeshift divider is a reminder that all this is still relatively new. It is the first winter where the NHS's response to the usual heavy demands will have to be adjusted for coronavirus.\n\nOn the Covid unit, something else is immediately apparent: the sound of conversation.\n\nWhen I first reported from a Covid intensive care unit in April, I was left haunted by what I'd seen. All but one patient had been on a ventilator, in a medically induced coma. It was eerily quiet, just the rhythmical sound of machines pumping air into lungs.\n\nThe medical teams were at a loss to know how best to treat a savage condition which was ravaging victims' lungs and other organs. Lives hung in the balance, often for weeks on end. In early April, two out of three ventilated patients did not survive.\n\nToday, in this intensive care unit (ICU) at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne, only one of the five patients is on a ventilator. The others are sitting up, engaging with the nurses, reading or watching TV.\n\n\"The Jedi is my nickname,\" says Brian Clamp. The 62-year-old is a steward at a social club, where he works behind the bar.\n\nHe had been getting better but was readmitted to intensive care when his breathing worsened. It is still a little laboured, despite the nasal oxygen supply, but his sense of humour and laughter are intact. Brian admits the experience has been \"absolutely terrifying\", but adds, with a smile, \"they will get us better, I know that\".\n\nHe is determined to get home to watch his granddaughter, Millie, play football.\n\nI’m lucky to have got it in the second wave - the doctors know so much more\n\nAt least half the patients here are on clinical trials. Brian has received convalescent plasma, packed with antibodies against coronavirus, donated by someone who recovered from the infection. It's not clear whether blood plasma works against Covid-19, but trials are ongoing. I donated plasma earlier this year and there's still an urgent need for more adults to do so.\n\nFurther down the ward is Edmund Derrick, who is relieved to have his sense of taste back. He is savouring an egg sandwich.\n\n\"I had this foul, acrid, burnt taste in my mouth for days, which invaded absolutely everything,\" he says. His other symptoms included violent uncontrollable shuddering and sudden temperature swings.\n\nThe 71-year-old retired local government worker is, like everyone here, keen to get home to his family. His wife contracted coronavirus at the same time as him but didn't fall seriously ill. Men are still twice as likely as women to end up in intensive care with Covid-19.\n\n\"I think I'm lucky to have got it in the second wave,\" he says, \"now the doctors know so much more.\"\n\nThere's no doubt more patients are surviving Covid-19, although it's too early to give precise figures. Ventilators are used more sparingly and there is greater reliance on other, non-invasive means of giving oxygen.\n\nAbout 1,000 Covid patients a day are being admitted to hospitals across the UK, roughly a third of the numbers at the peak. Covid-related deaths are running at about a fifth of the level in early April.\n\n\"Now, we know the beast that is Covid pneumonia,\" says Dr Lewis Gray, a consultant in intensive care. \"We know how it develops, how it's treated, how people can and do recover.\"\n• None 173Covid patients in Newcastle NHS Trust, at peak of first wave, with...\n• None 71Covid patients, when BBC visited in October, with...\n\nPatients are given dexamethasone, a cheap steroid which is proven to cut the risk of dying by up to a third. They also receive remdesivir, an antiviral drug which has been fully approved in the US, although its effectiveness is still under review.\n\nPatients are also given increased doses of anti-coagulant medication, to prevent blood clots, which can be a serious complication of Covid. And they are often nursed on their front, prone, as this helps with breathing.\n\nBut the impact of Covid is felt in the hospital way beyond the ICU. The more Covid there is, the greater the impact on other non-emergency care - hip replacements, eye operations, myriad other conditions.\n\nIn March, there was concern that hospitals would be overwhelmed, so all non-urgent surgery was cancelled. This time, the aim is to ensure that non-Covid patients don't lose out. But every bed allocated to Covid care requires specialist nurses. Already, the Royal Victoria Infirmary (RVI) has had to close four of its 50 operating theatres to reallocate the nurses to intensive care.\n\nDame Jackie Daniel, chief executive of Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust and a former nurse, says the situation in the hospital is finely balanced.\n\nIf you are a frail, elderly person, isolated and fearful, we are pushing them into deeper anxiety\n\n\"At the moment we're managing, but are not complacent, because it's going to be tough.\"\n\nLike other trusts, waiting times for non-life threatening surgery, from hips to hernias, have increased. The Newcastle trust has maintained cancer services, but elsewhere there is a backlog of \"tens of thousands of patients\", says Dame Jackie.\n\n\"Cataracts are a good example - a relatively simple procedure, but if you are a frail, elderly person, isolating, fearful, we are pushing those patients into deeper anxiety.\"\n\nKathleen Lawson, from Durham, had been due a thyroid operation in March. Only now has the 67-year-old had the surgery.\n\n\"I feel fortunate it's happened. I'm absolutely elated,\" she says.\n\nOn another ward I spoke to several patients who were recovering from a serious Covid infection.\n\nEpifania Garcia, a 66-year-old care worker, and her husband, are on separate wards. Epi is positive they will both get better but worries about her two grown-up daughters, both nurses.\n\n\"I feel emotional because I cannot see them. I have never left them this long,\" she says.\n\nA few beds along lies Mohammed Siddique, a former mill worker, bus and taxi driver. Aged 87, he suffers confusion, so his daughter Shamim - who's had Covid - is allowed to stay with him. She sits by his bedside, stroking his hands.\n\n\"He was very close to dying. It was very scary,\" says Shamim, who lives in the next street to him, with her family. Her husband spent two weeks in hospital, including time in ICU. Covid has swept through the extended family.\n\nAlbert Brown, 67, still has a slight tan from his holiday in Turkey. He says he thinks got infected on his return, while on a local night out. At home one night, two weeks later, he collapsed on his hands and knees gasping for breath.\n\n\"I was very afraid,\" he says.\n\nWhile at the RVI, he has witnessed several younger people being admitted with Covid complications.\n\n\"It can attack anybody, it doesn't pick and choose, but it's certainly not a joke. We need to take it seriously.\n\nI'm the BBC's medical editor. Since 2004 I have reported on a huge range of topics from cancer, genetics, malaria, and HIV, to the many significant advances in medical science which have improved people's health. I've also followed pandemic threats such as bird flu as well as Sars and Mers. Now I'm focusing on Covid-19 and its immense global impact.", "Hospitals in Liège are transferring patients elsewhere and cancelling non-urgent surgeries as coronavirus admissions surge\n\nDoctors in the Belgian city of Liège have been asked to keep working even if they have coronavirus amid a surge in cases and hospital admissions.\n\nAbout a quarter of medical staff there are reportedly off sick with Covid-19.\n\nNow 10 hospitals have requested that staff who have tested positive but do not have symptoms keep working.\n\nThe head of the Belgian Association of Medical Unions told the BBC they had no choice if they were to prevent the hospital system collapsing within days.\n\nDr Philippe Devos acknowledged that there was an obvious risk of transferring the virus to patients.\n\nOne in three people tested are coming back positive with the virus in the eastern Belgian city. Hospitals are transferring patients elsewhere and cancelling non-urgent surgeries, days after Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke warned the country was close to a \"tsunami\" of infections where authorities \"no longer control what is happening\".\n\nThe decision comes as governments across Europe try to tackle fresh waves of coronavirus infections.\n\nAt a news conference on Monday, World Health Organization (WHO) officials suggested travel restrictions, stay at home orders or even national lockdowns may be needed across the continent to tackle the fresh outbreaks.\n\n\"Right now we are well behind this virus in Europe, so getting ahead of it is going to take some serious acceleration in what we do,\" warned WHO emergencies head Dr Mike Ryan.\n\nItaly - hit hard by the virus in March - has closed gyms, theatres and swimming pools in a bid to bring down case numbers. The country reported more than 21,200 new infections on Sunday.\n\nThe Italian government has warned that the rise in cases was putting a huge strain on health services, but Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said that a full lockdown would be catastrophic for the economy.\n\nRestaurants, bars and cafes must stop table service at 18:00 and offer only take-away until midnight. Contact sports are prohibited but shops and most businesses will remain open.\n\nThe new restrictions, which are in force until 24 November, will also see 75% of classes at Italy's high schools and universities conducted online instead of in a classroom.\n\nRegional governments had asked for all classes to be conducted via distance learning, Italian media reported, but the move was opposed by Education Minister Lucia Azzolina.\n\nBars and cafes across Italy must end table service by 18:00\n\nThe government is also urging people not to travel outside their home towns or cities unless absolutely necessary and to avoid using public transport if possible.\n\n\"We think that we will suffer a bit this month but by gritting our teeth with these restrictions, we'll be able to breathe again in December,\" Mr Conte told a news conference on Sunday.\n\nThe latest restrictions have triggered demonstrations in cities including Naples, Turin and Rome.\n\nGyms and pools have also closed in the Belgian capital Brussels, and shops must shut at 20:00. Masks are now compulsory in public spaces. These rules will remain in force until 19 November.\n\nIn the UK, people aged 16 to 25 are more than twice as likely as older workers to have lost their job during the pandemic, BBC Panorama has found. Research seen by the programme also suggests the education gap between privileged and disadvantaged young people has widened further.\n\nIn France, health experts have warned that the number of new Covid-19 cases per day could be about 100,000 - twice the official figure.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nProf Jean-Francois Delfraissy, the head of France's scientific council which advises the government on the pandemic, said the estimated figure included undiagnosed and asymptomatic cases.\n\nHe told RTL radio he was surprised by the \"brutality\" of the second wave which he expected to be much worse than the first, adding: \"Many of our fellow citizens have not yet realised what awaits us.\"\n\nFrance has already imposed night-time curfews on major cities, including Paris. The country has recorded more than 1.1 million cases in total and 34,780 deaths.\n\nThe Czech Republic has also introduced a night-time curfew, which came into effect on Tuesday at midnight for a week. Nobody will be allowed to leave the house between 21:00 and 04:59 each night except to travel to and from work, for medical reasons or a few other exceptions. All shops will be shut on Sundays and will close at 20:00 on other days.\n\nAnd Spain has declared a national state of emergency and imposed a night-time curfew amid a new spike in Covid-19 infections.\n\nPrime Minister Pedro Sánchez said the curfew, which came into force on Sunday night, would be in place between the hours of 23:00 and 06:00.\n\nUnder the measures, local authorities can also ban travel between regions. Spain has seen more than one million cases and 34,750 deaths.\n\nRussia has registered a record 17,347 new daily coronavirus cases, officials said on Monday. Total reported cases have surpassed 1.5 million - but the mayor of the worst-hit city, Moscow, said that while \"there is still growth... it is slower\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Gavin Lee reports from the epicentre of Europe's second wave, which is in Belgium\n• None How the Czech Covid response went wrong", "More than 50 Tory MPs have written to the prime minister calling for a \"clear road map\" out of lockdown restrictions in northern England, warning the region risks being \"left behind\".\n\nThe letter from the Northern Research Group said the pandemic threatened Boris Johnson's pledge to \"level-up\".\n\nThey also called for an economic recovery plan for the region, arguing it had been hardest hit by the virus.\n\nNo 10 said it was \"committed to levelling up across the country\".\n\nAnd speaking to BBC Newsbeat, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said that he shared the MPs' \"frustrations at restrictions\" adding that the government wanted to invest in northern areas.\n\nAll the areas under the strictest restrictions of the government's three-tier system for England are in the North or the Midlands.\n\nThis will mean about eight million people in England will be living under the toughest restrictions, which are reviewed after 28 days, by the end of the week.\n\nIn areas under tier three rules, pubs and bars not serving substantial meals must close and households are not allowed to mix indoors or outdoors in hospitality venues or private gardens.\n\nRuss Bowden, Labour leader of Warrington Council, said he could not see a way out of the top tier of restrictions for his area, adding that he did not know what measurements the government were using for putting places in tier three in the first place.\n\nHe also told Radio 4's Today programme: \"There are no clear rules about what the success criteria are with the tiers and how you move between the different tiered layers.\"\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has previously raised the issue in the House of Commons, saying that the top tier was a \"gateway\" to potentially months and months of \"agony\" from which there was no exit.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said that the \"simplest and most effective way\" for areas to get out of tier three was to get the R number - the rate at which the virus is spreading - \"down to one or below\".\n\nThe Department of Health also said other data taken into account included which age groups were being affected and the pressures facing the NHS in those areas.\n\nSome 40 Conservative MPs representing areas in the north of England, North Wales and the Scottish borders, have publicly signed the letter, including former cabinet ministers David Davis, David Mundell and Esther McVey, while a further 14 have had their names redacted.\n\nThe newly-formed Northern Research Group of Tory backbenchers is led by former Northern Powerhouse minister Jake Berry.\n\nIn their letter, the group called for the prime minister to set out \"a clear road map down the tiering system and out of lockdown\", warning restrictions were \"disproportionately\" affecting people in the north of the country.\n\n\"The virus has exposed in sharp relief the deep structural and systemic disadvantage faced by our communities and it threatens to continue to increase the disparity between the North and South still further,\" they said.\n\nMr Berry who represents Rossendale and Darwen said \"We are asking people to give up huge civil liberties, businesses to close, people to live on two thirds of their normal wages.\n\n\"I don't think it is unreasonable to say the other side of that coin should be 'show us the way out'.\"\n\nHe also denied that he and other northern MPs were staging a \"revolt\" against the government, saying they were asking the prime minister to \"reaffirm\" his commitment to \"stimulate the North\".\n\nDecember's general election saw the Conservatives demolish the \"red wall\" - winning seats in the north of England from Labour it hadn't held in a generation.\n\nThe government pledged to repay that support before the pandemic hit, throwing normal politics up in the air.\n\nBoris Johnson has continued to talk about that agenda - but the signatories of this letter are worried that Covid will see some of the pledges made fall down the political priority list.\n\nIn particular, they share concerns with many Labour leaders in the North that there isn't a clear road map out of restrictions.\n\nIt's been a bruising few weeks for the government's relationship with the North, with very public rows over support for local economies.\n\nThese MPs support the government - and say their intervention is designed to influence its plans. But it also shows fears for the north of England are shared across the political spectrum\n\nThe group welcomed the financial support already in place for businesses, such as the furlough scheme and extra funding for local authorities under the tightest coronavirus restrictions.\n\nBut they added: \"We do however share concerns that the cost of Covid could be paid for by the downgrading of the levelling-up agenda, and northern constituencies like ours will be left behind.\"\n\nMr Johnson won a majority of 80 seats in December's election, with many traditionally Labour constituencies in the so-called \"Red Wall\" turning Conservative blue.\n\nA key part of his campaign was a pledge to \"level-up\" and reduce regional inequality across the country.\n\nMr Sunak said he understood the MPs' concerns but added: \"I also share their passion and their ambition for the North\" and promised that the government \"remained committed\" to investing in these areas.\n\nShadow Treasury minister Bridget Phillipson said the government had been \"treating local communities with contempt\".\n\nShe added that the decision not to extend free school meals over the half-term holiday \"is the clearest sign yet that the Conservatives have the wrong priorities and are not on the side of British families\".", "US stock markets suffered their sharpest drop in weeks as concerns about the economic impact of surging coronavirus cases sent shares tumbling.\n\nThe Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 2.3%, after dropping more than 3% earlier in the day. The S&P 500 fell 1.8% and the Nasdaq 1.6%.\n\nStocks in Europe, where a rise in virus cases has prompted new restrictions, also declined.\n\nShares in travel and energy firms took some of the heaviest losses.\n\nIn the United States, cruise lines Royal Caribbean Group, Carnival and Norwegian all dropped more than 8%, while in the UK, British Airways owner IAG closed 7.6% lower.\n\nTravel firms have been some of the most sensitive to warnings about the virus, which experts worry will intensify as winter approaches.\n\nOn Monday, Michael Ryan, an emergencies expert for the World Health Organization, said that Europe would need \"much more comprehensive\" measures to get the virus under control.\n\n\"Right now we're well behind this virus in Europe, so getting ahead of it is going to take some serious acceleration in what we do,\" he said.\n\nOn Monday, France's CAC 40 ended 1.9% lower, while Germany's Dax index dropped 3.7%. In the UK, the FTSE 100 fell nearly 1.2%.\n\nUS President Donald Trump has vowed to avoid widespread restrictions on activity, similar to the lockdown restrictions seen this spring, saying such limits are not worth the economic cost.\n\nBut such decisions are typically handled by local leaders in America, some of whom, such as the mayors of El Paso, Texas and Newark, New Jersey, tightened rules on Monday.\n\nOver the last week, the number of new virus cases reported daily in the US has repeatedly passed 80,000, sending the seven day average to a new high of nearly 69,000 - roughly double what it was in September.\n\nThe number of hospitalisations has jumped 40% in the past month and death rates are also rising, though more slowly.\n\nOn a per capita basis, the number of new cases in the US over the past seven days remains lower than some other countries, including the UK, Spain and France, which have announced new restrictions recently.\n\nBut analysts say the economy is unlikely to mend until concerns about Covid-19 are resolved.\n\nAmid those strains, investors are also worried about the impasse in Washington over the need to fund additional coronavirus economic relief.\n\nOn Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who has been trying to broker a deal for the White House, said the two sides remained far apart. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, who leads Democrats in the House of Representatives made similar comments.\n• None Covid map: Where are cases the highest?", "Levels of protective antibodies in people wane \"quite rapidly\" after coronavirus infection, say researchers.\n\nAntibodies are a key part of our immune defences and stop the virus from getting inside the body's cells.\n\nThe Imperial College London team found the number of people testing positive for antibodies has fallen by 26% between June and September.\n\nThey say immunity appears to be fading and there is a risk of catching the virus multiple times.\n\nThe news comes as figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the number of Covid-19 deaths in the UK rose by 60% in the week of 16 October.\n\nThe ONS figures suggest there have now been more than 60,000 deaths involving Covid-19 in the UK.\n\nMore than 350,000 people in England have taken an antibody test as part of the REACT-2 study so far.\n\nIn the first round of testing, at the end of June and the beginning of July, about 60 in 1,000 people had detectable antibodies.\n\nBut in the latest set of tests, in September, only 44 per 1,000 people were positive.\n\nIt suggests the number of people with antibodies fell by more than a quarter between summer and autumn.\n\n\"Immunity is waning quite rapidly, we're only three months after our first [round of tests] and we're already showing a 26% decline in antibodies,\" said Prof Helen Ward, one of the researchers.\n\nThe fall was greater in those over 65, compared with younger age groups, and in those without symptoms compared with those with full-blown Covid-19.\n\nThe number of healthcare workers with antibodies remained relatively high, which the researchers suggest may be due to regular exposure to the virus.\n\nY-shaped antibodies stick to the surface of viruses to stop them infecting the body's cells\n\nAntibodies stick to the surface of the coronavirus to stop it invading our body's cells and attacking the rest of the immune system.\n\nExactly what the antibody drop means for immunity is still uncertain. There are other parts of the immune system, such as T-cells, which may also play a role, directly killing infected host cells and calling to other immune cells to help out.\n\nHowever, the researchers warn antibodies tend to be highly predictive of who is protected.\n\nProf Wendy Barclay said: \"We can see the antibodies and we can see them declining and we know antibodies on their own are quite protective.\n\n\"On the balance of evidence, I would say it would look as if immunity declines away at the same rate as antibodies decline away, and that this is an indication of waning immunity.\"\n\nThere are four other seasonal human coronaviruses, which we catch multiple times in our lives. They cause common cold symptoms and we can be reinfected every six to 12 months.\n\nMany people have mild or asymptomatic coronavirus infections.\n\nTwo out of every three people who tested positive for coronavirus in a study published today by the Office for National Statistics experienced none of the main symptoms of coronavirus.\n\nSeparate figures from the ONS today showed that Covid-19 deaths in the UK increased from just under 500 to just over 750 in the week to 16 October, pushing the total number of deaths 6% over the level expected for this time of year.\n\nThe ONS figures suggest that more than 60,000 deaths in the UK have involved coronavirus so far this year.\n\nBy 16 October, more than 59,000 of these deaths had happened and, since then, a further 1,200 people have died within 28 days of a positive test for coronavirus. Ninety per cent of these deaths happened before the end of June.\n\nThere have been very few confirmed cases of people getting Covid twice. However, the researchers warn this may be due to immunity only just starting to fade since the peak infection rates of March and April.\n\nThe hope is the second infection will be milder than the first, even if immunity does decline, as the body should have an \"immune memory\" of the first encounter and know how to fight back.\n\nThe researchers say their findings do not scupper hopes of a vaccine, which may prove more effective than a real infection.\n\nOne of the researchers, Prof Graham Cooke, said: \"The big picture is after the first wave, the great majority of the country didn't have evidence of protective immunity.\n\n\"The need for a vaccine is still very large, the data doesn't change that.\"\n\nProfessor Paul Elliott, director of the REACT-2 study, said it would be wrong to draw firm conclusions from the study about the impact of a vaccine.\n\nHe said: \"The vaccine response may behave differently to the response to natural infection.\"\n\nBut he said it was possible that some people might need follow-up booster doses of any vaccine that became available to top up fading immunity over time.\n\nCommenting on the findings, Prof Jonathan Ball from the University of Nottingham said: \"This study confirms suspicions that antibody responses - especially in vulnerable elderly populations - decrease over time.\"\n\nHowever, he said it was still important to get a better overall view of \"what protective immunity looks like\".\n\nProf Eleanor Riley, from the University of Edinburgh, said it would be \"premature\" to assume immunity did not last, but \"the data do lend weight to the concern that antibodies induced by natural infection may be short-lived, as is the case for other seasonal coronaviruses.\"", "Two adults and two children have died after a boat carrying migrants sank off the coast of northern France.\n\nA large search and rescue operation began earlier after the vessel was seen in difficulty near Dunkirk.\n\nTwo children - aged five and eight - and a man and a woman, believed to be from Iran, have died. Fifteen others have been taken to hospital.\n\nUK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said his thoughts were with the victims' loved ones.\n\nHe said: \"We have offered the French authorities every support as they investigate this terrible incident, and will do all we can to crack down on the ruthless criminal gangs who prey on vulnerable people by facilitating these dangerous journeys.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dan O'Mahoney said the incident strengthened their resolve to bring those responsible to justice\n\nThe stricken vessel was spotted about 2km off the French coast by a passing sailboat at about 09:30 local time, which alerted French authorities.\n\nFour French vessels, one Belgian helicopter and a French fishing boat took part in the rescue and a search operation for people in the water.\n\nConditions in the English Channel have been rough throughout the day, with a gale warning issued overnight by the Met Office.\n\nAn investigation has been opened by the public prosecutor in Dunkirk to try to identify the cause of the sinking.\n\nThere has been a regular drum-beat of complaints from the UK that France is not doing enough to prevent migrants putting to sea in the first place, or accept them back on French soil once they do.\n\nBut local MPs around Calais say that Britain - not France - is the magnet for migrants along this coast, and that no amount of policing will stop them.\n\nOne French MP accused the British government earlier this year of lacking \"even an ounce of humanity\" by not allowing people to claim asylum from outside the UK.\n\nThe Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has promised to make the Channel \"unviable\" for migrant boats. People smugglers in Calais and Dunkirk are reportedly warning their clients of an upcoming crackdown.\n\nMigrants have been found this year trying to cross the Channel without the people-smuggling networks, on makeshift rafts, or simply by trying to swim across.\n\nLabour MP Yvette Cooper, chair of the home affairs select committee, said the deaths were \"truly awful\", and that criminals were profiting from \"other people's desperation\".\n\nThe committee is looking at the rise in Channel crossings and \"the work that is urgently needed to prevent more lives being lost\", she said.\n\nDover MP Natalie Elphicke said it was \"terrible that tragedy has struck in the Channel again\", adding: \"People traffickers have no regard for life, no matter how old or young.\"\n\nThe UK government has vowed to make the crossings \"unviable\" and called for boats to be stopped at sea and returned to France.\n\nThe UN Refugee Agency said in August it was \"troubled\" by the plans to intercept and return boats, adding that the numbers making the crossing \"remain low and manageable\".\n\nCharity Care4Calais said the \"loss of life should be a wake-up call for those in power in France and the UK\".\n\nIt said creating a new system which would allow asylum-seekers to apply for refuge in the UK from outside its borders would \"put an end to terrifying, dangerous sea crossings and stop tragedy striking again\".\n\nSave The Children added: \"Today's tragic news must be a wake-up call for both London and Paris to come up with a joint plan that ensures the safety of vulnerable children and families.\n\n\"The English Channel must not become a graveyard for children.\"\n\nSurvivors have been taken to hospitals in Calais and Dunkirk\n\nMore than 7,400 migrants have reached the UK in small boats this year, up from 1,825 in 2019.\n\nAt least two other people are thought to have died while attempting the crossing this year, with one body found on a beach near Calais on 18 October.\n\nAbdulfatah Hamdallah, from Sudan, died while trying to row to the UK in August.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Woolworths closed its doors for good in 2008, owing £385m\n\nA tweet announcing the relaunch of UK High Street retailer Woolworths has gone viral, despite being fake.\n\nThe Twitter account @UKWoolworths, which has now been deleted, misspelled the shop's name.\n\nAnd it linked to a website that was not active and had, BBC News has learned, been registered only hours earlier.\n\nMetro, which appears to have been the first mainstream media outlet to report the fake news, has now corrected its story.\n\nVery, the company that owns the local rights to the Woolworths brand, confirmed it was a hoax.\n\n\"We own the Woolworths trademark in the UK,\" a spokesman told BBC News.\n\n\"The Twitter account UKWoolworths is not connected to the Very group.\"\n\nThe original tweet read: \"Here to save 2020.\n\n\"Woolworths is coming back to your High Street, as a physical store.\n\n\"A couple of legal things to get sorted but we're full steam ahead at Woolworths HQ.\n\n\"We want to get this right, so we need your help.\n\n\"What do you want at your UK #YourWoolworths?\"\n\nMetro appears to have been the first mainstream media outlet to report the fake news\n\nRay Walsh, scam expert at virtual private network (VPN) company ProPrivacy, said: \"It's not unsurprising that huge numbers of people around the UK have fallen for fake news surrounding the reopening of Woolworths.\n\n\"The brand was a much-loved part of UK shopping history.\n\n\"And many have fond memories of the retailer.\n\n\"But the Twitter account spreading the hoax was full of typos and spelling mistakes.\n\n\"This alone should have been enough to make it obvious that something extremely fishy was going on.\n\n\"The important take away from all of this is how social engineering and nostalgia can be used to trick people.\n\n\"And it serves as an important reminder of why people need to think carefully when using the internet to avoid falling for scams and phishing attacks.\"\n\nThe Twitter account @UKWoolworths, which now has more than 4,000 followers, misspelled the shop's name\n\nWoolworths closed its doors for good in 2008, owing £385m.\n\nThe shops, famous for their Pic'n'Mix sweets, also sold kitchen and garden equipment and toys.\n\nOne of the UK's oldest chains it had 815 stores, many of which were taken over by shops such as Wilko and Poundland.\n\nThe Woolworths name remains in use in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa as an unrelated retail brand.\n\nThis was the fake news story 2020 needed - and it might seem less important than harmful coronavirus conspiracy theories or political disinformation, which have spread on wildfire on social media in recent months.\n\nBut it does teach us some important lessons about how and why disinformation spreads on social media.\n\nWe tend to share posts that we want to be true or that confirm our biases - who isn't missing Woolworth's pic'n'mix, especially during a pandemic?\n\nThat partly explains why the tweet from the fake Woolworth's account - which kept spelling the name of the chain wrong - went so viral.\n\nBut it also highlights the need for verification - and the role of the media in amplifying disinformation.\n\nA quick ring around would have confirmed that Woolworth's is not re-opening - but that did not stop a number of news outlets covering this fake Twitter account.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: 'We don't want to see children going hungry'\n\nBoris Johnson has defended his refusal to extend free school meals for children in England over the half-term holiday, saying he was \"very proud\" of the government's support so far.\n\n\"I totally understand the issue of holiday hunger,\" he said. \"The debate is, how do you deal with it.\"\n\nHe said the government will \"do everything in our power to make sure that no kid, no child goes hungry\".\n\nPressure has risen on the PM, including from his own MPs, to rethink the issue.\n\nMr Johnson also said he had not spoken to Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford - who has been leading a high-profile campaign to extend free school meals into the holidays - since the summer.\n\nThe UK government extended free school meals to eligible children during the Easter holidays earlier this year and, after Rashford's campaigning, did the same for the summer holiday.\n\nBut it has refused to do so again. A petition created by the England striker calling for provision to continue in the holidays had gained more than 900,000 signatures by Monday evening.\n\nScotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have already introduced food voucher schemes.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Marcus Rashford and his mother Melanie helped out at FareShare Greater Manchester\n\nSpeaking during a visit to a hospital in Reading to launch a review of hospital food, Mr Johnson said \"I totally salute and understand\" where Rashford was coming from.\n\nBut he said the government was supporting families with a Universal Credit increase of £20 a week, introduced in April.\n\nThe government also said it gave £63m to councils - first announced in June - to help people who are struggling to afford food and essentials.\n\nHowever, the Local Government Association said this funding was intended to be spent before the end of September and had been \"outstripped\" by demand.\n\nMr Johnson said: \"We are very proud of the support we have given, I have said repeatedly throughout this crisis that the government will support families and businesses, jobs and livelihoods, across the country.\n\n\"We're going to continue to do that.\n\n\"We don't want to see children going hungry this winter, this Christmas, certainly not as a result of any inattention by this government - and you are not going to see that.\"\n\nDowning Street doesn't want to do a U-turn; at least not in too obvious a fashion.\n\nSo it isn't stumping up the cash to extend holiday food vouchers in England.\n\nBut listen carefully to Boris Johnson and it's clear that he might stump up cash in other ways, for pretty much the same purpose.\n\nSo, for example, could councils be given further funds to help struggling families?\n\nThen ministers can try and argue that they're simply carrying on with an existing policy that they believe is more effective.\n\nThe PM was at pains today to show that he both recognises and cares about this issue.\n\nBut some Tories fear that, because of cack-handed communications, Downing Street lost the PR battle on compassion days ago.\n\nOne mother, Nicola Palmer from Leicestershire, said the meal vouchers had been an \"absolute lifeline\" for her family during the Easter and summer holidays.\n\nShe receives Universal Credit but said that, after paying bills, she and her partner and their two children \"would be lucky\" to have £40 a month to live on.\n\n\"Me and my partner have been disabled. I've been disabled since 2017 with multiple sclerosis. My partner has been disabled for a lot longer than that with Crohn's disease and a few other health issues,\" she said.\n\nMs Palmer said the vouchers helped her and her partner feed their two children when they were struggling with money\n\nShe said one day last week - which was their half-term - she and her partner had no dinner at all, to make sure the children could eat.\n\n\"Yes, we are in receipt of Universal Credit, however due to our low income and having to pay for bills as well as trying to put a meal on the table, the very slight increase on this has not made any difference for us whatsoever.\"\n\nLucy Houghton, 36, from Norfolk, also relies on free school meal vouchers and said there are times she will not eat so her children can.\n\n\"It's going to be tough this week,\" she said.\n\n\"It's all very well businesses offering free food, but I'm in a rural location and would need fuel to get there. And it's humiliating. I hate asking for help from anybody and I know I'm not alone in that.\"\n\nDefence Secretary Ben Wallace said the government had been \"incredibly generous\" during the pandemic, with support such as wage subsidies, increases to benefits and business rates relief.\n\nHe added: \"If there is still need or if this Covid crisis continues to kick in and more lockdowns happen, of course the government will look at other alternatives, or other solutions. We're not going to sit there in a static environment.\"\n\nLabour said Mr Johnson's \"warm words\" would \"do nothing\" for the children at risk of going hungry this week.\n\n\"Labour will not not give up on the children and families let down by this government, and we will hold the prime minister to his word, forcing another vote in Parliament if necessary,\" said shadow education secretary Kate Green.\n\nRashford's campaign has led to businesses including fish and chip shops, pubs, restaurants and cafes promising to dish out free food to eligible children over half-term, which began on Monday in many areas.\n\nAnd Manchester United says it will distribute 5,000 meals - cooked at the Old Trafford kitchen facilities - to children eligible for free school meals across Greater Manchester.\n\nSome charities have set up websites and maps allowing parents to search for places nearby providing free meals.\n\nDavid Pickard, head of community operations at Midland Mencap, said he expected \"hundreds\" of families to access free lunches from its community centre in Birmingham this week.\n\nMother-of-three Aisha, who spoke to a reporter as she collected food donations from a community centre in Birmingham, said: \"I am usually really good with my budget. Their father, who I'm divorced from, usually pays for their uniforms but he got ill and he couldn't work, so I bought them this time.\n\n\"But the £200 I used came from money I use to pay my bills, because the school said if I brought in the receipts I could get some help from them.\n\n\"I did that - but it's been seven or eight weeks now, and I haven't heard anything back from the school, so I'm struggling.\"\n\nSome councils - including several Tory-run local authorities - have promised to supply meal vouchers or food parcels for children facing hardship.\n\nCafe staff in Liverpool prepare sandwich bags for children, as businesses offer to help\n\nLast week, Conservative MPs voted against Labour's attempt to extend free school meals by 322 votes to 261, with five Tory MPs rebelling and voting for Labour's motion.\n\nStuart Anderson, Tory MP for Wolverhampton South West, said he had received threats and his office had been vandalised after he opposed the plan to offer free school meals in the holidays.\n\nChildren of all ages living in households on income-related benefits may be eligible for free school meals.\n\nIn England, about 1.4 million children qualified for free school meals in January 2020 - about 17.3% of state-educated pupils.\n\nAnalysis by the Food Foundation estimates a further 900,000 children in England may have sought free school meals since the start of the pandemic.", "Plastic surgeons fear there will be a big increase in injuries from DIY firework displays this November.\n\nPublic events have been cancelled due to Covid, meaning many people may decide to host their own Diwali and bonfire night displays at home.\n\nMedics who do reconstructive surgery and deal with hand and burn injuries say firework-related injuries have become an all-too-familiar sight.\n\nThey are urging people to think twice before buying fireworks.\n\nA survey of 1,200 British adults conducted on behalf of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons (BAPRAS), found 37% were considering putting on a display at home.\n\nMost injuries are caused by incorrect firework use, poor handling of fireworks, and use of petrol or other accelerants to light bonfires.\n\nAlong with burns, eye and hand injuries are especially common.\n\nAnd alcohol consumption and fireworks can be a lethal combination, say medics.\n\nThey say the potential risk is too high and unnecessary at this time when the NHS is already under pressure dealing with a backlog of work due to Covid.\n\nMark Henley, consultant plastic surgeon and president of BAPRAS, said: \"Every November, plastic surgeons across the UK witness serious injuries caused by fireworks, with many patients requiring multiple rounds of complex reconstructive surgery.\n\n\"With the NHS stretched to capacity due to Covid-19 and a huge backlog for surgical procedures, we simply cannot afford for an increase in preventable injuries, and urge people to think twice before purchasing fireworks for personal use.\"\n\nLondon Fire Brigade has also called on people to \"think twice\" about holding a firework display or building a garden bonfire.\n\nThe brigade's assistant commissioner for fire safety, Paul Jennings, said: \"Think about your neighbours, particularly older people or those who are self-isolating, pets and of course those of us in the emergency services.\n\n\"Despite our warning, if you do choose to have your own display, never drink alcohol and set off fireworks, keep fireworks in a closed metal box and only ever buy ones which carry the CE mark.\"\n\n\"Bonfires should be clear of buildings, sheds, fences and hedges. Bonfires in your back garden can especially be dangerous.\n\n\"This time of year is usually one of the busiest for firefighters and control officers, and we also need to support our NHS colleagues, so please help us by keeping yourself safe.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Baby clothes have been listed as essential and can now be sold in supermarkets\n\nBaby clothes have been listed as essential items that should go on sale in supermarkets during Wales' lockdown.\n\nThe Welsh Government has also said customers should be able to ask for non-essential items in exceptional circumstances.\n\nBut ministers say the principle of restricting non-essential goods will stay until lockdown ends on 9 November.\n\nPlaid said it showed building public trust was vital while the Conservatives called the rules \"absolute madness\".\n\nThe new guidance, issued after meetings with businesses and trade unions, follows a backlash after supermarkets closed off sections of their shops selling clothes and other items.\n\nEarlier, business groups had appealed for customers to be \"trusted to make their own decisions\" on what was essential to them.\n\nIn a statement, the Welsh Government said it had \"positive discussions\" and that it had \"clarified that a sensible system should be introduced whereby customers can ask to buy non-essential items by exception under the regulations\".\n\nProducts deemed non-essential are being covered up in stores\n\n\"We are hopeful this provides a workable solution for retailers and customers,\" it said.\n\n\"However, we cannot move away from the central principle that retailers must restrict the sale of non-essential goods for the duration of the firebreak.\n\n\"We continue to work closely with the sector and would stress that these restrictions are in place to stop the spread of coronavirus and save lives.\n\n\"We are asking the public to continue to support the effort by restricting unnecessary journeys and shopping .\"\n\nHome electrical items such as irons are not being sold in supermarkets\n\nMinisters issued a list that \"we consider that the regulations allow\" to be sold in supermarkets:\n\nInitially, the Welsh Government said supermarkets and department stores should close off sections of their stores, including clothing aisles.\n\nOfficials say there will be further discussions with supermarkets over coming days on how to implement the changes.\n\nEarlier on Tuesday, retailers made their own proposals to \"resolve confusion\" over sales of non-essential items during Wales' lockdown.\n\nStores said such items could remain on shelves and not be cordoned off, with signs instead advising customers to put off non-essential purchases.\n\n\"The final liability ought to rest with the customer,\" retailers said.\n\nPlaid Cymru's health spokesman Rhun ap Iorwerth said the fallout should remind the Welsh Government of the importance of \"building public trust\".\n\nThe Welsh Conservative leader Paul Davies has called for the Senedd to be recalled to discuss the rules.", "Baroness Lawrence says \"decades of structural injustice\" have increased Covid rates among BAME communities\n\nCovid-19 has \"thrived\" among black, Asian and ethnic minority (BAME) communities because of structural race discrimination, a Labour report says.\n\nIts author, Baroness Lawrence, said these groups were \"over-exposed\" and faced \"barriers\" to healthcare.\n\nBAME people had also been scapegoated for Covid's spread, she added.\n\nBut a government adviser said last week that \"structural racism\" was not in itself a \"reasonable explanation\" for rates differing between ethnic groups.\n\nDr Raghib Ali also suggested that focusing on other factors like people's jobs and housing conditions would help more people.\n\nAnd Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch said higher transmission rates among BAME groups appeared to be down to \"a range of socio-economic and geographical factors\", including exposure at work, population density and household composition, as well as pre-existing health conditions.\n\nGovernment analysis published in August found people of Bangladeshi ethnicity had about twice as high a risk of death from Covid-19 as white British people.\n\nPeople of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, other Asian, black Caribbean and other black ethnicity had between a 10% and 50% higher risk of death when compared with white British people.\n\nIn her report, Baroness Lawrence - whose 18-year-old son Stephen was murdered in a racially motivated attack in 1993 - wrote: \"Black, Asian and minority ethnic people have been over-exposed, under-protected, stigmatised and overlooked during this pandemic - and this has been generations in the making.\n\n\"The impact of Covid is not random, but foreseeable and inevitable, the consequence of decades of structural injustice, inequality and discrimination that blights our society.\"\n\nThe report said BAME workers were more likely than white people to work in \"frontline\" jobs and come into contact with coronavirus.\n\nWhen accessing healthcare, there was a \"lack of cultural and language-appropriate communication\", with patients \"not being taken seriously when presenting with symptoms\", it added.\n\nBAME people were also \"under-represented across the senior leadership of the NHS\".\n\nBaroness Lawrence, whose report was commissioned by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer in April, said BAME groups had \"also been subject to disgraceful racism as some have sought to blame different communities for the spread of the virus\".\n\nShe asked ministers to outline a plan to tackle a rise in hate crime, with party leaders \"issuing a joint statement condemning attempts to pit communities against one another\".\n\n\"Covid-19 has thrived on inequalities that have long scarred British society,\" Baroness Lawrence, a Labour peer since 2013, said.\n\nA Public Health England report published in June said factors such as racism and health inequality may have contributed to an increased risk of BAME communities catching and dying from Covid-19.\n\nDr Ali said last week that considerations such as occupation, living in crowded housing and having a pre-existing condition explained part of the difference.\n\nHowever, Ms Badenoch said the risks \"remained unexplained for some groups\" and promised to report back to MPs at the end of the next quarter with the latest evidence.\n\nA government spokesperson said that \"many of the factors identified in the [Labour] report affect non-ethnic groups as well\".\n\nIt was important to \"identify the root causes of the disparities we're seeing and not assume they are evidence of discrimination or unfair treatment in public services like the NHS\", they also said.", "Mohammed Agha told the inquiry he had worked at more than 30 concerts at the arena\n\nSuicide bomber Salman Abedi was smiling as he walked to his death and murdered 22 bystanders by detonating his home-made bomb, a public inquiry has heard.\n\nAbedi, 22, was on his mobile phone as he made his \"final walk\" after waiting for crowds to emerge at the end of a concert at Manchester Arena in 2017.\n\nSeconds later he detonated his device packed with 3,000 nuts and bolts.\n\nShowsec security guard Mohammed Agha told the inquiry he was not initially suspicious of Abedi.\n\nMr Agha had seen Abedi outside the Ariana Grande concert on 22 May 2017, dressed in black and carrying a big, bulky rucksack, three times earlier that night, but he did not think him suspicious until minutes before the bombing when he agreed it \"crossed his mind\" Abedi might be a suicide bomber.\n\nHe denied he \"fobbed off\" a member of the public, Christopher Wild, who came to him to report his suspicions about Abedi at about 22:15 BST.\n\nFifteen minutes later Abedi left his position at the back of the City Room, a CCTV \"blind spot\", to detonate his device.\n\nPaul Greaney QC, counsel to the inquiry said: \"How did the man seem to be at that stage as he made that final walk?\"\n\nMr Agha replied: \"He was on the phone, mobile phone, he was smiling.\"\n\nMr Agha said he had passed on Mr Wild's comments about Abedi to a colleague, Kyle Lawler, at 22:25, some eight minutes after Mr Wild had first raised his concerns.\n\nTop row (left to right): Alison Howe, Martyn Hett, Lisa Lees, Courtney Boyle, Eilidh MacLeod, Elaine McIver, Georgina Callander, Jane Tweddle - Middle row (left to right): John Atkinson, Kelly Brewster, Liam Curry, Chloe Rutherford, Marcin Klis, Angelika Klis, Megan Hurley, Michelle Kiss - Bottom row (left to right): Nell Jones, Olivia Campbell-Hardy, Philip Tron, Saffie-Rose Roussos, Sorrell Leczkowski, Wendy Fawell\n\nMr Agha, aged 19 at the time and being paid the minimum wage of £7.90 an hour, said that night his job was to stand by a fire exit.\n\nHe had no radio and said if he left his post, except for an emergency, he might lose his job.\n\nFamilies of some of the victims wiped away tears and others shook their heads as the witness continued his evidence.\n\nMr Agha said he tried but failed to attract the attention of his boss, standing 30 metres away across the room, by raising his hand.\n\nWhen Mr Lawler passed by him, he spoke to the fellow Showsec steward, who had a radio, in order to report what Mr Wild had said to his superiors in the control room.\n\nAs he and Mr Lawler looked at Abedi, he described the bomber as, \"kind of looking nervous, or kind of looking fidgety. He was playing with his hands\".\n\nMr Greaney asked the witness if he thought one possibility was that the suspicious man with the backpack might be a suicide bomber.\n\nMr Agha replied: \"Not, not like, I did think about it, but it was not fully in my head.\"\n\nMr Greaney continued: \"Do you agree, it did cross your mind that this man might be a bomber?\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson spoke to BBC Breakfast's Louise Minchin about his eldest brother's death from coronavirus.\n\nThe politician's brother Bill died in mid-October in hospital.\n\nLiverpool is in tier three of the new lockdown system.", "More children are missing out on their education, as the rate of attendance falls across England's schools.\n\nThe percentage of pupils attending primary and secondary schools fell to 86% last week down from 89% the previous week, government data shows.\n\nThe Northern Powerhouse, a group working to redress North-South economic imbalance, says pupils in the North face the most disruption over Covid-19.\n\nThe government said some pupils were self-isolating \"as we would expect\".\n\nThe Department for Education said 55% of secondaries and 20% of primaries in England reported having one or more pupils self-isolating due to potential contact with a case of coronavirus in the school.\n\nThis is up from 46% and 16% respectively on the previous week.\n\nOverall attendance at primary school fell from 92% in the week ending 15 October to 90% in the week ending 22 October.\n\nBut the drop on the previous week's attendance was most significant in secondary schools, falling from 87% to 83%.\n\nIf you are a parent tell us how your child has experienced school disruption:\n\nHowever, \"the vast majority of these schools remain open to most pupils\", the DfE said.\n\nGeoff Barton, head of the school leaders' union ASCL, said the figures painted a \"grim picture of the increasingly challenging picture facing schools\".\n\nAs attendance rates fall, there are growing concerns that pupils in the north of England are missing more school than their peers in other parts of the country.\n\nAnalysis from the North West Association of the Directors of Children's Services, seen exclusively by the BBC, reveals the pressures.\n\nIn mid-October Bury, Knowsley, Liverpool and Manchester all had more than 40% of schools with confirmed cases - some of these were among teachers.\n\nAccording to the report, which is based on a snapshot of 16 October, there were 710 teachers with a positive test for coronavirus in the North West - this was 35% of the total of confirmed cases among teachers across England on that day.\n\nThe Northern Powerhouse wants next year's exams ditched in favour of coursework, saying pupils in the north of England had been particularly badly affected by disruption to their schooling.\n\nBut the government says exams are \"the fairest way\" of judging performance and ministers have said exams will go ahead in summer 2021, with a three-week delay.\n\nAbout eight million pupils in England were sent home in March\n\nIt pointed out that some areas in the North had attendance rates for secondary school as low as 61%, whereas others in the South were close to the usual national figure of 95%.\n\nIt added: \"We appreciate the government's desire to try and keep things as normal as possible, but this is now unrealistic in many northern communities.\n\n\"We urge the government to commit to continuous assessment as it is a fairer alternative to the proposed examination plan.\"\n\nThe government is consulting on contingency measures to manage any disruption to GCSEs, A-levels and BTecs in 2021, and has said it will produce plans before Christmas.\n\nA DfE spokesperson said: \"Exams are the fairest way of judging a student's performance, which is why they will go ahead next year, underpinned by contingency measures developed in partnership with the sector.\n\n\"Over the coming weeks we will jointly identify any risks to exams and the measures needed to address potential disruption, with fairness for students continuing to be our priority.\"\n\nThe spokesperson added that schools had plans in place to deliver remote education for self-isolating pupils and the government was providing an initial additional allocation of 150,000 devices for eligible children.\n\nThe CEO of Ormiston Academy Trust, Nick Hudson, urged the government to publish data on attendance broken down by local authority, amid concern that pupils in the worst-affected areas might be falling further behind.\n\n\"To be fair to young people the data needs to be transparent, then we can ensure that we put as much equity into the system, especially those sitting exams,\" he said.\n\n\"If we experience the same levels of staff absence as we have in the first half-term between now and the end of term, it would be very difficult to ensure consistent education for all of our pupils in all of our schools - that would mean looking at the possibility of rotas.\"", "Niyad Farah was punched to the ground and dragged into a doorway during the attack\n\nPolice investigating a serious racist attack after apologising for failures in an earlier inquiry have been passed mobile phone video of the incident.\n\nBBC Newsnight understands the footage shows two attackers, one of whom makes what seem to be monkey chants directed at three women in London.\n\nThe women said officers in the initial investigation made racist assumptions about them, hampering the inquiry.\n\nThe Metropolitan Police denies this, but said it is reviewing its work.\n\nLast week Newsnight revealed serious failings in the police investigation into the attack on the three women, all of Somali descent, on 22 December last year.\n\nPolice closed the case in April, saying they had no CCTV evidence or leads.\n\nBut Newsnight found that officers failed to obtain CCTV from nearby shops or take witness statements, even from the victims, for nearly two weeks after the attack.\n\nBy the time the police tried to recover security camera footage from shops in Kilburn Lane in early January, it had been recycled - and overwritten by new material.\n\nThe Met reopened the case last week and apologised to the women. A source close to the investigation said the Met now has 21 lines of enquiry into the unsolved hate crime.\n\nThe former chief constable of Surrey Police, Bob Quick, told the programme the Met's response had been \"woeful\".\n\nNiyad Farah, 38, was kicked unconscious in the attack and taken to St Mary's hospital, Paddington for treatment. It was categorised as racially motivated GBH with intent - a very serious hate crime.\n\nMs Farah told Newsnight that one officer asked her if she had been \"buying anything\" from the attackers. She believes he was implying they were buying drugs and knew the men.\n\nShe said she thought the officer believed \"it was almost impossible for a racist attack to happen in that area\".\n\nThe Met denies racist assumptions were made and says it accepted from a very early stage this was a vicious attack by strangers. But in response to Newsnight's investigation it apologised for failing the women.\n\nIn a statement, the Met admitted the incident \"should have been escalated and prioritised at an earlier stage\" adding \"there was a delay in the necessary follow-up enquiries being made just after the incident, and this hindered the subsequent investigation\".\n\n\"This shouldn't have happened, and we are sorry for letting the victims in this case down. This was an appalling attack which should have been investigated with greater urgency,\" the force said.\n\nThe Met has also referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.\n\nIt confirmed it has received new information relating to the attack.", "Supermarket staff say they are targets for customers venting their frustration over the rules\n\nFirebreak shopping rules are causing \"uncertainty, fear and anxiety\", according to supermarket workers.\n\nFilco director Matthew Hunt said he has had no information from the government and \"found out on Facebook\".\n\nAnd one supermarket worker said staff are facing \"abuse and intimidation\".\n\nThe Welsh Government will publish revised guidance later over its ban on the sale of non-essential items in supermarkets during the 17-day lockdown.\n\nMr Hunt told Radio Wales Breakfast: \"We never had any communication from any of the governmental bodies before this was introduced.\n\n\"As yet, we've still yet to have anything concrete that we can work with.\"\n\nHe added he was worried about the pressure staff members may feel about deciding what is essential.\n\n\"This is only a two-week period, by the time you try and unravel the confusion that is out there, we'll be out the end of this one,\" he said.\n\nA supermarket worker called Jane told Radio Wales she felt anxious going into work.\n\n\"You don't know what you're going to face,\" she said.\n\n\"It is causing a lot of frustration with customers. A couple have behaved really awfully - we had one gentleman come in with no mask, filming the store, shouting abuse, telling us we were all robots for the government.\n\n\"We get general frustration from other customers who wanted to buy something for the home and can't. A lot of people tend to mutter, trying to provoke a reaction.\"\n\nShe added she had been \"personally intimidated by a customer who's really got in my face and invaded my personal space\" and some customers had been removed from the store.\n\n\"It certainly isn't right that shop workers should have to put up with that kind of behaviour.\n\n\"We've been going to work all the way through the pandemic to keep the country fed and abuse shouldn't be part of our job at all.\"\n\nThe toy aisle at Tesco on Western Avenue in Cardiff has been blocked off\n\nHealth Minister Vaughan Gething told Monday's coronavirus press briefing that supermarkets should use their discretion over the sale of non-essential items.\n\nJane, from Mold in Flintshire, said her store had needed to use flexibility when a customer was in crisis at the weekend.\n\n\"They needed baby clothing - they'd fled from a bad situation and they weren't able to bring everything that they needed for their baby, so we allowed them to purchase what they needed,\" she said.\n\n\"There was no way you could have said no to that person.\"\n\nBut she added the decision should not be made by supermarket staff.\n\n\"It shouldn't be down to the responsibility of the shop worker to enforce the new arrangements.\n\n\"It should be up to the public to follow the rules...we need a clear message of what we should say to them.\"", "There are now 366 cases linked to outbreaks at the three general hospitals and two community hospitals\n\nAnother 12 deaths have been linked to hospital infections in the Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board area, bringing the total so far to 69.\n\nThe deaths have happened at its three general hospitals in Llantrisant, Merthyr Tydfil and Bridgend.\n\nIt comes as official figures report another 47 deaths in Wales involving Covid-19 registered in the latest week.\n\nThis is the highest weekly figure since mid-May reported by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).\n\nIt is 10 more deaths than reported the week before.\n\nCwm Taf Morgannwg health board said there were now 366 cases linked to outbreaks at the three general hospitals and two community hospitals in Rhondda and Maesteg.\n\nDeaths included in the outbreaks are patients whose deaths are associated with the virus, not necessarily directly due to Covid-19.\n\nThere have now been 47 deaths at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital, 11 at the Prince Charles Hospital and 11 at the Princess of Wales Hospital.\n\nRhondda Cynon Taf has the ninth highest total death rate per 100,000 people involving Covid-19 across England or Wales, with a total of 353 deaths registered so far in the pandemic.\n\nAnalysis by the BBC shows the area now also has one of the fastest-rising case rates in the UK for Covid-19 infections, based on positive results.\n\nHealth board medical director Nick Lyons said: \"Infection rates continue to rise at a concerning rate in our communities.\n\n\"It is up to all of us as individuals to take seriously our responsibilities and to adhere to the restrictions of the 17-day lockdown period. By doing this, you will be helping us to get this virus under control and protect everyone, including the most vulnerable, in our communities.\"\n\nConservative health spokesman in the Senedd, Andrew RT Davies, who repeated his call for an inquiry into hospital-acquired infections, called for a \"serious focus\" on the issue.\n\n\"Deaths linked to hospital-acquired Covid infections is turning into a real scandal in the second wave and my deepest sympathies go to the families of those who've tragically died,\" he said.\n\nThe separate ONS figures, covering the week ending 16 October, reveal 15 deaths happened in hospitals in the Cwm Taf Morgannwg area, 10 in Aneurin Bevan, five each in Betsi Cadwaladr and Cardiff and Vale and three in Swansea Bay.\n\nThere is a time lag in the ONS figures being published, compared to the daily Public Health Wales bulletin, to allow for deaths to be registered.\n\nBut the ONS also gives deaths in care homes, hospices and people's own homes, as well as hospitals.\n\nTen of the hospital deaths involved patients from Rhondda Cynon Taf. Across England and Wales, Liverpool saw the most deaths in hospital for this week with 29.\n\nSo-called excess deaths, which compare all registered deaths with previous years, are above the five-year average in Wales.\n\nComparing with the number of deaths we would normally expect to see at this point in the year is seen as a useful measure of how the pandemic is progressing.\n\nIn Wales, the number of deaths rose to 688 in the latest week, which was 58 deaths higher than the five-year average.", "It is views such as this on a route to the top of Snowdon that attracts hundreds of thousands of people to visit north Wales\n\nThe tourism industry in Wales needs urgent clarity on rules after the national Covid firebreak lockdown ends, say some of its leaders.\n\nEmotions in the sector are turning from \"anxiety to anger\" in some parts of the country, warned one industry insider.\n\nHealth Minister Vaughan Gething has said there would be guidance at least a week in advance on what comes next.\n\nThe Welsh Government said it met a tourism taskforce \"on a weekly basis\" to work with the industry.\n\nBut Jim Jones, the managing director of North Wales Tourism, said the 1,000 members he represents needed to know \"a month ago\".\n\nHe said most of north Wales had already been put under hyper-local lockdown, and extending the measures to the national firebreak was \"draconian\".\n\n\"The first minister talks about the short, sharp shock - we're talking about the long, sharp shock to our economy,\" Mr Jones said.\n\n\"The current lockdown is really unfair for business.\n\n\"I've always said right from day one 'yes, absolutely we should be protecting lives' - but at the same time we should be protecting people's livelihoods.\"\n\nAutumn in the Conwy Valley may be cooler - but its colours are usually a visitor magnet\n\nHe said the economic impact was being felt across the whole of the hospitality sector in the region, including the supply chain behind the tourism industry.\n\n\"We're already hearing of redundancies, or job losses, and questions of whether businesses will open,\" Mr Jones continued.\n\n\"It's the uncertainty going forward - and the anxiety which is now turning to anger.\n\n\"It's the lack of information, the lack of engagement that we are having at this moment in time with Welsh Government and business.\n\n\"We are the last to find out, yet we're the ones dealing with the brunt of it all.\"\n\nDemonstrators gathered on Llandudno's prom on Sunday over Covid restrictions\n\nConcerns about the lockdown measures led to a protest over the weekend in Llandudno, one of the main holiday destinations on the north Wales coast.\n\nNorth Wales Tourism said the sector was worth more than £3bn alone to the region every year.\n\nAcross Wales, the industry was worth an estimated £6.3bn in spending by visitors in 2018, according to Welsh Government figures.\n\nIt also employed more than 132,000 people - nearly one-in-10 of the Welsh workforce.\n\nAnglesey glamour-camping entrepreneur Victoria Roberts said she had already bitten the bullet and called it a year for her glamping sites.\n\n\"I know it's October, but we keep getting calls about bookings - there's still a market out there,\" she said.\n\nBut with the firebreak in place, she said she and others in similar businesses across the island were resigned to staying shut until next year.\n\nShe also runs another holiday accommodation business but said she did not know where she stands after the firebreak ends on 9 November.\n\n\"Can I take bookings? Will the travel restrictions still be in place? What about the rule-of-six - will that still be in place?\" she asked.\n\nAnglesey was one of the few places in north Wales to avoid local lockdown - but it is now part of the Wales firebreak lockdown\n\nAs co-chairman of the island's own tourism association, she said other businesses were in the same situation.\n\n\"People just need to know - clear direction and back it up with reasons why,\" she added.\n\n\"We need to know by the end of the week. We need to know what the plan is and how it will pan out - and what the next step will be.\n\n\"Will we be potentially looking at other firebreakers in the new year?\"\n\nMr Gething told Monday's coronavirus briefing that discussions would continue with stakeholders across industries such as tourism and retail over the course of the week.\n\n\"There are conversations taking place today, tomorrow, Wednesday, Thursday and beyond, and we'll then expect the Cabinet to come together and agree a set of rules,\" he said.\n\n\"We want to be in a position to give people at least a week or so to understand the new rules that are going to be in place.\"\n\nA Welsh Government official added that \"engagement with the industry has been vital during the course of the pandemic\" and, in addition to weekly meetings, a news bulletin in Wales was sent to 61,000 tourism businesses.\n\n\"Tourism is extremely important to our economy and we know this is an incredibly challenging time for businesses,\" they added.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Twenty seven people are waiting to be admitted to Antrim Area Hospital\n\nAntrim Area Hospital has warned it is \"operating beyond capacity\" with 27 sick patients awaiting admission.\n\nPatients have been asked by the Northern Health Trust not to attend the hospital's emergency department unless they require urgent medical care.\n\nThe trust said they were clearly \"in the midst of the second Covid surge\" with many very ill in-patients.\n\nThe Northern Ireland Ambulance Service (NIAS) and Southern Health Trust also said they were \"extremely busy\".\n\nOn Monday, Northern Ireland reported a higher daily number of Covid hospital inpatients, at 342, than the previous 8 April peak, when the number hit 322.\n\nThe NIAS asked for patience on Monday evening.\n\n\"We will prioritise calls to provide the quickest response to the most seriously ill or injured,\" it said.\n\nIn a social media post, the Southern Health Trust said: \"Please only attend if you need emergency treatment, non urgent cases will have a long wait time.\"\n\nAltnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry has reached a point where its critical care surge plan has been triggered.\n\nIn a statement, the Western Trust confirmed: \"As numbers increase, we increase capacity as per our critical care surge plan up to 18 beds.\"\n\nMeanwhile, there has been a outbreak of Covid cases in a ward at the Ulster Hospital.\n\nTwo patients and seven staff members in its coronary care ward have tested positive for Covid-19 at the hospital in Dundonald, the South Eastern Trust confirmed.\n\nNine other patients in ward 16 are self isolating and the ward has been closed to further admissions and visitors.\n\nThe South Eastern Trust said staff members who have tested positive for the virus are self-isolating at home.\n\nIt added that additional measures are in place to limit further spread.\n\n\"We would like to reassure all patients and members of the public attending the Ulster Hospital that it is safe to do so,\" the South Eastern Trust said, in a statement.\n\n\"Relatives of patients in ward 16 should contact the ward directly if they have any queries.\"\n\nThe Department of Health in Northern Ireland reported five further Covid-19 related deaths on Monday, bringing its total to 658.\n\nThere were 727 further positive cases, with the total number of cases now 34,832.\n\nThree further deaths were recorded in the Republic of Ireland on Monday, with 939 newly confirmed cases of the virus.", "Doctors say Covid-19 is now rampant in the refugee camps of Idlib, north-west Syria.\n\nThe number of positive coronavirus cases rose tenfold in this region last month.\n\nAid agencies say that due to a lack of testing, the real figure is expected to be much higher.\n\nThe BBC's Darren Conway gained rare access to the camps.", "Many parents involved in family court hearings are having to participate by phone and some say they cannot follow what is happening, according to a survey. These hearings sometimes determine the future of their children, whether they are taken into care, which parent they live with. Since lockdown eased the Family Court has been holding remote or hybrid hearings, where only a handful of people are in court and the others join by phone or video link.\n\nThis summer, Elizabeth, not her real name, took part in a family court hearing by phone. For years her ex-partner had argued their two sons should live with him - but their permanent home had always been with her. This time, to her shock, the judge decided the two boys should move.\n\n\"I wasn't able to speak to my barrister during the hearing,\" she said. \"My phone line was used up listening to the court.\"\n\nShe believes it would have been different if she had been able to appear in person, to stand in court before the judge.\n\n\"A million per cent. A lot of communication is more than just hearing someone over the telephone - it's visual, body language.\"\n\nWe can't see the evidence in family courts and no judgment has been published in Elizabeth's case - so we don't know why the judge made that decision, or whether appearing in person would have made a difference,\n\nBut her account worries Sir Andrew MacFarlane, the most senior judge in the Family Court.\n\n\"A major part of being a family judge is to empathise with the human beings at the centre of the case,\" he says. \"And it's very difficult to do that even across a video link, very hard over a phone.\"\n\nSince lockdown, the family courts have ensured social distancing by having few people in court and allowing others to join by virtual link. A survey published by the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory suggests most professionals, including lawyers and judges, believe the system is working relatively smoothly.\n\nHowever, most of the parents who took part raised concerns. Most said they had had to participate via phone, like Elizabeth, and some said they couldn't follow what was going on in the hearing.\n\nMore than 1,100 professionals were contacted - 132 family members.\n\nLisa Harker, director of the observatory, said parents reported being unable to fully participate in hearings, sometimes the technology broke down and at other times people had no support. She was worried about those who joined from home, and were left alone to absorb the court's decision - which could be to take away their child forever.\n\nProf Andy Bilson, who interviewed many of the parents, said one mother had to phone in to a hearing about her child from a psychiatric hospital. \"The situation of doing hearings by telephone is not just,\" he said.\n\nSir Andrew believes the situation has been improving recently, and that for the most significant hearings parents are now able to appear before a judge. However he is concerned by some of the accounts logged by the observatory report, and says he will be working with the judiciary to find solutions.\n\nMeanwhile the workload of the family courts has been growing. Cafcass, the court service, reported record numbers of child cases in England for September. In that month, there were 5,761 new cases (12.6% or 644 cases more cases than September 2019).\n\nMost of these (4,262) were so-called private law, where parents cannot agree over their children, like Elizabeth's dispute with her ex-partner.\n\nI asked Sir Andrew if he knew why these numbers were rising. He explained it was partly because of a backlog in the system, partly because existing child arrangements for visits and residence had broken down, but also because of a rise in the number of domestic abuse cases.\n\n\"Sadly the number of domestic abuse cases has gone up, and there will be a necessary correlation in applications to protect children in those sad cases.\"\n\nElizabeth is trying to appeal against the judge's decision, but for now has no money to pay lawyers. She believes the process has been deeply unfair. Over the summer, just before her hearing, there was a much publicised libel case, which saw actor Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard give evidence to the High Court after Depp took legal action against the Sun newspaper.\n\n\"Johnny Depp can go to a court hearing in person, with Amber Heard, and be socially distanced, because they're celebrities and have money. In the family courts we're treated with contempt, deprived of our rights.\"", "Households in Newcastle-under-Lyme and elsewhere in Staffordshire would not be able to mix indoors\n\nStaffordshire will move to tier two restrictions in a bid to stem the rise of Covid infections, the council says.\n\nUp to Saturday, the seven-day infection rate was 239 per 100,000, said the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).\n\nDudley is also to enter tier two measures - or the high tier - by the end of the week.\n\nCouncil leader Patrick Harley said to expect the tier to come into force in the early hours on Thursday.\n\nIn Staffordshire, new measures could be in place this weekend but a date is still to be confirmed, the county council stated.\n\nThe government is to make a formal decision on Wednesday.\n\nTier two (high) restrictions came into force in Stoke-on-Trent on Saturday.\n\nThe county council had lobbied the government to remain in tier one last week, but the soaring infection rate across all areas appeared to have prompted a rethink, LDRS said.\n\nLatest Public Health England figures show there have been 10,768 cases since the start of the pandemic in the county.\n\nWith some of the highest infection rates in the West Midlands, the surprise is not so much that Staffordshire is entering tier two, more that it had not done so already.\n\nMuch like Dudley, which is also expected to enter tier two this week, local politicians had been hoping to remain in tier one, but the reality of rates in excess of 200 cases per 100,000 across the piece meant that was not going to be possible.\n\nTiers, however, are not simply decided by infection rates and the pressure on the Royal Stoke University Hospital will have influenced decision making.\n\nThe trust, which is a trauma centre, serves a large community not just in Staffordshire, but across the wider region.\n\nSouth Staffordshire had the highest rate in the county as of Saturday, with 349 per 100,000, while Cannock Chase and Newcastle borough had the second and third highest - 290 and 263 respectively.\n\nCounty council leader Alan White said: \"This year, Staffordshire has showed what it does best... but now we need to redouble our efforts to avoid any further restrictions and protect our county.\"\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Alistair Wilson murder: ‘My only memory of my dad was when he was shot’\n\nThe son of bank worker Alistair Wilson, who was shot dead on the doorstep of his home in 2004, has appealed for help in catching his father's killer.\n\nAndrew Wilson was aged just four at the time of the murder in Nairn in the Highlands.\n\nHe said the only memory he has left of his father is seeing him lying on the ground moments after being shot.\n\nIt is the first time Mr Wilson has spoken publicly about the murder and how it has devastated his family.\n\nHe said: \"I still cannot believe how someone could shoot my dad dead on our doorstep while my brother and I were upstairs.\n\n\"Photographs are all I have and no family should suffer the way we have all these years.\n\n\"I am appealing on behalf of my family to anyone who may have any information, no matter how big or small, to please come forward. Someone out there could have the missing piece of information.\"\n\nAlistair Wilson, 30, was shot at his home at about 19:00 on 28 November 2004. He later died in hospital.\n\nMr Wilson's wife Veronica had answered the door to his killer - a stocky man wearing a baseball cap - who asked for Alistair Wilson.\n\nMr Wilson spoke to the man and was handed an empty blue envelope with the word Paul written on it.\n\nHe was then shot with a German-made handgun.\n\nA massive police inquiry was launched at the time, but no-one has been apprehended and detectives continue to investigate the case.\n\nA young Andrew Wilson with his father Alistair, mother Veronica and younger brother\n\nAndrew, now 20, recalled the moment he saw his father lying on the doorstep.\n\nHe said: \"Someone came to our family home on a Sunday evening while my dad was reading my brother and me bedtime stories after our bath.\n\n\"The next thing I know I am looking at my dad lying in our doorway covered in blood.\"\n\nMr Wilson's family, along with detectives, are using the approaching 16th anniversary to make a renewed appeal for information in the hope of finally bringing someone to justice.\n\nAndrew says all he has left of his father are photographs\n\nAndrew Wilson and his brother at his father's graveside\n\nAndrew Wilson added: \"I was four years old when this happened and my dad was only 30.\n\n\"There would be no more bedtime stories, no more playing football or helping him in the garden.\n\n\"My dad and I missed out on so many things together, showing me how to tie a tie, driving lessons and taking me for my first pint.\n\n\"I am now a 20-year-old with little answers regarding my dad's death. For the last 16 years I have been left wondering why I didn't have a dad like all my friends.\n\n\"Nothing can bring my dad back, but knowing who did this and why could give us the closure we need. Any information could be crucial to our case.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Alistair Wilson's widow: 'A who and a why would let us move on'\n\nDet Insp Gary Winter, of the Major Investigation Team, has outlined the specific areas being focused on in the latest appeal.\n\nHe said: \"The murderer was described in 2004 as a man aged 30-40 years old, stocky build and approximately 5ft 4in to 5ft 7in tall.\n\n\"Alistair's killer would now be approaching his 50s or 60s and has enjoyed a life denied to his victim and his family.\n\n\"The handgun used was a Haenel Suhl pocket pistol from the 1930s, which has distinctive H and S letters superimposed on the grip.\n\n\"We believe this weapon is likely to have been taken to the UK after World War Two as some form of souvenir, however the ammunition used in the murder is from the 1980s or 90s.\n\n\"Do you know of anyone who had a similar pocket pistol? Do you know of anyone who mentioned having firearm souvenirs from the World War Two or from any family who were World War Two veterans?\"\n\nThis is a murder which people, not just in the Highlands but across the world, are determined will be solved.\n\nAll murders are shocking but this was so beyond the imagination that it has had people bewildered and frustrated for 16 years, including the police.\n\nThree years ago I interviewed Veronica Wilson, Alistair Wilson's husband. It was the first time she had been interviewed for a dozen years and it formed the spine of The Doorstep Murder podcast series.\n\nShe revealed then that her older son, aged just four at the time, saw her father's body on the doorstep.\n\nIt was hoped then that her pleas for new information would help find the killer. It generated many calls to both the BBC and Police Scotland but the murder remained unsolved.\n\nThe fact that Alistair Wilson had been reading his young sons a bedtime story moments before he was shot so brutally has generated enormous sympathy and anger that his two boys have grown up without their father.\n\nSo to hear from Andrew Wilson will reunite people with the details of the murder and, it's hoped, persuade someone with information to step forward after all these years.\n\nListen to The Doorstep Murder podcast on BBC Sounds.\n\nThe doorstep murder shocked the residents of Nairn\n\nPolice believe the murder weapon may have been brought to the UK after World War Two\n\nDet Insp Winter also highlighted the envelope given to Mr Wilson before the shooting - and the possibility that the murder was a case of mistaken identity.\n\nHe said: \"The blue envelope handed to Alistair by the killer had the name Paul on it, which may or may not be relevant. Does this mean anything to you in the context of this investigation?\n\n\"Lastly, do you know any other person by the name Alistair Wilson, who may have been the intended target of violence or retribution to any extent?\"\n\nMr Winter said the force remained committed to ensuring the person responsible for the murder was brought to justice.\n\nHe added: \"Someone out there knows what happened to Alistair and I hope this appeal serves as a vital reminder that it is never too late to come forward with information. Do not assume that the police already know the information you possess.\"\n\nAnyone with information is asked to contact the police on 101 or e-mail a dedicated inbox at SCDHOLMESAberdeen@scotland.pnn.police.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section Football\n\nWales remain unbeaten in the Nations League after they were held to a lifeless goalless draw away against the Republic of Ireland.\n\nThe main talking point of an uninspiring first half was a rejected penalty appeal for Wales after Ethan Ampadu was bundled over by Republic goalkeeper Darren Randolph.\n\nIt was not until the 55th minute that either team produced a genuine chance, with the Republic's Shane Long wastefully heading over from close range.\n\nJames McClean was sent off for the hosts after two yellow cards in quick succession towards the end of the game and, although Wales searched hopefully for a late winning goal, neither side really deserved to win an eminently forgettable encounter.\n\nHaving won both their first two matches of this Nations League campaign, Wales remain top of Group B4 with a trip to Bulgaria to come on Wednesday.\n\nBut they will be without striker Kieffer Moore in Sofia - who had been a doubt for this game with a bruised toe - after the Cardiff City target man picked up a yellow card to trigger a suspension.\n\nAlthough the Republic are still searching for a first victory, it was in some ways a commendable effort considering that Stephen Kenny's men had to contend with the withdrawal of five players on the morning of the game and now go to Finland on Wednesday.\n• None Best action and reaction from Republic of Ireland v Wales\n\nWith two wins from their opening two fixtures against Finland and Bulgaria, Wales had travelled to Dublin with confidence for their fifth meeting with the Republic in three years.\n\nThursday's 3-0 friendly loss to England mattered little as manager Ryan Giggs had rested the likes of Harry Wilson and Daniel James with this game in mind, while Juventus midfielder Aaron Ramsey returned to the starting line-up as captain as one of four changes from the match at Wembley.\n\nAfter a subdued start at an empty Aviva Stadium, the visitors were the first to produce a shot on target as Wilson's curling effort from the edge of the penalty area was palmed away by Randolph.\n\nThe Irish goalkeeper was fortunate not to concede a penalty five minutes later, dropping a cross and then clattering Ampadu who had beaten him to the ball.\n\nReferee Anastasios Sidiropoulos ignored Wales' protestations, and he did the same when they appealed for handball after a Ramsey shot hit Shane Duffy and Cyrus Christie.\n\nThere was a whiff of desperation about the latter penalty appeal as Wales grew frustrated with their inability to play with any attacking fluency against a robust and well organised Irish team.\n\nAs the second half wore on, with his side lacking invention and purpose, Giggs turned to his bench and brought on David Brooks, Dylan Levitt and Neco Williams, who had scored an injury-time winner as a substitute against Bulgaria last month.\n\nOn this occasion, however, there would be no fairytale intervention from any of Wales' replacements.\n\nThis was another blunt display and a reminder of how Giggs' side can be found wanting in attack. Of all the teams to qualify for Euro 2020, none scored fewer in qualifying than his side.\n\nAnd while this was a mediocre performance, Wales are still in control of their Nations League group with Wednesday's game in Bulgaria - and home matches against the Republic and Finland in November - yet to come.\n\nThings could have been worse for the Republic, whose preparations were severely disrupted on the morning of the game when five of their players were ruled out after one of them tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nAaron Connolly and Adam Idah had already pulled out because of a Covid-19 issue - withdrawn shortly before kick-off of Thursday's Euro 2020 play-off semi-final loss to Slovakia - while David McGoldrick and James McCarthy were also unavailable because of injuries.\n\nAll this was particularly unhelpful as Irish morale was low after the shootout loss to Slovakia and a poor start to their Nations League campaign, which had seen them snatch a draw in Bulgaria before losing at home to Finland.\n\nConsidering the upheaval they had endured beforehand, Kenny and his side might have been content with such an uneventful start to the game.\n\nRobbie Brady was the only player to threaten in the first half with a whipped effort which whistled just wide, and it was not until the 55th minute that either side produced a proper scoring opportunity.\n\nRepublic left-back Enda Stevens created it, clipping a beautiful cross for Long who headed over with Wales keeper Wayne Hennessey stranded.\n\nIf the Irish thought they might be able to pinch a late winning goal, those hopes were dashed when McClean lost his cool by getting booked for tripping Connor Roberts and then, only a few minutes later, picking up a second yellow card for a wild lunge on Ampadu.\n\nMcClean protested his innocence but it was a lost cause, the draw leaving the Republic on two points from three games and now probably concentrating on simply keeping their place in the second tier of the Nations League.\n• None Shane Duffy (Republic of Ireland) wins a free kick in the defensive half.\n• None Substitution, Republic of Ireland. Josh Cullen replaces Jayson Molumby because of an injury.\n• None Attempt saved. David Brooks (Wales) left footed shot from outside the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Connor Roberts.\n• None Second yellow card to James McClean (Republic of Ireland) for a bad foul.\n• None James McClean (Republic of Ireland) wins a free kick in the defensive half.\n• None Attempt saved. Jeff Hendrick (Republic of Ireland) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the top centre of the goal. Assisted by Sean Maguire.\n• None Jeff Hendrick (Republic of Ireland) wins a free kick in the defensive half.\n• None James McClean (Republic of Ireland) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Senator Mike Lee, who later tested positive for Covid-19, seen hugging other attendees\n\nUS President Donald Trump's tweet on Friday confirming that he and his wife had tested positive for coronavirus shocked the world.\n\nWith Mr Trump now in hospital, there are growing questions about how the pair were exposed to the virus.\n\nA crowded Rose Garden event is coming under intense focus - the ceremony on 26 September where Mr Trump formally announced his nomination of the conservative Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court. The World Health Organization says it commonly takes around five to six days for symptoms to start after contracting the virus.\n\nFootage from the scene showed few attendees wearing masks. The seating was not set two metres (six feet) apart, while some bumped fists, shook hands or even hugged one another in greeting.\n\nEight people who attended are now confirmed to have the virus - although it is unclear exactly where and when they caught it. Aside from the president and the First Lady:\n\nMr and Mrs Trump tested positive after the president's communications director, Hope Hicks, contracted the virus. She did not attend the Rose Garden event.\n\nGuidelines published by the Centers for Disease Control recommend six feet of distance between people outside your home, and covering your nose and mouth when others are around you.\n\nDozens of lawmakers, family members and staff from the White House were at the event. Those who have tested positive were seated in the first few rows of the crowd.\n\nThose who have tested positive were sat in the first few rows of the packed event\n\nGatherings of more than 50 people at an event are banned under Washington DC coronavirus regulations, although federal property like the White House is exempt.\n\nThe Washington Post reports that authorities have left contact tracing efforts to the Trump administration. An official from Mayor Muriel Bowser's office told the paper that if all eight people were infected at the event, it would be one of the highest community spread incidents Washington DC has experienced.\n\nCity council member Brooke Pinto told the Washington Post it was \"disappointing that the White House has flaunted not wearing masks and gathering large crowds\".\n\n\"That is not only dangerous messaging for the country, but it is directly threatening to our efforts to decrease our spread across the district,\" she said.\n\nSome of the event last Saturday also took place inside.\n\nSome of the event took place inside the White House\n\nThe president stood next to Amy Coney Barrett as she delivered her speech. Ms Barrett tested negative on Friday, according to a White House spokesperson.\n\nVice-President Mike Pence and his wife Karen also tested negative. Mr Pence sat across the aisle from Mrs Trump at the ceremony.\n\nAttorney General William Barr sat in the same row as the vice-president. A Department of Justice spokesperson announced on Friday that Mr Barr had tested negative.\n\nJohns Hopkins University coronavirus trackers say that 7.3 million people in the US have contracted the virus, the highest figure in the world.\n\nThe country also has the highest death toll, with more than 209,000 people killed.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. President Trump's seven days before his Covid-positive test", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dilys Price said she felt free when she was jumping out of planes all over the world\n\nA woman who became the world's oldest female skydiver has died, aged 88.\n\nFormer teacher Dilys Price, from Cardiff, was scared of heights when she did her first jump in her fifties.\n\nBut she went on to complete hundreds of parachute jumps all over the world, and set the Guinness World Record for the oldest female solo parachute jump.\n\nShe also founded the Touch Trust charity championing art and creative movement programmes for disabled people.\n\nIts chief executive Bev Garside said she was always struck by Ms Price's \"intelligence, her energy and her warmth\".\n\n\"Always with a twinkle in her eye, she grabbed life with both hands until the end,\" she said.\n\n\"She has had a positive impact on the lives of so many and leaves the world a better place.\"\n\nIn 2018 Ms Price told BBC Wales: \"Skydiving is my passion, there you have the ultimate beauty of the sky... you just feel so free.\"\n\nAfter taking up the sport when she was 54, she went on to complete over 1,139 solo jumps all over the world.\n\nShe was no ordinary skydiver - with a background in drama and dance, she specialised in air acrobatics and freestyling.\n\nDilys Price setting her Guinness World Record for the oldest female solo parachute jump\n\nThe University of Wales Trinity Saint David, where she was an honorary fellow, said she was a \"remarkable, amazing and inspiring\" woman.\n\nMark James Parry tweeted: \"Very very sad that my Aunt ⁦@DilysPriceOBE⁩ has passed away. She touched many with her incredible personality and truly lived life to the full. An inspiration to all. Truly grateful that I got to call her my Aunt. We will miss you.\"\n\nLearning Disability Wales said she \"transformed the lives of thousands of people with profound multiple disabilities and people with autism\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Cardiff Metropolitan University This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by GuinnessWorldRecords This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Superwoman Network This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAged 80, the former Cardiff College of Education lecturer set the Guinness World Record for the oldest solo parachute jump (female).\n\nAt 86 she sold her parachute, but went on to do a tandem skydive with former Wales rugby star Gareth Thomas.\n\nShe was awarded an OBE for services to people with special needs in 2003, and was honoured for her work at the Pride of Britain awards in 2017.\n\nIn 2018, she was included on a list of the 100 women who have influenced Welsh life.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dilys Price said she was \"amazed\" to be included on a list of the most influential Welsh women\n\nBack in 2018, Ms Price, who went on to model for Helmut Lang, said she wanted to inspire older people to keep active.\n\nShe said: \"We only get one shot at life\".", "Protests have convulsed Belarus every weekend since the disputed presidential election in August\n\nBelarusian riot police have used water cannon and stun grenades to break up the latest mass protests against President Alexander Lukashenko.\n\nProtests have swept the eastern European country since Mr Lukashenko claimed victory in an August election widely viewed as rigged.\n\nDozens of protesters were detained during the latest rallies on Sunday.\n\nIn the capital Minsk, police blasted protesters with coloured water to mark them out for arrest.\n\nCritics of Mr Lukashenko said Sunday saw police use some of the most brutal tactics against protesters since the immediate aftermath of August's disputed presidential election.\n\nMany opposition activists have been beaten up by police and thousands have been arrested during months of unrest. They are demanding the release of all political prisoners and a free and fair re-run of the election.\n\nThe EU, the UK and the US have refused to recognise Mr Lukashenko's new term. Mr Lukashenko denies fixing the poll and has received support from Russia, his country's closest ally.\n\nSvetlana Tikhanovskaya emerged as the main opposition leader after standing against Mr Lukashenko in August's election, arguing she would have won had it not been rigged.\n\nMs Tikhanovskaya was forced to go into exile in Lithuania after receiving threats following the disputed vote. She has repeatedly appealed to the international community to put pressure on Mr Lukashenko so that a democratic transition can be launched by negotiation.\n\nOpposition protesters clashed with masked riot police in Minsk at the latest rally on Sunday\n\nOpposition hopes of a peaceful resolution were raised on Saturday after Mr Lukashenko held an unexpected meeting with political opponents in the jail where they are currently detained.\n\nState media reported that the president called the meeting to discuss constitutional reform with his imprisoned opponents.\n\nIn now-familiar scenes, thousands of pro-opposition protesters gathered in Minsk and other major cities for the ninth successive Sunday of demonstrations against Mr Lukashenko.\n\nWearing coats and carrying umbrellas on a rainy afternoon, protesters called for the resignation of 66-year-old Mr Lukashenko, Belarus's leader since 1994.\n\nFootage shows the security forces, dressed in black and armed with batons, rounding up peaceful protestors congregating in Minsk city centre and taking them to waiting vehicles.\n\nSeveral thousand people were reported to have attended Sunday's march in Minsk\n\nPolice used stun grenades and water cannon against demonstrators in Minsk, a spokeswoman for Belarus's interior ministry told AFP news agency.\n\nThey sprayed plain and coloured water at demonstrators, covering them in what appeared to be orange dye.\n\nSome defiant protesters remained unmoved, using their umbrellas to shield themselves from the blast.\n\nA local news website described police using tear gas on crowds and said police were herding people into courtyards.\n\nIn videos posted online, police can be seen beating protesters with batons and snatching their white-and-red flags - a symbol of nationalist opposition to Mr Lukashenko.\n\nSome protesters fought back and pelted police with bottles and other objects.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Mass arrests as crowds chant 'go away' to Belarus president\n\nThe Viasna rights group, which monitors detentions at political protests, said at least 140 people had been detained in Minsk and other cities.\n\nJournalists covering the demonstrations were among those detained, including those from Russia's Tass agency and the state Belarusian news agency BELTA.\n\nSunday's demonstrations in Belarus's capital Minsk now follow a familiar course.\n\nTens of thousands of people march through the streets demanding President Lukashenko step down. Then, he responds by sending his security forces to arrest as many of them as possible.\n\nWhat makes this weekend different, however, is that on Saturday President Lukashenko held a long meeting with a group of political prisoners in jail.\n\nIt's the first indication - after more than two months of protests - that he just might be willing to negotiate with the opposition.\n\nThe president's press office said participants had agreed to keep the four-and-a-half-hour conversation \"secret\".\n\nHowever, a photo posted by the press service shows Mr Lukashenko sitting at a table with 11 political figures, all of whom look pale and unsmiling.\n\nAmong them is Viktor Babaryko, a banker who was initially seen as Mr Lukashenko's strongest rival in the election, but was barred from running and jailed in July.\n\nLiliya Vlasova, a lawyer and member of the opposition's Coordination Council, is also in the photo, as is Vitali Shkliarov, a Belarusian-American strategist who worked on US Senator Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign.\n\nPress Office of the President of Belarus A photo of the meeting was shared by Mr Lukashenko's office\n\nA short video clip shared by the press service also shows Mr Lukashenko saying to the group: \"I am trying to convince not only your supporters but the whole of society that we need to look at things more broadly.\"\n\nApparently referring to the ongoing protests, he added: \"You can't rewrite the constitution on the streets.\"\n\nOpposition figures suggested meeting was a sign of Mr Lukashenko's weakness, perhaps signalling a newfound eagerness to compromise with the protest movement.\n\nBut in a social media post, Ms Tikhanovskaya said \"you can't have dialogue in a prison cell\".", "More migrants successfully crossed the Channel in the first three weeks of September than in the whole of 2019\n\nA plan to use nets to stop dinghies carrying migrants across the English Channel is being considered by the government, it has been reported.\n\nDan O'Mahoney, who leads the Home Office's efforts to tackle illegal crossings to the UK, outlined the strategy to the Sunday Telegraph.\n\nHe told the newspaper that British vessels could use the tactic before then returning migrants to France.\n\nRecord numbers of migrants are continuing to make the crossing.\n\nIn the first three weeks of September, at least 1,892 migrants successfully crossed the Channel - more than in the whole of 2019.\n\nMr O'Mahoney's strategy has so far been delayed because France is not willing to accept migrants back who have been subject to the tactic, he told the paper.\n\nA former member of the Royal Marines, Mr O'Mahoney said: \"We definitely are very, very close to being able to operationalise a safe return tactic where we make an intervention safely on a migrant vessel, take migrants on board our vessel and then take them back to France.\n\n\"The problem with that currently is that the French won't accept them back.\"\n\nThe Home Office wants to reduce the number of asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East\n\nAsked whether the method was similar to Royal Navy trials, in which nets were used to snag up propellers and bring boats to a standstill, Mr O'Mahoney said: \"It's that type of thing, yes. So safely disabling the engine and then taking the migrants on board our vessel.\"\n\nHe said this was just one of a number of methods his team has considered deploying over the next few months, but he did not go into further details.\n\nMr O'Mahoney, appointed by Home Secretary Priti Patel in August, said he was working with people \"everywhere across government to come up with new tactics\" to tackle illegal migration across the Channel.\n\nThe numbers of migrants attempting the perilous journey across the Channel has been exacerbated by a sharp drop in air and rail travel during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nIn September, a Home Office official said people smugglers had cut the cost of crossing the Channel by overloading dinghies with migrants.\n\nThe rate charged by criminals to reach the UK from France has fallen by about a third as demand has soared.\n\nShadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said in August the government's handling of the crisis was \"lacking in competence and compassion\" after a £340m RAF Poseidon P8 aircraft had been used to help Border Force patrol boats to spot migrants.\n\nA week later, the body of a young male migrant from Sudan was found on a French beach after he attempted to make the crossing in a small boat.", "In all its glory: Mars pictured by Damian Peach on 30 September\n\nGet out there and look up!\n\nMars is at its biggest and brightest right now as the Red Planet lines up with Earth on the same side of the Sun.\n\nEvery 26 months, the pair take up this arrangement, moving close together, before then diverging again on their separate orbits around our star.\n\nTuesday night sees the actual moment of what astronomers call \"opposition\".\n\nAll three bodies will be in a straight line at 23:20 GMT (00:20 BST).\n\n\"But you don't have to wait until the middle of the night; even now, at nine or 10 o'clock in the evening, you'll easily see it over in the southeast,\" says astrophotographer, Damian Peach. \"You can't miss it, it's the brightest star-like object in that part of the sky,\" he told BBC News.\n\nEven though this coming week witnesses the moment of opposition, it was Tuesday of last week that Mars and Earth actually made their closest approach in this 26-month cycle.\n\nA separation of 62,069,570km, or 38,568,243 miles. That's the narrowest gap now until 2035.\n\nAt the last opposition, in 2018, Earth and Mars were just 58 million km apart, but what makes this occasion a little more special for astrophotographers in the Northern Hemisphere is the Red Planet's elevation in the sky. It's higher, and that means telescopes don't have to look through quite so much of the Earth's turbulent atmosphere, which distorts images.\n\nExperienced practitioners like Damian use a technique called \"lucky imaging\" to get the perfect shot. They take multiple frames and then use software to stitch together the sharpest view.\n\nDamian's picture at the top of this page shows up clearly the \"Martian dichotomy\" - the sharp contrast between the smooth lowland plains of the Northern Hemisphere and the more rugged terrain in the Southern Hemisphere. Evident too is Mars' carbon dioxide ice cap at the southern pole.\n\nThe image was captured using a 14-inch Celestron telescope.\n\n\"That's quite a serious bit of equipment; it's not something you get on a whim,\" says Damian. \"But even a telescope half that size will show up all the major features on Mars quite easily. And if you've got a good pair of binoculars, you'll certainly be able to make out that it's actually a planet and not a star.\"\n\nArtwork: The UAE's Hope probe will study Mars' atmosphere from next year\n\nIt's around opposition that space probes are launched from Earth to Mars. Obviously - the distance that needs to be travelled is shorter, and the time and energy required to make the journey is less.\n\nThree missions are currently in transit, all of which were sent on their way in July: The United Arab Emirates' Hope orbiter; China's Tianwen orbiter and rover; and the Americans' Perseverance rover.\n\nEurope and Russia had hoped to despatch their ExoMars \"Rosalind Franklin\" rover, too, but they missed the launch window and will now have to wait until late 2022. That's the penalty you pay when the planets align only every 26 months.\n\nHope, Tianwen and Perseverance are all on course to arrive at Mars in February.\n\nIn 2003, Mars made its closest approach to Earth around opposition in nearly 60,000 years - a separation of just 56 million km.\n\nThe distance between the two at opposition can be over 100 million km, as happened in 2012.\n\nThe variation is a consequence of the elliptical shape of the orbits of both Mars and Earth.\n\nJonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos", "The collision happened early on Sunday morning, east of Bangkok\n\nA bus has collided with a train in Thailand, killing at least 18 people and injuring dozens more, officials say.\n\nThe crash happened on Sunday morning, 50km (31 miles) east of Bangkok.\n\nThai police said passengers inside the bus were on their way to a temple to mark the end of Buddhist Lent.\n\nImages from the scene show the bus upturned on its side, heavily damaged and objects scattered along the train tracks.\n\nRescue workers say they need a crane to be able to lift the bus.\n\nThere were 60 passengers travelling in the bus at the time of the crash, province governor Maitree Tritilanond said.\n\nThai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha gave his condolences and called for a thorough investigation.\n\nTraffic collisions are common in Thailand, with poor safety standards and busy roads thought to be key factors. A 2018 report from the World Health Organization (WHO) said Thailand had the second-highest traffic fatality rate in the world.\n\nIn March 2018, at least 18 people died and dozens wounded when a bus in north eastern Thailand swerved off the road and smashed into a tree.\n\nAt least three people were killed in 2016 when a train collided with a double-decker bus carrying tourists at an unguarded railway crossing west of Bangkok.", "Workers at companies told to close as part of virus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages\n\nThe Labour Party and business groups have voiced concern at the \"ripple effect\" of Covid shutdowns that are expected to be announced on Monday.\n\nOn Friday, the chancellor said staff at UK companies told to close would get 67% of their wages from the government under the expanded Job Support Scheme.\n\nBut no specific help was announced for workers who may be indirectly affected - for example, those in supply chains.\n\nThe Treasury denied firms that are not fully closed would not receive help.\n\nLabour claims close to one million workers will be at risk, including 500,000 people in the wedding industry, 369,000 in the sports industry, and 142,000 event caterers.\n\nShadow business secretary Ed Miliband said: \"There are massive holes in the new safety net.\"\n\nA spokesperson for the Treasury said: \"We do not recognise these figures,\" adding that Labour had \"incorrectly\" listed some sectors as not benefitting from the scheme.\n\nThe spokesperson added: \"Companies that are open can use the other element of the Job Support Scheme which is aimed at those able to open but at lower levels of demand.\n\n\"And of course they can also access the other help we have made available, including billions of pounds of grants, loans and tax cuts.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe Job Support Scheme was announced by Mr Sunak on 24 September and will replace the \"furlough\" scheme from 1 November for six months.\n\nIt \"tops up\" the wages of employees who can't work their normal hours.\n\nThe expanded scheme, announced on Friday and available to firms ordered to shut down, will provide two-thirds of wages to employees unable to work.\n\nOn Monday, Boris Johnson is expected to announce a tiered system of measures for England in an effort to stall rising infection rates.\n\nUnder the new system, different parts of the country would be placed in one of three categories.\n\nThe worst-affected areas - which may include much of northern England - could see its pubs and restaurants closed.\n\nShadow Business Secretary Ed Miliband claimed the government had been \"forced into a climbdown\" over supporting shut-down businesses.\n\nBut he said businesses including weddings, theatres, cinemas, events, and many suppliers would be left out \"on a technicality\" because they have been \"forced to shut in all but name\", he said.\n\nMr Miliband added: \"Ministers must urgently rethink their damaging sink or swim approach which consigns whole sectors of our economy to the scrapheap.\"\n\nRoger Barker, Director of Policy at the Institute of Directors said the new measures set out by the chancellor on Friday were a \"useful step\" towards supporting businesses affected by the lockdown.\n\nBut he said their impact would be limited because they \"don't account for the ripple effects of restrictions across the economy\".\n\nHe added: \"It is becoming increasingly clear that the chancellor's previous strategy of phasing out business support and allowing supposedly 'unviable' companies to fail was premature in the face of a resurgent virus.\n\n\"Friday's measures should be seen as the start of renewed efforts to sustain the survival of companies and jobs if long-term damage to the economy is to be prevented.\"\n\nAdam Marshall, Director General of the British Chamber of Commerce, also said the new support did not go far enough to protect firms in supply chains and town and city centres and urged: \"Their cash flow concerns and worries about future demand must be heeded.\"", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Robert Jenrick: \"Ministers do not get involved in making decisions for their own constituencies\"\n\nCommunities Secretary Robert Jenrick has dismissed Labour's call for an investigation into the award of a £25m regeneration grant to his constituency.\n\nHe told BBC One's Andrew Marr show the decision to give the money to Newark, Nottinghamshire, had been taken by fellow minister Jake Berry.\n\nMr Jenrick said he had himself decided to grant funds to a town in Mr Berry's constituency under the same scheme.\n\nHe called this \"perfectly normal\" and accused Labour of \"distraction\".\n\nBut Labour described the allocation of the money \"murky\" and urged Mr Jenrick to submit himself to a \"full\" investigation.\n\nThe £25m was awarded to Newark under the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government's £3.6bn Towns Fund, set up last year to help places that had \"not always benefitted from economic growth in the same way as more prosperous areas\".\n\nNewark and Sherwood District Council submitted its town investment plan - including better transport, training and digital connectivity - in July.\n\nMr Jenrick, Conservative MP for Newark since 2014, supported the bid.\n\nFor Labour, shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Reynolds told Sky News's Ridge on Sunday: \"The whole question has always been quite a murky one as to how this money was allocated.\n\n\"The secretary of state has questions to answer and an investigation is the right way forwards.\"\n\nBut Mr Jenrick said the government had a \"robust\" system in place for choosing which places would benefit from the Towns Fund and that the rules had been created before he became communities secretary.\n\nHe added that Mr Berry, who oversees local growth in England as a minister within Mr Jenrick's department, had made the decision following advice from civil servants.\n\nDarwen, a town in Mr Berry's Rossendale and Darwen constituency, was also allocated money from the Towns Fund.\n\nThe decision, Mr Jenrick said, had been \"made by myself\".\n\nHe added: \"This is perfectly normal. Ministers don't get involved in making decisions for their own constituency.\n\n\"But neither should their constituencies be victims of the fact that their MP is a minister.\"\n\nMr Jenrick also said: \"The Labour Party front bench need to get beyond the M25 and see what's happening in our constituencies.\"\n\nEarlier, he told Sky News that Labour's accusations were \"completely baseless\".\n\nBut, following the interviews, shadow communities secretary Steve Reed insisted that, if \"Robert Jenrick has nothing to hide, he should submit himself to a full investigation\".\n\nIn August, Mr Jenrick said he regretted sitting next to property developer Richard Desmond at a Conservative Party fundraising event last year.\n\nMr Desmond donated £12,000 to the Conservatives in January, 12 days after the minister overruled government planning inspectors to approve a development at the former Westferry print works in east London.\n\nLabour said this had raised suggestions of \"cash for favours\".\n\nBut Mr Jenrick has always insisted he had no knowledge of the donation and was motivated by a desire to see more homes built.", "Last updated on .From the section Republic of Ireland\n\nA further five Republic of Ireland players missed Sunday's Nations League draw with Wales after one of them tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nThe Football Association of Ireland said that an unnamed player tested positive on Friday after having tested negative last Monday.\n\nFour other squad members identified as close contacts of the player were also stood down for Sunday's match.\n\nAaron Connolly and Adam Idah were already out because of a Covid issue.\n\nThey were set to feature in Thursday's Euro 2020 play-off game in Slovakia but were ruled out shortly before kick-off after being deemed to have been in close contact with a member of the Republic's backroom team who tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nManager Stephen Kenny made an appeal to the Irish medical authorities about the duo's exclusion from the match - which the Republic lost on penalties after a 0-0 draw - but it was unsuccessful.\n\nThe Republic's team announced some 80 minutes before Sunday's 14:00 BST kick-off showed four changes from Thursday's starting line-up as they were able to name only seven substitutes including goalkeepers Mark Travers and Caoimhin Kelleher.\n\nWhile injured pair David McGoldrick and James McCarthy were ruled out, the squad showed no sign of centre-back John Egan, forward Callum Robinson and midfielders Alan Browne and Callum O'Dowda, who all featured in Slovakia.\n\nKevin Long replaced Egan in defence with Jayson Molumby taking over from McCarthy in midfield.\n\nShane Long and Robbie Brady came into the starting line-up in place of McGoldrick and Robinson.\n\nIn a further twist, the FAI statement said the staff member who tested positive in Bratislava on Wednesday may have received a \"false positive\" result.\n\nThe FAI said two tests carried out on the individual on Saturday \"confirmed no trace of Covid-19\", adding that it would now \"discuss the issue with Uefa\".\n\n\"In light of these developments, the FAI wishes to make it clear that it complied with all Uefa and HSE [Irish Health Service Executive] Covid-19 guidelines concerning the availability of players and the well-being of staff around the Slovakia v Republic of Ireland fixture in Bratislava on Thursday night.\"\n\nSunday's news further depleted a squad which went into the three games minus injured captain Seamus Coleman and which is now shorn of Sheffield United striker David McGoldrick who picked up a thigh injury in Thursday's heartbreaking play-off defeat.\n\nThe Republic face Finland away in the Nations League on Wednesday evening.\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "The cause of the mid-air collision over Loches, Indre-et-Loire is under investigation\n\nTwo small planes have collided in mid-air before crashing in western central France, killing five people, local officials say.\n\nThe collision between two light aircraft happened south-east of the city of Tours at about 16:30 local time (15:30 BST) on Saturday.\n\nEmergency crew, including about 50 firefighters, were called to the scene. They cordoned off the crash sites.\n\nNo-one else was harmed when the planes came down.\n\nThe smaller aircraft, a microlight carrying two people, landed on a fence around a house in the town of Loches, situated about 46km (29 miles) south-east of Tours.\n\nPolice have cordoned off the crash sites\n\nA witness told AFP news agency it burst into flames after landing on the house's electricity meter.\n\nThe larger plane, a Diamond DA40, landed more than a 100m (328ft) away in an uninhabited area. It had three tourists on board.\n\n\"All five people involved died,\" local government official Nadia Seghier told AFP.\n\n\"Air emergency staff from Lyon were brought in at first to track down the plane, which was quickly found.\"\n\nThere were no immediate details about the identities of the victims or the cause of the collision.\n\nLocal police have launched an investigation into the incident.\n\nThe crash sites have been blockaded and residents have been told to stay in their homes, a witness said.\n\nThe mayor called the collision an \"unbelievable accident\"\n\nWitness Genevieve Allouard-Liebert, who lives in the area, said she had heard a \"big crash\" when the planes came down. She said she and her husband saw a man fall from the larger plane as it skimmed nearby rooftops.\n\nMid-air collisions between small aircraft are considered to be rare. One fatal incident in France happened over Quiberon Bay off the coast of Brittany in 1998, when a Beechcraft 1900D collided in mid-air with a light aircraft, killing 15 people.\n\n\"There's never any air traffic around Loches, it's an unlikely and unbelievable accident,\" the town's mayor Marc Angenault said.", "Pubs in the central belt closed on Friday and are not due to reopen until 25 October at the earliest\n\nScotland's hospitality minister has said there is \"no guarantee\" that pubs and restaurants across the central belt will reopen in two weeks' time.\n\nThe Scottish government ordered their closure on Friday night as part of new Covid-19 restrictions.\n\nFergus Ewing said he was \"acutely aware\" of the \"very serious, adverse impacts\" on the hospitality sector.\n\nBut he said the restrictions were \"absolutely necessary\" and could continue past 25 October.\n\nMr Ewing told BBC Scotland's Sunday Politics programme: \"Were they not in place, the worry is that we may have had to go to something even more stringent.\n\n\"The first minister had made it clear that she really wishes to avoid a further lockdown - as does, I believe, the leadership in the other parts of the United Kingdom.\n\n\"That is absolutely the case. But there can be no guarantees.\"\n\nThe new restrictions involve licensed premises in Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lothian, Lanarkshire, Forth Valley and Ayrshire and Arran being closed until 25 October - although they can still serve takeaways.\n\nHospitality venues in the rest of Scotland are allowed to open, but are only permitted to serve non-alcoholic drinks and food indoors between 06:00 and 18:00.\n\nLicensed premises in these areas are still able to serve alcohol in outdoor areas, such as beer gardens, up to the 22:00 curfew introduced in September.\n\nFergus Ewing accepted the restrictions were having very serious impacts on the hospitality industry\n\nReacting to criticism that the hospitality sector had been treated unfairly, Fergus Ewing said the Scottish government was following the best scientific advice.\n\nHe said there were \"no absolute certainties\" when it comes to establishing how a person caught coronavirus.\n\nBut he said illegal house parties or hospitality settings \"where alcohol is imbibed and inhibitions lax\" appeared to be the places where the risks were greatest.", "São Paulo is the worst-hit city in Brazil\n\nThe number of people to have died from Covid-19 in Brazil has passed 150,000, the country's health ministry says.\n\nBrazil has the second-highest coronavirus death toll in the world, after the US, and the third-highest number of cases after the US and India.\n\nThe country also passed five million total infections earlier this week.\n\nPresident Jair Bolsonaro has been accused of downplaying the risks of the virus throughout the pandemic, ignoring expert advice on restrictive measures.\n\nBrazil has by far the highest number of deaths in South America, and the state of São Paulo has been the worst hit.\n\nAccording to figures from the health ministry, 150,198 people in Brazil have died of Covid since the first fatality was recorded in March, and 5,082,637 people have tested positive for the virus.\n\nIn Colombia, the next worst-hit country in the region, 27,495 people have died and there have been 894,300 confirmed cases.\n\nHowever the daily number of new cases in Brazil has been slowly falling since it plateaued in the summer, when there were about 1,000 new deaths per day for two months.\n\nMr Bolsonaro's handling of the pandemic - his decision to oppose lockdown measures and prioritise the economy - has been extremely divisive.\n\nHe has also been criticised for minimising the threat of Covid-19, including by calling it a \"little flu\".\n\nHowever, the president has repeatedly rejected this criticism, even when he himself became ill with the virus in July.\n\nIn August, Brazil's Vice-President Hamilton Mourão also defended the government's approach, and instead blamed a lack of discipline among Brazilians for the failure to limit the spread of the virus through social distancing measures.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Brazil's vice-president said in August that the authorities struggled to enforce social distancing measures", "Margaret Ferrier travelled back from London to Glasgow after testing positive for coronavirus\n\nAn MP who used public transport while knowing she was infected with coronavirus has called it a \"blip\".\n\nMargaret Ferrier argued that the virus \"makes you act out of character\" in an interview with the Sun on Sunday.\n\nShe faced calls to quit after travelling from Glasgow to London with Covid-19 symptoms last month, then returning home after testing positive.\n\nThe SNP suspended Ms Ferrier and the Metropolitan Police is investigating the incident.\n\nScotland's first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has said she \"couldn't be clearer\" and Ms Ferrier should resign.\n\nThe MP, 60, told the paper that she \"panicked\" and insisted she followed the rules.\n\n\"A lot of people say Covid makes you do things out of character. You're not thinking straight,\" she said.\n\nShe said she took a test on Saturday, 26 September because she had a \"tickly throat\" - but had no symptoms on the Sunday or Monday, when she travelled to London for a debate.\n\nOn receiving her test result on the Monday night in London, she said she began \"panicking\" and \"wanting home\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Constituents said they were unconvinced by the MP's explanation\n\n\"I don't have a flat in London. You're thinking, 'Am I going to get worse in a week's time or a few days' time',\" she said, adding that she was worried she would have to self-isolate in a hotel for two weeks.\n\n\"I felt there was no alternative and that's why I took the train. That's the decision I took at the time.\"\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said no party leader has the power to force an MP to resign from parliament.\n\nBut she said Ms Ferrier's \"lapse of judgement\" was \"so significant and so unacceptable\" that she should step down.\n\nSpeaking on Sky's Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme, Ms Sturgeon said: \"We suspended her from the party and we now have a due process to go through. I can't unilaterally decide to expel somebody.\n\n\"But I couldn't be clearer - she should step down.\n\n\"I've read her comments in the media today but I still hope she will do the right thing.\n\n\"It is unacceptable that someone in her position flagrantly disregarded the rules like that.\"\n\nScottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said Ms Ferrier's comments showed she had \"learned nothing\".\n\nHe added: \"She is refusing to face up to her reckless, selfish and dangerous behaviour. Her intention to cling on until the next election is treating her constituents with contempt.\"\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said Ms Ferrier \"has again shown a stunning lack of self-awareness\".\n\nHe said: \"Margaret Ferrier's excuses are mortifying and shameless. She clearly values her own salary more than doing the right thing.\"\n\nMs Ferrier is also believed to have attended Mass at a church in Glasgow after showing Covid symptoms.\n\nAt the beginning of the month, she apologised and said she \"deeply regretted\" her actions.\n\nScotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, described her actions as \"reckless, dangerous and completely indefensible\" and said she should resign as an MP.\n\nBut Ms Ferrier told the Sun on Sunday she wants to continue representing her constituents in Rutherglen and Hamilton West.\n\nResponding to the criticism, Ms Ferrier said: \"It may be a serious error of judgment. I'm not denying that. People may be saying, 'You should have known better, you're a public figure'.\n\n\"But at the end of the day it still hurts. You then think is all that hard work and dedication just wiped away?\"\n\nShe also described regulations and guidelines issued during the pandemic as \"muddled\".", "At least 40 people armed with metal bars and fireworks have attacked a police station to the south of Paris, according to officials.\n\nThe assailants, who caused damage to cars and broke windows, also tried unsuccessfully to storm the building, police said.\n\nThe police station is in an area known for drug trafficking, and the local mayor said the attack could be in retaliation for a recent scooter accident allegedly caused by police.", "File photo of São Paulo police force, which has launched a search for Macedo\n\nOne of Brazil's biggest crime bosses has gone on the run after being briefly freed from prison the previous day.\n\nAndré Oliveira Macedo, also known as André do Rap, was released from a high security prison on Saturday - but this decision was revoked just hours later.\n\nHe has been missing since.\n\nMacedo is a senior member of the São Paulo-based First Command of the Capital (PCC) gang, which holds power in jails across Brazil and Paraguay and smuggles tonnes of cocaine into Europe.\n\nHis release was the result of a controversial order by Judge Marco Aurélio Mello, one of 11 justices on Brazil's Supreme Court.\n\nJudge Mello granted Macedo's release from the São Paulo prison on the grounds that the amount of time he had spent in detention awaiting trial had exceeded the legal maximum. He was arrested in September 2019, and had been detained since.\n\nAfter his release, Macedo was ordered to go into house arrest.\n\nThe order to release him was controversial. São Paulo state governor João Doria called it \"an unacceptable condescension to criminals\".\n\nWithin a few hours, High Court president Luiz Fux had suspended the decision and ordered Macedo to be re-arrested and returned to prison immediately.\n\nHowever, by this time he was already gone - with some local reports suggesting he fled the country.\n\nInvestigators in São Paulo have not provided details on the search.", "The UK has reached a \"tipping point\" in its coronavirus epidemic similar to that last seen in March, one of the country's top scientists has warned.\n\nEngland's deputy chief medical officer Prof Jonathan Van-Tam said the seasons were \"against us\" and the country was running into a \"headwind\".\n\nMore deaths would follow a rise in cases over coming weeks, he said, and urged people to limit social contact.\n\nOn Monday, Boris Johnson is expected to announce tougher restrictions.\n\nIn a statement to MPs, the prime minister is expected to set out plans for a three-tier local lockdown system which would see every region in England placed in one of three tiers, depending on the severity of cases.\n\nAcross the UK, the R number - the average number of people each infected person passes the virus onto - is now estimated between 1.2 and 1.5. Anything above 1.0 means cases are increasing.\n\nOn Saturday, 15,166 people in the UK were reported to have tested positive for coronavirus - up 1,302 on Friday's figure, according to the government's dashboard. There were a further 81 deaths - a decrease of six on Friday.\n\nHowever, the Office for National Statistics estimates 224,000 people in homes in England had the virus, up to 1 October - roughly double the figure reported by the ONS for each of the preceding two weeks.\n\nIn his statement published on Sunday, Prof Van-Tam said that while the epidemic \"re-started\" again among younger people over the past few weeks, there is \"clear evidence of a gradual spread into older age groups\" in the worst-hit areas.\n\n\"Sadly, just as night follows day, increases in deaths will now follow on in the next few weeks,\" Prof Van-Tam said.\n\nHe warned that the UK was in a different position than during the first wave because \"we are now are going into the colder, darker winter months\".\n\n\"We are in the middle of a severe pandemic and the seasons are against us. Basically, we are running into a headwind,\" he said.\n\nBut he also said the UK has \"much improved testing capabilities\" and \"better treatments\" available, meaning that \"we know where it is and how to tackle it\".\n\nHe stressed the importance of following public health guidance and minimising contact with others, adding: \"I know this is very hard, but it is an unfortunate scientific fact that the virus thrives on humans making social contact with one another.\"\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection are required to view this interactive. How many cases and deaths in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out are where COVID-19 was mentioned on the death certificate. Source: ONS, NRS and NISRA – England, Wales and Northern Ireland updated weekly. Scottish local authority data updated monthly. are people who have tested positive for coronavirus. The \"average area\" means the middle ranking council or local government district when ranked by cases per 100,000 people. Public health bodies may occasionally revise their case numbers. Source: UK public health bodies - updated weekdays.\n\nIt comes as the Labour Party and business groups voiced concern at the \"ripple effect\" of Covid shutdowns that are expected to be announced on Monday.\n\nLabour claims that close to one million workers will be at risk because the chancellor's plan to pay staff at UK companies that are told to close 67% of their wages does not extend to those who may be indirectly affected, such as those in supply chains.\n\nThe Treasury denied firms that are not fully closed would not receive help.\n\nA spokesperson said: \"We do not recognise these figures,\" adding that Labour had \"incorrectly\" listed some sectors as not benefitting from the scheme.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson will set out the new rules for hotspots in the House of Commons on Monday.\n\nEvery region of England is expected to be placed in one of three tiers, with the Liverpool City Region thought to be in the category with the strictest rules.\n\nPlans are not yet finalised, BBC political correspondent Chris Mason said, but that is likely to mean pubs will close, restaurants could face restrictions, people may even be told not to travel in and out of the area. Schools and universities would remain open.\n\nPubs and restaurants across the central belt of Scotland have closed for the last time in at least two weeks\n\nMore talks are expected on Sunday between the government and leaders in parts of England that are expecting new restrictions.\n\nCouncil leaders and mayors have expressed their anger at what they see as inadequate help for those who will no longer be able to work.\n\nMany regions are demanding more local control over contact tracing, while others have raised the possibility of legal action if they do not get the support they demand.\n\nThe government says it is committed to involving local leaders in decision-making.\n\nDiscussions with Downing Street on Friday were described on Merseyside as \"frosty,\" but \"cordial and giving on both sides\".\n\nLeaders in Greater Manchester do not yet have another meeting with the government arranged, Chris Mason added - but one is expected before the prime minister's statement on Monday.\n\nIn Nottingham, Newcastle, Sunderland, Leeds and elsewhere, leaders and residents await the announcement of the template for the next phase of the pandemic.\n\nHow has coronavirus affected you? What have restrictions meant for you?? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Last updated on .From the section Football\n\nBelgium's Kevin de Bruyne believes England should be leading candidates at next year's European Championship and the 2022 World Cup.\n\nThe Manchester City midfielder will be part of the Belgium side against England in the Nations League at Wembley on Sunday (17:00 BST kick-off).\n\nBoth teams reached the World Cup semi-finals in Russia two years ago.\n\n\"They should be very excited,\" the 29-year-old said of England. \"It's a very young team with a lot of potential.\"\n• None Who made your England XI for Belgium?\n\nEngland have not won a major trophy since the 1966 World Cup but De Bruyne, who was voted last season's Professional Footballers' Association Player of the Year, said: \"They should aim to win the next Euros and World Cup. I think they have that potential.\n\n\"There are always a lot of teams who want to win it, but I think the team they have - the players who play in top clubs - they should do that.\"\n\nBelgium manager Roberto Martinez agreed that England counterpart Gareth Southgate has an impressive squad at his disposal.\n\n\"His players are as good as anyone individually in world football and it is just a matter of time that they will get that trophy or major result in a major tournament,\" said former Swansea, Wigan and Everton boss Martinez.\n\nEngland, ranked fourth in the world, warmed up for Sunday's match with a 3-0 victory against Wales at Wembley on Thursday, with goals from Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Conor Coady and Danny Ings, while Jack Grealish impressed on his first senior start.\n\nBelgium, top of the Fifa rankings, beat England twice at the 2018 World Cup, but they will be without key forwards Dries Mertens and Eden Hazard on Sunday.\n\nDe Bruyne has revealed he is open to a new contract with Manchester City but says no discussions have taken place.\n\nHe joined City from Wolfsburg for £55m in August 2015 and has two and a half years to run on his existing deal.\n\nThere has been recent speculation in the media over a new two-year contract at Etihad Stadium.\n\nDe Bruyne has won two Premier League titles, four League Cups and the FA Cup during his spell with City.\n\n\"I have not spoken once to the club so I don't know why people are saying I have already agreed to something,\" he said.\n\n\"I always told everybody I am really happy at the club and I feel comfortable, so if the people at the club want to talk to me I am open to that and we will see what happens.\n\n\"But at the moment nothing has happened.\"\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "Another member of staff at Glasgow's Barlinnie prison has tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nTwo inmates and five staff at the jail have already been confirmed as having Covid-19.\n\nOn Saturday the Scottish Prison Service said more than 250 inmates were put into lockdown, with 12 staff from the jail's A hall also isolating.\n\nAll visits to A hall have been suspended until at least the end of October.\n\nAn SPS spokesman said the rest of the prison was not affected by the outbreak or visiting ban.\n\nHe added that contact tracing was being carried out for staff members.\n\nEarlier this year, the Scottish government approved new early release regulations to help the prison system cope with Covid cases.\n\nThe move, designed to free up more cells for single-use occupancy, could allow up to 450 inmates to get out of prison early.\n\nBut only those sentenced to 18 months or less and with 90 days or less left to serve are potentially eligible. Some serious offences are excluded.\n• None Up to 450 prisoners to be released early", "Mr Beynon says no one in public life should have to put up with personal attacks\n\nA councillor who welcomed asylum seekers has been called a paedophile by online abusers and told his partner will be raped.\n\nProtests have been held outside a military training camp in Penally, Pembrokeshire where asylum seekers are being housed.\n\nJoshua Beynon, 23, who is gay, has reported 30-40 people to the police after homophobic comments and abuse online in response to his support.\n\n\"It's quite scary at times,\" he said.\n\nPembrokeshire council has condemned online abuse directed at councillors, individuals and charities who have supported asylum seekers at the controversial camp.\n\nMr Beynon, who was elected in 2017 and is one of the youngest councillors in Wales, said most of the abuse had come after he criticised racism online.\n\n\"People think they can say things online, that they would never ever dream of saying to your face,\" said Mr Beynon.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The asylum seekers said they loved the UK and the people who saved their lives, but the accommodation was \"not suitable\"\n\nThe Pembroke Dock councillor said he had received homophobic comments in the past on social media, but it intensified when he campaigned to get County Hall in Haverfordwest lit up in support of the Black Lives Matters movement.\n\nBut Mr Beynon, a Labour councillor, said the abuse had been far worse since he posted online supporting the refugees and challenged \"horrendous racism\".\n\nProtests have been held over the Home Office's decision to house up to 250 people at the army training centre, which has been described as a target for \"hard-right extremist\" protestors.\n\nProtests and counter-protests have been held over the camp near Tenby\n\nAfter posting a picture on Facebook of him with other community members hanging welcome messages on the gates of the camp, Mr Beynon received homophobic abuse.\n\n\"They've called me a nonce, a faggot, there's been loads and loads of stuff like that,\" he said, adding he had also been called a \"gremlin\", \"snowflake\", \"muppet\" and \"Judas\".\n\n\"There are some which are out of this world, someone said I was funded by the big media, some saying I was a paedophile, I don't know where this stuff comes from,\" he added.\n\nIn one post, a woman wrote: \"How much is he paying them people too do that, plus he's got more faces than the town clock and he's a nonce...should not be a cllr he's a Paedophile and most people now that makes me sick.\"\n\nIn another comment, one person said: \"Wait till they rape his children and his wife\", to which someone responded \"or his husband\".\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford said the camp had become a target for extremists\n\n\"There's been stuff that's been quite intimidating,\" said Mr Beynon, who said some of the messages had been from people who lived hundreds of miles away.\n\n\"I've had to ask the council's monitoring officer if I can have my address removed from my register of interests on the council website on a temporary basis. Just to make sure that nothing happens to me or anyone I live with.\"\n\nSome locals have protested against the camp, saying while they welcome asylum seekers, the facility is not suitable to house people fleeing persecution.\n\n\"I understand people do have genuine concerns who live in the local area, but I strongly object to these really racist remarks that they automatically assume that they are murderers, or rapists or thieves, there is no proof of that, it's just stirring up hatred online,\" Mr Beynon said.\n\n\"If you call it out, then you get personal attacks about you.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Joshua Beynon This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMr Beynon said he had reported 30 to 40 people for comments to the police and had sought advice from lawyers.\n\n\"These actions are criminal, and I think people need to realise that they can't sit behind a keyboard, and say what they want, and get away with it,\" he said, adding many people had defended him on social media.\n\n\"I'm more than happy to debate with people, and have people say they disagree with me, but you don't have to say because \"you're gay\",\" he added.\n\nMr Beynon's post welcoming refugees had over 1,000 comments, with some including homophobic comments\n\nMr Beynon said that he feared trolling, racism and homophobia, would put others off standing from election, and prevent diverse candidates from entering politics.\n\nThe most recent survey of county councillors in Wales, carried out after the 2017 elections but with a low response rate, suggested 98% were white, 72% over the age of 50, 67% were male, and 93% were heterosexual.\n\nUnder changes, aimed at increasing diversity in Welsh politics ahead of the 2022 council elections, the Welsh Government said it was looking at measures to \"ensure councillors and their families are safe when undertaking their duties\".\n\nPembrokeshire council leader David Simpson added: \"Pembrokeshire has a proud history of tolerance and respect.\n\n\"Racism and homophobia has no place in society and we cannot condone this unacceptable behaviour.\"\n\nThe Welsh Local Government Association said it was supporting Mr Beynon, adding that councillors were \"ordinary everyday people trying to make a difference in their communities\".\n\nA spokesman said: \"Whilst debate is welcomed, they should not have to tolerate any sort of abuse or vitriol for doing their duties.\n\n\"We want to attract diverse people from all backgrounds to stand in local elections.\n\n\"Nobody should feel discouraged from wanting to represent their communities by the intimidatory actions of a few. This behaviour will not be tolerated and action will be taken wherever necessary.\"", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Liverpool is one of many cities where there are extra restrictions\n\nIn many areas under local lockdown, cases and hospital admissions have continued to soar. Does that mean restrictions don't work?\n\nConsider the national lockdown in the spring. While it feels like it was one single policy, it was in fact a package of different measures. Schools, universities and offices shut. Pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops closed. No-one could mix with people from outside their household. People were advised not to use public transport and to limit the number of times they visited essential shops.\n\nTogether these had a dramatic impact on cases, and the number of coronavirus patients in hospital plummeted from 20,000 to about 800.\n\nHow much each part of that lockdown contributed is hard to say.\n\nThe rules were relaxed but then, at the end of June, Leicester became the first place to go into a local lockdown. Other cities, and whole regions, have followed. But so far, Leicester's lockdown is the only one to have come close to the strictness of the national policy. Shops and pubs were stopped from opening. Households were barred from mixing indoors. And new cases of the virus dropped by 60% during July. People in hospital beds with coronavirus fell from 88 to 18.\n\nSince Leicester, local lockdowns have multiplied. More than 15 million people - very roughly, a quarter of the UK population - have come under new curbs, in some form.\n\nAnd it's become harder to see whether they are working or not.\n\nAfter the first changes, cases continued to rise, throughout August. Then, after pub and restaurant closures, case rates dropped sharply. It is, however, too soon to say for sure that the stricter measures led directly to the decline.\n\nIn the rest of Greater Manchester, gatherings with other households were banned but shops, pubs and restaurants remained open. Cases have mostly kept climbing throughout these local restrictions.\n\nHowever, the latest week's data will be welcome news - suggesting the sharp increases might be levelling off. The rise in cases in many areas under local lockdown appears to be slowing, in line with the national picture.\n\nThis may be a sign that the England-wide \"rule of six\" is working.\n\nA large national study, published last week, confirmed the growth in cases was slowing across England, although overall levels remained high. But restrictions on households meeting - which have been seen at a local level - don't always lead to a slowing case rate. And this change in impact highlights the many factors involved which make it difficult to isolate the precise effect of local lockdowns.\n\nPeople don't necessarily change their behaviour exactly in line with rule changes.\n\nWhen concerns about cases rising begin to be reported, some people alter their behaviour before any law change. Other people, even when the rules come into place, don't obey them.\n\nSo it may be a question of timing: are people more ready to restrict their movements now than they were in August?\n\nTo complicate the figures further, other things have been going on at the same time as local lockdowns were being introduced, including summer holiday season and schools reopening.\n\nIn Leicester, cases fell when restrictions were introduced. When they were progressively eased in August and September, cases started to rise. But this rise coincided with more people travelling abroad. And with children going back to school.\n\nIn Greater Manchester, cases also rose over those months despite the area being in lockdown - albeit a looser version than Leicester's had been.\n\nUnpicking these different factors is a big challenge.\n\nLooking at \"positivity rates\" - the proportion of all tests that are positive, adjusting for different levels of testing - shows there have been increases in cases across England, with particularly sharp spikes in the North West and North East between the end of August and the end of September. Restrictions in those regions were only introduced between the middle of September and the beginning of October, making it too soon to see the impact of these rules.\n\nBut in Blackburn, which has been in lockdown long enough for an effect to be seen, there was also a rise in cases - though this has come back down in recent weeks.\n\nRecent increases in hospitalisations from coronavirus have highlighted the extent of the challenge facing the north of England. Though without up-to-date localised data, it is difficult to judge whether the impact on a local level - such as those in Blackburn - have helped prevent serious cases.\n\nThere's no doubt the national lockdown had a considerable impact on cases.\n\nFundamentally, the virus needs people to be in close contact and mixing between circles to spread through the population. How tight the restrictions are makes a difference - look at the experience of Leicester, compared with Oldham or Blackburn.\n\nBut so do the crucial issues of timing and compliance. A lockdown only works if people stick to it.\n\nThe data also indicates that any impact lockdowns do have is far from permanent - relax the restrictions and allow more contact, and the virus will quickly start to spread again.\n\nUnless and until a viable vaccine becomes available, government will be faced with the same choice: shut down large chunks of society or allow the virus to tear through communities, with little idea of the true toll that either will exact.", "The UK economy may have grown by as much as 17% in the three months to the end of September, says the EY Item Club, but slower growth may follow.\n\nShoppers splurged during the period as coronavirus lockdown restrictions were lifted, it said.\n\nIt is a rosier vision than the one offered by Item Club economists in the summer, but they warned that growth for the rest of 2020 would be far slower.\n\nGrowth for the final three months will be 1% or less, they predicted.\n\n\"The UK economy has done well to recover faster than expected so far,\" said Howard Archer, chief economic adviser to the EY Item Club.\n\n\"Consumer spending has bounced back strongly, while housing sector activity has also seen a pick-up, in part thanks to the stamp duty holiday.\"\n\nThe economy probably grew 16-17% in the third quarter of the year compared with the second quarter, it said. It had been expecting growth of 12%.\n\nWhile government help such as the furlough programme has provided \"much-needed support\", growth will now begin to fade, said Mr Archer.\n\nThe end of the furlough scheme, under which workers had part of their salary paid by the government, will mean higher unemployment and sluggish growth, said the forecasters, who use a similar economic model to the Treasury.\n\nThat said, the UK economy is now predicted to regain its pre-pandemic size in the second half of 2023. Back in July, the EY Item Club did not expect that to happen until late 2024.\n\nOfficial figures from the Office for National Statistics showed last week that The UK economy continued its recovery in August, growing by 2.1% in the month, as the Eat Out to Help Out scheme boosted restaurants.\n\nIt was, however, smaller than economists had estimated and helped drag down the estimated pace of recovery for the year.\n\nAs with any economic forecast, there are factors which could speed up or slow down the recovery, the economists said.\n\nA vaccine is likely to help the economy, but there are more likely threats to growth than there are surprise boosts.\n\nFactors that could weigh down growth include a drop in consumer spending, more lockdown measures, slow Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU and a spike in unemployment.\n\n\"The latest forecast also notes that, even if further virus outbreaks are contained and major restrictions on economic activity are avoided, consumers and businesses could remain cautious in their behaviour for an extended period,\" the report said.\n\nThe Club's estimates assume a simple free trade agreement with the EU by the end of the year.\n\nWithout an agreement, growth of 4.8% is forecast in 2021, down from 6%, while growth in 2022 would be cut to 2.6% from 2.9%.", "Last updated on .From the section England\n\nEngland came from behind to overcome the world's top-ranked team Belgium and record an important Nations League victory at Wembley.\n\nBelgium took a lead their early superiority deserved when Romelu Lukaku sent England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford the wrong way after the striker had been brought down by Eric Dier's poor challenge.\n\nEngland were on the back foot for most of the first half but were handed a lifeline back into the game six minutes before half-time when captain Jordan Henderson went down very easily in a tussle with Thomas Meunier, Marcus Rashford scoring from the spot.\n\nGareth Southgate's side enjoyed much more possession after the break but needed a large slice of luck to take the lead after 64 minutes, Mason Mount's effort deflecting off Toby Alderweireld and looping over keeper Simon Mignolet to inflict Belgium's first loss since November 2018.\n• None 'A statement win - but let's not kid anyone'\n• None Best action and reaction from England v Belgium\n\nEngland were very much second best until they got a rather soft penalty when Henderson tumbled under a challenge from Meunier - but the way they gathered themselves after the break to subdue this talented Belgium side deserves great credit.\n\nSouthgate's side were very conservative in that opening spell, rather like his team selection, but the manager will say the end result justified the means, although this was a game where both sides were also missing key individuals.\n\nEngland held firm at the back and were resolute, limiting Belgium to one clear opening after the break when Yannick Carrasco flicked Kevin de Bruyne's brilliant pass inches wide of the far post.\n\nGoalkeeper Pickford, who retained Southgate's faith despite poor form for Everton, was not placed under huge pressure but mostly did what he had to do competently, with one first-half save from De Bruyne's low shot and a couple of decent pieces of handling.\n\nThe bigger picture, apart from putting England top of Group A2, is that this is a victory that will give Southgate real satisfaction as it is the sort of game against elite opposition where his side have been found wanting in the past, not least when they lost twice to Belgium at the 2018 World Cup, in the group stage and the third-place play-off.\n\nLukaku has regained his reputation as one of Europe's finest strikers since leaving Manchester United for Inter Milan in August 2019.\n\nHis spell at Old Trafford was regarded as a relative failure despite a highly respectable record of 42 goals in 96 games.\n\nLukaku may have been the victim of the turmoil under Jose Mourinho and then the switch to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer at United, but there was no doubt he looked out of sorts for long periods.\n\nHere at Wembley, particularly in the first half, he showed the threat he possesses when at the top of his game, bullying Dier and Harry Maguire and also showing quality on the ball.\n\nLukaku drew the unwise challenge from Dier to score his 53rd goal for his country from the spot, emphasising his importance to Roberto Martinez's side as they look to build on their ranking as the world's number one side.\n\nMartinez, admittedly without the injured Eden Hazard, Thibaut Courtois and Dries Mertens, will be disappointed by how his side lost momentum after England equalised - but Lukaku showed once more what a fine striker he is at his best.\n\n'We had to suffer' - what they said\n\nEngland manager Gareth Southgate: \"It was a top-level game. We had a lot of young players there for whom that was a really great experience. You have to suffer to win these big games and the players did that.\"\n\nMatch-winner Mason Mount: \"It's a special achievement to score my first goal at Wembley. I found myself in a bit of space and had only one thing on my mind. It took a really big deflection but it doesn't matter how they go in. I'll take it.\"\n\nCaptain Jordan Henderson: \"We want to compete with the very best teams, and Belgium are certainly that. We competed very well and that's what we want to do, keep competing and growing and you never know where that may take us.\"\n• None England have won 20 of their past 21 competitive home games (L1), scoring 67 goals while conceding only 10.\n• None Belgium have lost for only the fourth time in 47 games under Martinez (P47 W36 D7), and for the first time since November 2018 versus Switzerland.\n• None England have beaten Belgium in a competitive fixture for just the second time (D2 L2), with the only previous such win coming at the 1990 World Cup.\n• None England's first attempt of the game was a 31st-minute header by Dominic Calvert-Lewin - it's the longest they've had to wait for their first attempt at home since November 2011 v Spain (32nd minute).\n• None Rashford became the fourth Man Utd player to score in four consecutive competitive appearances for England, after Bobby Charlton, David Beckham and Wayne Rooney (x2).\n• None Lukaku's opener was the first goal England have conceded in exactly a year; the last player to score against England was Zdenek Ondrasek for the Czech Republic on 11 October 2019.\n\nBoth sides continue in Nations League action on Wednesday evening. England host Denmark at Wembley while Belgium travel to Iceland (both games 19:45 BST).\n• None Offside, Belgium. Timothy Castagne tries a through ball, but Yari Verschaeren is caught offside.\n• None Attempt missed. Marcus Rashford (England) right footed shot from the centre of the box is just a bit too high. Assisted by Declan Rice following a fast break.\n• None Offside, Belgium. Timothy Castagne tries a through ball, but Jéremy Doku is caught offside.\n• None Attempt missed. Harry Kane (England) header from the centre of the box misses to the right. Assisted by Kieran Trippier with a cross following a corner.\n• None Attempt blocked. Mason Mount (England) right footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by Harry Kane.\n• None Attempt blocked. Romelu Lukaku (Belgium) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Toby Alderweireld.\n• None Attempt missed. Toby Alderweireld (Belgium) right footed shot from outside the box is high and wide to the right. Assisted by Jason Denayer following a corner. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant has seen 25 deaths and 135 cases relating to coronavirus\n\nWales is \"close to a tipping point\" with the number of coronavirus cases rising rapidly across parts of the country, the first minister has said.\n\nMark Drakeford said the number of patients with suspected or confirmed Covid in hospital had gone up \"steadily over the last couple of weeks\".\n\n\"We're heading back to the sorts of demands on the health service that we saw earlier in the year,\" he said.\n\nPeople in 17 areas of Wales now face local lockdown rules due to the virus.\n\nA total of 1,669 people in Wales have died with Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, according to figures published by Public Health Wales on Sunday.\n\nIt also said 30,121 people have tested positive for the virus, with 467 new cases reported on Sunday.\n\nEngland's deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam has said the seasons were \"against us\" and the country was running into a \"headwind\" due to mounting cases.\n\nMr Drakeford told BBC Radio Wales' Sunday Supplement that, \"while I don't think we are in the identical position as they face across our border in England... I don't think there's a great deal of comfort to be drawn\".\n\nHe said the increase in cases was seen mostly in community settings, not from transmission from people mixing in the hospitality sector.\n\n\"Unless we are able to turn back the tide of coronavirus in the community, we will see our health service come under very significant strain,\" he said.\n\nAll but essential travel in or out of an area is banned under local lockdown restrictions in Wales\n\nOn Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to announce tougher restrictions for England.\n\nIn a statement to MPs, he is expected to set out plans for a three-tier local lockdown system which would see every region in England placed in one of three tiers, depending on the severity of cases.\n\nHe has already rejected a call by Mr Drakeford to ban people travelling from Covid hotspots in England to Wales.\n\nPeople in Wales cannot leave lockdown areas without a good reason, such as going to work.\n\nMr Drakeford said: \"If it were to be the case that on Monday we hear that high circulation areas in England are to have a similar regime as the one we have in Wales, that will be a huge relief for us in Wales, but I think it is the right thing to do across the United Kingdom as a whole.\"\n\nPlaid Cymru's health spokesman Rhun ap Iorwerth called for an \"unambiguous plan, communicated clearly, implemented effectively and enforced strictly\" to curb the spread of the virus.\n\n\"The government has to provide the data that proves it's able to target its efforts properly, balancing clampdowns on clusters with the well-being of people and business,\" he said.", "Last updated on .From the section Rugby Union\n\nWorld Rugby's decision to prevent transgender women from competing at the highest levels of the women's game has provoked a mixed reaction.\n\nThe move has been criticised by LGBT charity Stonewall, while some women's rights and gay rights campaigners have welcomed the decision.\n\nNew guidelines published on Friday \"do not recommend\" transgender women play contact rugby \"on safety grounds\".\n\nNational unions can be flexible in their application of the guidelines at community level.\n\nStonewall says it is \"deeply disappointed\" with the decision, but Fair Play for Women - which \"works to protect the rights of women and girls in the UK\" - thanked World Rugby \"for not trading away women's safety\".\n\n\"The proposals were based on hypothetical data modelling that has little relevance to the questions of fairness and safety in rugby that the policy review sought to address,\" said Stonewall chief executive Nancy Kelley.\n\n\"Important policies like this should be based on robust, relevant evidence and work closely with trans people playing in the sport.\"\n\nHowever, Bev Jackson, co-founder of the LGB Alliance, said the organisation \"applauds World Rugby for conducting a thorough, evidence-based study and making a decision on that basis to protect safety in women's rugby. We are very pleased that they resisted political pressure and kept to scientific facts. Many lesbians play this sport and they are enormously relieved.\"\n\nShe added that \"judging by the reactions we have received, a great many LGB people and indeed many trans people think this was the right decision\".\n\nDr Nicola Williams, director of Fair Play For Women, said: \"World Rugby have taken a transparent and evidence-based approach and we welcome their decision to prioritise safety and fairness for elite female players.\n\n\"We now look to Rugby's national governing bodies to follow their lead and guarantee the same protections for the thousands of women and girls who play at club level.\"\n\nTransgender men remain permitted to play men's contact rugby union, but the sport's governing body says a review of its existing guidelines had concluded that \"safety and fairness cannot presently be assured for women competing against trans women in contact rugby\".\n\nWorld Rugby chairman Bill Beaumont said: \"We recognise that the science continues to evolve and we are committed to regularly reviewing these guidelines, always seeking to be inclusive.\"\n\nSpeaking to BBC Sport in August, Grace McKenzie, a trans woman who plays for Golden Gate Women's rugby club in San Francisco, said she was worried \"that other sporting federations will look at World Rugby and begin to second-guess the existing science that supports trans women's inclusion in sport, and begin to make policies based out of a place of fear instead of a place of logic and reason\".\n\n\"I want to be able to participate fully with my team and in the sport that I love. I think that there is still a path forward to allow us to do that,\" she said.\n\nFormer Great Britain swimmer Sharron Davies, who has been vocal on the issue of trans women in elite sport, also welcomed World Rugby's decision.\n\nThe 57-year-old, a silver medallist at the 1980 Olympics, posted on social media: \"If we, as a fair society, want equal opportunities for females to medals, team places, safe sport and scholarships, with all the associations, rewards and careers, sport must be based on biological sex.\"\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "Radical proposals for the reform of English football could have a \"damaging impact\" on the game, says the Premier League.\n\nUnder the proposals, led by Liverpool and Manchester United, the English top flight would be cut to 18 teams.\n\nThe plans would see the Premier League hand over the £250m bailout required by the Football League to stave off a financial disaster among its 72 clubs.\n\nThe Premier League would also hand over 25% of its annual income to the EFL.\n• None EFL chief Parry: 'Reforms will benefit game as a whole'\n\nThe proposals, dubbed Project Big Picture, would see:\n• None The Premier League cut from 20 to 18 clubs, with the Championship, League One and League Two each retaining 24 teams.\n• None The bottom two teams in the Premier League relegated automatically with the 16th-placed team joining the Championship play-offs.\n• None A £250m rescue fund made immediately available to the EFL\n• None £100m paid to the FA to make up for lost revenue.\n• None Nine clubs given 'special voting rights' on certain issues, based on their extended runs in the Premier League.\n\nBut the plans have been criticised by the Premier League, the government and supporters' groups.\n\n\"English football is the world's most watched, and has a vibrant, dynamic and competitive league structure that drives interest around the globe,\" a Premier League statement said.\n\n\"To maintain this position, it is important that we all work together. Both the Premier League and the FA support a wide-ranging discussion on the future of the game, including its competition structures, calendar and overall financing particularly in light of the effects of Covid-19.\n\n\"Football has many stakeholders, therefore this work should be carried out through the proper channels enabling all clubs and stakeholders the opportunity to contribute.\"\n\nUnder the proposals, the EFL Cup in its present form would be abolished and the Community Shield scrapped.\n\nIn addition, the top flight's 14-club majority voting system would change.\n\nThe Premier League statement added: \"In the Premier League's view, a number of the individual proposals in the plan published today could have a damaging impact on the whole game and we are disappointed to see that Rick Parry, chair of the EFL, has given his on-the-record support.\n\n\"The Premier League has been working in good faith with its clubs and the EFL to seek a resolution to the requirement for Covid-19 rescue funding. This work will continue.\"\n\nThe Department for Culture, Media and Sport condemned what it called a \"backroom deal\".\n\n\"We are surprised and disappointed that at a time of crisis when we have urged the top tiers of professional football to come together and finalise a deal to help lower league clubs, there appear to be backroom deals being cooked up that would create a closed shop at the very top of the game,\" a DCMS spokesperson said.\n\n\"Sustainability, integrity and fair competition are absolutely paramount and anything that may undermine them is deeply troubling. Fans must be front of all our minds, and this shows why our fan led review of football governance will be so critical.\"\n\nThis is a hugely divisive and potentially seismic proposal, threatening the biggest shake-up of the English game in a generation.\n\nAngered by the way the story broke without their blessing, the Premier League has already given it short shrift, viewing this as a regrettable power-grab. In fact one well-placed Premier League source has described it as a \"takeover attempt, rather than a rescue package\".\n\nMany will see this as an anti-competitive plot to concentrate power in the hands of the biggest clubs, opening the door to them controlling broadcast contracts, financial rules and even takeovers bids in a way top-flight bosses have always been desperate to avoid - a step towards a European Super League, and a means of freeing up space in the calendar to play more lucrative pre-season friendlies.\n\nFor years the bigger clubs have wanted more money and more sway. This is the most dramatic manifestation of that to date. But will it get off the ground? There will be huge doubts given 14 clubs would need to approve a plan that would mean fewer Premier League places. But the involvement of the two biggest clubs in the country means this surprising development has to be taken seriously.\n\nAt a time when the EFL is facing an unprecedented financial crisis however, it is easy to see why they would support a plan that would hand them the £250m they need to cover the loss of match-day revenue this season. And many in football will welcome the idea of a more redistributive financial model, with 25% of Premier League income shared at a time when the gulf between the divisions has been identified as a major problem.\n\nIndeed, if the threat of this plan helps break the impasse between the Premier League and the government over a rescue package for the EFL, and a more redistributive financial 'reset', perhaps it can emerge as a positive development.\n\nThe English Football League confirmed it had been in talks over 'Project Big Picture' and that its chairman Rick Parry was in favour of the plans, first reported in the Daily Telegraph.\n\n\"The need for a complete rethinking regarding the funding of English professional football predates the Covid-19 crisis,\" he said in a statement.\n\n\"Discussion and planning around 'Project Big Picture' has been ongoing for quite some time, unrelated to the current pandemic but now has an urgency that simply cannot be denied.\n\n\"The revenues flowing from the investment and work of our top clubs has been largely limited to the top division creating a sort of lottery, while Championship clubs struggle to behave prudently and Leagues One and Two are financially stretched despite enormous revenues English football generates.\n\n\"This plan devised by our top clubs and the English Football League puts an end to all of that.\"\n\nParry says, in 2018-19, Championship clubs received £146m in EFL distributions and Premier League solidarity payments, compared with £1.56bn received by the bottom 14 Premier League clubs.\n\nHe added parachute payments made to eight recently relegated clubs totalled £246m and represented one-third of the total Championship turnover.\n\nParry said it created \"a major distortion that impacts the league annually\".\n\n\"The gap between the Premier League and the English Football League has become a chasm which has become unbridgeable for clubs transitioning between the EFL and Premier League,\" he said.\n\nIt is understood Liverpool's owners, the Fenway Sports Group, came forward with the initial plan, which has been worked on by United co-chairman Joel Glazer. It is anticipated it will receive the backing of Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur - the other members of England's 'big six'.\n\nThe idea is to address longstanding EFL concerns about the huge gap in funding between its divisions and the Premier League by handing over 25% of the annual income, although the current parachute payment system would be scrapped.\n\nThere would be a £250m up-front payment to address the existing crisis created by the coronavirus pandemic, seen by some as a bid to garner support for the proposals.\n\nIn addition, the Football Association would receive what is being described as a £100m \"gift\".\n\nThe Football Supporters' Association said it noted \"with grave concern\" the proposals, adding they had \"far-reaching consequences for the whole of domestic football\".\n\n\"Once again it appears that big decisions in football are apparently being stitched up behind our backs by billionaire club owners who continue to treat football as their personal fiefdom,\" it said in a statement.\n\n\"Football is far more than a business to be carved up; it is part of our communities and our heritage, and football fans are its lifeblood. As football's most important stakeholders, it is crucial that fans are consulted and involved in the game's decision-making.\n\n\"We have welcomed the government's commitment to a 'fan-led review of the governance of football'; we would argue that today's revelations have made that process even more relevant and urgent.\"\n\nThe organisation said it remained \"open-minded to any suggestions for the improvement of the governance and organisation of the game\".\n\nIt added: \"We would however emphasise that in our discussions so far, very few of our members have ever expressed the view that what football really needs is a greater concentration of power in the hands of the big six billionaire-owned clubs.\"\n\nNo date has been set for the proposed new-style league to be in operation but sources have suggested 2022-23 is not out of the question.\n\nIn order to get down from 20 to 18, it is anticipated four clubs would be relegated directly, with two promoted from the Championship. In addition, there would be play-offs involving the team to finish 16th in the Premier League and those in third, fourth and fifth in the second tier.\n\nIt is also planned that, as well as the 'big six', ever-present league member Everton, West Ham United and Southampton - ninth and 11th respectively in the list of clubs who have featured in the most Premier League seasons - would be granted special status.\n\nIf six of those nine clubs vote in favour of a proposal, it would be enough to get it passed.\n\nThere is no mention of Aston Villa and Newcastle United, both of whom have featured in more Premier League campaigns than Manchester City.\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "Last updated on .From the section Tennis\n\nRafael Nadal produced one of his finest French Open displays to stun Novak Djokovic and equal Roger Federer's record of 20 Grand Slam men's titles.\n\nSpanish second seed Nadal outclassed world number one Djokovic in a 6-0 6-2 7-5 win, which clinched a record-extending 13th title at Roland Garros.\n\nQuestions had been asked about 34-year-old Nadal's level, but he responded with an almost flawless performance.\n\nTop seed Djokovic, 33, lost a completed match for the first time in 2020.\n• None Which way will the 'GOAT race' turn?\n• None Why is Nadal so good on clay?\n\nThe Serb was overwhelmed by Nadal's rapid start and produced a despondent display as a result.\n\nDefeat also meant Djokovic, who was bidding for an 18th Grand Slam title, lost ground on Nadal and Federer in their ongoing battle to finish with the most major wins.\n\nNadal sealed victory after two hours 41 minutes with a kicking ace out wide on his first match point, leaving the Spaniard laughing as he fell to his knees on the court where he has enjoyed unparalleled success.\n\n\"A win here means everything for me,\" said Nadal, who also became the first player to win 100 singles matches at Roland Garros.\n\n\"Honestly, I don't think about the 20th and equalling Roger, for me it is just a Roland Garros victory.\n\n\"I have spent most of the most important moments in my career here.\n\n\"Just to play here is a true inspiration and the love story I have with this city and this court is unforgettable.\"\n\nNadal shows exactly why he is the 'King of Clay'\n\nFew things in the sporting world over the past 15 years have been almost as certain as Nadal winning the French Open men's singles title.\n\nThis year, like with so many things across the world because of the coronavirus pandemic, there was more uncertainty.\n\nNadal himself put some doubt on his chances going into a tournament which looked and felt like no other French Open.\n\nPlayed in cooler weather than usual - with the tournament in October rather than June - and without his usual preparation on the clay courts, Nadal said it represented the toughest test he had ever faced at Roland Garros.\n\nBut he came through these new challenges to win in arguably the finest fashion yet.\n\nNot only did Nadal win the tournament without dropping a set for a fourth time, it was the manner of his one-sided victory against Djokovic which made it so impressive.\n\nNadal raised his game to a scarcely believable level from the start, defending ferociously and attacking with equally great effect.\n\nEverything he hit at Djokovic landed with pace and precision, leading to just six unforced errors in the opening two sets.\n\nDjokovic looked up to the sky in amazement when Nadal eventually started making a few more mistakes in a more competitive third set - but by then it was too late for even him to turn the match around.\n\n\"Today you showed why you are King of the Clay, I experienced it with my own skin,\" Djokovic said.\n\n13 - no other player has won as many Grand Slam singles titles at one place\n\n15 - the number of years since his first Grand Slam title, only Serena Williams' wins have spanned a longer period\n\n100 - Nadal is the first player to reach a century of singles wins at Roland Garros\n\nSubdued Djokovic not allowed to play his best\n\nWhile Nadal had the superior history at Roland Garros, Djokovic had the superior form over the course of a fragmented year.\n\nDjokovic had won 37 of his 38 previous matches this year, with his only defeat coming as a result of being defaulted in the infamous US Open fourth-round match against Pablo Carreno Busta last month.\n\nUnlike Nadal, Djokovic had dropped sets in his previous six matches - albeit only three - but looked to be operating at a higher level as he swatted aside tougher opponents than Nadal.\n\nTherefore, many would have considered Djokovic as the slight favourite going into the final.\n\nDjokovic had played with clarity of thought and perfect execution through much of the tournament but looked befuddled and subdued as he was unable to cope with Nadal's ferocious start.\n\nWhile Djokovic had come back from two sets down to win on four previous occasions, none of those were against Nadal. Even more crucially, none of them were against Nadal at Roland Garros.\n\nBetter serving and more aggressive returning by the Serb, who was playing fewer of the drop shots that Nadal had read with speed of mind and fleet of foot earlier, made the third set more like the contest the world had expected.\n\nFrailties were still loitering, however, and appeared again when he produced a double fault to hand over the crucial break in the 11th game which enabled Nadal to serve out victory.\n\n\"I am not so pleased with the way I played but I was definitely outplayed by a better player on the court,\" Djokovic said.\n\n\"I didn't know whether he [Nadal] had that sort of level of tennis in him at the age of 34. It is 15 years since he first won this thing. Here he is in his 30s playing utterly devastating tennis.\n\n\"Novak Djokovic was made to lose. I don't think two players could have stopped Rafael Nadal today.\n\n\"It is an absolutely massive moment in the sport that he has drawn level with Roger Federer.\"\n\n\"Nadal has done it again. At 34 he is still the one to beat when it comes to Roland Garros.\n\n\"He played a dream match. The level of tennis that Rafa brought today was out of this world.\n\n\"On today's form, Rafa looks physically in such good condition.\n\n\"Djokovic being a year or two younger, he has years and years ahead of him and is able to do that across a number of surfaces as well.\n\n\"It is going to be fascinating [how the race to win the most Grand Slam titles goes]. It is interesting to hear Rafa play down the importance of the record to him.\"\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "Liverpool is expected to be placed under the most severe set of restrictions in a new, three-tier system\n\nAnother national coronavirus lockdown is a possibility and we have to do what we can to avoid that at all costs, a leading UK scientist has said.\n\nProf Peter Horby said the UK was at a \"precarious point\" as Covid cases and hospital admissions continue to rise.\n\nHis comments echo those of England's deputy chief medical officer, who said more deaths would follow and urged people to limit social contact.\n\nMinisters say their local approach to restrictions is the right way forward.\n\nThe prime minister is expected to announce tougher local restrictions on Monday.\n\nIn a statement to MPs, Boris Johnson will outline plans for a three-tier system, where each region in England is placed into a tier based on the severity of cases in the area.\n\nHe has spent Sunday afternoon updating cabinet ministers on the next steps.\n\nThe plans have already sparked opposition, with Labour MPs in Greater Manchester telling Mr Johnson they would not support being placed under the harshest level of restrictions.\n\nAcross the UK, the R number - the average number of people each infected person passes the virus on to - is now estimated to be between 1.2 and 1.5. Anything above 1.0 means cases are increasing.\n\nOn Sunday, 12,872 people in the UK were reported to have tested positive for coronavirus - some 2,294 fewer than on Saturday - according to the latest figures on the government's dashboard. There were a further 65 deaths - down from 81 on Saturday.\n\nProf Horby, chair of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) and a government adviser, said the \"critical mission\" now was to protect the NHS to avoid non-essential hospital services being cancelled, as many were when the UK went into its first nationwide lockdown in March.\n\n\"We really need to provide care to everybody - those with Covid and those without,\" he said. \"The way to do that is to keep the numbers down.\"\n\nHe warned that some hospitals in the north of England were already coming under pressure and it might not be long before intensive care beds fill up.\n\n\"I am afraid we are going to have to make some very difficult choices and act very quickly,\" he added.\n\nProf Horby said a surge in cases in the North was partly because people were coming into contact with more people than in other parts of the country.\n\nHe also told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that in the months before the increase in cases, numbers had not dropped to as low a level in the North as in other parts of England.\n\nProf Horby said the country must accept more stringent measures to drive down transmission of the virus.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Videos on social media showed Saturday night street scenes in some cities, including an impromptu game of cricket\n\nIn an earlier statement, England's deputy chief medical officer Prof Jonathan Van-Tam said the UK has reached a \"tipping point\" in its epidemic, similar to that last seen in March.\n\nThe seasons were \"against us\" and the country was running into a \"headwind\" ahead of the winter months, he warned.\n\nIt is expected that parts of the north of England and the Midlands will be placed under tougher measures as part of the prime minister's announcement.\n\nLiverpool, where there are currently 600 cases per 100,000 people, is expected to be placed under the most severe set of restrictions, with all the city's pubs forced to close.\n\nPubs and restaurants across the central belt of Scotland closed their doors for at least two weeks on Friday, to try to tackle a rise in cases.\n\nThere is growing concern about the pressure on hospitals. But just how busy are they?\n\nThere are more than 600 new admissions for Covid each day in the UK with close to 4,000 patients in hospital. That means about 3% of beds are occupied by Covid patients overall.\n\nAt the peak, the numbers topped 20,000.\n\nThat may not seem too worrying, but the national picture masks the real pinch being felt in particular areas.\n\nHospitals in north-west England are caring for more than a quarter of those patients, including 132 in intensive care. On current trajectories they could hit the numbers seen during the spring peak within three weeks.\n\nBut what none of this tells us is what free capacity the NHS actually has, because neither the government nor the NHS is publishing this on a regular basis.\n\nThere were 30,000 beds free in the middle of summer - three times more than is normally the case, due to the slowdown in non-Covid care.\n\nMore detail about the current situation would allow us to properly judge the comments being made by ministers and their advisers.\n\nPolitical leaders in the north of England fear harsher measures in their regions could damage local economies and leave some people struggling to survive.\n\nThey say Chancellor Rishi Sunak's announcement - to pay two-thirds of workers' wages for UK firms forced to close by law by coronavirus restrictions - is \"insufficient\".\n\nDavid Greenhalgh, Conservative leader of Bolton Council, said: \"The North feels like they are being treated differently.\n\n\"We know our rates are high, we are not underestimating that, but we cannot throw our local economy to the wall. I urge government to respect that.\"\n\nFive Labour MPs in Greater Manchester have written to the prime minister, arguing pre-emptively against being placed in tier three, which will have the harshest restrictions.\n\nThey said in their constituencies, the virus was spreading among students and in private homes, and less so in the hospitality sector.\n\nClosing all restaurants and pubs would therefore not have a \"sizeable effect\" on transmission rates yet would devastate businesses and livelihoods, they added.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Lisa Nandy: \"It's very clear that we do need further restrictions\"\n\nShadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy, who is MP for Wigan, agreed further restrictions were needed in many areas, but accused the government of treating people with contempt.\n\n\"I haven't felt anger like this since I was growing up in the 1980s. People feel that they haven't just been abandoned, they now feel that the government is actively working against us.\"\n\nShe said Labour would try to force a House of Commons vote on Mr Sunak's plans \"so there is an opportunity to put forward an alternative support package\".\n\nHousing Secretary Robert Jenrick said the chancellor's proposals provided a \"fair safety net\" for people, but he accepted there were \"hard choices\" to be made.\n\n\"We can't do everything, there is a limit to what the state can do here but we are trying to support these communities,\" he added.\n\nResponding to a question about anger in the North, Mr Jenrick told Andrew Marr the new measures would apply to the whole of the UK - and ministers would never bring in a change \"that penalises one part of the country over another\".\n\nThe huge variation in case numbers across the country meant a localised approach was right, he said, adding: \"None of us want to see a return to blanket national measures.\"\n\nHow has coronavirus affected you? What have restrictions meant for you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guerin) vaccine for tuberculosis, pictured at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1931.\n\nScientists in the UK have begun testing the BCG vaccine, developed in 1921, to see if it can save lives from Covid.\n\nThe vaccine was designed to stop tuberculosis, but there is some evidence it can protect against other infections as well.\n\nAround 1,000 people will take part in the trial at the University of Exeter.\n\nBut while millions of people in the UK will have had the BCG jab as a child, it is thought they would need to be vaccinated again to benefit.\n\nVaccines are designed to train the immune system in a highly targeted way that leaves lasting protection against one particular infection.\n\nBut this process also causes wide-spread changes in the immune system. This seems to heighten the response to other infections and scientists hope it may even give our bodies an advantage against coronavirus.\n\n\"This could be of major importance globally,\" Prof John Campbell, of the University of Exeter Medical School, told the BBC.\n\n\"Whilst we don't think it [the protection] will be specific to Covid, it has the potential to buy several years of time for the Covid vaccines to come through and perhaps other treatments to be developed.\"\n\nThe UK trial is part of the international Brace-study, which is also taking place in Australia, the Netherlands, Spain and Brazil, recruiting 10,000 people in total.\n\nIt will focus on health and care workers, as they are more likely to be exposed to coronavirus, so researchers will know more quickly if the vaccine is effective.\n\nSam Hilton, a GP from Exeter, is taking part in the trials since, as a doctor, he is at higher risk of catching Covid.\n\n\"There's quite a good theory BCG might make you less likely to get unwell when you get Covid,\" he told the BBC.\n\n\"So I see it as a potential for me to get protected a bit, which means I'm more likely to come to work this winter.\"\n\nDr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, is one of the authors of a Lancet article saying the BCG vaccine has the potential to \"bridge the gap before a disease-specific vaccine is developed\".\n\n\"This would be an important tool in the response to Covid-19 and future pandemics,\" the article states.\n\nHowever, the BCG vaccine will not be a long-term solution.\n\nAny enhanced resilience to Covid is expected to wane meaning people who were immunised with BCG in childhood would no longer have protection. BCG has not been routinely used in the UK since 2005 because levels of tuberculosis are so low.\n\nAdditionally, the vaccine will not train the immune system to produce the antibodies and specialist white blood cells that recognise and fight off the coronavirus.\n\nThe big goal remains a vaccine that specifically targets the coronavirus. Ten such vaccines are in the final stages of clinical research, including the one developed at the University of Oxford.\n\nProf Andrew Pollard, from the Oxford Vaccine Group, told the BBC: \"The way that most vaccines work is to make a very specific immune response against the germ you are trying to prevent.\n\n\"But in order to make a good immune response, there is also a rather non-specific 'souping-up' of the immune response and that changes the way the immune system is able to respond in the future.\n\n\"The problem we have today is I can't tell you what you could do with other vaccines to try to improve your ability to respond to coronavirus because we have no evidence at all.\"", "Crowds gathered in Liverpool on Monday to watch filming for a new Batman film in the city\n\nBoris Johnson is due to announce a new \"three-tier\" Covid system for England.\n\nThe PM will address Parliament at 15:30 BST, setting out different rules for regions classified as being on \"medium\", \"high\" or \"very high\" alert.\n\nThe Liverpool City Region - home to 1.5 million - is expected to face the tightest restrictions with pubs and gyms closed, and further rules on households mixing indoors.\n\nNewcastle council's leader has said the North East could avoid tighter rules.\n\nMr Johnson will address MPs before holding a Downing Street news conference. Other areas awaiting news of further restrictions include Greater Manchester, Nottingham and Leeds.\n\nLiverpool recorded 600 cases per 100,000 people in the week ending 6 October. The average for England was 74.\n\nThe Liverpool City Region includes the local authority districts of Halton, Knowsley, Sefton, St Helens and Wirral, as well as Liverpool.\n\nLocal MPs were told during a call with Health Secretary Matt Hancock all bars, pubs, gyms and betting shops will be closed while restaurants will remain open for the moment.\n\nLegal restrictions will also be placed on indoor household mixing and there will be guidance on travel restrictions.\n\nThe new curbs are to be reviewed after a month.\n\nMr Johnson chaired a meeting of the emergency Cobra committee \"to determine the final interventions\" on Wednesday morning.\n\nScotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said experts told Cobra even tier three restrictions would be unlikely to bring the UK's R number - the rate at which an infected person passes on the virus - below 1.\n\nThe PM will announce changes in Parliament, before speaking at a Downing Street news conference at 19:00.\n\nHe is expected to be joined at No 10 by Chancellor Rishi Sunak and England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Videos on social media showed Saturday night street scenes in some cities, including an impromptu game of cricket\n\nDuring a data briefing earlier, NHS England medical director Stephen Powis said more people were now in hospital with Covid than before restrictions were introduced in March.\n\nHe confirmed Nightingale hospitals in Manchester, Sunderland and Harrogate were being prepared to take patients.\n\nProf Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England, said infection rates had never dropped as low in the northern England as in the South but warned \"things are heating up\" across the country.\n\nTougher measures were introduced in Scotland on Friday, including the closure of pubs and restaurants across the central belt, while the Welsh government has said the next few days could determine if \"national measures\" are implemented.\n\nUnder the new system for England, tier three is expected to involve the tightest restrictions.\n\nWe know the broad outline of what the government is going to announce today.\n\nMinisters have been working on a tier system for local restrictions in England for weeks - and today they'll confirm how it will work and the basic principles.\n\nThe Liverpool region is set to be the first put into the \"very high\" top tier - which will mean significant restrictions on hospitality within days.\n\nBut there are still details of a support package being worked out.\n\nThe metro mayor in Liverpool Steve Rotheram is adamant there needs to be more support for workers and businesses that will be told to close.\n\nHe doesn't think the chancellor's current plans go far enough - and I'm told conversations on economic support are likely to continue into this afternoon.\n\nThere have been questions about definitions - when is a pub a pub, which could be told to close, rather than restaurant which might not?\n\nIt's worth highlighting that if other areas are added to the highest tier in the next few weeks, restrictions may look different.\n\nSources say there is room for flexibility based on local factors.\n\nLiverpool City Region mayor Steve Rotheram said he wanted \"some surety from national government that if we hit some milestones we can come out of tier three very quickly\".\n\nHe said the government had been clear the Liverpool City Region would be placed in the highest category, with \"no ifs, no buts\", and he added it had already been agreed there would be more local control over the tracing of close contacts and enforcement of restrictions.\n\nCulture Secretary Oliver Dowden said the government was \"not panicking\" but taking \"reasonable and proportionate measures\", adding that \"we know there are challenges around hospitality\".\n\nCalum Semple, professor of outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool and advisor to the government, said: \"Most of the outbreaks are happening within and between households and then after that, it's in the retail and hospitality sector.\n\n\"So, the major issue here is to focus on the cities and areas with the largest outbreaks and sadly my home city of Liverpool is being hammered at the moment. These restrictions are necessary.\"\n\nThe problem with introducing the sort of restrictions that are being suggested to control the spread of the virus is that no-one is really sure whether they will really work.\n\nFirstly, while the government's advisers can track patterns in where infected individuals have been prior to being diagnosed, they cannot prove that they were actually infected in those places.\n\nSecondly, there will be unintended consequences.\n\nClose pubs and you may make the situation worse by driving people to mix more in private homes which are less \"Covid-secure\".\n\nIt is a point that has been made in recent days by Manchester City Council leader Sir Richard Leese as well as others as ministers weigh up their options.\n\nThen there is the economic, social and emotional toll of closing down parts of a community.\n\nThese are decisions that will divide opinion and, what is more, it will be nigh on impossible to judge exactly what impact they will have had on the virus.\n\nOldham West and Royton MP Jim McMahon said Greater Manchester would be placed in tier two - \"with household restrictions on meeting indoors in any setting, but not outdoors\" - and pubs that serve food staying open.\n\nIt came after Sacha Lord, Greater Manchester's night-time economy adviser, started legal proceedings to challenge any restrictions on hospitality and entertainment venues in the North of England.\n\nPeople in 17 parts of Wales now face local lockdown rules - and cannot leave these areas without a good reason, such as going to work.\n\nWales' health minister Vaughan Gething said he was disappointed that the prime minister was not issuing guidance on whether people should travel out of highly infected areas.\n\nMinisters and health officials in Northern Ireland spent Sunday discussing what to do about the rapidly increasing rates of the virus. One MP said he believed lockdowns would be examined by the Northern Ireland Executive on Monday.\n\nOn Sunday, 12,872 people in the UK were reported to have tested positive for coronavirus - some 2,294 fewer than on Saturday.\n\nThere were a further 65 deaths - down from 81 on Saturday.\n\nHow could the new restrictions affect you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Nicola Sturgeon says she has not spoken with Alex Salmond since 2018\n\nNicola Sturgeon says Alex Salmond may be angry with her because she refused to \"collude\" to make sexual misconduct allegations against him \"go away\".\n\nSpeaking to Sky News, the first minister also read out messages between the two after claims they had been withheld from an inquiry.\n\nA source close to former first minister Mr Salmond denied he was angry.\n\nThey said he was however \"astonished at the ever shifting sands\" of Ms Sturgeon's story.\n\nMr Salmond's lawyer has previously suggested the Scottish government may be trying to \"malign his reputation\".\n\nIt comes after the Scottish government had to pay Mr Salmond more than £500,000 in legal costs after accepting that its own investigation into allegations of misconduct against him was unlawful.\n\nMr Salmond was acquitted of sexual assault charges after a trial at the High Court in Edinburgh in March.\n\nNicola Sturgeon has previously said that she has not spoken with her former friend and mentor since July 2018.\n\nShe has faced accusations that she has been less than forthcoming with the Holyrood inquiry set up to investigate her government's botched handling of the harassment allegations.\n\nThe Scottish government was forced to pay Alex Salmond more than £500,00 in legal costs\n\nIn an interview with Sophy Ridge On Sunday, Ms Sturgeon said: \"I think the reason perhaps he [Mr Salmond] is angry with me - and he clearly is angry with me - is that I didn't cover it up, I didn't collude with him to make these allegations go away and perhaps that is at the root of why he is as annoyed as he appears to be.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon said much of the criticism she has taken over the issue was the \"age-old\" situation where \"a man is accused of misconduct against women and often it's a woman that ends up sitting answering for them\".\n\nIn response, Mr Salmond said: ''I have made no public comment since I was acquitted of all charges in the High Court in March and have made it clear that the first time I will comment is in front of the parliamentary committee.\n\n\"This committee was established to inquire into the conduct of the first minister, her special advisers and civil servants after her government's behaviour was found to be 'unlawful', 'unfair' and 'tainted by apparent bias' and at enormous cost to the public purse.\"\n\nThe committee's chair, SNP MSP Linda Fabiani, has said the inquiry had been \"completely frustrated\" by the lack of evidence being handed over.\n\nShe said the committee was still awaiting responses from the government, Mr Salmond and SNP chief executive Peter Murrell.\n\nMs Sturgeon has repeatedly rejected claims that she has withheld information from the inquiry.\n\nNicola Sturgeon has insisted she had \"nothing to hide\" over the Alex Salmond inquiry\n\nShe insisted that \"every day I've tried to do the right thing and not cover it up\".\n\nHowever, a source close to Mr Salmond said: \"Alex Salmond is not \"angry\" with the first minister; just astonished at the ever shifting sands of her story.\n\n\"Her claims of an attempted 'collusion' are not only untrue but unsupported by the written evidence and directly contradicted by her own previous parliamentary statements.\"\n\nThe source added: \"The first minister claims to be entirely focussed on a health pandemic where people are still dying but is lashing out on television about matters which should properly be dealt with in front of the parliamentary committee established for that very purpose.\"\n\nThe first minister has faced accusations that she withheld some WhatsApp exchanges with Mr Salmond, but insisted they were \"not a big revelation\".\n\nShe acknowledged that the messages did make \"an oblique reference\" to claims of inappropriate conduct by Mr Salmond - despite saying she released all relevant evidence to the Holyrood investigation.\n\nChallenged about the claims on the Sophy Ridge programme, Ms Sturgeon offered to read out the messages.\n\nShe said she was \"setting up a conversation\" to discuss an inquiry by Sky News in 2017 about Mr Salmond allegedly behaving inappropriately.\n\nMr Salmond has hosted a weekly show on Kremlin-backed broadcaster Russia Today since November 2017\n\nMs Sturgeon said the messages were sent during the week of 5 November 2017, and Mr Salmond had not previously told her he was to start hosting a show on Kremlin-backed broadcaster Russia Today.\n\nAsked about the undisclosed messages, Ms Sturgeon said: \"Around about the time I spoke to [Mr Salmond] about the Sky News query, I sent him a message on 5 November saying, 'Hi, when you free to speak this morning?'. He replies saying '10am'.\n\n\"That's when I asked him, 'What is this Sky thing?'\n\n\"I go back to him later that day to say, 'Any developments?'\n\n\"The next day, I say, 'You free for a word?'\n\n\"So I was setting up a conversation that I have told the parliamentary inquiry about, it's hardly a big revelation.\n\n\"Later that week, incidentally, I messaged him to say, 'No wonder you didn't want to tell me'. That's just after I find out that he's agreed to host a regular show on Russia Today, and it reflects my incredulity at that decision.\n\n\"I think his response to me then makes an oblique reference to the Sky News query, so that may be what he's talking about.\"\n\nPressed as to why Mr Salmond could want these messages to be released to the parliamentary inquiry, Ms Sturgeon suggested the former first minister might want people to believe the allegations were \"all a big conspiracy\" to deflect from his conduct.", "A student isolating in Nottingham was given bread, jam and an apple for breakfast\n\nUniversities are facing anger from students over conditions some have faced while self-isolating in campus accommodation.\n\nStudents have criticised the cost and quality of food provided to them by universities while in isolation.\n\nUndergraduates say food parcels have often been filled with \"junk\", meaning they have had to request fresh fruit and vegetables from parents.\n\nInstitutions said they were working hard to provide students with supplies.\n\nPeople told to self-isolate because of coronavirus must stay at home for at least 10 days under rules punishable by fines.\n\nUniversities UK has issued guidance on best practice for supporting students who are required to self-isolate.\n\nFirst-year economics and politics student Tess Bailie, 18, began a social media campaign after hearing of especially poor conditions for those isolating on her campus.\n\nOut-of-date food and a lack of catering for religious and dietary requirements are among the complaints at the University of Edinburgh's Pollock Halls, dubbed the \"UK's most expensive prison\".\n\n\"Students are saying the only thing saving them was the fact that half of them have Covid and they can't taste it anyway,\" Ms Bailie said, referring to a common Covid-19 symptom.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by pollockprisoner This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe University of Edinburgh admitted there had been a \"few occasions when students' needs have not been met\". But it said these were addressed quickly with work taking place to improve its systems.\n\nIn a statement, the university said: \"Ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our students continues to be our absolute priority.\n\n\"We have teams of staff working 24 hours a day to provide those who are self-isolating in our catered and self-catered residences with three meals a day - including ready-to-heat meals - in line with their dietary requirements and preferences. Essential items are also being delivered on request.\"\n\nAt the University of York, students are given the option of a £70 meal deal providing a sandwich, crisps, chocolate bar and water for every day they are in self-isolation.\n\nWhile the university said the food was freshly made, Claire Baseley, a registered nutritionist, said a daily sandwich would be unlikely to provide adequate nutrition for those self-isolating.\n\n\"It is important that people do get a variety of vitamins and minerals to support their immune system,\" she said.\n\nFor three meals a day, including breakfast, lunch and a hot evening meal, students are charged £170 for the isolation period.\n\nA first-year psychology student at the University of Birmingham said she and her flatmates must now spend their weekly catering allowance on boxes of food that have included Pot Noodles and frozen ready meals.\n\nThey received an initial box free of charge as soon as they reported their self-isolation, but future supplies are uncertain and will come at a cost of £28 per person for six days.\n\nStudents in Birmingham received one free box full of essentials but must now pay £28 each for similar supplies\n\nShe said: \"We don't know if that is enough food to last for our period of isolation in terms of fresh food and vegetables which are lacking. It's a lot of just like frozen stuff in there.\n\n\"We don't know what will be in the next box but because of the [first box] people from my flat have contacted home and asked for them to send things like vegetables.\"\n\nWhile online teaching has been working well, there are shortages of things such as toilet paper and a £30 charge for washing 7kg of clothes has gone down badly with many students, she added.\n\nThe University of Birmingham said its initial food boxes were designed to last two to three days and include ready meals cooked by in-house chefs, which are designed to be nutritious. It said responses to surveys of students were \"very positive\" and that the laundry service is offered at a discount by a local dry cleaning company.\n\nSome universities are not charging for providing food and toiletries however, as this bundle of provisions from Lancashire's Edge Hill University shows:\n\nPart of the weekly provisions for a group of six to eight students\n\nVice Chancellor John Cater said anyone isolating was being given free food whether they were in catered halls or not.\n\nAt the University of Nottingham, one history student said the university should have been more prepared for possible cases - and students having to isolate - after it took a week for issues with food supplies to be resolved.\n\nThe teenager is in catered halls with breakfast and dinner usually provided and £25 for lunches each week - but she has been self-isolating after testing positive for coronavirus.\n\nMeals have been provided - but she said some days, lunches weren't brought. And one day, her breakfast was crisps, a chocolate bar, an apple and a juice box - while the person in a neighbouring room had bread, butter and jam.\n\n\"It was really bad,\" she said. \"They kept missing days. I tried calling as well, but no-one answered.\"\n\nThings have improved in recent days, she added.\n\nA spokesperson for the University of Nottingham said it apologised to a small number of students in halls who had experienced issues with their catering and was working on a new process.\n\nThey said: \"Our staff have been working hard to support our students who are self-isolating, along with their households, in accordance with public health guidelines.\n\n\"We recognise how difficult this will be for all our students who are affected, many of whom are away from home for the first time, and we thank them for their co-operation in following the rules, doing the right thing, and helping to contain the virus.\"\n\nOne 18-year-old who recently started Durham University and told not to come into contact with anyone else said food boxes there were filled with \"junk food and a lot of dry food\".\n\n\"I've been going to bed with stomach pains because I'm hungry. It's making my throat hurt and making me dehydrated,\" she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.\n\nDurham pro-vice-chancellor Jeremy Cook said he apologised to those students who felt they had not been given sufficient, or healthy, food. \"But we have acted fast, listened to our students and recognised their concerns.\"\n\nMore than 1,000 people have signed a petition accusing Lancaster University of \"profiting\" from self-isolating students with food deliveries, while the University of East Anglia cut the cost of its food supplies after a backlash.\n\nHillary Gyebi-Ababio, vice-president of higher education at the National Union of Students, said students were being seen as \"pounds not people\" and universities need to remember their \"duty of care\" towards them.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Andy Burnham: \"This package is insufficient to protect our communities\"\n\nPeople will not be surrendered to hardship, Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has said, as the government prepares to bring in new restrictions in England to slow the spread of Covid.\n\nLabour mayor Mr Burnham said the chancellor's pledge to pay two-thirds of workers' wages if restrictions force UK firms to close was \"insufficient\".\n\nThe government is planning to bring in a three-tier local lockdown system.\n\nIt could mean tougher rules in parts of northern England and the Midlands.\n\nLiverpool, where there are currently 600 cases per 100,000 people, is expected to be placed under the most severe set of restrictions, with all the city's pubs forced to close.\n\nOn Saturday, 15,166 people in the UK were reported to have tested positive for coronavirus - an increase of 1,302 on Friday's figure - according to the government's dashboard.\n\nThere were a further 81 deaths - a decrease of six on Friday.\n\nIn a joint press conference with other mayors from northern England, Mr Burnham said negotiations about the lockdown in the North of England were ongoing but he was told by a \"senior figure in Number 10\" that the proposed financial help was \"non-negotiable\".\n\n\"I'm angry actually about being told the effect on people's lives is non-negotiable,\" he said.\n\nHe added that the chancellor's plans would hit the lowest paid - those on minimum or living wages. \"These people can't choose to pay two-thirds of their rent or two-thirds of their bills,\" he said.\n\n\"To accept the chancellor's package would be to surrender our residents to hardship and our businesses to failure or collapse - and we are not prepared to do that,\" he added.\n\nReferring to the chancellor's previous furlough scheme, Steve Rotheram, the Labour mayor of Liverpool City Region, said: \"If 80% was right in March, it's right now. You can't do lockdown for the North on the cheap.\"\n\nHe said if the new restrictions were as severe as during the national lockdown in March, a similar sort of package was needed.\n\nMr Burnham said he wanted the minimum package to be 80% of workers' wages, in line with the initial national furlough scheme.\n\nMr Burnham and Mr Rotheram, together with mayors from Sheffield and North of Tyne, have written to all MPs in northern England asking them to call for a separate vote in Parliament on the chancellor's latest package - and to reject it.\n\nThose who have long argued that mayors provide the best model for the leadership of a city often point to what they see as their principal advantage: a widely known figurehead locally, who can stand up for you nationally.\n\nToday, we have seen that in action.\n\nParty politics plays something of a role here: all four of the mayors making their case today represent the Labour Party, all four have sharpening critiques of the Conservative government at Westminster.\n\nBut, at the same time, about 30 Tory MPs from northern England have got together.\n\nThey are the intriguingly named Northern Research Group of Conservative MPs.\n\nIf that name sounds a little bit familiar, maybe you're remembering the European Research Group of Conservative MPs, who proved to be a never ending political migraine for former Prime Minister Theresa May.\n\nBut they pointedly observe: \"We don't form a government unless we win the North.\"\n\nMinisters counter that financial support for the North of England and elsewhere is unprecedented and wide ranging.\n\nThe big question now is what happens on Monday when the prime minister addresses the Commons: what do the restrictions look like, what support will be offered, and to whom?\n\nMr Burnham said he would not rule out a legal challenge and did not accept hospitality workers were \"somehow second-class citizens\".\n\n\"This goes to the heart of everything we care about - the north of England is staring the most dangerous winter for years right in the face.\n\nThe chancellor's announcement that the government would pay two-thirds of employees' wages for six months from next month if their firm is forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions came on Friday afternoon.\n\nIn response to the criticism from some mayors of the scheme, a government spokesman said: \"Ministers are continuing to work closely with local leaders on how we can combat coronavirus together.\n\n\"We will keep all financial support under review to support businesses who need it most and protect jobs over the coming weeks and months.\"\n\nUnder the new restrictions, expected to be detailed by the prime minister in a statement to MPs on Monday, pubs and restaurants could be closed in areas where some of the highest numbers of cases are occurring and a ban on overnight stays is also being considered.\n\nA senior adviser to Boris Johnson has written to MPs representing constituencies in the North of England to confirm that some areas were \"very likely\" to be placed under \"further restrictions\".\n\nIn the letter seen by the BBC, Sir Edward Lister said ministers would hold discussions with local authorities in the region during the weekend.\n\nIt has been suggested that the most severe measures - imposed for areas in tier three - would be agreed with local leaders in advance. However, on Saturday, northern mayors said there had been conversations with Downing Street but little consultation.\n\nThe details of each tier, including the level of infection at which an area would qualify for it and the nature of the restrictions, are being debated this weekend.\n\nIt comes as the British Medical Association (BMA), a doctor's trade union, has called on the government to bring in clearer and stronger measures to stem the spread of Covid-19.\n\nIt is recommending actions including modifying the current \"rule of six\" so only two households can meet and for the wearing of face masks to be made mandatory in all offices and workplaces.\n\nHow are the restrictions affecting you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Lewis Hamilton equalled the all-time record for career Formula 1 victories by winning the Eifel Grand Prix.\n\nThe Mercedes driver's win was the 91st of his career and he will surely break Michael Schumacher's record soon.\n\nHamilton extended his championship lead over team-mate Valtteri Bottas to 69 points after the Finn retired.\n\nBehind Max Verstappen's Red Bull in second, Daniel Ricciardo scored Renault's first podium since returning to F1 as a constructor in 2016.\n• None Great of his time Hamilton is 'not done yet'\n\nThe race had been poised for a close fight between Hamilton and Bottas before the second Mercedes hit trouble at the Nurburgring in Germany.\n\nHamilton, second on the grid, made a better start than Bottas and dived for the inside at the first corner, pushing him wide, but Bottas held his ground and recovered the lead on the inside of the second corner.\n\nThat gave Bottas control of the race, but Hamilton pressured him hard and in the end the leader buckled.\n\nBottas handed the advantage back to Hamilton on lap 13, locking a wheel into Turn One and running wide, allowing Hamilton to close in and pass for the lead around the outside of Turn Two.\n\nThree laps later, the race fell further into Hamilton's lap when a virtual safety car allowed him and Verstappen to pit for fresh tyres and retain their positions ahead of Bottas, and two laps after that Bottas retired with a suspected failure of the MGU-H, part of the hybrid system.\n\nAlthough Verstappen stole the point for fastest lap from Hamilton on the last lap of the race, Hamilton's lead is close to three clear race victories with only six races remaining. A seventh world title - which would equal another Schumacher record - is beckoning.\n\nSchumacher's son Mick presented Hamilton with one of his father's old helmets, from his last F1 season with Mercedes in 2012, to recognise the achievement.\n\n\"I don't know what to say,\" Hamilton said. \"When you grow up watching someone and you idolise them, really, for the quality of the driver they are and what they are continually able to do as a driver and with his team week on week.\n\n\"Seeing his dominance for so long and I don't think anyone - especially me - thought he would get close to this record.\n\n\"It's an incredible honour but I could not have done it without this incredible team. A big thank you and huge respect to Michael.\"\n\nRicciardo's podium was made possible by Bottas' retirement, as the top two had almost lapped the field before a late safety car was called to recover Lando Norris' McLaren, which had stopped with an engine failure.\n\nBut the Australian's result was well deserved. Renault have been making steady progress and Ricciardo, who has been outstanding this season, held off Racing Point's Sergio Perez in a battle over the closing laps.\n\nA bet with team principal Cyril Abiteboul means the Frenchman has to have a tattoo in a design of Ricciardo's choosing. Abiteboul can choose size and placement. Ricciardo said he did not know what the design would be, but probably \"something with a German flavour\".\n\nNorris had been fighting with Perez for fourth on divergent strategies for a while, but the early development of his ultimately terminal engine problem cost him time and he was running fifth before he stopped.\n\nNorris' McLaren team-mate Carlos Sainz took fifth instead, ahead of Alpha Tauri's Pierre Gasly, who was able to pass Ferrari's Charles Leclerc for sixth place as a result of Ferrari's decision not to stop for fresh tyres at the late safety car.\n\nNico Hulkenberg took an impressive eighth for Racing Point after starting last, following his late substitution for the ill Lance Stroll on Saturday morning.\n\nAnd there were the first points of the season for Haas' Romain Grosjean and Alfa Romeo's Antonio Giovinazzi in ninth and 10th places.\n\nWhat happens next?\n\nSix races to go and they start with a new track for F1, Portimao on Portugal's Algarve on 25 October. It is a well-regarded track and the drivers are all looking forward to the challenge. And the weather should be a good deal warmer than the wintry conditions at the Nurburgring this weekend.\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "Twitter has experienced a major outage, with users across the world affected.\n\nThe social media giant said the issue was caused by an \"inadvertent change\" it made to its internal systems.\n\nPeople in countries including the US and UK were unable to use the platform for more than an hour, with many receiving error messages.\n\nThe service was later largely restored, and the California-based company said the site should soon be working for all of its users.\n\nAccording to DownDetector.com, reports of problems with Twitter began to spike at about 21:30 GMT on Thursday.\n\nIt said users from around the world - including Japan, Australia, Argentina and France - had reported being unable to use the platform.\n\nIn the US, there were tens of thousands of reports of problems.\n\nUsers were sent error messages including \"something went wrong\" and \"Tweet failed: There's something wrong. Please try again later.\"\n\nTwitter said there was no evidence of a security breach or hack.\n\nInternet monitoring group NetBlocks confirmed the incident was \"not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering\".\n\nIn July, hackers accessed Twitter's internal systems to hijack accounts owned by some of the platform's most prominent users.\n\nThe breach saw the accounts of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Kanye West and Bill Gates among other celebrities used to tweet a Bitcoin scam.", "A Merseyside gym that stayed open despite strict new coronavirus restrictions has been fined £1,000.\n\nPolice attended Body Tech Fitness in Moreton, Wirral, twice on Wednesday as new Tier 3 measures came into force.\n\nThe rules for the Liverpool City Region mean gyms, betting shops and many pubs cannot open.\n\nOwner Nick Whitcombe had repeatedly taken to social media to say the gym would continue to stay open as it is \"vital to physical and mental health\".\n\nHe said: \"We are not staying open for financial gain but more for our members mental and physical well-being.\n\n\"Gyms should be supported in fighting against Covid obesity, mental health and many other conditions and diseases.\"\n\nMerseyside Police said officers acted after a report from a member of the public concerned the gym was breaking the rules.\n\nOfficers ordered the gym to close on Wednesday morning but issued the fine after finding it still open when they returned later that day.\n\nBody Tech Fitness in Moreton, Wirral, is among the gyms opposed to the closure order\n\nCh Supt Claire Richards said she understood people were \"frustrated\" but appealed to the public and businesses \"to adhere to the guidance\"\n\nShe said enforcement would be used \"where there are clear breaches of legislation\".\n\n\"While this lockdown does present huge challenges, the focus of us all should now be on preventing the spread of the virus and getting us back to normality as safely and as quickly as possible.\n\n\"The new restrictions have been brought in to try to achieve that.\"\n\nSome medical experts say gyms could encourage the virus to spread, as they are humid and confined spaces with shared equipment.\n\nBut several gym operators have opposed that view, claiming the fitness benefits to the public are of greater value.\n\nThe UK's largest gym chain, Pure Gym, has said it is considering legal action over the decision to close gyms and fitness centres in Liverpool.\n\nA petition calling for the Government to prevent gyms closing as a measure to stop the spread of Covid-19 has been signed by more than 131,000 people.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The officer was checking on the welfare of a man on Portswood Road when he was attacked\n\nA man has been arrested on suspicion of attempting to murder a policeman who was stabbed multiple times.\n\nThe 43-year-old officer was responding over concern for a man living in Portswood Road, Southampton, at about 12:00 BST on Thursday.\n\nHampshire police said the officer suffered \"serious, but not life-threatening, injuries\" and had to stay in hospital overnight.\n\nThe arrested man, a 51-year-old from Southampton, remains in custody.\n\nThe officer was called to Portswood Road in Southampton at about 12:00 BST on Thursday\n\nPeter Crawford, who lives in the road, said it appeared the policeman had an injured arm.\n\nHe said: \"I saw all these police cars... and there was a guy at the front of one - I didn't realise he was a policeman at the time - I saw him bandaging his arm up.\n\n\"And I saw a guy come out with the police with handcuffs on behind his back.\"\n\nZoe Wakefield, who chairs Hampshire Police Federation, said the injured policeman was with a colleague when he was attacked and has since been released from hospital.\n\nShe said: \"The officers acted very bravely and I think the situation could have been a lot worse.\"\n\nA force spokesman said detectives were working to establish the exact circumstances of the attack.\n\nDet Ch Insp Dave Brown said officers were conducting inquiries, including house-to-house visits, and examining CCTV footage.\n\n\"At the same time, we are providing support to the officer's family and his colleagues following this incident,\" he said.\n\nThe force did not believe there was any wider risk to the public, Det Ch Insp Brown added.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section Football\n\nHarry Maguire's miserable start to the season continued with a red card as England had two men sent off for the first time in their Nations League defeat by Denmark.\n\nManchester United's captain suffered a 31-minute nightmare, shown a yellow card for a reckless early challenge on Yussuf Poulsen and then dismissed by Spanish referee Jesus Gil Manzano after he brought down Kasper Dolberg trying to retrieve his own poor touch.\n\nEngland's night got worse four minutes later when Christian Eriksen scored his 34th goal for Denmark on his 100th appearance after Kyle Walker was harshly adjudged to have fouled Thomas Delaney.\n\nChelsea defender Reece James was shown a red card after the final whistle for confronting referee Manzano.\n\nIn a low-key affair, England had their moments and it took a magnificent save from Kasper Schmeichel to claw away Mason Mount's close-range header as Denmark closed out the win.\n\nEngland are now third in their group, with only the winners progressing to the Nations League finals in 2021.\n• None Maguire has my full support, says Southgate\n• None Does Maguire need a break for club and country?\n• None Who would you pick in England's best XI?\n• None Misery for Maguire and England at Wembley - listen to Football Daily podcast\n• None All the reaction from England v Denmark here\n\nMaguire endured what must have been one of the most miserable nights of his career before he was sent off after only 31 minutes.\n\nIt was bad from the opening moments when he needlessly left his foot in on Poulsen, and the rest of his performance was distracted and chaotic.\n\nMaguire was ill-at-ease with England's three-man defensive system, often out of position, even pulling up holding the top of his hamstring at one point before his fate was sealed by a shocking first touch which he tried to retrieve with a lunge that injured Dolberg.\n\nHe looks like a player suffering mentally as well as physically following his recent arrest in Greece and it would be no surprise if he was also taken out of the line of fire at club level given his recent poor form.\n\nHe made an error that led to Tottenham's first goal in United's 6-1 home defeat before the international break and his display earned him a rating of just 1.85 out of 10 by BBC Sport readers - which was still higher than he carded for this defeat.\n\nEngland never seriously troubled Denmark apart from a couple of late scares, Harry Kane looking out of sorts and the failure of manager Gareth Southgate to introduce the creativity of Jack Grealish ahead of Jordan Henderson - which is no slight on the Liverpool captain - a mystery.\n\nThere was also more uncertainty involving goalkeeper Jordan Pickford and Walker that led to a somewhat dubious penalty award - summing up what was a very unsatisfactory and disjointed night for England and Southgate.\n\nChelsea's James was arguably England's best player on his full debut - only to ruin all that good work after the final whistle when he got verbally involved with referee Manzano and was shown a red card.\n\nIt was a moment of frustration for the 20-year-old but also inexcusable ill-discipline, which has been a trend in England's recent games given Walker's sending-off in Iceland last month and the two dismissals here.\n\nThis was a bad night for England but James was one of those who could have held his head high, until he unwisely showed dissent to the officials.\n\nJames had been solid in defence and a real threat in attack, on a night when England were struggling with reduced numbers and were being held at bay by a resilient Danish rearguard.\n\nSadly for James, a fine performance will now be remembered for the wrong reasons.\n\n'Very proud of the performance'\n\nEngland manager Gareth Southgate talking to Sky Sports: \"I was very proud of the performance. I thought we were excellent with 11 men and causing them all sorts of problems down our right-hand side. The sending off alters everything and the penalty - it's a foul on Kyle Walker and I don't see the foul at all. The less said the better.\n\n\"We showed resilience and showed a great example of how to play with 10 pragmatically, and when to press. Their keeper made an amazing save to keep it at 1-0. I couldn't be prouder of the boys in the last 10 days, they are learning and improving. We've had any number of changes to our preparation and showed resilience.\"\n\nThree defeats in 50 - the stats\n• None This was only England's third home defeat in their past 50 competitive internationals on home soil.\n• None Denmark have lost just two of their past 40 international matches, keeping clean sheets in nine of their past 11 games.\n• None Christian Eriksen has been directly involved in 32 goals in his past 35 appearances for his national side (24 goals, eight assists).\n• None This was Marcus Rashford's 40th England cap, making him only the third player to reach that tally before the age of 23, after Michael Owen in 2002 and Wayne Rooney in 2007.\n• None Attempt blocked. Conor Coady (England) header from the right side of the six yard box is blocked. Assisted by Harry Kane.\n• None Attempt missed. Dominic Calvert-Lewin (England) header from the centre of the box misses to the left. Assisted by Reece James with a cross following a set piece situation.\n• None Reece James (England) wins a free kick on the right wing. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Can the scene now make it big outside of London?", "Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker has recalled the night that she was shot and killed by police in her home.\n\nSpeaking to CBS This Morning, Mr Walker said he is \"a million per cent sure\" officers did not identify themselves before entering.\n\nMs Taylor, a 26-year-old black hospital worker, was shot six times when police forced their way into her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, on 13 March.\n\nNone of the three officers have been charged directly over the killing.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police dispersed guests at the wedding reception in west London\n\nPolice have broken up a wedding reception where more than 100 guests congregated in breach of coronavirus restrictions.\n\nThe event at the Tudor Rose in Southall, west London, on Tuesday evening was described as a \"flagrant and arrogant violation of the law\".\n\nThe venue's owner has been reported and could face a fine of up to £10,000.\n\nUnder current guidance, the number of guests allowed at weddings is limited to 15 people.\n\nBody-worn camera footage of the reception, released by the Metropolitan Police, showed guests being led from the venue.\n\nArea Commander, Ch Supt Peter Gardner, said: \"This was a dangerous and foolish breach of the regulations, which have been designed specifically to keep people safe from transmitting a deadly virus.\n\n\"Restrictions on large gatherings, such as weddings, have been in place for months and quite frankly there can be no excuse for this flagrant and arrogant violation of the law.\n\n\"There was clearly no attempt by the venue owner to enforce the regulations or keep their patrons safe. It is for this reason we have reported them for a £10,000 fine.\"\n\nLondon is among a number of places in England which will face Tier 2 lockdown restrictions beginning on Saturday, including a ban on households mixing indoors.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A US photographer has said she was \"devastated\" when one of her photos was used for a UK government-backed advert suggesting a dancer should retrain.\n\nThe ad was criticised for encouraging \"Fatima\" to give up on dancing and \"reskill\" in cyber security.\n\nThe dancer is actually called Desire'e and the photo was taken by Krys Alex.\n\n\"I was shocked,\" the Atlanta-based photographer said in a YouTube video. Artists \"should not be encouraged to stop doing what we love\", she added.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by FLIdP This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nThe ad was pulled after Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden disowned it, describing it as \"crass\". A 10 Downing Street spokesperson agreed that it was \"not appropriate\".\n\nThe first Alex knew of her photo's use was when the advert began to be criticised on social media.\n\n\"I woke up Monday morning to a bunch of emails and tags, and I really felt devastated,\" she said. \"I immediately thought of Desire'e and how her face was just plastered all over social media and the internet, different news articles, and memes were created, and she had no clue. All of that really hurt me.\n\n\"Some people questioned if I knew and if I approved the use of my work. If I'd have know that this was going to be used in the way it was, I would have never agreed to it.\"\n\nDesire'e Kelley is \"a young, talented and beautiful aspiring dancer from Atlanta\", she added.\n\n\"We're exploring all our options and we're talking and consulting with different professionals to figure out the best way to protect our rights in this situation.\"\n\nThe photo was available on stock image site Unsplash, whose licence says pictures can normally be downloaded for free for commercial and non-commercial purposes.\n\nThe campaign, which also features images of people from other walks of life, was created for CyberFirst, which is described as \"a government outreach and education programme run by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of GCHQ\".\n\nThe original photo also included Tasha Williams, owner of the Vibez in Motion Dance Studio in Atlanta, Georgia. She was cropped out for the ad.\n\nWriting on Instagram, Williams described the advert as an \"unforgivable act\".\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by vibezinmotion This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nShe said: \"I can remember growing up hearing, 'Dance is art, it's not a career just a hobby, make sure to get a real job and dance on the side.' The UK campaign took me right back to that place mentally, which was a bit scary.\n\n\"Being about 11 or 12 and feeling like I had to be someone I wasn't and suppress my creative energy to satisfy what 'others' saw as productive lives.\"\n\nMr Dowden again distanced himself from the advert when he was asked about it by MPs on the House of Commons culture select committee on Wednesday.\n\n\"I was at the Royal Ballet just on Friday and it was wonderful to see artists perform again. I know the huge value they bring to this country,\" he said.\n\nHe cited grants awarded this week from the Culture Recovery Fund to institutions including the Royal Academy of Dance and Birmingham Royal Ballet. \"We know those are jobs that should be preserved,\" he said.", "A scientist who processed coronavirus swab samples at one of the UK's largest labs has alleged working practices were \"chaotic and dangerous\".\n\nHe highlighted overcrowded biosecure workspaces, poor safety protocols and a lack of suitable PPE.\n\nThe Health and Safety Executive has uncovered safety breaches at the lighthouse lab in Milton Keynes.\n\nThe UK Biocentre, which runs the lab, said strict safety measures were in place and improvements were being made.\n\nThe joint investigation by the BBC and the Independent has learnt that an experienced virologist who worked at the lab said he was \"traumatised\" and \"freaked out\" by seeing inexperienced colleagues unaware of the hazards they were dealing with.\n\nDr Julian Harris started working in laboratories dealing with highly infectious diseases in the 1980s.\n\nBut within one week of working at the Milton Keynes facility - which processes up to 30,000 tests a day - in early July, he was so troubled by what he saw he contacted the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).\n\nThe \"lighthouse labs\" are run by independent organisations and are part of the government's plan for increasing testing capacity for coronavirus.\n\nDr Harris said coronavirus swabs had to be processed in \"containment level 2\" labs, with tight safety procedures to protect staff.\n\nBut he said fellow workers had limited laboratory experience and were not given proper safety induction.\n\n\"I found they've got no experience with this sort of facility or handling bio-hazardous, and then they're just launched into this facility,\" Dr Harris said.\n\nHe saw two people using biosecurity cabinets - enclosed, ventilated workspaces where scientists open the tubes containing the contaminated swabs - which were only calibrated to have protective airflow for one person.\n\n\"Once you disrupt that [airflow], you might as well be working on an open bench. It just disrupts the whole reason for a cabinet to protect the operator. And it is really disturbing,\" Dr Harris said.\n\nHe called the working practices \"chaotic and dangerous\".\n\nThe UK Biocentre said that the second scientist was witnessing and supporting the person working in the cabinet, and that new staff had three days of mandatory training.\n\nIt also said the lab workers it recruited had previous lab experience.\n\nDr Harris alleged part of the problem was that recruiters found it tough to bring in experienced staff, because of the drive to push up capacity in time for the winter.\n\nHe said the lab set out to recruit young people from the local area to work long shifts, often of 12 hours.\n\nThe lighthouse labs were set up as are part of the government's plan for increasing testing capacity\n\n\"They just want people to do the gruelling labour of handling these biohazardous things,\" he claimed.\n\nDr Harris took his concerns to the laboratory management in early August.\n\nA senior manager told him that the professionally-experienced staff were going back to their institutes - and that the lab was in \"a transitional period\" and new staff had less experience.\n\nThe manager admitted that the training in place did not look \"robust enough\" for these new recruits.\n\nDr Harris said he also raised concerns about mobile phones being used in the labs and then taken to the canteen, and a lack of safety signage and first aid kits.\n\nThe HSE visited the Milton Keynes lab and found five material breaches of health and safety legislation.\n\nThe BBC understands they included inadequate health and safety training for staff, and employees working too closely together.\n\nBut the Milton Keynes lab said no improvement notice had been issued by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).\n\nAnother former worker at the Milton Keynes lab, who did not want to be identified, said: \"I immediately began to question some of the most basic practices that were being employed in the labs.\n\n\"It was like we were set up to work on a war footing with massive enthusiasm for the task, but they just ignored many of the things we could implement from existing industry and lab practice to make things more efficient and safer for the work team.\"\n\nThe worker, who is also a PhD student, was asked to wear cheap disposable lab coats and plastic gloves attached with parcel tape.\n\n\"If you were in a hospital biomedical sciences lab, you would not be allowed to wear those lab coats to do those things,\" the student said.\n\nThe UK Biocentre, which runs the lab - one of seven mega-labs in the UK - said that cloth and disposable lab coats were available to staff, and tape was an additional safety measure because they insist on staff wearing two pairs of gloves.\n\nThe laboratory added in a statement: \"We are already addressing observations that have been made to us as we continue to expand our testing capacity to tackle the coronavirus.\n\n\"Given the scale of our 24/7 operation - 400 staff, 40,000 tests a day - we have strict safety measures in place to protect staff who are operating in a confined laboratory space.\n\n\"We take the health and safety of all our staff very seriously and actively encourage the scientists and other colleagues to suggest improvements and raise any concerns.\"\n\nA spokesperson from the Department of Health and Social Care said: \"Rigorous quality control and safety procedures are in place across the laboratory network, and we expect the highest standards to be met.\n\n\"We regularly review and inspect our partner laboratories to ensure strict protocols are adhered to. We investigate any concerns raised and will take action if proper procedures are not followed.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Matt Hancock: \"Things will get worse before they get better\"\n\nMillions of people in London, Essex, York and other areas face tougher Tier 2 Covid measures from Saturday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said.\n\nUnder this \"high\" alert level, there is a ban on households mixing indoors, including in pubs and restaurants.\n\nGreater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is resisting the region moving to Tier 3, ahead of a final decision on this.\n\nMore than half of England's population will now be living under high or very high-alert restrictions.\n\nThe areas to go into high alert restrictions this weekend are: London, Essex (apart from Southend and Thurrock), York, North East Derbyshire, Chesterfield, Erewash in Derbyshire, Elmbridge in Surrey, and Barrow in Furness, Cumbria.\n\nAs unitary authorities, Southend and Thurrock councils are not included in the move and will remain in Tier 1, Essex County Council has said.\n\nThe health secretary said \"things will get worse before they get better\".\n\n\"Now, I know that these measures are not easy but I also know that they are vital,\" Mr Hancock told MPs.\n\n\"Responding to this unprecedented pandemic requires difficult choices, some of the most difficult choices any government has to make in peacetime.\"\n\nOn Thursday, a further 18,980 cases and 138 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were reported in the UK.\n\nThe new three-tier system sees every area of England classed as being on medium, high or very high alert - also known as Tiers 1 to 3, respectively.\n\nIt came into effect on Wednesday, and the Liverpool City Region remains the only area currently in the highest tier.\n\nMeanwhile, the government announced that travellers returning to the UK from Italy, Vatican City and San Marino must self-isolate for 14 days from 04:00 BST on Sunday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nDiscussions are continuing over whether Greater Manchester will be moved into the highest tier of restrictions, with a financial support package yet to be finalised.\n\nSpeaking at a press conference on Thursday, Mr Burnham said the region's leaders were \"unanimously opposed\" to the introduction of Tier 3 measures, calling the government's plans \"flawed and unfair\".\n\nHe said: \"They are asking us to gamble our residents' jobs, homes and businesses and a large chunk of our economy on a strategy that their own experts tell them might not work.\"\n\nRepeating his calls for a financial support package for parts of the North West, he added: \"Greater Manchester, the Liverpool City Region and Lancashire are being set up as the canaries in the coalmine for an experimental regional lockdown strategy as an attempt to prevent the expense of what is truly needed.\n\n\"The very least they should be offering the people of Greater Manchester who will be affected by these closures is a full and fair 80% furlough for all affected workers, 80% income support for people who are self-employed and a proper compensation scheme for businesses.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Andy Burnham says his region is one of those \"being set up as the canaries in the coal mine\"\n\nTier 3 involves pub closures and a ban on household mixing indoors, in private gardens and in most outdoor hospitality venues and ticketed events.\n\nMr Hancock confirmed in the Commons that no decision had been made on moving more regions to Tier 3, but added \"we need to make rapid progress\".\n\nMeanwhile, the NHS Test and Trace system in England recorded its worst week for reaching community contacts since the middle of June.\n\nData showed some 62% of non-household contacts of people who tested positive in the community were reached through the system in the week ending 7 October.\n\nThis is the lowest success rate since 24 June, down from 67% last week.\n\nAsked about the latest data, the PM's spokesman said tests were being provided on an \"unprecedented scale\" and No 10 was still working to raise capacity to 500,000 tests a day by the end of the month.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has defended his call for a nationwide \"circuit-breaker\" - a short limited lockdown - to stem rising infection rates, saying \"no region will be immune\" from Covid-19.\n\nSpeaking to the BBC, he said the alternative was \"weeks and months of prolonged agony\" in a tiered system.\n\nShadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth told MPs in the Commons that a full national lockdown \"stretching for weeks and weeks\" would \"be disastrous for society\", but that a lockdown of between two and three weeks could help \"take back control of the virus\".\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio 4's World at One, Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS providers, said he also favoured this move to ensure the NHS is not overwhelmed by Covid-19 cases.\n\nMeanwhile, Labour mayor Sadiq Khan told London's City Hall there was \"simply no other option\" than introducing the new restrictions.\n\nHe said he will continue to press the government for more financial support, but added that \"we've got a difficult winter ahead\".\n\nConcerns have been raised about the impact the restrictions will have on businesses, particularly in the hospitality sector.\n\nLondon has 3,640 pubs and 7,556 restaurants, according to real estate adviser Altus Group, but they will not be eligible for government support available to premises which have been ordered to close.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sadiq Khan says there is \"simply no other option\" as London moves to Tier 2 restrictions\n\nThe British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA), the trade association for Britain's brewing and pub sector, said Tier 2 restrictions without a \"proper package of support\" would \"decimate\" pubs.\n\nEmma McClarkin, BBPA chief executive, said pubs were already struggling due to the current restrictions, with the new measures leaving \"most pubs fighting for their very survival\".\n\nNickie Aiken, Tory MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, urged the government to set out an \"exit plan\" for ensuring London is placed back into Tier 1.\n\nShe said she remained \"deeply concerned about the impact further lockdown will have on the capital's hospitality, leisure and retail businesses\".\n\nRobert Halfon, Conservative MP for Harlow in Essex, said he welcomed Tier 2 measures for the county but would call on Chancellor Rishi Sunak to prevent businesses suffering financially.\n\nLiverpool is considering a two-week half-term break for schools as part of its \"battle with Covid-19\".\n\nUnder the plan, backed by a teaching union, pupils would be taught remotely at home for the second week of the break.", "The House of Commons is to stop serving alcohol on its premises, after tougher Covid restrictions were announced across the UK.\n\nSpeaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle said the ban would begin on Saturday, and apply to all catering outlets, whether food is served or not.\n\nHe said he had ordered the move as some MPs represent constituencies where pubs have now been closed.\n\nThe drinks ban, he added, would last for the \"foreseeable future\".\n\nA House of Commons spokeswoman said six out of its 10 catering outlets that are currently open serve alcohol, and would be affected by the ban.\n\nA ban on serving alcohol at all Commons premises after 22:00 BST is already in place, while most of its bars remain shut.\n\nThe curfew was announced in September, even though Parliament's \"workplace canteens\" are legally exempt from England's 22:00 closing time.\n\nThe Speaker's announcement came after tougher Tier 2 restrictions were announced for London, to begin on Saturday.\n\nUnder this \"high\" alert level, pubs and restaurants will remain open but households will be banned from mixing socially there, or anywhere indoors.\n\nHowever, in the Liverpool City Region - the only area in England under the \"very high\" Tier 3 restrictions - pubs not serving meals will be closed.\n\nPubs and restaurants have been closed across central Scotland, and will remain so until 25 October at the earliest.\n\nSir Lindsay said he had ordered the parliamentary authorities to bring the Commons \"into line with the national picture\".\n\n\"MPs represent different constituencies in different tiers - with the very highest level ordering the closure of pubs,\" he added.\n\nHe said that the House of Commons Commission - in charge of administration - would meet on Monday to consider \"other measures\" to protect MPs and staff from Covid-19.\n• None London, Essex, York and other areas move to Tier 2", "A high pressure device called a diamond anvil cell was used to compress and alter the properties of hydrogen-rich materials\n\nScientists have found the first material that displays a much sought-after property at room temperature.\n\nIt is superconducting, which means electrical current flows through it with perfect efficiency - with no energy wasted as heat.\n\nAt the moment, a lot of the energy we produce is lost as heat because of electrical resistance.\n\nSo room temperature \"superconducting\" materials could revolutionise the electrical grid.\n\nUntil this point, achieving superconductivity has required cooling materials to very low temperatures. When the property was discovered in 1911, it was found only at close to the temperature known as absolute zero (-273.15C).\n\nSince then, physicists have found materials that superconduct at higher - but still very cold - temperatures.\n\nThe team behind this latest discovery says it's a major advance in a search that has already gone on for a century.\n\n\"Because of the limits of low temperature, materials with such extraordinary properties have not quite transformed the world in the way that many might have imagined,\" said Dr Ranga Dias, from the University of Rochester, in New York State.\n\n\"However, our discovery will break down these barriers and open the door to many potential applications.\"\n\nDr Dias added that room temperature superconductors \"can definitely change the world as we know it\".\n\nIn the US, electrical grids lose more than 5% of their energy through the process of transmission. So tackling this loss could potentially save billions of dollars and have an effect on the climate.\n\nThe scientists observed the superconducting behaviour in a carbonaceous sulphur hydride compound at a temperature of 15C.\n\nHowever, the property only appeared at extremely high pressures of 267 billion pascals - about a million times higher than typical tyre pressure. This obviously limits its practical usefulness.\n\nSo Dr Dias says the next goal will be to find ways to create room temperature superconductors at lower pressures, so they will be economical to produce in greater volume.\n\nThese materials could have many other applications. These include a new way to propel levitated trains - like the Maglev trains that \"float\" above the track in Japan and Shanghai, China. Magnetic levitation is a feature of some superconducting materials.\n\nAnother application would be faster, more efficient electronics.\n\n\"With this kind of technology, you can take society into a superconducting society where you'll never need things like batteries again,\" said co-author Ashkan Salamat of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.\n\nThe results are published in the prestigious journal Nature.\n\nScientists were able to observe superconducting behaviour at room temperature in the lab", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "A 12-year-old boy made the discovery of his lifetime when he found a dinosaur skeleton dating back 69 million years.\n\nThe amateur palaeontologist was out hiking with his father in a fossil-rich part of Alberta, Canada this July, when he saw bones protruding from a rock.\n\nOn Thursday, the skeleton's excavation was completed.\n\nThe boy, Nathan Hrushkin, says when he first laid eyes on the bones, he was \"literally speechless\".\n\n\"I wasn't even excited, even though I know I should have [been],\" he tells the BBC.\n\n\"I was in so much shock that I had actually found a dinosaur discovery.\"\n\nNathan, who has been interested in dinosaurs since he was six, often goes hiking in the Nature Conservancy of Canada's protected site in the Albertan Badlands with his father.\n\n\"I've always just been so fascinated with how their bones go from bones like ours, to solid rock.\"\n\nA year ago, they had found small fragments of fossils, and his father guessed that they were falling down from the rock above.\n\nSo this summer Nathan decided to inspect. The fossilised bones were poking out of the side of a hill.\n\n\"Dad, you got to get up here!\" he called to his father.\n\nHis father knew Nathan had found something by the tone of his voice.\n\n\"They looked like bones made of stone - you could not mistake them for anything else,\" his father, Dion Hrushkin, said.\n\n\"It looked like the end of a femur - it had that classic bone look to it - sticking straight out of the ground.\"\n\nNathan knows that the fossils are protected by law, so when they got home, he and his father logged in to the website for the Royal Tyrrell Museum, which is located in Alberta and devoted to the study of prehistoric life. The museum advised them to send photos of their discovery and its GPS coordinates, which they duly did.\n\nThe Badlands are home to many fossils, and a dinosaur - named the Albertosaurus - was discovered by Joseph Tyrell in the late 1800s. But the part of the conservation site where they were walking was not known for fossil discoveries, so the museum sent a team of experts to excavate.\n\nSo far they have found between 30 and 50 bones in the canyon's wall, all belonging to one young Hadrosaur, estimated to be aged about three or four.\n\n\"I was probably like most kids, the Tyrannosaurus Rex was probably my favourite kind [of dinosaur],\" Nathan says.\n\n\"But after my discovery, it's most definitely the Hadrosaur.\"\n\nThe dinosaur is scientifically significant, the museum claims, because the fossil is about 69 million years old, and records from that time period are rare.\n\n\"This young Hadrosaur is a very important discovery because it comes from a time interval for which we know very little about what kind of dinosaurs or animals lived in Alberta. Nathan and Dion's find will help us fill this big gap in our knowledge of dinosaur evolution,\" the museum's palaeo-ecology curator, François Therrien, said in a statement.\n\nNathan says he's enjoyed learning more about dating dinosaur bones, and that the whole process has been \"surreal\".\n\n\"It's going to be great to see them, after months of work, finally take something out of the ground,\" he says.", "Alisha Rehman married her husband in a small ceremony earlier this year\n\nA bride whose dream wedding plans were derailed by Covid-19 has said she is being denied her £16,000 deposit.\n\nAlisha Rehman, 25, from Birmingham, was due to get married at Excellency Midlands' venue in Telford in July in a 500-person ceremony.\n\nOfficial rules say couples affected by government restrictions have a right to refunds, but getting money back has proved difficult.\n\nExcellency Midlands said the whole sector had been left \"on hold\".\n\nMrs Rehman cancelled her booking when restrictions were brought in and got married in a small ceremony in her mother-in-law's garden.\n\nShe said the pandemic meant it was not certain when a large-scale event could be held.\n\nExcellency Midlands hit the headlines last month when police found 120 guests at a post-wedding party at its venue.\n\nIt was fined £10,000 and banned from hosting weddings during government measures.\n\nCurrently only 15 people can attend weddings in England, but Excellency Midlands was fined after it hosted a party for 120 people last month\n\nCouples up and down the country have faced similar decisions to Mrs Rehman - whether or not to cancel. Official figures suggest 73,600 weddings and civil partnership ceremonies have been affected by restrictions.\n\n\"My wedding was initially booked for July, then because of the pandemic, clearly nothing can go ahead,\" she said. \"We've given them £16,000 and they are not giving us a penny back.\"\n\nMrs Rehman said the package included \"the food, photography, the car, the whole thing\".\n\nAccording to the Competitions and Markets Authority, refunds should be given for weddings that could not take place as planned due to coronavirus.\n\nMrs Rehman and her husband drove to Telford to meet the venue owners to discuss the refund, but she said nobody turned up. They scheduled another meeting and \"still nothing\".\n\n\"It's taken my whole life to save that and they're not even giving us a penny,\" Mrs Rehman said. \"It stresses me out... it's just a joke.\"\n\nShe said the firm had instead offered a new date in March 2021. Despite approaches from her solicitor, she said the venue had failed to respond.\n\nIn a statement to BBC News on Thursday, Excellency Midlands said the wedding industry had been badly affected by the pandemic and the whole hospitality sector was \"on hold\".\n\nIt blamed the government for a lack of \"any directions, help or guidance as to how we are looking to open in the near future\" which meant it was \"impossible\" to provide any clear information to clients.\n\n\"We completely understand the difficulty couples, hoping to get married, are in, and want to let them know that we will be supporting them fully, once the industry is back,\" a spokesman said.\n\n\"As soon as the government provides a pathway to opening the industry back, we will be contacting all of our loyal customers and making sure they receive the urgent attention we know they deserve.\"\n\nThe BBC understands the CMA cannot comment on individual cases.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Five hundred teaching staff and 8,000 pupils are currently self-isolating\n\nLiverpool is considering a two-week half-term break for schools as part of its \"battle with Covid-19\", its mayor has said.\n\nThe city has the third highest number of infections in England.\n\nUnder the plan, backed by a teaching union, pupils would be taught remotely at home for the second week.\n\nMayor Joe Anderson said teachers were under \"huge pressure\" as almost 500 teaching staff and 8,000 pupils are currently self-isolating.\n\nThe Local Democracy Reporting Service reports that almost 900 positive cases have been reported among staff and students in Liverpool schools since September and current attendance rate is 77%.\n\nA Liverpool City Council spokesperson said there would be \"no announcement that schools are closing\".\n\nThe city has 660 cases per 100,000 per population in the week up to 11 October. This is behind Nottingham, which has 892, and Knowsley with 688, according to Public Health England data.\n\nLiverpool Mayor Joe Anderson said teachers were under \"huge pressure\"\n\nLiverpool City Region has been put in the top tier of the government's new system of coronavirus restrictions.\n\nHowever, Mr Anderson has claimed in a tweet that Prime Minister Boris Johnson's \"deadly dithering has caused untold grief\" and called on the government for a \"circuit breaker\" lockdown to help prevent the virus spreading.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Joe Anderson This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe Labour mayor said the \"virus was out of control\" in the city, with \"30 deaths\" in the past seven days.\n\n\"We need to take serious action, we're in a real battle with Covid-19,\" he said.\n\n\"I know it can cause disruption to parents but at the same time our teaching staff are under huge pressure.\n\n\"We have got hundreds of people in the teaching profession who are isolating at the moment as well as pupils.\"\n\nMr Anderson said it was a \"very anxious\" time in Liverpool and the \"virus had run out of control\" with hospitals under huge strain, too.\n\nHe added he would consult with other council leaders across the city region over the proposal for an additional week's school holiday at half-term.\n\nLiverpool has the third highest number of infections in England\n\nLiverpool's Liberal Democrats are also backing the move.\n\nCouncillor Liz Makinson, the Lib Dems education spokesperson, said the infection rates in schools since September were \"frightening\".\n\n\"There is only one school in the city that has not had any positive cases of Covid-19. Three hundred and eighty five teachers have tested positive and 21,619 pupils have had to isolate,\" she said.\n\nDamian McNulty, from the NASUWT teachers' union, said the second week was needed as a \"circuit breaker\" as teaching staff and pupils had been \"very stressed\".\n\nThe \"crisis\" of the test and trace system had seen schools conducting their own tracing when children were ill and sent home \"on a daily basis\", he said.\n\nThe city council said in a statement it would not be making any announcements about schools closing.\n\n\"We will continue to work with the DfE (Department for Education) and the Schools Commissioner on the challenges the city faces,\" a council spokesperson added.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe UK faces a \"period of destitution\" in which families \"can't put shoes on\" children, the government's former homelessness adviser has warned.\n\nThe government has promised to pay two-thirds of wages from 1 November for workers at firms forced to close under tougher Covid restrictions.\n\nBut Dame Louise Casey said this reduced level of support would not \"cut it\".\n\nShe told the BBC many \"normal people, trying to get on in normal lives\" risked falling into poverty.\n\nThe Treasury said its \"priority\" was to protect jobs and incomes and it had made \"our welfare system more generous\".\n\nThe furlough scheme - under which the government and firms are together paying up to 80% of people's wages, to a maximum of £2,500 a month - ends on 31 October.\n\nUnder its replacement, the job support scheme, those in \"viable jobs\" able to work at least one-third of their hours will get 77% of their pay, with the government contribution capped at £697.92 per month.\n\nEmployees at UK firms ordered to close completely will get 67% of wages of their usual salary paid - up to a maximum of £2,100 a month.\n\nDame Louise told BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg this was \"not going to be good enough\".\n\nShe said: \"It's like you're saying to people, 'You can only afford two-thirds of your rent, you can only afford two-thirds of the food that you need to put on the table.'\n\n\"There's this sense from Downing Street and from Westminster that people will make do. Well, they weren't coping before Covid.\"\n\nIn England, so far only Liverpool has been placed in the highest Tier 3 restrictions, under which pubs and bars not serving meals will be closed.\n\nBut other areas, particularly in northern England, could soon follow if Covid infection rates continue to rise sharply.\n\nPubs and restaurants across central Scotland have also been closed until 25 October.\n\n\"We are looking at a period of destitution,\" said Dame Louise.\n\n\"I can't impress upon you enough that I think we are heading into an unprecedented period. We're already in it and it's going to get worse. And it needs a more cross-government cross-society response.\"\n\n\"Do we want to go back to the days where people can't put shoes on the children's feet?\" she added.\n\n\"Are we actually asking people in places like Liverpool to go out and prostitute themselves, so that they could put food on the table?\"\n\nDame Louise also questioned Chancellor Rishi Sunak for saying that those on the lowest wages could also claim Universal Credit to \"compensate for a good chunk\" of lost earnings.\n\nShe said it was \"unprecedented for a Conservative chancellor to say 'well, don't worry, go on to Universal Credit'\".\n\n\"That's not necessarily what you'd expect from a Conservative chancellor, who should be about jobs and about keeping people in employment.\"\n\nThe standard monthly Universal Credit allowance for a couple in which at least one partner is aged 25 or above is £594.04.\n\nThe extra amount for a first child is a maximum of £281.25, while it is £235.83 for other children.\n\nThe government has added £20 a week to Universal Credit payments, but this is due to end in April.\n\nDame Louise called the plight of many working people \"unprecedented\", adding: \"I have never worked in a situation where I'm so concerned about what's going to happen.\"\n\n\"We need an unprecedented spending review that is generous and kind and [it] needs to make sure that we don't have hungry children,\" she said.\n\nLouise Casey has a reputation for getting things done.\n\nThat's why successive governments, including this one, have brought her into the fold - not to make them feel good, but to tell the truth about what needs to happen to achieve their aims.\n\nThat's why her warning today could be hard for the government to ignore.\n\nSince the pandemic struck, the Treasury has racked up generationally massive bills to support businesses and families through the crisis.\n\nBut as we enter the grim challenge of the second wave, that support, while still huge, is dwindling.\n\nFor Dame Louise, that risks pulling out vital support for families at the very moment when it is needed most.\n\nHer verdict is haunting. With millions more people facing tighter restrictions, her fear is that could mean real destitution for countless families.\n\nA Treasury spokesman said: \"Our priority since the start of this outbreak has been to protect as many jobs and incomes as possible - and that will continue as we go through the difficult months ahead.\n\n\"The expanded job support scheme is one element of our unprecedented package of support and its generosity is in line with similar schemes provided by European counterparts.\"\n\nThe government has \"invested more than £9bn in making our welfare system more generous\", with increases both in Universal Credit and local housing allowance, the spokesman said.\n\n\"This has made the system more responsive to people's needs, with the lowest-paid in society seeing an increase in the support they receive.\"\n\nBut Labour said the chancellor had \"abandoned workers and families in parts of the country under local restrictions\" and \"must think again\".\n\nShadow chief secretary to the Treasury Bridget Phillipson added: \"People shouldn't have to worry about meeting their rent, paying the bills or putting food on the table because the government has lost control of virus.\"\n\nEarlier this year, Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed Dame Louise to head up the review into homelessness, saying he was \"absolutely determined to end rough sleeping once and for all\".\n\nBut when the pandemic hit, Dame Louise instead became the head of the government's homeless Covid taskforce, organising emergency housing for almost 15,000 rough sleepers during lockdown.\n\nShe stepped back from the role in August.", "Thousands of families have been displaced by the fighting\n\nFears are growing for civilians caught up in fighting between government forces and the Taliban in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province.\n\nThere have been several days of clashes as Afghan forces, supported by US air strikes, try to defend Helmand's strategically important capital, Lashkar Gah, from a Taliban assault.\n\nIt is estimated that about 35,000 people have so far fled their homes.\n\nAmnesty International called on both sides to give civilians \"safe passage\".\n\nThe group said the fighting had taken out power in Lashkar Gah and shut down telecommunication networks, and that all exit routes from the city had been blocked.\n\n\"The situation for civilians in Lashkar Gah is grave and could deteriorate rapidly in the coming days. Tens of thousands of people are trapped in the middle of a bloody battle that shows no sign of abating,\" Omar Waraich, head of South Asia at Amnesty International, said in a statement.\n\nThe United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan earlier called on both sides to \"take all feasible measures to protect civilians\", including \"safe paths for those wishing to leave\".\n\nAid agencies are reporting that many civilians are now sleeping on the streets without shelter.\n\nOne family told the BBC earlier this week that they left their home in Lashkar Gah with only the clothes they were wearing. Others said they feared they might die from hunger, while staff at local hospitals said they had admitted dozens of casualties.\n\nPregnant women are among those to have been injured in the fighting in Helmand.\n\nOne 18-year-old woman told Reuters news agency that she lost her baby when she was shot in the stomach while caught in the cross-fire in Gereshk district this week.\n\n\"I hadn't even chosen a name for him,\" she said. \"My innocent child, gone forever.\"\n\nThe battle over Lashkar Gah marks the first big Taliban offensive since historic peace talks between the two sides began last month.\n\nCorrespondents say Taliban actions on the battlefield are again raising questions about their commitment to the negotiating table.\n\nTwo Afghan military helicopters transporting wounded soldiers collided on Wednesday, killing nine people on board. Afghanistan's defence ministry said the collision was due to \"technical issues\".", "The star said he was \"floored\" by the extent of his victory\n\nPost Malone was the big winner at the 2020 Billboard Music Awards, taking home nine prizes including top artist.\n\nEight of his trophies were delivered in a cart by host Kelly Clarkson, who pushed them towards him \"Covid-style\".\n\n\"I can't touch you, so I had to wheel it out,\" joked the singer.\n\nThe three-hour ceremony, which was originally scheduled for April, was held at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. While many artists performed in person, there was no live audience.\n\nDue to the delay, the show mostly celebrated hits from last year, with Lil Nas X taking home four prizes for his hit single Old Town Road.\n\nMany of the winners and performers used the televised ceremony to urge fans to vote in the US presidential election.\n\nAccepting the top song sales artist prize, Lizzo delivered an impassioned speech while wearing a dress emblazoned with the word \"vote\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Billboard Music Awards This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n\"I've been thinking a lot about suppression, and the voices that refuse to be suppressed,\" she said. \"Let me tell y'all something. When people try to suppress something, it's normally because that thing holds power. They're afraid of your power.\n\n\"There's power in who you are. There's power in your voice. So whether it's through music, protest or your right to vote, use your power, use your voice, and refuse to be suppressed.\"\n\nBillie Eilish, who picked up three awards, including top female artist and top new artist, was more succinct, saying simply: \"Please vote, please wear a mask, please wash your hands and be safe.\"\n\nBillie Eilish wore a mask as she accepted her three awards, including top female artist\n\nHowever, broadcaster NBC censored Demi Lovato's performance of Commander-In-Chief - a new song that takes aim at President Trump. Although she was permitted to play the song in full, a video screen displaying the message \"Vote\" was edited out of the TV show.\n\nAccording to TMZ, the network felt the message would be seen as a call to vote against the president, rather than a neutral call to action.\n\nDespite that, the network tweeted a photo of Lovato's performance in which the \"Vote\" backdrop dominated the image. Lovato retweeted the picture without comment.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by NBC Entertainment This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nJohn Legend gave one of the night's most moving performances, dedicating the song Never Break to his wife Chrissy Teigen, just weeks after the couple lost their unborn baby.\n\nSeveral other performers used their stage time to send messages of hope - with Alicia Keys playing the empowering ballad Loves Looks Better and country star Luke Combs delivering a heartfelt performance of Better Together.\n\n\"I know everybody out there has been through so much this year,\" Combs said, accepting the prize for top country artist.\n\n\"I want to thank the crew that is working on this show tonight, because they have gone through some insane stuff to make this happen for you guys. I hope everybody's staying safe at home.\"\n\nElsewhere, BTS performed a slower live band arrangement of their hit single Dynamite from South Korea, before picking up the fan-voted top social artist prize.\n\nDoja Cat gave off vibes of Chicago's Roxie Hart as she performed a medley of hits - wearing a throwback dress and wig, while combining Bob Fosse choreography with the TikTok dance craze that propelled her single Say So into the charts.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by k⁷ This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nBritish winners included Harry Styles, who received the Billboard Chart Achievement award; Ellie Goulding, whose single Close To Me was named best electronic song; and Sir Elton John, who won best rock tour.\n\nKanye West's spiritually-charged ninth album Jesus Is King saw him named top gospel artist, while Khalid won five awards, including best R&B album.\n\nRun The Jewels rapper Killer Mike was honoured with the first ever Billboard Change Maker award, recognising his work in championing community activism and civil rights.\n\nHe used his speech to highlight the importance of the arts in promoting social change.\n\n\"Kids out there that sing and dance, what you do is worthy,\" he said. \"You are artists, and your goal should be to express the very reality around you in the very most beautiful or ugliest of ways that you see fit.\n\n\"You matter more than you know,\" he continued. \"The kids plotting, planning, strategising, on the ground mobilising, you are needed more than ever. I'm a culmination of all these things.\"\n\nAlicia Keys gave a powerful performance of Love Looks Better\n\nSia performed Courage To Change in an electric pink gown, topped off with a giant yellow bow\n\nCountry singer Garth Brooks took home the icon award, while Clarkson paid tribute to rock legend Eddie Van Halen, who died of cancer last week.\n\n\"Just a few days ago, a true giant was taken from us,\" said the singer. \"He was a legendary guitarist, an amazing musician and an incredible songwriter. He will never be forgotten.\"\n\nR&B legends En Vogue closed the show with a rousing performance of their anti-racism anthem Free Your Mind.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by Billboard Music Awards This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMalone's domination of the award categories came after a year in which he scored two multi-platinum singles in the US, Sunflower and Circles; while his third album, Hollywood's Bleeding sold three million copies.\n\nThe singer-songwriter and rapper, 25, said he was \"blown away, just by the love that everybody's shown to me\".\n\n\"We just try our best every day... to reach out to people who might not have anybody to turn to and show everybody that they're not alone, and music can bring everybody together,\" he added.\n\n\"It's absolutely incredible and I just want to say, thank you so very much, ladies and gentlemen. I'm blown away. I'm floored.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Two wards in Altnagelvin's north wing are now being used to treat Covid-19 patients\n\nHospital admissions of patients with coronavirus in NI's Covid-19 hotspot are \"doubling every three to four days\", the Western Trust has said.\n\nThirty-one patients are now being treated for coronavirus at Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry - five people are in intensive care.\n\nTwo additional wards at Altnagelvin have been opened to treat coronavirus patients.\n\nA third ward has been identified for further admissions, the trust said.\n\nThere have been 3,161 confirmed cases in the Derry and Strabane council area since March - 1,463 of them were diagnosed in the past seven days.\n\nThree people have reported to have died in Derry and Strabane since Friday after testing positive for coronavirus, according to daily figures from the Department of Health.\n\nLast week, the Derry and Strabane council area was placed under tighter restrictions to help curb the growing number of cases.\n\nBut the infection rate in Derry and Strabane is continuing to rise.\n\nDirector of acute services, Geraldine McKay, said the rate of infection was \"increasing at pace\".\n\n\"We have revised the Altnagelvin surge plan to indicate that,\" she said.\n\n\"There are two wards in the north wing that are now Covid wards, we also have a further third ward identified in the south building.\"\n\nA total of 1,463 cases of coroanvirus have been diagnosed in Derry and Strabane over the past seven days.\n\nShe said both the trust's acute hospitals - Altnagelvin and the South West Acute Hospital in County Fermanagh - are \"right in the middle of the surge at this time\".\n\n\"Altnagelvin is at red, the South West at amber,\" she added.\n\nThe Western Trust has previously warned that it is facing increased staff pressures, as rising levels of Covid-19 in the community mean more and more staff are being asked to self-isolate.\n\nOn Monday the trust confirmed a total of 460 staff, across all disciplines, are not able to work at present - 345 at Altnagelvin and 115 at the South West hospital.\n\nNot all staff are absent because of Covid-19, the trust said, but it has had \"a major impact on those numbers\".\n\nElective orthopaedic inpatient services have been suspended and restrictions on visiting at the trust are now also in place as part of its surge plan.\n\n\"Unfortunately we have seen a growing number of incidents where our own staff have been faced with verbal abuse and aggression regarding some of the restrictions around visiting,\" Brian McFettridge, assistant director in critical care at Altnagelvin Hospital said.\n\nHe added: \"We would ask the public to be patient with us and to be kind\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Special safety measures were put in place to protect the Queen\n\nThe Queen has carried out her first public engagement outside of a royal residence in seven months.\n\nThe monarch, 94, was joined by the Duke of Cambridge for the visit to Porton Down, near Salisbury, to meet scientists at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL).\n\nThey also met staff involved in the rapid response to the Novichok poisoning attack in Salisbury in 2018.\n\nSpecial safety measures were put in place to protect the Queen.\n\nShe arrived separately to her grandson William and all those due to come into close contact with the pair were tested for coronavirus ahead of the visit and came back negative. Small groups of people taking part in the event were arranged two metres apart.\n\nNeither the monarch nor William wore a face covering when they arrived and they walked two metres apart.\n\nKensington Palace declined to comment as to whether the duke was required to have a test in order to be able to accompany his grandmother.\n\nThe Queen was last seen outside a royal residence on 9 March, when she joined the Royal Family at Westminster Abbey for a Commonwealth Day service\n\nA Buckingham Palace spokeswoman said: \"Specific advice has been sought from the medical household and relevant parties, and all necessary precautions taken, working closely with DSTL.\"\n\nBut the pressure group Republic said the Queen should have been \"setting an example\" by wearing a face mask.\n\nFace coverings are required by law in certain indoor settings, such as on public transport, in shops and places of worship.\n\nThe government recommends wearing a face covering in indoor places where social distancing may be difficult and where the public come into contact with those they do not normally meet.\n\nRoyal commentator Joe Little, managing editor of Majesty magazine, said the Queen and William would inevitably be criticised, but medical advice would have been carefully followed.\n\nUntil now, the Queen has been in royal residences with a household of reduced staff, nicknamed HMS Bubble.\n\nShe knighted Captain Sir Tom Moore in the grounds of Windsor Castle in July and had also watched a socially-distanced Trooping the Colour there for her birthday the previous month.\n\nThe Queen travelled to Balmoral for her private summer break and also spent a few weeks in Sandringham before returning to Windsor on 6 October.\n\nThe Queen and the Duke of Cambridge watch a demonstration of a forensic explosives investigation featuring an explosives detection dog named Max\n\nBefore the Porton Down visit, she had last been seen outside a royal residence on 9 March, when she joined the Royal Family at Westminster Abbey for a Commonwealth Day service.\n\nThe monarch and William were shown weaponry used in counter-intelligence during their visit to DSTL and met counter-terrorism staff.\n\nAs part of the visit, they then spoke to those involved in identifying the nerve agent used in the Novichok incident, and those who worked on the decontamination clean-up operation.\n\nThe Queen unveils a plaque to officially open the new Energetics Analysis Centre at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory\n\nRussian intelligence has been accused of being behind the attempted assassination of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.\n\nMonths after the attack, Dawn Sturgess and her partner Charlie Rowley fell ill in nearby Amesbury. Ms Sturgess later died after coming into contact with a perfume bottle believed to be linked to the case.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. There would need to be 50,000 homes transformed a year until 2050, experts say\n\nThousands of old homes should be \"retro-fitted\" with energy-saving improvements to create jobs as part of the economic recovery from coronavirus, housing bodies have urged.\n\nBetter insulation and the latest energy-efficient technology could cut bills and help tackle climate change.\n\nThe Federation of Master Builders wants Wales to push ahead with a programme.\n\nThe Welsh Government said housing had an important role in the \"green recovery\" after Covid-19.\n\nThese new solar-powered timber homes in Pembrokeshire demonstrate the technology in new developments\n\nIfan Glyn, director of FMB Cymru, said Wales had the oldest housing stock in Europe but investing in an energy efficiency upgrade programme would \"turbocharge\" the building industry.\n\n\"Retrofitting ticks all the boxes: it creates good quality jobs and boosts economic growth whilst also helping to tackle fuel poverty and climate change,\" he added.\n\nOver the next 10 years, a national retrofit programme should focus on council houses, social housing and privately-owned homes in fuel poverty, a Welsh Government advisory group on the decarbonisation of homes has suggested.\n\nThat is 300,000 (21%) of Wales' 1.4 million homes.\n\nTo focus on costs alone is to miss the bigger picture which is the benefits such as reduced fuel bills, reduced green house gases, increased employment\n\nAn independent review on decarbonising homes in Wales, published last year, found that 12% of homes are in fuel poverty.\n\nChristopher Jofeh, chair of the advisory group, said: \"It's a huge challenge, because we've got almost 1.4 million homes so that would mean 50,000 homes being done each year.\n\n\"Costs will be high and there will be lots of people who can't afford it so we would need public money to do that. I have no doubt that if the Welsh Government announced a 10-year programme that the industry would respond.\"\n\nHe added: \"To focus on costs alone is to miss the bigger picture, which is the benefits such as reduced fuel bills, reduced green house gases, increased employment, improvements in health for people living in cold, damp homes and enormous tax revenues for the Treasury to pay for public services improvements.\n\n\"Yes, it's expensive but it's necessary and it would deliver enormous benefits.\"\n• None 32% of Welsh homes were built before 1919\n• None £0.5bn to £1bn retrofit spending suggested per year for the next 10 years\n\nIn 2019, the Welsh minister for environment, energy and rural affairs declared the ambition \"to bring forward a target for Wales to achieve net-zero emissions no later than 2050\".\n\nSome local authorities have already started work to introduce the latest carbon neutral technology to their existing housing stock.\n\nA row of bungalows in the Swansea valley have recently undergone a retrofit by the council\n\nA row of council-owned bungalows at Craig-cefn-parc near Clydach in the Swansea valley which used oil, LPG and electric heaters, have now been retro-fitted with insulated wall rendering.\n\nThey also have a system which circulates filtered air through ceiling vents and a Tesla battery which stores electricity generated by solar panels.\n\nCommunity Housing Cymru said the pandemic had \"shone a light\" on the importance of a good home for everyone's wellbeing, and housing must now be \"at the heart of Welsh Government's plans for the economic recovery in Wales\".\n\nIt said it could create 50,000 new jobs, £1.8bn fuel savings for tenants and deliver more than £23.2bn of economic activity over the next 20 years.\n\n\"Poor quality housing costs the Welsh NHS more than £95m each year, and investment in housing associations is key to deliver the high quality, affordable homes Wales needs to tackle this,\" a spokesman said.\n\nThe Welsh Government said: \"We are committed to a green recovery from the pandemic which creates a fairer Wales - housing has an important role to play in achieving this.\"\n\nIt said its Innovative Housing Programme funded the development of new models of social housing models and it would be announcing details of an extensive new programme to retrofit existing homes with energy efficiency measures.\n\n\"Later this year, we will also be consulting on a new plan to tackle fuel poverty, which will include continued investment in the Warm Homes Programme and exploring new ways to help reduce fuel poverty and improve home energy efficiency,\" a spokesman added.", "At the age of 49, Sarah Fisher feels her life is on a knife-edge.\n\nShe had a heart attack during lockdown and has subsequently been diagnosed with heart failure.\n\nIn July, she was told she needed to have an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) fitted, which can shock the heart back into rhythm when it detects a potential cardiac arrest.\n\nBut 12 weeks on, she is still waiting. \"I could have a cardiac arrest at any point,\" Sarah says.\n\n\"It is awful not knowing what is going to happen.\n\n\"I am on the urgent list - but the infection rates are rising and the clinics are closing.\n\n\"I don't know when I will get it.\n\n\"There are so many people in my position - we don't have Covid but our lives are at risk too.\n\n\"We are the forgotten victims of this pandemic.\"\n\nBritish Heart Foundation analysis of Office for National Statistics data for England and Wales found almost 800 extra deaths from heart disease among under-65s from March to July - 15% more than would be expected.\n\nThe rate of death was highest during the full lockdown - but, worryingly, the trend continued afterwards.\n\nThe charity blames delays in people seeking care, as well as reduced access to routine tests and treatments.\n\nAnd NHS England figures show a sharp rise in the numbers waiting over six weeks for a whole range of key tests, including echocardiograms for hearts.\n\nBHF associate medical director Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan says the consequences of the pandemic have been \"tragic\".\n\n\"Covid has put people with heart and circulatory conditions at greater risk than ever,\" she says.\n\nAnd it is essential people seek help if they are worried about their health.\n\n\"Don't delay because you think hospitals are too busy,\" Babu-Narayan says.\n\n\"The NHS still has systems in place to safely treat you.\"\n\nHeart disease is not the only condition affected. Similar warnings have been made by patient groups for other conditions.\n\nMacmillan Cancer Support says a drop in referrals for urgent cancer check-ups, people starting treatment and the numbers being screened is threatening to have a \"traumatic\" impact on people's lives now and in the future.\n\nIt is unclear how many lives have been lost for non-Covid reasons.\n\nThere were a total of 13,000 non-Covid excess deaths in England and Wales during the first eight weeks of the pandemic.\n\nSince then, overall death rates have returned to close to normal.\n\nBut many more people than would be expected are still dying at home.\n\nAn extra 28,000 deaths in private homes have been recorded since the pandemic started, which is higher than the excess death toll in care homes.\n\nAnd a third of them were in July, August and September, when Covid death rates were very low.\n\nThe Office for National Statistics is investigating the cause.\n\nThe numbers dying in hospital have been lower than expected in recent months, so it may just be people are choosing to die at home.\n\nBut the Nuffield Trust says it could also be a sign people are going without vital treatment.\n\nThe numbers attending accident-and-emergency units dropped by 50% in April and have still not recovered to normal levels.\n• None What do global death patterns reveal about the UK?", "Morrisons, Waitrose and John Lewis have said they won't be using glitter in own-brand Christmas products this year.\n\nThe tiny pieces of plastic can wash into the environment, harm wildlife, and get into the food chain.\n\nThe move is part of a wider push by retailers to try to reduce festive plastics pollution.\n\nBoots said it would be cutting out single-use plastic packaging from Christmas gifts, taking 2,000 tonnes of plastic from its ranges.\n\nAsda announced in September that it would launch its first sustainable Christmas range, and Tesco uses only edible glitter.\n\nSainsbury's said that this year \"customers will find no glitter on our Christmas cards, wrapping paper or gift bags.\" It has also removed glitter used on a range of crackers, decorations, and flowers.\n\nBetween four and 12 million tonnes of plastic waste makes its way into oceans every year, mainly through rivers, according to estimates.\n\nThat plastic then breaks down into smaller, toxic pieces, which can be ingested by creatures, harming and potentially killing them, if it fills their stomachs.\n\nMorrisons will ditch glitter on own brand Christmas products\n\nMorrisons said on Wednesday that it would completely remove glitter from all of its own brand Christmas ranges including cards, crackers, wrapping paper, present bags, flowers, plants and wreaths.\n\nIt will also include only paper, metal or wooden toys in its Christmas crackers, which will be completely plastic-free, it said.\n\nGlitter is an \"ecological hazard\" which \"takes hundreds of years to degrade\" once it gets into rivers and oceans, Morrisons said.\n\nMorrisons said its decision would remove 50 tonnes of plastic from its shelves during the festive period.\n\nChristine Bryce, Morrisons home director, said: \"Every time a cracker is pulled, or a card is opened, plastics have been used... but just the once.\n\n\"So, we've taken glitter and plastic out of our festive range this year - so that our customers can enjoy their festivities without worrying about the environmental impact.\"\n\nWaitrose and John Lewis will also remove glitter from all single-use products this Christmas.\n\n\"All own-brand cards, crackers, wrapping paper, gift bags are now 100% glitter-free,\" it said in a statement.\n\nWaitrose has been phasing out glitter over the past few years, and has a target to make its own brand packaging widely recycled, reusable or home compostable by 2023.\n\nBoots said searches for ecologically friendly products on its website had grown by almost a third in a year.\n\nIt said that it would completely ditch single-use plastic packaging this year, and that gift packaging \"is intended to be recycled or reused.\"\n\nRetailers \"are right to ditch unnecessary plastic this Christmas\" said campaign group Friends of the Earth.\n\n\"People can still enjoy the festive season without the glitter and pointless packaging that add to the waves of plastic pollution that pour into our environment every year and threaten our wildlife,\" said Friends of the Earth campaigner Tony Bosworth.\n\nBut he said \"we must go much further to end the scourge of plastic pollution\" and called for the UK government to set targets for firms to phase out the use of unnecessary plastic.", "Boris Johnson has been at pains to use every chance recently to say how much restricting our lives bothers him.\n\nBranding himself a \"freedom-loving Tory\", time and again his reluctance for further clamp downs is clear.\n\nBut can he, should he, hold out? It's clear in black and white now that the scientific advisers he used to boast of following think it is maybe even past the time to act.\n\nMinutes from Sage (the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) and the very public view from England's Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, that the national measures aren't adequate made that plain.\n\nAnd the BBC understands that health officials have been considering putting Greater Manchester and Lancashire into the highest level of restrictions, although a decision won't come on Tuesday.\n\nThe Labour leader's call for a \"circuit-breaker\" has added to the volume of demand for extra caution - marking the end of the phase of what he used to describe as constructive opposition.\n\nSir Keir Starmer has been inching away from the broad frontbench consensus on how to handle coronavirus for weeks.\n\nTo the frustration of some on his own side, rather than scream down the government's plans, he has developed an attack on the government's ability to handle the situation and to act quickly enough.\n\nSir Keir Starmer has become increasingly critical of Boris Johnson's performance\n\nBut his call for a circuit-breaker means he believes the government has simply got its wrong.\n\nPolling suggests too that there is public desire for tougher actions to prevent a terrible second wave. Some senior figures in government agree.\n\nYet the balance of desire in the Conservative Party has shifted, with more pleading for finding ways to live with the virus, rather than lock down again. The point has been made time and again on the back benches.\n\nNow a junior member of the government, Chris Green, has resigned in protest at the restrictions in his Bolton constituency, attacking the government's strategy completely. (If you have been paying VERY close attention to politics you might remember it's not the first time Mr Green has quit, and the last time round, Simon Hart, who is now Welsh secretary, was less than flattering about whether it mattered very much.)\n\nBut many ministers are cautious about anything that goes beyond the regional tiered approach that was announced only on Monday.\n\nAnd the Treasury in particular is reluctant to budge - fearing the economic savagery of even a short, sharp national period of more restrictions.\n\nAs we've discussed before, none of this is easy. There is no precedent for how to handle the situation. Nor is there a parallel universe where the government or MPs can judge what would have happened if they hadn't taken the actions they've done already.\n\nBut as cases continue to rise, one Whitehall insider told me that people are preparing for what looks logical on paper - a short period of more intense restrictions everywhere in England.\n\nIt's not what No 10 wants to have to do, but to use Whitehall cliché, the discussions are \"live\" - in other words, it may well happen.\n\nThe prime minister may boast about his love of liberty, but he'll be reluctant too to leave himself open to a repeat of the allegations he faced at the start of the pandemic - that government action to protect people's health was too little, and too late.", "The regional facility at Belfast City Hospital's tower block was temporarily stood down in May\n\nNorthern Ireland's Nightingale hospital has been re-established due to Covid-19 pressures, Health Minister Robin Swann has said.\n\nThe Nightingale, at Belfast City Hospital's tower block, was stood down in May as cases began to decrease.\n\nMr Swann said there were now \"rapidly escalating pressures\" across all of NI's health trusts.\n\n\"It is not something I wanted to do - it was a decision I tried to hold off on for as long as possible,\" he said.\n\n\"The virus is rapidly and exponentially and urgent action was needed.\"\n\nNightingale hospitals are non-permanent facilities that were set up across the UK during the first wave of the pandemic.\n\nOn Tuesday, the Belfast Trust announced it was to use an intensive care unit in the Nightingale facility for its Covid patients, in a move which only affected the Belfast Trust area.\n\nMr Swann's announcement on Wednesday will see the facility reopen for Covid-19 admission from across Northern Ireland.\n\nThe decision comes as health chiefs warned that some services were beginning to suffer due to Covid-related pressures.\n\nOn Wednesday it was announced more restrictions would be placed on the hospitality industry and schools.\n\nMr Swann acknowledged the public had \"many questions, doubts and fears\" about the new restrictions.\n\n\"My heart goes out to all those businesses who will now come under even more pressure and to all those people whose lives and plans have been thrown up into the air,\" he said.\n\nThe deaths of another four people who tested positive for Covid-19 were reported by the Department of Health on Wednesday, bringing the death toll to 602.\n\nThe department also reported another record high in the number of newly-diagnosed cases, with 1,217 people testing positive.\n\nNI's chief scientific adviser said the increase in cases of Covid-19 cases in NI was not due to increased testing but instead \"reflect a genuine increase in community transmission\".\n\nNI's chief scientific adviser said the average number of daily cases recorded was currently 950\n\nProf Ian Young, who was alongside Mr Swann at the Stormont briefing, said testing had increased by 25% while cases had more than doubled.\n\n\"The average number of positive tests continues to rise and has now reached over 12% in the last seven days,\" he said.\n\n\"To put this into context, the World Health Organization suggests that anything over 5% reflects an epidemic which is out of control.\"\n\nProf Young said there had been a \"sustained and dramatic rise in the average number of cases\" being recorded in NI each day - he said the average was currently 950 cases per day.\n\nHe added the new restrictions \"don't represent a lockdown\" but were designed to reduce mixing between people to allow a chance to reduce the R-number down to less than one.\n\nR is the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to, on average.\n\n\"Ideally between 0.7 and 0.9 - that's the goal and we all have a role in achieving that,\" Prof Young said.\n\nNorthern Ireland's chief medical officer told the briefing new restrictions coming into force across NI could \"achieve the reset we need so badly\".\n\nDr Michael McBride said it would take two to three weeks before the effects of the measures became clear.\n\n\"It's time to wise up,\" he said.\n\n\"The new measures will only work if each one of us recommits to strictly following the health advice.\"", "Binky Felstead has spoken out about her miscarriage\n\nMade in Chelsea star Binky Felstead says she wants to \"break the stigma\" around miscarriage and open up conversations about baby loss.\n\nLots of the influencer's followers and friends got in touch with her after she posted on Instagram about losing her baby.\n\nThe 30-year-old told Newsbeat many of those people had never talked about their own miscarriages.\n\n\"It's heart-breaking, so I felt that I'd like to try and break the stigma.\"\n\nAbout one in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage, and it's most common in the first three months of pregnancy.\n\nAfter 24 weeks, it's known as stillbirth.\n\nBinky says her miscarriage happened when she was almost 12 weeks pregnant.\n\nShe had two early scans which showed \"a strong heartbeat\", but at the third scan she was told there wasn't a heartbeat at all.\n\n\"It's such important issue to raise because no-one really talks about it,\" she says.\n\n\"It's almost like it's a taboo subject.\"\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by binkyfelstead This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nShe adds: \"It's obviously deeply personal, incredibly emotional and physically tiring.\n\n\"In all honesty the last thing you want to do is talk about it.\"\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post 2 by binkyfelstead This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nBinky told Newsbeat that she and partner Max Darnton made the decision to post about her miscarriage because her followers deserved to see her \"reality\".\n\n\"I've always shared my happy moments, from when I got pregnant with India, when I had India and my engagement last month.\n\n\"I don't think it's reality - or that it's fair - that I don't share my down time as well.\n\n\"The one piece of advice I feel that I can give is to make sure you allow yourself to physically and emotionally heal.\"\n\nSince Binky's post, the Miscarriage Association says it's been inundated with phone calls from women.\n\n\"It's really helpful when someone well-known like Binky talks publicly about her experience of miscarriage because it's not an easy thing to do,\" says Ruth Bender-Atik from the Miscarriage Association..\n\n\"For some reason it's still a taboo and it can be difficult to talk about.\n\n\"Sometimes you feel like you could have done better, lots of people feel like it's because they've done something wrong and that they could have done something.\n\n\"It's hard to talk about, but it really helps if we can get miscarriage talked about more.\"\n\nThe coronavirus pandemic has had a major impact for women who have had a miscarriage.\n\nCharities say it's complicated grief, with partners unable to always attend appointments and scans.\n\nThere have been some changes to official NHS guidance, but it's still an issue for many.\n\n\"Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, feelings of isolation have become more widespread than ever and many people have begun to talk more openly about grief,\" Dr Clea Harmer, chief executive of the stillbirth and neonatal death charity (SANDS) said.\n\n\"Many of those whose baby died during the pandemic will not have been able to spend time making memories or saying goodbye to their baby in the way they would have wanted to.\n\n\"Now more than ever, we can all come together to let those affected by pregnancy and baby loss know they are not alone and that we are all here to support them.\"\n\nListen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.", "Ken McCallum took up his role in April\n\nBritain is facing a \"nasty mix\" of national security threats, from hostile state activity by Russia and China to fast-growing right-wing terrorism, the new director general of MI5 has said.\n\nKen McCallum said terrorism remains the biggest threat - with Northern Irish and Islamist extremism also a concern.\n\nThe Covid lockdown raised the risk of online contact between groups, and made covert surveillance harder, he added.\n\nMr McCallum was speaking at his first media briefing as head of the service.\n\nThe new man at the top of the UK's domestic intelligence agency since April is a slim, youthful Glaswegian mathematician by training. He likes hiking up mountains when his parenting and work allows.\n\nAfter 24 years at MI5, some of it seconded to industry, he is surprisingly comfortable in front of the camera and he is setting about making parts of his organisation more visible to the public.\n\n\"We need to be increasingly visible, opening up new partnerships,\" Mr McCallum said, adding: \"MI5's operational successes are mostly invisible.\"\n\nMr McCallum said empty streets in lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic have made covert surveillance far harder.\n\nFewer crowds give adversaries fewer opportunities to attack but make the job of MI5's watchers more conspicuous.\n\n\"We spend our days and nights planting microphones in attics - with warrants - and meeting covert informants,\" said Mr McCallum, \"so we are used to operating in secret with extreme care.\"\n\nWith MI5's key workers being tasked with safeguarding national security it has had to try to maintain staff levels inside its headquarters building at Thames House with social distancing.\n\nData analysts, scientists, researchers and medically-qualified staff have been seconded to help the NHS and with vaccine research.\n\nTheir work, said Mr McCallum, has included protecting vaccine research from theft and combating deliberate disinformation.\n\nOn the threat from jihadists, Mr McCallum said there are still tens of thousands of people committed to that ideology.\n\nThe challenge was to make the difficult judgements on the small numbers amongst them who are going to turn to violence.\n\nMore terrorists these days, he said, have opted for fast, simple plots, giving away fewer clues and less time to find them.\n\nAround 950 UK-linked extremists travelled to war zones in Syria, he said.\n\nOn average, most of those who have returned did so early on and tended to be less extreme.\n\nA significant number of those who remained have been killed, others are in third countries, some are interned in camps in Syria while yet more are still at large in north-west Syria.\n\nMr McCallum said jihadist plots form the bulk of UK investigations.\n\nThe new threat is from right-wing terrorism, where MI5 took over the lead from the police in April.\n\nOut of 27 terrorist plots disrupted in the last four years, eight have involved right-wing extremists.\n\nMany of the adherents around the world are very young, indicating the problem may be around for some time.\n\nMI5 regularly compares notes with its counterparts in the FBI, European agencies and the other nations in the Five Eyes grouping - US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand .\n\nBut so far there has not emerged a single, global, unifying ideology in the way the Islamic State group or al-Qaeda have had.\n\nRussian, Chinese and Iranian espionage and disruption is all growing in severity and complexity, said Mr McCallum.\n\nThe threats are to people, the economy, infrastructure, academic research and democracy.\n\nMI5 has an operational role in investigating certain individuals and disrupting their activities, and a protective role building up UK's resilience in the cyber and physical spheres.\n\nDealing with China requires a complicated balance, he said.\n\nHe said there is a need to work with China on issues like climate change, but at the same time to be robust in confronting its covert activity.\n\nNew legislation is expected to make a big difference in bringing the law up to date in criminalising what foreign espionage agents get up to inside Britain.\n\nMr McCallum used a meteorological analogy, saying Russia was like bad weather but China was a far greater challenge in the long-term and more like climate change.\n\nSince 2018 Mr McCallum has spent part of career focusing on new technology and Artificial Intelligence, or machine learning.\n\nHe said when a suspect is arrested there are multiple digital devices to be trawled through, often containing terabytes of data.\n\nWith police allowed to hold a suspect for 14 days it can become a race against time to find court-usable evidence such as photographs of guns or proscribed IS flags.\n\nAI helps pluck these out far faster than humans can. It can also help with translations of vast tracts of text.\n\nAnd then there is CCTV footage.\n\nWhen a covert camera is placed watching a door, for example, it might only be opened after hours of no activity. AI will save someone having to trawl through all those hours of nothing.\n\n\"AI has massive applicability for our business,\" Mr McCallum said.\n\nThe Manchester bombing of 2017 prompted public criticism that MI5 should have done more to stop it.\n\nThe bombing was followed by two in-depth reviews looking at both the facts of the case and how MI5 can improve in the future, and the bomber's brother Hashem Abedi was successfully prosecuted.\n\nThere have been sweeping changes but the hardest thing for anyone in MI5 is that \"we cannot stop every single attack\", Mr McCallum said.\n\nMr McCallum, who spent years running covert informants and later led investigative teams before the 2012 London Olympics, is well used to a disrupted home life.\n\nAnd yet, he said: \"When my phone rings late in the evening my stomach still lurches.\"", "Some people who stayed at the YHA Hostel have moved to more permanent accommodation\n\nWales' housing minister says she is \"absolutely determined\" homeless people will not have to go back on to the streets after the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nCouncils are being asked to find permanent homes for hundreds of rough sleepers who moved into emergency accommodation during lockdown.\n\nRooms in hotels, student accommodation and hostels were bought up at the start of the pandemic to provide 800 places.\n\nBut Julie James said that was not \"OK for the longer term\".\n\nAnother £20m will now go towards building homes and converting empty properties.\n\nShe said it would ensure \"that everybody housed stays housed\".\n\n\"We are absolutely determined that no one will have to go back on to the streets,\" Ms James added.\n\nShe said she was worried about a small number of people who were deemed to have \"no recourse to public funds\" because of their unsettled immigration applications.\n\nSara John said she felt more secure at the YHA Hostel in Cardiff\n\nThey include asylum seekers who have been given temporary housing under the Welsh Government's health powers to protect them from Covid-19.\n\nMs James said there were \"tens\" of them in Wales and she urged the UK government to change its rules so they can continue to get help.\n\nThe Home Office said that was \"inaccurate.\"\n\nA spokesman said: \"Asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute are provided with free, fully furnished accommodation, and we continue to provide accommodation and support to those whose claims have been rejected and are unable to return home.\n\n\"We will review this situation by the end of June.\"\n\nIn Cardiff, the council has taken over two hotels to temporarily house homeless people.\n\nOfficers say only a handful of people have remained out on the streets during the pandemic.\n\nSara John, 35, is staying at a YHA hostel with her partner after previously staying at other hostels and spending time on the streets.\n\nShe said coronavirus was \"scary because you don't know if you're going to have the virus or not\".\n\nThe YHA hostel in Cardiff has 89 beds for homeless people\n\n\"There are things you hear but, obviously, I've been out every day and I'm still here,\" she said.\n\nThe YHA hostel, which has 89 beds, makes her feel more secure \"because you can lock away and you've got staff here if you need them\".\n\nManager Gareth Edwards said some people had moved on to more permanent accommodation.\n\n\"We are dealing with 200 and something people at the moment so there's probably going to be a bottleneck of people trying to get into private rented accommodation or supported accommodation in some way,\" he said.\n\n\"I think that's going to be the challenge for us now is to try and identify what people's needs are and where is going to be the best place to place them.\"\n\nShelter Cymru director John Puzey said: \"We now have a unique opportunity before us to ensure that homeless people currently in temporary accommodation are supported into homes that they can begin to restart their lives from.\"\n\nPlaid Cymru's housing spokeswoman, Delyth Jewell MS, said eradicating homelessness had always been \"a question of political will\".\n\nShe said: \"The fact that the Welsh Government has now made a commitment to eradicate homelessness for good is extremely welcome, although many lives could have been saved had they acted sooner.\"\n\nTory MS David Melding said councils should follow a Newport scheme where private landlords were guaranteed six months' rent if they took in homeless tenants.\n\n\"It does seem that the Newport scheme has worked very well, and may be a very constructive way forward that uses the resources of the private sector, which are so extensive in providing rental accommodation,\" he said.\n\nFunding announced by Ms James would help people into stable housing \"so they don't fall back and then end up in the streets again\", Mr Melding said.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Both sides have been calling on the other to compromise on key issues\n\nOn the eve of their two-day summit in Brussels, the prime minister reminded EU leaders of his words back in early September.\n\nA trade deal had to have been agreed between the two sides by 15 October for it to be in force by the end of the year, he'd said.\n\nIf not, he added: \"I do not see that there will be a free trade agreement between us, and we should both accept that and move on.\"\n\nIn other words - end negotiations and walk away.\n\nYet, Boris Johnson moved the goalpost himself on Wednesday evening.\n\nIn a call with the European Commission president and the European Council president he said he would wait for EU leaders to finish their summit discussions on Friday before deciding the UK's next steps.\n\n\"Boris Johnson swore before he'd die in a ditch. He's set deadlines again and again and they have come and gone,\" a seasoned EU figure told me.\n\nBut Brussels is far from sanguine about the prospect of failing to agree a UK deal.\n\nLeaders like the Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte have said the Covid-19 pandemic makes it all the more important to have an agreement. The economic fallout of no-deal come the end of the year would provoke additional political and economic headaches EU politicians would far prefer to avoid. They assume Boris Johnson feels the same way.\n\nYet EU leaders are not yet all on the same page when it comes to how much they should give up or give in to get a deal.\n\nBrussels keeps calling on the UK to make concessions but a successful outcome will require compromises on both sides.\n\nAnd that is the real significance of this week's summit.\n\nIt's not all about Brexit.\n\nEU leaders plan to discuss Covid-19, the environment and EU-Africa relations as well. But this is very likely the last time they'll be face to face before negotiations with the UK end. It's also the first time in a long time that EU leaders hold a detailed discussion on Brexit. For much of this year the Covid-19 pandemic has sucked the political oxygen across Europe.\n\nSo, how much is a deal worth to them?\n\nWill France's Emmanuel Macron relinquish his hard-line position about keeping current fishing quotas in UK waters? He'll have to, to get a UK deal.\n\nWill Germany's Angela Merkel give way on some demands on competition regulations (aka the level playing field) yet still grant the UK zero tariff, zero quota access to the single market?\n\nEU leaders must agree all this amongst themselves and it won't be straightforward. A trade agreement with the UK impacts the bloc's global reputation, EU businesses (especially those in countries with high trade volumes with the UK, like Germany and the Netherlands) and political fortunes.\n\nAngela Merkel is thinking of her legacy as she prepares to step down as chancellor next year. She wants to maintain close ties with the UK for geopolitical as well as economic reasons. She also keen to avoid any major internal EU disagreements over the deal.\n\nEmmanuel Macron meanwhile, is looking over his shoulder at his arch political rival, the Eurosceptic nationalist Marine Le Pen. He hopes to demonstrate in negotiations with the UK that leaving the EU is fraught with difficulty. He also wants to be seen fighting for French interests - hence the hard line on fish. And on competition regulations. Mr Macron and other EU leaders don't want to grant the UK advantageous access to their single market if the UK is then free to undercut European businesses by slashing regulations and/or boosting UK enterprises with government subsidies that Brussels doesn't allow its members.\n\nFishing is a major sticking point in negotiations between the UK and the EU\n\nSo how much will the EU curb its desire to keep the UK attached to its competition rules and standards in order to reach a deal? The UK says it's left the bloc, is now a sovereign nation and must be recognised by Brussels as such.\n\nEU diplomats suggest it would help them ease up on their level-playing-field demands if the UK signed up to a dispute mechanism with teeth - meaning if either side breached the terms of their trade deal, then swift and hefty legal action could be taken.\n\nOne diplomat close to the negotiations rather patronisingly described this potential EU compromise position by comparing the UK to a toddler that doesn't want to eat its vegetables. He said the EU was now looking for alternative arrangements to get the UK to sign up to a deal. He described it as mixing things up to hide the vegetables from the toddler.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nSo will the UK sign up to a vegetable mush? To an aggressive dispute mechanism and to high-level common principles on state aid, for example, as well as a strong national regulator?\n\nThere are indications it might, but working out the technical details is \"not to be underestimated\" as a UK source put it.\n\nBritish negotiators say they're frustrated that the EU has so far refused to start working on joint legal texts that can be sent backwards and forwards between the two sides as negotiations progress.\n\nThe most likely outcome from this week's EU summit as far as Brexit is concerned is that leaders will call for negotiations to step up in pace and intensity (if you think you've heard all this before, you are absolutely right).\n\nFrance's Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian says EU-UK talks between now and mid-November will be decisive.\n\nIf the prime minister signs up to them.", "Dougie said he would have died if he had not changed his ways\n\nFor more than 20 years, Dougie's life was a vicious cycle of drugs, crime and the death of people close to him. But for the past nine months he has been taking a medication that blocks his craving for heroin and helps him break the cycle.\n\nDrug misuse has claimed the lives of Dougie's brother, two uncles and more than a dozen friends.\n\nAnd two years ago he lost a leg due to health complications related to his addiction.\n\n\"If I hadn't stopped I would have died, simple,\" he says.\n\n\"I don't think my mum would survive losing another boy through drugs.\"\n\nThe 39-year-old Glaswegian has been in and out of prison since he was a teenager, stealing to fund his dependence on heroin and street Valium.\n\nBut since the start of the year he has been prescribed Buvidal, a new development in the treatment of addiction to opiates.\n\nThe Buvidal injection is given once a month\n\nDougie says it has been \"life changing\".\n\nHe was previously taking the opiate substitute methadone but it was not working for him.\n\n\"I tried this new drug and it managed to get me clean off methadone and clean off heroin,\" he says.\n\nMore than 100 people in Glasgow are now being prescribed the drug, which is injected once a month, meaning those using it no longer need to visit chemists to pick up methadone prescriptions every day.\n\nIt is hoped this will allow patients to focus on improving their lives and overall health rather than managing their dependence.\n\nScotland's drug deaths figures are the worst in Europe\n\nScotland, and especially cities such as Glasgow and Dundee, has the worst rate of drug misuse deaths in western Europe.\n\nIt is not known how many people died from overdoses in Scotland last year as the figures have been delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nHowever, the figures for 2018 showed almost 1,200 people dying from drug misuse, more than three people every day.\n\nExperts say they think the figures for last year could be even higher.\n\nIn response to the crisis, a pilot programme for Buvidal was launched with 14 patients in Glasgow last year.\n\nIt found that more than six months after the trial, all of them remained engaged in recovery.\n\nJennifer Kelly, a prescribing pharmacist for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde's alcohol and drug recovery services, said feedback has been \"overwhelmingly positive\".\n\nShe said Buvidal blocks the opioid receptors in the brain which stops the patients having withdrawals and allows them to be comfortable.\n\nMs Kelly said it works best for patients committed to moving away from opioid use.\n\nIt allows patients to engage with the services they need such as occupational therapy, mental health and social services, she said.\n\n\"For our patients it's been a game-changer,\" she said.\n\n\"Their lives have improved in many ways, less drug use, better interaction with their families, with their children.\n\n\"It's not a case of they go on it and they are on it forever, which is sometimes an issue that people throw at methadone. We have managed to detox a number of patients from Buvidal.\"\n\nBuvidal is being prescribed to 100 people in Glasgow\n\nDougie says the drug has \"changed the way I'm ticking\".\n\n\"I've got a better relationship with my mum and dad whereas when I was doing drugs they wouldn't open the door,\" he said.\n\nHe said the first few weeks coming off methadone were hard because of the withdrawal effects.\n\n\"Now that I am free of methadone, the plan is to wean myself off Buvidal and then stay totally clean but that is easier said than done,\" he said.\n\n\"I wish it had been around 20-odd years ago, it would have saved so many lives.\"\n\nDougie said he wanted to convince his friends it is better than methadone.\n\n\"But a lot of my lads are scared,\" he says. \"How are you meant to change that mindset?\"\n\nAccording to Dougie one of the advantages over methadone is not having to go to the pharmacy every day and risk contact with other users or sellers.\n\nAnd for the future he says he wants to go back to college to learn the maths and English he missed in his youth.\n\n\"I don't want to start that lifestyle being a user everyday, chaotic,\" he said.\n\n\"I don't want that life any more. I have been there, it doesn't work.\"\n\nExperts are wary of words like \"miracle drug\" and warn that Buvidal is not suitable for everyone.\n\nBut it is already helping to fix some broken lives and they want that to continue.", "Disappointed Quality Street customers have taken to social media to complain that the selection is lacking a crucial ingredient.\n\n\"Where are the Chocolate Caramel Brownies?! My 8yr old son is devastated,\" wrote one.\n\nAnother customer complained they had been given extra Orange Cremes.\n\nThe company said that its manufacturing process was adversely affected during lockdown, resulting in a narrower range in some tins.\n\n\"In order to keep Quality Street production going during the Covid-19 lockdown period, we made some temporary changes to the way we operated, such as running fewer lines for a time,\" a spokesperson for Nestle said.\n\nWhile there was no change to the overall weight being sold, the range had been affected, she said.\n\n\"As a result, some consumers may find that they do not have all 12 varieties of Quality Street sweets in their mix.\"\n\nThe full range of chocolates was being produced and incorporated into more recent boxes, she added.\n\n\"We apologise for any disappointment caused but hope consumers understand why it was necessary to make these changes during such unprecedented conditions,\" the spokeswoman said.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Matthew Tindale This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe limited edition Chocolate Caramel Brownies were removed from production for four weeks earlier this year.\n\nWhen the lockdown was at its height, a number of factory workers were shielding or looking after children, which was why Nestle made the change.\n\nThe Quality Street chocolates that are normally in a tin include a mix of:\n\nOther manufacturers have also been affected by the coronavirus crisis.\n\nIn June, Marmite-owner Unilever said production of its spread was hit by a shortage of brewer's yeast after pubs were closed in March during lockdown.\n\nBut in the main, food producers around the world have said they have too much stock as restaurants and others areas of hospitality close for business.", "Christian Cooper filmed Amy Cooper after she refused to stop her dog running through woodland\n\nA white woman who called police on a black man bird watching in New York's Central Park made a second call accusing him of attempted assault, prosecutors say.\n\nAmy Cooper appeared in court on Wednesday charged with falsely reporting an incident.\n\nA viral video showed Ms Cooper threatening Christian Cooper, no relation, with the police when he asked her to put her dog on a lead.\n\nThis happened on 25 May, Memorial Day.\n\nThis was also the day that unarmed black man George Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis, triggering weeks of national and global anti-racism protests.\n\nMs Cooper lost her job and dog after the incident, and publicly apologised.\n\nManhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr said in a statement on Wednesday: \"We will hold people who make false and racist 911 calls accountable.\"\n\nMs Cooper did not enter a plea when she appeared before the judge.\n\nThe charge of filing a false report is punishable by up to one year in jail.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Melody Cooper This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nChristian Cooper, who is prominent in the New York bird watching community, filmed his encounter with Ms Cooper, 41, after he asked her to put her dog on a lead to keep it from scaring away birds.\n\nMr Cooper, 57, said he offered the dog treats, as a way to convince Ms Cooper to contain her dog.\n\nIn response, Ms Cooper called emergency services. She told them: \"I'm in the Ramble,\" - a wooded area in Central Park - \"there is a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet and he is recording me and threatening me and my dog,\" as her tone rose in apparent distress.\n\n\"I am being threatened by a man in the Ramble, please send the cops immediately!\" she said.\n\nProsecutors said that, in the second, previously unreported call, Ms Cooper repeated her accusation and said he had \"tried to assault her\".\n\n\"Amy Cooper engaged in racist criminal conduct when she falsely accused a Black man of trying to assault her in a previously unreported second call with a 911 dispatcher,\" District Attorney Vance said.\n\n\"Fortunately, no one was injured or killed in the police response to Ms Cooper's hoax.\"\n\nShe admitted to the police who responded to her call that the male had made no physical contact with her.\n\nMr Cooper, in a statement to CNN on Wednesday, said his focus \"has been and continues to be on fixing policing and addressing systemic racism like we saw in that incident\".", "Marcus Rashford was awarded an MBE for his campaign to get free school meals extended through the summer holiday in England\n\nFree school meals will be provided for children during all school holidays in Wales until spring 2021, it has been announced.\n\nEducation Minister Kirsty Williams said £11m would pay for the scheme up to and including Easter 2021.\n\nEngland footballer Marcus Rashford, who successfully campaigned on the issue in England, welcomed the plan.\n\nThe Manchester United star said the plan would protect \"the most vulnerable children across the country\".\n\nMore than 75,000 pupils aged between five and 15 from lower-income homes are eligible for free school meals across Wales.\n\nIt is also open to younger children who attend nursery for full days and sixth form pupils.\n\nMs Williams said she hoped it would provide \"some reassurance in these times of uncertainty\".\n\nChildren will now get free school meals during every holiday until after Easter 2021\n\nRashford, 22, was recently awarded an MBE after campaigning for the UK government to allow about 1.3 million children to claim free school meal vouchers in England's summer holidays during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\n\"Having this framework in place for the foreseeable future will have a significantly positive impact on children who are struggling to engage in learning due to anxiety and fear, not to mention the noise of their rumbling stomachs,\" he said.\n\n\"No child in 2020 should be sat in a classroom worried about how they are going to access food during the holidays, and the impact that will have on their parents when matched with unemployment, ill health and, in some cases, personal loss.\"\n\nHe said there was still more work to be done to protect the next generation, but welcomed the \"swift response to this urgent need\".", "The Metropolitan Police has said it is taking no further action against an MP who travelled by train from London to Glasgow after testing positive for coronavirus.\n\nThe force said Margaret Ferrier had not breached laws in England which require people to self-isolate because she was tested before they came into effect.\n\nThe case is now being examined by Police Scotland.\n\nMs Ferrier is sitting as an independent MP after being suspended by the SNP.\n\nShe has refused to quit as an MP, and said coronavirus made her act \"out of character\".\n\nThe MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West was tested for coronavirus on Saturday 26 September because she had a \"tickly throat\".\n\nWhile awaiting her results, she is believed to have gone to church on the Sunday before travelling to London by train on the Monday.\n\nShe spoke in the Commons later that day, before finding out a short time later that she had tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nMs Ferrier then decided to get a train back to Glasgow the following day, fearing she would have to self-isolate in a hotel room for two weeks or her condition could worsen.\n\nIn a statement, the Met said it had considered possible offences under the Health Protection Regulations 2020, which makes it an offence for people in England to come into contact with others when they should be self-isolating.\n\nThe force added: \"On detailed examination of this new legislation, and following legal advice, it was concluded that this regulation is applicable only after the 28 September.\n\n\"In this case the test occurred prior to the 29 September and therefore the regulation does not apply.\n\n\"As such, there will be no further action in relation to this investigation from the Metropolitan Police.\"\n\nIt added: \"We are in liaison with Police Scotland and have referred the matter to them for consideration.\"\n\nIn Scotland, self-isolation is guidance rather than a legal requirement.\n\nHowever, Police Scotland said it would now assess the circumstances of the case and consult with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service \"before taking a decision on next steps.\"\n\nMs Ferrier's actions have been widely condemned, with cross-party calls for her to resign as an MP.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, said the MP's actions had been \"utterly indefensible\" and called for her to step down.\n\nAnd the speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, said he was \"very, very angry\" at Ms Ferrier's \"reckless\" behaviour.\n\nAlthough Ms Ferrier has been suspended by the SNP, the party is unable to force her to quit as an MP.\n\nHowever, the Scottish Conservatives have called on the SNP to expel Ms Ferrier from the party.\n\nMs Ferrier defended her actions in an interview with the Sun on Sunday at the weekend, saying she had panicked at the prospect of having to self-isolate in a London hotel after testing positive.\n\nThe MP added that she did not deny that she had made \"a serious error of judgment\", but said she wanted to continue representing her constituents and dismissed the incident as a \"blip\".", "Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry is suspending all visits until further notice due to a surge in coronavirus cases in the area\n\nAltnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry is suspending all visits until further notice due to a surge in coronavirus cases in the area.\n\nVisiting is suspended \"due to the continuing rise in Covid-19 cases in the area,\" the Western Trust said.\n\nThe trust said some visits, with restrictions, can still be permitted in certain circumstances.\n\nVisiting is permitted for patients in end of life care, dementia patients and those with learning disabilities.\n\nPregnant women can also be accompanied by a nominated partner, children with one accompanied carer and vulnerable or elderly patients with communication difficulties.\n\nThe trust said anyone with symptoms should not visit a patient, and children are not permitted to visit.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Western Trust This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe time and length of the visit for anyone visiting a patient in palliative or end-of-life care must be agreed in advance with the ward sister or charge nurse.\n\nVisiting is also only permitted for patients with dementia or a learning disability, who would benefit from having a loved one at their bedside, for a short period of time.\n\nVulnerable or elderly patients with communication difficulties may also be accompanied by one person for the duration of their time in the emergency department.\n\nThe Western Trust said that visitation at other sites such as Gransha, the South West Acute Hospital and Omagh will not be suspended\n\nIn a statement, the trust said visits at other sites, such as Gransha Hospital, the South West Acute Hospital and Omagh Hospital and Primary Care Complex remain subject to the same restrictions that are in place across all five trusts.\n\nThese are that one visitor is permitted once a week for one hour, with some exceptions.\n\nThose arrangements are \"being kept under review, dependent on prevalence of the virus in the community,\" the trust said.", "A number of NHS trusts stood down in-house coronavirus testing for staff in the summer, ahead of a surge in virus cases, a health leaders' body says.\n\nThis followed assurances from government about the capacity of the centralised system, it is understood.\n\nBut it left some staff, including in virus hotspots, unable to access testing when the national system came under strain earlier in the autumn.\n\nThe government has since said it has increased testing capacity.\n\nThe Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is also extending regular testing to some NHS staff without symptoms.\n\nAt the start of the pandemic, \"a lot of trusts pulled together their own [makeshift] testing schemes because they really needed to test staff\", said Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, the body which represents health trust leaders in England.\n\nBut as a centralised national system developed, many trusts \"stood down\" their testing arrangements put in place in the first months of the pandemic, she said.\n\nThis was partly in response to the \"direction of travel from central government\".\n\nFor example, Blackburn with Darwen and East Lancashire clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) said their staff were currently relying on the public system.\n\nBetween April and July, their clinical staff were tested via the local hospital trust.\n\nBut this arrangement was \"stood down following increased swabbing capacity\" in the centralised pillar two system, according to a spokesperson representing areas including Blackburn, Burnley, Hyndburn, Ribble Valley, Rossendale and Pendle - all virus hotspots in recent weeks.\n\nSince then, some trusts have re-instated their in-house testing, but this time they won't be reimbursed for it.\n\nThough NHS staff in large hospitals can generally access tests through their workplaces, many others have had to rely on the public system - referred to as \"pillar two\" of the testing programme.\n\nPillar two testing goes through six centralised Lighthouse Labs, and it is this part of the programme that has struggled with capacity over the past month or so.\n\nPillar one, dealt with in NHS laboratories, is generally for hospital patients and staff.\n\nCommunity and mental health staff and those at smaller district hospitals are all particularly likely to be relying on pillar two, since they are less likely to be working on a site with its own lab facilities.\n\nAlthough larger hospitals have been able to test these types of staff working in their local area where they have enough lab capacity, patients and their own staff are given priority.\n\nFrom late August, through the autumn, the government was forced to restrict the public \"pillar two\" element of the testing regime in parts of the country, after rising demand meant labs couldn't keep up. This meant many people, including NHS staff, have struggled to get tests.\n\nNow, matters appear to have improved, but three-quarters of people who get tests are still waiting more than 24 hours for a result.\n\nAnd recent documents published by the government's scientific advisers stated said the NHS Test and Trace system was having only a \"marginal impact\" and this would \"likely decline further\", in part because of these delays.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BBC spoke to people trying to get tests at a centre in Oldham\n\nPublic health experts have argued summer was when the nation should have been building, not reducing, testing capacity.\n\nNHS Providers added things had improved considerably in recent days, though, through \"herculean\" efforts to ramp up testing.\n\nThe Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said pillar two of the testing system was currently running at its maximum safe capacity of 85%, but testing in NHS labs was running at a lower capacity of 65% meaning there was room to increase numbers.\n\nBecause of this, NHS labs have begun to process some of the public tests to ease the strain on the system.\n\nA DHSC spokesperson said: \"Since the beginning of this pandemic we have prioritised testing for health and care workers to ensure all NHS staff have consistent access\".\n\n\"This is provided through pillar one testing in NHS settings where there is growing capacity within trusts to ensure staff can get tested. In addition to this, NHS staff with symptoms continue to be able to access testing via pillar two as a priority.\"", "There is growing concern about the potential for more collisions in space (Artwork image)\n\nTwo items of space junk expected to pass close to one another have avoided collision, said a company which uses radar to track objects in orbit.\n\nLeoLabs had said a defunct Russian satellite and a discarded Chinese rocket segment were likely to come within 25m of each other.\n\nIt said there were no signs of debris over Antarctica on Friday morning.\n\nOther experts thought Kosmos-2004 and the ChangZheng rocket stage would pass with a far greater separation.\n\nWith the objects having a combined mass of more than 2.5 tonnes and relative velocity of 14.66km/s (32,800mph), any collision would have been catastrophic and produced a shower of debris.\n\nAnd given the altitude of almost 1,000km, the resulting fragments would have stayed around for an extremely long time, posing a threat to operational satellites.\n\nLeoLabs, a Silicon Valley start-up, offers orbital mapping services using its own radar network.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by LeoLabs, Inc. This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by LeoLabs, Inc.\n\nDr Moriba Jah, an astrodynamicist at the University of Texas at Austin, worked out the miss distance to be about 70m.\n\nAnd the Aerospace Corporation, a highly respected consultancy, came to a similar conclusion.\n\nWith more and more satellites being launched, there is growing concern about the potential for collisions.\n\nThe big worry is the burgeoning population of redundant hardware in orbit - some 900,000 objects larger than 1cm by some counts - and all of it capable of doing immense damage to, or even destroying, an operational spacecraft in a high-velocity encounter.\n\nThis week, the European Space Agency released its annual State of the Space Environment report, which highlighted the ongoing problem of fragmentation events.\n\nThese include explosions in orbit caused by left-over energy - in fuel and batteries - aboard old spacecraft and rockets.\n\nOn average over the last two decades, 12 accidental fragmentations have occurred in space every year - \"and this trend is unfortunately increasing\", the agency said.\n\nAlso this week, at the online International Astronautical Congress, a group of experts listed what they regarded as the 50 most concerning derelict objects in orbit.\n\nA large proportion of them were old Russian, or Soviet-era, Zenit rocket stages.", "The US state of Colorado is battling the largest wildfire in its history.\n\nMore than 164,000 acres have burned since the Cameron Peak Fire ignited in August.\n\nNo deaths have been reported and the cause of the blaze is still being investigated.", "Mr Biden and Mrs Harris campaigned in Arizona together last Thursday\n\nDemocratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris will halt campaign travel until Monday after two members of her staff tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nThe California senator's communications director, Liz Allen, and a flight crew member received the results on Wednesday, a Biden official said.\n\nNeither aide had close contact with the candidates in the 48 hours prior to their positive tests, she added.\n\nMs Harris had been scheduled to fly to North Carolina on Thursday.\n\nBiden Campaign Manager Jen O'Malley Dillon said the senator had no close contact with either infected staff member in the two days before the positive test, and was therefore not required to quarantine.\n\n\"Regardless, out of an abundance of caution and in line with our campaign's commitment to the highest levels of precaution, we are cancelling Senator Harris's travel through Sunday,\" she said.\n\nAn airline company staff member who flew with presidential candidate Joe Biden on Monday and Tuesday also tested positive, Ms Dillon said in a statement.\n\nMr Biden was not in close contact with the individual, his team said, and doctors advised that he did not need to self-isolate.\n\nOn 8 October, Ms Harris and Mr Biden campaigned together in Arizona, where they held multiple appearances and interviews. The campaign says Ms Harris flew with both staff members on that trip, but they all wore masks throughout the flight and practiced social distancing.\n\nMs Harris and her husband both tested negative on Thursday, the campaign told reporters.\n\nThe Biden campaign has made emphasising health safety a visible part of its political strategy, in an effort to mark a point of contrast with President Trump. A number of Republicans and White House associates - and Mr Trump himself - have tested positive for coronavirus in recent weeks.\n\nMr Biden is scheduled to hold a town hall event on ABC News on Thursday night. President Trump is due to host a competing town hall on NBC at the same time.\n\nMs Harris had been due to visit North Carolina on the state's first day of early in person voting. She was scheduled to visit the cities of Charlotte and Asheville for what would have been her second trip to the crucial swing state in the past three weeks.\n\nMr Trump, who held an afternoon airport rally in the North Carolina city of Greenville, is holding his sixth visit to the state since the Republican convention in late August.\n\n\"Two of the people that travel with her, in the plane all the time. They have tested positive,\" Mr Trump said on Thursday. \"We extend our best wishes, which is more than they did for me,\" he told the audience.\n\nBoth Mr Biden and Ms Harris publicly wished the president and the first lady a quick recovery after the news of their positive Covid test was announced.\n\nThe president's visit was expected to draw thousands of people, local police say. Parking restrictions mean that attendees were required to take a Trump campaign shuttle bus from a nearby fairgrounds.\n\nLocal health officials had appealed to Trump supporters to wear masks and practice social distancing and hand washing at the rally.\n\nBut like at previous Trump rallies, pictures from Greenville showed many of his supporters eschewing masks and crowding close together.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "Travellers returning to the UK from Italy, Vatican City and San Marino from 04:00 BST on Sunday must self-isolate for two weeks.\n\nThe transport secretary said those returning from the Greek island of Crete will now not need to quarantine.\n\nItaly, which is visited by large numbers of UK residents, was one of the last major countries in Europe on the safe list.\n\nIt had its highest daily count of Covid cases on Thursday, with 8,804.\n\nThe country has recorded a seven-day rate of 64 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nA rate of 20 cases per 100,000 is the threshold above which the government considers imposing quarantine conditions.\n\nLast week, no countries were added to the quarantine list, amid a spike in UK cases.\n\nChanges to the government's list of destinations from which arrivals do not need to enter quarantine have typically been announced every Thursday at 17:00 BST, and implemented the following Saturday at 04:00 BST.\n\nAnnouncing the news on Twitter, Grant Shapps said the implementation date would be moved to 04:00 BST on Sunday 18 October and applies UK wide.\n\nScotland has added mainland Greece and the Greek islands - including Crete, but excluding Mykonos - to its travel corridor list, having removed the country last month. Wales and Northern Ireland have also added Crete to their safe lists.\n\nPoland, Turkey and the Caribbean islands of Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba were among the most recent places added to the quarantine list.\n\nIn Italy, it is mandatory to wear face coverings in indoor spaces, including shops, offices, public transport and in bars and restaurants when not seated at a table, though private homes are exempt.\n\nMasks must also be worn in busy outdoor spaces. The country recently announced compulsory testing for anyone arriving from the UK, Netherlands, Belgium and the Czech Republic.\n\nItalians were subject to some of the strictest lockdown measures in the world when the country became the first in Europe to be overwhelmed by the coronavirus earlier in the year.\n\nWhen the quarantine is applied to a destination, there is an immediate impact on bookings.\n\nOnly non-quarantine destinations are \"in demand\", according to one airline insider.\n\nThe flip side is also true.\n\nLast week, the UK government took the Greek island of Zakynthos off its quarantine list.\n\nTui scheduled a flight soon after and it sold out in days.\n\nThat said, passenger numbers overall are massively suppressed due to the resurgence of the virus and the tightening of travel restrictions.\n\nNo airline is expecting a surge in bookings for this half-term.\n\nThe government has promised that passengers will, by next month, be able to pay for privately-funded Covid tests to reduce the quarantine period by a week.\n\nMinisters are also considering allowing passengers to test before they travel into the UK and that might mean that some people arriving from at risk countries don't have to quarantine at all.\n\nWinters are always tough for airlines. This one looks incredibly bleak and the prospect of testing to reduce the impact of quarantine is only a small glimmer of light.\n\nPassengers arriving in the UK from at-risk countries could avoid having to quarantine under a number of options being considered by the government. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told a travel conference the plan could involve private Covid testing or a period of self-isolation before departure.\n\nThe other option being considered by the government is a system whereby passengers would only have to self-isolate for about a week, instead of two weeks, if they were tested after that period and tested negative.\n\nRory Boland, editor of Which? Travel, said the government's travel corridors system has \"all but collapsed with most destinations now removed from the list\". He added that the travel sector was in \"dire need of urgent targeted support if it is to survive the winter months\" with \"serious reform\" needed from government.", "No more money to be put on the table, Burnham says he was told\n\nThe Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham concludes his comments by revealing that government ministers suggested there is \"no money left\" for the kind of financial package the local leaders say is necessary before their areas are put into the highest tier of coronavirus restrictions. Burnham, who spoke to health ministers earlier today, said he had been told \"there is no money to put on the table\". He added: \"To be honest with you, I don't believe that for one second. When I look today at some of the fees they are paying to consultants working on the failed test and trace scheme, when I look at the billions that is being thrown at a scheme that isn't working for Greater Manchester, money that has been found for other things this year. \"The argument I am making is... support people right now when they need it because by supporting people now you will save jobs and businesses that will be able to restart the minute we find a vaccine, the minute the recovery is on.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"A few words on Brexit\" – EU leaders' views from the summit\n\nEU leaders have called for post-Brexit trade talks to continue beyond the end of the week - the deadline suggested by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.\n\nAt a two-day summit in Brussels beginning on Thursday, they called on the UK to \"make the necessary moves\" towards a deal.\n\nEU chief negotiator Michel Barnier said fresh \"intensive\" talks should aim to reach a deal around the end of October.\n\nBut his UK counterpart said he was \"disappointed\" by the EU's approach.\n\nLord David Frost tweeted the EU was expecting \"all future moves\" for a deal to come from the UK, which he called an \"unusual approach to conducting a negotiation\".\n\nHe added the prime minister would react to the EU's position as the summit wraps up on Friday.\n\nBoth sides are calling on each other to compromise on key issues, including fishing and limits on government subsidies to businesses.\n\nThey are seeking an agreement to govern their trading relationship once the UK's post-Brexit transition period ends in December.\n\nFollowing the talks on Thursday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said \"in some places there was movement, in other places there is still a lot of work to do.\"\n\n\"We have asked Great Britain to continue to be willing to compromise towards an agreement. Of course, this also means that we have to make compromises,\" she told reporters.\n\nEuropean Council President Charles Michel said the EU would decide whether talks should continue in the coming days, based on the UK's next move.\n\nMr Barnier said negotiations were \"not finished\", and the EU was ready to accelerate talks from Monday for the \"two or three weeks that remain before us\".\n\nEarlier, in a conclusions document issued during the summit, the EU said progress in key areas was currently \"not sufficient\" to reach a deal.\n\nIt asked Mr Barnier to \"continue negotiations in the coming weeks\".\n\nThe formal written conclusions of EU leaders' Brexit meeting seemed harsher than expected.\n\nThey insisted it was up to the UK to make \"the necessary moves\" for a deal to be reached.\n\nNo hint that the EU too was preparing to compromise - and words matter in these highly sensitive negotiations.\n\nThe UK's chief negotiator immediately took to Twitter to object.\n\nHe also noted that, while EU leaders had called for negotiations to continue, their document didn't describe them as \"intensive\" talks.\n\nMinutes after, the European Commission tweeted that its chief negotiator Michel Barnier had called for two weeks of intensive talk to start as of Monday.\n\nSo what do we learn from this confused war of words?\n\nNegotiations are drawing to a close, difficult political compromises loom for both sides, tempers are frayed, and time is tight.\n\nAll eyes are on Boris Johnson on Friday, when he has promised to announce the UK's next move.\n\nAs the summit got under way, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she would be self-isolating for the second time in a month after a member of her staff tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nIn a tweet, she added she had tested negative herself but would be leaving the summit \"as a precaution\".\n\nArriving at the summit, French President Emmanuel Macron said his country's fishermen would not \"in any situation\" be \"sacrificed to Brexit\".\n\n\"We didn't choose Brexit. Preserving access for our fishermen to British waters is an important point for us,\" he told reporters.\n\nMrs von der Leyen (R) left the summit early after exchanging views with EU leaders.\n\nThe Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Micheál Martin said a deal was still possible \"within the timeframe available to us\".\n\nHe told the BBC a no-deal outcome would represent a \"significant additional shock to our societies\" on top of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\n\"That is a motivating factor in seeking to arrive at a comprehensive deal,\" he added.\n\nDutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said: \"\"It would be crazy for the outside world if the UK and the EU will not be able to come to an agreement\".\n\nOver the summer, both the UK and EU seemed to agree the end of October was the final date to get a deal done - allowing enough time for it to be ratified before 31 December.\n\nBut come 7 September, Boris Johnson decided to shorten the deadline.\n\nHe said if a deal wasn't reached by 15 October, \"then I do not see that there will be a free trade agreement between us, and we should both accept that and move on\".\n\nThursday was that day - but Downing Street appears to have moved back from it as a hard deadline.\n\nFormal negotiations ended at the start of October, but Mr Johnson and Mrs von der Leyen pledged to \"intensify talks\" over the coming weeks.\n\nPressed on whether the UK would walk away on 15 October, the government's chief negotiator Lord Frost said it was his job to \"advise the prime minister\" on whether a deal was on the cards by then.\n\nBy remaining in the bloc's single market and customs union, the UK has continued to follow EU trading rules during its post-Brexit transition period.\n\nThis 11-month period is due to end in December, and the UK has ruled out seeking an extension.\n\nFormal talks began in March and continued throughout the pandemic, initially via video link before in-person discussions resumed over the summer.\n\nIf a deal is not done, the UK will trade with the EU according to the default rules set by the World Trade Organization.\n• None What are the sticking points in Brexit trade talks?", "Pubs and restaurants in Scotland's central belt are currently closed,but could reopen from 26 October\n\nNicola Sturgeon has warned that Scotland will not return to normal when the current restrictions on pubs and restaurants expire later this month.\n\nLicensed premises across the central belt were temporarily closed last week, with tough restrictions placed on those elsewhere in the country.\n\nThe rules are due to expire on 26 October - but Ms Sturgeon said this would not signal a return to normality.\n\nThe ban on visiting other people's homes will also remain in place.\n\nAnd the Scottish government is to introduce a multi-tier system of alert levels similar to that now in force in England, which could potentially see venues in areas with coronavirus outbreaks remain closed.\n\nMs Sturgeon was giving a video statement to MSPs as she announced that a further 1,351 cases of Covid-19 and 13 deaths were registered in Scotland.\n\nShe said the country was in a \"precarious\" position and facing a \"critical moment\" in the battle to contain the virus, with \"tough decisions\" needed from government.\n\nAll existing restrictions and guidance are to remain in place for now, and the first minister warned that even the expiry of \"tough temporary restrictions\" on the hospitality trade would not signal a major change.\n\nShe said: \"It is important to stress that given the ongoing challenge of Covid, that will not herald a return to complete normality.\n\n\"The restrictions on household gatherings for example will remain in place until it is considered safe to ease them.\n\n\"And more generally we intend to replace the temporary restrictions with a more strategic approach to managing the pandemic\".\n\nMs Sturgeon said Scotland was in a \"precarious\" position\n\nThe government is drawing up a system similar to that newly in force in England, with \"different tiers of levels of interventions\".\n\nIt will include plans to \"strengthen and improve the effectiveness\" of existing measures, and improve compliance with rules particularly around self-isolation.\n\nMs Sturgeon also said she could not rule out \"having to go further in future\".\n\nThe Welsh government is introducing a system of travel restrictions to stop people moving from areas of the UK with higher rates of Covid-19 into areas with lower prevalence of the virus.\n\nMs Sturgeon said that \"needs to be considered\" in Scotland, and has written to Prime Minister Boris Johnson calling for \"urgent talks\".\n\nNew regulations have also been tabled tightening the rules around face coverings.\n\nThe new rules will make it mandatory for workers to wear them while moving around in offices or in staff canteens.\n\nHowever one rule has been eased, with an exemption introduced to allow couples to take part in marriage and civil partnership ceremonies without wearing masks.\n\nThe first minister has written to Boris Johnson urging him to adopt a \"four nations\" approach to travel restrictions\n\nMs Sturgeon's speech took place in an entirely virtual meeting, with Holyrood currently in recess, and connection issues meant Ruth Davidson's question was largely inaudible.\n\nThe Scottish Conservative group leader called on the government to introduce more testing in hospitals to stop the virus from spreading there.\n\nScottish Green co-leader Patrick Harvie echoed this, and called for \"regular weekly testing on a much bigger scale\".\n\nThe first minister said hospital acquired infections were \"a concern\", and that opposition party leaders would be consulted as part of an ongoing review of the testing strategy.\n\nScottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said measures had been introduced \"with no engagement of those affected\", which had resulted in \"ambiguity and confusion\".\n\nMs Sturgeon rejected his claims she had \"ignored scientific advice\", saying: \"I will make no apology, given the nature of the threat we are dealing with right now, of being prepared to take quick, firm and decisive action if we deem that is necessary to save lives.\"\n\nLib Dem leader Willie Rennie pressed the first minister on delays in the contact tracing system, saying it was \"alarming\" and \"dangerous\" that in the past week 567 people had waited more than two days to get a call from Test and Protect.\n\nMs Sturgeon said the system was \"working incredibly well\" but accepted that \"the turnaround time is not as quick as we want it to be\".", "Boris Johnson will decide on the \"next steps\" for post-Brexit trade talks after an EU summit later this week, Downing Street has said.\n\nNo 10 said the PM expressed \"disappointment\" at recent progress in a call with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday.\n\nMr Johnson has previously set Thursday's meeting of EU leaders as the deadline for a deal.\n\nMrs von der Leyen said the EU wanted a deal, \"but not at any price\".\n\nBoth sides are calling on the other to compromise on key issues, including fishing and limits on government subsidies to businesses.\n\nThey are locked in talks over striking an agreement to govern their trading relationship once the UK's post-Brexit transition period ends in December.\n\nA No 10 spokesperson said Mr Johnson \"noted the desirability of a deal\" during his pre-summit call with Mrs von der Leyen.\n\nHowever, the PM also \"expressed his disappointment that more progress had not been made over the past two weeks,\" they added.\n\n\"The prime minister said that he looked forward to hearing the outcome of the European Council and would reflect before setting out the UK's next steps.\"\n\nEarlier, a No 10 spokesman said fishing rights remained the \"starkest\" point of difference ahead of Thursday's two-day EU leaders' summit.\n\nThe government's chief Brexit negotiator Lord David Frost was seen going into Downing Street on Thursday morning.\n\nBackbench Conservative Peter Bone told MPs Lord Frost was briefing the prime minister \"on whether to continue the negotiations or whether to call it a day and prepare for a no-trade deal Brexit\".\n\nSpeaking after her call with the prime minister, Mrs von der Leyen said: \"The EU is working on a deal, but not at any price.\"\n\nShe added that \"conditions must be right\" on fishing, post-Brexit competition rules and how a deal is enforced for the EU to sign an agreement.\n\nShe added: \"Still a lot of work ahead of us.\"\n\nEuropean Council President Charles Michel also joined the call with Mrs von der Leyen and the Mr Johnson on Wednesday evening.\n\nIn a letter to EU leaders ahead of Thursday's meeting, Mr Michel said reaching a deal before December was \"in the interests of both sides\".\n\nHe added that as well as fishing rights, \"key issues\" for a deal included post-Brexit rules on competition and how a deal would be enforced.\n\nEU leaders are not yet all on the same page when it comes to how much they should give up or give in to get a deal.\n\nBrussels keeps calling on the UK to make concessions but a successful outcome will require compromises on both sides.\n\nWill France's Emmanuel Macron relinquish his hard-line position about keeping current fishing quotas in UK waters? He'll have to, to get a UK deal.\n\nWill Germany's Angela Merkel give way on some demands on competition regulations (aka the level playing field) yet still grant the UK zero tariff, zero quota access to the single market?\n\nEU leaders must agree all this amongst themselves and it won't be straightforward.\n\nOver the summer, both the UK and EU seemed to agree the end of October was the final date to get a deal done - allowing enough time for it to be ratified before 31 December.\n\nBut come 7 September, Boris Johnson decided to shorten the deadline.\n\nHe said if a deal wasn't reached by 15 October, \"then I do not see that there will be a free trade agreement between us, and we should both accept that and move on\".\n\nThursday is that day - but Downing Street appears to have moved back from it as a hard deadline.\n\nFormal negotiations ended at the start of October, but Mr Johnson and Mrs von der Leyen pledged to \"intensify talks\" over the coming weeks.\n\nPressed on whether the UK would walk away on 15 October, the government's chief negotiator Lord Frost said it was his job to \"advise the prime minister\" on whether a deal was on the cards by then.\n\nSpeaking on Tuesday, France's foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian suggested EU leaders do not see this week as a hard deadline for a breakthrough.\n\n\"The date of 15 October, it's Prime Minister Boris Johnson who announced that, it is not the position of the European Council,\" he told French MPs.\n\nHe added that \"everything should be played out\" between October 15 and \"mid-November\".\n\nHe warned that the prospect of no deal was \"unfortunately very likely,\" but the EU was \"prepared for all eventualities\".\n\nBy remaining in the bloc's single market and customs union, the UK has continued to follow EU trading rules during its post-Brexit transition period.\n\nThis 11-month period is due to end in December, and the UK has ruled out seeking an extension.\n\nFormal talks began in March and continued throughout the pandemic, initially via video link before in-person discussions resumed over the summer.\n\nIf a deal is not done, the UK will trade with the EU according to the default rules set by the World Trade Organization.\n• None What are the sticking points in Brexit trade talks?", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. How do people feel about the new restrictions in Preston?\n\nTalks are continuing between the government and local leaders over the expansion of the strictest coronavirus restrictions to more parts of England.\n\nLiverpool City Region is the only area in the top tier of restrictions, with pubs and bars not serving meals closed.\n\nBut Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham has said he is meeting the PM's team later to discuss the issue.\n\nIt comes as it was announced London will move into the second highest tier of restrictions from Saturday.\n\nGreater Manchester and Lancashire could be placed under \"very high alert\" - the highest level of restrictions.\n\nMPs in Greater Manchester and London are taking part in ministerial calls on Thursday morning.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock will update MPs on the latest measures in a Commons statement later.\n\nAsked on BBC Radio 4's Today programme whether the government would still take action to place areas into higher levels of restrictions if local leaders objected to the move, business minister Nadhim Zahawi said: \"It's important that we look at how we suppress this virus because the alternative is much worse.\"\n\nHe added: \"Let's wait and see what the health secretary says to Parliament.\"\n\nAlso on the programme, Eamonn O'Brien, leader of Bury Council in Greater Manchester, said officials were \"deeply sceptical\" that Tier 3 would work or that it offered enough financial support to businesses and people affected by the restrictions.\n\nHe said he had a \"strong impression\" that government will go ahead with the changes later.\n\nEarlier, Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson told BBC Breakfast he was \"categorically told\" by the government last weekend that Liverpool City Region would be placed under the highest tier restrictions.\n\n\"The fact is that the government will decide who goes into Tier 3 today,\" he said, adding that he expected to see more areas being placed under \"very high alert\" later.\n\nMr Anderson acknowledged that the \"virus is out of control and something has to be done\", but called for \"economic intervention to support people\".\n\nIn the week up to 11 October, local authority figures showed there were 660 cases per 100,000 people in Liverpool, 466 per 100,000 in Manchester, and up to 135 per 100,000 in London (in Richmond upon Thames).\n\nThe average area in England had 89.\n\nThe new three-tier system sees every area of England classed as being on medium, high or very high alert.\n\nMost of the country is on medium alert, which means areas are subject to the national restrictions currently in force, including the rule of six on indoor and outdoor gatherings and the 22:00 closing time for pubs, bars and restaurants.\n\nIn addition to these restrictions, in areas on high alert - including north-east England, much of the North West and parts of the Midlands, along with West and South Yorkshire - different households are not allowed to mix indoors.\n\nAreas on very high alert face extra curbs, with different households banned from mixing indoors or outdoors in hospitality venues or private gardens.\n\nPubs and bars will be closed unless they are serving substantial meals and there is also guidance against travelling in and out of the area.\n\nFurther restrictions may be agreed for particular regions in the top tier and in the Liverpool City Region gyms, leisure centres, betting shops and casinos have also been forced to close.\n\nIn a meeting on Wednesday, health officials from the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) suggested that Greater Manchester along with much of north-east and north-west England and parts of Yorkshire and the Midlands should be moved into the top tier.\n\nBut the recommendations of the JBC will not necessarily be enforced and discussions are likely to continue between local and national politicians and officials over the coming days.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nLabour's Mr Burnham said he had a briefing with the deputy chief medical officer for England, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, on Wednesday and was expecting a further meeting with the prime minister's team later.\n\nHe has argued against Greater Manchester being put into the top tier, saying that without increased financial support they would prefer a so-called \"circuit-breaker\" - a short, limited lockdown to help bring the virus under control.\n\nMr Burnham said he would consider a legal challenge if the government placed the area under very high alert, adding such a move would be \"by imposition, not consent\".\n\nIn contrast, Mr Khan said he would back London moving from tier one to two - but called for a package of financial support, including for businesses struggling under the restrictions, despite being allowed to remain open.\n\nA final decision to move Greater Manchester and Lancashire into the highest tier of restrictions is one for politicians - and has not yet been made.\n\nBut there is increasing concern about the spread of the virus in both areas - and a growing belief that tougher measures are likely.\n\nMr Burnham is demanding more support for local businesses, which would be hit hard by a further shutdown of large swathes of hospitality.\n\nLocal leaders in Lancashire want more support too - but believe new restrictions are all but inevitable.\n\nThere are still decisions to be made - but if agreed - the further restrictions could cover another four million people.\n\nAnd other parts of north-east and north-west England could follow after a recommendation by health officials on Wednesday. Again, that still has to be approved by politicians.\n\nBoris Johnson has defended his three-tier system as the \"right way forward\", saying it would \"avoid the misery of a national lockdown\" - but he did not rule out going further.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer is continuing to call for a \"circuit-breaker\".\n\nMeanwhile, schools in Northern Ireland will close from Monday and pubs and restaurants face new restrictions from Friday.\n\nWales is preparing to ban people from parts of the UK that have high rates of coronavirus from travelling to the country from 18:00 BST on Friday.\n\nAnd in Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has advised Scots against travelling to high risk areas of England, singling out Blackpool as being linked to \"a large and growing number\" of Covid-19 cases in her country.\n\nOn Wednesday, a further 19,724 coronavirus cases were recorded in the UK, while 137 more people have died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The prime minister and Labour leader clashed over coronavirus policy\n\nA new three-tier system of regional Covid-19 restrictions in England \"is the right way forward\", Boris Johnson has said.\n\nThe PM told the House of Commons the policy \"can bring down the virus\" but that he did not rule out going further.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer again called for a \"circuit-breaker\" - a short, limited lockdown in England to bring the virus under control.\n\nHe said such a move was supported by government science advisers.\n\nThe PM said he hoped the three-tier system would \"avoid the misery of a national lockdown\".\n\nHe added: \"I rule out nothing of course in combating the virus, but we are going to do it with the local, the regional approach that can drive down and will drive down the virus, if it is properly implemented.\"\n\nIt comes as Wales prepares to ban people from parts of the UK that have high rates of coronavirus from travelling to the country from 18:00 BST on Friday.\n\nOn Wednesday, a further 19,724 coronavirus cases were recorded in the UK, while 137 more people have died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus.\n\nThe new tier system has begun in England, with the Liverpool region the first to enter the highest alert level.\n\nThe BBC understands that a meeting of the Joint Biosecsurity Centre (JBC) has suggested that Greater Manchester alongside much of north-west and north-east England, large parts of Yorkshire and parts of the Midlands should also be moved into the highest tier.\n\nThe JBC recommendations will not necessarily be enforced and discussions are likely to continue between local and national politicians and officials over the coming days.\n\nGreater Manchester's mayor Andy Burnham had a meeting with deputy chief medical officer, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, and said further talks are to take place on Thursday morning with the \"PM's team\".\n\nMost of the country is in the lowest tier - medium - but millions of people in the North and the Midlands are currently in the second highest tier and face extra curbs on households mixing.\n\nSchools, close-contact services and all retail outlets will remain open under basic measures, even in the highest alert areas.\n\nLocal politicians in Greater Manchester have argued against the region being put into the highest tier saying that without increased financial support they would prefer a circuit-breaker.\n\nMr Burnham said he would consider a legal challenge if the government placed the area in Tier 3 restrictions, adding such a move would be \"by imposition, not consent\".\n\nBut Bolton Council leader David Greenhalgh said he was not in support of a circuit-breaker at this time.\n\nSteve Rotheram, mayor of the Liverpool City Region, said he and Mr Burnham were also considering legal action against the new job support scheme.\n\nHe said it appeared \"discriminatory\" that No 10 had offered to pay 80% of workers' pay in March under the furlough scheme while the latest help is providing two-thirds of wages to employees of businesses made to close under the restrictions.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nThe approach of targeting different restrictions at different parts of England has exposed a rift between Westminster and some local politicians, who have called for more say over what's happening in their areas.\n\nUnder pressure to say why he has so far rejected the idea of a national \"circuit-break\" period, Boris Johnson was keen to stress that the current package of measures could bring down transmission IF there was co-operation at a local level and proper enforcement.\n\nMore involvement for local leaders means more responsibility for things going well - or badly.\n\nFor now, the PM seems determined to continue to try to tread this middle path - mindful also perhaps of the chunk of his own MPs concerned about even the current range of restrictions and the impact on the economy.\n\nThe risk is that he may have lost valuable time, if he does decide to change course.\n\nThe Labour leader's initial call for a circuit-breaker in England came on Tuesday.\n\nSir Keir said such a course of action would help buy time to \"save lives, fix testing, and save the NHS\".\n\nSchools would kept open as normal because it would be timed to coincide with the October half term. However, Sir Keir said \"all pubs, bars and restaurants would be closed\" and compensated.\n\nSpeaking at Prime Minister's Questions, he said Mr Johnson had rejected the advice of government science advisers, who had suggested a circuit-breaker when they met on 21 September.\n\nSeparately, a scientific report has suggested a two-week circuit-breaker at the end of this month may halve coronavirus deaths between now and the end of the year. The researchers said the measure \"buys more time to put other controls in place\", but there is huge uncertainty over some of their predictions.\n\nBut, responding to Sir Keir's comments, the PM told MPs the three-tier system was an \"opportunity to keep things going, to keep our kids in schools, to keep our businesses going\" and the \"logical thing to do\".\n\n\"That, I think, is what the people of this country want to do. This is our opportunity to do that and suppress the virus where it is surging,\" he said.\n\nThe PM said the disease was now \"appearing much more strongly\" in some parts of the country than others so a different approach was needed to that taken earlier in the year.\n\nHe highlighted the fact there were 670 coronavirus cases per 100,000 residents in the Liverpool region, compared with 33 per 100,000 in Cornwall.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Keir said it is a \"small ask\" for the Prime Minister to pick up the phone and reach an agreement with the First Minister\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has called for Boris Johnson and Wales' first minister to reach agreement on travel restrictions.\n\nHe said Mark Drakeford, who plans a ban on travel from Covid hotspots to Wales, was \"trying to keep Wales safe\".\n\nSir Keir initially said he hoped \"it doesn't come\" to restrictions, but after he was asked several times for his position said he would support them if it controlled coronavirus.\n\nThe ban is set for Friday at 18:00 BST.\n\nMr Drakeford, the Welsh Labour leader, says he would bring it into force if the prime minister does not introduce his own restrictions.\n\nThe Welsh Labour leader has written twice in recent weeks to Mr Johnson asking for travel to be restricted in and out of areas with high levels of transmission in England.\n\n\"What Mark Drakeford is trying to do is to keep people in Wales safe,\" Sir Keir told BBC Wales.\n\n\"He is frustrated. He's been asking the prime minister to work with him on this.\n\n\"Mark's objective is to keep people safe and he's absolutely right about that.\n\n\"I think the ball is really in the prime minister's court to do something about it.\n\n\"Because I hope it doesn't come to this... travel restrictions. I don't think it needs to if the prime minister enters discussions with Mark in the right spirits.\"\n\nThe travel ban, with exceptions such as work, is due to come in on Friday evening\n\nSir Keir added: \"The prime minister just needs to be clear that people shouldn't travel from high infection rate areas into areas in Wales where there aren't those high infection rates.\"\n\nAfter he was asked several times for his position on what should be agreed between the two governments, Sir Keir said: \"There has to be a way of controlling the virus.\n\n\"And if that unfortunately means people can't travel in the way they did before then that's got to be put in place.\"\n\nAbout 2.3 million people in 17 areas of Wales are already subject to a bar on travel, with exceptions for school, work and other limited reasons.\n\nIt is expected the ban on people from Covid hotspots elsewhere in the UK will have similar exceptions.\n\nThe rules will be imposed on people from Tier 2 and 3 regions in England, the whole of Northern Ireland and the Scottish central belt.\n\nThe UK government's Welsh secretary has warned the first minister's travel restrictions plan risks \"stirring division and confusion\".\n\nSimon Hart questioned the enforceability of the measures and asked for further detail on how the restrictions will work, and what exemptions there might be.", "Footballer Marcus Rashford is pledging to continue his campaign to see free school meals given to children during all school holidays in England, after the government rejected the idea.\n\nThe Manchester United and England forward says his call - part of an effort to end child food poverty - is \"not going to go away anytime soon\".\n\nRashford prompted a government U-turn over free meals in the summer holidays.\n\nNo 10 says it has \"taken action to make sure children don't go hungry\".\n\nHowever, Rashford responded in a tweet by saying it was \"not for food banks to feed millions of British children,\" adding: \"This is not going away anytime soon and neither am I...\"\n\nIt comes as a petition set up by the footballer urging the government to go further in tackling child hunger hit more than 140,000 signatures hours after it was launched.\n\nDuring the coronavirus lockdown the government was providing vouchers to families whose children qualify for free meals.\n\nIt had insisted this would not continue outside of term time but changed its mind after Rashford's campaign in the summer.\n\nRashford, 22, has told of his own impoverished childhood and formed a coalition of food campaigners.\n\nHis new petition calls for free school meals to be available for every child from a household on Universal Credit or equivalent.\n\nThis would mean the meals reach an additional 1.5 million children aged seven to 16, his campaign said.\n\nHe also wants holiday meals and activities to be expanded to an extra 1.1 million, and the value of healthy food vouchers for pregnant women to be increased to £4.25 per week (up from £3.10).\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Marcus Rashford MBE This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nBut asked about the campaign on Thursday, a Downing Street spokesman indicated ministers would not provide free school meals to children in the Christmas break, saying: \"It's not for schools to regularly provide food to pupils during the school holidays.\"\n\nThe spokesman added: \"We took that decision to extend free school meals during the pandemic when schools were partially closed during lockdown. We're in a different position now with schools back open to all pupils.\n\n\"We believe the best way to support families outside of term time is through Universal Credit rather than government subsidising meals.\"\n\nEarlier, the government cited its extension of welfare support by £9.3bn, funding councils to provide emergency assistance to families with food, essentials and meals.\n\nSenior Tory MP Rob Halfon, chairman of the Education Select Committee, said on Twitter the government response was \"very disappointing... We need a long-term plan to combat child food hunger, especially given 32% of families have had a drop in income since March.\"\n\nPaul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders' union NAHT, said: \"We are not in normal times. Normal solutions like Universal Credit may not be enough.\n\n\"Without doubt, the disruption to people's livelihoods as a result of Covid will mean that even more children are plunged into poverty.\"", "The bodies of 39 Vietnamese nationals were discovered in a refrigerated trailer\n\nA group was seen jumping from the back of a lorry and into cars days before 39 people were found dead in a lorry container nearby, a jury heard.\n\nStewart Cox said he was on his way to work when he saw 10 to 20 people \"with rucksacks\" run from the lorry towards the four cars on 11 October 2019.\n\nThe bodies of 39 Vietnamese people were found in a container on a nearby Essex industrial estate 12 days later.\n\nFour men are on trial at the Old Bailey in connection with the deaths.\n\nProsecutors have said the bodies of men, women and children, aged between 15 and 44, were found when the container was opened in Purfleet, Essex.\n\nTemperatures in the unit reached an \"unbearable\" 38.5C as the Vietnamese nationals were sealed inside for at least 12 hours, jurors were told.\n\nThe container had \"become a tomb\", the Old Bailey has heard\n\nGiving evidence, Mr Cox said he was trying to go to work at about 08:00 on Friday, 11 October 2019, but in the narrow lane in front of him was a lorry with a red-and-white cab, and four Mercedes cars which had just pulled up.\n\n\"I just see people getting out of the back of the lorry… with rucksacks… and just running towards the cars to get in the cars,\" he told the jury.\n\n\"After they disappeared the lorry, he was in a real hurry to get out.\n\n\"He pulled into the lorry park and then reversed. I tried to get a picture, but I just panicked. There was no number plate on it. It was covered over.\"\n\nThe jury has seen CCTV from the nearby Orsett Golf Course that morning showing a red-and-white lorry, two Mercedes cars, an Audi and another car driving down the lane \"in convoy,\" according to the prosecution.\n\nThe court heard Christopher Kennedy collected a lorry trailer from Purfleet Port on 11 October\n\nThe prosecution has said a picture from nearby Purfleet Port that morning shows Christopher Kennedy collecting a lorry trailer that had crossed the channel unaccompanied from Zeebrugge in Belgium.\n\nProsecutors allege the trailer had been dropped off in Zeebrugge by Eamonn Harrison.\n\nThe prosecution say that 12 days later he also dropped off the trailer in which the 39 people died.\n\nMr Harrison, 23, of Mayobridge, Co Down, Northern Ireland, and Gheorghe Nica, 43, of Basildon, Essex, are on trial accused of manslaughter.\n\nThe pair are also accused of being part of a people-smuggling conspiracy with Mr Kennedy, 24, of Co Armagh, Northern Ireland, and Valentin Calota, 37, of Birmingham.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "The William Harvey in Ashford is one of the hospitals run by the trust\n\nA \"toxic culture\" at a troubled NHS trust is risking patients' lives, say several current and former staff.\n\nManagers and medics have told BBC News that people are fearful of speaking up amid a bullying, blame culture at the East Kent Hospitals Trust.\n\nThe BBC has already revealed how a man with dementia was restrained by security on 19 separate occasions to allow treatment to be administered.\n\nThe trust says it takes all staff concerns and complaints seriously.\n\nThe East Kent Hospitals Trust is at the centre of an independent investigation into maternity failures and has been criticised by inspectors for failing to prevent patients catching coronavirus at one of its hospitals.\n\n\"It is so badly broken,\" said one manager, but the trust leadership is \"so, so arrogant that it will not listen\".\n\n\"If your face doesn't fit, they come after you,\" said another nurse. The trust has two main sites in east Kent; the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford and the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital in Margate.\n\n\"The bullying culture exists across the two sites but it's more overt at the William Harvey,\" said a manager.\n\nRecent concerns about the actions of senior leadership have included the management of Covid-19 at the William Harvey and the treatment of some staff following the poor care of the patient with dementia.\n\nSecurity guards were called to restrain a patient with dementia for treatment\n\nThe trust was the first in England to be criticised by the Care Quality Commission for the way it dealt with coronavirus, with high numbers of people contracting the virus in the Ashford hospital.\n\nThe trust did not have an infection control director until the CQC raised concerns, an example not just of poor management but also of its \"arrogance\", according to a former employee.\n\nSome staff were astonished when nurses and managers who were not involved in the care of the man who was repeatedly restrained were suspended, yet those directly responsible were initially allowed to continue treating patients.\n\n\"I wouldn't necessarily ask to be taken there in an ambulance,\" said a close observer of the trust.\n\n\"It's geographically on the edge, so it doesn't attract the biggest and best talent.\n\n\"It struggles. It doesn't have the turnover of staff that bring in new ideas.\"\n\nQueen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital in Margate is also run by the trust\n\nWhile the BBC has heard criticisms about several members of the executive team, the actions and management style of the trust's chief operating officer, Lee Martin, appear to have caused the most concerns.\n\nWhile people recognise him as hard-working, and praise his efforts at improving A&E performance and preparing the trust for a possible no-deal Brexit last year, he has variously been described as \"bullying\", \"vindictive\" and \"hysterical, prone to shouting and swearing\" in meetings.\n\nOne female manager said he'd been known to message staff on their phones during meetings that he's attending, telling them to stop talking, while his temper outbursts have occasionally left some colleagues in tears.\n\n\"He's not a leader, he's a dictator,\" said a manager. \"NHS England knows what he's like.\"\n\nMr Martin, who joined the trust in 2018, has previously worked in hospitals in both Australia and London.\n\nIn Canberra, a parliamentary inquiry into a scandal around the manipulation of waiting times, which Mr Martin was not involved in, nonetheless heard concerns about his leadership style.\n\nSeveral staff said he had \"demonstrated inappropriate managerial behaviours\", while the head of Canberra Hospital told Australian politicians that \"on a couple of occasions, issues [were] brought to my attention in relation to Mr Martin's management approach.\n\n\"I have spoken to Mr Martin and we are working with his executive coach in relation to matters that have been raised.\"\n\nOn returning to the UK in 2013, Lee Martin was appointed chief operating officer at the Whittington Hospital in north London.\n\nAgain, the BBC has been told, concerns were raised about his \"very assertive managerial style\", including some staff saying they felt bullied by him.\n\nHe left the Whittington to join the London Northwest Healthcare Trust in 2015 before moving to Kent.\n\nAll the allegations were put to Mr Martin.\n\nHe has chosen not to respond.\n\nMr Martin has chosen not to respond to the allegations\n\nIn a statement, the East Kent Hospitals Trust said: \"We take all staff concerns and complaints extremely seriously and are committed to listening and acting on feedback.\n\n\"There are several ways that staff can raise concerns or make complaints about the behaviour of colleagues and we would encourage any member of staff with a complaint or a concern to contact the chief executive, their line manager or one of our Freedom to Speak Up Guardians so the matter can be properly investigated.\"", "The number of empty privately-owned homes in Wales has risen 40% in nearly a decade, figures have shown.\n\nThe 27,000 empty properties have been described as a \"wasted resource\" as so many people need affordable homes.\n\nShelter Cymru said councils have not used powers to take over some homes to bring them back into use because they fear \"getting it wrong\".\n\nThe Welsh Government said £40m had been given to councils and it expected the number of empty properties to fall.", "Plans for when universities in England must stop in-person teaching to allow students to go home for Christmas will be set out \"shortly\", the Department for Education has said.\n\nIt comes after the Guardian reported that students will be told to remain on campus and teaching will be done online in the run-up to the end of term.\n\nThe government said the risk of spreading the virus must be minimised.\n\nBut the University and College Union described the measures as \"unworkable\".\n\nA spokesman for the Department for Education said: \"All students will be able to go home at Christmas if they so choose.\n\n\"However, if students are travelling home, we must ensure they do so in a way which minimises the risks of spreading the virus, and the date when universities must stop in-person teaching will be an important part of this.\n\n\"We will set out details on this shortly.\"\n\nThe department gave no details on whether the measures would be for all universities in England or just those in virus hotspots.\n\nMore than 50 universities are believed to have had coronavirus cases so far this term, with thousands of students forced to self-isolate.\n\nLast month, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said universities in England could move to online-only learning before term would usually end so that students in areas with outbreaks would have time to isolate and still be able to travel home at Christmas.\n\nAccording to the Guardian, the government's plan, which is said to be in its early stages, would see students told to stay on campus and all in-person teaching paused from 8 December until 22 December.\n\nResponding to the reports, general secretary of the University and College Union Jo Grady said: \"This is an unworkable and chaotic set of measures that will be impossible to deliver or oversee.\n\n\"Instead of this perverse obsession with Christmas, ministers and universities must focus on the here and now. We should be talking about getting people home now, not in two months' time.\"\n\nShe called for the plan to be scrapped and for \"all possible activities\" to be moved online.\n\nOn Monday it emerged that the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) had recommended that all university teaching should be carried out online \"unless absolutely essential\".\n\nMr Williamson has previously rejected calls to move all teaching online.\n\nSome universities, including Aberystwyth, temporarily suspended in-person teaching in response to outbreaks.\n\nIn Northern Ireland, the executive has agreed to advise universities to run courses online.\n\nMinisters in Scotland and Wales have said it is a \"priority\" to allow students to return home for Christmas.", "A final decision has not yet been made on whether Greater Manchester will move into the highest level of Covid measures, local MPs have told the BBC.\n\nA financial package has not been finalised, with local leaders expressing concerns about the impact on the hospitality industry.\n\nTier 3 involves pub closures and a ban on household mixing indoors, in private gardens and in most outdoor venues.\n\nMeanwhile, other parts of England will move into Tier 2 from Saturday.\n\nUnder this \"high\" alert level, the regions will face restrictions on meeting indoors.\n\nIt means more than half of England's population will be living under Tier 2 or 3 restrictions.\n\nTalks between the government and officials in Greater Manchester and Lancashire were taking place on Thursday morning about moving to Tier 3 or the \"very high\" alert level.\n\nSpeaking in the House of Commons, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said discussions with local leaders in other parts of the country \"in Greater Manchester, in Lancashire, and elsewhere\" were ongoing - including \"what financial support is needed\".\n\nBut he told MPs he wanted to see \"rapid progress\" on the issue, and said \"we have put in place unprecedented support [for] those affected\".\n\nHe added: \"Let us be under no illusions about the danger posed by this virus.\n\n\"Coronavirus is deadly and it is now spreading exponentially in the UK.\"\n\nGreater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham has been resisting following the Liverpool City Region into Tier 3 restrictions, which he has described as unfair and a threat to jobs and businesses.\n\nShadow foreign secretary and Labour MP for Wigan Lisa Nandy said \"despite repeated attempts to claim we're divided\" there was \"total unity\" from Conservative and Labour Greater Manchester MPs on a call with Downing Street officials on Thursday morning.\n\nShe tweeted: \"We will support evidence based interventions with adequate financial support. We will not support this chaos.\"\n\nOldham Council leader Sean Fielding described the meeting as a \"masterclass in how not to\" hold negotiations.\n\nHe said the government's \"opening line\" was that Tier 3 would be implemented with local leaders or imposed, with \"nothing... to bring us on side because 'there is no money'\".\n\nMeanwhile, Labour's Andrew Gwynne, the MP for Denton and Reddish, tweeted that the briefing \"was utterly pointless\".\n\n\"While they claim 'no decision on Tier 3' we know it was being heavily briefed,\" he said.\n\n\"The strength of feeling was strong from Tory and Labour MPs alike. The minister needs to listen: we are a city united.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe new three-tier system sees every area of England classed as being on medium, high or very high alert - also known as Tiers 1 to 3, respectively.\n\nMedium alert means areas are subject to the national restrictions currently in force, including the rule of six on indoor and outdoor gatherings and the 22:00 closing time for pubs, bars and restaurants.\n\nIn addition to these restrictions, in areas on high alert - including north-east England, much of the North West and parts of the Midlands, along with West and South Yorkshire - different households are not allowed to mix indoors.\n\nAreas on very high alert face extra curbs, with different households banned from mixing indoors or outdoors in hospitality venues or private gardens.\n\nPeople from different households can still meet in certain outdoor public spaces, such as parks, beaches, the countryside, forests, public gardens, allotments, outdoor sports facilities and playgrounds.\n\nPubs and bars will be closed unless they are serving substantial meals and there is also guidance against travelling in and out of the area.\n\nFurther restrictions may be agreed for particular regions in the top tier and in the Liverpool City Region gyms, leisure centres, betting shops and casinos have also been forced to close.\n\nWorkers at firms told to shut because of coronavirus rules over the winter will receive at least two-thirds of their pay from the government, under the Job Support Scheme announced by Chancellor Rishi Sunak.\n\nThis means the scheme - which replaces furlough at the start of November for six months - will pay those people who can't go to work because pubs and restaurants have been closed under ''very high'' Tier 3 coronavirus restrictions.\n\nUntil then, workers are in line for up to 80% of their pay - 20% from their employer and 60% from the government - if their premises must close, or if there isn't enough for them to do.\n\nIn a meeting on Wednesday, health officials from the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) suggested that Greater Manchester along with much of north-east and north-west England and parts of Yorkshire and the Midlands should be moved into the top tier.\n\nMeanwhile, schools in Northern Ireland will close from Monday and pubs and restaurants face new restrictions from Friday.\n\nWales is preparing to ban people from parts of the UK that have high rates of coronavirus from travelling to the country from 18:00 BST on Friday.\n\nAnd in Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has advised Scots against travelling to high risk areas of England, singling out Blackpool as being linked to \"a large and growing number\" of Covid-19 cases in her country.\n\nOn Wednesday, a further 19,724 coronavirus cases were recorded in the UK, while 137 more people have died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus.\n\nHow will the new measures affect you? Do you have any questions about the restrictions? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Rashford scored a winner for vulnerable children in the summer\n\nHungry children are sitting in class worrying about what their younger siblings will eat at home later, says campaigning footballer Marcus Rashford.\n\nRashford, who prompted a Westminster government U-turn on free meals over the summer holidays, says some cannot focus due to rumbling stomachs.\n\nStepping up his child poverty campaign, he is urging UK ministers to offer free meals to 1.5 million more children.\n\nNumber 10 said it was not for schools to provide food during holidays.\n\nThe Prime Minister's official spokesman told reporters the government had already \"taken action to make sure children don't go hungry\".\n\n\"We are in a different position now schools are open - it's not for schools to regularly provide food during the holidays.\n\n\"We think Universal Credit will provide what's needed,\" he added.\n\nWales has said it will offer poor pupils free meals over the holidays.\n\nNorthern Ireland, which has announced a time limited lockdown in which schools will close, has said it will cover pupils' meals during this period, but nothing further is promised for the coming Christmas holiday.\n\nEngland's government has not committed any further resources to free school meals since schools returned in September.\n\nRashford, who has told of his own impoverished childhood and formed a coalition of food campaigners under the name #endchildfoodpoverty, is now mounting a petition to Parliament.\n\nThe petition calls for free school meals to be available for every child from a household on Universal Credit or equivalent.\n\nThis would mean the meals reach an additional 1.5 million children aged seven to 16, his campaign said.\n\nHe also wants holiday meals and activities to be expanded to an extra 1.1 million, and the value of healthy food vouchers for pregnant women to be increased to increased to £4.25 per week (up from £3.10)\n\nRashford, who has just become an MBE for his work for vulnerable children, said many say that education is the most effective means of combating poverty.\n\nBut he added: \"Education is only effective when children can engage in learning.\n\n\"Right now, a generation who have already been penalised during this pandemic with lack of access to educational resources are now back in school struggling to concentrate due to worry and the sound of their rumbling stomachs.\n\n\"Whatever your feeling, opinion, or judgement, food poverty is never the child's fault.\n\nSaffron says children need support more now than ever\n\n\"Let's protect our young. Let's wrap arms around each other and stand together to say that this is unacceptable, that we are united in protecting our children.\"\n\nHe added that millions of British children were finding themselves in very vulnerable circumstances, and were \"beginning to question what it really means to be British\".\n\n\"I'm calling on you all today to help me prove to them that being British is something to be proud of,\" he said.\n\nRashford added: \"The school holidays used to be a highlight of the year for children. Today, it is met with anxiety from those as young as seven years old.\"\n\nSaffron, who is 15 and from Portsmouth, said: \"After the U-turn this summer, it felt like the government finally understood that children can't be left to go hungry during the holidays.\n\n\"But now we're back in the same position of having to ask for help. Covid-19 isn't going away, and even more families are struggling. Children need support during the holidays now more than ever.\"\n\nWhile 15-year-old Felix, who has eight siblings and lives in Norfolk, said: \"For a really big family like mine, the holidays mean much more pressure on our parents - with me and my siblings at home there needs to be more meals, extra childcare, higher bills.\n\n\"For families fallen on hard times and for parents have lost their jobs because of Covid, the pressure to provide during the holidays must be overwhelming.\"\n\nA spokesman for the Westminster government said it had taken substantial action to make sure children and their families did not go hungry.\n\nThis included extending free school meals support to those eligible when schools were closed, extending welfare support by £9.3bn, funding councils to provide emergency assistance to families with food, essentials and meals, it said.\n\n\"We know it has been a challenging time for families which is why we have increased the safety net available to them with income protection schemes, mortgage holidays and support for renters.\"", "Three-year-old Hadija is now an orphan. Her mum, dad and older sister were killed in a missile strike by Armenian forces on their house.\n\nArmenia and Azerbaijain are fighting a war for control of the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.\n\nBut civilians on both sides are also caught up in the conflict.", "Is President Trump right about US carbon emissions?\n\nIn the final presidential debate last night, Donald Trump said the US has had the \"best carbon emission numbers\" in the last 35 years. He went on to claim that countries such as China, Russia and India were \"filthy\". Last year, the US's carbon emissions per capita were at their lowest point in the past 35 years - if this is what Trump was referring to. The data shows that, in recent decades, total carbon emissions have been on a general downward trend, with some fluctuations. There's been a shift to both gas and renewable energy sources, and away from coal, largely because of cost. Trump would have burned more coal (which would have increased emissions), but it proved uneconomic to do so. As far as other countries are concerned, China has higher total CO2 emissions than the US, although emissions from the US are still much bigger than both India and Russia. And as far as emissions per capita go, the US is still ahead of China, Russia and India. Emissions from the US per capita in 2017 were over 16 tonnes while India's were the lowest – at fewer than two tonnes.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Mr Becker appeared at Southwark Crown Court where he denied all 28 charges against him\n\nEx-tennis champion Boris Becker has appeared in court accused of failing to hand over trophies from his playing days so they could be sold to pay debts.\n\nThe three-time Wimbledon winner was declared bankrupt in 2017 over money owed to a bank.\n\nHe is accused of not complying with obligations to disclose information.\n\nMr Becker denied all 28 charges against him at a Southwark Crown Court hearing in London on Thursday.\n\nThe 28-count indictment includes mention of his 1985 All England Club trophy, his 1989 silverware from the same tournament, and his Australian Open trophies from 1991 and 1996.\n\nBoris Becker was the youngest ever Wimbledon men's singles champion, aged 17\n\nThe 52-year-old German national is also accused of concealing more than £1m held in bank accounts, in addition to property in the UK and abroad.\n\nThe court heard that he failed to declare his property interest in an address in Chelsea, south-west London, with similar charges for two properties in his home town of Leimen.\n\nMr Becker is also accused of removing hundreds of thousands of pounds by transferring it to other accounts, including to former wife Barbara Becker, and estranged wife Sharlely \"Lilly\" Becker.\n\nIt is also alleged he hid his holding of shares in a firm called Breaking Data Corp.\n\nMr Becker appeared to record himself on his mobile phone at Southwark Crown Court\n\nMr Becker was released on bail ahead of his trial next September, which is set to last up to four weeks.\n\nProsecutor Rebecca Chalkley said the retired sportsman and television presenter may face further charges at a later date.\n\nDefence counsel Jonathan Caplan said: \"He (Mr Becker) is determined to face and contest these charges and restore his reputation in relation to the allegations made against him.\"\n\nThe former world number one and six-time Grand Slam champion collected 49 singles titles out of 77 finals during his 16 years as a professional tennis player.\n\nHe was picked to enter the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2003, and has been a commentator on the BBC and at tennis tournaments around the world.", "Australian police have arrested 44 men across the nation on suspicion of possessing and producing child abuse material.\n\nSixteen children had been \"removed from harm\" in the process, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said.\n\nThe arrests followed a year-long investigation into images and videos that were shared online.\n\nArrests of the suspects - all aged between 19 and 57 - were made in every Australian state.\n\nPolice laid a total of 350 charges, all related to possessing or producing child exploitation material.\n\nThe men had allegedly used a cloud storage platform to share the abuse. The AFP described some evidence as among \"the most abhorrent produced\".\n\nCommissioner Reece Kershaw said identifying and rescuing victims was a \"race against time\" in such cases.\n\n\"Pixel by pixel, our investigators painstakingly look for clues and never give up,\" he said.\n\nHundreds of police and other specialists worked on the operation across Australia's states and territories.\n\nThe arrests numbered 11 in Victoria, 11 in Queensland, nine in South Australia, eight in New South Wales, seven in Western Australia, five in Tasmania and one in the Australian Capital Territory.\n\nThe suspects worked in industries including construction, transport, law enforcement and hospitality.\n\n\"Children are not commodities and the AFP and its partner agencies work around-the-clock to identify and prosecute offenders,\" Mr Kershaw said.\n\nThe AFP said it had rescued 134 children from child exploitation this year, including 67 who were not in Australia.", "There have been confirmed Covid-19 cases in half of Northern Ireland's schools since the start of term.\n\nThat is according to new figures published by the Public Health Agency (PHA).\n\nThe PHA has been informed of 2,030 positive Covid cases in schools since teaching returned at the beginning of term.\n\nThere had been 608 Covid-19 so-called incidents in 519 schools up until 20 October, said the agency.\n• None 519Schools with at least one positive Covid case out of 1,035 total schools\n• None 237Schools with a cluster of two to five cases\n• None 69Schools with a cluster of more than five cases\n\nAn incident can be a single positive case, a cluster of two to five cases or more than five cases.\n\nA cluster is defined by the PHA as two or more laboratory-confirmed cases of Covid-19 among individuals in one setting, such as a school.\n\nThis is the first time the agency has reported the number of Covid cases specifically in schools.\n\nIn other Covid-19 developments on Friday:\n\nThe figures from the PHA detail the number of cases in schools from the start of term in late August up until Tuesday.\n\nA school can have more than one Covid \"incident\"- for instance, it could have two separate cases or clusters that are not linked to each other.\n\nOverall, 86% of post-primary schools had at least one case since the start of term, compared to around 40% of primary schools and 66% of special schools.\n\nAround three-quarters of schools (76%) in the Belfast City Council area have been affected by positive cases.\n\nThat local government district had the highest proportion of schools affected, just higher than the numbers recorded in Londonderry, Strabane and Omagh - the district with the second highest proportion.\n\nOf school cases notified to the PHA, just over two-thirds (68%) were pupils and one-third (32%) were staff.\n\nThe PHA does not report how many pupils or staff had to self-isolate as a result of coming into contact with positive cases in schools.\n\nHowever, separate figures released to the Alliance MLA Chris Lyttle in response to an assembly question showed that over one in 10 teaching and non-teaching staff were not working in school in the week from 6-13 October.\n\nJust over a third of those staff were absent from school as they were self-isolating for 14 days.\n\nHowever, staff who are self-isolating may still be working from home.\n\nSome schools have been forced to close for short periods and teach pupils online, due mainly to a number of staff self-isolating.\n\nSchools in Northern Ireland began an extended two-week half term break on Monday 19 October.", "US retailer Gap could close all of its own UK stores, putting thousands of jobs at risk, as it mulls shifting its operations to franchise-only in Europe.\n\nShops in the UK, France, Ireland and Italy could shut next summer, along with its UK-based European distribution centre, the retailer said.\n\nGap would not disclose the number of UK stores it has, nor the size of its workforce.\n\nFalling sales in recent years have been exacerbated by coronavirus disruption.\n\nThe retailer reported a £740m loss in the three months to May.\n\nInstead of operating its own stores, Gap said it was looking at whether to move to a franchise model. The retailer had 129 Gap-branded stores in Europe at the end of July, and about 400 franchise stores.\n\n\"As we conduct the review, we will look at transferring elements of the business to interested third parties as part of a proposed partnership model expansion,\" said Mark Breitbard, head of Gap brand global.\n\nA Gap spokesperson added it was also looking at \"alternative ways to operate the European e-commerce business.\" The spokesperson declined to give a breakdown of the number of stores and employees Gap has by country.\n\nClothing retailers have been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis. As well as temporary shop closures during lockdown, they have had to contend with lower footfall and an accelerated shift to online shopping which has been capitalised on by specialists such as Asos and Boohoo.\n\nMany retailers have struggled to survive amid the crisis, according to the Centre for Retail Research. These include:\n\nEven before the pandemic, Gap was fighting to revitalise itself after losing younger shoppers to cheaper fast fashion brands such as Zara, H&M and Forever 21 over a number of years.\n\nEarlier this year, Gap said it planned to close over 225 unprofitable Gap and Banana Republic stores globally as a part of a restructuring plan.", "UK tourists seeking winter sun have been given a boost, after Spain's Canary Islands and the Maldives were added to the government's safe travel list.\n\nIt means visitors will no longer need to quarantine for 14 days on their return, with the Greek island of Mykonos and Denmark also deemed safe.\n\nThe changes apply to anyone arriving in the UK after 04:00 BST on Sunday.\n\nBut Liechtenstein has been taken off the list, so arrivals must isolate.\n\nThe changes apply to citizens from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.\n\nThe Canary Islands are popular with winter holidaymakers, being one of the few parts of Europe warm enough for beach holidays at that time.\n\nHowever, the rest of Spain, including the Balearic Islands, remain subject to quarantine restrictions amid a surge in infections.\n\nBeyond having to fill in passenger locator forms, visitors to the Canaries and Mykonos currently face no restrictions to entry.\n\nBut all visitors to the Maldives are required to prove they have had a negative Covid test within 96 hours of arrival.\n\nAnd any UK citizen visiting Denmark must prove they have a \"worthy purpose\" for visiting, such as work or study, as Denmark deems Britain to be a high risk country.\n\nTourism is not considered a worthy purpose, although people with second homes in the country may visit.\n\nThe Department for Transport said the new additions to the safe list had seen a decrease in confirmed cases of coronavirus.\n\nHowever, it said \"a significant change in both the level and pace of confirmed cases of coronavirus in Liechtenstein\" had led to it being removed from the current list of \"travel corridors\".\n\nAfter so much doom and gloom, travel companies can suddenly see the sunshine. The Canaries are a key destination for UK airlines and tour operators.\n\nAnd it is not an exaggeration to say that the removal of the quarantine will help these companies make it through the winter.\n\nThe government has, in effect, dialled-up the tourism \"on switch\".\n\nHowever it will be a real test case for whether, in these uncertain Covid times, there is demand for travel.\n\nWith plenty of time for people to make winter bookings it's a timely moment.\n\nBritish Airways recently scheduled a direct flight to the Maldives, so maybe they knew something we didn't.\n\nTravel companies, which have seen demand slump due to the quarantine rules, welcomed the decision on the Canaries.\n\n\"The Canaries are a hugely important market for winter travel - representing over 50% of bookings for some tour operators - so this is very welcome news for the whole sector,\" said industry body Airlines UK.\n\nAndrew Flintham, managing director of TUI, said the holiday operator had not been able to take people on a holiday to the Canaries for 89 days.\n\n\"We're therefore delighted that UK flights will now resume from Saturday 24 October. The first flights will depart to Fuerteventura and Lanzarote this weekend, with many more added in the coming days.\"\n\nThere are now only a handful of places travellers from the UK can visit without facing restrictions - either when they arrive at their destination, or return.\n\nThere are hopes coronavirus testing for passengers could make travel to more destinations possible, by providing proof of a negative result before travellers leave the UK.\n\nTransport Secretary Grant Shapps, meanwhile, has said he is \"hopeful\" a new testing regime for arrivals to Britain can be in place by 1 December, reducing the amount of time people need to spend in quarantine.\n\nHowever, new British Airways boss Sean Doyle last week called for tests for returning Britons before departure, warning the UK would \"get left behind\" without more radical action.\n\nEarlier on Monday the airline cut flight numbers again, saying it would operate fewer planes than planned for the rest of the year as the pandemic continues to hit demand.\n\nThe Foreign Office still advises British nationals against all but essential international travel due to the pandemic.", "A hospitality body has described the government's new financial support package as welcome in the short-term - but \"the equivalent of being abandoned at sea with only a lifejacket\".\n\nThe Scottish Hospitality Group said the current approach was having a \"devastating\" impact on people’s lives and livelihoods.\n\nAnd it warned the new tiered system of restrictions would only add to the problem.\n\nSpokesman Stephen Montgomery said: \"The industry cannot survive if the intention is to impose these restrictions indefinitely.\n\n\"They (the Scottish government) need to sit down and work with businesses before it is too late and save an industry that is the third biggest employer in the country.\n\n\"The hospitality industry is still left bearing the brunt with no scientific, statistical, or medical evidence for these restrictions.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Rugby Union\n\nEngland's match against the Barbarians at Twickenham on Sunday has been called off after 12 Barbarians players were stood down for breaking Covid rules.\n\nThe players left their hotel bubble - contrary to team protocols - to have dinner at a London restaurant.\n\nDuring its investigation, the Rugby Football Union (RFU) said it discovered another breach where players left the hotel without permission.\n\nFormer England captain Chris Robshaw is among the players who have apologised.\n\nIt is understood several Barbarians players went to a central London pub on Tuesday as well as an Italian restaurant on Wednesday.\n\nThe RFU said the players' actions meant the \"bubble environment\" was compromised.\n\n\"We are incredibly disappointed to be calling a halt to this fixture,\" said RFU chief executive Bill Sweeney. \"We know how much fans were looking forward to seeing the teams play.\n\n\"However, our priority is to protect the health and safety of the England squad and the other international teams they will go up against this autumn.\"\n\nRobshaw, Richard Wigglesworth, Sean Maitland and Jackson Wray were among the 12 players stood down from the fixture, along with a number of other Saracens players.\n\nRobshaw, who is set to join San Diego Legion in the US, expressed his \"deepest apologies\" for \"leaving the hotel post-training with some of my team-mates\".\n\n\"A huge effort went into conducting this match in a safe fashion and it was irresponsible of me to break the protocols which are put in place to protect players, staff and the public,\" he said.\n\n\"I understand that my actions have ultimately contributed to the cancellation of Sunday's match and I am sincerely remorseful for my role in undoing all the amazing work that went into trying to make it happen.\n\n\"I promise that I will learn from this mistake and ensure something like this never happens again.\"\n\nFormer England scrum-half Wigglesworth said: \"Embarrassed and beyond gutted to have let (coach) Vern Cotter and everyone at Barbarians FC as well as the RFU.\n\n\"Should not have happened and for that I am truly sorry. I've let a lot of people down including myself and wish I'd done it differently. Sorry again.\"\n\nSaracens lock Joel Kpoku and former Ireland wing Fergus McFadden also posted social media apologies.\n\nThe Barbarians, who announced their 23-man squad on Wednesday, were given a 15:00 BST deadline on Friday to attempt to recruit a team.\n\nPremiership Rugby officials emailed clubs on Thursday to ask if they would release players to play for the invitational side.\n\nHowever, it has now been deemed unsafe to fulfil the fixture.\n\nSweeney said: \"There has been a great deal of effort put into Covid codes of conduct and planning for games, including cooperation with Premiership clubs to release additional players to fulfil the fixture safely.\n\n\"We are all incredibly frustrated and disappointed that the actions of a number of Barbarians players mean we no longer feel it is safe for the game to go ahead.\"\n\nBarbarian FC expressed their \"extreme disappointment\" in the conduct of the players who breached regulations.\n\nThe build-up to Barbarians games is famous for its focus on socialising and the team management installed a team room in their London base to keep the players entertained.\n• None Can a government minister outrun the secrets of his past?\n• None Behind the scenes of a club reborn", "Half of Scotland's councils are to move down a level following the latest review of the country's Covid restrictions.\n\nThese include the 11 areas which had been in level four, which contains the toughest restrictions.\n\nThe changes take effect on Friday. So what are the rules which apply in the different levels?\n\nAbout 2.3 million people in west and central Scotland have been living under these restrictions, which are the closest to a full lockdown, since 20 November.\n\nAll non-essential shops are closed, as are all pubs, cafes and restaurants - although they can still offer a takeaway service.\n\nHairdressers, tailors, barbers and beauticians also had to shut, along with all leisure, entertainment and visitor attractions, and public buildings.\n\nGyms and sports centres are also closed, with only non-contact sports allowed outdoors.\n\nSocialising is not allowed in people's homes, although six people from two households can still meet outdoors.\n\nIt is illegal to travel outside your council area without a reasonable excuse and journeys within your area should also be kept to a minimum.\n\nUp to 20 people can attend places of worship, weddings, civil partnerships, funerals and wakes. Wedding and civil partnership receptions are not allowed.\n\nShops, bars, restaurants, visitor attractions, libraries, hairdressers, barbers and beauticians can reopen if an area moves down to level three.\n\nA maximum of six people from two households can meet in hospitality venues, either indoors or outdoors. However, no alcohol can be sold, and premises must close at 18:00.\n\nAll leisure and entertainment venues are closed, such as soft play, funfairs, snooker and pool halls, indoor bowling alleys, casinos and bingo halls. Outdoor live events are banned.\n\nGyms can open for individual exercise but indoor group exercise activities for over-18s are not allowed. Organised outdoor non-contact sports, personal training and coaching can take place, but contact sports are banned for adults (apart from professional sport).\n\nUnder-18s can take part in organised sports and activities, both indoor and outdoor, as long as they follow the guidance for that sport.\n\nAs in level four, it is against the law to travel outside your council area unless your journey is for an essential purpose.\n\nPlaces of worship can open for up to 50 people, and there is a 20-person limit for weddings, civil partnerships, funerals, wakes and receptions.\n\nIn-home socialising is still not allowed, although up to six people from two households can meet outdoors and in hospitality settings.\n\nPubs, cafes and restaurants can serve alcohol indoors, but only with a main meal, and must close by 20:00. Outdoors, alcohol can be consumed without a meal and venues can stay open until 22:30.\n\nMost leisure and entertainment premises are still closed. However, cinemas and bingo halls can reopen with physical distancing measures in place.\n\nStadium gatherings and events are still banned, other than drive-ins.\n\nAdults are allowed to take part in organised outdoor sports, personal training and coaching, as well as indoor exercise classes and non-contact sports. Contact sports are not allowed indoors.\n\nThe rules for places of worship and for life events, such as weddings and funerals, are the same as in level three.\n\nBy law, those in levels two and below should not travel into level three or four areas unless their journey is essential. People should also not travel to or from other parts of the UK without a reasonable excuse.\n\nPeople living in level two and below are also asked to minimise unnecessary journeys between areas in different levels.\n\nThere should be a \"reasonable\" degree of normality in level one.\n\nIn Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, up to six people from two households are allowed to meet indoors at home.\n\nHowever, the ban on meeting in your or another person's home remains in the other level one areas.\n\nUp to eight people from three households can meet outside - either in a park or garden, or outdoors at a hospitality venue.\n\nPubs cafes and restaurants can serve food and alcohol in line with normal licensing rules, but must close by 22:30.\n\nSoft play, funfairs, snooker and pool halls, indoor bowling alleys, casinos and bingo halls can reopen, although nightclubs and adult entertainment venues are still closed. All indoor and outdoor visitor attractions can also open.\n\nThe guidelines on participating in sport are similar to those in level two, with adults still unable to take part in indoor contact sports.\n\nIt is possible for crowds to return to sports stadia with limited numbers, and outdoor seated events are also allowed.\n\nOutdoor grouped standing events are still banned, although small indoor seated events can take place.\n\nThe rules for travel, life events and places of worship are the same as in level two.\n\nThis level is broadly comparable to the position in August when the virus was very suppressed in Scotland but still a threat.\n\nA maximum of eight people from three households would be able to meet indoors, either in someone's home or in hospitality premises.\n\nUp to 15 people from five households can gather outdoors, either in a park or garden or outdoors at a pub, cafe or restaurant.\n\nAll outdoor events are allowed, with restricted numbers. Indoor events can go ahead where those attending are seated or able to walk around a venue, but events where people stand in groups should not take place.\n\nLeisure and entertainment remains open with the exception of nightclubs and adult entertainment venues.\n\nUp to 50 people can attend weddings, civil partnerships, funerals, wakes and receptions. The same number can attend indoor places of worship, but 200 people could be allowed at an outdoor act of worship.\n\nThe same travel rules apply as in levels one and two.", "Climate change activists are staging a protest outside the Grangemouth oil refinery.\n\nDemonstrators from Extinction Rebellion are attempting to prevent access to the Ineos plant and have blocked two roads with boats. The group said protesters had also locked themselves together.\n\nThe group has accused the petrochemical manufacturer of being Scotland's biggest climate change polluter.\n\nIneos said it would continue to explore ways to reduce emissions at its sites.\n\nProtesters are also demonstrating outside the company's London headquarters.\n\nAn Extinction Rebellion statement said it had blocked the Bo'ness Road gate with a boat and that another boat was located at the Ineos office on Inchyra Road.\n\nExtinction Rebellion Scotland said Covid-19 safety precautions were being taken, including face masks, social distancing and use of hand sanitiser, while participating activists were using a track and trace app.\n\nCampaigners held up banners stating \"No Future in Fossil Fuels\" and \"Climate Justice = Social Justice\".\n\nAnnie Lane, 26, a campaigner from Glasgow, said: \"We are here to expose the climate destruction that Ineos is causing. We are running out of time, with the climate crisis affecting so many in the global south already.\"\n\nIneos said that between 2009 and 2019, emissions from its Grangemouth site had reduced by 37% and emissions from the chemicals business had fallen by 43%.\n\nA spokesman said the company's sites were exploring ways to reduce emissions.\n\nHe added: \"As more and more energy-intensive manufacturing industries in Scotland close down, then it is inevitable that those which the Scottish economy so heavily rely on will stand out above the rest in terms of their emissions.\n\n\"Observers should be left in no doubt: manufacturing products in the UK we rely on every day, every week, every year reduces carbon footprint from importing such items, ensures compliance with the strictest environmental and safety standards and delivers carbon savings through their applications, 'light-weighting' vehicles, components for wind turbines and so on.\n\n\"We do our utmost to do this as efficiently (and environmentally responsibly) as possible - because this is how we will remain in business.\"\n\nSupt Simon Jeacocke of Police Scotland said officers had reached agreement with protesters to allow a peaceful demonstration ending at 14:00.\n\n\"At 2pm, the group informed police that they did not wish to leave the area and as a result, 12 people have been arrested,\" he said.\n\n\"In addition, two sailing boats and various other items used to create the roadblock have been seized.\n\n\"Reports will be submitted to the Procurator Fiscal and the road will be fully re-opened in due course.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "A selection of your pictures of Scotland sent in between 16 and 23 October. Send your photos to scotlandpictures@bbc.co.uk. Please ensure you adhere to the BBC's rules regarding photographs which can be found here.\n\nPlease also ensure you follow current coronavirus guidelines and take your pictures safely and responsibly.\n\nConditions of use: If you submit an image, you do so in accordance with the BBC's terms and conditions.\n\nThis out-of-this-world shot of the milky way above Lonan House in Glen Lonan was snapped by Michael Kent.\n\nAutumn has arrived. Andrena Coburn's daughter shares her name with the season and enjoys her special time of year playing hide and seek behind the big fir trees in the Hermitage at Dunkeld.\n\nDoe a deer - this friendly female deer wasn't shy as she met Michelle Borland on a visit to Glencoe.\n\nRay - this drop of golden sun adds the finishing touches to Marion Reid's portrait of autumn.\n\nMe myself and I - Bruce Melvin's daughter Evie has the hills near Cairnsmore of Fleet all to herself in this picture.\n\nCanoe believe how beautiful the light and the broody sky look for this kayaker on Loch Bracadale, Skye?\n\nOh deer - this majestic creature was waiting for a snack from Marc McCubbin from Renfrew at the Kingshouse Hotel in Glencoe.\n\nA housebreaking squirrel is caught in the act stealing nuts in Edinburgh.\n\nWho says we only choose dogs? Cleo the cat represents the feline faction as she enjoys the autumn sunshine in her garden in Motherwell.\n\nA line of the times: Aoibheann Devine thought this washing line near Pittenweem was very 2020.\n\nAhead of the curve: Stephanie Brough got the best part of the day on her morning run through the McLennan Arch on Glasgow Green.\n\nWhy couldn't the pony sing? Because he was a little hoarse: Christie Mellis reckons her son Nathaniel was sharing a joke with a local horse where his gran stays near Cove, Kilcreggan.\n\nHaving it Largs: A rainbow encapsulates the North Ayrshire town, spotted from the Cumbrae ferry terminal by Maureen Kerrigan.\n\nNo going back: Lucy, aged 10 braces for the cold after jumping off the slipway at Lamlash Bay, Arran as her mum Alison Roberts snapped the shot.\n\nThis tree-mendous picture of Finn the Cocker Spaniel at the Cat Gates at Culzean Castle has a cinematic feel to it.\n\nSandie Pow's husband Colin travels at the speed of kite as he surfs on the family's favourite beach, Sands of Luce in Dumfries and Galloway.\n\nStephen Robertson soaked up the rich colours of autumn highlighted in this beautiful sunset over the hamlet of Altandhu and the summer isles.\n\nFour-year-old George is on track for a nice day out as he waves at the approaching train driver and passengers on the miniature railway as Strathaven Model Society staged the final rides of 2020.\n\nMist and yellow fruitfulness: Autumn colours take over in the back garden of Sarah Morris in Hamilton.\n\nGene Webster saw some shades of Halloween in this in-tree-guing shot taken at Glenmore in Aviemore.\n\nSea bass: Alan Bruce from Edinburgh captured this cold-looking view of Bass rock with gannets looking on.\n\nThree Exmoor ponies at North Berwick Law take a colt hard look at a couple of dogs walking past.\n\nWish view were here: Linda Young captures Ard Neackie on Loch Eriboll - a rocky promontory connected to the mainland by a sandy spit.\n\nLeave me alone: Ross Collins witnesses a car-free Kelvin Way in Glasgow as it remains pedestrian-only for social distancing.\n\nJoe and Joshua appreciate a neighbour's rainbow in support of our NHS.\n\nMussel Beach: Jan DolnyI took an autumnal walk along Musselburgh Beach and was reminded how the town got its name, with thousands of mussel shells lining the shoreline beyond Fisherrow Harbour.\n\nDrama scene: Craig Buchan's photo from St Fillans looking out over Loch Earn looks like the start of a movie with the morning mist breaking over the still loch.\n\nIn the run-up to Halloween, this moody picture of the light at the end of the tunnel on Inchcolm Island in the Firth of Forth has a hint of Harry Potter about it, and He Who Must Not Be Named.\n\nIt's not Ard to see why we loved this mirror image shot of Loch Ard by Alan from Glasgow.\n\nPlease ensure that the photograph you send is your own and if you are submitting photographs of children, we must have written permission from a parent or guardian of every child featured (a grandparent, auntie or friend will not suffice).\n\nIn contributing to BBC News you agree to grant us a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to publish and otherwise use the material in any way, including in any media worldwide.\n\nHowever, you will still own the copyright to everything you contribute to BBC News.\n\nAt no time should you endanger yourself or others, take any unnecessary risks or infringe the law.\n\nYou can find more information here.\n\nAll photos are subject to copyright.", "Coronavirus infections continue to rise across the UK, according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics.\n\nIt estimates cases have risen by a quarter to more than 35,200 a day in England.\n\nInfection rates have been highest among teenagers and young adults in recent weeks.\n\nIt comes as stricter rules come into force for millions more people across the UK.\n\nAround one in 130 people you might meet in the street in England had coronavirus in the week to 16 October, data from the ONS infection survey suggests.\n\nThis compares with one in 180 in Wales and Scotland, and one in 100 in Northern Ireland.\n\nThe highest levels of the virus continue to be in the north-west and north-east of England.\n\nMeanwhile, the R number has decreased slightly and is now estimated to be between 1.2 and 1.4. That means every 10 people with the virus pass it on to 12 or 14 others, on average.\n\nThe ONS figures are based on a survey of people in random households whether they have symptoms or not, giving one of the most accurate pictures of the epidemic.\n\nAlthough cases are still rising, they suggest a slight slowing in the rate of growth of infections since the previous week's survey.\n\nThis echoes data from Public Health England which suggests cases may now be falling among people in their teens and 20s while still increasing in all other age groups.\n\nThe ONS figures are much higher than the lab-confirmed cases recorded by the UK government every day. Another 21,242 cases and 189 deaths were confirmed on Thursday.\n\nAnother source of data, the Covid Symptom study app, suggests there were more than 36,000 new daily cases in the UK over the two weeks to 18 October - up from nearly 28,000 a week ago.\n\nThese numbers are based on users logging their symptoms and positive tests on the app.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid symptoms: What are they and how long should I self-isolate for?\n\nTim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College London, and founder of the app, said the gap between the northern regions of the UK and the south \"was growing\".\n\n\"Our data clearly shows that the number of cases is still being driven by the younger generations, which should mean less pressure on NHS admissions compared to earlier in the year,\" he said.\n\nBut he warned that people of all ages can get long Covid and it is important to control the second wave.\n\nPHE's weekly report on the spread of the virus shows case rates are still highest in the under 30s, but are now coming down.\n\nIn contrast, cases per 100,000 people in all age groups over 30 continue to rise.\n\nIn hospitals, admissions and deaths are still rising right across England and health officials are concerned that black, Asian and minority ethnic communities make up nearly 40% of admissions to intensive care.\n\nThe highest hospital admission rates for people with Covid-19 were in the over 85s, and in the north west of England.\n• None How will the vulnerable be protected from Covid? And other questions", "It is Boris Johnson's \"ambition\" for people to celebrate Christmas with their families, his spokesman has said.\n\nThe prime minister is \"hopeful\" that \"some aspects of our lives\" could be \"back to normal\" by then, he added.\n\nBut a scientific adviser to the government warned without taking action a normal Christmas was \"wishful thinking in the extreme\".\n\nIt comes as tougher rules come into force for nearly six million Britons - including a lockdown in Wales.\n\nWelsh health minister Vaughan Gething also brought up the prospect of Christmas, saying the 17-day national lockdown, starting at 18:00 BST, was happening now so \"we can have a much more normal Christmas season for businesses\".\n\nBut Wales' First Minister Mark Drakeford said the priority was \"saving lives not saving Christmas\".\n\nScots have been warned the idea of a normal Christmas is a \"fiction\" and they should prepare for digital celebrations.\n\nSpeaking at a briefing for journalists, the No 10 spokesman said: \"The PM has been clear previously that he is hopeful that in many ways we could be able to get some aspects of our lives back to normal by Christmas.\n\n\"As I say, we've been clear about the ambition to ensure that people may celebrate Christmas as a family this year.\"\n\nBut earlier, government scientific adviser Prof John Edmunds said the idea that people could \"carry on as we are\" and then have a normal Christmas with friends and family was \"wishful thinking in the extreme\".\n\nProf Edmunds, who sits on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) committee, said: \"The only way that we can have a relatively safe and normal Christmas is if we take radical action now to reduce incidence - at the very least in high incidence areas - and keep the incidence low across the country by implementing a package of measures to reduce social contacts.\"\n\nProf Edmunds was responding to comments made by government minister Stephen Barclay, who told BBC Radio 4's Today programme he hoped families would be allowed to spend Christmas together.\n\n\"I think few people expect it to be exactly as it would normally,\" said Mr Barclay - but \"the ability of families to spend Christmas together\" was \"something we all hope to be in a position to do\".\n\nSir Jeremy Farrar, who also sits on the Sage committee that advises the government, has already warned that Christmas would be \"tough\" and was unlikely to be the \"usual celebration\" of \"families coming together\".\n\nMeanwhile, the UK recorded another 224 deaths and 20,530 new confirmed cases on Friday.\n\nThe R number for the UK has decreased slightly and is now estimated to be between 1.2 and 1.4. That means every 10 people with the virus pass it on to 12 or 14 others, on average.\n\nWarrington is the latest place to announce it is moving to England's highest level of restrictions - tier three. The measures will take effect next week.\n\nNottingham and parts of Nottinghamshire are also expected to be moved into tier three next week, with the finer details such as whether or not gyms can stay open still to be decided.\n\nSouth Yorkshire will also move into tier three from 00:01 on Saturday, by which time more than seven million people will be living under England's tightest rules.\n\nGreater Manchester, Liverpool City Region and Lancashire are already in tier three.\n\nUnder tier three rules pubs and bars not serving substantial meals have to close, while household mixing is banned indoors and outdoors in hospitality settings and private gardens.\n\nSome areas have also gone further, closing businesses such as bingo halls, casinos, betting shops and soft play centres, while there is guidance against travelling in or out of the area.\n\nRising infections mean Coventry, Stoke and Slough will move into tier two restrictions at 00:01 on Saturday.\n\nThe high alert level means households are banned from mixing indoors and people are encouraged to reduce their use of public transport.\n\nScotland is bringing in its own five-tier system of restrictions which will come into force from 2 November, with the top level close to a full lockdown.\n\nIn Wales, the \"firebreak\" means people will have to stay at home and pubs, restaurants, hotels and non-essential shops will close until 9 November.\n\nHow have you been affected by coronavirus? What do the current restrictions mean for you? Do you have any questions? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "The drive-in movie theatre is due to be held at Chester FC's stadium\n\nPlans for a drive-in cinema in Chester were bogged down after the toilets were found to be across the border with Wales and subject to Welsh Covid rules.\n\nThe bathroom facilities at Chester FC cannot be used due to the new Covid-19 lockdown in Wales.\n\nAnyone caught short would not have been allowed to cross the border.\n\nBut event promoter Storyhouse has confirmed it has managed to hire some portable toilets so customers \"could have a wee without breaking the law\".\n\nChief executive Andrew Bentley said earlier: \"The toilets are in the stand - it is all a bit crazy.\n\n\"Originally we had planned to have six nights on the Welsh part of the ground but had to change it to the English part of the car park after the Welsh Government brought in new restrictions.\"\n\nAndrew Bentley said it was a \"crazy\" situation\n\nStoryhouse said capacity had been reduced to \"comfortably fit\" all the cars on the English side of the border.\n\nBizarrely the Welsh border also runs down the centre of the club's pitch which could have caused problems for Chester FC's players who will play their first game after the Welsh \"firebreak\" lockdown starts.\n\nBut the ultimate offside trap has been avoided, according to club spokesman Albert Davies.\n\nHe said: \"We are actually classed as elite sport, so the rules do not apply.\n\n\"We've played some great stuff recently and it has been elite football.\"\n\nThe National League North team are in action in the FA Cup fourth preliminary round on Saturday against Marine who are based in... Waterloo.\n\nThe toilets are in the Welsh part of the stadium\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A man wanted by police for two years has been arrested after being found in the attic of a south Belfast house.\n\nThe South Belfast Neighbourhood Policing team carried out a search of the house on the Donegall Road on Friday morning.\n\nHe was arrested for possession of a class B controlled drug with intent to supply and two bench warrants.\n\nAnother male was also arrested for possession of a class B controlled drug with intent to supply.\n\nA spokesperson for the PSNI said: \"South Belfast Neighbourhood Policing team carried out a proactive house search in the Donegall Road area this morning.\n\n\"A check of the roof space turned up something interesting also.\n\n\"A male who had been wanted by Police for over two years was located hiding up above.\"", "If social media is to be believed, there was only one winner of the final presidential debate - the person in charge.\n\nKristen Welker has been lauded online for her performance as moderator, in particular being praised for keeping candidates to time and not allowing them to talk over her.\n\nThe 44-year-old grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Harvard in 1998.\n\nShe became NBC's White House Correspondent in 2011, and has since become co-anchor of NBC show Weekend Today.\n\nThere have been more than 125,000 tweets about the NBC journalist, who became only the second black woman to moderate a presidential debate alone, 28 years after ABC News journalist Carole Simpson became the first in 1992.\n\nWelker would have still been at school when Simpson moderated that debate between Bill Clinton and George HW Bush.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Beatrice-Elizabeth Peterson This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nFox News journalist Chris Wallace faced criticism for his moderation of the last debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, while Susan Page was similarly criticised for how she handled the vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris.\n\nBut clearly Welker was taking notes from those debates, as she was praised specifically for managing to keep the candidates in line, and controlling the conversation - though she did have the advantage of the candidates being muted during each others' allotted two minutes.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Bianna Golodryga This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nFellow journalists have been vocal in their praise for Welker's performance. NBC's Chief White House Correspondent Hallie Jackson called it \"a career-defining moment\", while news anchor Harris Faulkner said she \"gave the American people a real debate\".\n\nAnd PBS White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor said she was \"beaming\" watching Welker.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Yamiche Alcindor This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMSNBC host Rachel Maddow labelled Welker the \"clear winner\" of the debate, while previous moderator Chris Wallace told Fox News that he was \"jealous\" of her - wishing that he had been able to take charge of the debate instead.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by Oliver Darcy This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIt was not just Welker's colleagues who were positive about her performance. American author Brigitte Gabriel said she did a better job than Wallace, and one person went so far as to suggest she deserved a medal for her performance.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 5 by Kimberly Saltz This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAnd despite calling Welker \"terrible and unfair\" ahead of time, Trump took time during the debate to praise the moderator's performance.\n\n\"By the way, so far I respect very much the way you're handling this,\" he said.", "Virgin Holidays has been ordered to meet refund deadlines following Covid-related cancellations or face court action by the regulator.\n\nThe company has agreed to pay refunds by 30 October for any holidays cancelled before September.\n\nThose cancelled last month or this month will be refunded by 20 November.\n\nBy law, package holidays cancelled by an operator should be refunded within 14 days, but some people have waited three months to get their money back.\n\nA spokesman for Virgin Holidays said it was \"98% through the refund queue\", adding: \"Our focus now is on rebuilding trust with our customers, recognising that it has regrettably taken much longer than normal to process their refunds. We thank them sincerely for their patience throughout.\"\n\nMeanwhile, holidaymakers have spoken to the BBC in recent months over the stress of getting refunds from Virgin Holidays.\n\nDavid and Natalie Rogers had their honeymoon cut short after just a few hours Image caption: David and Natalie Rogers had their honeymoon cut short after just a few hours\n\nNewlyweds David and Natalie Rogers, from Dudley, saved for two years for their dream honeymoon safari trip to Kenya but coronavirus ruined their plans.\n\n\"We were quite angry about having to wait on hold [to Virgin Holidays] for over eight hours, and a message on the line saying that travellers should have already received a voucher for their missed holidays. It just felt like we'd been forgotten about,\" they said.\n\nLynn and Martin Fox had remortgaged their home to pay for a holiday of a lifetime with their two children in Florida.\n\n\"If only they [Virgin Holidays] would have been honest with us and communicated with us, we would have been happy. If they put a date on the refund, we could have planned. But the phone cut off calls and emails were ignored,\" Mrs Fox said.", "During the final presidential debate, Trump and Biden clashed on the response towards the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nCovid-19 was the first topic on the night at the debate in Nashville.", "North Korean TV warned viewers that the \"yellow dust\" included \"toxic material, virus, and pathogenic microorganism\"\n\nNorth Korea has warned its citizens to stay indoors over fears that \"yellow dust\" which blows in from China could bring coronavirus with it.\n\nThe streets of the capital Pyongyang were reported to be virtually empty on Thursday following the warning.\n\nThe secretive state claims to be coronavirus-free but has been on high alert since January with strict border closures and restrictions on movement.\n\nThere is no known link between the seasonal dust clouds and Covid-19.\n\nHowever, they are not the only country to suggest a link. The BBC's Disinformation Team notes Turkmenistan also alleged virus-laden dust was the reason citizens were being told to wear masks. They have denied trying to cover up an outbreak.\n\nState-controlled Korean Central Television (KCTV) broadcast special weather segments on Wednesday, warning of an influx of the yellow dust the next day. It also announced a nationwide ban on outdoor construction work.\n\nYellow dust refers to sand from Mongolian and Chinese deserts that blows into North and South Korea at certain times of the year. It is intermingled with toxic dust that for years has raised health concerns in both countries.\n\nOn Thursday, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, a government mouthpiece, said “all workers… must clearly recognise the danger of invading malicious viruses” in response to the dust cloud, the BBC's Disinformation Team noted.\n\nThe Russian Embassy in Pyongyang said on its Facebook page the North Korean foreign ministry had warned it and other diplomatic missions and international organisations in the country about the dust storm, recommending all foreigners stay at home and tightly close their windows on Thursday.\n\nNorth Korean state media has reasoned that research linking the coronavirus to airborne transmission means it \"should take the incoming flow of yellow dust seriously\", reported the specialist news site NK News\n\nThe US Centres for Disease Control has said coronavirus can remain suspended in the air “for hours”. However, it also says it is extremely rare for someone to be infected this way - especially outdoors. The main way people get infected is from standing in close proximity to someone who is infected who then coughs, sneezes or talks, spreading the virus through droplets.\n\nMedia in neighbouring South Korea has also dismissed the suggestion that yellow dust from China could spread Covid-19 to the North as impossible, according to NK News.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Kim Jong-un chokes up during speech thanking troops in virus fight\n\nDespite claiming the country has no cases of coronavirus, there are deep fears about Covid-19 in North Korea and leader Kim Jong-un has been holding high-level meetings to ensure tight restrictions remain in place.\n\nAnalysts have said it is highly unlikely that North Korea has not experienced any coronavirus cases at all.\n\nThe dust had cleared from the Korean peninsula by Friday and was forecast to stay that way on the weekend.", "Thumbs up or down? Our voter panel's verdict on how confident they are about the state of the US\n\nTwo Biden voters. Two Trump voters. Two undecided voters. All from battleground states.\n\nWe watched the final debate with six voters who will help determine the fate of the nation on 3 November.\n\nOur two undecided voters felt the final head-to-head between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was enough to help lock in their vote.\n\nAs for the rest? The debate simply confirmed their choice for president. Here's what they said.\n\nAndrew is an undecided voter leaning toward Joe Biden, but wishes he had other options to choose from. He works in the restaurant industry and has two young children.\n\nWhat moment stood out to you in the debate?\n\nAt the beginning it looked like they were going to do much better. But Trump seems like he just wants people to like him, it's so pathetic. I questioned it when he said he did more for black people than any other president. He seemed like someone who has such a huge disconnect with reality.\n\nDid Trump or Biden do enough to win your vote tonight?\n\nTrump appealed to me on only one issue, and I still don't like his personality. I have enough information now. Biden is who I'm going to go for, although he's not my favourite choice.\n\nOne word to describe Trump and Biden tonight?\n\nAfter becoming disillusioned with the left, Eliana now supports the policies of the Republican Party and backs the re-election of Donald Trump. She is the president of her local young Republicans group and a former professional dancer. She won the national television competition So You Think You Can Dance in 2012.\n\nWhat moment stood out to you in the debate?\n\nThe standout moments are ones that affect me personally. I ended up spending a tremendous amount on Obamacare. Biden said he would get rid of the competition and that ups the price.\n\nIf your candidate is defeated, what would it mean to you?\n\nIt's incredible that we live in a country with an election process like we have here. I would stay in the country and be a proud citizen. But the way I live my life would very much change. I would take my assets and put them into real-estate because I don't trust the government. I am for low-regulation and for a free market.\n\nOne word to describe Trump and Biden tonight?\n\nJoe Biden was not Jessica's first choice as Democratic candidate but she will cast her vote for the former vice-president because she likes and respects him a lot. An attorney and self-described \"news junkie\", Jessica admits to feeling exhausted by this election.\n\nWhat moment stood out to you in the debate?\n\nWhen Trump was going on about how Biden wanted everyone to have small windows and how he wants to knock down buildings and rebuild them. It stood out to me because it's so silly and such an obviously false depiction of Biden's climate plan.\n\nIf your candidate is defeated, what would it mean to you?\n\nI think I'll be scared if Donald Trump wins again. Less for myself than for future generations. I don't have children, but I have a niece and a nephew who are black, and I fear for their future. I worry about another four years of Trump being president and of Republicans rolling back civil rights, reproductive rights and climate measures.\n\nOne word to describe Trump and Biden tonight?\n\nLesley was raised in Canada and became a US citizen in 2016. She is an independent, and will vote for Joe Biden.\n\nWhat moment stood out to you in the debate?\n\nIn general I felt like Trump wasn't answering the questions. The one part that made my eyebrows raise was when he brought up Hillary Clinton. Why can't he get past that and just lead the country?\n\nIf your candidate is defeated, what would it mean to you?\n\nAs a black person and an immigrant living in this country - things have shifted so much in the last four years. I literally have fear - for my life and people who look like me - if there's another four years of Trump.\n\nOne word to describe Trump and Biden tonight?\n\nNoel is a dual UK-US citizen and undecided voter. Before the debate he said he preferred Biden as a person but was more supportive of Trump's policies.\n\nWhat moment stood out in the debate to you?\n\nThere were two things that really stood out to me. First, when Biden admitted policy mistakes in the past, which is very rare. Trump could probably learn a lesson from that. Second, Biden was completely wrong when he spoke about the minimum wage.\n\nDid Trump or Biden do enough to win your vote tonight?\n\nThe debate did very little to help me. I am leaning more towards Trump after the debate because I didn't like what Biden said about the economy. I don't think Trump really nitpicked Biden's agenda enough. But in the end, Biden seems to want to grow government, which I am personally not in favour of. But is this really the best that America can deliver?\n\nOne word to describe Trump and Biden tonight?\n\nRom was featured on Tuesday's military veterans panel. He enthusiastically supports the president's re-election.\n\nWhat moment stood out in the debate to you?\n\nFor the most part, it was a dignified slugfest. The one moment that stood out was when Biden said he was going to give a pathway to 11 million people who are in the US illegally. We've got millions of unemployed Americans and I don't think that's going to sell very well to anybody who listened to the debate that he's giving priority to people here illegally.\n\nIf your candidate is defeated, what would it mean to you?\n\nI will accept the results, however much I may dislike those results, and I will do it in a dignified way. I have family members who are extreme [Democrats] and said in 2016 when Trump won that he was \"not my president\". I will not take that route. I will take a dignified route as distasteful as it may be for me.\n\nOne word to describe Trump and Biden tonight?\n\nAll voters featured here are members of our US election voter panel. You'll hear more from them, and many of our other voters, throughout the next two weeks.\n\nJoin the conversation: In five words, tell us what's at stake in this election.\n\nWe're just two weeks away from voting day. The BBC wants to answer your questions about the US election on our live page. Submit them here.\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.", "The toy aisle at Tesco on Western Avenue in Cardiff has been blocked off\n\nSupermarkets have been covering up non-essential goods as Wales enters a national lockdown.\n\nFrom 18:00 BST shops will be forced to close for 17 days, unless they sell essential items such as food.\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford has said supermarkets should also stop selling items such as clothes as a matter of \"fairness\" until 9 November.\n\nBut the Welsh Retail Consortium said it was \"deeply disappointed\" with the \"ill-conceived policy\".\n\nRetailers have said the rules are confusing as they have not been given any definition of what is essential.\n\nBy law, clothing and homeware stores, and garden centres, will have to close during the national lockdown, while supermarkets, pharmacies and hardware stores can remain open.\n\nOn Thursday, the Welsh Government said that supermarkets would be told not to sell non-essential goods, like clothes, toys, decorations and electrical items during the 17-day firebreak.\n\nPlastic covering was seen placed over pillows and cat baskets in Asda in Coryton, Cardiff.\n\nPlastic has been seen over goods in supermarkets including microwaves and cat baskets\n\nThe company said it had been given \"little time to implement these changes or clarity on what is deemed 'essential'\" and had \"expressed our deep concerns about the implications for customers accessing products they genuinely need\".\n\nTesco said it would work \"incredibly hard\" to comply with the Welsh Government's rules, while Sainsbury's said it was \"working around the clock to put changes in place\".\n\nThe Welsh Retail Consortium said: \"In spite of the dearth of government clarity, our members' focus now will be on equipping hard-working colleagues with as much information as possible given the undoubted uncertainty and complexity that has been caused by this decision.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Grant Tucker This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nGuidance published for retailers on the Welsh Government's website says aisles selling homeware and decorations, toys, mobile phones, clothes and games, should be \"closed to the public\", and some areas may need to be cordoned off.\n\nSpeaking at Friday's Welsh Government briefing, Mr Drakeford said the decision to stop supermarkets from selling all but essential items was based on a \"need for fair play\".\n\n\"I'm not prepared to treat small businesses in Wales in one way, requiring them to close - they are not able to earn a living during these two weeks, as part of our national efforts - and then simply because another sector in society are more powerful, are bigger, that they think that they can be treated differently.\n\n\"It is a straightforward matter of fairness, we are in this together here in Wales.\n\n\"No individual and no organisation is above the effort that we are all required to make.\"\n\nMr Drakeford said \"many hundreds\" of small businesses would be closed across Wales.\n\n\"We cannot do that and then allow supermarkets to sell goods that those people are unable to sell,\" he said.\n\nHe added: \"This is not a period to be browsing around supermarkets looking for non-essential goods.\"\n\nThe Welsh Conservatives have said businesses and the economy would be hit \"very, very hard\" by the rule, and Plaid Cymru said communication about what the rule meant was \"lacking\".\n\nMr Drakeford defended himself from criticism of the plans saying they were making decisions under \"huge pressure.\"\n\n\"We said from the very beginning that non-essential retail would close in Wales,\" he said. \"All we are doing is clarifying that and remaining consistent with that initial decision.\"\n\nIf people could not find essential products in supermarkets there were ways around the problem, he said, adding that friends and neighbours were \"often very willing to help\".\n\n\"There are online ways that people can purchase goods,\" Mr Drakeford said. \"It is not a problem without a solution.\"\n\nSenedd Conservative leader Paul Davies said: \"It shouldn't have come to this in the first place.\n\n\"We believe that introducing this temporary national lockdown is disproportionate and will actually hit businesses and hit the economy very, very hard, and therefore in our view obviously independent retailers should be allowed to open as well.\"\n\n\"I think that's been the story throughout this pandemic,\" he said.\n\n\"I've been arguing on behalf of businesses in my constituency back in May, June, July, give us plans, give us an idea of what is ahead.\n\n\"This firebreak needs to be a reset for the way government communicates these messages.\"", "Piers Corbyn will go on trial in November\n\nJeremy Corbyn's brother Piers was \"specifically targeted\" by police at anti-lockdown protests, his barrister has told a court.\n\nThe weather forecaster, 73, was \"very much on the radar\" of officers patrolling London's Hyde Park in May, Westminster Magistrates' Court heard.\n\nMr Corbyn denies breaching coronavirus rules during protests on 16 and 30 May.\n\nHe was due to stand trial on Friday but issues with late disclosure of police logbooks have delayed proceedings.\n\nDistrict Judge Sam Goozee indicated his impatience with lawyers, telling them: \"These issues should have been dealt with between June and today\" as he ordered the disclosure of a logbook from 30 May relating to the 'bronze' level of command.\n\nA new trial date for 27 November was set at the same court.\n\nSketching out the defence case, Mr Corbyn's barrister Ben Cooper QC referenced a Black Lives Matter protest on 30 May, pointing out that there were \"no arrests taking place at other protests\".\n\n\"This demonstrates there is a politicisation in the enforcement of the regulations by choosing to permit one set of demonstrators to protest while at the same time discriminating against different groups on the same day,\" he said.\n\nSpeaking outside court before the hearing, Mr Corbyn said: \"If we win today, this will set a precedent for all other people arrested under the Covid regulations.\n\n\"If we lose, we will appeal.\n\n\"Whatever happens, if they impose a fine, I will not pay the fine.\n\n\"I'm not going to pay any fines for these anti-just, illegal laws.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Police broke up two large gatherings on Isambard Brunel Road\n\nLarge crowds fled from police as they broke up a street party outside a block of student flats.\n\nOfficers were called to the University of Portsmouth's Margaret Rule Hall where they broke up the gathering at 0:46 BST.\n\nTwo hours later, the force had to disperse a group of 40 from the site.\n\nHampshire Constabulary said it had identified the organiser of the party and officers were reviewing footage of the gatherings on Isambard Brunel Road.\n\nPolice can issue £10,000 fines to the organisers of large gatherings, with attendees fined £200 for a first offence.\n\nInsp Marcus Kennedy said It was \"frustrating\" for officers forced to deal with \"such a clear breach of the current restrictions\" which had been \"in place for some time\".\n\n\"There is no excuse for this type of behaviour,\" he said.\n\nUniversity vice-chancellor Prof Graham Galbraith said he was \"angry and disappointed\".\n\nHe added: \"I want to be clear that any student found to have broken the laws in place will face swift disciplinary action by the university as well as any fines that may be issued by the police.\"\n\nThere have been 306 new coronavirus infections recorded in the city in the the past week, with most in younger adults, and 1,390 positive test cases in total.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What you missed - the best bits from Trump and Biden's final debate\n\nThe mute button, or at least the threat of it, seemed to work. In the second presidential debate, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were more restrained.\n\nThe candidates allowed each other to speak. They used respectful tones. Even when they went on the attack, they did so in a calm, deliberate manner.\n\nAfter a pugnacious first debate, during which Donald Trump's constant interruptions may have cost him support in subsequent opinion polls, the president has very visibly dialled down the volume - and it made him a much more effective debater.\n\nThis time, the content of what the candidates are saying might be what the American public remembers from the debate - not the chaotic manner in which it was delivered.\n\nOnce again, Biden largely held up under fire - avoiding the kind of gaffes and stumbles that could have played into Republican attempts to question his age and mental acuity.\n\nThe Trump campaign will try to make an issue out of Biden's call for a \"transition\" from oil-based energy - a risky thing to throw in at the tail end of the debate. In an era of hybrid cars and energy-efficient homes, however, when even petroleum companies employ similar language, it may not hit Americans as hard as Republicans imagine.\n\nIn the end, the raucous first debate probably will be what the history books remember. And with polls showing most Americans already having made up their minds - and more than 45 million already having voted - the chance that this evening has a lasting impact on the race seems slim.\n\nThe Trump campaign complained that this debate was supposed to be focused on foreign policy - perhaps allowing the president to tout what he sees as his accomplishments in the Middle East, trade and Syria and go after Biden on his son's business ties to China.\n\nInstead, like earlier debates, it started on the coronavirus pandemic - a topic the American public cares most about, polls suggest.\n\nDonald Trump, once again touted a vaccine he said would be ready \"in weeks\". He offered personal testimony to the power of the new drugs to treat the disease and boasted that he was now \"immune\".\n\nBiden, not surprisingly, went on the attack. He pointed out Trump had repeatedly promised the disease would disappear on its own. He said there were 220,000 Americans dead and there could be another 200,000 by the end of the year.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Trump and Biden clash over the US response to Covid\n\nIn the back and forth between the two candidates, Trump continued to offer hope that things were getting better and businesses and schools should reopen. And when Trump said that people were \"learning to live\" with the disease, Biden pounced.\n\n\"People are learning to live with it?\" he asked. \"People are learning to die with it.\"\n\nAt one point, Trump offered an answer that he said was \"perhaps just to finish this\". The president, clearly, was eager move on to different subjects.\n\nTrump telegraphed early and often that he would make Biden's son Hunter a topic of the debate, and it wasn't long before the president brought up the former vice-president's family. He alleged that Biden personally profited from his son's business dealings in Ukraine and China, citing recent news stories based on information allegedly gleaned from Hunter Biden's laptop computer.\n\nBiden's defence was a blanket denial, followed by changing the subject to Trump's taxes and business ties to China. That forced the president to spend time explaining about how he really \"pre-paid\" millions of dollars in taxes and again saying he'd someday release his tax returns. The exchange, which would require paragraphs to explain in any sufficient detail, probably left the casual American viewer confused.\n\nTrump was counting on drawing blood with his attacks on Biden's family, making this into a controversy that finally pulls his front-running opponent back to earth. Chances are this night won't do that.\n\nFour years ago, Trump rode a hard line on immigration to the Republican nomination and, ultimately, the White House. When the topic came up in Thursday night's debate, however, he tried to downplay some of the more extreme steps he's taken while in office.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Trump says catch and release policy only works on immigrants with 'lowest IQs'\n\nWhen asked about his administration's policy of separating the children from the parents of undocumented migrants, for instance, Trump tried to turn the conversation to the detention facilities - \"cages,\" in Trump's term - created by the Obama administration to house unaccompanied minor immigrants.\n\nBiden, flashing indignation, noted that the children Trump was detaining came over with their parents and that the policy was making the US a \"laughing stock\". For many American voters, the audio of separated children crying for their parents may still be relatively fresh in their minds.\n\nTrump's response, that those children were \"so well taken care of,\" in \"facilities that are so clean\" probably didn't help his cause.\n\nIn the first presidential debate, Trump talked himself into trouble when the topic turned to race relations, as he danced around whether to directly condemn white supremacist groups. This time around, the president was considerably more nimble.\n\nHe boasted about his cross-party criminal justice reform and funding for historically black colleges. He attacked Biden for his sponsorship of a draconian crime bill in the 1990s that led to a sharp rise in the number of black Americans in prisons. And, perhaps most potently, when Biden began talking about his proposals for reform, he questioned why the former vice-president didn't accomplish more when he served with President Barack Obama.\n\n\"It's all talk but no action with these politicians,\" Trump said. \"Why didn't you get it done? You had eight years to get it done.\"\n\nAnyone who lived through the \"tough on crime\" 1990s in the US would probably be shocked by this debate exchange, where both candidates talked about the number of felons to whom they gave clemency and their efforts at reducing the number of incarcerated Americans. As the mass demonstrations against institutional racism demonstrated earlier this year, the times have indeed changed.", "Tests were carried out on the sanitiser by the Irish Department of Agriculture\n\nHealth officials are looking into whether hand sanitiser used by the NHS in NI is affected by a safety recall in the Republic of Ireland.\n\nVirapro hand sanitiser is being withdrawn from sale in the Republic on the Irish government's instructions.\n\nIt warned prolonged use of the product may cause skin problems, eye and respiratory irritation and headaches.\n\nStormont's Department of Health said checks are being carried to see if any stock delivered to NI is affected.\n\nIt said the Northern Ireland's Health and Social Care Board \"has not received any contact regarding recall\".\n\nThe Virapro safety warning was issued by the Irish Department of Agriculture after it carried out tests on the sanitiser.\n\nThe tests showed that some of the product on sale contained methanol rather than ethanol.\n\nThe department stated that prolonged use of the sanitiser \"may cause dermatitis, eye irritation, upper respiratory system irritation and headaches\".\n\nAs a result, it has removed Virapro hand sanitiser from Ireland's biocidal product register, which outlines products that are legally allowed to be sold in Ireland.\n\n\"This product may not remain on the market or be made available for use,\" the department said in a statement on Thursday night.\n\n\"Members of the public are advised to stop using this sanitiser with immediate effect.\"\n\nIt instructed the Dublin-based firm which sells the item to begin \"an immediate recall of all product\".\n\nTrade publications earlier this year reported that during the early stages of the pandemic, when there were worldwide shortages of hand sanitiser, Virapro delivered orders to both the Health Service Executive in the Republic of Ireland and the NHS in Northern Ireland.\n\nAt the time, the Dublin-based firm said it had to charter extra planes in order to fulfil both orders.\n\nStormont's Department of Health confirmed to BBC News NI that \"the Virapro product has been procured for use in Northern Ireland\".\n\nIn other Covid-19 developments on Friday:\n\n\"At this stage we are unable to confirm if any product supplied is affected,\" its spokesman said.\n\n\"At this point Health and Social Care Northern Ireland has not received any contact regarding recall and is initiating contact with its supplier to establish if any product supplied to Northern Ireland is affected.\"\n\nHe added: \"If product used in NI is found to be affected, then as with any product found to be defective or sub-standard it will be withdrawn from use.\"\n\nVirapro is based in Raheny in County Dublin and its hand sanitiser is used widely in schools in the Republic of Ireland.\n\nIn a statement, the company said it was \"very concerned\" by the issue and was \"grateful to the department for its diligence\".\n\n\"Following discussions with the department, albeit at the time their concerns had not been confirmed, nonetheless we immediately sealed the product off in our warehouses to prevent any distribution of this batch.\"\n\n​The firm said it was currently contacting its customers and \"providing a full replacement for that product\".​\n\n\"We have been in contact with the manufacturer who is also investigating the matter,\" it added.", "A man has been charged with preparing for a right-wing terrorist attack on a major immigration law firm.\n\nCavan Medlock, 28, of Harrow, north London, is charged with preparing an act of terrorism by researching Duncan Lewis Solicitors with the intention of killing an immigration solicitor.\n\nProsecutors allege he equipped himself with a knife and handcuffs, as well as Nazi and Confederate flags before going to the offices in Harrow on 7 September.\n\nHe faces a trial on 17 May.\n\nHe is charged with preparation of terrorist acts under Section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006.\n\nHe is also charged with five further counts, including threatening with a bladed article in a public place, battery, two counts of causing racially aggravated alarm, harassment or distress, and making a threat to kill.\n\nHe is accused of threatening a receptionist with a knife before threatening to kill a solicitor and abusing other members of staff because of their racial or religious background.\n\nMr Medlock was not present during a hearing at the Old Bailey after he stripped to his waist as he briefly appeared by video-link from Wormwood Scrubs prison, before refusing to put his clothes back on.\n\nHe is yet to enter pleas to any of the charges.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Britain and Japan have formally signed a trade agreement, marking the UK's first big post-Brexit deal.\n\nThe deal, unveiled last month, means nearly all its exports to Japan will be tariff free while removing British tariffs on Japanese cars by 2026.\n\nBut critics have said it will boost UK GDP by only 0.07%, a fraction of the trade that could be lost with the EU.\n\nThe two countries had reached a broad agreement in September, and the deal is expected to boost trade between the UK and Japan by about £15bn.\n\nThe deal, which was negotiated over the summer, will take effect from 1 January 2021.\n\nBut some experts said it was a missed opportunity between the UK and its 11th biggest trading partner.\n\nJapan said UK-EU deal was still crucial for Japanese business, especially its carmakers\n\nDr Minako Morita-Jaeger, international trade policy consultant and fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory at the University of Sussex, said: \"Given that Japanese FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) has been playing an important role in the UK economy and retaining its existing investment in post-Brexit is crucial, the UK government should have shown a strong commitment to Japanese investment by including a comprehensive investment chapter encompassing investment protection and dispute settlement.\"\n\nShe added that Japan was the largest investor abroad in the world, accounting for 14% of the world total in 2018.\n\nThe new deal is very similar to the existing EU-Japan deal, but has an extra chapter on digital trade.\n\n\"It used to be said that an independent UK would not be able to strike major trade deals or they would take years to conclude,\" said Ms Truss at a joint press announcement with Japan's Foreign Minister, Toshimitsu Motegi.\n\nMr Motegi said a deal between the UK and the EU was still crucial for Japanese business, particularly carmakers such as Nissan and Toyota who use parts from across Europe in vehicles they assemble in the UK.\n\n\"It is of paramount importance that the supply chain between the UK and the EU is maintained even after the UK's withdrawal,\" he said.", "One council leader described some MPs as \"callously indifferent\" to the plight of children\n\nCommunities across the country are stepping up to the plate to provide free school meals to children after a campaign by Marcus Rashford.\n\nIt comes after a motion to extend free school meals over holidays during the Covid-19 pandemic was rejected by MPs.\n\nThe Manchester United striker had called on people to \"unite\" to protect the most vulnerable children.\n\nFish and chip shops, pubs, restaurants and cafes are among the hospitality venues to offer free meals.\n\nA growing number of councils across England have also pledged to provide food vouchers over half term.\n\nLabour-led authorities in Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, Hammersmith & Fulham and Doncaster are among those agreeing to fund their own schemes.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Marcus Rashford and his mother Melanie helped out at FareShare Greater Manchester\n\nThe government said all measures would be kept under review after a Labour motion in the Commons to extend the scheme over holidays until Easter 2021 was defeated.\n\nHammersmith & Fulham Council leader Stephen Cowan said watching the vote was \"cutting\".\n\nHe said: \"I have seen a lot of kids who need food. I was in a school on Tuesday speaking to kids who have the free lunches now and they were explaining they have gone for days without a proper meal.\n\n\"They were very sweet kids, and then I looked at the MPs who were so callously indifferent to that and I thought, 'how can that be happening in the fifth richest country on Earth?'\n\n\"There are so many things they spend money on, it's a moral imperative.\"\n\nLiverpool mayor Joe Anderson said the decision would feed about 19,800 children in the city, while Doncaster's mayor Ros Jones said it was \"the right thing to do\".\n\nIan Ward, leader of Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in England, described the government policy on the issue as \"chaotic\" and \"unsustainable\".\n\nGovernment ministers have praised Mr Rashford for highlighting the difficulties facing low-income families, but some Conservative MPs have accused him of \"virtue signalling\".\n\nMore than 200 children's writers are among those urging the government to ensure no child goes hungry this winter.\n\nOther councils who have offered their own meal schemes include York, Wolverhampton, Oldham, Southwark, Redbridge, Lambeth, North Tyneside, Greenwich, Tower Hamlets and Telford & Wrekin.\n\nMarcus Rashford has urged people to \"unite\" to protect the most vulnerable children\n\nOther areas that will provide support include Reading, Middlesbrough, Medway, Kirklees, Brighton, Sefton, Knowsley, Lewisham, Halton and Portsmouth.\n\nTreasury minister Steve Barclay told BBC Radio 4's Today earlier there was an extra £9bn in support available through the welfare system.\n\n\"It's important we support families in need,\" he said.\n\n\"In the design and the measures we've taken, for example on housing support, lifting the allowance at the lowest in terms of rents to cover a much wider range of housing benefits, that again is about supporting families through the welfare system.\"", "Their last time together on stage featured a much more subdued debate with real policy discussions. Topics ranged from the Covid-19 response to race relations in the US.", "Facilities where migrants have been detained include containers where it is not possible to socially distance\n\nThe Home Office did not prepare for a predictable rise in English Channel migrant crossings, leaving men, women and children detained in unfit conditions, the prisons watchdog says.\n\nChief Inspector of Prisons Peter Clarke said migrants were often held in what looked like an unsafe building site.\n\nFacilities included containers where it was not possible to socially distance.\n\nThe Home Office said it has since improved facilities and the way it deals with arrivals.\n\nSo far, some 7,444 migrants have crossed in boats during 2020 - the third annual jump in arrivals.\n\nWhen the numbers began to rise in 2018, Sajid Javid, the then home secretary, described it as a \"major incident\".\n\nMigrants are generally taken to two facilities in Dover before being transferred to other units or released on immigration bail.\n\nWhile these facilities are not jails, the prisons watchdog has the power to inspect them because they are used to detain people.\n\nOne of the facilities, Tug Haven, received 2,500 migrants between June and August - but Mr Clarke said the facilities were completely unsuitable.\n\nOnce inside, there were a number of gazebos and three containers with chemical toilets - but no means to socially distance and reduce the risk of the spread of coronavirus.\n\nThe facilities at Tug Haven were described as \"completely unsuitable\" by the prisons watchdog\n\nThe migrants - mostly from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria and Eritrea - tended to be wet and cold but during the inspection, the facility ran out of both dry clothes and mugs for hot drinks.\n\nThe detainees - 200 of whom arrived on one day - then spent hours in the open air or in the container units.\n\nDespite the conditions, the detainees were positive about the way they were treated by the staff.\n\n\"We met detainees who had been extremely traumatised after their long journeys, and their positive feedback on the decency shown to them by many individual staff cannot be underestimated,\" said Mr Clarke.\n\n\"However, the detention facilities in Dover were very poorly equipped to meet their purpose and important processes had broken down.\n\n\"It is hard to understand this failure to prepare properly for what must have been a predictable increase in migrant numbers.\n\n\"Just because numbers are unprecedented, that does not mean they are unpredictable or cannot be planned for.\"\n\nThe Home Office said it has made improvements to Tug Haven since the inspection.\n\nThe nearby Kent Intake Unit - a larger facility - had better facilities, said the report.\n\nBut it was also not suitable for detaining the migrants for long periods - not least because social distancing was not possible.\n\nThe inspectors said measures to protect children were weak.\n\nMore than 70 unaccompanied children had been held in the unit in the three months to August, but often they had to wait a long time for an assessment because Kent County Council's social services was overloaded.\n\nOne 12-year-old boy and his 18-year-old brother were told to go to a London hotel but records did not show whether the local social services were aware of the pair's arrival.\n\nThe Home Office said it took the welfare of people in its care \"extremely seriously\" and ensured its facilities were \"decent and humane\".\n\n\"These crossings are dangerous, illegally-facilitated and unnecessary,\" the spokesperson added. \"We are committed to fixing the asylum system, to make it fairer and firmer, compassionate to those who need help and welcoming people through safe and legal routes.\"", "Lily Collins plays the titular Emily, who travels to Paris to work for a marketing firm\n\nThe creator of hit Netflix show Emily in Paris has defended the programme following criticism that its view of the city is idealised and clichéd.\n\nUS writer and executive producer Darren Star said he was \"not sorry for looking at Paris through a glamorous lens\".\n\nThe show follows a young American, played by Lily Collins, who travels to the French capital for work.\n\nIt has been criticised, particularly in France, for promoting stereotypical images of the city and its residents.\n\n\"No cliché is spared, not even the most desperate,\" wrote Premiere's Charles Martin in his French-language review when the show made its debut earlier this month.\n\n\"Cite a cliché about France and the French [and] you will find it in Emily in Paris,\" agreed 20 Minutes' Fabien Randanne.\n\nThe Eiffel Tower is among the familiar landmarks that feature in the show\n\nEmily in Paris has faced criticism from non-French reviewers as well, with one claiming it offers \"a comic-book version\" of the French capital.\n\n\"The first half of the season is an exorcism of all of the French clichés the writers could think of,\" wrote The Guardian's Rebecca Nicholson in her one-star review.\n\nThe Independent's Ed Cumming gave the same rating to a show whose setting he likened to \"a kind of Westworld-style Paris-themed amusement park\".\n\nYet other critics were more forgiving, with Variety's Daniel D'Addario calling it \"a delight\" set against \"a truly inviting backdrop\".\n\nE! Online, meanwhile, let two critics offer contrasting opinions, variously describing the show as \"refreshing\" and \"insufferable\".\n\nSpeaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Star, who also created Sex and the City, said he intended his new show to be \"a love letter to Paris\" seen through the eyes of Collins' title character.\n\nStar's other shows include Sex and the City and Beverly Hills, 90210\n\n\"The first thing she is seeing is the clichés because it's from her point of view,\" he explained. \"I wanted to do a show that celebrated that part of Paris.\"\n\nEarlier this month, Star revealed he had drawn on his own experiences of visiting the city. \"I wanted to showcase Paris in a really wonderful way that would encourage people to fall in love with the city in a way that I have,\" he told the New York Times.\n\nA second series of the show has yet to be commissioned, but Star has revealed he already has ideas about what its heroine will do next.\n\n\"She'll be more of a resident of the city [in season two],\" he told Oprah magazine. \"She'll have her feet on the ground a little more.\"\n\nCollins herself told Vanity Fair she \"would love nothing more than to be able to go back to Paris\" to shoot a second season. The 31-year-old British-born actress is the daughter of pop star Phil Collins.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Supermarkets will only be able to sell items like food\n\nSupermarkets will be unable to sell items like clothes during the 17-day Covid firebreak lockdown in Wales.\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford said it would be \"made clear\" to them they are only able to open parts of their business that sell \"essential goods\".\n\nMany retailers will be forced to shut but food shops, off-licences and pharmacies can stay open when lockdown begins on Friday at 18:00 BST.\n\nRetailers said they had not been given a definition of what was essential.\n\nThe Association of Convenience Stores and the Welsh Retail Consortium have written urgently to the first minister, expressing alarm over the new regulations.\n\nSara Jones, head of the Welsh Retail Consortium, said they wanted the Welsh Government to abandon the \"essential items\" rules.\n\n\"Compelling retailers to stop selling certain items, without them being told clearly what is and what isn't permitted to be sold, is ill-conceived and short-sighted,\" she said.\n\nWelsh Conservative Andrew RT Davies tweeted: \"The power is going to their heads.\"\n\nBut Plaid Cymru's Helen Mary Jones said \"smaller businesses should not be put at an unfair disadvantage during the firebreak lockdown\".\n\nBusiness leaders say companies in Wales have been given just hours to finalise plans for the firebreak lockdown, which ends at midnight on 9 November.\n\nMr Drakeford told a Senedd committee on Friday that \"in the last lockdown, people were reasonably understanding of the fact that supermarkets didn't close all the things that they may have needed to\".\n\n\"I don't think people will be as understanding this time.\n\n\"We will make sure there is a more level playing field in those next two weeks.\"\n\nClothes shops will have to close during the lockdown\n\nThe first minister was responding to Conservative Member of the Senedd Russell George, who said it was \"unfair\" to force independent clothing and hardware retailers to close while similar goods were on sale in major supermarkets.\n\n\"It felt very wrong and disproportionate to the small businesses,\" Mr George said.\n\nMr Drakeford said: \"We will be making it clear to supermarkets that they are only able to open those parts of their business that provide essential goods to people.\n\n\"And that will not include some of the things that Russell George mentioned, which other people are prevented from selling.\"\n\nThere is no precise list of non-essential goods in the law coming into force on Friday, but any business selling goods or services for sale or hire in a shop will have to close.\n\nBut there are exceptions for food retailers, newsagents, pharmacies and chemists, bicycle shops, petrol stations, car repair and MOT services, banks, laundrettes, post offices, pet shops and agricultural supplies shops.\n\nUnder the law firms conducting a business that provides a mixed set of services will be allowed to open if they cease conducting the service that must close.", "Among the exchanges between Donald Trump and Joe Biden at last night's presidential debate, one in particular caught the public's imagination.\n\nOn the hotly contested issue of US race relations, President Trump made a reference to Abraham Lincoln - the 16th US president whose victory in the Civil War secured the abolition of slavery.\n\nMr Biden sought to capitalise on the apparent comparison with a mocking quip, but Mr Trump didn't find it funny.\n\nPresident Trump asserted - not for the first time - that \"nobody has done more for the black community than Donald Trump... with the exception of Abraham Lincoln\". He added: \"I'm the least racist person in this room.\"\n\nMr Biden responded: \"'Abraham Lincoln' here is one of the most racist presidents we've had in modern history. He pours fuel on every single racist fire. Every single one.\"\n\nTrump: \"He made a reference to Abraham Lincoln, where did that come in?\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What you missed - the best bits from Trump and Biden's final debate\n\nTrump: \"No, no. ... I didn't say 'I'm Abraham Lincoln'. I said, 'Not since Abraham Lincoln has anybody done what I've done for the black community'.\"\n\nMr Trump hit back by questioning Mr Biden's own record on race issues. He cited the 1994 crime bill that Mr Biden helped to draft and which the Black Lives Matter movement blames for the mass incarceration of African-Americans.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Michael Beschloss This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by The Daily Show This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post 2 by The Daily Show\n\nPresident Trump has used the reference to Abraham Lincoln before and said his administration had advanced the causes of African Americans in education, employment and other areas.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Donald J. Trump This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAnalysts have taken issue with his claims, saying other presidents in modern times have made far greater progress with civil rights, particularly Lyndon B Johnson, who oversaw the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act in the 1960s.\n\nLast year, Mr Trump made another comparison with the 16th president, saying that no other US leader had been treated as badly by the press as he had - not even Lincoln.\n\n\"Abraham Lincoln was treated supposedly very badly, but nobody's been treated badly like me,\" he said.\n\nPresident Lincoln led the Union to victory over the secessionist southern Confederacy in the war of 1861-65. He ordered African-American slaves to be freed in 1863.\n\nJust days after General Robert E Lee surrendered in 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at a theatre in Washington DC by John Wilkes Booth, while attending a play.\n\nAbraham Lincoln is one of America's most revered presidents", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid in Scotland: What is the five-tier lockdown system?\n\nScotland is to enter a new five-level system of coronavirus restrictions, Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed.\n\nThe new model will come into force from 2 November, when temporary curbs on the hospitality trade are due to expire.\n\nIt features five tiers of measures - from \"level zero\" to four - to be applied in different areas of Scotland depending on the spread of the virus.\n\nThe top level would be close to a full lockdown, but the aim is for schools to remain open at all levels.\n\nRestrictions under levels two and three are similar to those which are currently in place for different parts of Scotland.\n\nThe first minister said the new strategy was about \"striking the best balances we can\" between suppressing the virus and minimising wider harms to businesses and individuals.\n\nThe move in Scotland comes as tougher restrictions are brought into force for millions of people in England and Wales.\n\nCoronavirus cases in Scotland continue to rise, with 1,401 registered on Friday alongside a further 18 deaths.\n\nThe latest figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest the virus is spreading across the UK, with 1 in every 180 people in Scotland thought to have been infected in the two weeks to 16 October.\n\nMs Sturgeon said the ban on home visits and the short-term restrictions currently imposed on bars and restaurants in the central belt of the country in particular were beginning to slow the increase in cases.\n\nHowever, she said restrictions would still be needed until a vaccine for the virus was developed, adding: \"Everything we do must be consistent with suppressing Covid as far as we can.\"\n\nThe first minister said there would be talks with opposition parties and representatives of businesses - particularly from the hospitality trade - about the exact details of the different levels.\n\nDecisions on which tier each part of Scotland will be placed in will be made alongside local health protection teams in the coming week.\n\nMs Sturgeon has previously said decisions about where levels would be set for each region of Scotland would be taken on a \"collaborative\" basis, but said she would ultimately bear accountability for them.\n\nThe system will come into force from 2 November, following a vote by MSPs, and the application of different levels in different areas will be reviewed on a weekly basis.\n\nThe first minister said: \"It's possible the whole country at some point could be placed in the same level. But it means we don't have to take a one size fits all approach if that's not warranted.\n\n\"A part of the country with low rates of infection won't have to live with the same levels of restrictions as a part of the country with high rates.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon said that while case numbers were still rising across Scotland, there were \"some signs of progress\" in the data.\n\nThe average number of new cases per day in Scotland has increased by 7% over the past seven days, compared with the previous week. This is down from a 29% increase on average the previous week, and a 52% jump the week before that.\n\nMs Sturgeon said: \"Cases are still rising, which is why we cannot be complacent. But the rate of the increase does seem to be slowing down, which gives us grounds for some cautious optimism.\"\n\nMSPs will hold a vote on the proposed framework next week\n\nA system of grants for businesses hit by closures or restricted trading has also been announced, with payments on a par with those offered in England.\n\nMs Sturgeon said firms in Scotland \"deserve nothing less\", but said she wanted greater guarantees of funding from the Treasury \"as quickly as possible\".\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said Scotland had \"got a fair share\" of UK-wide funding, saying the Scottish government should \"get that funding out to businesses now\".\n\nMeanwhile, Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said it was \"vital there is clarity over what restrictions people are living under and for how long\".\n\nThe strategic framework comes alongside an expanded testing strategy, which includes a commitment to expand Scotland's testing capacity to 65,000 tests per day by the end of the year.\n\nThis will include boosting the number of tests that can be processed at the UK government's Lighthouse laboratory in Glasgow, as well as NHS facilities and some smaller commercial ones.\n\nNew NHS regional hubs are under construction in Grampian, Lothian and Greater Glasgow and Clyde, and are expected to take on all of the daily routine testing done in care homes around Scotland.\n\nUse the form below to send us your questions and we could be in touch.\n\nIn some cases your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read the terms and conditions.\n\nIf you are reading this page on the BBC News app, you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question on this topic.", "It is 60 years since the Severn Railway Bridge disaster which saw two tanker barges - the Wastdale H and the Arkendale H - collide in fog near to Sharpness.\n\nThe two barges were then caught in the tide and collided with a railway bridge which collapsed. Five men lost their lives.\n\nNew drone footage gives us a close-up view of the remains of the shipwrecked vessels.", "Susan Nicholson was murdered by Robert Trigg five years after he killed his previous partner\n\nThe parents of a woman murdered by her boyfriend have won a High Court bid for a new inquest into her death.\n\nSusan Nicholson was killed by Robert Trigg in 2011, five years after he had killed his previous partner, Caroline Devlin, in similar circumstances.\n\nNeither death was initially deemed suspicious by Sussex Police.\n\nMs Nicholson's parents campaigned for a new inquest to investigate whether police failed to adequately protect her.\n\nTrigg, 54, was jailed for life in 2017 for the murder of Ms Nicholson and manslaughter of Ms Devlin at their homes in Worthing, West Sussex.\n\nFollowing the conviction, the High Court quashed the accidental death finding in the original inquest into Ms Nicholson's death and ordered a new one.\n\nSenior West Sussex coroner Penelope Schofield had ruled it would be a short inquest, with no witnesses questioned.\n\nBut the High Court has ordered a full inquest be held after the latest legal challenge.\n\nA spokeswoman for Ms Nicholson's parents, Elizabeth and Peter Skelton, said it would take a in-depth look at potential police failures.\n\nThe family had run a fundraising effort to bring their case against the coroner to the High Court.\n\nBut Sussex Police, an interested party, \"rigorously\" opposed the judicial review, according to the family's lawyer, Alice Hardy.\n\nShe claimed the force presented them with a £6,000 legal bill prior to the hearing and said it would \"expect Susan's parents to pay for their legal fees\" if they lost the case.\n\nRobert Trigg behaved in similar ways after killing both his partners in similar ways, his trial heard\n\nLord Justice Popplewell and Mr Justice Jay said the ruling did not mean the police \"were in fact guilty of any failings, or in breach of the operational duties\".\n\nThey said: \"Our conclusion is merely that that can credibly be suggested, so that an inquest should look into whether that is so.\n\n\"It may find that no criticism of the police is justified, or that any criticisms are isolated failures and not serious. That will be a matter for investigation at the inquest.\"\n\nMr Skelton said the family were \"so relieved that the court has come to this decision\" and hoped the new inquest would provide the answers they needed.\n\nHe added: \"Susan was cruelly taken away from us nine years ago, and yet it has taken this long for the authorities to be questioned about the role they played in her death.\"\n\nElizabeth and Peter Skelton have campaigned for a new inquest\n\nMr and Mrs Skelton's lawyers argued police did not find similarities between her death and Ms Devlin's suspicious and had treated Trigg as a bereaved partner rather than a suspect.\n\nIn 2011, coroner Michael Kendall ruled Ms Nicholson had died accidentally after Trigg claimed he rolled on top of her unintentionally while they slept on a sofa.\n\nIt was only after Ms Nicholson's parents hired professionals to re-examine the original pathologist's report that the case went to court.\n\nSussex Police, which had argued Mr and Mrs Skelton's appeal should be dismissed, said it was \"considering [its] position\".\n\nA spokesman added: \"We will, of course, fully co-operate with HM Coroner in providing information for the inquest.\n\n\"It would not be appropriate for us to make any further comment at this time.\"\n\nThe judges also dismissed an application by Trigg, who was also an interested party in the case.\n\nHe had asked the court to make an order that the coroner should be allowed to reach her own conclusion on how Ms Nicholson died and that she did not have to rule in line with his murder conviction.\n\nBut the High Court judges upheld a ruling made by the coroner last year that \"the fresh inquest cannot reach a verdict inconsistent with Trigg's conviction\".\n\nThe Skeltons' lawyer, Alice Hardy, condemned Trigg for \"jumping on the bandwagon\" and casting some \"pretty insulting aspersions about the two women and their families along the way\".\n\nFollow BBC South East on Facebook, on Twitter, and on Instagram. Send your story ideas to southeasttoday@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: \"We do need to see faster turnaround times\"\n\nEngland's NHS Test and Trace system needs to improve to provide faster results, Boris Johnson has conceded.\n\nAt Thursday's coronavirus briefing, he said he shared \"people's frustrations\" at the turnaround times for results.\n\nThe government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said it was \"very clear there's room for improvement\" in the system.\n\nIt comes as figures showed just 15.1% of people who were tested received their result within 24 hours.\n\nThese figures, for the week ending 14 October, are the lowest since the system began.\n\nThe PM previously pledged that all tests would be processed within 24 hours - unless there were issues with postal tests - by the end of June.\n\nSpeaking at a press conference at Downing Street, Mr Johnson said: \"I share people's frustrations and I understand totally why we do need to see faster turnaround times and we need to improve it.\n\n\"We need to make sure that people who do get a positive test self-isolate - that's absolutely crucial if this thing is going to work in the way that it can.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance says there is \"room for improvement\" in test and trace\n\nSir Patrick Vallance said the capacity for testing had increased, but \"it's really important to concentrate on numbers of contacts, isolation, as quickly as you can and getting things (results) back as quickly as you can. Ideally you get the whole process done within 48 hours\".\n\n\"It's very clear there's room for improvement on all that and therefore that could be diminishing the effectiveness of this.\"\n\nHe also said the the high number of infections diminished the effectiveness of the system.\n\nThe percentage of people who received a test result within 24 hours has dropped from 32.8% in the previous week.\n\nThe figures also showed a fall to 59.6% in the proportion of close contacts reached of people who tested positive.\n\nThis is also the lowest weekly percentage since the system began and is down from 63% in the previous week.\n\nThe UK recorded another 21,242 cases on Thursday and 189 more deaths within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nSir Patrick also told the briefing some coronavirus measures would be needed for some time to come.\n\n\"The numbers (of cases) speak for themselves. They are increasing and they are not going to decrease quickly,\" he told the No 10 news conference.\n\n\"I think it is likely that some measures of restriction are going to need to be in place for a while to try and get those numbers down.\"\n\nSir Patrick added that \"a lot depends now on what happens over the next few weeks\".\n\n\"At the moment, the numbers are heading in the wrong direction but there are some signs in some places of a potential flattening off of that.\n\n\"We need to wait and see and monitor the numbers very carefully.\"\n\nEarlier the government released a job advert looking for a \"VP of operations\" to start immediately, with experience of \"turning around failing call centres\" on a day rate of up to £2,000.\n\nHours later, the Department of Health withdrew the advert, saying it was being redrafted and the text had not been approved.\n\nShadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said the statistics on test and trace \"have been bad every week\", while his colleague, shadow health minister, Justin Madders said: \"To have over 40% of people not even being contacted by the test and trace system is an interstellar-sized black hole in the government's plan to reduce transmission.\"\n\nProf James Naismith, director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute at the University of Oxford, said the numbers showed \"a system struggling to make any difference to the epidemic\".\n\nHe said he worried the increasing percentage of household contacts indicated \"a tick-box system rather than proper tracing\" with the value of the system being in reaching non-household contacts who are infectious but asymptomatic.\n\nMr Naismith added the system \"has given a bird's eye view of the pandemic and done very little to halt it\".", "Rhys and Quinn made a banner from hotel bed sheets to take with them to the airport\n\nA man who spent two months in isolation in an Italian coronavirus facility has spoken of his joy of being home with his family.\n\nBritons Rhys James, 23, Quinn Paczesny, 20, and Will Castle, 22, had been teaching in northern Italy before they tested positive for Covid-19 in August.\n\nMr James is now back home in Pembroke Dock, Pembrokeshire, after Italian laws changed, allowing them to leave.\n\n\"It's just so lovely, I'm being treated like royalty,\" he said.\n\nMr James, Mr Paczesny, from Sheffield, and Mr Castle, from Brighton, had been kept in separate rooms in a facility in Florence since they tested positive.\n\nThey had been told they needed two consecutive negative tests - or a double negative - before they could leave the rooms.\n\nLast Friday, after 61 days in separate hotel rooms, having food left outside their doors and staying in touch via video calls, Mr James was told the law had changed and he could leave.\n\n\"We were ecstatic, but it was quite underwhelming, it was just a phone call from reception saying 'you're free to go',\" he said.\n\n\"We were just so happy to get out of there, telling our families was amazing.\"\n\nAfter gathering their belongings from their hotel, on Saturday Mr James and Mr Paczesny flew back to the UK where they were greeted by their parents holding a \"welcome home banner\".\n\n\"It's been so lovely, they are treating me like royalty at the moment - we will see how long that lasts for,\" said Mr James, who has been staying with his family since arriving back.\n\n\"It's just all the little things, being able to cook, eat with my family, being able to walk up the garden, it's just a world of difference to what we had before.\"\n\nRhys James said spending time with other people after being on his own was exhausting\n\nMr James, who works as a travel rep for Tui, flew to Milan on 5 July to teach English at summer schools across northern Italy, before going travelling with his two new friends.\n\nAfter two of the group developed mild symptoms in Venice, the trio isolated in rented accommodation for a few days, before travelling to Florence, unpacking and going to the hospital to be tested.\n\nThey tested positive and were separated and placed in a converted hotel used for isolating patients, and were told they could not even go into the hallway to speak to each other.\n\nThe three friends were moved to three different facilities and made to live apart\n\nMr James, who has coeliac disease, had said he kept being given food he could not eat, and was not allowed to have food delivered.\n\nThe friends tried to stay positive by doing yoga and video calling each other at meal times.\n\n\"You were always told by doctors maybe you'll be able to leave tomorrow, and that was every single day for nine weeks,\" he said, adding it had felt like a prison.\n\n\"We felt on edge all the time, there was no privacy, you had random swab tests all the time, so you feel a bit like a lab rat, and there was no end date.\"\n\nEvery week after having a swab test the group would wait for the results, and last week after each finally getting one negative result they were hopeful of coming home.\n\nBut only Mr Castle got a double negative and was allowed to leave, while the other two tested positive and were facing another week in isolation, before the law changed.\n\nThe friends only met while working in Italy but say they have bonded over the experience\n\n\"We had a lot of support in Italy, I had a lawyer call my hotel room to say they were using our case to try and get the law changed,\" he said, adding the fact only one of them had got two negatives made no sense.\n\n\"Doctors and nurses visiting our rooms were saying they didn't agree with it, but they couldn't let us leave. It was so strict and surreal.\"\n\nMr James said his family threw him a little surprise welcome home party\n\nHaving only arrived home days before a Wales-wide lockdown begins at 18:00 BST on Friday, Mr James said he had been trying to have socially distanced catch-ups with loved ones while he could.\n\n\"I'm still adapting to being home. I'm quite an outgoing person, I went to the shop today and I felt nervous, and I've never had that sort of social anxiety before.\n\n\"The other two have said the same, we are still talking constantly on group chats, and we are all finding the same thing, being around other people is quite exhausting, it's quite nice that we can chat about the experience.\"\n\nThe friends said they were moved to three different Covid facilities while in Italy\n\nMr James said the group - who had all lost weight and are struggling with reduced appetite since they got home - had faced criticism on social media, with people saying it was their own fault for going to Italy in the first place.\n\n\"People have said it's not like we were in a war dungeon or a prison cell, we know it wasn't the worst place in the world, but mentally it really took its toll,\" he said.\n\n\"We were forcing ourselves to sleep though the day just to make it go quicker, I'm getting very exhausted easily just talking all the time.\n\nMr James, who thanked doctors and nurses in Italy for looking after the group, said he would go back to Florence at some point, but maybe not for a couple of years.\n\n\"If there's one good thing to come out of this is I have made great friends,\" he said.", "Manchester went into tier three - the highest level - of lockdown rules at 00:01 on Friday\n\nStricter coronavirus rules are coming into force for nearly six million Britons.\n\nGreater Manchester's population of 2.8 million joined Liverpool City Region and Lancashire in England's highest tier of restrictions at midnight.\n\nAnd from 18:00 BST, the 3.1 million people in Wales will have to stay at home as a 17-day lockdown begins.\n\nIt comes as a minister said there was a \"common purpose here to get the virus down\" so people could enjoy Christmas.\n\n\"I think few people expect it to be exactly as it would normally,\" said Chief Secretary to the Treasury Stephen Barclay - but \"the ability of families to spend Christmas together\" was \"something we all hope to be in a position to do\".\n\nWelsh health minister Vaughan Gething said the lockdown in Wales was happening now so \"we can have a much more normal Christmas season for businesses\".\n\nThe UK recorded another 189 deaths and 21,242 new confirmed cases on Thursday.\n\nWarrington has become the latest place to be placed into tier three - or \"very high\" alert level. The measures will take effect next week.\n\nNottingham and parts of Nottinghamshire are also expected to be moved into tier three next week, with the finer details such as whether or not gyms can stay open still to be decided as talks continue.\n\nThe tier three alert level means people cannot mix with other households and pubs and bars will be closed - unless they are serving substantial meals. Some areas in the top tier have also gone further, closing businesses such as bingo halls, casinos, betting shops and soft play centres.\n\nHouseholds are banned from mixing outdoors in private gardens or anywhere inside and people are advised against travelling into or out of the area.\n\nSouth Yorkshire will also move into tier three restrictions from 00:01 on Saturday, by which time more than seven million people will be living under England's tightest rules.\n\nRising infections mean that Coventry, Stoke and Slough will move into tier two restrictions at 00:01 on Saturday.\n\nThe \"high\" alert level means households are banned from mixing indoors and people are encouraged to reduce their use of public transport.\n\nIn Wales, the \"firebreak\" means people are being ordered to stay at home and pubs, restaurants, hotels and non-essential shops will close until 9 November.\n\nSupermarkets have been told not to sell items such as clothes, as First Minister Mark Drakeford said it would be \"made clear\" they should only open the parts of their business that sell essential goods.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Mixed views on the firebreak in Wales' first local lockdown area\n\nAnd the Scottish government is to set out its own tiered alert system of Covid restrictions, which will come into force from 2 November.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it would have five tiers, with the middle tiers corresponding roughly to England's three, plus a lower tier that is \"the closest to normality\" possible without a vaccine.\n\nShe said an additional top tier would be \"closer to a full lockdown\" - and was added because England's chief medical officer had acknowledged tier three restrictions were not necessarily enough to reduce infections in all circumstances.\n\nThe move in Greater Manchester comes after days of confrontation between local politicians and ministers over the level of financial support the area would receive.\n\nAfter the \"very high\" alert level was imposed, the government announced a more generous wage subsidy scheme, backdated to August, for areas that have been under additional restrictions.\n\nShadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds says ministers need to be clearer about how they decide what financial support areas will get and how long this will be for.\n\n\"Initially it was suggested there was some kind of a negotiation going on between government and local areas about support for businesses,\" she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.\n\n\"Now it looks like actually there's a formula that's being used by government but they haven't published it anywhere, they've not discussed it, it hasn't been voted on for government.\"", "Supermarkets say they have been given \"very little time\" to implement changes announced ahead of tonight's firebreak lockdown.\n\nA spokesperson for Asda said: “The Welsh Government’s firebreak regulations means that we can only sell products they deem to be essential.\n\n“We have been given very little time to implement these changes or clarity on what is deemed ‘essential’.\"\n\nThe store chain expressed \"deep concerns about the implications for customers accessing products they genuinely need and the risk to colleagues' safety\".\n\n“We will continue to do our utmost to keep our customers and colleagues safe and would appeal to our customers to be patient when they shop with us and to continue to treat our colleagues with respect as they do their best to help them understand the new regulations,” said the spokesperson.\n\nNon-essential goods have been covered up at Asda stores including Coryton in Cardiff Image caption: Non-essential goods have been covered up at Asda stores including Coryton in Cardiff", "Beckton water plant is taking part in the scheme\n\nNinety wastewater treatment sites in England, Wales and Scotland will start testing more sewage for coronavirus.\n\nThe aim is to create an early warning system to detect local outbreaks before they spread.\n\nScientists established earlier this year that fragments of the virus's genetic material could be identified in human waste.\n\nA successful trial in Plymouth has detected a cluster of infections in the local area.\n\nAnd scientists in Scotland have found evidence of the virus in waste water samples from most of its health board areas. The results are consistent with areas where there are confirmed cases of Covid-19.\n\nCrucially, virus fragments can be detected even when there are only asymptomatic Covid-19 cases in the community.\n\nThe project is a collaboration between central and local government, along with academic institutions and water companies.\n\nProf Davey Jones, an expert in soil and environmental science at Bangor University, was one of the researchers to get involved.\n\nHe said: \"We have been monitoring viruses like norovirus and hepatitis in human sewage for the last decade. We added Covid-19 to the list in March this year.\"\n\nHis team discovered that viral levels in wastewater tracked the success of lockdown measures during the first wave.\n\nSamples will be analysed for genetic material\n\nWaste from sites such as Beckton Sewage Treatment Works in East London, will be tested four times a week from now on.\n\nResults of the analysis will then be shared with test-and-trace systems in England, Wales and Scotland - helping them focus on particular communities for extra attention, as well as tipping off local NHS services.\n\nScientists had to overcome some tricky issues to refine the technique, not least that wastewater - by its nature - contains a lot of contaminants and samples vary widely, which makes it tricky to develop a one-size-fits all standard, accurate test.\n\nBut a pilot in south-west England has already helped to spot a rise in infections that occurred last month in Plymouth, where a cluster was silently growing as a result of several asymptomatic cases.\n\nThe levels of the virus's genetic material in the wastewater acted as an invaluable early warning system.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Coronavirus: Tracking new outbreaks in the sewers\n\n\"Levels were very low during the summer and then in September there was a sudden spike,\" said Environment Secretary George Eustice.\n\n\"That enabled local health officials to try to identify where around Plymouth there might have been a particular problem, even though the test-and-trace system hadn't shown it up at that point.\"\n\nMr Eustice acknowledges these waste tests are not a substitute for an effective test-and-trace regime, but he describes it an \"added tool in the box\".\n\nRoseanna Cunningham, the Scottish government's Environment Secretary, said: \"The early data is already providing our public health experts with new information, which complements the wider population testing programme to give a more robust picture of the prevalence of Covid disease in Scotland.\"\n\nFor the moment, the testing will be done at water treatment works, but the hope is that sewage tests might become even more localised over time - perhaps down to individual postcodes.\n\nThe technique is already being used elsewhere in the world. The University of Arizona in the US, for example, tests waste from its student residences twice a week.\n\nBritain is also looking to advise developing countries on the practicalities of this method, as many low-income countries do not have enough testing machines for their populations.", "The bodies of 39 Vietnamese nationals were discovered in a refrigerated trailer\n\nA woman saw nine people get into a lorry in northern France the day before 39 Vietnamese migrants were found dead inside it in the UK, a court heard.\n\nThe witness, who said police were alerted, said the group were dropped by taxi near a farm shed before the white lorry stopped and they got in.\n\nA little later on 22 October 2019, a lone man arrived saying he was \"looking for his friends\", the Old Bailey heard.\n\nFour men are on trial after the migrants' bodies were found in Essex.\n\nJurors have heard the 39 victims, aged between 15 and 44, had suffocated in the sealed trailer - which was found on an industrial estate in Purfleet - as the temperature inside reached 38.5C.\n\nThe victims were discovered when the container was opened at Purfleet in Essex\n\nGheorghe Nica, 43, of Basildon, Essex, and lorry driver Eamonn Harrison, 23, deny the manslaughters of 39 Vietnamese people, aged between 15 and 44.\n\nMr Harrison, of Mayobridge, County Down, Christopher Kennedy, 24, of County Armagh, and Valentin Calota, 37, of Birmingham, deny being part of a people-smuggling conspiracy, which Mr Nica has admitted.\n\nA statement from carer Laetitia Mockelyn was read to the trial, in which she said she had heard Estelle Duyke call the Gendarmes on 22 October about migrants being seen close to her elderly mother-in-law's house, in Bierne.\n\nShe said she later saw the lone man being dropped off by a taxi after the lorry had left with the nine people who had arrived earlier.\n\nWhen he was approached the man said in English he was \"looking for his friends\", before walking off in the direction of a factory.\n\nA police image shows how packed boxes of macaroons in an earlier shipment bore dirty footprints\n\nWhen the Gendarmerie arrived they checked the shed where the nine people had waited but \"there was no-one there\", Ms Mockelyn said.\n\nShe said the nine all appeared to be aged under 35 and among them was a woman wearing a padded jacket, white woolly hat and small backpack, and a \"slightly-built\" man in jeans and classic black cap.\n\nThe man who arrived after the lorry departed was described as being of small build and wearing blue jeans, a padded jacket and Adidas backpack.\n\nMs Mockelyn told officers she had never seen anything like it before.\n\nLorry driver Eamonn Harrison, 23, allegedly picked up the migrants in his trailer before dropping it at the port of Zeebrugge in Belgium, on 22 October.\n\nThe court heard the temperature inside the trailer had already risen from 11.7C to 15.6C by 10:30 BST.\n\nThe next morning the trailer was collected by Maurice Robinson in Purfleet, Essex, and he discovered the bodies of the men, women and children, the jury was told.\n\nProsecutors said Harrison had two encounters with the police in the days before he allegedly collected the migrants. The first time was due to the fact he was intoxicated and the second because his trailer was parked illegally.\n\nMeanwhile, haulage boss Ronan Hughes, Robinson and alleged key organiser Gheorghe Nica were caught on CCTV at the Ibis Hotel in Thurrock, Essex, on the evening of 18 October.\n\nHughes, 41, and Robinson, 26, have pleaded guilty to 39 counts of manslaughter.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "More than £3bn of furlough job protection money could have been stolen by criminal gangs and employers, the National Audit Office (NAO) has said.\n\nThe spending watchdog said up to £2bn of taxpayer money may have gone to criminals using fake companies.\n\nFirms also claimed for workers not on furlough or inflated the money needed.\n\nThe NAO, which has already warned about \"bounceback\" business loan fraud, said nearly one in 10 workers on furlough had been asked to work by their boss.\n\nThe government defended the scheme as a \"lifeline\" without which lives would have been ruined during lockdown.\n\nBut in a report on Friday, the NAO said it was brought in so rapidly in March that \"considerable levels of fraud and error\" were likely.\n\nDesigned to help those who could not work due to lockdown, the Coronavirus Jobs Retention Scheme scheme supported more than 9.6 million workers at its peak.\n\nWorkers on leave have been paid 80% of their salaries, in full or part by the government, although it will be replaced by a less generous jobs scheme from 1 November.\n\nThe NAO said that a fraud hotline set up by the tax authorities, HMRC, received over 10,000 reports of contraventions, while its own survey, conducted by Ispos Mori, found 9% of furloughed workers had continued to work at the request of their boss.\n\nLondon's usually bustling Regent Street in June. Large parts of the economy were forced to shut down during lockdown.\n\nSome employers had also claimed furlough payments but not passed them on in full to employees, the NAO said.\n\nBy May about a third of the UK workforce was on furlough, while at least 2.6 million self-employed were also given state support via a separate programme.\n\nHowever, the NAO said as many as 2.9 million people were unable to access any help, \"either because of ministerial decisions about where to focus support, or because HMRC did not have data needed to properly guard against the risk of fraud\".\n\nThe civil service had done well to launch the job protection schemes so quickly, said Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, but due to the pace at which they were introduced it had not been able to follow standard procedures.\n\nHe said the tax office should have done more to prevent fraud including informing employees whether their employer was part of the furlough scheme.\n\n\"In future, the departments should do more while employment support schemes are running to protect employees and counter acts of fraud,\" Mr Davies said.\n\nEarlier this month MPs on the Public Accounts Committee also warned that setting up the schemes at such short notice had left \"unacceptable room for fraud\".\n\nThe NAO is recommending that any future support schemes should consider how to ensure more people are eligible, if they have suffered loss of income, as well as how to prevent further fraud.\n\nThe Treasury and HMRC should also focus on assessing fraud and error and recovering overpayments.\n\nA government spokesperson said it made \"no apology\" for the speed at which the schemes were delivered.\n\n\"The government's priority from the start of the outbreak has been on protecting jobs and getting support to those who need it as quickly as possible, and our employment support schemes have provided a lifeline to millions of hardworking families across the UK.\n\n\"Our schemes were designed to minimise fraud from the outset and we have rejected or blocked thousands of fraudulent claims. We will not tolerate those who seek to defraud taxpayers and will take action against perpetrators, including criminal prosecution.\"", "Household mixing is banned indoors and most places outdoors under tier three restrictions\n\nWarrington will move to England's highest tier of coronavirus restrictions from next week, its council has confirmed.\n\nThe Labour-run council said it had reached agreement with the government and would be moving into tier three.\n\nConservative MP for Warrington South, Andy Carter, said this was proportionate with the financial settlements for other tier three areas.\n\nThe Cheshire town, home to about 210,000 people, is the 35th-worst hit place in England according to government figures.\n\nAs of Monday, the government reported 733 coronavirus cases in Warrington, with a rate of 349 per 100,000 people in the previous seven days.\n\nCouncil leader Russ Bowden said case numbers remained \"stubbornly high\" and \"urgent action\" was needed.\n\nRestrictions are expected to come into force at 00:01 GMT on Thursday.\n\nThe council has said people must not:\n\nThe council said people should:\n\nUnder the rules pubs and bars which don't serve substantial meals will close, along with soft play centres, betting offices and casinos.\n\nSupport bubbles and childcare bubbles are not affected.\n\nSarah Lott and her husband Paul run family business The Jungle Play Centre in Warrington\n\nSarah Lott, who runs The Jungle soft play centre in Warrington, said she was \"devastated\" and has already had a staff member in tears since the announcement.\n\nShe said she did not understand why trampoline parks could stay open but soft play could not.\n\n\"You can't pinpoint the reason. If the government had scientific advice or told us why. What is the evidence that soft play centres are a pit of germs?\" Ms Lott said.\n\n\"We are working at 40% capacity, there is loads of room, adults wear masks and we clean between sessions. There is no issue at all.\"\n\nShe said she has already let two thirds of her staff go and is \"down to the bare minimum\".\n\n\"I don't know how we are going to survive. Our rent is over £10,000. It is a blow. It is just horrific. Here we go again,\" she added.\n\nWarrington, like many parts of England, has seen a surge in cases over the last eight weeks, according to government figures.\n\nThe area recorded 349 cases per 100,000 people in the week to 19 October, well above England's overall rate of 187.4 per 100,000 over the same period, but a slight drop on the previous week so far.\n\nIt also saw 10 further deaths from coronavirus in the last week and hospital admissions to Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals rose by 10 in the seven days to 18 October on the previous week.\n\nAuthorities such as Salford, Wigan and St Helens have seen higher rates, while Halton - already in tier 3 as part of the Liverpool City Region - Cheshire East and Cheshire West all recorded lower rates.\n\nGareth Hammond who runs the Chapel House Inn in Burtonwood said it was a \"blessed relief\" to shut after some \"stressful days\" since being placed in tier two.\n\nHe had been forced to \"separate friends who had been drinking together for years\", he said, and there had been \"difficult conversations\" with customers who felt there was \"no logic\" behind the rules.\n\nGareth Hammond who runs the Chapel House Inn said it would be a \"relief\" to close after stressful days trying to police tier two rules\n\n\"You would have a couple of people who had been working in a van together all day but I had to tell them they could not sit together and have a drink afterwards,\" he said.\n\nHe also said it had been \"uncomfortable\" as people from other tier three regions had \"flooded\" the Warrington pubs.\n\nHowever, Mr Hammond said, the business could only survive short term by \"scrimping and saving\".\n\nIf the current restrictions went on for as long as the initial lockdown, he said, it could be \"a different kettle of fish\".\n\nHe said having to close would be \"difficult to manage\" , but he didn't know how long he could carry on operating under tier two conditions.\n\n\"We're making very little money and it is not enjoyable,\" he said.\n\nHouseholds will no longer be able to mix outside hospitality venues as they can in tier two\n\nBookmaker Harold Smith, who runs a betting shop, said the move was \"completely misinformed\".\n\n\"More people stand outside at the bus stop than come into the shop,\" he said.\n\n\"Since they introduced no smoking people don't stay in the shop any more. Any that do are wearing masks.\"\n\nPunters \"didn't come back\" after the initial lockdown in March, he said, adding: \"we are doing our business on the telephone now\".\n\nThe council said £1.68 m of the funding package would be allocated to supporting its public health response, including testing and enforcement.\n\nIt said £4.2m would be used for business and employment support.\n\nLabour MP for Warrington North, Charlotte Nichols, said it was a \"grim inevitability\" that Warrington would be put in tier three.\n\nShe said the town had \"double the average rate of infection\" among over-60s and its main hospital was \"nearing its ICU capacity\".\n\nMs Nichols said only about 60% of close contacts were being traced due to the \"failing\" system.\n\nShe also criticised Warrington's financial settlement as being \"not remotely enough\" and said the government's formula for working it out was \"far too rigid\".\n\nWarrington will follow Greater Manchester, which joined Liverpool City Region and Lancashire in tier three at midnight.\n\nSouth Yorkshire will move into tier three restrictions from 00:01 on Saturday.\n\nNottingham and parts of Nottinghamshire are also expected to be moved into tier three next week, with the finer details such as whether or not gyms can stay open still to be decided as talks continue.\n• None Warrington in talks over move to tier 3 regulations", "\"I still have nightmares most nights about being completely out of my depth.\"\n\nGemma, a ward nurse in Northern Ireland, was redeployed to a critical care unit at the end of March when the first wave of coronavirus struck.\n\n\"I had never looked after a critically ill intensive care patient in my life,\" she says.\n\n\"I just thought, I'm coming in here and I'm going to die. I'm going to catch Covid and I'm going to be one of those patients in the beds.\"\n\nAs the second wave of the pandemic takes deep root across parts of the UK, thousands of NHS workers are struggling to recover from what they have already been through.\n\n\"We were all in PPE all the time,\" recalls Nathan, a senior intensive care nurse at a hospital in the Midlands. \"All you can see is people's eyes, you can't see anything else.\"\n\nHe describes trying to help junior members of staff survive long and difficult days.\n\n\"And I'd see these eyes as big as saucers saying help me, do something. Make this right. Fix this.\"\n\n\"The pressure was insane, and the anxiety just got me,\" he says. \"I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't eat, I was sick before work, I was shaking before I got into my car in the morning.\"\n\nNathan ended up having time off with severe anxiety, but he is now back at the hospital, waiting for the beds to fill up again.\n\nWe've spoken to a number of nurses and doctors across the UK who are deeply apprehensive about what lies ahead this winter.\n\nWe're not using their real names because they shared their views on condition of anonymity, in order to speak freely.\n\nAll believe it is important that the general public hears first-hand about the enormous strain the health service and its staff have been under.\n\nIt has not just been about coping with the devastating effects of a new and deadly disease.\n\nPressure to deal with the huge backlog of other medical treatments, which had been put on hold, meant some health care workers didn't have much of a break during the summer either.\n\n\"I finally went on holiday in September and it was like I came out of a fog,\" says Danny, an intensive care doctor and anaesthetist based in Yorkshire.\n\n\"Almost the last six months of my life was just some kind of haze that I don't remember very well. You just became all about Covid and nothing else,\" he says. \"And I think that got us through the first wave, but obviously it isn't a sustainable mechanism to carry on.\"\n\nThat widely shared feeling of exhaustion has been heightened by long-standing concerns about staff shortages, and by deep resentment - particularly among nurses - about pay and conditions.\n\nOne of the lasting images of the first wave of Covid is of the weekly \"clap for carers\" - that moment of national unity that took place on doorsteps at 20:00 every Thursday night.\n\nHealth care workers have been very appreciative of public support, but many say they would prefer a proper pay settlement to another round of applause.\n\nAnd Jo Billings, a psychologist from the Covid Trauma Response Working Group at University College London, says \"the narrative of health care workers being heroes or angels has largely been really unhelpful.\"\n\nIt painted a picture that people do this because they're special, not because they're simply doing their job, for which they should be adequately paid and protected.\n\n\"It's also been a real barrier to people seeking help with their own problems,\" Dr Billings says, \"because they feel heroes don't struggle. An angel doesn't get PTSD.\"\n\nThe first wave of Covid-19 could have been much worse than it was. In fact, many doctors expected it to be. A lot of the extra capacity that was created so quickly in the health system, in temporary Nightingale hospitals and elsewhere, was not needed.\n\nBut health care staff speak of an \"all hands on deck\" mentality, when people were doing long shifts and were often away from home for extended periods to protect their families.\n\n\"It was mentally draining, and we've not really had a proper downtime,\" says Moussa, a respiratory consultant from Greater Manchester. \"As soon as the first wave finished, we started catching up with the backlog of other cases. So, there was another mountain to climb.\"\n\nThat sense of fatigue and frustration, in a health service already stretched to the limit before Covid struck, is captured in data put together by the Covid Trauma Response Working Group.\n\nIts Frontline Covid study of nearly 1200 health care workers from across the UK between May and July found that nearly 60% of them met the criteria for at least one of three things - anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.\n\nVarious risk factors were identified, including fear of transmitting Covid to others, unreliable access to Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) at the time, feeling stigmatised due to their role, and not feeling able to talk to a manager about how they were coping.\n\nConversations with NHS staff reveal a system of support for staff welfare and mental health which is patchy - fantastic in some places, not so in others.\n\n\"A junior doctor I spoke to the other day was talking about what a difficult time she'd found in another hospital,\" says Dorothy Wade, a psychologist at University College Hospital in London. \"And I said, 'Didn't you have anything like this at the other hospital?' And she said, 'No, absolutely nothing. There was nothing on offer at all.'\n\nShe says quite a lot of hospitals still don't have a staff psychologist, and didn't have resources to offer any provisions.\n\nIt has been a similar story in intensive care units, says Nicki Credland of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses.\n\n\"In some places there have been significant amounts of psychological support,\" but in others \"staff are reporting that they're needing to go to their GP.\"\n\nNHS England says nearly half a million staff were given extra support with their health and mental wellbeing needs during the first wave, via self-help apps, text services, online forums and telephone helplines.\n\nBut in most cases, it is down to local management, and sometimes support isn't available at the time that shift workers need it.\n\n\"Members of staff in our ward have been permanently scarred by Covid,\" says Jacqui, a nurse at a small community hospital in London. \"They sometimes struggle now doing some of the more minor tasks. [But] we were very lucky that we're in a very good, small trust,\" she says, \"which has taken all that on board and is supporting them.\"\n\nA large number of health care workers, however, were redeployed into new hospitals or new wards, or even into entirely new areas with very little training and very little preparation.\n\nAnd the Frontline Covid survey reveals that many of them were distressed by what they saw.\n\nThat is partly because even at the best of times in critical care, a lot of patients are going to die.\n\n\"You have to have this slight disconnect with what's going on because you have to accept that you can do everything right, and the patient still might not survive,\" says Danny, the ICU doctor in Yorkshire. \"But people coming from elsewhere in the hospital haven't had the time to develop that kind of mentality.\"\n\nIn Northern Ireland, Gemma was asked recently by her manager if she would like to volunteer to go back into an ICU.\n\n\"I laughed in her face and said no,\" she admits. \"I don't know if I'll be made to go. But as soon as you walk over the threshold of a hospital, you cannot refuse to look after a patient. And the thought is, you've done it before, you can do it again.\"\n\nThere's little doubt that morale in the NHS would be higher if staff felt they were being rewarded more fairly.\n\nThe Royal College of Nursing (RCN) surveyed more than 40,000 of its members in the aftermath of the first Covid wave, and found that pay, and feeling under-valued, was their number-one concern.\n\n\"It may feel like now is not the time to talk about pay, with so many people in lockdown and in serious financial difficulty,\" says Mike Adams of the RCN, \"but we've thought about this very carefully.\n\n\"If you want to do one thing for nurses who need a boost to get through the rest of this year, and through the winter, it would be to show you value them with a meaningful pay rise.\"\n\nMany staff are frustrated because they know that is unlikely to happen.\n\nNearly three quarters of respondents to the RCN survey said they thought they were more valued by the general public after the onset of Covid-19. But less than one fifth thought they were more valued by the government in their part of the UK.\n\n\"All that clapping, and all that goodwill,\" says Nathan, \"and now it's back to normal.\"\n\nDoctors earn more money than nurses, but express similar sentiments.\n\n\"We've lost 40% of our pension pot in the last five years,\" says Jack, a consultant in London. \"And everyone is looking at it and wondering whether they should get out now before we lose any more.\n\n\"I think by next March, it's going to be a great deal worse,\" he says\n\nThat in turn highlights another message delivered by members of the RCN. In the aftermath of the first Covid wave, 35% of more than 40,000 people said they were actively considering leaving the profession.\n\nAn NHS spokesperson told the BBC that there are now more than 300,000 nurses in England, including 13,000 who joined recently.\n\n\"And this year there was a 22% increase in applications for nursing degrees, on top of our £28m fund to boost international recruitment,\" the spokesperson continued.\n\nIt takes years to train new recruits, however, and there were more than 40,000 nursing vacancies across the NHS at the beginning of the year.\n\nNow, with Covid an ever-present danger, many experienced members of staff are thinking of leaving, and many of them are not coming back.\n\n\"Nurses approaching retirement used to - in significant numbers - retire, and then return on a smaller number of hours,\" says Mike Adams at the RCN. \"But that is just not happening as much. We're losing the guides and mentors for the student nurses and the newly qualified nurses.\"\n\nGemma in Northern Ireland says she plans to leave the NHS when this next Covid phase is over, and get a job in the private sector where she won't be redeployed at a moment's notice.\n\n\"A lot of what got us through is the camaraderie, informal chats in the tearoom,\" she explains. \"But we're not even allowed to chat in the tearoom anymore. We have to sit apart with masks on.\n\n\"I'd say a large proportion of my team feel the same. A couple of nurses have just taken early retirement saying, 'No, not doing it anymore.'\"\n\nMany people in the NHS think the public aren't always aware of how acute staff shortages could become.\n\n\"The focus during the first wave was all on ventilators and the Nightingales and beds and things like that,\" says Danny in Yorkshire. \"But the actual thing we need is staff.\"\n\nHe highlights a concern raised by a number of NHS staff that we talked to - an awful lot of people were so burnt out by the first wave that they may not be able to commit so much this time.\n\nStaffing up of ICU became a focus in the early months of the pandemic\n\n\"We've noticed there's a real reluctance among doctors, nurses, everyone to pick up these extra shifts now,\" he says. \"People are realising the importance of family, the pandemic has encouraged everyone to make life simpler, and they want to do something more sustainable second time around.\"\n\nThe challenge could be particularly acute in intensive care.\n\nIn south-west London, Jacqui worked in an ICU during the first wave, and has the rights skills and experience. But she doesn't think she can do it again.\n\n\"Intensive care is incredibly physical, and I hurt my shoulder last time trying to roll a patient over,\" she says. \"Psychologically, I'm not sure I could completely cope with it again.\"\n\n\"It has actually made me go, 'Right, next year, I really will take my pension, I won't work full time anymore.' I've done my bit.\"\n\nBack in March and April, staff were redeployed in large numbers from other parts of the health system, particularly from operating theatres, to bolster intensive care.\n\nBut if the government wants things like elective surgery and operations elsewhere in the health system to continue, many of those extra staff may not be available.\n\n\"We haven't miraculously managed to find an extra 10,000 ICU nurses over the past five months,\" says Nicki Credland. \"That gives us a problem, which is compounded by staff that are off sick because of the psychological and physical response to the first wave of Covid.\"\n\nThere are potential solutions to ease serious staff shortages if the virus strikes specific areas hard. Seriously-ill patients could be moved to hospitals under less pressure, or experienced staff, based in areas where the virus is spreading more slowly, could be moved into hotspots.\n\n\"We're taking a much more local approach,\" the medical director of NHS England Stephen Powis said last week, \"and we are determined to keep the capacity for non-Covid services open for as long as possible.\n\n\"That involves hospitals helping each other, the use of independent sector hospitals where we can, and it might involve some of the Nightingale hospitals.\"\n\nA doctor at an NHS trust near Liverpool - which is in tier three - confirmed that her hospital was on standby to take patients from Liverpool City Region, even though its ICU was already full.\n\nAmbulances stand by in Strasbourg in March to load patients with Covid-19 into a medicalised train\n\nBut if the pandemic gets a lot worse, the effectiveness of local cooperation like this could be limited. And there is no national plan for moving people or resources around the country.\n\n\"In France, they reconditioned trains and made carriages into mobile intensive care units,\" says Jack, the consultant in London. \"In Holland, they had a big double-decker bus, a mobile ICU to move large numbers around. But I'm not aware that we've got anything other than fleets of ambulances.\"\n\nWhen you look back to March, there is no doubt some things have changed for the better. There is far more testing of NHS staff, including testing staff without symptoms in hotspot areas, and there is far less anxiety about the supply of personal protective equipment.\n\nDoctors also know more about the disease and ways to try to treat it, which should have a positive effect on staff morale.\n\n\"We still don't have a cure, but seeing people get better obviously makes staff stronger psychologically,\" says consultant Jack. \"We're only human after all.\"\n\n\"We will put our best foot forward, and we'll do the best for the patients,\" says Nathan, the ICU nurse in the Midlands, \"but I can genuinely say all of my colleagues, including senior management, are terrified.\"\n\n\"We're not sure how, in terms of resilience, we are going to be able to get through this.\"\n\nAcross the NHS you can hear similar concerns - a determination to step up to the plate again, but also the knowledge that adrenalin only gets you so far.\n\nThe desire to continue with business as usual in the NHS - treating other conditions and diseases as normal - is a laudable, and probably an essential, aim.\n\nBut that may not prove possible - some hospitals are cancelling operations already.\n\n\"The pressure to still run all the normal functions of the NHS and deal with a Covid second wave that's got the potential to be bigger than the first one,\" says Moussa, \"that's a harsh, harsh thing when we feel we need to prioritise.\"\n\nMany doctors were expecting a second wave to start around November, so it has come in some places a little earlier than predicted. And even in a normal year, the onset of winter and the flu season puts huge additional capacity pressure on the NHS.\n\nThe government argues that the system has shown extraordinary resilience in the face of a pandemic unprecedented in living memory.\n\nBut Moussa argues that as a country, \"we could have done more to be ready for the second wave\".\n\n\"When you think about it,\" he says, \"it's a bit of a perfect storm.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nLeeds United ended Aston Villa's winning start and ruined their chance of going top of the Premier League thanks to a brilliant Patrick Bamford hat-trick.\n\nVilla came into Friday's game having won their first four games of a league campaign for the first time since 1930-31, but three expert finishes from the Leeds striker prevented the hosts making it a club record five victories on the spin to open their season.\n\nThe result lifts Leeds to third - their highest position at the end of a day in the division since September 2002.\n\nIt was reward for a relentlessly positive performance from an injury-hit visiting side that should probably have yielded more goals.\n\nIn the first-half, Bamford missed with a header and then side-footed wide after being found by Jack Harrison's low cross at the end of swift counter-attacking move.\n\nLeeds' record signing Rodrigo was also guilty of spurning good opportunities, slicing one shot wide before seeing an effort blocked by Ezri Konsa.\n\nDean Smith's Villa team, who had put seven goals past champions Liverpool in their previous home game, saw a Jack Grealish shot cleared off the line by Luke Ayling after the ball had fallen to the midfielder from Trezeguet's miscued shot.\n\nVilla's captain also went close with a saved effort from close range after he had shown great tenacity and skill to carry the ball from within his own half.\n\nBut Bamford had the decisive say, finding the corner of the net from just a few yards out after Emiliano Martinez had palmed out Rodrigo's low shot.\n\nIf his first was simple, his second and third were stunning - a rising effort into the top corner from 20 yards after he was found by Mateusz Klich on 67 minutes and a dug out, curling finish following Helder Costa's low ball seven minutes later.\n\nLeeds are now two points and a place behind Villa, who remain second, a point behind leaders Everton.\n• None How Bamford and Leeds are proving doubters wrong\n• None Best action and reaction from Aston Villa v Leeds\n• None Football Daily podcast: Hat-trick Bamford and what next for Wilshere?\n\nLeeds maybe have not been as spectacular as Villa in the early stages of 2020-21, but they are certainly making their mark on a top flight that had been without them for 16 years.\n\nThere were plenty of times during that period when little was missing in their absence, but now - with Marcelo Bielsa in charge - the pleasure is all the Premier League's.\n\nLeeds have already shown they are unwilling to be daunted and compromise their attacking principles, even when facing the elite sides.\n\nAnd at Villa Park, with influential midfielder Kalvin Phillips and captain Liam Cooper missing through injury and a makeshift defence in place, they took apart the division's form team on their own patch.\n\nUnder Bielsa, Leeds create chances but they have not always had the cutting edge to make them count, with Bamford too often frustratingly profligate.\n\nPremier League life with Leeds clearly suits the English striker, though, and Friday's hat-trick took him to six goals in six matches this term. His treble is also the sixth in the top flight already in 2020-21 - after 49 games, it is the earliest that has happened.\n\nLeeds themselves have now scored 12 league goals, the most by a newly promoted club after six games of a season in the competition since Middlesbrough also netted 12 in 1992-93.\n\nIt is perhaps in-keeping with what has been a chaotic Premier League season so far that Villa, yet to drop points and whose last appearance on their own ground saw them put seven past Liverpool, would be put to the sword by newly promoted Leeds.\n\nBut still it defied all expectation. Villa were second best throughout, unable to compete with the visitors' intensity and energy.\n\nEven Grealish, who has impressed so much, was unable to inspire his side, although he did have moments - not least of all with the solo run that almost brought an opener for the hosts early in the second half.\n\nBamford's first goal was a big blow, his second sent Villa to canvas and the third knocked them out.\n\nIt was a bad night at the office, but Smith's side remain a work in progress - and while he is unlikely to be pleased after defeat, one poor showing in five is a percentage he will surely take.\n\nThe key now will be whether Villa can respond to such a ruthless ending to one eight-game unbeaten streak by building another.\n\n'We probably got away with a 3-0' - what the managers said\n\nAston Villa boss Dean Smith, speaking to Match of the Day: \"Very frustrated, especially with the last 40 minutes. I thought the first half was very even. They scored the first goal and we got worse and they were very good. We probably got away with a 3-0 in the end with the chances they had.\n\n\"Who knows what would have happened if we had scored? That is the first time we have been behind in a game and we didn't handle it very well.\"\n\nLeeds boss Marcelo Bielsa, speaking to Match of the Day: \"It was an important game for us and a deserved triumph. We scored first and were a little bit lucky they didn't score some of the chances they had. We were playing well even before the goal and had played well enough to go ahead.\"\n\nOn striker Patrick Bamford, Bielsa added: \"Very happy for Patrick because he scored some wonderful goals. Apart from that [he is] a noble player who sacrifices a lot for the team - generous also. I think his development is more to do with him and less to do with me.\"\n• None This was Aston Villa's first defeat in nine Premier League matches (six wins) and also the first time they had fallen behind at any stage in any of those nine matches.\n• None This was the biggest win by a newly promoted side in an away Premier League match since October 2019, when Aston Villa won 5-1 at Norwich, and the biggest by a promoted club away from home while also keeping a clean sheet since Brighton won 3-0 at West Ham in October 2017.\n• None Since the start of last season, Aston Villa have lost 22 Premier League games and conceded 72 goals in the competition - only Norwich City (27 defeats, 75 goals conceded) have lost and conceded more in the division in that time.\n• None Bamford has scored six goals in Leeds' first six league matches this season - only Eric Cantona in 1992-93 (also six) has scored as many goals for the club at this stage of a Premier League campaign.\n• None The Englishman is only the second player to score in Leeds United's first three away games in a top-flight league season, after Gordon Hodgson in 1937-38.\n• None Bamford is the ninth Leeds player to score a Premier League hat-trick and the first since Mark Viduka away at Charlton in April 2003.\n• None Attempt missed. Jack Harrison (Leeds United) left footed shot from the left side of the box is close, but misses to the left. Assisted by Pablo Hernández following a fast break.\n• None Attempt missed. John McGinn (Aston Villa) left footed shot from outside the box is too high. Assisted by Ross Barkley.\n• None Mateusz Klich (Leeds United) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt missed. Ollie Watkins (Aston Villa) right footed shot from the right side of the box is close, but misses to the left. Assisted by Ross Barkley.\n• None Attempt saved. Patrick Bamford (Leeds United) header from the centre of the box is saved in the top centre of the goal. Assisted by Jamie Shackleton with a cross.\n• None Attempt missed. Raphinha (Leeds United) left footed shot from the centre of the box is close, but misses to the right. Assisted by Patrick Bamford. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Can a government minister outrun the secrets of his past?\n• None Behind the scenes of a club reborn", "Ms Sturgeon will set out plans for the new system at her daily coronavirus briefing\n\nThe Scottish government is to publish details later of a new five-tier alert system of Covid-19 restrictions.\n\nThe new system - which adds two levels to the three tiers used in England - will come into force from 2 November.\n\nIt will set out different levels of measures that can be applied either nationally or regionally, depending on the rate of infection across Scotland.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said this would provide clarity about rules and flexibility for different areas.\n\nThe new \"strategic framework\" will also include details of support for businesses hit by restrictions and a new testing strategy.\n\nTemporary restrictions targeting the hospitality industry in the central belt of Scotland in particular have been extended to cover the gap until the new system comes into force.\n\nDetails of how it will work are to be published on Friday, but Ms Sturgeon has already revealed that it will feature five different levels.\n\nThe three tiers currently used in the English system - of \"medium\", \"high\" and \"very high\" alert - will be broadly equivalent to the middle of the Scottish system.\n\nAn extra level will be added at the bottom, which Ms Sturgeon said would be \"the closest to normality that we can reasonably expect to live with until we have a vaccine\".\n\nAnd another tier will be added at the top, featuring harsh restrictions similar to those imposed at the outset of the pandemic in March.\n\nMs Sturgeon said: \"When England published their [system] the chief medical officer in England at the time said he thought the top level was not enough to necessarily, in all circumstances, get the virus down. So we think we need one above that which is closer to a full lockdown if things got to be that serious.\"\n\nMSPs will hold a vote on the proposed framework next week\n\nOpposition parties were consulted while the new framework was being drawn up, and MSPs will put the broad principles to a vote when Holyrood returns from its half term recess.\n\nMs Sturgeon has said decisions about where levels will be set for each region of Scotland would be taken on a \"collaborative\" basis, but said she would ultimately bear accountability for them.\n\nThe first minister said she wanted to avoid a standoff like that between the UK government and local leaders in the Greater Manchester region, adding: \"I believe it's really important that the buck for these difficult decisions stops here, with me and government.\"\n\nThe strategic framework comes alongside an expanded testing strategy, which includes a commitment to expand Scotland's testing capacity to 65,000 tests per day by the end of the year.\n\nThis will include boosting the number of tests that can be processed at the UK government's Lighthouse laboratory in Glasgow, as well as NHS facilities and some smaller commercial ones.\n\nNew NHS regional hubs are under construction in Grampian, Lothian and Greater Glasgow and Clyde, and are expected to take on all of the daily routine testing done in care homes around Scotland.\n\nAlongside the Scottish government's paper, the Office for National Statistics is expected to publish the initial results of a Covid infection survey north of the border.\n\nThis estimates how many people in private households were infected with the virus over a two-week period, which Ms Sturgeon said would provide \"an additional tool to track the spread and prevalence of the virus and tailor our response to it accordingly\".", "British retail sales have continued to increase for the fifth consecutive month, boosted by non-food items including DIY and garden supplies, according to official figures.\n\nThe Office for National Statistics (ONS) said retail sales volumes rose by 1.5% between August and September.\n\nSpending on groceries remained high, but petrol sales were still down as motorists made fewer journeys.\n\nSales are now 5.5% higher than the pre-pandemic levels seen in February.\n\nThe three months to September saw the biggest quarterly increase on record, as retail sales volumes increased by 17.4% when compared with the previous three months.\n\nHowever, analysts warned that the sales surge was unlikely to last, with many parts of the country returning to coronavirus lockdown.\n\n\"While food sales have done well in recent months as people have eaten out less, non-food store sales have now made a recovery at 1.7% above their February levels,\" the ONS said.\n\n\"Home improvement sales continued to do well in September, with increased sales in household goods and garden items within 'other' non-food stores.\"\n\nFuel was the only main sector to remain below February's pre-pandemic level, the ONS said, with volume sales 8.6% lower in September when compared with February 2020.\n\n\"As lockdown eased, we saw an increase in travel and the quantity of fuel bought. However, as many people remained working at home and with certain restrictions still in place, fuel sales were yet to fully recover,\" it added.\n\nAnother positive contribution came from sales of spectacles and contact lenses, the ONS said.\n\n\"We gained feedback from opticians in this sector, suggesting that pent-up demand for eye tests and optical wear increased their sales when lockdown measures had eased,\" it added.\n\nThe proportion of online sales was at 27.5%, compared with 20.1% reported in February.\n\n\"There's no doubting that UK consumers have been doing their bit to boost the economy, following a quarter of record retail sales growth,\" said Lynda Petherick, head of retail at Accenture UKI.\n\n\"There's little time for retailers to gather breath, though, and they will already be wondering - or perhaps dreading - what lies ahead in Q4.\n\n\"This should be a time for excitement as the crucial 'golden quarter' for retail is now underway. However, with lockdown measures across the UK tightening by the day, retailers are braced for a difficult and unconventional end to the year.\"\n\nOne retailer, James Daunt, chief executive of booksellers Waterstones, told the BBC that his stores were \"entering a very unpredictable period of trading\".\n\nOn the move towards local lockdowns, he said: \"It's had a negative impact, particularly in large metropolitan cities - big city centres, where people use public transport.\n\n\"But in local High Streets, [there is] much less impact and in some, not at all.\"\n\nFurther evidence of the impact of local lockdowns on the economy came from the latest IHS Markit/CIPS flash UK composite output index, which indicated a \"sharp slowdown\" in growth due to a much weaker contribution from the service sector.\n\nThe index registered 52.9 in October, down from 56.5 in September and August's recent peak of 59.1. Anything above 50 indicates economic expansion.\n\nIHS Markit said respondents to its survey had frequently commented on tighter restrictions across the hospitality sector, with service providers as a whole reporting a decline in new business for the first time since June.\n\n\"The latest reading pointed to the weakest rise in UK private sector output since a return to growth was first signalled in July,\" it added.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. An attempt was made on Thursday to move the whales out to sea\n\nBoats are being used to herd whales from a Scottish loch into the open sea ahead of a huge military exercise in the region.\n\nExperts have been monitoring the northern bottlenose whales in Gare Loch in Argyll for the last month.\n\nAn operation began at 10:30 on Thursday to move the whales from the sea loch over fears sonar used by warships could distress the animals.\n\nThere are also concerns that one of the whales is looking \"skinny\".\n\nEurope's largest military exercise - Joint Warrior - begins on Saturday and its headquarters will be at Faslane, the naval base next to Gare Loch.\n\nThe operation to move the mammals is being led by the British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR).\n\nIt said five whales have been spotted in the Loch Long area and some have entered some of the smaller lochs nearby.\n\n\"It is very unusual for them to be in coastal waters,\" said a charity spokesman.\n\n\"However, we have had similar incidents in recent years where animals of the same species have entered lochs, including Loch Long, that have subsequently left of their own accord without intervention, and presumably have succeeded in returning to their proper habitat.\n\n\"We recently became aware that a significant military exercise is due to begin next week, and as whales are particularly sensitive to underwater sound, have been concerned about the effect it may have on the animals.\"\n\nIt added that attempting to move them \"of course does come with risks of its own and there is no guarantee it will be successful given the depth of water and distance that needs to be covered, so will be undertaken with as much care as possible.\n\n\"We will of course reassess our actions and options if the whales decide that they will not go.\"\n\nGavin Lemon, a volunteer with the charity, said the animals would be herded from Gare Loch using a number of boats in formation.\n\nHe said it was important to move the animals while they were healthy and in good condition.\n\n\"We've been monitoring them - they are feeding on local fish,\" he said. \"They usually like squid and the like, diving up to 1,000m (3,000ft).\n\n\"Gare Loch is about 25m (80ft) deep. So they've not been having their normal diet, but it has been sustaining them.\n\n\"However, one of them looks skinny which is not a good sign with a whale.\"\n\nJamie Munro has been photographing the whales while they have been in the area between the naval base and the top of the loch.\n\nHe told BBC Scotland: \"At first we thought it a real novelty with the three of them tail slapping and breaching. We thought they were fishing.\"\n\nBut he said concern grew and whale watchers have expressed concern that the animals were in distress.\n\n\"I've been watching them now from our house for six days and every morning I go out early hoping not to see them and that they have made it out, but sure enough they pop up and so it goes.\"\n\nWarships, aircraft, marines and troops from the UK, Nato and allied forces will take part in the military exercise, which is due to run until 15 October.\n\nA spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said: \"The Royal Navy takes its environmental responsibilities very seriously and continues to work with the relevant UK authorities to ensure all practical measures required to reduce environmental risk and comply with legislation are taken.\n\n\"A necessary series of safety checks is observed and an environmental risk assessment is carried out before any underwater task is undertaken by MoD, to minimise any potential risk to marine life.\"\n\nHe added that members of the armed forces who are involved in the Exercise Joint Warrior training in the area will be made aware of the presence of the whales and the latest sightings.\n\n\"All participants are aware that environmental protection remains a priority for the exercise and we are prepared to amend the programme if these whales remain in an atypical situation,\" he added.", "Chrissy Teigen and husband John Legend have said they are in \"deep pain\" after losing their baby during pregnancy.\n\n\"We are shocked and in the kind of deep pain you only hear about, the kind of pain we've never felt before,\" she wrote in a moving Instagram statement.\n\nHer post was accompanied by several black and white photos, including one of her crying in her hospital bed.\n\nModel Teigen and singer Legend have two children, and in mid-August revealed they were expecting a third.\n\nIn her latest post, Teigen revealed the Los Angeles-based couple had named the baby Jack.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by chrissyteigen This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n\"We never decide on our babies' names until the last possible moment after they're born, just before we leave the hospital,\" she wrote.\n\n\"But we, for some reason, had started to call this little guy in my belly Jack. Jack worked so hard to be a part of our little family, and he will be, forever.\n\n\"I'm so sorry that the first few moments of your life were met with so many complications, that we couldn't give you the home you needed to survive. We will always love you.\"\n\nRetweeting her, Legend added \"We love you, Jack\" alongside five black love hearts.\n\nTeigen later added: \"Driving home from the hospital with no baby. How can this be real.\"\n\nTeigen, who is also a TV presenter, had been documenting her pregnancy on social media. She was taken to hospital on Sunday due to excessive bleeding but had reassured fans she and the baby were healthy.\n\nIn her latest post, however, she revealed that \"we were never able to stop the bleeding and give our baby the fluids he needed\".\n\nTeigen thanked her followers for their \"positive energy, thoughts and prayers\" and expressed gratitude for the \"amazing\" life she enjoyed with her family.\n\n\"But everyday can't be full of sunshine,\" she continued. \"On this darkest of days, we will grieve, we will cry our eyes out. But we will hug and love each other harder and get through it.\"\n\nLegend, 41, is a multiple Grammy-winning artist whose 2013 track All of Me - a song he dedicated to his wife - spent 92 weeks in the UK singles chart.\n\nHis parallel careers in film, music and TV work have seen him become an EGOT - one of only 16 people who've won a competitive Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award.\n\nThe couple were flooded with messages of condolence and support on social media, with many praising their strength for sharing their grief and some recounting their own experiences of loss.\n\n\"I know many other women like me who also have experienced miscarriage appreciate your sharing your story to help demystify this all too common occurrence,\" wrote one Twitter user.\n\nAnother wrote: \"We lost twins at 20 weeks and your bravery for sharing this can hopefully slow people to know they are not alone. Thank you.\"\n\nKim Kardashian West was among the celebrities who sent messages, writing: \"We're always here for you and love you guys so much.\"\n\nActress Viola Davis sent a \"big virtual hug of love, love, love\", while socialite Paris Hilton said she was \"so sorry for your loss\".\n\nActress Gabrielle Union added: \"We love you guys so much and we will be here for whatever yall need. Always.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Those who tested positive at the plant and those they have been in close contact with are isolating\n\nTesting has uncovered 170 cases of Covid-19 among workers at a pork meat processing plant in Cornwall.\n\nFive hundred staff at Pilgrim's Pride in Pool, near Camborne, were tested in a contact tracing exercise by the NHS.\n\nMost of those who tested positive were unaware they had Covid-19 and were not displaying symptoms.\n\nThey and those they have been in close contact with are isolating in line with government guidelines, said Cornwall Council.\n\nCases of Covid-19 in the South West are still below the national average, latest figures show.\n\nCornwall remains the area in the region with the highest number of cases.\n\nIn the week to Sunday, numbers rose from 115 to 180. The infection rate is 31.5 per 100,000.\n\n\"In total, almost 500 employees at the factory have been tested and the vast majority of the cases who tested positive were not displaying symptoms,\" said Cornwall Council.\n\nRachel Wigglesworth, interim director for Public Health for Cornwall Council, said: \"In finding people who weren't displaying symptoms we have potentially stopped much wider spread in our communities\".\n\nCouncil leader Julian German said \"proactive testing\" was \"helping us to take action quickly to limit the spread of Covid in our communities\".\n\nPilgrim's Pride said in a statement said \"from the outset\" it had \"worked conscientiously to do all we can to protect our workforce and the local community\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Helen Hancock and Martin Griffiths were found by police on New Year's Day\n\nA man has been jailed for life for murdering his wife and her new partner on New Year's Day.\n\nDerby Crown Court heard Helen Hancock, 39, and Martin Griffiths, 48, suffered 103 injuries when they were stabbed at her home in Duffield, Derbyshire.\n\nA paramedic said it was the \"most violent incident he had ever seen\", the court was told.\n\nRhys Hancock, who admitted both murders when found at the scene, was jailed for a minimum of 31 years.\n\nThe court heard how 40-year-old Hancock, of Etwall, called 999 himself at 04:26 to report his double murder, saying: \"I have just stabbed them... there is blood everywhere\".\n\nJudge Nirmal Shant described it as a \"brutal attack\" which had \"deprived two families of the people they loved\".\n\nThe prosecution described how, after coming back from the pub, Hancock had told his mother he \"felt like he wanted to kill\" the pair.\n\nHe told her he knew he would be sentenced to 25 to 30 years for what he was about to do but still shared a cup of tea with her before leaving.\n\nHe took her emergency buzzer and landline phones so she could not call the police and then drove to Ms Hancock's house with two knives from his mother's kitchen.\n\nThe court was told Hancock had found out about his wife's new relationship on 26 December\n\nOnce there he entered through the backdoor and attacked the pair in the bedroom.\n\nThe court heard how one paramedic described the scene as a \"blood bath\".\n\nHelen Hancock and Martin Griffiths were found at her and Mr Hancock's former marital home in New Zealand Lane, Duffield\n\nOfficers, alerted by his mother after she found her mobile phone, found him outside the property covered in blood.\n\nHe told them: \"I'm hardly going to deny it - look at me.\"\n\nProsecutor Michael Auty QC said: \"There is no escaping these murders were premeditated, they were savage, the attack was merciless, there were elements of sadism and the intention was always... and only to kill.\n\n\"Perhaps, above all else, they were committed in the coldest of blood.\"\n\nBut Judge Shant concluded she \"could not be sure\" this was \"sadistic or sexual\" and would not be handing out a whole life term, although she accepted it was a \"borderline\" case.\n\nShe added: \"No sentence I impose will seem adequate to [the victims' families] and nothing I do can fill the undoubted void that the deaths of Helen Hancock and Martin Griffiths have left.\"\n\nMs Hancock, who had been using her maiden name Almey, worked as a PE teacher at Fountains High School in Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire.\n\nIn a statement read to the court her family described her as a \"beautiful, vibrant and outgoing person who loved and lived life to the full\".\n\nHer sister added Mr Hancock's actions had left their children without either a mother or a father.\n\nMr Griffiths' family said his death was \"like losing a precious piece of a jigsaw and so never being able to see the full picture again\".\n\nHelen Hancock and Martin Griffiths climbed Mount Snowdon together a few days before they both died\n\nThe case was referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) due to contact between Derbyshire Police and Ms Hancock in the period leading up to the murders.\n\nAn IOPC spokesperson said: \"We are close to finalising our investigation and we will consider releasing our findings when all associated proceedings, including coronial, have been concluded.\"\n\nThey previously told the BBC the police contact related to \"a number of domestic incidents over a period of time\".\n\nThe court had heard Hancock was on police bail at the time of the murders after he allegedly threw something at his wife in October 2019, causing a laceration.\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Keir Starmer says the government is \"lurching from one ridiculous proposition to another\"\n\nProposals to process asylum seekers in disused ferries are \"inhuman\", Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has said.\n\nHe accused the government of \"lurching from one ridiculous proposition to the next\".\n\nAccording to Refugee Action, 35,566 asylum applications were made in 2019 down from a peak of 84,000 in 2002.\n\nTop Home Office civil servant Matthew Rycroft said \"everything is on the table\" when it comes to \"improving\" the UK's asylum system.\n\nAnd Downing Street said it was looking at what other countries do \"to inform a plan for the UK\".\n\nBut the Labour leader fiercely criticised the plan, telling reporters: \"This isn't creative thinking... these suggestions are inhuman and the government shouldn't be pursuing them.\n\n\"Everybody knows that the biggest problem with asylum seekers' claims is that it takes a long time for the Home Office to process them, that's the problem, it's been there for years.\n\n\"Get your house in order, get that sorted out instead of lurching from one ridiculous proposition to another.\"\n\nHe called for better international cooperation, adding: \"There is of course an issue with people trying to get to the United Kingdom, but people are fleeing often from persecution.\"\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel asked officials to look at policies, including housing people who are seeking asylum offshore.\n\nOn Tuesday, the Financial Times reported the Foreign Office had carried out an assessment for Ascension Island, a remote UK territory in the Atlantic Ocean - which included the practicalities of transferring migrants thousands of miles - and decided not to proceed.\n\nNow the Times has reported that the government is giving \"serious consideration\" to the idea of buying retired ferries and converting them into processing centres, but it says the Home Office rejected a proposal to use decommissioned oil platforms in the North Sea.\n\nThe newspaper also says processing migrants on an island off the coast of Scotland had been considered, but First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted that \"any proposal to treat human beings like cattle in a holding pen will be met with the strongest possible opposition from me\".\n\nAppearing before the Public Affairs Committee, Home Office Permanent Secretary Mr Rycroft said he would not comment on leaks to newspapers, but that the department was \"brainstorming\" ideas.\n\nHe said: \"No decisions have been taken. No final proposals have been put to ministers.\"\n\nMr Rycroft said the UK would \"always comply with all of our international obligations\" and civil servants would \"assess all of the various different possible ideas out there to see which are legal and which make operational sense… so that ministers can ultimately make decisions\".\n\nHow does the government tempt fewer people to attempt a perilous crossing of the Channel to reach the south coast?\n\nWell, one idea is to make it clear that even a successful crossing won't mean getting to stay in the UK - at least in the short term.\n\nThe government is exploring \"all sorts of options\" - not my words, but those of the most senior civil servant in the Home Office.\n\nHence the recent headlines about transferring asylum seekers to a lump of British rock in the middle of the South Atlantic - Ascension Island, or buying an old ferry to house them.\n\nBut remember, although the numbers coming over the Channel in boats are at a record high, they are still a small proportion of overall asylum seekers coming to the UK.\n\nAnd rows about asylum are far from new.\n\nTwenty years ago, it was the then-Home Secretary, Jack Straw, found himself in a row with his own party about what the Labour government should do about the issue.\n\nSo this is an historic problem for parties of both colours.\n\nThe SNP's home affairs spokeswoman, Joanna Cherry, said the leaked plans showed \"the callousness at the core\" of the government, and the plans would \"treat vulnerable asylum seekers as cattle rather than human beings\".\n\nBut Conservative MP for Gravesham in Kent, Adam Holloway, said the Home Office was \"completely right\" to be looking at other options that were \"some sort of deterrent\" for asylum seekers.\n\nHe told Radio 4's Today programme: \"We need to break the link in people's minds that if you get to Britain you're going to stay in Britain, you're going to stay in a hotel and you're going to be accommodated.\"\n\nHe added that the UK needed to find a \"civilised version\" of the model used by Australia, which has controversially used offshore processing and detention centres for asylum seekers since the 1980s.\n\nThe discussion comes as record numbers of people are crossing the Channel to the UK, with 400 arriving in one day in September.\n\nAscension Island is more than 4,000 miles (6,000km) from the UK\n\nNearly 7,000 people have reached the UK in more than 500 small boats this year - by 23 September, 1,892 migrants had arrived during the month, more than in all of 2019.\n\nBut they are still a small proportion of the asylum seekers coming to the UK.\n\nTo be eligible for asylum in the UK, applicants must prove they cannot return to their home country because they fear persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, gender identity or sexual orientation.\n\nA caseworker decides if they have a valid claim by taking into account factors such as the country of origin of the asylum seeker or evidence of discrimination.\n\nThis is supposed to be done in six months but delays in processing claims have increased significantly in the last year.\n\nWhile waiting for a decision to be made, asylum seekers are usually not allowed to work and are initially placed in hostel-type accommodation before longer-term housing is arranged.", "People in England use an estimated 4.7 billion plastic straws each year\n\nA ban on single-use plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds has come into force in England.\n\nThe measure, originally due to start in April, makes it illegal for businesses to sell or supply the items.\n\nPeople in England use an estimated 4.7 billion plastic straws, 316 million plastic stirrers and 1.8 billion plastic-stemmed cotton buds each year.\n\nEnvironmental campaigners welcomed the ban but called for a crackdown on further single-use items.\n\nAn exemption will allow hospitals, bars and restaurants to provide plastic straws to people with disabilities or medical conditions that require them.\n\nEnvironment Secretary George Eustice said the government was \"firmly committed\" to tackling environmental \"devastation\" caused by single-use plastics.\n\nCampaigners welcomed the move but said the items formed only a \"fraction\" of the plastic waste littering the environment.\n\nSion Elis Williams, of Friends of the Earth, said ministers \"must also do more to challenge our throwaway culture by forcing a shift away from all single-use materials in favour of reusable alternatives\".\n\nTatiana Lujan, of environmental law charity ClientEarth said straws, cotton buds and stirrers were \"some of the most pointless plastics out there\" and the ban on them was \"a no-brainer\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Five ways to break up with plastic\n\nBut they remained \"a tiny fraction\" of single-use plastics, she said, adding that countries such as Ireland and France had \"shown far more ambition\" with targets on reusable packaging and deposit return schemes.\n\nMr Eustice said the government was \"building plans\" for a deposit return scheme to encourage recycling of single-use drinks containers.\n\nThe Welsh government has said it is also considering a similar ban on plastics.\n\nA number of national restaurant chains ditched plastic straws before the ban was announced.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Talks are ongoing over new Wylfa nuclear plans, it has been confirmed\n\nPlans for a new nuclear power station on Anglesey may not be over, letters to the UK government have revealed.\n\nJapanese firm Hitachi pulled the plug on the £20bn scheme at Wylfa on Anglesey two weeks ago.\n\nBut developer Horizon Nuclear Power has sent two letters to ministers stating talks with other \"third parties\" are continuing.\n\nA decision on planning consent was due to be made on Wednesday, but will now be delayed until 31 December.\n\nThe chief executive of Horizon Nuclear wrote to the UK government's Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Secretary Alok Sharma on 22 September and 28 September.\n\nIn the letters, Horizon's Duncan Hawthorne asked for a \"short extension\" on the deadline to announce the government's decision on whether it would allow planning permission for the original Hitachi plans for Anglesey.\n\nThe Development Consent Order (DCO) process, which is the name given to planning applications for major UK infrastructure projects such as Wylfa, has been under consideration since June 2018.\n\nMr Hawthorne's second letter to the energy secretary said: \"Since Hitachi Ltd's announcement to cease development activities associated with the Wylfa Newydd DCO Project, Horizon has been engaged in discussions with third parties that have expressed an interest in progressing with the development of new nuclear generation at the Wylfa Newydd site.\n\n\"These discussions are still at an early stage and it is felt that a short deferral would allow time for Horizon and those interested parties to determine whether, and if so how, the Wylfa Newydd DCO Project could be taken forward in Hitachi Ltd's absence.\"\n\nWylfa Newydd was being developed for Hitachi in the UK by its subsidiary Horizon Nuclear Power\n\nThe nuclear boss said he could not reveal any more details about the talks, or who was involved, due to discussions being \"commercially sensitive\".\n\nBut, he added: \"My team and I will be working hard over the coming months to bring these to a positive conclusion at which point we will be able to provide you with a more comprehensive update, including the extent to which this could materially impact on the development consent order currently before you for determination.\"\n\nWork on the Wylfa Newydd project on Anglesey was suspended in January 2019 because of rising costs after Hitachi failed to reach a funding agreement with the UK government.\n\nOn 16 September, Hitachi finally announced it was halting its involvement in Wylfa and its project at Oldbury-on-Severn in Gloucestershire - despite describing both sites as \"highly desirable\" for new nuclear plants.\n\nIt said it made the decision given 20 months had passed since the project had paused \"and the investment environment has become increasingly severe due to the impact of Covid-19\".\n\nThe Anglesey project would have seen 9,000 jobs created in the construction phase.\n\nThe new Wylfa power station would have been built next to the old power plant on Anglesey\n\nThe UK government responded to the decision by stating it remained willing to discuss a replacement for the original Wylfa plant, which shut in 2015 after 44 years of service, with viable companies.\n\nIt said the UK remained committed to nuclear power and recognised the Hitachi announcement was \"very disappointing news\" for people in north Wales.\n\nWriting to Horizon Nuclear on Wednesday, the energy secretary said he had considered the request to delay the planning consent decision while talks continued,.\n\n\"In the circumstances, it is appropriate to reset the decision deadline for the application to 31 December 2020,\" said Mr Sharma.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Even an effective coronavirus vaccine will not return life to normal in spring, a group of leading scientists has warned.\n\nA vaccine is often seen as the holy grail that will end the pandemic.\n\nBut a report, from researchers brought together by the Royal Society, said we needed to be \"realistic\" about what a vaccine could achieve and when.\n\nThey said restrictions may need to be \"gradually relaxed\" as it could take up to a year to roll the vaccine out.\n\nMore than 200 vaccines to protect against the virus are being developed by scientists around the world in a process that is taking place at unprecedented speed.\n\n\"A vaccine offers great hope for potentially ending the pandemic, but we do know that the history of vaccine development is littered with lots of failures,\" said Dr Fiona Culley, from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London.\n\nThere is optimism, including from the UK government's scientific advisers, that some people may get a vaccine this year and mass vaccination may start early next year.\n\nHowever, the Royal Society report warns it will be a long process.\n\n\"Even when the vaccine is available it doesn't mean within a month everybody is going to be vaccinated, we're talking about six months, nine months... a year,\" said Prof Nilay Shah, head of chemical engineering at Imperial College London.\n\n\"There's not a question of life suddenly returning to normal in March.\"\n\nThe report said there were still \"enormous\" challenges ahead.\n\nSome of the experimental approaches being taken - such as RNA vaccines - have never been mass produced before.\n\nThere are questions around raw materials - both for the vaccine and glass vials - and refrigerator capacity, with some vaccines needing storage at minus 80C.\n\nProf Shah estimates vaccinating people would have to take place at a pace, 10 times faster than the annual flu campaign and would be a full-time job for up to 30,000 trained staff.\n\n\"I do worry, is enough thinking going into the whole system?\" he says.\n\nEarly trial data has suggested that vaccines are triggering an immune response, but studies have not yet shown if this is enough to either offer complete protection or lessen the symptoms of Covid.\n\nProf Charles Bangham, chairman of immunology of Imperial College London, said: \"We simply don't know when an effective vaccine will be available, how effective it will be and of course, crucially, how quickly it can be distributed.\n\n\"Even if it is effective, it is unlikely that we will be able to get back completely to normal, so there's going to be a sliding scale, even after the introduction of a vaccine that we know to be effective.\n\n\"We will have to gradually relax some of the other interventions.\"\n\nAnd many questions that will dictate the vaccination strategy remain unanswered, such as:\n\nThe researchers warn the issue of long-term immunity will still take some time to answer, and we still do not know if people need vaccinating every couple of years or if one shot will do.\n\nCommenting on the study, Dr Andrew Preston from the University of Bath, said: \"Clearly the vaccine has been portrayed as a silver bullet and ultimately it will be our salvation, but it may not be an immediate process.\"\n\nHe said there would need to be discussion of whether \"vaccine passports\" are needed to ensure people coming into the country are immunised.\n\nAnd Dr Preston warned that vaccine hesitancy seemed to be a growing problem that had become embroiled in anti-mask, anti-lockdown ideologies.\n\n\"If cohorts of people refuse to have the vaccine, do we leave them to fend for themselves or have mandatory vaccination for children to go to schools, or for staff in care homes? There are lots of difficult questions.\"", "A Met Police sergeant killed at a custody centre while on duty died from a gunshot wound to the chest, an inquest has heard.\n\nNew Zealand-born Sgt Matiu Ratana died in hospital after being shot by handcuffed suspect Louis De Zoysa.\n\nShe opened and adjourned the inquest into the 54-year-old's death until a later date.\n\nSgt Ratana's son dialled into the inquest hearing from Australia.\n\nIt comes on the day New Zealand's High Commissioner to the UK visited the scene where Sgt Ratana was killed.\n\nBede Corry laid a wreath and paused briefly in front of a memorial at Croydon Custody Centre.\n\nNew Zealand High Commissioner Bede Corry joined Met Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick in Croydon on Thursday\n\nDozens of police officers have paid tribute to Sgt Matiu Ratana\n\nSince Friday a shrine outside the custody centre has been lined with scores of floral bouquets and surrounded by New Zealand flags and sports jerseys.\n\nMr Corry said: \"New Zealanders were shocked and saddened to learn of the tragic death of Sgt Matiu Ratana.\n\n\"As someone who was a police officer in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, he uniquely served both countries. We know he will be deeply missed.\"\n\nMr De Zoysa, 23, had been arrested for possession of ammunition and possession of Class B drugs with intent to supply following a stop and search in the London Road area of Pollards Hill at 01:30 BST on Friday.\n\nLouis De Zoysa was arrested on Friday in the London Road area of Pollards Hill\n\nDet Supt Nick Blackburn told the inquest at Croydon Town Hall that Mr De Zoysa arrived at Croydon Custody Centre and was taken into a holding room with officers who prepared to search him again.\n\n\"The custody sergeant, Matt Ratana, entered the holding room as part of his duties when the suspect produced a firearm and discharged the weapon several times, during which both Sgt Ratana and the suspect were injured.\n\n\"Police and paramedics treated him at the scene and he was taken to hospital by the London Ambulance Service.\n\nA revolver handgun was recovered from the scene, Det Supt Blackburn added.\n\nMr De Zoysa remains critically ill at St George's Hospital in Tooting and is still yet to be questioned by detectives investigating the murder.\n\nThe Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) confirmed he was handcuffed with his hands behind his back and had been taken to the custody centre in a police vehicle, before being escorted into the building.\n\nNo police firearms were discharged in the shooting, and the case is not being treated as terror-related.\n\nThe Banstead farmland used to serve as an ammunition depot during the Second World War\n\nSix days on from the fatal shooting detectives are still extensively searching Mr De Zoysa's family in home in Norbury, south London, and a farmland in Banstead, Surrey, which is expected \"to take days to complete\", the Met has said.\n\nOn Wednesday a man from Norwich, who was arrested on suspicion of supplying a firearm, was bailed by detectives until late October.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Stanley Johnson was pictured in a newsagents without a face covering on Tuesday\n\nThe prime minister's father, Stanley Johnson, has been pictured shopping without a face covering, breaking current Covid-19 restrictions.\n\nMr Johnson - a former Tory MEP - has apologised, claiming he may not be \"100% up to speed\" with current rules after returning from abroad.\n\nFines for not wearing a covering in a shop were raised by the government last week to £200 for first time offenders.\n\nFormer Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has also apologised for breaking the rules.\n\nHe was pictured at a dinner party which appeared to have nine guests, going against the government's \"rule of six\".\n\nAsked about the pictures, Boris Johnson's official spokesman said it was now for the police to \"determine what action to take\", adding: \"What the prime minister is clear on is that the rules apply for everyone and everyone should follow them\".\n\nThe PM's father was seen in a newsagents in West London without a mask on Tuesday, with the picture first appearing in the Daily Mirror.\n\nIt came a day before his son, Boris Johnson, held a press conference, appealing to the public to \"follow the rules\" and warning fines would be imposed on those who don't.\n\nSpeaking to the Mirror, Stanley Johnson said: \"I'm extremely sorry for the slip up and I would urge absolutely everybody to do everything they can to make sure they do follow the rules about masks and social distancing.\n\n\"The fact this was my first day back in the UK after three weeks abroad is, I am sure, no excuse for not knowing the rules.\"\n\nA Downing Street spokesman said the PM's father \"fully understands that it is vital for everyone to abide by the rules\".\n\nMr Johnson was criticised back in July for travelling to Greece during the coronavirus lockdown.\n\nThe guidance on air travel from the UK Foreign Office advised against \"all but essential international travel\" at the time and insisted on a two-week quarantine on return.\n\nBut he told the Daily Mail he was in the country \"on essential business\" to ensure a property he rents out was \"Covid-proof\" before holidays restart.\n\nThe picture of Mr Corbyn appeared in the Sun, with the newspaper saying the gathering had taken place on Saturday.\n\nAcross England, people face fines starting at £200 for meeting inside or outside in groups of more than six - although the rules are stricter in some parts of the country.\n\nThe North London MP told the paper: \"I recently had dinner at a friend's house where the number of guests eventually exceeded five.\n\n\"I understand that remaining at the dinner was a breach of the rule of six. I apologise for my mistake.\"\n\nResponding to the picture, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said: \"All of us should obey the rules, Jeremy knows that, I know that, all of us have to comply with the rules.\n\n\"I have said throughout that whatever the Government rules are, we should all follow them. We have got a duty to so.\"\n\nAsked whether Mr Corbyn should be fined, Sir Keir told reporters: \"It's not for me to decide who should be fined, but it is for me to say that everybody should follow the rules.\"\n\nIt is not known if either Mr Johnson or Mr Corbyn have received fines.", "Students should be allowed to leave university and study online if they want to, according to unions representing academics and students.\n\nThe National Union of Students (NUS) and the University and College Union are calling for the government to take urgent action.\n\nIt comes after university campuses have been hit by outbreaks of the virus, with many students in self isolation.\n\nLarissa Kennedy, NUS president, said students had been left \"trapped in halls\" and were struggling to access food and wellbeing resources.\n\nUK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said students will be allowed to be with their families at Christmas if they choose to.\n\nBut the education unions are calling for a move to online learning wherever possible - and they say students should be given a safe way to leave campus now if they want to.\n\nStudents should not face any financial detriment for giving up accommodation, or choosing to defer or leave university, they say.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has called on the government to provide a \"support package\" to those university students currently self-isolating.\n\nHe said: \"There should have been serious consideration to delay going back. There certainly should have been some thought as to testing.\"", "Stipe Lozina walked up to Rana Elasmar - who he did not know - and attacked her\n\nAn Australian man who punched and stamped on a pregnant woman in a suspected Islamophobic attack has been jailed for three years.\n\nMs Elasmar, then 38 weeks pregnant, had been with friends in a cafe when Lozina entered and approached their table, asking for money.\n\nWhen she refused, he launched into a \"vicious\" assault fuelled by religious prejudice, a trial heard.\n\nProsecutors said he had yelled \"you Muslims wrecked my mum\" before leaning over and punching Ms Elasmar to the ground.\n\nHe struck her at least 14 times and stamped on the back of her head before other customers managed to pull him away.\n\nSecurity video of the attack outraged people across Australia.\n\nSentencing judge Christopher Craigie previously described it as a \"wicked and deplorable\" attack from an \"obviously unwell\" man.\n\n\"The assault was one with a grave potential to cause very serious harm to both the victim and her unborn child,\" he said on Thursday.\n\nMs Elasmar told the court in September she had felt targeted because of her religion, and had feared for her baby's life and her own.\n\n\"If nobody intervened, I could have been killed,\" she said.\n\n\"I made a conscious decision to turn my abdomen away from his punches. I wanted to protect my baby.\"\n\nShe suffered minor injuries and gave birth to a boy three weeks after the attack.\n\nBut the court heard she had suffered lasting trauma since, including fears about being in public and explaining the attack to her four children.\n\n\"Islamophobia needs to end. Violence against women needs to stop,\" she said last month.\n\nLozina refused legal help and represented himself in court. During his trial, he made many incoherent rants, Australian media reported.\n\nThe judge noted that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had a \"longstanding struggle with mental illness\".\n\nHe will be eligible for parole in 2022.", "Lockdown, social distancing and local anti-virus restrictions have made seeing loved ones difficult if not impossible for many since Covid-19 hit the UK.\n\nFor elderly relatives, care home residents and those shielding, the situation has been even more heartbreaking and lonely.\n\nBut 26-year-old Lucy Mein from Edinburgh has managed to find a unique way of staying in touch with her 86-year-old grandmother who lives hundreds of miles away in Northampton.\n\nIt has even brought them closer as they share an old-fashioned way of communicating.\n\nLucy's gran Margaret is 86 years old and deaf.\n\nLucy shared one of her paintings on social media and attracted dozens of compliments for the sweet gesture for her grandmother\n\nDuring lockdown the family tried Zoom calls but they frustrated Margaret as she couldn't hear them. She was also not able to have visitors.\n\nLucy started painting her gran a picture every Sunday and writing up her weekly news.\n\nMargaret would then send letter back by the following Friday and the pair became pen-pals.\n\nLucy told BBC 5 Live's Drive programme: \"It's like sending love in an envelope.\"\n\nLucy now treasures her letters from Margaret\n\nThe idea started with a birthday card at the end of the summer.\n\nLucy said: \"I sent my grandma a birthday card, and she sent me a 'thank you' letter.\n\n\"She lives with my grandpa and has struggled in lockdown.\n\n\"I always felt connected to her by writing. She writes really well and it's lovely to receive those letters. I just wanted to send her something that would cheer her up.\"\n\nMargaret loves handmade things and the pair have always made and sent handmade birthday cards to each other.\n\nLucy's husband suggested she keep it up.\n\nShe said: \"So now I just send her a letter and draw something every week.\n\n\"There's a massive geographical gap between us with me in Scotland, her in Northampton. So it's really important for me to keep in touch somehow because I haven't seen her since Christmas.\"\n\nOne of Lucy's paintings for her grandmother\n\nLucy is training to be an architect and she started painting for the first time since high school during lockdown, mainly to get away from her computer. She says she has fallen back in love with it.\n\nShe paints with watercolours and has sent Margaret, landscapes, nature scenes, bible verses and anything that pops into her head.\n\nAnd she thinks anyone can do the same to create a special bond with a loved one.\n\nShe said: \"I have loved getting those letters. I keep them in a drawer and feel properly connected and like I can share my life with her and it has deepened our relationship.\n\n\"I can't recommend doing this enough to people. It has been a lovely thing to do at such a difficult time.\"\n\nLucy said she hadn't drawn or painted for years and enjoyed doing it for her beloved grandma", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Scotland's first minister has not announced any additional coronavirus restrictions in her latest review of the rules.\n\nBut Nicola Sturgeon said she would not hesitate to take further action in the coming weeks if it was needed to curb the recent increase in cases.\n\nThe number of people in hospital with the virus has nearly doubled to 154 over the past week.\n\nAnd Ms Sturgeon said the country's R number could now be as high as 1.7.\n\nThe first minister said that a further 668 people had tested positive for the virus in the past 24 hours, which she said was 10.8% of those who had been newly tested.\n\nThree more people have died after testing positive for the virus - bringing the total number under that measurement to 2,522.\n\nMs Sturgeon said the figures demonstrated why it had been necessary to impose tighter restrictions last week, when a ban on visiting other people's homes was introduced alongside a 10pm curfew for pubs and restaurants.\n\nBut she gave no indication that the Scottish government was planning to impose a so-called \"circuit-breaker\" lockdown.\n\nThe country's national clinical director, Prof Jason Leitch, said earlier on Thursday that this was being \"seriously considered\".\n\nProf Leitch said the move could see the country put back into stricter lockdown for a two or three week period, potentially during the October school holidays, with businesses such as pubs and restaurants possibly having to close and tighter travel restrictions being introduced.\n\nBut he stressed that no decision had yet been taken on whether it would be necessary.\n\nProf Jason Leitch said a circuit breaker lockdown was being considered, but no decision on it has yet been taken\n\nMs Sturgeon did formally confirm that the easing of some measures, which had originally been due to take place next week, would definitely not go ahead.\n\nThese rules cover soft play areas, indoor contact sports for those aged 12 and above, and some live events and sports stadiums.\n\nMs Sturgeon had indicated last month that they were unlikely to be relaxed at this stage.\n\nShe told the Scottish Parliament: \"I hope members will agree that it would not be sensible to ease restrictions that are still in place while infection rates are rising and we are working to bring them back down.\n\n\"We will review these restrictions again by 15 October. However, if we need to take further action before that to curb the spread of the virus we will not hesitate to do so, but of course we will report that to parliament.\"\n\nScottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said all proposals for future coronavirus restrictions - including any plan for a circuit-breaker lockdown - should be voted on by the Scottish Parliament before being imposed.\n\nMr Leonard said: \"Since the need for local and targeted restrictions, new rules have increasingly been announced via late night press releases, Twitter and TV interviews.\n\n\"Parliament has so far not had an opportunity to give its consent to local restrictions, unless they have already expired.\n\n\"This is no way to govern. Parliament is supposed to provide checks and balance to government power. Without this we risk a real democratic deficit.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon responded by pledging: \"Where it is possible we will seek to bring things to parliament in advance\".\n\nBut she added: \"This is an infectious virus and we have to act quickly and flexibly sometimes if we have a sudden spike or outbreaks that are putting health and life at risk.\"", "Travellers arriving in the UK from Poland, Turkey and three Caribbean islands will have to self-isolate for 14 days from 04:00 on Saturday.\n\nPoland's infection rate has risen, while the UK government said it removed Turkey over concerns about the way the country reports its data.\n\nThere will also be tougher fines for those who fail to self-isolate - up to a maximum of £10,000 in England.\n\nOne airport group says it is a \"further blow\" to a \"struggling\" sector.\n\nThe UK reported a further 6,914 coronavirus cases and 59 deaths on Thursday, and stricter measures have been announced to control a spike in areas of northern England.\n\nAnnouncing the changes to the quarantine list, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said data from Poland showed that \"test positivity has nearly doubled increasing from 3.9% to 5.8% alongside a rapid increase in weekly cases\".\n\nPoland is reporting 25.9 coronavirus cases per 100,000 people, up from 15.6.\n\nArrivals from the Caribbean islands of Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba will also have to quarantine from Saturday, he added.\n\nThose islands reported 142.4 new cases per 100,000, unchanged from 142.4 the previous week.\n\nMeanwhile, the Scottish Government announced that those arriving from the Portuguese islands of the Azores and Madeira will no longer need to quarantine in Scotland \"due to the low number of cases\".\n\nThe Azores and Madeira were already on the \"exempt\" list for the rest of the UK.\n\nThe Scottish government's statement added that it was \"clear that case numbers in Turkey have been under-reported\".\n\nTurkey's reported infection rate has dropped to 12.9 cases per 100,000, down from 14.2 in the week prior.\n\nIt has also been announced that in England, fines for the first offence of failing to self-isolate when required will start at £1,000, before increasing to £2,000, then £4,000 up to a maximum of £10,000.\n\nThe upper limit for repeat offences was previously £3,200. The increase in fines will come into force from Friday.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSince the introduction of the travel quarantine regime in the summer, police officers have investigated more than 4,000 alleged breaches of the rules.\n\nMore than 200 people were found to be ignoring the quarantine requirement, but escaped a fine because they listened to the officer on their doorstep.\n\nOverall there were just 38 penalties for breaching holiday quarantine.\n\nIf you look at the official data coming out of Turkey then it sits comfortably below the UK's benchmark for applying the quarantine of 20 cases for every 100,000 people.\n\nBut revelations that the number of cases in Turkey has been under-reported has put the country onto the \"red\" list.\n\nTurkey and Poland are key destinations for airlines and airports so it's another blow for the travel sector.\n\nThe Department for Transport is still looking at whether testing can be used at airports to reduce the quarantine period from 14 to seven days.\n\nIt is almost impossible for the police to enforce quarantine rules so it is hoped heavier fines for repeat offenders will mean fewer people will break the rules.\n\nThe Manchester Airports Group, which owns and operates Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands airports, said Poland and Turkey's removal from the travel safe list \"means that a large proportion of the markets our passengers usually travel to are now effectively closed-off, despite many of them having much lower infection rates than the UK\".\n\nThe announcement \"is a further blow to the already struggling aviation sector\", a statement said.\n\nThe group said it was \"vital\" for the government to establish a testing regime \"which would allow for a safe reduction in quarantine periods for passengers arriving from abroad\".\n\nTim Alderslade, from Airlines UK, the trade body for UK registered airlines, said a testing regime was \"the only way we can reopen international travel\".\n\n\"Without testing aviation cannot recover and we will miss the opportunity to get the economy moving again,\" he said.\n\nThe Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) also said it was a \"massive blow for the travel industry\".\n\n\"This coupled with popular winter-sun destinations, like the Canary Islands - still on the quarantine list - only piles the pressure on a struggling sector,\" the travel industry trade body said.\n\n\"Many travel businesses are in precarious position and will find it difficult to survive unless the government acts now with tailored support to assist the travel industry.\"\n\nConcert pianist Tomasz Lis has cancelled a performance in Poland on Sunday because of the rules\n\nTomasz Lis, who lives in London after moving to the UK from Poland 23 years ago, runs a travel company offering tailored trips to his home country. He says the new rule will cost him thousands of pounds.\n\nThe 43-year-old said: \"It's been an impossible year already and the government would do much better by checking temperatures at the airports, for instance, and test people who may have it rather than introduce those absurd rules.\"\n\nMr Lis is also a concert pianist and has cancelled a performance in Poland on Sunday because of the rules - meaning he will lose £3,000 and the cost of his flights.", "No events that would attract a gathering or crowd will take place this year\n\nEdinburgh's Christmas festivals for 2020 have been cancelled because of the Covid-19 outbreak.\n\nCity of Edinburgh Council and event producers Underbelly said the decision followed the \"latest advice\" from public health experts.\n\nAny event which could attract a gathering or crowd - including market stalls and rides - will now not happen.\n\nThe council said the focus would move to celebrating Edinburgh's Christmas online this year.\n\nEdinburgh's Hogmanay street party was called off in July because of the pandemic, but organisers had hoped that other events could take place with access controlled to ensure social distancing.\n\nHowever, the council said it was now clear the \"best place\" to experience Edinburgh's Christmas and Hogmanay would be from home.\n\nCases of Covid-19 are on the increase across Scotland and new measures designed to stem the rise came into force on 22 September, including a 22:00 curfew for bars and restaurants.\n\nAdam McVey, leader of City of Edinburgh Council, said: \"Whilst we understand the absence of popular events will bring some disappointment, we want to be clear that Edinburgh's Christmas isn't cancelled and our businesses right across the city will be offering their usual festive cheer for us to take advantage of.\n\n\"We look forward to announcing details of an innovative digital 2020 programme soon to help in these celebrations.\"\n\nEvents in Edinburgh over Christmas and New Year have traditionally included markets, fairground rides and a fire parade which starts the city's Hogmanay festival.\n\nThe city would have also marked its 28th Hogmanay street party, which has had a capacity of 75,000 in recent years.\n\nCharlie Wood, director of Underbelly, said: \"We very much wanted to bring some festive cheer and light to Edinburgh this Christmas and to support local makers and producers, at the end of what has been a challenging year for everyone.\n\n\"Public health is our absolute number one priority, and with the ongoing uncertainty concerning Covid-19 and the possibility of further restrictions, we have taken the collective and very sad decision with the council, NHS Lothian and Scottish government not to proceed with this year's Edinburgh's Christmas sites in the city centre.\n\n\"There will be no public events which might encourage gatherings of people at either Edinburgh's Christmas or Edinburgh's Hogmanay.\"\n\nThe festival is a boost to local businesses in the run up to Christmas\n\nRussell Imrie, from the Edinburgh Hotels Association, said the cancellation of the festival would be \"devastating\" for businesses in the city.\n\n\"To put an event on of some sort, with Christmas markets dispersed through the city centre, at least it was something you could market for people to come to Edinburgh and it would be something for them to do with a festive feel about it,\" he told BBC Radio Scotland's Drivetime programme.\n\n\"To now hear that everything is cancelled, it almost removes the reason for people to come to Edinburgh during the festive period because they'll just be coming to a city like any other normal day over the winter period.\n\n\"At least when there was a festival on it really did feel like a special occasion to visit the city.\"", "There are currently different rules across local areas of England\n\nThe government is to push ahead with a new \"three-tier\" approach to coronavirus restrictions in local areas of England, the BBC understands.\n\nThe Department of Health confirmed last month the system was being considered - but it has now been signed off by government officials and politicians.\n\nAn announcement is expected next week, with the roll-out of the new tiers expected in mid-October.\n\nThe Department of Health said there were \"no imminent changes\" expected.\n\nA spokesman for No 10 added: \"We keep all of the measures which we put in place under review - if there is anything further to set out then we will do so to the House\".\n\nAccording to a memo seen by the BBC, public health officials will receive precise proposals later on Thursday.\n\nThe government's aim is to replace the patchwork of existing Covid-19 restrictions across the country.\n\nAreas that fall into tier one will have fewer than 100 cases per 100,000 of population and will need to adhere to national restrictions - such as the \"rule of six\" and social distancing.\n\nTier two would kick in where cases are above 100 per 100,000. Restrictions for these areas would be similar to those currently in place in large parts of northern England, such as bans on household meetings.\n\nAnd tier three areas would have significantly higher rates and would face full lockdowns - excluding schools and essential businesses, like supermarkets, as well as places of worship.\n\nThe memo seen by the BBC shows plans for additional money for local authorities placed into tiers two or three.\n\nLocal authorities would get £1 per head of population if placed into tier two and £2 per head for tier three.\n\nWhen all areas are \"mapped\" onto the new system, it is not believed any areas will be moved to level three at this stage.\n\nThe BBC understands some within Public Health England are concerned at the speed of the transition.\n\nBut there is also an acknowledgement the new system could \"simplify and rationalise the current set up\".", "The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have called for the end of \"structural racism\" in a piece written for a newspaper for Black History Month.\n\nPrince Harry and Meghan said there had been changes in the UK in the past 30 years but \"sufficient progress had not been achieved\".\n\nThey were writing in the London Evening Standard as they highlighted leaders in the UK's black community.\n\nThe couple recently urged voters in the US election to \"reject hate\".\n\nThe duke and duchess have moved to Santa Barbara with their son Archie and agreed a deal to create shows for the streaming service Netflix, having stepped back as senior royals in January.\n\nIn the piece they said that \"if you are white and British, the world you see often looks just like you\" and spoke of the importance for young people of seeing role models and leaders who share the same skin colour as them.\n\n\"For as long as structural racism exists, there will be generations of young people of colour who do not start their lives with the same equality of opportunity as their white peers. And for as long as that continues, untapped potential will never get to be realised,\" they warned.\n\nThe duke and duchess concluded the article by saying: \"We cannot change history, nor can we edit our past. But we can define our future as one that is inclusive, as one that is equal, and one that is colourful.\"\n\nRace equality think tank Runnymede describes structural racism as \"the set of circumstances artificially created over generations, through European colonialism, which holds 'whiteness' to be superior.\"\n\nAfter the article was published, a spokesman for Prince Harry told the BBC: \"The Duke believes structural racism exists in the UK and I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who disagrees with that.\n\n\"He is not saying that Britain itself is structurally racist or that Britain is racist.\" The spokesman said the Duke was referring to parts of institutions in Britain.\n\nThe Duke and Duchess of Sussex during their tour of South Africa\n\nIn an accompanying interview Meghan said she understood that the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd's death in the US had been \"inflammatory for a lot of people\" but said when there is peaceful protest with the intention of wanting community and equality, \"that is a beautiful thing\".\n\nShe added: \"While it has been challenging for a lot of people certainly having to make this reckoning of historical significance that has got people to the place that they are, that is uncomfortable for people. We recognise that. It is uncomfortable for us.\"\n\nPrince Harry told the paper he accepted some of their views may be seen as \"controversial\" but said it was an important time to use their platform. He said it was not about \"pointing the finger\" but was an important time in British and world culture \"that we should be grasping and actually celebrating\".\n\nThey also discussed their son, who Meghan said keeps them on their toes and dance group Diversity's performance on Britain's Got Talent, which the duke said was \"the most amazing display\".\n\nThe list of \"Next Gen Trailblazers\" was selected by BAME celebrities including rugby player Maro Itoje, Booker-prize winner Bernadine Evaristo and Baroness Doreen Lawrence.", "SNP MP Margaret Ferrier spoke in the Commons on Monday while awaiting the result of a coronavirus test, which later turned out to be positive.\n\nShe travelled back to Scotland by train the day after the positive test result.\n\nMs Ferrier said she had been self-isolating at home since then.\n\nShe released a statement three days after the positive test, saying she was \"very sorry for her mistake\".", "The BBC revealed how criminal gangs had set up fake companies to claim loans.\n\nThe government was warned in May that its flagship loan scheme to help small firms affected by Covid was at \"very high risk of fraud\" from \"organised crime\", it has emerged.\n\nThe state-owned British Business Bank (BBB) which supervises the Bounce Back Loan Scheme, twice raised concerns.\n\nA BBC report revealed that criminals were setting up fake firms to get loans worth tens of thousands of pounds.\n\nThe Bounce Back Loan Scheme has already paid out more than £38bn.\n\nIn early May, just two days before the scheme launched, the chief executive of the BBB, Keith Morgan, wrote of the \"very significant fraud and credit risks\", adding that it was \"vulnerable to abuse by individuals and organised crime\".\n\nThe bank, he said in a letter to Business Secretary Alok Sharma, could not guarantee \"robust controls\".\n\nOther concerns included an \"extensive reliance on customer self-certification\" and \"potential for market distortion\". He said that the BBB had commissioned a review of the scheme by accountants PwC, which had classified its fraud risk as \"very high\".\n\nIn his letter, dated 2 May and which followed a email warning the day before, Mr Morgan also raised concerns that the quick introduction of the scheme had \"created huge operational challenges\".\n\nHowever, Mr Sharma said the scheme should go ahead despite the risks, because of what he called the \"unprecedented situation facing the country\".\n\nBounce Back Loans are 100% government-backed loans of up to £50,000, and were introduced to mitigate the huge pressure on small businesses after the economy went into coronavirus lockdown. They do not have to be paid off for six years, and are interest-free for the first 12 months.\n\nAccording to latest Treasury figures, there have been 1.55 million applications, with 1.26 million approvals and £38.02b paid out.\n\nAt the weekend, the BBC's Angus Crawford revealed how fraudsters were targeting the loan system. One bogus company, Tellings Home Made Furniture, \"borrowed\" £50,000 by stealing the personal details of a man called Mark Telling.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Watch the moment Mark Telling finds out he's been a victim of fraud\n\nThe revelations come after the head of the National Audit Office told the Guardian Bounce Back Loans were the \"riskiest\" of all the bailout measures.\n\nBut a government spokesman told the BBC the loan scheme had been vital for many businesses and that fraudsters would be pursued.\n\nHe said: \"Our loan schemes have provided a lifeline to thousands of businesses across the UK - helping them survive the outbreak and protecting millions of jobs.\n\n\"Our support has been targeted to ensure we help those who need it most as quickly as possible and we won't apologise for this.\"\n\nHe said the government worked with agencies to minimise fraud, \"with lenders implementing a range of protections including anti-money laundering and customer checks, as well as transaction monitoring controls. Any fraudulent applications can be criminally prosecuted for which penalties include imprisonment or a fine or both\".", "Future in full flow: Teacher and students at Epsom College\n\nMinisters are using powers under the Coronavirus Act to require schools to offer pupils who are not in school the same lessons as those in class.\n\nTeaching unions reacted angrily to the move calling it a \"grave error\" which risks damaging the government's relationship with the profession.\n\nIt comes after official figures showed one in six secondaries in England were partially closed to some pupils.\n\nThe government said it was formalising pupils' rights to remote learning.\n\nIt comes as huge swathes of the north-east and north-west of England are under stricter lockdown measures.\n\nMinisters have insisted that schools will only close as a last resort in the event of widespread virus spread.\n\nInstead, in areas where cases are high, schools may switch to a rota system of two weeks on, two weeks off.\n\nThe guidance, published on the Department for Education website, said: \"The Direction means schools have a duty to provide education to children at home, as they do when children are in the classroom.\"\n\nIt added: \"The Direction will help provide assurances to both pupils and parents that if pupils have to self-isolate at home their education will not be disrupted.\n\n\"In the event of a confirmed case, schools are following the necessary guidance, including requiring small groups of children to self-isolate.\n\n\"In these cases, continuing to provide education is an absolute necessity.\n\n\"The Direction helps ensure this and sets a clear expectation on the high-quality education they should receive.\"\n\nIn Darlington, Year 3 teacher, Mary Craghill has been teaching by video link\n\nBut general secretary of the NAHT head teachers' union Paul Whiteman said there was no need to reach for legal powers as there was every indication that schools have taken their preparations for partial or full closure seriously.\n\nHeads were \"taking steps to ensure they meet and exceed government and parental expectations for remote education, should circumstances require it,\" he said.\n\nHe added: \"Right now, government action should be focused wholly on support, not sanction - the carrot, not the stick.\n\n\"Bitter experience tells us that mandating compliance to a minimum criteria is a poor way of driving quality and excellence in a system.\n\n\"There is absolutely no reason to believe that emergency powers are required to compel schools to act.\n\n\"By reaching for legal powers, the government risks sending an unequivocal message to the profession and parents that they do not trust school leaders to act in the interests of young people in this country.\"\n\nHead teachers unions had advised DfE officials strongly against using such emergency powers, adding that they had been working flat out for months to support children's education.\n\nNational Education Union joint general secretary Mary Bousted said: \"Staff in schools are desperate to do their best for pupils and the pandemic makes their roles all the more important.\n\n\"The legal requirement to provide remote education must be backed by government support for what is, by some distance, not business as usual.\"\n\nShe claimed a support package, announced alongside the guidance, promising 100,000 laptops, fell short by a long way.\n\n\"This government is once again trying to cut corners over Covid.\n\n\"Schools were crying out for the right support for online learning throughout lockdown, not least for disadvantaged young people who did not have the right IT or wi-fi equipment at home that would have ensured a continuity and parity of learning.\"\n\nThe government is also facing growing pressure to make a back-up plan in case GCSEs and A-levels cannot go ahead.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Further restrictions are expected to be announced for Merseyside later after a spike in coronavirus cases.\n\nLiverpool Mayor Joe Anderson said rules could be \"even stricter\" than in the North East as there were \"serious concerns\" about managing the virus.\n\nHe said financial support needed to follow any new restrictions.\n\nLiverpool's weekly infection rate rose to 258 per 100,000 on 28 September. Knowsley has the second highest rate in the country at 262 in the same week.\n\nSt Helens had 212 per 100,000 and Halton had 206, while Burnley in Lancashire has the highest rate at 327 per 100,000.\n\nRestrictions on households mixing, with a ban on people meeting in homes and gardens and pubs being told to shut early, were brought in across Merseyside earlier in September.\n\nDuring that time, Liverpool's infection rate has risen 13 fold.\n\nMr Anderson said he thought this was due to an increase of people moving around the city, with schools and students returning and people going back to work.\n\nHe said: \"There are more people in the city we didn't have before and they are now moving freely around the city...spreading human contact is spreading the disease and virus which is what it thrives on.\"\n\nPossible new measures for Merseyside could include restricting pubs to only serving alcohol with food or making pubs and restaurants takeaway only.\n\nThe government is also considering whether people who had already been shielding should start to shield again, Mr Anderson said.\n\nPeople in Merseyside were already advised only to use public transport for \"essential purposes\"\n\nHe told BBC Breakfast he had discussed the situation with Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night after infection rates were shown to be doubling every six or seven days.\n\nIf stricter measures are brought in, Mr Anderson said some kind of \"local furlough\" was needed because the area \"relies very heavily\" on the hospitality sector which would be \"hit hard\".\n\n\"I think we're gong to have to have [stricter measures] in order to arrest and supress the virus but we need that financial support too.\"\n\nIt is now illegal for two million people in several parts of north-east England to mix in any indoor setting, including pubs and restaurants.\n\nPeter Kinsella, who owns Spanish restaurant Lunya in Liverpool said a short term lockdown could be \"catastrophic\" without targeted support.\n\n\"Just as we were starting to recover our income will be taken away again. Expenses, costs, don't go away.\n\n\"We are a viable business here...we paid £8m in taxes over the last ten years. The government need us to be here long term to pay taxes to get us out of this.\"\n\nA delegation of the region's MPs also met the Health Minister Helen Whately.\n\nSefton MP Bill Esterson said he asked her for \"clear communication\" on any measures brought in and financial support for businesses.\n\nHe said \"trust is in short supply\" and the government must \"fix NHS test and trace fast\" or the virus would \"spiral even further out of control\".\n\nAre you in one of the regions? What will stricter measures mean for you? Emailhaveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nOr use this form to get in touch:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your comment or send it via email to HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any comment you send in.", "Timothy Ray Brown, also known as the Berlin patient, pictured in 2012\n\nThe first person cured of HIV - Timothy Ray Brown - has died from cancer.\n\nMr Brown, who was also known as \"the Berlin patient\", was given a bone marrow transplant from a donor who was naturally resistant to HIV in 2007.\n\nIt meant he no longer needed anti-viral drugs and he remained free of the virus, which can lead to Aids, for the rest of his life.\n\nThe International Aids Society said Mr Brown gave the world hope that an HIV cure was possible.\n\nMr Brown, 54, who was born in the US, was diagnosed with HIV while he lived in Berlin in 1995. Then in 2007 he developed a type of blood cancer called acute myeloid leukaemia.\n\nHis treatment involved destroying his bone marrow, which was producing the cancerous cells, and then having a bone marrow transplant.\n\nThe transfer came from a donor that had a rare mutation in part of their DNA called the CCR5 gene.\n\nCCR5 is a set of genetic instructions that build the doorway that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) walks through to infect cells.\n\nMutations to CCR5 essentially lock the door and give people resistance to HIV.\n\n\"I quit taking my medication on the day that I got the transplant, after three months there was no HIV any more in my body,\" Mr Brown told the BBC in 2012.\n\nThe virus was never detected in his body again. He was in effect \"cured\".\n\n\"I was excited about it, but I still kind of feared it might come back, but it didn't,\" he added.\n\nBut the leukaemia, that led to his HIV cure, returned earlier this year and spread to his brain and spinal cord.\n\n\"It is with great sadness that I announce that Timothy passed away... surrounded by myself and friends, after a five-month battle with leukaemia,\" his partner Tim Hoeffgen posted on Facebook.\n\nHe added: \"Tim committed his life's work to telling his story about his HIV cure and became an ambassador of hope.\"\n\nMr Brown's cure was too risky and aggressive to be used routinely - it remains principally a cancer treatment. The approach is also too expensive for the 38 million people, many in sub-Saharan Africa, thought to be living with an HIV infection.\n\nHowever, Mr Brown's story inspired scientists, patients and the world that a cure could eventually be found.\n\nThe International Aids Society (IAS) said it was mourning with \"a profoundly heavy heart\".\n\n\"We owe Timothy and his doctor, Gero Hutter, a great deal of gratitude for opening the door for scientists to explore the concept that a cure for HIV is possible,\" said Prof Adeeba Kamarulzaman, the IAS president said.\n\nThe second person cured of HIV was announced earlier this year. Adam Castillejo - known as the London patient - had a similar treatment to Mr Brown and could come off his HIV drugs.\n\n\"Although the cases of Timothy and Adam are not a viable large-scale strategy for a cure, they do represent a critical moment in the search for an HIV cure,\" said Prof Sharon Lewin, the director of the Doherty Institute in Melbourne, Australia.\n\n\"Timothy was a champion and advocate for keeping an HIV cure on the political and scientific agenda.\n\n\"It is the hope of the scientific community that one day we can honour his legacy with a safe, cost-effective and widely accessible strategy to achieve HIV remission and cure using gene editing or techniques that boost immune control.\"", "The restrictions will ban people from leaving the Madrid area unless it is for an essential trip\n\nThe Spanish government has ordered a partial lockdown in the capital Madrid and surrounding areas badly affected by coronavirus after a rise in cases.\n\nUnder the new restrictions, residents will not be allowed to leave the area unless they have to make an essential journey.\n\nHowever, Madrid's regional government says the lockdown is not legally valid.\n\nGreater Madrid accounts for more than a third of the 133,604 cases diagnosed in Spain over the past two weeks.\n\nOn Wednesday, a majority of Spain's regional governments, who are in charge of healthcare, voted in favour of imposing restrictions in areas with more than 100,000 residents if they met three benchmarks - 500 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, 35% Covid patient occupancy in intensive care units and positive results in 10% of tests.\n\nMadrid, which has a rate of 780 infections per 100,000, already meets the criteria. The order, published on Thursday, gives the city's authorities 48 hours to put in place the restrictions, which fall far short of the lockdown measures imposed nationally on 14 March.\n\nUnder the new restrictions, people in Madrid and nine neighbouring towns will only be allowed to leave their area for essential trips involving work, school and university, visits to the doctor and care for the vulnerable.\n\nSocial gatherings will be limited to six people and restrictions on hours and numbers are also being imposed on hotels, places of worship and shops. Parks and playgrounds are exempt unless the local authority chooses to shut them.\n\nMadrid's regional government, which is controlled by the conservative opposition and did not vote in favour of the restrictions, has argued that the lockdown is not legally valid.\n\nRegional health chief Enrique Ruiz Escudero accused the central government of sending a \"message of alarm and agitation\" and did not rule out fighting the lockdown in court. But Madrid president Isabel Díaz Ayuso said on Thursday that while the order would be challenged in court, it would be complied with.\n\nThe Madrid regional government had chosen not to put the city and surrounding areas into lockdown, instead issuing restrictions in 45 basic healthcare areas in a bid to curb the spread of the virus.\n\nThese measures themselves were controversial as they affected mostly poorer areas of the city and prompted protests by hundreds of residents.\n\nSpain's central government argued that the restrictions were not sufficient and recommended an end to all unnecessary movement across the city.\n\nSpain has seen a significant rise in cases in recent weeks. More than 31,411 people have died during the pandemic and there have been more than 748,000 infections, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.\n\nThe World Health Organisation earlier this week said European countries were seeing \"worrying increases of the disease\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police described video of the incident which shows a figure approach the officers' car, before opening fire\n\nInvestigators in Los Angeles have charged a man with the attempted murder of two police officers who were shot as they sat in their patrol car.\n\nDeonte Lee Murray, 36, was already in custody for unrelated carjacking charges, prosecutors said.\n\nAt a court appearance on Wednesday he pleaded not guilty to the charges in both cases, AP News reported.\n\nWidely shared video of the shooting showed a figure approach the police car, open fire and then run away.\n\nThe officers were seriously injured but have since been released from hospital.\n\nFootage of the 12 September attack, described by police as an ambush, caused a national outcry and both candidates in the presidential race - President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden - called for the perpetrator to be severely dealt with.\n\nIn a statement, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said Deonte Lee Murray had been charged with two counts of attempted murder and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. He had been in custody since his arrest on 15 September for the carjacking charges, the statement said.\n\nFollowing Wednesday's court appearance, Mr Murray was remanded in prison with bail set at $6.15m (£4.7m) and is due back in court in November.\n\nPolice guarded the hospital where the wounded officers were taken\n\nProsecutors have not suggested a possible motive for the shooting of the officers, which happened in the Los Angeles suburb of Compton.\n\nThey were not named but were described as a 31-year-old woman and a 24-year-old man.\n\nThe female officer was shot in the jaw and arms while the male officer was hit in the forehead, an arm and a hand.\n\nIt later emerged that, despite her injuries, the female deputy helped her partner to safety and applied a tourniquet to his wounded arm.\n\nWith law and order a key issue in next month's presidential election, both candidates strongly condemned the attack at the time.\n\nPresident Donald Trump shared footage of the incident and tweeted: \"Animals that must be hit hard.\"\n\nMr Biden, meanwhile, said that the \"cold-blooded\" shooting was unconscionable and \"the perpetrator must be brought to justice\".", "A video of a dying indigenous woman screaming in distress and being insulted by hospital staff shows the \"worst form of racism\", says Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.\n\nJoyce Echaquan streamed herself on Facebook shortly before she died.\n\nA nurse has been fired and three investigations are under way.\n\nMs Echaquan's family has said they will be taking legal action over her death.", "Google's hardware chief has said its new flagship smartphone was designed to go on sale during an economic downturn.\n\nAs a result, the Pixel 5 has abandoned some of its predecessor's headline features and runs on a slower chip in order to be sold at a lower price.\n\nHowever, it does gain 5G connectivity and some new photography capabilities.\n\nExperts say it will face tough competition from other mid-range Android handsets, but the included bundle of Google services could help.\n\n\"To not bring to market a true flagship demonstrates Google is now thinking about the market in a very different way than it was last year,\" commented Ben Stanton from the tech consultancy Canalys.\n\n\"And on a price-specs basis alone, Google will probably lose to Samsung and Chinese competitors.\n\n\"Its key selling point, however, remains that it offers a stock Android experience with superfast updates.\"\n\nThis is a reference to the fact that many other Android device-makers layer their own proprietary user interfaces on top of Google's operating system, and typically take longer to offer software updates.\n\nThe Pixel 5 will cost $699/£599, and has a 6in (15.2cm) display and 128 gigabytes of storage. That compares to the $999/£929 price of last year's top-end 6.3in Pixel 4XL.\n\nGoogle also unveiled a 5G-enabled version of its existing Pixel 4a, which will cost £499.\n\nSmartphone designs are typically locked in place many months before the products go on sale, in order to secure the required components and carry out tests.\n\nGoogle's senior vice president of devices and services acknowledged that the Pixel 5's features had been decided upon before the coronavirus pandemic began.\n\nBut he said a deliberate choice had been taken to offer a 5G-capable phone at \"an affordable price\".\n\nThe Pixel 5 can wirelessly charge some accessories placed on its back\n\n\"What the world doesn't seem like it needs right now is another $1,000 phone,\" said Rick Osterloh.\n\n\"Obviously nobody anticipated the pandemic, but we actually did think that the world was possibly headed for an economic downturn... and it only further emphasised our point of view that this is the right thing.\"\n\nTech jettisoned from the Pixel 4 includes the Soli radar chip, which Google had taken five years to develop. It automatically turned on the older phone's screen when its owner approached and allowed gesture controls.\n\nLast year's face-unlock sensors have also been ditched, with a return to the Pixel 3's fingerprint sensor on the back of the Pixel 5.\n\n\"These technologies will be used in the future, but they're very expensive,\" Mr Osterloh said.\n\nThe Pixel 5's Snapdragon 765G chip is also rated as being slower and having lower graphics-processing performance than last year's Snapdragon 855, although Mr Osterloh said he did not believe consumers would notice.\n\nMr Osterloh has been Google's hardware chief since 2016\n\nThe device does benefit from some improvements, including being able to produce a shallow-focus effect in \"super low-light conditions\".\n\nOne of its rear cameras now has a wider angle lens than before. And there are a choice of new video stabilisation modes.\n\nIn addition, the RAM memory has been boosted to 8GB, which should help the phone switch from task-to-task more quickly.\n\nAnd Google is bundling some of its subscription services including three months of its games-streaming platform Stadia and 100 gigabytes of online storage.\n\n\"Bundling three months of Stadia Pro cloud gaming with 5G Pixel phones is smart, because gamers benefit in particular from the 5G experience,\" commented Ian Fogg from OpenSignal.\n\n\"But cloud gaming is still 'early' tech for mobile.\"\n\nGoogle hopes the phone will help attract more users to its cloud gaming service Stadia\n\nThe Pixel 5's competition will include Samsung's Galaxy S20FE and the forthcoming OnePlus 8T - which are also being targeted at the \"mid-market\".\n\nGoogle shipped 4.6 million Pixel smartphones over the 12 months leading up to July 2020, according to research firm IDC.\n\nThat marked a 37% drop over the same period a year earlier. However, a wider fall in demand for smartphones meant the brand still rose from being ranked 16th to 12th in terms of market share for the final quarter of each period.\n\nOther products unveiled at Google's virtual event included Nest Audio - a redesigned version of its Google Home smart speaker, which now promises more bass and louder volumes.\n\nThe Google Nest Audio is covered in a fabric made out of recycled material\n\nGoogle is the second best-selling smart speaker brand in Western markets. But it is still forecast to sell about a third of the number of Amazon's Echo speakers in the UK this year, according to research firm eMarketer.\n\nGoogle also showed off a new version of its television-streaming dongle, which is now called Chromecast with Google TV.\n\nUnlike its predecessors, the device comes with its own remote control, which allows users to control their TV and soundbar via its buttons or voice commands as an alternative to using a smartphone app.\n\nThe latest Chromecast dongle now comes with its own remote\n\nIt also brings together movies and TV shows from the various apps each user subscribes to in order to make its own recommendations.\n\nThe Apple TV set-top box and Amazon's latest Fire TV stick both offer similar functions.", "Top row (left to right): Alison Howe, Martyn Hett, Lisa Lees, Courtney Boyle, Eilidh MacLeod, Elaine McIver, Georgina Callander, Jane Tweddle - Middle row (left to right): John Atkinson, Kelly Brewster, Liam Curry, Chloe Rutherford, Marcin Klis, Angelika Klis, Megan Hurley, Michelle Kiss - Bottom row (left to right): Nell Jones, Olivia Campbell-Hardy, Philip Tron, Saffie-Rose Roussos, Sorrell Leczkowski, Wendy Fawell\n\nThe Manchester Arena bomber was known or suspected to be in contact with six people who were being investigated by MI5, a public inquiry has heard.\n\nTwenty-two people were killed and hundreds more injured when Salman Abedi detonated a bomb in May 2017.\n\nAbedi's contacts were linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL, the inquiry was told.\n\nBut there was no intelligence indicating he was planning an attack or posed a risk to national security, the legal team for the Home Office said.\n\nThe inquiry, scheduled to last into next spring, is looking at events before, during and after the attack including the radicalisation of Abedi and what the security services knew about him.\n\nDelivering an opening statement on behalf of the Home Office and MI5, Cathryn McGahey QC said there were missed opportunities to investigate Abedi more closely in the months before the attack.\n\nBut she said: \"MI5 did not identify any points where a different course of action would have been likely to lead to a different outcome.\"\n\nMost evidence relating to MI5 will be heard in secret at the inquiry for \"national security\" reasons, but some new facts did emerge in the Security Service's opening statement, raising serious questions about both its judgement and internal processes.\n\nWhen MI5 closed its investigation into Abedi he was deemed so low risk he was not even referred to the counter extremism scheme Prevent, which receives thousands of referrals each year.\n\nMI5 linked Abedi to at least six people it was actively investigating. He was linked to two of these people in the early months of 2017 - precisely when the attack was being prepared.\n\nInformation that did result in him being considered for further investigation was received in mid-2016, but did not generate a response from an internal \"priority indicator\" until 3 March 2017.\n\nIt then took until 8 May to decide whether to have a further meeting - by which time he was in Libya - but it was not scheduled until 31 May.\n\nMI5 today admitted a \"missed opportunity\" for failing to request that Abedi be stopped when re-entering the UK, which he did five days before the attack itself on 22 May that year.\n\nMs McGahey said despite Abedi coming to the attention of MI5 several times in the years before the bombing, \"there was no intelligence to indicate that he was engaged in attack planning or otherwise posed a risk to national security\".\n\nAt the time of the attack, Abedi had been identified \"for further low-level investigation to identify whether he had re-engaged in Islamist extremist activity,\" she said.\n\nMs McGahey said MI5 admitted it received intelligence on Abedi on two occasions in months before the attack.\n\n\"In retrospect this intelligence was highly relevant to the planned attack but the significance of it was not fully appreciated at the time,\" she said.\n\nCathryn McGahey QC said at the time of the attack Abedi had been identified \"for further low-level investigation\"\n\nShe told the inquiry at Manchester Magistrates' Court that MI5 cannot provide more details about this in an open hearing.\n\n\"There is no question of secrecy being used to conceal failure\", she said. \"MI5 has nothing to hide from this inquiry.\"\n\nMs McGahey said MI5 had provided unfettered access to the inquiry and information has been withheld from core participants only when necessary to protect national security.\n\nEarlier on Wednesday, Andrew Warnock QC, speaking for Greater Manchester Fire & Rescue Service (GMFRS), apologised for its inadequate and inefficient initial response.\n\nHe told the public inquiry: \"It is unacceptable that it took over two hours for the fire and rescue service to arrive at the arena.\n\n\"We would like to say to the families and victims that we are sorry that this happened.\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The men said they loved the UK and the people who saved their lives, but the accommodation was \"not suitable\"\n\nAsylum seekers being housed in a military training camp said they were shocked by the conditions.\n\nThe group of men, from Iraq and Iran, said it was the first time they had been placed in military accommodation since arriving in the UK.\n\nProtests and counter-protests have taken place this month at the site in Penally, Pembrokeshire, that could house up to 230 asylum seekers.\n\nA police commissioner has called on the Home Office to apologise.\n\n\"It's cold and impossible to social distance,\" one of the asylum seekers told the BBC.\n\nThe Home Office said it had \"worked at pace\" to provide suitable accommodation \"during these unprecedented times\".\n\nSome of the group seeking asylum are as young as 17\n\nThe group, who did not want to give their names, are aged between 17 and 26 and waiting for their claims to be processed.\n\nOne said the UK had \"saved\" his life after fleeing Iraq, but Penally was the seventh \"and worst\" location he had been sent to in seven months in the UK.\n\n\"It's not good for human people here,\" he said.\n\n\"We are not army, we are civic people. We are an engineer, a doctor, a nurse, a teacher.\n\n\"It's very cold and we are six people in a very small room. It is too many. We can't social distance.\"\n\nSome protesters carried banners reading \"migrants and refugees welcome here\"\n\nHe said the group was \"shocked\" to be behind barbed wire and high fences.\n\nWales' First Minister Mark Drakeford has criticised the Home Office's decision to place asylum seekers at the camp, saying it was \"unsuitable\" for vulnerable people who have \"fled terror and suffering\".\n\nAnd there had been a \"lack of planning, communication, consultation and information\", according to Dyfed Powys Police and Crime Commissioner Dafydd Llywelyn.\n\nHe described the move as \"totally unacceptable\" and said it showed a \"lack of respect\" to residents in Penally and the surrounding area.\n\n\"It has been left to our local agencies including the police to pick up the pieces of this impractical Home Office decision and I am therefore asking for a direct apology,\" Mr Llywelyn added.\n\nOne of the group, who said he had fled a war zone, said some of them found being in a military setting distressing.\n\n\"He came from war and political fighting and now they put him in an army camp,\" he said.\n\n\"Being here, he remembers all the things that happened to him. It's scary.\"\n\nOne asylum seeker showed his scars from the war in his home country\n\nMr Drakeford blamed the Home Office for its handling of the situation, saying his request for a two-week delay for the housing was blocked.\n\nLast week, the Home Office said it was working to find suitable accommodation for asylum seekers, with facilities in the south-east of England under strain.\n\nHowever, members of the group said they had been told they would be in Penally for a year.\n\n\"We don't have anything against the location, we feel safe, but we are not army,\" the man said.\n\n\"This is not temporary. Please, we can't stay here.\"\n\nOn Wednesday, police say they arrested a 29-year-old man on suspicion of arson and criminal damage after they were called to the camp at about 22:30 BST. He remained in police custody, Dyfed Powys Police added.\n\nThe ambulance service said paramedics also responded and a person was taken to Withybush Hospital in Haverfordwest. Their condition is not known.\n\nA Home Office spokesman said: \"Following a review of available government property, the [Ministry of Defence] agreed to temporarily hand over two of their sites in Kent and Pembrokeshire which are now being used to house asylum seekers.\n\n\"Nobody staying at these sites is being detained. Asylum seekers are able to come and go from the accommodation and are staying in safe, Covid-compliant conditions, in line with the law and social distancing requirements.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Ministers are considering converting disused ferries moored off the coast to process people seeking asylum in the UK.\n\nAccording to Refugee Action, 35,566 asylum applications were made in the UK in 2019 - down from a peak of 84,000 in 2002.\n\nDowning Street said it was looking at what other countries do \"to inform a plan for the UK.\"\n\nLabour called the proposal to process people on ferries \"unconscionable\".\n\nThe most senior civil servant at the Home Office, Matthew Rycroft, said \"everything is on the table\" when it comes to \"improving\" the UK's asylum system.\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel asked officials to look at policies, including housing people who are seeking asylum offshore.\n\nOn Tuesday, the Financial Times reported the Foreign Office had carried out an assessment for Ascension Island, a remote UK territory in the Atlantic Ocean - which included the practicalities of transferring migrants thousands of miles - and decided not to proceed.\n\nNow the Times reports that the government is giving \"serious consideration\" to the idea of buying retired ferries and converting them into processing centres, but it says the Home Office rejected a proposal to use decommissioned oil platforms in the North Sea.\n\nThe paper also says processing migrants on an island off the coast of Scotland had been considered, but First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted that \"any proposal to treat human beings like cattle in a holding pen will be met with the strongest possible opposition from me\".\n\nAppearing before the Public Affairs Committee, Permanent Secretary Mr Rycroft said he would not comment on leaks to newspapers, but that the department was \"brainstorming\" ideas.\n\nHe said: \"We've been looking at what a whole host of other countries do in order to bring innovation into our own system.\n\n\"No decisions have been taken. No final proposals have been put to ministers... this is in the realm of the brainstorming stage of a future policy.\"\n\nMr Rycroft said the UK would \"always comply with all of our international obligations\" and civil servants would \"assess all of the various different possible ideas out there to see which are legal and which make operational sense… so that ministers can ultimately make decisions\".\n\nHow does the government tempt fewer people to attempt a perilous crossing of the Channel to reach the south coast?\n\nWell, one idea is to make it clear that even a successful crossing won't mean getting to stay in the UK - at least in the short term.\n\nThe government is exploring \"all sorts of options\" - not my words, but those of the most senior civil servant in the Home Office.\n\nHence the recent headlines about transferring asylum seekers to a lump of British rock in the middle of the South Atlantic - Ascension Island, or buying an old ferry to house them.\n\nBut remember, although the numbers coming over the Channel in boats are at a record high, they are still a small proportion of overall asylum seekers coming to the UK.\n\nAnd rows about asylum are far from new.\n\nTwenty years ago, it was the then-Home Secretary, Jack Straw, found himself in a row with his own party about what the Labour government should do about the issue.\n\nSo this is an historic problem for parties of both colours.\n\nLabour's shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said Labour would oppose any move to use ferries, adding: \"Even considering this is appalling.\"\n\nHe accused the government of \"lurching from one inhumane and impractical idea to another\" and claimed it had \"lost control and all sense of compassion\".\n\nThe SNP's home affairs spokeswoman, Joanna Cherry, said the leaked plans showed \"the callousness at the core\" of the government, and the plans would \"treat vulnerable asylum seekers as cattle rather than human beings\".\n\nBut Conservative MP for Gravesham in Kent, Adam Holloway, said the Home Office was \"completely right\" to be looking at other options that were \"some sort of deterrent\" for asylum seekers.\n\nHe told Radio 4's Today programme: \"We need to break the link in people's minds that if you get to Britain you're going to stay in Britain, you're going to stay in a hotel and you're going to be accommodated.\"\n\nHe added that the UK needed to find a \"civilised version\" of the model used by Australia, which has controversially used offshore processing and detention centres for asylum seekers since the 1980s.\n\nThe discussion comes as record numbers of people are crossing the Channel to the UK, with 400 arriving in one day in September.\n\nAscension Island is more than 4,000 miles (6,000km) from the UK\n\nA Home Office source said this week that ministers were looking at \"every option that can stop small boat crossings and fix the asylum system\", but no final decisions had been made.\n\nNearly 7,000 people have reached the UK in more than 500 small boats this year - by 23 September, 1,892 migrants had arrived during the month, more than in all of 2019.\n\nBut they are still a small proportion of the asylum seekers coming to the UK.\n\nTory MP Natalie Elphicke, who represents Dover, said the government had been \"clear they are going to take whatever action is necessary to put a stop to these small boat crossings\".\n\nShe told the BBC No 10 and the Home Office were looking at a \"whole range of things\" to address the \"draw factor\" of the UK, \"from cruise ships and ferries through to offshore fast track assessment centres, through to changing the immigration law\".\n\nEarlier in the Commons, Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove told Parliament the government was \"actively looking at the steps that we can take\" to stop illegal crossings in the English Channel so the UK can \"maintain our commitment to providing a safe haven\" but also \"safeguard our borders\".\n\nTo be eligible for asylum in the UK, applicants must prove they cannot return to their home country because they fear persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, gender identity or sexual orientation.\n\nA caseworker decides if they have a valid claim by taking into account factors such as the country of origin of the asylum seeker or evidence of discrimination.\n\nThis is supposed to be done in six months but delays in processing claims have increased significantly in the last year.\n\nWhile waiting for a decision to be made, asylum seekers are usually not allowed to work and are initially placed in hostel-type accommodation before longer-term housing is arranged.", "Norton said judges would not be able to \"compare like with like\"\n\nGraham Norton has questioned the need for Strictly Come Dancing to feature same-sex couples.\n\nFormer Olympic boxer Nicola Adams is set to become the first celebrity to be paired with a same-sex partner when this year's series begins next month.\n\nNorton said same-sex pairings meant the judges would not be able to \"compare like with like\".\n\n\"It does kind of muddy the waters for the judges,\" the chat show host and author told Best magazine.\n\n\"As you have people who can be openly gay on that show, I don't ­particularly need to see a man dancing with a man,\" continued Norton, who is gay himself.\n\n\"I understand the reason the Strictly bosses might do it is coming from a good place, but it does kind of muddy the waters for the judges.\"\n\nHe added: \"If you've got two partners who can do lifts and men's bodies are different shapes, how would that work?\n\n\"I don't think it's a homophobic thing. You want to be able to compare like with like.\"\n\nHearst, which publishes Best magazine, confirmed to the BBC that the interview with Norton took place before the announcement that Nicola Adams would have a female partner this year.\n\nStrictly has previously featured gay contestants dancing with a partner of the opposite sex, including Judge Rinder, Susan Calman and Scott Mills.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nAdams requested a female partner for her appearance on the show this year, commenting that it was \"definitely time for change\".\n\n\"I think it's really important,\" she said. \"It's definitely time to move on and be more diverse, and this is a brilliant step in the right direction.\"\n\nHer dance partner has not yet been revealed.\n\nEarlier this month the BBC released a statement defending the same-sex pairing after viewers complained about the move.\n\n\"Strictly Come Dancing is an inclusive show and is proud to have featured same-sex dancing amongst the professional dancers in group numbers in previous series,\" the corporation said.\n\n\"We have stated, in the past, that we are open to the prospect of including same-sex pairings between our celebrities and professional dancers, should the opportunity arise.\n\n\"Nicola Adams requested an all-female pairing, which we are happy to facilitate. The show is first and foremost about dance.\n\n\"The sex of each partner within a coupling should have no bearing on their routine.\"\n\nThe move follows a one-off routine from last year's series that saw two male professionals, Johannes Radebe and Graziano di Prima, dancing together.\n\nEarlier this year ITV's Dancing On Ice featured its first same-sex couple when it paired Ian Watkins - H from Steps - with professional skater Matt Evers.\n\nThe 18th series of Strictly will begin in October but will be shorter than usual, with judge Bruno Tonioli having a reduced role amid coronavirus restrictions.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Middlesbrough mayor Andy Preston said the government needed to \"understand local knowledge and expertise\"\n\nA ban on households mixing anywhere indoors in Hartlepool and Middlesbrough is \"unacceptable\", a mayor has said.\n\nIt follows Health Secretary Matt Hancock's announcement of stricter rules in parts of the north of England to combat a rise in Covid-19 cases.\n\nMiddlesbrough mayor Andy Preston said the rules would \"damage mental health\" and \"we defy the government and we do not accept the measures\".\n\nBe he said he \"won't condone\" anyone disobeying the new regulations.\n\nThe Department for Health and Social Care has been approached for a comment.\n\nThe new restrictions mean that from one minute past midnight on Saturday households can no longer mix in homes and gardens and indoor settings such as pubs and restaurants.\n\nMr Hancock said the measures, affecting 250,000 people in Hartlepool and Middlesbrough, would bring both towns in line with other parts of the North East.\n\nEarlier this week, Mr Preston had put in a request to the government for a ban on household mixing, but without a change to the current \"rule of six\" for meeting others outside of homes in Covid-secure venues such as cafes, restaurants and pubs.\n\nThe new rules will affect about 250,000 people in Hartlepool and Middlesbrough\n\nFollowing the announcement, the elected independent mayor said: \"I think this measure has been introduced based on... a monstrous lack of communication and ignorance.\n\n\"They will destroy viable jobs and damage mental health.\n\n\"The government needs to understand our local knowledge and expertise and ability to get things done and preserve jobs and wellbeing.\"\n\nHe said the town had some \"astonishingly well-run\" cafes and restaurants which were capable of hosting people, socially distanced.\n\n\"That being denied is a monstrous barrier to returning to normality and protecting mental health and our culture and our society,\" he said.\n\nHe added: \"Of course I won't disobey the law and absolutely won't condone anyone else disobeying it, but as things stand today with this announcement, I'm saying to the government 'no, it's not acceptable, it's not good enough, come and talk to us'.\"\n\nSimon Clarke, Conservative MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, described the measures in a tweet as \"very regrettable\", but added: \"We are where we are and must now focus on obeying the rules, bringing the infection rate down and getting back to normal as quickly as possible.\"\n\nMike Hill, Labour MP for Hartlepool, said it was an \"absolutely disgraceful one size fits all\" approach that was made \"without consulting local MPs and leaders\".\n\nHartlepool council leader Shane Moore accused the government of reneging on assurances that enhanced restrictions would not be introduced until the authority had confirmed in writing it was happy with what was being proposed.\n\nThe Hartlepool Independent Union councillor said the new rules would have a \"devastating impact\" on local businesses.\n\nHowever, Labour MP for Middlesbrough Andy McDonald, described the move as \"inevitable\".\n\nHe said: \"It's only 13 miles from Middlesbrough to Sedgefield in County Durham and the virus is clearly in circulation right across the region at levels that are concerning, and the virus pays no heed to the local authority borders between County Durham and the Tees Valley local authority areas.\"\n\nThe new measures come into force one minute past midnight on Saturday\n\nIn Middlesbrough, Toni Cook, owner of the Sticky Fingers Cafe and Rock bar, said the new rules would hit trade.\n\n\"We are not going to see the year out,\" she said.\n\n\"I understand there's a virus and I understand it's rampant but we all need to act and conform to certain ways, but a lot of us are and we are bending over backwards to do this but we are still punished.\"\n\nTim Cave, who was enjoying a drink on his day off from work, added: \"If you've got no symptoms, does it matter if you're sat with a mate who you haven't seen for so long?\n\n\"It's just going to affect people's mental wellbeing, people need that someone they don't see every day to be able to go and sound off at.\"\n\nAndrew Quinn, a student at Teesside University, said: \"I've been looking forward to coming here for a year or so and then we can't even meet up with other households in our accommodation building either, so we can't see our families or our friends in the building.\"\n\nFellow fresher Amy Hardy added: \"I've got friends in other halls of residences and even though we all go to university together and we're in the same lectures, we see each other every day, we're not allowed to pop to the bar for a drink, pop to the pub for a pint, it's madness really.\"\n\nThe Reverend Gemma Sampson, the curate of two churches in Hartlepool, expressed concerns about the effects of the restrictions.\n\n\"One of my congregation said to me 'I'd rather die of coronavirus than loneliness',\" she said.\n\n\"And I feel like both those things are an equal threat and the risk of loneliness is so great in the worst possible way.\"\n\nThe boss of Middlesbrough FC said the public should fully appreciate the seriousness of coronavirus, having recently recovered from it.\n\nNeil Warnock, 71, said: \"It's life and death with this horrible virus.\"\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.", "Authorities will analyse infection rates and come to a decision on Sunday, the health minister said\n\nFrench authorities could place Paris under maximum Covid alert from Monday, the country's health minister warned.\n\nOlivier Véran said infection rates in the capital and its suburbs are rising and a decision on imposing new restrictions will be made on Sunday.\n\nHe added that a \"total closure of bars\" could be needed in the capital.\n\nFrance, one of many European countries that are seeing a rise in cases, recorded more than 13,000 infections on Thursday.\n\nThe World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that surging figures in Europe should serve as \"a wake up call\".\n\nIn a news conference on Thursday, Mr Véran said the Paris region passed three thresholds qualifying for a maximum alert on Thursday.\n\nOne of these was the number of infections, which has now surpassed 250 per 100,000 people.\n\n\"We need a few days to confirm the trends, but if they are confirmed, we'll have no choice but to put it on maximum alert, from Monday,\" he said.\n\nAccording to Mr Véran, more than 30% of beds in Paris's intensive care units have been filled with Covid-19 patients.\n\nHe warned that if the maximum alert was put in place, there would be no more family reunions and bars would be closed. Bars and restaurants in the region already have to close by 22:00.\n\nSimilar restrictions have already been introduced in Marseille. Last Monday, Mr Véran announced bars, restaurants and gyms would close in the southern city for at least two weeks amid an upsurge in cases.\n\nOn Thursday, France recorded 13,970 cases and 63 deaths. More than 31,986 people have died in the country since the pandemic began, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.\n\nElsewhere in Europe, the Spanish government has ordered a partial lockdown in the capital Madrid. Under the restrictions, residents will not be allowed to leave the area unless they have to make an essential journey.\n\nThe UK has taken Poland and Turkey off its no quarantine list. Those arriving from the two countries from 04:00 BST (03:00 GMT) on Sunday will have to self-isolate for 14 days.\n\nPoland's infection rate has risen, while the UK government said it removed Turkey over concerns about the way the country reports its data.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The church threatened with Kalashnikovs over Covid-19 outbreak", "Navalny was released from hospital in Berlin last week\n\nLeading Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny says he believes President Vladimir Putin was responsible for his poisoning.\n\n\"I assert that Putin is behind this act, I don't see any other explanation,\" he told German news magazine Der Spiegel in an interview.\n\nGermany, where Mr Navalny is recovering, says he was poisoned by a Novichok nerve agent. Its findings were confirmed by labs in France and Sweden.\n\nResponding to the interview on Thursday, Mr Putin's spokesman said there was no evidence that Mr Navalny had been poisoned with a nerve agent, and said CIA agents were working with the opposition leader.\n\nMr Navalny collapsed on a flight in Russia's Siberia region on 20 August. He was transferred to the Charité hospital in the German capital Berlin two days later.\n\nIn an interview published by Der Spiegel on Thursday - the first since he fell ill - Mr Navalny said the order to use Novichok could only have come from the heads of three of Russia's intelligence services, all of whom work under Vladimir Putin.\n\n\"If 30 people have access to a [chemical] agent, and not three, then it's a global threat,\" the 44-year-old told the magazine.\n\nHis supporters initially believed his tea had been spiked at Tomsk airport but traces of the nerve agent were later found on water bottles at the hotel where he stayed the previous night.\n\nSpeaking of his experience, Mr Navalny said: \"You feel no pain, but you know you're dying. Straight away.\"\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by navalny This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIt was only because of \"a chain of lucky circumstances\" that he had been able to receive urgent medical care and survive, he said. Otherwise, \"it would have just been a suspicious death\".\n\nAsked why the Russian president would target him, Mr Navalny spoke of recent unrest in the far eastern province of Khabarovsk.\n\n\"The Kremlin realises that it must take extreme measures to prevent a 'Belarus situation',\" the opposition leader said, in reference to weeks of mass anti-government protests there following a disputed election.\n\n\"The system is fighting for its survival and we've just felt the consequences.\"\n\nMr Navalny was released from hospital in Berlin last week and is still receiving physiotherapy to aid his recovery.\n\nHis spokeswoman said last week that his bank accounts had been frozen and his flat seized but Mr Navalny told Der Spiegel he still planned to return to Russia.\n\n\"Not going back would mean that Putin had achieved his goal... I will not give Putin the gift of not returning to Russia.\"\n\nThe EU and a number of governments have called for Russia to investigate Mr Navalny's poisoning.\n\nIf the attack on Alexei Navalny was meant to frighten him into silence or compliance, it failed. He's made it clear that he intends to return to Russia - and to opposition politics - more determined than ever, pledging to take on those \"villains\" who commit \"the most heinous crimes\".\n\nBut the fact he identifies Vladimir Putin as chief \"villain\" in his poisoning has infuriated the Kremlin. Its spokesman called the accusation \"utterly unfounded\" and \"insulting\".\n\nThat's standard Kremlin-speak but Dmitry Peskov also said he had \"concrete information\" that Alexei Navalny was getting \"clear instructions\" from the CIA. That's new, and an escalation apparently aimed at discrediting him as thoroughly as possible here in Russia.\n\nMr Navalny has already mocked the claim online, wondering whether the CIA was \"instructing\" him on his physiotherapy, as that's all he's been doing since his release from hospital. He's threatened to sue for what he called a \"monstrous lie\", which he believes is meant to distract Russians from what the Kremlin \"needs to hide\".\n\nA nerve agent from the Novichok group was also used to poison Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England in 2018. They both survived, but a local woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after coming into contact with the poison.\n\nBritain accused Russia's military intelligence of carrying out that attack. Twenty countries expelled more than 100 Russian diplomats and spies. Moscow denied any involvement.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "A technical problem forced a full-day trading halt on Japan's stock exchanges, including the popular Nikkei 225 index on Thursday.\n\nThe shutdown happened when a backup system failed to kick in after a hardware malfunction, according to the Japan Exchange Group.\n\nIt was quick to point out the halt wasn't connected to cyber-attackers.\n\nTrading was suspended at the main Tokyo stock exchange along with connected bourses in Nagoya, Fukuoka and Sapporo.\n\nJapan Exchange Group apologised for the one-day shutdown and said it aimed to resume trading as normal on Friday.\n\nTokyo's roughly $6tn (£4.6tn) stock market is the world's third largest, after New York and Shanghai, according to data from the World Federation of Exchanges.\n\nThe trading halt closed one of Asia's few major regional markets on Thursday, with exchanges in Hong Kong, Shanghai, South Korea and Taipei all closed for holidays.\n\nThe suspension soured the mood of some investors, who were expecting the market to rebound after an acrimonious US presidential debate pushed the Nikkei 225 1.5% lower on Wednesday.\n\nThe trading halt was the exchange's first significant glitch since 2018, when a trading system problem left some securities firms unable to make orders.\n\nThe Nikkei 225 index includes the shares of many of Japan's biggest companies including Honda, Nissan, Hitachi and Canon.\n\nMany stock markets have been hit with temporary glitches in the past.\n\nIn August, the New Zealand Exchange was hit by cyber-attacks that forced it to halt trading over the course of one week.\n\nOver the past decade, the tech-heavy Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange, the London Stock Exchange, the Singapore stock exchange and Bombay's Sensex have all faced technical glitches that have delayed trading.\n\nIn 2017, a temporary market error saw the share price of several major tech firms wrongly listed at the same price on the Nasdaq.", "Part of a London street is cleared of diners ahead of the 22:00 BST curfew\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock has promised MPs votes \"wherever possible\" on England or UK-wide coronavirus rules before they come into force.\n\nBut he warned that some urgent regulations could not be held up.\n\nIt follows concern from Tory MPs over a lack of parliamentary scrutiny, while the Commons Speaker warned the government against treating Parliament with \"contempt\".\n\nMPs voted to extend the coronavirus powers by 330 votes to 24.\n\nMr Hancock was speaking in the House of Commons ahead of a vote on a motion that will extend the Coronavirus Act.\n\nThe emergency legislation passed in March grants extensive powers to the authorities to tackle Covid, such as closing schools and stopping mass gatherings.\n\nAddressing MPs, the health secretary said: \"I am sure that no member of this House would want to limit the government's ability to take emergency action in the national interest as we did in March.\n\n\"And we will continue to involve the House in scrutinising our decisions in the way the prime minister set out last week, with regular statements and debates and the ability for members to question the government's scientific advisers more regularly.\n\nHealth Secretary told MPs they would get a vote \"wherever possible\"\n\n\"And I hope the new arrangements will be welcomed on all sides of the House and I will continue to listen to colleagues' concerns, as I've tried my best to do so throughout.\"\n\nSir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 committee of backbench Conservative MPs, had been pushing for MPs to have more of a say over restrictions introduced to tackle the virus.\n\nHe welcomed Mr Hancock's announcement saying: \"We are grateful that he and other members of the government have understood the importance of proper scrutiny in this place and the benefits that can bring to better government as well.\"\n\nAsked by a former Conservative chief whip Mark Harper for clarity on which new rules MPs would be allowed to vote on, Mr Hancock said \"I hope over the weeks to come we will demonstrate through our actions and what we bring forward that we are true to this commitment, which essentially will become a new convention.\"\n\nOther Conservatives expressed frustration with the government. Sir Charles Walker said the 90 minutes provided for the debate was \"just not good enough\" while Sir Bernard Jenkin warned that \"the prime minister cannot lead his parliamentary party unless he has their consent\".\n\nLabour's shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said: \"We recognised that the government, in a pandemic, any government needs extraordinary powers available, and why with a heavy heart today, facing this highly unsatisfactory situation of an all or nothing motion, we will not be blocking its passage today.\"\n\nHowever, the Liberal Democrats have said they would vote against extending the Coronavirus Act because of the power it gave ministers to \"reduce rights\" for carers.\n\nSeven Conservatives and six Labour MPs also voted against the motion.\n\nDozens of Tory MPs backed an amendment to the motion by Sir Graham calling for future regulations affecting the whole of England only to be introduced if Parliament has the opportunity to debate and vote on them in advance.\n\nCommons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle did not select the amendment explaining that any amendment to the motion risked creating uncertainty about the legality of the Act, and potentially opened it up to court challenge.\n\nHowever he told MPs: \"The way in which the government has exercised its powers to make secondary legislation during this crisis has been totally unsatisfactory.\n\n\"All too often important statutory instruments have been published a matter of hours before they come into force and some explanations as to why important measures have come into effect before they can be laid before this House has been unconvincing and shows a total disregard for the House.\"\n\nHe said he was \"now looking to the government to rebuild trust with the House not treat it with the contempt it has shown\".\n\nResponding to Sir Lindsay Hoyle's criticism, the prime minister's spokesman said the government was \"looking at further ways to involve parliament in the process in advance\".", "Mr Mackay had been widely tipped as a future first minister prior to his resignation\n\nDerek Mackay has continued to claim expenses for accommodation in Edinburgh despite not having been seen at the Scottish Parliament since quitting as finance secretary in February.\n\nMr Mackay stepped down after admitting he \"behaved foolishly\" by messaging a 16-year-old boy on social media.\n\nHe is now an independent MSP having been suspended from the SNP, and has not taken part in any debates or votes.\n\nHowever, he claimed for accommodation in Edinburgh for 10 days in July.\n\nA spokesman for Mr Mackay said the expenditure \"complies with Scottish Parliament allowance rules\" and \"covered the notice period and requirements of terminating the accommodation tenancy\".\n\nHe added: \"Mr Mackay's Renfrewshire North and West constituency office is continuing to operate remotely, in line with the Scottish government's coronavirus guidance, in dealing with casework and making representations on behalf of constituents.\"\n\nExpenses records covering the period directly after Mr Mackay's resignation are yet to be published by the parliament, but BBC Scotland has seen claims filed by the Renfrewshire North and West MSP for rent totalling £327.10 in early July.\n\nHolyrood was in recess at the time, although members did sit on one of the 10 days involved for Nicola Sturgeon to update them on the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nAs a current MSP Mr Mackay is entitled to claim an \"Edinburgh accommodation provision\" and there is no rule that he must attend parliament to do so.\n\nHowever records show he has not taken any part in formal proceedings since he quit the government in February.\n\nThe Scottish Sun newspaper revealed hours before Mr Mackay was due to set out the Holyrood budget that he had sent hundreds of messages to a teenage boy over a six-month period.\n\nHe issued a statement apologising \"unreservedly\" to the boy and resigned from his cabinet post.\n\nPolice later concluded that there was \"nothing to suggest that an offence has been committed\", and the SNP suggested in March that the MSP was \"under medical supervision\".\n\nScottish Conservative MSP Graham Simpson said Mr Mackay's constituents would be appalled that he was claiming money for accommodation in Edinburgh despite not turning up to parliament and working for them.\n\n\"It shows exactly why we need my Mackay's Law to be put into legislation in order to oust MSPs like him who shun their responsibilities to the public,\" he said.", "The rolls used in Subway's hot sandwiches contain too much sugar to be considered bread, according to Ireland's Supreme Court.\n\nIreland's highest court made the ruling in a case about how the bread is taxed.\n\nAn Irish franchisee of the US company had claimed it should not pay VAT on the rolls it uses in heated sandwiches.\n\nBut the court ruled that because of the level of sugar in the rolls they cannot be taxed as bread, which is classed as a \"staple product\" with zero VAT.\n\nUnder Ireland's VAT Act of 1972, ingredients in bread such as sugar and fat should not exceed 2% of the weight of flour in the dough.\n\nThe five judges, who were considering an appeal by Bookfinders Ltd, a Subway franchisee based near Galway, concluded that in Subway sandwiches the sugar content is around 10% of the flour in the dough for both white and wholegrain rolls.\n\n\"Subway's bread is, of course, bread,\" said a spokesperson for Subway.\n\n\"We have been baking fresh bread in our stores for more than three decades and our guests return each day for sandwiches made on bread that smells as good as it tastes.\"\n\nIn Irish law, bread is considered a staple food and has a zero rate of VAT. Following the ruling, the rolls are subject to tax at 13.5%.\n\nThe case stems from a decision by Ireland's tax authority in 2006 to refuse Bookfinders' request for a refund on VAT payments made between 2004 and 2005.\n\nAfter an appeal commissioner upheld the tax authority's refusal of a refund, Bookfinders took its case to the High Court which it lost before going to the Court of Appeal, where it was also unsuccessful.\n\nIt is not the first time Subway's bread has been in the spotlight. In 2014, the company announced it was removing azodicarbonamide - the so-called \"yoga mat\" chemical - from its rolls.\n\nSubway stopped using the so-called \"yoga mat\" chemical - azodicarbonamide - in its bread in 2014\n\nThe chemical is used to whiten flour and improve the condition of dough. It is also used to make vinyl foam products such as yoga mats and the underlay for carpets.\n\nSubway stopped using the agent six years ago but the US Food and Drug Administration continues to approve the use of the chemical in produce.\n• None How safe are takeaways and supermarket deliveries?", "Archie Lyndhurst with his father Nicholas and mother Lucy Smith in 2017\n\nCBBC star Archie Lyndhurst, the son of Only Fools and Horses actor Nicholas Lyndhurst, has died at the age of 19 after a short illness.\n\nHe was best known for playing Ollie Coulton in the comedy show So Awkward.\n\nIn a statement, Nicholas said he and wife Lucy were \"utterly grief stricken and respectfully request privacy\".\n\nCBBC head of content Cheryl Taylor said he was \"such a talented young actor\", adding: \"All of us at BBC Children's are devastated.\"\n\nShe added: \"He will be greatly missed by us all and our deepest condolences go out to his family and friends at this time.\"\n\nArchie began his acting career at the Sylvia Young Theatre School at the age of 10. In 2013, his father Nicholas told the BBC that his son had inherited the \"acting gene\".\n\nArchie appeared in So Awkward, a sitcom following the lives of a group of friends in secondary school, from its first series in 2015.\n\nNicholas appeared alongside his son in a 2019 episode of the programme.\n\nNicholas and Archie Lyndhurst in So Awkward\n\nChannel X North, the independent production company that makes So Awkward, said it was \"deeply shocked and saddened\" by the news.\n\n\"He was an incredibly talented performer and his contribution to So Awkward, on and off screen, will not be forgotten,\" it said in a statement.\n\n\"As well as hilarious, he was a generous, kind-hearted young man who we had the honour to work with on the show for seven years.\n\n\"Our thoughts are with his family and friends at this time.\"\n\nJohn Challis, who played Aubrey \"Boycie\" Boyce in Only Fools, said Archie's death was \"the saddest news of all\".\n\nHe said Archie was \"just starting out on his chosen career in acting\" and that his \"heart aches for Nick and Lucy\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by John Challis This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nActress Sue Holderness, who played Boycie's wife Marlene in the show, said the news was \"too sad\", adding: \"My heart goes out to his Mum and Dad and to all who knew him.\"\n\nSamuel Small, who appeared with Archie in So Awkward and also in a 2014 episode of Game of Thrones, posted a lengthy tribute on Instagram to his \"brother\" and \"best friend\".\n\n\"I still can't quite comprehend that you have passed,\" he wrote. \"You still had so much life to live and I'd give anything for you to keep on living it.\n\n\"I wish you could've all known Archie how we knew him,\" he continued. \"I've never met someone so full of life [who] touched so many peoples hearts.\n\n\"I still can't find the words that do him justice and show how much of a beautiful soul he was.\"\n\nLyndhurst appeared in 75 episodes of the CBBC programme\n\nArchie's other roles included recurring appearances as a younger incarnation of comedian Jack Whitehall in various TV programmes.\n\nThese included BBC Three sitcom Bad Education, in which he was seen as a younger version of Whitehall's Alfie Wickers character.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Last updated on .From the section League Cup\n\nArsenal boss Mikel Arteta believes his side took a \"step forward\" by beating Liverpool on penalties to reach the quarter-finals of the Carabao Cup.\n\nAfter a goalless 90 minutes at Anfield, Gunners goalkeeper Bernd Leno saved two penalties in the shootout before Joe Willock scored the winning spot-kick.\n\nArsenal lost 3-1 in the Premier League at the Reds four days ago, and Arteta was pleased with his side's response.\n\n\"We still have lots to learn but we are on the right path,\" the Spaniard said.\n\n\"It is the third time in about eight weeks we have played against the best team in Europe, in my opinion, and it is a step forward for my team.\n\n\"We want to treat every competition as an opportunity to win a trophy, we have to do that for the club we represent and we will do that.\"\n\nThe teams produced a 5-5 thriller at Anfield in the competition last season before a penalty shootout, won by Liverpool, but this was a considerably less exciting match.\n\nBoth sides struggled for fluency after making numerous changes from their Premier League meeting on Monday.\n\nBut after Divock Origi and Harry Wilson saw efforts saved by Leno, Willock converted the decisive penalty.\n\nArsenal will now host Manchester City in the last eight, with all ties to be played in the week commencing 21 December.\n\nMohamed Elneny's miss in the shootout looked like it was going to be costly for the Gunners, but German goalkeeper Leno salvaged the situation for Arteta's side.\n\nLeno's excellence was a theme of the match, particularly once Liverpool - who had made nine changes from their win on Monday - got to grips with the game towards the end of the first period.\n\nThe former Bayer Leverkusen keeper brilliantly parried new signing Diogo Jota's header and deserved some fortune when Takumi Minamino hit the crossbar with the follow up when he ought to have scored.\n\nArsenal were organised and disciplined in defence and despite Mohamed Salah joining Minamino and Jota in an experienced frontline for Jurgen Klopp's side, they could not find the breakthrough.\n\nLiverpool were made to work hard for openings, and when they did create chances, Leno thwarted them as he produced superb saves to deny both Jota and Virgil van Dijk after the break.\n\nThe 28-year-old became the first Arsenal goalkeeper to keep a clean sheet at Anfield since Vito Mannone in September 2012.\n\n'I really have belief in Bernd' - what they said\n\nLiverpool boss Jurgen Klopp, speaking to Sky Sports: \"If there would have been a winner in 90 minutes it should have been us but we are not in dreamland, you have to score. I liked a lot of parts of the game, we mixed it up a lot and I saw a proper performance, a lot of things we like on the pitch when you wear this wonderful shirt. A penalty shoot out is tricky, everyone knows. That is it.\"\n\nWhat did the performance lack? \"Goals. So many things are different when you mix it up in decisive positions especially. I really liked how the boys did it, there were a lot of good individual performances, it could have been a Premier League game but here or there we lacked the last pass. There were not a lot of chances in this game because there was a lot of work from both teams closing each other down.\n\nOn Xherdan Shaqiri's absence from the squad: \"Some were not involved. It is the time of the year when some things happen in the background and you have to react - that is what we did.\"\n\nArsenal boss Mikel Arteta, speaking to Sky Sports: \"I am really happy with the performance. I think the boys were exceptional. We corrected a few things from Monday and it was superb.\n\n\"We competed much better, the level of aggression we had, the way we pressed them really high was exceptional. Bernd Leno was really good. When we needed him we had him. You need a top individual performance to win at Anfield and that is what we had tonight.\n\n\"I really have belief in Bernd. I know him really well and what he can give us. We didn't want Emiliano Martínez to go but it was probably the right thing for both parties to do. The gap towards Liverpool is still big. We will keep improving to try and reach their level.\"\n\nOn drawing his former club Manchester City: \"I was waiting and enjoying the victory and then we have to play Manchester City. It is what it is, there are a lot of tough teams left in the competition and we will prepare for it.\"\n\nLiverpool are next in action when they travel to face Aston Villa in the Premier League on Sunday, 4 October (19:15 BST). Arsenal host Sheffield United in the Premier League on the same day at 14:00 BST.\n• None Goal! Liverpool 0(4), Arsenal 0(5). Joseph Willock (Arsenal) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the centre of the goal.\n• None Penalty saved! Harry Wilson (Liverpool) fails to capitalise on this great opportunity, left footed shot saved in the bottom right corner.\n• None Goal! Liverpool 0(4), Arsenal 0(4). Nicolas Pépé (Arsenal) converts the penalty with a left footed shot to the bottom left corner.\n• None Goal! Liverpool 0(4), Arsenal 0(3). Curtis Jones (Liverpool) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the bottom left corner.\n• None Goal! Liverpool 0(3), Arsenal 0(3). Ainsley Maitland-Niles (Arsenal) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the top right corner.\n• None Penalty saved! Divock Origi (Liverpool) fails to capitalise on this great opportunity, right footed shot saved in the bottom left corner.\n• None Penalty saved! Mohamed Elneny (Arsenal) fails to capitalise on this great opportunity, right footed shot saved in the centre of the goal.\n• None Goal! Liverpool 0(3), Arsenal 0(2). Takumi Minamino (Liverpool) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the top right corner.\n• None Goal! Liverpool 0(2), Arsenal 0(2). Cédric Soares (Arsenal) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the bottom right corner.\n• None Goal! Liverpool 0(2), Arsenal 0(1). Georginio Wijnaldum (Liverpool) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the top right corner.\n• None Goal! Liverpool 0(1), Arsenal 0(1). Alexandre Lacazette (Arsenal) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the bottom left corner.\n• None Goal! Liverpool 0(1), Arsenal 0. James Milner (Liverpool) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the centre of the goal. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None How Do You Cope?: Fabrice Muamba on the night that changed his life\n• None All the reaction from some heavyweight EFL Cup ties", "At Whipsnade Zoo, a male southern white rhino called Sizzle has been introduced to new female rhinos, in the hope that they will breed\n\nZoos' vital conservation work is being put at risk by a Covid-related funding crisis.\n\nBreeding programmes to rescue rare species may have to be cancelled, with many zoos facing the biggest cash crisis in their history.\n\nThe body that represents British zoos says a government rescue package is inaccessible for most of its members.\n\nOnly one zoo has claimed successfully, the BBC has learned.\n\nZoos face huge income losses due to lockdown and reduced visitor numbers. Ultimately, this will impact on their ability to care for species which are the last of their kind on Earth, and now found only in zoos.\n\n\"The extinct-in-the-wild species are absolutely dependent on human care,\" said Dr John Ewen of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).\n\n\"It's our decision about which way to go forward that determines extinction or recovery.\"\n\nThe scimitar-horned oryx is regarded as a conservation success story\n\nBBC News has discovered that just one zoo out of around 300 in England has successfully made a claim from a £100m government recovery fund.\n\nThe trade body that represents Britain's zoos and aquariums, Biaza, says the way the government's bailout fund is structured means it is virtually impossible for most of its members to claim.\n\nThey need to be 12 weeks from bankruptcy to qualify and by that time any responsible animal park would already be trying to find new homes for its residents, the association says.\n\nIt warns that many international breeding programmes, designed to ensure the survival of rare species, may have to be cancelled and without government help some big UK zoos face closure.\n\nThe government says its rescue package was designed to provide a safety net if zoos got into really serious financial difficulties.\n\nPolynesian tree snails are being saved from extinction\n\nZoos are one of the largest funders of conservation work around the world, particularly large, successful zoos in Europe, North America and Australia.\n\nDr Alexandra Zimmermann is a senior research fellow at Oxford University and former head of conservation at Chester Zoo.\n\nShe told BBC News: \"Zoos contribute hundreds of millions of support all over the world for conservation in the wild so if we lose a lot of that support from the effects of Covid, then that has really detrimental effects on conservation everywhere.\"\n\nAt least 77 species of plants and animals are classified as extinct in the wild by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which compiles data on endangered species.\n\nThe Guam kingfisher is one such bird, disappearing in the 1980s from the island of Guam, a US territory in the western Pacific.\n\nA stowaway snake was accidently brought in on military equipment, where it wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. With no natural predator, the snake species rapidly multiplied, eventually growing to such a number that it ate most of the island's native bird species.\n\nAll 100 or so Guam kingfishers live in human care\n\nThe last few kingfishers on Earth were rescued and taken into captivity. There are now 100 or so birds in breeding programs at US zoos, with plans to reintroduce them to Guam and other suitable islands, if a safe habitat can be found.\n\nMany of the zoos were already under strain to breed enough birds to keep the population going, even before the pandemic, said Dr Ewen.\n\n\"Covid's come along and put incredible pressure on all of the institutions that care for them,\" he added.\n\nGuam has more than 2 million snakes, which have wreaked havoc with the ecosystem\n\nSince many of the \"last stand\" species have gone extinct in the wild due to human actions, we have a responsibility to save them, said Dr Amanda Trask of ZSL.\n\n\"It's crazy not to take that chance and try and bring them back,\" she said.\n\nLockdown has placed many zoos around the world in a precarious financial situation. While many institutions have reopened, reduced visitor capacities due to social distancing are adding to the financial pressures.\n\nZoos face huge bills from caring for animals; ZSL's monthly running costs were £2.3 million at the height of lockdown and it stands to lose £20 million this financial year.\n\nSome small zoos have already closed down while others are reducing conservation work.\n\nPere David's deer: Breeding at Whipsnade Zoo after becoming extinct in the wild\n\nDr Matyas Liptovszky, honorary assistant professor of zoo animal medicine at the University of Nottingham, said species kept alive in zoos and botanical gardens are \"the last safeguards of irreplaceable parts of our worlds\".\n\nThe UK spends hundreds of millions annually on museums to preserve cultural and historic relics, but not in keeping extinct animals alive, he said, describing this as \"bizarre\" for a nature and animal-loving nation.\n\n\"One of the biggest differences between a great UK museum, which preserves remnants of already extinct animals, and a great UK zoo, which fights to keep alive another one on the way to extinction, is the complete lack of government funding for the latter one,\" he said.\n\n\"Their visitor revenue is directly funding vital conservation and scientific work, but with no or reduced number of visitors, they deserve and desperately need external help\".", "Blackbaud's software is used by non-profit organisations to help obtain donations\n\nBank account information and users' passwords are among details feared stolen by hackers in a security breach at a service used to raise donations from millions of people.\n\nMany UK universities and charities, as well as hundreds of other organisations worldwide, use the software involved.\n\nIts developer Blackbaud made the admission in a regulatory filing.\n\nThe firm previously said the theft had been limited to other personal data - but not payment details.\n\nIt added it was contacting affected clients. They, in turn, will need to send follow-up alerts to at least some of the donors they had already contacted about the incident.\n\n\"We have informed the small subset of Blackbaud customers who were part of this development,\" the company told the BBC.\n\n\"We apologise that this happened and will continue to do our very best to supply help and support as we and our customers jointly navigate this cyber-crime incident.\"\n\nThe BBC has learned that some of the organisations believed to have been impacted by the latest development include:\n\n\"We are aware that some financial data may have been accessed as a result of the data breach and are working with Blackbaud to determine if this affects us,\" said a spokesman for the National Trust.\n\nThe National Trust is a charity that looks after places of historic interest and natural beauty\n\nMillions of people worldwide have been warned they could have been affected in the original alerts sent out about the attack over recent months.\n\nA spokeswoman for the Information Commissioner's Office told the BBC: \"Our investigation is ongoing and we will be making further enquiries regarding the latest developments.\"\n\nThe ICO said it knew of 166 UK organisations that had been affected by the security breach.\n\nThey include dozens of universities as well as health-related charities, schools and trusts set up to care for historic buildings.\n\nInternational clients who were affected also included hospitals, human rights organisations, non-profit radio stations and food banks.\n\nSouth Carolina-based Blackbaud said the new findings did not apply to all clients affected by the hack, but acknowledged that, in some cases, the payment information involved had not been digitally scrambled, as might have been expected.\n\n\"Further forensic investigation found that for some of the notified customers, the cyber-criminal may have accessed some unencrypted fields intended for bank account information, social security numbers, user names and/or passwords,\" its filing said.\n\nDozens of universities have sent emails and other alerts to current students and alumni about the attack\n\n\"In most cases, fields intended for sensitive information were encrypted and not accessible.\"\n\nAn updated security notice on the firm's site added that the firm did not believe credit card details had been exposed.\n\nOne cyber-security expert said it was essential that affected donors be told as soon as possible.\n\n\"It's simply not acceptable to store financial data, and passwords, in an unencrypted form,\" said Prof Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey.\n\n\"This latest revelation means that whereas their customers relied upon their initial statements to reassure people that banking information was not affected, that has now to be potentially reversed.\"\n\nThe hack occurred in May and was first disclosed to the public in July.\n\nAt the time, Blackbaud said it had paid the attackers a ransom and believed the thieves had subsequently destroyed the stolen data.\n\nPaying a ransom in such circumstances is not illegal, but goes against the advice of numerous law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, NCA and Europol.\n\nA banking security news site reported last week that Blackbaud faces at least 10 lawsuits in the US over the matter.", "A ban on different households meeting will be introduced amid further restrictions for the north of England after a spike in coronavirus cases.\n\nIt will be illegal to meet indoors in places such as pubs in the Liverpool City Region, Warrington, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough from Saturday.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock told MPs the new rules \"are necessary\".\n\nIn Middlesbrough, the mayor Andy Preston said: \"We defy the government and we do not accept these measures.\"\n\nBut he later said he would obey the law and urged others to do so.\n\nMr Hancock said he wanted the rules to stay in place for \"as short a time as possible\" and also \"recommended against all social mixing between households\".\n\nMr Hancock told the House of Commons: \"Earlier this week we brought in further measures in the north-east, however in parts of Teesside and the north-west of England cases continue to rise fast.\"\n\nDifferent households are being banned from mixing indoors anywhere\n\nKnowsley, an area in the Liverpool City Region, had the second highest rate in the country at 262 per 100,000 on 27 September.\n\nLiverpool's weekly infection rate rose to 258, Warrington's was 163 and Hartlepool and Middlesbrough both had 121 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nBurnley, where no further restrictions are yet to be imposed beyond the Lancashire-wide ones already introduced, has the highest infection rate in England at 327 per 100,000.\n\nSix areas in England have been added to the coronavirus watchlist as an \"area of concern\".\n\nThey are Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, Cheshire West and Chester, Cheshire East, Wakefield in West Yorkshire, Rotherham in South Yorkshire and Luton in Bedfordshire.\n\nSheffield has now been designated an \"area of enhanced support\".\n\nMr Hancock said: \"Working with council leaders and the mayors, I'm today extending these measures that have been in the north-east since the start of this week to the Liverpool City Region, Warrington, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough.\"\n\nMr Preston tweeted he did not accept the new rules and described them as \"unacceptable\" and based on a \"monstrous lack of communication and ignorance\".\n\nHe said: \"We tried to communicate with the government but they didn't listen.\n\n\"They're imposing restrictions that [will] kill viable jobs and damage mental health.\"\n\nHowever, he went on to confirm he would obey the law and urged others to do so.\n\nMiddlesbrough has been on the government's watchlist following an increase in cases\n\nRestrictions on households mixing, with a ban on people meeting in homes and gardens, were brought in across Merseyside and Warrington last month.\n\nHouseholds were also advised not to mix in public places but that was not enforceable by law.\n\nIt will now be illegal to mix indoors anywhere but there is also a recommendation not to mix outside, in beer gardens or parks.\n\nColm Buteux and his wife, who is a teacher, have two children, aged 13 and 10, and live in Warrington.\n\nHe said the new restrictions \"won't make a massive difference\" but he does feel families with two parents can be \"socially isolated\".\n\n\"I do get why the government is doing this but they should let families [with two parents] have access to a support bubble,\" he said.\n\nSingle parents can form a social bubble with another household.\n\nThe 50-year-old contract commercial manager said he was \"relieved\" his children were still going to school and doing sports.\n\n\"I don't care if they close every pub, I want my children to go to school and do exercise,\" adding it was \"tough\" during lockdown when they were stuck at home.\n\nColm Buteux said he was relieved his two children were still going to school\n\nJo Davies, from Walton, Liverpool, lost her partner to Covid-19 in March and now lives alone.\n\nThe 72-year-old is used to having daily visits from her family who come round for meals and a \"chit chat\".\n\nShe has seven grandchildren and one great grandchild and will be moving in with her daughter and her husband for the new restrictions so she can care for her two grandchildren while her daughter is working shifts.\n\n\"My grandchildren keep me young and I'm devastated I won't be able to see them all, and there is going to be so many people like me,\" she said.\n\nHartlepool and Middlesbrough previously had no additional restrictions apart from national measures.\n\n\"I know individual rules are challenging but they are necessary and there are early signs they are working,\" Mr Hancock added.\n\nMr Hancock told MPs we must not \"let up\" but there was \"small hope\" given by a study from Imperial College which suggested the R number may be falling.\n\n\"I put it no stronger than that. Cases are still rising. However, as the chief medical officer set out yesterday this second peak is highly localised and in some parts of the country the virus is spreading fast.\"\n\nMr Hancock said £7m funding would be provided to support areas affected.\n\nMayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson told BBC Radio Merseyside: \"It's a strange one because it seems to be a halfway house.\n\n\"The infection rate is basically out of control…the businesses, the bars, the hotels, the restaurants, those are the people that are employed by the hospitality sector. Thousands of them are going to close and potentially won't come back.\"\n\nHe said funding announced was a \"drop in the ocean\" and he was \"deeply, deeply worried\" about businesses.\n\nOne of the strange things with the first wave in the UK was that the virus seemed to seed everywhere.\n\nIn other countries, Spain and Italy for example, it was much more localised with the virus highly concentrated in a few towns and cities.\n\nBut as the second wave rolls out, a clear pattern is emerging with marked peaks in a number of north-west and north-east areas.\n\nIt was a point made at the televised briefing on Wednesday with chief medical adviser Prof Chris Whitty saying the UK may have quite a different spread this time round.\n\nThe situation could easily change. Other areas may see sharp rises in the coming weeks - although the evidence at the moment suggests a more gradual increase.\n\nThe big unknown is why this is happening. Certainly there were higher levels of infection in the north when lockdown lifted, making it easier for the virus to take off.\n\nThere are a number of other theories - from the socialising habits of young people to the high concentration of densely-populated housing.\n\nWhatever the cause, the high rates of infection and climbing hospital admissions in these areas is the issue that is causing ministers and their officials most concern at the moment.\n\nThe leader of Knowsley Council, councillor Graham Morgan, tweeted he was \"concerned\" the further restrictions \"won't be enough to stop the spread of the virus here\".\n\n\"We're at a critical point and need swift, effective solutions to protect our residents.\"\n\nSteve Rotheram, metro mayor of Liverpool City Region, said he wanted to know the exit strategy for these restrictions.\n\nHe said: \"It's a bit like the Hotel California- you can check out but you can never leave. Other areas have gone into restrictions and months later they are still there. We can't afford that.\"\n\nMarie Rimmer, Labour MP for St Helens South & Whiston, said she welcomed measures that would \"help to keep all of us safe\" but with each new set of restrictions, things were \"getting more confusing and more difficult\".\n\nThe strain it is taking on mental health alone cannot be underestimated, she said.\n\nMr Hancock also said Bolton would be \"brought in line\" with the rest of Greater Manchester.\n\nThis means easing restrictions which reduced all pubs and restaurants in the town to takeaway only.\n\nThere would be no other changes to restrictions elsewhere, including West Yorkshire, Midlands, North East and other parts of Greater Manchester, he said.\n\nAre you in one of the regions? What will stricter measures mean for you? Emailhaveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nOr use this form to get in touch:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your comment or send it via email to HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any comment you send in.", "Cars have been queuing in Clydach for tests but the centre is closed\n\nPeople needing Covid-19 tests have been sent to a centre in an area under local lockdown, despite it being closed.\n\nRhondda Labour MP Chris Bryant said the situation in Clydach Vale, near Tonypandy, Rhondda Cynon Taf (RCT), was an \"utter farce.\"\n\nThe site is run by Serco and slots are booked via the UK government-run online system.\n\nThe UK government, which oversees most of Wales' coronavirus tests, said testing capacity increased daily.\n\nAll those who booked at the Clydach site were contacted and advised to go to an alternative site in Abercynon where they will be tested, a spokesman said.\n\nRichard Case, 45, from Llanharan booked a test at Clydach Vale at 10:00 BST on Thursday for his 13-year-old son Dylan, who has a sore throat and dry cough.\n\nWhen he and Dylan arrived they joined a queue of \"around 20 vehicles\" but could see in the distance that people were turning around.\n\n\"I thought they were there having the tests and then turning around, but only when we got to the front of the line did we see that everything there, all the council offices up there, were completely shut off.\n\n\"And it wasn't until I looked on Twitter and saw Chris Bryant's tweets when I got home that I realised that the test centre had been shut.\"\n\nRichard Case (centre) was sent to the closed Clydach Vale site for a test\n\nMr Case then logged back on to book another test. Again, the system offered him Clydach Vale, but he selected Abercynon instead where he got a test at 12:30.\n\nThe experience of being sent to Clydach Vale was \"frustrating to say the least\", he said.\n\n\"I can only imagine people that are trying to get there on public transport, who've got children, or whose symptoms are much worse - it's not very good.\"\n\nThe Clydach Vale testing centre closed on Wednesday after demand fell\n\nRCT's Labour council leader Andrew Morgan told BBC Wales a mobile testing unit was originally set up at Porth and then moved to Clydach three weeks ago.\n\nIt was closed on Wednesday as demand had fallen but bookings were still being taken on Thursday, he said.\n\n\"It seems they didn't take it off the booking system so hundreds have been turning up there - many from outside the area,\" he said.\n\nThe Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board tweeted to say its teams were \"working on this as a matter of urgency\".\n\nMr Bryant said: \"I'm grateful to the health board and RCT who are trying to sort this out - and I've contacted [UK government Health Secretary] Matt Hancock as well.\n\n\"But we feel really badly let down in the Rhondda at the moment.\"\n\nRhondda Cynon Taf was the second county to be put into local lockdown last month after a rise in coronavirus cases there.\n\nA UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) spokesman said: \"NHS Test and Trace is providing tests at an unprecedented scale - 225,000 a day on average over the last week - with the vast majority of the public reporting no issues at all with the process.\n\n\"Testing capacity increases daily and we're on course to have capacity for 500,000 tests every day by the end of October - bringing in new labs that can process tens of thousands of tests a day, opening new test sites, and trialling new rapid tests that will give results on the spot.\"\n\nA spokesman for Serco said the company \"does not manage the booking system but we understand that all those booked have been sent a message by DHSC asking them to go to Abercynon where they will be tested. We have also sent one of our team to Clydach to redirect people to Abercynon.\"", "The man's lawyers told the High Court his parents \"nurtured his dependency\"\n\nA 41-year-old man has failed in a legal bid to force his wealthy parents to continue financially supporting him.\n\nA qualified solicitor with mental health disabilities, the man said his parents \"nurtured his dependency\" on them but reduced support as his relationship with them deteriorated.\n\nHis lawyers said the judge had powers to order parents to provide support based on laws relating to marriage and children.\n\nBut the judge ruled he had \"no case\".\n\nSir James Munby said in a ruling following a remote family court hearing that the claim was \"most unusual\" and as far as he knew \"unprecedented\".\n\nNeither of the parties was named, but the judge said the man lived in London and his parents in Dubai.\n\nAlthough the man has a degree in modern history, is a qualified solicitor and has a master's degree in taxation, Sir James said he has \"various difficulties and mental health disabilities\" and has been unemployed since 2011.\n\nHis parents have supported him, allowing him to live in a flat in central London that they own, and until recently paying the utility bills.\n\nBut the judge said: \"The relationship between the applicant and his parents, in particular, it would appear, his father, has deteriorated and the financial support they are prepared to offer has significantly reduced.\"\n\nThe case appeared to be \"unprecedented\", Sir James Munby said\n\nThe man's lawyer, Tim Amos, said his parents are \"very wealthy\" and could comfortably pay any support the court might reasonably order.\n\nMr Amos characterised the parents as having \"nurtured his dependency on them for the last 20 years or so\" and now \"seek to cast that dependency onto the state\".\n\nLawyers for the parents disputed this account.\n\nSir James dismissed the case on legal grounds, saying the court had no jurisdiction to grant his claims under the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, the Children Act 1989, or under human rights law.\n\nThe man's lawyer had argued that the provisions in these laws allowing the court to order payments to support young children could also apply to adult children - if they were undergoing education and training, or if they had special circumstances such as a disability.\n\nBut the judge pointed out that these provisions only applied when a court order for financial support has already been made when the child is young, and when the parents are not living with each other - which was not the case for this man.\n\nHe said the law was clear that an adult child \"should not be able to take his parents to court to obtain finance\".\n• None Is this the end of the bank of mum and dad?", "Elvington Airfield, pictured in 2017, is a former RAF base near York\n\nThe fatal accident occurred at Elvington Airfield, a former RAF base near York, governing body Motorsport UK said.\n\nIt said the driver's family had been informed and an investigation into the circumstances had begun.\n\nNorth Yorkshire Police said it was called to reports of a \"serious collision\" at the scene shortly after 16:30 BST.\n\nElvington was an RAF station until 1992, and has become a popular motorsports venue since entering private ownership.\n\nIt has hosted dozens of world record attempts, and is also used as a filming location.\n\nOn Sunday, Jason Liversidge, who has motor neurone disease, set a world speed record in his custom-made electric wheelchair.\n\nIn 2006, Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond was involved in a near-fatal crash at Elvington.\n\nHe suffered serious brain injuries when his jet-powered car crashed at almost 300mph, but made a full recovery.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The plug in question had a design flaw, found Which?\n\nA smart plug for sale on Amazon poses a fire risk and people should immediately stop using it, an investigation by consumer watchdog Which? suggests.\n\nAmazon said it had removed the Hictkon smart plug with dual USB ports from sale, pending investigation.\n\nIts live connection was too close to an energy-monitoring chip, Which? found.\n\nAnd this could cause an electrical discharge between two electrodes, posing a fire risk particularly in homes with older wiring.\n\nThe investigators also said the product's CE mark, normally associated with having passed rigorous European safety standards, was misleading.\n\nSome Chinese companies use a similar CE mark to designate \"China export\".\n\nOthers simply fake the safety mark because there is no central database to check whether it has been verified and it can be self-declared by companies.\n\n\"Companies get away with it until they don't,\" said Clever Compliance chief executive Max Stralin.\n\n\"The same issue arose with the burning hoverboards back in 2015.\"\n\nAmazon said customers concerned about purchases should contact its customer-service team.\n\n\"We monitor the products sold in our stores for product-safety concerns,\" it said.\n\n\"When appropriate, we remove a product from the store, reach out to sellers, manufacturers and government agencies for additional information or take other actions.\"\n\nBut Which? Computing editor Kate Bevan said: \"Too often we've seen dangerous products being sold on online marketplaces from unknown brands - in many cases originating from China's electronics capital, Shenzhen - that appear to have little accountability and are virtually impossible to contact.\n\n\"This raises big concerns around safety checks and monitoring carried out by online marketplaces like Amazon.\n\n\"Currently, consumers face a lottery regarding the safety of the products they buy from online marketplaces and whether they meet required safety standards in the UK.\n\n\"That's why it's vitally important that the government gives online marketplaces more legal responsibility for preventing unsafe products from being sold on their sites.\"\n\nShe called for government legislation and an \"enforcement body with teeth\" to crack down on rogue devices.\n\nHictkon products, which include muscle massagers, ultraviolet lamps, touchscreen monitors and Hallow-e'en masks, are available only on Amazon, according to Which?\n\nMany of the top 10,000 UK sellers on online marketplaces were also based in China, it said:\n\nBut Amazon allows some sellers to ship products to its UK-based fulfilment centres, so they are packed and distributed by it, rather than directly from China.", "The Gender Identity Service is based at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust\n\nDoctors at a child gender clinic raised concerns about the use of puberty blockers 15 years ago - an issue that was also discussed by staff last year.\n\nAn internal review conducted in 2005, obtained by BBC Newsnight, says some clinicians felt pressured to refer patients for the treatment too quickly.\n\nStaff at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) raised serious safeguarding issues last year.\n\nThe Trust which runs the clinic said the report was \"no longer relevant\".\n\nGIDS, which is run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, is a specialised unit for young people who have difficulties with their gender identity.\n\nIn 2005, the Trust's then medical director, adult psychiatrist Dr David Taylor, conducted a review into the service - then called the Gender Identity Development Unit.\n\nHe reported that colleagues at the Trust were working hard to provide good care for patients, but highlighted concerns about some aspects of their treatment.\n\nThe document details concerns raised by some clinicians at that time about alleged pressure on staff to refer patients for treatment with puberty blockers, a lack of a robust evidence base underpinning this treatment, and the apparently troubled backgrounds of some young people referred. These included past sexual abuse and trauma.\n\nNewsnight obtained the 2005 review via the Freedom of Information Act, a move which the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust resisted. It argued disclosure of the document would \"adversely impact on the Trust's ability to provide effective and safe services to its patients\".\n\nBut the Information Commissioner's Office ruled that the document's publication was in the public interest.\n\nIn his 2005 report Dr Taylor, who left in 2011 after 30 years, made a series of recommendations for improvements to the service - which in 2005 was much smaller, receiving tens of referrals per year rather than thousands.\n\nDr Taylor called for the service to monitor patients after leaving, for more research into this area of healthcare, and for staff to be supported if faced with pressure to refer for treatments when they thought it was inappropriate.\n\nIn his report, which was published in 2006, he said puberty blockers might be the best course of action for some, but added that in his view young people needed a period of explorative therapy first.\n\nThe document also detailed concerns from some staff about the speed at which some young people were being referred for treatment with puberty blockers.\n\nThese drugs stop a young person's body developing, with the aim of helping to relieve gender dysphoria - distress caused when a person's gender identity does not match their biological sex. The NHS now recognises that little is known about their long term side effects.\n\nConcerns about the use of puberty blockers were subsequently raised by other staff in the internal 2019 review of the service.\n\nIt is unclear why some recommendations made in 2005 were not implemented, but Dr Taylor told Newsnight there may be several reasons, and said the demand for the service was \"greater than the capacity of the unit to cope.\"\n\nSociety's shifting attitudes towards gender identity, and the underfunding of other adolescent mental health services are also important, he told the BBC.\n\nLast month the NHS announced an independent review into gender identity services for young people.\n\nIn a statement the Trust said: \"This report from 2006 is not relevant to the circumstances and issues faced by the GIDS service today. The service had been nationally commissioned since 2009, with NHS England (NHSE) taking responsibility for it in 2013. The service specifications were reviewed in 2016 and are currently under review again, as scheduled.\n\n\"Some of the young people we see in the service experience difficulties which may or may not be related to gender dysphoria. GIDS is a specialist service and relies on an integrated care model in which it works closely with local CAMHS to support ongoing difficulties.\n\n\"It is important to recognise that not all co-occurring difficulties will be resolved by accessing specialist psychosocial exploration of gender identity and related issues.\"\n\nThe Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust welcomed the NHS review of gender services, to be conducted by Dr Hilary Cass, the former President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.\n\n\"We welcome this and hope this will lead to better and quicker access to support for these young people.\"", "Top row (left to right): Alison Howe, Martyn Hett, Lisa Lees, Courtney Boyle, Eilidh MacLeod, Elaine McIver, Georgina Callander, Jane Tweddle - Middle row (left to right): John Atkinson, Kelly Brewster, Liam Curry, Chloe Rutherford, Marcin Klis, Angelika Klis, Megan Hurley, Michelle Kiss - Bottom row (left to right): Nell Jones, Olivia Campbell-Hardy, Philip Tron, Saffie-Rose Roussos, Sorrell Leczkowski, Wendy Fawell\n\nThe Manchester Arena suicide bomber was missed by seconds by a police patrol, the inquiry into the bombing heard.\n\nSalman Abedi, dressed in black and bent over by the weight of the home-made bomb in a large rucksack, later made his way to the foyer where he detonated the explosive, killing 22 people.\n\nThe inquiry has heard of \"missed opportunities\" prior to the attack.\n\nPolice personnel patrolling Manchester Arena were also absent from patrol for more than two hours, the inquiry heard.\n\nFour British Transport Police (BTP) operatives were present on the night of the attack, one PC and three PCSOs, patrolling in pairs, the hearing in Manchester was told.\n\nIt heard PC Jessica Bullough and PCSO Mark Renshaw took a break at about 19:30 BST, leaving Manchester Arena to buy food, as the Ariana Grande concert began on 22 May 2017.\n\nThey returned 45 minutes later and resumed patrolling two hours and 10 minutes after they first departed to buy food, the inquiry heard.\n\nTwenty-two people were killed and hundreds more injured in the explosion\n\nTwo more PCSOs, Jon Morrey and Lewis Brown, took an hour's break from 21:15.\n\nBetween 21:15 and 21:37, it appeared no BTP officer was patrolling the railway station, when Abedi took up his position at 21:33 in the foyer of the venue, the inquiry heard.\n\nEarlier, the two PCSOs had conducted a routine check on toilets at Victoria Station at 20:49, less than a minute after Abedi left there.\n\nBoth police and Showsec security workers later received reports of suspicions from members of the public about Abedi, the inquiry was told.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West spoke in a debate in the House of Commons before returning unwell back to Scotland\n\nScotland's first minister says the actions of an SNP MP who travelled to Westminster despite experiencing Covid symptoms are \"utterly indefensible\".\n\nMargaret Ferrier said she made the journey because she was feeling \"much better\" - but also returned home after getting a positive test result.\n\nShe is facing calls to resign from opponents and SNP politicians, after she was suspended by the party.\n\nNicola Sturgeon tweeted her support for the decision to suspend the MP.\n\nShe said: \"This is utterly indefensible. It's hard to express just how angry I feel on behalf of people across the country making hard sacrifices every day to help beat Covid.\n\n\"The rules apply to everyone and they're in place to keep people safe. @Ianblackford_MP is right to suspend the whip.\"\n\nGlasgow East MP David Linden, one of Ms Ferrier's former SNP colleagues, told BBC Question Time she \"should resign\" as an MP.\n\nHis fellow SNP MPs, Kirsty Blackman and Stephen Flynn, have also called for her to step down.\n\nMeanwhile, Ruth Davidson, former Scottish Conservative leader, told BBC Newsnight: \"She shouldn't be an MP at all. That's on her and if she had a shred of decency she would [resign],\" she said.\n\nTaking public transport after testing positive amounted to an \"absolutely reckless endangerment of person and of life\", she added.\n\nMs Ferrier said she took a coronavirus test on Saturday after experiencing \"mild symptoms\", but travelled to London on Monday as she felt better.\n\nThe MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West spoke in the coronavirus debate in the House of Commons on Monday, and said she received her positive test result that evening.\n\nShe then took a train back to Scotland on Tuesday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMs Ferrier said she had informed the police and that she deeply regretted her actions.\n\n\"I travelled home by train on Tuesday morning without seeking advice. This was also wrong and I am sorry,\" she said.\n\n\"I have been self-isolating at home ever since.\"\n\nPolice Scotland confirmed they had been contacted by Ms Ferrier, saying officers were \"looking into the circumstances\" and liaising with the Metropolitan Police Service.\n\nThe SNP's Westminster leader Ian Blackford said he had spoken to Ms Ferrier, who accepted that what she had done was wrong.\n\nHe said: \"Margaret will be referring herself to the parliamentary standards commissioner as well as the police. I am tonight suspending the whip from Margaret.\"\n\nDave Penman, general secretary of the FDA union, which represents some Commons staff, said it was \"such a deliberate and reckless act\".\n\nHe told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"It's a complete disregard for others. Coronavirus is like any other health and safety issue in the workplace - we all have obligations to other people and anyone who recklessly endangers other people has to face consequences.\"\n\nWhen someone tests positive for coronavirus they normally attract sympathy and concern.\n\nBut that's in extremely short supply for Margaret Ferrier after she admitted breaking Covid self-isolation rules.\n\nShe may have apologised for attending parliament and making lengthy journeys by public transport with coronavirus but she has not offered an explanation.\n\nHer behaviour is far more serious than the lockdown travel breach that cost Catherine Calderwood her job as Scotland's chief medical officer.\n\nIt is also more serious than the lockdown travels of the prime minister's adviser, Dominic Cummings, who Mrs Ferrier called on to resign.\n\nIt is no surprise then that the Conservatives are demanding the MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West stands down from Parliament.\n\nShe has already been suspended by the SNP and the party leader, Nicola Sturgeon, has described her behaviour as \"utterly indefensible\".\n\nHouse of Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle wrote to MPs on Thursday evening to say he was informed after Ms Ferrier told the SNP whip on Wednesday afternoon that she had tested positive for Covid-19.\n\n\"The House authorities immediately took all necessary steps in line with their legal obligations and PHE [Public Health England] Guidance,\" he wrote.\n\n\"On the basis of the information supplied to the contact tracing system, only one individual has been identified as a close contact in relation to this case and is now self-isolating.\"\n\nA House of Commons spokesperson said the House's priority was to ensure the safety of those working on the estate.\n\nThe statement added: \"We have closely followed public health guidance on the action to take following a confirmed case of Covid on site.\n\n\"Parliament has a dedicated team to support the test and trace teams across the UK, acting as a central point of contact in the event of any suspected or confirmed cases, where an individual has been working on the estate.\"\n\n\"She has put passengers, rail staff, fellow MPs, Commons staff and many others at unacceptable risk,\" he said.\n\n\"To breach the rules twice is simply unforgivable, and has undermined all the sacrifices made by her constituents.\"\n\nTrain drivers union Aslef described her actions as \"both dangerous and disgraceful\".\n\nMs Ferrier was one of the MPs who called on the prime minister's adviser Dominic Cummings to resign in the wake of the controversy over his visit to the North East of England during lockdown.\n\nAt the time, she said his actions had \"undermined the sacrifices that we have all been making\" and described his position as \"untenable\".", "Loss of a sense of smell may be a more reliable indicator of Covid-19 than cough or fever, research suggests.\n\nA study by University College London (UCL) of 590 people who lost their sense of smell or taste earlier in the year found 80% had coronavirus antibodies.\n\nOf those people with antibodies, 40% had no other symptoms.\n\nThe research only looked at people with mild symptoms, however.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid symptoms: What are they and how long should I self-isolate for?\n\nEvidence that loss of smell and taste could be signs of coronavirus began to emerge from about April, and they were added to the official list of symptoms in mid-May.\n\nCurrent guidance states anyone who experiences a loss of, or change to their sense of smell or taste should self-isolate and apply for a test.\n\nBut lead author of the UCL study, Prof Rachel Batterham, says cough and fever are still seen by many as the main symptoms to look out for.\n\nShe recruited people between 23 April and 14 May by sending out texts via four GP surgeries in London, enrolling those who reported losing their smell or taste in the previous four weeks.\n\nAll of these participants were tested for antibodies, and four out of five were positive, suggesting a previous Covid-19 infection.\n\nThe study was constrained by the fact that all its participants had mild symptoms, including or limited to a loss of smell or taste, so they may not be representative of all Covid patients.\n\nBut its findings emphasise the importance of people looking out for any change to their sense of smell or taste, and self-isolating if they realise they can't smell \"everyday\" items like perfume, bleach, toothpaste, or coffee, Prof Batterham said.\n\nWhile not all coronavirus patients will necessarily lose their sense of smell, if you do lose your sense of smell it is highly likely to be coronavirus, this research seems to suggest.\n\nThe thing to look out for is a loss of smell without having a blocked or runny nose, Prof Batterham explained.\n\nIt's thought loss of smell happens with Covid-19 because the virus invades the cells found at the back of the nose, throat and on the tongue.\n\nThis is distinct from the experience of having a cold where smell and taste might be altered because a person's airways are blocked.\n\nKing's College London researchers, who run the Covid Symptom Study app, previously estimated 60% of people with coronavirus lost their sense of smell or taste.\n\nAlthough this is considered a milder symptom and unlikely to land someone in hospital, Prof Batterham points out the potential dangers of losing your sense of smell including not being able to detect smoke, leaking gas or food that has gone off.\n\nIf suffered longer term, it can also have a significant impact on people's quality of life.\n\nThousands of people online have reported worrying experiences including causing fires and not being able to smell the smoke. Some have noticed constantly smelling a rancid \"garbage\" odour or experiencing a metallic taste, while others have found themselves unable to taste food for months after being clear of the virus.\n\nThe group of people who only lose their smell without experiencing any other symptoms may also pose the \"greatest risk\" to others since they may feel generally well and carry on going about their daily lives, Prof Batterham pointed out.\n\nAlthough the two often go together, loss of or change to smell was more common than loss of taste among people who have recovered from coronavirus, she said.\n\nHer research took place at a time when loss of smell and taste were not recognised symptoms of the virus.\n\nHow has coronavirus affected you? How have current restrictions affected you? Emailhaveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nOr use this form to get in touch:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your comment or send it via email to HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any comment you send in.", "Emma and her husband James were devastated that they could not be together when they aborted their baby for medical reasons\n\nA woman who had a termination alone because of Covid restrictions said no-one else should have to go through the \"devastating\" experience.\n\nEmma Kemsley, from Saffron Walden, was told at a scan her baby boy was very unlikely to survive outside the womb.\n\nHer husband James was not allowed to attend the scan or the termination, leaving them \"heartbroken\".\n\nThe Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) said it hoped hospitals could be flexible.\n\nRestrictions have recently been lifted on many maternity wards to allow partners to attend scans and during labour, but this would not always include terminations.\n\nMrs Kemsley, who has endometriosis, said she was overjoyed to fall pregnant after six rounds of IVF and was told at her 12-week scan the baby was healthy.\n\nHowever, at an 18-week scan at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, in May, she found out his bladder was blocked and his lungs, kidneys and heart were not developing properly.\n\nEmma and James had six rounds of IVF to conceive their baby boy\n\nShe said the sonographer said her son had very little chance of survival outside the womb and gave her the number for an abortion clinic, telling her she needed to arrange a termination herself.\n\nMrs Kemsley, 33, who is a magazine editor, said: \"The hospital basically washed their hands of me. They were so clinical in their language and just told me to sort it out myself.\n\n\"I was completely alone and my husband James was in the car park. I had to break the news to him over speakerphone.\"\n\nMrs Kemsley struggled to find a clinic because the procedure was complicated by her endometriosis and because she was so far on in the pregnancy.\n\nShe made a complaint to Addenbrooke's and they eventually helped her find a specialist hospital where she could have the surgery.\n\n\"By this time, I was 20 weeks pregnant. It was just so scary and I felt so alone.\n\n\"James was desperate to support me but was forced to sit in the car park again.\n\n\"It was his baby too, he deserved to be there.\"\n\nJames said he was desperate to support his wife but could only watch from the sidelines\n\nMr Kemsley, 37, works as a personal development coach and has been helping men through similar experiences.\n\nHe said: \"No one should have to hear about the loss of their child over speakerphone. I should have been by my wife's side, supporting her, through every step of the process.\"\n\nAmanda Rowley, head of midwifery at Addenbrooke's, said the hospital had aimed to handle the restrictions in \"as sensitive and compassionate way as possible\".\n\nShe said: \"We are deeply sorry if the care provided fell below the high standards that we set ourselves.\"\n\nNHS England has recently written to hospitals asking them to allow partners to attend maternity units, after a campaign called for bans to be lifted.\n\nHowever, restrictions remain in place in most hospitals for terminations, in line with the national guidance on inpatient visitors.\n\nA spokesperson for RCOG said it had been an \"incredibly difficult\" time for women and their partners.\n\n\"Terminating a pregnancy because of a fetal condition can be a difficult experience, especially if women are having the procedure alone,\" they said.\n\n\"We very much hope trusts and boards are able to be flexible and support women and their partners at this time.\"\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n• None James Kemsley - Same You Different Perspective The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "There has been a 90% rise in Covid-19 patients in intensive care in the past week\n\nDetails of a 60% rise in both hospital admissions and patients in beds with Covid-19 in Wales over the past week are shown in latest official figures.\n\nIt is being led by a dramatic rise in coronavirus patients in the Cwm Taf Morgannwg area, according to NHS Wales.\n\nThere were 229 Covid-19 patients in the health board's hospitals, the highest numbers since the end of May.\n\nMeanwhile, two more deaths were confirmed due to an outbreak inside Royal Glamorgan Hospital.\n\nIt takes the total of deaths to 10 due to infections caught inside the hospital near Llantrisant, Rhondda Cynon Taf. The number of linked cases has now risen to 89, after 60 were reported on Wednesday.\n\nCwm Taf Morgannwg health board also said it now had 22 confirmed cases of Covid-19 at Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil.\n\n\"We have one ward closed and strict infection prevention and control procedures are being followed\", said a spokesman. \"We have also increased our testing in the hospital.\"\n\nDirector of public health Dr Kelechi Nnoaham added: \"The number of cases at Prince Charles Hospital are unlinked to the cases at Royal Glamorgan Hospital.\n\n\"Temporary restrictions to services at the Royal Glamorgan hospital will remain in place until we are absolutely sure that we have contained the spread of the virus on the site.\n\n\"The opening of our field hospital next week will create capacity at the hospital for patients who need the most specialist care, and enable others to relocate to a Covid-free setting.\"\n\nThere were 550 Covid patients in hospital beds in Wales on Tuesday, although this is 40% of the levels at the pandemic's peak.\n\nNHS Wales chief executive Dr Andrew Goodall outlined the rises to Senedd members on Wednesday, but the weekly figures give further detail.\n\nThe 229 Cwm Taf Morgannwg patients make up 41% of all Covid-19 hospital patients across Wales.\n\nThey also make up a third of all hospital admissions, while neighbouring Aneurin Bevan is providing another fifth.\n\nDuring a period when Covid-19 is resurging - obviously there's a lot of focus on the rising numbers of cases.\n\nBut case rates fluctuate depending on how much testing is happening and where.\n\nArguably, a more accurate picture of the situation comes from the data on how many people are in hospital with confirmed or suspected Covid-19.\n\nThis measure often lags behind the rising number of cases as it takes a period of time, usually from when someone gets exposed to developing symptoms and then becoming ill.\n\nAlthough it's worth remembering not everybody infected will get ill. But the picture that emerges from today's figures is that the pressure on the NHS is building yet again, with the numbers of patients with coronavirus in hospital wards and in intensive care rising sharply - and now at their highest levels since June.\n\nIt's also striking the proportion of all Covid-19 patients in Welsh hospitals who are from the Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board area.\n\nThis reflects the high rates in communities, like Rhondda Cynon Taf, and the serious outbreak at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital.", "Cases are highest in the North West, North East and Yorkshire and The Humber\n\nCoronavirus cases in England have \"increased rapidly\", data shows, as ministers grapple with what to do next.\n\nEstimates suggest between one-in-170 and one-in-240 people you meet in the street has the virus.\n\nBoth current cases, and the speed at which they are increasing, are much higher in the north of England than the national average.\n\nScientific advisers warn hospital admissions are \"very close\" to levels in early March.\n\nThe official government statistics do not capture the full pattern of the number of people infected.\n\nMeanwhile, the largest study of coronavirus, by Imperial College London, has also reported its analysis of 175,000 people, with the last samples taken on Monday.\n\nAcross England, it says cases are continuing to increase, but not as aggressively as at the beginning of September.\n\nBut this masks a stark regional picture - with cases doubling around twice as fast in the North West, Yorkshire and the West Midlands compared to the whole of England.\n\nIt also shows there has been an eight-fold increase in cases in people over 65 as the epidemic surge that started in younger age groups bleeds into the rest of the population.\n\nProf Steven Riley, from Imperial, said: \"I think it's clear that the prevalence is still increasing\" and that if new, tougher measures were needed in northern England, then they should come in \"sooner rather than later\".\n\nThe rise in cases and people being admitted to hospital is causing mounting political concern. New rules are expected to be announced on Monday and come into force on Wednesday.\n\nThe precise details are still being debated, but measures including closing pubs and restaurants, or a ban on overnight stays, are on the table.\n\nData presented to MPs by England's Chief Medical Officer, Prof Chris Whitty, appears to put the hospitality sector in the firing line, given that parts of society such as schools and universities are being kept open.\n\nA slide shown at the meeting lists hospitality as the most frequent setting for coronavirus exposure.\n\nIt says pubs, restaurants and the hospitality sector as a whole are a major area where people testing positive for the virus have been mixing.\n\nGillian Keegan, minister for skills and apprenticeships, said the government had to act to stem the rise in cases.\n\n\"This is serious - it is getting out of control, and we have to do something to bring it back under control,\" she said.\n\nThe Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) says it is \"almost certain that the epidemic continues to grow exponentially across the country and is confident that the transmission is not slowing\".\n\nSir Mark Walport, a member of Sage, told the BBC: \"On the 19 March, just before the first set of widespread restrictions, hospital admissions were 586 in England and on the 6 October they were 524.\n\n\"So we are very close to the situation at the beginning of March.\"\n\nHospital admissions are around one fifth of the level at the peak in spring, but are currently doubling every fortnight.\n\nSir Jeremy Farrar, another Sage member and director of the Wellcome Trust, says: \"We are back to choices faced in the early March... the longer the decisions are delayed, the harder and more draconian are the interventions needed to change trajectory of [the] epidemic.\"", "Tory Lanez has been charged with shooting Megan Thee Stallion.\n\nThe rapper - real name Daystar Peterson - is accused of shooting Megan several times at her feet and wounding her.\n\nAccording to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, it happened after the pair got into an argument whilst riding in an SUV in the Hollywood Hills on 12 July.\n\nTory Lanez, who's 28, is also charged with carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle.\n\nIf convicted the Canadian artist faces up to 23 years in prison.\n\nHe's denied the charges - but only in music he's released since the incident.\n\nCourt hearings will begin on October 13 at the Foltz Criminal Justice Centre in Los Angeles.\n\nRapper Tory Lanez hasn't spoken out about the alleged shooting\n\nAt first Megan, whose real name is Megan Jovon Ruth Pete, claimed she was cut by glass, but she later posted on Instagram that she had been shot by Tory.\n\nThe 24-year-old also claimed she was scared police would start shooting if she said a gun was involved.\n\n\"I didn't tell the police nothing, because I didn't want us to get in no more trouble than we was about to get in.\"\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by theestallion This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSince the incident, Megan accused Tory's team of spreading misinformation online.\n\n\"Stop acting like black women is aggressive when all they be doing is speaking the... facts, and you... can't handle it,\" she said.\n\nShe spoke about being called a \"snitch\" online - and also disputed claims that she hit Tory Lanez before the shooting.\n\nTory Lanez hasn't spoken about the incident directly but released an album Daystar last month with many of the tracks addressing the incident.\n\n\"Megan people tryna frame me,\" he raps on the opening track, Money Over Fallout.\n\n\"Girl, you had the nerve to write that statement on that affidavit, knowing I ain't do it but I'm coming at my truest.\"\n\nIn the same song, he casts doubt on whether she was shot at all, asking: \"How you get shot in your foot, don't hit no bones or tendons?\"\n\nOn another track he has a dig at JoJo who removed a collaboration from her album following the incident.\n\nListen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe way in which police restrained a mentally ill man contributed to his death in custody, an inquest jury has found.\n\nKevin Clarke, who had schizophrenia, was surrounded and restrained by officers in a field in March 2018.\n\nHe told officers who handcuffed him twice that he \"couldn't breathe\".\n\nJurors at Southwark Coroner's Court deliberated for five days after hearing evidence from police officers and paramedics for over a month.\n\nThe inquest had heard that the 35-year-old told officers \"I'm going to die\" as he was put into handcuffs, due to his size, but was \"ignored\" and then lost consciousness as he was taken to an ambulance.\n\nReturning a narrative conclusion, the jury concluded that the decision to use restraints on Mr Clarke was \"inappropriate\".\n\nThe jury said the use of restraints \"probably more than minimally or trivially\" contributed to his death.\n\n\"It is highly likely that at least one officer heard Mr Clarke say 'I can't breathe' on one of the occasions he repeated it,\" they added.\n\n\"Despite this, no action was taken other than one officer saying 'you've got to breathe, you've got to breathe, breathe, deep breaths'.\n\n\"Failure to remove restraints at this point was contrary to guidance and training.\"\n\nKevin Clarke was handcuffed twice when he collapsed\n\nMr Clarke's mother, Wendy Clarke, told the BBC sitting through the whole inquest was \"painful, very painful to see a lack of urgency\".\n\n\"Kevin should have been alive today but there was no urgency in his care,\" she said.\n\n\"All that he needed was to have been taken from where he was to a place of safety, and the ambulance service let him down, the police let him down and the home let him down.\"\n\nHis sister Tellecia Strachen said the inquest had been \"distressing\".\n\n\"We haven't been able to grieve probably because we're constantly reminded of what's happened,\" she said.\n\n\"They knew it was an emergency, there was no sense urgency and there were so many missed chances at every step, at every level, by all the interested parties.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Tellecia Strachen, Kevin Clarke's sister: \"There must not be another George Floyd\"\n\nMr Clarke had been living at the Jigsaw Project, a residential support service, for about two years up until his death in hospital.\n\nHe had been seen by officers earlier that day in Lewisham, but was not sectioned despite concerns from staff at Jigsaw.\n\nJurors found that the communications between police and staff at Mr Clarke's residential support service were insufficient.\n\nBut they said the insufficiency did not contribute to his death.\n\nBodyworn footage played in the inquest showed the moment Mr Clarke was restrained by officers and put in two sets of handcuffs.\n\nVarious clips showed officers leading Mr Clarke away from the field towards an ambulance - but he passed out and never regained consciousness.\n\nThe London Ambulance Service has already admitted its crew failed to conduct a \"complete clinical assessment\" of Mr Clarke on arrival.\n\nThis amounted to a \"failure to provide basic medical care\", which the jury said possibly contributed to his death.\n\nThe cause of his death was given as \"acute behavioural disturbance, in a relapse of schizophrenia, leading to exhaustion and cardiac arrest, contributed to by restraint, struggle and being walked\".\n\nDuring the inquest a mural of Kevin Clarke was created outside Lewisham Police Station\n\nReacting to the jury's decision, the Met Police's Commander Bas Javid apologised to Mr Clarke's family \"for the failings identified by the jury\".\n\n\"The officers who attended that day found themselves in a very difficult situation dealing with a man undergoing a mental health crisis who clearly needed urgent medical care,\" he said.\n\nHe said they made a rapid assessment and within 90 seconds had called for an ambulance.\n\n\"The jury has made several observations about how those officers dealt with Mr Clarke,\" he added.\n\n\"Now we need to carefully consider those observations.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Businesses groups have largely welcomed a new wage support for workers at firms forced to close by Covid restrictions.\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak has said the state will cover two-thirds of staff wages at closed workplaces, and firms in England can get grants of up to £3,000 per month.\n\nThe subsidy is an extension to the Job Support Scheme announced last month.\n\nThe CBI business lobby group said it \"should cushion the blow for the most affected and keep more people in work\".\n\n\"But many firms, including pubs and restaurants, will still be hugely disappointed if they have to close their doors again after doing so much to keep customers and staff safe,\" added CBI boss Dame Carolyn Fairbairn.\n\nThe business group additionally called for a \"consistent and open strategy for living with Covid-19 through the autumn and winter\".\n\nAn update on restrictions, which could see pubs and restaurants shut in the worst-affected areas, is expected on Monday.\n\nUK Hospitality, an industry body representing pubs, restaurants and bars, also welcomed the government support for wage bills, but said more help was needed for companies still trading under restrictions.\n\n\"Support for nightclubs and other businesses left in limbo, still unable to reopen, is very welcome. It will help save jobs in a sector that would be sorely missed it were allowed to die,\" said UK Hospitality chief executive Kate Nicholls.\n\n\"However, worryingly, it does nothing to address the issues faced by sector businesses operating well below capacity due to restrictions and consumers avoiding travel and struggling to keep their workforce employed\".\n\nThe boss of London pub company Young's said pubs and restaurants should be congratulated by the government for creating safe environments for patrons, not seen as a problem whose activities should be restricted.\n\nChief executive Patrick Dardis said: \"Since reopening, we have had 2.7 million people through our doors, but just nine confirmed Covid cases. That's an infection rate of just 0.00000328%.\n\n\"Our sector has spent hundreds of millions in ensuring it is Covid safe and secure for staff and customers alike.\"\n\nThe head chef at Newcastle field-to-fork restaurant Bistro forty six, Max Gott, said the restrictions already in place mean he can only sit 12 people per night instead of 30.\n\nIf a local lockdown was imposed, Mr Gott said the company would have to decide whether it was worth taking the grants, shut up shop and furlough staff while \"trying not to haemorrhage too much money while we shut, or try and operate as a takeaway and try and make some money and break even, although that's unlikely\".\n\nHe said it would be better for staff if his restaurant could access grants and the subsidy while operating as a take-away.\n\n\"Some of the staff won't be able to live on two-thirds wages, we've got mortgages to pay,\" Mr Gott added.\n\nSee-sawing between opening and closing the restaurant, based on customer reactions to restrictions, came with added costs each time, he said.\n\n\"We've got bills coming in all the time - we've got stock that we'll lose - if we had to shut we've got £300 of stock that we'd put in the bin or try to give away or something so it all adds up and each time we get told to shut and then open it's a cost\".\n\nMany businesses could be forced to close if lockdown restrictions are tightened\n\nFederation of Small Businesses boss Mike Cherry said the extra help for closed businesses would be \"welcomed by thousands of small businesses\".\n\n\"Evolving the Job Support Scheme to provide two-thirds of total salary costs together with enhancing existing cash grants for those faced with this scenario are both game-changers, and it's welcome to see them adopted today.\n\n\"We will work with government on clarity on where and when any new restrictions will apply, and clear, accessible small-business-friendly guidance to make sure this help gets to those facing a lockdown of their business premises.\"\n\nAlthough it said \"a lockdown with support for staff wages is better than a lockdown without any support,\" the Belfast Chamber of Trade and Commerce warned that if businesses were forced to close it was not just staff who lost money.\n\n\"Companies who supply the food and drink we consume in bars, pubs, cafes and restaurants will feel the consequences too,\" said Belfast Chamber chief executive Simon Hamilton.\n\n\"Similarly, sectors which aren't formally forced to close could well find that their custom drops because of wider lockdown restrictions, thus impacting on their viability too.\"", "Only a few hundred North Atlantic right whales remain\n\nMore than 350 scientists and conservationists from 40 countries have signed a letter calling for global action to protect whales, dolphins and porpoises from extinction.\n\nThey say more than half of all species are of conservation concern, with two on the \"knife-edge\" of extinction.\n\nLack of action over polluted and over-exploited seas means that many will be declared extinct within our lifetimes, the letter says.\n\nEven large iconic whales are not safe.\n\n\"Let this be a historic moment when realising that whales are in danger sparks a powerful wave of action from everyone: regulators, scientists, politicians and the public to save our oceans,\" said Mark Simmonds.\n\nThe visiting research fellow at the University of Bristol, UK, and senior marine scientist with Humane Society International, has coordinated the letter, which has been signed by experts across the world.\n\n\"Save the whales\" was a familiar green slogan in the 1970s and 1980s, part of a movement that helped bring an end to commercial whaling.\n\nWhile stricken populations in most parts of the world have had a chance to recover from organised hunting, they are now facing myriad threats from human actions, including plastic pollution, loss of habitat and prey, climate change and collisions with ships.\n\nBy far the biggest threat is becoming accidently captured in fishing equipment and nets, which kills an estimated 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises a year.\n\nRally in Mexico to draw attention to the vaquita\n\nHundreds of scientists have expressed the same concern - that we are moving closer to a number of preventable extinctions. And unless we act now, future generations will be denied the chance to experience these intelligent social and inspiring creatures.\n\nThey point to the decline of the North Atlantic right whale, of which only a few hundred individuals remain, and the vaquita, a porpoise found in the Gulf of California, which may be down to the last 10 of its kind.\n\nAnd they say it is almost inevitable that these two species will follow the Chinese river dolphin down the path to extinction. The dolphin, also known as the baiji, was once a common sight in the Yangtze River but is now thought to have died out.\n\nThe letter, which has been signed by experts in the UK, US, Mexico, South Africa and Brazil, among others, points out that these \"dramatic\" declines could have been avoided, but that the political will has been lacking.\n\nDr Susan Lieberman of the Wildlife Conservation Society said she signed the letter to help scientists raise these issues more widely.\n\n\"It is critical that governments develop, fund, and implement additional needed actions to better protect and save these iconic species - so they don't end going the way of the baiji,\" she told BBC News.\n\nThe scientists say that more than half of the 90 living species of whales, dolphins and porpoises, are of conservation concern, and the trend of acting \"too little, too late\" must end.\n\nThey are calling on countries with whales, dolphins and porpoises (cetaceans) in their waters to act to monitor threats and do more to protect them.\n\nSarah Dolman of Whale and Dolphin Conservation, UK, said accidental capture in fishing gear, known as bycatch, is an issue around UK waters, causing the deaths of thousands of cetaceans and other animals, including seals and birds, a year.\n\nThese include harbour porpoises and common dolphins, and increasing numbers of minke and humpback whales off the coast of Scotland.\n\nShe said entanglement in fishing nets was a \"horrible way to die\" with some animals surviving with broken teeth or beaks, or losing their young.\n\nShe told BBC News: \"We have a long way to go before we can be confident the fish we are eating is not causing bycatch of protected species like whales and dolphins.\"\n\nThe letter is part of a growing movement by scientists and conservationists to raise awareness of the threats faced by whales and their smaller relatives, the dolphins and porpoises.\n\nThe matter was discussed in September at a meeting of the scientific conservation committee of the International Whaling Commission, which has a core mission to prevent extinctions.\n\nMembers have set up an \"extinction initiative\" to work out how many extinctions we may be facing and what more we can do to prevent them.", "Pubs in Wales currently have to stop serving alcohol at 22:00\n\nPubs in Wales could close if coronavirus cases continue to rise, the health minister has warned.\n\nAll bars and restaurants across central Scotland have been closed following a surge in cases.\n\nVaughan Gething said the Welsh Government was considering the measure, but said it could mean \"significant unemployment\" unless there was financial support from Westminster.\n\nCurrently, pubs, cafes and restaurants in Wales stop serving alcohol at 22:00.\n\nMr Gething told BBC Radio Wales \"we are not yet at a point\" where widespread closures of bars was needed, but the situation was \"rapidly evolving\".\n\nThe man in charge of Public Health Wales' response to the pandemic, Dr Giri Shankar, has raised concerns over ongoing transmissions in pubs and bars\n\nFigures show there has been 33 cases linked to venues in the Garw Valley, Bridgend county, and cases have been linked to bars in Newport in recent weeks.\n\nRestrictions are to be further tightened in parts of England early next week, with the closure of bars and restaurants a possibility, the BBC has been told.\n\nIn Wales, the infection rate stands at 95.1 cases per 100,000 of the population, over the past seven days, with 2,999 people testing positive in the last week.\n\nOn Friday, Mr Gething said the infection rate would need to drip below 50 cases per 100,000 in order to avoid \"larger measures\" regionally or nationally.\n\nHe told BBC Radio Wales the situation was being reviewed every day, but the Welsh Government was \"considering\" closing pubs.\n\nNew rules in Scotland have been described as a \"death sentence\" for many pubs and restaurants\n\nBut, he said, the impact on people's livelihoods would be significant if the UK government did not give financial support.\n\n\"We also have to consider, if we are going to close a sector of the economy without support... then they are going to lose their jobs, they are going to lose their businesses, and there is a direct health impact that comes from significant unemployment,\" he said.\n\n\"We are not at the point where we need to have wholesale closures in the hospitality industry, but this is a rapidly evolving, highly infectious disease and the picture could be different on Sunday or Monday then the one we have today.\n\n\"I'm not itching to press a button, I'm looking to see what we can do to keep people alive, and to keep Wales safe.\"\n\nOwner of the Boar's Head Hotel in Carmarthen, William Hunter, said he did not think his business would be viable if there were any further changes to the rules.\n\n\"It's so worrying at the moment. We're more than 50% down - any more restrictions will push us that bit further which won't be viable,\" he said.\n\n\"We're at the stage where we're offering 50% off all food, four days a week - which is keeping us afloat.\"\n\nAt a daily coronavirus briefing, First Minister Mark Drakeford said: \"When I was talking to the chief constable of Gwent and others yesterday, the evidence on the ground in that part of Wales was that the numbers that are rising are not being caused by hospitality businesses.\"\n\nHe said the approach was to \"match the action to the source of the problem\".", "Olivier Max Caramin died in 2017 while working on a Queensland farm\n\nAn Australian employer has been fined over the death of a Belgian backpacker who collapsed from heat stress while working on a farm picking fruit.\n\nOlivier Max Caramin, 27, died in a Queensland hospital in November 2017 after just three days on the job.\n\nHis employer, Bradford Clark Rosten, pleaded guilty to breaking labour laws. He was fined A$65,000 (£36,000; $47,000) but avoided a conviction.\n\nAustralia's fruit-picking sector has faced much criticism over conditions.\n\nThe industry is often heavily staffed by overseas backpackers who can use it to extend their working holiday visa.\n\nMr Caramin had hoped do that by working on the farm in Ayr, a town in tropical northern Queensland.\n\nOn the day of his collapse, he had been picking pumpkins for hours in 35C heat with no shade.\n\nLocal media reported that Mr Caramin had told co-workers he was struggling, but they were told to keep picking to meet a quota.\n\nOn Friday, the Townsville Magistrates Court found Mr Rosten - who ran a labour-hire company - failed to provide proper safety training to his workers.\n\nMagistrate Ross Mack noted Mr Rosten's remorse and previously good record, but said \"complacency\" had contributed to Mr Caramin's death.\n\nAn earlier investigation by Queensland's workplace regulator found that workers had been provided with inadequate health information and ill-considered conditions.\n\nIn recent years, several other cases of backpacker exploitation, underpayment and abuse have come to light.\n\nIndustry representatives have argued such issues are not widespread, but critics say backpackers are vulnerable in the usually isolated, rural areas.\n\nIn 2017, the mother of British backpacker Mia Ayliffe-Chung - who was murdered in a Queensland hostel - called for Australian farm work to be better regulated. Rosie Ayliffe said an \"aggressive atmosphere\" had contributed to her daughter's death.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. 'I'm sitting in the cubicle where Mia died'\n\nA study in the same year found one in three backpackers working in Australia were being paid about half the minimum wage or less.\n\nFruit and vegetable farms have struggled this year due to the pandemic reducing the number of available pickers, especially from overseas. The sector is facing an estimated shortfall of 30,000 workers.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Celebrity cook Mary Berry and grime pioneer Dizzee Rascal have been honoured in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.\n\nBerry, who has earned the status of national treasure over a six-decade career, was \"overwhelmed\" at being made a dame for services to broadcasting, the culinary arts and charity.\n\nIt is \"such a huge honour\", she said.\n\nDizzee Rascal, real name Dylan Kwabena Mills, has been made an MBE for services to music.\n\nReacting to the news, Dame Mary added: \"When I was first told that I was going to be a dame you don't really believe it. And then it's so exciting, and you feel very proud.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Mary Berry on damehood: \"I'll still be the same person\"\n\n\"For most of my life I have been lucky enough to follow my passion to teach cookery through books and the media.\n\n\"To be a dame is really the icing on the cake.\"\n\nThe former Great British Bake Off judge joked: \"I just wish my parents and brothers were here to share my joy, as my only achievement at school was just one O-Level - in cookery of course.\"\n\nDame Mary is no stranger to the Royal Family, having made meringue roulades with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge last year, for her Berry Royal Christmas TV special.\n\nThe much-loved broadcaster, baker and food writer is also a patron of Child Bereavement UK, after having lost her son William aged 19 in a car crash in 1989.\n\nIn 2018, she told The Graham Norton Show she was once arrested at an airport after baking ingredients were mistaken for drugs.\n\nDizzee Rascal has had five UK number one singles\n\nDizzee Rascal is considered to have been one of the founding fathers of grime - a UK-based electronic rap genre which grew out of the English capital at the start of the century.\n\nIn 2003, aged 19, the East London MC became the youngest artist to win the Mercury Prize, with his debut album Boy in da Corner.\n\nThe elder statesman of the British rap game, who drops his seventh album E3 AF at the end of October, told the BBC in 2017 that he deserved to be given top billing at Glastonbury Festival.\n\n\"I've toured this festival for years, never disappointed,\" he said. \"You can always count on me.\"\n\n\"I'm basically at the stage where they need to make me headline this thing - because they ain't had no British rappers headline this festival.\"\n\nHis drive and success helped to pave the way for modern superstar Stormzy to eventually become the first black solo headliner in the history of the Worthy Farm event last year, bringing UK hip-hop and grime into the mainstream in the process.\n\nDame Mary is joined by veteran actress and Coronation Street star Maureen Lipman and The Woman in Black author Susan Hill, in being made a dame commander. The former played the title character's mother in Roman Polanski's Oscar-winning 2002 drama The Pianist.\n\nThere were knighthoods for one of the country's first rock 'n' roll icons Tommy Steele, for services to entertainment and charity, along with Brookside, Grange Hill and Hollyoaks creator Professor Phil Redmond, for services to broadcasting and arts in the regions. Hercule Poirot actor David Suchet was also knighted for services to drama and charity.\n\nDerrick Evans - more commonly known as Mr Motivator - has also been made an MBE after creating online home exercises during lockdown and hosting a week-long workout with Linda Lusardi to raise money for Age UK's Emergency Coronavirus Appeal.\n\nAnother English music star, singer Mica Paris, was also made an MBE, as well as performer and vocal coach Carrie Grant.\n\nDavid Attenborough and Lorraine Kelly also make the Queen's latest list\n\nElsewhere, broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough added to his legacy by being made a GCMG - one the country's highest honours.\n\nSir David, who has spoken to a big Glastonbury crowd himself in recent years, is considered to be an inspiration for people of all ages in the UK and beyond, for a lifetime spent warning world leaders of the need to protect the planet and of ongoing issues around climate change.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nSir Paul Smith, the chairman of the clothing label Paul Smith, was made a Companion of Honour, for services to fashion.\n\nLongstanding daytime ITV presenter and journalist Lorraine Kelly was made a CBE alongside Judy Craymer, the woman behind the movie Mamma Mia! and singer-songwriter/campaigner Joan Armatrading - for services to music, charity and equal rights.\n\nProfessor Brian Cox, scientist and presenter of BBC shows including The Wonders of the Universe, was also made a CBE alongside actor Adrian Lester, who is currently starring in BBC drama series Life and appeared in the films Primary Colors and The Day After Tomorrow.\n\nBernardine Evaristo was made an OBE and Professor Brian Cox was made a CBE\n\nOBEs went to ELO singer and music producer Jeff Lynne; and Tony Hatch - the man who wrote the theme tunes for Neighbours, Crossroads, Emmerdale and Petula Clark's Downtown; as well as Last Tango in Halifax screenwriter Sally Wainwright - for services to television.\n\nBooker Prize-winning-author Bernardine Evaristo was also appointed at the same level.\n\nThe Girl, Woman, Other novelist became the first black woman to win the award, when she shared it with Margaret Atwood in 2019, after the judges broke their rules by declaring a tie.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Atwood and Evaristo become the first authors to jointly win the Booker Prize since 1992\n\nHow to Train Your Dragon writer Cressida Cowell was made an MBE for services to children's literature, while ITV's Dr Hilary Jones was made an MBE too, for services to broadcasting, public health information and charity.\n\nRapper Lady Leshurr was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to music and charity.\n\nThe freestyle performer, whose real name is Melesha Katrina O'Garro, performed her distinctive rap, Quarantine Speech, for a YouTube fundraiser during lockdown.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by Lady Leshurr This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nRap duo Krept and Konan, real names Casyo Johnson and Karl Wilson, were also awarded the British Empire Medal for services to music and the community in Croydon.\n\nThey launched the Positive Direction Foundation three years ago, which offers activities including including workshops in music production, engineering and songwriting for young people.\n\nLast year they also judged the first series of BBC Three's The Rap Game UK.\n\nKrept and Konan: Honoured for their music and work in their community\n\nThe Queen's Birthday Honours list is usually revealed in June, but it was delayed this year by several months due to coronavirus.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "A number of people have died in an Edinburgh hospital following an outbreak of Covid-19 on a cancer ward.\n\nSix other patients at Edinburgh's Western General have also been confirmed with the virus.\n\nNHS Lothian said it was investigating the outbreak and the ward had been closed to new admissions and discharges to allow tests to be carried out.\n\nIt comes after a number of positive cases were also identified on wards at Glasgow Royal Infirmary.\n\nNHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said a ward had been closed to new admissions and other Covid-19 control measures introduced at the hospital.\n\nIn Edinburgh, patients and staff are being screened for the virus as part of the health board's response.\n\nAn incident management team (IMT) has also been set up and new infection control measures put in place.\n\nNHS Lothian said all patients on the cancer ward had been informed of the outbreak and contact tracing was being carried out.\n\nPatients who would normally return home for the weekend to spend time with families have been asked to remain in the hospital to reduce the risk of further transmission.\n\nDr Donald Inverarity, consultant microbiologist and chair of the IMT, said: \"Our thoughts are with the family of the deceased and I would like to express our sincere condolences.\n\n\"The situation will continue to be reviewed and monitored very closely.\n\n\"Patient safety is our main priority and while we understand that the request not to go home for the weekend may be upsetting, it is necessary.\"\n\nIn Glasgow, the health board said strict infection control guidance was being observed to ensure patient treatments could continue.\n\nIn a statement, they said: \"We have a number of positive cases in wards at Glasgow Royal Infirmary and staff are working extremely hard to ensure the appropriate measures have been implemented to minimise the spread of the virus.\n\n\"This includes the temporary closure of the ward to new admissions and other Covid-19 control measures.\n\n\"All those affected have been contact traced, screened and are self-isolating. All asymptomatic contact patients are being cared for separately from the confirmed cases.\"", "President Trump is taking a drug which he has touted as a “cure” for Covid-19, and says he will roll it out across the US.\n\nThe drug uses a combination of antibodies, and is developed by US based company Regeneron using human cells derived from an aborted foetus.\n\nBut the Trump administration suspended funding for projects using human foetal tissue from abortions in 2019. There is no outright ban however on the use of foetal material in drug research.\n\nAt the time of the funding suspension, the Department of Health and Human Services released a statement saying: “Promoting the dignity of human life from conception to natural death is one of the very top priorities of President Trump’s administration.”\n\nThis has raised questions about the president’s use and promotion of new coronavirus treatments which have been developed using the practice.\n\nRemdesivir, another drug used by the president, and some vaccine development projects with White House funding also rely on the same cell lines produced from foetal tissue.\n\nBut the policy excluded cell lines made before June 2019. The cells used by most of the companies now trying to find a coronavirus treatment were derived from tissue of a foetus aborted in the 1970s.\n\nSo the latest drugs being touted by Trump don’t violate the current regulations as long as they’re not being developed using cell lines from a recently aborted foetus.", "Last updated on .From the section Football\n\nDominic Calvert-Lewin marked his England debut with a goal as Gareth Southgate's side eased to victory in the friendly against Wales at Wembley.\n\nEverton's in-form striker rose to head his 10th goal of the season after 26 minutes from Jack Grealish, delivering an impressive all-round display until he was substituted just before the hour.\n\nThe outstanding Grealish was at the heart of England's best work, drawing the foul that led to England's second goal eight minutes after the break. Kieran Trippier delivered a perfect free-kick that was turned in by an ecstatic Conor Coady for his first international goal.\n\nEngland were now in control against a Wales side defending an eight-match unbeaten run and Danny Ings, making his first start, showed superb athleticism to add a third in the 63rd minutre with a perfectly-executed overhead kick after Tyrone Mings had headed down a Kalvin Phillips corner.\n• None Best action and reaction from England v Wales\n\nCalvert-Lewin was the Premier League's striker in form with nine goals for Everton - so it was no surprise this was an England debut bursting with confidence.\n\nThe 23-year-old has matured rapidly and all that development was on show as he delivered further illustration that he has what it takes to become the complete striker.\n\nCalvert-Lewin's attitude and workrate have never been in question but his goals output has. Now, with Everton top of the Premier League under manager Carlo Ancelotti, he cannot stop scoring.\n\nHere, he was the beneficiary of brilliant work by Grealish, whose cross from the right was the sort any striker dreams of, Calvert-Lewin soaring to power in the header.\n\nHe was taken off just before the hour but his power in the air, close control, hold-up play and strong running made this an impressive bow.\n\nEngland's other contender for the man-of-the-match award was Grealish, who had waited so long for his international debut and finally got on for 14 minutes in the dismal goalless draw against Denmark in Copenhagen in early September.\n\nHere, given his first start, Aston Villa's captain ran the show from midfield, drifting into dangerous positions, creating danger and constantly drawing fouls in dangerous positions.\n\nGrealish gave a top-class performance and his contribution, along with that of debutant Calvert-Lewin, will have delighted Southgate.\n\nThe added bonus came with all three goalscorers getting off the mark with their first goals for England.\n\nWales were missing their two big stars, the injured Gareth Bale and the unavailable Aaron Ramsey - who will now join up with the squad. Ramsey missed this game under coronavirus protocols, with Juventus having put their squad in a bubble last Saturday after two non-playing staff tested positive.\n\nThose absences showed as they had a fair amount of possession in the first half but created little - it might have been different had those two been present.\n\nGiggs will have been casting his eyes towards the Uefa Nations League games against the Republic of Ireland and Bulgaria - so one of his biggest concerns would have been the injury that forced off key striker Kieffer Moore in the first half.\n\nHe will have been worried too by Wales' vulnerability to crosses and set-piece deliveries, which brought England's three goals.\n\nWales have more important tests ahead and while this was an experimental night for Giggs, it was still a disappointing outcome.\n\nSix on the bounce against Wales for England - key stats\n• None England have won six consecutive matches against Wales for the first time since a run of seven between March 1908 and March 1914.\n• None Wales suffered their worst defeat against England since May 1973, also a 3-0 defeat.\n• None Three players all scored their first England goals in this game (Calvert-Lewin, Coady and Ings), the first time that's happened since June 1963 against Switzerland (Tony Kay, Johnny Byrne and Jimmy Melia).\n• None Dominic Calvert-Lewin became the 188th player to score on his England debut and the first Everton player to do so since Fred Pickering in 1964.\n• None Conor Coady ended a run of 111 games for club and country with a goal, scoring his first goal since April 2018 for Wolves against Bolton in a Championship match. It was the first time he'd had two shots in a match since March 2017 for Wolves against Reading.\n• None England gave four players (Saka, Calvert-Lewin, Barnes, James) their England debuts, the second game running four players have earned their debuts. It's the first time since April/May 1933 that England have given four or more debuts in consecutive internationals.\n• None There were just 54 caps between the players in the England starting XI before kick-off, the fewest for an international since 1976, when the XI for a game against Wales had just 47 caps between them.\n• None The starting XI featured players from 10 different clubs (Burnley, Atletico Madrid, Arsenal, Liverpool, Wolves, Everton, Spurs, Leeds, Southampton and Aston Villa), the most for a match since May 1997 against South Africa.\n• None Kieran Trippier captained England for the first time, becoming the first outfield player since David Beckham in June 2008 against Trinidad & Tobago to captain England while playing for a non-English club (Atletico Madrid).\n• None Attempt saved. James Ward-Prowse (England) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the bottom right corner. Assisted by Danny Ings.\n• None Attempt saved. Danny Ings (England) right footed shot from the centre of the box is saved in the top right corner. Assisted by Ainsley Maitland-Niles. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page", "Nottingham has the highest Covid-19 infection rate in the UK, according to the latest data.\n\nPublic Health England figures show that 689.1 per 100,000 people tested positive for the virus in the city over the past week.\n\nDocuments leaked earlier today indicate that new social distancing rules for Nottinghamshire are due to be announced on Monday.\n\nLocal politicians have criticised the delay in imposing restrictions.\n\nNottingham City Council leader David Mellen said the government's lack of action on new measures in Nottingham \"makes absolutely no sense\" and that \"strict interventions are needed urgently\".\n\nThe Labour politician said: \"The delay leaves this weekend open to potential abuse of the existing rules, which could result in yet more Covid cases in our city.\"\n\nHe called on the government to \"act urgently and decisively or, better still, give us the powers to let us get on with taking action ourselves\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. David Mellen says a lack of coronavirus restrictions this weekend could mean a “last chance to party\" in Nottingham\n\nIn the week up to 5 October, Nottingham recorded 2,294 cases, up from 407 the previous week.\n\nEarlier, the county council said the rate of infection for Nottinghamshire was 106 per 100,000, much lower than the rate in Nottingham.\n\nAlthough the government has yet to introduce formal measures, local authorities have asked people in the county to avoid mixing indoors with other households indoors following the \"dramatic\" rise in cases.\n\nNottingham's director of public health Alison Challenger said: \"Everyone needs to stick rigidly to their social bubbles and not mix with other households.\n\n\"There is no need to wait for additional government restrictions.\"\n\nGedling MP Tom Randall said he would \"wholly support calls\" for people to follow stricter guidelines, while Nottingham South MP Lilian Greenwood has called the delay in introducing measures \"reckless and indefensible\".\n\nMs Greenwood added: \"It's outrageous that [MPs] only found out about this decision from the media.\"\n\nOn Thursday evening, the government released a statement urging residents to follow \"the advice of the local authority\", as well as practising social distancing, wearing face coverings, and getting tested if they exhibited symptoms.\n\nA spokesperson added: \"The local authority has our full backing and support.\"\n\nBut Nottingham North MP Alex Norris, who was briefed about the government's strategy during a call with health minister Edward Argar, said he was sceptical about the government's strategy.\n\nHe said: \"When pressed about Nottingham, the advice that came back was, 'We've not decided yet', which is very hard to understand.\n\n\"They won't support us because they won't bring in the restriction we're appealing for them to bring in.\n\n\"We're trying to get ahead of those restrictions by suggesting them to people ourselves, but of course we don't have the legal backing to enforce those.\"\n\nBen Bradley, MP for Mansfield - which has a lower infection rate of 62.2 - called on the government to reconsider blanket restrictions for the whole of the county.\n\nThe Conservative politician added: \"It would be really frustrating to have restrictions imposed when, locally, we might not need them.\"\n\nAccording to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, leaked documents show Nottinghamshire is expected to go into level two of a new \"three-tier\" system next week.\n\nThey indicate people will still be able to go on holiday outside the county, but only with people from their own household or support bubble.\n\nHouseholds would still be able to meet indoors if they are in a support bubble.\n\nJo Cox-Brown, founder of Night Time Economy, which works with businesses and local authorities to create safer nights out in English cities, said further restrictions could have a devastating effect on jobs.\n\n\"[Businesses] are terrified. The night-time economy is worth 14,000 jobs in Nottingham alone,\" she said.\n\n\"They were closed for three months, they have been trading for two months but at 50-75% of normal occupancy levels, so financially these venues are on their knees.\"\n\nAcross England, bars and restaurants could be forced to close as the government prepares to tighten restrictions for the worst-affected areas.\n\nIt follows the announcement that similar outlets across central Scotland are to be closed for 16 days.\n\nLocal restrictions have yet to be imposed in the city\n\nHousing Secretary Robert Jenrick has refused to say whether pubs and restaurants in the north and in Nottingham will be forced to close.\n\nHe said: \"We are currently considering what steps we should take, obviously taking the advice of our scientific and medical advisers, and a decision will be made shortly.\"\n\nAsked if there will be an announcement linked to the hospitality industry, he said: \"We are considering the evidence. In some parts of the country, the number of cases are rising very fast and we are taking that very seriously.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.", "The woman made visits to a gym after returning from Mykonos\n\nA woman who failed to self-isolate when returning from holiday on a Greek island has been fined £1,000.\n\nPolice said they were left with \"no choice\" after the woman left her home in Warrington in a \"blatant flouting\" of Covid-19 rules.\n\nShe left home on \"several occasions\" including three visits to a gym in Warrington, Cheshire, after returning from Mykonos.\n\nThe island is currently on the government's 14-day quarantine list.\n\nWarrington is also currently subject to tighter restrictions after a rise in coronavirus cases.\n\nSupt Julie Westgate said: \"On this occasion officers from Cheshire Police have had no choice but to issue a fixed penalty notice of this nature.\n\n\"It's a shame we have had to do this because the majority of Cheshire residents are sticking to the rules.\n\n\"Unfortunately this woman put not only herself but others at risk by consistently breaching the regulations.\n\n\"Our officers will always engage, explain and encourage the public to make the right decision, but in this instance they had to enforce due to the blatant flouting of the rules.\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Indian actors, lawmakers and cricketers have urged people to visit the stall\n\nA viral tweet has changed the fortunes of a struggling food stall in India's capital Delhi, even earning it a spot on the food delivery app, Zomato.\n\nCustomers have been flocking to the spot, touched by a video of the stall's 80-year-old owner crying over the lack of business during the pandemic.\n\nAnd owners Kanta Prasad and his wife, Badami Devi, are now local celebrities.\n\nStreet food is hugely popular in India, but the pandemic has hit vendors hard, forcing many to shut shop.\n\nThe couple have been running their shop, Baba ka dhaba, since 1990 in south Delhi's Malviya Nagar. They serve fresh, home-cooked meals - the menu typically includes parathas, a round, buttered bread popular northern India, a gravy of some kind, rice and dal, a thick soup of lentils. A meal sells for less than 50 rupees (about $0.70; £0.50).\n\nMr Prasad says that his business had come to a standstill\n\nThey managed to make ends meet all these years, but the pandemic was devastating, Mr Prasad told a food blogger in a recent interview.\n\nHe is seen crying in the video as he talks about his struggles. Mr Prasad shows the dishes they have prepared for the day. When he is asked how much he has earned so far, he shows a few 10-rupee notes and breaks down.\n\nThe blogger, Gaurav Wasan, shared the clip on Instagram on Wednesday. It travelled quickly, soon making its way on to Twitter. A woman shared it saying it \"completely broke her heart\" and urged people in Delhi to visit Baba ka dhaba and help Mr Prasad and his wife.\n\nIt was just a matter of time before the tweet was noticed by celebrities - from Bollywood stars to cricketers - and ordinary people alike. The video has been watched over four million times.\n\nBy the end of Thursday, Zomato had tweeted saying Baba ka dhaba was now listed on their app - the service even urged people to let them know of any other struggling food stalls so they could help.\n\nCustomers have thronged the stall since the video went viral\n\nIn the video, Mr Prasad says he and his wife start preparing the menu at 6.30am every morning and finish by 9.30am.\n\nThe first lot of customers are usually informal workers or office-goers looking for a hearty breakfast. But the pandemic, which cost people their jobs or forced them to stay at home, has shrunk business.\n\nMrs Prasad says that at times they take the unsold food back home, and on some days, they don't have money to cook a meal for themselves.\n\nBut ever since the video went viral, the stall has seen a steady flow of customers, some of whom are eager to squeeze in a selfie with the now-famous spot.\n\nTV crews have been showing up as the stall and its owners continue to grab headlines. Bollywood actress Sonam Kapoor and cricketer R Ashwin are among those who have offered to help.\n\nMr Wasan told ANI that he had come across Baba ka dhaba by chance. \"They told me that were making losses every day. So I made a video at the spot and shared it with my followers.\"\n\nHe adds that he has collected around $2,700 in donations to repair the stall and the couple's house.\n\nThe Prasads are both touched and elated.\n\n\"It is all because of Gaurav that the customers have lined up today,\" Mr Prasad told ANI news agency. \"Yesterday there was almost no sales. Today I feel that the whole country is with us.\"", "Bangor will go into lockdown this weekend, the Welsh Government has announced.\n\nEight wards in the city - Garth, Hirael, Menai, Deiniol, Marchog, Glyder, Hendre and Dewi - will have further Covid-19 restrictions from 18:00 BST on Saturday.\n\nThe restrictions will be similar to those in other counties across Wales.\n\nResidents will not be allowed to leave or enter the areas without a reasonable excuse and can only meet outdoors.\n\nThe Pentir ward, which includes parts of Penrhosgarnedd and is the site of Ysbyty Gwynedd, is not covered by the restrictions.\n\nThe Welsh Government said Bangor had seen a significant cluster of cases and the incident rate stands at about 400 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nIt said cases are appeared to be closely associated with young people and the student population.\n\nBangor is home to 10,000 students at its university\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford said the cases were \"largely linked to people socialising\".\n\nHe added that although large parts of Wales are currently under further local restrictions, \"this is not a national lockdown\".\n\n\"These are a series of local restrictions to respond to rises in cases in individual areas,\" he said.\n\n\"It's always difficult to make the decision to impose restrictions but we hope that these measures will make help to control the spread of the virus.\"\n\nLeader of Gwynedd council, Dyfrig Siencyn, said: \"Acting now will help slow the rapid increase in positive cases in the city, break the chain of transmission and protect Bangor residents as well as the wider Gwynedd public.\"\n\nHe said the council appreciates the impact lockdown will have on people and businesses.\n\nBut taking these steps now will hopefully mean avoiding \"stricter and more disruptive measures further down the line\".\n\nHe added that there was no room for complacency for residents across Gwynedd, even though the current lockdown only affects Bangor.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Footage of the stop was shared widely on Twitter after being posted by former Olympic 100m champion Linford Christie, who questioned why the vehicle had been targeted\n\nFive police officers are facing an investigation over the stop and search of British athlete Bianca Williams and her partner in west London.\n\nMs Williams and Ricardo dos Santos, whose baby son was in the car, believe they were racially profiled when they were stopped in Maida Vale, on 4 July.\n\nThe Met referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) after footage was widely shared.\n\nSal Naseem said a \"threshold for a misconduct investigation\" had been met.\n\nThe IOPC's regional director added: \"Decisions on any further action will only be made once our investigation is complete.\"\n\nThe Met had said officers were patrolling the area in which Ms Williams was stopped because of an increase in youth violence.\n\nCommonwealth Games gold medallist Ms Williams, 26, accused the Met of racially profiling her partner, who was driving a black Mercedes.\n\nThree days after the incident, the Met apologised to Ms Williams.\n\nBianca Williams won European and Commonwealth gold in the 4x100m relay in 2018\n\nThe force also referred itself to the IOPC, despite two reviews by the force's directorate of professional standards concluding there had been no misconduct.\n\nThe five officers will now be investigated for potential breaches of police standards of professional behaviour relating to use of force; duties and responsibilities; and authority, respect and courtesy, the IOPC said in a statement.\n\nThe IOPC said its independent investigation would focus on seven points including why Mr Dos Santos's car was followed and stopped and whether the force used against Mr Dos Santos and Ms Williams was lawful, necessary, reasonable and proportionate.\n\nIt is also being questioned why a Merlin report, a Met-run database that stores information on children who have become known to the police for any reason, was created for Ms Williams's son.\n\nMr Dos Santos and Ms Williams say police handcuffed them while their son was in the car\n\nInvestigators will also look at whether Ms Williams and Mr Dos Santos \"were treated less favourably because of their race\" as well as the accuracy of the accounts provided by the officers and the \"appropriateness of the communications\" issued by the Met.\n\nThe IOPC statement said it would look at whether there were grounds for Mr Dos Santos to be kept in handcuffs after he had been searched.\n\nIt added: \"In relation to Ms Williams the potential breaches, which will all be thoroughly investigated, include taking hold of her without first having sought her co-operation with the search; handcuffing her initially and continuing to handcuff her after she had been searched; her continued detention and whether there were grounds to do so.\"\n• None Police 'willing to learn' after athlete stopped\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "After seven months, the Royal Ballet company is back on stage at the Royal Opera House in London.\n\nThe performances will be different to before - with social distancing on stage and off.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Hospital porter David Morgan Jones is still recovering from his fight with Covid-19\n\nThe next few months could be extremely difficult for north Wales' NHS unless the spread of coronavirus is contained, senior doctors believe.\n\nBetsi Cadwaladr health board has plans to deal with a patient surge while maintaining essential services.\n\nBut acting deputy medical director Kate Clark warned if the pressure becomes too great, non-emergency operations could be put on hold.\n\nIn the spring, most non-urgent treatments were postponed.\n\nThis was in anticipation of the first peak of cases and ever since, the health board has struggled to deal with a growing backlog.\n\n\"All of our services have got plans in place to understand at what point they would need to release staff to support the Covid response,\" said Dr Clark.\n\n\"We want to maintain our essential services as long as possible - and do more than we did the first wave - but we're prepared that if things do become really severe then we will have to look to stop doing some of that activity and switch that resource.\"\n\nHospital bosses hope to maintain services such as treatment for cancer while dealing with a second wave\n\nFigures from Public Health Wales published on Thursday show the Betsi Cadwaladr health board area had an infection rate of 144 cases per 100,000 people in the most recent seven-day period.\n\nThis is the second highest rate in Wales, behind the Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board area.\n\nAreas such as Flintshire, Denbighshire and Conwy also have a significant older populations.\n\nFour council areas in north Wales are currently subject to lockdown restrictions, with people not able to leave or enter Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire and Wrexham without a \"reasonable excuse\".\n\nThere is also concern about a recent rise in cases in Gwynedd.\n\nDr Clark says they are monitoring the situation, adding: \"What we saw in the first wave was a push from England and over the border, so Wrexham was hit first and then Glan Clwyd and then down to Gwynedd.\n\nAnglesey and Gwynedd are the only counties in north Wales not under local lockdown rules\n\n\"We're seeing again increased activity in Wrexham and Glan Clwyd, less so in Bangor.\"\n\nDan Menzies, a respiratory physician at Glan Clwyd hospital in Denbighshire also said the number of Covid cases being seen was increasing steadily.\n\n\"It's always been in the background, even over the summer months, there's been a few patients here and there that have been admitted with Covid but now I think we're seeing those numbers increase steadily, over the last few weeks in particular,\" he said.\n\n\"And unlike the last four or five weeks for example, we're seeing patients with the more serious consequences. So the respiratory-type problems, the pneumonias, requiring higher levels of care and intervention.\"\n\nDoctors say the virus is now better understood and treatments have been refined\n\nDoctors are keen to stress that people should not be put off from seeking medical help and Dr Menzies said hospitals were still safe for patients.\n\n\"People develop all sorts of conditions, lung cancer is just one example, which we want to pick up as early as we can. We don't want to see people presenting late when it is untreatable and incurable,\" he said.\n\nNot only is the NHS in north Wales gearing up for a potential second wave which could last longer than the first, but also the pressures of winter when other respiratory illnesses circulate more generally.\n\nOfficials want to try to keep essential services going such as cancer care.\n\nThey admit this will be a big challenge - particularly in terms of staffing, with some having had little rest after dealing with the first coronavirus wave.\n\nBut Dr Menzies said the NHS was now in a stronger position as the virus was now better understood.\n\n\"We've looked after a large number of people with Covid now, so straight away when they come through the door we can identify patients that might be most at risk of having problems,\" he said.\n\n\"And then the treatments that we're offering have become more refined over the last few months, we've managed to tailor things down.\n\n\"We know drugs that are more effective and we've got those in our armoury and in our repertoire, so we can use those in patients that we think are at risk.\"", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "A rapid \"bedside\" test for coronavirus could help cut the spread of the infection in hospitals, scientists say.\n\nIn their study, the rapid test took under two hours to show results, while standard tests - which have to be sent to laboratories - took much longer.\n\nResearchers say this meant patients taking the rapid test could be isolated more quickly when positive, potentially reducing the spread of the virus.\n\nThey are calling urgently for more rapid tests on the NHS.\n\nThe report appears in the journal the Lancet Respiratory Medicine.\n\nIn March and April 2020, scientists at Southampton General Hospital tested 500 people with symptoms of coronavirus with a rapid Covid-19 test, done close to the bedside, and analysed by a machine on the same ward.\n\nThey compared these results with around 500 patients given only the standard nose-and-throat swab tests which had to be sent to a separate laboratory for analysis.\n\nPatients who had the bedside test were isolated or put on dedicated coronavirus wards on average a day earlier than patients waiting for standard swab results.\n\nIn the early days of the pandemic, scientists found it took an average of 21 hours to complete and get the result from standard tests, resulting in delays in patients getting to the right part of the hospital.\n\nThey say standard testing times have improved in many hospitals in recent months.\n\nBut they argue rapid, so-called \"point-of-care\" tests still have considerable benefits because transporting samples to laboratories, waiting for enough samples to analyse, and the results then being sent on to clinical teams before being checked, can all take time.\n\nDr Tristan William Clark, who conducted the study, told the BBC: \"With the rapid tests, the same team admitting the patient can often do the test and check the results, making sure the patient goes to the most appropriate ward. This can mean things are much quicker.\"\n\nHe acknowledges the tests can be expensive but says the costs are \"highly likely to be offset by the benefits of moving patients to the right wards quickly\".\n\nProf Lawrence Young, at Warwick Medical School, described the work as \"an exciting development\".\n\nHe said: \"The value of this approach in rapidly identifying infected patients means that such individuals can be quickly isolated away from non-infected patients leading to improved infection control. It also means that infected patients can be more rapidly and efficiently enrolled in clinical trials.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nEmployees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions are to get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.\n\nThe scheme, announced by Rishi Sunak, begins on 1 November for six months and a Treasury source said it could cost hundreds of millions of pounds a month.\n\nA restrictions update, which could see pubs and restaurants shut in the worst-affected areas, is expected on Monday.\n\nLeaders in areas now under restrictions said the scheme did not go far enough.\n\nIn a statement, the mayors of Greater Manchester, North Tyne, Sheffield and Liverpool said: \"We are pleased that the government has listened and recognised that any new system of restrictions must come with a substantial package of financial support.\"\n\nBut they said it was only a \"start\" and more help was needed \"to prevent genuine hardship, job losses and business failure this winter\".\n\nThe announcement comes just a fortnight after the government unveiled its Job Support Scheme - replacing the furlough scheme - to top up the wages of staff who have not been able to return to the workplace full time.\n\nThe latest scheme will only apply to businesses told to close - rather than those who choose to shut because of the broader impact of Covid restrictions.\n\nThe support will be reviewed in January. Until November businesses that are asked to close can continue to use the existing furlough scheme.\n\nThe grants will be paid up to a maximum of £2,100 per employee a month and the Treasury said they would protect jobs and enable businesses to reopen quickly once restrictions are lifted.\n\nOne pub manager in Otley, West Yorkshire, said the scheme \"doesn't even touch the sides\" in terms of its impact on pubs.\n\n\"Two-thirds of somebody's wage isn't going to cut it,\" said Mel Green, 41, of The Black Bull.\n\n\"We're in a trade where everyone's on national minimum wage pretty much. They're the ones that are losing out. A lot of them are living hand to mouth already and they've already had hours reduced.\"\n\nThe chancellor said the latest measures for companies forced to shut would provide \"reassurance and a safety net for people and businesses in advance of what may be a difficult winter\".\n\nIn addition, for businesses forced to close in England, Mr Sunak announced an increase in business grants - with up to £3,000 a month paid every fortnight.\n\nThe Treasury says the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will receive increased funding allowing them to bring in similar measures if they choose to.\n\nIt is a sign of how quickly the coronavirus situation has soured that the chancellor is having to return to a policy he thought he'd parked less than two weeks ago when he announced his Winter Economic Plan.\n\nThe government insists this is not a retread of the furlough scheme, which is due to expire at the end of this month, but in all important aspects this is furlough mark two.\n\nThe crucial bit is that small employers will not have to make any contribution to their workers' wages if they are legally forced to shut down.\n\nLarger businesses will have to contribute about 5% of employee costs in the form of National Insurance and pension contributions.\n\nThat is much more generous than the expiring furlough scheme and way more generous than the Job Support Scheme Mr Sunak announced 10 days ago, which requires employers to pay 55% of active workers' salaries.\n\nThe reason for that is simple - those measures applied to businesses that were allowed to be open. This new scheme only applies to businesses which are not.\n\nOther questions are not simple - who will be eligible? What about businesses that were never allowed to reopen since March?\n\nWill it be applied by postcode? Will you be able to walk 10 minutes down the road to go to the pub that is open but having to pay 55% of staff wages when it's less than half full?\n\nAnd perhaps most importantly for the expected \"beneficiaries\" of this scheme - the hospitality industry - how strong is the evidence on which this policy is based and can we see it in detail?\n\nLabour said the government's \"rather slow, incompetent, dithering response\" had caused \"unnecessary anxiety and job losses\".\n\nShadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds welcomed the measures but called for further changes to the scheme to incentivise employers to keep more of their staff on.\n\nThe CBI business lobby group said the scheme \"should cushion the blow for the most affected and keep more people in work\".\n\n\"But many firms, including pubs and restaurants, will still be hugely disappointed if they have to close their doors again after doing so much to keep customers and staff safe,\" added CBI boss Dame Carolyn Fairbairn.\n\nFederation of Small Businesses boss Mike Cherry said the extra help for closed businesses would be \"welcomed by thousands of small businesses\".\n\nShop workers' trade union Usdaw said it was concerned retailers facing reduced business in an area subject to the new restrictions would not benefit from the scheme.\n\nMeanwhile, the number of people in the UK to have tested positive for coronavirus rose by 13,864 - a decrease of 3,676 on Thursday's figures - with a further 87 deaths reported on the government's dashboard.\n\nThe chancellor described his announcement as \"a very different scheme to what we've had before, this is not a universal approach, this is an expansion of the job support scheme specifically for those people who are in businesses that will be formally or legally asked to close\".\n\nAsked whether the announcement suggested the government was going to ask businesses, such as those in hospitality, to shut, Mr Sunak said: \"The rise in cases and hospital admissions in certain parts of the country is a concern.\n\n\"It's right the government considers a range of options... but it's also right they engage with local leaders.\n\n\"That is what's happening this afternoon and over the weekend so those conversations can happen and collectively we can decide on the appropriate response.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The shadow chancellor welcomes a “U-turn” by the government to pay workers made to stay at home in any new lockdowns.\n\nThe Job Support Scheme, which will replace the furlough scheme from 1 November, will see eligible workers get three quarters of their normal salaries for six months.\n\nTo qualify, employees must be in a ''viable job'' where they can work for at least one-third of their normal hours.\n\nFor the hours not worked, the government and employer will each pay one-third of the remaining wages. This means the employee would get at least 77% of their pay.\n\nPubs and restaurants could be closed in the worst-affected areas under new measures\n\nA tiered system of measures for England is expected to be announced by Monday, in an effort to stall rising infection rates, to replace the patchwork of existing rules across the country.\n\nUnder the new system, different parts of the country would be placed in different categories - although ministers are still discussing the precise details.\n\nPubs and restaurants could be closed in the worst-affected areas, including parts of northern England and the Midlands, while a ban on overnight stays is also being considered.", "UK takeaway pizza chain Papa John's is investigating allegations that taxpayer cash was fraudulently claimed during the Eat Out to Help Out scheme.\n\nA Papa John's franchisee Raheel Choudhary claimed over £250,000 in non-existent meals during the scheme, the Daily Mail alleges.\n\nMr Choudhary has denied all the allegations.\n\nHe told the BBC: \"We are confident that we were fully compliant with the criteria set by the government.\"\n\nPapa John's GB Ltd said it was investigating the allegations \"thoroughly\".\n\n\"We will be extremely concerned and disappointed if they prove to be true. All of Papa John's UK stores are run by franchisees and we made it very clear to all franchisees that we felt it unlikely that they would be eligible to participate in Eat Out To Help Out (EOTHO),\" a spokesman told the BBC.\n\n\"It is important that our investigation is completed fully before drawing any conclusions, but if any franchisee participated improperly in EOTHO, they will have been in breach of their franchise agreement with us, and we will require them to make things right.\"\n\nThe Mail said it conducted its investigation with the help of several whistleblowers who worked for Mr Choudhary's stores.\n\nThe newspaper claims that Mr Choudhary instructed staff to process thousands of fake meals under the scheme across 57 of the 61 branches he owns, resulting in hundreds of thousands of pounds being wrongly claimed.\n\nIn one incident, the Mail alleges that 13 orders were processed in under a minute at the Tunbridge Wells branch, despite staff being told it was forbidden to eat in the store, which has no tables.\n\nIt is alleged that branch managers were given targets of £500-£600 per day for stores that had turnovers of under £10,000 per week, or a target of £1,000 a day for bigger branches with a turnover of more than £10,000 per week.\n\nThe newspaper added that Mr Choudhary had instructed his staff to record payments made by \"phantom covers\" as voucher payments.\n\nA representative for Mr Choudhary disputed the value of the claims made under the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, stating it was £185,015 and not the alleged £250,000.\n\nMr Choudhary said in a statement: \"Of my 61 franchises, 40 have seating capacity, and we implemented the 'Eat Out to Help Out Scheme' in all of those 40 stores from Monday to Wednesday throughout August.\n\nOver 100 million meals were claimed by diners in August during the Eat Out to Help Out scheme\n\n\"All customers who benefited from the scheme ate in store and we are confident that we were fully compliant with the criteria set by the government.\n\nA representative for Mr Choudhary said the Eat Out to Help Out scheme accounted for 9% of total orders in August.\n\nMr Choudhary said: \"When the government's scheme ended, we followed up with our own discount offer in September.\"\n\nMr Choudhary said that on average, his stores saw an average of 32 customers a day across the 40 stores that took part in the scheme in August.\n\nHowever, the BBC understands that franchisees were clearly instructed by Papa John's GB Ltd that the franchise would not be participating in the scheme.\n\nFranchisees are bound by agreements that require them to follow all guidelines issued by Papa John's GB Ltd, as well as abiding by and meeting ethical standards and regulatory obligations.\n\nIt is also understood that the digital tills software, which is frequently remotely updated by the head office, has never included an Eat Out to Help Out scheme voucher button, and the scheme cannot be used on the Papa John's UK website either.\n\nA HMRC spokesperson said: \"It's our duty to protect taxpayers' money and we will not hesitate to act against those who attempt to break the rules.\n\n\"We have built checks into the Eat Out to Help Out scheme to prevent fraud and protect public money, and will check claims and take appropriate action to withhold or recover payments found to be dishonest or inaccurate.\n\n\"Anyone concerned that an establishment is abusing the scheme can report fraud to HMRC.\"", "The container had \"become a tomb\", the Old Bailey heard\n\nThirty-nine people who died in the back of a lorry trailer tried to break out through the roof as they ran out of oxygen, a court has heard.\n\nThe Vietnamese nationals, aged between 15 and 44, suffocated as they were transported from Zeebrugge in Belgium to Purfleet on 23 October last year.\n\nThe court was told people smugglers got \"greedy\" and attempted \"two loads in one\".\n\nFour men are on trial at the Old Bailey in connection with the deaths.\n\nSome of the people recorded goodbye messages to their families.\n\nNguyen Tho Tuan, 25 recorded a message for his wife and children saying \"I am sorry. I cannot take care of you. I am sorry. I am sorry. I cannot breathe.\n\n\"I want to come back to my family. Have a good life.\"\n\nWhen police officers entered the trailer the next morning they found the migrants had used a metal pole to try to break out of the sealed unit, the court heard.\n\nThe court has heard how the 39 victims had been sealed in the pitch black unit in \"unbearable\" 38.5C heat for 12 hours.\n\nA forensic expert calculated it would have taken about nine hours for the air to turn toxic in the trailer, soon after resulting in death.\n\nProsecutor Bill Emlyn Jones told jurors: \"It may well have crossed your minds - why did this trip go so terribly wrong, when on the other occasions the migrants survived the trip and were safely unloaded?\n\n\"You may well conclude that on this occasion the criminals just got too greedy, at £10,000 a head.\n\n\"They had too many people loaded into a single lorry.\"\n\nJurors were told there had been identical and successful trips with fewer people on 11 and 18 October.\n\nMr Emlyn Jones suggested they may have been \"under pressure to double up\" after 20 migrants were removed from a lorry driven by Christopher Kennedy, one of those on trial, on 14 October near Eurotunnel in France.\n\nAt least two of the migrants discovered in Mr Kennedy's lorry on 14 October were found dead in the trailer at an Essex industrial estate nine days later.\n\nA port worker who drove the unaccompanied trailer off the ship just after midnight noticed a pungent smell \"similar to waste\", the court heard.\n\nGheorge Nica, 43, of Basildon, Essex, and Eamonn Harrison, 23, of Mayobridge, Co Down, Northern Ireland, deny 39 counts of manslaughter.\n\nMr Harrison, Mr Kennedy, 24, of Co Armagh, Northern Ireland and Valentin Calota 37, of Birmingham, deny being part of a wider people-smuggling operation, which Mr Nica has admitted.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The Joshua Tree earned U2 a Grammy Award for album of the year\n\nU2's The Joshua Tree has been named the best album of the 1980s.\n\nReleased in 1987, it made U2 one of the world's biggest bands, thanks to anthems like With Or Without You and Where The Streets Have No Name.\n\nNow, listeners to BBC Radio 2's Sounds of the 80s have chosen it as the decade's best record, in a poll marking National Album Day on Saturday.\n\nDire Straits' Brothers In Arms came second, followed by The Stone Roses' eponymous debut.\n\nAll but one of the top 20 are by male artists, with the exception being Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love - which lands at number 11.\n\nThe Human League's Dare, which takes sixth place, also features prominent contributions from singers Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley; while albums by Madonna, Janet Jackson, Tracy Chapman and Grace Jones feature further down the list.\n\nThe Joshua Tree was almost called The Two Americas. Later, Desert Songs was another contender, before the band settled on The Joshua Tree - a title that perfectly captured the sacred/secular tension of U2's landscaped songs and Biblical imagery.\n\nWritten against the backdrop of the Cold War, the album reflected two sides of the American dream, with the Irish band seduced by its glamour but repelled by what bassist Adam Clayton called \"the bleakness and greed\" of the Reagan era.\n\n\"And it feels like we're right back there in a way,\" said guitarist The Edge, after hearing the results of Radio 2 poll. \"Politics are still so polarised.\"\n\nHe added: \"We've had the privilege of playing The Joshua Tree live all over the world in the last few years and it's almost like the album has come full circle.\n\n\"We're just thrilled that people are still connecting with these songs, night after night, year after year.\"\n\nProduced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, The Joshua Tree won U2 a Grammy for album of the year, and songs like I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For and Bullet The Blue Sky - a criticism of US activities in Central America - have remained staples of their live shows ever since.\n\nIn the UK, it was the ninth best-selling album of the 1980s, beaten by several records - including Michael Jackson's Bad and Phil Collins' No Jacket Required - which came lower down Radio 2's list.\n\nSounds of the 80s presenter Gary Davies reflected that choosing the ultimate 80s album was a near-impossible task.\n\n\"Because there were so many brilliant albums in the 80s, having to choose just one is really difficult,\" he said.\n\nHowever, he added: \"I'm very pleased to see that the Radio 2 listeners have impeccable taste by choosing an album from my all-time favourite band.\"\n\nA countdown of the audience's top 40 favourite albums will be broadcast on Friday, 9 October from 20:00 BST on Radio 2 and BBC Sounds.\n\nNational Album Day follows on Saturday, with an 80s theme of its own. Record stores will be stocked with limited editions of classics like ZZ Top's Eliminator, Paul Simon's Graceland, Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual, Prefab Sprout's Steve McQueen and Duran Duran's self-titled debut album.\n\nOn Twitter, Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess will hold an all-day session of his album listening parties, featuring Toyah Willcox (15:00 BST), Marillion (17:30 BST), Matthew Wilder (19:00 BST), Blossoms (20:00 BST) and La Roux (21:00 BST).\n\nBBC Four will also screen a weekend of documentaries dedicated to 80s music, while Radio 2, 6 Music and the Asian Network will be playing tracks from the decade throughout Saturday and Sunday.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Parts of England, including Sheffield, have seen big jumps in the rate of coronavirus\n\nCoronavirus is \"getting out of control\" in the north of England, a minister has said, as she defended government plans to bring in new restrictions.\n\nGillian Keegan said the country was in an \"unbelievably serious situation\", but added that communication with areas facing new rules needed to be clearer.\n\nIt comes as Labour's Sir Keir Starmer called for local leaders to be \"in the room\" and included in decisions.\n\nThe chancellor will set out support linked to the new restrictions later.\n\nA Treasury spokesperson said Rishi Sunak's latest move as part of the Jobs Support Scheme would help to \"protect jobs and provide a safety net for those businesses that may have to close in the coming weeks and months\".\n\nIt has already been announced that the scheme, which will replace the furlough scheme when it ends this month, will see workers get three quarters of their normal salaries for six months.\n\nA tiered system of measures for England is set to be announced within days, in an effort to stall rising infection rates.\n\nUnder the new system - which will replace the patchwork of existing rules - pubs and restaurants could be closed in the worst-affected areas, while a ban on overnight stays is also being considered.\n\nBut there has been growing anger among MPs and local leaders about the way the government has communicated the proposed changes with them.\n\nGreater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham accused the government of treating the north of England with \"contempt\" after he learned ministers were considering shutting hospitality venues in the worst-affected areas in a newspaper report.\n\nMr Burnham said he would challenge the closure of pubs, bars and restaurants if the measure did not come with financial support.\n\nHe told BBC's Question Time: \"The message I've given to the government is a pretty clear one - there can be no restrictions without support.\n\n\"And if it's going to be the tier three restrictions - effectively a national lockdown - we have to go back to a full furlough scheme for those staff, support for those businesses, otherwise the north of England is going to be levelled down this winter and I won't accept it.\"\n\nIn response, Gillian Keegan, minister for skills and apprenticeships, said the government had to act to stem the rise in cases.\n\n\"This is serious - it is getting out of control, and we have to do something to bring it back under control,\" she said.\n\nBut she acknowledged that communication with the worst-hit areas needed to improve.\n\n\"We definitely need to work locally and we definitely need to make sure that the communications are much clearer.\"\n\nMs Keegan also said she understood how \"very frustrating\" it must be for local leaders \"if leaks are made or there is speculation in the press\".\n\n\"But clearly we have to do something if we're going to bring those cases back under control.\"\n\nWriting in the Daily Telegraph, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer accused the government of \"operating under the misguided, arrogant and counterproductive view that 'Whitehall knows best'\".\n\nHe said the government had \"lost control of the virus\" and urged ministers to \"get a grip\".\n\n\"It was an act of gross irresponsibility for anonymous No 10 sources to tell a few newspapers on Thursday about plans to impose further restrictions on millions of people, without any detail, without any consultation and without any statement from the prime minister.\n\n\"This has significantly added to the sense of confusion, chaos and unfairness in the approach that is being taken.\"\n\nIn response, a government source said Sir Keir should \"be supporting measures to protect the NHS and save lives - instead of playing politics in the middle of a global pandemic\".\n\nEarlier, Health Secretary Matt Hancock warned the country was facing a \"perilous moment\" in the pandemic, with cases continuing to rise.\n\nThere were 17,540 new cases of coronavirus recorded in the UK on Thursday, up from the 14,162 reported the day before, government data showed. A further 77 people died after testing positive for the virus within 28 days.\n\nMr Hancock said the situation was becoming \"very serious\", and that he was most concerned about parts of Yorkshire, the North West and North East of England, as well as areas of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.\n\nFears have been raised that NHS services could be overwhelmed if the virus gets out of control.\n\nNHS England data published on Thursday showed the number of people waiting more than a year to start hospital treatment is at its highest level since 2008 - with some 111,026 people waiting more than 52 weeks to start hospital treatment in August.\n\nProf John Edmunds, a member of the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said the virus was \"holding a gun\" to Prime Minister Boris Johnson's head over the restrictions being introduced.\n\nThe nation faces an anxious wait to see the full impact on the NHS, he said.\n\n\"In the north of England now, we are not that far away from the health service being stretched.\n\n\"Because even if we turn the epidemic around now, infections that occur today won't go to hospital for another week or two,\" he said.\n\nDr Stephen Griffin, associate professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Leeds, said the increase in cases should \"serve as a warning to the government to take further action without delay\".\n\n\"It is clear that the consequences of not suppressing infections sufficiently over the summer may be severe if we cannot get on top of this increase,\" he said.\n• None What happens when furlough ends?", "Edinburgh Woollen Mill, owner of the Peacocks and Jaeger clothing brands, says it plans to appoint administrators in an attempt to save the business.\n\nThe move puts 21,000 jobs at risk amid what the company described as \"brutal\" trading conditions.\n\n\"Like every retailer, we have found the past seven months extremely difficult,\" said Edinburgh Woollen Mill chief executive Steve Simpson.\n\nThe stores will continue to trade as a review of the firm is carried out.\n\nThe company says it has had \"a number of expressions of interest for various parts of the group\" which it will consider.\n\nEdinburgh Woollen Mill (EWM), which is owned by billionaire businessman Philip Day, has 1,100 stores for its brands.\n\nThe businesses attract older shoppers who are likely to be keeping away from the High Street to protect against coronavirus, says Catherine Shuttleworth, an independent retail expert.\n\nShe said it was a \"devastating blow\" to small towns and tourist areas where they are based and that buyers for the businesses as a whole could be hard to come by.\n\n\"You might get piecemeal buyers, but I don't hold out much hope,\" she said.\n\nMr Day has a £1.14bn fortune, according to the Sunday Times Rich List published in May 2020.\n\nHe bought Bonmarché out of administration in February. The deal ruffled some feathers, since Mr Day was its previous owner and landlords and suppliers were expected to forgive some of its debts.\n\nBonmarché is not part of the plans announced on Friday. Edinburgh Woollen Mill, including Bonmarché, employs 24,000 people.\n\nEWM said it had filed a notice to appoint administrators, partly because of \"the harsh trading conditions caused by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and a recent reduction in its credit insurance\".\n\nMr Simpson said: \"Through this process, I hope and believe we will be able to secure the best future for our businesses, but there will inevitably be significant cuts and closures as we work our way through this.\"\n\nHe also blamed part of the company's troubles on \"a series of false rumours about our payments and trading which have impacted our credit insurance\".\n\nEWM has been accused by suppliers in Bangladesh of not paying for goods. The company denies this.\n\nEWM has appointed FRP to review the business. The firm was also hired for the Bonmarché administration.\n\nA spokesperson for FRP said: \"Our team is working with the directors of a number of the Edinburgh Woollen Mill Group subsidiaries to explore all options for the future of its retail brands, including Edinburgh Woollen Mill, Jaeger, Ponden Mill and Peacocks.\"\n\nThe pandemic has accelerated a shift in the retail industry from physical stores to online shopping people have been stuck at home and stores have been temporarily closed.\n\nLast month, the boss of one of the UK's most successful and resilient High Street chains told the BBC that hundreds of thousands of traditional retail jobs may not survive in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.\n\nLord Wolfson, who runs clothing firm Next, said there was a clear threat to thousands of jobs, which are now \"unviable\" because the lockdown has triggered a permanent shift to online shopping.\n\nAre you an Edinburgh Woollen Mills employee? Have you been affected by the issues raised here? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Pubs and restaurants in the central belt will have to close for two weeks\n\nAdditional police officers will be deployed in communities across Scotland to ensure pubs and restaurants close at 18:00, Police Scotland has said.\n\nChief Constable Iain Livingstone said patrols would be \"highly visible\" to explain and encourage compliance with new Covid restrictions.\n\nAfter premises close in the central belt, they will not reopen until at least 25 October.\n\nTighter restrictions will also come into force in the rest of the country.\n\nLicensed premises will not be able to serve alcohol indoors and opening hours will be limited.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the moves were \"essential\" to get the spread of the virus back under control.\n\nMr Livingstone said most people had co-operated with the police and supported their work during the Covid crisis. But he said he was concerned about a \"small minority\" who continue to host house parties.\n\nIn the week up to Sunday 4 October, police broke up 271 illegal house parties, issued 106 fines, and made 18 arrests.\n\n\"While restrictions have changed quickly and often, I do not believe anyone in Scotland can be in any doubt that house gatherings and house parties allow the virus to spread and are unlawful,\" Mr Livingstone said.\n\nMeanwhile business owners have warned the new rules could cost thousands of jobs but details of a £40m package of support for hospitality businesses are still to be set out.\n\nAbout 3.4 million people in five health boards - Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lothian, Lanarkshire, Forth Valley and Ayrshire and Arran - are to be subject to the harshest restrictions.\n\nIn these areas across the central belt, licensed premises will have to close for 16 days, although they can still serve takeaways.\n\nCafes with a licence will not have to close, as long as they do not serve alcohol but there is confusion over what constitutes a cafe.\n\nNicola Sturgeon said the government was seeking to strike a \"difficult balance\"\n\nHospitality venues in the rest of Scotland will be allowed to open, but will only be permitted to serve non-alcoholic drinks and food indoors between 06:00 and 18:00.\n\nLicensed premises in these areas will still be able to serve alcohol in outdoor areas, such as beer gardens, up to the 22:00 curfew introduced in September.\n\nAt her daily briefing, Nicola Sturgeon said the government was waiting for an announcement from the UK Chancellor on the furlough scheme, which could have an effect on their proposals for a business support package.\n\nShe said the Scottish plan would include support for employment, a cash grant for each business and a discretionary fund for local authorities.\n\nThe new restrictions are an attempt to arrest a sharp rise in coronavirus cases, with a further 1,246 positive tests recorded on Friday.\n\nThere are 397 people in hospital being treated for the virus, with 33 in intensive care. Six confirmed Covid deaths were also recorded in the last 24 hours.\n\nA paper published by the government on Wednesday claimed that the rate of infections could hit a peak similar to that experienced in March before the end of October.\n\nFurther measures will also come into force from midnight to bring back the 2m (6ft 6in) physical distancing rule in shops and tighten the rules around the wearing of face coverings.\n\nOutdoor live events, adult contact sports, group exercise classes, snooker and pool halls, casinos and bingo halls will also have to close in the health board areas covering Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lothian, Lanarkshire, Forth Valley and Ayrshire and Arran.\n\nPeople are also being asked to avoid public transport where possible and not to share a vehicle with another household.\n\nScotland's national clinical director has insisted the new restrictions are not meant as a \"punishment\" from the Scottish government for people not complying with the regulations.\n\nProf Jason Leitch told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme on Friday: \"The enemy here is not the clinical advice. The enemy here is a deadly virus that has killed a million people.\"\n\nProf Leitch also told the programme he was \"very hopeful\" that the combination of the recent limitations on household mixing and the new measures will enable progression to the \"next version of what the restrictions might look like\".\n\nBut, highlighting the spiralling number of cases across Europe, he warned: \"There has to be a reverse gear.\"", "Two weeks in, the NHS Covid-19 app for England and Wales seems to have got off to a good start, with more than 16 million downloads so far - but a range of employers are actively discouraging their staff from using it.\n\nEarlier this week, both the pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline and a Hull-based fuel supplier told staff the app should be switched off at work - both said it was unnecessary in their \"Covid-secure\" workplaces.\n\nAnd now, there are numerous reports teachers are being told they should not use the app in school.\n\nI have received a message from a teacher in north-west England who wants to remain anonymous.\n\nThis person downloaded the app on the day it was released and then, last Monday, tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nAs the test had been booked through the app, it then triggered alerts telling three colleagues at the school to go into isolation.\n\nBut then, according to the teacher, the secondary school's business manager told the three people involved to ignore the messages and delete the app if they felt they had not been within 2m (6ft) for at least 15 minutes.\n\nOne of the teachers ignored that advice, went into isolation and had a test.\n\nBut when that proved negative, they returned to work - which is contrary to the government advice to complete your period of isolation even if you have a negative test.\n\nMy anonymous contact told me: \"Too many schools want to keep staff in, even if it means breaking the law.\n\n\"I am in a school with about 75-80% black African heritage intake, so our demographic is at very high risk.\"\n\nWe have also heard of a school in Eastbourne, in Sussex, telling teachers not to use the app \"in school time\".\n\nOne head teacher told his colleagues there was a danger a staff member could receive an alert relating to their external activities, which would then trigger more alerts affecting the school.\n\nEast Sussex County Council said it had not issued any guidance on the matter, but suggested the school might have based its policy on an interpretation of a national guidance document.\n\nThe prime minister visited a secondary school in his constituency last week\n\nAnd more cases keep coming in.\n\nA teacher in the Midlands messaged me to say it had been suggested he and his colleagues \"delete the app and ignore messages so [as] not to interfere [or] risk A-level resits\".\n\nOne teacher, however, had a different story.\n\n\"Our headmaster has advised staff and pupils over 16 to use the app,\" he said.\n\n\"This is what persuaded me to use it.\n\n\"Our head has been amazing.\n\n\"I feel looked after, like he cares about the staff as well as the kids.\"\n\nA Department of Health official said: \"We want as many people to download and use the app as possible.\n\n\"It is important to use the NHS Covid-19 app at all times unless in specific scenarios which are set out in our guidance.\"\n\nThat guidance says contact tracing should be turned off at work when:\n\nBut while some teachers may be locking their phones away some of the time, these exemptions do not appear to justify a blanket ban on using the app in schools – or indeed at GlaxoSmithKline's labs and factories.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Watch: How to install the NHS Covid-19 app\n\nPart of the issue seems to be a lack of understanding of how the app works.\n\nIt is only if a member of staff tests positive and the app determines they have had close contact with another app user for a significant period that alerts will be sent telling those people to isolate.\n\nSo employers need to ask themselves if a member of staff tests positive, why would you not want colleagues at risk of spreading the infection alerted as swiftly as possible?", "A selection of your pictures of Scotland sent in between 2 and 9 October. Send your photos to scotlandpictures@bbc.co.uk. Please ensure you adhere to the BBC's rules regarding photographs which can be found here.\n\nPlease also ensure you follow current coronavirus guidelines and take your pictures safely and responsibly.\n\nSwing state: \"With the sky painted in an epic array of colours I had to get the camera out\", Andrew Leinster said of this stunning image of Isla Morris at Burnturk Woods looking towards the Lomond hills.\n\nThe tide and groom: \"My daughter Kirsty and her new husband Andy Sneddon having some post-wedding fun on the beach at Luskentyre, Harris\", from Lynn Cadger.\n\nSurf's up: Ian Brown captured this action shot at Troon, with Ailsa Craig in the background.\n\nLike an oil painting: The harbour in Aberdeen, Europe's oil capital, in all its glory thanks to Erskine Logan.\n\nMotherly love: A red deer and her calf in Galloway at sunrise, thanks to Mandy Williams.\n\nFull marks: \"This is the moon over Goat Fell on the Isle of Arran and Saltcoats harbour in north Ayrshire\", says Peter Ribbeck.\n\nA nice day on the horizon: A sensational sunrise scene at Broughty Ferry beach, courtesy of Connor McLaren.\n\nBorder crossing: First light on Beinn Each in the Trossachs, starring Dougal the border terrier, from Stephen Willis.\n\nHigh hopes: \"I don't know the fella in this picture but I hope he sees it\", says Claire Scott. \"Beautiful day with amazing views from the summit of The Cobbler.\"\n\nA sly drink: \"This fox cub has learnt to drink from our birdbath in Edinburgh\", says Peter MacKenzie.\n\nMonster effort: Loch Ness from the air, thanks to Justin Hill.\n\nThistle do nicely: Brian Hughes took this Flower of Scotland shot in Pittencrieff Park in Dunfermline.\n\nThe calm before the storm: \"Looking across the countryside near Quilquox, Aberdeenshire, in beautiful light shortly before a rain shower\", says Andy Leonard. \"I was struck by the bright green of the new crops and the trees silhouetted against the storm clouds.\"\n\nSplit decision: \"I captured this shot of the sun truly splitting the trees on a walk up Dumgoyne Hill on the edge of the Campsie Fells\", says Morven Hibbert.\n\nSwell idea: Stephen Swindell captured the power of these waves at Aberdeen harbour amid Storm Alex at the weekend.\n\nSeeing double: \"The photo was taken at Ferneyhill Cemetery in Kelso looking towards the Thomson Monument\", says Wendy Richardson.\n\nAfternoon Knapp: John Cuthbert captured this atmospheric scene at Knapps Loch in Inverclyde.\n\nTable for two: Marian Coburn spotted these “twins” in Perth.\n\nA well-trained eye: An atmospheric shot at the Glenfinnan Viaduct, from Tom Blackman\n\nClouding the view: \"There wasn't much of a view from the summit of Ben Klibreck due to cloud - but there was once you dropped below the clouds\", reports Neil MacRitchie.\n\nCatch of the day: Angela Mihovska caught this fishing scene off the Stonehaven coast.\n\nA deer friend: Cassie Richardson sent this photo taken in front of Buachaille Etive Mòr.\n\nLeven it late: \"Captured this lovely sunset over Loch Leven while staying in Glencoe\", says Gerry Feeney.\n\nA robin red rest: Tracy Macpherson spotted this little chap taking a break at Dunoon.\n\nA whale of a time: Peter Maciver caught this majestic moment at Gare Loch.\n\nWhere Hugo, I go: \"This amazing sunset shows Arbroath beach in all its beauty, with my happy dachshund Hugo exploring\", says Charlene Craig. \"He loves the beach more than life itself.\"\n\nStorr blimey: \"Took this picture on a walk up to the Old Man of Storr\", says Jon Wood of his impressive Isle of Skye shot.\n\nFishing for compliments: Gerry McKeown also caught this beautiful image after an evening on Loch Coulter, Stirling.\n\n\"No, it’s not a volcano!\": That was Phil Ashby's description of this well-timed shot of Glen Etive.\n\nRoe deer oh dear: \"This chap decided to feed on our plants and shrubs in our garden in Oban\", says Dave Todd. \"Grabbed this image through our kitchen window\".\n\nBest of bothy worlds: \"Cycled past this on an mountain bike ride over from Glen Artney\", says Duncan McLay.\n\nSomething in the Ayr tonight: \"We've been having some lovely colours at sunset lately\", says Eilean Low.\n\nA lovely golf shot: Mark Grierson from Edinburgh captured a \"fire-like\" sunset at Gifford golf course.\n\nBeak-a-boo: \"Wee bit close Mr Swan, taken at Hogganfield Loch\", says Rosie McGeachan in Glasgow.\n\nStag night: Moon and Mars aligning above Andy Scott's sculpture in Dumbarton\", says Gerry Doherty.\n\nBeach buoys: \"This is washed up in Irvine beach park at the moment\", says Martin McKerrell. \"It made an interesting focus for those walking on the beach\".\n\nOutstanding in its field: \"I came across this suitably masked scarecrow in the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh\", says Chris Pinder. \"Who wouldn't want to maintain a social distance from her?!\"\n\nSons set: Charlie Gallagher caught this tranquil moment featuring sons Charlie, four, James, 10 and Chris, 11, enjoying an ice cream at the end of the day in Largs.\n\nConditions of use: If you submit an image, you do so in accordance with the BBC's terms and conditions.\n\nPlease ensure that the photograph you send is your own and if you are submitting photographs of children, we must have written permission from a parent or guardian of every child featured (a grandparent, auntie or friend will not suffice).\n\nIn contributing to BBC News you agree to grant us a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to publish and otherwise use the material in any way, including in any media worldwide.\n\nHowever, you will still own the copyright to everything you contribute to BBC News.\n\nAt no time should you endanger yourself or others, take any unnecessary risks or infringe the law.\n\nYou can find more information here.\n\nAll photos are subject to copyright.", "Davina McCall and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen will be on the reboot of the show\n\nDavina McCall has been named as the host of Channel 4's upcoming reboot of the BBC show, Changing Rooms.\n\nThe presenter will join interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, who was on the original home improvement show which broadcast on the BBC from 1997 to 2004.\n\nThe show sees two sets of homeowners work against the clock to renovate a room in each other's houses.\n\nThe original show was hosted by Carol Smillie.\n\nIt also featured designers including Linda Barker, Anna Ryder-Richardson and Graham Wynne along with carpenter Andy Kane.\n\nStaying largely true to the original format, the reboot will air across six hour-long episodes.\n\n\"I'm so excited to be presenting Changing Rooms,\" said former Big Brother presenter McCall. \"It's a classic\".\n\n\"It's the perfect time to bring it back, everyone is going DIY and decor mad. I can't wait to see all the amazing transformations - I might even get stuck in myself if I'm allowed to be let loose with a paint brush.\"\n\nLockdown measures enforced due to the Covid-19 pandemic brought about a surge in TV watching and online streaming, according to media watchdog Ofcom.\n\nMany broadcasters, hastily came up with ideas for new TV shows to make life indoors a bit more bearable, such as the BBC's HealthCheck UK Live and Grayson's Art Club, on Channel 4.\n\nSpeaking ahead of the return of Changing Rooms, Jonny Rothery, commissioning editor for Channel 4, said: \"With us all spending so long staring at our own four walls, there's never been a better time to see the return of the nation's favourite interiors show.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Political leaders from the North of England have warned the chancellor's latest Covid rescue package may \"not be enough\" to save jobs and businesses.\n\nRishi Sunak earlier announced the state will pay two-thirds of the wages of staff whose employers are legally forced to close over the coming months.\n\nHe said he wanted to work with regional chiefs to help them through the winter.\n\nBut the mayors of Greater Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield said they still feared widespread \"hardship\".\n\nAnd a group of North-East council leaders are set to oppose any plans to close pubs or other hospitality venues in the worse-affected areas, which could be announced as early as next week.\n\nThe government is poised to introduce a new three-tiered framework of restrictions for England after coming under pressure to simplify the patchwork of different restrictions in force across much of the North.\n\nAhead of an expected announcement next week, Mr Sunak outlined a support package for firms which are no longer trade from their premises, including wage subsidies and increased cash grants from 1 November.\n\nBusiness groups welcomed the move but Labour said thousands of workers would be excluded while Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and his Liverpool counterpart Steve Rotheram - whose regions are expected to be subject to extra restrictions - also expressed caution.\n\n\"We are pleased that the government has listened and recognised that any new system of restrictions must come with a substantial package of financial support,\" the two men said in a statement, also signed by Sheffield Mayor Dan Jarvis and Jamie Driscoll, Mayor of North Tyne.\n\n\"What has been announced by the Chancellor today is a start but, on first look, it would not appear to have gone far enough to prevent genuine hardship, job losses and business failure this winter.\"\n\nAnd the leaders of Northumberland, Newcastle, South and North Tyneside, Gateshead, Sunderland and County Durham councils are set to oppose any further restrictions.\n\nMartin Gannon, the leader of Gateshead Council, told the BBC that existing measures in place were beginning to work and further restrictions risked \"confusing the message\" and \"undermining public confidence\".\n\n\"If you look at the underlying figures across the region, we are seeing the beginning of a decrease in the number of new cases,\" he said following a meeting with Cabinet Office representatives.\n\n\"So, our message to the government is that we don't want to see any further restrictions or closing of the economy.\"\n\nDuring a briefing on Thursday led by England's chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty, 150 MPs from Northern constituencies were shown research from Public Health England suggesting bars, pubs and restaurants accounted for 41% of cases in which two or more under-30s visited the same venue in the week before testing positive.\n\nThey were reportedly told that the number of coronavirus patients in intensive care in the north of England would ultimately surpass the April peak if infections continued to increase at the current rate,\n\nConservative Chief Whip Mark Spencer told BBC Radio Nottingham that ministers and scientific advisers were striving to come up with a \"very clear and easily understood system\".\n\nMinisters had been expected to announce the new system of tiered restrictions this week but there were reports this has been delayed due to disagreements within cabinet.\n\nAccording to a memo seen by the BBC last week, restrictions would be rationalised into three tiers, depending on the level of infection in a particular area.\n\nTwo weeks ago, Tory MPs unhappy with lack of Parliamentary scrutiny over local lockdowns forced the government to agree to give them a vote before any new nationwide curbs come into force.\n\nMr Spencer, who is in charge of maintaining discipline on the Conservative benches, said the government would honour its promise to its MPs, with a vote expected next week.\n\nAsked about the reported delay in officially announcing the plan, which was briefed to selected newspapers on Wednesday, he said it was \"important to get this right rather than fast as it would be very easy to announce something that isn't going to work\".\n\nThe new system, he suggested, would be similar to the current approach used by government based on infection rates but with greater flexibility built in.\n\n\"As we see the disease increase we will obviously go up those tiers but if we can all observe the social distancing and make sure we keep away from each other the disease will hopefully start to go down in number and then we can ease off that again.\"", "Harry Richford died a week after he was born\n\nAn NHS trust has been charged over the death of a baby who died seven days after an emergency delivery.\n\nHarry Richford died a week after he was born at Margate's Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital (QEQM) in 2017.\n\nThe Care Quality Commission (CQC) said East Kent Hospitals NHS Trust had been charged with exposing Harry and his mother Sarah Richford to significant risk of avoidable harm.\n\nThe trust has apologised \"unreservedly\" to the family over its failings.\n\nAn inquest earlier this year ruled Harry's death was \"contributed to by neglect\".\n\nFollowing the inquest, the independent Kirkup review of maternity services at the trust began its investigations. At the time, Susan Acott, chief executive of the NHS trust, told a board meeting there had been 15 baby deaths that could possibly have been preventable.\n\nHarry's parents Sarah and Tom said they had been in the spotlight for nearly three years\n\nThe Richford family said they were pleased the CQC had made \"this landmark decision\".\n\n\"It will now be for the courts to hear all of the evidence that the CQC and our family have amassed over the last three years and to decide whether the clinical care and treatment offered at that time could be considered safe, or whether there was a criminal breach of the duty of care that was clearly owed to both Sarah and Harry at their most vulnerable time,\" they added.\n\n\"In the meantime, the Kirkup inquiry will carry on their work looking into the way maternity services were delivered since 2009 for all families affected, with the aim of finding the truth and ensuring these circumstances cannot be repeated.\"\n\nThe family urged anyone with concerns about maternity care in east Kent to contact the inquiry.\n\n\"Our family have been in the spotlight for nearly three years, now is our time to pass the responsibility of finding the truth and ensuring lasting change in east Kent to the CQC, the courts, Bill Kirkup and indeed the government,\" they said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Richford family said they were pleased with the decision\n\nEast Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust chief executive Susan Acott said the trust had \"admitted to the CQC that it failed to provide safe care and treatment for which we are profoundly sorry\".\n\n\"We are deeply sorry and apologise unreservedly for our failure to provide safe care and treatment resulting in the death of baby Harry in November 2017,\" she said.\n\n\"Mr and Mrs Richford's expectation was that they would welcome a healthy baby into their family. We are deeply sorry that we failed in our role to help them do that and for the devastating loss of baby Harry.\n\n\"We recognise the mistakes in both Harry's delivery and subsequent resuscitation and that Harry's family was not given the support and answers they needed at the time. We deeply regret the extra pain that this caused them.\"", "Two billionaire brothers from Blackburn have been made CBEs a week after clinching a £6.8bn deal to buy the Asda supermarket chain from Walmart.\n\nMohsin and Zuber Issa were among a number of business bosses on the Queen's Birthday Honours list.\n\nGlaxoSmithkline chief executive Emma Walmsley was made a dame for services to the pharmaceutical industry.\n\nThe drugs firm is one of about 20 that is part of a global race to develop a coronavirus vaccine.\n\nThe billionaire Issa brothers started their business 20 years ago with one rented petrol station and grew it into a network of nearly 6,000 forecourts across 10 countries.\n\nIt was announced last week that the Issa brothers and private equity firm TDR Capital would take a majority stake in Asda.\n\nWalmart said that, under the new owners, Asda will invest £1bn in the supermarket over the next three years.\n\nA number of honours were awarded to people for their work during the coronavirus pandemic, including Ms Walmsley.\n\nShe was given a damehood for services to the pharmaceutical industry and business after leading the UK's biggest drugs manufacturer for the past three years.\n\nEmma Walmsley has been chief executive of GlaxoSmithkline since 2017\n\nGlaxoSmithkline (GSK) is part of the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine, and said last week it had started clinical trials with fellow drugs firm Sanofi.\n\nAs chief executive, Ms Walmsley has been instrumental in the company's involvement in international efforts to develop a vaccine.\n\nProperty tycoon Tony Gallagher was given a knighthood in relation to his service to \"land development and the property business\".\n\nThe Gallagher Estates founder is a friend of former Prime Minister David Cameron and a major donor to the Conservative party.\n\nAndrew Mackenzie, the former chief executive officer of mining giant BHP Billiton, was made a Knight Bachelor for services to business, science, technology and to UK and Australia relations.\n\nClare Woodman the chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley International was given a CBE for services to finance.\n\nFashion entrepreneur Sir Paul Smith was also recognised on the annual list, being named as a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour.\n\nThere were also honours for a number of utilities bosses.\n\nRichard Flint, who recently retired as Yorkshire Water's chief, Olivia Garfield, chief executive at Severn Trent, and Chris Jones, who stepped down as chief of Welsh Water last year, all become CBEs.", "El Shafee Elsheikh (l) and Alexanda Kotey (r) were flown to the US on Wednesday\n\nTwo Islamic State (IS) suspects from the UK have pleaded not guilty in a US court to charges of conspiring to murder four American hostages.\n\nEl Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey are accused of belonging to an IS cell dubbed \"The Beatles\" involved in kidnappings in Iraq and Syria.\n\nAppearing by videolink, they both pleaded not guilty at a hearing in Alexandria, Virginia.\n\nThey had been flown from US custody in Iraq to face charges on Wednesday.\n\nElsheikh, 32, and Kotey, 36, are facing trial for involvement in the murders of US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and relief workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller.\n\nBoth of the accused waived their right to a fast trial.\n\nSetting the date of the next hearing for 15 January, Judge TS Ellis described the case as \"complex and unusual\" and said it may involve classified information.\n\n\"Time is required in order to achieve the ends of justice in this case,\" the judge said.\n\nElsheikh and Kotey are suspected of involvement in the deaths of other hostages, including Alan Henning - a taxi driver from Salford, Greater Manchester, who was delivering aid - and Scottish aid worker David Haines, from Perth, as well as two Japanese nationals.\n\nThey are also face charges of supporting terrorism and conspiring to commit hostage taking.\n\nOriginally from west London, their alleged IS gang was given its 1960s pop group nickname by hostages due to their British accents. They were stripped of their UK nationality in 2018.", "The singer has recorded dozens of hits with the Housemartins, The Beautiful South and Jacqui Abbott\n\nSinger Paul Heaton has been praised for his generosity, after the final editor of Q Magazine revealed how he supported staff when the publication closed.\n\nWriting on Twitter, Ted Kessler explained how the star made a large donation to the magazine, which was shared amongst 40 staff.\n\n\"It really was the most amazingly kind, selfless, generous act,\" he said. \"For some, it meant a bill could be paid.\"\n\nIn thanks, the staff commissioned a Q Award to honour the star.\n\nReceiving it on Friday, Heaton thanked the magazine for its support and the \"kind words\" about his donation.\n\n\"It was just meant to make sure people weren't left on their arse,\" he said in a video posted to Twitter.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Paul Heaton This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nKessler, who was at the helm of Q Magazine when it closed in July, shared the story on what would have been the date of the annual Q award ceremony.\n\n\"We had the Roundhouse booked for two nights for the Q Awards next week,\" he wrote on Twitter. \"We didn't have talent sorted when we had to Covid cancel in April, but Nadine Shah was presenting and the two gigs were Liam Gallagher one night, Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott the other.\n\n\"The only award we knew for sure was to Paul Heaton, as we'd heard he'd never won one.\n\n\"Think of all the brilliant songs he's written for The Housemartins, Beautiful South, etc. Millions of records sold. No Q award (or Brit) for his songwriting. So we knew he'd be Classic Songwriter.\n\n\"Then, a few days after Q closed, we got a message from him saying that to thank Q for all the support we'd given him over 35 years, he was going to donate a large sum to thank us in our turmoil. Obviously, I politely declined.\n\n\"He was insistent. I accepted the donation and shared it amongst over 40 staff and freelancers working for Q at the time, all of whose minds - like mine - were blown.\"\n\nPosting a photo of Heaton's award, Kessler concluded: \"We got him that award in the end. Britain's greatest living pop star. A true legend.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Ted Kessler This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nFans welcomed the anecdote with an outpouring of joy and gratitude.\n\n\"Such a non-2020 thing to happen,\" said Mat Osman, bassist for Suede. \"A musician who I love is suddenly trending and it turns out that it's just because he's a lovely guy.\"\n\n\"This kind of thing is just enough to retain faith in human nature. What a wonderful thing to do,\" added BBC 6 Music's Shaun Keaveny.\n\n\"A proper working class hero,\" added one fan, while another commented: \"Paul Heaton and his songs have pulled me out of very dark times. He deserves all the kudos, awards and love that goes his way,\" added another user.\n\nHeaton, who was formerly a member of the Housemartins and The Beautiful South, is known for his generosity.\n\nIn 2017, he revealed that he had offered all the royalties from his back catalogue to the government - meaning that every time a hit like Happy Hour, Rotterdam or Perfect 10 was played, the money would be used to fund schools and the NHS.\n\n\"I felt I'd made enough money from them, I didn't want to nationalise my savings, as such, I was just saying this was a gift to the British public,\" he told Channel 5's Matthew Wright programme.\n\nHowever, he said, the offer was turned down.\n\nThe star was also due to play a free concert for NHS staff on the frontline of the coronavirus crisis next week, along with his current singing partner Jacqui Abbott.\n\nThe show, in Nottingham's Motorpoint Arena, has been rescheduled for April, due to ongoing restrictions on live events.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Deke Duncan has joined WLHA but still broadcasts Radio 77 to one listener - wife Pamela - at home in Stockport, Greater Manchester\n\nA DJ who featured in a 1970s BBC TV report about his \"one listener\" radio shows broadcast from his garden shed to his wife in the house has been signed by a US radio station.\n\nDeke Duncan, 75, was filmed by BBC Nationwide in Hertfordshire 40 years ago, and he will now broadcast on Wisconsin's WLHA Radio from Sunday.\n\nHe was tracked down in 2018 by BBC Three Counties Radio and his story has since been reported all over the world.\n\n\"I'm living the dream, still,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm really thrilled about it - join me for a cheerful earful every Sunday.\"\n\nOn BBC Nationwide on BBC One in the 1970s, DJ Deke Duncan said his \"ultimate ambition would be to broadcast to the rest of Stevenage\"\n\nInspired by pirate station Radio Caroline, Duncan started playing records from his back garden in Gonville Crescent, Stevenage in 1974, and still does it from his home in Stockport, Greater Manchester.\n\nHe set up Radio 77, but with no licence, the station could only be sent to a speaker in his living room to wife Teresa - his only listener.\n\nIn 2018, the film was tweeted by BBC Archive and BBC Three Counties Radio found him in Stockport, Greater Manchester, where he was still presenting to one listener on Radio 77 - his second wife Pamela.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Deke Duncan was given a one-off show by BBC Three Counties Radio\n\nWLHA AM is operated by University of Wisconsin alumni who studied there in the 1970s and 1980s.\n\nDuncan said his show, which can be heard online at 16:00 BST, would be \"exactly like Radio 77 that I've been doing for nearly 50 years\".\n\nProgramme director, Kevin \"Casey\" Peckham said he was \"truly delighted\" Duncan had joined the team.\n\n\"Deke's finely-honed talent for doing upbeat, fast-paced, and imaginative radio in the style of great radio of the 1960s and 1970s is a perfect fit for us,\" he said.\n\n\"We recognized [him] as a kindred spirit who shared our own passions for radio as it existed decades ago.\"\n\nDuncan presented non-stop weekend slots from his shed at 57 Gonville Crescent in Stevenage in 1974 - home of Radio 77\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk", "A US man in Thailand who was arrested for writing a negative hotel review will avoid legal action and jail time.\n\nWesley Barnes had posted several reviews allegedly accusing the Sea View Resort of \"modern day slavery\".\n\nHe was subsequently detained and charged under Thailand's strict anti-defamation laws.\n\nPolice said Mr Barnes and the resort had managed to reach an agreement, which included an apology to the hotel and to Thailand's tourism authority.\n\nHe was also told to send a statement to foreign media organisations that had previously written about his then possible arrest, including BBC News.\n\nIn it, Mr Barnes said that he apologised for his \"repeatedly false and untrue statements... made to maliciously defame Sea View. These reviews were written out of anger and malice\".\n\nThe statement said he regretted his actions, adding that \"the hotel has forgiven me and agreed to withdraw the complaint\".\n\nColonel Kitti Maleehuan, superintendent of the Koh Chang police station - the island where the resort is located - told the AFP news agency that both parties had met over a mediation session overseen by police.\n\nMr Barnes will also have to provide \"an explanation to the US embassy\", said AFP - though it did not elaborate.\n\nThe hotel had said it would withdraw its complaint against Mr Barnes if he met all these terms.\n\nMr Barnes had ahead of the mediation session told news agency Reuters that he wanted to \"end this case once and for all\".\n\nIf found guilty, he could have faced up to two years in prison.\n\nMr Barnes, who works in Thailand, had stayed in the Sea View resort earlier this year.\n\nHe is said to have got into an argument with staff over him wanting to bring his own bottle of alcohol while dining in the restaurant.\n\nA hotel statement said he had \"caused a commotion\" and refused to pay a corkage fee which was eventually waived when the manager intervened.\n\nSince leaving, Mr Barnes posted several negative reviews of the property, after which the hotel sued him for defamation.\n\nThe hotel said the reviews were \"false\" and \"defamatory\"\n\nThe hotel has alleged that his reviews were \"fabricated, recurrent, and malicious\", with one post on TripAdvisor accusing the hotel of \"modern day slavery\".\n\nMr Barnes, though, had earlier told the BBC that this particular post was never published as it violated TripAdvisor's guidelines.\n\nHe also said he had already lost his job over the incident and expressed worries that the publicity his case had received would make it harder to find new employment.\n\nThe hotel told the BBC that after the reviews had been published, it had received cancellations and inquiries about employee treatment.\n\nThailand's tourism sector has been hit hard by the fallout of the global coronavirus pandemic.\n\n\"Receiving multiple false and defamatory reviews over a period can be extremely damaging, especially, during these incredibly difficult times,\" the statement from the hotel said.\n\nThey added that they had repeatedly tried to contact Mr Barnes before they filed the suit.\n\n\"We chose to file a complaint to serve as a deterrent, as we understood he may continue to write negative reviews week after week for the foreseeable future,\" they said.\n\n\"Despite our multiple efforts to contact him to resolve the matter in an amicable way for well over a month, he chose to ignore us completely. He only replied to us when he had been notified of our complaint by the authorities.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"I shouldn't be scared to walk down the street\"\n\nTwo years ago, 50-year-old Tommy Barwick was attacked after London's Pride parade. He was left requiring the use of a wheelchair.\n\n\"I heard shouting behind me that was homophobic. Then I was hit. I felt my back crack and I fell to the floor. They stamped on my back,\" said Tommy - and they swore at him as he lay on the ground and told him he \"deserved it\".\n\n\"The pain - it was so awful. I was in and out of consciousness. I thought I was going to die, I really did. I thought I was never going to see my daughter again,\" he said, recalling the traumatic experience.\n\nThis homophobic assault - an attack based on prejudice against LGBT people - was part of a surge in such cases over the past five years.\n\nNew figures obtained by the BBC from all 45 police forces in the UK reveal that the number of reported homophobic hate crime cases almost trebled - from 6,655 in 2014-15, the year same sex marriage became legal in England, to 18,465 in 2019-20.\n\nIn the past year, there has been a 20% rise in reports to police of homophobic hate crime, according to the data which was obtained through Freedom of Information requests.\n\nPolice forces said this increase could reflect a greater confidence in reporting such crimes.\n\nBut LGBT charities said they had seen a rise in people experiencing such hate crimes and this could be just the \"tip of the iceberg\".\n\nThe attack has left Tommy in pain - and it meant losing his livelihood because he was no longer able to run the shop he owned.\n\n\"My life was taken from me. I can't play with my daughter like I used to. I don't sleep. I have flashbacks. I have nightmares. I'm financially ruined,\" he told the BBC.\n\nBut his attackers were never found. The police force dealing with his case has apologised for the way that his case was handled, and the BBC has seen the letter.\n\n\"I wanted to reiterate my apology for the lack of face-to-face contact with any officer after your attack. It is clear that the service you received left you feeling let down, and this is not acceptable,\" he was told by the police.\n\nBut Tommy doesn't think that's good enough.\n\n\"They've told me that they handled my case wrong, and that now they'll train their officers better. But that doesn't help me. I haven't got a lot of trust in them anymore.\"\n\nA hate crime is a criminal offence that is motivated by \"hostility or prejudice\" towards someone because of factors such as their race or religion or their sexual orientation.\n\nIt means prosecutors can apply to the court to increase the offender's sentence.\n\nSuch cases of hate crimes based on sexual orientation seem to have been increasing in many areas.\n\nCharlie Graham, a 21-year-old from Sunderland, says homophobic hate crime is just a part of life.\n\nCharlie has been attacked several times over the past three years - and was left beaten and covered in blood after the most recent incident a few months ago.\n\n\"I did go downhill after the first two of three times. Like really downhill, to the point where I was in a hole and I didn't want to come out of it,\" Charlie said about the impacts of the attacks.\n\n\"Suicidal thoughts, drinking, not giving a care in the world.\"\n\nAs with Tommy's experience, Charlie's attackers were never found. The police looking into the case apologised.\n\nEven after going through such horrific experiences, Charlie refuses to change any way of life, and said nobody else should have to either.\n\n\"I could come up with lots of examples where we are getting it right,\" said Deputy Chief Constable Julie Cooke, the lead for LGBT at the National Police Chiefs' Council.\n\n\"But I absolutely take seriously where we don't. And we need to make sure that we improve and learn from those times when we've not done it right,\" she said.\n\n\"It is hugely underreported. And so please do come forward. And if you're not getting the right response that you would expect, please make sure that you tell us about that.\"\n\nBut Nancy Kelley, chief executive of Stonewall, the LGBT charity, doesn't think the rise is just down to better reporting.\n\n\"We are definitely seeing a real increase in people reaching out for help across all of the LGBT organisations,\" she said.\n\n\"So we are very concerned that this is a real rise in people who are being attacked because of who they are and who they love.\n\n\"We know that 80% of LGBT people don't report hate crimes. So this is really just the tip of the iceberg.\n\n\"One of the key steps to changing this is making it visible, and by standing up and saying that we shouldn't have to experience this kind of hate and abuse.\"", "Fewer than half of state schools in England offer counselling for pupils on site in the wake of the coronavirus lockdown, research says.\n\nThe Institute of Public Policy Research study says fewer schools offer such services now than in 2010 and schools in more deprived areas were most likely to have lost out.\n\nIt wants a national entitlement to mental health support in schools.\n\nThe government says it is investing in mental health and children's wellbeing.\n\nBut John Trickett, Labour MP for Hemsworth, who has been campaigning with counselling organisations on the issue, said he was very angry about the lack of access, despite government pledges.\n\n\"The fact that some schools in more deprived areas haven't been able to offer counselling and other pastoral services isn't surprising in this context, but it is wrong, unfair and should make people's blood boil,\" he said.\n\n\"This generation of school and college children have already experienced unprecedented upheaval in the last six months.\"\n\nThere has been a huge increase in young people struggling with mental health issues in recent years, and a further spike in cases related to lockdown is expected by many groups working with children.\n\nGeneral secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers Paul Whiteman said mental health support teams were a vital aspect of improving access to mental health support, but progress to develop these had slowed.\n\nHe added: \"It has never been more important for young people to get the support they need, but it still appears that it is a lottery. The government urgently needs to step in to correct this.\"\n\nThe IPPR based its findings on a survey of nearly 7,000 teachers in state and private schools, weighting the results to reflect the national picture.\n\nSome 48% of the teachers polled said their schools offered counselling on the school site.\n\nAllowing pupils to access counselling in school is important because it reduces the lesson time they will miss if they have to travel elsewhere for appointments.\n\nIt also helps staff can understand whether the pupil is dealing with an ongoing issue.\n\nAlso, teachers, parents and head teachers frequently say they find it difficult to access the support services they need for their children.\n\nWaiting lists for support through the NHS can be long, and young people often need to be severely impaired before they are approved for help.\n\nHarry Quilter Pinner, IPPR associate director and lead author of the report, said the pandemic had highlighted inequalities in society and the very real needs of children.\n\n\"Many schools are unable to provide the support young people need to thrive.\n\n\"Without urgent government action to ensure every school can provide vital services such as counselling and after-school clubs there is a profound risk that the legacy of the pandemic will be even bigger educational and health inequalities.\n\n\"The government has started to put in place some support for young people in the wake of the national lockdown. But it can and should go further - the pandemic should be seen as an opportunity to 'build back better'.\"\n\nThe Department for Education pointed to its £8m training programme for schools to access the knowledge and resources they need to support children and young people, teachers and parents.\n\nThe Wellbeing for Education Return programme, which started in September, will support staff working in schools and colleges to respond to the additional pressures some children and young people may be feeling as a direct result of the pandemic. These include bereavement, stress, trauma or anxiety.", "Bars and restaurants are to be shut in another four French cities where Covid-19 is spreading\n\nThe French government has imposed tighter coronavirus restrictions in four more cities with high infection rates, as a number of European countries see a surge in cases.\n\nThe cities of Lyon, Lille, Grenoble and Saint-Etienne will become zones of maximum alert from Saturday.\n\nBars and restaurants will have to close, as they did in Paris earlier this week and Marseille last month.\n\nThe measures were announced as France saw a near-record 18,129 new cases.\n\n\"The situation has deteriorated in several metropolises in recent days,\" French Health Minister Olivier Veran said at a news conference on Thursday. \"Every day, more and more people are infected.\"\n\nFrance's maximum-alert level comes into force when the infection rate in a locality exceeds 250 infections per 100,000 people and at least 30% of intensive care beds are reserved for Covid-19 patients.\n\nHospitals in the Paris region moved into emergency mode on Thursday, as coronavirus patients took up almost half of intensive-care beds.\n\nFrance's coronavirus situation mirrors that of other European countries, including the Netherlands, Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic, which all reported record increases in daily cases on Thursday.\n\nEven Germany, a relative success story of the pandemic in Europe, has started to see what its health minister has called a worrying rise in cases.\n\nA large proportion of the rise in coronavirus cases globally is being driven by outbreaks in Europe, the Americas and South-East Asia.\n\nOn Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a record one-day increase in global coronavirus cases, with the total rising by 338,779 in 24 hours.\n\nGermany saw its highest daily rise in infections since April, with confirmed cases rising by almost a third to more than 4,000.\n\nIt has now recorded a total of 310,144 cases with a death toll of 9,578, according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI). The UK in contrast has registered 544,275 cases and 42,515 deaths. On Thursday 17,540 new cases were recorded in the UK.\n\nAt a news conference, RKI President Lothar Wieler said Germans must be wary of what he called the \"prevention paradox\" - the feeling that measures were no longer needed because case numbers were relatively low.\n\n\"The current situation worries me a lot. We don't know how the situation in Germany will develop in the coming weeks. It's possible we'll see more than 10,000 new cases a day, it's possible the virus will spread out of control,\" he said.\n\nGerman Health Minister Jens Spahn praised the German people for their \"prudent actions\" in integrating the rules into their day-to-day lives, but added: \"We must not gamble away this achievement.\"\n\nHe pointed the finger at large groups of socialising young people, who \"think they are invincible\", for failing to follow the rules on social distancing and hygiene and welcomed the curfews on evening entertainment introduced by Berlin and Frankfurt.\n\nAs the autumn school holidays get under way in Germany, rules for domestic travel have also been tightened and include a ban on overnight stays in hotels or holiday apartments for anyone coming from \"risk zones\" where infection rates top 50 per 100,000 inhabitants.\n\nGermans have also been urged to avoid travelling abroad during the holiday period.\n\nThere are already bans on large gatherings in areas with high infection rates, testing at airports for people arriving from high-risk countries and fines for anyone failing to wear face coverings in shops or on public transport.", "However you look at the blizzard of statistics about the Coronavirus, the disease is still spreading - despite town after town being placed under extra limits.\n\nEven before Nicola Sturgeon's moves on Wednesday to try to break the spread in Scotland, ministers in SW1 were looking at the next steps they would need to take to stop the acceleration of the virus.\n\nAs we've reported, the government is likely to introduce a tiered approach to put different parts of the country with different spreads of the diseases into different categories.\n\nBut the exact nature of the strictest form of restrictions are yet to be set in stone.\n\nIt's a complicated equation. The Department of Health is worried about the spread of the disease, as well as other patients losing out on other treatments because of the focus on Covid.\n\nNo 11 is fearful about the impact on the economy, which has already had a profound shock.\n\nAnd it's No 10's job to worry about all of it, then reach a conclusion.\n\nBut Boris Johnson also knows that his own MPs and the opposition parties are more and more sceptical as each day passes about what the government proposes.\n\nIt's clear that shutting pubs and restaurants is a possibility - the \"circuit breaker\" that we have talked about on here lots of times.\n\nBut there are many questions still to be settled.\n\nWould that happen everywhere? Or just in the most affected parts of the country?\n\nWould closures be total or for a certain period of time only?\n\nWould they be temporary? Or put in place until an indeterminate time?\n\nA lot is unknown, but the discussions are serious. The Treasury is already looking at financial support for the different options, including not just closing pubs in the most affected areas, but potentially well beyond.\n\nThere is a lot yet to settle, and the next formal announcement is likely (as things stand) not to come until Monday.\n\nBut more action is clearly on the way.", "Last updated on .From the section Scotland\n\nScotland are one game away from their first major finals since 1998 after a nerve-shredding win on penalties against Israel at Hampden.\n\nKenny McLean scored the pivotal spot-kick in the depleted Scots' first ever shootout, with only a victory in Serbia on 12 November now separating Steve Clarke's men from Euro 2020.\n\nIt was a turgid affair at an empty national stadium between two below-par teams, but five perfect penalties from the hosts have a nation daring to dream of reaching a long-awaited tournament.\n\nScotland, without a clutch of players after call-offs due to Covid-19 protocols and injury, are now on a six-game unbeaten run.\n\nSerbia lie in wait in the play-off finals after they defeated Norway 2-1 in extra time in Oslo.\n• None What could still ruin Scotland's dream?\n\nHoping for the best, fearing the worst. The mantra of every Scotland fan following the match across the land. Was it now, or would it continue to be never?\n\nAs the Tartan Army dared to whisper of the former, the preamble silenced much of the chatter.\n\nStuart Armstrong, Kieran Tierney, Ryan Christie, Scott McKenna, Liam Palmer, James Forrest and Oliver Burke all ruled out - the first three amid Covid controversy.\n\nWhat followed in the fledgling moments of this encounter would have offered modest reassurance. While seeing plenty of the ball, Scotland struggled to serve the front two of Oli McBurnie and Lyndon Dykes.\n\nInstead, the hosts' best efforts came from set-pieces. Andy Robertson arced a free-kick wide in a half chance before Scott McTominay missed a jaw-dropping chance, steering a header the wrong side of the post from six yards when left all alone.\n\nThe noise of the Manchester United man - playing again in a back three - chastising himself for the miss walking off at the break the only thing cutting through the Hampden silence.\n\nScotland captain Robertson was four years old the last time the country graced a major tournament, and the pressure seemed to suffocate him and his team-mates.\n\nWhile the back three looked steady, there was little intensity going forward, minimal width and nothing for Ofir Marciano to do in the Israel goal.\n\nInstead, the team ranked 93rd in the world were the ones to get the only shot of the 90 minutes on target, Eran Zahavi's zinger from distance being dealt with by David Marshall.\n\nThe game limped over the line into extra time - Scotland's first added half hour since 1961 - with what was likely to have been a unified sigh of resignation across the country.\n\nSubstitute Ryan Fraser brought intent and conviction to the side, the Newcastle winger sparking flickers of intent, but again Marciano's gloves remained immaculate. Twenty two years of hurt down, 15 minutes to play.\n\nThe agonising torture of Scotland's first penalty shootout seemed inevitable, but Israel offered one huge heart-in-mouth moment.\n\nCeltic's Hatem Elhamed's cross was missed by Liam Cooper. Lurking behind was Shon Weissman, but the Real Valladolid striker's outstretched leg missed it too. The cracks in the fingers contracted tighter.\n\nThen the nerves were shredded further. A last-gasp Robertson corner found the head of Cooper. His connection was true, but the ball crashed off an upright and out of play to signal penalties.\n\nScotland were now into uncharted waters. Nothing up until this point suggested how plain sailing it would be.\n\nJohn McGinn, Callum McGregor, McTominay, Lawrence Shankland and McLean all scored, with Marshall saving Zehavi's opening spot kick. It trigger delirium on the pitch, at homes everywhere, and no doubt on streets outside of pubs that closed - or were supposed to, at least - halfway through extra time.\n\nIt's safe to come out from the back of the sofa, but best keep the spot warm for next month.\n\nWhat did we learn?\n\nNot as much what did we learn, but what were we reminded of? Watching Scotland should come with a health warning.\n\nThis is a national team that for so many years has threatened to be consumed by the beast of a two-decade burden of regret, angst and humiliation. While Israel didn't threaten for the most part, the group of players in dark blue struggled to find their rhythm.\n\nBut, it wouldn't be Scotland unless it was done the hard way. While Clarke will say Slovakia and Czech Republic in the Nations League in coming days will get due respect, the focus internally will surely be on preparing for Serbia. With an influx of players returning, you just never know...\n• None This was Scotland's first goalless draw in 55 matches, since November 2013 against United States.\n• None Scotland have gone six games without defeat in all competitions (W4 D2) for the first time since being unbeaten in seven matches under Gordon Strachan in October 2017.\n• None Only one of the game's 29 shots was on target - Eran Zahavi's attempt for Israel in the 72nd minute.\n• None It was the first time Scotland have not had a shot on target at home since the game against Belgium in September 2013.\n\nScotland's focus now falls to Sunday's visit of Slovakia to Hampden in the Nations League, then the arrival of the Czechs on Wednesday. Honestly...\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(5), Israel 0(3). Kenny McLean (Scotland) converts the penalty with a left footed shot to the bottom left corner.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(4), Israel 0(3). Mohammad Abu Fani (Israel) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the bottom right corner.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(4), Israel 0(2). Lawrence Shankland (Scotland) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the bottom left corner.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(3), Israel 0(2). Shon Weissman (Israel) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the centre of the goal.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(3), Israel 0(1). Scott McTominay (Scotland) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the bottom left corner.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(2), Israel 0(1). Nir Bitton (Israel) converts the penalty with a right footed shot to the high centre of the goal.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(2), Israel 0. Callum McGregor (Scotland) converts the penalty with a left footed shot to the bottom right corner.\n• None Penalty saved! Eran Zahavi (Israel) fails to capitalise on this great opportunity, right footed shot saved in the bottom left corner.\n• None Goal! Scotland 0(1), Israel 0. John McGinn (Scotland) converts the penalty with a left footed shot to the bottom left corner.\n• None Liam Cooper (Scotland) hits the right post with a header from the centre of the box. Assisted by Andrew Robertson with a cross following a corner.\n• None Attempt blocked. Andrew Robertson (Scotland) left footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by John McGinn.\n• None Offside, Israel. Nir Bitton tries a through ball, but Shon Weissman is caught offside. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Exploring how it defines the way we feel\n• None What We're Not Taught In Schools", "Premier League games not selected for broadcast in October will be available to fans on a pay-per-view basis.\n\nThe five fixtures per round not already picked to be shown live, will be available on BT Sport Box Office or Sky Sports Box Office, priced at £14.95.\n\nClubs have agreed this \"interim solution\" to allow fans to continue watching their teams live.\n\nPremier League clubs voted 19-1 in favour of the move, with Leicester City the only one to vote against it.\n\nThe move has drawn criticism from football supporters, while the Premier League said it and its clubs \"remain committed to the safe return of fans as soon as possible\".\n\nSpectators have been unable to attend Premier League games since football was halted on 13 March because of the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nThe top flight resumed on 17 June with the remaining 92 games of last season being played behind closed doors and the opening games of this season have followed suit.\n\nThe Premier League and UK government had hoped to bring fans back into stadiums from 1 October but those plans were scrapped following an increase in coronavirus cases.\n\nSky Sports managing director Rob Webster said: \"Our subscribers still get more than 140 of the very best matches, while supporters of individual clubs won't have to miss out on any games during this period.\"\n\nBT Sport said fans without a subscription would still be able to access their Box Office service.\n\nFormer Manchester United and England right-back Gary Neville, now a Sky pundit, said on social media it was a \"really bad move\" by the Premier League.\n\nIn a statement, the Football Supporters' Association urged broadcasters to \"reconsider their pricing\".\n\n\"Today's announcement shows that fan power works,\" the FSA said. \"At the start of this season the Premier League and its broadcasters had planned to leave match-going fans entirely locked out of their side's matches; now thanks to the sustained pressure of our #LetUsWatch campaign all games will be available for fans.\n\n\"Many Premier League clubs have already taken money from fans for matches they can't attend, so we urge them to get refunds out to those supporters as soon as possible, particularly season ticket holders.\"\n\nAlex Hurst, the chair of Newcastle United's Supporters Trust said: \"The idea that Premier League clubs need to implement PPV because of economic needs would carry more weight if they hadn't just spent £1bn on players, furloughed staff, received government loans, weren't charging fans for games they aren't going to and hadn't just made thousands of staff redundant.\"\n\nSupporters of EFL clubs can buy match passes to watch their teams for £10 using the iFollow service.\n\n'The Premier League's move has raised eyebrows within government' - analysis\n\nEver since last season resumed, all Premier League matches have been available to watch live via the top flight's broadcast partners. This was partly to help the government encourage fans to stay at home while games stayed behind closed doors, rather than congregating outside grounds or in pubs.\n\nBut having had their hopes of a partial return of fans inside grounds from 1 October dashed, despite the success of pilot events, the clubs have had enough of generating nothing from these matches.\n\nTheir annoyance at being told turnstiles must remain shut when pressure is also building on them to come up with a bailout for the EFL, is likely to have hardened their stance.\n\nBut after clubs spent more than £1bn in the summer transfer window, and at a time when many supporters will be struggling financially, there will be anger about having to pay £15 for matches fans had grown used to watching for no extra cost, on top of their subscriptions for Sky and BT. Those who have also bought season tickets will be particularly infuriated.\n\nI understand the Premier League's move has raised eyebrows within government, and clubs will now come under renewed pressure to refund season ticket holders, and perhaps reduce the pay-per-view cost going forward.\n• None Exploring how it defines the way we feel\n• None What We're Not Taught In Schools", "Scottish LibDem leader Willie Rennie says today's guidance highlights the confusion generated by the first minister's statement on Wednesday.\n\nHe told BBC One Scotland's Coronavirus Update that there should be a \"proper package of financial support for those self isolating\".\n\nMr Rennie says Scotland should be mass testing students and called for a timetable to detail when society can return to \"some form of normality.\"\n\nMr Rennie adds it is incredibly important to get the route map right going forward.\n\nHe says: \"This chopping and changing of the last week can't be repeated in future.\n\n\"We need to have clarity. We need to have debate. We need to have scrutiny.\n\n\"We can't have the parliament being bounced, which is what I warned was going to happen this week.\"", "The chancellor will set out on Friday more support for businesses forced to close by law, with tighter virus rules expected in England next week.\n\nRishi Sunak will outline the next stage of the Job Support Scheme to help firms that \"may have to close in the coming weeks or months\", the Treasury says.\n\nAn update on restrictions, which could see pubs and restaurants shut in the worst-affected areas, is due on Monday.\n\nRegional leaders have called for more help for struggling firms.\n\nThe chancellor is expected to announce the new financial support scheme will be a six-month plan, with a three-month review point.\n\nBut Labour's shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds said Mr Sunak's Job Support Scheme was \"forcing businesses to flip a coin over who stays and who goes\" because it was cheaper to employ one worker than two to do the same hours.\n\nThe Job Support Scheme, which will replace the furlough scheme from 1 November, will see eligible workers get three quarters of their normal salaries for six months.\n\nTo be eligible, employees must be in a ''viable job'' where they can work for at least one-third of their normal hours.\n\nFor the hours not worked, the government and employer will each pay one-third of the remaining wages. This means the employee would get at least 77% of their pay.\n\nNearly three million workers - or 12% of the UK's workforce - are currently on partial or full furlough leave, according to official figures. The current furlough scheme ends on 31 October.\n\nBut Labour's shadow chancellor Ms Dodds tweeted that the Job Support Scheme \"makes it more expensive to bring staff back than many other international schemes\".\n\nShe said the cost to an employer of bringing back two workers in the arts sector for half of the week versus one for the whole week was £163 in the UK, compared with £98 in the Netherlands, £69 in France and nothing in Germany.\n\n\"Once again it seems like the chancellor has waited to the last possible minute to start listening to Labour and bring in targeted support for those parts of the country under local restrictions,\" she said.\n\n\"The chancellor's constant flip-flopping on furlough is putting 900,000 jobs at risk, leaving workers in limbo and creating chaos in the midst of a pandemic.\"\n\nA tiered system of measures for England is set to be announced by Monday, in an effort to stall rising infection rates, to replace the patchwork of existing rules across the country.\n\nUnder the new system, different parts of the country would be placed in different categories - although ministers are still discussing the precise details.\n\nPubs and restaurants could be closed in the worst-affected areas, while a ban on overnight stays is also being considered.\n\nConservative chief whip Mark Spencer has said MPs will be given a vote on the proposed new framework, saying the tiered system was \"being worked on at the moment\".\n\nHe told BBC Radio Nottingham that ministers and scientific advisers were striving to come up with a \"very clear and easily understood system…so we all know what the aim is\".\n\nOn Thursday, England's chief medical officer Chris Whitty presented evidence to MPs in a video call that a \"significant proportion\" of exposure to coronavirus was happening in the hospitality sector - but nothing more was shown on the scope, severity, timing or precise location of any new restrictions.\n\nBut there has been growing anger among MPs and local leaders about the way the government has communicated the proposed changes with them.\n\nGreater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham accused the government of treating the north of England with \"contempt\" after he learned ministers were considering shutting hospitality venues in the worst-affected areas in a newspaper report.\n\nMr Burnham said he would challenge the closure of pubs, bars and restaurants if the measure did not come with financial support.\n\nHe told BBC's Question Time: \"The message I've given to the government is a pretty clear one - there can be no restrictions without support.\n\n\"And if it's going to be the tier three restrictions - effectively a national lockdown - we have to go back to a full furlough scheme for those staff, support for those businesses, otherwise the north of England is going to be levelled down this winter and I won't accept it.\"\n\nIn response, junior minister Gillian Keegan said the government had to act to stem the rise in cases.\n\n\"This is serious - it is getting out of control, and we have to do something to bring it back under control,\" she said.\n\nBut she acknowledged that communication with the worst-hit areas needed to improve.\n\nThere were 17,540 new cases of coronavirus recorded in the UK on Thursday, up from the 14,162 reported the day before, government data showed. A further 77 people died after testing positive for the virus within 28 days.\n\nNHS England data published on Thursday showed the number of people waiting more than a year to start hospital treatment is at its highest level since 2008 - with some 111,026 people waiting more than 52 weeks to start hospital treatment in August.\n\nHow have you been affected by coronavirus? What do the current restrictions mean for you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Liverpool is expected to be placed under severe new restrictions next week\n\nThe prime minister is to make a statement to MPs on Monday giving details of new restrictions to slow the spread of coronavirus in England.\n\nA letter from Boris Johnson's adviser to MPs in the North West seen by the BBC says it is \"very likely\" some areas will face further restrictions.\n\nBut some regional leaders warn the new plan for a three-tier local lockdown system will only create more confusion.\n\nIt comes as a doctors' union calls for clearer and more stringent rules.\n\nUnder the new restrictions, pubs and restaurants could be closed in parts of northern England and the Midlands - where some of the highest numbers of cases are occurring - while a ban on overnight stays is also being considered.\n\nIt is understood that the most severe measures - imposed for areas in tier three - would be agreed with local leaders in advance.\n\nThe details of each tier, including the level of infection at which an area would qualify for it and the nature of the restrictions, are being debated this weekend.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was grossly irresponsible for anonymous government sources to tell newspapers on Thursday about plans for further restrictions on millions of people, without any detail, consultation or statement from the prime minister.\n\nThe letter to the MPs from Downing Street's chief strategic adviser Sir Edward Lister says the government is hoping to \"finalise these details as soon as possible\" amid \"rising incidence in parts of the country\".\n\nIt also cites the \"engagement that is taking place today and during the course of the weekend with local authority leaders in your region\".\n\nSir Edward says the set of measures being discussed \"present difficult choices. We must seek to strike the right balance between driving down transmission, and safeguarding our economy and society from the worst impact\".\n\nIn the face of pressure from MPs, elected mayors and council leaders, the prime minister has signalled he wants \"much closer engagement\" with local politicians.\n\nAs a senior government source said, they will bring \"expertise on what will work in their regions\".\n\nThe hope is for \"top tier\" restrictions in the new multi-level system to be agreed between the government and local leaders in advance.\n\nThere is an acknowledgement from inside government that this marks a change in approach. It is a shift away from what Labour described as a \"Whitehall knows best\" attitude.\n\nIt will allow local politicians, some of whom until now have complained of being frozen out, to have a greater input.\n\nBut it will also mean they are accountable, alongside government ministers, for the success or failure of the measures introduced.\n\nThey will have to share the responsibility, perhaps blame, if measures don't work or prove unpopular.\n\nAnd amid calls for clarity, it seems the new tiered system could vary region by region, making clear national messaging more difficult.\n\nSusan Hopkins, deputy director of Public Health England's national infection service, said the number of cases was rising all over the country, but more quickly in the North East, North West and Yorkshire and Humber than the South.\n\nShe said it was concerning that cases were rising \"quite fast\" in pockets of north-west England among the over-60s, the group most likely to need to be admitted to hospital.\n\nA number of areas in the North West, the North East and the Midlands are already subject to stricter restrictions. A tiered system of measures is designed to replace the patchwork of existing rules across the country.\n\nHousing Secretary Robert Jenrick told BBC Radio 4's Any Questions there needed to be \"greater freedom for local areas to design measures for themselves\".\n\nHe said there was \"a merit to simplicity\", adding that in local areas \"local leaders will know best\".\n\nLiverpool's Labour Mayor Joe Anderson said he expected Liverpool - where there are currently 600 cases per 100,000 people - to be placed in tier three, under the highest set of restrictions.\n\nHe told the BBC's Today programme he understood this would involve the lockdown of all the city's pubs from Wednesday.\n\nHe said the government was wrong to allow Liverpool's bars and pubs to stay open this weekend, with infection rates so high.\n\nHe accepted people in the city should take individual responsibility and said he was \"angry and frustrated\" at those flouting the rules, but added: \"I'm not convinced people trust the government's decisions.\"\n\nAsked what his role would be in setting the restrictions, he said there had been conversation with Downing Street, but no consultation. It was clear the decisions had already been made, he said, but they were listening to his suggestions about how spikes in the city could best be dealt with.\n\nMartin Gannon, Labour leader of Gateshead Council, said there had been \"warm words\" in a meeting with civil servants but ultimately the laws would be made by government.\n\nHe said he would oppose any further restrictions placed on the North East, saying they could be \"counter-productive\" and lead to resistance from the public. Current measures were starting to bring down case numbers, he insisted, and the government needed to help local authorities win people's confidence.\n\nAnd Glen Sanderson, Conservative leader of Northumberland County Council, said he did not want blanket restrictions on Northumberland, which has large rural areas \"virtually unaffected\" by the virus as well as towns where case numbers were rising.\n\n\"I don't think the argument is there to bring in much tougher restrictions - we have to take people with us. If we can't get people to conform, we won't make any progress,\" he told BBC News.\n\nMeanwhile, the British Medical Association (BMA) said the government's measures to reduce the spread of the virus had not worked, given the uncontrolled escalation, and has made its own recommendations.\n\nIt wants to see masks worn in all offices and outdoors where two-metre distancing is not possible; free medical grade masks for the over-60s and vulnerable groups; financial support for businesses to become Covid-secure; and the \"rule of six\" tweaked to allow only two households to meet in groups of no more than six.\n\nChairman Dr Chaand Nagpaul said: \"The infection has risen following rapid relaxation of measures and with the Westminster government letting down its guard - as recently as August, the government was encouraging people to travel, go to work and mix in restaurants and pubs.\"\n\nSpeaking at the Co-operative Party virtual conference, Labour leader Sir Keir accused the government of serial incompetence, saying a test, trace and isolate system was \"critical\". Without that, \"thousands and thousands of people are walking around today who should be in self-isolation\", he warned.\n\nOn Friday the number of people in the UK to have tested positive for coronavirus rose by 13,864 - a decrease of 3,676 on Thursday's figure - with a further 87 deaths reported on the government's dashboard.\n\nHow have you been affected by coronavirus? What have restrictions meant for you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "England player Marcus Rashford was named in the Queen's delayed birthday honours list for services to vulnerable children in the UK during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nThe 22-year-old Manchester United forward successfully campaigned to extend free school meals over the summer after pressing the government into a U-turn on the issue.", "The rare raptor, seen only a handful of times in the UK, was spotted at Moulton West Fen earlier\n\nAn enormous bone-eating vulture, rarely seen in the UK, has been spotted in the skies over Lincolnshire.\n\nThe bearded vulture, or lammergeier, is normally found in Alpine regions, and has a wing span of 2.5m (8.2ft).\n\nThe rare raptor was captured on film by Mark Hawkes at Moulton West Fen earlier after news of its arrival circulated on social media.\n\nIt was recently spotted in Norfolk, having spent the summer roosting in the Peak District.\n\nMr Hawkes, who lives in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, said he drove to the area after reading the news on the \"birder grapevine\".\n\nHe was lucky enough to see the it flying around with crows, and later \"sitting tight in a field\", he said.\n\nMr Hawkes added that about 200 other enthusiasts had also made the trip.\n\nAnother birder, Will Bowell, said it was an amazing sight to see, adding he was looking forward to seeing where it went from here.\n\nThe bird was first captured on film earlier this year in the Peak District.\n\nTeenager Indy Kiemel Greene photographed the bird in the Peak District in July\n\nAt the time, Tim Birch, from Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, said the bird - dubbed \"Vigo\" - was about two years old and had flown over to the UK from the Alps, where the endangered species is being reintroduced.\n\nPreviously, the only other reported sighting of a bearded vulture in the UK was in 2016, around Dartmoor and Monmouthshire.\n\nBut despite its enormous size, the bird is not dangerous to people or farm animals, and feeds on scavenged bones, Mr Birch added.\n\nBearded vultures are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List - meaning they are a \"near threatened\" species.\n\nThey get their name from a distinctive tuft of feathers under their lower beak.\n\nFollow BBC East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.", "MPs from the Midlands and northern England are calling for more detail on possible plans to close restaurants and pubs in areas worst-hit by coronavirus.\n\nThey met ministers earlier, with some venting frustration about potential restrictions appearing in newspapers before being announced in Parliament.\n\nA tiered system of measures could be introduced next Wednesday, in an effort to stall rising infection rates.\n\nThe government said it was trying to create \"greater consistency on rules\".\n\nThere were 17,540 new cases of coronavirus recorded in the UK on Thursday, up from the 14,162 reported the day before, government data showed. A further 77 people died after testing positive for the virus within 28 days.\n\nMPs took part in a video call with health ministers Nadine Dorries and Edward Argar - and England's chief medical officer Chris Whitty - earlier on Thursday.\n\nThe chief medical officer presented evidence to the MPs that a \"significant proportion\" of exposure to coronavirus was happening in the hospitality sector - but nothing more was shown on the scope, severity, timing or precise location of any new restrictions.\n\nYet again, ministers are wrestling with grim trade-offs where no decision is pain-free.\n\nBut they're also wrestling with a communications challenge: what do you do when newspapers have been briefed that \"Restaurants and pubs in North forced to shut again\", as the Times front page headline reads today, but it hasn't yet been formally decided and announced?\n\nWell, a cabinet minister ends up doing a round of interviews where he or she can't answer any of the key questions directly: precisely which parts of the country will be affected by the new regulations, when, for how long, and how severe will they be?\n\nCue noisy grumbles from local leaders in those cities with sky-high infection rates, who don't know what is going to happen.\n\nYes, most of those leaders are Labour politicians not averse to complaining about a Conservative government, but ministers are left with an announcement that appears half-made: the prospect that various businesses may have to close or significantly scale back what they do, but without it being clear which ones, or where.\n\nProfound changes affecting millions of people hover as an imminent prospect. But ask a specific question, and the answer is we don't know.\n\nShadow health minister Alex Norris, an MP for Nottingham North - now the city with the highest case numbers in England - told BBC News: \"It was not the most convincing call to be part of.\"\n\n\"When pressed about Nottingham, the advice that came back was, 'We've not decided yet,' which is hard to understand when I have then talked to local journalists and they are getting better briefings than we are.\"\n\nHe said he understood new restrictions would be coming in next week, adding he believed they should come in immediately \"given we are top of the list now\".\n\nBen Bradley, Conservative MP for Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, who took part in the call, said: \"There are some really challenging circumstances.\n\n\"We talked about the North West and North East in particular, where we were talking about - in three weeks' time - having hospitalisation levels higher than in the original peak.\"\n\nHe said ministers had told the MPs to expect new measures to be announced on Monday and implemented on Wednesday.\n\nThe meeting came amid growing anger among politicians about the way the government has handled new restrictions in parts of the country with high infection rates.\n\nLabour's mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, told the BBC he had been \"having discussions with ministers this week. At no point did somebody say, 'We're closing all hospitality in the north of England on Monday.'\"\n\nFormer minister Jake Berry, the Conservative MP for Rossendale and Darwen, has accused the prime minister of enjoying his emergency powers \"a little bit too much\" and of being \"London-centric\".\n\nThe Conservative MP for Bishop Auckland, Dehenna Davidson, said in the Commons that the government was \"exactly right to take a localised approach\".\n\nBut she said the public in some areas of her constituency did not understand why they faced local restrictions when case numbers were low.\n\nA slide shown at the meeting lists hospitality as the most frequent setting for coronavirus exposure.\n\nLiverpool's Labour Metro Mayor, Steve Rotheram, said the \"North should not be a petri dish for experimentation by central government\".\n\nMPs have also expressed unease about the \"rule of six\" and the 10pm curfew for pubs and restaurants, calling for the scientific rationale behind the measure to be made public.\n\nBut Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has said his party will not be \"voting down\" the curfew next week, instead saying the rule \"needs to be reformed\".\n\nOthers on the left of the Labour Party, including former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, want a more \"severe\" lockdown. One told the BBC they wanted a \"zero Covid approach - hard, fast and backed up by comprehensive testing and financial support\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Cllr David Mellen says a lack of coronavirus restrictions this weekend could mean a “last chance to party' in Nottingham.\n\nCommunities Secretary Robert Jenrick has not ruled out pubs being closed but said the response would be \"proportionate and localised\".\n\nHe told the BBC the precise measures for different areas would be announced \"in the coming days\".\n\nMr Jenrick added that the government was trying to give \"greater consistency on rules so they're easier to understand\" and was working on \"slightly broader canvases of regions or cities and counties to avoid differences in people's daily lives if they drive over the border\".\n\nThe government is expected to introduce a new \"three-tier\" approach to coronavirus restrictions in local areas of England in an effort to simplify the system and avoid public confusion, the BBC understands.\n\nBut details of how severe restrictions will be in each tier have yet to be confirmed.\n\nThe BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg said there were \"whispers in Whitehall of a 'firewall' approach\" to new restrictions expected next week.\n\nThis could mean extra limits to be turned on and off again to allow for Christmas, with the possibility of more being introduced in January and February to help the NHS cope.\n\nBut Laura Kuenssberg said the situation was \"still unclear with so many unknowns\" and final decisions have not been made.\n\nThe Liberal Democrats have written a letter to Chancellor Rishi Sunak, calling for the furlough scheme to be extended before enforcing any shutdowns of industries, such as hospitality and retail.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nPubs and restaurants across the central belt of Scotland have closed for the last time in at least two weeks.\n\nAfter they shut their doors at 18:00, they will not reopen until 25 October at the earliest.\n\nIt comes as the Scottish government publishes details of a £40m support package for businesses forced to close due to Covid restrictions.\n\nThere will be a tightening of rules across the rest of the country but licensed premises can remain open.\n\nPolice Scotland said additional officers would be deployed to ensure premises comply with restrictions.\n\nA protest against the measures took place in Glasgow on Friday evening, with bar workers dumping a large pile of ice outside the City Chambers.\n\nBar workers showed their contempt for the new rules\n\nA letter posted to the Glasgow Bartenders Club said venues in Edinburgh were also leaving the remaining contents of their ice machines outside the Scottish Parliament.\n\nThe new rules come into force as six further Covid deaths were confirmed by the first minister in her daily briefing.\n\nShe said 1,246 positive tests had been recorded and the number of Covid patients in hospital was continuing to increase. \"The restrictions which come into force today are significant, but the case numbers we have seen in recent weeks - including, increasingly, the figures for people being hospitalised - show why they are necessary,\" Ms Sturgeon said.\n\n\"We have to stop the virus from spreading further. And having already restricted meetings between households in each other's homes, the most important additional step we can take is to restrict meetings in bars and restaurants.\"\n\nThe Scottish government plans to help businesses with a £40m package which includes support for employment, a cash grant for each business and a discretionary fund for local authorities.\n\nMinisters were waiting to hear details of the UK's plans to help affected employees before laying out the full details of their scheme.\n\nEconomy secretary Fiona Hyslop outlined the details of the fund on Friday evening:\n\nChancellor Rishi Sunak has said people who work for UK firms forced to shut by Covid restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid by the government.\n\nHe also announced increased grants for business in England - a move the UK government says will lead to £700m additional funding for Scotland.\n\nPubs across the central belt of Scotland closed their doors at 18:00\n\nThe scheme is due to start on 1 November - a week after the latest Scottish restrictions are due to end. But employers should be able to use the existing furlough scheme until the end of October.\n\nScotland's Finance Secretary Kate Forbes welcomed the move but called for more clarity on \"what it covers in terms of health, transport and business support\".\n\nThe measures were described as \"good news\" by the Scottish Chambers of Commerce.\n\nBut its chief executive, Liz Cameron, warned they were not enough to offset the impending loss of trade and jobs.\n\n\"We need governments to focus on enabling business to continue to freely function, and manage our way through this situation,\" she said. \"This stop-start approach is damaging for business.\"\n\nScottish Tory leader Douglas Ross described the funding increase as \"seismic\" while his colleague, Scottish Secretary Alister Jack, said it provided a \"vital safety net\".\n\nAbout 3.4 million people in five health boards - Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lothian, Lanarkshire, Forth Valley and Ayrshire and Arran - are subject to the strictest restrictions.\n\nLicensed premises will be closed for 16 days although they can still serve takeaways.\n\nCafes with a licence have been told they can remain open as long as they do not serve alcohol but there is confusion over what constitutes a cafe.\n\nHospitality venues in the rest of Scotland will be allowed to open, but will only be permitted to serve non-alcoholic drinks and food indoors between 06:00 and 18:00.\n\nLicensed premises in these areas will still be able to serve alcohol in outdoor areas, such as beer gardens, up to the 22:00 curfew introduced in September.\n\nMs Sturgeon said: \"These measures still allow for some social contact in cafes during the day. And they do not prevent people from taking half-term holidays which have already been booked, or from going ahead with weddings which have already been planned.\n\n\"But for a period of just over two weeks, they will remove some of the major opportunities the virus has to spread. That should have a significant impact on transmission rates.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Police Scotland revealed that in the week up to 4 October officers broke up 271 illegal house parties, issued 106 fines and made 18 arrests.\n\nAre you a pub or restaurant worker in central Scotland? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BBC asks Ismail Abedi why he's not co-operating with the public inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing\n\nThe elder brother of the Manchester Arena suicide bomber has refused to say why he is not co-operating with the public inquiry into the atrocity.\n\nThe inquiry has heard that Ismail Abedi has declined to answer questions in case he incriminates himself.\n\nThe BBC located the 27-year-old in Manchester, where he still lives, and approached him to ask why. He refused to engage and drove away.\n\nTwenty-two people were killed and many more injured in the May 2017 attack.\n\nSalman Abedi detonated a bomb at the end of an Ariana Grande concert.\n\nEarlier this year, younger brother Hashem Abedi was jailed after being convicted of murdering all those who died.\n\nThe bombing after an Ariana Grande concert killed 22 people and injured hundreds more\n\nSalman and Hashem had spent months preparing the attack - buying bomb-making chemicals, transporting their purchases around Manchester, and renting a flat to make explosives.\n\nA public inquiry is investigating every aspect of the bombing.\n\nIsmail Abedi told Sky News in August that he wanted to \"apologise for the pain\" his brothers had caused and said he had \"no idea they had taken this path\".\n\nBut he was not questioned on any of the evidence from the trial. His refusal to co-operate with the inquiry emerged soon afterwards.\n\nLast month, Paul Greaney QC, counsel to the inquiry, said: \"Ismail Abedi, the brother of the killers, has been required by the inquiry legal team to answer a series of questions relating to what might in general terms be described as the issue of radicalisation.\n\n\"To date, he has declined to answer those questions on the basis that he maintains that his answers may tend to incriminate him.\"\n\nMr Greaney said that none of the Abedi family - the brothers' parents live in Libya - had provided a \"substantive response\", adding that it was \"most unhelpful\" and he hoped the family would \"reflect and understand that they have a moral obligation to provide the information we require\".\n\nInquests into the Westminster and London Bridge attacks of 2017 did hear evidence from family members of the attackers. The Arena inquiry is the equivalent process for the Manchester attack.\n\nThe Abedi parents moved to the UK after fleeing Col Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, with their children born in Britain and brought up in Manchester.\n\nAt the time of the attack the parents had moved back to Libya. The family had regularly travelled to the country following the 2011 revolution.\n\nHashem Abedi was arrested in Libya the day after the bombing\n\nIsmail had purchased one-way tickets to Libya for his two brothers in April 2017. Salman returned five days before the bombing, while Hashem stayed there and was only extradited to the UK over two years later.\n\nBut Ismail Abedi, who is married, has remained in Manchester. He was arrested the morning after the Arena bombing, but later released without charge.\n\nThe inquiry has heard that in 2015 he was stopped by police after arriving at Heathrow Airport and that his mobile phone had contained recruitment videos and literature produced by the Islamic State group.\n\nThe inquiry has also been told that his Facebook account had earlier been viewed by MI5 and seen to show, among other things, a picture of Ismail holding a machine gun with an IS logo imprinted on the image.\n\nThe inquiry is looking at a number of things, including the emergency response to the attack\n\nEvidence presented during the Hashem Abedi trial also raises questions for Ismail.\n\nIsmail's name was used to buy car insurance for Salman and Hashem, neither of whom had a driving licence, for a car they bought to transport materials around Manchester during the preparations.\n\nA bank card in the name of the brothers' mother - which received over £1,000 in benefits each month despite her being in Libya - was used by Salman and Hashem to buy relevant items during their attack preparations, but it was found in Ismail's possessions when he was arrested following the bombing.\n\nThe public inquiry was told that a Libyan number was texting both Salman and Ismail on the evening of the attack.\n\nSalman received texts a few minutes apart saying \"call\" and \"ASAP\".\n\nBetween the messages, the number wrote to Ismail saying: \"Allah's peace and blessings be upon you.\"\n\nMr Greaney, during the inquiry opening, said: \"This message and the coincidence of its timing with what was happening in Manchester may be innocent, but do serve to indicate that... the inquiry will need to explore whether, and if so to what extent, the Abedi family or members of it were a radicalising influence on Hashem Abedi and Salman Abedi.\"\n\nBut BBC research shows the Libyan number in question was Hashem Abedi's.\n\nEvidence at Hashem's trial linked him to the number. The evidence included a text from Ismail to a contact saying whose number it was.\n\nSalman called Hashem later that night - the last call he made before the bombing.\n\nPete Weatherby QC, representing seven bereaved families at the inquiry, told the BBC there had to be \"maximum transparency\" from all those called on to assist.\n\n\"If there is a lack of openness and transparency that is much for difficult for the public inquiry to achieve its ends, delivering truth and justice to the families and ultimately trying to prevent an outrage of this kind happening again,\" he added.", "The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have won an apology from a US news agency after drones were allegedly used to take pictures of their son, Archie.\n\nThe couple's case at Los Angeles County Superior Court said the 14-month-old was photographed at their home in the city by an unnamed person during the coronanvirus lockdown.\n\nThey described the incident as an invasion of privacy.\n\nThe X17 agency will also reimburse some of the royal couple's legal fees.\n\nIt has agreed to hand over the photos, destroy any copies it holds and stop distributing the images.\n\nPrince Harry and Meghan are now based in Santa Barbara, California, having stepped back as senior royals at the end of March.\n\nAccording to court documents, they were living at the home of a friend in Los Angeles when the photographs were taken of Archie and Meghan's mother, Doria Ragland.\n\nTheir lawyer Michael Kump said: \"Over the summer, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex took action against intrusive and illegal paparazzi photos taken of their family at a private residence...\n\n\"This is a successful outcome. All families have a right, protected by law, to feel safe and secure at home.\"\n\nAccording to the legal action filed in July, the royal couple were constantly being followed by paparazzi, who tracked them down following their move to the US, flying helicopters overhead and cutting holes in their security fences.\n\nCalifornia privacy laws make photographing or filming anyone in their homes by use of drone or telephoto lenses illegal.\n\nIn a statement, X17 said: \"We apologise to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their son for the distress we have caused.\n\n\"We were wrong to offer these photographs and commit to not doing so again.\"\n\nIn a separate legal action in London, against the publisher of the Mail on Sunday and Mail Online, Meghan is suing for breach of privacy and copyright infringement over the publication of a letter she wrote to her father. The publisher denies the claims.", "French charity worker Sophie Pétronin and ex-Malian opposition leader Soumaïla Cissé have been freed\n\nFour people abducted and detained in Mali, including 75-year-old French charity worker Sophie Pétronin and ex-Malian opposition leader Soumaïla Cissé, have been released.\n\nMs Pétronin, who was seized in December 2016, was the last French citizen to be held hostage anywhere in the world. She has now arrived in France.\n\nTwo Italian nationals were also freed.\n\nThe release was part of a prisoner swap for more than 100 jihadists, believed to be affiliated to al-Qaeda.\n\nThe Malian presidency has not revealed how it was able to free the hostages.\n\nMalian and international armed forces have been struggling to contain a jihadist insurgency in the north of country that first emerged in 2012.\n\nMs Pétronin and Mr Cissé, who was abducted in March while campaigning for parliamentary elections, were taken to the capital, Bamako, in a military plane along with the two Italians, Mali's presidency announced on Thursday.\n\nHundreds of Mr Cissé's supporters later gathered at Bamako airport to greet the opposition leader on his arrival. Others expressed their jubilation by driving through the streets of the capital sounding their car horns.\n\n\"I am very happy to be here, for Mali, for my family,\" Mr Cissé said on his return, adding: \"I have spent six months... in conditions that were very austere... in a state of isolation.\"\n\nAuthorities had been working on the hostages' release for months.\n\nFollowing news of Ms Pétronin's release on Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron said he felt \"immense relief\" and was \"happy to know she is free\".\n\n\"To the Malian authorities, thank you,\" he said in a tweet, adding: \"The fight against terrorism in the Sahel continues.\"\n\nEarlier this week, Ms Pétronin's son Sébastien Chadaud said he was weary of celebrating after earlier reports that his mother was set to be free proved to be false. \"We've already lived through moments like this, for four years,\" he said.\n\nPresident Macron met Ms Pétronin as she arrived in Paris on Friday\n\nMs Pétronin's son Sébastien Chadaud in the Malian capital Bamako earlier this week\n\nThe two Italian hostages released were named as Pierluigi Maccalli, a missionary priest who was kidnapped in 2018, and Nicola Chiacchio, who was believed to have been captured while travelling in the region as a tourist.\n\nIn April, the two appeared in a video together which was reportedly handed to local media outlets by an unnamed group.\n\nEarlier on Thursday, the Malian authorities announced the release of a dozen political and military figures arrested during the coup.\n\nIn August, Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta was overthrown by a military junta and little is known of what happened to talks to secure a prisoner swap after the coup.\n\nAbducted on Christmas Eve 2016 in the northern city of Gao, she was well known locally for her work helping orphans and other children suffering from malnutrition.\n\nShe had been running Swiss charity Association Aid to Gao since 2004 and was an expert in guinea-worm disease, which spread through contaminated water in northern Mali.\n\nWhen Tuareg rebels, backed by Islamists, seized Gao as unrest spread in Mali in 2012, seven Algerian diplomats were abducted and the Algerian consul gave her protection until the building came under attack. She fled through a back door and was spirited out of Mali into Algeria wearing long robes.\n\n\"We crossed the desert in just one night, when normally it takes two days,\" she told Le Dauphiné Libéré newspaper in May 2012. \"I checked the speedometer, we were going at 130km/h (80mph).\n\nFrench President Emmanuel Macron thanked the Malian authorities after news of Ms Pétronin's release\n\nShe had escaped Mali in disguise but soon returned, and was abducted in a daylight raid claimed by Mali militant group JNIM.\n\nShe has appeared in two hostage videos and at one point her son went to a local mediator who said the kidnappers were prepared to accept a ransom for her release. In one video, in June 2018, she appealed for help from Mr Macron, looking tired and gaunt.\n\nShe was suffering from cancer and malaria at the time of her abduction.\n\nMr Cissé, who was kidnapped while campaigning for legislative elections, is a former government minister and a prominent opposition leader.\n\nFormer Malian presidential candidate Soumaïla Cissé was abducted in March\n\nHe was the main challenger to Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta in the 2013 and 2018 presidential elections - losing both times. Following the result of the 2018 vote, he complained of electoral fraud.\n\nPresident Keïta was overthrown in August, in part because of a perceived failure to tackle the jihadist militants in the north of the country, and Mr Cissé's continued captivity was seen as a symptom of that.\n\nA separatist rebellion in the north of the country that began in 2011 created the conditions for militant jihadists to take control of parts of the region.\n\nIn 2013, a French-led force helped seize back territory, but a network of jihadist groups remained active and they were able to carry out attacks and kidnappings.\n\nThe Malian government has not been able to regain full control of the north.\n\nFrance continues to support forces in Mali and in other parts of the Sahel region in their fight against the militants.", "Liverpool is one of many cities where there are extra restrictions\n\nIn many areas under local lockdown, cases and hospital admissions have continued to soar. Does that mean restrictions don't work?\n\nConsider the national lockdown in the spring. While it feels like it was one single policy, it was in fact a package of different measures. Schools, universities and offices shut. Pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops closed. No-one could mix with people from outside their household. People were advised not to use public transport and to limit the number of times they visited essential shops.\n\nTogether these had a dramatic impact on cases, and the number of coronavirus patients in hospital plummeted from 20,000 to about 800.\n\nHow much each part of that lockdown contributed is hard to say.\n\nThe rules were relaxed but then, at the end of June, Leicester became the first place to go into a local lockdown. Other cities, and whole regions, have followed. But so far, Leicester's lockdown is the only one to have come close to the strictness of the national policy. Shops and pubs were stopped from opening. Households were barred from mixing indoors. And new cases of the virus dropped by 60% during July. People in hospital beds with coronavirus fell from 88 to 18.\n\nSince Leicester, local lockdowns have multiplied. More than 15 million people - very roughly, a quarter of the UK population - have come under new curbs, in some form.\n\nAnd it's become harder to see whether they are working or not.\n\nAfter the first changes, cases continued to rise, throughout August. Then, after pub and restaurant closures, case rates dropped sharply. It is, however, too soon to say for sure that the stricter measures led directly to the decline.\n\nIn the rest of Greater Manchester, gatherings with other households were banned but shops, pubs and restaurants remained open. Cases have mostly kept climbing throughout these local restrictions.\n\nHowever, the latest week's data will be welcome news - suggesting the sharp increases might be levelling off. The rise in cases in many areas under local lockdown appears to be slowing, in line with the national picture.\n\nThis may be a sign that the England-wide \"rule of six\" is working.\n\nA large national study, published last week, confirmed the growth in cases was slowing across England, although overall levels remained high. But restrictions on households meeting - which have been seen at a local level - don't always lead to a slowing case rate. And this change in impact highlights the many factors involved which make it difficult to isolate the precise effect of local lockdowns.\n\nPeople don't necessarily change their behaviour exactly in line with rule changes.\n\nWhen concerns about cases rising begin to be reported, some people alter their behaviour before any law change. Other people, even when the rules come into place, don't obey them.\n\nSo it may be a question of timing: are people more ready to restrict their movements now than they were in August?\n\nTo complicate the figures further, other things have been going on at the same time as local lockdowns were being introduced, including summer holiday season and schools reopening.\n\nIn Leicester, cases fell when restrictions were introduced. When they were progressively eased in August and September, cases started to rise. But this rise coincided with more people travelling abroad. And with children going back to school.\n\nIn Greater Manchester, cases also rose over those months despite the area being in lockdown - albeit a looser version than Leicester's had been.\n\nUnpicking these different factors is a big challenge.\n\nLooking at \"positivity rates\" - the proportion of all tests that are positive, adjusting for different levels of testing - shows there have been increases in cases across England, with particularly sharp spikes in the North West and North East between the end of August and the end of September. Restrictions in those regions were only introduced between the middle of September and the beginning of October, making it too soon to see the impact of these rules.\n\nBut in Blackburn, which has been in lockdown long enough for an effect to be seen, there was also a rise in cases - though this has come back down in recent weeks.\n\nRecent increases in hospitalisations from coronavirus have highlighted the extent of the challenge facing the north of England. Though without up-to-date localised data, it is difficult to judge whether the impact on a local level - such as those in Blackburn - have helped prevent serious cases.\n\nThere's no doubt the national lockdown had a considerable impact on cases.\n\nFundamentally, the virus needs people to be in close contact and mixing between circles to spread through the population. How tight the restrictions are makes a difference - look at the experience of Leicester, compared with Oldham or Blackburn.\n\nBut so do the crucial issues of timing and compliance. A lockdown only works if people stick to it.\n\nThe data also indicates that any impact lockdowns do have is far from permanent - relax the restrictions and allow more contact, and the virus will quickly start to spread again.\n\nUnless and until a viable vaccine becomes available, government will be faced with the same choice: shut down large chunks of society or allow the virus to tear through communities, with little idea of the true toll that either will exact.", "Simon Calder said the intensity of the comments was \"off the scale\"\n\nA travel writer said he received \"such intense abuse\" when he suggested people visit Wales that he has \"no further plans\" to book a stay in the country.\n\nSpeaking on ITV's This Morning earlier this week, Simon Calder listed Gwynedd and Ceredigion, as well as Belfast and Edinburgh, as places people could go.\n\nBut he said he then received a torrent of abuse via email and social media.\n\nVisit Wales said it was trying to welcome people back \"in a way that is safe\".\n\nIn an article for The Independent, Mr Calder said he had replied to many of the hundreds of people who messaged on social media and understood the deep concern about the spread of coronavirus, but did not now intend to book a holiday in Wales again.\n\n\"Anyone lucky enough to have a public platform, it's clearly quite right people respond how they want and I applaud feedback,\" he said.\n\n\"The intensity of negative comments were of a magnitude I've not experienced, completely off the scale.\"\n\nMr Calder said he had never meant to upset anyone and had followed travel advice, but it was an \"interesting lesson\" on current sensitivities.\n\nHe added: \"The hundreds of people I inadvertently angered may be glad to hear that I have no further plans to book a stay in Wales.\n\n\"I intended to inspire travellers to enjoy, responsibly, a part of the UK that is rich in wonders, and hoped their visits would in turn support local businesses.\"\n\nMuch of south and north Wales are under local lockdown restrictions, with people unable to leave or enter 15 of Wales' 22 local authorities, as well as the town of Llanelli.\n\nHowever, Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused to put a ban on people leaving areas of England with high instances of Covid-19 to visit Welsh beauty spots.\n\nThis led the Welsh Government to say it would consider quarantine measures for people entering Wales from Covid hotspots in the UK.\n\nThe counties of Gwynedd, Ceredigion, Powys, Anglesey and Pembrokeshire are not currently under lockdown restrictions, meaning people from England are able to visit.\n\nAberystwyth was also named as one of Wales' \"easy\" destinations\n\nMr Calder named Gwynedd - via Machynlleth, Aberystwyth and other seaside towns - as a great idea for a holiday.\n\nHe told the ITV programme: \"My absolute top tip, you could stop off in the lovely town of Machynlleth where you've got some great outdoor attractions such as the Centre for Alternative Technology which I just love, and of course you can go to Aberystwyth and all the resorts, Barmouth and Harlech all the way round to lovely Pwllheli.\n\nHe said he had \"concurred\" with Visit Wales' assertion that areas of the country were \"good to go\".\n\nEarlier this week, people said they were worried about an \"influx\" of tourists after TV personality Stacey Solomon posted photographs on social media about a holiday to Rhayader, Powys.\n\nA Welsh Government spokesperson said: \"We expect any visitors to Wales to respect the area they choose and abide by local restrictions.\n\n\"It's well documented that the first minister has written to the prime minister requesting he stop people travelling to Wales from areas of England with high coronavirus infection rates - but he has yet to receive a response.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Level three restrictions in Ireland remain in place until midnight on 27 October\n\nThe Irish foreign affairs minister has said that his government is \"not in the business of erecting barriers on the (Irish) border\" but a conversation with Stormont about how \"movement is being restricted within NI\" is needed.\n\nSimon Coveney told RTÉ that more co-operation between north and south was needed.\n\nMovement is restricted between counties in the Republic of Ireland.\n\nGarda (Irish police) checkpoints have been set up across the country.\n\n\"During the first wave we had managed to see lot of co-operation between the PSNI and An Garda Síochána in terms of restricting movement generally on the island,\" he said.\n\n\"What is required here is clarity from politicians north and south and closer cooperation between the two CMOs, which is already a very good relationship, but politicians need advice from their CMOs to ensure we have a lot more co-operation,\" he added.\n\nMr Coveney also told RTE's Morning Ireland that NI Secretary Brandon Lewis had told him that the UK government has already made significant funding available to the NI Executive, specifically for Covid-19.\n\n\"I'd like to speak to some of the senior politicians in Northern Ireland today to establish exactly what is the blockage there because certainly was very clear with me yesterday that funding should not be the blockage,\" he added.\n\nMeanwhile it has been announced that there will be no countries on the Republic of Ireland's safe travel list from Monday, the Irish Foreign Ministry has announced.\n\nThe Irish government's Green List features countries people can travel to without having to restrict their movements when they return.\n\nFrom Monday, Cyprus, Finland, Latvia and Liechtenstein will be removed.\n\nThe list does not affect cross-border travel to and from Northern Ireland.\n\nNowhere was found to be below the required 14-day cumulative number of Covid-19 cases.\n\nThis criteria, judging the number of cases per 100,000 population, is based on data from the European Centre for Disease Protection.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Irish Foreign Ministry This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe department of foreign affairs said it reviews the list every Thursday, with changes taking effect the following Monday.\n\nIn a statement, it said: \"Ireland continues to work with EU partners to finalise negotiations on the new Council Recommendation on co-ordinating travel with the Union ('EU traffic lights system').\n\nThe Northern Ireland Executive publishes a separate list on exempted countries and territories from which travellers do not have to self-isolate.\n\nIt still includes Cyprus, Finland, Latvia and Liechtenstein.\n\nTravel by people from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is allowed across the Irish border, however, Great Britain is excluded from the Republic's Green List.\n\nTighter Covid-19 restrictions are currently in force in County Donegal until 16 October.\n\nThe move followed a rise in case numbers in Donegal and NI's north west. The chief medical officers from NI and the Republic of Ireland have advised against all but necessary travel across the NI-Donegal border.", "The pace of Europe's Covid-19 vaccination campaign has picked up and in many countries infection rates have been falling.\n\nLockdowns are gradually being eased as the summer tourist season gets under way, and there are plans for an EU-wide digital vaccination certificate to be in place by 1 July.\n\nNationwide curfew ended on 20 June, 10 days earlier than planned. Face masks are no longer required outdoors.\n\nRestaurants, cafes and bars can serve customers indoors, with 50% capacity and up to six people per table.\n\nStanding concerts will resume on 30 June and nightclubs on 9 July (with 75% capacity). People attending will need a health pass which shows either full vaccination, a negative test within the previous 72 hours, or else a previous coronavirus infection.\n\nMedical grade masks are compulsory in shops and on public transport.\n\nFrom 30 June, working from home will no longer be compulsory.\n\nOn 21 June, Italy's curfew was scrapped and the whole country, except for the northwest region of Valle d'Aosta, became \"white zone\" - the country's lowest-risk category.\n\nAmong the measures still in place are social distancing (1m) and the wearing of masks indoors (and in crowded outdoor places), and a ban on house parties and large gathering.\n\nNightclubs and discos are also closed.\n\nAll indoor businesses, with the exception of nightclubs, are open.\n\nThe government introduced a \"corona pass\" in April, the first to do so in Europe.\n\nThis shows - either on a phone or on paper - that you have been vaccinated, previously infected or that you have had a negative test within 72 hours.\n\nPeople need to show it for entry to cinemas, museums, hairdressers or indoor dining.\n\nThe Greek government is welcoming tourists from many countries, if they are fully vaccinated or can provide a negative coronavirus test.\n\nFace coverings must be worn in all public places and there is a curfew from 01:30-05:00, but bars, restaurants, museums and archaeological sites are all open.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Greek island of Milos is aiming to become \"Covid-free\" so it can welcome back tourists\n\nCinemas, theatres, museums and restaurants are open at 50% capacity. From 26 June, this increases to 75%.\n\nNightclubs and discos will also be allowed to reopen, with a limit of 150 people.\n\nFace coverings must be worn in enclosed spaces and 1.5m social distancing observed.\n\nShops, bars, restaurants and museums are open, although face coverings remain compulsory in most public places.\n\nNightclubs can now reopen in parts of Spain with low infection rates.\n\nIn Barcelona, they are restricted to 50% of capacity and can stay open until 03:30 - dancers have to wear masks.\n\nSpain began welcoming vaccinated tourists from 7 June. Most European travellers still have to present a negative Covid test on arrival.\n\nBrussels: Outdoor dining resumed in Belgium on 8 May\n\nShops, cinemas, gyms, cafes and restaurants are open, with restrictions. Households can invite up to four people inside.\n\nFrom 1 July, working from home will no longer be mandatory, if the situation continues to improve.\n\nCultural performances, shows and sports competitions can also go ahead, with limited numbers, and more people will be allowed at weddings and other ceremonies and parties.\n\nPortugal has lifted many of its restrictions but face coverings must still be worn in indoor public spaces and some outdoor settings.\n\nBars and nightclubs remain closed, and it's illegal to drink alcohol outdoors in public places, except for pavement cafés and restaurants.\n\nAlcohol cannot be sold after 21:00 unless it is with a meal.\n\nRestaurants, cafes and cultural venues have to close at 01:00 and have capacity limits.\n\nA weekend travel ban is in force in the Lisbon area, starting at 15:00 on Friday, with residents only allowed to leave for essential journeys.\n\nIn Lisbon and in Albufeira (Algarve), cafes, restaurants and non-essential shops have to close by 15:30 at the weekend and 22:30 on weekdays.\n\nPortugal's summer season looks uncertain, yet its Covid figures have improved\n\nRestaurants, cafes, museums and historic buildings have reopened with capacity limits.\n\nFrom 26 June, a number of restrictions are being lifted.\n\nAlcohol can be sold after 22:00, and nightclubs can open, with an entry pass system.\n\nEvents held in public venues such as cinemas, conference centres and concert halls will be allowed, subject to social distancing.\n\nMasks will no longer be compulsory except on public transport, airports and in secondary schools.\n\nOutdoor services in restaurants and bars returned in June. Theme parks, funfairs, cinemas and theatres, gyms and swimming pools, have reopened as well.\n\nFrom 5 July, restaurants and bars will be able to serve customers indoors. Weddings and other indoor events for up to 50 people will be permitted and the numbers at outdoor organised events will increase.\n\nSince June, pubs have been able to stay open until 22:30 and more people are now allowed at sports events, outdoor concerts, cinemas and markets.\n\nOn 1 July, limits on private gatherings will be raised, and the recommendation to interact with a small circle of people removed.\n\nFurther easing is planned on 15 July and in September.", "Baddeley was arrested near the surgery in Chepstow\n\nA man who secretly stalked his dentist for years has been sent back to prison after being found outside his surgery.\n\nThomas Baddeley, 42, from Bristol, was sentenced in August after being found with a 'murder kit', near the home of his former dentist Ian Hutchinson.\n\nOn Friday, he pleaded guilty to breaching a restraining order by going to Dr Hutchinson's surgery.\n\nDistrict Judge Martin Brown said his \"obsession\" was continuing and he would be sentenced on 23 October.\n\nBaddeley was previously jailed for 16 months at Cardiff Crown Court after admitting stalking Dr Hutchinson without fear, alarm or distress, and two offences of possessing offensive weapons.\n\nHe had been arrested near Dr Hutchinson's home in November 2019, wearing a balaclava and carrying what was described in court as a \"murder kit\".\n\nIt contained items including a large knife, crossbow with bolts, bleach and a hammer, and his car seats were covered in plastic sheeting.\n\nA crossbow was among the weapons found in Thomas Baddeley's car in 2019\n\nHe was released from prison on licence after sentencing in August 2020, due to time served on remand.\n\nIn October 2020, a police officer saw Baddeley near Dr Hutchinson's surgery in Chepstow.\n\nThe officer, who was aware of the restraining order, noted Baddeley was riding a bike and had made efforts to disguise himself.\n\nHe was walking \"in the general direction\" of the surgery when he was arrested.\n\nSteve Jones, defending, told the court there had been no contact with Dr Hutchinson and that the dentist had not seen Baddeley.\n\nHowever, Judge Brown said the case had had a huge impact on Dr Hutchinson.\n\n\"This is a very unhealthy obsession because there has been no other explanation presented to the court,\" he said.\n\n\"The only reason you were in the Chepstow area was to continue your obsession.\"", "Geek Retreat recently opened new stores in Northwich and Chelmsford\n\nFrom online fashion to grocery, only a handful of sectors have bucked the coronavirus downturn, and now it seems comics and gaming have joined the list.\n\nGeek Retreat - which specialises in \"all things geeky\" including comics, memorabilia and table top games - says it will open another 100 stores over the next two years, at a time when the UK High Street is under pressure.\n\nThe Scottish firm currently has 14 UK sites, which combine retail space with cafes and areas to play games and hold events.\n\nIt said its Covid-safe plan would create around 600 new jobs.\n\n\"During the pandemic, while our gaming events have had to stop and the hospitality side of our business is more difficult, our stores still have loyal communities who support our retail side,\" Geek Retreat boss Peter Dobson told the BBC.\n\n\"We have made sure all of our stores are welcoming and accessible to gamers whatever their interests, providing a place for our loyal customers to get out of the house and play safely post-lockdown.\"\n\nGeek Retreat boss Peter Dobson says the games and hobby sector is expanding\n\nCountless High Street businesses had to close temporarily during lockdown, and many remain under pressure as shoppers minimise social contact.\n\nHowever, Mr Dobson said Geek Retreat was benefitting from the growth of the wider games and hobby sector which is valued at £8bn a year in the UK and predicted to expand by 3% in 2020.\n\nEarlier this year, miniature wargames manufacturer Games Workshop - which is best known for its Warhammer products -announced record sales and profits, and its shares were promoted to London's FTSE 250 index.\n\nGeek Retreat - founded in Glasgow in 2017 - stocks merchandise such as comics, posters, clothing, figures and memorabilia as well as games and trading cards.\n\nIt also specialises in various cult brands such as Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars and Harry Potter, while selling graphic novels and gaming accessories such as dice.\n\nThe retailer said it expected to open sites in Bournemouth, Northampton and Liverpool in coming months, followed by Southampton, Dumfries, Cardiff and Sutton in London.\n\nThe chain, which operates as a franchise, aims to open five stores per month from the beginning of 2021, but points out that with the Covid-19 virus those plans are subject to change.\n\nMr Dobson said all his outlets were Covid secure, with only limited numbers allowed in at one time. Customers also have to book events in advance, submit their details for track and trace and follow social distancing rules.", "After criticising the country's top infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci this morning, President Trump doubled down on the denunciation at a campaign rally this afternoon in Arizona.\n\nThe president then turned to his rival, Joe Biden, saying that the Democrat \"wants to listen to Dr Fauci\".\n\nFauci has served as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, and has become one of the most visible figures in the government’s coronavirus response.\n\nBut Biden doesn't seem to mind the association with Dr Fauci. He retweeted the president's remarks with a simple \"yes\".\n\nFauci has served under six US presidents - both Democrats and Republicans - and he knows a bit about the rough and tumble politics of Washington.\n\nOver his five decades as a medical researcher, he has seen his effigy burnt, heard the cries of protesters calling him a \"murderer\", and had smoke bombs thrown outside his office window.\n\nYou can read our profile here.", "Twenty one people were killed in two blasts on 21 November 1974\n\nThe home secretary is to consider the case for a public inquiry into the 1974 Birmingham Pub Bombings.\n\nThe blasts at the Mulberry Bush and Tavern in the Town pubs on the night of 21 November killed 21 people and injured 220.\n\nTheir families have long called for a public inquiry into what happened.\n\nPriti Patel said she \"recognised the desire to see those responsible brought to justice\".\n\nFresh inquests last year ruled the victims were unlawfully killed, but did not establish who was responsible.\n\nThose hearings came about after years of campaigning by families for a full account into what happened that night.\n\nJulie Hambleton, who lost her sister Maxine in the pub bombings, said the Justice for the 21 group believed an inquiry was the only way to establish \"truth, justice and accountability\" for the victims.\n\nThe blasts ripped apart the Mulberry Bush pub at the base of the Rotunda and the Tavern in the Town in nearby New Street\n\nWest Midlands Mayor Andy Street said: \"Whilst this is not a firm commitment, it is a step towards securing a public inquiry and ultimately justice for the 21 murdered that night and their families.\n\n\"I am firmly of the belief that the only way to achieve justice now is through an open, panel-led, public inquiry, and I will continue to make the case alongside the J421 campaign. The families, and the city of Birmingham, need closure.\"\n\nMs Patel said: \"My sympathy remains with all those affected by these awful events 46 years ago.\"\n\nShe said she would \"welcome\" the opportunity to meet some of the families, so she could \"take their views into account\" before making a decision about an inquiry.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Following the inquests, Julie Hambleton called on police to bring the bombers to justice\n\nMs Hambleton said: \"She [Priti Patel] needs to hear from us first hand what we have gone through and what we continue to fight for.\n\n\"A statutory inquiry is the only way forward. It is such a complex set of circumstances and the big question is, who bombed Birmingham and who killed our loved ones?\"\n\nSix men - Hugh Callaghan, Paddy Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker - were wrongly jailed for life in 1975 for the bombings.\n\nThe group, who became known as the Birmingham Six, had their convictions quashed in the appeal court and they were released in 1991.\n\nWest Midlands Police said there continued to be an active criminal investigation into the case.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk", "China's economy continues its recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic according to its latest official figures.\n\nThe world's second-biggest economy saw growth of 4.9% between July and September, compared to the same quarter last year.\n\nHowever, the figure is lower than the 5.2% expected by economists.\n\nChina is now leading the charge for a global recovery based on its latest gross domestic product (GDP) data.\n\nThe near-5% growth is a far cry from the slump the Chinese economy suffered at the start of 2020 when the pandemic first emerged.\n\nFor the first three months of this year China’s economy shrank by 6.8% when it saw nationwide shutdowns of factories and manufacturing plants.\n\nIt was the first time China’s economy contracted since it started recording quarterly figures back in 1992.\n\nThe key economic growth figures released on Monday suggest that China’s recovery is gathering pace, although experts often question the accuracy of its economic data.\n\nThe quarterly figures are compared to the same quarter of 2019.\n\n\"I don't think the headline number is bad,\" said Iris Pang, chief China economist for ING in Hong Kong. \"Job creation in China is quite stable which creates more consumption.\"\n\nChina’s trade figures for September also pointed to a strong recovery, with exports growing by 9.9% and imports growing by 13.2% compared to September last year.\n\nOver the previous two decades, China had seen an average economic growth rate of about 9% although the pace has gradually been slowing.\n\nWhile the Covid-19 pandemic has hampered this year's growth targets, China also remains in a trade war with the US which has hurt the economy.\n\nChina's economy continues to grow at rates unimaginable in other Covid-hit countries.\n\nDraconian lockdown measures to control the virus combined with some government stimulus appeared to have worked well.\n\nWhile growth of 4.9% is slightly below some forecasts, industrial output - a good barometer of state controlled activity - came in above expectations.\n\nChina's communist party rulers wanted to see ramped up supply, but retail sales were slower than predicted.\n\nNonetheless it appears to be a broadening recovery with the all-important services sector rebounding.\n\nDomestic tourists and travellers have probably helped the recovery continue by spending their money at home because global restrictions mean they can't - yet - go abroad.\n\nEarlier this year China's central bank stepped up support for growth and employment after widespread travel restrictions choked economic activity. But it has more recently held off on further easing.\n\nPremier Li Keqiang warned earlier in October that China needs to make arduous efforts to achieve its full-year economic goals.\n\nFor the second quarter of this year, economic growth in China reached 3.2% as it started its rebound.\n\n\"China's economy remains on the recovery path, driven by a rebound in exports,\" said Yoshikiyo Shimamine, chief economist at the Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo.\n\n\"But we cannot say it has completely shaken off the drag caused by the coronavirus.\"\n\nChina's economy should also get a boost this year from \"Golden Week\" - an annual holiday in October that sees millions of Chinese travel.\n\nWith international travel severely restricted, millions of Chinese have been travelling, and spending, domestically instead.\n\nThere were 637m trips in China over the eight-day holiday which generated revenue of 466.6bn RMB ($69.6bn, £53.8bn), according to data from its Ministry of Culture and Tourism.\n\nDuty-free sales in the tropical island province of Hainan more than doubled from last year, soaring by nearly 150% according to the local customs data.", "Can I eat out with someone from a different tier? And other questions\n\nWe've been answering more of your questions about what new regulations in place across the UK mean for you. They include one from a reader who lives in a tier two area who wants to know if they can have dinner with their sister at a tier one restaurant, indoors. The answer is no, as you can't mix with anyone indoors if you live in a tier two area, as it's under high alert. You can meet outside though, as long as there aren't more than six of you. There are also questions on whether you can stay at a partner's house if you live in areas under different regulations (in short - it depends where you live, whether you have formed a bubble and whether there's childcare to take into consideration), and on the job support scheme. Read more here - and click or tap here if you want to send in a question yourself.", "Deaths at home up by nearly a quarter in Wales\n\nMore than 1,600 extra deaths have occurred in people's own homes in Wales so far this year than average, according to analysis by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Deaths from heart disease amongst men in their own homes were 22.7% higher compared with the five-year average - while there were more than 29% fewer deaths through this cause in hospital. Deaths for women from dementia in their own homes almost doubled in Wales, while in hospitals they fell by 25.5%. “While deaths in hospitals and care homes have dropped below the five-year average since the initial peak of the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve consistently seen deaths in private homes remain well above the five-year average,\" said ONS analyst Sarah Caul. Unlike the high numbers of deaths involving Covid-19 in hospitals and care homes, the majority of deaths in private homes are unrelated to the virus. Up to 11 September, there have been 7,440 deaths in people's homes in Wales, with 134 of these involving Covid-19. This was 1,624 deaths more than the five-year average for the same period. Nearly two-thirds of these excess deaths came in the 70 to 89 years age group. One expert has suggested these deaths would normally have occurred in hospital. People may have been reluctant to go, discouraged from attending, or the services have been disrupted, Sir David Spiegelhalter of the Cambridge University said.", "Greater Manchester is currently in tier two, or \"high alert\" level\n\nGreater Manchester leaders have been given a deadline of midday to reach a deal with the government over moving to tier three Covid restrictions.\n\nIf a deal is not reached, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said the PM would decide on the next steps.\n\nIn this situation, the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg said the \"implication\" was the top tier of rules would be imposed.\n\nGreater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said the region was seeking a \"fair figure\" of support from the government.\n\nMr Burnham told BBC Radio 4's Today programme he would be meeting with local leaders this morning and would advise them to set out the request in a letter to the government.\n\nThe government and local leaders - including mayors and MPs - have been embroiled in 10 days of talks over moving Greater Manchester's 2.8m population from tier two to the highest restrictions.\n\nGreater Manchester has been under local restrictions since July.\n\nThe \"very high\" alert level - also known as tier three - would mean closing pubs and bars which do not serve meals, and additional restrictions on households mixing.\n\nMr Jenrick said local leaders had been \"so far unwilling to take the action that is required to get this situation under control\".\n\nIt come as the number of weekly registered coronavirus deaths in England and Wales rose by 438 and increased by a third in the space of seven days, according to official figures from the Office for National Statistics.\n\nSpeaking to Today, Mr Burnham described the government's \"late-night ultimatum briefed to the media\" as a \"slightly provocative move\", but he said he was going to \"try and find a way forward\".\n\nHe said local leaders had never been given a figure for additional financial support in return for further restrictions.\n\nAs well as setting out what a \"fair figure\" of support was, Mr Burnham said he wanted \"full flexibility\" to support people who will be affected by restrictions.\n\nHe said: \"I think it is fair to recognise that if you put a place under restrictions for as long as we've been under restrictions it grinds people down. It pushes businesses closer to the brink.\"\n\nMr Burnham has previously called for the government to reintroduce the 80% furlough scheme used during the UK's first lockdown, instead of the new Job Support Scheme which covers 67% of the wages (covered by employers and the government) of people affected by tier three closures.\n\nBusiness minister Nadhim Zahawi told Today £22m had been offered to Greater Manchester - equivalent to £8 per person - and there would be \"additional support commensurate with what we have done in Liverpool City Region and in Lancashire\".\n\nMr Burnham said he would not \"break the law\" if no agreement was reached between both sides and the government imposed tier three measures on Greater Manchester.\n\n\"It's their prerogative to do what they think is needed,\" he told BBC Breakfast.\n\n\"But I would say to them that I don't think it will help us bring people with what they want to do to control this virus. I think it would be better to come to an agreement.\"\n\nMr Burnham also said he thought the shielding of elderly and vulnerable people in Greater Manchester needed to be \"looked at seriously\" and suggested it was \"part of the solution\".\n\nSir Richard Leese, the Labour leader of Manchester City Council, told BBC Newsnight he hoped a deal could still be made, but added: \"If government imposes tier three - and I hope that won't happen - we will clearly need to comply with that.\"\n\nOn Monday, Mr Burnham and Sir Richard accused the government of using \"selective statistics\" on hospital occupancy rates to bolster the case for tougher rules.\n\nOn Monday evening, the two sides couldn't even agree on what they actually discussed earlier.\n\nBelieve the local leaders and on Monday morning there seemed to be hope in the air. Officials from central government had mooted the possibility of a hardship fund to help support low-paid workers who stand to lose out if businesses close their doors under tighter restrictions.\n\nThe message local leaders took from their meeting was that, while the Treasury is adamant they are not going to extend their national furlough scheme - nor increase the level of cash available from its replacement, the Job Support Scheme - Westminster might sign off extra money that could be spent that way, if local politicians saw fit.\n\nThere was no concrete agreement on the numbers, but sources in Greater Manchester suggest the cost of supporting those who need the extra help comes in at around £15m a month.\n\nAfter that call, the consensus among North West leaders was moving in the direction of signing on the dotted line, with another call planned with Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick for the afternoon.\n\nBut rather than ushering in a new spirit of co-operation, that meeting went south.\n\nA three-tier system of alerts was announced a week ago in an attempt to control rising coronavirus cases without a UK-wide lockdown.\n\nSo far, only the Liverpool City Region and Lancashire have been moved into tier three.\n\nHowever, Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the House of Commons on Monday that discussions are planned for South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, north-east England and Teesside also moving into the top tier.\n\nSpeaking ahead of those discussions with government, Nottingham City Council leader David Mellen said he would make clear \"that we want a package that properly protects local people, businesses, jobs and education, whether it's for tier two or tier three\".\n\nElsewhere in the UK, in Wales people will be told from Friday to stay at home, while pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops will shut, as part of a \"short, sharp\" national lockdown until 9 November.\n\nA two-week school closure has begun in Northern Ireland as part of a tightening of restrictions.\n\nIn Scotland, the tightest restrictions are in place in the central belt, and there are plans for a three-tier framework of measures, similar to England's.\n\nOn Monday, government figures showed the UK recorded a further 18,804 coronavirus cases and 80 deaths.\n\nHow have you been affected by coronavirus? What have restrictions meant for you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "A project manager on the Grenfell Tower refurbishment has admitted she \"binned\" notebooks relating to her work, after the deadly fire at the building.\n\nClaire Williams told a public inquiry she thought the information was \"documented elsewhere\" and not needed.\n\nThe inquiry chairman said it was hard to understand why she had \"taken it upon herself\" to do such a thing.\n\nIt comes after her former colleague disclosed notebooks with \"material of the utmost relevance\" only last week.\n\nThe first phase of the Grenfell inquiry concluded that cladding put on during the refurbishment fuelled the fire in June 2017 in which 72 people died.\n\nThe inquiry is now examining how the blaze could have happened in the first place.\n\nPolice searched the offices of the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO) and took away material from the desks of staff after the blaze.\n\nWhile the inquiry has access to official emails and minutes of meetings, hand-written notes could reveal more detail about decisions taken during the refurbishment of the tower.\n\nMs Williams told the inquiry she left the job in May 2018 and lawyers for her former employers have possession of a notebook covering \"probably 2017 and 2018\".\n\nBut she said she may have thrown out \"two or three notebooks\" containing records dating back to 2013, explaining: \"If the police didn't take them, I binned them.\"\n\nInquiry chairman Sir Martin Moore-Bick asked: \"You binned them even though you knew, by that time, there was already on foot a public inquiry?\"\n\nMs Williams said: \"I think I just tidied up the desk. I would have looked at them and thought 'There's nothing here that isn't in formal evidence'.\"\n\nShe told the inquiry: \"There was nothing underhand about it. I was clearing my desk, I looked and decided that everything that was in there was formally represented in minutes or other paperwork and it was of little value.\"\n\nShe said: \"It wasn't a conscious, hiding anything decision, it was 'I'm clearing my desk'. I put them in the bin.\"\n\nEarlier, counsel for the inquiry, Richard Millett QC, said he would be questioning Ms William's former colleague Peter Madison on Tuesday.\n\nHe said Mr Madison, former head of assets and regeneration at the TMO, needs to give \"clear and convincing explanations\" of why his notebooks and diaries had not been been disclosed to the inquiry, and possibly the police, until now.\n\nThe material, including 300 pages of handwritten notes, was handed over at the weekend after Mr Madison heard the evidence of colleagues and realised they might be of value.", "Welsh Government ministers are meeting again on Sunday to discuss a 'fire-break' national lockdown\n\nOfficials are \"not blind\" to the impact another national lockdown would have on the economy, Wales' health minister has said.\n\nVaughan Gething said the concern being voiced \"weighs heavily\" on ministers.\n\nA decision on a two or three-week \"fire-break\" lockdown is expected on Monday.\n\nHowever, Conservative leader in the Senedd Paul Davies said he would not support the measure \"until I know what the details are\".\n\nMr Gething told BBC Politics Wales he recognised a circuit-breaker lockdown to slow the infection rates would have real impacts \"in terms of people being able to pay their bills\".\n\n\"We're also not blind to the fact that doing nothing means that Covid will continue to grow and we will continue to see harm,\" he added.\n\n\"We want to be able to get to the end of the year with a pattern that people can live with.\n\n\"What we can't do though is give people a guarantee that things will not happen during the winter. That depends on all the choices that we make.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government cabinet met on Sunday afternoon to continue its discussions, and agreed to meet again on Monday ahead of the expected announcement from First Minister Mark Drakeford.\n\nA Welsh Government spokesperson said: \"Ministers have held a number of meetings over the weekend with senior Welsh Government officials, scientists and public health experts to consider their advice on a potential need for a 'fire break' set of measures to control the virus.\n\n\"The Welsh cabinet met this evening to consider that advice. The cabinet will meet again tomorrow morning to make a final decision. The first minister will update the people of Wales on any decisions taken tomorrow.\"\n\nSeventeen areas in Wales currently have local lockdown rules in place\n\nPrior to the cabinet meeting, Mr Gething insisted no final decision had been taken on lockdown measures.\n\nIt follows the publication of a letter on possible dates for a short, Wales-wide lockdown.\n\nIt prompted calls from the Welsh Conservatives for an emergency recall of the Senedd on Monday.\n\n\"They should come now to the Senedd tomorrow to make a statement to explain that (letter), and also to explain what their plans are, because it's unacceptable that they are actually briefing organisations and the media,\" said Mr Davies.\n\n\"They should be making the decisions and making the announcements in the Senedd, that's the point we're making.\"\n\nThe letter was sent to all Confederation of Passenger Transport members by the Welsh director\n\nIn the letter to members of the Confederation of Passenger Transport, Wales director John Pockett said lockdown would start at 18:00 on 23 October and end on 9 November.\n\nBut Mr Pockett has since told PA Media he was assuming what would happen.\n\n\"The letter is genuine and it contains what I assume or surmised would be the position,\" he said.\n\n\"It was me advising my bus operator members to be prepared for something and this is what it may well be.\n\n\"It could be more - it could be anything. I think other associations have communicated with their members in the same way.\"\n\nThe speculation over the possible lockdown has led to \"frustration\", said one of Wales' police and crime commissioners.\n\nDyfed-Powys Police and Crime Commissioner Dafydd Llywelyn told BBC Radio Wales' Sunday Supplement: \"We have had meetings last week in relation to the preparation for what may be happening in the future.\n\n\"The reality, and I will be very open about this, the detail of that has not necessarily been shared in a huge amount with us and there is sometimes - and has been during the whole period - some frustration on the part of policing.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BBC's Laura Foster explains what a circuit breaker is and how it could help tackle Covid-19\n\nPlaid Cymru Member of the Senedd Sian Gwenllian said the Welsh Government \"must urgently set out its plans for a national fire-break\".\n\n\"We are concerned about the lack of clarity and anxiety caused by a drip-feed of information circulating in the media and elsewhere over the weekend,\" she added.\n\nBaroness Wilcox, the former head of the Welsh Local Government Association, said there was a \"growing consensus that we need a different set of measures\".\n\n\"We need different actions to respond to the virus,\" she said.\n\nThe Welsh Government said: \"The measures we have put in place at both a local and a national level, with help from the public, have kept the spread of the virus under check.\n\n\"However, there is a growing consensus that we now need to introduce a different set of measures and actions to respond to the virus as it is spreading across Wales more quickly through the autumn and winter.\n\n\"We are actively considering advice from SAGE and our TAC Group.\n\n\"A 'fire-break' set of measures to control Covid-19, similar to that described in the SAGE papers, is under consideration in Wales. But no decisions have been made.\"", "A hacking group is donating stolen money to charity in what is seen as a mysterious first for cyber-crime that's puzzling experts.\n\nDarkside hackers claim to have extorted millions of dollars from companies, but say they now want to \"make the world a better place\".\n\nIn a post on the dark web, the gang posted receipts for $10,000 in Bitcoin donations to two charities.\n\nOne of them, Children International, says it will not be keeping the money.\n\nThe move is being seen as a strange and troubling development, both morally and legally.\n\nThe hackers posted their tax receipt for the $10,000 donation\n\nIn the blog post on 13 October, the hackers claim they only target large profitable companies with their ransomware attacks. The attacks hold organisations' IT systems hostage until a ransom is paid.\n\nThey wrote: \"We think that it's fair that some of the money the companies have paid will go to charity.\n\n\"No matter how bad you think our work is, we are pleased to know that we helped changed someone's life. Today we sended (sic) the first donations.\"\n\nThe cyber-criminals posted the donation along with tax receipts they received in exchange for the 0.88 Bitcoin they had sent to two charities, The Water Project and Children International.\n\nChildren International supports children, families and communities in India, the Philippines, Colombia, Ecuador, Zambia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and the United States.\n\nA Children International spokesperson told the BBC: \"If the donation is linked to a hacker, we have no intention of keeping it\".\n\nThe Water Project, which works to improve access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, has not responded to requests for comment.\n\nAnother receipt was posted on the dark web blog showing a $10,000 donation\n\nBrett Callow, Threat Analyst at cyber-security company Emsisoft, said: \"What the criminals hope to achieve by making these donations is not at all clear. Perhaps it helps assuage their guilt? Or perhaps for egotistical reasons they want to be perceived as Robin Hood-like characters rather than conscienceless extortionists.\n\n\"Whatever their motivations, it's certainly a very unusual step and is, as far as I know, the first time a ransomware group has donated a portion of their profits to charity.\"\n\nThe Darkside hacker group is relatively new on the scene, but analysis of the crypto-currency market confirms they are actively extorting funds from victims.\n\nThere is also evidence they may have links to other cyber-criminal groups responsible for high-profile attacks on companies including Travelex, which was crippled by ransomware in January.\n\nThe way the hackers paid the charities is also a possible cause for concern for law enforcement.\n\nThe cyber-criminals used a US-based service called The Giving Block, which is used by 67 different non-profits from around the world including Save The Children, Rainforest Foundation and She's The First.\n\nThe now-deleted tweet celebrating the donation from the hackers\n\nThe Giving Block describes itself online as \"the only non-profit specific solution for accepting crypto-currency donations\".\n\nThe company was set up in 2018 to offer cryptocurrency 'millionaires' the ability to take advantage of the \"huge tax incentive to donate Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies directly to non-profits\".\n\nThe Giving Block told the BBC it was not aware these donations were made by cyber-criminals. It said: \"We are still working to determine if these funds were actually stolen.\n\n\"If it turns out these donations were made using stolen funds, we will of course begin the work of returning them to the rightful owner.\"\n\nThe company did not clarify if this means returning the stolen money to the criminals, or attempting to work out which of the criminal victims it intended to reimburse and how.\n\nThe Giving Block, which is also an advocate for crypto-currencies, added: \"The fact they used crypto will make it easier, not harder, to catch them.\"\n\nHowever, The Giving Block has not given details on what information they collect on their donors. Most services that buy and sell digital coins like Bitcoin require users to verify their identity, but it's not clear whether this has been done here.\n\n67 charities use The Giving Block to accept crypto-currency\n\nAs an experiment, the BBC attempted to donate anonymously through The Giving Block's online system, and was not asked any identity verification questions.\n\nExperts say the case highlights the complexity and dangers of anonymous donations.\n\nCrypto-currency investigator Philip Gradwell from Chainalysis said: \"If you walked into a charity shop with an anonymous mask on and donated £10,000 in cash, then asked for a taxable receipt, questions should probably be asked - and it's no different.\n\n\"It's right to say that researchers and law enforcement have become adept at tracing crypto-currency funds as they are moved around from wallet to wallet. But finding who actually owns each wallet is far more complicated.\n\n\"By allowing anonymous donations from potentially illicit sources, it opens up the danger of money laundering.\n\n\"All crypto-currency businesses need a full range of Anti-Money Laundering measures including a Know Your Customer (KYC) program of basic background checks, so that they can understand who is behind the transactions their business facilitates.\"\n\nThe BBC has spoken with other charities which accept donations via The Giving Project.\n\nSave the Children told the BBC it would \"never knowingly take money obtained through crime\".\n\nShe's the First, a charity for girls' education around the world, said it would not be comfortable accepting money from anonymous, possibly criminal, sources and said: \"It's a shame that bad actors would exploit the opportunity to donate crypto-currency for personal gain, and we hope that even anonymous donors share our community's values.\"", "Manchester has resisted being put into the \"very high risk\" tier\n\nEarly in the pandemic, the government consistently said it was \"following the science\" - but what does that really mean, and is the divergence between politics and science now wider than it has ever been?\n\nSome with heels clacking on the cobbles, others capturing the moment on their phones - it's like the aftermath of a big win in the football, or the Saturday after pay day. The videos show Concert Square in Liverpool heaving with crowds.\n\nAnd this in a city on the crest of a second wave of coronavirus, where almost all the intensive care beds in the hospitals are full.\n\nIt was Tuesday night, hours away from the Liverpool City Region entering the toughest restrictions in the country. But the footage sparked anger, and on Twitter there was a fight over the damage to the city's reputation.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Crowds gather in Liverpool on eve of new Covid rules\n\nDozens of tweets insisted that those present must have been students, that no true Liverpudlian would set foot in Concert Square, let alone behave like that. The tweeters were adamant - these people came from outside.\n\nThe mayor and the metro mayor condemned the scenes - but that wasn't the only thing they were angry about.\n\nThey accused the government at Westminster of not providing enough financial support - workers affected by the closure of businesses such as bars and gyms will only get two-thirds of their wages.\n\nOn the first day of lockdown, one gym owner showed his defiance by remaining open and was fined for it.\n\nGyms have indeed provided a source of confusion. Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson questioned why gyms in the Liverpool City Region had to close when the area moved into tier three - very high alert - but those in Lancashire, which went into tier three on Saturday, were allowed to stay open.\n\nLiverpool was the first place in England to go into the strictest measures\n\nIn Blackburn, with 438 cases per 100,000 (in the week to 13 October), you can work out, but in Wirral, with 284 cases per 100,000, you can't.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has acknowledged inconsistencies. \"There are anomalies, that's inevitably going to happen in a complex campaign against a pandemic like this.\"\n\nBut do these discrepancies encourage those who feel the government's decision-making sometimes veers away from the science?\n\n\"Following the science\" was a phrase we heard a lot of earlier in the year. It's what, we were repeatedly told, the government at Westminster was doing.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe reality was always more nuanced. There was a range of scientific views on a topic about which precious little was known at the outset, and there are still vast amounts to learn.\n\nAdded to that, from the perspective of ministers, this could never only be about scientific advice.\n\nThere was a constant swirl of broader considerations, what we might call the three Ls - lives, liberties and livelihoods. Ministers have been tussling with the three Ls from the start of the pandemic. But the divergence has never been wider than it is now.\n\nClaire Hamilton is the BBC's political reporter for Merseyside @chamiltonbbc\n\nThe critical moment in recent weeks can be traced back to 21 September, when Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK's chief scientific adviser and Prof Chris Whitty, the UK's chief medical adviser, warned of the need for immediate action.\n\nIn a televised briefing, Sir Patrick warned cases could reach 50,000 a day by mid-October if they doubled every seven days, as had happened in recent weeks.\n\nWe now know that on that same day, the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) met and suggested the \"immediate introduction\" of a \"short period of lockdown,\" and a series of longer term measures, including:\n\nA day later, what actually happened?\n\nThe prime minister said people should work from home if they could and a 22:00 curfew for pubs and restaurants was introduced. In other words, not a lot of change.\n\nWhat happened to \"following the science\"?\n\nPlenty at Westminster whispered, even before we had seen the minutes from the Sage meeting, that this was a victory for those in government, like Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who worried about the pandemic's crippling economic consequences.\n\nMr Sunak has been consistent - warning again, just this week, of the danger of \"rushing to another lockdown\". He warned, instead, of the \"economic emergency\", touching on another of the three Ls - livelihoods.\n\nWhen you speak to people in the Treasury, you get an insight into what informs this outlook.\n\n\"We have to keep an eye on the medium term. There may not be a vaccine. Listening to the scientists recently, the mood music has changed. They're more pessimistic,\" says one.\n\nThis is no longer about dealing with a short-term emergency, but being resilient through a medium or long-term slog of a crisis.\n\nAnd that means the Treasury is well aware of what is going out - in public spending - and what is coming in, in taxes.\n\n\"There isn't the headroom there was,\" an insider says - a reference to the £200bn already spent.\n\nAnd there is a keen awareness of the economic consequences of shutting pubs. \"Our economy is comparatively very reliant on social consumption,\" is how it is described.\n\nThe experts know the ministers have to take into account a variety of factors. One Sage member said: \"Our job is to give clear unvarnished science advice so they can do that with their eyes open.\"\n\nOn Tuesday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer advocated a short, limited lockdown - the circuit-breaker suggested by the scientific advisers.\n\nBut does Sir Keir calling for a circuit-breaker make it more or less likely to happen?\n\nSince then, the government - to quote Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab - has been \"leaning in\" to its regional response for England.\n\nPolitical convention says, everything else being equal, it is harder to adopt a policy advocated by your opponents than it is by independent advisers.\n\nThen there's the last of the three Ls. Liberties.\n\nAmong the most influential Conservative backbench voices is Sir Graham Brady, who said ministers had got used to \"ruling by decree\" and \"the British people aren't used to being treated like children\".\n\nThis unease at how the pandemic has, in their view, swept away some of the checks and balances on those in power, is widely held in Parliament.\n\nThen there's the question of geography. First there was devolution for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but now we're all aware of the big English cities that have metro mayors because they are fighting back against Westminster.\n\nAccording to well-placed sources, Health Secretary Matt Hancock had argued for tougher measures in private. But the need to get local leaders on board has meant the tiered system has had to leave some wriggle room for negotiation.\n\nMinisters were stung when Middlesbrough mayor Andy Preston said he flatly rejected the restrictions that the government announced there in early October. \"It was a real problem for us - it undermined the public health message and threatened to undo what we were trying to achieve,\" one government source said.\n\nSteve Rotheram, Metro Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, had been asking for a lockdown circuit-breaker for at least two weeks - but he said any measures must come with a bespoke financial support package for businesses. It appears this hasn't been forthcoming.\n\nBut the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has gone much further than his colleague in Liverpool. On Friday, he was described as \"effectively trying to hold the government over a barrel\" by Mr Raab.\n\nMr Burnham, a former Labour cabinet minister, who lost out to Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 Labour leadership contest, is suddenly back on the national stage. He is demanding noisily and frequently the need for more generous support for those unable to work because of tier three restrictions.\n\nThere is nervousness within the Labour Party nationally, and elsewhere in the north of England, about this stance. Some worry it imperils people's health, others that it's become \"the Andy show\" - as one figure put it.\n\nThe idea of \"metro mayors\" voted for directly by the people of the region has long been championed by the Conservatives. David Cameron was a particular fan.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Top SAGE scientist tells us the regional restriction row is dangerous\n\n\"Some Conservatives are now realising you've got to be careful what you wish for,\" an early advocate of them says.\n\n\"And remember this, Boris Johnson was a mayor. There is a path to Downing Street that can pass via a town hall. Perhaps Andy Burnham has realised that too.\"\n\nWhat we are seeing is how different parts of the UK have tilted in different directions. Loyalty to region, to nation, to party. The legacies of past perceived slights and injustices. The realities of perceived injustices now.\n\n\"We owe a big thanks to George Osborne for bequeathing us this incredible standoff,\" a senior Conservative says about the row.\n\nSome Conservative ministers ponder privately that - in the end - Mr Sunak will be forced to be more generous to those unable to work under tier three restrictions. They don't think it'll be politically sustainable to pay people normally on the minimum wage, less than the minimum wage, for months on end.\n\nThe rows between local and central government leaders are \"very dangerous\" and \"very damaging to public health\", according to Prof Sir Jeremy Farrar, Sage member, and director of the Wellcome Trust.\n\nBut these are not the only rows that have been taking place. Across the scientific and medical community tempers are frayed and the pandemic is taking its toll.\n\nThere is a network of committees that feed into Sage, bringing together a wide range of experts from sociologists and public health directors to epidemiologists.\n\nMany are not paid for their advice and instead are fitting it in around their day jobs. \"We do it because we care and it's our life's work,\" said Prof Devi Sridhar, an expert in global public health at Edinburgh University, who has been advising the Scottish government.\n\nTalk to these experts and it is clear they are exhausted.\n\n\"The requests just keep coming in,\" one said. \"We're fed up, especially when we hear that test-and-trace consultants are getting paid £7,000 a day, and we have to put up with MPs going on the TV telling the world we are naïve and don't live in the real world. It's demoralising.\"\n\nBut it is not just between politicians and scientists that disputes have developed. Rival camps of scientists are clashing. Two online petitions have now been established: the Great Barrington declaration for those who want to see controlled spread of the virus and protection of the vulnerable, and the John Snow Memorandum for those arguing for outright suppression until a vaccine is developed.\n\nProf Francois Balloux, director of the UCL Genetics Institute, says the toxic atmosphere that is developing is really \"unhelpful\".\n\nBrought together, it has created a climate where almost every utterance or development is examined for double-meaning.\n\nThe problem facing advisers and decision-makers is two-fold. First, the nature of the virus means it is a lose-lose situation - whatever decision is taken has negative consequences either for the spread of the virus, or for the economy, education and wider health and well-being. What's more, there is not a simple binary choice of one thing or the other.\n\nFor example, much has been made in recent weeks about the need for the NHS to also focus on non-Covid work, which has taken a terrible hit during the pandemic.\n\nReferrals for urgent cancer check-ups and the number of people starting treatment have dropped, while the amount of routine surgery being done is still half the level it was before the pandemic.\n\nThis can have tragic consequences. This week the British Heart Foundation warned the number of younger adults dying of heart disease had increased by 15% during the pandemic.\n\nThe argument put forward by some is that the government should choose to do more non-Covid work. But, and this is a point the health secretary has been making week after week, if hospitals fill up with coronavirus patients, it makes non-Covid work harder to do.\n\nThe second key issue - and this goes to the heart of the disagreements we have seen bubble up in recent weeks among the scientific and medical community - is that there are huge gaps in the evidence and knowledge.\n\nThis is true on everything from the numbers infected already and the level of immunity exposure brings to the true impact of \"long Covid\", and exactly what effect any restrictions beyond a full lockdown actually have.\n\nIn normal times, the scientific and medical community is able to reach more of a consensus off the back of rigorous randomised controlled trials and painstaking peer review.\n\nBut in a fast-moving pandemic with a new virus, that has simply not been possible. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, says it means there is such \"uncertainty in the science\" that he does not think any plan is guaranteed to work.\n\nAnd then there is the human factor - the unintended consequences of actions that are impossible to take into account in the modelling. Hence the prospect of scenes like the ones we saw in Liverpool, which were not taken into account by Sage in its latest advice.\n\nBut Prof Keith Neal, an infectious disease expert at Nottingham University, says it shouldn't come as a surprise that people react in the way they do. Both young and old are suffering, he says, from not being able to meet up with people. \"This degree of isolation is not allowed in prisons under human rights legislation.\"\n\nPeople from different households will not be able to drink together inside, after London went into tier two\n\nIt is, he says, therefore natural that some people will ignore the rules. Closing pubs may sound good on paper, he says, but it could lead to an increase in house parties where people are \"far more at risk\".\n\nSo where has this left us?\n\nThe complexity of competing interests, uncertainty in the science and general exhaustion across society both among decision-makers and the public has, some fear, left us in the worst of both worlds.\n\nDelay and deliberation, says Sir Jeremy Farrar is a \"decision in itself\".\n\nBut by reaching a decision by default there is a risk - another adviser says - of making the same mistakes we made at the start of the pandemic.\n\n\"In March we toyed with the Swedish model of limited restrictions with the hope of developing immunity and then hesitated. But we then went for a lockdown, but it was introduced bit by bit and it was too late anyway.\n\n\"The same thing has happened again - we have delayed and then gone for some half measures. I can understand why. This is bloody difficult.\"\n\nThe government is now hoping it will be just enough that we can get through this wave without a devastating number of deaths or hospitals being overwhelmed. But it's a big risk - it could all unravel.", "Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan's lawyers say he is \"surprised and saddened\" by the allegations\n\nThe Hay literary festival has accused a senior Gulf royal of an \"appalling violation\" after he allegedly sexually assaulted one of their employees.\n\nCaroline Michel, Hay chair, said they would not work in Abu Dhabi again while Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan remains minister of tolerance.\n\nTheir employee, Caitlin McNamara, claims he attacked her earlier this year and is seeking legal redress.\n\nMs McNamara, 32, told the Sunday Times that the alleged attack happened on 14 February at a remote private island villa where she had been summoned, she thought, to discuss preparations for the first-ever Hay Festival in Abu Dhabi, which was opening 11 days later.\n\nShe said she told both her employer and embassy officials soon after the attack, and went to the police in the UK when coronavirus lockdown restrictions lifted.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Hay Festival This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nAccording to the Sunday Times, Ms McNamara is waiting to hear whether the Crown Prosecution Service will take up her case, and said she had decided to waive her right to anonymity because \"I feel I have nothing to lose\".\n\n\"I want to do this because I want to highlight the effect of powerful men like him doing things like that and thinking they can get away with it,\" she told the newspaper.\n\n\"It seemed clear from the set up I was not the first or last. It really took a massive mental and physical toll on me for what to him was probably just a whim.\"\n\nThe Sunday Times said Sheikh Nahyan had not responded to its approach for a comment on the allegations, but had received a statement from London libel lawyers Schillings which said: \"Our client is surprised and saddened by this allegation, which arrives eight months after the alleged incident and via a national newspaper. The account is denied.\"\n\nSchillings declined to give further comment to the BBC.\n\nIn a statement, posted on Twitter, Hay Festival Chair Caroline Michel, said: \"What happened to our colleague and friend Caitlin McNamara in Abu Dhabi last February was an appalling violation and a hideous abuse of trust and position.\n\n\"Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan made a mockery of his ministerial responsibilities and tragically undermined his government's attempt to work with Hay Festival to promote free speech and female empowerment\".\n\n\"We continue to support Caitlin in seeking legal redress for this attack and we urge our friends and partners in the UAE to reflect on the behaviour of Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan and send a clear signal to the world that such behaviour will not be tolerated. Hay Festival will not be returning to Abu Dhabi while he remains in position.\"", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid: What is it like to self-isolate in student halls?\n\nSome of Scotland's biggest universities did not reduce the capacity of their student halls despite the need for physical distancing, the BBC has found.\n\nA Disclosure investigation found many student halls were 100% full despite the risks of spreading Covid.\n\nIt also found that guidance on offering remote teaching was changed at the last minute, pressuring students to attend.\n\nProf Stephen Reicher, who advises both UK and Scottish governments, said it was an \"accident waiting to happen\".\n\nHe said the risks were \"pretty clear\" and that he and others spoke publicly about the need for widespread Covid testing when students returned but this was never done.\n\nProf Reicher said it was pretty clear what the risks were\n\nScotland's students began to return to university in mid-September.\n\nAs they packed into student halls, hundreds tested positive for the virus and thousands more were told to self-isolate.\n\nSt Andrews University, which had \"strongly recommended\" students return to the town, recorded three cases imported from outside Fife in mid-September. Subsequently, it asked all students to observe a \"voluntary lockdown\".\n\nThere was confusion across the country about whether students in university accommodation were able to go back to their family home.\n\nBBC Scotland's Disclosure programme found that there have so far been 1,500 positive tests among students in halls, 10% of all cases in Scotland since 19 September.\n\nThe programme found some universities cut the number of students in halls of residence by as much as half but St Andrews University, the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, in Glasgow, were at full capacity.\n\nThe Royal Conservatoire said it did not own or operate student accommodation but had an arrangement with a private company.\n\nA spokesperson said: \"We have a lease agreement with a purpose-built student accommodation provider for 164 ensuite rooms in a recently opened facility. To-date we have received no reported cases of Covid in our leased accommodation.\"\n\nEight other universities would not tell the BBC whether or not they cut numbers to allow physical distancing.\n\nThe return of students appears to have eased some of the financial pressures on higher education.\n\nIn May, at the height of the pandemic, the Scottish Funding Council predicted losses of up to £500m for the sector but universities are thought to have performed much better due to a higher than expected numbers of students.\n\nThe Disclosure programme heard that, as late as 31 August, draft government guidance for Scottish universities said \"work and study that can be done remotely must be done so\".\n\nThis would have meant that many students did not have to travel to university to take part in their course,\n\nThe University and Colleges Union (Scotland) said this was changed to instead focus on \"blended\" or \"hybrid learning\" and asked institutions to make \"reasonable efforts\" to facilitate remote working.\n\nThe UCU said the guidance was changed overnight and published on 1 September without its knowledge.\n\nIt believes the change was made to allow universities to market more face-to-face teaching and bring students back to campus.\n\nCarlo Morelli, from UCU Scotland, said: \"If you're telling students they have to come to campus, then they're going to have to take up the accommodation that's offered to them. So the push was from the universities to get students to come and take up their place in accommodation.\"\n\nThe Disclosure investigation also found that some universities are subject to \"nomination agreements\" with private accommodation providers.\n\nThis is where universities enter deals with private developers to provide modern attractive accommodation. These deals may include guarantees from universities that a certain percentage of the rooms will be filled each year.\n\nFor instance, the University of Edinburgh has eight nomination agreements in place, with a fifth of its students living in accommodation rented from private providers.\n\nFinancial analyst Louise Cooper told the programme that there had been an explosion of student numbers in recent years and universities had turned over their property portfolios to private developers.\n\nBut she said the \"risk\" of the properties being empty was generally being borne by the universities.\n\n\"The underlying model requires high occupancy, students in there, paying their weekly, monthly rents,\" she said. \"As ever, you need to follow the money.\"\n\nThe University of Edinburgh said: \"Throughout the pandemic our prime concern has been, and remains, the health, safety and general well-being of our students and staff. This will always come before any financial considerations.\"\n\nEight universities did not answer:\n\nEdinburgh University's Prof Peter Mathieson said the decision was not financial\n\nEdinburgh University vice-chancellor, Prof Peter Mathieson, said the decision to bring students back was driven by \"a belief that we want to provide the best possible student experience that we can\".\n\nHe said the university had focused on making the teaching environment safe for students and staff.\n\nAlastair Sim, from Universities Scotland, also said universities were \"prioritising learning\".\n\nProf Reicher, a professor of social psychology at St Andrews, said that when experts looked at the US data it was \"pretty clear that going back to university was a real risk\".\n\nHe said everyone should have been tested when they arrived and they should not have been allowed to mix together until later.\n\nUniversities minister Richard Lochhead said there were no \"hidden agendas\" over blended learning\n\nHigher Education minister Richard Lochhead said the advice was that testing capacity should be focused on students who had symptoms of Covid.\n\nHe said that having identified positive cases, the Test and Protect regime and self-isolation was the best way to prevent the transmission of the virus.\n\n\"In terms of asymptomatic testing, we are currently looking at whether there is more we can do that as a government, and that may well involve student populations going forward, because it's a developing science and the tests are also improving,\" he said.\n\nMr Lochhead said there was no \"hidden agendas\" that led to the blended learning guidance.\n\nHe said it came after the back and forth of debate and the aim was to strike a balance between face-to-face teaching and online learning.\n\nThe minister said students' leaders had told him of concerns about purpose-built accommodation in Scotland and he had already given a commitment to carry out a review.\n\nMr Lochhead said: \"We've done our best. I accept we'll look back on this and think we've made mistakes, because we're all dealing with a very difficult situation, where there are no easy options.\"", "The Transport Secretary says he is \"very hopeful\" a new testing regime for travellers to the UK can be in place by 1 December, reducing the amount of time people need to spend in quarantine.\n\nGrant Shapps said it could happen as long as there was enough testing capacity to support the plan.\n\nThe government has been consulting on a system where passengers would be tested after just a week of isolation.\n\nBut BA's new boss wants testing before departure, not quarantine on arrival.\n\nAddressing an online aviation conference, Mr Shapps said the government was looking at introducing a virus test alongside a shortened quarantine period by early December.\n\n\"My ministerial colleagues and I have agreed a regime, based on a single test provided by the private sector and at the cost to the passenger, after a period of self-isolation,\" he said.\n\n\"It will mean a single test for international arrivals, a week after arrival.\"\n\nThe government's travel taskforce, which is working on the plans, will put its recommendations before the prime minister in November, Mr Shapps said.\n\nThe idea is to reduce the amount of time travellers coming into the UK have to spend self-isolating - currently 14 days for those arriving from areas not included on the government's list of \"travel corridors\".\n\nThe government's approach may be designed to protect public health, but is unlikely to win it many friends in the aviation industry.\n\nJust before Grant Shapps spoke, and at the same event, British Airways' new boss Sean Doyle used his first major public appearance since his appointment to argue for a \"fundamental rethink\" of the UK's approach to flying during the pandemic.\n\nIt was time, he said, to replace the current quarantine regime with a \"reliable and affordable\" test taken before flying.\n\nPeople within the sector blame the current restrictions for killing off hopes of a strong revival in the sector, after the lockdown earlier this year.\n\nThe prospect of spending two weeks in isolation, they say, is simply deterring people from travelling. Ryanair plans to operate at 40% of its normal capacity this winter, while Easyjet will have just 25% capacity.\n\nMr Doyle suggested that even a reduction in the quarantine period to seven days would not be enough to change matters.\n\nBut Mr Shapps made it clear the government will press on with its own plans.\n\nSpeaking at the same conference, British Airways' new boss Sean Doyle emphasised his objections to the current system.\n\n\"We need to get the economy moving again and this just isn't possible when you're asking people to quarantine for 14 days,\" said Mr Doyle, a week after he replaced Alex Cruz as chief executive of the airline.\n\nHowever, he said that even if quarantine was reduced to seven days, demand for travel would remain low, and called for tests before departure.\n\n\"People won't travel here and the UK will get left behind,\" Mr Doyle said.\n\nMr Shapps said the government was in talks with the US about trialling pre-departure tests, but no agreement has been reached yet.\n\nBritish Airways is currently slashing thousands of jobs amid a slump in demand for air travel - a pattern seen at other carriers.\n\nSome warn there could be hundreds of thousands more cuts unless the sector gets additional government support.\n\nThe International Air Transport Association has downgraded its 2020 traffic forecasts, after \"a dismal end to the summer travel season\".\n\nThe association, which represents 290 airlines, estimates that it will be at least 2024 before air traffic reaches pre-pandemic levels.", "John Leslie said he could not remember being at the party in 2008\n\nFormer TV presenter John Leslie has been found not guilty of sexual assault.\n\nThe 55-year-old was on trial at Southwark Crown Court accused of grabbing a woman's breasts at a Christmas party in 2008.\n\nThe woman made a complaint to the police in 2017.\n\nMr Leslie began his TV career in 1989 on the BBC's Blue Peter show. He went on to host Wheel of Fortune and This Morning.\n\nThe jury returned a not guilty verdict after 23 minutes of deliberations, following the week-long trial.\n\nHis former co-presenters Anthea Turner and Fern Britton were his character witnesses in the trial.\n\nMr Leslie told the jury he could not remember being at the party, and described the single allegation of sexual assault from 5 December 2008 as \"crazy\" and \"ludicrous\".\n\nGiving evidence, he said: \"I would not have touched her like some mannequin and walked off.\"\n\nHe told the jury he had previously been made out to be an \"aggressive, sexual monster\" by the tabloid press.\n\nThe jury returned a not guilty verdict on Monday after 23 minutes of deliberations\n\nMr Leslie said his life changed in 2002 when he was wrongly identified on live television as the unnamed alleged rapist in his former girlfriend Ulrika Jonsson's autobiography.\n\nPresenter Matthew Wright later apologised, saying he named him in error, the court was told.\n\nMs Jonsson has never made any complaint to police, the jury heard.\n\nThe jury took just 23-minutes to reach their verdict.\n\nAs the court reassembled John Leslie was asked to stand to hear the foreman say they'd found him not guilty of one count of sexual assault.\n\nOn hearing those words the former Blue Peter presenter began to sob in the dock.\n\nHis father, Les Stott, who's attended court every day with his son, punched the air before he too broke down in tears.\n\nThe two of them hugged and cried before they left.\n\nMr Leslie, from Edinburgh, said there had never been any sexual assault allegations against him before his name was wrongly linked to the book, and described the fallout as \"Armageddon\".\n\nHe said the tabloids \"decided I was their man\", and there had been \"adverts for women to come forward with allegations\".\n\nMr Leslie, whose full name is John Leslie Stott, told the jury he had become reclusive, paranoid, depressed and suicidal amid the allegations, saying: \"I lost everything.\"\n\nIn 2003, two charges of indecent assault against him made by one woman were dropped, and not guilty verdicts were recorded at Southwark Crown Court.\n\nAfter Monday's verdict, Judge Deborah Taylor said: \"Mr Stott, you for the second time leave this court without a stain on your character and I hope it will be the last time you have to attend.\"\n\nFor more London news follow on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Vessels carrying migrants were intercepted by Border Force and brought to Dover\n\nUp to 170 migrants in 12 boats have crossed the English Channel after days of choppy sea conditions improved.\n\nA further 222 people were stopped from making the \"perilous\" journey by French authorities, the Home Office said.\n\nThe authorities later confirmed the body of a man in a lifejacket, found on a beach near Calais at 08:00 BST, was that of a migrant.\n\nSix migrants on two kayaks tied together were also rescued by the French navy off the coast of Calais.\n\nThe man, who was found dead on the beach at Sangatte, had almost certainly been trying to cross the Channel, said Pascal Marconville, the prosecutor of nearby town Boulogne-sur-Mer.\n\nThe number of people reaching the UK by boat had fallen in October amid harsher conditions in the Channel.\n\nMr Marconville said initial examinations of the man's body indicated there was no third party involvement in his death.\n\nSix migrants were rescued from a makeshift raft in French waters\n\nThere was also no suggestion he had been in the water for any length of time - washing up just a few hours after attempting to make the crossing.\n\nOfficers investigating his death would work with the migrant communities based in Calais and Dunkirk to try to establish his identity and the circumstances around his death, he added.\n\nAbout 260 people have successfully made the crossing this month, compared to a record 1,951 in September.\n\nHome Office minister Chris Philp said the government was \"taking action at every step of these illegally-facilitated journeys to make this route unviable\".\n\nThe National Crime Agency this week arrested 12 people alleged to be responsible for smuggling migrants into the UK, he said.\n\nA 30-year-old man was arrested in Hastings on Friday on suspicion of sourcing boats in the UK and transporting them to France, where they were allegedly used to cross the Channel.\n\nA demonstration was held in support of asylum-seekers outside a barracks in Folkestone\n\nMeanwhile, about 250 people gathered in Folkestone, Kent, to show support for asylum-seekers being housed inside a former army barracks.\n\nIt followed claims that far-right activists were using the arrival of asylum-seekers at the Napier barracks to \"fuel hate\".\n\n\"There's a narrative that has been put forward by a group of people saying that these fellow human beings aren't wanted in Folkestone and we know that isn't the case,\" said Bridget Chapman, of charity Kent Refugee Action Network.\n\nAnd Clare Moseley, co-founder of refugee charity Care4Calais, said they were only risking crossing the Channel \"because they are frightened, fleeing appalling horrors in some of the most dangerous places on earth\".\n\n\"They [also] do it because of the grim and unsanitary conditions in Calais, where they are constantly harassed and abused by the authorities,\" she continued.\n\n\"They do it because there is no safe and legal way to have their UK asylum claim heard.\"\n\nKent Police thanked \"the vast majority of the attendees\" at the Folkestone protest at what it described as a \"peaceful event\".\n\nOne man was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage following a confrontation with a small counter demonstration.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The team have been monitoring road crossings, roadkill and use of tunnels\n\nUp to 335,000 hedgehogs are dying each year on UK roads, a study suggests.\n\nThe figure represents a three-fold mortality rate on 2016 data, described as \"alarming\" by a team at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) researchers.\n\nA study in 2016 put the UK road death figure at 100,000 but experts suggested that was a \"mid-line estimate\".\n\nResearchers said measures such as tunnels and speed bumps \"could\" protect the animals but ultimately relied on drivers' behaviour to change.\n\nPhD student Lauren Moore led the review, which has been jointly funded by wildlife charity People's Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) and NTU.\n\nNew research suggests as many as 335,000 hedgehogs are killed on UK roads each year\n\nRecent estimates put the hedgehog population in England, Wales and Scotland at about one million, compared with 30 million in the 1950s.\n\n\"Hedgehog roadkill is sadly a very familiar sight both in the UK and in Europe,\" Ms Moore said.\n\nThe research considered a number of measures to protect the creatures, including speed bumps, road signs and tunnels, but concluded none would be effective without help from drivers.\n\n\"Although we know some hedgehogs use road-crossing structures, we don't yet know how effective these solutions are,\" Ms Moore continued.\n\n\"Changing drivers' behaviour has been shown to be difficult to achieve and sustain, reducing the potential for meaningful reductions in roadkill.\"\n\nNew signs featuring a picture of a hedgehog started to appear in 2019\n\nShe thought the solution may lie in a combination of measures constructed \"in carefully chosen locations\" close to hedgehog hotspots.\n\nNida Al-Fulaij, grants manager at PTES, said: \"With thousands of hedgehogs killed on UK roads every year, the continuous development of road networks, without any mitigation, puts this already endangered species at even further risk.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.", "A Chinese animal park has promised to improve safety after one of its workers was fatally attacked by bears in front of a tourist bus.\n\nThe accident at the Shanghai Wildlife Park took place on Saturday in the zoo's \"wild beast area\".\n\nVideo reportedly of the incident, which was shared on social media, shows a group of tourists yelling as they watch the bears from inside a bus.\n\nThe park has expressed its condolences to the worker's family.\n\nIn a statement on its website, the Shanghai Wildlife Park said it was \"extremely distressed that such a tragedy occurred\", adding that it also \"apologised to tourists for any inconvenience caused\".\n\nThe park says it is currently looking into the incident, would improve its safety management and \"do our best to handle the aftermath of the incident\".\n\nIt has since temporarily closed the wild beast area, refunded tickets for visitors and \"strengthened its safety operations\".\n\nThe video, circulating on China's Weibo, shows tourists yelling as they sit inside a bus, while several bears can be seen gathered outside, crowded in one spot.\n\nThe area is only accessible to visitors by bus, with footage on social media site Weibo showing how animals are allowed to roam freely.\n\nIn the video, a man can be heard exclaiming \"there's someone [there]\", while someone else is heard asking \"what's going on?\".\n\nThe video quickly went viral and stirred debate about the existence of zoos.\n\nSome argued that the bears were only acting as any wild animal would, proposing the only solution to eradicate such accidents was to \"just close zoos... let animals be free\".\n\nOthers condemned the zoo's lack of safety measures, and expressed sympathy for the tourists that witnessed the accident, saying they would be \"deeply traumatised\".\n\nIt is rare for zoo workers in China to be mauled to death by animals, but attacks are not entirely uncommon - although in most of these cases, these accidents are allegedly brought on by the visitors themselves.\n\nIn 2017, a man was bitten by a bear in a drive-through wildlife park in China after he ignored park warnings and rolled down his window to feed the bear.", "Kath Sharpe says the division is \"crackers\"\n\nPeople across the country have opposing views about the government's new coronavirus tier system.\n\nBut in the case of Langwith, on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border, the division is somewhat more literal.\n\nThe county boundary runs down the middle of Portland Road, meaning houses on one side have \"tier one\" restrictions, while the other side is \"tier two\".\n\nIt's caused some amusement among residents, but also much frustration due to the difficulty of living in a community with two sets of rules.\n\nThe division between the two tiers runs right down the middle of Portland Road\n\nPeople on the Derbyshire side of the street, currently in tier one, can meet socially in groups of six indoors, while those on the other side are subject to more stringent restrictions - due to the fact Nottinghamshire became tier two this week.\n\nKath Sharpe, a 72-year-old parish councillor who lives in the village, said people had been joking about building a wall down the middle of the road.\n\n\"It's crackers,\" she said. \"As far as I'm aware, we've not had any cases of Covid in the village.\n\n\"People here have been very good at following the rules but I don't think they're going to stick to this - plus, who's going to come and enforce it?\n\n\"It should have been looked at as a whole community, not some of it lumped in with what's happening miles away.\"\n\nDave Mather says tier one ends at his garden wall\n\nDave Mather, 69, a retired miner who lives on the Derbyshire side of Portland Road, said: \"It's absolutely crazy - Derbyshire and tier one ends at my garden wall.\n\n\"They should have realised you can't divide a village up.\"\n\nDawn Wakeling doubts people in the village will follow the different restrictions\n\nDawn Wakeling, 49, lives on the tier one side of the road but her mother, whom she helps look after, lives across the street.\n\nShe said they will remain unaffected, as they are in a bubble, but added: \"People aren't going to follow it.\n\n\"I wouldn't be going to Nottingham but I won't be avoiding parts of the village. It has to be done on a village-by-village basis.\"\n\nBeverley Booker, 54, lives on the tier two side.\n\n\"When the border is just a walk to the other side of the street, it's a bit daft, isn't it?\" she said.\n\nKath McCormack, 66, who lives on the Nottinghamshire side, said: \"I know we're technically in Nottinghamshire, but Derbyshire is just a road away.\n\n\"It doesn't make sense to split a village in two.\"\n\nIt's not just people on the street that are feeling divided - the split has affected the whole village.\n\nJanice Mitchell, 64, said she will not be able to see her seven-year-old granddaughter because she lives in tier two.\n\n\"It's difficult to understand,\" she said. \"I know they have to have borders but why not go to the end of the road, rather than cut through the middle?\n\n\"I'll follow the rules but now I can't have my granddaughter to stay.\"\n\nThe village's pubs also fall into different tiers.\n\nBev Plumb, landlady of the Jug and Glass Inn, which is in tier two, said she had already had customers contacting her to cancel bookings.\n\nShe said the fact people can meet in pubs just a short walk down the road is an issue, and questioned how she would be able to enforce the ban on households mixing.\n\n\"People are trying to do the right thing, trying not to break the law, but it does affect our business,\" she said.\n\n\"There shouldn't be a blanket approach for the whole of Nottinghamshire.\"\n\nThe village pub that falls into tier two has had cancellations\n\nDerbyshire Labour councillor Joan Dixon drew attention to the anomaly on social media.\n\nShe said: \"There is some local amusement but there is also the sense that the rules are becoming very complicated and people are weary now.\n\n\"There are a lot of close-knit families in that community who will be affected.\"\n\nBoth Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire county councils urged residents to stick to the restrictions.\n\nA Nottinghamshire spokesperson said: \"If they are in Nottinghamshire, it will be a legal requirement not to mix with other people indoors unless they live with them, have a support bubble with them or fall under one of the other exceptions.\"\n\nA Derbyshire spokesperson said: \"These are government restrictions and we would urge people to follow all the latest guidelines.\"\n\nIt added it was the government that decided which tier areas were placed in.\n\nA Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said decisions were made in \"close consultation\" with local leaders.\n\n\"We... constantly review the evidence and will take swift action where necessary,\" she said.\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, or on Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "There will be a pause on giving the flu vaccine to people under 65 in Northern Ireland until more stock is received, the Public Health Agency has said.\n\nIt said that following \"phenomenal\" demand, Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK was \"now reaching full uptake of the allocated stock\".\n\nThe agency added that there was a \"worldwide issue\" with supply.\n\nIt advised patients that it will take \"a number of weeks\" for more vaccine doses to be delivered and distributed.\n\nDr Gerry Waldron from the Public Health Agency (PHA) acknowledged the temporary restriction on supply \"will cause some concern\" for patients who are awaiting vaccination.\n\nHowever he added he \"would like to provide reassurance that people will still get the vaccine well in time before we anticipate that flu will be circulating widely in the community\".\n\nVulnerable patients had been advised that getting vaccinated against seasonal flu was more important than ever this year, to avoid putting more pressure on health services during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nDr Waldron said more than 500,000 doses of flu vaccine have already been distributed in Northern Ireland which he described as \"an unprecedented number at this stage of a seasonal flu vaccination programme\".\n\n\"Indeed, we have distributed more vaccines in the past few weeks than the entirety of previous flu seasons,\" he added.\n\n\"It is great to see people getting the vaccine in such high numbers, but it does create the unusual situation of pausing some aspects until further supplies become available,\" Dr Waldron explained.\n\n\"As this is a worldwide issue, it will take a number of weeks for the vaccine to be delivered and distributed, with a plan to reopen ordering in mid-November,\" he said.\n\nA PHA spokeswoman also confirmed that the flu vaccination programme in schools is separate from the adult programme and it is not affected by the supply issue.\n\nUntil more adult vaccine stocks are received, GP surgeries and health trusts are being advised to use their existing supplies and to notify the PHA of unused vaccine so it can be redistributed to other practices that may need it.\n\nThe PHA has also asked for frontline health workers to be given priority for vaccination across the health and social care sector.", "Last updated on .From the section Darts\n\nFallon Sherrock, who made history by beating two men at the PDC World Darts Championship, has narrowly failed to qualify for the 2021 tournament.\n\nShe lost out despite winning the last of four women's events which offered two spots for the championship, which starts at Alexandra Palace in December.\n\nDeta Hedman edged through on a total of 85 legs to 83 for the second place, after Lisa Ashton had sealed her spot.\n\nShe played in the 2019 World Championship while Hedman will make her debut.\n• None Insight: Hedman's life on and off the oche\n\nSherrock earned the nickname 'Queen of the Palace' after becoming the first woman to win a match en route to the third round of the 2020 tournament.\n\nBut the 26-year-old from Milton Keynes finished just outside the top two in the PDC Women's Series Order of Merit despite reaching two finals, a semi-final and a quarter-final over four events in Barnsley.", "Rallies are held across France in support of Samuel Paty, the teacher beheaded after showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a lesson.\n\nBanners reading \"Je suis enseignant\" (I am a teacher) and \"Je suis Samuel\" (I am Samuel) were on display in solidarity.", "Instagram is being investigated by Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) over its handling of children's personal data on the platform.\n\nThe social media app's owner Facebook could face a large fine if Instagram is found to have broken privacy laws.\n\nIt comes amid reports Instagram failed to protect data, including allowing email addresses and phone numbers of those under 18 to be made public.\n\nFacebook said it rejected the claims but was cooperating with the DPC.\n\nA number of US tech giants have their European headquarters in Ireland, and the DPC is the lead European Union regulator under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in 2018.\n\nThe DPC is responsible for protecting individuals' right to online privacy, and has the power to issue large fines.\n\nThe Irish regulator is investigating whether Facebook has a legal basis for processing children's personal data and if it employs adequate protections and restrictions on Instagram for children.\n\nSeparately, it is also looking at whether Facebook has adhered with GDPR requirements in relation to Instagram's profile and account settings. It is inquiring into whether Facebook is adequately protecting the data protection rights of children as vulnerable people.\n\nThe minimum age for having an Instagram account is 13.\n\n\"Instagram is a social media platform which is used widely by children in Ireland and across Europe,\" said Graham Doyle, a deputy commissioner with DPC.\n\n\"The DPC has been actively monitoring complaints received from individuals in this area and has identified potential concerns in relation to the processing of children's personal data on Instagram which require further examination.\"\n\nAccording to reports, the investigation stems from a complaint from David Stier, a US-based data scientist who last year analysed profiles of almost 200,000 Instagram users across the world.\n\nHe estimated that for over a year, at least 60 million users under the age of 18 were given the option to easily change their profiles into business accounts.\n\nInstagram business accounts require users to display their phone numbers and email addresses publicly, meaning that personal data belonging to many users is visible to other Instagram users.\n\nData scientist David Stier is concerned that complete strangers can contact children using their emails and mobile numbers on Instagram\n\nThe same personal information was also contained in the HTML source code of web pages accessed when using Instagram on a computer, meaning that it could be \"scraped\" by hackers.\n\nMr Stier reported his findings to Facebook, but he wrote in a Medium blog that Instagram had refused to mask the email addresses and phone numbers for business accounts.\n\nHowever, Facebook did decide to remove the contact information from the source code of Instagram pages.\n\nHowever, on Monday a Facebook spokeswoman told the BBC that Mr Stier's claims were based on a misunderstanding of its systems.\n\n\"We've always been clear that when people choose to set up a business account on Instagram, the contact information they shared would be publicly displayed. That's very different to exposing people's information.\n\n\"We've also made several updates to business accounts since the time of Mr Stier's mischaracterisation in 2019, and people can now opt out of including their contact information entirely.\"\n\nMr Stier has also alleged that hackers might have succeeded in stealing personal information from Instagram's website, after it was revealed in May 2019 that contact details relating to 49 million users were stored online in an unguarded database owned by a firm in India.\n\n\"Do we have a responsibility to keep kids' phone numbers and emails hidden so that strangers can't find them just by clicking a button?\" wrote Mr Stier.\n\n\"Speaking as a parent, I want to be assured that the experience Instagram offers to teens is as 'adult-overseen' as possible.\"", "The name change comes after years of debate in the Quebec town\n\nThe small Canadian town of Asbestos that decided it needed a rebrand has done away with the name derived from its mining heritage.\n\nThe Quebec town, home to some 7,000 people, voted for \"Val-des-Sources\" as its new moniker.\n\nThe town was once the location of the world's largest asbestos mine.\n\nIt was given the English name for the mineral - rather than the French amiante - in the late 19th Century.\n\nBut the town's council said the connotation hindered its ability to attract foreign investment, and announced last November that the hunt was on for a new name.\n\nThe town, about 150 km (95 miles) east of Montreal, finally announced the winning title with some fanfare on Monday evening.\n\nIt was picked after a lengthy consultation and a vote by town residents, including those as young as 14.\n\nAbout half the town residents eligible to cast ballots did so. Val-des-Sources won with just over 51% of the vote in the third round of voting.\n\nThe name is \"above all, inspiring for the future\", Mayor Hugues Grimard said.\n\nOther possibilities on the shortlist were L'Azur-des-Cantons, Jeffrey-sur-le-Lac, Larochelle, Phénix and Trois-Lacs, which came in second place.\n\nAsbestos won't be changing its town signs immediately, said Mr Grimard, who suggested it could be the end of the year before the formal, legal switch.\n\n\"It'll be a nice Christmas present,\" he said.\n\nThe town of Asbestos thrived for over a century on the chrysotile asbestos manufactured at its open-pit mine. The mine suspended operations in 2011.\n\nOnce considered a miracle mineral, asbestos was used in construction industries for strengthening cement, in insulation, roofing, fireproofing and sound absorption.\n\nBut by the mid-20th Century, concerns about its use were growing as more and more studies linked asbestos to deadly illnesses.\n\nBreathing in asbestos fibres has been linked to cancer and other diseases.\n\nGlobal demand plummeted as countries around the world began banning asbestos. Canada was a latecomer, only banning its manufacture, import, use and export in 2018.\n• None Quebec town of Asbestos seeks new name", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly returned as hosts of Strictly this year, but stayed 2m apart\n\nThe launch episode of this year's Strictly Come Dancing was watched by an average of 8.6 million viewers, according to overnight ratings.\n\nThat's an increase on last year's opening show audience, which attracted 7.8 million.\n\nSaturday night's episode achieved a 42.2% audience share and had a peak of nine million viewers, a spokesman for the programme said.\n\nThere were several big changes to the format due to coronavirus restrictions.\n\nEach couple has formed a bubble to limit contact with other people, and in the studio celebrities and their partners performed in front of a socially distanced audience.\n\nThe judges sat at their own mini-podiums although Bruno Tonioli was missing as he is also a judge on US show Dancing with the Stars.\n\nHe usually flies back and forth to appear on both shows but that isn't possible this year due to self-isolation rules when travelling between the US and the UK.\n\nBruno will, however, appear remotely on the Sunday results show and will appear in the studio later in the series once Dancing in the Stars has wrapped up.\n\nThere will be no Halloween or Blackpool specials either.\n\nBut what did the critics make of the new-look format? Has the magic gone or is this just the glut of glitter we need to see us through a tough winter?\n\nThe Telegraph's Ed Power was pleased to have the show back, giving it four stars out of five and declaring that, \"Strictly, for all its concessions to Covid, felt reassuringly unchanged\".\n\nHe added: \"With the New Normal becoming increasingly abnormal, this was comfort TV of the first rank.\"\n\n\"While Coronavirus has obviously brought complications to Strictly 2020 it hasn't, on the evidence of a reliably glittery launch episode, sapped the heel-clicking juggernaut of any of its strut.\"\n\nJan Moir, writing in the Daily Mail, was also pleased to have Strictly back.\n\n\"Strictly Come Dancing returned on Saturday night, providing a joyous burst of fun for viewers starved of sparkle and gagging for glitter,\" she wrote.\n\nBut she wasn't impressed with the show's regular references to how they've adapted to the Covid-19 guidelines.\n\n\"Claudia and Tess spend far too much time patiently explaining the show's Covid rules - we get it! - although the admirable ingenuity, planning skills and can-do determination to make the show happen are nothing short of miraculous.\"\n\nMoir was confident the show could still thrive without Bruno's enthusiastic presence.\n\n\"Bruno Tonioli is absent this year, but I fear he won't be missed much in the shortened format; no Blackpool, no Clauditorium, fewer episodes,\" she wrote.\n\nOlympic boxing champion Nicola Adams made history by becoming the first celebrity to dance in a same sex pair, partnering up with Katya Jones.\n\nMoir wrote: \"Strictly's first same-sex partnership has garnered much attention, but what is the fuss about?\"\n\nThe Independent's Emma Bullimore gave the show a maximum five stars, noting: \"Another fab-u-lous surprise awaits this year, as the pairings take place out and about across the country, captured in pre-recorded films.\n\n\"It's much more natural, less prolonged, and quite frankly a relief for everyone involved.\"\n\nShe added: \"It's not a perfect show. Anton du Beke insists on singing (to the delight of nobody). And every member of the (much smaller) audience is wearing a mandatory plain black face mask, which feels stingy - could the budget not have stretched to a few sequins for the fans?\n\n\"But coming in from a grey day to glitterballs, glamour and smiles is a long-awaited injection of pure joy.\"\n\nThe Guardian's Heidi Stephens wrote a live blog on Saturday night, declaring it was \"so good to be back\".\n\nShe found the studio a little quiet though.\n\n\"Ah, we're in the studio and it's gone disco. It seems strange without an audience, but on the upside, no out-of-time clapping.\n\n\"Usually I'd bitch about how this show takes 90 minutes to do a pairing job that should take about ten, but I'm so Strictly-starved I'm prepared to go with it. Embrace the endless filler, everyone.\"\n\nViewers, including artist Grayson Perry, were also pleased to have Strictly to look forward to.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Grayson Perry This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nBut Pointless presenter Richard Osman was also a little frustrated by the frequent Covid-19 references.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Richard Osman This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 3 by Rainy This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 4 by Kristina Rihanoff This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nITV Love Your Garden presenter Katie Rushworth summed the mood up.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 5 by Katie Rushworth This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe first live show airs this Saturday, 24 October.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Last updated on .From the section Liverpool\n\nLiverpool centre-back Virgil van Dijk wants to return stronger after learning he needs surgery on the knee injury he sustained in the 2-2 draw at Everton.\n\nThe 29-year-old Netherlands defender was unable to continue following a rash challenge by Toffees keeper Jordan Pickford in the first half on Saturday.\n\nIt is unclear how long the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury will keep him out for.\n\n\"I'm ready for the challenge ahead,\" he said in a post on social media.\n\nThe former Celtic and Southampton centre-back went for a scan before a specialist confirmed the extent of the damage.\n\n\"I'm now fully focused on my recovery and will do everything I can to be back as soon as possible,\" said the Dutchman.\n\n\"Despite the obvious disappointment, I'm a firm believer that within difficulty lies opportunity, and with God's help I'm going to make sure I return better, fitter and stronger than ever before.\n\n\"In football, as in life, I think everything happens for a reason and it's important to try and keep level-headed whether going through the highs and lows.\"\n• None How much will Liverpool miss Van Dijk? The stats that show his value\n\nReturning to action after ACL surgery can take many months and Liverpool are refusing to specify how long the Dutchman will be out for until after his operation.\n\nSurgery will not be immediate and the operation has yet to be arranged.\n\nClub sources are reluctant to rule out a return to action this season, as much will depend on his rehabilitation.\n\nVan Dijk has been a key figure for Liverpool since signing for them in January 2018 for £75m.\n\nHe played every league game for the club in the past two seasons as Liverpool finished second in 2018-19 before winning their first top-flight title in 30 years in 2019-20.\n\nThe Dutchman was also a leading figure for the side as they won the Champions League in 2019 and the Club World Cup later that year.\n\nHe had played seven times for the Reds this season prior to the Merseyside derby.\n\nThe injury will have \"massive implications\" for Liverpool's season, according to BBC pundit Chris Sutton, who won the Premier League as a striker for Blackburn in 1994.\n\n\"He is their rock at the back, their organiser. Simply put, he is irreplaceable. They are going to have to somehow fill that void. He is such a big player for them,\" he said.\n\nVan Dijk's absence will leave manager Jurgen Klopp with Joe Gomez and Joel Matip as his main centre-backs as well as the inexperienced Nathaniel Phillips, Rhys Williams and Sepp van den Berg.\n\nGomez and Matip have never started a match together as centre-backs for Liverpool. Before Saturday's Merseyside derby, the last time they both played in that position for any part of a game was the last hour of the 4-1 defeat by Tottenham in October 2017 at Wembley\n\nMidfielder Fabinho deputised at centre-back in the win at Chelsea earlier this season.\n\n\"We won't know until the end of the season how much impact it will have on the Liverpool squad. There will be a sense of togetherness. It will definitely hinder their defence of the title,\" said former Liverpool defender Stephen Warnock on BBC Radio 5 live.\n\n\"It's that old cliche: 'Let's win it for Virgil and make sure we have something to celebrate at the end of the season.'\n\n\"But when you are in the changing room, you look across and you haven't got Virgil van Dijk - this big colossus of a player. Defensively when things are going well and you turn back and see Van Dijk, it's okay. Now you turn back and he's not there.\n\n\"It's not being disrespectful to the players that are in there but he is their number one centre-back - someone who has performed to such a high level since he has come into the football club.\"\n\nIn addition to Liverpool, the Netherlands will be keeping their fingers crossed he will be fit to take part in the postponed Euro 2020, which is now set to take place from 11 June to 11 July 2021.\n\nThis is truly terrible news for Liverpool.\n\nThe Premier League champions may not be putting a timescale on Virgil van Dijk's likely absence but in the short term, they don't really have to.\n\nFew players have returned from cruciate ligament surgery within six months - and depending on the exact extent of the damage, it could be longer.\n\nEven a six-month absence would keep Van Dijk out until the back end of April. Effectively, it means Jurgen Klopp will have to do without his defensive talisman and 2019 PFA Player of the Year for the rest of the season.\n\nIt will stretch Liverpool's defensive resources - and Matip and Gomez have a big job ahead of them in a season in which the physical demands will be like no other given the reduced amount of time the campaign is being played over.\n\nThe news will frustrate Liverpool even further because Everton keeper Pickford escaped punishment for the terrible tackle that inflicted the damage.\n• None Is it time for a national 'circuit-breaker'?\n• None What impact has Covid-19 had on the climate?", "The most senior police officer on duty before the Manchester Arena attack had taken an \"unacceptable\" two-hour break before the bombing, the inquiry heard.\n\nPC Jessica Bullough admitted she then missed bomber Salman Abedi walking from the train station into the arena.\n\nThe British Transport Police (BTP) officer had been qualified for only eight months, and was still in her probationary period.\n\nThe suicide bombing killed 22 people and injured many more on 22 May 2017.\n\nThe public inquiry into the attack heard there were no police officers on patrol when 22-year-old Abedi made his journey from Victoria Station to the arena foyer.\n\nThe hearing was told PC Bullough took a break of two hours and nine minutes, during which time Abedi walked from the tram stop into the City Room.\n\nPC Bullough admitted her break should have been between 50 minutes and one hour.\n\nThe inquiry heard if she had come back 10 minutes earlier she would have seen Abedi carrying a large rucksack that contained explosives.\n\nShe said looking back, it was \"unacceptable\" to have taken a break of that length, and said she probably would not have done that had a supervisor been present.\n\nTop row (left to right): Alison Howe, Martyn Hett, Lisa Lees, Courtney Boyle, Eilidh MacLeod, Elaine McIver, Georgina Callander, Jane Tweddle - Middle row (left to right): John Atkinson, Kelly Brewster, Liam Curry, Chloe Rutherford, Marcin Klis, Angelika Klis, Megan Hurley, Michelle Kiss - Bottom row (left to right): Nell Jones, Olivia Campbell-Hardy, Philip Tron, Saffie-Rose Roussos, Sorrell Leczkowski, Wendy Fawell\n\nPC Bullough was the first on the scene in the foyer after the suicide attack at the end of the Ariana Grande concert.\n\nShe said: \"I think the training I had wasn't sufficient to deal with what I was witnessing.\"\n\nJohn Cooper QC, representing some of the bereaved families, said: \"Effectively did you feel left in the lurch?\"\n\nBTP PCSO Lewis Brown said he and a colleague took a break before other officers had returned from theirs, meaning there was no-one on patrol between just before 21:00 and 21:35 BST, when Abedi made his trip from the station into the foyer.\n\nMeanwhile, a father picking up his children on the night of the Manchester Arena attack told the inquiry he thought \"straight away\" that Abedi was a suicide bomber.\n\nNeal Hatfield said when he saw Abedi in the foyer of the arena his rucksack did not look normal as it did not flex under his weight.\n\n\"It was rock solid, that's what alarmed me straight away,\" Mr Hatfield said.\n\nMr Hatfield was about to go up the stairs to the mezzanine area of the arena's City Room when he saw Abedi with his back to him \"in the process of lying down, he had a backpack on the floor next to him\".\n\n\"I thought suicide bomber straight away, very little doubt in my mind. Honestly, my heart was racing,\" he said.\n\n\"The way he was dressed, the way he was acting, the body language was that he was trying to protect the bag. He was pretending to be casual, but I could see what he was doing.\"\n\nThe inquiry has heard Salman Abedi made three scouting trips round the Arena and Victoria Station\n\nMr Hatfield said he made eye contact with Abedi, who looked \"emotionally distressed\".\n\n\"He seemed frightened, his eyes were glazed over and he seemed nervous, agitated, he didn't seem right,\" he added.\n\nMr Hatfield told the inquiry he saw two members of the security team nearby and believed they were having a conversation about Abedi, and gesturing towards him.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Prosecutors in rape cases in England and Wales need to be aware of changing sexual behaviour in the digital age, when deciding if a case should go to court, new guidance says.\n\nNaked selfies, dating apps and casual sex are covered in a wide-ranging Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) review.\n\nThe CPS says prosecutors must understand that many teenagers believe sexting is part of \"everyday life\".\n\nIt follows criticism over record-low rape convictions in England and Wales.\n\nThere has also been a big drop in cases being taken to court.\n\nThe CPS says it has worked with victim support groups to produce this new guidance aimed at challenging long-held rape myths and stereotypes.\n\nIt found such stereotypes are common, such as believing that wearing a short skirt is proof of implied consent to sex.\n\nHowever prosecutors also need to understand that technology has changed the way people communicate and behave.\n\nSiobhan Blake, CPS rape lead, said: \"It's vital that our prosecutors understand the wider social context of these changes. For example, many teenagers believe that sending explicit photos or videos is part of everyday life.\n\n\"Our prosecutors must understand this and challenge any implication that sexual images or messages equate to consent in cases of rape or serious sexual violence.\"\n\nChanges have also been made to guidance in cases involving same sex violence and when there are victim vulnerabilities, with a focus on psychological and mental health issues.\n\nThe latest statistics for rape convictions in England and Wales are due out on Thursday. The last quarterly figures in July showed convictions at an all-time low.\n\nIn 2019-20, 1,439 suspects in cases where a rape had been alleged were convicted of rape or another crime - in 2016-17 there were 2,991 convictions. The number of prosecutions also fell from 5,190 in 2016-17 to 2,102 in 2019-20.\n\nAt the same time the CPS launched \"a five-year blueprint\" to reduce the gap between reported cases of sexual violence and those which come to court.\n\nOver the past five years, cases reported to police and initially recorded as rape have risen sharply to 59,747, but the number making it to court in that time has more than halved.\n\nIn 2017 Rebecca began a relationship with a man who lied to her that he was a police officer. In reality he was a convicted criminal with a history of violence.\n\nShe discovered this after he threatened her with a knife, punched her, tried to break her hand and raped her.\n\nAfter the attack Rebecca says she had some seemingly normal WhatsApp exchanges with her attacker because she was terrified of him.\n\nShe was told by CPS lawyers that because of this he would not be prosecuted.\n\nRebecca says she was left suicidal by her experience and she's unsure whether she would advise other complainants to come forward.\n\nShe describes the timing of this new guidance - with rape convictions at a record low in England and Wales - as a whitewash.\n\n\"I hope the myth-busting training starts with the CPS lawyers who specialise in rape and serious sexual offences. In my view they are the problem,\" she says. \"I have seen first hand how the CPS strategy is to pull apart a case and play the 'odds' game.\n\n\"Their approach is to second guess what a jury will decide. The lawyers are fixated on conviction rates and funding, not on representing victims.\"\n\nRebecca says that while a focus on digital communication might help younger complainants, it won't be relevant to older victims.\n\n\"Rape doesn't discriminate. It is endemic and it happens to people of all ages. There are swathes of people who do not get involved in sharing naked pictures or sexting.\"\n\nThe End Violence Against Women coalition and their lawyers at the Centre for Women's Justice are currently involved in legal action over rape prosecutions.\n\nIn a case due to be heard early next year, they are mounting a court challenge that will examine rape prosecution policy and practice.\n\nSarah Green, director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, said: \"The new guidance for rape prosecutors is welcome if it enables those who prepare cases for court to predict and reject sexist stereotypes about rape and to really consider the impact of trauma on how rape survivors may present.\n\n\"Rape prosecutions are at an all-time low - with just one in 70 reported cases going to court. We hope therefore that this new guidance will be accompanied by comprehensive new training for all prosecutors and a clear message from CPS leaders that improvement here is expected and is a top priority.\"\n\nFay Maxted, chief executive of the Survivors Trust, said it was important to dispel misconceptions and misunderstandings.\n\n\"Negative stereotypes and myths about rape victims are pervasive in society, creating a toxic environment where victims and survivors fear they will be judged or disbelieved.\"", "Scaffolding has been erected after faulty cavity barriers were found\n\nHundreds of residents at a housing complex in west London are having to move out while fire safety and structural problems are investigated.\n\nPeople living in the Paragon complex in Brentford are being evacuated after faulty cavity barriers, which prevent flames spreading, were found.\n\nEvery occupant of the 1,059 high-rise homes will be moved out this week.\n\nHousing association Notting Hill Genesis (NHG) said it was \"working to uncover the full extent of the issues\".\n\nOne resident told the BBC it was \"sickening\" they had been allowed to move into an \"unsafe building\".\n\nLaura Howes, 19, was placed in the building by the University of West London (UWL), where she is student.\n\nMs Howes said the university owed her \"a massive apology\".\n\n\"We should be getting the rent back for the months we've been staying in an unsound building,\" she said.\n\nUWL said in a statement: \"Alternative accommodation has been secured for all those affected.\n\n\"Extensive support plans are in place to facilitate the smoothest possible transition to the new accommodation.\"\n\nMany residents at Paragon are students at the University of West London\n\nSome residents are currently self-isolating with positive coronavirus cases, one resident told the BBC.\n\nSam Wilkins, 19, said covid-positive residents were about to be taken out of isolation and moved to different flats.\n\n\"It doesn't make much sense to me. It feels like NHG are panicking,\" he said.\n\nNHG said all residents had found alternative accommodation, including in hotels, and it was providing financial support.\n\nSince the Grenfell Tower fire the building has had a \"waking watch\" to ensure residents are alerted in the event of a blaze.\n\nBut technical consultants have advised they could not guarantee the safety of residents and so an evacuation was required.\n\nKate Davies, NHG's group chief executive, said: \"I understand that Paragon residents may feel angry or alarmed by this news, as they have every right to be.\n\n\"This is a very distressing time and we are genuinely sorry for the huge amount of disruption and uncertainty that this situation will cause.\n\n\"This is a complex situation and we don't yet have all the answers. We are working to uncover the full extent of the issues at Paragon so that we can provide residents with clarity about timescales, next steps and options as quickly as possible.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Raelyn Reynolds spent 110 days in hospital after being born at 26 weeks, six weeks after her mother's waters had broken\n\nThe family of a baby who stopped breathing shortly after being born at 26 weeks in a lorry have praised paramedics who helped save her.\n\nGemma Greensmith gave birth to daughter Raelyn outside her Staffordshire home in June.\n\n\"We got into my partner's work lorry to go to hospital but didn't make it off the street,\" she said.\n\nIt quickly became obvious their daughter Raelyn was not breathing and the couple dialled 999.\n\n\"They talked us through how to do CPR on the phone,\" Ms Greensmith said.\n\n\"We both did a bit - I was pumping with my thumb on her chest and my partner was blowing into her mouth.\n\n\"But she was so tiny, you couldn't barely see her mouth.\"\n\nThe 33-year-old from Cheadle said she was absolutely terrified, then \"relieved beyond belief\" when the ambulance arrived.\n\nWest Midlands Ambulance Service paramedics Kirsty Lockett and Jenine Cryle took over CPR, with the baby still attached to her mother.\n\nParamedics Ian Yates, and Kirsty Lockett surprised Gemma Greensmith and partner Mark Reynolds outside the hospital with gifts and balloons\n\nThe actions of the parents and paramedics proved decisive, doctors later revealed.\n\nRaelyn was eventually discharged on 29 September after 110 days at the Royal Stoke University Hospital.\n\n\"While we were in hospital one of the consultants managed to keep in contact with the paramedics and keep them up-to-date with her progress, so it was amazing to see them outside when we were discharged,\" Ms Greensmith said.\n\n\"I will never forget what they did and will always remember them.\"\n\nParamedic Ms Lockett said \"nothing will ever compare to the feeling of meeting Gemma and Raelyn and seeing them happy and healthy\".\n\nHer colleague Ms Cryle described the outcome as \"once in a life-time\" and one of her \"proudest moments\".\n\nGemma Greensmith and partner Mark Reynolds rang the hospital bell when baby Raelyn's treatment ended after 110 days\n\nWest Midlands Ambulance Service is encouraging everyone to learn how to do CPR. For further details visit the WMAS website.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "People aged 70-89 made up most of those dying at home\n\nMore men than normal are dying at home from heart disease in England and Wales, and more women are dying from dementia and Alzheimer's, figures show.\n\nMore than 26,000 extra deaths occurred in private homes this year, an analysis by the Office for National Statistics found.\n\nIn contrast, deaths in hospitals from these causes have been lower than usual.\n\nThe Covid epidemic may have led to fewer people being treated in hospital.\n\nOr it may be that people in older age groups, who make up the majority of these deaths, are choosing to stay at home - but the underlying reasons for the figures are still not clear.\n\nAlzheimer's disease charities called for action over the \"heartbreaking\" side-effects of lockdown and isolation.\n\nBetween March and September 2020, there were 24,387 more deaths in England than expected in private homes, and 1,644 in Wales. The large majority did not involve Covid-19.\n\nOf these, an extra 1,705 men died from heart disease at home in England - 25% more than normal.\n\nIn Wales there was a similar rise in men dying from heart disease at home, of 22.7%.\n\nOver the same period, deaths in hospitals from heart disease went down by about a quarter in England and Wales.\n\nDuring the pandemic, deaths from dementia and Alzheimer's disease at home increased the most among women - with 1,400 more than normal.\n\nWhile deaths from these conditions also rose in care homes, hospital deaths from dementia went down - by 40% in England, and 25% in Wales.\n\nCompared with normal years, there have been more deaths at home from a number of major causes, including cancers and respiratory diseases, during the last six months.\n\nThe ONS figures show that deaths in private homes, hospitals and care homes were well above the five-year average during April and May, at the height of the UK epidemic.\n\nSince then, deaths in care homes and hospitals have dropped to below normal levels and stayed there, but deaths in people's homes have remained higher than usual.\n\nProf Sir David Spiegelhalter, chairman of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, said that equated to an extra 100 people dying at home every day.\n\n\"Usually around 300 people die each day in their homes in England and Wales,\" he commented.\n\n\"The latest ONS analysis confirms that even after the peak of the epidemic this has stayed at around 400 a day and shows no sign of declining. That's one third extra, very few of which are from Covid.\"\n\nHe suggested these deaths would normally have occurred in hospital.\n\n\"People have either been reluctant to go, discouraged from attending, or the services have been disrupted,\" Prof Spiegelhalter added.\n\n\"It is unclear how many of these lives could have been extended had they gone to hospital, for example among the 450 extra deaths from cardiac arrhythmias.\"\n\nAlzheimer's Research UK said the fact more people were dying from dementia in their own homes than ever before was \"truly heartbreaking\".\n\n\"Many people say they would prefer to die at home, but we need to understand whether people with dementia are able to access the medical help they need during the Covid-19 pandemic,\" said director of policy and public affairs, Samantha Benham-Hermetz.\n\n\"It's likely that factors such as social isolation and people's fear of coming forward to access the medial care they need has led to such a huge increase, which is why it's more important than ever that people with dementia are not neglected.\"", "This year's Olympics ended up being postponed because of the pandemic\n\nRussian hackers targeted this year's Olympic Games in Tokyo with the aim of disrupting them, UK officials said.\n\nThe Foreign Office said Russia's GRU military intelligence carried out \"cyber reconnaissance\" against officials and organisations involved.\n\nThe alleged attacks took place before the Games were postponed until 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nOfficials did not, however, specify the nature or extent of the cyber-attacks in detail.\n\nAt the same time, the US Department of Justice announced charges against six Russian GRU officers for alleged cyber-attacks serving \"the strategic benefit of Russia\".\n\nThe group sought to disrupt the 2018 Winter Olympics, the 2017 French presidential election, and Ukraine's power grid, US prosecutors said.\n\n\"No country has weaponised its cyber capabilities as maliciously or irresponsibly as Russia,\" assistant attorney general John Demers told a press conference, calling it \"the most disruptive and destructive series of computer attacks ever attributed to a single group\".\n\nUK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the attacks targeting organisers, sponsors, and logistics providers of the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games were \"cynical and reckless\".\n\n\"We condemn them in the strongest possible terms,\" he said. \"The UK will continue to work with our allies to call out and counter future malicious cyber-attacks.\"\n\nForeign Office officials also revealed details of the attack on the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.\n\nOn that occasion, the operation was a \"false flag\" - one designed to look like it came from North Korea or China, they said.\n\nThe UK and US have been trying to increase the pressure on Russian hackers for a number of years by publicly exposing their activity, and they will be hoping that news of Moscow targeting an event like the Olympics will draw wider support from other countries.\n\nIt is thought that this attempt at disruption, like the 2018 attack on the Winter Olympics, was in response to Russia being excluded from sporting events for doping violations. Two years ago, some attendees were unable to print tickets for the opening ceremony, leaving empty seats, and this is the first time the UK government has formally attributed that attack to Russia.\n\nWestern intelligence officials believe there is some disruption caused by the exposure of Moscow's practices and specific techniques, forcing the hackers to adapt.\n\nBut there is not much sign that the public campaign is forcing a rethink over their willingness to engage in such activity.\n\nThe 2018 Winter Olympics operation is said to have taken aim at the opening ceremony - targeting broadcasters, officials, sponsors, and even a ski resort.\n\nThe UK's National Cyber Security Centre, which helped to analyse the information, said the 2018 attack was \"intended to sabotage the running of the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games\" by disabling its networks.\n\nOne method was to deploy malware that deleted data from the computer systems used that year.\n\nIt was prevented by IT officials cutting off affected computers and replacing them entirely to prevent the malware from spreading, it said.\n\nUK officials have attributed several cyber-attacks against major organisations to GRU units operating under various names such as Sandworm, VoodooBear and Iron Viking.\n\nThe Foreign Office itself was subjected to one such attack in 2018, when GRU-affiliated hackers attempted to access its computer systems using a spearphishing attack.", "Sophie Howe has called for politicians to be \"brave and radical\"\n\nA shorter working week and universal basic income should be piloted by the next Welsh Government, a policy influencer has said.\n\nWales' Future Generations Commissioner Sophie Howe has published a \"manifesto\" ahead of May's Senedd election setting out policies she would like the next administration to adopt.\n\nAn emphasis on green policies is also on her list of suggestions.\n\nShe called on politicians to \"be brave and start making radical changes\".\n\nOn 6 May, voters are due to head to the polls to vote for their representatives in the Welsh Parliament.\n\nThe election will be the first time 16 and 17-year-olds are able to vote in Wales and also the first poll since the Welsh assembly was renamed the Welsh Parliament.\n\nEstablished as part of the Future Generations Act, the commissioner's role is to help public bodies and policy-makers in Wales \"think about the long-term impact their decisions have\", but they cannot block a decision or give plans the go-ahead.\n\nA universal basic income means everyone gets a set monthly income, regardless of means.\n\n\"This is a call to action which is future-focused and which is progressive, and I want to live in a Wales where politicians support that progressive approach,\" Ms Howe said.\n\n\"What this is about is focusing on what are the things that are going to be critical to ensuring the best possible future for our future generations.\n\n\"That has to be a low-carbon future. That has to be a future where we question 'is our economic model right?' The fact that we place value on how many hours you work, how much money you make, rather than 'are you healthy, are you safe, are you well, is your mental health OK?'\"\n\nMs Howe says there has been a \"fundamental shift\" in attitudes due to the pandemic\n\nMs Howe - the first person to do the £95,000-a-year job, which she has held since 2016 - said a \"fundamental shift\" during the coronavirus pandemic had led people to reflect on these issues.\n\nAccording to her manifesto, a \"ministry of possibilities\" would bring together the \"brightest and best... to consider radical changes in government systems, adopt new innovative models and work in ways that take calculated risks\".\n\nShe said her achievements included the Welsh Government's decision to scrap the M4 relief road and a \"transformation\" of planning policy.\n\n\"What my role does is provide the ability to be a figurehead to act as the guardian of future generations and to call out politicians where they are not doing that,\" Ms Howe said.\n\n\"For too long our political systems have focused on short-term decision-making in the interests of their electoral successes at the next ballot box.\n\n\"What I'm saying is they must go beyond that - they must be demonstrating to our young people now and those yet to be born that they are acting in their interests.\"\n• None 'I worry about not being good enough'", "Seventeen areas in Wales currently have local lockdown rules in place\n\n\"Clear guidelines\" are needed if a new national lockdown goes ahead in Wales, a council leader has said.\n\nHugh Evans said it was \"important that we keep the public on board\" with any new plans to tackle a rise in Covid-19 cases.\n\nThe Denbighshire council leader and others held talks with the Welsh Government on Friday \"to consider what is going to happen next week\".\n\nDiscussions on a \"fire-break\" lockdown are continuing over the weekend.\n\nMr Evans told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast he wanted the Welsh Government to \"come up with clear guidelines, and a clear understanding, if this does happen\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BBC's Laura Foster explains what a circuit breaker is and how it could help tackle Covid-19\n\nMr Evans said he was told on Friday that \"no decision has been made yet\".\n\nDenbighshire is one of 17 areas in Wales with local lockdown rules in place to try to reverse an increase in coronavirus cases.\n\nMovement is restricted in and out of these places without a reasonable excuse, such as going to work.\n\nOn Friday, First Minister Mark Drakeford said a \"short, sharp\" circuit-breaker could slow down the virus.\n\nHe said a decision was likely to be made on Monday, while talks continued with health officials, scientific advisors and councils over the weekend.\n\n\"Doing nothing is not an option,\" he said.\n\nPeople from Covid-19 hotspots in England are banned from visiting Wales, under Welsh Government rules\n\nMeanwhile, businesses face an anxious wait to hear if any changes will affect them.\n\nJonathan Greatorex, owner of The Hand hotel at Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog, near Llangollen, Denbighshire, said he had already borrowed money to cover costs, with a wage bill of £5,000 a week.\n\n\"Coming into winter with fuel bills going up, costs going up, it's completely, completely, worrying for everyone,\" he said.\n\nKathryn Jones, sales and marketing director at food wholesaler Castell Howell in Carmarthenshire, said the firm had faced a \"nightmare\" since the first national lockdown in March and feared \"it's just about to get worse\".\n\n\"We have placed orders for produce to come in next week for half term. Are schools involved… are we going to end up throwing produce away?\" she said.\n\nNail and beauty salon owner Kelli Gwiliam, from Pencoed, Bridgend, said she felt \"numb\" due to the possible effects on her business from a second lockdown.\n\n\"If there is no help, I really do think this is the beginning of the end,\" said the mother-of-four.\n\nShe said her 11-year-old son told her \"not to worry about Christmas this year\".\n\n\"That's heart-breaking,\" she said.", "The agriculture minister has also said he has grave reservations about the new restrictions\n\nDUP minister Edwin Poots should apologise for saying coronavirus is more common in nationalist areas, Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd has said.\n\nLast week, Mr Poots said the difference in transmission between nationalist and unionist areas was \"around six to one\".\n\nHe has also criticised new lockdown restrictions imposed by the executive to manage the virus.\n\nMr O'Dowd said his comments about virus levels in different council areas were a \"disgrace\" and should be withdrawn.\n\nThe Department of Health said it was vital to stress that Covid-19 represented \"a threat to everyone in society, regardless of their background, and that it is spreading across the community\" in Northern Ireland.\n\n\"For the record, data on Covid infections is not collected according to religious or political affiliation,\" it added.\n\nA further six Covid-19 related deaths have been reported in Northern Ireland by the Department of Health, bringing its total to 621.\n\nThe department also reported an additional 820 positive cases of the virus, meaning there have been 28,040.\n\nThere were 3,869 individuals tested in the previous 24 hours.\n\nMr O'Dowd's comments came after Mr Poots, the agriculture minister, had spoken to UTV on Friday, openly criticising the imposition of the new regulations, which are in place for the next four weeks.\n\n\"I will abide by the regulations, as have most people in my community,\" said Mr Poots.\n\n\"What I'm saying is, those people who didn't abide by them, including the Sinn Féin leadership - because a lot of this started shortly after the Bobby Storey funeral.\n\n\"A lot of the problems started after that event, and people in that community saw the breaking of the rules.\n\n\"That's why there is a difference between nationalist areas and unionist areas - and the difference is around six to one.\"\n\nThe remarks have drawn criticism from other political parties at Stormont.\n\nOn Sunday, Mr Poots was defended by his party colleague, Education Minister Peter Weir, who said \"people have a right to express their opinions\".\n\nAccording to the latest Department of Health data, there are now 261 hospital inpatients being treated for Covid-19, compared to the peak of the first wave in April, when there were 322 people in hospital.\n\nThere are 29 people in intensive care, with 25 of them ventilated.\n\nThere are also 80 outbreaks of Covid-19 in care homes across Northern Ireland.\n\nThe Derry and Strabane area, which at one point had the worst infection rate in the UK, has seen numbers decrease and is now at 769.9 cases per 100,000 over a seven day period.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Michelle O’Neill This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHealth Minister Robin Swann appealed for members of the public not to become \"distracted\" and to adhere to public health messages on social distancing and reducing contacts.\n\n\"Unfortunately, the predictions that were made about the increase in cases and the consequences this will bring are coming true,\" he said.\n\nDeputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill tweeted: \"It is evident that the covid situation is deteriorating rapidly,\" she said.\n\n\"The next four weeks are critical and we all need to work together to try and gain back some control.\"\n\nSpeaking to BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback programme on Monday, Mr O'Dowd condemned the comments by Edwin Poots.\n\n\"His comments about the breakdown of the council areas and his hint that this is a Catholic problem is an absolute disgrace,\" he said.\n\n\"(They are) comments that he should withdraw - and comments he should apologise for.\"\n\nAlliance MP and the party's deputy leader, Stephen Farry, also called for an apology.\n\n\"People found it deeply offensive - the onus has to be on an apology,\" he told Talkback.\n\n\"The DUP have an absolute lock on decision-making, nothing ever comes to the executive table or leaves it without the DUP's full agreement, so people are scratching their heads as to how last Tuesday the DUP could be saying one thing in the executive and then seeing a key minister peeling off in that way.\"\n\nNelson McCausland said it was important to ask questions about why some communities had higher infection rates than others\n\nHowever, former DUP assembly member Nelson McCausland said Mr Poots' views had been misrepresented.\n\nHe said in Great Britain it was pointed out at an early stage that there was a higher incidence of coronavirus in black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups.\n\n\"No-one's saying that's racist - those are legitimate questions for people to ask and in fact it's important that they are asked,\" he said.\n\nHe said it was important to establish if there was a social reason as to why somewhere like Derry and Strabane had such a high rate of infection.\n\nSinn Féin's Mr O'Dowd also defended actions of his colleague, Communities Minister Carál Ní Chuilín, after she called for all sporting events to be played behind closed doors.\n\nThe regulations do not prohibit spectators attending outdoor sporting events, and First Minister Arlene Foster tweeted that it was \"preposterous\" for sports clubs to be told anything to the contrary.\n\nMr O'Dowd said he believed Ms Ní Chuilín had taken \"responsible action\" by urging sports clubs to hold events without spectators.\n\n\"She wrote directly to sports clubs and she'll be meeting them in the next few days to discuss this further,\" he added.\n\n\"How the joint first ministers choose to respond is up to them - there are protocols and avenues in place for those discussions to take place other than on Twitter.\"", "Bank of England (BoE) boss Andrew Bailey has said the UK faces \"an unprecedented level of economic uncertainty.\"\n\nBritain's economy shrank by 20% in the three months to June as it battled with the coronavirus pandemic, the biggest fall of any large advanced economy.\n\nHis remarks come as tighter coronavirus restrictions are imposed across the UK.\n\nMr Bailey warned that there is significant risk of economic growth continuing to be lower than expected.\n\nThe governor told an online event on Sunday that he expected output at the end of the third quarter to be 10% lower than the end of 2019.\n\n\"Of course, that is heightened now by the return of Covid... the risks remain very heavily skewed towards the downside,\" he said during the video conference for central banks, which was hosted by the Group of Thirty, a panel of economic policymakers and senior bankers.\n\nMr Bailey said that it was best for policymakers to act aggressively, rather than cautiously, in the face of uncertainty,\n\nHe also touched on the ongoing debate over setting negative interest rates, which would bring the cost of borrowing below zero.\n\n\"Our assessment of negative interest rates, from the experience elsewhere, is that they probably appear to work better in a more wholesale financial market context, and probably better in a nascent economic upturn,\" he said.\n\nIf interest rates are negative, the BoE charges for any deposits it holds on behalf of the banks. That encourages banks to lend the money to business rather than deposit it.\n\nBut with interest rates already low, it is not clear how much negative rates would help spur new activity.\n\nDuring the same event on Sunday, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) spoke about growing concerns over sharp increases in debt levels in poorer countries.\n\nIMF's managing director Kristalina Georgieva says suspending debt payments is only a temporary measure\n\nIn April, officials from the \"Group of 20\" (G20) countries with the largest and fastest-growing economies agreed to suspend debt repayments and interest payments for the world's poorest countries until the end of the year.\n\nThe G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative has helped 44 countries defer $5bn (£3.8bn) repayments to spend on tackling the coronavirus crisis instead.\n\nHowever, the IMF's managing director Kristalina Georgieva said that urgent action was still needed in the form of restructuring debts.\n\n\"We are buying some time, but we have to face reality that there are much more decisive actions ahead of us,\" she said. \"Doing too little too late is costly to debtors, costly also to creditors.\"\n\nShe added that global debt levels were predicted to reach 100% of gross domestic product in 2021.\n\nIn early October, the IMF said the global economy is still in deep recession, despite the fact that it has predicted a global economic contraction of 4.4%, which is more moderate than it envisioned in June.\n\nIt warned that most economies will suffer lasting damage, and that extreme poverty is likely to rise for the first time in more than 20 years.", "NHS Blood and Transplant is boosting stocks of blood plasma for very ill coronavirus patients ahead of winter.\n\nIt wants more people who have recovered from Covid-19 to become donors.\n\nTheir plasma contains antibodies that are believed to help other sufferers fight the virus.\n\nFourteen new donation centres will open in November and December, to bring the total in England to 42. The blood plasma will be used to treat patients in Covid trials.\n\nMother-of-seven Ann Kitchen, from London, was the first person in the UK to get the treatment.\n\nShe was being treated for coronavirus in intensive care at St Thomas' Hospital.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Ann \"felt so well\" after being given plasma from patients who had recovered from Covid-19\n\nNHSBT says donations are urgently needed to confirm the benefit for patients, and then make the treatment available for general use in the NHS.\n\nAbout 850 people have received the transfusions so far.\n\nTrial results are expected before the end of the year.\n\nMinister for Innovation Lord Bethell said: \"The use of convalescent plasma has shown promising results in treating coronavirus, and the opening of more donation centres is an important step towards getting this innovative treatment to more patients, if clinical trials demonstrate it should be available on the NHS.\n\n\"More donations are needed and everyone has a part to play in stopping this virus from harming our loved ones. I urge everyone who has had Covid-19 to come forward and donate - your contribution could save lives.\"\n\nDonating takes about 45 minutes and requires the insertion of a needle into the arm.\n\nAfter your appointment, you can get on with your normal day and your body will naturally replace the plasma you have donated.\n• None 'Right thing' to be part of Covid-19 plasma trial\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Health Secretary Sajid Javid says there are \"no guarantees\" when it comes to ruling out new restrictions or another circuit breaker before Christmas.\n\nBut what exactly is a circuit breaker in Covid terms?\n\nThe UK, Northern Ireland, Singapore and Israel have all previously used circuit breakers to try to reduce their coronavirus cases.\n\nBut how do they work? How long is a Covid circuit breaker? How can it help tackle Omicron?\n\nBBC health correspondent Laura Foster explains it all in a minute.", "A decision on further restrictions is due to be announced later\n\nA decision on a \"short, sharp\" national lockdown across Wales is due to be announced later.\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford is set to make an announcement about a two or three-week \"firebreak\" around midday.\n\nThe Welsh Government cabinet is meeting this morning to make a final decision over the circuit-breaker, after considering advice from experts.\n\nBut mounting speculation about a two-week lockdown to slow down the virus has been fuelled by a letter.\n\nWales director of the Confederation of Passenger Transport, John Pockett, wrote to members on Friday, saying a lockdown would start at 18:00 on 23 October and end on 9 November, which would \"take us back to the situation in March\".\n\nHe subsequently told PA Media he was \"surmising\" the outcome.\n\nThe Welsh Government's cabinet met on Sunday afternoon, with further discussions taking place on Monday morning before a final decision is made.\n\nOn Friday Mr Drakeford said a \"firebreak\" lockdown would be a \"short, sharp shock to all our lives\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Mark Drakeford This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n\"We would all have to stay at home to once again save lives. But this time it would be for weeks not months,\" he said.\n\nIt comes as talks continue to discuss if Greater Manchester will move into England's top tier of Covid rules.\n\nLiverpool and Lancashire already have the strictest lockdown restrictions in England where most adult sports facilities including gyms and betting shops have been forced to shut amid other tighter rules on meeting people outside your \"bubble\".\n\nAll schools in Northern Ireland have shut for two weeks from Monday in a bid to curb their rising Covid-19 cases while pubs, restaurants and cafes across NI closed their doors to sit-in customers on Friday.\n\nIn Wales, the extent of the expected national lockdown is currently unclear as talks continue to discuss whether or not schools will close and what financial support the Welsh Government can give to businesses when the furlough scheme comes to an end next week.\n\nIt comes as half-term is due to start on Monday 26 October, but it is not clear if a lockdown will coincide with that.\n\nThe Welsh Government has been urged to consider a four-week shutdown - or even longer - to turn around the surge in coronavirus cases, that has been almost a thousand daily cases for three of the last five days.\n\n\"In the first week of a circuit-breaker, you would still see cases probably going up because there would be people who caught it before the measures came in,\" Jamie Jenkins, former head of health analysis at the Office for National Statistics, told BBC Radio Wales.\n\n\"You might be looking at at least two and a half weeks before you see any improvement, and then if you're looking a the data, you'll probably want to see the rate coming down to the rate we saw about a month ago.\n\n\"You're probably looking at two, three, four weeks - and then having to say we have to go a bit further - that is the difficulty of putting a time limit on a circuit-break when you are trying to assess how long this is going to be.\"\n\nSeventeen areas in Wales currently have local lockdown rules in place\n\nCurrently about 2.3 million people in Wales are living in communities under local lockdown rules - 15 of Wales' 22 counties plus Bangor and Llanelli - where coronavirus infection rates are at their highest.\n\nRestrictions include a ban on travelling outside of those areas without \"reasonable excuse\", the ending of extended households or bubbles and people can only meet other households outdoors.\n\nBusinesses across Wales said they were anxious to find out whether they would be told to close.\n\nWelsh hospitality bosses warned a Wales-wide temporary lockdown could put jobs at risk for almost a third of their 140,000-strong workforce, as well as the 40,000 employed in their supply chain.\n\nHospitality bosses says the sector needs government financial support to survive a winter lockdown\n\n\"It's going to be a really difficult time and I can see a lot of business going to the wall,\" David Chapman, executive director in Wales of industry body UK Hospitality, told BBC Radio Wales.\n\n\"I can see jobs being shed as furlough is coming to an end. We need full support, if we don't get support now we are going to lose people in large numbers.\n\n\"We could lose up to 40,000 jobs which will be a massive impact in many rural and coastal communities.\n\n\"When we were shut down in March, the government came up with a package which was brilliant and immediate. The business rates and furlough package was great - but things are starting to get tighter.\n\n\"If we don't get the furlough equivalent or more, we're going to have to balance cutting jobs, which will damage the community, or shutting businesses which would be even worse.\n\n\"But if we can help, stay open and get through to next summer we can start contributing the £37bn a year we put into the UK economy.\"\n\nA circuit-breaker is a tight set of restrictions imposed for a fixed period of time and the Welsh Government has said its \"firebreak\" version would mean restrictions lasting \"for weeks not months\".\n\nCouncils agree \"something needs to be done\" to stop the surge in coronavirus cases in Wales but the leader of the group representing councils says ministers will decide \"the best option\" as they \"balance health and the economy\".\n\n\"We are seeing cases rising, almost a thousand on Sunday and the impact on the economy is quite substantial right now,\" Andrew Morgan, leader of Rhondda Cynon Taf council and the Welsh Local Government Association, told BBC Radio Wales.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The BBC's Laura Foster explains what a circuit breaker is and how it could help tackle Covid-19\n\n\"Not only does every one of those cases have to self-isolate right now but all of their close contacts have to - so every day contact tracers are asking thousands of people to self-isolate.\n\n\"Over a 10-day period we are talking tens of thousands of people so if you think there is no harm to the economy right now it is foolhardy - and these numbers will continue to grow.\"\n\nMr Morgan, who has been part of talks with government, said financial support to Welsh businesses will be \"fundamental\" to plans of ministers as \"businesses are anxious to know\" the new measures.\n\nMr Drakeford previously said that a \"successful firebreak would re-set the virus at a lower level\".\n\n\"Together with a new national set of rules for the whole of Wales after the firebreak period we would have slowed the virus down enough to get us through to Christmas,\" the first minister said.\n\nLeaders say financial help to businesses will be \"fundamental\" as Welsh ministers discuss the detail of a Wales-wide lockdown\n\nThe Welsh Conservatives have called for an emergency Senedd debate as this is \"where major announcements of this kind should be made\" in a \"parliamentary democracy\".\n\n\"I think it's unacceptable, I think the first minister needs to make a statement in the Senedd, and that's why we've called for an emergency session,\" said Darren Millar, vice-chair of the Welsh Conservatives and Clwyd West MS.\n\n\"If they want growing consensus then they also need to engage with other political parties and they haven't been doing that.\"\n\nPlaid Cymru said the case for a firebreak was \"now overwhelming\" and urged the Welsh Government \"to address the weaknesses of the test, trace and isolate system\".\n\n\"I want as few restrictions as possible to be imposed, but properly enforced, and with clear support for people and businesses affected,\" said Plaid's health spokesperson Rhun ap Iorwerth MS.\n\nPlaid's proposals include measures to \"improve our track, trace and isolate system, to safeguard workplaces, and to ensure sufficient financial support for businesses and their employees\".", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nRoss Barkley dedicated his winning goal to Aston Villa's medical staff as Dean Smith's side maintained their 100% start to the season by edging victory at Leicester.\n\nThe game looked set to be the first goalless match of the campaign, but Barkley finished incisively into the bottom corner to give Villa all three points and send them second in the Premier League.\n\nVilla have won their opening four top-flight games for the first time in 90 years.\n\nBarkley joined Villa on loan from Chelsea in the summer and has been impressive for the West Midlands club, with the goal his second in as many games.\n\nHowever, he revealed that a knee problem had left him in doubt for Sunday's game.\n\n\"I was 50-50 in the week and our club doctor did a really good job getting me right,\" said Barkley.\n\n\"He said I would end up scoring the goal and I did, so I dedicated the goal to him.\n\n\"The manager has given me the platform to play and I am excited and looking forward to every game.\"\n\nIt had been a drab Sunday night encounter until Barkley's 91st-minute effort, with neither goalkeeper called on to make difficult saves.\n\nDouglas Luiz had curled a 25-yard shot straight at Leicester's Kasper Schmeichel, while Villa's Emiliano Martinez kept out Youri Tielemans' deflected long-range strike.\n\nVilla are just one point behind leaders Everton with a game in hand, while Leicester remain fourth.\n\nThe fixture was a poignant one, as last season's equivalent back in March was the final game staged with fans before the coronavirus-enforced suspension to the season.\n\nSince then supporters have not been allowed into stadia - but had a crowd been in attendance, many may have been thinking of an early exit as the contest appeared to be drifting towards a bore draw before Barkley's late intervention.\n\nVilla narrowly avoided relegation last season but have started this campaign in magnificent fashion, backing up their 7-2 dismantling of champions Liverpool last time out with a narrow victory on this occasion.\n\nThey have won four Premier League games in a row for the first time since 2009, stretching their unbeaten run in the competition to eight games.\n\nThe signing of Chelsea's Barkley on a season-long loan came as a surprise, but it looks to be an inspired acquisition by Smith and the England international has formed a good understanding with Jack Grealish.\n\nThe goal was a superb strike from the former Everton player, striding forward as the Leicester defence backed off before firing a crisp, low drive past the reach of Schmeichel.\n\n\"We have seen Ross Barkley do that enough times for Everton and Chelsea so we are pleased he did it for us,\" said Smith.\n\n\"It was touch and go whether he started. He had a knock to the knee, but a great goal and a real battling performance by the whole team.\"\n\nLeicester were in the top four for much of last season before falling away after the restart, and they began this term with three straight victories.\n\nBut they have since faltered, losing back-to-back games, and rarely looked like finding the net against Villa.\n\nWithout the injured Jamie Vardy to call upon up front, Leicester struggled to carve out meaningful chances and Belgium full-back Timothy Castagne and Nigeria forward Kelechi Iheanacho both saw their efforts comfortably saved by Martinez.\n\nEven the introduction of the rarely-sighted Algerian Islam Slimani, making his first Foxes appearance since January 2018 following loan spells away, could not spark any attacking impetus for Brendan Rodgers' side.\n\nPromising defender Wesley Fofana, 19, was given his debut after signing for £30m from Saint-Etienne, but there was little the French teenager could do to prevent Barkley's superb strike.\n\n\"I didn't think we deserved to lose,\" said Leicester boss Brendan Rodgers.\n\n\"We tried to be too precise in the final third of the pitch. It was just that final ball when we get into the box. It is still very early and we will continue to work hard.\n\n\"We are disappointed but we will go again.\"\n\nLeicester are in Europa League action on Thursday against Zorya Luhansk (kick-off 20:00 BST), while Villa look to maintain their impressive Premier League start when they host Leeds next Friday (20:00).\n\nVilla keep it clean - the stats\n• None Aston Villa have won their opening four games of a league season for the first time since the 1930-31 campaign, when they went on to finish second in the top flight.\n• None Leicester have suffered consecutive Premier League home defeats without scoring for the first time since February 2017.\n• None Aston Villa are unbeaten in their last eight Premier League games (W6 D2); their longest run without defeat in the competition since October 2011 (10 games).\n• None Leicester manager Brendan Rodgers suffered his first defeat against Aston Villa in the Premier League since September 2014 (1-0 in charge of Liverpool), having won each of his previous four meetings with them since then.\n• None Aston Villa have kept a clean sheet in both of their two away games in the Premier League this term, after keeping none in 19 away games in the competition last season.\n• None Ross Barkley has scored in each of his two Premier League appearances for Aston Villa (2 goals), as many as he managed in his last 42 for Chelsea before moving to Villa Park.\n• None Since the start of last season, Aston Villa's Jack Grealish has won 182 fouls in the Premier League (including five tonight) - the most of any player in the competition.\n• None Goal! Leicester City 0, Aston Villa 1. Ross Barkley (Aston Villa) right footed shot from outside the box to the bottom left corner. Assisted by John McGinn.\n• None Attempt saved. Bertrand Traoré (Aston Villa) header from the centre of the box is saved in the bottom right corner. Assisted by John McGinn with a cross.\n• None Offside, Aston Villa. John McGinn tries a through ball, but Ollie Watkins is caught offside.\n• None Attempt blocked. Ross Barkley (Aston Villa) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Jack Grealish.\n• None Attempt missed. Matt Targett (Aston Villa) left footed shot from outside the box misses to the right following a corner.\n• None Offside, Aston Villa. Emiliano Martínez tries a through ball, but Ollie Watkins is caught offside.\n• None Attempt blocked. Harvey Barnes (Leicester City) right footed shot from the left side of the box is blocked. Assisted by James Justin.\n• None Attempt missed. Islam Slimani (Leicester City) header from the centre of the box is close, but misses the top right corner. Assisted by Ayoze Pérez with a cross.\n• None Attempt blocked. Ayoze Pérez (Leicester City) left footed shot from the right side of the box is blocked. Assisted by James Maddison. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Is it time for a national 'circuitbreaker'?\n• None What impact has Covid-19 had on the climate?", "Passengers flying from Heathrow to Hong Kong on Tuesday will be the first to have the option of paying for a rapid Covid test before checking in.\n\nThe test will cost £80 and the result is guaranteed within an hour.\n\nThe aim is to help people travelling to destinations where proof of a negative result is required on arrival.\n\nCollinson, the company behind the initiative had hoped the test could be used to enter Italy, but talks with the Italian government are continuing.\n\nA growing number of countries have classified the UK as being \"at risk\", meaning travellers from the UK face more restrictions.\n\nThe authorities in Hong Kong now require people to show they have a negative test result, taken within 72 hours of a flight from London.\n\nThe rapid saliva swab, which is now available at Heathrow Terminals 2 and 5, is known as a Lamp (Loop-mediated Isothermal Amplification) test.\n\nBritish Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Cathay Pacific will now offer it to customers.\n\nTim Alderslade, chief executive of the aviation trade body Airlines UK, said he would like the cost of the test to be lower.\n\n\"For business passengers £80 is probably quite competitive but we've certainly said to the government in terms of introducing a test on arrival in the UK anything from £50-£60 would be better,\" he said.\n\nA Lamp test is quicker than the PCR test, which is widely used in the NHS, because the sample does not need to be sent to a laboratory.\n\nCollinson, the company behind the initiative at Heathrow, admitted that the Lamp test is \"slightly less sensitive\" than the PCR test.\n\nHowever, the Lamp test is considered to be much better than another rapid option - the antigen test.\n\nCollinson's chief executive David Evans told the BBC that \"health screening\" was quickly becoming another stage of the airport experience.\n\nHe said passengers would only have to turn up at the airport an hour earlier. And he maintained testing would help give people confidence to travel, because flights would be \"Covid-secure\".\n\n\"It starts to make travel easier again,\" he said.\n\nCollinson, which partners with Swissport, hopes testing will help open up routes between the UK and other countries.\n\nPeople arriving in Italy from the UK must now either prove they had a negative coronavirus test before departure, or take a test on arrival at an airport in Italy.\n\nHowever, the type of test offered at Heathrow is not sufficient for people travelling to some destinations, such as Cyprus, the Bahamas and Bermuda.\n\nAll those places currently require proof of a negative PCR test, which requires analysis in a laboratory.\n\nThe hope is that more countries will change their rules and allow for other types of test, which could be administered on the spot at Heathrow.\n\nIt is important to note that the new testing facility at Heathrow is not for passengers flying into the airport.\n\nThat means it will not have any immediate impact on the UK's two-week travel quarantine for people arriving from \"at risk\" countries.\n\nCollinson set up a separate testing facility in arrivals at Heathrow over the summer. However, that facility has not been used by passengers, because the government has not given its backing to testing people on arrival.\n\nMinisters have promised that next month, they will give their formal approval to the idea of people paying for a test after a week of quarantine, to avoid the full two weeks.\n\nOn Monday, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps confirmed the government was in talks with the US Department of Homeland Security about a different type of system, possibly involving \"multiple tests\".\n\nThe government is looking at another system, under which people could take one test two or three days before they fly into the UK, and then another test when they arrive.\n\nThat could make it possible for someone arriving in the UK from an \"at risk\" country to avoid quarantine altogether.\n\nHowever, Mr Shapps said he could not say when that type of system would be up and running, because it required international co-operation.", "First Minister Mark Drakeford said children would be the top priority in the \"short, sharp\" lockdown in Wales.\n\nWales will go into a \"short, sharp\" national lockdown from Friday, 23 October until Monday, 9 November.\n\nPeople will be told to stay at home, while pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops will shut.\n\nPrimary schools will reopen after the half-term break, but only Years 7 and 8 in secondary schools will return at that time.\n\nMr Drakeford told a media briefing it had been a difficult decision but the NHS would not be able to look after the increasing number of seriously ill people.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Michael Gove: Not reaching a trade deal with the EU is an “outcome for which we are increasingly well prepared”.\n\nThe EU has said it is willing to \"intensify\" talks on a trade deal with the UK this week to try to break the impasse between the two sides.\n\nIts negotiator Michel Barnier said the bloc was prepared to discuss all areas of disagreement, including fishing and competition, based on legal texts.\n\nMichael Gove said he welcomed the bloc's latest \"constructive\" step.\n\nLater, No 10 said there was \"no basis to resume talks\" unless there was a \"fundamental change\" from the EU.\n\nThe UK has accused the EU of dragging its feet and failing to respect its sovereignty in the negotiations.\n\nIn a Commons statement, Cabinet Office Minister Mr Gove said his \"door was not closed\" to further talks but the EU needed to change its position for the process to continue.\n\nAfter a call between Mr Barnier and the UK's chief negotiator, Lord Frost, Downing Street released a statement saying the EU needed to try to find an agreement \"between sovereign equals\".\n\nOn Friday, No 10 suggested formal negotiations were \"over\" as the EU was not serious about discussing the details of a free trade agreement similar to the one it has with Canada - the UK's preferred outcome.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said the UK should \"get ready\" to trade with the EU from 1 January, when it leaves the single market and customs union, without a specific agreement.\n\nBut following a video call with his UK counterpart Lord Frost on Monday, Mr Barnier said he was willing to accelerate the process in the coming days to try to bridge the gap between the two sides.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Michel Barnier This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMr Barnier suggested all subjects would be on the table and the discussions would be based on specific legal texts, which the UK has accused the EU of refusing to consider in recent weeks.\n\nIn response, Lord Frost tweeted that the proposal to intensify work had been noted, and added: \"But the EU still needs to make a fundamental change in approach to the talks and make clear it has done so.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by David Frost This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nUpdating MPs on the state of the talks, Mr Gove said the EU's latest move was a positive one and suggested the UK would respond in kind.\n\nHe said: \"Even while I have been at the despatch box, it has been reported that there has been a constructive move on the part of the EU and I welcome that.\n\n\"We need to make sure we work on the basis of the intensification they propose and I prefer to look forward in optimism rather than look back in anger.\"\n\nHe added: \"If there has been movement, and there seems to be movement, then no-one would welcome it more than me but what we can't have from the EU is the illusion of engagement without the reality of compromise.\"\n\nSome senior Conservatives have urged the government to walk away from the talks, suggesting the EU is no longer negotiating in \"good faith\".\n\nFormer Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said the EU's \"refusal\" to engage in meaningful talks on trade in financial services and agricultural products was a breach of the terms of the withdrawal agreement governing the UK's exit.\n\nThe government has said the UK will prosper whatever the outcome of the negotiations, as it will be able to exercise freedoms not available while being an EU member.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Rachel Reeves calls on the government to be “honest” about the effect of the UK not reaching a trade deal with the EU.\n\nBut business groups have warned the UK's fallback option of a so-called \"Australian-style\" arrangement - where UK-EU trade will default to World Trade Organization rules - would be disastrous as it would see tariffs on goods moving across the channel.\n\nWith less than 75 days to go before the transition period ends on 31 December, the government has urged business to step up its preparations for the looming changes to trading rules.\n\nThe PM will hold a meeting with industry groups on Tuesday to emphasise the need for action.\n\nLabour has said the government only has itself to blame for the current uncertainty, shadow Cabinet Office minister Rachel Reeves calling on ministers to be \"honest\" about the effect on the UK of not agreeing a trade deal.\n\nAnd former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May suggested the implications of failing to agree a future partnership would also be highly damaging for the UK's security.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Brexit: Theresa May seems unimpressed with Michael Gove's plan\n\nMrs May, who quit last year after Parliament rejected her withdrawal agreement three times, said the UK \"should not be resigned\" to the prospect of failing to agree a deal over law enforcement and information sharing.\n\nShe warned that \"if the UK walks away with no deal, then our police and law enforcement agencies will no longer have the necessary access to databases in order to be able to continue to identify and catch criminals and potential terrorists in order to keep us safe\".\n\nIn response, Mr Gove said \"significant progress\" had been made in terms of security co-operation but the EU could not make access to databases conditional on the UK accepting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Andy Burnham: \"This is not just Greater Manchester's fight\"\n\nGreater Manchester's mayor has called on Boris Johnson for help in \"breaking the impasse\" over stricter Covid-19 curbs in the region.\n\nAndy Burnham said in a letter to the PM and other party leaders that Parliament should hold an urgent debate to end the deadlock.\n\nLater the mayor said he had a \"constructive call\" with Mr Johnson's chief strategic adviser.\n\nEarlier, minister Michael Gove said: \"We hope to agree a new approach.\"\n\nMr Gove said the government wanted the best for Greater Manchester and that he hoped \"we can find a way through together\".\n\nBut he criticised what he described as the \"incoherence\" of politicians in that region and warned that if an agreement could not be reached the government would \"look at\" having to impose restrictions.\n\nLeaders in Greater Manchester, including Mr Burnham, have rejected a move to England's tier three alert level without better financial support.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson has said he may \"need to intervene\" if local leaders do not accept a move to tier three curbs.\n\nA further 16,982 people tested positive for the virus as of Sunday, the Department of Health figures showed, with a further 67 deaths occurring within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nScottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted that the figure for positive Covid cases in Scotland should be \"treated with some caution\" due to \"a delay within the UK lab system\". Cases rose by 316 in Scotland with no further deaths recorded.\n\nThe UK government said there was no capacity issue at a Lighthouse laboratory in Glasgow and that rerouting of tests to other laboratories was routine practice.\n\nMr Burnham has said he would be \"ready to speak to the prime minister at any time\" to discuss the situation. The mayor's spokesman confirmed Mr Burnham had spoken to Sir Edward Lister, a No 10 official, in a phone call on Sunday afternoon.\n\nIn the letter, Mr Burnham said the prospect of tier three - very high - restrictions on hospitality and other areas \"is not just a Greater Manchester issue\".\n\nHe wrote: \"Establishing clear national entitlements of the kind we had during the first lockdown will create a sense of fairness which in turn would help build public support for, and compliance with, any new restrictions.\"\n\n\"As leaders of the main political parties in Westminster, I urge you to work together to help resolve this current dispute and establish a fair financial framework for local lockdowns that the whole country will be able to support,\" he added.\n\nIn the language of negotiation, it seems the government and mayor of Greater Manchester may have stepped back from the brink.\n\nBoth sides softened their tone in interviews this morning, there was talk of ending the war of words and finding a new way through.\n\nBut it's important to remember this is not just a two-way row.\n\nThe most telling intervention of the last 24 hours has not been from Andy Burnham or Michael Gove, but the senior Conservative MP Sir Graham Brady.\n\nHe represents a constituency in the region and says MPs, council leaders and mayor are \"united\" across party lines in resisting tier 3 restrictions.\n\nSo, while the argument plays out in public between the government and Mr Burnham, it may be won or lost in private between ministers and their own backbenchers whose support is crucial to the government's approach.\n\nEarlier, Mr Burnham told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show there had been \"exaggeration\" by the prime minister of rising case numbers in Greater Manchester.\n\nMr Johnson said on Friday cases in the region had doubled over the previous nine days. Mr Burnham said that while cases were \"up slightly\" they were \"certainly not doubling every nine days\".\n\nSir Graham Brady, a senior backbench Conservative and MP for Altrincham and Sale West in Greater Manchester, described the region's Labour and Tory MPs as \"pretty united\" and said positive tests were \"flattening\".\n\nThe latest data on infection rates in the city of Manchester itself show they have fallen slightly, to around 458 cases per 100,000 of the population.\n\nAcross Greater Manchester as a whole - which includes another nine boroughs including Salford, Stockport and Bury - the infection rate is slightly up.\n\nSo it is a mixed picture, but the region as a whole is still a long way off other areas such as Derry, Nottingham and Liverpool.\n\nBut in many ways it is not the infection rate that matters. What counts are the number of people who are falling so seriously ill they end up in hospital.\n\nWe know that lots of otherwise fit and healthy students falling ill with Covid-19 is not going to have a significant impact on the local health service, but lots of older people falling ill would change the picture quickly.\n\nLast week it was reported that, in Liverpool, around 95% of intensive care beds were occupied.\n\nBut Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham told the BBC on Sunday morning there were only 64 occupied beds in the city region.\n\nAcross Greater Manchester, leaders accept there is a serious problem. But they question whether it is serious enough to warrant the kind of economic impact - not to mention the effect on people's mental health - that moving to tier three - very high - would have.\n\nMr Burnham also described \"side deals\" with councils in regions moving into tier three - very high - as not \"good enough for me\".\n\nLiverpool City Region's metro mayor Steve Rotherham announced his area will receive an additional £44m and a similar package worth £42m was given to local leaders in Lancashire.\n\n\"Let's remember, the places they're trying to close in tier three - pubs, bookies, gyms - these are places where people are on low wages. And what we're saying is you cannot take away their place of work and not give them support,\" Mr Burnham said.\n\nHe called on the government to re-introduce the 80% furlough scheme used previously in the pandemic to support the low paid affected by tier three closures. Currently, a less generous scheme to provide two-thirds of wages is on offer.\n\nThe Labour mayor added: \"The truth is health, protecting health, is about more than controlling the virus.\"\n\nA letter from Tory MPs representing areas on the lowest tier of England's Covid alert system called on Mr Burnham to accept a move to tier three - very high - rather than allow national restrictions through a so-called \"circuit-breaker\".\n\n\"It does not make sense to shut down the whole country when the virus is spiking in particular locations,\" it said.\n\nBut four Conservative MPs representing seats in Greater Manchester hit back, describing the letter as \"deeply disappointing... unnecessary and ill-advised\", \"neither wanted nor helpful\" and a \"No 10 approved communication\".\n\nAnd Mr Burnham said: \"I'm not sure a sort of 'we're alright, Jack' letter from a group of southern Conservative MPs is going to cut much ice [in Greater Manchester].\"\n\nMeanwhile, Prof Jeremy Farrar, a scientific adviser to the government, said Christmas will be \"tough\" this year with traditional family celebrations unlikely.\n\n\"Christmas will be tough this year. I don't think it's going to be the usual celebration it is and all families coming together, I'm afraid,\" he told Sky News.\n\n\"I think we have to be honest and realistic and say that we are in for three to six months of a very, very difficult period.\"\n\nBut the Wellcome Trust director said there is \"light at the end of the tunnel\", as he believes a Covid-19 vaccine and effective treatment will be ready in the first quarter of 2021.", "Yasmin Qureshi said she started to feel unwell about two weeks ago and immediately self-isolated\n\nBolton South East MP Yasmin Qureshi has been admitted to hospital with pneumonia after testing positive for Covid-19.\n\nThe Labour MP said she started to feel unwell about two weeks ago and immediately self-isolated at home.\n\nMs Qureshi, 57, said she was admitted to Royal Bolton Hospital on Saturday after beginning to feel \"much worse\".\n\n\"I'm being very well looked after and have nothing but praise and admiration for the wonderful staff,\" she added.\n\n\"They have been amazing throughout the process and I would like to extend my thanks to everyone working here in such difficult circumstances.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Yasmin Qureshi MP This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nShadow international development minister Ms Qureshi has been one of the Greater Manchester MPs arguing against tier three restrictions being imposed in the region.\n\nLocal leaders want better financial support before agreeing to a move to the top tier of rules, which would force some businesses to close.\n\nGreater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has called on the government to reintroduce the 80% furlough scheme instead of a new Job Support Scheme, which covers 67% of the wages of people affected by tier three closures.\n\nHe said businesses that would close under tier three \"are places where people are on low wages\" and two-thirds pay was not enough.\n\nBut Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick has said further delays to a decision will \"put people's lives at risk\".\n\nLabour leader Keir Starmer has tweeted his support for Ms Qureshi, saying: \"My thoughts are with my friend @YasminQureshiMP who has been admitted to hospital after being diagnosed with Covid-19.\n\n\"My thanks go to the staff caring for Yasmin at the Royal Bolton Hospital, along with NHS staff across the country who are on the frontline against Covid-19.\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Code-breaking hub Bletchley Park's contribution to World War Two is often over-rated by the public, an official history of UK spy agency GCHQ says.\n\nThe new book - Behind the Enigma - is released on Tuesday and is based on access to top secret GCHQ files.\n\n\"Bletchley is not the war winner that a lot of Brits think it is,\" the author, Professor John Ferris of the University of Calgary, told the BBC.\n\nBut he said Bletchley still played an important role.\n\nAnd GCHQ had a significant influence in other conflicts, according to the signals intelligence historian.\n\nGCHQ, known as Britain's listening post, was set up on 1 November 1919 as a peacetime \"cryptanalytic\" unit.\n\nDuring World War Two, staff were moved to Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, to decrypt Nazi Germany's messages including, most famously of all, the Enigma communications.\n\nThis provided an inside view of Nazi orders and movements.\n\nThe work was kept secret for decades but an official history of British intelligence in the war would later say it had shortened the conflict by two to four years and without it the outcome would have been uncertain.\n\nBletchley Park remains the most iconic success in British code-breaking and intelligence gathering. But some of the mythology surrounding it has masked the reality, the new book argues.\n\nNazi Germany actually had the advantage when it came to intelligence and code-breaking for the early part of the war because Britain's own communication security was so poor.\n\nEventually, Britain overtook the Germans and Bletchley carried out \"amazing\" work which did hasten victory, but not necessarily by the amount some previous estimates have claimed.\n\n\"Intelligence never wins a war on its own,\" says Prof Ferris.\n\nHe was given extensive access to the secret files of the intelligence agency, although some limits were placed on what he could see and write about, including more recent interceptions of other countries' diplomatic messages and some of the technical secrets of code-breaking.\n\nThe book provides a detailed sweep of the agency's contribution from its founding after World War One through to the cyber age of today, including the impact of revelations from US whistleblower Edward Snowden.\n\nProf Ferris writes that a \"cult of Bletchley\" has protected GCHQ and boosted its reputation, and argues that the fact he is able to raise questions about it show GCHQ was sincere in giving him freedom to come to his own conclusions.\n\n\"GCHQ is probably Britain's most important strategic asset at the moment and will probably remain that way for generations,\" he says.\n\n\"I think that Britain gains from keeping it strong and world class, but at the same time, you need to put in proportion what it is you can and cannot get from intelligence.\"\n\nBletchley was still a high-point, he said, because of the ability to get inside the enemy's strategic communications.\n\nThis was not possible against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, although GCHQ was still able to provide the majority of intelligence about its adversary's military thanks to innovative work in studying the patterns of communications.\n\nSteel helmets abandoned by Argentine armed forces who surrendered in 1982 at Goose Green to British Falklands Task Force troops\n\nProf Ferris also argues the agency's contribution was particularly important in the 1982 Falklands Conflict.\n\n\"I don't think Britain could have won the Falklands conflict without GCHQ,\" Prof Ferris told the BBC.\n\nHe said because GCHQ was able to intercept and break Argentine messages, British commanders were able to know within hours what orders were being given to their opponents, which offered a major advantage in the battle at sea and in retaking the islands.\n\n\"They understand what the Argentines planned to do. They understand how exactly the Argentines were deploying their forces.\"\n\nThe book provides new details on the controversial sinking of the Argentine warship Belgrano and over whether enough was done to warn of the invasion.\n\n\"It was a failure of policy, as far as I'm concerned, rather than a failure of intelligence,\" Prof Ferris told the BBC.\n\nThe book also details the close alliance with the US which persists to this day and how the make-up of staff who work at the agency, now based in Cheltenham, has changed over time.\n\nIn a foreword, the current director of the intelligence agency, Jeremy Fleming writes: \"GCHQ is a citizen-facing intelligence and security enterprise with a globally recognised brand and reputation. We owe all of that to our predecessors.\"", "A meeting between ministers and local leaders about Greater Manchester's Covid restrictions has ended without agreement.\n\nLocal leaders want better financial support for workers before any move to the top tier of rules, which would force some businesses to close.\n\nThe communities secretary has said local leaders have a deadline of noon on Tuesday to reach a deal.\n\nIt comes as the UK recorded a further 18,804 coronavirus cases and 80 deaths.\n\nFollowing the meeting, Greater Manchester's Labour Mayor Andy Burnham told the BBC: \"The government could have a deal if it better protects low-paid people. It is choosing not to do that.\"\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said on Friday that he might \"need to intervene\" if local leaders did not accept a move to tier three - the highest level of England's coronavirus restrictions.\n\nMeanwhile, Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the Commons further discussions were planned with leaders in South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, north-east England and Teesside about restrictions in these areas.\n\nThere are conflicting reports about Monday afternoon's meeting between Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick and local leaders in Greater Manchester, which one source on the call said ended \"abruptly\".\n\nIn a joint statement, Mr Burnham and the Labour leader of Manchester City Council Sir Richard Leese said: \"We had been encouraged by earlier discussions at an official level where the idea of a hardship fund, to top up furlough payments and support the self-employed, had been tabled by the government.\n\n\"It was both surprising and disappointing when this idea was taken off the table by the secretary of state.\"\n\nBut a spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) said that while it was \"disappointing\" no agreement had been reached, Mr Burnham was \"incorrect in claiming that officials made this proposal today\".\n\nA key sticking point of the dispute is that Mr Burnham wants the government to reintroduce the 80% furlough scheme used during the UK's first lockdown, instead of the new Job Support Scheme which covers 67% of the wages of people affected by tier three closures.\n\nThis evening, the two sides can't even agree on what they actually discussed earlier.\n\nBelieve the local leaders and this morning there seemed to be hope in the air. Officials from central government had mooted the possibility of a hardship fund to help support low-paid workers who stand to lose out if businesses close their doors under tighter restrictions.\n\nThe message local leaders took from their meeting was that, while the Treasury is adamant they are not going to extend their national furlough scheme that has supported millions of wages any further - nor increase the level of cash available from its replacement, the Job Support Scheme - Westminster might sign off extra money that could be spent that way, if local politicians saw fit.\n\nThere was no concrete agreement on the numbers, but sources in Greater Manchester suggest the cost of supporting those who need the extra help comes in at around £15m a month.\n\nAfter that call, the consensus among North West leaders was moving in the direction of signing on the dotted line, with another call planned with Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick for the afternoon.\n\nBut rather than ushering in a new spirit of co-operation, that meeting went south.\n\nMeanwhile, people in Wales will be told from Friday to stay at home, while pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops will shut, as part of a \"short, sharp\" national lockdown until 9 November.\n\nIt comes as a two-week school closure begins in Northern Ireland as part of a tightening of restrictions.\n\nScotland continues to draw up plans for a three-tier framework of measures, similar to England's.\n\nThe prime minister's official spokesman said that in Greater Manchester the number of new cases in people over the age of 60 had tripled in the most recent 15 days of full data - from 89 cases per 100,000 on 27 September to 282 per 100,000 on 12 October.\n\nHe said government projections suggested coronavirus patients would take up the entire current intensive care capacity in Greater Manchester by 8 November, not including capacity in Nightingale hospitals.\n\nHowever, Prof Jane Eddleston, the region's medical lead for the coronavirus response, said Greater Manchester's intensive care capacity was not at risk of being overwhelmed.\n\nProf Eddleston said the situation was \"serious\" but despite the \"stark\" figures on hospital admissions and cases, extra capacity would be available.\n\nIn their joint statement, Mr Burnham and Sir Richard said Greater Manchester's intensive care unit occupancy rate was \"not abnormal for this time of year\" and it was \"essential... public fears are not raised unnecessarily\".\n\nThere is a blizzard of numbers flying around about Greater Manchester, and the North West more widely, as national and local politicians argue about whether to introduce local restrictions.\n\nBut a curious element that seems to have been missed is that the rise in cases may have already stalled.\n\nThe last few days show no rise in the average number of new infections across the North West, while Manchester itself may actually be seeing cases fall after peaking at more than 500 a day on average at the end of September.\n\nThis will take some time to filter through into hospital cases as the people who are ill enough to be admitted to hospital have been infected a few weeks before.\n\nBut already there are signs the rises in hospital admissions are slowing.\n\nThat's not to say hospitals and intensive care in particular is not busy. The pressures are akin to what the NHS would normally see in the peak of winter and, of course, it's only October.\n\nBut talk of units becoming overwhelmed when they have not even really dipped into their \"surge capacity\", transforming other parts of the hospital into temporary intensive care wards, seems somewhat premature.\n\nWhat happens in the coming weeks though will be crucial.\n\nEarlier, Mr Jenrick indicated that Greater Manchester could be offered a financial package similar to the \"tens of millions\" of pounds of support agreed for Lancashire and the Liverpool City Region - the two parts of England already in tier three.\n\nNottingham's Labour council leader David Mellen has also called for more support for businesses in the city if it is moved to tier three.\n\nHow have you been affected by coronavirus? What have restrictions meant for you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Roehl Ribaya became the last patient to leave the unit in Blackpool\n\nA man who was the last patient to leave Blackpool Victoria Hospital's intensive care unit after being treated for Covid-19 in July has died.\n\nRoehl Ribaya spent 60 days in intensive care in the summer but \"never recovered\" from the long-term effects of the virus.\n\nHis widow, nurse Stella Ricio-Ribaya, performed CPR on him when he suffered a cardiac arrest.\n\nShe told the BBC: \"He was taken too soon.\"\n\nThe Filipino aerospace engineer's family said the virus had taken a heavy toll on the 47-year-old even after he was discharged from hospital on 14 August.\n\nHe had a cardiac arrest on 13 October and was in a coma until he died two days later.\n\nRoehl Ribaya was \"very funny and always joking around\", said his friend Mark Delabajan\n\nMrs Ricio-Ribaya, who lives in St Annes in Lancashire, said: \"He was never the same. He was so breathless all the time.\n\n\"Please follow the government's advice so we can stop this virus.\n\n\"We don't want any more to die.\"\n\nClose friend Mark Delabajan said the family were \"devastated\".\n\nHe said Mr Ribaya's cause of death was cardiac arrest with the secondary cause given as post-Covid pulmonary fibrosis.\n\n\"It was long Covid. His breathing was never the same and he couldn't get up the stairs,\" he said.\n\n\"He was rushed back into hospital a number of times.\"\n\nRoehl Ribaya's wife Stella Ricio-Ribaya said he remained breathless after being discharged\n\nMr Ribaya arrived at the Blackpool hospital on 29 May and spent 48 days in intensive care on a ventilator.\n\nIn July, when he was clapped out of intensive care, lead consultant Dr Jason Cupitt said it signalled the hospital had \"survived the first wave of this silent killer\".\n\nKevin McGee, chief executive of Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: \"We were extremely saddened to hear about the death of Roehl and our thoughts and prayers are with his family at this sad time.\"\n\nIn July, Dr Jason Cupitt (centre) said Mr Ribaya's discharge from hospital showed \"we have survived the first wave\"\n\nMr Delabajan said Mr Ribaya was the \"life and soul of the party... very funny and always joking around\".\n\n\"The staff in Blackpool Victoria Hospital were very fond of him,\" he added.\n\nMr Delabajan's wife Angela has set up a fundraising page on Go Fund Me to raise money for Mr Ribaya's family.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Matt Hancock was pictured on Monday without a mask\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock has been seen travelling in his chauffeur-driven car without wearing a mask, against the advice of No 10.\n\nThe public face fines of £200 if they fail to wear a covering in taxis or private hire cars.\n\nThere is an exemption for chauffeur-driven cars, but Downing Street said it had advised all its ministers to wear coverings.\n\nA No 10 spokesman said there were masks available in all ministerial cars.\n\nThe picture was first published on the Daily Mirror website.\n\nIt shows the health secretary arriving at the Department for Health and Social Care on Monday without a mask.\n\nThe BBC understands Mr Hancock had been wearing a mask on the journey, but removed it as his car approached the department.\n\nAsked later whether the minister would be reprimanded for going against the advice, the prime minister's official spokesman said he had not seen the photo.\n\nHe added: \"On the general point, we set out at the time that we were making face coverings available in all ministerial cars so that ministers would be able to wear them.\"", "Christmas is unlikely to be the \"usual celebration\" of \"families coming together\", a leading scientist has said.\n\nJeremy Farrar, who sits on the Sage committee that advises the government, warned it would be a \"tough\" Christmas.\n\nThe Wellcome Trust director also told Sky News there was \"light at the end of the tunnel\" as he believed a vaccine would be ready early in 2021.\n\nPM Boris Johnson has warned things will be \"bumpy to Christmas and beyond\".\n\nEarlier this week, Prof Farrar told BBC Newscast arguments between Westminster and local leaders were \"very dangerous\" and also that a circuit-breaker, or a short, limited lockdown, was needed now.\n\nSpeaking to Sky News' Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme, Prof Farrar said the UK faces a \"very, very difficult\" period.\n\n\"Christmas will be tough this year. I don't think it's going to be the usual celebration it is and all families coming together, I'm afraid,\" he said.\n\n\"I think we have to be honest and realistic and say that we are in for three to six months of a very, very difficult period.\n\n\"The temperatures drop, we are all indoors more often, we have the other infections that come this time of year.\n\n\"It's much better for us to be upfront and honest now, and say we are in for a really difficult time, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.\"\n\nProf Farrar said he thought a vaccine and effective treatment would be ready early next year.\n\n\"I do believe the vaccines will be available in the first quarter of next year, I do believe that monoclonal antibodies to treat patients and save lives will be available in the coming months,\" he said.\n\n\"It's with that context that I think we need to reduce transmission now and we need to get ourselves back to the beginning of September as a country, not in piecemeal, not in fragments across the country, but as a whole country.\"\n\nSpeaking further about the need for a circuit-breaker, Prof Farrar claimed there could be 50,000 cases per day in England.\n\nThe government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, warned in a press conference on 21 September that the UK could face 50,000 cases a day by mid-October if no action was taken.\n\nProf Farrar said an Office for National Statistics (ONS) survey, which he described as the \"best data in the country at the moment\", showed that 27,000 people were getting infected each day in England as of 10 October, but he said, given a time lag, it would actually be more than 50,000 by now.\n\nThe ONS survey tests a representative sample of the general population to provide an estimate of the true spread of the virus, as it picks up asymptomatic cases that would not necessarily be identified in the daily figures.\n\nThe ONS figures are far higher than the number of confirmed cases announced by the government each day.\n\nOn Sunday, the government figures showed 16,982 people tested positive for the virus and a further 67 people had died.\n\nProf Farrar said the \"best time\" to have introduced the short, limited lockdown would have been around 20 September, but said the \"second best time is now\".\n\nHe said the worst time would be at the end of November when things had got worse.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has also called for a circuit-breaker but the prime minister has said its three-tier system of regional restrictions avoids the \"misery of a second national lockdown\".", "Energy regulator Ofgem is introducing new rules from 15 December to help vulnerable customers who struggle to pay their energy bills this winter.\n\nSuppliers will be required to offer emergency credit to customers who cannot top up prepayment meters.\n\nAnd if customers are in debt, suppliers must put them on \"realistic and sustainable\" repayment plans.\n\nIn March, suppliers voluntarily agreed with the government to support people affected by the pandemic.\n\nNow Ofgem has updated its licence rules to formally require suppliers to help customers in financial difficulty.\n\nThe industry watchdog said those in financial distress would get some breathing space, but ultimately all customers will need to pay for the energy they use.\n\nThis follows Ofgem cutting the price cap on default tariffs and prepayment meters, due to falling gas wholesale prices, which means cheaper energy bills for millions of people this winter.\n\n\"Suppliers have stepped up to the challenge of supporting their customers during the Covid-19 crisis, especially those in vulnerable situations,\" said Ofgem's director of retail Philippa Pickford.\n\n\"Customers who are struggling to pay their bills should contact their supplier as soon as possible. The extra protections we have announced today will help ensure they get some breathing space this winter.\"\n\nFrom 15 December, suppliers will be required to offer emergency credit or extra prepayment credit to households in vulnerable circumstances.\n\nThis could be because people are temporarily unable to afford to top up their prepayment meters, or are unable to visit their local shop due to having to self-isolate or having a mobility issue.\n\nEnergy suppliers need to offer emergency credit to people on prepayment meters who are temporarily unable to top them up\n\nOfgem wants to reduce the number of prepayment customers who run out of credit and end up being without energy.\n\nThe regulator also wants to make sure that suppliers have appropriate credit management policies, make proactive contact with customers, and set repayment rates based on their ability to pay.\n\nIn September, Citizens Advice estimated that 6 million people in the UK have fallen behind on paying at least one household bill during the pandemic, and that many more are on the cusp of being unable to afford to make ends meet.\n\n\"This raft of new protections from Ofgem should help more people who are struggling to stay afloat,\" said Citizen Advice's chief executive Dame Gillian Guy.\n\n\"Energy is an essential service and everyone should be confident they can adequately heat their home and protect their health - especially during a global pandemic.\n\n\"We've been pressing for the measures agreed between government and energy suppliers to help people through the coronavirus pandemic to be extended and widened, so we're very pleased to see this announcement from the regulator.\"\n\nHowever, she warned that many consumers will still struggle to \"pay for the basics\", even with help from energy suppliers.\n\nDame Gillian added: \"Government needs to do more to support those who need it most, including making the temporary uplift to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit permanent.\"", "HMS Vigilant is one of Britain's four Vanguard-class submarines\n\nA Royal Navy officer has been sent home from the US after reporting to take charge of a submarine's Trident nuclear missiles while unfit for duty.\n\nLt Cdr Len Louw is under investigation at Faslane naval base in Scotland amid reports he had been drinking.\n\nColleagues raised concerns when the weapons engineering officer arrived for work on HMS Vigilant last month.\n\nThe Scottish Sun reported claims the submariner was \"staggering drunk\" when he came on board the £3bn vessel.\n\nHMS Vigilant - one of Britain's four Vanguard-class submarines which carry up to eight Trident missiles armed with nuclear warheads - was docked at a US naval base at the time.\n\nThe BBC understands the officer had been drinking the night before and was carrying a bag of leftover chicken from a barbecue for his lunch.\n\nHMS Vigilant is normally based at Faslane in Scotland but was in the US for maintenance\n\nHMS Vigilant is normally based at Her Majesty's Naval Base Clyde at Faslane in Argyll and Bute, but at the time of the incident in September, it was undergoing maintenance at the Kings Bay facility in Camden County, Georgia.\n\nThe weapons engineering officer is responsible for all weapons and sensors on board.\n\nIt is not yet clear if drink was the reason why Lt Cdr Louw was judged unfit to carry out his duties, but due to the responsibilities of his job, he was sent back to the UK pending an investigation.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Ministry of Defence Press Office This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by Ministry of Defence Press Office\n\nA Royal Navy spokesman said: \"An investigation is under way therefore it would be inappropriate to comment further.\n\n\"However, where an individual's conduct falls short of the high standards we expect, we won't hesitate to take the appropriate action.\n\n\"While we don't comment on the detail, there are numerous safety checks and processes to protect the safety and use of weapons aboard all submarines.\"\n\nIt is not the first time HMS Vigilant's crew has made the headlines.\n\nIn October 2017, a captain was relieved of his command after an alleged \"inappropriate relationship\" with a female member of his crew.\n\nLater that same month, nine sailors posted on the submarine were dismissed from the Royal Navy after failing drugs tests.", "Nicola Sturgeon has played down a row with the UK government over delays to Covid-19 tests in Scotland, saying she has no interest in a \"war of words\".\n\nOnly 316 new cases of the virus were reported on Sunday - a dramatic drop from 1,167 on Saturday.\n\nThe Scottish government said this was due to tests being diverted from the UK government's Lighthouse lab in Glasgow to other sites across the country.\n\nThe UK government spokeswoman insisted this was \"categorically untrue\".\n\nHowever Ms Sturgeon said the governments were \"working very hard\" to improve turnaround times for tests and did not disagree on the \"substance\" of the issue.\n\nShe said there were \"intermittent frustrations\" about the testing system, but said people should have confidence that it \"does work\".\n\nThe number of positive tests registered jumped back to 993 on Monday, with the number of people in hospital also continuing to rise.\n\nAfter the figures for Sunday bucked the recent trend, a post on the Scottish government website claimed that \"demand from outwith Scotland\" had caused a delay in test results coming back from the Lighthouse lab in Glasgow, with swabs being redirected elsewhere.\n\nThe UK government issued a response insisting there was \"no capacity issue at the UK government's Glasgow Lighthouse lab\", and that \"rerouting tests to other laboratories is a routine practice to ensure timely processing\".\n\nAt her daily coronavirus briefing, the first minister said it was \"not in anybody's interest to have a war of words\".\n\nShe said: \"We are working very hard with the UK government to ensure turnaround times, particularly for tests that are already taking longer than we would want, are as quick as possible.\n\n\"When I looked at the UK government statement I'm not sure they are denying or challenging the substance of what I am saying - it recognises that a large number of tests have been diverted to labs elsewhere in the UK.\n\n\"We hope that redirection will have stopped as of yesterday.\"\n\nThe Lighthouse laboratory is based at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Glasgow\n\nMs Sturgeon said tests from drive-through centres - which are usually taken by people who have symptoms and are thus more likely to return positive results - were among those diverted, which she said \"might explain\" why Sunday's figures were \"probably artificially low\".\n\nAllan Wilson, who is president of the Institute of Biomedical Science, based at Monklands hospital in North Lanarkshire, told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme the problem was that no one understood how the Lighthouse laboratories operate.\n\nHe said: \"The issue we have with the Lighthouse lab is that there is a lack of transparency to what happens in that lab because it is not part of the NHS testing, it is delivered through the UK government and it is difficult to find out what the actual issues are until we actually hit problems like we just hit.\n\n\"They work as a network, so they move samples around the country if there are problems. That in itself increases turnaround time and delays results getting back. They did have an issue with staffing, certainly when staff returned to academic institutions, when universities started back, and we know they are actively recruiting.\n\n\"What we are calling for is more transparency. If the Lighthouse labs worked more in collaboration with the NHS labs we would be able to work between the two more easily and focus on those samples and results that are needed urgently.\"\n\nPeople across Scotland are currently banned from visiting other people's homes, and tougher restrictions on licensed premises were introduced earlier this month.\n\nTemporary measures in the central belt have led to the closure of pubs and restaurants in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire, Lothian, Forth Valley and Ayrshire and Arran NHS board areas.\n\nThose living in these areas have been warned not to travel to other parts of Scotland or to areas in England where such restrictions are not in force.\n\nThese measures are due to expire on 26 October, to be replaced by a new \"strategic framework\" for suppressing the virus.\n\nMs Sturgeon is drawing up plans for a \"three-tier framework\" of alert levels which would trigger different restrictions, either on a local or national basis.\n\nThis will be set out at the end of the week, with MSPs set to debate and vote on the plans when Holyrood returns from the half term recess.\n\nMs Sturgeon said this was an \"important step as we look ahead to winter\", which would be a \"very challenging period\".", "Right-wing nationalist Ersin Tatar has won the presidential election in Turkish-controlled northern Cyprus.\n\nMr Tatar, who is pro-Turkey and wants the divided Mediterranean island to be two separate states, received nearly 52% of the vote in a surprise victory.\n\nHis opponent and incumbent leader, Mustafa Akinci, sought reunification with the Greek part of the island.\n\nCyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkey invaded the north after a military coup backed by Greece.\n\nThe island was effectively partitioned, with the northern third run by a Turkish Cypriot government and the southern two-thirds by the internationally-recognised government led by Greek Cypriots.\n\nThe self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) - which has a population of around 300,000 - is recognised as an independent state only by Turkey, while the rest of the world sees it as part of Cyprus.\n\nTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who supported Mr Tatar during his election campaign, congratulated him on his victory.\n\nThere has been no comment yet from the Cypriot government in Nicosia, although opposition parties there have lamented the result.\n\n\"We deserve our sovereignty - we are the voice of Turkish Cypriots,\" he said.\n\n\"We are fighting to exist within the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, therefore our neighbours in the south and the world community should respect our fight for freedom… because we deserve it.\"\n\nResponding to the result on Twitter, Mr Erdogan said Turkey would \"continue to provide all types of efforts to protect the rights of the Turkish Cypriot people\".\n\nSupporters of Ersin Tatar celebrated his victory in the northern part of the divided capital Nicosia\n\nSunday was the second round of the presidential election, after Mr Tatar secured 32% of the vote in the first round on 11 October, while incumbent President Akinci won almost 30%.\n\nFollowing the result, Mr Akinci's re-election hopes were boosted after he gained the backing of Tufan Erhurman, who had come third in the first round of voting.\n\nThroughout the campaign, Mr Akinci had accused Turkey of interfering in the election. He admitted defeat on Sunday night but said the contest \"wasn't normal\".\n\n\"These results mark the end of my 45-year political career,\" Mr Akinci was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency. \"I wish good luck to our people.\"\n\nMr Tatar's victory in northern Cyprus follows increased tensions between his backer Turkey and Greece over energy claims in the eastern Mediterranean in recent months.", "Facebook has deleted a post in which President Trump had claimed Covid-19 was \"less lethal\" than the flu.\n\nMr Trump is at the White House after three days of hospital treatment having tested positive for the virus.\n\nHe wrote the US had \"learned to live with\" flu season, \"just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!\"\n\nTwitter hid the same message behind a warning about \"spreading misleading and potentially harmful information\".\n\nUsers have to click past the alert to read the tweet.\n\n\"We remove incorrect information about the severity of Covid-19, and have now removed this post,\" said Andy Stone, policy communications manager at Facebook.\n\nAn exact mortality rate for Covid-19 is not known, but it is thought to be substantially higher - possible 10 times or more - than most flu strains, according to Johns Hopkins University.\n\nThe President has reacted by posting: \"REPEAL SECTION 230!!!\"\n\nThis is a reference to a law that says social networks are not responsible for the content posted by their users.\n\nBut it allows the firms to engage in \"good-Samaritan blocking\", including the removal of content they judge to be offensive, harassment or violent.\n\nIf the law were to be repealed, social media companies would face being sued over the edits and changes of user content they made.\n\nThis is the second time that Facebook has deleted a post from the president. Twitter has intervened more often with deletions and warnings.\n\nUsers do not see Trump's tweet in his timeline unless they click on the View link\n\nBoth social networks have vowed to combat potentially dangerous misinformation around the virus.\n\nBut Mr Trump has taken issue with what he sees as editorialising by the companies.\n\nShortly after Twitter put a warning label on his posts for the first time in May, Mr Trump signed an executive order to repeal Section 230.\n\nThe proposal has attracted cross-party support - but for different reasons.\n\nThe Republicans say there is a bias against or even outright censorship of conservative views online and want this to stop. The Democrats say they are more interested in the spread of misinformation.\n\nLast week, the US Senate Commerce Committee issued subpoenas for the heads of Facebook, Twitter and Google to probe the matter further.\n\nPressure has been mounting on Facebook and Twitter to do more to tackle misinformation both about the pandemic and the US election. For that reason, their decisive action on Trump's recent post promoting false claims about the severity of coronavirus will be welcomed.\n\nThat said, Trump's comments about the flu - and those yesterday saying \"Don't be afraid of Covid\" - have already started to fuel conspiracy theories online.\n\nPosts in pro-Trump and anti-mask Facebook groups have shared the comments with captions about the pandemic not being real, or not very serious. They have also used it to encourage others not to follow health guidance like wearing a mask or social distancing.\n\nEarly on in the pandemic, the BBC investigated the human cost of misinformation, including those who fell seriously ill because social media posts led them to doubt the reality or severity of the pandemic and ignore advice.\n\nThe hope will be that this action from social media sites could reduce the risk of that happening - but those who may have already been exposed to this disinformation could be impacted.\n\nAnd all eyes will be on social media sites to see if they keep up this approach to tackling disinformation - coronavirus, political or otherwise - especially from the US Election candidates as polling day nears.", "The \"extremely rare\" orange-coloured lobster was saved by a fishmonger in Lancashire\n\nA \"one in 30 million\" orange Canadian lobster has been saved from the pot by a fishmonger and sent to live out its days in an aquarium.\n\nThe apricot-hued arthropod, which are normally a speckled dark brown colour, was found by Steve Atkinson in a delivery to his shop in Fleetwood.\n\nHe said he called Sea Life Blackpool after spotting the crustacean, which \"stood out dramatically\" in the box.\n\nSea Life curator Scott Blacker said its colouring was \"extremely rare\".\n\n\"Its striking and extremely unusual orange colour is actually only found in one in 30 million,\" he said.\n\n\"It really is something very special.\"\n\nThe lobster will now permanently live in the main tank at Sea Life Blackpool\n\nHe said the lobster, which Mr Atkinson found in September, had completed a 21-day quarantine and would now go \"on permanent display to the public in one of our main tanks\".\n\n\"We will, of course, be ensuring it has a forever caring and loving home,\" he added.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Sue Taylor and Lola Mitchell haven't been able to travel because of coronavirus restrictions\n\nTrain customers have expressed their anger at being unable to get refunds for tickets they can no longer use because of UK coronavirus restrictions.\n\nIn some parts of the UK, people have been advised against all but essential travel after a spike in Covid-19 cases.\n\nHowever, passengers who bought advance tickets to travel to or from these areas are not entitled to refunds.\n\nThe passenger watchdog said customers shouldn't be left \"out of pocket for doing the right thing\".\n\nAdvance tickets are usually non-refundable, although those restrictions were temporarily relaxed when the UK went into a nationwide lockdown in March.\n\nUK train companies have been propped up during the pandemic by money from the government, which has set the advance ticket policy.\n\nThe Department for Transport said it was focusing investment \"on maintaining services\" to \"ensure we are fair to taxpayers\".\n\nLola Mitchell, 41, from Brighton, said it was \"unbelievable\" she hadn't been able to get a refund for her £106.50 tickets for a return journey from London to Newcastle.\n\nShe was due to travel to the North East last month for a socially-distanced concert, which was cancelled when new restrictions were introduced in Newcastle on 17 September.\n\nThose measures included advising people in the area to only use public transport for essential purposes.\n\nLola cancelled her trip and has been trying to get her money back from LNER for her advance tickets, which are sold as non-refundable.\n\nShe was offered the option of changing her date of travel for a £10 fee before her scheduled departure - but not a refund.\n\nThe government-owned train company has told customers that the Department for Transport has told it that \"normal ticket restrictions are still to be upheld\" despite the local lockdowns.\n\nLola said that the day before her planned travel date, LNER emailed her to ask her to consider whether making her journey was essential.\n\n\"What a wind-up, if they are not prepared to offer a refund,\" she said.\n\nAaron, from London, had also planned a trip to Newcastle with his girlfriend. They were going to celebrate their first anniversary and had booked their train tickets \"months before the restrictions came in\" for the first weekend in October.\n\nHe says he was \"shocked\" when LNER wouldn't refund his \"non-essential journey\", and instead told him to choose another time, for a £10 admin fee - although LNER currently only sells tickets up until November.\n\nThat isn't an option for him, he says, because \"who knows if they'll be out of lockdown - and secondly I have no reason to travel to Newcastle any more\".\n\nAnother rail customer, Sue Taylor, 46, who lives in Fulham in London, was planning on staying with friends in Glasgow. She had bought a £33 advance ticket with Avanti for the return journey to London at the end of October.\n\nLast month indoor visits between households were banned, first in Glasgow, and then extended to the rest of Scotland, until further notice.\n\nThe train companies will allow customers to change their advance tickets to a different day for a £10 administration fee, although Avanti has only released tickets until mid-December.\n\nSue said she would settle for a credit note, or the ability to be able to change the date of the ticket without a charge.\n\n\"As it stands the only options I have are to either lose the ticket or pay another £10 to change, to a date of who knows when. So much uncertainty.\n\n\"Do I change it now for £10, only to have that date become unworkable and have to pay another £10 to change again? There's no winning for me.\"\n\nShe added: \"I do understand that the advance single ticket is, under normal circumstances, non-refundable, but we know nothing about the current situation is normal.\"\n\nAnother train company offering long-distance travel across the UK, CrossCountry Trains, doesn't charge the £10 admin fee - although that was a policy it introduced before the coronavirus outbreak.\n\nAnthony Smith, chief executive of independent passenger watchdog Transport Focus, said: \"Passengers no longer able to travel because of local lockdowns shouldn't be out of pocket for doing the right thing.\n\n\"If they are asked not to travel, it seems unfair that they will lose the money for pre-booked journeys.\n\n\"While the government continues to provide high levels of support to make sure the day to day railway keeps operating, advance tickets must be made more flexible or the railway will lose both custom and goodwill.\"\n\nTaxpayer money was used to plug the shortfall in ticket revenues after passenger numbers fell during lockdown\n\nThe Rail Delivery Group, which represents train operators, said the government initially offered refunds on advance tickets \"due to the exceptional circumstances the country faced\".\n\nA spokesman added: \"Significant taxpayer funding continues to help maintain rail services which is supporting the country's recovery from the pandemic and, after careful consideration, the government does not intend to allow refunds for non-refundable advance tickets.\"\n\nLast month the Department for Transport extended emergency measures to cover the losses of train firms by 18 months in England, while extra funding has also been provided in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.\n\nA Department for Transport spokeswoman said the government took immediate action at the outbreak of the pandemic to support the rail industry and delivered \"refunds on all advance fares, as well as removing charges for cancellations\".\n\nShe added: \"With fares revenue having fallen to less than 5% of pre-Covid levels, we must ensure we are fair to taxpayers and focus investment on maintaining services, to enable social distancing and support our economic recovery.\"", "Jeni Larmour from County Armagh was named as one of the students who died\n\nThree university students and a man have died in suspected drugs-related incidents in the north-east of England.\n\nTwo 18-year-old women and a 21-year-old man died in Newcastle, and another man, who was also 18, died in Washington, Northumbria Police said.\n\nOne of those who died has been been named as Newcastle University student Jeni Larmour, 18, from County Armagh.\n\nPolice said ketamine and MDMA were \"suspected to have been a factor in the deaths of the students.\"\n\nA large-scale investigation has been launched and officers have been searching student accommodation with sniffer dogs.\n\nTen people have been arrested and released on bail as inquiries continue.\n\nEmergency services were called to student accommodation on Newcastle's Richardson Road twice over the weekend\n\nMs Larmour had been \"a model pupil\" and deputy head girl at The Royal School Armagh, the school said in a statement.\n\n\"Her outstanding qualities as a pupil were recognised in her final year when she was appointed deputy head girl, a role she carried out to a very high standard,\" it said.\n\nNewcastle University said its students had been in the city for less than 48 hours when they died.\n\nVice-chancellor Chris Day has written to all students warning them about the two tragedies.\n\n\"We are all heartbroken and our thoughts and condolences are with their families, friends and loved ones at this most difficult of times.\n\n\"We know that many of you will be affected by this distressing news.\n\n\"Whatever difficulties you have gone through, we have ample support both at the university and in the city,\" he said\n\n\"Whatever those problems are, please do not turn to excessive alcohol or drugs to solve them because you have seen the potential consequences.\"\n\nThe university's students' union urged students, and all young people in the area, to \"look out for each other\".\n\nOne of those who died was a student at Northumbria University\n\nMs Larmour was pronounced dead at a building on Richardson Road shortly after 06:00 BST on Saturday.\n\nLater on Saturday, at about 16:00, emergency services were called to a man on the Coach Road Estate in Washington who had suffered a cardiac arrest after reportedly taking MDMA, police said.\n\nOn Sunday, at about 08:15, police were called to Newcastle's Melbourne Street when a 21-year-old Northumbria University student became ill. It is believed he had taken MDMA. He died in hospital.\n\nThen just after 13:00 on Sunday, another 18-year old female student was found dead at the same student building where Ms Larmour had died the previous day. Police said it was \"believed ketamine had been present at the address\".\n\nCh Insp Steve Wykes said it was \"too early\" to say whether a \"bad batch of drugs\" was involved.\n\nHe added: \"What we must remember is illegal drugs are never safe and so that message is incredibly important.\n\n\"But we are conducting significant inquiries to try and understand what the substances involved do contain.\"\n\nProfessor Fiona Measham, chair in criminology at Liverpool University and co-founder of the harm-reduction charity The Loop, said she believed lockdown restrictions were of \"concern\".\n\n\"Particularly because nightclubs are closed and the pubs are closing early,\" she told BBC Radio Newcastle.\n\n\"I think the reason it's a concern about nightclubs in particular is that nightclubs often have paramedics, they have harm-reduction services and they have security staff that help keep people safe.\n\n\"So if you close the nightclubs, you lose that safety net.\"\n\nFollow BBC North East & Cumbria on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to northeastandcumbria@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Rebel Tories have clashed with a health minister over the ban on gatherings of more than six people in England, arguing it doesn't make sense.\n\nThe government easily won a vote on retaining the rule by 287 votes to 17.\n\nSir Graham Brady - one of 14 Tories to oppose the rule - told minister Helen Whately the \"rule of six\" was not based on scientific evidence.\n\nMs Whately hit back, saying the government could not allow coronavirus to \"rip\" through communities.\n\nBut the comment angered Tory former minister Mark Harper.\n\nHe said all MPs \"want the government to be successful\" in combating coronavirus, but they did not appreciate being accused of \"wanting to let it rip and kill tens of thousands of people\" every time they suggested an alternative strategy.\n\nLabour agreed with many of the backbenchers' points in the Commons debate, but the party abstained in the vote on the restrictions, which came into force three weeks ago.\n\nHowever, five DUP MPs joined the Tory rebels in voting against the restriction.\n\nThere could be a bigger rebellion coming if MPs vote on England's 22:00 hospitality curfew.\n\nTory rebels are confident that dozens of backbenchers would be prepared to retrospectively vote down the measure.\n\nIn the Commons debate leading up to the vote on the rule of six, MPs on all sides demanded to know why children had not been excluded from the restriction - as they have in Scotland and Wales.\n\nSir Graham, who chairs the influential 1922 committee of Tory MPs, said: \"Can she (Ms Whately) share with us her estimate of the efficacy of the rule of six compared to that of a rule of eight, had that been introduced instead?\n\n\"Is the rule of six more or less effective than a ban on household mixing?\"\n\nHe added: \"These rules are a massive intrusion into the liberty and private lives of the whole British people, and they're having a devastating economic effect as well, which will result in big job losses and masses of business failures.\"\n\nTory MP Huw Merriman said he feared the rule of six would \"do more harm than good\" as people might end up ignoring rules \"that do make sense\" - adding he had not seen any evidence it would reduce rates of Covid-19.\n\nTory former minister Steve Baker added: \"We're hearing about people who are being destroyed by this lockdown. Strong, confident people, outgoing people, gregarious people, who are being destroyed and reduced to repeated episodes of tears on the phone.\n\n\"This is a devastating social impact on our society and I believe that people would make different choices were they the ones able to take responsibility for themselves.\"\n\nShadow health minister Justin Madders reeled off a list of questions to Ms Whately on the policy, echoing many of the criticisms made by Tory and Lib Dem MPs.\n\nHe said Labour would support \"whatever reasonable steps are necessary to protect the NHS and save lives\", but said the government was guilty of \"mixed messages and confused communications\".\n\nBut Ms Whately said the rule of six gave \"a clear steer\" and made the guidance \"simple and absolutely clear for everybody\".\n\nShe added: \"We are also taking a path of on the one hand trying to enable a level of socialising for the sake of people's quality of life, while taking steps to control the virus.\n\n\"That is where we have taken the position that the rule of six achieves that balance.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The first minister says new measures will not amount to the lockdown seen in March\n\nNew coronavirus restrictions for Scotland will be announced on Wednesday - but it will not be another full lockdown, Nicola Sturgeon has said.\n\nOptions for a so-called \"circuit-breaker\" to slow the spread of the virus were discussed by the Scottish cabinet on Tuesday morning.\n\nBut the first minister said people would not be told to stay at home, and there would be no national travel ban.\n\nAnd schools will only close for the October holidays.\n\nHowever, the first minister did not rule out local travel restrictions being introduced, or the possible closure of pubs and restaurants, in areas with higher rates of the virus.\n\nMs Sturgeon was speaking as 800 new cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in Scotland.\n\nThe number of people in hospital with the virus rose by 44 overnight and now stands at 262, with 25 patients being treated in intensive care.\n\nThe virus is continuing to spread across Scotland, but particularly in central belt areas such as Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire, Lothian, Forth Valley and Ayrshire and Arran.\n\nSome parts of the country are currently seeing infection levels higher than 50 per 100,000 people. A local lockdown was imposed in Aberdeen in August when it had 20 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nWhen new measures barring people from visiting each other inside their homes were imposed two weeks ago, an average of 285 new cases were being reported each day.\n\nThat figure now stands at 729 cases per day, which Ms Sturgeon said showed how the pandemic had \"accelerated\".\n\nThe first minister said Scotland was facing \"the most difficult decision point yet\" if it wanted to suppress the virus ahead of winter.\n\nShe said the country was facing a \"sharply rising rate of infection again\", with cases spreading from younger age groups into the older and more vulnerable population.\n\nHowever she said the government needed to \"strike a balance\" between the public health toll and the wider costs of lockdown to the economy and people's lives.\n\nSome tourism and hospitality businesses have warned that they may never recover from the effects of any further restrictions that impact on them.\n\nMs Sturgeon said the wider harms of lockdown \"weigh very heavily\" on her, and said she hoped the fact this was being \"carefully considered\" would reassure businesses.\n\nThe first minister will set out new measures in the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday after further talks with ministers and advisors - but has stressed that \"we are not going back to where we were in March\".\n\nShe said: \"We are not proposing another lockdown at this stage, not even on a temporary basis.\n\n\"We are not going to ask you to stay inside your own homes the way we did in March.\n\n\"And while we have been asking people to think carefully about non-essential travel, and while restrictions on travel may sometimes be an option and necessary for hotspot areas, we are not about to impose restrictions on the whole of the country.\n\n\"We are not about the shut down the whole economy or halt the remobilisation of the NHS.\n\n\"And apart from the October holidays, we are not proposing to close schools even partially.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon refused to be drawn on what specific measures are being considered, but said her statement would address whether they would need to be imposed Scotland-wide or more locally.\n\nShe said she would \"set out the rationale\" and scientific basis for any decisions in her speech to MSPs.\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said any further restrictions would need to be supported by further action to safeguard jobs and businesses.\n\nMr Ross said: \"There hasn't been a single policy from the SNP anywhere near as ambitious as what (UK Chancellor) Rishi Sunak has delivered.\n\n\"All the SNP have done is try to pass the buck back to the UK government. So far, they've given businesses and people fearful of losing their jobs nothing but empty words.\n\n\"The money is there for the SNP to act. We heard this week the £500m Growth Scheme delivered half of the promised funding. The missing millions should be delivered to businesses now, this week, before it's too late.\"", "Doctors are being told to \"think carefully\" before ordering any tests for their patients, amid shortages caused by a supply chain failure at a major diagnostics company.\n\nSwiss pharmaceutical firm Roche said problems with a move to a new warehouse had led to a \"very significant\" drop in its processing capacity.\n\nA spokesman said Covid-19 tests would be prioritised.\n\nBut the backlog could affect tests including for cancer and heart disease.\n\nOne NHS trust in the south west has already advised its GPs to stop all non-urgent blood tests.\n\nA memo seen by the BBC, sent to clinicians within a large hospital trust in London, said leaders were \"preparing for a sustained disruption\".\n\n\"We urgently need all clinical teams to only send tests that are absolutely essential for immediate patient care, delaying testing where possible,\" it said.\n\nThyroid and cortisol tests were unavailable, while certain cholesterol, liver function and inflammation tests were \"severely restricted\".\n\nIn a statement, Roche said: \"We deeply regret that there has been a delay in the dispatch of some products.\n\n\"We are prioritising the dispatch of Covid-19 PCR [diagnostic] and antibody tests and doing everything we can to ensure there is no impact on the supply of these to the NHS.\"\n\nIt did not comment on the impact on other specific tests including for kidney, liver and thyroid function, sepsis and infection.\n\nDr Tom Lewis, lead clinician for pathology at North Devon District Hospital, said his hospital's trust had sent out communications that all non-urgent blood tests in the community should be stopped.\n\nWithout rationing these non-urgent tests, he said, they would run out of swabs in \"three to four days\".\n\nEven with rationing, essential equipment could run short by next week, he said.\n\nA scientist at a major London hospital's lab said they had already stopped doing thyroid tests, and expected an important test of liver function, and another for inflammation, to run out within the day.\n\nMany of the London labs are supplied by Roche, he said, with reagents - substances used to analyse test results - proving a particular problem.\n\nAllan Wilson, president of the Institute of Biomedical Science, said if the problem continued for days \"it probably will have minimal impact, but if it's weeks then yes it could have a considerable impact on our ability to deliver tests,\" across a whole range of conditions in the UK.\n\nThe main issue appears to be with the supply of reagents - used to detect the presence of a substance whether that's pregnancy hormones, blood glucose or coronavirus.\n\nBecause these have such wide application, the number of different diagnostic tests that could be affected is vast.\n\nIf you go to your GP with a hormonal imbalance, chest infection or sexually-transmitted infection (STI), your test will end up being processed in the lab using these materials.\n\nIf you're admitted to hospital, you will have your electrolytes tested again relying on the same kind of materials. And your organ function may also be monitored in the same way.\n\nKit supplied by Roche is crucial in testing the health of your liver, heart and kidneys.\n\nThey also supply antibodies which are used in cancer diagnosis.\n\nFor NHS trusts which use the company as their main supplier of these types of diagnostic equipment, the work of whole departments could be at risk.\n\nRoche initially told trusts it could take more than a fortnight to resolve the problem.\n\nBut a spokesperson later said they were confident there would be \"significant improvements by the weekend\" and that they would be \"well on the way to resolution by the end of next week\".\n\nThe company is one of the main suppliers of diagnostic testing equipment and materials in the UK.\n\nThe affected warehouse in West Sussex is Roche's only distribution centre in the UK and covers the whole country.\n\nIn September it moved from another warehouse in East Sussex as part of its Brexit preparations, the BBC understands.\n\nIt is \"not a problem with the volume of product available\" but a logistical issue affecting their ability to distribute it, a spokesperson said.\n\nDr Lewis said perhaps most concerning was the shortage of electrolyte tests supplied by Roche, since these were \"the key test\" for critically ill patients, as well as being extremely commonly used by GPs to check people's medications were safe.\n\nOne virologist in the Midlands tweeted that her service had not received Hepatitis C testing kits, and was now running short.\n\nMaterials used in cancer diagnostics could also be affected.\n\nIn a letter sent to NHS trusts, seen by the BBC, Roche said: \"In September we moved from our old warehouse to a new automated warehouse capable of much higher volumes.\n\n\"However, during the transition we encountered some unforeseen issues and a very significant drop in our processing capacity. Since then we have worked around the clock to prioritise and manage orders as well as increase this capacity\".\n\nThe letter went on to advise local NHS services to \"activate [their] local contingency plans\" and \"look to prioritise essential services only\".\n\nBut one clinician pointed out that local contingency plans often involve sending tests to a nearby lab, which in this case might also be affected.\n\nAn NHS spokesperson said:\"Roche has alerted hospitals to an issue with their supply chain, and they will be working urgently to resolve this issue.\"\n\nHave you been affected by any issues around testing? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "An artist's impression showing the memorial in its proposed location\n\nPlans for a Holocaust memorial next to Parliament would create a \"trophy site\" for terrorists, the former independent reviewer of terror laws has warned.\n\nThe memorial has been proposed for Victoria Tower Gardens on Millbank.\n\nBut a planning inquiry has been told by Lord Carlile that the landmark would be a \"self-evident terrorism risk\".\n\nThe Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) said it was confident the site would be secure.\n\nThe plan was previously rejected by Westminster City Council, but the final decision will be made by the government following the public inquiry.\n\nHowever, the plans have significant support from more than 170 MPs and peers, including Housing and Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick.\n\nAnd last week, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer told the Jewish Chronicle the memorial was \"vital\" in order to educate future generations about the Holocaust.\n\nAn online planning inquiry into the plans began on Tuesday.\n\nIn his written evidence to the inquiry, Lord Carlile said: \"From my extensive experience of observing, analysing and discussing terrorism issues with front-line practitioners, I have absolutely no doubt that the proposed site raises a clear - indeed self-evident - terrorism risk.\n\n\"I give this warning with regret, but with total conviction. This would be a threat to the public, and also a potential threat to Parliament.\"\n\nThe project features 23 large bronze fin structures and an underground learning centre.\n\nIt was announced in 2016 by then Prime Minister David Cameron, who said it would be dedicated to the six million Jewish men, women and children and other victims murdered by the Nazis.\n\nHowever, several senior Jewish figures have also voiced their opposition to the location of the memorial, while the Royal Parks said it would have a \"significant harmful impact\" on the area.\n\nLord Carlile QC said the issue was personal to him.\n\n\"I have a strong interest in this,\" he told the BBC.\n\n\"Many of my close relatives were exterminated in the Holocaust. My half-sister's mother was murdered in Auschwitz.\n\n\"I am absolutely determined that this should be remembered properly. I just feel that this isn't the right place for it.\"\n\nThe proposed plans feature 23 large bronze fin structures and an underground learning centre\n\nHe added: \"I know - indeed I believe everybody knows - that the Houses of Parliament are an iconic target for terrorists.\n\n\"This site is cheek by jowl with the Houses of Parliament.\n\n\"This site would also be, potentially, a target for right-wing extremists. It seems to be foolish for these two iconic places to be on the same broad site.\"\n\nHe added: \"International terrorists usually want to make a splash. Having a site which combines the Houses of Parliament and the new British Holocaust memorial seems to me to be asking for trouble.\"\n\nA spokesman for the MHCLG said: \"We are fully aware of the security implications associated with this site and we have been advised on measures to mitigate risks.\n\n\"The memorial will stand as a reminder to all in parliament, and the whole nation, of our responsibility to remain vigilant against intolerance and bigotry.\"\n\nIn addition to Lord Carlile's security concerns, a group of 42 Holocaust academics raised concerns that the centre would portray Britain as \"the ultimate saviour of the Jews\".\n\nIn a joint letter to the inquiry led by Dr Hannah Holtschneider of the University of Edinburgh, they said: \"Situating the UK Holocaust memorial next to the Houses of Parliament is likely to create a celebratory narrative of the British government's responses to the Jewish catastrophe during the Nazi era and beyond.\"\n\nThe project has government backing as well as support from the opposition benches.\n\nSir Keir told the Jewish Chronicle: \"The fight against intolerance and prejudice in our society, and the stain of anti-Semitism, goes on.\n\n\"So I offer my wholehearted support to the Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre and its placement next to the heart of our democracy.\"\n\nCommunities Secretary Mr Jenrick said in February the government remained \"implacably committed\" to the construction of the memorial.\n\nHe said it would ensure \"future generations never forget\".\n\nKaren Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said the project was important to preserve the stories of survivors of the Holocaust as well as the stories of the six million \"whose voices we will never hear\".\n\nThe works are being led by the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dominic Raab \"considering further action\" over Uighur Muslims\n\nDominic Raab has not ruled out boycotting the Beijing Winter Olympic Games over the treatment of the Uighur Muslims by the Chinese government.\n\nThe foreign secretary said it was his \"instinct to separate sport from diplomacy and politics\" but that there \"comes a point where that might not be possible\".\n\nHe said there had been \"egregious human rights abuses\" against the group.\n\nChina has faced growing accusations over its treatment of the Uighurs.\n\nIt is believed the government has detained up to one million of the population in \"re-education camps\" in the Xinjiang region.\n\nThere are also claims it has carried out the forced sterilisations of Uighur women.\n\nIn July, Mr Raab accused China of \"gross\" human rights abuses against the population and said he would not rule out taking sanctions against the country.\n\nBut the Chinese Ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, said the accusations were baseless and that Uighurs \"enjoy peaceful, harmonious coexistence with other ethnic groups of people\".\n\nMr Raab was appearing at the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and was asked about what the UK was doing to combat persecution of Uighur Muslims.\n\nHe said: \"In the UK, our concerns can only be growing about the reports of what's happening in Xinjinag and we would want to work very closely with our international partners to give the most powerful message, whether it is in the UN... or whether it is in applying sanctions.\n\n\"We do need to look at what action to take. The concerns of what's happening to the Uighurs, the detention, the mistreatment, the forced sterilisation, is something that we cannot just turn away from.\"\n\nThe foreign secretary said the UK needed to \"call them out [and] hold China to account\", adding: \"We need to be making the point to China, as a country that rightly has expectations to be treated as a leading member of the international community, that this is at odds with the responsibilities that come with being a leading member of the international community.\"\n\nAsked by fellow Conservative MP Alicia Kearns whether boycotting the Winter Games in 2022 would send a strong message, Mr Raab said: \"Generally speaking my instinct is to separate sport from diplomacy and politics but there comes a point where that may not be possible.\n\n\"I would say, let's gather the evidence, let's work with international partners, let's consider it further in the round with further action we need to take.\"\n\nThe chair of the committee, Conservative Tom Tugenhadt, also asked Mr Raab whether he would encourage the Duke of Cambridge whether to attend on behalf of the British government.\n\nThe foreign secretary said that decision would be \"part of a wider process\" and he would look at it \"very closely and carefully\".", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Denis Villeneuve's Dune is the latest Hollywood blockbuster to have its release date delayed.\n\nThe Warner Bros sci-fi epic featuring a star-studded cast including Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya was due for release in December.\n\nThe premiere has now been pushed back to October 2021, according to Variety.\n\nWarner Bros has also delayed The Batman, now due in March 2022, but the company has brought forward Matrix 4 to December 2021.\n\nThe Batman, starring Robert Pattinson, was set for release on 1 October 2021, so would have clashed with the new release date for Dune.\n\nThe Matrix 4 was originally due out in May this year but was postponed to April 2022. It's now coming just over three months earlier, taking the slot intended for Black Adam, the DC Comics movie starring Dwayne Johnson.\n\nThat film has been taken off the schedule altogether, as has Minecraft: The Movie, which was due to open in March next year.\n\nMoving The Matrix 4 to December next year will also allow The Batman to hold the blockbuster limelight the following spring.\n\nThe Keanu Reeves action/sci-fi franchise is also thought to have completed most of its shooting before the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of the world's movie production, including The Batman.\n\nThe Matrix's next outing has been brought forward\n\nThe Batman re-started principal photography at the start of September but had to shut down again when a member of the production team tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nSome media outlets reported it was Robert Pattinson, although that has never been confirmed.\n\nHollywood studios have been deterred from putting out their major releases due to the pandemic but cinema chains had been banking on these films to draw back audiences.\n\nCineworld has confirmed plans to temporarily close its theatres in the UK and US due to a lack of new releases. The Regal chain followed suit, while Odeon and Vue have shared their concerns over the situation.\n\nThe Odeon will open a quarter of its cinemas only at weekends.\n\nThe changes announced by Odeon and Cineworld come after the release of the new James Bond film was delayed again.\n\nThe premiere of No Time To Die had already been moved from April to November because of the pandemic.\n\nRobert Mitchell, director of theatrical insights at Gower Street Analytics, said: \"Bond was really the one that UK exhibitors were really relying on more than any.\"\n\nThe film's star Daniel Craig told Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show that \"this thing is just bigger than all of us\".\n\n\"We want to release the movie at the same time all around the world and this isn't the right time. So fingers crossed 2 April is going to be our date.\"\n\nMeanwhile the British Film Institute (BFI) has said it is \"deeply concerned\" about the challenges facing the cinema industry.\n\nNo Time to Die, starring Daniel Craig as James Bond, will now be released in 2021\n\nBen Roberts, the BFI's chief executive, warned the impact of the release date delays and closures would be felt across the whole sector.\n\nHe added: \"The BFI will continue to work with the distribution and exhibition sector over this difficult time.\n\n\"However, many cinemas across the UK are still open and welcoming audiences. The government-backed Culture Recovery Fund is giving vital support to struggling independent cinemas in England.\"\n\nMr Roberts reminded customers independent films are still being released in cinemas.\n\nOn Tuesday, Showcase Cinemas said it would be keeping its UK cinemas open, after resuming business in July.\n\n\"We were delighted to start reopening our cinemas back in July, and are committed to keeping them open,\" said Mark Barlow, Showcase's UK general manager said.\n\nFilm producer Rebecca O'Brien, known best for her collaborations with director Ken Loach, told Radio 4's Today programme she thought Cineworld's decision to close its screens and put at risk the jobs of 5,500 employees in the UK alone was a \"cynical\" move.\n\n\"They demonstrate here that they don't have the best duty of care to their employees and that they don't really care,\" she added.\n\n\"The cinemas that are open have made it very possible [for audiences to return] and cinemas shouldn't just be going for the fast buck with the Bonds.\"\n\nIt is hoped that the Cineworld cinemas will be able to reopen next year, with staff being asked to accept redundancy in the hope of rejoining the company when theatres open again.\n\nHollywood had hoped Christopher Nolan's blockbuster Tenet would entice customers back into cinemas after months of closures.\n\nCineworld chief executive Mooky Greidinger said it had been \"very successful internationally and the movie will reach something like $300m gross in the international market... but I would say also the studios have their side of the story, the investment today of the movies is huge\".\n\nMr Greidinger also pointed to the fact that cinemas in Los Angeles and New York, the two biggest movie-going markets in the US, remain largely closed due to the pandemic, putting studios off releasing films.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "John McAfee has been charged with failing to file tax returns for four years\n\nAnti-virus software entrepreneur John McAfee has been arrested in Spain and faces extradition to the US where he has been charged with tax evasion.\n\nProsecutors say he failed to file tax returns for four years, despite earning millions from consulting work, speaking engagements, crypto-currencies and selling the rights to his life story.\n\nNone of the income is connected with the software firm which bears his name.\n\nMr McAfee has not publicly commented on the charges.\n\nIf convicted, he could face up to 30 years in prison.\n\nIn a statement the US Justice Department said Mr McAfee allegedly evaded tax liability by having his income paid into bank accounts and cryptocurrency exchange accounts in the names of nominees. As a result, it is alleged, he failed to file any tax returns from 2014 to 2018.\n\nHe is also accused of concealing assets, including a yacht and real estate property, in the names of others.\n\nThe charges were announced shortly after the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealed that it had brought civil charges against Mr McAfee.\n\nThe government regulator alleges that Mr McAfee made over $23m (£17.7m) by \"leveraging his fame\" and recommending seven cryptocurrency offerings between 2017 and 2018, which allegedly turned out to be \"essentially worthless\", without disclosing that he was paid to do so.\n\nThe SEC is seeking to impose a civil penalty on him, and disgorge him of any \"allegedly ill-gotten gains\", with interest. It also wants to permanently ban him from serving as an officer or director of any listed company, or any company which files reports to the SEC.\n\nIn addition, the SEC has charged Mr McAfee's bodyguard, Jimmy Watson, with aiding and abetting the sale of digital currencies, along with other allegations.\n\nNeither he nor Mr McAfee have commented publicly on the charges.\n\nMr McAfee is a controversial figure in the technology sector. He came to prominence in the 1980s when he founded a company that released the first commercial anti-virus software - McAfee VirusScan - and helped spark a multi-billion dollar industry.\n\nAlthough that business has since been sold to Intel, he still develops cyber-security products of his own.\n\nThe entrepreneur, who was born in the UK, also launched unsuccessful bids to become the Libertarian Party's candidate for the presidential elections in 2016 and 2020.\n\nMr McAfee has previously expressed his disdain for taxes, tweeting last year that he hadn't filed tax returns for eight years because \"taxation is illegal.\"\n\nLast year he was also briefly detained in the Dominican Republic for allegedly bringing weapons into the country.\n\nIn 2012, Mr McAfee made headlines after Belize police began investigating the death of his neighbour, Florida businessman Gregory Faull, and named Mr McAfee as a \"person of interest\".\n\nMr McAfee left the country after the death, saying he feared for his own safety, but said he had \"no connection whatsoever\" with the killing.\n• None Security guru McAfee says he was hacked", "A presenter of a new documentary about slavery has rejected the idea of selling art and artefacts with links to the trade, to compensate descendants.\n\n\"I don't think the sensible way to achieve reparation is to sell off national heritage,\" Afua Hirsch said.\n\n\"I want people to see it and engage with it. The more accessible it can be, the more it can be used to educate.\"\n\nThe writer and broadcaster is fronting Enslaved with actor Samuel L Jackson. The series starts on BBC Two on Sunday.\n\nSamuel L Jackson and Afua Hirsch both discovered their roots on the show\n\nHirsch, who writes a column for the Guardian and penned the book Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, told The Radio Times: \"I'm not about destroying history at all. I want people to see it and engage with it.\n\n\"But I do feel quite critical that until now these things have been held in a way that neither educates nor enlightens us about our colonial history.\"\n\nShe was responding to a question about the National Trust, which has identified 93 properties with connections to colonialism and historic slavery. Hirsch said she applauded the organisation, but that their collections should be used to tell a more complete version of history.\n\nShe added on Twitter that the interview \"left out the part where I said the amount owed in reparations MONUMENTALLY exceeds the amount that could be raised by selling off National Trust collections\".\n\nHirsch, who was born in Norway but grew up in the UK, added that the debate about the legacy of slavery was \"not about beating ourselves up, it's about understanding how we got here\".\n\nEnslaved used new diving technology to locate and examine sunken slave ships in the UK, the Caribbean and Florida, retrieving artefacts such as a large ivory tusk 45 miles off the coast of Devon. The four-part CBC/Epix series has already been broadcast in the US.\n\nThe transatlantic slave trade saw European countries including the UK traffic around 12 million people from West Africa to the Americas between the 16th and 19th Centuries.\n\nHirsch also filmed with Jackson in Elmina, Ghana, one of the major slave trading posts in what was then known as the African Gold Coast.\n\nShe added that history taught in British schools should acknowledge the country's role in the slave trade rather than just celebrate its abolition.\n\nIt is not compulsory for schools to teach about the slave trade, but teachers can choose to include it when covering British history from 1745-1901 at Key Stage 3, for pupils aged 11-14.\n\nFollow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Can the government see its way to a greener future?\n\nA huge breakthrough in climate policy was signalled this week when China announced it will reduce its emissions to net zero by 2060.\n\nIt's a potentially game-changing leap, following in the footsteps of the UK's existing 2050 net zero target.\n\nBut promises are easy, actions are more challenging - and the UK has been steadily slipping from its climate targets.\n\nIt's consistently promised tougher policies for the future, but for a few years, Britain's long-term climate strategy has lain buried in fog.\n\nWe know the net zero carbon destination point, but we can't yet see how the government intends to get there.\n\nAt last, in a contribution to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) on Thursday, the prime minister did briefly illuminate several paths towards carbon Nirvana.\n\nBut they're only tantalising pointers to the direction of travel, when a full, clear properly funded roadmap is urgently needed.\n\nMr Johnson speaking this week to the UN General Assembly\n\nIn previous years, climate policy was typically held up in different government departments.\n\nBut environmentalists say key policies are now stuck in a Downing Street logjam awaiting sign-off from the prime minister himself.\n\nIt prompts John Sauven from Greenpeace to plead: \"Some of the ideas the government is proposing are really impressive – but the prime minister needs to resolve disputes within government on environmental policies. Now is the time for him to lead.\"\n\nNo 10 insists that deadlines for decisions on climate and the environment will be met in key policy areas like those in the long list below:\n\nThe National Infrastructure Strategy will lay out plans for government to spend £100bn on big projects.\n\nPast spending might have been dominated by new roads, but the government has gone quiet over its £27bn roads programme.\n\nNew roads will increase emissions, and the Covid experience suggests some of the roads cash might be more wisely invested in broadband instead.\n\nRadical ideas are under discussion for redesigning city centres, and for providing new electricity networks that’ll be needed to power electric vehicles (EVs).\n\nEmissions from transport remain high, but Mr Johnson is pinning his hopes on EVs. He told UNGA he'd spring forward the phase-out date for diesel and petrol cars.\n\nIt's thought 2030 will be the new date, with plug-in hybrids allowed until 2035 - although that's still in the fog.\n\nTransport Secretary Grant Shapps accepts that overall car use must also fall because even battery-powered cars contribute to pollution. But that will need some behaviour change, which is against the PM's instincts.\n\nOn aviation, the Citizens' Assembly UK said people would support a tax on frequent fliers.\n\nThat would be truly radical, but Mr Shapps and Mr Johnson hope clean technology will allow travellers to escape guilt-free to the sunshine.\n\nThere are planning issues in transport, too. How does the government stop housebuilders building in places where people need their car to get a pint of milk?\n\nHeat is a Cinderella problem – more than a third of UK carbon emissions are created by heat production.\n\nMinisters are being pressed to announce a date when gas home boilers will be phased out.\n\nIndustries want incentives for low-carbon heat, and Mr Johnson's UN remarks suggest he has been persuaded by the well-funded lobby trumpeting the role of hydrogen in heating and some transport, although that looks expensive.\n\nThe nuclear giant EDF is suggesting that nukes might be harnessed to generate heat, but there's scepticism about this.\n\nThe government is also under pressure to stop buildings being demolished where possible, because new building materials create a lot of carbon emissions.\n\nMr Johnson told UNGA the UK could become the \"Saudi Arabia of wind\".\n\nOffshore wind no longer needs subsidy but progress is being delayed by a host of other factors, including their impact on birds, or fishing. It does need help.\n\nTo the dismay of some green campaigners, Mr Johnson also committed himself to nuclear power – although it's not clear if that means the behemoth Sizewell C, or multiples of mini-nukes called SMRs.\n\nPerhaps we'll have both. But neither will happen unless the PM agrees government-backed funding.\n\nThe PM also declared himself for \"evangelist\" to the carbon capture technology that catches CO2 emissions from industry, albeit at a heavy cost. He said he'd previously been sceptical. How will this be funded?\n\nUnder international climate rules, each nation is obliged to produce its own decarbonisation plan. Mr Johnson is urging nations to join the UK in doing that on 12 December, the fifth anniversary of the successful Paris climate conference. But what will Britain's revised target be?\n\nIn the past, the Treasury has often blocked climate policies, but since the net zero law was passed, observers say it's been generally supportive. It needs to lay out how much the many commitments will cost.\n\nCampaigners say it should go further, with a \"green\" reform of tax policy – especially on gas.\n\nThe chancellor has earmarked £3bn for energy efficiency - £2bn of it for households. It's a huge job-creating measure, and the fund was due to be spent by the end of March.\n\nBut the insulation industry, which shrank when ministers previously withdrew funding, can't now absorb all that cash. So the scheme is likely to be extended. Experts demand a 10-year funding plan.\n\nThe PM told UNGA a \"green industrial revolution\" would create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and quipped the UK \"would never be lagging on lagging\" (insulation).\n\nWhile the PM was hailing the UK's green leadership, he's been accused of hypocrisy at home because he's refused to ban the burning of peat moorland and the sale of peat for gardens.\n\nPeat is the biggest store of carbon in the UK, but policies to protect it have been delayed after protests from country landowners.\n\nNearly two years ago the government published its outline Environment Bill, hailing it a flagship of legislation. But the PM has left this flagship becalmed in the Commons without a breath of Parliamentary time for nearly 200 days.\n\nThe Bill will set targets for improving air, water, waste and wildlife. It will also create an Office of Environmental Protection to replace the European courts.\n\nBut until it's passed, that office doesn't exist, so, on Brexit day, British citizens will lose their ability to appeal if their government breaks environmental laws.\n\nRuth Chambers from the pressure group Greener UK has lost patience. \"Nature is in freefall,\" she says. \"The government’s promises look hollow.\"\n\nThe Bill sets out the framework for UK farm policy after Brexit. The Lords are insisting it bans imports of chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef into the UK.\n\nThe National Farmers Union (NFU) president, Minette Batters, said allowing these imports would be \"morally bankrupt\".\n\nThe government has repeatedly said it doesn’t want to import those goods – but insists it can't have its hands tied in trade negotiations.\n\nFarming is a major source of carbon emissions, and the government has been wrestling with policies that will cut CO2 from the land whilst also supporting farm businesses and restoring wildlife.\n\nThis is an issue of dizzying complexity – especially for farmers facing the shock of leaving the EU.\n\nMinisters will be under pressure to risk riling their own supporters to eat less red meat to protect the planet - as well as their own health.\n\nThis long list – by no means comprehensive - demonstrates how seriously many departments are addressing what used to be considered a peripheral problem – the environment. It also reveals how difficult it will be to enact policies.\n\nChris Stark from the Climate Change Committee told me: \"We're in an unprecedented time.\n\n\"We look to the PM for some leadership… it's desperately needed. But this feels like a very important and exciting period.\"\n\nMr Stark is optimistic about the political outcome of next year's Glasgow climate conference.\n\nBut he admits a caveat: we've got climate disruption with just one degree of warming so far, and the way things are looking we'e still heading towards a highly dangerous three degrees.", "Donald Trump has returned to the White House after being treated by medics for coronavirus. Before leaving Walter Reed medical centre for home, he first drove by his supporters, who had gathered outside. So what do people make of his actions?\n\nScott Pio says Trump is showing love to his supporters by visiting them Image caption: Scott Pio says Trump is showing love to his supporters by visiting them\n\nScott Pio, a 36-year-old software engineer who lives in Loudoun County, Virginia, was one of those who gathered outside of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to show their support for the president.\n\nPio applauded the president’s decision to go for a drive and does not think it was a risky move. The president, he says, ventured outside of the gates of the military hospital because he wanted “to show his supporters love for being out there\".\n\nPio adds: “He wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t really care about the people who are supporting him.”\n\nNeil Melton says Trump shows a 'winning spirit' even when ill Image caption: Neil Melton says Trump shows a 'winning spirit' even when ill\n\nNeil Melton, a construction-project manager who lives in Prairie Village, Kansas, says he appreciates the way Trump has been candid about his experience with coronavirus.\n\n“He’s trying to be one-on-one with the American people, and he’s trying to show: ‘Hey, I’m just like you.’’”\n\nAt the same time, says Melton, he likes to see the president project strength – such as when he walked to the top of a White House staircase and stood at a balcony and took off his mask.\n\n“People want to see that winning spirit,” says Melton. “They don’t want to live with this Covid lifestyle forever.”\n\nMelton adds: “He wants to show some symbolism: ‘Hey, we can come out of this.’”\n\nStevie Storck says Trump is not taking the virus seriously Image caption: Stevie Storck says Trump is not taking the virus seriously\n\n“After three days, he was saying: ‘You don’t need to be afraid of it,’” says Stevie Storck of Windsor, Pennsylvania.\n\nShe lives on a block with Trump signs (“Make Liberals Cry Again”), and she says people in her community do not always follow public-health guidelines.\n\nPeople are sometimes cavalier about wearing masks in the post office and in shops, she says, and she is concerned they will be emboldened by the president’s actions.\n\n“The misinformation he spread about the virus is a big danger to our community,” she says. “He’s just furthering that attitude of not taking it seriously.”", "Credit Suisse has apologised after a report that Tidjane Thiam, then its chief executive, left his chairman's birthday party when a black performer dressed as a janitor danced on stage.\n\nThe banking giant said in a statement: \"We are sorry for any offence caused.\"\n\nThe New York Times said last November's Studio 54-themed party also included chairman Urs Rohner's friends dancing on stage wearing afro wigs.\n\nMr Thiam revived the bank's fortunes but was ousted this year.\n\nHe left in February after it emerged that two former employees of the bank had been put under surveillance, although Mr Thiam denied knowledge of the operations.\n\nCredit Suisse stressed that the birthday party was neither organised by the company nor its chairman, Mr Rohner.\n\nThe bank stressed its commitment to diversity, saying it had put in place \"a number of initiatives to improve ethnic diversity across the bank\".\n\nIt said it had signed up to the UK's Business in the Community Race at Work Charter, which requires firms to adopt a zero-tolerance policy towards racial harassment or bullying, and in the US it has a programme to hire, retain and advance black talent.\n\n\"Credit Suisse is strongly committed to equality, diversity and supporting all our employees,\" the investment bank said.\n\n\"As a company, we are proud to be a geographically and culturally diverse group, and we strive to further strengthen this culture, which supports all our colleagues.\"\n\nThe Guardian reported that a friend of Mr Thiam said the former executive had not received a personal apology.\n\nMr Thiam could not be reached for comment.\n\nMr Thiam, who ran Credit Suisse between 2015 and February this year, has had an illustrious and varied career. The French Ivorian studied in France and worked in management consultancy before serving as Ivory Coast's Minister of Planning and Development, until a military coup led to him being placed under house arrest.\n\nHe later became boss of financial services firms Aviva Europe and Prudential before joining Credit Suisse five years ago. In doing so he became the only black executive at the top of a major global bank.\n\nMr Thiam, who also holds French citizenship, has appeared on Desert Island Discs as the first ever black chief executive of a top 100 UK company.\n\nHe is on record saying he was heavily courted for his role at Credit Suisse and had strong backing from Mr Rohner.\n\nThat backing was withdrawn along with that of the rest of the board after the spying scandal, although some leading shareholders retained their support.", "London Ambulance Service sent five ambulances to the school\n\nThirteen children at a north London school were taken to hospital when they fell ill after eating what they believed were \"sweets\".\n\nThe pupils from La Sainte Union Catholic School, Highgate, were taken by ambulance to hospital for treatment just after midday.\n\nPolice said the sweets were believed to contain tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), an active ingredient of cannabis.\n\nInvestigations are under way to establish the quantity in each sweet.\n\nNo-one is believed to be seriously unwell and the children's parents have been informed.\n\nNo arrests have been made but inquiries have begun to establish what happened.\n\nThe school, which is a girls' Roman Catholic secondary, has not been evacuated.\n\nA spokesman for the school said: \"The students became ill after eating what they believed were sweets.\n\n\"The contents of what the students ate and how they came into possession of them is being investigated by the police.\n\n\"We have made parents aware of this incident.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "MPs have backed the latest stage of a bill to allow undercover agents to commit crimes on operations.\n\nThe government says the legislation will give a \"sound legal footing\" for those who work to \"protect the public\".\n\nBut backbenchers are divided over the implications for human rights and civil liberties, and many have concerns over if the right safeguards are in place.\n\nFormer Tory minister David Davis has warned the bill could \"impinge on innocent people\".\n\nDuring a debate on the bill, shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said Labour would not oppose it at this stage.\n\nBut he said the party would \"seek to improve [it] on the vital issue of safeguards, so the public can have confidence in the process and our law enforcement bodies can carry out that vital work of keeping us all safe\".\n\nHowever, a number of Labour MPs broke party orders to abstain on the vote including former leader Jeremy Corbyn and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell who voted against the bill.\n\nSpeaking in the Commons, another Labour MP Apsana Begum said: \"There is a grave, serious and very real danger [the bill] could end up providing informers and agents with a license to kill.\"\n\nBBC home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani said the legislation would explicitly authorise MI5, the police, the National Crime Agency and other agencies that use informants or undercover agents to commit a specific crime as part of an operation.\n\nThe law will require MI5 officers and others to show the crime is \"necessary and proportionate\", but security officials will not say which crimes they will consider authorising, as it could lead to terrorists and other serious criminals working out who is undercover.\n\nHowever, the legislation stresses agencies must not breach the Human Rights Act, which requires the government to protect life.\n\nA senior judge will report on how the power is used and there will be no role for the Crown Prosecution Service in reviewing the crimes.\n\nOpening the debate earlier on Monday, Home Office minister James Brokenshire said the bill would \"help keep our country safe\".\n\nHe said it would \"ensure operational agencies and public authorities have access to tools to keep us safe from terrorists, safe from serious organised crime groups and safe from those who wish to cause harm to our country and citizens\".\n\nAnd he also pointed to comments by the new director general of MI5, Ken McCallum, that claimed such operations had thwarted 27 terror attacks in the country since March 2017.\n\nBut a number of MPs from across the House raised concerns around safeguards to ensure agents would not be able to commit crimes such as murder or torture.\n\nTory MP Steve Baker said: \"For those of us who like the red meat of law and order, it has forced us to look inside the abattoir and we don't like what we see.\n\n\"I can't imagine ministers will be authorising killing or torture, but [that should be] on the face of the bill so the public can have confidence.\"\n\nLabour's Yvette Cooper, who chairs the Home Affairs Select Committee, also said the safeguards were \"very vague and very broad\", calling for them to be \"strengthened to get this legislation right\".\n\nThe bill will return to the Commons for its next stages on 15 October.", "The report found improvements were needed in the care of prisoners at risk of self-harm\n\nPrisoners in Swansea have made up to 300 protective clothing items a week for front-line healthcare staff.\n\nA recent visit by HM Inspectorate of Prisons found workshops had been adapted during the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nThis helped cut the number of inmates kept in their cells for long periods.\n\nInspectors said the number of men training as cleaners increased in response to enhanced levels of hygiene, with 33 bio-hazard cleans carried out in the prison by newly trained inmates.\n\nOverall the coronavirus-shortened scrutiny visit found HMP Swansea to be a \"well-led establishment that, despite some weakness, had overall made good progress\" since the start of the pandemic.\n\nIt follows some damning reports in recent years, including one which said the prison was \"not fit for purpose\" after failing to prevent eight suicides over six years, all by prisoners who had been in Swansea for less than a week.\n\nThe latest inspection reported two further suicides since the previous inspection in 2017 \"soon after the prisoners arrived\" and an action plan had been drawn up in response to recommendations by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman.\n\nSwansea was once one of the UK's most overcrowded jails and according to a report compiled in July, it remained the ninth most overcrowded.\n\nChief Inspector of Prisons Peter Clarke said while Swansea had \"progressed\", managers needed to establish \"appropriate oversight in the areas of self-harm prevention\".\n\nBut Mr Clarke said improvements were needed in the care of those at risk of self-harm.\n\nHe found the scale of mental health problems in Swansea was extremely high, affecting almost eight in 10 inmates, which has prompted the introduction of a new crisis team.\n\nThe report said outcomes were better for many prisoners at Swansea than at other local prisons\n\nThe Victorian jail, which opened in 1861, has seen 12 prisoners and 10 staff test positive for coronavirus since March, but there has not been a positive case in a prisoner since April.\n\nThe inspector said a \"good partnership\" with the local health board, Public Health Wales and the Welsh Government meant every symptomatic prisoner was tested for Covid-19.\n\nPrisoners were able to get out of their cells for about 90 minutes a day during the pandemic, with inspectors finding a far greater proportion were involved in \"purposeful activity\" than other prisons.\n\nEven in areas where social distancing was possible, most prisoners were not staying 2m apart. But some measures introduced in response to the pandemic had cut bullying, such as canteen orders being delivered to cells.\n\n\"We found that managers had made significant progress during the Covid-19 pandemic,\" said Mr Clarke.\n\n\"Appropriate priority was given to keeping prisoners in work, maintaining some limited face-to-face education and continuing sentence and risk management.\n\n\"Outcomes for many prisoners at Swansea were better than at other local prisons.\"\n\nThe Prison Service said HMP Swansea had \"played its part in the national effort\" to tackle coronavirus and added as \"restrictions are gradually easing, family visits have resumed\".", "The universities said the majority of its teaching will be done online until at least 30 October\n\nThe two main universities in Manchester are teaching online until \"at least\" the end of the month after a coronavirus outbreak among students.\n\nManchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and the University of Manchester (UM) said it was a \"collaborative decision\" with public health bosses and \"won't impact\" on teaching quality.\n\nIt comes after 1,700 students were told to self-isolate at MMU on 26 September.\n\nUM said the move was to \"protect the health\" of students and staff.\n\nFace-to-face teaching is also being suspended at the University of Sheffield after it saw its biggest rise in cases on Monday.\n\nManchester has the highest rate of infections in England with 561 cases per 100,000 of the population.\n\nThe University of Manchester said more than 1,000 students and 20 staff members have reported testing positive for the virus while the figure is understood to be over 500 at Manchester Metropolitan University.\n\nDavid Regan, the director of public health for Manchester, said: \"Clearly we need to introduce a contain approach with the universities just to manage transmission over the next three weeks.\"\n\nManchester has the highest rate of infections in England with 561 cases per 100,000 of the population\n\nThe universities said teaching will be done online until at least 30 October, but there will be a review on 23 October. Exceptions to the online teaching include accredited and professional programmes, and laboratory, clinical and practice-based subjects.\n\nThe University and College Union welcomed the move towards virtual learning but said Covid-19 outbreaks \"could have been prevented had the decision been taken earlier\".\n\n\"Hundreds of students that did not have to move into student accommodation are now self-isolating without their familiar support network,\" Martyn Moss, from the UCU said.\n\nAll teaching will be moved online at the University of Sheffield, with the exception of clinical teaching and research, from Friday until 19 October.\n\nA spokesperson said it would be \"working hard to resume these activities as soon as possible\".\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk", "Last updated on .From the section Cycling\n\nBritain's Geraint Thomas was forced to pull out of the Giro d'Italia because of a fractured hip.\n\nThe Ineos Grenadiers rider, 34, crashed just before the start of Monday's third stage after a drinks bottle became lodged under his front wheel.\n\nA scan on Monday was inconclusive but a second on Tuesday showed a fracture.\n\nWelshman Thomas completed Monday's stage but lost more than 12 minutes, effectively ending his hopes of winning the race.\n\n\"It's so frustrating. I'd put so much work in to this race,\" said Thomas, who won the Tour de France in 2018.\n\n\"I did everything I could and feel like I was in just as good, if not better, shape than when I won the Tour. I was feeling really good. So for it just to end like this is gutting.\n\n\"I woke up and wanted to start with the boys and at least help them go for stages over the next few days, but deep down I knew something wasn't right, so we went to get these extra scans.\n\n\"It does make the decision easier when there's a fracture in some ways, because obviously I don't want to do any more damage.\"\n\nThomas was among the favourites to win this year's Giro before his crash during the neutralised zone at the start of Monday's mountainous stage up to Mount Etna.\n\nHe appeared to be riding comfortably despite badly torn kit and landing on his hip.\n\nBut Thomas slipped back from the peloton about 25km from the end of the stage.\n\nIneos Grenadiers doctor Phil Riley said on Tuesday: \"Geraint had an MRI and a CT scan this morning which revealed a small undisplaced fracture in the lower part of the pelvis, which wasn't picked up on the X-rays yesterday.\n\n\"As a precaution, he will be withdrawn from the race as it's an injury that could easily be aggravated.\"\n\nWhat now for Thomas and Ineos?\n\nThomas' withdrawal is a major blow for Ineos, whose run of five successive Tour victories ended last month after defending champion Egan Bernal abandoned the race when he lost seven minutes to leaders on stage 15.\n\nIneos must now decide on a new leader for the rest of the Giro, with Tao Geoghegan Hart their highest-placed rider in the general classification at three minutes 19 seconds off the lead.\n\nFor Thomas himself, having to pull out of another Grand Tour is bitterly disappointing.\n\nIn the build-up to this year's Giro, he had spoken about his burning desire to address his \"unfinished business\" with the race, having been forced to withdraw in 2017 after another crash beyond his control.\n\nThomas missed this year's Tour in order to concentrate on the Giro and his preparations had gone well as he finished second at the Tirreno-Adriatico stage race and fourth in the Road World Championships time trial.\n\nHaving been denied another chance to win a second Grand Tour, Thomas must now heal from the latest in a long line of injuries and use this pain to fuel his determination to come back stronger next season.\n• None England star talks to Headliners about his battle with bulimia", "The number of people admitted to hospital with Covid-19 on one day has jumped by nearly a quarter in England.\n\nThere were 478 people admitted to hospital on Sunday - the largest daily figure since early June - up from 386.\n\nMore than two-thirds of those were in the North West, North East and Yorkshire.\n\nIt comes as a further 14,542 cases were confirmed across the whole of the UK on Tuesday. That daily figure has trebled in a fortnight.\n\nExtra restrictions have been introduced in many areas of the UK to try to contain the spread of the virus - including across the whole of Scotland and Northern Ireland.\n\nOn top of these national measures, parts of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and areas in the Midlands, Lancashire, Merseyside, West Yorkshire and the North East of England have seen additional rules imposed.\n\nBut Prof John Edmunds, who advises the government's coronavirus response as part of Sage, said more stringent national lockdown restrictions were needed to bring the pandemic under control.\n\nHe told BBC Newsnight local restrictions in the north of England had not been very effective, and the government's \"light tough\" measures were just \"delaying the inevitable\".\n\n\"We will at some point put very stringent measures in place because we will have to when hospitals start to really fill up,\" he said.\n\n\"Frankly, the better strategy is to put them in place now.\"\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon said new coronavirus restrictions would be announced on Wednesday - but it will not be another full lockdown.\n\nAnd households could be banned from mixing in Nottingham after a surge in cases, a city health official has said.\n\nThe BBC understands that the government will push ahead with a new \"three-tier\" approach to restrictions in local areas of England, in an effort to replace the patchwork of existing measures.\n\nUnder the system, local areas would be put under one of three levels of restrictions based on the number of cases per 100,000 people.\n\nHowever, the mayors in Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Manchester - where cases are soaring - said a \"more nuanced approach\" than this was needed.\n\nThe current restrictions \"are not working, confusing for the public and some, like the 10pm rule, are counter-productive\", they said, in a letter to the health secretary.\n\nThey are demanding more powers for local police and councils to try to address the rising infection rates \"based on local knowledge\".\n\n\"Our response should consider broader local impacts than absolute numbers of infections: impacts on jobs and business; effects on poverty and deprivation; and relative infection rates in different sections of the population,\" they said.\n\nAs always, we should be cautious about reading too much into one day's change.\n\nBut of all the measurements of Covid, hospital admissions are perhaps the most reliable and they had been rising quite gradually before the jump on Sunday.\n\nSadly, we should expect cases to continue rising.\n\nThis is the time of year when emergency admissions for respiratory illness do go up.\n\nIn a normal year, we can expect 1,000 admissions a day for flu and respiratory viruses by December.\n\nWhat we don't know is to what extent the normal illnesses are adding to this Covid total.\n\nThese new admissions mean about 3% of hospital beds are now occupied with Covid patients.\n\nThere are reports that hospitals, particularly in northern England, are very busy.\n\nBut elsewhere beds are free. The reduction in other services, from cancer care to routine operations, means bed occupancy levels are about a quarter lower than normal.\n\nHowever, unions would point out that a shortage of staff means there are not always the doctors and nurses available to care for patients.\n\nCases and hospital admissions have been rising sharply in cities in the north of England, but are substantially lower in the south.\n\nIn Manchester, where the rate of infection is 529 cases per 100,000 people, the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University have said they will teach online only until \"at least\" the end of the month. More than a thousand students in the city have already been told to self-isolate.\n\nFace-to-face teaching is also being suspended at the University of Sheffield, after the city's rate increased to 287 per 100,000.\n\nIn Liverpool the rate is 487 per 100,000 and in Newcastle Upon Tyne it is 435. There are 60 cases per 100,000 people in London, 46 in Bristol and 32 in Norwich.\n\nAcross the UK, the latest daily figures show a further 76 people have died within 28 days of testing positive.\n\nThat is a long way off the death tolls reached in April, but BBC medical editor Fergus Walsh said there was concern hospital admissions and eventually deaths would \"just keep rising\", unless coronavirus cases were brought under control in the north of England.\n\nIn total, nearly 2,800 patients are in hospital with Covid in England, compared with more than 17,000 at the epidemic's peak. A total of 2,783 Covid-19 patients spent Monday night in England's hospitals - the highest daily total since 25 June. There were also 349 patients in mechanical ventilation beds.\n\nThe latest hospital admissions figures, released for Sunday, show there were 478 new patients admitted - the highest daily figure since 3 June.\n\nIn Scotland, 262 people confirmed to have Covid-19 are in hospital - a rise of 44. In Wales, 92 admissions were recorded on the government's coronavirus dashboard - but that figure includes people who are suspected to have coronavirus, as well as those who have tested positive. There were no admissions in Northern Ireland.\n\nMeanwhile, the government won a vote on retaining the \"rule of six\" in England by 287 votes to 17.\n\nAmong the MPs who voted against it were 12 rebel Tories, one of whom called it a \"massive intrusion\" into people's lives that does not \"make sense\".\n\nThe prime minister's spokesman earlier described it as a \"sensible and helpful\" measure.", "The health secretary has said a technical glitch that saw nearly 16,000 Covid-19 cases go unreported in England \"should never have happened\".\n\nThe error meant that although those who tested positive were told about their results, their close contacts were not traced.\n\nBy Monday afternoon, around half of those who tested positive had yet to be asked about their close contacts.\n\nLabour said the missing results were \"putting lives at risk\".\n\nExperts advise that ideally contacts should be tracked down within 48 hours.\n\nThe technical error was caused by some Microsoft Excel data files exceeding the maximum size after they were sent from NHS Test and Trace to Public Health England.\n\nIt meant 15,841 cases between 25 September and 2 October were left out of the UK daily case figures.\n\nPHE said the error itself, discovered overnight on Friday, has been fixed, and outstanding cases had been passed on to tracers by 01:00 BST on Saturday.\n\nBut Health Secretary Matt Hancock told MPs the incident as a whole had not yet been resolved - with only 51% of those whose positive results were caught up in the glitch now reached by contact tracers.\n\nHe said it had \"not substantially changed\" the government's assessment of the epidemic, however, and had \"not impacted the basis on which decisions about local action were taken\".\n\nHe also said outbreak control in care homes, schools and hospitals had not been directly affected, as they do not rely on the data in question.\n\n\"This incident should never have happened. But the team have acted swiftly to minimise its impact,\" he added.\n\nThe BBC has confirmed the missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Microsoft's Excel software. Furthermore, PHE was to blame, rather than a third-party contractor.\n\nThe issue was caused by the way the agency brought together logs produced by the commercial firms paid to carry out swab tests for the virus.\n\nThey filed their results in the form of text-based lists, without issue.\n\nPHE had set up an automatic process to pull this data together into Excel templates so that it could then be uploaded to a central system and made available to the NHS Test and Trace team as well as other government computer dashboards.\n\nThe problem is that the PHE developers picked an old file format to do this - known as XLS.\n\nAs a consequence, each template could handle only about 65,000 rows of data rather than the one million-plus rows that Excel is actually capable of.\n\nAnd since each test result created several rows of data, in practice it meant that each template was limited to about 1,400 cases. When that total was reached, further cases were simply left off.\n\nLabour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said the missing results were \"putting lives at risk\".\n\nHe said the unreported cases meant as many as 48,000 contacts had not been traced and therefore not been isolating, with \"thousands blissfully unaware they've been exposed to Covid, potentially spreading this deadly virus\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Matt Hancock tells MPs the late reporting of test results was a “serious issue that is being investigated fully”.\n\nPaul Wells said the NHS Covid-19 app allowed him to \"carry on as normal\" even after his husband had uploaded a positive test result and been told to self-isolate.\n\n\"It's very frustrating to hear that processes or systems are not working correctly, especially with something that is high risk,\" he told BBC News.\n\n\"The knock-on effect is damaging to not only myself and my husband, but the ripple effect it has to family and friends and our neighbours.\"\n\nOn Monday afternoon, the government's coronavirus dashboard announced a further 12,594 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK, bringing the total number of cases in the UK to 515,571.\n\nAnother 19 people were reported to have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19.\n\nThe earlier technical error meant the daily case totals reported on the government's coronavirus dashboard over the past week have been lower than the true number.\n\nDaily figures for the end of the week were about 10,000 rather than the roughly 7,000 that had been reported.\n\nBBC analysis found the number of cases reported for the week to 1 October increased by 92.6% in the North West after taking in the missing tests - with similar rises reflected across England.\n\nThe increase, of 8,348 cases, is mostly down to the missing tests, but the figures also included some results which came back after 2 October.\n\nYou can look at the case numbers two ways: we normally count them on the date they're reported, which today would be 12,594.\n\nBut today's news has shown how reporting lags can skew those trends.\n\nIf you arrange the figures by the date the tests were taken, you can get a clearer picture.\n\nIn that analysis, we reached an average of 10,000 new cases a day towards the end of last week.\n\nThat's about double what it was a fortnight ago.\n\nIt's hard to say for sure what's happened since then, since it takes a few days for tests to be reported and for these figures to settle down.\n\nBut that pattern is consistent with other data: the number of people going into hospital, or official surveys and symptom trackers.\n\nThey all paint a picture of an epidemic that's growing - not doubling every week, but growing.\n\nThere's hope in some parts of the data that the pace of growth may be slowing slightly, but there's no evidence that it's shrinking.\n\nMr Hancock suggested that the error did not impact the introduction of local restrictions last week.\n\nHowever, Liverpool Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram said the measures brought in there were \"predicated on\" figures that were \"underestimated by a considerable sum\".\n\n\"We understand that there needed to be further restrictions because of those increases in transmission rates, but we've not received any of the scientific evidence that backs that up,\" he told the BBC.\n\n\"It seems that the restrictions were predicated on a false promise that the figures that we were provided with were the basis for the announcement.\"\n\nPHE data shows Liverpool has the second highest rate of infection in England, at 456.4 cases per 100,000 people in the week to 1 October, from 287.1 the week before. Knowsley in Merseyside, Newcastle, Nottingham, Leeds and Sheffield have also seen sharp rises.\n\nManchester has the highest rate of infection, at 495.6 cases per 100,000 people, from 223.2 the week before.\n\nThe BBC's Danny Savage said the head of public health in Manchester estimates the infection rate among the city's student population is as high as 3,000 cases per 100,000.\n\n\"We'll have to watch closely at what those figures are like in student populations across the country in areas with a high number of infection,\" he said.\n\nPHE said NHS Test and Trace has made sure there are enough contact tracers working, and is working with local teams to ensure they also have sufficient resources to be urgently able to contact all cases.\n\nThe number of call attempts is being increased from 10 to 15 over 96 hours.\n• None 1,980cases per day, on average, were missed in that time\n\nHave you recently tested positive? Have you been contacted by test and trace? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "As the new academic year begins at Cambridge, the university has exclusively revealed to the BBC that they have admitted a record number of 137 black UK students, the highest figure ever for the university and up 46 students on last year, which was also a record year.\n\nWhilst this is a step in the right direction for Cambridge, they admit there is still a way to go. BBC reporter Ashley John-Baptiste has followed three black students who started last year through what turned out to be quite an extraordinary year.", "Len McCluskey (pictured) has expressed concern about the direction the Labour Party is taking\n\nA meeting of the Unite union executive has decided to cut its affiliation money to the Labour Party by about 10%, BBC Newsnight understands.\n\nUnite is the Labour Party's single biggest donor, providing the party with millions in funding every year.\n\nBut there is anger in the union about Labour's direction under Sir Keir Starmer with a source saying he and his inner team were \"just not listening\".\n\nSir Keir said he enjoyed \"strong relations\" with Unite.\n\nThe party and the union would \"continue campaigning side-by-side and shoulder-to-shoulder\" on \"important\" issues facing workers, he added.\n\nUnite general secretary Len McCluskey was a major ally of the former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and is a stalwart of the party's Left. He is due to stand down as general secretary in 2022.\n\nAhead of the meeting of Unite's executive, he told Newsnight another cut in funding might happen if the party changed course too drastically under its new leader.\n\nHe said: \"I have no doubt if things start to move in different directions and ordinary working people start saying, 'Well, I'm not sure what Labour stand for,' then my activists will ask me, 'Why are we giving so much money'?\"\n\nHe went on to express dismay that Unite funds had been spent by Labour paying damages to whistle-blowers who contributed to a Panorama programme about Labour's handling of the anti-Semitism crisis.\n\nMr McCluskey said his executive was angry about the decision \"because they thought it was an absolute mistake and wrong to pay out huge sums of money to individuals who were suing the Labour Party based on the Panorama programme, when Labour's own legal people were saying that they would lose that case if it went to court. So we shouldn't have paid them anything.\"\n\nBut, when the payout was announced, Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner said it was a \"prudent move\" which was \"part of that healing process\" that the party needed.\n\nAnd, in a statement read out in the High Court, Labour said it unreservedly apologised and was determined to root out anti-Semitism in the party and the wider Labour movement.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the decision was \"for Unite as a union.\"\n\nThere is some frustration on the Labour left that Sir Keir ran for the leadership on the party's left but has quickly tacked to the centre since winning the contest in April this year.\n\nA Unite source said: \"Keir and his inner circle are just not listening.\n\n\"There's a lot of anger from the people who knock on the doors and man the phones. They don't want to be taken for granted.\"\n\nThe source went on to say that Mr McCluskey was likely to redirect the money to left-wing grassroots organisations to support a socialist programme, \"which he sees as vital to produce a Labour victory in 2024\".\n\nResponding to Mr McCluskey's comments, Sir Keir said: \"The decision was a decision for Unite as a union.\"\n\nHe added: \"I haven't spoken to Len in the last 24 hours but I speak to him on a regular basis. We've got a very good relationship with Unite and will continue to work with them.\"\n\nLast month, TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady told the BBC: \"Keir has had a really strong start. You only have to look at the opinion polls to see that.\n\n\"I hear Keir talking about decency, dignity. Those are really important values, along with people looking after each other.\"\n\nThe campaign to choose Mr McCluskey's successor begins next year.", "A PE teacher who \"just loves competing\" has broken the world record for the Over-50s at high jump.\n\nJulia Machin, from Burgess Hill, West Sussex, leapt 1.66m, beating the previous record by 5cm.\n\nShe said she still participates in sport because she enjoys it, adding: \"I consider records to be a bonus.\"", "Some tourism and hospitality businesses may never recover from the effects of more coronavirus restrictions, industry leaders have warned.\n\nThe first minister will announce any further Covid curbs in the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday.\n\nSome government advisers have backed the idea of a \"circuit breaker\" lockdown as a \"short, sharp shock\".\n\nAt her daily briefing Nicola Sturgeon said no final decisions had been taken but there would no return to lockdown.\n\nShe said schools would remain open, the remobilisation of the NHS would not be halted and there would be no nationwide restriction on travel.\n\nBut she did not rule out local travel limits or further controls on people meeting in bars or restaurants.\n\nStephen Leckie, the owner of the Crieff Hydro Hotel in Perthshire, said the developments made \"extremely harrowing reading\" for people working in hotels, restaurants, self-catering businesses or visitor attractions.\n\nHe told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme that the next three weeks - covering many schools' October break - was the last chance for these businesses to make money before the end of the year.\n\n\"Any form of travel restriction would in effect be a lockdown those in this industry,\" he said.\n\n\"If we had to close for the remainder of this month for example, we'd walk from the frying pan straight into the fire.\n\n\"From November for the next five months, this industry, these people, our businesses, would simply lose money and many just wouldn't reopen next year.\"\n\nMr Leckie, who also chairs the Scottish Tourism Alliance, said consumer confidence had been knocked and people were cancelling bookings every time there are reports of possible further Covid restrictions.\n\nHe added: \"If we were to lockdown this Friday, we have our rotas seven days in advance.\n\n\"We cannot simply say to our people - and there will be 700 people working this weekend across our company - we cannot simply say to them, 'Look we're locking down, we're not going to pay you, we don't need you to come to work'.\"\n\nBusinesses also face a \"mammoth amount of work\" in paying back deposits to people if all the bookings are cancelled, he said.\n\n\"Surely there must be other levers that we can pull in order to restrict the spread of this virus,\" he said.\n\n\"Surely the blanket travel restriction, or circuit breaker or lockdown, as we're understanding it, surely that's not the answer. There must be other levers they can pull in order to halt this virus.\"\n\nCarina Contini, a restaurateur in Edinburgh, questioned whether the closure of hospitality was a \"fait accompli\". \"Is this absolutely the alternative?\" she asked.\n\nA further lockdown - however short - would have \"devastating consequences for many, many businesses\", she added.\n\nThe Scottish Hospitality Group (SHG), which represents nine of the country's largest independent hospitality operators, warned a two-week lockdown would cost its members £10m and harm their 6,000-strong workforce, including 1,500 under-25s.\n\nNic Wood, who runs the Signature Pubs chain and is a member of SHG, said: \"Not only does a bar or restaurant job provide much-needed money for young Scots, it gives them the people skills and experience that are vital in building their careers.\n\n\"It will be heartbreaking if we are forced to make redundancies because the government has shut us down again.\n\n\"Young people in Scotland will once again bear a disproportionate amount of the burden and coming on top of all the issues that students and young people are facing already, this will be a step too far.\"\n\nDuring her daily briefing, Ms Sturgeon said she hoped that her statement outlining what would not happen during a \"circuit-breaker\" would reassure the hospitality industry.\n\nShe added: \"Hopefully the fact that we are carefully weighing all of these factors and thinking about economic impact and how we mitigate that will also give a degree of reassurance.\n\n\"I understand how horrendously difficult this is for people like Stephen Leckie who has watched a business that has been built up with a lot of blood, sweat and tears over the years struggle in the way so many businesses have.\n\n\"I, like everyone does, find that heartbreaking, I find so many aspects of dealing with this pandemic utterly heartbreaking. I can't magic the virus away - I wish I could.\"", "Margaret Ferrier travelled back from London to Glasgow after testing positive for coronavirus\n\nMP Margaret Ferrier is believed to have attended Mass at a church in Glasgow after showing Covid symptoms.\n\nThe Daily Record reported that Ms Ferrier gave a reading as she joined up to 50 parishioners at St Mungo's RC church in Townhead on 27 September.\n\nShe later travelled to London before returning to Glasgow by train after testing positive.\n\nMs Ferrier has been widely condemned for risking the health of people in parliament and on public transport.\n\nShe has been suspended by the SNP and faces calls to quit as an MP. The Metropolitan Police are also investigating.\n\nThe Catholic Church in Scotland said it could not confirm whether Ms Ferrier, or anyone else, attended the Mass due to data protection laws.\n\nA spokesman for the Archdiocese of Glasgow said: \"For the good of the whole community, it is important that anyone who is required to self-isolate does so in accordance with the government's guidance, so anyone in that situation should not attend Mass.\n\n\"It is disappointing if this has not happened but we would like to reassure people that we fulfil all the government and church guidelines.\"\n\nPolice Scotland are not thought to be considering any action since self-isolation is guidance rather than a legal requirement in Scotland.\n\nMs Ferrier is believed to have joined up to 50 parishioners at St Mungo's church\n\nUnder government Covid-19 restrictions, no place of worship should admit more than 50 people at any one time, regardless of its size or usual capacity.\n\nPlaces at services are allocated via a booking system and everyone attending must wear a face covering.\n\nMs Ferrier, the MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, previously said she had experienced \"mild symptoms\" on Saturday 26 September and was tested for coronavirus.\n\nHowever, she decided to travel by train to Westminster the following Monday before getting her result because she was \"feeling much better\".\n\nShe spoke for four minutes in the Commons chamber during a coronavirus debate - tweeting a video of her speech - but was told later that evening that she had tested positive for the virus.\n\nDespite this, Ms Ferrier took a train back to Scotland on Tuesday 29 September, with SNP whips in the Commons being told about her positive test the next day.\n\nIt is understood she had initially told the party she was going home because a family member was unwell.\n\nMs Ferrier has apologised and said she \"deeply regretted\" her actions but has not yet given any indication of whether or not she intends to continue sitting as an independent MP.\n\nShe has referred herself to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, as well as to the police.\n\nScotland's first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has described Ms Ferrier's decision to travel to and from London when she should have been self-isolating as the \"worst breach imaginable\".\n\nShe said she had made it \"crystal clear\" to her that her \"reckless, dangerous and completely indefensible\" actions meant she should resign as an MP.", "There could be a \"tsunami\" of cancelled operations this winter as the NHS copes with rising numbers of coronavirus patients, leading surgeons are warning.\n\nMembers of the Royal College of Surgeons of England say they doubt the NHS can meet targets to restore surgery back to near pre-pandemic levels.\n\nPlanned procedures such as hip replacements were paused to free up beds during lockdown in the spring.\n\nAnd hospitals have since been dealing with a backlog.\n\nIn July, NHS England boss Sir Simon Stevens told trusts hospitals should by September 2020 be performing at least 80% of their September 2019 rates of:\n\nAnd by October, this proportion should rise to 90%.\n\nBut data suggests more than two million people have been waiting longer than 18 weeks for routine operations, with 83,000 waiting more than a year - up from 2,000 before the pandemic.\n\nMore than 140,000 operations such as knee and hip replacements were performed in July 2020, up from 41,000 in April.\n\nBut that is less than half the level seen in July 2019.\n\nThe Royal College of Surgeons of England surveyed nearly 1,000 members in September and found:\n\nPresident of the college Prof Neil Mortensen said: \"This is a national crisis requiring a truly national effort across all hospitals - private and NHS alike.\n\n\"As the virus becomes more prevalent again, there is a real risk of a tsunami of cancelled operations unless surgical beds are funded and protected.\n\n\"That means building up theatre capacity and designating beds exclusively for those who need an operation.\"\n\nAn NHS spokesman said the survey underestimated the amount of surgery now happening in the NHS, adding that goals for the end of August were met.\n\n\"The NHS has flexed its hospital capacity and community services as needed throughout the pandemic, treating over 110,000 severely ill people for Covid-19, and doubling the number of non-urgent operations since April. More people are set to benefit from the deal struck with independent hospitals also to make use of their bed capacity.\n\n\"Covid inpatient numbers are rising and much depends on keeping the virus under control through continued public action on hands-face-space, Test and Trace service, and rapid action to control local outbreaks,\" he said.\n\nHave you had an operation cancelled? How long have you been waiting? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of the capital Bishkek\n\nProtesters in Kyrgyzstan calling for the country's parliamentary election to be annulled have broken into parliament in the capital, Bishkek.\n\nFootage showed people in the office of President Sooronbai Jeenbekov, and throwing paper from windows. Parts of the building appeared to be on fire.\n\nThe break-in follows a day of clashes with police, who initially dispersed crowds with water cannon and tear gas.\n\nThe clashes come amid allegations of vote-rigging in last Sunday's election.\n\nOne person died and nearly 600 were injured in the unrest, according to the Health Ministry.\n\nPresident Jeenbekov has appealed for a return to order, accusing \"certain political forces\" of attempting to illegally seize power.\n\nHe has met opposition party leaders and said he would annul the results of the election if necessary.\n\nFollowing the vote, only four parties out of 16 passed the 7% threshold for entry into parliament, three of which have close ties to President Jeenbekov.\n\nOn Monday, police used stun grenades to disperse thousands of protesters in Ala-Too square, before following them into nearby streets.\n\nBut demonstrators later flooded back into the central square before storming the parliament building, known as the White House.\n\nVideo footage shared on social media showed opposition protesters gaining access to the complex, some by climbing fences and others by pushing open the main gates. Later, smoke could be seen billowing out of the building.\n\nThousands of protesters gathered in Ala-Too square in Bishkek amid allegations of vote-rigging\n\nProtesters also released Kyrgyzstan's former President Almazbek Atambayev, who was being held in a remand centre at the State National Security Service awaiting a trial for corruption offences, the local AKIpress news agency reported.\n\nGroups close to the president have been accused of vote-buying and voter intimidation - claims international monitors say are \"credible\" and a cause for \"serious concern\".\n\nOn Monday, 12 opposition parties jointly declared that they would not recognise the results of the vote.\n\nLater, President Jeenbekov's office said that he would on Tuesday meet leaders from all 16 parties that competed in the election, in a bid to defuse tensions.\n\nTwo parties with close ties to President Sooronbai Jeenbekov each took 25% of the vote\n\nOpposition candidates also called on the Central Electoral Commission to cancel the results of the election.\n\nOne candidate, Ryskeldi Mombekov, told a crowd of more than 5,000 protesters on Monday: \"The president promised to oversee honest elections. He didn't keep his word.\"\n\nMr Mombekov's party, Ata Meken, had been confident of entering parliament, but in the end it was one of the eight parties that missed the threshold. Ata Meken leader Janar Akaev suffered a leg injury in the protests on Monday.\n\nProtesters were also calling on President Jeenbekov to resign.\n\nThomas Boserup, head of the election observation mission of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said in a briefing that although the vote had been \"generally well organised\", allegations of vote buying were a \"serious concern\".\n\nThe police used water cannon, stun grenades and tear gas on demonstrators.\n\nThey first used force to disperse protesters in the main square, but as the crowds moved into other streets in Bishkek, police continued to go after them.\n\nReports of injuries then began to emerge - both among the protesters and the police.\n\nThere were about 5,000 people protesting in Ala-Too square, and the demonstration was largely peaceful for most of the day. But at about 20:10 local time (14:10 GMT), a smaller group of protesters splintered off and went to the parliament building. When they got there, they reportedly tried to break through the gates.\n\nThis is what triggered the police response. The police had said that they wouldn't interfere in the protests as long as they stayed peaceful - but this was seen as a provocative act.\n\nThe demonstrators were initially dispersed, but they later returned and successfully gained entry to the parliament building.\n\nThe two leading parties, which got a quarter of the vote each, were Birimdik and Mekenim Kyrgyzstan.\n\nMekenim Kyrgyzstan, meanwhile, is seen as being closely connected to the powerful Matraimov family. The family's figurehead, Rayimbek Matraimov, was the target of anti-corruption protests last year and is believed to have helped finance Mr Jeenbekov's successful presidential campaign in 2017.\n\nLate on Monday, Birimdik announced that it would be open to a re-run of Sunday's election, and called on other parties that had crossed the 7% threshold to do the same.", "Paul Cleeland has been fighting to clear his name for decades\n\nPapers have shown a gun at the centre of a 1973 murder trial may have been the wrong weapon, it has been claimed.\n\nPaul Cleeland, who says he was wrongly convicted, has obtained a transcript of his failed appeal in 2002.\n\nHe said prosecutors claimed Terry Clarke was shot in Hertfordshire in 1972 with a Gye and Moncrieff (G&M) but two other guns were found at the time.\n\nHis lawyers have said judges wrongly ruled the other guns were excluded. A court heard the claims on Tuesday.\n\nSuspected gangland boss Mr Clarke was shot in Stevenage after returning home from a bar on 5 November 1972.\n\nCleeland always insisted he was innocent but he served 26 years behind bars.\n\nTerry Clarke was killed after he returned home from a bar\n\nCourt documents listed the guns as the G&M shotgun, an American Western Field 12-bore pump action repeater shotgun and a German Muller 12-bore double-barrelled shotgun.\n\nA note by Edward Fitzgerald QC, who previously represented Cleeland, claimed the Appeal Court ruling in 2002 \"was flawed by a fundamental error of fact\".\n\nHe wrote: \"The Court of Appeal in 2002 proceeded on the basis that the evidence excluded the possibility that either of the two shotguns put forward by Mr Cleeland as the murder weapons could have been the murder weapons.\n\n\"However, the transcript of the evidence obtained by Mr Cleeland confirms that the Home Office expert, Mr Pryor, did not rule out the possibility that the pump action shotgun was the murder weapon.\"\n\nLawyers for the 79-year-old from Folkestone, who has been representing himself, obtained the transcript from the court after accessing a closed file in the National Archives.\n\nFolkestone MP Damian Collins, who has backed Cleeland's campaign to clear his name, said: \"Over many years, Paul was unaware of the contents of those papers when they could have real significance to his case.\"\n\nThe MP said most of the original trial evidence had been challenged and said: \"Over the past 10 years I've been involved with it [Cleeland's case], a constant stream of new information has come out and I would say the direction of that information has always been to cast doubt on that original judgement.\"\n\nPaul Cleeland was 30 when he was jailed\n\nCleeland put the claims before the Administrative Court in London on Tuesday.\n\nDuring the hearing, Cleeland told the court the transcript, which he received eight to ten months ago, had been locked away for years and was \"totally in contradiction of the judgement\".\n\nHowever the judge, Lord Justice Lavender, said: \"You were there when Mr Pryor gave evidence.\"\n\nAt the hearing, Cleeland sought to amend the grounds of his application for a judicial review of a Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) decision not to refer his case to appeal that was dismissed last year.\n\nSarah Clover, representing the CCRC, told the court the G&M gun had \"only ever been put forward as a possibility\".\n\nShe said the CCRC had considered the matter and concluded it would not have been justified in referring the case to appeal, while the Appeal Court in 2002 was aware of discrepancies and took them into account when it rejected the case.\n\nThe court heard that the guns were later destroyed.\n\nThe judge will hand down his ruling at a later date.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played\n\nTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.", "The search involved police, firefighters, coastguard staff and search and rescue volunteers\n\nA man's body has been recovered following a major search of a river in north Wales.\n\nEmergency services had searched the river at Abergwyngregyn, Gwynedd, after reports a telephone engineer had fallen in at about 16:00 BST on Tuesday.\n\nA body was found just before 19:15, North Wales Police said.\n\nDet Ch Insp Alun Oldfield said the man's next of kin had been informed and his family were being supported.\n\n\"Our heartfelt sympathies are with the man's family and friends at this incredibly difficult time,\" he said.\n\n\"An investigation is now under way to establish what happened.\"\n\nA major search was launched with police, firefighters and the coastguard, and search and rescue volunteers.\n\nTwo specialist water rescue teams and three fire crews from North Wales Fire and Rescue Service searched the river, along with members of Ogwen Valley Search and Rescue Team.\n\nResidents saw the helicopter flying over the river\n\nThe coastguard helicopter attended and two coastguard rescue teams were sent from Bangor and Llandudno to assist in the search.\n\nEarlier this week homes in the village were flooded after the River Aber burst its banks following heavy rain.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Repair work from previous flooding was still under way when these properties were hit again", "Poorna Kaameshwari Sivaraj, 36, and her son Kailash Kuha Raj were last seen on 21 September\n\nA three-year-old boy and his parents have died at a flat in west London.\n\nThe bodies of Poorna Kaameshwari Sivaraj, 36, and son Kailash Kuha Raj were found at Golden Mile House on Clayponds Lane, Brentford.\n\nScotland Yard said it believed both had been dead for some time. They were last seen on 21 September.\n\nIt is thought Kuha Raj Sithamparanathan, Kalish's father and Ms Sivaraj's husband, fatally injured himself when officers forced entry.\n\nThe 42-year-old was found with stab injuries and pronounced dead by paramedics at the scene.\n\nThe family's deaths mean London has recorded 100 violent deaths this year.\n\nPolice remain at the scene in Clayponds Lane, Brentford\n\nScotland Yard said officers initially received a phone call on Sunday from a family member raising concerns about the welfare of Ms Sivaraj.\n\nOfficers attended the address several times early on Monday but did not receive a reply.\n\nConcerns heightened after speaking to neighbours and officers decided to force entry just after midnight on Tuesday.\n\nA mandatory referral has been made to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.\n\nNext of kin have been informed and post-mortem examinations are set to take place on Thursday.\n\nLead investigator, Det Ch Insp Simon Harding, said it was being treated as a murder investigation.\n\n\"We know the family often walked their dog, a poodle cross breed, in and around the local area and I would ask anyone who saw them at any time in the last month to contact police so we can begin to build a full picture of their lives,\" he added.\n\nOfficers were called to the property after receiving concerned calls from neighbours\n\nWest Area BCU Commander, Peter Gardner said: \"This horrific incident has understandably caused enormous shock and concern among local residents and across the borough. All our thoughts are with the family and friends of those affected.\n\n\"Local residents can expect to see officers at the scene and patrolling the local area to provide reassurance, and if they have any concerns, I would urge them to speak to our officers.\"\n\nNeighbours earlier told of their shock after the deaths of the family of three.\n\nSheri Diba said the family were \"very friendly\" and she used to regularly see them taking their dog for walks.\n\n\"I've always seen them in the lift. They were very friendly. They said 'Hi, how are you?' I always saw them together going for walks.\n\n\"I feel really bad (hearing the news) because they were very friendly, nice people.\"\n\nMs Diba, a mother of one, said she had lived in the building for seven years and described it as a \"nice area\", but said she had not seen the family for a number of months.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The UK can and will \"build back better\".\n\nThe Conservatives' theme at their virtual party conference this week is a message that Boris Johnson has sought to impart continuously since the country emerged from lockdown in early July.\n\nBut as the prime minister prepares to deliver his leader's speech on Tuesday, his party is facing up to the impact that the worst public health crisis for a century is likely to have on its ability to deliver on its promises to voters.\n\nThe PM has insisted his mission of national renewal, the \"levelling-up\" agenda which was a key backdrop to the Tories' thumping victory in December's election, has not been put to one side in the national struggle against Covid.\n\nHe says the programme, which the party describes on its conference website as \"driving lasting change in parts of the country forgotten by successive governments\", is being accelerated, rather than slowed, by the pandemic.\n\nAnd the rush of announcements made during the four-day event and beforehand suggest the government knows it cannot afford to lose sight of its over-riding objective, that is to give those living outside London and the south of England a better chance in life and bigger slice of the economic cake.\n\nIn his own speech, the PM will earmark £160m to upgrade ports and infrastructure in Teesside, the Humber and other areas as part of a drive to make the UK a world-leader in low-cost green energy.\n\nElsewhere, the lion's share of a £80m fund for local regeneration projects is going to towns in the North East, North West and Yorkshire, a review of transport links will look at upgrading the A1 in Northumberland, while a shake-up of vocational education will pay for all 18-year-olds without an A-level to take a college course.\n\nThese are all consistent with the Tories' promises in their election manifesto to share prosperity and opportunities more equally across the UK and to boost economic performance beyond the capital.\n\nThe party is also seeking to leave a more permanent imprint of its own by opening a second HQ in Leeds while creating a fighting fund to help its MPs defend the dozens of \"Red Wall\" seats snatched from Labour in December, some of which turned blue for the first time in electoral history.\n\nBut as Conservative activists grapple with the role that transport, green and digital technologies will play in the UK's post-Covid recovery, the legacy of what is the UK's deepest post-war recession cannot be ignored.\n\nThe Institute for Fiscal Studies says the government faces a \"daunting task\" if it is to reverse deep-seated regional inequalities, among the most pronounced in Europe, in the current climate.\n\nIn a recent analysis, the respected think tank warned that inequalities within regions are often more acute, with towns in post-industrial regions, coastal resorts and isolated rural areas among those which have fallen furthest behind, a situation which could be exacerbated by Covid and any disruption to post-Brexit trade with Europe.\n\nIt would cost £22bn to level up transport spending, the IFS has said\n\nEven \"well-designed policies could take years or even decades to have a meaningful effect\", it says.\n\nWhile the government is right to focus on addressing decades of under-investment in transport and R&D outside London and the South East, it says the cost of closing the gap cannot be underestimated, with £22bn alone being needed to bring per person spending on transport across England in line with that in the capital.\n\nThe government, it adds, \"cannot be all things to all places\".\n\nWhatever improvements can be made in infrastructure, housing and skills, the IFS says the success of the levelling-up agenda will inevitably be judged on how far employment and pay disparities can be closed.\n\nMiddlesbrough, identified by the think tank as one of the five most \"left-behind\" towns in terms of working-age employment rates, has had some recent success stories to celebrate.\n\nStart-up bank GBB announced recently it would set up its headquarters in the town, creating more than 120 jobs, while the National Hydrogen Transport Centre is also basing itself there - consolidating the Teesside's market-leading position in the emerging clean technology.\n\nBut, at the same time, Covid is casting a long shadow over the North East, with the Mayor of Middlesbrough warning that thousands of jobs in hospitality and retail are \"hanging by a thread\" due to local restrictions.\n\nThe North East hopes to become a world leader in hydrogen transport technology\n\nSpeaking to the BBC's Newscast podcast last week, Andy Preston - who despite being an independent is admired by local Tories - said the implications of the virtual lockdown for the local economy were \"monstrous\".\n\nHe said he had been left \"fuming\" at what he said was the lack of consultation and dialogue with ministers over restrictions, which have prompted claims of a growing North-South divide in the second wave of the disease.\n\nThe fraying in relations between local leaders and ministers does not augur well at a time when the government's blueprint for further devolution in England has reportedly been shelved until next year.\n\nFar-reaching plans to create more combined authorities and directly elected mayors, while at the same time abolishing a raft of district councils, have caused unease in some Tory heartlands.\n\nFormer deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine, who championed English devolution while advising David Cameron, has urged the government to get on with it, saying a lack of local delivery mechanisms is hampering progress.\n\n\"There should be no presumption that civil servants in London devising schemes which seem sensible to ministers should be imposed on local economies,\" he told a recent meeting of the Lords Economic Affairs Committee.\n\nBut the former Tory, who lost the party whip after rebelling against the government over Brexit, has urged ministers to get the capital on board and not give the impression that London is being penalised for its success.\n\n\"It is very difficult to see how you level up without levelling down somebody,\" he said. \"You are never going to make a success of an economy by holding back the most successful core part.\"", "Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have a lot in common - distinctive hairstyles, larger-than-life personalities and a habit of creating controversy.\n\nAnd now they share the unwanted experience of being leaders taken to hospital with coronavirus.\n\nThe US president is currently being treated for the disease, six months after UK Prime Minister Mr Johnson fell victim to the same virus.\n\nBut how do their experiences compare - and what, if anything, can the US learn from the UK's experience?\n\nOn 27 March, the UK Prime Minister announced he had tested positive for Covid. It was not hugely unexpected given the virus had ripped its way through the top levels of UK government - infecting ministers and senior advisers.\n\nIn a Twitter video Mr Johnson said he had experienced \"mild symptoms\" but insisted he was - \"thanks to the wizardry of modern technology\" - still leading the government's response despite self-isolating.\n\nOne week later he announced that a persistent temperature meant he would have to continue self-isolating.\n\nBoris Johnson looked noticeably unwell when he appeared outside Downing Street a few days before going into hospital\n\nTwo days later, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said his boss had \"very much got his hand on the tiller\". But that evening Mr Johnson was admitted to hospital - although Downing Street stressed this was \"a precautionary step\".\n\nTwenty-four hours later the shocking news came that his condition had \"worsened\" and the prime minister had been moved to the intensive care unit.\n\nThere are parallels between Mr Johnson's experience and Mr Trump's. Like the prime minister, Mr Trump has been keen to emphasise that he is still at work, posting pictures of himself at a desk with documents.\n\nBoth their visits to hospital were described as precautionary - Mr Trump's team said it had been motivated by an \"abundance of caution\".\n\nAnd both leaders - being male, over 50 and overweight - are in an at-risk category.\n\nHowever, there are also differences. Updates on Mr Johnson's condition came solely from the Downing Street spokesperson, rather than the hospital or his doctor, whereas in the US, the president's doctors have held press conferences.\n\nIn some ways this caused confusion - particularly when Dr Sean Conley's account conflicted with briefings from White House staff.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Dr Sean Conley said he was trying to \"reflect the upbeat attitude\" of his team by not revealing the president received oxygen\n\nBut unlike in the UK, US journalists were able to question the medical team - and perhaps as a result Americans got a broader picture of their leader's health.\n\nIt speaks to a wider difference between the two countries. In America, a whole medical unit based in the White House is devoted to the care of the president and candidates to the presidency are now expected to release medical records\n\nNo such set-up exists in Downing Street and if you Google medical records plus Jeremy Corbyn (the former leader of the opposition) you are more likely to get hits for stories about the National Health Service, than any personal information.\n\nTwo blonde leaders get Covid and end up in hospital.\n\nBut that's where the similarities end.\n\nThere are vast constitutional and cultural differences between British and American politics.\n\nThe cultural first: men in white coats in front of a microphone. We've seen that in Washington.\n\nUpdates from the doctors, in front of the cameras. Updates with detail too: the drugs the president's on, the days he's getting them.\n\nThere is no way medics at St Thomas's Hospital in London were ever going to offer a running, public commentary on the prime minister's health, let alone the content of their syringes.\n\nOh, and an American president has a medical team and facilities on hand at the White House.\n\nIn contrast, Boris Johnson was holed up on his own, upstairs in Downing Street, his tea left at the door of his flat.\n\nAnd now the constitutional: in short, America has one, the UK doesn't.\n\nSo while the question of who takes over isn't easily answered in the UK, there's a long established plan in the US.\n\nOnce the prime minister was admitted into intensive care, his Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, was asked to deputise \"where necessary\".\n\nIn the US, the 25th Amendment sets out the conditions for a vice-president assuming power from his boss, but in the UK, with its unwritten constitution and enthusiasm for precedents over codified rules, there is no formal power that allows for such a transfer of responsibility.\n\nWe knew very little about the exact extent of Mr Raab's authority - and opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer suggested Mr Raab, was \"reluctant\" to take decisions, leaving the government in a kind of limbo while the Prime Minister recuperated.\n\nConstitutional expert Dr Catherine Haddon of the Institute for Government said at the time: \"The lack of a plan for who can take over when the prime minister is incapacitated looks extraordinary to many in the country and abroad.\"\n\nDominic Raab deputised for the prime minister as he was moved to intensive care.\n\nSince his admission to hospital, there has been speculation about how Mr Trump's poll ratings will be affected - particularly with the presidential election one month away.\n\nLooking at the UK example - not much is the answer.\n\nBBC political analyst Peter Barnes says Boris Johnson's personal approval ratings went up - hitting 50% and above - when government introduced measures to tackle coronavirus.\n\nThe high ratings continued throughout the period that the prime minister was ill, and into May, before starting to fall back.\n\nMr Johnson came out of hospital on 12 April and returned to work after a two-week break.\n\nYet six months on, there has been some speculation over whether the Prime Minister is fully recovered. However, when asked if he was suffering from long Covid, Mr Johnson insisted he was \"as fit as several butchers' dogs\".\n\nHis spell in hospital has prompted at least one change in his behaviour. The prime minister has acknowledged he was \"too fat\" when he caught the virus and has hired a personal trainer to get him fit.\n\nSo in a few months' time, Americans may get used to seeing pictures of Mr Trump running laps round the Rose Garden.", "19-year-old Dylan Irvine died in a crash near Crimond on Monday\n\nPolice have apologised to the family of a teenager after they were incorrectly told he had died in a car crash.\n\nThe 18-year-old was critically injured in an incident on the A90 near Crimond in Aberdeenshire at about 07:30 on Monday but his family were told he had been killed.\n\nIn fact, it was 19-year-old Dylan Irvine who had died in the crash.\n\nCh Insp Neil Lumsden said incorrect information had been given to police at the scene.\n\nHe said officers were \"faced with a confused scene including incorrect information provided by a witness\".\n\n\"Officers at the scene of a crash use every avenue available to help identify those involved as quickly and accurately as possible,\" he said.\n\nHe said this included using personal effects found at the scene, using police systems to find out who the registered keeper of a vehicle is, looking at who is insured to drive it and checking for any other information through the agencies such as the DVLA.\n\n\"Finally, crash investigators will also use the information gathered from those involved who are able to identify themselves and others\", Ch Insp Lumsden said.\n\n\"On this occasion, officers were faced with a confused scene including incorrect information provided by a witness.\n\n\"Once identified, the error was promptly corrected and the families of those involved were spoken to and were understanding of the circumstances.\n\n\"We have apologised to the families for any unintended upset and will review to identify any learning.\"\n\nMr Irvine's family said he was \"a loving son, brother and grandson, and was loved by all that had the pleasure of knowing him\".\n\n\"He had an adventurous and outgoing soul and had the biggest heart,\" they said.\n\nPolice are appealing for anyone with information about the crash to contact them.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"That was a very worrying moment, thinking 'have I now got Covid?'\"\n\nCovid-19 is being \"weaponised\" by offenders, according to one police force which has seen spitting and coughing assaults on officers double.\n\nNorth Wales Police saw twice as many such assaults between March and June compared with the same period in 2019.\n\nAlmost one-third of assault charges on South Wales Police officers were related to spitting or coughing between March and May, BBC research shows.\n\nMaximum sentences for assaults on emergency workers are being doubled.\n\n\"It's just absolutely appalling to weaponise a virus or disease against police officers and emergency service workers\" said North Wales Police Federation general secretary Mark Jones.\n\n\"It's unlike anything we've ever seen before, to be threatened with what is an unseen and silent killer is really terrible.\"\n\nPC David Roberts-Ablett: \"It was a very worrying moment, thinking - have I now got Covid?\"\n\nPC David Roberts-Ablett was coughed at by a man who claimed he had coronavirus symptoms after he was arrested for being violent towards staff at a Tesco supermarket in Cardiff.\n\nDarrell Glen Humphries had been taken to the city's University Hospital of Wales so an injury could be treated when the 53-year-old coughed in PC Roberts-Ablett's face.\n\n\"In these times of Covid, there's a concern. It was a very worrying moment,\" said the constable of nearly 20 years.\n\n\"He had been quite aggressive so I asked him to calm down. It was a very deliberate motion by him, he turned his head, his eyes, fixated on me.\n\n\"It was almost like he was targeting me, and he picked my face, and then deliberately looked straight at me and coughed at me. Fortunately I was wearing my glasses and a mask at the time so I was protected.\"\n\nDarrell Glen Humphries admitted assaulting an emergency worker in May\n\nHumphries, of Canton in Cardiff, was sentenced to 26 weeks in prison by the city's magistrates in May for the attack.\n\n\"It was a very worrying moment, thinking 'have I now got Covid?',\" the officer said.\n\n\"I thought what do I do? Where do I go?\n\n\"There is being a police officer and dealing with the criminal aspect of things, but there's a more humane side to it as well, where there's a lot of implications on me and my family, my colleagues and the people I am serving in Cardiff.\n\n\"It does play on your mind because for a while you just don't know.\"\n\nPolice forces across the UK saw a 21% increase in assaults on their officers in the first three months of lockdown.\n\nIn the North Wales force area, 30 of the 157 crimes recorded against police officers were coughing and spitting, up from 14 the previous year.\n\nOf those, 23 people were charged, up from 10 in 2019, according to a freedom of information request by the BBC.\n\nOne chief constable says an officer told him he would rather in some ways be shoved or pushed than coughed at\n\n\"The amount of deliberate coughing and spitting at police officers has risen quite sharply,\" Mr Jones said.\n\n\"To see that form of assault and attack on a police officer is quite worrying.\"\n\nIn the South Wales force area, the largest in Wales, of the 167 charges of police officer assaults, 55 were \"weaponising\" Covid-19 as threat and related to PCs being spat or coughed on.\n\n\"What we have seen is a number of people effectively making a weapon out of spitting and then presenting that they've got or believe they might have Covid-19,\" said Chief Constable Matt Jukes.\n\n\"A colleague who'd been involved in an incident said 'in some ways I'd rather be shoved, or punched, than get bitten or spat out, because of that long-term worry about the impact on health'.\n\n\"What the spitting and biting does is leaves officers with real uncertainty, until they can get test results.\n\n\"It's not always Covid-19, sometimes it's other infectious diseases. Sometimes they have to wait for reassurance or knowledge that there may be another issue they need to deal with.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Footage released of woman coughing at police officer in Tyne and Wear\n\nAssaults against police officers have also risen in the Gwent force area from 54 to 57 year-on-year, but they decreased in Dyfed-Powys from 111 to 96.\n\nMaximum sentences for those convicted of assaulting emergency workers in England and Wales are to be doubled, the home secretary said in September.\n\n\"Every day they risk their lives to protect ours - they should never face being punched, kicked or spat at,\" said Justice Secretary Robert Buckland.\n\n\"Anyone looking to harm prison officers, police, fire personnel or health workers should be under no illusion - your disgraceful behaviour is unacceptable and you will feel the full force of the law.\"", "Sir Ian Botham has taken his seat in the House of Lords.\n\nThe Brexit-backing former England cricketer wore the traditional scarlet and ermine-trimmed robe for the brief formal introduction ceremony.\n\nBaron Botham, of Ravensworth in the county of North Yorkshire was nominated for a life peerage in the 2020 Political Honours and will sit as a cross bencher.\n\nThe proceedings were delayed due to a technical problem, prompting groans from peers when Lord Speaker Lord Fowler told them: \"I think rain has stopped play just for the moment.\"", "A surge in cases has seen Nottingham rise to fifth in England for coronavirus rates\n\nHouseholds could be banned from mixing in Nottingham after a surge in cases, a city health official has said.\n\nDirector of public health Alison Challenger said rules were likely to be similar to those already in place in parts of northern England.\n\nThis would mean people from different households would no longer be able to meet.\n\nIt follows a surge in the city's Covid rate to 440.1 per 100,000, giving it the fifth highest rate in England.\n\nNo new rules have yet been imposed, but Nottingham City Council is urging residents to \"follow stricter restrictions\", and not to mix indoors with people from other households apart from their bubble.\n\nThis includes in the home, others' homes and at leisure and hospitality venues.\n\nMs Challenger said: \"Rather than waiting for a national message to come through, it makes sense for people to address those issues now and look at reducing their household contact.\"\n\nThe government is expected to announce tougher rules for the city this week, similar to those introduced in Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds.\n\nEvery area in England with a higher rate of positive tests already has local restrictions in place.\n\nThe city has already seen its historic Goose Fair cancelled due to the virus\n\nMs Challenger told BBC Radio Nottingham the city had seen a \"dramatic\" rise in rates, from 71.2 per 100,000 in the week ending 26 September.\n\nIn the same period, the number of confirmed cases increased from 237 to 1,465.\n\n\"It's a worrying trend and it means the measures we have in place are no longer enough to stop the spread of the virus in the city.\n\n\"So we are going to have to do more to keep people safe,\" she said.\n\nThe \"sudden and very sharp\" rise has coincided with students returning to the city.\n\nThe University of Nottingham said there had been 425 confirmed cases among its student population in the week to 2 October, including 226 students in private accommodation and 106 others living in halls of residence.\n\nBut Ms Challenger said the reasons behind the surge were more complex.\n\nShe said: \"Cases were going up before students came back, but of course large numbers of people living in close proximity, then that's inevitable we will see an increase in a number of cases.\n\n\"But that's not the whole picture, cases are going up everywhere.\"\n\nPublic Health England was now looking at the situation closely, Ms Challenger said.\n\n\"We do expect later this week that the government will be introducing more restrictions in Nottingham, so we can expect to see tighter restrictions,\" she said.\n\n\"The sort of measures we will be looking at are very much around the households mixing in particular.\n\n\"So we may find we are returning to that situation where we are in bubbles and we're asking people not to mix in their households.\"\n\nDetails of any restrictions are currently unclear, including exact boundaries of affected areas and whether it will apply outdoors as well as indoors.\n\nMs Challenger felt, however, it was possible the limit on gatherings may be changed.\n\nThe city council has also said the regional Covid-19 testing site in London Road may need to be moved as the current location has poor drainage.\n\nProvisional applications have also been made for nine additional testing sites in Nottingham.\n\nA Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: \"We work closely with local leaders and public health teams to inform decisions on local interventions, taking into account a range of factors.\n\n\"PHE and NHS Test and Trace are constantly monitoring the levels of infection across the country.\n\n\"We discuss measures with local directors of public health and local authorities, constantly reviewing the evidence and we will take swift targeted action where necessary.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Offshore wind farms will generate enough electricity to power every home in the UK within a decade, Boris Johnson has pledged.\n\nSpeaking to the Conservative party conference, the PM announced £160m to upgrade ports and factories for building turbines to help the country \"build back greener\".\n\nThe plan aims to create 2,000 jobs in construction and support 60,000 more.\n\nHe said the UK would become \"the world leader in clean wind energy\".\n\n\"Your kettle, your washing machine, your cooker, your heating, your plug-in electric vehicle - the whole lot of them will get their juice cleanly and without guilt from the breezes that blow around these islands,\" he said.\n\nMr Johnson's speech comes after he made a pledge at a UN biodiversity summit in New York to protect 30% of UK land for nature as a \"boost for biodiversity\".\n\nThe scheme will see the money invested into manufacturing in Teesside and Humber in northern England, as well as sites in Scotland and Wales.\n\nMr Johnson said the government was raising its target for offshore wind power capacity by 2030 from 30 gigawatts to 40 gigawatts.\n\nThe commitments are the first stage of a 10-point plan for a \"green industrial revolution\" from the government, with No 10 promising the rest of the details later this year to \"accelerate our progress towards net zero emissions by 2050\".\n\nThe net zero target means greenhouse gas emissions would be dramatically slashed and any remaining emissions offset, neutralising environmental impacts and slowing climate change.\n\nMr Johnson's speech comes amid a \"fractious\" mood on the Conservative backbenches about his handling of the Covid-19 crisis, BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg says.\n\nShe said the occasion could provide the prime minister with an opportunity to sell his vision of the country post-pandemic to party members.\n\nBut she added this year's speech - to be delivered virtually without a live audience - would not allow him to plug into the energy of a crowd as he normally would.\n\nThe Beatrice offshore wind farm in Scotland generates enough power for more than 450,000 properties\n\nMr Johnson told the conference he believes that in 10 years' time, \"offshore wind will be powering every home in the country\".\n\n\"Far out in the deepest waters we will harvest the gusts, and by upgrading infrastructure in places like Teesside and Humber and Scotland and Wales, we will increase an offshore wind capacity that is already the biggest in the world.\"\n\nThe PM also repeated his pledge for the UK to become the \"Saudi Arabia of wind power\", adding: \"As Saudi Arabia is to oil, the UK is to wind - a place of almost limitless resource, but in the case of wind without the carbon emissions and without the damage to the environment.\"\n\nThe PM's enthusiastic windy rhetoric has been welcomed by the renewables industry - but there's nothing new about the 40GW figure.\n\nIt was previously announced in the Conservative Party manifesto.\n\nWhat's important today is the promise of cash to improve ports to support the offshore industry in Scotland and the north of England.\n\nIt won't just create jobs to replace some of those being lost in the shrinking oil sector.\n\nIt could also support the onset of floating offshore wind power, which would allow wind farms anchored in deep water far west of Scotland, where the conditions are challenging but the winds are strong and consistent.\n\nThe advances in wind power are momentous, but shouldn't be exaggerated.\n\nThe PM is promising enough power all UK homes - but remember, homes only account for a third of electricity demand. The rest goes to offices and factories.\n\nAnd there's a long way to go before the economy is decarbonised.\n\nThe industry is now waiting for the government's long-delayed energy white paper.\n\nThat will set the course for onshore wind, solar, and the two latest objects of prime ministerial desire - hydrogen produced by surplus off-peak wind energy; and carbon capture, where emissions are caught and pumped into underground rocks.\n\nMinisters will also have to decide how they can fund the new nuclear stations that Mr Johnson says will be part of the UK energy mix.\n\nThe prime minister has previously said the UK should embrace a range of new technologies to achieve its goal of net zero emissions by 2050.\n\nLast month, Mr Johnson said he wanted the UK to take the lead in carbon capture and storage technology, in which greenhouse gas emissions are captured from sources such as power stations and then stored underground.\n\nHe also said the UK government was thinking of bringing forward the date for phasing out new petrol and diesel cars from 2035 to 2030.\n\nGreenpeace UK executive director John Sauven said: \"The prime minister's recognition that last year's Tory manifesto commitment on offshore wind can generate jobs whilst cutting energy bills and carbon is a great lightbulb moment.\n\n\"If carried through it would help cement the UK's global leadership in this key technology.\n\n\"But delivering 40 gigawatts of power on to the grid by 2030 requires action in this Parliament.\"", "Last updated on .From the section Arsenal", "The age at which most people start to receive the state pension has now officially hit 66 after steady rises in the qualifying age in recent years.\n\nMen and women born between 6 October, 1954, and 5 April, 1960, will start receiving their pension on their 66th birthday.\n\nFor those born after that, there will be a phased increase in state pension age to 67, and eventually 68.\n\nIt comes as the chancellor vowed the \"triple lock\" pledge is safe.\n\nUnder this pledge, the state pension increases each year in line with the highest of average earnings, prices (as measured by inflation) or 2.5%.\n\nCoronavirus and the furlough scheme is set to distort the calculations for average wages and could mean one bumper year of pension increases. This has led MPs and economists to discuss how this could be smoothed out.\n\nBut, when asked by LBC radio whether the triple lock was safe, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said: \"Yes, our manifesto commitments are there and that is very much the legislative position.\n\n\"We care very much about pensioners and making sure they have security and that's indeed our policy.\"\n\nThe full state pension for new recipients is worth £175.20 a week.\n\nTo receive the full amount, various criteria including 35 qualifying years of national insurance must be satisfied.\n\nThe age at which people receive the state pension has been increasing as people live longer, and the government has plans for the increase to 68 to be brought forward.\n\nHowever, the increases have been controversial, particularly for women who have seen the most significant rise.\n\nCampaigners took their fight to court\n\nCampaigners claim women born in the 1950s have been treated unfairly by rapid changes and the way they were communicated to those affected.\n\nSome of those involved in the campaign recently lost a legal challenge, claiming the move was unlawful discrimination.\n\nThe coronavirus crisis has led many people to reconsider retirement plans, especially those who feel they are more at risk from the outbreak.\n\nFormer pensions minister Ros Altmann argued that the crisis meant there was a \"strong case\" for people to be given early access to their state pension, even if it were at a reduced rate.\n\nShe also pointed out the large differences in life expectancy in different areas of the UK.\n\nMillions of people who will rely on their state pension in retirement need to know two things: how much will they receive, and when.\n\nThe future for both is not entirely clear.\n\nFirstly, the age at which the state pension begins has been rising, and will continue to do so. MPs will decide on how quickly this happens, fully aware of the strength of feeling from the WASPI (Women Against State Pension Inequality) campaign over how this has been handled in the past.\n\nSecondly, there is always plenty of debate over the future of the triple lock - the pledge to ensure the state pension rises by a minimum of 2.5% each year.\n\nAnd if young workers think this has nothing to do with them, they should think again. How long we work before we receive state financial support in retirement is a vital issue for long-term financial planning.\n\nYounger workers have also been urged by pension providers to consider their retirement options, with a strong likelihood of state pension age rising further as time passes.\n\n\"As people live longer, it's clear many will also have to work for longer,\" said Pete Glancy, head of policy at Scottish Widows.\n\n\"The increase to the state pension age provides a timely reminder to everyone to check your pension pots and ask yourself whether the savings you've built up are enough for the kind of life you want in retirement.\"\n\nTom Selby, senior analyst at AJ Bell, said: \"As average life expectancy continues to increase, the state pension age will inevitably follow suit.\n\n\"This means younger savers probably need to plan assuming they might not reach their state pension age until 70 or even beyond. Anyone who aspires to more than the bare minimum in retirement needs to take responsibility as early as possible to build their own retirement pot.\"", "Coronavirus can be spread by tiny particles suspended in the air, sometimes for hours, says the US Centres for Disease Control.\n\nIts updated guidance says this airborne route of transmission is still uncommon - bigger droplets from coughs, sneezes and talking are still the main source.\n\nPeople are at higher risk of catching it the longer and closer they are to someone who has the virus.\n\nLast month, the CDC published - and then took down - a draft version of the guidance warning about possible airborne transmission, saying it had been posted in error.\n\nAt the time, the World Health Organization (WHO) said it knew of no new evidence to suggest this was how the virus was spreading, although it agreed that aerosol transmission was possible in some circumstances.\n\nThere are some examples where people with Covid have infected others who were more than 6ft or 2m away. Others have caught the virus in an air space that an infectious person was present in minutes or hours earlier.\n\nThe CDC says these are rare, and existing advice on protective behaviours - washing hands, wearing face coverings and social distancing - remains the same.\n\n\"People can protect themselves from the virus that causes Covid-19 by staying at least 6ft away from others, wearing a mask that covers their nose and mouth, washing their hands frequently, cleaning touched surfaces often and staying home when sick,\" says the CDC.\n\nIt says the general public do not need to take the added precautions that healthcare professionals do to protect against airborne transmission, such as wearing medical grade masks and other personal protective equipment.\n\nGuidance from the UK government says clinicians carrying out tasks that could generate airborne droplets of saliva loaded with the virus should use the higher standard of protection, including disposable gowns, filtering respirators and face-shielding visors.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This was a virtual conference speech in which the prime minister's gaze extended over the horizon -- to the point when our national conversation is no longer dominated by Coronavirus.\n\nIt was clearly an attempt to reassure Conservative MPs and activists that the Boris Johnson they elected as their leader, and the country enthusiastically embraced as prime minister at the last election, hadn't disappeared.\n\nSo there were the colourful turns of phrase, the sentences that would have generated laughter in the hall, the reassurance he had fully recovered from his bout of the virus.\n\nAnd then it was the big picture: the agenda, alongside delivering Brexit, that delivered that thumping majority back in December last year.\n\nSo: talk of enterprise, talk of home ownership, a green tinged economic recovery.\n\nWas there less in this than a conventional conference speech?\n\nYes: it was shorter, there was no audience, no razzmatazz.\n\nIt was also delivered in the teeth of a pandemic, with a grim autumn and winter beckoning - where the government, like the rest of us, remain hostages to the fortune, or lack of it, of what the pandemic might bring.", "Mike Hampshire says without a bounce back loan he may have to search for other work\n\nQuitting his IT job two years ago to start a beer tour business was a dream for Mike Hampshire.\n\nBut his hopes of breaking even in his second year of operation were crushed when the coronavirus crisis hit in spring.\n\nNow the future of his Leeds-based business is in serious doubt as he's been unable to get a bounce back loan.\n\n\"Without a loan to tide me over I'm going to have to look for other work,\" he said.\n\nIn September, the chancellor extended the deadline for the government's coronavirus loan schemes to the end of November.\n\nBounce back loans allow small firms to borrow up to £50,000 over nine years at preferential rates, with the loans 100% guaranteed by the government.\n\nMr Hampshire is not the only small business owner fighting to survive without being able to get a loan through the government scheme.\n\nMr Bounceback, an anonymous businessman behind a website which helps struggling small firms, said he has heard from lots of people with problems.\n\n\"Several banks are not accepting new customers, and the majority of them have chosen to only allow their existing customers to apply, or even worse some lenders appear to be handpicking customers and inviting them to apply,\" he said.\n\nSmall businesses which bank with smaller lenders could be missing out\n\nSuren Thiru, head of economics at the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), said: \"With many firms facing continued cash flow pressures, it is concerning that businesses who bank with non-accredited lenders remain largely unable to access these vital financial lifelines.\"\n\n\"Government, regulators and banks must work together to ensure that a greater number of firms can access this support during this challenging period.\"\n\nBanking trade body UK Finance said that \"the vast majority of applicants have been able to rapidly access the finance they need\" through the scheme which has lent £38bn to 1.26 million smaller businesses.\n\n\"It isn't the only type of lending, I must say,\" said Stephen Pegge, UK Finance's managing director for commercial finance. \"There is a possibility, even if you can't get a bounce back loan, of borrowing elsewhere.\"\n\nHe told the BBC's Today programme there are \"28 accredited lenders account for the vast majority of existing business relationships so most people will bank with one of those\".\n\nBut he said that of those 28 lenders, only \"one or two\" will give a bounce back loan to new customers.\n\nMike Hampshire's guided beer tours came to a sudden halt in March when pubs shut their doors.\n\n\"I've pretty much had no income since March, but had a bit of cash put by, so thought I'd try and ride it out,\" he told the BBC.\n\n\"When pubs re-opened, the social-distancing rules made it impossible to run the tours and I've also had to cancel the annual beer festival I run in November.\"\n\nWith his money running out he turned to government support and decided to apply for a bounce back loan.\n\n\"I need about £5,000 to see me through to the spring when, hopefully, things will be better,\" he said.\n\nMike Hampshire's guided beer tours came to a sudden halt in March\n\nBut he banks with Monzo which isn't one of the 28 lenders which signed up for the government scheme.\n\nHe tried to apply through HSBC, but the bank closed its doors to new customers last week, the day before he made his application.\n\nNow he reckons he'll have to take on a different job, just to help him get through the winter.\n\n\"There are so many unknowns. If I do find another job, it could well become a permanent thing which would mean the end of my business.\"\n\nHSBC said that it had made £12bn of bounce back loans and that it was trying to prioritise existing applications, which is why it closed applications to new customers on 30 September.\n\n\"We are no longer accepting new applications for Bounce Back Loans from companies that don't have an existing HSBC business account and we will also stop taking on any new small business banking customers until 14 December,\" the bank said.\n\nLloyds Banking Group, which includes Bank of Scotland and Halifax, said limiting bounce back loans to existing companies made applications speedy, as well as helping with fraud and money laundering checks.\n\nNatWest Group said it had always been its policy that bounce back loans were offered to existing customers.\n\nNatWest also owns the brands Coutts, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank and Adam & Company, which are each listed in the 28 lenders taking part in the scheme.\n\nThe deadline for bounce back loan applications is 30 November, which means time is running out for firms who have yet to secure a loan.\n\nThe latest Treasury figures show lenders have approved 1,260,940 applications for the bounce back loan scheme.", "Covid is taking an emotional toll across Europe with rising levels of apathy among some populations, the World Health Organization is warning.\n\nSurvey data reveals the scale of this \"pandemic fatigue\", estimated to have reached over 60% in some cases.\n\nMany people are feeling less motivated about following protective behaviours after living with disruption and uncertainty for months, says the WHO.\n\nAlthough weary, people must revive efforts to fight the virus, it says.\n\nUntil a vaccine or effective treatments are available, public support and protective behaviours - washing hands, wearing face coverings and social distancing - remain critical for containing the virus.\n\nCoronavirus is continuing its spread across the world, with more than 35 million confirmed cases in 188 countries and more than one million deaths.\n\nDr Hans Henri Kluge, WHO's regional director for Europe, says fatigue is to be expected at this stage of the crisis.\n\n\"Since the virus arrived in the European region eight months ago, citizens have made huge sacrifices to contain Covid-19.\n\n\"It has come at an extraordinary cost, which has exhausted all of us, regardless of where we live, or what we do. In such circumstances it is easy and natural to feel apathetic and demotivated, to experience fatigue.\n\n\"I believe it is possible to reinvigorate and revive efforts to tackle the evolving Covid-19 challenges we face.\"\n\nHe says there are strategies to get us back on track, with communities at their heart:\n\nHe highlighted virtual celebrations during Ramadan or floating cinemas as successful new approaches that could help people adapt to the new conditions imposed by the pandemic.\n\nThe UK does its own regular survey on coronavirus and social attitudes and behaviours, based on a poll of around 2,200 adults.\n\nYouGov also tracks public attitudes and says the majority of people are still supportive of restrictions and measures to reduce the spread of the virus, based on surveys of more than 1,600 adults.\n\nStrongest support comes for the measures that are less restrictive on groups of people meeting, with 85% supporting the toughened rules around wearing face masks, the advice to work from home when possible (85%) and pubs operating with table service only (82%).\n\nSupport for other measures is slightly weaker, though closing pubs at 22:00 (69%), reducing capacity at weddings (62%) and limiting indoor sport to six people (61%) are all still backed by a majority of the British public.\n\nDisapproval of government handling of Covid continues to rise, however. Around 65% now say the government is doing a bad job, compared with 20% in late March when the country went into lockdown.\n• None Which treatments work best against Covid?\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Comic Relief ditch plastic red noses thanks to school campaign\n\nRed Nose Day 2021 will have plastic-free red noses for the first time after schoolchildren persuaded Comic Relief to switch to a natural alternative.\n\nThe charity, which runs the TV fundraising extravaganza, said it had received letters and emails from hundreds of children about the issue.\n\nPupils in Cornwall even got the backing of Sir David Attenborough when they called for an end to plastic red noses.\n\nComic Relief's Richard Curtis said they had \"definitely made a difference\".\n\nRed noses are sold to raise funds for the charity, which made more than £63m the last time Red Nose Day took place in 2019.\n\nThe new noses will be made from bagasse, a natural by-product of sugar cane.\n\nThe stars of the Only Fools and Horses stage show wearing red noses in 2019\n\nAccording to the charity, Fourlanesend Community Primary School in Torpoint, Cornwall, wrote to Sir David suggesting an alternative material, and he wrote back saying the children were \"perfectly correct\" to raise \"the question of replacing plastic products wherever we can, and I hope you get an adequate answer from Comic Relief\".\n\nCurtis told the PA news agency the charity had been thinking about the issue already, but praised the children who got in touch.\n\n\"There is absolutely no doubt that a bit of tactical nudging by some passionate kids definitely made a difference,\" he said. \"That's a good thing and what we would hope of people who support Comic Relief.\"\n\nFourlanesend headteacher Rebecca Norton said: \"Plastic is an issue our children care passionately about as they see so much plastic waste wash up on the shores of our beaches.\n\n\"The children were the driving force behind contacting our local press in 2019 and writing to Comic Relief and can't quite believe this has all happened.\"\n\nThe 18th Red Nose Day will take place on 19 March 2021.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Protests in Naples over possible lockdown\n\nProtesters in Naples opposed to stricter coronavirus measures clashed with police late into the night.\n\nSome threw smoke bombs and firecrackers in the centre of the southern Italian city; police responded with tear gas.\n\nThe mainly young crowd defied a night-time curfew imposed late on Friday in the Campania region after cases rose.\n\nRegional President Vincenzo de Luca has called for a national lockdown to avoid a repeat of the casualties seen in the first wave earlier this year.\n\nHundreds broke through a police cordon near the regional headquarters building late on Friday, Italy's Ansa news agency reports.\n\nAlong with smoke bombs, bottles were thrown at the 100-strong line of police in riot gear.\n\nDemonstrators earlier gathered in front of a university building in response to calls on social media. One carried a banner with the words \"you close us, you pay us\".\n\nProtesters chanted slogans calling for financial help\n\n\"No conditions of discomfort, however humanly understandable, can in any way justify violence,\" he said.\n\nItaly, badly hit during the first wave of the virus in March and April, has seen a spike in new daily infections - 19,143 were registered on Friday. Ninety-one deaths were recorded, though that is much lower than the peak of fatalities in the first wave.\n\nRegional leaders have the power to impose their own measures, but Campania's president said regional lockdowns would not be enough.\n\n\"We need to make one last effort to get things under control. We need to shut everything down for a month, for 40 days,\" he said in a statement posted on the regional government's website.\n\nPrime Minister Giuseppe Conte has said he does not want to repeat the national lockdown imposed during the first wave, as Italy continues to grapple with the severe economic consequences.\n\nCampania is the second worst-hit region in Italy in terms of new cases, behind Lombardy, which was the epicentre when the pandemic first arrived in Italy.\n\nMore than 37,000 people have died with coronavirus in Italy, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, and over 484,000 have been infected.\n\nScroll table to see more data Please update your browser to see full interactive", "Crowds looted a warehouse believed to be storing food supplies for distribution during Covid lockdowns\n\nNigeria's chief of police has ordered the immediate mobilisation of all police resources to put an end to days of street violence and looting.\n\nMohammed Adamu said criminals had hijacked anti-police brutality protests and taken over public spaces.\n\nA new wave of looting was reported on Sunday, a day after Mr Adamu ordered police to end the \"violence, killings, looting and destruction of property\".\n\nProtests calling for an end to police brutality began on 7 October.\n\nThe demonstrations, dominated by young people, started with calls for a police unit, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (Sars), to be disbanded.\n\nPresident Muhammadu Buhari dissolved the Sars unit - accused of harassment, extortion, torture and extrajudicial killings - days later, but the protests continued, demanding broader reforms in the way Nigeria is governed.\n\nThey escalated after unarmed protesters were shot in the nation's biggest city, Lagos, on Tuesday. Rights group Amnesty International said security forces killed at least 12 people. Nigeria's army has denied any involvement.\n\nLagos has in recent days seen widespread looting of shops, malls and warehouses, and property has been damaged, with the businesses of prominent politicians targeted. A number of buildings have been torched and prisons attacked.\n\nOn Sunday, there were reports of government warehouses being ransacked in the central city of Jos, as well as in Adamawa and Taraba states, with people taking away food and agricultural supplies.\n\nThere were similar reports of looting from warehouses in Bukuru city, near Jos, on Saturday.\n\nThe warehouses were said to have stored food supplies for distribution during lockdowns imposed to help control the spread of Covid-19.\n\nThe images of people carrying sacks of supplies from a warehouse in Bukuru were posted on social media\n\nPresident Buhari has said that at least 69 people have died in street violence since the protests across Nigeria began - mainly civilians but also police officers and soldiers.\n\nOn Saturday, the Nigerian police force tweeted that Mr Adamu, the inspector general of police, had told them \"enough is enough\" and ordered officers to \"use all legitimate means to halt a further slide into lawlessness\".\n\nA group that has been key in organising the demonstrations in Lagos had on Friday urged people to stay at home.\n\nThe Feminist Coalition also advised people to follow any curfews in place in their states.\n\nThe group said it would no longer be taking donations for the #EndSARS protests.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. An organiser of protests against police brutality in Nigeria tells the BBC he saw soldiers shoot people dead", "Health boards across Wales are preparing for a mass immunisation programme if a Covid-19 vaccine becomes available\n\nNew trials of coronavirus vaccinations will start in Wales \"within weeks\".\n\nA top scientist who works for the body responsible for organising the pilots said different vaccines will be trialed across parts of Wales \"very soon\".\n\nAbout 500 volunteers in the Gwent area have already taken part in trials of the Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University.\n\nThe new trials will be for different vaccines, but Health and Care Research Wales would not confirm which products.\n\n\"We're working with vaccines developed by others and they are searching for locations to trial their vaccinations,\" said Dr Angharad Davies, Health and Care Research Wales' lead for infection.\n\n\"Although we're not developing the vaccines ourselves, it is a lot of work.\n\n\"We're looking at starting the trials very soon - within the next month or two. They will be held across Wales.\n\n\"Some will be in the Aneurin Bevan Health Board area in Gwent, some will be in Cardiff and there will be others in north Wales - they will probably be with a different vaccination.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Coronavirus vaccine: How close are you to getting one?\n\nWales' 17-day national lockdown started on Friday as the Welsh Government aims to slow the surge in Covid-19 cases and hospital admissions by ordering people to stay at home and closing non-essential shops, pubs, restaurants and hotels.\n\nMore than 40,000 people have tested positive and 1,756 people have died with Covid-19 in Wales since the first case at the end of February. There have been more than 41.5 million cases across the world and more than one million deaths.\n\nVaccines are designed to train the immune system in a highly targeted way that leaves lasting protection against one particular infection.\n\nImmunisation is often seen as the holy grail that will end the Covid-19 pandemic, but a report from researchers brought together by the Royal Society said people needed to be \"realistic\" about what a vaccine could achieve and when.\n\nSome 200 different vaccines are being developed across the world, with some countries already using vaccinations developed by their own scientists. Some scientists fear, however, these vaccines may not have been tested rigorously enough.\n\nDr Davies understand 10 vaccinations have now reached a stage in the development process where researchers feel it \"seems safe to administer and creates a response from the immune system\".\n\nPeople have been warned a coronavirus vaccine is \"not around the corner\"\n\n\"It then needs to be tested to see whether it can prevent infection - and whether it is safe on a large scale, looking at potential rarer side-effects,\" she added.\n\nHealth boards across Wales are preparing a mass immunisation programme for when - or if - a vaccine becomes available.\n\nBut one of Wales' top drug professors has warned \"history is against us\" when finding a cure against \"this family of viruses\".\n\n\"It could be a very long time until a vaccine is found which is both safe and effective, and there is no certainty one will appear,\" said Arwyn Tomos Jones, Professor of Membrane Traffic and Drug Delivery at Cardiff University.\n\n\"If everything worked perfectly, there would be hope of a vaccine in around a year I'd say.\n\nThe Welsh Government have confirmed they are working with Public Health Wales and the UK government on plans to distribute the vaccine when one becomes available.\n\nThose facing the highest risk will likely be immunised first, with priority being decided at a UK level by an expert committee.", "Bennu - the asteroid could hold clues as to how the Solar System was formed\n\nA Nasa probe sent to collect rock from an asteroid several hundred million kilometres from Earth has grabbed so much that samples are spilling out.\n\nOfficials behind the Osiris-Rex probe, which landed on Bennu earlier this week, say the collection operation may have performed too well.\n\nPictures beamed back to Earth show a rock has wedged open the door of a container and a fraction of the sample is leaking, Nasa says.\n\nNasa is now trying to stow it safely.\n\n\"A substantial fraction of the required collected mass is seen escaping,\" head of mission Dante Lauretta said.\n\nThe craft is believed to have collected some 400g (14oz) of fragments, he said.\n\nThe probe could not have done better, he added. \"My big concern now is that the particles are escaping because we were almost a victim of our own success here.\"\n\n\"Time is of the essence,\" Thomas Zurbuchen, Nasa's associate administrator for science, told reporters as the space agency focuses on making sure no more is lost.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sampling an asteroid: This image sequence is speeded up and repeated\n\nThe collection container will now be stowed within the spacecraft, which means it will not be possible to measure exactly how much sample has been taken.\n\n\"Although we may have to move more quickly to stow the sample, it's not a bad problem to have,\" Mr Zurbuchen said. \"We are so excited to see what appears to be an abundant sample that will inspire science for decades beyond this historic moment.\"\n\nOsiris-Rex touched down on Tuesday on 500m-wide Bennu, some 320 million kilometres (200 million miles) from Earth.\n\nIt kicked up debris and dust when it took the samples from the asteroid's surface. \"We really did kind of make a mess,\" Mr Dante said on Tuesday.\n\nScientists hope the mission will throw light on how the Solar System began 4.5 billion years ago, once the samples are examined when the spacecraft returns home in 2023. Asteroids contain debris from the formation of the Solar System.\n\nThe spacecraft launched in 2016 and begins its journey back to Earth next March.", "More than 1.4 million people in South Yorkshire are the latest to move to England's top level of restrictions.\n\nTier three measures came into effect at midnight affecting areas including Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield.\n\nSheffield City Region's mayor said the measures were needed but called on the government to \"define precisely what the exit criteria is\" from tier three.\n\nMeanwhile, Wales entered the first full day of a national lockdown amid border patrols to stop non-essential travel.\n\nGloucestershire Constabulary said it will patrol routes into the Forest of Dean area and pull over vehicles suspected of making unnecessary journeys out of Wales.\n\nDrivers without a valid excuse will be advised to turn around and, if they do not, will be reported to police in Wales who can issue fines, the force added.\n\nIt comes as another 174 deaths and 23,012 new confirmed cases were recorded on Saturday.\n\nAnd a leading epidemiologist has warned sending some children home from schools may be the only way to control infection rates.\n\nProf Neil Ferguson, a former government scientific adviser, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the current restrictions on household mixing \"should have a significant effect\".\n\nBut he said beyond that there was a \"limit to what we can do\" without sending some school year groups home.\n\nProf Ferguson, whose advice led to the lockdown in March, also said it was \"too early to say\" what impact the restrictions were having, adding: \"I think we'll have to wait another week or two.\"\n\nAsked what the impact would be of relaxing lockdown rules for one or two days on Christmas, Mr Ferguson, who quit his role in May after an \"error of judgement\", said it was a \"balancing act\" and \"a political judgement\".\n\n\"It risks some transmission and there will be consequences of that,\" he said. \"But if it's only one or two days the impact is likely to be limited.\"\n\nSome 7.3 million people are now living under England's tightest restrictions.\n\nAs the Sheffield City region entered tier three - very high alert - mayor Dan Jarvis, urged people to \"do their bit\" and stick to the new rules.\n\nHe told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that he was \"clear what it takes our end\" to get out of tier three, such as a drop in new cases - but the government \"do have to be clear and transparent about the exit strategy\".\n\nElsewhere, Stoke-on-Trent, Slough and Coventry moved into tier two - high alert level - at midnight.\n\nIn Wales, a 17-day \"firebreak\" has started, meaning most non-essential businesses are closed, with people only able to leave home for limited reasons.\n\nIn line with new guidance, supermarkets removed non-essential items from sale - including clothing, kitchen electrical items and crockery - using barriers and plastic sheets to cover products.\n\nShoppers in Wales will not be allowed to buy non-essential items, such as clothing and tableware, in stores\n\nIn Scotland, a five-level system will be introduced from 2 November. The top level would be close to a full lockdown, but the aim is for schools to remain open at all levels.\n\nIn Northern Ireland, schools have been closed for two weeks as part of an extended half-term break. This is part of a four-week \"circuit-breaker\" lockdown, with some businesses being told to close temporarily.\n\nUnder England's tier three rules, pubs and bars not serving substantial meals have to close, while household mixing is banned indoors and outdoors in hospitality settings and private gardens.\n\nAdditional rules in South Yorkshire include the closure of betting shops, adult gaming centres, casinos, and soft play centres. However, gyms will remain open.\n\nThe new measures will be reviewed after 28 days, but Sheffield's director of public health, Greg Fell, said he feared four weeks \"will not be long enough\".\n\nIn a letter to residents, Mr Jarvis, who is also the Labour MP for Barnsley Central, said there was light at the end of the tunnel and the restrictions would \"help us reach it sooner, and at a lower cost\".\n\nHe warned South Yorkshire communities now have some of the highest numbers of cases in the north of England and infection rates are still going up.\n\nIn Barnsley the infection rate in the seven days to 19 October was 486 cases per 100,000 people, in Sheffield 415, in Rotherham 407 and in Doncaster 393. The average area in England had 117.\n\nMr Jarvis wrote: \"It's tempting to think that because new restrictions are not a silver bullet they are not worth the disruption.\n\n\"We don't have the luxury of easy choices. But I have no doubt this was the right one to make.\n\n\"The alternatives carry far too great a risk of causing more deaths, and ultimately more harm to our economy.\"\n\nSouth Yorkshire joins Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region and Lancashire in tier three.\n\nTier three rules will also come into force in Warrington on Tuesday, two days earlier than initially planned, to \"urgently\" reduce coronavirus cases, according to the local council.\n\nNottingham and parts of Nottinghamshire are expected to be moved into the highest tier next week, with the finer details such as whether or not gyms can stay open still to be decided.\n\nMeanwhile, Office for National Statistics data estimates cases in England have risen to more than 35,200 a day.\n\nThe ONS survey tests a representative sample of the general population to provide an estimate of the true spread of the virus, as it picks up asymptomatic cases that would not necessarily be identified in the daily figures.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nHow are the restrictions affecting you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "A man has been charged with preparing for a right-wing terrorist attack on a major immigration law firm.\n\nCavan Medlock, 28, of Harrow, north London, is charged with preparing an act of terrorism by researching Duncan Lewis Solicitors with the intention of killing an immigration solicitor.\n\nProsecutors allege he equipped himself with a knife and handcuffs, as well as Nazi and Confederate flags before going to the offices in Harrow on 7 September.\n\nHe faces a trial on 17 May.\n\nHe is charged with preparation of terrorist acts under Section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006.\n\nHe is also charged with five further counts, including threatening with a bladed article in a public place, battery, two counts of causing racially aggravated alarm, harassment or distress, and making a threat to kill.\n\nHe is accused of threatening a receptionist with a knife before threatening to kill a solicitor and abusing other members of staff because of their racial or religious background.\n\nMr Medlock was not present during a hearing at the Old Bailey after he stripped to his waist as he briefly appeared by video-link from Wormwood Scrubs prison, before refusing to put his clothes back on.\n\nHe is yet to enter pleas to any of the charges.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Pressure is mounting on the government to reverse its decision not to provide free school meals over the holidays in England.\n\nSeveral Conservative MPs are opposing No 10's stance, as Labour threatens to push for another Commons vote and some 2,000 doctors call for a U-turn.\n\nIt comes as the PM faces calls to meet footballer Marcus Rashford to discuss his free school meals campaign.\n\nThe government has said it has increased welfare support.\n\nDowning Street has also highlighted tens of millions of pounds in funding for councils to help vulnerable families during the pandemic.\n\nBut there is increasing criticism from within Tory ranks over the government's decision to rule out extending meal vouchers for around 1.3 million vulnerable children in England to cover holidays.\n\nFormer Tory children's minister Tim Loughton, who did not support Labour's motion, said he would lobby ministers to reverse the decision for the Christmas break.\n\nAnd Tobias Ellwood, a former defence minister, said the free school meals scheme was \"well received\" and a \"simple and practical\" way of supporting families.\n\nJohnny Mercer, a defence minister, admitted on Twitter that the government had dealt with the issue \"poorly\".\n\nAnd more than 2,000 paediatricians who work with young people have signed a letter saying England should follow Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in providing meals during the holidays.\n\nMarcus Rashford has led a viral social media campaign highlighting organisations providing food during half term\n\nMeanwhile, chairman of the education select committee Robert Halfon said a meeting would help ministers create a long-term strategy to combat child food hunger.\n\nLabour has said it will force a new Commons vote on the issue if the government does not change its position before the Christmas Commons recess.\n\nTulip Siddiq, shadow minister for children, said she was sorry the issue had \"become a political football\" but some Conservative MPs \"are realising this is principles before party\" and she appealed for more to stand against the government.\n\nShe told BBC Breakfast that, with some local councils agreeing to supply meal vouchers during the holidays, the issue had become \"a postcode lottery\" because not every council had \"stepped up\".\n\nOn Wednesday, Conservative MPs rejected Labour's Opposition Day motion to extend free school meals by 322 votes to 261, with five Tory MPs rebelling.\n\nOne of those rebels, Mr Halfon, called on Mr Johnson to meet Rashford, telling the BBC: \"It may be that they don't agree with everything that Marcus Rashford is proposing, but it would give us a chance to come up with a long-term plan to combat child food hunger once and for all.\"\n\nOn Saturday, Rashford, 22, tweeted to condemn the \"unacceptable\" abuse some MPs had received for voting against the motion.\n\nThe government extended free school meals to eligible children during the Easter holidays earlier this year.\n\nFollowing the Manchester United striker's campaign, it bowed to pressure to do the same throughout the summer holiday.\n\nBut this time it has refused to do so, saying it has given councils £63m for families facing financial difficulties due to pandemic restrictions, as well as increasing welfare support by £9.3bn.\n\nBusinesses have been offering to provide children with food during half-term\n\nThis puts it at odds with the other UK nations, which have all extended the policy beyond term time.\n\nHowever, hundreds of cafes, restaurants and some local councils have since pledged to help feed children facing hardship during the October half term - prompting Rashford to say he \"couldn't be more proud to call myself British\".\n\nRashford's petition on child food poverty was approaching 800,000 names on Sunday morning.\n\nMeanwhile, two Conservative MPs have said comments they made about the issue were \"taken out of context\" after their remarks were criticised.\n\nCommenting on a school in Mansfield, Ben Bradley said that \"one kid lives in a crack den, another in a brothel\". Another Twitter user responded, saying that \"£20 cash direct to a crack den and a brothel sounds like the way forward with this one\", to which Mr Bradley replied: \"That's what FSM [free school meal] vouchers in the summer effectively did...\"\n\nMr Bradley said the tweet, which has since been deleted, had been \"totally taken out of context\".\n\nSimilarly, Conservative MP, Selaine Saxby, used the same defence after writing in a since-deleted Facebook post that she hoped businesses who were giving away food for free \"will not be seeking any further government support\".\n\nHave you been affected by any of the issues raised here? You can share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "One council leader described some MPs as \"callously indifferent\" to the plight of children\n\nCommunities across the country are stepping up to the plate to provide free school meals to children after a campaign by Marcus Rashford.\n\nIt comes after a motion to extend free school meals over holidays during the Covid-19 pandemic was rejected by MPs.\n\nThe Manchester United striker had called on people to \"unite\" to protect the most vulnerable children.\n\nFish and chip shops, pubs, restaurants and cafes are among the hospitality venues to offer free meals.\n\nA growing number of councils across England have also pledged to provide food vouchers over half term.\n\nLabour-led authorities in Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, Hammersmith & Fulham and Doncaster are among those agreeing to fund their own schemes.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Marcus Rashford and his mother Melanie helped out at FareShare Greater Manchester\n\nThe government said all measures would be kept under review after a Labour motion in the Commons to extend the scheme over holidays until Easter 2021 was defeated.\n\nHammersmith & Fulham Council leader Stephen Cowan said watching the vote was \"cutting\".\n\nHe said: \"I have seen a lot of kids who need food. I was in a school on Tuesday speaking to kids who have the free lunches now and they were explaining they have gone for days without a proper meal.\n\n\"They were very sweet kids, and then I looked at the MPs who were so callously indifferent to that and I thought, 'how can that be happening in the fifth richest country on Earth?'\n\n\"There are so many things they spend money on, it's a moral imperative.\"\n\nLiverpool mayor Joe Anderson said the decision would feed about 19,800 children in the city, while Doncaster's mayor Ros Jones said it was \"the right thing to do\".\n\nIan Ward, leader of Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in England, described the government policy on the issue as \"chaotic\" and \"unsustainable\".\n\nGovernment ministers have praised Mr Rashford for highlighting the difficulties facing low-income families, but some Conservative MPs have accused him of \"virtue signalling\".\n\nMore than 200 children's writers are among those urging the government to ensure no child goes hungry this winter.\n\nOther councils who have offered their own meal schemes include York, Wolverhampton, Oldham, Southwark, Redbridge, Lambeth, North Tyneside, Greenwich, Tower Hamlets and Telford & Wrekin.\n\nMarcus Rashford has urged people to \"unite\" to protect the most vulnerable children\n\nOther areas that will provide support include Reading, Middlesbrough, Medway, Kirklees, Brighton, Sefton, Knowsley, Lewisham, Halton and Portsmouth.\n\nTreasury minister Steve Barclay told BBC Radio 4's Today earlier there was an extra £9bn in support available through the welfare system.\n\n\"It's important we support families in need,\" he said.\n\n\"In the design and the measures we've taken, for example on housing support, lifting the allowance at the lowest in terms of rents to cover a much wider range of housing benefits, that again is about supporting families through the welfare system.\"", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nStaggering the return to universities after Christmas and the use of testing will form the strategy to get students home in December.\n\nScotland's Education Secretary John Swinney has given more details of the plan to allow students to return home.\n\nIt follows a spike in coronavirus infections in September when students moved into university accommodation.\n\nHundreds tested positive across the UK, with thousands told to self-isolate in halls.\n\nSpeaking on Politics Scotland, the deputy first minister said the Scottish government was in discussions with the UK government and the other devolved administrations to learn lessons from the experience of early autumn.\n\nHe said: \"Some of the points we are looking at are staggered returns of students, arrangements for how testing can be part of the architecture of how we handle that return.\n\n\"Also, what expectations we have of students when they are returning home and when they return to universities, and how their learning will be undertaken.\"\n\nThe Scottish government is working with the rest of the UK nations to manage the movement of students at Christmas\n\nHe said the discussions involved \"intense detail\" to make sure the movement of students both home for Christmas and returning back to university was handled safely to prevent spread of the virus in other parts of the UK.\n\nHe said testing programmes would be involved.\n\n\"These are some of the options being looked at,\" he added. \"Practicalities are eased if return of students is staggered over a longer period and we are working with institutions because they have to be partners with us on how the learning is undertaken over that period.\n\n\"We want to avoid any situation where there is not too much strain on the testing system or on the possibility of the circulation of the virus when students return or when they return to their homes in the first place.\"\n\nMatt Crilly, president of the National Union of Students (NUS) Scotland, said it wanted to see a \"clear and coherent\" plan from the Scottish government \"urgently\".\n\n\"In terms of a return to campus in the new year, we must avoid a repeat of the mass outbreaks we saw among the student population in the autumn,\" he said.\n\n\"Universities and Colleges need to clearly communicate with their students on what their next semester is going to look like, so that students can make an informed decision on whether they wish to return.\n\n\"NUS Scotland continues to call for remote learning to be the default position. That way no student has to go back to campus unless absolutely necessary. No student should be left asking themselves, again, why they've been asked to return for no good reason.\"\n\nHe added: \"We welcome that the Scottish government and institutions are looking at mass asymptomatic testing for the student population. We would welcome further discussion on this issue.\"\n\nScottish Liberal Democrat Leader Willie Rennie also welcomed the asymptomatic testing which he said could \"hunt down and drive out the virus from campuses\".\n\nOn Saturday he told the BBC the Scottish government was doing everything it could to get students home for Christmas.\n\nHe said he recognised the importance of family and community occasions but that suppressing the virus was paramount.\n\nStudents were asked to stay away from parties, pubs and restaurants for a weekend and were only allowed to return home if they could self-isolate and their households went into quarantine.\n\nAt the time Nicola Sturgeon said it was \"absolutely our priority\" to make sure that students are able to return home for Christmas.\n\nIt comes after children in Scotland were asked to stay at home this Halloween.\n\nStudents in Edinburgh staged a protest against their treatment by the university\n\nMeanwhile, students from Edinburgh University staged a protest over their \"mistreatment\" by the institution during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nProtesters claimed the university made a \"false promise\" of hybrid learning and said many students would not have taken out leases on flats if they had known most learning would be online.\n\nThey also claimed the university's treatment of first years had been \"terrible\", saying the university had \"locked them in halls of residences with zero regard for their mental health and wellbeing\".\n\nStudents gathered to protest in the city's Bristo Square on Saturday, calling for better treatment and services and an \"actual provision of hybrid learning\", saying if the university cannot provide this then a cut in fees for the online semester is needed.\n\nThe university said academic and support staff had been working \"tirelessly\" to provide students with the world-class education that they expect from the institution.\n\nStudents were unhappy at what they saw as a lack of support when cases soared at halls of residence\n\nA spokeswoman said: \"We have been working closely with the Students' Union and other student groups to ensure that their views are heard at the highest level.\n\n\"Students are receiving a hybrid learning experience, in line with Scottish government guidance, with some in-person teaching taking place on campus. We are delivering more than 95,000 hours of teaching this semester and more than 35,000 hours of these are scheduled to take place on campus.\"", "The bodies of 39 Vietnamese nationals were discovered in a refrigerated trailer\n\nA woman saw nine people get into a lorry in northern France the day before 39 Vietnamese migrants were found dead inside it in the UK, a court heard.\n\nThe witness, who said police were alerted, said the group were dropped by taxi near a farm shed before the white lorry stopped and they got in.\n\nA little later on 22 October 2019, a lone man arrived saying he was \"looking for his friends\", the Old Bailey heard.\n\nFour men are on trial after the migrants' bodies were found in Essex.\n\nJurors have heard the 39 victims, aged between 15 and 44, had suffocated in the sealed trailer - which was found on an industrial estate in Purfleet - as the temperature inside reached 38.5C.\n\nThe victims were discovered when the container was opened at Purfleet in Essex\n\nGheorghe Nica, 43, of Basildon, Essex, and lorry driver Eamonn Harrison, 23, deny the manslaughters of 39 Vietnamese people, aged between 15 and 44.\n\nMr Harrison, of Mayobridge, County Down, Christopher Kennedy, 24, of County Armagh, and Valentin Calota, 37, of Birmingham, deny being part of a people-smuggling conspiracy, which Mr Nica has admitted.\n\nA statement from carer Laetitia Mockelyn was read to the trial, in which she said she had heard Estelle Duyke call the Gendarmes on 22 October about migrants being seen close to her elderly mother-in-law's house, in Bierne.\n\nShe said she later saw the lone man being dropped off by a taxi after the lorry had left with the nine people who had arrived earlier.\n\nWhen he was approached the man said in English he was \"looking for his friends\", before walking off in the direction of a factory.\n\nA police image shows how packed boxes of macaroons in an earlier shipment bore dirty footprints\n\nWhen the Gendarmerie arrived they checked the shed where the nine people had waited but \"there was no-one there\", Ms Mockelyn said.\n\nShe said the nine all appeared to be aged under 35 and among them was a woman wearing a padded jacket, white woolly hat and small backpack, and a \"slightly-built\" man in jeans and classic black cap.\n\nThe man who arrived after the lorry departed was described as being of small build and wearing blue jeans, a padded jacket and Adidas backpack.\n\nMs Mockelyn told officers she had never seen anything like it before.\n\nLorry driver Eamonn Harrison, 23, allegedly picked up the migrants in his trailer before dropping it at the port of Zeebrugge in Belgium, on 22 October.\n\nThe court heard the temperature inside the trailer had already risen from 11.7C to 15.6C by 10:30 BST.\n\nThe next morning the trailer was collected by Maurice Robinson in Purfleet, Essex, and he discovered the bodies of the men, women and children, the jury was told.\n\nProsecutors said Harrison had two encounters with the police in the days before he allegedly collected the migrants. The first time was due to the fact he was intoxicated and the second because his trailer was parked illegally.\n\nMeanwhile, haulage boss Ronan Hughes, Robinson and alleged key organiser Gheorghe Nica were caught on CCTV at the Ibis Hotel in Thurrock, Essex, on the evening of 18 October.\n\nHughes, 41, and Robinson, 26, have pleaded guilty to 39 counts of manslaughter.\n\nFind BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The organiser was fined after a flat party in Simpson Street\n\nA man has been fined £10,000 after more than 50 people attended a party in a flat in Manchester.\n\nIndoor gatherings are banned as the city tries to curb the spread of coronavirus.\n\nOfficers said they fined the party organiser after also finding DJ decks, large speakers and a buffet in the flat in Simpson Street, Angel Meadows.\n\nGreater Manchester Police said it had issued 52 fines since tier three rules came into force in the area on Friday.\n\nAssistant Chief Constable Mabs Hussain said: \"This party was a blatant disregard of the rules and for public health.\n\n\"It is totally unacceptable in the current crisis the whole world is facing and is not what we want our officers to be spending their time doing.\n\n\"We had no alternative but to issue the maximum penalty for breaching the legislation on large gatherings and I hope this serves as a reminder to those considering to flout the rules - we will take action.\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "President Donald Trump has voted early in the US election, while on a campaign visit in Florida. It marks the first time an incumbent president has voted, in-person, in the state.\n\nThere has been record early voting in the US election with 53 million people already having cast their ballots, largely because of fears over Covid-19.\n\nThe official election day is 3 November.", "Coronavirus infections continue to rise across the UK, according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics.\n\nIt estimates cases have risen by a quarter to more than 35,200 a day in England.\n\nInfection rates have been highest among teenagers and young adults in recent weeks.\n\nIt comes as stricter rules come into force for millions more people across the UK.\n\nAround one in 130 people you might meet in the street in England had coronavirus in the week to 16 October, data from the ONS infection survey suggests.\n\nThis compares with one in 180 in Wales and Scotland, and one in 100 in Northern Ireland.\n\nThe highest levels of the virus continue to be in the north-west and north-east of England.\n\nMeanwhile, the R number has decreased slightly and is now estimated to be between 1.2 and 1.4. That means every 10 people with the virus pass it on to 12 or 14 others, on average.\n\nThe ONS figures are based on a survey of people in random households whether they have symptoms or not, giving one of the most accurate pictures of the epidemic.\n\nAlthough cases are still rising, they suggest a slight slowing in the rate of growth of infections since the previous week's survey.\n\nThis echoes data from Public Health England which suggests cases may now be falling among people in their teens and 20s while still increasing in all other age groups.\n\nThe ONS figures are much higher than the lab-confirmed cases recorded by the UK government every day. Another 21,242 cases and 189 deaths were confirmed on Thursday.\n\nAnother source of data, the Covid Symptom study app, suggests there were more than 36,000 new daily cases in the UK over the two weeks to 18 October - up from nearly 28,000 a week ago.\n\nThese numbers are based on users logging their symptoms and positive tests on the app.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid symptoms: What are they and how long should I self-isolate for?\n\nTim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College London, and founder of the app, said the gap between the northern regions of the UK and the south \"was growing\".\n\n\"Our data clearly shows that the number of cases is still being driven by the younger generations, which should mean less pressure on NHS admissions compared to earlier in the year,\" he said.\n\nBut he warned that people of all ages can get long Covid and it is important to control the second wave.\n\nPHE's weekly report on the spread of the virus shows case rates are still highest in the under 30s, but are now coming down.\n\nIn contrast, cases per 100,000 people in all age groups over 30 continue to rise.\n\nIn hospitals, admissions and deaths are still rising right across England and health officials are concerned that black, Asian and minority ethnic communities make up nearly 40% of admissions to intensive care.\n\nThe highest hospital admission rates for people with Covid-19 were in the over 85s, and in the north west of England.\n• None How will the vulnerable be protected from Covid? And other questions", "A 17-year-old boy has been killed in a street stabbing in east London.\n\nThe Met Police said officers were called to Westbury Road in Walthamstow at 21:20 BST on Friday, where they found the boy injured.\n\nParamedics treated the teenager at the scene but he was pronounced dead shortly after.\n\nOfficers are in the process of establishing his identity and informing his next of kin. No arrests have been made.\n\nA crime scene remains in place while detectives carry out an investigation.\n\nA local resident, who did not want to be named, said that before the arrival of emergency services they \"didn't hear anything at all that indicated violence, heard no shouting etc that we thought was odd\".\n\n\"It is incredibly tragic and such a senseless loss of life. It feels especially shocking when it happens so close to home, and on an otherwise peaceful street,\" they said.\n\nThe resident said sniffer dogs were at the scene on Friday night, while two cars had been removed by police.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A self-proclaimed member of a violent anti-government group has been charged with rioting during the George Floyd protests in Minnesota.\n\nFederal prosecutors said Ivan Hunter, a 26-year-old from Texas, opened fire on a Minneapolis police precinct to escalate the unrest back in May.\n\nHe was arrested in an FBI investigation into the Boogaloo Bois extremists.\n\nOther far-right groups have also been suspected of trying to foment violence at recent racial justice protests.\n\nThe protests began after the death of George Floyd, a black man, in police custody. At times, the demonstrations turned violent.\n\nThe US Attorney's Office in Minnesota has charged Mr Hunter with one count of travelling across state lines with the intent to participate in a riot. Prosecutors allege Mr Hunter had travelled from Boerne, Texas, in an effort to incite unrest with other members of the Boogaloo Bois group.\n\nMr Hunter is accused of firing 13 rounds from an AK-47 style semiautomatic rifle into the police department on 28 May.\n\nHe was filmed high-fiving others and shouting \"Justice for Floyd\", according to the criminal complaint announced on Friday. Officials also said another person involved in the incident told authorities Mr Hunter was the one who fired the shots.\n\nThe police building was eventually set on fire by protesters.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. A police station was set on fire in third night of unrest in Minneapolis\n\nProsecutors say when he returned to Texas, Mr Hunter referenced participating in violence in Minneapolis on social media, allegedly messaging someone saying that he \"set fire to that precinct with the black community\".\n\nHe was stopped by police in Austin, Texas, on 3 June, as the vehicle he was in had traffic violations. He was one of three individuals in the vehicle, and he had loaded magazines for an assault rifle on his person, officers said.\n\nThere were three semi-automatic rifles in the vehicle and two loaded pistols.\n\nAn image believed to be of Mr Hunter in Minneapolis from the FBI criminal complaint\n\nFollowing the traffic stop, federal agents learned of his connections to the Boogaloo Bois, a loosely organised extremist group that wants to overthrow the government.\n\nMr Hunter had an online affiliation with Steven Carrillo, another Boogaloo Bois member accused of murdering a federal officer in California.\n\nA statement from the Minnesota US Attorney's office said Mr Hunter was arrested on 21 October in San Antonio, Texas, and appeared in court on 22 October.\n\nSome are capitalising on the protests to engage in acts of violence against authorities. Three Boogaloo members were charged with terrorism offences in Nevada in June for alleged attempts to \"spark violence\" in protests.\n• None Police station set on fire in Minneapolis unrest. Video, 00:00:56Police station set on fire in Minneapolis unrest", "A patient carries out his own Covid-19 test at a new walk-through testing site in Inverness\n\nA further 11 people who tested positive for Covid-19 have died in Scotland.\n\nThe Scottish government's daily update showed that 1,433 more positive cases were recorded in the previous 24 hours - 19.1% of people newly tested.\n\nThere were 524 new cases in Greater Glasgow and Clyde, 321 in Lanarkshire, 174 in Ayrshire and Arran and 166 in Lothian.\n\nA total of 985 people were in hospital and 84 people were in intensive care, an increase of eight on Friday.\n\nThe death toll under the measure of people who first tested positive for the virus within the previous 28 days has risen to 2,699.\n\nA total of 55,449 people have now tested positive in Scotland, up from 54,016 the previous day.\n\nDeputy First Minister John Swinney said that despite recording 11 more deaths linked to Covid-19, the figures gave cause for \"cautious optimism\".\n\nHe said the 1,433 more positive cases recorded in the previous 24 hours could have been higher.\n\nHe said: \"I think we can take some optimism from the figures, that we are not seeing the increase growing faster than we might have predicted would be the case and I think that's a measure of the effectiveness of the measures and the level of public compliance applied to the restrictions.\n\n\"If we had predicted the pattern of the increase in cases a couple of weeks ago, we would have expected today to have had much higher numbers reported.\"\n\nOn Saturday a new walk-through testing centre opened in Inverness.\n\nThe site, at Highland Council's headquarters in Glenurquhart Rd, is the 11th of 22 planned pedestrian centres in Scotland.\n\nCreated by the UK government, the centre will be operated by Mitie.\n\nOther sites are already running in St Andrews, Aberdeen, West Dunbartonshire, Stirling, Dundee, Inverclyde and two in each in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Each local test site has a daily capacity of 300 tests.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced this week that Scotland aims to increase testing capacity to 65,000 tests per day by building three regional testing hubs in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, as well as increasing the amount of testing done by the UK government.\n\nScotland Office minister David Duguid said: \"The UK government is helping all parts of the UK fight the coronavirus pandemic and this new walk-through testing centre in Inverness will make it easier for people to get tested.\n\n\"Testing is vital, helping to manage local outbreaks and protecting people's livelihoods.\n\n\"The UK government is providing the bulk of Covid testing in Scotland, and this new walk-through centre is just the latest in our extensive testing network.\n\n\"We are pleased to be working with local and commercial partners. These sites are not possible without the hard work of many people and I would like to thank everyone involved for their hard work to get this testing centre up and running.\"\n\nA patient hands over their test at the Inverness testing centre\n\nHealth Secretary Jeane Freeman said: \"Working alongside the UK government and local partners, the site in Inverness delivers on our commitment to have 11 walk through centres in place across Scotland by the end of October with another 11 planned over the course of the winter.\n\n\"This is testament to the hard work and commitment of those working to set up the sites as well as those on the ground delivering tests at the centres.\n\n\"Containing and suppressing this virus relies on testing being accessible to everyone and this site will further increase our testing capacity ahead of potential spikes as we move into winter.\n\n\"Centres like this can be operational in a matter of days, and we are working at pace with NHS National Services Scotland and local authorities to roll out more across the country so that more people have access to local testing.\"", "The body of the woman, believed to be in her 60s, was found at a National Trust estate\n\nA man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after the body of a woman was discovered at a National Trust estate.\n\nPolice found the body in woodland on the Watlington Hill estate, Oxfordshire, just before 18:00 BST on Friday.\n\nThe arrested man is being treated in hospital for serious injuries.\n\nThames Valley Police said it was linking the murder to reports of a man seen acting suspiciously near a pub a few hours earlier.\n\nThe victim is believed to be in her 60s, the force added.\n\nOfficers have appealed for anyone who saw a man behaving strangely near the Fox and Hounds pub in the Christmas Common area of Oxfordshire at about 15:30 to get in touch.\n\nAnyone who saw anything suspicious in the Watlington Hill area at about 17:30 has also been asked to contact detectives.\n\nDet Supt Craig Kirby said: \"We are carrying out a thorough investigation to piece together what has happened to lead to this woman's death.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Police clashed with some protesters as they tried to disperse the crowds\n\nEighteen people have been arrested at a protest in central London over coronavirus lockdown restrictions.\n\nLarge crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace, where police were stationed, before moving on to Trafalgar Square.\n\nSome protesters carried placards calling for \"freedom\" and an end to the \"tyranny\" of Covid-19 restrictions.\n\nThe Metropolitan Police said the crowds had been dispersed but urged people to continue social distancing.\n\nThere was some disruption on Westminster Bridge as officers tried to break up demonstrators.\n\nThe force said three officers had suffered minor injuries.\n\nArrests were made for a variety of offences, including breaching coronavirus regulations, assaulting an emergency service worker and for violent disorder.\n\nThe capital was placed into tier two lockdown restrictions earlier this week.\n\nCommander Ade Adelekan, of the Met, said he had become \"increasingly concerned that those in the crowd were not maintaining social distancing or adhering to the terms of their own risk assessment\".\n\nHe added: \"Organisers did not take reasonable steps to keep protesters safe which then voided their risk assessment. At this point, officers then took action to disperse crowds in the interests of public safety.\n\n\"I am grateful that the vast majority of people listened to officers and quickly left the area. Frustratingly, a small minority became obstructive, deliberately ignoring officers' instructions and blocking Westminster Bridge.\n\n\"Although the majority of protests have concluded, our policing operation will continue into the night and I would urge Londoners to stick to the regulations, avoid gathering in large numbers and maintain social distancing.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Schools may need to close to some year groups in order to get control over the coronavirus infection rate, a leading epidemiologist has warned.\n\nProf Neil Ferguson, who modelled the epidemic's impact for the government, said restrictions on household mixing \"should have a significant effect\".\n\nBut he said beyond that there was a \"limit to what we can do\" without sending some school year groups home.\n\nProf Ferguson also said if rules were relaxed, deaths would increase.\n\nIt comes as the UK government announced on Saturday there had been a further 23,012 confirmed cases and 174 new deaths.\n\nMore than seven million people in England are now living under the top level of coronavirus restrictions, with South Yorkshire the latest region to have new rules come into force.\n\nThe whole of Wales - 3.1 million people - is also seeing its first full day of national lockdown, which is due to last for 17 days.\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Prof Ferguson - who quit his role from the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies in May after breaking lockdown rules - said the situation was \"worrying\".\n\n\"We now have 8,000 people in hospital with Covid. That is about a third of the level we were at at the peak of the pandemic in March,\" he said.\n\n\"If the rate of growth continues as it is, it means that in a month's time we'll be above that peak level in March and that is probably unsustainable.\n\n\"We are in a critical time right now. The health system will not be able to cope with this rate of growth for much longer.\"\n\nProf Ferguson, who leads Imperial College London's Covid-19 response team, said it was \"too early to say\" if current restrictions were having an effect and \"we'll have to wait another week or two\".\n\nHe said while there were \"little hints\" of slowing, for example in the North East of England, \"we're not seeing the sort of slowing that we really need to get on top of this\".\n\n\"What we're seeing is case numbers coming down quite quickly in a narrow age band, in 18-21 year olds,\" he said.\n\n\"Unfortunately in every other age group case numbers continue to rise at about the same rate they were.\"\n\nProf Neil Ferguson's modelling of the spread of coronavirus was key to the government's decision to bring in the lockdown\n\nHe said the impact of rules on households mixing should be \"significant\" - although \"as yet we haven't been able to see it definitively\".\n\nHe added: \"If we go beyond that there is a limit to what we can do in terms of reducing contacts, short of starting to target, for instance, the older years in schools and sixth form colleges where we know older teenagers are able to transmit as adults.\n\n\"Of course, nobody wants to start moving to virtual education and closing schools even partially. The challenge may be that we are not able to get on top of the transmission otherwise.\"\n\nThe UK government has been keen not to close schools again, with Boris Johnson saying it was a \"national priority\" for children to be in school.\n\nProf Ferguson was also asked about Christmas and what the impact would be of relaxing lockdown rules for one or two days.\n\n\"It's always a balancing act,\" he said. \"It risks some transmission and there will be consequences of that. Some people will die because of getting infected on that day.\n\n\"But if it's only one or two days the impact is likely to be limited. So that really is a political judgement of the costs versus the benefits.\"\n\nIt comes after No 10 said it was Prime Minister Mr Johnson's \"ambition\" for people to celebrate Christmas with their families.\n\nThe PM was \"hopeful\" that some aspects of our lives could be \"back to normal\" by then, No 10 added.\n\nBut that differed to comments made by other politicians and scientists.\n\nProf John Edmunds, who sits on Sage, said the idea that people could \"carry on as we are\" and then have a normal Christmas with friends and family was \"wishful thinking in the extreme\".\n\nAnother Sage scientist said last week that Christmas was unlikely to be the \"usual celebration\" of \"families coming together\".\n\nMeanwhile, Scotland's national clinical director Jason Leitch has said people should prepare for \"digital celebrations\", while Wales' first minister said the priority was \"saving lives not saving Christmas\".", "\"I still have nightmares most nights about being completely out of my depth.\"\n\nGemma, a ward nurse in Northern Ireland, was redeployed to a critical care unit at the end of March when the first wave of coronavirus struck.\n\n\"I had never looked after a critically ill intensive care patient in my life,\" she says.\n\n\"I just thought, I'm coming in here and I'm going to die. I'm going to catch Covid and I'm going to be one of those patients in the beds.\"\n\nAs the second wave of the pandemic takes deep root across parts of the UK, thousands of NHS workers are struggling to recover from what they have already been through.\n\n\"We were all in PPE all the time,\" recalls Nathan, a senior intensive care nurse at a hospital in the Midlands. \"All you can see is people's eyes, you can't see anything else.\"\n\nHe describes trying to help junior members of staff survive long and difficult days.\n\n\"And I'd see these eyes as big as saucers saying help me, do something. Make this right. Fix this.\"\n\n\"The pressure was insane, and the anxiety just got me,\" he says. \"I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't eat, I was sick before work, I was shaking before I got into my car in the morning.\"\n\nNathan ended up having time off with severe anxiety, but he is now back at the hospital, waiting for the beds to fill up again.\n\nWe've spoken to a number of nurses and doctors across the UK who are deeply apprehensive about what lies ahead this winter.\n\nWe're not using their real names because they shared their views on condition of anonymity, in order to speak freely.\n\nAll believe it is important that the general public hears first-hand about the enormous strain the health service and its staff have been under.\n\nIt has not just been about coping with the devastating effects of a new and deadly disease.\n\nPressure to deal with the huge backlog of other medical treatments, which had been put on hold, meant some health care workers didn't have much of a break during the summer either.\n\n\"I finally went on holiday in September and it was like I came out of a fog,\" says Danny, an intensive care doctor and anaesthetist based in Yorkshire.\n\n\"Almost the last six months of my life was just some kind of haze that I don't remember very well. You just became all about Covid and nothing else,\" he says. \"And I think that got us through the first wave, but obviously it isn't a sustainable mechanism to carry on.\"\n\nThat widely shared feeling of exhaustion has been heightened by long-standing concerns about staff shortages, and by deep resentment - particularly among nurses - about pay and conditions.\n\nOne of the lasting images of the first wave of Covid is of the weekly \"clap for carers\" - that moment of national unity that took place on doorsteps at 20:00 every Thursday night.\n\nHealth care workers have been very appreciative of public support, but many say they would prefer a proper pay settlement to another round of applause.\n\nAnd Jo Billings, a psychologist from the Covid Trauma Response Working Group at University College London, says \"the narrative of health care workers being heroes or angels has largely been really unhelpful.\"\n\nIt painted a picture that people do this because they're special, not because they're simply doing their job, for which they should be adequately paid and protected.\n\n\"It's also been a real barrier to people seeking help with their own problems,\" Dr Billings says, \"because they feel heroes don't struggle. An angel doesn't get PTSD.\"\n\nThe first wave of Covid-19 could have been much worse than it was. In fact, many doctors expected it to be. A lot of the extra capacity that was created so quickly in the health system, in temporary Nightingale hospitals and elsewhere, was not needed.\n\nBut health care staff speak of an \"all hands on deck\" mentality, when people were doing long shifts and were often away from home for extended periods to protect their families.\n\n\"It was mentally draining, and we've not really had a proper downtime,\" says Moussa, a respiratory consultant from Greater Manchester. \"As soon as the first wave finished, we started catching up with the backlog of other cases. So, there was another mountain to climb.\"\n\nThat sense of fatigue and frustration, in a health service already stretched to the limit before Covid struck, is captured in data put together by the Covid Trauma Response Working Group.\n\nIts Frontline Covid study of nearly 1200 health care workers from across the UK between May and July found that nearly 60% of them met the criteria for at least one of three things - anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.\n\nVarious risk factors were identified, including fear of transmitting Covid to others, unreliable access to Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) at the time, feeling stigmatised due to their role, and not feeling able to talk to a manager about how they were coping.\n\nConversations with NHS staff reveal a system of support for staff welfare and mental health which is patchy - fantastic in some places, not so in others.\n\n\"A junior doctor I spoke to the other day was talking about what a difficult time she'd found in another hospital,\" says Dorothy Wade, a psychologist at University College Hospital in London. \"And I said, 'Didn't you have anything like this at the other hospital?' And she said, 'No, absolutely nothing. There was nothing on offer at all.'\n\nShe says quite a lot of hospitals still don't have a staff psychologist, and didn't have resources to offer any provisions.\n\nIt has been a similar story in intensive care units, says Nicki Credland of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses.\n\n\"In some places there have been significant amounts of psychological support,\" but in others \"staff are reporting that they're needing to go to their GP.\"\n\nNHS England says nearly half a million staff were given extra support with their health and mental wellbeing needs during the first wave, via self-help apps, text services, online forums and telephone helplines.\n\nBut in most cases, it is down to local management, and sometimes support isn't available at the time that shift workers need it.\n\n\"Members of staff in our ward have been permanently scarred by Covid,\" says Jacqui, a nurse at a small community hospital in London. \"They sometimes struggle now doing some of the more minor tasks. [But] we were very lucky that we're in a very good, small trust,\" she says, \"which has taken all that on board and is supporting them.\"\n\nA large number of health care workers, however, were redeployed into new hospitals or new wards, or even into entirely new areas with very little training and very little preparation.\n\nAnd the Frontline Covid survey reveals that many of them were distressed by what they saw.\n\nThat is partly because even at the best of times in critical care, a lot of patients are going to die.\n\n\"You have to have this slight disconnect with what's going on because you have to accept that you can do everything right, and the patient still might not survive,\" says Danny, the ICU doctor in Yorkshire. \"But people coming from elsewhere in the hospital haven't had the time to develop that kind of mentality.\"\n\nIn Northern Ireland, Gemma was asked recently by her manager if she would like to volunteer to go back into an ICU.\n\n\"I laughed in her face and said no,\" she admits. \"I don't know if I'll be made to go. But as soon as you walk over the threshold of a hospital, you cannot refuse to look after a patient. And the thought is, you've done it before, you can do it again.\"\n\nThere's little doubt that morale in the NHS would be higher if staff felt they were being rewarded more fairly.\n\nThe Royal College of Nursing (RCN) surveyed more than 40,000 of its members in the aftermath of the first Covid wave, and found that pay, and feeling under-valued, was their number-one concern.\n\n\"It may feel like now is not the time to talk about pay, with so many people in lockdown and in serious financial difficulty,\" says Mike Adams of the RCN, \"but we've thought about this very carefully.\n\n\"If you want to do one thing for nurses who need a boost to get through the rest of this year, and through the winter, it would be to show you value them with a meaningful pay rise.\"\n\nMany staff are frustrated because they know that is unlikely to happen.\n\nNearly three quarters of respondents to the RCN survey said they thought they were more valued by the general public after the onset of Covid-19. But less than one fifth thought they were more valued by the government in their part of the UK.\n\n\"All that clapping, and all that goodwill,\" says Nathan, \"and now it's back to normal.\"\n\nDoctors earn more money than nurses, but express similar sentiments.\n\n\"We've lost 40% of our pension pot in the last five years,\" says Jack, a consultant in London. \"And everyone is looking at it and wondering whether they should get out now before we lose any more.\n\n\"I think by next March, it's going to be a great deal worse,\" he says\n\nThat in turn highlights another message delivered by members of the RCN. In the aftermath of the first Covid wave, 35% of more than 40,000 people said they were actively considering leaving the profession.\n\nAn NHS spokesperson told the BBC that there are now more than 300,000 nurses in England, including 13,000 who joined recently.\n\n\"And this year there was a 22% increase in applications for nursing degrees, on top of our £28m fund to boost international recruitment,\" the spokesperson continued.\n\nIt takes years to train new recruits, however, and there were more than 40,000 nursing vacancies across the NHS at the beginning of the year.\n\nNow, with Covid an ever-present danger, many experienced members of staff are thinking of leaving, and many of them are not coming back.\n\n\"Nurses approaching retirement used to - in significant numbers - retire, and then return on a smaller number of hours,\" says Mike Adams at the RCN. \"But that is just not happening as much. We're losing the guides and mentors for the student nurses and the newly qualified nurses.\"\n\nGemma in Northern Ireland says she plans to leave the NHS when this next Covid phase is over, and get a job in the private sector where she won't be redeployed at a moment's notice.\n\n\"A lot of what got us through is the camaraderie, informal chats in the tearoom,\" she explains. \"But we're not even allowed to chat in the tearoom anymore. We have to sit apart with masks on.\n\n\"I'd say a large proportion of my team feel the same. A couple of nurses have just taken early retirement saying, 'No, not doing it anymore.'\"\n\nMany people in the NHS think the public aren't always aware of how acute staff shortages could become.\n\n\"The focus during the first wave was all on ventilators and the Nightingales and beds and things like that,\" says Danny in Yorkshire. \"But the actual thing we need is staff.\"\n\nHe highlights a concern raised by a number of NHS staff that we talked to - an awful lot of people were so burnt out by the first wave that they may not be able to commit so much this time.\n\nStaffing up of ICU became a focus in the early months of the pandemic\n\n\"We've noticed there's a real reluctance among doctors, nurses, everyone to pick up these extra shifts now,\" he says. \"People are realising the importance of family, the pandemic has encouraged everyone to make life simpler, and they want to do something more sustainable second time around.\"\n\nThe challenge could be particularly acute in intensive care.\n\nIn south-west London, Jacqui worked in an ICU during the first wave, and has the rights skills and experience. But she doesn't think she can do it again.\n\n\"Intensive care is incredibly physical, and I hurt my shoulder last time trying to roll a patient over,\" she says. \"Psychologically, I'm not sure I could completely cope with it again.\"\n\n\"It has actually made me go, 'Right, next year, I really will take my pension, I won't work full time anymore.' I've done my bit.\"\n\nBack in March and April, staff were redeployed in large numbers from other parts of the health system, particularly from operating theatres, to bolster intensive care.\n\nBut if the government wants things like elective surgery and operations elsewhere in the health system to continue, many of those extra staff may not be available.\n\n\"We haven't miraculously managed to find an extra 10,000 ICU nurses over the past five months,\" says Nicki Credland. \"That gives us a problem, which is compounded by staff that are off sick because of the psychological and physical response to the first wave of Covid.\"\n\nThere are potential solutions to ease serious staff shortages if the virus strikes specific areas hard. Seriously-ill patients could be moved to hospitals under less pressure, or experienced staff, based in areas where the virus is spreading more slowly, could be moved into hotspots.\n\n\"We're taking a much more local approach,\" the medical director of NHS England Stephen Powis said last week, \"and we are determined to keep the capacity for non-Covid services open for as long as possible.\n\n\"That involves hospitals helping each other, the use of independent sector hospitals where we can, and it might involve some of the Nightingale hospitals.\"\n\nA doctor at an NHS trust near Liverpool - which is in tier three - confirmed that her hospital was on standby to take patients from Liverpool City Region, even though its ICU was already full.\n\nAmbulances stand by in Strasbourg in March to load patients with Covid-19 into a medicalised train\n\nBut if the pandemic gets a lot worse, the effectiveness of local cooperation like this could be limited. And there is no national plan for moving people or resources around the country.\n\n\"In France, they reconditioned trains and made carriages into mobile intensive care units,\" says Jack, the consultant in London. \"In Holland, they had a big double-decker bus, a mobile ICU to move large numbers around. But I'm not aware that we've got anything other than fleets of ambulances.\"\n\nWhen you look back to March, there is no doubt some things have changed for the better. There is far more testing of NHS staff, including testing staff without symptoms in hotspot areas, and there is far less anxiety about the supply of personal protective equipment.\n\nDoctors also know more about the disease and ways to try to treat it, which should have a positive effect on staff morale.\n\n\"We still don't have a cure, but seeing people get better obviously makes staff stronger psychologically,\" says consultant Jack. \"We're only human after all.\"\n\n\"We will put our best foot forward, and we'll do the best for the patients,\" says Nathan, the ICU nurse in the Midlands, \"but I can genuinely say all of my colleagues, including senior management, are terrified.\"\n\n\"We're not sure how, in terms of resilience, we are going to be able to get through this.\"\n\nAcross the NHS you can hear similar concerns - a determination to step up to the plate again, but also the knowledge that adrenalin only gets you so far.\n\nThe desire to continue with business as usual in the NHS - treating other conditions and diseases as normal - is a laudable, and probably an essential, aim.\n\nBut that may not prove possible - some hospitals are cancelling operations already.\n\n\"The pressure to still run all the normal functions of the NHS and deal with a Covid second wave that's got the potential to be bigger than the first one,\" says Moussa, \"that's a harsh, harsh thing when we feel we need to prioritise.\"\n\nMany doctors were expecting a second wave to start around November, so it has come in some places a little earlier than predicted. And even in a normal year, the onset of winter and the flu season puts huge additional capacity pressure on the NHS.\n\nThe government argues that the system has shown extraordinary resilience in the face of a pandemic unprecedented in living memory.\n\nBut Moussa argues that as a country, \"we could have done more to be ready for the second wave\".\n\n\"When you think about it,\" he says, \"it's a bit of a perfect storm.\"", "Shakespeare's Globe said its £2.98m would allow it to \"plan more confidently for our future\"\n\nShakespeare's Globe, the Sage Gateshead and the company behind the Lady Boys of Bangkok are among the latest recipients of emergency government arts funding.\n\nThe replica Elizabethan theatre in London will receive almost £3m from the £1.57bn Culture Recovery Fund.\n\nThe Birmingham Hippodrome, London's Old Vic theatre and the English National Ballet will all get the maximum £3m.\n\nGandey Productions, which stages the Chinese State Circus and the Lady Boys of Bangkok, will get more than £1m.\n\nThe Sage concert hall will receive £1.8m. Overall, 35 organisations and venues across England will receive up to £3m each in the latest round of grants, which is worth £75m in total. More than 70% is going go to venues and organisations outside London.\n\nOther recipients include the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton, Newcastle Theatre Royal, Norwich Theatre, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London Transport Museum and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon.\n\nAlso on the list are the Fabric nightclub in London and two equipment companies - Lancashire-based Lights Control Rigging, which has helped the likes of Ed Sheeran and Rita Ora perform, and Merseyside's Adlib Audio.\n\nCulture Secretary Oliver Dowden said the \"vital funding\" would secure the recipients' futures and \"protect jobs right away\".\n\nThe culture secretary visited the Design Museum, another recipient, earlier this week\n\n\"These places and organisations are irreplaceable parts of our heritage and what make us the cultural superpower we are,\" he said.\n\nThe government said the grants were being awarded \"to places that define culture in all corners of the country\".\n\nGrant recipients in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will be announced separately by their devolved administrations.\n\nThe English funding has been warmly welcomed by both the venues and organisations themselves and by their celebrity spokespeople.\n\nAndrew Scott was seen on the Old Vic stage last year in Present Laughter\n\nAndrew Scott, an Old Vic ambassador, said its £3m grant was \"a hugely exciting and positive step forward\" that would help the theatre \"survive and thrive\".\n\nFellow actor Adrian Lester said the £1.38m awarded to the Birmingham Rep Theatre would allow it to \"inspire and entertain again\" when it is able to reopen.\n\nBrian Conley and Lesley Joseph, meanwhile, thanked the government for giving the Theatre Royal in Plymouth a £1.89m \"lifeline\".\n\nTamara Rojo, English National Ballet's artistic director, said she was \"thrilled and so grateful\" to receive funds that would allow it to \"adapt, rebuild and innovate\".\n\nTim Marlow, director of the Design Museum in London, said its own £2.96m grant would provide \"much needed support at a very precarious time\".\n\nOther museums to benefit from this tranche of funding include the Ironbridge Gorge Museums in Shropshire and the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley.\n\nMore than £500m has now been allocated from the Culture Recovery Fund to almost 2,500 cultural organisations and venues.\n\nWhen the £1.57bn rescue package was announced in July, the government described it as \"the biggest ever one-off investment in UK culture\".\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Last updated on .From the section Premier League\n\nLeeds United ended Aston Villa's winning start and ruined their chance of going top of the Premier League thanks to a brilliant Patrick Bamford hat-trick.\n\nVilla came into Friday's game having won their first four games of a league campaign for the first time since 1930-31, but three expert finishes from the Leeds striker prevented the hosts making it a club record five victories on the spin to open their season.\n\nThe result lifts Leeds to third - their highest position at the end of a day in the division since September 2002.\n\nIt was reward for a relentlessly positive performance from an injury-hit visiting side that should probably have yielded more goals.\n\nIn the first-half, Bamford missed with a header and then side-footed wide after being found by Jack Harrison's low cross at the end of swift counter-attacking move.\n\nLeeds' record signing Rodrigo was also guilty of spurning good opportunities, slicing one shot wide before seeing an effort blocked by Ezri Konsa.\n\nDean Smith's Villa team, who had put seven goals past champions Liverpool in their previous home game, saw a Jack Grealish shot cleared off the line by Luke Ayling after the ball had fallen to the midfielder from Trezeguet's miscued shot.\n\nVilla's captain also went close with a saved effort from close range after he had shown great tenacity and skill to carry the ball from within his own half.\n\nBut Bamford had the decisive say, finding the corner of the net from just a few yards out after Emiliano Martinez had palmed out Rodrigo's low shot.\n\nIf his first was simple, his second and third were stunning - a rising effort into the top corner from 20 yards after he was found by Mateusz Klich on 67 minutes and a dug out, curling finish following Helder Costa's low ball seven minutes later.\n\nLeeds are now two points and a place behind Villa, who remain second, a point behind leaders Everton.\n• None How Bamford and Leeds are proving doubters wrong\n• None Best action and reaction from Aston Villa v Leeds\n• None Football Daily podcast: Hat-trick Bamford and what next for Wilshere?\n\nLeeds maybe have not been as spectacular as Villa in the early stages of 2020-21, but they are certainly making their mark on a top flight that had been without them for 16 years.\n\nThere were plenty of times during that period when little was missing in their absence, but now - with Marcelo Bielsa in charge - the pleasure is all the Premier League's.\n\nLeeds have already shown they are unwilling to be daunted and compromise their attacking principles, even when facing the elite sides.\n\nAnd at Villa Park, with influential midfielder Kalvin Phillips and captain Liam Cooper missing through injury and a makeshift defence in place, they took apart the division's form team on their own patch.\n\nUnder Bielsa, Leeds create chances but they have not always had the cutting edge to make them count, with Bamford too often frustratingly profligate.\n\nPremier League life with Leeds clearly suits the English striker, though, and Friday's hat-trick took him to six goals in six matches this term. His treble is also the sixth in the top flight already in 2020-21 - after 49 games, it is the earliest that has happened.\n\nLeeds themselves have now scored 12 league goals, the most by a newly promoted club after six games of a season in the competition since Middlesbrough also netted 12 in 1992-93.\n\nIt is perhaps in-keeping with what has been a chaotic Premier League season so far that Villa, yet to drop points and whose last appearance on their own ground saw them put seven past Liverpool, would be put to the sword by newly promoted Leeds.\n\nBut still it defied all expectation. Villa were second best throughout, unable to compete with the visitors' intensity and energy.\n\nEven Grealish, who has impressed so much, was unable to inspire his side, although he did have moments - not least of all with the solo run that almost brought an opener for the hosts early in the second half.\n\nBamford's first goal was a big blow, his second sent Villa to canvas and the third knocked them out.\n\nIt was a bad night at the office, but Smith's side remain a work in progress - and while he is unlikely to be pleased after defeat, one poor showing in five is a percentage he will surely take.\n\nThe key now will be whether Villa can respond to such a ruthless ending to one eight-game unbeaten streak by building another.\n\n'We probably got away with a 3-0' - what the managers said\n\nAston Villa boss Dean Smith, speaking to Match of the Day: \"Very frustrated, especially with the last 40 minutes. I thought the first half was very even. They scored the first goal and we got worse and they were very good. We probably got away with a 3-0 in the end with the chances they had.\n\n\"Who knows what would have happened if we had scored? That is the first time we have been behind in a game and we didn't handle it very well.\"\n\nLeeds boss Marcelo Bielsa, speaking to Match of the Day: \"It was an important game for us and a deserved triumph. We scored first and were a little bit lucky they didn't score some of the chances they had. We were playing well even before the goal and had played well enough to go ahead.\"\n\nOn striker Patrick Bamford, Bielsa added: \"Very happy for Patrick because he scored some wonderful goals. Apart from that [he is] a noble player who sacrifices a lot for the team - generous also. I think his development is more to do with him and less to do with me.\"\n• None This was Aston Villa's first defeat in nine Premier League matches (six wins) and also the first time they had fallen behind at any stage in any of those nine matches.\n• None This was the biggest win by a newly promoted side in an away Premier League match since October 2019, when Aston Villa won 5-1 at Norwich, and the biggest by a promoted club away from home while also keeping a clean sheet since Brighton won 3-0 at West Ham in October 2017.\n• None Since the start of last season, Aston Villa have lost 22 Premier League games and conceded 72 goals in the competition - only Norwich City (27 defeats, 75 goals conceded) have lost and conceded more in the division in that time.\n• None Bamford has scored six goals in Leeds' first six league matches this season - only Eric Cantona in 1992-93 (also six) has scored as many goals for the club at this stage of a Premier League campaign.\n• None The Englishman is only the second player to score in Leeds United's first three away games in a top-flight league season, after Gordon Hodgson in 1937-38.\n• None Bamford is the ninth Leeds player to score a Premier League hat-trick and the first since Mark Viduka away at Charlton in April 2003.\n• None Attempt missed. Jack Harrison (Leeds United) left footed shot from the left side of the box is close, but misses to the left. Assisted by Pablo Hernández following a fast break.\n• None Attempt missed. John McGinn (Aston Villa) left footed shot from outside the box is too high. Assisted by Ross Barkley.\n• None Mateusz Klich (Leeds United) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt missed. Ollie Watkins (Aston Villa) right footed shot from the right side of the box is close, but misses to the left. Assisted by Ross Barkley.\n• None Attempt saved. Patrick Bamford (Leeds United) header from the centre of the box is saved in the top centre of the goal. Assisted by Jamie Shackleton with a cross.\n• None Attempt missed. Raphinha (Leeds United) left footed shot from the centre of the box is close, but misses to the right. Assisted by Patrick Bamford. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Can a government minister outrun the secrets of his past?\n• None Behind the scenes of a club reborn", "The drive-in movie theatre is due to be held at Chester FC's stadium\n\nPlans for a drive-in cinema in Chester were bogged down after the toilets were found to be across the border with Wales and subject to Welsh Covid rules.\n\nThe bathroom facilities at Chester FC cannot be used due to the new Covid-19 lockdown in Wales.\n\nAnyone caught short would not have been allowed to cross the border.\n\nBut event promoter Storyhouse has confirmed it has managed to hire some portable toilets so customers \"could have a wee without breaking the law\".\n\nChief executive Andrew Bentley said earlier: \"The toilets are in the stand - it is all a bit crazy.\n\n\"Originally we had planned to have six nights on the Welsh part of the ground but had to change it to the English part of the car park after the Welsh Government brought in new restrictions.\"\n\nAndrew Bentley said it was a \"crazy\" situation\n\nStoryhouse said capacity had been reduced to \"comfortably fit\" all the cars on the English side of the border.\n\nBizarrely the Welsh border also runs down the centre of the club's pitch which could have caused problems for Chester FC's players who will play their first game after the Welsh \"firebreak\" lockdown starts.\n\nBut the ultimate offside trap has been avoided, according to club spokesman Albert Davies.\n\nHe said: \"We are actually classed as elite sport, so the rules do not apply.\n\n\"We've played some great stuff recently and it has been elite football.\"\n\nThe National League North team are in action in the FA Cup fourth preliminary round on Saturday against Marine who are based in... Waterloo.\n\nThe toilets are in the Welsh part of the stadium\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The new restrictions started just after midnight on Saturday\n\nStoke-on-Trent and Coventry have moved into the tier two category to tackle rising coronavirus cases.\n\nRestrictions came into force at 00:01 BST on Saturday. Slough has also moved into the tier two \"high\" category.\n\nThe restrictions in tier two mean households can no longer mix indoors, including in pubs and restaurants.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock announced Stoke-on-Trent would move up a tier on Thursday, while Coventry announced the same move earlier in the week.\n\nHowever, there are exemptions for childcare and support bubbles.\n\nMichelle Swift runs Swifty's, a micro pub in Meir, Stoke-on-Trent, which she has to temporarily close due to the new restrictions.\n\n\"When we first opened we were limited to the rule of six, we could work with that,\" she said.\n\n\"It wasn't the same as what it used to be but it was manageable.\"\n\nNow she can only have seven tables, which, if customers come alone, could mean just seven customers.\n\n\"It just doesn't make sense. We're near the border with Staffordshire County Council so you can go a mile up the road and you can sit with your friends in another pub,\" she said.\n\nMs Swift also said the guidance on enforcing the restrictions was \"not that clear\" and therefore left \"open to interpretation\".\n\n\"You're literally the fun police and you're on edge all the time because your licence is at risk,\" she said.\n\nStoke-on-Trent City Council leader Abi Brown said taking the approach now would limit the damage to the local economy ahead of any potential move to the \"very high\" category.\n\n\"I'm not willing to put the lives of Stoke-on-Trent residents at risk by dithering for a week when we can act now to save lives and minimise economic damage,\" she said.\n\nThe council applied to the government to be put into the higher measures as it said the city had seen a sharp increase in cases over the last few days.\n\nDr Paul Edmondson-Jones, director of adult social care and health, said this would continue to accelerate unless urgent action was taken.\n\nThe council leader in Coventry, George Duggins, said the city had to work to get back to tier one as soon as possible.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Polish President Andrzej Duda has contracted Covid-19 but is feeling \"good\", he says.\n\nMr Duda, 48, was tested on Friday and found to be positive, but it is not clear when he contracted the virus.\n\nHe joins a handful of world leaders who have been ill with Covid-19, among them US President Donald Trump and UK PM Boris Johnson.\n\nPoland faces a surge in the coronavirus pandemic, with a daily record of more than 13,600 new cases on Friday.\n\nThe country has now entered a nationwide \"red zone\" lockdown that includes the partial closure of primary schools and restaurants.\n\nMr Duda attended an event in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, on Monday where he met Bulgarian President Rumen Radev who later went into quarantine. He also met Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid, who has since tested negative.\n\n\"I didn't have and I don't have any symptoms, especially the serious ones like lack of taste or lack of smell, but the result of the test is absolutely clear,\" Mr Duda said in a video message posted on Twitter.\n\n\"I feel good right now. I will spend the upcoming days in self-isolation along with my wife and I will be working remotely; it's not a problem at all.\"\n\nMr Duda visited a field hospital under construction to Poland on Friday\n\nPresidential minister Blazej Spychalski, who first gave details of the president's positive test, has himself tested positive and is going into quarantine.\n\nOn Friday, Mr Duda visited a field hospital under construction at the National Stadium in the Polish capital, Warsaw. Pictures show the president wearing a face mask while meeting workers at the site.\n\nHe also met 19-year-old tennis star Iga Swiatek, winner of the French Open this year, to award her the Gold Cross of Merit for achievements in sport.\n\n\"Neither I nor members of my team have symptoms of coronavirus. We carry out tests regularly. We will quarantine ourselves in accordance with current procedures,\" Ms Swiatek said in a Twitter post (tweet in Polish).\n\nThe second wave of infections is hitting Poland hard, with the number of new cases 22 times higher than the highest number of cases in the spring, although testing is now more prevalent.\n\nThe number of hospital beds in use by coronavirus patients rose by 6.5% on Friday to 11,496, which means 60% of the total available are now filled.\n\nUnder the new restrictions, gatherings of more than five are banned, and children must be accompanied by an adult when outdoors. People aged over 70 are being urged to stay at home.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Gavin Lee reports from the epicentre of Europe's second wave, which is in Belgium", "Six months after getting coronavirus, Rebecca Logan is still feeling the effects\n\n\"We all thought we would get Covid. but we never really thought it would be a bad thing.\n\n\"I was young, I was fit, I was healthy.\"\n\nRebecca Logan, a fitness instructor and part-time nurse, began to feel unwell in April.\n\nThe 39-year-old mother of two felt dizzy and lost her sense of taste and smell.\n\n\"When I got the positive test, I thought: 'Okay, this is maybe how it's going to be for the next few days and then I'll pick up.'\n\n\"What happened to me was that, by day 14, whenever you usually expect to feel better, I actually was a lot worse.\"\n\nFive weeks later, however, and Rebecca was still not feeling better.\n\nNow, more than six months later, she still suffers from breathlessness, \"brain fog\" and has to take daily naps.\n\nRebecca believes she has so-called long Covid - a term being used to describe a range of symptoms identified in people months after they have had the virus.\n\nThere is no medical definition or list of symptoms shared by all patients - two people with long Covid can have very different experiences.\n\nHowever, the most common feature is crippling fatigue.\n\nOthers symptoms include: breathlessness, a cough that won't go away, joint pain, muscle aches, hearing and eyesight problems, headaches, loss of smell and taste as well as damage to the heart, lungs, kidneys and gut.\n\nMental health problems have been reported including depression, anxiety and struggling to think clearly.\n\nIt is estimated that as many as 60,000 people in England could have post-Covid conditions and NHS England has committed £10m to fund specialist clinics.\n\nNothing like this has been announced yet for Northern Ireland, but Stormont's Department of Health said it had set up a Strategic Clinical Advisory Cell to establish a clinical working group.\n\nIt said it expected \"a regional multidisciplinary working group will be formed to provide continuing guidance\" on the future needs of patients.\n\nBBC Radio Ulster's Evening Extra revealed this week that none of Northern Ireland's health bodies are collating data on the number of people who are still suffering with symptoms associated with the virus.\n\nThe Department of Health said \"an agreed clinical definition of long Covid is required before numbers can be officially recorded\".\n\nThis definition is being developed by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) which advises GPs on how to treat medical conditions.\n\nDr Toby Hillman is a respiratory consultant at one of the UK's first post-Covid clinics, based at University College Hospital in London. He is also helping NICE to define the condition.\n\n\"We accept the evidence is not great at the moment, that it's starting to be generated in ever greater depth and quality but the definition is going to change,\" he said.\n\n\"The definition is likely to include clinical diagnoses of this disease because we're aware of the difficulties of accessing testing and the problems with confirmatory testing, so it's going to be a fairly broad church.\"\n\nRebecca said she needs support now: \"People need to recognise that long Covid is a condition and that people need help physically and mentally because you feel so alone.\n\n\"People look at you whenever you say you're still not feeling great and you're still not able to do things because they think: 'Sure Covid, you get it and you're better in 14 days, what's the problem?'\n\n\"It's a very lonely position to be in.\"", "There have been confirmed Covid-19 cases in half of Northern Ireland's schools since the start of term.\n\nThat is according to new figures published by the Public Health Agency (PHA).\n\nThe PHA has been informed of 2,030 positive Covid cases in schools since teaching returned at the beginning of term.\n\nThere had been 608 Covid-19 so-called incidents in 519 schools up until 20 October, said the agency.\n• None 519Schools with at least one positive Covid case out of 1,035 total schools\n• None 237Schools with a cluster of two to five cases\n• None 69Schools with a cluster of more than five cases\n\nAn incident can be a single positive case, a cluster of two to five cases or more than five cases.\n\nA cluster is defined by the PHA as two or more laboratory-confirmed cases of Covid-19 among individuals in one setting, such as a school.\n\nThis is the first time the agency has reported the number of Covid cases specifically in schools.\n\nIn other Covid-19 developments on Friday:\n\nThe figures from the PHA detail the number of cases in schools from the start of term in late August up until Tuesday.\n\nA school can have more than one Covid \"incident\"- for instance, it could have two separate cases or clusters that are not linked to each other.\n\nOverall, 86% of post-primary schools had at least one case since the start of term, compared to around 40% of primary schools and 66% of special schools.\n\nAround three-quarters of schools (76%) in the Belfast City Council area have been affected by positive cases.\n\nThat local government district had the highest proportion of schools affected, just higher than the numbers recorded in Londonderry, Strabane and Omagh - the district with the second highest proportion.\n\nOf school cases notified to the PHA, just over two-thirds (68%) were pupils and one-third (32%) were staff.\n\nThe PHA does not report how many pupils or staff had to self-isolate as a result of coming into contact with positive cases in schools.\n\nHowever, separate figures released to the Alliance MLA Chris Lyttle in response to an assembly question showed that over one in 10 teaching and non-teaching staff were not working in school in the week from 6-13 October.\n\nJust over a third of those staff were absent from school as they were self-isolating for 14 days.\n\nHowever, staff who are self-isolating may still be working from home.\n\nSome schools have been forced to close for short periods and teach pupils online, due mainly to a number of staff self-isolating.\n\nSchools in Northern Ireland began an extended two-week half term break on Monday 19 October.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner is rebuked after making the comment\n\nConservative MPs have faced \"widespread abuse\" after Labour's Angela Rayner used the word \"scum\" in a Parliamentary debate, the party's co-chairwoman says.\n\nAmanda Milling has written to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer asking if he will take action against Labour MPs \"who perpetrate abuse\".\n\nMs Rayner made the remark on Wednesday during a Commons speech by Tory MP Chris Clarkson, later apologising for \"language I used in a heated debate\".\n\nMs Milling, in a letter signed by more than 100 Tory backbenchers, wrote that Ms Rayner's use of the word \"scum\" towards Mr Clarkson was \"unacceptable\".\n\nShe said it had resulted in the phrase \"Tory scum\" trending on Twitter and had caused \"widespread abuse towards members of our parliamentary party\", including abusive phone calls and MPs' offices being targeted.\n\n\"We respectfully ask you to take action, reaffirming your commitment to working constructively, asking Labour MPs and party members to act appropriately at all times, taking action against those who perpetrate this unacceptable abuse online and offline, and publicly apologise for Angela Rayner's record of unparliamentary behaviour,\" she wrote to Sir Keir.\n\nMs Rayner, the party's deputy leader who represents Ashton-under-Lyne in Greater Manchester, opened Wednesday's debate, which was about financial support for regions facing tighter coronavirus restrictions.\n\nLater, Mr Clarkson - also a Greater Manchester MP - criticised the area's Labour mayor, Andy Burnham, and accused the opposition of \"opportunism\".\n\nAt this point, Ms Rayner was overheard saying \"scum\" from her seat on Labour's frontbench and was rebuked by the Deputy Speaker Dame Eleanor Laing.\n\nMeanwhile, footballer Marcus Rashford, who has led a campaign calling on the government to provide free school meals over the holidays, tweeted to condemn the \"unacceptable\" abuse some MPs had received for voting against the motion in Parliament.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Marcus Rashford MBE This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe political consensus of early this year has been blown apart in recent days.\n\nAngela Rayner had to apologise earlier this week for saying \"scum\" while a Conservative MP criticised Labour in a debate over Covid.\n\nThere is increasing political disagreement over the government's handling of the crisis.\n\nAnd the free meals issue has separately sparked a huge and heated debate, both in Parliament and on social media.\n\nThe government is adamant it is offering support in other ways. Some Tory MPs have spoken publicly about why they think free meals is the wrong approach and accused Labour of trying to politicise the issue.\n\nLabour is going to continue to push this issue though - and believes it shows the government is out of touch.", "Gwent Police said it issued six fixed penalty tickets for breach Covid regulations on Friday night\n\nWales' second national lockdown is more challenging to police than the first because people are \"fatigued\" with Covid, a police chief has warned.\n\nBut Dyfed-Powys Police and Crime commissioner said it was important people took \"personal responsibility\".\n\nPeople can leave home for limited reasons, including to provide care, buy food and medication, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home.\n\nA further 16 deaths of people with coronavirus were reported in Wales on Saturday - the highest total since 28 May - while 1,324 more people tested positive.\n\nAll but essential shops have closed and on Friday supermarkets began covering up non-essential goods, which the Welsh Retail Consortium labelled an \"ill-conceived policy\".\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford has said supermarkets should also stop selling items such as clothes as a matter of \"fairness\" to non-essential shops that have closed.\n\nHowever a Senedd petition against the move has become the fourth-ever to be signed by more than 45,000 people, and will be considered for a debate in the Welsh Parliament.\n\nJodi Merry, from Rhondda Cynon Taf, said the ban has come at an awkward time as she was planning to buy new clothes, including winter pyjamas, for her eight-year-old son after she gets paid next week.\n\n\"Everything is essential when it's something you desperately need,\" she said.\n\nPlastic has been seen over goods in supermarkets including clothes, microwaves and cat baskets\n\nTravel into or out of Wales to go on holiday or to visit a second home is illegal under the rules, and people are being told only to travel for \"essential reasons\".\n\nDyfed-Powys Police and Crime commissioner Dafydd Llywelyn said: \"The public... I guess there's fatigue that has set in in relation to the rules and regulations.\n\n\"Which is why it's really important we get the message out for people to take personal responsibility.\"\n\nHe said officers would be engaging and educating the public in the first instance and enforcement would only happen at the \"latter stage of that process\".\n\nMeanwhile, the Law Society of England and Wales, which represents solicitors, said it was keen to make people aware of the powers that enforcement officers have during the firebreak.\n\nIt said police had the power to enter homes and other premises if they have reasonable grounds for suspecting that the lockdown restrictions are being contravened or are about to be contravened.\n\nIts president David Greene said: \"These are extraordinary powers and it is important that the public are fully informed about them so that they don't fall foul of them inadvertently.\n\n\"It is vital that laws of this nature are both visible and understandable.\n\n\"We will be concerned to ensure they are being used in a proportionate fashion.\"\n\nResponding to these concerns, Mr Llywelyn said: \"I think it's really important for the police to act in a proportionate way.\n\n\"We mustn't also forget that we're in an emergency situation with this being a global pandemic so these are short-term measures that are here to safeguard the communities across the whole of Wales.\"\n\nChief constables in England and Wales have received an extra £30m to pay for overtime costs\n\nDyfed-Powys Police tweeted it was not patrolling the border with England, but officers were out across the road network and in communities.\n\n\"Truth be told, we're really hoping that we can all work together to do what we've been asked to do,\" it added.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Heddlu Dyfed-Powys Police This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nGwent Police tweeted its motorcyclists had carried out proactive patrols on Friday night.\n\nIt said it stopped 10 \"vehicles of interest\", issued six fixed penalty tickets for breach Covid regulations and arrested a driver for driving while under the influence of cannabis.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Gwent Police | Operations & Support This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nPeople can be issued a fixed penalty notice \"for most types of breaches\" and fined £60 for the first offence.\n\nThat fine is increased to £120 for a second offence and continues to double for repeated offences, up to a maximum of £1,920. If prosecuted, however, a court can impose an unlimited fine.\n\nEnforcing the restrictions puts huge pressure on police resources. Crime has returned to levels last seen before the March lockdown - which means the frontline is stretched once more.\n\nChief constables in England and Wales have received an extra £30m to pay for overtime costs.\n\nBut to limit demands on officers, a policing model they call \"The Four Es\" remains in place.\n\nBefore fines are issued to rule-breakers, police will first take a number of steps:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average:\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection are required to view this interactive. How many cases and deaths in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out are where COVID-19 was mentioned on the death certificate. Source: ONS, NRS and NISRA – data updated weekly. are people who have tested positive for coronavirus. The \"average area\" means the middle ranking council or local government district when ranked by cases per 100,000 people. Public health bodies may occasionally revise their case numbers. Source: UK public health bodies - updated weekdays.", "Some owners of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro handsets have reported being shown an error message when trying to use the NHS Covid-19 app.\n\nApple's devices - which were released on Friday - can in fact run England and Wales' contact-tracing software.\n\nBut the issue arises if apps are transferred from an older iPhone via an iCloud Backup data transfer, which is common practice.\n\nThis can easily be addressed by making a change within the Settings menu.\n\nWhen users install the app from scratch, they are prompted to give the required permission.\n\nBut in what appears to be an oversight, when Apple transfers apps over, the phone does not ask owners to enable the permission and it is not obvious that it needs to be done.\n\nAs a result, the app cannot enable the Bluetooth-based matching functionality it needs to work.\n\nThe requirement is designed to protect user's privacy.\n\nHowever, the alert shown by the app suggested other factors might be at play.\n\nAnd to confuse matters further, when questioned about the matter the app's official Twitter account responded by highlighting that the iPhone 12 was not among devices checked for compatibility with the software.\n\nSome users had got round the problem by deleting the app and then downloading it again from the App Store, which triggered the exposure notification permission request.\n\nHowever, this technique results in all information previously stored by the app on the phone being wiped, including places the user had checked in to.\n\nAbout 18 million people have installed the NHS Covid-19 app so far. In addition to contact tracing, it is also used to log visits to restaurants and other leisure facilities, as well as to check symptoms and order a coronavirus test.\n\nThe BBC revealed last week that Huawei is also working with NHS Test and Trace officials to try and get the app working on some of its newer phones.", "The first live episode of this year's Strictly Come Dancing got under way with a tribute to frontline NHS staff.\n\nHosts Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly thanked the workers, who were seated in the audience, before the celebrities took to the dance floor.\n\nReality TV star Jamie Laing was the first to dance live, performing the cha cha cha with his partner, Karen Hauer.\n\nStringent Covid measures are in place for this year's show, including judges sitting separately from each other.\n\n\"Thank you so much for everything you have done for us and everything you continue to do and we really hope you enjoy tonight,\" Winkleman said to the NHS staff, who sat at a social distance.\n\nOlympic boxer Nicola Adams (right) and Katya Jones made history as Strictly's first same-sex couple, dancing the quickstep\n\nMade In Chelsea star Jamie Laing was the first to dance live, dancing the cha cha cha with Karen Hauer\n\nLaing was invited back for a second year after having to leave the last series when he was injured.\n\n\"I've been waiting a whole year to do the Strictly training,\" he said. \"Now I'm here, I'm feeling the pressure.\"\n\nJudge Craig Revel Horwood called Laing's performance \"flat-footed, very tight and restricted\", and added: \"That might have something to do with those lovely trousers you are wearing, don't leave much to the imagination, do they!\"\n\nLaing said afterwards he was \"nearly physically sick\" at the prospect of dancing first, doing the cha cha cha with Karen Hauer.\n\n\"I had to go to the bathroom - I thought I was going to throw up. I gagged a little bit but I was fine,\" he said.\n\nActress Caroline Quentin became emotional after performing the American Smooth with her professional partner Johannes Radebe\n\nActress Caroline Quentin was in tears after performing the American Smooth with her professional partner Johannes Radebe.\n\nJudge Shirley Ballas told her she was \"graceful, charming, elegant and you have the most exquisite sense of timing... You did yourself so proud today\".\n\nFormer home secretary Jacqui Smith and Anton Du Beke took to the dancefloor with top hats, performing the foxtrot\n\nFormer Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and Anton Du Beke took to the dance floor with top hats, performing the foxtrot.\n\n\"This is my chance to show you can have a new adventure, even when you're getting on a bit,\" Smith said.\n\nShe played on her former career as a politician, with a dance which began with Smith pretending to be a candidate sitting next to a ballot box.\n\nAfter spelling out his criticisms, Revel Horwood had some good news.\n\n\"When you consider [former prime minister] Theresa May and her dancing, I think you're 10 times better than that,\" he said.\n\nThe pair were awarded a three, five, and five from the judges.\n\nTV presenter and former marine JJ Chalmers with professional dancer Amy Dowden\n\nThey won a standing ovation from judges Motsi Mabuse and Ballas, with Smith called an \"absolute firecracker\".\n\nSinger HRVY and Janette Manrara closed the show with a jive\n• None 'It feels so good to be back dancing'", "Police broke up two large gatherings on Isambard Brunel Road\n\nLarge crowds fled from police as they broke up a street party outside a block of student flats.\n\nOfficers were called to the University of Portsmouth's Margaret Rule Hall where they broke up the gathering at 0:46 BST.\n\nTwo hours later, the force had to disperse a group of 40 from the site.\n\nHampshire Constabulary said it had identified the organiser of the party and officers were reviewing footage of the gatherings on Isambard Brunel Road.\n\nPolice can issue £10,000 fines to the organisers of large gatherings, with attendees fined £200 for a first offence.\n\nInsp Marcus Kennedy said It was \"frustrating\" for officers forced to deal with \"such a clear breach of the current restrictions\" which had been \"in place for some time\".\n\n\"There is no excuse for this type of behaviour,\" he said.\n\nUniversity vice-chancellor Prof Graham Galbraith said he was \"angry and disappointed\".\n\nHe added: \"I want to be clear that any student found to have broken the laws in place will face swift disciplinary action by the university as well as any fines that may be issued by the police.\"\n\nThere have been 306 new coronavirus infections recorded in the city in the the past week, with most in younger adults, and 1,390 positive test cases in total.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Liz Saville Roberts MP questions how people from Liverpool can still visit Anglesey\n\nFirst Minister Mark Drakeford has threatened a travel ban in Wales on people from English Covid hotspots if the prime minister does not impose his own.\n\nHe said he is giving UK ministers \"one final opportunity\" before he makes changes in Welsh law.\n\nThe UK government announced on Monday that it will advise against non-essential travel from Merseyside.\n\nBut it stopped short of making it illegal, angering Welsh ministers.\n\nMr Drakeford said he could close the border with England, but that is not his preferred option.\n\nWelsh ministers have asked for travel from areas with high rates of coronavirus in England to be restricted, to prevent people visiting parts of Wales where lockdowns are not in force and where rates are lower.\n\nIn 17 Welsh areas under local lockdown, people are subject to travel restrictions and cannot go in or out of the areas concerned except for a limited set of reasons, including to go to work or school.\n\nThey are not allowed to leave to go on holiday.\n\nThe Liverpool City Region will be placed on the \"very high risk\" Covid alert level from Wednesday, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned people in the area not to go on holiday to Wales.\n\nHowever, UK government ministers who govern Covid rules in England have not made it illegal to travel.\n\nWales and England have different coronavirus rules\n\nSpeaking on BBC Wales Today, Mr Drakeford said he would be writing a letter to the prime minister spelling out the powers he has.\n\n\"If he doesn't act, we will use them,\" he said.\n\n\"I want to offer him one final opportunity to do the right thing, because that would be fair to people in Wales, and people across our border.\n\n\"I don't want it to be a border issue. People in England in high incidence areas should not be going to low incidence areas in England, either.\"\n\nHe said the prime minister's solution of guidance \"simply will not do\", saying North Wales Police cannot turn people away on the basis of it.\n\n\"We need rules that prevent people from high incidence areas coming into Wales to low incidence areas,\" he said.\n\nHe said the letter will provide evidence, requested by UK government ministers, that people moving from areas with high levels of the virus to areas with low levels spread the virus.\n\nA Welsh Government spokesman said they want to receive a reply \"within days\".\n\nMark Drakeford said he will write a further letter to the prime minister\n\nIt is the second time the first minister has written to the PM asking for a travel ban.\n\nAfter the first time, the Mr Johnson rejected the proposal in an interview with BBC Wales.\n\n\"I don't want to impose travel restrictions within the UK generally,\" he said at the time.\n\nIt came after a coach of holidaymakers from Bolton travelled to Pembrokeshire after a lockdown was imposed in Bridgend, where they were originally due to go for an Elvis festival.\n\nIn the Commons on Monday Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts asked if it is fair that people in Liverpool can holiday in Gwynedd and Anglesey, when people in neighbouring Conwy cannot make non-essential journeys outside of the county.\n\nMr Johnson replied: \"The guidance is very clear that people from very high areas such as Merseyside should not be making those journeys.\"\n\nMr Drakeford and Health Minister Vaughan Gething spoke to the prime minister on Monday morning in a Cobra meeting.\n\nAfterwards the Welsh Government said Mr Drakeford had \"expressed deep disappointment at the inadequate proposals for travel restrictions in high infection areas in England\".\n\nAt a press conference Mr Gething outlined how travel restrictions between Wales and English Covid hotspots could work.\n\n\"We should, if needed, be able to identify those areas where the risk is such that we should have restrictions on travel,\" he said.\n\n\"It would not be a reasonable excuse for those people to enter Wales because of the risk that they present because of the area of the country that they come from.\"\n\nThe prime minister has already refused to introduce a travel ban in English Covid hotspots.\n\nSo why is the first minister asking again, rather than simply using the powers the Welsh Government has?\n\nIt probably reflects ideological as well as practical difficulties.\n\nWelsh Labour is a pro-union party and the idea of legislation banning some people from England crossing the Welsh border might sit uncomfortably.\n\nRemember that, during the national lockdown, the Welsh \"stay local\" rule applied across Wales - it didn't single out any particular group of people.\n\nThe practical problems include messaging and enforceability - the border sees millions of crossings every week and filtering lawful from unlawful journeys could be a major headache.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Alistair Wilson murder: ‘My only memory of my dad was when he was shot’\n\nThe son of bank worker Alistair Wilson, who was shot dead on the doorstep of his home in 2004, has appealed for help in catching his father's killer.\n\nAndrew Wilson was aged just four at the time of the murder in Nairn in the Highlands.\n\nHe said the only memory he has left of his father is seeing him lying on the ground moments after being shot.\n\nIt is the first time Mr Wilson has spoken publicly about the murder and how it has devastated his family.\n\nHe said: \"I still cannot believe how someone could shoot my dad dead on our doorstep while my brother and I were upstairs.\n\n\"Photographs are all I have and no family should suffer the way we have all these years.\n\n\"I am appealing on behalf of my family to anyone who may have any information, no matter how big or small, to please come forward. Someone out there could have the missing piece of information.\"\n\nAlistair Wilson, 30, was shot at his home at about 19:00 on 28 November 2004. He later died in hospital.\n\nMr Wilson's wife Veronica had answered the door to his killer - a stocky man wearing a baseball cap - who asked for Alistair Wilson.\n\nMr Wilson spoke to the man and was handed an empty blue envelope with the word Paul written on it.\n\nHe was then shot with a German-made handgun.\n\nA massive police inquiry was launched at the time, but no-one has been apprehended and detectives continue to investigate the case.\n\nA young Andrew Wilson with his father Alistair, mother Veronica and younger brother\n\nAndrew, now 20, recalled the moment he saw his father lying on the doorstep.\n\nHe said: \"Someone came to our family home on a Sunday evening while my dad was reading my brother and me bedtime stories after our bath.\n\n\"The next thing I know I am looking at my dad lying in our doorway covered in blood.\"\n\nMr Wilson's family, along with detectives, are using the approaching 16th anniversary to make a renewed appeal for information in the hope of finally bringing someone to justice.\n\nAndrew says all he has left of his father are photographs\n\nAndrew Wilson and his brother at his father's graveside\n\nAndrew Wilson added: \"I was four years old when this happened and my dad was only 30.\n\n\"There would be no more bedtime stories, no more playing football or helping him in the garden.\n\n\"My dad and I missed out on so many things together, showing me how to tie a tie, driving lessons and taking me for my first pint.\n\n\"I am now a 20-year-old with little answers regarding my dad's death. For the last 16 years I have been left wondering why I didn't have a dad like all my friends.\n\n\"Nothing can bring my dad back, but knowing who did this and why could give us the closure we need. Any information could be crucial to our case.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Alistair Wilson's widow: 'A who and a why would let us move on'\n\nDet Insp Gary Winter, of the Major Investigation Team, has outlined the specific areas being focused on in the latest appeal.\n\nHe said: \"The murderer was described in 2004 as a man aged 30-40 years old, stocky build and approximately 5ft 4in to 5ft 7in tall.\n\n\"Alistair's killer would now be approaching his 50s or 60s and has enjoyed a life denied to his victim and his family.\n\n\"The handgun used was a Haenel Suhl pocket pistol from the 1930s, which has distinctive H and S letters superimposed on the grip.\n\n\"We believe this weapon is likely to have been taken to the UK after World War Two as some form of souvenir, however the ammunition used in the murder is from the 1980s or 90s.\n\n\"Do you know of anyone who had a similar pocket pistol? Do you know of anyone who mentioned having firearm souvenirs from the World War Two or from any family who were World War Two veterans?\"\n\nThis is a murder which people, not just in the Highlands but across the world, are determined will be solved.\n\nAll murders are shocking but this was so beyond the imagination that it has had people bewildered and frustrated for 16 years, including the police.\n\nThree years ago I interviewed Veronica Wilson, Alistair Wilson's husband. It was the first time she had been interviewed for a dozen years and it formed the spine of The Doorstep Murder podcast series.\n\nShe revealed then that her older son, aged just four at the time, saw her father's body on the doorstep.\n\nIt was hoped then that her pleas for new information would help find the killer. It generated many calls to both the BBC and Police Scotland but the murder remained unsolved.\n\nThe fact that Alistair Wilson had been reading his young sons a bedtime story moments before he was shot so brutally has generated enormous sympathy and anger that his two boys have grown up without their father.\n\nSo to hear from Andrew Wilson will reunite people with the details of the murder and, it's hoped, persuade someone with information to step forward after all these years.\n\nListen to The Doorstep Murder podcast on BBC Sounds.\n\nThe doorstep murder shocked the residents of Nairn\n\nPolice believe the murder weapon may have been brought to the UK after World War Two\n\nDet Insp Winter also highlighted the envelope given to Mr Wilson before the shooting - and the possibility that the murder was a case of mistaken identity.\n\nHe said: \"The blue envelope handed to Alistair by the killer had the name Paul on it, which may or may not be relevant. Does this mean anything to you in the context of this investigation?\n\n\"Lastly, do you know any other person by the name Alistair Wilson, who may have been the intended target of violence or retribution to any extent?\"\n\nMr Winter said the force remained committed to ensuring the person responsible for the murder was brought to justice.\n\nHe added: \"Someone out there knows what happened to Alistair and I hope this appeal serves as a vital reminder that it is never too late to come forward with information. Do not assume that the police already know the information you possess.\"\n\nAnyone with information is asked to contact the police on 101 or e-mail a dedicated inbox at SCDHOLMESAberdeen@scotland.pnn.police.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "MPs have rejected the latest attempt to require imported food to meet domestic legal standards from 1 January.\n\nThey struck down a Lords amendment to the Agriculture Bill to force trade deals to meet UK animal welfare and food safety rules.\n\nCampaigners have warned the UK could be forced to accept lower standards to secure a future US trade deal.\n\nBut Farming minister Victoria Prentis said the government was \"absolutely committed to high standards\".\n\nExisting laws would safeguard them, she told the House of Commons, adding that these were \"of more use than warm words\" in maintaining animal welfare, food standards and environmental protections.\n\nThe bill - designed to prepare the farming industry for when the UK no longer has to follow EU laws and rules next year - returned to the Commons on Monday following amendments by the House of Lords.\n\nThe government says EU rules banning imports of chlorine-washed chicken and other products will be automatically written into UK law once the post-Brexit transition period ends on 31 December.\n\nBut peers made a number of changes, including one which would give MPs a veto over sections in trade deals relating to food imports, which would be required to comply with \"relevant domestic standards\".\n\nThey argued these changes were necessary to make it impossible for the US or other countries to export so-called chlorinated chicken or beef fattened with hormones.\n\nHowever, MPs voted by 332 votes to 279 - a majority 53 - to back government plans to reject the amendment.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Jamie Oliver accuses the government of using \"back door\" secondary legislation to avoid scrutiny of post-Brexit food standards\n\nHowever, Conservative MPs Sir Roger Gale and George Freeman said they would vote for the amendment to remain in the bill, saying it was in line with their party's 2019 manifesto pledge to maintain welfare standards.\n\nNeil Parish, the Conservative chairman of the Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, told the Commons that Brexit meant UK agriculture could move in a \"much more environmental direction\", including planting more trees and cutting the use of nitrates.\n\nThe country should be a \"beacon\" of high animal welfare and countryside-protection standards, he added.\n\nBut Conservative MP John Lamont supported the government, saying the amendments were \"not in the interests\" of food producers or standards and would be \"bad for trade\".\n\nParty colleague Anthony Mangnall said there had been a \"huge amount of fear-mongering\" over the importation of chlorinated chicken and hormone-injected beef, and that \"has to stop\".\n\nIn the Commons, Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Tim Farron said the controversy over chlorinated chicken was not \"about the quality of food\" but the \"integrity of our farming industry\".\n\nFor Labour, shadow environment secretary Luke Pollard said this was a \"crucial moment for British agriculture\", adding that high standards could all be \"thrown away\".\n\nHe urged the government to \"show some leadership\" and \"back British farmers\".\n\nThe bill must include guarantees that UK farmers would not be \"undercut\" in post-Brexit trade deals, Mr Pollard said.\n\nHowever another potential rebellion by backbench Tory MPs was avoided by the government when the deputy speaker ruled out an amendment to strengthen the new Trade and Agriculture Commission.", "Pensioners argue with a law enforcement officer on Monday during an anti-government rally\n\nPolice in Belarus have been authorised to use lethal force if necessary against anti-government protesters, a senior government official says.\n\nThe move was in response to increasingly radicalised, violent anti-Lukashenko groups, he said.\n\nSeparately, EU foreign ministers have said they are ready to impose sanctions against President Alexander Lukashenko.\n\nProtests have swept the country since Mr Lukashenko claimed victory in an August poll widely viewed as rigged.\n\nBelarusian authorities have been accused of brutality and torture in their suppression of the mass street protests that followed.\n\nOn Monday, the interior ministry confirmed police fired stun grenades and tear gas during an unauthorised rally in the capital, Minsk, which involved a large number of pension-age protesters.\n\nA spokesperson said action was taken after \"citizens started to show aggression\". An unconfirmed number of demonstrators were also arrested.\n\nReferring to protests in the city on Sunday, First Deputy Interior Minister Gennady Kazakevich said they had \"become organised and extremely radical\", adding they now mainly centred on Minsk and were less widespread.\n\nWhereas protesters hurled stones and bottles in the afternoon, as well as wielding knives, by nightfall they had moved on to building barricades and burning tyres, he said.\n\n\"This has nothing to do with civil protests. We're confronted not just by aggression, but by groups of militants, radicals, anarchists and football hooligans,\" he said in a video statement.\n\n\"On behalf of the interior ministry, I say that we will not leave the streets and will guarantee the law in the country. Law enforcement personnel and interior troops will use special equipment and lethal weapons if need be.\"\n\nPolice deployed water-cannon trucks in Minsk on Sunday, spraying protesters with brightly coloured dye\n\nEuropean Union foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg said they were ready to expand sanctions to take in Mr Lukashenko, according to a statement.\n\nBut the ministers say the president's refusal to consider new elections as a way out of the crisis leaves the bloc with no choice.\n\n\"This is an answer to the evolving situation in Belarus,\" EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters. \"There has not been any kind of signal from the Belarus authorities to engage in any kind of conversation.\"\n\nBelarus police have been accused of disproportionate violence\n\nOn Sunday, demonstrators turned out across the country for the ninth successive weekend in protest at the disputed re-election of Mr Lukashenko.\n\nCritics of Mr Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, said Sunday saw police use some of the most brutal tactics against protesters since the immediate aftermath of the election. Riot police again used water cannon and stun grenades to break up the latest rally in Minsk, and many protesters were beaten with police batons.\n\nMore than 700 people were arrested on Sunday, the interior ministry said.\n\nProtesters are demanding the release of all political prisoners and a free and fair re-run of the election.\n\nInternational observers including the European Union have characterised the demonstrations as peaceful.\n\nThe EU, the UK and the US have refused to recognise Mr Lukashenko's new term. Mr Lukashenko denies fixing the poll and has received support from Russia, his country's closest ally.\n\nPresident Vladimir Putin has said he is prepared to send Russian police to help Mr Lukashenko if the protests get \"out of control\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Mass arrests as crowds chant 'go away' to Belarus president last month", "Officials decided that these ads did not show the games as they were\n\nTwo misleading ads for mobile games that bear little relation to the actual product have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).\n\nThe ads, for the Homescapes and Gardenscapes games, both come from developer Playrix.\n\nThey showed a game where users pull pins in a specific order to solve a puzzle - though the actual games had totally different \"core gameplay\".\n\nThe ASA said the ads should not be used again.\n\nIn recent years, a number of mobile games have used ad videos that show puzzle game mechanics they do not use - or barely use - prompting complaints from gamers.\n\nSome mobile game developers \"are actively targeting consumers that are more likely to pay for in-app purchases, or sit through a higher number of ads,\" explained Matthew Bailey, a games analyst at Omdia.\n\n\"It would not be surprising for a publisher to target certain types of gamers with ads featuring the more competitive and problem-solving elements of their title, even if they don't make up the bulk of gameplay,\" he said.\n\n\"However, an increasing number of gamers are becoming annoyed with irrelevant, misleading and badly implemented mobile game ads.\"\n\nHomescapes and Gardenscapes both use the same core gameplay loop: a home or garden needs to be renovated, and players earn the resources they need by playing a \"match three\" type game - similar to other popular games such as Bejewelled or Candy Crush.\n\nBoth Homescapes and Gardenscapes are hugely popular, with more than 100 million app installs each from the Google Play store.\n\nAn example of Gardenscapes \"match three\" gameplay from its app store listing\n\nBut the games have often used ads that show a multiple-choice type puzzle to avert a catastrophe, or, more recently, the pin-pulling puzzle type.\n\nTwo Facebook ads for Homescapes and Gardenscapes, from March and April this year, were referred to the ASA for being misleading.\n\nDespite a brief warning at the bottom of the video that \"not all images represent actual gameplay\", the ASA sided with the seven people who complained.\n\nOne BBC reporter, however, said they had seen the offending ads pop up since the judgement was handed down.\n\nIn its submission, Playrix said that the type of gameplay in the ads was, in fact, in their games.\n\nBut out of thousands of levels of gameplay, there were only 10 such mini-games in Homescapes in April 2020, it said, and the mini-games in the ads were only available every 20 levels or so.\n\nPlayrix also told the ASA that \"most users\" stopped playing near the start of the game. In April, when the offending ads ran, those mini-games were on \"distant levels only\", the ASA said - meaning most players would never see them.\n\nThe company has since changed the game so these mini-games appear closer to the beginning.\n\n\"We understood users would play a significant amount of content which was of a different style in order to access the gameplay featured in the ads,\" the ASA said in its ruling.\n\n\"Because the ads were not representative of the games they were purported to feature, we concluded that they were misleading.\"\n\nIt ruled the ads must not appear again - and told Playrix to make sure ads represented its games in future.\n\nGames analyst Matthew Bailey said that \"artistic licence\" had long been used with game ads, citing 1990s adverts where the cover art was far more impressive than the game graphics.\n\nBut the difference now is that devices are advanced enough to be able to show users what the game is like - and developers are sometimes choosing not to.\n\n\"The ASA's recent ruling on the topic will send an even stronger message to other game makers about their use of misleading ads,\" he warned.", "The use of do-not-attempt-resuscitate (DNAR) orders is to be reviewed after a number were wrongly applied in care homes at the start of the pandemic.\n\nThe Care Quality Commission (CQC) will investigate concerns that some care homes still have blanket orders in place covering groups of residents.\n\nIt became clear that blanket use was in place in some care homes in the early weeks of the pandemic.\n\nBut it was widely condemned by the CQC and medical bodies.\n\nThe decision about whether or not to attempt resuscitation if a very sick person falls dangerously ill is supposed to be discussed with the individual, or family members if they are too sick.\n\nDoctors can make a decision on the spot without consultation in exceptional circumstances.\n\nHowever, the decisions are always supposed to be made on an individual case-by-case basis.\n\nThe health minister Lord Bethell has asked the CQC to investigate the latest claims. He told the House of Lords that blanket use of DNARs was \"unacceptable\".\n\nDr Rosie Benneyworth, CQC chief inspector of primary medical services and integrated care, said: \"Health and social care providers have faced extraordinary pressures this year. Both staff, and people using services and their loved ones, have at times raised concerns with us about care.\n\n\"It is vital that we take this opportunity to learn from what has happened - challenging poor care and sharing the ways that providers have put people's needs at the heart of their care so that others can learn from them.\"\n\nDr Benneyworth said it was unacceptable for DNARs to be applied to groups of people of any description.\n\n\"These decisions must continue to be made on an individual basis according to need. Through this review we will look to identify and share best practice in this complex area, as well as identifying where decisions may not have been patient-centred, and ensuring mistakes are not repeated.\"\n\nNHS England said it had already made clear that orders should only ever be made on an individual basis.\n\nThe charity Pohwer said it had found blanket DNARs put in place across Norfolk, West Midlands, London, Oxfordshire, Sussex, Surrey and Buckinghamshire, potentially affecting more than 700 people.\n\nIn a statement, the charity said: \"There are probably many more cases where the homes did not necessarily admit to the blanket DNAR order, or where they did not feel comfortable speaking with an external organisation. So 704 is the minimum number of individuals that would have otherwise been affected.\"\n\nLast week Amnesty International said sending thousands of older untested patients into care homes in England at the start of the coronavirus lockdown was a violation of their human rights.\n\nMore than 18,000 people living in care homes died with Covid-19, and Amnesty says the public inquiry promised by the government must begin immediately, including a thorough review of the use of DNAR forms.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Protests have convulsed Belarus every weekend since the disputed presidential election in August\n\nBelarusian riot police have used water cannon and stun grenades to break up the latest mass protests against President Alexander Lukashenko.\n\nProtests have swept the eastern European country since Mr Lukashenko claimed victory in an August election widely viewed as rigged.\n\nDozens of protesters were detained during the latest rallies on Sunday.\n\nIn the capital Minsk, police blasted protesters with coloured water to mark them out for arrest.\n\nCritics of Mr Lukashenko said Sunday saw police use some of the most brutal tactics against protesters since the immediate aftermath of August's disputed presidential election.\n\nMany opposition activists have been beaten up by police and thousands have been arrested during months of unrest. They are demanding the release of all political prisoners and a free and fair re-run of the election.\n\nThe EU, the UK and the US have refused to recognise Mr Lukashenko's new term. Mr Lukashenko denies fixing the poll and has received support from Russia, his country's closest ally.\n\nSvetlana Tikhanovskaya emerged as the main opposition leader after standing against Mr Lukashenko in August's election, arguing she would have won had it not been rigged.\n\nMs Tikhanovskaya was forced to go into exile in Lithuania after receiving threats following the disputed vote. She has repeatedly appealed to the international community to put pressure on Mr Lukashenko so that a democratic transition can be launched by negotiation.\n\nOpposition protesters clashed with masked riot police in Minsk at the latest rally on Sunday\n\nOpposition hopes of a peaceful resolution were raised on Saturday after Mr Lukashenko held an unexpected meeting with political opponents in the jail where they are currently detained.\n\nState media reported that the president called the meeting to discuss constitutional reform with his imprisoned opponents.\n\nIn now-familiar scenes, thousands of pro-opposition protesters gathered in Minsk and other major cities for the ninth successive Sunday of demonstrations against Mr Lukashenko.\n\nWearing coats and carrying umbrellas on a rainy afternoon, protesters called for the resignation of 66-year-old Mr Lukashenko, Belarus's leader since 1994.\n\nFootage shows the security forces, dressed in black and armed with batons, rounding up peaceful protestors congregating in Minsk city centre and taking them to waiting vehicles.\n\nSeveral thousand people were reported to have attended Sunday's march in Minsk\n\nPolice used stun grenades and water cannon against demonstrators in Minsk, a spokeswoman for Belarus's interior ministry told AFP news agency.\n\nThey sprayed plain and coloured water at demonstrators, covering them in what appeared to be orange dye.\n\nSome defiant protesters remained unmoved, using their umbrellas to shield themselves from the blast.\n\nA local news website described police using tear gas on crowds and said police were herding people into courtyards.\n\nIn videos posted online, police can be seen beating protesters with batons and snatching their white-and-red flags - a symbol of nationalist opposition to Mr Lukashenko.\n\nSome protesters fought back and pelted police with bottles and other objects.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Mass arrests as crowds chant 'go away' to Belarus president\n\nThe Viasna rights group, which monitors detentions at political protests, said at least 140 people had been detained in Minsk and other cities.\n\nJournalists covering the demonstrations were among those detained, including those from Russia's Tass agency and the state Belarusian news agency BELTA.\n\nSunday's demonstrations in Belarus's capital Minsk now follow a familiar course.\n\nTens of thousands of people march through the streets demanding President Lukashenko step down. Then, he responds by sending his security forces to arrest as many of them as possible.\n\nWhat makes this weekend different, however, is that on Saturday President Lukashenko held a long meeting with a group of political prisoners in jail.\n\nIt's the first indication - after more than two months of protests - that he just might be willing to negotiate with the opposition.\n\nThe president's press office said participants had agreed to keep the four-and-a-half-hour conversation \"secret\".\n\nHowever, a photo posted by the press service shows Mr Lukashenko sitting at a table with 11 political figures, all of whom look pale and unsmiling.\n\nAmong them is Viktor Babaryko, a banker who was initially seen as Mr Lukashenko's strongest rival in the election, but was barred from running and jailed in July.\n\nLiliya Vlasova, a lawyer and member of the opposition's Coordination Council, is also in the photo, as is Vitali Shkliarov, a Belarusian-American strategist who worked on US Senator Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign.\n\nPress Office of the President of Belarus A photo of the meeting was shared by Mr Lukashenko's office\n\nA short video clip shared by the press service also shows Mr Lukashenko saying to the group: \"I am trying to convince not only your supporters but the whole of society that we need to look at things more broadly.\"\n\nApparently referring to the ongoing protests, he added: \"You can't rewrite the constitution on the streets.\"\n\nOpposition figures suggested meeting was a sign of Mr Lukashenko's weakness, perhaps signalling a newfound eagerness to compromise with the protest movement.\n\nBut in a social media post, Ms Tikhanovskaya said \"you can't have dialogue in a prison cell\".", "The news comes as bars and pubs in Liverpool that do not serve meals prepare to close from Wednesday\n\nThe government's scientific advisers called for a short lockdown in England to halt the spread of Covid-19 last month, newly released documents show.\n\nThe experts said an immediate \"circuit breaker\" was the best way to control cases, at a meeting on 21 September.\n\nCommunities Secretary Robert Jenrick insisted the government had taken \"robust action\" that \"balanced\" the impact on the economy.\n\nBut Labour has described the documents as \"alarming\".\n\nIt comes as the Liverpool region prepares to enter a \"very high\" Covid alert level from Wednesday, the highest of a new three-tier system for coronavirus restrictions in England.\n\nEvery area will be classified as being on medium, high or very high alert under the system. It is not clear what the specific criteria is for each alert level.\n\nMost parts of England are the lowest tier, but Essex has asked to be moved to \"high\" level restrictions.\n\nShielding is not being reintroduced in England yet, but people who were on the list will receive a letter with updated advice to avoid getting Covid.\n\nMeanwhile, the latest Office for National Statistics figures showed there were 343 deaths involving coronavirus registered in the week to 2 October - a figure that has been doubling every fortnight over the last month.\n\nAt a press conference on Monday evening, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the alert system for England could succeed in driving cases down if it was implemented \"very effectively\", and he rejected the \"extreme route\" of a full nationwide lockdown \"right now\".\n\nBut at the same briefing, England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, voiced concerns over the impact of the new rules, saying he was not confident the \"base measures\" in the highest tier \"would be enough to get on top of\" the virus.\n\n\"That is why there's a lot of flexibility for local authorities [...] to do significantly more,\" he said.\n\nReleased shortly after Monday's press conference, minutes from the meeting of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) - which feeds into UK government decision-making - stated the advisers had called for the immediate introduction of a short national lockdown three weeks ago.\n\nThe papers also showed the scientists suggested:\n\nOf all the measures proposed by the advisory group, just one - advising those who can work from home to do so - was implemented by the government at the time.\n\nIn the documents, Sage warned that \"not acting now to reduce cases will result in a very large epidemic with catastrophic consequences\".\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nSpeaking to BBC Breakfast, Mr Jenrick said the government had introduced measures such as the rule of six at the time, and stressed the Sage papers had contributed to the measures the PM announced on Monday.\n\nHe said they had taken \"balanced judgements\" that weighed up the effect on the economy and \"all the other unintended consequences\" of measures, such as the impact on mental health and delayed surgeries.\n\nOn the new three-tiered system, he said: \"We are now able to have a very clear and consistent framework across the whole country, so people will be able to understand approximately what the rate of infections is in their own area and what the rules are accordingly.\"\n\nHe later told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that there were no plans for other parts of the country to go into the highest tier this week, but plans would be \"kept under review\".\n\nLabour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth told BBC Breakfast he was \"alarmed\" by the Sage papers, and called for ministers to explain why the advice was \"rejected\".\n\nHe also insisted the government was going to have to go further than the latest measures, saying things were getting \"really serious\" as winter approaches.\n\nCases are increasing across the whole of the country and the number of people in hospital is now higher than before the full lockdown in March. We are at a critical stage in the epidemic.\n\nIt is at this moment the gulf between the official scientific advice and the decisions made by government has been laid bare.\n\nIt is the case that \"advisers advise and ministers decide\". When considering new measures to stop Covid, government must also take into account the harms they cause to our health and the economy.\n\nBut there is some concern the government is doing too little, too late.\n\nAnd that we can either choose the terms for controlling the virus now, or wait and the virus will force our hand as it did with lockdown in March.\n\nThe newly released Sage documents also showed advisers said NHS Test and Trace was only having a \"marginal impact\" and this would \"likely decline further\" unless the system expanded to keep up with the rise in cases and people were given support to enable them to self-isolate.\n\nA separate document from 17 September stated that Sage believed curfews in bars, pubs, cafes and restaurants were also \"likely to have a marginal impact\".\n\nA 22:00 closing time was introduced for all hospitality venues in England from 24 September.\n\nA Sage document from 21 September warned that \"single interventions by themselves are unlikely to be able to bring the R below one\" and both local and national measures are needed.\n\nHowever, a document examining measures including a two to three week \"circuit-breaker\" - a short period of tightened restrictions - said this step, if it was \"as strict and well-adhered to as the restrictions in late May\", could \"put the epidemic back by approximately 28 days or more\".\n\n\"Multiple circuit-breaks might be necessary to maintain low levels of incidence,\" it added.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson explains a three-tiered level of rules to fight the coronavirus pandemic in England.\n\nMost areas in England are in the medium alert level - meaning current restrictions continue, including the 10pm hospitality curfew and the rule of six.\n\nAreas already under additional local restrictions are automatically in the high alert level - meaning bans on household mixing indoors are extended to include hospitality venues.\n\nThe city of Nottingham, which has the highest rate in the country, will start in this category alongside the rest of Nottinghamshire, East and West Cheshire and a small area of High Peak, as well as Greater Manchester, parts of South Yorkshire, and north-east England. Around 4.4 million people will be in high alert areas.\n\nThe Liverpool City Region - home to 1.5 million people - becomes the first area to enter the very high alert level, which - at a minimum - sees pubs and bars close if they do not serve \"substantial meals\", almost all household contacts banned and advice against travel. The rule of six will continue to apply in outdoor public spaces such as parks.\n\nAreas in the highest tier are able to impose further restrictions, and in the Liverpool City Region this will mean the closure of betting shops, gyms, leisure centres and casinos.\n\nMr Johnson said he had agreed some of the measures with the region's Labour Mayor Steve Rotheram - but Mr Rotheram said that was \"totally false\" and that the new measures had been \"dictated to us by the government\".\n\nThe government has issued details of the full restrictions for each alert level.\n\nMeanwhile, the Scottish government is drawing up its own three-tier framework of restrictions to be implemented later this month.\n\nIn Wales, a second national lockdown is being considered and First Minister Mark Drakeford has threatened a travel ban on people from English Covid hotspots if the prime minister does not impose his own.\n\nMinisters in Northern Ireland's devolved government are meeting later to decide on further coronavirus restrictions.\n\nA further 13,972 confirmed coronavirus cases were reported across the UK on Monday, with 50 more deaths within 28 days of a positive test recorded.", "\"I'm going to be here, I'm going to fight this,\" said the 32-year-old, who is having radiotherapy\n\nTom Parker, one of the members of boy band The Wanted, has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour.\n\nThe singer, 32, said he was \"still in shock\" after being told he had a grade IV glioblastoma six weeks ago.\n\n\"I knew something wasn't right, but I never expected it to be this.\"\n\nSpeaking to OK! magazine, the singer said he would remain positive, despite being told the cancer was terminal. \"I'm going to be here,\" he added. \"I'm going to fight this.\"\n\nParker achieved fame in the early 2010s as part of The Wanted, reaching number one with the singles All Time Low and Glad You Came.\n\nSince they went on hiatus in 2014, he has played Danny Zuko in a touring production of Grease, and made the semi-finals of Celebrity Masterchef.\n\nHe married actress Kelsey Hardwick in 2018. The couple have a 16-month-old daughter, Aurelia, and are expecting their second child.\n\nThe star and his wife Kelsey Hardwick are expecting their second child\n\nParker suffered a seizure in July and was put on a waiting list for an MRI scan. Six weeks later he had another, more serious seizure during a family trip to Norwich and was rushed to hospital.\n\nAfter three days of tests, he was diagnosed with cancer. Because of Covid-19 restrictions, his wife was not allowed in the hospital, and he received the news on his own.\n\nOn Monday, the couple posted a message on Instagram telling fans that Parker had begun chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment.\n\n\"We are gonna fight this all the way,\" they said. \"We don't want your sadness, we just want love and positivity and together we will raise awareness of this terrible disease and look for all available treatment options.\"\n\nGlioblastoma is the most aggressive of brain tumours in adults. Speaking to OK!, the couple said they had not asked about a timescale for how it is likely to develop.\n\n\"I said that for Tom's state of mind, and who he is as a person, that would not be good for him,\" said Hardwick. \"He would literally sit here and count down the days and not live his life.\"\n\nParker added: \"There are so many stories of people who were given a bad prognosis and are still here five, 10, even 15 years later. We're going to fight this all the way.\"\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by tomparkerofficial This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe couple were inundated with messages of support on Monday morning.\n\n\"Sending so much love and support always,\" wrote Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington in a comment under their Instagram post.\n\n\"We love you Tom!\" added The Only Way Is Essex's James \"Arg\" Argent, who appeared with Parker on ITV's cancer fundraiser The Real Full Monty in 2018. \"We got this brother, No doubt about it!\"\n\nThe Wanted sold more than 10m records worldwide (L-R): Siva Kaneswaran, Max George, Nathan Sykes, Tom Parker and Jay McGuiness\n\nHardwick added that Parker's bandmates had rallied round, with Jay McGuinness and Max George visiting the couple over the past few weeks.\n\n\"Siva [Kaneswaran] and Nathan [Sykes] obviously live a lot further away, but all four of the boys have been texting regularly and sending through different articles and possible treatments and therapies that they're all reading about. They've been amazing.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Last updated on .From the section West Ham\n\nWest Ham are against radical plans by Liverpool and Manchester United to reform the English football pyramid, according to a club source.\n\nThe Project Big Picture proposals have been put together by Liverpool owner John Henry and United co-chairman Joel Glazer.\n\nEverton, Southampton and West Ham would be granted special status in the plans, along with the so-called 'big six'.\n\nHowever, a Hammers insider has told BBC Sport they are \"very much against\" it.\n• None Reforms in 'best interest of clubs' - Parry\n\nIt is understood the club were unaware of the proposals, even though they were named in them - and were shocked when they emerged into the public domain on Sunday.\n\nThe source said they were of the view Liverpool and United were the instigators but that they had been told talks have been going on since January and what has emerged is the 17th version of the proposal.\n\nThe plans also include special status for Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City and Tottenham.\n\nA spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Monday the plans would \"undermine the trust in football's governance\".\n\n\"In terms of support for clubs we have been given assurances by the Premier League and English Football League that they have no intention to let any EFL club go bust due to covid and we know they have the means to prevent that from happening within existing mechanisms.\n\n\"We strongly urge the Premier League and EFL to continue to work constructively to come up with a package of support for the whole football family.\"\n• None The Premier League cut from 20 to 18 clubs, with the Championship, League One and League Two each retaining 24 teams.\n• None The bottom two teams in the Premier League relegated automatically with the 16th-placed team joining the Championship play-offs.\n• None A £250m rescue fund made immediately available to the EFL & 25% of all future TV deals\n• None £100m paid to the FA to make up for lost revenue.\n• None Nine clubs given 'special voting rights' on certain issues, based on their extended runs in the Premier League.\n\nThe Hammers feel the obvious negatives - the loss of two home games - will hit their finances, while at the same time creating space for more European games and lucrative pre-season friendlies, which would disproportionately benefit the 'big six'.\n\nThe plans include reducing the Premier League to 18 clubs and scrapping the EFL Cup.\n\nIn return, the EFL would get 25% of all future TV deals, which would be negotiated jointly, plus the £250m bail-out many clubs have been demanding since May.\n\nThis is the fourth season in a row where the 'big six' have all qualified for European football. In the past 10 seasons, one of them has missed out on only four occasions.\n\nOver the past decade, West Ham have had two European campaigns, both of which ended during the qualifying rounds. Southampton and Everton have also qualified for Europe twice in the same period.\n\n\"The big six are using Covid for a power grab,\" said the West Ham source. \"If this goes through, over time they will just use more and more for themselves.\"\n\nIt is not known what will happen if the plan - which has drawn criticism from supporters' groups, the government and the Premier League executive - is rejected.\n\nThe Premier League said \"individual proposals\" in the plan \"could have a damaging impact on the whole game\", and that it would continue its own work on a \"resolution to the requirement for Covid-19 rescue funding\" for the EFL.\n\nHowever, one theory - which EFL chairman Rick Parry refused to dismiss when questioned specifically about it twice on Sunday - is that the six clubs have been told they could play within the Football League if their Premier League status was threatened.\n\nOne source with detailed knowledge of running clubs at both Premier League and EFL level says the plan has merit but the fear of how the 'big six' might rewrite the rule book - potentially including halting relegation or blocking new owners whose investment may threaten their own status - was likely to be regarded as too big a price for many to accept.\n\n'Something needs to be done right now'\n\nChairman of League Two club Forest Green Rovers, Dale Vince, said he was \"positive\" and \"excited\" about a \"very well-rounded and fair packet of changes\".\n\n\"I think it will really put a line under the EFL in terms of financial stability, and in terms of creating a level playing field as well,\" he told BBC Sport.\n\n\"The ending of parachute payments goes hand in hand with that. It distorts competition in the Championship in particular, but that does flow down the EFL as well.\"\n\nAsked whether the proposal would put too much power in the hands of the 'big six', Vince says the Premier League should adopt a simple majority voting system, where 10 votes would succeed in an 18-team league.\n\nHe added: \"I don't think there is anything wrong with the timing of this, there is probably everything right with it because something needs to be done right now.\"\n\nDerby County's chief executive Stephen Pearce told BBC Sport that he does not see the proposals as a \"power grab\" by the bigger Premier League clubs.\n\n\"This actually about how we protect the pyramid as far as I can see,\" Pearce said. \"Looking at it long term, we need financial stability throughout the whole pyramid. We need the controls in place to sort out player wage inflation and everything we talked about previously.\n\n\"I think it makes a case that clubs will be able to focus more on making themselves financially sustainable and putting more into the infrastructure of the clubs, into coaching, the grassroots, the academies.\n\n\"I think, in the longer term, it will make the competition better and people will see it as a more attractive sporting product that is more competitive.\"\n• None David Attenborough on the future of our planet: 'We have to believe it's possible'\n• None What was it like to deliver the Premier League trophy?", "A detective sent \"flirtatious\" messages to a victim of attempted rape, a misconduct panel heard.\n\nDet Sgt Jonathan Pearce could be dismissed by Kent Police over the Facebook messages, which included a topless photograph.\n\nThe pair had met online and started messaging before she told him of the attempted rape in October 2019, the panel heard.\n\nHe denies trying to begin a sexual or emotional relationship with the woman.\n\nHours after telling Det Sgt Pearce about the attempted assault, she said to him \"you want me\", the panel heard.\n\nHe replied: \"Maybe a little bit.\"\n\nIn other messages he told the woman that if he were \"20 years younger\" he would have asked her out, and sent her a topless photograph including his head and shoulders.\n\nDavid Mesling, setting out the allegations, said while \"knowing or believing [the woman] to be a vulnerable person\" Det Sgt Pearce had \"continued to attempt to enter into a sexual or emotional relationship with her\".\n\nThe officer, in his 40s, said the messages were \"light-hearted banter, never anything serious\".\n\nThe messages were an attempt to \"make her feel better about herself\" and he wanted to bring the alleged perpetrator to justice, Det Sgt Pearce said.\n\nHe is accused of a \"serious failure\" to secure evidence, after deleting their online exchange.\n\nMr Mesling said the detective had given a \"changing account\" of how the messages were deleted.\n\nDet Sgt Pearce told the panel it was \"purely accidental\" and he had meant to archive them.\n\n\"I deleted them because I was stupid and pressed the wrong button,\" he added.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The Oruc Reis will again spend 10 days in the disputed waters\n\nThe Turkish navy has said a research ship at the centre of an energy rights row with Greece will be sent back to disputed waters in the Mediterranean.\n\nTensions flared in August when the vessel was sent to survey an area claimed by Greece, Turkey and Cyprus.\n\nTurkey withdrew its ship, the Oruc Reis, in September ahead of diplomatic attempts to resolve the dispute.\n\nNow, Ankara has said that the ship will again spend 10 days conducting seismic research in the eastern Mediterranean.\n\nThe vessel will also be accompanied by two other ships, Ataman and Cengiz Han.\n\nGreece and Turkey are both Nato members, but have a history of border disputes and competing claims over maritime rights.\n\nThis particular row was sparked when Turkey deployed the seismic research vessel and warships to the disputed waters on 10 August.\n\nThe Oruc Reis, as well as two auxiliary vessels, were sent to search for potentially rich oil and gas deposits south of the Greek island of Kastellorizo.\n\nAt the time, Greece's foreign ministry said this was a \"new serious escalation\" which \"exposed\" Turkey's \"destabilising role\".\n\nThe row then saw Greece and Turkey stage rival air and navy drills in the waters between Cyprus and the Greek island of Crete.\n\nTurkey eventually pulled the Oruc Reis back to shore last month, sparking hopes that the two nations could resolve the crisis.\n\nHowever, Turkish officials at the time insisted the ship was only undergoing planned maintenance and that it would be returning to sea.\n\nEarlier this month, the EU threatened to bring in sanctions on Turkey if it failed to do what the bloc said was illegal drilling and energy exploration activities in waters claimed by Cyprus and Greece.\n\nTurkey said the threat of sanctions was \"unconstructive\".", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Mitchells & Butlers, the pubs and restaurants group, has begun redundancy consultations with a number of staff as it struggles with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.\n\nM&B, whose chains include Harvester and All Bar One, has about 1,700 pubs and restaurants and 44,000 employees.\n\nIt has not yet disclosed how many jobs are at risk.\n\nA spokesperson for the company described it as \"a difficult and regrettable decision\".\n\nM&B would \"seek to redeploy affected staff wherever possible\", the spokesperson added.\n\n\"Our industry is operating in exceptionally challenging and uncertain circumstances.\n\n\"While we have worked incredibly hard to make sites Covid-19 secure and keep staff and customers safe, we are facing significant difficulties from the recently introduced 10pm curfew for pubs, bars and restaurants, new enforced closures and tapering government support that doesn't go far enough.\"\n\nM&B's spokesperson also called for further government support for the hospitality sector.\n\n\"With trading restrictions and uncertainty likely to continue for the foreseeable future, we strongly urge the government to step up the level of support it is offering to an industry which has been repeatedly singled out and taken the full brunt of restrictions.\"\n\nOther well-known brands in the M&B stable include Toby Carvery and O'Neill's.\n\nThe move comes after warnings by the hospitality industry that the new coronavirus restrictions will come as a huge blow to bars and restaurants across much of England.\n\nBars and pubs in Liverpool have been instructed to close from Wednesday and will receive financial support.\n\nBut venues in \"tier 2\" areas, including large parts of the North and Midlands, will lose custom, with households no longer allowed to mix indoors.\n\nTrade body the Night Time Industries Association is pressing for a judicial review of the restrictions.\n\nAre you a Mitchells and Butler employee? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Lord Frost and Michel Barnier are continuing to talk, ahead of Thursday's EU summit\n\nBoris Johnson has been clear with the EU that the time left to get a post-Brexit trade deal in place is in \"short supply\", Downing Street says.\n\nThe prime minister has set a deadline of this Thursday, after which he has said the UK is ready to \"walk away\".\n\nNo 10 said the time limit was still in place and the government was trying to \"bridge\" disagreements over fishing rights and state aid for businesses.\n\nMeanwhile, the UK's negotiating team is in Brussels for further talks.\n\nThese come after Mr Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for an intensification of discussions.\n\nThe prime minister set his deadline to coincide with the start of an EU summit, at which leaders will discuss the state of the trade talks.\n\nBoth sides have spoken of progress in the last couple of weeks, but there are still major disagreements on two issues in particular.\n\nFirst, the EU wants the UK to follow its rules on state aid - financial assistance given by government to businesses - but the UK says it would undermine independence.\n\nSecond, the UK wants full access to EU markets to sell its fish, but in return the EU is demanding full access for its fishing fleets to UK waters - which the UK does not want to provide.\n\nIt has been reported that France is ready to rule out a deal if the UK does not back down over fishing rights.\n\nIf no agreement is reached, the UK and EU would do business under World Trade Organisation rules from 1 January next year, which would mean tariffs on goods.\n\nLast week, Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin said \"movement\" was required before \"end-state negotiations\" could begin.\n\nThe UK's chief negotiator, Lord Frost, said he would advise the prime minister on whether the UK's set conditions for a deal have been met following his talks with EU counterpart Michel Barnier in Brussels.", "John Leslie is accused of committing the assault in Westminster in December 2008\n\nFormer Blue Peter presenter John Leslie \"grabbed\" a woman's breasts at a Christmas party and then laughed, the opening of his trial heard.\n\nThe 55-year-old is accused of the assault shortly after arriving at the gathering in London's West End in 2008.\n\nMr Leslie was charged with sexual touching of a woman on 5 June 2019, Southwark Crown Court heard.\n\nHe denies the charge of sexual assault by intentionally touching a woman without her consent.\n\nProsecutor Jocelyn Ledward said Mr Leslie grabbed the woman's breasts \"quite deliberately for a period of a few seconds\" before walking off.\n\nMs Ledward told Southwark Crown Court: \"The woman was stunned but did not report it to the police.\n\n\"He [Mr Leslie] denies he did any such thing and if there was any physical contact between them, then it must have been an accident.\"\n\nThe woman had recognised Mr Leslie at the bar and went over to him, the court heard.\n\nHe smiled at her, Ms Ledward said.\n\n\"She smiled back. Without saying anything further he grabbed both of her breasts with both of his hands and laughed as he did so,\" the prosecutor added.\n\n\"The prosecution say this was no accidental touching but a quite deliberate sexual assault.\"\n\nThe woman did not think her complaint would be taken seriously at the time but had confided in a friend who was left \"shocked\", Ms Ledward said.\n\nIt was in late-2017 after the MeToo campaign became prominent, that the woman decided to make a complaint, the court was told.\n\nMr Leslie voluntarily attended a police interview in March 2018 at the end of which he told them, \"I have not attacked or assaulted anyone ever\", the jury was told.\n\nMr Leslie, who began his TV career in 1989 when he became a presenter on the BBC's Blue Peter, went on to present Wheel Of Fortune and This Morning.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Downing Street has added its voice to criticism of a government-backed advert suggesting a ballet dancer should retrain in cyber security.\n\nA No 10 spokesperson said it was \"not appropriate\" and had been taken down.\n\nThe ad, the latest in a long-running campaign to promote cyber security jobs, sparked a social media backlash.\n\nIt had already been disowned by Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden, who said the \"crass\" ad did not come from his department.\n\nAcclaimed choreographer Sir Matthew Bourne was among Twitter users criticising the advert, asking in a tweet: \"This has to be a joke? Right?\"\n\nThe advert depicts a ballet dancer and reads: \"Fatima's next job could be in cyber (she just doesn't know it yet). Rethink. Reskill. Reboot.\"\n\nIt is attributed to CyberFirst, a programme led by the National Cyber Security Centre to encourage young people to get into tech, and to HM Government.\n\nCritics on Twitter called the advert \"patronising\", saying it showed the government was not helping the arts through the pandemic.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Matthew Bourne This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIn a tweet, writer Caitlin Moran wondered if the government had \"recently created a Hopes and Dreams Crushing Department\".\n\nShadow mental health minister Dr Rosena Allin-Khan tweeted: \"Fatima, you be you. Don't let anyone else tell you that you aren't good enough because you don't conform to their preconceived social norms.\"\n\n\"This was part of a campaign encouraging people from all walks of life to think about career in cyber-security, but this piece of content was not appropriate and has been removed,\" Downing Street said.\n\nMr Dowden said in a tweet: \"I want to save jobs in the arts\", and underlined that £1.57bn was being invested in the industry.\n\nHe said the advert \"was a partner campaign encouraging people from all walks of life to think about a career in cyber security\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Oliver Dowden This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe image, the latest in a series of promotions that started last year under a \"Rethink. Reskill. Reboot.\" campaign, has now been removed. Before its removal, it read: \"If your career plan's been altered this year, you're not alone.\n\n\"2020 has shaken up jobs - but most successful careers have a turning point. The government-backed Rethink. Reskill. Reboot. programme by CyberFirst could be yours.\"\n\nThe reaction to this \"Rethink Reskill Reboot\" campaign was immediate on social media, and the ballet dancer picture was replaced by a picture of a baker almost immediately.\n\nIn the context of the difficulties facing the arts during the Covid-19 pandemic, it's a sensitive subject. The use of a ballet dancer - seen through the narrow focus of social media - seems dreadfully timed and at least one government minister agrees.\n\nThe Chancellor's comments during an ITV interview last week have caused confusion around jobs in the arts, but it seems he was talking about all job sectors, rather than the arts in particular. However, it's the persistent belief that he was referring to people in creative industries retraining into new careers that has caused anger.\n\nAs for the courses themselves, QA have been running vocational courses under the CyberFirst name since 2017, in partnership with the government's NCSC, and sometimes alongside companies like BAE Systems - so these campaigns are not new.\n\nLast year, the NCSC used the CyberFirst brand in an event aimed at steering school pupils toward a career in cyber-security, and they have told Huffington Post that the current \"Reboot\" campaign has no connection with them.\n\nThe image of \"Fatima\" comes from a photograph by Atlanta-based photographer Krys Alex published on Instagram in July 2017. The original picture shows dancers Desire'e Kelley and Tasha Williams from the Vibez in Motion Dance Studio in Atlanta, Georgia.\n\n\"Fatima\" is Atlanta-based dancer Desire'e Kelley, pictured here with Tasha Williams\n\nThe coronavirus pandemic has forced industries to scale back their businesses and cut jobs, including many music venues and cultural organisations.\n\nLast week, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said that all workers needed to adapt to the changing environment.\n\nHe told ITV: \"Can things happen in exactly the way they did? No. But everyone is having to find ways to adapt and adjust to the new reality.\"\n\nDepartment for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, the National Cyber Security Centre and GCHQ have all been contacted for comment.", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Monday morning. We'll have another update for you at 18:00 BST.\n\nThe country will be divided up into \"medium\", \"high\" and \"very high\" when it comes to infection levels. The aim is to simplify the current patchwork of restrictions, but the measures are still to be finalised. Once they are, Boris Johnson will tell MPs in the Commons first, followed by a Downing Street press conference. The Liverpool City Region is expected to become the first tier 3 area, with the likely closure of pubs, gyms and casinos, but others could follow. The UK isn't alone is facing these sorts of decisions in response to the second wave - see what's happening elsewhere in Europe.\n\nSorry, your browser cannot display this map\n\nHealth experts are urging all pregnant women to take up the offer of a free flu jab as soon as possible to help protect themselves and their babies. Anyone working in maternity departments is being given the same message. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and Royal College of Midwives say the vaccination is even more important this year because of Covid-19. Pregnancy can change the way the body responds to viral infections, and in rare cases, flu can have very serious consequences.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Should I get a flu jab this winter?\n\nThe UK economy may have grown by as much as 17% in the three months to the end of September, thanks to a surge in shopping and a healthy housing market. The optimistic prediction from forecasters at the EY Item Club comes with a sting in the tail, though. It thinks much slower growth will come in the final three months of 2020 - possibly 1% or less - as the furlough scheme ends and unemployment rises. The possible failure of Brexit trade talks is also casting a shadow.\n\nEY said consumer spending bounced back strongly over the summer\n\nMany smaller football clubs are struggling to survive without spectators but, as yet, no rescue package has been agreed. Now a set of proposals, led by Liverpool and Manchester United, has been put forward which would give them an immediate bail-out and a 25% share of future Premier League revenue. Alongside that there'd be a major shake-up of football's structure, with the number of teams in the top flight cut and the longest-serving clubs handed more power. The government and Premier League don't like it, but our sports editor Dan Roan thinks it could help break the current impasse.\n\nGate receipts are the main source of income for smaller clubs\n\nAdapting to life under coronavirus is tough for many schools, but at New College Worcester there's an extra layer of complexity because all 69 pupils are blind or visually impaired. Social distancing may be difficult, but the school has found ways to manage. One sixth former, Mustafa, told the BBC the pandemic wouldn't hold him back, and headteacher Nicki Ross says teachers are determined to continue their mission to help students become independent young people.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Coronavirus: How blind school in Worcester is keeping pupils safe\n\nFind more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nPlus, with a great many of us still working from home, how can you hope to get promoted if you aren't in the office?\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "Nigel Wright was caught on CCTV at Tesco in Lockerbie\n\nA farmer who laced baby food with metal shards in an attempt to blackmail Tesco has been jailed for 14 years.\n\nNigel Wright, 45, of Osgodby, Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, contaminated jars of Heinz baby food and placed them on supermarket shelves.\n\nHe then wrote to Tesco threatening that babies would be seriously or fatally injured unless he was paid £1.4m.\n\nWright was found guilty in August of three counts of blackmail and two charges of contaminating goods.\n\nNo babies were harmed but the metal was spotted by two mothers who were only moments away from feeding their children.\n\nPolice said an urgent recall of baby food led to 42,000 jars being recovered. There was no evidence that further jars had been tampered with.\n\nThe jury at the Old Bailey heard Wright demanded Tesco pay him his ransom in the online currency Bitcoin.\n\nNigel Wright was sentenced to a total of 14 years in jail\n\nThe sheep farmer was convicted of a further charge of blackmail for demanding £150,000 worth of Bitcoin from a driver with whom he had a road rage row.\n\nHe was sentenced to 11 years for his plot against Tesco, and a further three years to run consecutively for the road rage blackmail.\n\nIn that case, Wright sent a letter to the driver demanding Bitcoin and threatening to kill him and his wife and children if he did not comply.\n\nJudge Mr Justice Warby said: \"You were under no pressure from others, or from circumstances.\n\n\"It is not as if you had - for instance - a legitimate grievance against Tesco, nor can any other explanation easily be identified for engaging in this series of repulsive actions, apart from greed.\"\n\nHertfordshire Police, who led the investigation, said Wright claimed he had been forced to carry out the baby food plot by travellers who were threatening him, but had no evidence of this.\n\nDet Insp Lucy Thomson said: \"Wright is a dangerous offender who gave no thought to the babies he could have harmed during his callous pursuit of money.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The Bank of England has written to UK banks asking them how ready they are if interest rates were cut to zero or turned negative.\n\nThe UK would be following countries such as Japan and Switzerland if it cut borrowing costs to such a low figure.\n\n\"We are requesting specific information about your firm's current readiness,\" the bank's deputy governor, Sam Woods, said in the letter to banks.\n\nThe Bank of England cut rates to the current historic low of 0.1% in March.\n\nMr Woods said he wanted to know if the banks would face technological challenges if rates should turn negative.\n\n\"We are also seeking to understand whether there may be potential for short-term solutions or workarounds, as well as permanent systems changes,\" he said.\n\nThe past few years have been marked by outages and other problems with the computer systems of various British banks.\n\nLast year, MPs condemned the level of IT failures at banks, warning that financial levies on firms and more regulation may be needed.\n\nWhile the Bank of England may set its base rate below zero, it is unlikely most consumers will immediately enter the topsy-turvy world of being paid to borrow money.\n\nThose on fixed-rate mortgages will see no difference, while variable-rate mortgage terms often state that borrowers will never pay less than zero.\n\nSavers with deep pockets such as the wealthy and the banks themselves, may be charged to deposit their money.\n\nBanks depositing cash overnight at the European Central Bank currently pay 0.5% to do so. In November, Swiss bank UBS began charging up to 0.75% for cash deposits from wealthy clients.\n\nFor some years the Bank of England and financial regulators have been pretty sceptical about the use of negative interest rates.\n\nRewarding borrowers and punishing savers would certainly be a difficult communications task.\n\nBut the reason for scepticism repeatedly communicated to me was the structure of the UK financial system.\n\nBuilding societies, in particular, are reliant on the difference between the interest rates they pay and they receive - the net interest margin. It is tough enough at the current record low rates of interest.\n\nTo be clear, should the move materialise, typical savers and borrowers should not be immediately affected by this new world - although a Danish bank did launch a negative interest rate mortgage last year.\n\nThe move would mainly affect the plumbing of the financial system, basically institutional bank accounts at the Bank of England.\n\nThe point would be to penalise hoarding of cash, and provide incentives to spend and invest.\n\nThe evidence from other countries that have dabbled in these rates is mixed.\n\nToday's move is designed to get financial institutions ready internally, especially in terms of computer systems, to cope with either a zero rate or a negative one.\n\nIt removes a barrier against the option of this radical policy, though far from guarantees it.\n\nThe Bank of England is demonstrating that it has not run out of weapons, as the recovery slows and profound uncertainties of the pandemic and post-Brexit trade with the EU loom large.\n\nThe banks have until 12 November to respond to the central bank's request.\n\nInvestors are betting on a rate cut below zero in May, the Reuters news agency has reported.\n\nWhile a cut in rates would squeeze the profit margins of lenders, the central banks did not ask about the risks of this, sticking to questions about its practicality.\n\nThe term \"interest rates\" is often used interchangeably with the Bank of England base rate.\n\nDescribed as the \"single most important interest rate in the UK\", the base rate determines how much interest the Bank of England pays to financial institutions that hold money with it, and what it charges them to borrow.\n\nHigh Street banks also use it to determine how much interest they pay to savers, as well as what they charge people who take out a loan or mortgage.\n\nThe Bank of England usually lowers interest rates when it wants people to spend more and save less.\n\nIn theory, taking interest rates below zero should have the same effect. But in practice, it's a bit more complicated.", "File photo of São Paulo police force, which has launched a search for Macedo\n\nOne of Brazil's biggest crime bosses has gone on the run after being briefly freed from prison the previous day.\n\nAndré Oliveira Macedo, also known as André do Rap, was released from a high security prison on Saturday - but this decision was revoked just hours later.\n\nHe has been missing since.\n\nMacedo is a senior member of the São Paulo-based First Command of the Capital (PCC) gang, which holds power in jails across Brazil and Paraguay and smuggles tonnes of cocaine into Europe.\n\nHis release was the result of a controversial order by Judge Marco Aurélio Mello, one of 11 justices on Brazil's Supreme Court.\n\nJudge Mello granted Macedo's release from the São Paulo prison on the grounds that the amount of time he had spent in detention awaiting trial had exceeded the legal maximum. He was arrested in September 2019, and had been detained since.\n\nAfter his release, Macedo was ordered to go into house arrest.\n\nThe order to release him was controversial. São Paulo state governor João Doria called it \"an unacceptable condescension to criminals\".\n\nWithin a few hours, High Court president Luiz Fux had suspended the decision and ordered Macedo to be re-arrested and returned to prison immediately.\n\nHowever, by this time he was already gone - with some local reports suggesting he fled the country.\n\nInvestigators in São Paulo have not provided details on the search.", "At least 40 people armed with metal bars and fireworks have attacked a police station to the south of Paris, according to officials.\n\nThe assailants, who caused damage to cars and broke windows, also tried unsuccessfully to storm the building, police said.\n\nThe police station is in an area known for drug trafficking, and the local mayor said the attack could be in retaliation for a recent scooter accident allegedly caused by police.", "British Airways has announced it is replacing its chief executive Alex Cruz as the airline navigates \"the worst crisis\" facing its industry.\n\nMr Cruz, who has been with BA since 2016, will be immediately replaced by Aer Lingus boss Sean Doyle.\n\nMr Cruz will stay on as non-executive chairman for a transition period before Mr Doyle also takes on the role.\n\nBA has been embroiled in a bitter dispute with unions over redundancies and pay cuts.\n\nIt is cutting about 10,000 staff, drawing criticism from staff and MPs who claim the airline has been following a \"fire and rehire\" policy.\n\nLuis Gallego, chief executive of IAG, which owns BA, said: \"We're navigating the worst crisis faced in our industry and I'm confident these internal promotions will ensure IAG is well placed to emerge in a strong position.\"\n\nThe shake-up is one of the first major movesby Mr Gallego who took over as IAG's chief executive last month, replacing long-standing boss Willie Walsh.\n\n\"This is a sign that the new chief executive of IAG, Luis Gallego, is flexing his muscles and trying to demonstrate he'll make the changes necessary to lead a sustained recovery for the airline group,\" said Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.\n\nNew data from Heathrow showed the challenges being faced by the travel industry from the coronavirus pandemic. Just 1.2 million passengers travelled through the airport in September, down 82% compared with the same month last year.\n\nHe's done the dirty work - now a fresh pair of hands is needed.\n\nAlex Cruz's most recent task at BA was to push through thousands of job cuts as well as changes to pay and conditions, which will see many remaining staff earning a lot less in future.\n\nThose cuts may have been necessary due to the Covid crisis, but the way BA went about it - effectively threatening to fire employees who refused to sign new contracts - provoked deep resentment and bitterness among the workforce.\n\nAnd he was hardly popular to begin with. He arrived at BA with a brief to cut costs and boost profitability, to enable the airline to compete with budget carriers. He succeeded, but at a price.\n\nCustomer satisfaction fell sharply, leading to accusations that the BA brand was being sacrificed for short-term shareholder value. There were strikes over what was described as \"poverty pay\" by cabin crew. And repeated IT failures proved deeply embarrassing for the company.\n\nNow the man who appointed him, former IAG chief executive Willie Walsh, has retired. The new IAG boss, Luis Gallego, appears keen to make his mark and rebuild bridges with staff.\n\nMr Cruz was very much part of the old regime. It should come as no surprise that he now has to step aside.\n\nMr Doyle is returning to BA after just two years in charge at Aer Lingus, which is also owned by IAG. Prior to that, he had worked at BA since 1998.\n\nBut Ms Streeter said: \"Sean Doyle will have his work cut out to make immediate progress given that British Airways is facing the toughest challenge in its history as demand for international travel has plummeted and quarantine restrictions continue to constrain bookings.\"\n\nMr Cruz's tenure as BA's boss has been eventful. In September last year, the airline's pilots staged their first ever strike which led to 2,325 flights being cancelled and cost BA €137m (£124m).\n\nIt has also suffered a number of costly IT problems, including an incident in 2017 that left 75,000 flyers stranded and cost the airline £80m.\n\nLast year, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) announced it intended to fine BA a record £183m after a breach of its security system, exposing hundreds of thousands of customer details. The ICO and BA are still in discussions regarding the fine.\n\nIAG declined to comment on whether Mr Cruz would receive any compensation when he leaves BA once the transition period is completed. It also declined to say how long the transition period would last.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Liverpool is one of many cities where there are extra restrictions\n\nIn many areas under local lockdown, cases and hospital admissions have continued to soar. Does that mean restrictions don't work?\n\nConsider the national lockdown in the spring. While it feels like it was one single policy, it was in fact a package of different measures. Schools, universities and offices shut. Pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops closed. No-one could mix with people from outside their household. People were advised not to use public transport and to limit the number of times they visited essential shops.\n\nTogether these had a dramatic impact on cases, and the number of coronavirus patients in hospital plummeted from 20,000 to about 800.\n\nHow much each part of that lockdown contributed is hard to say.\n\nThe rules were relaxed but then, at the end of June, Leicester became the first place to go into a local lockdown. Other cities, and whole regions, have followed. But so far, Leicester's lockdown is the only one to have come close to the strictness of the national policy. Shops and pubs were stopped from opening. Households were barred from mixing indoors. And new cases of the virus dropped by 60% during July. People in hospital beds with coronavirus fell from 88 to 18.\n\nSince Leicester, local lockdowns have multiplied. More than 15 million people - very roughly, a quarter of the UK population - have come under new curbs, in some form.\n\nAnd it's become harder to see whether they are working or not.\n\nAfter the first changes, cases continued to rise, throughout August. Then, after pub and restaurant closures, case rates dropped sharply. It is, however, too soon to say for sure that the stricter measures led directly to the decline.\n\nIn the rest of Greater Manchester, gatherings with other households were banned but shops, pubs and restaurants remained open. Cases have mostly kept climbing throughout these local restrictions.\n\nHowever, the latest week's data will be welcome news - suggesting the sharp increases might be levelling off. The rise in cases in many areas under local lockdown appears to be slowing, in line with the national picture.\n\nThis may be a sign that the England-wide \"rule of six\" is working.\n\nA large national study, published last week, confirmed the growth in cases was slowing across England, although overall levels remained high. But restrictions on households meeting - which have been seen at a local level - don't always lead to a slowing case rate. And this change in impact highlights the many factors involved which make it difficult to isolate the precise effect of local lockdowns.\n\nPeople don't necessarily change their behaviour exactly in line with rule changes.\n\nWhen concerns about cases rising begin to be reported, some people alter their behaviour before any law change. Other people, even when the rules come into place, don't obey them.\n\nSo it may be a question of timing: are people more ready to restrict their movements now than they were in August?\n\nTo complicate the figures further, other things have been going on at the same time as local lockdowns were being introduced, including summer holiday season and schools reopening.\n\nIn Leicester, cases fell when restrictions were introduced. When they were progressively eased in August and September, cases started to rise. But this rise coincided with more people travelling abroad. And with children going back to school.\n\nIn Greater Manchester, cases also rose over those months despite the area being in lockdown - albeit a looser version than Leicester's had been.\n\nUnpicking these different factors is a big challenge.\n\nLooking at \"positivity rates\" - the proportion of all tests that are positive, adjusting for different levels of testing - shows there have been increases in cases across England, with particularly sharp spikes in the North West and North East between the end of August and the end of September. Restrictions in those regions were only introduced between the middle of September and the beginning of October, making it too soon to see the impact of these rules.\n\nBut in Blackburn, which has been in lockdown long enough for an effect to be seen, there was also a rise in cases - though this has come back down in recent weeks.\n\nRecent increases in hospitalisations from coronavirus have highlighted the extent of the challenge facing the north of England. Though without up-to-date localised data, it is difficult to judge whether the impact on a local level - such as those in Blackburn - have helped prevent serious cases.\n\nThere's no doubt the national lockdown had a considerable impact on cases.\n\nFundamentally, the virus needs people to be in close contact and mixing between circles to spread through the population. How tight the restrictions are makes a difference - look at the experience of Leicester, compared with Oldham or Blackburn.\n\nBut so do the crucial issues of timing and compliance. A lockdown only works if people stick to it.\n\nThe data also indicates that any impact lockdowns do have is far from permanent - relax the restrictions and allow more contact, and the virus will quickly start to spread again.\n\nUnless and until a viable vaccine becomes available, government will be faced with the same choice: shut down large chunks of society or allow the virus to tear through communities, with little idea of the true toll that either will exact.", "Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson have won the 2020 Nobel Economics Prize for their work on auction theory.\n\nThe Stanford University game theorists have helped in developing formats for the sale of aircraft landing slots, radio spectrums, and emissions trading.\n\nThe Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their work \"benefitted sellers, buyers and taxpayers\" worldwide.\n\nGame theory uses mathematics to study decision-making, conflict, and strategy in social situations.\n\n\"This year's laureates in economic sciences started out with fundamental theory and later used their results in practical applications, which have spread globally. Their discoveries are of great benefit to society,\" said Peter Fredriksson, chair of the prize committee.\n\nProf Wilson developed a theory for auctions where the value of the object on the block is uncertain beforehand but ends up being the same for everyone - for example, the value of radio frequencies, or the volume of a mineral in a particular area.\n\nHe also developed a theory as to why rational bidders tend to place maximum bids that are below what they estimate the actual value of the object to be: they are worried about the so-called \"winner's curse\" - overpaying to win the auction.\n\nProf Milgrom put together a theory which takes into account not only auctions where the object turns out to have the same value for all the bidders, but also for auctions where the object is valued differently by different bidders.\n\nHe demonstrated that the seller should get a higher revenue when bidders learn more about each other's estimated values during bidding.\n\nMost of us don't buy art or livestock. Nor do we buy our fresh fish or fruit and veg at auction.\n\nRather more of us might occasionally buy or sell some modestly valued furniture or ornaments that way, and perhaps more still make use of online auction sites.\n\nBut the committee at the Swedish Central Bank which awards the prize says that auctions affect all of us at every level.\n\nThe wholesale electricity market, radio frequencies for telecommunications, emissions allowances and much more are allocated using auctions in at least some countries.\n\nFor a private seller the ideal auction is one that gets the highest price.\n\nFor a public sector agency, getting revenue does matter but there can be other considerations, for example seeking to have radio frequencies allocated in a way that gives the most benefit to society as a whole.\n\nAuctions are often complicated by uncertainty - how much will you get out of an oilfield, or how much will people use a mobile phone service.\n\nThe work of Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, and many others, explores these issues with a view to designing auctions to get the best results.\n\nHowever, the award was criticised by one charity which said that economics was out of touch with global problems, including the impact of coronavirus.\n\nThe Rethinking Economics charity, which pushes for a broader application of economics, said it was \"disappointing\" that the prize had gone to \"two white men from the global north working on auction theory\".\n\nCatriona Watson, co-director of Rethinking Economics said: \"The discipline of economics is depressingly out of touch.\n\n\"The Nobel Prize as a marker of excellence in the field needs to become reflective of our global community and address the most pressing issues of our time like the climate crisis, the pandemic or structural racial injustice - otherwise it risks becoming increasingly irrelevant.\"\n\nThe prize has been won in the past by economists including Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman, and last year was won by poverty-fighting couple Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.\n\nBut Ms Watson said that this year the award was \"back to business as usual\".\n\nThe prize, worth 10m Swedish crowns (£887,000), is not one of the original five Nobel awards created in the 1895 will of industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, but was established by Sweden's central bank and first awarded in 1969.", "The UK economy may have grown by as much as 17% in the three months to the end of September, says the EY Item Club, but slower growth may follow.\n\nShoppers splurged during the period as coronavirus lockdown restrictions were lifted, it said.\n\nIt is a rosier vision than the one offered by Item Club economists in the summer, but they warned that growth for the rest of 2020 would be far slower.\n\nGrowth for the final three months will be 1% or less, they predicted.\n\n\"The UK economy has done well to recover faster than expected so far,\" said Howard Archer, chief economic adviser to the EY Item Club.\n\n\"Consumer spending has bounced back strongly, while housing sector activity has also seen a pick-up, in part thanks to the stamp duty holiday.\"\n\nThe economy probably grew 16-17% in the third quarter of the year compared with the second quarter, it said. It had been expecting growth of 12%.\n\nWhile government help such as the furlough programme has provided \"much-needed support\", growth will now begin to fade, said Mr Archer.\n\nThe end of the furlough scheme, under which workers had part of their salary paid by the government, will mean higher unemployment and sluggish growth, said the forecasters, who use a similar economic model to the Treasury.\n\nThat said, the UK economy is now predicted to regain its pre-pandemic size in the second half of 2023. Back in July, the EY Item Club did not expect that to happen until late 2024.\n\nOfficial figures from the Office for National Statistics showed last week that The UK economy continued its recovery in August, growing by 2.1% in the month, as the Eat Out to Help Out scheme boosted restaurants.\n\nIt was, however, smaller than economists had estimated and helped drag down the estimated pace of recovery for the year.\n\nAs with any economic forecast, there are factors which could speed up or slow down the recovery, the economists said.\n\nA vaccine is likely to help the economy, but there are more likely threats to growth than there are surprise boosts.\n\nFactors that could weigh down growth include a drop in consumer spending, more lockdown measures, slow Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU and a spike in unemployment.\n\n\"The latest forecast also notes that, even if further virus outbreaks are contained and major restrictions on economic activity are avoided, consumers and businesses could remain cautious in their behaviour for an extended period,\" the report said.\n\nThe Club's estimates assume a simple free trade agreement with the EU by the end of the year.\n\nWithout an agreement, growth of 4.8% is forecast in 2021, down from 6%, while growth in 2022 would be cut to 2.6% from 2.9%.", "Last updated on .From the section England\n\nEngland came from behind to overcome the world's top-ranked team Belgium and record an important Nations League victory at Wembley.\n\nBelgium took a lead their early superiority deserved when Romelu Lukaku sent England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford the wrong way after the striker had been brought down by Eric Dier's poor challenge.\n\nEngland were on the back foot for most of the first half but were handed a lifeline back into the game six minutes before half-time when captain Jordan Henderson went down very easily in a tussle with Thomas Meunier, Marcus Rashford scoring from the spot.\n\nGareth Southgate's side enjoyed much more possession after the break but needed a large slice of luck to take the lead after 64 minutes, Mason Mount's effort deflecting off Toby Alderweireld and looping over keeper Simon Mignolet to inflict Belgium's first loss since November 2018.\n• None 'A statement win - but let's not kid anyone'\n• None Best action and reaction from England v Belgium\n\nEngland were very much second best until they got a rather soft penalty when Henderson tumbled under a challenge from Meunier - but the way they gathered themselves after the break to subdue this talented Belgium side deserves great credit.\n\nSouthgate's side were very conservative in that opening spell, rather like his team selection, but the manager will say the end result justified the means, although this was a game where both sides were also missing key individuals.\n\nEngland held firm at the back and were resolute, limiting Belgium to one clear opening after the break when Yannick Carrasco flicked Kevin de Bruyne's brilliant pass inches wide of the far post.\n\nGoalkeeper Pickford, who retained Southgate's faith despite poor form for Everton, was not placed under huge pressure but mostly did what he had to do competently, with one first-half save from De Bruyne's low shot and a couple of decent pieces of handling.\n\nThe bigger picture, apart from putting England top of Group A2, is that this is a victory that will give Southgate real satisfaction as it is the sort of game against elite opposition where his side have been found wanting in the past, not least when they lost twice to Belgium at the 2018 World Cup, in the group stage and the third-place play-off.\n\nLukaku has regained his reputation as one of Europe's finest strikers since leaving Manchester United for Inter Milan in August 2019.\n\nHis spell at Old Trafford was regarded as a relative failure despite a highly respectable record of 42 goals in 96 games.\n\nLukaku may have been the victim of the turmoil under Jose Mourinho and then the switch to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer at United, but there was no doubt he looked out of sorts for long periods.\n\nHere at Wembley, particularly in the first half, he showed the threat he possesses when at the top of his game, bullying Dier and Harry Maguire and also showing quality on the ball.\n\nLukaku drew the unwise challenge from Dier to score his 53rd goal for his country from the spot, emphasising his importance to Roberto Martinez's side as they look to build on their ranking as the world's number one side.\n\nMartinez, admittedly without the injured Eden Hazard, Thibaut Courtois and Dries Mertens, will be disappointed by how his side lost momentum after England equalised - but Lukaku showed once more what a fine striker he is at his best.\n\n'We had to suffer' - what they said\n\nEngland manager Gareth Southgate: \"It was a top-level game. We had a lot of young players there for whom that was a really great experience. You have to suffer to win these big games and the players did that.\"\n\nMatch-winner Mason Mount: \"It's a special achievement to score my first goal at Wembley. I found myself in a bit of space and had only one thing on my mind. It took a really big deflection but it doesn't matter how they go in. I'll take it.\"\n\nCaptain Jordan Henderson: \"We want to compete with the very best teams, and Belgium are certainly that. We competed very well and that's what we want to do, keep competing and growing and you never know where that may take us.\"\n• None England have won 20 of their past 21 competitive home games (L1), scoring 67 goals while conceding only 10.\n• None Belgium have lost for only the fourth time in 47 games under Martinez (P47 W36 D7), and for the first time since November 2018 versus Switzerland.\n• None England have beaten Belgium in a competitive fixture for just the second time (D2 L2), with the only previous such win coming at the 1990 World Cup.\n• None England's first attempt of the game was a 31st-minute header by Dominic Calvert-Lewin - it's the longest they've had to wait for their first attempt at home since November 2011 v Spain (32nd minute).\n• None Rashford became the fourth Man Utd player to score in four consecutive competitive appearances for England, after Bobby Charlton, David Beckham and Wayne Rooney (x2).\n• None Lukaku's opener was the first goal England have conceded in exactly a year; the last player to score against England was Zdenek Ondrasek for the Czech Republic on 11 October 2019.\n\nBoth sides continue in Nations League action on Wednesday evening. England host Denmark at Wembley while Belgium travel to Iceland (both games 19:45 BST).\n• None Offside, Belgium. Timothy Castagne tries a through ball, but Yari Verschaeren is caught offside.\n• None Attempt missed. Marcus Rashford (England) right footed shot from the centre of the box is just a bit too high. Assisted by Declan Rice following a fast break.\n• None Offside, Belgium. Timothy Castagne tries a through ball, but Jéremy Doku is caught offside.\n• None Attempt missed. Harry Kane (England) header from the centre of the box misses to the right. Assisted by Kieran Trippier with a cross following a corner.\n• None Attempt blocked. Mason Mount (England) right footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by Harry Kane.\n• None Attempt blocked. Romelu Lukaku (Belgium) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Toby Alderweireld.\n• None Attempt missed. Toby Alderweireld (Belgium) right footed shot from outside the box is high and wide to the right. Assisted by Jason Denayer following a corner. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Joe Anderson said a local furlough scheme is needed to compensate businesses forced to close\n\nBusiness owners in Merseyside say they are fearful for the future after the government unveiled a new three-tier lockdown system for England.\n\nThe Liverpool City Region has become the first area to enter the \"very high\" alert level under the new system.\n\nIt will mean the closure of pubs, bars, betting shops, gyms, leisure centres and casinos from Wednesday.\n\nManagers have spoken of their heartbreak, anger and confusion over the latest announcement of measures to tackle the spread of Covid-19.\n\nGareth Morgan said the \"final nail in the coffin\" for pubs was limiting people to only their social bubbles\n\nGareth Morgan, who runs independent pub Dead Crafty Beer Co in Liverpool city centre, said closing pubs was \"devastating\" and would \"really hurt, if not ruin\" the industry.\n\n\"So many little bars won't survive without more support,\" he said.\n\nThe 41-year-old, who has five members of staff, said employees needed full compensation when pubs were forced to close.\n\nMr Morgan added his trade was 58% down on last year's figures after halving capacity in the pub and having to close at 22:00 each night.\n\nIn a bid to mitigate the effect of the new rules, the government will pay up to 67% of the wages of workers at firms told to shut.\n\nThis will be part of the Job Support Scheme, which replaces furlough at the start of November.\n\nBut Mr Morgan said he believed the measures were insufficient for many workers in the hospitality industry.\n\n\"Paying workers 67% sounds good but, in reality, for staff to pay bills it is nowhere near enough,\" he said.\n\nTakings for Bodytorque, which is run by Ashley Hughes, are 50% down on last year\n\nGym owner Ashley Hughes, from Huyton, Knowsley, said further restrictions were \"heartbreaking\" as so many people were \"already on the brink and living off their overdraft\".\n\n\"So many businesses are closing and people are losing their jobs and even their homes,\" he said.\n\nThe 33-year-old said gyms had taken a \"massive hit\" in 2020, the worst of his nine years trading with his company, Bodytorque.\n\n\"I got a grant during lockdown but that just about covered the rent during the four months we were shut.\"\n\nAfter reopening he found customers were reluctant to return as many were \"cutting back\" on spending.\n\nHe said it was \"very worrying\" for gyms but also for people's wellbeing as \"many people use the gym to improve their mental health\".\n\nKeith Haggis said restrictions had been a nightmare for his business\n\nKeith Haggis, owner of Keith's Food & Wine Bar in Liverpool, said allowing restaurants to remain open with the current restrictions in place was \"disastrous\".\n\nHe said he believed his business would have been better off closed as his staff would be compensated and he may have had access to grants.\n\nStaying open under current restrictions means his only option is to \"limp on and survive\".\n\nThe further restrictions such as limited hours, capacity and restricting people to sit only with people from their households or social bubbles had been a \"nightmare\" and it had \"decimated turnover\", he added.\n\nNick Thompson said the company would find a way to pay out any winning bets from closed shops safely\n\nThe managing director of Merseyside-based bookmakers Dave Pluck has called on the government to review the tier-three lockdown \"sooner than the four weeks stated\".\n\n\"A large part of the Liverpool area is deprived and needs further help. It seems to me that it is being used as a test case by the government,\" said Nick Thompson.\n\n\"They know they have few votes in the area so maybe they don't mind if they lose those. I could not imagine this level of lockdown taking place in the south.\"\n\nHe has called on the government to provide financial support to businesses in need.\n\n\"I can see no science to support local lockdowns being an effective measure at present,\" he added.\n\n\"I am keen to help wherever possible, and will clearly follow any government guidelines, but I would ask that extra financial aid is available.\"\n\nDespite the difficulties ahead, Mr Thompson added that \"as we did in the full lockdown, we will be back\".\n\nJulie O'Grady said she feels like the north has been \"hung out to dry\"\n\nJulie O'Grady, co-owner of Neptune Brewery, said the latest coronavirus measures for Merseyside had left many unanswered questions.\n\nMs O'Grady, who runs the company with her husband Les, said: \"It's just so frustrating. Nothing seems to make sense.\n\n\"We fear for people's heath as well but give us the financial support so we can survive.\n\n\"As a brewery we have done everything we possibly can to ensure everyone's safety.\n\n\"There are signs up, we have used temperature thermometers when people come in, there is hand gel, we have been taking people's details.\n\n\"We have done everything we can and that's still not enough.\"\n\nJez Lamb, who founded craft beer marketplace Beers@No.42 in Birkenhead, Wirral, almost 15 years ago, said: \"Striking the right balance is proving a nightmare.\n\n\"As things stand many more businesses will go to the wall and many more people will lose their jobs,\" he said.\n\n\"Tighter lockdown restrictions could see an economy that is already on life support start to flat-line. An ominous winter lies ahead.\"\n\nSome pubs had already decided to shut in advance of the prime minister's announcement.\n\nThe owners of Ye Cracke, the Pilgrim Pub and the Swan Inn in Liverpool city centre closed on Sunday.\n\nIt said in a statement on its Facebook page: \"Due to the expected government announcements on Monday we have decided to close this Sunday at 10pm until further notice.\"\n\nSome of the highest rates of new coronavirus infections have been recorded in the Liverpool City Region.\n\nIn the week to 8 October there were nearly 670 positive tests per 100,000 people in Knowsley and almost 599 per 100,000 in Liverpool.\n\nSefton, St Helens and Halton are all within the top 20 out of 315 areas of England. While Wirral had the lowest rate of the six boroughs that make up the city region, it still recorded 286 cases per 100,000.\n\nWhen deciding whether to impose local lockdowns, public health experts and the government will take account not just of the rate for each area but also its trend - how quickly cases may be rising or falling - as well as what local plans are in place, hospital admissions and deaths.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n• None Coronavirus (COVID-19)- what you need to do - GOV.UK The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The former children's laureate and acclaimed author said nurses showed \"overwhelming devotion\" when caring for him during his 12-week stay in hospital, which included 48 days in intensive care.\n\nMichael Rosen was placed into an induced coma in March and is still suffering from symptoms including sight and hearing loss.\n\nSix months on, he still faces weekly hospital visits as he suffers from the long-term consequences of Covid-19, known as \"long Covid\".", "Top row (left to right): Alison Howe, Martyn Hett, Lisa Lees, Courtney Boyle, Eilidh MacLeod, Elaine McIver, Georgina Callander, Jane Tweddle - Middle row (left to right): John Atkinson, Kelly Brewster, Liam Curry, Chloe Rutherford, Marcin Klis, Angelika Klis, Megan Hurley, Michelle Kiss - Bottom row (left to right): Nell Jones, Olivia Campbell-Hardy, Philip Tron, Saffie-Rose Roussos, Sorrell Leczkowski, Wendy Fawell\n\nA security supervisor saw a suspicious man carrying a \"bulging rucksack\" four days before a suicide bombing, the Manchester Arena Inquiry has heard.\n\nEx-police officer Jonathan Lavery said he thought the man may have been carrying out \"hostile reconnaissance\".\n\nHe was seen filming people in the arena's City Room before a Take That concert on 18 May 2017.\n\nThe man \"stood out like a sore thumb\" as he \"did not fit the demographic\" of a Take That fan, the inquiry was told.\n\nTwenty-two people were killed and many more injured when Salman Abedi detonated an explosive as fans left the Ariana Grande concert on 22 May 2017.\n\nMr Lavery, an operations executive for the arena's security provider Showsec, said he was \"profiling\" the crowd in the foyer before the Take That gig when an Asian man dressed in black came to his attention.\n\nHe told inquiry chair Sir John Saunders : \"That individual actually stood out like a sore thumb.\n\n\"He was wearing a black tracksuit, I think the hood was up.\n\n\"I am convinced he had a mobile phone in front of him, waving it around.\"\n\nMr Lavery, who served as a police officer for more than 30 years, concluded the man - who was not Abedi - needed to be stopped but lost sight of him before he boarded a train from Manchester Victoria station.\n\nHe was later ruled out by police of having any involvement with the atrocity that followed, or having any known terrorism links.\n\nAbedi, 22, was himself in the foyer on 18 May conducting reconnaissance as he briefly watched concertgoers queue about 35 minutes before the man entered the building.\n\nThe public inquiry has heard of \"missed opportunities\" in the hours before as Abedi was sighted dressed in black and bent over by the weight of the shrapnel packing his home-made explosives in a large rucksack on his back.\n\nBoth police and security workers received reports of suspicions from members of the public about Abedi on the evening of 22 May.\n\nMr Lavery, who joined Showsec in February 2017, was not working on the night of the bombing but next day emailed the firm's managing director to flag up the man with the \"bulging rucksack\".\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Radical proposals for the reform of English football could have a \"damaging impact\" on the game, says the Premier League.\n\nUnder the proposals, led by Liverpool and Manchester United, the English top flight would be cut to 18 teams.\n\nThe plans would see the Premier League hand over the £250m bailout required by the Football League to stave off a financial disaster among its 72 clubs.\n\nThe Premier League would also hand over 25% of its annual income to the EFL.\n• None EFL chief Parry: 'Reforms will benefit game as a whole'\n\nThe proposals, dubbed Project Big Picture, would see:\n• None The Premier League cut from 20 to 18 clubs, with the Championship, League One and League Two each retaining 24 teams.\n• None The bottom two teams in the Premier League relegated automatically with the 16th-placed team joining the Championship play-offs.\n• None A £250m rescue fund made immediately available to the EFL\n• None £100m paid to the FA to make up for lost revenue.\n• None Nine clubs given 'special voting rights' on certain issues, based on their extended runs in the Premier League.\n\nBut the plans have been criticised by the Premier League, the government and supporters' groups.\n\n\"English football is the world's most watched, and has a vibrant, dynamic and competitive league structure that drives interest around the globe,\" a Premier League statement said.\n\n\"To maintain this position, it is important that we all work together. Both the Premier League and the FA support a wide-ranging discussion on the future of the game, including its competition structures, calendar and overall financing particularly in light of the effects of Covid-19.\n\n\"Football has many stakeholders, therefore this work should be carried out through the proper channels enabling all clubs and stakeholders the opportunity to contribute.\"\n\nUnder the proposals, the EFL Cup in its present form would be abolished and the Community Shield scrapped.\n\nIn addition, the top flight's 14-club majority voting system would change.\n\nThe Premier League statement added: \"In the Premier League's view, a number of the individual proposals in the plan published today could have a damaging impact on the whole game and we are disappointed to see that Rick Parry, chair of the EFL, has given his on-the-record support.\n\n\"The Premier League has been working in good faith with its clubs and the EFL to seek a resolution to the requirement for Covid-19 rescue funding. This work will continue.\"\n\nThe Department for Culture, Media and Sport condemned what it called a \"backroom deal\".\n\n\"We are surprised and disappointed that at a time of crisis when we have urged the top tiers of professional football to come together and finalise a deal to help lower league clubs, there appear to be backroom deals being cooked up that would create a closed shop at the very top of the game,\" a DCMS spokesperson said.\n\n\"Sustainability, integrity and fair competition are absolutely paramount and anything that may undermine them is deeply troubling. Fans must be front of all our minds, and this shows why our fan led review of football governance will be so critical.\"\n\nThis is a hugely divisive and potentially seismic proposal, threatening the biggest shake-up of the English game in a generation.\n\nAngered by the way the story broke without their blessing, the Premier League has already given it short shrift, viewing this as a regrettable power-grab. In fact one well-placed Premier League source has described it as a \"takeover attempt, rather than a rescue package\".\n\nMany will see this as an anti-competitive plot to concentrate power in the hands of the biggest clubs, opening the door to them controlling broadcast contracts, financial rules and even takeovers bids in a way top-flight bosses have always been desperate to avoid - a step towards a European Super League, and a means of freeing up space in the calendar to play more lucrative pre-season friendlies.\n\nFor years the bigger clubs have wanted more money and more sway. This is the most dramatic manifestation of that to date. But will it get off the ground? There will be huge doubts given 14 clubs would need to approve a plan that would mean fewer Premier League places. But the involvement of the two biggest clubs in the country means this surprising development has to be taken seriously.\n\nAt a time when the EFL is facing an unprecedented financial crisis however, it is easy to see why they would support a plan that would hand them the £250m they need to cover the loss of match-day revenue this season. And many in football will welcome the idea of a more redistributive financial model, with 25% of Premier League income shared at a time when the gulf between the divisions has been identified as a major problem.\n\nIndeed, if the threat of this plan helps break the impasse between the Premier League and the government over a rescue package for the EFL, and a more redistributive financial 'reset', perhaps it can emerge as a positive development.\n\nThe English Football League confirmed it had been in talks over 'Project Big Picture' and that its chairman Rick Parry was in favour of the plans, first reported in the Daily Telegraph.\n\n\"The need for a complete rethinking regarding the funding of English professional football predates the Covid-19 crisis,\" he said in a statement.\n\n\"Discussion and planning around 'Project Big Picture' has been ongoing for quite some time, unrelated to the current pandemic but now has an urgency that simply cannot be denied.\n\n\"The revenues flowing from the investment and work of our top clubs has been largely limited to the top division creating a sort of lottery, while Championship clubs struggle to behave prudently and Leagues One and Two are financially stretched despite enormous revenues English football generates.\n\n\"This plan devised by our top clubs and the English Football League puts an end to all of that.\"\n\nParry says, in 2018-19, Championship clubs received £146m in EFL distributions and Premier League solidarity payments, compared with £1.56bn received by the bottom 14 Premier League clubs.\n\nHe added parachute payments made to eight recently relegated clubs totalled £246m and represented one-third of the total Championship turnover.\n\nParry said it created \"a major distortion that impacts the league annually\".\n\n\"The gap between the Premier League and the English Football League has become a chasm which has become unbridgeable for clubs transitioning between the EFL and Premier League,\" he said.\n\nIt is understood Liverpool's owners, the Fenway Sports Group, came forward with the initial plan, which has been worked on by United co-chairman Joel Glazer. It is anticipated it will receive the backing of Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur - the other members of England's 'big six'.\n\nThe idea is to address longstanding EFL concerns about the huge gap in funding between its divisions and the Premier League by handing over 25% of the annual income, although the current parachute payment system would be scrapped.\n\nThere would be a £250m up-front payment to address the existing crisis created by the coronavirus pandemic, seen by some as a bid to garner support for the proposals.\n\nIn addition, the Football Association would receive what is being described as a £100m \"gift\".\n\nThe Football Supporters' Association said it noted \"with grave concern\" the proposals, adding they had \"far-reaching consequences for the whole of domestic football\".\n\n\"Once again it appears that big decisions in football are apparently being stitched up behind our backs by billionaire club owners who continue to treat football as their personal fiefdom,\" it said in a statement.\n\n\"Football is far more than a business to be carved up; it is part of our communities and our heritage, and football fans are its lifeblood. As football's most important stakeholders, it is crucial that fans are consulted and involved in the game's decision-making.\n\n\"We have welcomed the government's commitment to a 'fan-led review of the governance of football'; we would argue that today's revelations have made that process even more relevant and urgent.\"\n\nThe organisation said it remained \"open-minded to any suggestions for the improvement of the governance and organisation of the game\".\n\nIt added: \"We would however emphasise that in our discussions so far, very few of our members have ever expressed the view that what football really needs is a greater concentration of power in the hands of the big six billionaire-owned clubs.\"\n\nNo date has been set for the proposed new-style league to be in operation but sources have suggested 2022-23 is not out of the question.\n\nIn order to get down from 20 to 18, it is anticipated four clubs would be relegated directly, with two promoted from the Championship. In addition, there would be play-offs involving the team to finish 16th in the Premier League and those in third, fourth and fifth in the second tier.\n\nIt is also planned that, as well as the 'big six', ever-present league member Everton, West Ham United and Southampton - ninth and 11th respectively in the list of clubs who have featured in the most Premier League seasons - would be granted special status.\n\nIf six of those nine clubs vote in favour of a proposal, it would be enough to get it passed.\n\nThere is no mention of Aston Villa and Newcastle United, both of whom have featured in more Premier League campaigns than Manchester City.\n• None Meet the world-leading surgeons pushing the boundaries of science", "The city of Bangor has gone into local lockdown from 18:00 BST on Saturday.\n\nIt means that about 16,000 people there cannot go in or out of the area without good reason, such as work or study.\n\nBangor's restrictions will affect eight wards in the city: Garth, Hirael, Menai, Deiniol, Marchog, Glyder, Hendre and Dewi.\n\nThe city had seen a significant cluster of coronavirus cases and the incident rate stands at about 400 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nIt becomes the second area to face a local lockdown while the rest of its county does not, following Llanelli in Carmarthenshire.\n\nDiscussions were held earlier but it was decided not to extend restrictions to anywhere else in Gwynedd.\n\nA Welsh Government spokeswoman said: \"We will continue to closely monitor the situation in Gwynedd and will meet with the local authority and with neighbouring local authority leaders at the start of the week to discuss the developing situation further.\"\n\nBangor's cases appear to be associated with young people and its student population, officials have said\n\nSeventeen areas around Wales are now facing local lockdown restrictions, affecting more than two million people.\n\nIn north Wales, the whole counties of Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire and Wrexham are already in lockdown.\n\nThe Welsh Government said cases in Bangor appeared to be closely associated with young people and the student population.\n\nBangor Students' Union president Henry Williams said it was \"working hard... to ensure that students are aware of the new restrictions\". \"We understand it is a difficult time for us all,\" he said.\n\n\"We must continue to support each other to deal with what lies ahead.\"\n\nMeanwhile, the Department for Work and Pensions confirmed its Bangor service centre was temporarily closed on Friday due to coronavirus but would reopen on Monday.\n\nTattooist Jules Lee says it is \"difficult\" to make people abide by social distancing\n\nJules Lee, who runs a tattoo shop in Bangor, said it was \"very difficult to get people to follow the rules\" on social distancing.\n\n\"We've got massive signs saying one person at a time, and the amount of time that we'll have to tell them 'I'm sorry' [because] they come three or four people at the same time.\n\n\"It's really awkward. It's difficult to get people to comply,\" she told BBC Radio Wales Breakfast.\n\nGwynedd council leader Dyfrig Siencyn said he appreciated the lockdown would impact residents and businesses, but steps had to be taken to \"avoid stricter and more disruptive measures down the line\".Mr Siencyn said the situation was \"serious\" and being monitored closely.\"Put simply, there is no room for complacency for any Gwynedd resident,\" he said.\n\n\"We must all play our part as individuals in following the national Covid-19 guidelines to protect ourselves, our loved ones and the wider community,\" he said.\n\nMeanwhile, First Minister Mark Drakeford defended the local restrictions in place in Conwy.\n\nIt follows a letter from council leader Sam Rowlands requesting some measures be lifted to help its tourism industry.\n\nMr Drakeford said restricting travel to or from an area with rising community infections was \"more likely to prevent uncontrolled spread into nearby areas\".", "Dr Ghebreyesus said allowing the virus to spread would cause 'unnecessary' suffering\n\nThe head of the World Health Organization has ruled out a herd immunity response to the pandemic.\n\nHerd immunity occurs when a large portion of a community becomes immune to a disease through vaccinations or through the mass spread of a disease.\n\nSome have argued that coronavirus should be allowed to spread naturally in the absence of a vaccine.\n\nBut WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus said such an approach was \"scientifically and ethically problematic\".\n\nThere have been more than 37 million confirmed cases of coronavirus across the globe since the pandemic began. More than one million people are known to have died.\n\nWhile hundreds of vaccines are currently under development, with a number in advanced trials, none has yet received international approval.\n\nSpeaking at a news conference on Monday, Dr Tedros argued that the long-term impacts of coronavirus - as well as the strength and duration any immune response - remained unknown.\n\n\"Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it,\" he said.\n\n\"Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic.\"\n\nThe WHO head added that seroprevalence tests - where the blood is tested for antibodies - suggested that just 10% of people had been exposed to coronavirus in most countries.\n\n\"Letting Covid-19 circulate unchecked therefore means allowing unnecessary infections, suffering and death,\" he said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Coronavirus vaccine: How close are you to getting one?", "Kuenssberg: Will these restrictions be enough?\n\nIt's time for questions from journalists, and the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg asks several - including about whether financial support is enough for people facing restrictions, and whether the restrictions themselves will be enough to curb the spread of the virus. Prof Whitty says he is \"not confident\" that tier three proposals for the \"very high\" alert areas with the highest rates of transmission \"would be enough to get on top of\" the virus in those areas. That is why there's \"a lot of flexibility\" for local authorities to add more restrictions on top of the \"base\" of tier three rules, he says. He adds that it's widely agreed by experts that \"the base will not be sufficient\" to tackle the worst rates of infection. The PM adds that he believes the R number will come down under the new three-tiered system, \"if properly implemented and enforced\". He adds that a return to a national lockdown would be \"extreme\" and would do \"a lot of immediate harm\" such as to children who would miss out on school. As for those calling for no restrictions at all, Johnson says: \"I can't support that approach I'm afraid Laura. We have to do a balanced approach.\" In a separate question from Kuenssberg, Sunak says his Job Support Scheme, covering two-thirds of wages is \"very much in line with our peers\" - citing Germany's scheme as an example.", "NHS Nightingale hospitals in Manchester, Sunderland and Harrogate are being asked to get ready to take patients.\n\nGovernment advisers say admissions are rising, with more elderly people needing urgent treatment for Covid.\n\nMore people are now in hospital with Covid than before restrictions were announced in March.\n\nIt comes as a new three-tier system of lockdown rules for England has been announced.\n\nFrom Wednesday, the Liverpool City Region will face the tightest restrictions under the new three-tier system which will classify regions as being on \"medium\", \"high\" or \"very high\" alert.\n\nLiverpool recorded 600 cases per 100,000 people in the week ending 6 October. The average for England was 74.\n\nBut England's deputy chief medical officer said the rise in coronavirus cases was now being seen \"nationwide\" and was not solely a problem for northern England.\n\nCases in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have been increasing too.\n\nProf Jonathan Van-Tam said the \"marked pick-up\" that the country was seeing would lead to more deaths and he warned that coronavirus was spreading from younger age groups into the over 60s who are more vulnerable.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Stephen Powis: \"There is still no cure, nor no vaccine for Covid-19\"\n\nHospitals have not yet reached capacity, but the NHS may have to use some of the temporary critical care Nightingale hospitals if demand continues to rise, say the advisers.\n\nMost of the Nightingales, set up in the spring as an insurance policy in case the NHS became overwhelmed, were never used.\n\nNHS England's medical director Prof Stephen Powis cautioned that it would take \"a number of weeks\" before the benefit of any extra measures - such as shutting pubs - would be seen in bringing hospital admissions down.\n\n\"In the over-65s - particularly the over-85s - we are seeing steep rises in the numbers of people being admitted to hospital so the claim that the elderly can somehow be fenced off from risk is wishful thinking,\" he said.\n\nHe said NHS staff working in the parts of England with the highest Covid rates would be offered regular tests to check if they had the virus.\n\nThe fact there are more patients in English hospitals now than there were when lockdown was announced is alarming.\n\nBut the comparison needs a bit of context too.\n\nThere has been a gradual and slow build up to the 3,500 cases in English hospitals in recent weeks.\n\nAround 500 new patients a day are being admitted at the moment - with a few hundred being discharged too.\n\nThe number of daily new admissions is on an upward trend, doubling every fortnight at the moment.\n\nBut, compare that to the spring, and the picture is somewhat different.\n\nThe numbers being admitted were exploding then - doubling every few days and threatening to overwhelm hospitals everywhere.\n\nSoon 3,000 new cases a day were being admitted. That is three times worse than the NHS would normally see for all types of respiratory viruses in the middle of winter.\n\nWhat we are seeing currently is not like that.\n\nThe danger with Covid, of course, is things can get worse rapidly. That has certainly happened in the north west and could be repeated elsewhere.\n\nThe coming weeks will be crucial.\n\nThe problem with introducing the sort of restrictions that are being suggested to control the spread of the virus is that no-one is really sure whether they will really work.\n\nDr Jane Eddleston, medical lead in Greater Manchester, urged the public to \"respect\" the virus due to the \"extremely serious\" consequences it has for some patients.\n\nShe told the press briefing: \"The North West has about 40% of all Covid cases at the moment and this is proving very challenging for us.\"\n\nProf Van-Tam reminded people how the virus spreads - in closed spaces, crowded places and between close contacts.\n\nOn Sunday, 12,872 people in the UK were reported to have tested positive for coronavirus - some 2,294 fewer than on Saturday.\n\nThere were a further 65 deaths - down from 81 on Saturday.", "The War of the Worlds sci-fi series is set in modern day Europe but based on HG Wells' classic novel\n\nSex Education and The Pact are the latest Welsh productions to begin filming - but with dedicated testing laboratories and face masks on set.\n\nThey follow Fox TV's War of the Worlds - the first big-budget series to resume shooting in the UK after lockdown.\n\nThe show, shot in a Newport studio and on location in south Wales, restarted filming on 13 July.\n\nProducer Adam Knopf said everyone was working \"to the highest safety standards\".\n\nDrama series and feature films have had to raise millions in extra finance to pay for new safety precautions to ensure cast and crew are protected from coronavirus.\n\nDelays to a UK government industry insurance scheme also means those who have succeeded in restarting filming have largely had to rely on contingency funding from broadcasters to pay for health and safety measures and unforeseen costs.\n\nOn the set of the second series of War of the Worlds, the changes include temperature checks on arrival, regular Covid-19 testing of cast and some crew, increased distance between departments working on set, and partitions between make-up and costume areas that were previously communal spaces.\n\nThe second series of War of the Worlds is currently being filmed in south Wales\n\nEven the breaks between filming have been affected, with one-way systems and packed lunches replacing the traditional food trailers and dining areas.\n\n\"We had actors that were due to shoot on other productions in other countries, so we knew that if we didn't start shooting on the thirteenth [of July] we might not even go this year,\" said Cardiff-born producer Adam Knopf.\n\n\"So, for us, it was key that we started shooting on the thirteenth, and we managed it, just about.\"\n\nIt involved securing a contingency fund from the broadcasters who had commissioned the series, and ensuring the production had exemptions from some Welsh Government restrictions.\n\nEveryone wear masks on set, with actors taking them off just before filming starts\n\nKey cast members who were travelling from abroad were excused from quarantine rules, as long as they only travelled from hotel to film set.\n\nMr Knopf said they spent 12 weeks putting plans in place, adding: \"We were the first in the UK out of the high-end TV productions to start.\n\n\"We had a lot of eyes on us, so we had to make sure it was solid and correct, and that everyone was working to the highest safety standards.\"\n\nIt helped Netflix series Sex Education, which is currently shooting in south Wales, War of the Worlds and another south Wales-based production to pool resources to create a private testing facility.\n\nDeputy director Gerwyn Evans said Covid-19 had \"hugely impacted\" the industry, adding: \"The first thing was to get money into the sector, because it was needed.\n\n\"The second thing was around the guidance - having real and open honest conversations about what issues the productions were coming up against, and it was varied all across Wales.\n\n\"And making sure we could feed that into a consistent message that went out to everyone.\"\n\nNew BBC Wales crime drama The Pact was due to begin filming at a Vale of Glamorgan country house the day after the UK-wide lockdown was announced in March.\n\nInstead it was delayed until September, and production company Little Door had to negotiate a significant increase in funding to enable the shoot to go ahead.\n\nThe series stars former Coronation Street actress Julie Hesmondhalgh and Breaking Bad star Laura Fraser in a drama which follows the lives of five friends.\n\nActors wear masks at all times on set, including during rehearsals, and they are only removed when the cameras start rolling.\n\nProduction companies are relieved to be be able to start filming again, with many owners having feared for their future\n\nCast and crew must also self-report any symptoms online every morning, with Julie Hesmondhalgh saying: \"It couldn't be more different, could it?\n\n\"It's the thing that you have got used to in ordinary, everyday life, but taking them into a work situation feels really different.\n\n\"The main difference is having the masks on for rehearsing. We only whip them off just at the take, because we need to protect ourselves until the very last minute. And that has been very funny, and strange.\"\n\nCo-star Jason Hughes added: \"You end up going home at the end of the day with very tired eyes. They are doing a lot of work with this mask on. It's like this reveal, isn't it? You are just watching a pair of eyes and then you take it off and you get to see the whole thing.\"\n\nLittle Door's managing director Elwen Rowlands said she feared the company could have collapsed if work had not resumed.\n\n\"I feel incredibly fortunate that we are filming at the moment because I am hearing about a lot of difficulty out there,\" she said.\n• None War of the Worlds filmed in assembly", "Crowds gathered in Liverpool on Monday to watch filming for a new Batman film in the city\n\nBoris Johnson is due to announce a new \"three-tier\" Covid system for England.\n\nThe PM will address Parliament at 15:30 BST, setting out different rules for regions classified as being on \"medium\", \"high\" or \"very high\" alert.\n\nThe Liverpool City Region - home to 1.5 million - is expected to face the tightest restrictions with pubs and gyms closed, and further rules on households mixing indoors.\n\nNewcastle council's leader has said the North East could avoid tighter rules.\n\nMr Johnson will address MPs before holding a Downing Street news conference. Other areas awaiting news of further restrictions include Greater Manchester, Nottingham and Leeds.\n\nLiverpool recorded 600 cases per 100,000 people in the week ending 6 October. The average for England was 74.\n\nThe Liverpool City Region includes the local authority districts of Halton, Knowsley, Sefton, St Helens and Wirral, as well as Liverpool.\n\nLocal MPs were told during a call with Health Secretary Matt Hancock all bars, pubs, gyms and betting shops will be closed while restaurants will remain open for the moment.\n\nLegal restrictions will also be placed on indoor household mixing and there will be guidance on travel restrictions.\n\nThe new curbs are to be reviewed after a month.\n\nMr Johnson chaired a meeting of the emergency Cobra committee \"to determine the final interventions\" on Wednesday morning.\n\nScotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said experts told Cobra even tier three restrictions would be unlikely to bring the UK's R number - the rate at which an infected person passes on the virus - below 1.\n\nThe PM will announce changes in Parliament, before speaking at a Downing Street news conference at 19:00.\n\nHe is expected to be joined at No 10 by Chancellor Rishi Sunak and England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Videos on social media showed Saturday night street scenes in some cities, including an impromptu game of cricket\n\nDuring a data briefing earlier, NHS England medical director Stephen Powis said more people were now in hospital with Covid than before restrictions were introduced in March.\n\nHe confirmed Nightingale hospitals in Manchester, Sunderland and Harrogate were being prepared to take patients.\n\nProf Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England, said infection rates had never dropped as low in the northern England as in the South but warned \"things are heating up\" across the country.\n\nTougher measures were introduced in Scotland on Friday, including the closure of pubs and restaurants across the central belt, while the Welsh government has said the next few days could determine if \"national measures\" are implemented.\n\nUnder the new system for England, tier three is expected to involve the tightest restrictions.\n\nWe know the broad outline of what the government is going to announce today.\n\nMinisters have been working on a tier system for local restrictions in England for weeks - and today they'll confirm how it will work and the basic principles.\n\nThe Liverpool region is set to be the first put into the \"very high\" top tier - which will mean significant restrictions on hospitality within days.\n\nBut there are still details of a support package being worked out.\n\nThe metro mayor in Liverpool Steve Rotheram is adamant there needs to be more support for workers and businesses that will be told to close.\n\nHe doesn't think the chancellor's current plans go far enough - and I'm told conversations on economic support are likely to continue into this afternoon.\n\nThere have been questions about definitions - when is a pub a pub, which could be told to close, rather than restaurant which might not?\n\nIt's worth highlighting that if other areas are added to the highest tier in the next few weeks, restrictions may look different.\n\nSources say there is room for flexibility based on local factors.\n\nLiverpool City Region mayor Steve Rotheram said he wanted \"some surety from national government that if we hit some milestones we can come out of tier three very quickly\".\n\nHe said the government had been clear the Liverpool City Region would be placed in the highest category, with \"no ifs, no buts\", and he added it had already been agreed there would be more local control over the tracing of close contacts and enforcement of restrictions.\n\nCulture Secretary Oliver Dowden said the government was \"not panicking\" but taking \"reasonable and proportionate measures\", adding that \"we know there are challenges around hospitality\".\n\nCalum Semple, professor of outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool and advisor to the government, said: \"Most of the outbreaks are happening within and between households and then after that, it's in the retail and hospitality sector.\n\n\"So, the major issue here is to focus on the cities and areas with the largest outbreaks and sadly my home city of Liverpool is being hammered at the moment. These restrictions are necessary.\"\n\nThe problem with introducing the sort of restrictions that are being suggested to control the spread of the virus is that no-one is really sure whether they will really work.\n\nFirstly, while the government's advisers can track patterns in where infected individuals have been prior to being diagnosed, they cannot prove that they were actually infected in those places.\n\nSecondly, there will be unintended consequences.\n\nClose pubs and you may make the situation worse by driving people to mix more in private homes which are less \"Covid-secure\".\n\nIt is a point that has been made in recent days by Manchester City Council leader Sir Richard Leese as well as others as ministers weigh up their options.\n\nThen there is the economic, social and emotional toll of closing down parts of a community.\n\nThese are decisions that will divide opinion and, what is more, it will be nigh on impossible to judge exactly what impact they will have had on the virus.\n\nOldham West and Royton MP Jim McMahon said Greater Manchester would be placed in tier two - \"with household restrictions on meeting indoors in any setting, but not outdoors\" - and pubs that serve food staying open.\n\nIt came after Sacha Lord, Greater Manchester's night-time economy adviser, started legal proceedings to challenge any restrictions on hospitality and entertainment venues in the North of England.\n\nPeople in 17 parts of Wales now face local lockdown rules - and cannot leave these areas without a good reason, such as going to work.\n\nWales' health minister Vaughan Gething said he was disappointed that the prime minister was not issuing guidance on whether people should travel out of highly infected areas.\n\nMinisters and health officials in Northern Ireland spent Sunday discussing what to do about the rapidly increasing rates of the virus. One MP said he believed lockdowns would be examined by the Northern Ireland Executive on Monday.\n\nOn Sunday, 12,872 people in the UK were reported to have tested positive for coronavirus - some 2,294 fewer than on Saturday.\n\nThere were a further 65 deaths - down from 81 on Saturday.\n\nHow could the new restrictions affect you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA man has been convicted of stabbing a prayer leader in the neck as he held prayers at London Central Mosque.\n\nDaniel Horton - who had converted to Islam and worshipped at the mosque - admitted attacking Raafat Maglad, 70, on 20 February.\n\nHorton, 30, pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court to wounding with intent and possessing an offensive weapon.\n\nHorton, of no fixed address, is due to be sentenced at the same court on 16 November.\n\nHe had converted to Islam and had been attending the north London mosque as a worshipper for a few years, prosecutors told the court.\n\nOn the day of the attack, he attended the mosque where Mr Maglad, in his role as a Muezzin, was calling all members of the mosque to prayer in the main prayer hall.\n\nRaafat Maglad returned to the mosque less than 24 hours after he was stabbed\n\nWhen the second prayer was ending, Horton attacked Mr Maglad by stabbing his praying victim in the neck with a small kitchen knife.\n\nThe Crown Prosecution Service's Jonathan Efemini said no motive had been established for the stabbing, which he described as \"unprovoked\".\n\n\"Horton launched this targeted attack on Mr Maglad who was defenceless in the midst of prayer,\" he told the court.\n\n\"He had waited for the service to commence, lunged towards the victim, and stabbed him once in the neck.\n\n\"Mr Maglad has been attending Regent's Park Mosque for 25 years as the Muezzin who would make the call for prayer five times a day.\n\n\"This should have been a safe and sacred space for him to worship in peace.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "RV Polarstern returns to the port city Bremerhaven early on Monday\n\nThe German Research Vessel Polarstern has sailed back into its home port after completing a remarkable expedition to the Arctic Ocean.\n\nThe ship spent a year in the polar north, much of it with its propulsion engines turned off so it could simply drift in the sea-ice.\n\nThe point was to study the Arctic climate and how it is changing.\n\nAnd expedition leader, Prof Markus Rex, returned with a warning. \"The sea-ice is dying,\" he said.\n\n\"The region is at risk. We were able to witness how the ice disappears and in areas where there should have been ice that was many metres thick, and even at the North Pole - that ice was gone,\" the Alfred Wegener Institute scientist told a media conference in Bremerhaven on Monday.\n\nMid-winter in the Arctic is accompanied by 24-hour darkness\n\nRV Polarstern was on station to document this summer's floes shrink to their second lowest ever extent in the modern era.\n\nThe floating ice withdrew to just under 3.74 million sq km (1.44 million sq miles). The only time this minimum has been beaten in the age of satellites was 2012, when the pack ice was reduced to 3.41 million sq km.\n\nThe downward trend is about 13% per decade, averaged across the month of September.\n\n\"This reflects the warming of the Arctic,\" said Prof Rex. \"The ice is disappearing and if in a few decades we have an ice-free Arctic - this will have a major impact on the climate around the world.\"\n\nOn occasions the expedition was harassed by polar bears\n\nThe €130m (£120m/$150m) cruise set off from Tromsø, Norway, on 20 September last year. The project was named the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC).\n\nThe idea was to recreate the historic voyage of Norwegian polar researcher Fridtjof Nansen, who undertook the first ice drift through the Arctic Ocean more than 125 years ago.\n\nRV Polarstern embedded itself in the ice on the Siberian side of the Arctic basin with the intention of floating across the top of the world and emerging from the floes just east of Greenland.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by AWI Media This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIn the course of this drift, hundreds of researchers came aboard to study the region's environment.\n\nThey deployed a battery of instruments to try to understand precisely how the ocean and atmosphere are responding to the warming forced on the Arctic by the global increase in greenhouse gases.\n\nInvestigations were conducted to improve future measurements made from space\n\nCoronavirus only briefly interrupted the expedition - not by making participants ill, but by obliging the ship at one point to leave the floes to go pick up its next rotation of scientists. Other ships and planes were supposed to deliver the participants direct to RV Polarstern, but international movement restrictions made this extremely challenging in the early-to-middle part of this year.\n\nDespite the hiatus, Prof Rex declared the MOSAiC project a huge success.\n\nThe mass of data and samples now in the possession of researchers would make the modelling they use to project future climate change much more robust, he explained.\n\nIt was as if the MOSAiC scientists had been shown the inner workings of an intricate clock, he said.\n\n\"We looked at all the different elements, down to the different screws of this Arctic system. And now we understand the entire clockwork better than ever before. And maybe we can rebuild this Arctic system on a computer model,\" he told reporters.\n\nThe ship returned to a world that is very different from the one it left\n\nProf Rex said the sea-ice was very thin or even absent in places where it used to be thick\n\nClarification 6 December, 2022: This article was edited to include the word 'propulsion' in the description of which engines were turned off.\n• None Covid crisis does little to slow climate change", "RM (2nd from right) is the band's leader\n\nSouth Korean K-pop group BTS is facing a backlash in China over comments a member made about the Korean War.\n\nIn a speech, the band's leader, known as RM, mentioned South Korea's shared \"history of pain\" with the US over the 1950-53 conflict, in which the two countries fought together.\n\nBut his remarks have angered Chinese social media users, as Beijing backed the North in the war.\n\nThe controversy also appears to have affected commercial deals.\n\nAdverts featuring BTS from companies including Samsung, sports brand Fila and car manufacturer Hyundai disappeared from a number of Chinese websites or social media platforms, although it is unclear who removed them.\n\nK-pop has a large following in China and BTS - one of the most successful groups - are no different, with at least five million fans on China's popular social media platform Weibo.\n\nRM's comments came as BTS received an award celebrating relations between the US and South Korea.\n\n\"We will always remember the history of pain that our two nations shared together and the sacrifices of countless men and women,\" he said.\n\nBut his words were met with an angry response by some social media users in China, who noted the losses their country also suffered in the war.\n\n\"They [BTS] should not make any money from China,\" one user commented on Weibo, reported Reuters news agency. \"If you want to make money from Chinese fans you have to consider Chinese feelings.\"\n\nAccording to the Global Times, a state-run newspaper with a nationalistic perspective, \"Chinese netizens said the band's totally one-sided attitude to the Korean War hurts their feelings and negates history\", adding that the comments were designed to \"play up\" to US audiences.\n\nAround 200,000 South Korean soldiers and 36,000 American soldiers died during the Korean War, as well as millions of civilians. Chinese state media say 180,000 soldiers from China also lost their lives.\n\nIt was difficult to gauge the scale of the backlash to RM's comments among BTS's Chinese fan base. Some were calling on each other to stay low-key and quiet on Weibo posts. And a number of people on Twitter defended the group, noting that RM's speech did not mention China directly.\n\nThe seven-member BTS is popular around the world and have broken a number of records. Earlier this year, their single Dynamite became the most viewed YouTube video in 24 hours, with 101.1 million views in a day.\n\nThe controversy comes days before Big Hit Entertainment, the agency that manages BTS, is set to go public in Seoul in an initial public offering expected to value the company at up to $4bn (£3bn).", "The UK hospitality industry has said it will take legal action to stop new local lockdown rules that could force pub, clubs and other venues to close.\n\nTrade body the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) said there was no evidence that hospitality venues contributed to the spread of Covid-19.\n\nIt comes as the government prepares to unveil new restrictions for England.\n\nNTIA boss Michael Kill said the hospitality industry had been left with \"no other option\".\n\n\"These new measures will have a catastrophic impact on late night businesses, and are exacerbated further by an insufficient financial support package presented by the chancellor in an attempt to sustain businesses through this period,\" he said.\n\n\"This next round of restrictions are hugely disproportionate and unjust, with no scientific rationale or correlation to Public Health England transmission rates, when compared to other key environments.\"\n\nThe Liverpool City Region is expected to face the tightest restrictions under a new \"three tier\" system, which will classify regions as being at a \"medium,\" \"high\" or \"very high\" level of alert.\n\nIn the most infectious areas, pubs, bars and other hospitality and leisure businesses are likely to be forced to close, as has happened in parts of Scotland.\n\nThe chancellor has promised to pay two-thirds of workers' wages if employers have to shut.\n\nBut some fear this will not be enough and there could still be an impact on jobs, said Dame Carolyn Fairbairn, director general of business lobby group the CBI.\n\nDame Carolyn Fairbairn said the government needed to \"show its workings\"\n\n\"It is particularly hard for hospitality who worked so hard to get their premises Covid-safe, but also the supply chains that depend on them,\" she told the BBC's Today programme.\n\n\"I think they do want to see a much more evidence-based approach - the government needs to show its workings.\"\n\nLeaders in northern England, which has been hard hit by the new surge in coronavirus cases, are supporting NTIA's call for a judicial review.\n\nSo too are the British Beer and Pub Association and two of the country's biggest pub operators, JW Lees and Joseph Holt, alongside 10 other organisations.\n\nSacha Lord, Manchester's Night Time Economy Adviser, said: \"Once again the government wants to shut down pubs and bars, but this cannot keep happening and we need to understand why the hospitality industry is being isolated like this - where is the scientific evidence to suggest closing venues suppresses transmission?\"\n\nManchester Mayor Andy Burnham said many workers faced hardship if their employer was forced to close.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Andy Burnham This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\n\"The government is treating hospitality industry workers as second-class citizens. Many of them are already on the minimum wage and there is no justification for a furlough scheme that pays two-thirds of their wages when workers in other industries were given four-fifths,\" he said.\n\nHowever, Calum Semple, professor of outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said imposing restrictions is the right course.\n\nHe told BBC Breakfast: \"Most of the outbreaks are happening within and between households and then after that, it's in the retail and hospitality sector.\n\n\"So, the major issue here is to focus on the cities and areas with the largest outbreaks and sadly my home city of Liverpool is being hammered at the moment. These restrictions are necessary.\"\n\nThe government is already facing a legal challenge over its decision to impose a 10pm curfew on English pubs.\n\nJeremy Joseph, boss of the G-A-Y club group, said the curfew was detrimental to hospitality businesses and \"makes absolutely no sense\".\n\n\"It does the opposite of protecting people by pushing them onto the street at the same time. They are going from being safe inside venues with staggered closing times to unsafe on overcrowded streets and overloaded public transport.\"", "Half the population of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh have been displaced by fighting.\n\nOn both sides of the conflict, Armenian and Azeri civilians have been killed.\n\nWithin hours of a temporary truce agreed in Moscow, fresh shelling was reported by both Armenian and Azerbaijani forces.\n\nThis is not a religious war, but many Armenians are sheltering in churches and fear they may be shelled.", "The gates of Auschwitz concentration camp, now a memorial, where more than one million people died\n\nFacebook has explicitly banned Holocaust denial for the first time.\n\nThe social network said its new policy prohibits \"any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust\".\n\nFacebook boss Mark Zuckerberg wrote that he had \"struggled with the tension\" between free speech and banning such posts, but that \"this is the right balance\".\n\nTwo years ago, Mr Zuckerberg said that such posts should not automatically be taken down for \"getting it wrong\".\n\n\"I'm Jewish and there's a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened,\" he told Recode at the time.\n\n\"I find it deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don't believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong.\"\n\nBut on Monday, as Facebook changed its policies, he wrote that he had changed his mind.\n\n\"My own thinking has evolved as I've seen data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence, as have our wider policies on hate speech,\" he wrote in a public Facebook post.\n\nMr Zuckerberg had previously said he did not want to ban mistaken beliefs\n\n\"Drawing the right lines between what is and isn't acceptable speech isn't straightforward, but with the current state of the world, I believe this is the right balance.\"\n\nEarlier this year, Facebook banned hate speech involving harmful stereotypes, including anti-Semitic content. But Holocaust denial had not been banned.\n\nFacebook's vice-president of content policy, Monika Bickert, said the company had made the decision alongside \"the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people\".\n\nShe said that later this year, searching for the Holocaust - or its denial - on Facebook would direct users to \"credible\" information.\n\nBut she also warned change would not happen overnight, and training its employees and automated systems would take time.\n\nThe World Jewish Congress - which had conferred with Facebook on anti-Semitism - welcomed the move.\n\n\"Denying the Holocaust, trivializing it, minimizing it, is a tool used to spread hatred and false conspiracies about Jews and other minorities,\" the group said in a statement.\n\nBut it also noted that it had campaigned for the removal of Holocaust denial content from the platform \"for several years\".\n\nJonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, tweeted: \"This has been years in the making.\"\n\n\"Having personally engaged with Facebook on the issue, I can attest the ban on Holocaust Denial is a big deal... glad it finally happened.\"\n\nThis was a bit of a \"wait, they don't do this already?\" moment.\n\nPerhaps that's because Facebook has quite radically shifted its position on removing hate speech and fake news in recent months.\n\nWe're still seeing loopholes from an old moderating regime being closed.\n\nCritics, though, argue this isn't happening fast enough.\n\nThe combined platforms of Facebook and Instagram - which is owned by Facebook - have an extraordinary reach of billions of users worldwide.\n\nThat influence has to be used responsibly, and Facebook acknowledges this.\n\nThe advertising boycott in July also helped cement the view internally that more had to be done to tackle hate speech.\n\nMark Zuckerberg's instincts have always been to champion freedom of speech - the best way to fight bad speech is good speech he's always said.\n\nBut this latest move appears to indicate Facebook now accepts it needs to be more proactive in combating hate speech.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nA black man who was led by a rope down a Texas street by two white officers on horseback has sued the city and its police department for $1m (£750,000).\n\nGalveston Police apologised last year after footage emerged of Donald Neely, 44, arrested for criminal trespassing.\n\nA lawsuit filed this week alleged the officers' conduct was \"extreme and outrageous\" and caused Mr Neely injury and emotional and mental anguish.\n\nThe trespass charges against Mr Neely were later dismissed in court.\n\nMany people on social media compared the footage of Mr Neely to the slavery era, an allusion referenced explicitly in the lawsuit. According to the lawsuit, the officers should have been aware that Mr Neely, \"being led with a rope and by mounted officers down a city street as though he was a slave, would find this contact offensive\".\n\nAccusing both the city and the Galveston police department of negligence, the suit says that Mr Neely \"suffered from handcuff abrasions, suffered from the heat, and suffered from embarrassment, humiliation and fear\".\n\nCity officials declined to comment on the lawsuit to US media.\n\nLast year, after an outcry over images of Mr Neely, police clarified that he was not tied with the rope but was \"handcuffed and a line was clipped to the handcuffs\".\n\nGalveston's police chief Vernon Hale said at the time that the technique was acceptable in some scenarios but that \"officers showed poor judgment in this instance\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The USA's history of racial inequality has paved the way for modern day police brutality\n\nThere was no \"malicious intent\", he said, and apologised to Mr Neely for the \"unnecessary embarrassment\". Department policy was changed to prevent the use of this technique.\n\nMr Neely - who was homeless at the time - was sleeping on a sidewalk, US media reported, when he was arrested for criminal trespass and led around the block to a mounted police patrol staging area. The charges were later dismissed.\n\nFollowing an investigation into the encounter, the department released body camera footage of the arrest. In it, the officers can be heard commenting on the appearance of Mr Neely's arrest.\n\n\"This is going to look so bad. I'm glad you're not embarrassed, Mr Neely,\" one officer is heard saying.\n\nA status conference is currently scheduled for 7 January, 2021. Mr Neely is requesting a trial by jury, according to court documents.", "We have entered a crucial phase in the epidemic.\n\nCases are increasing across the whole of the country and the number of people in hospital is now higher than before the full lockdown.\n\nIt is at this critical moment that the gulf between the official scientific advice and the political decisions made by government has been laid bare.\n\nDocuments released by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) reveal a call to action three weeks ago.\n\n\"The re-imposition of a package of measures is required urgently,\" it warned on 21 September.\n\nIt added: \"The more rapidly these interventions are put in place the greater the reduction in Covid-related deaths and the quicker they can be eased.\n\n\"Not acting now to reduce cases will result in a very large epidemic with catastrophic consequences.\"\n\nSage said government should consider the following policies immediately:\n\nThe government has to balance not only the impact of measures on the virus, but also their damaging impact on people's health, wellbeing and the economy.\n\nThere was official advice to work from home, but none of the other measures have been implemented nationally.\n\nThe documents were published shortly after Boris Johnson's televised briefing on Monday night, during which the chief medical officer for England, Prof Chris Whitty, openly declared nobody thought the current tier-three measures being introduced around Liverpool would stop the virus.\n\n\"I am not confident and nor is anybody confident that the tier-three proposals for the highest rates, if we did the absolute base case and nothing more would be enough to get on top of it,\" he said.\n\nHe said it would take \"significantly more\" to achieve control and powers to do so had been given to local authorities.\n\nProf Calum Semple, who was at the Sage meeting on 21 September, said the three-tier system had come too late and he believes that a short national lockdown could be needed within weeks.\n\nSage is also damning of the government's supposedly world-beating test-and-trace system.\n\nTest-and-trace is at the heart of the government's plans - a way of avoiding the need for a national lockdown by targeting restrictions where the virus is.\n\nSage says \"this system is having a marginal impact on transmission\" and that unless its resources grow faster than the epidemic then test-and-trace \"will further decline in the future\".\n\nThe documents say a two-week circuit break in October could drive cases down, essentially rewinding the clock by 28 days. This could buy time for test-and-trace to catch up.\n\nThe Sage papers also reveal how the widely supported decision to keep schools open means a \"wide range of other measures will be required\".\n\nThe national R number - the number of people each infected person passes the virus on to on average - is between 1.2 and 1.5. Anything above 1.0 means the epidemic is growing.\n\nOne set of Sage documents reveals how much individual policies may cut the R number by:\n\nFor each measure aimed at targeting the virus, Sage also details the damaging effect the measures are likely to have.\n\n\"Government will continue to have to juggle social freedom, economic activity and transmission for many months. It is imperative, therefore, that a consistent series of measures is adopted over the next 6-9 months,\" it says.\n\nNine months from that meeting would be June.\n\nThe current situation has been widely predicted, including in a major report in July that warned there could be more deaths in the second wave than the first.\n\n\"We're on track to have 100 deaths a day in next week or so, that's very much tracing some of those worst case scenarios, if the outbreak's increasing it doesn't bode well for November/December,\" said Dr Adam Kucharski, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the modelling group that feeds advice to Sage, told me.\n\nThere is also mounting angst about what the government is trying to achieve.\n\nThe R number is thought to be comfortably above 1 in every region of England, not just parts of the North West.\n\nJeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and Sage member, tweeted: \"Objective has to be to get R<1, if that is not the objective [then we] need clarity on what [the] objective is.\"\n\nThe University of Warwick's Dr Mike Tildesley, who sits on one of the Sage sub-groups, told BBC News: \"It is extremely important the government says what the objective is, what they're trying to achieve, then the science group can be much more useful in advising government.\n\n\"If they tell us, it will be much easier.\"\n\nThe fear among some scientists advising the government is that many of the fundamentals have not changed. This is a virus that thrives on human contact and to which the vast majority of us have no immunity to.\n\nTreatment has improved, but not by enough to prevent large numbers of deaths in a significant outbreak.\n\nThe concern is either we choose the terms for controlling the virus now, or we wait and the virus will force our hand as it did with lockdown in March.", "Lord Janner, who was a Leicester MP, died in 2015\n\nChildren allegedly abused by the late Lord Janner did not immediately contact police because they felt \"fear, shame, embarrassment and confusion\", an inquiry has heard.\n\nLord Janner, a former Leicester MP, died in 2015 while awaiting trial for 22 child sexual abuse offences.\n\nThe Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) heard complainants were \"worried they would not be believed\".\n\nThe inquiry will not decide if he was guilty, but will look at how authorities reacted to the multiple allegations of indecent assault and buggery dating as far back as the 1960s.\n\nMany of the alleged victims, some from care homes, have only come forward in recent years.\n\nBrian Altman QC, counsel to the inquiry, said: \"There are a myriad of reasons why the complainants say they did not make their disclosures at the time.\n\n\"The reasons include feelings of fear, shame, embarrassment and confusion.\"\n\nLawyer David Enright said one alleged victim described how it felt like \"poor children are on a conveyor belt to abuse, and that nobody seems to believe them\".\n\nThe inquiry heard how Tracey Taylor, a complainant who has waived her right to anonymity, said she was raped by the former MP after entering the care system at 14.\n\nShe said he told her he \"could make her the next prime minister's wife\".\n\nShe added she tried to tell police about the alleged abuse on a number of occasions but was not believed and was called \"Crazy Tracey\" by officers.\n\nProf Alexis Jay is leading the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA)\n\nLord Janner was charged with counts relating to nine boys after Leicestershire Police launched an investigation into the allegations in 2012.\n\nHe denied all charges and criminal proceedings came to an end when he died in December 2015 at the age of 87 following a \"long illness\".\n\nLawyers representing the alleged victims said the prosecution had come \"too late\".\n\nNick Stanage said: \"[It] came many years after allegations first surfaced... justice delayed was justice denied\".\n\nLord Janner's family has continued to defend their father's reputation.\n\nRabbi Laura Janner-Klausner, Lord Janner's youngest daughter, said in a statement the family does not \"recognise any of [our] father's character\" in the allegations.\n\nShe added: \"[This was] never the lost opportunity for justice it is misleadingly claimed to be.\"\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Twitter has experienced a major outage, with users across the world affected.\n\nThe social media giant said the issue was caused by an \"inadvertent change\" it made to its internal systems.\n\nPeople in countries including the US and UK were unable to use the platform for more than an hour, with many receiving error messages.\n\nThe service was later largely restored, and the California-based company said the site should soon be working for all of its users.\n\nAccording to DownDetector.com, reports of problems with Twitter began to spike at about 21:30 GMT on Thursday.\n\nIt said users from around the world - including Japan, Australia, Argentina and France - had reported being unable to use the platform.\n\nIn the US, there were tens of thousands of reports of problems.\n\nUsers were sent error messages including \"something went wrong\" and \"Tweet failed: There's something wrong. Please try again later.\"\n\nTwitter said there was no evidence of a security breach or hack.\n\nInternet monitoring group NetBlocks confirmed the incident was \"not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering\".\n\nIn July, hackers accessed Twitter's internal systems to hijack accounts owned by some of the platform's most prominent users.\n\nThe breach saw the accounts of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Kanye West and Bill Gates among other celebrities used to tweet a Bitcoin scam.", "Rain swept across the UK in the wake of Storm Alex\n\nSaturday 3 October was the wettest day for UK-wide rainfall since records began in 1891, Met Office researchers have said.\n\nThe downpour followed in the wake of Storm Alex and saw an average of 31.7mm (1.24ins) of rain across the entire UK.\n\nThe deluge was enough to exceed the capacity of Loch Ness - the largest lake in the UK by volume - the researchers added.\n\nIt has been a year of stark contrasts across the UK when it comes to rainfall.\n\nTwo named storms, Ciara and Dennis, helped push February to the top of the records as the wettest ever in the UK.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThis was followed by a very dry and bright spring that saw May break the record for sunniest calendar month with 266 hours of sunshine.\n\nBut a middling summer has been followed by a drenching autumn across much of the UK.\n\nIn the wake of Storm Alex, the heavens opened almost everywhere.\n\n\"The main characteristic for October 3 was moderate but persistent rain, and it was very widespread,\" said Dr Mark McCarthy, from the Met Office.\n\nStorms across the UK saw February become the wettest on record\n\n\"We had 30 to 50mm of rain, quite extensively across large parts of the UK that day, and that's quite unusual.\"\n\nIf all that rain was collected together, Dr McCarthy said, it would over top the UK's biggest lake by volume.\n\n\"So 31.7mm across the area of the UK equates to around 7.6 cubic kilometres of water by volume,\" he said, adding: \"Loch Ness is around 7.4-7.5 cubic kilometres.\"\n\nWhile the previous record came during the very wet summer of 1986, the third wettest day across the UK was on 15 February this year with 27.2mm.\n\nMany parts of the UK have already passed their average October rainfall in the first couple of weeks of the month.\n\nOxfordshire is leading the way as the wettest county, with around 148% of its long-term average October rain experienced so far.\n\nSo, do these heavy downpours across 2020 show the signal of climate change?\n\nThe Met Office says enough rain fell on October 3 to fill Loch Ness\n\n\"We can't make any definitive statements specifically about the attribution of this particular event on October 3,\" said Dr McCarthy.\n\n\"There's a general expectation that under our warming climate, we would expect to see increases in some types of extreme rainfall and rainfall events and we're expecting to have wetter winters overall, we could expect increases in these types of extremes.\"\n\nWhile the record for the wettest day on average across the UK stood for 34 years, it might not take so long to break it again.\n\n\"Over recent decades that we have seen a cluster of notable rainfall records in the last sort of 10 to 20 years in quite a long rainfall series,\" said Dr McCarthy.\n\n\"So it would fit within the general pattern that we're observing, and aspects of what we would expect continued climate change to lead to.\"", "The officer was checking on the welfare of a man on Portswood Road when he was attacked\n\nA man has been arrested on suspicion of attempting to murder a policeman who was stabbed multiple times.\n\nThe 43-year-old officer was responding over concern for a man living in Portswood Road, Southampton, at about 12:00 BST on Thursday.\n\nHampshire police said the officer suffered \"serious, but not life-threatening, injuries\" and had to stay in hospital overnight.\n\nThe arrested man, a 51-year-old from Southampton, remains in custody.\n\nThe officer was called to Portswood Road in Southampton at about 12:00 BST on Thursday\n\nPeter Crawford, who lives in the road, said it appeared the policeman had an injured arm.\n\nHe said: \"I saw all these police cars... and there was a guy at the front of one - I didn't realise he was a policeman at the time - I saw him bandaging his arm up.\n\n\"And I saw a guy come out with the police with handcuffs on behind his back.\"\n\nZoe Wakefield, who chairs Hampshire Police Federation, said the injured policeman was with a colleague when he was attacked and has since been released from hospital.\n\nShe said: \"The officers acted very bravely and I think the situation could have been a lot worse.\"\n\nA force spokesman said detectives were working to establish the exact circumstances of the attack.\n\nDet Ch Insp Dave Brown said officers were conducting inquiries, including house-to-house visits, and examining CCTV footage.\n\n\"At the same time, we are providing support to the officer's family and his colleagues following this incident,\" he said.\n\nThe force did not believe there was any wider risk to the public, Det Ch Insp Brown added.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has won a landslide victory in the country's general election.\n\nMs Ardern's first term in office has been a challenging time, but her compassionate leadership style and charisma have seen her become one of the world's most prominent leaders.\n\nHere's a look back at some of the key moments of her leadership.", "Hospital admissions for Covid have risen significantly in just a week, Andrew Goodall said\n\nThe number of Covid-related patients in Wales' hospitals has risen by 49% in a week.\n\nWelsh NHS boss Andrew Goodall said more than 700 people were being looked after - the highest number since late June.\n\nThe chief executive said demand for beds would continue to increase in the days and weeks ahead.\n\n\"I anticipate this winter will be more challenging than any I have known in my professional career,\" Mr Goodall told a Welsh Government press conference.\n\nIt comes as the Welsh Government said it was \"planning very seriously\" for a circuit breaker lockdown.\n\nThe number of confirmed coronavirus cases in hospital - where a patient has tested - is 326, up 70% on two weeks ago, Mr Goodall said.\n\nThat is half of the peak in April, \"but I am concerned at the rising trend\", he added.\n\nCoronavirus has meant waiting lists have increased, with a \"five-fold\" increase in the number of people waiting 36 weeks because of limited activity taking place.\n\nAndrew Goodall said this winter will be the most challenging of his career\n\nThere are plans to increase critical care capacity but the 152 normal critical beds are currently full, mainly with people who do not have coronavirus.\n\nThere are also plans in place to allow the NHS to balance care and treatment, but Mr Goodall said if capacity in the NHS doubles as it did in March and April, \"it doesn't take much with the maths involved to work out that we could see a system that is under pressure\".\n\nThe NHS chief executive said there was a \"different level\" of preparation \"than perhaps when we were at the first peak\".\n\n\"We build on experience of many years of dealing with infection control, but this is still a virus that surprises us with its ability, particularly in closed settings, in its ability to transmit across to other parts of hospital and healthcare settings,\" he said.\n\nHe said the Welsh NHS had commissioned plans for an extra 5,000 beds: \"This is 10 times the number of our usual winter plans.\"\n\nCovid-19 outbreaks in hospitals could lead to more suspensions of planned surgery and other services.\n\nThere have been outbreaks in nine hospitals - Dr Andrew Goodall said action plans were already in place to tackle them, but added the virus \"continues to surprise us\" in the way it manages to spread.\n\nBut the NHS expects to have 24 weeks supply of personal protective equipment (PPE).\n\nThe supply chain for PPE is in a \"very good position at the moment\", Mr Goodall added.\n\nConservative leader in the Senedd Paul Davies says the Welsh Government should set up \"Covid-free hospitals\" so that routine surgery can be carried out.\n\nMr Goodall says the rise in Covid cases has had a big impact on waiting times for routine surgery \"with a five-fold increase in people waiting more than 36 weeks because of the limited activity taking place\".\n\nPaul Davies said: \"The Welsh Government and the Welsh NHS should set up covid-free hospitals so that people can continue to receive routine surgery\".\n\nHe added: \"I've had lots of correspondence on this with people very worried about routine surgery and the waits that people have to wait\".\n\nMeanwhile, the number of patients who have caught Covid-19 in hospital in Wales has risen again.\n\nThere were 94 \"probable\" or \"definite\" infections caught in the last week - a 71% rise on the previous week.\n\nMore than half were in Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board.\n\nThere are 58 hospital onset cases in the region in the last week, according to Public Health Wales (PHW).\n\nCwm Taf Morgannwg said up to Tuesday there has now been 38 deaths, with 32 of these coming at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital.\n\nThere have been separate infection outbreaks at Prince Charles Hospital, Merthyr, and Princess of Wales in Bridgend, with 196 cases across the three sites.\n\nMedical director Dr Nick Lyons said \"In conjunction with PHW we continue to closely monitor cases at a number of our sites. The safety of our patients and staff remains our first priority and immediate measures to contain the spread of the virus have been put in place.\"\n\nThe Public Health Wales figures also show Aneurin Bevan health board has seen 24 cases in the last week, with another nine at Swansea Bay.\n\nA spike in patients infected with coronavirus in hospital in north Wales - at Wrexham Maelor - in July eased off, although there has since been an outbreak at Glan Clwyd and two other local hospitals.\n\nBetsi Cadwaladr health board - where three new infections were reported over the last week - has reported more than 20 patients with infections across the three sites and expects to publish an update at the end of the week.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Police dispersed guests at the wedding reception in west London\n\nPolice have broken up a wedding reception where more than 100 guests congregated in breach of coronavirus restrictions.\n\nThe event at the Tudor Rose in Southall, west London, on Tuesday evening was described as a \"flagrant and arrogant violation of the law\".\n\nThe venue's owner has been reported and could face a fine of up to £10,000.\n\nUnder current guidance, the number of guests allowed at weddings is limited to 15 people.\n\nBody-worn camera footage of the reception, released by the Metropolitan Police, showed guests being led from the venue.\n\nArea Commander, Ch Supt Peter Gardner, said: \"This was a dangerous and foolish breach of the regulations, which have been designed specifically to keep people safe from transmitting a deadly virus.\n\n\"Restrictions on large gatherings, such as weddings, have been in place for months and quite frankly there can be no excuse for this flagrant and arrogant violation of the law.\n\n\"There was clearly no attempt by the venue owner to enforce the regulations or keep their patrons safe. It is for this reason we have reported them for a £10,000 fine.\"\n\nLondon is among a number of places in England which will face Tier 2 lockdown restrictions beginning on Saturday, including a ban on households mixing indoors.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A US photographer has said she was \"devastated\" when one of her photos was used for a UK government-backed advert suggesting a dancer should retrain.\n\nThe ad was criticised for encouraging \"Fatima\" to give up on dancing and \"reskill\" in cyber security.\n\nThe dancer is actually called Desire'e and the photo was taken by Krys Alex.\n\n\"I was shocked,\" the Atlanta-based photographer said in a YouTube video. Artists \"should not be encouraged to stop doing what we love\", she added.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by FLIdP This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nThe ad was pulled after Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden disowned it, describing it as \"crass\". A 10 Downing Street spokesperson agreed that it was \"not appropriate\".\n\nThe first Alex knew of her photo's use was when the advert began to be criticised on social media.\n\n\"I woke up Monday morning to a bunch of emails and tags, and I really felt devastated,\" she said. \"I immediately thought of Desire'e and how her face was just plastered all over social media and the internet, different news articles, and memes were created, and she had no clue. All of that really hurt me.\n\n\"Some people questioned if I knew and if I approved the use of my work. If I'd have know that this was going to be used in the way it was, I would have never agreed to it.\"\n\nDesire'e Kelley is \"a young, talented and beautiful aspiring dancer from Atlanta\", she added.\n\n\"We're exploring all our options and we're talking and consulting with different professionals to figure out the best way to protect our rights in this situation.\"\n\nThe photo was available on stock image site Unsplash, whose licence says pictures can normally be downloaded for free for commercial and non-commercial purposes.\n\nThe campaign, which also features images of people from other walks of life, was created for CyberFirst, which is described as \"a government outreach and education programme run by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of GCHQ\".\n\nThe original photo also included Tasha Williams, owner of the Vibez in Motion Dance Studio in Atlanta, Georgia. She was cropped out for the ad.\n\nWriting on Instagram, Williams described the advert as an \"unforgivable act\".\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by vibezinmotion This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nShe said: \"I can remember growing up hearing, 'Dance is art, it's not a career just a hobby, make sure to get a real job and dance on the side.' The UK campaign took me right back to that place mentally, which was a bit scary.\n\n\"Being about 11 or 12 and feeling like I had to be someone I wasn't and suppress my creative energy to satisfy what 'others' saw as productive lives.\"\n\nMr Dowden again distanced himself from the advert when he was asked about it by MPs on the House of Commons culture select committee on Wednesday.\n\n\"I was at the Royal Ballet just on Friday and it was wonderful to see artists perform again. I know the huge value they bring to this country,\" he said.\n\nHe cited grants awarded this week from the Culture Recovery Fund to institutions including the Royal Academy of Dance and Birmingham Royal Ballet. \"We know those are jobs that should be preserved,\" he said.", "A scientist who processed coronavirus swab samples at one of the UK's largest labs has alleged working practices were \"chaotic and dangerous\".\n\nHe highlighted overcrowded biosecure workspaces, poor safety protocols and a lack of suitable PPE.\n\nThe Health and Safety Executive has uncovered safety breaches at the lighthouse lab in Milton Keynes.\n\nThe UK Biocentre, which runs the lab, said strict safety measures were in place and improvements were being made.\n\nThe joint investigation by the BBC and the Independent has learnt that an experienced virologist who worked at the lab said he was \"traumatised\" and \"freaked out\" by seeing inexperienced colleagues unaware of the hazards they were dealing with.\n\nDr Julian Harris started working in laboratories dealing with highly infectious diseases in the 1980s.\n\nBut within one week of working at the Milton Keynes facility - which processes up to 30,000 tests a day - in early July, he was so troubled by what he saw he contacted the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).\n\nThe \"lighthouse labs\" are run by independent organisations and are part of the government's plan for increasing testing capacity for coronavirus.\n\nDr Harris said coronavirus swabs had to be processed in \"containment level 2\" labs, with tight safety procedures to protect staff.\n\nBut he said fellow workers had limited laboratory experience and were not given proper safety induction.\n\n\"I found they've got no experience with this sort of facility or handling bio-hazardous, and then they're just launched into this facility,\" Dr Harris said.\n\nHe saw two people using biosecurity cabinets - enclosed, ventilated workspaces where scientists open the tubes containing the contaminated swabs - which were only calibrated to have protective airflow for one person.\n\n\"Once you disrupt that [airflow], you might as well be working on an open bench. It just disrupts the whole reason for a cabinet to protect the operator. And it is really disturbing,\" Dr Harris said.\n\nHe called the working practices \"chaotic and dangerous\".\n\nThe UK Biocentre said that the second scientist was witnessing and supporting the person working in the cabinet, and that new staff had three days of mandatory training.\n\nIt also said the lab workers it recruited had previous lab experience.\n\nDr Harris alleged part of the problem was that recruiters found it tough to bring in experienced staff, because of the drive to push up capacity in time for the winter.\n\nHe said the lab set out to recruit young people from the local area to work long shifts, often of 12 hours.\n\nThe lighthouse labs were set up as are part of the government's plan for increasing testing capacity\n\n\"They just want people to do the gruelling labour of handling these biohazardous things,\" he claimed.\n\nDr Harris took his concerns to the laboratory management in early August.\n\nA senior manager told him that the professionally-experienced staff were going back to their institutes - and that the lab was in \"a transitional period\" and new staff had less experience.\n\nThe manager admitted that the training in place did not look \"robust enough\" for these new recruits.\n\nDr Harris said he also raised concerns about mobile phones being used in the labs and then taken to the canteen, and a lack of safety signage and first aid kits.\n\nThe HSE visited the Milton Keynes lab and found five material breaches of health and safety legislation.\n\nThe BBC understands they included inadequate health and safety training for staff, and employees working too closely together.\n\nBut the Milton Keynes lab said no improvement notice had been issued by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).\n\nAnother former worker at the Milton Keynes lab, who did not want to be identified, said: \"I immediately began to question some of the most basic practices that were being employed in the labs.\n\n\"It was like we were set up to work on a war footing with massive enthusiasm for the task, but they just ignored many of the things we could implement from existing industry and lab practice to make things more efficient and safer for the work team.\"\n\nThe worker, who is also a PhD student, was asked to wear cheap disposable lab coats and plastic gloves attached with parcel tape.\n\n\"If you were in a hospital biomedical sciences lab, you would not be allowed to wear those lab coats to do those things,\" the student said.\n\nThe UK Biocentre, which runs the lab - one of seven mega-labs in the UK - said that cloth and disposable lab coats were available to staff, and tape was an additional safety measure because they insist on staff wearing two pairs of gloves.\n\nThe laboratory added in a statement: \"We are already addressing observations that have been made to us as we continue to expand our testing capacity to tackle the coronavirus.\n\n\"Given the scale of our 24/7 operation - 400 staff, 40,000 tests a day - we have strict safety measures in place to protect staff who are operating in a confined laboratory space.\n\n\"We take the health and safety of all our staff very seriously and actively encourage the scientists and other colleagues to suggest improvements and raise any concerns.\"\n\nA spokesperson from the Department of Health and Social Care said: \"Rigorous quality control and safety procedures are in place across the laboratory network, and we expect the highest standards to be met.\n\n\"We regularly review and inspect our partner laboratories to ensure strict protocols are adhered to. We investigate any concerns raised and will take action if proper procedures are not followed.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Matt Hancock: \"Things will get worse before they get better\"\n\nMillions of people in London, Essex, York and other areas face tougher Tier 2 Covid measures from Saturday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said.\n\nUnder this \"high\" alert level, there is a ban on households mixing indoors, including in pubs and restaurants.\n\nGreater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is resisting the region moving to Tier 3, ahead of a final decision on this.\n\nMore than half of England's population will now be living under high or very high-alert restrictions.\n\nThe areas to go into high alert restrictions this weekend are: London, Essex (apart from Southend and Thurrock), York, North East Derbyshire, Chesterfield, Erewash in Derbyshire, Elmbridge in Surrey, and Barrow in Furness, Cumbria.\n\nAs unitary authorities, Southend and Thurrock councils are not included in the move and will remain in Tier 1, Essex County Council has said.\n\nThe health secretary said \"things will get worse before they get better\".\n\n\"Now, I know that these measures are not easy but I also know that they are vital,\" Mr Hancock told MPs.\n\n\"Responding to this unprecedented pandemic requires difficult choices, some of the most difficult choices any government has to make in peacetime.\"\n\nOn Thursday, a further 18,980 cases and 138 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were reported in the UK.\n\nThe new three-tier system sees every area of England classed as being on medium, high or very high alert - also known as Tiers 1 to 3, respectively.\n\nIt came into effect on Wednesday, and the Liverpool City Region remains the only area currently in the highest tier.\n\nMeanwhile, the government announced that travellers returning to the UK from Italy, Vatican City and San Marino must self-isolate for 14 days from 04:00 BST on Sunday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nDiscussions are continuing over whether Greater Manchester will be moved into the highest tier of restrictions, with a financial support package yet to be finalised.\n\nSpeaking at a press conference on Thursday, Mr Burnham said the region's leaders were \"unanimously opposed\" to the introduction of Tier 3 measures, calling the government's plans \"flawed and unfair\".\n\nHe said: \"They are asking us to gamble our residents' jobs, homes and businesses and a large chunk of our economy on a strategy that their own experts tell them might not work.\"\n\nRepeating his calls for a financial support package for parts of the North West, he added: \"Greater Manchester, the Liverpool City Region and Lancashire are being set up as the canaries in the coalmine for an experimental regional lockdown strategy as an attempt to prevent the expense of what is truly needed.\n\n\"The very least they should be offering the people of Greater Manchester who will be affected by these closures is a full and fair 80% furlough for all affected workers, 80% income support for people who are self-employed and a proper compensation scheme for businesses.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Andy Burnham says his region is one of those \"being set up as the canaries in the coal mine\"\n\nTier 3 involves pub closures and a ban on household mixing indoors, in private gardens and in most outdoor hospitality venues and ticketed events.\n\nMr Hancock confirmed in the Commons that no decision had been made on moving more regions to Tier 3, but added \"we need to make rapid progress\".\n\nMeanwhile, the NHS Test and Trace system in England recorded its worst week for reaching community contacts since the middle of June.\n\nData showed some 62% of non-household contacts of people who tested positive in the community were reached through the system in the week ending 7 October.\n\nThis is the lowest success rate since 24 June, down from 67% last week.\n\nAsked about the latest data, the PM's spokesman said tests were being provided on an \"unprecedented scale\" and No 10 was still working to raise capacity to 500,000 tests a day by the end of the month.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has defended his call for a nationwide \"circuit-breaker\" - a short limited lockdown - to stem rising infection rates, saying \"no region will be immune\" from Covid-19.\n\nSpeaking to the BBC, he said the alternative was \"weeks and months of prolonged agony\" in a tiered system.\n\nShadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth told MPs in the Commons that a full national lockdown \"stretching for weeks and weeks\" would \"be disastrous for society\", but that a lockdown of between two and three weeks could help \"take back control of the virus\".\n\nSpeaking on BBC Radio 4's World at One, Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS providers, said he also favoured this move to ensure the NHS is not overwhelmed by Covid-19 cases.\n\nMeanwhile, Labour mayor Sadiq Khan told London's City Hall there was \"simply no other option\" than introducing the new restrictions.\n\nHe said he will continue to press the government for more financial support, but added that \"we've got a difficult winter ahead\".\n\nConcerns have been raised about the impact the restrictions will have on businesses, particularly in the hospitality sector.\n\nLondon has 3,640 pubs and 7,556 restaurants, according to real estate adviser Altus Group, but they will not be eligible for government support available to premises which have been ordered to close.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sadiq Khan says there is \"simply no other option\" as London moves to Tier 2 restrictions\n\nThe British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA), the trade association for Britain's brewing and pub sector, said Tier 2 restrictions without a \"proper package of support\" would \"decimate\" pubs.\n\nEmma McClarkin, BBPA chief executive, said pubs were already struggling due to the current restrictions, with the new measures leaving \"most pubs fighting for their very survival\".\n\nNickie Aiken, Tory MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, urged the government to set out an \"exit plan\" for ensuring London is placed back into Tier 1.\n\nShe said she remained \"deeply concerned about the impact further lockdown will have on the capital's hospitality, leisure and retail businesses\".\n\nRobert Halfon, Conservative MP for Harlow in Essex, said he welcomed Tier 2 measures for the county but would call on Chancellor Rishi Sunak to prevent businesses suffering financially.\n\nLiverpool is considering a two-week half-term break for schools as part of its \"battle with Covid-19\".\n\nUnder the plan, backed by a teaching union, pupils would be taught remotely at home for the second week of the break.", "The House of Commons is to stop serving alcohol on its premises, after tougher Covid restrictions were announced across the UK.\n\nSpeaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle said the ban would begin on Saturday, and apply to all catering outlets, whether food is served or not.\n\nHe said he had ordered the move as some MPs represent constituencies where pubs have now been closed.\n\nThe drinks ban, he added, would last for the \"foreseeable future\".\n\nA House of Commons spokeswoman said six out of its 10 catering outlets that are currently open serve alcohol, and would be affected by the ban.\n\nA ban on serving alcohol at all Commons premises after 22:00 BST is already in place, while most of its bars remain shut.\n\nThe curfew was announced in September, even though Parliament's \"workplace canteens\" are legally exempt from England's 22:00 closing time.\n\nThe Speaker's announcement came after tougher Tier 2 restrictions were announced for London, to begin on Saturday.\n\nUnder this \"high\" alert level, pubs and restaurants will remain open but households will be banned from mixing socially there, or anywhere indoors.\n\nHowever, in the Liverpool City Region - the only area in England under the \"very high\" Tier 3 restrictions - pubs not serving meals will be closed.\n\nPubs and restaurants have been closed across central Scotland, and will remain so until 25 October at the earliest.\n\nSir Lindsay said he had ordered the parliamentary authorities to bring the Commons \"into line with the national picture\".\n\n\"MPs represent different constituencies in different tiers - with the very highest level ordering the closure of pubs,\" he added.\n\nHe said that the House of Commons Commission - in charge of administration - would meet on Monday to consider \"other measures\" to protect MPs and staff from Covid-19.\n• None London, Essex, York and other areas move to Tier 2", "Michele Murray and Jill McLaren arrive home from Russia after a month of treatment\n\nTwo Scottish women have returned home after a month in a Russian hospital undergoing what they hope will be life-changing medical treatment.\n\nJill McLaren and Michele Murray have been living with multiple sclerosis for almost 20 years.\n\nThey travelled to Moscow for stem cell transplants after initial travel plans were cancelled because of the pandemic.\n\nThe procedure aims to \"reboot\" their immune systems, stopping their MS in its tracks.\n\nAfter a month of gruelling treatment, they have now travelled back to Scotland and were met by their families at Edinburgh Airport.\n\nJill is greeted by her family at Edinburgh Airport\n\nJill said: \"I can't even explain how amazing it is to be back. It's been really hard, but it'll be worth it.\"\n\nShe said she had come home MS-free.\n\n\"Next is the long recovery and rehabilitation. If this gives us a chance to get our lives back, I'll take it.\"\n\nThe women were unable to get the transplants through the NHS in Scotland, however Michele's treatment was paid for through crowd funding.\n\n\"It's been absolutely amazing,\" she said. \"Everyone has just been so kind. I'm in awe of them. The generosity has just been unbelievable, it really has.\"\n\nOver 15,000 people in Scotland have multiple sclerosis, a lifelong neurological condition which affects the brain and spinal cord and can lead to serious disability.\n\nInstead of fighting off infection, the immune system attacks the nerves which control different parts of the body.\n\nThe illness forced Jill to give up her career in radio and with her health worsening, the mother of twins from Edinburgh decided to undergo the transplant.\n\nMichele, who's from Tain in the Highlands, had reached the same decision and they travelled together to Moscow last month.\n\nLast month Michele said it was important for her to try the treatment\n\nHaematopietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is an aggressive procedure that carries risks.\n\nThe MS Society Scotland says for some people it results in \"life-changing results\" but it's not effective for all types of the disease.\n\nStem cells are taken from the patient's bone marrow or blood before chemotherapy wipes out the immune system. The stem cells are then reintroduced to the body, where they grow a new immune system.\n\nThe women could take up to a year to recover and will be extremely vulnerable to serious infections for months.\n\nJill looks forward to returning to a normal life\n\nJill said: \"We won't be able to see anyone for the next few weeks outside our immediate families, and probably it'll be after new year before we can actually see other see people.\n\n\"We'll be monitored all the time to make sure our recovery is going well enough. We've got a baby immune system now and we just have to be really, really careful.\n\n\"We've overcome the big hurdle, the one that really punished the body. Now it's time to repair it and hopefully get back to a normal life.\"", "A high pressure device called a diamond anvil cell was used to compress and alter the properties of hydrogen-rich materials\n\nScientists have found the first material that displays a much sought-after property at room temperature.\n\nIt is superconducting, which means electrical current flows through it with perfect efficiency - with no energy wasted as heat.\n\nAt the moment, a lot of the energy we produce is lost as heat because of electrical resistance.\n\nSo room temperature \"superconducting\" materials could revolutionise the electrical grid.\n\nUntil this point, achieving superconductivity has required cooling materials to very low temperatures. When the property was discovered in 1911, it was found only at close to the temperature known as absolute zero (-273.15C).\n\nSince then, physicists have found materials that superconduct at higher - but still very cold - temperatures.\n\nThe team behind this latest discovery says it's a major advance in a search that has already gone on for a century.\n\n\"Because of the limits of low temperature, materials with such extraordinary properties have not quite transformed the world in the way that many might have imagined,\" said Dr Ranga Dias, from the University of Rochester, in New York State.\n\n\"However, our discovery will break down these barriers and open the door to many potential applications.\"\n\nDr Dias added that room temperature superconductors \"can definitely change the world as we know it\".\n\nIn the US, electrical grids lose more than 5% of their energy through the process of transmission. So tackling this loss could potentially save billions of dollars and have an effect on the climate.\n\nThe scientists observed the superconducting behaviour in a carbonaceous sulphur hydride compound at a temperature of 15C.\n\nHowever, the property only appeared at extremely high pressures of 267 billion pascals - about a million times higher than typical tyre pressure. This obviously limits its practical usefulness.\n\nSo Dr Dias says the next goal will be to find ways to create room temperature superconductors at lower pressures, so they will be economical to produce in greater volume.\n\nThese materials could have many other applications. These include a new way to propel levitated trains - like the Maglev trains that \"float\" above the track in Japan and Shanghai, China. Magnetic levitation is a feature of some superconducting materials.\n\nAnother application would be faster, more efficient electronics.\n\n\"With this kind of technology, you can take society into a superconducting society where you'll never need things like batteries again,\" said co-author Ashkan Salamat of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.\n\nThe results are published in the prestigious journal Nature.\n\nScientists were able to observe superconducting behaviour at room temperature in the lab", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Face masks are now required in workplace areas such as canteens, with the rules set to extend to corridors\n\nFace coverings must now be worn in workplace canteens in Scotland under new rules that have come into force.\n\nOther communal workplace areas such as corridors will also be included in the restrictions from Monday.\n\nBut the rules on wearing face coverings at wedding and civil partnership ceremonies have been relaxed slightly.\n\nIt means the couple will no longer have to cover their faces during the ceremony so long as they are at least 2m away from everyone else.\n\nFace coverings were already required in a number of public settings in Scotland, such as shops and on public transport.\n\nThey must also be worn in secondary schools by adults and all pupils in areas such as corridors and communal areas where physical distancing is difficult to maintain.\n\nThere are exemptions from all of the rules for young children and people with certain health conditions.\n\nThe new workplace restrictions mean that everyone must cover their face in work canteens unless they are sitting at a table - similar to the rules for cafes - and in most other communal areas.\n\nThe measures were announced on Thursday by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who said they were needed as part of the response to an increase in the number of cases and deaths across the country in recent weeks.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nMs Sturgeon said the country was in a \"precarious\" position and facing a \"critical moment\" in the battle to contain the virus, with \"tough decisions\" needed from government.\n\nA further 1,196 cases of the virus were recorded on Friday, bringing the total number since the pandemic began to 45,232.\n\nThe number of people in hospital with the virus has increased by 27 to 629 since Thursday, with 58 patients being treated in intensive care - an increase of six.\n\nThe deaths of nine more people who died after testing positive for Covid-19 have also been registered, bringing the total under that measure to 2,594.\n\nPubs and restaurants across the central belt of Scotland have been closed until at least 26 October, with tough restrictions placed on licensed premises elsewhere in the country.\n\nAnd strict rules on household mixing that were introduced three weeks ago mean that people are generally not allowed to visit other homes.\n\nCouples who are getting married or entering civil partnerships no longer need to cover their faces during the ceremony\n\nMs Sturgeon has said that these measures - particularly the most recent ones for pubs and restaurants - will not yet be having an impact on the number of cases of the virus that are being detected.\n\nShe has also warned that tougher measures may have to be introduced in the future, and that the country will not return to normal when the current restrictions on licensed premises expire on 26 October.\n\nThe Scottish government intends to introduce a tiered system of restrictions at that point, similar to the one that came into force in England earlier this week.\n\nIt will include plans to \"strengthen and improve the effectiveness\" of existing measures, and to improve compliance with the rules - particularly around self-isolation.\n\nThe English system has been highly controversial, with Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham threatening to \"stand firm\" against plans to move it into the highest Tier 3 category of restrictions.\n\nMr Burnham has described the tiered strategy as being \"flawed\" and \"unfair\", and has called for greater financial support to be given by the UK government to people affected by tougher rules.\n\nHowever, neighbouring Lancashire has agreed a deal to enter Tier 3, the BBC has been told.\n\nAn official announcement on the new measures is expected later.\n\nIt will become the second part of England, after the Liverpool City Region, to go into Tier 3.", "British Airways has been fined £20m ($26m) by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for a data breach which affected more than 400,000 customers.\n\nThe breach took place in 2018 and affected both personal and credit card data.\n\nThe fine is considerably smaller than the £183m that the ICO originally said it intended to issue back in 2019.\n\nIt said \"the economic impact of Covid-19\" had been taken into account.\n\nHowever, it is still the largest penalty issued by the ICO to date.\n\nThe incident took place when BA's systems were compromised by its attackers, and then modified to harvest customers' details as they were input.\n\nIt was two months before BA was made aware of it by a security researcher, and then notified the ICO.\n\nThe data stolen included log in, payment card and travel booking details as well name and address information.\n\nA subsequent investigation concluded that sufficient security measures, such as multi-factor authentication, were not in place at the time.\n\nThe ICO noted that some of these measures were available on the Microsoft operating system that BA was using at the time.\n\n\"When organisations take poor decisions around people's personal data, that can have a real impact on people's lives. The law now gives us the tools to encourage businesses to make better decisions about data, including investing in up-to-date security,\" said Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham.\n\nBritish Airways said it had alerted customers as soon as it had found out about the attack on its systems.\n\n\"We are pleased the ICO recognises that we have made considerable improvements to the security of our systems since the attack and that we fully co-operated with its investigation,\" said a spokesman.\n\nData protection officer Carl Gottlieb said that in the current climate, £20m was a \"massive\" fine.\n\n\"It shows the ICO means business and is not letting struggling companies off the hook for their data protection failures,\" he said.\n\nIt's taken more than two years for BA to face the music over this extremely serious incident.\n\nThe company breached data protection law and failed to protect themselves from preventable cyber attack. It then failed to detect the hack until the damage was done to hundreds of thousands of customers.\n\nThe lag between incident and fine has raised eyebrows in privacy circles but I understand the Information Commissioner's Office has been working methodically to get it right. This is the commissioner's first major fine under the EU data regulation GDPR and was being watched closely by the rest of Europe as a potential landmark decision.\n\nThe final figure of £20m has come as a shock to many who were expecting it to be closer to the eye-watering £183m initially proposed but it is still a significant moment for data privacy and GDPR. Other companies will look at the fine as a shape of things to come if they also fail to protect customers.\n\nIn a post-Covid world, the ICO may not be as gentle.", "Rushed-through coronavirus aid may have led to the loss of billions of pounds of taxpayers' money through fraud and error, MPs have warned.\n\nThere was an \"astonishing lack of economic planning for a pandemic\" which led to \"hastily drawn up economic support schemes\", the Commons Public Accounts Committee said.\n\nThat meant \"unacceptable room for fraud against taxpayers,\" it added.\n\nBut the government said the schemes \"had provided a lifeline to millions\".\n\n\"We make no apology for the speed at which they were delivered,\" a spokesman said, adding that the government had rejected \"thousands of fraudulent claims\". \"Without them lives would have been ruined.\"\n\nSince the spring, the government has approved billions in spending and tax cuts to cushion the economy from the effects of the pandemic, including discounts to encourage dining out and income support for furloughed workers.\n\nThe furlough scheme, which is due to finish at the end of October, was designed to pay 80% of the wages of employees at firms hit by the pandemic.\n\nAccording to the latest figures, it sent £39.3bn to 1.2 million employers to the 20 September.\n\nBut a recent estimate by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) suggested that up to 10% of the money delivered by the scheme to mid-August - £3.5bn - may have been paid out in fraud or error.\n\nThe Commons Public Accounts Committee, which reviews government expenditure, described the figure as \"very worrying\".\n\nThe government should have been better prepared for the economic fall-out from the coronavirus outbreak, as a pandemic had been top of the national risk register for years, Committee chair Meg Hillier said\n\n\"Our finding of the astonishing lack of economic planning for a pandemic shows how the unacceptable room for fraud against taxpayers was allowed into the government's hastily drawn up economic support schemes,\" she said.\n\n\"I would like to see the government publish a list of the companies which received furlough money. Where taxpayers money is being used, transparency should be a given.\"\n\nThe committee also said when the outbreak occurred, HMRC switched staff from frontline tax collection activities to guiding taxpayers through the various Covid support schemes. But that has hurt the government's ability to collect revenue.\n\nHMRC has estimated the revenue it collected through its compliance work in the first three months of the tax year 2020-21 was down 51% on the same period the previous year, and warned the sums may never be recovered.\n\nThe committee said HMRC had administered the tax system based on the assumption that that the \"vast majority\" of taxpayers would be able to meet their obligations and that only a \"few exceptions\" would need to be pursued for non-compliance.\n\nIt said HMRC recently started issuing penalties for people not filing tax returns, because there has been a drop in the numbers being filed.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The PM says it is time to \"get ready” for trading arrangements with the EU to be \"more like Australia's\" from 1 January.\n\nTalks between the UK and EU over a post-Brexit trade agreement are \"over\", Downing Street has said.\n\nNo 10 argued there was \"no point\" in discussions continuing next week unless the EU was prepared to discuss the detailed legal text of a partnership.\n\nUK chief negotiator Lord Frost said he had told EU counterpart Michel Barnier there was now no \"basis\" for planned talks on Monday.\n\nNumber 10 said the two sides had agreed to talk again next week - by phone.\n\nEarlier, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted that the Brussels negotiating team would go to London after the weekend to \"intensify\" discussions.\n\nFrance's Europe minister Clément Beaune told BBC Newsnight that, while the EU would not pursue a deal at any cost, \"we will listen to what the UK side wants to say to us\".\n\nMeanwhile, ratings agency Moody's has downgraded the UK's credit status, citing falling economic strength due to the coronavirus pandemic and uncertainty over Brexit.\n\nThe prime minister had set this week's EU summit as the deadline for the two sides to agree a deal.\n\nBut there are still major disagreements over fishing rights and state help for businesses.\n\nAnd the UK government hardened up its message to the EU over the course of Friday.\n\nIn the morning, Boris Johnson said the country had to \"get ready\" to trade next year without an agreement, although he did not say the talks were over.\n\nHe suggested the EU was unwilling to consider seriously the UK's preferred option of a comprehensive free trade agreement based on the bloc's existing arrangement with Canada.\n\nThe UK, he added, must look at the \"alternative\" - which he suggested was Australia's much-more limited set of agreements with the EU.\n\nAs statements go, those four words from the prime minister's spokesman this afternoon were something of a bombshell.\n\nBut Michel Barnier, due to come to London next week to continue talks, might not be unpacking his briefcase just yet.\n\nThere's no doubt that Downing Street is sending the clearest signal possible that it expects the EU to make the next move.\n\nAnd the rhetoric accompanying the talks has reached a new level.\n\nBut both sides still want a deal, the process has not broken down and there is still time to reach an agreement.\n\nIt's one thing to declare the talks over; it's another thing to refuse to continue talking.\n\nThe prime minister's official spokesman took a tougher line with Brussels later in the day.\n\n\"There is only any point in Michel Barnier coming to London next week if he's prepared to address all the issues on the basis of a legal text in an accelerated way, without the UK required to make all the moves or to discuss the practicalities of travel and haulage,\" he said.\n\n\"If not, there is no point in coming.\"\n\nHe added: \"Trade talks are over. The EU have effectively ended them by saying they do not want to change their negotiating position.\"\n\nThe UK and EU had been hoping for a \"zero-tariff\" agreement to govern their trading relationship once the UK's post-Brexit transition period ends on 31 December.\n\nIf no deal is reached, they will operate on World Trade Organization rules, meaning tariffs are imposed.\n\nMrs von der Leyen (R) left the summit early after exchanging views with EU leaders\n\nBoris Johnson's public declaration that the UK should prepare for no deal did not cause great concern within EU circles.\n\nThe immediate response came in a tweet from Commission President Ursula von der Leyen who said it was full steam ahead for trade talks next week and that EU negotiators would be getting on the Eurostar to London as planned.\n\nBut the subsequent statement from the prime minister's official spokesman that the \"trade talks are over\" has left senior diplomats \"deeply unimpressed\", as one put it.\n\nAlthough \"we're getting used to being part of Johnson's pantomime\", they added.\n\nSome EU figures fear Boris Johnson still doesn't know if he actually wants a deal and is trying to buy time while he grapples with the Covid crisis.\n\nFollowing the hardening of the British position by No 10, France's President Macron called on the prime minister to make up his mind, while there was still time.\n\nMany in Brussels remain \"cautiously optimistic\" some sort of deal can be agreed, but any route there is now even harder to see.\n\nAfter the EU summit concluded on Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said it would be best to get a deal and that compromises on both sides would be needed.\n\nFrench President Emmanuel Macron said the UK needed a Brexit deal more than the EU did.\n\nFor Labour, shadow Cabinet Office minister Rachel Reeves urged the UK government to \"step back from the brink\" and \"stop posturing\".\n\n\"Any tariffs or any delays at the border will make it harder for goods to flow freely, whether those are foods or medicines,\" she said.\n• None What are the sticking points in Brexit trade talks?", "Police have been deployed to guard Sarcelles' synagogue\n\nFrench Muslims disgusted by the shootings in Paris may nonetheless have reasons for not embracing the slogan \"I am Charlie\".\n\n\"For a Muslim, the Prophet Muhammad is more important than their own parents,\" says the young man I meet in Sarcelles, his face twisted with contempt for the caricatures Charlie Hebdo published.\n\nHis friend, also 18, nods in agreement as we stand on a street in this Paris dormitory town, famous in France for its large Sephardic Jewish community.\n\n\"They were warned but they kept on mocking the prophet,\" he continues. \"But you cannot kill for that. You cannot go against press freedom in France. Still, they will have to answer to God.\"\n\n\"Real Muslims condemn these attacks,\" adds a third man, 22 and also Muslim. \"Those who committed them were insane. The attack on the kosher supermarket was a catastrophe for France and for the world. If you kill one man it is like you kill all of humanity. That is how we think.\"\n\nWe stand chatting openly on the pavement but nobody wants to be identified.\n\nMistrust of the media runs deep since an outburst of violence last July when police held rioters back from entering the town's Jewish area as they raged at Israel's bombardment of Gaza.\n\nAn invisible line marks the beginning of the Jewish area on Avenue Paul Valery, scene of the confrontation with the police. It starts just before a Holocaust monument and a synagogue.\n\nThere is no sign of trouble but it has been guarded by CRS riot police since last week.\n\nDavid, a kosher businessman I encounter, is so dismayed by the deterioration he perceives in community relations in France that he foresees a time when the \"great majority\" of its half-million or so Jews will emigrate.\n\nBut the Muslim teenager accuses French media of exaggerating the divisions in Sarcelles, where Jews now make up about a quarter of the 60,000-strong population. \"We say one thing, you might write another,\" he suggests, smiling.\n\nWhen I ask how he and his friends relate to the town's Jewish community, they say they have Jewish friends and \"nothing has changed\". \"Mosques get attacked but that doesn't make the news,\" he adds.\n\nThe older of the three speaks with real warmth of the French values of liberty, equality and fraternity which were schooled into him.\n\nSolidarity rallies were staged across France on Sunday, gathering millions of people\n\n\"When I go on holiday to Morocco, I know I could never live there because people make me feel French,\" he says of his ancestral country. \"But in France I am made to feel Moroccan,\" he adds.\n\n\"Am I going up to the Jewish area?\" asks the younger man. The Jews got the nice part of Sarcelles, he explains, a little sourly, while we got this, gesturing back to the long blocks of uniform five-storey council flats stretching down to the railway station.\n\nActually, there was a time when Jewish immigrants from the former French colonies lived there themselves in numbers, and some Jews still do, but the demographic has changed.\n\nBy the mosque near the station, old men sit and chat in Arabic.\n\nA Tunisian Muslim pensioner I meet gives two reasons why he shunned Sunday's national unity march in Paris, while condemning the attacks.\n\nLike the teenagers, he is indignant at the cartoons Charlie Hebdo published: \"It set out to provoke people for its own amusement.\n\n\"It attacked their religion. Make fun of yourselves if you will, but leave others alone. The media is like a car: you need to have a licence to be on the road, otherwise you will be a danger to others. Charlie had no licence to put people's lives at risk with their provocations.\"\n\nHis other reason is the presence at the march of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whom he calls \"the biggest terrorist in the world\" because of the Gaza conflict.\n\nHe insists he is not anti-Jewish, saying he had Jewish friends back in Tunisia.\n\nAnother Muslim pensioner I meet separately, a man from Morocco, says he has Jewish friends too, here in France, men he will \"have a coffee or beer with\".\n\nHe takes a rather detached view of Charlie Hebdo, dismissing it as a fringe paper he never wanted to read. \"But I am 200% in support of freedom of expression,\" he declares.\n\nMore Muslims might have attended the march had they not felt \"shame\", he suggests, at the actions of gunmen claiming to defend Islam. \"Muslims may also fear retaliation by jihadists if they take to the streets,\" he adds.\n\nHe himself is uneasy after the attacks. \"Nobody is safe now,\" he says before directing me to the nearest tram stop.\n\nAs my tram glides out of Sarcelles, I reflect that I have not seen a single \"I am Charlie\" poster or pencil symbol since my arrival yet the quiet battle of ideas here is no less intense than in Paris itself.", "Recent polls suggest Joe Biden has a significant and steady lead over Republican Donald Trump in this year's presidential race in both national preference and key swing-state surveys.\n\nDue to record-shattering fundraising, the Democrat also has a sizeable financial advantage, which means he'll be able to blanket the airwaves with his campaign message in the final weeks.\n\nElectoral analysts have been increasing their odds that Trump will lose his re-election bid. Nate Silver's Fivethirtyeight.com blog currently has Biden with an 87% chance of winning, while Decision Desk HQ puts him at 83.5%.\n\nIf all of this is painfully familiar to Democrats, it should be. At a similar point four years ago, Hillary Clinton was also predicted to have a high likelihood of victory. They remember how that turned out.\n\nCould history repeat itself with another Trump victory? If the president is taking the oath of office once again in January, here are five possible reasons why it happened.\n\nFour years ago, just 11 days before the election, FBI Director James Comey disclosed that his agency was reopening an investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state. For a week, related stories dominated the headlines and gave the Trump campaign room to breathe.\n\nWith just over two weeks before polls close in 2020, a similar seismic political event might be enough to propel Trump to victory.\n\nSo far, at least, the big surprises this month have been bad news for Trump - such as the revelation of his tax returns and his hospitalisation for Covid-19.\n\nHunter Biden and his father, then Vice-President Joe Biden, in 2016\n\nA New York Post article about a mysterious laptop containing an email that might link Joe Biden to his son Hunter's efforts to lobby for a Ukrainian gas company has been billed by some conservatives as such a campaign earthquake - but its questionable provenance and lack of specificity means it's unlikely to sway many voters.\n\nTrump has promised that there's more to come, however. If this is just an opening salvo, setting up direct evidence of wrongdoing by Biden while vice-president, that could be a different, bigger story.\n\nOr perhaps there's another, wholly unanticipated and shocking campaign development that's just about to burst.\n\nIf we could predict it, it wouldn't be a surprise.\n\nPractically since Biden secured the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, national polls have given him a steady lead over Trump. Even in key swing states, which have shown a tighter race, Biden has demonstrated a consistent lead frequently outside the margin of error.\n\nAs 2016 demonstrated, however, national leads are irrelevant and state-level polls can miss the mark.\n\nPredicting what a presidential electorate will look like - that is, who will actually show up to cast a ballot - is a challenge in every election, and some pollsters got it wrong last time, undercounting the number of white, non-college-educated voters who would turn out for Trump.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Can we believe the polls this time?\n\nAlthough the New York Times predicts Biden's current margins would protect him from even a 2016-level misfire, pollsters have some new obstacles to overcome in 2020.\n\nMany Americans, for instance, are planning to vote by mail for the first time. Republicans are already promising to aggressively challenge mail-in ballots to prevent what they say could be the potential for widespread fraud - something Democrats have said is really an effort at voter suppression.\n\nIf voters fill out their forms incorrectly or do not follow proper procedure, or there is delay or disruption in mail delivery, it could lead to otherwise valid ballots being discarded. Understaffed or limited in-person polling places could also make it more difficult to vote on election day, discouraging Americans who had been considered by pollsters to be \"likely voters.\"\n\nThe dust has now settled from the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden more than two weeks ago, and the president is the one who got the dirtiest.\n\nPolls indicate Trump's aggressive, interrupting style didn't play well with suburban women, who are a key voting demographic in this campaign. Meanwhile, Biden held up adequately under fire, assuaging concerns among voters - played up by Republicans - that he had lost a step in his advancing age.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"Shut up, man\" and other insults and interruptions from the first debate\n\nTrump missed an opportunity to change his first-debate impressions when he backed out of the second scheduled debate because it had been switched from in-person to a \"virtual format\". He'll have one more chance on the big stage next Thursday and will have to make it count.\n\nIf Trump presents a calmer, more presidential demeanour and Biden comes unglued or has some particularly dramatic gaffe, the balance of the race could possibly tilt in Trump's favour.\n\nEven with polls showing an advantage for Biden, there are enough states where Trump is ahead or within the margin of error that - if things break just the right way for the president - the Electoral College arithmetic could work out for him.\n\nEven though Trump lost the national popular vote last time around, he had a comfortable margin in the Electoral College, where each state gets a number of votes based on their population.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Who really decides the US election? A look at which voters matter\n\nSome of the swing states he won - like Michigan and Wisconsin - seem to be out of reach this time. But if he can claw out narrow victories in the rest, turning out even more white non-college voters in places like Pennsylvania and Florida, he can reach the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the White House.\n\nThere are even scenarios where he and Biden each get 269 votes, creating a tie that would be decided by the state delegations to House of Representatives, a majority of which would probably side with Trump.\n\nBiden has run a remarkably well disciplined campaign so far.\n\nWhether it's by design or due to the realities imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, a candidate known to be gaffe-prone has been able to largely stay out of the spotlight and avoid situations where his mouth can get him in trouble.\n\nBut Biden is now hitting the campaign trail in earnest. With more exposure comes a greater risk of saying or doing something that costs him at the polls.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What do young Democrats think of Joe Biden?\n\nBiden's electoral coalition is a hodgepodge of suburban moderates, disaffected Republicans, traditional working-class Democrats, ethnic minorities and liberal true believers. That's a lot of different and conflicting interests that could be stirred to anger if he gives them reason to.\n\nThen there's the chance that, under the fatigue of the campaign trail, Biden shows his age and again raises concern about whether he is up to the task of being president. If he does, the Trump campaign will be poised to pounce.\n\nThe Biden campaign may feel it just has to run out the clock, and the White House will be theirs. But if they stumble, they wouldn't be the first political team to find a way to snatch improbable defeat from the jaws of what seemed certain victory.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "Two wards in Altnagelvin's north wing are now being used to treat Covid-19 patients\n\nHospital admissions of patients with coronavirus in NI's Covid-19 hotspot are \"doubling every three to four days\", the Western Trust has said.\n\nThirty-one patients are now being treated for coronavirus at Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry - five people are in intensive care.\n\nTwo additional wards at Altnagelvin have been opened to treat coronavirus patients.\n\nA third ward has been identified for further admissions, the trust said.\n\nThere have been 3,161 confirmed cases in the Derry and Strabane council area since March - 1,463 of them were diagnosed in the past seven days.\n\nThree people have reported to have died in Derry and Strabane since Friday after testing positive for coronavirus, according to daily figures from the Department of Health.\n\nLast week, the Derry and Strabane council area was placed under tighter restrictions to help curb the growing number of cases.\n\nBut the infection rate in Derry and Strabane is continuing to rise.\n\nDirector of acute services, Geraldine McKay, said the rate of infection was \"increasing at pace\".\n\n\"We have revised the Altnagelvin surge plan to indicate that,\" she said.\n\n\"There are two wards in the north wing that are now Covid wards, we also have a further third ward identified in the south building.\"\n\nA total of 1,463 cases of coroanvirus have been diagnosed in Derry and Strabane over the past seven days.\n\nShe said both the trust's acute hospitals - Altnagelvin and the South West Acute Hospital in County Fermanagh - are \"right in the middle of the surge at this time\".\n\n\"Altnagelvin is at red, the South West at amber,\" she added.\n\nThe Western Trust has previously warned that it is facing increased staff pressures, as rising levels of Covid-19 in the community mean more and more staff are being asked to self-isolate.\n\nOn Monday the trust confirmed a total of 460 staff, across all disciplines, are not able to work at present - 345 at Altnagelvin and 115 at the South West hospital.\n\nNot all staff are absent because of Covid-19, the trust said, but it has had \"a major impact on those numbers\".\n\nElective orthopaedic inpatient services have been suspended and restrictions on visiting at the trust are now also in place as part of its surge plan.\n\n\"Unfortunately we have seen a growing number of incidents where our own staff have been faced with verbal abuse and aggression regarding some of the restrictions around visiting,\" Brian McFettridge, assistant director in critical care at Altnagelvin Hospital said.\n\nHe added: \"We would ask the public to be patient with us and to be kind\".", "Dutt is one of India's most bankable stars\n\nBollywood star Sanjay Dutt has confirmed he has cancer after weeks of speculation by the Indian press.\n\nIn an Instagram video, the 61-year-old actor of more than 150 films said he would \"beat the disease soon\". Dutt also said he would begin shooting for his next film in November.\n\nIn August Dutt was tested for Covid-19 after he reported some difficulty in breathing. He tested negative.\n\nHe was subsequently tested at Mumbai's Lilavati hospital for other illnesses.\n\nAmid unconfirmed media reports that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer, Dutt said in August he was \"taking a short break from work for medical treatment\".\n\nThe actor and his wife Maanayata issued separate statements, urging the star's fans \"not to worry or unnecessarily speculate\" about his condition.\n\nIn the recent video recorded at his hairstylist Aalim Hakim's salon, Dutt pointed a camera at a scar running from his left eyebrow to the side of his head.\n\n\"This is a recent scar in my life. But I will beat it. I will be out of this cancer soon,\" he said.\n\nHe actor added that he was \"happy to be on the set again\" for his upcoming film.\n\nHe is known as one of Bollywood's most bankable stars, but his acting came to an abrupt halt when he had to return to prison in 2013 to finish a five-year jail sentence. He was convicted of firearms offences linked to the 1993 Mumbai blasts which killed 257 people and injured 713.\n\nYet, he successfully re-launched his career in 2016 after getting out.\n\nHe signed several new films with some of them doing extremely well at the box office. A biopic on his life, starring actor Ranbir Kapoor, was also a massive hit.\n\nThe actor has openly talked about his problems with drug addiction and his conviction in his interviews. He said these problems only made him stronger.\n\nHe has also witnessed two cancer-related deaths in his family. His mother Nargis died of pancreatic cancer in 1981 - just days before he made his Bollywood debut.\n\nHis first wife Richa Sharma also died of brain cancer.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Terry Thomas is struggling to care for June Lavelle-Lepsa and fears she could end up in hospital\n\nA man is struggling to care for his seriously ill partner after waiting years for a simple cataract operation left him almost blind.\n\nTerry Thomas, 72, from Menai Bridge on Anglesey, lost the sight in his right eye when he was 21.\n\nHe was told two and a half years ago he needed surgery on his left eye but it has been repeatedly cancelled.\n\nBetsi Cadwaladr University health board apologised and said Covid-19 had disrupted its services.\n\nMr Thomas initially waited 18 months for the 20-minute operation in February but it was cancelled the day it was due to happen and rescheduled for 23 March.\n\nHowever the UK's coronavirus lockdown began that day and Mr Thomas' operation was cancelled again. He has now been told the doctor due to perform the surgery has left.\n\nMr Thomas' partner June Lavelle-Lepsa, also 72, has been diagnosed with motor neurone disease which has progressed rapidly, and she now uses a wheelchair and is unable to speak.\n\nHis deteriorating eyesight has even resulted in him giving his partner the wrong medication.\n\n\"It's extremely difficult,\" Mr Thomas, a retired lecturer in forest economy, said.\n\n\"I can't read anything. I'm responsible for giving her her medication. Already I've given her the wrong medication on a couple of occasions because I can't see it.\"\n\nSince her diagnosis, Ms Lavelle-Lepsa has received \"fantastic\" care and home adaptations, Mr Thomas said.\n\nBut in contrast, Mr Thomas feels the way his condition has been dealt with is \"inept, totally inept\".\n\n\"It's making me angry, cross and very, very disappointed.\"\n\nMr Thomas' GP has contacted the eye service to stress the pressing need for the operation, and Mr Thomas visited Ysbyty Gwynedd in Bangor in person to explain the situation.\n\nHe said the staff he spoke to there were \"profusely apologetic\" but said: \"You've got no care. Your consultant doesn't work here any more and we can't find anyone to do it\".\n\nWith his partner's health deteriorating further, Mr Thomas says the need for his cataract to be sorted out is greater than ever.\n\n\"It's making very day that much more difficult and that much more frustrating for her,\" he said.\n\nArpan Guha, acting executive medical director at Betsi Cadwaladr health board, said: \"We apologise to Mr Thomas for the delay to his surgery.\n\n\"We understand this is an upsetting time for our patients who are experiencing longer waits than anticipated due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\n\"Covid-19 has caused disruption to our services and we are working hard to prioritise our waiting lists so that we can offer patients access to treatments.\n\n\"However, regrettably, some patients will experience longer waits to be seen for their treatment.\"\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"Time is of the essence\" for Manchester - Boris Johnson\n\nBoris Johnson says the spread of coronavirus in Greater Manchester is \"grave\" and he may \"need to intervene\" if new measures are not agreed.\n\nThe prime minister urged mayor Andy Burnham to \"engage constructively\" with the government over the region entering \"very high\" tier three measures.\n\nHe said the situation was worsening every day and \"time is of the essence\".\n\nMr Burnham, who wants more financial aid for workers affected, said regional leaders will meet No 10 at \"any time\".\n\nMeasures under tier three include pub closures and a ban on household mixing indoors, in private gardens and in most outdoor venues. Liverpool City Region was the first of England's regions to enter the very high alert level.\n\nLancashire has agreed to move into tier three from Saturday with a financial support package worth £42m. Around 1.5 million people, including those living in Blackburn, Blackpool, Burnley, Lancaster and Preston, will be affected by the new rules.\n\nSpeaking at a Downing Street briefing on Friday, Mr Johnson said he understood the \"reluctance\" of local leaders to put the region under tougher restrictions and said it would be \"far from a pain-free course of action\".\n\nHe warned: \"Of course, if agreement cannot be reached I will need to intervene in order to protect Manchester's hospitals and save the lives of Manchester's residents.\n\n\"But our efforts would be so much more effective if we work together.\"\n\nRevealing that a deal had not been reached between No 10 and the region's leaders, Mr Johnson said it was time for action to be taken.\n\n\"Each day that passes before action is taken means more people will go to hospital, more people will end up in intensive care and tragically more people will die,\" he said.\n\nIn a joint statement with Greater Manchester's deputy mayors and council leaders, Mr Burnham said they had sought a further meeting with Downing Street officials - and this did not happen.\n\n\"We can assure the prime minister that we are ready to meet at any time to try to agree a way forward,\" they said.\n\nThey said they had done \"everything within our power to protect the health of our residents\" but are not convinced that closing pubs and bars is the only way to protect hospitals.\n\nInstead, they want other measures like shielding to be considered, and tougher penalties on venues that do not comply to Covid regulations, including instant closure powers.\n\n\"We firmly believe that protecting health is about more than controlling the virus and requires proper support for people whose lives would be severely affected by a tier three lockdown,\" they said, adding that the current proposals do not \"provide adequate support\".\n\nAndy Burnham says northern England has been treated with contempt\n\nThe latest government figures showed there were 15,650 new cases reported on Friday, bringing the total to 689,257.\n\nThere were a further 136 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test, bringing the total to 43,429.\n\nMr Johnson said he hoped the most stringent \"very high\" restrictions could be lifted as quickly as possible for the affected regions.\n\nHe said: \"The amount by which we need to reduce the R is not as big as it was right back in the beginning of the spread of this disease.\n\n\"If we all work together on the measures we have outlined we can definitely do it.\"\n\nThe reproduction (R) number has risen slightly to 1.3-1.5, with growth of the epidemic still widespread across the country.\n\nThe PM said he wanted to avoid another national lockdown \"if at all possible\" amid calls for a circuit-breaker - a short, limited lockdown - across the country.\n\nHe said he disagreed with those who argued in favour of a national lockdown \"instead of targeted local action\", insisting: \"Closing businesses in Cornwall where transmission is low will not cut transmission in Manchester\".\n\nMr Johnson said that while he could not \"rule anything out\", he wanted to avoid a national lockdown because of \"the damaging health, economic and social effects it would have\".\n\nThe UK government's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said during the briefing that the nation is in a \"different situation\" from when the Sage group of scientists recommended a two-to-three week national \"circuit break\" to stop the spread of coronavirus.\n\nHe said the situation had changed, adding: \"We recommended in September taking a circuit break. The idea there was that actually a two-week interruption would set cases back probably to the levels they were in August and then at those levels, test and trace is more effective to keep control.\n\n\"Where we are now is of course a different situation. It's crucial that where the R is above 1 and the numbers are high we get R below 1 for all the reasons that have been outlined, including of course the hospitalisations which are increasing. So it's crucial that's done, and there are a number of ways that can be done.\"\n\nHe added that would only be achieved by combining \"tier three baseline conditions\" suggested by the government with some extra measures agreed in an affected region using \"local knowledge and local insight\".\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nThe PM said accepting increased coronavirus restrictions was the \"right and responsible\" measure to protect the NHS.\n\nHe added: \"Without action, there is no doubt that our NHS would soon be struggling to treat the sheer number of people seriously ill with Covid.\n\n\"Non-Covid treatments and surgeries would need to be cancelled to cope and many more people would die.\"\n\nLabour's shadow health minister Alex Norris MP said it was \"damaging\" for Mr Johnson to avoid a full lockdown and that the regional approach is not enough.\n\n\"We need this circuit-breaker to give us time to sort these significant problems in testing and tracing,\" he said. \"We've had the worst week last week for tracing. The system's falling over. The prime minister is desperate to avoid lockdown just as he was at the beginning of the pandemic - but we know that that delay at the beginning was really damaging.\"\n\nOn Thursday, London, Essex, York and parts of Surrey, Derbyshire and Cumbria were moved up to tier two and will face tougher measures from Saturday.\n\nMore than half of England's population will now be living under high or very high-alert restrictions.\n\nThe PM also revealed that the UK is developing the capacity to manufacture millions of new fast turnaround tests for coronavirus - with some saliva tests able to deliver results in 15 minutes.\n\nHe said distribution and trials of the tests would start over \"the next few weeks\" and would enable NHS and care home staff to be tested \"more frequently\".\n\nSchoolchildren and university students would also be able to be tested, he said, to help keep education \"open safely over the winter\".", "The BBC cannot push issues of race \"under the rug\" any longer, says DJ Sideman - who quit the corporation in protest at the use of a racial slur in a news report this summer.\n\nThe DJ said the BBC should improve diversity among senior managers and introduce racial sensitivity training for its employees.\n\nHe quit 1Xtra in August when a reporter repeated racist language allegedly used in a hit-and-run attack in Bristol.\n\nThe BBC initially defended the decision to use the N-word, saying it had been made following careful consideration and with the approval of the victim and their family.\n\nSideman, whose real name is David Whitely, announced he was stepping down from his radio show over the incident on 8 August. In a statement, he said the \"action and the defence of the action feels like a slap in the face of our community\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. DJ Sideman: \"On this occasion I just don't think that I can look the other way\"\n\nA day later, the BBC's then-director general Tony Hall overruled the BBC's defence of the report, and apologised for the use of the slur.\n\n\"Every organisation should be able to acknowledge when it has made a mistake,\" he said in an email to staff.\n\n\"We made one here. It is important for us to listen - and also to learn. And that is what we will continue to do.\"\n\nThe corporation has subsequently strengthened its guidance on the use of racist language. The new rules \"now carry a presumption that such language will not normally be used\" unless a judgement at divisional director level had ruled otherwise.\n\nWhen asked what BBC bosses should do to avoid similar controversies in the future, Sideman told the PA news agency the corporation should show \"understanding of the times that we are in\".\n\nHe added: \"Things are changing and black people's issues are not an issue you can push under the rug any more.\n\n\"It is something that you have to address, it's something that you have to have an action plan for or these things will happen again and it will be embarrassing for you.\"\n\nThe DJ said that, while there is institutional racism in the BBC, the same is true of \"almost every organisation in this country\" and he did not intend \"slander or malign\" the broadcaster.\n\nHe added that he had been surprised by the response to his resignation - which was originally announced in a video posted to social media.\n\n\"I look back on what I did and think wow, people really amplified my voice and made it louder and made it have more impact,\" he said.\n\n\"If social media didn't make the big stink of it that they did, then it wouldn't have been as monumental a thing as it was with the BBC apologising just over 24 hours later.\"\n\nSideman wasn't the only BBC staff member to criticise the report.\n\nLarry Madowo, a US-based correspondent for BBC World, said in a tweet that the BBC's rules on racially-sensitive language were being applied inconsistently.\n\n\"The BBC didn't allow me, an actual black man, to use the N-word in an article when quoting an African American who used it,\" he said. \"But a white person was allowed to say it on TV because it was 'editorially justified'.\"\n\nSideman expressed regret that it had taken actions like these to prompt the BBC to change its mind.\n\n\"18,000 people complained the right way, the boring way,\" he told PA.\n\n\"They went on a website and typed in a long, boring email. What I did was a video on Instagram.\n\n\"That to me says something about our society, that what I did caused more of a stink.\"\n\nIn response to his comments, the BBC said; \"We are committed to building inclusive, welcoming, modern and diverse organisation, which is why we have taken steps to change the editorial policy on offensive language, increased training for all staff, and introduced policies to improve representation on and off air.\n\n\"We have made progress in recent years, but we recognise there is more to do\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Coronavirus patients admitted to intensive care have a better chance of surviving now than they did in April, according to the dean of the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine.\n\nBut these gains levelled off over the summer, Dr Alison Pittard said.\n\nThe proportion of patients admitted to critical care who die fell by almost a quarter from the peak and as much as half in hospitals overall.\n\nIt is too soon to know the survival rate for patients admitted this autumn.\n\nA better understanding of the disease has allowed doctors to treat patients better, including using the steroid dexamethasone and less invasive types of ventilation.\n\nThe Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC), which reports on the outcomes of patients who end up in critical care units, has begun separating out the cases of people admitted after 1 September.\n\nThe Health Service Journal reported these figures, which it said suggested a dramatic fall in the proportion of patients dying between the first wave (up until the end of August) and the second (from 1 September).\n\nOn average, 39% of patients admitted to critical care died between the start of the pandemic and the end of August and this appears to have fallen to just under 12%.\n\nBut while this appears a dramatic fall at first glance, Dr Pittard cautioned this was most likely to be a product of the fact that not enough time has passed to know the outcomes of patients admitted to hospital since the beginning of September.\n\nMany will remain in intensive care and until a patient is either discharged or dies, they do not appear in the data.\n\nThough it is too soon to know what mortality will look like in the second wave, we do know that mortality was higher at the beginning of the first wave than it was at the end, she said.\n\nThe BBC previously reported this fall in the death rate among patients admitted to hospital with coronavirus, when University of Oxford researchers estimated it had fallen from 6% to 1.5% between the peak in April and June.\n\nIt is difficult to match deaths to hospital admissions in general, though, whereas critical care patients' outcomes are regularly reported.\n\nLooking at the outcomes of patients admitted to critical care, more than half were dying around the peak of the epidemic in April.\n\nBy the beginning of July it had fallen to about 40% and remained roughly at that level until the end of the summer.\n\nBased on a much smaller number of patients admitted between the 1 September and the start of October, the death rate now appears to be about a quarter of that level.\n\nHowever, Dr Pittard believes it is too soon to say whether this is a genuine fall.\n\n\"There are lots of reasons why the mortality rate reduced over time but the biggest thing is we have learnt more about the disease,\" Dr Pittard said.\n\n\"In the early days we were, almost immediately that people were admitted, putting them in ICU, sedating them and putting them on a ventilator.\n\n\"We started to use more non-invasive ventilation and patients were doing very well,\" she said.\n\nThat means more patients are treated using things like CPAP machines - a face mask with a pump that controls airflow - rather than being sedated and having a tube put into their airway.\n\n\"We saw the effect on blood clotting. We recognise the disease a lot earlier,\" Dr Pittard added.\n\nThe use of a steroid called dexamethasone which reduces inflammation is also thought to have contributed to falling death rates, although it is hard to say how much.\n\nAnd the type of patients ending up in hospital may be a factor too, as a much higher proportion were in the 30-59 age bracket in September, compared with the peak.\n\nBut it has been suggested that if intensive care units get too full, the death ratio could rise again.", "The regional facility at Belfast City Hospital's tower block was temporarily stood down in May\n\nNorthern Ireland's Nightingale hospital has been re-established due to Covid-19 pressures, Health Minister Robin Swann has said.\n\nThe Nightingale, at Belfast City Hospital's tower block, was stood down in May as cases began to decrease.\n\nMr Swann said there were now \"rapidly escalating pressures\" across all of NI's health trusts.\n\n\"It is not something I wanted to do - it was a decision I tried to hold off on for as long as possible,\" he said.\n\n\"The virus is rapidly and exponentially and urgent action was needed.\"\n\nNightingale hospitals are non-permanent facilities that were set up across the UK during the first wave of the pandemic.\n\nOn Tuesday, the Belfast Trust announced it was to use an intensive care unit in the Nightingale facility for its Covid patients, in a move which only affected the Belfast Trust area.\n\nMr Swann's announcement on Wednesday will see the facility reopen for Covid-19 admission from across Northern Ireland.\n\nThe decision comes as health chiefs warned that some services were beginning to suffer due to Covid-related pressures.\n\nOn Wednesday it was announced more restrictions would be placed on the hospitality industry and schools.\n\nMr Swann acknowledged the public had \"many questions, doubts and fears\" about the new restrictions.\n\n\"My heart goes out to all those businesses who will now come under even more pressure and to all those people whose lives and plans have been thrown up into the air,\" he said.\n\nThe deaths of another four people who tested positive for Covid-19 were reported by the Department of Health on Wednesday, bringing the death toll to 602.\n\nThe department also reported another record high in the number of newly-diagnosed cases, with 1,217 people testing positive.\n\nNI's chief scientific adviser said the increase in cases of Covid-19 cases in NI was not due to increased testing but instead \"reflect a genuine increase in community transmission\".\n\nNI's chief scientific adviser said the average number of daily cases recorded was currently 950\n\nProf Ian Young, who was alongside Mr Swann at the Stormont briefing, said testing had increased by 25% while cases had more than doubled.\n\n\"The average number of positive tests continues to rise and has now reached over 12% in the last seven days,\" he said.\n\n\"To put this into context, the World Health Organization suggests that anything over 5% reflects an epidemic which is out of control.\"\n\nProf Young said there had been a \"sustained and dramatic rise in the average number of cases\" being recorded in NI each day - he said the average was currently 950 cases per day.\n\nHe added the new restrictions \"don't represent a lockdown\" but were designed to reduce mixing between people to allow a chance to reduce the R-number down to less than one.\n\nR is the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to, on average.\n\n\"Ideally between 0.7 and 0.9 - that's the goal and we all have a role in achieving that,\" Prof Young said.\n\nNorthern Ireland's chief medical officer told the briefing new restrictions coming into force across NI could \"achieve the reset we need so badly\".\n\nDr Michael McBride said it would take two to three weeks before the effects of the measures became clear.\n\n\"It's time to wise up,\" he said.\n\n\"The new measures will only work if each one of us recommits to strictly following the health advice.\"", "The C-SPAN television network has suspended its political editor after he admitted to lying about his Twitter account being hacked last week.\n\nSteve Scully, tipped to moderate this week's presidential debate before it was cancelled, had appeared to solicit advice from a former Trump adviser.\n\nWhen the exchange prompted controversy, Scully suggested he had been hacked.\n\nIn a statement apologising, Scully said he had let down his colleagues. \"I ask for their forgiveness,\" he wrote.\n\nThe news comes on the same day that the political veteran had been scheduled to moderate the second debate between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The event was cancelled last week after the president refused to participate virtually following his Covid-19 diagnosis.\n\nLast week, the president criticised Scully, calling him a \"Never Trumper\" - invoking a label used for Republicans who refused to vote for Mr Trump in the 2016 election.\n\nScully responded, tagging Anthony Scaramucci, a former White House communications director and now a vocal critic of the president: \"@Scaramucci should I respond to Trump.\"\n\nIn his statement on Thursday, Scully said he had sent the tweet \"out of frustration\" after \"relentless criticism\" regarding his role as moderator, including from President Trump.\n\n\"The next morning when I saw that this tweet had created a new controversy, I falsely claimed that my Twitter account had been hacked,\" he wrote, apologising for these two \"errors in judgement\".\n\nSoon after Scully's suspension was announced, Mr Trump responded to the news, heralding his own \"good instincts\".\n\n\"I was right again! Steve Scully just admitted he was lying about his Twitter being hacked,\" the president wrote on Twitter, repeating past claims that the debate was \"rigged\".\n\nScully, seen here with Republican President George W Bush, had earned a reputation for balanced coverage\n\nIn a statement, C-SPAN said Scully had confessed to lying about the hack on Wednesday.\n\n\"We were very saddened by this news and do not condone his actions,\" it said in a statement, but pledged support for its star anchor. \"After some distance from this episode, we believe in his ability to continue to contribute to C-SPAN.\"\n\nScully has led the network's presidential election coverage for nearly 30 years and has developed a reputation for balanced coverage. It is unclear when he will return, but his suspension suggests he will sit out the network's election night programming on 3 November.", "People in Blackpool will be among those affected by the new rules\n\nLancashire has agreed to move into tier three - the top level of England Covid restrictions - from Saturday.\n\nThe \"very high\" alert level measures include pub closures and bans on household mixing indoors, in private gardens and most outdoor venues.\n\nHowever, gyms and leisure centres would not close, unlike in Liverpool City Region - the other area in tier three.\n\nSome local council leaders said they had been \"bullied\" into accepting the deal by Downing Street.\n\nHowever, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the government had \"worked intensively with local leaders\" to agree the move.\n\nHe added that an \"unrelenting rise in cases\" in the north-west England county had meant \"we must act now\".\n\nAround 1.5 million people, including those living in Blackburn, Blackpool, Burnley, Lancaster and Preston, will be affected by the new rules.\n\nThe Labour leaders of Preston, Pendle and South Ribble councils released statements saying they had been forced to accept a deal that would not be enough to stop the virus.\n\nPaul Foster, of South Ribble said: \"We have been bullied, harassed, threatened and blackmailed into moving into tier three.\"\n\nHe added: \"The discussions with government were a complete shambles and we were basically told if we didn't accept the restrictions we would have even more draconian measures imposed on us.\"\n\nHowever, Geoff Driver, the Conservative leader of Lancashire County Council, told the BBC: \"It's been a long drawn out process but I think we've got a good deal.\"\n\nHe said it involved a support package worth £42m, the area having initially been promised £12m, with £30m to help the businesses affected.\n\nMr Driver said Lancashire had also been promised more support for local test and trace and a specific ministerial team to deal with the outbreak in the county.\n\n\"What we've been able to do is to convince government that the measures we have in place to monitor such things as the gyms and the leisure centres are sufficient to ensure that they're not a source of infection,\" he added.\n\nThe new measures, which will be reviewed every two weeks, cover all parts of Lancashire:\n\nFurther restrictions may be agreed for particular regions in the top tier and in the Liverpool City Region, gyms and leisure centres have also been forced to close.\n\nMayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson tweeted: \"Liverpool City Region has demanded immediate clarification on why Lancashire gyms are allowed to stay open and Liverpool's close.\n\n\"Inconsistent mess - we now have tier three A and tier three B.\"\n\nSteve Rotheram, the mayor of the Liverpool City Region, said he was \"concerned that there appear to be differences between the two packages of measures, particularly the opening of gyms\".\n\n\"We have always been clear that we were given no choice about the specific package of measures that would be applied to us,\" he said.\n\nHowever, the prime minister's official spokesman said it was up to regional leaders to decide whether gyms should be closed.\n\n\"The purpose of the very high level is to allow for local, tailored interventions and they are determined on the basis of discussions with local authorities and based on local evidence,\" he said.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIt comes as talks between Greater Manchester leaders and central government over putting the region into tier three of England's three-tier system have stalled.\n\nGreater Manchester's mayor Andy Burnham wants more financial support for people affected before bringing in tougher rules.\n\nForeign Secretary Dominic Raab accused Mr Burnham of \"effectively trying to hold the government over a barrel over money and politics\".\n\nOn Thursday, London, Essex, York and parts of Surrey, Derbyshire and Cumbria were moved up to tier two and will face tougher measures from Saturday.\n\nMore than half of England's population will now be living under high or very high-alert restrictions.\n\nMeanwhile, First Minister Mark Drakeford said Wales was facing a two-week national lockdown, calling it a \"fire break\".\n\nHe said a decision was likely to be made on Monday, with discussions continuing with health officials, scientific advisors and councils over the weekend.\n\nIt comes as a ban on travelling to Wales from coronavirus hotspots elsewhere in the UK comes into effect on Friday evening.\n\nIn Northern Ireland, pubs, restaurants and cafes will only be allowed to offer takeaway and delivery services for four weeks from 18:00 BST on Friday.\n\nTighter rules around face coverings have come into effect in Scotland, making them mandatory in workplace setting such as canteens.\n\nOn Thursday, a further 18,980 cases and 138 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were reported across the UK.", "Coronavirus infections are continuing to rise rapidly, with an estimated 27,900 new cases a day in England, the Office for National Statistics says.\n\nThis figure is far higher than the number of confirmed cases announced by the government each day.\n\nThe R number has risen slightly to 1.3-1.5, with growth of the epidemic still widespread across the country.\n\nIt comes as the highest level of restrictions are introduced in more of the UK.\n\nSir Patrick Vallance, the government's chief scientific adviser, said 'R' was not growing as fast as it would be without the measures people were following.\n\nBut he said \"we are not where we need to be\", adding there was \"more work to do\".\n\nThe increase in people testing positive in recent weeks is being driven by high rates in older teenagers and young adults, the ONS infection survey says.\n\nIt found steep increases in infection rates in the north west, the north east, Yorkshire and the Humber.\n\nNew cases of the virus have gone up by 60% in a week, according to the ONS, based on its survey of people in random households with or without symptoms.\n\nIt estimates that one in 160 people in England had the virus in the week to 8 October - an increase on one in 240 the previous week.\n\nFor the same week, the ONS estimates one in 390 people had the virus in Wales and one in 250 in Northern Ireland - both an increase on the week before.\n\nThe ONS survey doesn't cover Scotland. As confirmed cases and hospital admissions rise there, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says Scotland is in a \"precarious\" position in its fight to contain Covid-19.\n\nAn app which tracks the Covid symptoms of four million users estimates there are more than 27,000 new cases per day in the UK.\n\nIts latest figures, for the two weeks to 11 October, found the fastest acceleration of cases in the north west, while Scotland, Wales, London and the Midlands were also increasing, but more slowly.\n\nProf Tim Spector from King's College London, who founded the Covid Symptom study app, said there was no longer the \"exponential increases\" of a couple of weeks ago - but the data still shows \"new cases continuing to rise\".\n\nOther estimates, from a large study by Imperial College London and a group of scientists advising government, suggest new cases could be even higher - up to 74,000 a day.\n\nA different measures of cases - the number of people with symptoms to test positive for coronavirus - rose by 15,650 on Friday, the lowest for four days.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid symptoms: What are they and how long should I self-isolate for?\n\nThe R number is the average number of people infected by each person testing positive for the virus. An R number above 1 means the epidemic is growing.\n\nAt the peak of the epidemic back in April, the R number is thought to have been around 3.\n\nFrom May up until mid-August after the national lockdown, it stayed below 1, but has been rising steadily since. All the restrictions in place around the UK are now an attempt to reduce transmission of the virus between people and get it back to below 1.\n\nHow have you been affected by the issues relating to coronavirus? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n• None How will the vulnerable be protected from Covid? And other questions", "JD Wetherspoon has reported its first annual pre-tax loss since 1984 as it laid bare the impact of coronavirus restrictions on the pubs industry.\n\nIt revealed a £105.4m loss on sharply lower sales in the year to 26 July.\n\nWetherspoon's chairman Tim Martin railed against changes in rules to stop the spread of the coronavirus, which he said were \"confusing\".\n\nFrom Saturday, households in London will not be allowed to mix indoors, including in pubs and restaurants.\n\nLondon and Essex will come under Tier 2 restrictions while Liverpool has already been placed under tougher Tier 3 rules.\n\nSpeaking to the BBC's Today programme, Mr Martin said: \"There's massive confusion in the UK now because you've got the 'rule of six', Tier 2, Tier 3 - everyone's confused.\n\n\"I think you should concentrate on the basics which is social distancing. If you don't get too close to someone you won't get infected, that works better.\"\n\nThe loss after exceptional items is a sharp reversal from the £95.4m pre-tax profit reported in the previous year.\n\nWetherspoon's full-year results - which cover the first weeks after pubs were allowed to reopen on 4 July - also revealed that sales dropped by 30.6% to £1.2bn.\n\nThe company said that since reopening, like-for-like sales at its pubs were 15% lower compared to last year: \"With strong sales in the first few weeks, followed by a marked slowdown since the introduction of a curfew and other regulations.\"\n\nDuring that time, 66 Wetherspoon's staff across 50 pubs tested positive for coronavirus. The company employs 41,000 staff and had reopened 861 of its pubs.\n\nMr Martin said that although the safety measures introduced to allow reopening were tough on pubs \"because it reduced capacity dramatically\", the industry was \"gradually getting used to it\".\n\n\"Trade was improving and social distancing was working and infections were low,\" he said. \"But what's happened under emergency powers, the government is making a lot of changes which we think in the industry are arbitrary [and] don't work, like the curfew and that's making life almost impossible.\"\n\nUK Hospitality, which represents the industry, has warned that the new Tier 2 restrictions due to come into force in London and Essex could lead to 250,000 people losing their jobs unless firms are given additional financial support.\n\nThe hospitality industry has been one of the worst hit sectors during the pandemic. Earlier this week, Marston's, the pubs and brewery group, said up to 2,150 furloughed staff were at risk of losing their jobs.\n\nWetherspoon said recently that up to 450 of its staff who work at pubs in airports were facing cuts as \"sales are generally much lower and where a high percentage is closed\".\n\nThe company confirmed on Friday that 108 head office staff have been made redundant.", "A statue on Place de la Republique, Paris, symbolically \"gagged\" by protesters after the Charlie Hebdo attacks\n\nWhen French President Francois Hollande gave a sombre televised address to the nation, hours after the shocking attack on Charlie Hebdo, he vowed to protect the message of freedom that the magazine's journalists represented.\n\nCharlie Hebdo's \"heroes\" had defended freedom of speech and this was an attack on the entire republic, he said.\n\nBut since the start of the week, 54 people have been detained and several jailed for a variety of remarks, shouted out in the street or posted on social media, and France's judiciary has been lampooned for what appear to be double standards.\n\nThe so-called comic Dieudonne M'bala M'bala will face trial for writing \"I feel like Charlie Coulibaly\", hours after 3.7 million French citizens had taken to the streets behind the \"je suis Charlie\" rallying cry.\n\nHe said the posting was meant to be humorous. But in the context of his past convictions for anti-Semitism, the authorities saw it as a voice of support for one of the gunmen, Amedy Coulibaly, who had murdered four Jewish men in a kosher supermarket.\n\nDieudonne could face up to seven years in jail for his Facebook comment\n\nPrime Minister Manuel Valls set it out plainly: freedom of speech should not be confused with anti-Semitism, racism and Holocaust denial.\n\nBut Dieudonne has plenty of young fans who watch his shows and follow his social media posts, however tasteless they may be, and many in France saw his arrest as an example of double standards.\n\nAfter all, Charlie Hebdo's entire ethos has been tasteless lampooning of the establishment.\n\n\"Extremely clumsy to detain Dieudonne when you've just made the whole world march for freedom of speech,\" read one tweet.\n\nBut the crackdown extends way beyond a notorious comic with a string of convictions.\n\nThe justice ministry has revealed that a number of fast-track custodial sentences have been handed down in cities across France in the past few days for expressions of support for the gunmen.\n\nIn Toulouse alone, three men in their early twenties have been jailed, two of them for 10 months, for shouting obscenities at police.\n\nOne threatened to attack police with a Kalashnikov while another said the Kouachi brothers were \"just the start\".\n\nIt was in Toulouse that Islamist gunman Mohamed Merah killed seven people in a series of attacks in 2012, including one on a Jewish school.\n\nIn Nanterre, east of Paris, a man was sent to prison for a year for posting a video on Facebook that mocked policeman Ahmed Merabet, who was shot at point-blank range by one of the Kouachis.\n\nThe French government tightened anti-terror laws in November, clamping down on online comments\n\nHuman rights groups have been less than impressed with what would seem to be a knee-jerk response by the authorities after what Mr Valls admitted had been clear failings by the security services.\n\nFrance's League of Human Rights (LDH) has condemned the fast-track sentences, which it argues are handed down in dreadful conditions and largely apply to drunks or fools.\n\nBut while the sentences may look startling and in some cases even draconian, they are following the letter of an anti-terror law that was passed by the National Assembly as recently as last November.\n\nDirectly provoking or publicly condoning terrorism in France now commands a five-year jail term and a fine of €75,000. And if it is done online, the penalty can be extended to seven years and €100,000 (£76,000; $116,000).\n\nSo for the many French who did not feel \"je suis Charlie\", where does France now see the boundary between freedom of speech and condoning terrorism?\n\nThe right to say, write or print what you want is rooted in the declaration of rights that came with the 1789 French Revolution, but even then abuse of that freedom was limited by law.\n\nThose exceptions were defined in 1881 (in French) as defamation, slander and incitement to hate. There is also explicit reference to condoning crimes of war, crimes against humanity or collaboration with the enemy.\n\nNot everyone has felt comfortable with the \"je suis Charlie\" message in France\n\nHowever, not since the revolution has blasphemy been against the law in France, and according to Mr Valls it never will.\n\nThe restrictions on freedom of speech go well beyond those in the US. A former editor of Charlie Hebdo had to defend himself against incitement in 2007 after reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.\n\nSince November those restrictions have gone further still. What was previously a law against condoning terrorism in the media has been extended to social media too.\n\nAnd it will not just be careless tweets or Facebook posts that are caught in the crosshairs. US-based social media companies will be required to police their sites too.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: You may find there are restrictions\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson appeared confused over the rules for single parents living apart from their children during a Covid briefing.\n\nA questioner called Christopher, from Margate, Kent, asked what would happen where one parent lives in a high alert level area and the other medium.\n\nHe was told to check the government's website for guidance but that there are restrictions on such movements.\n\nBut government advice says there are exceptions for childcare arrangements.\n\nChristopher had asked if he could see his son, who lives in Essex, if either area moves from the medium level of restrictions to the higher tier two - as Essex will on Saturday.\n\nSpeaking at Downing Street, Mr Johnson said: \"Christopher, I think the guidance alas is that - you should go on the website obviously and check - but when cases go to a higher tier from the basic medium then there are restrictions on household contact.\n\n\"So depending on how you define your household you may find there are restrictions, but you really need to go onto the website to find out what's going on in Kent and what's going on in Essex in order to be absolutely sure.\"\n\nThe government advice for both areas in the \"high\" and \"very high\" Covid alert level specifies that there are exceptions to travel restrictions where children do not live in the same household as both their parents or guardians.\n\nThe regulations state that there is an exception for \"the purposes of arrangements for access to, and contact between, parents and children where the children do not live in the same household as their parents or one of their parents\".\n\nIt comes after an earlier incident, last month, when the prime minister apologised after making a mistake when talking to media about the rule of six in the north-east of England.", "Pubs and restaurants across the central belt were ordered to close last Friday\n\nThe Scottish government's £40m package for licensed premises affected by coronavirus restrictions is a \"drop in the ocean\", industry leaders have said.\n\nBusinesses such as pubs and restaurants will be able to apply for grants of up to £3,000 if they have been closed.\n\nThey will be to claim up to £1,500 if they are still open but are seeing reduced trade.\n\nThe Scottish Hospitality Group said the money \"would not touch the sides\" of what was needed.\n\nThe group, which represents some of the country's best known hospitality firms, also criticised a lack of clarity about when the grants - which open for applications next Tuesday - would actually be paid out.\n\nIt said this made it difficult for business owners to plan ahead.\n\nScotland's finance secretary, Kate Forbes, said she wanted to make sure businesses received the money \"as quickly as possible\".\n\nHowever, she acknowledged that it would not be enough to fully cover the income that licensed premises had lost either through closure or by having their opening hours restricted.\n\nPubs and restaurants in five health board areas across the central belt of Scotland have been closed for the past week, with tough restrictions placed on licensed premises elsewhere in the country.\n\nFirst Minister Nicola Sturgeon has already warned that things will not return to normal when the current restrictions expire on 26 October, with the Scottish government planning to bring in a tiered system of restrictions at that point - similar to the one already in place in England.\n\nThe first minister has warned that things will not return to normal when the current restrictions on licensed premises expire later this month\n\nScottish Hospitality Group spokesman Stephen Montgomery said funding support offered to the sector, which employs nearly 300,000 people in Scotland, was \"absolutely no good at all\".\n\nHe added: \"It's not going to touch the sides and we're looking at bringing redundancies forward.\n\n\"£40m may sound like a lot of money, but Liverpool City Council brought £40m over a weekend to support 3,000 businesses.\n\n\"In Scotland we've got £40m to support 20,000 businesses who are subject to restrictions of some kind.\"\n\nMr Montgomery also told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme that the industry had been \"absolutely crippled through no fault of our own\" by the restrictions.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nAnd he said businesses still do not know when they would receive the money, which is intended to see them through until+ 26 October, or what would happen after that date.\n\nHe added: \"It opens on 20 October but we don't know when we are going to get paid it.\n\n\"The people that are indirectly affected by it — how much they are going to get? When they are going to get it?\n\n\"This should have all been planned long before the announcement last week.\"\n\nHis concerns were echoed by James Brown, the managing director of Brewdog Bars, who said the £40m fund was a \"drop in the ocean\" for the industry.\n\nMany pubs and restaurants believe they have been unfairly treated by the current restrictions\n\nMr Brown added: \"The ones that are really going to struggle are the independent pubs - who are the lifeblood of our community - and the late night industry, which is on its knees.\n\n\"Nightclubs haven't been able to open since lockdown and there is no end in sight.\n\n\"We want to show our support and call for the government to provide more assistance. That £40m is a drop in the ocean for what is actually needed to help these businesses and keep jobs\".\n\nMs Forbes told BBC Scotland that she fully understood the concerns.\n\nShe added: \"The grant support will never replace all lost income and it can never be distributed fast enough because businesses are battling for survival and have been for many months.\n\n\"We want to get that money out the door as quickly as possible.\"\n\nMs Forbes said the size of the grants reflected that the current restrictions were intended to be a \"short, sharp intervention\".\n\nBut she said they would never be a replacement for the UK government's furlough scheme, which she said had been a \"lifeline\" for businesses.\n\nAnd she repeated her call for furlough to be fully extended by the UK government at the end of the month.\n\nThe Chancellor has already unveiled a replacement for the furlough scheme, which will end on 31 October\n\nUK Chancellor Rishi Sunak has unveiled plans for a new Job Support Scheme, which will replace the current furlough scheme from 1 November.\n\nUnder the scheme, the government will subsidise the pay of employees who are working fewer than normal hours due to lower demand.\n\nWorkers who do at least a third of their normal hours will be paid by their employer for those hours.\n\nThe government and the employer will also pay a third each for the hours they cannot work.\n\nIt means someone working a third of their hours would receive 77% of their pay, with the government grant capped at £697.92 per month.\n\nAll small and medium sized businesses will be eligible for the UK-wide scheme, which aims to stop mass job cuts when furlough ends.", "Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry is suspending all visits until further notice due to a surge in coronavirus cases in the area\n\nAltnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry is suspending all visits until further notice due to a surge in coronavirus cases in the area.\n\nVisiting is suspended \"due to the continuing rise in Covid-19 cases in the area,\" the Western Trust said.\n\nThe trust said some visits, with restrictions, can still be permitted in certain circumstances.\n\nVisiting is permitted for patients in end of life care, dementia patients and those with learning disabilities.\n\nPregnant women can also be accompanied by a nominated partner, children with one accompanied carer and vulnerable or elderly patients with communication difficulties.\n\nThe trust said anyone with symptoms should not visit a patient, and children are not permitted to visit.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Western Trust This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe time and length of the visit for anyone visiting a patient in palliative or end-of-life care must be agreed in advance with the ward sister or charge nurse.\n\nVisiting is also only permitted for patients with dementia or a learning disability, who would benefit from having a loved one at their bedside, for a short period of time.\n\nVulnerable or elderly patients with communication difficulties may also be accompanied by one person for the duration of their time in the emergency department.\n\nThe Western Trust said that visitation at other sites such as Gransha, the South West Acute Hospital and Omagh will not be suspended\n\nIn a statement, the trust said visits at other sites, such as Gransha Hospital, the South West Acute Hospital and Omagh Hospital and Primary Care Complex remain subject to the same restrictions that are in place across all five trusts.\n\nThese are that one visitor is permitted once a week for one hour, with some exceptions.\n\nThose arrangements are \"being kept under review, dependent on prevalence of the virus in the community,\" the trust said.", "Kristin Scott Thomas, Gareth Malone and Sharon Horgan appeared with the Combined Military Wives Choir at their London UK film premiere in February\n\nVenues and organisations including the Military Wives Choirs, The Hepworth Wakefield and Night and Day in Manchester are to receive a share of £76m government arts funding.\n\nWhitby's Gothic Festival, London's Somerset House and Kneehigh Theatre in Cornwall are also set to benefit.\n\nThe latest raft of grants, for 588 organisations, will come out of the wider £1.57bn Cultural Recovery Fund.\n\nIt follows Monday's £257m injection, which helped The Cavern Club and LSO.\n\nCulture Secretary Oliver Dowden said that Saturday's new round of \"vital funding\" would go to \"protect cultural gems across the country, save jobs and prepare the arts to bounce back\".\n\nIt will cover comedy clubs, circuses, festivals, regional theatres and local museums, across England.\n\n\"These awards build on our commitment to be here for culture in every part of the country,\" he added.\n\nWhile July's announcement of the wider support package was welcomed by the arts and entertainment industries, Mr Dowden did admit that it would not be enough to save every job or cultural establishment.\n\nThe Military Wives Choir rose to fame through the BBC documentary series with Gareth Malone and was recently the subject of a film starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan.\n\nDirector Melanie Nightingale said they were \"incredibly grateful\" for the \"much-needed support,\" at a time when many arts organisations have been struggling due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\n\"We are thrilled that this funding enables our 73 choirs to sing, share and support one another and feel stronger together through music,\" she said.\n\nThe grants of under £1m have also been awarded to the West End's longest running play, The Mousetrap; the Shangri-La stage at Glastonbury Festival; and grassroots music venues, including Night & Day Cafe.\n\nNight & Day Cafe in Manchester has hosted gigs by the likes of the Arctic Monkeys, Elbow, and Jessie J\n\nJennifer Smithson, director of the latter Manchester venue, explained that the financial help \"enables us to plan for the future when we look forward to having live music back at the venue once again\".\n\nJoe Wright, who directed films including Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, is also a Kneehigh associate. He said he was delighted the Cornwall theatre had been successful in round two, and will now be able to reopen in December with the aim of providing safe, socially distanced outdoor artistic experiences.\n\n\"Kneehigh remain an inspiration for many throughout the sector, they've never got 'stuck' and have always been quick to adapt to new challenges,\" he said.\n\n\"Their mission to remain local whilst telling stories that reflect all our lives is vital in helping us all through these unprecedented times.\"\n\nFurther round of funding from the Cultural Recovery Fund pot are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.\n\nOrganisations that will be receiving funding part of the £76m include:\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "New measures announced by Boris Johnson this week fell short of advice provided by scientists\n\nDocuments have revealed the UK government did not follow the advice given to it by scientists as coronavirus cases began to surge.\n\nThe Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage) is a committee attended by scientists across a range of fields. While its members may not individually agree, their role is to look at the evidence, work out what it is suggesting, and present an agreed view to the government. It's then for the politicians to decide what rules to make.\n\nThe papers, which date from 21 September, were published on Monday night. They set out in black and white what scientists thought should happen on a number of important topics.\n\nWhat scientists recommended: They did not go as far as recommending a full lockdown on the scale of the one in the spring. This was also an outcome Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been extremely keen to avoid.\n\nTheir evidence said: The effect of a full lockdown, including closing non-essential businesses and banning contact between households, was clear: it would have had a big impact on coronavirus cases and deaths. But it would also have had a large knock-on impact - hurting people in other ways, such as their ability to work and socialise.\n\nWhat happened: The government opted for a three-tier system in England, with household mixing indoors banned only in the areas of highest concern. Businesses will broadly remain open.\n\nWhat they recommended: Sage said government should consider a short lockdown of two or three weeks, immediately, to bring down the number of cases.\n\nTheir evidence said: There were solid grounds to suggest this would have had \"similar levels of effectiveness\" to that of the national spring lockdown, in turning the tide of the pandemic. But its shorter period would have limited the overall effects - there would almost certainly have been fewer deaths but the line on the graph would look less dramatic. You would also have had to wait until after the restrictions had been lifted to see any benefit, since it takes time for the infections that would have been prevented to translate to lower hospital admissions and deaths.\n\nWhat happened: This idea was rejected by No 10 in favour of an option that keeps businesses open and household contact going for most of the country, but with the threat that such privileges could be taken away if cases rise. Now Labour leader Keir Starmer has called on the government to think again.\n\nMultiple anecdotal reports of outbreaks linked to bars in the UK, Europe, US... curfews likely to have a marginal impact\n\nWhat they recommended: The scientists recommended people be advised to work from home if they could.\n\nTheir evidence said: This would have been likely to make a significant dent in transmission as about a third of people's total contacts are made at work. But this will vary drastically by industry - and how much it would have dented the current transmission depends on how many people currently at work could have done their job from home.\n\nWhat happened: Those who can are once again being advised to work from home, in a reversal of the government's drive over summer to encourage more people back to the workplace .\n\nWhat they recommended: The advisory group said government should consider immediately putting a stop to contact between households, unless they were part of a support bubble.\n\nTheir evidence said: Being in an enclosed space, breathing the same air and touching the same surfaces, makes mixing indoors a high risk activity. Much of this risk is shared with people you live with, where cutting contact is not really possible. But spreading the virus to other households is what allows the epidemic to be sustained - though scientists say restrictions on different mixing would have been less effective in areas with lots of intergenerational households, where young and old mix within the same bubble.\n\nWhat happened: Mixing with other households indoors has been banned for people living in areas on \"high\" or \"very high\" alert. Outdoor mixing is allowed in groups of no more than six.\n\nWhat they recommended: Sage said government should consider the immediate closure of closure of all bars, restaurants, cafes, indoor gyms, and \"personal services\", for example hairdressers.\n\nThe evidence said: The risk in bars, restaurants and cafes was \"likely to be higher than many other indoor settings\" as people sit close together for long periods without wearing face coverings, and potentially talk loudly, risking spraying more virus into the air. Alcohol also affects people's behaviour. The scientists pointed to multiple outbreaks linked to bars - but also indicated the evidence suggested curfews were likely to have only a \"marginal impact\".\n\nWhat happened: The government largely rejected the advice. Most of England can continue going to pubs and restaurants, although since cases began to spike, a 22:00 curfew has been ordered. In \"very high\" alert areas, pubs and bars must close unless they are operating like a restaurant and only serving alcohol as part of a sit-down meal.\n\nWhat they recommended: Sage recommended all university and college teaching should be carried out online \"unless absolutely essential\", but schools should continue in person. It's possible a \"circuit-breaker\" could be timed to coincide with school holidays.\n\nThe evidence said: Closing schools, particularly secondary schools, might have had a moderate impact on transmission but would come with a high level of harm for children's education and their own and their parents' wellbeing. For adult students, the impact on transmission was considered to be higher and the harm to health and social equality lower.\n\nWhat happened: Schools and universities remain open - although many universities are beginning to move teaching online anyway due to outbreaks.", "There is growing concern about the potential for more collisions in space (Artwork image)\n\nTwo items of space junk expected to pass close to one another have avoided collision, said a company which uses radar to track objects in orbit.\n\nLeoLabs had said a defunct Russian satellite and a discarded Chinese rocket segment were likely to come within 25m of each other.\n\nIt said there were no signs of debris over Antarctica on Friday morning.\n\nOther experts thought Kosmos-2004 and the ChangZheng rocket stage would pass with a far greater separation.\n\nWith the objects having a combined mass of more than 2.5 tonnes and relative velocity of 14.66km/s (32,800mph), any collision would have been catastrophic and produced a shower of debris.\n\nAnd given the altitude of almost 1,000km, the resulting fragments would have stayed around for an extremely long time, posing a threat to operational satellites.\n\nLeoLabs, a Silicon Valley start-up, offers orbital mapping services using its own radar network.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by LeoLabs, Inc. This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. End of twitter post by LeoLabs, Inc.\n\nDr Moriba Jah, an astrodynamicist at the University of Texas at Austin, worked out the miss distance to be about 70m.\n\nAnd the Aerospace Corporation, a highly respected consultancy, came to a similar conclusion.\n\nWith more and more satellites being launched, there is growing concern about the potential for collisions.\n\nThe big worry is the burgeoning population of redundant hardware in orbit - some 900,000 objects larger than 1cm by some counts - and all of it capable of doing immense damage to, or even destroying, an operational spacecraft in a high-velocity encounter.\n\nThis week, the European Space Agency released its annual State of the Space Environment report, which highlighted the ongoing problem of fragmentation events.\n\nThese include explosions in orbit caused by left-over energy - in fuel and batteries - aboard old spacecraft and rockets.\n\nOn average over the last two decades, 12 accidental fragmentations have occurred in space every year - \"and this trend is unfortunately increasing\", the agency said.\n\nAlso this week, at the online International Astronautical Congress, a group of experts listed what they regarded as the 50 most concerning derelict objects in orbit.\n\nA large proportion of them were old Russian, or Soviet-era, Zenit rocket stages.", "Face coverings will only be required in corridors, communal areas and on buses\n\nScottish secondary school pupils will have to wear face coverings in corridors, communal areas and school buses from next Monday.\n\nEducation Secretary John Swinney said the new rules would apply to all pupils aged over 12.\n\nHe said the guidance had been updated based on new advice from the World Health Organization (WHO).\n\nThere will be no requirement to wear face coverings in classrooms where distancing measures are in place.\n\nMr Swinney said individual exemptions could be granted for health reasons, but the guidance would be \"obligatory\" for all secondary, special and grant-aided schools.\n\nHe told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme: \"From August 31st young people over the age of 12 in secondary schools should habitually be wearing face coverings when they are moving around schools and corridors and in communal areas where it is difficult to deliver the physical distancing.\"\n\nHe said the Scottish government had acted in the light of the new WHO advice based on evidence that teenagers can infect others in the same way as adults, but had decided to go further by extending it to school transport.\n\n\"It's part of the general measures we are taking to ensure we keep pace with the emerging advice about how to keep our schools open and to keep our schools safe,\" he said.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. BBC's Laura Foster explains how to wear your mask correctly and help stop coronavirus spreading\n\nYoung people returned to Scotland's schools earlier in August with no requirements for physical distancing between younger pupils, and no rules around face coverings.\n\nBut First Minister Nicola Sturgeon signalled on Monday that a change in the guidance was imminent.\n\nThe new rules for school buses will apply to pupils over the age of five, in line with guidelines for public transport. Staff and students can continue to wear face coverings in all settings voluntarily if they wish.\n\nEileen Prior, executive director of the parents' organisation Connect, formerly known as the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, earlier said she hoped schools would be offered some flexibility over how the new guidance was implemented.\n\nShe said: \"In some schools it won't be necessary - it depends very much on the environment within a school.\n\n\"Some schools are incredibly crowded but some simply aren't and some are well below capacity, perhaps with wide corridors and they don't have the issue that we have in many high schools of young people just crowding because they just can't not crowd.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: “If we need to change the advice then of course we will”\n\nBut Mr Swinney said while the new rules were not mandatory, they had the same status as other guidance on reopening of schools, such as physical distancing and hand hygiene, and should be considered \"obligatory\" across the secondary sector.\n\n\"There will be exemptions from this because the wearing of face coverings is not suitable for all individuals and that has to be respected,\" he said.\n\nHe also stressed that an individual pupil should not be excluded from a school because they were not wearing a face covering.\n\nThe UK government has said there are \"no plans\" to introduce similar measures when schools return in England after the summer break.\n\nHead teachers, however, have complained about a lack of clarity and asked whether English schools would have the flexibility to allow masks if requested as a safety measure by teachers.\n\nLinda Bauld, professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh, said the revised guidance in Scotland was a sensible move.\n\nShe said: \"The schools have done brilliantly well getting going again but I think their physical distancing in some of the communal areas is always going to be a bit of a challenge to enforce... when we've still got cases circulating in the community this will provide additional protection when it's difficult to physically distance.\"\n\nShe said there may be more work to do to educate young people about the correct way to put on or remove a face covering.\n\n\"Not touching the surface - taking it off around the ears. I would recommend young people might carry a little bag in their pocket, stick the face covering in there and when they're taking it off and when they're putting it back on, making sure they don't touch the front of it,\" she said.\n\n\"And then of course there's the cleaning issue - these coverings need to be washed, just in warm water and soap.\"\n\nThe interim chief medical officer, Dr Gregor Smith, said the education advisory group had considered carefully whether poor hygiene while using masks might spread the virus.\n\n\"In their consideration they looked at the evidence from infection from removing masks, on and off, and whether that was likely to play a significant component in terms of introducing an increased risk of transmission,\" he said.\n\n\"On balance, their assessment of that evidence was that there was insufficient evidence to support that view.\"\n\nThe EIS teaching union welcomed the announcement as a \"sensible and appropriate step\" but repeated its call for investment in more teaching staff to allow smaller class sizes.\n\nGeneral secretary Larry Flanagan said: \"There needs to be a much sharper focus on ensuring social distancing in schools to protect pupils, staff and the wider community. Smaller class sizes to ensure appropriate physical distancing of pupils are essential.\"", "Travellers returning to the UK from Italy, Vatican City and San Marino from 04:00 BST on Sunday must self-isolate for two weeks.\n\nThe transport secretary said those returning from the Greek island of Crete will now not need to quarantine.\n\nItaly, which is visited by large numbers of UK residents, was one of the last major countries in Europe on the safe list.\n\nIt had its highest daily count of Covid cases on Thursday, with 8,804.\n\nThe country has recorded a seven-day rate of 64 cases per 100,000 people.\n\nA rate of 20 cases per 100,000 is the threshold above which the government considers imposing quarantine conditions.\n\nLast week, no countries were added to the quarantine list, amid a spike in UK cases.\n\nChanges to the government's list of destinations from which arrivals do not need to enter quarantine have typically been announced every Thursday at 17:00 BST, and implemented the following Saturday at 04:00 BST.\n\nAnnouncing the news on Twitter, Grant Shapps said the implementation date would be moved to 04:00 BST on Sunday 18 October and applies UK wide.\n\nScotland has added mainland Greece and the Greek islands - including Crete, but excluding Mykonos - to its travel corridor list, having removed the country last month. Wales and Northern Ireland have also added Crete to their safe lists.\n\nPoland, Turkey and the Caribbean islands of Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba were among the most recent places added to the quarantine list.\n\nIn Italy, it is mandatory to wear face coverings in indoor spaces, including shops, offices, public transport and in bars and restaurants when not seated at a table, though private homes are exempt.\n\nMasks must also be worn in busy outdoor spaces. The country recently announced compulsory testing for anyone arriving from the UK, Netherlands, Belgium and the Czech Republic.\n\nItalians were subject to some of the strictest lockdown measures in the world when the country became the first in Europe to be overwhelmed by the coronavirus earlier in the year.\n\nWhen the quarantine is applied to a destination, there is an immediate impact on bookings.\n\nOnly non-quarantine destinations are \"in demand\", according to one airline insider.\n\nThe flip side is also true.\n\nLast week, the UK government took the Greek island of Zakynthos off its quarantine list.\n\nTui scheduled a flight soon after and it sold out in days.\n\nThat said, passenger numbers overall are massively suppressed due to the resurgence of the virus and the tightening of travel restrictions.\n\nNo airline is expecting a surge in bookings for this half-term.\n\nThe government has promised that passengers will, by next month, be able to pay for privately-funded Covid tests to reduce the quarantine period by a week.\n\nMinisters are also considering allowing passengers to test before they travel into the UK and that might mean that some people arriving from at risk countries don't have to quarantine at all.\n\nWinters are always tough for airlines. This one looks incredibly bleak and the prospect of testing to reduce the impact of quarantine is only a small glimmer of light.\n\nPassengers arriving in the UK from at-risk countries could avoid having to quarantine under a number of options being considered by the government. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told a travel conference the plan could involve private Covid testing or a period of self-isolation before departure.\n\nThe other option being considered by the government is a system whereby passengers would only have to self-isolate for about a week, instead of two weeks, if they were tested after that period and tested negative.\n\nRory Boland, editor of Which? Travel, said the government's travel corridors system has \"all but collapsed with most destinations now removed from the list\". He added that the travel sector was in \"dire need of urgent targeted support if it is to survive the winter months\" with \"serious reform\" needed from government.", "The Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp perpetuated anti-Asian stereotypes\n\nA content advisory notice for racism in classic Disney films, in place since last year, has been updated with a strengthened message.\n\nWhen played on the Disney+ streaming service, films such as Dumbo, Peter Pan and Jungle Book now flash up with a warning about stereotypes.\n\n\"This programme includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures,\" the warning says.\n\n\"These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now.\"\n\nThe message adds that rather than remove the content, \"we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together\".\n\nOther films to carry the warning are The Aristocats, which shows a cat in \"yellow-face\" playing the piano with chopsticks, and Peter Pan, where Native Americans are referred to by the racist slur \"redskins\".\n\nLady and the Tramp, which has several instances of racism and cultural stereotyping, also carries a warning.\n\nThe company first added a warning about racism last November - however, it was much shorter.\n\nThen, the disclaimer read: \"This programme is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.\"\n\nSome films, such as Song of the South, are not available to stream on Disney+ at all because of racism.\n\nWarner Bros, similarly, has long had a warning about \"ethnic and racial prejudices\" in some of its cartoons.\n\n\"While these cartoons do not represent today's society, they are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed,\" the Warner Bros warning says.", "Ali Hirsz says she was \"shocked\" when the donation appeared.\n\nA singer from Cambridge will be able to have vital surgery, thanks to the Manic Street Preachers.\n\nAli Hirsz needs the trapezius muscle that runs from her neck to her shoulder rebuilt, in an operation that isn't available on the NHS.\n\nAfter Covid-19 robbed her of income from live music, she had to ask fans to help raise the money for the operation.\n\nHer initial crowd-funding goal was £1,000 - but once she reached £500, the Manics stepped in and paid the rest.\n\nWhen the donation arrived, \"I was in tears,\" she tells the BBC.\n\n\"I love them anyway, they're such a great band, but £500 is so unbelievably generous. I thought, 'I can't believe they've done that.'\n\nRepresentatives for the Manic Street Preachers confirmed to the BBC that the donation had come from the band.\n\nHirsz, who sings with an indie band called Idealistics, has an incurable connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.\n\nThe condition means \"my skin is like tissue paper, it tears really easy,\" says the 20-year-old. A vascular compression on her small intestine also requires her to be fed via a tube.\n\nShe needs corrective surgery on her shoulder after a previous operation severed the nerve to her trapezius muscle, causing it to waste away. As a result, her shoulder blade dropped, affecting the blood supply to her arm.\n\nThe condition has already forced her to stop playing bass, as she has little feeling in her left hand.\n\nShe says she has \"never asked for money before\" and was \"sweating with nerves\" before posting her crowd-funding request last week.\n\nBut the campaign became necessary after coronavirus wiped out her band's concert diary; and Hirsz had to leave her day job as a horse trainer because she was shielding.\n\nIn the the meantime, she says, she received no financial support from the government's furlough or self-employment support schemes.\n\n\"It is very, very stressful, particularly in times where you don't have money lying around anyway,\" she says.\n\nAli (left) formed Idealistics as a teenager with her partner George Gillott and sister, Dom, on drums.\n\nThe response to her campaign has been \"overwhelming\", however. Hirsz hit the £1,000 goal within 24 hours, and has since increased her target to £5,000.\n\n\"Because the surgery's not been done before, we don't know exactly how much it's going to cost,\" she explains.\n\n\"I know it's a hard time for everyone,\" she adds, \"so all these donations mean everything.\"\n\nHirsz says her story is typical of disabled musicians, who have found themselves left high and dry by the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nSinger-songwriter Chloe Mogg, who has both fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, agrees the last six months have been \"really, really tough\".\n\n\"The NHS is doing an amazing job at the moment but, especially with chronic fatigue syndrome, it seems like all the invisible illnesses have been pushed to the side,\" she says.\n\n\"We're walking on a tightrope and we don't know if we're going to fall off at any stage.\"\n\nMogg says she has faced discrimination from venues and promoters because of her condition\n\nBut Mogg, like Hirsz, has approached the pandemic with imagination and resilience, channelling her energies into organising an online music and arts festival.\n\nCalled The 7 Arts Still Exist, it highlights the work created by artists, designers, sculptors, writers, musicians, dancers and photographers during the pandemic. Mogg is already lining up its third event with her childhood friend Amy Crouch.\n\nThe musician says the pandemic has taught her to \"live more in the present moment\", even when \"it felt like I've been put on pause\".\n\n\"It's been tough for me and it's been tough for a lot of musician friends who have anxiety problems,\" she says.\n\n\"It's something we're learning to adapt to - but I don't feel like we should be needing to adapt. It's really, really tough.\"\n\nFor visually-impaired sitar player Baluji Shrivastav, adaptability has been the watchword for the last six months.\n\nThe 70-year-old, who has played with Oasis, Stevie Wonder, Massive Attack, Kylie Minogue and Coldplay, cannot travel during the pandemic, making it \"very difficult to perform anywhere\".\n\n\"But we still meet sometimes,\" he says. \"We are allowed to meet six people in one place, and we have a garden so we rehearse there sometimes - but it will be difficult in the winter.\"\n\nBaluji Shrivastav played at the Paralympic closing ceremony with Coldplay\n\nShrivastav was appointed an OBE in 2016 for his services to music, after founding the Inner Vision Orchestra, whose players are all blind or partially-sighted.\n\nHe says live-streamed concerts are harder for blind musicians, because communication between players is reliant on physical proximity. Meeting up for socially-distanced concerts poses other problems.\n\n\"Even if we can reach the venue without help, we need help within the venue itself,\" he says. \"It's a constant difficulty for visually-impaired people.\n\n\"And, of course, financially, we are not earning at all.\"\n\nAccording to the UK Disability Arts Alliance #WeShallNotBeRemoved, the pandemic has had a particularly negative impact on disabled people working in the creative industries.\n\nIn an open letter to the secretary of state for culture, Oliver Dowden MP, the alliance warned that \"many disabled artists are facing long term shielding, a total loss of income, compromised independent living and the risk of invisibility in wider society\".\n\nSeparately, the Audience Access Alliance - which represents 12 disability charities in the UK - says it is \"deeply concerned\" that disabled people will miss out on access to gigs, theatre and sport when venues reopen because of extra Covid-related precautions and restrictions.\n\n\"If we want to 'build back better', it's vital that we build back for all,\" the organisation wrote in an open letter to the live music industry earlier this month.\n\nThe fear for both organisations is that the progress made since the UK's equality act came into force 10 years ago will be lost.\n\nHirsz and Mogg both have horror stories about the discrimination they faced before Covid.\n\nOne promoter refused to work with Idealistics because of Hirsz's condition. \"They said, 'You've got all these [feeding] tubes and nobody wants to see that. You're just going to deter a crowd,'\" she recalls.\n\nMogg was also berated by a promoter last year, after a flare-up of fibromyalgia forced her to pull out of a show.\n\n\"He was like, 'You're a massive disappointment,'\" she says. \"It was so embarrassing. I felt really ridiculed and ashamed of my illness, even though it's part of me.\"\n\nDespite the challenges like those, Hirsz, Mogg and Shrivastav are determined to stay active throughout the pandemic.\n\nThe Idealistics have just released their new single Memory River (inspired, naturally, by the Manic Street Preachers), while Hirsz is working as an advocate for disability charity Attitude is Everything.\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by Idealistics This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nOn Monday, Shrivastav's Inner Vision Orchestra launched their first studio album, Indian Classical Interactions - one of three records the musician recorded in the space of a week before lockdown earlier this year. A documentary about his life will also be screened at the Bloomsbury festival this weekend.\n\nAnd Mogg is busy finalising the third edition of The 7 Arts Still Exist, which will feature country artists Katy Hurt and Roisin O'Hagan.\n\nIn the meantime, she says its crucial that everyone looks out for the people around them, and asks for help when they need it.\n\n\"Just be kind, be bold and, especially if you're suffering, talk to someone and tell them how you're feeling. Because they would rather hear it now than listen to your story at a funeral.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Pubs and restaurants in Scotland's central belt are currently closed,but could reopen from 26 October\n\nNicola Sturgeon has warned that Scotland will not return to normal when the current restrictions on pubs and restaurants expire later this month.\n\nLicensed premises across the central belt were temporarily closed last week, with tough restrictions placed on those elsewhere in the country.\n\nThe rules are due to expire on 26 October - but Ms Sturgeon said this would not signal a return to normality.\n\nThe ban on visiting other people's homes will also remain in place.\n\nAnd the Scottish government is to introduce a multi-tier system of alert levels similar to that now in force in England, which could potentially see venues in areas with coronavirus outbreaks remain closed.\n\nMs Sturgeon was giving a video statement to MSPs as she announced that a further 1,351 cases of Covid-19 and 13 deaths were registered in Scotland.\n\nShe said the country was in a \"precarious\" position and facing a \"critical moment\" in the battle to contain the virus, with \"tough decisions\" needed from government.\n\nAll existing restrictions and guidance are to remain in place for now, and the first minister warned that even the expiry of \"tough temporary restrictions\" on the hospitality trade would not signal a major change.\n\nShe said: \"It is important to stress that given the ongoing challenge of Covid, that will not herald a return to complete normality.\n\n\"The restrictions on household gatherings for example will remain in place until it is considered safe to ease them.\n\n\"And more generally we intend to replace the temporary restrictions with a more strategic approach to managing the pandemic\".\n\nMs Sturgeon said Scotland was in a \"precarious\" position\n\nThe government is drawing up a system similar to that newly in force in England, with \"different tiers of levels of interventions\".\n\nIt will include plans to \"strengthen and improve the effectiveness\" of existing measures, and improve compliance with rules particularly around self-isolation.\n\nMs Sturgeon also said she could not rule out \"having to go further in future\".\n\nThe Welsh government is introducing a system of travel restrictions to stop people moving from areas of the UK with higher rates of Covid-19 into areas with lower prevalence of the virus.\n\nMs Sturgeon said that \"needs to be considered\" in Scotland, and has written to Prime Minister Boris Johnson calling for \"urgent talks\".\n\nNew regulations have also been tabled tightening the rules around face coverings.\n\nThe new rules will make it mandatory for workers to wear them while moving around in offices or in staff canteens.\n\nHowever one rule has been eased, with an exemption introduced to allow couples to take part in marriage and civil partnership ceremonies without wearing masks.\n\nThe first minister has written to Boris Johnson urging him to adopt a \"four nations\" approach to travel restrictions\n\nMs Sturgeon's speech took place in an entirely virtual meeting, with Holyrood currently in recess, and connection issues meant Ruth Davidson's question was largely inaudible.\n\nThe Scottish Conservative group leader called on the government to introduce more testing in hospitals to stop the virus from spreading there.\n\nScottish Green co-leader Patrick Harvie echoed this, and called for \"regular weekly testing on a much bigger scale\".\n\nThe first minister said hospital acquired infections were \"a concern\", and that opposition party leaders would be consulted as part of an ongoing review of the testing strategy.\n\nScottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said measures had been introduced \"with no engagement of those affected\", which had resulted in \"ambiguity and confusion\".\n\nMs Sturgeon rejected his claims she had \"ignored scientific advice\", saying: \"I will make no apology, given the nature of the threat we are dealing with right now, of being prepared to take quick, firm and decisive action if we deem that is necessary to save lives.\"\n\nLib Dem leader Willie Rennie pressed the first minister on delays in the contact tracing system, saying it was \"alarming\" and \"dangerous\" that in the past week 567 people had waited more than two days to get a call from Test and Protect.\n\nMs Sturgeon said the system was \"working incredibly well\" but accepted that \"the turnaround time is not as quick as we want it to be\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"A few words on Brexit\" – EU leaders' views from the summit\n\nEU leaders have called for post-Brexit trade talks to continue beyond the end of the week - the deadline suggested by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.\n\nAt a two-day summit in Brussels beginning on Thursday, they called on the UK to \"make the necessary moves\" towards a deal.\n\nEU chief negotiator Michel Barnier said fresh \"intensive\" talks should aim to reach a deal around the end of October.\n\nBut his UK counterpart said he was \"disappointed\" by the EU's approach.\n\nLord David Frost tweeted the EU was expecting \"all future moves\" for a deal to come from the UK, which he called an \"unusual approach to conducting a negotiation\".\n\nHe added the prime minister would react to the EU's position as the summit wraps up on Friday.\n\nBoth sides are calling on each other to compromise on key issues, including fishing and limits on government subsidies to businesses.\n\nThey are seeking an agreement to govern their trading relationship once the UK's post-Brexit transition period ends in December.\n\nFollowing the talks on Thursday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said \"in some places there was movement, in other places there is still a lot of work to do.\"\n\n\"We have asked Great Britain to continue to be willing to compromise towards an agreement. Of course, this also means that we have to make compromises,\" she told reporters.\n\nEuropean Council President Charles Michel said the EU would decide whether talks should continue in the coming days, based on the UK's next move.\n\nMr Barnier said negotiations were \"not finished\", and the EU was ready to accelerate talks from Monday for the \"two or three weeks that remain before us\".\n\nEarlier, in a conclusions document issued during the summit, the EU said progress in key areas was currently \"not sufficient\" to reach a deal.\n\nIt asked Mr Barnier to \"continue negotiations in the coming weeks\".\n\nThe formal written conclusions of EU leaders' Brexit meeting seemed harsher than expected.\n\nThey insisted it was up to the UK to make \"the necessary moves\" for a deal to be reached.\n\nNo hint that the EU too was preparing to compromise - and words matter in these highly sensitive negotiations.\n\nThe UK's chief negotiator immediately took to Twitter to object.\n\nHe also noted that, while EU leaders had called for negotiations to continue, their document didn't describe them as \"intensive\" talks.\n\nMinutes after, the European Commission tweeted that its chief negotiator Michel Barnier had called for two weeks of intensive talk to start as of Monday.\n\nSo what do we learn from this confused war of words?\n\nNegotiations are drawing to a close, difficult political compromises loom for both sides, tempers are frayed, and time is tight.\n\nAll eyes are on Boris Johnson on Friday, when he has promised to announce the UK's next move.\n\nAs the summit got under way, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she would be self-isolating for the second time in a month after a member of her staff tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nIn a tweet, she added she had tested negative herself but would be leaving the summit \"as a precaution\".\n\nArriving at the summit, French President Emmanuel Macron said his country's fishermen would not \"in any situation\" be \"sacrificed to Brexit\".\n\n\"We didn't choose Brexit. Preserving access for our fishermen to British waters is an important point for us,\" he told reporters.\n\nMrs von der Leyen (R) left the summit early after exchanging views with EU leaders.\n\nThe Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Micheál Martin said a deal was still possible \"within the timeframe available to us\".\n\nHe told the BBC a no-deal outcome would represent a \"significant additional shock to our societies\" on top of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\n\"That is a motivating factor in seeking to arrive at a comprehensive deal,\" he added.\n\nDutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said: \"\"It would be crazy for the outside world if the UK and the EU will not be able to come to an agreement\".\n\nOver the summer, both the UK and EU seemed to agree the end of October was the final date to get a deal done - allowing enough time for it to be ratified before 31 December.\n\nBut come 7 September, Boris Johnson decided to shorten the deadline.\n\nHe said if a deal wasn't reached by 15 October, \"then I do not see that there will be a free trade agreement between us, and we should both accept that and move on\".\n\nThursday was that day - but Downing Street appears to have moved back from it as a hard deadline.\n\nFormal negotiations ended at the start of October, but Mr Johnson and Mrs von der Leyen pledged to \"intensify talks\" over the coming weeks.\n\nPressed on whether the UK would walk away on 15 October, the government's chief negotiator Lord Frost said it was his job to \"advise the prime minister\" on whether a deal was on the cards by then.\n\nBy remaining in the bloc's single market and customs union, the UK has continued to follow EU trading rules during its post-Brexit transition period.\n\nThis 11-month period is due to end in December, and the UK has ruled out seeking an extension.\n\nFormal talks began in March and continued throughout the pandemic, initially via video link before in-person discussions resumed over the summer.\n\nIf a deal is not done, the UK will trade with the EU according to the default rules set by the World Trade Organization.\n• None What are the sticking points in Brexit trade talks?", "Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones were killed during a conference to rehabilitate offenders\n\nPrevent officers tasked with monitoring the man who killed two people in the Fishmonger's Hall attack had \"no specific training\" in handling terrorists, a court has heard.\n\nConvicted terrorist Usman Khan fatally stabbed Cambridge graduates Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones at prisoner rehabilitation event on 29 November.\n\nHe injured two others before he was shot dead by police on London Bridge.\n\nA pre-inquest review hearing was held at the Old Bailey on Friday morning.\n\nThe full inquest into the deaths of Mr Merritt and Ms Jones is expected to take place next April - and one for Khan will follow after.\n\nNick Armstrong, a lawyer for Mr Merritt's family, suggested there was already evidence of a \"systemic problem\".\n\nHe said officers in Staffordshire who were handling Khan had said they had \"received no specific training in dealing with terrorist offenders\".\n\nHenry Pitchers QC, for Ms Jones's family, said the question was not whether Prevent or probation knew there was a risk but whether they \"should have had an inkling\".\n\nKhan was \"assessed as the highest level of risk\" when he was allowed to leave prison - less than a year before the attack - and \"had 22 licence conditions attach to his release,\" Mr Pitchers told the court.\n\nHe said the last visit by police officers to Khan's home in Stafford was two weeks before the attack.\n\nThe flat was dark, and Khan opposed the officers photographing his Xbox and asked them to leave, which they did.\n\nBut this does not appear to have raised suspicions, Mr Pitchers said.\n\nHe also raised the issue of security at the Learning Together event where the attack took place.\n\n\"There was no security check at the door,\" he said. \"Not even a rudimentary bag check.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. This video has been removed for rights reasons\n\nAt the pre-inquest review Jude Bunting, representing Khan's mother Parveen Begum, said: \"Mrs Begum and her family were deeply shocked by the events.\n\n\"Mrs Begum still finds it hard to believe such terrible damage was caused by her son.\n\n\"They want to better understand how this tragedy happened. How a family member who they thought was reformed, committed this atrocity.\"\n\nUsman Khan, 28, was jailed in 2012 over a plot to blow up the London Stock Exchange\n\nThe court heard the Counter Terrorism Command of the Metropolitan Police does not think anyone else was involved in the attack.\n\nChief Coroner Mark Lucraft QC was told a toxicology investigation of Khan's body found evidence of \"the occasional use of cocaine\" in the period leading up to his death.\n\nKhan had recently been released from a prison sentence for terrorism offences when he attended the Learning Together event at Fishmongers' Hall in the City of London.\n\nMs Jones's family's legal team opposed an application by Khan's family that they should have \"interested party\" status at the inquest into her death and that of Mr Merritt.\n\nThey also opposed Khan's family having legal representation in the inquests.\n• None London Bridge: What we know", "A 38-year-old man has been arrested by police investigating a series of attacks on women in Belfast on Monday night.\n\nA woman pedestrian was stabbed in the first attack on Castle Place in the city centre at 19:42 BST.\n\nFour women were stabbed and two were punched during a one-and-half hour period in south and central Belfast.\n\nThe man has been taken to Musgrave police station for questioning.\n\nPolice said none of the victims' injuries was life-threatening, but it had been \"hugely traumatic\" for them.\n\nThe six women were all aged 19 to 22.\n\nPolice believe a man on a bicycle was responsible for all the attacks.\n\nCh Supt Simon Walls said \"the attacks were \"frightening\" and \"completely random\".\n\nCh Supt Simon Walls said police were taking the attacks\" incredibly seriously\"\n\n\"Detectives are carrying out a significant investigation, so once again I am appealing to any drivers who were in the city centre on Monday, who have yet to review any dash cam footage, and similarly, for any business owners in the relevant areas to review their CCTV and to contact us if they have any information that could help,\" he said.\n\n\"I also encourage anyone who may have witnessed any of these incidents, who have yet to speak with us, to contact detectives.\"\n\nThe first stabbing happened in Castle Place in the city centre, at about 19:42 BST.\n\nA second was reported on Ormeau Avenue, at about 19:51 BST.\n\nThere was a third stabbing at 20:56 BST in Donegall Square West, followed by a woman being punched in the back of the head as she walked along the Dublin Road, sometime between 20:56 and 21:01 BST.\n\nThe fourth knife attack happened on University Road, near Mount Charles at about 21:01 BST.\n\nA sixth incident- in which a woman was punched in the neck - happened on the Upper Lisburn Road, near Dunluce Avenue at about 21:03 BST.\n\nPolice have increased their presence in the city centre and south Belfast following the attacks\n\nThe attacker was described as wearing dark clothing, possibly a hooded top, riding a mountain bike which may have a light coloured frame and reflectors on the spokes.\n\nPolice believe he may have been wearing a black mask and wearing a backpack.\n\nHe is not believed to have spoken during the attacks.\n\n\"Officers continue to carry out additional patrols across the city centre and south Belfast,\" Ch Supt Walls said.\n• None Three women stabbed and two punched in attacks", "The prolific rapper has released eight mixtapes and one album since 2014\n\nTottenham-born rapper Headie One has topped the UK charts with his debut album, Edna.\n\nSongs from the record, which is dedicated to his late mother, were streamed 25.5 million times last week, said the Official Charts Company.\n\nA progressive marriage of drill, trap, UK rap, dancehall and US hip-hop, it confronts the turbulent realities of growing up in Britain's inner cities.\n\nIt tops the chart just six months after the rapper was released from prison.\n\nThe 26-year-old, whose real name is Irving Adjei, had been jailed in for carrying a knife, and later described the experience as a \"wake-up call\".\n\n\"Those kind of situations was my normality years ago,\" he told The Guardian, referring to three previous jail terms from his youth.\n\n\"It was a wake-up call that it really is a thin line - one wrong move and it's all over, it's back to what you used to dream to get out of.\"\n\nThis YouTube post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on YouTube The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts. Skip youtube video by HeadieOneVEVO This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Google’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.\n\nBy the time he was jailed in January, the rapper was already one of the biggest names in UK rap, with a string of increasingly-impressive mixtapes and a guest slot on Stormzy's second album, Heavy Is The Head.\n\nAn eighth mixtape, Gang, hit streaming services within hours of his release, and entered the charts at number five.\n\nIt marked a move away from the rapper's origins in drill - a darker, bleaker variant of grime - towards a more melodic, less insular sound.\n\nThat comes to full fruition on Edna, notably on the chart-busting single Ain't It Different, whose catchy hooks hide a message about the dull reality of prison life (\"You ain't ever made a birthday cake from digestive biscuits,\" he raps at one point).\n\nElsewhere, he resolves to \"right my wrongs\", promising to make \"a different way of livin'\" despite the mockery of his former associates.\n\n\"Edna is proof that he's the unmistakeable, global 'King of drill', and much more besides,\" concluded the NME. \"It's a move into the mainstream, without forgetting where it all began.\"\n\nThe star's mother died when he was just three years old\n\n\"Having my debut album go to number one means a lot to me,\" said the star, who posed with his Official Chart Award at his mother's graveside.\n\n\"Edna,\" he added, \"this is for you.\"\n\nThe album tops the charts after a close three-way battle with fellow UK rappers D-Block Europe and the late John Lennon.\n\nLennon's Gimme Some Truth, a new compilation produced by his widow Yoko Ono and son Sean Lennon to mark what would have been his 80th birthday, enters the chart at number three.\n\nD-Block Europe's debut, The Blue Print - Us vs Them, is at number two.\n\nIn the singles chart, 24kGoldn's Mood ft Iann Dior holds tight at number one - and Fleetwood Mac's Dreams re-enters the Top 40 for the first time in 43 years,\n\nThe song, which has seen a surge in popularity after soundtracking a viral video on TikTok, rose 18 places to Number 37 this week.\n\nWritten and sung by Stevie Nicks, it only made number 24 upon its original release in August 1977.\n\nHowever, its success has endured over the years, racking up almost 100 million streams in the UK since streaming data was incorporated into the charts in 2014.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Around 12 new Covid-19 admissions are being reported daily in the Cwm Taf Morgannwg area in the last week\n\nCwm Taf Morgannwg health board has more patients being treated for Covid-19 than at any time since the pandemic began, according to NHS Wales figures.\n\nThere have been an average of 210 patients in its hospitals - with 237 on Tuesday.\n\nThe boss of NHS Wales said on Wednesday he was concerned at a rising trend across Wales with 49% more patients with the virus than a week before.\n\nFigures also show Aneurin Bevan health board has most hospital admissions.\n\nThe area, covering Newport, Monmouthshire, Caerphilly, Torfaen, Blaenau Gwent and parts of south Powys, saw an average of 28 patients being admitted with suspected or confirmed Covid-19 symptoms each day over the past week.\n\nThis is more than twice the numbers in the Cwm Taf Morgannwg and Cardiff and Vale areas.\n\nThe numbers for Cwm Taf Morgannwg admissions reflect Covid-19 infection outbreaks in three of its main hospitals, with 205 cases linked to the outbreak, including patients.\n\nAnother 20 cases are being monitored at Ysbyty Cwm Rhondda.\n\nThe health board said earlier this week there had been 47 deaths: 38 at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant, five at Prince Charles in Merthyr Tydfil, and four at the Princess of Wales in Bridgend.\n\nFrom Thursday, its Bridgend Seren hospital opened to its first patients \"well on the road to recovery\" to allow its three district hospitals to focus on acute care in those locations.\n\nIt comes as most elective surgery is postponed at the Royal Glamorgan.\n\nThe board's Medical Director Dr Nick Lyons said: \"Ysbyty'r Seren will provide a breadth of care for these patients, which will include support with their emotional and physical wellbeing as they recover from the virus.\n\n\"The safety of our patients and staff remains our first priority and we now seeing the very beginnings of the positive impact of the mitigating actions we are taking across our sites to contain the spread of the virus.\"\n\nOf those 326 confirmed Covid-19 cases in Welsh hospitals, more than half of patients are in Cwm Taf Morgannwg.\n\nWith the Aneurin Bevan health board, it is comfortably above other health boards for the number of Covid patients, confirmed, suspected and recovering from the virus.\n\nAndrew Goodall, NHS Wales' chief executive, said demand for beds would continue to increase in the days and weeks ahead.\n\nHe said it was a virus that \"surprises us with its ability, particularly in closed settings, in its ability to transmit across to other parts of hospital and healthcare settings\".", "Pensioners queuing to vote in Indiana earlier this month\n\nState election officials across the US are reporting record numbers of voters casting their ballots ahead of election day on 3 November.\n\nMore than 29 million had voted early by Monday, either in person or by mail, according to the US Election Project.\n\nAt the same point in the 2016 race, about 6m votes had been cast.\n\nExperts say the surge in early voting correlates to the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused many people to seek alternatives to election day voting.\n\nOn Tuesday, Texas, a state that has relatively tight restrictions on who can qualify for postal voting, set a record for most ballots cast on the first day of early voting.\n\nOn 12 October, the Columbus Day federal holiday, officials in Georgia reported 126,876 votes cast - also a state record.\n\nIn Ohio, a crucial swing state, more than 2.3 million postal ballots have been requested, double the figure in 2016.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Early voters have formed long queues in several states across the US\n\nReports indicate that registered Democrats have so far outvoted registered Republicans - casting more than double the number of ballots. And of these early voting Democrats, women and black Americans are voting in particularly high numbers. Some are motivated by dislike for Donald Trump, while others have been energised by racial justice protests throughout the summer following the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.\n\nBut this early advantage does not mean that Democrats can already claim victory. Republicans, who claim postal voting is vulnerable to fraud, say Democrats may win the early vote, but that Republicans will show up in large numbers on election day.\n\nAccording to a 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, the rate of voting fraud overall in the US is between 0.00004% and 0.0009%.\n\nRepublicans have also made gains in voter registration efforts in the key states of Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, though Democrats still lead overall.\n\nIn Florida, that registration margin has narrowed to a little over 134,000 voters - less than 1%. Mr Trump won Florida by just under 113,000 votes in 2016.\n\nThese states are known as battlegrounds in the election as voters are more likely to switch parties in these regions than elsewhere in the country. As a result, states like Florida are where the campaigns tend to focus their efforts.\n\nThe enormous numbers of voters have led to long lines, with some people waiting for up to 11 hours for an opportunity to vote.\n\nYounger people, who historically have been difficult to get to the polls, appear to be turning out in larger numbers this year. The youth vote may be the highest its been since 2008 for the election of Barack Obama - the country's first black president.\n\nA recent survey by Axios found that four in 10 university students said they planned to protest if Mr Trump wins. Six in 10 said they would shame friends who could vote but choose not to.\n\nBy contrast, only 3% of surveyed students said they would protest if Joe Biden was elected.\n\nWhat questions do you have about the US election?\n\nIn just three weeks, Americans head to the polls to cast their vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden. What questions do you have for American voters? Submit your questions here and we'll put them to our voter panel.\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Andy is suing a betting company after it refused to pay him his £1.7 million winnings.\n\nA man who was refused a payout of £1.7m after his online betting company account was credited with the money has taken his case to the High Court.\n\nAndy Green, 53, from Lincolnshire, said he hit the jackpot in January 2018 playing a blackjack game from bookmaker Betfred on his phone.\n\nBetfred said there was a software error and the company's terms and conditions meant it could withhold the payment.\n\nBut lawyers for Mr Green say they have been given no proof of the problem.\n\nAfter a long night playing the Betfred Frankie Dettori Magic Seven Blackjack in January 2018, Mr Green's online account was credited with £1,722,923.54 which he tried to withdraw - but the request was declined.\n\nAfter placing some more bets with his winnings he took a screenshot to prove what had happened.\n\nHowever, a Betfred director called him to say there had been a \"software error\" and it was rejecting the claim.\n\nAs a token of \"goodwill\" the company was willing to pay £30,000, but Mr Green would have to agree not to talk about it ever again.\n\nMr Green refused and the company increased its offer to £60,000, which he also rejected.\n\nMore than two years later he has gone to the High Court to sue Betfred and its parent company, Gibraltar-based Petfre for £2m, including the interest he would have earned from the win.\n\nMr Green said \"the last two and a half years have felt like hell on earth\".\n\n\"You wouldn't treat an animal like I've been treated by Betfred,\" he said.\n\n\"Hopefully the judge will accept the arguments put forward by my legal team and this nightmare will be over. My champagne remains on ice!\"\n\nMr Green is in poor health and has suffered four heart attacks - one of them since the money was credited to his online account in 2018.\n\nThe legal argument centres on 49 pages of terms and conditions, and game rules which Mr Green ticked when signing up for Betfred.\n\nThey include a clause that all \"pays and plays\" would be void in the event of a \"malfunction\", and Betfred argues that by ticking the box, Mr Green was agreeing.\n\nHis solicitor Peter Coyle said \"whilst Betfred's betting terms and conditions are incredibly complicated and span across numerous different documents, we are confident that, on their proper construction, the terms simply don't allow for Betfred to withhold payment\".\n\nMr Coyle pointed out that if \"all pays and plays\" were void, then Betfred would have refunded other customers, but the company had produced no evidence that had happened. It only wanted to withhold Mr Green's enormous win, he said.\n\nBetfred licences the software for its online games from another company Playtech, which has refused to confirm the nature of the software glitch.\n\nBy law, Playtech has to notify the Gambling Commission of Great Britain of the fault, known as a \"key event\". Mr Coyle says the description of what happened is only four lines long and does not describe the nature of the problem.\n\nDespite repeated requests, Mr Green's lawyers say Betfred has been unable to prove there was a software problem at all. Neither has the company attempted to drag its supplier Playtech into the case.\n\nIf the court rules in Mr Green's favour, other gamblers denied their winnings due to technical problems could be able to make similar claims.\n\nMr Green's lawyers have asked for a summary judgment, which would mean the facts are not at issue and the judge could decide the case without a trial.\n\nThe judge has reserved judgement, which could mean one of three outcomes at a later date: deciding the case without a trial in Mr Green's favour, deciding in Betfred's favour, or ordering a trial.\n\nA Betfred spokesman said \"the case is currently progressing at court and it is therefore inappropriate for us to comment further\".", "The row over England's three-tier regional Covid restrictions is \"very damaging to public health\", a scientist advising the government has warned.\n\nTalks between Westminster and local leaders over moving Greater Manchester and Lancashire to the toughest tier of rules are due to resume later.\n\nManchester's Labour mayor said northern England had been treated with contempt.\n\nBut Dr Jeremy Farrar warned making it a north-south or party political issue was \"a very dangerous route\".\n\nThe Wellcome Trust director, who also sits on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), told the BBC's Newscast podcast countries that had controlled the virus well so far - including South Korea and New Zealand - had a \"national consensus about the way forward\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\n\"I think we've got to come together as a country, this fragmentation, and frankly making this either a north-south or a party political issue, that's a very dangerous route to go on,\" he said.\n\n\"What we don't want now is a fragmentation or confusion - one area or region or city pitched against another. I think that would be very, very damaging to public health and the country's ability to respond.\"\n\nSir Jeremy added that negotiations with individual areas delayed the ability to respond to the virus, and he was more in favour of national restrictions.\n\nThe prime minister has defended the three-tier system as \"the right way forward\", which he hoped would \"avoid the misery of a national lockdown\".\n\nDiscussions between central government and leaders in Lancashire are expected to resume at 08:00 BST, while more talks are also expected between leaders in Greater Manchester and No 10 on Friday morning.\n\nFrom Saturday, people in London, Essex (apart from Southend and Thurrock), York, North East Derbyshire, Chesterfield, Erewash in Derbyshire, Elmbridge in Surrey, and Barrow in Furness, Cumbria, will move to the second highest tier - high alert.\n\nThis means more than half of England's population will now be living under high or very high alert restrictions.\n\nSo far the Liverpool City Region is the only area in the top tier.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nThe new three-tier system sees every area of England classed as being on medium, high or very high alert.\n\nAreas on medium alert are subject to the national restrictions currently in force, including the rule of six on indoor and outdoor gatherings and the 22:00 closing time for pubs, bars and restaurants.\n\nIn addition to these restrictions, in areas on high alert - which currently includes north-east England, much of the North West and parts of the Midlands, along with West and South Yorkshire - different households are not allowed to mix indoors.\n\nAreas on very high alert face extra curbs, with different households banned from mixing indoors or outdoors in hospitality venues or private gardens.\n\nPubs and bars will be closed unless they are serving substantial meals and there is also guidance against travelling in and out of the area.\n\nFurther restrictions may be agreed for particular regions in the top tier - in the Liverpool City Region gyms, leisure centres, betting shops and casinos have also been forced to close.\n\nFor the three-tier system to work, Sir Jeremy said the current level of restrictions would have to be toughened up \"substantially\" and he was more in favour of national restrictions.\n\n\"One of the concerns I have is it is sort of dividing up the country when every part of the country is going through an expanding epidemic at the moment in all age groups,\" he said.\n\n\"One of the challenges is the confusion of the messaging. I think on the whole simplicity is easier to understand, it's easier to adhere to, there's a sense that the country is in this together and all parts of the country affected.\"\n\nHe said he would have preferred a \"circuit-breaker\" - a short, national lockdown - in September, but the \"next best\" time to act was as soon as possible.\n\nThe government is under significant pressure over its approach to local restrictions.\n\nTalks to try to strike an agreement with Greater Manchester will continue on Friday morning - but local leaders in the region are angry and have pledged to fight back against further measures if they are not accompanied by significantly more support, including an improved furlough package for those whose workplaces are forced to close.\n\nThe final decision on restrictions rests with ministers - but they desperately want local support for any decision and for now the stand-off continues.\n\nThat stand-off is causing dismay among some scientists.\n\nBut the government is also facing resistance from its own MPs in Greater Manchester - who fear its plans are too strict.\n\nMeanwhile, conversations on Lancashire moving to the highest tier of restrictions continued late into the night.\n\nLocal leaders are considering a package of support offered by ministers but no final decision has been made yet.\n\nOn Thursday, Greater Manchester's Mayor Andy Burnham said leaders in the region were \"unanimously opposed\" to a move to the top tier and he called for more financial support for businesses and individuals affected by restrictions.\n\nHe said the region was \"being set up as the canaries in the coal mine for an experimental regional lockdown strategy\".\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock said local leaders should \"set aside party politics\" and work with the government, with cases rising \"exponentially\" in the north west of England.\n\nHowever, some of the area's Tory MPs also oppose Greater Manchester moving to the top tier, including Sir Graham Brady - chairman of the influential backbench 1922 Committee and MP for Altrincham and Sale West - who said there was \"widespread concern\" about the proposals.\n\nThe Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has backed tougher restrictions for the capital but has also called for more financial support.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Andy Burnham says his region is \"being set up as the canaries in the coal mine\" for the government's lockdown strategy\n\nMeanwhile, the Scottish government is planning to introduce a multi-tier system of alert levels similar to that in England. The country's central belt already faces stricter rules, with pubs and restaurants closed.\n\nIn Northern Ireland, schools will close on Monday while, from Friday, pubs, restaurants and cafes will only be allowed to offer takeaway and delivery services for four weeks.\n\nAnd a ban on travelling to Wales from coronavirus hotspots elsewhere in the UK comes into effect on Friday evening.\n\nOn Thursday, a further 18,980 cases and 138 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were reported across the UK.\n\nHow have you been affected by the restrictions and by the coronavirus pandemic? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "As almost every day brings another record high in the number of daily infections in Russia, the authorities have been tightening restrictions across the vast country.\n\nThey differ from region to region since President Vladimir Putin delegated significant powers for fighting the epidemic to local authorities in April.\n\nOn 16 October, Russia reported another spike of 15,150 new coronavirus cases, up from 13,754 the previous day. In late August, the number was below 5,000. The daily death toll from Covid-19 has been rising too, reaching an all-time high of 286 yesterday.\n\nTo combat the spread of the epidemic, employers in some cities have been told to move at least some of their staff to home working, some regional administrations have urged locals to stay at home, but no part of Russia has returned to the strict lockdown measures that were imposed at the start of the pandemic.\n\nWearing a face mask in shops or on public transport is mandatory in most Russian regions.\n\nEmployers in Moscow, Rostov and Volgograd have been ordered to switch at least 30% of staff – as well as everyone older than 65 - to working from home.\n\nAlso in Moscow, the autumn school holidays were extended from one week to two (until 18 October) and older pupils will be moved to distance learning until the end of the month.\n\nThe authorities in Moscow, Volgograd, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area, Nizhny Novgorod Region, Krasnodar Territory and Russia-annexed Crimea ruled that people over 65, pregnant women and those with chronic diseases must stay at home.\n\nIn Rostov, local residents are required to stay at home unless they are on the way to work, shopping or engaged in one of a number of other activities such as exercising or walking a dog.\n\nMass public events are banned in Rostov Region, Krasnodar Territory, Transbaikal Territory, Udmurtia and the city of Sevastopol in Crimea.\n\nStavropol Territory requires visitors from other regions to quarantine for 14 days.\n\nLeningrad Region introduced \"red\", \"yellow\" and \"green\" zones depending on the density of Covid-19 cases in the area, and limits the number of people present in these zones accordingly.\n\nKaliningrad Region banned cinemas on weekends. Bars and night clubs are closed in Kaliningrad Region, Chukotka and Rostov Region.\n\nRostov Region and Lipetsk Region suspended routine medical care, except for urgent conditions, for everyone apart from Covid-19 patients.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Elaine cares for her partner Ian, who has multiple sclerosis, and says it is a struggle with day centres closed\n\nMany unpaid carers looking after vulnerable friends or relatives during the coronavirus crisis say they are worried about how they will cope this winter.\n\nEight in 10 said they had been doing more, with fewer breaks, since the pandemic began - and three-quarters said they were exhausted.\n\nThe government said it recognised the \"vital role\" of unpaid carers.\n\nOne of those is Elaine Kenyon from Accrington, Lancashire, who looks after her partner Ian.\n\nIan, 64, developed multiple sclerosis (MS) about 12 years ago, and now needs help around the clock with everything from dressing to using the toilet.\n\nThe day care service that they used to rely on is still in lockdown. It's not clear when it can re-open.\n\nElaine was furloughed from her job in April, and says she will have to go back to work in November to earn enough to pay her and Ian's bills.\n\nShe says she feels under a lot of stress.\n\nIn the Carers UK survey, 58% of carers said they had seen their physical health affected by caring through the pandemic, while 64% said their mental health had worsened.\n\nPeople also said day centres and reductions in other services meant the help they once got had reduced or disappeared, leaving many feeling worn out and isolated.\n\nCarers UK wants such services up and running again as a matter of urgency.\n\nHelen Walker, chief executive of Carers UK, said: \"The majority of carers have only known worry and exhaustion throughout this pandemic.\n\n\"They continue to provide extraordinary hours of care, without the usual help from family and friends, and with limited or no support from local services.\n\n\"It's no surprise that carers' physical and mental health is suffering, badly.\n\n\"I am deeply concerned that so many carers are on the brink and desperately worried about how they will manage during the next wave of the pandemic.\"\n\nCarers UK is also calling on the government to ensure that those receiving Carer's Allowance - the main benefit for people caring 35 hours or more every week - receive an equivalent payment increase to those receiving Universal Credit.\n\nThis would provide £20 a week extra to help cover the extra costs that caring will inevitably incur over the winter months.\n\nA Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said it recognised the \"vital role played by unpaid carers, especially during this difficult period\" and that it would \"continue to work closely with carer organisations to support them\".\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Jeff Bridges told his fans he would keep them posted\n\nOscar-winning American actor Jeff Bridges has revealed he has lymphoma but says his \"prognosis is good\".\n\nIn a tweet echoing his \"Dude\" character in The Big Lebowski, Bridges said he was starting treatment, acknowledging it was a \"serious disease\".\n\nLymphoma is a form of cancer that affects the lymph system, which is part of the body's germ-fighting network.\n\nBridges, 70, won Academy Award for Best Actor in 2010 for playing an alcoholic singer in the film Crazy Heart.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Jeff Bridges This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHe is also known for his roles in The Last Picture Show, The Contender and Starman, as well as cult film The Big Lebowski in 1998, where he plays The Dude, a Los Angeles slacker.\n\nIn a BBC interview in 2016, Bridges said: \"I really try my best not to do movies. I try not to act because I have so many other things I like to do, like playing guitar. Once you commit you are busy so I really try not to engage.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Jeff Bridges is saved from embarrassment by wife on the red carpet in 2017", "Greater Manchester is currently in tier two, or \"high alert\" level\n\nGreater Manchester leaders have been given a deadline of midday to reach a deal with the government over moving to tier three Covid restrictions.\n\nIf a deal is not reached, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said the PM would decide on the next steps.\n\nIn this situation, the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg said the \"implication\" was the top tier of rules would be imposed.\n\nGreater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said the region was seeking a \"fair figure\" of support from the government.\n\nMr Burnham told BBC Radio 4's Today programme he would be meeting with local leaders this morning and would advise them to set out the request in a letter to the government.\n\nThe government and local leaders - including mayors and MPs - have been embroiled in 10 days of talks over moving Greater Manchester's 2.8m population from tier two to the highest restrictions.\n\nGreater Manchester has been under local restrictions since July.\n\nThe \"very high\" alert level - also known as tier three - would mean closing pubs and bars which do not serve meals, and additional restrictions on households mixing.\n\nMr Jenrick said local leaders had been \"so far unwilling to take the action that is required to get this situation under control\".\n\nIt come as the number of weekly registered coronavirus deaths in England and Wales rose by 438 and increased by a third in the space of seven days, according to official figures from the Office for National Statistics.\n\nSpeaking to Today, Mr Burnham described the government's \"late-night ultimatum briefed to the media\" as a \"slightly provocative move\", but he said he was going to \"try and find a way forward\".\n\nHe said local leaders had never been given a figure for additional financial support in return for further restrictions.\n\nAs well as setting out what a \"fair figure\" of support was, Mr Burnham said he wanted \"full flexibility\" to support people who will be affected by restrictions.\n\nHe said: \"I think it is fair to recognise that if you put a place under restrictions for as long as we've been under restrictions it grinds people down. It pushes businesses closer to the brink.\"\n\nMr Burnham has previously called for the government to reintroduce the 80% furlough scheme used during the UK's first lockdown, instead of the new Job Support Scheme which covers 67% of the wages (covered by employers and the government) of people affected by tier three closures.\n\nBusiness minister Nadhim Zahawi told Today £22m had been offered to Greater Manchester - equivalent to £8 per person - and there would be \"additional support commensurate with what we have done in Liverpool City Region and in Lancashire\".\n\nMr Burnham said he would not \"break the law\" if no agreement was reached between both sides and the government imposed tier three measures on Greater Manchester.\n\n\"It's their prerogative to do what they think is needed,\" he told BBC Breakfast.\n\n\"But I would say to them that I don't think it will help us bring people with what they want to do to control this virus. I think it would be better to come to an agreement.\"\n\nMr Burnham also said he thought the shielding of elderly and vulnerable people in Greater Manchester needed to be \"looked at seriously\" and suggested it was \"part of the solution\".\n\nSir Richard Leese, the Labour leader of Manchester City Council, told BBC Newsnight he hoped a deal could still be made, but added: \"If government imposes tier three - and I hope that won't happen - we will clearly need to comply with that.\"\n\nOn Monday, Mr Burnham and Sir Richard accused the government of using \"selective statistics\" on hospital occupancy rates to bolster the case for tougher rules.\n\nOn Monday evening, the two sides couldn't even agree on what they actually discussed earlier.\n\nBelieve the local leaders and on Monday morning there seemed to be hope in the air. Officials from central government had mooted the possibility of a hardship fund to help support low-paid workers who stand to lose out if businesses close their doors under tighter restrictions.\n\nThe message local leaders took from their meeting was that, while the Treasury is adamant they are not going to extend their national furlough scheme - nor increase the level of cash available from its replacement, the Job Support Scheme - Westminster might sign off extra money that could be spent that way, if local politicians saw fit.\n\nThere was no concrete agreement on the numbers, but sources in Greater Manchester suggest the cost of supporting those who need the extra help comes in at around £15m a month.\n\nAfter that call, the consensus among North West leaders was moving in the direction of signing on the dotted line, with another call planned with Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick for the afternoon.\n\nBut rather than ushering in a new spirit of co-operation, that meeting went south.\n\nA three-tier system of alerts was announced a week ago in an attempt to control rising coronavirus cases without a UK-wide lockdown.\n\nSo far, only the Liverpool City Region and Lancashire have been moved into tier three.\n\nHowever, Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the House of Commons on Monday that discussions are planned for South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, north-east England and Teesside also moving into the top tier.\n\nSpeaking ahead of those discussions with government, Nottingham City Council leader David Mellen said he would make clear \"that we want a package that properly protects local people, businesses, jobs and education, whether it's for tier two or tier three\".\n\nElsewhere in the UK, in Wales people will be told from Friday to stay at home, while pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops will shut, as part of a \"short, sharp\" national lockdown until 9 November.\n\nA two-week school closure has begun in Northern Ireland as part of a tightening of restrictions.\n\nIn Scotland, the tightest restrictions are in place in the central belt, and there are plans for a three-tier framework of measures, similar to England's.\n\nOn Monday, government figures showed the UK recorded a further 18,804 coronavirus cases and 80 deaths.\n\nHow have you been affected by coronavirus? What have restrictions meant for you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.", "Stormzy's stab-proof vest, which he wore whilst headlining Glastonbury Festival last year, has been nominated for a major design award.\n\nThe Banksy design was donned by the grime star to highlight structural racism.\n\nThe winner of the Beazley Designs of the Year prize will be announced by London's Design Museum next month.\n\nAlso in the running is a house created for the Oscar-winning South Korean class war thriller Parasite.\n\nLee Ha Jun based the entire scheme for the fictional home of the wealthy Parks family on one simple sketch from the film's director Bong Joon Ho.\n\nThe technology used to take years off Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese's mobster movie The Irishman is in contention too.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. How we made the actors younger\n\n\"I thought it was really good,\" De Niro told the BBC last year. \"I always joke I can gain 30 more years in my career.\"\n\nMeanwhile, UK collage artist Cold War Steve's Hellscape Jigsaw also made the cut.\n\nThe artist, who last year made the cover of Time Magazine with his satirical take on Brexit, tweeted to say he was \"thrilled (and somewhat aghast to be honest)\" to be nominated.⁦\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Cold War Steve This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nIn June 2019, Stormzy made history by becoming the first-ever black British solo act to top the bill at the Worthy Farm event.\n\nWearing the stab-proof Union Jack vest, he used his set to bring attention to inequality in the justice system and the arts.\n\nThe eye-catching vest was created by the famously anonymous artist Banksy from a former police issue garment.\n\nThe organisers of the new exhibition said it was \"a defining cultural moment\".\n\nThe rapper's famous Union Jack stab-proof vest will go on display at the Design Museum\n\nSeveral months after his big gig, Stormzy told Q Magazine that technical issues had made it the \"most difficult thing\" he had done.\n\n\"Then after calming down for an hour,\" he added, \"Some of the people at the festival - Emily Eavis and that - gave us a memory stick to watch it back. And I got about halfway through and I was, like, 'I think it all went alright'.\"\n\nThe design prize features 74 nominations across six categories - architecture, digital, fashion, graphics, product and transport.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nAlso in contention are the sound design for the award-winning TV drama Chernobyl, and a virtual library aimed at evading censorship in the computer game Minecraft.\n\nA Chinese hospital built in 12 days at the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic is recognised on the longlist; as well as the vegan Impossible Burger 2.0; and The Renegade - a dance choreographed by the then 14-year-old Jalaiah Harmon, which went viral on the social media platform TikTok.\n\nThe exhibition opens at the Design Museum in London on Wednesday 21 October and runs until 28 March 2021, with an overall winner being announced on 26 November (there are also winners for each of the categories).\n\nLast year the overall prize was won by Anatomy of an AI System by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler.\n\nAt a glance - some other designs nominated for the Beazley prize include:\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Sadiq Khan said the curfew does not \"make sense\"\n\nThe 10pm curfew should be scrapped in London to help venues deal with Tier 2 coronavirus restrictions, the Mayor of London has said.\n\nSince 27 September all pubs, bars and restaurants in England must shut no later than 10pm.\n\nCurrent restrictions also prevent Londoners from meeting friends or family in pubs and restaurants.\n\nSadiq Khan said the curfew does not \"make sense\" and extending hospitality opening hours will boost cash flow.\n\nIn a statement, Mr Khan said: \"Now London and other parts of the country have moved into Tier 2 the current 10pm curfew policy makes even less sense and should be scrapped.\n\nScrapping the policy \"would allow more sittings of single households in restaurants throughout the evening\", Mr Khan said.\n\nThis would \"boost cash flow at a time when venues need all the support they can get\".\n\n\"Ministers must give businesses the support they need to survive while restrictions remain in place,\" Mr Khan added.\n\nA legal challenge is under way against the 10pm curfew\n\nUnder the Tier 2 restrictions, household mixing is still permitted outside, including at pubs and restaurants with outdoor seating, although the rule of six applies.\n\nThe 10pm curfew is subject to a legal challenge, led by nightclub chain owner Jeremy Joseph.\n\nLast week, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the curfew was a \"matter of policy choice\" rather than driven by scientific advice.\n\nHe claimed there is \"direct and proximate evidence\" for the positive impact of the limits on pubs and restaurants, citing a fall in alcohol-related A&E admissions late at night.\n\nBut Mr Hancock said the government's desire to protect education and work \"as much as is possible\" meant they had to take measures against socialising to try to slow the spread of Covid-19 transmission.\n\nThe Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy said: \"The restrictions for pubs and bars, which the mayor originally called for, are carefully judged to achieve the maximum reduction in the R number with the minimum impact on jobs and livelihoods. However, we keep all measures under review.\"", "A hacking group is donating stolen money to charity in what is seen as a mysterious first for cyber-crime that's puzzling experts.\n\nDarkside hackers claim to have extorted millions of dollars from companies, but say they now want to \"make the world a better place\".\n\nIn a post on the dark web, the gang posted receipts for $10,000 in Bitcoin donations to two charities.\n\nOne of them, Children International, says it will not be keeping the money.\n\nThe move is being seen as a strange and troubling development, both morally and legally.\n\nThe hackers posted their tax receipt for the $10,000 donation\n\nIn the blog post on 13 October, the hackers claim they only target large profitable companies with their ransomware attacks. The attacks hold organisations' IT systems hostage until a ransom is paid.\n\nThey wrote: \"We think that it's fair that some of the money the companies have paid will go to charity.\n\n\"No matter how bad you think our work is, we are pleased to know that we helped changed someone's life. Today we sended (sic) the first donations.\"\n\nThe cyber-criminals posted the donation along with tax receipts they received in exchange for the 0.88 Bitcoin they had sent to two charities, The Water Project and Children International.\n\nChildren International supports children, families and communities in India, the Philippines, Colombia, Ecuador, Zambia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and the United States.\n\nA Children International spokesperson told the BBC: \"If the donation is linked to a hacker, we have no intention of keeping it\".\n\nThe Water Project, which works to improve access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, has not responded to requests for comment.\n\nAnother receipt was posted on the dark web blog showing a $10,000 donation\n\nBrett Callow, Threat Analyst at cyber-security company Emsisoft, said: \"What the criminals hope to achieve by making these donations is not at all clear. Perhaps it helps assuage their guilt? Or perhaps for egotistical reasons they want to be perceived as Robin Hood-like characters rather than conscienceless extortionists.\n\n\"Whatever their motivations, it's certainly a very unusual step and is, as far as I know, the first time a ransomware group has donated a portion of their profits to charity.\"\n\nThe Darkside hacker group is relatively new on the scene, but analysis of the crypto-currency market confirms they are actively extorting funds from victims.\n\nThere is also evidence they may have links to other cyber-criminal groups responsible for high-profile attacks on companies including Travelex, which was crippled by ransomware in January.\n\nThe way the hackers paid the charities is also a possible cause for concern for law enforcement.\n\nThe cyber-criminals used a US-based service called The Giving Block, which is used by 67 different non-profits from around the world including Save The Children, Rainforest Foundation and She's The First.\n\nThe now-deleted tweet celebrating the donation from the hackers\n\nThe Giving Block describes itself online as \"the only non-profit specific solution for accepting crypto-currency donations\".\n\nThe company was set up in 2018 to offer cryptocurrency 'millionaires' the ability to take advantage of the \"huge tax incentive to donate Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies directly to non-profits\".\n\nThe Giving Block told the BBC it was not aware these donations were made by cyber-criminals. It said: \"We are still working to determine if these funds were actually stolen.\n\n\"If it turns out these donations were made using stolen funds, we will of course begin the work of returning them to the rightful owner.\"\n\nThe company did not clarify if this means returning the stolen money to the criminals, or attempting to work out which of the criminal victims it intended to reimburse and how.\n\nThe Giving Block, which is also an advocate for crypto-currencies, added: \"The fact they used crypto will make it easier, not harder, to catch them.\"\n\nHowever, The Giving Block has not given details on what information they collect on their donors. Most services that buy and sell digital coins like Bitcoin require users to verify their identity, but it's not clear whether this has been done here.\n\n67 charities use The Giving Block to accept crypto-currency\n\nAs an experiment, the BBC attempted to donate anonymously through The Giving Block's online system, and was not asked any identity verification questions.\n\nExperts say the case highlights the complexity and dangers of anonymous donations.\n\nCrypto-currency investigator Philip Gradwell from Chainalysis said: \"If you walked into a charity shop with an anonymous mask on and donated £10,000 in cash, then asked for a taxable receipt, questions should probably be asked - and it's no different.\n\n\"It's right to say that researchers and law enforcement have become adept at tracing crypto-currency funds as they are moved around from wallet to wallet. But finding who actually owns each wallet is far more complicated.\n\n\"By allowing anonymous donations from potentially illicit sources, it opens up the danger of money laundering.\n\n\"All crypto-currency businesses need a full range of Anti-Money Laundering measures including a Know Your Customer (KYC) program of basic background checks, so that they can understand who is behind the transactions their business facilitates.\"\n\nThe BBC has spoken with other charities which accept donations via The Giving Project.\n\nSave the Children told the BBC it would \"never knowingly take money obtained through crime\".\n\nShe's the First, a charity for girls' education around the world, said it would not be comfortable accepting money from anonymous, possibly criminal, sources and said: \"It's a shame that bad actors would exploit the opportunity to donate crypto-currency for personal gain, and we hope that even anonymous donors share our community's values.\"", "The fiancee of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has filed a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia's crown prince, accusing him of ordering the killing.\n\nHatice Cengiz and the rights group Khashoggi formed before his death are pursuing Mohammed bin Salman and more than 20 others for unspecified damages.\n\nKhashoggi was killed by a team of Saudi agents during a visit to the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2018.\n\nThe crown prince has denied ordering the killing.\n\nKhashoggi was a prominent critic of the Saudi government and had been living in self-imposed exile in the US, frequently writing for the Washington Post.\n\nIn the civil lawsuit filed in Washington DC on Tuesday, Turkish citizen Ms Cengiz claims personal injury and financial losses over Khashoggi's death.\n\nKhashoggi's human rights group, Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn), says its operations were hampered.\n\nThe lawsuit alleges that Khashoggi was murdered \"pursuant to a directive of defendant Mohammed bin Salman\".\n\n\"The objective of the murder was clear - to halt Mr Khashoggi's advocacy in the United States... for democratic reform in the Arab world,\" the lawsuit says.\n\nIn a video conference on Tuesday, lawyers for Ms Cengiz and Dawn said the focus of the lawsuit was to have a US court hold the crown prince liable for the killing and to obtain documents that reveal the truth, the Washington Post newspaper reports.\n\n\"Jamal believed anything was possible in America and I place my trust in the American civil justice system to obtain a measure of justice and accountability,\" Ms Cengiz said in a statement.\n\nA prominent Saudi journalist, Khashoggi covered major stories, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the rise of the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, for various Saudi news organisations.\n\nFor decades, the 59-year-old was close to the Saudi royal family and also served as an adviser to the government.\n\nBut he fell out of favour and went into self-imposed exile in the US in 2017. From there, he wrote a monthly column in the Washington Post in which he criticised the policies of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the son of King Salman and Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler.\n\nIn his first column for the Post in September 2017, Khashoggi said he had feared being arrested in an apparent crackdown on dissent overseen by the prince.\n\nHe was last seen entering the Saudi consulate on 2 October 2018 to obtain papers he needed in order to marry Ms Cengiz.\n\nAfter listening to purported audio recordings of conversations inside the consulate made by Turkish intelligence, UN special rapporteur Agnes Callamard concluded that Khashoggi was \"brutally slain\" that day.\n\nThe Saudi public prosecution concluded that the murder was not premeditated.\n\nIt said the killing was ordered by the head of a \"negotiations team\" sent to Istanbul to bring Khashoggi back to the kingdom \"by means of persuasion\" or, if that failed, \"by force\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nThe journalist was forcibly restrained after a struggle and injected with a large amount of a drug, resulting in an overdose that led to his death, according to the Saudi prosecution. His body was then dismembered and handed over to a local \"collaborator\" outside the consulate. The remains were never found.\n\nTurkish prosecutors concluded that Khashoggi was suffocated almost as soon as he entered the consulate, and that his body was destroyed.\n\nIn December 2019, the Riyadh Criminal Court sentenced five people to death for \"committing and directly participating in the murder of the victim\". Three others were handed prison sentences totalling 24 years for \"covering up this crime and violating the law\".\n\nThree people were found not guilty, including Saudi Arabia's former deputy intelligence chief, Ahmad Asiri.\n\nSaud al-Qahtani, a former senior adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed, was investigated by the Saudi public prosecution but not charged.\n\nLast month, state media reported that the five death sentences were commuted to 20-year jail terms.", "The couple were seen posing on tracks in Whitby in July, accompanied by wedding guests\n\nA couple who posed for wedding photographs on railway tracks in North Yorkshire have been condemned by Network Rail.\n\nThey were caught on CCTV standing on a line near Whitby in July.\n\nMore than 5,000 trespassing incidents were recorded between June and September, with many involving people using the railways as a backdrop for photos.\n\nNetwork Rail said taking selfies and photo shoots was \"plain stupidity\".\n\nIn September alone some 1,239 incidents were recorded - a 17% rise.\n\nNetwork Rail shared an image of a photo shoot on a train line in Cilfrew, Neath Port Talbot\n\nSupt Alison Evans, of British Transport Police, said: \"The railway is not an appropriate or safe setting for a photographic backdrop, no matter how scenic the setting.\n\n\"Every time someone strays on to the rail network they are not only putting themselves at risk of serious, life-threatening injury, but also delaying essential journeys.\"\n\nHollyoaks actor Ellis Hollins was forced to apologise in July after posting images on social media from a photoshoot on the railway.\n\nHe admitted it was \"irresponsible\" and he was \"careless to take part in such a dangerous situation\".\n\nAnother image showed people walking down a railway track in Harlech in Gwynedd\n\nNetwork Rail has launched a \"You vs Train\" campaign in partnership with British Transport Police to highlight the issue of young people trespassing.\n\nThe number of incidents involving children at 51 targeted locations has fallen in each of the past two years.\n\nAllan Spence, of Network Rail, said: \"Wedding photos or selfies on the track are just plain stupidity.\n\n\"Please, make sure you know the rail safety basics and pass that knowledge onto your loved ones. Lead by example and stay off the tracks.\"\n\nFollow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk or send video here.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Hairdressing salon owner Helen Rouse: \"It just feels wrong to be shutting us down\"\n\nThe beauty sector needs VAT cut to match the hospitality sector to survive winter, an MP has said.\n\nLabour Swansea East MP Carolyn Harris said she fears many beauty businesses will go under by Christmas without more support.\n\nOne Cardiff hairdresser owner has said the new Job Support Scheme \"wasn't viable\" for businesses like theirs.\n\nThe UK Treasury said their Winter Economy Plan will ensure support for the sector continues.\n\nIn July, a temporary cut to VAT from 20% to 5% was announced for the tourism and hospitality sector, which has been extended to 31 March 2021.\n\nIt applies to all food, non-alcoholic drinks, accommodation and tourist attractions across the UK.\n\nBut Ms Harris, chair of Parliament's all-party group on beauty, aesthetics and wellbeing, has said the cut needs to be applied to the beauty sector.\n\n\"We really have to start thinking about this as a very serious contributor to the economy, a massive employer - they really need to have the support other sectors have had,\" she said.\n\nMs Harris added that while Wales' two week 'firebreak' lockdown would be \"frustrating\" for those in the sector, it was \"the best means through which we can try to prevent a further, prolonged national lockdown over the winter months\".\n\nCardiff hairdresser owner Helen Rouse says the Job Support Scheme is \"not viable\"\n\nUnder Wales' firebreak, beginning on Friday, close-contact services like hairdressers and beauty salons will be required to close until Monday, 9 November.\n\nHelen Rouse, the director and owner of a salon in Cardiff, said the Treasury's furlough scheme had been a \"real help\", but added that its replacement - the Job Support Scheme - was \"not viable\".\n\nHer business employs 20 people, and two self-employed people, 19 of whom were eligible for the furlough scheme which ends on 31 October.\n\n\"I think the hairdressers are forgotten amongst all this,\" she said.\n\n\"Pubs and restaurants had 'eat out to help out' back in August - there was nothing for us. No VAT break.\"\n\nThe Welsh Government said every firm covered by small business rates relief would receive a £1,000 payment, and small and medium-sized retail, leisure and hospitality firms that have to close will get a one-off payment of up to £5,000 - with additional discretionary grants for struggling firms.\n\nMs Rouse said while the Welsh Government support for small businesses would be \"helpful\" it wouldn't be enough to cover their 20 staff.\n\nMany salons invested in temperature check guns and plastic screens to keep customers safe\n\nShe said the best support they could have would be to stay open.\n\n\"We can't survive the quieter months of January, February if we can't maximise our October, November, December,\" she said.\n\n\"Hairdressers are hygienic by nature, we've followed every rule, we've invested in all the Covid-secure PPE and screens and everything, and it just feels wrong to be shutting us down.\"\n\nJayne Goodings, who owns Lemon Tree beauty salon in Cowbridge, Vale of Glamorgan, said the best she can hope for is to survive the lockdown as the Job Support Scheme would not help if they were closed.\n\n\"I was gutted for myself and lots of other small businesses,\" she said.\n\n\"It's been very, very tough. I've done my ranting, I've done my crying, but we've got to take it and get on with it.\n\n\"As long as I can be here when this is all over, that's all I can hope for.\"\n\nSwansea East MP Carolyn Harris said she fears many beauty businesses won't survive until Christmas\n\nA letter from Ms Harris to the prime minister in July said the sector contributed almost £8bn to the UK economy, and employed 370,000 people.\n\nSince the summer, Ms Harris said the situation has become worse.\n\n\"I really worry that a lot of them will have gone under by Christmas at this rate,\" she said.\n\n\"Unless we start making sure they are protected, they are going to have to think about redundancies, or closing up - especially the mobile therapists - who have only got themselves.\n\n\"Why not give them that support now to keep to them going, tide them over, so they're still viable when this all ends and they're able to reopen fully.\"\n\nA Treasury spokesperson said they keep all taxes under review and said: \"We've supported the beauty sector from the start of the outbreak, protecting jobs through business rates holidays, our income support schemes, VAT deferrals and cash grants of up to £25,000.\n\n\"Our Winter Economy Plan will ensure this continues in the difficult months to come.\"", "First Minister Mark Drakeford has written again to Chancellor Rishi Sunak warning \"many staff will be laid off\" in leisure and hospitality as a result of the firebreak lockdown in Wales.\n\nHe said it is because they will not fulfil the eligibility criteria to be enrolled for the last week of the Job Retention Scheme (JRS).\n\n\"Employers with no income will be faced with the difficult decision of paying all of the wage costs of these employees or making them redundant,\" Mr Drakeford said in the letter.\n\n\"It makes no sense from the point of view of the UK Exchequer to have to meet the possible long-term costs of paying out-of-work benefits to these individuals for the sake of one week’s support on the JRS.\n\n\"Will you therefore agree in these exceptional circumstances to waive the requirement for employees for whom JRS is claimed for this period to have been on furlough for at least three weeks prior to 30 June?\"", "James Redford and his father Robert, pictured together at an event in 2018\n\nHollywood star Robert Redford is \"in mourning\" following the death of his son James at the age of 58.\n\nActivist and filmmaker James Redford died on Friday after being diagnosed with liver cancer, his wife Kyle confirmed via Twitter.\n\nHis famous father's publicist, Cindi Berger, said: \"The grief is immeasurable with the loss of a child.\"\n\nThe 84-year-old retired actor and director starred in movies like Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid.\n\n\"Jamie [James] was a loving son, husband and father,\" added Berger, who asked for privacy for the Redford family \"during this difficult time\".\n\n\"His legacy lives on through his children, art, filmmaking and devoted passion to conservation and the environment.\"\n\nHis latest film Playing Keeps, which explored the importance of play and downtime in our lives, was given a virtual premiere online at this month's Mill Valley Film Festival in California.\n\nHis wife of 32 years, Kyle, shared the news of his death online, alongside pictures of the couple and their two children.\n\n\"We're heartbroken. He lived a beautiful, impactful life and was loved by many,\" she wrote.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by kyle redford This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nShe told the Salt Lake Tribune that James had discovered the cancer diagnosis late last year while awaiting a liver transplant.\n\nHis liver disease had returned two years ago, she added.\n\nPaying tribute, actor and director Mark Ruffalo wrote: \"Damn. This year has cut deep. Another great, sweet, kindly person leaves us.\"\n\nAnother Hollywood star, Kiefer Sutherland, described the late filmmaker as \"a wonderful writer and a wonderful man\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by Kiefer Sutherland This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nFellow filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom tweeted she was \"heartbroken to hear of my friend Jamie's passing\".\n\n\"He was an amazing filmmaker and a beautiful person, & I will be forever grateful to him for his mentorship when I started out as a filmmaker.\"\n\nRobert Redford has three other children, including the actress Amy Redford.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "More than 100,000 women have had their clothes digitally removed from images\n\nFaked nude images of more than 100,000 women have been created from social media pictures and shared online, according to a new report.\n\nClothes are digitally removed from pictures of women by Artificial Intelligence (AI), and spread on the messaging app Telegram.\n\nSome of those targeted \"appeared to be underage\", the report by intelligence company Sensity said.\n\nBut those running the service said it was simply \"entertainment\".\n\nThe BBC has tested the software and received poor results.\n\nSensity claim the technology used is a \"deepfake bot\".\n\nDeepfakes are computer-generated, often realistic images and video, based on a real template. One of its uses has been to create faked pornographic video clips of celebrities.\n\nBut Sensity's chief executive Giorgio Patrini said the shift to using photos of private individuals is relatively new.\n\n\"Having a social media account with public photos is enough for anyone to become a target,\" he warned.\n\nThe artificial intelligence-powered bot lives inside a Telegram private messaging channel. Users can send the bot a photo of a woman, and it will digitally remove her clothes in minutes, at no cost.\n\nThe BBC tested multiple images, all with the subjects' consent, and none were completely realistic - our results included a photo of a woman with a belly button on her diaphragm.\n\nA similar app was shut down last year, but it is believed there are cracked versions of the software in circulation.\n\nThe administrator running the service, known only as \"P\" said: \"I don't care that much. This is entertainment that does not carry violence.\n\n\"No one will blackmail anyone with this, since the quality is unrealistic.\"\n\nHe also said the team looks at what photos are shared, and \"when we see minors we block the user for good.\"\n\nIllustrations from the report show how messaging the bot will result in a modified version being sent back\n\nBut the decision on whether to share the photo with others is up to whoever used the bot to create it in the first place, he said.\n\nDefending its relative level of harm, he added: \"There are wars, diseases, many bad things that are harmful in the world.\" He has also claimed he will soon remove all of the images.\n\nTelegram has not responded to a request for comment.\n\nSensity reported that between July 2019 and 2020, approximately 104,852 women have been targeted and had fake naked images of them shared publicly.\n\nIts investigation found that some of the images appeared underage, \"suggesting that some users were primarily using the bot to generate and share paedophilic content.\"\n\nSensity said the bot has had significant advertising on the Russian social media site VK, and a survey on the platform showed that most users were from Russia and ex-USSR countries.\n\nBut VK said: \"It doesn't tolerate such content or links on the platform and blocks communities that distribute them.\"\n\nTelegram was officially banned in Russia until earlier this year.\n\n\"Many of these websites or apps do not hide or operate underground, because they are not strictly outlawed,\" said Sensity's Giorgio Patrini.\n\n\"Until that happens, I am afraid it will only get worse.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Actress Bella Thorne opens up about her experience of deepfake abuse\n\nThe authors of the report say they have shared all their findings with Telegram, VK and relevant law enforcement agencies, but have not had a response.\n\nNina Schick, author of the book Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse, said deepfake creators were all over the world, and that legal protections were \"playing catch-up\" with the technology.\n\n\"It's only a matter of time until that content becomes more sophisticated. The number of deepfake porn videos seems to be doubling every six months,\" she said.\n\n\"Our legal systems are not fit for purpose on this issue. Society is changing quicker than we can imagine due to these exponential technological advances, and we as a society haven't decided how to regulate this.\n\n\"It's devastating, for victims of fake porn. It can completely upend their life because they feel violated and humiliated.\"\n\nLast year the US state of Virginia became one of the first places to outlaw deepfakes\n\nThe current UK law around fake nude images has recently been criticised for being \"inconsistent, out-of-date and confusing\" in a university report.\n\nDespite progress on issues like revenge porn and upskirting, \"there remain many glaring gaps in the law\", says Lucy Hadley of the Women's Aid charity.\n\nWhile these statistics show how widespread deep-fake images can be, it is not currently a specific offence.\n\nThe government has instructed the Law Commission to review the law around the issue in England and Wales. Its findings are due in 2021.", "John Leslie said he could not remember being at the party in 2008\n\nFormer TV presenter John Leslie has been found not guilty of sexual assault.\n\nThe 55-year-old was on trial at Southwark Crown Court accused of grabbing a woman's breasts at a Christmas party in 2008.\n\nThe woman made a complaint to the police in 2017.\n\nMr Leslie began his TV career in 1989 on the BBC's Blue Peter show. He went on to host Wheel of Fortune and This Morning.\n\nThe jury returned a not guilty verdict after 23 minutes of deliberations, following the week-long trial.\n\nHis former co-presenters Anthea Turner and Fern Britton were his character witnesses in the trial.\n\nMr Leslie told the jury he could not remember being at the party, and described the single allegation of sexual assault from 5 December 2008 as \"crazy\" and \"ludicrous\".\n\nGiving evidence, he said: \"I would not have touched her like some mannequin and walked off.\"\n\nHe told the jury he had previously been made out to be an \"aggressive, sexual monster\" by the tabloid press.\n\nThe jury returned a not guilty verdict on Monday after 23 minutes of deliberations\n\nMr Leslie said his life changed in 2002 when he was wrongly identified on live television as the unnamed alleged rapist in his former girlfriend Ulrika Jonsson's autobiography.\n\nPresenter Matthew Wright later apologised, saying he named him in error, the court was told.\n\nMs Jonsson has never made any complaint to police, the jury heard.\n\nThe jury took just 23-minutes to reach their verdict.\n\nAs the court reassembled John Leslie was asked to stand to hear the foreman say they'd found him not guilty of one count of sexual assault.\n\nOn hearing those words the former Blue Peter presenter began to sob in the dock.\n\nHis father, Les Stott, who's attended court every day with his son, punched the air before he too broke down in tears.\n\nThe two of them hugged and cried before they left.\n\nMr Leslie, from Edinburgh, said there had never been any sexual assault allegations against him before his name was wrongly linked to the book, and described the fallout as \"Armageddon\".\n\nHe said the tabloids \"decided I was their man\", and there had been \"adverts for women to come forward with allegations\".\n\nMr Leslie, whose full name is John Leslie Stott, told the jury he had become reclusive, paranoid, depressed and suicidal amid the allegations, saying: \"I lost everything.\"\n\nIn 2003, two charges of indecent assault against him made by one woman were dropped, and not guilty verdicts were recorded at Southwark Crown Court.\n\nAfter Monday's verdict, Judge Deborah Taylor said: \"Mr Stott, you for the second time leave this court without a stain on your character and I hope it will be the last time you have to attend.\"\n\nFor more London news follow on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Police will \"assess whether a criminal offence may have been committed\" after records relating to the Grenfell Tower refurbishment were \"binned\".\n\nA project manager for the works said she threw away notebooks relating to her work almost a year after the deadly fire at the building in 2017.\n\nAt that time a public inquiry and police investigation were under way.\n\nClaire Williams told the public inquiry she thought the information was \"documented elsewhere\" and not needed.\n\nThe chairman of the inquiry, which is looking into the June 2017 fire which killed 72 people, said it was hard to understand why she had \"taken it upon herself\" to do such a thing.\n\nA spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police Service said the force was \"aware\" of evidence presented to the inquiry about the notebooks and was waiting for the inquiry to pass it to officers.\n\n\"If relevant documentation has been disposed of or withheld from the criminal investigation, the MPS will seek to establish the facts and assess whether a criminal offence may have been committed,\" the spokeswoman said.\n\nMs Williams, who worked for Grenfell landlords the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO), told the inquiry on Monday that she got rid of her records when she cleared her desk and left her job in May 2018.\n\nShe said: \"There was nothing underhand about it. I was clearing my desk, I looked and decided that everything that was in there was formally represented in minutes or other paperwork and it was of little value.\"\n\nShe said: \"It wasn't a conscious, hiding anything decision, it was 'I'm clearing my desk'. I put them in the bin.\"\n\nIt comes after her former colleague, Peter Maddison, disclosed several notebooks and diaries containing \"material of the utmost relevance\" to the inquiry only last week.\n\nThe inquiry, now in its second phase examining how the blaze could have happened in the first place, is continuing to hear evidence from Ms Williams.\n\nThe first phase concluded that cladding put on during the refurbishment fuelled the fire in June 2017 in which 72 people died.", "Visa and Mastercard have been accused of cashing in during the coronavirus crisis by charging \"excessive fees\".\n\nThe British Retail Consortium says the fees charged by payment firms have almost doubled in the last two years.\n\nThey warn that retailers will be forced to pass on the extra costs to consumers, with credit card bills rising by another £40 a year.\n\nHowever, Mastercard questioned the BRC's findings and said shops were paying less than five years ago.\n\nThe BRC's head of finance policy, Andrew Cregan, told the BBC: \"It is vital that the government takes action to tackle excessive card costs,\" said the BRC's Andrew Cregan.\n\n\"If a phone or energy company increased their fees by such an amount there would uproar.\n\n\"It's an abuse of a dominant market position by these companies. They're two of the most profitable organisations in the world and they've got merchants over a barrel.\"\n\nThe industry body wants the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to investigate the card schemes.\n\nA Visa spokesperson responded: \"Visa enables millions of merchants throughout the UK to access the benefits of digital payments, giving them the ability to reach billions of potential customers both in their local communities and across the globe. Visa has delivered to UK consumers some of the most secure and innovative payments solutions available anywhere in the world.\"\n\nA Mastercard spokesperson said: \"We do not believe the BRC's report represents the facts of the UK payments industry.\n\n\"The UK benefits from a highly competitive payments system designed for ease, simplicity and security for all those who make or receive a payment.\n\n\"Digital payments are the most effective way of receiving and making payments for business and by their nature are significantly less costly than cash.\"\n\nMastercard added that, on average, BRC members \"pay less to accept a like-for-like Mastercard transaction than they did five years ago\".\n\nRetail and hospitality trade bodies have come together to call for action to tackle card fees, as more of them have been forced to accept only card payments due to the pandemic and social distancing rules.\n\nMany retailers now only accept card payments, but they feel penalised by payment processers\n\nIn its latest Payments Survey, the BRC said that card schemes were clearly the \"least competitive layer of the card payments ecosystem\", with a duopoly controlling 98% of the UK market.\n\n\"Complex billing structures have become a powerful tool to bamboozle political, regulatory or legal attempts to rein in increasing abuses of the schemes' dominant market positions,\" said the industry body.\n\nBRC said the increases in scheme fees - 39% in 2017 and 56% in 2018, measured as a percentage of turnover - were \"clear demonstrations of an abuse of market dominance\".\n\nThe BRC said the average cost of a cash transaction to retailers was just 1.42p. Accepting payment by debit cards costs retailers 5.88p, while credit cards cost them 18.4p.\n\n\"The events of the last few months have accelerated a move towards the use of card payments across hospitality, with many now not accepting cash on safety grounds,\" pointed out David Sheen, public affairs director at UK Hospitality.\n\n\"The sector needs to be protected from excessive fees for doing the right thing.\"\n\nJeff Moody, commercial director, British Independent Retailers Association, said that local shops are being penalised as they are not able to negotiate better fees with payment firms.\n\n\"The contracts available to large national chains are often not available to individual smaller independent retailers,\" he said.\n\n\"With card transactions now the majority of their payment transactions, these costs are therefore being felt by consumers.\"\n\n\"The costs that accompany acceptance of card payments represent yet another overhead for embattled small retailers,\" added Martin McTague, national policy and advocacy vice chairman at the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB).", "A silent march was held in honour of Mr Paty on Tuesday evening in the suburbwhere he was killed\n\nThe father of a pupil accused of launching an online campaign against Samuel Paty, the teacher beheaded in France, sent messages to the killer before the attack, French media report.\n\nMr Paty, who was killed on Friday, had earlier shown controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to his pupils.\n\nThe 48-year-old father, who has not been officially named, is accused of issuing a \"fatwa\" against the teacher.\n\nThe brutal murder of Mr Paty, 47, has shocked France.\n\nTens of thousands of people took part in rallies across France at the weekend to honour him and defend freedom of speech. A silent march was held on Tuesday evening in the suburb north-west of Paris where he was killed.\n\nA man named as 18-year-old Abdoulakh A was shot dead by police after killing Mr Paty on Friday.\n\nThe father of the pupil is reported to have exchanged a number of text messages with Mr Paty's killer prior to the attack close to the teacher's school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.\n\nHe is accused, along with a preacher described by French media as a radical Islamist, of calling for Mr Paty to be punished by issuing a so-called \"fatwa\" (considered a legal ruling by Islamic scholars).\n\nInterior Minister Gérald Darmanin said the two men had been arrested and were being investigated for an \"assassination in connection with a terrorist enterprise\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. French minister: Lessons on freedom of expression will continue\n\nPolice launched a series of raids targeting Islamist networks on Monday, and some 40 homes were targeted.\n\nOn Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron said the Sheikh Yassin Collective - an Islamist group named after the founder of the Palestinian militant group Hamas - would be outlawed for being \"directly involved\" in the killing.\n\nHe said the ban was a way of helping France's Muslim community, Europe's largest, from the influence of radicalism.\n\nThe group's leader is among 16 people who were taken into custody in the aftermath of the murder.\n\nSix have now been released after questioning including the killer's grandfather, parents and 17-year-old brother. Four school students are believed to remain in detention.\n\nMr Darmanin earlier said 51 French Muslim organisations, including charities and NGOs, would be inspected by government officials and closed down if they were found to be promoting hatred.\n\nHe said police would also be interviewing about 80 people who were believed to have posted messages in support of the killing.\n\nAlso on Tuesday, the French government ordered a mosque to close for sharing videos on Facebook calling for action against Mr Paty and sharing his school's address in the days before his death.\n\nThe Pantin mosque, which has about 1,500 worshippers and is situated just north of Paris, will close for six months on Wednesday. The mosque expressed \"regret\" over the videos, which it has deleted, and condemned the teacher's killing.\n\nBeneath the public outrage there is a divided nation. A growing number of people believe France's rules on secularism and freedom of speech need to change.\n\nAround 29% of Muslim respondents told a recent poll that Islam was incompatible with the values of the French Republic - a sharp increase over the past few years. And among those under 25, the figure was much higher.\n\nThe number of people who think violence is justified in response to cartoons of Muhammad is very small. But teachers in some areas say that view is growing among their pupils.\n\nThe roots of this rebellion against French national values are complex - conflicts abroad, racism, lack of opportunity and government policy all play a role.\n\nIt's hard to support the values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity if they don't appear to apply to you.\n\nBefore this attack, President Macron had already promised a new law to target \"separatism\". But will it tackle the growing chasm or deepen the fault-lines once more?\n\nOn Monday, anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-François Ricard said Mr Paty had been the target of threats since he showed the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class about freedom of speech earlier in October.\n\nThe history and geography teacher advised Muslim students to leave the room if they thought they might be offended.\n\nMr Ricard said that the killer went to the school on Friday afternoon and asked students to point out the teacher. He then followed Mr Paty as he walked home from work and used a knife to attack him.\n\nSamuel Paty, a well-liked teacher, had been threatened over showing the cartoons\n\nTuesday evening's silent vigil in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine was attended by thousands. Earlier in the day, the French parliament observed a minute of silence.\n\nMr Macron will attend a ceremony with Mr Paty's family on Wednesday.\n\nThe teacher will also be posthumously given France's highest award, the Legion d'Honneur.\n\nDepictions of the Prophet Muhammad can cause serious offence to Muslims because Islamic tradition explicitly forbids images of Muhammad and Allah (God).\n\nThe issue is particularly sensitive in France because of the decision by satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. A trial is currently under way over the killing of 12 people by Islamist extremists at the magazine's offices in 2015 following their publication.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Rallies in Paris, Toulouse, Lyon and other French cities in support of Samuel Paty\n\nFrance's Muslim community comprises about 10% of the population.\n\nSome French Muslims say they are frequent targets of racism and discrimination because of their faith - an issue that has long caused tension in the country.", "Scientists around the globe are working on potential vaccines for coronavirus\n\nThe UK is pushing ahead to be the first nation to carry out \"human challenge\" studies where up to 90 healthy people will be deliberately exposed to Covid.\n\nThe trials, which could begin in January, aim to speed up the race to get a Covid-19 vaccine.\n\nThe government is putting £33.6m towards the groundbreaking work.\n\nSafety will be a number one priority, experts insist. The plans will need ethical approval and sign-off from regulators before they can go ahead.\n\nHuman challenge studies provide a faster way to test vaccines because you don't have to wait for people to be exposed to an illness naturally.\n\nResearchers would first use controlled doses of the pandemic virus to discover what is the smallest amount that can cause Covid infection in volunteers aged 18 to 30.\n\nThese human guinea pigs, who will be infected with the virus through the nose and monitored around the clock, have the lowest risk of harm due to their young age and good health.\n\nNext, scientists could test if a Covid vaccine prevents infection.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nLead researcher for the project Dr Chris Chiu, from Imperial College London, said: \"My team has been safely running human challenge studies with other respiratory viruses for over 10 years. No study is completely risk free, but the Human Challenge Programme partners will be working hard to ensure we make the risks as low as we possibly can.\"\n\nProf Peter Openshaw, co-investigator on the study and director of the Human Challenge Consortium, said deliberately infecting volunteers with a known human pathogen was \"never undertaken lightly\".\n\n\"However, such studies are enormously informative.\n\n\"It is really vital that we move as fast as possible towards getting effective vaccines and other treatments for Covid-19.\"\n\nThere are hundreds of Covid vaccines being developed around the world and several front-runners already in the final stages of testing, including one from Oxford University.\n\nWhile some of these could get results and start to be used before the new trial has chance to begin, researchers say the work will still be useful, particularly for head-to-head studies to compare which vaccines work best.\n\nExperts say we will probably need a few different vaccines, as well as effective treatments, to defeat Covid. They will also need to be tested in those at highest risk from Covid - the elderly and vulnerable.\n\nThe first stage of the human challenge project will be delivered by a partnership between Imperial College London, the Royal Free Hospital's specialist and secure research unit in London and a company called hVIVO.\n\nAfter exposure to Covid, the young volunteers will need to stay in a biosecure facility until they are no longer infectious.\n\nThey will be financially reimbursed for their time, and monitored for up to a year after taking part in the study to check for any side-effects.\n\nPeople can sign up here.\n\nPurposely infecting someone with Covid does pose an ethical dilemma, especially since there is no treatment to cure patients, although there are ones that might make it less deadly.\n\nProf Julian Savulescu, an expert in ethics at Oxford University, said the trials were justified: \"In a pandemic, time is lives. So far, over a million people have died.\n\n\"There is a moral imperative to develop to a safe and effective vaccine - and to do so as quickly as possible.\n\n\"Given the stakes, it is unethical not to do challenge studies.\"\n\nBusiness Secretary Alok Sharma said: \"We are doing everything we can to fight coronavirus, including backing our best and brightest scientists and researchers in their hunt for a safe and effective vaccine.\"\n• None UK volunteers could be given virus to test vaccine\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Burnham: 'It can't be right to close businesses without support'\n\nThe failure to agree a £65m package of support will mean a \"winter of hardship\" for Greater Manchester if tier three measures are imposed, the region's mayor has said.\n\nAndy Burnham said tighter measures \"would be certain to increase levels of poverty, homelessness and hardship\".\n\nHe added ministers \"walked away\" from negotiations over aid earlier today.\n\nTier three rules mean most pubs and bars will close, and there will be extra restrictions on household mixing.\n\nIt comes as Prime Minister Boris Johnson prepares to hold a press conference at 17:00 BST, which will be followed by a statement in the House of Commons from Health Secretary Matt Hancock at 19:00.\n\nSpeaking alongside other local leaders, Mr Burnham said: \"At no point today were we offered enough to protect the poorest people in our communities.\"\n\nThe former MP added he was still willing to do a deal with the government \"but it cannot be on the terms the government has offered today\".\n\nBut addressing the people of Greater Manchester, he added: \"Please, everybody, observe the law at all times and follow the public health advice. Above all else, please look out for each other, as I know you will.\"\n\nThe latest government figures showed that, on Tuesday, the UK recorded a further 21,330 coronavirus cases and a further 241 deaths within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nMr Burnham's comments follow 10 days of talks between the government and local leaders - including mayors and MPs - over moving Greater Manchester's 2.8 million population from tier two to the highest restrictions.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the \"collapse of the talks\" was a \"sign of government failure\".\n\nGreater Manchester is currently under tier two rules, meaning pubs and restaurants must close at 22:00, there is no household mixing indoors and the rule of six applies outdoors.\n\nUnder tier three rules - currently only applied to Lancashire and the Liverpool City Region - pubs and bars not serving substantial meals have to close, household mixing is banned both indoors and outdoors, and there is guidance against travelling in or out of the area.\n\nGreater Manchester was offered £60m of central government to help support businesses under the new Tier 3 limits - but in a conversation with the prime minister, Mayor Andy Burnham suggested it was not possible to accept less than £65m.\n\nGreater Manchester leaders originally submitted a request for £90m, which had been costed by a former Treasury official. On Tuesday morning they discussed £75m with government officials, which would have covered the period until the end of the financial year.\n\nIt's understood that Boris Johnson and Mr Burnham discussed a figure of £60m but were unable to agree. Ministers were reluctant to set a precedent of giving one region more, proportionately, than another, especially given ongoing talks with several other parts of the country which could also face tougher restrictions.\n\nIt is now not clear what financial support the region will receive. After 10 days of talks (of a kind) and billions spent during this crisis, it is quite something that the deal fell over down to a gap of £5m.\n\nEarlier, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said Mr Burnham had been \"unwilling to take the action that is required to get the spread of the virus under control\".\n\nHe added: \"I have therefore advised the prime minister that these discussions have concluded without an agreement.\"\n\nResponding to the news, Sir Keir said: \"The Conservatives have been treating local communities, particularly in the Midlands, North West and North East, and their leaders with contempt.\n\n\"Labour recognise the need for stricter public health restrictions. However, that must be accompanied by extra financial support.\"\n\nWilliam Wragg, Conservative MP for Hazel Grove in Greater Manchester, tweeted that the \"sense of failure\" was \"overwhelming\".\n\nHe added: \"I shall avoid political comment until I have heard Matt Hancock's statement in House of Commons this evening.\"\n\nThe three-tier system of alerts came into force in England last week in an attempt to control rising coronavirus cases without a UK-wide lockdown.\n\nOn Monday, Mr Hancock told the Commons that discussions were planned about South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, north-east England and Teesside also moving into the top tier.\n\nSpeaking ahead of those discussions with government, Nottingham City Council leader David Mellen said he planned to make clear \"that we want a package that properly protects local people, businesses, jobs and education, whether it's for tier two or tier three\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. What is the new three tier system after lockdown?\n\nElsewhere in the UK, in Wales people will be told to stay at home from Friday, while pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops will shut, as part of a \"short, sharp\" national lockdown until 9 November.\n\nA two-week school closure has begun in Northern Ireland as part of a tightening of restrictions.\n\nAnd in Scotland, the tightest restrictions are in place in the central belt, and there are plans for a three-tier framework of measures, similar to England's.", "Kath Sharpe says the division is \"crackers\"\n\nPeople across the country have opposing views about the government's new coronavirus tier system.\n\nBut in the case of Langwith, on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border, the division is somewhat more literal.\n\nThe county boundary runs down the middle of Portland Road, meaning houses on one side have \"tier one\" restrictions, while the other side is \"tier two\".\n\nIt's caused some amusement among residents, but also much frustration due to the difficulty of living in a community with two sets of rules.\n\nThe division between the two tiers runs right down the middle of Portland Road\n\nPeople on the Derbyshire side of the street, currently in tier one, can meet socially in groups of six indoors, while those on the other side are subject to more stringent restrictions - due to the fact Nottinghamshire became tier two this week.\n\nKath Sharpe, a 72-year-old parish councillor who lives in the village, said people had been joking about building a wall down the middle of the road.\n\n\"It's crackers,\" she said. \"As far as I'm aware, we've not had any cases of Covid in the village.\n\n\"People here have been very good at following the rules but I don't think they're going to stick to this - plus, who's going to come and enforce it?\n\n\"It should have been looked at as a whole community, not some of it lumped in with what's happening miles away.\"\n\nDave Mather says tier one ends at his garden wall\n\nDave Mather, 69, a retired miner who lives on the Derbyshire side of Portland Road, said: \"It's absolutely crazy - Derbyshire and tier one ends at my garden wall.\n\n\"They should have realised you can't divide a village up.\"\n\nDawn Wakeling doubts people in the village will follow the different restrictions\n\nDawn Wakeling, 49, lives on the tier one side of the road but her mother, whom she helps look after, lives across the street.\n\nShe said they will remain unaffected, as they are in a bubble, but added: \"People aren't going to follow it.\n\n\"I wouldn't be going to Nottingham but I won't be avoiding parts of the village. It has to be done on a village-by-village basis.\"\n\nBeverley Booker, 54, lives on the tier two side.\n\n\"When the border is just a walk to the other side of the street, it's a bit daft, isn't it?\" she said.\n\nKath McCormack, 66, who lives on the Nottinghamshire side, said: \"I know we're technically in Nottinghamshire, but Derbyshire is just a road away.\n\n\"It doesn't make sense to split a village in two.\"\n\nIt's not just people on the street that are feeling divided - the split has affected the whole village.\n\nJanice Mitchell, 64, said she will not be able to see her seven-year-old granddaughter because she lives in tier two.\n\n\"It's difficult to understand,\" she said. \"I know they have to have borders but why not go to the end of the road, rather than cut through the middle?\n\n\"I'll follow the rules but now I can't have my granddaughter to stay.\"\n\nThe village's pubs also fall into different tiers.\n\nBev Plumb, landlady of the Jug and Glass Inn, which is in tier two, said she had already had customers contacting her to cancel bookings.\n\nShe said the fact people can meet in pubs just a short walk down the road is an issue, and questioned how she would be able to enforce the ban on households mixing.\n\n\"People are trying to do the right thing, trying not to break the law, but it does affect our business,\" she said.\n\n\"There shouldn't be a blanket approach for the whole of Nottinghamshire.\"\n\nThe village pub that falls into tier two has had cancellations\n\nDerbyshire Labour councillor Joan Dixon drew attention to the anomaly on social media.\n\nShe said: \"There is some local amusement but there is also the sense that the rules are becoming very complicated and people are weary now.\n\n\"There are a lot of close-knit families in that community who will be affected.\"\n\nBoth Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire county councils urged residents to stick to the restrictions.\n\nA Nottinghamshire spokesperson said: \"If they are in Nottinghamshire, it will be a legal requirement not to mix with other people indoors unless they live with them, have a support bubble with them or fall under one of the other exceptions.\"\n\nA Derbyshire spokesperson said: \"These are government restrictions and we would urge people to follow all the latest guidelines.\"\n\nIt added it was the government that decided which tier areas were placed in.\n\nA Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said decisions were made in \"close consultation\" with local leaders.\n\n\"We... constantly review the evidence and will take swift action where necessary,\" she said.\n\nFollow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, or on Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The name change comes after years of debate in the Quebec town\n\nThe small Canadian town of Asbestos that decided it needed a rebrand has done away with the name derived from its mining heritage.\n\nThe Quebec town, home to some 7,000 people, voted for \"Val-des-Sources\" as its new moniker.\n\nThe town was once the location of the world's largest asbestos mine.\n\nIt was given the English name for the mineral - rather than the French amiante - in the late 19th Century.\n\nBut the town's council said the connotation hindered its ability to attract foreign investment, and announced last November that the hunt was on for a new name.\n\nThe town, about 150 km (95 miles) east of Montreal, finally announced the winning title with some fanfare on Monday evening.\n\nIt was picked after a lengthy consultation and a vote by town residents, including those as young as 14.\n\nAbout half the town residents eligible to cast ballots did so. Val-des-Sources won with just over 51% of the vote in the third round of voting.\n\nThe name is \"above all, inspiring for the future\", Mayor Hugues Grimard said.\n\nOther possibilities on the shortlist were L'Azur-des-Cantons, Jeffrey-sur-le-Lac, Larochelle, Phénix and Trois-Lacs, which came in second place.\n\nAsbestos won't be changing its town signs immediately, said Mr Grimard, who suggested it could be the end of the year before the formal, legal switch.\n\n\"It'll be a nice Christmas present,\" he said.\n\nThe town of Asbestos thrived for over a century on the chrysotile asbestos manufactured at its open-pit mine. The mine suspended operations in 2011.\n\nOnce considered a miracle mineral, asbestos was used in construction industries for strengthening cement, in insulation, roofing, fireproofing and sound absorption.\n\nBut by the mid-20th Century, concerns about its use were growing as more and more studies linked asbestos to deadly illnesses.\n\nBreathing in asbestos fibres has been linked to cancer and other diseases.\n\nGlobal demand plummeted as countries around the world began banning asbestos. Canada was a latecomer, only banning its manufacture, import, use and export in 2018.\n• None Quebec town of Asbestos seeks new name", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson says Greater Manchester will move into Tier 3\n\nGreater Manchester will move to England's highest tier of coronavirus restrictions from Friday at 00:01 BST, the prime minister has announced.\n\nSpeaking at No 10, Boris Johnson said \"not to act now\" would put the lives of Manchester's residents \"at risk\".\n\nHe said a \"generous\" offer of financial support had been made to the region but that Mayor Andy Burnham had refused it.\n\nMr Burnham said he had not been offered enough to \"protect the poorest people in our communities\".\n\nUnder tier three rules - currently only applied to Lancashire and the Liverpool City Region - pubs and bars not serving substantial meals have to close, while household mixing is banned indoors and outdoors in hospitality settings and private gardens.\n\nBetting shops, casinos, bingo halls, adult gaming centres and soft play areas will also have to close, while there is guidance against travelling in or out of the area.\n\nGreater Manchester is currently under tier two rules, meaning pubs and restaurants must close at 22:00, there is no household mixing indoors and the rule of six applies outdoors.\n\nAhead of the Downing Street press conference, Mr Burnham - speaking alongside other local leaders - said that without a \"bare minimum\" of £65m in additional business support, tighter measures \"would be certain to increase levels of poverty, homelessness and hardship\" among the region's 2.8 million population.\n\nHealth Secretary Matt Hancock later told the House of Commons that a £60m offer previously made to local leaders remained \"on the table\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Burnham: 'It can't be right to close businesses without support'\n\nOn the inability to agree on financial help, Mr Johnson said: \"I do regret this. As I said last week, we would have a better chance of defeating the virus if we work together.\"\n\nHe added Greater Manchester would receive £22m in funding as part of a \"comprehensive package of support\" but that the \"door was open to continue the conversation\" about further aid, so long as it was in line with that offered to other areas in same position.\n\nThe £22m mentioned by Mr Johnson - which is for expenses such as local enforcement and test and trace - is separate to the £60m that Mr Hancock spoke of.\n\nIn addition, the new Job Support Scheme will cover 67% of the wages - funded by employers and the government - of people affected by tier three closures.\n\nBoris Johnson says he can't give Greater Manchester disproportionately more money than other tier three areas.\n\nAndy Burnham says that he won't accept a deal that will lead to increased levels of hardship and homelessness.\n\nBut there are political risks on all sides here.\n\nCould Boris Johnson look like a Whitehall bean-counter who can't bring himself to stump up an extra £5m?\n\nDoes Andy Burnham look like he's overplayed his part as \"King of the North\" (as some now call him)?\n\nAll the while, those living in Greater Manchester might wonder what on earth is actually going to happen on Friday, in terms of financial support, as new measures kick in.\n\nThat surely is now the next deadline. And I suspect political leaders on all sides won't want to have to explain to people, on Friday morning, why they couldn't reach an agreement in time.\n\nExplaining the decision to impose tougher restrictions on Greater Manchester, Mr Hancock said hospital admissions in the region were higher now than at the end of March.\n\n\"There are now more Covid-19 patients in Greater Manchester hospitals than in the whole of the South West and the South East combined,\" he added.\n\nShadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth, meanwhile, said residents of Manchester would be \"watching the news in disbelief\".\n\nHe said they would be asking: \"Why was it right to cover 80% of wages in March and then now, in the run-up to Christmas, cover just two-thirds of their wages in October?\"\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the party would force a Commons vote on Wednesday, demanding a \"fair deal\" for areas facing tier three restrictions.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Keir Starmer This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nConservative MP Chris Green, who represents Bolton West, wrote on Facebook that Bolton had \"been through a far tougher lockdown than Tier 3 and it didn't work\".\n\nHe added: \"The government believes that three weeks of closing pubs and soft play centres will make a dramatic difference. It hasn't and it won't.\"\n\nHowever, six other Conservative MPs from the region have written to Mr Burnham to express their \"concern and deep disappointment\" about what they called \"his failure to come to an agreement with the Government\" on a support package.\n\nThe signatories ask Mr Burnham to \"make way\" for \"local MPs and council leaders\" to \"have a go at getting a sensible settlement\".\n\nKate Nicholls - the head of industry body UKHospitality - described the move to tier three as \"another huge blow for our sector and a very bitter disappointment for hospitality businesses in Manchester\".\n\n\"We need a practical and workable package of support for the whole of Manchester's hospitality sector in order to keep these businesses afloat and jobs alive,\" she said. \"Jobs, once lost, are not always easily revived and businesses closed not easily reopened.\"\n\nMeanwhile, the PM confirmed that conversations were ongoing with leaders in South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and the North East about the possibility of moving to the very high alert level, tier three.\n\nThe leaders of West Yorkshire's council later said a decision had been made to maintain tier two status in the county this week.\n\nIt comes as the latest government figures showed that, on Tuesday, the UK recorded a further 21,330 coronavirus cases and a further 241 deaths within 28 days of a positive test.\n\nThe rising case numbers in England have led some scientists and politicians to call for a so-called \"circuit breaker\" - a short, sharp lockdown such as that being brought in for Wales.\n\nBut speaking alongside Mr Johnson at Downing Street, England's deputy chief medical officer, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, said this approach would be \"inappropriate\" for parts of England where the disease was lower and \"very hard to justify for some communities\".\n\nIn Wales, people will be told to stay at home from Friday, while pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops will shut as part of the \"short, sharp\" national lockdown until 9 November.\n\nA two-week school closure has begun in Northern Ireland as part of a tightening of restrictions.\n\nAnd in Scotland, the tightest restrictions are in place in the central belt, and there are plans for a three-tier framework of measures, similar to England's.", "Last updated on .From the section European Football\n\nMarcus Rashford repeated his late heroics against Paris St-Germain with a superb winner as Manchester United marked their return to the Champions League with a fine win at the home of last season's beaten finalists.\n\nRashford's stoppage-time penalty sealed a famous victory at the Parc des Princes 18 months ago and the England striker was again on target to ensure Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's side took maximum points from their opening match in a formidable group.\n\nThe visitors had excelled in a first half which saw Bruno Fernandes stroke them ahead with a twice-taken penalty.\n\nBut the multiple French champions were far stronger and threatening in the second half and deservedly drew level when United striker Anthony Martial headed into his own net.\n\nDavid de Gea had to put in a much-improved display in United's goal, making strong saves to deny PSG's superstar duo Kylian Mbappe and Neymar.\n\nAnd the sides looked set to share the points when Rashford collected a pass from substitute Paul Pogba, rolled away from a defender and fired in off the base of the post from 20 yards.\n• None Reaction to all of Tuesday's Champions League action\n• None Quiz: Name the teams in the group stage\n\nRashford's penalty completed a stunning comeback in 2019 which all but cemented the case for Solskjaer's temporary reign to be made permanent, turning a delighted Rio Ferdinand - the former United defender turned BT Sport pundit - into a meme in the process.\n\nSolskjaer has not been able to maintain that blistering success since becoming full-time manager, but once again the Norwegian was able to conjure a victory against the odds.\n\nWithout captain Harry Maguire and midfielder Pogba, United played a back five - with defender Axel Tuanzebe being summoned from the wilderness and shining on his first appearance of 2020.\n\nTwice the 22-year-old kept stride with the rapid Mbappe and made fine challenges in an impressive display.\n\nAt the other end, United's opener came from a more familiar route - Fernandes converting a penalty after Martial was tripped. It was, remarkably, the 27th spot-kick awarded to United since the start of last season.\n\nFernandes, the captain on the night, actually missed for the second time in three days, but Keylor Navas was clearly off his line before the save and the video assistant referee called it back. Fernandes went the same way; the goalkeeper went the other.\n\nPSG looked far more like their old selves after the break and United had to defend well - but Rashford was guilty of wasting a couple of chances on the counter-attack before his brilliant late winner.\n\nThe rebuilding of Paris St-Germain has long been aimed solely at European glory - with domestic monopoly tied up years ago - and the run to the final just 58 days ago looked like a key juncture.\n\nThomas Tuchel's side is packed with blistering talent, but question marks over their consistency have long been raised and this was another frustrating display.\n\nThey moved the ball far too slowly in the first half and deserved to find themselves behind, even if De Gea was called into a double save from Angel di Maria and Layvin Kurzawa.\n\nTuchel moved Di Maria deeper at half-time, sending on Everton loanee Moise Kean up front, and his side were better. De Gea again made a flying save to deny Mbappe after a typically brilliant run, and Kurzawa hit the crossbar with a miscued cross.\n\nMartial gave them a route back into the match when he nodded Neymar's inswinging corner into his own net, but United improved when Pogba came on.\n\nWith RB Leipzig - semi-finalists last season - up and running with a win, it is now Tuchel's side who need to click into gear fast just to make it out of Group H.\n• None Paris St-Germain suffered a home defeat in a Champions League group game for the first time in 25 games, since losing 1-3 to CSKA Moscow in December 2004.\n• None Manchester United have scored nine own goals in the Champions League, more than any other side.\n• None Since the start of last season, United have been awarded 27 penalties and scored 22 of them, both highs among sides in Europe's big five leagues (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain) in that time.\n• None Since his debut for Manchester United in February, Bruno Fernandes has been directly involved in more goals than any other Premier League player (27 - 16 goals, 11 assists).\n• None Fernandes has scored 11 of his 12 penalties for United, more than any other player from Europe's big five leagues in that time.\n• None Anthony Martial is the second French player to score an own goal in the Champions League against French opposition, after Jeremy Mathieu for Barcelona, also against Paris St-Germain, in April 2015.\n• None PSG's Neymar has failed to score in four consecutive Champions League appearances for the first time since November 2013 (his first five games in the competition).\n• None Offside, Paris Saint Germain. Keylor Navas tries a through ball, but Kylian Mbappé is caught offside.\n• None Moise Kean (Paris Saint Germain) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt missed. Neymar (Paris Saint Germain) right footed shot from outside the box is high and wide to the right. Assisted by Pablo Sarabia.\n• None Goal! Paris Saint Germain 1, Manchester United 2. Marcus Rashford (Manchester United) right footed shot from the right side of the box to the bottom left corner. Assisted by Paul Pogba.\n• None Attempt blocked. Paul Pogba (Manchester United) right footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by Scott McTominay.\n• None Danilo Pereira (Paris Saint Germain) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.\n• None Attempt saved. Neymar (Paris Saint Germain) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Rafinha. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page\n• None How effective is it for weight loss?", "Martin Usborne's family spent a lot of time in isolation answering phone call after phone call\n\nTwo weeks ago, Martin Usborne, a publisher who lives in east London, found out a close family contact had coronavirus. A few days later his wife, Ann, and their one-year-old daughter, also tested positive.\n\nFrom that moment on, Martin says his wife's phone would not stop ringing. Over the course of 10 days, Ann had 30 separate calls from NHS Test and Trace that she managed to pick up. On top of this were another 27 calls that were missed. And then there were the half a dozen calls her husband received.\n\n\"At one point she would finish one call and as soon as she put the phone down - literally seconds later - another contact tracer would ring. And as soon as that call was over, test-and-trace would call my phone.\n\n\"This really was not the easiest situation to deal with, particularly while looking after our two small children,\" Mr Usborne told the BBC.\n\nSome calls were made because Ann had been in contact with the family acquaintance, who works in her home, while others were to tell her that her young girls (one and three years old) had been near the same person.\n\nNext came the calls because Ann had tested positive, calls because her little one had tested positive and then calls to alert her older toddler that she had been in contact with someone else one who had the virus (this time her mother).\n\nThe family understands some of these calls were necessary and is keen to stress that everyone they spoke to was kind and considerate and did their job well, but Mr Usborne is very concerned there has been a significant waste of resources.\n\n\"The majority of calls were long and repetitive, with different callers reading out the same script each time, asking the same questions and giving the same answers,\" he says.\n\nAnd the family say when they told contact tracers they had heard the exact same thing several times already, the callers apologised but said they would have to complete the entire phone call or it would not register and someone else would simply ring again.\n\nMr Usborne told the BBC: \"Essentially we were dealing with a broken excel spreadsheet, personified by a very nice person.\n\n\"In a way it was quite impressive as they were really persistent - but it was like a dog who had got the wrong bone.\"\n\nLater in the week, calls from contact tracers became more helpful, with some checking the family were OK and giving them information on when their isolation would end.\n\nBut Mr Usborne says they received conflicting advice about how long they had to remain at home. The NHS Covid-19 app recommended his wife stay indoors a few days longer than contact tracers suggested, for example.\n\nHe added: \"The people were super-nice about it but one contact tracer admitted they worked on a different system to the app and would continue to use theirs. Which one is right?\"\n\nThey are now not quite certain when exactly it is safe to go out and are isolating for the longest suggested time. And, more crucially, they say they are not sure if they can trust the advice at all.\n\nThe family feels there needs to be a lot more done to join up the dots, so that contact tracers are alerted if someone has already been called and the system recognises when callers have already spoken to parents or carers responsible for small children in the same household.\n\nMr Usborne also feels there should be a way for the hard-working humans on the other end of the phone to override the computer system if a family tells them they have received multiple, repetitive calls, all week long.\n\nAccording to the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS Test and Trace has reached a total of 901,151 people since it was started.\n\nThe first week of October saw the service successfully reach 76.8% of people who tested positive and 76.9% of contacts where communication details were provided.\n\nBut there have been issues over the time taken for test results to be returned.\n\nAnd the system had its worst week for reaching close contacts who were not in the same household as the person testing positive. Just 62% were reached in the week to 7 October, down from 67% the week before.\n\nIn the same week, the number of people transferred to test-and-trace more than doubled, to 88,000.\n\nA spokesperson said the government's test-and-trace programme \"is working hard to break chains of transmission, with over 900,000 people who may otherwise have unknowingly spreading coronavirus contacted and told to isolate\".\n\n\"We all have a crucial part to play in keeping the number of new infections down, which is why there is now a legal duty to self-isolate, and steps have been taken to make sure that people are complying with the rules.\"\n• None Who can still get free Covid tests?", "A 104-year-old who was inspired by Captain Sir Tom Moore to walk a marathon for charity is nearing the end of her challenge.\n\nRuth Saunders, from Newbury in Berkshire, started taking daily walks during lockdown and was encouraged by her granddaughter to try to cover the distance of a marathon.\n\nShe has around 30 laps of her house to complete and is raising money for the Thames Valley Air Ambulance.", "The most senior police officer on duty before the Manchester Arena attack had taken an \"unacceptable\" two-hour break before the bombing, the inquiry heard.\n\nPC Jessica Bullough admitted she then missed bomber Salman Abedi walking from the train station into the arena.\n\nThe British Transport Police (BTP) officer had been qualified for only eight months, and was still in her probationary period.\n\nThe suicide bombing killed 22 people and injured many more on 22 May 2017.\n\nThe public inquiry into the attack heard there were no police officers on patrol when 22-year-old Abedi made his journey from Victoria Station to the arena foyer.\n\nThe hearing was told PC Bullough took a break of two hours and nine minutes, during which time Abedi walked from the tram stop into the City Room.\n\nPC Bullough admitted her break should have been between 50 minutes and one hour.\n\nThe inquiry heard if she had come back 10 minutes earlier she would have seen Abedi carrying a large rucksack that contained explosives.\n\nShe said looking back, it was \"unacceptable\" to have taken a break of that length, and said she probably would not have done that had a supervisor been present.\n\nTop row (left to right): Alison Howe, Martyn Hett, Lisa Lees, Courtney Boyle, Eilidh MacLeod, Elaine McIver, Georgina Callander, Jane Tweddle - Middle row (left to right): John Atkinson, Kelly Brewster, Liam Curry, Chloe Rutherford, Marcin Klis, Angelika Klis, Megan Hurley, Michelle Kiss - Bottom row (left to right): Nell Jones, Olivia Campbell-Hardy, Philip Tron, Saffie-Rose Roussos, Sorrell Leczkowski, Wendy Fawell\n\nPC Bullough was the first on the scene in the foyer after the suicide attack at the end of the Ariana Grande concert.\n\nShe said: \"I think the training I had wasn't sufficient to deal with what I was witnessing.\"\n\nJohn Cooper QC, representing some of the bereaved families, said: \"Effectively did you feel left in the lurch?\"\n\nBTP PCSO Lewis Brown said he and a colleague took a break before other officers had returned from theirs, meaning there was no-one on patrol between just before 21:00 and 21:35 BST, when Abedi made his trip from the station into the foyer.\n\nMeanwhile, a father picking up his children on the night of the Manchester Arena attack told the inquiry he thought \"straight away\" that Abedi was a suicide bomber.\n\nNeal Hatfield said when he saw Abedi in the foyer of the arena his rucksack did not look normal as it did not flex under his weight.\n\n\"It was rock solid, that's what alarmed me straight away,\" Mr Hatfield said.\n\nMr Hatfield was about to go up the stairs to the mezzanine area of the arena's City Room when he saw Abedi with his back to him \"in the process of lying down, he had a backpack on the floor next to him\".\n\n\"I thought suicide bomber straight away, very little doubt in my mind. Honestly, my heart was racing,\" he said.\n\n\"The way he was dressed, the way he was acting, the body language was that he was trying to protect the bag. He was pretending to be casual, but I could see what he was doing.\"\n\nThe inquiry has heard Salman Abedi made three scouting trips round the Arena and Victoria Station\n\nMr Hatfield said he made eye contact with Abedi, who looked \"emotionally distressed\".\n\n\"He seemed frightened, his eyes were glazed over and he seemed nervous, agitated, he didn't seem right,\" he added.\n\nMr Hatfield told the inquiry he saw two members of the security team nearby and believed they were having a conversation about Abedi, and gesturing towards him.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Kanad Basi had drunk alcohol and taken cocaine and ecstasy before the crash\n\nA drink and drugs driver who killed a teenager in a crash has been jailed for four years and eight months.\n\nKanad Basi, 22, was almost twice the drink-drive limit having also taken cocaine and ecstasy when he lost control of his BMW and hit a tree.\n\nHis front-seat passenger, 16-year-old Jack Frame, died at the scene in Lesmahagow, South Lanarkshire.\n\nAt the High Court in Glasgow, Basi pled guilty to causing his death by driving dangerously on 10 February 2019.\n\nFollowing the sentence, Jack's family released a statement saying they felt \"angry and devastated at the outcome\".\n\nFront-seat passenger Jack Frame died at the scene of the crash in February 2019\n\nThey added: \"Only getting four years eight months in jail will not deter anyone from doing the same thing.\n\n\"This has not given us any type of justice after what has a been a long process for us.\"\n\nThe crash happened after Basi, a waiter in the family business, took three teenagers for a drive.\n\nHe drove into a bend at speed on New Trows Road, Lesmahagow, before crashing into a tree.\n\nRear passengers Aiden O'Donnell and Eleanor Plenderleith suffered severe injuries in the crash.\n\nFollowing the crash, Basi climbed into the rear seat and pushed Ms Plenderleith into the front.\n\nHowever, his DNA and blood were found on the driver's airbag.\n\nJack Frame's family added: \"Kanad tried to blame Ellie which was incredibly unfair and this accident resulted in Jack's death and serious injury to both Aiden and Ellie.\"\n\nJudge Lord Mulholland told Basi he would \" have to live with what you have done for the rest of your life\".\n\nHe added: \"You have delivered a life sentence to Jack Frame's family by your dangerous driving.\n\n\"They have shown dignity and human spirit in the face of the misery that you have inflicted upon them.\"\n\nBasi will also be banned from the road for 12 years and four months.\n\nThe court had heard how Basi had driven to a party in Lesmahagow in his BMW 1 series two-door coupe at about 01:00.\n\nA number of the partygoers asked to go for a drive in it and three of them drove off with him at 02:00.\n\nProsecutor Jane Farquharson said: \"As the accused approached a right-hand bend, he lost control of the car. His vehicle left the carriageway, mounted the grass verge, collided with a wire fence and struck a tree in the grounds of Hallandbush Golf Club.\n\n\"Due to this impact, Jack Frame was thrown forward and trapped within the front passenger side of the vehicle. His head was wedged underneath the glove box area.\"\n\nMr O'Donnell, an apprentice joiner who was 18 at the time, was sitting behind Basi.\n\nHe suffered a fractured skull, four facial fractures, two broken legs and a number of fractures to his left arm.\n\nThe court was told he had to learn to walk again and has been unable to work since the accident.\n\nMs Plenderleith, who at the time was 19 and worked at Subway, was knocked unconscious.\n\nShe had a punctured lung, lacerated liver, broken ribs and a fractured chest bone. A metal plate had to be inserted into her left upper arm.\n\nNone of the passengers was wearing a seat belt. Basi, who was wearing one, suffered a broken wrist.\n• None Boy killed by drunk driver who had taken drugs", "Talks have taken place over the creation of a new £4.6bn European Premier League, involving the top sides from across the continent.\n\nSources told the BBC that discussions are still at an early stage but the plan would involve replacing the Champions League with a new format.\n\nBut the project is said to still have a \"long way to go\" and the deal \"may not happen\".\n\nReports suggest five Premier League clubs, including champions Liverpool and Manchester United, have been approached by those behind the plan with more than a dozen teams from England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain in negotiations about becoming founder members of the competition.\n\nIt has also been reported that the European Premier League would see 18 sides compete in a single league with the top sides taking part in a play-off to determine an overall winner and that world governing body Fifa is involved.\n\nLast week Premier League clubs rejected 'Project Big Picture' - a proposal to reduce the league from 20 to 18 clubs and scrap the EFL Cup and Community Shield. It would also have seen more power transferred to the so-called 'big six' Premier League clubs.\n\nEuropean football's governing body Uefa said it opposed the plan.\n\n\"The Uefa president has made it clear on many occasions that Uefa strongly opposes a Super League.\n\n\"The principles of solidarity, of promotion, relegation and open leagues are non-negotiable. It is what makes European football work and the Champions League the best sports competition in the world.\n\n\"Uefa and the clubs are committed to build on such strength not to destroy it to create a super league of 10, 12, even 24 clubs, which would inevitably become boring.\"\n\n'Last nail in the coffin'\n\nKevin Miles, chief executive of the Football Supporters' Association, said the idea of a European Super League shows that billionaire owners of clubs \"are out of control\".\n\n\"The latest reports of plots, allegedly involving Manchester United and Liverpool, to create a European Super League, expose the myth that billionaire owners care about the English football pyramid, or indeed anything other than their own greed,\" said Miles.\n\n\"This has to be the last nail in the coffin of the idea that football can be relied upon to regulate itself.\"\n\nLa Liga president Javier Tebas said: \"The authors of that idea - if they really exist, because there is nobody actually defending it - not only show a total ignorance of the organisation and customs of European and world football, but also a serious ignorance of the audiovisual rights markets.\n\n\"A project of this type will mean serious economic damage to the organisers themselves and to those entities that finance it, if they exist, because they´re never official. These underground projects only look good when drafted at a bar at five in the morning\"", "Google has been issued with huge fines in the EU over market dominance\n\nThe US government has filed charges against Google, accusing the company of violating competition law to preserve its monopoly over internet searches and online advertising.\n\nThe lawsuit marks the biggest challenge brought by US regulators against a major tech company in years.\n\nIt follows more than a year of investigation and comes as the biggest tech firms face intense scrutiny of their practices at home and abroad.\n\nThe company has maintained that its sector remains intensely competitive and that its practices put customers first.\n\n\"People use Google because they choose to - not because they're forced to or because they can't find alternatives,\" it said.\n\nThe charges, filed in federal court, were brought by the US Department of Justice and 11 other states. The lawsuit focuses on the billions of dollars Google pays each year to ensure its search engine is installed as the default option on browsers and devices such as mobile phones.\n\nOfficials said those deals have helped secure Google's place as the \"gatekeeper\" to the internet, allowing it to own or control the distribution channels for about 80% of search queries in the US.\n\nAlphabet boss Sundar Pichai at a 2018 hearing in Washington. In July, he assured Congress, \"We conduct ourselves to the highest standard\".\n\n\"Google has thus foreclosed competition for internet search,\" the lawsuit said. \"General search engine competitors are denied vital distribution, scale, and product recognition - ensuring they have no real chance to challenge Google.\"\n\nIt added: \"Google is so dominant that 'Google' is not only a noun to identify the company and the Google search engine but also a verb that means to search the internet.\"\n\nThe suit said the deals have hurt the public by damaging search quality in terms of privacy and data protection, reducing choice and thwarting innovation.\n\nSally Hubbard, who works for the Open Markets Institute, a Washington think tank that has long pushed for more aggressive action against big tech firms, said focusing on Google's search distribution deals was one of the easiest legal cases to make against the company.\n\nOn Twitter she said the lawsuit had \"been so long coming but it's wonderful to see\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Sally Hubbard This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe case could be the first of many in the US that challenge the dominance of big tech firms and potentially lead to their break-up.\n\nOther states have launched their own investigations, and said they may join the suit filed on Tuesday or file their own.\n\nPoliticians in Congress have also called for action against Google and fellow tech firms Amazon, Facebook and Apple in an effort that has united Democrats and Republicans.\n\nThe decision to file the lawsuit just a few weeks before the US presidential election has raised questions about whether it was simply a move by the Trump administration to prove its willingness to challenge the influence of the sector if it gains a second term.\n\nBut officials said they had not rushed the investigation to ensure it was filed before the election - noting that for years, many advocates have said the government was moving too slowly on such issues.\n\n\"We're acting when the facts and the law warranted,\" deputy attorney general Jeffrey Rosen said, adding that the department's review of competition practices in the technology sector is continuing.\n\nGoogle has faced similar claims in the European Union. It is already appealing against €8.2bn ($9.5bn; £7.3bn) in fines demanded by the European Commission which include:\n\nGoogle parent Alphabet, which has a market value of more than $1tn, is expected to fight the allegations in the US as well. Its share price was little changed on Tuesday, despite the news.\n\nTaking on a giant like Google will be one of biggest competition cases in decades. But the case - to decide if the California-based company abuses its market power - could last years.\n\nEuropean regulators have led the way in taking action against the tech giants. But this move by the US Department of Justice is a sign that the mood has turned against them at home too.\n\nThe complaint says that two decades ago Google was a scrappy innovative start-up - but now it's the monopoly gatekeeper to the internet.\n\nGoogle stands accused of using anti-competitive tactics to shut out rivals and extend that monopoly. Google says people use it because they choose to rather than being forced.\n\nDeciding who is right won't be a quick decision.", "An American spacecraft is about to attempt the audacious task of grabbing rock samples from an asteroid.\n\nThe Osiris-Rex probe will lower itself on to the 500m-wide object known as Bennu to make a contact that lasts no more than a few seconds.\n\nBut in the course of this \"high-five\" manoeuvre, the spacecraft will deliver a squirt of gas to stir up the surface.\n\nAnd with luck, Osiris-Rex will catch a couple of handfuls of dust and grit it can bring back to Earth.\n\nThe aim is to capture at least 60g, but the scientists and engineers working on the Nasa-led mission are confident the probe can secure a kilo or more.\n\nIf that happens, it would represent the biggest extraterrestrial sample-return cache since the Apollo astronauts picked up rocks from the Moon 50 years ago.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Lockheed Martin This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nContact with Bennu is timed to occur just before 22:15 GMT (23:15 BST) when the asteroid and Osiris-Rex are about 330 million km from Earth.\n\nThe whole procedure will be automated. It has to be. Radio signals take 18 minutes to traverse the expanse of intervening space, making it impossible for controllers to intervene.\n\nBennu is a fascinating object. About the size of the Empire State Building, it looks somewhat like a spinning-top toy.\n\nResearchers understand it to be what they call a carbonaceous asteroid, meaning its rocks still retain a lot of the chemistry that was present when the Sun and the planets came into being more than 4.5 billion years ago. Hence the desire to bring some of its material home for analysis in sophisticated Earth laboratories.\n\nBennu contains chemistry preserved from the dawn of the Solar System\n\nWhen Osiris-Rex arrived at Bennu in 2018, the mission team immediately got a fright.\n\nDistant telescope and radar observations had suggested the asteroid would have a kind of sandy surface. But the probe's close-up imagery revealed the diminutive world to be littered with imposing boulders instead.\n\nWorse still, it was noticed the asteroid would occasionally kick out fragments from its surface as volatile substances vented into space.\n\nThis environment has challenged the mission team to find a safe place to sample.\n\nMonths have been spent precisely mapping every lump and bump on Bennu.\n\nExtensive investigations have identified two locations Osiris-Rex should be able to get in and out reasonably comfortably.\n\nThe primary site, called Nightingale, is 8m across - a little under the width of a singles tennis court, or a few car parking spaces.\n\nThe probe will approach this constrained zone very slowly, using its automated visualisation system to avoid nearby hazards, including a two-storey boulder that's been dubbed Mount Doom.\n\n\"For some perspective: the next time you park your car in front of your house or in front of a coffee shop, and walk inside - think about the challenge of navigating Osiris Rex-into one of these spots from 200 million miles away,\" remarked Mike Moreau, Nasa's deputy project manager on the mission.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Osiris-Rex has to squeeze past some big rocks to sample Asteroid Bennu\n\nWith its sampling arm outstretched, Osiris-Rex will press a ring-shaped device into the asteroid's surface that works like a kind of \"reverse vacuum cleaner\".\n\nWhen the ring touches down, a charge of pressurised nitrogen will be released to kick up small chunks of rock and \"soil\".\n\nIf a good contact is made, a decent amount of this elevated debris should get trapped inside the sampling head.\n\n\"We estimate that our time on the surface will be between five and 10 seconds before the spacecraft backs away with the sample safely inside of the sampler head,\" explained Sandra Freund, the mission operations manager from Lockheed Martin Space, the company that made Osiris-Rex.\n\nThe probe will be taking pictures throughout, to enable the mission team to gauge the success or otherwise of the sampling bid.\n\nHowever, it could be some days before Nasa is able to make a definitive statement on how much of Bennu's surface material has been retrieved.\n\n\"I'm confident that we're going to have abundant material based on the nature of the Nightingale site and the extensive testing that we did with our Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (Tag-Sam),\" said principal investigator Dante Lauretta from the University of Arizona, Tucson. \"And in the best-case scenario where the Tag-Sam filter is filled up, we might have a kilogram of sample or more. So, I can't tell you how excited I am.\"\n\nShould a second attempt be needed, Osiris Rex would target the back-up site nicknamed Osprey.\n\nAny samples will be packaged for return in a capsule that's expected to land back on Earth in September 2023.\n\nNasa is working closely with the Japanese space agency whose Hayabusa-2 probe sampled a different type of asteroid called Ryugu last year.\n\nThat mission's cache, weighing perhaps 100 milligrams, is coming home in December.\n\nNumerous scientists, including in the UK, are hoping to get the chance to analyse the materials from both endeavours - among them Sara Russell from London's Natural History Museum.\n\n\"We can learn a lot about the early formation of the Solar System from meteorites. But as soon as those rocks come through the atmosphere to fall to Earth, they're immediately contaminated in some way or another,\" she told BBC News.\n\n\"So, this is our chance to get a truly pristine sample, to understand what the primordial chemistry in the Solar System was really like.\"", "Russell Causley has never revealed the whereabouts of his wife Carole Packman's body\n\nA man whose grandfather has just been released from prison - after killing his wife 35 years ago - has told the BBC the parole process in England and Wales is \"secretive\" and \"coy\".\n\nNeil Gillingham has called for \"greater scrutiny\" of Parole Board hearings.\n\nIt comes as a review of the parole system is to consider whether victims and journalists should be allowed to attend hearings.\n\nThe reforms aim to improve the transparency of decisions.\n\nThe first step of the review will be a public consultation, according to the government.\n\nThe Parole Board came in for heavy criticism after a decision two years ago to free John Worboys, known as the black cab rapist. His release was overturned by the courts and he then admitted further crimes.\n\nFollowing the Worboys case, ministers pledged to improve transparency over Parole Board decisions, which currently take place after hearings held in private, usually behind closed doors in prisons.\n\nChief executive of the Parole Board Martin Jones told BBC Radio 4's Today programme he welcomed the idea, but said there were difficulties that needed to be overcome.\n\nMr Gillingham's grandmother Carole Packman was murdered in 1985 by his grandfather Russell Causley, who has just been released from prison after the Parole Board ruled he was not a risk to the public.\n\nSpeaking to Today, Mr Gillingham said victims and their families have limited influence over decisions.\n\nNeil Gillingham said he has never been allowed to attend a parole hearing in person\n\n\"The parole process I've always described as incredibly secretive, there is no transparency,\" he said.\n\n\"In terms of the input that the victim has [through the process] it is nothing more than a tick box exercise. It's an element for the Parole Board to be able to say that the victim has been listened to.\"\n\nMr Gillingham added that information following a decision is also \"incredibly limited\".\n\n\"To give you an example, 'Russell Causley poses an emotional risk to Samantha Gillingham [his mother] and a physical risk to Neil Gillingham',\" he said.\n\n\"But they would never go into detail into how that risk is quantified.\"\n\nMr Gillingham said he was in support of the review as \"there needs to be greater scrutiny\", but he questioned why changes had not come sooner.\n\n\"Until I can go to a parole hearing, we convict in an open court, we release in a closed court,\" he said.\n\nVictims are currently allowed to attend parole hearings only to read a statement about the impact of an offender's crime.\n\nThe review will look at whether they should be able to play a fuller role by observing hearings. Also under discussion will be whether the wider public and the media should have greater access to proceedings.\n\nIt will also examine whether parole panels should have more legal clout with powers like the courts to compel witnesses to attend hearings.\n\nAs part of the move to greater transparency the Parole Board now produces summaries of its decisions for victims and the public.\n\nAnd the justice secretary, victims and prisoners are able to challenge Parole Board decisions without having to go through the courts.\n\nMr Jones said the review offered \"a real opportunity to provide more transparency of our decision making\".\n\n\"Providing there are appropriate safeguards [...] victims would be better able to understand why we make the decisions that we do, and indeed the wider public,\" he said.\n\nBut he added that there were some difficulties to overcome, including where parole hearings currently take place - \"physically in a prison\" - and balancing the fact that there might be sensitive information mentioned about both the victim and the prisoner.\n\n\"There needs to be safeguards and balances in relation to information,\" he said.\n\nMr Jones suggested parole hearings could be streamed for victims to attend remotely, or that a court room might be more suitable if it's \"a particularly tricky case\" - allowing press to attend \"as they do a normal crown court hearing\".\n\nThe proposed moves represent the biggest change to the system since parole boards were established almost 60 years ago.\n\nThe Ministry of Justice has said decisions on its review of the Parole Board system are set to be made by the end of the year once the results of the consultation are received.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Residents gathered at Chinnor Community Church on Monday to remember the Powell family\n\nA man who survived a crash which killed his wife and three of their children says he feels an \"abundance of loss\".\n\nJosh Powell's wife Zoe, 29, died with Phoebe, eight, when their people carrier collided with a lorry in Oxfordshire.\n\nSimeon, six, and four-year old Amelia, died at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, where their father and 18-month-old sister Penny remain.\n\nIn a tribute to his family, Mr Powell said he faced an \"uncertain future\".\n\nThe crash happened on the A40, near a railway bridge between Oxford and Cassington, on 12 October.\n\nZoe Powell and her three eldest children died in the crash\n\nMr Powell, from Chinnor, said: \"As I look to an uncertain future, I reflect on the fun that we had as a family, with feelings of sadness that it was cut so short.\n\n\"Before the adventure of starting a family nobody truly knows what to expect.\n\n\"All of life's preconceptions and what we see in the world around us meant that life as a family man was so much better than I expected it to be.\n\n\"I had been blessed with four wonderful children, whose thirst for life and hunger of adventure kept me busy but in the best possible way.\"\n\nThe 30-year-old described Phoebe as the \"model of her mother but with a thirst to always know more\" and that she was \"clever and able to make great jumps of imagination - her great creations in Lego are testament to this\".\n\nHe said Simeon \"was just like his father, with a mischievous sense of humour [and] a keen sportsman\" who had been shortly due to play his first football match.\n\nAmelia was \"kind and spirited\", he said, with a \"tenderness and thoughtfulness much more advanced than her years\".\n\nHe added: \"Myself and Zoe were as different as we were alike. Despite the frequent tensions this would bring, it was of immense benefit having such differing world views.\n\n\"Zoe was a dreamer; with a head spinning of new things to do or tales to tell. More than anything, we made a great partnership to raise a family.\"\n\nMrs Powell, who had lived in Chinnor since the mid-2010s but was previously from Sheffield, was a blogger who wrote about motherhood, family life and the challenges of having young children.\n\nThe crash happened on the A40, between Oxford and Cassington\n\nThe deaths came just months after the family lost everything in a blaze at their home.\n\nMr Powell thanked well-wishers for the support now that he had lost his \"immediate nuclear family\" and said there were \"many battles to come\".\n\nA candlelit vigil was held in their home village on Monday evening for the family.\n\nThe 1st Chinnor Scout Troop, where Mr Powell is a leader, marched to the private vigil, while residents in the cul-de-sac where the family lived illuminated their houses with green lights to show support.\n\nJosh Powell says he faces an \"uncertain future\" following the loss of his wife and three older children\n\nA JustGiving page set up by a railway worker colleague of Mr Powell has raised more than £120,000.\n\nThe 56-year-old driver of the lorry involved in the crash suffered minor injuries.\n\nNo arrests have been made, police said.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid in Scotland: FM wants to avoid Manchester lockdown situation\n\nNicola Sturgeon has insisted she will have the final say on local Covid-19 restrictions in different parts of Scotland, saying \"the buck stops here\".\n\nThe Scottish first minister said she would not \"offload\" decisions about local alert levels onto councils.\n\nA lengthy row has played out between UK ministers and leaders in Manchester over imposing stricter rules there.\n\nMs Sturgeon said it was her \"driving ambition\" not to repeat this when a new multi-tier system begins in Scotland.\n\nShe said the government would \"consult and be as collaborative as possible\", but would ultimately make the decisions and would not be getting into \"standoffs\".\n\nSome 2.8 million people in Greater Manchester were left in limbo for more than a week during talks between ministers, mayors and MPs over whether the region would move into the top tier of England's Covid alert system.\n\nThe talks broke down after 10 days amid disagreements over financial support, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has now confirmed the region will be placed in the \"very high\" alert level from Friday even without a deal.\n\nScotland is due to implement its own multi-tier system of restrictions after a set of short-term measures expires later in October.\n\nMs Sturgeon said she made no criticism of anyone involved in the \"tough decisions\" in Manchester, but said she would be aiming to avoid such a dispute.\n\nThe UK government has been in a standoff with local leaders in Greater Manchester over Covid-19 restrictions\n\nThe first minister said: \"I believe it's really important that the buck for these difficult decisions stops here, with me and government.\n\n\"We are asking people to do extraordinary things right now, and it's not fair for me and the government to try to offload those onto other people, be it local authorities or health boards.\n\n\"We have to consult and be as collaborative as possible - we will absolutely be engaging with local authorities. And as we take decisions about which levels apply in which parts of the country we will want that to be collaborative.\n\n\"But ultimately we have to be able to take the decisions.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon said her government was \"not in a position to get into standoffs over money\", stressing the \"finite resources\" available to her.\n\nShe said: \"What we are trying to do is give as much clarity and certainty as we can, have as much collaboration and discussion with those that need to be involved in these decisions as we can, not shy away from responsibility and ultimately me bearing the accountability for these decisions, and retaining a degree of flexibility in the face of an infectious virus.\n\n\"That is the balance we are trying to strike.\"\n\nPubs in Scotland's central belt have been shut down by the current set of short-term restrictions\n\nAt her daily coronavirus briefing, Ms Sturgeon also hinted that the current short-term restrictions on bars and restaurants - which are chiefly focused on the central belt - could be extended for another week until the multi-tier system has been signed off by MSPs.\n\nRules clamping down on the hospitality trade are due to expire on 26 October, but MSPs will not vote on the government's \"strategic framework\" before then as Holyrood is in recess.\n\nThe first minister is to discuss the restrictions with her cabinet on Wednesday.\n\nAsked if the current measures would be extended to cover the gap, she said: \"If you look at the numbers across the central belt right now and the sequencing over the next week of moving to a new system, you might expect it might make sense from a public health point of view to see that rolled over.\n\n\"That is one option cabinet is looking at tomorrow.\n\n\"The regulations currently expire on Monday, so another option would be for that to be allowed to happen - we will look at the data and I will give the outcome of that tomorrow.\"\n\nMs Sturgeon is to hold talks with opposition party leaders about the next steps on Tuesday afternoon, including Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross.\n\nThe Tory MP said he would \"look at everything as constructively as possible\", but said there had been a \"lack of clear guidance\" from the Scottish government to firms.\n\nHe said: \"When they were given just 50 hours' notice to introduce these further restrictions, what was the guidance from the Scottish government to businesses about how they could change and adapt to make sure they could open again safely?\n\n\"It seems nothing has happened, nothing has been developed in that area and businesses are once again hearing through the daily briefing that these restrictions may last far longer.\"", "Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Tuesday evening. We'll have another update for you tomorrow morning.\n\nThe highest tier of Covid restrictions will be imposed on Greater Manchester from Friday after talks between local leaders and Westminster to resolve a row over financial support broke down. At a Downing Street briefing, PM Boris Johnson said a \"generous\" offer of financial support had been made to the region, but mayor Andy Burnham refused. Mr Burnham said ministers \"walked away\" from talks earlier today after refusing to offer the £65m called for. Our political editor Laura Kuenssberg said it is understood that Mr Johnson and Mr Burnham discussed a figure of £60m but were unable to agree. The \"very high\" alert level - or tier three - means pubs and bars not serving food must close, and there will be extra restrictions on household mixing. In Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has insisted she will have the final say on local Covid-19 restrictions in different parts of Scotland, saying \"the buck stops here\".\n\nThe UK is pushing ahead to be the first nation to carry out \"human challenge\" studies, where up to 90 healthy people will be deliberately exposed to Covid-19. The trials, which could begin in January, aim to speed up the race to get a coronavirus vaccine. The government is putting £33.6m towards the work and experts insist safety will be a number one priority. The plans will need ethical approval and sign-off from regulators before they can go ahead. Researchers would first use controlled doses of the pandemic virus to discover what is the smallest amount that can cause Covid infection in volunteers aged 18 to 30. Next, scientists could test if a Covid vaccine prevents infection.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nAlmost half of secondary schools in England sent home one or more pupils because of coronavirus incidents last week, the latest attendance figures show. It meant pupils having to isolate in 46% of secondary and 16% of primary schools. Overall, attendance across both primary and secondary schools has worsened from 90% to 89%, data from the Department for Education shows. The rules around how schools operate during the pandemic varies in each of the devolved nations.\n\nHospitality chiefs are scrambling to work out whether working lunches at pubs and restaurants could be exempt from new coronavirus restrictions. Trade body UK Hospitality said it wants government clarification, as many central London venues rely on workers meeting up over lunch. People from different households are banned from meeting in pubs and restaurants in tier two and tier three areas. But the rules suggest meetings are allowed for business purposes. Current government guidance advises working from home as much as possible and limiting social contact.\n\nThe sale of Durex jumped when social-distancing rules were relaxed in the summer, says maker Reckitt Benckiser. The consumer goods giant said growth in its health arm, which includes condoms and \"sexual wellbeing products\", rose 12.6% in the last three months. Sales of Dettol, Cillit Bang and air fresheners also jumped, helped by workers improving their new home-office environment, Reckitt said. Total group sales in the last quarter rose 13% to £3.5bn on the same period last year.\n\nFind more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.\n\nPlus, with Northern Ireland already in one and Wales soon set to follow, when will we know whether a circuit-breaker is working?\n\nWhat questions do you have about coronavirus?\n\nIn some cases, your question will be published, displaying your name, age and location as you provide it, unless you state otherwise. Your contact details will never be published. Please ensure you have read our terms & conditions and privacy policy.\n\nUse this form to ask your question:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or send them via email to YourQuestions@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any question you send in.", "Health Secretary Sajid Javid says there are \"no guarantees\" when it comes to ruling out new restrictions or another circuit breaker before Christmas.\n\nBut what exactly is a circuit breaker in Covid terms?\n\nThe UK, Northern Ireland, Singapore and Israel have all previously used circuit breakers to try to reduce their coronavirus cases.\n\nBut how do they work? How long is a Covid circuit breaker? How can it help tackle Omicron?\n\nBBC health correspondent Laura Foster explains it all in a minute.", "The report by HMP Birmingham's Independent Monitoring Board found standards are improving\n\nMore than 300 pages of \"solicitors letters\" were laced with drugs and sent to inmates during a prison's Covid-19 lockdown.\n\nThe letters, marked as being from inmates' legal teams, were intercepted at HMP Birmingham in June.\n\nStaff's efforts emerged in a report on standards since an inspector called the prison the worst he had ever seen.\n\nNow a watchdog hopes improvements during the virus will help reshape the prison's future.\n\nHMP Birmingham's Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) has been assessing progress for the 12 months since July 2019, when the government took over the site full time from private security firm G4S.\n\nThe switch followed a raft of serious complaints over the prison which painted a picture of severe squalor, chronic danger and acute drugs misuse.\n\nStaff at the prison are diligent in tracking down illicit items, the report says\n\nBut the IMB's annual report found \"rising trends in standards\", and that in general, inmates' experience had improved, with expectations \"this upward trajectory will continue\".\n\nInstances of violence and drug use have fallen, and the board concedes it is related, yet only in part, to prisoners spending most of the day in cells during the enforcement of Covid-19 restrictions.\n\nAmid national lockdown, the prison experienced an influx of letters laced with psychoactive substances (PS).\n\nThey were marked as Rule 39 solicitors letters - messages between inmates and legal counsel that by law cannot be read by prisons unless contraband is suspected.\n\nStaff did suspect and found 330 pages of drug-coated paper; a move that left the board \"reassured the prison is diligent in tracking down illicit items\".\n\nThe board added incidents of PS abuse were \"much lower\" than in recent years, and a body scanner was finally in place to detect drugs.\n\nIn terms of violence, the board found the prison to be \"much safer\", with one officer reporting a \"transformation\".\n\nThe fall in violence, the report said, predated the prison's Covid-19 lockdown, rolled out between March and July.\n\nBoard members praised effective communication, \"outstanding management\" and staff teamwork in keeping the prison Covid-safe.\n\nThe report concluded: \"The reduction although not elimination of the drug supply and bullying during lockdown has helped to create an environment within which many men have reported feeling safe.\n\n\"It is undoubtedly the case that staff-resident relationships have significantly improved during the lockdown.\n\n\"The challenge will be to maintain this in the future while also allowing a reasonable time out of cell.\"\n\nDuring lockdown, inmates were in their cells 23-and-a-half hours a day.\n\nThat concerned the board, but it said the move should be viewed in context of only three inmates testing positive for the virus, and inmates' general acceptance the move was for their safety.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Government trying to do two things at once\n\nThe PM’s confirmation that the Greater Manchester area is to go into a tier-three shutdown of much of the hospitality sector at the end of Thursday will be damaging to the local economy but the virus is still spreading rapidly. The surprising thing here was that £60m of support to businesses placed on the table in negotiations with Manchester at midday appears to have been completely withdrawn. The region was trying to establish how much would be needed to fund support for businesses affected. At the press conference, just £22m was mentioned, which works out at £7.85 per Greater Manchester citizen - about half what Liverpool received. Local MPs and politicians said Manchester was being “punished”. The problem for the government here is that it is trying to do two things at once. It is trying to accommodate the fact that some jobs are gone forever and those people, it believes, should get new ones. That was the rationale behind closing the furlough scheme. But since then the health crisis has returned with a vengeance, and businesses are being obliged to be shut, as more were in March. Mr Burnham says when London was driving national infection levels high, the whole nation was shut down, and a £5bn a month furlough scheme was launched. Now the north is leading infections, only its city regions are being compulsorily shut, and the jobs support is significantly less generous. During the negotiations, it is said that Greater Manchester was told there was no longer the money. The government is trying to balance lives, livelihoods and the limits of public spending on a regional basis for economic reasons. But it is far from certain that a national lockdown will be avoided.", "Today we're featuring members of our voter panel who are US military veterans. You met Rom yesterday. Today we're featuring his answers on why being a veteran impacts his vote.\n\nRom served as a US Marine for seven years and now works in business development. After backing Trump in 2016, he is more enthusiastically supporting his re-election this year as a check on the “rampant liberalism” of Democrats.\n\nWhy does this election matter to you?\n\nAs an avid historian, a follower of current events since I was very young, and a veteran, I have become quite startled at the lurch towards the left by one of the two major political parties in our country. There was a time not long ago when the differences between the two parties were not that great. Both parties, Republican and Democrat, were aligned on the same goals, albeit, their methods for achieving those goals is what differentiated them.\n\nHowever, there has never been such a great divergence in goals between the two parties, with one - Democrats - appearing to make a steep and staggering lurch towards the left and intent on altering the fundamental values that the United States was built upon, and which allowed it to become the world's leader and economic powerhouse. There's never been a time in our country's recent history when one major party has pushed so hard to turn the United States into a socialist-like country.\n\nHow does your background as a veteran influence your vote?\n\nService members are trained to put their lives on the line for their country. In order to be willing to die for your country, you have to believe in its core values. I believed in the core values of my country when I served for seven years in the US Marine Corps, just as I continue to believe in those core values today.\n\nNotwithstanding his caustic and unconventional demeanor and personality, there are three primary reasons I support Mr Trump:\n• He holds dear the values that have made this country great.\n• He follows through on his campaign promises - unlike other politicians of the past, both Republican and Democrat, who made promises while campaigning but rarely followed through.\n• Mr Trump has shaken the establishment class to its core - he's the Disruptor-in-Chief and I, as well as many others, believe disruption has been in order for a long time because the establishment class - Washington - has been out of touch with the general working-class population.\n\nRom is a member of our US election voter panel. You'll hear more from him, and many of our other voters, throughout the week.\n• We want to hear from you - what questions do you have about the US election?\n• In five words, tell us what's at stake in this election.", "Speaking outside the Manchester's central library, Andy Burnham insisted the city was \"fighting back\"\n\nOnce a New Labour rising star, twice a defeated Labour leadership candidate, now mayor of Greater Manchester.\n\nWhile other ex-Labour ministers of his generation can be found on the backbenches or the set of Strictly, Andy Burnham has found a new political power base.\n\nHis confrontation with the government over coronavirus restrictions has dominated the news over recent days and he has now been dubbed \"the King of the North\" by one of the city's bars.\n\nAndy Burnham was born in 1970 in Liverpool to telephone engineer Kenneth and receptionist Eileen.\n\nShortly afterwards, the family moved to Culcheth, a commuter belt village halfway between the city he was born in and the city he now represents as mayor.\n\nThe middle of three brothers, he describes his family as \"tight-knit\", with Everton Football Club being \"the glue that keeps us together\".\n\nHis family on both sides came from Liverpool but he says that growing up he spent more time in Manchester and was \"massively into the Manchester music of the mid and late 80s\".\n\nHe told Nick Robinson's Political Thinking podcast that he did go to the famous Hacienda nightclub, but added: \"I probably won't say much more about that,\"\n\nThe 80s drama Boys from the Blackstuff told the story of Liverpudlian men trying to find work amid an economic recession\n\nAged 15 he joined the Labour Party, having partly been politicised by the miners' strikes of 1984-5, as well as the TV series Boys from the Blackstuff - a drama about unemployed men in Liverpool.\n\nHe attended a Roman Catholic comprehensive and later studied English at Cambridge University.\n\nAfter graduating he wrote for trade magazines including Tank World, before getting work with then-Labour MP Tessa Jowell.\n\nIn 2001 he was elected to what was then considered to be the safe Labour seat of Leigh in Greater Manchester (it turned Conservative in the last election).\n\nIn his first speech to the House of Commons, Mr Burnham told MPs that his constituents had little confidence in Parliament and said his challenge was \"to restore people's faith in politics and show that Parliament does listen and deliver good news as well as bad\".\n\nFive years after becoming an MP he was promoted by Tony Blair to the position of junior Home Office minister - a role which including going on a \"charm offensive\" tour to promote ID cards.\n\nIn 2008, Gordon Brown made him culture secretary, and it was as culture secretary that he attended a memorial service for the 96 Liverpool football fans killed in the Hillsborough disaster.\n\nAndy Burnham at the High Court with other MPs and Hillsborough campaigners including Margaret Aspinall\n\nHe later said he had \"agonised for weeks\" over whether he should attend the event because he knew \"he had nothing to say\" to the relatives seeking justice.\n\nHis speech was interrupted by heckles from the crowd - angry that no-one had been prosecuted for the tragedy.\n\nThis prompted him to raise the issue at cabinet and the Hillsborough Independent Panel was later established to investigate the disaster.\n\nSpeaking at an event marking the 25th anniversary of the tragedy, he told the audience that the barracking he had received helped him \"find the political courage to do something\".\n\nIn June 2009 he became health secretary and critics have accused him of increasing the role of private companies in the NHS.\n\nHowever, he argues, he used his time at the Department of Health to change policy by ensuring the NHS was always the preferred provider.\n\nFollowing Labour's defeat in the 2010 general election, Mr Burnham joined the race to succeed Mr Brown as party leader but lost out to Ed Miliband, coming fourth out of five candidates.\n\nHe did better in 2015, coming second, beaten by Jeremy Corbyn.\n\nReflecting on his defeat, he says he felt he was \"punished for loyalty\" to the Labour leadership, adding: \"Politics doesn't reward people who try and pull for the team.\"\n\nAndy Burnham says he lost the 2015 Labour leadership election because Jeremy Corbyn offered \"a sense of renewal\" to Labour members\n\nHe has previously described himself as \"tribal\". \"If anything defines me, it is being Labour,\" he has said. \"Whoever is the manager, I am part of the team.\"\n\nHowever, more recently he told the New Statesman he felt \"semi-detached\" from the party.\n\nSome have accused him of moving with the prevailing wind and shifting from being a firm supporter of New Labour and Tony Blair when he first started out in politics to posing as the candidate of the left in the 2015 election.\n\nHe says he gets \"frustrated\" by the flip-flop label, arguing that his politics are \"nuanced\".\n\nLooking back on New Labour, he says \"the early albums were very good\", but suggests it went wrong when \"it courted power and influence too much\".\n\nHe served in Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet, but stepped down to run for the mayoralty of Greater Manchester - a position he won in 2017 with 63% of the vote.\n\nAndy Burnham with his wife Marie-France Van Heel after winning the Greater Manchester mayoral election\n\nAs mayor, he promised to donate 15% of his salary - currently £110,000 - to a mayor's homelessness fund and pledged to end rough sleeping by 2020.\n\nLast year he acknowledged that he may not meet the target but said he \"couldn't have done more\".\n\nHe has vociferously defended devolution in England arguing that in the past \"places have felt powerless in the face of change.\"\n\nMr Burnham says that, apart from London, English cities \"aren't punching their weight\", adding: \"If we are going to make a success of Brexit, you have to set those cities free - and devolution could do that.\"\n\nHe insists that he is \"not about plotting a route back to Westminster\" and argues that he has more power now than he did as a cabinet minister.\n\nAsked in 2018 if he would rather score a hattrick for Everton or stand on the steps of Downing Street, he said: \"The hattrick for Everton dream has long gone, so has Downing Street - that ship has sailed.\n\n\"The dream for me is to play some part in the revival of the North of England.\"\n\nBut, whether he wanted to or not, Mr Burnham has very much returned to the centre of attention in UK politics in recent weeks, as he takes on the government over its plans to raise Covid restrictions on Greater Manchester's 2.8 million people to the highest level.\n\nHe is demanding more money - as much as under the soon-to-end furlough scheme - to support those likely to unable to work as a result, including staff in pubs and bookmakers.\n\nWarning Westminster not to \"ignore\" his region, Mr Burnham said: \"If we go into a lockdown where we don't support people who are in the lowest-paid professions we will have a mental health crisis on top of a pandemic.\"\n\nThe stakes for Greater Manchester, and Mr Burnham's legacy, appear huge.", "GCSE exams due to take place in early November have been postponed for almost two weeks.\n\nEducation Minister Peter Weir made the decision due to the closure of schools for an extended mid-term break.\n\nGCSE exams run by the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment (CCEA) will now begin on 23 November.\n\nAlmost 1,500 positive cases of coronavirus have been recorded in NI schools since they reopened to pupils at the end of August.\n\nThousands of Year 11 and Year 12 pupils taking GCSEs in science are due to sit exams in November.\n\nThere are exam papers in biology, chemistry and physics on three consecutive days.\n\nThose exams had been due to take place from 11 to 13 November.\n\nHowever, schools have now been told they will be postponed until 23 to 25 November.\n\nIn a statement, CCEA said that the decision had been taken by Mr Weir \"following the Northern Ireland Executive's recent decision that all schools should close for an extended mid-term break, due to the ongoing health situation in Northern Ireland\".\n\nPupils are also due to sit maths and English language GCSE exams in January 2021 and more science GCSE exams in February 2021.\n\nMr Weir had previously decided that the main summer A-level, AS and GCSE exams in Northern Ireland will start one week later in 2021, but will still finish by 30 June.\n\nThe minister said he had asked the Northern Ireland exams board CCEA to consider what he called \"back-up\" arrangements.\n\nPupils are due to sit fewer exams in many GCSEs in 2021 but CCEA has not yet provided final details of precise changes to individual subjects.", "The sale of Durex jumped when social-distancing rules were relaxed in the summer, says maker Reckitt Benckiser.\n\nThe consumer goods giant said growth in its health arm, which includes condoms and \"sexual wellbeing products\", rose 12.6% in the last three months.\n\nSales of Dettol, Cillit Bang, and air fresheners also jumped, helped by workers improving their new home-office environment, Reckitt said.\n\nTotal group sales in the last quarter rose 13% to £3.5bn on last year.\n\n\"Relaxations of social distancing regulations resulted in improved demand for our sexual well-being products,\" it said.\n\nDuring the spring lockdown Reckitt saw a sharp drop in demand for condoms as people had less sex.\n\nHowever, the company suggested on Tuesday that this spring fall could have a knock-on effect on its baby formula business next year, with an expected fall in the global birth rate.\n\n\"There is evidence that birth rates will be further lowered in coming quarters as a result of behaviour changes related to the pandemic,\" it said.\n\n\"Our performance has been led by an increase in hygiene and health volumes,\" said boss Laxman Narasimhan.\n\nSales of Dettol-branded sprays, wipes and liquid climbed more than 50% compared to the same period last year.\n\nAirwick and Finish continued to grow strongly, with consumers continuing to spend more time at home compared to a year ago, the company said.\n\nReckitt said that Covid-19 was accentuating trends such as \"urbanisation and global warming, and their impact on their spread of infection, re-enforcing the necessity of improved hygiene\".\n\nIt also highlighted a growing demand for self-care and a growing importance of sexual health and wellbeing.\n\n\"As consumers have sought to embrace self-care for themselves and their families, we have seen growth in preventative treatments, such as vitamins, minerals and supplements,\" it said.\n\nWhile many retailers have been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis, which has seen an acceleration towards online sales, some benefitted from lockdown.\n\nAnn Summers, which is known for selling lingerie and sex toys, said overall sales were up 14.4% in the three months to 26 September compared with last year.\n\n\"2020 has been an extraordinary time, and as a business we have seen customers taking time to truly invest in their mental and sexual wellbeing,\" a spokesperson said.\n\n\"We have also seen increased engagement on our expert advice videos and content hub online, as customers seek out new and exciting ways to survive lockdown.\"\n\nThere was also a big surge over the summer and early autumn in people buying household cleaners, disinfectant, and bleach, according to retail analysis firm Kantar.\n\nSales of household cleaners grew by £38m in the 12 weeks to 4 October compared with last year. In the same time period, antiseptic and disinfectant sales were up more than 57%, while bleach and toilet cleaner sales rose almost 10%.\n\nReckitt's latest results were well received by analysts. ''Reckitt Benckiser has cleaned up on our obsession with hygiene,\" said Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst, Hargreaves Lansdown.\n\n\"Our pursuit of cleanliness during the pandemic has been hugely beneficial for the group, and the signs are that the crisis is leading to a longer-term behaviour shift with consumers demanding reassurance that workplaces, shops and public transport are germ free.\"\n\nRichard Hunter, head of markets at interactive investor, said: \"Reckitt was already seeing the benefits of improving hygiene and self-care awareness, and the pandemic has moved growth to another level.\"\n• None People having less sex in lockdown, says Durex", "Passengers flying from Heathrow to Hong Kong on Tuesday will be the first to have the option of paying for a rapid Covid test before checking in.\n\nThe test will cost £80 and the result is guaranteed within an hour.\n\nThe aim is to help people travelling to destinations where proof of a negative result is required on arrival.\n\nCollinson, the company behind the initiative had hoped the test could be used to enter Italy, but talks with the Italian government are continuing.\n\nA growing number of countries have classified the UK as being \"at risk\", meaning travellers from the UK face more restrictions.\n\nThe authorities in Hong Kong now require people to show they have a negative test result, taken within 72 hours of a flight from London.\n\nThe rapid saliva swab, which is now available at Heathrow Terminals 2 and 5, is known as a Lamp (Loop-mediated Isothermal Amplification) test.\n\nBritish Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Cathay Pacific will now offer it to customers.\n\nTim Alderslade, chief executive of the aviation trade body Airlines UK, said he would like the cost of the test to be lower.\n\n\"For business passengers £80 is probably quite competitive but we've certainly said to the government in terms of introducing a test on arrival in the UK anything from £50-£60 would be better,\" he said.\n\nA Lamp test is quicker than the PCR test, which is widely used in the NHS, because the sample does not need to be sent to a laboratory.\n\nCollinson, the company behind the initiative at Heathrow, admitted that the Lamp test is \"slightly less sensitive\" than the PCR test.\n\nHowever, the Lamp test is considered to be much better than another rapid option - the antigen test.\n\nCollinson's chief executive David Evans told the BBC that \"health screening\" was quickly becoming another stage of the airport experience.\n\nHe said passengers would only have to turn up at the airport an hour earlier. And he maintained testing would help give people confidence to travel, because flights would be \"Covid-secure\".\n\n\"It starts to make travel easier again,\" he said.\n\nCollinson, which partners with Swissport, hopes testing will help open up routes between the UK and other countries.\n\nPeople arriving in Italy from the UK must now either prove they had a negative coronavirus test before departure, or take a test on arrival at an airport in Italy.\n\nHowever, the type of test offered at Heathrow is not sufficient for people travelling to some destinations, such as Cyprus, the Bahamas and Bermuda.\n\nAll those places currently require proof of a negative PCR test, which requires analysis in a laboratory.\n\nThe hope is that more countries will change their rules and allow for other types of test, which could be administered on the spot at Heathrow.\n\nIt is important to note that the new testing facility at Heathrow is not for passengers flying into the airport.\n\nThat means it will not have any immediate impact on the UK's two-week travel quarantine for people arriving from \"at risk\" countries.\n\nCollinson set up a separate testing facility in arrivals at Heathrow over the summer. However, that facility has not been used by passengers, because the government has not given its backing to testing people on arrival.\n\nMinisters have promised that next month, they will give their formal approval to the idea of people paying for a test after a week of quarantine, to avoid the full two weeks.\n\nOn Monday, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps confirmed the government was in talks with the US Department of Homeland Security about a different type of system, possibly involving \"multiple tests\".\n\nThe government is looking at another system, under which people could take one test two or three days before they fly into the UK, and then another test when they arrive.\n\nThat could make it possible for someone arriving in the UK from an \"at risk\" country to avoid quarantine altogether.\n\nHowever, Mr Shapps said he could not say when that type of system would be up and running, because it required international co-operation.", "Almost half of secondary schools in England sent home one or more pupils because of Covid incidents last week, the latest attendance figures show.\n\nIt meant pupils isolating in 46% of secondary and 16% of primary schools.\n\nThe updated figures show 5% - or about 400,000 pupils - are out of school because of Covid outbreaks.\n\nDisruption from Covid has been increasing in schools - but the way of counting has changed which prevents comparisons with previous weeks.\n\nSince the start of term, the Department for Education (DfE) has published a figure showing how many schools were only partially open because of having to send home groups of pupils - which had risen to 21%.\n\nBut the latest weekly figures use a different way of showing how attendance has been affected during the pandemic - based on one or more pupils having to self-isolate.\n\nThis shows 21% of all schools, primary and secondary, sending home a pupil - with up to 13% sending home 30 or more pupils.\n\nBelow this overall average, secondary schools continue to face much more significant problems - three times more likely to send home pupils than in primary.\n\nOverall attendance has worsened from 90% to 89% - but very few schools, about 0.3%, have been completely closed.\n\nJulie McCulloch of the ASCL head teachers' union said the latest figures showed the \"high level of disruption\" from Covid outbreaks.\n\nShe said schools \"haven't received enough support from the government\" over access to testing and health advice - and a helpline set up for schools by the DfE had proved \"patchy\" in its usefulness.\n\nBut the DfE said the attendance figures showed \"a small proportion of pupils are self-isolating\" which was \"similar to previous weeks\".\n\nAppearing before the Education Select Committee on Tuesday morning, England's Schools Minister Nick Gibb said the change in data published on attendance provided more \"granular detail\".\n\n\"So the attendance data that's published this afternoon will be on a different timeline from the data we've published so far, because the data we've collected so far asks schools to report whether they have sent home groups of pupils.\"\n\nThere have been concerns about how pupils missing school will be able to take GCSE and A-level exams next summer.\n\nMr Gibb said exams remained the fairest system - but there was a particular concern about how exams could be fair between pupils who have missed different amounts of time in school, with those in high infection areas likely to have missed the most.\n\nMr Gibb said GCSEs and A-levels would go ahead next summer\n\n\"The other issue that really worries me more than any other issue we're having to grapple with at the moment is the unfairness and unevenness, where different students have had a different experience of missing education during this period.\n\n\"And that is something that is something that we're working with the exam boards and Ofqual to seek to address.\"\n\nHe acknowledged that \"some students will have suffered greater lockdowns, greater propensity to be self-isolating than students in other schools\".\n\n\"That does worry me,\" he said.\n\nMr Gibb said it was important that all year groups were \"able to catch up as swiftly as possible on the lost education that has been caused by this pandemic\".\n\n\"We do not want this generation of schoolchildren to suffer long term as a consequence of having to close schools to most pupils from March to the summer.\"\n\nPressed about exams, he told MPs he expected GCSEs and A-levels to go ahead next summer.\n\n\"We expect all schools to sit exams, we expect all students in Year 11 and Year 13 who are studying for exams to take those exams.\n\n\"We've been working very closely with Ofqual and the exam boards certainly to begin with on the timing issue and we've already announced that there'll be a three week delay to the timing.\"\n\nHe said there was no plan to shorten the school holidays, saying teachers and students needed a break.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Michael Gove: Not reaching a trade deal with the EU is an “outcome for which we are increasingly well prepared”.\n\nThe EU has said it is willing to \"intensify\" talks on a trade deal with the UK this week to try to break the impasse between the two sides.\n\nIts negotiator Michel Barnier said the bloc was prepared to discuss all areas of disagreement, including fishing and competition, based on legal texts.\n\nMichael Gove said he welcomed the bloc's latest \"constructive\" step.\n\nLater, No 10 said there was \"no basis to resume talks\" unless there was a \"fundamental change\" from the EU.\n\nThe UK has accused the EU of dragging its feet and failing to respect its sovereignty in the negotiations.\n\nIn a Commons statement, Cabinet Office Minister Mr Gove said his \"door was not closed\" to further talks but the EU needed to change its position for the process to continue.\n\nAfter a call between Mr Barnier and the UK's chief negotiator, Lord Frost, Downing Street released a statement saying the EU needed to try to find an agreement \"between sovereign equals\".\n\nOn Friday, No 10 suggested formal negotiations were \"over\" as the EU was not serious about discussing the details of a free trade agreement similar to the one it has with Canada - the UK's preferred outcome.\n\nPrime Minister Boris Johnson said the UK should \"get ready\" to trade with the EU from 1 January, when it leaves the single market and customs union, without a specific agreement.\n\nBut following a video call with his UK counterpart Lord Frost on Monday, Mr Barnier said he was willing to accelerate the process in the coming days to try to bridge the gap between the two sides.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Michel Barnier This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nMr Barnier suggested all subjects would be on the table and the discussions would be based on specific legal texts, which the UK has accused the EU of refusing to consider in recent weeks.\n\nIn response, Lord Frost tweeted that the proposal to intensify work had been noted, and added: \"But the EU still needs to make a fundamental change in approach to the talks and make clear it has done so.\"\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post 2 by David Frost This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nUpdating MPs on the state of the talks, Mr Gove said the EU's latest move was a positive one and suggested the UK would respond in kind.\n\nHe said: \"Even while I have been at the despatch box, it has been reported that there has been a constructive move on the part of the EU and I welcome that.\n\n\"We need to make sure we work on the basis of the intensification they propose and I prefer to look forward in optimism rather than look back in anger.\"\n\nHe added: \"If there has been movement, and there seems to be movement, then no-one would welcome it more than me but what we can't have from the EU is the illusion of engagement without the reality of compromise.\"\n\nSome senior Conservatives have urged the government to walk away from the talks, suggesting the EU is no longer negotiating in \"good faith\".\n\nFormer Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said the EU's \"refusal\" to engage in meaningful talks on trade in financial services and agricultural products was a breach of the terms of the withdrawal agreement governing the UK's exit.\n\nThe government has said the UK will prosper whatever the outcome of the negotiations, as it will be able to exercise freedoms not available while being an EU member.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Rachel Reeves calls on the government to be “honest” about the effect of the UK not reaching a trade deal with the EU.\n\nBut business groups have warned the UK's fallback option of a so-called \"Australian-style\" arrangement - where UK-EU trade will default to World Trade Organization rules - would be disastrous as it would see tariffs on goods moving across the channel.\n\nWith less than 75 days to go before the transition period ends on 31 December, the government has urged business to step up its preparations for the looming changes to trading rules.\n\nThe PM will hold a meeting with industry groups on Tuesday to emphasise the need for action.\n\nLabour has said the government only has itself to blame for the current uncertainty, shadow Cabinet Office minister Rachel Reeves calling on ministers to be \"honest\" about the effect on the UK of not agreeing a trade deal.\n\nAnd former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May suggested the implications of failing to agree a future partnership would also be highly damaging for the UK's security.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Brexit: Theresa May seems unimpressed with Michael Gove's plan\n\nMrs May, who quit last year after Parliament rejected her withdrawal agreement three times, said the UK \"should not be resigned\" to the prospect of failing to agree a deal over law enforcement and information sharing.\n\nShe warned that \"if the UK walks away with no deal, then our police and law enforcement agencies will no longer have the necessary access to databases in order to be able to continue to identify and catch criminals and potential terrorists in order to keep us safe\".\n\nIn response, Mr Gove said \"significant progress\" had been made in terms of security co-operation but the EU could not make access to databases conditional on the UK accepting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.", "Mark Milsome's credits included work on Sherlock, Game of Thrones and Quantum of Solace\n\nIndustry standards \"should never have allowed\" a camera operator to die when a stunt went wrong, his father told an inquest.\n\nMark Milsome, 54, from Builth Wells, Powys, died after being hit by a Land Rover in Ghana in November 2017.\n\nHe had been working on the Netflix and BBC drama Black Earth Rising.\n\nDoug Milsome, himself a big screen cinematographer, spoke at West London Coroner's Court on the opening day of the hearing into his son's death.\n\n\"I have shot Bond movies and death-defying action sequences far more complex than the ones that killed my son,\" he said.\n\n\"The standards of professional stunt crew and producers, those who make key decisions, should never have allowed Mark to die that night - a fact.\"\n\nOutlining the circumstances of Mr Milsome's death, senior coroner Chinyere Inyama said a stunt car, a Land Rover Defender, was supposed to mount a ramp and then topple over.\n\n\"The car mounted the ramp but took off and ploughed into Mr Milsome,\" he said.\n\nThe self-employed cameraman originally from London, who was known for his work on hits including Quantum Of Solace and Cliffhanger, suffered fatal injuries.\n\nDean Byfield, first assistant director on the production, told the inquest he had \"no misgivings\" ahead of the stunt.\n\nBut he said it ended up being \"completely shocking and unexpected\".\n\nHe said there had not been an \"entirely inclusive all-encompassing safety briefing\" that night, but that it would not have been standard either.\n\nDetails were heard about a risk assessment being completed three days before the incident which referred to potential hazards including burns from flames and poor visibility.\n\nBut Adrian Waterman QC, the family's barrister, said: \"There is no reference at all to the risk of the vehicle going out of control and hitting someone.\"\n\nMr Byfield agreed, but said he did not think he had seen that risk assessment.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Code-breaking hub Bletchley Park's contribution to World War Two is often over-rated by the public, an official history of UK spy agency GCHQ says.\n\nThe new book - Behind the Enigma - is released on Tuesday and is based on access to top secret GCHQ files.\n\n\"Bletchley is not the war winner that a lot of Brits think it is,\" the author, Professor John Ferris of the University of Calgary, told the BBC.\n\nBut he said Bletchley still played an important role.\n\nAnd GCHQ had a significant influence in other conflicts, according to the signals intelligence historian.\n\nGCHQ, known as Britain's listening post, was set up on 1 November 1919 as a peacetime \"cryptanalytic\" unit.\n\nDuring World War Two, staff were moved to Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, to decrypt Nazi Germany's messages including, most famously of all, the Enigma communications.\n\nThis provided an inside view of Nazi orders and movements.\n\nThe work was kept secret for decades but an official history of British intelligence in the war would later say it had shortened the conflict by two to four years and without it the outcome would have been uncertain.\n\nBletchley Park remains the most iconic success in British code-breaking and intelligence gathering. But some of the mythology surrounding it has masked the reality, the new book argues.\n\nNazi Germany actually had the advantage when it came to intelligence and code-breaking for the early part of the war because Britain's own communication security was so poor.\n\nEventually, Britain overtook the Germans and Bletchley carried out \"amazing\" work which did hasten victory, but not necessarily by the amount some previous estimates have claimed.\n\n\"Intelligence never wins a war on its own,\" says Prof Ferris.\n\nHe was given extensive access to the secret files of the intelligence agency, although some limits were placed on what he could see and write about, including more recent interceptions of other countries' diplomatic messages and some of the technical secrets of code-breaking.\n\nThe book provides a detailed sweep of the agency's contribution from its founding after World War One through to the cyber age of today, including the impact of revelations from US whistleblower Edward Snowden.\n\nProf Ferris writes that a \"cult of Bletchley\" has protected GCHQ and boosted its reputation, and argues that the fact he is able to raise questions about it show GCHQ was sincere in giving him freedom to come to his own conclusions.\n\n\"GCHQ is probably Britain's most important strategic asset at the moment and will probably remain that way for generations,\" he says.\n\n\"I think that Britain gains from keeping it strong and world class, but at the same time, you need to put in proportion what it is you can and cannot get from intelligence.\"\n\nBletchley was still a high-point, he said, because of the ability to get inside the enemy's strategic communications.\n\nThis was not possible against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, although GCHQ was still able to provide the majority of intelligence about its adversary's military thanks to innovative work in studying the patterns of communications.\n\nSteel helmets abandoned by Argentine armed forces who surrendered in 1982 at Goose Green to British Falklands Task Force troops\n\nProf Ferris also argues the agency's contribution was particularly important in the 1982 Falklands Conflict.\n\n\"I don't think Britain could have won the Falklands conflict without GCHQ,\" Prof Ferris told the BBC.\n\nHe said because GCHQ was able to intercept and break Argentine messages, British commanders were able to know within hours what orders were being given to their opponents, which offered a major advantage in the battle at sea and in retaking the islands.\n\n\"They understand what the Argentines planned to do. They understand how exactly the Argentines were deploying their forces.\"\n\nThe book provides new details on the controversial sinking of the Argentine warship Belgrano and over whether enough was done to warn of the invasion.\n\n\"It was a failure of policy, as far as I'm concerned, rather than a failure of intelligence,\" Prof Ferris told the BBC.\n\nThe book also details the close alliance with the US which persists to this day and how the make-up of staff who work at the agency, now based in Cheltenham, has changed over time.\n\nIn a foreword, the current director of the intelligence agency, Jeremy Fleming writes: \"GCHQ is a citizen-facing intelligence and security enterprise with a globally recognised brand and reputation. We owe all of that to our predecessors.\"", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Roehl Ribaya became the last patient to leave the unit in Blackpool\n\nA man who was the last patient to leave Blackpool Victoria Hospital's intensive care unit after being treated for Covid-19 in July has died.\n\nRoehl Ribaya spent 60 days in intensive care in the summer but \"never recovered\" from the long-term effects of the virus.\n\nHis widow, nurse Stella Ricio-Ribaya, performed CPR on him when he suffered a cardiac arrest.\n\nShe told the BBC: \"He was taken too soon.\"\n\nThe Filipino aerospace engineer's family said the virus had taken a heavy toll on the 47-year-old even after he was discharged from hospital on 14 August.\n\nHe had a cardiac arrest on 13 October and was in a coma until he died two days later.\n\nRoehl Ribaya was \"very funny and always joking around\", said his friend Mark Delabajan\n\nMrs Ricio-Ribaya, who lives in St Annes in Lancashire, said: \"He was never the same. He was so breathless all the time.\n\n\"Please follow the government's advice so we can stop this virus.\n\n\"We don't want any more to die.\"\n\nClose friend Mark Delabajan said the family were \"devastated\".\n\nHe said Mr Ribaya's cause of death was cardiac arrest with the secondary cause given as post-Covid pulmonary fibrosis.\n\n\"It was long Covid. His breathing was never the same and he couldn't get up the stairs,\" he said.\n\n\"He was rushed back into hospital a number of times.\"\n\nRoehl Ribaya's wife Stella Ricio-Ribaya said he remained breathless after being discharged\n\nMr Ribaya arrived at the Blackpool hospital on 29 May and spent 48 days in intensive care on a ventilator.\n\nIn July, when he was clapped out of intensive care, lead consultant Dr Jason Cupitt said it signalled the hospital had \"survived the first wave of this silent killer\".\n\nKevin McGee, chief executive of Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: \"We were extremely saddened to hear about the death of Roehl and our thoughts and prayers are with his family at this sad time.\"\n\nIn July, Dr Jason Cupitt (centre) said Mr Ribaya's discharge from hospital showed \"we have survived the first wave\"\n\nMr Delabajan said Mr Ribaya was the \"life and soul of the party... very funny and always joking around\".\n\n\"The staff in Blackpool Victoria Hospital were very fond of him,\" he added.\n\nMr Delabajan's wife Angela has set up a fundraising page on Go Fund Me to raise money for Mr Ribaya's family.\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Greater Manchester is set to move to the top level of England Covid restrictions\n\nBusinesses in Greater Manchester fear some may not survive as the area is moved into the top tier of Covid-19 restrictions.\n\nIt has followed Liverpool City Region and Lancashire into tier three.\n\nBusinesses including pubs and bars, unless they serve substantial meals, as well as soft play facilities, betting shops and casinos will have to close on Friday just after midnight.\n\nThe move has been met with anger, frustration and upset by businesses.\n\nThe owner of a Menagerie Restaurant and Bar, on the outskirts of Manchester city centre, said consumer confidence had been knocked by the confusion over coronavirus restrictions.\n\nKarina Jadhav said she was allowed to stay open, but have to close anyway as people stay away\n\n\"We have been operating under restrictions, which are close to tier three for three months now,\" said Karina Jadhav.\n\n\"While we are allowed to stay open, the restrictions, the confusion and the communication coming from the government has really reduced consumer confidence.\n\n\"This has resulted - for us - in a lot of cancellations, people not booking, people wanting refunds.\n\n\"So while we are allowed to stay open, we are being restricted to the point where it is difficult to keep the business open in the current circumstances.\"\n\nThe managing director of Wythenshawe-based Whitehouse Event Crockery said the situation was \"heartbreaking\".\n\nMarc Gough said he had a viable business but had been forgotten by government\n\nThe business, which supplies goods including plates and glassware for weddings and events, will not be forced to close down in tier three.\n\nHowever, the move to the toughest tier of measures would have a direct effect on the number of bookings, said Marc Gough.\n\n\"Weddings cannot take place in a tier three environment, so effectively they are stopping us from working with no financial support,\" he said.\n\n\"This is a viable business - a very successful, viable business - and we have just had no support from the government.\n\n\"We have been simply forgotten and it's heartbreaking.\"\n\nGreater Manchester recorded almost 11,000 new cases in the week to 16 October, according to data updated on Monday.\n\nLatest figures show cases rose across most of Greater Manchester in the week to 16 October.\n\nHowever, the city of Manchester has so far seen a fall compared with the week before.\n\nEven so, it still has a high rate of new cases, with just under 404 per 100,000 people in the week to last Friday.\n\nStockport and Trafford have the lowest rates in Greater Manchester, with 266 per 100,000 and 310 per 100,000 respectively.\n\nThe managing director of a bar in Burnage said it was going to be a \"tough winter\" as the hospitality industry adjusted to the new three-tier system.\n\nElena Rowe, pictured right with her colleague Sean Gregson, said it had been a frustrating time for the business\n\n\"It's really sad. We have done everything we can to keep safe,\" said Elena Rowe, from Reasons to be Cheerful.\n\nReasons to be Cheerful will be among the pubs to close under tier three.\n\n\"We have regulars and a lot of them drink on their own, and the space we provide is their bubble and it's sad that this is going to end for people.\n\n\"It's going to be a tough winter. I'm frustrated and upset,\" said Ms Rowe.\n\nThe owner of a bar in the heart of Manchester's gay village said tier three would also force him to close.\n\nJohn Hamilton warned that businesses were fading away and he called for help\n\nJohn Hamilton, who runs Bar Pop and employees 60 members of staff, said: \"I am so upset. The city centre will be like a deserted island.\n\n\"We need help. We are independent businesses but slowly and surely we are fading away.\"\n\nHe said tier two restrictions were \"bad enough\" and his weekly takings had plummeted from £35,000 to £11,500 and he was struggling to pay the bills.\n\nMr Hamilton said: \"I am decimated - we have nothing.\"\n\nWhy not follow BBC North West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk", "Spencer Davis, one of the key figures of the 1960s beat scene, has died at the age of 81.\n\nThe Welsh guitarist was the driving force behind The Spencer Davis Group, who scored transatlantic hits with Keep On Running and Somebody Help Me.\n\nThe band, which also featured a teenage Stevie Winwood, toured with The Who and The Rolling Stones in the 60s.\n\nDavis died in hospital on Monday, while being treated for pneumonia, his agent told the BBC.\n\n\"He was a very good friend,\" said Bob Birk, who had worked with the musician for more than 30 years.\n\n\"He was a highly ethical, very talented, good-hearted, extremely intelligent, generous man. He will be missed.\"\n\nThe son of a paratrooper, Davis was born in Swansea in 1939 and first started learning harmonica and the accordion at the age of six.\n\nHe moved to London to work for the civil service at the age of 16, but later relocated to Birmingham, where he taught German by day, and played in local clubs at night.\n\nInspired by blues and skiffle, he formed a band called The Saints with Bill Wyman, later a member of the Rolling Stones; and performed folk music with Christine Perfect - who, as Christine McVie, became a core member of Fleetwood Mac's classic line-up.\n\nBut it was with his eponymous rock group that he struck gold. Formed in 1963, The Spencer Davis Group featured Davis on guitar, a teenage Stevie Winwood on organ and vocals, his brother Muff on bass and Peter York on drums.\n\nOriginally called The Rhythm & Blues Quartette, they changed their name in 1964 when Muff pointed out that Davis was the only one who enjoyed doing interviews - the logic being that the rest of the band could slope off to the pub while he handled the press.\n\nKeep on Running knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts\n\nTheir breakout hit, Keep On Running, was a cover of a song by West Indian performer Jackie Edwards.\n\nWhen it topped the UK charts in 1966, it knocked the double A-sided Beatles single We Can Work It Out/Day Tripper from the top slot - and Davis received a telegram from the band congratulating him on the achievement.\n\n\"It's in a pile of papers somewhere,\" he told the BBC in 2009. \"It said, 'Congratulations on reaching number one - The Beatles.'\"\n\nThe follow-up was delayed when Davis bashed his head on a car windscreen after braking to avoid a dog - but Somebody Help Me, another Jackie Edwards cover, gave the quartet a second number one in March 1966.\n\nThe band went on to prove they had songwriting chops of their own, with hit singles like I'm A Man and Gimme Some Lovin', which was later covered by The Blues Brothers.\n\nThe Spencer Davis Group also recorded the theme song for the long-running children's TV show Magpie, under the pseudonym The Murgatroyd Band - a reference to the show's mascot, a fat magpie named Murgatroyd.\n\nBy 1966, the band had starred in their own film, a musical comedy called The Ghost Goes Gear, which found the band stranded in a haunted manor. Davis also made a cameo in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, as a bus passenger.\n\nHits followed in the US, although the band never toured there; while Davis's ability with languages (he was fluent in German, French and Spanish) helped the band further their career in Europe.\n\nThose linguistic capabilities even led to Davis recording a German version of The Age Of Aquarius (Aquarius Der Wassermann) in 1968, and earned him a lasting nickname: \"The Professor\".\n\nThe Spencer Davis Group - and Nicholas Parsons - in their 1966 comedy musical The Ghost Goes Gear\n\nHowever, the Spencer Davis Group came to an untimely end in 1967 when, at the height of their fame, Winwood quit to form Traffic, leaving Davis without his dynamic frontman.\n\nThe band recorded a few more minor hits, but broke up soon after, with Davis moving to California, where he embarked on a short-lived solo career.\n\nAt the time, he later claimed, he was near to bankruptcy, thanks to a punitive contract with Island Records.\n\n\"I didn't realise what had been going on. I'd sold millions of records and hadn't seen a penny from them,\" he told Music Mart magazine in 2005.\n\n\"In 1970, I was considering declaring bankruptcy, but I'd written a track with Eddie Hardin, called Don't Want You No More, which the Allman Brothers put on their Beginnings album. The damned thing sold six million copies. Suddenly a cheque for £5,000 arrived through the door and I'd never seen so much money in all my life.\n\n\"I saw more money from that one song than I saw from all the stuff that had been an Island production.\"\n\nAfter confronting Island Records' owner Chris Blackwell over the issue, he was given a job in artist development at the label in the mid-70s.\n\nThere, he helped to promote newcomers like Bob Marley, Robert Palmer and Eddie And The Hot Rods, as well as working alongside Winwood, who was now establishing himself as a solo artist.\n\nThe Spencer Davis Group pictured in the mid-1960s (L-R): Spencer Davis, Peter York, Steve Winwood, Muff Winwood\n\nDavis returned to songwriting with 1984's Crossfire, which featured contributions from Dusty Springfield and Booker T.\n\nHe subsequently reformed the Spencer Davis Group - minus the Winwood brothers - with whom he toured the world for the rest of his career, often playing more than 200 shows a year.\n\nBirmingham International Jazz Festival founder Jim Simpson, who was told about Davis' passing by drummer Pete York, said: \"Spencer was a lovely man - always very courteous and a purist about music.\n\n\"The Spencer Davis Group stuck more to the blues and never became a fully-fledged rock band. Spencer was scholarly and well educated, very gentle and kind and his tastes in music were spot on.\"\n\nThe musician is survived by his long-time partner June, and three adult children.\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Hospitality chiefs are scrambling to work out whether working lunches in English pubs and restaurants could be exempt from new Covid restrictions.\n\nTrade body UK Hospitality said it wants government clarification, as many central London venues rely on workers meeting up over lunch.\n\nPeople from different households in England are banned from meeting in pubs in Tier 2 and Tier 3 areas.\n\nBut the rules suggest meetings are allowed for business purposes.\n\nCurrent government guidance advises working from home as much as possible and limiting social contact.\n\nThe question is whether rules allowing necessary business meetings come first, or rules banning the mixing of households, UK Hospitality chief Kate Nicholls told the BBC.\n\n\"We don't know,\" she said. \"It's a grey area.\"\n\nA Number 10 spokesman suggested that the loophole may only be available to sole traders or freelancers with no business premises to conduct meetings as an alternative.\n\nMs Nicholls said businesses would need to know how they judge whether a lunch is for work purposes or whether potential patrons are breaking the rules,.\n\n\"This could be a vital revenue stream for some venues at a time when they are trying to operate under extreme restrictions,\" Ms she said.\n\n\"It is not likely to be a magic wand for the sector, though.\".\n\nFor Tier 3 regions, being open to lunchtime custom would also mean businesses could not receive employment support, since that is for businesses closed by the restrictions.\n\n\"It also relies on people physically coming together to hold their meetings at a time when the trend appears to be towards working from home and remote meetings,\" she said.\n\n\"If workers can see the benefit in a face-to-face meeting in a safe setting, then they need to know the option is there for them. That's something which may not have been communicated too well by the government.\"\n\nLast week, UK Hospitality warned that tougher Tier 2 Covid restrictions will put up to 250,000 jobs at risk in London's hospitality sector.\n\nHouseholds are not allowed to mix indoors, including in pubs and restaurants.\n\nMs Nicholls said that without additional government support thousands of jobs in the capital will go. \"It will be absolutely catastrophic,\" she told the BBC.\n\nShe has written to the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, warning that elevating the capital's coronavirus risk level \"will be incredibly damaging without additional financial support\".", "PM Boris Johnson has suggested the recent spike in coronavirus cases in the UK is a result of a \"fraying of people's discipline\" over the summer.\n\nHe said compliance with the virus restrictions had been \"high at first\" but then \"probably... everybody got a bit, kind of complacent and blasé\".\n\nCases have increased sharply across the UK since the end of August.\n\nAfter starting to relax restrictions before the summer, the government has since had to toughen its measures.\n\nIt comes as the latest UK figures show there have been a further 6,968 cases and another 66 deaths.\n\nThe R number - a measure of how many other people each person with the virus is infecting - has risen to between 1.3 and 1.6.\n\nHowever, there is more evidence that new coronavirus infections may be increasing more slowly than in previous weeks.\n\nIn total, at least 16.8 million people in the UK - about one in four people - face extra coronavirus measures on top of the national rules, including two-thirds of people in the north of England.\n\nThe prime minister, who has been speaking to BBC journalists from around the country, denied that a lack of testing in north-east England had caused the virus to get out of control in the region.\n\n\"That's not the reality… the nation came together in March and April, what happened over the summer was a bit of sort of fraying of people's discipline and attention to those rules,\" he said.\n\nThe government has faced strong criticism for its mixed messages since it started easing the national lockdown in late spring.\n\nAfter a steady decline in confirmed cases since the first peak in April, cases began rising again in July, with the rate of growth increasing sharply from the end of August.\n\nIn a separate interview with BBC Scotland, Mr Johnson said: \"You saw what happened in March and April in Scotland, across the country, we came together and got the virus down.\n\n\"Alas, probably what happened since then is that everyone got a bit, kind of complacent and a bit blasé about transmission.\n\n\"The rules on social distancing weren't perhaps obeyed in the way they could have been, or enforced in the way they could have been, and that's why we've had to put in measures both in Scotland and elsewhere to bring it down again.\"\n\nNew rules, such as restricting gatherings to a maximum of six people and limiting opening hours for hospitality venues, are among the national measures that have been introduced around the UK.\n\n\"I'm afraid some of the muscle memory has faded and people are not following the guidance in the way that they should,\" Mr Johnson added.\n\nAsked about comments from the mayor of Middlesbrough who said there had been a \"frightening lack of communication with local government\" over local lockdowns, Mr Johnson disagreed, adding: \"We work very closely with local government across the country.\"\n\nBoris Johnson hired a personal trainer after ending up in hospital with coronavirus\n\nThe prime minister also described concerns that he has not been \"the old Boris\" since contracting coronavirus in March as \"sinister disinformation\".\n\nHe said he felt \"considerably better\" and, thanks to \"recent efforts\", he was about two stones lighter than he was a year ago.\n\nMr Johnson has previously revealed he has hired a personal trainer to lose weight after acknowledging he was \"too fat\" when he caught Covid-19.\n\nHe also declined to comment when asked about the future of MP Margaret Ferrier, who travelled from Glasgow to London with Covid-19 symptoms then returned home after testing positive.\n\n\"I'm going to leave that one very much to the SNP and to their whips - that's for them to decide but it's very important that everyone obeys the rules and the guidance,\" he said.\n\nThe Metropolitan Police has launched an investigation into Ms Ferrier, who has been suspended by the SNP and faces calls to quit as an MP.", "A Met Police sergeant killed at a custody centre while on duty died from a gunshot wound to the chest, an inquest has heard.\n\nNew Zealand-born Sgt Matiu Ratana died in hospital after being shot by handcuffed suspect Louis De Zoysa.\n\nShe opened and adjourned the inquest into the 54-year-old's death until a later date.\n\nSgt Ratana's son dialled into the inquest hearing from Australia.\n\nIt comes on the day New Zealand's High Commissioner to the UK visited the scene where Sgt Ratana was killed.\n\nBede Corry laid a wreath and paused briefly in front of a memorial at Croydon Custody Centre.\n\nNew Zealand High Commissioner Bede Corry joined Met Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick in Croydon on Thursday\n\nDozens of police officers have paid tribute to Sgt Matiu Ratana\n\nSince Friday a shrine outside the custody centre has been lined with scores of floral bouquets and surrounded by New Zealand flags and sports jerseys.\n\nMr Corry said: \"New Zealanders were shocked and saddened to learn of the tragic death of Sgt Matiu Ratana.\n\n\"As someone who was a police officer in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, he uniquely served both countries. We know he will be deeply missed.\"\n\nMr De Zoysa, 23, had been arrested for possession of ammunition and possession of Class B drugs with intent to supply following a stop and search in the London Road area of Pollards Hill at 01:30 BST on Friday.\n\nLouis De Zoysa was arrested on Friday in the London Road area of Pollards Hill\n\nDet Supt Nick Blackburn told the inquest at Croydon Town Hall that Mr De Zoysa arrived at Croydon Custody Centre and was taken into a holding room with officers who prepared to search him again.\n\n\"The custody sergeant, Matt Ratana, entered the holding room as part of his duties when the suspect produced a firearm and discharged the weapon several times, during which both Sgt Ratana and the suspect were injured.\n\n\"Police and paramedics treated him at the scene and he was taken to hospital by the London Ambulance Service.\n\nA revolver handgun was recovered from the scene, Det Supt Blackburn added.\n\nMr De Zoysa remains critically ill at St George's Hospital in Tooting and is still yet to be questioned by detectives investigating the murder.\n\nThe Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) confirmed he was handcuffed with his hands behind his back and had been taken to the custody centre in a police vehicle, before being escorted into the building.\n\nNo police firearms were discharged in the shooting, and the case is not being treated as terror-related.\n\nThe Banstead farmland used to serve as an ammunition depot during the Second World War\n\nSix days on from the fatal shooting detectives are still extensively searching Mr De Zoysa's family in home in Norbury, south London, and a farmland in Banstead, Surrey, which is expected \"to take days to complete\", the Met has said.\n\nOn Wednesday a man from Norwich, who was arrested on suspicion of supplying a firearm, was bailed by detectives until late October.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Even an effective coronavirus vaccine will not return life to normal in spring, a group of leading scientists has warned.\n\nA vaccine is often seen as the holy grail that will end the pandemic.\n\nBut a report, from researchers brought together by the Royal Society, said we needed to be \"realistic\" about what a vaccine could achieve and when.\n\nThey said restrictions may need to be \"gradually relaxed\" as it could take up to a year to roll the vaccine out.\n\nMore than 200 vaccines to protect against the virus are being developed by scientists around the world in a process that is taking place at unprecedented speed.\n\n\"A vaccine offers great hope for potentially ending the pandemic, but we do know that the history of vaccine development is littered with lots of failures,\" said Dr Fiona Culley, from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London.\n\nThere is optimism, including from the UK government's scientific advisers, that some people may get a vaccine this year and mass vaccination may start early next year.\n\nHowever, the Royal Society report warns it will be a long process.\n\n\"Even when the vaccine is available it doesn't mean within a month everybody is going to be vaccinated, we're talking about six months, nine months... a year,\" said Prof Nilay Shah, head of chemical engineering at Imperial College London.\n\n\"There's not a question of life suddenly returning to normal in March.\"\n\nThe report said there were still \"enormous\" challenges ahead.\n\nSome of the experimental approaches being taken - such as RNA vaccines - have never been mass produced before.\n\nThere are questions around raw materials - both for the vaccine and glass vials - and refrigerator capacity, with some vaccines needing storage at minus 80C.\n\nProf Shah estimates vaccinating people would have to take place at a pace, 10 times faster than the annual flu campaign and would be a full-time job for up to 30,000 trained staff.\n\n\"I do worry, is enough thinking going into the whole system?\" he says.\n\nEarly trial data has suggested that vaccines are triggering an immune response, but studies have not yet shown if this is enough to either offer complete protection or lessen the symptoms of Covid.\n\nProf Charles Bangham, chairman of immunology of Imperial College London, said: \"We simply don't know when an effective vaccine will be available, how effective it will be and of course, crucially, how quickly it can be distributed.\n\n\"Even if it is effective, it is unlikely that we will be able to get back completely to normal, so there's going to be a sliding scale, even after the introduction of a vaccine that we know to be effective.\n\n\"We will have to gradually relax some of the other interventions.\"\n\nAnd many questions that will dictate the vaccination strategy remain unanswered, such as:\n\nThe researchers warn the issue of long-term immunity will still take some time to answer, and we still do not know if people need vaccinating every couple of years or if one shot will do.\n\nCommenting on the study, Dr Andrew Preston from the University of Bath, said: \"Clearly the vaccine has been portrayed as a silver bullet and ultimately it will be our salvation, but it may not be an immediate process.\"\n\nHe said there would need to be discussion of whether \"vaccine passports\" are needed to ensure people coming into the country are immunised.\n\nAnd Dr Preston warned that vaccine hesitancy seemed to be a growing problem that had become embroiled in anti-mask, anti-lockdown ideologies.\n\n\"If cohorts of people refuse to have the vaccine, do we leave them to fend for themselves or have mandatory vaccination for children to go to schools, or for staff in care homes? There are lots of difficult questions.\"", "SNP MP Margaret Ferrier spoke in the Commons on Monday while awaiting the result of a coronavirus test, which later turned out to be positive.\n\nShe travelled back to Scotland by train the day after the positive test result.\n\nMs Ferrier said she had been self-isolating at home since then.\n\nShe released a statement three days after the positive test, saying she was \"very sorry for her mistake\".", "Margaret Ferrier campaigns with the then-SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon ahead of the 2019 General Election\n\nA by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.\n\nShe had travelled to London while feeling ill in 2020 then got a train home after a positive Covid test.\n\nFerrier was elected as an SNP member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West in 2015 but was suspended from the party after the lockdown breach in 2020 and has since sat as an independent.\n\nShe had taken a Covid test on Saturday 26 September 2020 after noticing what she described as a \"tickly throat\".\n\nWhile awaiting her results, she went to church, gave a reading to the congregation and spent more than two hours in a bar in Prestwick, South Ayrshire.\n\nThe next day she travelled to London by train and spoke in the Commons before finding out a short time later that she had tested positive for the virus.\n\nFerrier decided to get a train back to Glasgow the following day, fearing she would have to self-isolate in a London hotel room for two weeks.\n\nShe was arrested and charged with culpable and reckless conduct in January 2021 and pleaded guilty last August. A month later she was ordered to carry out 270 hours of community service.\n\nThe 62-year-old first became an MP in 2015 in the SNP landslide that saw the party take 56 of the 59 seats in Scotland.\n\nFerrier, who won Rutherglen and Hamilton West, pulled off one of the biggest shocks on a night full of surprises.\n\nHer victory overturned a Labour majority of 21,002 - one of the largest in the UK - and she ended up the winner by 9,975 votes.\n\nShe was 54 when she was chosen to be the SNP candidate and had only joined the party four years earlier.\n\nSoon after becoming an MP, she told the Rutherglen Reformer she could not remember a time when she did not support an independent Scotland.\n\nEven as a member of the Labour Party in her youth, she felt the country should go it alone, she said.\n\nBorn in the south of Glasgow, she lived for almost two years of her childhood in Spain.\n\nShe told the Reformer she had early memories of correcting people in Spain when they called her English.\n\n\"I wasn't English, I was Scottish, so I always had that Scottish identity, even from the age of 12,\" she said.\n\nFerrier returned to Scotland in 1972 and settled with her family in Rutherglen.\n\nMargaret Ferrier in the House of Commons during a debate on the coronavirus response\n\nShe is said to have had a keen interest in politics since her early-20s and was a member of Amnesty International.\n\nBefore becoming an MP, she had worked as a commercial sales manager for a manufacturing construction company in Motherwell.\n\nAlthough she said she voted for the SNP on a number of occasions, she did not join the Rutherglen branch of the party until 2011.\n\nShe quickly established herself in the local party and was a candidate for the council elections in 2013.\n\nShe said she was initially reluctant to contest the Westminster seat in 2015 and admitted at the time that some potential candidates may have been put off by the prospect of taking on a huge Labour majority.\n\nHer surprise win was followed by defeat in the snap election of 2017 when Ged Killen regained the seat for Labour with a slender majority of 265.\n\nThe then-First Minister Nicola Sturgeon visited Rutherglen to offer her support for Margaret Ferrier as she campaigned successfully to win back the seat in the 2019 election.\n\nFerrier was one of the MPs who called on the prime minister's adviser Dominic Cummings to resign in the wake of the controversy over his visit to the North East of England during lockdown.\n\nAt the time, she said his actions had \"undermined the sacrifices that we have all been making in lockdown to protect each other from coronavirus\" and described his position as \"untenable\".\n\nIt subsequently emerged that Ferrier had travelled from Glasgow to London with Covid symptoms, and then returned home by train after testing positive.\n\nNicola Sturgeon was quick to condemn her actions as \"dangerous and indefensible\".\n\nThe former SNP leader later called \"with a heavy heart\" for Ferrier to resign as an MP.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. President Trump's seven days before his Covid-positive test\n\nPresident Donald Trump's coronavirus diagnosis came after a busy week running his administration and campaigning for November's election.\n\nThe president announced that he and his wife and his wife, Melania has tested positive for Covid-19, in a tweet sent on Friday at around 01:00 local time (05:00 GMT).\n\nThis followed a positive test for his close aide, Hope Hicks, who reportedly started feeling symptoms on Wednesday.\n\nSince the president's diagnosis, several people close to him have tested positive too, including his press secretary.\n\nSo far the majority of publicly released results have been negative. However, test accuracy can vary depending on when a sample is taken during the course of the illness. One taken very soon after exposure may not give an accurate result.\n\nThe White House says it has begun contact-tracing. Here's a look at some of the people we know Mr Trump has crossed paths with during the last week - starting with an event that is being investigated as a possible \"super-spreader\":\n\nPresident Trump announced his Supreme Court pick, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, in front of a crowd of about 200 people on the White House lawn.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Senator Mike Lee, who later tested positive for Covid-19, seen hugging other attendees\n\nJudge Coney Barrett said on Friday that she had tested negative. Sources told US media she had the virus earlier this year.\n\nAlong with Mr Trump and his wife, at least seven other people who attended the Rose Garden event say they have tested positive - although it's not known where they caught the virus.\n\nThey are: White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany; former White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway; Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who are both on the judiciary committee; the president of the University of Notre Dame, John Jenkins; and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who said he checked himself into a hospital on Saturday as a precaution.\n\nThe White House Correspondents' Association said an unnamed reporter at the event had also tested positive with symptoms.\n\nDuring the evening, President Trump held a rally at Harrisburg International Airport in Middletown, Pennsylvania.\n\nSince the afternoon's ceremony, Judge Coney Barrett has held meetings with various senators - including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell - ahead of her much-anticipated confirmation hearing, due to take place on 12 October.\n\nThe president played golf at his club in Potomac Falls, Virginia, in the morning and led a White House reception for the families of military veterans during the evening.\n\nOn Monday, President Trump held a news briefing in the White House Rose Garden - giving an update on his administration's coronavirus testing strategy.\n\nIt was attended by Vice-President Mike Pence, Health Secretary Alex Azar, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the chief executive of Abbott Laboratories, Robert Ford, among others.\n\nLater, Trump viewed a model of a new pickup truck - being built at a factory in Ohio - on the White House lawn. Representatives from the company, Lordstown Motors, attended, as well as two members of Congress.\n\nThe White House regularly tests officials who come in contact with the president. However, US media has noted that mask-wearing and social distancing around him is less common - suggesting that people may be too reliant on the testing system, which is not foolproof.\n\nThe president faced his election rival, Joe Biden, at their first face-to-face debate in Cleveland, Ohio on Tuesday evening.\n\nPresident Trump flew there on his presidential plane, Air Force One, alongside his wife, adult children and multiple aides. Many were seen not wearing masks when boarding or disembarking.\n\nAlso on the plane were: White House Chief of staff Mark Meadows; campaign strategist Jason Miller; policy adviser Stephen Miller; Robert C O'Brien, the national security adviser who tested positive for the virus in July; and Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan.\n\nAfter landing, the president's campaign manager, Bill Stepien, was spotted getting into a staff van with Ms Hicks, the New York Times reports. Late on Friday, it was announced that Mr Stepien had tested positive for Covid-19 and was experiencing mild flu-like symptoms.\n\nThe debate was held at Cleveland Clinic's Health Education Campus, a shared facility with Case Western Reserve University.\n\nThe organisers, the Commission on Presidential Debates, brought in numerous Covid-era safety precautions. There were no handshakes between the two candidates and everyone attending - including the 80 or so audience members - was tested before the event and asked to wear masks throughout.\n\nIn the run-up, Mr Trump's eldest daughter, Ivanka, posted a picture of herself backstage in a mask, alongside her sister Tiffany, sister-in-law Lara and stepmother Melania.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by ivankatrump This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nHowever, during the event itself, Ivanka Trump and other family members, including siblings Don Jr and Eric, were pictured mask-less. Moderator Chris Wallace has since told Fox News that they were offered masks by event staff but they refused them.\n\nObservers said those on Mr Biden's side of the room kept their masks on.\n\nMr Trump and Mr Biden kept a distance during the debate, at podiums on opposite sides of the stage.\n\nMr Trump and Mr Biden loudly spoke over each other throughout the contentious debate\n\nWhen the candidates were greeted by the wives on stage afterwards, Jill Biden wore a mask and Melania Trump didn't.\n\nAt a separate campaign event in Pennsylvania, Vice-President Mike Pence said he had been in the Oval Office with President Trump earlier that day. It is thought to be their last in-person meeting.\n\nPresident Trump and much of his entourage flew back to Washington DC on Tuesday night.\n\nThe day after the debate, President Trump was straight back into campaign business, flying to Minnesota. Ms Hicks was among those accompanying him.\n\nAt a press conference on Saturday, the president's physician Dr Sean Conley said Mr Trump had been diagnosed 72 hours previously, which would place his diagnosis on Wednesday. But the White House later clarified that he was diagnosed on Thursday.\n\nHe attended a closed-door fundraiser at a private home in Minneapolis, and later held a rally at an airport in Duluth, in front of a crowd of thousands. Few wore masks but there was distance between them and the president.\n\nMinnesota Congressman Kurt Daudt tweeted a picture of himself close to Mr Trump, with neither wearing masks.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Kurt Daudt This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nOn Wednesday evening, Mr Trump and various aides returned to Washington DC on Air Force One again.\n\nMeanwhile Ms Hicks, who was feeling unwell, was isolated in a separate cabin, according to US media. She reportedly disembarked from the back of the plane, instead of the front alongside the other passengers.\n\nThe following day, Ms Hicks tested positive for coronavirus.\n\nPresident Trump flew to his Bedminster golf resort in New Jersey for a private fundraiser. Several aides who were in proximity to Ms Hicks scrapped their plans to accompany the president, according to the Associated Press.\n\nKayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, is thought to have been in close contact with Ms Hicks. Ms McEnany held a briefing for reporters at the White House on Thursday, without mentioning her colleague's test and without wearing a mask. She has since said she did not know about the diagnosis.\n\nThat night, in pre-taped remarks to the annual Al Smith dinner in New York City - held virtually this year - Mr Trump said that \"the end of the pandemic is in sight\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"The end of the pandemic is in sight,\" President Trump told a dinner on Thursday\n\nHe later announced in an interview on Fox News that he and the first lady were being tested for the virus.\n\nIt is not known how many supporters he came into contact with in recent days, he but told Fox presenter Sean Hannity that people were always wanting to get close to him. \"They want to hug you, and they want to kiss you,\" he said.\n\nPresident Trump announced that he and Mrs Trump had tested positive, adding that they will begin the \"quarantine and recovery process immediately\".\n\nJust before 11:00, his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told reporters the president has \"mild symptoms\" but remains in \"good spirits\".\n\nMrs Trump tweeted to say she also had mild symptoms.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The president has \"mild symptoms\" but will \"remain on the job\", says White House chief of staff Mark Meadows\n\nThat day, several other people announce that they've tested positive: Kellyanne Conway, former White House counsellor; Bill Stepien, Mr Trump's campaign manager; Mike Lee, Utah senator; Thom Tillis, a senator for North Carolina; Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee; Rev John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame University; and Senator Ron Johnson, head of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.\n\nMeanwhile Joe Biden, the Democrats' presidential candidate, tests negative, as does: Jill Biden, his wife; Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen Pence; Kamala Harris, the Democrats' vice-presidential candidate; Amy Coney Barrett, Supreme Court nominee; Mike Pompeo, secretary of state; Steve Mnuchin, treasury secretary; Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services; William Barr, attorney general; Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr, the president's daughter and son; and Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law.\n\nFormer New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Nicholas Luna, a White House presidential aide, both test positive.\n\nMr Trump waved to well-wishers from behind the glass of a sealed car after tweeting that he would pay a \"surprise visit\" to \"patriots\" outside the hospital.\n\nInside the car, at least two people could be seen wearing protective gear in the front seats, with Mr Trump sat in the back.\n\nThere were concerns that the president who wore a mask, may have endangered others inside the car. But White House spokesperson Judd Deere said the trip had been \"cleared by the medical team as safe\".\n\nWhite House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany announces on Twitter that she has tested positive.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "The rolls used in Subway's hot sandwiches contain too much sugar to be considered bread, according to Ireland's Supreme Court.\n\nIreland's highest court made the ruling in a case about how the bread is taxed.\n\nAn Irish franchisee of the US company had claimed it should not pay VAT on the rolls it uses in heated sandwiches.\n\nBut the court ruled that because of the level of sugar in the rolls they cannot be taxed as bread, which is classed as a \"staple product\" with zero VAT.\n\nUnder Ireland's VAT Act of 1972, ingredients in bread such as sugar and fat should not exceed 2% of the weight of flour in the dough.\n\nThe five judges, who were considering an appeal by Bookfinders Ltd, a Subway franchisee based near Galway, concluded that in Subway sandwiches the sugar content is around 10% of the flour in the dough for both white and wholegrain rolls.\n\n\"Subway's bread is, of course, bread,\" said a spokesperson for Subway.\n\n\"We have been baking fresh bread in our stores for more than three decades and our guests return each day for sandwiches made on bread that smells as good as it tastes.\"\n\nIn Irish law, bread is considered a staple food and has a zero rate of VAT. Following the ruling, the rolls are subject to tax at 13.5%.\n\nThe case stems from a decision by Ireland's tax authority in 2006 to refuse Bookfinders' request for a refund on VAT payments made between 2004 and 2005.\n\nAfter an appeal commissioner upheld the tax authority's refusal of a refund, Bookfinders took its case to the High Court which it lost before going to the Court of Appeal, where it was also unsuccessful.\n\nIt is not the first time Subway's bread has been in the spotlight. In 2014, the company announced it was removing azodicarbonamide - the so-called \"yoga mat\" chemical - from its rolls.\n\nSubway stopped using the so-called \"yoga mat\" chemical - azodicarbonamide - in its bread in 2014\n\nThe chemical is used to whiten flour and improve the condition of dough. It is also used to make vinyl foam products such as yoga mats and the underlay for carpets.\n\nSubway stopped using the agent six years ago but the US Food and Drug Administration continues to approve the use of the chemical in produce.\n• None How safe are takeaways and supermarket deliveries?", "Zef Eisenberg, pictured in July 2017, just a year after a \"near-death\" crash at Elvington Airfield\n\nZef Eisenberg, who launched Maximuscle, died at Elvington Airfield, near York, where in 2006 ex-Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond crashed.\n\nMotorsport UK said the 47-year-old's car \"went out of control at high speed at the end of a run\" on Thursday.\n\nGuernsey-based Mr Eisenberg was involved in a \"near-death\" 230mph crash at the same airfield in 2016.\n\nMotorsport UK said Mr Eisenberg was attempting to break the British land speed record in a Porsche 911 Turbo S when he was killed at about 16:30 BST.\n\nThe organisation paid tribute to the \"much-loved member of the motorsport community\" and confirmed a full investigation into the crash had begun.\n\nMr Eisenberg left behind his partner Mirella D'Antonio and two children, it added.\n\nSports nutrition firm Maximuscle said it was \"devastated\" at the news of the Mr Eisenberg's death, who had \"worked tirelessly\" on his \"brain child\" during his ownership of the company.\n\nEmergency services were called to the crash at the airfield at around 16:30 BST on Thursday\n\nMr Eisenberg ran the Madmax Race Team, which attempts speed records with motorbikes and cars.\n\nBefore his previous crash, in which he suffered 11 broken bones including his pelvis, he had set other speed records at the airfield.\n\nHe returned to racing in 2017, despite concerns he would never walk again.\n\nIn 2019, Mr Eisenberg set the record for the \"flying mile\" at Pendine Sands in Wales, stealing the crown from actor Idris Elba, who himself had broken the record in 2015, after it had stood since 1927, when Sir Malcolm Campbell set the pace.\n\nHe also holds a Guinness world record for exceeding 225mph (363kmh) on a turbine-powered motorbike in 2015, as well as three FIA records for speeds achieved on an electric motorbike.\n\nThe businessman, who left school after his GCSEs, founded Maximuscle in 1995. It was sold to pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in 2011 for £162m.\n\nMr Eisenberg also presented ITV4 show Speed Freaks, which was aired last year.\n\nITV's Satmohan Panesar said: \"Zef was a truly unique character whose passion for speed came across vividly in his presenting, and his personal and professional achievements are testament to his drive and determination.\n\n\"He will be missed enormously by everyone who worked with him and our condolences go to his friends and family.\"\n\nElvington was an RAF station until 1992, and has become a popular motorsports venue since entering private ownership.\n\nIt has hosted dozens of world record attempts, and is also used as a filming location.", "The MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West spoke in a debate in the House of Commons before returning to Scotland after her positive test was confirmed\n\nThe House of Commons speaker has said he is \"very, very angry\" at the \"reckless\" behaviour of an MP who travelled from Glasgow to London with Covid-19 symptoms, then returned home after testing positive.\n\nSir Lindsay Hoyle said he could not believe that Margaret Ferrier had put other people's health at risk.\n\nAnd he said she had not initially given a straight story to the authorities.\n\nMs Ferrier has been suspended by the SNP and faces calls to quit as an MP.\n\nDUP MP Jim Shannon, who was seated at the same socially-distanced dining table as Ms Ferrier on Monday evening, is self-isolating but received a negative test result on Thursday afternoon.\n\nAn Assistant Serjeant at Arms was close to Ms Ferrier when she spoke in the Commons on Monday but has not been advised to self-isolate.\n\nMs Ferrier has apologised and said she \"deeply regretted\" her actions but has not yet given any indication of whether or not she intends to continue sitting as an independent MP.\n\nShe has referred herself to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, as well as to the police.\n\nScottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who is also the SNP leader, told her daily coronavirus briefing that Ms Ferrier had been guilty of the \"worst breach imaginable\".\n\nAnd she said she had made it \"crystal clear\" to her that her \"reckless, dangerous and completely indefensible\" actions meant she should stand down in the interests of the overall integrity of the public health message.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Lindsay Hoyle says he is \"really very angry\" about the behaviour of MP Margaret Ferrier.\n\nWhen asked by the BBC whether he believed Ms Ferrier should quit as an MP, Sir Lindsay replied: \"I would expect the member to consider what they have done, and the reckless behaviour, and how that looks to the rest of the country.\n\n\"This sends all the wrong messages. People have really got to consider their position on that.\"\n\nThe Speaker expressed his \"complete shock that somebody could be so reckless\" and said he was \"really very, very angry\" that \"the House has been put at risk\".\n\nHe said Ms Ferrier had then put \"a whole different set of people at risk\" by travelling on public transport after testing positive for the virus.\n\nHe also criticised the speed at which he was informed about the incident - but blamed the MP, rather than the SNP.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nSir Lindsay said: \"Not to be told until Wednesday is not acceptable, and we were hearing different stories, different messages, that made it even more difficult to deal with.\"\n\nMs Ferrier, the MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, said she had experienced \"mild symptoms\" on Saturday and was tested for coronavirus.\n\nHowever, she decided to travel by train to Westminster on Monday before getting her result because she was \"feeling much better\".\n\nShe spoke for four minutes in the Commons chamber during a coronavirus debate - tweeting a video of her speech - but was told later that evening that she had tested positive for the virus.\n\nDespite this, Ms Ferrier took a train back to Scotland on Tuesday, with SNP whips in the Commons being told about her positive test on Wednesday.\n\nIt is understood she had initially told the party she was going home because a family member was unwell.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The first minister has condemned the actions of Ms Ferrier\n\nA spokesman for the party said the SNP's chief whip immediately informed parliament authorities after learning of Ms Ferrier's positive test on Wednesday.\n\nBut he said it was not until Thursday that the SNP discovered that Ms Ferrier had been tested prior to travelling to London and had then travelled back to Glasgow despite knowing that she had a positive result.\n\nMs Sturgeon said she was only told on Thursday afternoon - shortly after she faced opposition leaders at first minister's questions in the Scottish Parliament.\n\nMs Ferrier's actions became public when she tweeted an apology at about 18:00 on Thursday.\n\nSNP sources initially said they would await the result of a police investigation into her actions before deciding whether or not she would be suspended.\n\nBut the party announced her suspension about an hour later, with Ms Sturgeon subsequently tweeting that the MP's actions had been \"indefensible\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Nicola Sturgeon This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nPolice Scotland confirmed they had been contacted by Ms Ferrier, saying officers were \"looking into the circumstances\" and liaising with the Metropolitan Police Service.\n\nMs Ferrier could face a £4,000 fine for a first-time offence of coming into contact with others when she should have been self-isolating under a law that came into force on the day of her positive test.\n\nIan Blackford, the SNP leader at Westminster, earlier told BBC Breakfast that \"nobody is above the law\" and calling on Ms Ferrier to \"do the right thing\".\n\nSNP MPs David Linden, Kirsty Blackman and Stephen Flynn have also called for her to step down.\n\nBBC Scotland's chief political correspondent, Glenn Campbell, said there may be a way for Ms Ferrier's constituents to force her out if she refuses to quit.\n\nThis would require her to first be suspended from the Commons for a fortnight or ten sitting days by the standards committee.\n\nIf 10% of registered voters in her constituency then signed a recall petition within the next six weeks, her seat would become vacant and a by-election would be called.\n\nFive days a week, every week, Nicola Sturgeon appears on TV, taking questions about her coronavirus policies and urging every one of us to abide by the rules.\n\nSo for the MP who has committed the most egregious breach of the regulations - possibly of the law - to be one of her own is acutely embarrassing.\n\nThe SNP leader who has been quick to condemn others for breaking the rules has made no attempt to defend or excuse Margaret Ferrier.\n\nThis is the first minister whose chief medical advisor resigned for breaking lockdown rules back in April and who demanded the sacking of the PM's chief advisor Dominic Cummings after he admitted to breaches of the regulations.\n\nSNP MPs called publicly Ms Ferrier to resign and Ms Sturgeon has spoken to her this morning and made clear that she should step down as an MP.\n\nBut the problem for the SNP is that they cannot force the MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West to leave her job. They have already removed the party whip and suspended her from the SNP. But that is all they can do.\n\nMs Ferrier was one of the MPs who called on the prime minister's adviser Dominic Cummings to resign in the wake of the controversy over his visit to the North East of England during lockdown.\n\nAt the time, she said his actions had \"undermined the sacrifices that we have all been making in lockdown to protect each other from coronavirus\" and described his position as \"untenable\".\n\nScottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said Ms Ferrier's \"reckless\" actions had put the lives of other people at risk, and has questioned the SNP's timeline of events.\n\nMr Ross said: \"The SNP say they only found out about any wrongdoing on Thursday. That means we're supposed to accept that the SNP found out Margaret Ferrier tested positive on Wednesday - and asked nothing.\n\n\"The SNP's timeline is full of holes and any reasonable person can see that.\"\n\nShadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray also demanded answers from the SNP to the \"very serious questions\" surrounding the behaviour of Ms Ferrier.\n\nThe Scottish Labour MP said her \"catastrophic, negligent actions\" had put lives at risk.\n\nMs Ferrier was first elected as an SNP MP in 2015 but lost her seat to Labour in 2017 before winning it back in last year's general election with a majority of 5,230.", "The MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West spoke in a debate in the House of Commons before returning unwell back to Scotland\n\nScotland's first minister says the actions of an SNP MP who travelled to Westminster despite experiencing Covid symptoms are \"utterly indefensible\".\n\nMargaret Ferrier said she made the journey because she was feeling \"much better\" - but also returned home after getting a positive test result.\n\nShe is facing calls to resign from opponents and SNP politicians, after she was suspended by the party.\n\nNicola Sturgeon tweeted her support for the decision to suspend the MP.\n\nShe said: \"This is utterly indefensible. It's hard to express just how angry I feel on behalf of people across the country making hard sacrifices every day to help beat Covid.\n\n\"The rules apply to everyone and they're in place to keep people safe. @Ianblackford_MP is right to suspend the whip.\"\n\nGlasgow East MP David Linden, one of Ms Ferrier's former SNP colleagues, told BBC Question Time she \"should resign\" as an MP.\n\nHis fellow SNP MPs, Kirsty Blackman and Stephen Flynn, have also called for her to step down.\n\nMeanwhile, Ruth Davidson, former Scottish Conservative leader, told BBC Newsnight: \"She shouldn't be an MP at all. That's on her and if she had a shred of decency she would [resign],\" she said.\n\nTaking public transport after testing positive amounted to an \"absolutely reckless endangerment of person and of life\", she added.\n\nMs Ferrier said she took a coronavirus test on Saturday after experiencing \"mild symptoms\", but travelled to London on Monday as she felt better.\n\nThe MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West spoke in the coronavirus debate in the House of Commons on Monday, and said she received her positive test result that evening.\n\nShe then took a train back to Scotland on Tuesday.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nMs Ferrier said she had informed the police and that she deeply regretted her actions.\n\n\"I travelled home by train on Tuesday morning without seeking advice. This was also wrong and I am sorry,\" she said.\n\n\"I have been self-isolating at home ever since.\"\n\nPolice Scotland confirmed they had been contacted by Ms Ferrier, saying officers were \"looking into the circumstances\" and liaising with the Metropolitan Police Service.\n\nThe SNP's Westminster leader Ian Blackford said he had spoken to Ms Ferrier, who accepted that what she had done was wrong.\n\nHe said: \"Margaret will be referring herself to the parliamentary standards commissioner as well as the police. I am tonight suspending the whip from Margaret.\"\n\nDave Penman, general secretary of the FDA union, which represents some Commons staff, said it was \"such a deliberate and reckless act\".\n\nHe told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: \"It's a complete disregard for others. Coronavirus is like any other health and safety issue in the workplace - we all have obligations to other people and anyone who recklessly endangers other people has to face consequences.\"\n\nWhen someone tests positive for coronavirus they normally attract sympathy and concern.\n\nBut that's in extremely short supply for Margaret Ferrier after she admitted breaking Covid self-isolation rules.\n\nShe may have apologised for attending parliament and making lengthy journeys by public transport with coronavirus but she has not offered an explanation.\n\nHer behaviour is far more serious than the lockdown travel breach that cost Catherine Calderwood her job as Scotland's chief medical officer.\n\nIt is also more serious than the lockdown travels of the prime minister's adviser, Dominic Cummings, who Mrs Ferrier called on to resign.\n\nIt is no surprise then that the Conservatives are demanding the MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West stands down from Parliament.\n\nShe has already been suspended by the SNP and the party leader, Nicola Sturgeon, has described her behaviour as \"utterly indefensible\".\n\nHouse of Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle wrote to MPs on Thursday evening to say he was informed after Ms Ferrier told the SNP whip on Wednesday afternoon that she had tested positive for Covid-19.\n\n\"The House authorities immediately took all necessary steps in line with their legal obligations and PHE [Public Health England] Guidance,\" he wrote.\n\n\"On the basis of the information supplied to the contact tracing system, only one individual has been identified as a close contact in relation to this case and is now self-isolating.\"\n\nA House of Commons spokesperson said the House's priority was to ensure the safety of those working on the estate.\n\nThe statement added: \"We have closely followed public health guidance on the action to take following a confirmed case of Covid on site.\n\n\"Parliament has a dedicated team to support the test and trace teams across the UK, acting as a central point of contact in the event of any suspected or confirmed cases, where an individual has been working on the estate.\"\n\n\"She has put passengers, rail staff, fellow MPs, Commons staff and many others at unacceptable risk,\" he said.\n\n\"To breach the rules twice is simply unforgivable, and has undermined all the sacrifices made by her constituents.\"\n\nTrain drivers union Aslef described her actions as \"both dangerous and disgraceful\".\n\nMs Ferrier was one of the MPs who called on the prime minister's adviser Dominic Cummings to resign in the wake of the controversy over his visit to the North East of England during lockdown.\n\nAt the time, she said his actions had \"undermined the sacrifices that we have all been making\" and described his position as \"untenable\".", "Loss of a sense of smell may be a more reliable indicator of Covid-19 than cough or fever, research suggests.\n\nA study by University College London (UCL) of 590 people who lost their sense of smell or taste earlier in the year found 80% had coronavirus antibodies.\n\nOf those people with antibodies, 40% had no other symptoms.\n\nThe research only looked at people with mild symptoms, however.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Covid symptoms: What are they and how long should I self-isolate for?\n\nEvidence that loss of smell and taste could be signs of coronavirus began to emerge from about April, and they were added to the official list of symptoms in mid-May.\n\nCurrent guidance states anyone who experiences a loss of, or change to their sense of smell or taste should self-isolate and apply for a test.\n\nBut lead author of the UCL study, Prof Rachel Batterham, says cough and fever are still seen by many as the main symptoms to look out for.\n\nShe recruited people between 23 April and 14 May by sending out texts via four GP surgeries in London, enrolling those who reported losing their smell or taste in the previous four weeks.\n\nAll of these participants were tested for antibodies, and four out of five were positive, suggesting a previous Covid-19 infection.\n\nThe study was constrained by the fact that all its participants had mild symptoms, including or limited to a loss of smell or taste, so they may not be representative of all Covid patients.\n\nBut its findings emphasise the importance of people looking out for any change to their sense of smell or taste, and self-isolating if they realise they can't smell \"everyday\" items like perfume, bleach, toothpaste, or coffee, Prof Batterham said.\n\nWhile not all coronavirus patients will necessarily lose their sense of smell, if you do lose your sense of smell it is highly likely to be coronavirus, this research seems to suggest.\n\nThe thing to look out for is a loss of smell without having a blocked or runny nose, Prof Batterham explained.\n\nIt's thought loss of smell happens with Covid-19 because the virus invades the cells found at the back of the nose, throat and on the tongue.\n\nThis is distinct from the experience of having a cold where smell and taste might be altered because a person's airways are blocked.\n\nKing's College London researchers, who run the Covid Symptom Study app, previously estimated 60% of people with coronavirus lost their sense of smell or taste.\n\nAlthough this is considered a milder symptom and unlikely to land someone in hospital, Prof Batterham points out the potential dangers of losing your sense of smell including not being able to detect smoke, leaking gas or food that has gone off.\n\nIf suffered longer term, it can also have a significant impact on people's quality of life.\n\nThousands of people online have reported worrying experiences including causing fires and not being able to smell the smoke. Some have noticed constantly smelling a rancid \"garbage\" odour or experiencing a metallic taste, while others have found themselves unable to taste food for months after being clear of the virus.\n\nThe group of people who only lose their smell without experiencing any other symptoms may also pose the \"greatest risk\" to others since they may feel generally well and carry on going about their daily lives, Prof Batterham pointed out.\n\nAlthough the two often go together, loss of or change to smell was more common than loss of taste among people who have recovered from coronavirus, she said.\n\nHer research took place at a time when loss of smell and taste were not recognised symptoms of the virus.\n\nHow has coronavirus affected you? How have current restrictions affected you? Emailhaveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nOr use this form to get in touch:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your comment or send it via email to HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any comment you send in.", "The former president posts that he has been told to report to a grand jury, \"which almost always means an Arrest\".", "The debate will take place in Salt Lake City in Utah on Wednesday Image caption: The debate will take place in Salt Lake City in Utah on Wednesday\n\nOn Wednesday night, Republican Vice-President Mike Pence will face Democratic Senator Kamala Harris for the only vice-presidential debate ahead of November's election.\n\nThis election cycle has seen increased scrutiny on Pence and Harris, as they support the campaign of two presidential candidates in their 70s.\n\nWith President Trump now receiving treatment for Covid-19, and more members of the White House announcing positive virus tests, there’s a new emphasis on precautions from event organisers.\n\nFor one, the vice-presidential candidates will stand more than 3m (9.8ft) apart (podiums at the first Trump-Biden debate last week were 2m apart). They will be separated by plexiglass, CNN reports.\n\nCovid testing is already under way for reporters and others planning on attending the debate in Salt Lake City, Utah.\n\nWhether everyone will be required to wear a mask this time remains to be seen.\n\nNow, we want to know: What questions do you have about the vice-presidential debate? You tell us here and we’ll get to work finding the answers.", "Delayed repairs to the Palace of Westminster cost taxpayers £2m a week, a government spending watchdog says.\n\nPoliticians had been scheduled to leave the building for at least six years while building work is completed at an estimated cost of £4bn.\n\nBut in May the body overseeing the work said the move should be reviewed due to the financial pressures of coronavirus.\n\nThe Public Accounts Committee said the \"few decisions\" that have been taken so far did not need reviewing.\n\nThe committee's Labour chair Meg Hillier also warned that \"excessive political interference\" in the process \"may muddy the waters\" and make delivery of the project more difficult.\n\nEarlier this year, the prime minister suggested the House of Lords could be moved to York on a permanent basis.\n\nThis idea was later rejected. but the government said it would continue to push for a move out of London, even though the final decision will be down to MPs and peers.\n\nMs Hillier said: \"Parliament is literally falling apart around the thousands of people who work there and the million or so who, in better times, visit every year. It poses a very real risk to health and safety in its current state,\"\n\n\"After nearly 20 years of discussion and costs to the taxpayer of just maintaining Parliament now rising by £2m a week, what we don't need is for the authorities to keep reopening and reviewing what few decisions have been taken.\n\n\"The cost of the project will be high but doing nothing is not an option and is certainly not a cost-free option - without action we are just ratcheting up the bill to the taxpayer.\"\n\nThe Labour MP also suggested the coronavirus pandemic meant Parliament was quieter than usual, providing an opportunity for building work to go ahead.\n\n\"It's time for those responsible to get creative and get to work,\" she said.\n\nResponding to the committee's report Sarah Johnson, CEO of the Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal Sponsor Body, said the review was aimed at securing value for money and providing \"certainty about the way forward\".\n\n\"The work to save our Parliament buildings for the nation is essential and urgent, and the Palace of Westminster continues to be at a high risk of catastrophic damage, be that a major fire, flood or falling masonry,\" she added.\n\nThe Palace of Westminster, which houses the Houses of Commons and Lords, has long been in need of repair and in 2018 MPs voted for refurbishment work to go ahead.\n\nUnder current plans, parliamentarians will move into temporary accommodation while the major repairs are carried out.\n\nHowever, the Sponsor Body - a panel of politicians and building experts set up to oversee restoration - said it would review the project, looking at ways of cutting costs, including alternatives to decanting Parliament to a different building.\n\nRenovation could happen around politicians as they continue working in the building, although the process could take longer and cost more.\n\nIn its report, the Public Accounts Committee warned that \"excessive political interference may muddy the waters of the Sponsor Body's work and has the potential to make delivery of the programme more difficult\".\n\nIt advised the body to publish details of \"what it considers are the main risks to building political consensus\" and how it plans to mitigate those risks.\n\nAnd it suggested the Sponsor Body launch an \"engagement strategy\" to ensure the public can feed into decisions.", "BBC Scotland has asked people in Margaret Ferrier's constituency about the MP's decision to travel by train from London to Scotland after testing positive for Covid-19.\n\nThe SNP MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West is under pressure to resign, with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon telling her daily coronavirus briefing that Ms Ferrier had been guilty of the \"worst breach imaginable\".", "Last updated on .From the section Liverpool\n\nLiverpool forward Sadio Mane has tested positive for coronavirus and is self-isolating.\n\nThe news comes three days after the club said midfielder Thiago Alcantara had tested positive for Covid-19.\n\nLiverpool say the Senegal winger has \"displayed minor symptoms of the virus but feels in good health overall\".\n\nMane, 28, played for the Reds in a 3-1 win over Arsenal on Monday but was not in the squad for the EFL Cup defeat on penalties by the Gunners on Thursday.\n\nA statement on Liverpool's website added: \"Like with Thiago Alcantara, Liverpool are - and will continue to - following all protocols relating to Covid-19 and Mane will self-isolate for the required period of time.\"\n\nMane, who has scored three goals for the Anfield club this season, will miss the Premier League game against Aston Villa on Sunday prior to the international break.\n\nThe club's first game after that will be the Merseyside derby at Everton on 17 October.\n\nOn Monday, the Premier League announced 10 people had tested positive for coronavirus in the latest round of testing - the highest number of positive tests since the season began.", "President Trump and his wife Melania plan to recover at the White House\n\nAs news emerged that US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania had tested positive for coronavirus, the story shot to the top of every news agenda worldwide.\n\nIt's just 32 days until Americans cast their votes in the race for the White House - and this is a seismic development.\n\nWorld leaders were quick to send the Trumps their well-wishes, with India's Twitter-loving Prime Minister Narendra Modi among the first.\n\n\"Wishing my friend @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and @FLOTUS a quick recovery and good health,\" he wrote.\n\nIsrael's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted: \"Like millions of Israelis, Sara and I are thinking of President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump and wish our friends a full and speedy recovery.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"Hang on, Peter\": How US news reacted to Trump's Covid diagnosis\n\nRussia's Vladimir Putin sent a message by telegraph, according to the Interfax News Agency, writing: \"I am certain that your inherent vitality, good spirits and optimism will help you cope with this dangerous virus.\"\n\nIn much international media, however, the news was accompanied by criticism of what was said to be the US president's \"botched\" response to the coronavirus pandemic, and his \"open scepticism\" over the use of face masks and social distancing.\n\nGerman media seemed somewhat unsurprised. \"Trump usually does not wear a mask in public\", wrote the centre-right Die Welt, while the centrist Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung pointed out that the pandemic did not deter him from making numerous major election campaign appearances.\n\nMedia in France echoed the sentiment that Mr Trump undermined his own health by underestimating the virus. \"After months of catastrophic handling of the pandemic in the USA, after months of lies and contradictory messages to his supporters… Donald Trump has tested positive for Covid-19,\" wrote Libération.\n\nIran's international-facing English-language Press TV observed that Trump \"has been somewhat cavalier\" about the Covid-19 threat, adding that \"it was only a matter of time\" before the US president caught the virus.\n\nAn anchor on Iranian state television broke the news \"with an unflattering image of the US president surrounded by what appeared to be giant coronaviruses\", the Associated Press reports.\n\nElsewhere, questions have been asked about what the news could actually mean for the US presidential election. The India Today website anticipated that Trump's quarantine would bring his election campaign to a standstill, stating: \"The [presidential] debates and the entire Republican campaign now comes under a shadow.\"\n\nThe website quoted predictions by analysts that Trump may hope to get sympathy votes now that he has tested positive himself. But others, like Hindi-language daily the Navbharat Times, predicted that \"Trump's diagnosis and his attitude towards the pandemic will harm him in the election.\"\n\nAn artist in Mumbai, India, paints a mural of the ailing couple\n\nPakistan's Geo News carried an online report reading: \"The future of Trump's re-election campaign is in doldrums due to his illness and inability to address the rallies before the crucial November 3 vote.\"\n\n\"The president, who is tested regularly for Covid-19, has kept up a rigorous travel schedule across the country in recent weeks, holding rallies with thousands of people in the run-up to the November 3 election, despite warnings from public health professionals against having events with large crowds.\"\n\nIn China, which Mr Trump has repeatedly blamed for the spread of the coronavirus, news of his illness was one of the most searched topics on Weibo, the popular (if heavily censored) social media app.\n\nThe editor of the state-owned Global Times newspaper, Hu Xijin, tweeted in English: \"President Trump and the First Lady have paid the price for his gamble to play down the Covid-19.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nDomestically, some of Mr Trump's favoured outlets took a gentler tone. \"Get through this together!\" reads a headline on Fox News's website, where the story is leading the news.\n\n\"Trump, first lady send messages of calm, resilience from White House after testing positive for Covid,\" it adds.\n\nThe site's sympathetic coverage includes an article on people it calls \"a number of the president's fiercest critics\", sending their best wishes for his recovery. The network's medical expert Marc Siegel said his sources had described the couple as \"absolutely asymptomatic\".\n\nElsewhere in the US press, the Wall Street Journal noted a fall in US stock futures and said \"the diagnosis throws up a host of uncertainties for markets to process\", including the question \"will the US government be able to function normally?\"\n\nThe Washington Post has dropped its paywall to allow people to read its live updates on the situation.\n\nPolitico described Mr Trump as \"the world's highest-profile patient of a disease that has killed more than one million people\".\n\n\"A person familiar with the situation said the president was not showing symptoms yet on Thursday,\" the site reported. \"Still, Vice-President Mike Pence may need to step in for some tasks if Trump is confined to the White House grounds,\" it quoted the source as saying.\n\nOn that score, there is some good news for the Trump administration: Mr Pence and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both tested negative.", "Archie Lyndhurst with his father Nicholas and mother Lucy Smith in 2017\n\nActor Archie Lyndhurst's mother has posted a poignant message remembering her \"most wonderful unique son\" following his death at the age of 19.\n\nThe son of Only Fools and Horses star Nicholas Lyndhurst, he was known for his role in the CBBC comedy So Awkward.\n\nMum Lucy Smith wrote: \"We shall love him forever and a day and are the luckiest parents to have had the most wonderful unique son.\"\n\nShe added that he had brought \"nothing but joy in our lives\".\n\nShe was responding to an Instagram tribute from comedian Jack Whitehall, who described him as \"passionate, generous and pitch perfect\" and \"an utter joy to work with\".\n\nThe young actor played a younger version of Whitehall on TV, film and stage.\n\nThis Instagram post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Instagram The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip instagram post by jackwhitehall This article contains content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Meta’s Instagram cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSmith thanked the star for \"all the amazing opportunities\" he had put their son's way, and for the \"lifelong friendship\" that had ensued.\n\n\"He loved every moment of every job and relished in the fantastic scripts you wrote,\" she added.\n\nLyndhurst died after a short illness, it was announced on Thursday. In a statement, his father had said he and his wife were \"utterly grief stricken and respectfully request privacy\".\n\nIn his tribute, Whitehall said Lyndhurst was \"loved by everyone on set\" and would \"never be forgotten\".\n\n\"Archie Lyndhurst came in to my life nearly 10 years ago, playing the young me in a short film I'd written,\" Whitehall wrote with \"a heavy heart\".\n\n\"He was brilliant, so talented and funny. An utter joy to work with.\"\n\nArchie Lyndhurst played a younger version of Jack Whitehall on TV, film and on-stage\n\nWhitehall recalled how their \"wonderful partnership\" led to them doing a skit at the London Palladium and joining forces again in a sketch for his arena tour and TV special.\n\n\"When we needed to find an actor to play the young Alfie Wickers in Bad Education it was the easiest piece of casting we ever had to do,\" he continued.\n\n\"Every time I worked with Archie he was the same - passionate, generous and pitch perfect, he was loved by everyone on set. I have no doubt he would have had a long and illustrious career and would have continued lighting up the lives of all those who encountered him.\"\n\nWhitehall went on to explain that during lockdown, Lyndhurst had been taking shopping and groceries to his parents Michael and Hilary when they couldn't leave the house.\n\n\"The enthusiastic and talented boy I met all those years ago had grown into an equally charming young man,\" he wrote of the kind gesture. \"It's testament to what a wonderful and kind person he was.\"\n\nHe concluded: \"The world has been robbed of a truly special soul. He will never be forgotten, I feel utterly devastated that he is gone but I also feel so blessed to have met him.\"\n\nFollow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.", "Hundreds of students at Northumbria University are self-isolating after testing positive for Covid-19\n\nHundreds of students at Northumbria University are self-isolating after testing positive for Covid-19.\n\nA spokesman for the university, in Newcastle, confirmed 770 students had tested positive since returning in mid-September, 78 of whom are symptomatic.\n\nAll infected students, and their close contacts, have self-isolated for 14 days in line with government guidance.\n\nMeanwhile, Newcastle University confirmed it has had 94 students and seven staff test positive.\n\nA Newcastle spokeswoman said the \"overwhelming majority of cases\" were from \"social and domestic settings\".\n\nUniversity and College Union (UCU) said it warned Northumbria University it was \"far too soon for a mass return to campus\".\n\nIn a statement the UCU, which represents lecturers, said: \"We told Northumbria University they had a civic duty to put the health of staff, students and the local community first and we take no pleasure in now seeing another preventable crisis play out.\n\n\"We warned last month that, given the current restrictions in the region, the direction of the infection rate and the problems with test and trace, it was clearly far too soon for a mass return to campus.\"\n\nNorthumbria University said self-isolating students were being provided with food, laundry, cleaning materials and welfare support by the university, working alongside the students' union and Newcastle City Council.\n\nEllie Burgoyne, 19, who studies social sciences, has been isolating since one of her flatmates tested positive a week ago.\n\nShe said: \"The uni and accommodation have been great in providing support and keeping us as comfortable as possible as not leaving our flat for two weeks isn't the most fun.\n\n\"I moved a couple of weeks ago and immediately noticed how strict our accommodation was being when it came to students meeting with other flats, trying to have parties.\n\n\"I think it's a common misconception that students haven't been listening to the guideline, my accommodation has been quiet aside from the odd flat having a few people over.\"\n\nMeanwhile, students will also receive additional academic support if they miss out on face-to-face tuition during their isolation period.\n\nThe university spokesman added: \"The increase in numbers comes in the week after students returned to university and reflects the good access to and availability of testing, as well as rigorous and robust reporting systems.\n\n\"In parts of the UK where universities started term earlier, numbers of student cases surged in induction week, and then reduced.\n\n\"We are making it clear to students that if they break the rules they will be subject to fines from police and disciplinary action by the universities which may include fines, final warnings or expulsion.\n\n\"Both Northumbria and Newcastle universities have Covid response teams on call that are working closely with NHS Test and Trace, Public Health England North East and the City to identify and get in touch with anyone who has been in close contact with those affected.\"\n\nAround 56 universities across the UK have had at least one confirmed case of Covid-19.\n\nThere have been more than 200 cases at the University of Sheffield and 177 University of Liverpool staff and students have tested positive, according to a PA news agency survey which contacted 140 institutions.\n\nApproximately 2,500 positive cases of Covid-19 have been identified at these universities, the analysis suggests.\n\nAre you a student at Northumbria University? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.\n\nPlease include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Harvey Weinstein now faces 11 charges involving five victims in Los Angeles County\n\nDisgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein has been charged with six further counts of sexual assault, the Los Angeles District Attorney confirmed.\n\nFriday's charges involve two victims of alleged incidents that occurred more than 10 years ago.\n\nWeinstein now faces 11 sexual assault charges in Los Angeles County involving five women, District Attorney Jackie Lacey said in a statement.\n\nIn March, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault.\n\nDuring that trial in New York, the 68-year-old was found guilty of committing a first-degree criminal sexual act against one woman and third-degree rape of another woman.\n\nThe latest charges allege that he raped a woman at a hotel in Beverly Hills between 2004 and 2005, and raped another woman twice - in November 2009 and November 2010.\n\nIn January, Weinstein was charged with sexually assaulting two women in 2013. Then in April, a further charge alleging that he assaulted a woman at a Beverly Hills hotel in 2010 was added.\n\nLos Angeles officials have already started extradition proceedings, however this has been delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Another extradition hearing is set to take place in December.\n\nIn March, Weinstein himself was said to have tested positive for coronavirus in a prison in upstate New York.\n\nA spokesman for Weinstein said: \"Harvey Weinstein has always maintained that every one of his physical encounters throughout his entire life have been consensual. That hasn't changed.\"\n\nThe spokesman said they would not comment on the additional charges.\n\nAllegations against Weinstein began to emerge in 2017 when The New York Times first reported incidents dating back over decades.\n\nHe issued an apology acknowledging that he had \"caused a lot of pain\", but disputed the allegations.\n\nAs dozens more emerged, Weinstein was sacked from the board of his company and all but banished from Hollywood.\n\nA criminal investigation was launched in New York in late 2017, but Weinstein was not charged until May 2018 when he turned himself in to police.\n\nWhen he was sentenced to prison in March this year, jurors acquitted him of the most serious charges of predatory sexual assault, which could have seen him given an even longer jail term.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Reaction to the court's decision to sentence Harvey Weinstein to 23 years in jail (file image from 24 February 2020)", "Five days a week, every week, Nicola Sturgeon appears on TV, taking questions about her coronavirus policies and urging every one of us to abide by the rules.\n\nSo for the MP who has committed the most egregious breach of the regulations - possibly of the law - to be one of her own is acutely embarrassing.\n\nThe SNP leader who has been quick to condemn others for breaking the rules has made no attempt to defend or excuse Margaret Ferrier.\n\nThis is the first minister whose chief medical advisor resigned for breaking lockdown rules back in April and who demanded the sacking of the PM's chief advisor Dominic Cummings after he was accused of breaching the regulations.\n\nSNP MPs called publicly Ms Ferrier to resign and Nicola Sturgeon has spoken to her this morning and made clear that she should step down as an MP.\n\nMargaret Ferrier has faced calls to stand down as an MP\n\nBut the problem for the SNP is that they cannot force the MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West to leave her job.\n\nThey have already removed the party whip and suspended her from the SNP. But that is all they can do.\n\nThe SNP have been in a similar position before.\n\nThe former Finance Secretary Derek MacKay resigned from the Scottish cabinet after it was revealed that he had sent inappropriate messages to a 16-year-old boy on social media. But he is still an MSP and is still causing the party embarrassment\n\nThe SNP administration in Edinburgh have taken a consistently tough line on coronavirus regulations and on those who have been to found break them.\n\nMargaret Ferrier's trip to London and back threatens to undermine much of that. The party will be hoping that she announces soon that she is no longer an MP.", "With a month to go before the presidential election, voters around the US are digesting the news that President Donald Trump is infected with Covid-19.\n\nMr Trump is currently experiencing mild symptoms - but aged 74 and within the clinical definition of obesity, he has risk factors that raise his chance of having a severe reaction.\n\nWe asked some older members of the BBC voter panel how they felt when they heard the news.\n\nMark Falbo is a retired higher education administrator who recently moved to Windham, Maine. He is a Democrat voting for Joe Biden.\n\nI am very concerned when anyone gets a diagnosis of being Covid positive - being someone my age and my size, I know how bad that can be for them, so I'm hoping that the president and first lady, and all those who may have been exposed, will recover well.\n\nI'm also hoping that it will create an area of seriousness around the president about this, because this still is a very dangerous situation and hopefully [this will be] his way of having to learn how leaders need to respond to threats to their population.\n\nI don't think he underestimated the crisis - it's pretty clear that he was aware of the threat. I personally think he mismanaged. And I think that's been a huge disservice to not simply Americans, but to the world.\n\nHere in Maine, we are pretty sensitive about Covid-19 and I'm fortunate to be in a state where the governor and our CDC director has taken this very seriously, with the exception of some silly activities by a few families.\n\nLaura Powers is a materials scientist from Wilmot, Wisconsin. She identifies as Independent and will vote for Joe Biden.\n\nWhen I woke up this morning and listened to the news, and heard that he had tested positive, my first thought was that maybe this is a wake-up call to his followers who think that this is all a hoax.\n\nMy second thought was that unless he has symptoms that are a little more severe - and I don't wish that on anyone including him and Melania - he's going to pull out and broadcast to his followers that Covid-19 is nothing to worry about, and even at his age he got through it.\n\nI have been extremely careful and I do take the health situation very seriously. I don't have underlying conditions but I know many people who do. I worry about people who are not, and I think that this will be a wake-up call. But as I said, I think that if [Trump has only a mild case], he will convince his followers that Covid has been blown out of proportion by the media.\n\nKathleen McClellan from Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, is a Republican voting for Donald Trump.\n\nI'm very sorry that [Donald and Melania Trump] caught the infection. I hope they do well. But my brother also caught it and he said he's had flus that felt worse. So, I know that it varies quite a bit. But I think that's just the way a virus works - it has to infect a certain number of people before it's going to go away.\n\nI don't think he's underestimated the crisis. I think he's in a position where he has seen people die, but he has a different philosophy, where you push forward. It's an individual decision for each person and I don't think anybody really knows that much about the virus. But it seems like at this point in time we may need to just get on with our lives, protect people who are especially vulnerable.\n\nIt's just a reminder that [Covid-19] is not something anyone should take for granted. But you can't be paranoid. It's not like back in April, when a complete shutdown made sense because we didn't know what we were dealing with.\n\nEric Scholl, 65, is a media coordinator from Tulsa, Oklahoma. He voted for Trump in 2016, but will vote for Joe Biden this year.\n\nCovid is not a Republican issue, it's not a United States issue, it's a global health issue. Unfortunately, and I do mean very unfortunately, the president never [listened to] the medical experts, let alone the fact that he totally blew off first protecting the country. So, it's sad - I'm just very sad for him and his wife and I hope they recover, but that's not gonna change who I vote for.\n\nI respect that there will be a small percentage [of the population] that will be more proactive in protecting themselves [after the president got the virus]. But here where I live in Oklahoma, the attitude is \"Hey I'm bulletproof. It's not going to affect me.\"\n\nThe president has greatly underestimated the power of Covid-19.\n\nJim Hurson from the San Francisco Bay Area in California is a Republican voting for Donald Trump.\n\nMy first reaction was, obviously, I thought it's very unfortunate. My second reaction is wondering what his opposition is going to do, to try and leverage this into making him look bad again. I think for sure they will play a game of \"we told you so\".\n\nWe have to remember that we have the benefit of hindsight.\n\nIf you listen to purely health oriented people, they want to make things as safe as they can from the standpoint of virology. But the president also has to deal with the consequences of disastrous economic fallout, what are the mental health problems of sequestering people in their homes... what is the society as a whole going to suffer from, and the government spending money that it frankly does not have?\n\nIt's an incredibly complicated situation when you look at it from a national standpoint. Given that, I don't think anybody could have done any better.\n\nIf you don't assume that the government can solve all of this, and you look at individuals and say how they are behaving, we're all going through this nicely.\n\nAre you an American voter? Join Jim, Kathleen, Mark, Eric and Laura on our US election voter panel.\n\nUse this form to get in touch.\n\nIf you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your response.", "Travellers arriving in the UK from Poland, Turkey and three Caribbean islands will have to self-isolate for 14 days from 04:00 on Saturday.\n\nPoland's infection rate has risen, while the UK government said it removed Turkey over concerns about the way the country reports its data.\n\nThere will also be tougher fines for those who fail to self-isolate - up to a maximum of £10,000 in England.\n\nOne airport group says it is a \"further blow\" to a \"struggling\" sector.\n\nThe UK reported a further 6,914 coronavirus cases and 59 deaths on Thursday, and stricter measures have been announced to control a spike in areas of northern England.\n\nAnnouncing the changes to the quarantine list, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said data from Poland showed that \"test positivity has nearly doubled increasing from 3.9% to 5.8% alongside a rapid increase in weekly cases\".\n\nPoland is reporting 25.9 coronavirus cases per 100,000 people, up from 15.6.\n\nArrivals from the Caribbean islands of Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba will also have to quarantine from Saturday, he added.\n\nThose islands reported 142.4 new cases per 100,000, unchanged from 142.4 the previous week.\n\nMeanwhile, the Scottish Government announced that those arriving from the Portuguese islands of the Azores and Madeira will no longer need to quarantine in Scotland \"due to the low number of cases\".\n\nThe Azores and Madeira were already on the \"exempt\" list for the rest of the UK.\n\nThe Scottish government's statement added that it was \"clear that case numbers in Turkey have been under-reported\".\n\nTurkey's reported infection rate has dropped to 12.9 cases per 100,000, down from 14.2 in the week prior.\n\nIt has also been announced that in England, fines for the first offence of failing to self-isolate when required will start at £1,000, before increasing to £2,000, then £4,000 up to a maximum of £10,000.\n\nThe upper limit for repeat offences was previously £3,200. The increase in fines will come into force from Friday.\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nSince the introduction of the travel quarantine regime in the summer, police officers have investigated more than 4,000 alleged breaches of the rules.\n\nMore than 200 people were found to be ignoring the quarantine requirement, but escaped a fine because they listened to the officer on their doorstep.\n\nOverall there were just 38 penalties for breaching holiday quarantine.\n\nIf you look at the official data coming out of Turkey then it sits comfortably below the UK's benchmark for applying the quarantine of 20 cases for every 100,000 people.\n\nBut revelations that the number of cases in Turkey has been under-reported has put the country onto the \"red\" list.\n\nTurkey and Poland are key destinations for airlines and airports so it's another blow for the travel sector.\n\nThe Department for Transport is still looking at whether testing can be used at airports to reduce the quarantine period from 14 to seven days.\n\nIt is almost impossible for the police to enforce quarantine rules so it is hoped heavier fines for repeat offenders will mean fewer people will break the rules.\n\nThe Manchester Airports Group, which owns and operates Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands airports, said Poland and Turkey's removal from the travel safe list \"means that a large proportion of the markets our passengers usually travel to are now effectively closed-off, despite many of them having much lower infection rates than the UK\".\n\nThe announcement \"is a further blow to the already struggling aviation sector\", a statement said.\n\nThe group said it was \"vital\" for the government to establish a testing regime \"which would allow for a safe reduction in quarantine periods for passengers arriving from abroad\".\n\nTim Alderslade, from Airlines UK, the trade body for UK registered airlines, said a testing regime was \"the only way we can reopen international travel\".\n\n\"Without testing aviation cannot recover and we will miss the opportunity to get the economy moving again,\" he said.\n\nThe Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) also said it was a \"massive blow for the travel industry\".\n\n\"This coupled with popular winter-sun destinations, like the Canary Islands - still on the quarantine list - only piles the pressure on a struggling sector,\" the travel industry trade body said.\n\n\"Many travel businesses are in precarious position and will find it difficult to survive unless the government acts now with tailored support to assist the travel industry.\"\n\nConcert pianist Tomasz Lis has cancelled a performance in Poland on Sunday because of the rules\n\nTomasz Lis, who lives in London after moving to the UK from Poland 23 years ago, runs a travel company offering tailored trips to his home country. He says the new rule will cost him thousands of pounds.\n\nThe 43-year-old said: \"It's been an impossible year already and the government would do much better by checking temperatures at the airports, for instance, and test people who may have it rather than introduce those absurd rules.\"\n\nMr Lis is also a concert pianist and has cancelled a performance in Poland on Sunday because of the rules - meaning he will lose £3,000 and the cost of his flights.", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "E-scooters should be legalised on roads but riding on pavements should be prohibited, the Transport Committee of MPs has said.\n\nCurrently, privately-owned e-scooters are banned to use in the UK anywhere except on private land.\n\nThe committee argues the vehicles, which usually travel 9-15mph, could offer a green alternative to the car.\n\nOfficial trials of rented e-scooters have already been announced in some places in England.\n\nWhile supporting the introduction of e-scooters, the Transport Committee said the government should use trials to monitor the numbers and types of collisions that take place.\n\nDescribing riding e-scooters on pavements as \"dangerous and anti-social\", the committee said the law should \"prohibit their use on pavements\" and that \"robust enforcement measures\" would be needed.\n\nFurther committee recommendations include allowing local authorities to determine the speed of e-scooters and encouraging users to wear helmets.\n\nIt also said there are \"valid environmental concerns\" about the processes used to recharge e-scooter batteries and advised the Department for Transport to monitor the environmental impact.\n\nThe Tees Valley, Milton Keynes Borough, Northamptonshire, and the West Midlands have signed up to trial the use of rental e-scooters.\n\nHowever a trial in Coventry was paused after five days following concerns over pedestrian safety and e-scooters being abandoned on the streets.\n\nCommittee chair Huw Merriman said: \"E-scooters have the potential to become an exciting and ingenious way to navigate our streets and get from place to place.\n\n\"If this gets people out of the car, reducing congestion and exercising in the open air, then even better.\"\n\nBut he added: \"We need to ensure that their arrival on our streets doesn't make life more difficult for pedestrians, and especially disabled people.\"\n\nRAC head of roads policy Nicholas Lyes said e-scooters could \"transform how many of us get around\" but added \"the path to introducing them safely is fraught with difficulties\".\n\nHe called for effective regulation and education of riders to ensure \"limited road space\" could be shared safely by drivers, cyclists and e-scooter riders.\n\nAnd Roger Geffen from Cycling UK said the maximum speed and weight of e-scooters should be reduced before legalisation.\n\nA Department for Transport spokesperson said: \"We welcome the outcome of the committee's report today and believe that e-scooters can offer an affordable, reliable and sustainable way to travel.\n\n\"Safety will always be our top priority and our current trials are allowing us to better understand the benefits of e-scooters and their impact on public space, helping us to design future regulations.\"", "The government looked into putting floating barriers in the English Channel to stop asylum seekers crossing to the UK, a leaked document shows.\n\nThe Home Office approached the trade group Maritime UK over the possible use of temporary \"marine fencing\", in a request for ideas sent over the summer.\n\nThis, it said, must be able to \"prevent a slow-moving, heavily overloaded migrant boat from making progress\".\n\nThe government said it did not \"comment on leaks\".\n\nBut Maritime UK said it was its \"clear view\" that building a wall in the Channel was \"not legally possible\" under the terms of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea.\n\nThis year, almost 7,000 people have reached the UK in more than 500 small boats, often totally unsuited to the conditions.\n\nHome Secretary Priti Patel has declared she is \"determined to stop this criminal trade\".\n\nThe government has looked at setting up a processing centre for asylum seekers on Ascension Island, 4,000 miles from the UK - or on disused ferries moored off the coast of England.\n\nMeanwhile, the Times has reported that other proposals drawn up by the Home Office include the use of a water cannon in the Channel to create waves to push back vessels.\n\nOn Thursday, the most senior civil servant at the Home Office, Matthew Rycroft, told MPs that \"everything is on the table\" when it comes to \"improving\" the UK's asylum system.\n\nHe added that the UK had been \"looking at what a whole host of other countries do in order to bring innovation into our own system\".\n\nAn email from Maritime UK - sent on 17 September and first seen by the Financial Times - included the request put out by the government over the summer, asking \"what options are available for marine fencing and other water-based technologies that would inhibit passage to UK territorial waters\".\n\nThese needed \"the capability to fully prevent a slow-moving, heavily overloaded migrant boat from making progress\" and had to be \"deployable to a precise location, and capable of remaining in that position\".\n\nThe request added that the technology had to be \"rapidly deployable and rapidly removable\", while being \"safe for those who come into contact with it\" and \"for those operating it\".\n\nThe Strait of Dover - separating the Channel and the North Sea - is the world's busiest shipping lane.\n\nThe Home Office suggested that any fencing be placed \"on the median line\", which separates French and UK territorial waters, but \"without the equipment entering French waters\".\n\nIt was reported earlier this year that the Greek government was planning to construct a barrier of nets to deter people crossing the Aegean by boat from Turkey.\n\nThese would use pylons connected to the seabed, leaving half a metre - topped by flashing lights - above the surface, the magazine Dezeen said.\n\nLabour leader Sir Keir Starmer has described some of the ideas being considered by the Home Office as \"inhuman\" and \"ridiculous\".\n\nWhen asked about the possibility of a floating wall in the Channel, a Home Office spokeswoman said the department \"does not comment on leaks\".\n\nThey also said: \"As the public will fully understand, we do not comment on operational matters because to do so could provide an advantage to the exploitative and ruthless criminals who facilitate these dangerous crossings, as they look for new ways to beat the system.\"\n\nBen Murray, director of Maritime UK, said: \"As the umbrella organisation for UK maritime we are a conduit between industry and government and are often asked by government for advice or input on policy matters.\n\n\"The Home Office engaged us to pass on a question around options to inhibit passage to UK territorial waters, which we gave to our members.\n\n\"The clear view, which we shared with the Home Office, was that as a matter of international convention, that this is not legally possible.\"", "The Proud Boys is far-right, anti-immigrant group with a history of violence\n\nUS President Donald Trump has condemned all white supremacist groups following controversy over remarks he made during the first presidential debate.\n\nIn an interview with Fox News on Thursday he explicitly condemned the Proud Boys group which in the debate he had urged to \"stand back and stand by\".\n\nMembers of the far-right group had regarded his comment as an endorsement.\n\nMr Trump's Democratic rival Joe Biden had accused the president of refusing to disavow white supremacists.\n\nSenior Republicans also expressed unease over the remarks, and attempts by Mr Trump to walk back the comments at a news conference on Wednesday failed to end the controversy.\n\nIn an interview with Sean Hannity on Thursday evening President Trump said: \"I've said it many times, let me be clear again, I condemn the KKK [Ku Klux Klan]. I condemn all white supremacists. I condemn the Proud Boys.\n\n\"I don't know much about the Proud Boys, almost nothing, but I condemn that.\"\n\nDuring Tuesday's debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked whether the president would condemn white supremacists and tell them to stand down during protests.\n\nWhen Mr Trump asked who it was he was being told to condemn, Mr Biden twice said \"Proud Boys\", referring to the far-right, anti-immigrant, all-group with a history of violence against left-wing opponents.\n\nThe president said: \"Proud Boys - stand back and stand by. But I'll tell you what... somebody's got to do something about antifa [anti-fascist activists] and the left because this is not a right-wing problem.\"\n\nAfter his refusal to explicitly condemn far-right groups drew criticism, Mr Trump sought to qualify his remarks during an exchange with reporters on the White House had lawn on Wednesday.\n\nHe said he did not know who the Proud boys were.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Trump: \"I don't know who the Proud Boys are\"\n\nHe did not clarify his use of \"stand by\" in the debate but said he wanted to \"let law enforcement do their work\".\n\nDuring his time in office, President Trump has been accused of emboldening far-right groups with his rhetoric while being more willing to openly condemn those on the far-left.\n\nThe tone and tactics of the first presidential debate were widely criticised.\n\nThe candidates were given two minutes to answer moderator questions before being allowed to address each other's response.\n\nHowever, President Trump constantly interrupted Mr Biden leading to a series of chaotic exchanges in which both men talked over each other.\n\nThe Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) - a nonpartisan body that has organised presidential debates since 1988 - has since said it will announce new measures to help moderators \"maintain order\" in the remaining two debates.", "Parts of the UK are facing heavy rain and high winds, as Storm Alex brings in a stretch of bad weather.\n\nGale-force winds reached 61mph (98km/h) in southern England on Friday, as drivers were urged to be \"cautious\" and carry out safety checks.\n\nRain warnings are in place across much of Wales and England and parts of Scotland for this weekend.\n\nThe Met Office's chief meteorologist said the forecast was a \"miserable end to the working week\".\n\nStorm Alex, which has been affecting France, earlier pushed strong winds and lashing rain into southern England.\n\nMet Office spokeswoman Nicola Maxey said the highest wind speeds of 61mph hit Berry Head in Devon and the Isle of Wight on Friday morning.\n\nA yellow weather warning for wind and rain is in place on Friday across much of southern England - stretching from Cornwall to the Kent coast - and parts of Wales.\n\nNine breakdowns per minute have been forecast on UK roads between Friday and Monday, with the most callouts expected on Saturday, according to Green Flag.\n\nMark Newberry, commercial director at the breakdown cover provider, said: \"As a result of these weather conditions, we urge drivers to remain cautious and to carry out the relevant safety checks before leaving to make their journeys.\"\n\nIn Swanage in Dorset, waves were seen crashing against the seafront\n\nLocals joined a clean-up effort after stones were brought in by the sea\n\nThere is also the possibility of flooding this weekend across parts of the UK.\n\nAmber weather warnings for rain cover much of Wales and south-west England, and parts of Scotland, from 12:00 BST on Saturday to 06:00 on Sunday.\n\nYellow weather warnings are in place for most of central and southern England, and eastern coasts into Scotland from Saturday into Sunday.\n\nA yellow weather warning means heavy rain is expected and could lead to disruption from flooding, while an amber warning means heavy rain is expected to bring some flooding and transport disruption.\n\nOver the weekend, parts of Wales, south-west England and eastern Scotland could see more than 100mm of rain.\n\nThis could lead to the risk of flooding and landslides as well as very difficult driving conditions, the Met Office said - concerns that were echoed by the Environment Agency.\n\n\"We urge people to stay away from swollen rivers and not to drive though flood water - it is often deeper than it looks and just 30cm of flowing water is enough to float your car,\" the Environment Agency said.\n\nMembers of the Coastguard were on hand as the waves knocked a bin over\n\nA car drives through a large puddle on the A20 in Folkestone, Kent\n\nUnplanned power outages in more than 20 areas including Portsmouth, Southampton and towns east of Reading have been recorded by Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks.\n\nHowever, the company said this was normal, rating the shortage as \"low incidence\", and adding that the cuts were concentrated to small areas, with power lines generally \"holding up very well\".\n\nWestern Power Distribution has also recorded incidents in the South West, affecting Devon, Cornwall, Dorset and Somerset.\n\nNational industry body for gas and electricity, Energy Networks Association, said the storm had not caused \"significant disruption\" but that it was monitoring the weather \"very closely\".", "Despite calls for a ceasefire from the US, Russia and France - fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh continues to intensify.\n\nThe BBC’s Ros Atkins looks at the history of the conflict, the reasons it’s escalated this week and why some warn it could become a regional conflict.", "Future in full flow: Teacher and students at Epsom College\n\nMinisters are using powers under the Coronavirus Act to require schools to offer pupils who are not in school the same lessons as those in class.\n\nTeaching unions reacted angrily to the move calling it a \"grave error\" which risks damaging the government's relationship with the profession.\n\nIt comes after official figures showed one in six secondaries in England were partially closed to some pupils.\n\nThe government said it was formalising pupils' rights to remote learning.\n\nIt comes as huge swathes of the north-east and north-west of England are under stricter lockdown measures.\n\nMinisters have insisted that schools will only close as a last resort in the event of widespread virus spread.\n\nInstead, in areas where cases are high, schools may switch to a rota system of two weeks on, two weeks off.\n\nThe guidance, published on the Department for Education website, said: \"The Direction means schools have a duty to provide education to children at home, as they do when children are in the classroom.\"\n\nIt added: \"The Direction will help provide assurances to both pupils and parents that if pupils have to self-isolate at home their education will not be disrupted.\n\n\"In the event of a confirmed case, schools are following the necessary guidance, including requiring small groups of children to self-isolate.\n\n\"In these cases, continuing to provide education is an absolute necessity.\n\n\"The Direction helps ensure this and sets a clear expectation on the high-quality education they should receive.\"\n\nIn Darlington, Year 3 teacher, Mary Craghill has been teaching by video link\n\nBut general secretary of the NAHT head teachers' union Paul Whiteman said there was no need to reach for legal powers as there was every indication that schools have taken their preparations for partial or full closure seriously.\n\nHeads were \"taking steps to ensure they meet and exceed government and parental expectations for remote education, should circumstances require it,\" he said.\n\nHe added: \"Right now, government action should be focused wholly on support, not sanction - the carrot, not the stick.\n\n\"Bitter experience tells us that mandating compliance to a minimum criteria is a poor way of driving quality and excellence in a system.\n\n\"There is absolutely no reason to believe that emergency powers are required to compel schools to act.\n\n\"By reaching for legal powers, the government risks sending an unequivocal message to the profession and parents that they do not trust school leaders to act in the interests of young people in this country.\"\n\nHead teachers unions had advised DfE officials strongly against using such emergency powers, adding that they had been working flat out for months to support children's education.\n\nNational Education Union joint general secretary Mary Bousted said: \"Staff in schools are desperate to do their best for pupils and the pandemic makes their roles all the more important.\n\n\"The legal requirement to provide remote education must be backed by government support for what is, by some distance, not business as usual.\"\n\nShe claimed a support package, announced alongside the guidance, promising 100,000 laptops, fell short by a long way.\n\n\"This government is once again trying to cut corners over Covid.\n\n\"Schools were crying out for the right support for online learning throughout lockdown, not least for disadvantaged young people who did not have the right IT or wi-fi equipment at home that would have ensured a continuity and parity of learning.\"\n\nThe government is also facing growing pressure to make a back-up plan in case GCSEs and A-levels cannot go ahead.", "Delphine Boël wants the same rights as her half siblings, her lawyer says\n\nThe love child of former Belgian King Albert II has won a court battle to grant her the same rights and titles as her father's children by his marriage.\n\nUnder the ruling, artist Delphine Boël, 52, will be granted the title of Princess of Belgium.\n\nKing Albert admitted he was her father in January this year, having fought her paternity claim for more than a decade.\n\nHer mother, Baroness Sybille de Selys Longchamps, claims she had an 18-year affair with Albert before he was king.\n\nRumours first emerged that he had fathered a child with another woman after it was disclosed in an unauthorised biography about Albert's wife, Queen Paola, published in 1999.\n\nMs Boël first alleged on the record that King Albert was her biological father during a 2005 interview, but it was not until he abdicated in 2013 - when he lost his immunity to prosecution - that she opened court proceedings.\n\nHer lawyer told reporters that she was \"delighted\" with the court's decision.\n\n\"A judicial victory will never replace a father's love, but it does offer a sense of justice,\" said Marc Uyttendaele. \"Many more children who have gone through similar ordeals may be able to find the strength to face them.\"\n\nMs Boël and her two children can now hold the surname of her father, Saxe-Cobourg.\n\nAs a result of the ruling, after King Albert's death she will be entitled to receive an inheritance, along with his three other children - Prince Laurent, Princess Astrid and Philippe, the current king.\n\nDespite her new title, Ms Boël will not receive any royal endowment. But Albert must pay nearly €3.4m (£3.1m) to cover her legal fees, according to local outlet De Standaard.\n\nHer mother Baroness Longchamps says the affair with Albert, who was then Prince of Liège, lasted from 1966 to 1984, and he was around during Ms Boël's childhood.\n\nFollowing his older brother's death in 1993 at 62, Albert unexpectedly came to the throne. He held the position until July 2013, when he announced his abdication - citing ill health - and was replaced by his son, Philippe.\n\nThe 86-year-old had resisted court orders to undergo DNA testing until he was facing fines of €5,000 per day for refusing to do so. In January, he announced he accepted Ms Boël as his fourth child after he \"learnt the results of the DNA tests\".\n\nBelgium has a constitutional monarchy in which the king plays a largely ceremonial role.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. King Albert was sworn in as the sixth king of the Belgians on 9 August 1993", "The group were stopped near Brynamman in the Black Mountains\n\nA group of men who ignored local lockdown rules to go \"car racing\" have been hit with penalty fines.\n\nThe group had travelled from Caerphilly to near Brynamman in the Brecon Beacons National Park.\n\nCaerphilly is under extra Covid restrictions, making it illegal to leave the county without good reason.\n\nDyfed-Powys Police said the four men refused to co-operate with officers over lockdown, and were all handed fines.\n\nThe Carmarthenshire Roads Policing Unit had come across the group of racers congregating for a \"rallying-type event\".\n\n\"Officers tried to engage with the group, who had travelled from Caerphilly, and explained several times that were not allowed to be in this area,\" said Insp Andy Williams.\n\n\"After lengthy attempts at asking them to leave and make their way back to their home addresses, they were still refusing to co-operate.\"\n\nCaerphilly has been in local lockdown since 8 September\n\nIt comes as a number of cases where fixed penalty Covid fines were not paid headed to court in the force area.\n\nHearings at Llanelli Magistrates' Court have included people who drove over 100 miles from Newport to Pembroke Dock while travel was banned, and others who had broken rules by entering people's homes at the height of lockdown.\n\nIn two cases, people were ordered to pay more than £800 in fines and costs, after failing to pay the initial fixed penalty notice.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "A video of a dying indigenous woman screaming in distress and being insulted by hospital staff shows the \"worst form of racism\", says Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.\n\nJoyce Echaquan streamed herself on Facebook shortly before she died.\n\nA nurse has been fired and three investigations are under way.\n\nMs Echaquan's family has said they will be taking legal action over her death.", "Amazon said that more than 19,816 of its frontline workers in the US have contracted Covid-19 since March.\n\nThe number equates to 1.44% of its 1.37 million workers across Amazon and its subsidiary Whole Foods.\n\nAmazon had faced criticism from employees, unions and elected officials, who have accused the company of putting employees' health at risk.\n\nBut the online retailing giant said its infection rate is lower than expected.\n\nAmazon has kept its facilities open throughout the pandemic to meet a surge in demand from shoppers stuck at home.\n\nStaying open has proven very lucrative for the e-commerce firm, and has added to the wealth of founder Jeff Bezos, who is the world's richest man.\n\nThe tech giant's sales soared 40% to $88.9bn (£67.9bn) in the three months ending in June, and its quarterly profit of $5.2bn (£4bn) was its biggest since the company started in 1994.\n\nIn a blog post, Amazon argued that 33,952 workers would have contracted the virus if Amazon's infection rate had equalled the wider population's, when accounting for employees' age and geography.\n\nThe figures include seasonal staff and those who may have been infected outside work.\n\nThe company said that it \"introduced or changed over 150 processes\", distributed more than 100 million face masks, and implemented temperature checks at its facilities around the world.\n\nAmazon said it introduced social distancing measures and additional cleaning, which \"occurs across each site about every 90 minutes\".\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. \"Mr Bezos... why on Earth would one of your partners compare your company to a drug dealer?\"\n\nAmazon challenged other companies to make public their own Covid-19 statistics.\n\n\"This information would be more powerful if there were similar data from other major employers to compare it to,\" Amazon said in the blog post.\n\nAthena, a coalition that has opposed Amazon on a wide range of labour, planning and environmental issues, called on officials to investigate further.\n\n\"Amazon allowed Covid-19 to spread like wildfire,\" Athena's director Dania Rajendra said in a statement.", "No Time To Die marks Daniel Craig's swansong as James Bond\n\nThe release of the new James Bond film has been delayed again.\n\nThe premiere of No Time To Die had already been moved from April to November because of the pandemic.\n\nThe film has now been further delayed until 2 April 2021 \"in order to be seen by a worldwide theatrical audience\", a statement on the film's website said.\n\n\"We understand the delay will be disappointing to our fans but we now look forward to sharing No Time To Die next year.\"\n\nNo Time To Die, the 25th instalment in the Bond franchise, marks Daniel Craig's final appearance as British secret service agent, 007.\n\nTrailers for the film, as well as Billie Eilish's title song, have already been released - with the Eilish video debuting mere days ago - before Friday's last-minute decision to delay.\n\nIndustry insiders had been speculating whether the studio would stand by the November release date, following lacklustre box office returns for the Christopher Nolan blockbuster Tenet, which was released last month.\n\nThe sci-fi epic, which cost approximately $200m to make, has so far made $243 million internationally, but only $41m in the US - where cinemas in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco largely remain closed.\n\nA significant part of Bond film earnings come from the UK and European market, where coronavirus is once again on the rise and there may be been concern by the studio that potential restrictions could limit box office earnings in November.\n\nThe previous Bond film, 2015's Spectre, took almost $900m (£690m) at worldwide box offices - winning an Oscar for best original song. The latest film will no longer be in contention for the 2021 Oscars under current guidelines.\n\nThe postponement of No Time to Die comes after both two major autumn releases, Wonder Woman: 1984 and Marvel Studios' Black Widow - starring Scarlett Johansson - were both pushed back.\n\nWith Steven Spielberg's West Side Story and Kenneth Branagh's Death of the Nile remake also delayed, it could spell disaster for many struggling cinema chains, which rely on big budget releases for much of their income.\n\nOscar-winning Rami Malek plays the latest Bond villain Safin in the forthcoming film.\n\nIn the US, the National Association of Theatre Owners, the Directors Guild of America and the Motion Picture Association wrote an open letter last week calling on Congress to bail out \"our country's beloved movie theatres\".\n\nThe letter stated that if the current situation continued without additional support, 69% of small and mid-sized cinemas in the US would likely go bankrupt or close. The letter was signed by a string of Hollywood directors, including James Cameron, Clint Eastwood and Britain's Steve McQueen.\n\nBut John Fithian, head of the National Association of Theatre Owners, told Variety it was also essential that the studios played their part in supporting cinemas - by continuing to release films.\n\n\"If we don't have any movies until we're fully vaccinated as a world, a lot of the theatre companies are going to be gone and the theatres themselves won't be there,\" he said.\n\n\"This idea of waiting out the pandemic to make your movies more profitable doesn't make sense to me. There won't be as much of an industry left to play your movies in if you do that.\"\n\nIn China, cinemas reopened in July - with restricted numbers - while in India they are due to partially reopen in mid-October, ahead of the Diwali holiday in November.\n\nCinemas in the UK were given the go-ahead to reopen in July, with social distancing measures in place, staggered start and finish times and pre-ordered popcorn, among the measures.\n\nHowever many sites did not open immediately. Cineworld, the world's second-largest cinema chain, reopened many of its locations across the UK in early September. It recently reported a $1.6bn loss in the first six months of the year.\n\nOn Friday, Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden urged the British public to \"support your local cinema\" as he announced a government cash boost of £650,000 to 42 independent cinemas across England as part of the £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund.\n\nSome fans on Twitter have called for the latest franchise to be released digitally rather than delaying the release date to next Easter. Earlier this week, Warner announced that the big budget remake of Roald Dahl's The Witches, starring Anne Hathaway, will debut on the streaming platform HBO Max in the US.", "President Trump's treatment for Covid-19 has spawned baseless rumours and conspiracy theories - about body doubles, oxygen tanks and more.\n\nMany appear to be politically motivated and conflicting information from the White House over the weekend hasn't helped.\n\nOfficials gave varying answers on when the president had been given oxygen. Unanswered questions remain over when Mr Trump last tested negative for the virus.\n\nThis left the internet to fill in the gaps with unfounded speculation. Here are some of the most viral rumours - and what we know about them.\n\nRepublican supporters - in some cases tweeting from verified accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers - have spread a baseless rumour that the president was somehow deliberately infected with Covid-19 at some point during last week's debate.\n\nThis goes well against the tide of early evidence showing that several top officials who have been infected, all attended a White House event announcing Mr Trump's supreme court nominee, held several days before the debate.\n\nMeanwhile, the suggestion that Mr Trump tested positive earlier than was originally suggested has led to rumours that he's more ill than doctors have let on - and even that his most recent public appearances were staged with a body double.\n\nTweets to this effect from accounts mostly supporting the Democratic Party accumulated thousands of retweets.\n\n\"Body double\" conspiracy theories are fairly common - in 2016, similar allegations were hurled at the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.\n\nA video which claims to show bikers praying for President Donald Trump outside the Walter Reed Medical Center in suburban Washington isn't from this weekend, and wasn't even filmed in the United States.\n\nThe clip, shared more than 25,000 times on Twitter and viewed over 1.3 million times, was uploaded onto video-sharing platform TikTok on Friday.\n\nHowever, detective work by fact-checking website Lead Stories, verified by the BBC, reveals that the video was actually shot in South Africa and shows bikers protesting against farm murders.\n\nThe original clip was uploaded to TikTok on 29 August, and comparison with Google Street View shows it was shot outside the Union Building in Pretoria.\n\nAnother rumour being spread suggested that the president was wearing a secret oxygen tank when he was seen leaving the White House on Friday.\n\nA number of accounts supporting the Democrats circled close-up images of Trump claiming they could see he was hooked up to some kind of device - and using it as evidence that the White House was downplaying how ill the President really is.\n\nPresident Donald Trump waves to supporters as he briefly rides in front of Walter Reed Medical Center\n\nLike the baseless claim that Joe Biden was wearing an ear piece to help him during last week's debate - which was used by Trump's campaign in a series of Facebook adverts - this particular rumour appears to have been started by people getting overly excited by folds and creases.\n\nBut even if he wasn't toting a hidden tank, we do now know that the president was given supplemental oxygen at several points over the weekend.\n\nRumours that the President is pretending to be ill for votes continue to spread online, pushed by some high-profile opponents of Mr Trump.\n\nAnd at the extreme fringes, some QAnon supporters have gathered outside the hospital. They are pushing the baseless conspiracy that Trump is \"pretending\" to have Covid-19 in a bid to trick the \"deep state\" and have powerful people arrested.\n\nHow can you spot disinformation on your social media feed when there are conflicting messages coming from the top and various political agendas online?\n\n1) Think about bias. Why was a post shared? Remember, this is happening during a hotly contested election.\n\n2) How does it make you feel? Big news events can lead to worry, confusion, panic and anger - especially when those we would expect to inform us are not doing so. Pause before sharing.\n\n3) Interrogate the source. Where has a post come from? If something is unconfirmed or there's no evidence to support it, it's often better not to share potential misinformation.\n\nCoins commemorating \"Donald Trump defeating Covid\" on sale from an online outlet called the White House Gift Shop have no connection with the US President.\n\nMuch-shared but false posts on social media suggest that President Trump is selling the $100 (£77) coins to make money on the back of his diagnosis.\n\nIn fact, the White House Gift Shop has nothing to do with the President nor the Trump family. The website came to our attention in May when it sold coins \"commemorating\" the Covid-19 outbreak, and a BBC Reality Check investigation found it was not an official product.\n\nThe store was set up in 1946 by President Harry S Truman in the basement of the White House, but it was subsequently transferred to a private company which now holds the \"White House Gift Shop\" trademark.\n\nWith reporting by Upasana Bhat, Alistair Coleman, Christopher Giles, and Olga Robinson.", "Police are investigating the actions of MP Margaret Ferrier, who travelled from Glasgow to London with Covid-19 symptoms then returned home after testing positive.\n\nThe Met said it was looking at possible offences related to the Health Protection Regulations.\n\nMs Ferrier has been widely condemned for risking the health of people in parliament and on public transport.\n\nShe has been suspended by the SNP and faces calls to quit as an MP.\n\nThe Met said in a statement that an MP had contacted Police Scotland on Thursday to say she may have breached legislation and guidance relating to coronavirus.\n\nIt said this had related to actions including a train journey on Tuesday between London and Glasgow, following a positive Covid-19 test.\n\n\"Following consultation with Police Scotland, officers from the Metropolitan Police, working with British Transport Police, are conducting an investigation into potential offences,\" said the Met.\n\n\"The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards has been informed.\"\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.\n\nCommons speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle had earlier spoken of his disbelief at Ms Ferrier's \"reckless\" actions, which he said had put other people's health at risk.\n\nAnd Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, said she had spoken to Ms Ferrier and urged her to \"do the right thing\" and stand down as an MP.\n\nShe said Ms Ferrier had been guilty of the \"worst breach imaginable\" and that her \"reckless, dangerous and completely indefensible\" actions had undermined the public health message.\n\nDUP MP Jim Shannon, who was seated at the same socially-distanced dining table as Ms Ferrier on Monday evening, is self-isolating but received a negative test result on Thursday afternoon.\n\nAn Assistant Serjeant at Arms was close to Ms Ferrier when she spoke in the Commons on Monday but has not been advised to self-isolate.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Sir Lindsay Hoyle says he is \"really very angry\" about the behaviour of MP Margaret Ferrier.\n\nIn an interview with BBC Scotland, Prime Minister Boris Johnson would not be drawn on whether he thought Ms Ferrier should stand down as an MP.\n\nHe said it was important that \"everyone obeys the rules and guidance\".\n\nMs Ferrier, the MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, travelled by train to London on Monday despite being tested for Covid at the weekend after experiencing mild symptoms.\n\nShe spoke in the Commons chamber during a coronavirus debate, but was told later that evening that she had tested positive for the virus.\n\nDespite this, Ms Ferrier took a train back to Scotland on Tuesday, with SNP whips in the Commons being told about her positive test on Wednesday.\n\nIt became public knowledge on Thursday evening when Ms Ferrier tweeted an apology and said she \"deeply regretted\" her actions.\n\nShe has not yet given any indication of whether or not she intends to continue sitting as an independent MP.", "Police said Jones had tried to put out the blaze but it had already spread trapping the family inside\n\nA family of four were trapped in their burning house after an arsonist \"mistakenly\" targeted their home.\n\nNathan Lee Jones, of Golwg y Castell, Cardigan, set bin bags alight outside their home on Castle Street on 16 June 2020.\n\nPolice later found out that Jones had intended to set fire to a different house, but got the address wrong.\n\nJones pleaded guilty to arson with intent to endanger life, and was jailed for four years at Swansea Crown Court.\n\nDyfed Powys Police said Jones had gone back and tried to put out the blaze, which was started in the early hours of the morning.\n\nDet Con Damon Watmough said: \"However it appears a black bag was still smouldering, and spread to the other refuse outside the house.\n\n\"By the time the occupants were aware, they had no means of escape, and a gas pipe had been damaged and was leaking into their home.\"\n\nMr Watmough said it was initially thought the fire had been caused by a lit cigarette, but it was later proven it was started deliberately.\n\nPolice said Jones was caught with the help of CCTV\n\nJones was spotted on CCTV at the house at around the time of the fire, and was identified through conversations on social media, he added.\n\n\"This was a very serious and traumatic incident, which could have had devastating consequences for the victims,\" Det Con Watmough added.\n\n\"The defendant was determined to cause fear or harm by starting the fire, and put the lives of a family with two young children at risk.\n\n\"We hope this sentence will provide reassurance to the community and victims following this distressing incident.\"", "Authorities will analyse infection rates and come to a decision on Sunday, the health minister said\n\nFrench authorities could place Paris under maximum Covid alert from Monday, the country's health minister warned.\n\nOlivier Véran said infection rates in the capital and its suburbs are rising and a decision on imposing new restrictions will be made on Sunday.\n\nHe added that a \"total closure of bars\" could be needed in the capital.\n\nFrance, one of many European countries that are seeing a rise in cases, recorded more than 13,000 infections on Thursday.\n\nThe World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that surging figures in Europe should serve as \"a wake up call\".\n\nIn a news conference on Thursday, Mr Véran said the Paris region passed three thresholds qualifying for a maximum alert on Thursday.\n\nOne of these was the number of infections, which has now surpassed 250 per 100,000 people.\n\n\"We need a few days to confirm the trends, but if they are confirmed, we'll have no choice but to put it on maximum alert, from Monday,\" he said.\n\nAccording to Mr Véran, more than 30% of beds in Paris's intensive care units have been filled with Covid-19 patients.\n\nHe warned that if the maximum alert was put in place, there would be no more family reunions and bars would be closed. Bars and restaurants in the region already have to close by 22:00.\n\nSimilar restrictions have already been introduced in Marseille. Last Monday, Mr Véran announced bars, restaurants and gyms would close in the southern city for at least two weeks amid an upsurge in cases.\n\nOn Thursday, France recorded 13,970 cases and 63 deaths. More than 31,986 people have died in the country since the pandemic began, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.\n\nElsewhere in Europe, the Spanish government has ordered a partial lockdown in the capital Madrid. Under the restrictions, residents will not be allowed to leave the area unless they have to make an essential journey.\n\nThe UK has taken Poland and Turkey off its no quarantine list. Those arriving from the two countries from 04:00 BST (03:00 GMT) on Sunday will have to self-isolate for 14 days.\n\nPoland's infection rate has risen, while the UK government said it removed Turkey over concerns about the way the country reports its data.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The church threatened with Kalashnikovs over Covid-19 outbreak", "Police said large crowds congregated outside the church\n\nPolice are investigating a funeral attended by \"between 400 to 500 people\", despite government guidance stating only 30 mourners are allowed.\n\nBedfordshire Police dispatched officers to the area when \"large crowds\" gathered outside a church in Dunstable.\n\nConservative MP for the town Andrew Selous said he was very angry about the \"flagrant breach\" of rules at the \"traveller funeral\".\n\nThe force said it will review evidence and consider taking action.\n\nCh Insp Lee Haines said: \"We worked with the local authority, the cemetery and the funeral directors prior to this event so people could attend to pay their respects while following social distancing measures.\n\n\"The funeral was initially attended by lower numbers of people, as planned, but larger crowds subsequently started gathering outside the church where the funeral was taking place.\"\n\nAndrew Selous MP said the large number of people attending the funeral blocked a road in the town\n\nMr Selous, the MP for South West Bedfordshire, said the number of people attending the funeral at St Mary's Church in West Street was \"completely unacceptable\".\n\n\"Bedfordshire Police tell me they estimate that there were between 400 to 500 people present when only 30 are allowed at a funeral,\" he said.\n\n\"We are all under the law and it is simply not right or acceptable for the rest of the population who have made such sacrifices to see others getting away with such behaviour.\"\n\nBedfordshire Police said officers \"understand that people wish to pay their respects to their loved ones... but everyone needs to follow the rules\".\n• None COVID-19- guidance for managing a funeral during the coronavirus pandemic The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Boris Johnson: 'It’s just up to them'\n\nBoris Johnson has said it is now up to the EU to avoid a no-deal scenario over post-Brexit trade.\n\nAfter the final round of formal talks between officials, the prime minister said a deal was \"all there\".\n\nBut the prime minister said Brussels had to be \"commonsensical\" to get it across the line, with both sides setting an October deadline to settle their differences.\n\nShe is due to meet Mr Johnson on Saturday via video call to \"take stock\" of the situation and decide the next steps.\n\nTalks between chief negotiators Lord David Frost and Michel Barnier broke up earlier, without an agreement.\n\nMr Barnier said \"persistent serious divergences\" remained between the two sides, while Lord Frost said there was \"very little time now to resolve these issues\".\n\nThe UK formally left the EU in January, but entered a transition period - where the UK has kept to EU trading rules and remained inside its customs union and single market - to allow the two sides to negotiate a trade deal.\n\nFormal talks began in March and continued throughout the pandemic, but there has been concerns over whether a plan would be agreed before that period runs out on 31 December.\n\nIssues that have become particular sticking points between negotiators are state aid - where governments give financial support to businesses - and fishing rules.\n\nThe EU has said a deal must be reached before the end of October to allow it to be signed off by the member states before the end of the year, while Mr Johnson has said both sides should \"move on\" if agreement was not reached by the middle of the month.\n\nIf a deal is not done, the UK will go on to trade with the bloc on World Trade Organisation rules.\n\nIn a round of interviews with the BBC, Mr Johnson said: \"I hope that we get a deal, it's up to our friends.\"\n\nHe told BBC Northern Ireland's Mark Devenport: \"They've done a deal with Canada of a kind that we want, why shouldn't they do it with us?\n\n\"We're so near, we've been members for 45 years. It's all there, it's just up to them.\"\n\nThe PM also said to BBC Midlands Today's Elizabeth Glinka there was \"every chance to get a deal\", but added: \"It's up to our friends and partners to be commonsensical.\"\n\nBoris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen will speak via video conference on Saturday\n\nSpeaking ahead of her call with the UK prime minister, Mrs von der Leyen said: \"We should not forget we have made progress in many many different fields, but of course the most difficult ones are still completely open.\"\n\nShe pointed to the problems with the so-called \"level playing field\" with state aid - calling it \"a question of fairness\" - as well as the issue of fishing,\n\nBut, she added: \"Overall, where there is a will there is a way, so I think we should intensify the negotiations because it is worth working hard on it.\"\n\nNews of the talks between Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen is significant and Saturday cannot be dismissed as more blah blah in the Brexit process.\n\nSpeculation is rife, of course, as to why the prime minister and the EU Commission president have suddenly scheduled their digital tête-à-tête.\n\nIn general, it's interpreted as a positive sign.\n\nThe accepted wisdom has always been that negotiating teams can only make so much progress.\n\nAnd that the final push - the politically tough decisions on how much to compromise on the final sticking points - would have to come from up high.\n\nIt's possible the prime minister and Mrs von der Leyen are talking tomorrow to explore who is really willing to make what compromises on the final outstanding issues.\n\nFor now, the why's and what's of Saturday's talks are pure speculation.\n\nThe only thing we know for sure: the UK and EU say they want a deal - though not at any price.\n\nYet if and when a deal eventually emerges, both sides will have had to make compromises.\n\nRead more from Katya here.\n\nIn a statement, Lord Frost said the final round of negotiations had been \"constructive\" but \"familiar differences remain\".\n\nOn fishing, he said the gap was \"unfortunately very large\", and he called for the EU to \"move further before an understanding can be reached\" on state aid.\n\nThe negotiator added: \"I am concerned that there is very little time now to resolve these issues ahead of the European Council on 15 October [the deadline set by the PM to reach a deal].\n\n\"For our part, we continue to be fully committed to working hard to find solutions, if they are there to be found.\"\n\nMr Barnier agreed the negotiations had been conducted in a \"constructive and respectful atmosphere\", with some \"positive new developments on some topics\" - such as aviation safety and police cooperation.\n\nBut he said there was \"a lack of progress on some important topics\", such as climate change commitments, \"as well as persistent serious divergences on matters of major importance for the European Union\", including state aid and fishing.\n\nHe added: \"We will continue to maintain a calm and respectful attitude, and we will remain united and determined until the end of these negotiations.\"", "Some Covid restrictions are being reintroduced in response to the Omicron variant.\n\nCheck what the rules are in your area by entering your postcode or council name below.\n\nA modern browser with JavaScript and a stable internet connection is required to view this interactive. What are the rules in your area? Enter a full UK postcode or council name to find out\n\nIf you cannot see the look-up, click here.\n\nThe rules highlighted in the search tool are a selection of the key government restrictions in place in your area.\n\nAlways check your relevant national and local authority website for more information on the situation where you live. Also check local guidance before travelling to others parts of the UK.\n\nAll the guidance in our search look-up comes from national government websites.\n\nFor more information on national measures see:\n\nFind out how the pandemic has affected your area and how it compares with the national average by following this link to an in depth guide to the numbers involved.", "Ms Taylor said she felt harassment and discrimination after identifying as gender fluid in 2017\n\nA gender-fluid worker has won £180,000 in compensation from her former employer Jaguar Land Rover (JLR).\n\nAn employment tribunal previously found in favour of Rose Taylor, who claimed she had suffered abuse and a lack of support at work.\n\nThe compensation was agreed at a remedy hearing held on Friday.\n\nJLR apologised and said it was using the recommendations of the case to strengthen its \"diversity and inclusion strategy\".\n\nMs Taylor, who prefers to use the female pronoun, had worked as an engineer for the company in Warwickshire for almost 20 years and previously presented as male when she began identifying as gender fluid in 2017.\n\nShe claimed she was subsequently subjected to insults from colleagues and abusive jokes.\n\nAfter resigning in 2018, Ms Taylor took JLR to a tribunal arguing she had suffered harassment and direct discrimination in the workplace because of gender reassignment and sexual orientation.\n\nShe also claimed victimisation after the company later failed to permit her to retract her resignation.\n\nJaguar Land Rover has apologised to Ms Taylor \"for the experiences she had during her employment\"\n\nFollowing the hearing, Ms Taylor's barrister, Robin White, said: \"The claimant is very pleased and also about the fact that the case could make a difference in the future.\n\n\"Hopefully that will mean others may not suffer difficulties in the workplace as she did.\n\n\"She has been vindicated in the case, by the award given, she has shown horrible things happened in workplace and is pleased to move on in life.\"\n\nIn its previous judgement, the tribunal said it was minded to make recommendations to ensure JLR took \"positive steps\" to prevent a similar situation arising again.\n\nDave Williams, executive director for HR at JLR, apologised to Ms Taylor on behalf of the company for \"the experiences she had during her employment with us\".\n\n\"We continue to strive to improve in this area and we respect the outcome of the case,\" he said.\n\n\"Jaguar Land Rover does not tolerate discrimination of any kind. We are committed to creating an environment where everyone can flourish, where our employees feel listened to, understood, supported and valued equally.\"\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Rick Moranis's last on-screen film role was in 1997\n\nRick Moranis, who starred in Honey I Shrunk the Kids is recovering after being attacked in New York City.\n\nThe 67-year-old Ghostbusters actor was walking on Central Park West near 70th Street at 7:30 am local time when he was punched in the head, police said.\n\nThe video shows a man running up and knocking Mr Moranis to the ground before walking away.\n\nPolice have not yet made any arrests and have asked for the public's help in identifying the suspect.\n\nMr Moranis went to hospital and reported pain in his head, hip and back before reporting the crime at the precinct.\n\nHis management team told CBS News he is \"fine, but grateful for everyone's thoughts and well wishes\".\n\nThis Twitter post cannot be displayed in your browser. Please enable Javascript or try a different browser. View original content on Twitter The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Skip twitter post by NYPD Crime Stoppers This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy, external and privacy policy, external before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.\n\nThe Canadian actor rose to fame in the 1980s as a member of the cast of Second City Television (SCTV). He became a household name around the world after appearing in the blockbuster smash Ghostbusters.\n\nBut he has mostly kept a low profile since his wife's death from cancer in 1991, choosing to focus on raising his children.\n\nHe is set to reprise his role as the mad inventor and family man Wayne Szalinski in Shrunk, a sequel to Honey I Shrunk the Kids.", "Elvington Airfield, pictured in 2017, is a former RAF base near York\n\nThe fatal accident occurred at Elvington Airfield, a former RAF base near York, governing body Motorsport UK said.\n\nIt said the driver's family had been informed and an investigation into the circumstances had begun.\n\nNorth Yorkshire Police said it was called to reports of a \"serious collision\" at the scene shortly after 16:30 BST.\n\nElvington was an RAF station until 1992, and has become a popular motorsports venue since entering private ownership.\n\nIt has hosted dozens of world record attempts, and is also used as a filming location.\n\nOn Sunday, Jason Liversidge, who has motor neurone disease, set a world speed record in his custom-made electric wheelchair.\n\nIn 2006, Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond was involved in a near-fatal crash at Elvington.\n\nHe suffered serious brain injuries when his jet-powered car crashed at almost 300mph, but made a full recovery.\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "The pace of Europe's Covid-19 vaccination campaign has picked up and in many countries infection rates have been falling.\n\nLockdowns are gradually being eased as the summer tourist season gets under way, and there are plans for an EU-wide digital vaccination certificate to be in place by 1 July.\n\nNationwide curfew ended on 20 June, 10 days earlier than planned. Face masks are no longer required outdoors.\n\nRestaurants, cafes and bars can serve customers indoors, with 50% capacity and up to six people per table.\n\nStanding concerts will resume on 30 June and nightclubs on 9 July (with 75% capacity). People attending will need a health pass which shows either full vaccination, a negative test within the previous 72 hours, or else a previous coronavirus infection.\n\nMedical grade masks are compulsory in shops and on public transport.\n\nFrom 30 June, working from home will no longer be compulsory.\n\nOn 21 June, Italy's curfew was scrapped and the whole country, except for the northwest region of Valle d'Aosta, became \"white zone\" - the country's lowest-risk category.\n\nAmong the measures still in place are social distancing (1m) and the wearing of masks indoors (and in crowded outdoor places), and a ban on house parties and large gathering.\n\nNightclubs and discos are also closed.\n\nAll indoor businesses, with the exception of nightclubs, are open.\n\nThe government introduced a \"corona pass\" in April, the first to do so in Europe.\n\nThis shows - either on a phone or on paper - that you have been vaccinated, previously infected or that you have had a negative test within 72 hours.\n\nPeople need to show it for entry to cinemas, museums, hairdressers or indoor dining.\n\nThe Greek government is welcoming tourists from many countries, if they are fully vaccinated or can provide a negative coronavirus test.\n\nFace coverings must be worn in all public places and there is a curfew from 01:30-05:00, but bars, restaurants, museums and archaeological sites are all open.\n\nThis video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. The Greek island of Milos is aiming to become \"Covid-free\" so it can welcome back tourists\n\nCinemas, theatres, museums and restaurants are open at 50% capacity. From 26 June, this increases to 75%.\n\nNightclubs and discos will also be allowed to reopen, with a limit of 150 people.\n\nFace coverings must be worn in enclosed spaces and 1.5m social distancing observed.\n\nShops, bars, restaurants and museums are open, although face coverings remain compulsory in most public places.\n\nNightclubs can now reopen in parts of Spain with low infection rates.\n\nIn Barcelona, they are restricted to 50% of capacity and can stay open until 03:30 - dancers have to wear masks.\n\nSpain began welcoming vaccinated tourists from 7 June. Most European travellers still have to present a negative Covid test on arrival.\n\nBrussels: Outdoor dining resumed in Belgium on 8 May\n\nShops, cinemas, gyms, cafes and restaurants are open, with restrictions. Households can invite up to four people inside.\n\nFrom 1 July, working from home will no longer be mandatory, if the situation continues to improve.\n\nCultural performances, shows and sports competitions can also go ahead, with limited numbers, and more people will be allowed at weddings and other ceremonies and parties.\n\nPortugal has lifted many of its restrictions but face coverings must still be worn in indoor public spaces and some outdoor settings.\n\nBars and nightclubs remain closed, and it's illegal to drink alcohol outdoors in public places, except for pavement cafés and restaurants.\n\nAlcohol cannot be sold after 21:00 unless it is with a meal.\n\nRestaurants, cafes and cultural venues have to close at 01:00 and have capacity limits.\n\nA weekend travel ban is in force in the Lisbon area, starting at 15:00 on Friday, with residents only allowed to leave for essential journeys.\n\nIn Lisbon and in Albufeira (Algarve), cafes, restaurants and non-essential shops have to close by 15:30 at the weekend and 22:30 on weekdays.\n\nPortugal's summer season looks uncertain, yet its Covid figures have improved\n\nRestaurants, cafes, museums and historic buildings have reopened with capacity limits.\n\nFrom 26 June, a number of restrictions are being lifted.\n\nAlcohol can be sold after 22:00, and nightclubs can open, with an entry pass system.\n\nEvents held in public venues such as cinemas, conference centres and concert halls will be allowed, subject to social distancing.\n\nMasks will no longer be compulsory except on public transport, airports and in secondary schools.\n\nOutdoor services in restaurants and bars returned in June. Theme parks, funfairs, cinemas and theatres, gyms and swimming pools, have reopened as well.\n\nFrom 5 July, restaurants and bars will be able to serve customers indoors. Weddings and other indoor events for up to 50 people will be permitted and the numbers at outdoor organised events will increase.\n\nSince June, pubs have been able to stay open until 22:30 and more people are now allowed at sports events, outdoor concerts, cinemas and markets.\n\nOn 1 July, limits on private gatherings will be raised, and the recommendation to interact with a small circle of people removed.\n\nFurther easing is planned on 15 July and in September.", "The Gender Identity Service is based at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust\n\nDoctors at a child gender clinic raised concerns about the use of puberty blockers 15 years ago - an issue that was also discussed by staff last year.\n\nAn internal review conducted in 2005, obtained by BBC Newsnight, says some clinicians felt pressured to refer patients for the treatment too quickly.\n\nStaff at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) raised serious safeguarding issues last year.\n\nThe Trust which runs the clinic said the report was \"no longer relevant\".\n\nGIDS, which is run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, is a specialised unit for young people who have difficulties with their gender identity.\n\nIn 2005, the Trust's then medical director, adult psychiatrist Dr David Taylor, conducted a review into the service - then called the Gender Identity Development Unit.\n\nHe reported that colleagues at the Trust were working hard to provide good care for patients, but highlighted concerns about some aspects of their treatment.\n\nThe document details concerns raised by some clinicians at that time about alleged pressure on staff to refer patients for treatment with puberty blockers, a lack of a robust evidence base underpinning this treatment, and the apparently troubled backgrounds of some young people referred. These included past sexual abuse and trauma.\n\nNewsnight obtained the 2005 review via the Freedom of Information Act, a move which the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust resisted. It argued disclosure of the document would \"adversely impact on the Trust's ability to provide effective and safe services to its patients\".\n\nBut the Information Commissioner's Office ruled that the document's publication was in the public interest.\n\nIn his 2005 report Dr Taylor, who left in 2011 after 30 years, made a series of recommendations for improvements to the service - which in 2005 was much smaller, receiving tens of referrals per year rather than thousands.\n\nDr Taylor called for the service to monitor patients after leaving, for more research into this area of healthcare, and for staff to be supported if faced with pressure to refer for treatments when they thought it was inappropriate.\n\nIn his report, which was published in 2006, he said puberty blockers might be the best course of action for some, but added that in his view young people needed a period of explorative therapy first.\n\nThe document also detailed concerns from some staff about the speed at which some young people were being referred for treatment with puberty blockers.\n\nThese drugs stop a young person's body developing, with the aim of helping to relieve gender dysphoria - distress caused when a person's gender identity does not match their biological sex. The NHS now recognises that little is known about their long term side effects.\n\nConcerns about the use of puberty blockers were subsequently raised by other staff in the internal 2019 review of the service.\n\nIt is unclear why some recommendations made in 2005 were not implemented, but Dr Taylor told Newsnight there may be several reasons, and said the demand for the service was \"greater than the capacity of the unit to cope.\"\n\nSociety's shifting attitudes towards gender identity, and the underfunding of other adolescent mental health services are also important, he told the BBC.\n\nLast month the NHS announced an independent review into gender identity services for young people.\n\nIn a statement the Trust said: \"This report from 2006 is not relevant to the circumstances and issues faced by the GIDS service today. The service had been nationally commissioned since 2009, with NHS England (NHSE) taking responsibility for it in 2013. The service specifications were reviewed in 2016 and are currently under review again, as scheduled.\n\n\"Some of the young people we see in the service experience difficulties which may or may not be related to gender dysphoria. GIDS is a specialist service and relies on an integrated care model in which it works closely with local CAMHS to support ongoing difficulties.\n\n\"It is important to recognise that not all co-occurring difficulties will be resolved by accessing specialist psychosocial exploration of gender identity and related issues.\"\n\nThe Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust welcomed the NHS review of gender services, to be conducted by Dr Hilary Cass, the former President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.\n\n\"We welcome this and hope this will lead to better and quicker access to support for these young people.\"", "The hotel is no longer allowed to hold any event until 10 January\n\nA hotel manager has been fined £10,000 for hosting a funeral which was attended by more than 200 mourners.\n\nThe event at Castle Bromwich Hall Hotel in Solihull on Friday prompted calls reporting the large gathering and loud music, West Midlands Police said.\n\nIt was the latest event at the hotel to break Covid-19 rules and the manager had been warned before, officers added.\n\nIncreased restrictions have been introduced in the borough of Solihull due to the number of virus cases.\n\nFigures to 29 September show the rate of positive cases for Solihull is 79 per 100,000.\n\nTemporary Assistant Chief Constable Claire Bell said: \"We engaged with all those at the funeral gathering and explained why they needed to leave which they duly did.\"\n\nSolihull Council said the venue did not ask people for test and trace details and social distancing was not observed.\n\nThe local authority said the event was a \"clear breach of the rules against mass gatherings\".\n\nThe hotel has been banned from holding any events, including weddings and funerals, until 10 January.\n\nPolice said the owner's licence has been suspended and a full hearing by the council's licensing panel will be held later this month.\n\nGovernment guidelines state a \"modest\" number of close friends and family can attend a funeral but they should not exceed 30 people.\n\nFace coverings must be worn and venue capacity must allow for social distancing.\n\nThe owners of Castle Bromwich Hall Hotel can appeal against the council's decision through the magistrates' court.\n\nThe hotel said the manager no longer worked at the venue and it would not be commenting further.\n\nFollow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: newsonline.westmidlands@bbc.co.uk\n\nThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.", "Australia's new scheme will begin in a fortnight\n\nNew Zealanders are to be granted access to Australia in the first opening of international borders by either nation since Covid restrictions were imposed.\n\nPeople will be able to fly from New Zealand to New South Wales and the Northern Territory - and avoid mandatory quarantine - from 16 October.\n\nThe nations closed their borders in March in a bid to stop the spread of coronavirus.\n\nOfficials say the risks are now low enough to justify a \"travel bubble\".\n\n\"The establishment of a travel zone between Australia and New Zealand has been finalised,\" said Australian Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack.\n\n\"This is the first stage in what we hope to see as a trans-Tasman bubble between the two countries, stopping not just at that state and that territory.\"\n\nAt first, travel will be limited to New Zealanders.\n\nMr McCormack said a decision on when Australians may be able to visit New Zealand would be up to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.\n\nPeople from New Zealand will be able to travel to two Australian regions\n\nHe said Australia had assessed New Zealand visitors as posing \"a low risk of Covid-19 transmission\" as it currently had no \"hotspots\".\n\nAustralia defines a hotpot as any area with at least three local infections per day across a three-day rolling average, he added.\n\nNew Zealand's most recent locally acquired case was reported on 21 August.\n\nAustralia's Northern Territory has not recorded any infections in two months. New South Wales - which includes Sydney - has not seen a locally transmitted case since last week.\n\nAustralia's federal government has pushed for domestic and international borders to be re-opened \"as soon as practical\" to help the economy, but some state governments - which have power over their own borders - have been more resistant.\n\nVictoria remains cut off from the rest of Australia, after an outbreak in the state capital Melbourne which is now abating.\n\nNew Zealand has recorded 1,848 cases and 25 deaths, while Australia has seen over 27,000 cases and 888 deaths.", "Peter Webster is honoured by other players at a match earlier this year\n\nA British football fanatic will retire from the game on Friday, playing his last competitive match at the age of 80.\n\nPeter Webster, who lives in Wollongong, Australia, said he had known for a while that he did not contribute to matches as much as he once did.\n\n\"It has been on the cards for quite a few years,\" he told the BBC.\n\n\"You get more and more game when you think, 'I'm wasting the shirt out there'. You know yourself.\"\n\nMr Webster was born in Preston, England, but moved to Wales in 1948.\n\nHe only started playing the game competitively at 15, having gone to a school where rugby dominated.\n\nThe former steelworker played for many teams in Welsh leagues in his 20s and 30s, before moving to Australia with his wife Moira and three children in 1981.\n\nMr Webster said he had been surprised to find football was so advanced in Australia, and that he \"would rather play in 38 degrees Celsius than 38 degrees Fahrenheit\".\n\nAs well as playing his last match for Wollongong's Figtree Football Cub, Mr Webster was also retiring as the club's groundsman.\n\nMr Webster has shared his love of football with his grandchildren\n\nHe planned to arrive early for Friday night's game against Russell Vale, the league leaders, so he could help put up the goal nets.\n\nHe would also have a word with the opposition to make sure they did not take it easy on him, he added.\n\n\"In my first few years when you're playing, you wake up on Sunday all bruised and it's gone by Monday. Now it's Monday before I feel the bruises and it's the following Saturday until they're gone.\"\n\nMr Webster is such a legend in the local game that there is even a competition named after him - the Peter Webster Cup.\n\n\"Usually you've got to pay for it, or be dead. But I'm not paying for it and I'm not dead so I thought I'll see if I can play in it,\" he said.\n\nThe secret to his longevity had been keeping up with playing, he said. While he used to run and cycle, most of his exercise these days came from walking his granddaughter's dog.\n\n\"I'm not a good runner. I've bumped into players from other teams and they say: 'This is the third time we've seen you running this week - you must enjoy running. But I say, 'no - I enjoy playing football.'\"\n\nMr Webster is to become a more regular fixture on the sidelines\n\nMr Webster said he was not sure how he would feel after his final match, but he hoped to continue having a kick-about with players at the club.\n\nHe also intended to watch more of his grandson and granddaughter play football - he had often missed games previously because he was playing himself.\n\nHis wife said she was looking forward to her husband doing more jobs around the house.\n\nFigtree Football Cub president Mike Dodd said Mr Webster's contribution had been \"immense\"."], "link": ["http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54636636", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-54634518", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54630785", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54639674", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-54632619", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-54626663", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-54619778", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-54619729", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-54624961", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/us2020", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54625270", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-54620118", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/54633147", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54574154", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54584127", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54631658", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54615429", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/election-us-2020-54630561", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54638347", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54632985", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-54626928", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-54633337", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54613565", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-54626579", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-54627531", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54373904", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54622293", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/54627360", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-54627352", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/54559717", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54639713", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54620408", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54637128", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54635421", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54617148", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-54614742", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54638267", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54624653", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-54615683", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54627017", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-54628770", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-54631524", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-54629771", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54628712", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-54631004", 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"http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54381928", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54396415", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-54387438", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-54394780", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54393539", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54377726", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-54392276", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54384437", "https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54373904", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-54389785", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-54396065", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-54381228", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-53640249", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54374165", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-54387536", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-54381811", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-54381808"]}
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